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Out of the Depths: A Romance of Reclamation, a novel by Robert Ames Bennet |
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Chapter 27. Lower Depths |
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_ CHAPTER XXVII. LOWER DEPTHS Beetling precipices shut off the direct light of the moonbeams and left the abyss again in dense darkness long before the coming of the laggard dawn. Blake slept on, storing up strength for the renewal of the battle. Yet even he could not outsleep the reluctant lingering of night. He awoke while the tiny flame of the watchfire still flickered bright against the inky darkness of the sky. Ashton had fallen into a fitful doze. The engineer stood up and silently groped his way to and fro on the shelf of rock, stretching and limbering his cramped muscles. He wasted no particle of energy; the moment he had relieved his stiffness he stretched out again. He lay contemplating that flame of love on the heights until it faded against the lessening blackness of the sky and the rays of the morning sun began to angle down the upper precipices. He rose to take out two portions of food from the single pack in which he had bound up all the provisions. The portion for Ashton was small; his own was smaller. He roused the dozing man and placed the larger share of food in his hand. "Don't drop it," he cautioned. "That's all I can let you have. We must go on rations until we can see a way out of this hole." Ashton ate his meager breakfast without replying. The fire within him had burned to ashes. He was cold and dull and dispirited. He had failed. He would have been willing to sit and brood, and wait for God to answer his prayer.--But his waiting was not to be an inert lingering in the place where he had failed. The moment the down-creeping daylight so lessened the gloom of the depths that Blake could take rod readings, he plunged over into the stream, with a curtly cheerful command for Ashton to prepare to follow. Too dejected even to resist, the younger man silently obeyed. When Blake signaled to him through the dimness, he held the rod on the last turning-point of the previous day, and lowered himself from the shelf down into the stream. The evening before, the water at this point had come up to his waist. It was now only knee-deep. His surprise was so great that in passing Blake he broke his sullen silence to remark the fact and ask what could have caused the change. "Melting of the snow on the high range," the engineer shouted in explanation. "Takes time for it to run down the canyon all these miles. River probably still falling. Will begin to rise about noon. Faster we get along now, the easier it will be. Hustle!" Ashton responded mechanically to the will of his commander. For the time being his own will was almost paralyzed. The reaction from his long-sustained rage had left him dazed and nerveless. He had sunk into a state of fatalistic indifference. He moved quickly downstream from turning-point to turning-point, driven by Blake's will, but with a heedless recklessness that all Blake's warnings could not check. Within the first hour he twice stumbled and went under while wading deep reaches of the river, and once he fell from a ledge, bruising himself severely and knocking a splinter from the rod. Half an hour later he lost his footing in descending a swift and narrow place that would have been impassable at high water. Had not Blake been below him he would never have come out alive. The engineer leaped in and dragged the drowning man to safety, after a desperate struggle with the torrent. But in the wild swirl, both the food-pack and the rod went adrift. The moment he had rescued his companion, Blake rushed away downstream, leaping like a goat from rock to rock. He at last overtook the rod, caught in the eddy of a pool. Of the pack he could find no trace. He returned to Ashton and silently handed him the rod. There was no need for him to admonish. The loss of all the food and the narrowness of his escape had sobered the younger man. He resumed his work with a cautious swiftness of movement that avoided all needless risks yet never hesitated to encounter and rush through the dangers that could not be avoided. In this he copied Blake. All the time they were advancing down the angry torrent, deeper and deeper into its secret stronghold,--creeping, crawling, leaping, wading, swimming--step by step, turn after turn, wresting from the abyss that which the engineer was resolved to learn, even though he should learn, only to perish. The day advanced. Steadfastly they struggled on down the bed of the river, twisting and crossing over with the winding course of the chasm; now between beetling precipices that shut out all sight of the blue-black sky; now in more open stretches where the Titanic walls swung apart and the glorious hot sun rays pierced down into the very depths to warm their drenched bodies and lighten their heavy spirits. Ashton had long since lost all count of time. His watch had been smashed in his first fall of the day. But Blake seemed to have an intuitive sense of time. At fairly regular intervals he fired a shot to tell the watchers above the extent of their progress. Sometimes the answering flag-signal could be seen waving from