"Down with Luma! Down with Luma! Lynch the coward! Tear him to bits! Down with him! Down with him! Turn him over!" I heard the mob repeating, with rising fury, as the ventilating lid slammed to a close above our heads—and the multitude, not observing us, went shouting on its way down the avenue.
The next moment Clay and I had seized the ropes and hooks and had begun the climb back to the Overworld.
There is no need to dwell upon our adventures when, tied together with ropes like mountain climbers, we accomplished the ascent through the air-tubes. Several hours later, thanks to my expert knowledge of the ventilation system, we had wearily reached the outlet, and, for the first time in years, stood beneath the open sky, blinking in the bright sunlight and exposing our skin to the luxury of the breeze....
It was days later when we reached civilization. For scores of miles we made our way, scarcely knowing where, across the sagebrush barrens of the Nevada desert; and had we not found water by melting the snow from the sunless shelves of the peaks, while nourishing our bodies by concentrated food capsules from Wu, we would not have survived to tell the story. Even as it was, we had reached the last stages of exhaustion when, tattered and torn, with our food exhausted and our faces covered with a ragged growth of beard, we stumbled into a mining camp near the California border. The startled miners had the surprise of their lives when two strangers, still dressed fantastically in the pointed hats and black skirts of Wu, suddenly made their appearance; and it is not surprising that we were mistaken for madmen and that our story was greeted with derisive laughter.
But now that we have been restored to our homes and friends and are once more full of life and activity, I do not hesitate to make the facts public, so that the world may know of the unsuspected civilization inhabiting the chasms beneath the Nevada desert. It is the purpose of Clay and myself to lead an expedition back to Wu and Zu, so that we may fathom their miraculous scientific secrets, many of which we have been unable to penetrate; and it is our hope that we may set forth at an early date, for we do not know how soon, in their renewed strife over Nullnull, the people of the Underworld may blow themselves out of existence, leaving no more than their blackened labyrinths and crumbling galleries to prove that they ever have lived.