'Well?'
'Well, you may have got up beyond normal surface-level already, and be boring your way through the heart of a mountain.'
'It's possible—but it ain't likely. You see, there's a hell of a lot more flat than mountains round here. It's thousands to one against our being under any sizeable mountain, and I guess we've got to take the risk anyway.'
'You couldn't send out some side tunnels experimentally?'
Smith shook his head.
'Not now. It'd be a waste of time. If it hadn't come to a showdown, it might've been worth trying. But with this on our hands, the best we can do is to keep straight on and up.'
The two strolled on, talking until they were interrupted by a hail from the wall. Smith hurried over.
'What is it?'
'Something going on in the right-hand tunnel.' said the lookout. 'There've been one or two of them dodging about in there.'
Both Smith and Mark stared, but they could make out little. There was certainly movement, though it was impossible to make out what was taking place.
'Better call the men up,' Smith decided. 'There may be another charge.'
Within two minutes the parapet was lined with staring faces whose owners speculated audibly, but it was half an hour before a definite move took place.
Near the middle of the wall Ed had chosen to station himself and his 'artillery'. The rest gave them a wide berth, and eyed them with misgiving; it had been noticed that stones had a habit of flying out of slings before the release was intended.
At last, when the majority had decided that the alarm must be false, a few small, white figures issued from the right-hand cave mouth. Ed waited until they had formed a line, then he and his men let fly. Most of the stones clattered harmlessly; only one figure subsided. It sat on the ground, hugging a damaged knee. The rest swung their slings and replied with a volley. The men on the wall watched the missiles come arching towards them. They were bigger than the stones used before, and flung on a higher trajectory. They looked like a flight of snowballs. Only when they landed did it become clear that they were not stones at all.
One struck the parapet just in front of Mark. It burst into a cloud of spores. He began to cough and choke as they entered his lungs. The more he gasped for breath, the more floating spores he breathed. His eyes streamed until he could scarcely see. He had a glimpse of another volley of white balls, bursting in another smother of spores.
The whole line of men was gasping and choking in the dusty air. The flakes swirled around them like a mist, blotting everything from view. Throats and chests began to ache with coughing; each fresh paroxysm seemed to rack more painfully.
They had been out-manoeuvred. The pygmies, or their advisers, had welcomed Ed's fungus idea, but they had realised too that they could not hope in the face of a bombardment tp roll the puff-balls up to the wall. The problem had been solved by extracting the spores from ripe balls, and stitching them into smaller skins suitable for slinging. But to what purpose?
The wall with its defenders had now disappeared into an artificial blizzard, but the flights of spore-bombs continued to fall with accuracy wherever the cloud was thinning. The pygmies and 'natives' could not hope to make an attack now. Once they should reach the spore area they would be in as bad a plight as the rest. It could only be that the present barrage was intended not just to disable, but to act as a screen. What might be afoot at the end of the cave, the spluttering, choking defenders could only guess.
At last, after what seemed an interminable period, the spore-bombs ceased to fall. The white swirl began to settle and thin, or drift away. The paroxysms of choking grew less frequent and less agonising. Eyelids could be opened without reclosing immediately in self-defence. The red-rimmed eyes, still streaming, could peer painfully in an effort to see what had taken place behind the screen, but their vision was dimly blurred. It was noses which gave the clue—a faint smell of burning.
A whistling flight of stones made them duck again. Mark put his recovering eyes to the spyhole, and the pygmy operations ceased to be a mystery.
In a line across the end of the cave lay five huge piles of vegetable rubbish, and from each was ascending a column of heavy, yellow smoke. For a few feet it poured straight up, then it bent over, broadening fanwise as the draught from the tunnels behind began to carry it farther into the big cavern. The rising curls, progressively attenuated, mingled as they climbed, losing individuality in a grey-yellow haze. Already an obscuring tide was flowing across the uneven roof. Those lamps it had engulfed showed wanly; their brilliance sicklied to a gloomy dimness. Mark watched it lap about others, flowing first to either side before it thickened to submerge them; increasing the gloom step by step.
With the decreasing light, the cave seemed to change character. It was no longer the familiar, workaday place they all knew. Nooks and corners, becoming shrouded, took on an ill aspect. Fears were born in 'he hidden crevices and came stealing out to attack the men's minds; the agents provocateurs of panic.
A group on the far right swarmed over the parapet and dropped to the loam. They started racing for the fires, oblivious of the flying stones which slashed at them. The slingmen changed their tactics and sent spore bombs which burst in their path. The running men staggered and reeled, they doubled up, and the sound of their rasping coughs came back to those still on the wall. The stones whistled among them again, felling a number and driving the rest into an impotent fury as they floundered with a temporary blindness.
Mark glanced round at Smith in mute inquiry. The other shook his head.
'No good. That's just what they want—to get us in the open. Once they do that it's all up.'
Smith was right; it was the position, not the numbers of the defenders which had baffled the attack. Doubtless they would be able to give a good account of themselves with their clubs, but though the pygmies were small, their numbers, added to those of the 'natives', were not. To take to the open meant certain defeat sooner or later. Mark became gloomy. This smoke business had not been foreseen. The slight draught which played through the crevices would not be enough to keep the air breathable. The time would not be long in coming when the only alternatives would be to make a dash or to suffer asphyxiation. Either meant the end of their plan. The pygmies would probably prefer the latter; it would give them less trouble.
The smoke was now a thick blanket over the whole roof. In the semi-darkness the men looked questioningly at their leader. Smith failed them—he could see no way out, and their eyes, roving farther along the wall, sought the burly Ed. He, too, was without a suggestion, and for the first time in Mark's experience of him, looked dejected.
'No, you ain't got this thing right,' he said to those who urged a charge. 'Maybe you'll get five minutes' fun skull cracking, but that ain't gonna help us any if you get your own skulls cracked after. What we gotta do is figure out some new line. And,' he added after an interval, 'it seems to me as there ain't none____Gees, don't I wish I'd never pulled that puff-ball stuff.'
The smoky stratum deepened; the cave grew more fearful in murky penumbra. The yellow columns above the five fires intensified, appearing almost as writhing solids. It was a mere matter of time till the pall above should creep down to drive them from the wall. Beyond the fires, to windward of the choking smoke, the slingers stood waiting; behind them, others filled the passages impassably. Sheer clogging of numbers alone would defeat an attempt to rush.
The defenders, too, waited. They could do nothing else. The fate of the first party to go over the top had proved a potent lesson. They could no longer look to Smith or any other as leader. That fatalism which they had thrown off at the need for action came seeping back, tinged now with resentful desperation. The tunnel upon which so many of them had worked for years would never be used now. The phrase, 'any time now' had even less meaning than before. The last ray of their hope was narrowed by a closing iris of smoke until it became that ultimate pinpoint of light without which they could not live. It was that last, feeble glimmer which set one and then another pair of eyes roving towards the shadowed wall in unadmitted faith that a figure might yet emerge crying: 'We're through.' But no such figure showed. The wall and the tunnel they had hewn through it receded into a blacker and blacker distance____