They Found Atlantis

'I've got much more to fear than you darling,' Camilla gulped and suddenly burst into tears.

Vladimir did not know how to contain himself any longer. The sight of his so beautiful Duchess weeping in a fit of uncontrollable terror from fear of this bully Kate was too much for him. Bozo was seated immediately in his rear. With a sudden totally unexpected movement he swung round and smashed his great fist into the gunman's face.

Bozo's head was jerked backward and hit the steel side of the bathysphere a terrific crack. His gun slipped from his fingers before he knew what had hit him and he slid down to the floor unconscious, black blood streaming from his broken nose.

The Prince grabbed the automatic and laughed with boyish glee. 'Now,' he declared waving the weapon dangerously in challenge to the world, 'who shall lay a touch upon my pet-lamb. Camilla my so loved remit your fears I beg. Anyone who speaks unpleasantness to you so beautiful I will shoot, yes instantly—just as I would a dirty dog.'

'For God's sake be careful with that thing!' cried the McKay.

'Have no troubles my nice Captain. With firearms I am an intimate, and in shooting I crack like a double dab.'

'Well I congratulate you Prince,' said Count Axel. 'That was a courageous piece of business and admirably executed. This man's pistol may come in handy if the fears of the Duchess and Sally are justified, but I do hope you won't use it except in the last extremity. Remember there will be at least a dozen like it against you and a couple of machine guns as well.'

'I don't see that you've done much good anyhow,' remarked Nicky gloomily. 'It will only infuriate them when they find that you've knocked out one of their men, and we've no means of getting rid of the body even if he were dead. The moment he fails to come out of the sphere and they find him unconscious they'll cover us with their rods and take that one off you.'

'My poor Nicky you are made jealous,' the Prince 192

laughed again, 'because I also can now say "I hit him— didn't I—right on the nose."'

The incident at least had the effect of stopping Camilla's tears and she clung to Vladimir's free arm while she stared out of the porthole; no longer even registering the great lemon yellow Finger Squid they were passing on their way up, but endeavouring to persuade herself that her brave young Roumanian would protect her from Kate's wrath when they reached the surface.

Sally sat silent, clutching the McKay's hand in both of hers and trying to still her fears, while he, Count Axel and the Doctor considered the new position. Although they did not voice their thoughts all three had come to the conclusion that, courageous as Vladimir's action had been, considering that he might well have received a bullet in the back, his bravado would be of little use to them when the bathysphere was hoisted on to its supports. The McKay placed his chief hope in obtaining help through the people on the tender, but he was not acutely worried by Kate's arrival since he could not convince himself that there was any real reason why Kate should have any cause to put them through the mill.

Count Axel was dreading that Vladimir's rashness might precipitate a general massacre and had determined to keep within clutching distance of him directly they left the sphere; in order that he might prevent the Prince using the weapon he had secured unless it came to the unlikely point of their lives being actually threatened.

'Sally,' said Camilla in a low voice.

'Yes, darling?'

'Don't you think we ought to tell them—now.'

'I don't see that it matters dear. When we discussed it we agreed that their knowing would not make the least difference to our chances of escape. But tell them if you like.'

'Well,' Camilla hesitated. 'This is why Sally and I are so frightened. When Kate forced me to sign that will he didn't know that-'

She got no further. They had risen about 800 feet and only just moved on after one of the regulation halts for a tie to be removed. Now, quite unexpectedly, they stopped again.

For a moment they sat silent, expecting their steady up-t.F.A.—G 193

ward progress to be resumed, but nothing happened. The ball continued to hang motionless.

'Ask what is the matter,' said the Doctor. He had a faint but uncomfortable thought that the crane machinery might have jammed.

'What's happened? Anything wrong?' enquired Nicky into the telephone.

Oscar's voice came back in reply: 'Orders from the bridge that we are to let you remain suspended where you are mein Herr.'

Nicky informed the others and, as they pondered silently on this change of plan, he turned back to the instrument. 'Lets have it Oscar—what's the big idea?'

'Wait,' said Oscar. Then, after a pause of quite two minutes, he spoke again in a guttural whisper: 'A warship has arrived. It is British and they have lowered a boat.'

'Good man!' said Nicky, 'keep me posted if you can. With a beaming face he swung round and passed on the news.

'By Jove! ! Then my signals were picked up after all.' The McKay suddenly burst into song.

'What shall we do with a drunken sailor? What shall we do with a drunken sailor? Shave his chin with a rusty razor Early—in—the-'

'Stop!' shouted Sally, among a chorus of excited enquiries. 'What signals?'

'Why,' he announced with modest pleasure, 'I've been morsing from my cabin with the light switch every night since Kate first seized the yacht. Someone was bound to spot the flashes from the porthole sometime—but I didn't hope for much until we crossed the shipping belts on our way South.'

'O! you hero!' Sally's big grey eyes were damp with relief and joyful emotion. 'You never told us a thing about it— you've saved us after all!'

'By Crikey!' Vladimir slapped the McKay on the shoulder enthusiastically. 'You are a black horse and no mess up!'

'What's that,' Nicky asked eagerly at the telephone. Then he turned again: 'Oscar says that a Naval Officer and a party of men have just come on board.'

The McKay winked at Sally. 'Aren't you glad that scoundrel Kate came back now? He's arrived just in time to meet the Navy.'

Count Axel gave a low delighted chuckle. 'It has been an amazing experience and we are no worse after all. Now that the world knows of the hold-up the Duchess's fortune is safe, and while Kate has spent thousands in organising his coup, we have been quietly carrying on our diving just as we planned. All his schemes have gone for nothing while we have actually found Atlantis!'

'The exploration—you will not stop now Gnadige Hertz-ogin—but permit it to go on,' the Doctor asked anxiously.

'Of course, Doctor—of course.' Camilla gave him a gracious smile. 'We will refit as soon as we possibly can and then you shall carry on for just as long as you like.'

He seized her hand and kissed it, while the McKay broke into song once more:

'Hi! Hi! up she rises Hi! Hi! up she rises Hi! Hi! up—she--'

Suddenly the sphere began to move again. Not up—but down. They stared at each other questioningly. To find themselves sinking when they expected to be drawn up at any moment by their rescuers was startling enough but what followed held them silent with a quake of fear.

Instead of being gently lowered at the usual speed of two minutes to a hundred feet, the ball was gathering speed as it went down. Fish, squids, prawns, jellies, sea-snails and shoals of arrow worms began to flash past the windows at an alarming speed.

'Quick Nicky!' yelled the McKay. 'Order them to slow us up—what's that madman on the crane up to?' The appalling thought had flashed into his mind that the undercarriage of the sphere contained a load of dynamite and a couple of dozen fulminate of mercury detonators. If they hit bottom at this pace they would all be blown to hell.

'Stop us!' shouted Nicky into the telephone. 'Stop us, damn you or we'll crash for sure!'

No reply came from the other end, and so it seemed that Oscar had left the instrument. Then he heard a ragged fusillade of distant shots.

'Somethings wrong,' he gasped, 'they're shooting at each other up there.'

About sixteen minutes had elapsed since the bathysphere had started, without warning, on its upward journey. It had risen some eight hundred feet but now, despite the resistance of the v/ater, its weight and that of the eight people in it, caused fish and squids to slither past its rounded sides as it hurtled unchecked at full speed towards the bottom.

Fortunately Sally and Camilla were not aware of the acute danger due to the dynamite stored in its base, and anticipated no more than that it would hit the sea floor with a horrid bump. They were much more concerned in wondering what was going on above.

'Try again Nicky—try again,' Camilla cried anxiously. 'Ask what's happening up on deck.'

'I am,' bawled Nicky, 'can't you hear me—but the swine refuses to answer,' and it was true that he had never ceased to demand or plead for information from his instrument which was now so sinisterly dumb.

The McKay judged that they had dropped at least 700 feet. He knew that the crash must come at any second and then the horrible blackout. It would be almost instantaneous anyway, yet time is an illusion, happy days pass before their full joy is even remotely realised, one can only savour something of them afterwards in retrospect; and anxious hours drag by while the minute hand of the clock crawls like a snail circling the dial. Who can say, when a man blows his brains out, that the pause between his finger pressing the trigger and the moment when he is really dead may not seem to him like a month of shattering overwhelming agony in which tissue is torn from tissue with unendurable successive and separate spasms of torture as the bullet crashes through his skull. He put his arm round Sally's shoulders then closed his eyes and waited.

Suddenly there was a terrific jolt, they were lifted from their seats for a second, then flung together in a tangled heap.

The bathysphere had been completely arrested in its rapid descent, and hovered uncertainly for a moment.

When they recovered from the shock they realised that the searchlight had gone out.

Nicky screamed down the telephone. He screamed and blasphemed in vain. He knew that the line was already dead.

Camilla clung to Vladimir. He had his two great arms locked round her in a defiant, protective embrace.

The Doctor scrambled to his feet and produced a hand torch. He flashed it at the window, the sphere was sinking again, but more slowly now, it had not had time to gather pace.

After what seemed to be an eternity but was actually no more than a minute they came to rest on the bottom with a gentle bump.

The blue beam from the Doctor's torch, focused on a porthole, penetrated the inky blackness no more than a foot, but into it there swam a new snake-like creature from above. Dead black, no more than three inches thick, and seemingly endless, it passed through the beam in graceful looping curves.

The McKay stared at it with sudden horror. He knew that it was no living thing but the cable coiling down from above as it sank in great festoons about them. It had snapped, and they were trapped there, 900 fathoms down, where no human hand could ever bring them aid.

Death Hovers in the Darkness

The Doctor knew too what that thin curving line of falling cable meant. Someone in the ship above had jammed the lever into reverse when the bathysphere was running out at a speed far greater than had ever been intended. The violence of the check had proved too great a strain. It had snapped somewhere in its mile of length above their heads. There was nothing to be done—nothing. He switched out his torch.

The black, utterly impenetrable, darkness closed down upon them as if they had suddenly been struck blind. Then a glimmer of greyness showed the ports and, as their eyes recovered from the change, they saw once more than eternal devil dance of ghostly shapes in the dull luminosity carried by the strange creatures of the deep.

Each one of the seven conscious persons in the sphere now guessed what had happened and each was so appalled that none of them could speak. Subconsciously they understood that they had been caught—trapped beyond any possible hope of escape—in this small circular steel chamber nine hundred fathoms down; but for a little their brains refused to take it in—could not admit it—and rebelled against the terrible thought that they had been severed completely from all the life that they had previously known —with utter unalterable finality.

A horrible unnatural silence lasted for almost two minutes, each of which seemed like the passing of many days. Stark ungovernable fear held them in its grip like a physical paralysis then Count Axel relaxed a little and sighed heavily.

He had always hoped that when death came to him he would be able to meet it with a bow. He was not afraid of death because he had unshakable faith in the survival of his Kama. He had enjoyed his present life but his principal regret to leave it would be that he must pass that strange barrier which blots out all but the vaguest intuitive memories of earlier experiences before a soul is born again. Now, he was not so certain that he would be able to greet death as he had always planned. It was one thing to die by a bullet, drowning, a street accident perhaps, or even after a long and painful illness during which such fortitude as he could muster had been displayed, but quite another to sit there cramped and hopeless waiting for his companions to show the first signs of madness and eventually to die a screaming maniac, fighting for the last breath of air.

'We're going to die!' said Sally at last, in a whisper that held a terrible conviction, and then again, her voice rising to a shriller note, 'We're going to die!'

'Steady m'dear,' the McKay's arm was still round her shoulders and he pressed her nearer. He would have given anything in the world had he been safe and possessed it then to be able to think of some words to comfort her, but his tongue was dry in his mouth and there was no shred of hope that he could offer.

'I'm not going to die! I won't! I won't! Help! Help! Help!' screamed Nicky down his useless telephone.

Vladimir released Camilla from his embrace, turned and struck out twice into the darkness behind him. He barked the knuckles of his right fist badly on the ice cold steel of the sphere but the left caught Nicky behind the ear. Suddenly his frantic gibbering ceased. He choked and slid down on to the body of the still unconscious gunman.

'Oh what have you done!' moaned Camilla.

'I could not wait by and see such behaving in your presence.' The Prince excused himself soberly then he added in a meditative way with no trace of laughter in his tone. 'Often I have wished to kick that Nicky in his so colourful pants but never did I foresee this kicking with so little happiness to myself.'

'Oh Vladimir—Vladimir,' Camilla suddenly reached up in the darkness and put her arms round his neck. 'Can't you do something—please, please—get us out of this.'

'Ah my so beautiful,' his deep vibrant voice held a soft 199

caressing note. 'If it were my life only—it would not be much to give but—but—what can I do?'

'We're going to die,' said Sally again in that toneless whisper and the McKay felt her tremble as she leaned against him. He was still searching his mind desperately for one ray of hope when Vladimir exclaimed:

'The dynamite! All that we have let us drill into the rocks. The explosion beneath our bottoms may drive us sky high!'

'Absurd,' grunted the McKay. 'The electric wires snapped with the cable, so we can't work the drill or explode the charges, and anyhow I doubt if there's enough H.E. in Chatham to blow this ball up through five-thousand feet of water. Besides, even if one could perform such a miracle we'd only sink again immediately.'

'Gniidige Hertzogin, Fraulein Sally. Herrshaft,' the German addressed them with his usual formality. 'I make my apologies now to all. I haf trusted in the cable being able to withstand any strain and haf been proved in error. That was a miscalculation for which I too shall pay with my life since there is no help for us. One tank of oxygen will last forty-five minutes for eight people—an hour perhaps if we use it sparingly. There are twelve tanks but we have been down four hours and have used five and a half tanks already. The remaining six and a half tanks will keep alive the eight persons here six and a half hours only.'

'As a warship has come to our assistance—they may try to hook us up with their end of the cable,' muttered the McKay yet even as he spoke he realised the absurdity of the suggestion. If sufficient cable still remained attached to the drums for the broken end to reach the bottom the ship was still drifting and, since they had no means of communication, the chances were a thousand to one against the people above lowering the cable over the exact spot where the bathysphere had come to rest. Besides it would be the supreme irony of all if such an attempt succeeded. They were sealed and riveted into the sphere and had a great hook been dangling before the windows at that moment they would have been completely powerless to reach and attach it.

The Doctor shook his head. 'All the ships in the world might be above but they could not help us in any way. We can do nothing—nothing but wait until death comes.'

'You are wrong, Doctor,' said Count Axel quietly. 'A little manipulation of your instruments and we should barely live out another minute. Surely that would be more merciful to us all.'

The horrid silence came again as each debated with themselves if they should choose slow or instant death but it was broken by Camilla almost immediately.

'No, no,' she cried, shuddering in Vladimir's embrace. 'No! I can't bear to die!'

'I had already thought of the Herr Count's suggestion,' announced the Doctor heavily.

'Sally m'dear,' questioned the McKay, 'it's a rotten business I know—but what about it? *

'We're going to die,' repeated Sally with rising hysteria. 'We're going to die! We're going to die!

He pressed her hand and let his head sway from side to side a little with the intensity of his frustration.

'Please,' he murmured, 'now or later?'

She did not reply and the sudden impression reached him that she was going off her head with shock and fear already. Camilla's terrified outbursts were more normal than this dreadful repetition of the one hopeless phrase. He shook her roughly.

'Sally d'you hear me—did you hear what I said?'

'What is it?' she asked vaguely and then, as though waking from a dream: 'Oh God! What are we going to do?'

'Listen m'dear,' he said gently, 'we're trapped here. The cable's snapped—get that? And there's no way out. We haven't a hope in Hades so it's a choice if we hang on for about six hours—then suffocate, or if we take it now— standing up as it were—since the Doctor can black us out in about a minute.'

'I don't care,' her voice was dull—apathetic. 'We're going to die—that's what it is. We're going to die and we just can't do anything to stop it.'

A groan came up from the darkness in their rear. At first they thought it to be Nicky, but it was Bozo coming round. Axel and Vladimir fumbled about until they could haul him into a sitting position. The Doctor flashed his torch to help them, but when they had propped him up his head sagged forward and he apparently passed out again.

Then Nicky, who had come to as his body was lifted 201

from on top of the gunman's sniffed, choked on a sob and muttered, 'Undo the door—can't you. Let's take a sporting chance that the air bubble from this thing carries us to the surface.'

They could not see the Doctor's eloquent shrug but he spoke a moment later. 'The door has been riveted down from the outside, we could not open it even if our lives depended on it and we were in the air above. Here, even if we had the power to do so, which we have not, the in rush of water would compress the air to a bubble no larger than a football and crush us flat.'

Camilla was crying quietly on Vladimir's broad chest. 'I dont want to die,' she sobbed, 'I don't want to—something may happen—it must.'

Nothing could happen. Count Axel on her other side, the Doctor, Vladimir, the McKay all knew that.

'Who's snatched my rod?' A gruff voice came from by the doorway. It was Bozo whose wits were slowly returning to him. 'Put on the light damn you—the boss'll grill you all for this when we get back on deck.'

'I'm afraid there's been an accident,' Count Axel told him quietly. 'Your friends were careless in reversing the crane after they had let us come down with a rush.'

'Is—that—so? Playin' a joke on me eh—I'll learn them plenty when we hit the surface.'

'I only wish you might have the opportunity, but unfortunately the cables broken and we're on the bottom here— stuck.'

'The hell we are!' Bozo lurched drunkenly to his feet, hit his head on the roof of the sphere and swore profanely-then bellowed: 'Where's that lousy Doctor. Come on—get busy. You've got to get us up.'

'I—I wish with all my heart I could,' Doctor Tisch stammered, 'but the Herr Count is quite correct. The cable has broken and we are at rest on the sea bottom—I can do nothing and no help can reach us here.'

'Hi! quit bluffin' Doctor.' Bozo's voice had suddenly gone scared. 'That's not straight—is it?'

'I speak quite truthfully,' the Doctor assured him. 'We face death. There is no alternative. At most we shall all be dead in seven hours.'

'An' you've let me in fer this—have you? All right! I'll 202

mince you first a piece if I've got to die like a rat in a trap.

The gunman threw his heavy body in the direction from which the Doctor's voice had come. Camilla and Sally clutched nervously at the McKay. This fighting in the pitchy blackness distracted their thoughts for a moment yet added to the macabre horror of their situation.

The Doctor grunted as Bozo landed on him, but he still held his torch and switched it on. Vladimir gripped the big gunman by the scruff of the neck and with his tremendous strength hauled him off as if he were only a puppy. Then flung him to the floor.

'Rat is what you are,' declared the Prince contemptuously. 'Open your face again and I will beat you to a pulping.'

Bozo squirmed into a sitting position and sat there hunched, staring with wide eyes into the terrifying darkness. He would have taken on the Prince for a tussle in free air but the appalling finality of the calamity was just beginning to penetrate his dull brain. They were to die then— all of them—like rats in a trap and there was nothing they could do about it—nothing at all. A sort of terrified coma gripped him as, for the first time in his animal existence, he began to visualise certain death in the agony of suffocation.

No one spoke then for a little and the silence was only broken by Camilla's sobbing. She tried to stop but she could not. The great fear seemed to be there right inside her somewhere in the pit of her stomach reaching up and dragging at her very heart.'

'It's true you know—we're going to die,' Sally murmured again almost as if talking to herself.

