The Secret People

CHAPTER I

Consciousness began to trickle back in a very filtered form. The first thing Mark was aware of was a familiar, blinding headache. He moved uneasily. There had been the explosion; the whole world turning somersaults; the Sun Bird diving at the sea____No, that was farther off.

Hadn't something else happened since then? He made a tremendous effort to open his eyes. Each lid seemed to be weighted with several pounds as well as being stiff from disuse. And when they lifted, he could not focus properly. There was a hazy vision of a grey surface which whirled and tilted. It steadied after a few seconds, and became clearer. Rock? That was familiar somehow....

Memory suddenly came back in full flood. The passages, the caves, the fantastic mushrooms, and the little men____

'Margaret?' he said feebly.

He turned his head, searching for her. He found himself lying in a cave the size of an ordinary dining-room. In the centre of the ceiling a blue-white lamp was glowing, smaller, but in other particulars like those in the corridors. Beside him, on the floor, stood a bowl of polished stone, full almost to the brim with water. He stretched out a hand to pull it closer, and then stopped in the middle of the action; the hand felt so weak, looked so thin and wasted that he could scarcely recognise it for his own. How long had he been here? he wondered as he leant over the bowl to drink.

The cool water did him good. He leaned his head back on the pillow and considered the surroundings more carefully.

The cave could hardly be called furnished, but someone had made attempts to render it habitable. Against the other walls were set low, couch-like mounds like that on which he himself lay. The coverings of both the small cushions and the larger which served for mattresses were woven from inch-wide strips of some strange material which was leather-like in colour, though not in texture. To give warmth and extra comfort somebody had wrapped a long, blue woollen scarf about him.

In several places the nakedness of the rock walls had been hidden by designs and pictures painted in three or four raw colours. But he noted that though the execution was rough, it was backed by knowledge; the crudity was in the workmanship, not in the observation. The study of a fungus forest was no less informed than the view of an Arab village, but there were figures here and there which puzzled him. Arabs he could recognize, white men and even the dwarf grey folk, but there were others, both men and women, which fitted into neither of these categories.

He raised a hand to his aching head and found that it was heavily bandaged. What had happened since that fight in the corridor? He had a misty notion of faces close to his own, voices which murmured encouragingly, but they had been strangers. Where was Margaret? He must find her. ...

The effort of sitting up set his head pounding again so that he had to clench his teeth. With difficulty he got to his feet and leaned for some swimming seconds against the wall. His legs felt so weakly useless that any movement might double them beneath him. The effort required to force them on was prodigious. Only his anxiety for Margaret drove him to make it.

The cave entrance had been chiselled to the shape of a doorway, though it held no door. It gave on to a corridor, dimly lit and stretching away to both sides. A faint murmur which might be of voices came from the right, and decided him to go that way. In all he made a journey of perhaps fifty yards, but it seemed one of the longest of his life. Four times in his slow course he was forced to rest against the wall, feeling too spent either to continue or return, wishing only to drop where he was. But each time he regathered, at last, just enough strength to drag his unsteady feet forward.

Finally the passage gave on to a cavern. He stood looking at numbers of men and women who crossed its floor on the way from one tunnel mouth to another. He tried to call out to them, but his voice sounded childishly weak. And something queer was happening to the people____They seemed to be swimming about.... The whole cave was reeling drunkenly. His knees suddenly sagged. The floor of the cavern rose obliquely from the left, and hit him.

Arms lifted him into a sitting position; a smooth something was thrust against his lips.

'Here, drink this,' said a voice.

He obeyed feebly. A gulp of some coarse spirit burned its way down. His eyes opened to the hazy sight of two bearded faces hanging over his own. The mouth in one opened:

'What are you doing out here?'

'Margaret,' he managed to say. 'Where is she?'

The two bearded faces looked at one another. The first spoke again.

'That's all right, buddy. Don't you worry. All you got to do is rest. How about getting back now?'

They assisted him to his feet.

'Think you can walk?'

He nodded dumbly, but at the first faltering step his knees doubled up again. The taller of the two men picked him up easily, and strode back along the passage. Very thankfully Mark felt himself laid down on the couch he had so lately left. After an indefinite period which might have been a few minutes or a few hours, someone roused him. The man who had carried him was holding out two bowls, one containing water, and the other, a kind of mash.

'What-?' he began. But the other shook his head.

'No, just you get outside this first. You can talk after.'

He took a drink of water and started on the mash. It had a slightly earthy flavour, curious, though not unpleasant. While he fed he took stock once more of his surroundings. He was back in the decorated cave, all right, but this time he had three companions. The man who had spoken was a tall, broad figure, clad in the rags of a French uniform. His hands, and such parts of his face as were visible behind a matted beard, were lined with ingrained grime. Hair which might be fair when clean had been clumsily restrained, possibly with the aid of a knife. Above it, far back on the head was perched a battered kepi.

Wonderingly, Mark transferred his gaze to the next. A slighter man, this, with hair thinning, though such as did grow had been lopped in the same crude fashion. His beard, like the others, was matted, and his hands equally grimy, but his clothing was different. The tatters of his suit would never be recognised by its London maker, but they were tatters of good quality. The third man was an Arab, wearing a burnous which had the appearance of having served its owner throughout an arduous campaign. It reminded Mark vaguely of certain battle-torn Hags he had seen hung in churches.

He finished the mash, in which he detected traces of the same coarse spirit which had been given him before, and pushed the bowl away. He felt greatly improved. In a pocket he found a packet of cigarettes which he handed round. The three men looked at him as if he had performed a miracle. They lit up with a care which was almost reverent.

'Now perhaps you'll tell me where she is?' he asked.

'Was she with you?' inquired the big man.

'Of course she was. Do you mean you've not seen her?' He looked questioningly at them in turn. They shook their heads.

'But she was with me when I was knocked out. I've got to find her.'

He began to struggle to his feet. The tall man caught his arm and pushed him back.

'No. You keep sitting awhile. There's a whole lot you got to learn yet. And one of 'em is that it ain't no sort of good being in a hurry in these parts.'

'But-'

'I tell you, you can't do a thing. Anyway, you're still sick, and got to lay up for a bit. Take it from'me, if your girl's safe now, she'll stay safe.'

'You mean that?'

'Sure I mean it.'

Mark believed him. The man spoke firmly, as though he had no doubt. Moreover, in his present state of weakness, he could be of assistance to no one. He dropped back on his cushions and contemplated the three.

'Well, for God's sake tell me something about this place. I've been living in a kind of nightmare. I don't know how long I've been here, or even where I really am.'

'Well, you're the latest arrival, I can tell you that, though you've been sick a goodish time. You're a tailor's dummy to the rest of us in this dump. How d'you get here? Tell us your yarn first.'

Mark told his story in considerable detail. The first part seemed to hold more interest for his listeners than did the account of the fungus forest, and the tall man quelled the very evident desires of the European to make frequent interruptions. He was silent for a time after Mark's account of the fight.

'So that's what it's all about,' he said thoughtfully. 'No wonder the poor devils are getting all het up. It'll mean the end of them.'

'And of us too,' said the other.

The Arab merely nodded.

'But what are you doing here?' Mark asked impatiently. 'You're American, aren't you? Why the French uniform?'

'Say, we've forgotten the introductions. I'm John Smith, leastways that's my name in the Legion. This is Charles Gordon, of London, England, and this, Mahmud el Jiz-zah, of some God-forsaken hole in the desert. Gordon is an arch—, arch—, anyway, he digs for things which aren't no manner of good to anybody. And Mahmud, well I don't know what he does, but he was educated in some swell place in England, Oxford College.'

'Balliol,' murmured the Arab, deprecatingly.

'But what are you all doing here?'

'Just living here.'

'But why?'

'Because we darn well can't do nothing else. D'you think we're here for fun?'

Mark looked at their beards, and the rags which flapped about them.

'How long have you been here?'

'What's the date?'

Mark considered. Probably several days had elapsed during his unconsciousness, but he could remember the date of the Sun Bird's crash.

'It was the sixteenth of September when we fell in.'

'The year, man.'

He stared. 'Why, 1964, of course.'

'That makes six years for me.'

'Seven for me,' said Gordon.

'Five,' admitted the Arab.

Mark's eyes opened wide. He looked from face to face for a sign that this was a leg pull.

'Seven years!' He stared at Gordon. 'You can't mean it. Seven years—here, in these caves?'

The other nodded and smiled a little grimly. 'Oh yes, I mean it, all right.'

'But—but I don't understand. There must be ways out.'

'There are ways out—must be any amount of them. The trouble is that we can't get at them.'

'Why not? You found your ways in.'

'So did you, but it doesn't help, does it?'

'But you didn't all come in down waterfalls.'

'No. The real trouble is these little grey guys. They've got us penned up like we was cattle. And haven't they just got the drop on us. Say, it'd be easier to crash out of hell than out of this joint.'

'But you don't mean you're here for good?'

'You've said it, buddy. You too.'

'But-'

Mark was aware again of the feeling that this was all part of a nightmare, growing worse at every turn. Imprisoned in these caves for the rest of one's life! It was fantastic, it couldn't be true. He turned to Gordon who was staring at the picture of the Arab village. There was something in his expression more disturbing than an hour of the American's conversation.

'It is quite true,' the Arab's voice assured him calmly.

'It can't be true. There must be a way out.'

'If anyone had ever got out, this place would no longer be secure. That it is secret means that no one ever has got out.'

Gordon interrupted. 'No, that's not so. I believe in my theory that-'

'Oh, damn your theories,' Smith cut in. 'Even if they're right, what the hell's the good of them to us? Cut 'em out.'

He turned back to Mark. 'The sooner you get a hold on the idea that you and me and all of us are in the cooler for keeps, the easier it's gonna be for you.'

Mark's convalescence was a long business. When it irked him, and he grumbled at the waste of time, Gordon did his best to be reassuring.

'For one thing, the phrase "waste of time" has no meaning in here,' he said. 'And, for another, you're damned lucky to be convalescent at all. Candidly, you were in such a mess when you came in that we never thought you'd make it. Then you didn't help things by getting out of here the minute you came round—it gave you a nasty relapse. Just lie there quietly, and don't fret about things. It won't do you any good to get what Smith calls "all het up".'

Mark did his best to obey, and during the time which followed, he came to know the three men well. His first hazy impressions had to be revised. Smith, for instance, was not altogether the pessimist he had appeared. So far from losing all hopes of escaping from the caves, as he had suggested, he was full of hopes. His insistence on its impossibility was seldom a genuine belief; far more often it was a defence, a kind of counter-suggestion set up to check his hopes from rising too high. Once, in a moment of unusual confidence, he admitted:

'If I didn't think we were going to get clear of this place sometime, I guess I'd have bumped myself off before now; but if I let myself get too worked up. I'll probably have to bump myself off one day through sheer disappointment. Most of the time I expect the worst; it's so good when it doesn't happen.'

A simple theory, Smith's, of not tempting the gods. It had points in common with the practice of carrying an umbrella to persuade the sun to shine, or travelling with two spare wheels in order to avoid a puncture. Beneath his attempts to bluff fate, he was more hopeful than the others.

Gordon had reached a mental stage verging upon acceptance of the inevitable. Only a firm belief in some of his theories—of which, Mark was to discover, he had many—had prevented him from long ago relinquishing all idea of return. Even so, he was not likely to sink into the despair which Smith feared. He had a power of dissociating himself from his surroundings and losing himself in the purely conjectural, without which he would indeed have been forlorn. He was not without moods of deep dejection, but even a chance word would often break their spell. A light of sudden excitement would flicker in his eyes, the thin face would come to life as though a mask had been cast off, and in a few moments he would be holding forth violently; passionately advocating theories which were sometimes sound common sense, and at others the extreme of fantasy. For the most part his words seemed to flow around Smith without causing a ripple of appreciation; though occasionally the big man would grasp a practical suggestion out of the flood of words, and haul it ashore with satisfaction.

The Arab listened to the talk with little more comment than a grunt here and there. Mark was uncertain whether his silence covered fatalistic acceptance, or profound thought. Whichever it was, he seemed of all the party, the least affected by the situation. When he did talk it was usually to give reminiscences or to tell some Arab fable of which the point was completely incomprehensible to the European mind. His chief link with the others seemed to be a mutual admiration between Smith and himself. The big frame and the slow strength of the American found its complement in the wiry agility of the Arab.

Mark, growing stronger, began to develop a more active interest in his surroundings, and a desire to know how he came to be in his present company. His own method of entry was, beyond doubt, unique. He demanded to know how Smith had found his way in.

Smith pulled his ear thoughtfully, and looked at the others with some doubt. Mark realised that the three must know one another's stories by heart.

'I don't mind. Carry on,' said Gordon, and the Arab nodded amiably.

'Well, it ain't much of a yarn, but here it is. We—a company of us, that is—had been moved up to do some police work in the mountains north of Ghardaia—and let me tell you that if you don't know where Ghardaia is, you ain't missed much.

'Now, the Frenchies have an idea that a guy who's still alive after a couple of months in the Legion is so tough that he can't be killed anyway. And they behave according. They dress you up in the heaviest clothes they can find, give you a camel-sized pack and send you hiking for thousands of kilometres where the sun's shining twice as hot as it does any place else. I can't say how many blasted, blistering miles we put away that day, but I do know they marched us till we was pretty near dead. Some of the poor devils were all but asleep on their feet, and I was as near all in as makes no difference.

'I guess they didn't mean us to fight. The big idea was to make a nice bright show of uniforms, and whatever local sheik it was that had gotten a bit above himself would just naturally curl up and reflect on the glory of la France. Yes, that was the idea, right enough. The trouble was the Arabs didn't see it that way—maybe the uniforms didn't look smart enough, or something. Anyway, they waited till we were about played out, and then took a hand. We were in the open, and they were on the cliffs above us, skipping about just like antelopes-—'cept that they had guns—and taking playful pot shots—most of 'em bulls. It wasn't so funny, and we got orders to do the only possible thing—leg it to the cliff foot and take cover.

'There were a lot of caves there, all sizes, and not wanting to stay outside and have rocks dropped on our nuts, we made for 'em. And there we stayed put. They'd got us all nicely bottled up, and how! All you'd got to do for a fatal dose of lead poisoning was to take one look outside. Some guys who'd been told that Arabs can't shoot tried it—once.

'Maybe it sounds worse than it looked. Anyway, we weren't worrying a lot—I reckon we all just wanted to sleep. It wouldn't be long before somebody at headquarters missed us and started raising hell to know what we were at. We'd nothing to do bar sit tight and wait.

'But the local sheik didn't see the fun of that. He'd started something, and he was going through with it. It'd probably be easier for him to explain away the disappearance of a whole company than to account for a few dead bodies. He was wholesale-minded, that fellow. We'd been there about an hour when there was hell's own crash, away on the right. A couple of our men looked out to see what had happened—maybe they did, but it wasn't much help to us, seeing that they got bullets through their heads for their trouble. The rest of us were content to sit tight and guess what particular form of hell-raising was going on outside. A half-hour later we knew for certain. There was a Gawdalmighty explosion right above us. Half the cliff face must have split off and come down with a run. Leastways, it was enough to bury the mouth of our cave, and put paid to four poor devils who were standing near. The wily sheik had hit on a swell idea for covering up his tracks, and it looked like we were buried alive____I reckon the guys in the other caves were; I ain't seen none of 'em in these parts.

'Well, that left three of us standing. Olsen, Dubois, and me. And we had the choice of sitting down to die right there, or looking round the cave to see whether there wasn't some other way out. We hadn't a hope of shifting the tons of stuff in the entrance. After a bit we found a kind of a crack at the back. There was a draught through it, which meant it went some place. We shoved in and started hiking again, with a few bits of candle between us.

'I don't know how long it was before Olsen and me found ourselves looking down a split into one of those lighted tunnels—some days, most likely. And it's no good my telling you the way those lights struck us; you must've felt the same way yourself when you first saw 'em. If it hadn't been that Olsen saw 'em, same as me, I'd 've thought I was nuts.

'We'd lost Dubois. He'd fallen into a crevice some place back along, and broken his neck—poor devil. Olsen wasn't in too good shape, either; he'd broken an arm, and pretty near knocked himself silly on a stalactite. But we'd made it—just.

