THE WORLD BELOW

CHAPTER I
OF PLACE AND TIME

“Applied science,” said the Professor, “is always incredible to the vulgar mind.”

“You know, George, they really did go—disappeared absolutely—and there’s only one door to the room, and we sat round it. There’s no kid about that,” young Danby added—perhaps recognising that his father lacked somewhat in the amenities of social intercourse.

“If I go at all, I shall take an axe,” I remarked irrelevantly.

Bryant leant forward, and knocked the ashes out of his pipe.

“Templeton went like a Pirate Chief,” he said, smiling slightly.

It was the first time he had spoken.

“Look here, Bryant,” I said, “tell me what really happened, and I’ll do my best to believe it.”

He hesitated a moment, and then answered slowly, “It’s true enough, what they’ve told you, as far as we can tell it. As to theories of time and space, I know no more than you do. I used to think they were obvious. I’ve heard the Professor talk two nights a week for three years, and I’ve realised that it isn’t all quite as simple as it seemed, though I don’t get much further. But the next room’s a fact. We lay things down on the central slab, and the room goes dark, and we go back in two minutes, and it gets light again, and they’re still there. And the Professor says he’s projected them 500,000 years ahead in the interval, and they don’t look any the worse for the journey.”

“And it must be true, because they don’t deny it,” I said flippantly. “It sounds rather a dull game, but not very difficult.”

“Yes, I know how it sounds,” he answered, “and we thought just the same; but it did seem to prove one thing—that it did no harm to the objects of the experiment.

“If they went anywhere, at least they came back safely. So at last we tried it with Harry Brett—and he didn’t. We left him there, and we went back, and the room was empty. It’s just a bare circular room, metal-walled, with one exit. You can see for yourself. It wouldn’t hide a fly.

“The next day Harry’s wife came and kicked up a row, and we got frightened, and told Templeton, and he said he didn’t believe a word of it, but he was going to find out, and so we tried it on him too.”

“And he disappeared in the same way?”

“No, he didn’t. He came out all right, and he said, ‘It’s true enough, but I reckon you’ve settled Brett. But what’s the use of half-an-hour? I’m going back now. Give me a year, and I may find him.’

“The Professor told him he couldn’t repeat the experiment twice the same night, but he could come back the next, and so he did—and that’s the end of it so far.”

“But if he were to be gone for a year, and he went last Tuesday?”

“He wasn’t to be gone for a year; he was to be there for a year, and be back in two minutes. That’s quite simple. The Professor’ll tell you.”

“But—if the Professor will excuse the remark—it wouldn’t be any good if he did. I’ve read The Time Machine, and I know that space is curved, thanks to Einstein’s enterprising investigation. I quite understand that, if I got at the right distance from the earth (and my eyesight were good enough), I should see our Darwinian ancestor shinning up the tree-trunk for the fatal apple, but I don’t profess to follow these mysteries further. When I had to learn science, I always preferred the demonstrations. Now, if the Professor would project a pullet six months old backward, and it returned a chicken——”

Young Danby laughed, and I saw Bryant’s eyes twinkle, but the Professor answered me patiently.

“It is obviously impossible to project anything into the past, which is fixed irrevocably.

“Otherwise there would be no finality, and the confusion would be intolerable. It requires no scientific training of intellect to understand that the ordered experience of life would become chaotic if, for instance, upon reading of a long-past murder, I could project myself into the past, and intervene to save the victim.

“In such event the murder would both have occurred, and been prevented: which is absurd.

“But the future is different. It is unformed, or, at least, its facts are in a condition of fluidity. We are all occupied in forming them. If I kill an insect, I do not destroy it only, but its descendants also. I also influence the lives of other insects with which they would have mated, and which will form other alliances. From such alliances other insects will be born which would not have existed. The present consequences of any action, even the most momentous, are trivial, because the present is but a moment. Its future consequences are incalculably greater, because the future is infinite.

“Realising this, we recognise that our present actions belong to the future almost entirely, and it becomes a less important possibility that we may be able to project ourselves forward into some future period, and influence its circumstances by the physical methods with which we are familiar here.”

