Journey To The Underground World Read online

  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-Despreaux,“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 verhohnen 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 D.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 Ahmerica
in?“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.

  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 well-deserved 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 Profs 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 me
an. 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!”