On, on they went, through ebon hours that belonged to no diurnal period. Slowly, tortuously, the road curved inward, as if it were coiled about the interior of a blind and cosmic Babel. The earthnen felt that they must have circled the abyss many times in that terrific spiral; but the distance they had gone, and the actual extent of the stupefying gulf, were inconceivable.
Except for their torches, the night was absolute, unchangeable. It was older than the sun, it had brooded there through all past aeons. It accumulated above them like a monstrous burden; it yawned frightfully beneath. From it, the strengthening stench of stagnant waters rose. But still there was no sound, other than the soft and measured thud of marching feet that descended into a bottomless Abaddon.
Somewhere, as if after the lapse of nocturnal ages, the pitward rushing had ceased. Bellman, Chivers and Maspic felt the pressure of crowded bodies relax; felt that they were standing still, while their brains continued to beat the unhuman measure of that terrible descent.
Reason — and horror — returned to them slowly. Bellman lifted his flashlight, and the circling ray recovered the throng of Martians, many of whom were dispersing in a huge cavern where the gulf-circling road had now ended. Others of the beings remained, however, as if to keep guard over the earthmen. They quivered alertly at Bellman’s movements, as if aware of them through an unknown sense.
Close at hand, on the right, the level floor ended abruptly; and stepping to the verge, Bellman saw that the cavern was an open chamber in the perpendicular wall. Far, far below in the blackness, a phosphorescent glimmer played to and fro, like noctilucae on an underworld ocean. A slow, fetid wind blew upon him; and he heard the weird sighing of waters about the sunken cliff’s: waters that had ebbed through untold cycles, during the planet’s desiccation.
He turned giddily away. His companions were examining the cave’s interior. It seemed that the place was of artificial origin; for, darting here and there, the torch-beams brought out enormous columnations lined with deeply graven basreliefs. Who had carved them or when, were problems no less insoluble than the origin of the cliff-hewn road. Their details were obscene as the visions of madness; they shocked the eye like a violent blow, couveying an extra-human evil, a bottomless malignity, in the passing moment of disclosure.
The cave was indeed of stupendous extent, running far back in the cliff, and with numerous exits, giving, no doubt, on further ramifications. The beams of the flashlights half dislodged the flapping shadows of shelved recesses; caught the salients of far walls that climbed and beetled into inaccessible gloom; played on the creatures that went to and fro like monstrous living fungi; gave to a brief visual existence the pale and polyp-like plants that clung noisomely to the nighted stone.
The place was overpowering, it oppressed the senses, crushed the brain. The very stone was like an embodiment of darkness; and light and vision were ephemeral intruders in this demesne of the blind. Somehow, the earthmen were weighed down by a conviction that escape was impossible. A strange lethargy claimed them. They did not even discuss their situation, but stood listless and silent.
Anon, from the filthy gloom, a number of the Martians reappeared. With the same suggestion of controlled automatism that had marked all their actions, they gathered about the men once more, and urged them into the yawning cavern.
Step by step, the three were borne along in that weird and leprous procession. The obscene columns multiplied, the cave deepened before them with endless vistas, like a revelation of foul things that drowse at the nadir of night. Faintly at first, but more strongly as they went on, there came to them an insidious feeling of somnolence, such as might have been caused by mephitical effluvia. They rebelled against it, for the drowsiness was somehow dark and evil. It grew heavier upon them and then they came to the core of the horror.
Between the thick and seemingly topless pillars, the floor ascended in an altar of seven oblique and pyramidal tiers. On the top, there squatted an image of pale metal: a thing no larger than a hare, but monstrous beyond all imagining.
The queer, unnatural drowsiness seemed to increase upon the earthnen as they stared at the image. Behind them, the Martians thronged with a restless forward movement, like worshippers who gather before an idol. Bellman felt a clutching hand on his arm. Turning, he found at his elbow an astounding and wholly unlooked for apparition. Though pale and filthy as the cave-dwellers, and with gaping orbits in lieu of eyes, the being was, or had formerly been, a man! He was barefooted, and was clad only in a few rags of khaki that had seemingly rotted away with use and age. His white beard and hair were matted with slime, were full of unmentionable remnants. Once, he had been tall as Bellman; but now he was bowed to the height of the dwarfish Martians, and was dreadfully emaciated. He trembled as if with ague, and an almost idiotic look of hopelessness and terror was stamped on the wreck of his lineamemts.
‘My God! who are you?’ cried Bellman, shocked into full wakefulness.
For a few moments, the man gibbered unintelligibly, as if he had forgotten the words of human speech, or could no longer articulate them. Then he croaked feebly, with many pauses and incoherent breaks, ‘You are earthmen! earthmen! They told me you had been captured… even as they captured me… I was an archaeologist once… My name was Chalmers… John Chalmers. It was years ago… I don’t know how many years. I came into the Chaur to study some of the old ruins. They got me — these creatures of the pit… I have been here ever since. There is no escape… The Dweller takes care of that.’
‘But who are these creatures? And what do they want with us?’ queried Bellman.
Chalmers seemed to collect his ruined faculties. His voice became clearer and steadier.
‘They are a degenerate remnant of the Yorhis, the old Martian race that flourished before the Aihais. Everyone believes them to be extinct. The ruins of some of their cities are still extant in the Chaur. As far as I can learn (I am able to speak their language now) this tribe was driven underground by the dehydration of the Chaur, and they followed the ebbing waters of a sub-Martian lake that lies at the bottom of this gulf. They are little more than animals now, and they worship a weird monster that lives in the lake… the Dweller… the thing that walks on the cliff. The small idol that you see on the altar is an image of that monster. They are about to hold one of their religious ceremonies; and they want you to take part in it. I am to instruct you… It will be the beginning of your initiation into the life of the Yorhis.’
Bellman and his companions, listening to the strange declaration of Chalmers, felt a mixture of nightmarish revulsion and wonder. The white, eyeless, filthy-bearded face of the creature before them seemed to bear a hint of the same degradation that they saw in the cave-dwelling people. Somehow, the man was hardly human. But, no doubt, he had broken down through the horror of his long captivity in darkness, amid an alien race. They felt themselves among abhorrent mysteries; and the empty orbits of Chalmers prompted a question that none of them could ask.
‘What is this ceremony? ‘ said Bellman, after an interval,
‘Come, and I’ll show you.’ There was queer eagerness in Chalmers’ broken voice. He plucked at Bellman’s sleeve, and began to ascend the pyramid with an ease and sureness of footing that bespoke a long familiarity. Like dreamers in a dream, Bellman, Chivers and Maspic followed him
The image resembled nothing they had ever seen on the red planet — or elsewhere. It was carven of a strange metal that seemed whiter and softer even than gold, and it represented a humped animal with a smooth and overhanging carapace from beneath which its head and members issued in tortoise fashion. The head was venomously flat, triangular — and eyeless. From the drooping corners of the cruelly slitted mouth, two long proboscides curved upward, hollow and cup-like at the ends. The thing was furnished with a series of short legs, issuing at uniform intervals from under the carapace; and a curious double tail was coiled and braided beneath its crouching body. The feet were round; and had the shape of small, inverted goblets.
Unclean and bestial as a figment of some atavistic madness, the eidolon seemed to drowse on the altar. It troubled the mind with a slow, insidious horror; it assailed the senses with an emanating stupor, an effluence as of primal worlds before the creation of light, where life might teem and raven sloth- fully in the blind ooze.