He wormed his way through a narrow crevice. Doc and I followed. We soon entered what at one time in the past must have been the wide mouth of an underground cavern.
For a moment we stood there, breathing the cold, moist air and staring into the darkness.
Suddenly a light flashed. I saw that Rog Tanlu was using that fountain-pen thing like a flashlight, but now it was sending out a blue-white radiance instead of those thin, death-dealing flashes.
"This was my laboratory," he said, holding the light at arm's length above his head. "There were big sliding doors that closed the place up tight and kept out the ice and the cold. I had some rather unique scientific apparatus here, but now it's all mouldering dust."
His voice sounded flat, there with the weight of rocks around us, and sad somehow.
The floor of the cavern slanted stiffly upward. As we advanced, the air around us kept getting colder and colder. It was like a gale from the poles blowing in our faces.
"We'll soon be directly behind the Ice Stone," said Rog Tanlu.
A light began to appear ahead. I could see more of that cavern—even the rock-ribbed ceiling high overhead. I can't express just what I was thinking at that moment, but I saw Doc Champ kick at a mound of something underfoot. The mound crumbled; Doc stooped and picked up a round object, like a disk of rusted metal, and looked at it with a kind of stark wonder. Then he threw it away and we followed Rog Tanlu.
The light grew brighter, became a huge square of blustery, blue-white chaos. We were standing as if just within the maws of a Gargantuan doorway—an open doorway through which we could look out over a scene of inexpressible dreariness.
You've seen pictures of the Antarctic? Titanic masses and pinnacles of ice, frozen white barrens, a land without feeling or soul? It was like that.