Journey To The Underground World Page 6

  The old boy was hopping from one foot to another in an agony of impatient and frustrated frenzy. I had to pity him: but his torment soon dissolved into another of those moods of dreamy rapture he was constantly falling into as he regarded yet another variety of prehistoric monster.

  “… To think of it, my boy! … the original sea serpent of the Dawn Age, vanished from the earth before the first man stood erect … until now we have only been able to study the plesiosaurus from its fossilized remains-but to be the first living man to actually look upon the living monster itself-gakl”

  Gak, indeed: for just then ten of the ugliest men I have ever seen came around the bluff and stopped short at the sight of us.

  They were hairy and half-naked and had matted manes and beards, and hefted huge clubs and things.

  And they were very definitely … men.

  “Oh, my goodness,“whispered the Professor faintly in a faint voice.

  “You can say that again,“I muttered, grabbing my gun and wishing I had packed along a good carbine and plenty of ammo, instead of one little .45.

  They were nearly naked, and were about the hairiest men I had ever seen or heard of, with barrel chests and long apelike arms and thick, matted hair and dirty beards on their ugly faces. They walked with a gait somewhere between a shamble and a shuffle, huge, dirty splayed feet wide-spread, and they had poorly tanned animal hides tied about them with thongs made of gut. Grunting and snorting to each other, they looked us over suspiciously, with an expression of surly truculence.

  “Neanderthals, or I’m a monkey’s uncle,” breathed the Professor, a look of angelic rapture on his face.

  “Eternal Euclid, that I should live to see it … !”

  “Neanderthals? You mean cavemen?“I muttered out of the corner of my mouth, not daring to take my eyes off the pug-uglies. He nodded vaguely.

  “I should have guessed at the possibility of primitive man having found his way down here, when I saw the mammoth,” he said. “Both early man and mammoth must have fled here from the advancing glaciers when the Ice Age came down across Europe … probably via the same Gibralter landbridge the dinosaurs used, many millions of years earlier . .

  All this was interesting enough, I suppose, but hardly relevant to the problem at hand. I didn’t bother asking the Doc if Neanderthal men were dangerous, because I had a pretty fair notion they were. And I believe I failed to mention they were carrying wooden clubs, stone axes, and a couple of long, clumsy-looking spears tipped with sharply pointed bits of stone.

  One perfectly enormous caveman stepped to the fore to look us over. He was a good head taller than I am, and must have tipped the scales at three hundred pounds, with those gorilla-like shoulders and huge, hairy paunch. He wore a crude necklace of seashells threaded on a string of gut around his fat throat: from this, and the way the others deferred to him, I reckoned him to be the chief.

  “How,“I said, lifting my right hand slowly, palm open and forward, as they do in the movies.

  He grunted and spat, looking me over sourly. I took the opportunity to take a good look at him.

  He must have been the ugliest man I’ve ever seen, with a thick underslung jaw and a heavy brow-ridge, hardly any forehead to speak of, and a nose that had been squashed flat a few times. His skin was so dirty and matted with hair that it was almost impossible to tell what color it was. His hair, amusingly, was reddish, nearly the same shade as the mammoth’s coat. His eyes caught my attention: one of them was blank white, obviously blinded either from a cataract or an injury. The other eye was small and mean, buried in a pit of gristle under that bony shelf of a brow. His beard was short and scrubby, and he was crawling with lice: I know this for a fact, for while he was giving me the once-over, he plucked one of the vermin from his armpit, and cracked it between his teeth.

  “Tasty, I’ll bet,“I remarked in an easy, conversational manner. “I can just imagine what your table manners are like!”

  “Be careful, my boy, you might make him angry,“muttered the Professor nervously.

  I grinned. The Neanderthal man evidently felt he was being talked about, or laughed at-or, possibly, both. Grunting, he spat between my feet, a murderous gleam in his one good eye.

  In the next instant he came at me in a rush, growling like a lion at the charge.

