Using the poles of the travois and with the sword slung over my back on a piece of queerly tough fiber Oona had given me, I was now able to hobble forward beside her. The light had the brilliance of the flash powder cameramen use. It blinded and dazzled, so that Oona soon replaced her smoked glasses and I drew the peak of my deerstalker down over my eyes. Effectively we were blind and deaf and so moved even more slowly and carefully.
The phosphorescence curved in a wide ribbon that stretched across our horizon and fell, almost like a rainbow, downwards into sparking blackness. Farther away one could just make out another glowing area, much wider than the great band of light which pierced the darkness of the vast cavern. None of this light revealed a roof. Only the depth of the echo gave any notion of height. It might have been a mile or two up. The roar, of course, was coming from the same source as the light. And so, I now began to notice, was the heat.
If complex life did exist so far below the surface of the earth, I now knew at least how it survived without the sun.
From the humidity I guessed us to be approaching the river Bastable had mentioned. I was unprepared for the first sign that we were near. Like winking fireflies at first, the rocks soon became alive with the same silvery blaze we could see ahead. Little stars blossomed and faded in the air and began to fall on our bodies.
Liquid. I thought at first it must be mercury but realized it was ordinary water carrying an intense phosphorescence, no doubt drawn from a source closer to the surface, perhaps under the sea.
Oona was more familiar with the stuff. When she found a pool, she cupped her hands and offered some to me. The water was fresh. Her hands now glowed, so that she resembled some garish saint from a commercial Bible. Where she pushed back her hair, her head was briefly surrounded by a halo. Wherever the water clung to us, we were jeweled in pewter and glinting quicksilver. She signed that I could drink if I wished. She bent to her hands and sipped a little. For an instant, her lips glowed silver and her ruby eyes regarded me with enthusiastic glee. She was enjoying my astonishment. For a few seconds the water passing down her throat illuminated veins and organs so that she seemed translucent.
I was entranced by these effects. I longed to know more about them, but the roar continued to deafen us and it was still hard to look directly at the horizon. As the phosphorescent water fell on our heads and bodies, covering us with tiny fragments of stars, we ascended smooth, slippery rocks at the point where the great wall of light began its gentle downward curve.
At last we could see the reason for the roaring. A sight which defied anything I had witnessed in ail my travels. A wonder greater than the seven which continue to astonish surface dwellers. I have often said that the wonders of the world are properly named. They cannot be photographed or filmed or in any way reproduced to give the sense of grandeur which fills you when you stand before them, whether it be Egypt's pyramids or the Grand Canyon. These unknown, unnamed falls were like something you might discover in Heaven but never on our planet. I was both strengthened and weakened by what I observed. To describe it is beyond me, but imagine a great glowing river widening across a falls vaster than Victoria or Niagara. Under the roof of a cavern of unguessable height, whose perimeters disappear into total darkness.
A vast tonnage of that eerie water crashed and thundered, shaking the ground on which we stood, rushing down and down and down, a mighty mass of yelling light and wild harmonies that sounded like human music. Throwing monstrous shadows everywhere. Revealing galleries and towers and roads and forests of rock, themselves throwing out soft illuminating silver rays like moonbeams. Relentlessly carrying the waters of the world down to the heart of creation, to renew and be renewed.
Something about that vision confirmed my belief in the existence of the supernatural.
I felt privileged to stand at the edge of the mighty cataract, watching that fiery weight of water tossing and swirling and sparking and foaming its way down a cliff whose base was invisible, yet which became a river again. We could see it far below, winding across a shallow valley and forming at last the main mass of shining water which I now realized was a wide underground sea. At least this geography followed surface principles. On both sides of the river, on the rising banks of the valley, were slender towers of white and gray light so varied they might have been the many-storied apartment blocks of the New York skyline. The formations were the strangest I'd ever experienced. My geologist brother, who died at Ypres, would have been astonished and delighted by everything around us. I longed to be able to record what I was seeing. It was easy to understand why no explorer had brought back pictures, why the only record of this place should be in a book by a known fantast, why sights such as these were incredible-until witnessed.
