Two Thousand Miles Below Part 18

It beat upon him thunderously. As deep as the deepest tone of a mighty organ, like a thousand gigantic organs welded in one, it roared and shook him through and through with its single note.

Exhausted by his wild flight, surrounded by this maelstrom of sound, he sank to the floor and let his laboring lungs have their way. But his eyes were searching the big room.

The great cave was too regularly formed to have had a natural origin.

The light that the girl had carried gave only feeble illumination in so great a s.p.a.ce that had so evidently been hollowed out of the solid red matter.

The light flashed here and there as the girl and her companions moved away. They were circling the room. Rawson saw the irregular outlines of entrances to many dark pa.s.sages like the one through which they had come. The red rock-ma.s.s seemingly had been riven and torn, and apparently in front of each opening the white figures fought against the rush of outgoing air. Rawson felt the same current sweeping and whirling gustily about him.

Now his companions were across the room, and between him and them in the center of the floor he saw the mouth of a black well, a pit some twenty or more feet across. Directly above, where the red rock stuff formed a domed ceiling, he found a counterpart of the pit below--another great bore or open shaft, roughly circular. Apparently it went straight on up and was a continuation of that lower pit.

"This room was cut out," Rawson was thinking, "by the white people or the mole-men--Lord knows who, or when, or why. Cut out around this big shaft...."

His thoughts trailed off. Even thinking seemed impossible under the battering of the roaring noise that pounded about him. Then another thought pierced through the bedlam. He had found the source of the uproar.

That upper shaft, the hole that went on up, must be plugged. There was no outlet that way, and this air that drove endlessly upward from the room must be coming from the lower shaft. It was striking up into that upper cavity.

An organ pipe, truly. But whence came the unending blast of air to keep that gigantic instrument in operation? Rawson dropped to his knees and crept slowly across the floor toward the pit. He must test his theory--see if that was where the air was driving in.

Just short of the brink he stopped. The girl had called--a cry of alarm. She was running swiftly toward him, circling the pit. And Rawson, as she tugged at him, trying to draw him back, knew that she had mistaken his motive. She had thought he was going to cast himself down.

He did not need to go farther. He was close to the edge. And now, even above that roaring sound he heard the rush of the column of air. He seated himself on the stone floor and smiled up at the girl rea.s.suringly. Her eyes that had been dark with fear changed swiftly to a look so sweetly, beautifully tender that Dean Rawson found himself thrilled and shaken by an emotion that set his nerves to quivering even more than did the sonorous vibration from above.

Her companions had joined her. Dean saw her eyes regarding them steadily. Then, as if reaching some sudden final conclusion in her own mind, she dropped swiftly to her knees beside him, raised one of his hands in hers and pressed her soft lips against it.

And Dean, even had he known their language, could not in that moment have spoken. There had been something in the look of her eyes and the soft touch of her lips that of themselves went far beyond words.

"You darling," he was whispering softly to himself as the girl sprang to her feet and walked swiftly away, the others following.

"An angel, no less--down in this d.a.m.ned place!"

He wondered, as he watched the flickering light far across the room, what destination they could be bound for. Surely no one so radiantly beautiful could inhabit a world of endless dungeons like that where the mole-men lived. But if not that, then what? Where would their next journey take them? And in what direction would they go?

Again Rawson's thoughts were submerged beneath his own weariness. This air that beat about him had seemed cool after the terrific heat that drove in off the Lake of Fire. Now he realized that the air itself was hot. His one spurt of strength and energy had been expended.

He watched the men disappear into one of the pa.s.sages, but he roused himself when they returned. They were clinging to a strange device, a metal cylinder that floated in air above their heads like a dirigible on end. It was about eight feet in diameter and some fourteen feet in height; both upper and lower ends were rounded. A cage of parallel bars enclosed it from end to end; like springs of steel they extended from top to bottom where they curved in and were attached to the rounded ends.

Rawson sat up quickly and stared in startled amazement at the thing glinting like polished aluminum in the light. And his engineer's mind responded as much to that smooth finish and the evident workmanship that had entered into the making of this thing as it did to the object itself.

The girl placed her light on the floor. She, too, reached up and gripped a bar of the protecting cage to which the others were holding.

With her added weight and strength they drew it down almost to the floor. Rawson knew by their efforts that they were dealing with something actually buoyant, a metal balloon. One of the men, still putting his weight on the bars, reached in and opened a door in the smooth sh.e.l.l. He stepped inside, and a moment later the big sh.e.l.l dropped to the floor and, still vertical, stood on the lower rounded end of the protecting cage, rocking gently as the hot whirling wind hit it.

They were communicating among themselves by signs. Rawson saw them motioning. Speech was useless in that roaring, pandemonium-filled room.

