power and the place where they stored their slides and we shall begin to disentangle something of the enigma of the city.'
Fourteen
The remainder of that day was spent in a fevered chaos by Scarsdale and Van Damm in particular. Though the discovery of the picture-machine in the ancient city beneath the ground was of stupefying importance from an archaeological and historical point of view it did not excite me as much as might have been supposed. Naively, I had imagined that we were to see something like early newsreel films of this long-forgotten civilisation. Instead, the reality, when it came was much more prosaic though the Professor and his scientific companions passed an evening much like that of Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter when they discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen.
In point of fact what the Great Northern Expedition had unearthed was equally as important, possibly more so, as the city of Croth had never even been suspected until Scarsdale and one or two obscure scholars had begun their researches into certain forbidden books. What Scarsdale and Van Damm had reanimated in what they came to call the Central Library of the city was, in fact, a visual method of projecting book pages so that hundreds of people could take part in readings at one time. This would not only have served the same function as our modern cinema for this ancient people but obviously took the place of printing for them, as by this method they had only to 'publish' one particular book for the entire population.
When Van Damm himself discovered the central deposits, the raison d'etre for the whole building, there was a high pitch of excitement so that I felt constrained to go back across the square to relieve Prescott, so that he could join in an occasion of outstanding interest. What the doctor and Scarsdale were so enthused about was, I had to admit to myself, something pretty spectacular in the way of breaking new ground and the Great Northern Expedition would go down in history for this alone.
What had happened was that Van Damm had accidentally dislodged a bronze knob somewhere behind the lectern; the others had felt a draught shortly after and had then noticed that a dark slot had appeared' in the rear wall of the building. The lever apparently operated an ingenious series of counterbalances, sliding back a stone door cut from one slab of material but so thinly and accurately that my colleagues found it could be pushed to and fro with one hand.
What they found within, ranged upon minutely indexed stone shelves and in elaborately inscribed storage bins, were thousands of exquisitely engraved metal cylinders. How these had been created, it was not clear, as there were no tools discernible, but no doubt, Scarsdale surmised, we would find metalworkers' shops and those of other skilled artisans within the city itself.
The cylinders contained many different 'frames' of material, each evidently representing a numbered page of a book or communication. The figures and symbols were punched with such delicacy and precision — letters like O having the central portion linked to the main symbol with exquisitely fine tracery work — that they could be projected complete to give a representation of the page upon the stone screen in the auditorium below.
When the cylinders were placed on a central pin on the machine, which presumably had some sort of light source within its hollowed-out interior, it could then be revolved to bring various faces of the work projected to the viewer's notice in proper numbered sequence. Van Damm himself had expected there to be a series of lenses, as in a modern movie projector, but this proved not to be the case.
The light, whose source remained a mystery, passed through a sort of pinhole as in that old form of camera, and by a racking device which animated the spindle, could be focused by natural light intensity, funnelling it through the metal ring on the exterior of the pulpit. We then realised that the design of the mechanism, which could only 'focus' within very narrow limits, made necessary for the whole building to be constructed to suit the apparatus. In other words, the length of the projector's 'throw' determined the point at which the rear wall screen would be built. The effect can be realised by noting the projection of a sign on a glass door when sunlight repeats the pattern on a light wall some distance away.
There was no denying the tremendous nature of this discovery, and Scarsdale and those who followed would be able to learn much of this ancient civilisation from the deciphering of the cylinders. But further examination would have to wait as we had the whole city before us, wide open for exploration. I took the first watch as sentry that night and noted that the sleep of my companions was markedly broken by the excitement of this extraordinary day.
The following morning Holden was left in charge of Camp Five, the inevitable machine-gun pointing its snout along the plaza in the northward direction to which we were committed. Scarsdale had decreed that for the moment we would explore only those buildings of greatest importance which lay directly on our route. It was his aim, he said, to penetrate as far to the north as possible -1 myself believed he intended to seek out the source of the strange distant throbbing — and only to explore the city in depth upon our homeward journey.
It was about ten a.m. when the party left, Scarsdale and Van Damm leading, as always, and myslf, as the least scientifically useful member of the expedition in the rear. The expendable position Prescott called it jocularly, and though we all laughed, it was a somewhat macabre joke to my mind. But perhaps Prescott was a more effective psychologist than he realised as his words served to sharpen my wits so that I kept a more than usually alert watch from my vulnerable rearward position.
The northward-leading thoroughfare, which nevertheless had a disturbing optically-distorted quality about it, led away through what in a normal city would be described as the suburbs. The size of the buildings diminished as we left the square, though they were still upon an impressive scale. The light, to which we had now become accustomed, was of the same overall strength so that we did not need any artificial aids to illuminate our way. The distant throbbing was growing more distinct as we tramped onwards for more than an hour; the structures here, into which we occasionally ventured, were nothing more than empty square boxes with no windows but merely steps upwards, a portico and a square door punched in the surface.
The material was the same steel-hard stone that we had already observed. Before we left the square proper we also ventured into one or two other large buildings but despite the inscriptions on the lintels we could not make out their purpose; one appeared to be a sort of office, with large square flat slabs of stone which might have served as counters. There were no chairs or furniture of any other kind. The floors were of the same smooth, interlocking stones which gave the aberrant optical effects I had already noted and were free of dust or detritus of any kind.
The second building seemed to be some sort of warehouse, full of jars and square vessels all sealed and there were also piles of thin stone slabs which bore incised writing in a language different to the hieroglyphs, Scarsdale said. We did not open any of the sealed jars or boxes, in view of our previous experiences in the embalming gallery. The roadway led slightly uphill, always due north, and with other roads, built on a smaller scale running at exact mathematical radii from it; almost always at rightangles. Just before noon we came to a sensational innovation, a strange, four-arched bridge, that seemed to be suspended from either side of a large stream about forty feet wide, but of some unknown engineering principle as the bottoms of the arches nowhere appeared to touch the water.
This caused a great deal of excited speculation between Scarsdale, Van Damm and Prescott and it was quite some while before any of us ventured on it, as it seemed so frail. It proved to be of some unfamiliar metal and even more bizarre, nowhere was there any evidence of nuts, bolts, rivets or welding as known in the modern world.
Scarsdale summed it up well when he turned to me and said, 'If I didn't know the thing was impossible I would say that this whole structure was carved from one block of metal by some gigantic force.'
Van Damm's face was white as he gazed around him in the gloom.
'Just why do you say it is impossible, Professor?' he said quietly. 'I should say this is one word which it would be unwise to use down here, judging by what we've already seen.'
It was the only time I had seen Scarsdale at a loss for words. He coughed awkwardly and shifted his huge feet in the riding boots.
'Perhaps you're right. Van Damm,' he said mildly. 'One cannot always judge properly without all the relevant data. I should perhaps have qualified my remarks.'
