'Zalor was obviously of them or in their employ.'
We were at the tractor by this time and he paused at the door as I prepared to go in.
'I must have words with the Mir about this on our return,' he said grimly.
I went inside and brewed some tea for all of us, waiting for the running footsteps and excited questions Scarsdale's errand would arouse. There was no more sleep for me that night. When I had carried the urn of tea to the vegetable store where my colleagues were already servicing the equipment by the light of portable generating equipment, I went to drink mine by the edge of the town, looking over the Plain of Darkness; there was nothing to see but I knew that the sun would eventually arise from that direction.
I wondered whether Zalor was somewhere out there or if he had fled back in the direction of the ancient City of Zak. I wondered too how he would survive, or whether he had friends among the desert tribes. I smiled grimly to myself in the darkness. People like Zalor always survived. The headman, hastily roused by Scarsdale, had a party searching Nylstrom street by street but I guessed the dwarf would have his plans laid too well and that he would no longer be within the town. And so it proved when dawn eventually came.
Long before that I stirred to find Van Damm by my side. He joined me in my vigil until the distant rays of yellow light harshly illuminated the black plain of ash before us; the dawn wind sent faint whorls of dust moving uneasily on its surface. We looked in vain for any trace of Zalor.
Van Damm glanced at me sombrely. His face was haggard in the strange light of that ancient place.
'A bad business, Plowright,' he said. 'And an ill omen for this enterprise, I fear.'
Seven
The command tractor shifted and lurched on the Plain of Darkness, the immediate foreground of the windshield filled with whirling dust and cinders. I could see the Black Mountains rising from the raging dustclouds like some monstrous whale-like creature, they were so close. Scarsdale was silent at my side, now peering anxiously ahead, now making abstruse calculations with his slide-rule and mathematical instruments on the chart- table before him.
I went back to steering on a compass bearing, conscious that in a little more than an hour we should be off the plain and into the foothills of the mountains; Scarsdale had told us that there was some vegetation and we intended to follow up a shallow valley which eventually rose steeply and would take us to our destination. I only hoped the tractors would be robust enough to raise us on to the plateau which would lead us to the cave formations of which the Professor held such high hopes. Once again I marvelled at his tremendous vitality and strength in undertaking such a colossal journey on foot and with such an ill-equipped expedition as the earlier one.
When the excitement over Zalor's treachery had died away in Nylstrom and all the headman's searches had failed to discover the dwarf within the town, Scarsdale had held a brief council of war. We had decided to press on to the object of our journey as soon as possible. To that end the technicians among us had proceeded with the overhaul of the tractors and Number 4 had been left in the vegetable store, padlocked and under day and night guard. I was set to boiling water for the tanks of the three remaining vehicles, for that would be our biggest lack once we were among the mountains. I also took charge of gathering what fresh vegetables and fruit there was available, which would make a welcome change from the material in our tinned supply.
From the night of my fight with Zalor, Scarsdale had insisted on breaking out the weapons and we all wore sidearms; some, in addition carried rifles. I found the heavy pistol strapped to my waist in its webbing holster a tremendous nuisance and I had very little idea how to use it so that I felt I should be a greater danger to my companions in an emergency, rather than to any supposed enemy.
I took a last group of still photographs of our helpful headman and his people; and staged the few cinema shots necessary for this section of the route. I had stayed behind to record the scene as the villagers waved off the three remaining tractors into the unknown distances of the Plain of Darkness and once I had stopped the whirring motor of my machine and carried it and the heavy tripod off across the desert to where Scarsdale had halted to pick me up, I could not help reflecting on the contrast this scene would make with that of the splendour of the departure from Zak; the Plain was doubly sombre in the light of our later knowledge.
The Professor and I continued in Number 1 Command vehicle, with Van Damm alone in the middle and with Prescott and Holden in the third vehicle at the rear. Scarsdale had hoped to cross the plain in four hours or so at our maximum cruising speed but in the event it was nearer six before I heard his warning mutter; I altered my steering vector and the tractor's treads grated over solid rock as we slid upwards out of the warm dust and into the welcome shade of some stunted trees. A stiff breeze was blowing down the gully and when I had steered the tractor about a mile down the arid draw in which we found ourselves, the Professor decided to make camp. The sun was already low in the sky but as it now set from us across beyond distant Nylstrom, our shadows were long on the ground before us and the dark replicas of our strange vehicles were stencilled on the rocky floor of the valley as we pulled the machines into a rough circle and cut the motors.
For two days we followed the winding contours of the valley, every hour rising higher and higher into the mountain range, whose arms almost imperceptibly and inevitably closed in behind us until we all had the feeling that we were in a giant's grip. The wind increased daily, blowing in gusts from the heart of the range, but it did not trouble us as the desert wind, as there was little dust to obscure our view. It did, however, add to the difficulties of steering and our vehicles tended to yaw from side to side so that one wearied at the handles and muscles craved relief from the buffeting, which went on hour after hour.
It was growing steadily colder too, though the sun shone as regularly as hitherto; this did not bother us at first but we were then aware, during our frequent halts, that the breeze was a chilly one and we were beginning to feel the benefit of the sheepskin-lined coats which was one of Scarsdale's strange-seeming requisitions for the expedition's stores. The way twisted and wound upwards and for most of the time we were steering the tractors at half-speed through mazes of gigantic boulders and among formations of weirdly striated rock.
But there had been no major difficulties; the tractors were standing up well to the wear and tear of this difficult going and, most important of all, there had so far been no impossible places; no doubt due to Scarsdale's detailed surveying of the route on his previous journeyings. If there had been one impassable section then that would have made the Expedition untenable; apart from our using the tractors as mobile bases, there was the sheer impossibility of transporting the masses of stores and equipment along these miles of pitiless moraine.
The territory through which we were advancing was quite featureless; black rock; boulders; stunted trees; above, a perpetually blue sky; ahead, the eternal probe of the restless wind in one's teeth and the jumble of rocks which indicated the next bend.
We were too close in now to see what peaks lay ahead and so far as one was aware we were not high enough for snow. Scarsdale still continued in his mysterious and inscrutable way. Though his charts, log books and tables of weird hieroglyphs multiplied on the chart-table in the command vehicle at night, he gave no detailed hints of what we might soon expect.
We had been several days on our journey to the plateau when I myself broached the matter one evening; he shook his head, with an enigmatic smile.
'We are not close enough yet,' was all he would say. 'Time enough when we are within the Galleries.'
He had with him a translation of the blasphemous book. The Ethics of Ygor, which had been typed on ordinary foolscap sheets and he would be lost for hours in its study most evenings, the smoke from his pipe curling upwards vertically in the still air of the tractor. While in the desert we had kept within the machines whenever we stopped. There was good reason for this, of course; the tractors were air- conditioned and the sand and grit constantly blown about made eating and conversation in the open air a misery.
But here just the opposite rule obtained. Though the air was cold and the wind blew chill, whenever Scarsdale called a halt over his radio link and all three vehicles drew into a rough laager, we all of us, without anyone ever putting it into words, foregathered in the open air, lit fires and cooked our food. Huddled in our sheepskin jackets and hoarding our precious gatherings of wood we drank our nightly tea-ration and made the mountains echo with our animated talk.
Van Damm in particular made his own attitude plain; I could read it well enough on his face, though he never
