CHAPTER XXX
EXPLORATION
Under the ministering care of Beatrice and the patriarch,Stern's convalescence was rapid. The old man, consumed with terrorlest the dreaded chief, Kamrou, return ere the stranger should havewholly recovered, spent himself in efforts to hasten the cure. Andwith deft skill he brewed his potions, made his salves, and concoctedrevivifying medicines from minerals which only he--despite hisblindness--knew how to compound.
The blow that had so shrewdly clipped Stern's skull must haveinevitably killed, as an ox is dropped in the slaughter-house, a manless powerfully endowed with splendid energies and full vitality.
Even Stern's wonderful physique had a hard fight to regain its finelyripened forces. But day by day he gained--we must speak of days,though there were only sleeping-times and waking-times--until atlength, upon the fifth, he was able for the first time to leave hisseaweed bed and sit a while weakly on the patriarch's bench, withBeatrice beside him.
Hand in hand they sat, while Stern asked many questions, and the oldman, smiling, answered such as he saw fit. But of Kamrou neither henor the girl yet breathed one syllable.
Next day and the next, and so on every day, Stern was able to creepout of the hut, then walk a little, and finally--sometimes alone,sometimes with one or both his nurses--go all among the wondering andadmiring Folk, eagerly watch their labors of all kinds, try to talkwith them in the few halting words he was able to pick up, and learnmany things of use and deepest interest. A grave and serious Folk theywere, almost without games or sports, seemingly without religiousrites of any kind, and lacking festivals such as on the surface everybarbarous people had always had.
Their fisheries, netmaking, weaving, ironwork, sewing with long ironneedles and coarse fiber-thread keenly interested him. Accustomed nowto the roaring of the flame, he seemed no longer to hear this soundwhich had at first so sorely disconcerted him.
He found out nothing concerning their gold and copper supply; buttheir oil, he discovered, they collected in pits below the southernwall of the village, where it accumulated from deep fissures in therock. With joy he noted the large number of children, for this bespokea race still vigorous and with all sorts of possibilities whentrained.
Odd little, silent creatures the children were, white-faced andwhite-haired, playless and grave, laboring like their elders even fromthe age of five or six. They followed him about in little troops,watching him soberly; but when he turned and tried to talk with themthey scurried off like frightened rabbits and vanished in thealways-open huts of stone.
Thoroughly he explored every nook and corner of the village. As soonas his strength permitted, he even penetrated parts of the surroundingregion. He thought at times to detect among the Folk who followed andsurrounded him, unless he expressly waved them away, some hard lookshere or there. Instinctively he felt that a few of the people, hereone, there one, still held hate and bitterness against him as an alienand an interloper.
But the mass of them now outwardly _seemed_ so eager to serve and carefor him, so quick to obey, so grateful almost to adoration, that Sternfelt ashamed of his own suspicions and of the revolver that he stillalways carried whenever outside the patriarch's hut.
And in his heart he buried his fears as unworthy delusions, as theimaginings of a brain still hurt. The occasional black looks of one oranother of the people, or perchance some sullen, muttered word, he setdown as the crude manners of a primitive and barbarous race.
How little, despite all his skill and wit, he could foresee the truth!
To Beatrice he spoke no word of his occasional uneasiness, nor yet tothe old man. Yet one of the very first matters he attended to was theoverhauling of the revolvers, which had been rescued out of the meleeof the battle and been given to the patriarch, who had kept them witha kind of religious devotion.
Stern put in half a day cleaning and oiling the weapons. He foundthere still remained a hundred and six cartridges in his bandolier andthe girl's. These he now looked upon as his most precious treasure. Hedivided them equally with Beatrice, and bade her never go out unlessshe had her weapon securely belted on.
Their life at home was simple in the extreme. Beatrice had the innerroom of the hut for her own. Stern and the patriarch occupied theouter one. And there, often far into the hours of the sleeping-time,when Beatrice was resting within, he and the old man talked of thewonders of the past, of the outer world, of old traditions, of theabyss, and a thousand fascinating speculations.
Particularly did the old man seek to understand some notions of thelost machine on which the strangers had come from the outer world;but, though Stern tried most patiently to make him grasp the principleof the mechanism, he failed. This talk, however, set Stern thinkingvery seriously about the biplane; and he asked a score of questionsrelative to the qualities of the native oil, to currents in the sea,locations, depths, and so on.
All that he could learn he noted mentally with the precision of thetrained engineer.
With accurate scientific observation he at once began to pile upinformation about the people and the village, the sea, theabyss--everything, in fact, that he could possibly learn. He felt thateverything depended on a sound understanding of the topography andnature of the incredible community where he and the girl now foundthemselves--perhaps for a life stay.
Beatrice and he were clad now like the Folk; wore their hair twistedin similar fashion and fastened with heavy pins or spikes of gold,cleverly graven; were shod with sandals like theirs, made of the skinof a shark-like fish; and carried torches everywhere theywent--torches of dried weed, close-packed in a metal basket andimpregnated with oil.
This oil particularly interested Stern. Its peculiar blue flame struckhim as singular in the extreme. It had, moreover, the property ofburning a very long time without being replenished. A wick immersed init was never consumed or even charred, though the heat produced wasintense.
"If I can't set up some kind of apparatus to distil that intogas-engine fuel, I'm no engineer, that's all," said Stern to himself."All in time, all in time--but first I must take thought how to raisethe old Pauillac from the sea."
Already the newcomers' lungs had become absolutely accustomed to thecondensed air, so that they breathed with entire ease and comfort.They even found this air unusually stimulating and revivifying,because of its greater amount of oxygen to the cubic unit; and thusthey were able to endure greater exertions than formerly on thesurface of the earth.
