Ashbless said there was little doubt of it, and Squires glanced at Edward again and winked. Ashbless was lost in thought.
“See here,” said Professor Latzarel after clearing his throat monumentally. “All this literary talk is very fine, but the Newtonians are a scientific discussion group, and I for one am anxious for Mr. Ashbless to give us the account of the polar expedition for the benefit of Mr. Spekowsky here from the Times and Dr. Orville Lassen from the Journal of Amphibiana.” Two men, one in glasses and a string tie — Mr. Spekowsky, apparently a reporter — and another in an enormous orange sweater and khaki pants — Dr. Lassen from the University. Both men nodded. Spekowsky, frowning, said, “I believe that the gentleman who has just left knew little about physics. Mass, if I’m not very much mistaken …” William Ashbless interrupted him saying, “No, but he knows about the mysteries. Everything he says is accurate. The world doesn’t care about your watery little definitions.” Spekowsky fell silent. William wandered back in, just then, filling glasses with newly opened port and giving Jim and Giles, who sat respectfully and silently in the corner on a pair of kitchen chairs, a little liqueur glass each, half full of the purple wine.
“I’m given to understand,” said Spekowsky in a voice full of doubt, “that you gentlemen made something of a discovery some years ago which is suddenly newsworthy. I can’t at all follow it.”
Ashbless snorted contemptuously.
Conversation settled. William collapsed into his green chair, still lost in the fever of inspiration, and puffed steadily on his pipe. Ashbless, who was the only one among them beside Latzarel who had been at the pole, swirled the liquid in his glass in a tight little circle, watching it race around the inside. Edward understood that he was summoning his powers of memory and art in order to give string-tied Spekowsky his money’s worth.
Chapter 4
“Peach was there,” Ashbless said as a sort of cryptic preface. “I’m not sure any of you know what that means yet. You will though.” Then his eye wandered past Giles, who had sunk into his corner in a drowsy reverie. It was impossible to say that he’d even heard the poet’s peculiar reference to his father. Ashbless frowned and continued:
‘This was in 1954, mind you. Ten years ago. The Pinion expedition to the South Pole. The frozen cave bear chipped out of a wall of ice six hundred miles below Tierra del Fuego by Pinion’s bearers made something of a sensation. It’s in a refrigerated vault beneath the Museum of Natural History in Los Angeles. Any of us can have a look at it. It’s fairly unremarkable except for its original location. Pinion’s bode, Hole in the Ground, and the entire revised hollow Earth theory trade on the discoveries of Admiral Byrd at the Pole and on the cave bear — circumstantial evidence and hearsay. Pinion is remarkably adept at passing off others’ discoveries as his own. He’s one of those self-important people who are always dredging up evidence to demonstrate their own cleverness.”
Ashbless rummaged in his coat pocket and hauled out a yellowed newspaper clipping from the Times. “Road to the Center of the Earth?” the heading read, “Cave Bear at South Pole.” The article reported other peculiarities found by the Pinion/Latzarel party: clumps of leafy twigs, a pale orange tulip suspended in a shard of ice, the tip of a stone spear imbedded in the frozen flesh of a prehistoric bird.
Ashbless cast the clipping onto the tabletop with a gesture of contempt, not stooping to pick it up when it slid across onto the floor. William picked it up and carried it across to Spekowsky who himself dropped the clipping onto the top of a smoking stand, not bothering to look at it.
“What can’t be shoved into a museum vault,” Ashbless continued, “was discovered by myself, Professor Latzarel, and Basil Peach while Pinion and his party were chasing down the rumored sighting by Indians of a live wooly mammoth some fifty miles to the east — a practical joke, I don’t doubt. We camped for the space of four nights on an ice field above a tiny warm water lake, steaming deep in a natural depression in the ice — a hot spring, believe it or not, on the Ellsworth Highland. There was a network of caverns and caves running off through the ice below us, little of which we had time to explore. One branch, however, which we followed, opened after some four hundred feet onto a little rocky bay on the shore of a subterranean lake. It was the only access. The walls of the tunnel were lit somehow, perhaps by sunlight glowing through the transparent ice above. And trapped within the ice, hundreds of feet beneath the surface, were the fossil remains of ancient beasts. We could just make out the ivory curve of what must have been an enormous ribcage — the skeleton of a mastodon — encased in clear ice a half mile away. And above the tunnel, just below the point where it led out onto the shore of the lake, were the wing and head of a perfectly preserved pterodactyl in frozen flight, peering down out of the blue crystal, the other half of him, like the dark side of the moon, lost forever in a swirl of opaque white.
“Pinion never saw a bit of this, mind you. The whole network of tunnels collapsed in an earthquake days before he and his fools returned from their goose chase with some faked up plaster-of-Paris casts of footprints.”
Spekowsky gave Lassen a meaningful look. Ashbless didn’t hesitate.
“Two of our party — Fuegan Indians — vanished one evening as they fished in the waters of that pool. Basil Peach was in the caves at the time and was surprised by a third Indian tearing up the tunnel screaming and gibbering about monsters — a great reptilian head that had lurched up out of the lake and swallowed his companions. Peach himself swore that beneath the ice of the tunnel floor he saw the flippered shadow of some great saurian, some Mesozoic amphibian, humping up toward the surface, then disappearing again into the shadowed depths, as if the ice tunnels ran along above a vast subterranean sea of which the little lake was only the tip. Nothing remained of the Fuegans but a smear of blood and one of their hats made of llama fur that floated on the surface of the water.
‘The following evening, Professor Latzarel and Basil Peach themselves witnessed the surfacing of a vast marine turtle, a beast the size of an automobile. It too slid away into the depths of the Earth.”
“Hocus pocus!” shouted Spekowsky, unable to contain himself any longer. His companion, however, was perched on the edge of his chair, his mouth open. Ashbless shrugged. The door opened and Phillip Mays, the aurelian, hunched in, weighted down with a cardboard carton full of liquor. A clove cigarette sputtered in his mouth.
Jim was relieved to see him. He was always relieved to see him if only because Mays seemed so predictable. The edge of impending doom and insanity which sharpened his dealings with everyone else, even his father — particularly his father — was absent in Mays. And at the same time he was undeniably eccentric, a trait which Jim held in high esteem. Mays was always off on adventures, although he didn’t at all look like the adventurous type, squinty as he was and with an overslept look about him. He was off to the Amazon after a rumored violet moth the size of a small bird one month, then scaling the Himalayas the next, scouring little clumps of high altitude tundra for tiny belemnite butterflies that could mimic in miniature perfection their resting place: a wild lilac, a granite slab on a hillside, a blade of grass, a human face. His house reeked of camphor, and on the wall of his study, pinned with an epee to green plaster, was a butterfly the size of a heron, netted in Colombia by Indians and worshipped before being traded to Mays for a five-dollar gold piece, a cigarette lighter, and a penlight with a miniature painting of the Santa Monica pier in the tip, which you could just make out by aiming the thing into the sun and screwing your eye, so to speak, into a little porthole in the end, then waiting for a moment to sort out palm trees from eyelashes. Mays had a case of the things. He never went into the jungle without a half dozen in his satchel and had given one to Jim at the second meeting of the Newtonians.