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Title: The Greatest Adventure
Author: Taine, John [Bell, Eric Temple] (1883-1960)
Author [1944 introductory description]: Anonymous
Date of first publication: 1929
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Famous Fantastic Mysteries, June 1944
   [Chicago and New York: All-Fiction Field, Inc.]
Date first posted: 12 September 2015
Date last updated: 12 September 2015
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1272

This ebook was produced by Al Haines


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.

A table of contents has been added for the convenience of
the reader.






An astounding clue to the secret of evolution ... a sailor's fantastic
story of an unprecedented upheaval of ocean's depths in the dreary
wastes of mid-Antarctic ... and four set sail to solve the tantalizing
riddle for mankind--or die!




The Greatest Adventure

By

John Taine




  CONTENTS

  Chapter

  I.  Bird or Reptile?
  II.  The Riddle of the Rocks
  III.  "Battles Long Ago"
  IV.  Beached
  V.  Into It
  VI.  Trapped
  VII.  The Devil Chick
  VIII.  Attack
  IX.  At Close Quarters
  X.  Desperate




CHAPTER I

BIRD OR REPTILE?

UNDOUBTEDLY Dr. Eric Lane was a man to be envied.  With ordinary luck
he might yet look forward to thirty-five years of the keenest pleasure
a highly intelligent and healthy man can experience, the discovery of
natural laws and their application to the good of his fellow men.

Although today was his fortieth birthday he felt not a day over
eighteen.  He smiled as the thought occurred to him, for it reminded
him of his daughter Edith.  She was just the age that he felt.

"We're a pair of kids," he laughed, looking fondly at the white and
gold porcelain image of a sleepy tomcat, which she had deposited on his
worktable as a birthday offering.  Their appreciation of cats was but
one among scores of likings which they shared in perfect understanding.
Edith's gift of sympathy no doubt was responsible for her father's
continued widowerhood.  Not once in the ten years since his wife's
death had Dr. Lane thought of marrying.  His wife had been like Edith,
quick to understand when he left the thought but half expressed, and
tactfully willing to let him think in silence for days when the mood
was on him.  Her early death had broken him for a year or two, but with
Edith and his work to live for he had gradually taken a grip on himself
and set his face to the future.

"I wonder what she is doing," he mused, dwelling affectionately on the
sleepy cat of her offering.  As if in answer to his unspoken thought
the study door opened noiselessly two inches.  An appraising brown eye
took in the situation.

"Come in," he called.  "I'm not working."

Edith joined him by the worktable with its litter of microscopes and
queer looking specimens pallid in their neatly stoppered alcohol jars.

"Do you know," he said, "it sometimes scares me a little?"

"What scares you, dear?" she queried, for once at a loss.

"Why, that I do have everything I want."

"Well, why shouldn't you?  Surely you have earned it."

"So have thousands of other men.  Yet they have nothing while I have
everything."

"Oh," she laughed, "it isn't so bad as all that.  You are not a
billionaire.  Nor do you want the whole earth as some of the others do,
and cry when they can't get it."

"Still," he persisted, "there are thousands of men as able as I am who
slave all their lives and have nothing but a bare living to show for
all their labor."



HE STROLLED over to the French windows and stood gazing absently at the
clear spring beauty of San Francisco Bay.  With all the world to choose
from he had selected this spot as his abiding place, high upon
Telegraph Hill overlooking San Francisco and the whole sublime sweep of
the harbor.  Often he would stand at this window for an hour at a time,
lost in thought, only half consciously watching the swift white ferry
boats rounding Goat Island with the clock-like precision of mechanical
toys.  The warm spring breeze rustling the leaves of the young
eucalyptus by the open window brought him back to the present and his
surroundings.

"Yes," he continued, "there is young Drake, for instance, twenty-nine
and as poor as a crow.  When I was his age I had been a millionaire
several times over for almost six years.  Yet Drake has a fundamentally
better mind than I have.  He simply did not have my chance.  That is
all."

"But suppose he had been given your chance," Edith protested, "could he
have taken it?"

"No," her father replied thoughtfully.  "There's not a grain of
business sense in him.  Still, for all that, I maintain that his head
is better than mine."

"Then why doesn't he use it?"  There was just a tinge of scorn in
Edith's retort.  Her father glanced up at her face in surprise.

"I thought you and Drake were great pals," he said.

"We are," she admitted readily enough.  "But the sheer futility of his
everlasting inscriptions rather gets on my nerves.  I do wish he would
turn his brains to something less trivial."

"How do you know his work is so useless?" the Doctor parried.

"Oh, if you are going to begin one of your scientific attacks on me,"
she laughed, "I'll retire at once to my humble corner.  I'm routed.
But can't you see," she protested earnestly, "that all his deciphering
of outlandish inscriptions cannot make ah atom of difference, one way
or the other, to human beings today?  What does it matter how a
half-civilized race, extinct centuries ago, predicted eclipses of the
moon?  Will it make life more endurable for any human being to know how
those dead and forgotten people disposed of their corpses?"

"Perhaps," the Doctor hazarded with a smile, "you would prefer to see
our young friend Drake turning his unique talents to the unsolved
problem of infant colics?"

"It would be more useful," she flashed.

"It isn't, angel child," he admitted.  "You must look at life in a
broader way.  The conquest of disease and the discovery of the origin
of life are not even half the problem.  As the old fellows used to say,
the whole is one, and you can't change the smallest part in any place
without altering the entire fabric everywhere.  Drake's Bolivian
hieroglyphics are just as vital a part of science as are the obscure
fish parasites that I mess with in the hope of learning something about
cancer.  And I shouldn't wonder," he concluded half seriously, "if some
day Drake's work gives us a clue to the central problem."

"And shows us what life is?" she laughed.  "When it does, I'll eat
that."

She pointed to a particularly loathsome reptile in a glass jar.  It was
one of the Doctor's favorites, as the tumor to which it had succumbed
appeared to be something unique in the history of disease.

With a last smile she was gone as noiselessly as she had come.  She had
her work, and the Doctor his.  Her morning would be begun in a short
conference with the Chinese servants, short because both she and they
were efficient and wasted no words.  Then she might work for an hour or
two among her flowers in the English garden which was her pride, before
settling down to the serious business of the day.  This consisted of
systematic reading directed by her father.  At her own request he had
mapped out a course of study and experiment which would enable her to
understand something of what he was attempting to do.  For two hours
every evening a young doctor just from the University eked out his
meagre practice helping her over the rough places in the day's work.
In this way she made rapid and substantial progress.  She never
bothered her father with difficulties that any competent teacher could
set right.



DURING the sunny part of the day she studied under the pepper trees by
the gate, to be ready to receive and pay the Italian and Japanese
fishermen who brought the curiosities of their catches to her father.
All up and down the Pacific Coast, and even to Hawaii and far-off
Japan, Dr. Lane of San Francisco was a celebrity among the fishermen
and sailors.  They knew him only distantly and impersonally as a
deluded crank eager to pay one dollar apiece for curiously diseased and
otherwise unsalable fish.  For weird monstrosities from the deep-sea
levels he had been known to give as high as ten dollars each.  What he
did with all these abominations they never inquired.  Sufficient unto
their ignorance was the price thereof.

Left to himself the Doctor returned to the open window.  Spring fever
was upon him.  Work and all its paraphernalia appeared as an insult to
nature.  Accordingly he yielded himself to the soft influences of the
warm breeze and the flashing blue and silver glory of the bay.
Standing there he let the memories of a busy lifetime stream through
his mind and out to the future with all its promise of many great
things to be.

Ever since his school days he had been bitten by the ambition to trace
life to its secret source and lay bare its mystery.  To create life, or
at least to control and direct it when once created, that was the great
problem.  Then, when he had begun to learn something of systematic
biology, he had seen the utter hopelessness of a direct attack.
Wasting no time he had turned his energies elsewhere, to humbler
things, in order that he might, if lucky, surprise the enemy unaware.
For he realized that a wholesale creation of a fully living organism by
artificial means was probably centuries beyond the capabilities of
science, and his was too high an intelligence to waste itself on
unsolvable riddles.  If in laborious investigations of lesser problems
he might catch a glimpse of the goal he would be happy, provided only
that his search was not otherwise fruitless and bore abundant good to
humanity in the alleviation of pain and preventable misery.  But he
would not waste his gifts on crass impossibilities.

His course at first had been hard and indirect.  Forced by poverty to
work his way through school and college, he had come early to a wisdom
far beyond his years.  With absolute clarity he had seen that freedom
from worry over money matters is the first essential for genuinely
creative scientific work.  While constantly harassed by poverty he had
been powerless to concentrate his abilities on any problem worth the
solving.  He therefore decided in his second college year to swerve
aside temporarily from his ambition and make money.  To the regret of
his instructors he abruptly threw up the study of medicine and changed
over to geology.

The new science was congenial.  At many points it touched the past
story of life if not the present.  Putting every ounce of brain and
energy into the work, he mastered the geology of coal and oil
formations and graduated easily at the top of his class.

He was now twenty.  The day after graduation he shipped as a coal
passer on a steamer bound for China.  Arrived there, ignorant though he
was of the language, he disappeared into the interior.

His subsequent career is one of the classics of mining engineering.  In
eighteen months he had located one of the richest anthracite fields in
the history of coal.  Moreover he had obtained from the Chinese
government certain concessions which, if worked, would make him one of
the hundred richest white men in the world.  All he had to do was to
stay on the ground and let his prize develop.  Capital would come
almost unasked.



IT WAS here that he showed the stuff he was made of.  Instead of
degenerating into a money-making machine he placed all his rights in
the hands of an English company.  Within six weeks he had sold out for
ten million dollars cash all of his interest which, if nursed with
ordinary business acumen, would have netted him a hundred million
before he died.  But he had no time to squander in making money.  The
most precious years of his life were slipping through his hands, and he
was still but half educated for the work he had set himself.

While idling about Shanghai waiting to close up his business he met and
married the English girl who for eight years made him a flawlessly
happy man.

Having invested his fortune in government bonds he forgot it and
proceeded with his wife to Vienna to finish his medical education.
That accomplished, he left his wife and infant daughter with his
mother, and took a year's holiday with half a dozen friends exploring
the southernmost extremity of Patagonia in a fossil hunting expedition.

The fossils aroused his purely biological interests.  On returning to
civilization he again went with his wife to Europe.  There he
specialized for two years in the great centres of pure biology.  At
twenty-seven, on returning to America, he felt himself fitted to begin
useful work.

Resolutely putting from his mind the fantastic hope of discovering the
origin of life, he concentrated his powers on the difficult problems of
cell growth.  Thus gradually and naturally was he led to the study of
cancer, on which he had now been engaged for about ten years,
publishing little but learning much, if only in a negative way.
Always, subconsciously, at the back of his mind loomed up the greater
problem.  In his reading and in his experimental investigations he let
slip no chance of following out the slightest clue.  These excursions
into the unpractical sometimes cost him weeks of precious time.  Yet he
never regretted them, for the least profitable yielded two or three
definite facts worth the having.

With singular detachment he had kept his mind free from speculative
theories.  He followed neither Driesch nor Loeb.  To him vitalism and
mechanism, as judged by their positive achievements, were equally
impotent to describe life.  One side philosophized without experiment,
while the other, experimenting blindly without reason, contented itself
with a vague reference to electricity as the probable source of all
living phenomena.  Profound technicalities like the intriguing
"polarity" and "heliotropism" that seemed to the unthinking to
"explain" so much while in fact they explained nothing but their
authors' taste in names, left him cold.  All this might be the first
step, but surely it was no more.  With the rapidly changing fashions in
science and the influx of men of genius into biology, ten years might
see polarity displaced by some newer fetish equally noncommittal.  In
the meantime he would remain neutral.

The door opened softly and Edith appeared.

"Oh," she said, "you're not working.  I'll bring him up, then."

"Bring who up?"

But Edith had vanished.  Presently she reappeared, ushering in a
gray-bearded stranger, evidently a seafarer.  The new-comer carried a
tar-soaked box about four feet long and ten inches square.

"This is Captain Anderson," she said.  "He insisted on showing you what
he has brought himself."

"Pleased to meet you, Captain," said the Doctor, advancing to shake
hands with his visitor.  "Won't you sit down?"

"After you have seen what's in here."

Captain Anderson produced a huge clasp knife and proceeded methodically
to pry off the lid of his long box.  As he worked crystals of rock salt
spilled out over the table and floor.  The mess seemed to trouble him
not at all.  Evidently he had great faith in the soothing efficacy of
his pickled monster, whatever it might be.

At last the cover was off and the closely packed salt invitingly ready
to be scooped out by the handful.  The Captain used both hands.  Then,
reaching in, he got the deceased monstrosity by what had been its neck,
gave it a vigorous shake to free it from the last crystals of salt, and
asked complacently:

"Isn't he a little peach?"

Edith, case-hardened as she was to monstrosities, could not repress a
gasp and a shudder of repulsion.  Lane looked paralyzed.

"Good Lord," he exclaimed, "what is it?  Bird or reptile?"



THE Doctor and Edith stood dumb before Captain Anderson's dried
monster.  Its elaborate hideousness, unlike that of any living thing,
held them with a perverse fascination.  Neither bird, reptile nor fish,
it was an incredible mongrel of all three.  The serpent-like, heavily
scaled belly contradicted, the bat-like wings with their short, bristly
feathers; while the exaggerated beak, crammed full of cruel yellow
teeth, revealed by the hard backward snarl of the horny lips, refuted
the monstrosity's claims to be considered a bird.  Flattened against
its withered flanks were two lizard hands armed with ugly claws, to one
of which still adhered the dried scales of the last fish the creature
had devoured.

A skeptic at first glance would have declared the creature an
impossible fraud perpetrated by some over-imaginative sailor in his
misused leisure.  But Dr. Lane, also at the first glance, thought he
knew better.

"It's only a baby of its kind," he said.  "The parents have been dead
millions of years.  This is the one perfect specimen in existence."
The Doctor thought he knew what he was talking about.

"Then there are others like it?" Captain Anderson asked, somewhat
crestfallen.

"No, only their fossilized bones and the impressions of a few feathers
in the rocks that were mud when these things flew.  The most perfect
impression was found in a mine in Bulgaria about four years ago.  But
it was only a mark on the stone--not a shadow to this beauty.  Where on
earth did you get it?"

"In the South Polar seas."

"Frozen into the ice?" the Doctor hazarded.  He recalled instantly the
reputed discoveries of long extinct mastodons in Alaska, Northern
Siberia and elsewhere, their meat as fresh as on the day the giants
were trapped on the ice floes hundreds of centuries ago.

"No," the Captain replied.  "This thing was still warm when we picked
it up.  It could not have been dead more than fifteen minutes."

"But how on earth--"

"First let me ask you one or two questions.  What is it?"

"I don't know," the Doctor confessed doubtfully.  "At first I thought
it might be the missing link between the reptiles and the birds--a
half-way creature something like a pterodactyl and not quite an
archaeopterix.  The last is the ancestor of all the birds.  We know
only its fossil remains.  Then I thought--but, here see for yourself."

Dr. Lane strode over to the bookshelves and selected a large green
portfolio.  "Put your beast on the table and compare it with this," he
said, exhibiting a photographic reproduction of the famous Bulgarian
fossil.  "Now, isn't yours like this?"

"In the main, yes.  But that snake-bird in the mud had no scales on its
belly," the Captain objected.

"So much the better for yours.  Either this is a forefather of the
known reptilian ancestor of the birds or it is a distinctly new
species."

"Now for my second question," the Captain continued.  "What is this
thing worth?"

"That depends upon whom you ask to buy it.  A fishmonger down the
street might give you ten cents for it as a curiosity.  Then again the
American Museum of Natural History would offer you, I imagine, whatever
it could afford.  For this specimen is priceless."

"Very well.  I'm only an ex-mining engineer and an old whaler.  I know
next to nothing about such things and must take your word for the value
of this.  Now, my last question.  How much will you give me for it?"

Dr. Lane hesitated, but only for a second.

"Nothing," he replied.

"Then that's settled," the Captain retorted, restoring his despised
monstrosity to its coffin.

"Hold on a minute, Captain.  By itself your wonderful find is of little
or no value to me.  I care only for diseased things.  This is perfectly
sound.  A museum is the proper place for it after the right men have
worked out its anatomy in detail.  When I said that I would give you
nothing for it I meant what I said.  But I will give you a considerable
sum if you take me to the exact spot where you found this thing, as you
said, still warm."



THE Captain desisted in his efforts to scoop up all the salt spilled in
his first exuberant haste.

"When you say a considerable sum what do you mean?"

"Name what you think right and I'll see."

"Ten thousand dollars?"

"It is not too much.  I would offer even more under certain conditions."

"For instance?"

"That you could show me where to find a living specimen like this one
you found so recently dead.  Can you do that?"

"Let me be aboveboard with you from the beginning, Dr. Lane.  I can't."

"Why not?"

"Because we picked this up in the sea a hundred and twenty miles from
the nearest land."

"It had fallen into the water from exhaustion and been drowned?"

"I guess not.  In fact I know that it never flew the hundred and twenty
miles from the land.  For I saw it roll up from below directly under
the stern of our ship."

"Did it leap out like a salmon?  If so that was a queer performance for
a creature built like this."

"No, it boiled out, dead as a dummy."

The doctor regarded the grizzled whale pirate with rather more than a
touch of suspicion.

"If I had not seen this thing with my own eyes," he remarked, "I should
disbelieve your whole story."

"You haven't heard it yet," the Captain dryly rejoined.  "Before I tell
it will you agree either to pay me ten thousand for it or to keep still
about it after I leave this house?"

"That's fair enough.  I agree."

"Now, Dr. Lane," he continued with a change in tone, "as I said in the
beginning I want this whole business to be open and aboveboard.  So I
should like you to know that one of the main reasons for my troubling
you at all is the fact that you are a rich man with barrels of money to
spend on your hobbies.  I have known of you for years.  They still talk
of your big coal strike over in China.  Now a man who knows as much as
you do about coal should be able to appreciate the value of oil."

"To a certain extent," the Doctor smiled.  "I have sense enough to let
wildcatting alone."

"I haven't.  And that, in a word, is why I'm here.  Unless I can
persuade you for once to invest heavily in oil I shall have to take my
queer fish elsewhere."

"Perhaps I can afford to throw ten thousand dollars down your oil well
to feed the fish at the bottom.  Go ahead and see if you can sell me."

"Then here goes.  Don't call me a liar until I've finished.  I shall
tell you only enough to let you see for yourself whether you want to
come in or stay out and forget all about me and my queer fowl.

"I was educated as a mining engineer, but gave up my profession to
follow the sea.  For the past twenty years I have been master and part
owner of a whaling vessel.

"About eighteen months ago, having cleaned up for the season, we
started north.  We were in the South Polar Seas, to the east of Cape
Horn and considerably south.  That is a close enough description of our
position for the present.  The nearest coastline of the Antarctic
continent lay about a hundred and twenty miles south-east of us.  The
season, though well advanced, was extraordinarily mild and open.  For
eight days we had sighted no ice.

"One night shortly before eleven I was awakened by a peculiar jarring
of the whole ship.  It lasted fully forty seconds.  The mate and the
man at the wheel also felt it.  Like me they could make nothing of it
till daylight.  Then we guessed.  For the water was a peculiar milky
green as if muddied by finely powdered chalk.  There had evidently been
a submarine earthquake and a volcanic eruption on the ocean floor
during the night.  All that morning the water grew milkier and milkier.
By noon it was the color of a dirty river and as sluggish as molasses.

"Suddenly, about two o'clock in the afternoon, the whole surface of the
water began to boil up in huge bubbles like a cauldron of hot porridge.
The ship rattled and clattered as if it were being shaken to bits.  The
men, of course, acted like a pack of panic-stricken idiots.  Discipline
went to the devil.  That fool of a mate's account of what probably was
happening a mile or two beneath us drove them clean crazy.  Then I took
a fist in things and knocked some sense into their silly heads.

"But for the infernal boiling there was a dead calm.  It was shortly
after three o'clock that the first great bubble of black oil burst with
a gurgling plop half over the decks.  Inside of ten minutes the sea was
a heaving blanket of heavy black oil three feet thick.  If only we had
been a fleet of tankers with pumping gear we could have made our
fortunes within a radius of half a mile.  Sheer to the horizon the
whole sea was a dance of sleek black bubbles as big as whales.

"About five o'clock the oily mess began to boil more furiously.  Our
decks were one black slop from stem to stern.  Then without warning a
great gusher of sticky brown tar burst right under our bows and shot
roaring straight up a hundred and fifty feet above our masts in a
tumbling spout.

"We had banked our fires at the beginning of the row.  Otherwise we
should have been, ablaze in a sea of fire hours before.  Now the filthy
brown tar began streaming down our funnels to the boilers.  There was
only one thing to do, stuck there as we were, and we did it, half
smothered in the sticky brown mess.  Somehow or another we got the
funnels capped with tarpaulins.  There we rocked and rattled in that
boiling filth till dark, unable to get up steam and dodge the worst of
it, stuck fast under that slapping deluge of brown muck.



"NIGHT came down slowly.  Except for the eruption of oil and tar, and
the queer deadness of the air, the last hours of that rotten day were
like those of any other open weather twilight in the South Polar Seas.
Just as it began to get too dusky to see clearly that beastly tar spout
gave a mumbling gulp and dropped down into the pitch as dead as a stone.

That was the end of it.

"We thought our troubles were over.  And so they were in a way.  I sent
the mate below to kick the men up to swab the decks.  The sea was still
boiling violently when he left.  I was alone on deck when the next
nightmare, and the jumpiest of all, leapt from the sea."

Captain Anderson paused for a moment in his narrative, seeking the
right words to convince his curious audience of his veracity.

"The mate had Just disappeared," he resumed, "when a terrific jar, as
if the ship were being hit with a hundred battering rams, warned me
that the devil was about to break loose.  And he did.  A huge chunk of
black rock--the size of the Baptist Church down the street--shot from
the heaving oil about a hundred yards east of the ship, whizzed clear
over us in a crazy curve, and sent up a whooping splash of black muck
as it dived that nearly swamped us.  If that chunk had been aimed a
trifle lower I shouldn't be here now.

"Well, that was only the first of them.  At intervals of half a mile to
a mile apart the whole sputtering mess of black oil began to spit up
the floor of the sea in hunks of black rock as big as city hotels.
None of them broke loose or hit closer to the ship than half a mile.
The first was our one close call.

"That fool of a mate got the men on deck just when the show was at its
best.  They let out one yell and ducked back to their holes in the
forecastle.  The idiots missed a sight they'll never get another chance
of seeing, for in five minutes that particular row was over.  Either
there was nothing left on the bottom of the sea to be thrown up, or
sufficient vents had been torn in the floor for what was to come next.
It came with a gurgling, oily rush.

"Before it happened, however, the black oil suddenly stopped heaving.
No more bubbles rose.  Evidently the intermittent supply of oil from
below had given place to slow, even gushers.  The surface of the oil
became almost flat with the whirling ends of stream lines spinning up
and twisting out everywhere.  It looked just like a gigantic black
millrace, gnarled over like the water of a river half a mile below a
high fall.

"The mate and I are the only witnesses of what seethed up through the
crawling oil.  The only human witnesses, I mean.  For if our pickled
friend in the salt there could speak he might spin us a good yarn.  He
came up in that slow, churning motion of the pitch, one of thousands
like him, and one small fry in a stew of huge beasts whose horny
ugliness made him and his bigger sisters look like rosy June brides.

"All the three hundred foot nightmares of our dragon-ridden fairy-tale
days boiled lazily up in that infernal black stew.  Lizards as big as
small trains with grinning mouths jammed full of six-inch teeth rolled
over and over in the swashing oil as dead as Trojans, and huge armor
plated, four-legged brutes the size of locomotives twirled round and
round belly up in the twilight.  Some of them had been split wide open,
and their insides, black with oil, steamed and smoked like slaughter
houses.  Smaller beasts in thousands, and a thick scum of broken
insects, littered the crawling oil between the slowly plunging
carcasses of the big fellows.

"The mate is a fussy man given to footling hobbies.  Photography is his
messiest.  He now dived below to fetch up his camera.  Any fool could
have told the idiot there was no use trying to get a snapshot in that
light.  But he kept at it like a mule and wasted five dollars' worth of
films.  He found out what an extravagant fool he had been about three
weeks later when he got time to develop his photographic rubbish.

"His idiocy gave me an idea.  Nobody would believe our unsupported
story.  So I took a line and fished up this freak."  He indicated the
bird-reptile in its box.  "I should have liked one of the big lizard
brutes, but that we had no room to stow it on deck.  And anyway the
light was about gone."

"You said, Captain," Dr. Lane began, "that your catch was evidently
just dead when you hauled it in.  How do you know?"

"Because I stuck my knife into its neck to make sure.  Thick warm blood
oozed out.  Here, I'll show you the place."

Once more he exhibited his scaly, feathered monster.  It was as he had
said.  There was plainly visible on the left side of the neck a deep
gash.



"IT'S a queer fish and a queerer story," Edith remarked, with a glance
of distaste at the poor pickled monster.

Dr. Lane agreed with his daughter's estimate.

"For all its strangeness," he said, "I am inclined to take a chance.
Captain Anderson, I will back your oil stock to the extent of ten
thousand dollars, on one condition.  You must take me to the exact spot
where you picked up this wonderful creature.  Mind, I am not swallowing
your yarn whole.  It is just possible that in your excitement you saw
things that weren't there.  The light, according to your own statement,
was about gone."

"But the mate?" Captain Anderson protested.  "Was he crazy too?"

"Possibly.  Any psychologist will tell you that such things do happen
frequently.  Collective hallucination is the scientific name for such a
state of affairs.  Both you and he, I suppose, have seen pictures, or
restorations, of extinct animals like the ones you thought you saw
boiling up through the oil--dinosaurs, huge lizards three hundred feet
long, the ceratops, and the like?  You, Captain, must have seen such
things when you were studying mining engineering."

"I know I have," the Captain admitted.  "And the mate is such a
hobby-ridden fool, always messing about libraries and reading rooms
when he is ashore, that doubtless he's in the same fix.  For all that
you can't convince me that the whole thing was a nightmare.  I saw it."

"Did any of the men see it too?" Edith asked.  "Next morning, I mean."

"Not the main part of the show.  All the heavy brutes had sunk.
Nothing but the scum of broken insects floated through the night."

"It sounds queer," was Edith's frank comment.

"Indeed it does.  Captain," her father agreed.  "Now this is my guess.
You found this bird-reptile right enough, for here it is.  I don't
think," he said with a smile, "that even I can explain it away to your
satisfaction.  What you took for thick warm blood oozing from the slash
in its neck was nothing but brown tar."

"Well, suppose it was," the Captain retorted.  "What does that prove?"

"Everything.  And in a perfectly reasonable way.  I accept the eruption
of oil from beneath the sea floor as real.  Your crew saw that?"

The Captain nodded.

"Very well, then, it's all clear.  First let me tell you about a
somewhat similar state of affairs less than two hundred miles from here
in Southern California.  It is at the famous asphalt and oil hole on
the Rancho La Brea.  Some years ago the geologists from the University
of California began digging out of the oily ooze all manner of bones
and other remains of extinct animals--skulls of sabre tooth tigers that
haven't lived in this part of the world for the past hundred thousand
years, and many others equally interesting.

"The explanation of these remains is quite simple.  Ages ago drinking
pools of rainwater collected on the sticky surface of the oily ooze.
The prehistoric beasts, not knowing the danger, picked their way out to
drink.  On trying to return to solid ground they quickly mired
themselves like flies on tanglefoot.  Now is it likely that in an
entire continent of tar holes this one at La Brea should be unique as
an animal trap?"

"So you believe my reptile or whatever he is was thrown up from some
prehistoric asphalt hole buried under the floor of the Antarctic Ocean?"

"Undoubtedly, Captain."

The Captain grinned behind his gray beard.  "A thoroughly scientific
theory no doubt, Doctor.  As such it does you credit.  According to you
my reptile should be full of brown tar, not dried blood and other
stuff.  Suppose you cut him open and see."

"That's a practical test," the Doctor assented, rising to get his
implements.  "If he has anything inside him besides pitch, like a badly
cured mummy, I'll double my offer."

"Then you might as well hand me your check for twenty thousand now.
I'll equal your offer.  If you find nothing but mummy pudding inside
I'll let you have my yarn for the stuffing."

The Doctor did not reply immediately.  He was too busy making his
incision where it would do the least damage to the appearance of the
specimen.  Presently he drew up with a gasp of astonishment.

"Why," he exclaimed, "It's as fresh as a newly pickled salmon."

"Of course it is.  I packed it in salt the minute the mate had finished
washing it off with rum and turpentine."

"Great Scott what a find!  Edith, bring me the largest of those jars
about a third full of alcohol.  This beats me.  The thing must have
been miraculously preserved for ages.  My offer stands, Captain.  Take
me to the place where you found this and the twenty thousand is yours
the day we start."

"You will raise that to fifty thousand when I tell you the rest," the
Captain prophesied confidently.

"Have you more specimens?"

"No, but I have a round gross of first-class photographs."

"But you said the mate's pictures were a failure."

"So they were that time.  He had better luck the next when I could boss
him."

"Prehistoric animals?"

"Something much better, unless I'm badly off."

"Do go on," Edith begged, "and tell us what else you found."

"In a moment.  Shall I telephone the mate to bring up his pictures?"

"Yes, do!" they exclaimed together, and Edith handed him the desk
telephone.

Having got his number Anderson asked if Ole Hansen were still about.
The answer apparently was satisfactory, for Ole was asked to step to
the telephone.

"It's all right, Ole," the Captain shouted, as if his faithful mate
were still in the vicinity of the South Pole.  "The Doctor has
swallowed it all so far, bait, hook and sinker.  Bring the rest of the
junk up here to his house.  Get Christensen to show you the way.  Jump
on a street car and shake a leg."




CHAPTER II

THE RIDDLE OF THE ROCKS

THE diplomatic Wong announced in faultless English that a gentleman by
the name of Ole Hansen awaited the Doctor's pleasure.

"Show him up, Wong."

Hansen entered, as red as a lobster and shaped like a brandy keg.

"I've brought the photographs," he announced after the introductions.

"Dump them on the table and let the Doctor see for himself.  They need
no explanation--"

"But," Hansen expostulated, unburdening himself of his twelve dozen
masterpieces, "I have a theory.  If you will let me--"

"I won't, so don't try."

Giving his Captain a red explosive look, Hansen sat on the safety valve
and obeyed orders.  Heaven only knows what clouds of theories he
generated under the suppression of all that superheated steam.  A man
of less robust build must have burst into a thousand hypotheses.  The
barrel-shaped Hansen merely sat and swelled and held his peace.

Meanwhile Dr. Lane was devouring the photographs of the black rocks
with feverish interest.  Occasionally he passed one to Edith with a
terse suggestion to "take a look at that."  Each picture was that of a
smooth black surface, in many cases badly fissured by the violence of
the explosion which had disrupted the mass from its matrix, and densely
incised with pictograms.

"Call up Drake," the Doctor ordered before he had worked half through
the pile, "and tell him we have a puzzle here that makes the Bolivian
Inscriptions look like A.B.C."

Edith reported that Drake would join them just as fast as his legs
could possibly let him.

"Captain Anderson," the Doctor said, rising, "I'm in with you on this
to the limit of my means.  You can have the oil, I'll take the rest.
It's worth more."



LEAN, lanky, hatless, Drake arrived at the conference breathless and
disheveled.

Edith greeted him with applause and a peal of laughter.

"Where did you leave your tie and socks, John?"

Drake groaned.  The telephone message had interrupted the stream of his
Mexican musings and here he was, just as he had flung himself together.

"Never mind, Drake," the Doctor consoled him, "I'll lend you things
before dinner.  In the meantime, here is something more important."

He handed the ruffled young archaeologist a pocket lens and one of
Hansen's photographs.  With a nod of acknowledgment to Captain Anderson
and the mate whom the Doctor introduced, Drake seated himself near the
open window and peered through the lens at the photograph.

The fifteen minute silence lengthened to twenty and the atmosphere of
the study grew unpleasantly tense.  Half an hour passed without a
sound.  At last Drake rose and handed back the picture to Dr. Lane.

"Well, what do you make of it?" the Doctor demanded.

"Do you want the truth?"

"Of course."

"Very well.  I do not wish to insult either of your guests," Drake
began with anxious diffidence.  "Especially as I have just been
introduced," he added with an apprehensive glance at the compressed,
husky Hansen.  "However, you asked for the truth.  I may as well let
you have it before I know what parts precisely Mr. Hansen and Captain
Anderson play in this affair.  That photograph, in my opinion, is a
clever fake."

"What!" the Captain exploded, bounding out of his chair.  "You're
crazy.  Tell him about it, Ole."

But the outraged Hansen was beyond coherent speech.  One of his round
gross of masterpieces, and therefore the whole twelve dozen, had been
pronounced fraudulent by this herring-gutted young dude without a shirt
to his back or a collar to his neck.

"You'll eat those words," he spluttered in a turkey-cock fury.

Drake, with roseate visions of an early martyrdom in the cause of
Truth, stood his ground before the advancing barrel of high explosives.

"Gentlemen!" the Doctor intervened sharply.  "This isn't the
forecastle.  Be seated, Mr. Hansen.  Drake, remember where you are.  I
won't have you making a prize ring out of my study.  Sit down and
explain yourself."

The bewildered Drake, by nature a pacifist to the marrow of his bones,
subsided into a chair.  Hansen, with a few choice compliments in
Norwegian, also sat.  Captain Anderson opened the attack.

"You're dead wrong, Mr. Drake.  As a man of common-sense, would you
suppose it likely that any fakir has money enough to manufacture a
hundred and forty-four frauds weighing fifty to five hundred tons
apiece?  You wouldn't, eh?  Well, neither would I.  You've only seen
the picture of one.  Show him the rest, Dr. Lane."

Retiring once more with his glass to the window, Drake made a rapid
inspection of the entire series of photographs.  After the first few
his frankly skeptical expression changed rapidly to bewilderment and
finally to intense interest.  Beginning again with the first he ran
more slowly through the series, selecting fourteen of the pictures for
further consideration.

"Well," said the Captain, "what do you make of them now?"

Like most specialists Drake saw his beloved hobby in everything.

"Pictograms," he announced incisively.

"Real or fake?" Hansen demanded with a red scowl.

"Real, I should say."

"What significance, if any, have they?" the Doctor inquired.

