Morgo the Mighty by Sean O’Larkin was originally serialized in The Popular Magazine in 1930. Over the next few weeks I’m going to be serializing it again here. Except for correcting the odd typo, I’m reproducing the text as printed in the original publication.

A wailing cry came through the hole widened by Morgo’s hands. It was the signal of a Bakkete.

Morgo shouted to them. I heard the flurry of wings against the cliffs, though my eyes saw nothing. Was this really delivery? Or would the ants reach us first – pick off the last man?

“I am here!” Baku’s welcome voice cried to us.

“Nurri Kala goes first,” Morgo said. She was given into the arms of a Bakkete. “To Kahli. We will join you there.”

“Zorimi goes next,” Morgo cried. “Hold him, Derro!”

I had no idea where the magician was, so I struck a match, my last. Zorimi had scurried to the far side of the cave. He did not mean to be made prisoner by Morgo.

“Zorimi!” Morgo commanded. “This is your only hope of life! Come!”

“No – no!” Zorimi said huskily. He started to climb the wall, moving upward, his hands and feet jabbing into little niches I hadn’t noticed. There was a hole near the ceiling toward which he moved.

Morgo sprang at him.

The ant-engorged door broke and Rortas and Husshas swarmed into the room. My light went out.

“Morgo!” I shouted. “They’re in the room!”

Morgo’s arms guided me to the hole. I felt a Bakkete’s arms take hold of me and I swung off the floor, crying to Morgo to follow me.

I caught my breath and felt easier when I saw the flash of his white body in the air beside me.

“I said we would come through, Derro,” Morgo laughed across the gulf of stillness that separated our flying Bakketes. “And we have the white girl.”

Little did I realize in that moment what the white girl would mean to us – do to us.

The flight into Kahli was made without signs of our enemies. The night of Shamman was empty of the huge bats. But from below came the incessant munch-munch of the Husshas still pouring out of Verizon, marching on the plateau, the goal set by the Raba at Morgo’s request. Shamman would be ravaged by these insects. I decided I wouldn’t give two cents for Zorimi’s chances of escaping the plateau alive. His world was infested with certain death.

On returning to Morgo’s cave, we received the reports of the aerial battle from Morgo. The ranks of the Bakketes were sadly depleted. The suddenness of the Shamman bats’ attach threw hundred of them into the mandibles of the black ants. And the Shammans perished, too, in those tongs.

When the tide of the battle turned against them, the Bakketes scattered in groups to hide in territory free of the ants, beneath stalagmites and the stunted trees and vegetable growths. Yet they were routed by the approach of the red ants which seemed to come out of the earth and move directly toward the plateau of The Flame.

Baku feared for his master’s and my life when he saw the Olympian mound inundated by the black and red creatures. The other bats urged a retreat to the Cave of Kahli but he insisted on waiting until the light came. He still hoped for a sign.

There was a growing restlessness, verging on mutiny in the Bakketes ranks, when the signal call came from Morgo. Then Baku had a hard time locating the source of the call. It was only when Morgo gave his schoolboy’s whistle a second time that the Bakketes spotted the hole in the wall of the cliff.

While this conference was in order, Nurri Kala took over the Shamman servants and directed them in the preparation of a meal I’ll never forget. She personally supervised the cooking of leg of mannizan – which to me was plain mouse – but what mouse, when I ate it with the trimmings she concocted. Also, she had the fat of these huge rodents torn from the meat and gristle and this she applied to the burns on our three bodies, which had been scorched and seared by The Flame. It held some ingredient that soothed like an unguent.

We ate like – like Husshas, I’d say. We devoured and munched til we could eat no more. Never have I needed a meal so badly and never was one so well served up to me.

During this repast, Nurri Kala told us as much as she knew about Zorimi, which was very little. I have recounted that in an earlier chapter for the sake of chronological order. Morgo and I were aghast at the magician’s proposal to make her his mate. The white youth was fiercely moved and left us hunched over our dishes to walk out on the ledge over which the yellow light was just spreading its early morning color.

I was keenly interested in all the girl could tell me about Zorimi’s excursions to the Cavern of Zaan where he amassed the diamonds. After these trips, he periodically disappeared from the caves – sometimes months on end. Where he went, Nurri Kala had no idea. But of one thing she was certain: he always took the Shining Stone – She of the Three Heads – with him, as well as packs of diamonds.

“Jesperson, the jeweler! Jesperson, the jeweler!” the words kept whispering themselves to me. The logic fitted nicely – too nicely, I concluded. If Zorimi was Jesperson in the outer world, why did he so greatly fear my knowing his identity? He alone knew there as a way out of these Himalayan caverns other than the Door of Surrilana. I was a prisoner here until my dying day. He could come and go as he pleased. Or did he fear that I might discover this other exit? Was it so easy to find? That set me to thinking.

But thoughts of Jesperson and Lacrosse and of Zorimi’s true identity were dispelled by the lovely sight of Nurri Kala’s golden beauty. Enigmatically, she studied me with those soft blue and mysterious eyes of hers. Those childlike eyes that I adored – and in a flash, realized that I was adoring.

“Why do you stare at me, Nurri Kala?” I asked. “Are you trying to read my thoughts?”

“I am thinking of what a brave man you are, Derro with the red head. And I have never seen such fiery hair before.” She smiled and dropped her eyes to steal shy glances at me.

“We owe our lives to Morgo,” I said impulsively. “It was his courage and his strength that brought us through all our troubles.”

“He is very brave, too – but he is of the caves. You come from beyond the caverns. I did not think men from that world were so daring.”

“What makes you think that?”

“From what little I remember of it – and that not too clearly. The men did not do the things you and Morgo do. But I expect fine deeds of Morgo. He makes his life here. You have made yourself learn our ways. You have done more than he, Derro.”

“You’re giving me the blarney,” I laughed. “But I always love to hear it from the lips of a pretty woman.”

She drew herself up and tossed her head proudly. “Pretty? Do you think I am pretty, Derro?”

“I think you are beautiful, Nurri Kala.”

“Beautiful? I have heard that word before.”

“And you’ll hear it again, whenever I’m around. Why, I’ll fall in love with you if I’m not careful.”

“Love?” Her eyes kindled with glorious light. The word seemed to awaken some deeply hidden response within her. “I have heard that word. My father used to say it to my mother.”

“I’ll bet he did – if she was anything like you.”

“She was more beautiful, Derro.”

“I don’t believe it!” My Irish gallantry wouldn’t stand for that! Nurri Kala was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen or, I suppose, will ever see again.

Morgo returned to the fireside. “Let us sleep, Derro. We are all weary.” His eyes watched Nurri Kala as she got up. I frowned. The thought crossed my mind and was lost: was he falling in love with her?

I gave up my pallet to the girl and made myself comfortable on a pile of skins near the fire beside Morgo. The embers winked and glowed and a coolness stole into the cave. Sleep did not come to me, though I was exhausted and sore inside from the Hussha’s terrible grip; and I tossed restlessly.

My eyes fell upon Nurri Kala’s white shoulders peeping out from beneath her blanketing pelts. She would catch her death of cold, my civilized mind told me. So I got up and going to her side, drew the covers up over her, pressing them to her throat. Her alabaster skin was soft and warm to my touch.

“Thank you, Derro,” she murmured sleepily.

A little later, back on my pelts, I noticed that Nurri Kala had moved and thrown off the covers. I was about to get up when Morgo stirred and got to his feet. He crossed to the girl’s bed and did as I had done – drew the covers tighter about her throat. She did not speak to him. And as I dozed off, I wondered if he had been watching me.

It was late the next day when I opened my eyes. I had slept the sleep of the dead and awoke refreshed though my insides still hurt. My fears that I was injured internally were soon forgotten in the business afoot.

Nurri Kala was laughingly fixing the cave up, cleaning it cleaner than was the wont of the captive Shammans. She was fastidious, and Morgo obeyed her every wish, arranging dishes here and piling the sleeping skins there, sweeping the dust and ashes over the ledge instead of back into the fireplace. She was demonstrating that feminine touch in a bachelor’s diggings.

“Get up, lazy Derro!” Morgo boomed at me. “Take your shower bath!”

I demurred. Nurri Kala was insistent.

Morgo ordered the bowls filled with water and when I retreated to the ledge he followed me, pounced upon me and started to disrobe me.

“You must take your shower,” Nurri Kala said. “Morgo has been telling me all about it. I must have one, too.”

Breathlessly, with Morgo sitting astride my recumbent form, I explained that where I came from, men and women did not participate in the same bathing facilities. Though I tried to couch my thoughts as delicately as possible, the girl was suddenly seized with an understanding that caused her to blush.

“Oh?” was all she said. When Morgo dragged me back into the cave and stripped me, she refused to come in and witness the ceremony. He doused me with the icy water and I returned the compliment while he choked and sputtered and roared with mirth, calling all the while to Nurri Kala to watch “Derro’s funny custom.” Later when we went off on the hunt, I learned, Nurri Kala had one of the Shammans duplicate the shower for her. She was still shivering from the chill bath when we returned.

Morgo explained that our larder was low and that we needed flesh and greens to eat. A hunt in the forests of Kahli was necessary.

Baku and a Bakkete were summoned and Morgo and I took off, armed with bows and arrows. It was to be my first experience at archery.

We dropped into a thickly wooded spot where Morgo bent close to the ground, studying the earth and looking at the leaves. He pointed out large footprints, oddly fingered, and leaves that had been nibbled.

“Mannizans have been here,” he said. “We shall have Mannizan for food.”

I followed him through the brush and jungle growths while, overhead, the two Bakketes traced our path in the air. Morgo walked with a noiseless, springy step, shoulders thrown back and head cocked to one side. His eyes darted along the ground where the Mannizans had passed.

He stopped and held up a warning finger for me.

“Be careful, Derro,” he said. “They are very dangerous.”

We moved forward noiselessly. I could hear sounds of animals moving behind the forest screen ahead of me. They were gentle sounds and I could not connect them with a ferocious rodent.

Through a rift in the wall of green, we saw them.

Five Mannizans were browsing on the leaves, their noses close to the earth. I was excited. These gray, furry creatures were rats the size of Fords. I had expected to see unusually large mice – not these beasts out of delirium tremens.

Morgo frowned. “This is bad. They are not the Mannizans from Kahli. They are of Shamman.”

“Could Zorimi have sent them here?”

“It is possible. Or perhaps they fled from the Husshas. When one predatory beast raids a cave in large numbers, the less strong flee to another cave – a safer place. But these Mannizans are destructive. They kill the herbs and green we eat.”

“Well, let’s kill a few of them,” I said.

Morgo fitted his arrow to the bow string and took aim. Twang! The arrow, a curve of silver in the yellow light, sang through the air. It went into the beast’s soft skin between the head and shoulders.

The Mannizan reared and squeaked lustily, exposing a red, deep mouth lined with fine sharp teeth. Its white whiskers bristled and then it sank on its side and its breathing diminished into death.

The other Mannizans were startled and they looked at their dead mate with curious eyes – eyes curiously human, too. They regarded one another and scrutinized the surrounding trees.

Morgo gripped my wrist lest I speak. He even held his breath. The four huge Mannizans took to staring in our direction. Then they spread out and began to advance upon us.

“Shoot now,” Morgo whispered fiercely. “Shoot between the head and shoulder. It is a vital spot.”

Morgo sent three arrows at the Mannizans. Only one took effect.

I shot at three. None of mine found their mark.

With a loud squealing, a horrible, bloodcurdling cry of rage, they charged us, burrowing through the green undergrowths straight for our feet. I could see their bristling whiskers flat against their heads, their parted lips with the gleaming white teeth ready to rip.

Bow and arrow were not meant for me! I drew my gun and shot two of the rat creatures. They screamed with the pain of the bullet and dropped in their tracks. Another took fright and turned tail.

The third was upon Morgo, its legs pummeling him as it tried to stand erect. Morgo slipped and fell heavily and, as I went to help him, firing at the beastial rodent, its ponderous body struck at me, hurling me aside.

Morgo was beneath the Mannizan, pinned to the earth by its weight – but beyond the reach of its mouth. I got up and took aim and then could not fire as Morgo and the rodent became as one, a whirling, thrashing mass. He kept his head well away from the gnashing jaws. He was fumbling for his knife. If I fired, I might hit him.

Morgo’s fingers clenched the creature’s furry sides, holding himself close. It was his most advantageous position – for if he jumped clear, the beast could rush him – with set jaws. Then with a mighty effort, the Mannizan shook Morgo from it and my friend sprawled on his back, his arms outstretched, the knife glittering in one hand.

I shot at the beast, but it had pounced, avoiding my bullet. Morgo looked up at the descending rodent, at the red tongue hanging from the foamy mouth – calmly, I thought. The Mannizan fell full upon Morgo and drew its jaw back to sink its teeth into the man’s white flesh. The knife cut through the air, touched the furry coat and disappeared. The jaws quivered and the teeth not touching my friend, locked like a bear trap, severing the extended tongue at once.

Again I fired, directly into the Mannizan’s body and, as it rolled over, Morgo leaped to his feet and drove the knife into the vital spot below the throat.

“Now,” he said with a grin for me, “we have plenty of food. Four Mannizans. But I do not like their presence in Kahli. These creatures from Shamman will drive out all the other good meat and plague us. It will make the hunt unsafe. Besides, only a small portion of their meat is good to eat. We must kill many Mannizans of Shamman to kill our hunger.”

He called to Baku who went off in search of other Bakketes. They would carry our kill back to the cave dwelling. Morgo did not permit all the necessary carriers to follow his progress in the jungle, for the bat men frightened the creatures and sent them to cover.

When the four Mannizans were taken aloft and we were in the arms of our carriers, I had Baku skim the treetops. Birds were routed and in their fright a few flew in my face. Yet I was curious about this invasion of Kahli by the Shamman rats.

I learned what I sought. The jungles were virtually filled with these beastial rodents. The men of Kahli, usually peaceful, were fleeing toward the higher ground from the forests in which they lived. I saw whole families on the march. And, too, I saw men and small parties devoured by herds of Mannizans.

One party – men, women and children, their weapons and dishes and skins on their backs – were walking hurriedly from the path of the Mannizans. From above, I saw them moving directly into a herd of the beasts. My cries and shouts to them meant nothing. They feared even me.

The Mannizans got their scent. They rush into the group of primitive humans was awful. The shrieks and moans of the stricken floated up to me. Men went down before they could put an arrow to bowstring. Mothers and babes in arms were crushed beneath the gray herd. My peppering shots availed little save to draw the baleful eyes of the Mannizan upward for a moment while they gorged themselves.

The laws of nature in these caves were cruel and relentless.

The Husshas drove the Mannizans out of Shamman and the rats were driving the people and creatures of Kahli out of their homes to other caves where they undoubtedly would have to put up a stiff struggle for their very existence.

I was thankful the security afforded by the Bakketes placed me above this struggle for life on the floors of the great caves.

Yet I was to know just such a struggle one day. Those laws of nature were to operate against me – and rob me of all that was dear to me.

Morgo the Mighty by Sean O’Larkin was originally serialized in The Popular Magazine in 1930. Over the next few weeks I’m going to be serializing it again here. Except for correcting the odd typo, I’m reproducing the text as printed in the original publication.

My automatic dropped from my numb fingers and clattered on the floor. The pain from the big mandibles forced open my eyes.

Morgo had slipped – in eel fashion – from the pressure of his enemy’s mandibles, freeing one arm. His knife ripped and hacked at the black tong until he was free of it. The Hussha rose to its legs to hurl its weight upon him, to crush the life out of him before devouring him.

Nimbly, he leaped back and the black ant, missing its quarry in its rush, toppled to the floor. Morgo’s bowie knife was driven far into its back as he leaned over the Hussha. A thick, suety stream of gore burst from the creature’s side and Morgo jumped aside to avoid the torrent. He slit the back of the Rorta that menaced Nurri Kala and his mighty arms swept her from the reach of the fire. She regained her strength, pushed Morgo from her and pointed to me.

In another moment, he had driven his knife into the body of the black ant that held me relentlessly. I felt the grip of the Hussha’s tongs slacken, but they still hung to me while the insect writhed in its dying agonies. Morgo quickly cut the mandibles that bound me to the Hussha and I sank to the floor.

A glance at Nurri Kala assured him that she was all right. Then he picked me up in his arms as if I were a two year old and ran toward the jagged frame of The Flame’s orifice.

“Can you climb that wall, Nurri Kala?” he cried breathlessly to her. She nodded. “Then go ahead of me. I will carry Derro.”

The girl sprang at the wall. Her hands and feet found holds that the sharp eyes of Morgo had spied. She moved with startling agility and was soon high above the frieze of skulls with the pyre of flames roaring at her side, scorching and blistering her fair skin.

Morgo slung me over his shoulder like a sack of meal and began his ascent. My weight slowed his progress but his might carried the two of us upward with ease.

With my head hanging down and the pain within me numbing my senses, I was aware only that my eyes gazed into a sea of struggling black and red ants. The Husshas that would have followed us – we were good fleshy prey – were forced to turn their attention to the venomous Rortas. The chamber of skulls was a shambles, its floor smeared with gore and the dotted bodies of the reds and the blacks fighting for supremacy.

Nurri Kala had reached a ledge. Morgo told her to follow it and we were presently in a dark gallery. This was one of the many corridors that honeycombed the plateau of The Flame that Morgo told me about – the one into which he had fallen the first day we met Zorimi.

