A Trip to Venus Part 19

"That is probably his den," said Gazen, who was now as collected as I have ever seen him. Nevertheless all his faculties were on the stretch.

His keen grey eye was everywhere, and his active mind was calculating every chance. I felt then as I had often felt before that in action as well as in thought the professor was a man of no common mark.

The event showed that his surmise was correct, for soon after he had spoken the dragon uttered a startling cry--a kind of squawk like that of a drake, but much louder, hoa.r.s.er, shriller--and alighted on the ground.

"There is not a moment to lose," said Gazen. "We must attack him before he enters the cave."

Certainly the darkness inside the cavern would give the beast a great advantage, and although we might succeed in killing him, we could scarcely hope to find Miss Carmichael alive. Was she alive now? I had my doubts, but I kept them to myself. Since she had been carried away she had not given the smallest sign of life, not even when the dragon settled. Perhaps, however, she had merely lost her senses through fright, and was still in a dead faint.

We might have fought the creature from the air, but we had decided to a.s.sail him on the solid ground, because we should thus be able to scatter and take him in the flank, if not in the rear.

While Carmichael landed his car the astronomer and I kept a sharp watch on the beast, all ready to fire at the first movement which seemed to threaten the safety of the young girl, who was lying motionless at the bottom of a slope or talus which led up to the mouth of the cavern.

Freed from his burden the dragon now stood erect, and a more awful monster it would be difficult to conceive. He must have been at least forty feet in stature, yet he gave us an impression of squat and st.u.r.dy strength.

I have called him a dragon, but he was not at all like the dragons of our imagination. With his great bullet head and p.r.i.c.k ears, his beetling brows and deep sunken eyes, his ferocious mouth and protruding tusks, his short thick neck and ma.s.sive shoulders, his large, gawky, and misshapen trunk, coated with dingy brown fur, shading into dirty yellow on the stomach, his stout, bandy legs armed with curving talons, and his huge leathern wings hanging in loose folds about him, he looked more like an imp of Satan than a dragon.

Hitherto he had not appeared to notice his pursuers; but now that he was freer to observe, the grating of the car upon the rocks caught his attention. He turned quickly, and stared at the apparition of the vessel, which must have been a strange object to him; but he did not seem to take alarm. It was the gaze of a jaguar or a tiger who sees something curious in the jungle--vigilant and deadly if you like, but neither scared nor fierce.

We lost no time in sallying forth, all three of us, armed with magazine rifle, cutla.s.s, and revolver. Mr. Carmichael in the middle, I on the lower, and Gazen on the upper side, or that nearest to Miss Carmichael.

The rocks around were slippery with ordure, and the sickening stench of rotting skeletons made our very gorge rise. Suddenly a loud squeaking in the direction of the cave arrested us, and before we had recovered from our surprise, nearly a dozen young dragons, each about the size of a man, tumbled hastily down the slope, and rushed upon the lifeless form of Miss Carmichael.

"Great Scott, there's the whole family," muttered Gazen between his teeth, at the same time bringing his rifle to the shoulder, and firing in quick succession.

The foremost of the crew, which had already flung itself upon the prey, was seen to spring head over heels into the air, and fall back dead; another lay writhing in agony upon the ground, and uttering strangely human shrieks; whilst the others, terrified by the noise, turned and fled back helter-skelter to the cave.

The old one, roused to anger by the injury done to his offspring, snarled ferociously at his enemies and, drawing himself to his full height, made a furious dash for Gazen.

Our rifles cracked again and again; the monster started as he felt the shots, and halted, glaring from one to another of us like a man irresolute. Purple streams were gushing from his head and sides; he attempted to fly, and ran towards the brink of the ledge; but ere he could gain sufficient impetus to launch himself into the air, he staggered and fell heavily to the ground, with his broken wings beneath him.

Gazen, quicker than her father, flew towards Miss Carmichael, and bent over her.

"Is she alive?" enquired Carmichael, in breathless and trembling accents.

"Yes, thank G.o.d," responded Gazen fervently; as he raised her hand to his lips and kissed it.

There were tears of joy in his eyes, and I knew then what I had long suspected, that he loved her.

Suddenly a loud croak in the distance caused us to look up, and we beheld another dragon on the wing, coining rapidly towards us from a pa.s.s among the mountains. There was not a moment to be lost, and Gazen, taking Miss Carmichael in his arms, we all hurried on board the car, eager to escape from this revolting spot.

CHAPTER XII

SUNWARD HO!

"By the way," said Gazen to me, "I've got a new theory for the rising and sinking of the sun behind the cliffs at Womla--a theory that will simply explode Professor Possil, and shake the Royal Astronomical Society to its foundations."

