Thyra Read online

  Our blood ran cold in our veins, and every nerve in our bodies tingled with fear of the awful abyss. It was as if the solid earth had collapsed beneath us. For a time we could neither move nor speak, so great was the shock of the discovery.

  At last, however, Thord and Balderston and I realised that the balloon was no longer sinking, and the knowledge somewhat restored our presence of mind. Our rigid muscles relaxed, and we gazed about, half fearfully, to measure the extent of the gulf. Eastward the black precipices of the mighty escarpment jutted out in a Titan buttress that hid from our view all the land beyond; while to the north the whole abyss was veiled by wisps of vapour, floating up out of the black depths to the cloud sea. In that direction we could see neither earth nor sky. To the west, however, across a great southward bend of the gulf, we caught vague glimpses of a faraway land, sloping up from the gloom of the lower pit to a dim white sierra of icy mountains.

  Balderston was the first among us to speak, and his voice sounded harsh and strained.

  "Symmes' Hole!" he muttered.

  I shook my head, and, with much effort, managed to reply: "No; I see bottom - miles down - where the sun strikes through the vapours."

  "Niflheim!" cried Thord meaningly.

  "Ay!" gasped Rolf Kaki, panting as when chased by the Thorlings - "ay, Niflheim - yonder in the lower depths. We float above the Ormvol."

  "Lower depths - lower depths!" I repeated, and my jaw fell.

  "Where lies Updal?" demanded Thord.

  The Northman pointed to the dim outlines of the icy sierra.

  "Yonder, beneath the Utgard Jokuls," he answered. "If we float on as now, we shall soar across."

  "Good!" cried Balderston, and we breathed easier. The dread of the abyss that had so dazed and appalled us, fast gave place to other emotions. An oath from Thord broke the last bond of the spell. Angry at his own panic, the giant turned upon Black, who still crouched in his place, ashen-faced and rigid, exactly as at first.

  "Here, you blasted nigger! Stand up, or I'll kick you over!"

  To the rest of us the brutal words acted as a powerful tonic, stimulating all our self-control. But the sergeant only licked his blue lips and moaned hoarsely: "De bottomless pit! - de bottomless pit!"

  The man was half crazed with terror. But for his lieutenant, another hour would have seen him raving. With ready wit, Balderston adopted what was perhaps the only way to reach the man's tottering reason.

  "Attention! he commanded, in curt martial tones. "'Bout face! - salute!"

  Like an automaton, the sergeant straightened up, wheeled about, and jerked up his hand. Up went Balderston's hand with the same mechanical motion.

  "Special order No. 10," he snapped out, "Sergeant Black detailed to cook dinner for the mess."

  Again the sergeant gave his jerky salute, and again the lieutenant responded in kind. Suddenly Black drew a deep gasping breath. His scarred face lost its ashen hue, and the hideous glare of his eyes softened to a more human look. His reason was saved. But still he stood at attention, dazed and hesitating.

  "Damn you! Step out, sir! What you standing there for?"

  "Yas, sah! Goin', sah!" stuttered Black. Then abruptly he flung up his arms and burst into tears.

  "There, there, sergeant; don't make a fool of yourself," admonished Balderston, in a tone of womanly tenderness, "Come now, you're not scared of a hole in the ground - so long as it has a bottom. There is one. Look and see it."

  "Yas, sah; yas, sah," replied Black, and he sought to hide the shame of his panic and tears by close attention to his duties.

  The whole scene was laughably grotesque, but the narrow escape of the man's reason was quite enough to sober us, even had we not been smarting under the mortification of our own panic. Even Thord unbent, and, with rough sympathy, helped Black lower his stove and dishes into the car.

  "A strange thrall," commented the big Northman, as Black laid aside his fur cap and slipped through the trap after his cook outfit.

  "Thrall," repeated Thord.

  "Is he not? His hair is cropped," said Thyra, peering around my shoulder. One of the scarlet wings on her cap brushed my sleeve, and I was so interested in observing her lovely profile, just visible from the tail of my eye, that I only half heard Thord's reply. He said something explanatory of negro wool and of Black's relations to Balderston. Then he added, sotto voce, in English: "It's well, fellows, that we've had no haircut for so long. Otherwise, I venture to say, these latter-day Norse would look on us as we regard clipped convicts."

