Two Thousand Miles Below Part 17

"Gevarro!" he was shrieking. "Gevarro!"

Beside him a priest swept the metal table clear. Rawson's clothing, the gun, the radio receiver, all were s.n.a.t.c.hed up and hurled into one of the ma.s.sive chests. Phee-e-al was still shouting shrill commands.

An instant later Rawson was lifted in air, rushed to the barrier and thrown bodily from the sacred premises he had invaded. Then the hands of the red guard closed about him before he could struggle to his feet. A s.h.i.+ning object swung down above his head. It was the last he knew.

His dreams were of falling. Always when he half roused to consciousness he was aware of that smooth, even descent, and he knew it had continued for hours.

Once he saw black walls slipping smoothly past, upward, always upward.

Gropingly he tried to marshal his facts into some understandable sequence. He was falling, falling toward the center of the earth, and this that he saw was not rock, or any metal such as he knew.

"It's all different," he told himself dully, "new kind of matter. Rock would flow; this stands the pressure." But he knew the air pressure had built up tremendously. The blood was pounding in his ears. He wanted to sleep.

It was the heat that awakened him. The air was stifling him, suffocating. He was struggling to move his heavy body, fighting against this nightmare of heat when he opened his eyes and knew that he was in a place of light. First to be seen were walls, no longer black, no longer even with the characteristics of rock, or even metal.

Here, as Rawson had sensed, was new material to form the core of a world. It would have been red in an ordinary light. It was transformed to orange, strangely terrifying in the blazing flood of yellow brilliance that came from the tunnel's end.

Rawson's brain was not working clearly. An unendurable weight seemed pressing upon him--the air pressure, he thought, to which he had not yet become accustomed. And the air, itself, hot--hot!

A breeze blew steadily past toward that place of yellow horror at the tunnel's end. Yellow, that reflected light; but its source was a searing, dazzling white in the one brief instant when Rawson dared turn his eyes.

Hands held him erect, red, gripping hands. One, whose body seemed molten copper in that fierce glare, approached. His hand described a circle over Rawson's bare chest. Straight lines radiated out from the circle, lines of stabbing pain for the helpless man. He had seen the same emblem in the temple of fire, again in the big room where Phee-e-al had stood.

The living sacrifice was prepared. Burned into his bare flesh was the emblem of their legendary sun-G.o.d. The priests, their bodies coated with a flas.h.i.+ng coppery film that must somehow be heat-resistant, had him in their grasp.

The red warriors had fallen back. Then Phee-e-al appeared; he joined the march of death of which Dean Rawson formed the head. Voices were chanting--somewhere a trumpet blared. Then Rawson, moving like one in a dream, knew the priests were guiding him toward that waiting, incredible heat.

The tunnel's end was near. About him was an inferno where heat and hot colors blended. The whole world seemed aflame, but beyond the tunnel's end was a seething pit upon which no human eyes could look and live.

One glimpse only of the unbearable whiteness beneath which was the lake of fire, then the chains of his stupor broke and Dean Rawson struggled frenziedly in the grip of two copper giants.

They had been chanting a shrill monotonous refrain. They ceased now as they fought to throw the man out past that last ten paces where even they dared not go.

Rawson was beyond conscious thought. Eyes closed against the unendurable heat, he fought blindly, desperately, then knew his last strength was going from him. Still struggling he opened his eyes; some thought of meeting death face to face compelled him.

A hideous coppery face glared close into his own. Miraculously it vanished, disappeared in a cloud of white. Then the blazing walls were gone--there was nothing in all the world but rus.h.i.+ng clouds of whiteness, shrieking winds, the roar of an explosion--and cold, so biting that it burned like heat.

Vaguely he wondered at the hands that still clutched at him. Dimly he sensed other bodies close to his, other hands that tore him free where he lay, still struggling with the priests, upon the floor. A narrow opening was in the wall, a blur of darkness in the billowing white clouds. They were dragging him into it, those others who held him, and they were white--white as the vapor that whirled about him.

Ahead, the girl of his former dreams was guiding him, her hand cool and soft in his. Others helped him; he ran stumblingly where they led down a steep and narrow way.

The White Ones! In a vision they had reached out to him before. Was this, too, a dream? Was it only the delirium of death? That burst of cold--had it truly been liquid fires, wrapping him around?

