Part 2

Before he could complete the thought there came a sudden dull reverberation from the swamp to eastward, a quivering of the ground beneath him, a rumbling thunder rapidly nearing him. In sudden panic he shrank back into the forest at the broad path's edge, and the next moment their appeared in the east along that path a mighty shape, thundering down the path toward him and dimly visible in the starlight. It was a brontosaur, he saw, bearing one of the dark lizard-shapes which rode at the base of its great neck, thundering down the path toward the west in giant, earth-shaking strides. Another followed it, and another, until four had passed, and then the thunder of their great tread died away in the west, as they galloped on toward Brinton. Rowan stared after them and then, as a sudden thought flared in his brain, he crept again from the sheltering trees and moved steadily eastward into the swamp, following the great path by which the brontosaurs had come.

The path was beaten hard and flat, he found, and seemed to lead due eastward into the heart of the swamp. And as he followed it, as he crept onward, light came to his eyes from far ahead, a white brilliance which filtered faintly through the ranks of close-packed trees. Steadily Rowan crept on toward it, and then as its radiance began to strengthen he left the broad path and slipped again into the shelter of the forest, creeping forward ever more cautiously between the close-ranked trees and over the rotting, stagnant slime toward the source of the pallid light ahead.

A dull roar of sound came to his ears as he went on, a whistling, shrieking clamor as of some great wind which raged ceaselessly, louder and louder as he neared it. Through the trees ahead he glimpsed a broad open space lit by the white radiance, and dropped to his knees, crawling silently on. At last he had crept to the very edge of the open space and lay crouched in the slime behind a great tree, peering tensely forward.

Before him lay a great, flat mound of solid ground, elevated a few feet above the ooze of the swamp, roughly square in shape and fully one thousand feet across. It was quite bare and treeless, all vegetation upon it having apparently been sheared away, and was lit by a single globe of radiant white light suspended by a slender shaft of metal high above the great mound's surface. At the center of the broad, flat surface there yawned a tremendous pit which occupied half the mound's expanse, a vast circular shaft some hundreds of feet across whose smooth, perpendicular sides gleamed dully as though coated with metal. From where he crouched at the great mound's edge he could glimpse only the round mouth of the great shaft and a few feet of its downward-sinking sides, but he perceived that it was from this mighty pit that there roared upward the thunderous torrent of unceasing winds. Then his attention shifted from the great pit to the creatures grouped near its rim.

At the far edge of the great shaft there rose from the ground a strange, three-pillared structure of gleaming metal, bearing on an upheld plate a number of shining studs and a single large dial or wheel of metal. And beside this structure stood a knot of unearthly creatures, green-scaled, dark-eyed lizard-shapes like those he had glimpsed in the attack on Brinton. These were standing across the pit from him, at the very rim of the great shaft, and one or two of them were apparently staring down into the darkness of the shaft itself.

And now, over the raging shriek of winds from the pit, came another sound to the crouching Rowan's ears, a faint but deep bellowing which grew swiftly louder. He saw the lizard-men at the pit's edge stir, look downward, and then suddenly there rose up out of the great shaft's depths a great, round platform of metal, a mighty, disklike platform fully four hundred feet across which all but filled the mouth of the great pit as it rose, separated from that pit's edge by a tiny circular gap of a yard or less. Up from the dark depths of the shaft _floated_ this great platform, slower and slower, and he saw that upon it were standing two of the gigantic, bellowing brontosaurs and some half-dozen more of the lizard-men. Smoothly the vast disk and its great burden drifted upward, until it hung level with the edges of the pit, its vast weight and the weight it bore suspended incredibly above the abyss. A moment it hung there, and in that moment the lizard-men on it stepped swiftly out onto the mound, prodding the two brontosaurs on before them. The empty platform hovered a moment longer at the pit's edge, and then began to sink slowly downward, gathering speed swiftly and dropping smoothly out of sight into the dark depths of the giant shaft.

Rowan gasped. That mighty platform, moving up the great shaft and down it, with upon it the great brontosaurs--from what unguessed depths below had it come? He saw that the lizard-men now were swinging up into curious, saddle-like seats affixed upon the backs of the giant beasts, and then heard them utter rasping cries, at which the two dinosaurs moved obediently forward, off the mound and onto the broad, beaten path which led from its edge westward through the swamp toward Brinton. In a moment the two great beasts and their riders had thundered down that path and disappeared, while on the mound were left only three of the lizard-creatures, who conversed in low, rasping tones.