"That I don't know.  In fact this is a problem that may well take fifty
years or a century to solve."

"I have a theory--" Hansen began, but the rude Captain nipped it
cruelly in the bud.

"Bother your theory!" he snapped.  "Let us hear what Mr. Drake has to
say."

"Perhaps," Drake hesitated, "if you told me where these pictures were
taken I might be able to form a more intelligent opinion."

"No," the Doctor objected, "we want an expert's unbiased estimate.  Mr.
Drake," he continued, "is probably the best man in the world for our
purpose.  Whatever he decides will be worth learning and absolutely
without prejudice.  Go ahead, Mr. Drake.  Take your time."

Drake picked up the fourteen pictures which he had selected from the
pile.

"These," he said, "seem to go together.  They are parts, I judge, of
some much larger inscription.  The rest of the pictures seem to be
dislocated, but a close examination would be necessary before reaching
a definite conclusion.  I feel certain, however, of one very curious
fact.  Two widely separated ages of art are represented in this entire
series.  This feature is extremely puzzling for one peculiarity.  Any
archaeologist will tell you that two such periods of art are never of
equal brilliance.  Yet these pictograms, in respect of artistic
excellence, are all on a par--and a very high one at that.  Now these,"
he continued, exhibiting the fourteen, "are not by any means nearly the
whole of their story.  They are nothing more than disjointed fragments.
Yet they are the one evidence of some sort of continuity in the whole
lot.  On them, if at all, we must base our attempt at a final
decipherment."

"I told you we should have spent a week looking for the rest," Captain
Anderson bellowed at the indignant Hansen.  "Why did you drag me back
to the ship?"

"It was you who got as fussy as an old woman and dragged me back," Ole
retorted, swelling ominously.  "I knew we hadn't enough--"

"Oh, well.  Go on, Mr. Drake."



"AS I was saying," Drake resumed, "these fourteen hang together.  But
they are evidently not by any means the whole story.  However they are
enough to show that there must be some consistent scheme running
through the lot.  Whether I shall be able to unravel the tangle is
another question.  At present I doubt whether the inscriptions are more
than mere picture writing.  If so, what meaning are we to give all
these excellent representations, literally by the thousands, of
impossible monsters?"

"Not so impossible as you think," Lane objected.  "Had your education
been less lopsided you would recognize many of these monsters as
first-class and highly probable restorations of extinct animals.  They
are life-like to an amazing degree."

"I must disagree with you," Drake replied.  "In a way I can appreciate
the obvious fact that these pictured monsters are vividly life-like,
although I never saw anything resembling them.  But in a more
significant sense they are strikingly artificial and, if I may make a
rough hypothesis, intentionally so.  The people who cut these rows upon
rows of pictures into the rocks must have been in a highly advanced
state of civilization.  The very perfection of the art was the chief
thing that made me suspicious at first.  Our own stone-cutters with all
their modern appliances could do no better today.  Now is it not at
least curious, I ask you, that artists capable of such excellent work
should deliberately go out of their way to cast an air of unlife-like
unreality over certain aspects of their art?  I shall not attempt at
present to support my contention that the art is intentionally
fantastic.  The evidence is here; examine it for yourselves.  Again,
another circumstance roused my suspicions at once.  There is a complete
absence of any attempt to represent the human figure.  How are we to
explain this?  I confess I don't know.  Such a lack is unheard of in
the art of any known race."

"Would you expect to find portraits of human beings in a treatise, say,
on crabs?"

"Yes," Hansen promptly and unexpectedly replied, with a hard stare at
the Captain.

"I see your point, Doctor," Drake admitted.  "Yet what race of human
beings would go to all this trouble to cut into hard stone a work on
prehistoric animals--as you say these are--when paper and printer's ink
are so cheap?"

"Suppose printing hadn't been invented when these inscriptions were cut
into the rocks?"

"Your hypothesis is fantastic.  What--"

"I have a theory--" Hansen interrupted with desperate eagerness, but
the Captain squashed it.

"Ole!"

"Since Drake is all at sea," the Doctor smiled, "perhaps it would be as
well to hear what Mr. Hansen has to say.".

"All right, Ole.  Get it off your chest and don't take till next
Sunday."

"It's like this," Ole began, rising to give his utterance all the
impressiveness of his rotund authority.  "I agree with Dr. Lane and
therefore disagree with Mr. Drake.  Those pictures are life-like.  They
are life itself!  And now I tell you why.

"Two years ago in the Sailors' Free Reading Room at Rio de Janeiro I
saw a book with pictures of extinct animals from some French and
Spanish caves.  Now who made those pictures?  The damn fool who found
them?"

"Ole!"

"All right, Captain.  I forgot the lady.  No, the d ..., the fool I
mean, who found those pictures did not make them.  He had not brains
enough, not what you call the artistic genius, to draw like that.
Nobody any longer has so much genius.  Those pictures were made by men
who had never seen what you call modern art.  They were too good, too
much like nature, only better--if you know what I mean.  Did the great
Michael Angelo ever paint a herd of wild buffaloes?  No.  Michael
Angelo only painted flocks of big she angels out of his head.  Then
came Rubenstein.  Did he--"

"It's getting late, Ole.  Cut out the wild asses and the encyclopaedia
and come to your theory."

"I am arriving, Captain.  Therefore, I say, those long extinct
buffaloes were drawn by men who had seen buffaloes, who had lived with
them _en famille_ as the French say.  And therefore it follows in the
same way," he concluded with a geometrical flower of rhetoric culled
from his gourmand reading, "the men who cut the pictures of those
monstrous animals into the rocks lived with them.  They drew their
likeness from nature.  For these animals are life-like, they are almost
alive!  Did those forgotten geniuses delay their masterpieces for
Gutenberg?  No.  They needed no printing presses in their business.
Which was to be proved, was it not?"

"Preposterous," Drake remarked as Ole, with a self-conscious bow,
resumed his creaking chair.

"Is it?" the Doctor asked quizzically.  "Precisely why is Mr. Hansen's
theory absurd?"

"Because it would put the art of a million years before the Stone Age
on a higher level than that of the Twentieth Century."



"THE point is, Drake," the doctor continued, "that you know as little
of what was art in prehistoric times as do I.  Why, it is less than
thirty years since you archaeological chaps were telling us that all
real art began with the Greeks.  Then they found those Stone Age cave
paintings that Mr. Hansen has mentioned.  Since then we haven't heard
so much of 'Greece, wonder-child of the Ages.'  You are open-minded
enough about your own stuff.  Why can't you imagine Hansen's
photographs in the same spirit?"

"Never.  At least not until I have deciphered them."

"Then go to it.  That's just what we want you to do."

"How can I make anything out of a bald catalogue of dead beasts?  Why,
I don't even know their blessed names."

"Drake, you are deliberately playing the fool for some reason of your
own.  I believe you have guessed more than you admit."

"It is always best," Drake generalized, "to know nothing at the
beginning of an investigation.  For then one is certain not to know
less at the end."

"Do you see any sort of regularities running through those fourteen you
put aside?" the Doctor persisted.

"Dozens of them."

"That sounds encouraging.  What, for instance?"

"First, about five-eighths of the monsters have four legs each.
Second, approximately fifty-five per cent of them have no tails and the
rest one apiece.  Third, each of several has one eye by actual count,
or two by inference, the second being on the invisible side of the
profile.  Fourth--"

"You're an ass," the Doctor interrupted irritably.

"Hear, hear, sir," Ole agreed.

Drake grinned.  "Did you ever try opening a live oyster with a
toothpick?  When I have something definite I'll let you know.  Until
then Mr. Hansen no doubt will be glad to hatch out poetic theories for
you."

"All right," Lane assented goodnaturedly.  "Only don't spend ten years
in finding out that all these inscriptions are nothing more exciting
than a fossilized multiplication table."

"Or a treatise on the integral calculus," Ole gravely added.

"Oh Lord," said Drake, "do you know the name of that too?  When do you
find time to navigate your raft?"

"He doesn't know half of what he gabs about," Anderson explained.
There was a distinct note of jealousy in the Captain's voice.  "If you
think he's a blazing genius it's your own lookout."

"When I was in Boston two and a half years ago," Ole volunteered 
propos of nothing, "I took an intelligence test.  The psychologist said
I was in the upper one per cent of the entire population of the United
States."

"He lied," said the Captain.

"Now Captain, what about oil?"

"Are you coming in?"

"Yes, even if our friend Drake doesn't succeed before he's seventy in
deciphering Mr. Hansen's photographs.  We shall need a ship, I suppose."

"The old whaler will do."

"Not much ice, then, where we are going?"

"No more than she can buck.  Our troubles will begin on land."

"So I have guessed.  Would an airplane be of any use?  Amundsen is
taking one with him on his North Polar expedition."

"Who would fly the beastly thing if we did take one along?"

"Why not Drake?  He's young and therefore teachable."

"Oh, let me learn too," Edith begged.  "You know how useless Drake is
when anything goes wrong with his typewriter."

"Indeed?" said Drake, deeply mortified.  He truly was as helpless as a
baby before any machine more complicated than a monkey wrench.  Rather
pathetically he imagined himself a first-class amateur mechanic, for
Edith always tactfully let him do the bossing while she did the
tinkering when his typewriter collapsed.

The Doctor turned to Edith.  "Who said you were coming with us, young
lady?"

"Nobody yet.  But you were just going to invite me.  Weren't you, dear?"

"What about it, Captain?"

"It's up to you.  She's not my daughter.  If she can stand forty below
zero she may enjoy the trip."

"I'm afraid not," the Doctor said doubtfully.  "You do so hate the
cold, Edith."

"Fiddlesticks!  Captain Anderson said the water was warm.  Anyway I'm
younger than you are.  If I'm unfit to go it will be suicide for you."

"Well, we'll consider your case when the time comes."

Knowing that she had won, Edith sensibly said no more.

"How long will it take us to get ready?" the Doctor asked.

"About six months.  You, Drake, and your daughter if she comes, must
get thoroughly hardened before we start.  Hansen and I can see to
overhauling the ship and laying in the necessary stores.  We're both
old hands at the game."

"Where is your ship now?"

"Drydock.  Rio de Janeiro."

"What!" the Doctor exclaimed.  "Do you mean to say you came clear to
San Francisco just to show me that reptile bird?"

"Why not?" the Captain asked complacently.  "I knew you would join us."

"Am I as easy as they told you I was?"

"No, Doctor.  You wouldn't swallow a mermaid."

"Such is the bubble reputation.  Edith, this comes of your collection
of freaks.  I wish you would adopt some less humiliating form of
charity in future."

"You haven't believed my story of all those big beasts in the oil yet,"
the Captain reminded him soothingly.

"No, and I'll be hanged if I do until I see them with my own eyes.
Well, I'm game.  That thing in the box is real, anyway.  You can
telegraph the Rio de Janeiro dry-dock to give your ship a thorough
overhauling.  Fit up quarters somewhere for a passenger or two."

"Ole and I saw to all that before we left."

"Easier and easier.  Well, well.  You are a surprising person."  This
bit of information seemed almost to surprise him more than the
captain's strange tale.  "It's too late for lunch and too early for
dinner.  Will you have tea with us?"




CHAPTER III

"BATTLES LONG AGO"

SEVEN strenuous months of physical toughening lay behind Drake, Edith,
and her father.  They had lost no time in setting about their
preparations for the hardships they knew were ahead.

The day after the tea with Captain Anderson and the mate they were on
their way to the Canadian Rockies.  Before leaving, Dr. Lane gave the
efficient Wong a sheaf of checks dated the first of each month for the
next three years.  With these Wong was to pay his own salary and keep
the house in order..

To his rage and stupefaction Drake was dragged kicking from his puzzles
to become a hardened mountaineer.  The Doctor was determined that the
obstinate archaeologist should accompany them to see with his own eyes
the originals of Hansen's photographs.  Anderson and the mate left San
Francisco the same afternoon to return to Rio via Boston.

The party of three had gone straight north to a fashionable resort in
the heart of the Canadian Rockies.  They planned to begin their
training gradually.  Arrived at the luxurious hotel, they hired guides
and mapped out their program.  Four hours' mountain hiking a day for
the first week, six the second, and so on up to fifteen, when they
would be sufficiently seasoned to dispense with the guides.

After twelve weeks of roughing it on the snowfields and glaciers of the
Rockies the three went to Alaska for a more drastic course of the same
training.  Little by little they accustomed themselves to scantier and
scantier clothing, until by the end of their hardening they were
clambering over ice and snow in howling blizzards with no clothing but
a single loose overall garment of wool.  The Doctor in his joyous
enthusiasm was inclined to go farther, pointing out that if stark
nakedness in the snow is the proper thing for consumptive children,
surely a breech clout in a blizzard should be sufficient for tough
campaigners like themselves.  But Edith wouldn't hear of it, although
Drake seemed to entertain the suggestion favorably.

And now all this, the hardship and the fun, lay behind them.  That
night they were sailing from Montreal for Rio de Janeiro, there to meet
the rest of the expedition and undergo their last training.  They must
learn to fly.  Dr. Lane still believed that an airplane might prove the
decisive factor in the success of their venture, although Captain
Anderson, with an old sailor's conservatism, belittled the idea and
grudged the two months' delay which it would cost.

Ole, on the contrary, by letter and cablegram, fairly gloated over the
prospect.  A mastery of flying would bring him many steps nearer the
omniscience which was his ideal in this imperfect life.  The Captain's
letters reported him already a past master of the art of flying--on
paper.  He had even invented an improved type of flying machine which,
according to the envious Anderson, resembled a wheelbarrow with wings.
This masterpiece of Ole's unsuspected mechanical genius was still in
the chrysaloid stage of development, being as yet only one-third
drawings and two-thirds pure theory.  Still, all in all it justified
Ole's high rating in the Boston intelligence tests.  Anderson could
never have done anything like it.

Except for Drake's alleged seasickness the voyage down to Rio de
Janeiro was uneventful.  Drake had telegraphed from Vancouver to one of
his antiquarian cronies to meet him in Montreal with half a ton of
carefully selected books, for the most part profusely illustrated works
on biology, geology and evolution.  With these he shut himself up in
his cabin, admitting only the stewards who reported him in the last
stages of sea-sickness.  Smelling a prosperous rat, Dr. Lane left the
sufferer to his agonies and hopefully promenaded the decks or played
quoits with Edith.

On the morning of the last day of the voyage the doctor's patience was
rewarded.  The invalid emerged from his cabin looking, as Edith
informed him, as fresh as a young string bean.

"I'm better," Drake announced.

"That's good," said the Doctor.  "How are Hansen's photographs?"

Drake tried not to look pleased.  He failed.  His face broke into a
grin.

"Doing as well as could be expected, thank you," he replied.

"Have you deciphered them?"

"If I say 'yes' you will pester me to death with questions; if I say
'no' you will set me down as a blockhead.  So I shall evade the
question by answering both yes and no.  And that, as a matter of fact,
is the exact state of affairs."

"I'll give you a swift kick unless you come through with what you have
found," the Doctor snapped.  "Come on; out with it."

"Before violence I am powerless.  I am too proud to run away."  He
became more serious.  "You were right when you said my education was
lopsided.  A thorough knowledge of biology, geology, evolution and half
a dozen tougher sciences is just what I lack now to read those
fragments fully.  I have been doing my weak best to make up the
deficiency and learn something worth knowing.  At present I can guess
at the meaning of those fragments, but only through thick blankets of
woolly ignorance.  Unless I am clean off there is vastly more than can
be read at a glance in those rows upon rows of prehistoric monsters.  I
don't believe those inscriptions will ever be fully deciphered by any
man who like me is an ignoramus on all the sciences connected with
living things."

"You evidently have found more than you admit.  Tell us what you know.
If you need more science to go ahead I'll give you all I have."

After a brief tussle with his antiquarian conscience Drake yielded.



"FIRST," he began, "this sort of work is very deceptive.  Take the case
of the Etruscan writing for instance, or the Hittite inscriptions if
you prefer.  Either one has been 'read' in half a dozen different ways.
One man making perfect sense of a particular inscription says it is an
extremely modest account of a marriage ceremony.  His opponent and
critic reads precisely the same signs as a detailed description of the
slaughter of forty bulls.  Both can't be right, unless of course the
forty bulls are a poetic metaphor for the bridegroom.  And so it goes;
what one theorist reads as a beautiful prayer to the goddess of love
another deciphers as a simple recipe for lentil soup.  Unless there are
dates, numerals, or other mathematical signs that can be definitely
checked against facts in such work it is all likely to be a mere
reflection of the decipherer's personality.  So when a man says 'forty
bulls' I know what to think of him."

"And you are afraid now," Edith smiled, "of giving yourself away?
Never mind, I'll forget all the compromising parts."

"I have nothing to be ashamed of in my private life," he retorted,
drawing himself up like a stork.

"That is what they all say when they begin to tell their dreams," the
Doctor laughed.  "Then they are as mad as tarantulas when they find
they have given away the whole show.  But go ahead; those beasts of
yours are not all purely subjective."

"That is where you are wrong.  It is the ideal, the subjective part
that matters in these particular inscriptions.  And that is precisely
what I can't decipher.  The rest is easy enough.  Superficially these
fourteen inscriptions are fragments of the history of a terrible war.
It is the symbolism behind the bald account of battles and sieges that
I can't get at.  It is like one of those sentences that can be read in
a dozen different ways to give good sense.  The surface meaning seems
perfectly clear.  Then when the sentence is read a second time another
meaning begins to appear, and so on, until the whole shows up as a most
ingeniously constructed cipher.

"Consider, for example, the simple statement 'It rained yesterday.'
Ordinarily we should think nothing of it.  But suppose you were an
intelligence officer in the army and you found one of your men sneaking
over to the enemy with 'It rained yesterday' sewn into his left sock.
You would ask for the code, wouldn't you, before shooting him?

"Well, so it is in my case.  At first sight those inscriptions record
only fragments of a hideous war.  But only at first sight.  The account
of the war is consistent and thorough, even if it is appalling in its
stark insanity.  Intelligence, if I may say so without becoming
ornamental, is dethroned.  There never was another war like it, and
there never will be again.  For the fighting material has gone out of
existence."

"Beast against beast?" the Doctor hazarded.  "No.  Beast against
intellect and intellect against beast.  Only I can't make out whose
intellect it was or what, exactly, the beasts were.

"That, however, is not my main difficulty.  The whole story, I am
convinced, is merely the symbol of the real conflict which those
inscriptions record.  I have no definite knowledge that this is the
case.  Yet I feel it to be the absolute truth.  Some terrific struggle
has been disguised under the fairly straightforward account of a war
unique in the history of the world.  It is my guess that the real
conflict was of so terrible a character that the survivors deliberately
wrapped it up in a symbolism that may never be explained."

"What could have been their motive for recording this struggle at all
if they took such pains to obscure its history?"

"Can't you see?  Perhaps they guessed that some day a similar devil
might break loose, and they left this hint of their own chaining of the
fiend.  They suppressed a plain history lest some idiot be tempted to
try again what had wrecked them.  Such things do happen.  If it were
not for the lofty patriotism of certain old men we younger fellows
might never have to face gas and other horrors never intended for the
destruction of life.  The makers of those inscriptions decided to
disguise the truth so that only beings as intelligent as they
themselves could decipher its meaning.  This is only my theory, as our
friend Hansen would say."

"Still," the Doctor objected, "I fail to see in your theory why a
record of the horror should have been left at all, even in the most
obscure form.  If they wished oblivion for it, surely the safest way
would have been to leave no record, symbolic or otherwise."

"If that was their only anxiety, yes.  But what if they wished to leave
a warning to anyone intelligent enough to read and take it?  Suppose,
for the sake of argument, they had discovered some secret of nature.
And suppose that this very discovery undid them.  Would they not wish
to leave a caution to the next race of investigators who might blunder
through to the forbidden door?"

"Your imagination is running away with your brains, to say nothing of
your tongue.  What about the actual war that is recorded?"

"I'm feeing seasick again," Drake prevaricated, diving for his cabin.
"Some other time."

And that was all they got out of him, for he locked his stateroom door.



THEIR two busy months in Rio de Janeiro passed pleasantly enough.  With
the help of a young lieutenant from the Brazilian navy one at least of
the adventure seekers became an expert aviator.  Possibly it was
Edith's striking beauty that caused the young officer to lavish his
skill and patience upon perfecting her in those finer points of
aviation which she probably would never use unless she became a
stuntist at a county fair.  It is at any rate certain that he took far
less pains with the industrious Ole who, after one shocking misalliance
with a top of a church, developed into a safe and sane air navigator,
largely self-taught.

Captain Anderson gave it up immediately after his first stomach raising
flight with the daredevil lieutenant.  He refused flatly to learn the
knack of being seasick all over again.

By the end of the first month in Rio Drake's habits were ruined.  He
now had the whole of Hansen's masterpieces in his room for study, one
hundred and forty-four dumb tormentors of the reason.  Although the
heat was terrific, the long lean Drake seemed not to suffer.  But his
food did, intensely.  Meals brought to his door remained outside until
the porter devoured them with ghoulish glee or took them away for
burial.  At last, however, the sympathetic landlord concocted a
villainous ration which was both meat and drink, and which could be
downed at one gulp with a minimum of attention to details.  Oysters and
cream formed the basis of this ghastly diet to which rum and a dash of
absinthe gave the finishing flavor.  The intervening strata were a
horrible mystery.  A suspicious granulated blackness about the middle
suggested caviare.  This perhaps was confirmed at the curdled surface
by the unmistakable odor of finely chopped garlic.  The necessary
balance of carbohydrates was supplied by a liberal admixture of brown
sugar.  A quart of this ambrosial hooch placed four times daily in his
hand, with unlimited coffee "as black as the devil, as sweet as love
and as hot as hell" in the Spanish phrase, kept the wolf from Drake's
vitals.

Lane spent his nights aboard ship, while Edith danced till three in the
morning with the amorous lieutenant under the perfunctory chaperonage
of his aged mother.  So Drake had a free hand to do what he liked with
the twenty-four hours between dawn and dawn.  He slept when sleep stole
upon him from behind and overpowered him in his chair.  If when
exhausted he instinctively sought his bed he lay down without bothering
to undress.  Within four hours he was at his problem again.  Refuting
all theories of the hygienists he took no exercise whatever and
remained in perfect health, as hard as a rock.  After all, a busy mind
is perhaps the perfect tonic and the best exerciser.

Ole, gleaning daily bulletins from the landlord, developed an awed
respect for this unprecedented young hatcher of theories.  That
something huge and universal must at last leap forth from such an
aeonial gestation he had not the slightest doubt.  On the morning of
departure he led Drake aboard to his quarters on the old whaler--now
cleansed and rechristened the _Edith_--with all the solicitude he would
have shown an expectant mother.

The _Edith_ slunk under her own steam from the grand harbor, rounded
the point, and headed due south in the sparkling air, cleaving a sea of
chrysoprase.  Officially they were on a whaling expedition.

The great adventure had begun, but what was to be its outcome not one
soul aboard the silent ship had the slightest idea.  They were headed
due south for the undiscovered oilfields and for a stranger thing
which, could they have foreseen it, they would not have wished to
discover.  It is in this unreasoning way that human beings are forever
blundering into the mysteries of life.

By Lane's orders Drake was left to himself.  Hansen's reports had
impressed him, and he knew from experience the powerful drive of
unbroken thought.



AS the days flew over them like azure birds the breeze freshened and a
knife-edged cold cut the unhardened members of the crew to the bones.
The oldtimers and the well-seasoned beginners merely quickened their
movements and went about their work with a new energy.  The greenhorns
would soon get used to it.  In the meantime they must stamp and swear
and get on with it as best they could.

The lightly ballasted _Edith_ beginning to pitch and roll like a
porpoise, the oysters, caviare and brown sugar of Drake's orgy had
their revenge.  His abused stomach, protesting at the sound ship fare,
rejected honest salt horse with ineffable scorn.  Edith forgot his
inconstancy, pardoning him all his theories, and ministered to him like
a white robed angel of forgiveness.  His recovery was as sudden as his
collapse.  And with the return of his vigor and his temper--he had been
as sweet as a consumptive curate during his prostration--he once more
jilted Edith for his houri.

"Let us go to the Captain's cabin and talk over what we are to do," he
suggested, "You bring your father and I'll rout out Ole.  This is the
second mate's watch.  They will all be off duty."

Seated comfortably round the red baize of the Captain's table the five
discussed their plans.  Anderson and Lane had decided to head directly
for the inlet which the Captain had discovered the morning after the
submarine eruption.  They were then to steam up the inlet as far as
possible.  Then they were to leave the ship in charge of Bronson, the
second mate and a capable seaman, and travel inland by dog-team and
sledges to the volcano whose smoke and flames Anderson and the mate had
seen from the inlet.  If practicable to use the airplane two of the
party could return for it.

The men under Bronson's charge were to wait at the ship three months
for the party to return.  If at the end of that time they had heard
nothing from the explorers they were to despatch a relief party to go
in search.  The organization of the relief had been planned to its last
detail.  Should circumstances so dictate Bronson would have only to
carry out his written instructions to the letter.

Anderson had made only a rough guess as to the probable location of the
oil which he expected to find.  Although this first conjecture was
founded on a theory of Ole's the Captain refused to give him any
credit.  With a rare flash of common sense Ole had observed that since
the heavy black smoke and ruddy pillar of flame which they had seen
from the inlet looked like burning oil, probably it was burning oil.

The one stumbling block which this sensible hypothesis had to surmount
was, as Lane pointed out, the Captain's estimate of two hundred fifty
to three hundred miles inland as the distance of the explosion which
they had heard.  It hardly seemed probable that an outburst of burning
oil could make itself heard and seen at such a distance.  A volcanic
eruption, on the other hand, easily might carry that far.  Krakatoa,
Katmai, Pelee and many others among the more famous eruptions had
carried even farther.

The Captain, however, would have none of Lane's objections.  To him the
mere vastness of an oilfield was no slur on its probability.  The
bigger the likelier was his theory.  And staring up at the swinging
kerosene lamp he beheld a beatific vision of stocks and shares floating
like all the leaves of Vallombrosa on an ocean of unlimited liability.



LANE was curiously reticent about what he expected to get out of the
exposition.  Since that afternoon, now ten months ago, in his San
Francisco study, he had not once alluded to the Captain's tale of dead
prehistoric monsters boiling up as fresh as life through a sea of
pitch.  If questioned he would have said that his judgment was
suspended, as undoubtedly it was.  The indubitable bird-reptile
obstinately continued to exist as an awkward reality not yet
satisfactorily explained away.

On mature reflection he had abandoned his first theory that the
reptilian bird had been preserved for ages like a sardine in oil.  But
he refrained from acquainting the Captain with his changed state of
mind lest that imaginative ex-mining engineer and inventive whaler,
should be moved to show what he really could do in the way of a yarn
when put on his mettle.  In the true scientific spirit the Doctor was
resolved to wait further facts before abandoning himself like Ole to
seductive theories.

One sore spot in his memories hardened him in this decision.  He had
not yet forgiven the Captain for assuming that he was a gullible
enthusiast eager to swallow the first mermaid with a cocoanut head
dangled before his mouth.  Above all, still holding the opinion that
Drake was the greatest decipherer of his time, he wished to hear what
the young archaeologist had to report as to the outcome of his intense
concentration on Hansen's photographs.  Edith, with Drake's permission,
had revealed the secret of his vile temper in the Canadian Rockies.

"Well," said the Doctor, turning to Drake, "are you ready to open up
yet?"

"Have you a theory?" Ole blurted out.

"Two," Drake replied.

"Two theories!" Ole rhapsodized.  "Young man, you are a scientist.
What are your theories?"

"The first, and the one which I favor, is that I'm crazy."

"So impossible as all that?" the Doctor asked, raising his brows.

"I told you in San Francisco it was impossible," the Captain asserted.
"Now Drake is going to prove what I said.  Wait till you see it with
your own eyes."

"It is not that part of it which is impossible," Drake replied.  "After
what I have guessed as the true meaning of the symbolism of the
inscriptions your stew of monsters sounds a little tame.  I am willing
to accept your account as true to the facts, even if Dr. Lane is still
too cautious to commit himself.  But the other thing, the real meaning
of that fragmentary history recorded in the inscriptions, is a subject
which I must decline to discuss until events have proved me either
crazy or right."

"I appreciate your stand, Drake," said the Doctor.  "Under like
circumstances I should feel the same way.  Still, you can tell us this
much without prejudicing your case.  From what you have made out so far
do you believe that we shall find any tangible evidence of the true
struggle?  I mean of course the one which the makers of the
inscriptions took such pains to disguise."

Drake gave him a shrewd look.  "You have guessed the nature of that
conflict?"

"Perhaps, reasoning from other data, I have.  In that case you can
understand why I prefer to wait before venturing my guesses.  Shall we
find any traces of the real fight?"

"I don't know.  To me it is incredible that we should."

"Some things are eternal," the Doctor remarked quietly.  "For all we
know life may be indestructible."

"Have you ever whiffed a dead whale?" the Captain interposed.  He was a
practical man.

"That isn't what the Doctor means," Ole expostulated, beginning to
redden.

"I know, Ole.  I know what the Doctor means.  He's talking of the soul.
Now, Doctor, did you ever see a whale with a soul?"

"Not after it was dead," the Doctor admitted with a smile.  "However,
that was not what I had in mind.  My idea was something much more
prosaic--a question of energy and cells, and all that common-place sort
of stuff."

"Cells?" the Captain snorted.  "Rotten fish is rotten fish, cells or no
cells."

"That isn't--"

"Shut up, Ole.  No, Doctor Lane, I'm not fool enough to argue with you
on your own deck.  But when you show me a whale that I can't set
stinking ripe in three weeks I'll begin to believe in the
indestructibility of life."

"That--"

He was cut short by a jarring tremor that shook the stout ship from
stem to stern.

"My God!" the Captain shouted, bolting for the door, "we've struck!
All hands on deck!"



THEY reached the deck a second behind him.  Instantly an overpowering
stench enveloped them body and soul, searching out the secret
convolutions of their brains with a sense-destroying, paralyzing
nausea.  Hardened old whale pirates were leaning over the rail in a
paroxysm of the extremest misery.

On the less calloused members of the expedition the effect was
instantaneous and drastic.  It was complete.  No chemist in the
distorted ambition of his wildest nightmare ever dreamed of a smell
such as that which defiled the very soul of this night, otherwise so
beautiful and serene.

A full moon silvered the calm meadows of the sea.  Nature, dead and
living, lay peacefully asleep.  Athwart the silver road through the
ripples floated majestically the vast corpse through whose middle
rottenness the sturdy ship had churned her filthy way.  Four pillars,
two at either end, towered up in the mystic light like the ruins of a
shattered temple on a hill in Greece.  These were the creature's legs.
What else of it the moonlight revealed had better be veiled.

"There's your immortal whale, Captain," the Doctor sobbed when from
very emptiness he ceased his calisthenics.

"Whale be blowed.  That carcass is the size of four whales.  It's one
of them."

"I believe," said the penitent Doctor, "smelling is a severer test of
truth than seeing.  Lead us below and give us asafetida from your
medicine chest to take the taste of truth out of our months."

Returning to the Captain's cabin they sought forgetfulness in rum
tinctured with Jamaica ginger.

"How shall I ever get it out of my hair?" Edith wailed.

"Shave your hair, dear," the Doctor prescribed, "and then boil it in
lye."




CHAPTER IV

BEACHED

SHORTLY after midnight Captain Anderson called the sleepers.

"This is the spot, Doctor," he said.  "You wanted to see it with your
own eyes."

"What spot?" the Doctor sleepily inquired.

"Where all those big beasts boiled up from the bottom of the sea."

They stood gazing over the rail at the cold, glittering Antarctic waste
of black water.  Far to the south the dim shapes of five huge bergs
towered up like vast frozen ghosts in the moonlight.

"The water looks clean enough," the Doctor remarked suspiciously.  The
smell having dissipated, his skepticism was returning.  "Where's your
oil?"

"Blest if I know.  Washed ashore months ago, I expect."

"In what direction is the nearest land?"

"Southeast.  Directly in line with the southernmost of those bergs."

"When shall we reach it?"

"Within twelve hours if the wind doesn't rise."

The Doctor glanced at the cloudless sky.  "Everything looks serene.
Well, we should see your inlet sometime tomorrow afternoon.  By the
way, has the lookout sighted any more dead--whales?"

"Whales?  That was no whale we cut through, I tell you.  It had four
times the bulk of the biggest whale afloat.  Think what you like, that
was one of those brutes that boiled up when I was here before.  And the
lookout saw three others."

"How close?"

"About two miles.  Of course he couldn't make out exactly what they
were at that distance.  But I'll bet they were not floating islands, or
ice, or dead whales.  If we sight another I'll steam up close to give
you a whiff if you like."

"For mercy's sake don't," Edith begged.  "My cabin is full of the last
one still."

"A mere smell proves nothing," the Doctor remarked dryly.

"Mere smell?" Drake exploded.  "Great Scott!  What is your idea of a
full-blown reek?"

"I mean," the Doctor explained, "the smell may have come from
putrefying whale blubber.  The odor is notorious and far reaching I'm
told."

"You bet it is," the Captain asserted.  "Twenty years of it have made
me an expert.  And I tell you straight that a ripe whale smells like a
bunch of violets beside that beauty we cut through."

Disdaining further argument the Doctor retired to his cabin, and the
others after a last look at the austere grandeur of the icy night
turned in to their warm bunks.

About nine o'clock the next morning the breeze veered and blew from the
icebound land far to the southeast.  It was still a mere sigh.  The
Captain and Ole anticipated a safe and early arrival at their goal.
That afternoon would bring them to the mouth of the volcanic inlet.

No spot on the oceans of the earth could have been more coldly serene,
more vastly mysterious.  The water, almost black in the mass, curled
over in hard glossy waves intensely green as they broke, and far to the
south the airy peaks and pinnacles of huge bergs swam like dreams
athwart the taut horizon.  Then the offshore breeze freshening brought
with it the first faint hint of an indescribable pollution.

"Dead whales," the Captain laconically remarked to Lane.

"Undoubtedly," replied the Doctor through his handkerchief.

Edith gazed longingly at the high powered airplane under its tarpaulins.

"We must have run over another of them," she sighed.

Anderson laughed.  "Did you feel a jar, Edith?  No?  Well, neither did
I, and my sea legs are more sensitive than yours.  We're not running
over the rotten brutes; we're running into them."

