CHAPTER IV The Caverns of Venus—An Inhabitant
For two or three minutes the creature continued to stare at us, motionless, and we to stare at him. It was so dramatic that it makes my nerves tingle now when I think of it.
His eyes alone were enough to scare a man out of his senses. As I have said, they looked like full moons, they were so big, so round, and so luminously yellow. It was the phosphorescent yellow, shot with green, that you sometimes see in the eyes of a cat or a wild beast. Its great hairy head was black, but its short stocky body was as white as that of a polar bear. Its arms were long, like an ape's, and it had a look of immense strength and activity.
Edmund was the first to recover from the surprise, and then he did a thing that seems absurd when I recall it.
"Well, hallo you!" he called out, in a voice that made us jump as if it had been a thunder-clap. In that heavy atmosphere the sounds struck the eardrums like trip-hammers.
The effect on the creature was electric. A film shot across his big eyes, he made a sudden movement, uttered a queer squeak that seemed ridiculous coming from an animal of such size, and, in an instant more, he had disappeared, stumbling and tumbling down the steps.
"Hurrah!" shouted Edmund. "We've conquered a hemisphere!"
In fact, the evident terror of the creature immediately heartened us all. Our fear vanished, and, following Edmund, we rushed for the hole, and began a hurried chase down the steps.
We noticed that the air was decidedly warmer round the mouth of the pit, and as we descended the temperature rose. After a while we pulled off our Arctic togs, and left them on a shelf of rock, but we didn't leave the automatic pistols. Then we proceeded downward. It was an awful hole for depth. The steps, rudely cut, wound round and round the sides like those in a cathedral tower, except that the shape of the pit was not regular. It looked like a natural formation. Perhaps, I thought, the throat of an extinct volcano; though, there being no mountain, that didn't seem probable either. But the steps were certainly of artificial origin.
The Awful Tenants of the Cave
When we had descended several hundred feet we emerged suddenly into a broad cavern. The temperature had been rising all the time, and here it was as warm as in an ordinary room. The cavern was, I should say, about twenty yards broad and eight or ten feet in height, with a flat roof. Over in a corner I saw a hole down which the steps continued. There was not a living thing visible, but there was light coming from what looked like a heap of coal, burning with great brilliance, in the center of the floor.
A strange but not unpleasant odor filled the place, and as we paused to consult we all spoke of the curious exhilaration which we had experienced, almost from the moment of setting foot on the planet. Edmund said it was due to the dense atmosphere, which undoubtedly was heavy with oxygen. It certainly had a good deal to do with our rising courage, and our insensibility to fatigue. Notwithstanding the precipitancy of our long descent, we did not draw an extra breath. As we looked about us, seeing no one, Edmund declared that it was necessary to go on.
"We can't give it up," he said. "We've got to find the inhabitants, and now that we have seen one of them, we know pretty well what to expect. Come along."
He led the way down the steps in the corner. They wound round just like the others, and again we descended a long distance, perhaps as much as three hundred feet. Then we reached a second cavern, larger and loftier than the first. And there we found them! There never was such a sight! It made our blood run cold again, notwithstanding our initial triumph, which had been so cheaply won.
Ranged along the farther side of the cavern, visible by the light of another heap of bright coal, were twenty or thirty of those creatures, standing shoulder to shoulder, with their great eyes glaring like bull's-eye lanterns. But the most frightful of all were their motions.
The Venustians Terrified by One Pistol Shot
You have read how a huge cobra, rearing on his coils, sways his terrible head from side to side before striking. Well, all those black heads before us, with their lantern eyes, were swaying in unison, only the motion was circular. Three times by the right, and then three times by the left, those heads circled, in rhythmic cadence, while the luminous eyes made phosphorescent rings in the air, intersecting one another in consequence of the rapid movement.
It was such a spectacle as no man ever beheld in the wildest dream. It was baleful! It was the charm of the serpent paralyzing its terrified prey. We felt it in an instant, and our brains began to whirl. I found myself staggering in spite of all my efforts to stand firm, and a kind of paralysis ran through my limbs. Presently, all moving together and uttering a hissing, whistling sound, they began slowly to approach us, keeping in line, each shaggy leg lifted high at the same moment, like so many soldiers on parade, while the heads continued to swing, and the glowing eyes to cut linked circles in the air. But for Edmund we should have been lost. He spoke to us over his shoulder, in a whisper:
"Boys, take your pistols and kill as many as you can, but don't shoot unless they make a rush. I'll knock over the leader, in the center, and I think that'll be enough."
So saying, he raised his pistol; but, as for the rest of us, we could no more have stirred our arms than if we had been marble statues.
As the creatures approached another step, Edmund blazed away! The report was like an earthquake! It shocked us into our senses, and almost out of them again. The weight of the atmosphere,