* * * * *

Minutes passed while Rowan crouched there, watching them, and then one pointed downward into the shaft again, and in a moment there floated up once more the great disk-platform, but empty this time. It swept smoothly up once more to the edge of the shaft's mouth, hung motionless momentarily again at that edge, and then sank from sight once more. Rowan saw, then, that its motion was apparently automatic, and then before he could speculate further on it all his attention focused on the three lizard-men on the mound, who were walking together toward the great path which led west from that mound.

One seemed to point westward, where the red glare of light from burning Brinton still quivered in the sky, and then the three had disappeared down the path, evidently for a better view, since Rowan still could hear over the shriek of winds from the pit the rasping of their harsh, insectlike voices in the distance. Minutes he crouched, while the white-lit mound before him lay unoccupied, and then rose suddenly from his place of concealment and crept silently across the mound to the rim of the great pit. Tensely he craned forward, staring downward.

In his ears was the deafening roar of the winds from beneath, winds which tore at him with cyclonic fury as they rushed up from the dark depths of the shaft. Staring down into that shaft Rowan could see nothing, since its interior was of intense and unrelieved blackness, without spark of light. As seconds passed, though, and his eyes became more accustomed to the blackness beneath, he seemed to sense, rather than see, a quiver of light far below, a wavering, flickering of light that lasted for but a moment and then vanished. And then he glimpsed something far below that was rising swiftly toward him, something that gleamed a little in the white light from above him. The platform!

Abruptly there was a sound of sharp movement behind Rowan, and he whirled around, then stood motionless. At the mound's west edge there stood a single one of the scaled, unhuman lizard-creatures, his eyes full upon Rowan. From down the great path came the rasping squeak of the voices of the other two, but the one was silent, staring straight toward him. Then, with a movement inconceivably swift, he had leapt forward.

Rowan cried out as the creature leapt, then felt himself grasped by powerful, taloned claws, thrown to the ground, whirling about at the pit's edge in threshing combat. He heard a harsh cry from the creature that grasped him, heard the cries of the other two as they raced now to his aid. The two struggling figures were at the very rim of the great shaft, now, rolling and twisting, and in one uppermost moment Rowan glimpsed the mighty disk-platform sweeping up out of the depths of that shaft, hovering motionless at its mouth, beside him.

He staggered to his feet, still in the other's grasp, striking frantically out with clenched fists. Now the other two had raced up on the mound, he saw, and were leaping toward the combat. Then Rowan gave a frantic wrench and twist, felt himself and the creature holding him tottering at the rim of the abyss, and then they had fallen, still striking and twisting, had fallen upon the great disk as it hovered momentarily at the pit's edge beside them, and locked still in deadly combat upon that disk were sinking ever more swiftly downward, into the darkness of the giant shaft, into the raging of the deafening winds, down, down, down....

4

For how many minutes he struggled thus with his lizard-thing opponent on the great disk, Rowan could not guess. Twisting, squirming, striking, the two rolled about, and then as the powerful muscles of the creature began to wear down his own resistance, Rowan put forth all his strength in one last effort. Grasping the scaled body of the creature with his left arm he encircled its conical head with his right and twisted that head back with all his force. There was a moment of intense effort, a frantic threshing of the creature in his grasp, and then a muffled snap as of breaking bones, and the thing lay limp and still. Rowan scrambled up to his knees, panting.

Around him now roared the deafening torrents of ascending and descending winds, and a few feet away from him the smooth metal wall of the great shaft was flashing upward with immense speed as the disk shot downward. From high above a pale white light fell down upon him, a little circle of white radiance that was swiftly contracting, dwindling, as the disk flashed down. In a moment it had dwindled to a spark of light, and then had vanished entirely. And then about Rowan was only darkness--darkness and the thundering bellow of the raging winds.

He crept to the edge of the great disk, now, peered down over the low protecting rail that rimmed it, straining his eyes down through the darkness. The flicker of light he had glimpsed from above was clear now to his eyes, a tiny patch of quivering red light that was growing rapidly stronger, larger, as the disk flashed down toward it. Crouched at the great descending platform's edge Rowan gazed down toward it, hair blown back by the great winds that raged past him, clinging to his hold against their tremendous force. The patch of illumination was swiftly broadening, until it lay across all the shaft far below, a crimson, quivering glare.

And now it seemed to Rowan that the downward-shooting disk-platform was slowing a little its tremendous speed. The gleaming walls around him were not flashing upward so swiftly, he thought, and then even as that thought came to him the great disk shot down out of the darkness of the shaft and into a glare of lurid crimson light, into a titanic, cavernous space which seemed to his eyes in that moment limitless.

