Beyond the Great Oblivion

CHAPTER XXVII. DOOMED!

The aged man stood for a moment as though tranced at sound of the engineer's voice. Then, tapping feebly with his staff, he advanced a pace or two into the dungeon. And Stern and Beatrice--who now had sprung up, too, and was likewise staring at this singular apparition--heard once again the words:

“Peace, friends! Peace!”

Stern snatched up the revolver and leveled it.

“Stop there!” he shouted. “Another step and I--I--”

The old man hesitated, one hand holding the staff, the other groping out vacantly in front of him, as though to touch the prisoners. Behind him, the dull blue light cast its vague glow. Stern, seeing his bald and shaking head, lean, corded hand, and trembling body wrapped in its mantle of coarse brown stuff, could not finish the threat.

Instead, his pistol-hand dropped. He stood there for a moment as though paralyzed with utter astonishment. Outside, the chant had ceased. Through the doorway no living beings were visible--nothing but a thin and tenuous vapor, radiant in the gas-flare which droned its never-ending roar.

“In the name of Heaven, who--what--are you?” cried the engineer, at length. “A man who speaks English, here? Here?”

The aged one nodded slowly, and once again groped out toward Stern.

Then, in his strangely hollow voice, unreal and ghostly, and with uncertain hesitation, an accent that rendered the words all but unintelligible, he made answer:

“A man--yea, a living man. Not a ghost. A man! and I speak the English. Verily, I am ancient. Blind, I go unto my fathers soon. But not until I have had speech with you. Oh, this miracle--English speech with those to whom it still be a living tongue!”

He choked, and for a space could say no more. He trembled violently. Stern saw his frail body shake, heard sobs, and knew the ancient one was weeping.

“Well, great Scott! What d'you think of that?” exclaimed the engineer. “Say, Beatrice--am I dreaming? Do you see it, too?”

“Of course! He's a survivor, don't you understand?” she answered, with quicker intuition than his. “He's one of an elder generation--he remembers more! Perhaps he can help us!” she added eagerly. And without more ado, running to the old man, she seized his hand and pressed it to her bosom.

“Oh, father!” cried she. “We are Americans in terrible distress! You understand us--you, alone, of all these people here. Save us, if you can!”

The patriarch shook his head, where still some sparse and feeble hairs clung, snowy-white.

“Alas!” he answered, intelligibly, yet still with that strange, hesitant accent of his--“alas, what can I do? I am sent to you, verily, on a different mission. They do not understand, my people. They have forgotten all. They have fallen back into the night of ignorance. I alone remember; I only know. They mock me. But they fear me, also.

“Oh, woman!”--and, dropping his staff a-clatter to the floor, he stretched out a quivering hand--“oh, woman! and oh, man from above--speak! Speak, that I may hear the English from living lips!”

Stern, blinking with astonishment there in the half-gloom, drew near.

“English?” he queried. “Haven't you ever heard it spoken?”

“Never! Yet, all my life, here in this lost place, have I studied and dreamed of that ancient tongue. Our race once spoke it. Now it is lost. That magnificent language, so rich and pure, all lost, forever lost! And we--”

“But what do you speak down here?” exclaimed the engineer, with eager interest. “It seemed to me I could almost catch something of it; but when it came down to the real meaning, I couldn't. If we could only talk with these people here, your people, they might give us some kind of a show! Tell me!”

“A--a show?” queried the blind man, shaking his head and laying his other hand on Stern's shoulder. “Verily, I cannot comprehend. An entertainment, you mean? Alas, no, friends; they are not hospitable, my people. I fear me; I fear me greatly that--that--”

He did not finish, but stood there blinking his sightless eyes, as though with some vast effort of the will he might gain knowledge of their features. Then, very deftly, he ran his fingers over Stern's bearded face. Upon the engineer's lips his digits paused a second.