I don’t suppose the Professor had finished, but he paused for breath for a second, and I took the chance he offered.

“I’m sorry I came a cropper over the pullet plan. And, anyway, there wasn’t much sense in it. It would be too unprofitable to become popular. But why not get the chickens, and project them forward? Nine months ahead, say, and they come back cackling, with the first egg on the table?—‘Professor Danby, the Magic Poulterer.’ There’s a fortune there, anyway.”

For the first time the Professor showed distinct signs of irritation. “You may not be a scientist,” he said, “but as a business man you must know that you are talking nonsense. Would you send your chickens into the future without a hen to brood them?

“Would you expect the people of some future age to rear them for your benefit? When they discovered that they always vanished at maturity, would they not kill them a few days earlier?—But this is idle talk. Something of the kind you imagine may follow in the years to be, as the penetration of the future, which is now the subject of theory and experiment, becomes an exact science, and when it does, such minds as yours will take it as casually as you now do the transmission of speech and sight over the earth’s surface, in ways which your fathers would have considered incredible. The scientists who have conquered space have less honour in the mouths of men than Napoleon, who conquered Europe,—and had not the brains to hold it. It is not reasonable to suppose that those who conquer time will be more highly regarded.

“But all this is beside the point. There are two men who have vanished, or so we tell you. We have no proof, and you are under no obligation to believe us. We may have murdered them, though we have no evident object, and your knowledge of our characters should enable you to discount that possibility. If you will take the same risk, be it much or little, I will find the sum you need, which is somewhat large, and which you tell me is urgent.”

I said, “I do need it; and if I don’t accept at once, it’s because the whole tale sounds too wild for believing. I should like to ask a few questions.

“First, you say these two men have disappeared entirely. I believe what you have told me is genuine, or at least that you believe it to be so. But have you told me all? Is there nothing you are holding back that might influence my decision? No?

“But you say that Templeton returned from his first adventure, and went again the next night. Surely he told you something of his experiences?”

“No; he didn’t seem to want to talk,” Bryant answered; “he only said it was too strange to explain, and he must go back and find out. When we pressed him, he said he supposed we thought that, if a stranger to our planet stood in his back-garden for half-an-hour, he would be able to describe the whole earth in detail, from the marriage customs of Alaska to the flora of the Zambesi. You know Templeton’s way.

“But he was anxious enough to get back, and he turned up next night with a sack of things he thought he would find useful, and enough weapons in his belt to stock an arsenal.”

“And he didn’t return,” I added, “so the things he took don’t seem to have been sufficiently useful. As I said before, if I go, I shall take an axe; for one reason, because I spend half my leisure in tree-felling, and I know how to use it. For another, it’s a useful tool, and not only intended for the destruction of your fellow-men. Whether I shall find any fellow-men, I don’t know, but, if I go into a strange world, I don’t propose to equip myself as though I intended to engage it in single combat. It seems tactless to me.—But did he say nothing about temperature? I don’t want to stumble into a glacial epoch, without even a fur collar in which to face it.”

“You need have no fear of that,” said the Professor, “you will be at least thirty-thousand years away from the nearest glacial epoch, and Templeton didn’t seem to have suffered either from change of air or an excessively high temperature.”

“He took plenty of clothes when he went back,” young Danby added, “but he said it was much easier to throw off clothes you didn’t want than to put on those you hadn’t got, and he didn’t know where he would be going, ‘it might be up, or it might be down!’—whatever that meant.”

“It doesn’t sound as though he had much confidence in the resources of the future world,” I said doubtfully, “and there are about fifty questions I should like to ask, but they wouldn’t make much difference, even if you knew the answers, which you probably don’t.

“I’ve got to-morrow to make any preparations that seem worth while. I’ll take the cheque now, Professor, if you will be so kind as to draw it,—and I’ll give you a note to-morrow which will clear you with Clara, if I follow Templeton’s example.”

CHAPTER II
THE EMPTY DAWN

The room which the Professor had constructed for his experiments was circular, walled in an iron-grey metallic substance, empty, and, when the door closed upon me, it was in absolute darkness.

