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.

Terrified, Harker and Lacrosse fell back in their seats. They knew that if they leaped on Kenvon, he had but to press the trigger – and all of us would go hurtling to kingdom come. Miles of death hung below us.

“Well?” Kenvon demanded of me.

“Risk it!” Lacrosse shouted hoarsely. “We’ve no other choice!”

“Kenvon is insane!” Harker cried weakly. “We’re in the hands of a madman. Take a chance, McRory.”

Perforce, I bowed to the inevitable. There was still hope for my neck. A Chinaman’s chance. I prayed that my gods had a weather eye on me. So nodding to Kenvon, I brought the Junker about in a broad, swinging circle. I wanted to drink in one last sight of the outer world’s beauty.

And never, save in that moment when I face the Beyond, did it seem so sweetly glorious – never did I feel more full of life itself. This challenging the unknown powers was quite different from challenging an enemy to combat in the skies – for now I was coming to grip with natural elements the like of which I knew none.

We faced the Door of Surrilana.

I took aim with my black bird’s bat-faced nose. The motors hummed pleasantly, giving me a sense of thrilling life in the stick. Better Surrilana than a bullet! I’m that much of a gambler – when it’s force upon me.

Kenvon reached to the control board, still keeping me covered, and switched on the searchlight and the bulbs on top of the wings. He sat back then, unloosened his safety belt and, wary of me, watched the approaching hole in the glacier anxiously.

I saw the maw of ice and rock yawn wider and wider like a hoary mouth, the talons of icicles a brush mustache, a stumble beard beneath Kanchenjumga’s nose. There was something unclean about this orifice and the druid blood in me whispered of unholiness in violating a mountain in this manner. The blackness ahead grew larger and larger.

We shot through the gateway of ice. The vast arch encircled us – and then we were inside, our lights flooding a huge frost-encrusted cavern, its walls glittering like a palace out of “Grimm’s Fairy Tales.” It would be easy to believe we were in a diamond world if we did not know about the ice.

It was just as Kenvon had described to us – a great cave covering an as broad as the plains of Kansas with the heavens thrown in. I estimated that this mountain hollow as at least fifty miles square and two miles high. The roar of our engines reverberated deafeningly from the distant walls of ice and stone.

I circled, I swept close to the floor, I mountained to the dripping vault above. Strange winds sucked us this way and blew us that. The Junkers slipped, slid and banked dangerously in the grip of these mighty blasts despite my efforts.

Harker and Lacrosse lost their fears momentarily beholding the site no mortal man had ever seen before – at least, so I thought then. Tat Kanchenjunga could hold such a hollow was unbelievable. Yet our eyes were not lying to us.

“There is a darker space toward the north,” Kenvon said, “make for it, McRory.”

I did, fool that I was.

The dark patch on our new horizon proved to be more than a shadow, more than a fissure in the cavern’s wall. It was another opening, a channel that dropped slowly downward. The beam of the searchlight told me that much.

“Be careful,” Harker warned me. “We’ve seen enough.”

“We’re not going any deeper into this,” Lacrosse shouted. “You’ve had and seen enough for one day, Kenvon!”

“Cowards!” the condor nose snapped. “Follow that channel, McRory!”

I was about to object when again I saw the muzzle of the millionaire’s automatic peering up at me. What other choice had I? Where there’s life, there’s hope. And so long as I kept the Junkers afloat, I had life at my command.

This tunnel into which we dove was some three hundred feet high and four hundred feet wide. Not enough room in which to turn about. Twice it turned, each time to the east. I thanked my stars this G-38 had no tail or we would have scraped the walls – gone a-crash.

After flying two miles and a half, dropping in altitude to ten thousand feet – a considerable drop from twenty-one thousand feet – we debouched into another cavern still greater than the one next Surrilana’s Door. I cannot calculate its size, but it must have been a hundred miles wide and three hundred miles long. Roof and floor were four or five miles apart and the air was appreciably warmer.

“For God’s sake, McRory,” Lacrosse cried out, “be careful.”

I caught his eye in the mirror and peered upward through my port.

Stalactites – long, fierce fingers – hung from the vault above. They glistened in our passing light like angry canine teeth, lustful incisors, jagged molars.

Beneath was a sea of mammoth stalagmites, sharp, jagged, stumpy – all horrible beds of instant death if the Junkers failed me. Such were part of Kanchenjunga’s digestion of the waters that seeped from her scales of glacier through her many pores.

“Say,” Harker cried out, “there’s light in this hole.” Pointing toward our wake, he watched a strange eerie glow.

Kenvon nodded. Without a word, he took the light switch and doused our illumination.

I held my breath as we hung in mid-air. The fool, out of sheer curiosity, would wreck us for a glimpse of this inner phenomenon.

But the cavern was aglow with light like that of early dawn. The teeth that jutted from the floor and roof were awash with it and gleamed on their easterly sides.

Though I could not see it, there was apparently some source of light in this cavern and it did not come from above, or from any visible opening. Rather, it diffused itself evenly through this vast room of fierce, ghastly teeth.

Again Kenvon switched on the lights. I brought the stick back sharply and we zoomed upward, over three lank stalagmites that had reached out to rip us asunder.

“Continue east,” Kenvon commanded.

It was mine not to reason why. The gun was still in his fist.

Down the five hundred mile stretch we went, and lower still we dropped. My altimeter stood at eight thousand feet when the cavern seemed to level again. My eyes were wary with watching floor and roof – their teeth, some longer than others, suddenly dartling out of the gloom into the searchlight’s path.

Lacrosse screamed incoherently. I saw in the mirror that something on the floor had attracted him and now a horrible curiosity enthralled him.

I took one look and called upon my gods again.

