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tunnel to the vast abyss. The presence of a living water bird in such a
direction - in a world whose surface was one of age-long and uniform
lifelessness - could lead to only one conclusion; hence our first thought was to
verify the objective reality of the sound. It was, indeed, repeated, and seemed
at times to come from more than one throat. Seeking its source, we entered an
archway from which much debris had been cleared; resuming our trail blazing -
with an added paper supply taken with curious repugnance from one of the
tarpaulin bundles on the sledges - when we left daylight behind.
As the glaciated floor gave place to a litter of detritus, we plainly discerned
some curious, dragging tracks; and once Danforth found a distinct print of a
sort whose description would be only too superfluous. The course indicated by
the penguin cries was precisely what our map and compass prescribed as an
approach to the more northerly tunnel mouth, and we were glad to find that a
bridgeless thoroughfare on the ground and basement levels seemed open. The
tunnel, according to the chart, ought to start from the basement of a large
pyramidal structure which we seemed vaguely to recall from our aerial survey as
remarkably well-preserved. Along our path the single torch showed a customary
profusion of carvings, but we did not pause to examine any of these.
Suddenly a bulky white shape loomed up ahead of us, and we flashed on the second
torch. It is odd how wholly this new quest had turned our minds from earlier
fears of what might lurk near. Those other ones, having left their supplies in
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the great circular place, must have planned to return after their scouting trip
toward or into the abyss; yet we had now discarded all caution concerning them
as completely as if they had never existed. This white, waddling thing was fully
six feet high, yet we seemed to realize at once that it was not one of those
others. They were larger and dark, and, according to the sculptures, their
motion over land surfaces was a swift, assured matter despite the queerness of
their sea-born tentacle equipment. But to say that the white thing did not
profoundly frighten us would be vain. We were indeed clutched for an instant by
primitive dread almost sharper than the worst of our reasoned fears regarding
those others. Then came a flash of anticlimax as the white shape sidled into a
lateral archway to our left to join two others of its kind which had summoned it
in raucous tones. For it was only a penguin - albeit of a huge, unknown species
larger than the greatest of the known king penguins, and monstrous in its
combined albinism and virtual eyelessness.
When we had followed the thing into the archway and turned both our torches on
the indifferent and unheeding group of three, we saw that they were all eyeless
albinos of the same unknown and gigantic species. Their size reminded us of some
of the archaic penguins depicted in the Old Ones sculptures, and it did not
take us long to conclude that they were descended from the same
stock-undoubtedly surviving through a retreat to some warmer inner region whose
perpetual blackness had destroyed their pigmentation and atrophied their eyes to
mere useless slits. That their present habitat was the vast abyss we sought, was
not for a moment to be doubted; and this evidence of the gulf s continued warmth
and habitability filled us with the most curious and subtly perturbing fancies.
We wondered, too, what had caused these three birds to venture out of their
usual domain. The state and silence of the great dead city made it clear that it
had at no time been an habitual seasonal rookery, whilst the manifest
indifference of the trio to our presence made it seem odd that any passing party
of those others should have startled them. Was it possible that those others had
taken some aggressive action or t-ried to increase their meat supply? We doubted
whether that pungent odor which the dogs had hated could cause an equal
antipathy in these penguins, since their ancestors had obviously lived on
excellent terms with the Old Ones - an amicable relationship which must have
survived in the abyss below as long as any of the Old Ones remained. Regretting
- in a flare-up of the old spirit of pure science - that we could not photograph
these anomalous creatures, we shortly left them to their squawking and pushed on
toward the abyss whose openness was now so positively proved to us, and whose
exact direction occasional penguin tracks made clear.
Not long afterward a steep descent in a long, low, doorless, and peculiarly
sculptureless corridor led us to believe that we were approaching the tunnel
mouth at last. We had passed two more penguins, and heard others immediately
ahead. Then the corridor ended in a prodigious open space which made us gasp
involuntarily - a perfect inverted hemisphere, obviously deep underground; fully
a hundred feet in diameter and fifty feet high, with low archways opening around
all parts of the circumference but one, and that one yawning cavernously with a
black, arched aperture which broke the symmetry of the vault to a height of
nearly fifteen feet. It was the entrance to the great abyss.
In this vast hemisphere, whose concave roof was impressively though decadently
carved to a likeness of the primordial celestial dome, a few albino penguins
waddled - aliens there, but indifferent and unseeing. The black tunnel yawned
indefinitely off at a steep, descending grade, its aperture adorned with
grotesquely chiseled jambs and lintel. From that cryptical mouth we fancied a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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