In spite of his thoughts for Maya, he could not help thinking that the Brons had brought this on themselves. When they tried to put the Neeblings in second place, that was when the bell had sounded. Even so, why had this splendor been reduced to ruin? Oh, there were jewels that could be salvaged. And statues. But the Tower was a work of art from top to bottom. The finest lace. China as thin as paper. Paintings. These were gone. One might as well salvage Mona Lisa’s eyes and swear that they were the original. Higher up, where the water had not reached, the machines had been stored along with other treasures. But Opal’s best had been water-logged.
And the trip that Odin had made with Wolden into the tunnel. That was the most heart-breaking of all. The Brons and the Neeblings had saved the treasures from the warring civilizations of the world above. The statues could be preserved. Some of the machines might possibly be restored. But the paintings, the art, and the books. All gone. Wolden especially mourned a Navajo sand-painting, which he compared to Goya. Not a trace was left of it.
Wolden had taken him into the tunnel, just as he had once before. It was dripping now, and the sound of the pumps throbbed through the ruins like the struggling heart of a wounded thing. Their little car moved slowly down the old tracks. Occasionally it had to stop, where some disintegrating pile of treasures had spilled out. One sack of diamonds had broken. Wolden stopped and kicked the stones away. An ancient Ford, with its back seat piled high with rotting and sprouting sacks of prize-winning oat seed, was both heart-breaking and ludicrous.
The Brons and the Neeblings had been the true antiquarians of the world. And they had taken centuries to gather their collection. A dinosaur skeleton stared at them. The salvaged carved prow of a galleon leaned against a gaping whale’s jaw. A model of the first atomic pile supported a score of leaning spears, but the feathers and artwork on those spears were now stains and shreds. An English flag, delicately embroidered, drooped beside the dripping tatters of the Confederacy. A Roman eagle was lifted high beside the crudely beautiful banner of the Choctaws—on which Odin could barely make out the three arrows and the unstrung bow.
Chinese vases, thin as egg shells, most of them broken, lay in a tumbled pile beside ancient cradles and spinning wheels.
A Neanderthal skull was staring hungrily at a twelve foot skeleton of a giant bird. And a restoration of a tiny little equus was looking up like an inquisitive mouse at a huge ruined painting by Rosa Bonheur.
Thousands upon thousands of relics of the world above—some taken from the jetsam of the sea and others taken by exploring parties from Opal during those long glad years when the inner-world was as comfortable as Eden and almost as happy. Gems by the millions, gold and silver coins, trappings inlaid with diamonds, furs, silks, bone instruments and ivory carvings. A Stradivarius was warping apart, and a Gutenberg was swollen to twice its size, its moldy pages curling away from the parent-book. The books had fared worse. Great stacks of leather-covered libraries were turning into moldy, starchy mounds. Papyrus and lambskin scrolls were falling apart. Once, when they stopped for Wolden to thrust some moldy folds of Hindu thread-of-gold weaving from their path, Odin stopped and picked up the cover of a book. It was soggy and faded. But he could make out the title: “Poems by a Bostonian.”
So they had gone on, but slower now than on their first journey into the tunnel which led to the floor of the Gulf. An odor of dankness and decay hung over everything. The air was cold and damp. And everywhere were the footprints and handprints of Death who had spared this galley for so long, but who had come back with his flashing scythe to claim his own. The stinking carcass of a hammer head shark, washed in by the flood, lay sprawled across the sodden sarcophagus of an Egyptian princess.
And a gloomy sickness fell upon Jack Odin there in the tunnel as he thought of all the splendor that had died here, and the ages and ages of sweat and blood that had gone into these treasures. A thousand, thousand treasures were trying to whisper their stories to him, but the dripping water was drowning them out. Thousands of men, some slaves and some kings, were trying to tell him what the jewels and books, and swords and cradles had meant to them—but the drip-drip-drip of the water choked the echoes of their voices. The darkness that was ever crowding in seemed to be filled with the shadows of beautiful women in fine laces, with flashing jewels about their throats, and pendants brushing their half-covered breasts. They were trying to smile out of the dark, but a cold fog was creeping from the walls of the tunnel, settling about the shadows, and driving them back, farther and farther into all pervading nothingness.