THE LOST OASIS
Doc Savage and his friends were having it so easy they felt a bit suspicious.
“Something is up,” Johnny muttered. “I feel it in my bones!”
“You couldn’t very well feel it anywhere else!” said the sharp-tongued Ham, eying Johnny’s thin frame.
Monk scowled at Ham, then at the others. “I wonder if we could get along without this shyster?” he pondered. “If I thought so, I’d pitch him out. I sure get tired of him trying to be funny!”
“Funny!” Ham sneered. “This gang don’t need any jokes to make ’em laugh! All we have to do is take a look at that homely fizz of yours and start chuckling!”
Monk only grinned amiably. If Ham could not think of a better comeback than that, he must be slipping.
“It’s strange!” Long Tom echoed the general feeling of uneasiness. “Every one of our enemies seems to have disappeared!”
“Did you fellows hear the start of a woman’s scream a moment ago?” Doc Savage asked unexpectedly.
The others looked at him in surprise. They had heard nothing; only Doc’s hearing had been keen enough to catch the distant shriek. The scream with which Lady Nelia had tried to warn them of the horror about to be unleashed!
Doc stood erect on the catwalk. Leaning slightly to one side, he drove a big, metallic fist against the skin fabric of the dirigible. The doped cloth burst with a loud report before the terrific blow. Tearing, Doc opened the hole to a greater size.
Without a word, he swung outside.
A terrific blast of air hit him. The titan of fabric and alloy upon which he stood was traveling at a fast clip. The air was very warm. Heat beat up from the aluminum-treated back of the Aëromunde. The African sun was reflected in a blinding glare.
Off to either side, heat-scored desert flung away to the horizon. It was an ominous waste of shifting sand dunes, as trackless as all eternity.
Ahead, low mountains reared. They were chopped masses, as if a titanic meat cleaver had hewn and beaten at the expanse of stone. Bald and hideous; repellent to the eye. Not even a bush.
Doc’s golden eyes were thoughtful as he surveyed the rugged fastness of rock. He had a good idea as to the dirigible’s position. And maps did not show these mountains.
That was understandable, however. This portion of Africa was uninhabited—a desert which offered no livelihood, even to the hardy Arabs. A few aviators flying across Africa were probably the only civilized men who had ever seen much of it.
The dirigible was heading straight for the low, bare mountains.
Doc moved toward the bows, bending against the tearing rush of wind. Footing was treacherous. A misstep meant he might easily skid off the top of the airship into space.
He was wasting no time. His scrutiny of the earth below had been brief, and now he was running easily.
The unnatural lack of life, the ominous tension which had seized upon the craft, had conveyed warning. Some plot was unfolding. Too, Doc had heard the portion of a cry Lady Nelia had uttered!
The Aëromunde had originally been constructed as a ship of war. Stationed along the ridge were four machine-gun emplacements.
Doc, reaching the first of these, noted the rapid-firers were still in place, swathed in canvas weather jackets.
Access to this machine-gun nest was through one of the perpendicular keel-to-ridge shafts—the one which terminated in the control cabin.
Doc lifted the hatch. His gaze sank through the vertical flue.
At the shaft mouth, plainly visible, he saw the wicker basket. The lid was jammed tightly to the opening. A brown, supple hand fumbled at the lid and, as Doc watched, the lid was yanked back.
A hideous black shape lifted upward in the shaft.
* * * *
The deadly, fluttering creature mounted with amazing speed. It was like a trembling, lividly black cloth pulled on a string. The thing shut off what illumination came from the bottom of the shaft. The resulting murk concealed the exact nature of the horror.
Doc Savage carried no guns; he subscribed to the theory that the man who carries a firearm will come to put too much dependence upon it and will, as a consequence, be virtually helpless when without the gun.
No doubt cartridges were in the ammo drums cased beside the machine guns in the ridge emplacement. But it would take time to rip off the rapid-firer covers, detach them and turn the muzzles down the shaft.
Time! There were only splits of seconds.
Not even Doc could get the machine gun into action. Anyway, copious quantities of hydrogen gas were pouring from the shaft maw, coming from the rent where the unfortunate brown man had fallen into a ballonet and suffocated. A powder flash would ignite the vapor.
Doc’s bronze hand dived into his clothing and came out with several of his anæsthetic-containing glass globes. These, although they produced an effect similar to Monk’s gas, were not as potent. Moreover, the anæsthetic became ineffective after approximately a minute, whereas Monk’s gas retained its power until dispersed by a breeze.