Waiting there, I had a curious and disquieting consciousness, as of absolute vacancy, such as a disembodied spirit might feel before its next incarnation, but nothing happened, neither did the Professor return as he promised. I knew that the two minutes were long past, but there was no movement in the room, and no break in the darkness. Had he misled me, I wondered, and was I the victim of some quite different experiment,—perhaps of how much strain the human mind could endure, and yet retain its sanity? And why was the room so much colder?—and the air against my face was damp, as though a mist were rising.

I looked round, and saw nothing,—upward, and the three great stars of Orion’s belt showed through the fog, and the upper part of the constellation; and other stars were in the central heavens, but lower down the mist hid them.

If I were indeed transported to some remote and future time, at least the same stars were there, with little change, even of their positions in the heavens.

It was a moment when any source of confidence was needed. I had imagined many ways in which a strange world might appear around me, but I had overlooked the possibility that I might arrive in the night-time. But there I was, standing on something which felt hard and very smooth, and afraid to move a step in the darkness.

How long I stood there I have no means of knowing. The mist increased, and the night continued dark, and very strangely silent.

Fortunately, I had clothed myself warmly, in a suit of close-fitting leather garments, with the fur turned inward. I had brought sandwiches which I had calculated would be sufficient for two days, if other food should be hard to gain, and I ate some of them, and then as the hours passed, I grew too tired to stand, and sat down on the hard pavement beneath me. It felt like very smooth and polished stone, and I reached out on either hand, thinking to feel some joining which would confirm this supposition, but could find nothing. As the hours passed, I tried to lie and sleep, but only those who have done this for the first time on a hard and level surface will understand my discomfort.

Yet I slept at last, and waked again, feeling both cold and hunger, and ate and slept, and waked and ate and slept again, till I became aware that all the food was gone, and still the night continued.

Then fear came, indeed.

Had Templeton come to this, and had he fired his foolish pistols into the mocking stillness of a perpetual and lifeless night?

The silence was absolute.

An ordinary English night is full of joyous, furtive, or defiant sound. A tropic night is full of life and movement, and noon is the time of quietness.

The owl hoots even above the silence of the Arctic snow.

But here there was no faintest distant call, nor any whisper of movement.

Yet I recalled that Templeton had been once, and returned, so once at least he must have seen daylight. Then I realised that the darkness was less dense, and the stars were dimmer.

Dawn approached, but how slowly!

I must have watched for hours while the sky flushed faintly, and still the darkness was but slightly lifted.

Gradually, very gradually, the strange scene opened.

Sloping downward, and stretching as far as sight could reach toward the coming sun, was one unbroken plain of purple-brown, on which were growths of one kind only, compact and round, and averaging some eight feet in height, like gigantic cabbages in shape, and of a very vivid green.

Behind me rose a high grey cliff, so smooth and straight that I doubted whether it were of natural formation, or the work of some directing intelligence.

Between the cliff and the great plain there was a strip of smooth and lucent paving, about twenty feet in breadth, on which I had rested while the long night passed.

As the familiar sun rose slowly, a gradual gold spread over the vivid green that sloped toward it, till the whole expanse shone with a dazzling splendour; and as the rising light struck across the path on which I stood, it showed a shining band of opalescence that stretched right and left to the horizon limits, beneath the background of the dark-grey wall.

The sky was of a deep unbroken blue, and the whole scene was one of great though alien beauty.

I had imagined that I might find myself lost amidst the inexplicable complexities of a civilisation different from anything of which I had heard or known, or perhaps amidst enormous jungle growths, and beasts of unfamiliar terrors. But here seemed only an interminable and barren weirdness, offering neither menace to life nor any means by which to support it.

So I thought, in a double error, as I was to learn very quickly.

The sun was by now almost completely visible, but there was no cry or stir of life to break the silence, nor did any bird cross the blue expanse above me.

The need to explore the new world in which I found myself was urgent. There was no hope from inaction amid such surroundings. The cliff on one side was a wall unclimbable. The purple soil, from which I could see that a slight steam was rising, offered no invitation to lose myself among the great green globes, which seemed to be its sole fertility. There remained only the opal platform on which I stood, by which it seemed that I might go on, to right or left, for ever.

