After several hours Austen stopped. "It is not a half mile to the shafts," he said. "We shall have to make a rope. I have made cords from the tough bark of the red trees. That does very well. I want to reach the bottom of the pit before night. But I have reason to think that the things are active in their underworld at all hours of the day, emerging only at night because the magnetic vibration of sunlight interferes with the operation of the delicate machinery of their bodies." Of that, I came to a better understanding later.
We began to weave a rope of strips of leather-like like bark torn from the mighty red trees. We kept at it until we had many hundred feet of the tough strands. As we worked Austen began to talk a little, in a voice that was very low, and a little husky, of his boyhood on a Western farm, and of the bright spots of his life. He told a few stories of his school and college days, and of the girl he had loved and lost. But when the rope was finished and coiled, he fell silent again, and grimly examined his automatic. He adjusted his pack, got out his pipe and filled it with my tobacco, and grinned. Then he said soberly, "We are here. We are ready to play our hand, to win or to lose. And if we lose—"
He thrust out his hand. I shook it and we walked on silently. We had now gone more than a hundred yards when the scarlet forest thinned, and we walked out on a level stretch of bare white sand. The clear space was perhaps a mile long and half as wide. Along the western side rose a dark precipitous cliff, like that over which the silver fall plunged, with a line of red brush along the top. At the foot was a great sloping bank of talus, scattered with gigantic boulders. The cliff and the lofty crimson forest that rimmed the open space on the other three sides, seemed to reach into the dusky purple of obscurity of the low-hanging sky.
Spaced irregularly about the center of the flat were perhaps a dozen low circular metal structures—evidently the mouths of great white metal tubes projecting from the earth. From five of them dense clouds of purple vapor were pouring.
The Sacrifice
We left the shelter of the jungle and quickly approached the nearest of the wells. The metal curbing was about four feet high, around a circular pit some 20 feet in diameter. We leaned over and looked into it. The tube was lit faintly for a few feet down the walls, but we saw no light toward the bottom of the tube. A faint humming sound came up out of the darkness, and I felt a strong current of air flowing down the tube. It was altogether stranger and more terrible than I had anticipated. I doubt that I could have found the courage to descend.
"Is the rope long enough?" I whispered.
"Yes," he replied in a cautious undertone. "On the day I discovered the place I dropped a pebble in the well and timed its fall with my watch. The depth is just over five hundred feet."
I put the end of the cord over the metal rim and paid it out until only enough was left to hitch around my body. With a smile of forced cheerfulness, Austen looked to his pack, knocked out the pipe, and put it in his pocket.