For a time we watched the Husshas pore into the chamber below from Shamman through the far opening. And the red Rortas piled down the steps on the opposite side in a steady, cascading stream. The advance of the black ants was so formidable, there was no turning back or aside for them. Those that were not killed by the poison of the Rortas, marched straight into the hissing flames.

The Rortas, feeding this chamber without control, could not stem their own advance and mingling with the black ants, were swept in the procession of death into the pyre. At last, I thought, the strange forces of nature that sent the blind ants to destruction were in our favor.

But I hoped too soon.

Some sixth sense warned those insect that they were parading to their doom. They sought other means of escape. They moved toward the walls and presently, were climbing the sides like flies, reds and blacks alike, titanic monsters of the insect world.

“We must risk getting away from them by taking this tunnel,” Morgo said. “It is our only hope.”

I insisted on being set on my feet. A few steps convinced me that I could still walk. And I did not want to be a burden to Morgo in this flight for our lives. The pain subsided a little and I was able to stagger and stumble along with the support of Morgo’s supporting arms.

We plunged into the darkness of the tunnel, Nurri Kala just ahead of us.

“If we can find a path that goes higher,” the girl said, “I think that we can cross over the ceiling of the chamber and get into tunnels in which I know my way.”

“Then use your own judgement, Nurri Kala,” Morgo said to her. “Be our leader in this darkness.”

We moved forward as quickly as possible, despite my weakness. The ants were behind us. I could hear their scraping and scratching in the tunnel.

Nurri Kala got us to an ascending tunnel, and I felt the walls grow damp and the odor of decay assailed my nostrils. We were leaving the vicinity of The Flame. I was numb but my sense of direction told me that we were easily above the chamber, turning into a corridor over its roof. Still the sounds of the ants escaping death in the chamber and pursuing us, were audible.

“It is here,” Nurri Kala cried. “I know this path now.”

Morgo sighed and my energies seemed renewed as we pressed closer after her.

We wound to the right and to the left, we descended a sharp decline, passing many darker mouths of corridors from which foul breaths were exhaled in the chilled air. I prayed that the girl was taking us to the top or to an opening in the wall of the cliff that defined the mound. She seemed to know her way, turning into corridors that were only black holes to me.

“I know these walls by the feel of them,” Nurri Kala said. “Many times I have walked through them – playing at exploration. Zorimi forbade it – but I had no other diversion.”

I hoped her former diversions would profit us a little now.

“There is a room with a door, if I can find it,” she called back to us. “Zorimi used it to store his Shining Stones when he returned with them from Zaan.”

Ahead of us I heard a sudden scraping noise. The ants. Rortas or Husshas? Had we circled in our wanderings? Were we about to cross their paths? I listened, pausing for breath.

The scraping sound was still behind us.

And ahead of us now, too.

We were running into another horde of ants. Morgo pressed my hand, signifying that he, too, had heard, and he put a finger to my lips. He didn’t want me to startle the girl with our discovery.

The ants moving ahead of us were now more audible. My body turned cold and a sweat broke out. I was afraid.

We passed a tunnel, sensing it only by the air wafted at us. The ants were in that corridor. The path ahead was once more silent. We hurried on. Two streams of ants were flowing behind us, a molten river of venomous or crushing death.

“I have found it,” Nurri Kala shouted to us. Her voice was distant. “It is the door to the room.”

We ran in the direction of her voice.

She called again, more distantly. Morgo caught my wrist and turned me about and we retraced our steps. When every second counted, the darkness lead us astray. We had entered the wrong tunnel.

Morgo shouted our location. The girl replied and in a few minutes we were touching her hands. I felt the panels of a huge thick door made of a wood unknown to me. It swung on heavy iron hinges.

I gasped with a new fright. Had we reached this supposed haven of safety, only to find the door locked?

“It opens,” Morgo said softly, happily. My relief was so great it weakened me and Morgo carried me into the room, the size of which was denied us by the gloom.

“There is a bar in here,” Nurri Kala said. “Zorimi used to lock himself in when he was counting his Shining Stones.”

She and Morgo searched for it with outstretched fingers. They ran along the walls and then crawled over the floor on their hands and knees.

Morgo muttered in pain several times. “These stones are sharp. They cut my flesh.”

The Shining Stones of Zorimi! I knew them for diamonds! No wonder Morgo’s skin was pierced if it scratched the hard brilliants. I imagined the room covered with a diamond dust that would shame a king’s ransom.

“I have it,” Morgo cried. “The bar. And it is heavy.”

I listened to him closing the door. The sound of the bolt dropping into the iron hafts was music to my terrified ears. For a time, the Rortas and the Husshas were barred from our flesh and blood.

“Derro,” Morgo said to me, “can you strike a fire with one of your — what do you call them – matches?”

Fool that I was, I hadn’t thought of my matches earlier. They might have helped us in our mad plunge through the dark corridors. I took out a pack and lighted a match.

We were in a small chamber about fifteen feet square. The door was at one end and in the wall opposite it there was a tiny hole. When the light went out, Morgo went to the hole and, gripping it, lifted himself until his chin was level with the bottom of it. I saw him thus when I struck a second match.

“I think this hole leads to the outer cave, and not another tunnel,” Morgo said. “The air is fresh and pure.”

But I was paying no head to his words. My eyes were feasting on the sight of the floor. My guess was right. It was strewn with diamond dust, small particles that sang a glittering song in the light. So this was Zorimi’s treasure room. And Zaan was a cave of diamonds. My thoughts harked back to poor Jim Craig’s words – “a mountain of diamonds.” I wanted to visit Zaan.

Morgo was tearing at the hole with his bare hands. I made more light to aid him. Nurri Kala went to his side and began to work with him. The chalk, moist and soft, crumbled under their digging and pulling. The hole widened a little.

Silently, Morgo went about his task of tearing a hole in the side of the room. I saw the diameter grow. The chalk was like putty in the hands of those two children of these primitive caves.

When the hole was wide enough for a body to climb through and waist-high to the floor, Morgo leaned through it. He jumped back elated and rubbed his bloody hands on his sides.

“It is Shamman.” He said. “We are high up in the face of the cliff.”

“But we can’t climb up or down unless we make footholds,” I pointed out. “What good is your opening?”

In the light of a match I saw Morgo grin at me. “Listen to me, Derro.”

He leaned through the hole again and uttered a loud, shrill wail. It was the old schoolboy’s signal call I heard him use when he summoned Baku and the Bakketes.

Morgo’s ruse was a clever one. The Bakketes brought us to the plateau and they would effect our release from its bowels via the hole, if they still lived. Again Morgo called, and paused to strain his ears for an answering cry.

There was none.

The Bakketes were undoubtedly routed or vanquished by the Shamman bats. Zorimi had set a trap for us. He had waited until our forces were concentrated over the mound and then he released his hordes of human-headed bats upon us and had beat our army into the sea of monstrous black ants. And Morgo, with his bare hands, had prepared for us a door to freedom – which we might never use.

Something struck the barred door. Someone was pounding upon it.

“Open! Let me in!” a muffled voice cried. “Let me in!”

It was Zorimi.

He had fled from the Husshas swarming over the plateau to the safety of the secret tunnels. Now these very hiding places were filled with the creatures he sought to escape.

“The Rortas! The Husshas!” Zorimi wailed. “They are coming. The ants will destroy me!”

That voice, though it was Zorimi’s, was more familiar to me with its pitch of terror. Lacrosse? Jesperson? I had heard Lacrosse cry out in fear when Kenvon commanded us to enter the Door of Surrilana. I did not recognize this frightened voice as Lacrosse’s.

“Let me in, Morgo!” Zorimi cried. “I know you are in there.”

“Be careful, Morgo,” I said in a low voice. “It might be a trick – to overpower us.”

“Zorimi has a power over the Rortas,” Nurri Kala said. “He is a magician and does not fear them.” Yet I detected in her words a trace of doubt for the magician’s powers.

We drew close to the door and listened. The man on the other side was breathing with labored efforts. And I could hear the approaching ants – scratching and scraping on the walls of the corridors beyond, moving upon us in their blindness.

“Morgo! Have pity on me!” Zorimi shrieked. “They are near. I can hear them.”

Morgo’s hands fell upon the bar and moved as if to lift it. I scrambled to my feet and laid a resisting hand on his.

“He’s a trickster,” I said.

Zorimi evidently heard me. “This is no trick, Morgo! I swear it! Let me in! Let me in!”

Morgo brushed my hand from his. “I cannot let even him die such a death, Derro. Draw your gun and be ready for trouble. Strike a light, too. I must let him in.”

“No! No!” Nurri Kala cried. “I am afraid. He is evil. It is a trick, as Derro says!”

My gun was in my hand. I knew I could not argue with Morgo. His voice forbade it. A match was lighted.

The bar slid out of place. The door swung inward.

Zorimi, hidden in his cowl of skins, tumbled into the room.

“I mean to learn my secret now,” Morgo said to me as he went to replace the bar, “if it is the last thing I do!”

The bar was whipped from his hand.

The door burst open. In the flickering of my match, I saw Husshas and Rortas coming in upon us – their bulks red and black in the momentary light. I fired into their midst.

Nurri Kala screamed. I felt Morgo dragging me backward to the opening in the cliff.

“We can hurl ourselves out,” he said. “That is a better death than this. I had no idea the ants were so close to Zorimi.”

The magician shrieked out in the darkness. I felt his mass of pelts brush against me as he staggered.

I struck another match to get our bearings.

The door was choked with the ant bodies, soldiers and workers trying to gain an entry. In their eagerness for our flesh – having undoubtedly followed our spore through the labyrinth – they made for us a temporary blockade against the thousands behind them.

To Be Continued!

Morgo the Mighty by Sean O’Larkin was originally serialized in The Popular Magazine in 1930. Over the next few weeks I’m going to be serializing it again here. Except for correcting the odd typo, I’m reproducing the text as printed in the original publication.

Morgo listened to my story about Jesperson, who for some unknown reason, eloped with the De Haviland and for whom parties were searching the Nepalese jungles when I took off from Darjeeling for a day’s trip to Kenchenjunga. What a day! I had no reason to suspect that Jesperson intended to assail the Door of Surrilana. There had been no talk, in our trip from Bombay to Darjeeling, of his even being in the mountain.

If Harvey Jesperson were Zorimi, what I could not understand was how he came by Her of the Three Heads – the Shining Stone. That was in Jim Craig’s possession in Darjeeling on a night when Jesperson was supposedly lost in the jungles. Had Jesperson gotten the dacoit to steal it? Somehow, I doubted that. I couldn’t believe it.

But if this message – this warning – was to be believed, Lacrosse was or had been alive somewhere. Probably in Shamman. He might have seen us in the arms of the Bakketes and enticed one of those bat men to bring us this message. Yet it was my hunch that Lacrosse was Zorimi himself. Was this a trick on Zorimi’s part to confuse us? And did he know that we still lived after our descent into the cave of the green fungus?

Morgo listened to my spoken thoughts. At length he said:

“Derro, Zorimi knows all things. If we died in the unclean growth, he would have known. If we escaped, that, too, he would know. He has creatures in Kahli that tell him.”

I laughed. The thought of spies in these caverns filled with primitive beings was amusing. But that was what Morgo meant to convey to me.

“Still. if Zorimi knows we live, I cannot see the point of this message,” I said.

“Zorimi’s ways are strange – mysterious I think you say. If life is spared to us, we may learn more.”

Again we took off to seek the Raba of the Husshas. In the air, I could not shake off the idea that Jesperson might have entered the caves in the De Haviland. In view of what I had come to see and learn in the past fortnight, I believed anything was possible. Jesperson was presumably a prosperous jeweler from New York. I first laid eyes on him in Bombay and undertook the commission to pilot him into Nepal.

Harvey Jesperson, a jeweler! Diamonds in the Himalayas! Was that the tie-up? Did Jesperson get his diamonds from one of these caves and sell them in the outer world? As I’ve written, I’d come to believe that anything was possible now.

It was a clever trick of his, stealing the De Haviland after pretending to know nothing of aviation. His desire was to vanish from the face of the earth, penetrate the Door of Surrilana and make his way to his cache. Then he would leave the caves by some other and safer route. But I found all this hard to entertain. Jesperson with his round rosy cheeks and blue eyes and stubby figure was hardly the adventurous type for such an exploit. I refused to consider him in the role of Zorimi.

I noticed now that the Husshas, felling trees and gorging on the leaves and bark, revealed an open space in their ranks. In this traveled a larger ant than the others with fierce mandibles that tore tree fiber and bark apart and swallowed it, his sides heaving with the great gulps.

Morgo circled over this Hussha and I sensed that this was the Raba – or king of these ants. A mutter – a sibilant clicking sound – came from Morgo’s mouth as he hovered directly above the Raba. The big ant reared up on its hind legs and waved its mandibles slowly, a gesture of peace, I thought. The moan of munching in his vicinity ceased and soldiers and workers alike stopped eating and rested.

Baku brought me down to Morgo’s side. The parleying went on – a clicking language that reminded me of Hottentots I once heard talking the side show of a circus. The Hussha tongue was like the Hottentot. That the ant could talk I accepted as fact, though I only had Morgo’s word for it. Probably it was not speech as we know it but an exchange of word pictures in sound signs.

The Raba’s head was twice as large as a man’s and it glistened like a beady ball of malachite, punctuated near the throat by a wide blue slit, the mouth. It was the most monstrous insect head I had ever seen.

And there were no eyes in the Raba.

I looked at the other Husshas. Like the driver ants of Africa, this black, sinister horde, myriad in number, was blind – stone blind. How curious are the quirks and machinations of nature! They lived lustily and moved with military precision – nevertheless they could not see!

Morgo signaled to Baku and we rose high over the jet river of ant life and flew swiftly toward the door to Kahli. My friend had news for me and I was eager to hear it. We reached Morgo’s cave without mishap and, on landing, I went hungrily for my cigarettes to quiet nerves somewhat disturbed by the sight of the ugly ants. What if we had fallen in their midst? I remembered the messenger Bakkete’s fate!

“The Raba is our friend,” Morgo told me. “He will turn the army of Husshas into Shamman tonight. ”

“They will not pass through Kahli?” I cried aghast, thinking of what might happen in this pleasant land if the black ants marched through it.

“No, they do not come in here, Derro. It is an understanding I have with the Raba. Once I saved him from the river in a lower cavern, and in his strange way, he is my friend. No, the Husshas will enter Shamman through another opening that leads from Verizon.”

“How long will it take them?”

“A day and a night to reach the plateau, I think.” Morgo was fascinated with the idea of mustering such an army for the attach on Zorimi. “The Husshas can hide during the period of light. They will remain in the chalk and under the plant growth in Shaman, moving secretly.”

Again I thought of the Driver ants. They hide from the tropical sun of Africa during the daytime under leaves – often building tunnels across sunny patches – with leaves or the bodies of soldier who were destroyed by the sun. There was no heat to fear in Shamma; only the eyes of Zorimi’s people.

“By tomorrow night,” Morgo went on, “they will be able to swarm over the plateau. But there is another danger, Derro.”

“Surely not Zorimi’s magic?” I laughed.

“Worse than that. The red ants of Shamman. The Rortas. We never saw them. They live deep in the soft chalk, yet they are not unlike the Husshas in the way they live. They have an army life and while they are smaller and less strong, their bite is full of poison.”

“Poisonous to man?”

Morgo nodded. “To all creatures that breathe. Their bite stops the breathing.”

So these Rortas were capable of injecting a poison that, once in the blood, caused asphyxiations. I began to ply my friend with question. Were they enemies of the Husshas? Could Zorimi command them? Were they controllable?

“Yes, they are enemies of the Husshas – and Zorimi can speak to them as I spoke to the Raba. I think that if he knows the Husshas are in Shamman, he will turn loose the Rortas to combat them.”

“Then the Husshas will be destroyed!” I said, feeling that our plan was threatened with failure.

“Unless they kill the Rortas first. Their long killing teeth are not hurt by the Rorta poison – only their bodies. And the Husshas are clever fighters.”

I considered this doubtfully. Were we turning loose forces that might ultimately defeat our ends? Morgo said that the Husshas were treacherous. And now he spoke of venomous Rortas. I feared the more for Nurri Kala’s safety.

“If the Husshas take a day and a night to reach the plateau,” I said, “when will we have to be on hand?”

“Tomorrow night when the light begins to fail in Shamman. The Husshas will travel tonight and all tomorrow. I will send Bakketes to learn of the girl’s safety when it is dark. If she is dead, then I want Zorimi for a prisoner. I mean to learn from him the secret about me.”

This was my first inkling that Morgo was thinking about his identity too strongly. Zorimi’s betrayal of such knowledge had whetted my friend’s curiosity. Yet I wondered if Zorimi still lived. Hadn’t I seen him drop with my parting shot?

We spent the day resting and plotting. And when night came, Morgo went out on the ledge and summoned the Bakketes – four of them – to act as our scouts. I noted that Baku was one of them.

A little later, I missed Morgo and searched for him. He was not in or about the cave. The Shamman servants could tell me nothing when I made incomprehensible signs to them. But I understood. Baku’s presence among the scouting Bakketes was the key. Morgo had gone with him – to make certain that the information we wanted was correct.

