Their number Stern could only estimate, but it must have mounted well toward five or six thousand. One of the most singular sights the newcomers had in the Abyss was the homecoming of the flight, the feeding of the young--by discharging half-digested fish--and the subsequent noisy powwow of the waddling multitude. All this, heard and seen by torch-light, produced a picture weirdly fascinating.
Fish, weeds, sea-fowl--these constituted the sum tote of food sources for the Folk. There existed neither bread, flesh--meat, milk, fruit, sweets, or any of the abundant vegetables of the surface. Nor yet was there any plant which might be dried and smoked, like tobacco, nor any whence alcohol might be distilled. The folk had neither stimulants nor narcotics.
Stern blessed fate for this. If any such had existed, he knew human nature well enough to feel certain that, there in the eternal gloom and fog, the race would soon have given itself over to excesses and have miserably perished.
“To my mind,” he said to Beatrice, one time, “the survival of our race under such conditions is one of the most marvelous things possibly to be conceived.” Out toward the black and mist-hidden sea that rolled forever in the gloom he gestured from the wall where they were standing.
“Imagine!” he continued. “No sunlight--for centuries! Without that, nothing containing chlorophyl can grow; and science has always maintained that human life must depend, at last analysis, on chlorophyl, on the green plants containing it. No grains, no soil, or agriculture, no mammals even! Why, the very Eskimo have to depend on mammals for their life!
“But these people here, and the Lanskaarn, and whatever other unknown tribes live in this vast Abyss, have to get their entire living from this tepid sea. They don't even possess wood to work with! If this doesn't prove the human race all but godlike in its skill and courage and adaptability, what does?”
She stood a while in thought, plainly much troubled. It was evident her mind was far from following his analysis. At last she spoke.
“Allan!” she suddenly exclaimed.
“Well?”
“It's still out there somewhere, isn't it? Out there, in those black, unsounded depths--the biplane?”
“You mean--”
“Why couldn't we raise it again, and--”
“Of course! You know I mean to try as soon as I have these people under some control so I can get them to cooperate with me--get them to understand!”
“Not till then? No escape till then? But, Allan, it may be too late!” she burst out with passionate eagerness.
Puzzled, he turned and peered at her in the bluish gloom.
“Escape?” he queried. “Too late? Why, what do you mean? Escape from what? You mean that we should leave these people, here, before we've even begun to teach them? Before we've discovered some way out of the Abyss for them? Leave everything that means the regeneration of the human race, the world? Why--”
A touch upon his arm interrupted him.
He turned quickly to find the patriarch standing at his side. Silent and dim through the fog, he had come thither with sandaled feet, and now stood with a strange, inscrutable smile on his long-bearded lips.
“What keeps my children here,” asked he, “when already it is long past the sleeping-hour? Verily, this should not be! Come,” he commanded. “Come away! To-morrow will be time for speech.”
And, giving them no further opportunity to talk of this new problem, he spoke of other matters, and so led them back to his hospitable hut of stone.
But for a long time Allan could not sleep. Weird thoughts and new suspicions now aroused, he lay and pondered many things.
What if, after all, this seeming friendliness and homage of the savage Folk were but a mask?
A vision of the boiling geyser-pit rose to his memory. And the dreams he dreamed that night were filled with strange, confused, disquieting images.
CHAPTER XXXII. PREPARATIONS
He woke to hear a drumming roar that seemed to fill the spaces of the Abyss with a wild tumult such as he had never known--a steady thunder, wonderful and wild.
Starting up, he saw by the dim light that the patriarch was sitting there upon the stone, thoughtful and calm, apparently giving no heed to this singular tumult. But Stern, not understanding, put a hasty question.
“What's all this uproar, father? I never heard anything like that up in the surface-world!”
“That? Only the rain, my son,” the old man answered. “Had you no rain there? Verily, traditions tell of rain among the people of that day!”
“Rain? Merciful Heavens!” exclaimed the engineer. Two minutes later he was at the fortifications, gazing out across the beach at the sea.
It would be hard to describe accurately the picture that met his eyes. The heaviest cloudburst that ever devastated a countryside was but a trickle compared with this monstrous, terrifying deluge.
Some five hundred miles of dense and saturated vapors, suddenly condensing, were precipitating the water, not in drops but in great solid masses, thundering, bellowing, crashing as they struck the sea, which, churned to a deep and raging froth, flung mighty waves even against the massive walls of the village itself.
The fog was gone now; but in its place the rushing walls of water blotted out the scene. Yet not a drop was falling in the village itself. Stern wondered for a moment. But, looking up, he understood.
The vast cliff was now dimly visible in the glare of the great flame, the steady roar of which was drowned by the tumult of the rain.
Stern saw that the village was sheltered under a tremendous overhang of the black rock; he understood why the ancestors of the Folk, coming to these depths after incredible adventurings and long-forgotten struggles, had settled here. Any exposed location would have been fatal; no hut could have withstood the torrent, nor could any man, caught in it, have escaped drowning outright.
Amazed and full of wonder at this terrific storm, so different from those on the surface--for there was neither wind nor lightning, but just that steady, frightful sluicing down of solid tons of rain--Stern made his way back to the patriarch's house.
There he met Beatrice, just awakened.
“No chance to raise the machine to-day!” she called to him as he entered. “He says this is apt to last for hours and hours!” She nodded toward the old man, much distressed.
“Patience!” he murmured. “Patience, friends--and peace!”
Stern thought a moment.
“Well,” said he, at last, making himself heard only with difficulty, “even so, we can spend the day in making ready.”
And, after the simple meal that served for breakfast, he sat down to think out definitely some plan of campaign for the recovery of the lost Pauillac.
Though Stern by no means understood the girl's anxiety to leave the Abyss, nor yet had any intention of trying to do so until he had begun the education of the Folk and had perfected some means of trying to transplant this group--and whatever other tribes he could find--to the surface again, he realized the all-importance of getting the machine into his possession once more.
For more than an hour he pondered the question, now asking a question of the patriarch--who seemed torn between desire to have the wonder-thing brought up, and fear lest he should lose the strangers--now designing grapples, now formulating a definite line of procedure.
At last, all things settled in his mind, he bade the old man get for him ten strong ropes, such as the largest nets were made of. These ropes which he had already seen coiled in huge masses along the wall at the northern end of the village, where they were twisted of the tough weed-fiber, averaged all of two hundred feet in length. When the patriarch had gone to see about having them brought to the hut, he himself went across the plaza, with Beatrice, to the communal smithy.