CHAPTER XXIV.
A GLIMPSE OF THE UPPER WORLD.
“CHENOBI!” the baronet roared, “Chenobi!”
“Where the deuce can the fellow have got to?” he went on. “He said he’d meet us, and here we’ve been waiting over an hour, and not a sign of him yet.”
“Perhaps he’s met with some accident?” Mervyn suggested.
“I guess not,” replied the Yankee, “the Ayuti’s cute enough to keep out of danger. He’ll be along here presently, you’ll see. There you are”—as the sound of hoofs became audible—“I reckon he’s arrived.”
The next moment Chenobi’s hounds burst out of the gloom, followed a few seconds later by Muswani.
“I was delayed,” the king explained as he drew up; “I found three of the wolf-people hunting along the shore.”
“Did they attack you?” Seymour questioned.
“They will not follow the hunting trail again,” returned Chenobi significantly. “See, I have brought their weapons,” and he flung three spears to his friends.
“Give the other to Wilson,” Mervyn said, when Seymour and the Yankee had each taken one, “he will make better use of it than I should. And now for the next stage of our journey.”
First renewing their supply of water—which they carried in two skin bottles—from the lake, the adventurers turned and trudged forward again in the track of the elk. Now their way led over a bare, stony plain, with never a fungi-clump to relieve the gloom, and here the king’s jewel became once more of service. This part of the journey was by far the most trying to the foot-weary travellers, and they were glad to take advantage of the Ayuti’s offer, that each should ride in turn for a space upon Muswani’s broad back. Mile after mile they covered in this way, until a line of cliffs loomed before them, sheer and impregnable.
The adventurers gazed at Chenobi in amazement. Had he mistaken his route? So far as they could see, there was no opening in that towering wall, yet he dismounted at its base as though he had reached his goal.
A smile passed over his features as he noted the astonishment of his friends.
“All is well,” he said, “we will rest here a while, ere we ascend the cliff.”
“Ascend the cliff?” Seymour gasped, staring amazedly at the rocky barrier.
“Ay,” returned the Ayuti; “see you not that there be steps carven in the rock?”
Then the baronet saw what he had before overlooked. Up the very face of the cliff ran a rude stairway, hewn out of the solid rock.
“It was carven by my people,” Chenobi went on, “when they first came to this underworld, so that they might at times look upon the eye of Ramouni, the sun god, whom they worshipped.”
“Another instance of the remarkable engineering ability of this people,” remarked Mervyn to the baronet; “it must have taken years to carve out that stairway, rude though it looks.”
“Guess it’s a bigger job than I should care to tender for,” put in the Yankee. “Say, the old planet lost some real hustlers when the Ayutis pegged out.”
“Nothing seems to have been too great for the beggars to tackle,” murmured Wilson admiringly. “If they’d been above ground, they would have built a staircase to the moon, or something of the sort.”
Mervyn smiled.
“They were a wonderful race,” he said reflectively; “it is a thousand pities they have become extinct. Thoroughly civilised, they would have become one of the first nations in the world. Think of it—with their great bodily strength, splendid courage—as evidenced by our friend the king here—their engineering skill, what would they not have accomplished? Of course we may take it for granted there were wastrels among them; there is no community without its ne’er-do-wells. But the majority, from what I can gather from Chenobi, appear to have been an intelligent and utterly fearless people. Of the fate which overtook them, wiping them out of existence, I can learn nothing. The king always avoids the subject when I approach it.”
“I expect it’s too painful a matter to talk about,” returned Seymour; “but, whatever the cause of their dying out, I can well imagine the wolf-men had a hand in it. If their former priests were as diabolically ingenious as Nordhu is, I fear no race could have withstood them long. Just imagine, if you can: five millions of the brutes—I think that’s the number you mentioned, Meryvn?—they would overwhelm a world, let alone a city!”
“The presence of the priests is a puzzle to me,” the scientist went on. “Obviously they are a different race from the savages they govern, yet they are certainly not Ayutis! It may be that they are half-breeds, the result of a union between the two races? The offspring, perhaps, of some criminal, who, banished from the city for his misdeeds, joined himself to the wolf-men and became their leader.”
“But how do you account for their speaking the same language as the islanders of Ayuti?” questioned Seymour.
“I have formed a theory to account for the coincidence,” was the scientist’s reply, “whether it is the correct one or not remains to be proved. When we reach the end of our present journey I shall be better able to decide. But, see, the king is preparing to move on again.”
“Come,” Chenobi cried, approaching the base of the cliff stairway.
Rising, his friends followed. With a sharp word of command to his steed and hounds, the Ayuti commenced the ascent. Allowing a few moments to elapse, Mervyn followed, then in turn came Wilson and the American, Seymour bringing up the rear. Upward they toiled, their eyes strained to catch the gleam from Chenobi’s jewel, their only guide amid the gloom.
Slowly Muswani and the hounds—left to their own devices at the foot of the steps—faded from view. Then the plain itself vanished, seeming to give place to an illimitable black void. And afar off, miles and miles away, a silver haze hovered. It was the uncanny radiance from the fungi jungle. But even this faded at length, and still the rough-hewn ledges rose before the climbers, and their limbs grew weary of the treadmill-like motion. Occasionally an encouraging shout would peal downward from Chenobi, cheering the flagging spirits of his followers.
“Courage!” the king cried at length, “the end is at hand.”
Within a few moments they all stood in the mouth of a narrow tunnel, which stretched before them far into the heart of the cliff.
“Thank heaven that’s over!” muttered Wilson. “My leg’s still too stiff to stand much of that kind of thing.”
“Your wound hasn’t broken out afresh?” Seymour inquired anxiously.
“No,” the engineer returned, “there’s no chance of that now.”