The floor was seething with strange beasts. They ran to the right and the left, from beneath the path of the Junkers, darting around the stalagmites with a remarkable agility, considering their size. The shock of the sight diminished and courage returned to me, so I dropped lower.

These beasts were rodents – rats the size of horses, at least eight feet long and four tall. Their whiskers sprouted from their long noses like claws, and as they looked up in their flight, I was aware of their evil red mouths opened in screeches of terror. There were hundreds of them.

When, presently, we left this herd of rats behind us, the cavern again dropped. I thought it high time to turn back. It was one of my usual hunches that it was high time to be letting well enough alone. The gods had preserved us this far – but why tempt them further? I suggested this much to Kenvon but he shook his head.

“We’ll go on,” he grinned. “I haven’t seen half enough yet.” And he showed me the automatic again. I offered no argument.

The channel took an upward turn, veered to the north and then dropped sharply. Down – down – down the Junkers raced. The tunnel narrowed and I slipped through. It widened and I breathed a trifle more normally. I was famished for a cigarette but there was no time for allaying frayed nerves.

The altimeter touched five thousand feet. We were less than a mile above sea level and three miles below the point we where we had entered these caverns.

A new room engulfed us, and it was still more brightly lighted than the upper cavern. Its floor and ceiling held less threatening teeth, but all was pervaded with a loathsome gray tint. Everything was neutral colored. And this room was infinite in size. It was a veritable inner world.

We cruised without speech for about fifty miles to the east. The reverberation was less deafening, but I still could feel its mighty throb.

I had seen so much in the past two hours I no longer believed my eyes. They were tired of new sights, strange incredible things in gray.

And when I beheld creatures walking up upright, running like men, across the floor below, I put it down to imagination. I shouldn’t have been surprised if I had seen pink elephants and yellow snakes having tea together.

“Men! Men!” Harker screamed. “The place is alive with them!”

What next would we be seeing – I asked myself.

But men they were – or something uncommonly like us. And like the rats in the cavern above, they fled from us.

I swooped closer to the floor and saw they were brown, shaggy, hairy creatures, huge-boned and well-thewed but small headed – like primitive man in the Pleistocene period; I’d read bout such things.

There were score of these creatures and they scrambled over crumbled mounds of rock and hid behind thick monoliths that stuck their blunt noses up at us.

“Trepid hearts would not have won such a sight,” Kenvon smiled. “If Harker and Lacrosse had their way, we’d have missed all this and more.”

“Hell,” Harker snapped, “I’m ready to land and see more at close quarters. We’ll never get out and I’d like to have the satisfaction now of seeing everything.”

Lacrosse blessed himself and said nothing. He trembled with every nerve in his body.

I was thankful there were no landing spots. The floor remained a veritable sea of extant or broken stalagmites and peculiar dwarfed trees with gray trunks and leaves. I couldn’t get on what they thrived.

Then terror, swift and merciless, smote us.

The gray glow we were conscious of disappeared. Our own lights seemed to yield nothing but darkness.

The air was filled, as if a sudden squall of inky snow had hit us, wiht gigantic black flying creatures that hurled themselves upon the plane.

They were bats, their long, black bodies and fan wings inundating the Junkers. They dropped from the stalactites in the roof in hordes, pouring their filthy screams upon us so that we could hear them above the roar of the motors. Their bodies brushing against the plane, sent us tilting, bucking. The propeller blades cut dozens to pieces and I marveled that we did not crash then and there.

A face was battened against the port in front of me.

My blood chilled. It was a human face – a deformed man’s face.

These bats had the heads and faces of man – human eyes.

The face dropped away, the eyes closed by the stunning impact of the port glass against flesh and bone.

The left A-propeller blade snapped. The Junkers careened. And Kenvon screamed aloud with fright, appealing to me to save him, save his foolish life.

I fought with the stick to right my black bird. I wanted to climb, to turn about and flee. But the left wing was weighted with the bats’ bodies. They hung fast. I banked to shake them off, but they clung with feet and wings, screeching like unholy demons out of Dante’s Inferno.

The plane dropped, crippled bird that it was, and dropped slowly as I circled and circled. The darkness of a greater horde, turning out to meet a common enemy – our Junkers – descended from the vault above. They struck the plane with a a terrible impact and my black bird staggered, quivering in every stay.

I was zooming over the stalagmites now. The weight of these human headed bats on the wings grew greater. Was this a nightmare or reality? Hideous face replaced fiendish maw at my port – and the Junkers smashed them from my sight.

I managed to rise, to shoot upward, vertically. The mass of beating wings and screeching mouths was momentarily below us. Yet the horde was not through – nor beaten. I felt the wings turn leadend.

We dove into the midst of an awful tangle of wings, black bodies and half human faces with staring eyes. The Junkers plowed, cut, floundered.

Another squall of these flying mice-men struck the plane. Their high pitched, bloodthirsty screams rose in crescendo with pain, hate and fear. They were attacking us to save themselves from a monster.

I saw Harker and Lacrosse, white and haggard, unbuckling their safety belts.

Kenvon tried to stand up. He screamed advice to me, but I heard nothing in the din of motor and bat.

Crash! Darkness! The wind of a million wings!

I was hurled through the side of the fuselage into outer darkness. My eyes closed and consciousness left me.

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.

By the time I aroused Kenvon, Harker and Lacrosse in the shack I found next to the hangar and got open the front gates, there was no sign of the murdering dacoit or his knife. A rear, unbolted door, showed us how he left. The ooze of blood from Craig’s mortal wound showed us what he had done. Jim Craig was dead.

There was nothing to be done but notify the police. Harker did this via the phone in the shack. I stayed on at the hangar and gave my story to the Indian officials who presently turned up in a flivver.

They were amazed that dacoitry dared to show its head in the face of the British government – but there was nothing they could do about it. The attack upon me equally bewildered them. It was suggested that I might have been mistaken – for my breath was heavy laden. But they could not deny the fact of poor Jim Craig’s stark body.