'Everyone's got to die some time,' said the McKay soberly, 'we're only anticipating the natural course of things a bit m'dear—that's all.'

Camilla heard them and shuddered. Everyone had to die some time of course but she had never paused to face the thought that death must come one day to herself; and here it was hovering over her, in that fearful darkness that could be felt, and seemed to press with the gentlest persistence on her skin. She had taken such a harmless joy in all the flattery and adulation, the handsome lovers and the lovely clothes. Perhaps she might have done more good if she had spent less time amusing herself, but a special department of the Hart estate gave away enormous sums each mourn in response to genuine appeals for charity which had been properly investigated, and she had never harmed anyone wilfully in all her life. Both she and Sally had been brought up very quietly, hardly allowed to see anyone or go out into the world at all, until they were twenty-one, in order to protect the young heiress from fortune hunters. They were only twenty-three now and so had had barely two years of glorious freedom.

It was unfair—unjust to be cut off like this when life was only starting, Camilla felt, and impotent rage momentarily conquered her fear. Never again to admire her own beauty in the dressing-table glass while the maid did her hair. Never again to be able to display her supple rounded limbs, while sunbathing, to the admiration of all beholders. No more laughter, no more flirtations, no more joyous passionate love-making, but darkness—death—and decay. She thought of her exquisite, so carefully tended body, wasted, useless, rotting there, turned to a mass of putrescent stinking carrion, and sobbed afresh.

Aeons of time seemed to drift by while they sat huddled together motionless, their brains racing madly towards the borderland of insanity, or steeped almost to numbness now in blank despair.

The McKay glanced at the luminous dial of his wrist watch and announced: 'It's ten past one. We've been down here just on an hour.'

Nicky laughed, unnaturally, shrilly: 'It's cocktail time— cocktail time up there,' and they knew him to be on the verge of a breakdown.

'I've got a flask of brandy,' the McKay offered. 'I never go on any sort of risky business without one—here, have a pull at it if you like.' As he reached behind him in the darkness to hand over the flask he hoped that a good stiff peg might hold Nicky together for a little longer. He was dreading more than anything the time which must inevitably come when someone's nerve would snap.

'Thanks,' Nicky grabbed the flask gratefully and held it to his mouth.

'You poor dear,' Sally turned her head which was resting on the McKay's shoulder. She spoke normally again now. 'How right you were in trying to dissuade us from coming on these dives. You always foresaw that one of them would end in a tragedy. What rotten luck for you that just this one time you're with us should be the time the cable breaks.'

He shrugged. 'It can't be helped, m'dear. I'm lucky, con-siderin what I've been through, to reach the age I have— and anyhow I've had a lot of fun. It's yourself, and Camilla, and Vladimir and Nicky who're hardest hit. You're all young people who had a right to expect many happy years ahead.'

'You're a dear,' she murmured and snuggled closer to him.

Another hour drifted by while the lights of the luminous fishes came and went with monotonous regularity outside the ports. Inside the sphere they sat cramped yet motionless sunk in a hopeless apathy.

'I wonder,' said Count Axel meditatively, after he had asked, and been told, the time, 'I wonder how long will elapse before they find our bodies here?'

'From now till doomsday,' replied the McKay briefly.

'Oh no, my dear Captain, you are quite wrong. I should say fifty years at the utmost and it is possible that our human remains may be brought to the surface long before that.'

'Why should you think so?'

'Remember that before our unfortunate descent today the Doctor had already proved his theory to be correct. Slinger, Ardow, the telephonist Oscar, who has had a most fortunate escape by the way, and doubtless all the members of the crew, know that the remains of the Atlantean capital do really lie beneath them. This great discovery is now the property of the whole world; other, greater, bathyspheres with stronger cables will be built and new expeditions will find ready financial backing since that is always forthcoming when there are definite prospects of finding gold. Then the advance of science is so rapid these days, that every ruin in these waters will be mapped and examined They are bound to discover this rusty ball before they are done and it would not surprise me at all to learn—if I could see into the future—that before twenty years are past the sphere will be a greatly prized exhibit in some museum anc our bodies buried with considerable honour in-'

'Stop! cried Camilla wildly. 'Stop! How can you!'

'I am sorry Madame,' he apologised turning his head to smile in the darkness. 'I had hoped to distract your thoughts a little.'

'Don't, please,' she begged. 'It's bad enough as things are but to hear you calmly speculating on what may happen to our corpses will drive me out of my mind. Besides-'

'Besides what, Madame?' he prompted her.

'I've just remembered,' her voice went tremulous again. 'The Doctor warned us when we first went down that we should not talk too much, because the more we did the more—the more oxygen we used up.'

'I know, I hoped that you had forgotten that, because it had just occurred to me again. I was really trying to reduce our supply and, automatically, the time we still have to wait.'

'Camilla's right!' snapped Nicky, 'Camilla's right! For God's sake shut up.'

'I will,' agreed the Count—'since it is her wish.'

The silence was longer this time, so long that they almost seemed to have been asleep and suffering in some fantastic nightmare when the Doctor spoke:

'Nine out of our twelve tanks are used now.'

'Would it not be better if we made an end then?' Count Axel suggested again.

'No,' cried Nicky promptly. 'That's suicide and I won't have it. It may surprise you to know it but I'm religious in a kind of way. I don't mind telling you now it—it can't get any further but all that dope about my being an American and graduate of a swell college is sheer huey. I'm only half American through my mother and my father was North country English. I was born in a London slum. I ran away from home to better myself and I did by golly—but they were a religious pair and deep down in me their teaching stuck. We'll all have to go before the Judge's seat when the last trumpet sounds and that scares me more than the thought of death—I'll not add suicide to all the lying and cheating I've had to do to get up to where I got.'

'You're right, Boss—you said a mouthful,' Bozo came out of his coma and unexpectedly backed Nicky up. 'My folks was religious too—and what I've got to answer for's enough. Yes, Sir, I'm with you all the time.'

The McKay would have clung to his life like a limpet had there been the remotest hope of retaining it but, since they had to die, he preferred the Count's way out to the horror of madness and torture of suffocation. He too possessed deep religious convictions although he was not given to talking of them but the Doctor expressed his belief exactly when he said:

'I am no atheist. In fact I was educated for the Lutheran Church, ordained, and practised as a Minister until I was twenty-eight. Only my intense interest in archaeology and an offer of employment on an expedition to Assyria tempted me to resign from the Ministry; but I haf always believed that God's mercy has no limitations. I am unorthodox perhaps but I cannot think He would withhold his pardon from anyone who shortened their life by an hour or two when in such a hopeless predicament as ourselves.'

Camilla settled it. She began to scream and beg them frantically not to do anything—yet.

Vladimir declared jumpily that he would shoot anyone who attempted to go against Camilla's wishes, and they settled down again to wait for death in grim silence.

The atmosphere was so tense that they could almost feel each other thinking. Sally had not spoken for a long time now and a shivering fit took possession of her. The McKay felt her slim body trembling beneath his arm and once more he racked his brains for some way to comfort her.

'Look here,' he said suddenly. 'I'm no story teller but oxygen or no oxygen I'm going to tell you a story m'dear. It's the only one I can think of at the moment because my old brain's gone woolly, and you'll have heard it years ago but if you'll listen a bit maybe it will give you something to think about.'

The others turned towards him in the darkness and he began:

'Once upon a time there were three sisters, or rather two of them were sisters and the other was a stepsister if I remember. Anyhow two of them were much older than the other one and they were both very ugly, and lazy and bad tempered, while the youngest was a beautiful young girl like you.

Sally stopped shivering. Just those four first words: 'Once upon a time,* had caught her back from that maze of dread speculations; yet she was not listening to him as he went on; she was thinking of one thing only now. The full realisation that she loved him with all her heart and soul, had just come upon her. He might be nearly twice her age and grey haired, but he had all a young man's virility and in his heart lay youth tempered by a great gentleness. That his concern for her was so great that he could put aside the thought of his own approaching end in an endeavour to distract her, like a little child, with a fairy story touched her more deeply than any experience she had ever known. She lowered her head against his chest and burst into a violent storm of tears.

'What is it then. What is it Sally m'dear?' he asked tenderly as he stroked her hair. 'Listen to the story I'm telling you and try and forget everything else. Now these three sisters lived-'

'The fish!' exclaimed the Doctor suddenly. 'What is the matter with the fish?'

They all roused and stared out of the portholes. Something unusual was obviously happening outside. The lights had ceased to dance, every single one of them was streaming now in one direction, back from the open space, perhaps upon the western verge of the Atlantean city, where the bathysphere had fallen, towards the shelter of the ruins.

For a moment the prisoners in the bathysphere watched in wonder. Lights of every size and colour streaked by. There could be no doubt whatever that these creatures of the deep were fleeing in terror of their lives, just like animals before a forest fire, and the danger they feared was coming up out of the deeper waters to the westward.

The numbers of lights increased. The things outside dashed themselves against the fused' quartz windows in their frantic panic to escape. They seemed to burst, scattering clouds of luminous food and multitudes of coloured stars. The press became so great that, for the first time since the electric wires had broken, the group in the sphere could see each other's faces faintly illuminated in the unearthly radiance caused by this multitude of terrified creatures.

Then the lights dimmed, and the cataract of racing flashes ceased, yet a number of bright blotches hovered at the portholes bobbing feebly up and down as though their owners were caught in the crush and could not escape.

The Doctor switched on his torch and by it they saw that a solid writhing mass of fish and squids and prawns were now jammed up against the windows. Not an inch of water showed and the surface of each port was covered completely by wriggling tentacles and fins. Suddenly the bathysphere began to move.

'Gott in Himmel!' exclaimed the Doctor. 'What now!'

Slowly but surely the sphere moved sideways and was drawn along the surface of the ocean bed surrounded by the press of captive fish. The party sat tight and held their breath, utterly bewildered by this extraordinary phenomenon. They were dragged about a hundred yards, as far as they could judge, then the sphere tilted gently and fell over sideways.

Sally screamed—Camilla fainted—the others clutched wildly at each other as they were flung sprawling against the side of the sphere which held the searchlight and had now become its bottom. Yet there was no violent shock as they turned over. The sphere seemed to be sinking as though it had fallen over a cliff, and the second they had sorted themselves out the Doctor flashed his torch on the ports.

Nothing was to be seen. Only the mass of writhing creatures still pressed against the windows. For nearly fifteen minutes the feeling that they were sinking, first gently, then quite fast, then gently again, continued while they strove to revive Camilla and examined the damage which had been done. Fortunately the tanks were safe and still functioning, only the now useless lighting apparatus had been smashed. Camilla came round and went off again. Sally and Nicky were babbling half hysterically while the rest were wrought up to an almost unendurable pitch of excitement, although they were too staggered even to hazard an opinion as to what was going on outside.

Suddenly they knew that they had ceased moving yet their downward motion had been checked so gently that it was almost as though they were attached to the cable and only halting for one of the hose ties to be put on. There was a pause of about two minutes then, whatever held them pressed in the mass of fish, began to haul them in a fresh direction.

They started to bump a little and the Doctor cast anxious 209

eyes on the tanks where the spotlight of the torch showed them tilted at an angle. The sphere rolled over again, but not very much this time, only sufficient to make it necessary for them to change the place where they were crouching to a few feet nearer the door. The jolting ceased and they were sinking once more—still further into the abyss.

'What the thunderin' blazes is happening,' growled the McKay. It was the first coherent remark which emerged from the almost perpetual cries of fear and astonishment following their upset.

'We have been swallowed with these many fish,' said Vladimir. 'We are now as that poor Joshua in the belly of a whale.

'I do not think so,' the Doctor shook his head. 'We know little yet about life in the great deeps but it is quite unreasonable to suppose the existence of any such gigantic species. A swallow large enough to pass the bathysphere as part of a single gulp would need a submarine monster as great as a two-thousand-ton ship—I do not believe it possible.

'Besides,' Count Axel added, 'we were dragged along the sea door, sank several hundred feet, were dragged again, and are now sinking once more. Our movements would be quite different if we were in the stomach of some undreamed of Leviathan.'

As he ceased speaking they came to rest as gently as before. There was another pause then, for the third time the sphere was dragged sideways. They had to move again. The door was now almost at the bottom of the sphere, the ports were tilted upward at an angle in the slope of what was now the ceiling. For ten minutes the sphere moved forward, jerkily at times, while they lay or crouched among the broken canvas chairs and debris in its bottom.

It halted again and remained quite still. Then the blotches of light at the portholes began to move more freely. The Doctor lifted the beam of his torch from the cylinders to the ports and they saw that the pressure upon the great shoal of living creatures outside had been released. They were no longer jammed tight, but a seething mass leaping and thrashing in the water. After a moment bubbles appeared then foam and a little wavelet splashed against the fused quartz. The fish slid downwards and disappeared.

A water line now showed in the top sections of the ports then sank jerkily until that too was gone.

The Doctor stumbled to his feet and held his big torch close to one of the windows, the others craned their necks, standing on the broken chairs, to peer out over his shoulders.

Outside it was pitch dark and the beam did not carry to any roof above them, but in front and a little higher than the level of the sphere they could just make out a wall that had a flat even surface and seemed like the side of a stone quay. All about them were a solid mass of squirming fish and squids of every colour and variety which stretched right up to the wall and on either side of them as far as they could see. The bathysphere was half buried in them right up to the lower edges of its ports which were now almost at the top of the sphere.

'Where in heaven's name are we?' gasped Nicky.

'I don't know and I don't care!' exclaimed the McKay with sudden excitement, 'but there's air outside—air. Come on! We've got to get out of here.'

Count Axel sighed, then he said slowly, 'I'm afraid you've forgotten my friend that we are bolted in. Our two ton door is screwed down from outside. Escape is quite impossible and our oxygen will only last us just over another hour.'

Trapped in the Sphere

Count Axel's sober statement brought them crashing down from wild heights of excitement to a new level of despair. It was true. They were still sealed in the sphere and any attempt to break out of it must prove as hopeless as if they had been locked into the strongest vault under the Bank of England.

For a moment they were frozen into silence then Nicky cried: 'Look—look! There's something moving on that wall out there!'

As they stared a bulky greyish mass appeared out of the darkness and they saw they were right in supposing the wall to form a quay, for the mass came forward and it was recognisable as a solid block of countless human figures.

'Saved by Crikey!' exclaimed Vladimir. 'Camilla! We are saved I say 1'

She had come out of her faint again and, picking her up bodily, he held her so that she could see out of the port. A fresh wave of tremulous hope surged through the others. If these were human beings they would surely find some way to unscrew the door bolts of the sphere and let its occupants out.

But how could they be? In breathless silence Camilla and her friends pressed their faces to the windows and watched the advancing mob. They appeared human, yet they moved in darkness. No trace of light except the beam of the Doctor's torch and the luminosity of the creatures packed tight about the sphere, showed in this great undersea cavern; and the newcomers carried neither flares nor torches. Moreover, they wore no clothes or ornaments;

everyone of them was stark na ked and their bodies were an unhealthy greyish white.

'They're not human,' whispered Sally. 'And they are horrible—horrible.'

The McKay felt too that there was something utterly repulsive about that crowd of nude leprous looking bodies huddled on the quay, but he was not so ready to exclude them from the human race. They were a small people, the tallest among the males being only about five feet in height, but they certainly were not monkeys and each of them held a long spearlike weapon in his hand. Their bodies were hairless except for the pale, lank, almost white hair which grew sparsely on their narrow skulls. Their faces were curiously uniform with large parroty, wide nostrilled noses, heavy lidded, almost colourless eyes, large mouths filled with white even gleaming teeth, and weak underhung jaws, yet they had nothing of that savage look which had characterised the faces of the Mermen.

No leader appeared to control or direct their movements. They pressed forward, then sideways, all together, like a herd which scents danger or fresh pasture, in a wind. One of them slipped and fell from the quayside into the mass of fish. A great squid reached out a tentacle and curled it, snake-like, round his neck.

The others made no attempt to help him but stood there gibbering and twitching their heads from side to side, as though they knew what had happened without glancing down, but were only concerned with acute anxiety for themselves.

The one who had fallen fought and struggled, striving to break the grasp of the tentacle with one stubby claw-like hand and stabbing frantically with his long sharp spear, but the squid reached up three more tentacles and, wrapping them round his arms and torso, dragged him down.

It was all over in a moment, almost before Nicky had time to gasp: 'Why don't they help him?' and Sally moaned.

Upon the quayside the great mob had steadied. The front rank threw themselves upon their knees, the others pressed up behind them leaning across their shoulders then, as though upon a common impulse rather than at any word of command, they all began to stab downward with their spears, striking again and again at the heaving fish below.

The torrent of blows was so fast and regular that nothing could live under it; the long spears reached right down to the bottom of the harbour and soon even the tentacles of the squids had ceased to wave, for every creature within six feet of the quay was dead—stabbed through and through a dozen times.

Suddenly, like a herd once more, the whole mob leapt from the quay wall into the slippery sea of carcasses and attacked the still living creatures further out with the same rhythmic stabbing. A spear struck the bathysphere, another and another. The party inside it could not hear the clang of the blows upon the metal but they realised then, that this strange race of half men was blind.

As the mob advanced, wading waist high in the slimy shoal of dead sea creatures, a small fat woman with enormous hanging breasts stumbled head first against the bathysphere. She opened her mouth in what appeared to be a scream and, almost instantly the mouths of all the others opened too, then, as one man, they turned and fled. Floundering, slipping, thrusting each other aside they fought their way back to the quayside, and scrambled on to it. There they turned again and crouched in a great huddle, their spears upraised, staring blindly out towards the sphere.

'We'll get no help from them,' declared the McKay bitterly. 'They're wild things and blind I think. Anyhow they wouldn't know a rivet from a cocoanut.'

'Is there no way we can get out ourselves,' Sally asked with sudden desperation.

'None I fear, Fraulein,' declared the Doctor gently. 'The door is riveted down and the bottom—well, that is impossible.'

'What's that 1' snapped the McKay. 'Is there an entrance in the bottom?'

'No entrance Herr Kapitan but the bottom of the sphere is not solid as the sides. It has four layers of steel plates with supports between which will resist equal pressure. Each can be unscrewed in turn to enable us to get at the machinery which operates the claws, the dredges, and the drill.'

'Why the hell didn't you tell us that before?' the McKay blazed out at him.

'I never thought to see the bathysphere upon its side 214

which alone makes such exit possible,' protested the Doctor, 'and, since our arrival here, our every moment has been taken by watching these strange people; besides it would take two men a whole day's hard work to remove enough of the machinery to get out that way and we have oxygen to last us now an hour and a half only.'

'Reduce the oxygen supply to half. Show a light on the bottom, and give me a screw driver,' ordered the McKay.

'It is useless, Herr Kapitan,' the Doctor's voice was apathetic. 'If we had six and a half hours oxygen as when we were first cut off it might be done. But now—no. You will tear your fingers for nothing. The hundreds of screws and joints to be-'

'Do as I tell you—I'm taking charge here now.' The McKay pulled another torch from his pocket and thrust it into Sally's hand. 'Take that. I brought it on the off chance the lights might fail. The more light we have now the better.