Doc had a supply of Monk’s grenades. Yet, for reasons of his own, he used the glass balls. He pegged them into the shaft, causing them to break on the girders and brace wires.
The revolting creature in the shaft lifted with convulsive floppings. It entered the cloud of anæsthetic vapor. Onward, it came! The gas seemed to have no effect!
But no! The gloomy mass wavered! It hung poised! It contorted in grisly fashion! Then it plummeted back down the shaft!
Doc Savage, peering into the gloomy well of metal and fabric, found it impossible to ascertain the exact nature of the creature.
The thing crashed back into the open cage, still being held against the shaft.
The shock knocked the man who held the cage to his knees.
Terrified yells drifted upward! The men thought their monster had turned upon them. They did not know Doc had overcome it. The wicker basket with its grisly contents was dragged away from beneath the shaft.
Deliberately, Doc dropped more glass spheres down the vertical passage. These, for the most part, fell entirely to the bottom and burst, their contents flooding the control room.
The shouting abruptly subsided.
Doc waited a full minute, ears timed to penetrate the drone of the engines. The motors were not nearly as loud as usual; they had apparently been throttled down. A minute gone! The gas had dissolved.
Traveling so rapidly that he might have been sliding on a cable, Doc descended. He soon stood in the control cabin.
Lady Nelia Sealing slumped at the chart table, sleeping from the effects of the gaseous anæsthetic.
Men—Yuttal, Hadi-Mot, the four aviators—sprawled in various positions.
The wicker basket could not be seen. But the control-car door was unlatched.
Doc stepped to a window and glanced downward.
Below and to the rear, a tiny splotch could be discerned upon the hot desert sand. Doc seized binoculars which dangled from a hook over the array of controls at the front of the compartment. He focused the lenses upon the spot.
The wicker cage! The men had flung the thing overboard in their fright, wishing to be rid of their hideous creature. The basket and its contents, a pulpy mass, had been buried in the sand by the fall. It was impossible to tell what the horror had been.
The Aëromunde moaned through the hot sunlight like a vehicle of the living dead. No one stirred. There was no sound over the cadence of the motors, except for an occasional noisy snore.
The crew were still barricaded in their quarters, either unaware the wicker basket had been hurled overboard or fearing the creature of fluttering death had not been in the container.
Doc’s gaze ranged the controls, centering particularly upon the gauges showing the amount of fuel remaining, the quantity of ballast still unexpended, and the status of the gas supply.
Fuel was almost gone; little ballast reposed aboard; the ballonets were slack, the one above virtually empty. These things told Doc that the dirigible could remain in the air but two hours or so longer.
He had hoped he and his friends might seize the craft and sail it to civilization. No chance of that! They would never get out of the desert!
The chain securing Lady Nelia was padlocked securely at her neck and a girder. Doc worked over the padlock with one of the young woman’s hair pins. He got it open.
Carrying her slender form easily, he mounted the shaft.
He left Yuttal, Hadi-Mot, and the others behind—unharmed. He had an excellent reason for doing this. The men would revive in time to direct the landing of the airship.
The goal of the flight—the lair of these men—must be near, and Doc wished the leviathan of the air to reach its destination. He was curious to fathom whatever the secret the spot held.
It was characteristic of the big bronze man, this permitting himself and his aides to be carried into the rookery of his enemies. Reckless, overconfident, his move might have seemed to the uninitiated. It was none of these. He was merely unafraid, and prepared for any jeopardy.
* * * *
Doc’s five friends welcomed his return with astounded glances at the limp form of Lady Nelia. They rattled questions, to which Doc gave terse, descriptive replies.
While Doc administered restoratives to hasten Lady Nelia’s return to consciousness, the others clambered out on the ridge of the sky giant to get first glimpses of the strange, bleak country ahead.
They beheld an awesome sight The Aëromunde was over the low, rugged mountains. The array of rocky peaks lay in the shape of a ring, miles across.
In the center of the stony ring lay an oasis. A lost oasis! For certainly no hint of its presence would have reached a traveler on the desert.
A vast platter of green! The utter denseness of the vegetation caused the men to turn binoculars upon it. They saw such a jungle as they had seldom beheld.
