The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (68 page)

“I say, I say,”
Sidwell-Blue put in. He had long since recovered his pipe and was puffing
furiously away at it, challenging the ability of the air-circulator to keep up
with his production of bluish smoke. “I say, are you
sure
this won’t be
dangerous? Perhaps we should try this another time, don’t you know.”

From her position in a
corner of the cabin, Captain Alexandre put in, “Quite sure, Sir Shepley. There
is nothing to fear.”

“And as for another
time,” Speranza Verde put in, “do you know how long it is since Moses parted
the Red Sea? That is how often this peculiar phenomenon occurs. If we do not
take advantage of our opportunity, we will all be several thousand years old
before another such presents itself.”

“Well,” Sidwell-Blue
stammered, “well, if you’re really certain, C-Captain. And, ah, D-Doktor. But,
but, it strikes me that this is a dashedly dangerous undertaking. You know, I’ve
always worked in the museum, don’t you know. This is all quite new to me, this
racing about like a pack of Alan Quatermains and Captain Nemos.”

Out of the corner of his
eye Colonel White saw what appeared to be a grey-cloaked and death-white-masked
figure streak across the room and launch itself through the ait. It bounced off
the paunch of the unsuspecting Herr Schwartz, eliciting a startled grunt and a
violent exclamation, then landed with a skid in the centre of the nautical
chart that had been spread on the conference table.

“The apologies of
Rosny,
Mein Herr,” Captain Alexandre laughed.
“Madame et Messieurs, may
I
present My Lady Bast, our ship’s mascot and mouser par
excellence.”

The large cat studied
each of the conferees in turn, directing a piercing glance from golden eyes
that punctuated a snowy white face while she twitched her powder-grey tail
thoughtfully. She made her opinion obvious, redirecting her attention from the
conferees to the task of washing her paws.

“You should not barnyard
animals on a ship carry,” Herr Schwartz growled, “unless they are cargo to
market being transported.”

Captain Alexandre
ignored the German’s complaint. She stroked the luxurious fur; My Lady Bast
twitched her ears in response. Captain Alexandre compared the time according to
her watch, with that indicated by the ship’s clock. She nodded to the
hydrologist, Speranza Verde, then to the others. “I think it is time to begin
your explorations. I will remain aboard
Rosny. You
understand the
constraints of time under which you operate.”

At Captain Alexandre’s
command the submersible rose to the surface of the Fleuve Triste. Colonel White
found himself standing between Dottore Verde and Monsieur Rouge. A polished
metal railing surrounded
Rosny’s
deck. Sea water dripped from it and ran
from the submersible’s deck into the fleuve.

The sky above was still
black. The tropic stars blazed like the flames that astronomers stated that
they were.

Each of the explorers
carried an electro-atomic powered portable lantern. Further, Colonel White
noted to his amusement that the costume of each showed a mysterious bulge which
he took to reveal the presence of a clandestinely carried firearm. Even Dottore
Verde was so armed. Her weapon, he inferred, was most likely a small but
efficient Gilsenti automatic pistol.

Now the sun’s first rays
illumined the western sky, and within moments the edge of the solar disk
appeared over the waters of the Sahara Sea. Bright points of light danced
across the brine.

At this moment a buzzing
sound was heard, and Colonel White along with his companions turned his eyes
skyward. The daily flight from Rome to Serkout appeared, the sun’s early rays
reflecting off its polished metal exterior. The Bleriot trimotor’s propellers
were powered by Curie electro-atomic engines similar to those that furnished
Rosny’s
propulsion. The aeroplane’s passengers, business travellers, tourists,
diplomats, might well be gazing downward at
Rosny
even as
Rosny’s
explorers
were gazing upward at the Bleriot.

Now there came a great
rushing, roaring sound; the submersible rocked, bounced once, and settled on to
the rocky sand at the bottom of the Fleuve Triste. The Curie engine hummed and
the submersible’s Wells tracks found their footing on the sand and steadied the
submersible.