  Instinctively I put up my hand and twisted the point of my beard. After the months of neglect, my hair hung about my shoulders, rough and unkempt. But my Van Dyke I had managed to keep in very fair shape, considering that the trimming had been done with a pocket-knife. Greatly pleased over this and the recollection of our baths during the last weeks on the floe, I set about the agreeable task of entertaining Mistress Thyra.

  "So we float about the Ormvol," I observed, as I readjusted the sling for the girl's arm, which had been wrenched about when the lurch of the car into the abyss so nearly threw us out. With a grateful glance that repaid me a hundredfold for my attentions, the girl soberly answered my remark: "The Ormvol? - Yes, Lord Frey."

  I smiled at her serious face. It was evident she still entertained a suspicion that we were gods incog.

  "My name is not Frey, but Godfrey," I protested; "and I am neither drott nor hersir, - just plain John Godfrey. Call me John."

  "Jan," repeated the girl, and she smiled in turn, showing a dazzling line of teeth. This was an excellent beginning; but Balderston interrupted.

  "Would the daughter of Ragner like to draw up the pit's bottom?" he inquired.

  "Thanks, Frank. I'll show her," said I, and I appropriated the glasses.

  "Oh, John, you don't play fair!" he remonstrated; but good-natured as usual, he turned at once to join Thord in the entertainment of Rolf Kaki. The girl's naive smile told me that she understood the meaning of this little by-play. Very demurely she gazed from Balderston's blond poll to my plain and swarthy features. As the blue eyes met mine, they fell in sudden shy confusion, and a delicious thrill stirred my pulse at sight of the quick reddening of the girl's cheeks.

  Fortunately I managed to keep my head, and pretended not to notice her confusion. My heart was thumping like a trip-hammer, and my hands trembled with joyful excitement as I adjusted the binoculars for her use. Yet somehow I constrained myself to speak in a matter-of-fact tone. My self control was to be still more severely tested.

  As the girl could not, with only one hand, both support herself and hold the glasses, I placed my arm before her as a bar between the suspension-ropes. The bearing-ring was too low to safely lean out over, unless one had hold of the ropes. But my arm formed a higher support, and Thyra trustfully accepted my invitation to make use of it. Any one who has been a lover can realise the feeling that all but overcame me as I felt the weight of the girl's person upon my arm. The touch filled mc with a sort of blissful intoxication, and I was seized by an impulse, almost irresistible, to fling my arms about the beautiful girl and draw her to me.

  A cry from her diverted my thoughts none too soon. Her first look through the binoculars had very nearly startled her into dropping them. She started back and exclaimed in astonishment:

  "It is seid - the crystals are bewitched! When I gaze through them, the whole Ormvol rises!"

  "Not in truth, Thyra. It is but seeming," said I, and to hide my feelings I took the glasses. One glance was sufficient to give reality to my simulated interest. Far down in the gloom of the abyss I could discern a wide extent of hilly land, which seemed to be clad with thick forests of a strangely pallid hue. Eager to learn more of this weird subterranean world, I was straining my eyes to make out its features, when a flash of reflected sunlight half-blinded me.

  "There is a lake on the Ormvol!" I exclaimed, as I handed back the glasses.

  "Yes; Vergelmer. I see we soar above its lower end. It is the lake where
the bergs gather from the Ice Street ere they roll down Giol to plunge into Hela Pool."

  As she uttered the last name the girl shuddered, and lifted the glasses eagerly towards Updal.

  "Ah, Jan," she cried in delight, "they are wondrous crystals! I see the very walls of Biornstad. Look in line between the twin-peaked jokul, in the belt of green."

  Already I could see with the naked eye what I knew to be Updal; a huge natural terrace on the side of the pit, sloping down from the snow line at the base of the Updal Jokuls, to the brink of a long, broken escarpment. The latter, which varied in height from hundreds to thousands of feet, bounded the upper edge of the Thorling Mark.

