Chapter XXVII: Mutron of the Sleepers

For half a dozen hours we lumbered eastward through the forest. We wallowed through swamps, and rolled over broad green meadows alight with the crimson day, and broke through jungles bright with purple bloom. At last we emerged on a narrow upland, with the great lake below it. The black sheet of water, tinged with the red light of the sky, stretched away for many miles to the eastward. Along its northern shore we could see the low cliffs that divided it from the pit of Xath.

We stopped the machine, and looked for a long time across the black lake to the north, and over the low cliffs to the ruby mist beyond, alive with the dancing violet lights.

Then I turned to the rare girl beside me, who was watching me with tears brimming in her violet eyes. The utter grief, the black despair on her face half broke my resolution. I felt doubtful, weak, utterly miserable, with pain stabbing at my heart like a thin steel blade.

"It is right. You must go," she whispered bravely.

I took her in my arms again. How wonderful and true she was! Struggling so bravely to hold back her tears! More precious than ever in the final parting! A single hour of the heaven of that embrace--embittered by the knowledge that it would soon be ended!

Then, quickly, lest my resolution fail, I made ready for departure! I stretched up a tent in a little grove above the lake, and stocked it with a liberal assortment of supplies from our store-room. I gave Xenora an automatic and a case of ammunition, and showed her how to use the weapon. Here she was to stay, in the vain hope that I might return a victor from the mad attack on the Lord of Flame.

For I had determined to enter the abyss. I knew that was what Sam would have me do, rather than lose time in an attempt to learn his fate. Xenora was eager to cast her lot with mine, but I would not hear of it.

A choking lump was in my throat as I staggered aboard the Omnimobile, and closed the manhole with a trembling hand. I gave a final heart-breaking glance to the splendid girl, majestic and erect, even in her pain, standing desolate and alone by the tent. Then I turned on the generators, and drove north along the lake shore.

I had the rude map that Sam had drawn from Xenora's knowledge. It showed the pit of the Lord of Flame to be just north of the lake, separated from it only by a surprisingly narrow wall of cliffs which, the girl said, had been a highway of her fathers, though it was now covered with jungle. And the city of Mutron was shown north of me, on the brink of the pit of Xath.

Steadily I drove northward, in a daze of fevered pain. It seems an eternity when I look back upon it, but it could not have been many hours. Automatically I kept in the shelter of the purple trees. At last I emerged on the edge of a great plateau, covered with the green vegetation, many miles across. On the south and west, from whence I had come, it was surrounded by purple trees--by the thick purple wood in which I had halted. On the north the great cliffs towered up to the sharp-edged scarlet roof, four miles above. It was strange to see the blue walls cut off so abruptly by the red. The sky was like a red lake seen inverted in a mirror. Those blue cliffs were hardly a dozen miles away now--I had to bend back my head to see the sharp line where the roof cut them off.

On the east side of that plateau, there was--nothing!

Beyond, lay the pit of Xath, with the faint ruby mist above it, filled as always with the wavering reflections of violet flames. And a half dozen miles before me, on the brink of that pit, stood--Mutron!

The City of the Sleepers!

A strange scene it was! A city of silver metal! Domes and towers and pyramids of argent whiteness! Vast incredible machines! Huge and oddly wrought structures! Titanic cubes and cylinders and cones! All of gleaming silver! The city shone with a cold light. It was as weird, as unearthly, as a dead city of the moon! It had the silent, ghostly gleam of moonlight! It was wrapped in mystery, clad in frozen fear!

And the city was not idle. Those vast amazing machines were moving. Silver globe-ships were drifting in silent haste above it! And ever and anon, one of them dropped over the rim, into the pit of Xath, or one floated unexpectedly up out of that abyss!

As I stood there in the Omnimobile, in the shadow of the last of the purple trees, my heart grew sick again with doubt. What, indeed, could I, with my puny machine, do against the great science that that city of mystery represented? The men of one once mighty empire were now slaves to it! What hope was there for me? Was not the human race, like the bison or the dodo, about to fall before a superior power?

But there would be no turning back. I saw to it that all the machinery was in order, and returned to the conning-tower. Before me was the instrument board that controlled the electric arc and the rocket tubes, as well as the machinery.

I started the hydrodyne generators at their full capacity, and then threw the switch. As the half-million horse-power went through the resistance coils, jets of super-heated steam roared out of the nozzles, condensing in white rushing clouds. The terrific force of the jets uprooted the purple trees, and the machine vibrated to the mighty blast. I was hurled into the air. With a speed that swiftly increased to many hundreds of miles per hour, I hurtled the broad plain, and over the ghostly white city of silver--and into the abyss!

The plateau ended abruptly as if cut off with a knife. The crater fell sheer away before me, stretching to the vast blue cliffs in the north, and to the line of living purple and green that marked the beginning of the eastward forests. Only a thin green line separated the abyss from the lake on the south, which, in the reflected light of the scarlet sky, horribly suggested a sea of blood, ready to flow into the pit.

Undoubtedly the crater was of volcanic origin. I could not determine its depth, nor the state of its floor--it was filled with the thick crimson mist. The wavering tongues of violet fire still flickered through it, throbbing strangely, like the reflection of fires below--hinting unpleasantly of alien life.

As the rich green plain vanished beneath me, and I sped high over that busy strange white city and into the haze of the abyss, an odd feeling of the wildness and the unfamiliar terror of the place stole over me again. I was very thankful for the invention of Sam's, for the thin helmet of wire gauze above my head!

Suddenly a great twisting bar of green fire writhed up, like a serpent's head, from the nest of flames. It swung and coiled and twisted through the rosy mists with a slow, deliberate motion, like an incredible reptile of flame, raising its head, _looking, searching_! Despite the helmet, great fear swept my brain like a hot flame!