And with that comforting assurance he swung below to see if the
engineer could crowd on more steam.  He was tremendously eager.



LUNCH time passed unobserved.  Those of the crew who were off duty
followed the example of the passengers and sought seclusion below
decks.  But the ever increasing stench found them out like a forgotten
sin.  Every mile less between them and the land multiplied their misery
tenfold.  To the inexperienced passengers this penetrating torment
which prostrated hardened whalers became unendurable.  At last Lane,
reaching his limit, went in search of medical relief.

He had no definite idea of what he wanted, trusting blindly to the
stores for inspiration.  And he found it.  Presently he returned with
three improvised gasmasks of surgical gauze soaked in spirits of
camphor.

"Who ever would have guessed that we should need gas masks in the
Antarctic?" he laughed ruefully as he adjusted Drake's.  "Edith, get
out your needles and thread and make nosebags for all hands."

Under her father's supervision Edith labored diligently at a new style
of mask designed to filter the tainted air through finely sifted ashes.
If the temperature kept up the ashes might be soaked in deodorizer.
Otherwise the sufferers would have to put up with the lesser efficiency
of the dry material.

Ole, coming in to see how the greenhorns were bearing up, found Edith
at her task.  The poor fellow was the sickly hue of cheesy white
phosphorus.  Some of the men, he reported, were on the point of mutiny.

"Order them to make masks for themselves," Edith advised.  "They can
all sew.  Here, take this one as a pattern."

His rotundity drooping from his shoulders in soggy folds, Ole departed.
Although his faith in the vanity of nosebags was slight, yet in the
true scientific spirit he would test any theory before condemning it as
useless.  The men, therefore, were soon in the throes of a sewing bee.
And it may be said here that the masks later made endurable a labor
which without them might well have proved impossible.

Land was sighted at two thirty-five.  Due south along the horizon
stretched the great barrier cliff of black rock and sheer ice, shadowy
in the distance and unsubstantial as a vision.  Anderson joined the
three at the rail and passed Lane his binoculars.

"Look about two points east of south and you will see the opening of
the inlet."

"Ah, I get it.  Not very wide, is it?"

"No.  Just a twenty mile crack in the Antarctic continent that wasn't
there two years ago.  I imagine it narrows down fast after it gets
farther inland."

He turned and left them to go about his business.  They stood watching
the distant shadow assume definite outline.  Presently Lane hailed the
Captain on the bridge.

"We're getting off our course, aren't we?"

"No.  Dead on it."

"But we are going thirty degrees east of the inlet."

"Thirty-three, Doctor.  There's an eight mile stony beach over there
that I want to have a look at first.  It might give the men fresh seal
meat if there's any way of landing.  We have plenty of time to make the
inlet before dark if we decide to go on."

"Oh, all right.  You're the captain."

Although their changed course drifted them across the breeze instead of
directly into it, the stench became more terrific.  Without their masks
they could not have faced it.  Presently the Captain called Lane up on
the bridge and handed him his glasses.

"There's the beach, Doctor.  Now if smelling isn't believing perhaps
seeing is.  Take a close look at your whales."

Lane almost dropped the Captain's best glasses.

"Good Lord," he gasped, "hundreds and hundreds of them!  Full steam
ahead, Captain!"

He rah down the steps to tell the others to keep their eyes open.  As
the _Edith_ rapidly neared the long beach they saw at first only a coal
black slope littered with what looked like huge rounded lumps of black
rock.  Then a blast from the whistle raised a cloud of scavengers from
the black masses and the truth leapt out before their eyes.  The eight
mile beach was a refuse heap of huge oil-soaked carcasses festering in
the sun.

Piled five and six deep where the winter hurricanes had hurled them the
monsters of a forgotten age rotted in the delayed death which should
have been theirs nine million years ago.  On that beach there must have
been hundreds of thousands of the gigantic brutes.  The smaller
monstrosities wedged and packed between the mountainous carcasses were
without number.  The Antarctic cold, their long immersion in the salt
water and their thick coating of oil had but postponed the colossal
corruption which now, at the height of a mild open season, preyed upon
their mountains of rich flesh.



A BOAT was already being lowered.  They sprang in with Ole and the
Captain and were rapidly pulled ashore.  The landing on that shelving
beach was easy.  They stood up in the oozing slop of oil to gaze as in
a nightmare at the horror of the shambles surrounding them.

"Well," said the Captain, pointing to the sheer black cliffs barring
the beach from the frozen continent, "there's what is left of my oil.
The wind swabbed those rocks with some of it and blew the rest inland
or  wasted it all over the ocean from here to Cape Horn.  Is there any
money to be made out of these carcasses, Doctor?  What about blubber?
That big brute over there," he indicated a twisted dragon mailed in
triangular two-foot plates of horn, "looks pretty good to me.  He's not
so ripe as some of the others."

"Money be damned!" snapped the Doctor.  "This is a bigger thing than
the Standard Oil and Dutch Shell combined.  It would be nothing short
of an infamous sacrilege to hack these beautiful things to pieces for
the sake of a few dirty dollars.  No sir!  I am financing this
expedition, and so long as you are on land you will obey my orders.
Aboard ship you are the master, but only for so long as I choose to
employ you.  I am the owner.  Now, is that clear?"

"All right, Doctor.  Keep your shirt on."

The soft answer mollified the indignant lover of beauty.

"Do as I tell you," he said, "and I'll see that you find your precious
oil.  You can go prospecting while the rest of us are discovering our
treasure.  And although it isn't in our contract I'll give you gratis
all the very best expert mining and geological advice I can.  To begin
now, there is not the ghost of a possibility of striking oil on a beach
like this.  For your encouragement, however, I may tell you that I have
already formed a pretty rational theory where to look for the main
reservoir.  Your earthquake tapped only a top bubble of it."

"So have I a theory," Ole announced with modest pride.

"Shut up, Ole.  I want to hear what the Doctor thinks."

"I was only going to say," Lane continued, "that if my guess is right
all the oil you saw is only a bucketful of the big tank.  Unless I'm
all wrong you will stumble into a reservoir of the highest grade oil as
big as the State of California.  To settle this thing once for all, I
promise to finance another expedition for oil prospecting if you return
from this a cent poorer than you wish to be.  If we don't get your oil
this time we certainly will next.  There is no argument about it; I am
positive.  Now let us get to something more important and inspect some
of these gorgeous jewels while the light lasts."

They followed him into the thick of the shambles.

"Ole," he continued, "I see you have brought your camera.  Get busy.
Begin with the big fellows and be sure you take enough pictures of each
to show clearly the head, neck, position of the legs, pattern of the
scales, and tail--if there is one.  Take in the small fry too.  They're
just as important as the big fellows."

While Ole industriously clicked away at the mountains before him, the
rest of the party clambered over monsters whose horny armor still
afforded a sure footing, carefully avoiding the inviting slopes of the
colossal three hundred foot lizards.  A step on those smooth, bloated
bodies meant a plunge up to the neck in corruption.

From many of the hideous skulls most of the flesh had already
disappeared, leaving only irregular patches of blackened skin above the
arsenals of sabre teeth and around the huge glasslike masses of
lustreless jelly in the eye sockets.



AS they passed from monster to monster along that shambles of a beach,
Lane's expression changed gradually from reverent wonder to puzzled
incredulity.  His theory was taking shape before his eyes.  Yet so
strange was it that he doubted the evidence of tangible proofs.  The
thing he had imagined was unbelievable when seen.  What, he wondered,
lay behind this veil which his own speculations and those of Drake had
lifted ever so little?  Had they guessed the whole truth, or did an
unimagined catastrophe wait for them at the end of their untrodden path
into the unknown?  At this first partial confirmation of their theory
his belief in himself faltered.  For once he hoped that he had been
misled by reason.

Going up to one huge head he peered into the gaping cavity of the mouth
and began to count the teeth.  Their number would either confirm or
destroy Drake's theory and his.  Hoping that he had made a mistake he
counted the teeth a second time.  He had made no error.

"As I thought," he said, wiping the sweat from his forehead.  "These
things are all wrong."

"Is an ugly brute like that ever right?" Anderson asked.

"Always in nature.  At least according to their fossil remains they are
invariably true to type.  What would you think of a man with
forty-eight teeth instead of the normal thirty-two?"

"As a practical seaman," said the Captain, "I should advise him to go
to a dentist and have sixteen pulled.  It would save him a lot of
toothache on the high seas."

"That wouldn't work on this fellow.  It would take a steam shovel to
dig out his eight superfluous molars."

"Perhaps," Drake suggested hopefully, "this one is a freak.  Try
another.  There are plenty lying about."

"Yes, but I don't see one of the same species.  That's another curious
thing about all this.  There are not more than a dozen specimens of any
one kind, I should judge, in the whole stew."

"Isn't that one over there the same sort as this?" Edith asked,
pointing to a huger brute that resembled the monster of too many teeth.

The Doctor surveyed its frozen death agony.  "I believe you are right,"
he said.  "Let's count his teeth."

The count checked.  Again the monster had eight molars in excess of
what nature should have given him.

"That settles it," the Doctor muttered, sitting down on the treacherous
tail of a defunct reptile.

"Oh, see what a mess you are in!" Edith cried.  "Stand up.  You can't
come back to the ship till you've burned your clothes."

"Clothes don't matter in a crisis like this.  Science is rotting to its
foundations."

"That's no reason why you should sit down in the basement," Edith
retorted.  Her mask had slipped, and naturally she was inclined to be
severe.

"If this is science," Drake remarked, "I agree.  It's putrid from
cellar to attic."

"Don't play the fool.  If you have guessed as much as I think you have,
you should be able to appreciate what this may mean.  This is serious.
Not one of these creatures, I'll wager, is all that it should be.  Each
at first glance is like its supposed type.  When you look at them
closely and begin to apply scientific tests you find they are all
either deformities or new species.  Offhand one would say that nature
had been practising and had forgotten her art."

"That," said Drake, "isn't your theory, however.  Is it?"

"No," the Doctor admitted.  "But the facts, all theories aside, can be
ascertained either to establish or to refute my contention that these
things are not as nature should have made them.  Now here is a crucial
test.  See that blue brute like a potbellied crocodile over there?  No,
not the one with the saw ridge of three-foot spines down its back, but
the one with the red bags hanging down from its jowls.  All right.
According to all we know from fossil anatomy that beast was
comparatively harmless.  Its only weapons were its teeth and its claws.
I don't know what those obscene looking pouches mean--they don't show
in any fossil remains yet found.  Nor do I know whether red is their
natural color, or whether it is due to faster decay owing to all the
oil having dripped down off them.  So much for its supposed identity.



"NOW I suspect," he continued, "from the shape of that beast's head and
snout that it was venomous when alive.  The true animal, the one in the
fossil beds was as innocuous as a tame worm.  I'm going over to see.
If that brute has poison glands above its evil fangs the question is
settled.  It is some reptile utterly unknown to science."

Accompanying him to the grinning head they watched while he inspected
the rows of yellowish knives bared by the upward snarl of the dry,
scaled lips.  The great cavern of the mouth gaped open, revealing a
single five-foot row of teeth on each side of the gums.  Having
carefully selected the fang for his test, Lane picked up the largest
stone he could heft and hurled it with all his strength at the point.
The stone rebounded like a pebble from a brick wall.

"Here, Ole!" the Captain shouted.  "Come and play handball."

Ole with his knotted strength was more successful.  Behind his
thirty-pound pebble he put the full barrel of his strength.  The fang
was jarred.  The deep musical boom which it emitted died gradually away
and Ole took another shot.  At the fifth impact the fang was loose.
The sixth, aimed at the base, sent it crashing out of the monster's
head.  Lane peered up in the gaping cavity.

"There's a sac of something up there," he said, "but it may only be a
cushion of fat.  Ole, will you fetch an oar from the boat?"

When the oar arrived Lane thrust the blade far up the cavity and
prodded hard.  The sac broke, and a heavy oily green liquid oozed down
like cold pitch on the decaying remnants of the reptile's tongue.

"I want some of that," the Doctor exclaimed, hastily emptying the
brandy from his pocket flask.  "Ole, scoop up a ladleful on the end of
the oar.  I'll hold the flask; you let the stuff pour in like molasses."

"What is the decision?" Drake asked curiously, as the Doctor carefully
tucked away his pint of supposed venom.

"We can't tell until this stuff is tried on some living creature.
Nevertheless I am willing to stake my reputation on the outcome.  That
brute, when alive, was as venomous as a regiment of rattlesnakes."

"Then it is like no prehistoric monster known to science?"

"As different as a hen from a hippopotamus.  And so, I am willing to
wager, is every other creature that we have seen on this nightmare of a
beach.  They are all new.  For one thing the majority of them are
enormously bigger and bulkier than they should be.  That in itself,
however, is not conclusive.  It would be possible for such a state of
affairs to exist in, say, a herd of cattle.  If all suffered from the
same disease of certain glands--those regulating growth--they might all
be enormous giants and yet not unnatural.  These are abnormal in a far
more radical way."

"But," Edith protested, "several of them look very much like the
restorations in some of your books on fossils."

"That is the strangest part of all this unearthly dream.  They are like
bad copies, botched imitations if you like, of those huge brutes whose
bones we chisel out of the rocks from Wyoming to Patagonia.  Nature
must have been drunk, drugged or asleep when she allowed these aborted
beasts to mature.  Every last one of them is a freak.  It is just like
looking at a shambles of all the deformities of a nation."



"THE whole thing is inexpressibly hideous and depressing," Edith
shivered.  "And these masks are becoming useless."

"Hideous?  Depressing?  Why this is Heaven!"

"Then I wish I were in hell," the mate remarked.

"Hadn't we better be getting back to the ship, Doctor?  We shan't want
to plough our way through this in the dark."

"Perhaps we had," the Doctor reluctantly admitted, feeling like Adam
when the angel showed him the back door of paradise.  "How many
pictures did you get, Ole?"

"Twenty dozen."

"You look it," said Drake with a glance at Ole's bulging sweater.  "Are
you always half loaded or is part of it natural?"

"Pinhead," said Ole under his breath, beginning to pull on his oar.

Drake, who had been unusually taciturn on the beach, expressed himself
before reaching the ship.

"Doctor," he said, "your conclusion that all those rotten brutes are
only half natural confirms my theory of the inscriptions."

"Mine too," said the Doctor.

"And you still want to go on with this?"

"Of course."

"Well, I don't.  I'm beginning to turn back and go home right now."

"When it is just beginning to get interesting?"

"I don't believe you know what you are up against."

"Neither do you.  But we both seem to have made a pretty good guess.
I'm going to see it through and find out what is at the other end of
the chain."

"Then I shall have to stick it out too.  For I'm hanged if I'll let an
old man like you get the better of me."

"Old man?" Edith exclaimed indignantly.  "He's only eleven years older
than you are, baby.  And he's not half so frightened of the dark."



THE DOCTOR and Ole would have been deliriously happy to spend the rest
of their days among the monsters on the beach.  The weather however cut
short their ecstasies in the middle of the fifth week.

It had been growing gradually colder, although the sky still retained
its crystal clarity.  The wind steadily freshened.  Twice the party had
been caught by a "woolly" which knocked them sprawling in the
evil-smelling brown slush.  Young ice beginning to tinkle and chafe
against the ship, Anderson became anxious lest they be frozen fast for
the season over three hundred miles from their goal.  He counselled an
immediate withdrawal to the inlet.  Ole and the Doctor reluctantly gave
him best.

They were not ten hours too soon in their decision.  All about the ship
the water curdled rapidly into a churning waste of young ice which in
another twelve hours would render the propeller useless.  As it was,
the propeller several times on their short run to the inlet jammed, and
the Captain's heart descended to his boots to rise again as the
desperate expedient of going full steam ahead sent the screw kicking.

If the worst came to the worst, Lane reflected, and they were caught,
they could leave the ship in charge of Bronson and make their way over
the pack to the mainland with dogs and sledges.  But to be forced to
this expedient would disrupt the plan of their whole campaign.

Anderson, still obstinately trusting to his volcanic theory, expected
to find open water in the inlet.  And indeed as they bucked their slow
course toward the mouth the severe cold moderated several degrees and
the pack became less dense.  Lane and Ole began to regret their
precipitate flight from the heaven of their dreams.

The sudden departure from the slaughter beach had cut short the
Doctor's most ambitious project.  Another day might have seen it
accomplished.  With the help of Bronson and Ole he had rigged up a
tackle by which he planned to transport one of the larger horn-plated
monstrosities intact to the ship.  The crew had already cleared a place
for it on deck.  Over the protests of Edith, Drake and the crew, all
was ready for the reception of the huge evil-smelling brute when the
sudden necessity for getting out or being frozen in caused Lane to
abandon the beast and tackle at the water's edge.

"Never mind," Anderson consoled him, "we can hoist your lily aboard
when we come back this way.  It will be no sweeter then than it is now."

With a sigh of regret Lane resigned himself to the loss of his loved
one.  It was the prize of the whole filthy brood.  Whatever may have
been the state of its interior the heavy armor of its enormous scales
had preserved it, outwardly at least, from the more distressing
features of dissolution.  Edith rejoiced openly at her father's
misfortune, and the crew wore a smile that even the knife-edged blast
from the south was powerless to chill.



DESPITE his heartbreaking loss Lane did not quit the beach in absolute
poverty.  Every available nook of the _Edith_ was packed with his
well-salted and pitch-soaked mummies.  His collection as it stood would
be the scientific sensation of a century.

More valuable still were Ole's photographs.  An able-bodied Norwegian
seaman with the most expensive cameras and an unlimited supply of films
can take an overpowering abundance of excellent photographs in five and
a half weeks.  Under Lane's expert direction he had photographed
practically everything visible on that eight mile beach.

This indeed was but the minor part of Ole's Herculean labor.  His
greater masterpieces had been achieved by the freehanded expenditure of
Anderson's dynamite and blasting powder.  This the sagacious Captain
had stowed aboard the _Edith_ in ton lots, confident that he should
have heavy blasting to do in his oil prospecting.  He expected to find
his oceans of wealth under rocks buried beneath the accumulated ice of
ages.  An incautious remark to the Doctor, who was bewailing his
stupidity in not having brought crosscut saws, steam shovels and other
modern implements of surgery in the large, had betrayed the Captain's
hoard to the rapacious zoologist.  The three weeks' orgy of judicious
blasting which followed gave Ole his unique collection of interior
views.

In this filthy business Lane and the mate toiled alone.  The others
refused point blank to be present at the opening ceremonies.  A day's
practice with its attendant disasters, which may be imagined but not
described, made the adaptable Ole expert in the planting of the charge.
By the evening of the second day he was splitting open swollen monsters
with the expert neatness of a specialist on prehistoric appendicitis.
A second charge skilfully inserted when the Doctor so desired brought
forth the creature's stomach for detailed examination.

Lane was anxious to learn all that he could of the dead monsters' life
habits.  Anatomy alone, as revealed by Ole's beautiful interior
photographs, was not enough.  He must find out on what the creatures
had lived.  As a rich byproduct of this work he obtained, from the
undigested contents of the stomachs of the carnivorous reptiles and
mammals in the shambles, many of his most curious specimens.  Seclusion
from the air in the stomachs of the huge lizards and enormous
salamanders had preserved many of these beautiful objects practically
fresh.

One remarkable incident of all that surgical saturnalia deserves to be
recorded here.  At the time it gained only a passing notice from Ole
and the Doctor, absorbed as they were in the larger beauties of their
obscene orgy.  But had Lane given it the attention which it merited,
and which he as a scientifically-trained man should have accorded it,
the party might later have avoided a disastrous mistake.  Through
ignorance of its inevitable consequences they were all but destroyed.

Late one afternoon Ole had placed an unusually heavy charge against the
belly of an enormous brute whose carcass, from its well-preserved
condition, promised a rich mine of vegetable treasures.  An inspection
of the teeth showed Lane that the dead monster had been an eater of
herbs, leaves and grass.  The charge exploding prematurely only half
did its work.  The downward force of the dynamite tore a deep pit in
the loose, oil-soaked shale of the beach and shattered the underlying
bed of perpetual ice.  The broken surface of the deepest ice lay clean
of oil.  Immediately after the explosion some undigested green fronds,
of a mossy plant dropped from the creature's torn stomach upon the
clean, freshly broken ice.



THE half accidental explosion having ruined the specimen for further
investigation, Lane and his assistant shed no tears over the mess but
hurried on to the next.  They had but three-quarters of an hour's
daylight left, and their time was too precious for regrets.

Having finished their next operation successfully they prepared to
return to the ship while the light still served.

Their shortest way back led past the botched job.  Glancing down at the
ice pit, Lane called Ole's attention to the rich bright green mass of
hairlike vegetation, which, presumably, had fallen from the rip in the
creature's stomach.  Already overburdened with their implements and
specimens, they abandoned their intention of immediately collecting
some of the curious plant.  Reluctantly deciding to leave it till
tomorrow they hurried on through the dusk to the boat.

During the night the temperature rose several degrees.  This otherwise
fortunate incident robbed them of their expected prize.  For when they
visited the hole in the ice they found that the oily slush oozing down
through the shale had made of the vegetation a dirty brown soup.

Nothing was to be gained by crying over rotten vegetables.  They
proceeded at once to their surgery elsewhere, confident that the next
herb eater would furnish them with a ton of the green stuff.

In this way they were deceived.  It was not until some weeks later,
however, that Lane discovered their serious error.  They found an
abundance of green vegetation in the stomachs of such monsters as were
plant feeders, including tons of a particular variety whose green
fronds and masses of long tendrils resembled closely those which they
had missed.

Mere resemblance is far from identity, as the Doctor realized when it
was too late.  When knowledge finally came the party was fighting for
its life with a foe which gave no quarter.  But for this unpardonable
negligence on Lane's part the explorers need not have brought upon
themselves a hideous warfare for which they, as twentieth century human
beings, were totally unprepared.  The dropped fragments of Ole's and
Lane's green loot littered the clean shore, the fresh young ice from
the beach to the ship, and the decks.  Had Lane used his scientific
eyes he would have noticed immediately the sinister difference between
the habits of the plants he had collected and that which, through force
of circumstances, he had abandoned.

This oversight and its subsequent consequences gave Lane the scientific
chastisement of his life.  Since that ghastly fight on the ice he has
not scorned the humblest detail in his battles with the unknown.

The _Edith_ reached the mouth of the inlet not an hour too soon.  Snow
began to fall as the gap of the inlet swung into view.  Within ten
minutes the opening disappeared behind a thick grey confusion of
whirling feathers.  The ship crushed her way through thickening ice
pack, cautiously feeling for the door in the iron wall ahead.  To take
the pack at a rush was impossible.  Every yard of the way must be felt
out or a smash against the barrier would send the ship like a brick to
the bottom.  Along this barren coast the ice cliffs plunged sheer down
to deep water.

The slow going all but blocked the propeller with floating ice.  At
each succeeding jar the Captain's face became whiter.  He had no
physical fear; his anguish was purely mental.  It was the prospect of
losing his hypothetical oil that froze his nerves.

Suddenly the nerve-racking grinding lessened.  In fifteen minutes it
had ceased completely.

"We're in," Anderson announced with undisguised relief.  He would die
rich after all.  "No ice, as I expected."

A sounding gave no bottom.  The volcanic crack in the earth crust, if
such indeed was its nature, was deeper than the Captain had
anticipated.  Although before them loomed the impenetrable gray wall of
tumbling snow it seemed safe to proceed at half speed.

"For twenty miles at least this thing is as straight as a street," the
Captain explained, "and we want to get on."



OCCASIONAL blasts from the whistle reverberating from the high cliffs
nearest them gave a check on the course and kept the ship off the
rocks.  By daylight they had made only thirty miles, having slackened
speed for greater safety during the darkest hours of the morning.  The
snow had thinned and now showed signs of clearing.  Shortly after nine
o'clock only a dazzling glitter of finely divided crystals scintillated
in the sunlight.  For the first time the party saw its surroundings.

Ahead and due south, stretched the inlet, at this point about a quarter
of a mile wide, to disappear finally as a jagged black line on the
white waste.

Not a particle of ice floated on the water.  Anderson ordered one of
the men to draw up, a bucketful and take the temperature.  The reading
gave forty degrees Fahrenheit--eight degrees above freezing, while all
about them the bleak wilderness beneath its shroud of dry snow crystals
lay locked in perpetual ice.

"What do you make of it, Doctor?" the Captain asked.

"Nothing, yet.  What current is there?"

"About two miles an hour against us.  Shall we go ahead, or land here
and have a look at things?"

"Go ahead, full steam.  For all we know this may freeze over with the
first blizzard.  Besides I am anxious to see what is at the end of this
long street."

"So am I.  Full steam ahead it is."

Their progress was finally blocked in a most peculiar manner.  Sixty
odd miles of the roughly straight watercourse lay behind them when they
began to notice a decided rise in temperature.  Simultaneously a heavy
fog met them, rolling up from the south toward which they were headed.

The dazzling, bright sunshine and the stark blue sky became memories.
Anderson now proceeded as slowly as it was possible to do and still
make headway against the current.  The street showing unmistakable
signs of degenerating into a crooked alleyway, he kept the whistle
tooting almost continuously.  The engineer kept the screw just turning,
ready to reverse at the first blackening of the mist ahead.  But it was
water, not rock that stopped them.

A sudden gush sweeping down the channel in a three-foot wave sent the
_Edith_ spinning.  Full steam ahead kept her barely abreast of her
former position.  A second torrent brought with it clouds of steam.
Instantly the ship was racing to keep her place in a scalding deluge.
The waves breaking over the stem drenched and blistered the deckhands
with boiling water.

There was but one thing to do.  Taking a desperate chance in the
blinding steam, Anderson slewed the ship about in the narrow channel
and went down with the torrent, trusting to sound signals to keep him
off the cliffs.  By midnight the immediate danger was past.  Once more
the _Edith_ lay where she had started ahead at full steam.

"No lobsters boiled yet," said the Captain with a sigh.  "Even Ole is
still raw."  The stars glittered in the hard black sky like crystals of
icy fire.  "I shall drop anchor for the night here.  The lookout can
see far enough ahead to give warning if anything breaks loose."

"We should be safe enough here," the Doctor agreed.  "The last of the
steam fog is all of forty miles away."

And so it proved.  However, the night was not to pass without a flurry.
At three in the morning the lookout called Captain Anderson to view a
spectacle which had been troubling him at intervals for the past two
hours.  Having seen it, Anderson at once routed out Ole and all the
passengers.  They found the watchman staring straight ahead at a heavy
pall of low black clouds suspended above the southern horizon.

"Keep your eyes on those clouds," Anderson directed.

He had barely spoken when the under side of the pall burst into vivid
crimson.  For perhaps three minutes the cloud pall pulsated from
crimson to cherry red like the intermittent reflection from a forge
fanned by an old-fashioned bellows.  Then suddenly the light went black.

"How long before it lights up again?" Anderson asked the watchman.

"Thirteen and a half minutes, sir.  Regular as a clock."



THE interval passed and again the clouds burst into fire.  And so it
went till dawn when the rising winds of the upper atmosphere, tattering
the pall, flung it far to the frozen south.  During all that time the
party had watched in fascination, not heeding the stiffening of their
joints in the cold.  The unearthly beauty of that distant inferno, and
the mysterious regularity with which its manifestations recurred, made
conversation trivial.  Little was said until daylight, when the upper
winds and the rising sun obliterated the awful grandeur of the night.

"Is that your volcano?" the Doctor asked.

"Ole's burning oil well, you mean.  No, I'm sure it isn't.  Those
clouds were not more than fifty miles away at the most.  My estimate of
the other thing, you remember, was between two hundred and fifty and
three hundred miles inland.  That would make it over two hundred miles
from here."

"What is it to be, Lane?" the Captain asked.  "Do we try it again up
stream or shall we take to the land?"

"How long will it take to get ready for the land journey?"

"Four hours.  I saw to rationing the sledges while you and Ole were
enjoying yourselves."

"Are the dogs in fit shape?"

"They will do.  The four weeks' exercise on that rotten beach wasn't
all it should have been, but it will have to do."

"Why not compromise?" Drake suggested.  "Let us go by ship as far as we
can before taking to the sledges.  I don't relish dragging the beastly
things over the ice.  For that is what it will come to when the fool
dogs give in.  Sooner or later they are bound to go.  We can't pack
four months' grub for them and ourselves."

"What about it, Captain?" the Doctor asked.  "Are you willing to risk
the boiling water?"

"Now that we know what to expect I see no great danger.  Unless," he
added, "boiling mud comes down with the water and mires us a hundred
miles from the sea."

"We'll chance it," the Doctor decided.  "If there has been no more of
an eruption than boiling water so far it seems improbable that there
will be one now just to welcome us."

"There is always the airplane as a last resort," Edith pointed out.

"Yes," said the Captain, "and who would be the happy pair to escape
while the rest stayed behind and starved?"

"Don't you see?  The pilot could take off the men one at a time.  In a
pinch five or six could crowd on somehow: The plane can lift the weight
of ten men easily."

"And get the last of them off the night after Judgment Day.  No, Edith,
if we do get caught your plan won't work.  However, I'm as game as your
father.  And what I say the men will do--and be damned quick about it,
too.  Now, Doctor, since we are going back I should like to ask a
favor."

"Go ahead.  If it's anything reasonable consider it granted."

"It is this.  I want to find out what caused that glow on the clouds.
Suppose we take a side trip to find out before going on to the main
show?"

"That sounds all right to me.  And it will give the dogs some real
exercise."

"To say nothing of ourselves," Drake prophesied gloomily.  "I know the
brutes will be unmanageable.  One tried yesterday to take a piece out
of my leg--and I have no meat to spare."

Without further discussion the ship was put about.  They proceeded
upstream at full speed.  By noon they reached the point where they
judged it would be wise to leave the ship and take to the sledges.

Within two hours Anderson, Ole, Drake, Lane and Edith, who refused to
be separated from her father, were on their way over the ice with a
week's provisions.  Bronson was left in charge of the ship with orders
to head her downstream and keep a sharp lookout for trouble.  At the
first hint he was to steam for the mouth of the inlet.  Should the
party send no word to the contrary before the seventh night out, he was
to organize a relief and go in search.




CHAPTER V

INTO IT

THE party had two sledges.  Anderson and Ole, being the only members
experienced with dogs, taking charge of the sledges, instructed the
others.  One who has never had the pleasure, cannot appreciate how much
sport goes with the skilful manipulation of a dog team.  The greenhorns
soon learned.  A temperature several degrees above zero, dead calm, a
blinding glare from the undulating snowfields, and their own panting
exertions quickly brought out the perspiration.  Edith bore it with
compressed lips, the Doctor grinned like a cat in pain, and Drake,
wishing he might lie down and die, contented himself with a continuous
profane commentary on the dogs, the desolate landscape and the idiot
who had dragged him into this brainless mess.

Drake's misery reached its climax when was just on the point of
abandoning the expedition after three gruelling hours of elaborate
awkwardness.  His sledge at the moment was careening sideways like a
crab down a gentle ice slope which the winds had swept clean of ice
crystals.  Reaching the bottom without mishap he stubbed his toe on
some hard obstruction cunningly concealed beneath the loose drift.  At
the same instant one runner of the sledge found another stumbling
block.  Before Drake knew what it was all about he was sprawling on his
back like a lanky frog in the snow.

Ole discovered the cause of offense before the others reached the spot.
The mate was on his knees scratching like a terrier to scoop away the
loose snow from a black object, of which the pointed cap had already
been exposed by his frantic enthusiasm.

"Ah," he puffed, "you are a born researcher, Mr. Drake.  Invisible
though this was to the naked eye you found it.  You have the scientific
penetration, the genius that sees through deceptive appearances, to the
underlying truth."

Drake was now on his knees, rooting with Ole.  An exclamation from the
Captain proclaimed the discovery of the second black stone which,
buried in the snow, had wrecked the sledge.  All hands now began
digging.  In a few minutes two small, jagged fragments, evidently
pieces of a larger rock which had been shattered by its impact on the
ground ice, lay clean for inspection.

At first the result was deeply disappointing.  One of the fragments had
been so badly scarred by its rough treatment that not a single
pictogram remained on its surface, while the other exhibited only the
broken remains of half a dozen.  Neither was worth photographing.
Anderson, having set Drake's disaster to rights, suggested that they
move on.

But Drake appeared to be deaf.  The more badly damaged of the two
fragments seemed to hold him hypnotized.  Presently he rose to his feet
and kicked the black mass savagely with his heel.

"Fetch a sledge hammer," he ordered Ole.

"Where in hell am I to get one?"

Edith had already located the handaxe which she now offered to Drake.
With one sharp blow he split the black fragment into two along a plane
of cleavage.  The sight which met their eyes brought a cry of
astonishment from all but Anderson, and Ole.  One surface of the
divided rock was covered with the deeply incised pictograms of
prehistoric monsters, while the other, like a relief map, bore the
raised replica of the same inscription.  Yet the whole fragment before
Drake split it into two had seemed to be an ordinary chunk of black,
cement-like rock.  Drake's brain was at work.



"IF YOU found twelve dozen of one kind, Hansen," he said, "it is
against all probability that you saw none of the other.  Why didn't you
photograph some of them too?"

"I did," Ole replied like a stolid keg.  "In all I took over one
hundred pictures of the raised kind of inscriptions.  They are in my
chest aboard the ship."

"Then why on earth didn't you show them to me?"

"Because," Anderson informed him, "we knew what sort of men you
scientific chaps are.  We didn't want to give you too much to swallow
all at once--just enough in fact to make you hungry for more."

"You win," said Lane.  "I want everything you have."

"That's the lot, Doctor, honest.  From now on we are as green as you
are."

"And that's saying a good deal.  Does this throw any light on your
difficulties with Ole's photographs, Drake?"

"Enough to show me why the whole series doesn't hang together.  No
wonder the drawings of those animals are in two different styles
belonging to two totally distinct epochs of art.  It also explains a
thing you would have noticed if you had taken the trouble to examine
the pictures carefully.  Even I, with my vast ignorance of natural
science, can see that the monsters represented belong to different ages
of the earth's history.  Roughly they seem to be alike.  But the
resemblance, although real, is no deeper than the similarity between
men and apes.  They belong to the same races of creatures, but are
separated by millions of years of evolution."

"You're wrong there, Drake.  I prefer to think that the differences are
merely the varying expression of a fixed idea.  The minds of the
artists have evolved, not the creations of their art.  I'll argue it
out with you later.  For the present, does this find affect your guess
as to what's ahead of us?"