With nothing to direct my choice, I turned southward, and strapping on the knapsack in which I carried such things as I had brought with me, but from which my stock of food was exhausted, and shouldering the woodman’s axe, which was the only thing beside a heavy clasp-knife which I carried as tool or weapon, I walked briskly forward.

CHAPTER III
DEATH?

I had gone no great distance, and the sun had yet scarcely cleared the horizon, when I came to a high cavity in the cliff-wall.

It was of such height that an elephant would have looked a pigmy as he passed inward, and of a shape too regular to have been formed without the tools of some controlling mind.

The level sun shone into it, and illumed it, a very spacious tunnel, for a considerable distance. Then it bent out of sight. I went inward a few steps, and hesitated.

Anyone who, on a strange and lonely road, has reached a place where it branches in two directions, without knowledge or sign to guide his choice, will understand my feeling. Still in doubt, I walked back to the cave-mouth, and then, down the middle of the opal way, came something very swift and light. Someone who was neither man, nor beast, nor monkey. Someone who ran without effort, but as in urgent and silent fear.

She did not see me until she was level with the gap from which I watched her, and when she did, she leapt sideways with incredible agility. The leap took her to the very edge of the opal way, and her left foot pressed for a second on the purple soil beyond. As it did so, with the speed of light itself, the nearest of the bright-green globes shot open in a score of writhing tentacles, of which one caught the slipping foot, and dragged its victim down.

There came one scream, intense and dreadful, high and shrill, and then I watched a lithe furred human-seeming body which struggled against the clinging, twisting arm which dragged her in.

The tentacles were very long and thin, and of a brick-red colour. The one which reached her first was not thicker, toward its end, than a man’s finger, but for a moment only was there any doubt of the issue.

Then a stronger tentacle got a firm grip of its victim’s body, and as it did so the scream came again, but shriller, louder, and more exultant, and I realised that it was the plant that screamed, and not the prize it had captured.

I don’t think I should have interfered but for that second scream of triumph, but there was something in its tone so hateful, so bestial, that an impulse of pity for its victim broke across the blank amazement of my mind, and with the feeling, as thought that answered thought, I knew that she was calling to me to help her.

The axe lay ready to my hand on the cave-floor, and I picked it up and ran forward.

I brought the blade down on the nearest tentacle with such force as would have severed a branch of a well-grown tree, but it only dented a skin that was soft and flexible, but tough, like rubber.

As I swung the axe again, a long arm caught me round both ankles and pulled. Had I not been so strange to it, had it better gauged my strength and weight, or had it not been occupied with its earlier capture, I suppose that the next minute would have ended my experience, but as it was, the clutch only stirred me to a desperation of terror that brought the axe down with double force, and the severed limb fell quivering to the ground.

As it did so, the creature screamed again. It was a cry of the most utter terror, abject and hellish beyond any possibility of words to tell it.

And the forest answered.

It answered in a hundred voices that screamed, and clamoured, and questioned, and replied.

I had never known before the strength which panic and loathing may give to human muscles.

Backward writhed the frightened tentacles, their victim dropped and forgotten, and every axe-stroke that followed gashed or severed one of them, and where they were cut through, a wine-red semi-liquid jelly slowly welled from the gap.

I think as the creature contracted and closed its petals I might have stayed the blows if it had not screamed for mercy on a note which gave me a feeling of nausea, and a lust to kill, so that I struck till the great flesh-like leaves were gashed and shredded; till, as the cries continued, I realised that the centre of its life was underground, beyond my power to reach it.

Then I lowered the axe, and looked round.

Dimly I was aware that my heart was beating wildly, and that I was breathing with difficulty.

Still the forest was screaming around me in deafening tones of fear and hate and menace.

I looked back to the comparative safety of the cave I had left, and I saw the one that I had saved slowly dragging herself towards it, and as I did so I was conscious that she knew my thought, and answered.

I became aware for the first time that the soil on which I stood was hot, and that my feet were scorching.

