CHAPTER XI.

WHAT THE WHITE GLARE SHOWED.

The ninth lock was filled with a white, swirling mist, air now; water no longer, yet I had not remarked when the change came. I stood with Arturo at the window; the room outside was gray with dank, wet fog. As we rested in the lock, the pumps outside were hissing with the changing air. The fog dissolved; the air seemed clear, with only a dim haze. The door to the lock under us swung slowly open. We were lowered, our weight handled now by mechanical device. We came to rest in the tenth lock. The air became wholly clear, the moisture gone from it.

“Very good,” said Tad. They were preparing to leave. “Shall I open the door, Entt?”

“When we get, what you say--the signal.”

The tenth lock was a room like the others, a square, solid, metallic room, with girders of metal reënforcing its rock walls. It was dully illumined by an indirect light, whose source I could not see. The keeper sat with his instruments in a cubby; there was no dome over him. Figures moved on the lock floor about our globe--figures of men, down under the bulge of our walls; I could not see them clearly. They were clamping some mechanism upon us; the globe was swung aside, into an alcove evidently to store it.

A metallic, railed balcony ran midway of the room. Arturo gestured. I saw standing up there the figure of a woman. A brawny, powerful figure, gray-white of limb, with hair dead black. She stood on the balcony, gesturing down at the workmen, evidently commanding. A tall, gray figure, five feet ten, at the least. I could see her only dimly; a white shield like thin, flexible metal bound her torso; black coils of her long hair crossed her breast.

Our globe was drawn aside; the woman gestured vehemently at us. Entt called. “She said, ready now.”

Tad was moving about the globe. “Come on. We want a fast car, Entt.”

We swung open the globe’s heavy door. There was a gentle inrush of air; it seemed purer, fresher; but it brought an intensified smell of earthly dankness. Our voices in it were heavy, muffled.

I gathered up my few possessions, and we were ready. Entt extinguished the soft lights of the globe. Our round doorway showed with the dull radiance outside; voices in a strange tongue floated in to us; the clanking sounds of mechanisms; the last hiss of rushing air. The woman’s voice sounded sharp, vehemently commanding. With pounding heart I went down the swaying incline which they had put up. I stood on the damp metallic floor.

The realm of the abyss!

* * * * *

Black-garbed figures crowded around us. Entt scattered them. The gray woman on the balcony stood gazing down at us.

Entt led us away.

“See here,” said Arturo, “Entt, you tell her we must have the fastest car. Tell her we’re in a hurry.”

Entt called up. His words echoed dully through the heavy air. The woman answered--a brief, sharp, rasping retort. Her gray-white arm waved us away.

Arturo spurred us with fevered haste. We went through a small, heavy door. Down a ladder, out into an open space.

A sense of great open distance lay around me. It was wholly dark; a pregnant darkness wherein I felt that many strange things might be seen. A heavy, slow-moving breeze, coming from far off, stirred against my hot, tingling cheeks.

I gazed into what seemed an ocean of black space. I tried to focus my straining eyes upon something. Ah, there were stars! But I knew it was incredible. Not stars; points of twinkling light. They gleamed overhead, straight before me, to the sides, and even below--far ahead, but on a lower level than we were walking, so that I stopped suddenly, clutching at Arturo with the feeling that an abyss must yawn at my feet.

“This way, Jeff. Can you see?”

“No.”

“Hold to me. The car is right here.”

Tiny, distant points of light, like stars. I gazed at them across what was immeasurable blank distance.

But near at hand there were things vaguely to be seen. The dull blob of a passing man’s figure. A hundred feet away, perhaps, the vaguest of yellow radiance. Figures there; and a long, gleaming white thing lying in an upraised framework.

Entt headed us toward it. I walked, swaying as though alcoholite had befuddled me. A different gravity here. I felt lighter; yet it was not so much that. A difference. There have since been many learned discussions on this subject; I am not one to attempt it in technical detail. I felt as though all my weight were not pressing upon my feet with a downward pull in normal fashion. There was a side thrust--first one side and then the other as I chanced to be moving.

As though by inertia, my movement tended abnormally to persist. A different application of the gravitational force. And I believe, too, that the quality of this air had its effect. It seemed an atmosphere almost ponderable as I plowed through it. There was a sensible pressing of it upon me; the weight of the breeze was tangibly heavy.

“Here!” cried Arturo. “Get away, you!” He moved with irritable aggression at a man who crowded us, gaping curiously.

A flight into the void, by air! This was an aërocar, waiting here for us. A white structure of thin, flexible metal, some twenty feet long by four feet wide--open and flat like a long toboggan. There were seats on it, two abreast. A low railing, with bulging pontoons glowing dimly yellow. A streamlike thing; its forward end held a V-shaped windshield six feet high. Behind it a group of controls. Like a bowsprit of some ancient sailing vessel, a metallic tube projected out front. It glowed with a greenish phosphorescence.