But why had he refused to take me along, or tell me of his intention? I worried and tried to keep away and could not.

It was Morgo who aroused me from a heavy slumber the next morning. He had the shower baths ready and made me bathe with him before he would tell me a word of the previous night’s adventure. He parried my questions with laughter and splashed under the cold water the servants poured on us. I shivered and began to regret the introduction of such a custom into Kahli.

At breakfast he broke his silence. “I thought you needed rest, Derro. After what happened to you in the cave of the unclean growths, you were tired. You are not used to our life here – and tonight we will need your strength with mine – for Nurri Kala.”

“Then you did see her – alive?”

He nodded. “Yes, I had Baku carry me to Shamman. I knew if I told you I was going, you would have gone with me. But you needed sleep more than adventure – we were lucky – and went unobserved. None of the Shamman bats smelled us out.”

“But you did see her – Nurri Kala?”

“I did. At the opening to the room with the skulls. She was inside talking with Zorimi, her beauty glowing with the light of The Flame. I am sure she is not a priestess of Zorimi’s evil worship.”

“I  know she isn’t.”

“Zorimi is said to know all things – all that happens in living creatures’ heads.” Morgo gave a little laugh. “He did not know that Baku held me at his window that I might spy upon him. When I saw that the white girl lived, I was happy. We flew back to Kahli immediately. Tonight we shall have her with us.”

“I hope so.”

“You fear the ants? But we have the Bakketes, Derro. They will carry us over the fighting.”

I shook my head, worried.

“If the Shamman bats attack us, we will be beaten to the ground. The ants – red or black – will have us then. And there will be little we can do. What are a few arrows or bullets against millions of onrushing ants bent on making a meal of you?”

“Have courage, Derro. And I have another plan. We must try to take Zorimi, too. I want to talk to him. Make him tell me the secrets he knows – and then remove his evil from this life.”

Morgo’s voice rang with a fierce intensity as he uttered these last few words. He was an avenger now – the scourge of evil things in cave life that had been good to him!

I spent the day cleaning two .38s, mending the torn-out sleeve in my wind-breaker and trying to prevail upon Morgo to use a gun. He would have none of that, however. His arrows, he said, were his weapons and he preferred a knife to all the guns in the world, for fighting in caves was at close grips. He was more accustomed to man-to-man combat and overpowering an enemy than quickly killing him. Decidedly, he was not a killer.

The yellow afternoon light began to wane. Morgo hurriedly gave instructions to Baku. And presently the legions of Bakketes were in the air before our dwelling. The prospect of meeting the Shamman bats held no fears for them. They, too, were fighters, when Morgo called upon them for aid.

I cautioned Morgo not to take off before darkness was well upon the caverns. We must run no risk of being seen. We must avoid the Shamman bats. But Morgo pointed out that the Husshas were undoubtedly close to the plateau – that there was little time to lose. We had, perforce, to be at Zorimi’s mound when the Husshas began their attack.

I committed myself to Baku. The feelings of a man about to go over the top surged through me. I wanted to take Morgo’s hand and thank him for saving my life in the cave of the green fungus.

“Do not let us grasp hands, Derro,” he said to me, his eyes apparently reading my thoughts. “We are not parting. We will meet again.”

“You’re an optomist.”

“Our cause is right. We will come through and see each other again.”

I thought of the ants, and the bludgeoning winged Shamman bats. “I hope so.”

I was filled with dire forebodings. Our luck could not hold out forever. We had tried it deeply, too, in escaping those fingers of decay that coiled about us in the jungle of fungus. My Irish pessimism put me in good spirits.

We went aloft and straight for the tunnel into Shamman. The light began to vanish quickly – the eternal wick being lowered in the rooms of those eternal caverns beneath the Himalayas.

I wondered how the Husshas could travel so rapidly. A day and night to cover at least two hundred miles. Their bodies were great in size, I remembered, and I speculated on their moving with the speed of a fast horse. Little did I know that they could move even faster.

The stalactites of gray Shamman were devoid of the bat men of that cave. Steadily, wary of attack from above, we moved on the plateau. I could barely make out the thread of smoke from The Flame.

The spiked floor was a sea of veiled grayness below us. It moved like a leaden, molten sea beneath us. All was still. There were no signs of a living creature in all Shamman.

Morgo cried out to me and I heard him urging his carrier Bakkete on the faster. Looking ahead, I saw a black line emerging from the gray sea of stalagmites.

The Husshas were leaving their cover. They were attacking. They were ready to swarm upon the plateau of The Flame!

Baku flew lower than the legions behind us. I drew my gun.

I knew that if the Shamman bats fell upon us and we were beaten down into the river of black ants, Shamman and Bakkete alike would perish.

Now the top of the mound was alive with men and women – the Silurians. They had seen the Husshas. They understood. They knew what death in the mandibles of the big warlike ants meant.

Nearer and nearer we moved in narrowing circles. Still not Shamman bats were in sight.

I saw Zorimi now, a puny figure, running hither and yon, exhorting the Silurians. But they move steadily away from him, clambering down the other side of the mound, fleeing into the darkening grayness of Shamman’s ugly floor. They did not mean to fight if they could help it.

A scream burst from my lips.

The Husshas were at the base of the plateau. Their hordes flooded around it. In a few minutes, all retreat from the mound would be cut off by a circle of mandible blades.

Where was Nurri Kala? That was my only thought. Probably within the mound.

The Husshas began to climb the sides of the plateau – their bodies wagging from side to side. They were like flies strolling up a high wall. The precipitous sides were no obstacle to them.

Shrill, pitiable shrieks came from the far side of the plateau to which the Silurians had retreated. The last to leave the mound had fallen into the black crushing tongs of the Husshas. Death was already loose in the home of The Flame.

Zorimi was now a lone figure, standing on high crag, looking up at us.

What was he waiting for? Where were his bats?

I wondered too easily.

The whir of wings sounded overhead. The Bakketes screeched. The Shamman bats screeched more savagely. I could see their onslaught in the thickness of the descending gloom. Thousands met thousands fiercely. Bakkete and Shamman bat, bodies locking mortal combat, dropped into the pools of Husshas. The moan of munching began. The scores of fallen bats were like manna to the marching insects.

Above was the blackness of fighting wings. Below was the jet mass of ants in attacking phalanxes. Morgo and I hung between two brands of death. And Nurri Kala was still invisible.

Following Morgo’s move, I dropped to the plateau.

Heedless of my friend’s shouted warnings, the nature of which I couldn’t make out because of the aerial melee, I ran to the steps I knew of. They led down to the chamber of skulls.

“Nurri Kala!” I shouted. “Nurri Kala!”

A moment later I heard Morgo’s voice behind me, taking up the cry. We reached the smoky blue room of The Flame together. It was deserted on first sight.

Then I saw six Silurians standing guard over the white girl. She pressed her body against the chalk walls, crouching behind them, her eyes freighted with apprehension. She seemed to have some feeling of the danger that beset her. All of us now.

Morgo spoke gutturally to the scale-skinned men. They sprang at him.

I shot two of them. That stemmed their attack and they backed toward the opening that gave on Shamman.

Nurri Kala ran to me and threw herself into my arms.

“To the stairs!” Morgo cried. “We must get back to the Bakketes!”

Holding tightly to the girl, her sturdy grace beneath her silken tunic responding to my guidance, I piloted her toward the stairs we had descended.

The Silurians shrieked, terrified. They ran from the opening, but I saw one of them held fast there. The black ring of a Hussha’s mandibles were about him. He was flicked over backward into the mass of ants below.

The Husshas – blind and hungry and bent on destruction – were about to enter the chamber of skulls. I could see the glint of The Flame’s rays on their massive jet heads. We were all one to them – Silurian and white man – prey!

I stopped halfway up the step that I thought led to freedom.

Coming down, tumbling down, lighted by the fire of the ritual pyre, were the red ants – smaller than the Husshas but more loathsome. These Rortas with their crimson bodies glowed like bulbous balls of illuminated blood.

I drew Nurri Kala back to the floor of the chamber. The top of the plateau was alive with the Rortas. Zorimi had summoned them. Or they had been drawn from their underground borings by the scent of the Husshas, their eternal enemies?

Morgo was close to The Flame, his white body scarlet in its light. He had come to grips with a Hussha, his thews swelling and struggling like fiery snakes in that evil light. I saw him slash the ant’s right mandible from its shoulder with his knife.

My legs were suddenly enclosed in a vise. A Hussha’s mandibles held me fast. I poured lead from my .38 into its great body. Nurri Kala backed against the wall, watching the Rortas who continued slowly to move toward us. Her eyes were glazed with horror.

There were forty Husshas in the chamber of the skulls. Oddly enough, in that moment of peril, my eyes counted them. The Rortas still tumbled down the stairs.

The two tribes of ants met. I saw Husshas recoil. I saw their mandibles peck at the tails of the red bodies. I saw the black ants, bitten by the red, stop abruptly and curl up. Death was upon us all. I could hear the crunch of those huge black insect tongs upon the hard surface of the Rorta’s bodies.

Still the Husshas approached us.

Morgo, Nurri Kala and I back toward The Flame. The heat of that pillar of blazing inferno scorched our white skins. The blistering pain was intense.

A Hussha, rearing awkwardly on its hind legs, threw itself upon Morgo, pinioning his arms to his sides helplessly against its mighty mandibles. He staggered and went down under the heavy black body. I ran to his assistance as his knife slithered impotently over the creature’s sides, glancing off for lack of space in which to strike a blow that would bury the blade.

Nurri Kala screamed a warning to me.

I turned too late. The pressure of another black ant’s tongs caught me at the sides above the hips. The wind was being squeezed out of me in spasmodic tightenings of the Hussha’s grip. I could not turn around to send a bullet crashing into the ant’s vital spots.

The girl, sensing my desire, reached out for the gun.

But instead of taking it, she recoiled with a mute shriek and tottered close to the brink of the fiery pit. I saw a Rorta crawling toward her. Unable to bear the fierce heat, Nurri Kala fought a faintness, induced by horror and physical pain, and then succumbed to it, sinking limply to the floor at the edge of The Flame, its awful heat searing her white flesh.

Morgo’s white muscles quieted in their struggles. Hadn’t he seen Nurri Kala? The Rorta was ready to inject its venom into her beauty, destroying it forever! I saw that his eyes were closed as if in sleep. Was he dead?

I clenched my teeth to fight the pain that flashed through me like liquid fire. My vision faded. The life was being crushed out of me.

To Be Continued!

This ends Part One of Morgo the Mighty. The first chapter of Part Two will post in one month, on April 22.

Morgo the Mighty by Sean O’Larkin was originally serialized in The Popular Magazine in 1930. Over the next few weeks I’m going to be serializing it again here. Except for correcting the odd typo, I’m reproducing the text as printed in the original publication.

In my delirium, evoked by the gases from the red lips on which I lay, I dreamed that Morgo was caught in the coils of fungus, fighting mightily to tear them asunder, to overcome their insidious strength and save me. I could see him, in Baku’s arms, enmeshed in the drooping, swaying threads that held sinews of steel.

Vaguely he moved toward me. Baku’s pterodactyl wings beat sturdily, cutting the threads, sending them in wafting spirals to the floor below. Nearer and nearer Morgo approached.

A lucid moment came over me and I cursed the tricks a dying man’s brain play on him. I was doomed. I knew it. And all of Morgo’s might could not avail me anything in this life.

Again my senses departed and I saw my friend through a haze. He cried out to me to take courage – I dreamed the words – and I could only see his lip moving without sound coming from them. Now he was caught tightly, the thread coiled many times around his body. His bowie knife flashed in the green glow and the thread was severed, the coils still hanging from him. He was urging Baku closer to the lip that were now sinking backward. At any moment I would slide into the heart of the giant red-mouth fungus, to perish, slowly suffocating in the odor of inner putrescence.

My fingers bit into the reddish crust for a hold. The stuff flaked off at each grasp. I was slipping. Only my feet had a small purchase. The lips tilted sharply inward. Another degree and I could hold on no longer.

Why did I fight for life? It was so foolish! I was doomed. The thought of my gun occurred to me. There was salvation. A death that held no qualms for me. It was quick and neat and my consciousness would not then be fodder for this relentless fungus. A bullet would send me sliding into the red maw, unaware of what would happen to my flesh.

I held fast to the flaking lip with one hand while the other struggled for the automatic in my belt. My fingers reached the holster. I got it out. It slipped into my hand and the trigger finger felt its mark.

Quickly, I brought the gun up to my temple. Just one shot! I would remember nothing else!

“Derro! Derro!” A hand touched my wrist, grasped it. “Are you alive?”

I guess I just groaned.

The automatic was knocked from my grasp. Two strong hands caught my wrists. I felt myself being drawn off the reddish lip, the flaky stuff sucking at my clothing.

The rest I don’t remember – and don’t want to.

When I came to my senses again, cool sweet air was being pumped in and out of my hungry lungs. Morgo was pressing my stomach to make me breathe harder. Without his aid, my respiration was dangerously close to stopping.

“Sleep, Derro, sleep,” Morgo whispered. “We are safe now, away from unclean growths.”

I sighed and knew that he and Baku had successfully made the fight from the jungle of fungus to upper Shamman. It was still dark and I feared sleep.  Whenever I closed my eyes I saw those green threads whipping themselves around me, drawing me up to the red lips. I felt those lips turn inward to suck me into the bowels of the fungus itself. I was afraid of sleep now, but my body was sorely tired and its energy spent.

“Baku has gone for another Bakkete to carry us,” Morgo said. He spoke of other things but I dropped into a deep, exhausted coma so deep that even nightmares could not reach me there.

It was morning when I woke up. We were back in Morgo’s cave in warm Kahli. The Bakketes had brought us there during the darkness, through I was sound asleep throughout the trip.

I ate ravenously, as did Morgo. Conversation was imminent but we had to feed our strength first. My flying clothes needed cleaning, being covered with the mold from the green world, and one of the Shamman servants saw to that. And I had to bathe my body to rid my mind of the thought that any part of the fungus still adhered to it.

Morgo was highly amused by my ablutions. He bathed in a river he spoke about but never in his cave. His laughter was merry and boyish while he watched the Shamman servants douche me with cold spring water that made me gasp. Bowl after bowl of the clear liquid was thrown over my head and body, and I scraped myself clean.

Presently Morgo slid out of his skin and submitted his massive proportions to a similar ceremony. He thought it swell and promised more such showers every day. His thews rippled like pythons under his white, gleaming skin as he squirmed under the cold splashes. I noted his strength and was thankful for it – for that, as well as his courage, had saved my life the night before. Then we went out out on the rocks overlooking Kahli, to bask in the warm, yellow light and dry ourselves.

I broke open a carton of cigarettes and smoked. Morgo declined the invitation to join me in this luxury. He had tried a cigarette the week before – with dire results. Tobacco was not for this primitive son of the gods.

“I have been thinking,” I said, “about the girl, Nurri Kala.”

Morgo’s eyes brightened and he looked at me. “She was very beautiful, Derro.”

“I do not believe her dead. The Shamman bats took her. And I’m positive Zorimi has her again.

“Zorimi must want her badly to have a bat take her prisoner instead of killing her.”

“He knows something about her – and you – that neither of us know. But she is white like we are, Morgo – and we cannot let her remain in his hands. I can’t fathom whether he’s a white man who knows the caves or a Shamman who has been in the outer world.”

“I only know that he is evil and must be destroyed. But the girl – we must save her, Derro. We must bring her back to live with us.”

That was in my mind all the while. And I wondered whether I wanted to rescue her from Zorimi because she was a white girl or because she was a woman for whom I felt love. She was beautiful. She was sweet and innocent. She was all a man could ask for. And I refused to admit to myself that I wanted her for a mate. Man are slow to recognizing their love for woman. For they can’t quite understand just how or when or where the process began. Yet I had seen Nurri Kala and had talked to her. I felt that I knew her a little – and wanted to know her better.

“In Nurri Kala,” I said, “we have cause for another expedition to Zorimi’s plateau. But this time we must be more cautious. As for my friends, Harker and Lacrosse, I guess they’re dead.”

But the word “Lacrosse” stuck in my throat a little. Hadn’t I seen Zorimi start when, on impulse, I called him by Lacrosse’s name? Could it be that Lacrosse escaped death in the Junkers crash and was now cast in the role of the magician?

I turned the thought over in my mind. Back in Darjeeling, Jim Craig had muttered about diamonds. He spoke of a mountain-high cache in the Himalayas. And he intimated that the pectoral was the key to the treasure. Now I knew that this key – She of the Three Heads – was called the Shining Stone and that Zorimi used it in his deadly rituals.

The pectoral was stolen from Jim Craig’s body by a dacoit. Was the dacoit in Lacrosse’s pay? Was Lacrosse a man who knew the secrets of these caverns and who went abroad in the outer world with some of the wealth supposedly hidden here? I had only his and Kenvon’s word for it that he was a naturalist from Princeton.

Kenvon was a little mad. It would have been easy for Lacrosse to arrange for the Door of Surrilana map to fall into the millionaire’s hands; for him to finance the flight over Kanchenjunga. Kenvon was gullible, I thought. And it was prearranged that he was to insist on the entrance to the Door. For some reason, Lacrosse might have wanted to hide his hand – even from Harker and me – knowing full well that death was always ahead for us.

