"There's an open grave for you, Strong," he whispered to me, clutching my arm until his finger-nails almost pierced the flesh; "there's the road to hell's gate! Look at it, man! You shall rot in that darkness until the end of time; your bones shall lie there until fire strikes the mountain and the dead come forth! That's Black, the great Captain; that's where he's leading us, into the pit, I tell you—the pit—the pit!" And he frothed at the lips as though the fires of a madman's death already tortured his brain. It was a dreadful thing to hear, and I pushed him away, but could not escape him.
"There's rushing water through the tunnel, and a cascade," he went on; "the legend tells of it; the hillmen have it in their songs. Let the ship pass through, and we will see the night and the stars; but let the rock grip her in its fangs and what then, Strong—what then? A thousand years and our bones will wash to and fro in that pit of the sea; a thousand years and our skulls will grin in the darkness of the vault. That's the great Captain, I say; that's where he's leading us. My God, into the pit of hell—the pit of hell——"
He turned from me with a great cry which long years of agony might have wrung from a damned soul, and, shutting the pit from his eyes, I saw him creep down the ladder toward his cabin, wherein, I did not doubt, he would drug himself to insensibility, as he had so often done before. When he was gone I heard Black commanding the hands to come aboard, and right willingly he was answered. Immediately now there were lanterns dancing upon our decks and the cry of man to man, the casting free of hawsers, the rattling of chains. With a last look about him, up at the vault as though the stars would shine upon him, down at the ship as though she were his last hope in this world, the Captain roared a long farewell to the Caves of Vares. He was jesting again when he entered the conning-tower and bade me follow him.
"Good night, my Spanish monkeys; a long good night to ye. When I come back, take care of yourselves, or your tails will be shorter, by the powers! You thought to trap me, did you? Well, here's my answer to you, lousy swine that ye are; here's my answer to ye——"
He spat with unutterable contempt into the clear water, and so descended into the tower. If I had any consolation when I followed him it was to see our projectors throwing their monstrous beams of light once more upon the black river, and to know that they would guide us through the tunnel. Hot thoughts of our perils came crowding upon the fetid atmosphere of the ship when the caps of steel shut us in at last; but no thought which could stifle that hope of God's heaven which lay beyond the blackness of the caverns. And to this the wide beams pointed as they searched the waters of the tunnel, and disclosed its heart as man had never beheld it since the beginning of the world.
The water in the pool was very deep, I imagine. We sank to the rim of the conning-tower, and our main window still being above the current, we went at a snail's pace toward the orifice. There was not a sound and hardly a ripple upon the mirror of the sea. When the walls of rock closed in upon us, they drew so near together that an outstretched hand could have touched them; the roof bent down ominously and forced us at last to sink entirely, and thus to shut the danger from our eyes. Upon a dial before us, a clever instrument of Guichard's designing, the fathoms were recorded, just as though a leadsman had been in the chains. I saw, to my wonder, that the river ran to a depth of fifty feet here in these narrows. Black observed this at the same time, and his spirit leaped at it. Presently, however, he took the receiver of our sea telephone into his hands, and when he had listened a little while, his brow puckered and he handed the instrument to me.
"What do you make of that, my lad?"
"A sound of rushing water, Captain, or it might be a boat moving on ahead of us."
"There'll be no boat in the river of Vares. What makes you think it's a boat?"
I told him that the sounds were not constant, and might well stand for the rise and fall of oars in the surge; at which he took the receiver back and clapped it to his own ear.
"There'll be no boat hereabout," he said almost with contempt. "The Spanish rats speak of a cascade, and that's what you're hearing. You there, Marchand! Give 'em three bells in the engine-room, and let's have more light. Be d——d to the boat; there'll be none in the river of Vares."
The bells rang out clearly, and were answered almost immediately by a great flood of white light, which pierced the dark waters as with a tremendous arrow of radiance and showed us every crevice of the tunnel. A third projector, and this of gigantic size, had been added to the other two, and its radiating beam was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in all my life. You could almost count the flakes of weed in the stream about us. Rocks became nuggets of pure gold; the roof above us was a sheen of green and silver, the sand sparkled as with the powder of crushed diamonds. Such, I say, was the picture revealed to our wondering eyes. The terror came later and not less swiftly.
Marchand, the Frenchman, was the first to perceive it, and so did the thing affright him that he cried out aloud and clutched the Captain's arm. Upon that there comes a fearful oath to his lips, and, dragging us both to the glass, he showed us the horrible shape of a gigantic devil-fish. Such a fearsome thing in such a place, the eyes of it staring in our own, the eight arms extended as the gnarled boughs of a tree, was beyond all imagination unlooked for. For one long instant I beheld the revolting spectacle; then, in a flash, the scene was hidden; the water became black as jet; the Zero rocked as though a great sea had struck her.
I have many memories of this dreadful scene, but none which could convey to others the divers horrors of it or one tithe of its awful reality. Not at the first, perhaps, did it come to us that the devil-fish had gripped his arms about the rim of the conning-tower, and thus rocked us to and fro as a cradle is rocked by a woman's hand. Thrown headlong, the Zero rolling helplessly against the jagged rock; wild cries of terror reaching us from the engine-room; the water turned black with the filthy fluid the fish ejected; we were as men plunged into the darkness of the ultimate horror, robbed of our senses, driven to the madness of panic. And from this madness Black's voice alone recalled us. Even as write I can hear again his baying cry, "Stand fast there!" can see him holding to the iron rail before the dials, and sending his commands to the engineer. "Stand fast!" Aye, a mockery, and yet mockery which would win salvation.
The bells rang out; they were answered—I knew not how—and the propellers reversed. Slowly the Zero backed from the great fish and began to drag it, us it were, to the basin we had left. Thus fighting the monster, whose tentacles were as steel ropes about us, of a sudden the Captain gave the order, "Full speed ahead!" and with a rush, in which all should be lost or all won, we carried the cuttle-fish headlong and shot from the tunnel's mouth into a great vortex of the waters. It was the cascade of which the Spaniards had told us, and the heart of the earth holds no more beautiful thing.
Here from every side of a vast pit beneath the mountain the torrent fell into a cup which might have been shaped from a solid emerald, so wonderful were its hues of translucent green. Raging furiously upon the cycle of a whirlpool, the surge leaped and foamed about us, shooting its spray in whirls of froth and raining silver spindrift upon our glasses. No longer did the monster cuttle-fish blacken the water with the ink-like fluid; no longer did he drag us hither and thither in the blind ferocity of his attack. Our danger lay elsewhere. By a tunnel had we come into the basin; by a tunnel must we go out. As in some vision of a horrid sleep, I perceived the black orifice beyond the whirlpool, and asked myself what miracle even of the Captain's genius might carry us to such a gate of our salvation. The end of it all was at hand, I said. Here in this cavern of the torrents the Zero and all aboard her must lie to the end of time.
If this were the logic of my despair, the frenzy of the others took a mood less acquiescent. The steel door behind us had been opened by the men in their heat of passion, and now they would have come swarming in upon us, their lips black with the burning oaths, their eyes outstanding as the horror gripped them. Drawn down by the vortex, they screamed and cried in a delirium which put the fish's tentacles about their bodies and tore them limb from limb where they stood. To such as these the thunder of the cascade was less terrible than the eyes and arms of the monster which