The Brink of the Abyss
At last we were drawing near the mysterious light. It had now ceased to flicker and shone with a steady greenish-yellow glare, so bright as to illuminate the gallery with a weird radiance, wherein we could clearly distinguish each other's features. The source of the light, however, remained an enigma; while we, pressing on with increasing boldness, were resolved to discover its nature or perish in the attempt.
In a few minutes we had reached the end of the corridor, and, turning sharply, we found ourselves in a wider passageway penetrated by scores of cross-galleries and ending, about a hundred yards beyond, in a perfect blaze of greenish light.
"Lord in Heaven!" exclaimed the awe-stricken Clay, as we reached the new thoroughfare. "Are we dreaming?—or am I simply crazy?"
"Guess we're both crazy!" I muttered. And then, shielding my eyes from the glare and nerving myself for a supreme effort, I said, "Come on; let's find out what's what!"
"Might as well die exploring!" he conceded grimly as we resumed our pilgrimage.
I now noticed for the first time that Clay was walking with a slight limp; I also noticed that his rude mining costume was not only soiled with great streaks and blotches of black, but was ripped and torn in a hundred places, exposing the bare skin every here and there, so that he looked a perfect ragamuffin. But my own clothes, I could see, were in an equally sorry condition.
As we slowly covered the hundred yards to the end of the second gallery, Clay's mind seemed to center on somber thoughts. I could see the bleak furrows on his long, lean, battered face; I could read his disconsolate expression as, with a great hairy hand, he thoughtfully stroked his dishevelled red locks. But I was little prepared for his next words.
"Say, Frank, if anything happens to me, see that my old mother back in Denver gets my watch as a remembrance. And tell her I was thinking of her at the last—"
"The devil I will! Tell her yourself! What's getting into you, Phil?" I interrupted, almost savagely. "Haven't you as good a chance as I of getting out of this infernal mess?"
"I suppose I have, at that!" he acknowledged, wryly. "Guess it's both of us, or neither!"
At this point our conversation was interrupted by our arrival at the end of the second gallery, where we were to make a discovery compared with which our previous surprises appeared insignificant.
I remember that it was Clay, who, preceding me by half a dozen feet, was the first to stop short and gasp out his astonishment.
"God above!" I heard his swift exclamation; and I observed how, stricken all but speechless, he gaped open-mouthed into the green-lighted vacancy beyond. "God above!" he murmured a second time, before a dumbfounded silence overwhelmed him.
At a bound I had gained his side; and I too, as I gazed in bewilderment before me, seemed to have lost my tongue. "Merciful Heavens!" was all I could mumble in my amazement. "Merciful Heavens, what's this?" And I rubbed my eyes and pinched my sides, to make sure that I was not dreaming.
How shall I describe that stupendous scene which suddenly unfolded before us? Surely, the discoverer of a new planet could not have had a deeper sense of awe and wonder! For it was literally a new world that we beheld. The gallery had ended as if on the brink of a precipice; we were staring down, through yellowish-green abysses, into a chasm as wide and deep as the Grand Canyon of Arizona—as wide and deep, but by no means as irregular—by no means so narrow at the bottom! Unlike the great gorge of the Colorado River, it showed no unevenness of structure; sheer stone walls, straight and precipitous as the walls of a room, shot down beneath us a mile deep; sheer stone walls, equally precipitous and straight, rose opposite us at a distance of more than a mile, and between them spread the bare, level floor of the cavern, which reached to our right and left to an incalculable remoteness.
An unspeakably weird sensation overcame me as I gazed, in the thunderstricken silence, at that tremendous excavation. There was such an atmosphere of unreality about it all that only by degrees did my startled senses absorb the details—the gentle curve of the ceiling, which, arching but a few hundred feet above us, revealed fantastic figures, vaguely man-shaped, that stood out sharply in cameo—the multitude of greenish-yellow bulbs which, square or rounded or elongated into rods and spirals, studded the walls by the thousand and hung in long strings from above—the small round openings like the portholes of a vessel, which dotted the opposite side of the cavern in inestimable myriads, confronting us in scores of horizontal lines, and the little door-like apertures that opened at regular intervals all along the cavern floor.
Long and intently we gazed into that miraculous abyss; many minutes must have passed while we stood there spellbound. It was I that first regained some measure of composure; with a shock, I saw my companion standing entranced, so near the brink of the precipice that I trembled for his safety.
With a hasty gesture, I pulled him back a step. "Better watch out, Phil!" I warned, "else I won't have even your watch to bring back to your mother!"
Like a man in a daze, he wiped a grimy hand over his carrot-colored hair. "Good thing she can't see me now!" he gasped. "Lord preserve me! she'd be offering up prayers for the soul of her poor boy lost in Hell!"
"Lost in Hell is right!" I acknowledged, grimly.
"If I hadn't bit my lips to make sure I was alive, Frank," he continued, with an ugly grimace of his scarred face, "I'd think we had both died and were wandering around somewhere in the devil's back yard!"
Before I had had time to reply, fresh alarm swept aver us both; once more the earth wavered violently and the distant thunders and detonations burst out with renewed fury. At the same time, a shaft of violet light, from some unknown source, shot across the cavern with lightning swiftness. Then, in the barest fraction of a second, waves of orange light and of vermilion followed; then, while Clay and I stared at each other in consternation, the greenish-yellow luminaries all flickered and seemed about to be extinguished. Simultaneously, our ears were struck by a distant blast of sound, a little like the notes of a bugle; and the next instant, as the greenish-yellow lights regained their former brilliancy, a scene of startling activity became visible on the cavern floor.
Had we obeyed the dictates of our hammering hearts, we should have turned and fled. The impulse to flee was, indeed, powerful within us; but partly because we did not wish to seem cowards in each other's eyes, and partly because of our insatiable curiosity, we fought down our self-protective instinct, flung ourselves full-length upon the gallery floor, crept to the edge of the abyss, and gazed across. And there, in that recumbent position, like small boys secretly watching a ball game, we witnessed a spectacle so unimaginably strange that I cannot recall it even today without a shudder of the old horror.