It took us only a moment to conclude that this was indeed the route by
which those others had descended, and that this would be the logical
route for our own ascent, despite the long trail of paper we had left
elsewhere. The tower's mouth was no farther from the foothills and our
waiting plane than was the great terraced building we had entered, and
any further subglacial exploration we might make on this trip would lie
in this general region. Oddly, we were still thinking about possible later trips--even after
all we had seen and guessed. Then, as we picked our way cautiously over
the débris of the great floor, there came a sight which for the time
excluded all other matters. It was the neatly huddled array of three sledges in that farther angle
of the ramp's lower and outward-projecting course which had hitherto
been screened from our view. There they were--the three sledges missing
from Lake's camp--shaken by a hard usage which must have included
forcible dragging along great reaches of snowless masonry and débris,
as well as much hand portage over utterly unnavigable places. They were carefully and intelligently packed and strapped, and
contained things memorably familiar enough: the gasoline stove, fuel
cans, instrument cases, provision tins, tarpaulins obviously bulging
with books, and some bulging with less obvious contents--everything
derived from Lake's equipment. After what we had found in that other room, we were in a measure
prepared for this encounter. The really great shock came when we
stepped over and undid one tarpaulin, whose outlines had peculiarly
disquieted us. It seems that others as well as Lake had been interested
in collecting typical specimens; for there were two here, both stiffly
frozen, perfectly preserved, patched with adhesive plaster where some
wounds around the neck had occurred, and wrapped with care to prevent
further damage. They were the bodies of young Gedney and the missing
dog. X. Many people will probably judge us callous as well as mad for thinking
about the northward tunnel and the abyss so soon after our somber
discovery, and I am not prepared to say that we would have immediately
revived such thoughts but for a specific circumstance which broke in
upon us and set up a whole new train of speculations. We had replaced the tarpaulin over poor Gedney and were standing
in a kind of mute bewilderment when the sounds finally reached our
consciousness--the first sounds we had heard since descending out of
the open where the mountain wind whined faintly from its unearthly
heights. Well-known and mundane though they were, their presence in
this remote world of death was more unexpected and unnerving than any
grotesque or fabulous tones could possibly have been--since they gave a
fresh upsetting to all our notions of cosmic harmony. Had it been some trace of that bizarre musical piping over a wide
range, which Lake's dissection report had led us to expect in those
others--and which, indeed, our overwrought fancies had been reading
into every wind howl we had heard since coming on the camp horror--it
would have had a kind of hellish congruity with the æon-dead region
around us. A voice from other epochs belongs in a graveyard of other
epochs. As it was, however, the noise shattered all our profoundly seated
adjustments--all out tacit acceptance of the inner antarctic as a waste
utterly and irrevocably void of every vestige of normal life. What we heard was not the fabulous note of any buried blasphemy of
elder earth from whose supernal toughness an age-denied polar sun had
evoked a monstrous response. Instead, it was a thing so mockingly
normal and so unerringly familiarized by our sea days off Victoria Land
and our camp days at McMurdo Sound that we shuddered to think of it
here, where such things ought not to be. To be brief--it was simply the
raucous squawking of a penguin. The muffled sound floated from subglacial recesses nearly opposite to
the corridor whence we had come--regions manifestly in the direction
of that other tunnel to the vast abyss. The presence of a living water
bird in such a direction--in a world whose surface was one of age-long
and uniform lifelessness--could lead to only one conclusion; hence our
first thought was to verify the objective reality of the sound. It was,
indeed, repeated, and seemed at times to come from more than one throat. Seeking its source, we entered an archway from which much débris had
been cleared; resuming our trail blazing--with an added paper supply
taken with curious repugnance from one of the tarpaulin bundles on the
sledges--when we left daylight behind. As the glaciated floor gave place to a litter of detritus, we plainly
discerned some curious, dragging tracks; and once Danforth found
a distinct print of a sort whose description would be only too
superfluous. The course indicated by the penguin cries was precisely
what our map and compass prescribed as an approach to the more
northerly tunnel mouth, and we were glad to find that a bridgeless
thoroughfare on the ground and basement levels seemed open. The tunnel, according to the chart, ought to start from the basement of
a large pyramidal structure which we seemed vaguely to recall from our
aërial survey as remarkably well-preserved. Along our path the single
torch showed a customary profusion of carvings, but we did not pause to
examine any of these. *       *       *       *       *

Suddenly a bulky white shape loomed up ahead of us, and we flashed on
the second torch. It is odd how wholly this new quest had turned our
minds from earlier fears of what might lurk near. Those other ones,
having left their supplies in the great circular place, must have
planned to return after their scouting trip toward or into the abyss;
yet we had now discarded all caution concerning them as completely as
if they had never existed. This white, waddling thing was fully six feet high, yet we seemed to
realize at once that it was not one of those others. They were larger
and dark, and, according to the sculptures, their motion over land
surfaces was a swift, assured matter despite the queerness of their
sea-born tentacle equipment. But to say that the white thing did not
profoundly frighten us would be vain. We were indeed clutched for an
instant by a primitive dread almost sharper than the worst of our
reasoned fears regarding those others. Then came a flash of anticlimax as the white shape sidled into a
lateral archway to our left, to join two others of its kind which
had summoned it in raucous tones. For it was only a penguin--albeit
of a huge, unknown species larger than the greatest of the known
king penguins, and monstrous in its combined albinism and virtual
eyelessness. When we had followed the thing into the archway and turned both our
torches on the indifferent and unheeding group of three, we saw that
they were all eyeless albinos of the same unknown and gigantic species.