I threw the axe towards the cave, and went to help the one that I had ventured to rescue, and doing this, I had a strange feeling of repulsion, as from an alien body, and of attraction, as to a kindred soul.

I knew that she was mortally injured, and feared that I must horribly hurt the limp body as I picked it up.

I was startled by its lightness, and surprised that it made no sound.

As I lifted her, I was conscious again of the interchange of wordless thought, but when I answered mechanically with a spoken word I was rebuffed by the expression of repulsion and wonder which crossed her eyes.

But as I laid her down in the cave-mouth, wondering what I could do to aid her further, her thought answered mine clearly, “Do not touch my body. It is dead.”

Then our minds met, and for some moments wrestled abortively, till I realised that I could not understand unless my own were willing, and blank, and receptive. Nor could she understand my thought unless it were consciously approached to hers.

After that, we conversed in silence for some time, but very slowly. So wide was the gulf of separation in knowledge and experience, so baffling the mental shorthand by which agreed fact is implied without expression, so difficult was it to avoid the continual byways of explanation which only led to others, that it was a long time before I could receive even a blurred outline of the urgent facts which she was striving to give me.

By this time I realised that she regarded me as something strange and beast-like, and that any noise from my mouth would intensify this feeling against me, and confirm the judgment. I knew also that she recognised me as sympathetic, and in some measure intelligent, however physically repulsive—a repulsion made more acute by the clothes I wore, of which I was made to feel a sense of acute shame, so strongly did her mind impress my own with a conception of their indecency.

I thought that she regarded me much as we should do a half-tamed dog, ferocious, but amenable to kindness and reason, and of a possible loyalty.

I knew also that she regarded her body as a broken and negligible thing, and that her mind had concentrated on persuading me to undertake, and enabling me to understand, an errand which the accident had interrupted, and which was of a very urgent nature.

So I sat there at the cave-mouth, while the sun rose clear from the hateful vivid green of the forest, that was still vocal with fear and excitement, while I slowly took my first and very difficult lesson in the new world I had entered.

“And now,” she thought, “if that be all, and you understand, I shall be very glad to die. You will not touch me when I am dead? If you are a beast that needs such food, you will find that the jelly in the tentacles will supply you. You must wait here till the twilight.”

And then she turned over, with a movement of surprising ease in the broken limbs, and curled up, and I knew that she had left the cave.

And I sat there thinking of all she had told me, and felt a great loneliness, and a great fear.

CHAPTER IV
THE OPAL WAY

I sat there a long time, trying to reconstruct her tale, and to find some possible explanation of its apparent paradoxes. Why should I stay there till the twilight came? I had learnt that where I sat I was in the very shadow of death. I knew that the way was long, and the message I had undertaken was of the utmost urgency.

Some reason for delay there had been, but it was like a dream which eludes waking thought. And how, in light or dark, could I cross the great chasm where the pavement ended? I had asked her this, but she had replied as though she did not understand my difficulty. The bridge was where it was not. There was no meaning in that. Perhaps my physical limitations were beyond her understanding. Surely, if I tried that road by night, though I should avoid the terrors on either hand, I must fall into the abyss beyond, and perish.

I resolved that I would go forward, at least as far as the path was clear, and, at the worst, I knew that there were other cavities, such as this one, in which I could take refuge with no greater danger than was behind me here.

But again my resolve faltered. I knew that there was some reason against my going, though my thought could not recall it.

Why should I go by night?

Patiently I recalled the visions which had crossed my mind as our thoughts encountered.

But there was nothing there to guide me. Only there were gaps I knew in the cliff-wall, and these were associated with the idea of deadly danger, but of what kind I could not discover. Her thought had gone forward with the message I was to bear to her kinsfolk on the dim grey beaches. These I saw clearly, and strange and mist-like as the vision rose, there at least was the lapping tide of the unchanging sea. I would go also to these creatures which were intelligent, though they were not men. Creatures which could understand, and perhaps show friendship, though they might think of me as the uncouth Caliban of some forgotten age.

Why should I wait for the dark? Safety to them might be to me the deadliest peril.

I would go now.

But first for food, and—was there no fresh water in this accursed place?

