Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/42

42 and we felt as though the door to all wisdom had been opened to us.

I wish I could tell you the marvels those antique records made live in our minds as the records played and we were wafted into the ancient times when the world was young and life was perfect—a wonderland of rich experience—a place of no death and less disease—a place where accomplishment and learning were the order of every day and no man lay down to sleep without his hands having seen a mass of work and play accomplished, such as we moderns do not get into a lifetime. For there is no telling in our weak modern words and thought symbols what the ancients were or what wisdom and life experience are packed into their thought-records, for one gets but a sort of "skim" over the vastness of such a display of mighty thought energy, and that thin sight of ours sees more than one man can ever convey to another with this poor medium.

Old Mephisto proved tireless and very knowing as to what we most wished to see, and I suspected as the day wore on that our dark-eyed friend, Chlio, of the evening before was still watching us sleeplessly over her telaug beam and was reading our minds for our purposes and telling the old man's mind what it was we wished to learn; that he was really laying himself out for us because his dark-eyed "watcher" wished it so. And I was mightily pleased to see this evidence of love and care for us in these two and realized from many strange happenings that these two were all that kept the ancient pile of wonder and wisdom from becoming such another horror-hole as one can find only in the madness and wonder and struggle of the world below the earth.

We learned much of different kinds of weapons and their uses that we proposed to apply when we returned to our home and to our struggle with the human djinni, the devils migrant from far Africa who beset us there.

We learned, too, that the make of these things was not beyond us, that we could now repair and get into running order many things we had been unable to use before. The dero from afar are full of unthinking, and never try to do aught for themselves, often making of wonder-work a wreck and an ugly nothingness, over which they gloat.

OW the old man opened up a new section of the record files, saying: "What have I been showing you are from the very far past before the original Elder race left our earth. But this section is from a later time, and is the history of our family from its beginnings, both before and after they came to earth. As the story comes down into historical times, I will pick the most revealing; those bits of record which show what are, to me, the turning points in the history of the caves and the fortunes of the Mephisto family. The records cease about one hundred years ago, after the first Mephisto came here under America and established himself, the Zigor of whom you have heard. I came here with my following much later, quite recently, and this pile had been deserted for fifty years when I arrived.

"Luckily the place had remained untouched, as the nomads have a superstitious fear of the place."

We reclined in a circle on lounges about the massive dream-mech, with which Mephisto had chosen to display this part of the collection. I thought to myself how fortunate it was that this store of cavern history had been preserved through the vagaries of time and fortune to this day, and how infinitely valuable they would be to a group of ambitious young technical men from the surface and how much they would get of value to men from it all. But now old Mephisto had swung a ray separately upon each of us, and as he turned the record release, we drifted into a land of dream, a vivid place of more reality by far than the world of the ordinary senses, for the old records were made by the master race and are productive of much stronger sensations than natural when augmented by the powerful augmentors.

E AWOKE upon a world of metal, where titanic towers plunged upward into the blinding white of the clouds and were lost to view. The soil of the planet had been, as far as the eye could see, sealed over with rustless, impervious metal, and on this foundation the vast metal living places of this race of the past of some far world of space had been reared—and reared so tremendously that nowhere could one see the top of anything. Between the