The Doctor shrugged. 'I have a dozen torches here in case of need but this attempt is useless. We shall be dead before-'

'Stop talking, damn you. It uses oxygen and every ounce of that is precious now. Issue four torches and keep the rest in reserve. Everyone's to remain silent till we're out. Nicky! Axel! Bozo! you're to remain in the back of the sphere, away from its bottom. You two girls hold the torches—give you something to think about. Vladimir, you're the strong man. Come and help move the plates as we get them up. Doctor, how many screwdrivers have you got in your chest?

'One large—one small.'

'Good, give me the large one then—thanks. Use the other yourself. You know the machinery. Silence now—get busy.'

They obeyed him without questioning his commands. He stripped off his coat, flung it down to kneel on and began to attack the screws in the sphere's wooden floor.

In five minutes they had torn away the central floor boards but it took ten to remove the first layer of steel plates which was immediately beneath and only then did the McKay realise that the Doctor had real reason for his pessimism. They were faced with literally hundreds of small girders and slender rods all criss-crossed and mixed up with wheels. It looked a sheer impossibility to get them out under two hours at least and there were two more similar barriers to cross before they could reach the outer air.

The Doctor had already produced his whole set of tools and spread them out on the underside of the sphere. With these and frantic fingers they attacked the jungle of steel mechanism.

After twenty minutes the McKay was streaming with sweat and the Doctor blowing like a grampus. The air was already beginning to get thick and stuffy owing to the reduced supply of oxygen.

'Axel! Nicky! take over,' ordered the McKay when half an hour had passed and he sank back panting against the side of the sphere.

Nicky was quick and efficient at the job, but Axel's beautiful slim hands had never been created for such work. When he had watched the Count for two minutes the McKay called out, 'Bozo—did you ever run a car?'

'Sure boss—I've known the inside of a flivver since I was ten.'

'Take over from Count Axel then.'

The big gunman shambled forward and flung himself eagerly upon the floor, but his hands were large and clumsy. He was painfully slow at unscrewing the complicated joints.

'Let me have a go,' whispered Camilla. 'I'm good at screws. Meccano was my favourite nursery game.'

'Good girl! Take over from Bozo then.' The McKay wiped the dripping perspiration from his face.

Camilla proved a real asset. Her quick fingers slid in and out among the rods and Vladimir, just behind her, had all his work cut out to hand her spanners and pass the pieces she and Nicky freed into the back of the sphere where they were making a dump.

The whole of the work had to be carried out under the greatest difficulties. The sphere was only built to accommodate eight persons—the number in it at the present time— and each was supposed to sit in an allotted space which gave little play for movement. Its bulging sides allowed no additional freedom as these concave surfaces held all the instruments, the searchlight, the oxygen tanks, the fans, the trays of calcium chloride for absorbing moisture, and the even more important ones with soda lime in them for removing the poisonous excess of carbon dioxide from the air.

Now that the sphere lay on its side the broken chairs occupied valuable floor space despite the fact that Vladimir had smashed their slender wooden frames to matchwood to reduce their bulk. The members of the party who, in turn, were fighting so desperately to get at the mechanism under the floor had to be given elbow room as they knelt at their work. The torch-holders bent in cramped attitudes, shining the lights over their shoulders. Behind, the rest crouched or stood in strained positions, helpless but frantically anxious to glimpse what progress was being made.

Each time the workers were changed it necessitated their reliefs forcing their way through a crush that resembled a small section of the Black Hole of Calcutta. As the floor plates and pieces of machinery were passed back the press became even greater for, while the workers were unable to get more than their heads and their hands into the space which they had cleared, the awkward spiky dump of steel in the back of the sphere continued to occupy more room nearly every moment.

It took an hour to clear the first space between the quadruple floors of machinery. Then the McKay and Doctor Tisch attacked the second lining of steel plates.

Their fingers were no longer as supple as when they started, and their hands were bruised and torn. The air was stale and foul so that they panted and gasped as they twisted and jerked at the screws. In consequence it took them nearly twenty minutes to get up the second floor.

Another mass of levers now barred their passage. Not so many but larger this time and more difficult to get at. In addition there was a square steel box in the centre of their path. It contained the dynamite and, immediately the lid was off, the slabs were passed carefully back. The Doctor and the McKay got the box out but when they had done so they both had to give up, and lay gasping for breath on the floor.

At the McKay's order Sally and Vladimir tried their hands while Count Axel passed the freed material to the dump. Sally was nothing like as quick as Camilla and Vladimir was tempted into trying his strength instead of skill. He wrenched out two small rods with the assistance of a spanner, but the third only bent and caused them more trouble than they had experienced with half a dozen others put together, so the McKay put Camilla and Nicky on again, since they had done so well before.

Their partnership was not so successful this time. Nicky stuck to it gamely and did yeoman service but Camilla was so overcome now by the heavy atmosphere that she could hardly move her hands. The Doctor too seemed pretty done as he lolled uncomfortably, almost comatose, against the side of the sphere.

The McKay pushed Camilla aside and took her place. As he did so he called out to ask the time and, when Count Axel gave it to him, ordered the supply of oxygen to be reduced again by half. It seemed impossible that they could carry on at all with only a quarter of the normal allowance but he knew now for certain that they would never be able to free themselves in the three hours which was all that a half ration allowed them.

Count Axel, who felt his uselessness acutely, had secured another torch and, standing on tiptoe, took a look out of one of the ports. 'These people,' he said slowly, with laboured breath, 'are eating the fish raw—now.'

'Silence,' snapped the McKay angrily. He knew how infinitely precious every ounce of oxygen must be. As matters stood at present there seemed little enough chance of the supply holding out. Sally, lighting him at his work, felt too exhausted to be more than faintly disgusted at the mental picture which came into her mind that showed the host of blind grey ghouls greedily devouring the freshly killed fish.

Nicky's brain conjured up a memory of some shots from an Eskimo film—Mala the Magnificent—in which the native actors had fed with gluttonous delight on handfuls of warm blubber torn from the body of a captured seal; but his fingers never paused in their frantic efforts to loosen the joints of the machinery.

Time passed. The air became thin and rarefied. It was as difficult to draw sufficient into their lungs as if they had been locked up for hours in the dry heat of the hottest room in a Turkish bath. Camilla said nothing but she had an awful feeling that instead of being about to faint again she was really dying now. She tried desperately hard to keep herself upright but her body suddenly went limp and she fell forward in a crumpled heap. Vladimir saw her and motioned to Bozo to take his place then, as the gunman crawled painfully forward, he lifted Camilla tenderly in his arms, kissed her gently on the cheek, and propped her up against the side of the sphere next to the oxygen tanks where she would reap the benefit of more than her fair share of their precious supply.

After two hours and a half they had cleared the second lot of machinery and begun on the third floor, but the air had become positively stifling. Their breath came in quick short pants and an examination of the oxygen tanks showed that even with the reduced supply they had only three quarters of an hour to go. Another hour and they would certainly all be dead.

'We've got to get out—we've got to 1' wheezed the McKay, 'Come on Doctor—your turn now.'

The Doctor roused himself, wiped the sweat from his face and rolled over, then set to work again with a sudden spurt of energy. Nicky, whom he had just relieved, managed to reach the back of the sphere and then collapsed.

The McKay felt his fingers grow numb and clumsy. He hated the idea of giving up but knew that he must have another spell of rest, otherwise he would be delaying progress. He muttered to Bozo who took his place. The gunman's thick blunt hands were trembling and the sight of his slowness almost drove the McKay to a frenzy, but he worked doggedly at the job and his tools never slipped.

By the time they'd got the third floor up Count Axel knew from a quick glance at his watch that their limit of life was now reduced to a quarter of an hour. Without reference to the McKay he turned the oxygen valve a fraction lower—even another two minutes might mean the difference between safety and death, but if he could have seen the work still to be done from where he crouched behind the others, he would not have bothered.

A fresh barrier confronted them. Great reels of electric wires for exploding detonators from several hundred feet above the ocean bed—masses of springs and interlocking levers. The Doctor groaned but he and Bozo laboured on.

Their heads ached appallingly, their eyes seemed about to burst from their sockets, their tongues were swollen to almost double their normal size and filled their mouths so that they had to keep them wide open as they fought for the last breaths of oxygen.

Sally's torch slipped from her hand, smashed on the steel floor and went out. Then she slid to her knees and fell backwards. Bozo was the next to go. He had never fully recovered from the blow which Vladimir had given him eight hours before, soon after the cable had snapped, and now he just toppled over sideways like a shot rabbit.

Vladimir reached backwards and shook the Count out of his semi-torpor, then he pulled Bozo away from the mass of levers that still faced them and took his place. Axel crawled over the prostrate bodies and lit the workers with his torch.

The next to go was the Doctor. He had succeeded in freeing one of the big reels of wire so that they could actually see the last floor now, beyond which was the life-giving air. With a great effort he lifted the reel and, turning, placed it on Sally's chest, then without a murmur he fell forward senseless across her legs. The McKay picked up the spanner he had dropped.

It was now a nightmare scene. Enfeebled almost to fainting point from lack of air, the McKay and Vladimir still struggled with the many struts; Count Axel held the torch; while behind, five limp unconscious bodies lay huddled in grotesque and horrible disarray.

About eighteen inches square of the last floor was clear but the McKay knew now that he had failed. A dozen jutting rods had still to be removed before the smallest of them could force their way through the gap, and they were so weak that the floor itself would take another hour's work to get up. The oxygen was all but finished and death hovered waiting, in the shadows of the sphere to touch them on the shoulder.

He no longer had the strength for rapid action but he turned and whispered painfully:

'Count—dynamite—on your—knees.' He knew that what he was going to do was the most desperate hazard—they might all be blown to fragments, but what did that matter. Still there was a fraction less chance of the dynamite exploding through concussion if it were removed from contact with the surface of the sphere.

As Count Axel exerted all his remaining strength to lift 220

the box the McKay laid his hands on Vladimir's arm. 'Give me—your—gun.'

With slow fumbling fingers Vladimir pulled it from his pocket and passed it over.

The McKay took it and, as Count Axel focused the light again, he lifted it. The weapon seemed to weigh a ton, but he brought it up to a line where two of the bottom plates in the last floor were jointed—and fired.

In the confined space of the air-tight sphere the succession of explosions sounded as though a whole munition works was blowing up. For a second the McKay thought that, as he had feared, the shock of the vibration had set off the detonators. The automatic had dropped from his hand. The crash seemed to have burst his ear-drums. Vladimir was gasping out something but he could no longer hear.

He swayed feebly, peering through the little cloud of smoke that obscured the remaining machinery. Count Axel's arm was resting on his shoulder, still holding the torch. No hoped-for hole showed in the plates, only an irregular round dent on the joint that he had aimed at. It seemed now that their last hope had gone.

As the McKay crouched there, the echoes of the shots still reverberating in his ears, his head singing and whirling, his eyes suffused with blood, Vladimir picked up a heavy lever—the last that they had removed. Gripping it with both hands he lurched forward, his strength gone but his great weight behind the stabbing blow with which he jabbed the dented surface.

The bullets from the automatic had sprung the plates a trifle and Vladimir's last desperate effort completed the work. They only parted the sixteenth of an inch but an insistent hissing came like the sound of angels' music and they knew that the air was coming through.

For over an hour the McKay, Vladimir and Count Axel lay utterly exhausted and semi comatose, then they began to revive and one by one resuscitated the others. The air was still stifling hot, oppressive, and lifeless but it was just breathable, so they got to work again on the bottom of the sphere.

They took their time now; an hour and a quarter elapsed before they cleared the machinery and had removed sufficient plates in the last floor to crawl through.

The bottom of the sphere was tilted towards the harbour floor but, to their surprise, it was completely clear of fish. Hardly a trace remained of that mass of creatures which had flooded the whole space between the quayside and the sphere six hours before. The surface was just awash with a few inches of clear water.

Through the portholes they examined the quay. The great mob of greyish-white half-men were still there—all seated now on their haunches, peering blindly out of their almost colourless eyes in the direction of the bathysphere.

'I do not like the look of these people,' said the Doctor heavily.

The McKay shrugged. 'I'm afraid we've got to chance what they think of us. We can't stay here.'

'How long is it since we left the ship now?' asked Camilla.

After glancing at his watch Count Axel replied: 'We went down at 8.45, Madame. It is now 11.30 at night, so it is nearly fifteen hours and we survived nine of those hours on our remaining oxygen after we were cut off.' Before returning the watch to his pocket he methodically wound it up.

'Really?' Camilla's voice conveyed surprise and she added despondently, 'It seems as though it was at least a week.'

'I am a fasting man,' declared Vladimir, 'and would eat any old kipper that these so loathsome people can provide.'

Sally sighed. 'Need we go yet? There is our picnic lunch still that we've never had time even to think of eating. I'm so dead beat that I could drop. Can't we sleep here through the night?'

'Sorry m'dear,' the McKay laid his hand gently on her arm, 'I'm afraid we can't. Heaven alone knows what really happened to us but, as I see it, the sphere got caught in some sort of trawl and was dragged among these people's catch through a succession of locks which prevent this place being flooded. Anyhow, at any moment some flood gate may open and disgorge another haul. The crowd on the quay are probably sitting waiting for their next meal to arrive. If we remain here we may get caught in the sphere again—only next time, owing to the hole we've made in it—we'll all be drowned for certain.'

'The McKay is right,' urged Count Axel, 'and right too in his theory about the manner of our arrival here. Do you remember how gently we came to rest each time we sank to a lower level. We were probably falling down some deep, narrow shafts in which the catch of fish was packed so tightly together that those under us acted like a feather bed as we approached the bottom. Our brief sideways movements were perhaps when we were being dragged through tunnels which form the actual locks beyond each of which the pressure of water above lessens.'

'These people look so revolting,' demurred Camilla. 'It seems absurd in the face of what we've gone through—but somehow I'd much rather stay in the old sphere a bit longer.'

'We daren't risk it,' the McKay insisted. 'We'd have to abandon ship in any case in a few hours when our food and drink runs out, even if there were no danger of being engulfed by another mass of fish. I don't want to be unkind but just imagine that is going to happen in above five minutes' time and that as the water gushes up through the opening we've made, an octopus reaches in one of his tentacles to get you.'

'You brute! aren't things bad enough?' murmured Sally.

'No, honestly—however doubtful the future looks it will be a better bet once we're out of this and up on the wharf.'

The Doctor nodded. 'The Herr Kapitan speaks sense Frau-lein and although these people are primitive beyond belief they may prove hospitable. One thing is certain—they will be more frightened of us than we of them.'

Sally looked at Camilla, who nodded faintly. 'All right,' she said, 'do as you wish,' and so the matter was agreed.

A hasty meal was made, to keep up their strength, of half the picnic lunch. The remaining torches were distributed and every tool or item which might possibly be of use later, apportioned out amongst them.

The McKay still had the automatic; four bullets remained in it and he reloaded to capacity from Bozo's only spare clip, so that he had eight in the magazine and one in the chamber with a last reload of a further three in his pocket.

He picked up a three-foot steel bar with a big joint at its ■2nd from the dump at the back of the sphere as an additional weapon. The others, including the girls, armed themselves with suitable pieces of the machinery which had been

removed from the bottom of the sphere in such desperate

haste.

'Ready?' asked the McKay.

A murmur of assent went up.

'All right then,' he grinned for the first time since he had left the ship; 'it's just on midnight and a very appropriate hour to step ashore in an unknown land like this. Come on, help me through the hole some of you.'

Legs foremost they pushed him through and his feet splashed into the shallow water. Immediately he was standing upright they passed through his pistol, torch and steel bar. He thrust the latter through his braces like an awkward blunt sword, and began at once to take closer stock of his surroundings.

The torch showed him that they were in a lofty cavern— the roof was just visible. The wall opposite the quay reached sheer up to it—the extremities on either hand he could not see; he turned the beam on the quay.

It was of solid, well-built, even masonry and, above it, he saw at once that, whether they were blind or not, some sense had warned the half-men that he had left the sphere. Every one of the grey-white mob had risen and was staring at him with pale, blank, apparently sightless eyes.

'Hello there!' he called, waving the hand that held the torch in greeting, and holding his pistol ready with the other.

The response was instantaneous. Countless shrill voices broke into piercing cries, a thousand arms lifted—and a thousand stones were hurled in the direction of the sphere.

17

The Kingdom of the Damned

If those hundreds of nude grey-white figures on the quayside had been able to see the thing at which they aimed their missiles the McKay would never have survived that moment. It was too late for him to attempt wriggling back through the bottom of the sphere. He could only slip to his knee beside the undercarriage and fling his arms above his head.

The stones, so wildly thrown by the blind sub-humans, came whizzing down for fifty feet all round him. Half a hundred clanged on the bathysphere and, for a moment, it rang under them like some huge gong. The shallow water about it was churned to splashing wavelets as the missiles clattered on the harbour floor but the McKay, partly protected by the under carriage, was only hit by half a dozen.

One large one landed on his elbow and gave him momentary but exquisite pain, another caught him on the thigh. The rest were smaller and bounded off his body like a series of half-spent blows.

Immediately the hail of stones had ceased he sprang to his feet and, before the submen had time to follow up their assault, thrust his head and arms inside the sphere.

'Haul me in—quick!' he cried.

Willing hands grabbed at his shoulders and he wriggled violently. An irregular shower of stones began to fall again, but after a moment's tussle, he was pulled into safety.

'By Jove! That was a narrow squeak,' he panted as soon as he could speak. 'If those brutes weren't blind they would have pounded me to pulp.'

'My dear—are you hurt?' Sally put her arm round his t.f.a.—h 225

shoulders anxiously. The din from the stones ringing on the sphere was so great now its bottom was open that she had to shout to make herself heard.

'They got me on the elbow and the thigh, but it's nothing much,' he shouted back. 'Now listen—all of you. We've proved them hostile so we've got to make a plan of attack.'

The clamour lessened. Evidently some sense told the submen that their unseen enemy had escaped.

'Oh, can't we stay here,' Camilla pleaded, 'anyhow for a bit.'

'No, that's impossible. We'll only be trapped or driven out eventually by starvation. We've got to establish ourselves on that quay, somehow, and as soon as possible.'

Nicky was holding a torch to one of the portholes and peering out; 'There seem to be such hundreds of them,' he said in a low scared voice.

'Yes,' the McKay agreed. 'Their numbers are difficult to estimate with no more light than the beam of a torch—but they're packed so tightly that I should think there must be fully a thousand on the quay. What are they doing now?'

'Crouching again in a great huddle just as they were before you went outside. They're gibbering like mad too— as if they were scared to death—you can hear them if you listen.'

As Nicky ceased speaking the party inside the sphere all heard the shrill excited twittering which came from the quay. It sounded like a flock of frightened birds.

'They have much fear of us I am certain,' the Doctor announced, 'if only they could see that we would be friends.'

'Well, unfortunately they can't,' the McKay spoke abruptly, 'and we're not going to have much chance to show them we mean no harm if they're going to pelt us each time we put our heads outside the sphere.'

'Ach, fear!' sighed the Doctor, 'fear without reason—that is the cause of half the misery in the world. We are afraid of them because they are so numerous. They are afraid of us because they cannot see and believe us to be some dreadful monster which has become entangled in their catch. Therefore we must fight and maim each other—it is horrible!'

Count Axel nodded. 'Yes—it's sad. But it's their lives or 226

ours and, although they outnumber us by a hundred to one, we, at least, have dynamite.'

