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CHAPTER 15

THE VALLEY OF THE SACRIFICE

For the first half-hour of their climb down into the valley of the scratch, the three friends were too preoccupied with their own safety to talk more than an occasional sentence. They came upon many places that at first glance appeared impassable, or at least sufficiently hazardous to cause them to hesitate, but in each instance the changing contour of the precipice offered some other means of descent.

After thirty minutes of arduous effort, the Big Business Man sat down suddenly upon a rock and began to unlace his shoes.

“I’ve got to rest a while,” he groaned. “My feet are in terrible shape.”

His two companions were glad of the opportunity to sit with him for a moment.

“Gosh, I’m all in, too!” said the Very Young Man with a sigh.

They were sitting upon a ledge about twenty feet wide, with the wall down which they had come at their back.

“I’ll swear that’s as far down there as it ever was,” said the Big Business Man, with a wave of his hand towards the valley below them.

“Further,” remarked the Very Young Man. “I’ve known that right along.”

“That’s to be expected,” said the Doctor. “But we’re a third the way down, just the same; that’s the main thing.” He glanced up the rocky, precipitous wall behind them. “We’ve come down a thousand feet, at least. The valley must be three thousand feet deep or more now.”

“Say, how deep does it get before it stops?” inquired the Very Young Man.

The Doctor smiled at him quietly. “Rogers’s note put it about twelve thousand,” he answered. “It should reach that depth and stop about”—he hesitated a moment, calculating—“about two o’clock,” he finished.

“Some climb,” commented the Very Young Man. “We could do this a lot better than we’re doing it, I think.”

For some time they sat in silence. From where they sat the valley had all the appearance of a rocky, barren cañon of their own world above, as it might have looked on the late afternoon of a cloudless summer day. A gentle breeze was blowing, and in the sky overhead they could still see the huge light that for them was the sun.

“The weather is certainly great down here anyway,” observed the Very Young Man, “that’s one consolation.”

The Big Business Man had replaced his shoes, taken a swallow of water, and risen to his feet, preparing to start downward again, when suddenly they all noticed a curious swaying motion, as though the earth were moving under them.

“Now what?” ejaculated the Very Young Man, standing up abruptly, with his feet spread wide apart.

The ground seemed pressing against his feet as if he were weighted down with a heavy load. And he felt a little also as though in a moving train with a side thrust to guard against. The sun was no longer visible, and the valley was plunged in the semidarkness of twilight. A strong wind sprang up, sweeping down upon them from above.

The Very Young Man and the Big Business Man looked puzzled; the Doctor alone of the three seemed to understand what was happening.

“He’s moving the ring,” he explained, with a note of apprehension in his voice.

“Oh,” ejaculated the Big Business Man, comprehending at last, “so that’s the—”

The Very Young Man standing with his back to the wall and his legs spread wide looked hastily at his watch. “Moving the ring? Why, damn it—” he began impetuously.

The Big Business Man interrupted him. “Look there, look!” he almost whispered, awestruck.

The sky above the valley suddenly had become suffused with red. As they watched it seemed to take form, appearing no longer space, but filled with some enormous body of reddish color. In one place they could see it broken into a line of gray, and underneath the gray, two circular holes of light gleamed down at them.

The Doctor shuddered and closed his eyes; his two friends stared upward, fascinated into immobility.

“What—is—that?” the Very Young Man whispered.

Before he could be answered, the earth swayed under them more violently than before. The red faded back out of the sky, and the sun appeared sweeping up into the zenith, where it hung swaying a moment and then poised motionless. The valley was flooded again with light; the ground steadied under them and became quiet. The wind died rapidly away, and in another moment it was as though nothing unusual had occurred.

For a time the three friends stood silent, too astonished for words at this extraordinary experience. The Doctor was the first to recover himself. “He moved the ring,” he said hurriedly. “That’s twice. We must hurry.”

“It’s only quarter past ten. We told him not till eleven,” protested the Very Young Man.

“Even that is too soon for safety,” said the Doctor back over his shoulder, for already he had started downward.

It was nearly twelve o’clock when they stopped again for rest. At this time the valley appeared about seven or eight thousand feet deep: they estimated themselves to be slightly more than half-way down. From eleven until twelve they had momentarily expected some disturbing phenomena attendant upon the removal of the ring by the Banker from the clubroom to its place in the Museum. But nothing unusual had occurred.

“He probably decided to leave it alone for a while,” commented the Big Business Man, as they were discussing the matter. “Glad he showed that much sense.”

“It would not bother us much now,” the Doctor replied. “We’re too far down. See how the light is changing.”

The sky showed now only as a narrow ribbon of blue between the edges of the cañon’s walls. The sun was behind the wall down which they were climbing, out of sight, and throwing their side of the valley into shadow. And already they could begin to see a dim phosphorescence glowing from the rocks near at hand.

The Very Young Man, sitting beside the Doctor, suddenly gripped his friend by the arm. “A bird,” he said, pointing down the valley. “See it there?”

From far off they could see a bird coming up the center of the valley at a height apparently almost level with their own position, and flying towards them. They watched it in silence as it rapidly approached.

“Great Scott, it’s big!” muttered the Big Business Man in an undertone.

As the bird came closer they saw it was fully fifty feet across the wings. It was flying straight down the valley at tremendous speed. When it was nearly opposite them they heard a familiar “cheep, cheep,” come echoing across the valley.