'A bunch of them white pygmies found us wandering around. They didn't seem much surprised to see us. They brought up some food, and let us sleep a bit, then they marched us off here.'

He stopped. Apparently he considered his tale was finished. From Mark's point of view, it was scarcely begun.

'But what is this place?' he prompted. 'You forget I've seen practically nothing of it except this particular cave.'

'This? Oh well, you could call it a kind of jail. It's a corner of their system of caves, and there's only one way in to it. You were "out" when they lugged you along, or you'd have seen the way it is. They brought you down a tunnel much the same as the rest, only it stops short on a ledge. And that ledge is about a hundred feet up the side of one of the biggest of our caves. There's no ramp, nor steps, nor nothing leading from it. They just put a rope round you and let you down in here, and that's that. You can't climb up a hundred feet of smooth rock—not even if you're a human fly.'

'But do you mean to say that nobody's tried to get up?'

'Tried? By gosh, they have. But there's always some of the little grey guys watching for 'em. There's marks near the bottom where somebody had a try at cutting hand-holes—they say he was stopped by a rock being dropped on his head. I once saw a fellow try to make a break for it, Frenchie, he was, and about half crazed, or he'd never have tried it. They'd just let down a new specimen into this corral when this guy thinks he sees a chance. He rushes out of the crowd of us watching, grabs the rope and starts climbing like a monkey. They let him get three-quarters of the way up before they cut the rope.'

Mark remained almost as puzzled as before. Smith had been so long below ground that he failed to understand the bewilderment of a newcomer. Familiarity had wiped away his earlier amazement at this system of caves. Its existence had become an accepted, unsurprising fact, and the life within it a misfortune rather than an astonishment.

'But who are these little white men? What are they doing here? Why don't they come out?'

The American shook his head.

'That's out of my line. Gordon has a theory about it. Get him to tell you some time. What's interesting me right now is the dope you gave us. It makes things clearer.'

'I gave you?'

'Sure. The low down on this New Sea stuff. There's been something worrying them, we've seen that, but we couldn't figure out just what it was. Now we've got it.'

'Does it help?'

'Help? Oh, it helps all right. It means when we get drowned down here we won't have to worry any more about getting out.'

Another time Mark put his questions to Gordon with greater success. The archaeologist, though he had been imprisoned longei than Smith, had contrived to keep his mind more supple. Not only had he retained an active interest, save for brief periods of depression, in the whys and wherefores of this subterranean race and its origin, but he possessed some capacity for seeing another's point of view—a quality which could never have been characteristic of the American. Requests for information which Smith met with the assurance that there was 'no hurry' and that Mark would have 'a hell of a long time to find it out in', were treated by Gordon with some appreciation of the newcomer's bewilderment. He enlarged upon Smith's remark that their quarters were a 'kind of jail'.

'We're in prison for safety,' he explained. 'Our safety, and theirs. There are two good ways of making a man keep a secret; one is to stop his mouth, and the other, to stop his heart. Why they choose the former, I can't tell you, they don't seem squeamish • about things like that. Anyhow, this way's just as effective, and it costs them nothing. We've got our own fungus caves, and we grow our own food in them. In fact the only real difference between their position and ours is that they can go out, but don't want to, while we want to, but can't.'

'How many are there in here?'

'It was somewhere about fifteen hundred last time we counted.'

Mark, who had thought from the way the others talked that fifty or a hundred might be a likely estimate, stared. Fifteen hundred-?

'You do mean prisoners?'

'Yes, prisoners. Counting all kinds. You'll see them as soon as you're strong enough to get about a bit.' Gordon spoke for once in a way irritatingly reminiscent of Smith.

'And none have ever escaped?'

'That's what they tell us, but I think they're wrong there. It was probably a devil of a long time ago, but I think it's been done—more than once.'

'Why?'

'Well,' Gordon frowned slightly, 'mind you, this is only a theory. I don't say that the facts might not be explained another way, but I hold that it is a possible explanation. You remember that you saw a fungus forest?'

'Yes?'

'What did it remind you of?'

'I don't quite-'

'Didn't it seem somehow familiar—as if you might have seen it before somewhere?'

Mark fancied he saw what the man was driving at. He remembered how Margaret had remarked on their likeness to toadstools in a story-book picture. Gordon beamed when he heard it.

'And what did she think of the white pygmies?'

'That they looked like gnomes—only they had no beards.'

The other spread his hands in showman style.

'Well, there you are. You did in some degree recognise the situation—it was not entirely unfamiliar to you although you thought it was. And what does that mean?'

Mark, not having the -least idea of what it might or might not mean, remained silent. Gordon continued:

'It means that some suspicion, some faint rumour of such a place has leaked out into the world. All folk-beliefs have a rational beginning somewhere if you can find it. Men didn't invent the tales of gnomes and trolls, nor the idea of giant toadstools. Someone had the tale from a man who had actually seen them—several men, perhaps, for the legends are widespread. In the course of time the stories became garbled, and at the hands of painters our pygmies underwent a transformation, but they were still dwarfs, and in most places were reported as being unfriendly to ordinary men.

'I tell you, our pygmies are the originals. Centuries ago somebody who had been in here did get back to the world and tell them about it.'

Mark looked extremely doubtful.

'But nobody would have believed it—they'd have laughed them down. Just think what they'd say of us if we got out and told them about this without any proof.'

'You're getting your crowd psychology wrong. More primitive people were wiser in some ways than we are. They did not jeer at everything outside the immediate realities. The mass attitude right up to the Middle Ages was to believe until an assertion was disproved (and in some matters that attitude still persists), but the typically modern attitude is to disbelieve until proof is forthcoming. In the old days people believed in the sea-serpent, nowadays they wouldn't believe in a kangaroo without photographs. They can still be hoaxed, of course, but the method has to be different. Besides, think of the peasants of old Europe; why should they be more surprised by hearing of small men who lived underground than by travellers' tales of men with black skins who went naked? One is as credible as the other. The difference is that in the course of time one tale became substantiated, while the other for lack of evidence to support it decayed into what is called folk-lore. Just suppose the blacks had killed every whit;e man they saw, wouldn't their existence have become a myth, just as this people's has? Of course it would.'

Mark, confronted for the first time with one of Gordon's theories, felt that while it was extremely plausible, it was also extremely unconvincing. He avoided expressing his opinion by temporising.

'Then you think no one has escaped for a long time— perhaps several centuries?'

Gordon shrugged his shoulders. 'Impossible to say. They may have done. But, if so, there ought at least to have been rumours—tales among the Arabs. There may be, of course, but it is strange that we've never heard any. The most I can say is that I am convinced that there have been escapes in the past.'

'And if then, why not now?'

'Any of a dozen reasons. They may have found the loophole and blocked it. These may not be the same prison caves. I must confess that the thing which puzzles me most is why they don't kill us as they find us, and have done with it—but then, different races always have their own funny ideas on the subject of killing....'

CHAPTER II

It was with Gordon as guide that Mark made his first trip into the larger caves. The former had seen that further forced inaction would do Mark little good. Gradually returning strength had found its outlet in fretting and worrying. He asked continually and fruitlessly for news of Margaret, and the fact that all three of the men assured him that they had made every possible inquiry without success, did not tend to ease his mind. Even Gordon could make no suggestion.

'I never heard of such a thing before,' he admitted. 'Quite invariably every member of a captured party has been brought here and left to make the best of it, but I assure you she is not in any of our caves—it couldn't be kept quiet. Every newcomer is a centre of interest.'

'That's so,' Smith agreed. 'If it hadn't been that you got treated so rough, we couldn't have kept them off questioning you. Nobody's got her hid away; that's certain.'

'You don't think they—killed her?'

'No, why should they?' Smith spoke heartily; the other two said nothing.

Mark was without any means of telling how long he had lain ill. Night and day were not recognisable divisions in the caves; and with them went all other measures of time. One fed when hungry, slept when tired. Time flowed smoothly by in one long monotony. Days, months, years even, passed unrecorded save when a new arrival like himself reminded the prisoners that there was still an outside world where dates were kept. Each one was eagerly questioned for the current year and month, estimates were made of the length of time since capture, and then forgotten until another news bearer should arrive. The blue-white globes were never darkened, and their continual light had come to be accepted by the majority without wonder or interest.

Gordon admitted that his curiosity had led him to break one which he filched from a little used corner soon after his arrival. It had required a great deal of pounding with a heavy stone:

'Just curiosity, but it didn't gel: me anywhere. There was a splash of some kind of liquid on the floor, It shone for a while and then evaporated. The outside was pretty much like glass, only far tougher.'

'But doesn't that show that they had a pretty high development at one time, even if they haven't got it now?' Mark suggested.

Gordon was inclined to think that it didn't mean a great deal. There was no doubt that the pygmies were on the downward grade now, but it didn't seem likely that their level of civilisation could ever have been high. They had shown immense determination in constructing their labyrinths, enlarging and altering, until it was difficult to tell how much was natural and how much artificial, but in the matter of the light:

'It may have been just a fluke—one of those discoveries which are made and then forgotten. Think of Hero's steam engine at Alexandria, everybody forgot that for two thousand years. And those perpetual motion wheels which obviously weren't perpetual motion, but certainly worked somehow—they managed to get forgotten, unexplained. It happens again and again. Anyhow, there's nothing miraculous about these lamps. They wear out in time. You'll see some perceptibly duller than others.'

'All the same, I'll bet they'd astonish our physicists/ said Mark.

He became aware that he thought mostly as if he were a visitor to this place, a tourist; it was still impossible to realise that he might never come out, and he dreaded the moment when that realisation should be driven home. Perhaps it never would. Smith, after six years of it, was at bottom still unconvinced that he would die in this warren.

It was in such moods that he would revert to useless, frightening speculation upon Margaret's fate until increasingly frequent periods of restless irritation decided Gordon that even though incompletely recovered, he must be taken out of himself. He led him, still bandaged of head, and weakly in body to the big cave which he had glimpsed before. He stared silently at the scene for some minutes.

In addition to the figures which crossed between the various tunnel mouths, there were some sixty or seventy persons in the place. They stood or sat for the most part in groups, conversing in a desultory, uninterested fashion. An air of listlessness seemed to hang over them all; a lethargy which suggested that nothing need be done until tomorrow—and here there was no tomorrow. Their eyes, utterly lacking in spirit, looked as if they scarcely saw. The discouragement in their bearing was their most common possession; beyond that, variation was infinite.

Arabs predominated slightly, but whites of all types were numerous. A number of Negroes was scattered here and there, and even a few Indians could be seen, but there were some whom he could fit into no known category.

'What on earth is he?' he asked Gordon, pointing to one of these.

The man he indicated was as tall as himself and wore a minimum of clothing upon his grey body.

'Oh, he's a "native".'

'A native? I thought they were all small—you called them pygmies.'

'I don't mean a pygmy. By a "native" we mean one who was born here, in the prison caves.'

'Good God, you don't mean to say-?'

'Of course I do. There's quite a fair sprinkling of women down here, as you see. And you can't stop men and women being men and women, even in caves.'

'But to bear a child here-'

'I know. It seems pretty rough on the kid to us, but they don't think of it that way. The kid's an unavoidable accident from their point of view. Besides, the "natives" quite rightly say, why should they be condemned to perpetual chastity?—aren't things bad enough for them anyhow?'

'You mean that a "native" may have "native" parents?'

'That's it. By the look of that one, I should say he has.'

Mark watched the man out of sight. He felt shocked. A man who had never seen sun or stars; never heard waves breaking or trees rustling; never seen a bird, never—oh, it was endless. And Gordon made the statement so calmly. Had he forgotten what the outside world was like? Had he stifled his memories all these seven years? It seemed more likely that a man would dwell upon them until he remembered the surface as a paradise. What was it Smith had said the other day—no, there were no days here— what was it he had said a little while ago? He had been more abstracted than Mark had previously known him. There had been a dreamy longing in his manner of speaking.

'Bored! My God, to think that I could ever have been bored up there. Why, right now I could look at one flower for a week, and still find it marvellous. I used to reckon old man Wordsworth was kind of soft; I guess I was out there. Daffodils! Just think of 'em; a bank of 'em, blowin' in the wind!'

To him the world had become a flower garden, and the sky was for ever breaking into sunset. Sentimental? Of course it was sentimental, but it seemed a more natural state than the insensitiveness Gordon displayed. He was talking now about the natives coldly, dispassionately, as though they were museum exhibits:

'It's one of the drawbacks man suffers for his adaptability. Many another kind of creature shut up like this would die, pine away from sheer discouragement, but not man. Given time, these "natives" would evolve into a race perfectly adapted for this environment.' He paused, and glanced at Mark. 'You think that that man we saw a moment ago suffers a sense of loss. You imagine him deprived of his birthright—well, perhaps he is, perhaps we all are, but does he know it? Do we know it? What are these rights of man? That man never knew the open air, and he doesn't want to. He can't understand anything but life in caves. How should he?'

'But he must know. He must have heard from you and the rest of them here.'

'Of course he has, but it doesn't touch him. Doubtless your parents told you plenty about heaven—how beautiful it was, and all the rest of it, but how does that strike you now? Pretty thin, pretty much of a fairy-tale? Well, that's the way he feels when he hears of the world outside—a pleasant, rather childish fancy with little or no real significance. He hears about sky and fields and clouds and mountains just like you heard about harps and angels and streets paved with gold—and he takes about the same amount of notice.'

Mark frowned. He saw what Gordon was intending: the philosophy of 'what you've never had, you never miss'. But that, to his mind, was a shallow view. Carried to a logical extreme it would mean that man was a static creation, whereas he was the most dynamic. Indubitably man could, and did, miss what he had never had, the whole history of invention was a record of his attempts to overcome recognised deficiencies. He had never flown, but he missed the power of flight; the aeroplane was evolved. He lacked the ability to live for days on end in the water; the ship was built.-'His own unaided voice could only carry a short distance; intricate systems of communication were brought into being. It was nonsense. One could be aware of a restraint from within it. But the arguments bounced off Gordon. Mark's instances, he claimed, were superficial.

'For the most part they are imitative and cumbrous. Look at the complications needed to broadcast a message, and compare it with the simplicity by which a flock of migratory birds knows of its meeting-place, and the time of its flight.'

'But the very fact that we can broadcast, shows that we have recognised our limitation.'

'Does it? I doubt it. I should say that we recognised it as a limitation of the system we have evolved, not of ourselves. We put up an inferior substitute called telegraph and radio, and forget our limitations—but they are still there. How many men, do you suppose, realise the limitations of using words to convey our meanings? They may find that there are inconvenient misunderstandings, and blame language, but how many admit that the words are just a substitute for the thing they really lack—mental communication? Precious few. My point is that they do not realise the lack of direct mental communication, because they've never had it. They look on spoken or written language as a natural method of expression, whereas it is really a mechanical process more complicated than radio.'

'Yes, but you can't get over the fact that they have evolved a process to fulfil a need. And if that isn't a sign of recognising limitation, what is?'

'In some degree, but it is not fully recognised. There is a kind of mental myopia. Look at what happened. First there was the very arduous invention of the spoken language. Then it was seen that this only had a limited use— it could travel no great distance in either space or time— so there grew up a written language. This failed to reach enough persons in a short time; printing became necessary. In an effort to decrease the time-lag still further, electric communications followed. And all this process had to be gone through (and will be further elaborated) because the limitation was not clearly perceived in the beginning. The thing we really lacked was direct mental communication.'

'But that's impossible.' Mark was growing irritated.

Gordon's serious face relaxed into a sudden grin.

'Splendid. In effect, that's the power we've never had, and because we've never had it, you think we never will—practically "what you've never had, you never miss". Why should it be any more impossible than the vast array of substitutes we've managed to produce? Further, let me point out that your word "impossible" doesn't mean impossible at all—it merely means that the thing hasn't happened yet.'

Mark let the argument drop. He felt that it contained a sufficient number of weak links for him to split later. At present he was more interested in the sights about him. He required more information on the 'natives'.

'We don't see a lot of them,' Gordon admitted. 'They get sick of us and our continual surface reminiscences, and tend to keep to themselves.'

'They don't even want to know about surface life?'

'Not much. Apart from their scarcely believing the tales, they find that they have no bearing whatever on their life down here, and don't help them at all. A lot of the prisoners go half crazy after a few years, and live in a permanent state of melancholia which both puzzles and frightens the "natives". They're happier on the whole when they're not mixing with us. Just as well.'

