Huge clouds of dust billowed all about him, and once again he could hear the rumbling of nearby rock-falls. All around him came the noises of cracking stones and tumbling rocks, as he was suddenly enveloped in an even thicker mass of boiling smoke and dust.
“Oh, by Newton’s Nappies! Hanky or no hanky, I’ve had it now!” he thought desperately. “There’s no way I can breathe in all this smoke!”
The Erf-quake at last subsided, and Roger was left gasping; his chest felt like it was on fire and his mouth and nose seemed to have been convenient places to fill up with dust and soot. Any idea of using them for the actual function they were supposed to do seemed totally futile.
Roger realized, if he didn’t get a breath of proper air very soon, he was going to die!
He fell onto his back, against the slope, writhing and choking, desperately trying to get one good lung-full of air; but it was impossible. He was drowning in a surging sea of smoke.
“So, this is it, is it?” he wondered. “Me dying of asphyxiation; who would have thought? Mary would just call it ‘suffocating’ though. Asphyxiation is just me trying to be a clever clogs. Anyway, it just means ‘no pulse’ in Latin, and you still have a pulse for ages after you’ve suffocated.” Even as he choked, he felt amazed at himself, that even while he was dying of the aforesaid ‘asphyxiation,’ he could still babble away in his head and think of such seemingly silly and mundane matters as the meanings of words.
“Who cares about the blinkin’ definition now?” he thought, realizing that he sometimes was a bit over-pompous and pedantic about such things. He felt that, even while his body was struggling and choking slowly to death, there was yet another part of himself, the real him as it were, looking on and surveying the whole scene, in a cool and detached manner.
“Just like being, sort of, well, disembodied, I s’pose. If there is such a thing!” he thought.
Roger realized that he only had mere moments left now; then he would black out and go unconscious and then he’d be just a lost and unknown corpse buried somewhere underground and un-mourned by anyone.
“B-b-but what about Mary?” he wondered. “I c-c-can’t let M-M-Mary down, now can I?”
Then once more there was a sudden rumbling roar of sound from all around him.
“Oh, no, not another Erfquake!” he dimly thought, as he began to slip into dark oblivion. But it wasn’t an Erfquake at all. Roger found that he was beginning to breathe again. He saw that several of the Smoking Tree’s roots, just above him, had become very active and alive; now boring up through the ceiling of the rocky slope, and miraculously creating air vents.
But they weren’t acting alone. Roger saw there were several Giant Erf-Worms that had burrowed their way down through the slope’s roof as well. These were also creating tunnels to the surface above. The Smoking Tree’s roots and the Erf Worms were working together, creating air vents so that the smoke could clear, and Roger could breathe!
He became fully conscious of all this as his lungs automatically filled themselves with air. Roger gasped painfully as he gulped down the reviving oxygen, while the boiling clouds of bitter smoke were sucked up and away through the newly created vents. And soon the blue, eerily glowing Erf-Worms were rapidly disappearing back into the hidden depths of their rocky world, just as the smoking tree’s roots also retreated and became dormant once more.
Roger lay there for many minutes, panting and hardly daring to believe he was still alive.
“Oh, praise the mighty Megadriles and their Class of Oligochaetes!” he thought, as he slowly recovered.
For a while, all he could hear was his rapidly beating heart. All else was sunk into a dim, muffled silence as the rocks and dust settled; with just a few wisps of acrid smoke, coiling in the inky air before him. Then he heard, only very faintly at first, but more clearly the more he concentrated, Mary’s voice, once again, very weakly calling up to him from below.
“Hellooooo! Are you O.K., Roger, can you hear me?”
“I’m fine, Mary. Hold on. I’m c-c-coming!” he called back.
Judging from the sound of Mary’s voice, he was at last getting much closer now.
He just hoped to high heaven that there wouldn’t be any further unexpected dangers to interrupt and distract him from the brave and daring rescue of his damsel in distress.
“Surely there can’t be anything worse ahead of me now, can there?” he wondered.
CHAPTER 11:
THE RISE AND FALL OF RATTUS MAGNUS
Roger made his way down, once again sitting on his haunches, and again doing what could best be described as an undignified ‘bum-shuffle.’ But as there was no one there to see him, his slow and ungainly progress into the cavernous underground realms went by unremarked.
Every now and again there would be another cry of help from Mary, as well as further acrid billows of pungent smoke, blowing up from the depths below. Roger was by now extremely dirty, being black with soot from head to toe. And as he shuffled on further down the slope, he gave occasional cries of encouragement for Mary’s imminent rescue, shouting out, “I’m coming, Mary, hold on. It’ll be O.K. I’m coming!” as he shuffled, inch by cautious inch, down the slanting floor of rock, moving ever deeper beneath the tangled roots of the Smoking Tree.
“I just pray to Potty Pythagoras, this slope goes all the way to where Mary actually is,” he muttered wryly to himself.
As he continued though, the smoke was again getting thicker and billowing all about him. It came on in gusts and was getting in his clothes and seeping into his skin. But what was worse, even with the hanky over his face, it was getting into his eyes too and making them sting and stream constantly. This made it very difficult for him to see anything clearly at all. His throat felt like a soot-caked chimney-flue in need of a good sweep. He started coughing and spluttering once again as another belch of smoke hit him full in the face.
“Just where was all this smoke coming from?” he wondered.
He rested awhile and let the coughing subside. Then he pulled out another spotted hankie, discarding the old one, and tied it around his mouth and nose again. He wiped the mix of soot and sweat from his eyes with another hanky and carried on his bum-shuffling way down the rocky slope, praying to all the great Brains of Science that he would make it to Mary.
He now noticed there was an area just to his left that had several old roots poking up through the sloping floor there. And some of those roots contained several strange, ball-shaped objects. They clustered together amongst the root-ends, like leathery, black footballs.
Now what on Erf can they be? he thought.
He sidled his way over to them and played the flickering beam of his torch over the roots. He saw how each ball was segmented, like a rolled-up Armadillo, and they were in fact at least three times the size of ordinary footballs. But also, they weren’t really balls at all. As he looked, one started to uncurl itself, unrolling and showing what its true nature was.
Seemingly the light had disturbed it and Roger now saw a huge Woodlouse-like creature. Its small, stubby legs were wriggling madly and its two curving antennae were twitching and turning towards him. It now fully unrolled itself, found its footing and started scuttling away.
“Well, Bless my Bacon, it’s a giant Isopod!” he cried out in amazement.
Roger, being a budding Biologist and specializing in Entomology, (the study, as you now know, of Insects), of course knew quite a lot about Isopods. These were the usually very tiny armored insects that people more commonly knew of as ‘pill-bugs’ or 'wood-lice.’ And they would more normally find them underneath damp bricks or moldy logs in their back gardens. Roger’s natural bug-hunting instincts and curiosity now fully came to the fore.