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CHAPTER 3

THE HOLLOW MOUNTAIN

After leaving Tagoujalet, we had some eight hundred miles of Africa to cross by air. Which included some of the worst terrain in all these parts of the Dark Continent: parched desertlands, where the wells and oases were few and far between; stony tundra, where only the hardiest vegetation could manage to subsist; and the domains of the savage, still-untamed Tuareg tribesmen.

And we were heading into an even more forbidding region, which even the fearless Tuaregs shunned.

In the northernmost part of the El Djouf, we flew to Taoudeni, where we took on our last stores and provisions, and filled the water canisters to the brim. From this point on, we would be flying directly east, into the sun, and toward the mountain country.

The highest peak in the Ahaggars is Mount Tahat. At 9,840 feet, it was one of the tallest mountains in all of Africa; and I certainly hoped the mountain the Professor was searching for was nowhere near that height, for Babe simply couldn’t fly as high as ten thousand feet. He assured me that our mountain was only a fraction of Tahat’s height.

It had better be, I thought to myself grimly!

* * * *

Since there was nothing else to do to while away the time our trip consumed, we talked. And got to know each other pretty well. One thing that had been puzzling me was this hollow mountain stuff—and just why the Professor thought there was some sort of a giant cavern world beneath it. So I asked him.

“All those old myths and legends aside, Doc, what makes you think there’s a hollow mountain in the Ahaggar anyway, with all that space under it?”

“I have a theory,” he said. (The old boy had a theory about nearly everything under the sun, so this didn’t surprise me any.) “So what’s your theory?”

He started talking in that precise yet meandering, formal and pedantic way he had, which I was beginning to get used to.

Sometime during the Jurassic Era, or maybe a while before, Professor Potter theorized that the earth had collided with an immense meteorite of contraterrene matter.

“Come again?”

“Contraterrene matter,” he repeated. Then, with a little tut-tut, “Eternal Einstein, my boy, you must know something about physics?…Contraterrene matter is the mirror-opposite of ordinary matter…where a particle of ordinary, or terrene, matter has a positive charge, a contraterrene particle contains a negative charge, and so on and vice-versa…”

“Okay, I got that.”

“Well, then…it has long been known, or at least theorized, that when the two forms of matter touch, a terrific explosion will result—an explosion of nuclear proportions.”

“And how large was this meteor you’re talking about?”

He looked owlishly solemn. “Perfectly immense; it is difficult, if not actually impossible, to estimate its full original size from the scanty evidence I have managed to accumulate.”

“And when it hit the earth, there would have been a big bang, eh?”

“As you say, my boy, a very big bang…equal to the blast force of literally dozens of hydrogen bombs.”

The mental picture conjured up did not exactly make me feel comfortable. “Okay…what else?”

His watery blue eyes agleam with enthusiasm, he launched into his spiel. The meteorite, he believed, had struck earth somewhere in the Ahaggar region of North Africa…and as far back as we have any records, geographers have reported the crater of an extinct and very ancient volcano in those mountains: Greek merchants and travelers, Roman soldiers and scholars, Victorian explorers and adventurers had all mentioned it, although few of them ever seemed to have actually gotten there, since that was Tuareg country, and the Tuareg tribesmen are not only the best horsemen in North Africa, but have a welldeserved reputation for inhospitality carried to the point of hostility.

“My astronomer friend, Franklyn, at Hayden Institute, worked out the orbit,” he explained excitedly, “and calculated the angle at which the seetee meteorite entered the earth’s atmosphere—”

“Seetee?”

“A less-formal term for contraterrene matter…please, my boy, if you are not able to keep pace with my disquisition, save your questions until I am through explaining—!”

“And you think it went straight down the cone of the dead volcano?” I hazarded. He blinked surprisedly, as he always did when I said something intelligent.

“Precisely, my boy! And if my calculations are correct, it would have been some hundreds of miles below the earth’s crust before the meteor came into contact with normal matter. The explosion would have been of an unprecedented scale of magnitude. Hundreds of thousands of tons of solid rock would have instantly vaporized…forming a huge bubble of impacted molten rock far below the planet’s surface…”

“How huge?” I asked. He shook his head.

“No way of telling, I fear…we shall soon see for ourselves.”

“That’s why you wanted a helicopter!” I said, suddenly putting two and two together and coming up with at least three and nine-tenths.

“Exactly, my boy…I plan to descend into the crater of the volcano-let us christen it Mount Zanthodon, and employ the term hereafter as a verbal shortcut.”

“Well…Babe can do it, I suppose,” I muttered dubiously. “Depending on the width of the crater, that is. What do we do if it narrows on us before we get down to the center of the earth?”

“We get out and look about,” he said primly, hefting the shiny new geological pick he had purchased in the Cairo market. I groaned and tried to pretend I hadn’t heard.

Actually, it wasn’t the center of the earth we were going to at all. That was just the Prof’s gift for dramatic hyperbole. This side of the fantastic novels of Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs, nobody is ever going to get that deep into the planet because of the heat of the magma core, if for no other reason. But even a hundred miles down, which was about as deep as Potter reckoned the Underground World to be, was deep enough.

