CHAPTER VI
We found our molluscs and struggled back up the sloping path to shallow water. On the bank I lay and coughed, gasping and struggling to remove the residual water from my lungs and replace it with air. The transition back was far worse than entering the water. Nona, who quite evidently had done it several times before, recovered more quickly than I. As I lay panting and choking upon our couch, she made up a fire. The two stones which she rubbed together ignited in a moment—a slow, sulphurous-looking flame with a little smoke which the slight current of air through the cave carried away. Then, when the first stones were burning, she added other stones which glowed like coal.
We ate our meal, and I lay again upon our couch with Nona sitting beside me.
I was awakened by a sense of burning and smothering. I sat up, coughed, and twitched at Nona’s hair to arouse her.
The cave was full of smoke. Beside me was what seemed a pit of fire. The heat from it was intolerable. I flung Nona into the air and followed her myself with a leap.
Across the cave we stood trembling with fright, regarding the red monster of fire that had eaten for itself an open pit in the cave-floor.
Nona had forgotten to extinguish the fire of our evening meal. These rocks were inflammable. The fire had eaten its way downward, as a fire on your Earth would eat downward into a bed of coal, spreading out beneath the ground.
Nona and I did not reason it out that way at the time. All we knew was that the red fire-monster had broken loose, and we were afraid of it. Blue and red tongues of flame licked up from the mouth of its lair; its hot, poisonous breath was stifling us even across the cave.
I was inactive only for a moment. Bidding Nona keep away, I tried to throw dirt into the little crater-mouth.
But the dirt had no effect. I might have extinguished it with water you say? True, I might, though I think now that the volatile, highly aerated water would have been of little avail.
I did not try the water. I did not know that water and fire were traditional enemies. Nor did Nona. How were we to know that, unless we had chanced to discover it for ourselves, which we had not.
Nona screamed at me and I gave up my futile efforts. The air in the cave was almost suffocating; and with the instinct that comes to any trapped animal underground, we scrambled up the passageway to the surface of the meteor.
It was night, with silver Saturn filling the overhead sky. Trembling, we stood and watched the cave-mouth from which a visible line of smoke was now issuing. Our home was down there; the fire-monster had it—and we could not go down and take it from him.
We never went back to the cave. The meteor’s swift days and nights passed in rapid succession; and during several of them we stood helplessly watching.
Presently the fire came to the surface. I realize now that it was eating its way downward as well as upward until the entire vicinity of the cave was glowing with molten, burning rocks.
The ground all around the cave-mouth soon fell inward. A seething crater was exposed where the cave had been—a bottomless pit of lurid, licking flames with black smoke rolling up from it, and the hissing of steam below.
We took instant flight, swimming through the air over our tiny world, until, on its opposite hemisphere we found sanctuary.
There was no evidence of the fire here. We were pleased. We would find another cave, another river, and build our home anew.
We were both famished. I caught a lizard and we ate it—uncooked, for we were both afraid to unleash again the monster that had all but overcome us.
Then we slept; and again, when two of the meteor’s brief days and nights were passed, and Saturn was sinking below the horizon to give place to dawning sunlight, we searched for a new cave.
No cave was to be found. But there was water. A river several hundred yards wide bubbled up from the ground and flowed in a broad shallow stream toward the horizon. We followed it to a tiny line of hills. Into a hole in a cliff-face it plunged downward with an impetuous current.
Here we decided to build our home. There were blue rushes along the river bank. Nona gathered them; she would dry them, plait them into robes for our couch.
Once I flew back to the fire. I could not get very close to it, for the air choked me. The fire seemed to be burning itself out. It was dull, with flickering puffs of flame in the midst of a thick pall of smoke which hung motionless in the still air.
I returned to Nona.
“The fire-monster is dying,” I said. “But it has eaten our cave.”
I know now what was happening. The fire was being smothered for lack of fresh air to sustain its combustion. Had there been any wind I do not doubt but that the entire surface of the meteor would have been consumed.
An almost equally great danger threatened us, however—and presently we were made aware of it. The smothering, smouldering fire gave off steadily a tremendous volume of unconsumed gases. Even without any wind they diffused themselves throughout the meteor’s atmosphere, it was so small a world, with so thin a blanket of air about it—an infinitesimal fraction of the air that envelopes your Earth. Rapidly it became polluted with poisonous gases from the half-smothered fire—polluted throughout its entire extent.
For a day we were uneasy. Then we grew frightened. There was little evidence of smoke—only a blue haze. But the air seemed to choke us. It was the poisonous breath of the fire-monster come to make us sick.
We tried to go somewhere to escape it. But we were on the opposite side of the world from it already, and no matter which direction we took, inevitably we approached it.
Except upward. We tried higher altitudes. The air was purer up there, but also it was thinner, and we could not live in it for any length of time. Nor could we sustain ourselves aloft indefinitely—to say nothing of sleeping and eating.
Once in desperation we tried swimming off the meteor into Space. But the lack of any breathable air at all soon brought us struggling downward.
That night there was a gentle wind. The breath of the fire-monster swept up over the horizon and came upon us with a deadly blast. We woke up, choking. It was daylight, with a small red-yellow sun dim and blurred by the poisonous haze that enveloped us.
Nona was crying. But suddenly I laughed, triumphantly, for I realized now that the fire-monster could not harm us.
We were lying at the river bank. I seized Nona in my arms and flung her headlong downward into the water. And I plunged in after her. The water here was deep—thirty feet perhaps, as you on Earth would measure it. With arms flying, we sank like stones to the river bottom.