Kitabı oku: «Unexplored!», sayfa 6
CHAPTER VII
THE CAVE
Electing the turn to the left, Radcliffe led the way with his carbide lamp. Ace and Ted followed with their candles.
This time their choice was quickly verified by the discovery of the burros, standing patiently with their packs before the pool. (That accounted for the muddy footprints.) Skirting this on the shelving ledge as had Pedro and the Mexicans, they traversed the winding passageway that led to the grotto of brown cauliflower-like encrustations. But here, when they found that the left-hand passageway meant going on hands and knees, they chose the other turn. (They came that near to catching up with the fugitives!)
With the suddenness of events in a dream, they came into a vast chamber that at first glimpse, lighted as it was by the carbide lamp, gave the impression of a baronial ruin. The boys whistled simultaneously under their breath. At the far end stood a huge stone elephant, – or so it appeared at the first startled glance, – and beside him a gnome and several weird beasts vaguely reminiscent of the monsters of prehistoric times.
When Ted could speak, he whispered, “What are they? Fossils?”
Ace laughed. “I should say not. They’re nothing but dripstone, can’t you see? – They’d be ‘some fossils’! Why, if we could find just one fossil as big as that, our fortunes would be made – absolutely.”
“Gee! Then I’m sure going to keep my eyes peeled.”
“I thought,” put in Radcliffe, “that fossils were little stone worms. I’ve found those aplenty.”
“Fossils,” explained Ace, (fresh from first-year geology), “are any remains of plants or animals that lived, either on land or in the sea, in ancient times. A lot of those we find to-day were shell-fish and other marine life.”
“Gee!” grinned Ted, “doesn’t he talk like a professor? I’m going to call you professor after this, old Scout!”
“Go on,” the Ranger urged, ignoring this sally, “I’m interested.”
“So am I, honestly,” amended Ted contritely.
“There were land animals, too, that got buried in the accumulating sediments and fossilized. Times when the ocean over-ran the land, they got drifted into it, and sank, and got buried under the sands that made our sandstones–”
“This floor is sandstone!” interpolated Ted.
“Yes. Or they got buried in the ground-up shells that made our limestone, – like the walls of the cave, – or some of them were buried in mud.”
“I suppose,” offered Ted facetiously, “that the mud made mudstones,” and he laughed till his voice echoed and reëchoed startlingly.
“Ha, ha! You’re right!” Ace turned the laugh on him. “Go to the head of the class. I’ll show you mudstone when we come to it.”
“Why, then,” ventured the Ranger, “this must be a topping place to find fossils.”
“Provided,” Ace admitted, “the cave is not of too recent formation. But as I was about to say,” (seeing their undoubted interest), “geologists can just about piece together the history of the earth from the fossils that have been found, but no one locality gives it all. They have found part of the story in America and part in Africa, and parts in Europe and Asia. And from that series of fossils – and some other evidence – scientists have about agreed that since the earth was formed, about twenty whole mountain ranges, one after another, must have been formed and worn away almost to sea level.”
“How do they make that out?” Ted looked skeptical.
“That’s another long story. I’m no professor. But–”
“You can’t prove it.”
“Neither can you disprove it, any more than you can the conclusions on which astronomy, higher mathematics, any of the sciences – are based.”
“I suppose so! Gee, I’d like to study those things for myself!” sighed Ted, seating himself beside the others on a dry ledge while they ate their sandwiches.
“Find a valuable fossil and you’ve earned a college education,” Ace challenged him. “And you know, fossils are not necessarily fish or insects or skeletons or tree trunks that have been turned to stone.”
“To stone?”
“By the removal of their own tissues and replacement by mineral matter. A fossil may be merely the print of a leaf of some prehistoric plant on sandstone, or the footprint of some antediluvian reptile. In the National Museum they have a cast of a prehistoric shad that shows the imprint of every bone and fin ray.”
“How on earth could that have been formed?” marveled Ted.
“Why, it was simply buried in fine mud, which first protects it from the air, (and consequent immediate decay), then gradually fills every pore of every bone, till by the time the mud has turned to stone, the bones are ossified. Of course the animal matter has all dissolved away by this time. Now if this mud that filled the pores happened to be silica, (a sandy formation), it is possible to eat the surrounding limestone away with acids and uncover the silica formation, see, old kid?”
“Aw, that stuff makes my head ache,” protested Tim. “If I see any ossified bones lying around, or even a footprint or leaf print in the stone, I’ll know I’ve found a fossil. But I thought we were chasing fire-bugs.”