The thought struck me with such fear as I had not felt till then. There had been rain in the night, or at least a heavy mist, but now the sun shone with increasing strength in a sky of absolute and cloudless blue. There was a slight steam rising from the hot dark-purple powdery soil of the forest. The cliff-side was hot to touch. There was no moisture on the opal pavement now.

Had I to wait till the long-distant night and the cold mist returned?

Well, I might live till then, if I must, but at least it was a new reason for exploring further.

As to food—the severed tentacles lay on the soil before me. I had been advised to try them. Raw? I looked at them more carefully than I had yet done. They had not bled, as severed limbs would do on the earth I knew. But not plants.

Dare I go again across the burning soil, and would the monster dare to renew the conflict? Every moment there had been less sign of the havoc the axe had made. The hacked and shredded petals were growing to their old form again, but now they lay half-open to the sun, as did the whole of the forest.

Should I fear to approach it? And could it also read my thoughts, and would my fear give it confidence?

If that were so, I must school myself to feel courage. Is it not always the unknown that inspires terror, and was I not as strange to them as they to me?

My thought stopped to watch a new thing that was happening. Very cautiously, one of the petals moved aside, and very slowly an uninjured tentacle crept out across the soil. Was it feeling in the hope that its first victim still lay there? Did it hope to retrieve those broken tentacles? No, not that; for it touched one, as it seemed by chance, and shrank back, and trembled, and crept forward a different way.

Well, I would resolve it confidently. Axe in hand, I went forward. As I did so, I commenced to sing a lively tune that my subconscious mind suggested to the occasion.

But before the first line ended, it was drowned in the shrill scream of the monster, and the creeping arm leapt back to safety.

And again the scream was taken up and re-echoed by a hundred voices, hideous and deafening beyond description; and with no more thought of danger I went forward into that deadly space, among creatures that could destroy me in a moment, but that a song could terrify.

I walked quickly over the steaming soil, which was much hotter than before, picked up a piece of tentacle, perhaps six feet in length, and flung it on the pavement. Then I took it into the cave to examine it. The skin was tough and flexible, with a curious fibrous growth inside it, with hollow cells intervening. Then there was a thin membrane, and inside this a ruby-coloured jelly-like substance, outwardly firm, but semi-liquid towards the centre, from which a few drops fell as I turned it.

I tasted this jelly and found it very sweet, but otherwise unlike anything to which I can make comparison. I ate a little, hesitating, and then decided to sling my snake-like larder over my shoulder, and have a good meal later, if I felt no ill-effects from my first adventure.

CHAPTER V
THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE

I had now resolved to go forward while I had the use of daylight to guide me. Yet, so pliable is the human mind, I felt already the reluctance with which a man must take farewell of familiar things, to face the perils of a homeless way.

I glanced again at my companion of an hour, and with a more detailed consideration than I had previously given.

Slim and graceful still, the body curved in death.

Very close and soft was the fur that covered her, silver-grey on the back, but changing forward into a deepening chestnut. The legs were well and finely shaped, but below the knee of each there was a slender snake-like appendage, ending with curving fingers, like a tiny monkey’s hand, which could close round the opposite limb and bind them together. The feet also were delicately shaped, but deeply slit into three webbed toes, of which the central one was the longest. Others—one at each side,—set far back, were curled up normally, but could open sideways with a thumb-like claw. The feet were furred equally with the legs, the silver-grey of the undersides lying so closely that it looked almost like a shining skin. They showed no sign of damage from the long rough journey that I knew they had made, nor was any road-dust upon them.

The limbs were coloured in the same way as the body,—silver-grey behind and chestnut-brown before, and the hands were almost human, but for the webbing which had shown between the open fingers.

The head was to me the most singular, being furred like the body, and of a similar colouring. The eyes were of a very human quality, and I had seen them to be alert and intelligent. Now they were covered by a heavy lid which rose upward, and in its turn was protected by a thin film which closed down, and was lashed like a human eyelid. The ears were set far back, and were covered by a furry flap which could be closed at will to shut out air or water.

