Two Thousand Miles Below Part 21

Against the white glare in the valley of death was a hill, roundly outlined. Then the s.h.i.+p's nose sank heavily down; and, from each broad wing, in straight, forward-stabbing lines, was the steady lightning of the Rickert batteries in action.

The pilot's room was a place of unbearable sound. The crash of gunfire, it seemed, must crush the gla.s.s wall like an eggsh.e.l.l by the sheer impact of its own thunder. In that pandemonium Smithy never knew when they flattened out. He knew only that the hill ahead twinkled brilliantly, and that each flas.h.i.+ng light was an exploding sh.e.l.l. He knew when the hill pa.s.sed beneath them.

Then, in the night, close beside them and just outside the pilot-room gla.s.s, was a quick glow of red. The plane lurched and staggered.

Smithy clung desperately to the seat ahead. The pilot was fighting madly with the wheel. The roar of bombs from astern, where the bombers had launched their missiles at the approaching hill, was unheard. In a world suddenly gone chaotic he could hear nothing. He knew only that the valley dead ahead was whirling dizzily--that it sank suddenly from sight.

They were cras.h.i.+ng. That red glow--they had been hit. Then something hard and firm was pressing against him, pressing irresistibly. It was the last conscious impression upon Smithy's mind.

CHAPTER XIX

_The Voice of the Mountain_

In a strange new world surrounded by a group of kneeling figures of whom one, who called himself Gor, had spoken in Rawson's own tongue, Dean Rawson stood silent. It was all too overwhelming. He could not bring words together to formulate a reply. He only stood and stared with wondering eyes at the exquisite beauty of the world about him, a world flooded with a golden light, faintly tinged with green. Then he looked above him to see the source of that light and found the sun.

Not the sun that he had known, but a flaming ball nevertheless.

Straight above it hung, in the center of the heavens, a gleaming disk of pale-green gold, magnificently brilliant. He saw it through lids half closed against its glare. Then his gaze swept back down the blue vault of the heavens, back to a world of impossible beauty.

Directly ahead was a land of desolation, radiant in its barrenness.

For every rock, every foot of ground, was made of crystal. Nearby hills were visions of loveliness where the colors of a million rainbows quivered and flashed. Veins of metal showed the rich blues and greens of peac.o.c.k coloring. Others were scarlet, topaz, green, and all of them took the strange sunlight that flooded them and threw it back in blendings radiant and delicate.

The little hills began a short distance off, two low ranges running directly away. One on either side, they made brilliant walls for the flat valley between, whose foreground was barren rock of rose and white. But beyond the glistening barren stretch were green fields of luxuriant vegetation and in the distance, nestled in the green were cl.u.s.tered ma.s.ses that might have been a city of men. Still farther on, a single mountain peak, white beyond belief, reared its graceful sweeping sides to a s.h.i.+ning apex against the heavens of clear blue.

Slowly Rawson turned. A hundred yards away, at his left, there was water, a sea whose smooth rollers might have been undulating liquid emeralds that broke to infinite flas.h.i.+ng gems upon the sh.o.r.e. He swung sharply to the right and found the same expanse of water, perhaps the same distance away.

Then he turned toward the sh.e.l.l, which had been behind him and the shaft from which it had emerged, and into which the air was driving with a ceaseless rus.h.i.+ng sound. Now, looking beyond them, he found the same ocean; he was standing on a blunt point of rock projecting into the sea. The rest of this world was one vast expanse of water.

Suddenly Rawson knew that it was unlike any ocean of earth. Instead of finis.h.i.+ng on a sharply-cut horizon, that sea of emerald green reached out and still out, and _up_! It did not fall away. It curved upward, until it lost itself in the distance and merged with the blue of the sky. It was the same on all sides.

He swung slowly back to face the land that perhaps was only an island.

The kneeling ones had raised their bowed heads. They were regarding him from s.h.i.+ning, expectant eyes. Only the girl kept her face averted.

Rawson spoke to none of them; the exclamations that his amazement and dismay wrung from his lips were meant for himself.

"It's concave! It curves upward! I'm on the inside of the world! And that sun is the center! But what holds us here? What keeps us from falling?" He pa.s.sed one hand heavily across his eyes. The excitement of the moment had lifted him above the weariness of muscle and mind.

Now fatigue claimed him.

"Sleep," he said dully. "I've got to sleep. I've got to. I'm all in."