  I went for the automatic at my waist, but didn’t have time to use it. For the caveman slammed the flat of his stone axe up alongside my head, and, for me, the day was over.

  Part Three

  MEN OF THE STONE AGE

  Chapter 9. CAPTIVES OF THE CAVEMEN

  The next two or three days I will skip over, partly because my memory of them is rather blurred, but mostly because there really wasn’t much that happened to us that will bear repeating.

  The Neanderthal men seem to have been on a slave-hunting expedition, and were on their way back home with a dozen other captives when they encountered the two of us. One-Eye, as I came to call the chief of the expedition, didn’t mind adding a couple more captives to his collection, although I understand he thought the Professor a bit too scrawny to be worth carrying along. One of his cronies, an ugly customer I came to think of as Fatso from his triple chin and enormous belly, must have persuaded him otherwise, for when I came out of my little nap, there the two of us were, tied together.

  I was being carried over the shoulder of one brawny youth who was quite glad to put me down once it was understood I was awake and could walk. These men bore little resemblance to the Neanderthals; in fact, if you shaved them and put some clothes on them, they would not look out of place on Broadway or Main Street, being tall, bronzed, athletic young fellows with straw-yellow hair and blue eyes.

  “Obviously, descendants of Cro-Magnon man,“the Professor explained when I got a chance to ask him about our fellow-captives. “The two major genera of Homo sapiens were contemporaneous to some extent; their respective eras overlapped a trifle.”

  The differences between the two were certainly distinct. The blond Cro-Magnons stood tall and straight, and walked with a lithe, limber step that was very unlike the bowlegged shamble of the apelike Neanderthal men. Also, they kept themselves cleaner and wore well-tanned hides and furs. They even sported something like boots: well, high-laced buskins, anyway. And whereas the Apemen wore seashells threaded on a bit of gut, the Cro-Magnons wore polished, colored pebbles and the fangs of beasts on thin leather thongs. More than a few of them had ornaments of hammered copper or bronze, which fascinated the Professor.

  “Obviously, time has not stood still for the higher orders, even here in Zanthodon,“he mused thoughtfully. “They were men of Stone Age back in Europe before the glaciers came down from the north … but here, they have already entered the Bronze Age … this is fascinating, my boy! What a book I shall be able to write, once we have returned to civilization!”

  I didn’t bother pointing out to him that our return to civilization was probably going to be postponed for a while, due to slavery.

  The Apemen-I’m going to call them that from now on, because “Neanderthal”is a bit of a jaw-breaker-led us along through the jungles at a rapid trot. They used scouts which fanned out to all sides of the slave column, which I thought was a rather sophisticated strategy for such primitives. And they seemed to know just where they were going, although how they managed to find their way home in this land of eternal and unaltering daylight puzzled me. They seemed to know where they were going, however, and from the speed at which they forced us to jog along, and the occasional, apprehensive backward glances they cast over their hulking, hairy shoulders, I got the distinct impression that they were in a hell of a hurry-as if someone were following them.

  I noticed that we were following the curve of the coastline, never penetrating too deeply into the jungle to lose track of the sea, which remained at our left hand. The reason for this I did not learn until much later.

  My fellow-captives were tethered to a long rope of tough, braided grasses that extended the length of
the slave column, and whose ends were tied to the waists of One-Eye in front and Fatso behind. We all wore slave collars of leather and these were lashed by thongs to spaces along the length of the rope, one captive to either side. We moved along, then, in a column of twos at a rapid trot.

  I have never worn anything more galling and irksome than that slave collar, and I never hope to.

  The pace was grueling, and we were only given rest stops three times a “day”(I am going to start dividing time in this narrative between “days”and “sleeps,“since it was always day down here, and

  “night”is hardly an apt term); during those stops, which were of brief duration, water was passed back along the line in a hollow coconut shell pierced at one end: We had a chance at such times to lie down, rest a bit, catch our breath.

