Terrors (28 page)

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 theater. 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 gray as
My Lady Bast, returning from some place 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
the 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 onto 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 the cat 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 saber-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 the Speranza Curie 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.

Most horrifying of all, David White stood paralyzed with shock and fear. And know well, even the noblest of men know fear; it is the overcoming of this experience that comprises true courage. That which had paralyzed White was the sight of the five points of the statue’s face writhing
and turning, turning horribly, until the eyes focussed upon My Lady Bast the cat.

From all directions, tentacles tipped with horrid mouths and rows of teeth resembling those of giant, extinct sharks, wove toward My Lady Bast. From the cat there came a blood-freezing scream of raging ferocity as the pleasantly disposed ship’s mascot was transformed into a whirlwind of fury and violence.

My Lady
Bast flew from the grasping, mouth-tipped tentacles, the points of her claws leaving a trail of punctures from which there spurted a steaming green ichor. Blobs of the foul liquid splashed on the great paving stones with which the room was floored. Each point of contact was transformed into a miniature cauldron that seethed and bubbled and from which a noxious greenish vapor arose.

The cat by
now had reached the star-shaped head of the monstrous
living statue. Using the claws of two paws while she clung to the monstrous visage with the others, she shredded one baleful eye, then moved to the next and the next. The monstrous living statue yielded to a series of spasms.

David White, watching the incredible battle of a feline analog of his Biblical namesake against this titanic alien
Goliath, realized to his astonishment that the star-headed monster was actually terrified. He was aware that Siegfried Schwartz had drawn his Bergmann automatic and was firing at the monstrosity. Other members of the exploring party, Rouge, Sidwell-Blue, Speranza Verde, had drawn their own weapons and were pointing them upward.

Bounding forward to place himself between his comrades and the monster,
David White waved his arms and cried out, “Careful! Careful! Don’t hit the cat!”

Even as the sound of two revolvers and an automatic pistol echoed off the walls and ceiling of the chamber, the great monstrosity, blinded now and bleeding green ichor from its wounds, gave forth a mighty roar that echoed and re-echoed through the hall. It gave a mighty spasm and My Lady Bast, the gray and white
warrior, her grasp on the star-shaped head broken by the jolt, was flung from the monster. As if fully accustomed to flight she soared through the darkened reached of the tomb, falling at last into the welcoming arms of Colonel David White.

But this was no gentle pussy. My Lady Bast had been transformed into a warrior-goddess and she was not so quick to resume her domestic mien. Raking claws
shredded White’s military tunic and suddenly terrifying fangs snapped within millimetres of his eye, removing a gobbet of flesh just at his cheekbone. Then My Lady Bast flexed powerful legs, launched herself from his torso and disappeared into the darkness of the tomb.

Rouge, Schwartz and Verde had advanced cautiously toward the monster. In its great spasm it had flung itself from its plinth
and lay thrashing on the stone floor. Its mouths seemed to possess the power of speech independent of one another, and they uttered sounds that resembled human speech as a horrid parody of the human form might resemble a beautiful woman.

Siegfried Schwartz, surely crude and perhaps cruel as well, was by no means lacking in courage. He had advanced to within an arm’s reach of the monster and was
speaking to it in a language which David
White did not understand, but which he inferred to be that of ancient Egypt. Astonishingly, the monster seemed to hear and understand the German archaeologist, and to reply in a strange and terrible variant of the same language.

Without warning the monster managed to raise itself halfway to a vertical position. It turned its eye-tipped tentacles toward
the roof of the chamber.

There, its rays focussed through a lens of tinted mica, the sun casting a single, bright beam into the chamber. The beam had obviously been aimed, how many millennia before there was no way of calculating. In its light one of the painted panels on the tomblike wall seemed almost to come to life.

A row of half-human figures knelt in postures of worship. There was a man
with the head of a falcon, a woman with the features of a lioness, a hawk-man, a woman in the grotesque form of a hippopotamus, a being with a human body and the head of a crocodile. David White did not know their names, but he recognized them as Egyptian deities. And they were kneeling in submission.

Before them stood a party of star-headed, tentacled monsters like the one whose statue had seemingly
come to life only to be slain by the ferocity of a ship’s gray and white mascot. And behind the alien beings could be seen a sleek machine, obviously a vehicle that had brought it occupants from some home unimaginable to mere humanity.

From the shadowed passageway through which the explorers had entered the tomb there came an echoing voice. “It’s time,” came the voice of Sir Shepley Sidwell-Blue.
“We’d b-best get back to
Rosny
. Our t-time is r-running out.”

The explorers turned toward the passageway. Jemond Jules Rouge leading the way, followed by Speranza Verde and Siegfried Schwartz, preceded Colonel Dwight David White into the passage. White realized that they had all been so busy in dealing with the wonders and terrors of the tomb that they had forgotten the time. It was a good thing
that the Englishman had stayed outside the tomb, keeping track of the passing hours.

Once outside the tomb the party formed up and moved off in the direction of the temporarily dry bed of the Fleuve Triste.

They had gone only a score of paces when Sidwell-Blue cried out, “Halt!” The decisive and authoritarian utterance from the hitherto timid and uncertain Englishman startled the others into
obedience.
To their disbelieving eyes Sidwell-Blue ran back toward the dark opening in the rock. He disappeared into the shadowed passageway. Minutes passed. David White studied his own pocket watch, performed a rapid mental calculation and said, “If we don’t move quickly we’ll be trapped by the returning Marée.”

“But we cannot leave poor Sir Shepley in that tomb!” Speranza Verde cried. She started
back toward the rock sepulchre, followed by the others, but before she could reach the opening Sir Shepley Sidwell-Blue emerged into the Saharan sunlight, My Lady Bast nestled comfortably in his arms.

As they approached the submersible
Rosny
a mighty aqueous roar was heard and two walls of water became visible, speeding toward them from both directions. The explorers ran at top speed to the submersible
and scrambled up
Rosny’s
boarding ladder. Captain Alexandre herself had awaited them, and followed them into the submersible, counting off as they descended:

“Rouge.”

“Schwartz.”

“Blue.”

“Verde.”

“White.”

“My Lady Bast.”