Darkness and Dawn (36 page)

And with a fresh grip on the wheel, head well forward, every sense
alert and keen to meet whatever conditions might arise, to battle with
cross-currents, "air-holes," or any other vortices swirling up out of
those unknown depths, he skimmed the Pauillac fair toward the lip of
the monstrous vacancy.

Now as they rushed almost above the verge he could see conclusively
they were not dealing here with a canyon like the Yosemite or like any
other he had ever seen or heard of in the old days.

There was positively no bottom to the terrific thing!

Just a sheer edge and beyond that—nothing.

Nowhere any sign of an opposite bank; nowhere the faintest trace of
land. Far, far below, even a few faint clouds showed floating there as
if in mid-heaven.

The effect was ghastly, unnerving and altogether terrible. Not that
Stern feared height. No, it was the unreality of the experience, the
inexplicable character of this yawning edge of the world that almost
overcame him.

Only by a strong exercise of will-power could he hold the biplane to
her course. His every instinct was to veer, to retreat back to solid
earth, and land somewhere, and once more, at all hazards, get the
contact of reality.

But Stern resisted all these impulses, and now already had driven the
Pauillac right to the lip of the vast nothingness.

Now they were over!

"My God!" he cried, stunned by the realization of this thing. "Sheer
space! No bottom anywhere!"

For all at once they had shot, as it were, out into a void which
seemed to hold no connection at all with the earth they now were
quitting.

Stern caught a glimpse of the tall forest growing up to within a
hundred yards of the edge, then of smaller trees, dwindling to bushes
and grasses, and strange red sand that bordered the gap—sand and
rocks, barren as though some up-draft from the void had killed off
vegetable growth along the very brink.

Then all slid back and away. The red-ribbed wall of the great chasm,
shattered and broken as by some inconceivable disaster, some cosmic
cataclysm, fell away and away, downward, dimmer and more dim, until it
faded gradually into a blue haze, then vanished utterly.

And there below lay nothingness—and nothingness stretched out in
front to where the sight lost itself in pearly vapors that overdimmed
the sky.

Beatrice glanced at Stern as the Pauillac sped true as an arrow in its
flight, out into this strange and incomprehensible vacuity.

Just a shade paler now he seemed. Despite the keen wind, a glister of
sweat-drops studded his forehead. His jaw was set, set hard; she could
see the powerful maxillary muscles knotted there where the
throat-cords met the angle of the bone. And she understood that, for
the first time since their tremendous adventure had begun, the man
felt shaken by this latest and greatest of all the mysteries they had
been called upon to face.

Already the verge lay far behind; and now the sense of empty space
above and on all sides and there below was overpowering.

Stern gasped with a peculiar choking sound. Then all at once, throwing
the front steering plane at an angle, he brought the machine about and
headed for the distant land.

He spoke no word, nor did she; but they both swept the edge of the
chasm with anxious eyes, seeking a place to light.

It was with tremendous relief that they both saw the solid earth once
more below them. And when, five minutes later, having chosen a clear
and sand-barren on the verge, some two miles southward along the
abyss, Stern brought the machine to earth, they felt a gratitude and a
relief not to be voiced in words.

"By Jove!" exclaimed the man, lifting Beatrice from the seat, "if that
isn't enough to shake a man's nerve and upset all his ideas,
geological or otherwise, I'd like to know what is!"

"Going to try to cross it?" she asked anxiously; "that is, if there is
any other side? I know, of course, that if there is you'll find out,
some way or other!"

"You overestimate me," he replied. "All I can do, for now, is to camp
down here and try to figure the problem out—with your help. Whatever
this thing is, it's evident it stands between us and our plan. Either
Chicago lies on the other side—(provided, of course, as you say, that
there is one)—or else it's been swallowed up, ages ago, by whatever
catastrophe produced this yawning gulf.