'And they don't want to escape?'

'Not a bit. And it would be a poor day for most of them if they did—more than likely they'd have agoraphobia pretty badly if they couldn't look up and see rock all round them.'

By now they had reached the far end of the cavern. Its occupants, for the most part, paid little more attention to Mark than a stare as he passed. His surprise that they did not come flocking round to ask questions grew less when he remembered that Smith, Gordon, and Mahmud must have circulated all his news of any interest. Turning and looking back on the listless crowd, he asked:

'Is this all they do? Just hang about?'

'A few of the melancholies, but most of them take an occasional turn in the fungus caves. Does them good to work, cheers them up a bit—trouble is that not enough work's needed, so for the most part they just sit and brood, or sleep. About the only excitement they get is a fight now and then over one of the women.'

'But can't they be put on to making something?'

'What? Oh, you mean furniture or stuff like that. I should think they could, but you see there's no wood. Some of them do a bit of carving in stone. I'll show you.'

He led the way into a tunnel ten feet or so in height. After fifty yards of it he paused at a side turning and called:

'Zickle!'

A tall, well-built Negro came out of the smaller passage. He grinned at them both in a friendly fashion.

'Hullo, Zickle! I've brought Mr. Sunnet to have a look at your work.' The Negro grinned even more broadly, and beckoned them in. 'Zickle was brought up at a mission school,' Gordon explained. 'Hence his choice of a name, but the training seems to have been a bit superficial, as you'll see.'

They entered a rock chamber of about the same size as Mark's sick-room. But the walls of it, instead of being painted, were elaborately carved. Mark at first sight felt bewildered. Zickle continued to grin.

'Here is the piitce de resistance,' Gordon said, turning to the left-hand wall. 'What do you make of that?'

Mark examined it carefully. In the centre was an oddly conventionalised figure of a man, hanging upon an undoubted cross. But it was not the plain cross of tradition; curious symbolism and alien conceptions had been carved into it until it bore more resemblance to a totem pole. Above the head of the crucified man leered a face of most horrifying hideousness.

The Negro saw Mark recoil as he looked at it.

'Him scare devils,' he explained.

'It ought to scare anything,' agreed Gordon cheerfully. 'Come closer, Mark, and have a look at the detail.'

He obeyed, and began to examine the workmanship with a manifest admiration which delighted Zickle. He turned back to stare at the tall, black figure.

'You did all this?' He waved a comprehensive hand.

'Yes, sir. I done him all.'

Mark turned back. The Negro might have few words to express himself, but the carving came from the brain of a man of unlimited ideas. He began to feel a little awed. The ingenuity with which Christianity and paganism had been welded together—he felt that a study of the work might give a new conception of both. Nor was the technique itself a mere following of tradition. There was a single mode of thought running through the whole bas-relief, but it was the product of an experimenting mind, unafraid to attempt effects which sometimes failed, but more often succeeded brilliantly.

'It's genius,' Mark said.

'You're right,' Gordon agreed. 'I've seen a lot of African sculpture, wood and stone, but nothing to touch this. It is genius—and the world will never see it....'

'How long did it take to do all this?'

'Don't know. Zickle hasn't the slightest idea how long he has been in here. All I can tell you is that it was about a quarter done seven years ago, and has been complete for the last three. He carves most of the time when he isn't doing other work. Reckons it keeps him sane.' Gordon stared for a moment at the horrific head above the cross. 'I should say he's right—it must be better to get ideas like that out of the system.'

The Negro had been busy in another corner of the room. Presently he returned holding out a cup of polished stone to each of them. As they took them he pointed to some low stools carved carefully from stone, though in a fashion intended for wood. Gordon sat down and drank half his cupful at a gulp. Mark attempted the same, but the coarseness of the spirit set him coughing.

'My God, what is it?' he managed, at last.

'Stuff made from some of the fungi—it's an acquired taste.'

'So I should think.' Mark took a more careful sip.

Again he let his eyes wander over the carved walls, noticing and renoticing details. Below the cross, and separated from it by a broad horizontal band, he observed a panel which he had hitherto overlooked. It represented a number of squat, recognisable figures worked into a design among giant fungi.

'The white pygmies?' he inquired.

'Or demons—they're all the same to Zickle. He's convinced that this place is Hell.'

Zickle's face momentarily lost its grin, and he nodded.

'This very bad place—Hell. Plenty devils. Me plenty sins.'

'P'raps you're right; you know more about your own sins than I do.'

A voice came from the outside passage.

'Zickle there?'

The Negro and Gordon looked at one another for a moment; Gordon nodded, and Zickle called back. A man, a stranger to Mark, came slouching into the cave, followed by two companions. Like Smith he wore the dilapidated remnants of a French uniform, but there was little other resemblance. He was sallow skinned, with hair and beard as unkempt as the other's, but black. He nodded condescendingly to Gordon and turned to Zickle. The black faced him with an unamiable expression.

'Got a drink for me too?' The voice was harsh, and the words, though they came easily enough, were heavily accented.

Zickle hesitated. There was a murderous glare in his eyes. Gordon put his hand restrainingly on the black arm, and murmured something inaudible. The Negro nodded sullenly, and went in search of a cup with a bad grace. The newcomer laughed.

'Great little peacemaker, aren't you, Gordon?'

He took a good draught, wiped his lips on the back of his hand and looked at Mark with more contempt than curiosity.

'So this is the latest? And came in a plane, of all things.'

Gordon turned pointedly to Mark.

'This is Miguel Salvades. One would not like to say why he joined the Foreign Legion, but it might be guessed.'

Miguel laughed unpleasantly.

'I joined it because I killed a man at home—and I'm not above killing another.' He looked meaningly at the Negro. 'You can remember that..,. What's his name?' he added, turning back to Gordon.

'My name is Mark Sunnet,' said Mark, angrily resentful at his third-party treatment. But Miguel continued to address himself to Gordon.

'Showing him the ropes?'

'Yes.'

'Guess you find it interesting. What've you seen?'

The last question was directed at Mark with a goodwill in such contrast with the man's earlier uncouthness that he was taken by surprise.

'Not much yet—only the big cave near here.'

'And this chamber of horrors. Well, you've got plenty more to see, hasn't he, Gordon?'

'Yes.' Gordon was not encouraging.

'The fungus caves and the water caves?'

•Yes.'

'And other things?'

'Yes.'

Miguel turned back to Mark. 'Yes, there's a lot of this for you to see yet. A lot more than you and most of us think. There's a lot I've not seen, but I'm going to.' He looked at Gordon as he spoke the last phrase, but the older man's face remained expressionless. Miguel grinned sardonically and tossed off the remains of his spirit.

'Come on, boys,' he said to his companions who had remained silently in the background. 'Let's go.'

He lounged out of the doorway, whistling. Mark and Gordon followed a few minutes later.

'What was all that about?' Mark asked curiously, as they recrossed the large cave.

Gordon chose to be evasive. 'Oh, you never can tell with Miguel. He likes his drink—probably thinks we've got a stock of it hidden away somewhere. Don't bother about him.'

Mark, unsatisfied, but perceiving his inquiry to be unwelcome, changed the subject.

'From what you've said, I gather that this place falls into two classes—the prisoners, and the "natives" who don't mix with them?' ^

'And the pygmies. Don't forget them.'

'What! In this part?'

'A few dozens of them. I suppose they're criminals of some kind. Very few of us know anything about them. You'll have to ask Mahmud if you want to know more. Only he and Miguel and a few others have troubled to learn their language.'

'Three main divisions, then. Prisoners like ourselves, "natives" born here, and pygmy criminals. That's it?'

'Yes, except that there are subdivisions among the prisoners—but you'll find that out soon enough.'

They continued their way back to the painted cave in silence. Mark was reflecting on what he had seen and heard. This world below the world was proving more complicated than he had expected, and, to judge from Miguel's behaviour, there was more activity than there would appear to be. His reverie was broken by a flood of excited speech which greeted their arrival at the doorway.

'Say, come in for an earful,' called Smith's voice above the rest. 'Mahmud's been getting the low-down.'

CHAPTER III

The cave held, in addition to Smith and Mahmud, four strangers. Mark noticed that they turned to look at him with an interest which rather surprised him. The scrutiny, however, was brief, for they looked back expectantly to Mahmud. Smith spoke, forestalling the Arab:

'It ought to be easier for you guys to get this if you hear Mark's yarn first. Mark, give it 'em from the time you fell in, till you moored your Sun Bird.'

Mark obediently retold of the whirlpool, the fall, the drifting through caves and passages, and the final landing in the lighted cave.

'Thanks,' Smith said at the end. 'Now, Mahmud, it's your turn.'

Mahmud, it appeared, had been over to have a talk with the pygmy prisoners. It was one of his habits to do this at fairly frequent intervals. He had mastered their language without any great difficulty, and could now speak it fluently. For several reasons, not very clearly perceived even by themselves, he and Smith felt that an understanding with the outcasts might possibly be of some advantage. In any case, it could do no harm to have knowledge of the happenings in the pygmies' own caves. On this occasion he had gone with an idea of finding out what Miguel was doing, for the latter's increasing intimacy with the little men had been causing some speculation. When he had arrived there, it was to find a state of excitement which had immediately diverted his interest.

There had been a recent addition to the band of pygmy criminals, and he had brought disturbing news with him. They had all been aware, though without a definite source of information, that things were not all well in the main caves, but now for the first time those in the prison caves got direct news.

'It's the water,' Mahmud explained excitedly. 'The New Sea is breaking through—though of course they don't know it is the New Sea.'

'Well, we learnt that from Mark,' Gordon observed.

'Yes, but that was only one break—it has come through in many. There have been several big falls like that, and a lot of smaller ones, too. Sometimes the bed of the New Sea gives way, but more often it comes in through the air shafts. That is not so bad; the water comes first in a trickle, and the shaft can usually be stopped before it gets serious. But in the big falls it is serious. So far they have managed to stop them by breaking the tunnels, but a lot of water has got in.'

Mark recalled the resounding crash in the tunnel through which he and Margaret had been swept to the lighted cave. So it was the pygmies who had caused that tunnel to collapse____Mahmud was going on:

'They're scared. It is one thing to block tunnels, but another to get rid of the water. Pumps could do it, but of course they have no pumps. In some places they have been able to make holes and drain it away to the lowest levels where it doesn't matter much, but that means that there's no room to get rid of the next lot. Besides, it's salt—it's got into some of the reservoir caves already, and joined the fresh-water streams. If the sea were to stay at its present level, they might win through all right, but the water is still rising outside, and there may be fresh breaks at any moment. They're very frightened.'

'Hey, steady there. How do they know the sea's still rising? None of them has ever showed his nose up there,' Smith interrupted.

'Because it keeps on coming in through more of those ventilating cracks as it reaches them.'

'What else are they doing?'

'Nothing much, from what I could hear. After all, what can they do? There seems to have been some talk of clearing off northward; there are caves at a higher level there, but they've been neglected so long that the fungus beds are no good. They might be able to replant them, but they're doubtful how long it will be before they yield.'

'So what it comes to,' said Smith reflectively, 'is a choice between staying here to drown, and going north to starve —unless, of course they take to the open. And they won't do that,' he added, looking questioningly at Gordon.

The latter shook his head. 'No, they won't do that,' he agreed.

'Why not?' asked Mark. 'Surely it's the reasonable thing to do?'

'Reason doesn't count much. Reason suggests that it is foolish to live on the side of a volcano, yet people continue to do it. These pygmies have been here too long, they've adapted too far. For one thing, the light outside would blind them right away. But the point is, whatever they do we're sure to be left behind. Pleasant outlook.'

Smith nodded. 'It only wants the water to break in here, and we'd drown like rats. There's just that one way for it to get out, and that's a hundred feet up—most of the caves aren't as high as that. Maybe we could swim until our heads hit the roof, then—good-bye-'

All the men in the room were silent for a while. Mark, looking along the row of faces, saw that most of them had their eyes on the American. When at last one of the strangers said:

'What shall we do?' it was as though he spoke for all. A tacit admission of Smith's leadership. There might be sense in some of Gordon's theories, and, Mark learned later, much worth in many of his plans; Mahmud they knew to be subtle, excellent for intelligence work. But when action was needed, decisions were to be made, they looked to Smith. And he sat thinking ...

Gordon watched him in the manner of one who could make a suggestion if called upon, but would not do so gratuitously. The stranger who had been the last to speak broke the silence again:

'If we double the work?' He suggested. 'It can't be far now-' He broke off suddenly and darted a suspicious glance at Mark. Smith looked up.

'You're too free with your trap, Braddon. Keep it shut closer.' He turned to look at Mark thoughtfully.

'That's all right,' Gordon broke in. 'He'll be with us all right. He's not one of Miguel's sort.'

'He wouldn't be here now if I thought he was,' Smith replied, 'but we've got to be careful all the same.' He addressed Mark directly. 'What we say goes no farther, not an inch—get that? It's not only Miguel we're up against, he's obvious, but some of his pals ain't. Keep this under your hat or—well, you won't have any place to wear a hat.'

'We've just seen Miguel,' Gordon broke in again.

'Where?'

'Zickle's place.'

'And what was he after?'

Gordon shrugged. 'Just prowling around to see what he could pick up—the only thing he got was a drink.'

'Well, let's hope he goes there again. Zickle might hand him some news.'

'What do you mean?'

'Miguel's after something, and if we want a false trail laid Zickle will do it. He hates Miguel like hell, but he's taking his time. I wouldn't like to be in Miguel's shoes when that nigger gets going.'

'I didn't know that,' said the man who had been addressed as Braddon, in an aggrieved voice. 'What's it all about?'

Smith admitted to being not quite clear on the point himself. There had been something about the woman whom Zickle had lived with—Miguel's being mixed up in it left it pretty easy to guess the rest. Anyway, it was a more than ordinary hate.

'Miguel's going to get no change out of Zickle,' he added.

'But he's damned suspicious—he knows there's something in the air.'

'Well, don't we all?'

'No, I don't mean about the floods—you can bet he knows that all right. I mean about us.'

'Oh?' Smith turned to Mahmud. 'You heard anything about this?'

Mahmud was vague. Miguel, he admitted, had become much thicker with certain of the pygmy prisoners lately. There was more than mere curiosity behind the way he had taken to continual questioning.

'Try to get a line on it. It's up to you to find out what his game is. He must have some reason for nosing round the way he does—and that's reason enough for our keeping extra quiet. We've got to be careful.'

'Sure,' one of the others agreed impatiently, 'but what are we going to do?'

'Push on all work with the upward tunnel—hard as we can. What do you think about Greek's tunnel, Gordon?'

Gordon seemed to have thought the matter over already, and had his answer pat.

'Drop it.'

Smith considered. The upward tunnel climbed at a steep angle; it was hard to believe that its end could be far off the surface now. For an unknown number of years men had toiled at that tunnel. Nobody now living in the prison caves could remember when it had been started, and only a chosen few knew of its existence. A group of men determined not to perish easily in these catacombs had begun to hew their way out. Slowly, for their tools were miserable and inadequate, they had driven a passage up on as steep a slant as they could use. Progress had proved even slower than they had expected, and the way longer than they had thought; but they had been men of active brains and bodies. They continued their tunnel because they had begun it, and because it had given them hope and occupation. Without work they would have sunk to the level of most of the prisoners, minds and bodies would have deteriorated together to leave a hopeless apathy if not insanity. And so, through unnumbered years, the tunnel had gone on. As it had grown in length, so they had grown in age. They were no longer the strong young men of the caves. They became middle-aged, elderly, shorter in the breath, weaker in the arm.

But others had come along to replace them. Men of various races filtering into the caves through a score of unknown entrances, some enraged, some fatalistic, most of them destined to sink into lassitude, but always here and there a few whose strength of mind, whose will to live, drove them into activity. From these the planners of the tunnel had selected their successors: shown them the passage which would one day lead to sunlight and freedom, taught them how to work the rock and bade them 'get on with it. And the younger men had taken the worn-down chisels, and gone to work. Like the old men, they started to carve a road to liberty, and, again like the old men, they went on working to preserve sanity. Hopes became all but forlorn. Their tunnel was now several hours journey in length. They worked steadily, but the fire had gone. The light of expectation had dimmed from their eyes. Yet there was the sure knowledge that some day much come a hollow ringing in the rock, then a chisel point would break through to let in a gleam of daylight. And they plodded on.