The attack of the Shamman bats on the Junkers was unforseen. But after the crash – from which I escaped with my usual Irish luck – Lacrosse produced the Shining Stone and returned to his cave identity of Zorimi. He put Kenvon to death. Hadn’t I seen the decapitated body? And then Harker was carried off to The Flame. Hadn’t I seen his head in frieze of skulls?

Of Lacrosse, there was no trace. And Zorimi betrayed fear when addressed as Lacrosse. My conclusion was not wholly lacking in logic.

Zorimi! In him, I was dealing with a man of flesh and blood like myself, I was confident. He was not a Silurian or a Shamman. His English was too good. And he knew the identities and stories of Morgo and Nurri Kala who came from my world. All this I related to Morgo as we dried and grew warm. He was impressed by the logic of it.

“But, man or magician,” Morgo said, “I am not afraid of Zorimi. And I feel we must do something to save the girl from him. He is evil. I feel that.”

“Since the Bakketes cannot withstand the strength of the Shamman bats,” I pointed out, “we must adopt other measures for her rescue – for ascertaining that she is Zorimi’s prisoner again.”

“I will send three Bakketes into Shamman when the darkness comes. They will be cautious and will seek news of her.”

“Good! But then how can we effect a rescue? Have you no people or beasts with which we can combat Zorimi?”

“There are the ants,” Morgo said thoughtfully, “but they cannot be trusted. Once I saved their leader, the Raba of the Hussha tribe who lives in a cave nearby. They are fearless but very destructive. They might turn on us – or if they kill Zorimi, they might devour Nurri Kala as well as those who try to hold her. Once they are started on warfare and forage, there is no stopping them.”

“We can hover over their advance with the Bakketes and take the girl into the air.”

“To do that we must also fight the Shamman bats. Our Bakketes are not strong enough, Derro. But the Shammans and the Silurians fear the ants. Zorimi’s magic is supposed to keep the Husshas out of Shamman. It is really the dearth of food there which sends them to other caverns.”

“Can you talk to this Raba?” I asked incredulously.

“Of course. These ants have life and manners like our own. They have a language and live in tribes. But they are treacherous.”

I decided without hesitation.

“Then let’s visit this Raba and try to enlist his aid. I’m sure if we can take enough Bakketes into Shamman we can win our point – even against the mightier Shamman bats.”

We went inside and dressed. My clothes no longer reeked with the stench of the fungus and I quickly forgot the experience, helped by events that rapidly piled themselves upon us.

“There is a great cave next to Kahli,” Morgo said, “that is called Verizon. It is much like Kahli but warmer, and there are more beasts and reptiles living in it – beasts such as the small mannizan, the snake you call the python, the dog-headed lizards and catbirds. They prey upon the men and women who live there much like the Shammans. But all flee the ants.”

“We shall see. Let us be off.”

Baku and another Bakkete were summoned from their aeries high above the cliff in which we dwelt by a shrill whistle Morgo gave. It was a weird call, not batlike but rather like a small boy giving a secret code call for a pal. I could not imitate it.

We flew over the luxurious greenery of Kahli, peopled with the Kahlis, foraging mice and insects whose wings hummed like a Sikorsky motor, steadily and monotonously. The saffron light fell on all things, the trees and the shrubs and the wilderness of vines that grew beneath the pink, titillating stalactites in which the Bakketes flitted, hordes descending suddenly upon the swarming dragon flies, gnats and needle insects feeding in the green leaves. Life in these caves was much as life outside – the stronger preyed on the weaker and thereby survived. I could not think but how futile civilization was – for it merely replaced on method of preying for sustenance with another.

Instead of flying lower or higher to another cave, the Bakketes turn to the south and approached a door hemmed with chalk formations – the inevitable teeth with which nature endowed this inner world through the age-long processes of moisture dripping from the Himalayas’ skin into their viscera.

We passed through the great stony gate and entered Verizon which greatly resembled Kahli in its flora. It was a replica of that Cainozoic world of forty million years ago when grass ad land forests came into existence and the mammal began its life.

My eyes feasted on what was spread below and above – greener forests than in Kahli – stalactites that were glowing red embers in the bright yellow light. The source of that light was something I hoped to live to see. When our problem of Nurri Kala was solved, Morgo promised to reveal it to me. He called it The Shaft.

A cry escaped me. Morgo drew closer and pointed downward.

A black belt about thirty feet wide and apparently endless wound its way over the floor of the cave, uniformly covering what was beneath it. At no place in the belt could I see greenery on the cave’s sandy floor.

And this belt moved ever so slowly. On command, Baku went lower.

Now I could the life of this belt – black ants, ugly headed and at least five feet long with yard-long mandibles. These mandibles, projecting from the creatures shoulders, worked like tongs, reaching out, ripping apart the desired food, crushing it and stuffing it into the head’s mouth. A faint moan ascended to my ears. It was that of some one munching food, the sound of this army, several million strong, existing – eating its way through life.

I thought of stories I had heard of the Driver ants of Africa. They could destroy an elephant that fouled their path by swarming over it and picking its bones clean in three days. Men and smaller beasts met with the elephants’ fate, too. My heart echoed in my breast. This sight of the Husshas was terrifying.

And like the Drivers, the Husshas were organized – one of nature’s phenomena. Blacker ants, in columns of ten, formed two lines between which slightly smaller ants moved. These were the “soldier ants” and those in the middle column were the “workers”. The latter pushed leaves and mannizan flesh to the “soldiers”, the latter pushed them back or devoured them.

What awful allies! These were to be our “friends” in attacking Zorimi in Shamman. God help us if we failed to get Nurri Kala out of their path!

Baku swung me around abruptly and I saw another Bakkete flying towards us slowly, weakly. Some sixth sense had told Baku of this other’s approach. Morgo had sighted him, too.

The Bakkete tried to fly up to us. Now I saw that he was wounded. One arm was missing and a leg badly mangled.

But in his sound hand he carried something whitish – a piece of cloth.

The Bakkete tried to reach us, holding out the white cloth. His wings, flapping in exhaustion, failed him and he dropped – straight into the black belt of voracious Husshas. He was lost as the living jet river slid over his body. But the white cloth fluttered in the upheld hand, a hand that quivered in death’s agony.

Morgo shouted to his carrier. They swooped down upon the black line of ants. They were close enough for the Hussha soldiers to strike out at Morgo’s white skin with their pointed black tongs.

Morgo reached the still visible hand, caught the wrist and flew upward. The hand came off the arm, eaten away by the worker ants. He tore the white cloth from it and dropped the lifeless paw.

We flew, at a signal from Morgo, to a mound a safe distance from the crawling black belt and alighted there. Morgo opened the cloth.

“Why, it’s a piece of wing cloth!” I cried. “It might be from the Junkers. From my black bird!”

“There is writing on it,” Morgo said.

I peered over his shoulder and read: “Jesperson is Zorimi.” Below these cryptic words was the name “Lacrosse”.

So Harvey Jesperson was in the cave. And this was a message from Lacrosse – who wanted to inter that Jesperson – the man who took my De Haviland on a solo from Darjeeling, was Zorimi the magician.

I refused to believe it.

To Be Continued!

Morgo the Mighty by Sean O’Larkin was originally serialized in The Popular Magazine in 1930. Over the next few weeks I’m going to be serializing it again here. Except for correcting the odd typo, I’m reproducing the text as printed in the original publication.

When I lost Nurri Kala in the windmill of beating, fighting wings, I think I more sincerely hoped for her death than for her capture and return to Zorimi. Yet she was made prisoner. A Shamman bat had caught her with his taloned feet and, holding her tightly, ripped her away from the Bakkete’s grasp. She was well on her way back to the plateau before the combat ended.

Zorimi, the magician, was waiting for her on the lip of the rock outside the chamber of skulls. She was deposited at his feet.

“My magic is still good,” he laughed down at her. “White skin does not believe, but there is magic in Shamman. And I am its master!”

Nurri Kala opened her eyes.

“The white man can spit death from his finger – but he cannot kill Zorimi,” the skin-clad figure said, the sound of his voice apparently coming from the top of the headless mass of pelts. “I have sent the Silurians to destroy them or to return them to me for the death I designed for them.”

“You are very cruel,” Nurri Kala whispered. “I did not believe this of you until I saw with my own eyes. I thought you were a god.”

“I am that, Nurri Kala. But even gods can be moved to anger, when their domain is desecrated.”

“Their coming to this mound was innocent enough,” she replied. “They came to seek friends lost from a bird that brought the red one to Shamman.”

“You must not believe that, Nurri Kala. They came here to conquer The Flame – to which you are a consecrated vestal. They are my enemies.”

Nurri Kala shook her head doubtfully. “But what is this secret about me – and him who calls himself Morgo?”

“The day will come when I can tell you,” Zorimi said in a cunning tone. “And the day is nigh when I will take you from Shamman to the outer world.”

“The outer world? But why? My life is dedicated to these caverns. You told me that.”

Her eyes were incredulous, suspicious.

“I am a magician. I will change all that when the day comes. In the meantime, I must go to Zaan. But not until I am certain that the white men are dead.”

“Why do you so desire their deaths, Zorimi? You once called yourself the All Merciful.”

“They know of affairs of which they should have no knowledge.” Zorimi rubbed his shoulder and groaned. “The red one put a bullet through my flesh.”

“You attacked him – threatened his life,” Nurri Kala said. “Here in the caverns men must fight for their lives and kill to save themselves. You said that was as things should be.”

“They are my enemies. But my magic is greater than theirs.” His voice cackled. “My magic deflected the bullet from my heart and from the Shining Stone I held.”

“Yet you could not deflect it from your shoulder, Zorimi.” Nurri Kala was interested in this thought. The magician’s powers were not as great as he claimed – or Derro’s was stronger.

“I did not act in time!” Zorimi snapped. “I was taken unawares!”

That, Nurri Kala thought, was odd. Zorimi told her once that he knew all things, all that went on in other people’s minds. Yet he did not know Derro’s finger was going to spit at him. And in that instant, her first great doubt of Zorimi’s infallibility was born.

“You will go to your chamber now, Nurri,” the magician said. “I must wait for word from the expedition that set out to find my enemies.”

Nurri Kala rose wearily to her feet. Her body ached from the struggle to which it had been subjected – a Shamman bat tearing it from the hold of a lesser Bakkete. Zorimi’s voice halted her at the steps.

“There is more that I must tell you, Nurri Kala,” he said. “It is best that you know a little of my plans, my slave.”

The girl’s eyes flashed defiantly at the mass of skins. She was no longer his slave. And though he might hold great power over the Shammans and their world, she knew then that he was as much flesh and blood as other living creatures.

She considered this bent, huddled figure, tinted crimson by the rays of The Flame – that horrible pyre stoked with human flesh and bone. His face was a mystery to her since she had always been denied the privilege of seeing it. Only the voice she knew – and until now had obeyed. This man had been her mentor. He gave her life after that accident had robbed her of those other white people she knew as mother and father and who were so good to her. Of them and the accident that robbed her memory, she remembered nothing. Her life in the caves began with the ministrations of Zorimi who found her near the Door of Surrilana.

Through her growing years, the magician had been good to her. He taught her the ways of the Shammans and Silurians and made them her slaves. He gave her pretty bright stones and the reflecting glass in her chamber and indulged all her minor needs. The Flame, she was instructed, was the source of all life in Shamman, a holy thing, and to its burning eternally she must devote all her thought and prayers. This she had done faithfully.

Zorimi was amusing at times. He told her stories about the strange people and beasts in the other caverns. He delighted her with speculations about an outer world. And while she never felt any love for him such as the white man she once called her father, she liked Zorimi. He was her only friend, a man who spoke a language she knew without learning as she had had to learn the speech of the Shammans. She was dependent on him – and believed him when he told her she was an immortal and a sacred person, a vestal of The Flame.

Her slavery was a subtle relationship between them. It was her bowing to his will, her belief in all he told her, her captivity to the power of his awful eyes. And it hinged on his ability to prove himself greater than the people of Shamman. But now Derro had struck at Zorimi and his blow had been a telling one.

Moreover, Zorimi, a kindly man, had proven himself a destroyer of human life. Till that night, she had no knowledge of what went on at the rituals in the chamber of skulls. She had not been permitted to attend the other ceremonies. Yet now she knew, and Zorimi had commanded her to participate in it – to draw a man’s blood and take his life with the obsidian dagger, all for some incomprehensible reason. She suspected, though, that these pagan rituals were Zorimi’s method of demonstrating his power – a power built on the taking of human life.

She reflected. She might have killed a Shamman in the act of ritual. They were not really men but beasts. Zorimi might have induced her to believe in her godhood to that extent. But he erred in asking her to kill in the presence of a man with white skin, Derro, who was so brave.

Yes, she knew Zorimi better that night. He was a man of evil. He was not to be trusted. He planned her destruction in some way still obscure to her limited knowledge.

Zorimi was talking in high sounding words, many of which she did not understand. He was discoursing on her future, a glowing career in a world of great cities and vast seas of water that was salty to taste, of men and women who dressed strangely in suits and dresses of colors and who drove in things called motors and trains and airplanes, who went under water in boats. He was telling her incredible things and she smiled placidly to disarm him though she did not believe a word he uttered.

“And when I return from Zaan, the Cave of Diamonds -” Zorimi was saying.

“Diamonds? What are they?” Nurri Kala asked. “My mother had a diamond – I remember.”

“You shall have thousands, Nurri Kala. I promise it. You will look more beautiful than all the queens in the world.”

“Queens?”

“Rulers of men, women with great power in the outer world.” Zorimi grew ecstatic. “You shall be the greatest and richest woman in all the world. I promise it. And I shall be the richest man. Diamonds can buy anything?”

“But I do not want that,” Nurri Kala said seriously.

“No?” Zorimi was amused. “What do you want then? You shall have it.”

“I want to have Morgo and Derro for my friends – for they have a skin like mine. And Derro is very brave – and so is Morgo.” She spoke with the simplicity of a child.

Zorimi thundered. “That is something you cannot have! The friendship of those two! They must be destroyed – or they will destroy us! Morgo is a savage and the other seeks my life! Surely you would not be the friend of a savage and a murderer?”

Nurri Kala did not believe him, but she silenced her tongue. Instinct warned her not to betray to Zorimi her new attitude toward him.

“Nurri Kala,” Zorimi declaimed, taking her little hand in his grimy fist, “you are to be the Bride of the Shining Stone!”

She smiled at the sound of the words. They were pleasant. “Bride of the Shining Stone! My mother was a bride – I remember her saying it. And I shall be like her.”

“You shall be what I promise!”

“But who shall be like father to me? Like he was to mother?”

“I shall be that, Nurri Kala. I shall marry you!”

The girl did not understand this but an indefinable fear welled up inside her. She wanted to hurry to her chamber.

“I shall make you my bride before The Flame, Nurri Kala, and then again in a ceremony in the outer world. I promise you that.

She ran up the steps without further comment. She wanted to be alone.

Her chamber, a room off one of the higher corridors in the mound, was spacious though plainly furnished. There was a flambeau for light, stuck in a chalk hole, a pallet heaped with skins, a few dishes from which she ate her meals, a tiny window that fed her the air of Shamman and the reflecting glass – a tall mirror of polished silver.

She beheld her image in the silver and was pleased with it. What a relief from looking at the ugly, scale-skinned Silurians! And only she was permitted to look into it. The Silurian women were forbidden its secrets and she kept it covered when they cleaned her room.

Her hands ran languidly over her whiteness. The silver mirror showed her a pretty picture – the most beautiful she had ever seen. The girdle of shining stones winked and danced in the light of the flambeau. She removed it and the strange flower of diamonds in her hair and, combing her golden locks when they sprawled over her broad shoulders with skillful fingers, she thrilled to her splendor.

And later, lying on her couch in the darkness, stretching luxuriously with the grace of a sybarite, she hoped, in the moment before she fell asleep, that Derro, the red one, though she was good to look at.

The tramping of many feet in the corridor outside her door awakened her. The Silurians who went in search of Derro and Morgo, were returning to report to Zorimi. Perhaps the two men were prisoners again. She leaped to her feet with fast-beating hear and when the last man had passed her door, she crept out and made her way stealthily to the stairs leading to the chamber of skulls.

The leader of the Silurians addressed Zorimi. His voice sounded angry. A man had been killed by Derro, but the two white men were not captives. Her heart bounded with joy. They were free and she might see them again.

The Silurian’s next words left her frozen with terror. Derro and Morgo had dropped into the cave of the unclean growths to be devoured by plants that thrived on human life. They were utterly lost. Zorimi clapped his hands gleefully and chuckled with fiendish laughter. She hated the magician more than ever in that hour for she knew what death in the jungle of fungus meant. It had been described to her by the Silurian women who lost their men in it while they were on the hunts.

Yet Nurri Kala refused to despair. One man, she had heard, came out of that livid green cave alive and told his companions about it. She was not so much concerned with his tale as with the fact that he did live to escaped the creeping threads of growth that devoured flesh and blood.

And while Nurri Kala knew nothing of the God of the outer world, she raised her eyes and whispered: “If one man can escape, let the two – Derro and Morgo – free themselves from that death!”

To Be Continued!

Morgo the Mighty by Sean O’Larkin was originally serialized in The Popular Magazine in 1930. Over the next few weeks I’m going to be serializing it again here. Except for correcting the odd typo, I’m reproducing the text as printed in the original publication.

