Darkness and Dawn (48 page)

"The story says only eight or ten altogether reached this sea. It was
much smaller then. The islands of the Lanskaarn, as we call them now,
were then joined to the land here. Great changes have taken place.
Verily, all is different! Everything was lost—language and arts, and
even the look of the Folk.

"We became as you see us. The tradition itself was forgotten save by a
few. Sometimes we increased, then came pestilences and famines,
outbreaks of lava and hot mud and gases, and nearly all died. At one
time only seven remained—"

"For all the world like the story of Pitcairn Island and the mutineers
of the 'Bounty'!" interrupted the engineer. "Yes, yes—go on!"

"There is little more to tell. The tradition says there was once a
place of records, where certain of the wisest men of our Folk placed
all their lore to keep it; but even this place is lost. Only one
family kept any knowledge of the English as a kind of inheritance and
the single book went with that family—"

"But the Lanskaarn and the other peoples of the Abyss, where did
they
come from?" asked Stern eagerly.

The patriarch shook his head.

"How can I tell?" he answered. "The tradition says nothing of them."

"Some other groups, probably," suggested Beatrice, "that came in at
different times and through other ways."

"Possibly," Stern assented. "Anything more to tell?"

"Nothing more. We became as savages; we lost all thought of history or
learning. We only fought to live! All was forgotten.

"My grandfather taught the English to my father and he to me, and I
had no son. Nobody here would learn from me. Nobody cared for the
book. Even the tradition they laughed at, and they called my brain
softened when I spoke of a place where in the air a light shone half
the time brighter even than the great flame! And in every way they
mocked me!

"So I—I"—the old man faltered, his voice tremulous, while tears
glittered in his dim and sightless eyes—"I ceased to speak of these
things. Then I grew blind and could not read the book. No longer could
I refresh my mind with the English. So I said in my heart: 'It is
finished and will soon be wholly forgotten forever. This is the end.'

"Verily, I laid the book to rest as I soon must be laid to rest! Had
you not come from that better place, my thought would have been
true—"

"But it isn't, not by a jugful!" exclaimed the engineer joyously, and
stood up in the dim-lit little room. "No,
sir!
She and I, we're
going to change the face of things considerably! How? Never mind just
yet. But let's have a look at the old volume, father. Gad! That must
be some relic, eh? Imagine a book carried about for a thousand years
and read by at least thirty generations of men! The book, father! The
book!"

Already the patriarch had arisen and now he gestured at the heavy
bench of stone.

"Can you move this, my son?" asked he. "The place of the book lies
beneath."

"Under there, eh? All right!" And, needing no other invitation, he set
his strength against the massive block of gneiss.

It yielded at the second effort and, sliding ponderously to one side,
revealed a cavity in the stone floor some two feet long by about
eighteen inches in breadth.

Over this the old man stooped.

"Help me, son," bade he. "Once I could lift it with ease, but now the
weight passes my strength."

"What? The weight of a book? But—where is it? In this packet, here?"

He touched a large and close-wrapped bundle lying in the little crypt,
dimly seen by the flicker of the oily wick.

"Yea. Raise it out that I may show you!" answered the patriarch. His
hands trembled with eagerness; in his blind eyes a sudden fever seemed
to burn. For here was his dearest, his most sacred treasure, all that
remained to him of the long-worshipped outer world—the world of the
vague past and of his distant ancestors—the world that Stern and
Beatrice had really known and seen, yet which to him was only "all a
wonder and a wild desire."

"Lay the book upon the bench," he ordered. "I will unwrap it!"

Complex the knots were, but his warped and palsied fingers deftly
undid them as though long familiar with each turn and twist. Then off
came many a layer of the rough brown seaweed fabric and afterward
certain coverings of tough shark-skin neatly sewn.

"The book!" cried the patriarch. "Now behold it!"

"
That?
" exclaimed Beatrice. "I never saw a book of that shape!"

"Each page is separately preserved, wherefore it is so very thick,"
explained the old man. "See here?"