The air never grew foul. A steady current set in the direction thatStern's pocket-compass indicated as north. The heat no longeroppressed them; they were even getting used to the constant fog and tothe darkness; and already could see far better than a fortnightpreviously, when they had arrived.
Stern never could have believed he could learn to do without sunlightand starlight and the free winds of heaven; but now he found that eventhese were not essential to human life.
Certain phenomena excited his scientific interest very keenly--such asthe source of the great gas-flare in the village, the rhythmicvariations in the air-current, the small but well-marked tides on thesea, the diminished force of gravitation--indicating a very greatdepth, indeed, toward the center of the earth--the greater density ofthe seawater, the heavy vaporization, certain singular rock-strata ofthe cliffs near the village, and many other matters.
All these Stern promised himself he would investigate as soon as timeand strength allowed.
The village itself, he soon determined, was about half a mile long andperhaps a quarter-mile across, measuring from the fortified gatedirectly back to the huge flame near the dungeon and the place ofbones.
He found, incidentally, that more than one hundred and sixty freshlyboiled and headless skeletons were now dangling from the iron rods,but wisely held his peace concerning them. Nor did the patriarchvolunteer any information about the loss of life of the Folk in thebattle. Stern estimated there were now some fifteen hundred people,men, women and children, still remaining in the community; but sinceh
e knew nothing of their number when he had arrived, he could not formmore than a rough idea of the total slaughter.
He found, however, on one of his excursions outside the walls--whichat a distance of two hundred and fifty yards from the sea stretched ina vast irregular arc abutting at each end against the cliff--thegraveyard of the Folk.
This awesome and peculiar place consisted of heaps of smooth blackboulders piled upon the dead, each heap surmounted by a stone withsome crude emblem cut upon it, such as a circle, a square, a clusterof dots, even the rude figure of a bird, a fish, a tortoise, and soon.
Certain of the figures he could make nothing of; but he concludedrightly they were totem-signs, and that they represented all whichstill remained of the art of writing among those barbarous remnants ofthe once dominant, powerful and highly cultured race of Americans.
He counted more than two hundred freshly built piles of stone, butwhether any of these contained more than one body of the Folk hecould, of course, not tell. Allowing, however, that only two hundredof the Folk and one hundred and sixty of the Lanskaarn had fallen, hereadily perceived that the battle had been, for intensity and highpercentage of killing, sanguinary beyond all battles of his own time.
Under the walls, too, the vast numbers of boulders which had beenthrown down, the debris of broken weapons, long and jaggedly barbediron spear-points and so on, indicated the military ardor and theboldness of the fighting men he now had to dominate and master.
And in his soul he knew the problem of taming, civilizing, saving thisrude and terrible people, was certainly the very greatest ever giveninto the hands of one man and one woman, since time began!
Along the beach he found a goodly number of empty revolver-shells.These he picked up, for possible reloading, in case he should be ableat some later time to manufacture powder and some fulminating mixture.
He asked the patriarch to have search made for all such empty shells.The Folk eagerly and intelligently cooperated.
With interest he watched the weird sight of scores of men with torchesrolling the great stones about, seeking for the precious cartridges.From the beach they tossed the shells up to him as he walked along thetop of the fortifications so lately the scene of horrible combat; anddespite him his heart swelled with pride in his breast, to be alreadydirecting them in some concerted labor, even so slight as this.
Save for some such interruption, the life of the community had nowsettled back into its accustomed routine.
With diminished numbers, but indomitable energy, the Folk went on withtheir daily tasks. Stern concluded the great funeral ceremony, whichmust have taken place over the fallen defenders, and the horriblerites attending the decapitation, boiling, and hanging up of thetrophies of war, the Lanskaarn skeletons, certainly must have formed aseries of barbaric pictures more ghastly than any drug-fiend's mostdiabolical nightmare. He thanked God that the girl had been sparedthese frightful scenes.
He could get the old man to tell him nothing concerning these terrificceremonies. But he discovered, some thirty yards to southward of thecircle of stone posts, a boiling geyserlike pool in the rock floor,whence the thick steam continually arose, and which at times burst upin terrific seething.
Here his keen eye detected traces of the recent rites. Here, he knew,the enemies' corpses--and perhaps even some living captives--had beenboiled.
And as he stood on the sloping, slippery edge of the great naturalcaldron, a pit perhaps forty feet in diameter--its margins all wornsmooth and greasy by innumerable feet--he shuddered in his soul.
"Good God!" thought he. "Imagine being flung in there!"
What was it, premonition or sheer repulsion, that caused him, brave ashe was, to turn away with a peculiar and intense horror?
Try as he might, he could not banish from his mind the horriblepicture of that boiling vat as it must have looked, crammed to the lipwith the tumbling, crowding bodies of the dead.
He seemed still to hear the groans of the wounded, the shrieks of theprisoners being dragged thither, being hurled into the spumy, scaldingwater.
And in his heart he half despaired of ever bringing back tocivilization a people so wild and warlike, so cruel, so barbarous asthese abandoned People of the Abyss.
Could he have guessed what lay in store for Beatrice and himselfshould Kamrou, returning, find them still there, a keener and deadlierfear would have possessed his soul.
But of Kamrou he knew nothing yet. Even the chief's name he had notheard. And the patriarch, for reasons of his own, had not yet told thegirl a tenth part of the threatening danger.
Even what he had told, he had forbidden her--for Allan's own sake--tolet him know.
Thus in a false and fancied sense of peace and calm security, Sternmade his observations, laid his plans, and day by day once more cameback toward health and strength again.
And day by day the unknown peril drew upon them both.