I kept track of Nurri Kala’s flight in that Cimmerian night by the whiteness of her body in the Bakketes arms. Baku heeded me faithfully and flew as close to her as possible despite the terrific onslaught of the Shamman bats which tried, as usual, to beat us to the floor of the vast cave.

The handless and armless bats, I gathered, far outnumbered our Bakketes. But the latter were fleet of wing and soon we left screeching legions behind us. An instinctive sense of direction on the part of the Bakketes was carrying us toward the tunnel which led to the lower Cave of Kahli where Morgo pursued his peaceful life.

But I shouted before I was out of the proverbial woods. I was too quick to accept safety and the outstripping of the Shamman bats.

The Bakkete holding Nurri Kala uttered a piercing cry and began to sink. Baku flew closer.

Twenty Shamman bats had quietly joined our flight, flying as fast as they could, deceiving us into thinking that we were rid of our enemy. Now they swung suddenly to attack the man carrying the girl.

I saw one bat encircle the girl with his talonesque legs and try to tear her from the Bakkete. The others attacked him with their teeth and clouted him with their powerful wings.

Nurri Kala screamed and her cries were suddenly silenced. Had she been killed? Had she fainted? She was in the thickest part of the aerial fray.

I could not use my gun for fear of shooting her. Morgo was engaged with one of the other Shamman bats. I saw him reach for the flying monster with his bare hands which closed about its throat. Life was hard to rout from the bat, but Morgo’s strength was mighty. The bat pounded Morgo with its leathery wings and tore him with its talons, but Morgo was relentless. The huge bat weakened, gasped and then fell limply out of sight.

The Bakketes were impotent in helping their stricken mate. They tore at the Shamman’s wings with their long fingers, and other screeching creature, unable to fly with one wing ripped off, crashed downward.

Then the fighting mass of Bakketes and bats broke. I could not see Nurri Kala. My fear was that she had been dropped by the man who was beset so strongly. A Bakkete wavered, tried to keep aloft, and then he, too, drooped and fluttered downward, his wings shattered. The Shammans scattered and vanished in an upward rush of air and beating wings.

Morgo flew close to me.

“We have lost her,” he cried. “We have lost that beautiful creature!”

“Did they make her prisoner?”

“I could not see, Derro. But we are not strong enough in numbers to fly higher and search the stalactites.”

“Then let us make certain she did not fall to the rocks below. We will search there,” I said.

And while the army of Bakketes, battered and bleeding from their combat, hovered over us, a protecting cloud of friendly wings in the gloom, Morgo and I descended to the sea of stalagmites. Sight was well-nigh impossible in the darkness, but we carefully flew low over the area which we thought was directly below that of the previous scene of attack. The gray hulks of the chalky fingers were visible but no whiteness – as that of the girl’s body – gleamed in the shadows between those pillars.

The Bakketes took to screeching again. Wings beat on wings, two bodies fell close by us. Another fight was in progress in the gloom overhead. Zorimi had sent his bats back to annihilate us completely, or to make us prisoner, and they had fallen upon our forces noiselessly.

“Can those bats see us?” I asked Morgo.

“They can see anything in the dark.” The Bakkete army fled. We listened, seeing nothing, till the silence of the cave was great and nerve-wracking and devoid of a single stirring wing. We had alighted on a mound, an overturned monolith of rock.

I decided it was best that we seek refuge beneath a pillar of chalk until we had some indication that the Shamman bats had passed overhead in returning to Zorimi’s plateau. Morgo said it was likely that they would fly low in search of us and could be heard. He was confident that they would not follow the Bakketes into Kahli, for they were too great of wing to negotiate the descending tunnel safely.

And then we were attacked. We saw nothing coming. The sudden impact of wings upon us crushed us to the rock, bruising and cutting our bodies. Our Bakketes had been taken off guard again.

The Silurians appeared on every side of us. They dropped from between the legs of the war bats who so silently skimmed over us.

I fired at the nearest scale-skinned creature and darted through the opening, shouting to Morgo to follow me. There was no pursuit, the surprise of the shots momentarily holding the Silurians at bay.

How far we ran I cannot guess. Morgo’s breath was hot on my cheek, our footfalls muffled, noiseless. It was like running on air.

A black hole loomed before us – a small cave – and into it my feet carried me. I found Baku with Morgo. The other Bakkete, Morgo’s carrier, had evidently been destroyed.

The Silurians appeared in the haze of night. They saw the cave and hesitated before entering.

“Baku will lead us into this hole in the ground,” Morgo said. “Join hands with me. Eyes are good in the dark. It is our only hope of escaping them.”

Thirty Silurians, their scaly bodies now weirdly luminous, could be counted at the mouth of the cave. To fight meant defeat for us. Death or being taken prisoner and returned to the tortures that only the evil genius of Zorimi could devise. My ammunition was low, far too low for comfort.

One by one, the Silurians began to file into the hollow that held us. They feared my gun, I knew, but they were probably impelled by Zorimi’s orders to risk death in the hope of overpowering us ultimately. They were to bring us back to him dead or alive. They were to fight, girded with the assurance that their bodies were invulnerable – when my last round was fired.

I saw nothing. I merely took hold of Morgo’s sinewy wrist and moved forward, led by him, as if in a dream. The path twisted, declined, and we had to crawl in places where the ceiling was too low and narrow. The walls of this cave were repulsive to touch. At first I was puzzled and then I discovered the cause. They were not of chalk as were the other formations of Shamman but of something soft like the down on a baby’s head. Yes, they were hairy.

This soft growth, warm and loathsome when it brushed my fingers or face caused me to shudder involuntarily. And from it seeped a faint scent, like that of decay, indescribable decay, but nevertheless the decay of dying things. This odor grew stronger and permeated the air the farther we went.

We could hear the Silurians stumbling, scraping and groping their way after us. I even imagined I could hear their cautious, labored breathing. In actuality, I heard just that. For in a sudden burst of light from the very floor beneath our feet, a glow that threw Morgo and Baku into sharp silhouette, I looked back and saw the nearest Silurian within arm’s reach of me.

I had to shoot him. His falling body, the effect of his death and startling report of the automatic momentarily stayed the Silurians advance upon us as they hissed with fear.

Baku cried out shrilly, terrified. Morgo stepped back abruptly, almost upsetting me – but too late.

The floor of the cave gave way under us, and we fell through a fuzzy, malodorous substance that glowed with a greenish hue. My fingers fought for some support by the substance flew through them, ripped and tore. It was the sensation of being shot through a giant mushroom.

I struck something hard – rock or chalk formation. My body was spun around. Morgo and I became an interlocked mass for an instant, each holding to the other for support, to stay our terrific avalanche downward through this awful suffocating substance that breathed decay into our nostrils. Then we were whirled apart, and I rolled over and over. My head hit a sharp bit of hardness, and I forgot the rest of that descent into the bottoms of Shamman.

Morgo was holding my head in his lap, rubbing the brow, when I opened my eyes again. His features were dim and slowly they cleared. He became recognizable and so did Baku.

“What happened?” I tried to grin. “Who hit me?”

“We are in the forest of unclean growths,” Morgo informed me, a note of concern in his voice. “We cannot stay here too long or our breath will be stilled.”

Our breath? I was aware that my own breathing was impaired. There wasn’t enough oxygen in the air.

“Do not breathe too hard, Derro,” Morgo warned me. “I know of this place though I have avoided it. If you fight for air you will never get enough. Breathe slowly and you will last.”

My vision was better and I saw all. We were resting at the base of a slope of gelatinous matter cut by a deep furrow. That furrow was our path – made by our falling and rolling bodies. Above it was the hole through which we had dropped. The slope and its soft coating broke our fall.

The smell of decay was nauseating. My head reeled and I did my best to breathe slowly. We were in a cave, the walls, every part of which, were a quivering gelatinous mass, the substance coated with downy hair. All was greenish and livid white in spots.

Green mold! I had seen gray-green mold on stale, damp bread! This excrescence in which we were stranded, I now recognized.

Fungus! We were lost in a forest of fungus!

The cryptogamous growth fluttered over us, depending mostly from the roof of the cavern. It fed upon the Carboniferous-looking trees and shrubs in upper Shamman, upon the filth of that upper cave’s flooring. Of that I was certain though my knowledge of such putrescent life was exceedingly limited. Yet mold and fungus did thrive on dead, organic matter.

The bed of the cave was less thickly covered with the undulating growth. Here and there it was punctuated with a titanic mushroom or toadstool like an umbrella for giant leprechauns. I wondered if we could tread our way through it to some exit. The fear of dropping into a deep hole and suffocating to death in its decay made me cold and nervous. I was not afraid of death – but I must confess to a pronounced fear of the means of death.

“Is there a way out of this jungle of fungus, Morgo?”

“Baku says he knows a way, though he is not certain, Derro.”

“Let him seek it out then.”

“It is best that one of us go with him,” Morgo said. “He may find the opening to Shamman or Kahli and may not be able to return.”

“Why not?”

“I have heard strange tales of this unclean growth. It has hands. It feeds on living men and matter. Weapons cannot defeat it. Your gun and my knife are useless in fighting it. But Baku might save one of us – if he can get through to clean air.”

I got up, stretched my legs and felt life surge through me. My lungs, though respiration was shallow, were accustoming themselves to this dead air, perfumed with mold.

“You go first, Morgo. I’ll wait here for Baku.”

Morgo shook his head. “No, Derro, my mind is made up. You got with Baku. I will wait.”

Of course we argued. Neither would be the first to make his fight for life. At length, Morgo held up a quieting hand.

“We are wasting precious breath, Derro,” he said. “Please go.”

“We’ll toss for it.” I took his bowie knife and explained to him that the side bearing the manufacturer’s mark would be the head and plain side the tail. We would spin it in the air. He who called “heads” would stay.

Morgo nodded and, taking the knife in his hand, spun it, calling, “Heads!” The blade flopped on the quivering fungus at our feet. The manufacturer’s mark was uppermost.

“I stay,” he said proudly. “You go with Baku – and hurry.”

“What is the source of the light in here?” I asked, curious over the greenish pall and not too ready to leave my new friend. “It is night above in Shaman and yet here there is luminosity.”

“The Shaft does strange things, Derro. It is the source of all light in these caverns. I meant to show it to you one day.”

“You will.  You’ll come through.”

“I will wait for Baku – and try – if he comes back for me.”

I clasped Morgo’s hand in mine. He took the little cross of twigs from beneath his skin covering and gaze fondly at it.

“I pray for a safe trip for you, Derro.” His eyes met mine and I saw them shining. “You saved my life when Zorimi would take it. I owe it to you, Derro, to save yours – to pray for it. There is a bond between us now that only death can break.”

“To whom do you pray?”

“To a god my father told me about. I remember nothing about him except that these twigs are his sign. He has been kind and merciful to me in the past. He will help you now when I ask him. I am sure.”

Morgo’s simple faith in the Supreme Being was truly moving. WIth the veils of amnesia upon him, with a primitive existence substituted for his civilized youth, he still held fast to a faith he undoubtedly learned at his mother’s knee.

“Baku,” Morgo cried. “Derro is ready. Take him.”

Before I could protest or say more, ask more, the Bakkete slipped his arms around me, under mine.

“Go!” Morgo commanded Baku. And I was swept from the fungus flooring, watching Morgo, a small figure, become smaller and smaller with distance until he vanished in the sinister green light.

“Have you been in here before, Baku?” I asked my carrier.

“No. But I hear about it. There is a way out.”

That information was small consolation. The cavern was far-flung and the fumes of dead matter seemed more asphyxiating in mid-air than when closer to the floor. I felt faint and fought to hold my consciousness. My mind was a cauldron of quivering green and white and unclean grayish spots. We had eluded the Silurians for something far worse than Zorimir’s Flame.

“Look!” Baku cried.

My eyes opened and I saw a darkish cloud ahead in the gelatinous roof of the fungus where the growth, unlike that of the other part of the cave, hung in long threads that flicked at each other like the tentacles of an octopus. Were these the fingers – the hands – that Morgo mentioned? I tried to doubt and could not.

The dark spot beyond the beyond the wavering threads seemed to be an opening. And though the putrid air was stronger than before, I could feel blasts of something cleaner coming from the direction of the darkness. A breeze seemed to stir the depending threads of fungus and I hoped it was air and not the life in them that gave them motion.

“Save breath!” Baku said. “Danger is here!”

He meant to wend his way between two lines of fungus – an avenue offering possible safety. In another moment we were in the divide, flying as low as feasible to avoid any contact with the slithering, green threads and their fuzzy surface.

I struck out with my fists. It was useless.

A thread of the stuff was flung around my middle. Firmly, with perceptible tugs, it slowly drew us off our course, upward and toward a reddish crust – lips!

Baku’s wings were snarled in the stuff and the thought of woman’s eternal fear – a bat caught in her hair, flapping and squealing – flashed through my mind. I was deposited on the red crust.

The Bakkete was whipped away from me out of sight.

The fumes from the parted lips, a stench from the entrails of a monster dragon, suffocated my senses. I fell against the crust.

Heat! Bursting lungs! Reddish crust, hard to touch!

Green pallor! Unclean white splotches! Gray decay!

Black oblivion.

To Be Continued!

Morgo the Mighty by Sean O’Larkin was originally serialized in The Popular Magazine in 1930. Over the next few weeks I’m going to be serializing it again here. Except for correcting the odd typo, I’m reproducing the text as printed in the original publication.

Morgo, on viewing the thread of smoke that slid out of the roof of the mound, slid down the crag noiselessly onto a soft bit of chalky ground. He was about to motion me to descend when the floor gave way beneath his feet.

His cry of surprise was strangled as he crashed through debris, wet chalk and slime, into a passage beneath the plateau. When he picked himself up and took his bearings, he saw that he had slid at least fifty feet from the surface and the hole he made was but a small patch of gray, seemingly far above him. He tried to clamber up the step slopes, but failed, for the slime and wetness sent him sliding back to the bottom.

He decided to seek another exit from this passage and started on the up grade. He walked for some distance, winding, turning, moving up toward the surface and then down. Several corridors led into the passage, but he ignored them until he finally concluded he would be walking forever in this first passage unless he tried another.

This he did. He tried several, milling forward in inky darkness, dank gloom, and slime that oozed from the walls. At length, he decided that he was lost in a labyrinth that honeycombed the mound that was the home of The Flame.

His energy was great and he did not tire of seeking an outlet. He experimented with each new corridor. Hours were spent in this fruitless search. Silence, dampness and slime were his only companions. His footfalls were muffled and noiseless. Only his breathing assured him that he still lived.

Presently he felt the corridor he was traversing, grow warmer. That meant he was nearing the source of the smoke he saw on the plateau. He pressed forward. The warmth increased, the chalk walls were less damp, the slime decreased.

His progress was brought to a sudden halt by a sound ahead of him. He listened and made out the slow tread of another walker. This invisible person was moving away from him, pursuing his direction.

Again he went forward and turned a bend in the corridor.

Ahead of him, against a faint patch of light he saw a man, a scale covered Silurian. The man stopped, hesitated, and then disappeared.

Morgo was puzzled. Where had the creature gone? To the right, to the left? Or had the floor swallowed him up? He concluded that the Silurian had turned into another corridor, so he continued his march toward the patch of brightness at the far end of the corridor.

He was now conscious of greater warmth – of heat. The chalk was dry at touch. There was no slime underfoot.

His eyes were alert for the blackness on either side of him that would mark another corridor – the point at which the creature he saw had vanished from sight. He found none.

But when it was too late, he saw a niche in the wall. The Silurian was upon him, his eyes afire like those of a cat’s in the night. Two fierce scaly hands fastened to his throat. He threw his strength against the man and his hands slid from the wet, scaly surface of the Silurian’s body. He could get no hold on the man.

The two hands at his throat were pressing hard. His wind diminished and had no chance to recoup. Then, using his fists like hammers, he beat upon the face before him. The Silurian grunted and squealed with pain, his grip grew ruthless.

Morgo succeeded in slipping his fingers between the man’s hands and his throat. They fell to the floor, fighting silently, struggling for breath. The white man eventually succeeded in breaking the other’s hold and the Silurian sprang to his feet for another attack.

Morgo whipped out his bowie knife and scrambled up, too. The Silurian rushed him. The knife slid over his scaly body, but made no entry. Each time Morgo stabbed, the scales turned aside the blade, so invulnerable were they.

The creature used no weapons save his hands. He wanted to kill by strangling. For Morgo there was no opening at which to strike, since his knife glanced even from the hard face and neck of the Silurian. Yet he was not to be defeated and his passage to freedom was barred from this man. He had to kill him for his own life’s sake.

There was one point of attack from which he had refrained. Now perforce, he must strike at it – the Silurian’s glowing, bulging eyes, the gateway to his brain. Morgo struck out. The blade went home. The creature fell back and sank to the floor. Morgo watched him quiet and he felt the racing heart beneath the wet scales slow down and still itself.

He hurried on toward the bit of light. Now he could see that it was yellow and that it flickered.

A moment later he found himself at a window high above a room, the wall of which was lined with skulls. At one end he saw a great living monolith of fire, many Silurians with flambeaux and at the other side, he saw me as I was lifted to the ledge from my perilous perch on the face of the cliff.

And then unbelieving eyes – his eyes that doubted – fell upon the sight that paralyzed me with stark horror.