Tropical trees were matted in such profusion that they seemed to grow one out of the other. Lianas and aërial creepers tied the whole into an impenetrable mat. Orchids and other rare and brilliantly colored blooms could be seen.
Luxuriant though the jungle was, and contrasting as it did with the blazing desert, the oasis, nevertheless, possessed a sinister and unwholesome air. It was like something green and hideous lying there in an infinity of furnace-hot, wind-tortured sand.
Black, living specks sailed in the air above the strange oasis.
Johnny, after studying the dark birds with his binoculars, said: “Pharaoh’s hens!”
“Huh?” gulped Monk.
“Vultures!” Johnny then elaborated. “They call this species Pharaoh’s hens.”
The others shivered. Scavengers! Birds of death! They hung over the repellent green of the oasis as if it were a carrion thing.
“Say, the buzzards behave strangely,” Ham ejaculated after a time. “Watch ’em! They circle and circle, but they don’t go near the jungle. It almost looks as if the birds were afraid of the vegetation.”
“The thing that impresses me,” Renny muttered, “is that there are no other birds. Only vultures!”
“Hey—the birds are not afraid to go down!” Monk ejaculated. “There goes one black cuss now! See ’im!”
The men watched. They witnessed a weird, horrible occurrence.
The black scavenger bird settled swiftly into the vegetation. Apparently, it grasped some titbit of food.
The vulture sought to lift into the air again. Its hideous black wings flailed madly. But it did not get off! The plant, the sickly-hued shrub upon which it had landed, seemed to have grasped the bird.
Slowly, the shrub closed its tentacle-like shoots. It enveloped the vulture!
“Holy cow!” Renny croaked.
Of the five men, Johnny seemed the least surprised. He possessed a knowledge of strange earthly plants second only to Doc’s learning.
“Carnivorous plants!” he ejaculated. “They grow in boggy regions, and trap insects and small animals which come in contact with them! That’s the way they get food.”
“That vulture wasn’t so small!” Monk muttered.
“No-o-o!” Johnny admitted. “The carnivorous qualities must be developed to a more than ordinary degree!”
Ham now pointed with his sword cane. “There seems to be our destination!”
* * * *
The spot Ham indicated was a patch of rocky ground, higher than the surrounding jungle. This stony prominence was split with a deep crack.
The airship was swinging over the rent. Steep, overhanging, the rocky walls were three or four hundred feet in height.
“Hey!” Monk yelled. “D’you see what I do?”
“A sort of natural dirigible hangar!” one of the others grunted.
The overhang of the cliff on one side of the deep rut in the rock formed a ready-made shed. In this, stout fore-and-aft mooring masts of timber had been erected.
Men appeared on the ground, dozens of them. They were assembling in a compact group in the center of the cut.
A landing crew to handle the Aëromunde!
It was Renny who called attention to one of the most disquieting discoveries of all.
A rectangular stockade! It was constructed of tall posts, set so closely together that nowhere was there space for a man to squeeze through. At one point was a stout gate. The tops of the posts were sharpened to ugly points.
Within the stockade were human figures—dejected, wasted beings! Many were little more than living hulls.
They were chained, neck to neck, in groups of ten.
The forlorn sight was blotted from view as the dirigible swept over. The craft turned slowly and began nosing down into the rent. A slight breeze sweeping steadily between the precipitous walls simplified the landing, eliminating the menace of a cross wind.
It was while the giant aluminum cigar was over the north end of the crack that Doc’s men made an additional find—a deep pit, not unlike a monster well.
Treacherous paths led down into the void. Chained figures shuffled along these paths. And, when the Aëromunde was in a favorable position, they could observe many more shackled beings slaving in the bottom.
Around the mouth of the digging, bluish piles of waste were heaped. The stuff seemed to be clay—blue clay, with a faintly greenish tinge.
“This clears up the mystery of the slaves!” Ham declared grimly. “The slaves are poor devils being forced to work these diggings.”
“Yeah—being made to mine diamonds!” Monk muttered, forgetting himself so much as to agree with Ham.
“The blue ground means diamonds, of course! This must be the source of the stones Lady Nelia carried!”
The latter statement reminded them of something.
“Lady Nelia!” Renny grunted. “We’d better see if Doc has got her conscious yet.”
“And we’d better get us some plans, too!” Monk asserted. “We’re getting into a mighty tight spot!”
The men clambered back inside the airship body.
Lady Nelia Sealing was conscious. She gave them a faint, but entirely brave smile.