'Get it out, Count,' ordered the McKay, 'and the detonators. We must try to fix up some bombs to make a really telling demonstration.'

The two of them set to work with the Doctor. The others could not help, except by holding lights, as they had no knowledge of explosives but, after half an hour a dozen large grenades had been manufactured encased in various portions of the now useless instruments which they stripped from the walls of the sphere.

'The next thing is to protect ourselves—' The McKay flashed his torch round. 'What have we got here that might be useful?'

'We can use the canvas chair-seats as head covers,' suggested Axel, 'and the bottom boards could be converted into rough shields perhaps.'

'Good for you, Count—let's get to it.'

Soon they were all busy. The girls had no needles or thread but they twisted and tied the squares of canvas, as well as they could, into conical helmets which would serve to shield their heads a little from the stones since, with the exception of Bozo, who had refused to be parted from his dark felt, they had all gone down without their hats.

Sally invented a special model, which met with much approval, by utilising some broad strips of canvas which had formed the chair arms, as chin strips. These served to bandage their cheeks as well as to keep the rough helmets on their heads.

The men worked at the bottom boards, using the wire which was on the detonator reels instead of leather, to make an armlet for each. The boards were only about eight inches wide but, when the left forearm was slipped through the wire loop, they formed long narrow shields, which would at least protect the users' faces.

'Now,' said the McKay, when all was done, 'this is the order of our going. You'll slip out quietly and I'll have another shot at parleying with these people—although I don't think for a moment that it will be any good. Any more stone throwing and I'm chucking a few of these bombs up on to the quay. The moment you hear them explode—out you come. Get that?'

They muttered agreement and he went on: 'The men will be the first to follow me—old business of women and children last—with the exception of Vladimir who's to stay behind and help the girls out in case they get a fit of nerves at the last moment. You've all got to come—whether you like it or not because we can't afford to waste explosives, and this first time we'll have the value of surprise. They can never have come up against such things before—so it's our one big chance to establish ourselves on that quay. See what I mean?'

Further murmurs conveyed their understanding.

'Right then. Now, once we are all out of the sphere we've got to adopt a definite formation and stick to it. We shall form three ranks. Count Axel and myself will be in front. Behind us the second rank will march four abreast. Sally and Camilla in the centre with Nicky and Doctor Tisch on either flank. Our third and last rank will consist of Bozo and Vladimir walking behind the two girls. I've placed them in the rear-guard on purpose because they are the strong men of the party and it is essential that our biggest strength should be concentrated to protect our backs. Are you ready now?'

'Yes,' said Camilla in a whisper, 'we're ready.'

Then, just over an hour after he'd made his first appearance the McKay again crawled through the hole.

The great herd still crouched on the quay, peering into the darkness with their blank pale eyes. As the McKay's feet splashed into the few inches of water there was a rustle among them and they all stood up.

'Hello there?' he shouted, but the shrill cries broke out again and their arms lifted.

He was prepared this time and slipped behind the sphere. It formed good cover and not one of the shower of stones touched him. Then, as it slackened he came round the sphere's side and lobbed a bomb right over the quay wall into the midst of the nude grey-white figures. After it he flung a second, then two more which he took from his pockets. As the fourth sailed into the air the first exploded. There was a stab of flame among the densely packed mass, then a shattering crash which reverberated through the whole vast cavern.

The McKay never saw what happened for he had dodged 228

back behind the sphere to avoid the continuous rain of stones. Three more crashing explosions followed and he knew that his home-made grenades had not let him down. The stones ceased clanging on the sphere. He peered out. The quay was empty but for four little heaps of whitish-grey writhing figures who twittered now in a pain-racked falsetto. Axel and Nicky were already outside the sphere. Bozo was coming through the hole. The rest soon followed and fell in as he ordered, the two girls together in the middle. The McKay only paused to see that they were properly placed in formation then he yelled:

'Come on now,' and splashed through the water at a run towards the quay.

He and Axel carried two bombs apiece, the other men one each, but there was no need to use them. Except for the little piles of dead and stricken creatures the great deep quay ran back into the darkness as desolate as though no multitude had ever occupied it.

'Give me a leg up now,' the McKay cried to Count Axel as they reached the slimy eight foot wall. The Count obeyed and the McKay scrambled over the edge on to a flat surface. He paused to flash his torch round. No walls were visible— only the dripping roof above, and nothing stirred in the deep shadows ahead. He turned to help Count Axel up.

'So far so good,' murmured the Count. 'You keep a look out and I'll give a hand to the others.'

The McKay swung round to face the darkness again. In his left hand just beyond the edge of his wooden shield he held his torch, in the other a bomb ready for any emergency. The revolver was thrust into the top of his trousers and the steel lever through his braces. For a couple of minutes he stood there—feet firmly planted, legs wide apart, his ears keen to catch the patter of bare feet on the rocky floor, his eyes intent and watchful.

'We're all here now,' Count Axel reported softly. Somehow, in this tense darkness, none of them felt like speaking above a whisper and the McKay's reply was only just audible.

'All right—form up as before and follow me.'

He gave them a moment to fall into their ranks then, with Count Axel beside him he advanced warily.

Apart from the treble whimpering of the wounded sub-229

men no sound stirred the stillness. This strange new world was one of silence and eternal darkness.

The McKay walked on, the others followed. All of them advanced with slow, instinctively cautious, steps; fearing that the enemy might spring out on them from behind some hidden corner at any moment, and all the time the beams of their torches flickered hither and thither, stabbing the blackness with eight shafts of light—yet finding nothing.

They passed within twenty feet of one of the heaps of grey-white creatures. Sally felt physically sick as she glimpsed the leprous limbs splashed with blood and the naked torsos twisted so unnaturally, but Doctor Tisch had her firmly by the arm. One of the group, temporarily knocked out by the explosion but otherwise apparently unharmed was crawling in their direction. The Doctor's torch lit his face—stupid, bestial, repulsive; the high nostrils in his parrot-beaked nose distended and quivered, his heavy eyelids flickered down over his pale eyes as though, despite his blindness, he knew and feared the light. In a second he turned and scuttled away without a sound.

A nauseating smell arose from the heap of corpses. The McKay had been among men who had met sudden death from high explosives before and he knew that it was not the smell of entrails or spilled blood, nor had there been time for the carcasses to putrefy. This was like the revolting stench of bad fish and came, he guessed as much from the still living as the dead, when he remembered Nicky's description of how these people had gorged themselves on their catch while it was still raw.

After advancing two hundred yards he halted. His torch had just picked out a blank wall straight ahead of him. He went a little nearer to examine it. The wall rose sheer to the high ceiling and stretched, as far as he could see, unbroken on either side.

'We'll turn right,' he muttered, 'anyhow this will serve to protect our backs if we are attacked.'

They followed him, keeping their formation, but treading with a little more confidence now that one of their flanks was secured from surprise. The curve of the wall was hardly perceptible in the pitch blackness, but after a few moments it brought them back to the edge of the quayside and appeared to continue round the curve of the harbour without a break.

'This will be the opposite end to where the bathysphere came in,' said the McKay. 'It looks as if the cavern is an oval shape cut lengthwise by the quay. We'd better about turn and try the other way.'

'Oh, I'm so tired!' Camilla leaned heavily on Nicky who was her flank guard, 'I can hardly walk another step!'

'That goes fer me too sister,' Bozo mumbled, 'I'm not me-self somehow since your boy friend put me to sleep.' His thick skull had saved the back of his head from being split open when Vladimir had smashed it against the steel side of the sphere, but ever since he regained consciousness he had been suffering from a worse headache than he had ever experienced after a bout of drunkenness on illegal hooch, and now he felt that, instead of a head he carried the bathysphere—rolling from side to side on his thick neck.

Sally stretched out a hand and touched the McKay on the arm. 'Can't we stay here and sleep a little,' she pleaded. 'We're safe from drowning in the sphere now and anyway— what's the use of going on?'

'Sure. What's the use?' agreed Nicky who had also been knocked out temporarily that day and was feeling utterly done in after his spate of terrified energy in helping to remove the machinery from the bottom of the sphere. 'What do you hope to find if we go on—the Ritz-Carlton Grill Room round the corner or a handy Lyons?—For God's sake let's call it a day.'

'I was hoping to find a cave with a narrow entrance where we'd be reasonably safe for the time being,' said the McKay slowly. 'What do you think Count?'

'I am for remaining here,' Count Axel replied at once. 'If we were fresher I would say "push on" but half our party, at least, are unfit to proceed any further. It might even be necessary to carry them later and that would be a terrible handicap if we were attacked. Our present position is not so bad. We are in a triangle of which the wall forms one side and the quay another, so we have only one of three sides to defend. Let us remain here for a few hours until we are rested.'

The McKay nodded. 'AH right then—we'll park down for the night.'

His decision was an unutterable relief to the party. Camilla, Sally and Nicky were already sitting on the rocky floor, gratefully seizing the opportunity for even a short rest, while the stronger members of the group sagged as they stood, dumb now—their energies at the lowest ebb from their terrible experiences in the last fifteen hours.

No rocks or boulders were available for them to form a barrier across their exposed front, so for a moment, the McKay considered the possibility of erecting trip-wires fifty feet out in the darkness to give them warning of any hostile approach. He had the necessary material, salvaged from the bottom of the sphere, but there was nothing to which wires could be attached on that even floor and improvising supports meant fetching more gear from the abandoned bathysphere. The business would involve at least two hours' hard work for the whole party so he had to give up the idea and they all sank down unprotected at the extremity of the quay wall where they stood.

The McKay arranged that he and Axel should take the first watch and that Vladimir and the Doctor should relieve them after two hours had passed. He did not dare to make the spells of duty longer in case he and Axel dropped off into a doze. They were both feeling the strain and fatigue of the nightmare sequence of events as much as the others and only refrained from showing it in the same degree because the one had reserves of mental strength to draw upon and the other the life-long habit of responsibility.

Vladimir tried to make the two girls as comfortable as possible. He sat between them with his back against the wall and, placing an arm round each of their shoulders drew their heads down on to his broad chest. The other men curled up on either side of them, so weary that they hardly noticed the hard discomfort of the unyielding rock. Only the McKay and Count Axel remained, some feet in front of the group, side by side, still wide awake and watchful.

For a moment or two the six huddled figures by the wall endeavoured, in a groping way, to straighten out in their minds the extraordinary series of happenings which had brought them to their present situation. It was now one-thirty in the morning—eight and a half hours since the sphere had been carried into this undersea cavern, and in all that time their thoughts had been concentrated on immediate emergencies. They had not had one moment to speculate on their utterly miraculous escape from death or any explanation for the existence of this hidden world in which they found themselves. Now, their brains were so clouded with fatigue that they could not attempt to grapple with the problem and almost instantly surrendered to a heavy, death-like sleep.

The McKay and Count Axel, out in front, dared not relax and began to devise means to keep themselves alert. Fortunately a breakdown of the electricity supply from the ship when the bathysphere was on the bottom, was a normal possibility which the Doctor had foreseen, so the dozen torches which he had stowed in the ball against such an emergency were all new and large in size; but now, light was infinitely precious. In this grim underworld there could be no dawn to hope for and once the batteries ran out they would be completely at the mercy of anything which might steal upon them in the darkness. The McKay suggested that, to economise their light he and Axel should only use one flash every half minute—alternately. The necessity for regular switching on and off would help to keep them wakeful and, for the same reason it would be best to talk.

The Count agreed and, for what seemed an eternity they spoke in whispers, advancing every sort of fantastic theory to account for the nightmare place in which they had arrived, or speculating on the origin of the great herd of creatures who inhabited this subterranean domain. Even Count Axel was not bold enough to face the future squarely yet and he had formed a half belief that this was death. They had been so near the end when fighting to escape from the sphere that it seemed almost more reasonable to suppose that they had all died then—or even earlier, when the oxygen had given out without, perhaps, their being aware of it—than to credit the actual existence of their present surroundings.

The McKay's practical mind revolted equally from any attempt to foresee their future. It was unknown—unknowable. Obviously they were cut off completely and forever from the world above. This was no prison from which one could plan escape, no seeming impasse out of which wits and bravery might still find a way. When their torches failed they would be encompassed about with blackest darkness, and when they had consumed the last of their meagre supplies hunger and thirst would come upon them. Death must surely follow—either at the hands of those abominable submen or from weakness and exhaustion. Yet the 'will to live' is so strongly developed in the human consciousness that it never occurred to him not to play out the game of life to the very last trick.

At two-thirty he moved over to waken the reliefs and shook the Doctor into semi-consciousness, but when he saw Vladimir—his head fallen forward between those of the two girls—he knew that, to rouse the Prince, he must rouse them too so, instead, he shook Nicky by the shoulder.

Nicky started up and shuddered as though in the grip of some frightful dream but the McKay reassured him. Then he gave instructions about economising the light of the torches—told Doctor Tisch to wake him promptly at four-thirty, so that he could witness the changing of the guard— then he curled up on the hard floor at Sally's feet. Count Axel dropped beside him.

The Doctor and Nicky sat out in front now, the small pile of bombs between them, staring nervously ahead into the pitchy blackness of the great cavern.

Their two-hour sleep had refreshed them but they still felt slow and groggy from their previous expenditure of nervous energy. They agreed, as the McKay and Count Axel had done, that to talk was the best way of preventing themselves dropping off to sleep, but they had little to say to each other.

Nicky's contribution to the conversation consisted almost entirely of periodic exclamations—'Where the devil are we, Doctor?—Oh, God, I'm tired!—Doctor, what the hell are we going to do?' which he repeated at brief intervals.

The Doctor had not even the shadow of a theory to advance and could only mutter gutturally, 'I haf no idea-no idea at all. Of our future I can guess nothing and for the present we can only obey the Herr Kapitan's orders.'

It was almost at the end of their watch when they heard the muted patter of naked feet. The Doctor instantly flashed on his torch while Nicky sprang up and roused the others.

The McKay was wide awake at once: 'Prepare for action,' he said in a sharp whisper.

For a moment the other, newly awakened, members of the party could not get a grip of their surroundings. Automatically they stumbled to their feet, picked up their weapons, and adjusted the board shields over their left forearms. Then the pattering footsteps and the horrible smell of rotten fish which the advancing herd carried with them brought full realisation of past events and their present peril.

'It's—it's not a nightmare then?' Sally choked. 'We're really here— Oh, this is-'

'Silence!' the McKay cut her short. 'If they can't scent us they'll believe we're still in the sphere. Quick Doctor—put out that torch.'

They waited then, their blood throbbing again at full pulse through their arteries—tense and expectant—anticipating that the attack might open at any moment as they listened to that soft padding of innumerable footsteps in the darkness.

The sound ceased. The great cavern became silent as death. They could hear their own laboured breathing and judged that the unseen horde had halted somewhere in the centre and the far end of the big oval rock-roofed chamber.

Nothing happened. Camilla began to tremble. Sally put out a protective hand to her although little tremors of fear were running through her own body. The men were grouped round them, nervously fingering their weapons, ready instantly, at the McKay's order to press the buttons of their torches.

Suddenly there came a noise like thunder—a dull heavy rumbling in the far distance. It continued for some minutes yet seemed to grow no louder. Then it stopped abruptly.

The McKay shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Then this new silence was broken by the chirping and muttering of the herd out there in the darkness.

The thunder rolled again—this time much nearer. The unseen roof and walls of the cavern vibrated and quivered under the repercussion from the blows of some unknown force. The very air was tremulous.

Nicky cowered back against the wall. Camilla endeavoured to gulp down sobs engendered by the extremity of fear which seemed to grip her physically below the breasts. Sally was half fainting. The two leaned on each other for support or else their legs would have given way beneath them. The rest held their ground, white-faced and with protruding eyes which strained in vain to see one inch ahead in that impenetrable blackness.

Time passed. Not one of the little group could attempt to assess its duration but at last the thunder ceased again and now the shrill note of the submen's chatter had risen to a fiendish clamour.

Vladimir felt his dark hair clinging damp about his temples. The Doctor's soft collar was a wet rag round his neck. Everyone of the eight humans was sweating or shivering as they stood there—black night all about them—listening to those ghoulish cries.

A new note suddenly drowned the screeching. The thunder had turned to the roar and hiss of tossing water. A blur of silvery light appeared low down at the far end of the harbour. With horrifying suddenness it increased in size and leapt towards them.

Next second the foremost wave, released by some great subterranean floodgate, slapped against the wall—curved upwards scintillating with a million flashing lights and descended, drenching the little party on the quay with great splashes from the backwash.

Below them now, on their left under the quayside, they could see the furious churning of the waters as they seethed and foamed, lit dully by the lights of another great haul of deep sea creatures thrashing and leaping in a frantic effort to escape.

The luminosity from the harbour now lit a fair portion of the cavern with a dim ghostly light. Its roof and furthest walls were not visible, but the herd could be seen in a leprous mass, tightly packed together yet constantly moving like some vast blotchy writhing animal. Its nearest fringe was no more than fifty yards from the McKay but obviously they had no knowledge of his presence.

'Steady,' he said in a low voice. 'Steady now, they've come down here for the fish—not for us.'

'It's close on twelve hours since they had their last feed,' muttered Count Axel.

Again they waited, relieved a little, but still acutely anxious. It was almost certain that the submen would spread out along the quay and find them crouching there against the wall at its furthest extremity.

Sally was just behind the McKay. He could hear her breath coming in quick short gasps. Occasionally she choked in an endeavour to steady herself. Suddenly she screamed.

Her scream was so wild that it echoed right round the lofty chamber. Something soft had touched her shoe. For an instant she had thought it was Doctor Tisch's foot, but the thing had stayed there and, before she had time to move, twined round her ankle like the gentle caress of some slim fingerless hand. Now its grip tightened and it began to pull.

Instantly the semi-darkness was shattered. The torches flashed out—cutting great swathes through the greyish gloom—dazzling and bewildering.

Vladimir saw the 'thing' first and, dropping his weapon grabbed her round the shoulders. Another second and the others had seen it too. An octopus had reached its long tentacle up from the waters that seethed three feet below upon their left and, passing it in front of Doctor Tisch, had her by the leg. The fleshy pointed arm with its long row of suckers was taut with the brute's effort to drag her off the quayside into the harbour.

They had no knives with which to sever the tentacle so they slashed at it with their steel levers while Vladimir exerted all his strength to prevent Sally being wrenched from his embrace. The McKay jerked Bozo's automatic from his trousers top, focused the curved beak and enormous soulless eye of the octopus in the beam of his torch, then fired down into it.

A fountain of black liquid spouted into the air but still the creature kept its hold on Sally's ankle and reached up another waving tentacle which searched blindly for her companions. Sally screamed and screamed. Terrified, heartrending cries came shrilling from her wide open mouth and Nicky, as he flashed his torch on her face noticed, quite consciously, despite his own terror, that one of her back teeth had been crowned with gold.

The McKay fired again and again—and yet again. At last the tentacle loosened its grip; the others threshed the water furiously for a moment and the octopus sank from sight hidden under the mass of fish.

Sally went limp in Vladimir's arms, then slid to the floor like a half-empty sack as he released her, for the submen, warned of their presence by her screams, were now surging towards them.