“That’s good,” cried Haverly; “a wounded leg’s kinder awkward to rub along with. Jupiter!”
His sentence ended in a gasp, as a brilliant light flooded the tunnel.
“The sun!” Mervyn cried excitedly; “let us move forward again,” and, suiting the action to the word, he strode on over the slanting floor of the tunnel. But he pulled up again in a moment with a startled “Oh!” as the light, dying out as suddenly as it had come, left him in pitchy darkness.
Seymour burst into a laugh.
“You were a bit too previous, Mervyn,” he said. “Did you forget that the light only lasted for a few seconds?”
“I had almost persuaded myself that we should emerge into the open air within a few yards,” returned the scientist; “but I think I’ll let Chenobi take the lead. Come along; are you going to stand there all day?”
“Don’t get impatient, old chap,” retorted the Yankee; “we’re comin’ along right now.”
And now began a journey which taxed their strength to the utmost. The floor of the passage sloped almost as steeply as a house-roof, and the adventurers had the greatest difficulty in keeping their feet.
Chenobi, going barefoot, got over the ground rapidly, but with the others, in their heavy boots, slips were frequent. Hour after hour they pressed upward, pausing occasionally for rest and refreshment; then on once again with unflagging energy, knowing that each step brought them nearer to the daylight. Thrice in the course of that climb did the light of the sun penetrate the recesses of the tunnel, so that the journey must have taken them at least three days.
Then the water began to run short, and many were the anxious queries addressed to Chenobi as to the means of renewing the supply.
“There is water above,” he replied to all these questions. “Ere the light shall again strike upon the eye of the carven Ramouni our journey will be at an end.”
Thus encouraged, they increased their pace, and before long a cool breeze fanned their heated cheeks. Used as they had become to the stagnant, motionless atmosphere of the underworld, the gentle current came to the adventurers as a veritable life-giving elixir. It intoxicated them, indeed, for a little while, caused a species of madness, wherein the only thing of which they were conscious was the yearning to get out into the open. It spurred them on to such efforts that the Ayuti, for all his strength, had considerable difficulty in keeping pace with them. Never before had the prospect of gazing upon the face of Nature inspired them with such wildly delirious joy. Even the cool-blooded American succumbed to the rapture of the moment. Hope surged high within them all.
The Ayuti alone was grave and preoccupied. The hours he had spent with these new comrades had been pleasant enough, but he knew that they longed to return to their own world. They could not be happy in the gloom of the underworld. They were children of the light, and Ramouni, the sun god, was calling them back to bask once more in his bright rays; and he, Chenobi, must return to his life of solitude, to range the jungles till death came to him.
So thought the king. Little wonder that he was silent and grave. It had been better, he mused, if these white strangers had never come to his land; he would then have been content with his animals, and with the lonely life to which a cruel fate had doomed him. But now he longed for a comrade to share his solitude, and to divide the spoils of the chase. With an effort he shook off these imaginings, and applied himself more vigorously to the ascent. An hour passed by, and then an excited cry broke from Seymour:
“The moon!”
An instant later the party emerged into the full glory of the orb of night. For a while they stood drinking in the beauty of the scene around. They were standing in the crater of an extinct volcano. Imagine a vast well, many hundreds of feet in depth and over a mile in diameter at its base, its rugged walls—sloping slightly outward as they rose—covered with a mass of tropical vegetation whose every leaf gleamed like silver beneath the beams of the full moon that hung high above. This was the scene that met the gaze of the adventurers.
Leaving them gazing, Chenobi vanished into the shadow of the cliffs, returning presently with the skin bottle he carried full of clear water.
“Drink,” he said shortly, and to such good purpose did his friends obey that the bottle had to be replenished ere their thirst was satisfied. Then, thoroughly tired out, they flung themselves down where they stood, and, with the rich scents of a tropical forest in their nostrils, dropped off to sleep, leaving the Ayuti pacing to and fro across the crater floor.
The moon swung slowly across the dark blue dome above, and still Chenobi kept his vigil, moving back and forth with the regularity of an automaton. Yet it could not be that he feared danger. What danger could threaten in this peaceful spot?
No, it was not the fear of possible peril that kept the king from his slumbers. His mind was busy with other things. A daring thought had come to him, and, as he pondered it, the more feasible it appeared. It was nothing less than this: that he should forsake his old haunts and cast in his lot with his new friends. For hours he revolved this idea in his brain, until the moon disappeared below the crater rim; then he aroused the sleepers, and beneath the quickly paling sky the explorers had their first breakfast above ground since passing the great ice barrier. Anxiously they awaited the coming of dawn, eager to commence the last stage of their journey—the ascent of the crater wall.
With a suddenness peculiar to the tropics the sun rose. A fiery arrow flickered across the sky, followed by a blaze of golden glory, before which the stars rapidly paled and died. The day had come!
Rising, the king led the way across the crater, passing the tiny spring whence he had obtained the water the previous night. This, the explorers noted, overflowed its basin and trickled through a little crevice in the crater wall out into the open, to become, perhaps, a rushing river on the other side of the cliffs. Moving to a spot where the ascent promised to be easier than at any other point, Chenobi began to climb. The creepers and low-growing shrubs made progress very easy. Within an hour the summit was reached, and the party stood in the full glare of the sun on the rim of the great crater. This same rim proved to be a rugged ledge some twenty feet in width, from which the outer cliffs descended for the first hundred feet or so as sheer as a wall and about as devoid of foothold.
Below, the morning mists still veiled the base of the cone and the country which lay beyond it; but, as the sun gained power, the banks of vapour slowly dispersed, exposing to view the waving forests of a large island.
Eagerly Mervyn peered downward; then a glad shout pealed from his lips:
“I thought so! Look, Seymour! The island of Ayuti!”
“Great Scott! so it is!” gasped the baronet in amazement.