"To Winfield Fowler, physician, Perth, Australia: I, Horace Austen, am lost in an unknown new world, where alien terrors reign, that lies in a crater in the Mountain of the Moon. I implore you to come to my aid, for the sake of mankind. Bring arms, and my equipment—the Rontgen tubes and coils, and the spectrometer. Ascend ladder at west pinnacle. Find my friend Melvar, maiden of the crystal city, whom I left beyond the Silver Lake. Come, for the sake of civilization, and may whoever hears this forward it with all dispatch."
My uncle was inclined to suspect a hoax. But after the message had come over twice I received telegrams from several other radio amateurs who had heard it, and were forwarding it to me. We took the direction of the third call and had amateurs in Adelaide do the same. The lines intersected in the Great Victoria Desert, at a point very near that at which Wellington located the Mountain of the Moon, when he sighted it and named it in 1887.
Knowing Austen, as I did, to be intensely human as a man, but grave and serious as a scientist, it was impossible for me to take the message as a practical joke, as my uncle, deriding the possibility of my friend's being imprisoned in "an unknown new world," insisted it was. It was equally impossible for one of my impetuous and adventurous disposition to devote himself to any prosaic business when so attractive a mystery was beckoning him away. Then I would never, in any case, have hesitated to go to Austen's aid, if I knew him to be in need.
I got together the apparatus he had mentioned—it was some equipment he happened to have left with me as he went on—as well as my emergency medicine kit, a heavy rifle, two .45 Colt automatics, and a good supply of ammunition; and waited for more explicit signals. But the calls had never come regularly, and after the fifth no more were heard. Having waited another irksome week, I bade my uncle farewell and got on the train. I left the railway at Kanowna, and bought three ponies. I rode one and packed provisions, equipment, and water bottles on the other two. Nothing need be said of the perils of the journey. Three weeks later I came in sight of the mountain.
Wellington had christened it as he did because of an apparent similarity to the strange cliff-rimmed craters of the moon, and the appellation was an apt one. The crags rose almost perpendicularly from the sand to the jagged rim. To climb them was clearly out of the question. The rock was polished slick by wind-blown sands for many feet, but rough and sharp above. To my left, at the extreme west point of the great curve, was a dark needle spire that towered three hundred feet above its fellows. I knew that it must be Austen's "west pinnacle." What sort of ladder I was to ascend, I had little idea.
As the sun sank back of the rolling sea of sand, dark purple shadows rose about the barrier, and I was struck with deep forebodings of the evil mystery that lay beyond it. The gold of the desert changed to silver gray, and the gray faded swiftly, while the deep purple mantle swept up the peaks, displacing even the deep red crowns that lay like splashes of blood upon the summits. Still I felt, or fancied, a strange spirit of terror that lurked behind the mountain, even in the night.
Quickly I made camp. Just two of the ponies were left, and they were near death (I have passed over the hardships of my trip). I hobbled them on a little patch of grass and brush that grew where water had run from the cliff; pitched my little tent, and found brush to start a tiny fire. I ate supper, with but a scanty cup of water; then, oppressed by the vast mysterious peaks that loomed portentously in the east, shutting out the starlight, I went in the tent and sought my blanket. Then came the first of those terrible and inexplicable occurrences that led up to the great adventure.
CHAPTER II
The Abyss of the Terror-light