Drome/Chapter 16
Chapter 16
"Are We Entering Dante's Inferno Itself?"
When Scranton came with his weird story of Old He, I was, I confess, not a little puzzled by his and Milton's reference to the extra-ordinary scientific possibilities that it presented. At first I could not imagine what on earth they meant. But I saw all those possibilities very clearly now, and a thousand more I imagined. I knew a wild joy, exultation, and yet at the same time the wonder and the mystery of it all made me humble and sober of spirit. I admit, too, that a fear—a fear for which I can find no adequate name—had laid its palsied and cold fingers upon me.
In a few moments we reached that spot where the angel had vanished. There we paused in curiosity, looking about; but nothing was to be seen. The gallery—which from this point swung sharply to the right and went down at a rather steep angle—was as silent as some interstellar void.
"Bill," smiled Milton Rhodes, "he is idle who might be better employed."
And he started on, or, rather, down. A hundred feet, however (we were now under the glacier) and he halted, turned his light full upon the left-hand wall, pointed and said: "There you are. Bill—the writing on the wall."
I pressed to his side and stood staring. The rock there was as smooth, almost, as a blackboard; and upon it, traced in white chalk, were three inscriptions, with what we took to be names appended to them. That on the right was clearly a very recent one—had been placed there, doubtless, at the most but a few days .since, by that "cavernicolous Venus" that Milton Rhodes had seen for so fleeting a moment.
It was Milton's opinion that the characters were alphabetical ones, though at first I was at a loss to understand how they could be anything to him but an utter mystery. The letters were formed by straight lines only. The simplest character was like a plain capital T, with the vertical line somewhat elongated. And it was made to perform the office of another letter by the simple expedient of standing it upon its head. The number of cross-lines increased up to six—three at the top and three at the bottom; and in one or two characters there were two vertical lines, placed close together.
"Evidently," observed Milton Rhodes, "this alphabet was constructed on strictly scientific principles."
For a space we stood there looking, wondering what was recorded in that writing so strange and yet, after all, so very and beautifully simple. Then Milton proceeded to place another record there, and, as he wrote, he hummed:
"'When I see a person's name
Scratched upon a glass,
I know he owns a diamond
And his father owns an ass."
The inscription finished, we resumed our descent. The way soon became steep and very difficult.
"That Aphrodite of yours," I observed as we made our way down a particularly rugged place, "must have the agility of a mountain-goat." "Your rhetoric, Bill, is horrible. Wait till you see her; you'll never be guilty of thinking of a goat when she has your thoughts."
"By the way, what kind of a light did the lady have?"
"Light? Don't know. I was so interested in the angel herself that I never once thought of the light she carried. I don 't know that she needs a light, anyway."
"What on earth are you talking about?"
"Why, I fancy, Bill, that her very presence would make even Pluto's gloomy realm bright and beautiful as the Gardens of the Hesperides."
"Oh, gosh!" was my comment.
"Wait till you see her, Bill."
"I'll probably see her demon first."
"Hello!" exclaimed Milton.
"What now?"
"Look at that," said he, pointing. "I think we have the explanation of that mysterious sound, which you thought was like that of a great door suddenly closing: in her descent, she dislodged a rock-fragment, and that sound we heard must have been produced by the mass as it went plunging down."
"'Tis very likely, but"
"Great heaven!" he exclaimed.
"What is it now?"
"I wonder, Bill, if she lost her footing here and went plunging down, too."
I had not thought of that. And the possibility that that lovely and mysterious being lay somewhere down there, crushed and bleeding, perhaps lifeless, made me feel very sad. We sent the rays of our powerful lights down into the silent depths of the tunnel, but nothing was visible there, save the dark rock and those fearful shadows—fearful, what with the secrets that might be hidden there.
"The answer won't come to us, Bill," said Milton.
"No," I returned as we started down; "we must go get it."
The gallery at this place had an average width of, I suppose, ten feet, and the height would average perhaps fifteen. The reader must not picture the walls, the roof and the floor as smooth, however. The rock was much broken, in some spots very jagged. The gallery pitched at an angle of nearly forty-five degrees, which will give some idea of the difficulties encountered in the descent.
At length we reached what may be called the bottom; here the tunnel gave another turn and the pitch became a gentle slope. And there we found it, the rock-fragment, weighing perhaps two hundred pounds, that the angel had dislodged in her descent—which doubtless had been a hurried, a wild one.
"Thank heaven," I exclaimed, "she didn't come down with it!"
"Amen," said Milton.
Then a sudden thought struck me, a thought so unworthy that I did not voice it aloud. But to myself I said: "It is possible that we may find ourselves, before we get out of this, wishing that she had."
If a human being, one of the very best of human beings even, were to voice his uttermost, his inmost thoughts, what a shameful, terrible monster they would call him—or her!
And the demon. Where was her demon?
I could give no adequate description of those hours that succeeded. Steadily we continued the descent—now gentle, now steep, rugged and difficult. Sometimes the way became very narrow—indeed, at one point we had to squeeze our way through, so closely did the walls approach each other—then, again, it would open out, and we would find ourselves in a veritable chamber. And, in one of these, a lofty place, the vaulted roof a hundred feet or more above our heads, we made a strange discovery—a skeleton, quasi-human and with wings.
"Are we," I cried, "entering Dante's Inferno itself?"
A faint smile touched the face of Rhodes.
"Don't you," he asked, "know what this is?"
"It must be the bones of a demon."
"Precisely. Grandfather Scranton, you'll remember, wounded that monster, up there by the Tamahnowis Rocks. Undoubtedly the bullet reached a vital spot, and these are the creature's bones."
"But," I objected, "these are human bones—a human skeleton with wings. According to Scranton, there was nothing at all human about the appearance of that thing which he called a demon."
"I admit," said Rhodes, "that this skeleton, at the first glance, has an appearance remarkably human—if, that is, one can forget the wings. The skull, I believe, more than anything else, contributes to that effect; and yet, at a second glance, even that loses its human semblance. For look at those terrible teeth. Whoever saw a human being with teeth like those? And look at the large scapulæ and the small hips and the dwarfish, though strong, nether limbs. Batlike, Bill, strikingly so.. And those feet: they are talons, Bill. And see that medial ridge on the sternum, for the attachment of the great pectoral muscles."
"A bat-man, then?" I queried.
"I should say a bat-ape."
"Or an ape-bat."
"Whichever you prefer," smiled Milton.
"Well," I added, "at any rate, we have a fair idea now of what a demon is like."
Little wonder, forsooth, that old Sklokoyum had declared the thing was a demon from the white man's Inferno. And this creature so dreadful—well, the angel had it for a companion. When Rhodes saw her, she was, of course, without that terrible attendant: undoubtedly the next time, though—how long would it be?—she would not be alone.
"Oh, well," I consoled myself, "we have our revolvers."