This man, evidently seeing with perfect clarity by a light which permitted the engineer only partial vision, also examined Stern and made speech thereto and nodded with satisfaction.
Then he put half a dozen questions to the prisoner with evident slowness and an attempt to speak each word distinctly, but nothing came of this. And with a contemptuous grunt he went back to his paddle.
"Hold on, there!" cried Stern. "Can't you understand? There were two of us, in a--machine, you know! We fell. Fell from the surface of the earth--fell all the way down into this pit of hell, whatever it is. Where's the girl? For God's sake, tell me!"
Neither man paid any heed, but the elder suddenly set hollowed palms to his lips and hailed; and from across the waters dully drifted another answering cry.
He shouted a sentence or two with a volume of noise at which the engineer marveled, for so compressed was the air that Stern's best effort could hardly throw a sound fifty feet. This characteristic of the atmosphere he well recognized from work he had often done in bridge and tunnel caissons. And a wonder possessed him, despite his keen anxiety, how any race of men could live and grow and develop the evident physical force of these people under conditions so unnatural.
Turning his head and wrenching his neck sidewise, he was able to catch a glimpse of the water, over the low gunwale--a gunwale made, like the framework of the boat itself, of thin metallic strips cleverly riveted.
There, approaching through the mists, he got sight of another boat, also provided with its cresset that flung an uncanny shaft of blue across the jetty expanse--a boat now drawing near uncles the urge of half-seen oarsmen. And farther still another torch was visible; and beyond that a dozen, a score or more, all moving with dim and ghostly slowness, through the blind abyss of fog and heat and drifting vapors.
Stern gathered strength for another appeal.
"Who are you people?" cried he passionately. "What are you going to do with us? Where are we--and what kind of a place are we in? Any way to get out, out to the world again? And the girl--that girl! Oh, great God! Can't you answer something?"
No reply. Only that same slow, strong paddling, awful in its purposeful deliberation. Stern questioned in French, Spanish and German, but got not even the satisfaction of attracting their attention. He flung what few phrases of Latin and Esperanto he had at them. No result. And a huge despair filled his soul, a feeling of utter and absolute helplessness.