Two Thousand Miles Below Part 22

Rawson pounced upon that and demanded corroboration.

"All the power of earth tends to draw every object to its center, yet we're here on an inner surface. We're walking actually head down. And our bodies, every stone, every particle of matter, ought by well-known laws to fall into that flaming center. But we don't! That proves your point--proves a counter gravitation. Then there must be a neutral zone. A place where this upward thrust is exactly equalled by gravity's downward pull.

"The zone of fire," said Gor. "You pa.s.sed through it. Did you not see?"

"Saw it and felt it!" Rawson's mind leaped immediately to the next question.

"And we must have come through it at, surely, a thousand miles an hour. What drove us? That sh.e.l.l must have gone in from here. I can understand its falling one way, but not two. We should have come to rest in that very spot--and we'd have lasted about half a second if we had."

"Oro and Grah," said Gor. "Oro, the sun-stone, and Grah, the stone-that-loves-the-dark. But they are not stones, neither are they metal. We find them deep in the ground, clinging to the caves. A fine powder, both of them."

"Still I don't get it," said Rawson. "You drive that sh.e.l.l in from here, and then you drive it back again."

"That, too, I will explain later. It is simple; even the Dwellers in the Dark--those whom you call the mole-men--have Oro and Grah to serve them."

Gor launched into a long account of their tribal legends, of that time in the long ago when an angry sun G.o.d had driven his children inside the earth; of how Gor, and the son of Gor, and his son's sons tried always to return.

Rawson was listening only subconsciously. They were circling the white mountain, ascending its lower slope. Now he could see beyond it as far as the land extended, and he was startled to find this distance so short. They were on an island, ten miles or so in length, and beyond it was the sea; he must ask Gor about that.

"It is all that is left," said Gor, when Rawson interrupted his narrative. "Once the land was great and the sea small--this also in the long ago--but always it has risen. The air we breathe and the water in the sea come from the central sun. The air rushes out, as you know; the water has no place to retreat."

Again he took up his tale, but Rawson's eyes were following the upward curve of that sea. They, seemed to be in the bottom of a great bowl; he was trying to estimate, trying to gage distance.

"... and so, after many generations had lived and died, they found the Pathway to the Light," Gor was saying. "It is our name for the shaft through which you came. This was thousands of your years ago, when he who was then Gor, and the bravest of the tribe, descended. Even then they were workers in metal and they knew of Oro and Grah. They were our fathers, the first People of the Light."

Rawson had a question ready on his tongue, but Gor's words suggested another. "That shaft," he said, "the Pathway to the Light--do you mean it extends clear up to the mole-men's world? Why don't they come down?"

"To them the way is lost; the Pathway is closed above the zone of fire. That other Gor did that. And those who remained--the mole-men--have forgotten. They could break their way through if they knew--they are master-workers with fire--but for them the Pathway ends, and below is the great heat. But we know of a way around the closed place, the hidden way to the great Lake of Fire."

"They could break their way through if they knew!" repeated Rawson softly. For an instant he stood silent and unbreathing; he was remembering the ugly eyes in a priest's hideous face. The eyes were watching him as the White Ones took him away.

He forced his thoughts to come back to the earlier question. "What,"

he asked, "is the diameter, the distance across the inside world? How far is it from here to your sun? How many miles?"

"Miles?" questioned Gor. "We know the word, for the Mountain has told us, but the length of a mile we could not know. This I can say: there were wise men in the past when our own world was larger. They worked magic with little marks on paper. It is said that they knew that if one came here from our sun and kept on as far again through the solid rock, he would reach the outside--the land, of the true sun, from which our forefathers came."

Rawson nodded his head, while his eyes followed that sweeping green bowl of the sea. "Not far off," he said abstractedly. "Two thousand miles radius--and the earth itself not a solid ball, but a big globular sh.e.l.l two thousand miles thick. I could rig up a level, I suppose; work out an approximation of the curvature."

From the smooth winding path which they had followed there sounded behind them hurrying footsteps; a moment later Loah stood beside him.