“Alors,”
Captain Alexandre announced with a smile,
“Madame et Messieurs,
we are here. You have my permission to depart my ship. I wish you well, and
shall expect your safe return in four hours, thirty-two minutes, sixteen
seconds.”

She exchanged handshakes
with Jemond Jules Rouge and Shepley Sidwell-Blue. Herr Schwartz instead offered
a bow and click of his heels. With Speranza Verde she exchanged a brief
embrace, and with Colonel Dwight David White a crisp military salute.

The explorers clambered
down the ship’s ladder. Standing on the still moist sand of the Fleuve Triste
they found it drying rapidly. The tropical sun seemed to have sprung into a
brilliant and cloudless sky. Here and there specks of crystal in the Sahara
sand reflected as points of brilliance.

Speranza Verde had
brought with her the Roentgen-Daguerre plates that she had shown David White
the night before, and Herr Schwartz carried a smaller version of the nautical
chart that had been left on the conference table aboard
Rosny.

A grey and white streak
whizzed past the exploration party, raced up a sandy hillock and disappeared.

“That, was M-My Lady
Bast, My Lady Bast!” Sir Shepley Sidwell-Blue exclaimed. “The creature will be lost.
The- w-water will rush back in f-our hours and she will be Most.”

“Too bad for her,” Herr
Schwartz growled. “But a good thing she did, the way showing us to the finds.”
He held the map before him and pointed in the direction My Lady Bast had taken.
“March!” he commanded.

My Lady Bast had left
behind a track of feline footprints in the drying sand. The explorers followed
the cat’s trail. The sun’s rays had already dispersed the chill of night air,
and this small stretch of seabed was assuming the torrid glare it had known
before the creation of the world’s newest sea.

Upon reaching the crest
of a hillock the explorers were able to look back and see the submersible
Rosny
resting upon her Wells treads. Sailors moved on her decks polishing
metalwork and cleaning hardwood, looking for all the world like miniatures
performing in a puppet theatre. And in the other direction appeared a vision
denied to human eyes by the dark waters of the Sahara Sea for three decades,
and before that by the white sands of the erstwhile Sahara Desert for ten times
as many millennia.

These were the rocks,
dressed and polished, rising but a short distance from their position, that hid
the secret of the Sahara.

Herr Siegfried Schwartz
and Sir Shipley Sidwell-Blue raced ahead and dropped to their knees. Bending to
examine the carven rocks on which they knelt, the ill-matched pair resembled
nothing more than two worshippers come to make obeisance at an ancient shrine.

The uppermost rocks of
the formation reflected the sun’s rays with a white brilliance; those lower in
the ancient structure were still protected from direct illumination by the
intervening crest. Schwartz and Sidwell-Blue were running their hands over the
carven rocks, studying the figures placed there untold ages before by hands
long since turned to dust.

As the sun’s
illumination spread and the shadows crept away solar brightness struck a
glittering point so cleverly concealed within the intricacies of a carving as
to be for all practical purposes invisible. As it did so the rock in which it
had rested for thousands of years in utter darkness fell away from the kneeling
explorers. There was exposed before them a dark opening, its walls as smooth
and as carefully crafted as those of the Great Pyramid of Cheops.

There was a flash of
grey as My Lady Bast, returning from someplace of concealment, streaked past
the explorers and disappeared into the blackness.

Herr Schwartz switched
on his electro-atomic lantern and sent its rays into the blackness, flashing
them this way and that. Still on his knees, the German started down the
passageway. As he did so — Colonel White took note — he reached inside his
jacket and drew a weapon which White immediately identified as a Bergmann Model
Five automatic pistol.

As Schwartz disappeared
into the darkness he was followed by Jumond Jules Rouge and Speranza Verde,
each brandishing a lantern and a firearm; Rouge’s weapon was a Lebel revolver
and Verde the Gilsenti that White had expected.