the rim of the canyon. But in many places those above could not come near the brink to look over. The approach of midday found the bruised and weary fighters struggling through one of the narrowest reaches of the canyon. The precipices jutted out so far that the lower depths seemed more cavern than chasm, and the river swirled deep and swift between sheer, narrow walls. Twice Ashton was swept past what should have been the next turning-point, and Blake, unable to see the figures on the rod, had to guess at his readings. At last the precipices swung apart and showed the sky at a twist in the canyon's course that was the sharpest of all the turns the explorers had as yet encountered. As Blake came wading down past Ashton, along the inner curve of the bend, he stopped and pointed skywards. Ashton raised his drooping head and peered up at the rim of the opposite wall. From the brink a dense column of green-wood smoke was rising into the indigo sky. "One more set-up," shouted Blake. Three minutes later he took a reading on the water and on a point of rock at the angle of the canyon-side around which the river swung in its sharp curve. Three more minutes, and the two battered fighters stood together on the last bench of that tremendous line of levels, with torn and rent clothing, sodden, gaping boots, bodies bruised from head to foot--bleeding, weary, but victorious! They had finished the work that Blake had set out to do. He held up the now-soaked notebook for Ashton to see the last penciled elevation on the wet paper. "Two thousand, forty-five!" he shouted. "Over five hundred feet above that bench in Dry Greek Gulch! Water, electricity!--Dry Mesa shall be a garden!" Ashton stared moodily into the exultant face of the engineer. "Are you sure of that?" he asked. "How do you know that God will let you climb up out of this hell of stone and water?" "There's the saying, 'God helps those who help themselves,'" replied Blake. "I'm going to put up the best fight I can. If that doesn't win out, I shall at least have the satisfaction of not having quit. If you wish to pray, do so. The sooner we start the better. From now on, the water will be rising." "I prayed last night," said Ashton. He added somberly, "And now we are both going to the devil." "No," said Blake, with no less earnestness. "There is no devil--there is no room for a devil in all the universe. What man calls evil is ignorance,--his ignorance of those primeval forces of nature which he has yet to chain; his ignorance of those higher qualities in his own nature which, if known, would prevent him from wronging others and would enable him to bring happiness to himself and others." "You say that!" cried Ashton. "You can mock! You do not believe in hell!" Blake smiled grimly. "What do you call this?--But you mean a hell hereafter. I believe this: If, when we pass into the Unknown, we continue to exist as individual consciousnesses, then we carry with us the heaven and the hell that we have each upbuilt for ourselves." "God will not let you escape," stated Ashton. "You will pass from this hell of water into the hell of fire and brimstone." "Have it your own way," said Blake. "I lived one summer in Death Valley. The other place can't be much hotter." He climbed up the ledges and planted the level firmly on its tripod above the high-water mark of the spring floods. He called down to Ashton: "Hate to leave the old monkey up here; but it will serve as a memento of our present visit, when we come down again to locate the tunnel head." "How can it be that we shall ever come down again?" replied Ashton. "It is impossible--for we shall never go up." Blake jumped down the ledges to him and pointed to the column of smoke on the lofty heights. "Look there," he said. "That is where we are going, if there is any possible way to go. An optimist would stand here and wait, certain that wings would soon sprout for him to fly up; a pessimist would sit down and quit. An optimist is a fool; a pessimist is a worse fool." "And which are you?" asked Ashton. "I am neither. I am a meliorist. I am going to face the facts, and then fight for all I'm worth. What's more, you're going to do the same. Come! We've still got some clothes left, the rod for you to use as a staff, this rope, the revolver, and seventeen cartridges. It's fortunate we have any. We've got to signal that we are going on down the canyon, instead of back up." "We may as well stay and die here. But since you prefer to keep moving, I have no objections," said Ashton, with ironical politeness. Blake promptly stepped into the water and led the way to the next shelf of rock. Here he fired a shot. Going a few yards farther along the rocks, he fired again. Three times he fired, at intervals of two minutes. Then the white dot of the flag appeared on the precipice brink directly up across from him. "Once more, and we're sure they understand," he said. Advancing a full hundred yards on down the canyon, he fired the fourth shot. Very soon the fleck of white flaunted on the rim a little way beyond them. "They understand!" cried Blake. "Trust Jenny to use her head! Now catch your breath and tighten up. We're going to move!" He started, and Ashton followed close behind. It was the same rough, fierce game of leaping, crawling, wading, swimming,--battling