The Lost World MEGAPACK®. Lin Carter

he snapped. “If not, then pray permit me to inform you that the Mesozoic Era began some two hundred million years ago and terminated about seventy million years B.C. It is divided, I will have you understand, into three major subdivisions; and these are known as—taking the earlier period first—the Triassic, which lasted 35,000,000 years, the Jurassic, which was of similar duration, and—lastly—the Cretaceous, which extended for some sixty million years.”

      “Oh,” I said in a small voice. And rapidly changed the subject entirely.

      And about time, too.

      * * * *

      So I got myself hired to go volcano-hunting and dinosaur-digging. Well, I’ve had worse jobs, I suppose.

      Of course, I could have turned the Professor down flat when he tried to hire me. His wacky scheme sounded dangerous and uncertain from the beginning. But, if you will recall, I had left my last employment with about seventy bucks in my jeans, and by this time, after grubbing around Port Said for a couple of weeks, the exchequer was down to less than fifty. Which wouldn’t last long.

      To be blunt, I needed a job. Any job.

      This fact the Prof figured out back during our first conversation together, when we had drinks at the Cafe Umbala after I rescued him from the two muggers. I had been ordering my meals there for the past two weeks, and when the check came and I tried to coax Tabiz to put the bill on my tab, it turned out to be a bit too heavy already.

      “Never mind, my boy,” said the Prof grandly. “Ah, waiter…can the management of this estimable establishment possibly cash a one hundred dollar bill, perchance?”

      The Nubian rolled his eyes widely.

      “A hunnahd dollah Ahmericain?” he inquired, reverence throbbing in his hushed tones.

      “Precisely,” sniffed the Prof.

      And so I got hired. It seems the Prof had finished up his work for the Egypt Exploration Society and still had a fat wad of greenbacks left over from the sumptuous foundation grant he had wheedled out of the fat cats at his old alma mater. One look at the bankroll he flashed under the table to me, and I was a goner. No matter how wacky his theories niight be, or how nutty his ideas were, if he was going to pick up the tab for this expedition into the Back of the Beyond, well, I’m willing to fly him to the gates of hell—and back, if he can pay my bill.

      * * * *

      We came ashore at Agadar under a slight drizzle which is rare for these latitudes and this time of year. It took four stevedores to wrestle the ‘copter onto the dock, and half the night for the Professor and me to put Babe back together again and get her running smoothly.

      By dawn we were fueled up and ready to leave. What with all the petrol tins and food and medical supplies we had packed aboard, it was a wonder the bird could fly at all, but Sikorsky builds ’em tough, and Babe took to the air and wobbled a bit, but stayed aloft.

      From Agadar we flew almost directly south, beyond Merijinat and Tagoujalet, taking it by slow and easy stages, landing only to sleep when we had to and eat when we must.

      From just beyond Tagoujalet, I turned and flew almost due east…following the directions the Professor had calculated from the old maps.

      Even under the most ideal conditions, it would take us a couple of days to get to the Ahaggar region, and then maybe a couple of days more to find the mountain the Prof had christened Mount Zanthodon.

      Was it actually the entrance to the Underground World the old geographers and myth-makers had written about?

      Only time would tell…

      We flew on…into the east; into the rising sun.

      And into the Unknown.

      CHAPTER 3

      THE HOLLOW MOUNTAIN

      After leaving Tagoujalet, we had some eight hundred miles of Africa to cross by air. Which included some of the worst terrain in all these parts of the Dark Continent: parched desertlands, where the wells and oases were few and far between; stony tundra, where only the hardiest vegetation could manage to subsist; and the domains of the savage, still-untamed Tuareg tribesmen.

      And we were heading into an even more forbidding region, which even the fearless Tuaregs shunned.

      In the northernmost part of the El Djouf, we flew to Taoudeni, where we took on our last stores and provisions, and filled the water canisters to the brim. From this point on, we would be flying directly east, into the sun, and toward the mountain country.

      The highest peak in the Ahaggars is Mount Tahat. At 9,840 feet, it was one of the tallest mountains in all of Africa; and I certainly hoped the mountain the Professor was searching for was nowhere near that height, for Babe simply couldn’t fly as high as ten thousand feet. He assured me that our mountain was only a fraction of Tahat’s height.

      It had better be, I thought to myself grimly!

      * * * *

      Since there was nothing else to do to while away the time our trip consumed, we talked. And got to know each other pretty well. One thing that had been puzzling me was this hollow mountain stuff—and just why the Professor thought there was some sort of a giant cavern world beneath it. So I asked him.

      “All those old myths and legends aside, Doc, what makes you think there’s a hollow mountain in the Ahaggar anyway, with all that space under it?”

      “I have a theory,” he said. (The old boy had a theory about nearly everything under the sun, so this didn’t surprise me any.) “So what’s your theory?”

      He started talking in that precise yet meandering, formal and pedantic way he had, which I was beginning to get used to.

      Sometime during the Jurassic Era, or maybe a while before, Professor Potter theorized that the earth had collided with an immense meteorite of contraterrene matter.

      “Come again?”

      “Contraterrene matter,” he repeated. Then, with a little tut-tut, “Eternal Einstein, my boy, you must know something about physics?…Contraterrene matter is the mirror-opposite of ordinary matter…where a particle of ordinary, or terrene, matter has a positive charge, a contraterrene particle contains a negative charge, and so on and vice-versa…”

      “Okay, I got that.”

      “Well, then…it has long been known, or at least theorized, that when the two forms of matter touch, a terrific explosion will result—an explosion of nuclear proportions.”

      “And how large was this meteor you’re talking about?”

      He looked owlishly solemn. “Perfectly immense; it is difficult, if not actually impossible, to estimate its full original size from the scanty evidence I have managed to accumulate.”

      “And when it hit the earth, there would have been a big bang, eh?”

      “As you say, my boy, a very big bang…equal to the blast force of literally dozens of hydrogen bombs.”

      The mental picture conjured up did not exactly make me feel comfortable. “Okay…what else?”

      His watery blue eyes agleam with enthusiasm, he launched into his spiel. The meteorite, he believed, had struck earth somewhere in the Ahaggar region of North Africa…and as far back as we have any records, geographers have reported the crater of an extinct and very ancient volcano in those mountains: Greek merchants and travelers, Roman soldiers and scholars, Victorian explorers and adventurers had all mentioned it, although few of them ever seemed to have actually gotten there, since that was Tuareg country, and the Tuareg tribesmen are not only the best horsemen in North Africa, but have a welldeserved reputation for inhospitality carried to the point of hostility.

      “My astronomer friend, Franklyn, at Hayden Institute, worked out the orbit,” he explained excitedly, “and calculated the angle at which the seetee meteorite entered the earth’s atmosphere—”

      “Seetee?”