CHAPTER XXII.

REFUGEES OF THE LOWLANDS.

Tad and I struggled upward into the tunnel-passage. The fact that with Arturo and Nereid, and some two thousand of the Middge people, we at last reached the surface I have already made evident. I need not detail those weary, despairing days and weeks in the darkness. It may have been a march of several hundred miles. I do not know. I would have said it consumed a year, rather than those weeks.

We came upon Nereid and Arturo within a few hours. The passage was strewn with the Middge refugees. Out of the million in the abyss, perhaps a hundred thousand actually got into the tunnel. And only two thousand survived. We passed them hourly; families resting, encamped, to take up again the burden of the march. We passed them dead, or dying--burned and maimed at the tunnel-entrance, or before they got into the tunnel--struggling on now, falling at last.

The tunnel was heavy with gases. Sometimes, when we thought our last choking breath had been drawn, side rifts would seem to bring us purer air. We had started without equipment or food, or water, but there were hundreds of loaded _arras_ in the long line of refugees. We very soon found one whose owner had succumbed. Arturo and Nereid, when we overtook them, we found them well supplied. They had waited until a wave of flame had surged to the tunnel-entrance. They had even gone back there once; then despaired of us, and left.

We heard, soon after we four were again together, a muffled, terrible roar far away in the earth, and felt the tremble of it. It was the earthquake under the Pacific, though we could no more than guess it then. The tunnel shook; part of the roof near us fell, crushing a score of the Middge. We saw then that behind us the tunnel was blocked. The air ahead soon grew purer. No Middge could follow us, but those in advance were in less distress. We made better time, but at that it seemed an endless struggle.

Weeks of August’s close, and of September. We lost all possible track of them. We did not know until afterward that it was probably September 29 when the first pitiful little vanguard of our party reached the new world.

The food and water were running low. The _arras_ had all given out and were abandoned. The changing air-pressures, the new quality of air, affected us all somewhat, but the animals were stricken, a few at a time. We left them, pitifully breathless, gasping.

There was one stage of the march where for what might have been a week we were halted by a subterranean river torrent. We waited, helpless, despairing. But the water in the cross passage into which our tunnel abruptly ended, at last roared away. New air came to us, dank, with a rotting, salt tang to it.

We traveled, those final days, with the surviving Middge scientists. They told us that they had a weapon; a huge affair, for long range operation. It was not assembled. But when we reached the surface--

Ah, how many times in those days of struggle we voiced the thought: “When we reach the surface!” To come out upon a friendly earth. To join, with this weapon, the earth’s armies against the Gians. “When we reach the surface--”

“Why,” said Tad, “everything will be all right then. What can those Gian women and men do against our earth? Say, what is this Middge weapon?”

Good old Tad! His spirits never flagged. There were moments when his cheering voice to the Middge--the laugh which they could understand though his words were foreign--helped many a despairing family to get up and plod on farther.

Nereid did not know what the Middge weapon was. They did not care to talk about it now. But in the times of rest there was much talk of our food and water supply. If it would only last us to the surface. Ah, when we reached the blessed surface!

* * * * *

I think I shall never forget that moment when we struggled out into the dim light of the Lowlands. I stood with Tad and Arturo, half blinded. But of them all only we three had eyes that would adjust to the light. We stood in a cave-mouth, seemingly upon a mountainside. There were a score of ramifying caves beneath us. The Middge were crowding up into them. The light! The blessed, frightening daylight! We could hear the Middge babbling about it. Safety at last!

We three stood, with our pupils contracting--and at last we could see. It must have been nearly noon; through a rift in the dark clouds the sun momentarily showed.

Our blessed sun! Here again in our own world! But we stared, unbelieving. Foul mist hung about us, thick with the heavy, choking smell of ooze and slime. Beneath us, a thousand feet or more, a land surface lay in a tumbled mass of black crags. A river flowed tumultuous in a gorge. Behind us a great slimy plateau spread into the misty distance. Ooze caked by the daylight heat lay red and black upon it. Dark peaks, rounded and blurred, showed looming against the far horizon.

Our world? It seemed perhaps a lunar landscape. No, for there were clouds and dank mist enshrouding everything. A strange world, an infernal landscape, not of this planet, nor even of the moon.

Disappointment, such as I had never known before, flooded me. Not a living being to be seen here in all this desolation! Why, I could seem to see out over this tumbled waste for hundreds of miles! Safety here, with our food and water nearly gone? Why, we were as far from safety as any ancient explorer of the Polar icefields, standing lost upon a berg, surveying the desolation around him!

In a chain of dank slimy grottos close under the surface of this plateau-like elevation, the Middge clustered to await our communication with earth civilization. In a score of dim caves, the families grouped together, setting up small shelters of garments and robes, like tents, for privacy. The night came. Small glowing hand torches sprang with points of dim light. Strange encampment of struggling humans, here in the new world, waiting to be rescued!

Arturo, Tad and I came to prominence. The Middge leaders were already working on their war equipment. With Nereid for interpreter, we were questioned on where we were, and what was best to do. But we did not know where we were! This had been the Pacific Ocean. No islands were near here; in all this desolate panorama there had been no mountain top with any sign of verdure.

Could we travel on foot, here on this land? We did not know. A mile or two a day, perhaps; climbing the crags, descending into valleys, avoiding mountain torrents, picking our way over the caked ooze--struggling as men on foot have struggled over Polar icefields!

But in which direction? How far to the nearest mountain top where people might be living? We could not say.

