A Lost Page Of Earth

: The Moon Pool

When I awakened the sun was streaming through the cabin porthole.

Outside a fresh voice lilted. I lay on my two chairs and listened. The

song was one with the wholesome sunshine and the breeze blowing

stiffly and whipping the curtains. It was Larry O'Keefe at his matins:



The little red lark is shaking his wings,

Straight from the breast of his love he springs



Larry's voice soared.
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His wings and his feathers are sunrise red,

He hails the sun and his golden head,

Good morning, Doc, you are long abed.



This last was a most irreverent interpolation, I well knew. I opened

my door. O'Keefe stood outside laughing. The Suwarna, her engines

silent, was making fine headway under all sail, the Brunhilda skipping

in her wake cheerfully with half her canvas up.



The sea was crisping and dimpling under the wind. Blue and white was

the world as far as the eye could reach. Schools of little silvery

green flying fish broke through the water rushing on each side of us;

flashed for an instant and were gone. Behind us gulls hovered and

dipped. The shadow of mystery had retreated far over the rim of this

wide awake and beautiful world and if, subconsciously, I knew that

somewhere it was brooding and waiting, for a little while at least I

was consciously free of its oppression.



"How's the patient?" asked O'Keefe.



He was answered by Huldricksson himself, who must have risen just as I

left the cabin. The Norseman had slipped on a pair of pajamas and,

giant torso naked under the sun, he strode out upon us. We all of us

looked at him a trifle anxiously. But Olaf's madness had left him. In

his eyes was much sorrow, but the berserk rage was gone.



He spoke straight to me: "You said last night we follow?"



I nodded.



"It is where?" he asked again.



"We go first to Ponape and from there to Metalanim Harbour--to the

Nan-Matal. You know the place?"



Huldricksson bowed--a white gleam as of ice showing in his blue eyes.



"It is there?" he asked.



"It is there that we must first search," I answered.



"Good!" said Olaf Huldricksson. "It is good!"



He looked at Da Costa inquiringly and the little Portuguese, following

his thought, answered his unspoken question.



"We should be at Ponape tomorrow morning early, Olaf."



"Good!" repeated the Norseman. He looked away, his eyes tear-filled.



A restraint fell upon us; the embarrassment all men experience when

they feel a great sympathy and a great pity, to neither of which they

quite know how to give expression. By silent consent we discussed at

breakfast only the most casual topics.



When the meal was over Huldricksson expressed a desire to go aboard

the Brunhilda.



The Suwarna hove to and Da Costa and he dropped into the small boat.

When they reached the Brunhilda's deck I saw Olaf take the wheel and

the two fall into earnest talk. I beckoned to O'Keefe and we stretched

ourselves out on the bow hatch under cover of the foresail. He lighted

a cigarette, took a couple of leisurely puffs, and looked at me

expectantly.



"Well?" I asked.



"Well," said O'Keefe, "suppose you tell me what you think--and then

I'll proceed to point out your scientific errors." His eyes twinkled

mischievously.



"Larry," I replied, somewhat severely, "you may not know that I have a

scientific reputation which, putting aside all modesty, I may say is

an enviable one. You used a word last night to which I must interpose

serious objection. You more than hinted that I hid--superstitions. Let

me inform you, Larry O'Keefe, that I am solely a seeker, observer,

analyst, and synthesist of facts. I am not"--and I tried to make my

tone as pointed as my words--"I am not a believer in phantoms or

spooks, leprechauns, banshees, or ghostly harpers."



O'Keefe leaned back and shouted with laughter.



"Forgive me, Goodwin," he gasped. "But if you could have seen

yourself solemnly disclaiming the banshee"--another twinkle showed in

his eyes--"and then with all this sunshine and this wide-open

world"--he shrugged his shoulders--"it's hard to visualize anything

such as you and Huldricksson have described."



"I know how hard it is, Larry," I answered. "And don't think I have

any idea that the phenomenon is supernatural in the sense

spiritualists and table turners have given that word. I do think it is

supernormal; energized by a force unknown to modern science--but that

doesn't mean I think it outside the radius of science."



"Tell me your theory, Goodwin," he said. I hesitated--for not yet

had I been able to put into form to satisfy myself any explanation of

the Dweller.



"I think," I hazarded finally, "it is possible that some members of

that race peopling the ancient continent which we know existed here in

the Pacific, have survived. We know that many of these islands are

honeycombed with caverns and vast subterranean spaces, literally

underground lands running in some cases far out beneath the ocean

floor. It is possible that for some reason survivors of this race

sought refuge in the abysmal spaces, one of whose entrances is on the

islet where Throckmartin's party met its end.



"As for their persistence in these caverns--we know they possessed a

high science. They may have gone far in the mastery of certain

universal forms of energy--especially that we call light. They may

have developed a civilization and a science far more advanced than

ours. What I call the Dweller may be one of the results of this

science. Larry--it may well be that this lost race is planning to

emerge again upon earth's surface!"



"And is sending out your Dweller as a messenger, a scientific dove

from their Ark?" I chose to overlook the banter in his question.



"Did you ever hear of the Chamats?" I asked him. He shook his head.