“The impatience of youth!” Ace playfully squelched him, from the vantage point of his slight seniority.
“What does the Bible say,” laughed the Ranger, “about truth from the mouths of babes?” And he arose a bit stiffly, – for he had had a strenuous time of it the past few days, and the cave damp had set his tired limbs to aching.
For upwards of an hour they followed dark and winding passageways, (rats and lizards and occasional colonies of bats fleeing before them), naturally without the slightest sign of the fugitives, when they came to another grotto, the loveliest they had yet seen. It might have been a fairy cavern, aglitter with pure crystal. The carved prisms shone dazzlingly in the light of the carbide lamp, and the boys stuffed their pockets with some of the jewel-like bits that had fallen to the floor.
From this they presently entered into what seemed like a Gothic cathedral, with a dome whose highest point must have been several hundred feet above. The boys were fairly awed by its beauty, while the Ranger’s eyes gleamed appreciatively. On the walls were what might have been carvings of flowers and lacework, creamy to smoke color, gypsum, Ace told them.
“Are these fossils?” demanded Ted excitedly.
“I should say not, you poor fish! – You ichthyosaurus,” laughed Ace teasingly.
“You what?” asked the Ranger.
“That means ancient fish.”
“All right,” grinned Ted. “If I’m an ich–”
“Ich-thy-o-saur-us?” Radcliffe came to his rescue.
“Then you’re a dinosaur,” grinned Ted.
“Here, here, stop calling each other names!” commanded Radcliffe. “And perhaps Ace will tell us about this gypsum formation.”
“Thunder! Wish Norris was here! I tell you I’m no professor. But if you’re after fossils, don’t you remember what he told us, that day just before we lost the pack burro? – That in this part of California we have rock from the Cambrian era a mile thick, and I’ll bet it’s full of fossils of the fish age!”
“Well,” Radcliffe briskly interposed, as they came to another turn, “we’ll never find those Mexicans unless we separate and hunt faster than we’ve been doing. Are you fellows game for taking one way while I go back to that last turn and try the left hand passageway? Of course the instant you get wind of them, report back to me.” They signified their gameness by picking a precarious footing, (Ted first), along the slippery floor, their candles thrust in their hat bands.
Above they came to another but a smaller forest of alabaster stalactites, shining like icicles or mosses, some white as snow, some yellow as gold, and some so like maple sugar in appearance that Ace actually tasted it. In one place there was a bit of what Ace said was needle gypsum, that hung as fine as fur.
Radcliffe, retracing his steps, (with the aid of the twine ball), till he came to the cross roads, as it were, turned to the left and forged ahead with his carbide lamp, treading softly as a cougar, with revolver cocked in his right hand. Ever and anon he stopped breath-still to listen.
Passing through the same alabaster cavern that had so impressed the Spanish boy, his eye caught the bandanna Pedro had dropped in the left-hand passageway. With an inward exclamation, he hurried on till he had reached the end of the blind. Stooping with his lamp, he could see the fresh scratches their feet had made. Darting back to the turn of the tunnel, where he had picked up the bandanna, he took the only choice left to him, the right hand way, with all the satisfaction of a hound on the scent. More scratches on the sandstone floor assured him that they had really gone this way, instead of turning back the way they had come, and presently he too was standing in the gallery of the sloping floor and yellowed pillars, at whose far end the dripstone cataract hung, turned to soundless stone. But of the three Mexicans and Pedro there was no trace.
“I say, when do we eat?” Ace was just beginning, when the floor suddenly gave way beneath him, and he fell down a ten foot well, landing on all fours, in Stygian blackness. And no sooner had his bulk padded the stone beneath than Ted came, plunk! almost on top of him.
At the moment both were slightly stunned. Their candle flames had of course been flicked out. Then Ted reached mechanically for his matches, by whose flare he found his hat, and still firmly stuffed into the band, his candles. The light disclosed a cavern with muddy walls dripping above them, and to their right, an inky pool of water. The air was all aflutter with the bats they had startled from their pendant slumbers, lizards scuttled away in all directions, and a fish flopped in the pool, with a splash that sounded out of all proportion to its exciting cause. Ted grinned as he saw Ace first pinch himself to see if he were dreaming, then slowly feel his joints to make sure none were seriously damaged.
The fall had rather jolted his nerves, but otherwise he was unhurt, as was his chum. But how to return the way they had come they could not see, for the walls were too slippery to climb, there was not a spear of anything movable in sight on which they might gain a foot-hold, and when Ted tried it from Ace’s shoulders, the rim of the well was too slippery with mud for him to gain a hand-hold.