"Not materially.  The struggle that I deduced from the symbolism of the
inscriptions must have been longer than I thought.  That's all."

"Where did you find your inscriptions, Ole?"

"A good seventy miles north of here."

"Then there should be more in this neighborhood, because it probably is
nearer the source of the explosion.  If so, we shall find enough to
write a prehistoric encyclopaedia from A to Z."

And so it proved.  At intervals of half a mile to a mile they found the
vast undulating snowfields littered with colossal fragments of black
rock, many of which on their level faces were covered with the deeply
cut figures of prehistoric monsters.  As many more smaller chunks,
doubtless lay buried beneath the snow and ice of two winters.  Not
stopping to photograph these now they hurried on to their goal, the
source of the eerie light which they had seen from the ship.

That night, without much wind, was cloudless.  Although the temperature
dropped below zero none of the party experienced any serious discomfort
in their dry sleeping bags.  The months of hardening in the Canadian
Rockies and Alaska had well prepared the newcomers to the Antarctic for
hardships which otherwise might have proved unendurable.  The absence
of high winds on the bleak plateau was an unexpected piece of good
luck.  By rare fortune they had penetrated one of those mysterious,
almost windless regions of the Antarctic Continent which have puzzled
explorers.



THE first day they covered only twenty miles.  With the experience of a
march behind them they made a little over forty miles through the dead
calm of the second day, to creep into their bags at night exhausted.
The men took watch by turns in two-hour spells.  Not a flicker of the
strange fire they were seeking stained the cloudless night sky.
Beginning to doubt the correctness of their route they were wholly
unprepared for the inferno into which they blundered at five o'clock of
the third day.

The start at five o'clock on that memorable morning was made under a
sky blazing with the icy jewels of innumerable stars.  At sunrise they
found themselves ascending a sharp declivity of blue ice.  Up that long
ascent the going was necessarily slow.  By slogging ahead they had
risen two thousand feet shortly before ten o'clock.  As nearly as they
could judge they were now climbing over a huge fold of rock running
almost due north and south.  The view from the crest of the rise
confirmed their guess.  Below them they saw a broad trough running
north and south as far as vision carried, filled almost to the brim
with tumbling white mist.  Some thirty miles distant the farther side
of the trough towered high above the rolling mists in an unbroken
barrier of jagged black peaks.

Although it looked hopeless they decided after a brief consultation to
continue on their course.  Should the black barrier prove as forbidding
as it looked from thirty miles away they must turn back.  They were not
going to be balked, however, by the mere aspect of difficulties.
Without further debate they descended the long ice slope into the
heaving pall of white fog.

The descent was made without accident.  Arrived on the floor of the
trough Anderson produced his compass and led off through the swirling
mist.  Lane assumed command of one sledge with Drake as helper.  A few
yards behind the leader Ole and Edith managed the second.  So thick was
the fog that Anderson's figure only some forty feet ahead was invisible
to the tenders of the second sledge.  Nevertheless the Captain set a
stiff pace over the blue ice and hard packed snow crystals.

They had now but four and a half days left in which to make their
objective and return to the ship.  The Captain was determined to find
out the nature of that black barrier before Bronson could overtake him
with an unwelcome relief party.  The stiff pace, almost a run, suited
the others, for the clutching cold of the fog sought out and gripped
the marrows of their bones.

For perhaps three-quarters of an hour all went well.  Then a horrified
shout from Anderson brought the party to a palpitating halt.

"Don't come here," the Captain called back.  "Wait till I fetch you."

One by one he led the others to the brink of the death which he had
escaped by half a second.  There it gaped, a sheer well in the blue ice
thirty feet across and of depth unknown.  The lip of the circular hole
lay flush with the surrounding ice.  Its sides dropped straight down as
if carved out with a huge knife.  It was a perfect circular well, over
a hundred feet in circumference and of a depth which they could only
guess, for it was full to the brim with white fog.

Edith had an inspiration.  She returned to the first sledge.

"Here," she said, handing the Captain a pound tin of soup, "throw that
down and listen for the echo: Then we can figure out how deep it is."



ANDERSON tossed the can into the centre of the hole.  Only the
breathing of the dogs broke the intense stillness.  Not the ghost of an
echo rose from the well.

"Probably there is soft snow at the bottom," the Captain remarked.
"Well, I'm glad I'm above instead of below."

Not suspecting what lay before them, the party proceeded through the
fog at a brisk trot.  An astonished shout again brought them instantly
to a halt.

"Here's another of the damned things," the Captain announced.  "Ole,
fetch me a rope.  There's one on the second sledge."

"You're not going down it, are you?" Drake asked nervously.

"Not if I can help it, nor the next one either."  He tied one end of
the rope securely about his middle and passed the other end to Lane.
"Make that fast to both sledges.  When they begin to shoot ahead, pull
back hard.  All right, come on.  These may be oil wells for all we
know."

He marched rapidly forward through the blinding mist.  "Follow me
exactly," he called back.  "I've just gone two yards south of another."

From that time on they passed at least two of the wells every five
minutes, occasionally cutting across the narrow strip which separated
three or four in a cluster.  Prudence urged them to return, but the
determination to see the thing through held them to their course.

They had neither time nor inclination to speculate on the significance
of those sheer pits in the ice and rock.  All their will was
concentrated on their feet.  One slip and they might learn more of the
mystery than they cared to know.

Anderson forged steadily ahead without speaking.  He was bent on
reaching the barrier before turning back, holes or no holes.

At five o'clock they had been marching almost continuously for twelve
hours.  The constant strain on their nerves no less than the pull on
their muscles was beginning to tell.  Anderson suggested a brief halt
and a warm drink.  It would take half an hour to prepare the chocolate.
That would leave them about an hour of such daylight as there was in
the cheesy fog.

They were just about to enjoy the steaming drink when, with a rapid up
and down vibration, the ice beneath them began to shake violently.  The
dogs howled dismally and tried to bolt.  Suddenly a terrific jar
directly under them sent the party rolling.  Staggering to their feet
they succeeded in cowing the dogs.  The jarring ceased.  In dead
silence the last tremor died.

White and still, they stood staring at each other's scared eyes in the
ghostly mist.  Few things so terrify even the most courageous human
being as a violent earthquake.  There is about the terrific jarring an
impression of uncontrollable and insane force that temporarily upsets
the balance of the reason, and the helpless victim, powerless to
escape, can only wonder when the torment will cease.  Lane had
experienced earthquakes in central China.  This, however, was of a
different order.  To the other members of the party it was a new test
of courage.  Drake's knees turned to water.  He almost went down when
Edith, suffering from the same malady, clung to him for support.  Ole
said nothing.  He was too scared to pray.  Anderson stood it best.

"That's nothing," he said.  "It will save my blasting powder."

The words were hardly off his tongue before it began again, worse than
ever.  In ten seconds it was over.

"That's the queerest shake I ever felt," said the Doctor, wiping the
perspiration from his face.  "The motion was entirely vertical.  It
felt exactly as if someone miles below us was hitting the roof over him
with a heavy iron bar.  Listen!"



MILES under their feet they heard a muffled crashing like the slamming
of thousands of doors along a hundred mile corridor.  With a last
crescendo of slams the noise ceased, to be followed immediately by a
hollow rumble as of water bursting underground from the sea through
labyrinths of rock.  Rising to a sudden, deafening thunder directly
beneath them the shattering noise passed, to mutter itself out in the
bowels of the earth leagues to the south.  Then the mist all about them
took sudden life.  A great wind, eddying like a maelstrom, spun them
helplessly on the ice.

By instinct rather than reason Anderson got his claspknife open and cut
the rope which bound him to the sledges.  At the same instant Drake and
Ole each clutched one of Edith's arms, Lane seized Anderson by his
collar and with the other hand grasped Ole's coat, and all five huddled
together, flattened themselves on the ice.  Not one of them afterward
recalled any thought in all of this.  It had been purely the instinct
of self-preservation acting automatically.

Spinning like straws in a whirlwind, now this way, now that, they were
too dazed to comprehend what was happening.  Only a dim consciousness
that the air was being swept clean of fog penetrated their minds.  The
vortex motion of the atmosphere ceased as abruptly as it had begun.
Staggering to their feet in an air as clear and hard as glass they
found themselves less than two feet from the brink of a well fifty
yards across.  The last vestige of the fog had been sucked down the
innumerable blowholes.  These they now saw thickly pitted over the
desolate ice in all directions to the range of vision.

It was some seconds before they realized the full horror of their
plight.

Drake was the first to come out of the stupor.

"The sledges?" he muttered, staring about him in a daze.

They were gone.  Anderson took in the situation at a glance.  He kept
his nerve.

"Out of this as fast as we can," he said quietly.

He clutched his compass.  They followed him at a run.  There was no
time to speculate down which of the wells the sledges had been sucked.
Every nerve strained to get out of that ghastly maze of death traps.

"It's beginning again," Lane said presently.  "I felt a slight jar.
Down on your stomachs and all hang together.  Hansen, you're heaviest.
Get in the middle."

They cowered on the ice, their hands joined round Ole's stout figure,
waiting for they knew not what.



HUDDLED on the trembling ice they set their teeth and prayed inwardly,
expecting to be hurled skyward.  A rushing roar, like the tumbling of
flames in a furnace when the door is suddenly opened, rose with
incredible speed to a high, singing pitch of shattering intensity.
Just when the shrill whistling grew unendurable there shot from the
innumerable wells dotted over the ice hard white pillars of compressed
mist.  With explosive violence the fog which the wind had sucked down
into the bowels of the rocks was being expelled.

Straight up shot the thousands upon thousands of dense white columns to
fray themselves out in a whirling tracery on the roof of the sky like
the groining of a vast cathedral.

Then the bottoms of the rushing fog pillars soared free of the wells.
The shortening columns, sucked up into the newly formed clouds
flattened themselves upon the misty roof in thousands of rings that
vibrated, clashed into one another, rebounded, clashed again, and
finally rolled along the underside of the cloudy dome in a mazy tangle
of spinning filaments.

The pitch of the singing note from the blowholes heightened.  Air or
gas was being forced up under tremendous pressure from the interior of
the earth.  Speechless with awe, the huddled watchers beheld the tops
of the invisible columns burst into pale blue conical flames.  Almost
immediately after they heard the thudding of the ignition.

For perhaps ten seconds the whole cloud roof over the vast ice trough
was hung with the thousands of these pendant cones of blue flame.  As
the sustaining pressure now rapidly dropped the shrillness of the
whistling diminished, and by great trembling bounds the blue cones
descended toward the wells, reddening as they fell.

Half-way between the blood-red ice and the crimsoned cloud roof the
downward-rushing cones of red flame halted, suspended in mid-air,
roaring like ten thousand blast furnaces.  Then with a tumbling
reverberation the innumerable tongues of crimson lengthened, swooped
upon the wells, and with a last earth-shaking thunder disappeared.

Although daylight still lingered beneath the high gray pall of fog, the
party, blinded by that last downward rush of fire, saw nothing.  Dazed
and trembling, they got to their feet.  Gradually vision returned.
Without a word Anderson peered at his compass and led off.  They were
too stunned by the mere magnitude of what they had seen to attempt as
yet to comprehend it.  Only the instinct of self-preservation urged
them to immediate flight.

They had made a little less than a mile when again the subterranean
thunder shook the ice under their feet.  Then they remembered for the
first time their night vigil on the deck of the _Edith_.  That periodic
glow on the distant clouds had recurred every thirteen and a half
minutes.

For safety they again huddled together on the ice.  Again the surface
air was sucked down the wells, but with considerably less violence.
Apparently the initial disturbance had stored up fuel for the
succeeding flames.  Once more the shrill whistle from innumerable vents
announced the coming of the fires, and again the blue cones hung from
the massive cloud roof, to hover down presently in crimson fire before
the final swift plunge to the darkness of the wells.

Long before they escaped from the trap night overtook them.  Their
march had been a succession of panting runs while the tumbling flames
and the crimson glow lit up the icy desolation like a frozen hell.
When the flames vanished, and the air all about them became a black
well, they halted breathless with fear while the rapid jarring of the
ice rocked their brains, and the fierce whirlwinds clutched at their
bodies to hurl them down the bottomless pits of fire.



THE terror of the fiftieth grim watch was no less than that of the
first.  At any instant the gyrating wind might get a surer hold of
their shrinking bodies and dash them all to a horrible death.  Ordinary
courage, steeled by life-long habit to brave the commonplace dangers of
human existence, availed them nothing.  Their minds being unprepared
for this torture they could only cower under its fiendish recurrence.

Dawn found them still crouched in the trap or stumbling blindly forward
under the lash of instinct.  They had no idea how many miles they had
reeled through during the night.  For all they knew they might be two
miles or twenty from the comparative heaven of the icy desolation
between them and the ship.

With the coming of full daylight the temperature rose and the heavy
pall above them began slowly to descend.  A new terror gripped them
when the icy mists swirled down, enveloping the party in impenetrable
gray.  They must now grope their way forward a step at a time.  Haste
meant death in the wells, which still with maddening regularity shot up
their pillars of descending flame.  Numb with cold and stupefied by
fatigue as they were, they yet had feelings of awe for the mysterious
beauty of the infernal dream when the crimson flames, smoky as
milky-red opals through the shrouding mists, paused for a fraction of a
second above the wells for their final plunge.

Three hours after dawn the last rumble jarred the ice, and the
blowholes droned wearily, but no flame issued.  It was as if some titan
chained beneath the rock had expired his last flaming breath.  For that
day at least the strange terror was ended.

Through the searching cold of the dead mist they groped their way in
stunned misery for another four hours.  Only the necessary words of
caution as the leader avoided the pitfalls at his feet broke their
dazed silence.

At last they felt themselves climbing uphill.  They were out of the
inferno.  Urging their jaded bodies to the limit of endurance, they
panted up the long slope.  Two hours later they flung themselves on the
ice, face up in the glorious sunlight.

For half an hour they lay there in silence, soaking in the light of
heaven.  The heat of their bodies melting the ice, presently their
clothes were sagging with freezing water.  In spite of themselves they
slept.

"We can't stay here," Anderson said, getting to his feet.  "Wake up,
everybody.  We must go on as far as we can and trust that Bronson will
find us."

The Captain was right.  Sleep with no covering but their clothes, even
in the afternoon sunshine, was almost certain suicide.  Like automatons
they followed Anderson over the dazzling snowfields, tramping
monotonously till dark.  Among the weary five of them there was not a
particle of food.  And having no fuel they could not thaw out the hard
frozen snow or ice to drink.  The bits of ice which they sucked in the
stinging cold to allay the raging thirst cracked their lips and seared
their tongues, causing them exquisite torture.

Never slackening his gait, Anderson crunched steadily ahead.  Fatigue
to him might have been an alien mystery.  The three men followed him
doggedly.  Hansen appeared to notice nothing more than the ordinary
day's work.  He bobbed along like a jogging barrel directly behind
Anderson, treading down a firm foothold for Edith, who trudged after
him.  Lane came next, some yards behind, and Drake, cursing softly to
himself to keep up his spirits, brought up the rear.



THE deepest darkness of the early morning made no difference to
Anderson.  He kept on.  It is a perennial miracle what the human body
can stand when it is driven by a relentless mind.  All that night,
half-mad with thirst, the party slogged on through the black cold.

Dawn found them still marching.

"Anybody for a rest?" Anderson croaked through his cracked lips.

Edith nodded, and sank down in her tracks.  Instantly she was asleep.
Taking off his outer coat, Ole rolled her in it and slapped his sides
to keep from freezing.  To the protests of Drake and Lane, who peeled
their coats, Ole replied that he, having more blubber than both of them
together, could better stand a freeze.

None of the men attempted to sleep.  They sat on the ice or stamped
about when they began to stiffen.

"Hereafter I carry my sleeping bag on my back," the Captain croaked.
"Damn the dogs."

"Captain Anderson!" Ole reproved him.

"She's asleep, idiot.  Shut up."

Stirring uneasily, Edith rolled over on her cramped side.  Suddenly she
sat up with a start.

"Oh, I'm dreadfully ashamed," she cried, scrambling painfully to her
feet.

"How long have I slept?"

"Five minutes," Anderson lied nobly, and Drake nodded.

"It felt like five seconds," Edith sighed.  Then she noticed Ole's
coat.  "Oh, Ole, how generous of you," she exclaimed, helping him into
it.  "But you shouldn't have done it; I'm not a baby."

"That's nothing," Ole protested.

"It's a great deal," she replied.  "My, but it's cold."

"All right," Anderson croaked, "we'll go on.  You will soon warm up."

From that hour Edith became a firm adherent of the theory that five
minute naps at the proper time are as refreshing as a night's sleep.
None of the men had the heart to explode her theory.  They never told
her that she had slept three hours and twelve minutes.

Another rest of two hours in mid-afternoon refreshed them all.  By
huddling together three of the men generated warmth enough in the clear
sunshine to enjoy a profound sleep.  The fourth kept watch, rousing the
next man when his turn came.  Edith slept straight through the two
hours.



THAT night they marched briskly from dusk to dawn without a halt.
Another two-hour rest restored them for the final effort.  The men had
found their second wind.  Edith's sufficient sleep and youth made her a
good match for the men.  She would go through with it to the end and
come out smiling.  Curiously enough, hunger did not greatly distress
them.  After the first sharp pangs they forgot food in the intense
longing for copious draughts of water.  Putting their wills to it they
forged ahead almost at a run over the hard, packed snow.

Seventeen hours later they saw the rubies and emeralds of the ship's
lights gleaming through the crystal night air.  In fifteen minutes they
were wallowing alternately in cold water and steaming hot chocolate.

"Never again," said the Captain, limping off to his cabin.  "I'll leave
that sort of thing to professional explorers who enjoy talking about it
afterwards from a platform."

This, however, was the rash statement of a pessimistic and leg-weary
man.  By twelve o'clock the next day he was up to his neck in plans for
another assault on the black barrier which he was determined to cross.
He persisted in his belief that oceans of oil lapped the farther side
of the jagged range which they had failed to reach.

"Listen to me," Ole broke in.  For some time he had been suffering
agonies from the high pressure of his superheated theories.  "Those
blowholes," he said impressively, "spouted natural gas.  Therefore
there is oil at the bottom of them.  There are our wells, Captain."

"Idiot," said the Captain, "how are we to get at the oil if it is at
the bottom of those hell holes?"

"Pumps."

"Pump yourself and dry up."  The Captain turned to Lane.  "What is it
to be?"

"Full steam ahead as far as we can go.  Then deposit a cache of
dynamite and provisions, send the ship downstream a safe distance, and
make it inland by sledges to your volcano."

"Burning oil well," Ole corrected under his breath.

"We shall see when we get there," said the Doctor.  "Suppose we can
approach to within fifty or even a hundred miles of the volcano--pardon
me, Ole, burning oil well.  We could establish a base there--bury our
supplies in the ice, if necessary--and deposit caches of food and fuel
every ten miles to the place itself.  There are plenty of able-bodied
men aboard to chop holes in the ice and pack in the stuff.  Then we
won't be bothered with those beastly dogs."

"There are only two teams left, anyway," said the Captain.  "Your plan
sounds reasonable."

"May a mere woman participate in the councils of the gods?" Edith asked
with mock humility.

"Yea," her father answered, "even a mere child may prattle about our
feet.  'Out of the mouths of babes--' you know.  Proceed, infant."

"I shall do so," the child replied.  "And presently you won't be able
to see me for my smoke.  For I intend to take Ole with me on a tour of
inspection while you and the others are breaking pickaxes and your
backs over cast iron ice."

"How so, child?"

"I have wings, have I not?"

"Even so, angel child.  You were born with feathers on your back."

"Then I shall fly.  In three hours I shall find out more about this
country than you and the blessed dogs will learn in ten years.  If
Ole's cameras are good for anything we shall supply you with a map of
this continent from here to the South Pole.  Then you will be able to
find your way to the Captain's oil field without stubbing your toes
over every brick on the road as poor John did.  Ole, consider yourself
engaged as official photographer of the air reconnaissance.  In the
meantime, Captain Anderson, full steam ahead while our luck lasts."



THE last order being confirmed by Lane, the Captain obeyed.  Returning
to the cabin, he found Lane with his back to the wall fighting his last
battle against Ole and Edith.

"Help me to talk these lunatics out of their insanity," he begged,
"before they break their silly necks."

But the Captain, having reflected, was less inclined than the Doctor to
the lunacy theory.  "Let me take a squint at the barometer, first," he
said.

"Set fair," he announced.  "This seems to be an almost windless region.
Those tornadoes round the blowholes don't count.  The devil alone is
responsible for them.  Having his hands full there he won't bother us
here--at least not for twelve hours unless the barometer is a worse
liar than he is.

"Now here is my vote," he continued.  "If the weather stays set until
we reach our anchorage I say Edith and Ole should go.  She is right.
In three hours they can find out what it would take us years to bungle
through.  At the first sign of wind or dirty weather she can scoot back
to the ship.  She is the best air pilot of us all.  And I'll say this,
of Ole: he is second best."

Ole blushed appreciatively.  "You bet your boots I am."

"Also you are as dumb as a barrel," the Captain resumed, "so you won't
put Miss Lane up to any foolishness.  She will do the thinking for both
of you."

"Ole can take the pictures and theorize," Edith promised consolingly.

"And mend the motor when you bust it," Ole added with a touch of
vindictiveness.  It is one thing to call a man a master-builder of
theories and quite another to say he theorizes.  Ole sensed the
distinction.

The Doctor was finally routed.  And so it happened that Edith and Ole
took not one reconnoitering flight, while the men and dogs toiled
fifteen hours a day at the caches, but several.

That afternoon they proceeded upstream to within fifty miles of their
projected goal.

For twelve days of perfect calm they anchored in the narrow channel,
ready at a second's notice to race from the deluge of hot mud which
they half expected but which never came.  The stout ship was to leave
her timbers in that desolate spot to the end of time, but it was not
mud or lava which held her fast.

The powerful plane had been unshipped without difficulty.  A level
stretch of hard packed snow made an ideal landing ground.  When tanked
to capacity the plane carried enough petrol for a thousand mile flight.
Taking no chances, the explorers carried the full complement on each
trip.

"Au revoir," Edith said as she climbed in for her first flight.  "We'll
be back before midnight.  I promise."

"How far as you going?" Drake asked.

"To Hades."

Edith's answer had been given merely to shock Ole.  Yet it contained an
unsuspected element of truth.  That was precisely where she landed
before the end of her explorations.




CHAPTER VI

TRAPPED

EDITH'S intention was to fly due south.  She wished if possible to
discover the source of the eruption which Anderson had observed on his
first trip.  The account of the gigantic smoke ring, visible at over
two hundred and fifty miles, "teetering crazily up the sky" had taken
her imagination by storm.  She wished to see for herself what sort of a
monster blew such delightful rings.  Ole's burning oil well theory did
not seem entirely satisfactory.  Edith rather expected to find a crater
pursed up through the ice like a smoker's lips, lazily generating smoke
for the next puff.

So far the party had seen no sign of the distant disturbance from the
ship.  The cordial gush of hot water which had first welcomed them,
however, they regarded as highly significant.

Ole set himself with stolid perseverance to photograph the Antarctic
continent as seen from above.  With the results of his labors it would
be possible, he hoped, for subsequent explorers to find their way
blindfolded to the South Pole.

Forty freezing minutes flew behind them before they noticed any feature
of interest on the desolate, icebound landscape rolling up from the
south to meet them.  The jagged black crests of what appeared as an
almost perpendicular rock barrier pricked the horizon.

Nearing this barrier, they saw it rise by leaps above the white
wilderness.  Ole had charge of the navigating instruments.  By a rough
calculation, half guess and half arithmetic, he estimated the barren
cliffs to be not over three hundred feet high.  A glance vertically
down showed an undulating ice plain thickly dotted with huge fragments
of black rock.  Occasionally one of these jagged fragments, having
fallen with the flat side uppermost, presented a thatch of last
winter's snow to the observers, but for the most part their stark
pinnacles were bare and black.

Presently Ole gave a shout that was audible above the droning of the
propeller.

"Blowholes," he bellowed, handing Edith the binoculars.

Peering over the side Edith beheld a pockmarked expanse of blue ice,
pitted with bottomless wells and littered with huge fragments of rock.
Putting her trust in Providence not to "blow" the wells until she had
flown over them, she gave the engine more gas and spun toward the low
barrier.

Coming directly over the barrier they saw that the apparent wall was a
tumbled desolation of huge rock masses at least five miles broad.  It
would be impossible to traverse that jumble with dog teams.  If the
goal of the expedition lay beyond that chaos they must traverse it
painfully on foot with packs on their backs.

Edith flew on.  The speedometer showed eighty miles an hour.  Some
minutes later they saw the black mass beneath them, curving
precipitously down like the slope of a steep mountain.

Determined to ascertain the extent of the vast crater--for such they
judged it to be--Edith continued to fly due south with one eye on the
speedometer.  The walls of the huge depression below them were soon no
longer visible.  Only a sheer void with slowly heaving sooty black
clouds at the bottom, apparently several miles below them, met their
awed gaze.

That deep expanse of inky billows seemed never ending.  On they flew at
eighty miles an hour until seventy minutes lay between them and their
starting point at the lip of the gigantic crater, and the precipitous
slopes of the farther side soared suddenly up out of the black smoke to
meet them.  The crater, they inferred, must be ninety miles across.
Vast as this estimate made it, they could not be sure that it was
adequate, as they had no means of judging whether they had flown above
a diameter.



WHEN they finally cleared the last of the shattered buttress and level
ice stretched unbroken for miles beneath them, Ole signified his urgent
wish to descend.  They landed without mishap.

"Where are you going?" Edith demanded as Ole started on a run back to
the lip of the crater.

"I have just had a theory," he bellowed, forgetting in his enthusiasm
that he was no longer competing with the propeller.  "Now I test it."

When he joined her forty minutes later his face bore the smug
expression of one who has looked on Truth and found her all he had
hoped.

"Just as I thought," he said.  "The south sides of those rocks on the
edge of the crater are covered with lichens."

"Well," said Edith, testy from the cold, "did you expect to find
barnacles?"

"No," he replied with the bland complacency of a sunfish, "I knew I
should find lichens."

"Then it was stupid of you to waste nearly an hour looking for them,"
she retorted.  "Get in.  I'm going on."

"But," he expostulated, "I have proved my theory.  That is no new
crater.  It must be very old.  Therefore Captain Anderson did not see
it erupting."

"Then what did he see?"

"An eruption within an eruption.  Just the old floor of this volcano
has blown up in our times."

"And the floor was covered with inscriptions?  Yours is a likely
theory, I must say.  Who ever heard of people carving inscriptions on
the floor of a volcano?"

"Who ever didn't hear of it?" Ole retorted, not quite sure of his
logic.  "Why shouldn't they?  Perhaps those inscriptions were only
tombstones.  Haven't you seen the flat ones in the churchyards?  Those
ancient makers of inscriptions wished to bury something."

"So they dug a hole in the red hot lava and put a lid over it?"

"Not of course.  I mean," he corrected himself, "of course not.  No,
that isn't what I mean.  I want to say it doesn't follow.  The main
eruption may have been millions and millions of years ago."

"I too have a theory," Edith announced.

"Yes?" said Ole eagerly.

"My theory is that you will be left here talking through your hat
forever if you don't climb in at once.  I'm going on."

The unappreciated Ole took the hint.

Edith decided to fly home in a wide circle, following the southern rim
of the crater until it began to turn sharply to the north.  Then,
leaving it behind, she hummed on due west for about a hundred miles.
She was on the point of turning north again, and home to the ship, when
a peculiar dim blue line across the western horizon caught her
attention.  To investigate would take only half an hour.  She
investigated.

So did Ole.  He again discovered innumerable blowholes in the ice over
which they whizzed, and called Edith's attention to the significant
detail.

"This looks promising," she said to herself, for Ole could hear
nothing.  "Now if Nature knows anything at all about logic she should
have planted another big hole in the ice over behind that blue line."

Nature proved herself logical.  The blue line became the sheer edge of
a tremendous ice precipice sweeping in a gradual curve round the
horizon.  Fifty miles was a conservative guess at the diameter of this
vast depression.  Unlike the other no jumble of black rock cluttered
its edge or the surrounding plain.

Half a mile from the edge Edith landed.  In silence she and Ole hurried
over to the edge of the precipice.  Reaching it they stood a few yards
back and gazed into the immense void before them.  No smoke obscured
the sunlit floor of this vast amphitheatre.  So far below them it lay
that it appeared only as a dim blue shadow.

"Come," said Edith, "that's too good to spoil today.  We shall return
tomorrow and see it properly.  Don't say anything to the others about
this.  One thing at a time is enough for those doubting Thomas cats."

"I won't," Ole promised.  "My theory is," he jabbered before Edith
could choke him off, "my theory is that Satan is still chained down
there."

"There will be the devil to pay," she said simply.

Edith's report brought tears to the Captain's eyes.

"That fool Ole was right," he admitted generously.  "What he and I saw
from the ship was a burning oil well.  Now you have found it."

"Full of black smoke," Ole added gloomily.  "Probably all the oil is
burning away."

"No, idiot," the Captain replied, "or you would have seen flames."

"I suppose it was just smouldering?" Ole suggested with a nasty touch
of irony.

"Oh, undoubtedly," the Captain sneered.  "The obvious, practical
solution always escapes your colossal mind.  Can't you see it?  That
smoke is simply what has settled down after the fire went out."

"And burned up all the oil," the pessimist supplemented.

"Oh, shut up.  If what he says is true, Doctor, isn't there likely to
be more oil under the floor of that hole in the rock?"

"I'll tell you when I see the floor."

"Well, whatever theory you and he may hatch between you I'm going to
tear up an acre or two of what's left of that floor with dynamite.
Tomorrow we begin packing my part of the show to the circus tent."



BEFORE sunrise the next morning Edith and Ole were stirring in
preparation for their trip.  They were off with the first ray.  The
Captain having assured Lane that the cold, windless spell was certain
to continue, Edith coaxed her father into giving his consent at the
last minute.  She departed with the Captain's heartfelt blessing and
his best thermos bottle full of hot chocolate.  What souvenir the
blessed girl might bring back to him today he could only speculate, but
he hoped it would be another oil well of even vaster dimensions than
her first.

What Edith and Ole expected to find on their private expedition they
kept to themselves.  Neither had the least suspicion of the handsome
surprise which Nature had generously prepared for their welcome.

Turning sharply to the west as soon as the airplane lost sight of the
ship, Edith steered a straight line toward her find.  Ole as navigator
gave her the signals keeping her on the course.  She made the propeller
hum.  Not being interested in the dreary Antarctic landscape she shot
over it at a hundred and twenty miles an hour, which was the limit of
the machine's capacity.

The dim blue line on the horizon raced forward to meet them.
Slackening her speed to eighty miles an hour Edith spiralled down like
a seagull.  Reaching the level of the lip she circled for a turn near
the precipitous wall and then, to Ole's horror, made a nose dive for
the bottom of that vast well.  Cutting out the engine presently she
tilted to forty-five degrees, and glided down, down to the sunlight of
the blue plain below.

"Where are we going?" Ole gibbered in his fright.

"Down there, of course.  It looks nice and sunny.  I'm half frozen."

"What if we can't land?"

"Then we must fly out again."

"But suppose something goes wrong with the engine?"

"Then we shall be a pair of scrambled eggs with no toast, but only the
hard ground, beneath us."

The sunlight swam up to meet them, and to their astonished eyes was
revealed an azure river winding through a green plain.  Dropping lower
they saw the huge trees rush out, and then, farther away, the
innumerable silvery plumes of the pampas grass undulating to the warm
breeze.  Entranced they saw the long billows of light rising and
falling like the swell of a silver tide.  Here, sunk deep in the icy
heart of the Antarctic Continent lay a paradise of flowing water and
luxuriant vegetation.

Accepting it for what it was they flew on in silence, looking for a
spot to land.  For once Ole was without a theory.  Later he hatched
several.  The probable solution of the mystery was not, however, his
work alone.  Drake supplied the egg; Ole merely brooded on it and gave
it wings wherewith to soar.

The dense vegetation by the river thinned here and there into rolling
meadows of lush grass.  They flew over these, seeking more level ground
for a landing.  At least they spied what they sought, a long sandy spit
cleaving a still blue bay in the river.

They made a perfect landing.  Then, when they stood with their numbed
feet on the warm sand they realized the wonder of the place and its
beauty.  They were almost in the centre of the vast well.  Twenty-five
miles distant in whatever direction they looked towered up the sheer
blue cliffs fifteen thousand feet above the floor of the valley.

Age-old ice bound the brows of those precipices, and over the circular
opening to the sky howled the winter blizzards of the Antarctic,
powerless to freeze the water in this blue river or blight the
tenderest flowers of the valley's perpetual spring.  By what miracle
had time preserved this deep garden against the advancing cold?  Dying
ages had piled on the once tropical regions above a crushing desolation
of ice a thousand feet thick.  While overhead the yelling gales of
winter warred against themselves with whirlwinds of frozen sleet and
splintered shafts of clanging ice, only rain fell through this mild
atmosphere above the valley.  How had this spot, this very heart of a
forgotten paradise retained its life-giving warmth, while all about lay
the stark body of life frozen cold in the death of ages?  Or had it
always been as they now saw it?  These were questions which they could
only ask themselves but not answer.

"This is more beautiful than a California valley," Edith sighed, "and
on a far grander scale than any of them.  No other valley in the world
is an almost perfect circle like this one, nor is there another, with
cliffs like those to shelter it.  Those walls are three miles high."



THEY strolled off the sandy spit to ascend a little knoll whence they
might obtain a view of the whole valley.  Not until they had been
walking about five minutes did they notice the oppressive discomfort of
locomotion.  Thinking that it must be due to their own thawing out in
this mild air after the long flight through zero temperature, they took
off their heavy sealskin coats.  Twenty steps farther they shed their
sheepskin tunics.  Another ten yards and they stripped their jaegers.

"I know what it is," Ole exclaimed, not stopping to do his theorizing.
"We are two and four-fifths miles below the surface of the earth,
aren't we?"

"Three," said Edith.  "But it's too stuffy to argue.  Go on."

"Then we are at the bottom of a mine.  I mean," he explained
laboriously, "it is just as if we were at the bottom of a mine.  All
that air is crushing us."

At the crest of the hill they flung themselves panting on the thick,
mossy grass.

"I shall never growl at the cold again," Edith declared.  "This place
must be like a steam bath when the sky is clouded up over the opening."