Gor was beside him in an instant. "Whatever you wish is yours," he promised.

Rawson was to remember little of that journey toward the habitations of this people. Gor had spoken at times along the way: "... the Land of the Central Sun.... The People of the Light, peaceful and happy in our little world...."

Rawson had roused himself to ask: "Who it at the head of it? Who is the king, the ruler?"

And the tall man beside him had answered humbly: "Always since the beginning one named Gor has led. My father, and those who came before him; now it is I. And when I have gone, my little son will take the name of Gor."

He had glanced toward the girl and his voice had dropped into the soft, liquid syllables of their own tongue. She had smiled back at Gor, though her eyes persistently refused to meet those of Rawson.

Again Gor spoke in words that Rawson could understand.

"I think at times," he said, "it is my daughter Loah, my little Loah-San who really rules. I, knowing not who you were, did not approve of this expedition, but Loah insisted. She had seen you, and--" A glance from the girl cut him short.

The words lingered in Rawson's mind when he awoke. The horrible experience of the past days were no longer predominant. Even his own world seemed of a dim and distant past.

He awoke refreshed. He was in a new world and, for the moment, he asked nothing except to explore its mystery. He bathed under a fountain in an adjoining room, and grinned broadly as he wrapped the folds of the long golden loin cloth about him.

"As well be dead as out of style," he quoted. "And now to find Gor and Loah, and see what the devil all this is about--a talking mountain and a buried race that speaks first-rate American."

Gor was waiting for him in a room whose translucent walls admitted a subdued glow from outside. There was food on a table, strange fruits, and a clear scarlet liquid in a crystal gla.s.s. Rawson ate ravenously, then followed Gor.

Outside were houses, whose timbered frames of jet-black contrasted startlingly with the quartz walls they enclosed. The street was thronged with people who drew back to let them pa.s.s, and who dropped to their knees in humble wors.h.i.+p. Like Gor, the men wore only the loin cloth, but for this gala day, that simple apparel added a note of flas.h.i.+ng color. The long cloths wrapped about their hips, and brought up and about the waist where the ends hung free, were brilliant with countless variations of crimson and blue and gold. The same rainbow hues were found in the loose folded cloths that draped themselves like short skirts from the women's waists. Here and there, in the sea of white bodies and scintillant jeweled breast-plates, was one with an additional flash of color, where brilliant silken scarves had been thrown about the shoulders of the younger girls.

"From all the land," said Gor, "they have come to do you honor."

Hardly more than a village, this cl.u.s.ter of strangely beautiful shelters for the People of the Light. Beyond, Rawson saw the country, pastures where animals, weird and strange, were cropping the gra.s.s so vividly green; fields of growing things; little crystal houses like fanciful, glistening toys that had miraculously grown to greater size.

The dwellings were sprinkled far into the distance across the landscape. Beyond them was the base of the mountain, magnificent and glorious in its crystal purity of white, and the striations, vertical and diagonal, that flashed brilliantly with black jet and peac.o.c.k green.

Rawson knew them for mineral intrusions, and knew that the mountain was only one crystalline ma.s.s of all the quartz formation that made of the world's inner core a gigantic geode, gleaming in eternal brilliance under the glow of the central sun. And still, in it all, Dean Rawson had seen a lack without which perfection could not be complete.

"Where is Loah?" he asked of Gor. "I thought--I had hoped...."

Something in Gor's face told Rawson that his companion was troubled.

"She refused to come," he said. "But the wish of one of the great ones from the Land of the Sun is a command." He shouted an order before Rawson could put in a protest. A man darted away.

"Always happy, my little Loah-San," said Gor. His eyes held a puzzled look. "Always until now. And now she weeps and will not say why. Come, we will walk more slowly. There were questions you wished to ask. I will answer them as we walk."

"Questions?" exclaimed Rawson. "A thousand of them."

And now for the first time since, at the top of a barren peak, in the dark of the desert night, his wild journey had begun, he found answers, definite and precise, to the puzzles he had been unable to solve.

Their speech--their language--how was it they could talk with him? He fired the questions out with furious eagerness, and Gor replied.

As to their speech--the Holy Mountain itself would explain. And yes, truly, this was the center of the world, or the sun above them was.

The central sun did not attract, but instead repelled all matter from it--all things but one, the sun-stone, of which Gor would speak later.