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CHAPTER 2

INTO THE AHAGGAR

During the next two weeks I got to know the Professor quite well. His full name—to quote a grubby, thumbprintsmeared visiting card he flashed to overawe customs officials—read:

Professor Percival P. Potter, Ph.D.

He was suspiciously reticent on the question of what that middle initial stood for, but it was on his passport, which I saw by accident.

“‘Penthesileia’?” I read, incredulously.

He fixed me with a frosty, reproving glare.

“You peeked.”

“Well, I didn’t mean to…but—Penthesileia?”

Professor Potter cleared his throat and gave a little sniff. “My late father was a highly esteemed classical scholar,” he informed me coldly. “Penthesileia was the Queen of the Amazons, in an old Roman epic about the Trojan War, by Quintus Smyrnaeus. My father was perhaps overfond of the epic, which is minor and rather florid…”

I chuckled. “Your dad was also a bit overfond of alliteration,” said I with a grin at Professor Percival Penthesileia Potter, Ph.D.

The Prof was a comical old geezer, all right, but there were a lot of good things you could say about him, as I soon found out. For a skinny little bundle of bones I could pick up in one hand, almost, he had enough guts and courage and boldness for fifty wildcats. During all of our adventures together—and some of them were grueling ordeals, even for a man of my youth—I never once heard him gripe or whimper or complain. He was resourceful, staunch, brave to the point of being foolhardy, and a good man to have at your side when the chips were down.

He was also the smartest guy I’ve ever known. In fact, he knew more about more things than just about anybody this side of Isaac Asimov. I never did quite figure out just what he was a professor of.

For some odd reason, he was rather reticent on that point. Digging around for maps and stuff in the Cairo Museum library, I saw him sight-read a scroll written in old Coptic, and then make a critical remark about the ancient scribe’s sloppy use of diacritical marks. Impressive! But his main interest in finding this mountain gate which (presumably) led down into Zanthodon was to search for fossils and minerals. Strolling through another wing of the museum, he rattled off the names (you know, Latin and Greek stuff) of all the dinosaur skeletons we passed.

“What are you, anyway, Doc?” I asked, somewhat baffled. “Here I thought you were a geologist or a mineralogist, and now you’re making noises like a—whaddayacallum—fossil hunter, dinosaur expert—”

“Paleontologist?”

“Right: paleontologist,” I nodded. “So which is it, anyway?”

He cleared his throat with a little apologetic cough. “Well, a bit of them all, I’m afraid. A bit of a dabbler, you know…”

A paleontologist and geologist, who also knows more about ancient Coptic than the old scribes who used to write in it? Well, that was the Prof: a man of parts, as they say.

Later, as I got to know him better, I found out he had equal qualifications in archaeology, ancient languages, and half a dozen other isms and -ologies. Quite a guy!

But I had amused him by being impressed at his scholarly attainments. He chuckled, rather pleased that he had managed to impress me. Which he certainly had—

“‘Un sot toujours un plus sot qui l’admire,’” he murmured half to himself.

“Come again? That’s French, I know, but…?”

“A fool can always find a bigger fool to admire him,” he quipped, sardonically.

“Oh, yeah? Who says?”

“Boileau-Despréaux,” he replied smugly.

I ground my teeth, cudgeling my memory for a scrap of La Rochefoucauld I half remembered from college:

“Says you,” I snorted. “‘Il n’y pas des sots si incommodes que ceux qui ont de l’esprit’!”

He looked surprised: rather as if a pet chimpanzee had begun a critique of Einstein’s math.

“‘There are no fools so troublesome as those who have some wit,’” he translated. “My boy, you delight me! A splendid put-down, and quite apropos. But I wonder if you recall Goethe’s pointed remark…‘Wir sind gewohnt dass die Menschen verhöhnen was sie nicht verstehen’?”

“Only thing I ever read by Goethe was Faust,” I had to admit. His eyes twinkled:

“But it is from Faust, my dear boy! ‘We are used to see that man despises what he never comprehends.’ There, I trust that puts you in your place?”

It certainly did.

With all those “p’s” in his name, I suppose he just naturally had to be a…polymath.

* * * *

The Ahaggar region which was our goal was many hundreds of miles to the west of Port Said; the entire breadth of the African continent stretched between where we were and where we wanted to be.

Well, one thing was sure: I couldn’t fly Babe (my affectionate pet-name for the helicopter I had inherited, sort of, from my former partner in crime) all the way there. There’s rather a noticeable lack of filling stations in the North Sahara.

We decided to ship the Sikorsky to Morocco by a rusty old tub of a tramp steamer. The nice thing about this was that it wouldn’t cost me—or him, rather—one single pistole. This was because the fat, fiercely mustached Turk who owned the steamer owed me a favor or three. And that was because once upon a time we had both been smuggling guns and ammo into one of those little pepper-pot Middle East wars. My side won; his side lost their shirts—and mostly because the ammo he sold them didn’t fit the guns he had also peddled to them.

To this day, that particular government would like very much to get their mitts on a fat guy named Kemal Bey. And the favor I could do him was to keep my yap shut, while the favor he could do me was to carry Babe, the Professor and me down the Mediterranean coast to Morocco. This would not be all that hard to do, since, although Kemal’s rusty old tub was hardly much bigger than one of those tugboats they have back in New York Harbor, the chopper could be dismantled and stripped down with a little time, a mite of effort, and a good variety of wrenches.

Kemal Bey groaned and griped and called upon his gods, but relented in the end, and did as I asked. It would take us some weeks to sail down the coast of North Africa, through the Straits and down the west coast past Casablanca to the little seaport town of Agadir, which was smack-dab on the thirtieth parallel, almost.

