“Great Heavens, Beatrice,” exclaimed the engineer, “what are we up against? Of all the incredible places! That light! That roaring!”
He had difficulty in making himself even heard. For now the hissing roar which they had perceived from afar off seemed to fill the place with a tremendous vibrant blur, rising, falling, as the light waxed and waned.
Terribly confusing all these new sense-impressions were to Stern and Beatrice in their unnerved and weakened state. And, staring about them as they went, they slowly moved along with the motion of their captors toward the great light.
All at once Stern stopped, with a startled cry.
“The infernal devils!” he exclaimed, and recoiled with an involuntary shudder from the sight that met his eyes.
The girl, too, cried out in fear.
Some air-current, some heated blast of vapor from the vast flame they now saw shooting upward from the stone flooring of the plaza, momently dispelled the thick, white vapors.
Stern got a glimpse of a circular row of stone posts, each about nine feet high—he saw not the complete circle, but enough of it to judge its diameter as some fifty feet. In the center stood a round and massive building, and from each post to that building stretched a metal rod perhaps twenty feet in length.
“Look! Look!” gasped Beatrice, and pointed.
Then, deadly pale, she hid her face in both her hands and crouched away, as though to blot the sight from her perception.
Each metal bar was sagging with a hideous load—a row of human skeletons, stark, fleshless, frightful in their ghastliness. All were headless. All, suspended by the cervical vertebrae, swayed lightly as the blue-green light glared on them with its weird, unearthly radiance.
Before either Stern or the girl had time even to struggle or so much as recover from the shock of this fell sight, they were both pushed roughly between two of the posts into the frightful circle.
Stern saw a door yawn black before them in the massive hut of stone.
Toward this the Folk of the Abyss were thrusting them.
“No, you don’t, damn you!” he howled with sudden passion. “None o’ that for us! Shoot, Beta! Shoot!”
But even as her hand jerked at the butt of the automatic, in its rawhide holster on her hip, an overmastering force flung them both forward into the foul dark of the round dungeon. A metal door clanged shut. Absolute darkness fell.
“My God!” cried Stern. “Beta! Where are you? Beta! Beta!”
But answer there was none. The girl had fainted.
CHAPTER XXVI. “YOU SPEAK ENGLISH!”
EVEN in his pain and rage and fear, Stern did not lose his wits. Too great the peril, he subconsciously realized, for any false step now. Despite the fact that the stone prison could measure no more than some ten feet in diameter, he knew that in its floors some pit or fissure might exist, frightfully deep, for their destruction.
And other dangers, too, might lie hidden in this fearful place. So, restraining himself with a strong effort, he stood there motionless a few seconds, listening, trying to think. Severe now the pain from his lashed wrists had grown, but he no longer felt it. Strange visions seemed to dance before his eyes, for weakness and fever were at work upon him. In his ears still sounded, though muffled now, the constant hissing roar of the great flame, the mysterious and monstrous jet of fire which seemed to form the center of this unknown, incomprehensible life in the abyss.
“Merciful Heavens!” gasped he. “That fire—those skeletons—this black cell—what can they mean?” He found no answer in his bewildered brain. Once more he called, “Beatrice! Beatrice!” but only the close echo of the prison replied.
He listened, holding his breath in sickening fear. Was there, in truth, some waiting, yawning chasm in the cell, and had she, thrust rudely forward, been hurled down it? At the thought he set his jaws with terrible menace and Swore, to the last drop of his blood, vengeance on these inhuman captors.
But as he listened, standing there with bound hands in the thick gloom, he seemed to catch a slow and sighing sound, as of troubled breathing. Again he called. No answer. Then he understood the truth. And, unable to grope with his hands, he swung one foot slowly, gently, in the partial circumference of a circle.
At first he found nothing save the smooth and slippery stone of the floor, but, having shifted his position very cautiously and tried again, he experienced the great joy of feeling his sandaled foot come in contact with the girl’s prostrate body.
Beside her on the floor he knelt. He could not free his hands, but he could call to her and kiss her face. And presently, even while the joy of this discovery was keen upon him, obscuring the hot rage he felt, she moved, she spoke a few vague words, and reached her hands up to him; she clasped him in her arms.
And there in the close, fetid dark, imprisoned, helpless, doomed, they kissed again, and once more—though no word was spoken—plighted their love and deep fidelity until the end.
“Hurt? Are you hurt?” he panted eagerly, as she sat up on the hard floor and with her hands smoothed back the hair from his hot, aching head.
“I feel so weak and dizzy,” she answered. “And I’m afraid—oh, Allan, I’m afraid! But, no, I’m not hurt.”
“Thank God for that!” he breathed fervently. “Can you untie these infernal knots? They’re almost cutting my hands off!”
“Here, let me try!”
And presently the girl set to work; but even though she labored till her fingers ached, she could not start the tight and water-soaked ligatures.
“Hold on, wait a minute,” directed he. “Feel in my right-hand pocket. Maybe they forgot to take my knife.”
She obeyed.
“They’ve got it,” she announced. “Even if they don’t know the meaning of revolvers, they understand knives all right. It’s gone.”
“Pest!” he ejaculated hotly. Then for a moment he sat thinking, while the girl again tried vainly to loosen the hard-drawn knots.
“Can you find the iron door they shoved us through?” asked he at length.
“I’ll see!”
He heard her creeping cautiously along the walls of stone, feeling as she went.
“Look out!” he warned. “Keep testing the floor as you go. There may be a crevice or pit or something of that kind.”
All at once she cried: “Here it is! I’ve found it!”
“Good! Now, then, feel it all over and see if there’s any rough place on it. Any sharp edge of a plate, or anything of that kind, that I could rub the cords on.”
Another silence. Then the girl spoke.
“Nothing of that kind here,” she answered depairingly. “The door’s as smooth as if it had been filed and polished. There’s not even a lock of any kind. It must be fastened from the outside in some way.”
“By Heaven, this is certainly a hard proposition!” exclaimed the engineer, groaning despite himself. “What the deuce are we going to do now?”
Far a moment he remained sunk in a kind of dull and apathetic respair.
But suddenly he gave a cry of joy.
“I’ve got it!” he exclaimed. “Your revolver, quick! Aim at the opposite wall, there, and fire!”
“Shoot, in here?” she queried, astonished. “Why—what for?”
“Never mind! Shoot!”
Amazed, she did his bidding. The crash of the report almost deafened them in that narrow room. By the stabbing flare of the discharge they glimpsed the black and shining walls, a deadly circle all about them.