He turned the leaves reverently. Stern, peering closely by the dim
light, saw that they were loosely hung together by loops of heavy gold
wire. Each page was held between two large plates of mica, and these
plates were securely sealed around the edges by some black substance
like varnish or bitumen.

"Only thus," explained the patriarch, "could we hope to save this
precious thing. It was done many hundreds of years ago, and even then
the book was almost lost by age and use."

"I should say so!" ejaculated Stern. Even sealed in its air-tight
covering, he saw that every leaf was yellow, broken, rotten, till the
merest breath would have disintegrated it to powder. A sense of the
infinitudes of time bridged by this volume overwhelmed him; he drew a
deep breath, reached out his hand and touched the wondrous relic of
the world that was.

"Long ago," continued the old man, "when the book began to crumble,
one of my ancestors copied it on gold plates, word by word, letter by
letter, every point and line. And our family used only that book of
gold and put away the other. But in my grandfather's time the
Lanskaarn raided our village and the gold plates went for loot to make
them trinkets, so they were lost.

"My father meant to begin the task again, but was killed in a raid. I,
too, in my fighting youth, had plans for the work; but blindness
struck me before I could find peace to labor in. So now all that
remains of the mother tongue here is my own knowledge and these
tattered scraps. And, if you save us not, soon all, all will be lost
forever!"

Much moved, the engineer made no reply, yet thoughts came crowding to
his brain. Here visibly before him he beheld the final link that tied
these lost Folk to the other time, the last and breaking thread. What
history could this book have told? What vast catastrophes, famines,
pestilences, wars, horrors had it passed through? In what unwritten
cataclysms, in what anguish and despair and long degeneration had the
human mind still clung to it and cherished it?

No one could tell; yet Stern felt the essence of its unknown story. An
infinite pathos haloed the ancient volume. And reverently he touched
its pages once again; he bent and by the guttering light tried to make
out a few words here or there upon the crackled, all but perished
leaves.

He came upon a crude old woodcut, vague and dim; then a line of text
caught his eye.

"By Gad! 'Pilgrim's Progress'!" he exclaimed. "Look,
Beatrice—'Pilgrim's Progress,' of all books! No wonder he says
'Verily' and talks archaic stuff and doesn't catch more than half we
say. Well, I'll be—"

"Is this then not the English of your time?" asked the patriarch.

"Hardly! It was centuries old at the epoch of the catastrophe. Say,
father, the quicker you forget this and take a few lessons in the
up-to-date language of the real world that perished, the better! I see
now why you don't get on to the idea of steamships and railroads,
telephones and wireless and all the rest of it. God! but you've got a
lot to learn!"

The old man closed up the precious volume and once more began wrapping
it in its many coverings.

"Not for me, all this, I fear," he answered with deep melancholy. "It
is too late, too late—I cannot understand."

"Oh, yes, you can, and will!" the engineer assured him. "Buck up,
father! Once I get my biplane to humming again you'll learn a few
things, never fear!"

He stepped to the door of the hut and peered out.

"Rain's letting up a bit," he announced. "How about it? Do the signs
say it's ready to quit for keeps? If so—all aboard for the dredging
expedition!"

The storm, in fact, was now almost at an end, and when the
engineer awoke next morning he found the rain had wholly ceased.
Though the sea was still giving forth white vapors, yet these had not
yet reached their usual density. From the fortifications he could see,
by the reflected lights of the village and of the great flame, a
considerable distance out across the dim, mysterious sea. He knew the
time was come to try for the recovery of the machine, if ever.

"If I don't make a go of it to-day," said he, "I might as well quit
for good. There'll never be a better opportunity. And if it's left
down there very much longer, Heaven only knows what kind of shape
it'll be in. I make good to-day or it's all off."

Beatrice eagerly seconded his plans. The old man, too, was impatient
as a child to learn more of this wonder of the upper world. And,
translating to the Folk the directions that Stern gave him, he soon
had a great throng on the beach, where lay not only the Folk's canoes,
but also many left by the slaughtered and dispersed Lanskaarn.