I was driven back to the Nepal Bar in the flivver. Cheery good nights echoed under the starlight and I went up to my bed.

Sleep did not come easily, and I tossed, worried and wondering. Some weird deviltry had touched me. Craig’s having had that three-headed thing, Kenvon’s obvious loss of it, the attack on me, and the murder, all of it had a significance that was beyond my humble fathomings. My locked door gave me no sense of security.

Lord knows what time it was went I finally dozed off. Nightmares rather than sleep were my lot. That big-headed dacoit haunted me. “She of the Three Heads” dazzled me with her unholy light. I could see that knife handle sticking out of Jim’s breast – dacoits surrounded me, took to ramming in my door —

Someone was pounding on my door.

“Who’s there?” I shouted, running to my bag and fishing out my old service automatic.

“It’s I – Kenvon. Open up, please.”

I bade him wait a moment while I slipped into a dressing gown and pocketed the gun.

Kenvon was pale and drawn. He shook my hand and pinched his condor nose, watching me thoughtfully.

“Wasn’t that bad about poor Jim! I don’t get it at all. First a burglary, then a murder in the hangar.”

I said that I was just as puzzled. He met my searching gaze and sat me down on the bed beside him.

“It is very urgent that I make the flight I planned, at dawn,” he said, clipping his words sharply. He was a man used to giving orders. “Craig was to have been my pilot. Will you take his place, McRory?”

I told him that other business held me in Darjeeling. Word about the missing De Haviland and its occupant, Harvey Jesperson, the New York, diamond buyer, was awaited. The company was sending a search plane up from Bombay. Jesperson was three kinds of a fool – but an important personage to boot.

“I can arrange things,” he said. “We’ll only be gone a day. I must have an experienced pilot. And I’ll deposit ten thousand dollars to your credit in any New York bank you care to name.”

Now I ask you – who am I to think twice about earning ten thousand dollars for a day’s flying? The searchers mightn’t report for another day or two. The plane from Bombay mightn’t get to Darjeeling before evening or the following morning. This was the biggest money ever thrust upon me in all my thirty-two years of bread winning.

“Sure I’ll take the job!” I said. “What time do you start?”

“I’ll send over for you at five o’clock.”

With that he bade me good night a third time and departed.

Kenvon’s coming had relieved my fears somehow and, when I put my head to the pillow again, I slept the sleep of the conscienceless.

The first rosy tints of the dawn found me clambering over my monoplane, the weird-looking Junkers G-38, huge and of a one-hundred-and-ten-foot wing spread, without a tail and with the face of a square-eyed bat.

“Hell,” I muttered to myself while I inspected the control board for the last time, “if ever there was a wild-goose chase, I’m on it!”

Perhaps Jim Craig was luckier dead than faced with what I had before me. Kenvon was taking this tailless ship on a junket five miles above the earth – to what end? The advancement of science and aviation or the mere indulgence of a millionaire’s whim?

Of all the fool ideas, this was the prize winner – wanting to penetrate a cave in the southeastern face of the towering Kanchenjunga, the next highest peak to Everest, that “King of the Himalayas”. Kenvon assured me in hurried snatches of conversation that he wanted to wrest fame and glory from the Dyhrenfurth Expedition by not only dropping the flag on the summit but by going the very heart of of Kanchenjunga, that skyscraping majesty of rock and glacier, which like Everest, had flung puny man from its sides, keeping its glorious cloud-caressed pinnacle inviolate.

The hugeness of this four-motor Junkers gave a small sense of security that wavered only when I lifted my eyes above the jungle wall to the dimly veiled peaks of Helu and Timbila in the north. I knew these G-38s – but would this one stand those titanic gales that had been sharpening Kanchenjunga’s icy breast for dozens of centuries?

“Well, McRory,” I mused, “if Kenvon, Lacrosse, and Harker aren’t worrying about their necks, why should you? You’ve got but one neck to give for adventure and you might as well offer it up willingly – considering the ten thousand bucks you stand to win. The Germans didn’t break it in 1918, nor did the Riffians nor the Nicaraguans nor the Mexicans – nor Clancy’s safety-pin busses in his flying circus out of Omaha.

But somehow monkeying around a little known mountain peak between Nepal and Tibet at an altitude of twenty-nine thousand feet was still another matter. Men of old believed that mountains grew angry like humans when their sanctity was violated. I’m superstitious – but of Irish extraction – and I couldn’t help bu think of the innumerable live high crests had claimed.

I worried about the tonnage of the petrol, the elaborate lighting system on the black wings, the powerful searchlight, the store of foodstuffs and firearms. We were only going for a day – and provisioned for a month’s stay. Was Kenvon keeping something from me?

Grant Harker, a pleasant-faced geologist from Harvard whose job it was to size up Kanchenjunga’s age-old clothing in notes and photographic plates, climbed into the plane through the trap door.

“Well, McRory, my boy,” he beamed, “I guess we’re about ready to push off.”

“How’s your neck?”

“Like Barkis, it’s willin’,” he laughed. “My insurance and Kenvon’s bonus cover this flight, so the wife and kiddies back home have nothing to worry about, except me.”

Through the ports I could see the mechanics going over my black bird inch by inch, testing the four wheels, the stays to the wings, the guides, the propellor blades, the struts. Their eyes missed not a detail of this G-38 and the three of them fondled the Diesels tenderly.

Kenvon of the condor nose came out of the hangar followed by dozens of well-wishers, Indian officials, newspaper correspondents and camera men. His aristocratic figure was clad in an all leather flying outfit and a padded helmet dangled from his arm. I, in a tweed golf suit, leather riding boots and a heavy fleece-lined wind breaker, envied him his swank.