Deeper than any man has ever gone before.…

* * * *

Well, to make a long story just a wee bit shorter, it was there all right—the mountain, I mean. And only a little more than a thousand or so feet high: I hadn’t needed to worry about it being anywhere like the height of Mount Tahat, after all.

We made camp on the shoulder of the extinct volcano which the Professor had christened Mount Zanthodon. That put us up above the brush and—theoretically—out of the reach of whatever predators might be roaming around this part of the country. I wrestled with putting up the tent while the Professor twiddled with his instruments, taking measurements and pinpointing the latitude and longitude on his charts with his customary precision.

Then we unloaded everything from the chopper except enough gasoline to get us down to the bottom of the crater’s shaft, stashing away our reserve fuel for the return trip to Agadar. Just in case the stories were full of bunk about how the Tuareg tribesmen shunned this area, and to prevent our fuel from being stolen, I hid it by the simple expedient of burying it under the loose, flaky soil which clothed the flanks of the mountain.

With dawn the next day we were to make our first attempt at the descent.

Needless to say, neither of us got much sleep.

We were up early the next morning, for the Professor was hot to get started. My fears about the width of the crater proved groundless, for from lip to lip the crater was more than wide enough to accommodate Babe. Of course, there was no way of knowing in advance how swiftly the shaft might narrow, once we began our descent, and from the top it was impossible to guess.

The Professor puttered about the lip of the crater with something resembling a Geiger. He returned jubilant, reporting that the residual amount of background radiation suggested that his theory was absolutely correct, for the radioactivity was about that which he would expect to find left over from such an underground explosion as he had postulated.

“How dangerous is it?”

“Oh, nothing to worry about at all,” he burbled. “In fact, only a special instrument as sensitive as mine could detect it at all…no hazard to our health whatsoever!”

I guess I had to be satisfied with that.

* * * *

And so we started down. At the lip of the crater the width of the central shaft measured about two hundred feet in diameter and roughly six hundred feet in circumference. The great shaft yawned beneath us, seeming to go down and down forever, dwindling into inky darkness. It was a fantastic sight, I must admit; also, a frightening one. But we had not come all this way to sightsee; so I kicked Babe about, centered her above the shaft, and we began the descent.

The sides of the shaft were almost perpendicular, like the sides of a well; but there were jagged outcroppings and protuberances to watch out for, so I guided Babe down carefully, and very slowly, using the special spotlights we had ordered to be installed back at Cairo to illuminate the crater walls.

The sides of the shaft were thickly coated with lava, very porous and crumbling; in the enclosed space, Babe’s engine made a deafening racket. Bits and chunks of lava, jarred loose by the noise, went bouncing and ricocheting down. But the Professor reassured me that the dangers of creating a landslide were minute.

Well, he’d been right about everything so far; I would trust him to be right about this fact.

Jaws grimly set, I coaxed Babe down yard by yard. When we were about two hundred feet below the mouth of the crater, darkness closed in, thick and impenetrable, and I was very glad we had thought about installing those spots. Because now we really needed them.

If we so much as nudged against the side of the crater, or hit one of those projecting shelves or spurs of lava which jutted crazily out from the walls, seemingly at random, Babe could snap her rotors. We would still descend, of course, in that case, but a lot more quickly than we wanted to, and our landing would be a bad one.

The Professor was peering with fascination at the rock strata as we sank past the four-hundred-foot point. I suppose any geologist would have been fascinated by what he saw—he yelled, over the roar of the engine, stuff about “combustible carbons,” “silurians,” and “primordial soil,” but I was too busy gritting my teeth to bother listening.

Above our heads the circular opening framed a disc of day, which dwindled to the size of a dime. Now we were entered into the regions of Eternal Night, where light of the sun has but seldom penetrated since the planet was formed. It was an eerie experience, even a thrilling one, to have gone where no human foot had ever gone before us.

I would have traded the thrill for my favorite table at the Cafe Umbala and a good stiff martini and a glimpse of Tabiz’s grin.

* * * *

The glow of a flashlight lit the cabin and broke the gloomy pattern of my thoughts. By its glare, the Professor peered intently at his instruments.

“Two thousand five hundred feet, my boy,” he whispered hoarsely. “We are below the very base of Mount Zanthodon at this point…in fact, we are beneath the earth’s crust!”

I felt a momentary qualm of uneasiness go through me. Then I stiffened my spine and set my jaw firmly.

“How’s the radiation count?”

“Still the same amount of background radiation,” he murmured. “I do not anticipate that it shall rise to a level even remotely dangerous…the radioactivity released by the Jurassic explosion would have fallen to harmless levels many millions of years ago…but what of the width of the shaft?”

“Still about the same,” I said tersely, estimating with my eye. “Doesn’t look as if it’s ever gonna narrow!”

Nor did it when we reached the depth of a mile, then five miles, then ten.

And so we continued our descent into the regions of Eternal Night and our journey to the Underground World.