with the river, the rocks, the ledges. But now they were no longer checked and halted by the alternate stoppings for set-ups and turning-points, and no longer was Blake encumbered with the care of the level. There was nothing now to hinder or delay them except the natural obstacles of their wild path down the bed of the torrent. Blake could give all his thought to picking the best and quickest way through rapids and falls, over the water-washed rocks and along the side ledges. And he could give all his great strength to helping his companion past the hard places. In return Ashton gave such help as he could to the engineer, many times when a steadying hand or the outstretched rod rendered easier a descent or the fording of some swift mill race in the stream. At the end of the first quarter-mile Blake had fired a shot, and again at the second quarter. After that he waited longer intervals. He considered it advisable to husband the few remaining cartridges. The river was now rapidly rising. But every inch of added depth found the two fugitives much farther down the canyon. In two hours they advanced thrice the distance that they had covered in the same time before noon, and this despite the increasing depth and force of the river. The pace was so hot that Ashton was beginning to stumble and slip, but Blake kept by him and helped him along by word and deed. He asserted and repeated a dozen times over, that they were nearing the place where an ascent of the precipices might be possible. At last they rounded a turn in the winding chasm, and Blake was able to point to a break in the sheer wall on the Dry Mesa side, where the precipices were set back one above the other in a Cyclopean stepladder and their steeply-pitched faces were rough with crevices and shelves. "Look!" he cried. "There's the place--there's our ladder up from hell to heaven!" Ashton soon lowered his weary head. He stared dully downstream to where a fifty-foot cliff extended across from side to side of the canyon like a dam. "Part of the wall slid in," he stated with the simplicity of one who is nearing exhaustion. "That shall be our bridge to the ladder," shouted Blake. "It's all sheer cliff along here at the foot of the break, but the ledges run down sideways to the top of the cross cliff. We shall soon be lying up there, high and dry, getting our second wind for the run up the ladder." The engineer spoke confidently, and felt what he spoke. But as they struggled on down the turbulent stream to the cross cliff, the light left his face. From wall to wall of the canyon the great mass of fallen rock stretched across the bottom in a sheer-faced barrier, broken only by a tunnel barely large enough to suck in the swelling volume of the river. Blake came down close to the intake, scanning every foot of the cliff face for a scalable break or crevice. There was none to be found. He climbed along the cliff foot to a low shelf beside the roaring tunnel, and stood staring at the opening in deep thought. Even while he looked, the swelling volume of the river filled the tunnel to its roof. Blake peered at the fresh watermark twenty feet up the face of the cliff, and bent down beside Ashton, who had stretched out to rest on the shelf of rock. "There's only one thing to it, old man," he said. "We must dive through that tunnel." "Through that hole?" gasped Ashton. "No! I've done enough. I shall stay here." "To drown like a rat in a rainwater barrel!" rejoined Blake. "Look at that watermark. The tunnel is now running full. Inside a quarter-hour the river will be up over this ledge. It will keep rising till it reaches that mark, and it will not fall until after low water." "What do I care?" said Ashton hopelessly. "Go to the devil your own way. I'd rather drown here than in that underground hole. Leave me alone." Blake considered a full half minute, looked up the cliff face, and replied: "Perhaps it's as well. I shall do the best I can. But first I want to tell you I've wiped out all that past affair. You are another person from that Lafayette Ashton. We stand here almost face to face with the Unknown. One or both of us may soon go out into the Darkness. As we may never meet again, I wish to tell you that you have proved yourself, even more than I hoped when I saw you come rushing down the ravine to join me. You have proved yourself a man. Good-by." He held out his hand. But Ashton turned his face to the wall of rock and was silent. After a time he heard the sound of Blake's worn heels on the outer end of the shelf. His ears, attuned to the ceaseless tumult of the waters, caught the click of the protruded heel-nail heads. There was a brief pause--then the plunge. He looked about quickly and saw Blake's hands vanish in the down-sucking eddy where the swollen waters drew into the now hidden intake of the tunnel. A cry of horror burst from his heaving chest. Blake had gone--Blake the iron-limbed, iron-hearted man. He had conquered the river--and now the wild waters had seized him and were mauling and smashing and crushing him in the terrible mill of the cavern. Beyond that underground passage, it might be miles away, the victor would fling up on some fanged rock a shapeless mass that once had been a man. _ |
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