After five minutes of steady walking, he noticed a darker shadow, thin and elongated, on the floor parallel to the wall and about thirty feet away. He went out to it. It was a mammoth rail, projecting a foot above the floor level and nearly a foot wide. Beyond it, another forty or so feet away, he saw what might be another. But the room was darker further from the wall. And he was rapidly learning to fear the darkness — and the immutable silence.
The lights stretched out ahead, seemingly into infinity. Gowan Mitchell walked steadily. The world of high mountains was far behind. He still clutched the ice ax, thinking of it as a weapon.
At last he heard a sound. The splashing of water. It was off in the shadows. Carefully he walked toward it, his eyes adjusting to the lesser light. He found that the distant opposite wall had moved nearer and the metal was replaced by jagged rock, damp and rough. A trickle of water fell into a dark shining pool. Thirstily he dropped on his stomach, scooped it up in his hands. It was cool and delicious. He drank deeply, went on refreshed. Hunger was the most pressing problem. Inured to hardships, he knew that he could continue long after the average city-bred man would collapse from weakness.
In the distance, the lights stopped. Abruptly. Beyond them — the darkness. He had cold fear in his heart, wondering if he was doomed to walk the enormous echoing chambers forever, dying at last close to the brink of the cold pool.
He stood by the last light, the last glowing disc set flush with the metal wall. Ahead he could barely make out a huge arched doorway, fully twenty feet high and ten feet wide. He strained his eyes, but could not see beyond it.
Tightening his grip on the haft of the ice ax, he walked through the arch. The space beyond exploded into brilliant light, so shocking and so unexpected that his ax clattered to the metal floor and he covered his eyes with the backs of his hands, staggering back, nearly falling.
When he took his hands from his eyes and looked about him, he felt that he had gone mad. He stood in a room one hundred feet long and fifty feet wide. The ceiling was forty feet high. Side by side, in two parallel rows, with a wide aisle between them, were huge, coffinlike objects. To steady his reeling brain he counted them. Exactly thirty.
Up to the level of his eyes, they were intricate with odd dials, tubes, wiring, marked with symbols similar to those on the handles of the levers in the small room halfway to the top of the mountain. Above eye-level were the rounded, transparent tops.
And inside the bulbous tops were stretched the figures of men and women. But they were men and women such as he had never seen before. The fact that each was lying down made height difficult to estimate. It seemed that they were fifteen feet tall, each of them. Tall and blonde and dead. One of the coffinlike objects was empty, the hinged transparent lid flung back.
In superstitious fear he looked out into the darkness. Was one of these enormous creatures prowling the darkness, startled out of death by his coming?
It was then that he noticed the small lens set in the side of the arch and guessed that when he had entered the room, he had cut some sort of ray which had activated the brilliant lighting.
He listened. The vast place was as soundless as before. Growing bolder, he walked close to the nearest coffin, awed by the enormous size of the occupant. Men and women, they were naked to the waist, wore wide metal belts of intricate workmanship. From small slots in each belt protruded the handles of tools which were unlike anything he had ever seen before. To the belts were fastened a sort of skirt of fine metal mesh which came almost down to the knees. The men were bearded and, men and women alike, the tawny blonde hair was worn at shoulder-length.
There was no sign of pulse or breathing. He jumped back as he saw the faint quiver of a silver needle on one of the dials. It was a hall of the dead, with all the garish brilliance of a research laboratory.
Close to his eyes was the enormous hand of the woman behind the transparent substance. Each finger seemed almost as big around as his wrist. He turned and saw, on the far wall, to the left of the arch, a high board covered with large switches, with dials of varying sizes, with an array of different colored buttons, absurdly large.
Suddenly Gowan Mitchell laughed. It was a laugh close to the dangerous borderline of insanity. Of course! He was freezing to death on the summit of Shenadun and all this was the result of his tortured imagination. These levers and moving corridors and blonde giants! Absurd, of course. He told himself to die calmly, to force these images from his mind.
They were false. They could not exist. Giants under the earth? Nonsense! Worse. Childish nonsense! Fairy tales!
Still laughing, he ran to the huge board, began to yank levers at random, push buttons. The needles spun madly on the dials. Some of the levers and switches were out of his reach. He moved them with the point of his ice axe.
He turned from the board and looked back at the coffins. All of the lids, hinged like the thirtieth, had turned back. One of the men reached up and clutched his throat. A hoarse gasp filled the room. Gowan Mitchell cowered back in terror. The man shifted, fell heavily to the metal floor. Others began to stir. With slow and painful effort, the blonde giant got to his knees, stood up by clutching the table he had just vacated. His eyes were wild, and he came toward the panel at a slow stumbling run.
Gowan Mitchell backed toward the arch, ready to flee into the darkness, but the giant ignored him. The giant began to move the levers and switches that Gowan Mitchell had touched. The transparent hoods closed again, quickly.
One reopened and, long minutes later, the woman who occupied it sat up quietly and calmly. She stood on the metal floor, walked over and, after exchanging slow rumbling words with the man at the panel, she began to help him. The next one who stood up was a man. He also began to help. Their voices were very low, and their language was strange, reminding Gowan Mitchell of the Hawaiian tongue.
Each one moved as though very weak. At last there were twenty-nine blonde giants in the room. They seemed indifferent to Gowan Mitchell’s presence. They greeted each other and Gowan was reminded of friends meeting after a long absence.
Still he tried to tell himself that all of this was the product of his dying mind. At last he saw some of them looking at him, talking to each other. They smiled. A man started slowly toward him. He felt like a child among adults. With a gasp of fear, he turned to run into the huge outer room.
He took but one step, and then every muscle froze. He could not move. He could not change the direction of his gaze, but was forced to look out into the darkness. An enormous hand folded around his arm. It was then that he fainted...
He was conscious of a low humming, a monotonous noise that was not unpleasant. He tried to turn his head, but it was rigidly fixed in one position. He tentatively moved one arm, the other. He opened his eyes.
Above him, enormous and unbelievable, was the face of one of the blonde women. He seemed to be on some sort of a table. She looked down at him and her lips curled in a smile and she said, in a rich contralto:
“Do not be afraid!”
“Where am I?” he asked.
“Our ears are accustomed to different sound cycles, Mitchell. I am speaking abnormally quickly and at a higher than usual pitch. You must speak in as deep tones as you can, and slowly. Later we will devise something to cure this difference between us. I believe you asked where you are. Wait until I free you and you can look around.”
Her big hands touched something beside his head and the pressure began to lessen. Remembering her instructions, he asked, “How did you learn to speak my language?”