Beyond the Great South Wall: The Secret of the Antarctic

by Frank Savile

We stared with greedy eyes upon this hidden hoard. With awesome fingers we touched and handled the beakers, the basons, and the curious two-pronged forks and skewers. All bore traces of use, but we were at a loss to account for the jagged notches in the handles of some of the sword-like spits. They leaned against the rocky ledge, arranged in exact order along the floor. At the upper part of each were wavering scars in solid metal; we might have imagined them to be decorative patterns, but for their scratchiness and irregularity. I took one in my hands and examined it carefully.

It had a hilt about half-a-foot long at the thickest end. It was just below this that the dents eat into the metal. I caught hold of Lessaution by the arm to demand his explanations of this matter.

At first he contemned my curiosity, explaining that matters of much greater interest demanded his attention. He ran his fingers over the criss-cross work, and suddenly shuddered, handing the thing back to me with a repellent gesture.

“It is explained there,” he said, pointing to the device that ran above the ledge. “Those are the rituals of sacrifice. It is necessary to slay the victim according to the religion of Cay. So they stab the sword through the shoulder and pierce the lung, and the victim dies slowly—very slowly, and he calls for long. So they think the god is well pleased. Then the poor people who die, they are in agonies—ah, so great a pain, and they bite and snap at the handle with their teeth. So here we see the marks. It is not nice—that, no it is of the most horrible. But what would you? They were brutes, this people, but oh, so ancient,” and he shrugged his shoulders as if much might be forgiven to a people who had conducted their devilries from time immemorial.

I dropped the thing with a shiver and a tingling of my fingers. Brutes they were, indeed, these fearsome Mayans of the centuries of long ago. I could only give fervent thanks that they were not alive to welcome us to these savage shores. I could well imagine the delight that would be theirs in spitting us on their horrible prongs, and leaving us to slow agony, tickling, as they would doubtless believe, their god’s ears with our delightful tortures. And if they had not left us to pant out our lives before this bestial image, we should have been offered up alive to the monster himself, to meet a swifter doom, perhaps, but one as fearful.

I asked him how he was so sure of the matter. He explained that the whole of the devices that ran round the walls were the detailed dogma and rubric of the worship of Cay. Not only did these give full directions for sacrificial orgies, and prescribe particularly the transfixing of the victims in the manner spoken of, but also alluded to the keeping alive of these tormented wretches—I am only quoting from what he translated—with various drugs, the names of which he was unable to understand. The inscription laid stress on the fact that the cries of these unfortunates were beloved of the god, and that, therefore, they were to be prolonged as far as possible.

It was only to be considered natural that the worship of such a filthy monstrosity should breed degraded cruelties, but I puzzled my head to think how Mayans in Central America could have possibly divined the existence of anything resembling this antediluvian Horror in the Antarctic Circle. I questioned Lessaution on this point also.

He said that his researches had led him to think that the last home of the Mastodon had been in Central America, and that before he became extinct he might have become the holy beast of the Mayan religion, much as the bull is to the Hindoos. He went on to explain his theory that as by lapse of time the huge beast became a memory and a myth, he rose from being a symbol of the godhead to being confounded with the god himself. His proportions had probably been exaggerated by half-forgotten rumor, and with his size had grown his sacredness. To make themselves strong the priesthood had invented the human sacrifices, by which, doubtless, they could remove their special antipathies or heretics.

It was not surprising, he added, that the Mayans, born and nurtured in the service of this superstitious horror, should conceive the Dinosaur, when he thus descended upon them, to be their god in very deed. We must also reckon the effect their miraculous bringing to this desolate coast would have upon them. There was no doubt that they had frequently striven to do their divinity honor by human sacrifices, and that one of their first acts must have been the building of this temple under the shadow of the overhanging rock.

It was to be supposed that the glacier had been diverted from its former channel by some earthquake shock, and had poured upon the building from above, bringing to utter destruction the town that had stood round it, the only exceptions being the house we had found upon the mountain-side, and the one Parsons and I had discovered in the glacier. This last had been saved by the shielding cliff above it, though walled in by impenetrable thicknesses of ice.