They flung it back. The open pit yawned before them, eight feet across.
Angry, swirling water leaped into it in an unbroken sheet, from every side; it was a yellow funnel, foam-lined.
Ominous, furious, deafening, the yell of wild waters came up out of it.
John Star paused, staring into its savage yellow maw with a sickening wave of horror.
It seemed very suicide to dive into that bellowing vortex, suicide in a singularly fearful guise. To be sucked down that tawny, foaming throat, whirled helpless through the sewers below, battered against the walls, finally belched into the horrors of the great river!
And Aladoree!
It was impossible.
“We can’t!” he shouted to Jay Kalam, above the snarling roar of it
“We can’t drag her into that!”
“Mortal me!” hoarsely breathed Giles Habibula, the color of his face fading to a pallid, unhealthy green.
“It’s death!
Wicked, howling death, and fearful suffocation.”
He reeled back, staggering in the water that tore at his feet. Jay Kalam glanced at the Medusa drifting down, very close, now, with their black weapons and Eric Ulnar clinging to his cradle of snakes.
He looked gravely at Aladoree, a silent question on his face.
She glanced up at them, her pale face momentarily hardening with scorn.
Her gray eyes, still cool and steady, though too bright and dark-rimmed with weariness, looked deliberately from one to another of the four, and then down into the thundering whirlpool.
A long moment she hesitated.
She smiled then, oddly; she made a little fleeting gesture of farewell. And she dived into that yellow, bellowing funnel.
John Star was dazed by the suddenness of her action, by the cold, reckless courage of it.
It was a moment before he could recover his faculties, put down his own horror of that avid, howling maw.
He tossed aside his improvised weapon, then; he gasped a last full breath of air, and followed.
Twenty feet down, he fell with the yellow foaming vortex into a plunging river.
The murky red gloom was extinct in an instant.
In complete darkness he was whirled along, beneath the black city.
After a little time his struggles brought him to the surface.
The dram was racing almost full.
His fending arm was bruised against the top of the tube. But he was able to inhale a gasp of foul, reeking air.
He caught breath, again, to shout Aladoree’s name, then realized the utter futility of that.
Whirling ahead of him in the roaring torrent, she could never hear.
Nor would it serve any good if she did.
The passage turned presently; he was strangled in the smother of foam below the angle.
Again, after an indefinite time of waiting, fighting to keep afloat, breathing when he could, he was flung into a deeper, swifter current.
Here the dram was all but full.
The wild water washed and splashed and foamed against the roof of it; it was seldom he could find an open space from which to fill his lungs.
On and on he was rushed, until he felt that he had fought that savage torrent forever; until his bruised, weary body screamed for rest; until his lungs shrieked for pure air again, and not the foul, foam-filled pockets above the thundering tide.
He could not last another moment, he was thinking, when he plunged into a new wider channel.
The current sucked him under.
For seeming hours, deadly, lung-tortured, he fought for the surface; and he came up under racing metal, no air beneath it.
Somehow, he kept the water from his aching lungs.
He let the mad current whirl him on.
Could Aladoree, he wondered, have endured all this?
And the three behind him, if they had dived before the Medusae came, could they be still alive?
Abruptly he was in a wild fury of roaring foam.
He was drawn down again until a cruel weight of water crushed his chest.
Fighting a weary way upward, too nearly lifeless to feel any glow of triumph, he saw light in the water.
Up he broke through yellow foam, gratefully sucked in the clear reviving air of the open—quite oblivious of the red and slowly deadly gas that tainted it.
Above, on the one side, was the sullen sky, washed to its full and sinister brilliance by the storm.
On the other was the mile-high metal wall of the black metropolis.
He had been discharged into the surging flood of the yellow river.
Boiling, scarred with lighter lines of foam, pitted with vortices of angry whirlpools, its turbid tide reached away from him, ten miles wide, so wide that the low dark line of jungle on the farther bank was all but lost in thick red murk.