The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H. G. Wells (rooftoppers TXT) 📗

long and tortuous route to the place from which Redwood could speak to them all.

He and Cossar followed a steeply descending way that passed beneath an arch of interlocking machinery, and so came into a vast deep gangway that ran athwart the bottom of the pit. This gangway, wide and vacant, and yet relatively narrow, conspired with everything about it to enhance Redwood’s sense of his own littleness. It became, as it were, an excavated gorge. High overhead, separated from him by cliffs of darkness, the searchlights wheeled and blazed, and the shining shapes went to and fro. Giant voices called to one another above there, calling the Giants together to the Council of War, to hear the terms that Caterham had sent. The gangway still inclined downward towards black vastnesses, towards shadows and mysteries and inconceivable things, into which Redwood went slowly with reluctant footsteps and Cossar with a confident stride....

Redwood’s thoughts were busy. The two men passed into the completest darkness, and Cossar took his companion’s wrist. They went now slowly perforce.

Redwood was moved to speak. “All this,” he said, “is strange.”

“Big,” said Cossar.

“Strange. And strange that it should be strange to me—I, who am, in a sense, the beginning of it all. It’s—”

He stopped, wrestling with his elusive meaning, and threw an unseen gesture at the cliff.

“I have not thought of it before. I have been busy, and the years have passed. But here I see—It is a new generation, Cossar, and new emotions and new needs. All this, Cossar—”

Cossar saw now his dim gesture to the things about them.

“All this is Youth.”

Cossar made no answers and his irregular footfalls went striding on.

“It isn’t our youth, Cossar. They are taking things over. They are beginning upon their own emotions, their own experiences, their own way. We have made a new world, and it isn’t ours. It isn’t even—sympathetic. This great place—”

“I planned it,” said Cossar, his face close.

“But now?”

“Ah! I have given it to my sons.”

Redwood could feel the loose wave of the arm that he could not see.

“That is it. We are over—or almost over.”

“Your message!”

“Yes. And then—”

“We’re over.”

“Well—?”

“Of course we are out of it, we two old men,” said Cossar, with his familiar note of sudden anger. “Of course we are. Obviously. Each man for his own time. And now—it’s their time beginning. That’s all right. Excavator’s gang. We do our job and go. See? That is what death is for. We work out all our little brains and all our little emotions, and then this lot begins afresh. Fresh and fresh! Perfectly simple. What’s the trouble?”

He paused to guide Redwood to some steps.

“Yes,” said Redwood, “but one feels—”

He left his sentence incomplete.

“That is what Death is for.” He heard Cossar below him insisting, “How else could the thing be done? That is what Death is for.”

III.

After devious windings and ascents they came out upon a projecting ledge from which it was possible to see over the greater extent of the Giants’ pit, and from which Redwood might make himself heard by the whole of their assembly. The Giants were already gathered below and about him at different levels, to hear the message he had to deliver. The eldest son of Cossar stood on the bank overhead watching the revelations of the searchlights, for they feared a breach of the truce. The workers at the great apparatus in the corner stood out clear in their own light; they were near stripped; they turned their faces towards Redwood, but with a watchful reference ever and again to the castings that they could not leave. He saw these nearer figures with a fluctuating indistinctness, by lights that came and went, and the remoter ones still less distinctly. They came from and vanished again into the depths of great obscurities. For these Giants had no more light than they could help in the pit, that their eyes might be ready to see effectually any attacking force that might spring upon them out of the darknesses around.

Ever and again some chance glare would pick out and display this group or that of tall and powerful forms, the Giants from Sunderland clothed in overlapping metal plates, and the others clad in leather, in woven rope or in woven metal, as their conditions had determined. They sat amidst or rested their hands upon, or stood erect among machines and weapons as mighty as themselves, and all their faces, as they came and went from visible to invisible, had steadfast eyes.

He made an effort to begin and did not do so. Then for a moment his son’s face glowed out in a hot insurgence of the fire, his son’s face looking up to him, tender as well as strong; and at that he found a voice to reach them all, speaking across a gulf, as it were, to his son.

“I come from Caterham,” he said. “He sent me to you, to tell you the terms he offers.”

He paused. “They are impossible terms, I know, now that I see you here all together; they are impossible terms, but I brought them to you, because I wanted to see you all—and my son. Once more ... I wanted to see my son....”

“Tell them the terms,” said Cossar.

“This is what Caterham offers. He wants you to go apart and leave his world!”

“Where?”

“He does not know. Vaguely somewhere in the world a great region is to be set apart.... And you are to make no more of the Food, to have no children of your own, to live in your own way for your own time, and then to end for ever.”

He stopped.

“And that is all?”

“That is all.”

There followed a great stillness. The darkness that veiled the Giants seemed to look thoughtfully at him.

He felt a touch at his elbow, and Cossar was holding a chair for him—a queer fragment of doll’s furniture amidst these piled immensities. He sat down and crossed his legs, and then put one across the knee of the other, and clutched his boot nervously, and felt small and self-conscious and acutely visible and absurdly placed.

Then at the sound of a voice he forgot himself again.

“You have heard, Brothers,” said this voice out of the shadows.

And another answered, “We have heard.”

“And the answer, Brothers?”