As the McKay switched from shooting the octopus he saw the great grey-white herd all facing his direction. The front ranks wavered, pressing back in fear, but the hundreds behind thrust them forward with shrill cries and clamour.

The nearest were no more than ten yards away and held their long spears blindly before them. A shower of heavy stones came hurtling down, thrown from the back of the mob which was still hidden in the darkness.

'Bombs!' yelled the McKay. 'Axel, keep yours—the rest of you let 'em have it!'

They hurled their canisters while Camilla crouched above the unconscious Sally.

The nearest submen began to stab with a jerky motion of their spears but the light of the torches seemed to disconcert them, for they shielded their faces with their free hands, and jabbed indiscriminately at the empty air. Knocking a couple aside, the McKay lashed out with his lever felling a fat fleshy creature who goggled at him blindly.

As he swiped at another he prayed for the explosion of the bombs. In another minute his little party must be crushed up against the wall or forced off the quay into the water by the relentless pressure of the herd.

Suddenly one of the grenades went off. The crash seemed to shake the roof. Then another and another followed. The submen dropped their spears and broke in wild confusion, screeching vilely.

The McKay had already decided that, if their chance did come, they must take it immediately to get out of this dangerous corner and not let themselves be trapped again in any similar situation.

He gave one swift glance behind him to assure himself that his party was all together—paused for a second as he saw Sally unconscious on the floor, but started forward as Vladimir dragged her up and slung her bodily across his shoulder.

'Ouick—keep your formation and follow me!' the McKay 238

exclaimed then, as the fourth bomb exploded, he led the party back in the direction from which they had come nearly five hours before, striking close beside the wall.

The cavern was now like a scene from hell conjured up by the vivid brush of some early Flemish painter. A broad swathe of silvery-grey luminosity, given off by the big haul of fish and squids, rose above the whole length of the harbour, fading into darkness about ten feet up. As the party of humans advanced along the blank wall which curved in a great arc round the inland side of the quay the herd were thrown up in silhouette against the silvery grey mist. Screeching with terror little knots of them ran blindly from side to side, slipping and falling in the blood of their wounded or blundering into the piles of corpses which marked the places where the bombs had fallen.

The party advanced to near the spot where they had first struck the wall after they left the sphere, when Sally began to whimper. They halted a moment for Vladimir to set her down and the McKay forced a sip of brandy, from his flask, between her lips.

'Think you can walk m'dear?' he asked urgently.

Sally stared with terrified eyes at the nightmare figures moving in the silvery haze. 'Oh God!' she gulped. 'If we're caught I—I believe they'll eat us.'

'We'll be dead before that,' Nicky's voice quavered.

'Can you walk Sally?' repeated the McKay. 'We've got to make an effort now.'

'Yes,' she shuddered, 'I'll manage somehow.'

Camilla and Doctor Tisch took her arms, Vladimir dropped to the rear, and they hurriedly set off again in their original formation. Instead of fleeing as they had the night before, the submen were concentrating now at the far end of the chamber, and a scatter of rocks and stones began to fall.

They were wildly aimed and most of them pitched among their own gibbering wounded, but a few clopped against the wall and one caught Nicky on the shoulder.

'Up shields!' ordered the McKay, as he continued to press forward, then, when they had advanced another hundred yards he saw a lofty break in the wall beyond the place where the herd were massed together.

'That's the way they come,' he whispered to Axel. 'God knows where it leads but we've got to chance that and get through it somehow. I had hoped that the bombs would clear this place altogether.'

'You forget the fish,' Count Axel whispered back. 'Last night they had full stomachs when you attacked them, but now they are empty and they will not leave this place until they have secured their food.'

The stones were flying faster now, clicking and rattling as they bounded from the flat rock floor. A dozen had already thudded on the shields which the party held over their heads and faces.

Within fifty feet of the enemy the McKay halted. The big arch showed quite distinctly now, lit by the unearthly glow thrown up from the harbour. Between it and him a solid jam of the naked sub-race, males and females, were pressed—jostling each other as they threw their stones—a hundred deep, barring the passage.

'Clear me that entrance Count,' said the McKay, 'use both your bombs.'

Count Axel lobbed one carefully into the centre of the crowd and threw the other high with all his strength, so that it landed just short of the archway.

'This is sheer murder,' murmured the Doctor in a horror-stricken voice.

'D'you think I like it?' snapped the McKay.

They waited then, clustered together, their shields held up to protect them from the still-falling stones which continued to clatter all about them.

A blinding flash lit the cavern for a second. Again the whole place vibrated with the crash. Another followed two seconds afterwards. Once more there came those piercing screams of agony and the frantic gibbering as the herd parted, stampeding in great batches. One group, distraught with terror, rushed straight off the quayside into the harbour, another blindly collided with the wall only ten feet from where the McKay was crouching.

'Come on now,' he called, 'stick together and follow me!' Then at a quick trot he headed for the archway.

The submen seemed to know of their approach by the flashing of the torches, and with animal courage, turned to attack their tormentors.

For five minutes the little party of humans fought their way forward, striking out ruthlessly with their steel levers.

The filthy stench of rotten fish was so nauseating now they were right among the herd that they were nearly overcome by it.

They were terribly handicapped by the semi-darkness, as the beams of their torches only lit the thing upon which they were focused for the moment, and everything outside the rays was hidden from them.

Tripping and stumbling over dead bodies and writhing wounded they literally hacked their way through the mass of short, naked, stinking, grey-white people until, at last, the McKay reached the entrance of the lofty arch.

It was black and empty. In it he turned to assure himself that the rest had got through. The others were close upon his heels. Vladimir and Bozo were beating off the submen in a desperate rear-guard action.

'Come on,' he called. 'We've got the legs of them, and a clear run before us.' Then he plunged into the tunnel.

The others followed, breaking clear of the mob almost immediately. Yet, as they ran, they knew that they were pursued, for even the echo of their own flying feet did not entirely drown the soft padding of those countless others and the shrill birdlike voices of the submen twittered angrily in their ears.

Count Axel lit the way, his torch focused to the front but downwards, so that they should not rush headlong over some precipice hidden in the velvet blackness. Once or twice the McKay flashed his light up to the roof or walls. The tunnel was about twenty feet in height, and, apparently hewn out of the solid rock.

After a few moments they outdistanced their pursuers. The cries and patter had died behind them. They eased their pace and dropped into a steady loping trot.

The tunnel ended abruptly and, almost before they had realised it, they were traversing a level open space which sloped downwards. The roof was visible, but no walls until, two hundred yards further on they ran slap into one. Turning left they sped along it, hoping to find a break in its smooth surface but, before they did so that stealthy padding of the now silent mob upon their heels, could be heard again.

Unseen by the humans the submen streamed into the chamber, cutting diagonally across it and now it was evident that they were not totally blind, for they began to cast stones in the direction of the torches.

The McKay turned to face the new attack but, as the first shower of stones descended, Nicky cried: 'Here—this way! There's another tunnel.'

'Keep in your ranks,' called the McKay and, thrusting past Nicky, with Axel at his side, he led the way down it.

The second tunnel was much longer than the first and after a half a mile they had outdistanced the short-legged submen again. They slowed up then into a quick walk, all breathing heavily.

At last the second tunnel ended in another high-roofed chamber but the eyes of the whole party were instantly riveted on one spot in it, low down towards their right. A pale cloud of luminous silver light broke the curtain of pitchy blackness. Like children who had ventured into the dark cellars below some old house, they instinctively ran towards it.

The light came from a round pool about fifty feet in diameter, edged by a broken stone wall just knee high. The water was oily and showed not a ripple, the luminosity came from pieces of dead fish, transparent scales and spiky fins that were floating in a silvery scum upon its surface.

At first they thought the pool to be another of those strange subterranean harbours like that from which they had come, but suddenly the waters broke.

An utterly hideous and rapacious face stared up at them. It was a Merman, such as they had seen on their later dives but larger, and the fair quill-like hair not only stood out backwards from its narrow skull but also sprouted from its fanged receding jaw in a jagged beard.

They drew back in repulsion as others, females of the species, rose silently beside it, staring at them with beady unblinking eyes.

'If I could spare the bullets I'd put some into them,' muttered the McKay. 'But every one I've got is worth its weight in emeralds. Come on—we'll choose another place to rest in before we go any further.'

After exploring for a little while they found two fresh tunnels about fifty yards apart, but owing to their visit to the pool they were now no longer quite certain of their direction, so chose the entrance of the largest and sat down in it for a breather.

'How are you all feeling?' asked the McKay anxiously. 'Anyone get hurt in our last scrap?'

'My calf is cut by a stone,' complained the Doctor, 'but that is now of no consequence. What matters is that I have a pain in my stomach from hunger.'

The McKay considered for a moment. The herd had evidently given up the chase or taken a wrong turning among this labyrinth of chambers and tunnels. It seemed that they might just as well consume such food as they had left now. What object was there in saving it until later. In another twelve hours they must find a new source of supply or the game was up—and the sooner it was over, the better then. Since breakfast on the ship—yes, twenty-two hours ago— although it felt like a separate life-time, they had had only one scratch meal to support them. He ordered out the remainder of their provender.

An utter silence filled the great black spaces. Only the sound of their munching broke the heavy stillness.

In ten minutes they had finished up all that was left of their picnic lunch and were temporarily rested. The weaker members of the party had had four hours' sleep before the fight in the harbour and, in spite of her horrible experience with the octopus, the freer feeling of the great tunnels made Sally a little less nervy, while Camilla's tendency towards hysteria had played itself out, so that she squatted beside Vladimir now, sunk in a natural silence.

'We'll move on I think,' said the McKay, but as he was about to rise Count Axel held out a restraining hand.

'A cigarette first please. I have some still since we were not allowed to smoke in the bathysphere. After all why should we hurry, as we have no idea where we wish to go. Our only clear objective is to avoid those filthy fish-eating creatures.'

'Just as you like,' the McKay sat down again. He remembered that he had some cigarettes too—one would be very welcome. Most of the others had small supplies and soon they were all lighting up.

"This was a good idea,' said the McKay softly as he 243

offered Axel a light. 'Restore the old morale eh? You're a cool hand Count and I take off my hat to you.'

The Count shrugged. 'It is only the outcome of a lifelong habit of procrastination,' he replied, 'no more.' But in his mind he knew that the reason lay far deeper and could not be easily explained. He had decided definitely now that they had all died in the bathysphere. Slinger—Ardow—the immaculate but unscrupulous Mr. Kale—were all so infinitely far removed from this new existence.

That the party had remained together was quite explicable. From people who believed that they understood at least the fringe of such things he had heard that in a railway accident those who met sudden death could not quite realise at first that they were really dead, and spoke to the rescuers who removed their bodies, hoping they would hear. Yet they found no response—only from those who had died with them and, for a little while, they were earth-bound with those dead companions. Then in due course they had become accustomed to the new plane they occupied and drifted apart from their fellow dead—impelled by an omnipotent guidance towards the sphere reserved for their new activities.

It seemed to the Count that this dark underworld must be that in which the ancients had believed so universally; a sort of Purgatory where he would suffer in proportion to his sins but, as surely as the sun would rise again upon the upper earth tomorrow, the vital essence of himself would remain unharmed. Why therefore should they hurry anywhere.

His cigarette was only two thirds smoked when that stealthy patter of naked feet reached his ears again. The others had heard it too. As the McKay sprang up they all scrambled to their feet. The sound seemed to come down the tunnel in the entrance of which they were sitting.

'Form up!' rapped out the McKay, 'we'll take the smaller tunnel,' and at a trot again he led them to the other opening in the wall fifty yards further on.

Their sense of direction had deceived them in the darkness but they realised it too late. As they reached the second tunnel the submen came streaming out of it right on to them.

'About turn,' the McKay bellowed as he emptied the 244

remaining contents of his pistol into the foremost wave, hoping to stem the attack, but the host trampled down their slain and pressed forward without the slightest check.

Next moment the humans were fighting for their lives, hacking and hewing desperately at the purblind faces which surrounded them, while the filthy stench, drawn into their nostrils with every breath, made them want to vomit.

Perhaps the McKay's formation saved them then, for they closed in back to back with the two girls wedged in the middle, yet striking out over the men's shoulders wherever the need for help was greatest.

With Vladimir leading now they retreated like a square of infantry, fighting every inch of the way, until they were in the entrance of the cave where they had had their last meal. Then, at the McKay's order the group turned as on a pivot. He and Count Axel struck down the blind creatures that barred their path and led the way along the tunnel into temporary safety.

The party broke for a moment but re-gathered when they caught the McKay's shout that they must run, and after a hundred yards their longer legs had already carried them clear of the clamouring herd.

A shower of stones followed them down the tunnel but that curved a little, and they slackened to a gentler pace, trotting down hill for a quarter of a mile.

It was only when they broke into a walk and Vladimir cried, 'Where's Bozo?—he is with us no more,' that they halted dead in their tracks.

Vladimir was right. The gunman had vanished, felled by a stone on the head perhaps—he must have dropped without a sound as they fled.

'We must go back,' announced the McKay without hesitation. 'We can't leave him in the hands of these brutes— they'll tear him limb from limb.'

The party turned. In two minutes they had covered the distance back to the entrance to the tunnel. It was empty, but in the great cavern an extraordinary and horrifying scene was in progress.

The luminous mist which rose above the pool lower down the slope showed hundreds of the squat grey figures gathered about it. At one point a compact little company carried a dark shape as ants would carry a dead grasshopper. It was Bozo and before any move could be made to stop them they threw him, with one heave, head foremost, to the bearded monster and his horrible companions in the oily pool.

Camilla, who felt that she had passed beyond all terror, bit into her knuckles and whimpered pitifully with a fresh access of fear.

Sally closed her eyes and leaned limply against the wall. 'Oh heaven! Then that's what will happen when they catch us!' she whispered half fainting with horror.

'He was unconscious,' said the McKay softly, 'or dead perhaps. We should have seen him struggling otherwise.'

Count Axel did not speak. It was fitting he thought, that the simplest among them should pass on first. Bozo had paid, no doubt, for the crimes he had committed purely as a means of livelihood. A low mentality, seduced in youth to easy living by carrying out the orders of his criminal superiors without thought of their consequences to other people. Axel judged his own sins and those of his friends to be of a more subtle kind, and such as the human law could take no ready hold upon. Some power had it seemed, decreed that they must suffer further agonies before they had worked off the debts they had accumulated in the life they had just left and be granted rebirth into a more pleasant existence.

The herd had now fallen face downwards in a densely packed circle round the pool. Grovelling, with arms outstretched, they beat their foreheads on the rocky floor, and twittered without cessation, as they made obeisance to the swirling waters into which Bozo's body had disappeared.

'Dagon!' exclaimed the Doctor suddenly.

'What?' asked Nicky unsteadily.

'They worship Dagon, answered the Doctor, 'or Ea, if you prefer that name. The oldest god of all. It is a sight I never dreamed of witnessing. He was the Sea-god. The fish with a man's head who came up out of the great waters and spewed up the earth at the very beginning of time. India and Chaldea both retained traces of this cult. Himmel! that I should see it practised is past belief.'

'Let's get away from here.' Even the McKay's voice was a shade jerky now.

They turned then and ran, retracing their steps on the 246

downward road through the tunnel which they had already partly traversed.

After covering half a mile they came out in another, smaller, cavern. It had only one other exit, as far as they could see, so they took that and proceeded into the unknown.

The ground sloped upward now and they felt intensely weary but under the McKay's leadership they stumbled on. This passage was narrower and seemed endless but after they had been marching for twenty minutes Count Axel broke the silence.

'Am I imagining it or is it lighter here?' He switched out his torch and they halted for a minute, then agreed that the impenetrable blackness had given way to a greyish murk.

'Another chamber ahead with some more of those revolting fishmen in a pool I expect,' said the McKay gloomily but, as they advanced again the greyness lightened and took on a warmer yellowish tinge.

They could see each other without the aid of their torches for the first time in many hours. Each thought how tattered and dishevelled the others looked and that their strained, anxious faces had aged ten years in a night.

For a few more moments they plodded on through the half-light until they came round a bend and saw the exit of the tunnel, an arch, brightly lit by what appeared to be golden sunshine.

With cries of surprise, hope, and wonder they ran the last hundred yards, then halted, grouped together in the archway, utterly amazed at what they saw.

It was a cavern, larger and loftier than any which they had yet entered; roughly oval in shape and brightly lit through all its length by a ribbon of steady unflickering golden light which ran round its roof; but the sight which held them spellbound was the luxuriant vegetation covering almost the whole of its floor space.

Only a narrow shelf of bare rock ran round the walls of the vast hall, then came a deep ditch—fifteen feet wide, filled with clear water. On the far side of this moat rose a waist-high cactus hedge whose needle-like spines made it an almost impassable barrier. Above the level of that thick prickly fence flowering shrubs and fruit trees grew in wonderful profusion while beyond, a grove of forty foot palm trees towered up, all but hiding a square pillar of rock which supported the centre of the lofty ceiling.

A heavy silence brooded over the sunlit scene which added to its unreality. No breath of wind stirred the leaves or palm fronds and no rustle in the undergrowth betrayed the presence of any animal life, yet the whole fairyland of verdure made the air balmy with the sweet perfume of its flowers and grasses.

The McKay stood staring across the narrow strip of water no longer trusting his eyesight, until exclamations from other members of the party assured him that they too could see this enclosed woodland paradise.

Dazed and bewildered they moved forward along the narrow shelf of rock outside the water-filled channel, seeking a bridge over it, but they made the whole circuit of the place without finding the least variation in the ditch or any break in the thick spiky hedge of cactus which grew like a low wall on its far side.

This orchard jungle was an island, secreted behind strong natural defences and there seemed to be no way it could be entered.

The party paused again about fifty yards from the tunnel entrance, opposite a climbing growth of wistaria heavy with blossom, which rose above the thorny hedge.

'We've damn well got to get in there somehow,* exclaimed the McKay.

Suddenly, as though in answer to his speech, the tendrils of the wistaria parted and a man stood there, framed in flowers and greenery, eyeing them, with extreme curiosity across the low cactus wall. He was as tall as Vladimir, beautifully proportioned, and as handsome as Nicky but his features had the firmness of middle age and he was olive-skinned. The graceful folds of a white linen garment edged with purple hung from his shoulders. His expression was serene and kindly. He smiled at them and said:

'Good morning.'

The Garden of the Gods

'Now,' said Sally, 'I know we're dead. I've suspected it for a long time but it's nice that we should still be together, isn't it? *

Count Axel nodded. 'We all died together in the sphere —quite painlessly. There is no other explanation for ... all this!'

'You are mistaken I think.' A gentle humour twitched the lips of the man beyond the cactus hedge. 'You do not look at all dead to me.'

The McKay's eyes were popping out of his head. With a rudeness quite contrary to his nature he ignored the stranger and addressed the others. 'He's speaking English. I heard him—can you hear him too?'

The man on the island seemed to be more amused than ever. 'I speak in English because I heard you use that language,' he said, 'but, if you prefer it I can talk with you in any one of the five tongues which are most commonly used in the modern world and I know enough of several others to get about without difficulty.'

'To get about?' exclaimed Nicky. 'Just listen now—he's talking as though he might set off at any moment on an autumn cruise!'

