Chapter 36What Is It?

What Is It?

We walked over this massive pile of bones for what felt like forever - a really long, tired hour. We just kept going, totally driven by curiosity. What other crazy stuff was in this huge cavern? What other awesome treasures for a scientist?

My eyes were ready for anything, and my imagination was buzzing with the idea of something totally new and amazing.

The edges of the Central Ocean had vanished behind the hills scattered across the bone plain. The reckless, super-excited Professor, who didn't even care if we got lost, pushed me forward. We moved silently, surrounded by waves of electric light.

Because of something I can’t even explain, and thanks to how spread out it was, the light lit up every side of every hill and rock equally. It seemed to come from everywhere, not from any one spot, and there were no shadows at all.

It looked like a tropical place at noon in the middle of summer - right in the equatorial regions, under the blazing sun.

There were no signs of mist or anything. The rocks, the distant mountains, and some blurry clumps of faraway forests all had this weird, mysterious vibe because of the even light.

We felt a little like the mysterious guy in one of Hoffmann's crazy stories - the dude who lost his shadow.

After we walked about a mile more, we reached the edge of a huge forest, but it wasn't like those giant mushroom forests we’d found near Port Gretchen.

It was the incredible, wild vegetation from the Tertiary period, in all its awesome glory. Giant palms - a kind that doesn't exist anymore, called palmacites - along with pines, yews, cypress, and all kinds of cone-bearing trees, all tangled together with a crazy mess of vines.

A seriously gorgeous carpet of mosses and ferns covered the ground under the trees. Little brooks gurgled under the shady branches - though "shady" is a stretch, they didn’t really give any shade. Tiny, tree-like shrubs grew along their banks, the kind you’d see in hot countries back on Earth.

But these plants, shrubs, and trees were missing one thing: color! They’d never felt the warmth of the sun, so they were totally bland and colorless. Everything was just one faded brown.

The leaves were completely green-free, and the flowers - which were super common when they first popped up during the Tertiary period - were without color and without any scent, like old paper that’s been sitting out for ages.

My uncle headed into the huge groves, and I followed him, though I was a little freaked out. If nature could create such massive plants, could we run into equally huge - and dangerous - mammals?

I noticed tons of leguminous (bean-like) shrubs in the clearings left by trees that had fallen and been eaten away by time. Stuff like maple and other trees that animals love to munch on.

Then I saw trees from all over the world just jumbled together - an oak next to a palm tree, an Australian eucalyptus (a cool plant from the Myrtaceae family), leaning against a tall Norwegian pine, and a poplar from the north mixing branches with New Zealand kauris.

It was enough to totally mess with the most brilliant classifier from above and shake up all their ideas about plants.

Suddenly, I stopped dead in my tracks and held my uncle back.

The light was so spread out, I could see even tiny stuff way back in the woods. I swear - I really saw it - huge, massive animals moving around under those giant trees.

Seriously, they were gigantic animals, a whole bunch of mastodons, not fossils, but alive, just like the ones they found in eighteen oh one on the marshy banks of the Ohio River in North America.

I could see those enormous elephants, their trunks ripping down big branches, working in and out of the trees like a whole bunch of snakes. I could hear the sound of their huge tusks uprooting trees!

Branches snapped, and whole piles of leaves and green branches disappeared down the throats of those crazy monsters! That wild dream, seeing history before time, when the Tertiary and Quaternary periods flashed before me - it was real!

And there we were, alone, deep down inside the earth, totally at the mercy of its scary residents! My uncle stopped, totally blown away.

"Come!" he said finally, when he got over his shock, "Come on, kid, let’s go check them out closer."

"Nah," I said, stopping him from pulling me forward, "we don’t have anything to defend ourselves with. What are we gonna do surrounded by a bunch of giant animals? Let’s go, Uncle, please. No person could face the crazy anger of those monsters without getting hurt."

"No person," said my uncle, lowering his voice to a mysterious whisper, "you’re wrong, Henry. Look! Look over there! I think I see a person - someone like us - a man!" I looked, shrugging, ready to totally doubt it.

But no matter what I wanted, I couldn’t ignore what I was seeing.

Yeah - not more than a quarter mile away, chilling against the trunk of a massive tree, was a person - like, a Proteus of these underground spots, a new son of Neptune watching over this huge herd of mastodons.

"Immanis pecoris custos, immanior ipse!"

The keeper of gigantic cattle, himself even bigger! Yeah - it wasn't a fossil whose body we’d dug up from the big cemetery anymore, but a giant who could guide and control these crazy monsters. He was over twelve feet tall. His head, as big as a buffalo's, was lost in a tangled mess of hair.

Seriously, it was a huge mane, like the ones the elephants had way back when. He was holding a tree branch, using it like a shepherd’s crook for this ancient shepherd. We froze, totally speechless with shock. But he could see us any minute. We had to bail, like, ASAP.

"Let’s go, let’s go!" I yelled, pulling my uncle along; and for the first time, he didn't fight me.

A half hour later, we were way out of range of that insane monster! Now that I'm thinking about it calmly, and reflecting on it, you know, after months, years, have passed since this weird, unreal adventure happened to us - what am I supposed to think? What should I believe?

Nah, it's totally impossible! Our ears must have been playing tricks on us, and our eyes were messing with us! We didn't see what we thought we saw. No human being could have existed in that underground world!

No generation of people could live in the lower caves of the Earth without noticing those on the surface, without connecting with them. It was just crazy, totally nuts!

I’m starting to think maybe there was some animal that looked like a human - like a monkey from the first ages of the Earth, like the one M. Lartet found in the bone deposit of Sansan.

This thing - or whatever it was - tore past everything science knows. Seriously. Look, it’s wild, but maybe it was a monkey - but like, a dude, a real person. And a whole bunch of giant animals with him, buried deep underground. It was just...too crazy to even think about!