Page:Weird Tales Volume 9 Number 3 (1927-03).djvu/113

 only those other visions could be as easily banished as that one!

Ere long, however, those thronging thoughts and visions became hazy, confused, began to fade; and then suddenly they were blended with the monsters and the horrors of dreams.

It was 6 o'clock when I awoke. Rhodes was sitting up. He had, he told me, just awakened. One of the Dromans was stirring in his sleep and muttering something in cavernous and horrible tones. As I sat there and listened, a chill passed through me, so terrible were the sounds.

"I can't stand that," I exclaimed. "I'm going to wake him up. It's time we were moving, anyway."

"Yes," nodded Milton. "Surely, though, we'll find water today."

"Today! Where is your day in this place? It's night eternal. And for us, I'm afraid, it is good-night with a vengeance."

Ere long we were again under way. My canteen was now as dry as a bone, and I felt mighty sad. However, since I could not banish them, I endeavored to mask those dark and dire forebodings. When we set forth, it was with the hope that we might find, and be conducted by it to safety, the road by which those old worshipers had journeyed to and from that hall of the dragon. But not a vestige of such a route could we discover.

Hours passed. On and on we went, deeper and deeper. Noon came. No change. No one had a drop of water now. Rhodes and I estimated the distance traveled since quitting the temple of the dragon at ten miles and the descent at something like four thousand feet. This estimate, or rather guess, may, however, have been wide of the truth. We still were involved in the maddening intricacies of the labyrinth.

I confess that our situation began to assume an aspect that made my very soul turn sick and cold. Rhodes, however—divining perhaps what was in my mind—pointed out that we had not been lost very long, and that surely we would find water some place. A man, said he, in the equable temperature of this subterranean world, could live for quite a time without water. I had no doubt that a man could—if he were lying in bed! But we were not doing that; we were in constant motion. The arduous exercise that we were undergoing, our fatigue, the anxieties and fears that preyed upon the mind—each was contributing its quota to the dire and steady work of enervation.

No, I would fight against despair; but certainly I could imbibe no consolation, no strength, either mental or physical, from a deliberate blinking of facts. And one of the facts was that, unless we soon found water, ours would be that fate which has overtaken so many of those who have gone forth to search out the secrets of mysterious places.

that halt for lunch—and what an awful lunch that was!—Milton brought forward his journal, and Drorathusa, by means of pictures drawn in the book, made it clear to us that they would never have missed the route had it not been for the loss of their beloved demon. That, of course, made Rhodes and me very sorry; but, if the demon had not been killed, we certainly should have been even more sorry—and, I'm afraid, in a worse place than this in which we now found ourselves.

This strange intelligence, too, reminded me of Grandfather Scranton's wonder as to how his angel and her demon had journeyed over rock, snowfield and glacier to the Tamahnowis Rocks through that, dense, blinding vapor. I understood that now—they were guided by the wonderful instinct of the ape-bat. How truly wonderful that instinct is, we were yet to learn. Little wonder that Drorathusa mourned the