Sam Lacrosse, cartographer and professor of natural history at Princeton – a gangling fellow – brought up Kenvon’s wake. It was up to him to spot the flora and fauna of Kanchenjunga from the air and write the New York papers all about it.

On reaching the trapdoor, Kenvon turned and began addressing the assembled crowd, tanned faces still full of sleep in India’s early light. “Folks, I’m off in ten minutes. The wind is just right, the pilot tells me – and it promises to be a blooming day in May. We’ve only got about fifty miles to go, as the crow flies, to reach the beautiful but cruel Kanchenjunga. We’ll climb five miles toward God’s ceiling to reach our objective – Kanchenjunga’s brow and the Door of Surrilana.”

The Door of Surrilana! That name was news to me. I took it he meant the cave he hoped to enter, if I was willing to risk it.

“First,” he went on, “we’ll circle the pinnacle at an altitude of about twenty-eight thousand one hundred and fifty feet and drop Old Glory upon it. What a surprise that will be for Professor Dyhrenfurth’s party, if they ever reach the summit and behold our flag there! They passed through the Jongri and the Kang-La Passes and are making the ascent already, having left early in April. Yet in one day I will do what they are attempting to do in months.”

Dyhrenfurth, I had heard, was trekking it with a party of internationally renowned Alpine climbers and an army of Sherpa-Nepalese, Tibetan and Lepcha porters. His way lay through the Sikkim to the glaciers where footwork was more feasible.

Out of the torrid jungles they would climb into arctic barrenness into a world of rock and ice – treacherous, relentless ice that had already taken a toll of six lives and repelled several other expeditions.

“After studying the summit,” Kenvon was saying, “I will descend some eight thousand feet to seek the entrance to a vast chain of inner caverns about which I alone have information. That the Himalayas are honeycombed with caverns is the theory of the Royal Geographic Society in London. Elaborate tests have been conducted in planetaria demonstrating the hollow condition of the world’s greatest range.

“I will make this flight without landing. If we are forced to such an extremity I am amply prepared to make a fight back to civilization on foot – having sufficient stores and arms to get through ice, rock and the jungles of the Sikkim.” He stretched out his arms to his listeners.

“And now, gentlemen, au revoir till this evening.”

Harker and I had to climb out of the plane, and with Kenvon and Lacrosse, pose for the cameraman before its black beauty – that the world a week later might behold our intrepid faces over the breakfast table in rotogravure sections and tabloids. Flash lights popped, as Indian officials made a short speech bidding us Godspeed and we all climbed up through the trap.

Kenvon seated himself beside me and adjusted his brand-new helmet. I pulled a pair of old automobile goggles over my head and was glad they were smoked. The sun on the ice would be dazzling.

“All set, McRory?” Kenvon asked with a smile. “I am.”

“All set,” I reported. “I’ve been over this bus and it’s shipshape.”

The mechanics were at the side cranks behind the propellors.

“Switch off, sir.”

“Switch off,” I said. How like the old days behind the lines in France before going over to strafe! Curt efficiency! Keyed up nerves!

“Contact, sir.”

“Contact.”

There was a sputtering in the motors and then they belched forth a terrible roar, flaying the tall grass with a steady, cyclonic wind. While I warmed these, the B motors were started and at the end of five minutes, I signaled through an open port for gangway.

The Junkers swung over the field, lumbering with its heavy load of fuel and human beings. Faster – faster – faster, till the fuselage was horizontal with the floor of the field. We neared the edge of the jungle wall. Would she go up – over that wall?

I drew the stick back and slowly my black bird raised herself from mother earth, skimming the treetops of the forests. We met the May sun coming out from behind the hills in China. It was warm and bright and its light threw Helu and Timbila into a relief of silver glitter. “A good omen!” Kenvon shouted. “The sun is up with me!”

Phallukla’s grubby head shot past us in the west.

We hung over the Rathong Valley and the Great Rangit River, the early course of Dyhernfurth’s party. Fascinated by this glimpse of verdant Nepal beneath my feet, I made no effort to climb.

“I say,” Harker yelled to Kenvon, “now tell us about this map of yours.”

I saw Kenvon draw a leather wallet from his inner pocket and take from it a grimy, torn piece of parchment. On it was traced a crude topography of the Sikkim and Kanchenjunga. A cross marked on face of the mountain wall on its southeastern face.

“This was found by Professor Cartavan,” Kenvon explained, “in the Nepalese jungle in 1914. The map was in a chamois skin case. How it got there is a matter of conjecture, but it was drawn, undoubtedly, by one who had crawled up Kanchenjunga’s sides. In one corner in a barely legible handwriting is a description of a cavern accessible through the Door of Surrilana, a cavern described as vaster than the plains of Kansas.”

The map was in Kenvon’s lap close beside me. I could not help but see a portion of the writing and the name “Zorimi” stood out boldly. I asked what it meant.

“I don’t know,” Kenvon said. “I’d like to find out.”

This map annoyed me. Were we going on a wild-goose chase because of a mysterious map found in the jungle? Why, I had kidded poor Jim Craig only the night before about “the old map story”! All through the East beggars and derelicts are ever willing to sell you a map giving the whereabouts of buried treasure and the like. They concoct the topography themselves – and are hundreds of miles away when you reach your futile goal, if you are fool enough to believe in such maps.

I looked up into my mirror at Harker and Lacrosse behind me. Their tanned faces had paled. They, too, had become horribly skeptical of Kenvon’s source of information concerning what lay beyond the Door of Surrilana.

“You should have confided this to us before,” Harker snapped. “Surely you don’t believe in that map, Kenvon?”

“It’s a hoax!” Lacrosse cried. “Right now we vote to eliminate flying into any caves!”

