From his pack, Ondonarkus took a small silk-like bundle; like the tent
that Captain Amundsen left at the South Pole,[11] one could have put it
into a fair-sized pocket. The white-haired girl handed Ondonarkus the
sort of alpenstock which she carried, and, lo and presto, there was a
tent for the ladies!
[Footnote 11: See _In Amundsen's Tent_, by John Martin Leahy, in
August Derleth's anthology called _The Sleeping and the Dead_, page
386.--Darwin Frontenac.]
Rhodes and I betook ourselves off to a hollow in the wall, where we
halted and disposed ourselves for rest. This disposition, however, was
a very simple affair: we simply removed our packs and sat down on the
floor, the softness of which by no means vied with that of swan's-down.
I drank a little water, but it seemed to augment rather than to assuage
my burning thirst. For a time I sat there, my aching body leaning
back against the rock-wall, my fevered, tortured mind revolving the
grisly possibilities that confronted us. Meditation, however, only
served to make our situation the more appalling. With an exclamation
of despair, I lay down, longing for sleep's sweet oblivion. At this
moment Ondonarkus and the young man--whose name, by the way, was
Zenvothunbro--were seen approaching. They laid themselves down nearby,
their lanterns extinguished. We had shut off the electric lights, but
our phosphorus-lamps, and those of the Dromans, shed their pale and
ghostly light around.
Rhodes was sitting up, engaged in bringing his journal forward, as
carefully and cooly as though he were in his library at home, instead
of in this mysterious and fearful abode of blackness and silence,
thousands of feet below the surface of the earth, far--though how far
we could only guess--below the level of the sea itself.
When I closed my eyes, pictures came and went in a stream, pictures
swaying, flashing, fading. The amazing, the incredible things that had
happened, the things that probably were to happen--oh, was it all only
a dream?
I opened my eyes and raised myself up on an elbow. I saw Milton Rhodes
bent over his book, writing, writing; I saw the recumbent forms of the
two Dromans, whose heavy breathing told me that already they slept;
over there was the tent, in it the beautiful, the Sibylline Drorathusa
and her lovely companions--and I knew, alas, that it was not a dream.
I sank back with an inward groan and closed my eyes again. Oh, those
thoughts that came thronging! If I could only go to sleep! A vision of
treachery came, but it was not to trouble me now. No; Rhodes was right:
our Dromans _were_ lost. If only those other visions could be as easily
banished as that one!
Ere long, however, those thronging thoughts and visions became hazy,
confused, began to fade; and then suddenly they were blended with the
monsters and the horrors of dreams.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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