They, too, grew old and were replaced by younger men. The authors of the tunnel would not now live to see daylight again; many were already dead, and those who were left, sunk in senility. But their work still lived; others toiled on with a faith which could be dimmed but not snuffed. The workers had chosen their successors well. Backsliders had been few. They had held themselves for the most part aloof from the discouraged, lest they might be contaminated. The rest knew, as of course they must, that the workers were active upon some plan, but they were not interested. If men liked to work when there was no call to perform any task more serious than an occasional spell in the fungus caves, it was their own foolishness. Moreover, the workers took good care to discourage such sporadic outbursts of curiosity as did occur.

With a few individualists such as Miguel, a problem was presented. They were unstable or unsocial characters. The workers knew that they could not be depended upon for regular work, yet they managed to keep their minds free of the sluggish acquiescence which engulfed the rest. They were misfits and, as such, undesirables; they were ignored as far as possible.

Among the workers themselves things had not always proceeded with complete smoothness. Twice there had arisen major differences of opinion. Some years before Smith's arrival, a man named Jameson had caused a split in the party by announcing his conviction that the present methods were, if not useless, at least far too laborious. Why not, he asked, drive a horizontal tunnel? It would be bound before long to connect with one of the pygmy caves, and then they could fight their way out. There were enough of them to overcome a whole army of dwarfs.

He was permitted, after some dissension to start his horizontal tunnel, but after fifty yards had encountered an underground river which rendered farther progress out of the question—his suggestion of trying again elsewhere met with no support.

Still another passage had been begun by a Greek whose name no one remembered. From an unknown source he had obtained information that another series of caverns was situated below the prison system at no great depth. He, like Jameson, was convinced that once in the main caverns they would have little difficulty in fighting their way to the surface. His downward passage had been extended by his followers to a depth of over two hundred feet without result, but was still regarded by some as having possibility of ultimate success. It was against this Greek's Tunnel, as it was called, that Gordon had unhesitatingly advised.

'Why?' Smith asked.

'For one thing I haven't much faith in it, but the real reason is that it's noisy. If we go on working there, and Miguel's spying round in earnest, he'll find it sooner or later.'

'Does it matter much? After all, the up passage is the main thing. I was thinking that if we can get it through, it might act as a kind of drain in case we do get flooded.'

'There's something in that,' Gordon admitted. 'But I've got a feeling that it's better not to let Miguel know anything—he must have a pretty good reason for wanting to learn.'

'Well, that's simple enough,' suggested one of the others. 'Why not just bump him off?'

'It's not so easy. He's got pals. Besides, you can't tell how the rest would take it-—or the "natives". Two can play at bumping off. We don't want our hands full with a vendetta just when we've decided to push the work on. No, the best thing is to work like hell on the up passage, there'll be no noise from that. We must be nearly through by now.'

The men looked unimpressed by the last hope. Mark, watching their faces, wondered how often they and others before them had heard those same words—'we must be nearly through.' Perhaps they had begun to doubt that the phrase could ever be true. Nevertheless, they accepted the suggestion of intensified work enthusiastically. It was as though a limit however indefinite, had been set. They were to work against time until they won or the floods came. It was a change from the weary monotony in which time counted for nothing. Smith rose to his feet.

'Come on, we'll tell the rest,' he said.

Mark, forgotten, watched them leave. Gordon turned back and thrust his head in through the doorway.

'You go to sleep for a while,' he directed. 'I'll show you round a bit more tomorrow. And if Miguel shows up here—though I don't suppose he will—not a word about the tunnels.'

He disappeared again, and there was a sound of quick steps as he hurried to catch up the others. Mark stretched out thankfully on his couch. He felt exhausted, and the activity had started the throbbing in his head again. He was not yet as strong as he had thought, it seemed. He began to drift sleepward with a better serenity, due partly to weariness, but more to wakened hopes of escape.

It had been good to hear Gordon's slip of the tongue. His 'tomorrow' had given a sense of hopeful future to this place of unending 'today'.

CHAPTER IV

'Where now?' Mark asked, as he and Gordon emerged once again into the large cavern.

'About time you saw the fungus caves—you'll have to put in your spell of work there later.' Gordon spoke in an unnecessarily loud voice which caused the members of several conversing groups to turn and look in their direction. One of the women pointed at Mark and laughed. Her voice held a jeering note which recalled a sudden memory of himself as a new boy at school being shown round by his housemaster. The words with which she followed the laugh were in a language unknown to him, but he could feel their implication. He had heard the same tones in the voices of practical men who condemned impractical idealists. It put him into the class of the self-righteous.

Yet there was nothing of self-righteousness about those of the 'workers' party he had met so far. They worked because they needed an outlet, and to keep sane, just as the Negro, Zickle, worked at his carving. Such superiority as they undoubtedly did maintain was incidental rather than intentional; the merely static condition of avoiding the mental rot which set in in the minds of the unoccupied. The attitude of the latter showed that they were not entirely unaware of their own deterioration though they had not considered it worth checking. Life in the caves offered the minimum of joys, why forgo them? The women particularly quailed at the thought of dying with the knowledge that they had never lived. It was more easy and more comprehensible to live within an established order than to attempt to change it. What, he wondered, would Margaret have done had she been condemned to this place? Would she tend to accept the customs of the majority as these women did, or would she fight...?

He tried once more to suppress the figure of her which was constantly slipping into his mind. Bad enough for her influence to be rising continually from his subconscious, but far worse when she slit the diaphragm between his selves and invaded his active thoughts. He endeavoured again to thrust her back by taking an active interest in his surroundings.

The way led this time past the turning to Zickle's cave and through a larger tunnel. Mark noticed that the prison caves like the rest were a mixture of nature and craft. The interconnecting passages had been enlarged often from mere cracks to eight or ten-foot tunnels, according to their importance. Awkward or dangerous corners were smoothed and trimmed. Before the roof lights were fixed, a clearance had been made of those massive slabs which in natural caverns hang aloft, ready, to all appearance, to crash upon the heads of the venturesome. Cracks in the ground had been filled up or bridged over. Stalactites had been ground away in order that their spikes might no longer hang like Damoclean swords. Fallen rocks, conical stalagmites, and all the litter which must once have rendered these places fantastic and awe-inspiring, were gone. The floors had been made as level as possible, the walls regularised, and disorderly nature tamed to a prison-like severity.

Gordon indicated various side openings as they passed. This, he said, led to a series of caves given over to the 'natives'; another to the pygmy prisoners' warren.

Mark gave up trying to memorise their route. He was aware of a constant succession of caves, passages, and side turnings, all as full of character for his guide as the streets of a town, but to a newcomer monotonously indistinguishable from one another. The men and women whom they met glanced at them with little interest and passed on with unhurried steps. He noticed that a number of them were bearing sections of the great fungi upon their backs.

Gordon stopped in a cavern slightly larger than the average, and waved his hand towards the end wall in the manner of a showman.

'There's a problem for you,' he said.

Mark advanced to examine more closely a line of figures graven in low relief.

'The Egyptian gods?' he asked.

'Some of them, but others too. Look here.' He began pointing them out. 'Here's Hathor, with the cow's head— and this chap I think is Set, though the head's a bit different; shorter in the muzzle than usual—and, see, this must be meant for Ra; the hawk's head, all right, but they've missed out the sun's disc. And look at his sceptre, it's got a globe instead of a dog's head on it____Mahmud says that the globe is symbolic of these.' He pointed up to the glowing lights. 'If so, it means that the carving was done after these people renounced the upper world and the sunlight. Ra was the creator, the giver of all things—without that light there could be no life down here. And what's this?' 'This' was a female figure upon which was mounted a fish in place of a head. 'Presumably a fertility goddess of some kind. There was a goddess Hamhit, but she had a fish on top of her head, not instead of it. And here's another chap with a serpent's head—now, if it were a uraeus____But it's a plain, ordinary snake's head. Next to him is Bast, sis-trum and all....'

'Bast?' said Mark suddenly.

'Of course, look at the cat's head. The Greeks called her Bubastis later, and mixed her up; they made her preside over a lot of things she was never intended to. The Egyptians saw her as a gentle, warming influence, she was tied up somehow with Ra, but...'

But Mark was not listening. Bast—that damned cat. Could there be any connection? He remembered that Margaret had been holding the cat when they were attacked.

'The pygmies did these?' he asked, breaking in.

Gordon, knocked out of his vocal stride, looked puzzled. Mark repeated:

'Did the pygmies do these carvings?'

'Pretty certainly. Long ago, I should think, before these were used as prison caves. Why?'

'Do they still worship these gods?'

'I think so—or some very like them, according to Mahmud. Why?'

Mark ignored the second question as he had the first. The possibility of the cat's presence making any difference had never struck him until now. There had been no reason why it should before he had seen that cat-headed figure. Might not the fact that she was carrying it account for Margaret's non-appearance in the prison caves? He put the question to Gordon, who looked thoughtful.

'I wonder. It might be so. Of course,' he added, 'it's not absolutely certain that the pygmies carved these. There must have been Egyptians down here at some time—pure law of averages—but the carvings are sufficiently different in detail to convince me that they didn't do them. Ra, in particular, would never have been allowed to lack his disc of the sun. If prisoners had made them they would have tended to exaggerate the sun; it would have been the most potent symbol of the lot. So I think on the strength of that we are justified in assuming that the pygmies did do them. Moreover, Mahmud has talked about a kind of animal worship. Animals are so rare that when one does get in, it becomes deified automatically.'

'Then it is possible that Bast—our cat, I mean—is being worshipped?'

'Possibly, yes, but I wouldn't build on it. We don't really know much about them.'

Nevertheless, Mark did allow, even encouraged, his mind to build upon the unsteady foundation. If it were true that the ancient worship of Bast persisted here and that the cat remained her sacred symbol, what would Margaret's position be? Would she not be revered as a messenger of the goddess, divinely appointed to convey a token? Treated with honour, perhaps declared a demi-goddess? The misgivings which has closed about him grew tenuous and began to drift away. This, without any doubt, must be the explanation of her absence from the prison caves....

Gordon watched him, and, seeing his face clear, knew the line his thoughts were taking. There was little to be gained from pulling down such a castle in the air, though for his own part he remained unconvinced of the girl's safety. It seemed every bit as likely that she might have been condemned as impious for handling a sacred object —and the crime of impiety usually involves penalties of the more unpleasant kinds. Still, that probability need not be broached. "Mark was not yet fully recovered from his illness. The sense of hope would be a better medicine than any they could provide, so Gordon went on talking about the pygmies.

'They must have been much more numerous in the old days. They're dwindling now, like all the primitive races, and the whole system of caves is far larger than they need. I have thought that those carvings were probably made when the population was dense, before they were able to abandon this system for use as a prison, but I may be wrong. They could have been made by pygmy prisoners in some effort at atonement. There's no telling. The only certainty is that the figures are like, and yet unlike their Egyptian counterparts.'

Mark came down to earth.

'But it's odd that they should have adopted and kept the Egyptian gods.'

'If they did.'

'But, surely-'

'I mean how do you know that the Egyptians did not adopt their gods, or that the two sets did not spring from some common source. This pygmy race is old, I fancy— older than you have any conception. The ancient Egyptians are moderns compared with our pygmies.'

'How do you make that out? The system of caves, of course, must have taken centuries to perfect, but still to say that they are older than the Egyptians ...?'

Gordon shrugged. 'I'll give you my reasoning sometime, but it is a long explanation. We must get on now.'

He led from the cave of the carvings into a gently descending tunnel, and before long Mark became aware that the silence about them was no longer complete. There grew at first a mere agitation of murmurous echoes, indefinite and hard to place, but a new sound, different from the confused shuffle of occasional feet and voices. It grew clearer as they proceeded, clarifying gradually from one composite disturbance until the splash of trickling water became audible against the background of its gurgling passage.

They paused at the spot where a small stream gushed from a crack in the wall. Gordon picked up a stone bowl and held it under the flow. He drank thankfully.

'It's a blessing the salt hasn't got into our water yet,' he said relievedly. 'That'd be worse than drowning.'

He went on morbidly to elaborate the horrors which would attend lack of fresh water, but even the picture he drew of the prisoners driven crazy by thirst failed to subdue the elation which had risen in Mark.

By this time he had contrived out of a few straws of suggestion to build a raft of remarkable buoyancy. A feeling of hope had come flooding in to change every mental process. His spirits had stirred out of lethargy. It was as if weakness and worry had created a rust in him; now that rust was all washed away, and there was fresh oil on the bearings. He felt that his body would be able to break out of this prison even as his mind had. Gordon was astonished at the transformation. He looked almost a stranger, and one who walked with a springy step rare among the cave dwellers. He was silently astonished at the control the mental was showing over the physical.

A faint, familiar odour and a dampness became noticeable, and Mark knew that they must be nearing the fungus caves. There were five of them, interconnected, Gordon had told him, of which the combined acreage had easily supplied their needs until lately, but with the increase of population, both by new arrivals and births, the margin had been narrowed. All the conditions of life in this underground world, it seemed, were hastening concurrently to crisis.

Gordon stooped suddenly, and held up his hand. Mark could hear nothing but the faint murmur of the stream as it flowed beside them.

'Someone running,' Gordon said.

He grasped Mark's arm, and drew him back against the wall, puzzled and silent. Mark had not been long enough in the caves to realise that something unusual must be afoot. For a man to run here was all but unknown. Why should he? In this place time could neither be lost nor gained: it did not exist. Now he began to distinguish the sound of footsteps which would soon overtake them. Both watched the last corner expectantly. The sound grew louder.

'Only one,' said Gordon. He bent down to pick up a piece of rock, settling it firmly in his hand.

A form clad in flowing, grey tatters rounded the corner.

It came on until it caught sight of them, flattened against the wall. It stopped abruptly. Gordon dropped his stone, and stepped out.

'Mahmud!' He called in surprise.

The Arab approached, somewhat out of breath.

'What is it?' Gordon asked, joining him. The three walked on together.

'Miguel,' explained Mahmud excitedly. 'I've been talking to the pygmies; I found some of them who hate him, and I got it from them.'

'Well, what was it?' Gordon was impatient.

'Miguel's trying to find out where the tunnel is.'

'We knew that—what else could he have been trying to find out?'

'But there's more than that. He's got several of his friends and most of the pygmy prisoners behind him, and they've been bargaining with the pygmies outside. Miguel offered to show them our tunnel in exchange for his freedom, but they didn't like that, so he compromised. He would show them the tunnel if they would take him out of the prison system and give him the run of the ordinary caves.'

'That wouldn't do him much good.'

'He and his friends think it would—they've probably got an idea of his getting out somehow, and bringing help. Anyhow, the bargain's been made.'

Gordon stared. 'It has?'

'It has.'

'So that's what he's been up to, is it? He's a fool if he thinks they'll ever give him a chance of getting right outside.'

'But he's got some scheme—you can be sure of that.'

'Does he know yet where the passage is?'

'No, but-'

'With an incentive like that it won't take him long to find out, eh?'

The Arab nodded.

'Then he'll have to be dealt with,' Gordon went on.

'You mean, kill him?' Mark asked.

'I do—he's a rat.'

'But his friends—won't they take up the bargain?'

'We can treat all traitors alike.'

'And how far will that get you? As I see it, the real damage is done already—the pygmies know that the tunnel exists. It was only really safe while it remained unknown to them. The cat's out of the bag now, and I don't see that killing Miguel's going to do much good.'

'It he's not found the tunnel yet, it might. He's a long way the brightest of that gang. It'd set them back and give us more time. If he has found it, he must be got rid of at once before he can tell anyone else.'

'You won't be sure he hasn't told.'

'Sure enough. Miguel's kind keeps everything up its sleeve as long as it safely can. He'd be scared of the rest letting him down if he told them anything until the last moment.'