“Living English!” he breathed in an awed voice. “These lips speak it as a living language! Oh, tell me, friends, are there now men of your race--once our race--still living, up yonder? Is there such a place--is there a sky, a sun, moon, stars--verily such things now? Or is this all, as my people say, deriding me, only the babbling of old wives' tales?”

A thousand swift, conflicting thoughts seemed struggling in Stern's mind. Here, there, he seemed to catch a lucid bit; but for the moment he could analyze nothing of these swarming impressions.

He seemed to see in this strange ancient-of-days some last and lingering relic of a former generation of the Folk of the Abyss, a relic to whom perhaps had been handed down, through countless generations, some vague and wildly distorted traditions of the days before the cataclysm. A relic who still remembered a little English, archaic, formal, mispronounced, but who, with the tenacious memory of the very aged, still treasured a few hundred words of what to him was but a dead and forgotten tongue. A relic, still longing for knowledge of the outer world--still striving to keep alive in the degenerated people some spark of memory of all that once had been!

And as this realization, not yet very clear, but seemingly certain in its general form, dawned on the engineer, a sudden interest in the problem and the tragedy of it all sprang up in him, so keen, so poignant in its appeal to his scientific sense, that for a moment it quite banished his distress and his desire for escape with Beatrice.

“Why, girl,” he cried, “here's a case parallel, in real life, to the wildest imaginings of fiction! It's as though a couple of ancient Romans had walked in upon some old archeologist who'd given his life to studying primitive Latin! Only you'd have to imagine he was the only man in the world who remembered a word of Latin at all! Can you grasp it? No wonder he's overcome!

“Gad! If we work this right,” he added in a swift aside, “this will be good for a return ticket, all right!”

The old man withdrew his hand from the grasp of Beatrice and folded both arms across his breast with simple dignity.

“I rejoice that I have lived to this time,” he stammered slowly, gropingly, as though each word, each distorted and mispronounced syllable had to be sought with difficulty. “I am glad that I have lived to touch you and to hear your voices. To know it is no mere tradition, but that, verily, there was such a race and such a language! The rest also, must be true--the earth, and the sun, and everything! Oh, this is a wonder and a miracle! Now I can die in a great peace, and they will know I have spoken truth to their mocking!”

He kept silence a space, and the two captives looked fixedly at him, strangely moved. On his withered cheeks they could see, by the dull bluish glow through the doorway, tears still wet. The long and venerable beard of spotless white trembled as it fell freely over the coarse mantle.

“What a subject for a painter--if there were any painters left!” thought Stern.

The old man's lips moved again.

“Now I can go in peace to my appointed place in the Great Vortex,” said he, and bowed his head, and whispered something in that other speech they had already heard but could not understand.

Stern spoke first.

“What shall we call your name, father?” asked he.

“Call me J'hungaav,” he answered, pronouncing a name which neither of them could correctly imitate. When they had tried he asked:

“And yours?”

Stern gave both the girl's and his own. The old man caught them both readily enough, though with a very different accent.

“Now, see here, father,” the engineer resumed, “you'll pardon us, I know. There's a million things to talk about. A million we want to ask, and that we can tell you! But we're very tired. We're hungry. Thirsty. Understand? We've just been through a terrible experience. You can't grasp it yet; but I'll tell you we've fallen, God knows how far, in an aeroplane--”

“Fallen? In an--an--”

“No matter. We've fallen from the surface. From the world where there's a sky, and sun, and stars, and all the rest of it. So far as we know, this woman and I are the only two people--the original kind of people, I mean; the people of the time before--er--hang it!--it's mighty hard to explain!”

“I understand. You are the only two now living of our former race? And you have come from above? Verily, this is strange!”

“You bet it is! I mean, verily. And now we re here, your people have thrown us into this prison, or whatever it is. And we don't like the look of those skeletons on the iron rods outside a little bit! We--”

“Oh, I pray! I pray!” exclaimed the patriarch, thrusting out both hands. “Speak not of those! Not yet!”

