A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, February 1950 — page 93: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE SMOKING LAND 93 some king of the ice. Here was our shelter. Inside the tunnel, there was a greater space, perhaps five feet high, of the same width and about nine or ten feet in length. It made close quarters for the three of us and the dog. We worked over Darrell, and waited for thunder to burst outside the shelter we were in. And the thunder was bursting, all right. Those dogs of the air were right after us, and having seen us take to the earth, they were doing their best to scratch us out again. Just as Darrell sat up, they slammed the ice hill with six bombs in succession, and such a roaring and crash- ing I’ve never heard. Each bomb seemed to multiply its uproar, sending the sound deafeningly down to the roots of the pile. It was not one attack that they made, but many. For at least an hour, they pounded that hill of ice, and during that hour, they must have dropped well over a hundred bombs. We sat about, stuffing our fingers into our ears. Our eyes began to jump out of our heads. I really think that a little more of it would have driven us completely mad. Finally silence dropped, and spread over us in wave after wave of blessedness. And then we were able to breathe freely. Darrell, whose head had been merely grazed, finally said, “I think it’s over. They’ve either turned back to the Smok- ing Land, or else they’ve landed some- where, and will come to dig us out by hand. We'd better do a little exploring, Smoky.” I sent Murder down the passage, and started on behind him, but presently I heard him scratching; and then the most frightfully lugubrious howl welled up out of his throat and throttled me with its horror. Then he came backing out. I retreated, and the two of us came back into the little dugout. We knew perfectly well, all of us, what Murder had found. The bombs of the men from the Smoking Land had not blown our hill of ice to bits, but they had toppled soine ponderous boulders across our line of retreat. We were buried alive! Wee we knew what had happened to us, total resignation appeared in Sylvia’s face. She said nothing. She needed to say nothing, for I understood perfectly that she was saying to herself that the arm of the goddess was long and strong and sure. Darrell went down the blocked passage in his turn. He came back, saying that he estimated we had crawled in about twenty feet to the central widening of the rift in the ice. Of the twenty feet, about eight, he thought, were now blocked. We could try to pick our way out—it was the only thing to do. We went to work. We each had one of the knives from the Smoking Land, and never was the temper of steel better tested! The butt of my re- volver was our hammer, and the long blade of the dagger, the chisel. We could not drive that fragile blade very deeply into the ice lest we snap it off. We went at it slowly, taking from the face of the ice a small chip with every stroke. These chips were scraped to the rear and pushed back into the little cave. Imagine the frightful slowness of the work and the strain of the position which we were forced to work in! About half an hour of it was all we could stand at a: time. Then we’d switch places and rest. Sylvia took her turn. She did even more than her share, and I think that in one of her shifts she broke twice as much ice as Darrell or I, partly because of her wonderful patience and her precision of touch, and partly because she was so much smaller that she was more at ease in the shaft. We worked on steadily for twenty-four hours, and in that time we pushed through about six feet of the ice. According to. Darrell’s rough calculation, there should’ remain only about two or three feet of ice. ahead of us, but, as he himself now pointed out, it was very possible that the falling ice had spread out in a broad apron beyond the point at which we'd originally entered. In the meantime, we were nearly frozen in spite of the excellent furs that Darrell’s foresight had provided for us, and the air was gradually fouling. For twenty-four hours, we had been working steadily, and therefore breathing deeply, and now the air was so bad that the one of us who was resting lay with closed eyes in our ice cell, half dying from sheer lack of oxygen. Darrell and I felt it much more than the girl. At least, she showed it less, and GOMIIGooOoO S C@