Steampunk Prime_ A Vintage Steampunk Reader - Mike Ashley [64]
“All our factory-work is done in this way now,” Hammerfleet courteously explained to me. “This tangle of mechanism runs for the most part automatically, and is governed by one man. It covers many acres.”
Wheels were spinning round in the most bewildering manner, huge trip-hammers were thudding down, with tons of force, in various places, and, at intervals, some great overwhelming bar of metal weighing thousands of pounds would come swinging down from the roof and almost touch the ground with a heavy swoop that meant death to any man who got in its way.
“Why” I exclaimed, “it is like the maze of life. Anyone who should pass under one of those swinging beams at the wrong moment would be crushed out as though by a blow of doom. They seem to exemplify fate.”
“Quite so,” he agreed.
“Let us go back,” I proposed.
“No,” he objected, “that would be cowardly. Besides, you cannot find your way back safely now. The same sort of steel beams are swinging low behind us as in front. If you were to turn back, you would have to run the same risk of being crushed. I am your only guide. You must go forward with me and take your chances.”
“Yet,” I returned, “you say that this whole forest of moving machinery is regulated by one man? Suppose anything should happen to him; that he should die suddenly; or should be asleep or fainting and incapable at this very moment. The machinery would go on, and we might, perhaps, be destroyed under it.”
“This is the situation exactly,” answered Hammerfleet. “The engineer is asleep. I had him drugged in advance.”
“Then you intend to murder me here, in this forest of steel?” I asked defiantly, but with a decided inward shudder.
“Oh, no; I didn’t say that,” he returned coolly. “But I shall leave you to trace your own course; and if anything fatal happens to you it will be laid entirely to the machinery.”
“You villain!” I exclaimed. “So this is your trap for me, is, it? Well, it’s a pretty large one for such small game, and I’ll see whether I can make my way through.”
I started running and dodging ahead, nimbly, but warily through the awful shadows, the bewildering electric lights spotted here and there; and the throbbing, swinging, whirling, or rising and falling masses of metal, all of which appeared to be consciously aiming blows at me.
“Hold on!” Cried my enemy. “You will certainly be killed. Stop! On one condition I will help you out.”
“And that?” I shouted back, pausing,
“Is that you never again speak a word of love to Electra or recur to the wild idea of marrying her.”
“Death sooner!” I retorted. “I will never consent to such a promise.” And once more I started on my perilous advance through the forest of steel.
It was a frightful experience. In all my former life put together I had not suffered so much fearful excitement, anxiety and terror as were crowded into the next few minutes. A numbing chill crept up through me from my feet to my brain, and it seemed to me that I could actually feel my hair growing white.
Suddenly I thought the end had come. Everything seemed to stop. I stopped. Had I really been struck, and was I dead? Or was this merely imagination? Certainly the great moving wilderness of metal had come to a standstill. The next moment I heard an enormous ringing voice sending towards me from the farther border a loud hail: “Bemis, we are here. You are saved!”
It was the voice of Zorlin; and immediately following it came the rich contralto of Electra; “This way, this way! Come to us, Bemis.”
The bright glare of a searchlight swept through the darksome tangle like a ray direct from Heaven, and by it I was enabled to see my path clear. In a few minutes I had joined my rescuers, and Hammerfleet came after me with a deceitful air of solicitude relieved.
BOOK II.
CHAPTER VI.
IMPROVED CONDITIONS
From the moment of my fortunate escape, Zorlin was my close friend. It was he who, by the extraordinary power of mind reading, and the perception of distant, unseen things, which his people, the Kurols, possess, had divined the plot against me and the