We climbed on board. None of the attendants came with us; a group of them stood staring, whispering among themselves. Entt spoke to them briefly. The car trembled. The bowsprit tube in advance of us grew more intensely luminous, like a wire electrically heated in the darkness. The air around the tube snapped with a myriad tiny sparks.

Arturo said: “That air out front is dissolving--we’ll move forward into the vacuum.”

The glowing pontoons along our sides hissed with a downward thrust of gas. We lifted. The metallic stage with its staring group of figures dropped away. Entt tilted the luminous tube a trifle upward. We slid forward into the vacuum.

Faster. The wind went rushing past us. We slid out and upward into the blackness of the void, with its tiny points of light twinkling like stars in the distance.

* * * * *

I have flown, off and on, all my life. But this flight in the void of the abyss had an eerie unreality. Unreal, like the magic fancy of a child. Witches on a broomstick, with the rushing night around them, slanting up into the stars. Or a magic strip of carpet, this white thing upon which we crouched. Rushing through the wind; flexible, bending, undulating throughout its length beneath us.

We spoke very little; the noise of the wind tore at our words. I pulled at Arturo’s arm.

“How long--this flight?”

“An hour and a half, perhaps.”

My eyes seemed growing accustomed to the darkness; I strained them into the black space dotted with stars. Not many; occasional groups of them, above us, and as I gazed down over the low rail, I could see them twinkling underneath. The immensity of celestial space, as though we were rushing through it, out among the stars.

The sensation was suddenly dispelled. These were not stars, gigantic, infinitely far away, but points of man-made light, comparatively close. Gazing down, with vision expanding now in the darkness, I made out a vague black surface sliding under us. It lay, not horizontal, but sloping at a sharp angle, and I knew then that we were flying tilted partly sidewise. And while I stared, it swung level as we righted.

A dark surface of land; and the stars were lights down there. I saw them now as different colors, and in groups which might serve as landmarks.

The thin white shape of another aërocar rushed past us overhead.

We were descending now. I had guessed the surface to be some ten thousand feet beneath us. We dropped lower. I could make out a rocky, undulating landscape. Occasional patches of what might have been soil. Shining, narrow ribbons of roads. Areas of vegetation.

We passed over a village. Dull spots of light, merged into a glow. I saw the dark shapes of houses; on a hillside, tiers of them. There was movement down there, in city streets. Off to one side, beyond the settlement, a great flat structure was bathed in a red blast of light. It seemed a factory. A pit in the rocks beside it glowed red.

We swept on. The settlement vanished behind us. I saw a point of light, like a beacon, set on the summit of a rocky cliff. It changed color at intervals. Entt remarked it, with a gesture to Tad. He swung the controls; we went into a sharp, upward climb.

There were points of light always showing in the black void over our heads. As we had descended toward the rocky landscape, the lights overhead had grown very dim. I gazed up at them. They twinkled up there, very faint and dim now. I wondered what they could be. Not aërial beacons, poised over us? As we climbed, they began to brighten.

My imagination struggled to cope with this I was seeing. This silent realm down here--I had the sense of a great celestial spaciousness, but I knew that it was not so. This was within our earth, underground; a great, black void here, like a titanic cave. Yet it must be of finite area; comparatively small. Over my head now--up there where the points of light blazed like stars--must be some great rocky ceiling. And above that, miles above it, no doubt, my imagination saw the floor of our Pacific Ocean!

We ascended in a steep slant. The upper stars brightened. The lights beneath dimmed with distance. Then I saw overhead the outlines of what indeed was a rocky ceiling. It spread horizontally over us; eight or ten thousand feet still up there, at the least. I saw the lights set in this rocky ceiling.

* * * * *

And then I gasped. With sudden, changing viewpoint, I saw what was the truth. There were ribbons of roads on the rocky ceiling. Patches of open space that might have been soil. An open area glowing with light; houses in it--a settlement! It hung up there, the distant, small image of it--a settlement of houses and streets, upside down, perilously clinging to our ceiling!

It was then that my viewpoint changed. I envisaged, very suddenly, that our aëro was flying overturned. This land was beneath us, not above! Hanging head downward, as I have often done in a Wasp, I was staring down at this dark surface over which we were speeding. And as though to verify the fancy, I heard Entt speak, and saw him swing us. The void began slowly turning over. The dim stars came slowly swinging overhead; the rocky ceiling went down and steadied horizontally beneath us. Normality came again.

I grasped it now. This void, this titanic cave, was peopled on all its inner surface. Floor and ceiling, no difference. So strange! And yet was it? My fancy held that just a moment ago, this void had swung completely over. Our whole great earth lying outside it, had turned. This ceiling, which now was beneath us, was not a ceiling, but a floor. But in reality it was only our aëro which had turned.

So strange a thing, this inner surface peopled both top and bottom; up and down. But was it so strange? On the surface of our earth, we in the Americas visualize ourselves always as upright. Our heads are to the stars; our feet to the great earth which always lies bulging under us. And we can fancy China, down there with all its people hanging head downward. Yet we know that in twelve hours, they must be on top, and ourselves hanging down.