The bats, blind from their lightless lives, bumped against them and added the final touch of weirdness by their gnome-like faces.
With the uncanny feeling that they ought to whisper, the shaking boys started to explore the cavern, which they found led off in three directions. It must be on the same level they had left when they said good-by to Radcliffe, but in their panic they were completely turned around, and they had not explored for ten minutes before they were so confused that they could not even have found their way back to the cavern of the pool.
Now Ted had been lost before. He knew the panic feeling, the sudden sense of utter and helpless isolation, the absurd fearfulness, almost the temporary insanity of it. His scalp prickled, – as did Ace’s, – and for a little while his wits seemed befogged. Then he remembered that bed-rock advice Long Lester had once given him. When you don’t know which way to go, sit down and don’t move one step for half an hour. And try to think out the way you got there, or some plan of campaign for finding yourself again.
Ted had once been lost in the chaparral, – a thorny tangle of low growths that reached higher than his head. When he first discovered he was off the trail, he wandered about as in a mystic maze, till a shred of his own gingham shirt, (caught on a stub of manzanita), told him he had circled.
He had had to spend the night there, but in the end he had stumbled upon the trail again, not ten feet from where he lost it.
As Long Lester afterwards pointed out, had he but blazed his trail from the very first step, he could at least have back-tracked. Or better, if he had with his jack-knife made a blaze sufficiently high on some stunted tree to have seen it and come back to it, he might have circled, and in ever widening circles would surely, in time, have found the trail.
Or, again, he might have – had he known – at least hacked a straight course by the stars, (always provided that he knew in which direction lay the way out).
“Ace,” he managed to steady his voice when they had been seated on a dry ledge for some little time, “your knowledge of cave formations might help us to find the way out of here. Gee! If this was only in the woods, or even on some mountain side above the clouds! But it’s up to you now.”
“Well,” Ace began, “the map of the typical cave, say like Mammoth, wiggles around a little like a river with its tributaries, though nothing like so regularly, with here and there a wider place, and–”
“Here and there,” contributed his chum, “a well to a lower level.”
“Yes. You see, the water that wears a cave out of the softer layers of rock seeps in along the fissures of the surface rock, and at first they make subterranean rivers. Where you find these big springs in the hillsides, they may be the outlets of these underground waterways.”
“I get that, all right,” said Ted.
“Well, then, sometimes these Stygian streams–”
“Keep it up, Professor!” Ted clapped him on the shoulder.
“Huh! – These rivers wear away the soft limestone layer, – if it is this kind of a cave, – ’till they come to the harder sandstone. Then the first chance they find to get through the sandstone, – perhaps through a crack made by an earthquake or something, – they go down and wear away a deeper level. Mammoth Cave is on five levels. That leaves the upper galleries dry. Now the one we were on was dry except for the moisture that is always seeping into a cave, but I suspect now we’re on a level with the river, it’s so muddy, and we’ll find it somewhere.”
“Then we’ll find it somewhere!” brightened Ted. “And we can follow it. That’s the plan of action!” and he jumped to his feet.
“We’ll follow it if we can. Thunder! I wish we had a boat.”
“So long as you’re wishing, why don’t you wish for a fat steak with onions?”
“It has been some time since we ate.” Ace tightened his belt. “Must be getting late in the day! Let’s run!” And run they did, till they began slipping on a muddy slope.
They had to place each foot with care now, and their progress was slow. At the same time their candles were nearly gone. “Now let’s put out all but one,” suggested Ted. “Just burn one at a time. What would we do without any light?” But Ace did not know the answer.
What of Pedro, meantime? At that particular instant he had just tried to make his get-away, with the result that three drawn daggers were being flourished threateningly and most unhealthily near his heart. He had overheard enough evidence to convict all three of the Mexicans, thanks to his knowledge of the parent language, but as the desperadoes pushed farther and farther into the labyrinth, he gathered that they would come out a good safe distance from where they had entered, – probably on the other side of the ridge. Had he known the Ranger’s whereabouts at that precise moment, he would have felt very differently.
Radcliffe, meantime, was staring into the dark recess of the cavern, but all he could see was the two shining eyes of whatever occupant was there. Was it bear or cougar? For both, he knew, took refuge in caves. The largeness of the eyes inclined him to the belief that it was a California mountain lion, and such it was part of his work to exterminate, – though the state also hires an official lion hunter.
