The Dweller in the Gulf
Clark Ashton Smith
Swelling and towering swiftly, like a genie loosed from one of Solomon’s bottles, the cloud rose on the planet’s rim. A rusty and colossal column, it strode above the dead plain, through a sky that was dark as the brine of desert seas that have ebbed to desert pools.
‘Looks like a blithering sandstorm,’ commented Maspic.
‘It can’t very well be anything else,’ agreed Bellman rather curtly. ‘Any other kind of storm is unheard of in these regions. It’s the sort of hell-twister that the Aithais call the zoorth — and it’s coming our way, too. I move that we start looking for shelter. I’ve been caught in the zoorth before, and I don’t recommend a lungful of that ferruginous dust.’
‘There’s a cave in the old river bank, to the right,’ said Chivers, the third member of the party, who had been searching the desert with restless, falcon-like eyes.
The trio of earthmen, hard-bitten adventurers who disdained the services of Martian guides, had started five days before from the outpost of Ahoom, into the uninhabited region called the Chaur. Here, in the beds of great rivers that had not flowed for cycles, it was rumored that the pale, platinum-like gold of Mars could be found lying in heaps, like so much salt. If fortune were propitious, their years of somewhat unwilling exile on the red planet would soon be at an end. They had been warned against the Chaur, and had heard some queer tales in Ahoom regarding the reasons why former prospectors had not returned. But danger, no matter how dire or exotic, was merely a part of their daily routine. With a fair chance of unlimited gold at the journey’s end, they would have gone down through Hinnom.
Their food-supplies and water-barrels were carried on the backs of three of those curious mammals called vortlups, which with their elongated legs and necks, and horny-plated bodies, might seemingly have been some fabulous combination of llama and saurian. These animals though extravagantly ugly, were tame and obedient, and were well adapted to desert travel, being able to go without water for months at a time.
For the past two days they had followed the mile-wide course of a nameless ancient river, winding among hills that had dwindled to mere hummocks through aeons of exfoliation. They had found nothing but worn boulders, pebbles and fine rustly sand. Heretofore the sky had been silent and stirless; and nothing moved on the river-bottom, whose stones were bare even of dead lichen. The malignant column of the zoorth, twisting and swelling toward them, was the first sign of animation they had discerned in that lifeless land.
Prodding their vortlups with the iron-pointed goads which alone could elicit any increase of speed from these sluggish monsters, the earthmen started off toward the cavern-mouth descried by Chivers. It was perhaps a third of a mile distant, and was high up in the shelving shore.
The zoorth had blotted out the sun ere they reached the bottom of the ancient slope, and they moved through a sinister twilight that was colored like dried blood. The vortlups, protesting with unearthly bellows, began to climb the beach, which was marked off in a series of more or less regular steps that indicated the slow recession of its olden waters. The column of sand, rising and whirling formidably, had reached the opposite bank when they came to the cavern.
This cavern was in the face of a low cliff of iron-veined rock The entrance had crumbled down in heaps of ferro-oxide and dark basaltic dust, but was large enough to admit with ease the earthmen and their laden beasts of burden. Darkness, heavy as if with a weaving of black webs, clogged the interior. They could form no idea of the cave’s dimensions till Bellman got out an electric torch from his bale of belongings and turned its prying heam into the shadows.
The torch served merely to reveal the beginnings of a chamber of indeterminate size that ran backward into night, widening gradually, with a floor that was worn smooth as if by vanished waters. The opening had grown dark with the onset of the zoorth, A weird moaning as of baffled demons filled the ears of the explorers, and particles of atom-like sand were blown in upon them, stinging their hands and faces like powdered adamant.
‘The storm will last for half an hour, at least,’ said Bellman. ‘Shall we go on into the cave? Probably we won’t find anything of much interest or value, But the exploration will serve to kill time. Aod we might happen on a few violet rubies or amber-yellow sapphires, such as are sometimes discovered in these desert caverns. You two had better bring along your torches also, and flash them on the walls and ground as we go.’
His companions thought the suggestion worth following. The vortlups, wholly insensible to the blowing sand in their scaly mail, were left behind near the entrance. Chivers, Bellman and Maspic, with their torch-beams tearing a dotted gloom that had perhaps never known the intrusion of light in all its former cycles, went on into the widening cave.
The place was bare, with the death-like emptiness of some long-deserted catacomb. Its rusted floor and walls returned no gleam or sparkle to the playing lights. It sloped downward at an easy gradient, and the sides were water-marked at a height of six or seven feet. No doubt it had been in earlier aeons the channel of an underground offshoot from the river. It had been swept clean of all detritus, and was like the anterior of some Cyclopean conduit that might give upon a sub-Martian Erebus.
None of the three adventurers was overly imaginative or prone to nervousness. But all were beset by certain odd impressions. Behind the arras of cryptic silence, time and again, they seemed to hear a faint whisper, like the sigh of sunken seas far down at some hemispheric depth. The air was tinged with a slight and doubtful darkness, and they felt the stirring of an almost imperceptible draft upon their faces. Oddest of all was the hint of a nameless odor, reminding them both of ammal dens and the peculiar smell of Martian dwellings.
‘Do you suppose we’ll encounter any kind of life?’ said Maspic, sniffing the air dubiously.
‘Not likely?.’ Bellman dismissed the query with his usual curtness. ‘Even the wild vortlups avoid the Chaur.’
‘But there’s certainly a touch of dampness in the air,’ persisted Maspic. ‘That means water, somewhere; and if there is water, there may be life also — perhaps of a dangerous kind.’
‘We’ve got our revolvers,’ said Bellman. ‘But I doubt if we’ll need them — as long as we don’t meet rival gold-hunters from the Earth,’ he added cynically.
‘Listen.’ The semi-whisper came from Chivers. ‘Do you fellows hear anything?’
All three had paused. Somewhere in the gloom ahead, they heard a prolonged, equivocal noise that baffled the ear with incongruous elements. It was a sharp rustling and rattling as, of metal dragged over rock; and also it was somehow like the smacking of myriad wet, enormous mouths. Anon it deceded and died out at a level that was seemingly far below.
‘That’s queer.’ Bellman seemed to make a reluctant admission.
‘What is it? ‘ queried Chivers. ‘One of the millipedal underground monsters, half a mile long, that the Martians tell about?’
‘You’ve been hearing too many native fairy-tales,’ reproved Bellman. ‘No terrestrial has ever seen anything of that kind. Many deep-lying caverns on Mars have been thoroughly explored; but those in desert regions, such as the Chaur, were devoid of life. I can’t imagine what could have made that noise; but, in the interests of science, I’d like to go on and find out.’
‘I’m beginning to feel creepy,’ said Maspic. ‘But I’m game if you others are.’
Without further argument or comment, the three continued their advance into the cave. They had been walking at a fair gait for fifteen minutes, and were now at least half a mile from the entrance. The floor was steepening, as if it had been the bed of a torrent. Also, the conformation of the walls had changed: on either hand there were high shelves of metallic stone and columnated recesses which the flashed rays of the torches could not always fathom.
The air had grown heavier, the dampness unmistakable. There was a breath of stagnant ancient waters. That other smell as of wild beasts and Aihai dwellings, also tainted the gloom with its clinging fetor.
Bellman was leading the way. Suddenly his torch revealed the verge of a precipice, where the olden channel ended sheerly and the shelves and walls pitched away on each side into incalculable space. Going to the very edge, he dipped his pencil of light down the abyss, disclosing only the vertical cliff that fell at his feet into darkness with no apparent bottom. The beam also failed to reach the further shore of the gulf, which might have been many leagues in extent.