He was conscious first of a mighty curving roof of rock close above him, from which the disk was dropping smoothly downward, and in which there yawned a black circle which was the opening of the shaft down which he had come. A full mile below lay the floor of the mighty cavern, stretching away for miles on every side, a colossal underworld lit by the crimson, wavering glare. Then Rowan's stunned eyes made out, far away, the titanic, precipitous walls of gray rock which formed the great cavern's sides, miles in the distance, stretching from floor to rocky roof. And as his eyes swept along them they came to rest upon the blinding, dazzling source of the crimson light that illuminated all this cavern world.

In the gray wall to his right, miles away, was a great, slitlike opening near the roof, an opening through which there poured down a mighty torrent of blazing, liquid fire, a colossal Niagara of molten flame whose crimson, blazing radiance shot out a quivering glare which lit luridly the whole mighty cavern. For thousands of feet the great torrent of raging fires tumbled downward, caught at the base of the cliff in a canal of gray stone which conveyed it, a river of living flame, into a central basin of stone of the same diameter as the great shaft above, and which lay just beneath the opening of that shaft in the roof and beneath the descending disk, a lake of leaping flame. Around it were grouped a circle of strange, blunt-nosed machines of some sort, and down toward it the disk-platform was smoothly sinking.

And beyond and around it, on the stupendous cavern's floor, there stretched mass upon mass of huge buildings, gray and mighty and ancient in appearance, buildings which resembled masses of gigantic gray cubes piled upon each other in neatly geometrical designs. Broad streets cut through their square-cut masses, and in those streets moved great throngs of large and smaller shapes, mighty dinosaurs and masses of the lizard-men. Far away to the distant, encircling walls stretched the massed buildings, and over them hovered here and there great pterodactyls bearing lizard-riders, flitting across the cavern from place to place on their immense, flapping wings.

Rowan stared, stupefied, stunned, crouching at the edge of his descending disk, and then became suddenly aware of fierce and increasing heat beating up toward him. He looked down, saw that the disk was dropping straight toward the lake of fire below, sprang to its edge in sudden fear as it dropped on.

Down, down--ever more slowly the great disk was sinking, now, down until at last it hovered motionless a scant fifty feet above the surface of the molten lake, hanging level with the edges of the circular stone basin which held that lake, and level with the floor of the mighty cavern. A moment only it hovered there, and in that moment Rowan saw that awaiting it at the great basin's edge stood a half-score of the lizard-men. Even in the moment he saw them they glimpsed him crouching at the disk's edge, and instantly two of them leapt upon the disk, with the white globes that held the heat-beam outstretched toward him. He cowered back, but instead of loosing the ray upon him one grasped him by the shoulder and jerked him from the platform onto the basin's edge, just as the great disk began to move upward from that edge. Standing there for the moment Rowan saw the great disk floating smoothly up once more into the lurid light toward the black round opening of the shaft in the roof of rock above, rising swiftly into that shaft and disappearing from view inside it as it flashed upward once more on its endless, automatic motion.

As one of his captors tugged suddenly at his arm, though, he turned, and the creature pointed toward the gigantic gray buildings ahead, at the same time jerking him forward. Slowly Rowan started toward them, while on each side of him walked one of the lizard-men, their deadly white globes ready for action.

A moment and they had left the broad clear plaza of stone where lay the fiery lake, and were entering one of the wide streets which cut across the masses of the city's buildings. As he marched down that street between his two guards Rowan all but forgot his own predicament, so intensely interesting was the panorama before his eyes, a shifting pageant of creatures of the world's youth, enthralling to the eyes of the paleontologist.

For through the streets were pouring masses of the lizard-men, bearing tools or weapons, hurrying along on taloned feet or riding huge brontosaurs, who tramped majestically along the street's center while the walking crowds clung to its sides. Here and there, too, moved other dinosaurs, almost as huge, bearing burdens or ridden by lizard-men, the reptilian beast-servants of a lizard race. Tyrannosaurs there were, moving along in their swift, hopping gait, the fiercest and most terrible of all the dinosaurs, yet servants, like the rest, of the green-scaled lizard-folk; allosaurs, like smaller replicas of the great tyrannosaurs; mighty-armored stegosaurs and great-horned triceratops, and over all the whirring wings of the great pterodactyls.

As they marched on down the street, attracting but little attention from the hurrying lizard-creatures, Rowan saw that in the great gray buildings on each side the doors opening into the street were of immense size, forty to fifty feet in height, and saw here and there a giant dinosaur entering or emerging from one of those great open doorways in obedience to the command of its lizard master. Then abruptly his two guards turned with him into one of them, and he found himself in a long, colossal corridor, its gray roof fifty feet above him and its width almost as great. Here and there along this great corridor were open doorways, and into one of these he was jerked by his guards, finding himself in the presence of three other of the lizard-creatures who sat behind a metal block much like a legless table.