Two hours after the crude meal that must be called breakfast for want
of a better name, the expedition was ready to start.

Twenty-five of the largest boats, some holding twelve men, set out, to
the accompaniment of shouting and singing much like that when the
captives had been brought in. Stern, Beatrice and the patriarch all
sat in one canoe with eight paddlers. In the bottom lay Stern's heavy
grapple with the ten long ropes, now twisted into a single cable,
securely knotted to its ring.

To Stern it seemed impossible that any means existed for locating,
even approximately, the spot where the machine had fallen. As the
shore faded away and the village lights disappeared in the gloom and
mist, all landmarks vanished. Everywhere about them the dim, oily sea
stretched black and gloomy, with here and there the torches of the
little fleet casting strange blue-green lights that wavered like
ghostly will-o'-the-wisps over the water.

The boatman's song wailed high, sank low, trembled and ceased; and for
a while came silence, save for the dipping of the paddles, the purling
of the waters at the bow of the canoe. The engineer, despite his
hard-headed practicality, shuddered a little and drew his mantle
closer round him.

Beatrice, too, felt the eerie mystery of the scene. Stern put an arm
about her; she slid her hand into his, and thus in silence they sat
thinking while the boats drew on and on.

"They really know where they're going, father?" the engineer asked at
length. "It all looks alike to me. How can they tell?"

"Verily, I cannot explain that to you," the old man made answer. "We
know, that is all."

"But—"

"Had I been always blind you could not expound sight to me. A deaf man
cannot understand sound."

"You mean you've developed some new sense, some knowledge of direction
and location that
we
haven't got?"

"Yea, it must be so. In all these many centuries among the dark mists
we have to know. And this gloom, this night, are the same to us as you
have told me a lake on the surface would be to you in the brightness
of that sun which none of use have ever yet beheld."

"Is that so? Well, hanged if I get it! However, no matter about that
just so they locate the place. Can they find the exact spot, father?"

"Perhaps not so. But they will come near to it, my son. Only have
patience; you shall see!"

Stern and the girl relapsed into silence again, and for perhaps a
quarter-hour the boats moved steadily forward through the vapors in a
kind of crescent, the tips of which were hidden by the mist.

Then all at once a sharp cry rang from a boat off to the right, a cry
taken up and echoed all along the line. The paddles ceased to ply; the
canoes now drifted idly forward, their wakes trailing out behind in
long "slicks" of greasy blackness flecked with sparkles from the
reflected light of all those many torches.

Another word of command; the boatmen slowed their craft.

"Drop the iron here, son, and drag the bottom," said the patriarch.

"Good!" answered Stern, thrilled with excitement and wonder.

He pitched the dredge into the jetty sea. It sank silently as he payed
out the cable. At a depth he estimated—from the amount of cable still
left in the boat—as about thirty fathoms, it struck bottom.

He let out another five fathoms.

"All right, father!" he exclaimed sharply. "Tell our boatmen to give
way!"

The old man translated the order: "Ghaa vrouaad, m'yaun!" (Go
forward, men.) The paddles dipped again and Stern's canoe moved
silently over the inky surface.

Every sense alert, the engineer at the gunwale held the cable. For a
few seconds he felt nothing as the slack was taken up; then he
perceived a tug and knew the grapple was dragging.

Now intense silence reigned, broken only by the sputter of the smoking
torches. The canoes, spaced over the foggy sea, seemed floating in a
void of nothingness; each reflected light quivered and danced with
weird and tremulous patterns.

Stern played the cable as though it were a fish-line. All his senses
centered on interpreting the message it conveyed. Now he felt that it
was dragging over sand; now came rocks—and once it caught, held, then
jerked free. His heart leaped wildly. Oh, had it only been the
aeroplane!

The tension grew. Out, far out from the drifting line of boats the
canoe went forward; it turned at a word from the patriarch and dragged
along the front of the line. It criss-crossed on its path; Stern had
to admire the skill and thoroughness with which the boatmen covered
the area where their mysterious sixth sense of location told them the
machine must lie.