“For,” said the engineer, “it’s most important that we should keep track of the seasons up above. That may have much to do with our attempts to transplant this colony. It would never do to take a people like this, accustomed to heat and vapor, and carry them out into even the mild winter that now prevails in a present-day December. If we don’t get them to the surface before the last of this month, at latest—”
“We’ll have to wait until another spring?” asked she.
“Looks that way,” he assented, putting a few final touches to the calendar. “So you see it’s up to us to hurry—and certainly nothing more inopportune than this devilish rain could possibly have happened! Haste, haste! We must make haste!”
“That’s so’” exclaimed Beatrice. “Every day’s precious, now. We—”
“My children,” hurriedly interrupted the patriarch, “I never yet have shown you my book—my one and greatest treasure. The book!
“You have told me many things, of sun and moon and stars, which are mocked at as idle tales by my unbelieving people; of continents and seas, mountains, vast cities, great ships, strange engines moved by vapor and by lightning, tall houses; of words thrown along metal threads or even through the air itself; of great nations and wars, of a hundred wondrous matters that verily have passed away even from the remotest memories of us in the Abyss!
“But of our history I have told you little; nor have you seen the book! Yet you must see it, for it alone remains to us of that other, better time. And though my folk mock at it as imposture and myth and fraud, you shall judge if it be true; you shall see what has kept the English speech alive in me, kept memories of the upper world alive. Only the book, the book!”
His voice seemed strangely agitated. As he spoke he raised his hands toward them, sitting on the stone bench in the hut, while outside the rain still thundered louder than the droning roar of the great flame. Stern, his curiosity suddenly aroused, looked at the old man with keen interest.
“The book?” he queried. “What book? What’s the name of it? What date? What—who wrote it, and—”
“Patience, friends!”
“You mean you’ve really got an English book here in this village? A—”
“A book, verily, from the other days! But first, before I show you, let me tell you the old tradition that was handed down to me by my father and my father’s fathers, down through centuries—I know not how many.”
“You mean the story of this Lost Folk in the Abyss?”
“Verily! You have told me yours, of your awakening, of the ruined world and all your struggles and your fall down into this cursed pit. Listen now to mine!”
CHAPTER XXXIII. THE PATRIARCH’S TALE
“IN THE beginning,” he commanded, slowly and thoughtfully, “our people were as yours; they were the same. Our tradition tells that a great breaking of the world took place very many centuries ago. Out of the earth a huge portion was split, and it became as the moon you tell of, only dark. It circled about the earth—”
“By Jove!” cried Stern, and started to his feet. “That dark patch in the sky! That moving mystery we saw nights at the bungalow on the Hudson!”
“You mean—” the girl exclaimed.
“It’s a new planetoid! Another satellite of the earth! It’s the split-off part of the world!”
“Another satellite?”
“Of course! Hang it, yes! See now? The great explosion that liberated the poisonous gases and killed practically everybody in the world must have gouged this new planet out of the flank of Mother Earth in the latter part of 1920. The ejected portions, millions of millions of tons, hundreds of thousands of cubic miles of solid rock—and with them the ruins of Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Omaha, and hundreds of smaller cities—are now all revolving in a fixed, regular orbit, some few thousand miles or so from the surface!
“Think! Ours are the only living human eyes that have seen this new world blotting out the stars! This explains everything—the singular changes in the tides and in the direction of the magnetic pole, decreased gravitation and all the other strange things we noticed, but couldn’t understand. By Gad! What a discovery!”
The patriarch listened eagerly while Stern and the girl discussed the strange phenomenon; but when their excitement had subsided and they were ready again to hear him, he began anew:
“Verily, such was the first result of the great catastrophe. And, as you know, millions died. But among the canons of the Rocky Mountains—so says the tradition; is it right? Were there such mountains?”
“Yes, yes! Go on!”
“In those canons a few handfuls of hardy people still survived. Some perished of famine and exposure; some ventured out into the lowlands and died of the gas that still hung heavy there. Some were destroyed in a great fire that the tradition says swept the earth after the explosion. But a few still lived. At one time the number was only eighteen men, twelve women and a few children, so the story goes.”
“And then?”
“Then,” continued the patriarch, his brow wrinkled in deep thought, “then came the terrible, swift cold. The people, still keeping their English tongue, now dead save for you two, and still with some tools and even a few books, retreated into caves and fissures in the canons. And so they came to the great descent.”
“The what?”
“The huge cleft which the story says once connected the upper world with this Abyss. And—”
“Is it open now, “cried Stern, leaning sharply forward.
“Alas, no; but you hurry me too much, good friend. You understand, for a long time they lived the cave-life partly, and partly the upper life. And they increased a great deal in the hundred years that followed the explosion. But they never could go into the plains, for still the gas hung there, rising from a thousand wells—ten thousand, mayhap, all very deadly. And so they knew not if the rest of the world lived or died.”
“And then?” queried the engineer. “Let’s have it all in outline. What happened?”
“This, my son: that a still greater cold came upon the world, and the life of the open became impossible. There were now ten or twelve thousand alive; but they were losing their skill, their knowledge, everything. Only a few men still kept the wisdom of reading or writing, even. For life was a terrible fight. And they had to seek food now in the cave-lakes; that was all remaining.
“After that, another fifty or a hundred years, came the second great explosion. The ways were closed to the outer world. Nearly all died. What happened even the tradition does not tell. How many years the handful of people wandered I do not know. Neither do I know how they came here.
“The story says only eight or ten altogether reached this sea. It was much smaller then. The islands of the Lanskaarn, as we call them now, were then joined to the land here. Great changes have taken place. Verily, all is different! Everything was lost—language and arts, and even the look of the Folk.
“We became as you see us. The tradition itself was forgotten save by a few. Sometimes we increased, then came pestilences and famines, outbreaks of lava and hot mud and gases, and nearly all died. At one time only seven remained—”
“For all the world like the story of Pitcairn Island and the mutineers of the ‘ Bounty’!” interrupted the engineer. “Yes, yes—go on!”
“There is little more to tell. The tradition says there was once a place of records, where certain of the wisest men of our Folk placed all their lore to keep it; but even this place is lost. Only one family kept any knowledge of the English as a kind of inheritance and the single boor: went with that family—”
“But the Lanskaarn and the other peoples of the Abyss, where did they come from?” asked Stern eagerly.