Beside the marble slab near The Flame stood Nurri Kala, resplendent in the budding beauty of her youth, girdled with a bad of great, sparkling diamonds. A strange flower of little diamonds was caught in her golden hair that streamed down her back, cascaded over her shoulders and defied the red of the fire to color it, to so much as tint its hallowed purity.

But in her hand, which drooped limply at her side, she held a knife of obsidian – a symbol of sacrifice.

There she stood, the high priestess of Zorimi’s diabolical cult of fire and blood. There she stood, prepared to officiate a ritual of human sacrifice. The firelight played like a spotlight on the exquisite flower of diamonds, turning it a ruby red.

Two Silurians brought forward a screaming Shamman, one of the those who roved through the forests of stalagmites hunting the mice creatures for food. Undoubtedly he had dared to wander upon Zorimi’s Mount Olympus, and this, death and sacrifice, was to be his fate.

The man, whose howls were heart-rending, was flung upon the marble slab – the altar of this satanic temple. His arms were thrown over his head and held taut by one Silurian while the other held fast to his legs. This was the position in which he would best receive the blow of that obsidian dagger in Nurri Kala’s hand.

Zorimi’s voice thundered in the guttural language of the caves from some hidden point. Nurri Kala shook her head.

“I cannot do this, Zorimi,” she said listlessly.

“I have commanded it.”

“But I cannot.”

“You have refrained from taking part in the rituals these many years,” Zorimi cried harshly. “Now do my bidding!”

“If I refuse -”

“Then you will take that man’s place.”

“Perhaps I will choose to that rather than kill him!”

“Nurri Kala!” Zorimi’s voice broke plaintively. “He must die in any event. But you – ”

“I will die rather than kill, Zorimi.”

“So be it!” He barked his orders to the Silurians.

Nurri Kala stepped back from the sacrificial altar and dropped the obsidian knife. It clattered to the floor.

A Silurian woman, ugly, a Gargantuan-legged mermaid, detached herself from the others and, crossing the chamber, picked up the knife. Her eyes were agleam with a lust for blood. She stared avariciously at the livid victim on the slab.

Zorimi uttered further commands. Nurri Kala turned away from the sight of the substitute priestess and closed her eyes.

The Silurian woman tested the blade with her finger and waited.  Two men appeared carrying something wrapped in a silk, similar to the tunic Nurri Kala wore earlier in the day. I could swear it was silk from China. Holding this object over the victim whose moans were choking in his throat, they waited, too.

Then a tall man wrapped in think, odd skins that covered even his head and face like a monk’s cowl, walked swiftly to the altar. Zorimi!

Bony hands shot out from the bundle of skins and they whisked the covering from the object.

She of the Three Heads flashed in the firelight, unholy, unclean. This diamond emblem – this Shining Stone, as the Shammans called it – evoked a murmur of awe from the Silurians witnessing the pagan ritual. Zorimi held it to the victim’s breast and throat. Then it was covered and it disappeared beneath the folds of his cowl in his bony grasp.

Zorimi muttered an incantation, and the Silurian woman sent the obsidian dagger into the victim’s heart. I turned away, too, when she began to hack the head from the body.

When I dared look again – at something that was to be Nurri Kala’s fate – I saw a Silurian place the skull with the others in the frieze. The two, holding up the decapitated body, at another command from Zorimi, flung it far out into the fingers of The Flame.

At a sign from this Master of Evil, Nurri Kala moved easily toward the altar – prepared to take her place for sacrifice. Zorimi ordered the Silurians to seize her.

No sooner had their hands touched her white body than they screamed in agony and fell to the floor, dead. An arrow protruded from an eye in each man’s head.

Zorimi wheeled about and looked up. Still I could not see his face. He spoke quickly. The terrified Silurians sprang into action.

A moment later I heard a scuffle, the sounds of fighting, wild cries, shrieks of pain and mortal agony ringing out from the direction of a high window. Then silence, ominous and oppressive.

The Silurians returned to the chamber with Morgo fast in their arms, a struggling, snarling Morgo. It was he who for the moment saved Nurri Kala’s life by his unerring aim from that distant window.

“Morgo!” Zorimi cried. “At last! At last! For years I have awaited this moment!”

“Zorimi!” Morgo tried to see the man’s face but the cowl was lowered. “Who is this white girl?”

“Nurri Kala is not a white girl. She is an immortal.”

“She is white – like I am. Who is she?”

“I have spoken, Morgo.”

“You can kill me if you do not harm her.”

“I intend to kill you anyway,” Zorimi cackled, “that your secret will be the safer.”

“Secret? What secret?”

“The secret of who you are. The secret of your identity.”

“You know – ”

“I have always known,” Zorimi thundered. “I know all things of this world and of the other world.”

“Then,” I spoke up, “you know Nurri Kala’s true identity, too.”

Zorimi did not look in my direction. “I know all things, white man,” he said to me. “Once I feared Morgo. But nevermore!”

He shouted orders to the Silurians, and Morgo was dragged, struggling, to the altar.

“I had no intention of killing Nurri Kala,” he said softly, with sinister implications. “My threat was merely a test of her courage. She is brave, very brave. But death is not for her this night. I have other plans for her – for she is consecrated to the Shining Stone. But you, Morgo, will take her place. Your head will decorate my temple. And the other white man’s body will follow yours into The Flame.”

Morgo was flung upon his back on the marble slab. The Silurian woman caressed the obsidian knife. The men stretched Morgo’s arms and legs.

Beyond the opening, I heard the beating, the whirring of wings – hundreds of them. The Bakketes were there. A sixth sense assured me. Baku had brought the army from the far end of the Cave of Shamman. Zorimi had heard. He was puzzled. There were no sounds of fighting. The Silurians drew back, obviously frightened by imminence of the Bakketes.

“Your rescuers are here, Morgo,” he said uneasily, “but it is too late.” He spoke to the wielder of the obsidian dagger.

The purple-scale-skinned woman made ready for the sacrifice of Morgo’s life to gods and beliefs unknown to me.

Morgo’s primitive weapons had failed to effect Nurri Kala’s delivery. They had resulted in his own capture. Now it was time for me to use my “ace in the hole”. Zorimi knew of the outer world – therefore, I reasoned, he had some knowledge of guns – but he had forgotten about my automatic. Perhaps he hadn’t seen it when I was made prisoner or had forgotten to disarm me.

The Silurian woman’s arm went up, a cobra’s head poised to strike. Zorimi bent low over Morgo’s taut body, drew the Shining Stone – She of the Three Heads – from his coverings and prepared to caress my friend’s breast with it. It was the sigh of death.

There was no time to waste. The Bakketes were on hand for our rescue.

I drew my gun and shot the knife from the woman’s paw. She fell to the floor, writhing and screaming. Zorimi sprang back, clutching the Shining Stone to him.

Again and again I fired, killing the two Silurians who held Morgo to the marble altar. The other scale-skinned creatures hissed with terror and pressed back from me. I was a man who spat death from his finger. To their primitive minds, I worked miracles greater than Zorimi’s. They saw me point my finger, heard a report and saw two men fall dead. They could understand no more. It was magic to them.

Baku’s voice sounded behind me on the lip of rock. “Derro! I come back. Bakketes come.”

Morgo slid from the altar and ran to my side. I shouted to Nurri Kala to join us and she did, though her eyes strayed to Zorimi. His head was bent and she took courage to escape from her master.

“Morgo,” I snapped, “have a Bakkete prepare to carry the girl with us.” I watched while he gave this direction and saw Nurri Kala safe in a flying man’s arms. She accepted my hasty smile by way of reassurance.

“Now, Zorimi – or Lacrosse!” I said and saw the ruler of the caverns start. “Tell us the names of Morgo and Nurri Kala – their secret.”

“I will choke the truth from him!” Morgo cried, advancing on the man.

Screeched outside the chamber told me that the Bakketes were being attacked. The Shamman bat hordes had spied our army. Zorimi heard the whirring of wings, the sounds of fighting and took heart.

“That I cannot do,” he laughed. “Better compromise and make your escape, if you can, or my bats will destroy your Bakketes. And I will hurl my Silurians upon you!”

Morgo was about to spring when I caught his arm. “Hold on! We had better accept his offer and get him another time!”

Morgo nodded. “Yes, the Bakketes cannot fight the fierce bats of Shamman – though they can defeat them in swift flight.”

We backed to the opening, and I committed myself to Baku’s arms after seeing Nurri Kala safely off. Morgo took wing and shouted for me to hurry.

Zorimi screamed with rage and uttered what I took to be a command, to the Silurians, to seize me. They rushed forward as one man.

I shot at Zorimi. My last vision of that smoky blue chamber of horrors was of Zorimi crumpling to the floor, his hand to his chest, coughing and choking. He was all too mortal where hot lead was concerned.

To Be Continued!

Morgo the Mighty by Sean O’Larkin was originally serialized in The Popular Magazine in 1930. Over the next few weeks I’m going to be serializing it again here. Except for correcting the odd typo, I’m reproducing the text as printed in the original publication.

We descended roughly hewn steps in the rock for about forty feet when I found myself in a cavernous, smoky blue chamber. An opening at one end gave upon a sea of gray monoliths and outer Shamman. At the other end was a blasting pillar of flame – The Flame – and before it a bright shining slab, possibly marble. It was gory in the light of the fire.

For the first time I now saw my captors. They were men, like the primitive Shammans, equally as large and well-muscled, but their bodies glistened iridescently and purple. Instead of hair, scales like those of a fish covered their hulks. These creatures were not as well divorced from their reptilian ancestry as were the Shammans. Their heads were small and their mouths protruded, fishlike.

The grip on my arms was released, and I was permitted to stroll toward the opening that was farthest from The Flame. I wanted air, coolness. My blood was boiling, my mind reeling from the heat and odor of death that clung to the walls of this hollow mound.

I started.

A frieze of age-yellowed skulls ranged around the chamber a little higher than a man’s reach. They were all alike – those of the Shammans – browless, brutish and of small brain capacity. Matted hair and crumbling teeth still adhered to many of them, and there were, I’d judge, a thousand or more.

I remembered Kenvon’s decapitated head – the bat flying off with it after Zorimi’s arrival at the scene of the crash. Was that part of the ritual? Decapitation? But Kenvon’s body was not sacrificed to The Flame. And mine was to be committed to those tongues of crimson fire – alive.

Therefore, I reasoned, I would be allowed to keep my head. And keep it I must – before things began to happen.

One skull near the middle of the room attracted my attention. It was still covered with its human, fleshly sack. Though it was in a dimmish spot, I moved toward it and peered up, straining my eyes against the glare of the fire which was hot against my cheek.

My captors stared at me for the cry I uttered involuntarily.

The head I beheld was Harker’s.

But what had they done with his body? I had seen the bats carrying that, too. And Kenvon’s head. Where was that?

Screwing up my courage which was at lowest ebb, I walked around the chamber beneath the frieze of half human skulls. Each one I scrutinized, whether lighted or shadowed. I went closer to The Flame and far from the blistering heat toward the opening. I saw every skull that was visible.

But Kenvon’s face I did not see. Nor that of Lacrosse. Harker’s face was the only one recognizable, still holding its flesh.

The scale-skinned men withdrew and left me alone – with something not unlike Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors to keep me company. The gray light over Shamman lightened at noon and then its diffused rays slowly dimmed. The dark hours were swiftly approaching.

My automatic! I clapped my hand to my belt. It was still in its holster. The Shammans had not know enough of such things to seize it – to disarm me. But could I shoot my way out that room? What chance had I? Those purple-scale-skinned men would overwhelm me by sheer numbers – like the Germans pouring through the French lines, feeding the poilus’ machine guns – but ultimately taking the trenches attacked.

The chamber’s faint light faded like a room in which a lamp’s wick was turned low. Only the pillar of fire at the far end roared upward through the roof of the plateau, its crimson rays tinting those sections of rock and chalk nearest the orifice.

I wondered what had become of the eagle-eyed Baku – of Morgo – of the army of Bakketes hovering over the distant end of the Cave of Shamman. A shot would no attract no attention in the outer cave and might bring my captors upon me to disarm me. I remembered from the fight with the three bats of Shamman how the shots of my automatic were muffled.

“White man,” a small voice whispered, “speaker of English -”

I wheeled around and saw Nurri Kala who partially shrouded by the heavy shadows. Only the loveliness of her face and a glint of light on her golden hair were visible.

“Do not speak too loudly.” Her words were laden with great fear. “I may help you – but do not take too much hope to your heart.”

“Can you show me the way out of this hellhole?” I demanded, trying to forget her beauty in that hour of stress.

“The steps are well guarded. They lead to the plateau, where many Silurians are gathered.”

The word “Silurian” caught my attention. Wasn’t that the name of a prehistoric reptilian monster? That was Zorimi’s name for the scale-skinned men.

“But,” she added, “if you are brave, you can climb down from that door in the cliff’s face to the floor of Shamman. There are little holes for hands and feet. It is unsafe, but your only hope.

I nodded, then thought further of my mission. “Nurri Kala, are they any other white men prisoners of Zorimi? Or were there any?”

She hesitated and met my eyes fully. “Yes, there was another. Zorimi brought him here – on his return from the Long Hunt.” She avoided my inquisitive gaze and shuddered. “He brought his head with him – but not his body.”

I started. “He brought his head? Does Zorimi dress in strange clothes – of leather?” A horrible thought had occurred to me.

“I do not know. I did not see him return from the Long Hunt. He was gone many, many days. I only went to him when he summoned me. Then I saw him as I always saw him – in his skins with hidden face and hidden eyes.”

“You’ve never seen his face?”

“No, never.”

“And the head he brought back?” My eyes darted to that of Harker in the frieze of skulls lining the walls. She understood the significance of my glance and nodded.

“And what was this Long Hunt?” I asked. “Where did Zorimi go?”

“I do not know. He often goes on them and is away for a long time. When he returns, he looks after his affairs here in Shamman – the ruling of his subjects – then he goes down to Zaan for the Shining Stones which many Shammans and Silurians gather for him. The stones he takes away with him on the Long Hunts – and, I think, buries them – for some reason I do not know. I should like to have more of the Shining Stones. They are so beautiful.”

“Does he take the stones toward the Door of Surrilana?”

She shook her head. “I do not know. But I think he take them down to still another cavern – one lower down.” She listened at the stairs and grew anxious. “Go now. Hurry please! Quickly.”

“Nurri Kala, why do you want to help me?”

“You are white, like I am.” She turned away. “Somehow, I cannot bear to see your life destroyed. I see so much of death.”

“What do you mean?”

She pointed toward The Flame and bit her lip.

“Please go.”

“You warn me, try to help me – yet you are Zorimi’s friend.”

“No, I am only his slave. You have little time. The light is dying.”

With that she vanished. Just a motion of her slender white hand toward the door to freedom, and she was gone.

Now I had looked over the possibilities of escaping through that opening, and I had seen none. Again I looked and, lying flat on my belly, I squirmed forward and peered far over the ledge which was a good hundred feet from the bottoms of Shamman. The gray light was changing to gloom. Darkness would not be long in arriving.

I saw a feeble foothold, accessible only by my hanging by my hands from the lip of the ledge and then trusting to luck. Yet I had no other choice. I saw to the reloading of the automatic and then swum myself over the ledge. My arm muscles, sore where the Silurian monster had held me fast in his titanic grip, were not too secure.

My feet touched the first foothold. The surface of the chalk cliff was damp and fetid. It was some time before I found a purchase for my hands. But so far my luck held out. Foot and hand found purchases. I lowered myself some ten feet.

My heart pounded in trip-hammer fashion.

There were no more footholds. I clung fast to the bit of life and security that seemingly endless face of cliff yielded me.

There was a flurry of wings. I dared not look over my shoulder, though I knew a bat was approaching me, for my strength was ebbing and I feared for my balance.

“Derro!” It was Baku’s voice. “I am here.”

I thanked my luck stars. I felt Baku’s talons on my back.

A screech rent the leaden, gray silence. Another and another!

Baku cried out in fright.

Wings beat against each other and the shrill voices of three huge bats were mingled in rage and terror and pain. Behind me Baku was fighting for his life, bravely, almost hopelessly. My light was excluded by shadows of many wings. Hundreds of bats of Shamman, armless and handless, were dropping from the stalactites above to home, Zorimi’s prisoner, from rescue.

“Baku! Baku!” I screamed. “Fly away! Bring the Bakketes! Bring the others!”

I could not see the fight. But presently I heard the fighting wings and the screeching move away from me. Either Baku had been destroyed or he took flight and escaped his killers.

A flambeau cut the gloom overhead with its yellowish glare. The Silurians were looking for me over the ledge. I was seen.

My first thought was to drop – to take death on the rocks below rather than perish in The Flame. I would cheat Zorimi. But the desire to fight for life persisted. Those three old crones who weave the fabric of our lives – Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos – might still have more threads for me to live on. It was not, I sensed, time for Atropos to end the pattern she had designed for me.

Two paws reached out of the darkness and clutched at my shoulders, took hold of my arms. One Silurian had lowered another by his legs and I was being lifted back to Zorimi’s chamber of horrors by a living rope.

Once more my two feet were planted firmly on solid flooring. The room was lighted by many flambeaux and I saw it literally packed with Silurians, their bulging black eyes devouring me, shining in the many points of light. The Flame seemed to crackle more loudly, more hungrily.

