In the Morning of Time Part 16

Quick as thought, Grom drew his bow and shot at the appalling head.

The arrow drove straight into the gaping throat, eliciting a thunderous bellow of rage, but producing no other effect. Then Grom sprang after his fleeing companions, and raced for his life toward the cave mouth. The cave might be nothing more than a death-trap for them all; but it seemed to offer the one possibility of escape.

As they dashed into the cave the awful, gaping head was close behind them. They had a flashing glimpse, through the gloom, of high-arched distance melting into blackness, of a strip of black water along the right, and to the left a gentle ascent of smooth white sand, whose end was out of sight.

Up this slope they raced, with the clashing of monstrous fangs close behind them. But they had not gone a dozen strides when the slope quivered, and heaved upwards shudderingly beneath them; and they all fell forward flat upon their faces. From all but Grom there went up a shriek so piercing that in their own ears it disguised the stupendous rending roar which at that moment seemed to stun the air. The mighty arch of the cave mouth had slipped and crashed down, completely jamming the entrance, and opening up a gash of blue heaven above their heads.

To Grom's unshaken wits, it was clear on the instant what had happened. He staggered to his feet and looked back through a rain of falling rock-splinters. He had a vision of their colossal pursuer, its jaws stretched to their utmost width, the vast globes of its eyes protruding from their armored sockets, its ponderous, bowed fore-legs pawing the air aimlessly in the final convulsion. The falling rock-ma.s.s had caught it on the middle of the back, crushing its mighty frame like an eggsh.e.l.l.

For a second or two, Grom stood there rigid, staring, his gnarled fingers clenched upon his weapons. Then a second earthquake tremor beneath his feet warned him. With an unerring instinct, he sprang on up the slope after his companions, who had fled as soon as they could pick themselves up. And in the next moment the rock above his head, fissured deep by the rains, slipped again. With a growling screech, as if torn from the bowels of the mountain, it settled slowly down, and sealed the mouth of the cave to utter blackness.

Grom stopped short, having no mind to dash out his brains against the rock. There was stillness at last, and silence save for the faint, humming moan of the earthquake which seemed to come from vast depths beneath his feet. Profoundly awed, but master of his spirit, he stood leaning upon his spear in the thick dark till the last of that strange humming note had died away. Then, through a silence so thick it seemed to choke him, he called aloud:

"A-ya! where are you?"

"_Grom!_" came the girl's answer, a sobbing cry of relief and joy, from almost, as it seemed, beneath his outstretched hand.

"We are all here," came the voices of the three men.

They had fallen headlong at the second shock, as at the first; and in the darkness they had not dared to rise again, but lay waiting for their leader to tell them what to do. In half a dozen cautious, groping steps he was among them, and sank down by A-ya's side, clutching her to him to stop her trembling.

"What are we to do now?" asked the girl, after a long silence. Without Grom, they would probably have died where they were, not daring to stir in the darkness. But their faith in their chief kept them cheerful even in this desperate plight.

"We must find a way out," answered Grom, with resolute confidence.

"If Hobbo had not dropped the fire!" said young Mo bitterly.

The giant groaned in self-abas.e.m.e.nt, and beat his chest with his great fists. But Grom, who would allow no dissensions in his following, answered sternly:

"Be silent. You might have done no better yourself."

Then for a time there was no more said, while Grom, sitting there in the dark with the girl's face buried in his great s.h.a.ggy chest, thought out his plans. It was plain to him, from what he had seen in that last instant of daylight, that the entrance was blocked impregnably. Moreover, he judged that any attempt to work an opening in that direction would be likely, for the present, to bring more rocks down upon them. It would be better, first, to feel their way on into the cave in the hope of finding another exit. He was not afraid of getting lost, no matter how absolute the dark, because he possessed that sixth sense, so long ago vanished from modern man's equipment--the sense of direction. He knew that, as a matter of course, he could find his way back to this starting-point whenever he would.

"Come on!" he ordered at last, lifting A-ya and holding her hand in his grasp. Reaching out with his spear, he kept tapping the ground before him as he went, and occasionally the wall upon his left.

