The Lost World MEGAPACK®. Lin Carter

shrugged. “A drop of oil here and there and the other place, and a full tank of the best octane, that’s all it needs. We needed the chopper, you understand, ’cause we had to fly low. Mr. Sadat’s customs men use radar now, and the border country fringes some on Israeli-held territory. Antiaircraft batteries, you know…and trigger fingers get mighty itchy in that part of the world…”

      Something like prophetic bliss shone in his misty eyes. An adam’s apple the size of a golfball wobbled up and down in his stringy throat, measuring the intensity of his emotion just as the mercury does in a thermometer.

      “When you saved me from those scalawags, my boy,” he said huskily, “I thought…” And he rattled off a line or two of Swahili. Well, it was pure Swahili as far as I was concerned; it turned out to be Greek.

      Then he cleared his throat apologetically: “Hem! Forgive me, lad…Simonides the Athenian…‘One welcomes the arrival of a friend in need, even if he be a stranger at the time.’”

      “You don’t have to—”

      He silenced me with a magnificent gesture. “Not at all! The poet echoed my feelings of the moment; but now that I learn you possess a helicopter, I feel, rather (with Ephialtes), ‘Be serene: the Gods will provide you with the thing you need, in the hour appointed—’”

      He leaned forward suddenly, as if to transfix me with that white spike of stiff beard.

      “Have you ever heard of Zanthodon?” he whispered hoarsely.

      * * * *

      Of course, I hadn’t; nor has hardly anyone, this side of the half a dozen or so scholars in the world who read “proto-Akkadian.” The Doc, as I soon found out, was never so happy as when he was explaining something to somebody. So he began explaining.

      “Proto-Akkadian…name of the Underground World…the “Great Below” of the Sumerians, Na-an-Gub…the Babylonians, who came along much later, you know, called it ‘Irkalla.’…”

      “No, I don’t think I—”

      “Also seems to have been known to the ancient Egyptians and to the Hebrew prophets,” he continued, blandly riding over my interjection. “The Hebrews called it Tehom, the ‘Great Deep’…there resided the nephilim, the earth-giants of Hebrew myths…it appears that the Egyptians may have called the Underground World Amentet. It was the Sacred Land, the Underworld of the Dead—the Land in the West,” he said, with peculiar emphasis, eyes agleam.

      “Listen, Professor, I—”

      “Now this is particularly interesting, my boy,” he rode on, paying me no mind. “For the Sumerians located their own version of Zanthodon—Na-an-Gub—in ‘the land Martu,’ which is to say, in the west.”

      Tabiz brought us a second round. The Doc knocked his straight back as if it were apple juice instead of pure gin. He licked his lips and continued:

      “Even the Moslems know the legend…to them it is Shadukiam, the underworld of the djinns, ruled by Al-Dimiryat…Also in the west: “toward the setting sun” …all of these peoples seem to have thought of Zanthodon as a genuine place; more than one traveler, I hazard, actually tried to find it…none were successful, apparently. As the Pyramid Texts put it, in one of their more memorable verses:” and his voice sank to a spooky whisper as he recited,

      “None cometh from thence that he may tell us how they fare,

      That he may tell us what they need, that he may set our hearts at rest,

      Until we also go to the place whither they art gone,

      The place from which there is no returning.…”

      I have to confess a tingle crawled its way up my spine: there was a ring to the old boy’s voice that the late Boris Karloff might have envied.

      I cleared my throat.

      “Underworlds are pretty common in mythology, aren’t they?” I said. “Hell and Hades and Sheol…”

      He nodded vigorously. “And Duat and Dilmun, et cetera…yes, quite right! But as I was saying, my boy—”

      He went on; I gave up, leaned back, and savored my cocktail. There was no stopping Professor Potter once he got started talking.

      “My first clue as to the whereabouts of the entrance to Zanthodon I discovered in the old Babylonian creation epic, Enuma Elish…something to the effect that in the month of Adar, the Door to Irkalla lay ‘under the Path of Shimmah’…Now Shimmah (which the Egyptians called Khonuy) equates to the sign Pisces; and the month of Adar in the Babylonian calendar is about the same as the Egyptian month Mesore. Which means February!”

      “Um,” I said around a mouthful of martini.

      “Then I discovered in Smyrna, in a Greek manuscript of Zosimus the Panopolitan, reference to a fragment of the old Egyptian geographer, Claudius Ptolemy (the fragment is considered dubious by some authorities, but there you are! No one quite agrees on these things)—and Zosimus, quoting Ptolemy, placed the Mouth of Hades (Ptolemy meant Amentet) beneath the path of Pisces in the month Anthesterion.”

      He fixed me with an eye glittering with triumph, and a bit too much gin:

      “And the Greek month of Anthesterion is our February!”

      I looked at him thoughtfully: “I thought Pisces was a sign of the zodiac,” I murmured. “What does ‘the Path of Pisces’ mean?”

      He clucked his tongue, just like a lady math teacher I suffered under in the fifth grade: “The signs of the so-called zodiac are stellar constellations, my boy!” he said reprovingly.

      Then, brushing aside the ashtray and the now-empty glasses, he began to trace lines and curves on the tablecloth with the stub of a broken pencil fished from an inner pocket.

      “In February,” he said breathlessly, “the constellation passes over this belt of North Africa—thus and so—upon this latitude—”

      “Latitude 25,” I murmured, studying the rude chart he had sketched.

      He tapped a bony forefinger on one particular spot.

      “Here, I believe.”

      I mentally reconstructed the location from maps I had seen.

      “The Ahaggar Mountains,” I said. “In Targa country, surrounded by Tuareg lands. One of the least known, least explored, least visited and most completely inhospitable regions of the entire African continent.”

      “Precisely.”

      “And just what do you expect to find there?”

      His voice sank to an eerie whisper:

      “A hollow mountain, leading to the center of the world.”

      CHAPTER 2

      INTO THE AHAGGAR

      During the next two weeks I got to know the Professor quite well. His full name—to quote a grubby, thumbprintsmeared visiting card he flashed to overawe customs officials—read:

      Professor Percival P. Potter, Ph.D.

      He was suspiciously reticent on the question of what that middle initial stood for, but it was on his passport, which I saw by accident.

      “‘Penthesileia’?” I read, incredulously.

      He fixed me with a frosty, reproving glare.

      “You peeked.”

      “Well, I didn’t mean to…but—Penthesileia?”

      Professor Potter cleared his throat and gave a little sniff. “My late father was a highly esteemed classical scholar,” he informed me coldly. “Penthesileia was the Queen of the Amazons, in an old Roman epic about the Trojan War, by Quintus Smyrnaeus. My father was perhaps overfond of the epic, which is minor and rather florid…”

      I