  The Professor and I-he was directly behind me in the column-used these opportunities to talk, while the other captives eavesdropped curiously. (I later came to understand that it was bewildering to them to hear men conversing in a language they had never before heard, since all of the human denizens of Zanthodon speak the same universal tongue.)

  You may be wondering why I had not as yet fought my way free. The answer is simple: after One-Eye had nearly brained me with that stone axe of his, he and his boys went through our clothing and possessions, taking anything they fancied. One-Eye now sported my wristwatch on one hairy arm, Fatso had taken the revolver, which he wore stuck through the hides wrapped about his middle, below his enormous paunch, and another one of the Apemen had taken my hunting-knife. As for my backpack, it had vanished among the others.

  Without weapons of any kind, I couldn’t have put up much of a fight against a dozen savage Neanderthal men, so I concluded to hold onto my temper and bide my time. In this decision, the Professor heartily concurred.

  “Rest easy, my boy; a diversion is bound to occur sooner or later, just as the mammoth appeared in time to divert the triceratops from making us his luncheon! And, besides, I am gathering valuable anthropological data …”

  I am, of course, much too gentlemanly to have yielded to the impulse; thus, I held my tongue and didn’t tell the Professor what he could do with his data.

  Looking back over this part of the manuscript, I notice with some amusement that I have not yet mentioned the captive who was directly in front of me in the line of slaves.

  Her name was Darya, and she was about seventeen and absolutely the most beautiful girl I have ever laid eyes upon.

  Nearly naked, save for a skimpy apron-like garment of soft, elegantly-tanned furs, which extended over one shoulder but left one perfect breast bare; her slim, lithe, beautifully tanned body was as supple and graceful as a dancer’s. Like all of her people, she was blond and blue-eyed: in Darya’s case, the description is too sparse. She had a long, flowing mane of soft hair the color of ripe corn, and wide, dark-lashed eyes the hue of rainwashed April skies, and a full, luscious mouth the tint of wild strawberries.

  She was fastidious in her cleanliness and never failed to set aside a portion of her share of water to cleanse her person.

  Darya was a revelation to me: imagine a girl who has never used cosmetics, never chewed gum, never gone to the hairdresser for a permanent … a young woman totally ignorant of deodorants, perfume, eyebrow-plucking, and the latest fashions!

  For all of her primitive innocence, though, this Cro-Magnon Eve was every inch a lady-and all woman.

  She exposed her naked breast indifferently to the gaze of men, because her society has never found a reason to hide natural beauty away behind clothing, never having gotten around to inventing puritanical shame and prudery. When we paused during a rest stop to relieve nature, she performed her bodily functions with the rest of us, without the slightest mortification or selfconsciousness.

  She endured without a murmur of complaint our exhausting trek, and, although she suffered along with the rest of us from the lack of water, of sufficient rest, and of food, I never once saw her weep. Except when one of the older Cro-Magnon captives gave out and could run no more, and was callously brained by One-Eye, his corpse untied from the slave rope and carelessly tossed into the bushes. As I saw the gleam of tears in her great blue eyes, I wondered to myself if the victim had been a friend or relative.

  After a couple of days of traveling across fairly level country, still within close range of the shoreline, we began to ascend a rise of low hills, and were no longer beaten until we ran at the same pace as our brutish captors. Darya seized this opportunity to attempt a conversation with me. She had spoken to me on more than one occasion, but as I could not understand a word of her speech, or she a word of mine, expressions and gestures were the most we could exchange.

  I have heard it said that curiosity is the vice of women. Well, if so, I presume her curiosity must have gotten the better of her, because Darya, no longer able to endure my inability to answer or even understand her questions, promptly took the obvious course of action, and began to teach me hers.