Sometimes, too, he would reach upwards to a.s.sure himself that there was no lowering of the rocky ceiling. A spear's length to the right, more or less, he got always a splash of water.

With their fine senses intensely alert, they were able to make fair progress, even though unaided by their eyes. But Grom checked his advance abruptly. He had a perception of some obstacle before him. He reached out his spear as far as he could. It touched a soft object.

The object, whatever it was, surged violently beneath the touch. His flesh crept, and the s.h.a.ggy hair uplifted on his neck. "Back!" he hissed, thrusting A-ya off to arm's length and bracing his spear point before him to receive the expected attack. A pair of faintly phosph.o.r.escent eyes, small, but so wide apart as to show that their owner's head must have been enormous, flashed round upon them. There was a hoa.r.s.e squeal of alarm, and a heavy body went floundering off into the water. They could hear it swimming away in hot haste.

Every one drew a long breath. Then, after a few moments, A-ya laughed softly:

"It's good to find something at last that runs away from us instead of after us!" said she.

A little further on the cave wall turned to the left. A few steps, and their path came to an end. There was water ahead of them, and on both sides. Grom's exploring spear a.s.sured them that it was deep water.

"We must swim," said he. "Leave your clubs behind." And leading the way down into the unknown tide, he struck out straight ahead.

It was nerve-testing work swimming thus through that unseen water to an unguessed goal; but Grom was unhesitating, and his companions rested upon his steady will. The water was of a summer warmth, and slightly salt, which convinced him that it had free communication with the sunlit tides outside. Several times he came within touch of the rocky walls of the cavern, and found that they went straight down to a depth he could not guess. But he kept on with hope and confidence at a leisurely pace, which, in that bland and windless flood, he knew that every member of his party could have maintained for half a day.

Suddenly there appeared ahead of them a faint, bluish gleam upon the water's surface. It was something elusive and unreal, and vaguely menacing.

"Daylight!" exclaimed young Mo eagerly. But Grom said nothing. He did not think it was daylight, and he was apprehensive of some new peril.

The strange light grew and spread. It was evident now that it rose from the water, and also that it was advancing rapidly to meet the astonished swimmers. After a few moments it was bright enough in its blue pallor to show the swimmers that they were traversing a vast hall of waters, whose roof was lost in darkness. Some fifty yards ahead of them, and a little to the right, a low spit of rock, half awash for the greater part of its length, ran out slantingly from the wall of the stupendous chamber.

Toward this ledge Grom now led the way, hurling himself through the water on his side at top speed. He could not fathom this mysterious phosph.o.r.escence, and he wished to get his people out upon dry land before it reached them. But fast as the adventurers swam, the ghostly radiance spread faster. Before they got to the ledge, the light was all about them; but it seemed to be coming from a great depth.

Nervously they all glanced down, and a low cry of horror broke from their lips. The depths were swarming with monstrous, luminous forms, a moon-bright, crawling, sliding field of claws and feelers, and broad, flat backs, and dreadful, protruding eyes.

The eyes all stared straight up at them with a fixed malignancy that froze even Grom's blood. They seemed innumerable, and all together they came suddenly floating upwards.

Already the fugitives were dragging themselves out upon the ledge, in frantic haste, when the diabolical swarm reached the surface. But Hobbo, who was the slowest swimmer, was merely clutching at the rock when the water boiled all about him in a froth of light. A pair of huge, pincer-like claws seized him by the neck, and another pair by one arm, plucking him back. His convulsed face stared upward for an instant, and then, with a choked scream, he was dragged under. He disappeared in a swirl of pale blue, frantically waving claws, and eyes, and feelers, and black-fringed, chopping mouths.

Beside himself with rage and horror, Grom stabbed down wildly into the whirling struggle, and his example was followed at once by Loob and young Mo. Some of their random blows went home, and as one or another of the gigantic crabs turned over in its death-throes, its nearest fellows seized it, tore it to pieces, and devoured it.

But A-ya, who had taken no part in this vengeance, now s.n.a.t.c.hed Grom by the arm, shrieking wildly:

"Look! They are coming out!"

