“There’s one thing I’m thinking of even more,” said Brent promptly. “That is the value of all this to us. We have something here that we could sell for millions of dollars to a museum or to some foundation in New York.”
Lini nodded. Both of them were dazed by the magnitude of what they had found behind the seven doors. “We’ll have to act on it fast,” she said. “The glacier is constantly inching along over the cliff outside. Only a few inches might be enough to overbalance that two-hundred-foot ice wall so that some of it would crack down and bury this thing for another fifty thousand years.”
“Right,” said Brent. “We have to act fast. Yet we must guard it too. I’ll stay here and do that. You go to New York as fast as you can make it, with a sample of something to prove your story. Arrange to sell all this stuff.”
“Brent! You can’t stay here!” Lini looked at the legs of the mastodon, like gnarled and wrinkled tree trunks. Above them flooded the queer white light from the mysterious rods that looked like fused quartz. And over all presided ancient death, with one of his mummified minions as guard in each cave. “You’d go crazy in here!”
“Not with the thought of a couple of million dollars to keep me company,” said Brent. “Go along. You can find that last Indian settlement and get a guide there to hurry you to the railroad. Then down to Vancouver, and you can move fast from there on in.”
“You’d freeze—”
Brent pointed to a gorgeous fur costume. The pictures on the wall showed that this was the traditional costume of the master of mastodons. “I’ll wear that,” he said, “or one of the fur gowns in the wardrobe cave. I’ll be all right.”
“It’ll be a month, at least, before I can get back here with a boat and people to transport the things from the caves. In that time, the ice outside might fall and bury you alive.”
“I’ll have to take that chance,” said Brent. “Anyway, I can stay outside a lot at night, when no one can see me and get curious as to what’s keeping me hanging around here. Go on, Lini, and good luck.”
So Lini left, with many a backward glance at the sheer wall of ice towering up above the one way out for Brent. So many forms of danger threatening her brother… Intelligent as she was, it didn’t occur to her then to think that she herself might travel in danger just as imminent wherever she went with her bizarre secret.
CHAPTER III
Priceless Manuscript
Most people have heard of the Wittwar Foundation. Toward the end of the last century Phineas Wittwar made countless millions in steel. He died in 1917, and his will directed that twenty million dollars be set aside for the purchase of ancient Americana: Indian relics, fossils of an even older period, everything pertaining to the North American continent from 1500 A.D. backward.
The twenty million dollars was still intact, with several more millions having accumulated in interest from the trust fund. The sum was handled by Frank Wittwar, Phineas Wittwar’s son. Frank Wittwar owned a big meatpacking company and was a large investor in public-utilities stocks.
The advisors and fellow directors of the board, which had been set up to administer the Foundation funds, were three shrewd businessmen — Mortimer Werner, Roland Mallory and James Conroy. The Foundation had its own offices on the top floor of the Kembridge Building, on Lexington Avenue in New York City.
About three weeks after Lini Waller had apprehensively left her brother at his dangerous guard post, the four men who directed the destinies of old Phineas Wittwar’s millions sat in the conference room of the Foundation’s office suite. They were looking at the sample Lini had left with Frank Wittwar four days before.
That sample was a marvelous thing. It was one of the bundles of records from the library cave. The four men, all expert at ancient documents, had been over it fifty times, searching for indications that it was a phony. And they had been able to find none.
“The incredible thing about it is its apparent age,” said Frank Wittwar. He was a stocky man of fifty-five, with a firm jaw, clear if rather hard gray eyes, and a habit of clearing his throat brusquely before speaking. “If it is what it seems to be — and we are all pretty well agreed on that point — it must be at least fifty thousand years old.”
“And that girl said there were caves full of stuff from the same era and produced by the same ancient race!” exclaimed Conroy, who was reddish-haired, heavy-featured, blue-eyed. “Seven caves full, to be exact. And she said that in one of the caves there was actually a mastodon — not just the fossilized bones — but a full-fleshed mastodon.”
“I can’t swallow that,” grunted Mallory, who was thin and stooped. He had dark, sharp eyes that bit through horn-rimmed glasses at a world he evidently regarded very pessimistically. “Mastodon, indeed! Seven caves full of stuff from the ice age! After all, now — there are limits.”
“There’s this book to prove it,” pointed out Werner, who was a rotund, smiling man with the appearance of a cherub — till you looked closely at his jaw, like a steel trap. “If that bundle of hide were preserved, why couldn’t other things have been preserved?” They were silent. There wasn’t any answer to that logic.
“Did you get a chance to decipher any of the picture writing?” asked Mallory, dark eyes gloomy behind his lenses.
Wittwar brusquely cleared his throat. “A very little,” he said. “As I told you, this bundle of manuscript has a key to the hieroglyphs on the first page. A language key. And the first thing said in the book is that in each of the other volumes there is also a language key. That is so that any one manuscript, found by itself, could be deciphered no matter what the language of the discoverer. This indicates that there are many other volumes, just as the girl says. A whole cave full of them. It also indicates that this ancient race did try to leave a record and a physical specimen of everything that touched their lives.”
“Fancy!” beamed Conroy, running thick fingers through his stiff, reddish hair. “The entire archives and culture of a race going back fifty thousand years! We should not hesitate, gentlemen. Someone else will buy this priceless store if we don’t.”
Werner nodded, steel trap of a jaw firm in his cherubic face. “We have been fooling with Indian relics going back, at the most, three thousand years. Now we have this ancient museum thrust at us — at least fifty thousand years old. I say grab it.”
Wittwar cleared his throat. “At the figure suggested, gentlemen?”
“Sure,” said Mallory.
Wittwar rubbed his hands together. “Two and a half million,” he said, frowning. “That’s more than my packing company makes net in two years.”
“This isn’t out of your packing company,” Mallory said. “It’s out of the Foundation funds. And we can easily afford it. Don’t try to be too shrewd with the girl. We might lose the thing.”
Wittwar pressed a bell. His secretary came in. “Is Miss Waller outside? Send her in, please.”
Lini Waller came into the conference room and looked at the four men.
Wittwar cleared his throat briskly. “We have decided that — as far as can be humanly judged — this bundle of thin hides you brought is indeed an ancient manuscript, and that there is probably a store of other relics such as you describe. Therefore, we have decided to meet your price. We shall place two and a half million dollars in escrow with any bank you care to name. The money will become yours the instant we enter the seven caves you mention and get the things ready to transport back to New York. Is that satisfactory?”
Lini sat down abruptly. She had known the things she had seen under the glacier were worth that. She had been sure she would get her price, huge as it was. But the definite statement that she had won left her weak for a moment. Two and a half million dollars! “That is q-quite satisfactory,” she said. “I’ll go with you and show you where the caverns—”