Sir Shepley Sidwell-Blue
alone stepped aside as Colonel White moved toward the opening. “I th-think it
would be b-best if one of us s-stood guard out here, C-Colonel, don’t you know?
Just in case, w-well, don’t you know, in case of need.”

David White nodded and
followed Speranza Verde into the darkness.

The tunnel slanted
downward into bedrock. To David White’s surprise the air tasted fresh. He could
see only a short distance ahead, thanks to the procession of bodies, but at
length he heard a grunt and a guttural exclamation, followed by a series of
increasingly excited vocalizations as first Schwartz, then Rouge, than Speranza
Verde emerged from the slanting passage.

White paused
momentarily, pointing his lantern this way and that, then dropped the few feet
from the mouth of the passageway into the chamber. Two men and a woman had
separated in the chamber; flashing beams from their lanterns criss-crossed in a
virtual museum of unknowable antiquity. Statues cast great monolithic shadows
in the flashing lantern-beams. Some were tiny and were exhibited on plinths as
high as his own waist; others were of human size. At the far end of the chamber
a figure rose to herculean heights, its details concealed by distance and
darkness.

The walls were covered
with paintings that appeared as fresh as though they had been created this very
day. The scenes portrayed were those of nature, of forests and rivers, of
hippopotami and crocodiles and okapi, the beasts that must have roamed the
once-fertile plains of the Sahara before it had dried to form the desert now
covered by the waters of the sea.

Colonel White paced
slowly past paintings executed with impressive craftsmanship and skill, Yet
there was something disquieting and unpleasant about the images.

The paintings, he
inferred, represented a chronology, for after a time there appeared among the
beasts of the forest primitive human figures, and even more disquietingly,
other figures that were those of neither humans nor beasts, but of something .
. . other. He thought briefly of the fierce-looking lantern fish that had
studied the explorers through the cabin glass of
Rosny
even as they had
studied it.

The lantern fish, of
course, was fitted by nature with fins for propulsion and with a form adapted
to life beneath the surface of the sea. But the creatures in the paintings
appeared as if they were distant evolutionary relatives of the lantern fish,
great, pop-eyed, piscine beings. White remembered a lecture in a long-ago
classroom, where he had heard a savant expound upon the theory that whales,
dolphins, sea lions and seals had all evolved from marine creatures on to the
land, and had then returned at some time to their ancestral home to become once
again creatures of the deep.

Could the unpleasant
beings pictured on the carven walls have followed a parallel but opposite
evolutionary path, emerging from the sea to live on the surface of the earth
even as mammals were returning from the land to live beneath the sea?

More panels of ancient
art revealed an ongoing march of progress, if progress it might be called, as
both humans and piscines advanced. Cities appeared, and great sky-going
machines. The two civilizations developed side by side but there was little
commerce and no friendship between them, until in a series of paintings
portraying a terrible war the human civilization was destroyed and that of the
fish-men emerged triumphant.

There was a yowl from
the end of the gallery and White whirled to see My Lady Bast rising on her hind
legs, her coat standing on end to give her the appearance of a beast three
times her actual size. Her paws were raised and her sabre-like claws were
extended. Her needle-sharp teeth seemed to have grown into the fangs of a
feline many times her size but no less outraged than was My Lady Bast.

She stood poised before
the great statue that ended the gallery, and as Colonel White and his
companions stood in stupefaction she dropped to all fours, ran forward,
launched herself into the air and caught at the convolutions of the lowermost
part of the statue.

The brilliant beams of
four Curie lanterns followed the cat as she clawed and fought her way upward on
the statue. The thing was monstrous, a variant of the horrible image that
Speranza Verde had shown Colonel White the night before.

The thing was fitted
with tentacle-like stalks, uncounted numbers of them, some terminating in
sucker-like mouths, others in shining eyes. It had a head, or what must serve
as a head, shaped like a five-pointed star, each extremity of this bearing a
great, dark eye.