Rill made for the inscriptured rock the next day and the sailor followed, somewhat curious. The characters were large and deeply cut, excellently preserved by the six-inch skin of moss that covers everything in that region. Rill scraped merely enough to determine that the entire monolith was carved.
They dug also below the surface, and still finding the strange characters, determined that what they saw was merely the summit or upper half, possibly, of an obelisk. The writing ran in regular lines, sometimes horizontally and sometimes vertically. Rill discovered one line larger and more freely written than the rest, with simpler glyphs. He studied long over this, so long that the sailor tired of it and began to saunter off.
“Wait,” Rill said. “I’ve got part of it. I happen to have a smattering of this science—and when I go down the shaft I want to know as much as this will tell us.”
He began to elucidate, pointing to the row that ran around the stone.
“This line was written in a hurry; it’s more elemental. It’s the original stuff. See the serpent in the second group?—that stands for wisdom. The Pharaohs used the asp, symbol of their wisdom. The serpent tempted Adam and Eve, that is, the beginnings of wisdom or thought brought them self-knowledge. The dragon is the Chinese development of that idea; Hermes’s caduceus has the serpents of wisdom intertwined; there’s a Hindu god that holds out in one hand a big snake—all the same idea.
“Now, that first mark is the anthropomorphic sign and can stand for God. Right under it is a mouth, sign of talk. See the zigzag sign in the second group?—that’s water. Then comes the moon or month and the setting sun; the one like a dead bush is a hand, sign of force or power. The zigzag on a line means mountains sometimes, and in the next group is forest. The triangle thing’s got me guessing, but I can get the epic out of it, anyway.”
“You mean you can read the stuff?” Pug was somewhat incredulous, this feat appearing miraculous.
“It starts like this—the god speaks, evidently in warning, because the wise ones take to their boats and go off on the water, six to the boat rowing, I think. Then elapses the time from the new moon to the old moon and two days besides. Again the god warns in some way, and again a period of time. Finally the god acts or uses his power (you see the hand), and some terrible catastrophe occurs.
“The writer tells us of the chaos by putting the sun upside down, as if to say they never saw the sun or the days. But still the men number as the trees of a forest. They had no understanding, and put to sea. You can read the next sign—a big storm, all perish. And finally the god speaks once more, saying that man’s day is over. Some story, Pug?”
“It must have been the green god that did the talking and all. We’d best let the shaft alone. There’s always somebody scouting around these islands: we’ll get took off before long.”
They did wait. The sailor fished and performed the practical duties. The other was absorbed in the efforts to perfect the message, blocked by the meaning of the triangle signs. Together they struggled with the water supply. The pools were slowly drying, and becoming more brackish and filled with life. That was the big problem, the daily mounting worry—water.
The shaft held the only hope. Yet Pug preferred on the whole to struggle with the known phenomena of the surface, and Rill could not bring himself to the point of contending with the physical difficulties, the trusting himself to the rope, the dangers. There was also their mutual suspicion, natural and inevitable, that precluded, short of imminent necessity a combining of forces wherein one must trust the other.
A morning came when Rill, of weaker constitution, vomited after a swallow of the green water. That was enough; he determined immediately to explore the hole. They got the rope, and Pug came presently with a couple of pine-knots and burning brands from the fire to light them.
The edge of the shaft was clean-cut in the soft rock, so that they could peer over and down. Kneeling there, Rill whispered and the sibilance rushed back and forth ended finally in a subdued, venomous hissing at the bottom.
They dropped a stone, and the crash of its impacts mounted in a hollow roar now loudly, now softly, multitudinously. They could distinguish various upper strata, but the lower portion was shrouded in impenetrable black. The sailor glanced at Rill, and saw a sheen of damp on his forehead.
“What’s up?” he asked, thinking himself of the green thing of the legend.
“Suppose the rope isn’t long enough, or should cut on the rock—sure you can pull me up—and will?”
They did not talk much while the sailor knotted a loop in the rope for Rill’s foot, and tied the other end to a stake driven in a deft of the rock. Perhaps Rill did feel a qualm, but if so it was not again apparent to the other.
As his end of the rope eventually came into Pug’s hands a frown of worry lowered his eyebrows. He was certain that it was not long enough, when the tension laxed. He peered down. Far away the smoky yellow of the torch wavered upon the roughness of the rock. The man holding it called up, but long before the words came to the sailor they had been mingled and churned into a confused rumble.
Then the torch moved slowly into the wall until the blaze itself was hidden, though he could still see the moving light playing from the tunnel upon the wall of the vertical shaft. With the minutes that grew fainter. There came up a sharp cry of fright, and immediately the yellow glow vanished. The still menacing darkness of the centuries swooped once more, like the drop of a hawk, over the caverns.
With his back to the sun, the sailor listened intently at the edge, waiting for some explanation of that sudden shout and the succeeding silence. He called once or twice, but the sound echoed back to him raucously, mockingly. Presently apprehensions of the green thing, that had lain dormant for a time, swept over him.
His imagination pictured Rill in the grasp of some awful being, some green-tentacled, green-eyed chimera. That heavy darkness might hide any terror. Then he had a moment wherein common sense dictated that Rill had met with some natural accident; had fallen down a hole or dislodged a fall of rock.
It was good to look up at the placid sea and the two or three islands hazy in the distance, the lazy smoke of their signal-fire, the white birds floating and careering along the shore. The sense of freedom, the absence of the strain of always watching the other man, gave him a sort of pleasure.
He was almost glad that he was alone, and sauntered toward camp. But that act did not seem right; somehow he felt guilty; he felt that he had a duty, difficult and abhorrent, but nevertheless necessary. He went over to the rope and tested the firmness of the peg.
Rill had thrown down the extra torch. The sailor filled a pocket with dry leaves and twigs, enough to light it at the bottom. To slip over the side and descend hand under hand was not difficult. He had had a lifetime of that. But as he went down through the dusk-lit strata to the depths, his fear of that unknown enlarged.
The noise of his descent came back to him from the walls, almost maliciously, he imagined. From the bottom he looked up. He had never seen a sky of so intense a blue, clotted with winking stars. Though he had heard of this, nevertheless he wished that he had not looked up. It lent too much of an air of unreality to the whole undertaking. He sighed relievedly when he found the torch and got it flaring. The stale air smelt of the passage of Rill’s torch. Sweat came out on his forehead, perhaps caused as much by mental as by physical discomfort. He shouted and waited, but no answer came. The passage curved evidently, for he could not see far. Where it passed through soft strata the sides had been shored up with stone work, with great rocks patiently fitted into each other, narrowing toward
