Straining his eyes in the night, pierced only by the electric beam that ran and quavered rapidly over the broken forest-tops far below, Allan peered down and far ahead. The fire, the signal-fire he had told Beatrice to build upon the ledge--would he never sight it?
Eagerly he scanned the dark horizon only just visible in the star-shine. Warmly the rushing night wind fanned his cheek; the roar of the motor and propellers, pulsating mightily, made music to his ears. For it sang: "Home again! Beatrice, and love once more!"
Many long hours had pa.s.sed since, his fuel-tanks replenished from the apparatus for distilling the crude naphtha, which he had installed during his first stay in the Abyss, he had risen a second time into that heavy, humid, purple-vapored air.
With him he now bore Bremilu, the strong, and Zangamon, most expert of all the fishermen. Slung in the baggage-crate aft lay a large seine, certain supplies of fish, weed and eggs, and--from time to time noisily squawking--some half-dozen of the strange sea-birds, in a metal basket.
The pioneers had insisted on taking these impedimenta with them, to bridge the gap of changed conditions, a precaution Stern had recognized as eminently sensible.
"Gad!" thought he, as the Pauillac swept its long, flat-arc"d trajectory through the night, "under any circ.u.mstances this must be a terrific wrench for them. Talk about nerve! If _they_ haven"t got it, who has? This trip of these subterranean barbarians, thus flung suddenly into midair, out into a world of which they know absolutely nothing, must be exactly what a journey to Mars would mean to me.
More, far more, to their simple minds. I wonder myself at their courage in taking such a tremendous step."
And in his heart a new and keener admiration for the basic stamina of the Merucaans took root.
"They"ll do!" he murmured, as he scanned his lighted chart once more, and cast up reckonings from the dials of his delicately adjusted instruments.
Half an hour more of rapid flight and he deemed New Hope River could not now be far.
"No use to try and hear it, though, with this racket of the propellers in my ears," thought he. "The searchlight might possibly pick up a gleam of water, if we fly over it. But even that"s a small index to go by. The signal-fire must be my only real guide--and where is it, now, that fire?"
A vague uneasiness began to oppress him. The fire, he reckoned, should have shown ere now in the far distance. Without it, how find his way?
And what of Beatrice?
His uneasy reflections were suddenly interrupted by a word from Zangamon, at his right.
"O Kromno, master, see?"
"What is it, now?"
"A fire, very distant, master!"
"Where?" queried Stern eagerly, his heart leaping with joy. "I see no fire. Your eyes, used to the dark places and the fogs, now far surpa.s.s mine, even as mine will yours when the time of light shall come. Where is the fire, Zangamon?"
The fisher pointed, a dim huge figure in the star-lit gloom. "There, master. On thy left hand, thus."
Stern shifted his course to southwest by west, and for some minutes held it true, so that the needle hardly trembled on the compa.s.s dial.
Then all at once he, too, saw the welcome signal, a tiniest pin-p.r.i.c.k of light far on the edge of the world, no different from the sixth-magnitude stars that hung just above it on the horizon, save for its redness.
A gush of grat.i.tude and love welled in the fountains of his heart.
"Home!" he whispered. "Home--for where _you_ are that"s home to me!
Oh, Beatrice, I"m coming--coming home to you!"
Slowly at first, then with greater and ever greater swiftness, the signal star crept nearer; and now even the flames were visible, and now behind them he caught dim sight of the rock-wall.
On and on, a very vulture of the upper air, planed the Pauillac. Stern shouted with all his strength. The girl might possibly hear him and might come out of their cave. She might even signal--and the nearness of her presence mounted upon him like a heady wine.
He swung the searchlight on the canyon, as they swept above it. He flung the pencil of radiance in a wide sweep up the cliff and down along the terrace.
It gave no sight, no sign of Beatrice.
"Sleeping, of course," he reflected.
And now, Hope River past, and the canyon swallowed by the dense forest, he flung his light once more ahead. With it he felt out the rocky barrens for a landing-place.
Not more than twenty minutes later, followed by Bremilu and Zangamon, Stern was making way through the thick-laced wood and jungle.
Awed, terrified by their first sight of trees and by the upper world which to them was naught but marvel and danger, the two Merucaans followed close behind their guide. Even so would you or I cling to the Martian who should land us on that ruddy planet and pilot us through some huge, inchoate and grotesque growth of things to us perfectly unimaginable.
"Oh, master, we shall see the patriarch soon?" asked Bremilu, in a strange voice--a voice to him astonishingly loud, in the clear air of night upon the surface of the world. "Soon shall we speak with him and--"
"Hark! What"s that?" interrupted Stern, pausing, the while he gripped his pistol tighter.
From afar, though in which direction he could not say, a vague, dull roar made itself heard through the forest.
Sonorous, vibrant, menacing, it echoed and died; and then again, as once before, Stern heard that strange, hollow booming, as of some mighty drum struck by a m.u.f.fled fist.
A cry? Was that a cry, so distant and so faint? Beast-cry, or call of night-bird, shrill and far?
Stern shuddered, and with redoubled haste once more pushed through the vague path he and Beatrice had made from the barrens to Settlement Miffs.
Presently, followed by the two colonists who dared not let him for a moment out of their sight, he reached the brow of the canyon. His hand flash-lamp showed him the rough path to the terrace.
With fast-beating heart he ran down it, unmindful of the unprotected edge or the sheer drop to the rocks of New Hope River, far below.
Bremilu and Zangamon, seeing perfectly in the gloom, hurried close behind, with words of awe, wonder and admiration in their own tongue.
"Beta! Oh, Beatrice! Home again!" Stern shouted triumphantly. "Where are you, Beta? Come! I"m home again!"
Quickly he scrambled along the broken terrace, stumbling in his haste over loose rocks and debris. Now he had reached the turn. The fire was in sight.
"Beta!" again he hailed. "O-he! Beatrice!"
Still no answer, nor any sign from her. As he came to the fire he noted, despite his strong emotions, that it had for the most part burned down to glowing embers.
Only one or two resinous knots still flamed. It could not have been replenished for some time, perhaps two hours or more.
Again, his quick eye caught the fact that cinders, ashes and half-burned sticks lay scattered about in strange disorder.
"Why, Beatrice never makes a fire like that!" the thought pierced through his mind.
And--though as yet on no very definite grounds--a quick prescience of catastrophe battered at his heart.
"What"s _this?_"
Something lying on the rock-ledge, near the fire, caught his eye. He s.n.a.t.c.hed it up.