  I have always enjoyed a natural-born knack for picking up foreign tongues, which has amply served me during my travels, so it did not prove too difficult to pick up Cro-Magnon. What made it so remarkably easy was the simple fact that Darya’s language was an extremely simple one, a stark matter of the verbal necessities-all nouns and verbs, with just enough adjectives to lend it tang. A language uncluttered with all the complicated tenses more sophisticated languages seem to have.

  As we walked along, the cave-girl gave me lessons in the one universal tongue spoken the length and breadth of Zanthodon. She did this with a direct simplicity that I found refreshing-pointing to a bush, she enunciated the word for “bush,“for example, and made me repeat it back to her until I got the pronunciation to please her. In a single day we got through the items visible in the landscape immediately around us, and progressed to the parts of the body. On the next day we moved on to verbs, and I memorized the words for “jump”and “walk”and “run”and “stand”and “sit”and “lie down”and

  “sleep,““eat,““drink,“and so on.

  Each morning when we awoke, she made me repeat back to her the words she had taught me the day before, correcting me when it was necessary. But it was seldom necessary. As a matter of fact, learning her primitive tongue came so swiftly and easily that I was impressed myself-I had always been good at picking up a smattering of things like Arabic or German or Swahili, but never this good.

  It was almost … almost like remembering a language you once knew but had since forgotten, if that makes any sense.

  Well, it made quite a lot of sense to the Professor, who, being tied to the chain gang right behind me, was near enough to overhear our language lessons. In fact, he became absolutely livid with excitement.

  “. . Did you hear that, my boy?“he burbled, awe-struck. “The word for ‘father’ is vator … amazing!”

  “What’s so amazing about it?”

  “Because the ancient Sanskrit word for ‘father’ is very, very close to it in sound: pitar … . I have been noticing how very many of the words your little lady has been teaching you are remarkably similar to the words in our own language of the Upper World … and I have always had a theory about the common source of all languages … .”

  “Well, why not?“I grinned, shaking my head. “You seem to have a theory about nearly everything.”

  Darya listened uncomprehendingly to this exchange, her head tilted a little to one side and a quizzical expression on her sweet face.

  Paying me no attention, the Professor rambled on excitedly.

  “You must know, my boy, that English, French, Italian, German, Spanish and many other modern languages stem from the decay of the ancient Latin tongue … well, Latin, Greek, Hindi and other of the languages of antiquity derive from a common source, Sanskrit …. Sanskrit itself descends from Proto-Sanskrit, which came from the almost-forgotten Aryan tongue, and that language can be dated back nearly twenty thousand years, to the last of the great Ice Ages.

 
“Suppose that the original of Aryan, let us call it ‘proto-Aryan’ was the language spoken before history began by our own direct ancestors, the Cro-Magnon men of 50,000 B.C. Which is about when I imagine this young lady’s ancestors began drifting into Zanthodon, having fled from the endless winter of the glacial period … if my theory proves correct, we are learning earth’s first and oldest tongue, my boy-what a sensational chapter for my book!”

  “What does he say?“inquired Darya, impressed by the monologue. I shook my head.

  “No matter,“I grinned. “Old men talk a lot!”

  She giggled at the Professor’s glare of frosty reproof.

  Just then, our captors came down the line with sticks and clubs; urging us to greater speed. So we wisely decided to save our breath for running.

  When our language lessons had gotten to the point where we could make each other understand what we were saying, Darya wasted no time in asking me about myself. In particular, she was fascinated by the clothing I was wearing-or what was left of it by this time, for my khaki shirt was ripped to rags and my whipcord breeches equally the worse for wear. I awkwardly tried to explain the secret of weaving cloth to the savage girl, but with minimal success.

  She was also curious about my people-my “tribe”as she thought of it. I think she was fascinated by the differences between myself and all the other men she had ever known or seen.

  The Neaderthal men, you understand, are brown-haired or red-headed, and the Cro-Magnons are almost always blonds. But I happen to have curly black hair. Another difference was my eyes, for they are of a shade of pale gray rare even in the Upper World (I was beginning to think of it that way, in caps, by this point).