River of Ice

CHAPTER II River of Ice

Lini Waller recovered quickly. She had only fallen on level rock floor, and her right arm had partly broken the fall. There was an egg on her forehead, but that was all. She sat up, rubbing the bump, and looked into her brother’s frightened eyes. “I’m all right,” she said. “Where are we? This looks strange. Oh, we’re behind the door!”

“Behind the door,” nodded Brent. “And all there seem to be in here are a lot of other doors. I can’t figure it out.”

Rubbing her head, Lini looked around. They were in a cave about forty feet across, and quite low. Set at widely spaced intervals around the cave were doors just like the outer one through which she had fallen: heavy rock slabs set flush with the rock around them. And that was all. The cave was empty.

A very peculiar thing suddenly struck Lini’s consciousness. “Why, Brent!” she gasped. “It ought to be dark in here! And it’s not. There’s just the one opening made by that door swung open on a center pin. We shouldn’t be able to see ten feet away. Yet we can see this whole big place as if it were clear daylight all the way back!”

“By heavens, we can!” said Brent. “We can. That is funny, Lini.” They began looking for the source of the light. It simply couldn’t be daylight coming in from the comparatively small door. And they noticed at regular intervals around the walls that the light was a little brighter. Brent went to the nearest bright spot. Up above his head there was a rock shelf. Light streamed up and out from this. He reached high, and felt. The ledge was hollowed out into a deep niche and the source of the light was down in that. “For the love of Pete!” said Brent excitedly. “If this isn’t indirect lighting, I’ll eat the glacier over our heads!”

“You mean electric lights?” said Lini, incredulously.

“No, certainly not. How could there be electric lights in a place like— Here, give me a knee. I’ll hang onto the rock ledge so you won’t have my whole weight.” Lini knelt on one shapely knee, with the other leg out. Brent stood on it, holding most of his weight with his hands hooked over the ledge. He could see into the niche now. He continued to look as puzzled as before. “There’s something here like a glass rod,” he said. “It’s fiery white, gives off a sort of fluorescent glow. No, it’s not glass; it looks like fused quartz.”

“Any wires or anything like that to it?” asked Lini.

“Not a thing. There’s just the rod.” Brent touched it with a fast stab of his finger, then laid his whole hand on it. “There’s no heat in it. I never saw anything like it in my life.”

Lini was losing interest in the flaming white rod. “Come down, Brent. I want to look behind these other doors.”

“Think that’s wise?” said Brent, stepping down.

Lini got to her feet. “Why wouldn’t it be wise?” she demanded.

“There might be danger behind the doors.”

“Pooh! This cave layout has been buried under ice for thousands of years. What could be dangerous down here?”

Brent shrugged. He didn’t know. And while he was pondering it, Lini went to the first of the doors. There were, he counted, seven of them.

“I’ll bet they all open the same way the outside door opened,” said Lini, looking for worn spots where the press of many fingers had hollowed hard stone. “Yes! See?” The door opened as she pressed a spot on the right and another on the left of the slab.

“We ought to have flashlights,” mumbled Brent, forgetting about the strange light in this cave which was a sort of anteroom for the others. A flashlight wasn’t necessary. The opening door revealed another cavern, as well lighted as the previous one. And the light shone down on—

“Brent! Look! Gold! We’re rich!” At a glance the yellow gleam of the stacks of metal objects was unmistakable. But in a moment the two saw that none but vandals would ever utilize this metal for the gold itself. For the shapes into which it was molded and bent and hammered were too rare. There were golden masks of hideous but strangely lifelike faces. There were golden bells, golden ornaments, and a host of golden statues. There must have been a ton of the stuff.

But more remarkable than the quantity was the art with which it had been worked. “It’s Indian in type,” said Brent thoughtfully. “But the finest work I’ve ever seen. There’s culture showing in this work, Lini.”

The girl nodded. “But whose culture? We know something of Indian history in these parts. There has never been a tribe able to turn out stuff as fine as this. And remember, that river of ice over our heads has hidden this for a long, long time.”

They were weighted down by the deepening conviction of antiquity. Of aeons unguessable. Then Lini screamed. But it wasn’t at anything so intangible as thoughts of time. “Brent! A man!” Brent had seen the thing almost as soon as his sister had.

Off in a corner of the treasure cave was a seated figure. There was a spear in its hands, and an elaborate headdress, looking vaguely Egyptian, was on its head. It was mummified, ancient. But it seemed to keep vigil there. A sentry, dead for no one knew how many thousands of years, holding its spear and defying anyone to touch the gold.

They crept closer to the thing. The features of the dead face were Mongoloid, with a hint of the Negro race as well. There was a majesty about the intelligent spread of forehead over the sunken eye sockets. The embalming process had been marvelous, aided by the frigid preserving power of the glacier overhead. The body was only a little shrunken. “He’s alive!” Lini cried suddenly, leaping back.

“Nonsense,” said Brent. But his own tone was shaken. It certainly looked as if that spear had moved a little. But that of course was impossible. Could any embalmed thing, thousands of years old, be alive? “Let’s see what’s in the other caves,” Brent said.

Actually, over half of his desire to look into the other six caves opening off the central one consisted of a tremendous urge to get away from that grim, seated figure. But the two found that they weren’t getting away from death by leaving this cave. In the next one were piles of what at first seemed to be parchment, bound into volumes as if done by an expert bookmaker day before yesterday. But when they investigated, they found the parchment to be thin, wonderfully tough and pliant sheets of some hide. “This is their library,” said Lini. She almost whispered it. And as she did, she stared at the far corner of this second cavern.