'My surprise at this meeting is almost equal to your own,' remarked the man, 'as there is no record of any human from the upper world having penetrated here before—but not quite so great, for we at least had knowledge of your upper world whereas you were naturally ignorant of this. My name is Nahou and I am, what you would call, an Atlantean.'

Count Axel stepped forward to the brink of the water-249

filled ditch with a belated effort to show some courtesy. 'Sir,' he said gravely, 'if my belief that we are dead is right you are surely the subject of a gentle God. If I am wrong you are a civilised and cultured man. In either case I beg your pity and protection for myself and my friends. We have suffered much on our journey here. Our endurance is almost at an end, and we shall surely become the prey of evil things unless you grant us sanctuary in your island paradise.'

The Atlantean eyed him with equal gravity and spoke again with the same gentleness. 'Humans in such a desperate situation would have my sympathy in any case but your words, Sir, show you to be one of the elect—a twice-born— and for your sake, if no other, I make your party welcome here. Yet your request for sanctuary raises a problem which we have never had to face before. You will, I fear, find some difficulty in crossing our broad ditch.'

'We can swim,' said the McKay abruptly. 'Our real trouble's going to be when we have to try to scale that beastly cactus hedge.'

'All problems solve themselves with a little thought,' declared Nahou easily. 'I will fetch bedding to cast over the needle-thorns; then, if you can swim, I will haul you up one by one.' He turned away and the greenery closed behind him.

'By Crikey!' exclaimed Vladimir, 'I am either drunk or should be locked in a cushioned cell.'

'We all feel a bit that way I think,' agreed the McKay, 'but we've just got to hang on to ourselves and see what happens next.'

Camilla laughed—quite naturally. 'We're neither,' she said obscurely. 'This is only a very vivid dream. We'll wake up in our beds tomorrow in the hotel in Madeira. Doctor Tisch and his expedition to find Atlantis have never happened really.'

'Forgive me, Gnadige Hertzogin,' protested the Doctor who was just behind her, 'but I am quite real—also this cut in the calf of my leg which hurts greatly.'

Nahou returned and with him came a girl. 'This is Lulluma,' he introduced her as he began to pile a great bundle of finely woven linen, which he carried, on to the cactus wall. The others are away and so may not be disturbed to welcome you.'

They did not seek to probe the meaning of his last words because all their eyes were riveted on the girl. A head and a half shorter than Nahou, she too was dark, with smooth neatly parted hair which ended abruptly in a mass of thick curls on the nape of her neck, but her face bore not the slightest resemblance to the man's in racial characteristics. He was a pure Mediterranean type, or might even have been a fair-skinned Berber from North Africa. She had all the dark liveliness of a Celtic woman, but there was an added squareness and stockiness about her build which, together with the proud directness of her gaze, suggested a dash of the courageous aristocratic Norman blood. Her forehead was very broad, her head perhaps a trifle large for her short, beautifully rounded, body. Her eyes were very big and limpid, her skin clear and soft with the lustre of perfect health. Her lips were full, smiling, and moistly red.

Count Axel was long past his first youth and had known many women but now, on the instant he saw Luiluma, he knew that she was a being apart. It was not only her bodily loveliness but the very spirit of eternal youth and sparkling merriment which she seemed to carry with her as she moved. She might grow old in body but to her dying day she would retain a courageous gaiety despite every attempt of fate to break it down. Yet the laughter in her eyes as she gazed with surprise and pleasure on the strangers was not all of her. Count Axel guessed rightly that she was born under the sign of Scorpio and therefore thought deeply, kept her own secrets well and, under the beautiful gay mask could be intently serious and practical; turning her hand when necessity arose to any business just as easily as she could spend hours of idleness guzzling more good things to eat and drink, than were strictly good for her, between bursts of infectious laughter.

She was wearing red, the colour of the Scorpions, which set off her warm dark beauty in such a way that it was impossible to look at her and not feel a new vitality pulse through one's own body.

'Come now—the rest lies with you,' declared Nahou when he had arranged the bedding across the prickly hedge. 'We will help you over.'

'Vladimir—you will go first, then you can give the girls a

hand in landing,' ordered the McKay who was still nominally in command of the party. 'Nicky, you go after the girls —then the Doctor and Count Axel. I will come last.'

The Prince plunged into the narrow canal. His feet could not touch bottom and its sides were sheer so he would have found it impossible to gain a foothold on the island if Nahou had not reached down, gripped his wrist, and hauled him up. Sally pinned up her skirts and swam the fifteen feet of water, then the three on the opposite shore pulled her over the hedge into safety. Camilla followed her example, then the rest of the party splashed into the channel one by one and, in a quarter of an hour had entered—by this prosaic and most undignified manner—into Paradise.

The McKay introduced each member of his party by name and gave a short, very garbled, version of how they came to be there, then Nahou and Lulluma led them towards the centre of the vegetation where the palm trees rose towards the cavern's roof. The island was hardly a garden in the strict sense of the word for it lacked paths and borders, but the thick jungle-like growth which hid its interior from external view gave way, after a few yards, to a variegated orchard in which the trees were set wide apart, giving light and air to great clumps of flowers or little single coloured blossoms that starred the grass beside their footsteps.

'I'm afraid things are not looking quite their best just now,' Nahou apologised, apparently unnecessarily, as he led them forward. 'If you had visited us a fortnight earlier you would have found the Styglomenes in full bloom.'

Lulluma gave a deep chuckle. It was like gurgling water bubbling from a secret well that held the source of all the world's merriment. 'And if you had come a fortnight later,' she said seriously, 'the Prathatontecs would have been out for you to see I'

'You are a wicked child Lulluma,' Nahou smiled, throwing his arm carelessly round her shoulders, 'You mock at everything for your amusement.' His voice was gentle, caressing, yet it was not the tone of a lover, only that of one who had an infinite capacity for understanding and companionship.

'Dear fool,' she laughed, 'how can they care for the beauty of our blossoms now. They are wet and tired and hungry. When they have rested and are more themselves we will show them everything and also satisfy our burning curiosity about them.'

A vista opened showing a fairy-like scene. A little temple, no more than eighteen feet high, but built of pure gold, stood out against the background of the palm grove. Before it lay an open swimming pool, some thirty feet in length, its sides faced with deep blue lapis lazuli, a flight of white marble steps led down into it at the nearest end. At its far extremity, a dozen yards in front of the temple, a big satyr's head faced them and, from its mouth a cascade of sparkling water constantly refreshed the pool.

As they advanced the newcomers saw that on either side of the pool, but some way back from it, there stood two rows of low one-storied buildings.

'We have not beds enough,' said Nahou suddenly, 'and we dare not wake those who are away.'

'No matter,' Lulluma replied quickly, 'we have pillows in plenty. They can sleep naked on the grass while I dry their clothes in the earthshine.'

'They do not understand nakedness, as we do who are so old in time that we have come to appreciate the wisdom of reverting to the customs of simple savages in some things,' Nahou said seriously. 'You have not travelled as much as I and therefore know less of the habits of our guests.'

Lulluma threw a lightning glance at the bedraggled party. 'How strange,' she said, 'but never mind. You will soon learn the joy of being free from such stuffy clothes and your skins will be better for it. In the meantime you can keep your bodies covered with linen if you wish?'

'What do they mean?' Camilla whispered to Sally. 'I've sunbathed since I was a kid.'

They had reached the swimming pool and as she spoke Nahou turned: 'Is it your desire first to eat or sleep,' he asked.

'For myself I am hungry please,' replied Doctor Tisch without hesitation.

The others agreed. Utterly weary as they were they all felt an overwhelming craving to learn more of this secret island before they gave themselves to sleep.

'Very well then. Please be seated here while Lulluma and I prepare food for you.' Nahou waved his hand towards the even grass which bordered the marble surround of the pool and added, 'I ask only that you refrain from examining the buildings where we live. Our companions are away and it would be dangerous to wake them before they arise of their own free will.'

'We would not dream of abusing your hospitality,' Count Axel assured him, and the two beautiful beings walked leisurely away from them.

'This party's got me beat entirely,' admitted the McKay when their hosts were out of earshot. 'Are we dead or drunk or dreaming? That's what I'd like to know.'

Sally leaned against his shoulders; 'Does it matter my dear? This place is infinitely more lovely than any dream could be. I feel just as though I'd come home again after a long, long journey. You heard what that wonderful girl said about our taking off our clothes? Well, I don't mind a little bit. I wish that God had been a bit kinder about my ankles, but I'm not ashamed of my body.'

'What's the matter with your ankles?' asked the McKay loyally. 'To hear you talk anyone would imagine that your legs had no shape to them at all. They may not be as slim as Camilla's but they're sensible and the bits where they crease behind your knees are devilish attractive. I was looking at them just now.'

'Nelson—Andy—McKay! I don't keep my ankles behind my knees but I think you're a darling,' sighed Sally as she spread herself out luxuriously on the warm grass.

They all removed their drenched outer garments and sat there silently, almost stupefied with fatigue; gratefully drinking in the warmth of what Lulluma had termed the earthshire, which streamed upon them in sun-like radiance from the broad band of golden light running right round the roof of the high cavern above the island's protective water channel.

Presently Nahou returned, carrying a big bowl of red metal which Doctor Tisch recognised as orichalcum. Having set it down he took from it first a smaller bowl containing a variety of fresh fruit, then another which held flat round wheaten wafers and, lastly a stack of thin gold plates. As he handed round the latter he tapped the big bowl with his fingers. 'This is for your pips and rinds and scraps. It is our habit here to consume all waste matter with fire immediately.'

Luiluma then appeared with a large oval dish which had a number of compartments. In its centre there was some sort of meat, already cut into joints and round this were heaped half a dozen kinds of vegetables, some cooked and others raw like the ingredients of a salad.

'I hope you will like this,' she said anxiously. 'It is the loin of a small animal which you would call a buck, I think. We breed them in captivity and it is the only kind of meat we have in our island.'

The Doctor beamed. 'It smells most tempting Fraulein— but if you have only one kind of meat do you not get very tired of it?'

She shook her head. 'We eat it only occasionally—when we feel like a change from fish and fruit. I give it to you today because your bodies have need of such nourishment. Fortunately some was killed about a week ago.'

'You have fish here then?' asked the McKay.

'Yes, a dozen kinds which we breed in the lake behind the temple. Eat now, or your food will grow cold.'

Camilla and Nicky exchanged an awkward glance. No knives or spoons or forks had been provided, but Count Axel put out his hand at once and took a small joint of the roast meat in his fingers, just as if he had never seen table implements in his life.

As the others followed his example Nahou smiled: 'I know what you are thinking. "How strange that a people who eat their meals from gold should pick up cooked food in their bare hands." But our life here has been reduced to the essence of simplicity. Gold is unbreakable, does not tarnish and conveys no metallic taint to food; also plates and dishes are essential—but not so knives and forks. The use of them would only mean unnecessary labour and we have no slaves to do our work for us.'

Luiluma squatted down on her heels before them as they ate. Only her admirable manners restrained her curiosity about the visitors. She was longing desperately to question them about themselves but all she said was: 'Do you like the flavour of the meat?'

Count Axel threw a bone into the metal bowl and turned 255

to her with a bow as he took another piece. 'It is excellent,

and your cooking does you honour. You are right too about it being like buck—we should call this venison—and it is regarded as something of a luxury in the countries from which we come.'

'It has a pleasant flavour,' agreed Nahou, 'but we have no opportunity to compare it with other meats. That is as well perhaps otherwise we might have become—as you—a people whose staple diet is meat, and that is not healthy. Animal flesh has certain properties which are of the greatest value when taken with discretion, but eaten frequently and in too large quantities meat coarsens the body and leads to many of the internal complaints which are so prevalent among the white races of the upper world.' He too was eagerly awaiting the time when he could hear the story of his guests' journey, but for the moment confined himself to polite conversation.

Lulluma looked at Count Axel again: 'When you have slept,' she said, 'you must tell me all about the upper world. I know it only slightly and there is so much that I want to hear.'

'You know it?' he exclaimed, 'and Nahou knows it?—but how? I confess that I am completely mystified.'

She smiled. 'I will tell you—that and many other things— all in good time.'

Nahou removed the meat dish and as they started tasting the fruits, some of which were similar to varieties they knew and others totally different, Lulluma fetched some round goblets made of the halfs of cocoanut shells, highly polished and mounted on gold stems.

'Now that you have eaten you must drink,' she said, and poured out for each of them in turn from a golden jug.

It was an opaque greeny-yellow liquid and, as her guests tested it, they realised that it was some sort of fruit juice— diluted with water, sweet flavoured yet with a refreshing tang which cleansed the palate.

Sally guessed it to be a mixture of limes and grenadillas but there was some other taste in it which eluded her completely.

When they had all the fruit they needed Nahou went into one of the low buildings and brought back another set of

cups. Tiny ones this time, and with them he produced a big

flask.

'This is a cordial which will aid your digestion,' he told them as he handed round the cups. 'It is rather strong so you would do well to sip it slowly.'

Camilla sipped and choked immediately. The sticky dark green fluid was not unlike Chartreuse. It was flavoured with flowers and herbs and was highly alcoholic. The fiery spirit sent a warm glow right through her body as it went down.

While Nicky thumped her on the back the McKay sniffed at his tiny cup suspiciously then, having tasted its contents with extreme caution, he suddenly looked up.

'Thank God you've got liquor on the island. Well, here's how 1' Next moment he tossed off the cordial, sat with compressed lips and starting eyes for a second, then let out a long drawn sigh of extreme contentment.

'A-a-a-a-h! By Jove—I needed that!'

'Will you have some more?' Nahou proffered the flask but the McKay shook his head.

'Not now thanks. I'll come again another day if I may. That's the stuff to give 'em with a vengeance.'

Now that they had eaten their fatigue returned and they all felt terribly drowsy. Nahou glanced at Lulluma and she nodded; then he said: 'If you are willing I propose to send you into a dreamless sleep. You have suffered much in your journey here I know and if I do not it may be that hauntings of your recent past will trouble your unconscious minds.'

They showed their acquiescence by a series of sleepy nods except for the McKay, who did not care for the idea of giv-up his free will to anybody, but he remained silent.

'Look now at this gold plate,' Nahou continued, holding it before him so that the light shone full upon it. They obeyed—except for the McKay who kept his eyes focused on Nahou's knees a few inches lower down, while he wondered if he had not been a bit of an idiot to refuse another go of that excellent liquor. Lulluma rose and stood behind Nahou where he sat, cross-legged on the ground, placing her left hand on his head. Then the two Atlanteans concentrated, willing their guests to sleep.

'Won't we get rheumatism in these damp things?' Camilla asked drowsily, but no one replied to her. A great silence seemed to have descended on the garden again, broken only t.f.a.—i 257

by the continuous splashing of the water which gushed from the satyr's head into the pool.

One by one the strangers in Paradise closed their eyes. The light reflected by the golden plate seemed to have obscured everything else and about them spread only a gentle golden radiance. They sank back on to the grass and fell into a dreamless sleep.

The McKay alone remained conscious but he wished to sleep too. Politeness restrained him from saying that he preferred to do so in his own way without any assistance but, seeing the others slumbering he turned over and curled himself up.

Lulluma removed her hand from Nahou's head. 'They won't wake for a long time, she said in her own tongue. 'They look revolting now don't they? but when they wake they will have lost some of the horrid lines on their faces and after a bath some of them may not be quite so awful to look at. We had better take off those strange damp clothes they wear.

Nahou rose to his feet and followed her silently. With gentle care the two Atlanteans began systematically to strip their guests, then to arrange them one by one, as they were denuded of their clothing, in more comfortable attitudes with pillows under their heads. Suddenly Lulluma began to titter. Only the McKay and Doctor Tisch remained to be dealt with and they had just pulled off the latter's woollen pants.

She held them aloft so that Nahou might also appreciate this strange covering worn by beings from the upper world. He began to laugh too and soon both of them became utterly convulsed and helpless. They were no longer a middle-aged man and grown woman, dominated by the restraint and responsibility which affects most adults, but a pair of beautiful children enjoying an absurd stupendous joke. Lulluma laughed until the tears ran from her lovely eyes down her delicately coloured cheeks, and Nahou began to cough—holding his sides in pain because he had been so shaken by his merriment.

They sat down on the ground and leaned against each other—a little exhausted now but still giving way to new fits of uncontrollable mirth as Lulluma explored the intricacies of Doctor Tisch's long nether garments.

At last they recovered sufficiently to stand up again, then Luiluma regarded the Doctor's round protuberant stomach with a surprised stare.

'He's very fat, isn't he?' she said solemnly.

Nahou nodded. 'Yes, but we will teach him to breathe properly and that will soon reduce his body to normal. Providing of course that Menes permits them to remain here.'

'But he couldn't do otherwise,' protested Luiluma quickly. 'The poor things would all die in the darkness if we forced them to leave the island—and why should they not stay?—we have food enough for all.'

'True. We shall have to concentrate our yellow rays on them while they sleep though, and also strengthen that aura about ourselves when we have finished touching them—for they have probably got every sort of horrible disease. Come —help me with the little man who has such a strange red face.' Nahou turned towards the McKay.

He had removed his own coat and Luiluma was only just beginning to unbutton his trousers when he stirred, grunted, and sat up.

'What the thunderin' blazes—' he began, giabbing at his trousers in outraged modesty. He saw Luiluma bending over him with an amused smile, and then—behind her rouded shoulder—he caught sight of the stark naked bodies of his six friends as they lay sleeping in the sun.

He shut his eyes tightly for a moment then opened them again. Luiluma was still smiling at him.

'Good God!' he ejaculated, 'it's still there—I thought it was a dream but you're real apparently. Anyhow whatever you are you're not undressing me!'

'Please,' Luiluma pleaded gently. 'Why shouldn't I. You don't seem to be deformed at all and you would be so much more comfortable.'

He shook his head firmly. 'Very nice of you m'dear and I'm sure you don't mean any harm, but although I'm not deformed I'd rather not.'

'You did not look at the gold plate as I suggested,' Nahou accused him mildly, 'or else you would have been in a deep refreshing slumber.'

'No,' the McKay confessed. 'I didn't. I'm most awfully grateful for all you're doing but I prefer my own way of going to sleep.'

Nahou shrugged his shoulders lightly. 'That must be as you wish. No one person ever compels another here. We only help and guide each other where we can, and even in that we use the very greatest discretion in case the other person were offended—for then we should surely die of shame. You have accepted food and drink because you were hungry and thirsty—why then do you refuse my offer to throw you into a healing sleep which will refresh your whole body, now when you are so tired?'

The McKay considered for a moment then he glanced apologetically at the beautiful girl kneeling by his side. 'If you don't mind going for a stroll Miss—er—Lulluma I think I'd like to avail myself of Mr. Nahou's kind offer after all. It seems a sensible suggestion but I'm an old fashioned sort of cuss and with you—er—looking on you know——'

Lulluma felt an intense desire to giggle again. This little man was funnier even than the one they called the Doctor but from her childhood she had been trained to suppress any emotion which might give pain to other people. With a grave smile she stood up.

'Certainly I will leave you if you wish. Forgive me please that I should appear so ignorant of your customs—but I have had so little opportunity to travel yet.'

With a friendly wave of her hand she left them and gathering up the soiled dishes disappeared behind the nearest block of buildings.

