“I’m all right! I’m still coming, Mary, if you can hear me try and answer me, O.K.? Try shouting up to me, so I can better hear where you are, O.K.?”
“Help, help, I’m here, I’m here!” she called back. Followed though by a series of hacking coughs. Her fits of coughing were happening more often and more loudly now, Roger observed.
But Roger took hope that he, at long last, was now getting close to finding her.
Then all I have to do is get us both up to the surface and then get us home again, and back through the Bad Wood, and in the dead of night too! he thought. Will wonders never cease! he grimly joked. But knew in his heart of hearts, that the joke was on him.
Then… with a cry of alarm, he came to a shuddering stop. There was no more slope!
Roger found he was suddenly sitting in the dark and deep underground, and with his legs dangling into empty space. His stomach lurched, his heart went into overdrive and he froze again, sitting on his backside and sticking hard to the rock, like some petrified victim of Vesuvius.
“Oh, Jumping James Joules! Wh-wh-where’s the slope gone?” he cried out, in great alarm.
Below him, the slope had abruptly cut off and had become a vertical cliff; All he could see down beneath him was a large cloud of smoke; just as if he was looking down onto the top of a big, grey thundercloud. It roiled and boiled in continuous agitation and flickered and flashed angrily with occasional bursts of glaring oranges and garish reds, from deep within its churning and heaving mass.
By Holy Hawking, thought Roger in alarm. Mary is somewhere under all of that smoke and flame! Just what the Devil-in-Darwin am I supposed to do now?
Roger’s only course of action was for him to quickly do some hard thinking and turn to his trusted ‘scientific method’, and so follow the fine examples of his many scientific heroes, such as Einstein, Newton or Faraday. So, instead of simply panicking, Roger calmed himself and forced himself to think - clearly and logically.
And at least I don’t have any rabid, giant rats leaping in my face now! he thought.
Hmmm, let’s see, he continued to himself, now logically, if Mary has been down here all of this time, which she has, and she’s been able to survive and therefore still breathe, well there must be a way down that I can survive too, and ... what’s more, he continued, in a flash of realization, that means I can breathe under all of that smoke as well!
For a short while, Roger felt pleased with himself. This, however, didn’t last very long.
For, as many people know just by doing their best to live life, let alone from also being Scientists, coming up with new ideas and explanations as a theory, is just something that has yet to be proven. This was the bit of Roger’s logic that gave him the most cause for concern; for as with any theory, there was the continual, nagging doubt, the unquestionable and most worrying problem of all, but what if I’m wrong? nagging away in his head.
But this is what indeed made Roger special.
He had, as Mary had put it so very well, ‘hidden depths!’ Roger wasn’t at all stupid, but in lots of areas, he knew that he was very ignorant, for he knew there were lots and lots of things he didn’t yet know. This, however, made him quite a lot cleverer than most people.
Thinking you know all about something when you don’t is really more stupid than thinking you don’t know something when you do, after all.
And what Roger was finding out now that he hadn’t known before was just how brave he really was!
But despite being brave, Roger was still actually and factually terrified.
But once again, he used his brains, and now for the third time, used the time-honored hero’s trick, to determine just how deep the boiling cloud of smoke below him was.
He dropped a third penny and a clink and clatter came to his ears after only two or three seconds. He now knew that the floor of the cavern couldn’t lie that far below him, but he’d still have to climb down, as it was too far to jump, he was now pretty sure of that fact.
With a dry mouth, a thumping heart and a fluttering stomach, he started to lower himself over the edge, but then he stopped in his tracks. For there, not far below him, was the grisly sight of the Giant Rat. Rattus Magnus. But it was all right, for Roger at least, anyway. The Rat was stone dead; It hung there, impaled and motionless and still bleeding copiously, it having been pierced by a large stalagmite, rising pointedly up from the cavern below right through its chest.
“Oh, by Holy Heinlein!” he gasped feeling somewhat sick at the sight of the giant rat’s blood, still oozing and dripping, with continual soft plop-plop-plopping sounds, down onto the surface of the rock. The rat’s blank, lifeless eyes bulged, staring up at him as if challenging him with accusing guilt and responsibility for its untimely demise.
Roger looked all about him to see how he would ever get down past that horrid dead creature. He could see by the occasional flashes in the red glowing mass of cloud below him, that there were, in fact, several more, spiraling towers of rock, rising like jagged spears from the depths of the cavern’s floor. They jutted through the coiling smoke like deadly stone swords, raised in salute to some long-lost king.
“The bottom of the slope I’ve been sliding down must feed into this large cavern,” he mused out loud, getting his bearings. “I must be entering the cavern now… at the top of this cliff and that’s where Mary is, down there somewhere.”
“Mary, Mary, I’m here at the bottom of the slope; Where are you?” he called down again, as loudly as he could, directly into the foggy bank of smoke, lapping under his feet like an eerie lake.
“I’m here, Roger, I’m down here. An’ I’ve hurt my ankle an’ stuff, but I think I’ll be all right,” came her muffled reply.
Roger took heart from hearing her reply. But he secretly wondered how on Erf she wasn’t already dead.
That’s a heck of a long way to fall! he thought, puzzled. But then shrugged that idea away. “Well, I’m coming now,” he called back down to her. “I won’t be too long now, Mary, I hope. Just hold on!” Then muttered to himself, “Yeah! Just, as soon as I can figure out how to get down onto that cavern floor, and without choking to death, or plunging to it, just like that dead rat did!”
He could see that above him hung several spikes of rock, hanging down from the roof of rock over the slope and up from the yawning cavern too. These columns and spires, he knew, were scientifically termed, Stalactites and Stalagmites. They had an eerie beauty to them all of their own; Having been created by the Erf itself, over many thousands of centuries. And Roger could also very easily identify which of the columns of rock were the Stalactites and which were the Stalagmites, because of a neat trick he’d learned from his Geology studies.
“StalaCtites hang from the Ceiling and have C in the middle of the word, and StalaGmites have a G in the middle of the word and grow up from the Ground!” he casually reminded himself. “C for Ceiling, G for Ground.”
But as he searched for a workable solution to the problem of how to get down to Mary it was these very thoughts, along with the grisly plight of the Giant Rat itself, that finally gave him one. A solution that is - not a grisly plight!
He saw that the tapering, cone-like spire of rock, the stalagmite in this case, that the giant rat was impaled on, could be directly reached from the cliff-edge he was sat upon. It would mean having to clamber onto and over the dead rat’s body though and avoiding its’ still sticky, trickling blood, and then he’d have to carefully climb down the spiraling formation of the stalagmite, right through the smoke and on to the hidden floor of the cavern below.