  Since the most of Updal lay only two miles below sea-level, it was not so obscured from view as the greater depths. The glasses quickly confirmed my impression that it was a land fair to look upon. The higher parts were dark with pine and spruce; but lower down grew woods of deciduous tree. between which I could see meadows and, I thought, tilled fields. Of this last I was not certain, as the base of the nearest jokuls was yet forty miles distant, and wisps of vapour interfered with the view. I did, however, catch a clear glimpse of the walled town pointed out by Thyra. It stood midway down the terrace, about thirty miles distant from us.

  "So that is Biornstad, Thyra - the red walls with the smoke above?" I said.

  "It is Biornstad, the home of the Runefolk."

  "Then they are few in number?"

  Thyra shook her fair head so that one heavy braid came over her shoulder and fell across my arm like a strand of gold.

  "Nay, Jan," she exclaimed; "the benches in the Runehof seat seven score udallers, each the leader of a fylki."

  "And a fylki numbers-?"

  "Half a hundred warriors."

  I whistled with surprise. Seven thousand able-bodied men! - that meant a population of thirty thousand or more. The figure could not include the Thorlings, who were evidently a hostile clan of these Polar Northmen.

  "Are not your people the descendants of a certain Jarl Biorn and his following, who, in ancient times, came like us from the Southland?" I asked.

  Thyra's lovely face beamed with joy.

  "You know of the Hero!" she cried. "You have heard how he stormed Jotunheim - how he steered his ships through the ice-world, till the bergs ground them in splinters - how he then led all in safety over the floes to the Utgard Jokuls and across their crest, down into Updal."

  "I have heard of the Hero's venture - of his sailing to storm Jotunheim. So all your race sprang from those dauntless vikings?"

  "The Runefolk are of pure blood, replied the girl proudly. "As to the base Thorlings, many have mingled with the dwerger brood."

  "But who are these Thorlings?"

  "In the early years when first the Allthing voted the Rune-law, the fiercer warriors would not bend to it. So they were driven beneath the Gard Fells, into the forests of the Ormvol, where they have never ceased to welcome the thieves and berserks and other nithings outlawed from Updal. They own no other laws than guest-troth and the Orm-peace, save only the will of their king, and even that little beyond the sweep of his sword."

  "How of your king in Updal, Thyra?"

  "We have none. The eldormen sit in turn on the high-seat, judging by the Rune-law and the will of the Allthing."

  A hundred eager questions crowded my thoughts, but while I hesitated which first to ask, Sergeant Black popped his head and shoulders through the trap-door and spread a meal on the platform with deft swiftness.

  "Dinnuh's sahved!" he observed. "Doan step back, Mistah Thod. De beans is behin' you."

  Everybody promptly faced inward and settled down on the rim of platform between Black's dishes and the guard-ropes. The little space was somewhat cramped; but the sergeant, standing in the midst, half out of the man-hole, served his dishes with great dexterity. I, for one, had no objection to the arrangement, since it fenced me in on one side with the fair Norse maiden. She and her brother proved to be fully acquainted with the use of their forks, but the disability of the girl's arm gave me an excuse for numerous little attentions.

  The great variety of food in the stores of the balloon had given Black ample opportunity to prove his culinary skill, and our guests fell to on the novel dishes with keen relish. Our own appetites were nearly as sharp, but Balderston found time between bites to describe in graphic terms our swift flight over the Polar Ocean. Then, in response to eager inquiries, we told of the marvellous Southland, where the sea rolled free without floe or berg, and the sun, the year around, rushed straight across the sky and under the world, bringing night and day all in the period of a ring.

  "Wondrous!" exclaimed Thyra. "The skalds sing of these strange things; yet few men believed the tale."

  "It seems beyond reason," added her brother, and he stared upwards at the sun, circling around the sky in the noon of its six months' day.