Up and down! Meaningless terms when used to try and denote anything of the Absolute! There is, indeed, in all our universe, no term of time or space, or motion that means anything, when taken by itself alone.

The gravity here in this void? The new textbooks explain it in most learned fashion. They talk of different air quality, different pressure down here. The great bulk of our earth, encompassing this inner void to give rise to whole new sets of mathematical formulæ. They say that our scientists had never before encountered an underground area which had its own atmosphere, subject to its own pressures and laws. Let them have their say; I tell only what I saw and felt.

We were dropping suddenly downward in a swift spiral. Arturo touched me. “The City of the Mound. See it there?”

A low, rocky mound-shaped hill lay beneath us, a mile or so off to one side. It was dotted with lights, covered with houses--low, circular houses, seemingly of a gray-black stone. We dropped lower. The mound was perhaps three hundred feet high. The houses were set on its slopes, in tiers. Streets were between them, in orderly array--horizontal streets, like circular bands around the hill; and there were other streets running down the slope. One side was a gentle declivity; the other, a steep, almost precipitous descent. The street there went down a broad, metallic ladder.

Arturo gestured. “Her house is there--the Great Woman. At the top of the mound.”

The wind was lessening as our flight slowed and we settled. I demanded:

“What woman? That one we saw in the tenth lock?”

“Nonsense. She was a subordinate. The Empress--I call her that. Ruler of this realm, I mean; you’ll see her. We had intended to have you--”

He broke off. He was highly nervous--high-pitched, overwrought, I could not mistake it; abstracted, deep in his own thoughts, with little time yet for me. And he was never one to brook questions.

I turned away from him, absorbing myself in the scene of our landing. At the very peak of the mound was the house Arturo had indicated. A squat spreading building of dark frowning ramparts like some ancient moldy fortress. It stood there with a faint sheen of light upon it, grim and forbidding. Around it was an open space--a garden, with paths and low shrubs; beyond that, encircling it, a low palisade like a fence, with the city houses crowding it.

* * * * *

We were still at a high enough altitude for me to get a distant view. The houses covered the mound, and at its foot, thinner down on the level, they spread out into suburbs over the near-by rocky landscape. At the outer city fringes I saw a distant field with things growing.

It was everywhere a squat, solid landscape. The houses, all of one low story, sat squat upon the ground. There were trees, a dark forest over which we passed. The trees spread thick and wide, but low to the ground like shrubs. There was little height to anything.

I had seen no water. But now, on the edge of the city, I made out a dull-white, winding ribbon that I thought might be a river.

We swung down to within a thousand feet of the frowning palace fortress. On its flat roof in a sheen of light I could make out the tiny dark blobs of figures standing in a group by a parapet-wall. From the roof a point of fire suddenly mounted. It came up toward us, mounting slowly. My heart leaped; for an instant I thought it was a missile, sent up to strike and destroy us. But it rose no more than a hundred feet; then it opened into a great ball of white light. For perhaps a minute it hung poised, burning.

Entt gave a cry of fear. He and Nereid sat with hands to their eyes, blinded by the white glare. I felt our aëro wavering; Arturo leaped from my side; he and Tad, themselves shading their eyes, clung to the controls. We wavered, but they held us steady after a moment, circling over the fortress-roof, spiraling slowly down.

On the roof-top, the figures stood with what seemed dark glasses over their eyes. We had dropped still lower; I made them out plainly. Twenty of them at least; most of them tall, gray-limbed women. They stood gazing, not at us, but down at the city, regarding with shaded eyes the scene revealed by the white glare of light they had sent up.

[Illustration: _A minute of blinding glare showed a strange scene._]

A crowd of people pressed against the garden palisade. Some of them had evidently climbed it and were in the fortress garden. Men, and women with flowing tawny hair. All of them like Nereid and Entt. A different race from these gray giantess Amazons on the roof-top. They thronged against the garden palisade. Crowds of them surged in all the upper city streets. Crude weapons were in their hands--implements, perhaps, of agriculture.

An attack upon the fortress. It seemed so. It had evidently been done quietly--now which was doubtless the quiet time of sleep. But it had been discovered. In the white revealing glare the mob was stricken. The blinded figures in the garden were trying to run back--in a panic trying to escape. They stumbled, fell. Rose and blindly staggered away. I saw one run headlong against a tree trunk.

The quiet of the scene--it had been wholly quiet in the darkness a moment before--was broken by their cries of panic. At the palisade the milling throng was struggling to force its way backward against the press of those behind. The city was in a turmoil.

A minute of that white glare; then the flare burned out and blank darkness came again. For a time I could see nothing. I heard Arturo’s and Tad’s voices:

“Tad, my God--did you see that?”

“Yes.”

“It’s come--the revolt! But, Tad, we’re not ready. Nothing is ready--”

From beneath us, on the dark fortress-roof we were nearing, a cry floated up. A strident, woman’s voice, laughing ironically.