CHAPTER XXI
The last glimmer of light from above had vanished. The darkness, deeper than that of deepest night, crowded about the three. The little lamp in Isaiah’s hand shed only a tiny gleam that made the shadows behind and before tenfold the blacker. As they descended the air grew foul, so that the lamp sank to a poor spark, and all were gasping. It was like passing alive into Sheol, and threading the avenues of the dead. No word, save when Isaiah halted an instant and pointed to a ponderous bronze lever set in the brickwork.
“This controls the sluice,” quoth he, in a whisper; “we pass beneath the river soon.”
Darius had caught the lever in a giant clutch, and twisted it in its socket; it would play less easily now, and delay the flooding. Then the air around them grew yet more foul, so that they were fain to bow their heads and haste onward, catching the purer breaths that hung along the slimy bricks at their feet. And above him, and all around, the Persian heard what sounded as a rushing wind—yet not a wind, for it sang and sang, without gust or crooning, one ceaseless, monotonous murmur, and he knew that it was the great Euphrates speeding above his head. No longer any stairs—their path led right onward.
So narrow the way that they could have reached to each wall at once with outstretched hands. But they seldom did so, for all the bricks were slimy with an ooze that made the flesh creep to the touch. And Darius trod through a plashing mire, cold, fetid, unsunned for many a long year. What monsters lurked in the all-encircling dark? Did not the dread “Scorpion-Men” of the Chaldees’ tales here find dwelling? Were they not near the gates of Ninkigal, “Lady of Torment,” of the Anunnaki, the “Earth-Fiends”?
Once Zerubbabel, just ahead of Darius, had stumbled; they heard a splash and clatter of some object escaping into the dark—some vile, light-hating creature that loved this pathway of the dead. Yet there was no time for halting or even for trembling. Above them the rush of the river became a maddening torture. Every heart-beat seemed long, every breath of the death-laden air bought with a pang. And behind them at the mouth of the tunnel was the old man Daniel with Shaphat,—renegade once and hero now,—sacrificing themselves for the fugitives. But how long might such as they hold back Igas-Ramman and his scores? How long before hostile hands would be wresting on that sluice lever and this thoroughfare of the dead become a tomb indeed?
Darius knew that Isaiah was counting the brick piers bedded in the casement; but, though he stared into the blackness ahead until his eyes nigh throbbed with the pain, he met only darkness and ever more darkness.
Once he cried aloud to Isaiah, “How many piers are yet to pass?”