As she stood up to shake on her sealskin a darker blue stain on the
azure of the distant wall caught her eye.  Looking intently at the
deeper blue she imagined that she could see clear through the vast
cliffs into a dim azure world beyond.  Then dismissing the illusion
with a laugh at her own fancifulness she started slightly at a new
aspect of the shadow.  It was in the form of a perfect arch at least
three thousand feet high.  Ole's remark about the miners burrowing out
sideways when the heat grew unendurable stuck in her mind with an odd
persistence.  What if this were an old mine, disused since a million
years before the dawn of history?

"What do you see?" Ole demanded nervously.  He was struggling with his
heavy tunic.

"Nothing.  But you have a look.  What is that shadow on the cliffs over
there?"

Ole stared long and hard.  His seaman's eyes made out no more than had
Edith's.  Not wishing to commit himself to an untenable theory he
wheeled slowly round, searching the whole hundred and sixty mile
precipice.

"There is another," he began cautiously, "three points east of south."

"Yes," said Edith, "and I have counted four more.  That makes six in
all.  Let's investigate."

"Right, Miss Lane.  I'm with you."

Their lassitude vanished at the prospect of adventure.  Joining hands
they raced down the little hill by a shortcut which would take them
through a clump of high bushes directly to the airplane.  Laughing like
a pair of children off for a picnic they romped into the shade.

Suddenly a huge gray boulder blocking their path came to life with an
earth-shaking screech.  Edith screamed and clung to Ole.  He stood
frozen in his tracks, paralyzed with terror.

How they ever reached the plane they were unable afterwards to recall.
Edith remembers being thrown in bodily by Ole.  He only has a blurred
memory of cranking the propeller, climbing and kicking madly at the
evil red eyes in a hideous serpent head that shot up after him on a
massive thirty foot neck.  He swears that he struck one glaring red eye
just before the motor lifted and the heavy bodied brute flopped on its
belly in the sand, fanning the air with the vast spread of its
ineffectual, bat-like membranes.



TO THE Captain's anxious inquiries the fliers replied that they had
returned early on account of the cold.  Although sorely disappointed
that Edith had not discovered another oil-hole for him, Anderson said
nothing.  He contented himself with putting Ole to the dirtiest job in
sight.  Lane was far inland, superintending the caching of stores.
Drake had gone off somewhere to exercise his beloved dogs.

Edith and Ole conspired to keep their find to themselves until they
should have explored it thoroughly.  They began to regret their panicky
flight straight back to the ship.  Tomorrow, however, they would keep
their nerve and spend a heavenly day investigating the abode of the
dragon.  A landing in the open should be sufficient protection from a
surprise.  By avoiding clumps of brush, rock piles and pampas they
might see much before being chased.

That evening they gathered in the Captain's cabin.  The Doctor, having
unpacked his scientific paraphernalia, was absorbed in an attempt to
analyze the green venom which he had collected from the giant reptile
on the beach.  The scanty equipment proving insufficient he put away
his test tubes with a sigh of disappointment.

"I shall have to wait for a living victim."

"Let me see your flask, Doctor," Ole begged.

"Have you a theory?" the Doctor laughed, handing over the pint of
thick, evil, green fluid.

"Not this time.  But I have a knife."

To the astonishment of the party Ole proceeded to anoint the eight-inch
blade of his murderous knife with the sticky green venom.

"There," he said complacently, brandishing the knife to dry it, "nobody
gets fresh with me any more."

Edith rose to retire.  As she went out she shot Ole a significant
glance.  Mumbling an excuse he followed her.

"Why not take a revolver tomorrow?" she whispered.

"No use.  I couldn't hit the side of the ship at ten yards."

"But suppose we do get caught again?  The stuff may take hours to act.
I doubt whether it is a poison at all.  Father really knows nothing
about it."

"What can we do?  A guess is better than nothing.  Besides, I don't
mean to get caught."

"Neither do I.  Oh, that awful brute.  I shall have a ghastly
nightmare.  Good-night, Ole."

They were off at sunrise in the stinging cold.  Drake for a spell at
breakfast had grown quite peevish, not to say profanely rude, when Ole
harmlessly asked him to pass the butter.  The memory of what Drake had
said was food and warmth to Edith on the freezing spin south.  Having
nothing to cheer him but the shadowy prospect of sticking an
overdeveloped lizard with wings in the gullet, Ole froze.  It was with
reckless relief that he shed his sealskin when at last they landed.

Today they had come down in the centre of a five mile meadow.  Unless
the enemy flew they were safe.

Ole had brought the Captain's strongest binoculars.  With these he now
slowly swept every mile of the vast precipice, blue in the hazy
distance.  On each of the six sapphire shadows he lingered a full five
minutes.  The dim shadows, he decided, might be weather stains on the
cliffs.  If nothing more a three thousand foot stain should be very
well worth investigating.

"You take a look, Miss Lane," he told her.

"Those are caves full of mist," she said decisively, handing back the
glasses.  "Which one shall we try first?"

"The nearest.  That one to the south-east.  If we don't like what we
find this is a good place to fall back on."

"You think we may wish to turn tail in a hurry?"

"We can't tell," he said uneasily.  "I am no coward."

"Of course you are not.  Neither am I.  Shall we go?"

"My eyes are better than yours, Miss Lane.  Remember, I have been half
my life at sea."

"Well?"

"I thought I saw things moving at the base of those cliffs.  They were
only shadows."

"Afraid of a shadow, Ole?"

"Yes," he admitted frankly.  "Show me something real and I'll fight it
like the next man.  Put me up against a nightmare the devil himself
never dreamed of and my legs turn to water.  Now you know how I feel."

Impressed by his outspokenness she held out her hand for the glasses.
Long and curiously she searched the base of the cliff.

"I believe you are right.  There is something over there at the foot of
the precipice.  How far away from it are we?" she asked.

"About twenty-three miles."

"Even if the shadow were an elephant's we couldn't make it out at that
distance."

"Not with these glasses," he admitted.

"Has it struck you that those moving things can't possibly be shadows?"

"Why not?" he queried nervously.

"Because that whole sector of the cliffs is itself in deep shadow."

"I hadn't thought of that," the unpractical builder of theories
admitted.



FLYING as slowly as was possible they cautiously approached the
mysterious stain on the southeastern wall.  At that hour of the morning
the shadow of the precipice lay in a great blue crescent on the valley
before them.  Soon entering the shadow they experienced a sudden drop
in spirits.  To the superstitious Ole the semi-twilight was a gloomy
omen of disaster.

Edith began to wish she had been less daring.  Hating to back out after
her bold front to Ole she kept her forebodings to herself.
Nevertheless she had a strong premonition of trouble.  The thought that
the motor might fail them at a critical moment almost made her sick.
Swallowing hard she anxiously scanned the terrain for a safe landing
place.  To her joy she observed a gentle three mile grassy slope from
the base of the precipice to the edge of the pampas.

They were now near enough to make out the nature of the stain.  It was
indeed what they had first guessed, a colossal archway over half a mile
high in the face of the sheer cliff.  Smoky with blue mist it might
have been either a huge cave or the entrance to a tunnel under the
continent.  If the latter, Edith made a sudden resolution to explore it
to the end--some day.  At present she felt too shaky.

They were now within five miles of the cliffs.  Although it was not
exactly a sane proceeding, they changed places in mid-air.  Ole now
became the pilot and Edith the observer.

Her first observation stopped her heart for two sickening seconds.  The
green slope at the base of the cliffs was a crawling den of gigantic
monsters.  The huge, torpid beasts blundered and crawled over one
another's sluggish carcasses like blind salamanders.  Evidently they
were just awakening to greet the sunlight which in a few hours would
stir them into activity.  The vast cave or tunnel no doubt was their
den and breeding place.

The droning roar of the propeller roused the lethargic brutes to a
trumpeting rage.  A hideous forest of writhing necks shot up; flat,
brainless heads swayed up to spit their hatred and their venom at the
breaker of their bestial sloth, and the obscene red membranes of the
huge brutes' aborted wings clattered impotently against their bloated
bodies.  The fetid stench of their breath mingling with the reek of
their foul lair defiled the morning with an unforgettable sickness.  A
flashing vision of innumerable eyes red with brainless ferocity, a din
of yellowed fangs clashing after their unattainable prey, the
penetrating breath of a living decay, and the hideous flight was a
memory.

Was Hanson insane?  Again Edith shrieked as he shot full speed into the
blue mists of the cavern.  Shutting her eyes she instinctively braced
herself for the obliterating crash.

It never came.  Whether or not she fainted she doesn't know.  Ole
swears she did.



WHEN she opened her eyes she thought for one wild moment that she was
in hell.  The blue mists had given way to a rapidly flickering crimson
glow.  The oppressive heat all but stifled her.  Great gushers of flame
thundering up from the floor of the vast tunnel flattened and curled in
fronded fire over the arched rock half a mile above.  Down the endless
distance colonnades of pillared flames dwindled in vistas of alluring
terror, enticing the damned to their torments.

Ole had been less rash than he seemed.  While Edith was taking her fill
of the den over which they shot he, like a born navigator, was minding
his own business.  As the blue entrance of the tunnel rushed forward to
meet him he saw that its interior was approximately straight and
sufficiently well lighted for safe flying.  The chance he took was
negligible.  A mile from the entrance he sighted the first flaming
well, and thereafter the tunnel became a well lighted corridor, broad
and lofty, ideal for rapid flight.  Danger of a collision with one of
the roaring flame pillars was nil, the highway down the tunnel being
over a mile broad and the avenue of flame wells at least half a mile
wide at its narrowest point.

Those three thousand foot pillars of flame were absolutely without
smoke.  Ole's reasonable theory--inadequate, as later events
proved--made them vast natural gas jets.  He recalled that there are on
record in Asia oilwells and escapes of natural gas which have been
flaming continuously for over two thousand years.  Therefore, he said,
this probably was the same sort of thing on a much grander scale.  The
age-long action of water opening fissures in the rocks had first let
vents into the subterranean oil and gas reservoirs.  Then the heat of
chemical reactions between the water and minerals in the rocks had
ignited the gas.  This detail of his theory led him seriously astray.
Had he chanced upon the true explanation of how those gas pillars took
fire--which any competent physicist would have guessed at once from the
peculiar behavior of the flames over the blowholes which Anderson had
discovered--he would not have rushed like a fool into the trap which
nature had prepared for him.

Granting the ignition of the gas the astute Ole reflected that the rest
of the inferno explained itself.  Intense heat and the constant high
pressure of escaping gas had enlarged the first vents into huge
circular wells, up which the solid flames shot until they impinged on
the rock roof three thousand feet above.  Doubtless, he reflected, the
red hot rocks up there were constantly flaking.  In time an avenue of
blowholes would burst through the roof of rock and ice for some later
explorer, far in the future, to find and wonder over.  He inferred
naturally that under Anderson's trough of blowholes there probably
extended another vast tunnel through the solid rock.  The six shadowy
arches which he and Edith had observed on the wall of their circular
valley no doubt were all of one kind.  The continent must be, in this
strange region, a vast rabbit warren with tunnels branching in all
directions, some even to the sea.



AT this point of his meditations Ole experienced his first qualm.
Those other blowholes onto which the party had blundered differed in
one significant respect from those which the future explorer of his
musings was to discover.  The escape of gas and flames through the
first was intermittent and its period strangely regular.  The
periodicity of the first blowholes was the disturbing peculiarity.
These gushing wells of fire in the tunnel seemed to be continuous.  Did
they ever go out like the others?  Ole's imagination leapt ahead of the
racing machine.  What if those pillared flames should suddenly drop
down their vents and disappear?  In the dark he must smash himself
against the tunnel wall like a ripe tomato.

This squeamish reflection passed from his mind to make way for another.
One detail of his inadequate blowhole theory received a sudden and
disconcerting confirmation.  Half a ton of red hot rock shattered
itself with a crash on the floor of the tunnel not a hundred yards to
the right of his course.  The whole roof must be cracking under the
fierce bombardment of flames from those thousands of gigantic blast
furnaces.

For the first time he now noticed the stifling heat of the tunnel.  The
rushing air positively scorched.  What if his petrol tank should
explode?  And what if a red hot fragment of stone set fire to the
airplane?  Ole began to sweat from a combination of too many clothes,
too much heat and too little nerve.  He was not having the best time in
the world.  Nevertheless he shot on like a courageous fool at a hundred
and twenty miles an hour down that vast tunnel into the bowels of the
earth.

The air in the tunnel began to grow faintly smoky.  They were now over
an hour from the entrance.  Consequently at least a hundred and twenty
miles lay between them and daylight.

The same thought occurred to the pair; they should now be nearing the
vicinity of the smoke-filled crater which they had discovered first.
Theorizing rapidly Ole concluded that the tunnel joined these two, the
ruined crater and the vast depression still green as a paradise.
Doubtless the explosion of a huge reservoir of oil beneath the first
had sent its floor skyward to litter the surrounding desolation with
chunks of black rock.  Then, he speculated, had the first also been a
den of prehistoric monsters--or, as Lane maintained, botched imitations
of such--before its destruction?  It had.

The verification of Ole's speculation was twofold and twice convincing.
Like a dead memory from a forgotten existence a nauseating stench
assailed their nostrils.  They remembered that moonlit night on the
Antarctic ocean and the soul destroying pollution from the beach of
monsters.



PRESENTLY through the thickening smoke they saw the shambles.  The
tunnel was all but blocked by the rotting carcasses of huge brutes
which had trampled one another to pulp in their panic to escape the
fumes which finally suffocated their multitudes.

Cutting out the engine Ole glided toward the mountain of decay.  Just
as he turned the plane to escape from the immense corruption he spied
the second confirmation of his theory.

Great, slow-moving brutes, each the bulk of three full grown
hippopotami, mailed in horn and with a ridge of jagged armor sticking
up along their spines from the flat, broad head to the tip of the
thirty-foot tail, were crawling like huge newts over the rotting
mountain, or splashing heavily through the foul brown ooze from its
base.

These gigantic scavengers took no notice of the intruders, continuing
with voracity their filthy feasts.  The whole decaying pile crawled
with them.  Their number could only be guessed, for the end of the
tunnel was invisible through the murky smoke.  For all the explorers
definitely knew, they might be one mile or twenty from the ruined
crater.

They decided it was time to fly.  Both felt faint from the awful
stench.  Ole let out the engine to its limit.  The sudden roar startled
a flapping horde of lesser scavengers which they had not seen.  Being
almost the color of their obscene food these had escaped notice in the
murky light.  They now arose in thousands, cloud upon cloud of
long-necked reptilian "birds" with the wings of bats.  From tip to tip
the spread of their leathery membranes averaged a good eight feet, and
on each six-foot neck a grinning head the size of a horse's stretched
hungrily forward.  Hard round eyes like those of gigantic serpents
stared stonily at the intruders, estimating their value as food.  The
six-inch teeth clashing aimlessly at nothing filled the air with a
hideous cacophony.

Either their own foul banquet was more to their taste or the reptilian
birds were by nature peace loving scavengers averse to combat, for they
contented themselves with flapping round and round this unknown bird of
the twentieth century.  Their lineage went back millions of years; this
parvenu was an infant yesterday.  With hard stares of contempt they
circled back in wide spirals to their interrupted repast.

Thanking Heaven for this deliverance, Edith breathed again.  But her
thanks were premature.  A strangely familiar rumbling was but the
prelude to a remembered thunder of subterranean explosions.  She knew
what was coming.

So did Ole.  Anticipating it he cut out the engine and dipped
gradually.  Taking the desperate chance that no considerable mass of
shattered rock littered the floor immediately ahead he brought the
plane down.

Luck favored him.  They came to rest whole on the rocky floor.

They climbed hastily out.  The jarring under their feet all but threw
them prostrate.  They heard the sudden suction of the rushing
whirlwinds rushing down to the subterranean chambers, and saw what they
dreaded.  As if struggling for their life with the demon winds the
pillars of descending flame quivered for an instant in mid air.  Then
with a kneeling roar they disappeared in absolute night down the wells.




CHAPTER VII

THE DEVIL CHICK

AN hour in the impenetrable darkness of that suffocating stench was a
hundred years long.  Unfortunately Ole had a liberal supply of matches.
Under ordinary trials these would have been a godsend.  Here they
proved an exceedingly cunning gift from the devil.

The instant the terrific jarring ceased Ole lit his first match.  It
was just half past eleven in the morning.  Five hours before he and
Edith had been enjoying an extensive breakfast.  For lunch they now had
nothing but the air, such as it was.  They had given up the attempt to
eat their sandwiches after the first mouthful.  The meat tasted like
carrion, and the bread had made of itself a sponge to soak up all the
noisomeness of that foul shambles.

They climbed back into the machine to await the next earthquake and the
rekindling of the gas wells.  To pass the time Ole theorized and struck
matches every five minutes.  The brief light showed him a set white
face, the large brown eyes with their dilated pupils almost black, and
the resolute, finely shaped mouth compressed in a firm bow.  The girl,
he admitted to himself, was sticking it like a hero.  He had expected
her to blubber.

"I have been wondering," she said about the fifth match, "how we are to
get out of this beastly tunnel if the darkness continues for, say a
week."  She laughed ruefully.  "'Beastly' is right in more ways than
one.  The smell is beastly, there is a hideous den of prehistoric
beasts at the less obscene end of this filthy burrow, and a stinking
mountain of dead beasts blocking the back door.  Suppose we do have to
walk out, which way shall we go?  All those scavengers and hideous bird
things are behind us too."

"Whatever happens," he replied with savage conviction, "I am not going
to walk.  To the living devils it is a hundred and twenty miles.  What
kind of a fool would walk that far to be torn to pieces?  Especially on
an empty stomach?"

"Not my kind," she admitted ruefully enough.

"And do you think I'm going to swim through those miles of muck behind
us?"

She shuddered.  "I couldn't go that way even if those vile creatures
and the huge crawling brutes weren't there."

"No more could I.  No, I shall not walk."

"Then if the wells have gone out for good we must stay here forever."

"We can fly," he asserted.

"And smash ourselves in the dark like a pair of goose eggs.  I can
think of nothing stupider than two unhatched geese unless it be three."

"Well, isn't a quick smash better than slow rotting?  It wouldn't be
suicide," he added to pacify his conscience, "because we should be
doing it on the chance of saving our lives."

"Yes, a quick death is better.  I wonder if I shall ever see my father
again.  And my garden, and the dear cats in San Francisco...."

Ole was touched.  The poor kid was going to cry.  He struck a match.
Her eyes had grown larger and darker, but there were no tears.  After
all she was a brick.

"Listen," he said, "I have a theory."

"If it's as depressing as the rest of this nightmare please keep it to
yourself."

"But it isn't.  You remember how long it was between blowoffs at those
holes the other day?"

"About thirteen minutes."

"And the flames only lasted a few minutes after they caught.  Now those
jets in here were going full blast for over an hour.  Suppose they had
been going for a full day when we flew in."

"I'll suppose it.  What then?"

"They will light up again as the others did.  But not for a much longer
time."

"A week, perhaps?  We shall suffocate long before we see."

"No.  The same cause must be at the bottom of those flame holes and
these."

"And that cause may operate only once a month, once a year, or once a
century for all we know.  The next flare may light our bones."

"For two reasons I say no.  The first is practical, the second is
theory.  First, those bat birds have eyes.  They can see.  I know that
is so from the way they glared at us.  Now animals that can see don't
stay long away from the light."

"Ole, all that you say may be true.  But there is probably a back door
to this tunnel, and those filthy things just swoop in here to feed.
When they are gorged they flap out again to roost in their dens.  They
get all the fresh air and sunshine they need in their rookeries."

"I hadn't thought of that.  Still, having eyes they must be used to
seeing their food."

"Eyes for such creatures in this stinking place are an ornament of
luxury.  They have nostrils.  I saw them myself--two holes on the snout
like a snake's."

"Well, listen now to my theory.  You can't knock out that, any way,
because it is all pure reason."



HE lit another match.  Her eyes were fixed straight ahead on the
impenetrable soot.  The match died.

"Why do these blowholes come and go?" he continued.  "Why don't they
shoot off burning gas all the time?"

"Is it a riddle?"

"Not for me," Ole replied proudly, lavishing two matches on the
invisible stench.

"I give it up.  What's the answer?"

"The moon."

She wondered if she could climb out unnoticed by the theorizer.  Poor
Ole; his mind must suddenly have given way.  She was sorry for him, but
sorrier for herself.  A lunatic on top of her other troubles would be
too much.

"Where are you going?" Ole demanded.

The flaring match revealed a scared pair of eyes searching his.  Edith
had started to climb down.

"I thought you had gone crazy," she said, climbing back just as the
match expired and burnt Ole's fingers.  "But you seem no more insane
than usual.  Go on with your theory."

"The moon does it all.  Really it is quite simple when you get the
idea.  As a practical seaman I know how the moon raises the tides--they
follow it round the earth.  The moon attracts the water.  Then a big
heap of water gathers in the middle of the sea, and the bulge then
follows the moon."

"I wish I could follow you."

"When the moon gets so far ahead that the bulge can't keep up the tide
falls.  When the bulge sweeps over a place it is high tide there.
Anyhow that's something like it.

"Now my theory is," he said more rationally, "that there is a vast tank
of oil--perhaps several--under the whole region."

"Won't Captain Anderson be pleased to hear that?  I'm glad somebody
will be happy in all this mess."

"Not all oil, perhaps.  I think it may be floating on salt water."

"I wish it were carbolic acid."

"Now when the moon raises a tide on all that oil it rushes through the
underground galleries of this continent and forces up all the collected
gases of twenty-four hours through the blowholes."

"And somebody is waiting to set a match to it; I suppose?"

"You mean how does it catch fire?"

For a moment the inventive Ole was badly stumped.  Then his chambered
mind gave up its buried reminiscences: all gases when compressed get
hot.  Compress them far enough and they get red hot.

"Compression," he answered offhandedly, as if the effort had cost him
no labor.  "Compression heats up the gas.  When the wave passes it
presses the gas into a small volume next to the roof.  That makes it
red hot.  Then it escapes through the blowholes.  Friction on the sides
makes it hotter still.  Of course it catches fire--high up in the air,
high enough so the rush of escaping gas can't blow out the flame.  It
couldn't light up, could it, before it reached the air?  Then the tide
falls, air has to rush in to fill up the place left by the falling oil
and water, and the flames are sucked down."

"Tides don't rise and fall every thirteen minutes.  Your theory is up
the spout."

"My theory is irrefutable.  Of course tides don't happen every thirteen
minutes.  But haven't you ever seen the way the water swings back and
forth, up and down, when you set it going in a long bathtub?

"When the tide rushes into some vast underground cavern, half filling
it, big waves must be set up travelling back and forth, up and down
along the trough.  Suppose the wave comes in by a long tunnel into a
vast hole, and has to squeeze out by another tunnel.  In trying to
squeeze out all at once the waves will be started at the wall above the
tunnel.  And all the time the hole is filling up, compressing the gas
against the roof.  Now suppose it takes a wave thirteen minutes to run
the length of the underground tank.  Then it will force up the gases at
a particular place once every thirteen minutes.



"AS it passes the place," he went on with enthusiasm that fed upon
itself, "the air will be sucked down again.  That explains our first
blowholes.  Now for these.  The tank under them must be much longer.
The waves therefore take a longer time to pass under.  It follows that
the flame jets will burn much longer.  Which was to be proved."

"You have proved also," she pointed out, "that the flame pillars will
be dead for half an eternity.  We must wait at least until the next
full moon raises the gas for our torches.  And by then we shall be in
Heaven--I hope."

"No, I think every tide must raise the gas enough to send up a flame.
Of course at full moon the flame will be hotter and last much longer."

"And where does your blessed salt water come from to float the oil and
gas and raise the tides?"

"Where all salt water comes from--the sea."

"These tunnels, or others like them--bigger and longer, of course--must
stretch far out under the floor of the Antarctic ocean."

He became encyclopaedic, explaining how, gradually weakening under the
pressure and seeping of ages of water, the bottom of things aqueous had
suddenly given way letting the ocean burst down to the subterranean
fires, flooding them and the innumerable tunnels.  This, he said,
accounted for everything.  The oily stew of prehistoric monsters which
he and the Captain had witnessed was merely the backwash, the jetsam of
the sudden deluge which had drowned out perhaps a dozen of the
interconnected paradises such as the one Edith and he had discovered.
Some day the floor of the unruined one would give way too and there
would be another grand boiling up of monsters somewhere between South
Georgia and Cape Horn.  Or the accumulating gas under its rock-bottom
might suddenly hurl it skyward at some tide higher than the usual one.

The origin of these vast tunnels and semitropical paradises in the
frozen continent he was yet unable to explain.  At them his theory
balked, baffled.  He doubted now whether the monsters of the stew had
been so recently dead as he and Anderson imagined.  Their freshness and
the still uncoagulated blood of the baby devil they had fished up could
be rationally explained on a twenty-four hour immersion in warm oil and
water.

Theorizing thus freely Ole was happy despite the ever present, all
enveloping, stinking darkness.  Edith's respectful silence flattered
him.  He outdid himself.  Never before had he lectured to an audience
so sympathetically appreciative.  During his interminable harangue he
forgot even to strike a match.  When finally he did, Edith's eyes were
closed.  She was fast asleep.



ALTHOUGH deeply chagrined Ole considerately let her sleep.  Taking out
his pipe he rammed it full of twist.  The coarsely cut tobacco refusing
to burn he reached into his pocket for his knife.  Only when he was
about to cut up the tobacco in his palm did he remember what he had
done to the blade.  In a cold sweat he closed the knife and returned it
to his pocket.  A scratch, for all he knew, might be deadlier than the
fangs of a hundred cobras.  Anyway he would take no chances of a slip
in the dark.

Refilling his pipe he tried again to smoke.  Finally he compromised at
the rate of a match to a puff.  It became a continuous performance.
The tobacco in that smoke-fouled atmosphere reeking with an unspeakable
corruption lacked the rich, nutty flavor emphasized by the billboards,
yet it was some consolation.  The matches, especially their heads,
tasted even better than the tobacco smoke.

The devil betrayed him just as he broached the fourth box of matches.
He became aware of a wet, dragging noise.  Instantly he had a theory
that made him sick.  Those filthy scavengers also had eyes.  Not only
the bat-birds were by nature lovers of the light.  One of those huge
foul brutes, dripping corruption at every move, was wallowing toward
Ole's friendly little beacon in the universal darkness.

The noise stopped.  Then a measured slopping announced that the filthy
monster had paused to lick itself.  Having swabbed off its lunch, or
having performed its unseemly toilette, it sighed prodigiously and
rattled the grating armor of its horny scales.  Once more there was
silence.

Presently a hideous rasping proclaimed that the obscenity was
scratching its parasites.  Again it sighed heavily, profoundly.  The
companionable candle of its quest was perhaps but the disordered
illusion of an overloaded stomach.  A long-winded, slobbering belch
automatically begot and confirmed this hypothesis in Ole's paralyzed
brain.  He struck no more matches.

Should he wake Edith?  If she made any sound the monster must find
them.  On the other hand if she woke suddenly when the beast had
crawled closer, as it might, she would go mad from terror and be
unmanageable.  He decided to rouse her as gently as possible.

"What is it?" she said, and remembered.  "Oh--"

He clapped his hand over her mouth.  Again thinking him demented she
struggled violently.

"Danger," he whispered in her ear.  "Be quiet."

All her muscles tensed, she instantly became still.  Then she heard the
dragging shuffle of some ponderous body approaching the airplane.  In a
flash she realized what was upon them.

"Your knife," she whispered.

He opened the blade.  Of what use was this toy against a mailed brute
weighing over a hundred tons?  Yet it was his one weapon, and instinct
compelled him to be ready for his feeble best.

The creature heard their movements.  Its lurching drag, bringing with
it a leprosy of smells, quickened.  It was abreast of them, on Edith's
side.  Was it going past the machine?  In the sooty darkness the brute
blundered forward.  Its horny side rasped and rocked the plane, all but
upsetting it.

For some seconds the slow brain of the brute failed to interpret the
unusual sensations.  Then it registered, and the foul monster squatted.
The plane tipped sideways.  A foot higher and it must capsize.

The dull brain proving inadequate for its problem, the huge brute
resumed its wallowing progress.  Presently, to judge by the sounds, it
turned at right angles to the line of the machine, slewed round on its
belly, and squatted.  Was its head or its tail near them?  And in which
position could it hear the better?  They soon learned.

One or other of the occupants of the machine moved slightly and
something creaked.  For some ten seconds the brute took no notice.
Then, the significance of the noise penetrating its ganglia, the
monster moved slightly forward, directly toward Edith's side of the
plane.

"Quick!" she cried, "the knife!  Light!"

A cold breath, unutterably foul, blasted her own and extinguished Ole's
half handful of matches.  But the flare had shown her where to aim.
With her whole body she struck at the brute's eye.  The keen eight-inch
blade cut it like a jelly.  Her hand plunged into the slit, burying the
knife.

No injury to the slow-witted creature's eye alone could account for the
terrible sound which tore the silence of the tunnel to tatters of
screaming agony.  The green paste on the blade was indeed a venom.  It
had shot along the blood vessels and the optic nerve directly to the
monster's brain.

Its every nerve was in hell.  In its excruciating agony it bounded
furiously about the tunnel, missing the plane by bare yards, and
thundering down from its convulsive leaps in a writhing mass of torment
that shook the very rocks.

No human being could hear those terrible screams without pity.  In the
minute and a half that it lived the wretched thing suffered all the
agonies of all the hells imagined by human beings since the beginning
of the world.

With a last shivering yell of absolute pain it was dead.



THEIR brother's death agonies had aroused the bewildered scavengers in
a bellowing horde.  Blundering into one another in the darkness, the
monsters fought and screamed till the roof shook.  And the multitude of
reptilian birds, alarmed at the tumult, clattered down the black tunnel
in flapping clouds, screeching their fright or pain where they dashed
their brainless heads against the unseen walls.  Their broken bodies,
raining down on the rock floor, flapped convulsively till the maddened
monsters trampled them to smears.

Twice when a batwinged bird became entangled for a moment in the guy
wires the plane jarred dizzily, and once a bellowing monster lumbering
from its pursuer set the whole machine spinning like a top.  Unless the
pillars of fire burst forth soon it would be only a matter of minutes
until the plane was splinters and the bodies of its occupants pulp.

Above the jarring din they sensed a deeper tremor and a heavier
reverberation.  The subterranean waves were buffeting their way through
the labyrinthine corridors beneath the tunnel.  In a moment the solid
rock floor heaved like a swell of the sea, the blowholes roared, and
ten thousand pillars of flame burst thundering to the roof.

Panic-stricken, the huge monsters scuttled for their burrows in the
mountain of corruption.  On a vast scale it was the scurrying of a
multitude of beetles when a board is lifted, letting down the sun on
their secret world.

Blinded by the sudden glare, clouds of the reptilian bat birds crashed
against the walls of the tunnel, breaking heads and wings and necks.
Most horrible of all, hundreds dashed directly into the pillared flames
to be roasted alive and shot to the rock vault, where they exploded.
Their steaming viscera rained upon the floor.

Before Edith knew what he was about, Ole had cranked the propeller and
was back in the machine.  The impact of the bewildered scavenger had
reversed the plane.

"The shortest way," Ole shouted, and headed for the shambles.

Soaring over it, he plunged into the smoke and stench above.  They saw
now the cause of the dimmer light above the festering pile.  The
blowholes were choked with the huge carcasses which had rolled down
from the vast heap undermined by the feeding of the scavengers.  Until
the rushing flames could incinerate these obstructions they must bell
out in roses of fire.  Heavy black smoke billowing up from these fierce
crematories filled the narrow channel above the mountain of corruption
with an indescribable foulness.

Mile after mile they flew down the shallow channel between the
corruption and the rock roof, lighted only by the flickering crimson
reflected from the vault.  Would it never end?  Twenty miles fell
behind them, twenty-five, and still the obscene bat birds rose at their
approach to circle down to their interrupted banquet when the droning
parvenu had passed.

The smoke thickened, but became less foul.  Like a breath of heaven
they recognized the reek of burning petroleum.

A cleaner wind cut their faces.  Black with soot, the plane shot clear
of the tunnel into the relatively clean night.

They were still enveloped in billowing smoke, but it was not unclean.
An occasional banner of crimson flame unfurling for a moment at the
bottom of the black sea revealed the source of the conflagration.  A
vast lake of oil was burning far down there on the floor of the ruined
crater.

Rising sharply, they pierced the heaving smoke pall up to the wonder of
sweet air and icy stars.

The moon had just set.  They had emerged into the ruined crater of
their first discovery far west of the line along which they had
previously flown.

Edith, as a rational being, assumed that Ole would fly straight for the
ship at top speed.  He, however, had a nobler intention, and one which
did him great credit.  Taking the shortest air line to the jagged rim
against the northern stars he let out the engine, soared over the
wilderness of black rocks, black now as Tophet in the moonless night,
and then, when the dim gray of the icy desolation swam into sight, cut
the motor.

"What in the name of sin are you going to do?" Edith demanded.

"I am going to land on the snowfield beyond these rocks."

"And what for?  Are you crazy?"

"Not crazy," he replied solemnly, "although the scoffers would call me
so.  And why?  Because I am thankful."



THE plane was running along the snowfield parallel to the outlying mass
of jumbled rocks and about eight hundred yards from the nearest.

"On my knees," Ole announced as the plane came to rest, "I shall offer
up thanks for our merciful deliverance to God."

"If you do any such thing in this absurd place I shall box your fat
ears till they sing like all the hosts of Heaven.  Don't be a fool.
Get on home to the ship.  I'm freezing."

"I pray that you may not some day long for a lump of ice to cool your
tongue."

And with that hypocritical intercession he climbed down to the frozen
snow.

"Look here, Ole," she flung after him, "if you think the Creator is as
big a fool as you are, you are jolly well mistaken.  It will serve you
right if you fall down a blowhole.  You might at least have the decency
to crank the propeller before you commit suicide."

But Ole had overlooked more than the blowholes.  In so astute a
theorizer his oversight really was unpardonable.  He should have
observed that all the monsters of his acquaintance were confirmed
lovers of a mild temperature.  And he should have reflected that such
of the poor brutes as had wandered back to their ruined home, would
naturally gather round the cheerful hearths.

