A Thing of the Past. John Russell Fearn

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СКАЧАТЬ idea, but I mean to find out by the simple process of hatching it. May have been down there in the ice for centuries.”

      “Any idea why there should be ice down there?” the field engineer asked.

      “No idea at all, unless it’s some kind of drift from an underground glacial region, which is quite possible. Take an expert geologist to work that one out.” Cliff’s expression changed slowly as he stood thinking. “Something very queer down there, boys,” he continued. “Warm volcanic draughts, ice cold mass of glacier in which I found this, and a gorge of inconceivable depth going down into— Well I just don’t know what.”

      “The answer to all this being what?” the field engineer asked. “Can this region be passed as okay for building?”

      Cliff shook his head. “Not yet. For one thing this narrow shaft will have to be thoroughly examined in case there’s a chance of a subsidence later into that big cavern I landed in. This whole area’s in considerable danger of lunging inwards at some future date. I’m taking no responsibility. If the geologists issue a certificate, then that passes the buck to them. Right now there’s nothing more we can do but get this rubbish shovelled up. You look after it, Dick, and I’ll go into town and report to headquarters.”

      “Okay,” the field engineer promised, and Cliff went on his way still carrying the mystery egg with infinite care. When he arrived home that evening he still had it with him, but by now it was in a cardboard box lined with cotton wool. With a certain air of mystery, like a magician about to perform a trick, he displayed the egg to his wife.

      “What is it?” Joan asked, not particularly pleased at hav­ing the untidy old box dumped on the spotlessly white tablecloth.

      “An egg,” Cliff said proudly. “The biggest egg you ever saw!”

      “I can tell that. What laid it, an ostrich?”

      “Heavens, no! An ostrich’s egg would be tiny beside this. I’m going to hatch it out and see what comes of it.”

      “Oh, I see.” Joan looked rather stupid for a moment. Not because she really was stupid, but because she could not imagine why anybody should wish to bring home an outsize egg and hatch it just for the hell of it.

      “I found it in a glacier nearly three hundred feet down in the ground,” Cliff explained, hoping this information would stir up interest. “Very uncommon happening, I can tell you.”

      “Uh-huh— Are you having the remainder of the cold meat or shall I make it up into rissoles?”

      “It’ll do as it is,” Cliff replied absently. “Too hot for rissoles, anyway.”

      Joan shrugged and wandered off into the kitchen regions. Cliff looked after her and sighed. Joan was a good sort in most things—nice cook, kept the house perfect, only she had very little imagination and relied far too much on gadgets to help her with her work, when a little physical elbow grease might have done her a world of good. Cliff never regretted that he had married her, but he could have wished for a girl slightly quicker on the uptake.

      “Be back in a minute,” he called out as crockery rattled in the kitchenette.

      “Back? You’ve only just come in. Where are you going?”

      “To put the egg in the garage. Warm enough in there this weather to hatch it.”

      “Oh!” Just that: nothing more. By the time Cliff had rid himself of the egg, freshened up, and was seated at the table Joan seemed to have forgotten all about the egg until Cliff jogged her memory.

      “It’s possible,” he said, musing, “that the egg may have been buried down in that underworld glacier for many hundreds, or even thousands, of years.”

      Joan reflected. She was a tired-looking young woman with ash-blonde hair and hazel eyes. Not so bad looking really, only the romance seemed to have gone out of life, and she found married domesticity pretty humdrum. The thought of an egg buried in a glacier for thousands of years was hardly the basis of a pep talk either.

      “I’ve seen the geologists,” Cliff continued. “They’re going to explore the cavern where I found the egg and the shaft that leads down to it—” and he went on to explain in detail, including an account of the mighty gorge that he had been quite unable to fathom.

      “You surely don’t suppose,” Joan asked at length, “that that egg can possibly have anything in it? Not after the hundreds or thousands of years you so cheerfully speak of. Why, it ought to be—be rotten.”

      “Not if preserved in ice, dear. That’s the whole point. Do you realise that living bacteria, perhaps millions of years old, have been dug out of ice from time to time in circumstances very similar to these?”

      “Think of that!” Joan went on with her meal. Eggs did not appeal to her in any case, either for eating purposes or for scientific investigation. In fact, the thought of an egg that size made her feel strangely queasy within. Cliff sensed this fact and slightly changed the subject.

      “We got the site flattened out all right at last, thank goodness, but I don’t know what’s going to be done about that shaft. Maybe have to fill it in. Make foundations rocky if we—”

      The front door bell rang. Throwing down his napkin impatiently he headed out of the room, returning with Bill Masterson, the thick-necked, bull-headed geologist of the mining concern.

      “Howdy, Joan,” he greeted briefly, and then settled himself in the nearest armchair. “Don’t let me upset feeding time: I just wanted to tell you personally, Cliff, what I think you’ve run into back at the site.”

      Cliff resumed his seat at the table. “You’ve examined he shaft then?”

      “Certainly, and the cavern below. That explosion you set off to blow out the basalt opened a natural fissure that leads down into a completely preserved Jurassic Period. No doubt of it whatever. Up to now geologists have been content to find a few fragments of some past age—a bit of Triassic, maybe, or a bit of Eocene, but never have we landed on a whole area preserved exactly as it must have been in that period. You have done science a wonderful service, Cliff, and I intend to let the scientists know that.”

      “Well, thanks very much. Sheer chance, anyway.” Cliff frowned as he ate his meal. “How do you mean—perfectly preserved? How could it be?”

      “It’s like this. At the depth you reached—three hundred feet down—there was once a surface landscape of the Jurassic Period. Then something must have happened. Maybe a gigantic earthquake, or even a general sliding of the Earth’s surface. That area was covered with rock, but atmospheric pressures—steam pressures, that is, from inside the Earth—formed a gigantic blowhole in the shape of that cavern. A new surface formed over the hole and it’s lain there untouched ever since. As the pressures relaxed and the volcanic heat abated water vapour would form. Its drops caused the stalactites to form in the roof. It was after the Jurassic and Mesozoic Periods, the age of the dinosaurs, that a second glacial epoch descended on the world, and it is possible that that mighty buried glacier is a part of it, still unthawed because down in that huge cave there is so little warmth.”

      Silence, save for the clink of knives and forks.

      “How long ago did all this happen?” Joan asked finally. “The Jurassic Age, I mean.”

      “Oh, СКАЧАТЬ