Gordon was still talking as they came to the first of the fungus caves, and Mark found himself almost as surprised as he had been when he saw the giant mushrooms in the outer caves. His memory had reduced their size, and despite his expectations, he was taken aback. He would have liked to linger and examine the fantastic picture they made, but his companions were in too great a hurry. Gordon led round to the right, keeping to the strip of open space, between the growths and the wall, where walking was easy. At no great distance they encountered a passage only a few yards long, and passed through it into another cave. Here, the scene was more open for much of the fungus had been cut away to be carried to the living caves where it would be rendered more easily edible by mashing or other processes. They Crossed the loam, littered with chips and stubs of felled fungi, to plunge into the still standing growths beyond. The going became slower and more awkward. Gordon warned Mark to step over the twining ground tendrils, and if possible to avoid bruising them. Not, he admitted, that there was any great need for care as yet, but it would be better not to leave a trail.

It was in the third fungus cave that he became really wary. He led a complicated path among the trunks and marrow-like objects, zigzagging and doubling continually. Mark did his best to imitate the skill which both he and the Arab showed in passing without trace, but he felt that he was making a poor job of it. He was responsible for a number of broken stalks and crushed tendrils, however, they were scattered, and it seemed unlikely that anyone could follow so tortuous a trail from so few clues. He realised at last why Gordon had used loud tones to announce that they were going to the fungus caves. They were an obvious sight for a newcomer, but somewhere hidden away among them was the beginning of the upward tunnel.

He was relieved when he could see, between the mushroom heads, the grey stone wall only a few yards ahead. A minute or two more, and they stood on the fringe of the vegetation.

The sound of a sudden scuffle caused them all three to turn sharply. Mark had a glimpse of a man who ran from the wall and disappeared between the trunks to their right. Mahmud, too, saw him. Before the full significance came home to the others, he was in swift, silent pursuit, with the rags of his burnous streaming behind him. Mark opened his mouth, but Gordon raised his hand. The two stood listening.

Mahmud vanished among the stalks by the track which the other had left. For some moments there was nothing to be heard but the thudding of feet, mingled with the muffled snapping of stalks and tentacles. The fugitive was blundering blindly ahead, trampling the lower fungi underfoot, and turning aside only for the thicker trunks. The slender stalks which he swept from his way, broke, not with sharp crack of branches, but dully, like rotten wood. The watchers could follow his trail by the way in which more than one tall, umbrella-like head shook and leaned to subside slowly into the lower growths. A cloud of white spores broke suddenly into the air; they could hear Mahmud splutter and cough as he came to them. A minute later followed a choked cry; a tremendous agitation and threshing amid the trembling stalks. Mahmud and the fugitive had come to grips.

'Come on,' Gordon said, starting towards the sound.

'Look,' called Mark, but the other did not hear. He was already away. Mark alone had seen another figure break from the hiding of a mushroom trunk, and speed away up the clear space beside the wall. He gave chase.

The second fugitive was wiser than the first. He had no intention of tangling himself in stalks; he was depending on speed and a start of thirty yards to carry him safely to an opening.

Mark pounded along. He was in poor form for violent exercise, and saw that he was barely holding his own. The man ahead glanced over his shoulder, and then put on a spurt. Mark tried desperately to increase his own speed, but his feet felt clumsy and heavy. He scarcely knew why this man must be caught, but the attitude of the others had shown it to be vital. The man had begun to slacken— such violent exercise was not encouraged by life in the caves. But his own rate, too, was falling off, and his heart thumping painfully; he tried desperately to force his lagging feet.

A pale, fat tentacle defeated him. It had grown out more adventurously than the rest. Mark's descending boot crushed it into a slibbery mess, and he pitched head first into the loam.

He sat up at once, brushing the dirt from his eyes, but the fugitive had gone, and he himself was too winded to continue. He remained where he was for some minutes recovering, before he rose to walk back to the others.

He found them in a trampled arena. Mahmud lay on the ground, breathing heavily. Across the other side Gordon was bending over a still form with a queerly twisted head. As Mark approached, he straightened up.

'Damn,' he muttered, 'we might have learned something. What did you want to kill him for?'

'His neck or mine,' panted the Arab.

'There was another,' Mark said, sitting down wearily.

'The devil there was. Where is he?'

Mark explained.

'Damnation. You couldn't tell who he was?'

'I'd never seen him before.'

'Wish I'd seen him—blast it! Sure to have been one of Miguel's lot—this chap is. That means that we've got to get busy. Come on, Mahmud.'

The Arab rose unsteadily, still breathing hard.

'Come on,' Gordon repeated to Mark.

They followed him back to the fringe of the plantation. Gordon, without hesitation, went up to the wall and inserted all his fingers in an irregular crack. He leaned back, and slightly to the right, with all his weight. A rocky slab before him followed, pivoting slowly. He hustled the two through the space behind it and laid hold of the edge to drag it back into place.

Mark found himself in a chamber which contained nine or ten men. Among them he recognised one of the party who had visited Smith, and also the Negro, Zickle; the rest were strangers. A small globe in the roof shone dimly, but enough to show in the opposite wall, the beginning of a narrow passage leading upward at a severe angle. Gordon wasted no time.

'Miguel's on to us,' he said.

The Negro bared his teeth unpleasantly, otherwise the response was disappointing.

'Well, what about it?' asked one of the men. 'He can't do much, and we can croak him if he gets rough.'

'Not so simple,' said Gordon. 'Go on, Mahmud; tell them about it.'

Mahmud gave once more his report of Miguel's pact with the pygmies.

Some of ihe faces in the group began to look serious; others, including that of the one who had suggested 'croaking' Miguel, remained unimpressed. From the lat-ter's next remark, it became obvious that he had not grasped the situation.

'There aren't sotaiany pygmy prisoners. They can't give us much trouble.'

Mahmud explained afresh:

'It's not only the prisoners—he's made a pact with the pygmies in the outer caves.'

'How? They never come in here.'

'I don't know how the pact was made—I only know that it was. If he helps them to stop our tunnelling, he gets the run of the outer caves. Don't you see?'

'But how are they going to stop us. They never come-'

'Damn it, man,' Gordon broke in. 'Use your brains. I know we've never seen the pygmies in here except as prisoners—but they can invade us any time they like. We're not strong—a hundred and fifty at most. They'll have Miguel and his lot, most of the pgymy prisoners and the "natives" with them. The rest of the prisoners we can't be sure about. They may join up for the sake of a bit of excitement, but I think most of them will be neutral. Anyhow, we'd better be ready for them. Where's Smith?'

The other tilted his head towards the back of the cave.

'Up the tunnel.'

'At the end?'

'No. He hasn't been gone long.'

'Well, somebody go and fetch him—tell him it's urgent.'

One of the younger men scrambled to his feet and made for the entrance. Gordon looked over the group again.

'You, Zickle, get all our men you can find, and tell them to come here quick.' As the Negro rose, he added, 'And look out for Miguel—he might try an ambush.'

'Sure,' said Zickle. He seemed not unpleased by the prospect.

The stone door swung back after him, and the rest of the men faced Gordon expectantly. He started to speak, and then shook his head.

'No, better wait for Smith. This is more in his line.'

CHAPTER V

During the enforced wait a change crept over the group. Some of that lethargy which, despite all their efforts, had touched every one of them in greater or less degree, sloughed away. Time began to mean something. Even those who were sceptical of the real seriousness of Gordon's warning became more alert. Whether the danger were actual or not, here was an occurrence to create a moment of interest in the monotony. Apathy was broken by a fidgeting and shuffling which told of increasing tension. A few discussed the situation as far as they knew it. Their eyes brightened. The flaccidity of planless dreaming which had dulled each face disappeared as expressions became active. Mark marvelled at the change much as a short time ago Gordon had marvelled at a similar change in him.

He let his gaze roam round the stone chamber. It was a bare place, furnished only with benches and seats of hewn rock, and a few bowls containing water or fungus spirit. In one corner lay a few makeshift chisels, hammers, and other tools, among which he recognised long, thin French bayonets ground down by use. He wondered idly how the heavier tools had been acquired; iron and steel must be precious and rare in the caves. The accumulation of years, he supposed, collected from incoming prisoners. A problem occurred to him: how was the rubbish and detritus disposed of? Of the many tons of rock gouged out year after year, there was no sign, yet enough must have been removed to form a small mountain. He put the question to Gordon, who explained:

'Every now and then we come across fissures and faults into which the rubbish can be tipped. Some of them are narrow and not very deep, so that they are quickly filled up; others seem practically bottomless, and have to be bridged. We get across and continue the tunnel, sending the rubbish back to be dropped down the cleft behind until we strike another fault, then the same thing happens again.

'But in the beginning? when they made this place, for instance?'

Gordon shrugged.

'I suppose they had to cany it all away until the first fissure was struck. It must have been heavy work for the poor devils. I'm glad-'

A sudden scraping of the stone door interrupted him. He jumped up and seized a jagged piece of stone. The rest followed his example, standing with arms drawn back, ready to let fly. The door continued to turn ponderously upon its stone hinges. A streak of light from the fungus cavern appeared. The arms of the waiting men grew tense. A tousled, bearded head appeared; its owner grinned broadly at the sight of them.

'O.K. You can can your phoney pineapples,' he remarked cryptically. 'It's me and the boys.'

The threatening arms were lowered, and the held breaths released. The door swung wide enough to admit a man's body. The speaker entered, followed by ten or more companions of assorted races and nationalities.

'What's the big idea?' he demanded. 'That crazy nigger, Zickle's talkin' like the Day of Judgment's comin'. He gone nuts?'

'No, he's all right. We sent him. It's Miguel that's the trouble-'

'Trouble? What, that lousy wop? Gees, you ain't gotta get a whole bunch o' guys jest to beat him up. He's yeller; his whole gang's yeller. What's he been pullin', anyway?'

Gordon began to explain once more. Before he was halfway through, Smith came clattering out of the tunnel, demanding information. Mahmud was required to tell his tale for the third time.

Smith looked serious, and listened in silence. He frowned when Gordon completed the report by telling of the spies in the fungus caves.

'You're right,' he admitted. 'We've got to get busy. Mahmud's yarn mightn't have meant a lot by itself, nor might a couple of guys snoopin' around here. But the two together ... Well, it just means things are moving.' He turned to the latest comer. 'Is Zickle getting the rest, Ed?'

Ed looked doubtful, and scratched his beard.

'I guess he's doin' his best, but mostly they're razzin' him. Me and the boys thought there might be somethin' to it, so we came around.'

'Well, you and some of the boys better get right back and tell 'em to stop razzin' that nigger, or it'll be the last razzin' they'll do. Get me? Bring 'em here damn quick, and no maybe.'

'O.K., I getcha.'

The massive Ed and four of his followers went out, leaving the door open behind them. Smith resumed:

'Now, we've got to hustle. If Mahmud's right, the pyg-mies'll start to move just as soon as Miguel hands thein the low down on this tunnel. The time we've got depends on how long it'll take them to get the news round and mobilise themselves. What we've got to do is to hold them off, and keep on working the tunnel. We've done a hell of a lot of work, and I'm damned if we're going to let it go for nothing now. It can't be much farther to the top—we might be through any time now. The point is, where'll we hold them?'

After discussion, the obvious course of blocking the main passages had to be abandoned, albeit reluctantly. There were, as Smith pointed out, too many side turnings for safety. The sprawling network of ways would, in spite of the greatest care, leave opportunities for flanking movements and rear attacks. There was, moreover, the possibility that the pygmies might dig downward from caves existing above, and outmanoeuvre the defenders in that way.

The safer course, although more onerous, would be to fight the battle nearer home. The fungus cave in which the tunnel entrance was situated could be reached only by three openings at the farther end, and it was Smith's plan to build a rampart across the narrowest part of the cavern. This, he pointed out, would secure for themselves about two-thirds of the place, and therefore an ample supply of food for some time. The rampart itself would be built from the growths on the other third, thereby denuding that part of cover for the attackers.

With the plan decided, he began to assign duties:

'Mahmud and two others to take the three tunnels and act as scouts. One man to go up and fetch all those who can be spared from the tunnelling—but don't let the work slack off. The rest to build the rampart.'

Mark was given a sharp-edged rock flake and instructed to fell giant fungi at the far end of the cave. Despite the unhandiness of such a tool, he found that he made good progress at first. The serrations cut saw-like into the soft fibre and pulp more easily than he had expected, and it was possible to topple the mushrooms over when one had cut little more than half-way through the stem. The great heads were wrenched loose from most as they fell; those which still adhered were worked off by leverage. Each white trunk was seized by two other men and rolled away, while Mark went on to the next.

But the work quickly became tedious; it was not long before his right arm began to ache with the effort of wielding the cutting stone. The men to either side of him were making better progress. Their muscles were in harder condition from their work in the tunnel; moreover, they were not recently off a sick bed; nevertheless, he continued with a desperate determination while the ache spread from his arm across his shoulders. He must, he thought, have laid low over twenty thick trunks before an interruption occurred.

A sudden hubbub down the narrow end of the cave caused all the men to pause in their hacking. Their hands changed the grip on their stones. They stared at the barrier of stems before them, ready to hurl the sharp flakes at the first pygmy form which should show. Somebody ahead, perhaps one of the scouts, anticipated them. There was the clatter of a stone against a rock wall. It was followed by the bellow of a familiar voice.

'Blast your eyes. It's me and the boys.'

The burly Ed came crashing his elephantine way among the stalks. He seemed to be rejoicing that it was no longer necessary for him to move traillessly. Smith called from behind, where he was superintending work on the barricade.

'Got 'em all, Ed?'

'O.K., the whole bunch. What do we do now?'

Mark thrust his cutting stone towards one of Ed's followers.

'You get on with it,' he suggested. 'I'm all in for the present.'

He walked back a little, and sat down to rest where he could watch the progress of barricade building. In places the wall was already several feet high, and difficulties in raising the fat, pulpy logs were increasing. For the first time he saw how handicapping a lack of wood may be. With poles for use as levers the trunks could have been handled easily. With planks they could have made a ramp up which to roll them. If the cutting flakes could have been set in hafts they would have been ten times more efficient. Even neolithic man, he thought bitterly, was better equipped with tools than they were, and as for weapons ... With wood they could have made spears, and, with the right kinds of wood, bows and arrows. There could have been clubs, both plain, and headed with stone. But without wood they were practically weaponless—bits of rock and fists____

The arrival of Ed and his reinforcements had given a great spurt to the work. The majority of the hundred and fifty which Smith had called 'workers' were now employed at clearing, rolling the trunks, and building the wall. The task promised to be shorter than Mark had expected. Smith had chosen the position well. The floor-plan of the cave was shaped roughly to a figure eight, of which the lower half was twice the size of the upper. At the waist the opposite walls approached within fifty yards of one another, and it was across this comparatively narrow space that he was erecting his defences. If they could succeed in clearing all the ground on the lesser side before the attack arrived, the pygmies would have the unpleasant task of crossing it without cover.

A short rest was enough to revive Mark considerably. He had not been exhausted, but suffering from the rebellion of muscles lately unused, and now put to a sudden strain. He rose and walked towards the barricade. Smith saw him from his supervising position on the top, and beckoned him up.

'Come and give these fellows a hand,' he directed.

On the defenders' side of the wall he found a group, including Gordon, industriously working with coarse cord. The cord itself had been made by plaiting narrow strips of the tougher fungus skins, and then shrinking them either by natural drying, or by careful smoking above a slow fire. He watched them carefully for a while. A conveniently shaped stone was selected, and a number of lengths of cord tied round it. The depending ends of the cords were gathered together and bound tightly for a distance of twelve or fourteen inches from the stone head. Another tight binding was then superimposed upon this. The result was a short club with a handle which, though by no means rigid, was not too flexible for use. The finished weapon, save for the bulging stone head, appeared not unlike one of those hanks in which clothes' line is sold. Mark picked one up, and swung it experimentally. The balance was poor, and the pliability made the stroke awkward. Nevertheless it could be nasty for close fighting; far nastier than a mere fist, or a stone held in the hand. He dropped it back among the dozen or so already completed, and sat down to do his share.

The barrier was all but complete. A white wall of stacked mushroom logs, twelve feet high, stretched from side to side of the cave with only one break of a couple of yards. The top of the wall was sloped down on the inner side to give cover for the defenders. The outer part had been faced with a buttress of the circular mushroom heads, ranged in rows like huge shields. Seen from the now almost bare end of the cave it resembled an immense testudo, or the carapace of a fabulously armoured beast. Smith strode through the remaining gap and turned to survey the work with satisfaction. It was doubtful whether the mushroom heads would long stay in position, but they certainly ought to defeat the first charge. It would be impossible even to attempt to climb the wall until those smoothly curving plaques had been removed.

