CHAPTER XX.

DOOMED REALM!

It seemed for an instant that we had not the courage left to struggle. Yet even a rat within a cage plunged into water frantically fights to its last strength. We stood with full realization, apathetic; and then panic descended upon us. The instinct for self-preservation, overwhelming, driving us into unreasonable panic. We flung ourselves at the door; upon the thick windows we beat with bruised, futile fists.

This inconceivable torrent, rising. The windows were wet with the spray; as though a wave had struck us, solid water dashed against them and then receded. A white chaos out there, with the violet light leaping through it.

“Jeff! We can’t--we can’t get out! Jeff! Here--help me hit it! Let’s try hitting it with the table--”

I stood, with some remnant of reason, striving to master the panic. So this was the end?

“Tad, for God’s sake, stop! Don’t waste time. Stop and think what’s best to do. We’ve got to find a way out!” I held him, shook him. “We’ve got a few minutes--there must be some way!”

So this was the end of Tad Megan and Jeff Grant? Ah, there is a fate to guide us all in the making of our destiny. In stress, in crisis, in disaster--always some little thing.

My foot struck against the small projector lying on the floor. I stooped and seized it.

“Tad. This?” I moved about the room. With this stabbing, burning light, could we not blast or burn our way out through some vulnerable spot?

We were both suddenly calmer.

“Easy, Jeff, don’t waste its charge. How many flashes has it got?”

“I don’t know.” The building shook under the blow of an upflung surge of solid spray. “We’ll find some spot that might fuse easily.”

The window facing the ladder platform--its thick pane seemed embedded in a casement like lead, a gray soft metal. I stood a foot from it and fired. The stab of light came back at me, the recoil like a blow, and burning. My hand and arm were seared. But a portion of the casement was gone. The wind from outside came through.

“It works, Jeff! Give it to me--I’ll try one.”

A dozen or more blasts of the projector, then it failed us, empty, its charge exhausted. I flung it away. But the bull’s-eye pane was almost free. We raised the metal table, heaved it. The corner of it struck the pane; the whole thing fell outward. Wind and spume came beating madly through.

We climbed, and fell outward upon the platform. The roar was deafening. We crouched, clung and found the head of the ladder, then went down it.

There seemed still only spray at the bottom. In the white murk I saw the wet black ground, wet courtyard walls. The crest of a wave engulfed them. We clung to the bottom of the ladder. The water fell away.

We leaped, reached the ground, and ran, the spray following us down the declivity. The white abyss into which the water had been falling was nearly filled. I saw, as we turned and ran, the blurred vision of that gigantic crumbling dam. But even that would be very soon but a portion of the torrent.

* * * * *

The aëro was still unharmed. It seemed, as we climbed to it and started it aloft, that a wall of water swept under us. The car bucked and whirled in the wind; the spray was like a torrential salt rain as we mounted through it.

We had to shout above the roar.

“You think you can guide us out, Tad?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“We’ve got to get to the tunnel and find Arturo and Nereid.”

The water raced us. We rose perhaps five hundred feet. This abyss of the monsters now was not silent, nor dark. Behind us we could hear the roar and lash of the water pouring in. The dark, dying sea was whipped into fury, and rising visibly. The turmoil of water was white now. The white radiance streamed from it. I saw, far overhead, a rocky ceiling. I looked back. The radiance showed the clifflike wall back there, blurred by the white chaos; but I saw it crumbling.

We found the connecting passage leading out to the abyss of the Middge and Gians. The water had reached here--the first surge racing through here, a mile-wide subterranean torrent. We flew close over it. There was a place where the ceiling came down. We barely got through.

Racing, with the abyss behind us breaking under the pressure. Distant, muffled rumbling, horribly gigantic, behind us. There was a vague muffled explosion off somewhere--some fire-pit which the water had reached. The vibration of it--the suddenly increased air pressure--dashed our aëro into a wild upward leap, and then a drop. We barely recovered, and raced on.

The torrent here in the passage was eating at the walls. One of them broke through as we went by. A rock mass fell close behind us. The water backed against it; it broke sidewise in other places.

A chaos of falling rock was back there. The dammed-up water turned other ways, into other abysses--filled them, soon rose, pursuing us again.

“Where are we, Tad?”

I shouted it as we lay prone, clinging to the leaping little aëro.

“In the main abyss, I think. God, Jeff, look over there!”

We seemed rushing through the familiar abyss of the Mound City. But it was no longer familiar. I followed Tad’s gaze, and saw a red glare in the distance.

“Is that the fire caldron?”

“I don’t know--I think so--or was it the other way?”

The outlines of the abyss were changing; the walls breaking down; fire pits opening. For a time--how long I cannot say--we were lost. An hour perhaps? Or more?

We flew aimlessly, seeking the tunnel-entrance. Did it still exist?

This doomed realm! There were things Tad and I saw in that hour or more of flight which have marked us forever with horror, a myriad small fragmentary glimpses which were all our minds could grasp--tiny fragments of the whole which was beyond conception.

The distant red glare spread. We avoided it, flying the other way. Tad thought that the black wall off to our left held the tunnel mouth. But it began breaking, and a wall of water engulfed it.

The hot breath of the fires reached us, thickly sulphurous. We soon were gasping.

Everywhere the honeycomb was breaking down. Still distant--but the familiar conformations of the abyss were changing.

Lost. And then a new hope came to us. The surface beneath us showed clear in the red glare. Houses were here now, and a road.

“We’ve passed the tunnel,” Tad shouted. “That’s the road from the Mound--I know the way now!”

* * * * *

We turned back and followed it. People were down there. Middge and loaded _arras_, running in panic.

A muffled explosion sounded through the mingled roar of water and falling rock. A hot sulphurous wave of gas came surging. It seemed to cling to the surface--a black mist rolling, spreading. It engulfed the struggling line of Middge. Its tongues of flame licked at them. They wilted, shriveled. Human cries came up to us--shrill, tiny as shrieking insects. The gas-cloud hid them.

“Higher, Tad--we’ll be--choked--”

We mounted. The air was pure here, wet with wind and the salt of the inrushing sea. A wall of water came tumbling, engulfing, lashing at the surface, then pounding off to some lower area. A monster--something still alive, struggling with instinct of fear--trumpeted with a strident, uncanny scream. The cry stopped in a moment as the thing was swept away.

This doomed realm!

“Tad, look! Is that the entrance?”

A rock wall still intact loomed ahead of us, and a tunnel mouth, blurred in the mingled spray and smoke. One small beacon light still remained, bleary, winking--vanishing.

We landed on the rock with a crash. Unhurt, we jumped from the aëro. Human figures lay here, twisted, huddled shapes. A few still tried to move.

We choked with the fumes. I passed a child--dead, clinging in death to its dead mother. A woman alone--gruesomely burned from some flaming tongue which had licked the rocks here. I stooped. No, it was not Nereid.

We thought we had come to the niche where Arturo and Nereid were to meet us. It was empty. We stumbled away.

In the tunnel mouth the air seemed momentarily better. A man struggled ahead of us, then fell, lay still. I stooped over him. No, not Arturo.

The tunnel rose steeply. For just a moment at a turn, we stood looking back. A muttering, screaming, hissing abyss of red glare--steam and smoke and mingled water and fire, breaking down all its distant walls, an inconceivable torrent, filling this abyss, smothering these fires, crushing these passages. Rushing thousands of miles--smashing and roaring to find new levels.

We rounded the corner--struggled and stumbled on upward through the dark tunnel.