In short, Ole should have known that these heat-loving, carnivorous
monsters would frequent the vicinity of the blowholes.  To be snugly
out of the draughts they would retire between eruptions to their
spacious lairs in the jumble of rocks.  When the home fires burned
again they would emerge and gather round the blaze.  The spells of cold
between roasts would be excellent sharpeners of the appetite.
Undoubtedly the home-loving beasts were communists, sharing all things.
When a journey from the cheery blowholes to the gloomy banquet halls of
the tunnel seemed long and unattractive, they stayed at home and ate
one another.

To these simple-minded beasts the thankful Ole was literally a godsend.
Their pious instincts perceived him as manna dropped from Heaven.  It
chanced that he had selected his uncomfortable spot opposite one of the
poorer rookeries.  For a week all the famished beasts had been of two
sizes only: mere babies just born and therefore still dear to their
ferocious mothers, and huge, agile brutes of approximately equal
fighting abilities.  All intermediate sizes had devoted their lives to
the welfare of the community.

Being of extremely low intelligence, the strapping survivors had not
yet mastered the theory and practice of co-operation.  It never entered
their brainless heads that any two of them were more than a match for
an unlucky third.  Consequently all starved, whereas two-thirds of them
at any time until the Armageddon between the last gigantic pair might
have wallowed in luxury.  Lacking farsighted statesmen they lived in
armed neutrality and hunger until such time as the babies of the
community should develop militarism.  But this sporadic sort of
uprising furnished pretty lean pickings.

Unaware of his grateful audience, Ole prayed vigorously.  He thanked
Heaven that the blowholes in his immediate vicinity were not as other
blowholes.  These were orderly and quiet, the others roaring furnaces
of the devil.  He proceeded to inform headquarters that he had a theory.

"This chain of blowholes, O Lord, vents the gas of another tunnel.  The
oil tank under these is not connected with the tank under the others.
Thus, O Lord, hast thou prepared a safe place in the wilderness that
thy servant may give thanks unto Thee."

To say the least, Ole lacked neither brazen nerve nor conceit.  To give
Edith the full strength of his lecture he continued facing her.  His
back, therefore, was toward the rookery.  Nevertheless his remarks
carried in all directions unimpaired by distance in that intensely
still air.  Staccato echoes from the black rocks repeated his
vainglorious theory.  The echoes even improved on his remarks.  To
Edith, trying not to listen, it seemed that over there in the rocks
there was a sound of sleepy revelry, a drowsy, incredulous chuckling as
it were, reinforced by subdued squawks.  The infernal brood was awake.



CURIOUSLY watching a shadow against the starry sky Edith saw it move,
black out a dazzling planet, and grow larger.  Evidently it was not a
lump of rock.  A long neck cautiously raised itself above the black
mass like a periscope.  Having sighted its prey, the hungry head was
quickly lowered.  The black mass effaced itself on the blacker slope of
the rocks behind it.

"Look out!" she cried.  "It's coming."

Ignoring the unseemly interruption, Ole theorized louder.

"You idiot!  Crank the propeller--run for it!"

"The Lord is mindful of his own," Ole responded unctuously, and
proceeded to give thanks for the fact.

A piercing shriek from Edith brought him to his common sense.  One
glance over his shoulder and he was on his feet, running as he had
never run in his fat life.  After him like a gigantic ostrich raced the
enormous lizard on its long hind legs, the tail curved up like a
scimitar, and the twenty-foot neck stretched forward to the elastic
limit.  No turkey after a hapless grasshopper was ever more eager.

Ole's seven or eight hundred yard start saved him.  He fell into
Edith's lap just as a vicious swish of the monster's tail cut the air
under the machine in two.

Looking back toward the rocks, they saw the whole black brood boiling
out over the dim gray desolation.  As aimlessly as brainless hens they
darted hither and thither over the snowfields, seeking a prey which had
escaped.  Far over the black expanse they raced like great scuttling
lizards, and behind some of the huger shadows trailed three or four
tiny dots like pursuing vermin.  These were the babies of the brood
following their eager mothers.

Evidently these creatures were of a breed distinct from any that Edith
and Ole had yet seen alive.  On the slaughter beach Ole and Lane had
operated on three roughly similar giants.

So entranced were the observers with the ludicrous steeplechase that
they failed to note the familiar thunder preceding a "blow."  Before
Edith knew what was happening the plane was bounding and tumbling like
a glass ball in a fountain.

She came to her senses just in time.  As she shot the plane up for a
sixty degree climb the air immediately below them burst with a dull
roar into thousands of blue flame cones.  It was a sharp rebuke to
Ole's irreverent conceit.  The theory which he had confided to Heaven
evidently was faulty.  After all, the oil tank under this region of
blowholes probably was connected with that under the tunnel.  The
backwash of the tide under the tunnel was now forcing up the compressed
gas through the secondary chain of vents.

Looking down, they saw the flame cones descending rapidly.  In a moment
they would disappear down the wells.  Such, at least, was Ole's
confident prediction.  As if to teach him caution in theorizing, the
flames did nothing of the kind.  This eruption of gas was not of
precisely the same sort as that first one into which Anderson had
blundered with his party.  It was more like the neighboring one under
the tunnel.  The flames did not disappear, but lengthening downward to
the blowholes became short pillars of fire.  These, however, were on a
much smaller scale, mere conical candles a hundred feet high and from
five to thirty feet thick.

The home fires were again burning merrily.  It was impossible not to
feel a twinge of sympathy for the exiled monsters scurrying over the
icy plain to the friendly fires.  Mothers abandoned their trailing
young in the race after their more agile mates to the cheery hearths,
and many a small monster was left squawking piteously in the cold.
Around the invigorating warmth and light of the blowholes sociable
groups of three or four huge lizards squatted in amiable content, their
hunger and its consequent animosities for the moment forgotten.  Edith
was touched; Ole wasn't.

Mother instinct is said to be universal.  Those brainless females
hobnobbing with their ferocious mates around the comforting fires while
their babies cried miserably in the cold, disproved the theory.  Again
Edith was deeply touched.



WHEELING back in the starlight, she dipped and circled low above the
forlorn little monsters on the ice.  All her dormant mother love awoke
and strode rampant over one particularly shameful case of abandonment.
The isolated little creature, no bigger than a Newfoundland dog, could
not have been more than a few days old.  Its ridiculous little tail was
a mere stub, and its grotesquely disproportionate head all but
overbalanced the emaciated body see-sawing on two feeble pins.

"Ole," she exclaimed, "we must take that darling little devil chick
back to the ship.  It is perishing for warmth and its mother."

"You're not its mother, and I'm blowed if I'll warm it."

"Oh, yes you will.  For you are going to catch it."

"Who is crazy now?"

"Not I.  You will be perfectly safe with the parents away selfishly
enjoying themselves.  Besides, you will have a fair start of nearly
three-quarters of a mile if the mother sees your kidnapping.  If you
can't outrun her at that distance you're no good.  Here we are.  Climb
out and fetch the baby.  Grab it well up by the neck so it can't bite."

With elaborate caution Ole sneaked up on the squawking foundling from
behind.  In its hunger and pathetic loneliness it would have welcomed
him with open mouth.  Grabbing its long neck with one hand, he clutched
its stubby tail with the other.  Then putting forth all his barrel of
strength he started to lug the kicking little monster toward the
airplane.

Who would have suspected that the puny wretch had such a fight in its
emaciated body?  And who would have dreamed from its plaintive squawk
that the little devil had lungs of leather?  It bawled for its daddy,
screeched for its big brother, and yelled for its gadding mother.  They
came bounding in great hops.

All things considered, we must conclude with Edith that Ole, not the
abandoned chick, was the attraction.

Edith's mother love suddenly fell below zero.  She implored Ole to drop
the little beast--he was now carrying it bodily by its neck and
tail--and win the race to the propeller.  But Ole's Norwegian
perseverance was roused.  Having begun the job he would finish it or
bust.

Only an exceptionally strong man could have duplicated his feat.  While
with one hand he cranked the propeller he held the chick by its neck at
arm's length with the other.  The little beast had a wicked, raking
kick with its feeble-looking legs.  One rip with its claws might have
taught Ole anatomy.

The bereaved family arrived in time to hear their darling's farewell
wafted from above.  It was dangling over the side of the plane, still
kicking.  Ole had not relaxed his strangle hold on its neck.  With a
deft swing he got it aboard and sat on its stomach.  He still did not
trust the chick with its own head.  Consequently its last message to
its mother was sufficiently like the skirl of a bagpipe to be
distressing.

"Cuddle it up in the sealskins," Edith directed, "so it won't freeze on
the way home."

Ole cuddled it.  He was careful, however, not to let go of its neck.

"Won't father be delighted?" Edith resumed.  "This is better than a
whole continent of dead ones.  I wonder what it eats?"

"Shall I let go of its neck and find out?"

"Not yet.  Milk, I think is probably the right diet for so tender an
infant.  Have we plenty of the canned variety aboard?"

"About a hundred cases, I suppose.  They will last this little devil
all of a week."

Their way home passed over a region which was new to them, some thirty
miles west of the line which they had flown first.  About ten miles
beyond the blowholes they saw far beneath them a strange black lake.

"That looks interesting," Edith remarked, dipping down, "let's
investigate.  We can't be much later than we are already."

Nearing the surface of the lake they saw that it was in violent motion.
Even by starlight Ole recognized the appearance of those huge bubbles
instantly.

"Oil!" he shouted,



OIL was in fact bubbling up from hundreds of gushers at the bottom of
the lake.  The theory which Ole spontaneously brought forth was
probably not far from the truth.  The underground tides having risen to
the rock roof above them were forcing the crude oil through a chain of
blowholes.  At this point some obstruction, possibly a heavy fall of
rock from the roof, jarred loose by the violent earthquakes, had
blocked the passageway damming back the tidal oil.  Consequently it now
spouted through the gas vents.  The correspondingly slowed motion of
the heavy oil as it was forced upward had not generated sufficient
friction to ignite the fluid.  Such at any rate was Ole's theory.

As a first rough guess it may pass.  Much further work, however, must
be done before all the scientific puzzles raised by Lane's historic
expedition are finally elucidated.

The practical question troubling Ole now was whether the oil would be
sucked down with the receding subterranean tide.  If so Anderson might
find it difficult to form a stock company.  For obviously it would be
one thing to sell shares in a thirty by fifteen mile lake of oil and
quite another to float stock on a dirty hole in the ground.  He
comforted himself with the reflection that more oil stock is sold on
one smell of oil than on a thousand gushers.  With a practically
unlimited supply of smell in the hole even when empty they might easily
make millionaires of themselves and the entire crew in a month.

The southern boundary of the lake gave Ole a qualm.  On the south the
oil was dammed back by a mere swell in the ice not fifty feet broad on
top and less than twenty feet high.  What if this slight wall should
give way before the pressure of the oil?  The millions of dollars in
that beautiful lake would rush down the blowholes on the plain beyond.
To the north, on the shore nearer the ship, conditions were more
satisfactory.  Here the wall of the long trough--fifteen miles broad by
thirty long--was well over a hundred yards across the top.  His
calculations, of course, were only rough estimates based on their time
of flight and their first observation from above that the lake was
about twice as long as it was broad.

With a thousand fortunes in sight Ole forgot himself.  A tentative nip
on his leg reminded him of his infant charge.  Once more he grasped it
firmly by the neck.

The reception of the wanderers was cordial in the extreme.  Edith had
expected the very deuce from her father, but she was totally unprepared
for Drake's attack.  The devoted John tersely vented a longing to shake
the tar out of her.

"Try it," Edith suggested.  "You might find it profitable."

"What?" the Captain shouted.  "Have you found oil?"

"Oceans of it."

The Captain forgave both her and Ole on the spot.

"Father," said Edith, uncovering the devil chick which till now they
had kept concealed beneath the skins, "I have brought you a little
playmate.  Am I forgiven?"

Ole at that instant loosened his stranglehold on the chick's windpipe.
A whooping squawk greeted the Doctor.

"Oh you beautiful child!" he exclaimed with wondering reverence.  But
whether he was referring to Edith or her peace offering she was unable
to decide.




CHAPTER VIII

ATTACK

"WHAT do you expect to get out of all this, Doctor?" the Captain asked
curiously.

They were sitting in the Captain's cabin.  Eight days had elapsed since
the advent of the devil chick.  Tomorrow the explorers were to begin
their first serious attack on the unknown.  Everything was in readiness
for a quick march to the heart of the mystery and for a safe return to
the ship.

Lane parried the Captain's question.

"I may have come for my share of the oil stock.  I'm a member of the
crew, am I not?"

"You're no money grubber.  Come on, tell us why you came.  I've owned
up to everything.  A thousand acre orange grove in California with
nothing to do but boss it drove me into this mess.  After twenty years
of whaling you might be just as ready as I am to sell your soul for a
pint of dirty oil.  I've had enough of the cold and the stink.  Now I
want sunshine and orange blossoms.  What do you want?  You have all the
money you need.  Now just why did you come?"

"Perhaps I came to collect all those magnificent specimens we have
stowed away.  The lively little devil chick alone is enough to make any
lover of the beautiful happy for life.  Perhaps that is what I expect
in return for my money."

"I don't think so," said the Captain shrewdly.

"To change the subject for a moment," Lane rejoined after a pause,
"have you any relatives who would miss you if you died?"

"Not one.  Why?"

"Because we may never see the ship again after tomorrow."

"If these two," the Captain indicated Edith and Ole, "got through
alive, why can't we?  There is dynamite enough between here and the
crater to blow up an army of two-legged reptiles.  We shan't be taken
by surprise."

"It isn't that.  Yet if you were to ask me what I anticipate I should
have to put you off.  For I don't know myself.  Only I have a feeling
that we may blunder into more than we foresee.  Don't you feel the
same, Drake?"

"Yes," he admitted uneasily.  "That's why I say Edith shouldn't go.
Not on the first attack, anyway.  If everything is all right she can
come with us the second time."

"There may be no second attempt," Edith replied.  "I'm coming, John.
Now don't get fussy about it."

"All this may seem rather old womanish to you, Captain," the Doctor
resumed.  "Nevertheless that is how Drake and I feel.  We have
collaborated during the past seven or eight evenings and have now a
fairly definite theory."

"As to feeling nervous," the Captain laughed, "I occasionally have an
attack of nerves myself when I think of all that beautiful oil being
sucked down the blowholes.  It may at any time, you know.  But you
haven't told us yet why you want to go on."

"Drake really knows more about what may be ahead of us than I do."  He
grew strangely serious.  "On the eve of what may be our last peaceful
day on earth I think it only right to tell you everything I suspect.
Drake can speak for himself later.



"THIS is no mere naturalist's holiday.  The tons of specimens we have
gathered are priceless beyond count, no doubt, compared to the oceans
of oil which you expect to discover.  Yet priceless as our collections
are, and rich as your oil fields may prove, both together are not worth
the fraction of a cent when balanced against the true purpose of this
expedition."

Anderson gaped at him.  "What under the sun did you come for?"

"As I have said, I don't really know.  I can only guess.  If my
suspicion is right we shall save civilization from a horrible
destruction."

The Captain looked incredulous.  "You're pulling my leg for what Ole
and I did to yours in San Francisco.  When did you find out that we are
a gang of anointed crusaders prancing forth to make the world safe for
democracy?"

"We shall not make it safe for democracy, or for aristocracy, or for
socialism, or for any other pet creed.  What we shall make the world
safe for is life itself.  I am serious.  This is the greatest
adventure.  It was on the slaughter beach that I first definitely
recognized something fundamentally evil in all the strange things we
have seen so far.  The second definite hint came from that black rock
over which Drake stumbled."

"The inscriptions on it?" Ole asked sagaciously.

"No.  The rock itself gave the clue.  Drake, have you a piece of the
one you chipped yesterday?"

Drake produced a small fragment of the black rock.  Lane handed it to
the Captain.

"You were trained as a mining engineer, Anderson.  Even twenty years of
whales can't have made you forget all the simplest things in elementary
geology.  Take a good look at that chunk of rock and tell me what you
think it is.  Here's my magnifying glass."

The Captain studied the fragment long and curiously.  "I don't want to
make a fool of myself," he said at last, handing back the glass, and
rock.

"Go ahead.  What is the stuff?  I'm not trying to trap you."

"Well, Doctor, either I have forgotten all I ever knew or that stuff
isn't rock at all."

"If it isn't rock, what is it?"

"Manufactured, I should say--some artificial stone, if you like, or a
queer sort of cement."

"Precisely."

"Well, what of it?"

"Doesn't it strike you as remarkable that millions upon millions of
tons of artificial cement, scribbled over with inscriptions, should
exist on a continent that died before America was born?  The
inscriptions alone would not be so mysterious.  Races without number, I
am convinced, have lived, died and been forgotten since the beginning
of time.  The archaean rocks are an unread history.  But that any race
should pave vast areas of its dwelling place with an unimaginable mass
of artificial cement as hard as diamond, is a thing for which history
has no parallel.  It is unique."

"You are right," Ole agreed.  "No race known ever paved more than ten
acres in one place.  The ancient Babylonians--"

"Shut up, Ole.  Go on, Doctor."

"Well, that is about all.  Drake can tell the rest better."

"But you haven't said yet what made you bite in San Francisco."

"Your pickled reptile."

"That won't go.  You have just said that all your junk isn't worth half
a cent compared to the real thing that you are after."

"I am after my life's ambition.  Does that satisfy you?"

"Perfectly.  What is your life's ambition?"

The Doctor laughed.  "You are a greater sea lawyer than Ole.  I may as
well give you the whole story and be done with it.  Then Drake can tell
you something worth hearing."

He paused for a moment, selecting the few facts necessary.

"It all began," he resumed, "when I was about ten years old.  An aunt
gave me for Christmas a copy of that remarkable scientific romance by
Mary Shelley--the wife of the poet--based on the artificial creation of
life."

"I've read it," Ole interrupted eagerly.  "It's a peach.  Just like a
nightmare.  '_Frankenstein_' is the name of the book."

"Most readers with any brains at all enjoy the story.  If nothing else
it is imaginative, and that's a great deal in a world of prosy,
oversexed bores.  Well, that book determined the course of my life.
You remember, Ole, how the hero of the story creates a living creature
out of chemicals.  This creature was no mere amoeba, but a complex,
highly organized, half human monstrosity.

"It's nothing against Mrs. Shelley's fascinating tale to state that
today we know definitely that such a thing is impossible.  By merely
mixing together chemicals as her hero did it is not feasible to create
a complex, highly organized animal.



"ON THE other hand it may be possible to create out of chemicals a
colloid--a sort of jelly or gluelike substance--having some of the
essential properties of living matter.  Although thus far no chemist or
biologist has actually done this, it is not a sheer impossibility.  If
it could be done, and this is what I wish to emphasize, it would be an
incomparably easier feat than the one which is the basis of Mrs.
Shelley's story.

"We can see the relative difficulty of the two by an example from
another field.  The first savages killed one another by hurling stones
with their bare hands.  We destroy one another wholesale by--among
other ingenious and devilish ways--exceedingly complicated machines.
There is a vastly greater gap between a glue-like substance having some
semblance to living matter, and the simplest organized living creature,
than exists between a lump of stone hurtling through the air and a
torpedo directed by wireless.

"All this is by the way.  The significant thing for me in Mrs.
Shelley's book is that it awoke my imagination when I was ten years
old.  I determined to become a scientist.  The creation of life was to
be my life's ambition.  This, I believe, is the greatest adventure.

"Then later, learning something of science while picking up an
education in odd hours, I saw clearly that I was a million miles from
my goal.  And still later, digging deeper into the natural sciences, I
realized that my ambition was a fantastic dream.

"I saw then, and I see now, that if life is to be created by human
beings using purely artificial means it will not be in our generation,
nor in our century, nor perhaps in the next two centuries.  That it
will be done eventually I have not the slightest doubt.  But thus far
we have not succeeded even in stating the problem precisely.

"When we come to know exactly what it is that we are seeking we shall
find it.  At present we lack even a definition of life that is
scientific and more than a scholastic jumble of words.  Consequently,
although many of us may feel that we know what we are looking for, few
indeed have the training, the ability and the scientific tact to seek
it intelligently.  Men who today search for the origin of life are
hopeless cranks in a class with circle squarers and inventors of
perpetual motion.

"Having realized early that my first ambition was a chimera, I turned
to more natural and far more useful investigations.  I do not regret
the time lost in the vain pursuit of unattainable knowledge.  It was
not indeed lost, for it was my apprenticeship to true science.  Most of
my work since has been in the laws governing the growth and decay of
animals, and, as a by-product, the study of such diseases as depend
upon abnormal growth.  I need not bore you with any of this.

"I said that I abandoned my quest for life.  That is not strictly true.
It is impossible to eradicate from the mind the hopes, desires and
fears of childhood and adolescence.  Although in maturity I put away
all thought of ever directly attacking the problem of life, my
subconscious habits of thought were unalterably fixed in my youth.  My
psychology is what it was and I yet am driven against my will, for the
most part subconsciously, to think incessantly of the problem of life.

"All my work, I sometimes think, has been aimed at my first ambition.
It frequently gives me a shock to discover that what I am truly
interested in doing is not the artificial duplication of cancerous
growths, but the out and out creation of living cells.  It is almost as
if some familiar spirit keeps whispering 'do this, and in spite of
yourself you will find what you are looking for,' and I, not
consciously hearing the whisper do as I am directed.  This of course is
merely my own repressed desire taking its revenge.

"Again I do not regret.  For my work has led to at least three positive
facts recognized by competent authorities as contributions of real
value to our knowledge and control of certain diseases.



"NOW, Anderson, you will ask what all this has to do with our
expedition.  In one word, everything.  But for my repressed ambition
you would never have obtained one cent toward expenses.  I am not
interested in oil or in any other form of wealth.  I would not walk
across this cabin to make a million dollars.  For I have all the money
that is good for myself and Edith.  More would be a nuisance.  Had you
come to me without that pickled reptile I should have shown you the
door at once.

"You remember how at first I mistook your find for a young specimen of
a known prehistoric animal.  It is true that no fossil yet discovered
has both scales and feathers.  There is a 'missing link' in the chain
from reptiles to birds no less than in that from anthropoids to men.
But for all that your monster did not at first look wholly anomalous.
It might, in short, have been a natural animal.  And that is what I at
first thought it was.

"Then, while you were talking of your adventures, I began to think.  If
you were an ex-zoologist instead of an ex-mining engineer, I could make
my next point--the crux of the whole story--much clearer.

"Thinking over your specimen and looking more closely at it, I
recognized that the monster was indeed a monster, a thing never created
and evolved by nature.  There were certain astounding differences
between the obvious anatomy of the creature and any conceivable product
of orderly evolution.

"A frog will not evolve into a horse no matter how much time you give
him.  From now to the end of eternity all the descendants of frogs will
retain certain specific peculiarities of structure which will easily
differentiate them from horses.  At no point of the story will the two
become confused.  It will be possible a million years hence for any
trained scientist to say at a glance that the descendants of our frogs
and of our horses living in his day, or fossilized in the rocks of his
time, never had a common ancestor.

"And so it was with your monster.  At first it might have been a
missing link between the birds and the reptiles.  Closer inspection
showed that none of its ancestors were related to reptiles and that
none of its descendants would ever evolve into birds.  And it fitted
nowhere else into the scheme of evolution.

"Nor was it a deformity.  A kitten with three eyes is still a young cat
for all its eyes.  A man with six fingers on his right hand still
belongs to the family of men.  Mere abnormality does not exclude a
freak from the family to which it otherwise would belong.  Your queer
find, Anderson, was no deformed reptile, nor was it a freak bird,
'thrust into the world before its time but half made up.'

"There remained but one rational conclusion.  The thing was no creation
of nature but the result of a conscious attempt to imitate nature.
Either that monster had been created whole and alive by intelligent
beings, or it was the descendant of remote ancestors so created.

"The first possibility was out of the question.  Had the monster been
recently created we should have had another Frankenstein.  I know
enough of the present state of biology to be certain that such a
complete creation of a highly complex organism today is impossible.

"There remained the alternative.  Your monster was the descendant of
inconceivably remote ancestors, and those ancestors, incomparably
simpler in structure, had been created by conscious, intelligent beings.

"Evolution had done the rest.  Shaping the initial, simple organism
through millions of years, time and evolution had gradually complicated
its simplicity into a highly developed organism.

"The first creation probably was a mere speck of living matter, perhaps
a single cell, and this full-blown monster of yours was the slow flower
of ages blooming from that first almost formless seed.

"Such was my guess while you sat talking of the monsters boiling up in
oil from the floor of the ocean.  I decided to chance your veracity and
see for myself.

"On the slaughter beach, you remember, I pointed out how all those dead
monsters differed radically, in spite of superficial resemblances, from
their nearest types in the fossil beds.  The number and arrangement of
one monster's teeth I emphasized as particularly significant.  Nature
does not cram one man's mouth full with eighty teeth and give his
neighbor only sixteen.  She does nothing by violent jumps that can be
seen by a blind man.  Her changes are minute.  That is my second point.

"On that beach another thought disturbed me greatly.  All those
monsters gave me the impression of being badly botched jobs.  Suppose
you were aiming to create a harmless toad and achieved a deadly
rattlesnake.  You wouldn't consider yourself a master of the technique
of life, would you?  Well, neither can the beings whose scientific
blundering millions of years ago started the evolution of all those
hideous monsters on the beach.

"What those misguided experiments intended to do I don't know.  What
they did start, I do know, and I pronounce its fruit an obscene
abomination.  Not one of those huge creatures had intelligence above a
worm's, and not one of them ever could be of any possible value to the
world.  They are merely gigantic feeding, breeding and fighting
machines with just a spark of intelligence--enough to make them
exceedingly dangerous and no more.

"I suspect that all those huge brutes are, as I have tried to make
clear, the result of minute seeds first created and sown millions of
years ago.  Further, I believe that nature, taking the artificially
created seeds, has grown from them, through countless mutations, the
changing shapes whose perfected, dangerous uselessness infests the
secret places of this continent.  The beginning was unnatural, the
development and its conclusion are the work of natural laws.



"FINALLY I believe that the original creators of those monstrosities
realized when it was too late what they were doing, foresaw its
consequences, became terrified, tried to undo their blundering work and
perished in a war to destroy their own creations.  This, however,
belongs to Drake's part of the investigation.  He can tell it better
than I.

"Now last, let me say exactly what I expect to get from this
expedition.  I hope from close study of the anatomy, habits and
environment of these strange creatures to rediscover their origin.  See
what this implies.  If I am successful I shall be able to create
artificially a true living seed of life.  Whether or not I shall wish
to do so depends upon what we discover in the next few days.

"Mind, I am not expecting to make a gigantic lizard out of dead slime
or anything of that fantastic sort.  But I do hope to rediscover the
lost secret which started all those monstrosities.  A mere speck of
living matter, a single cell visible only under a high power microscope
is all that I shall achieve, if anything.  For I am convinced that the
originators of that aborted creation on the beach achieved no more.
One spark starts the forest fire; their invisible specks of artificial
living matter started the self-imposed catastrophe that wiped them out."

"But Doctor," Ole objected, "if they only made those very small specks
of living matter how were they wiped out?  You say it took millions of
years to evolve dangerous animals out of those bad beginnings.  The
things were too small, according to you, to bother a flea.  If I get
your meaning they were nothing better than pieces of jelly invisible to
the naked eye.  How could such things fight anybody?"

"That is what I hope to find out, definitely and in detail.  Drake and
I already have a rational theory."

"Is it your theory that they were disease germs when first created?"

"No, Ole, nothing so romantic.  As I tried to make plain a robin's egg
will never hatch crocodiles.  Nor will a disease germ ever evolve into
a three-hundred foot brute with a head and body like a bad dream."

"Then what is your theory?"

"On that point, if I understand your question, I have none.  Before
indulging in hypotheses on the origin of life I shall find out the
facts."

"Listen, Doctor, I have a theory.  Those things were first created--"

"Oh, pipe down, Ole."  The Captain was back on the job.  "Now Drake,
let us have your side of it."

"It is so late," Drake yawned, "that I shall have to beg off this time.
We start at five in the morning.  Good-night, everybody."



BY FORCED marches the party reached the north shore of the oil lake
early the third morning after leaving the ship.  Lane, Anderson, Ole
and Drake had gone by land.  Edith was to arrive at the base by air.
While the men marched she flew back and forth to the ship for last
minute supplies which she dropped conveniently near the southern
boundary of the oil lake.

No detail that might increase the safety of the expedition had been
neglected.  Between the ship and the north shore of the lake a chain of
provision caches made starvation impossible no matter what might
happen.  The party of five might all have hung onto the plane somehow,
and so have reached their goal more quickly.  But for several reasons
they decided to march, carrying with them the essentials of a light
prospecting outfit.  Anderson half expected to find indications of oil
by zig-zagging slightly across the line of caches.  He was nothing if
not optimistic.

In case of an accident to the ship, Bronson's men had deposited
provisions in caches parallel to the inlet north a distance of forty
miles.  As a final measure of safety they had landed every gallon of
petrol, storing it a mile inland in a deep dugout.  Even if forced to
flee on foot the expedition would have sufficient provisions.  Each man
could pack on his back a sleeping bag and short rations enough from the
northerly caches to last him to the coast.  Should no whaling vessel
appear within two weeks to take them off, Edith or Ole was to fly
northeast to the nearest whaling station for help.  No member of the
party expected the worst to happen.  But Anderson disbelieved in luck,
preferring arduous certainty to easy going chance.

At this moment the Captain, speechless with cupidity, was gazing over
the thirty-mile expanse of bubbling black oil.  With a hundred huge
fortunes before his eyes he was beginning to regret that Ole and the
crew had been promised a share of the profits.  More potential gold
bubbled and swirled in that vast bowl than the most ingeniously
dissolute debauchee could squander in fifty lifetimes.  Yet the Captain
wished that Ole and the crew were in Halifax.  Such is human nature.

The men were waiting for Edith.  She was to transport them and their
packs comfortably one at a time to the south shore of the lake.  They
were then to march at once for the blowholes where Edith and Ole had
seen the monsters warming themselves.  Lane's objective was the ruined
crater.  He and Drake were determined to inspect the black rocks at
first hand.  The shattered floor being his ultimate goal, the Doctor
hoped also to penetrate the black smoke at the bottom and search for
further animal remains.

An immediate assault on the crater would, of course, be suicide.  The
famished monsters would consider the party as a trifling hors d'oeuvre
vouchsafed by the generosity of Heaven for the great feast to come.

How then were the explorers to traverse the region of blowholes, scale
the crater lip, and reach the Doctor's objective?  This puzzle had
exercised the wits of the party for the first two days after the return
of Edith and Ole with the devil chick.  Between the oil lake and the
black rocks lay the blowholes, and round these the sociable monsters
might gather at just the most embarrassing moment.



THE puzzle had indeed seemed unsolvable.  Of all unpracticable beings
it was Drake who solved the problem by a brilliant flash of
imagination.  And of all things that might have inspired him it
actually was the last that might occur to a practical man.  Who but
Drake would have turned for inspiration to the memory of his sufferings
in a dentist's chair?  Having sat for several hours with the glass hook
of a long rubber siphon under his tongue, he now remembered his
discomfort with advantage.

As a consequence Edith and Ole during the six days following had
transported every foot of hose--fire hose and other--on the ship to the
south shore of the oil lake.  All the iron pipe that could be spared
also was taken to the same depot.  To both ends of each section of hose
the men had tied heavy iron slugs, and the end of each pipe they bent
into a short L.  This inefficient looking junk, a tangle of doubly
weighted hoses and bent pipes, constituted the entire arsenal of the
attacking party.  With this alone they must overcome the army of huge
lizards.  Otherwise they must turn back, provided they were not eaten
first.

"There she comes," the Doctor announced, pointing to a tiny speck
against the blue far to the north.  "Ole, you fly over first and take
our packs.  Hang them on somehow."

Ole seemed nervous at the prospect of being left alone with the packs
on the south shore while Edith returned for the next passenger.

"What if those brutes come out to get warm while the plane is over on
this side?"

"But you said the blowholes end quite a distance south of the lake,"
the Doctor replied.  "They won't come several miles from the heat just
to say hello to you."

"They will if they smell me."

"Cheer up, Ole," said Drake; "we will see you avenged."

"Lot of good that will do me.  You go over first."

"I'm not fat enough."

The dispute was cut short by the landing of Edith.

"Captain Anderson," she began at once, "Bronson asked me to tell you
that he may be forced to steam down the inlet at any minute.  A wave of
warm water came down again early this morning."

"Boiling?"

"No, just warm enough to raise a thick fog over the inlet."

"There is no great danger, I guess.  If he has to run he can make it.
And we are safe with all the supplies cached and the plane.  What did
he want me to do?"

"To send back word by me if he is to move at once.  If he doesn't hear
from you by night he will stay where he is."

"What about it, Lane?"

"I see no immediate danger.  There has been no violent earthquake."

"That's my best judgment too.  He is safe enough where he is.  All
right, Ole, hop in.  Miss Lane will waft you over for lunch."

"For lunch?"

"Yes, idiot.  Not yours, theirs."

With a fat groan Ole obeyed orders.



ARRIVED at the south shore of the lake they noted with alarm that the
oil had risen since their visit the previous week.  The black waves
were crawling slowly up the narrow rise separating the lake from the
chain of blowholes.  Should the wall of rock and ice give way under the
steadily increasing pressure, Anderson's fortune would vanish down the
blowholes in a week.  The thought that even if the wall held yet a flow
of oil over the top might overspread the plain and catch fire from the
blowholes, setting the entire lake aflame was anything but reassuring.
Leaving Ole to his dismal theories Edith skimmed back for the next
passenger.

Shortly after one o'clock the party assembled on the south shore with
their packs, ready for the opening move of their offensive.  The
blowholes were still quiescent.  This favoring the strategy of the
proposed attack the party decided to take advantage of it immediately.

Their first question was, who is to bell the cat?  More definitely,
which members of the party should risk their lives to carry put Drake's
ingenious plan?  The scheme demanded half an hour's work around the
blowholes.  The workers, if seen by the reptiles, certainly would be
welcomed by the whole rookery.  And no pair of human legs was a match
for the slowest of the huge lizards.  Again, if the work party
proceeded on foot by daylight to the blowholes they were sure to be
seen.  If they waited till dark the blowholes might flare up just at
the wrong time, and refreshments would enliven an otherwise dull
gathering round the home fires.  It was clear that the party must go by
airplane.

The landing on a plain spotted with bottomless wells would be difficult
enough, but the quick escape, if necessary, would be a feat for the
most expert aviator.  A landing at night obviously was out of the
question.