Through the gap poured a continuous double stream of men, entering with burdens, and emerging empty handed to fetch more. Such fungi as were not required for actual building material were being hurried within, partly for use as food, and partly in pursuance of the plan to clear the ground. Only the lowest trailing growths were left; they would be useless for purposes of concealment, and might serve the secondary purpose of slowing up the attackers.

Smith waited anxiously while the last marrow-like object and the last giant puff-balls were carefully trundled away. The men had worked willingly and fast. It was so long since he had thought in terms of time that he was at a loss to estimate the number of hours which had passed since he had heard Mahmud's story, but it could scarcely be more than five, nor less than four. There was no telling when the pygmies would show up. Mentally he went through the steps which would be necessary.

Miguel, if indeed it was he who had been in the cave, must first get back to the pygmy prisoners; then word would be passed on to the outside pygmies via the guards at the only exit from the prison caves. There must be mobilisation—or were they already waiting? Then descent into this system, and finally the march throughout its length____For the hundredth time he gave up the attempt to calculate how long all this would take. There were too many variables for the answer to be of the slightest use. The only certain thing was that they might arrive at any moment now....

He recalled Mahmud and the other scouts from the passages, and gave orders for the gap to be closed. A row of guards was posted, each with a supply of throwing stones, along the wall top. The more exhausted of the builders lay down to snatch some sleep, a few of the fresher were sent up to relieve the workers in the tunnel. Whatever happened, the tunnelling must continue. Ultimately, it was their only hope. The food they had could be made to last a long time, but it was more than doubtful whether they would be able to grow fresh at anything like the rate of consumption. A hundred and fifty men at work would get through a staggering amount of pulped mushrooms. The tunnel must be finished before the food gave out____

Such men, as were not under orders nor tired out, joined the group of weapon makers. Production was not only speeded up, but varied. The bulky Ed, having contrived for himself a kind of mace worthy of Goliath, turned his attention to primitive ballistics and produced a kind of bolas consisting of two stones linked by a double-plaited cord. Mark had some doubts whether this early ancestor of chain shot would prove of any worth in battle, but Ed had none. He gleefully practiced whirling it round his head, and letting fly with a fair accuracy. The supply of weapons was not complete when a shortage of cord became critical. Slow fires were -started, and the manufacture of more begun. As this was a skilled job, Mark found himself without occupation. He sought a comfortable spot, and lay down, watching the rest.

It was hard to believe that the industrious men about him were the same who had been so apathetic a few hours ago. Strange how easily the zest for life could be diminished or revived. Those other prisoners back in the living caves were completely demoralised, and these had been little better. The need for action had worked in them like some miraculous tonic. They were laughing again; chatting as they plaited the cords. The weight of depression had been lifted, and the true men released.

Mark's head dropped lower. The chatter and laughter became a murmurously pleasant confusion. His eyelids drooped wearily, and he slid from half sleep into true sleep.

CHAPTER VI

He awoke and sat up simultaneously, with a sudden, severe pain in the shin.

'What the hell-?' he began, putting a hand to the injured part.

The man who had tripped over him was struggling to his feet again. He spoke wheezily, for he was part winded:

'They're coming. Get to it.'

The sense of being hardly done by vanished. Mark jumped up, snatched the corded club which lay beside him, and ran for the wall. Scrambling up the protruding trunk ends, he flung himself flat on the top.

Only then did he come fully awake and realise that no battle was in progress. He raised his head cautiously to peer over the edge. The cleared space was as empty as were the cave mouths behind it. He began to grow indignant at being thus stampeded to no purpose, but a glance about served to reassure him. There was a bustling activity among the defenders; the wall was being manned in a business-like way. He turned to the next man:

'Where are they?'

His neighbour did not understand. He shook a dark complexioned, Italian-looking head, and muttered an un-intelligibility. The man beyond him spoke up.

'They're coming, all right. They were so long on the way that Smith got worried. He sent out Mahmud to see what was up, and they nearly got him. He's just back.'

'Many of them?' Mark inquired.

'Can't tell. He just saw the leaders coming along the passage, and ran for it.'

The hubbub of the defenders was quieting. Smith's voice still rose occasionally in sharp orders, but by now most of the men were at their stations. With the passing of the first flurry of excitement an expectant tenseness grew. Word came down the line. No one was to act till Smith gave the word. It went the length and the last whispering echoes of repeating voices died away into a silence broken only by deep drawn breaths. All ears were strained to catch the first faint sounds of approach.

Mark's attention wandered. It came to him in a flash that by joining the 'workers' he had cut himself farther off from Margaret than ever. He had managed on the slenderest evidence to convince himself that she was still alive and prisoner in the outer caves. Until now he had been merely one of the inhabitants of the prison caves, but by joining Smith he had put himself into a prison within a prison. Suppose he had joined Miguel's band? He might have got the run of the outer caves, and some chance of finding her. But wasn't it possible that the pygmies were double-crossing Miguel? It seemed more than likely. After all, once they had destroyed the weak spot which the tunnel made in the prison system, why should they trouble themselves about Miguel any longer?

It became clear that not only the fate of all of them, but of Margaret as well, depended upon the success of the tunnel. If they could only hold out until the surface was reached, it would mean the end of the pygmies. Once they were in touch with civilisation there would be no difficulty in collecting an expedition to rescue the remaining prisoners and to round up the whole unsuspected nation of troglodytes. Perhaps he had taken the wiser course after all. Rescue for Margaret could only come from the outside. Even if he had the luck to get into the outer cave system and to find her, what then? They could scarcely hope to make the upper world unassisted.

And what were they doing to Margaret? Why were they keeping her there? They'd never kept anyone before. It must be that damned cat—why else?

A stir ran through the line of men on the wall. Were they coming at last? Mark strained to hear. Yes, the whisper of a shuffle. The frouing of naked feet on the stone floor. Thoughts of Margaret vanished. His hand, like those of the men to left and right of him, went out to grasp a throwing stone. He kept his eyes to the crack between the trunks forming the topmost rampart; it gave him a view of the main opening and one of the subsidiaries. Simultaneously, white, monkey-like forms became visible in both.

One of the reasons for delay became apparent. The intention had been to trap them in this cave. The two companies (and probably a third, out of his sight) had been timed to arrive together. There was to be no dodging out through one hole while the pygmies came in by another. The complexion of. the affair became slightly altered. The move showed that the pygmv programme comprised not only destruction of the tunnel, but the punishment of those who had made it.

But now it was the pygmies own turn to be surprised. He saw them halt and gesticulate in amazement towards the barrier. Those behind thrust forward, crowding the leaders into the cavern. A chatter of high-pitched voices became audible.

It came to Mark with surprise that this was only his second meeting with the little people. He had heard so much of them, and thought of them so frequently, that he had come to think of them as a familiar sight, though he had seen none since his original encounter in the outer caverns. The odd feeling that he had seen the type before struck him again. He had meant to tell Gordon of this half recognition, but it had slipped his memory.

Evidently the pygmy plans, whatever they might be, suffered a severe upset at the sight of the wall. The medley of consultation became louder. A tall figure came pushing through the crowd, and emerged from the main entrance. Mark recognised him for a European, and grinned at his expression of consternation. A quantity of animated explanation ensued, followed by a council of war.

Still Smith made no move. Mark wondered. A volley of sharp stones flung into the mob might have done considerable damage, although the range was long.

The pygmies came to a decision at last, and made the first of their mistakes. Possibly they believed that only a few men held the wall, but their tactics were crudely incautious. They consisted merely in stringing out to the full breadth of the cavern, and making a headlong charge. Smith let them cover fully half the distance before he gave a shout.

The defenders rose to their feet, and a volley of stones crashed into the foremost rank of runners. A number fell or stumbled. Those behind, unable to stop, pitched headlong over the fallen. Before they could rise a second volley descended on them—sharp-edged stones which seldom killed, but could cut and wound painfully. The line of attack was broken in several places by tangled heaps of dwarfs struggling to recover their feet, but the attack itself did not waver. The uninjured came charging on where the way was clear, with undiminished speed. The hail of stones was now continuous, but in spite of it many won through to the foot of the wall. There for the most part they stopped, dismayed, only a few attempted the futility of climbing. The rest stood at a loss, marks for the stone-throwers. Their only weapons were stone knives, and they bore no shields for protection. Their bewilderment was pathetic; the brave assault had become a tragic farce. Those who could, did the only possible thing; they turned and scuttled back the way they had come.

Ed's voice rang out in a Gargantuan bellow of laughter. This fight, after all their preparation, had turned out to be nothing but a huge joke. The whole army of the pygmies routed by a few showers of stones; the improvised clubs had not even been put to the test. Others joined in his laughter; it became a great, roaring gust sweeping backwards and forwards through the echoing cavern. Of the pygmies only a few lay still, the rest were limping alone or in mutually assisting couples back to the passage mouths whence the rolling rumble of laughter followed them.

Mark could not join in the laughter. It was too cruel, too contemptuous of the little men. He was as relieved as the rest to find that the fight was no fight, but he saw what the others seemed to miss. These pygmies, these sorrowful-eyed little men, were fighting to preserve their race. They knew, as well as he knew, that once the outside world should learn of their existence, the end would not be long in coming. They were primitives, as Gordon had said. Their only hope of continued existence was to remain segregated. Time and time again it had been shown that the primitive cannot co-exist with the modern. Not only is there decimation by disease, but there seems to grow within them a lethal discouragement. They cannot adapt. The capacity for mutation has been outgrown. They are fitted for no other world nor society but their own, and the unfit may not survive.

They had much of that complacency which primitive races frequently display, but their energy was not entirely sapped; they could still fight for existence, though they might not change. They had not admitted, or had not allowed themselves to admit, that their hopes were forlorn, their doom certain. If they could prevent the success of the tunnel, they must still contend with the water. They might block break after break as it occurred, but sooner or later it would get them. The New Sea would come pouring in through the airshafts to submerge their whole cave world as it had already flooded the lower levels. In the end they must be driven into the open, or trapped to drown down here.

Mark became unpleasantly reminded that he also was trapped. There were times when he could scarcely believe that the tunnel through the hundreds of feet of rock would ever be finished. It was an all but impossible task for men as ill equipped as they. Smith said 'any time now', but for how long—he asked himself again—had the prisoners been saying 'any time now'? And how could they tell? Who among them had any idea of their depth? The phrase was no more than an empty expression of hope; an article of faith to ward off apathy.

He found he had been gazing without sight upon one of the prone figures. It had not stirred; it never would stir. One side of its head had been broken in by a stone. Perhaps he had flung that stone.... He remembered Margaret's words:

'So horribly suddenly.... A minute ago they were running. ... Oh, Mark, what have you done ...?'

Why had he? He hadn't wanted to kill that little man. He'd never seen him before. He'd only wanted to stop him and his fellows—not to break them. That was how it always was—wasteful, senseless smashing of men____His eyes wandered from the abandon of one sprawling form to the futility of another. There were ten altogether. Ed would think that funnier still—a battle with only ten casualties. Well, let him laugh. It was funny in a way: this human race which slaughtered members of itself. No one seemed to see it that way, even though they used a proverb about cutting one's nose to spite one's face. 'Queer lot we are,' he murmured to himself.

He shifted his gaze back to the passage-mouths. Most of the retreat had poured into the right-hand opening. He recalled that it was the one through which he had entered with Gordon; the link between this and the other fungus cave.

The defenders held to their posts, waiting for the next move. It was not likely that the pygmies would give up after one reverse. There was evidently a consultation in progress, for an occasional sound of high-pitched chatter floated in to them.

Smith decided that there was no immediate danger. The pygmy preparations might take some time. He detailed a party to relieve the tunnellers, and gave permission for the cord smokers to descend and continue their work. The rest sprawled at ease upon the wall top, some falling asleep, others talking. Ed sat down cross-legged and began to improve his mace by a further binding of cord which he had somehow acquired; he accompanied the task by a sotte voce cowboy song of startling obscenity. Gordon came wandering along the rampart, and sat down by Mark.

'Silly, isn't it?' he said, glancing at the bodies on the loam.

Mark nodded."'Damn silly. I suppose it's the way we're made. Ten of the little chaps dead—and none of us a penny the worse or the better. Has Smith any idea of the next move?' he added.

'No,' Gordon shook his head. 'It's a case of wait and see.'

They chatted for some time in a desultory manner before Mark bethought him of the question he had meant to put.

'I can't get it out of my mind that I've seen people like these before. It's absurd, of course, because they can't have been photographed, but the type isn't altogether strange. What is it they're like?'

'Oh, you've noticed it, too, have you? They're pygmies.'

'No, I mean what race are they? I know they are pygmy sized.'

'They are pygmies—not a doubt of it. There's not only the size, but the shape of the head, odd proportions of their spindly limbs, and that curiously sad, solemn look characteristic of them. They're not so mournful really, it's a way pygmy faces have.'

Mark had a sudden memory of a travel film. Pygmies, diminutive against the exploring party, looking at the camera with large, bewildered eyes; every face, male or female, adult or child, stamped with the same die of permanent melancholy. That was it, of course; the half memory of that film had been lurking just out of reach. Queer that it had not occurred to him before: the selfsame expression—or was it lack of expression?—had stared from the faces of these troglodytes, but until Gordon had told him he could not place it. He had used the word 'pygmy' as he might have said 'dwarf, with no understanding of its significance. Yet it was not so odd that he should have missed the connection—these cave dwellers were a pale, dirty white.

'But pygmies are black,' he objected.

'The surface ones, but why should they be black down here? No sun; no need of pigmentation. These chaps were probably black enough when they came in. It'd work out through the generations. Look what one generation has done for the prisoners' children, the "natives", no sign of ruddy complexion there.'

'But hang it, there aren't any pygmies for hundreds of miles to the south of here.'

'Not now, but there were once—I've got a theory about these chaps and how they got here, if it's of any interest to you.'

Mark encouraged him to go on talking. If nothing more, it served to relieve the monotony of waiting for an attack which might never come.

'The most troublesome thing is,' Gordon began, 'that ever since I knew of their existence, I've not been able to verify any of my facts. If we do get out of this, I'm going to dig myself into the B.M. reading-room, and make certain either one way or the other. However, here's their history roughly, as I think it must be.

'You know that thousands of years ago the whole continent of Europe was far warmer than it is now? That has been proved in lots of ways from fossils and remains. Among other things, traces of elephants have been found near Cromer, where there was once a forest. Elephants, mind you, not mammoths. The mammoths didn't mind climates below zero, but the elephants have always required warmth. Furthermore, they have found the remains of the same species of elephant in Dorset, in a buried trench over twelve feet deep. Now nature doesn't dig trenches through layers of chalk and flint to catch elephants; but there's a creature that does, and that's man. That elephant died a hell of a long time ago because man was there to kill him.

'England was not yet an island. The present North Sea was a plain, connecting it with the continent. Subtropical fauna ranged and thrived there, but even then there were our ancestors to harry it into traps and slay it by other cunning. It is a common fault to put the appearance of man at too late a date. After all, we had to evolve, like the other species. There is still a tendency (it may be a lingering respect for Genesis) to picture man appearing suddenly and fully formed, to the great consternation of all the other denizens of the world. He did not. He climbed as slowly and painfully as the rest. Perhaps those men who hunted elephants across North Europe did not look much like us, but even at that remote date, they were a long jump ahead of the animals they slew.

'Nor were the men all of one type. They, like the other creatures, had adapted to different climates. Until they had evolved clothes, discovered fire and other means of protection from extreme heat and cold, they were as subject to natural conditions as the animals themselves. Each race must have lived in its own zone with very little trespassing either to north or south.

'But in the course of time, the zones shifted. The earth's axis tilted; the sub-tropical flora began to perish. Each summer there was a little more ice round the poles, and each winter saw the Arctic Circle pushed a little farther south. It was slow—a matter of a few inches at a time— but it was relentless. The ice crept down, driving everything before it. The winters grew harder and longer; the animals went south, and the hunters followed. North Europe became temperate, then cold. Still the ice pursued, and the men from the north were driven down upon the inhabitants of the torrid lands in the south.