The astronomer and I were together in the observatory, where he was adjusting his telescope to look at the sun. After our misadventure with the flying ape, we had returned to our former station on the summit of the mountain, to pick up the drawing materials of Miss Carmichael; but as Gazen was anxious to get as near the sun as possible, and being disgusted with the infernal scenery as well as the foetid, malarial atmosphere of Mercury, we left as soon as we had replenished our cistern from the pools in the rock.

"Another theory?" I responded. "Thought you had settled that question."

"Alas, my friend, theories, like political treatises, are made to be broken."

"Well, what do you think of it now?"

"You remember how we came to the conclusion that Schiaparelli was right, and that the planet Venus, by rotating about her own axis in the same time as she takes to revolve around the sun, always keeps the same face turned to the sun, one hemisphere being in perpetual light and summer, whilst the other is in perpetual darkness and winter?"

"Yes."

"You remember, too, how we explained the growing alt.i.tude of the sun in the heavens which culminated on the great day of the Festival, by supposing that the axis of the planet swayed to and from the sun so as to tilt each pole towards the sun, and the other from it, alternately, thus producing what by courtesy we may call the seasons in Womla?"

"Yes."

"Well, judging from the observations I have made, we were probably right so far; but if you recollect, I accounted for the mysterious daily rise and set of the sun, if I may use the words, by changes in the density of the atmosphere bending the solar rays, and making the disk appear to rise and sink periodically, though in reality it does nothing of the kind. A similar effect is well-known on the earth. It produces the 'after glow' on the peaks of the Alps when the sun is far below the horizon; it sometimes makes the sun bob up and down again after sunset, and it has been known to make the sun show in the Arctic regions three weeks before the proper time. I had some difficulty in understanding how the effect could take place so regularly."

"I think you ascribed it to the interaction of the solar heat and the evaporation from the surface."

"Quite so. I a.s.sumed that when the sun is low the vapours above the edge of the crater and elsewhere cool and condense, thus bending the rays and seeming to lift the sun higher; but after a time the rays heat and rarefy the vapours, thus lowering the sun again. It seemed a plausible hypothesis and satisfied me for a time, but still not altogether, and now I believe I have made a discovery."

"And it is?"

"That Venus is a wobbler."

"A wobbler?"

"That she wobbles--that she doesn't keep steady--swings from side to side. You have seen a top, how stiff and erect it is when it is spinning fast, and how it wobbles when it is spinning slow, just before it falls. Well, I think something of the kind is going on with Venus. The earth may be compared to a top that is whirling fast, and Venus to one that has slowed down. She is less able than the earth to resist the disturbing attraction of the sun on the inequalities of her figure, and therefore she wobbles. In addition to the slow swinging of her axis which produces her 'seasons,' she has a quicker nodding, which gives rise to day and night in some favoured spots like Womla."

"After all," said I, "tis a feminine trait. _Souvent femme varie._"

"Oh, she is constant to her lord the sun," rejoined Gazen. "She never turns her back upon him, but if I have not discovered a mare's nest, which is very likely, she becks and bows to him a good deal, and thus maintains her 'infinite variety.'"

The cloudy surface of Mercury now lay far beneath us, and the glowing disc of the sun, which appeared four or five times larger than it does on the earth, had taken a bluish tinge--a proof that we had reached a very great alt.i.tude.

"What a magnificent 'sun-spot!'" exclaimed the professor in a tone of admiration. "Just take a peep at it."

I placed my eye to the telescope, and saw the glowing surface of the disc resolved into a marvellous web of shining patches on a dimmer background, and in the midst a large blotch which reminded me of a quarry hole as delineated on the plan of a surveyor.

"Have you been able to throw any fresh light on these mysterious 'spots?'" I enquired.

"I am more than ever persuaded they are breaks in the photosphere caused by eruptions of heated matter, chiefly gaseous from the interior--eruptions such as might give rise to craters like that of Womla, or those of the moon, were the sun cooler. No doubt that eminent authority, Professor Sylva.n.u.s Pettifer Possil, regards them as aerial hurricanes; but the more I see, the more I am constrained to regard Sylva.n.u.s Pettifer Possil as a silly vain asteroid."

While Gazen was yet speaking we both became sensible of an unwonted stillness in the car.

The machinery had ceased to vibrate.

Our feelings at this discovery were akin to those of pa.s.sengers in an ocean steamer when the screw stops--a welcome relief to the monotony of the voyage, a vague apprehension of danger, and curiosity to learn what had happened.

"Is there anything wrong, Carmichael?" asked Gazen through the speaking tube.