“All right, father. What we want to ask is for something to eat and drink, some other kind of clothes than the furs we're wearing, and a place to sleep--a house, you know--we've got to rest! We mean no harm to your people. Wouldn't hurt a hair of their heads! Overjoyed to find 'em! Now, I ask you, as man to man, can't you get us out of this, and manage things so that we shall have a chance to explain?

“I'll give you the whole story, once we've recuperated. You can translate it to your people. I ask some consideration for myself, and I demand it for this woman! Well?”

The old man stood in silent thought a moment. Plain to see, his distress was very keen. His face wrinkled still more, and on his breast he bowed his majestic head, so eloquent of pain and sorrow and long disappointment.

Stern, watching him narrowly, played his trump-card.

“Father,” said he, “I don't know why you were sent here to talk with us, or how they knew you could talk with us even. I don't know what any of this treatment means. But I do know that this girl and I are from the world of a thousand years ago--the world in which your ancient forefathers used to dwell!

“She and I know all about that world. We know the language which to you is only a precious memory, to us a living fact. We can tell you hundreds, thousands of things! We can teach you everything you want to know! For a year--if you people have years down here--we can sit and talk to you, and instruct you, and make you far, far wiser than any of your Folk!

“More, we can teach your Folk the arts of peace and war--a multitude of wonderful and useful things. We can raise them from barbarism to civilization again! We can save them--save the world! And I appeal to you, in the name of all the great and mighty past which to you is still a memory, if not to them--save us now!”

He ceased. The old man sighed deeply, and for a while kept silence. His face might have served as the living personification of intense and hopeless woe.

Stern had an idea.

“Father,” he added--“here, take this weapon in your hand!” He thrust the automatic into the patriarch's fingers. “This is a revolver. Have you ever heard that word? With this, and other weapons even stronger, our race, your race, used to fight. It can kill men at a distance in a twinkling of an eye. It is swift and very powerful! Let this be the proof that we are what we say, survivors from the time that was! And in the name of that great day, and in the name of what we still can bring to pass for you and yours, save us from whatever evil threatens!”

A moment the old man held the revolver. Then, shuddering as with a sudden chill, he thrust it back at Stern.

“Alas!” cried he. “What am I against a thousand? A thousand, sunk in ignorance and fear and hate? A thousand who mock at me? Who believe you, verily, to be only some new and stronger kind of Lanskaarn, as we call our ancient enemies on the great islands in the sea.

“What can I do? They have let me have speech with you merely because they think me so old and so childish! Because they say my brain is soft! Whatever I may tell them, they will only mock. Woe upon me that I have known this hour! That I have heard this ancient tongue, only now forever to lose it! That I know the truth! That I know the world of old tradition was true and is true, only now to have no more, after this moment, any hope ever to learn about it!”

“The devil you say!” cried Stern, with sudden anger. “You mean they won't listen to reason? You mean they're planning to butcher us, and hang us up there along with the rest of the captured Lanskaarns, or whatever you call them? You mean they're going to take us--us, the only chance they've got ever to get out of this, and stick us like a couple of pigs, eh? Well, by God! You tell them--you tell--”

In the doorway appeared another form, armed with an iron spear. Came a quick word of command.

With a cry of utter hopelessness and heartbreak, a wail that seemed to pierce the very soul, the patriarch turned and stumbled to the door.

He paused. He turned, and, stretching out both feeble arms to them--to them, who meant so infinitely much to him, so absolutely nothing to his barbarous race--cried:

“Fare you well, O godlike people of that better time! Fare you well! Before another tide has risen on our accursed black beach, verily both of you, the last survivors--”

With a harsh word of anger, the spearsman thrust him back and away.

Stern leaped forward, revolver leveled.

But before he could pull trigger the iron door had clanged shut.

Once more darkness swallowed them.

Black though it was, it equaled not the blackness of their absolute despair.