The Great White Space (16 page)

He chose for this first excursion the most massive and curious of the buildings surrounding the square; here again, there were difficulties in gaining the entrance. There was a long series of elaborately engineered ramps and ledges which we had first to surmount and then a short but exhausting flight of steps into the interior. We gained a sort of terrace at the top and turned to look back at Camp Five; the distortion of perspective there, some ten metres above the level of the square, was startling and our tents and stores appeared suspended on a heap of tumbled paving blocks.

Prescott had been left behind and on some members of our party waving, he saluted in reply; it was extraordinary to see what a fragmentary gesture it appeared, with his arm appearing completely disconected from his body. I had some fears under these weird optical conditions, even if we did meet a prospective target, and I voiced them on this occasion to Scarsdale. He said nothing but his eyes looked troubled.

We paused awhile on this balcony, taking in the bizarre and jumbled vista of Croth, its buildings seemingly all awry; from this height the distant throbbing which had long accompanied us was naturally more marked but I could not myself assign any specific direction to it. I had noted however, that the great broad central highway which had led us into the plaza continued out of it at the far side and that it pointed almost directly north. Along this the eternal warm wind blew steadily into our faces.

The outlines of the city seemed to fade into the amber- tinted dusk, now that the mist had disappeared, but none of us could make out any specific horizon or even a limit to the boundaries of Croth and my later photographs were to throw no further light upon this enigma. From first to last the exact geographical bounds of the city were to remain a mystery to us. While I photographed and the others noted, Scarsdale had been busy deciphering the inscription on the great portico of dressed stone towering high above our heads. He announced with surprise that the building appeared to be that of the city library and proposed to investigate further.

The interior of the building was free from dust of any sort and the light filtered down from the roof in the same manner in which the embalming gallery had been illuminated. The library initially was a disappointing experience from my point of view though to my companions the evening was one

of the most exciting since we had entered this fantastic underground world. If I had expected papyrus, manuscript or great sheets of vellum, I was sadly disappointed. The place, after we had ascended an interminable series of ramps, appeared to be a series of gigantic chambers, each bearing different inscriptions along the walls.

There were hundreds of great stone benches in each chamber, ranged before a large stone edifice like a lectern; set in front of the lectern parapet was a curious metallic surface, rather like a formal representation of an eye, with incised symbols in its raised contours. It appeared to be hollow and when Scarsdale's lantern flickered into its interior the pale light disclosed what looked like a primitive mechanism of metal. Facing the lectern but hundreds of metres away was a vast pale curved stone surface which projected from the wall. To my mind it resembled nothing more than a pre-historic version of a modern lecture hall in one of our universities but Scarsdale solved the enigma in an accidental and somewhat bizarre fashion.

He disappeared from our sight for a few moments round the plinth of the lectern-structure and the next moment we were blinded as light poured into the building; I am afraid that I cowered down behind one of the stone benches in rather an undignified manner while my companions were almost as much affected. In brilliantly delineated fashion and about a hundred feet high, vast symbols in the strange language burned at us on the far wall of the library. Then the room became dim again and Scarsdale's chuckle of satisfaction changed into a laugh of triumph.

'There is your library, gentlemen,' he beamed. 'This place is nothing more than a modern cinema-theatre. The information was stored something in the manner of a slide and projected on to the stone screen. What price the Lumiere Brothers now?'

There was a moment's stupefied silence and then the air was filled with amazed questions.

Van Damm went round behind the lectern with the professor, who explained that he had accidentally projected the rays of his helmet lantern down into the strange machine.

'My light source was far too strong, of course,' he explained. 'These people would have had something far subtler and less powerful, as befits the general lighting level in the ancient city of Croth. But this was undoubtedly the basis of it. There was a slide, so to speak, left in the machine. What we now have to find is the source of their power and the place where they stored their slides and we shall begin to disentangle something of the enigma of the city.'

1

The remainder of that day was spent in a fevered chaos by Scarsdale and Van Damm in particular. Though the discovery of the picture-machine in the ancient city beneath the ground was of stupefying importance from an archaeological and historical point of view it did not excite me as much as might have been supposed. Naively, I had imagined that we were to see something like early newsreel films of this long-forgotten civilisation. Instead, the reality, when it came was much more prosaic though the Professor and his scientific companions passed an evening much like that of Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter when they discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen.

In point of fact what the Great Northern Expedition had unearthed was equally as important, possibly more so, as the city of Croth had never even been suspected until Scarsdale and one or two obscure scholars had begun their researches into certain forbidden books. What Scarsdale and Van Damm had reanimated in what they came to call the Central Library of the city was, in fact, a visual method of projecting book pages so that hundreds of people could take part in readings at one time. This would not only have served the same function as our modern cinema for this ancient people but obviously took the place of printing for them, as by this method they had only to 'publish' one particular book for the entire population.

When Van Damm himself discovered the central deposits, the raison d'etre for the whole building, there was a high pitch of excitement so that I felt constrained to go back across the square to relieve Prescott, so that he could join in an occasion of outstanding interest. What the doctor and Scarsdale were so enthused about was, I had to admit to myself, something pretty spectacular in the way of breaking new ground and the Great Northern Expedition would go down in history for this alone.

What had happened was that Van Damm had accidentally dislodged a bronze knob somewhere behind the lectern; the others had felt a draught shortly after and had then noticed that a dark slot had appeared' in the rear wall of the building. The lever apparently operated an ingenious series of counterbalances, sliding back a stone door cut from one slab of material but so thinly and accurately that my colleagues found it could be pushed to and fro with one hand.