From that point on, traveling inland, the only thing to do was fly in the chopper, which meant we had to pack along plenty of high octane. This could be procured on the black market in Cairo easily enough, and could be shipped in Kemal’s cramped hold. Once we came ashore in Morocco, though, we would have to fly with the gas aboard, which was a mite dangerous.

During our days and nights at sea, I did a lot of thinking about the Prof’s scheme. And the more I thought about it, the wackier it seemed. Oh, he was smart enough, but like your typical stereotype of the absent-minded professor, nose buried in books and all, he had about as much practicality as I pack around in the tip of my little finger. Over one of Kenal’s lousy dinners—bad fish and raw onions and undrinkable Turkish booze—I asked him the value he estimated for the fossils and rare minerals he hoped to find in the Ahaggar.

“Value, my boy? Dollars-and-cents, you mean? Practically worthless…but the value to science—”

“I thought so,” I groaned.

He looked prim. “I perceive, my boy, that you consider me a science-for-the-sake-of-science fanatic…not so at all, I assure you. Fossils are worth little on the open market, that is true, unfortunately; but the region into which we are traveling is known to contain rich fossil beds ranging from the Upper Jurassic to the Lower Cretaceous…we can expect to find the remains of brachyosaurus, one of the largest of all giant saurians, and we can hope for gigantosaurus and perhaps even dichraeosaurus…also iguanodonts and even small pterosaurs. When Werner Janensch of the Berlin Museum excavated in and about those regions back in 1909, he discovered a spectacular skeleton of brachyosaurus and discovered over fifty specimens of kentrurosaurus, an African relative of the stegosaur.”

“You’ve got my head swimming,” I confessed. He snorted.

“I assure you, my boy, that a well-preserved and complete skeleton of any of the above reptilia will be an intrinsically valuable find.”

“How old is this underground place you hope to discover?” I asked, more to swerve the conversation away from all those jaw-cracking names than from any other motive.

“I believe that Zanthodon was formed in the middle of the Mesozoic, which means it has existed for something like 150,000,000 years.”

One hundred and fifty million years sounded like a lot of years to me, and I said as much. I also pointed out that he said the Ahaggar region abounded in Jurassic and Cretaceous life forms: and now he was talking about the Mesozoic.

He disintegrated me with a look of vitriolic contempt.

“Mighty Mendel, boy, didn’t they teach you anything at University?” he snapped. “If not, then pray permit me to inform you that the Mesozoic Era began some two hundred million years ago and terminated about seventy million years B.C. It is divided, I will have you understand, into three major subdivisions; and these are known as—taking the earlier period first—the Triassic, which lasted 35,000,000 years, the Jurassic, which was of similar duration, and—lastly—the Cretaceous, which extended for some sixty million years.”

“Oh,” I said in a small voice. And rapidly changed the subject entirely.

And about time, too.

* * * *

So I got myself hired to go volcano-hunting and dinosaur-digging. Well, I’ve had worse jobs, I suppose.

Of course, I could have turned the Professor down flat when he tried to hire me. His wacky scheme sounded dangerous and uncertain from the beginning. But, if you will recall, I had left my last employment with about seventy bucks in my jeans, and by this time, after grubbing around Port Said for a couple of weeks, the exchequer was down to less than fifty. Which wouldn’t last long.

To be blunt, I needed a job. Any job.

This fact the Prof figured out back during our first conversation together, when we had drinks at the Cafe Umbala after I rescued him from the two muggers. I had been ordering my meals there for the past two weeks, and when the check came and I tried to coax Tabiz to put the bill on my tab, it turned out to be a bit too heavy already.

“Never mind, my boy,” said the Prof grandly. “Ah, waiter…can the management of this estimable establishment possibly cash a one hundred dollar bill, perchance?”

The Nubian rolled his eyes widely.

“A hunnahd dollah Ahmericain?” he inquired, reverence throbbing in his hushed tones.

“Precisely,” sniffed the Prof.

And so I got hired. It seems the Prof had finished up his work for the Egypt Exploration Society and still had a fat wad of greenbacks left over from the sumptuous foundation grant he had wheedled out of the fat cats at his old alma mater. One look at the bankroll he flashed under the table to me, and I was a goner. No matter how wacky his theories niight be, or how nutty his ideas were, if he was going to pick up the tab for this expedition into the Back of the Beyond, well, I’m willing to fly him to the gates of hell—and back, if he can pay my bill.

* * * *

We came ashore at Agadar under a slight drizzle which is rare for these latitudes and this time of year. It took four stevedores to wrestle the ‘copter onto the dock, and half the night for the Professor and me to put Babe back together again and get her running smoothly.

By dawn we were fueled up and ready to leave. What with all the petrol tins and food and medical supplies we had packed aboard, it was a wonder the bird could fly at all, but Sikorsky builds ’em tough, and Babe took to the air and wobbled a bit, but stayed aloft.

From Agadar we flew almost directly south, beyond Merijinat and Tagoujalet, taking it by slow and easy stages, landing only to sleep when we had to and eat when we must.

From just beyond Tagoujalet, I turned and flew almost due east…following the directions the Professor had calculated from the old maps.

Even under the most ideal conditions, it would take us a couple of days to get to the Ahaggar region, and then maybe a couple of days more to find the mountain the Prof had christened Mount Zanthodon.

Was it actually the entrance to the Underground World the old geographers and myth-makers had written about?

Only time would tell…

We flew on…into the east; into the rising sun.

And into the Unknown.