The McKay waited until she vanished then he turned back to Nahou and said slowly: 'This travelling business— is it true that you and she have both been in the upper world among ordinary human beings?'

Nahou nodded. 'Yes, Lulluma is young yet but I and my companions have visited your country and other centres of modern civilisation many times.'

'Ah!' the McKay's eyes brightened. 'I felt certain that must be so. It's the only possible explanation of you being able to speak such darn good English. There's a way out of this place somehow then. A long tunnel which leads up under the sea and comes up in the Azores eh? By Jove I we're not sunk yet—we'll get back after all 1'

Nahou regarded him a little sadly. 'Did you learn much of the tradition which still exists about Atlantis before you came on this expedition?' he asked slowly.

'Enough to write a book,' declared the McKay. 'No offence of course—but I'm fed to the teeth with the whole darned business.'

'Then you will know that the earlier Atlanteans were credited with powers which the ignorant term "Magic"?'

'O-ah! Sons of the God going in unto the daughters of men, Nephilim, and all that sort of thing—hence the Flood. Yes, I know all about that but what's it got to do with this secret entrance to the place by which we can get home?'

'We still retain certain of those powers,' said Nahou gently, 'and they enable us to travel in the spirit, but none of my race have ever left this island in our physical bodies for over eleven thousand years. 1 am afraid my friend that you must put out of your mind once and for all any hope of being able to return.'

Count Axel Treads the Fields of Aspodel

Count Axel was the first to wake. All his friends were still sleeping soundly on either side of him but Lulluma was sitting near by busily stitching at some form of garment.

His first impression was of her serene untroubled smile and that she was no creation of his subconscious imagination but warm flesh and blood; his next, that he had grown a beard. As he passed his hand over his face he felt it—a stubby growth on his lips and chin.

'How do you feel now?' she asked, laying aside her work and standing up.

He took a long breath and sighed contentedly. 'If I were on my death bed I believe that the sight of you would be enough to raise me from it—but I never awoke feeling less like death than I do at the moment.'

'That is as it should be—you have slept well, nearly a week.'

'A week! surely that is impossible?'

'Almost a week,' she assured him, 'and you look terribly dirty. Come with me and you shall have a bath.'

Axel took the hand that she held out to pull him to his feet. Then he noticed that he and his friends had been stripped during their sleep; but the girl beside him did not seem the least embarrassed by his nakedness and he could not help murmuring as he surveyed the others: 'Don't they look funny without their clothes?'

Lulluma chuckled. 'The fat doctor is a very queer shape. The tall dark man has a good body though, also the fair one whom you call Nicky.'

'Yes,' he agreed, as he studied his friends with complete detachment, 'Vladimir is a fine figure of a man and both the

girls do credit to their race. Camilla is particularly lovely.'

Luiluma jerked his hand with sudden petulance, 'She is just passable—but she is nothing like as good-looking as I ami'

Count Axel had drawn her attention to Camilla's loveliness with deliberate intent. She had risen to the bait magnificently and he almost trembled with joy at this first real assurance that she was as vulnerable as any ordinary human girl. When he turned and looked into her eyes he meant every word as he said, 'You are right—in all my life I have never seen anyone quite so beautiful as you.'

She shrugged her well-covered shoulders; 'My mother carried out her ideas of my type quite well in me I think, but you may change your opinion when you see my companions. I would not change my nature with any of them but they are more beautiful. I am too short and lack the grace which they possess. Come now and wash.'

He followed her to one of the blocks of buildings which faced each other across the pool, each of them had six curtained entrances. She pulled aside the hangings over one doorway and disclosed a large square room furnished with spartan simplicity. There was a couch against the far wall, a dressing-table to one side, above which was set a large metal mirror and against the other wall stood a single oblong coffer. In the middle of the floor was a low sunken bath.

'This is my room,' announced Luiluma. 'You are not afraid of me I hope like the little muscular man who nearly had a fit when he found that Nahou and I were about to remove his damp trousers.'

Count Axel stood in the doorway, his hands on his hips and quite at his ease. 'No,' he replied, passing his fingers over his chin. 'If you do wish to eat me I am yours to eat, but first I would prefer to remove this beard—if that is possible. It would be more comfortable for us both.'

'Later on, if I find that I like you I might try,' she said with delightful frankness, 'but I would hardly care to touch you as you are. Look I Nahou has provided this sharp steel against your waking. In this vase you will find oil for lather and here is a linen towel. Water will enter the bath from the hot spring if you press down the Triton's head which decorates its end. After you have finished remove the spigot from the bottom and it will drain away. On the bed there I have put out a selection of men's garments. Since you are the first to wake you can choose which you like best. Now I will leave you to make yourself presentable.'

As she turned to go he laid his hand gently on her arm to detain her. 'Forgive me,' he said, 'but, since neither of us suffer from any shyness may I confess one thing to you?— I have never found it altogether easy to wash my own back.'

Lulluma looked at him for a moment and then she began to laugh again. 'Well really,' she declared, 'you are almost civilised. Quite like one of us. I will bath you with pleasure if you like?'

When Axel looked at himself in Lulluma's highly polished metal mirror he saw that he was indeed a filthy sight, but after some initial difficulty with Nahou's big hand-ground razor he got the hang of it and soon his chin was as smooth as silk. A good wash restored his face to its normal appearance and then he studied himself again. He saw a long humorous countenance smiling at him lazily and decided that his forty-odd years had not treated him too harshly. He felt no more than thirty and the abnormally long sleep seemed to have removed half a dozen years of deepening wrinkles from round his eyes and mouth. With an impulsive gesture he swung round to Lulluma.

'Well, how do I look now?'

She was sitting on her divan polishing her toe-nails and she looked up with a start. 'Why—you're quite good-looking,' her big eyes widened, 'I thought you were almost an old man and was only attracted by something about your mind which your friends do not possess ... before!'

As he turned on the water she stood up and added: 'I only consented to bath you out of courtesy you know—but now I think it will be rather fun.'

With a little wriggle of her shoulders she slipped off her red dress and picked up the vase of oil. Then amid splash-ings and laughter she scrubbed him so vigorously that he had to cry for mercy.

He chose a green tunic and when she had helped him to adjust it they went outside together. The others were still sound asleep so she offered to show him the island and they strolled off side by side.

In the grove of palm trees behind the temple there was 264

another group of buildings. A wide kitchen, a small laundry, and a row of workshops for metallurgy, dyeing, weaving, and distilling. All were quite deserted and showed no signs of recent labour. The rows of golden plates and dishes were arranged neatly in the kitchen racks, every tool and implement in the shops occupied its special place; no trace of waste material marred the scrupulous cleanness in any corner.

'You see, each of us makes what we require for ourselves and nothing more,' Lulluma explained, 'and when we wish to eat we gather whatever fresh fruit is in season from the trees or net a fish in the lake and cook it. All waste is consumed immediately after by the earthshine.'

'How does that work?' he asked. 'It seems to have all the properties of sunshine.'

'It has,' she assured him. 'You doubtless know that the centre of the earth is molten and gives off gases which are exactly similar to those which shoot out in great flames from the sun. Long ages ago our people tapped that source of heat and light and then it was a comparatively simple matter to conduct it through certain minerals so that it should give a steady glow. The circular arrangement round the roof enables the trees and plants to benefit from it at every angle in the same degree so that they are never distorted in one direction. The result is similar to that produced by the movement of your sun.'

'Forgive me, but there are so many things I want to ask you,' he smiled down at her. 'From the way you speak you are obviously familiar with our upper world?'

'There is little to do here,' she answered enigmatically, 'except make love!'

'You find that palls at times?'

'No, never—because we do not abuse our zest for it. Once every year or two each of us has some tremendous affair which lasts a few months, then when we are satiated for the moment, we go away. Later the urge rises again and when we feel it really strongly we take our happiness with another.'

'You speak of going away. What do you mean by that?'

'Two of us are always what you would call "on duty" here. It was the turn of Nahou and myself when you arrived. The others spend most of the year in sleep. Sometimes we sleep for a month or more at a stretch, and during that time our spirit travels—as quickly as an ether wave. We have learned to direct it to the place where we wish to go. The eyes of our invisible bodies can observe your customs and our ears can hear your speech. That is how we have learned your languages and know quite a lot about you, but there are many things you do which puzzle us still.'

Axel nodded. 'That sounds amazing—but I understand it. In a rudimentary way the people of the upper world practise thought transference at times or visit their friends in dreams, so that they are able to listen to their speech and see what they are doing. Such things with us are rare, haphazard and chancy though, whereas you must have developed these faculties to a fine art.'

'We have had an unbroken civilisation for twenty-nine thousand years in which to do it,' she said simply.

'Twenty-nine ... thousand ... years! That makes us seem to be still in the embryo stage then—but tell me more of what you do?'

'We remain here for a few days to renew our strength, then we set off again, and so life goes on until the love-urge is upon us once more; then, for a little while, we revel in what you would term a new honeymoon.'

'I should have thought that your bodies would have wasted during those long periods of sleep.'

'On the contrary. It is that which enables our tissues to restore themselves and rests the organs, so that we remain young and beautiful far longer than the people of your world above. Come now—I will show you what you would call our "Kitchen Garden".'

She pushed her arm impulsively through his and led him out of the palm grove to the far side of the island.

Just as the flower garden behind the pool was different from any which Axel had ever seen before so this 'Kitchen-Garden' was quite unusual in its lay-out. It extended the whole breadth of the island between the ten-foot deep creeper-clad walls and covered about two acres of ground, but there were no large ugly patches of vegetables and it had been planned with the most skilful care.

Its design was rigidly formal and the intersecting paths were bordered by successive rows of different plants, each slightly higher than the one in front until the rearmost hedged in solid squares of cereals. On each side of the paved walks Axel noticed lines of low root-crops—types of radish, carrot, turnip and many others which he did not recognise. Further in there were lettuces, dwarf beans and peas, then potatoes, broccoli and cabbages until rows of tall artichokes and espaliered fruit trees fenced in the blocks of wheat, oats, barley and maize.

He would never have believed that any purely utilitarian garden could be made so beautiful, yet the long lines of contrasting greens were worthy of Le Notre and the restful colouring gave a peace to the eyes which no massed ranks of flowers could have conveyed.

Luiluma pointed to a low, square building at the far end. 'That is where our roots and crops are stored—also it contains our wine-press and our mill. The wines of course have to be kept underground for many years before they are drinkable. Beyond is the enclosure where we pasture our herd of deer, and the fish-pond. Then at the extremity of the island is the jungle. Would you like to see those too?'

'Please.' Axel moved forward beside her, 'I wish to admire everything. Your domain is more enchanting than any fairyland of which I have ever dreamed.'

The vegetable garden ended in a metal fence almost entirely hidden by vines from which hung bunches of small unripe grapes. They passed through a gateway in it to a grassy, uncultivated wilderness. The island was slightly narrower here and a small stream, fed by some hidden spring meandered through the meadow to a lake fringed by tall reeds. As they walked forward a little herd of antelope, no more than twenty inches high, raised their heads to gaze at them with large liquid eyes, then scampered off to cover in the wall of greenness which kept the island secret and enclosed.

Beyond the lake another fence cut off the far segment of the island which was entirely covered by dense jungle. At first, when they entered it through another gate it seemed a solid mass of flowering creepers so inextricably interwoven that it was difficult to see the tree trunks on which they climbed. Splashes of blossom, yellow, pink, blue, and scarlet stood out against the massed green of the background and scented the air with the fragrance of a perfume-maker's laboratory.

Lulluma pulled aside a bunch of hanging tendrils and Axel followed her into a cool dark maze gently dappled by the earthshine which penetrated in speckled patches between the leaves above. Hardly discernible paths wound in and out among the massed bushes and clumps of flowering vines while here and there were more open spaces and recesses which invited rest on their mossy banks among the warm shadows.

'it is here,' said Lulluma, 'that we often come to make love.'

Axel felt his heart pounding beneath his ribs and his arm trembled as he put it round her shoulder, but a subtle instinct told him that she intended no invitation and that his only hope lay in exercising the greatest restraint. This small warm pagan goddess was no primitive creature to be taken by rough assault. Something told him that in spite of her apparent youth she knew the game of love even better than he did and could only be caressed at her own pleasure. When that time came he felt that she would show her desire as naturally as she would hunger or thirst.

His blood was pounding heavily behind his temples and he knew that he must break the tension or else he might do something which he would ever afterwards regret, so he removed his arms and leaned against a tree trunk, then spoke unthinkingly of the first thing which came into his mind.

'This is like Eden—to make it complete you only need the Serpent 1'

Instantly she sprang away from him with dark, fear-distended eyes.

'What is it? .. . I'm sorry! . .. please, what have I done?' he exclaimed, holding out his hands to her in quick supplication.

She shuddered and glanced over her shoulder fearfully. The jungle garden seemed very silent now as though every tree and vine were listening. Then she sighed and placed her hands in his.

'You should not have said that,' she whispered. 'Never— never speak of evil. It is almost our only rule but very strictly kept. The Ancient One has been barred out of here for countless centuries but he still waits, as he will wait until the end of time, for an invitation to enter in.'

Her voice was so intensely earnest that he could find no adequate apology and only bowed his head as though guilty of having broken some fragile priceless treasure.

She lifted a hand to his cheek and stroked it gently, seeking now to comfort him; 'You spoke only thoughtlessly and in jest I know but words have such terrible power. They vibrate on the ether long, long after our ears have ceased to hear them and evil forces focus, unseen, all about them. I am so afraid that what you have said may, in some awful way, mar the wonderful happiness I foresee for us—but that which has been spoken can never be recalled. All I can do now is to throw my vibrations about us both and trust that they may prove an effectual barrier.'

In silence now they moved on again yet, after Lulluma's outburst she soon seemed to push the episode into the back of her mind and regain her spirits. A few moments later she put her finger to her lips to enjoin quietness before drawing him round a corner of the maze.

There, in a nook, a fully grown girl was sleeping at the foot of a stone pillar topped by a bust of the God Priapus. A garland hung from the age-old symbol by which Axel recognised the Deity. The girl wore only a light tunic of white linen edged with gold; her hair, a lustrous ash-blonde colour, contrasting also with Lulluma's in that she wore it long, covered her shoulders and fell below her delicately modelled breasts. She was extremely lovely, with the milk and rose complexion of Axel's own Nordic people and her limbs, scarcely veiled by the semi-transparent material of her dress were long and graceful. He could not remember ever seeing such a perfect example of her type.

'Well, what do you say now?' Lulluma asked with a mocking glance, 'Would you not rather make love to her than to me? Speak truthfully—I shall not bear any ill-will. No man could hesitate at such a choice for she is far lovelier than I.'

Axel shook his head and his tone carried conviction: 'Many men might judge her to be more beautiful,' he acknowledged. 'But you have something which she lacks. Camilla is by no means perfect yet she might prove no mean rival to this girl, for the love of a man, whereas you are apart—infinitely rarer and more desirable. It is possible to meet such loveliness as hers on earth but yours only in the Garden of the Gods.'

Lulluma accepted this praise but seemed only moderately pleased by it. She looked down on the sleeping girl and murmured : 'I thought she was unique. I am intensely proud of her. She is Danoe—my daughter.'

'What?' exclaimed Axel incredulously. 'But that is impossible.

'Hush!' Lulluma drew him hurriedly back behind a screen of hanging creepers.

'But you?' Axel lowered his voice. 'I don't understand— you can't be more than twenty yourself—or let's be lavish and say twenty-two.'

'That is just it.' Lulluma smiled enigmatically. 'You do not understand. In this place we come normally to maturity in twenty years but after that the fact that we pass two-thirds of each year in sleep preserves our youth almost indefinitely. Presently you will see another of us—Laotzii, a woman of ninety, but to you she will appear to be only a little over forty.'

'But you?' persisted Axel, 'perhaps it is rude to ask but— how old are you?'

'I am young yet.' Lulluma gave her deep gurgling chuckle. 'Only forty-four next birthday.'

Axel surveyed again the warm loveliness which glowed before him; 'I would have wagered a fortune that you could not be more than twenty-three.'

'It is these long periods of sleep,' she repeated. 'How old do you think Nahou is?'

'If one judges by appearances I should say fifty. His muscles are so supple. There is not a single thread of grey in that fine straight black hair of his—he cannot be more.'

Lulluma laughed at his indignant tone. 'He has lived over one hundred years. If I remember he is a hundred and four. He is my grandfather and, with the exception of Menes, the oldest man amongst us. . . . Also he is a most accomplished lover,' she added naively.

'To what age do you live then?' Axel asked, ignoring her last remark.

'A hundred and thirty-eight to a hundred and forty-five. The last is a record I think.'

'How many are there of you here—awake or asleep?'

'Twelve only. Six women and six men. That number was decided on within a few generations of the Flood and it has never been varied since except for brief periods when we are eleven or thirteen. A child is born to one of our women every twelve years and if the eldest of our community is not already dead, they die quite naturally within a few months of the birth because their time is done and they no longer wish to live. Semiramis is the oldest of our women now. She is about a hundred and forty and if she is not dead before she will die soon after my daughter Danoe bears her first child—which will be in about four years' time.'

'You speak as if that was quite certain. Have you the power to control such things?'

She nodded. 'With us the gift of life is at the discretion of the giver's will. Such power was only achieved after innumerable generations of conscious effort by every mother, but concentrated thought is the greatest force in the world. By it we can heal very serious injuries when they occur in the mill or metallurgical workshop—although accidents are very rare with us.'

'Yes—I understand that,' said Axel thoughtfully. 'In the upper world there are now many people who follow a religion which centres largely round faith-healing. They are not always successful in fighting disease but they have worked a lot of cures where the doctors have failed. That you should have developed a similar faculty to a more perfect degree is not so surprising but the control of childbirth by will is a much greater problem, or have you reached that degree of evolution whereby only one sex is necessary for the reproduction of the species?'

'Of course not, you dear fool!' Luiluma laughed as she opened the gate from the jungle to the meadow; 'There was a lot of difficulty at first but our women had already progressed considerably in regulating the size of their families artificially even before the cataclysm. When they wholeheartedly desired to have a child it was considered a sin not to do so though, for only by intent can the most beautiful and balanced children be born.

'Then it was discovered that time and seasons played a great part in determining the child's appearance and character, so people began to choose the planets under which their children should be born in accordance with the type of baby they desired. As the ages passed women went even further and took it upon themselves to prepare with great seriousness for these important events. They spent many months visualising the child they were to bear as a grown man or woman in its full beauty, and by strong thought processes they threw up barriers against the entry of deformed, ugly or evil-natured offspring into life. Eventually through cumulative hereditary effort, the woman's will became the dominant factor so that without the definite desire to become a mother it was impossible for her to bear a child.'

Axel took her hand as they strolled slowly past the lake. 'Is the fact that there are six women and six men amongst you just chance,' he asked, 'or do you determine sex as well?'

'Oh, that was all planned long ago—it was one of the first steps. Each of the six women here bears two children—a boy and a girl. Your people will reach that stage of development soon I expect.'

'We are fairly near it now, Axel told her. 'I don't know very much about it but I believe it is a matter of the glands. Tell me, could you have more children if you wanted to?'

'I suppose so—but I've had my two. Danoe, the girl you saw, who is twenty, and Ciston, a boy of eight. Therefore I should never give my will to that again. It would be unutterably wrong.'