The mouth was lipless, a thin slit, with no sign of teeth. The cheeks were covered by retractile pads beneath which was a gill-like device for water-breathing.

The tail, which could curl up beneath the body till it was practically invisible, was forked, with two more of those tiny monkey-hands at its extremities.

I saw, or guessed, these details and their significance imperfectly at the time,—the more so for my pledge not to touch the abandoned body,—but it was evident that it was adapted for land or water living with almost equal excellence.

I recognised that the novelty of what I saw was not surprising, but rather that there was so little structural change in the form of animal life over so long a period of earthly time. Still there was the vertebrate body, the limbs, the head; still a general similarity of external and, presumably, of internal organs.

I looked at the sinuous, graceful body, and wondered what it was that repelled me.

To an impartial intelligence it might be considered more beautiful than even an ideal human body, and the ideal in the human race is not the majority.

Surely, it was more so than the average of our domestic animals.

Was it the unfamiliarity only, or was it the doubt of humanity, which repelled me?

But repulsion, from whatever cause, was countered by a very different feeling, which made my feet slow as I left the cave, and my glance go backward.

Then I turned resolutely to the task which I had undertaken.

The day was very still. There was no cry or motion from the great cliff-height above me. There was no flying life that crossed the unbroken blue. The forest had stilled its fear, and the monstrous growths were sprawling open upon the steaming soil. I wondered what control it might be which held them so far backward that none could reach a deadly arm across the path I kept. Perhaps the nearer soil was too shallow for the growth they needed.

I went forward in this quiet peace for about four hours, stopping twice to eat from the store I carried, which I found, though only semi-liquid at the centre, had a gratifying quality of quenching thirst almost with the first mouthful. I suppose it to have been formed largely of water, as many solids are, and to have been soluble to digestion to an unusual degree. But it is a matter which I have no competence to decide.

I know that I must have covered more than twelve miles in the first four hours, with times for rest included ... and then came the abyss.

The cliff-wall ended, and ran back in a black and barren hill, immense and desolate in the daylight.

The forest ended abruptly on the edge of a chasm so deep that, though it must have been nearly a quarter of a mile to the further side, the great depth made it look narrow.

Far below, dim and snake-like in the distance, a great river wound, between deep shelving banks that looked moss-grown, but were covered with (perhaps familiar) trees.

I stood upon the edge, which sank like a wall, and I saw no possible way to go forward, or to clamber down.

I knew that there was a way which I had been meant to take, and more than once I walked from side to side of the path on which I stood, bending perilously over an edge which fell almost sheer to not less than five-thousand feet below.

As I did this, the rope-like tentacle, which I was carrying over my shoulder, slipped forward. I made one effort to clutch it; then, conscious of my peril, let it go, but I was overbalanced already. With an involuntary cry, that echoed and re-echoed through the barren heights, I fell forward.

CHAPTER VI
THE FROG-MOUTHS

Was the abyss an illusion only?

Dizzy and blank of mind, with a heart that beat to choking, and with a bruised and injured knee, I lay upon a level vacancy, and the cause of the accident lay, as on nothing, beside me.

How long I lay there I have no conception. I believe that as my heart-beats slowed, and my senses cleared, I fainted from a revulsion of terror, and, reviving, I lay afraid to move, and gazing with half-delirious eyes into the appalling depth beneath me. But memory is indistinct, and it is a terror which I recall with reluctance.

Soon or late, at last I realised that the path, though invisible to me, must run out across the gorge, and timidly, and then more boldly I felt to right and left, and wriggled back, and stood once more upon the evident platform.

I remained there for a long time, seeking courage to go forward. With a knowledge of what to look for, I fancied that the sunshine caught a faint gleam of opal light that crossed the chasm.

How should I venture to tread it? How could so frail a bridge extend so far without support or suspension? Would it sway beneath me as I advanced? Would it break at last, and drop me, a dead thing, before I reached the silver streak below?

In vain I tried to stimulate myself to the adventure. What hope was there if I did not cross it? Was I not pledged in honour to the attempt, and might not the path of honour be the path of safety also? Here, without apparent reason, an old line of forgotten verse intruded,—