What they found within, ranged upon minutely indexed stone shelves and in elaborately inscribed storage bins, were thousands of exquisitely engraved metal cylinders. How these had been created, it was not clear, as there were no tools discernible, but no doubt, Scarsdale surmised, we would find metalworkers' shops and those of other skilled artisans within the city itself.

The cylinders contained many different 'frames' of material, each evidently representing a numbered page of a book or communication. The figures and symbols were punched with such delicacy and precision - letters like O having the central portion linked to the main symbol with exquisitely fine tracery work - that they could be projected complete to give a representation of the page upon the stone screen in the auditorium below.

When the cylinders were placed on a central pin on the machine, which presumably had some sort of light source within its hollowed-out interior, it could then be revolved to bring various faces of the work projected to the viewer's notice in proper numbered sequence. Van Damm himself had expected there to be a series of lenses, as in a modern movie projector, but this proved not to be the case.

The light, whose source remained a mystery, passed through a sort of pinhole as in that old form of camera, and by a racking device which animated the spindle, could be focused by natural light intensity, funnelling it through the metal ring on the exterior of the pulpit. We then realised that the design of the mechanism, which could only 'focus' within very narrow limits, made necessary for the whole building to be constructed to suit the apparatus. In other words, the length of the projector's 'throw' determined the point at which the rear wall screen would be built. The effect can be realised by noting the projection of a sign on a glass door when sunlight repeats the pattern on a light wall some distance away.

There was no denying the tremendous nature of this discovery, and Scarsdale and those who followed would be able to learn much of this ancient civilisation from the deciphering of the cylinders. But further examination would have to wait as we had the whole city before us, wide open for exploration. I took the first watch as sentry that night and noted that the sleep of my companions was markedly broken by the excitement of this extraordinary day.

2

The following morning Holden was left in charge of Camp Five, the inevitable machine-gun pointing its snout along the plaza in the northward direction to which we were committed. Scarsdale had decreed that for the moment we would explore only those buildings of greatest importance which lay directly on our route. It was his aim, he said, to penetrate as far to the north as possible -1 myself believed he intended to seek out the source of the strange distant throbbing — and only to explore the city in depth upon our homeward journey.

It was about ten a.m. when the party left, Scarsdale and Van Damm leading, as always, and myslf, as the least scientifically useful member of the expedition in the rear. The expendable position Prescott called it jocularly, and though we all laughed, it was a somewhat macabre joke to my mind. But perhaps Prescott was a more effective psychologist than he realised as his words served to sharpen my wits so that I kept a more than usually alert watch from my vulnerable rearward position.

The northward-leading thoroughfare, which nevertheless had a disturbing optically-distorted quality about it, led away through what in a normal city would be described as the suburbs. The size of the buildings diminished as we left the square, though they were still upon an impressive scale. The light, to which we had now become accustomed, was of the same overall strength so that we did not need any artificial aids to illuminate our way. The distant throbbing was growing more distinct as we tramped onwards for more than an hour; the structures here, into which we occasionally ventured, were nothing more than empty square boxes with no windows but merely steps upwards, a portico and a square door punched in the surface.

The material was the same steel-hard stone that we had already observed. Before we left the square proper we also ventured into one or two other large buildings but despite the inscriptions on the lintels we could not make out their purpose; one appeared to be a sort of office, with large square flat slabs of stone which might have served as counters. There were no chairs or furniture of any other kind. The floors were of the same smooth, interlocking stones which gave the aberrant optical effects I had already noted and were free of dust or detritus of any kind.

The second building seemed to be some sort of warehouse, full of jars and square vessels all sealed and there were also piles of thin stone slabs which bore incised writing in a language different to the hieroglyphs, Scarsdale said. We did not open any of the sealed jars or boxes, in view of our previous experiences in the embalming gallery. The roadway led slightly uphill, always due north, and with other roads, built on a smaller scale running at exact mathematical radii from it; almost always at rightangles. Just before noon we came to a sensational innovation, a strange, four-arched bridge, that seemed to be suspended from either side of a large stream about forty feet wide, but of some unknown engineering principle as the bottoms of the arches nowhere appeared to touch the water.

This caused a great deal of excited speculation between Scarsdale, Van Damm and Prescott and it was quite some while before any of us ventured on it, as it seemed so frail. It proved to be of some unfamiliar metal and even more bizarre, nowhere was there any evidence of nuts, bolts, rivets or welding as known in the modern world.

Scarsdale summed it up well when he turned to me and said, 'If I didn't know the thing was impossible I would say that this whole structure was carved from one block of metal by some gigantic force.'

Van Damm's face was white as he gazed around him in the gloom.

'Just why do you say it is impossible, Professor?' he said quietly. 'I should say this is one word which it would be unwise to use down here, judging by what we've already seen.'

It was the only time I had seen Scarsdale at a loss for words. He coughed awkwardly and shifted his huge feet in the riding boots.

'Perhaps you're right. Van Damm,' he said mildly. 'One cannot always judge properly without all the relevant data. I should perhaps have qualified my remarks.'

Van Damm said nothing in reply but went to the smoothly burnished balcony of the bridge, which ran in a shining, slightly curved arc to the further shore. He gazed down into the turgid, rippling water, which gave off a slight luminescence. There was a current here and it ran back in the direction from which we had come. I ventured to say that this river probably drained into the lake which we had crossed and was gratified to learn that the leaders of the party were already of the same opinion.

Nothing showed on the surface of the river; there appeared to be no life in the depths; and no flotsam or any other debris was carried down. At least, not while we were there and we lingered for an hour in that strange spot.