"In Papua," I explained, "there is a wide-spread and immeasurably old

tradition that 'imprisoned under the hills' is a race of giants who

once ruled this region 'when it stretched from sun to sun before the

moon god drew the waters over it'--I quote from the legend. Not only

in Papua but throughout Malaysia you find this story. And, so the

tradition runs, these people--the Chamats--will one day break through

the hills and rule the world; 'make over the world' is the literal

translation of the constant phrase in the tale. It was Herbert Spencer

who pointed out that there is a basis of fact in every myth and legend

of man. It is possible that these survivors I am discussing form

Spencer's fact basis for the Malaysian legend.[1]



"This much is sure--the moon door, which is clearly operated by the

action of moon rays upon some unknown element or combination and the

crystals through which the moon rays pour down upon the pool their

prismatic columns, are humanly made mechanisms. So long as they are

humanly made, and so long as it is this flood of moonlight from which

the Dweller draws its power of materialization, the Dweller itself, if

not the product of the human mind, is at least dependent upon the

product of the human mind for its appearance."



"Wait a minute, Goodwin," interrupted O'Keefe. "Do you mean to say

you think that this thing is made of--well--of moonshine?"



"Moonlight," I replied, "is, of course, reflected sunlight. But the

rays which pass back to earth after their impact on the moon's surface

are profoundly changed. The spectroscope shows that they lose

practically all the slower vibrations we call red and infra-red, while

the extremely rapid vibrations we call the violet and ultra-violet are

accelerated and altered. Many scientists hold that there is an unknown

element in the moon--perhaps that which makes the gigantic luminous

trails that radiate in all directions from the lunar crater

Tycho--whose energies are absorbed by and carried on the moon rays.



"At any rate, whether by the loss of the vibrations of the red or by

the addition of this mysterious force, the light of the moon becomes

something entirely different from mere modified sunlight--just as the

addition or subtraction of one other chemical in a compound of several

makes the product a substance with entirely different energies and

potentialities.



"Now these rays, Larry, are given perhaps still another mysterious

activity by the globes through which Throckmartin said they passed in

the Chamber of the Moon Pool. The result is the necessary factor in

the formation of the Dweller. There would be nothing scientifically

improbable in such a process. Kubalski, the great Russian physicist,

produced crystalline forms exhibiting every faculty that we call vital

by subjecting certain combinations of chemicals to the action of

highly concentrated rays of various colours. Something in light and

nothing else produced their pseudo-vitality. We do not begin to know

how to harness the potentialities of that magnetic vibration of the

ether we call light."



"Listen, Doc," said Larry earnestly, "I'll take everything you say

about this lost continent, the people who used to live on it, and

their caverns, for granted. But by the sword of Brian Boru, you'll

never get me to fall for the idea that a bunch of moonshine can handle

a big woman such as you say Throckmartin's Thora was, nor a two-fisted

man such as you say Throckmartin was, nor Huldricksson's wife--and

I'll bet she was one of those strapping big northern women too--you'll

never get me to believe that any bunch of concentrated moonshine could

handle them and take them waltzing off along a moonbeam back to

wherever it goes. No, Doc, not on your life, even Tennessee moonshine

couldn't do that--nix!"



"All right, O'Keefe," I answered, now very much irritated indeed.

"What's your theory?" And I could not resist adding: "Fairies?"



"Professor," he grinned, "if that Thing's a fairy it's Irish and when

it sees me it'll be so glad there'll be nothing to it. 'I was lost,

strayed, or stolen, Larry avick,' it'll say, 'an' I was so homesick

for the old sod I was desp'rit,' it'll say, an' 'take me back quick

before I do any more har-rm!' it'll tell me--an' that's the truth.



"Now don't get me wrong. I believe you all saw something all right.

But what I think you saw was some kind of gas. All this region is

volcanic and islands and things are constantly poking up from the sea.

It's probably gas; a volcanic emanation; something new to us and that

drives you crazy--lots of kinds of gas do that. It hit the

Throckmartin party on that island and they probably were all more or

less delirious all the time; thought they saw things; talked it over

and--collective hallucination--just like the Angels of Mons and other

miracles of the war. Somebody sees something that looks like something

else. He points it out to the man next him. 'Do you see it?' asks he.

'Sure I see it,' says the other. And there you are--collective

hallucination.



"When your friends got it bad they most likely jumped overboard one by

one. Huldricksson sails into a place where it is and it hits his wife.

She grabs the child and jumps over. Maybe the moon rays make it

luminous! I've seen gas on the front under the moon that looked like a

thousand whirling dervish devils. Yes, and you could see the devil's

faces in it. And if it got into your lungs nothing could ever make you

think you hadn't seen real devils."



For a time I was silent.



"Larry," I said at last, "whether you are right or I am right, I must

go to the Nan-Matal. Will you go with me, Larry?"



"Goodwin," he replied, "I surely will. I'm as interested as you are.

If we don't run across the Dolphin I'll stick. I'll leave word at

Ponape, to tell them where I am should they come along. If they report

me dead for a while there's nobody to care. So that's all right. Only

old man, be reasonable. You've thought over this so long, you're going

bug, honestly you are."



And again, the gladness that I might have Larry O'Keefe with me, was

so great that I forgot to be angry.





[1] William Beebe, the famous American naturalist and ornithologist,

recently fighting in France with America's air force, called attention

to this remarkable belief in an article printed not long ago in the

Atlantic Monthly. Still more significant was it that he noted a

persistent rumour that the breaking out of the buried race was

close.--W.J. B., Pres. I. A. of S.



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