Was this the pattern spun for me by that hag Atropos?

I shut my eyes, opened them and blinked at what I saw beside the marble slab. My lips parted to utter a cry of horror, of revolting disgust – but no sound came from them.

Morgo the Mighty by Sean O’Larkin was originally serialized in The Popular Magazine in 1930. Over the next few weeks I’m going to be serializing it again here. Except for correcting the odd typo, I’m reproducing the text as printed in the original publication.

We two humans and our three bat men flew for several hours over wastes of gray rock and chalk and stunted trees. Shammans moved about beneath us, but gave us no attention or barrages of rocks and missiles as I expected. Nor were we attacked by the other bats which I saw foraging eagerly for food.

The light that illuminated the cavern waned and darkness came swiftly afoot. Here and there on the floor beneath me I saw tiny fires, and out of the darkness a bat flitted across our path. I could not understand the peace that existed between the bats that attacked the Junkers so savagely and the Bakketes who carried us.

I felt the air grow warmer, and my aerial sense told me were dropping to a still lower altitude – since I reckoned altitude in terms of the outer world’s.

In the dark we penetrated a tunnel that tortuously downward. My Bakkete squealed every time his wing scraped on the jagged walls. These wings of theirs, I learned, were of flesh and blood and bone and were almost as sensitive as my own.

Then I felt that the darkness had grown bigger, that we were again in a cavern as large if not larger than that of the Shamman. The air was sweeter and more languid. I felt quit good and gave no thought to the strain of hanging from my Bakkete’s arms.

We flew another hour, I should guess, and then alighted on a rocky ledge in front of a small cave, the interior of which gave out a dull-red glow.

“We are home,” Morgo said to me, taking my arm. “Let us go in and have – what do you call it – supper?”

“Food is a good enough word for me tonight!”

Morgo’s cave was a big one, and in its center blazed a good fire overhung with earthen dishes crudely shaped. I was astonished. It was hardly the place I expected to find in the heart of the Himalayas.

The whitish walls were covered with drawings – bats, rats, snakes, lizards, strange prehistoric beasts I’d never before seen. My tired eyes were aroused. True, the artistry was crude, childish, but there was faithfulness to form and design. I recognized each animal or reptile immediately and could not help think of those drawings found in Spain, the bison, the reindeer, Paleolithic man’s attempts to reproduce life as he saw it in the Aurignacian Age. Morgo, born a child of civilization, was going through primitive man’s struggles to find himself again – to unlock the secrets of identity held fast in a brain that played hide-and-seek with his efforts.

He lighted a lamp – fat tallow in a soapstone dish – and gave it to me that I might inspect his handicraft the better. I saw stone axes, pierced for the wooden handle, flint arrow points, small and large bows, dishes fashioned from soft stones and a few bowls, marked by way of decoration, to hold food and water.

He answered all of my questions eagerly. He was more interested in hunt than combat. That was why he cover his walls with animal pictures rather than scenes of warfare. He proudly displayed a bed that rested on four legs – a skin-covered frame piled with grass and more skins.

I noticed three Shammans moving about the cave, tending the fire and the cooking food. They were sluggish but docile. Morgo explained that they were his servants, men he spared from death at the hands of their fellows. I later learned that one was a murderer and the two thieves. But they revered the ground that Morgo trod, in their simple way.

Morgo bade me be seated, and I went close to the fire, for the night air was damp, and crossed my legs under me. He was content to squat upon his haunches while the shammans passed his dishes heaped with steaming savory food. I ate hungrily and with relish. There were meats, unusual vegetables and herbs I could not identify. Our meal was consumed without speech, but I could see that Morgo did not devour his share in the savage manner of the shammans. There was breeding in his behavior.

When I finally inquired about the delicious meat, Morgo said that it was mannizan flesh. And to my amazement, I gathered on questioning him, that the mannizan was the ratlike creature I saw in the upper cave. My stomach did not rebel and sleep stole upon me.

My primitive host insisted that I take his bed, while he made himself comfortable on a heap of pelts near the fire. His insistence was so bound up in fraternity, I agreed at once, announcing I would construct a bed of my own the next day.

I stretched out and closed my eyes. But sleep was slow in coming. Once I glanced over at Morgo and found him sitting up, staring fixedly at a small cross – two twigs tied together. This was suspended from a string which hung around his neck. He presently tucked it beneath his garment and curled up and soon began to snore.

Dreams made my night a living hell. I relived the attack of the human headed bats on the Junkers. I saw those two bats sailing silently through the air, one holding Harker with the Shining Stone in his hand, blood red in the gray light, and the other carrying Kenvon’s head. I again recoiled from the dismembered body of the fanatic millionaire who was largely responsible for my plight, here, hundreds of miles inside the Himalayas. I found myself in mortal combat with those big-bodied, small-pated shammans in the forest of dirty-gray stalagmites.

The cave was flooded with a soft, yellow light when I was awakened by Morgo shaking my shoulder.

“We shall have breakfast, I thing the word is,” he grinned. “Come and eat.”

I did. And I didn’t question the food or its nature, because it was suited to a king’s palate.

On going outside and standing upon the rocky ledge before Morgo’s home, I looked out over a new world – a cave lighted in yellow which had no apparent source. Morgo’s nest was high up in the face of a gaunt granite precipice, the top of which was lost in a curtain of pinkish stalactites which were the most beautiful I’d ever seen. A broad plain cover with tall, fantastic greenish trees and plants, flora suggestive of the Carboniferous Age, stretched out as far as the eye could see. They reminded me of photos of Sagillariae and Lepidodendra, vegetation of that distant era.

Over this stillnes cruised the Bakketes, feeding on the vegetation, soaring high up in the stalagmites. I soon noticed a musical tinkling sound, the touching of many silver bells. Morgo came out and explained to me that the sound came from the pinkish stalactites when the Bakketes’ wings flitted against them. It was like a heavenly organ, distant and faint and, moreover, very pleasant to listen to.

I accepted life in the Cave of the Kahli as a man does the lotus flower and all its forgetfulness. A week slipped by – I counted on Morgo’s sticks – and the seven days were fraught with minor adventures, my discoveries about this new life. I grew accustomed to flying in the arms of the Bakketes. Baku was assigned to me because of his brief understanding of English. Among the stalactites, I struck the long, musical fingers of chalk and stone and filled this miniature welkin welkin with sonorous peals. I even thought of working out a carillon, a fantastic idea I quickly forgot.

Morgo hunted mouselike creatures in the verdure, and I did not hesitate to eat the dishes concocted from them, remembering I was once fond of chop suey despite the proverbial joke about it. I got to know that a ten-foot dragon fly was called a dragah, that there were pythons in the Carboniferous forests, that ants similar to the Drivers of Africa were most feared by the peaceful primitives of Kahli, a people slightly smaller than the shammans and suggestive of the Chinese sloe eyes. I heard about the venomous chameleons with six-foot tongues which inhabited Zaan, who caught a man with this tongue and gulped him down before you could say Jack Robinson.

Morgo’s world and Morgo’s life was a veritable Paradise – with reservations, of course. But I soon grew to like it. The source of yellow light which came and went, much as outer day, was called the Shaft. Morgo promised to show it to me one day when we went to the Caves of Zaan. There were a people there, he said, that had a white skin and blond hair, who were peaceful, and their cave floor glittered.

I decided that life and adventure within the Himalayas was far  more sensible for me than making a break for the outer world, fighting the cold, the ice and, if I was lucky enough to reach them, the jungles of the Sikkim between Kanchenjunga and Darjeeling. My fate I accepted with a resignation that had less stoicism and more pragmatism in it.

Yet there lurked in the back of my mind a concern for Harker and Lacrosse. Were they really dead? Had they met with Kenvon’s fate? Or were they still inside this mortal coil, as Shakespeare once described the earth? I told Morgo of my feelings and suggested an expedition to Shamman.

“Shamman is a dangerous cavern,” he said. “But I am ready to go into it, if you would seek your friends. I am ready to do what you say.”

I dallied a week more and felt more confident of my power to cope with the constant surprises I met with. Then I suggested a trip to the upper cave in quest of the geologist and the naturalist of Kenvon’s ill fated aerial expedition. My mind had to be satisfied that they were dead or safe and alive.

On the morning of our departure with an army of some three thousand Bakketes, I offered Morgo a gun. He had been taught how to use one but he preferred his bow and arrows, his sling and a bowie knife which he accepted as a gift from me. I armed myself with an automatic and several dozen rounds of ammunition.

The air before our ledge was swarming with Bakketes and, while there was no semblance of military organization, there was order among them. Baku uttered guttural commands, and small groups deployed to the right and the left, preparing for our advance into Shamman.

“Do you know where Zorimi lives?” I asked Morgo on a hunch. “Has he caves he lives in?”

“Yes; he lives close by The Flame.” And he explained that The Flame, something whose smoke he had only seen, was akin to an eternal fire, that Zorimi, the ruler of this underworld, kept ablaze. That it had been blazing for centuries.

“Let us look near it for my friends,” I said. “It is possible that they are held prisoners there.”

Morgo’s dark eyes met mine and flashed. “We will look there if you say so. But many Bakketes must die.”

“You mean we’ll have a fight on our hands for approaching so close to Zorimi’s hangout?”

“It is inevitable, Derro!” Derro was a name he gave me because of my hair. He could not pronounce McRory easily. And derro is a “red bush,” the fruit of which I’d tasted and gagged on.

I could see he was loath to sacrifice his Bakketes in combat with the bats of the other cavern. Yet I was determined on the expedition.

We took to the air, Baku holding me in his arms. Morgo followed close by. The ascent through the narrow tunnel was effected quietly, almost stealthily, by the three thousand flying creatures. Through Baku, who gave the orders which were passed from mouth to mouth, I was leader of this foray. Such was Morgo’s wish.

Once more in the cool, gray Cave of Shamman, we rose to the roof and surveyed the land below. Far, far away, I thought I discerned smoke. Mindful of Morgo’s concern about his army, I commanded the Bakketes to remain close to the channel while Morgo and I reconnoitered for our quarry. My greatest fear was for the human-headed armless bats that lurked in the stalactites overhead.

We swiftly approached the thin swirl of smoke.

Three bats dropped form the roof and Morgo cried a warning to me. We were attacked. The enemy bats, unable to seize us with their taloned feet, attempted to crush us to the ground by powerful beating wings. It was the same tactic that crashed the Junkers – smothering us to the cavern floor by raining wing blows upon us and clinging to us.

Morgo killed one creatured with an arrow. I fumbled for my gun, got it out and shot another, crippling it, sending it down.

The third bat drew away, frightened. Yet we were enemies and, perforce, to be destroyed. He singled me out for the final assault. He rushed at me and Baku staggered in mid-air when our bodies met in a terrific impact. The bat encircled me with his legs and started to fly upward.

Morgo shot an arrow and it missed. My gun arm was wedged against my body in the bat’s leg grip. I strained, I tugged, and up and up we sailed, Baku unable to cope with the stronger bat’s strength that was pulling me from his grasp.

At last I freed my hand and fired again. The human face of the bat contorted with pain. He screeched and tumbled downward like an autumn leaf. I was surprised the pistol shots had not reverberated, had not filled Shamman with echoes. Nor did the clash bring down other bats.

Nearing the thread of ascending smoke, I saw that it came from a high plateau. From the center of this mound of rock a tongue of fire licked out occasionally. The flame below its surface was a mighty one, I judged.

We dropped into a sea of stalagmites at the base of the mound. My plan was to climb up on foot, with our Bakketes keeping an eye on us, ready to pick us up if danger threatened. Morgo agreed to this.

The ascent of the mound was difficult. The chalk crumbled in our hands at every step. At times we were held fast to the wall by our feet or only our fingers. But eventually we made a climb of about sixty feet, breathless and muscle sore. Use to flying, clambering taxed us.

The plateau was uneven, rocky and crags jutted up in the shapes of hands, noses, human heads and church steeples. Weird is hardly the word for this gray table of chalk and stone; unholy is better. I sensed it in the very air – for, as I’ve said, I’m Irish.

Moving forward toward the smoke, Morgo and I tread our way carefully. Once I crushed a small snake underfoot and was certain it was an adder. Morgo destroyed three more, being quicker of eye, with thrown stones. Zorimi’s lair, I thought, was well protected.

Mounting a lofty crag to survey this plateau the better, we saw The Flame. It was gigantic – the light of a Titan. It licked upward from a hole in the floor of the deserted mound. The emptiness of the place appalled me, made me uneasy. Once always associated life with fire and here there were no signs of life. I wondered if The Flame was a natural phenomenon, of volcanic origin – but I was to learn the truth – in all too short a time.

Turning to climb down from the crag, I missed Morgo. He had vanished, utterly. I called to him and my voice was muffled by the mammoth silence. My heart pounded wildly. I was without an ally – save for my automatic. But what could have happened to him?

With the thought that he had possibly gone ahead without my hearing him, I move closer to The Flame and its pillar of slow smoke. I would see it plainly and then it would be hidden from view by intervening rock and monoliths.

A hidden fissure in the floor of the plateau yawned at my feet.

I leaped back. My finger touched the automatic’s trigger.

Someone – someone on whom I had nearly stepped – was looking up at me, staring wildly, bewildered.

It was a girl with golden hair. The most beautiful girl these weary eyes have ever seen. She was fair and blue eyed, more gorgeous than Cytherea. And devil of devils! She was wearing a single silken tunic caught in the middle by a silver girdle. Did they weave silk in these caves? I was flabbergasted.

She spoke to me softly in the strange guttural tongue of this underworld. And she was a white girl, not of Shamman.

“I don’t get you,” I said.

Her eyes grew larger. Her lips smiled rapturously.

“You speak a language I know,” she said. “Who are you?”

“Jerry McRory,” I said unbashed. “And who are you?”

“I am Nurri Kala,” she said. “But why are you here? There are none such as you in these caves.”

I tried to explain to her quickly, in words of one syllable, but she gathered little. And then I asked her what she was doing in Shamman.

“I am a vestal of The Flame,” she said softly, reverently. “I have been here for many years, but once I spoke as you do.”

“You’re English or American?” I suggested.

“I cannot remember. Zorimi brought me here.”

H’m, another amnesia victim, I reflected, thinking of Morgo’s strange tale. And Zorimi was involved in her fate.

“Zorimi?”

“He rules all of Shamman,” she said, darting a glance deeper into the fissure fearfully. “You must go away from here. It is dangerous to be found on this mound. Zorimi says it is the home of the gods – and no place for mortals to tread.”

Zorimi, whoever he was, I decided, was identifying himself with Zeus of the Greek mythology and had convinced the Shammans that his plateau was Olympus, the home of the old Greek gods, a place not to be spied upon.

“I should like to meet Zorimi,” I said. “I’ve lost two of my friends – three, I mean -” I thought of Morgo then “- and perhaps he can tell me where to find them.” I was confident that Zorimi had been at the scene of the Junkers’ crash, for hadn’t I heard the primitive men shout his name? Hadn’t he addressed them?

“Go away, please. Quickly!” the girl implored me.

“I’m not afraid of Zorimi,” I said. “Where does he lie?”

“You must not see him. It means death to any mortal who beholds his face!”

“But you see him – you know him!”

“I am an immortal,” Nurri Kala said naively, sincerely. “It is Zorimi’s will that I am such. I am a vestal of The Flame.”

“Lead me to him,” I said, growing impatient. “Then we can talk later on – about yourself. But I must see him about my friends!”

The girl screamed and her eyes stared over my shoulder. They were laden with a terror I’d never seen in a human before. I turned to see the object of her fear, but two arms were thrown abut me, holding me with the grip of a vise.

I could not budge. I could not move in that embrace of steel thews.

“I am Zorimi,” a guttural voice said behind me – in English. “But it is ordained that you shall not see me with mortal eyes.”

“Who are you?” I cried out. “You’re not one of the Shammans. You’re from the outer world, too!”

“I am Zorimi!”

Zorimi! Could it be that? The thought was odious. I shrank from it. Yet it persisted in my mind. Was Zorimi my friend Morgo, too?”

“You have violated the sanctity of my temple!” Zorimi went on angrily. “You have laid eyes upon an immortal vestal. You have earned death!”

Good God! This sounded like a page out of mythology! His seeing the white goddess of the African jungles! But I was dealing with a golden white girl and a man who spoke the King’s English for all his invisibility! Here was mystery with a capital M, and I so wanted to live – to satiate a sudden curiosity. I wanted to know who Nurri Kala really was! Who Zorimi really was!

“Is it Morgo that speaks to me?” I demanded of the unseen speaker.

“Morgo?”

Fear was in the voice.

“You know of Morgo, too? Where is he?”

I was satisfied, somehow, that this was not Morgo. And relief surged through me, for I now knew that Morgo had not fallen captive to Zorimi. But I had no idea of his whereabouts or why he disappeared.

“White man,” Zorimi said eagerly, “if you will deliver Morgo to me, I will spare your life.”

“Nothing doing,” I said. “Morgo is my friend.”

“I will do more” – the voice purred – “I will restore you to the outer world whence you came, if you deliver Morgo to me!” Zorimi meant to be tempting but I knew the sinister timbre of his words. I would die in any event, and I had no intention of betraying Morgo.