In here was a long-dead, seated figure too! It held a spear, and seemed to stare at them from eyeless sockets, cursing them for disturbing this tomb. A tomb, all right. More and more it became apparent just what this was.

The tomb of a whole race, a race that had died out far back in the mists of the ages. This room was indeed their library. There were records in here that must have described every activity that long vanished tribe indulged in, such was the number of stored “books.”

The third room was turned over to implements which Brent and Lini soon figured out. They were agricultural implements; and they indicated a race greatly superior to any the Wallers knew of among the Indians. More advanced even than the Aztecs or Incas; people who had developed rough farm machinery to do the work of reapers and harrows and combines. And from a corner, gaunt and grim, a sentry peered from eyeless sockets, while dead hands clasped a smooth and polished gold-pointed spear.

In the fourth cavern were other machines. These were industrial — for weaving, foundry work, woodworking and pottery. And again they showed a culture far exceeding anything known on the American continent in prehistoric times.

The fifth cave held garments and costumes, all preserved perfectly by the glacial ice above. The sixth and seventh caves were different.

In the sixth cavern was just one machine. But it was an object so big that it filled the cave: a complicated looking device of the fused-quartz rods — or whatever they were — only without light flooding from them. Then there was a central cauldron, in the bottom of which were more of the glassy rods that were bent into coils. Seated so that he seemed to be looking over the rim of the cauldron was the inevitable sentry.

The seventh cave took them right off their feet. It had a higher ceiling than any of the others. And yet, lofty as it was, the thing it housed almost scraped the roof. “An elephant!” gasped Lini.

But Brent shook his head soberly. This was no elephant. It made an elephant look like a pigmy. The great bulk, the tremendous, downcurving tusks, the flattish head and oversized ears… “It’s a mastodon,” said Brent, in awe. It was. As perfectly kept as if it had died yesterday and had been set up in here. Almost under its mighty trunk, sat the dead guard whose post was this seventh cave.

Around the rock walls of this place were painted pictures in a continuous frieze. “It shows them hunting,” said Lini, after a look.

“And how they hunted!” exclaimed Brent. The strip of pictures showed men with features like those of the ancient sentries, going after animals, the likes of which modern man has never seen. And it showed them mounted on mastodons. As men now ride horses to hunt the fox, according to these breathtaking pictures, the men of this ancient race rode mastodons to hunt the boar, the elk, and the saber-tooth tiger. And as there is now a master of hounds, that race had a master of mastodons. And it didn’t take much imagination and investigation to decide that the master of mastodons was also headman of the tribe.

“A little dictatorship even then,” observed Brent, looking at pictures showing the master directing the others in various hunting activities and, also, as the end of the frieze indicated, in a strange kind of worship.

“You know something?” whispered Lini. “I think this goes back even beyond the last ice age.”

“Don’t be foolish,” remonstrated Brent. “That was fifty thousand years ago. How could things last for fifty thousand years?”

“Things — even bodies like those of the sentries and the mastodon — could last for fifty million years, covered with ice all the time. Yes, I’ll bet the race that left this goes back before the ice age!”

Brent didn’t think so. But he went on with the fantasy. “And maybe they saw their doom coming,” he said, “and left this stuff here for the future to find. You know, we have done the same thing. It’s some university in Carolina, isn’t it, that has buried a lot of stuff to tell future ages what we were like? You know, one of everything — books on metal pages, drawings of skyscrapers, all the rest.”

“I actually think that’s what this is all about!” said Lini. “Think of it, Brent!”

“There’s one thing I’m thinking of even more,” said Brent promptly. “That is the value of all this to us. We have something here that we could sell for millions of dollars to a museum or to some foundation in New York.”

Lini nodded. Both of them were dazed by the magnitude of what they had found behind the seven doors. “We’ll have to act on it fast,” she said. “The glacier is constantly inching along over the cliff outside. Only a few inches might be enough to overbalance that two-hundred-foot ice wall so that some of it would crack down and bury this thing for another fifty thousand years.”

“Right,” said Brent. “We have to act fast. Yet we must guard it too. I’ll stay here and do that. You go to New York as fast as you can make it, with a sample of something to prove your story. Arrange to sell all this stuff.”

“Brent! You can’t stay here!” Lini looked at the legs of the mastodon, like gnarled and wrinkled tree trunks. Above them flooded the queer white light from the mysterious rods that looked like fused quartz. And over all presided ancient death, with one of his mummified minions as guard in each cave. “You’d go crazy in here!”

“Not with the thought of a couple of million dollars to keep me company,” said Brent. “Go along. You can find that last Indian settlement and get a guide there to hurry you to the railroad. Then down to Vancouver, and you can move fast from there on in.”

“You’d freeze—”

Brent pointed to a gorgeous fur costume. The pictures on the wall showed that this was the traditional costume of the master of mastodons. “I’ll wear that,” he said, “or one of the fur gowns in the wardrobe cave. I’ll be all right.”

“It’ll be a month, at least, before I can get back here with a boat and people to transport the things from the caves. In that time, the ice outside might fall and bury you alive.”

“I’ll have to take that chance,” said Brent. “Anyway, I can stay outside a lot at night, when no one can see me and get curious as to what’s keeping me hanging around here. Go on, Lini, and good luck.”

So Lini left, with many a backward glance at the sheer wall of ice towering up above the one way out for Brent. So many forms of danger threatening her brother… Intelligent as she was, it didn’t occur to her then to think that she herself might travel in danger just as imminent wherever she went with her bizarre secret.