"Look, Bill, look!" he cried suddenly pointing, "Look at that. The body has thirty-five somites or segments."
"Thirty-five segments?" I queried, scratching my head and wishing that the scolopendra was in Jericho. "What is there so wonderful about that?"
"Why," said he, "in the Scolopendridae of our own world, the segments of the body never exceed twenty-one. And this one has thirty-five. Really, Bill, I must keep so remarkable and splendid a specimen."
"Great Gorgons and Hydras! Keep it? Don't touch the horrible thing. It may be venomous, deadly as a rattlesnake. And, besides, you'll have plenty of time to collect specimens, and probably some of them will make this one look like the last rose of summer. Leave the hideous thing alone. Why, the Dromans will think that you are dippy. Fact is, I believe that they are beginning to think so already."
"Let 'em!" said Rhodes with true philosophic indifference. "People thought that Galileo was crazy, and Newton and Darwin; Columbus was non compos mentis,[13] Fulton was dippy, and Edison was looney. Yes, at one time the great inventor bore the beautiful sobriquet of Looney Edison. Listen to me, Billy, me lad: the greatest compliment that a scientist can ever receive is to be called a sap by sapheads."
All that, I admitted, was very true and truly cogent in its place; but this was not its place, and the Dromans certainly were neither sapheads nor saps. To my relief, and, indeed to my surprise, I dissuaded him from taking the thing as a specimen, and on we went once more.
At length we left the stream, which went plunging into a most fearsome place, into which no man could even dream of following it. Soon after that, the descent became very steep. The going, however, was good, and we went down at a rapid rate. This lasted for two or three hours, and we had descended many hundreds of feet. The slope then suddenly became gentle, and we were making our way through a perfect maze of tortuous galleries and passages, which at times opened out into halls and chambers.
The light was no longer in masses but in streams—streams that crawled and shivered and shook, as though in it spirit-things were immersed and were struggling to break from it. The fungal growths were everywhere now. There were mushrooms with pilei bigger than umbrellas. Shapes as grotesque as if seen through the eyes of madness. There were growths, too, that one could almost think beautiful, and masses hideous and slimy as so many octopi. A strong and most unpleasant odor filled the place. And here and there, almost everywhere in the strange fungoid growth, were things creeping, crawling—things for which I can find no name, and for some of them I am glad that I can not.
It was a weird scene, an indescribable scene, one horrible, mysterious and yet strangely wonderful too. A place gloomy and weird as any ever conceived by Dante or Doré. And through it human forms were moving, and its stillness was broken by human voices raised in song; and, moving with those human beings, those inhabitants of a world as alien as that of Venus or of Mars, were Rhodes and I, we two modern men from the great modern world above—the wonderful, the awful world of the sun.
Of a sudden an exclamation rang out—an exclamation that stilled the song on the instant, brought the party to an abrupt halt and the bow of Ondonarkus and that of Zenvothunbro from the cases.