“How wonderfully preserved it is,” said Kirk.
“Those people knew the secret of preserving wood by boiling it in certain kinds of oil. They knew a great deal more that might well have been kept by the white man. But the type of Spaniard who came to these shores, as well as the wild barbarians who came before them, were all for gold.”
As he stood there beside this strange underground sea, with this relic of another age so close beside him, Pant found himself lost in revery. He was trying to reproduce through his mind’s eye the scenes that these silent waters might once have witnessed.
“What a unique picnic ground,” he said to Kirk. “One sees it still. Gleaming torches, moving like giant firebugs across the water; dark canoes gliding here and there; the joyous shouts of children that came echoing back.”
“Hello-o!” he shouted suddenly. Back across the water it came to him again and again. “Hello-o—H-e-l-l-o-o-o.”
“Perhaps there are fish,” he went on. “May be very large fish. Blind, because there is no need of eyes, but fine fish all the same. Can you see them, the little Indian boys fishing from their canoes? Can you catch the gleam of their campfires as they roasted their fish over the coals?”
He kicked the beach under his feet and sure enough, from beneath the dust of centuries he uncovered the ashes of a long burned out fire.
“You see,” he smiled, “I am a conjurer. I can read both the past and the future.”
“Then,” said the other boy with a little shudder and a doubtful smile, “tell us what happens next.”
“Next?” said Pant. “Why next we find a small room equipped with a table and some chairs. I have some work to do in such a place, in fact that’s what I came for. I needed a dark room. But this,” he spread his arm wide, “this is not a room; it is a whole hidden world.”