“So that,” Barber said, looking back the way they had come, “is what we were going to build a ship out of—iron stains!”
Humbolt did not answer. For him it was more than a disappointment. It was the death of a dream he had held since the year he was nine and had heard that the Dunbar Expedition had seen iron-stained rock in a deep chasm—the only iron-stained rock on the face of Ragnarok. Surely, he had thought, there would be enough iron there to build a small ship. For eleven years he had worked toward the day when he would find it. Now, he had found it—and it was nothing. The ship was as far away as ever …
But discouragement was as useless as iron-stained sandstone. He shook it off and turned to Barber.
“Let’s go,” he said. “Maybe we’ll find something by the time we circle the chasm.”
For seven days they risked the danger of death from downward plunging rocks and found nothing. On the eighth day they found the treasure that was not treasure. They stopped for the evening just within the mouth of one of the chasm’s tributaries. Humbolt went out to get a drink where a trickle of water ran through the sand and as he knelt down he saw the flash of something red under him, almost buried in the sand. He lifted it out. It was a stone half the size of his hand; darkly translucent and glowing in the light of the setting sun like blood.
It was a ruby.
He looked, and saw another gleam a little farther up the stream. It was another ruby, almost as large as the first one. Near it was a flawless blue sapphire. Scattered here and there were smaller rubies and sapphires, down to the size of grains of sand. He went farther upstream and saw specimens of still another stone. They were colorless but burning with internal fires. He rubbed one of them hard across the ruby he still carried and there was a gritting sound as it cut a deep scratch in the ruby.
“I’ll be damned,” he said aloud.
There was only one stone hard enough to cut a ruby—the diamond.
*
*
*
It was almost dark when he returned to where Barber was resting beside their packs.
“What did you find to keep you out so late?” Barber asked curiously. He dropped a double handful of rubies, sapphires and diamonds at Barber’s feet.
“Take a look,” he said. “On a civilized world what you see there would buy us a ship without our having to lift a finger. Here they’re just pretty rocks.
“Except the diamonds,” he added. “At least we now have something to cut those quartz crystals with.”
*
*
*
They took only a few of the rubies and sapphires the next morning but they gathered more of the diamonds, looking in particular for the gray-black and ugly but very hard and tough carbonado variety. Then they resumed their circling of the chasm’s walls. The heat continued its steady increase as the days went by. Only at night was there any relief from it and the nights were growing swiftly shorter as the blue sun rose earlier each morning. When the yellow sun rose the chasm became a blazing furnace around the edge of which they crept like ants in some gigantic oven.
There was no life in any form to be seen; no animal or bush or blade of grass. There was only the barren floor of the chasm, made a harsh green shade by the two suns and writhing and undulating with heat waves like a nightmare sea, while above them the towering cliffs shimmered, too, and sometimes seemed to be leaning far out over their heads and already falling down upon them.
They found no more minerals of any kind and they came at last to the place where they had seen the smoke or vapor.
*
*