Her eyes gave unmistakable corroboration of what Gor had said of that torrent of tears, but she looked at Dean bravely, while every show of emotion was erased from her face. "You sent for me," she said.

And Rawson, though now he knew he could speak to her and be understood, found himself at a loss for words.

"We wanted you with us, Gor and I," he began, then paused. She was so different from the girl whose smiling eyes had welcomed him. The change had come when he spoke those first words on his arrival, and now she was so coldly impersonal.

"I wanted to thank you. You saved my life; you were so brave, so...."

Again he hesitated; he wanted to tell her how dear, how utterly lovely, she had seemed.

"It was nothing; it has pleased me to do it," she said quietly, then walked on ahead while the others followed. But Rawson knew that that slim body was tense with repressed emotion. He had not realized how he had looked forward to seeing again that welcoming light in her eyes.

He was still puzzling over the change as they entered a natural cave in the mountainside.

A winding pa.s.sage showed between sheer walls of snow white, where giant crystals had parted along their planes of cleavage. Then the pa.s.sage grew dark, but he could see that ahead of them it opened to form a wider s.p.a.ce. There were lights on the walls of the room, lights like the one that Loah had carried. And on the floor were rows of tables where men were busy at work, writing endlessly on long scrolls of parchment.

"The Wise Ones," Gor was saying. "Servants of the Holy Mountain." Yet even then men knelt at Rawson's coming as had the other more humble people. They then returned to their tables, and in that crystal mountain was only the sound of their scratching pens and the faint sigh of a breeze that blew in through a hidden pa.s.sage to furnish ventilation.

Yet there were some at those tables whose pens did not move; they seemed to be waiting expectantly. One of them spoke. "The time is near," he said. "Are the Servants prepared?"

And the waiting ones answered: "We are prepared."

Rawson glanced sharply about. "What hocus-pocus is this?" he was asking himself. Still the silence persisted. He looked at the waiting men, motionless, their heads bent, their hands ready above the parchment scrolls. He saw again the white walls, the single broad band of some glittering metal that made a continuous black stripe around walls and ceiling and floor.

"What kind of ore is that?" he was asking himself silently. "It's metallic; it runs right through the mountain. I wonder--"

His idle thoughts were never finished. A ripping crash like the crackle of lightning in the vaulted room! Then a voice--the mountain itself was speaking--speaking in words whose familiar accent brought a sob into his throat.

"Station K-twenty-two-A," said the voice of the mountain, "the super-power station of the Radio-news Service at Los Angeles, California."

"It's tuned in!" gasped Rawson. "Tuned in on the big L. A. station! A gigantic crystal detector! Those heavy laminations of imbedded metal furnish the inductance." Then his incoherent words ended--the mountain was speaking.

"Radiopress dispatch: The invasion of the mole-men has not been checked. Army Air Force fought a terrific engagement about midnight, last night, and met defeat. Over one hundred fighting planes were brought down in flames. Even the new battle-plane type, the latest dreadnoughts of the air, succ.u.mbed.

"Heavy loss of life, although civilian population of three towns had been evacuated before the mole-men destroyed them. Gordon Smith is reported killed. Smith was a.s.sociated with Dean Rawson in the Tonah Basin where the mole-men first appeared. With Colonel Culver of the California National Guard, Smith was returning from Washington in an Army dreadnought which crashed back of the enemy's lines."

Rawson's tanned face had gone white; he knew the others were looking at him curiously, all but the men at the tables whose pens were flying furiously across the waiting scrolls. Before him the face of Loah, suddenly wide-eyed and troubled, swam dizzily. He could scarcely see it--he was seeing other sights of another world.

"They're out," he half whispered. "The red devils are out--and Smithy--Smithy's gone!"

CHAPTER XX

_Taloned Hands_

Simple, pastoral folk, the People of the Light! In their inner world, a vanishing world, where nearly all of what once had been a vast country was now covered by the steadily encroaching sea, they had resisted the degeneration which might easily have followed the destruction of a complex civilization. Living simply, and clean of mind, they had clung to the culture of the past as it was taught them by their Wise Ones. And now the People of the Light had found a new G.o.d.