Chapter 1

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Title: The World Below
Date of first publication: 1930
Author: S. Fowler Wright
Date first posted: Nov. 30, 2017
Date last updated: Nov. 30, 2017
Faded Page eBook #20171144

This eBook was produced by: Al Haines

[Transcriber’s note: a Table of Contents has been added for reader
convenience.]

GALAXY Science Fiction Novel No. 5

The World Below

The COMPLETE Book Version, Unabridged

A pulse-pumping, mind-prodding sequel to THE
AMPHIBIANS … just as haunting as that
masterpiece of Earth’s far-distant future

By

S. FOWLER WRIGHT

WORLD EDITIONS, INC.
105 WEST 40TH STREET
New York 18, N. Y.

Copyright, 1930 by Longmans, Green & Co.

Copyright, 1949 by Shasta Publishers

All rights in this book are reserved. It may not be used for dramatic,
motion-, or talking-picture purposes without written authorization from
the holder of these rights. Nor may the book or part thereof be
reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission in writing,
except for brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
For information address SHASTA PUBLISHERS, 5525 South Blackstone
Avenue, Chicago 37, Illinois, U. S. A.

Published by Arrangement with
Shasta Publishers

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Foreword

1. Council
2. The Unknown Way
3. The Peril of the Lake
4. The Silence in the Wood
5. The Temple
6. The Downward Path
7. The Living Book
8. The Treaty
9. The Flame of Life
10. Visions
11. War
12. The Fate of Templeton
13. Separation
14. Love and War
15. Release
16. Return

Foreword

_The World Below_ is justly famous as the outstanding science-fiction
book written between H. G. Wells’s earlier imaginative romances and
Olaf Stapledon’s future histories. It can be read as a science-fiction
thriller, for it is a marvelously rich compound of unbounded background
imagination and fantastic adventure. In sheer alien concept it is
almost unparalleled in fantastic fiction. And yet Mr. Wright’s
restraint, his poise, his logic so successfully counterbalance his
powerful imagination that his marvels, although all the more alien,
remain completely plausible. No one will soon forget the
cabbage-whips, the parasitic grass, or the Amphibian itself.

Yet _The World Below_ like Mr. Wright’s other fantastic books, is more
than a thriller. It is a serious examination of that problem of
fatigue and degeneration in man which has resulted from his one-sided
growth and lack of harmony with the universe. A 20th century man is
sent into the world of the future–a man combining possibilities of
action, spirit, and intellect, although tainted by the bad ethical
background of his time–and there he meets two widely divergent
branches of the human race: the Dwellers and the Amphibians. The
Dwellers are giants in body and intellect, with a brilliant and
ruthless super-science, but are fatigued and gradually dying out. The
Amphibians, on the other hand, although equal to the Dwellers mentally,
have stressed quietism, and despite their intense spirituality and
harmony with nature, lack strength for action. They no longer
reproduce, and their numbers are limited and increased by laws which
are beyond the hero’s understanding. Thus, man, as the Dwellers know,
has reached another of his cyclic degeneration points. It now remains
for the primitive from the 20th century, after he has been cleansed by
the superior ethics of both Dwellers and Amphibians, to offer a
synthesis of human capabilities beyond the power of the
hyperspecialized future men, even though he still remains inferior to
both within their own specializations. It is within his power to
return from the 20th century with a woman, and start a new race of man.

Throughout _The World Below_ the reader who is historically minded will
catch reminiscences of _The Time Machine_, which Mr. Wright mentions,
and possibly a glimpse of David Lindsay’s _A Voyage to Arcturus_. But
the strongest influence on _The World Below_ is from the Italian poet
Dante. The hero’s descent, the Amphibians psychopomp, the various
hells, the legalistic vulture-men, the satires on the brilliant but
wicked lizards, and the Killers, all recall the Inferno. It is thus no
surprise that Mr. Wright is a Dante scholar, and is soon to publish a
translation of _The Divine Comedy_.

Chapter One

COUNCIL

The night had fallen to blackness while we still lay in the rock-cleft.

The ashes of the central buildings glowed with a pale blue light and an
occasional flame would rise up and lick across them like a ghostly
tongue.

The long curve of the living-wall had fallen in from end to end, but
the ashes were burning still, with a paler flame, so that it showed
like a white bow in the darkness.

There were no stars; the night had clouded while we slept–for I lay
long in a sleep of utter weariness and exhaustion, both of mind and
body; and so, I think, in her own way, did my companion.

But I waked at length, with a dim sense of peril ended, and the short
pause of security which is so precious to those who walk in dangerous
ways, but conscious also of thirst and hunger, and of the shadow of
great events, of which the significance was beyond my knowing.

I lay for some time in silence, pondering the strange things I had
seen; reviewing–not without some mental discords–my judgment of the
Bat-wings, and the fate to which it had cast them, and wondering vainly
what new marvels or terrors might be before us, when we should
penetrate the subterranean world of which we were about equally
ignorant.

As I lay I became aware that the night was chilly, though, being
cloudy, it was less so than we had experienced previously. But I was
suffering from a lowered vitality, and though my wounds were trivial I
was conscious of the throbbing of my scalded foot, and that my right
shoulder was both stiff and painful.

I then fell into a mood of depression, in which I saw very vividly the
folly of the adventure which we had undertaken. How could we hope to
penetrate undetected into the domain of the Dwellers? There was no
sanity in the supposition. If I wished to live till the year of my
exile were over, should I not endeavor to find some crevice in the
surface-world, of which I already knew something, where I might hope
that my insignificance would save me?