In the general yelling turbulence and showering silver mist, I had not considered what we would do next and was alarmed when Oona began to point down and inquire, through signs, if I had enough energy to begin a descent. Or should we sleep the night at the top?
Although weak, I did everything I could to move under my own volition. I still felt Gaynor had a chance of catching us. I knew I would feel more secure when I had put a few more miles between us. On the other hand, I was deeply uncomfortable with my circumstances and longed to begin the climb back to the surface, to get to a place where I could continue the common fight against Adolf Hitler and his predatory psychopathic hooligans.
I didn't want to continue that descent, but if it was the only way, I was prepared to try. Oona pointed through the glittering haze to a place about halfway down the gorge, where I saw the outlines of a great natural stone bridge curving out over the water, apparently from bank to bank. That was evidently our destination. I nodded to her and prepared to follow as she began to make her way carefully down a rough pathway which appeared to have been covered with droplets of mercury. The roaring vibrations, the long fingers of stone which descended from the roof or rose from the ground, the light, the massive weight of water, all combined to half mesmerize me. I felt I had left the real world altogether and was in a fantastic adventure which would have defeated the imagination of a Schiller.
In all directions the rock flowed in frozen, organic cascades. Every living thing on earth seemed to have come here and fused into one writhing chimera so that trees turned into ranks of bishops and bishops into grinning gnomes. Ancient turtle heads rose from amongst nests of crayfish and their eyes were the eyes of basilisks. You felt they could still reach you. Gods and goddesses like those intricate carvings on the pillars of Hindu temples or Burmese pagodas. I found it impossible to believe at times that this was not the work of some intelligence. It reproduced every aspect of the surface, every human type and every animal, plant and insect, sometimes in grotesque perspective or magnified twenty times. As if the stuff of Chaos, not yet fully formed, had been frozen in the moment of its conception. As if an imagination had begun the process of creating an entire world in all its variety-and been interrupted.
This vision of a not-quite-born world made me long for a return to the darkness which had hidden it from me. I was beginning to go mad. I was coming to realize that I did not have the character for this kind of experience. But something in me pushed me on, mocked me to make me continue. This is what they had tried to reproduce in Egypt and in Mexico. This is what they remembered in their Books of the Dead. Here were the beast-headed deities, the heroes, the heroines, angels and demons and all the stories of the world. There was no evident limit to these statues and friezes and fields of crystal looming over us, no far wall which might help us get our bearings. I had begun to understand that we had passed beyond any point where a compass could help us. There were no conventional bearings here. Only the river.
Perhaps those Nazi pseudoscientists had been right and our world was a convex sphere trapped in an infinity of rock and what we perceived as stars were points of light gleaming through from the cold fires which burned within the rock.
That I was experiencing full proof of their theory was no comfort. Without question we explored an infinity of rock. But had that rock once lived? Or did it merely mock life? Had it been made up of organic creatures like us? Did it strive to shape itself into the life of the surface as, in a less complex way, a flower or a tree might strive through the earth to reach the light? I found it easy to believe this. Anyone who has not had my experience need only find a picture of the Carlsbad Caverns to know exactly what 1 mean.
Pillars looked as if they had been carved by inspired lunatics so that you saw every possible shape and face and monster within them, and each rock flowed into another and they were endless in their variety, marching into the far darkness, their outlines flickering into sharp relief and dark shadow from the white fire flung up by that enormous phosphorescent river as she heaved herself endlessly into the heart of the world. Like Niagara turned into moonlit Elfland, an opiumeater's dream, a glorious vision of the Underworld. Did I witness the landscapes and the comforts of the damned? I began to feel that at any moment those snaking rocks would come alive and touch me and make me one of themselves, frozen again for a thousand years until brought to predatory movement only when