For a moment they walked in silence then, as they passed through the vine-covered trellis into the vegetable garden, Axel said: 'No one seems to be working here or in the shops. How is this place cultivated if ten out of twelve of you are asleep and the remaining two laze away the hours in the sunshine?'

'We do not laze,' she said quickly. 'The two of us who are here work for long hours tending our fruit trees, flowers and vegetables. It keeps us healthy and we need little sleep because we get so much at other times. Our only holidays are when two of us fall in love—then we are free to laze together for as long as we like. The arrival of your party is a tremendous event and that is why work has ceased in the last few days. Besides, in addition to the two months' labour each of us puts in to provide our necessities we all return for four fortnights in the year during which we sow and harvest our biannual crops. I enjoy those fortnights—just as I am enjoying all the strangeness of having you here—for it is then that we tell each other of our journeys into distant lands and at the end we have a festival!—a Feast of Love.'

'But I thought you told me that you only had affairs every two years or so?

'The serious ones—yes. Those which I was speaking of grow from flirtations during the period of harvest and generally end quite naturally at the Feast—but in them often lies the seed of deep attraction which leads to a more lasting attachment sometimes of months.'

She suddenly caught sight of his face and began to laugh. 'I believe you are shocked,' she said. 'I forgot that the ideas of your people are as ours were before the Flood I'

'I'm not shocked,' he countered her teasing, 'but it is all so strange. Most upper-world people could call you an immoral baggage, but after all it is quite natural to you and nothing,' he added seriously, 'which is natural can be immoral.'

'Only anger and the giving of pain are immoral,' declared Lulluma firmly, 'and, after all there are only six men here to choose from—I'm sure you've known at least a dozen women?'

'Quite,' Axel went so far as to admit, 'but don't let's go into that.'

'Why not?' she asked curiously. 'If we are going to spend a lot of time together it will give us some amusing and" interesting subjects to discuss.'

'I suppose there's no reason why we shouldn't but I was¹ brought up in the tradition that one might kiss a lot—but never tell I'

'We are not jealous as your women are, so it could do no harm among us, and any confidences you make to me can never reach the upper world because none of you will ever be able to return.'

He sighed happily and put his arm round her shoulders again. 'That is not a distressing thought—in fact I am convinced that I have been waiting all my life for the moment when I should meet you in this garden.'

Lulluma smiled up into his eyes and he caught his breath in wonder at her loveliness as she asked: 'Would you be content to stay here making love a little—working regularly —talking a lot?'

'My dear,' he said and put his hands behind his back. Me 273

felt that he was treading on sacred ground and must be careful not to make the smallest slip which might dash all the great hopes which had risen in him like an overpowering force since he had walked and talked with Lulluma in the Garden.

'My dear,' he said again, 'what more could one do if one had all the upper world to do it in and were a millionaire besides? There, one is beset with constant cares. If you possess no property you go hungry and if you own land or business interests life is one constant war to defend them from others who would take them from you. Here all causes of worry seem to have been eliminated. You have enough work to keep you healthy but no more and interests and food enough for all. What mortal who had eyes to see and understanding could ever wish to leave this Garden of the Gods?'

Lulluma stretched out her hand and put two cool fingers on his forehead. She seemed to listen for a moment and then she took her hand away and said: 'It is strange but you are, I believe, one of us in spirit—I am glad 1 But your friends —some of them are as different from you as we are from the creatures of the depths. I fear they will make themselves miserable by always craving to get back.'

'I had thought of that too,' acknowledged Axel, and his face clouded. 'I wonder if any of them have woken yet?'

'If so Nahou will look after them—or Rahossis.'

'Who is Rahossis?'

'My mother. She returned from a journey two days ago. She is very beautiful and very gay—red-haired and statuesque—and in the full bloom of her beauty—you will imagine her to be about thirty-two—but really she has lived many more years than that. She is twelve years younger than Quet, the son of Nahou, who was my father, and twelve years older than Peramon, who was the father of my first child Danoe.'

They reached the palm grove and, walking through it, came round the miniature golden temple to find that only Nicky and Vladimir were still asleep. Camilla and Sally had disappeared while the McKay and Doctor Tisch, with only trousers on, sat side by side on the grass near the bathing pool. Their coats were now covering—or partially so—the middle portions of the bodies of their still sleeping friends.

As the McKay's glance fell on the Count, arm in arm with Luiluma and dressed only in a short airy green tunic he clutched the Doctor's arm and exclaimed in a horrified voice:

'Good God 1 Look at Axel—he's gone native.'

The Doctor scratched his bristly head and laughed guttur-ally. He was still vaguely wondering where all this was going to end. It had not yet penetrated to his mind that those great stones he had discovered on the ocean bed were only the ghosts of a past Atlantis, whereas here, he was seated in the very heart of that long dead civilisation which it had been his life's ambition to find.

'Well, how are you both feeling?' Axel asked as he came up. 'I see you've both had a bath and a shave and are looking years younger already so your long sleep must have done you good.'

'Oh, I'm feeling all right,' the McKay agreed guardedly, 'and Mr. Nahou has been kindness itself although when I agreed to him putting me to sleep I didn't know it was to be for a week!'

Axel's lazy smile flitted across his face. 'We should all be most distressed, I know,' he said, 'if that has caused you to miss any important engagements.'

'Eh?—Ohl' the McKay's friendly grin appeared. 'You've caught me out there, Count—but I find it a little difficult to get the hang of our new quarters and he wanted me to put on one of those fancy dress affairs you are wearing. Well, no offence, but I thought that was a trifle thick!'

'Thin you really mean,' giggled Luiluma as she hung on Axel's arm, 'but why have you covered up your friends and where are the two young girls you had with you?'

'The girls went off together with a fine strapping red-haired wench—lady, I beg your pardon—who said her name was Rahossis. As for us putting our coats over our friends —well, I mean . . . !' The McKay shrugged eloquently.

'That was silly of you,' Luiluma said gently. 'We have covered you up each night. But in a health sleep such as you have undergone it is important that the gentle earth-shine should play upon every portion of your bodies.'

'You do have night here then,' said Axel. 'That is interesting because my only fear was that one might tire of perpetual day.'

She nodded. The earthshine is under our control and for ten hours out of every twenty-four we dim it, turning its principal energy into other channels. You saw all the little trenches in the vegetable garden—it pumps the water up which irrigates those and makes the fountains among the clumps of flowers play.'

'I see,' Axel murmured. 'I wondered how you could find time to water everything, but that makes it unnecessary.'

As he spoke a young boy came dashing out of one of the buildings. He raced across the grass and flung his arms round Lulluma.

'My darling,' she cooed in his own tongue, stooping to^Y embrace him. 'So you are back at last—did you have a good journey?'

'Yes—yes,' his dark eyes were bright with excitement. 'I found a long lonely beach and examined all the shells, then a wooden boat came past with men in it and I went over the water to them. They caught fish out of the sea, and two days later they took it home. I followed, to find out where they lived but they had only dark dirty huts and no gardens —Poor people, I was so sorry for them I...'

He broke off suddenly to stare at the strangers. Lulluma translated what he had said then, as an afterthought, introduced him: This is Ciston—the youngest amongst us.'

Apparently he understood the drift of her last words for he bowed gravely giving the Doctor, Axel and the McKay a friendly smile apiece.

The McKay grinned back and held out his hand. 'Shake me'lad,' he said. 'You and I will make some boats to float on that pond together.'

Ciston took the proffered hand though he could not understand what the stranger was saying, but Lulluma did and in that second, all thought of him as a weatherbeaten, truculent little man with absurd inhibitions passed from her. He could be gentle with a child and would make toy boats for the boy's amusement. Her heart warmed towards him and, to his intense embarrassment, she stooped and kissed him impulsively upon the neck.

'Now for your swim,' she said quickly to Ciston, giving the McKay a moment to recover from her assault, and the boy bounded away like some young faun. His head was covered with dark thick close-cropped curls and his body was a golden brown. Axel thought of a young Sicilian fisher-boy as Ciston plunged fearlessly into the pool.

He swam with ease and grace and they were still watching him when Camilla and Sally appeared. Their corn-coloured hair now hung round their shoulders and both wore only Atlantean tunics. Camilla's was blue with a silver border and Sally's a dove-grey edged with something which looked like mother of pearl. Rahossis accompanied them. She was a good few inches taller than either of the cousins and a magnificent woman of Junoesque proportions. Her skin was very white and her hair Titian red—shorter than Lulluma's. It made a halo for her head and clustered all over it in a forest of auburn curls.

The McKay put his hand in front of his eyes as Sally approached in her almost transparent tunic and she flushed a bright lobster pink as she said abruptly: 'Don't be a fool, Nelson—Andy—McKay, and get rid of those hideous trousers. When in Rome, you know ..

Then he removed his hand and she saw that he was laughing so she added defensively: 'Don't you think this suits me?'

'Very becoming, me'dear,' he chuckled, 'very becoming. God forbid that I should ever prevent any Roman lady doing her duty.'

'We're not Romans,' said Camilla, who caught the last words as she preened herself in front of Axel, 'we're Atlanteans now—and we've got to stay like this for the rest of our lives.'

Rahossis had drawn Lulluma aside. 'Well,' she said indulgently in Atlantean, 'this is a fine piece of good fortune for you, my sweet—I'm so glad that you were here when they arrived.'

'And for you, darling, too,' replied Lulluma. 'None of the five men will look at me now that they have seen you.'

'Nonsense.' Rahossis shrugged her fine shoulders. 'The one they call the Count is kissing your little feet already in his mind. I can tell from the way he's watching you out of the corner of his eye. As for myself—I could take any of the others if I wished but I do not think I want to. They are such intensely stupid people. Those girls are like small children—why, your little boy, Ciston, is more entertaining to talk to and any one of the men would bore me in an hour, But if you wish to enjoy yourself lose no time about it.'

'Why, darling?' asked Lulluma quickly.

'Because Menes has returned and he will exercise his sole right of re-calling all the others. There will be a council tonight for nothing like this has ever happened in our history before.'

Lulluma shrugged. 'What of it, dearest?'

'Our ancient law limits our number to twelve, and it may be thought that by allowing the strangers to remain we should bring about our own destruction. If so, Menes will order them to leave the island.'

Menes Speaks

It was a certain awe that the McKay's party watched the procession of Atlanteans going into their temple some six hours later.

The earthshine had just begun to dim and it was the first suggestion of 'night' which the strangers had experienced in this subterranean island. The flowers lost colour though much of their fragrance still perfumed the air; a vague mysterious twilight crept stealthily among the shrubs and trees, veiling them in a new secrecy, and a renewed sense of unreality troubled the newcomers, except Vladimir and Camilla, with fresh speculations as to whether they were alive or dead.

These two were occupied with happier thoughts for Vladimir had woken early that afternoon and, after his ablutions, taken Camilla for a walk through the meadow to the jungle. Tall, bronzed, handsome, his magnificent body set off in its full strength and beauty by the light Atlantean costume, he was as splendid a specimen of manhood as any of his hosts. In this new setting his qualities far outweigh those of either of his rivals, at least in Camilla's eyes, and, moreover, it was to him she had turned in every crisis of their dark journey. They were here for the rest of their lives it seemed, and she knew in her heart that she had always liked him best, so in a passionate outburst she had confessed that she loved him and promised to marry him just as soon as he wished.

Their news had been received with enthusiastic congratulations by their friends but when the practical side of the matter was discussed and it was discovered that the Atlanteans never married, or at least had no sort of marriage ceremony, Camilla had become a little dubious about the matter.

It seemed to her conventional mind not quite right somehow just to go off into the wood as Luiluma suggested. That might be all very well for these lovely savages, and privately that was how Camilla thought of the Atlanteans, but it wasn't like being really married at all. In fact, looked at squarely there would be no permanent tie, only casual indulgence in what she had always been taught to regard as sin.

'Besides,' as she said privately to Sally, 'if there's no service or anything I wouldn't really be his wife so what hold would I have over him if he starts to go after one of these Atlantean girls later on. I do love Vladimir terribly of course but they are such a frightfully good looking lot that I'm scared about losing him already. That's why I said "yes', before one of them could snap him up, this afternoon.'

Sally agreed about the extremely dangerous beauty of Luiluma and her friends but forbore to point out that if a man's pledge to a woman he said he loved was worth nothing when given to her alone, no amount of bells and rings and blessings was going to make it any more binding however many people heard him make it before an altar. She knew the way Camilla's mind worked and could only sympathise while being just a little bit amazed to see her cousin's complete change of attitude brought about by coming into collision with other women as beautiful as herself.

Fortunately however Doctor Tisch arrived on the scene and came to Camilla's rescue by reminding her that he had taken orders in his youth. His offer to perform the rites of the Lutheran church over the pair was accepted with grateful thanks and, since there could be no question of 'going away' after it, the time of the ceremony had been fixed to tally with the conclusion of the evening meal that night.

Nicky had been the last to waken, and bathed while Camilla and Vladimir were hugging each other in the jungle. He did not seem as cast down by the news of his rival's victory as might have been expected. Rahossis had taken care of him while Nahou was showing the Doctor and the McKay round the island. Since then he had not been able to take his eyes off her whenever she was in view, and he had already confessed to Sally that he had suffered an unrequited passion for Mae West before he left Hollywood, whom Rahossis undoubtedly resembled.

All of them now with the exception of the McKay, who declared a conservative preference for his trousers, were clad in the flimsy costumes usual among the small population of the island. The two girls did more than justice to the Atlantean tunics and the McKay, who had seen them many times in bathing suits or evening dress, admitted to himself that he had never seen them look more beautiful. That they were conscious of it was evident from the proud way in which they held themselves. Axel and Nicky, like Vladimir, seemed more handsome and virile from the simple change of costume. Even the stout Doctor who had succumbed to Lulluma's wiles, far from looking ridiculous appeared to take on a new dignity in his dark purple robe which he entirely lacked in his untidy checked lounge suit. The McKay was only saved from seeming quite out of place because he remained stripped to the waist and the rippling muscles of his fine torso had their own beauty.

They had met all the Atlanteans now, after the emergency waking which Menes had decreed and watched them in silence as they proceeded to their special conference.

Two by two they walked up the steps of the Temple, hand in hand. Menes and Semiramis first—both grey and white haired, yet upright elderly people, very gracious and benign in mien as befitted the rulers of such an advanced community.

Nahou followed them, leading a dark smooth-haired Russian looking woman called Tzarinska.

Next came Quet, who might well, the onlookers thought, have been called Montezuma, for he had the features and colouring of a Red Indian and the haughty aristocratic bearing suitable to a Mexican noble before the Spanish conquest. With him walked Laotzii. She looked to be a little over forty and possessed that curious beauty which is seen only in half castes resulting from the mixed union of a European and a Chinese.

Rahossis came after her and by her side a fair Greek-God-like young man called Peramon. He was better looking even than Nicky, although of the same type and, realising it Nicky was filled with a deep jealous rage which made his face turn almost chalk white.

Lulluma walked behind her mother escorted by a tall dark boy. His features made the spectators of the procession think of Ancient Egypt or Peru and they knew that he was named Karnoum.

Last of all came Danoe, splendid in her Nordic loveliness and by the hand she clasped her young brother Ciston—a true child of Italy or Spain.

Sally shivered slightly as the last two closed the golden doors of the temple behind them. Axel had learned only ten minutes before from Lulluma the reason for the council and passed it on to the rest. The knowledge that their fate still lay in the balance had turned their gaiety into an anxious gravity.

'I wonder what they will decide,' she murmured half to herself.

'It is death for us if they will not allow us to remain,' said the Doctor.

'Is it?' enquired the McKay, bracing his shoulders. 'It may be death for them! I've still got a couple of bombs left you know.'

'You couldn't!' exclaimed Camilla, 'after they've been so kind.'

'If you did I'd never speak to you again,' declared Sally almost in the same breath.

'Well,' he apologised, 'God forbid that we should do them any harm but we'd be sunk for good if we had to leave this place—and if it comes to a choice of their lives or ours what's a chap to do?'

In the face of this potent argument they all fell silent except the Doctor, who announced: 'Fear! that is the great curse of the world. If it were not for fear all the millions on the upper earth might dwell as happily as these people here. They are afraid that our presence might upset their well-ordered lives, and we are afraid to go out into the darkness. Ach! If only all men could cast out fear all should be saved.'

For a few moments they remained staring at the closed doors of the temple, then Sally said suddenly:

'It's no good us standing here. I've got a feeling that it is going to be all right. Anyway they're far too gentle to turn us out summarily before we've had another meal. Let's do what we can to prepare supper for them and for ourselves when they have finished their pow-wow.'

Her idea was accepted readily and the whole party trooped off to the kitchen. There, to their surprise they found many things already prepared. The Atlanteans had apparently busied themselves with arrangements immediately after their awakening.

There were four freshly caught fish, two of the little deer already skinned and gralloched and a quantity of newly gathered vegetables spread out on the tables.

Axel took charge, since he considered himself, with some justification, a master of the culinary art. The girls understood enough simple cooking to follow his directions and the others took the necessary platters for the meal out into the garden.

In three quarters of an hour the gold plate was spread out below the temple steps for eighteen persons to banquet facing the swimming pool. Fruit, flowers, and the wheaten biscuits which served for bread, had been arranged; only the cooked dishes remained—nearly ready and gently simmering on the long stove which was automatically fed by heat directed from the earthshine.

The McKay was setting the golden goblets and the little liqueur cups opposite each place when the doors of the temple opened and the Atlanteans came out. He straightened immediately and, abandoning his task, confronted Menes.

'Well, Sir,' he said abruptly, 'we'll be glad to know what decision you've arrived at.'

The grey-haired Atlantean raised his hand in a gesture like a blessing; 'The Gods are favourable,' he answered gently. 'You and your people may remain—we make you welcome!'

He did not specify if by "The Gods' he meant the Council of the Atlanteans or Deities whom they had consulted, but the McKay did not bother his head about that. He gave his frank smile and said:

'That's very nice of you, Sir. We are all more grateful than we will ever find words to express, I'm sure. Anyhow we'll give you no trouble and conform to your laws to the best of our ability. Well work for our keep of course, most gladly, and lend a hand to keep the place just as shipshape and lovely as you've made it.'

Menes laid his hand on the McKay's shoulder. His humanity urged him to accept the coming of these strangers now that a general sanction had been granted, although it was against his better judgement but, in his wisdom, he knew that time would inevitably unfold the true nature of the newcomers and if the need arose the Council of the Gods must meet again.

'I thank you my son,' he said gravely. Then he smiled towards the array of gold plate. 'It pleases me to see this earnest of your willingness which you have given us already.'

'That's the least we could do, Sir. The girls are busy cooking supper. You've only to say the word and it shall be served when you wish. We thought, with your permission, we'd wait on your people since they've been hard at it looking after us all day.'

The fine old man shook his head. 'A courteous thought, but one to which I cannot agree. Now that we have accepted you there are neither hosts nor guests amongst us. Each will do his share and look first to the wants of his immediate neighbour, as is our custom here. Now, by all means, let us dine.'

The Atlanteans invaded the kitchen into which Luiluma had already run, carrying the good news to Axel and the two girls. A quarter of an hour later they were all laughing and jesting as they sat on the grass before the temple steps, participating in the alfresco banquet.