"I will write a check for a million eagles to either one of you gentlemen if you can show me a single place where the Good Book is mistaken--even a single place, mind you," he said, much too loudly.
Athelstan Helms stirred. He and Walton had had this discussion; both men knew there were such places. Walton, however, was seized by the strong conviction that this was not the occasion to enumerate them. "What say we visit the smoking car, eh, Helms?" he said with patently false joviality.
"Very well," Helms replied. "I am sure Mr. Primrose does not indulge, tobacco being unmentioned in the Holy Scriptures--if not an actual error, surely a grievous omission."
That set Mr. Primrose spluttering anew, but he did not pursue the two Englishmen as they rose and walked down the central aisle. Dr. Walton had accomplished his purpose. "I dread our return," Walton said. "He'll serenade us some more."
"Ah, well," Helms said. "Perhaps he will leave us at peace if we avoid topics zoological and theological."
"And if he doesn't, we can always kill him." Dr. Walton was not inclined to feel charitable.
Despite the thickness of the atmosphere, the smoking car proved more salubrious than the ordinary passenger coach. It boasted couches bolted to the floor rather than the row upon row of hard seats in the other car. Walton lit a cigar, while Athelstan Helms puffed on his pipe. They improved the aroma of the smoke in the car, as most of the gentlemen there smoked harsh, nasty cigarettes.
A stag and a doe watched the train rattle past. They must have been used to the noisy mechanical monsters, for they did not bound off in terror. "More immigrants," Helms remarked.
"I beg your pardon?" his traveling companion said.
"The deer," Helms replied. "But for a few bats--many of them peculiar even by the standards of the Chiroptera--Atlantis was devoid of mammalia before those fishermen chanced upon its shores. In the absence of predators other than men with rifles, the deer have flourished mightily."
"Not an unhandsome country, even if it is foreign," Dr. Walton said--as much praise as any non-English locale this side of heaven was likely to get from him.
"Hard winters on this side of the Green Ridge Mountains, I'm given to understand," Helms said. "We would notice it more if the majority of the trees were deciduous rather than coniferous--bare branches do speak to the seasons of the year."
"That's so," Walton agreed. "I suppose most of the ancestors of the deciduous plants had not yet, ah, evolved when some geological catastrophe first caused Atlantis to separate from Terranova."
"It seems very likely," Helms said. "Mr. Primrose might tell us it was Noah's flood."
Dr. Walton expressed an opinion of Mr. Primrose's intimate personal habits on which he was unlikely to have any exact knowledge from such a brief acquaintance. Athelstan Helms' pipe sent up a couple of unusually large plumes of smoke. Had the great detective not been smoking it, one could almost suspect that he might have chuckled.
Day faded fast. A conductor came through and lit the lamps in the car. Walton's eyes began to sting; his lungs felt as if he were inhaling shagreen or emery paper. Nevertheless, he said, "I don't really care to go back."
"Shall we repair to the dining car, then?" Helms suggested.
"Capital idea," Walton said, and so they did.
Eating an excellent--or at least a tolerable--supper whilst rolling along at upwards of twenty miles an hour was not the least of train travel's attractions. Dr. Walton chose a capon, while Helms ordered beefsteak: both simple repasts unlikely to be spoiled by the vagaries of cooking on wheels. The wines from the west coast of Atlantis they ordered to accompany their suppers were a pleasant surprise, easily matching their French equivalents in quality while costing only half as much.
Halfway through the meal, the train shunted onto a siding and stopped: a less pleasant surprise. When Helms asked a waiter what had happened, the man only shrugged. "I do not know, sir," he replied in a gluey Teutonic accent, "but I would guess an accident is in front of us."
"Damnation!" Walton said. "We shall be late to Thetford."
"We are already late to Thetford. We shall be later," Helms corrected. To the waiter, he added, "Another bottle of this admirable red, if you would be so kind."
They sat on the siding most of the night. Word filtered through the train that there had been a derailment ahead. Mr. Primrose was snoring when Helms and Walton returned to their seats. Both Englishmen soon joined him in slumber; sleep came easier when the train stood still. Dr. Walton might have wished for the comfort of a Throckmorton car, with a sofa that made up into a bed and another bunk that swung down from the wall above it, but he did not stay awake to wish for long.
Morning twilight had begun edging night's black certainty with the ambiguity of gray when the train jerked into motion once more. Athelstan Helms' eyes opened at once, and with reason in them. He seemed as refreshed as if he had passed the night in a Throckmorton car--or, for that matter, in his hotel room back in Hanover. Walton seemed confused when he first woke. At last realizing his circumstances and surroundings, he sent Helms a faintly accusing stare. "You're not a beautiful woman," he said.
"I can scarcely deny it," Helms replied equably. "Why you should think I might be is, perhaps, a more interesting question."
If it was, it was one that his friend, now fully returned to the mundane world, had no intention of answering.
Behind them, Mr. Primrose might have been an apprentice sawmill. They took care not to wake him when they went back to the dining car for breakfast. Walton would have preferred bloaters or bangers, but Atlantean cuisine did not run to such English delicacies. He had to make do with fried eggs and a small beefsteak, as he had back in the capital. Helms' choice matched his. They both drank coffee; Atlantean tea had proved shockingly bad even when available.
They were still eating when the train rolled past the scene of the crash that had delayed it. Passenger and freight cars and a locomotive lay on their side not far from the track. Workmen swarmed over them, salvaging what they could. "A bad accident, very bad," Walton murmured.
"Do you know how an Atlantean sage once defined an accident?" Helms inquired. When the good doctor shook his head, Helms continued with obvious relish: "As 'an inevitable occurrence due to the action of immutable natural laws.' Mr. Bierce, I believe his name is, is a clearsighted man."
"Quite," Walton said. "Could you pass me another roll, Helms? I find I'm a peckish man myself this morning."
Little by little, the terrain grew steeper. Stands of forest became more frequent in the distance, though most trees had been cut down closer to the railroad line. Being primarily composed of evergreen conifers, the woods bore a more somber aspect than those of England. Their timbers helped bridge several rivers rushing east out of the Green Ridge Mountains. Other rivers, the larger ones, were spanned with iron and even steel.
"Those streams helped power Atlantis' early factories, even before she was initiated into the mysteries of the steam engine," Helms remarked.
"Helped make her into a competitor, you mean," Dr. Walton said. "The old-time mercantilists weren't such fools as people make them out to be, seems to me."
"As their policies are as dead as they are, it's rather too late to make a fuss over either," Helms said, a sentiment with which his colleague could scarcely quarrel regardless of his personal inclinations.
When Helms and Walton returned to their seats in the passenger car, they passed Henry David Primrose heading for the diner. "Ah, we get a bit more peace and quiet, anyhow," Walton said, and Helms nodded.
By the time Mr. Primrose came back, the train was well up into the mountains. The peaks of the Green Ridge were neither inordinately tall nor inordinately steep, but had formed a considerable barrier to westward expansion across Atlantis because of the thick forest that had cloaked them. Even now, the slopes remained shrouded in dark, mournful green. Only the pass through which the railroad line went had been logged off.