That the great cats are cowards he well knew. But this one was cornered, and might prove no mean antagonist. With revolver cocked in his right hand, his lamp in the other, he advanced toward those two shining fires. A faint scratching along the rocky floor warned him that the animal was gathering for a spring. He was still rather far for a revolver shot, but he aimed straight between the eyes. His shot reverberated with a thousand echoes. The sounds, ear-splitting in the smoke-filled gloom, – thundered like a thousand siege guns, it seemed to Radcliffe, stalactites tumbled about his ears like crockery, and more appalling than all the rest was the weird, almost human scream of the wounded animal, which likewise reëchoed for several minutes. The unwitting cause of all this turmoil was in a cold perspiration when things finally quieted down. But the puma, (for such it proved to be), lay dead at his feet.
The three Mexicans likewise heard the racket, for they, as it happened, were not far away. The Ranger had very nearly trailed them. With rolling eyes and hands that mechanically traced the sign of the cross, they listened, while the thunders died away.
Pedro, though his nerves were more than a little shaken, was quick to seize his opportunity. Slipping like an eel through a narrow opening between two columns, where the dripstone had all but closed the way into another chamber, he would have escaped observation entirely had it not been for his betraying torch-light.
Sanchez darted after him. But remember, Sanchez was at least a hundred pounds heavier than even well-fed Pedro. The result might have been expected. He stuck mid-way! And there he dangled his fat legs in an endeavor to free himself, while Pedro doubled with laughter and the other Mexicans stared, too amazed to move.
“Pull, can’t you, pull!” was Pedro’s expurgated version of Sanchez’s reiterated discourse with his followers. And when no one came to his rescue, he nearly burst a blood vessel in his helpless wrath.
Pedro, feeling safe from pursuit, with such a plug in the only approach to his sanctuary, now for the first time disclosed his knowledge of Mexican. Sanchez’s astonishment was as huge as his attitude was undignified, and if words could have seared, Pedro would have been well scorched. But the boy only told him of an item he had read in the paper, where a fat man got stuck in a cave and had to fast for three days before his girth had diminished sufficiently that he could be extricated.
With that, Pedro bade them a fond farewell, and departed along a labyrinthian way they could not follow. That some one was on their trail he suspected from the revolver shot, and the fire bugs would be nicely trapped.
Now the Ranger reasoned that the lion’s den would not be far from the outer world, and in that he was right, as he proved by following it to its end. The last lap of the way he had to wriggle along on hands and knees, but he could see the glow of the setting sun in a circle of light at the end, and in a very few minutes he had poked his head and shoulders beneath an overhanging bowlder on a rock ledge. It was the Southern slope of the spur, and after a little reconnoitering he discovered that it was the selfsame spur on which fire-fighting headquarters had been established. The cave, then, pierced clear through the ridge, and he had been exactly all day in following its windings.
Hiking wearily up the slope to the ridge, he could see the glow of the cook-fire perhaps a mile away, while down in the canyon on the other side the fire still glowed in red embers where it continued to devour the blackened tree trunks, though it was under far better control than it had been the day before.
Rosa’s solicitude at his haggard face and tattered, mud stained clothing restored him wonderfully. (After all, there were compensations in the scheme of things.)
“We were just about to start a search party in there,” said Norris. “I would have before, if it hadn’t been for the fire. But where are the boys?” He paled in alarm.
“I don’t know,” Radcliffe dragged from white lips.
“Oh!” gasped Rosa, her eyes filling with tears which she promptly hid by turning her back.
Without a word Long Lester gathered up the paraphernalia the Ranger now saw he had stacked and ready on the ground, and fitted it into a back-pack. There was food, rope, and candles, another tube of carbide for Radcliffe’s lamp, a box of matches in a tight lidded tin, and even a short length of rustic ladder made for the occasion.
Norris shouldered part of it as by previous agreement.
Radcliffe explained the diagram he tore from his note-book, marking a black cross at the point where he had left the boys.
“I dunno,” said the old prospector, “but what we might as well go in one way as another. I reckon we can folly this yere map backwards as well as forrud, and we’ll just hike down and go in the way you kem out.”
“That’s a go,” agreed Norris, striding after him.
“Oh,” yelled the Ranger after them. “Come back! I’ll deputize you both. Here, Norris,” and he gave the younger man his revolver and cartridge belt, with his official pronouncement.
“I swan!” said Long Lester. “Here I were a-thinkin’ so much about them boys I clean forgot the Mexicans,” and he slung his rifle atop his pack.
