Enormous edifices had been crushed and scattered like burnt biscuits thrown to the wild birds. The crumbs were identifiable. The shape of the whole was utterly lost. The loneliness was awful. Inch by inch I felt myself slipping into that spiritual twilight which sucks down to the black night of the soul. The tracks of the little man had disappeared—the dust was always drifting, and the contours of the lost city were perpetually changing. Yesterday was a memory. Tomorrow was a dream. Then tomorrow became yesterday—a memory; and memory blurred and twirled away with the dust devils. I was sick. There was a bad air in the ruins of Annan. I might have died, or run away, if there had not been the thunderstorm.
It threatened for forty-eight hours. I thought that I was delirious. Everything was still, dreadfully still. The air was thick, and hard to breathe. It seemed to me that from some indefinable part of the near distance I heard again that thin, agonized singing which I had heard once before. Male and female voices wailed a sort of hymn:—
Aaah, Balasamo,
Balasamo! Oh!
Sarna Corpano! . . . Oh-Oh!
Binno Mosha
Sada Rosha
Chu mila Balasamo! . . . Oh!
Then the storm broke, and I thanked God for it. It cleared the air and it cleared my head. The sky seemed to shake and reverberate like a sheet of iron. Lightning feinted and struck, and the rain fell. Between the thunder I could still hear the singing. As dawn came the storm rumbled away, and the aspect of the ruins was changed.
Annan wore a ragged veil of mist. Thin mud was running away between the broken stones. The sun was coming up and in a little while the dust would return; but for the moment the rain had washed the face of the ruin.
So I found the lid of the underworld.
It was a disc of eroded metal that fitted a hole in the ground. I struck it with my hammer: it fell to pieces. The pieces dropped away, and out of the hole in the ground there rose a dusty, sickening, yet familiar smell. The hole was the mouth of an ancient sewer. I could see the rusty remains of a metal ladder. The top rung was solid—I tried it with my foot. The next rung supported my weight. I went down.
The fifth rung broke, and I fell.
I remember that I saw a great white light—then a great dark. Later—I do not know how much later—I opened my eyes. I knew that I was alive, because I felt pain. But I was not lying where I had fallen. I could see no circle of daylight such as I had seen in falling, at the mouth of the manhole. There was nothing to be seen: I was in the dark. And I could hear odd little glottal voices.
“Water!” I said.
“Ah-awa,” said a thin, whining voice. Something that felt like a cracked earthenware saucer was pressed against my lips. It contained a spoonful or two of cold water; half a mouthful. The cracked earthenware saucer was taken away empty and brought back full. I took hold of it, to steady it.
It was a little cupped hand, a live hand.
I knew then that I had fallen down into the underground world of the little people that haunt the desolate ruin called Annan, or The Bad Place. I was in fairyland. But my right leg was broken. My flashlight was broken, and I was in the dark.
There was nothing to be done. I could only lie still.
The little people squatted around me in a circle. One high, ecstatic, piping voice began to sing:
Ookil’ karabin,
Ookil’ karabin!
Thirty or forty voices screeched:—
Isapara mibanara,
Ikil’ karabin!
Then, abruptly, the singing stopped. Something was coming. These little people knew the art of making fire, and understood the use of light. One of them was holding a tiny vessel, in which flickered a dim, spluttering flame no larger than a baby’s fingernail. It was not what we would call illumination. It was better than darkness, it permitted one to see, at least, a shadow. You will never know the comfort that I found in that tiny flame. I wept for joy. My sobbing jolted my broken leg, and I must have fainted. I was a wounded man, remember. Shivering in a wet cold that came from me and not from the place in which I lay, I felt myself rising in waves of nausea out of a horrible emptiness.
The little people had gone, all but one. The one that stayed had my elastic plaster on his left wrist. His right hand was cupped, and it held water, which I drank. Then he made a vague gesture in the direction of my pockets—he wanted chocolate. I saw this in the light of the little lamp, which still flickered. His shadow danced; he looked like a rat waltzing with a ghost. I had some chocolate in my pocket, and gave him a little. The light was dying. I pointed at it with a forefinger and gesticulated up, up, up with my hands.
He ran away and came back with another lamp.
I can tell you now that the oil that feeds those little lamps is animal fat—the fat of rats. The wicks of the lamps are made of twisted rat-hair. The little men of Annan have cultivated rats, since they went underground. There are hereditary rat-herds, just as there used to be hereditary shepherds and swine-herds. I have learned something—not much—of the habits of the little men of the dust in Annan. They dress in rat-skin clothes and have scraped out runs, or burrows, which extend for miles to the thirty-two points of the compass. They have no government and no leaders. They are sickly people. They are perishing.
Yet they are men of a sort. They have fire, although they cannot tolerate the glare of honest daylight. They have—like all of their kind—a buried treasure of useless coins. They have the vestiges of a language, but they are always cold. The poor creature whose wrist I broke had wanted my woolen jacket; now I gave it to him, and he wept for joy. They cultivated fungi—which I have eaten, not without relish—augment their diet of the rank meat which they get by butchering the gray creatures that provide them with food, fat, and fur. But they are always hungry. The rats are getting slower and less reliable in their breeding: the herds are thinning out.
My little man kept me supplied with meat and water. In the end I began to understand the meaning of his whispering and snuffling underworld language. This fairy, this man of the dust of Annan, was kind to me in his way. He adored me as a fallen god. Sometimes, when I raved and wept in delirium, he ran away. But he always came back. My leg was throbbing. I knew that infection was taking hold of the wound, and began to lose hope down in the dark. I tried to detach my mind from the miserable condition of my body. I listened to the strange songs of the rat-people. It was through the chant Balasamo that I learned their language. It came to me in a flash of revelation as I lay listening, Balasamo, Balasamo . . . The tune wove in and out. It gave me no peace. I had heard something like it at home. Doctor Opel had been lecturing on ancient music. . . .