Then, at about two o'clock in the afternoon to our intense relief we heard Holden's voice on the radio. He apologised for what he knew must have been a startling incident. He had fired, he said, at something which was moving towards him between the buildings at the edge of the plaza. He had then gone off to investigate, leaving the radio, and had only just returned.
Scarsdale moved to take the microphone from me at this point. I forget his exact words but his clipped tones and reproving, if urbane, remarks had the desired effect; Holden did not afterwards forget the Professor's strict instructions.
'Well,' he said at length. 'There appears to be no harm done and I think you can take it that anything down here would be alien to human life as we know it. We will not come back but I'll await your report when you return with the doctor.'
Scarsdale instructed Holden to dismantle the equipment; he and Van Damm could then investigate the area further on their way to re-join us. He would keep the radio link open constantly from now on. A few minutes later Van Damm's tetchy voice came through. When the two men came across the bridge pushing the trolley full of heavy equipment later in the afternoon, Holden told his story in person to Scarsdale as we all crowded round. He had been sitting in the square making notes, he said, when he became aware of some faint shadowy thing which appeared to flit between the far buildings at the end of the plaza.
The occurrence was so unusual that he kept watch on the one point for several minutes; he had thought that it was the optical illusion which we had found common to the city but he soon realised that a large 'hopping thing' as he described it, was moving about between the block-like structures at the edge of the square and gradually coming closer. Not surprisingly, he did not like this, and rapidly got behind the machine-gun.
After another quarter of an hour passed, the thing, which appeared to be grey in hue and of enormous size, stood still; Holden got the uncomfortable impression that he himself was being studied and he reached for his binoculars. He had difficulty in focusing the glasses but as soon as the thing began to come into reasonably clear view, its aspect was so disturbing that Holden became greatly agitated and was unable to hold the binoculars properly. It was only a few seconds after that before he let off a burst with the machine- gun, followed by two others, as the thing made off into the distance.
Courageously, under the circumstances, but foolishly as it now appeared, Holden then set off with one of the elephant rifles to see whether he had wounded the creature. The satisfying noise of the machine-gun had given him back his courage and he hoped to find whether he had hit it. He did find one or two of the flattened bullets from the gun lying at the edge of the square but so far as he could see, there was no sign of the creature and of course the buildings themselves were of too hard a material for the impact of the bullets to make any impression on them.
It was only after he had reported to us on the radio and Van Damm had reached him that they had seen any other evidence of the creature. He and Van Damm had taken a slightly different route out of the city, in order to pass by the spot where the hopping thing had been seen.
'There was a trail of slime leading off the edge of the square,' said Van Damm grimly. 'The stench was awful and we didn't follow it up.'
Fifteen
We didn't talk much about this among ourselves. As if by tacit consent each member of the Great Northern Expedition busied himself with the work in hand. Scarsdale wanted to press on to the limit of exploration in the northern direction; that was his prime purpose in mounting the project at all, he emphasised. We would be able to take in the ancient city of Croth on the return journey; he planned to spend a month charting, photographing and investigating every last building and artefact, he assured us.
There would also be a system of 'leave', with two members at a time returning to the outside air for a fortnight, both for relaxation and to safeguard the lines of communication. This seemed an excellent idea to me as I for one found the life underground oppressive and chilling, with the never- changing light and the haunting silence, broken only by the faint thumping of the great pulse in distance.
Scarsdale also made the implicit promise in his remarks that we would deal with the strange creature seen by Holden on our return; that there might be more of them and that somehow they might prevent our return to the outside world did not seem to have occurred to him. Or rather, to correct myself, I was sure that it had, but that he did not want to go into any detailed explanation for reasons of his own. I remembered then that the Great Northern Expedition was to crown Scarsdale's work of a lifetime and that he would naturally oppose anything which stood between him and its completion. He was determined to reach the furthermost northern limits where beat the strange heart we had travelled towards so long and to this end he was prepared to overlook any dangers and difficulties which might loom large in the mind of a lesser man.
Against this I had to weigh the possible dangers to the other, less knowing members of the party and whether Scarsdale, as leader, was entitled to risk the lives of his companions in this way; I maintained in the end that he was. i After all, he had made the same proposition to each one of us in the great study back in Surrey, and had emphasised the I dangers. After weighing things up each had made the identical decision; which implied absolute trust in Scarsdale as head of the party; in his integrity; and in his judgement as a I leader of men.
I had also to remember his great hardships and bitter disappointments in penetrating so far on his previous journey; and then being forced to return — at great risk to his own life. I put all these questions, arguments and counter arguments to myself as we walked onwards through the twilight for the rest of that day and I came ever to the same conclusion. That we 5 had trusted Scarsdale this far — in my own case quite blindly — I and we were, on balance, correct to continue to trust him right up to the edge of what many people would call, under those circumstances, folly.
Having come to this conclusion I marched with an easier mind; we saw nothing and heard nothing on this stretch, save that the wind now blew stronger, freshening to a fairly stiff I breeze at times and that the slow rhythmic thump, like a pile driver, was more audible and quite distinct. Van Damm and I were manoeuvring the trolley over fairly easy ground; there was a very slight gradient, leading uphill which was not, I however, at all fatiguing. I did most of the pushing while Van Damm walked at the front, occasionally steadying the equipment with his hand.
Scarsdale was leading, naked revolver drawn, while Prescott brought up the rear, also with a cocked and loaded weapon at the ready. Both Scarsdale and Prescott had the lamps in their helments switched on, in case of emergency, and in order to augment the existing light which still shone duskily from some unimaginable roof far above our heads. But the terrain was gradually changing; from a level plain such as that which we had crossed to reach the embalming gallery, the sides were gradually closing in to form a large tunnel about forty feet across. Here Scarsdale decided to halt for the night so that in case of any alarm we should have plenty of open space across which any intruder would have to advance.
We passed an undisturbed night, each of us taking two-hour turns at sentry; this time we did not pitch the tents but simply slept in the open. Van Damm had found an oil lamp from somewhere and by its reassuring pool of golden light he sat long into the night hours — we still measured time by earth's days and nights — and made his endless algebraic calculations in his series of notebooks. One of the most astonishing things about the expedition to my mind was the fact that the leaders obviously knew so much more about its purpose than the rank-and-file.