“I see to reason why Cartavan should hoax me,” Kenvon said impetuously. “He is a man of repute. I paid well for this chart.”

My heart wanted to take a seat in my mouth. The millionaire had been hoaxed by an impecunious professor whose cleverly faked map had inflamed Kenvon’s adventurous imagination. Shades of Rider Haggard and King Solomon’s mines. I was dealing with a nut!

While they argued, I worked with my stick. The black bird glided by Long Jong and the Jongri Pass. The altimeter registered thirteen thousand one hundred forty feet – the height of Long Jong’s snowy crest. I turned on the electric heaters to warm up the cabin.

Kabru rushed at us through the mists the sun was dispelling. The Junkers went up – twenty – twenty-one – to twenty-four thousand feet – four miles above sea level. The blood teemed in my ears and a weakness assailed the pit of my stomach which I placated with effort. I could see that Lacrosse was bleeding through the nose. We expected that in such a rarified altitude.

The black bird slid between Kabru and The Dome and before us a still higher wall flung itself heavenward, its rock a sheen of icy whiteness, blinding me temporarily with a celestial glare that vied with the purity of the blue vault above us.

“There she is!” I cried, pointing through my port, “Dead ahead!”

“Kanchenjunga!” Kenvon screamed ecstatically. “Never before has man seen such a marvelous sight! I am the first to see her from the heavens!”

Breathless, with throbbing heads, we four were held spellbound by this world in the skies. Earth was now denied us by a fleecy sea of rippling, cream-white clouds.

“I wonder if heaven is as swell a sight?” Harker sighed.

“I wish I could paint it!” Lacrosse said. Thrusting Kenvon aside, he swung his camera close to the forward port and took several shots of Kanchenjunga’s majestic bosom.

One eye on the mountain, one on the altimeter, I climbed. Twenty-five thousand. Twenty-six! We were over the Talung Saddle. Shrieking winds flung their mighty breaths into our bird’s face and buffeted the Junkers as though it were a bobbing cork on a mill race.

We pitched – slid dangerously. I feared for our lack of tail as we dropped a thousand feet. Face with an imminent crash against Kanchenjunga’s thighs, the Junkers bucked and rolled and pitched like a tramp in a November sea on the north Atlantic.

The Talung glacier, spotless white, grinned with cruel, jagged and glimmering teeth, grinned up at us through a rift in the white foam.

I climbed as best I could – twenty-seven thousand – twenty-eight. We were flush with Kanchenjunga’s crown of icy cathedral spires – twenty-eight five hundred – I prayed the altimeter wouldn’t bust. In the distance was Everest’s higher coronet, lofty, proud, merciless.

“Go over it!”

Kenvon shrieked like one possessed. “Go over it, I say! I’m a conqueror – conquering a great mountain. I’ll subdue Everest another day!”

Nuts, that’s what he was, I told myself. Twenty-nine thousand feet – my head swam – nausea gripped me and I fought to hold the stick in my frozen hands. Consciousness tried to leave me. My nose and ears were wet with running blood. The frigidity was intensely painful – the electric heaters were impotent against this chill that only Titans could withstand.

Kanchenjunga passed beneath us – beneath the first mortal men. We were speechless, not from fear or illness, but from sheer ecstasy. Beauty and conquest alone kept our blood from freezing.

I guided the plane through the gales above the Zemu Glacier. We circled Siniolchum, seven thousand feet below, a mere speck beneath our frost-bitten feet.  We were five miles over God’s terra firma.

“Now go back – to the highest peak in Kanchenjunga!” Kenvon gasped by way of command.

He busied himself with the weighted flag, the American colors fastened to a heavy balled spike. Lacrosse took picture after picture, his fingers bleeding when their cold skin touched the hard camera. Harker made copious notes with a trembling hand. Myself, I was content to drink in a beauty that only challenged that of Ireland’s lakes in the springtime, and simultaneously, to curse the arctic weather.

We dropped to twenty-eight thousand two hundred feet, fifty feet above the highest pinnacle. Kenvon opened the trapdoor and the icy blasts surging into the cabin, swept us into a loop-the-loop. Only the gods who watch over me, guided my hand to righting my black bird. The millionaire was prepared for this moment, I later learned, by days of practice in launching the weighted flag on the Darjeeling flying field.

“Ready! Slower!” His voice was insanely shrill.

The longest finger of Kanchenjuna tore at us, ripping its way through the azure blue of the heavens. Kenvon, calculating the velocity of the plane and the distance to the glacier below, dropped his flag.

We watched the flag – its red-and-white stripes and the field of stars on blue – as it shot into the snow, resplendent in the morning sunlight. It struck at the base of the finger, quivered then standing upright, unfurled its colors to the mountain wind.

Kenvon muttered about the surprise that flag would be for Dyhrenfurth if he ever reached the summit. I doubted whether the flag would last the day. It would be in shreds before another sun saw it, so fierce were the gales.

The right B motor missed, spluttered and went dead.

I was startled but not frightened. We weren’t in danger – but to a man who was brought up on tales of leprechauns and banshees, it was an ill omen. Was Kanchenjunga reaching out for us – now that we boasted of her conquest? Would she, though we were clear of its surface, still destroy us?

Continuing to circle in front of the southern face of the mountain, I diminished our altitude gradually to twenty-one thousand feet. Kenvon seemed please with these maneuvers. We were below the high wind belt, enjoying a well-earned respite.

“You’re seeking Surrilana,” he said to me and nodded with approval.

But my mind was made up. I alone knew how to handle this Junkers. The lives of all of us were in my hands. And I meant to return to Darjeeling when the others tired of feasting their eyes on Kanchenjunga’s beauties. Kenvon had nothing to say about it – even if I was burning up his money in petrol!

