Danforth's eyes as well as nose proved better than mine, for it was
likewise he who first noticed the queer aspect of the débris after we
had passed many half-choked arches leading to chambers and corridors
on the ground level. It did not look quite as it ought after countless
thousands of years of desertion, and when we cautiously turned on more
light we saw that a kind of swath seemed to have been lately tracked
through it. The irregular nature of the latter precluded any definite
marks, but in the smoother places there were suggestions of the
dragging of heavy objects. Once we thought there was a hint of parallel
tracks, as if of runners. This was what made us pause again. It was during that pause that we caught--simultaneously this time--the
other odor ahead. Paradoxically, it was both a less frightful and a
more frightful odor--less frightful intrinsically, but infinitely
appalling in this place under the known circumstances--unless, of
course, Gedney----For the odor was the plain and familiar one of common
petrol--every-day gasoline. *       *       *       *       *

Our motivation after that is something I will leave to psychologists. We knew now that some terrible extension of the camp horrors must
have crawled into this nighted burial place of the æons, hence could
not doubt any longer the existence of nameless conditions--present
or at least recent--just ahead. Yet in the end we did let sheer
burning curiosity--or anxiety--or autohypnotism--or vague thoughts of
responsibility toward Gedney--of what not--drive us on. Danforth whispered again of the print he thought he had seen at
the alley turning in the ruins above; and of the faint musical
piping--potentially of tremendous significance in the light of Lake's
dissection report, despite its close resemblance to the cave-mouth
echoes of the windy peaks--which he thought he had shortly afterward
half heard from unknown depths below. I, in my turn, whispered of how the camp was left--of what had
disappeared, and of how the madness of a lone survivor might have
conceived the inconceivable--a wild trip across the monstrous mountains
and a descent into the unknown, primal masonry----

But we could not convince each other, or even ourselves, of anything
definite. We had turned off all light as we stood still, and vaguely
noticed that a trace of deeply filtered upper daylight kept the
blackness from being absolute. Having automatically begun to move ahead, we guided ourselves by
occasional flashes from our torch. The disturbed débris formed an
impression we could not shake off, and the smell of gasoline grew
stronger. More and more ruin met our eyes and hampered our feet, until
very soon we saw that the forward way was about to cease. We had been
all too correct in our pessimistic guess about that rift glimpsed from
the air. Our tunnel quest was a blind one, and we were not even going
to be able to reach the basement out of which the abyssward aperture
opened. The torch, flashing over the grotesquely carved walls of the blocked
corridor in which we stood, showed several doorways in various
states of obstruction; and from one of them the gasoline odor--quite
submerging that other hint of odor--came with especial distinctness. As
we looked more steadily, we saw that beyond a doubt there had been a
slight and recent clearing away of débris from that particular opening. Whatever the lurking horror might be, we believed the direct avenue
toward it was now plainly manifest. I do not think any one will wonder
that we waited an appreciable time before making any further motion. And yet, when we did venture inside that black arch, our first
impression was one of anticlimax. For amidst the littered expanse
of that sculptured crypt--a perfect cube with sides of about twenty
feet--there remained no recent object of instantly discernible size; so
that we looked instinctively, though in vain, for a farther doorway. In another moment, however, Danforth's sharp vision had discovered a
place where the floor débris had been disturbed. We turned on both
torches full strength. Though what we saw in that light was actually
simple and trifling, I am none the less reluctant to tell of it because
of what it implied. It was a rough leveling of the débris, upon which several small objects
lay carelessly scattered, and at one corner of which a considerable
amount of gasoline must have been spilled lately enough to leave a
strong odor even at this extreme superplateau altitude. In other words,
it could not be other than a sort of camp--a camp made by questing
beings who, like us, had been turned back by the unexpectedly choked
way to the abyss. Let me be plain. The scattered objects were, so far as substance was
concerned, all from Lake's camp, and consisted of: tin cans as queerly
opened as those we had seen at that ravaged place, many spent matches,
three illustrated books more or less curiously smudged, an empty ink
bottle with its pictorial and instructional carton, a broken fountain
pen, some oddly snipped fragments of fur and tent cloth, a used
electric battery with circular of directions, a folder that came with
our type of tent heater, and a sprinkling of crumpled papers. It was all bad enough, but when we smoothed out the papers and looked
at what was on them we felt we had come to the worst. We had found
certain inexplicably blotted papers at the camp which might have
prepared us, yet the effect of the sight, down there in the prehuman
vaults of a nightmare city, was almost too much to bear. *       *       *       *       *

A mad Gedney might have made the groups of dots in imitation of
those found on the greenish soapstones, just as the dots on those
insane five-pointed grave mounds might have been made; and he might
conceivably have prepared rough, hasty sketches--varying in their
accuracy--or lack of it--which outlined the neighboring parts of the
city and traced the way from a circularly represented place outside
our previous route--a place we identified as a great cylindrical tower
in the carvings and as a vast circular gulf glimpsed in our aërial
survey--to the present five-pointed structure and the tunnel mouth
therein. He might, I repeat, have prepared such sketches; for those before
us were quite obviously compiled, as our own had been, from late
sculptures somewhere in the glacial labyrinth, though not from the
ones which we had seen and used. But what this art-blind bungler could
never have done was to execute those sketches in a strange and assured
technique perhaps superior, despite haste and carelessness, to any of
the decadent carvings from which they were taken--the characteristic
and unmistakable technique of the Old Ones themselves in the dead
city's heyday.