Recovering their senses, the three half-maddened men stared about them. On every side the gigantic crabs--some with claws eight or ten feet long, and eyes upon the ends of long waving stalks--were crawling up upon the ledge.

The ledge, fortunately, was of some width. At its landward end it rose into a ma.s.s of tumbled rocks perhaps twenty or thirty feet above the water. Toward this post of vantage the adventurers fought their way, striking and thrusting desperately with their spears as the monsters, crowding up from the water on either side, s.n.a.t.c.hed at them with their terrible mailed claws. Over and over again one or another of the party was seized by the foot or the leg; but his companions would beat the long, jointed limb to fragments, or drive their spear-points deep into the awful, drooling mouth, and set him free.

At last, bleeding from many wounds, they reached the end of the ledge and clambered to the top. Here but three or four of the giant crustaceans tried to follow them. These were easily speared from above, and hurled back disabled among their ravening kin. And the whole swarm, apparently forgetting their intended victims as soon as they were out of reach, fell to fighting hideously among themselves over the convulsed bodies of these wounded. The lower portion of the ledge, and the water all about it, was a crawling ma.s.s of horror that seemed to froth with blue light. And a confused noise of crackling, snapping and hissing arose from it.

Every eye but Grom's was glued in fascination to the baleful scene.

But Grom now thought only of using that pervasive light to best advantage while it should last. The wall of the cavern at this point was so broken and fissured that it was not unscalable; and a little way off to the right he marked, at some height above the water, what looked like the entrance to a lateral gallery.

"Come! While the light lasts," he ordered, setting off over the rocks.

The others followed close. Now sidling along knife-like ledges, now clinging by fingers and toes to almost imperceptible projections, they made their way across the face of the steep, and gained the mouth of the gallery. It was s.p.a.cious, and easy to traverse, its floor sloping upwards somewhat steeply. They plunged into it with confidence. And the blue light of the Hall of Terrors faded out behind them.

Not many minutes later, another light, as it were a white star, gleamed ahead of them. It grew as they went, and turned to gold. Then a patch of turquoise sky, flecked sweetly with small fleeces of cloud, opened before them, and in a moment more they came out upon a high, blossoming down, blown over by a breeze that smelt of honey and salt.

Below them was a lovely, land-locked bay, with a herd of deer pasturing among scattered trees by the sh.o.r.e. Away behind them undulated the gracious line of the downs, inviting their feet.

"It is a pleasant land," said Grom, "and we will surely come back to it. But I think we must find another way than that by which we came."

CHAPTER XI

THE FEASTING OF THE CAVE FOLK

I

At last, and reluctantly, the Folk of the Caves had withdrawn from their earthquake-hara.s.sed valley and betaken themselves to the new dwelling-place which Grom had found for them, on the green hill-slope beside the Bitter Waters. They had lost no time, however, in accepting the new conditions; for these caves in the limestone were ample and secure--it was hard for any invader to come at them save by way of the long, bare ridge of the downs running westward behind the caves; a sweet-water brook ran almost past their threshold to fall with a pleasant clamor into the bay,--and the surrounding country was rich in game. The vast basin of marshy plain and colossal jungle, to be sure, which stretched and steamed below the downs to southward, was the habitation of strange monsters; but these, apparently, had no taste for exploring the high, clean, windy downs.

On a certain golden morning it chanced that the caves were well-nigh deserted. The men of the tribe, including the chiefs themselves, Bawr and Grom, together with most of the women and the half-grown children, had gone off down the sh.o.r.e to a shallow inlet five or six miles distant to gather sh.e.l.l-fish--great luscious mussels and peculiarly plump and savory whelks. The girl A-ya, absorbed in her special occupation of fashioning bows and arrows for the tribe, had remained, with a half-score of old men and women and Grom's giant slave, the lame Bow-leg, Ook-ootsk, to guard the little children and the tribal fires. As Grom's mate, and his confidential a.s.sociate in all his greatest ventures, A-ya's prestige in the tribe had come to be only less than that of Bawr and Grom themselves.