  "Yet your piy-world is no less wonderful to us," replied Thord; and while the balloon sailed steadily on across the mighty gulf towards Updal, we listened with deepening interest to weird stories of the lower pit - of its fierce beasts and the great stone Orm; of the Orm Vala and the peace-holy Orm-ring, where Hoding Grimeye, the terrible Thorling king, held rude court with Bera, his sister; of the fiery Nida Mountains, the home of elves and sprites, far out across the impassable abyss; of the beast-like dwerger horde, swarming up the sides of Niflheim to adore the Snake; and of the living Orm, the great dragon Nidhug, down in the uttermost depths, where the blue death-glow flickers on the stagnant waters of Hela Pool.

  Chapter VI. Biornstad.

  Dinner was over, and Black cleared away the empty dishes; but still we listened, half doubting, to Rolf's tales of the dragon and his stone image. As to the living monster, we were somewhat sceptical, since all evidence of his existence rested on the assertions of the dwerger. But we could not do else than believe in the mammoth stone reptile on the Ormvol; for Rolf had himself seen it, while on a mission to King Hoding.

  His account of the gigantic saurian, chiselled from a glassy cliff, filled our minds with strange fancies. What vanished race could have conceived that monstrous image and graven it in flintlike obsidian?

  Our speculations were cut short by a cry from Thyra - "The Gard Fells! We soar above Updal."

  Gazing downward, we saw the pit slope falling away behind us, and even Thord heaved a sigh of relief. The balloon had drifted above the brink of the escarpment, and was floating over Updal towards the Utgard Jokuls.

  "We drift to the right of Biornstad," remarked Rolf, and he pointed out the red walls of the town, now only ten miles distant.

  "I suppose, Frank, we must land at the nearest point, and finish the trip afoot," I observed. "It will be four or five miles."

  "But the town would then miss the sensation of our descent out of mid-sky. Think of that! Why not try for a more favourable current?"

  "All right; I leave it to you."

  "Very well. But have you ever been in a compressed-air chamber, - a caisson?"

  "No. Why?"

  "We are about at sea-level now. Down there in the pit the atmospheric pressure must be very great, even on Updal. Our guests, of course, are used to it; but it may affect us. Remember, all of you, to keep swallowing, if you feel uncomfortable."

  Assured that every one understood his warning, Balderston opened one of the valves long enough to send us down a thousand feet. The drop brought the balloon into a different current, but it was even less favourable than the one above. Again the lieutenant dropped us, - with no better result. However, the third descent, which brought us down within four thousand feet of the terrace land, accomplished the desired purpose. The balloon entered a cross-current flowing directly towards Biornstad.

  Gazing down over the bearing-ring, we saw Updal spread out beneath us like a huge topographical chart; a parklike land, belted with spruce and pine along the upper side, and crossed by numerous glacial streams from the gorges of the snowy sierra. Towards Biornstad the sun's rays struck on
fields of yellow grain.

  "A fair land!" observed Thord. But our interest was mainly centred on the red walls of the town.

  Nearer and nearer we drifted, until we could discern the general features of the place. It lay on a wedge of land between the forks of a large stream, and the walls of red stone, forty feet high, stretched along the banks and across the base of the wedge in the shape of a huge triangle. The apex of this enclosure, at the junction of the streams, was filled by a large edifice, of which the converging town walls formed the sides. This, Thyra said, was the Rune-hof, which we took to be a sort of temple and town-hall combined.

  What most surprised us, however, was the appearance of the town proper. Instead of the high-gabled wooden houses which we had expected to see scattered about the enclosure, we perceived that fully half of the remaining space was laid out in a great park or common, intervening between the Runehof and the unbroken facade of the town. The latter seemed to consist of one enormous building, for all the space between the facade and the walls was covered by a continuous area of shining roof, rising here and there terraces, and pitted by garden courts, but nowhere betraying the outlines of separate structures. Towards the rear, this roofing sank beneath the level of the walls, and the lofty chimney-stacks towering up through it indicated the location of forges or factories.

  With what wondering curiosity Ave studied that broad stretch of roof and the great facade with its colonnades and stately stairways! To call it a town seemed most incongruous. It was rather an enormous spreading palace, - a people's palace, as Balderston observed.

  But presently the question of our descent demanded our attention. We had entered on our last mile's drift. A few minutes would determine whether we could effect a landing in the town park. Straight towards it we soared, and presently Balderston, with a satisfied nod, seized the valve cord.