Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/34

34 off and we floated again. They were built sturdily, or we should all have been dead. Some of these guns pointing out here we can use, but some I do not know how to use. I will teach you what I know."

E FLOATED in the exact center of the circular boring, the smooth, ancient, time-mottled rock of the floor glided away beneath us. The dust stirred slightly under the forcefields of the magnetic devices which held us afloat, that was all. A smell, as of an old bookstore, filled the globe, the smell of time itself, familiar to me now as the "smell of the caverns." The bright, glittering metal, untarnished and speaking as of work created yesterday, was here and there belied by dark streaks of corrosion where some less hardy metal had been used in the construction of some less essential part. Solaris advanced a huge lever a fraction of a notch, and the great globe started forward down the cavern at a speed of perhaps forty miles an hour.

"It won't go any slower, and if one went faster, the automatic eyes would keep us from bumping. But I cannot bring myself to trust my life wholly to such antique devices for safety. I can shut off the power and thus slow down, but it is seldom necessary. Watch the far screens for the ray-paths of some bush-whacker nomad. They often lie in wait along the ways with a ray to kill anything that passes. We must see them first and that without fail. They will know we are traveling, our thought will have been heard, our plans known. They will try to trap us."

Beside me as I swung the vision ray in a slow arc across the approaching network of ways, was Nydia's fair hair, curling softly about her gardenia face, her huge unseeing eyes that yet saw, much more than others. My heart pumped that blind loyalty she had inspired in me. I knew that Nydia's mental eyes, trained from her years of work with the telaug and similar mental apparatus, were seeing me in a wealth of detail no ordinary eyes with light-ray vision could attain. She was seeing my inner spirit, my will to bend life into what it should be, my own opinion of my body and inner-self was in her mind addeadded [sic] to all our friends inner vision of me to make a composite image of greatly increased accuracy to those held by ordinary mortals. This inner vision she held of me was what I strove to keep clean and bright, and that effort was good for my soul. Her kind of eye is a far more exacting one than that which never sees beneath the surface at all. For I am an ordinary fellow, of near six foot in height, 170 lbs. weight, well muscled,—with a potato nose, large teeth, a heavy chin—no beauty, though not entirely ugly. But Nydia saw far more than that, which was why she loved me. For I do have a will to make life what it should be, and that was the thing in me which she prized.

Nydia spoke softly in my ear.

"This Zigor's palace of dread, this Eg Notha, I have heard of it from travelers,—it is shunned, but some have looked upon it from afar. I hope we get to see it. To read that store of records, collected from the whole cavern world by the family of Mephisto. God knows what we may learn."

WISH I could put the actual scenes of this cavern journey into your minds, but words to depict the ultra-beauty of the ancient work do not exist. The walls of the caverns, sometimes vast connecting chambers where cavern ways cross, and sometimes longer chambers along the "way" sides like subway platforms where the trains stop, are decorated with vast bas-reliefs, of a meaning that sometimes glimbers through the clouds of ignorance that are modern man's inheritance—glimmer through in a blaze of terrific meaning that shakes the soul inside a man, but never quite completely registers all that it contains. Their picture symbol system of thought was vastly different from our own uncultured one, springing from a long heredity of knowledge of goings and lifeforms of which we know nothing. One sees pictured gatherings of beings, no two of them alike, and knows that it is a recorded scene of some past meeting of the life of many planets of divergently formed races, gathered to listen with their