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!

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.