"In either event we've got to try to discover the truth, and act
accordingly. But for now, there's nothing we can do. It's getting late
already. We've had enough for one day, little girl. Come on, let's
make the machine ready for the night, and camp down here and have a
bite to eat. Perhaps by to-morrow we may know just what we're up
against!"

The moon had risen, flooding the world with spectral light, before
the two adventurers had finished their meal. All during it they had
kept an unusual silence. The presence of that terrible gulf, there not
two hundred feet away to westward of them, imposed its awe upon their
thoughts.

And after the meal was done, by tacit understanding they refrained
from trying to approach it or to peer over. Too great the risks by
night. They spoke but little, and presently exhausted by the trying
events of the day—sought sleep under the vanes of the Pauillac.

But for an hour, tired as he was, the engineer lay thinking of the
chasm, trying in vain to solve its problem or to understand how they
were to follow any further the search for the ruins of Chicago, where
fuel was to be had, or carry on the work of trying to find some living
members of the human race.

Morning found them revived and strengthened. Even before they made
their fire or prepared their breakfast they were exploring along the
edge of the gigantic cleft.

Going first to make sure no rock should crumble under the girl's
tread, no danger threaten, Stern tested every foot of the way to the
very edge of the sheer chasm.

"Slowly, now!" he cautioned, taking her hand. "We've got to be careful
here. My God, what a drop!"

Awed, despite themselves, they stood there on a flat slab of schist
that projected boldly over the void. Seen from this point, the immense
nothingness opened out below them even more terrible than it had
seemed from the biplane.

The fact is common knowledge that a height, viewed from a balloon or
aeroplane, is always far less dizzying than from a lofty building or a
monument. Giddiness vanishes when no solid support lies under the
feet. This fact Stern and the girl appreciated to the full as they
peered over the edge. Ten times more ominous and frightful the vast
blue mystery beneath them now appeared than it had seemed before.

"Let's look sheer down," said the girl. "By lying flat and peering
over, there can't be any danger."

"All right, but only on condition that I keep tight hold of you!"

Cautiously they lay down and worked their way to the edge. The
engineer circled Beta's supple waist with his arm.

"Steady, now!" he warned. "When you feel giddy, let me know, and we'll
go back."

The effect of the chasm, from the very edge of the rock, was
terrifying. It was like nothing ever seen by human eyes. Peering down
into the Grand Canyon of the Colorado would have been child's play
beside it. For this was no question of looking down a half-mile, a
mile, or even five, to some solid bottom.

Bottom there was none—nothing save dull purple haze, shifting vapors,
and an unearthly dim light which seemed to radiate upward as though
the sun's rays, reflected, were striving to beat up again.

"There must be miles and miles of air below us," said Stern, "to
account for this curious light-effect. Air, of course, will eventually
cut off the vision. Given a sufficiently thick layer, say a few
hundred miles, it couldn't be seen through. So if there
is
a bottom
to this place, be it one hundred or even five hundred miles down, of
course we couldn't see it. All we could see would be the air, which
would give this sort of blue effect."

"Yes; but in that case how can we see the sun, or the moon, or stars?"

"Light from above only has to pierce forty or fifty miles of really
dense air. Above that height it's excessively rarified. While down
below earth-level, of course, it would get more and more dense all the
time, till at the bottom of a five-hundred-mile drop the density and
pressure would be tremendous."

Beatrice made no answer. The spectacle she was gazing at filled her
with solemn thoughts. Jagged, rent and riven, the rock extended
downward. Here vast and broken ledges ran along its flanks—red,
yellow, black, all seared and burned and vitrified as by the fire of
Hell; there huge masses, up-piled, seemed about to fall into the
abyss.

A quarter-mile to southward, a rivulet had found its way over a
projecting ledge. Spraying and silvery it fell, till, dissipated by
the up-draft from the abyss, it dissolved in mist.

The ledge on which they were lying extended downward perhaps three
hundred yards, then sloped backward, leaving sheer empty space beneath
them. They seemed to be poised in mid-heaven. It was totally unlike
the sensation on a mountain-top, or even floating among the clouds;
for a moment it seemed to Stern that he was looking up toward an
unfathomable, infinite dome above him.

