Two Thousand Miles Below Read online

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  Transcriber's Note:

  This etext was produced from Astounding Stories June, September, November 1932, January 1933. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

  The Table of Contents is not part of the original magazines.

  Two Thousand Miles Below

  _A Four-Part Novel_

  By Charles Willard Diffin

  * * * * *

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER PROLOGUE I A Man Named Smith II Gold! III Red Drops IV The Light in the Crater V The Attack VI Into the Crater VII The Ring VIII The Darkness IX A Subterranean World X Plumb Loco XI The White-Hot Pit XII Dreams XIII "N-73 Clear!" XIV Emergency Order XV The Lake of Fire XVI The Metal Shell XVII Gor XVIII The Dance of Death XIX The Voice of the Mountain XX Taloned Hands XXI Suicide? XXII The Red-Flowering Vine XXIII Oro and Grah XXIV The Bargain XXV Smithy XXVI Power!

  * * * * *

  PROLOGUE

  [Sidenote: Rawson learns to his cost that the life-spark of a fabledrace glows in the black heart of a dead, Western volcano.]

  _The derrick was falling as he fired again._]

  In the gray darkness the curved fangs of a saber-toothed tiger gleamedwhite and ghostly. The man-figure that stood half crouched in themouth of the cave involuntarily shivered.

  "Gwanga!" he said. "He goes, too!"

  But the man did not move more than to shift a club to his right hand.Heavy, that club, and knotted and with a head of stone tied andwrapped with leather thongs; but Gor of the tribe of Zoran swung iteasily with one of his long arms. He paid only casual attention as thegreat cat passed on into the night.

  One leathery hand was raised to shield his slitted eyes; the wind fromthe north struck toward the mouth of the cave, and it brought with itcold driving rain and whirling flurries of frozen pellets that bit andstung.

  Snow! Gor had traveled far, but never had he seen a storm like thiswith white cold in the air. Again a shiver that was part fear rippledthrough his muscles and gripped with invisible fingers at his knottedarms.

  "The Beast of the North is angry!" he told himself.

  Through the dark and storm, animals drifted past before the blasts ofcold. They were fleeing; they were full of fear--fear of somethingthat the dull mind of Gor could not picture. But in that mind was thesame wordless panic.

  Gor, the man-animal of that pre-glacial day, stared wondering,stupidly, into the storm with eyes like those of the wild pig. Hisarms were long, almost to his knees; his hair, coarse and matted, hungin greasy locks about his savage face. Behind his low, retreatingforehead was place for little of thought or reason. Yet Gor was a man,and he met the threat of disaster by something better than blind,terrified, animal flight.

  A scant hundred in the tribe--men and women and little pot-belliedbrown children--Gor gathered them together in the cave far back fromthe mouth.

  "For many moons," he told them by words and signs, "the fear has beenupon us. There have been signs for us to see and for all theFour-feet--for Hathor, the great, and for little Wahti in his hole inthe sand-hill. Hathor has swung his long snout above his curved tusksand has cried his fear, and the Eaters of the Dead have circled abovehim and cried _their_ cry.

  "And now the Sun-god does not warm us. He has gone to hide behind theclouds. He is afraid--afraid of the cold monster that blows whitestinging things in his breath.

  "The Sun-god is gone--now, when he should be making hot summer! TheFour-feet are going. Even Gwanga, the long-toothed, puts his tailbetween his legs and runs from the cold."

  * * * * *

  The naked bodies shivered in the chill that struck in from thestorm-wrapped world; they drew closer their coverings of fur andhides. The light of their flickering fires played strange tricks withtheir savage faces to make them still uglier and to show the dullterror that gripped them.

  "Run--we must run--run away--the breath of the beast is on us--hefollows close--run...." Through the mutterings and growls a sick childwhimpered once, then was still. Gor was speaking again:

  "Run! Run away!" he mocked them. "And where shall the tribe of Zorango? With Gwanga, to make food for his cat belly or to be hammered todeath with the stones of the great tribes of the south?"

  There was none to reply--only a despairing moan from ugly lips. Gorwaited, then answered his own question.

  "No!" he shouted, and beat upon his hairy chest that was round as thetrunk of a tree. "Gor will save you--Gor, the wanderer! You named mewell: my feet have traveled far. Beyond the red-topped mountains ofthe north I have gone; I have seen the tribes of the south, and Ibrought you a head for proof. I have followed the sun, and I have gonewhere it rises."

  In the half light, coarse strands of hair waved as hideous heads werenodded in confirmation of the boast, though many still droopeddespairingly.

  "If Gor leads, where will he go?" a voice demanded.

  Another growled: "Gor's feet have gone far: where have they gone wherethe Beast cannot follow our scent?"

  "Down!" said Gor with unconscious dramatic effect, and he pointed atthe rocky floor of the cave. "I have gone where even the Beast of theNorth cannot go. The caves back of this you have seen, but only Gorhas seen the hole--the hole where a strong man can climb down; a holetoo small for the great beast to get through. Gor has gone down tofind more caves below and more caves below them.

  "Far down is a place where it is always warm. There is water in lakesand streams. Gor has caught fish in that water, and they were good.There are growing things like the round earth-plants that come in thenight, and they, too, were good.

  "Will you follow Gor?" he demanded. "And when the Beast is gone andthe Sun-god comes back we will return--"

  * * * * *

  The blast that found its way inside the cave furnished its own answer;the echoing, "We follow! We follow!" spoken through chattering teethwas not needed. The women of the tribe shivered more from the coldthan from fear as they gathered together their belongings, their fursand hides and crude stone implements; and the shambling man-shape,called Gor, led them to the hole down which a strong man might climb,led them down and still down....

  But, as to the rest--Gor's promise of safe return to the light of dayand that outer world where the Sun-god shone--how was Gor to know thata mighty glacier would lock the whole land in ice for endless years,and, retreating, leave their upper caves filled and buried under avalley heaped with granite rocks?

  Even had the way been open to the land above, Gor himself could neverhave known when that ice-sheet left. For when that day came and oncemore the Sun-god drew steamy spirals from the drenched and thawingground, Gor, deep down in the earth, had been dead for countlessyears. Only the remote descendants of that earlier tribe now lived intheir subterranean home, though even with them there were some whospoke at times of those legends of another world which their ancestorshad left.

  And through the long centuries, while evolution worked its slowchanges, they knew nothing of the vanishing ice, of the sun and thegushing waters, the grass and forests that came to cover the earth.Nor did their descendants, exploring interminable caves, learning totame the internal fires, always evolving, always growing, have anyremote conception of a people who sailed strange seas to find newlands and live and multiply and build up a country of sky-reachingcities and p
eaceful farmlands, of sunlit valleys and hills.

  But always there were adventurous souls who made their way deeper anddeeper into the earth; and among them in every generation was onenamed Gor who was taught the tribal legends and who led theadventurers on. But legends have a trick of changing, and instead ofsearching upward, it was through the deeper strata that they madetheir slow way in their search for a mystic god and the land of theirfathers' fathers....