Chapter 16: The Metal Shell

[Illustration: She was motioning for him to follow.]

[Sidenote: The Voice of the Mountain heralds Rawson’s Messianic coming to the White Ones in their hour of need.]

Dean Rawson had passed through a nerve-racking experience. It was not a question of courage--Rawson had plenty of that--but there are times when a man’s nervous system is shocked almost to insensibility by sheer horror. Not at once did he realize what was happening.

Perhaps it was the sound of pursuit that jarred him out of the fog clouding all his thoughts and perceptions. It was like the sound of fighting animals--cat-beasts--whose snarls had risen to screaming, squalling shrieks of rage. It was sheer beastliness, the din that echoed through that narrow passage.

Ahead of him the girl was running. She held a light in her hand. Soft wrappings of cloth hung loosely from her waist; like her golden hair, it was flung backward in the strong draft of air against which they were struggling. She was outlined clearly before the red, rock-like masses where her light was falling; she was running swiftly, gracefully, like a wild, woodland nymph.

Two men, their milk-white bodies naked but for the thick folds of their loin cloths, were beside Rawson, helping him along. Two others followed. And, by their haste and their odd whispered words of alarm, he knew that pursuit had not been expected; they must have thought to get away unobserved.

Rawson felt his strength returning. He shook himself free from those who tried to aid him. He was amazed at how easily he ran: his weight was a mere nothing; his efforts were expended in driving his body against the blast of wind. The air seemed dense, thick; he had almost the feeling of forcing himself through water.

Ahead of him the girl darted abruptly through a narrow crack in the wall. Rawson followed--and then began a wild race through a network of connecting passages, a vast labyrinth of caves, more like fractures in this strange red substance which Rawson could think of only as rock, for lack of a more accurate name, until at last there was no sound except that of their own hurrying feet.

They stopped and stood panting in one of the wider passages. He heard nothing but the endless rush of the wind. For the first time Rawson became aware of his own almost naked condition.

The mole-men had prepared him for the sacrifice. They had decked him with a loin cloth of woven gold. It felt cold to the touch, and Rawson did not doubt its being made of fine threads of the precious metal. About his neck hung a gold chain with a heavy object suspended; he tore it off, and found again a representation of a golden sun. The copper priests had arrayed him to meet their fire-god, and again Rawson wondered at the emblem they employed.

“What in the name of the starlit heavens,” he demanded silently of himself, “could this buried race know of the sun?”

The others were watching him. In the glow of that strange light held by the girl he saw them smiling. They were congratulating one another with odd, soft-syllabled words. And Rawson, ignorant of their tongue, was mute, when his whole soul cried out to thank them.

He gripped the hands of the men. They were as tall as himself, their gaze level with his own. Their faces were human, friendly; their eyes sparkled and smiled into his. Then he turned to the girl.

She had seen the method of greeting this stranger employed. She extended her hand--a white hand, slim, soft, cool. And Rawson, choking with emotion, knowing that here was the one who had first seen him and who had returned to save him, a stranger, bent low above that hand, held in his own so rough and burned, and pressed his lips to the slender fingers in a quick caress.

When he raised his head she was looking at him oddly; her eyes were deep, serious and unsmiling. He wondered if, blunderingly, he had offended her. He could not know; he did not know their customs.

Again the slim girlish figure turned; her jeweled breast-plates flashed as she led the others on where always the way led upward and the wind pressed against them unceasingly.

The White Ones wore sandals that seemed woven of glass. Rawson’s bare feet were bruised and sore, for those narrower clefts had been paved only with broken fragments of the red walls. He moved less easily now. The heavy, beating air tired him; the lightness of his body made it all the more difficult to fight the steady wind. Still he followed the white figure of the girl where her light was flashing on endless walls of red.

In his ears a new sound was registering. Above the rush of the air, that now was soft and warm, a new note had risen to a hollow, unremitting roar. He knew that for some time he had been hearing it faintly. It grew louder, one long, steady, unchanging note, as they advanced. It was a deafening reverberation that seemed shaking the whole earth when they came at last to an open room.

It beat upon him thunderously. As deep as the deepest tone of a mighty organ, like a thousand gigantic organs welded in one, it roared and shook him through and through with its single note.

Exhausted by his wild flight, surrounded by this maelstrom of sound, he sank to the floor and let his laboring lungs have their way. But his eyes were searching the big room.

The great cave was too regularly formed to have had a natural origin. The light that the girl had carried gave only feeble illumination in so great a space that had so evidently been hollowed out of the solid red matter.

The light flashed here and there as the girl and her companions moved away. They were circling the room. Rawson saw the irregular outlines of entrances to many dark passages like the one through which they had come. The red rock-mass seemingly had been riven and torn, and apparently in front of each opening the white figures fought against the rush of outgoing air. Rawson felt the same current sweeping and whirling gustily about him.

Now his companions were across the room, and between him and them in the center of the floor he saw the mouth of a black well, a pit some twenty or more feet across. Directly above, where the red rock stuff formed a domed ceiling, he found a counterpart of the pit below--another great bore or open shaft, roughly circular. Apparently it went straight on up and was a continuation of that lower pit.

“This room was cut out,” Rawson was thinking, “by the white people or the mole-men--Lord knows who, or when, or why. Cut out around this big shaft...”

His thoughts trailed off. Even thinking seemed impossible under the battering of the roaring noise that pounded about him. Then another thought pierced through the bedlam. He had found the source of the uproar.

That upper shaft, the hole that went on up, must be plugged. There was no outlet that way, and this air that drove endlessly upward from the room must be coming from the lower shaft. It was striking up into that upper cavity.

An organ pipe, truly. But whence came the unending blast of air to keep that gigantic instrument in operation? Rawson dropped to his knees and crept slowly across the floor toward the pit. He must test his theory--see if that was where the air was driving in.

Just short of the brink he stopped. The girl had called--a cry of alarm. She was running swiftly toward him, circling the pit. And Rawson, as she tugged at him, trying to draw him back, knew that she had mistaken his motive. She had thought he was going to cast himself down.

He did not need to go farther. He was close to the edge. And now, even above that roaring sound he heard the rush of the column of air. He seated himself on the stone floor and smiled up at the girl reassuringly. Her eyes that had been dark with fear changed swiftly to a look so sweetly, beautifully tender that Dean Rawson found himself thrilled and shaken by an emotion that set his nerves to quivering even more than did the sonorous vibration from above.

Her companions had joined her. Dean saw her eyes regarding them steadily. Then, as if reaching some sudden final conclusion in her own mind, she dropped swiftly to her knees beside him, raised one of his hands in hers and pressed her soft lips against it.

And Dean, even had he known their language, could not in that moment have spoken. There had been something in the look of her eyes and the soft touch of her lips that of themselves went far beyond words.

“You darling,” he was whispering softly to himself as the girl sprang to her feet and walked swiftly away, the others following.

“An angel, no less--down in this damned place!”

He wondered, as he watched the flickering light far across the room, what destination they could be bound for. Surely no one so radiantly beautiful could inhabit a world of endless dungeons like that where the mole-men lived. But if not that, then what? Where would their next journey take them? And in what direction would they go?