We cruised east and west. The millionaire studied his grimy map and scrutinized the mountain’s face with narrowed eyes, breathing hard, eagerly. When I went far to the east, he cried out and jammed a finger into the port.

I saw it, though at first I thought it was only a broad fissure in the glacial wall. But it was the Door of Surrilana, a black yawning maw. It was tremendous in size, at least three hundred feet high and five hundred feet wide. A plane could make an entry easily – if there was room to turn about inside.

“Well, there it is!” Lacrosse said, fear giving way to skepticism in his attitude. “You can come back another day, without me, Kenvon, and explore your caverns to your heart’s desire!”

“That goes for me, too,” Harker agreed. “You can’t drag me into a hole in the earth, because you’ve been hoaxed by a phony map.”

Kenvon shook his head determinedly. “I want to go in now.”

“You can go back to Darjeeling now and drop me and Harker,” Lacrosse snapped. “I said it’s thumbs down on this part of the trip as far as I’m concerned. Harker is with me.”

“We’re going in, McRory,” Kenvon said, ignoring the protests of the other two. “Switch on the searchlight and the bulbs on the wings to light our way. I haven’t come this far to be disappointed, my friends. It is tempting ill luck to turn back – considering our victory over Kanchenjunga.”

There was nothing I could say without starting an argument. Instead of replying, I moved my black bird away from the Door of Surrilana. I wasn’t afraid to attempt the entry. But who knew what lay beyond! Stalagmites and stalactites, stone fingers and teeth to tear our wings? A sudden turn in the channel – if there was any – and a crash? Possibly no room in which to turn and make a safe exit. We would then be bottled up with inevitable death.

Kenvon watched at his port, waiting for me to bring the Junkers about. This maneuver did not take place.

“Where are you going, McRory?” the millionaire demanded of me.

“To Darjeeling.”

“The hell you are!” Kenvon blazed. I shall never forget the gleam in his eyes, fanatic, mad. “I say you’re going through the Door! I’m the master of this plane!”

“But I’m the pilot,” I explained calmly enough. “It’s a foolhardy attempt, considering your information. I put no stock in your map. There may be all you say inside and then again there mayn’t. Lacrosse and Harker want to go back. Their lives are in my hands, and I won’t jeopardize them against their wishes.”

In my mirror, I saw the geologist and the naturalist flash me a look of gratitude. But Kenvon was implacable. His soaring over Kanchenjunga had made him drunk with power – and the passion of further conquests – Kanchenjunga’s heart.

“I say we’re going in – and now!” Kenvon said in a lower and less ugly tone.

“I’m running this ship,” I said. “We’re going back to Darjeeling. You can hunt another pilot there. Get one from Bombay. The world is full of fools.”

I felt something blunt jabbed into my side. Looking down, I saw the black glint of an automatic – in Kenvon’s hand. The man’s frozen finger curled over the trigger.

“We’ll die together, here and now,” he screamed at me, “if you refuse to obey my orders! Choose! Take your risk on going through the Door – or dropping here! To hell what the other cowards want! I say we’re going into Kanchenjunga!

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. I’m reproducing the text as printed in the original publication.

It all began that night in Darjeeling. Had I been anywhere else, I should never have seen Kanchenjunga’s icy breasts nor her torrid heart; I should never have known Morgo nor the love of Nurri Kala – I should never have believed that an evil as great as Zorimi’s existed in this world. Yet all this did come to pass because of one man’s death and another’s insatiable vanity.

We were in the Nepal Bar, Jim Craig and I. He was drunker than the proverbial lord, and myself, sitting across the hooker-rimmed table from him, enjoyed no less a degree of eminence.

“Boy!”

Craig bellowed like a bull.

“Set up another round for me and McRory! Be quick, you black scut!”

Haste is an unseemly mannerism in Darjeeling but the white-coated servant was galvanized into action by Craig’s bull-elephant trumpeting. Two whiskey and sodas materialized between our fingers and we put them where they belonged.

“It’s diamonds I’m telling you of, McRory!” Craig was saying in a lower tone. “Not diamonds like you think of them – pebbles and pips of stones – but mountains of the rock – a solid wall of it. I’ll be as rich as that guy – Croesus – richer, I’ll swear!”

“And where are they, Jim?” I asked for the hundredth time.

“That I’ll not be telling the likes of you, Jerry McRory!” Craig snapped pettishly. “Drink with me – but don’t pry into my secrets!”

“Secrets, is it!” I laughed. “Tell me the floor of the Sikkim is diamond-laid. Diamonds! It’s the drink that’s giving you fancies, Jim. If you had a genuine secret you’d not keep it, for you’re not that kind of man, Jim Craig.”

“Liar you call me!” Craig heaved his six feet of brawn from his chair and hung over me, closing his brutish fists. “You’d give the lie to a Craig!”

“Sure,” I grinned up at him. “I don’t believe a word of your prattlings!”

I was not afraid of any Craig out of Ireland, for I’m a McRory.

The big fellow thought better of rashness and smiled weakly. “Well, I can’t be blaming you, Jerry. It does sound like a five pound trout out of a one-pound brook. But so help me – it’s the truth that I speak.”

“Sit down and have a drink on me,” I said. “And we’ll talk of something more sensible than mountains of diamonds.”

He did sit down, and after a pause, in which he collected his wits, he began to talk. “I’ll have you know, Jerry, that it’s God’s truth that I utter – there are diamonds – a solid wall of that ice.”

“I suppose you’ve found a map?” I chided him. “Tell me the old-map story – how the beggar in Port Said sold it to you for a sou!”

” ‘Tis no map, McRory!” he said heatedly. He looked about him and, noting that the nearest drinker was two tables away, he fiddled with the buttons of his khaki shirt. “Look, Jerry – look!”