Dean Rawson could not be sure. He knew only that his fate lay wholly in the hands of these White Ones--and that hideous eyes in the coppery face of a priest had glared at them as they fled.

CHAPTER XVI

_The Metal Sh.e.l.l_

[Ill.u.s.tration: _She was motioning for him to follow._]

[Sidenote: The Voice of the Mountain heralds Rawson's Messianic coming to the White Ones in their hour of need.]

Dean Rawson had pa.s.sed through a nerve-racking experience. It was not a question of courage--Rawson had plenty of that--but there are times when a man's nervous system is shocked almost to insensibility by sheer horror. Not at once did he realize what was happening.

Perhaps it was the sound of pursuit that jarred him out of the fog clouding all his thoughts and perceptions. It was like the sound of fighting animals--cat-beasts--whose snarls had risen to screaming, squalling shrieks of rage. It was sheer beastliness, the din that echoed through that narrow pa.s.sage.

Ahead of him the girl was running. She held a light in her hand. Soft wrappings of cloth hung loosely from her waist; like her golden hair, it was flung backward in the strong draft of air against which they were struggling. She was outlined clearly before the red, rock-like ma.s.ses where her light was falling; she was running swiftly, gracefully, like a wild, woodland nymph.

Two men, their milk-white bodies naked but for the thick folds of their loin cloths, were beside Rawson, helping him along. Two others followed. And, by their haste and their odd whispered words of alarm, he knew that pursuit had not been expected; they must have thought to get away un.o.bserved.

Rawson felt his strength returning. He shook himself free from those who tried to aid him. He was amazed at how easily he ran: his weight was a mere nothing; his efforts were expended in driving his body against the blast of wind. The air seemed dense, thick; he had almost the feeling of forcing himself through water.

Ahead of him the girl darted abruptly through a narrow crack in the wall. Rawson followed--and then began a wild race through a network of connecting pa.s.sages, a vast labyrinth of caves, more like fractures in this strange red substance which Rawson could think of only as rock, for lack of a more accurate name, until at last there was no sound except that of their own hurrying feet.

They stopped and stood panting in one of the wider pa.s.sages. He heard nothing but the endless rush of the wind. For the first time Rawson became aware of his own almost naked condition.

The mole-men had prepared him for the sacrifice. They had decked him with a loin cloth of woven gold. It felt cold to the touch, and Rawson did not doubt its being made of fine threads of the precious metal.

About his neck hung a gold chain with a heavy object suspended; he tore it off, and found again a representation of a golden sun. The copper priests had arrayed him to meet their fire-G.o.d, and again Rawson wondered at the emblem they employed.

"What in the name of the starlit heavens," he demanded silently of himself, "could this buried race know of the sun?"

The others were watching him. In the glow of that strange light held by the girl he saw them smiling. They were congratulating one another with odd, soft-syllabled words. And Rawson, ignorant of their tongue, was mute, when his whole soul cried out to thank them.

He gripped the hands of the men. They were as tall as himself, their gaze level with his own. Their faces were human, friendly; their eyes sparkled and smiled into his. Then he turned to the girl.

She had seen the method of greeting this stranger employed. She extended her hand--a white hand, slim, soft, cool. And Rawson, choking with emotion, knowing that here was the one who had first seen him and who had returned to save him, a stranger, bent low above that hand, held in his own so rough and burned, and pressed his lips to the slender fingers in a quick caress.

When he raised his head she was looking at him oddly; her eyes were deep, serious and unsmiling. He wondered if, blunderingly, he had offended her. He could not know; he did not know their customs.

Again the slim girlish figure turned; her jeweled breast-plates flashed as she led the others on where always the way led upward and the wind pressed against them unceasingly.

The White Ones wore sandals that seemed woven of gla.s.s. Rawson's bare feet were bruised and sore, for those narrower clefts had been paved only with broken fragments of the red walls. He moved less easily now.

The heavy, beating air tired him; the lightness of his body made it all the more difficult to fight the steady wind. Still he followed the white figure of the girl where her light was flas.h.i.+ng on endless walls of red.

In his ears a new sound was registering. Above the rush of the air, that now was soft and warm, a new note had risen to a hollow, unremitting roar. He knew that for some time he had been hearing it faintly. It grew louder, one long, steady, unchanging note, as they advanced. It was a deafening reverberation that seemed shaking the whole earth when they came at last to an open room.