"Doc Savage Adventure 1935-12 The Fantastic Island" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doc Savage Collection)

"That's anybody's guess."

"We could sure use Doc Savage about now." Climbing higher up the glassy slope, they passed through a belt of cold volcanic pits and cones, where, ages before, the molten rock had bubbled like mush and cooled in scabrous pockmarks.

They came out on a wide plateau where nothing grew, not even the cobra-head cactus, and where the pits were smaller, clogged with earth and so close together that it was necessary to skirt the region to make any forward progress.

Monk stopped suddenly.

"These pits are all in geometric order," he declared. "They're not volcanic pits like the ones below. They're manmade."

Ham stared. On the plain, the glassy rock had given way to a kind of reddish clay, or hard-packed volcanic ash.

"Right," he clipped. "The pits are crumbling away now and mostly buried under loose earth. Hard to tell, but they must have been laid out originally with the regularity of cells in a honeycomb."

As they continued on, the honeycomb pattern became more apparent as the pits were revealed in a less crumbling condition.

"These were dug later," Ham observed.

"Yeah," Monk agreed. "The farther we go, the fresher the pits look."

"Rut what are they for?" Pat wondered. "Say, this all gets queerer and queerer. What's it all about?"


"LISTEN," Ham said, tensely.

Wafted on the miasmatic breeze came sharp, cracking sounds. There was unearthliness about the sounds, as though they sprang from the air of their own volition.

"What is it?" Pat asked uneasily.

"No animal ever made a sound like that," Monk blurted.

Suddenly through and above the cracking sounds, came a long-drawn wail which quavered up and down the scale in agony so appalling that a trickle of icy water seemed to be loosened on the back of each of the three listeners.

Pat gasped: "I never heard anything like it. Horrible!"

"A dying animal of some kind," Ham said.

"Dying man!" Monk corrected, grimly.

"Come on," Ham said, gripping his sword cane.

As they pressed forward, the pits in the rocklike ash actually became as sharply delineated as the cells in a honeycomb. A giant honeycomb. These pits were about ten feet in diameter, and some ten feet where they were not filled with loose earth. The mysterious cracking noises sounded louder.

"Ahead there," Ham rapped under his breath. "Look!"

"Shadows!" Pat gasped. "Like men moving!"

The three worked closer, holding to the concealment of the fringing thicket. White-pointed thorns tore at them, viciously shredding their clothes and piercing flesh. But they succeeded in approaching opposite the place where the shadows moved, and from where the cracking, cutting noises issued. Here the plain stretched on, but the advancing line of pits came to an end.

They crouched down, watching. Stars dripped pale light. And suddenly a close, bulking mountain disgorged a red glare into the sky. Bathed in the baleful light of volcanic fires, huge-muscled men could be seen moving ceaselessly up and down at the edge of the honeycombed ground. The men were clothed as those others had been -- in loin cloths and leather collars. They carried long whips, which they swung over their heads and cracked down into the row of pits.