Caught tight to his hairy chest with adhesive tape was what the Egyptians call a pectoral – a sort of insignia worn by the old Pharaohs as a symbol of high rank and blood. But what Jim Craig wore was not of Egyptian design but something cruder, a thinnish piece of crystal shaped like a heart out of which protruded three heads – a woman’s and on either side of it, a lizard’s and a bat’s.

“Looks like crystal,” I commented, “Ancient stuff, too.”

“Crystal me eye!” Craig chucked, buttoning up his shirt. “It’s diamond. The biggest flat diamond you ever laid eyes on!”

I winked at him, incredulously. “Where did you steal it?”

“I found it, you red-headed baboon!” he replied, his gaze never flinching. “It’s the key to the place that’s lousy with its like.” For a moment the liquor clouded his thoughts and he muttered, “I heard it from his own lips when he was asleep – and God knows he never lies – asleep or awake.”

“So a sleepwalker gave it to you, Jim?”

“Mind your tongue, McRory! But wait a month here, my fine fellow, and when I come back the eyes’ll pop out of your head. I’ll be showing you diamonds then!’

“If I waited here a month, Jim,” I said, waving my hand to the bar, “My liver would be floating away. But tell me, do  you walk to this diamond mine of your dreams?”

“Sure I don’t. I’m flying – and in the morning at that.” His drooping, drink-laden eyelids flashed wide open, the fierce look on his face startling me.

“What have I been telling you, McRory? I’m soused.”

“I know that – and with diamonds!”

“Diamonds?” he muttered, sobriety coming into his eyes. “What nonsense was I mumbling?”

“You talked of bedazzling me with the shiny stuff.”

His right paw clapped itself to his chest and a finger slipped beneath his shirt, touching that thing with the three heads. He felt reassured and grinned sheepishly.

“I’m daft with this stuff,” he said, tapping his glass. “I’ll be pushing off to my trundle bed.”

“I’m to hear no more about the wall of diamond? Let me play with that toy under your shirt – she with the three heads!” I kidded him.

“Hush your mouth, McRory. Is there no sense beneath that red skull of yourn? It was the liquor weaving dreams in my addled head. I know of no diamonds nor – ” His glance went to a shadow that fell across our table.

A tall aristocratic gentleman with the lean nose of a condor was standing just behind Craig’s chair. His hand fell upon my friend’s shoulder paternally. “Hello, Jim! I’ve been looking all over for you. I might have thought of the Nepal Bar sooner.”

“Kenvon,” Craig started perceptibly, but he did not look up. “Have a drink? Sit down. Meet an old friend, Jerry McRory. He flies too.” He presented the newcomer as his boss, Mr. Kenvon.

The condor-nose bowed with clicking heels. I got up and gave my own worn heels a snap together, inclining from the hips as formally as he had. Could this be Edgar B. Kenvon, the millionaire man of mystery from New York? He didn’t look like thirty cents in his baggy tweeds. Hadn’t I heard why he was in Darjeeling? To be sure! I remembered when the fumes settled in my pate: he was planning a flight over Kanchenjunga, that glittering crown of the Himalayas only a thousand feet lower than haughty Everest. So my pal Jim Craig was hooked up with him – as pilot probably.

What Jim Craig’s business was in Darjeeling I didn’t know. I hadn’t troubled to ask. The sight of him there in the Nepal Bar, his fingers wrapped around a glass, was too good – after seven long years – so we had talked of those seven years until he got onto the line about his diamonds.

“I’m pleased to meet a fellow airman,” Kenvon said, loftily. “And a friend of Jim’s. Are you flying in these parts, Mr. McRory?”

“I was. I came up from Bombay with a party of tourists in a De Haviland,” I explained. “One of them, a fellow named Jesperson, took the bus up yesterday and God knows where he landed. He was no flyer. So I’m waiting here – and comfortably – for word from the search party.”

Kenvon nodded. He had heard of my passenger’s ill-advised solo. Jesperson was probably tempting carrion by this time, dangling with the wreckage on some jungle treetop, he added.

“By the way, Jim,” Kenvon said to Craig in a lower voice. “We’ve had a burglar at the hangar.”

“The saints protect us!”

“Some valuables of mine are gone. But the machine is untouched.”

“The saints be thanked!”

“I’ve lost something very precious. Did you notice any loiterers around the place today?”

“No – no, boss, I didn’t. Now what would anyone be wanting with your property, up here at the end of civilization?”

“I said it was something very precious, Jim.” There was a cold metallic ring in Kenvon’s voice. “It was an antiquity I picked up in Delhi. Something I prized.”

Craig shook his head dumbly, sadly. Kenvon watched him an instant and then regarded me with marked suspicion. My glass was empty – as usual – but I raised it to my lips and pretended to drink while I avoided Kenvon’s eyes. I could read in them that he was talking about the loss of that thing with three heads. I’ve hunches like that. His condor nose twitched as though scenting spore.

“I’m taking off at dawn, Jim,” Kenvon went on. “I’ll be needing you and your wits then, so you’d better knock off here. Call it a night and turn in. We have a long day ahead of us.”

“I know – I’m going home now, boss.”

Craig got up and shook hands with me, muttering a fond cheerio.

“Are you coming my way, boss?”

“No, I’ll stop for a drink with McRory. I’ll awaken you at sunup. Lacrosse and Harker are asleep in my shack. You take the hanger cot again. I’m worried about that theft. Someone might mean to harm the plane – to mess up our flight. All the world has its eyes on us, Jim. We’re tackling a big thing tomorrow.”

“Don’t I know it!”

Craig grinned and he lumbered out of the Nepal Bar. Kenvon watched his every step while I ordered two more whiskey-and-sodas.

The condor nose sat down opposite me, transfixed me with hawkish eyes and demanded bluntly enough: “What was Craig talking about with you, McRory?”