'The races did not mix. The original inhabitants were a smaller, weaker species than the invaders, and unable to resist the successive waves of humanity rolling in from the north; they were, in fact, the ancestors of the pygmies. The northerners were a hardier, more adaptable race for whom life had been less easy than it was for the others; there could be no question which was the better fitted to survive. There was a natural limit to the number which the land could support, and it became clear that if anyone was going to perish through starvation, it would not be the newcomers. The pygmies took their chance of survival and began to migrate southward in their turn. They took to the great forests, and hid themselves in jungle depths so inhospitable and unattractive that no race has ever yet troubled to dislodge them.

'It was one of the great changes of the world. The ice caps, creeping closer from north and south, compressed all life into the equatorial belt. Not only were the pygmies driven south, but other, similar races in other parts of the world were forced from the open, fertile country to seek refuges where they might survive. About that time the Andamanese must have reached their islands, the Sakai have found Sumatra, the Semangs, Borneo, and the New Guinea Pygmies have hidden themselves in their impenetrable country. And there they have all remained, for though the ice receded, the invaders did not. Their progeny spread to cover the north once again, but there was no racial withdrawal from the southern lands. That is what I meant when I said that these were real pygmies.'

'That this was once all pygmy country, and these have survived?'

'Exactly. They were driven into inhospitable regions; they took to living in caves. They found that this district was riddled with them, and they went deeper. Though, mind you, none of this happened suddenly; it was an instinctive move for self-preservation going on for generation after generation as conditions grew worse; there can have been little of conscious flight about it. While some made for the jungles they have never left, others reverted to cave dwelling, withdrawing more and more, spending less and less of their time on the surface, hiding from a world in which they could not compete, until at last there came generations who knew the outside only from hearsay as a place of discouragement and terror. So the elders died and the last link was snapped; communication with the surface ceased. They dug themselves deep into the earth. They joined cavern with cavern to form a subterranean country. They learned how to grow the giant fungi for food, and retained the secret of manufacturing their luminous fluid. In the end the life of the outer world became no more than a tradition kept alive by the occasional arrival of wanderers such as ourselves. The dominant races pursued their appointed course on the surface: the memory of the pygmies grew fainter until, at last, it was entirely rubbed away, and they were forgotten, lost.'

There was silence for a time after Gordon stopped speaking. Mark considered the theory. Fantastic, of course, but then, so was the pygmies' presence, and there must be some explanation of it. There could be no doubt that the caverns had been inhabited for a very long time. The fact that no tradition survived above indicated an immense period of utter isolation.

'When do you think all this happened?' he asked.

Gordon shrugged his shoulders. 'Hard to say. Somewhere in the Lower Paleolithic, I should guess—towards the end of it, about the Acheulean.'

'No,' said Mark. 'Tell me in English. How many years?'

Gordon considered for a moment. 'Perhaps a hundred thousand years.'

'A—what?' Mark blinked.

'Yes, I mean it. The trouble with people like you is that you have such a poor idea of the antiquity of man. I tell you that the pygmies represent one of the oldest living races, and you're staggered by a hundred thousand years. It's a mere flea-bite in natural development. Why, Pilt-down man probably lived three times as long ago as that. The effect of all this Genesis business is to make people believe that nothing ever happened before about 2000 b.c. assure you it did, and it had been happening for a long time.

'Just to cheer you up, I'll admit that there are two bad snags I've struck. One is those Egyptian gods, and the other is these lights.' He glanced up at the roof. 'They've really got me beat—in spite of what I said before—and the containers are more puzzling than the fluid inside them. I don't see how these people, virtually a stone-age race, found out how to make 'em—nor what they're made of, for that matter. In fact, they're the weakest spot in the whole theory, blast them. If it wasn't for the lights, they could never have-'

He stopped suddenly. Mark, looking up, saw that a few white figures had reappeared in the passage mouths. A shout from Smith called everyone to the top of the barrier. A score or so of pygmies emerged, and strung out into a line close to the back wall. Each was carrying something which it was impossible to determine at their distance.

Since there was no longer anything to be gained by surprise, the defenders had no reason to lie low. A volley of stones hurtled towards the dwarfs. The majority fell short, and those, which did not, were so spent that they could easily be dodged.

'No good,' grumbled the man beyond Gordon. 'Better wait till they come on a bit.'

But the pygmies were in no hurry. Each was doing something with the instrument he carried.

'What's their little game?' added the speaker.

A moment later he knew. The pygmies swung their right arms, and a flight of sharp stones whistled through the air. One took him full in the face, toppling him backwards off the wall. Mark, Gordon, and the rest dropped hurriedly to full length behind the parapet.

'Slings. Damn it, why didn't we think of them?' Gordon muttered.

Mark put his eye to his former spyhole. The slings were putting up a barrage which whistled low over his head. Something issuing from the right-hand tunnel caused him to give a whistle of surprise. Gordon risked his head above the edge to see what had caused it; he kept it there until a stone thudded against a trunk unpleasantly close.

'Ingenious devils,' he said, ducking again.

The round head of a mushroom, looking like a huge, unpainted archery target, slowly emerged into their caves. Once in the open, it moved sideways to make room for another following behind it, and slightly forward to allow the slingers to throw over it from their back wall position. The second mushroom head drew out and ranged itself alongside the first. Another followed, and another until a long rank was formed.

The fungi had been felled with particular care not to sever the heads. The trunk was carried by several men, while the round top made an excellent shield for them. When the first rank of portable defences was complete, a second was begun. Not until three such lines had been formed did the advance start. Then they moved forward slowly and deliberately, keeping their formation while the slingmen, acting as artillery, kept up a ceaseless shower of sharp stones.

'They've got the right idea,' said Gordon, with detached admiration. 'Pygmy tanks now in action.'

The opposition to the advance was slight as yet, being confined to a few experimental stones pitched uselessly against the mushroom heads. As the front rank passed the half-way stage, Ed rose to his feet and hurled a stone with all his force. It struck one of the white circles with an audible thud, and embedded itself in the pulpy mass. There was no other result. Ed dropped back with a grunt of disgust. Several others risked the slingmen, and imitated him with as little success; those stones which did not bounce off stayed to stud the white circles with dark flecks. The advance never hesitated.

Smith sent word down the line for clubs to be got ready. It looked like hand-to-hand fighting, for the pygmies would be able to advance under cover to the foot of the wall. So far the defenders had no apprehension of real trouble; their attitude was still an appreciation of the little men's ingenuity. After all, what could the attackers do? Merely attempt to scale the wall; it would be easy enough to push them off.

The advancing ranks increased the angle of the mushroom heads until, when they reached the wall, they were upright, forming a roof upon which missiles rained down. Only three had failed to make the journey, having stopped when their carriers were struck by lucky rather than skilful shots.

Against the wall they stopped. The defenders were unable to see what was taking place, but it was guessed that the facing of mushroom heads was either having footholds cut in it, or being pulled down to expose the more easily climbable trunk ends. A sudden diversion occurred. Mark heard one of their men shout, and saw him pointing to the passages. More figures were entering. They were pallid, like the rest, but taller, and better built.

'Good Lord, they've got the "natives" with 'em,' Gordon murmured.

The slingmen were still in action, so that the 'natives' covered the first few yards at a crouching run, keeping their heads below the line of fire. As they drew nearer they straightened up and increased their pace. An intensified fire from the slingers still kept the defenders behind their parapet. The leading 'natives' rushed across the ground, and climbed upon the rear rank of mushroom heads. It became clear that the pygmies' intentions had been not only to provide shields for themselves, but to make a platform upon which the 'natives' could be brought more nearly to the height of the defenders.

The slingers stopped as the 'natives' climbed and ran on. The defenders rose, hurling a shower of stones. The 'natives' were in great majority, but at severe disadvantage. It was difficult to move fast over the uneven platform, and they were fully exposed at short range. Their only arms were stone knives. Nevertheless, they came on. Before long they were battling with the men at the wall. Mark's stone club rose and fell with the rest. He struck without anger, coolly and shrewdly. He did not seem able to develop a fighting rage against these men. He aimed at the shoulders, content to numb the arms; he had still a feeling that this was a kind of mock battle, part of a great misunderstanding.

They were fighting now all along the line, and most of the men were not using his half-hearted tactics. They fought to kill or maim. Mark supposed that his freshness made the difference; had he been here for years like many of them, he would have known how they felt. Along in the middle of the line he could see Smith hammering away with a short club in each hand, while Ed made flailing sweeps with his mace.

The momentary lull passed as a fresh rush of 'natives' came on. One dodged within Mark's guard, tearing a ragged scrape on his upper arm. It was nothing much; he scarcely felt it, but it served to change his outlook. He began to lay about him in real earnest. Another man caught hold of his club, and tried to wrench it away. Mark's left fist came up with all his strength to the right of the other's jaw. The man reeled awav, and the next comer felt the full weight of the club. The fury of the attack began to slacken; the 'natives' were losing heart or growing less rash. Mark lowered his arm and stood panting, only to square up swiftly as another white figure came charging at him. He swung up his club, but at the same moment the support beneath his left foot fell away, and he tripped. His club was knocked from his hand, and the 'native' bounded over the parapet almost upon him. He fended off a vicious swipe of the stone knife, and caught the man's right wrist. For some seconds the two rolled this way and that in attempts to get the upper hand, then the 'native' suddenly went limp. Mark looked up to see Gordon bending over them.

'Thanks!' he said.

He was lying in a shallow depression between two of the white trunks. A depression which he was quite certain had not been there a few minutes ago. One trunk must suddenly have subsided, and in doing so, upset him. But why?

He crawled to a spot where he could look over the back of the wall, and found himself gazing into a pygmy face. Without hesitation he crashed a fist into it, and sent the owner tumbling backwards. There were others down there. But how had they got past the wall? He looked along and saw one in the act of emerging from a hole. The pygmies must have withdrawn logs from several places in the wall, under cover of their platform. In some spots those above were so jammed as to leave a way right through, whereas in others, such as that directly below him, the logs above had fallen down to close the hole. He caught up his fallen club, and sprang down with a shout. Only about a dozen of the pygmies were through so far, and when four or five other men joined him, they were soon accounted for. It became necessary, however, to set a guard on the holes to prevent more getting through.

'Just as well I fell when I did,' Mark thought. 'A few more minutes, and they'd have been in in dozens.'

He stood watching a hole in the middle of the wall. He was glad of the rest, for he had nothing to do now but keep an eye on it, and bring down his club on anything that came out of it.

'Hey?' called a voice above him.

He looked up to see Ed's tousled, full-bearded head.

'Get me one of those puff-balls, will you? A ripe one, buddy, and handle with care.'

'What about this?' Mark pointed to the hole.

'That's O.K. I'll watch it.'

Mark obediently sought one of the largest puff-balls and trundled it gingerly up to the wall.

'Can you lift it?' Ed inquired.

Mark could, with some difficulty, for it was a cumbersome object. Ed reached down as far as possible, and between them they managed to get it intact to the top of the wall. There Ed sat down and began carefully to cut long incisions with a sharp stone. Mark stood below with attention divided between Ed's operations, and his guardianship of the hole. He was puzzled, for there was fighting still going on along the wall, and it was unlike Ed not to be in the thick of it.

'What's it for?' he asked.

Ed chuckled. 'Come up and see.'

Mark climbed back to the wall top and sat down. A head was at once thrust experimentally out of the hole below. Mark dropped a stone on it, and it was withdrawn.

Ed continued to make incisions radiating like meridians from the poles of the puff-ball. None of the cuts was deep enough to split the skin, but the whole was weakened almost to bursting-point. The fighting had now become half-hearted, compared with the first attack. Probably its object had been to keep the defenders employed while the pygmies climbed through their holes in the wall. Now that the rear attack had not come, the 'natives' were flagging.

Ed examined his puff-ball, and grinned with satisfaction. He picked it up, raising it with both hands above his head. For a moment he poised, then he swayed forward, heaving with all his weight. The ball lobbed into the crowd of attackers. Two 'natives' went down beneath it as it burst. A cloud of white spores broke out like a flurry of snow. The men close to it were blotted from sight. A sound of coughing and spluttering arose from within the drifting mist. As it spread, growing more tenuous, the figures of 'natives' became visible, bent double in paroxysms of coughing, while with each breath they took, they drew more of the irritating feathery spores into their lungs. The cloud of white dust spread wider, afflicting more of the attackers. They lost all capability of fighting. Their eyes streamed so that they could barely see; they staggered to and fro, sneeezing, gasping, wheezing like the worst asthmatics. Ed gave a bellow of delighted laughter.

'Hey, gimme your jacket, and fetch another,' he directed.

He began to swing the coat before him, fanning the drifting spores away from the wall.

Within a few minutes there was a haze of spores all along the line, and the defenders had abandoned their clubs in favour of ragged improvised fans. The 'natives' were hopelessly demoralised. They could do little more than stagger, so exhausted were they with their efforts to cough up the fungus dust. The pygmies, below their testudo of mushroom heads, were in little better plight, for they had begun to breathe the spores which filtered through from above. Those who were not deafened by the sound of their own and other's coughing must have ground their teeth with anger as the familiar roar of laughter rose once more from the defenders. There was nothing to be done. They were too hopelessly disorganised for further action. As best they could they crawled free of their mushroom shields and made their way, an orderless, anomalous crowd of choking, sneezing miser-ables, back to the passage mouths. Gusts of laughter from the wall harried them on.

Ed. in a state of uproarious childish delight at the success of his 'gas attack', flung jibes after the rout. Zickle had broken into some heathen chant of victory. Even Mark found himself laughing at the farcical climax of this second attack.

The last gasping pygmy fled from the sound of jubilation, but the hilarity continued. It took Smith a long time to impress on his followers that it was necessary to repair their defences.

CHAPTER VII

Mark looked up at Smith.

'It must be several days since that second attack. Do you really think they'll come on again?'

'Sure thing,' Smith nodded emphatically. 'Why else'd I have gotten the wall mended?' He looked across at Gordon, who agreed.

'They're sure to try to get us one way or another. They can't afford to let us escape at any cost in casualties.'

'But it's so long since that puff-ball business. They may have given up.'

'Not they. I reckon they're putting their heads together and thinking up a new dodge.' Smith paused. 'What gets me is the ingenuity of 'em last time,' he continued. 'Another few minutes and there'd have been hundreds of 'em through the wall. Didn't guess the little guys had it in them to think up a stunt like that.'

'They haven't,' said Gordon. 'I'll bet anything you like that Miguel or one of his crowd put them up to it; what's more, its ten to one that whoever did it is putting them up to another one now. Don't forget, this means a lot to them—just as much as it does to us. They are out to nail us, and as a matter of fact, if they do give Miguel the run of the outer caves, he stands a better chance of getting out than we do.'

'Well, in that case,' said Mark thoughtfully, 'what are we here for?'

The others stared at him.

'I mean if we surrender and Miguel gets out, he won't keep quiet about this place. There'll be an expedition down here—just as there will be if we get out—so if he's got a better chance, why not let him go willingly?'

'You're forgetting something.'

'I don't see-'

'You're forgetting that Miguel made a bargain with the pygmies. I don't know what pygmy morals on a point like that are, but why should they keep it? He's got no way of making them keep it that I can see. Suppose they're just using him? They must know what his little game is, sure enough, but they won't let him play it.'

'Besides,' Gordon broke in, 'if they can beat a hundred and fifty of us, they'll ask themselves why they should kowtow to Miguel and his lot—and they'll find there's no reason why they should. The thing I don't understand is his falling for their promises. It's not like his kind to do a deal without guarantees.'

The three were silent for a time. It was Mark again who spoke first.

'I should have thought,' he said, 'that it would have been a good move from their point of view to put those lights out.' He looked up at the blue-white globes, shimmering unharmed in the rocky roof. 'The confusion would just about put paid to our defence: they'd be almost certain to break through somewhere.'

'Several reasons,' Gordon explained. 'For one thing they're not easy to break. They may look like glass, but they're tough. And, for another, these pygmies are more scared of the dark than any kid. It's just about the worst kind of bogey to them. Maybe you didn't realise it, but they've spent all their lives under these lamps, and that's tied up with the third reason. It'd be sacrilege to bust them. Their lives depend on them, and they all but worship them.' At Mark's look of inquiry he amplified: 'They're symbols of Ra—you remember, he was holding one in that carving. If they break one, they are insulting him. If they break several, he is so angry that he sends darkness to plague them. According to Mahmud they are so used to light that they can't think of darkness as being just an absence of it, but they fear it as a concrete something by which Ra manifests displeasure. It's for that reason more than any other that they're so scared of it. And even that's not a new idea—I seem to remember something about a plague of darkness over Egypt, and the Egyptians didn't like that, much though they knew what night meant. For these little devils it must be terrifying— like being struck blind.'

