“Now, we must go. Work waits for us. Everything is yet to be planned and done. The world and its redemption lie before us. Come!”
He led the girl away. As by mutual understanding they returned to where the biplane lay, symbol of their conquest of nature, epitome of hopes.
Near it, on the edge of the Abyss, they rested, hand in hand. In silence they sat thinking, for a space. And ever higher and more warmly burned the sun; the breeze of June was sweet to them, long-used to fogs and damp and dark; the boundless flood of light across the azure thrilled them with aspiration and with joy.
Life had begun again for them and for the world, life, even there in the presence of death. Life was continuing, developing, expanding--life and its immortal sister, Love!
CHAPTER II. EASTWARD HO!
Practical matters now for a time thrust introspection, dreams and sentiment aside. The morning was already half spent, and in spite of sorrow, hunger had begun to assert itself; for since time was, no two such absolutely vigorous and healthy humans had ever set foot on earth as Beatrice and Allan.
The man gathered brush and dry-kye and proceeded to make a fire, not far from the precipice, but well out of sight of the patriarch's grave. He fetched a generous heap of wood from the neighboring forest, and presently a snapping blaze flung its smoke-banner down the breeze.
Soon after Beatrice had raided the supplies on board the Pauillac--fish, edible seaweed, and the eggs of the strange birds of the Abyss--and with the skill and speed of long experience was getting an excellent meal. Allan meantime brought water from a spring near by. And the two ate in silence, cross-legged on the warm, dry sand.
“What first, now?” queried the man, when they were satisfied. “I've been thinking of about fifteen hundred separate things to tackle, each one more important than all the others put together. How are we going to begin again? That's the question!”
She drew from her warm bosom the golden cylinder and chain.
“Before we make any move at all,” she answered, “I think we ought to see what's in this record--if it is a record. Don't you?”
“By Jove, you're right! Shall I open it for you?”
But already the massively chased top lay unscrewed in her hand. Within the cylinder a parchment roll appeared.
A moment later she had spread it on her knee, taking care not to tear the ancient, crackling skin whereon faint lines of writing showed.
Stern bent forward, eager and breathless. The girl, too, gazed with anxious eyes at the dim script, all but illegible with age and wear.
“You're right, Allan,” said she. “This is some kind of record, some direction as to the final history of the few survivors after the great catastrophe. Oh! Look, Allan--it's fading already in the sunlight. Quick, read it quick, or we shall lose it all!”
Only too true. The dim lines, perhaps fifteen hundred years old, certainly never exposed to sunlight since more than a thousand, were already growing weaker; and the parchment, too, seemed crumbling into dust. Its edges, where her fingers held it, already were breaking away into a fine, impalpable powder.
“Quick, Allan! Quick!”
Together they read the clumsy scrawl, their eyes leaping along the lines, striving to grasp the meaning ere it were too late.
TO ANY WHO AT ANY TIME MAY EVER REVISIT THE UPPER WORLD: Be it known that two records have been left covering our history from the time of the cataclysm in 1920 till we entered the Chasm in 1957. One is in the Great Cave in Medicine Bow Range, Colorado, near the ruins of Dexter. Exact location, 106 degrees, 11 minutes, 3 seconds west; 40 degrees, 22 minutes, 6 seconds north. Record is in left, or northern branch of Cave, 327 yards from mouth, on south wall, 4 feet 6 inches from floor. The other--
“Where? Where?” cried Beatrice. A portion of the record was gone; it had crumbled even as they read.
“Easy does it, girl! Don't get excited,” Allan cautioned, but his face was pale and his hand trembled as he sought to steady and protect the parchment from the breeze.
Together they pieced out a few of the remaining words, for now the writing was but a pale blur, momently becoming dimmer and more dim.
... Cathedral on ... known as Storm King ... River ... crypt under ... this was agreed on ... never returned but may possibly ... signed by us on this 12th day ...
They could read no more, for now the record was but a disintegrating shell in the girl's hands, and even as they looked the last of the writing vanished, as breath evaporates from a window-pane.
Allan whirled toward the fire, snatched out a still-glowing stick, and in the sand traced figures.
“Quick! What was that? 106-11-3, West--Forty--”
“Forty, 22, north,” she prompted.
“How many seconds? You remember?”
“No.” Slowly she shook her head. “Five, wasn't it?”
Eagerly he peered at the record, but every trace was gone.
“Well, no matter about the seconds,” he judged. “I'll enter these data on our diary, in the Pauillac, anyhow. We can remember the ruins of Dexter and Medicine Bow Range; also the cathedral on Storm King. Put the fragments of the parchment back into the case, Beta. Maybe we can yet preserve them, and by some chemical means or other bring out the writing again. As it is, I guess we've got the most important facts; enough to go on, at any rate.”
She replaced the crumbled record in the golden cylinder and once more screwed on the cap. Allan got up and walked to the aeroplane, where, among their scanty effects, was the brief diary and set of notes he had been keeping since the great battle with the Lanskaarn.
Writing on his fish-skin tablets, with his bone stylus, dipped in his little stone jar of cuttle-fish ink, he carefully recorded the geographical location. Then he went back to Beatrice, who still sat in the midmorning sunlight by the fire, very beautiful and dear to him.
“If we can find those records, we'll have made a long step toward solving the problem of how to handle the Folk. They aren't exactly what one would call an amenable tribe, at best. We need their history, even the little of it that the records must contain, for surely there must be names and events in them of great value in our work of trying to bring these people to the surface and recivilize them.”
“Well, what's to hinder our getting the records now?” she asked seriously, with wonder in her gray and level gaze.
“That, for one thing!”
He gestured at the Abyss.
“It's a good six or seven hundred miles wide, and we already know how deep it is. I don't think we want to risk trying to cross it again and running out of fuel en route! Volplaning down to the village is quite a different proposition from a straight-away flight across!”
She sat pensive a moment.
“There must be some way around,” said she at last. “Otherwise a party of survivors couldn't have set out for Storm King on the Hudson to deposit a set of records there!”
“That's so, too. But--remember? ‘Never returned.’ I figure it this way: A party of the survivors probably started for New York, exploring. The big, concrete cathedral on Storm King--it was new in 1916, you remember--was known the country over as the most massive piece of architecture this side of the pyramids. They must have planned to leave one set of records there, in case the east, too, was devastated. Well--”
“Do you suppose they succeeded?”
“No telling. At any rate, there's a chance of it. And as for this Rocky Mountain cache, that's manifestly out of the question, for now.”