Stairway to Forever

Stairway to Forever Read Online Free PDF Page B

Book: Stairway to Forever Read Online Free PDF
Author: Robert Adams
Tags: Fiction, General, Science-Fiction, Fantasy
just stretched away into the far, dim distance and was as empty as the expanse of water, so far as he could determine with his unaided vision, so he turned inland, setting his feet to the incline of the nearest dune. But with the successful ascent and descent of it and the ascent of the next one beyond it, he suffered a return of the cold, prickly, uncomfortable sensation. His way back might not be, he realized, as clearly and enduringly marked as he had at first so rashly assumed.
    For below him, in a deep canyon between towering dunes, lay ample proof that the gentle, now-placid sea or ocean could at times assume demonic proportions. Such force as could lift and deposit so far from the high-tide marks a wooden ship that

    looked to be more than a hundred feet long could displace his flimsy marker-log with consummate ease and hardly an afterthought.
    But then he resolutely mastered his quick fears. He rationalized that such as the apparent shipwreck was more than likely the result of a storm or hurricane, and the sky above him just now harbored not so much as the bare wisp of a cloud, so there was almost no chance of any serious blow in the time it might take him to examine the wreck, below, at closer range.
    Close up, he found the hulk to be really huge, impressive despite its sad condition. Timbers of its fabric ran from several inches to a full foot and more in thickness. But he was at first hard-put to think of a satisfactory explanation for the regularly spaced hol-ings in the sides of the ship, extending in lines on both port and starboard and almost from one end to the other.
    "Cannon?" he thought, aloud.
    No, the thicknesses of the decking between the tiers of openings would have been insufficient to bear the weights and recoils of even small cannon. It was not until he had clambered up into the open waist of the hulk that he understood. The cluttered profusion of thick, broken off and splintered shafts told him the story.
    "Oars! Of course, it's a galley. No, I think I recall that galleys only had one bank of oars, this one had at least two. What was that old word for a ship with two banks of oars, anyway? Trireme? No, not trireme, that meant three banks of oars. Bireme? That was it, a bireme. This is a bireme, I'm on . . . or, rather, what's left of one.
    "But, good God, man, that's plain ridiculous, on the face of it. I mean, I don't think this kind of a ship

    has been used for a thousand years, anyway; maybe two thousands years. And this close to water, no kind of wood wouldVe lasted that long in any recognizable shape. And even without water and rot, in that length of time wind and sand wouldVe ground it down to nothing but dust. Hell, maybe I am just hallucinating, after all. I . . . OWWWl"
    The renewed thought of hallucinations speedily departed his mind, for the baulk of sun-bleached timber against which his shin had just made painful contact while he had wandered, musing, was just as solid and real as anything he ever had felt before, in the other world above the stone-walled crypt.
    Only the uppermost portions of the wrecked ship appeared to be in any way easily accessible, Fitz soon found. All of the low forecastle and the entire length below the deck on which he was standing seemed to be solidly packed with sand. The splintered stubs of two masts stood up out of that deck, it being the larger of them against which he had barked his shin, so oars and men's strong backs had not then been its only motive power.
    At the level on which he stood, he could see that the sterncastle was pierced with two low doorways, each of them plugged with solid-looking, unwarped wooden doors, the wide planks bound and hinged and studded with rust-flaking iron. Once Fitz had, with a shrieking of long-unused metal, shouldered open the left door, he was glad that he had marked the log back there on the beach and brought the flashlight with him. The yawning cavity before him was—especially now, after his lengthy exposure to the
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