Mark was scarcely convinced. Destruction of the lights seemed such an obvious way to create utter confusion. The globes might be tough, but the pygmies' slung stones travelled forcefully____They were not unbreakable; he remembered Gordon's own story of one smashed experimentally. Such a superstition as Gordon suggested seemed a slender screen between themselves and chaos. He said as much. Gordon shook his head.

'It's the safest defence we could have. There's no better guarantee than a good, well-grounded superstition. The decisions of the Hague Court or a Geneva conference are flimsy compared with it. You read a bit of anthropology one day—it'll surprise you. People can bind fetters round themselves that they can never break—though they may be beyond reason and safety.' His voice grew quieter and less emphatic as he ruminated: 'Superstition and suggestion through superstition are greatly neglected powers nowadays. I don't mean that there aren't plenty of superstitious conventions and taboos about; there are, but they're formless and ill-controlled, and very often conflicting. There's a great influence over men and women just wasted and running to seed today. Instead of using it, the leaders have dropped it. The only way they attempt to control people now is by mass suggestion at a late age. That works, but it's inefficient; it has to be boosted continually. You can easily work up a nation to war pitch, but it takes continuous energetic propaganda to keep it there. If you allow them to think for themselves, they'll slack off, and it becomes progressively more difficult to keep up your propaganda so that they shan't think for themselves sooner or later. What's more, mass suggestion always begets a certain amount of counter mass suggestion—pure cussedness to begin with, as likely as not, but it goes on growing because of the defaulters who join it when they find they've been hoaxed by the original suggestion. Damned silly way of going on. Reminds me of those advertisements about increasing your height—it can be done, but the right time to do it is while you're young. In the same way, suggestion will work on an adult, but if you want to make a good job of it you've got to start on the infant. The church has the right idea. It got in as soon as it decently could with a baptism service. When they followed that up with a proper course of training, they'd got the poor little blighter just where they wanted him. He couldn't think for himself. He thought he could, mind you; he often thought he was doing no end of a fine think, but that didn't matter; he was only playing a kind of game with the rules already set in his mind. In practice, he was only crawling around in a mental pen.

'That was the way with most of the old religions, and a lot of them lasted a long time. They bust up mostly because they used their power wrongly, not because it weakened. Some of them didn't give enough crawling room; they drew the walls of the pen closer and closer until something was bound to give. Others let the walls fall into disrepair so that the people inside could look out and see that the country round about wasn't so bad after all. And then they lost their great power—all the western nations have lost it, but a good superstitious upbringing still holds the primitives.'

'That was a sign that the power of superstition was ending,' Mark interrupted. 'The people were turning to reason instead.'

'Reason, my foot. They won't be ready for reason for thousands of years—if they last that long. My God, just look at the world, man. Reason!'

'But it's true. The religions are dying—in the west, anyhow. I know people make a vulgar noise about them, but that's because they're not convinced—if they were, there'd be no reason for the noise.'

'Rot. The religions aren't dying. Just because you give a thing a different name it doesn't change it. You can have a religion without an anthropomorphic figure-head, just as you can have a state without a king. Democracy, Socialism, Communism, they're all religions.'

Mark objected. 'No, they're political theories.'

'Well, when did you ever find a religion that wasn't somehow bound up with a political theory? I tell you they are just as much religions as Christianity, Mohammedanism, or Buddhism. They are a superstition. What else but a superstition could produce the fantastic idea that all men are equal? Reason certainly could not. What but superstition could set people forming laws on a Lowest Common Denominator basis, and forcing brilliant intellects to abide by them? Is it a home of reason which devotes so much of its energy and wealth to preserving its unfit that its fit are neglected and become unfit themselves? And these, mind you, are recent developments among people whom you say are "turning to reason". Reason! Oh, my God!'

Gordon got up and stumped away. Smith grinned at Mark.

'Great guy on the spielin', ain't he? Only trouble is that he doesn't know what he wants any more than the rest of us. Still, it's been handy havin' him around; gets the boys talkin' and arguin' so that they forget 'emselves for a bit.' He got up. 'I'm goin' over to have a look at Ed and his bunch. Comin'?'

They made a detour and came upon the group from the rear. Certain parts of the cave had become unhealthy since Ed's artillery school had started. Slings are instruments requiring a nicety of operation only to be attained by practice, wherefore the danger area in front of the tyros was of considerable width. In a mushroom head, leaned against the wall for target duty, two stones had lodged. Ed turned his usual cheerful countenance.

'Made it—once,' he declared proudly.

'Out of how many?' Smith asked.

'Oh, lay off that. This ain't a Tommy gun—you gotta get to know it.'

'Whose is the other?'

'Zickle's. That nigger's gonna do big things.'

Zickle gave a show of white teeth.

'Yes, me gottim,' he agreed.

The two stood watching the practice for a while. The speed and force of the missiles was formidable, though the aim remained erratic. Ed, undiscouraged, pointed out that when the attack should come there would be a lot of targets, not just one.

As they wandered on, leaving him to it, Mark inquired as to progress on the tunnel. Smith answered him with the usual 'any time now'.

'Do you know what's above?' Mark jerked his thumb at the roof.

'Not for sure. What're you gettin' at?'

'Just this—suppose it's a hill or a mountain?'

'Well?'

'Well, you may have got up beyond normal surface-level already, and be boring your way through the heart of a mountain.'

'It's possible—but it ain't likely. You see, there's a hell of a lot more flat than mountains round here. It's thousands to one against our being under any sizeable mountain, and I guess we've got to take the risk anyway.'

'You couldn't send out some side tunnels experimentally?'

Smith shook his head.

'Not now. It'd be a waste of time. If it hadn't come to a showdown, it might've been worth trying. But with this on our hands, the best we can do is to keep straight on and up.'

The two strolled on, talking until they were interrupted by a hail from the wall. Smith hurried over.

'What is it?'

'Something going on in the right-hand tunnel.' said the lookout. 'There've been one or two of them dodging about in there.'

Both Smith and Mark stared, but they could make out little. There was certainly movement, though it was impossible to make out what was taking place.

'Better call the men up,' Smith decided. 'There may be another charge.'

Within two minutes the parapet was lined with staring faces whose owners speculated audibly, but it was half an hour before a definite move took place.

Near the middle of the wall Ed had chosen to station himself and his 'artillery'. The rest gave them a wide berth, and eyed them with misgiving; it had been noticed that stones had a habit of flying out of slings before the release was intended.

At last, when the majority had decided that the alarm must be false, a few small, white figures issued from the right-hand cave mouth. Ed waited until they had formed a line, then he and his men let fly. Most of the stones clattered harmlessly; only one figure subsided. It sat on the ground, hugging a damaged knee. The rest swung their slings and replied with a volley. The men on the wall watched the missiles come arching towards them. They were bigger than the stones used before, and flung on a higher trajectory. They looked like a flight of snowballs. Only when they landed did it become clear that they were not stones at all.

One struck the parapet just in front of Mark. It burst into a cloud of spores. He began to cough and choke as they entered his lungs. The more he gasped for breath, the more floating spores he breathed. His eyes streamed until he could scarcely see. He had a glimpse of another volley of white balls, bursting in another smother of spores.

The whole line of men was gasping and choking in the dusty air. The flakes swirled around them like a mist, blotting everything from view. Throats and chests began to ache with coughing; each fresh paroxysm seemed to rack more painfully.

They had been out-manoeuvred. The pygmies, or their advisers, had welcomed Ed's fungus idea, but they had realised too that they could not hope in the face of a bombardment tp roll the puff-balls up to the wall. The problem had been solved by extracting the spores from ripe balls, and stitching them into smaller skins suitable for slinging. But to what purpose?

The wall with its defenders had now disappeared into an artificial blizzard, but the flights of spore-bombs continued to fall with accuracy wherever the cloud was thinning. The pygmies and 'natives' could not hope to make an attack now. Once they should reach the spore area they would be in as bad a plight as the rest. It could only be that the present barrage was intended not just to disable, but to act as a screen. What might be afoot at the end of the cave, the spluttering, choking defenders could only guess.

At last, after what seemed an interminable period, the spore-bombs ceased to fall. The white swirl began to settle and thin, or drift away. The paroxysms of choking grew less frequent and less agonising. Eyelids could be opened without reclosing immediately in self-defence. The red-rimmed eyes, still streaming, could peer painfully in an effort to see what had taken place behind the screen, but their vision was dimly blurred. It was noses which gave the clue—a faint smell of burning.

A whistling flight of stones made them duck again. Mark put his recovering eyes to the spyhole, and the pygmy operations ceased to be a mystery.

In a line across the end of the cave lay five huge piles of vegetable rubbish, and from each was ascending a column of heavy, yellow smoke. For a few feet it poured straight up, then it bent over, broadening fanwise as the draught from the tunnels behind began to carry it farther into the big cavern. The rising curls, progressively attenuated, mingled as they climbed, losing individuality in a grey-yellow haze. Already an obscuring tide was flowing across the uneven roof. Those lamps it had engulfed showed wanly; their brilliance sicklied to a gloomy dimness. Mark watched it lap about others, flowing first to either side before it thickened to submerge them; increasing the gloom step by step.

With the decreasing light, the cave seemed to change character. It was no longer the familiar, workaday place they all knew. Nooks and corners, becoming shrouded, took on an ill aspect. Fears were born in 'he hidden crevices and came stealing out to attack the men's minds; the agents provocateurs of panic.

A group on the far right swarmed over the parapet and dropped to the loam. They started racing for the fires, oblivious of the flying stones which slashed at them. The slingmen changed their tactics and sent spore bombs which burst in their path. The running men staggered and reeled, they doubled up, and the sound of their rasping coughs came back to those still on the wall. The stones whistled among them again, felling a number and driving the rest into an impotent fury as they floundered with a temporary blindness.

Mark glanced round at Smith in mute inquiry. The other shook his head.

'No good. That's just what they want—to get us in the open. Once they do that it's all up.'

Smith was right; it was the position, not the numbers of the defenders which had baffled the attack. Doubtless they would be able to give a good account of themselves with their clubs, but though the pygmies were small, their numbers, added to those of the 'natives', were not. To take to the open meant certain defeat sooner or later. Mark became gloomy. This smoke business had not been foreseen. The slight draught which played through the crevices would not be enough to keep the air breathable. The time would not be long in coming when the only alternatives would be to make a dash or to suffer asphyxiation. Either meant the end of their plan. The pygmies would probably prefer the latter; it would give them less trouble.

The smoke was now a thick blanket over the whole roof. In the semi-darkness the men looked questioningly at their leader. Smith failed them—he could see no way out, and their eyes, roving farther along the wall, sought the burly Ed. He, too, was without a suggestion, and for the first time in Mark's experience of him, looked dejected.

'No, you ain't got this thing right,' he said to those who urged a charge. 'Maybe you'll get five minutes' fun skull cracking, but that ain't gonna help us any if you get your own skulls cracked after. What we gotta do is figure out some new line. And,' he added after an interval, 'it seems to me as there ain't none____Gees, don't I wish I'd never pulled that puff-ball stuff.'

The smoky stratum deepened; the cave grew more fearful in murky penumbra. The yellow columns above the five fires intensified, appearing almost as writhing solids. It was a mere matter of time till the pall above should creep down to drive them from the wall. Beyond the fires, to windward of the choking smoke, the slingers stood waiting; behind them, others filled the passages impassably. Sheer clogging of numbers alone would defeat an attempt to rush.

The defenders, too, waited. They could do nothing else. The fate of the first party to go over the top had proved a potent lesson. They could no longer look to Smith or any other as leader. That fatalism which they had thrown off at the need for action came seeping back, tinged now with resentful desperation. The tunnel upon which so many of them had worked for years would never be used now. The phrase, 'any time now' had even less meaning than before. The last ray of their hope was narrowed by a closing iris of smoke until it became that ultimate pinpoint of light without which they could not live. It was that last, feeble glimmer which set one and then another pair of eyes roving towards the shadowed wall in unadmitted faith that a figure might yet emerge crying: 'We're through.' But no such figure showed. The wall and the tunnel they had hewn through it receded into a blacker and blacker distance____

'If only there were something we could do,' Gordon was muttering. 'To be smoked out like a lot of rats....'

There came a sudden noise, reverberating, booming in the shadows behind them. A hundred pairs of eyes switched like one towards it, boring the impenetrable. A sudden cry from the Negro, Zickle—'Water!' Then other voices, on rising, panicky notes—'Water I ... Water! ...'

Long minutes of chaos, kaleidoscopic. Shouts. Men gasping, cursing, dropping from the wall. Beyond, shrill pygmy voices rising in alarm. A last, disregarded volley from the slingers. Screams from the passage mouths. Fighting to escape, trampling one another, jammed in the tunnels? A hand on Mark's arm, rigid as a clamp. Gordon's voice, calm and firm among the hubbub. What's he saying?

'Wait. You'll be trampled.'

Wait! With the water gushing in to drown them all?

A wrench which failed to shake the clamp loose. Smith's voice:

'Plenty of time—plenty of time. Wait.'

First panic ebbing. Fighting for control. Behind it all, the rush of the water. Tons of it, spewing into the cave, reaching out to swamp and choke. Partial victory. It's a big cave—take a lot of water to fill it. Screams and shouts from the passages. Fighting, tearing one another to bits like animals—mad with fright. Gordon talking calmly to Smith:

'Let 'em get clear; the tunnel's narrow, it can't pass much water. Plenty of time.'

What tunnel? Things began to get clearer. Their tunnel, of course. It was through. Must have come up under the New Sea. Never thought of that possibility. The tunnel which was to lead to freedom____Mark began to laugh with an odd giggle.

Gordon shook him violently.

'Stop it.'

Mark tried, but could not. It was irresistibly funny— the tunnel which was to lead to freedom....

Something hard and angular hit his jaw.

'Shut up—do you hear?'

The shaking went on. He stopped laughing. Queer, it hadn't been very funny after all. The shaking ceased.

'Sorry,' he said. Smith grunted, rubbing his knuckles.

Ed came ambling along the wall with several others trailing after him.

'Crazy bunch o' saps,' he observed, nodding in the direction of the passages. 'Can you beat it?' He spat disgustedly over the parapet. They listened for a moment to the sounds of strife mingling with the rush of the water.

'Gees, and I thought some of those guys got brains—if they have, they're on vacation right now.'

'Some of 'em'll get out,' said Smith.

'Sure they'll get out—an' for what? To be chased by the water. You know darned well there ain't no way for it to get outa this place. They'll go right up to the big first cave by the entrance—and then what? Jest wait right there until the water ups and catches 'em. Ain't that a hell of a fine way to die?'

They turned and looked over the ground behind the wall. The water was visible now; its edge had advanced to within a few feet of them and was crawling rapidly forward, stirring the loam to mud.

'Well, it'll soon put out those goddam fires,' Ed murmured philosophically.

'Look there.' Gordon pointed to the white circle of a puff-ball, just visible in the gloom. It was swaying and bobbing erratically on the flood.

'Well, what about it?'

'It's floating. These trunks will float, too. A couple of them lashed together would make a good raft for three or four men.'

'But we'd only go up there.' Mark looked up at the smoke curtain over the roof.

'No. We can float them out through the passages as the water rises. Float them right out to the first cave, and then-'

He stopped suddenly as Ed's huge hand smote him on the back.

'Atta boy! You've said it. Gimme some cord, somebody; I'm gonna get busy.'

The binding of several stone clubs was speedily untwisted. Within a few minutes all the men were lashing the thick, white trunks into pairs. The water rose and trickled through the wall as they worked. The five fires went out in bursts of steam and fierce sizzlings. The first completed raft was thrust over the parapet, and fell with a splash. Its two builders climbed after it. Another splash followed, and another, until all the rafts bobbed in the muddy water. Ed looked up at the last pair.

'C'm on, you guys. Time to go places. Snap into it.'

They swarmed down into knee-deep water, and waded forward, pushing their rafts towards the passages. Behind them still sounded the roar of gushing water; around the walls it lapped slowly higher____