Айзек Азимов - Before The Golden Age

The country in which I found myself was wild beyond description. In place of the dense semi-tropical vegetation which I had been accustomed to associate with my submicroscopic empire, there was nothing but rock, bare rugged rock. Huge masses of stone, hundreds and even thousands of feet high, lay piled one on another as though a race of giants had tossed them about in sport, recking little of where they fell. There was none of the solidity and symmetry which marks the mountains of the larger plane. Many of the stones seemed to be precariously balanced and even where they were wedged together, the effect was one of insecurity. I shuddered and caught myself afraid to stir lest even my tiny weight would start one of the masses of rock into motion and engulf me and all my possessions in cataclysmic ruin. I walked in a gingerly fashion over to one of the unstable appearing masses of rock and rested my hand against it. It was solid to the touch and I pressed, gently at first, and then with all my strength, trying in vain to budge the mass which must have weighed thousands of tons, if my own negligible weight be taken as being its normal one hundred and eighty pounds. Satisfied that it was beyond my strength to move it, I felt safer, and began to consider in which direction I should start my travels.

I racked my brain for a clue. Somewhere in memory’s vaults there was an elusive something that this jumbled phantasmagoria of rock reminded me of. Suddenly I remembered it.

In the days when I had been hailed as the Crown Prince of Ulm, the husband of its ruler’s only child, I had been much interested in the ancient legends which told the history of the empire. Ulm had no written language and no records to which I could refer other than the traditions and legends which had been handed down from father to son. These legends were preserved in metrical form. The learning and reciting of them on occasion was the principal duty of the class of persons known as tamaaini, [Compare the Hawaiian word, “kamaaini,” an old inhabitant.] generally elderly men who were not of the noble class, but who, because of their profession, had an entree to the court and many of the privileges of nobility. Some of them had marvelous memories and could repeat without faltering thousands after thousands of lines of the old legends. It was from them that I learned that the Mena had originally come down from the north through the barren passes in the mighty mountains which border Ulm on all sides. I had never been able to gather much information as to derivation of the people of Ulm themselves. It seemed that so far as the tamaaini knew, they had always lived in their present location. There were, however, here and there in the legends dim and little understood references to other places and it was one of these passages that I strove to recall. Suddenly, like a flash, the long forgotten tale came to my mind.

It told of the flight of the natural son of a ruler of Ulm who had tried to wrest the throne from his legitimate half-brother, after his father’s death, and it described his own defeat and death. The victor pursued him with a handful of guards and caught him in a place where “giants played as children, tossing mountains hand to hand.” There they encountered a race of kahumas or wizards who flew through the air like birds and who shot fire from their many hands. They could “kill from afar with fire” and they allowed no one who entered their land to return. Evidently, at least one of the party returned to Ulm with the record of the attempted usurper’s death, which the legend goes on to detail at great length. The passage had always interested me, for it seemed to hint at a higher civilization than was possessed by the brave and chivalrous warriors of Ulm.

I looked about me and I did not blame the fancy of the ancient bard who had laid the condition of the landscape to the gambols of giants or to the evil machinations of wizards. Certainly his description was an apt one. The forbidden land lay, according to the legend, “toward the setting sun.” If the tale were true and if I were looking on the scene of that ancient tragedy, Ulm should lie to the east and not more than a few days’ journey away. It was a pretty slender clue but it was the only one I had. Without it I had no idea of which direction to take, so I decided to trust to the accuracy and authenticity of a legend of unknown antiquity and make my way eastward.

My first step was to fix the landscape in my mind and to take bearings with my marching compass on the most prominent points of the scenery. If I found my way back to Ulm my entire labor and travail would be lost unless I were able to return to the adjuster and its precious load of weapons. Three huge peaks dominated the scene to the north and they stood so that the farther one lay exactly in the middle of the interval between the two nearer ones. The bearing of the farther peak was a quarter point west of magnetic north. Exactly south east was another peak with a peculiar cleft near its summit. A short study enabled me to fix the location of the adjuster so firmly in my mind that I was certain that I could find the place again. With a final look around, I shouldered my rifle, set my face to the east and set out.

Despite the ruggedness of the country I was able, by the aid of my marching compass, to keep going in the general direction of east pretty well although I had to make several lengthy detours around masses of rock. For several hours I pushed on and found the country gradually getting a little less rugged. There were no signs of animal life but once in a while I came across a tuft of vegetation resembling the bunch grass so common in some parts of the West.

As the sun got higher it grew intolerably hot and I began to regret that I had loaded myself so heavily with food and especially ammunition and had brought only two quarts of water. It was too late to retrace my steps, so I husbanded my water as carefully as possible and kept going. Before noon the heat got so bad that I began to look for a place where I could find a little shelter.

Ahead of me I spied what looked like a cave in the rock and I pressed forward to investigate it. It was not a true cave but it was a fair imitation of one made by two huge masses of rock leaning against one another. I had no idea how far into the rock the cavity extended but it was cool in the shade and I discarded my pack with a sigh of relief. I also unslung the heavy bandoliers of ammunition which I carried and leaned my rifle against the wall of the cavern. According to my pedometer, I had covered about ten miles. I secured a pencil and notebook from my pack and stepped to the mouth of the cavern to sight the directions of the peaks by which I had marked my landing.

I located them without any trouble and was engaged in trying to locate myself by a process of triangulation on a crude map which I had made of my morning’s journey when an unfamiliar sound brought me up with a start. I listened intently and the sound faded for a moment only to increase in volume. I puzzled my brains as to what was causing it. It was a dull humming sound and the only thing it reminded me of was the whirling of an airplane propeller, a patent impossibility in Ulm.

The sound came nearer and I started back to the cave and took up my rifle when the cause of the noise came in sight. My flyer’s ears had not misled me. Flying along at a moderate speed about a thousand feet above my level was an airplane. It was not of the conventional pattern with which I was familiar although it bore certain resemblance to the planes I had flown. The main difference was in the size and shape of the wings. Instead of the usual rectangular wing spread on each side of the fuselage, this machine had a single heart-shaped wing mounted above the fuselage with the point of the heart to the rear. Above the wing was a crisscross network of wires which reminded me of an aerial.