“Nothing doing,” I said. “Besides, I’ve come to you on a friendly mission -” Zorimi laughed harshly. “I seek two friend of mine who were in an airplane with me – Grant Harker and Sam Lacrosse. Do you happen to know anything about them? Are they still alive? I saw Harker carried off by a bat.”

For some little time, Zorimi did not reply. Finally he said:

“I know of no other white men in Shamman. You and Morgo are the only people of such flesh. But consider my off: tell me where to take Morgo unawares and you shall live, shall go into the world whence you came.”

“I said nothing doing.:

“Fool!” Zorimi stormed, and muttered in his own tongue.

At length he said: “Then you shall serve another purpose on this holy mound, white man. I have long waited for such flesh as yours – or Morgo’s. The Flame craves it! The Flame must be fed! A living body, you shall be hurled into its white heat, to give your life to its Life!”

He uttered thunderous instructions to my captors who proceeded to push me forward and down the steps leading into the fissure of rock in which Nurri Kala was sitting. She heard these ominous words and cried out. But I saw by her eyes that Zorimi had transfixed her, had cautioned her to silence, and she covered her face with her slender ivory hands, sobbing as though she were losing a friend.

Downward I trudge, my feet tripping on the rough steps, into darkness, forced onward by two relentless iron hands that held my arms to my sides. A chill seeped into my very marrow.

The sound of crackling tongues of fire, rising from a mammoth pyre, reached my ears. The heat grew intense, foul smelling, and I thought of hell’s brimstone.

I was to be a human sacrifice to The Flame – to some pagan and perverse form of worship practiced by Zorimi – in the hidden recesses of this dank and dark mound of cavern chalk.

To Be Continued

Morgo the Mighty by Sean O’Larkin was originally serialized in The Popular Magazine in 1930. Over the next few weeks I’m going to be serializing it again here. Except for correcting the odd typo, I’m reproducing the text as printed in the original publication.

“Zorimi! Zorimi!”

With that word ringing in my ears, I opened my eyes and found myself – not in heaven, but on a mossy bed at the base of a twenty foot pillar of chalk – gray, dirty chalk. A forest of these pillars hemmed me in, but over them glowed that dull, ghastly early-morning light, now brighter but still livid. No bones were broken, but my wind-breaker sleeve was ripped off and my left arm a welter of bruises. I figured that I skidded down the stalagmite that broke my fall, to this bed of weird, gray moss.

“Zorimi!”

This shout grew louder, and was taken up by scores of guttural voices somewhere to my left.

The bats had vanished. Not a wing sound in the still, gray air. Yet I could distinctly hear the movement of many feet, walking, running, climbing, stumbling. All were moving to a point at my left.

Louder and more vociferous grew the cries of “Zorimi!” I was curious but also cautious. I, too, wanted to call out to Kenvon and Harker and Lacrosse. Yet something told me to be wary, to hold my tongue lest I attract attention to myself.

As I stood and steadied my groggy senses, I heard the din of voices suddenly silenced. The stillness of the great cavern was appalling – especially to myself who had been so recently accustomed to the roar of the Junkers’ motors, the reverberations, the screeching bats. For a moment, I thought that it would unnerve me.

Then a voice cracked the quiet like a musher’s whip. It was deep, guttural and to me, uncomprehensible. Yet someone was talking and hundreds of ears were listening. That I knew, sensed.

Sometimes the voice broke and went shrill. Again it was a falsetto and then a deep bass. I could not make out whether a man or woman was talking but I was certain I was listening to one person.

The name “Morgo” was mentioned several times. Each mention evoked a dull hum, a wave of displeasure from the listeners. At length the speaker ceased his harangue and the cries of “Zorimi!” rose up to the vault miles above like a pagan paean. I couldn’t help the shudder the name sent up and down my spine.

The speaker uttered a piercing cry and then another, not unlike that of the human-faced bats who had brought disaster to my black bird. There was an instant flurry in the air, wings stirred that awful gray stillness, and two of the bats sailed over my head, moving quickly to the left.

“Zorimi! Zorimi!” The shouts were repeated to a crescendo. A people seemed to be pay unholy homage to some king, some diety. The air seemed permeated with feeling and I caught it.

The voice that I had been listening to now appeared to be higher up. Was the speaker climbing a rocky eminence? Was he flying?

The bats swam into view – something caught between the legs of one of them. I gasped. It was a man’s body – Harker’s; I recognized the man’s flying suit. Between the other bat’s feet was a head held like a football – a human head, white and bloodless.

And I closed my eyes to what I saw next.

A hand dangled from the body carried by the first bat man. In it, iridescent in that ghastly light, besplotched with red, was the three-headed thing I last saw being taken from Jim Craig’s lifeless form by the dacoit in the hangar at Darjeeling the night before. At least, it was something similar and of identical design. How could I ever forget that pectoral poor Jim Craig called a diamond, with its three heads – the bat’s, the woman’s and the lizard’s.

The two bats rose higher and higher, into the grayness and were soon lost to sight in what I took to be the west. Again I heard the  movement of many feet, this time dispersing rather than coming together. The footfalls echoed loudly in the still air.

A group of them were coming toward me. I was unarmed, ill-equipped to put up a fight. Escape was the better part of valor for me. But where to?

Twenty yards away was a broken stalagmite, its crest no more than fifteen or twenty feet from the floor. I ran to it without hesitation, tore around to the far side and started climbing. Footholds were few, but my eager feet cut into the crumbling chalk, and up I went. On reaching the top, I threw myself prone on its scant surface and raised my eyes just over the edge, facing the mossy bed onto which the Junkers had flung me.

Forty or fifty men can throw the forest of chalk teeth, morose and silent. They were a good six feet tall and some of them seven. They were dressed as in the hour of their birth, but a shaggy, coarse gray hair was matted about their breasts, loins and limbs. Their heads were surprisingly small and, while suggesting the ape’s, were not apelike.

These were primitive men, the Pithecanthropus Erectus I read about in science books. How startlingly like the pictures I had seen of them, pictures conjured up from stray limb and jaw bones, for scientists had never found a complete skeleton of this type that roamed the earth six hundred thousand years ago, before the first glacial age. Were these men I was looking at their cousins, their direct descendants?

A dozen of them hesitated and sniffed the air over the bed of moss on which I had lain. They stooped and smelled it. They muttered, scanned the forest of monoliths about them and then slowly, dumbly shook their heads. The entire party presently moved on, passing directly beneath my lair.

I waited breathless. God knows what my fate would have been in the hands of those primitive beast men! Their footfalls grew fainter and died away. The awful silence once more fell upon the scene that I commanded.

Getting up and stretching my aching bones, I looked about. High in the air, in the direction from which the inhabitants of this cavern had come, I saw the remains of the Junkers G-38, festooned between two stalagmites. A broken aileron flapped slowly like the wing of a wounded bird, impaled on a fence picket.

I needed food and arms. I was in a strange world but life still flowed in my veins, and it was only natural that I make a fight to keep it coursing through me. It was up to me to pit my civilization and its knowledge and the resources of this wilderness of space, air and chalk of savage men and bats.

Clambering down from the broken mound of chalk, I pushed forward and, presently, came under the Junkers. It was a good thirty feet above me and about forty yards from the bed of moss into which I fell. I guessed that I was thrown clear of the fuselage the first time the plane struck a stalagmite and that the machine was carried forward by its great velocity to two peaks yards away.

How to reach the plane and its supplies was my problem. I was certain that it had not been looted, for what would the primitive men know of its stores? First I circled one pillar and found it unscalable; then I began to wend my way around the other.

My feet recoiled from what my eyes saw. Involuntarily, I leaped backward a pace.

There at the base of the stalagmite was a headless body – Kenvon’s. But how had the head been severed? The decapitation seem to be a clean one. And I had seen no knives or weapons on the persons of the hoary men on this cavern.

Kenvon was beyond my help. I stepped over the torn leather flying outfit and found, a few feet farther on, footholds on the pillar of chalk. They had been freshly made. But by who? It was beyond me.

I started climbing. The stillness remained unbroken save by my breathing. The ascent was not an easy one – but it had to be made. And make it I did, those towering thirty feet with chalk crumbling beneath every touch.

The plane was safely caught, its wings resting on the tips of the gray monoliths. I crawled over one, hung over the cabin and swung through the hole my body made when I was ejected from the ship in the first crash. Lacrosse was not to be seen nor had I expected to see him. Probably the hoary men carried him off. Yet why should they behead Kenvon and send Harker aloft with a bat man?

I broke open a tank of water and drank my fill. The biscuits and canned beef were equally delicacies. Then I turned to the store of arms and found besides three rifles, four automatics and ammunition, a machine gun of all things and a box of Very lights. What on earth did Kenvon expect to do with a machine gun if we had fallen in the Nepalese jungle? Surely he didn’t expect us to cart it on the trek back to Darjeeling, along with the rest of the arsenal and the food.

A blanket served me for a sling, and I filled it with all the rifle and pistol ammunition I could lay my hands on, besides the weapons themselves, of which I took a rifle and three automatics. I found two bowie knives and added them to a pile of canned beef, crackers and a water tank. The compas went in, too, together with four torchlights that weren’t smashed in the crash.

Having done this, I suddenly wondered why. Where was I headed? What could I do to get out of the caverns? I was several hundred miles away from  – and below – the Door of Surrilana. And if I ever reached the Door, what good would it do?

I sat down and began to laugh. My eyes fell upon a dozen cartons of cigarettes and, still laughing at my foolishness, I broke one open and was soon puffing away.

At length, I decided that the plane was not a safe place for me. I knew nothing about the winds in this cavern, but I figured a good breeze would shift the Junkers’ weight and send it to the floor below. Dropping two slings of food and arms from the hole, I made my way back to the pillar of chalk and, trying to climb down, slid most of the last fifteen feet. Again no bones were busted.

“Well,” I mused, “I’m worse off than Robinson Crusoe. He had a man Friday to tote his stuff and a sea to fish in. I’ve only the contents of the food sling. I don’t fancy eating bats, mice or Pithecanthropus Erectus!”

I looked up suddenly, conscious that eyes were upon me.

A man – a white man – and one of the finest specimens it’s been my lot to behold, stood a few yards behind me, covering my back with an arrow poised in a drawn bow. Behind him stood three bat men, but unlike the others that beset the Junkers, these had arms and long, crooked fingers on horny hands. I grabbed an automatic.

The white man addressed me in the guttural tongue I had heard coupled with the name “Zorimi.”

I shook my head at him and grinned.

“What the hell?”

“You speak English?” he asked, dropping his bow and staring at me.

“They call it that where I’ve been,” I said. “Who are you – who talks English and lives in this God-forsaken hole?”

“I am called Morgo,” he said, and for all that meant to me at the time he might have been Isidore O’Reilly. Yet I was mighty glad to see him, to hear his human voice.

“Who’re those guys with you?” I asked, pointing to the bat men.

He puzzled at my slang and then understood.

“They are Bakketes – men who fly. They are my friends. Do not harm them.”

“It’s O.K. with me if it’s the same with you. Now, how do I get out of here, Morgo?”

He was still puzzled at my words.

“Get out of here? But where to? Where do you come from?”

I realized then that Morgo had no idea of the outer world. He could not conceive of it.

“How long have you been here? How old are you?” I asked him.

“By my sticks, I am twenty-six years old,” he said. I later learned that he counted days by a system of notched sticks and set aside each three hundred and sixty-five for a year. “I have been here for sixteen years. But I was born in another place – where men like you lived. They even had red hair, some of them.”

“Where is that?” I  asked, thankful that my red mane had given me a distinguishing touch.

“I do not remember. I was very young. I even had another name and a mother and a father. I went to school with white-skinned boys like I once was. We talked English. But I forget much names and places, for I was in an accident down here. I fell from a rock and a lay in darkness a long time.”

Oh-ho, I said to myself, fancy finding an amnesia victim in the bowels of the Himalayas! Yet I believed the youth. One could not help but do that on looking into his dark, fearless eyes. He was a good six feet four in height, broad of shoulder and narrow of hip. His muscles were not bulky but rippled like titan strands beneath a weather beaten skin. The dark-brown hair of his was long and carefully knotted at the back. His loins were girded with a strange, fleecy pelt that was caught over one shoulder. And he was scrupulously clean.

“Are there any more white men like you in here?” I asked.

“No, I know of none. I have seen none but the beasts, the bats and the shammans.”

I took “shamman” to mean the primitive men and I was right.

“And just who is Zorimi?”

Morgo started and his eyes widened at the mention of the name. The bat men stirred and gazed balefully at me.

“Zorimi,” Morgo said, “is an evil one. I have never seen him – but all here fear him – beast and man. But I do not fear him because I have never seen him. He is a god that all worship and obey. He has but to reveal the Shining Stone, and all who would disobey him bow down and forget – so I am told.”

“The Shining Stone?” I had a hunch. “What is that?”

To my utter astonishment, despite my hunch, Morgo described Her of the Three Heads, the pectoral I had seen on poor Jim Craig. Here was mystery, and I couldn’t fathom the simplest phase of it.

Questions flew to my lips. I simplified them and stripped them of slang for this resident – a fellow white man – of this cavern world. How did he live? On the flesh of animals and herbs which came from the still lower caves. How did he move about? In the arms of the bat men he had behind him. They carried him on his hunts. He was a peaceful man and fought only when his life was endangered.

How did he amuse himself? By making drawings of this underworld and by perfecting himself with his bow and with his spear and with his sling shot. To demonstrate, he took a skinsling from his covering and sent a small stone through the Junkers’ wing thirty feet above us.

How did he get along without human companionship, having once had it? He fraternized with these peace loving bat men, hunted with them, and he was on friendly terms with a tribe of primitive men in the lower cave where he lived. And how did he get into the caverns?

“My father,” he said simply, “was a man who loved to climb mountains. He said that there was one mountain he would climb before all other men. With a party of friends, my mother and myself, he climbed high over ice into a cold world. There was a great door in the rock -”

“The Door of Surrilana?”

Morgo’s face brightened. He remembered that name, probably having heard it before as a child. He tried to recall other names, but shaking his head sadly, gave it up. “I cannot say for sure. My father wanted to climb the mountain but my father urged him not to.  But we did. My mother died of the cold. While waiting to return to wherever we came, we camped in a huge opening. Then one night there was a landslide, I think you call it. Ice came toppling down from the mountaintop. I remember seeing the tents crushed, and something struck me, wounding my head.

“When I came out of my sleep, I was in these caves. The bat men brought me here, and I have lived with them ever since, learning their language, teaching them a little of English. Baku,” he added, indicating a wiry little Bakkete, “understand and speaks English a little.”

I wondered what the Bakketes were doing in the neighborhood of Surrilana since this warmer climate seemed more indigenous to them. But then there many mysteries, I was to learn – and that was not one of them.

“Where does this Zorimi live?” I asked. “And where do you live that you do not see him?”

“I live in a lower cave – the Land of Kahli – where it is warmer. This is Zorimi’s cavern here, the Cave of Shamman.”

“And how did you happen to turn up here just now?”

I watched him suspiciously.

He sensed my attitude and smiled. “The Bakketes told me of the strange black bird that was in the caverns. I have not seen a bird in sixteen years. So I flew up here where I saw the fight between Zorimi’s bat men and bird.” He looked up at the Junkers. “The poor bird was killed.”

Excusing himself, he spoke to the Bakkete named Baku. The creature stood behind Morgo and threw its arms over his, clasping the horny black hands over the youth’s chest. Then the man and bat rose and soared over the Junkers. Morgo alighted and made his inspection of the plane. He was delighted, and I could hear his laughter while he chatted with the Bakkete. Presently he descended to my side.

“That is a wonderful bird,” he marveled. “Men have lived in its bowels. I should like to own a bird like that.”

“That’s the bird that brought me here,” I explained. Morgo was amazed, and I could see that his great respect for me and my red hair increased appreciably.

I told him of the food and arms I had, and he was only mildly interested. He said he had weapons of his own that sufficed in the caves. And he could get food easily. Yet he was interested in me, was curious about the world I came from. I could see that he craved my friendship and my companionship. It was a matter of one white man’s soul crying out to another’s for understanding, appreciation.

“Well,” I said at length, “I’m in your hands, Morgo. I despair of ever seeing the light of God’s day beyond Surrilana. I guess I’m here for keeps – and since I’m Irish, I might as well make the best of a bad deal. Take me to where you live and I’ll try to learn your ways.” And what else could I say, being in the hole I was?

“I shall be glad to call you a friend.” Morgo smiled at me. “And I will take you to my home.”

“Can I hoof it – walk there, I mean?”

He laughed and shook his head.

That meant I had to let a Bakkete hug me. It was not a thought to relish, but I soon conquered my distaste for such close contact with a bat. Morgo gave the orders in the strange guttural tongue. One of the Bakketes took my slings in his hands and flapped upward into the air. Another encircled me with his arms, catching his fists across my chest. I held my automatic in my hand suspiciously.

The bat man rose from the floor and I hung easily, my armpits over his forearms. And flying man that I was, used to every machine ever made, I got no greater kick out of any comparable to that of my first flight with a Bakkete. Morgo rose in Baku’s arms.

The vast, fan wings cut the air silently above the gray world below. I recalled pictures of the mighty pteranodon-pterodactyls, those batlike reptiles that flew over the seas that covered Kansas and Missouri in Mesozoic time. Now I was living a bad dream turned good.

To Be Continued!