at Scarsdale with an enthusiastic smile as he spoke and with a wave of his hand went back to the end of the bench. Scarsdale said nothing but got out a blackened old pipe from his pocket and bit at its yellow stem.
We had been walking round the workshop and found ourselves near the door to the yard; there was another vast shed, like an aeroplane hangar adjoining and Scarsdale now put his bull-like shoulder to a sliding door and slid it shudderingly back. He moved about ahead of me, switching on lights.
‘Excellent people, Prescott and Holden,’ he said succinctly. ‘One couldn’t wish for better companions. You’ll fit in well, I think.’
I stood blinking in the sudden glare of light from the banks of powerful reflectors set in the ceiling girders. Before me were two of the great grey tractor vehicles; these, unlike the one I had seen in the yard and the other in the orchard earlier, were shining with new paint and carried registration numbers. Both bore the stencilled black lettering, GREAT NORTHERN EXPEDITION. Number 1, I saw was labelled Command Vehicle and had Scarsdale’s name beneath. Number 2, bore Dr Van Damm’s name as commander. Numbers three and four would be accompanying us as reserve vehicles, explained Scarsdale, ushering me up the light metal steps into his own craft.
Once inside the sliding doors, the Professor switched on the interior lighting and showed me his domain with somewhat justifiable pride.
‘We have developed these vehicles between the four of us, to overcome certain difficulties I have already encountered,’ said the Professor. ‘A new principle of friction-drive is incorporated in the tractor units. Van Damm, whatever his faults in other directions, was invaluable here. He also developed a new type of long-life heavy duty battery, which we are able to re-charge en route.’
As he spoke, he showed me round the interior of the craft which seemed to me extremely ingenious and spacious. The control room, which had observation windows masked by sliding metal shutters, also incorporated a sort of chart-table and a rack for all the Professor’s books and instruments.
Beyond was a bedroom which could sleep three crew-members in comfort; beyond that again a small galley fully equipped for cooking. There was even a minute toilet and shower stall and wash-basin.
‘The other tractors are identical,’ said the Professor, ‘so that if something happens to one we can merely change over without difficulties of any sort.’
He paused before he went on.
‘You have no objection to learning to handle the machine, I suppose?’
‘I should be delighted,’ I said. ‘I intend to make myself fully useful in addition to my photographic duties.’
‘I ask for a particular reason,’ Scarsdale said. ‘The machines will go with us by sea in the first instance, of course. To get them to our destination means that we must have a driver for each. That commits four out of five, with one man acting as cook and reserve driver. So you can see we shall need the help of everyone.’
‘You won’t be engaging the help of any porters?’ I said.
The Professor shook his head.
‘You will see the reason why in due course,’ he replied. ‘We must have another two months in England before embarking. As you have seen, Van Damm is still far from perfect at piloting these things and I’m sure you’ll want to be thoroughly conversant before taking over.’
I agreed. Then another thought struck me.
‘As I’m to be the official photographer, ought I not to record some of these preparations on film?’ I said. ‘I have my equipment outside and would be delighted to start this afternoon.’
The Professor looked pleased but then his face clouded over. He put his hand on my shoulder.
‘I’m sure you won’t take this amiss, my dear fellow, but I must rely on your discretion.’
‘I’m not quite sure I follow you,’ I replied.
The Professor operated the mechanism which let down the shutters from in front of the forward windows. There was the hum of electric motors in this warm little world which seemed remote from the wet Surrey countryside about us.
‘This is a highly secret project,’ Scarsdale continued. ‘I’m at great pains that it should remain so. If the press should get wind of it, there might be difficulties involved in the country for which we are heading. So your prints must be shown to no-one but myself and your colleagues here.’
So worried did he look that I readily gave him my assurance, adding that if he wished I would leave the undeveloped film with him and print the material with my own equipment the next time I came down.
He seemed pleased at this but as I left the tractor to seek my camera, he halted me at the doorway.
‘To be quite fair to you, Plowright, I will tell you a little more about this business before you go. My conscience will then be clear.’
I assured him that I had already made up my mind to accompany him as official photographer but if he liked to let me know more about his plans and the circumstances surrounding the expedition, then I would, of course, fully respect any confidences he cared to place in me.
The next hour was an extremely busy one; I took something like seventy photographs in that time, with particular regard to the detail of the specialised equipment Scarsdale and Van Damm had perfected. I knew this would be appreciated by the Professor. He, together with the scowling Van Damm, was persuaded to pose on the steps of one of the tractors. Then I went out again into the drizzling rain to photograph Van Damm’s extraordinary manoeuvres in the orchard, watched by an alarmed Collins, who had strict orders from Scarsdale to report even so much as a bruised pear from the fruit trees.
I went on from there back to the workshop where I recorded the others at work, until I had a fairly comprehensive picture record of the Great Northern Expedition’s activities to date. By this time it was five o’clock and I was already so far committed to the as yet mysterious preparations of my companions that I was delighted when the Professor suggested that I should stay the night and at once fell in with his suggestion.
One of Collins’ stranger duties was the formal serving of tea, complete with silver teapot and all the accoutrements of toast, crumpets and scones, among the rough surroundings of the workshop, when the scientists were too busy to come indoors to the house. He had a strange contraption like a hospital trolley, with a collapsible hood to keep the rain from his heated delicacies and he trundled this solemnly out to the courtyard at five o’clock.
So it was that I found myself sipping almost boiling tea from fine china at the chart-table of the Professor’s tractor while he sombrely explained to me something of the difficulties we would be facing. He repeated that he had been somewhat alerted to the dangers facing the world by his researches into certain forbidden books many years before, in the early twenties. It was not until very much later that he began to connect them with the inscriptions found on stone tablets in various parts of the world; and then, eventually, with last year’s strange spring; the shifting lights in the sky, which were observed almost on a global scale and which were connected, Scarsdale maintained, with something he called the Coming.
It was such a spring and such a sequence of events, he said, which were hinted at in blasphemous old books and forbidden treatises in Arabic and Hebrew which he had studied for years on end and which he eventually made to yield up their secrets. It was the Latin volume. The Ethics of Ygor, he added, which had produced the most worthwhile results; and the key-sig’ns and notably the Magnetic Ring which was said to spin beyond the farthest suns of the universe, had eventually been the cause of his stumbling on to some fantastic and unbelievable facts which the Professor hesitated even to mention to his most learned colleagues.
They concerned, Scarsdale believed, a portion of the universe which he called ‘the great white space’; it was an area which the Old Ones particularly regarded with awe and which they had always formally referred to, in their primeval writings as The Great White Space. This was a sacred belt of the cosmos through which beings could come and go, as through an astral door, and which was the means of conquering dizzying billions of miles of distance which would have taken even the Old Ones thousands of years to traverse.
Scarsdale believed he had discovered a key to the identity of the Old Ones, through the hieroglyphs discovered on earth and after long and profound study of the writings, coupled with the key books of The Ethics of Ygor, he had come to the conclusion that the riddle of their existence might be probed here on earth. It was then that he had set out on the first and most difficult of his exploratory journeys, which he had already mentioned.
If Scarsdale feared that I should disbelieve what to a layman might appear to be a somewhat wild narrative, my demeanour must have rapidly given him confidence, for he was able to speak more clearly and confidently as the