She was motioning for him to follow. One of the men circled that central pit, came beside Rawson and helped him to his feet, steadying him as they crossed the room. The girl had entered the big metal sh.e.l.l. Dean saw the glow of her torch shining through the open doorway and through two other windows of crystal gla.s.s.

The big room had grown dimmer. The high ceiling was lost in murky shadows. All the room was dark save where that light struck upon walls and floor to make them glow blood-red. The waiting lighted sh.e.l.l seemed a haven of refuge. To get inside, close the door, lock out some of this unendurable, battering sound--it was all Rawson asked, all he could think.

The door closed. He was within the sh.e.l.l, standing on a smooth metal floor. The others were beside him. Dully he wondered what wild adventure was ahead.

He had expected--he hardly knew what. But there should have been machinery of some sort. If this weird balloon thing was actually to carry them, there must be some mechanism, some propelling power. And instead he saw nothing but the shining walls of the circular room and at the exact center, reaching from floor to ceiling, a six-inch metal post that thickened to a boxlike form on a level with his eyes. There was a plate on the side of that box, a cover, and clamps that held it in place, and on an adjoining side two little levers, one near the top of the box, the other near the bottom.

His one all-inclusive glance showed him bull's-eye windows in the ceiling. There were more of them in the floor. One curved bar, circling the room, was mounted on brackets against the wall. They were telling him by signs that he was to put his hands on it and hang on.

One of the men was beside that central post. He too gripped at a projecting hand-hold. His other hand was on the lower lever.

Rawson knew his disappointment was unreasonable, but his weary mind was tired of mysteries. Some understandable bit of machinery would have been rea.s.suring. And then in his next thought he asked himself what difference did it make. If this childish balloon thing were really capable of carrying them somewhere, what of it? It could only mean more of this hideous inner world that grew more unbearably fantastic with each new experience.

His life had been saved. True, but for what end? The girl's eyes were upon him, reading the expression on his face. She smiled encouragingly. Then Rawson's hands tightened upon the metal bar. The man who stood by the central post had moved one lever the merest trifle. Rawson felt the floor lifting beneath him. Then the sh.e.l.l, like a bubble of metal, pitched and tossed as the powerful air currents caught it.

His own lightness saved him from injury. He gripped the bar and held himself free of the wall. The round top of their strange craft grated against the domed roof. Then again the ship steadied and seemed motionless, and Rawson knew they had slipped up into the still air of that upper shaft.

For one wild instant, filled with impossible hope, Rawson saw this as a means of ascent to his own world. Then reason tore those wild hopes to shreds.

"It's closed up above," he thought. "It must be. That's why it sounded that way. That's why the air drove off through those side pa.s.sages."

The next instant held no time for thought. Rawson's whole attention was concentrated upon the bar to which he clung. For, quicker than thought, the metal sh.e.l.l, the little cylindrical world in which he and these others were, fell swiftly beneath them.

His body twisted in mid-air. He knew the others were being thrown in the same manner. Then, what an instant before had been the ceiling was now a floor beneath his feet, pressing up against him and giving him weight--and by the whistling rush of the air that tore past their sh.e.l.l he knew they had fallen with marvelous swiftness straight down through the throat of that lower shaft.

And now what had been down was up. The ceiling of this strange room was now their floor, but Rawson was not deceived. "Acceleration," he said. "It's crowding us. The sh.e.l.l tends to fall faster than we do.

It's like an elevator traveling downward at a swifter rate than a free falling body."

He had glimpsed the gla.s.sy-side of that well into which he knew they had been flung. He knew that the shrieks that filled the room time and again were caused by the touching of their sh.e.l.l's guiding and protecting bars against one gla.s.sy wall. Those sounds came always from the same side and Rawson found momentary satisfaction in his own understanding of the phenomenon.

"We're falling free," he argued within his own mind, "falling toward the center of the earth. And a falling body wouldn't follow a vertical course. It would tend to hug against one wall." And by that he knew something of their speed. The necessity for it was apparent a moment later.

Above his head the bull's-eyes pointing forward in the direction of their flight were faintly red. Swiftly they changed to crimson. Rawson was standing beside a window in the wall of their craft. That, too, grew quickly to an area of dazzling brightness. Slowly the heat struck in. The air in the little room was stifling. He saw the girl turn her head and give a sharp order.

The man by the central post responded with another slight movement of the lever. Beneath Rawson's feet the floor pressed upward in a surge of speed that bent his knees and bore him downward. Under his hands the rod to which he clung was hot. The shining walls were dimly glowing. They were being hurled through the very heart of h.e.l.l....

And then it was past. The crimson horror beyond those windows grew dull and then black. In the blunt nose of their craft a tiny crevice must have opened. The one who drove that projectile in its shrieking flight had touched another control that Rawson had not before seen.

And with a piercing shriek a thin jet of cold air drove down into the hot room.

No wine could have been one-half so potent. That thin jet filled the room with buffeting whirlwinds that grew quickly cold.