To these his guards spoke in their harsh voices. There was a moment of silence, and then a rasping command from one of the three, at which he was instantly reconducted from the room and down the corridor's length to a smaller, bolted door. A moment his captors fumbled with its bolt, then opened the door by sliding it down into an aperture in the floor, motioning Rowan inside and keeping the white globes full upon him.

Hopelessly he stepped in, and the door slid up and shut behind him, while in a moment the bolts clanged shut outside. Rowan turned slowly around, then stood rigid. Across the room from him a single figure was staring at him, and as his eyes took in that figure a cry broke from him:

"Morton!"

5

A single moment the other stared at him, unspeaking, a haggard, unshaven figure utterly different from the trim little scientist Rowan remembered, and then he came across the room, hands outstretched.

"Rowan!" he cried, hoarsely. "Good God, you here, Rowan!" Then his thoughts shifted, lightning-like. "They've gone out, Rowan?" he asked. "These things--these creatures--they've started their attack?"

"Yes," said the assistant. "Over Brinton, hours ago. I came--when you disappeared there in the swamp." Swiftly he spoke of the attack on Brinton, of his own crazed flight into the swamp, his own trip down the shaft and capture, and when he had finished Morton was silent, his face a mask. When at last he spoke it was in a whisper.

"They've started," he whispered. "Over Brinton--and over all earth, now. And I who might have warned, captured----"

"You were captured by them there in the swamp?" asked Rowan, quickly, and the other inclined his head.

"Taken there by them, without a chance to escape. And taken down here....

"You know, Rowan, why I came to Brinton, to the swamp, to investigate the rumors we had heard of great bones and skeletons existing in the slime of that swamp. And in the week I spent investigating the morass I found that the rumors had spoken truly, for here and there inside the edges of the morass I found great bone-fragments which could only come from dinosaur skeletons. Then, a week after I had begun my search, the thing happened.

"I was working with my probing-rod, perhaps a mile inside the swamp, when there was a sudden distant crashing of trees and I saw a gigantic, slate-colored bulk rolling across the forest toward me. Before I could recover from my amazement the thing was on me, a great brontosaur ridden by one of the lizard-men--a gigantic dinosaur out of the Mesozoic age, crashing through an Illinois swamp! Before I could gather my stunned wits another had crashed toward me from beyond it, and in an instant I was the prisoner of the lizard-creatures, who fettered my hands and feet, crashed back on the great brontosaurs with me toward that mound at the swamp's center, where there yawned the opening of the great shaft. Up and down that shaft moves the great disk-platform, endlessly, and on it they brought me down to this cavern world, down to this gray city of theirs and into this building. And here, first, I was examined by three of their number who seemed to hold positions of authority among them.

"For hours the three examined me, striving to converse with me in their rasping tones, endeavoring to make plain to me the elementary word-sounds of their strange language. That language, I found, is a phonetic one, but aided by gestures and written diagrams we were able to attain to a rough exchange of ideas. And partly through their own questions, partly through what I had seen in the great cavern outside, I came to understand who and what these enigmatic creatures were, and where they had originated.

"They were beings of an age dead for hundreds of millions of years, I learnt, creatures of the Mesozoic age, that period of the earth's history which we call the age of reptiles. For in that age the races of mammals had hardly begun to arise, and the great and smaller reptiles and lizard-races were the rulers of all earth. And just as man, the creature of dominant intelligence, was to develop later from the races of mammals, so had these lizard-men, the dominant intelligence of their own age, developed from the races of reptiles. They had spread out in great numbers over what is now North America, the most habitable portion of earth during the Mesozoic age. They had built strange cities, had developed their knowledge and science in myriad ways, and had learned how to conquer and subjugate the great reptilian creatures who swarmed then on earth, to make servants of them. The great brontosaurs, more tractable than the rest, they used as mounts and beasts of burden; the fiercer tyrannosaurs and allosaurs were their beasts of war; and on the mighty pterodactyls they soared into the upper air and flitted across earth's surface. Great indeed was their power, and through that power and through their terrible, giant servants they ruled all the habitable parts of earth unquestioningly.

"At last, though, there came that great convulsion of earth which was to mark the end of the Mesozoic age, that vast world-cataclysm in which continents sank beneath the seas and new lands rose from the oceans' depths. In such convulsions and mighty quakes the cities of the lizard-men were shaken down and annihilated, and across all their world was wild confusion. They knew, then, that they must find some other place of refuge or perish, and so they hit upon the plan of descending to one of the great cavernous spaces which lie scores of miles down in earth's interior. They had discovered long before that such great caverns exist inside earth's crust, and so they pierced a shaft down to one of them and descended into it to investigate.