He shuddered, despite his cool and scientific spirit of observation.

"Some chemical action going on somewhere down there," said he, half to
divert his own attention from his thoughts. "Smell that sulphur? If
this place wasn't once the scene of volcanic activities, I'm no
judge!"

A moderate yet very steady wind blew upward from the chasm, freighted
with a scent of sulphur and some other substance new to Stern.

Beatrice, all at once overcome by sudden giddiness, drew back and hid
her face in both hands.

"No bottom to it—no end!" she said in a scared tone. "Here's the end
of the world, right here, and beyond this very rock—nothing!"

Stern, puzzled, shook his head.

"That's really impossible, absurd and ridiculous, of course," he
answered. "There
must
be something beyond. The way this stone falls
proves that."

He pitched a two-pound lump of granite far out into the air. It fell
vertically, whirling, and vanished with the speed of a meteor.

"If a whole side of the earth had split off, and what we see down
below there were really sky, of course the earth's center of gravity
would have shifted," he explained, "and that rock would have fallen in
toward the cliff below us, not straight down."

"How can you be sure it doesn't fall that way after the impulse you
gave it has been lost?"

"I shall have to make some close scientific tests here, lasting a day
or two, before I'm positive; but my impression is that this, after
all, is only a canyon—a split in the surface—rather than an actual
end of the crust."

"But if it were a canyon, why should blue sky show down there at an
angle of forty-five degrees?"

"I'll have to think that out, later," he replied. "Directly under us,
you see all seems deep purple. That's another fact to consider. I tell
you, Beatrice, there's more to be figured out here than can be done in
half an hour.

"As I see it, some vast catastrophe must have rent the earth, a
thousand or fifteen hundred years ago, as a result of which everybody
was killed except you and me. We're standing now on the edge of the
scar left by that explosion, or whatever it was. How deep or how wide
that scar is, I don't know. Everything depends on our finding out, or
at least on our guessing it with some degree of accuracy."

"How so?"

"Because, don't you see, this chasm stands between us and Chicago and
the West, and all our hopes of finding human life there. And—"

"Why not coast south along the edge here, and see if we can't run
across some ruined city or other where we can refill the tanks?"

"I'll think it over," the engineer answered. "In the meantime we can
camp down here a couple of days or so, and rest; and I can make some
calculations with a pendulum and so on."

"And if you decide there's probably another side to this gulf, what
then?"

"We cross," he said; then for a while stood silent, musing as he
peered down into the bottomless abyss that stretched there hungrily
beneath their narrow observation-rock.

"We cross, that's all!"

For two days they camped beside the chasm, resting, planning,
discussing, while Stern, with improvised transits, pendulums and other
apparatus, made tests and observations to determine, if possible, the
properties of the great gap.

During this time they developed some theories regarding the
catastrophe which had swept the world a thousand years ago.

"It seems highly and increasingly probable to me," the engineer said,
after long thought, "that we have here the actual cause of the vast
blight of death that left us two alone in the world. I rather think
that at the time of the great explosion which produced this rent,
certain highly poisonous gases were thrown off, to impregnate the
entire atmosphere of the world. Everybody must have been killed at
once. The poison must have swept the earth clean of human life."

"But how did
we
escape?" asked the girl.

"That's hard telling. I figure it this way: The mephitic gas probably
was heavy and dense, thus keeping to the lower air-strata, following
them, over plain and hill and mountain, like a blanket of death.

"Just what happened to us, who can tell? Probably, tightly housed up
there in the tower, the very highest inhabited spot in the world, only
a very slight infiltration of the gas reached us. If my theory won't
work, can you suggest a better one? Frankly, I can't; and until we
have more facts, we've got to take what we have. No matter, the
condition remains—we're alive and all the rest are dead; and I'm
positive this cleft here is the cause of it."