I met his inquisitive glance. “The war, of course. We were in the same American outfit in France. We swapped yarns and guzzled the stuff for old times’ sake. Hadn’t met in seven years til tonight.”

The man did not believe a word I uttered, I knew. “You’re in commercial flying now, I take it. I’m something of a flyer myself.” He spoke this last a trifle childishly, proudly.

“Somewhat – since the big scrap. And I’ve done some military flying, too.”

I proceeded to tell him what I had done in the air. Planes were my bread and butter. I knew them as a watchmaker knows his Swiss movements. All this I recounted to the condor nose. He nodded, pleased and understanding.

“Where do you stay in Darjeeling, Mr. McRory?”

I pointed to the ceiling beyond the punkahs that stirred the warm tobacco-filled air. “Always over a bar. Upstairs.”

Kenvon quizzed me about different types of planes, partiticularly the new Junkers G-38, that tailless model just out of Germany. Could it stand a high gale? Was it good on altitude? Was it easy to handle? I said “yes” to these questions, adding that I had piloted one over Munich for a German company. I assured him that I could fly anything that went up in the air, except certain women who were naturally intractable. We had another drink together and he left me.

I paid my score and, as usual, Craig’s, and before turning in, decided on a stroll for a lungful of outer night. Outside, I started down the street, life returning to my rebellious limbs. It was a starry night, cool and sweet, such as one can only find in the silences of India, that vast mysterious triangle jutting into tropical seas. A breeze was stirring the trees on the edge of town. The morrow promised to be a fine flying day. Jim Craig had fine weather ahead of him – for whatever he and Kenvon were up to.

I stopped on the edge of a clearing and looked up at Orion, that glorious huntsman of the heavens. What a sight for eyes tired of hot suns and parched greenery. A million diamonds hung on the underside of dark-blue velvet!

Orion vanished and I leaped upward into sudden darkness.

When I opened my eyes again, my head was throbbing, threatening to split itself open. Nimble fingers were scurrying through my pockets, under my shirt, over my money belt. We McRorys have hard heads as a matter of history, for none were broken on the Boyne, though many were cracked, and I was once more in full possession of my few wits.

The man who bent over me was a native with an unusually large head. His fetid breath fanned my cheeks. Without a second thought, my hands went up and closed around his bull neck. He choked and as I swung him on his back, the silvery flash of a knife darted across the starlit heavens.

It took all of my might to avoid that deadly blade. But I did. In another moment I was astride the man, crushing away the breath of him, watching his tongue and eyes pop at me. The knife hand went limpe and the body stilled – though life stayed in it.

Three natives came down the road as I got to my feet, rubbing the back of my head. They took one look at the big-headed man and fled into town shrieking: “Dakait! Dakait!”

I guessed as much myself. The fellow was a dacoit – one of that skilled band of thuggee from Burma, an adept at thievery and murder. And I wondered on my way back to the Nepal Bar why he had beset me.

Then I remembered the burglary in Kenvon’s hangar. Something funny was up in Darjeeling. The hunch was in my bones. Jim Craig must be warned. Instead of turning into my hostelry, I went on to the hangar, the location of which I had a fair idea. It was at the other end of town on the edge of the flying field.

I hove in sight of the place after a ten minutes’ brisk walk.

The hangar was dark, but I was drawn to a window by a strange moving light. It was that of a torchlight seeking a goal. The window was dirty, but I managed to see inside – into a far corner beyond the bulk of a huge black bird.

A man – a native – was standing over a cot, a light in his hand full upon the sleeper. It was Jim Craig. My friend was supine, untroubled by the glare in his face. The native’s fingers ripped open Craig’s shirt and ripped the three-headed thing from the adhesive tapes that held it to his hairy chest.

He  stepped back from the cot, studying the three-headed thing with the light. It glistened, I swear, with an unholy light.

I cried out. The light was doused.

I had seen a knife upright in Jim Craig’s heart.

To Be Continued!

I started seeing these cover images online a couple of months ago. They started popping up on some of the blogs and tumblr accounts I follow. The paintings are beautiful. If there had only been one of them I probably would have noted the story that the painting was illustrated and then quickly forgotten about it.
Seeing three covers for Morgo the Mighty piqued my interest enough that I wanted to find out more the story.

You’ll notice that there’s no link to more information about the story. I looked. There’s a mention of it in an essay about Hollow Earth stories. It’s discussed in a few paragraphs at the end of a long article about Tam, Son of the Tiger. Otherwise, there’s really nothing useful. No fansite. No wikipedia article. No author’s bio. No Gutenberg Project e-text.
The author’s name “Sean O’Larkin” is apparently a pseudonym for J.F. Larkin. I didn’t find much beyond that. The cover illustrations are by Howard V. Brown. Him you can find info about and most of it includes examples of his lovely art.

Morgo the Mighty was serialized in four issues of The Popular Magazine. Interior illustrations were by Clarence Rowe.

I may not have been able to find much about the novel online but I was able to find someone selling a facsimile collection of it on ebay. I did find out enough about Morgo to know it takes place in a lost subterranean land populated with prehistoric monsters so I knew it was a representative of a genre I have affection for. So I bought it.

The seller seems to have scanned and cleaned up the original printed pages from The Popular. Instead of just reading it and keeping it to myself I’m going to share the story with you. Over the next few weeks I’m going to be retyping the story here, a chapter at a time.

Will we discover a forgotten classic? Or a rightfully forgotten pulp diversion?

I don’t know if this novel is in the public domain. Since it was published in 1930 it’s possible that it’s under copyright. The copyright lockdown that the Disney corporation engineered has prevented many works published after 1928 from entering the public domain. If J.F. Larkin is still alive somewhere or has heirs who have renewed the copyright please let me know. Otherwise, once I’m done posting the novel here I plan to donate the text to Gutenberg.