The Man Who Rocked the Earth, Robert Williams Wood [the two towers ebook .TXT] 📗

toward Ungava. Every one was in the best of spirits and everything moved with customary German precision like clockwork. Nothing had been forgotten, not even the pungent invention of a Berlin chemist to discourage mosquitoes. Without labour, without anxiety, the fourteen barges bored through the swift currents and at last reached a great lake that lay like a silver mirror for miles about them. The moon rose and turned the boats into weird shapes as they ploughed through the gray mists—a strange and terrible sight for the Nascopees lurking in the underbrush along the shore. And while the men smoked and sang "Die Wacht am Rhein," listening to the trill of the ripples against the bows, the foremost motorboat grounded.

The momentum of the barge immediately following could not be checked, and she in turn drove into what seemed to be a mud bank. At about the same instant the other barges struck bottom. Intense excitement and confusion prevailed among the members of the expedition, since they were almost out of sight of land and the draft of the motorboats was only nineteen inches. But no efforts could move the barges from where they were. All night long the propellers churned the gleaming water of the lake to foam, but without result. Each and every barge and boat was hard and fast aground, and when the gray daylight came stealing across the lake there was no lake to be seen, only a reeking marsh, covered for miles with a welter of green slime and decaying vegetable matter across which it would seem no human being or animal could flounder. As far as the eye could reach lay only a blackish ooze. And with the sun came millions of mosquitoes and flies, and drove the men and mules frantic with their stings.

Only one man, Ludwig Helmer, a gun driver from Potsdam, survived. Half mad with the flies and nearly naked, he found his way somehow across the quaking bog, after all his comrades had died of thirst, and reached a tribe of Nascopees, who took him to the coast. A great explosion, they told him, had torn the River Nascopee from its bed and diverted its course. The lakes that it fed had all dried up.

Blinded by perspiration, sweltering under the heavy burden of their outfit, goaded almost to frenzy by the black flies and mosquitoes, Hooker and Marc and Edouard staggered through the brush, following the monorail. They had already reached the summit of the Height of Land and where now working down the northern slope in the direction of Ungava. The land was barren beyond the imagination of the unimaginative Bennie. Small dwarfed trees struggled for a footing amid the lichen-covered outcroppings and sun-dried moss of the hollows. The slightest rise showed mile upon mile of great waste undulating interminably in every direction. The heat shimmering off the rocks was almost suffocating. At noon on September 10th they threw themselves into the shade of a narrow ledge, boiled some tea, and smoked their pipes, wildly fanning the air to drive away the swarms of insects that attacked them.

Hooker was half drunk from lack of sleep and water. Already once or twice he had caught himself wandering when talking to Marc and Edouard. The whole thing was like a horrible, disgusting nightmare. And then he suddenly became aware that the two Indians were staring intently through the clouds of mosquitoes over the tree tops to the eastward. Through the sweat that trickled into his eyes he tried to make out what they could see. But he could discern nothing except mosquitoes. And then he thought he saw a mosquito larger than all the others. He waved at it, but it remained where it was. A slight breeze momentarily wafted the swarm away, and he still saw the big mosquito hovering over the horizon. Then he heard Marc cry out:

"Quelque chose vol en l'air!"

He rubbed the moisture out of his eyes and stared at the mosquito, which was growing bigger every minute. With the velocity of a projectile, this monstrous insect, or whatever it was, came sweeping up behind them from the Height of Land, soaring into the zenith in a great parabola, until with a shiver of excitement Bennie recognized that it was the Flying Ring.

"It's him," he chattered emphatically, if ungrammatically.

Marc and Edouard nodded.

"Oui, oui!" they cried in unison. "C'est celui que vous cherchez!"

"Il retourne chez lui," said Marc.

And then Bennie, without offering any explanation, found himself dancing up and down upon the rocks in the dizzying sun, waving his hat and shouting to the Father of the Marionettes. What he shouted he never knew. And Marc and Edouard both shouted, too. But the master of the Ring heard them not, or if he heard he paid them no attention. Nearer and nearer came the Ring, until Bennie could see the gleaming cylinder of its great steel circle. At a distance of about two miles it swept through the air over a low ridge, and settled toward the earth in the direction of Ungava.

"He only goes ten mile maybe," announced Marc confidently. "Un petit bout de chemin. We get there to-night."

On they struggled beside the Rail, but now hope ran high. Bennie sang and whistled, unmindful of the mosquitoes and black flies that renewed their attacks with unremitting ferocity. The sun lowered itself into the pine trees, shooting dazzling shafts through the low branches, and then sank in a welter of crimson-yellow light. The sky turned gray in the east; faint stars twinkled through the quivering waves that still shook from the overheated rocks. It turned cold and the mosquitoes departed. Hugging the Rail, they staggered on, now over shaking muskeg, now through thickets of tangled brush, now on great ledges of barren rock, and then across caribou barrens knee-deep in dry and crackling moss. Darkness fell and prudence dictated that they should make camp. But in their excitement they trudged on, until presently a pale glow behind the dwarfed trees showed that the moon was rising. They boiled the water, made tea, and cooked some biscuits. Soon they could see to pursue their way.

"'Most there now," encouraged Marc.

Presently, instead of descending, they found the land was rising again, and forcing their way through the undergrowth they struggled up a rocky hillside, perhaps three hundred feet in height. Marc was in the lead, with Bennie a few feet behind him. As they reached the crest the Indian turned and pointed to something in front of him that Bennie was unable to distinguish.

"Nous sommes arrivees," he announced.

With his heart thumping from the exertion of the climb, Bennie crawled up beside his guide and found himself confronted by a strong barbed-wire entanglement affixed to iron stanchions firmly imbedded in the rocks. They were on the top of a ridge that dropped away abruptly at their feet into a valley, perhaps a mile in width, terminating on the other side in perpendicular cliffs, estimated by Bennie to be about eight hundred or a thousand feet in height. Although the entanglement was by no means impassable, it was a distinct obstacle and one they preferred to tackle by daylight. Moreover, it indicated that their company was undesired. They were in the presence of an unknown quantity, the master of the Flying Ring. Whether he was a malign or a benevolent influence, this Father of the Marionettes, they could not tell.

With his back propped against a small spruce Bennie focused his glasses upon dim shapes barely discernible in the midst of the valley. He was thrilled by a deep excitement, a strange fear. What would he see? What mysteries would those vague forms disclose? The shadows cast by the cliffs and a light mist gathering in the low ground made it difficult to see; and then, even as he looked, the moon rose higher and shone through something in the middle of the valley that looked like a tall, grisly skeleton. It seemed to have legs and arms, an odd mushroom-shaped head, and endless ribs. Below and at its feet were other and vaguer shapes—flat domes or cupolas, bombproofs perhaps, buildings of some sort—Pax's home beyond peradventure.

As he looked through the glasses at the skeleton-like tower Bennie had an extraordinary feeling of having seen it all before somewhere. As in a long-forgotten dream he remembered Tesla's tower near Smithtown, on Long Island. And this was Tesla's tower, naught else! It is a strange thing, how at great crises of our lives come feelings of anticipatory knowledge. There is, indeed, nothing new under the sun; else had Bennie been more afraid. As it was, he saw only Tesla's Smithtown tower with its head like a young mushroom. And at the same time there flashed into his memory: "Childe Harold to the Dark Tower Came." Over and over he repeated it mechanically, feeling that he might be one of those of whom the poet had sung. Yet he had not read the lines for years: