The Seeker - Isobelle Carmody [128]
It was not long before the way narrowed and twisted, creating the first turbulent stretch of rapids. The water boiled savagely, sending the raft shuddering and careening through foaming torrents, barely missing jagged rocks. Luck as much as steering kept us from being overturned or having a rock smash the raft to splinters.
And there were many such stretches. Each time we began to breathe easy, thinking ourselves lucky to have reached calmer waters, we would hear the familiar hollow roar ahead and would tighten our grips on the raft.
At one point, the entire surface of the river seemed to tilt, and we were as much sliding as being swept by the current. The wind whistled past me, whipping strands of hair wildly in my face.
We knew the Suggredoon flowed down to the lowlands, but I had been secretly afraid that the tunnel it had carved through the stone roots of the mountain might become too narrow for the raft to pass. My heart sank when the walls began to close in around us, and for a moment, the mountain seemed to throb with brooding malevolence.
I tried to ignore the roof drawing steadily nearer and more dim, as if the glowing insects disliked the closeness as much as we did. Gradually, it became so low that Domick could not stand. I needed no empathy to sense Avra’s fear. If the cavern became much more cramped, she would not fit. And we all knew there was no turning back.
But the way began to widen again, and I shivered with reaction. In my wildest fancies, I had never imagined the trip to the coast would be such a road of trials. I had worried only about soldierguards, yet in all that had befallen us, we had not even laid eyes on one.
Hearing a roar ahead, I prepared myself for another battering, but instead the raft flowed round a bend and through a natural stone arch into a vast, dark cavern. If not for the stalactites and stalagmites and the rock columns rising from the water to the roof where some had met and fused, I would have thought we had somehow got out onto the sea at night. The cave was lit by millions of the tiny insects.
The raft slowed but was still drawn along by a deeper current.
Our wonder at this great lake under the mountain dissolved into greater amazement as we drew near to what at first appeared to be strangely symmetrical rows of rocky mounds rising from the water.
Pavo realized first what we were seeing and gasped. I was struck by the wonder in his gaunt face. “This is a Beforetime city,” he whispered reverently.
Squinting, I saw that he was right. The shapes were too square to be natural, but the height of them astounded me. These, then, were the skyscrapers of the legends.
I stared about me as the current carried us between two of the monstrous constructions, along what must once have been a street. There was no way of telling how far below the surface of the water lay the floor of the dead city. Out of the distant past, I seemed to hear Louis Larkin telling me there were certain to be rare niches in the world where bits of the Beforetime were preserved.
And what wonders lay inside these buildings with their thousands of dark windows?
Up close, the surfaces were badly eroded, especially at the water line. One day the currents’ ebb and flow would eat the foundations, and the remnants of the ancient city would topple. Gaps in the rows of buildings suggested this had happened already in some cases.
Many of the smooth façades were crumbled, revealing the great black steel frames inside them, like the bones of some moldering animal. Much of the remaining walls were covered in a livid yellow fungus. The glowing insects either lived or fed on it, for wherever the fungus grew, they were clustered thickly, and their collective light was brighter.
I wondered if the city had somehow sunk into