“But one thing,” said Tad, “they’ll be planes flying over here. We must go up in the daylight, many of us on top where they can see us.”

We built, that next day, a tent of white for a signal, and crowded around it. The Middge came up, blinded by the light.

A plane went overhead. We could barely see it, just for a moment in a rift in the clouds. It seemed ten thousand feet above us, at least. It was a familiar model, we recognized its shape. But a bomb came whistling down. Our little tent was gone. A score of the Middge lay maimed and dying.

* * * * *

It was then that Nereid thought she had communicated with Polly, sending her desperate plea: “_Don’t let them attack us!_”

She was sure she had reached Polly. And all that day she struggled to communicate further. The night came--our second night in the Lowlands. Nereid had a little tent to herself against the wall of one of the caves. Arturo, Tad, and I had a shelter near it. We had discussed the possibility of organizing a party to start on foot for help.

A week or two here, even with the starvation rations upon which the encampment now was put, and our plight would be desperate. Nereid opposed it--she still thought she could direct Polly to bring help to us. And she believed, that evening sitting alone in her tent, that she had reached Polly again. But she said nothing to us.

It may have been midnight. Arturo and Tad were asleep. Exhausted with weeks of marching, this inactivity here was needed by us all. I had been sleeping soundly. I do not know what awakened me--chance perhaps, or fate.

I went to the flap of our little tent. The cave was in darkness; the fantastic tents, with a dim light here and there, were silent.

I saw a figure moving, recognized it for Nereid. She had evidently just come from her tent. I was alert at once; but instead of speaking to her, I drew back, watching. There was a furtiveness about her; she moved swiftly, silently across the grotto, her hair and veils floating as she walked.

In a moment, I followed. She was headed into one of the small tunnels that led a few yards upward to the open plateau. I lost sight of her for a time; but when I was out upon the upper level I saw her again. She moved along the rocks cautiously but swiftly and came to the edge of a cliff that fronted the distant void of the abyss. I stood watching.

It was dark enough, so that she could see comfortably. The clouds hung low over the plateau. The rounded rock spires, caked with ooze and slime, were dark sentinels in the gloom. The further distance was solid black; but in a moment moonlight broke through, edging the naked black rocks with a green-white glow.

In a hollow down the precipitous slope, a tangled rotting mass of sea vegetation lay slumped and limp in a dark pool of water which was trapped in a basin of the rock. And miles away and a thousand feet below where I stood, the moonlight slanted down through the clouds in a great white shaft and fell upon a giant caldron of inky water, painting it with white fire.

Against the moonlight Nereid flung a protecting hand to her eyes. She sat on a rock. The clouds closed over us; the scene was dark when I reached her.

“Nereid!”

She started, alarmed. Then relaxed. “Oh, it is you, Jeff.”

I sat beside her. “What are you doing up here?”

She hesitated, but she answered softly:

“I am very glad you came. I was frightened, to be up here alone. But I thought I wanted to be alone. Polly is coming! I have reached her--I am sure of it.”

“Polly!”

“Yes. With help for us. This morning I reached her.” She put a timid hand on my arm. “You, Jeff my friend--you know I am trying my best. I think I reached her this morning. And later, a few hours ago, I think she understood me again. She is coming--”

If only she were! My heart was beating fast. “But not alone, Nereid? She isn’t coming alone?”

“No. With others. I think she laughed when she told me there would be others.”

* * * * *

“But you don’t know where we are--how could you tell her where to come?”

I stood up. Polly, with a searching party, here in this abyss--“But Nereid, we must show some light.” I stared up at the impenetrable dark mist hanging in a low ceiling above us. Nereid stood with me. She said anxiously:

“Do you think there is a chance? I tried to describe these cliffs, this level top, the cave mouths. It was two hours ago, I think, when she said she was starting. Jeff, would she be that near here? Could any one fly from your cities nearest here in a few hours?”

Polly, down here on one of the mountain-tops which had been a South Sea island? It was possible. And the Marshall group, I thought, ought to be within a thousand miles to the east, and the Carolines not much more than half that to the south. Mountain ranges towering above the clouds of these desolate Lowlands. Was Polly on her way down from them to seek us?

“Nereid, we must show a light as a guide.”

She produced a globe from her robe. Futile little spot of radiance! We held it aloft.

An hour or more passed. We sat on the rock, with the light between us. Who could ever see us, tiny figures down in this barren, cloud-swept waste?

There was not a sound; a heavy thick silence hung over the Lowlands, with just a sullen murmur floating up from the tumbling water of the lower levels to the north.

“Nereid, you’d better go down, I’ll stay here--”

“No.”

Another hour? We heard nothing. But from over us presently there seemed movement. A blur in the cloud-bank; a blurred, nearing shape, hovering.

I leaped to my feet. Something quite close over us, stolen upon us. No earthly airplane! A long, narrow, gray-white shape!

Nereid gave a little cry. I gripped her; started to run. But too late. From above a light darted down in a narrow beam. It seized us, held and pulled and sucked us upward. I did not lose consciousness. I clung to Nereid. We were whirled, gasping, through the air. The gray shape magnified, gigantic at our heads. Hands and arms came reaching down; clutched us; the light vanished.

[Illustration: _The ray seized them, held them, pulled them relentlessly up into the air._]

We were hauled, as swimmers are hauled from the sea, over a low rail and flung to the aëro’s deck, with the tall gray figure of Rhana imperiously surveying us.