“The sparrow,” whispered the Very Young Man. “Oh, my gosh, look how big it is!”

In another moment it had passed them; they watched in silence until it disappeared in the distance.

“Well,” said the Very Young Man, “if that had ever seen us—” He drew a long breath, leaving the rest to the imagination of his hearers.

“What a wonderful thing!” said the Big Business Man, with a note of awe in his voice. “Just think—that sparrow when we last saw it was infinitesimally small.”

The Doctor laughed. “It’s far smaller now than it was then,” he said. “Only since we last saw it we have changed size to a much greater extent than it has.”

“Foolish of us to have sent it in here,” remarked the Big Business Man casually. “Suppose that—” He stopped abruptly.

The Very Young Man started hastily to his feet.

“Oh, golly!” he exclaimed as the same thought occurred to him. “That lizard—” He looked about him wildly.

“It was foolish perhaps.” The Doctor spoke quietly. “But we can’t help it now. The sparrow has gone. That lizard may be right here at our feet”—The Very Young Man jumped involuntarily—“and so small we can’t see it,” the Doctor finished with a smile. “Or it may be a hundred miles away and big as a dinosaur.” The Very Young Man shuddered.

“It was senseless of us to let them get in here anyway,” said the Big Business Man. “That sparrow evidently has stopped getting smaller. Do you realize how big it will be to us, after we’ve diminished a few hundred more times?”

“We needn’t worry over it,” said the Doctor. “Even if we knew the lizard got into the valley the chances of our seeing it here are one in a million. But we don’t even know that. If you’ll remember it was still some distance away from the scratch when it became invisible; I doubt very much if it even got there. No, I think probably we’ll never see it again.”

“I hope not,” declared the Very Young Man emphatically.

For another hour they climbed steadily downward, making more rapid progress than before, for the descent became constantly less difficult. During this time they spoke little, but it was evident that the Very Young Man, from the frequent glances he threw around, never for a moment forgot the possibility of encountering the lizard. The sparrow did not return, although for that, too, they were constantly on the look-out.

It was nearly half-past one when the Big Business Man threw himself upon the ground exhausted. The valley at this time had reached a depth of over ten thousand feet. It was still growing deeper, but the travelers had made good progress and were not more than fifteen hundred feet above its bottom.

They had been under tremendous physical exertion for over five hours, too absorbed in their strange experiences to think of eating, and now all three agreed it was foolish to attempt to travel farther without food and rest.

“We had better wait here an hour or two,” the Doctor decided. “Our size will soon remain constant and it won’t take us long to get down after we’ve rested.”

“I’m hungry,” suggested the Very Young Man, “how about you?”

They ate and drank sparingly of the little store they had brought with them. The Doctor would not let them have much, both because he wanted to conserve their supply, and because he knew in their exhausted condition it would be bad for them to eat heartily.

It was about two o’clock when they noticed that objects around them no longer were increasing in size. They had finished their meal and felt greatly refreshed.

“Things have stopped growing,” observed the Very Young Man. “We’ve done four pills’ worth of the journey anyway,” he added facetiously. He rose to his feet, stretching. He felt sore and bruised all over, but with the meal and a little rest, not particularly tired.

“I move we go on down now,” he suggested, walking to the edge of the huge crevice in which they were sitting. “It’s only a couple of thousand feet.”

“Perhaps we might as well,” agreed the Doctor, rising also. “When we get to the floor of the valley, we can find a good spot and turn in for the night.”

The incongruity of his last words with the scene around made the Doctor smile. Overhead the sky still showed a narrow ribbon of blue. Across the valley the sunlight sparkled on the yellowish crags of the rocky wall. In the shadow, on the side down which they were climbing, the rocks now shone distinctly phosphorescent, with a peculiar waviness of outline.

“Not much like either night or day, is it?” added the Doctor. “We’ll have to get used to that.”

They started off again, and in another two hours found themselves going down a gentle rocky slope and out upon the floor of the valley.

“We’re here at last,” said the Big Business Man wearily.

The Very Young Man looked up the great, jagged precipice down which they had come, to where, far above, its edge against the strip of blue marked the surface of the ring.

“Some trip,” he remarked. “I wouldn’t want to tackle that every day.”

“Four o’clock,” said the Doctor, “the light up there looks just the same. I wonder what’s happened to George.”

Neither of his companions answered him. The Big Business Man lay stretched full length upon the ground near by, and the Very Young Man still stood looking up the precipice, lost in thought.

“What a nice climb going back,” he suddenly remarked.

The Doctor laughed. “Don’t let’s worry about that, Jack. If you remember how Rogers described it, getting back is easier than getting in. But the main point now,” he added seriously, “is for us to make sure of getting down to Arite as speedily as possible.”

The Very Young Man surveyed the barren waste around them in dismay. The floor of the valley was strewn with even larger rocks and bowlders than those on the surface above, and looked utterly pathless and desolate. “What do we do first?” he asked dubiously.

“First,” said the Doctor, smiling at the Big Business Man, who lay upon his back staring up into the sky and paying no attention to them whatever, “I think first we had better settle ourselves for a good long rest here.”

“If we stop at all, let’s sleep a while,” said the Very Young Man. “A little rest only gets you stiff. It’s a pretty exposed place out here though, isn’t it, to sleep?” he added, thinking of the sparrow and the lizard.

“One of us will stay awake and watch,” answered the Doctor.