Edith was elected pilot by the simple process of elimination.  Who
should be her helper?  An active, practical man was needed for the job.
Although Drake pleaded for the honor of carrying his scheme into
effect, he was rejected on the first ballot.  His forte was brains, not
beef.  Lane followed him on the second.  It was between Ole and the
Captain.  Anderson being ignorant of aviation, Ole won the honor.

Having loaded the plane with all the bent pipe and weighted hose it
could lift, Ole took his place behind Edith.  They were off.

In all they made ten trips.  Their work, they hoped, had converted a
hundred and eight of the blowholes nearest the ruined crater into
deadly engines of destruction.  They had worked unmolested.  The
rookery either was asleep or all except the babies were away for the
week-end foraging under the black smoke of the crater.

"Well, Drake," the Doctor asked, "have you the courage of your
invention?"

"Absolutely.  It would wipe out an army."

"That may be just the optimism of the inventor.  What about it,
Anderson?  Do you feel like marching forward to await developments?  Or
shall we camp here until after the blow is over?"

"To stay here would be the sane thing, I suppose.  Still, I want to see
the show.  I vote for marching."

"So do I.  Unless we sit on him Drake of course won't miss seeing his
idea in action.  How about you, Ole?"

"Miss Lane and I will take care of the plane."

"All right, go ahead with our packs and wait for us on this side just
before the beginning of the blow-holes.  If the reptiles see you before
the blow, don't bother about our packs.  Leave them and fly due east to
confuse the brutes.  Then they won't blunder into us."



TWO hours after sundown Edith heard the far off crunching of the men's
boots in the frozen snow.

"There they are," she said.  "Ole, meet them and show them the way
here."

A hot drink all round from the thermos bottles and a full meal cheered
the tedium of the early watch.  Deciding at eleven o'clock that the
blowholes probably would not spout that night, all but the first
watchman turned into their sleeping bags.  The temperature being
several degrees above zero they were quite comfortable for the night.

In the brilliantly clear starlight the black barrier of the crater lip
seemed ominously near.  Yet, conscious as they were of what the rocks
hid, all but the sentry slept like stones.  The rookery also was fast
asleep or numbed by the cold, for no drowsy squawks floated over the
silence of no man's land.

It was the calm sleep before battle.  Should Drake's strategy prove
inadequate the attackers would not see the sunrise.  If on the other
hand Drake's invention was all that he hoped, those huge two legged
reptiles would never again visit the black ruins of their shattered
paradise.  Their next gathering round the cheerful fires would be their
last.  They would die happy, poor brutes.  Better one last hour of
comfort and then oblivion forever, than the slow death of years of
recurrent cold and increasing starvation.  Left to themselves they
might starve and fight and freeze and cling with all their brute
instinct to life for half a century.  It was more humane to destroy
them outright.

Midnight passed without a tremor.  Anderson relieved Lane.  Two o'clock
uneventfully came and went, and Drake relieved Anderson.

For the first half hour of Drake's watch all remained quiet with the
silence of a dead world.  Then he became aware of a faint stirring
among the infested rocks.  Huge creatures not yet awake were moving
uneasily in their sleep.  Something had disturbed them.

In a few moments they might awake fully and scour the plain.  For all
Drake or the others knew the creatures might be nocturnal in their
habits, prowling for their food only in the darkest hours of the early
morning.  He had not anticipated this.  Should the monsters emerge
before the blowholes spouted his strategem was worthless.  It took him
but a second to make up his mind.  He instantly roused the sleepers.

"Get out of here at once.  They're coming."

Not stopping to argue the men shook themselves together.  They were
still half-dazed by sleep.  Drake's news falling on befogged brains
completed their befuddlement.  It did not occur to one of them that all
five might easily climb onto the plane and reach safety in ten minutes.
The unpractical Drake, being the only member of the party with all his
wits, of course did not think of anything so simple and obvious.

"Take your father north ten miles, leave him, and come back for one of
us," he ordered Edith.  "Ole, crank up."

Ole was about to obey when a sleepy chorus of clattering squawks
drifted over the ice of no man's land.  It occurred to him that
probably the reptiles had been away from home, foraging, while he and
Edith were preparing the attack that afternoon.  This, in Ole's
opinion, accounted for their good luck.

"If I start the motor," he said in a hoarse whisper, "those brutes will
hear it.  In five minutes we shall be smothered."

"They are awake anyway," Drake whispered back.  "If they come out they
will see the plane against the snow."

Still hesitating Ole regarded Drake curiously in the dark.

"I can't see your face, String Bean," he said, still whispering
hoarsely, "but I can guess its color.  What are you going to do if
those brutes race out before Miss Lane comes back to fetch you?  She
will take you next."

"Don't stand there whispering and shaking like a blasted jelly.  Crank
that motor!  She could have been there and back by now."

"All right, General," Ole whispered.  "One second.  Now before I obey
orders I'll tell you what I'm going to do next.  The instant this
propeller hums you'll see me making tracks for the nearest blowhole.
If I beat the brutes to it, I dive.  It won't be suicide because there
is no way out.  I had rather smash or drown in oil than die the other
way.  Take my tip and follow me.  I've seen the brutes; you haven't.
And I've had one race.  Miss Lane will tell you about it in Heaven.  I
don't want another.  All right, General, here goes."

He braced himself to spin the blades.

"Wait," Lane whispered tensely.  "I felt it coming."

His more sensitive nervous system had detected the true cause of the
reptile's awakening.  Scarcely breathing the others stood rigid in an
agony of hoping.  Did the ice sway beneath their feet ever so gently?
Or was it merely the wish rocking their imaginations?  Seconds passed
without a recurrence of the sensation.  Then, with infinite relief they
heard, miles beneath them and far to the north, the faint, muffled
buffeting of subterranean thunder.  The jarring became unmistakable.
In a moment the icebound plain was vibrating like a steel plate beneath
the impact of a trip-hammer.



HALF a mile to the south they heard the swish of air being sucked down
the blowholes.  Then while the ice heaved like a wave of the sea, they
saw the black skyline of the ruined paradise boiling with gigantic
shapes that inked out the low stars for an instant and vanished.

A moment later a thudding in the upper air announced the kindling of
the innumerable flame cones, the ice for twenty miles around leapt into
dull crimson, and they saw the whole herd of gigantic monsters racing
with incredible speed directly toward them.

Ten minutes would decide whether Drake's invention meant victory or
death.  The flame cones descended, hovered a second in mid air,
lengthened downward with a reverberant roar and became pillars of fire.

Once more the monsters forgot the miseries of their frozen existence.
Gathering round the comforting flames with ludicrous yet touching
exclamations of delight they surrendered themselves to the gracious
warmth.  Around many of the roaring fires a dozen or more snuggled at a
safe distance in rings of blissful enjoyment.  Thawing rapidly in the
fierce heat they licked their flanks, rolled over on their backs and
pawed luxuriously at the warm air.

The sounds of their pleasure, the inarticulate noises of their
gratitude, would have softened the most calloused heart to pity.  There
was an appeal in the playful antics of the colossal beasts that was
irresistible.  Huge tails that might have buckled steel plates in the
full viciousness of their cut slapped harmlessly against lean sides
whose ribs stuck out like the timbers of an unfinished hull.  They were
starving; yet for this hour they frolicked in the enjoyment of their
other great need, heat.

Their slow brains neither speculated nor dreamed.  When once more the
flames vanished into the bowels of the earth they would crawl back to
their frozen caves.  Waking or sleeping they would remember nothing of
their transient happiness.  Only at the distant thunder of the next
subterranean tide would their instincts urge them to break anew the
iron spell of their misery.  Without memory each pain was a miracle,
each pleasure an accident without cause or consequence.  Without
consciousness of the past their future was a blank, their existence a
void.  With no pleasure remembered they could look forward to none.
They were damned with life.  Would it not be a gentle act of mercy to
bless them with death?

Watching their happiness the author of their destruction felt no
regret.  They would be killed painlessly at the high tide of their
pleasure.

"Look," he said, pointing to a blowhole.

They saw the four huge bodies roll over as if to sleep.  The monsters
shuffled on their sides and lay still, their great tails listlessly
curved on the ice.

One by one others of the friendly rings fell asleep.  Then, in fifteen
minutes, all were locked fast in death.

Still the cheerful flames thundered up undiminished.  The late comers,
the babies of the sleeping monsters, began to arrive.  Hopping feebly
they joined their mothers and nestled down in the genial glow.  Soon
they too were asleep forever.

Suddenly the air about the sleepers burst with a dull explosion into a
sheet of fire.  The instant flame lived but a second.  Only the cheery
fires rustled and glowed above the dead.




CHAPTER IX

AT CLOSE QUARTERS

AN hour before sunrise the ice again began to shake.  They heard the
returning subterranean wave bursting through the underground corridors.
The pillared flames, struggling an instant, plunged down the blowholes.
Only the morning star shed its chilly ray on the sleeping monsters,
cold now as the barren ice they cumbered.  Obliterating the very memory
of their last happiness the passing wave, with a whistling
reverberation, sucked down the warm air about the sleeping forms.

The party waited until two hours after sunrise before venturing among
the dead.  There remained one simple task before proceeding to the
ruined paradise, lest on their return they meet the same fate as the
monsters.

To save time the men loaded their packs before starting.  On the
previous afternoon Edith and Ole had transported four fifty-pound cases
of dynamite from the caches on the south short of the oil lake.  Each
of the men now loaded one of the fifty-pound cases on his back with his
sleeping bag and enough food to last two days, or on short rations,
four.  In addition Ole packed a five-foot steel drill and a heavy
sledge-hammer.

Edith was to have charge of the plane.  A landing in the ruined crater
being out of the question she was to circle above the men in their
descent, mark their route, and watch until they emerged from the smoke.

Should they not reappear by dark, she was to fly to a safe place, camp,
and return at daylight to watch for them.  If they appeared she was to
observe the easiest route up the rocks of the crater side, and by
flying toward it, direct them.  But if by noon they did not come out of
the smoke she was to fly straight back to the ship and then guide
Bronson's search party.

The men planned to descend the crater only far enough to learn what
they wished to know, Anderson and Ole whether oil was to be found, Lane
and Drake the appearance made by the black cement in situ.

Edith accompanied the men on foot to the blowholes.  Threading their
way between the huge carcasses the party methodically undid Ole's and
Edith's work of the previous afternoon.  There being no further use for
the weighted hose and bent pipes they threw the sections down the
blowholes.

No echoes rose.

"How on earth did you ever think of it?" Anderson asked Drake as he
heaved down the last bent pipe.

"As I told you," Drake answered modestly.  "That siphon arrangement the
dentist puts into your mouth to keep it dry while he works gave me the
idea.  If we could stick one leg of a pipe bent into a right angle down
a blowhole, laying the other flush along the surface of the ice, some
of the gas being forced up the hole would spray out over the
surrounding ice.  From watching those flames the first day we saw them
I knew that the gas ignites only when it meets the air.  The columns of
gas caught at the top.  The flame only travelled down the column as the
upward pressure of the gas diminished.  For this and other obvious
reasons it was clear that the flames did not start down in the
blowholes, at least not until after the pressure had decreased markedly
and the flames were about to be sucked down and extinguished.  A
considerable volume of gas therefore would be blown out through the
pipes and hose over the ice before the flames descended low enough to
ignite the mixture of air and gas near the surface.

"As for the rest I trusted to nature.  The gas, I knew from my school
chemistry, must be rich in carbon monoxide.  Now carbon monoxide is
deadly in even minute quantities to all animal life.  Less than a
minute under that enormous pressure would suffice to spray out enough
of the gas to asphyxiate an army of monsters.  Long before it became
rich enough in carbon monoxide to explode the mixture of gas and air
would reach the point fatal to animal life.  You saw what happened."

"The monsters probably did not actually die," Lane added, "until some
time after the flash.  The gas they had inhaled took some minutes to do
its work thoroughly."

"Well," said Edith, sadly regarding the pathetic groups, "I am glad it
was painless.  They just fell asleep."



THE men fully realized the danger of their undertaking.  Although they
probably had exterminated one rookery of the huge monsters there must
be hundreds more infesting the ruined crater.  They accordingly chose a
route down the steep side as nearly possible in line with the destroyed
rookery.  The scramble down over the chaotic fragments of rock alone
was no easy undertaking, nor was its safety increased by the two
hundred pounds of dynamite which the men carried.  A slip on the
treacherous rocks might set off a private eruption.  There was one
comforting thought, however, which gave them courage.  Should one of
them stumble and explode his charge neither he nor the rest would ever
know anything of it.

By noon they had safely descended about a thousand feet.  Another
thousand feet would take them down to the rolling black billows.
Already the reek of burning petroleum was acrid in their nostrils.  Ole
and the Captain, breathing deeply, filled their lungs with the odor of
wealth.

"Here you are, Anderson," said the Doctor.  "Strike the rock and see
the oil gush forth."  They were resting on a ledge of blocks at the
base of a two hundred foot cliff in the face of the crater wall.  On
either side of the unbroken expanse of cement great void pockets and
tunnels gaped in the shattered wall of what, before the explosion which
destroyed it, had been a green paradise such as that of Edith's and
Ole's discovery.  The whole wall probably was honeycombed with
galleries, tunnels and vast chambers which, until the eruption, had
been sealed over by thick masses of cement.  The explanation of these
which Lane gave later is reasonable and probably correct.

"Where is my oil?" Anderson demanded.

"Almost anywhere behind those rocks if you go far enough, I should say.
For some time past I have noticed indications.  See that stain up
there?"  The Captain nodded.  "That's oil.  It is probably oozing along
a fissure through the rocks.  Find the other end of the fissure and you
tap your first oil tank."

"But you said the other day that oil in this kind of rock--or
cement--is impossible."

"And I meant it.  Since then I have done some thinking.  The oil is
seeping through defects in the ruins of this artificial wall.  I have
good reasons for supposing that this wall was built ages ago partly to
keep out the raw material that ultimately became oil."

"How thick is this cement?"

"I haven't the least idea.  It may be a foot or a hundred miles.  I
should chance a shot if I were you."

The Captain was already busy with his dynamite.

"Better stand aside when you do," Lane advised.  "The oil may shoot you
into the middle of eternity."

Ole's steady swing soon drilled a hole for the stick of dynamite.  He
stood back on the ledge a few feet wiping the sweat from his face while
Anderson placed the charge and laid out the three minute fuse.  He
moved forward to watch the Captain just in time.  A fifty-ton block of
the black cement hurtled down from the brow of the cliff, shot directly
through the place where he had been standing, ricocheted on the lip of
the ledge and shattered itself to bits all down the steep slope to the
smoke.

"I have a theory," the Doctor announced with a wry smile when the
pelting finally ceased.  "Pardon me, Ole, for taking it out of your
mouth.  There is something alive up there moving about and dislodging
the loose blocks.  Of course that first fifty-ton brick may have been
very nicely balanced, needing only a slight push to send it over.  The
alternative is that our friend up there weighs two or three hundred
tons.  Take your choice."

"What shall we do?" Anderson asked, going white.

"Go ahead with our work.  If the brute comes down after us we can crawl
along the base of the cliff and get into one of those empty pockets.
The ledge peters out nicely over there to the right.  That beast, if it
is the size I estimate, can't get a foothold on anything narrower than
a city highway."

"Yes," said Drake, "and this ledge right here is just broad enough for
the brute's rump.  It will camp here for a week if necessary waiting
for us to come out to dinner."

"Would you prefer to race it to the bottom?  The smoke down there, I
suspect, covers a multitude of prowlers feasting on the dead."

"It isn't so bad," the Captain said hopefully.  "We can set off
dynamite sticks to scare the brute away."

"Our popgun won't annoy it after the explosions it must have heard in
the neighborhood of this exciting hole," Drake objected.  "But your
idea is good.  Edith will hear our efforts and bring help."

"Dessert, you mean," Lane dryly corrected him.  "Go ahead, Captain,
touch it off.  We might as well find out all there is to be known about
the place if we've got to die in it."

"If I strike oil," the Captain grimly rejoined, "I'll sell stock to the
devil himself."

He lit the fuse and followed the others to a safe place against the
wall.

The explosion flaked off a thick slab of the cement, revealing a deep
pocket, or possibly the entrance to a tunnel, similar to the others in
the face of the cliff.  Not a drop of oil issued.

"Sold."  The Captain swore heartily.



THEY followed him to the hole.  The entrance was just high enough for a
tall man to walk through without bending his neck.  Anderson entered.
His feet raised a cloud of greenish gray dust.

"Empty," he said to those without.

He was about to continue his disgruntled observations when a cascade of
rubble plunged over the top of the cliff.  Not waiting for an
invitation the others joined him in the dark pocket.  Their haste
raised the pungent, suffocating greenish gray dust in clouds.

"It's coming," said the Doctor.  "Down the slope to the left as fast as
its tonnage will let it.  Our fireworks attracted its attention."

"I hope it slips and breaks its beastly neck," Drake remarked viciously.

"Oh," the Doctor replied, "since the big blow-up here it probably has
acquired a sure foot in scrambling about this hole.  Most likely it
does all its heavier feeding in Ole's tunnel restaurant, coming out
here merely for exercise and lighter refreshments.  We're just in time
for lunch."

"I don't believe you give a damn whether you live or die," the Captain
snapped.

"Except for Edith's sake I don't.  I would give a great deal to see one
of those brutes alive and at close quarters."

"You'll shake hands with it in five minutes."

"If it becomes too sociable I shall take a short cut out of my
troubles.  Fit up one of your sticks with a cap and give it about a
ten-second fuse."

"Do you mean it?"

"Certainly.  If I must die I see neither virtue nor courage in
deliberately choosing a hideous death.  I shall not kiss death till
hell stares me in the face."

The Captain handed him the prepared stick of dynamite.

"If you go that way," he said, "the rest of us must follow, you know."

"Not necessarily.  This pocket is almost a tunnel, I'm sure.  It
certainly is long enough for you to get your packs out of danger of
detonation from my explosion."

"I'm for the shortcut," said Drake.

"So am I."  It was Anderson.

"Then I must," said Ole.  "In my case it won't be suicide.  I do it
against my will."

Unstrapping his pack he knelt down and prayed, silently.  The others
respectfully turned their backs, listening to the crash of falling
rocks heralding the approach of the monster.  Anderson began to grow
nervous.

"We might as well go farther back," he suggested.

"All right," Lane replied.  "You men leave your packs and go clear to
the back of the cave.  I'll take three sticks together so as to be sure
of setting off the lot.  It will be over before you know anything."

"What about you?"

"I'm going to see it.  Don't be afraid.  I shall take no chance of
being caught before my time."

Ole rose from his knees.  Their gigantic enemy, to judge by the sounds,
was now lumbering its slow way along the ledge.  Ole spoke.

"The Lord has answered."

"Let us hear what He said."  The Captain was sarcastic.  He disbelieved
in Ole's private conversations with headquarters.  "Most likely it will
be your last message."

"That beast may be too big to get in through the hole."

"Then it will sit down outside and wait for us."

"I see your idea," Drake exclaimed.  "When the brute squats we can
tickle its rump and make it move on.  Captain, fit up a punk with a
three-minute fuse."

Anderson did the quickest job of his life.  Fantastic visions of
euthanasia vanished like the fumes of a sickly dream.  The men once
more were what nature intended them to be, resourceful, self-reliant,
and instinctively determined to fight to the last breath.

"I'll never sneer at you again, Ole," the Captain promised solemnly.
"You put guts into us.  Take your dynamite clear to the back of the
tunnel--mine too.  Hurry!  Drake, lug back yours and Lane's."

Drake and Ole rejoined the others just as the vast bulk of the monster
blacked out the opening.  Still lumbering stupidly forward it passed
the entrance.  Daylight again entering the pocket the four crept to the
opening.

Lane peered out.  The brainless monster had reached the end of its
path.  Further progress along the narrowing ledge being impossible the
brute squatted.  In its stupidity it had gone so far that now it could
not turn with safety.  A cat in a similar predicament would have backed
instantly.  Apparently the solution of its problem was beyond the
monster's infinitesimal intelligence.  It just squatted.



THE Doctor was entranced.  He saw only the creature's mountainous back,
one enormous hind foot with its fifty-inch talons, and the gross,
forty-foot tail tapering out to a blunt nub.  But even this much with
the close view of the monster's irregular ridge of fleshy humps and its
blotched hide--it had no armor of horny scales, merely a thick skin
like an elephant's--rotten with festering colonies of parasites, was a
feast to the eyes.  He longed to scrape off a specimen of those living
diseases devouring the monster from the nub of its tail to the limit of
visibility.  And he did.

Emptying his tobacco box he stepped softly through the entrance.  Going
noiselessly up to the nearest patch of disease on the brute's tail he
scraped it with the sharp edge of the open box.  The huge beast gave no
sign of feeling.  Closing the box carefully Lane estimated the distance
to the entrance to the cave.  Then with all his force he kicked the
sorest looking spot on the tail and bolted.  He regained the cave just
as the tail struck the cliff like a broadside from a battleship.

"Why the devil did you do that?" Anderson demanded.  "Are you crazy?"

"We planned to make it move on, didn't we?" the Doctor, asked
innocently.

"Not that way.  But for your damn foolishness we might have got out of
here unnoticed."

"To tell the truth I wanted to see how long it would take a nervous
impulse to travel the distance from the brute's tail to its head."

"Well, you saw, confound it.  Now you've started the machinery.  Go out
and stop it."

"I have made a most interesting discovery," the Doctor rhapsodized.
"Zoologists have long suspected that the biggest of the prehistoric
monsters had two main nervous centres, one in the head, the other
somewhere in the rear.  One paleontogist of note even went so far as to
assert that reptiles roughly like this one could reason simultaneously
 priori and  posteriori.  His theory, is brilliantly confirmed.  That
brainless lout registered my kick in its tail.  It would have taken a
week to get the news up in its head."

"Oh blast your theories!"

The Captain had good grounds for his impatience.  Lane's energetic kick
had solved the monster's problem.  The whole stupid mass was slowly
backing.  In a few moments the brute's brainless head would be opposite
the entrance.

"Draw farther back," Lane advised.  "It will probably want to look in.
Sort of reverse reflex action, you know.  Where the tail went the head
will follow."

He was right.  The last few yards of the bony neck passed, and the
flat, reptilian head blocked the entrance.  By tilting it sideways the
monster managed to insinuate its head.  The thirty-foot neck followed
slowly, with ample leeway on either side of the entrance.

Just as they became aware of its heavy, slow breathing the monster saw
them in the dim light.  In a flash the lethargy of the brute vanished.
The straining neck, lashing from side to side, cut the air like a whip.
The whole vast bulk of the giant hurled itself furiously against the
jarring cliff in an endeavor to follow the head.

Great flakes of the black cement crumbled from the rapidly widening
entrance as the balked hunger of the monster rose to a screaming fury.

Its deafening screeches, like the shrilling of a herd of wild camels,
shook the cave with a terrific din, and its panting breath raised the
gray green dust in stifling clouds.

It was now or never.  While Drake struck matches, Anderson rapidly but
coolly prepared two more sticks of dynamite.  Then, watching his
chance, he lit all three fuses at once and deftly rolled the sticks
over the floor of the cave so that one lay in the middle and one at
either end of the arc threshed out by the huge serpent head.  He
overtook the others before they reached the end of the cave.



WHEN the terrific thunder finally ceased, and the men realized that
their two hundreds had not exploded, they stumbled back through the
dark in a daze to the entrance.  In their confusion they blundered
directly into the headless stump of neck-gushing blood like a hydrant.

They blasted their way out.  When the gory job was done they were
scarlet from boots to hair.  Crawling out under the smoking shoulders
of the butchered giant they saw Edith circling dangerously near the
rocks, risking herself and the plane in her eagerness to help should
her chance come.  They signalled that all was well, and she wheeled
farther from the shattered wall.

During their long descent Edith had lost sight of the men among the
huge blocks littering the sides of the crater.  She rediscovered them a
second after she observed the monster starting to back in response to
her father's kick.  With her binoculars she made out her father peering
through the entrance to the cave.  Until that moment she had not seen
the monster.  Prom her height it was as inconspicuous as an ant
crawling about among the jumbled rocks, unless one knew exactly where
to look.

Her feelings as she watched the gigantic brute trying to break its way
into the cave may be imagined.  The three muffled detonations in rapid
succession, the third of which blew off the monster's head, reassured
her.  Someone's brain was still working in that cave.  She saw the
entire carcass of the brute bound from the ledge as if in astonished
pain.  Descending with a dead slap that echoed round the crater, the
massive body struck the ledge, the enormous hind legs kicked
convulsively, the powerful tail thrashed the flying blocks of cement,
and with a last shudder from shoulder to rump the monster became still.
The neck was not withdrawn.  Guessing what had happened Edith sighed
her thankfulness and stood by to give help.

"Well," said Anderson, "is that a day's work?  Does anyone want to go
farther down?"

"Let us go down another hundred feet," Drake proposed; "So far we have
passed only half a dozen blocks showing traces of inscriptions.  I
should like if possible to photograph one unbroken record.  Ole has a
pocket camera."

"Very well," the Captain agreed.  "You and Ole keep in sight of this
ledge while Lane and I take a look round the cave.  There may be an
ooze of oil at the back.  Didn't you smell petroleum, Doctor, when we
were waiting for that shot to go off?"

"I can't say that I did, but then I was so busy waiting.  Drake, why
don't you try that other unbroken bluff over to the left?  If our
theory is right you should find inscriptions, if anywhere, either on
what was the surface of the cement before the explosion or on a
concealed layer some inches deeper into the cement.  If you can find an
unbroken stretch you will have the revised version of the prehistoric
fight.  What we want is the original history.  Look for a place where
only a few inches of the outer surface have been flaked off by the
explosion."

While Lane and Anderson explored the cave, Drake and Ole descended in
quest of inscriptions.  Edith hovered above the climbers like an
anxious robin over her fledglings.

"That's for you," Ole remarked with a grin.

"Mind your own business," Drake snapped.

Reaching the unbroken cliff which Lane had pointed out they found it
blank.

"There's another over there," Ole observed hopefully, indicating a
smooth vertical expanse about a thousand yards to their left.

"Yes, but if we go there we shall be out of sight of the ledge."

"It's safe enough."  He glanced up at the circling airplane.  "Take my
tip and don't let her see you running away."

With a muttered comment on Ole's meddlesome stupidity Drake started
over the intervening blocks like an excited crab.  His impetuosity was
rewarded.

"Hurry up with your camera," he shouted.  "This is just what we want."

They regretted keenly that Ole had not packed a hundred pounds of films
instead of his dynamite.  Five or six acres of cliff was covered with
representations of monsters in every conceivable posture.  Evidently
this was a record of importance.



BOTH strata of inscriptions were represented on the cliff.  In several
places the impact of the bombarding blocks from the eruption had flaked
off great scales from the outer layer of cement, baring the original
inscriptions.  The unscarred surface bore the revised version.  After
deliberating they decided to photograph the entire cliff in three dozen
sections--the limit of Ole's films.  This seemed better than
concentrating on individual inscriptions.  Drake hoped from enlargement
of the three dozen pictures to obtain a complete record of everything
on the cliff.

Anderson and Lane meanwhile were busy in the cave.  To the Captain's
disappointment they found no trace of oil.

"You have that lake beyond the blowholes," Lane expostulated.  "Isn't
that enough?  Let us get into the fresh air.  This vile dust is choking
me."

"It has a mouldy smell, hasn't it?"

"You're right," the Doctor agreed.  "I wonder what it is."  His
interest was aroused.

"Take some out to the daylight and see.  These matches were made by the
devil only to burn my fingers."

Lane scooped up a double handful of the dust and hurried to the
entrance.

"Spores," he announced excitedly.

Although he did not recognize it he had met the enemy.

"I'm no wiser," the Captain remarked.

"These are masses of seeds from some fernlike plant.  Lord!  I wish I
had a microscope; Haven't you ever seen the underside of a fern frond?"
The Captain nodded.  "Well, all that brown stuff on it is millions of
fern seeds finer than dust."

"But this stuff is grayish green."

"That makes it all the more interesting.  These are the spores, the
life germs, of some unknown plant.  I am sure of it.  We must take back
all we can carry.  Cram your pockets."

Lane dived into the cave and set the example.  Reluctantly enough
Anderson followed suit.

"Over by the wall where we haven't trampled the stuff should be a good
place," Lane continued.  "Sift it through your fingers and save
anything not finer than dust."

Presently Lane rose to his feet with an exclamation of delight.

"Look what I've found!"

Anderson followed him to the light.  The Doctor was lost in the
contemplation of a tiny desiccated frond of some plant that resembled a
fern yet most decidedly was not a fern.  The dried foliage, more like a
rank mould than a decent plant, was of hair-like fineness.

"Where have I seen something like this before?" Lane muttered to
himself.  "It was alive.  Where the deuce was it?"

"San Francisco?" the Captain hazarded dryly.

"No.  On that beach of monsters.  Ole blew the stomach out of one and
in the process ripped the lining.  Some of this plant, as fresh as
newly cut lettuce, dropped out of the rent.  I remember now.  We
planned to collect some on our way back to the ship.  When we returned
we were too heavily loaded to take on more.  Also it was getting dark.
So we had to leave it till next day.  By morning the oil and slush
oozing into the hole in the ice where the plant lay had made soup of
everything.  Well, this more than makes up for our loss.  I shall have
a chance to settle whether life remains dormant under the right
conditions, practically indefinitely."

"Ah, your theory of immortal whales?"

"The laugh will be on you when I make this greenish dust grow.  The
chances are infinity to nothing that the living plant disappeared from
the earth millions of years ago."



LANE was wrong in his first statement.  Less than twenty-four hours
later he found that the laugh was on him.  And a nasty, sardonic laugh
it was at that.  He spoke from insufficient knowledge.

Between them he and Drake had reconstructed the history of the perished
race whose records the rigors of the Antarctic solitudes had preserved
unviolated.  Drake as decipherer, and Lane as scientist, working
together imagined themselves in possession of all the essential details
of the catastrophe which had swept intelligence from the Earth when the
poles were regions of perpetual summer.  In the light of what happened
less than twenty-four hours after Lane's discovery of the greenish
spores, neither he nor Drake is now willing to claim finality for their
conclusions.  Before the struggle in which they all but perished, both
were confident of their theory.  It explained all the facts in their
possession and it was rational.

Their desperate fight for life showed them that they had not visualized
one half of the truth.  What they had guessed was the obvious part.
Their failure to reconstruct a single less obvious detail has taught
them modesty.  Neither Drake nor Lane will now admit that he knows more
than a small fraction of that obliterated history.

Lane moreover for the present is disinclined to speculate on the
obscure science behind the history.  He prefers to leave fundamental
theories and explanations to Ole.  And it may be said in passing that
Ole's most ambitious theory has already attracted numerous followers.
His fame, however, is rather mixed.  His following is as large as
Lane's is select.  For the notorious conservatism of professional
scientists holds them back in following Ole in regions where the more
adventurous layman rushes in whooping.

Lane had been so absorbed in his greenish spores that he failed to note
the disappearance of Ole and Drake.  They came into sight just as
Anderson began to swear.  Joining the others they voted it a day's
work, firmly strapped on their packs, and started up the thousand foot
scramble to the skyline.  Topping it shortly before sunset they marched
fast and reached the site of their last night's camp before dusk.
Edith joined them presently.

"Shall we camp here?" she asked.

"We might as well," Anderson replied.  "It is convenient to the crater.
Have you any reason for wishing to go farther back toward the oil lake?"

"Perhaps not.  You can decide best.  The wind seems to be rising.  Up
on the three thousand foot level it is blowing half a gale--thirty
miles an hour from the north.  Camped here in the open we shall have
trouble with the plane if the current descends during the night."

"There is only a four or five mile breeze blowing from the southeast
down here at present," the Captain pointed out.  "So far as I can see
the weather is exactly what it has been the past nine days."

"All right.  If you are satisfied I am.  Only I thought if there is any
danger of the wind rising in the night it would be easier to manage the
plane in the shelter of the south bank of the oil lake," she told him.

"There is no danger, I am sure.  This breeze won't go to more than six
miles an hour at any time during the night.  Your speaking of the lake
reminds me of something.  Will you take Ole and fly to the cache on the
south shore for more matches?  He can dig them out."

"Of course.  We shall be back in half an hour."

"And while you are there," her father begged, "dig up some sort of a
tin can for me.  Bring one with a lid.  I want to pack these precious
spores of mine safely away."

"Very well.  I shall bring a fresh tin of ship bread and we can have a
real feast.  I know how to make a heavenly hoosh with hardtack and
corned beef.  You may have the tin."

"And the rest of you the stew, I suppose?"

"If you go shares on your blessed spores," she laughed, "we'll do
likewise on the banquet."

When she returned Anderson thankfully emptied his pockets of the
greenish gray mess.

"Be careful," Lane admonished, hopping about excitedly on the frozen
snow.  "You're losing half of the stuff.  The breeze carries it off
like smoke."

The Captain did indeed lose about a pound and three-quarters.  Finally
turning his pockets inside out he gave them a thorough dusting in the
breeze.  Although Lane was more careful he also lost half a pound to
the wind.

"Well," he said, "I have enough anyway."  He slapped down the lid.
"With this I should be able to prove whether or not the life principle
can remain indefinitely in abeyance."

"The great Swedish chemist Arrhenius almost says it can," Ole informed
them.  "He has a theory that life originates on planets by the life
seeds from another planet.  The seeds drift across empty spaces for
ages till they strike a planet cool enough for life.  When the life
seeds drift too close to the sun or some other star the heat destroys
them."



LANE received Arrhenius' famous theory with the silence of disrespect.
He was already familiar with it as a speculation of the well known
physicists Tait and Stewart.  To him it had always been the example par
excellence of the incompetence of the average scientist to reason
straight about another man's specialty.  The Captain thought he saw the
point.

"The hen and the egg over again, isn't it?  What starts life on the
first planet?  How do your precious life seeds begin in the first
place?"

"They're not mine," Ole retorted indignantly.  "Arrhenius invented
them.  The life came to the first planet from another planet."

"Exactly," the Captain sneered.  "And when the chain is complete you
have perpetual motion.  Go and patent it."

The dispute becoming personal, the pacific Drake intervened.

"Both of you are right.  Ole can't be held responsible for any
foolishness but his own.  Nor can you, Captain, be blamed for
criticizing a scientific theory.  The ones that I have looked into are
all like that.  They assume the egg in order to produce the hen to
explain the egg."

"And you," the Doctor hotly interposed, "being a bat-eyed archaeologist
are a competent critic of science.  You may be able to read prehistoric
picture books but you couldn't tell the difference between evolution
and relativity.  Just because you mess about with fossilized opinions
you set yourself up as a judge of modern science."

"Not at all," Drake retorted.  "I only say that my training in
antiquities enables me to tell fresh eggs from Chinese.  And if
Arrhenius' perpetual motion theory of the origin of life isn't a
scientific bad egg I have no nose.  One doesn't need a brain to test
things as far gone as that."

"Now you two," said Edith, giving each of them a shake, "eat your hoosh
before it freezes.  You can fight afterwards."

"We won't want to," Drake grinned, "with a gallon of food under our
belts."

"True," the Doctor agreed.  "If those poor monsters over there had been
properly fed they might have made great pets.  The struggle for
subsistence ruined their tempers."

"I wonder if the blowholes will perform tonight?" Edith asked.

"No," Ole confidently asserted: "By my theory they should not go off
till early tomorrow forenoon."

"Your theory be blowed," the Captain growled.  He was jealous.  "You're
always theorizing and always wrong."

But Ole was right.  There was no flareup till nine o'clock the next
morning.




CHAPTER X

DESPERATE

AFTER the meal they luxuriously crawled into their warm sleeping bags
and lay talking for an hour.  Having exterminated the adjacent rookery
of monsters they saw no necessity for setting a watch.  The chances of
any adventurous prowlers from the interior of the crater foraging the
icy wilderness were negligible.

They decided to have a good night's sleep and be fresh in the morning
for a deeper descent into the crater.  The day following Edith had
reserved to take her father to the unruined paradise which she and Ole
had discovered.  The others were to march to the oil lake and wait
there for Edith to take them across.  They were then to return to the
ship for a second attempt to reach the black barrier of Anderson's
first objective.  Although they had not yet devised a means for
traversing the dangerous trough of blowholes which they had blundered
on in their first expedition, nevertheless they felt confident that
necessity would stimulate their inventiveness to a safe plan.

Anderson was more determined than ever to reach his first goal.  There
was no doubt that the black rock barrier beyond the trough was the wall
of another vast ruined paradise.  Therefore, he argued, there must be
oil in its vicinity.  What was true of one hole in the ice, he said,
must be true of another just like it.  Lane had considerably modified
his veto of the possibility of finding oil in such a formation.  And
the deciding factor in his change of opinion was his discovery that the
black cement was not of natural origin.

"What do you make of it all, Lane?" the Captain asked from his sleeping
bag.

"I told you the other day.  We have discovered the final product of an
intelligence that vanished from the earth before America was a
continent.  That intelligence, I believe, either deliberately or
accidentally solved the problem of life.  For some reasons I think it
more probable that the initial discovery was a blunder.

"The authors of the mistake were impotent to control it.  Everything we
have discovered points to their inability to direct their creation.  As
I said the other day they realized what they had done only when it was
too late, foresaw its probable consequences, and destroyed their entire
civilization in the attempt to nullify their blunder.  That they failed
to carry out their destructive purpose completely is self-evident.  Had
they succeeded not one of those dead monsters over there would ever
have come into existence."

"If they knew enough to create life," Ole objected, "they must have
known how to destroy it."

"Not necessarily.  An idiot with a test tube of the right sort of germs
might start a plague that not all the doctors of the world could
control.  And so with this thing.  The minute specks of living matter
which they created--I am assuming the process for the sake of
illustration only--multiplied like bacteria.  Now what is the last
remedy for a plague infested village?  Why, to burn it to the ground.
So possibly those rash experimenters learned.  But the seeds of
life--again I am merely guessing--had been scattered broadcast over the
country by the winds.

"What was to be done?  Fire the whole country?  That would have been
useless.  For it is impossible to bake the soil over thousands of
square miles to a depth of several feet.  I am assuming from tangible
evidence that the plague of life had passed so far beyond control that
the very soil was impregnated with its germs.

"What would they do?  What could they do but seal every mile of the
infected soil?  No air must reach the life spores.  Light must be
excluded.  They systematically set about burying the fertility of their
continent under millions of tons of air tight cement."

"But why should they bring slow starvation on themselves," Edith
objected, "if, as you say, they had not created any dangerous animals
to prey on them, but only the merest beginnings of life?"

"For one very good reason.  We may assume that their intelligence was
higher than ours.  Otherwise they could not have created life.  Knowing
enough even to blunder onto the secret of life they certainly would be
competent to decide whether their creation was in line with orderly,
normal evolution.  Finding that their artificial life spores all were
but the potential ancestors of abominations to be evolved to maturity
millions of years in the future, they looked forward to the probable
state of the world as a result of their mistake.  They foresaw hell on
earth.



"THERE was no immediate danger.  There was not even the possibility of
slight discomfort for millions upon millions of years.  But there was
the absolute certainty at the end of ages of a world that a decent
beast wouldn't live in.  They weighed one against the other--the
certainty of continued happiness for their race for a few million years
longer against the equal certainty of hell on earth forever thereafter.
And they decided that their protracted happiness, even their continued
existence, was not worth its deferred cost.

"I have said that they were intelligent.  The deliberate sacrifice of
their own happiness for a future that would never dream of their
existence, proves my assertion.  It is your stupid man who has the soul
of a hog.  Drake, you go on."

"Let me first knock the stuffing out of one of Ole's numerous
theories," Drake began.  "Then I can go on where the Doctor stopped.
Ole maintains that the intelligent beings--I won't call them human, for
they were too unselfish to deserve the epithet--who depicted all those
acres of fantastic monsters actually saw the creatures whose outlines
they pressed into the wet cement.  He contends that the artists drew
from living models.  That I flatly deny.  I admit that they saw the
models which inspired them.  But they saw with the mind's eye only.
Lane, I believe, is right.  They actually created nothing more
terrifying to behold than tiny specks of jelly."

"You must prove your theory," Ole exploded, rising bodily in his
sleeping bag to defend his offspring.

"It proved itself the first time I saw your precious photographs.  Of
all those thousands of different monsters represented in your pictures,
not one was in a posture that by any stretch of the imagination could
be called natural.  Every last one of them is drawn in some grotesque
attitude that would set an Apache artist's teeth on edge.  There has
been a deliberate and successful attempt to make each posture unnatural
in at least one detail.  The variations are not mere conventions.  They
are systematic, infinitely various, and exceedingly ingenious.

"That gave me my first clue.  Whatever race designed those inscriptions
had done its best to convey the information that the beasts were in a
definite sense, imaginary.  They were not imaginary in the sense that a
fire breathing dragon is fictitious.  By the help of a half a ton of
books I learned that such creatures were not flesh and bone
impossibilities.  They might have come into being if natural evolution
had started from different beginnings.  Lane helped me a lot on this.
My own first guess was merely a jump in the dark.

"Being ideal representations of non-existent but possible creatures,
what could they signify?  The answer was immediate: the results of an
elaborate scientific prophecy.

"Even I, unscientific antiquarian as I am, have heard of those
astronomers who predicted the exact spot in the heavens in which a
planet--Neptune--that no human eye had ever seen, would be found at a
definite time on a certain night.  And in spite of Lane's harsh
estimate of my scientific incompetence, I have also admired that
splendid discovery by the Scotch mathematician who foresaw from his
equations our wireless waves and described their behavior a generation
before wireless became practical.

"Knowing these antiquarian scraps of scientific history I let my
imagination loose.  If it is possible for us to predict unseen planets
and foretell in detail great scientific advances, why should not a more
intelligent race beat us at our own game?  We predict only physical
things.  Why shouldn't Lane, if he had brains enough, predict the
future course of a hen's life from an examination of the unhatched egg?"

"No reason at all," Lane laughed.  "Some day they will do better than
that.  You should let your imagination go."

"It might never come back to earth if I let loose altogether.  Well, I
made my working guess.  I supposed that the authors of those
inscriptions were predicting the distant evolution of some form of
life.  Taking that as a foundation I tried what I could build.

"You remember my remarking the entire absence of human figures from the
inscriptions.  Not one of those thousands of creatures represented
could by any flight of the imagination be considered above brute
intelligence.  The artists had taken great trouble to depict in each
instance a savage, almost brainless stupidity.

"Now I had also noticed immediately the vivid and lifelike pictograms
of sanguinary battles.  Putting these two facts together, the total
absence of all higher intelligence and the repeated depiction of
terrible conflicts, I reached what seemed an obvious conclusion.

"The authors of the inscriptions, I inferred, were depicting their own
annihilation by an enemy as yet not fully created.  Further they
predicted the subsequent reign of brutal anarchy and unintelligence.
The inscriptions were a forecast of what was to happen in the course of
evolution.  Intelligence, they predicted, was to disappear from the
earth.  Brute force, nature gone mad, and a chaos of living things were
to rule in the place of dethroned order.



"SO MUCH for the prophecy.  Now for the recorded history.  Almost at
the first glance I recognized that two distinct periods of art,
separated by a vast interval of time, were represented in the
inscriptions.  Between the earlier and the later the technique of
pictorial design had changed fundamentally.  The art of both periods is
developed almost to perfection.  Nevertheless, ages separate the two
schools, and they belong to the same race.  I need not bore you with
the evidence.  It is of the same sort as that which enables
archaeologists to say at a glance whether a sculpture is Greek or
Egyptian and further to fix its date relatively to some standard object.

"Notice now the extraordinary and significant detail.  The two periods
of art, although widely separated in time, were of equal brilliance.
During the ages between the first and second there had been no decline.
We have no parallel to this in recorded history.  A few centuries, or
at most two or three thousand years, sees the rise to approximate
perfection and the sure descent to mediocrity.

"This fact puzzled me more than all the other difficulties together,
and it still is baffling although to a lesser degree.  I was totally
unable to decide which inscriptions were the earlier.  The inscriptions
of both periods depicted struggles and, so far as I could see for a
long time, struggles of almost identical character.  What was the
obvious conclusion?  The earlier inscriptions prophesied the ghastly
conflict, the later recorded its occurrence.  I became convinced that
the forgotten race early foresaw its extinction in the shadowy future,
lived for ages in undiminished vigor anticipating destruction, and
finally was overwhelmed in the height of its power, surviving only long
enough to leave a record of impending and absolute defeat.

"I then tried on this hypothesis to decide which set of inscriptions
was the earlier.  The net result was nil.  Either the problem was
beyond me or I had gone stale.

"The intense scrutiny was not however a dead waste.  A suspicion which
had long been germinating in my subconscious mind struggled up to
certainty.  One set of inscriptions undoubtedly and possibly the other
also, was in cipher.  The actual conflict depicted was merely the
symbol of a deeper war.  It was not beast against beast, but beast
against intelligence.  Unmistakably the battles of one set of
inscriptions were symbols of a conflict that was not material.  What
then could have been its nature?

"By a process of exclusion I decided that the only rational guess was a
struggle against natural laws.  The conflict was not material; it could
not be against spirits.  It therefore most probably was intellect
against brute nature, the endless struggle of intelligence to be master
of itself and creator of its own fate.  The symbolic set of
inscriptions, I decided, must record the struggles of the long extinct
race to subdue nature.  In short the inscription must be a summary of
the more important scientific discoveries and technical achievements of
the race.



"THE next question was, why should they wish to conceal their
scientific knowledge?  My answer was immediate.  It was also, I am now
convinced, inadequate.  The scientific knowledge of the race, I
reasoned, must have been entrusted to a particular cult whose business
it was to increase and apply the store of wisdom.  To prevent disasters
this cult by means of hieroglyphics and symbolic language would conceal
from the uninitiated all dangerous discoveries.  Only a history of the
severe struggle to master the secrets of life and the material universe
would be recorded, so that later generations of seekers should not
repeat the experiments and encounter the same dangers.

"It was now natural to ascribe the purely symbolic, or scientific,
writings to the earlier period.  The later inscriptions I took to be a
record of the destruction of the race by the creations of its own
science.  The ruin which their scientists early predicted overtook
them, and the perishing race left a warning to intelligent life, should
such ever again inhabit the world, not to repeat the uncontrollable
blunder which had destroyed its first perpetrators.

"This hypothesis received a startling confirmation when we discovered
that lump of black cement with the embedded inscriptions.  The interior
inscriptions, those which had been cemented over, belonged to what I
had decided was the earlier period; those on the face of the fragment
to the latter.  Evidently the attempt at concealment had been much more
thorough than I dreamed.  The race not only disguised their dangerous
scientific knowledge in ambiguous symbolism; it actually buried the
obnoxious wisdom beneath several inches of a cement as hard as diamond.

"What could have driven them to such drastic caution?  Only the
desperate determination to obliterate the last traces of their
scientific knowledge.  And why?  Because in the final conflict they had
found its consequences terrible beyond belief.

"As to the nature of their dangerous knowledge and the aspect of the
monstrous catastrophe which it engendered, I can only follow Lane in
his speculations.  That race blundered onto the secret of life.
Creating it, they fashioned the seeds of abominations.  This they
realized.  And they foresaw that with the lapse of ages evolution would
breed from their beginnings, innocuous enough at the time and for
millions of years to come, a swarming, uncontrollable multitude of
monstrosities without intelligence.

"Lane has outlined their probable motives in choosing for themselves
wholesale destruction.  Until we shall have spent several years on the
inscriptions we can venture no theory as to how they created life."

"I have a theory!" Ole exploded.  He had been suffering for twenty
minutes.

"Pipe down," the Captain ordered.  "Lane, how do you account for all
those dead monsters over there by the blowholes?  And for the thousands
on the beach, to say nothing of the half million I saw boiling up from
the bottom of the ocean?"

"Easily.  Those originators of life destroyed their creation, I pointed
out, by burying the fertile soil of their continent under millions of
tons of air-tight cement.  A job like that takes time.  The longer they
worked at it the slower became their rate of progress.  And for a very
simple reason.  As the cemented region grew the food supply diminished.
They took care, of course, to cement over the most dangerous places
first, leaving the lighter work for the last few survivors of the race.

"Now where did they get the rock and other material for making their
untold millions of tons of the hardest cement?"

"Out of the ground, of course.  Mines."

"Exactly.  That crater we were in today is the ruin of one of their
mines.  The vast circular depression that Ole and Edith visited is
another.  It fortunately is still undestroyed.  That black barrier you
are so determined to explore is the ruined floor of another, heaved up
by the explosion of vast quantities of oil and natural gas.  How many
more there may be dotted about this frozen continent I hope some day to
discover.



"WELL, as I see it, they mined out those enormous holes to get material
for their cement.  The execution of so vast a project as theirs
demanded the highest intelligence and extraordinary engineering skill.
I suspect that they sunk those pits so deep in order to utilize the
internal heat of the earth.  In their day, millions of years ago, the
heat at comparatively shallow depths must have been much greater than
it is today in our deepest mines.  For the same purpose, and also
perhaps in the search for rarer minerals required in making their
time-outlasting cement, they drove enormous tunnels, galleries and vast
pockets far into the rocks at every stage of their work.  We have heard
the tides of oil and water surging along them under our feet.

"Now for your animals.  The race in its prime having cemented all the
most dangerous regions, the diminishing survivors had only to complete
the project by cementing the easier places.  Their task was to seal the
mines and subterranean chambers.  The mines are these vast holes in
this forsaken wilderness.  The one we explored this morning certainly
has been plastered with cement.  They did a thorough job.  That black
wall must have been yards thick before the gas explosion blew the whole
interior to bits.

"The first engineers, foreseeing that the last survivors must perish of
starvation before the completion of their work, took the precaution of
making the sides of their mines perpendicular.  It was extremely
improbable that every square yard of the floors, walls and roofs of the
open mines and subterranean galleries would be safely cemented over
before the last worker perished.  Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of acres
of free soil would be left exposed to the light, air and moisture.  The
dangerous life seeds polluting these extensive uncemented areas would
live and develop, and with the lapse of ages evolve into abominations.
This is why they made those pits, three miles deep, with perpendicular
walls as smooth as glass.  Whatever bred in those mines and galleries
would live and die there.  Soil and heat alike eventually becoming
exhausted, the last vestiges of life in the mines and tunnels would
perish.  We happen to have arrived before the natural end, which may
not come for millions of years yet.

"Why don't we find the mighty engines which those great workers must
have used?  Those which they left exposed to the air were rust a
million years ago.  Stone will outlast iron, and this cement, hard as
diamond, would outlast the finest steel.  As for such of their machines
as they used in their tunnels and caves, I confidently expect to find
traces, perhaps even one or two complete engines.  For I intend to
explore thoroughly every mile of those subterranean galleries from here
to the South Pole if necessary, and from there to far under the floor
of the Antarctic ocean.

"I am convinced that the agelong action of heat and water has slowly
widened the tunnels and extended them far out under the ocean.  The
roof of one of these, weakening under the same course, gave way,
letting in the ocean.  You saw the backwash of oil and dead beasts
blown up by the steam when the returning wave burst through to the
subterranean fires.  The monsters, I suspect, came from another such
paradise as the one Ole and Edith discovered.  I shouldn't wonder if it
turned out to be the one you are set on visiting.

"I have also a theory, as Ole might say, concerning the origin of your
oil.  These monsters have been living, evolving, multiplying and dying
in the galleries and uncemented mines for millions of years, literally
for ages of geologic time.  Their constantly decomposing carcasses are
responsible for the lakes and oceans of oil which, I feel confident,
swing their black tides deep down under this polar ice cap.

"Now, one last thing, and I shall have done.  We've been talking an
hour and it's time we all went to sleep.  I am willing to bet my
specimens, including the incomparable devil chick, against your oil
lake, that when we visit the unruined mine the day after tomorrow,
Edith and I shan't find a single inscription on its walls.  No other
pit besides the one we explored today, I am convinced, will show the
trace of an inscription.  One record, the authors of the inscriptions
rightly surmised, would be sufficient So why waste their labor in
leaving a score?  The first record, the one which they later cemented
over, was inscribed near the beginning of their gigantic labor.  They
were just about to cement over the walls of the first vast mine, now
grown so unwieldy as to be unmanageable.  They decided to leave a
record of the harsh science which was driving them to suicide.

"Accordingly, as they worked, they pressed into the unset cement the
secret symbolism of their fatal discoveries.  This record they intended
as a warning to their successors should intelligence ever again visit
the earth.  Thousands of years later, still toiling at their stupendous
task, they realized fully its crushing magnitude and the horror of the
doom which they labored to nullify.  While their own end still was
thousands of years in the future they decided to obliterate forever the
record of the knowledge which had driven their race down the long, slow
way to death.  Returning to their first mine they cemented over the
dangerous science which was their ruin.  Now let us go to sleep."

Edith was the first to awake.  She first noticed an oppressive warmth.
Not yet fully aroused she turned over on her side for a last nap.  The
sense of discomfort increased.  Her hair, she imagined, had fallen over
her face as she turned.  Some strands evidently had got into her mouth.

Still lazy, she tried to eject the supposed hair with her tongue.
Failing, she used her fingers.  The suspected hair having an unusual
feel she held it before her eyes for examination.  In the semi-darkness
she saw that it was green.  Startled, she looked more attentively.
What she saw was a mass of fern-like foliage of hair-like fineness.

It was the enemy.



EDITH'S cries brought the others, unable to get out of their sleeping
bags, struggling to their feet.  The mouths of the bags were choked
with thick masses of the hair-like vegetation.

Freeing their heads from the entangling meshes they stared out over a
dense, matted jungle of green hair five feet high.  To the south
numerous vivid mounds marked the thickly overgrown carcasses of the
asphyxiated monsters.  To the north stretched a dense mat of
impenetrable vegetation disappearing in a dark green cloud on the
horizon.

A hundred yards beyond the mounded monsters the tangled green mass
ended abruptly, save for a single band a hundred yards broad reaching
to the base of the black rocks.  There the band stopped.  It marked the
course which the men had taken across the ice on their return from the
crater.

Were their ears deceived?  They stood motionless, five blunted pillars
festooned with great streamers and wreaths of the rank, fungus like
green weed, listening in fear to the rustling crepitation.  The whole
mass was growing audibly.

Then they noticed a deep green discoloration of the ice on the west
side of the broad band between the blowholes and the rocks.  The edges
of the band were not sharp, like the edge of a cornfield.  The green
mass, tapering down at the boundaries, merged with the ice and snow.
That green tinge on the ice far beyond the limit of growing vegetation
was the dust of innumerable spores blown from the living plants by the
East wind which rose with the dawn.

Attempting to move they found themselves bound from feet to armpits by
living ropes woven from thousands of growing, hairlike strands.  They
fully realized their desperate situation only when Edith with a
frightened cry called attention to the airplane.  It had disappeared
beneath a tangled mound of green ropes.  Even if they could extricate
the machine it would be impossible to rise.  That matted vegetation
would stop a thousand horsepower tractor in less than a hundred yards.

"It is those infernal spores," the Doctor said quietly.  "See how our
track from the rocks to the blowholes is marked by the filthy weeds.
All that started from the dust Anderson and I shed from our boots and
our clothes as we marched.  The sea of green rope between us and the
horizon grew up in the night from the spores we lost to the wind.
Evidently this stuff grows very slowly at first, then like a fire, or
we should have noticed it before we went to sleep.  So much for theory.
Has anyone a plan for getting out of this?  Don't get panicky.  Take
your time."

"We might try to break our way through to the clean ice east of the
band," the Captain suggested, "and march round the stuff."

"Not much chance of beating it to the ship, I'm afraid.  Still, that's
one plan.  Any more?"

There was no response.

"Well," said Lane, "I suppose it is forward march.  Not that I am
particularly anxious to return to civilization with this blunder on my
head.  My stupidity has let loose one of the enemies which that
forgotten race gave its life to chain.  Having done the asinine thing I
now see how it could have been avoided.  Evidently these spores require
cold and moisture in order to grow like this.  Possibly a low
temperature actually forces the growth beyond all nature.  In the dry,
warm pockets in the cement, sealed from light and moisture, the spores
would lie dormant indefinitely.

"Probably what we found is the mass of spores from a growth which
started from a few dusted off the bodies of the last workers.  When the
vegetation had exhausted the soil and moisture in the pocket it ceased
to grow.  In the warmth, I imagine, the growth was slow and natural.
The spores have retained their life all these millions of years,
waiting for a fool like me to broadcast them over the ideal medium for
their luxuriant growth and propagation.  Did those dead workers foresee
the ice ages ahead?  Did they seal the caves against the escape of this
fiend to its stimulating cold?  I don't know.  Such is my theory, and
it is my last.  Which way, Anderson?"

"Head northeast.  Ole, you're the strongest.  Go first till you give
in.  We head off the stuff before it grows over that bay against the
rocks to the left.  Then we can climb along the rocks and beat it to
the east--if we can.  It is an inch higher than it was when we began
talking."



OLE made about twenty feet.  Panting and sweating he stopped for
breath.  He made another two feet and collapsed in the green slush.

"All right, Ole," the Captain said, taking his place.  "Fall behind
while I have a go."

Anderson gave out at the third yard.

"Drake, you're next."

Drake made less than a yard.  Lane followed with a yard and a half.
Edith shoved.  And so it went until complete exhaustion overtook them
less than a hundred feet from their starting place.  By now the green
mass grew high above their heads when they stood erect.

"I can do no more," Anderson panted.

Saying nothing they flung themselves down on the green mess they had
trampled.  Presently Edith got to her feet and beckoned to Drake.  He
followed her back along the green tunnel.  The hair-like mass at the
farther end was already a foot high.  This was a second growth
springing rankly up from the trampled slush of the first.

"I wish you to know," Edith began when they reached the end, "that I
have always loved you.  We shall not get out of here.  I feel no shame
in telling you."

"Why didn't you tell me before," he said, touched to the heart.  "I
never knew you cared that way for me, although I hoped that some day
you might, darling.  We shall die here.  Let us forget the past and not
think of the cold eternity before us.  The present is enough."

They heard someone ripping through the young growth in the tunnel.  It
was Ole.

"The Doctor sent me to fetch some grub," he said.

Edith's heart gave a great leap.  While there is appetite there is
hope.  Her father's head had started working again.

"Come on," she said to Drake, "we shall be married after all."

They found Lane and the Captain sitting in silence.  Anderson's face
was expressionless.  The Doctor glanced up at Edith's happy face, and a
spasm of pain contracted his own.  For he had sent Ole to fetch, not
food, but a hundred pounds of dynamite.  He had hoped to end the misery
of all of them painlessly and instantaneously without Edith's
foreknowledge.

"Have you thought of a way out?" she asked hopefully.

"Yes," he said.  "But seeing you I haven't the courage to take it."

She guessed.

"John and I," she said, laying her hand on Drake's arm, "will go back
again to the end of the tunnel where you can't see us.  I'm not afraid."

"But I am," he said.

She stood looking down at him, all the love and affection of her past
happy life in her eyes.

"You needn't be afraid.  I never was frightened of the dark."

Ole joined them, dragging his moss-grown pack.

Anderson glared at him.

"Why didn't you do it back there instead of coming here to scare the
girl to death?"

"I'm not going to do it.  You are.  Suicide and murder are against my
religion."

"Blowing you to hell is the only good thing about this whole business.
Hand me a cap and cut off a three-inch fuse."

In spite of himself Ole began to fumble.  His half-frozen fingers
refused to pick out the cap.  Then searching for his knife to cut the
fuse he remembered what had become of it.  He looked at Edith.

"You couldn't fetch my knife, could you?"

"No, stupid," she laughed.  "How could I fly back to the tunnel?"

"Here," the Captain exclaimed, impatiently brushing him aside, "I'll do
it."

Working in silence Anderson methodically set about his business.  Lane
still sat in the green slush, trying not to think of Edith.  Presently
he rose to his feet.

"The blowholes will spout in a moment," he said.  "I just felt the
suspicion of a tremor."

Involuntarily Anderson paused in his work.

The violent shaking began and ended with unexpected suddenness,
throwing them down in the slush.  A dull thudding in the air announced
the kindling of the flame cones.

"Gas, oil!" Lane shouted.

In his excitement he was incapable of giving coherent expression to the
association of ideas which flashed across his memory.  The others
started away from him.  Even Edith drew back in alarm.  Although they
were about it die it seemed a terrible thing that one of their number
should go out of life mad.

"Don't you remember, Ole?" he continued, barely able to utter the words
for emotion.  "The oil from the shale on the beach oozed down into the
hole where that green stuff lay.  That plant was the same as this.
What destroyed it?  Oil!  The whole mass was dissolved, a mess of brown
sludge when we saw it next.  Oil is its natural enemy!  Those gas
flames made me think of oil.  Thank God for memory!"

They still thought him demented.

"Nitric acid might as well be its natural enemy," Drake remarked, "for
all the good it will do us.  Where are we to get oil?"

Drake had not yet learned that genius is the gift for making the most
of circumstances.

"Where?" the Doctor shouted.  "From the tank of the airplane of course.
Edith, can you spare two hundred gallons and still have enough petrol
to take us to the south shore of the oil lake?"

"Yes.  It is less than a ten-minute fly.  I can spare three hundred
gallons if you need that much and have plenty to fly to the cache by
the ship."

But Lane had not yet thought that far.  Neither his own possible escape
from death nor that of the party had yet come above his horizon.  He
was planning a greater deliverance.

"Break through to the plane, Ole," he ordered, "while I get the can."



THE twelve feet to the oil tank took only half an hour.  Hope had
trebled their strength.  The first petrol drawn was used to soak the
spores in the can.  These were then thrown away in the tunnel and the
can washed clean.

"Strip that green devil off the plane somehow, the rest of you," Lane
directed, "while I spread the petrol in the tunnel."

They went at the job like tigers.

"Look," Lane cried from the tunnel.  "See what the soaked spores did."

Hurrying back they found him standing in a pool of brown muck.  Like a
field of dry flax before a fire the eight-foot wall of green hair was
dissolving round the edges of the pool.  The almost instantaneous decay
ate like a flame into the impenetrable thicket.

Lane carefully spread his can of oil against the matted roots along the
left side of the tunnel.  When he returned with the second can a band
of brown slush two feet broad marked the destruction wrought by the
first.

Four hours later they had cleared the plane and opened up a straight
alleyway through the matted tangle sufficiently broad and long enough
for the plane to run along and take the air.

"Hang on all your dynamite," Lane ordered.  "I'll bring the can.  Leave
everything else."

Ole and Edith climbed into their places, Drake sat on the back on the
seat clutching Ole round the neck, while Lane and the Captain disposing
themselves on either side of Drake clung to him and to one another.
The load, although considerable, was far below the plane's lifting
capacity.  Edith ran it down the long alleyway and lifted from the
brown sludge with thirty feet to spare.

Their last look at the blowholes showed the green mounds all about them
lit up by the cheery fires.

Rising to the thousand foot level they saw beneath them a vivid green
band twelve miles broad winding like a river due north toward the oil
lake.

"That's what the wind did with the spores we lost last night.  The
stuff multiplies on itself like compound interest at ten thousand per
cent.  Unless we stop its growth now this whole continent will be
matted thick in a month."

"And then it will blow across the ocean to South America."

"Not if I can help it.  We don't know yet whether it can multiply like
this in a warmer climate.  Freezing temperature seems to act on it like
a violent stimulant.  For all we know it might be controllable at ten
degrees and perish at fifty.  But I'm not going to find out.  This
plague will never get father than that lake.  Land near the cache,
Edith.  We shall need all the dynamite we have."

Anderson guessing the Doctor's purpose made no remonstrance.  The oil
had risen higher in the lake during the night.  Six inches more and it
would begin spilling over the south barrier of the lake.  But they
could not wait for nature.  The green plague river was broadening
before their eyes.  In half a day it would have streamed up the
intervening three miles to the oil lake, surrounded it, and swept onto
the desolate plain beyond in its ever swifter rush to the ocean.

Ole unearthed the pick and began digging furiously into the ice under
the narrowest point of the barrier.

"How long will it take to fly across the lake, Edith?" Lane asked.

"Twenty minutes at the most."

"Then give your shoots a twenty-minute fuse," Lane directed.  "We
shan't stay to see the show.  The oil may catch when the dynamite
explodes.  All hands soak themselves in crude oil.  We can't risk
starting those infernal spores in a new place."

Setting the example Lane baled up several canfulls of the black oil and
drenched himself from head to feet.  Then he soused the plane.  Having
finished he passed the can to Drake and stood watching Anderson at his
work.  The Captain was saying nothing in the presence of his tragedy.

"Look here, Captain," Lane said, "all this is due to my stupidity
alone.  I have lost your oil for you.  In slight return I shall make
you a present of the finest thousand-acre orange grove in California."

The proud temptation to refuse gave way to the memory of twenty years
of cold and stink.

"I accept the sunshine and orange blossoms with all my thanks," the
Captain replied.

"And while you are about that job," Lane continued, "put this in with
the dynamite too."  He handed the Captain his tobacco box containing
the parasites which he had scraped from the monster's tall.  "I shall
not take another chance with any of the infernal diseases of the
archaean age," he said.

Having planted the last charge Anderson soaked his clothing in oil
before lighting all four fuses.  He then clambered up on the plane with
the others.  They were off as fast as they could fly.

Twenty minutes passed, twenty-five, and they were well beyond the north
shore of the lake speeding toward the ship.

"Are you sure those fuses were dry?" Lane shouted above the roar of the
propeller.

Anderson nodded.



THEY flew another three minutes before hearing in rapid succession the
four dull explosions which announced the release of the oil flood.

Nearing the ship they saw Bronson and the men on the ice near the
petrol cache loafing about, exercising the dogs and the now sturdy
devil chick.

"Out of here at once," Anderson ordered.  "Is steam up?"

"Yes sir."

"Send four of the men to the petrol cache to fill the tank of the plane
to capacity.  Order the rest to get the sledges and their packs in
shape for an immediate march to the coast.  Hell's going to break
loose."

Bronson obeyed orders on the run.

"Now Edith," Anderson continued, "you and Hansen stand by ready to
follow the ship down the channel.  If mud comes down and mires us fly
as fast as you can to the nearest whaling station and send help.  Ole
will do the navigating.  We shall pack to the coast and wait there for
relief."

"Can I take the devil chick?" she asked.

"That brute?  It's as big as a cow."

"The plane can lift it easily."

"Nothing doing.  But," he added, seeing the tears in her eyes, "we'll
herd the ugly beast along with us if we have to hike."

Bronson rejoined them to say that the plane was now ready for a
thousand mile flight.

"Very well.  Get the ship out of here.  Have the men ready to leave her
at the first sign of trouble."

The men were already stowing their effects, including the obstinate
devil chick, aboard the ship.

Bronson had gone but four steps when the ice leapt into a crimson glow.

"Get the men on the ice and run for the coast," Anderson shouted.

The men needed no orders.  They were swarming out as fast as they
could.  The appalling concussion swept over them just as they reached
the ice.  Looking south they saw the roof of the continent hurtling
skyward.  A vast gush of red flames surging up overtook the black mass,
flattened along its underside in curling billows of crimson, and for an
instant pressed the millions of tons of suspended rock and cement hard
against the sky.  Then it fell.

The fliers were already headed for the coast.

Edith's last vision of the ship revealed one of the crew tugging
desperately at the devil chick's head in a final attempt to get it
ashore again.  Failing, the man abandoned the wretched creature and
jumped to save his own life.

The falling of the suspended rock had set up a choppy land tide of
waves twenty feet high.  Like a thunderclap the walls of the inlet met,
parted, and met again.  The ship was matches.

Explosion after explosion rolled the fleeing machine over and over in
the turbulent air like a feather.  But it was a well built plane, and
nothing of consequence snapped.

The fliers, better than the men far behind reeling over the heaving
ice, knew what might come at any instant.  The oil which had gushed
over the plain from the lake, to plunge down the flaming blowholes and
generate vast quantities of gas, must still be rushing in a river of
fire toward the subterranean reservoirs beneath the unruined paradise.
That the two chains of underground lakes were connected they had good
grounds for believing.

Their expectations were realized late that afternoon as they sped
northeast in their flight toward the nearest whaling station.  Neither
has any memory of how they weathered the unimaginable tempest of
detonations which shook the upper air from the Antarctic to Rio.  The
unruined paradise was ruined.

Four weeks later the whaling vessel _Orion_ of Boston rescued a party
of stunned and half-starved men shivering on the ice at the mouth of
what had been the inlet.  They were unable to give any coherent account
of their experience.  Not a member of the crew had been lost.  The
expedition had returned with its life.






[End of The Greatest Adventure, by John Taine]
