Baron Trump's Marvelous Underground Journey

The Marble Highway — a vast corridor of polished marble illuminated by flash-tailed lizards — leads Baron¹ to the first underground civilization. Sunrise comes when electrical currents glow through metal traceries in the ceiling.

In a park beside a fountain, he meets Master Cold Soul,⁸ the Court Depressor, whose professional duty is to dampen the Mikkamenkies' chronic happiness, since excessive joy shortens their clock-like hearts. Cold Soul⁸ gives Baron¹ goggles against the blinding white light and leads him to Queen Galaxa,⁴ seated on a throne of four crystal columns fifteen feet high.

The Mikkamenkies are transparent: amber bones, colorless blood, crystal eyes that cloud the instant someone lies. Each citizen wears a heart-shaped opening over their chest, covered by a black fan to conceal their feelings. Galaxa⁴ knights Bulger² with a touch of her golden wand.

In the Spectral Garden — where all flowers have bleached to ghostly white without sunlight — Bulger² bounds to the side of the damozel Glow Stone, ignoring the girl seated on the throne steps. Glow Stone³ confides a devastating secret: she is the true Princess Crystallina,³ switched at birth with a servant's child.

When the real Crystallina³ was born, her nurse discovered a tiny speck in her transparent heart. Queen Galaxa,⁴ knowing her people would reject an imperfect heir, swapped the babies. For years the true princess has served as a lady-in-waiting, receiving stolen kisses from a mother who could not claim her.

She lowers her black fan and lets Baron¹ examine her heart. He sees the speck is minuscule and reddish — not the black death sentence she feared, but something like a single drop of ancestral blood preserved through millennia.

With Galaxa's⁴ heart due to stop in hours, Baron¹ has a metal worker fit his magnifying glass into a tube, positions Crystallina³ behind a curtain, and signals a guide to catch the white light with a silver mirror. The beam passes through Crystallina's³ body, and the lens projects her beating heart — speck and all — onto the throne room wall.

The Mikkamenkies see how tiny the blemish is and erupt in joyful cries, hailing their new princess. Galaxa⁴ gets her three promised hours of happiness. But as darkness falls, a soft voice whispers love to Baron,¹ and a gentle hand pulls him through shadows.

Bulger² seizes Baron's¹ coat and drags him away onto the Marble Highway. When Crystallina's³ pleading voice reaches them through a natural speaking tube in the rock, Baron¹ plugs it with his neckerchief to keep Bulger² from turning back.

Two gigantic silver candelabra blazing with gas flames mark the entrance to a new civilization. Three small guards approach — not hostile, but eerily silent, waving their hands to measure air vibrations. They are blind, deaf, and dumb, communicating only by touch and raised writing on silver tablets.

These are the Soodopsies, descendants of skilled metalworkers who lost their senses over millennia underground. Their City of Silver is breathtaking: hammered walls, carved archways, statues, thousands of never-dying gas flames that its inhabitants cannot see.

Street names and literature are inscribed in raised letters on silver pavements, read by bare feet — favorite poems polished mirror-smooth by generations of thankful soles. The learned Barrel Brow⁷ reads four books simultaneously, two under his hands and two under his feet, and lectures Baron¹ on the absurdity of sight, hearing, and speech.

A nightly count reveals one Soodopsy missing. Pouting Lip¹⁵ has vanished. The entire blind population forms a Great Circle, linking hands in an expanding ring, and search parties sweep every chamber — finding nothing. Suspicion falls on Baron's¹ so-called dancing spectre, the shadow these eyeless people believe stalks him.

Barrel Brow⁷ warns Baron¹ to flee. But Bulger² acts first, mimicking a children's game to signal danger. Baron¹ investigates a newly annexed chamber and discovers the truth: what the Soodopsies thought was a rock mound is a gigantic tortoise, eight feet long, thawed to life by gas jets after millennia of sleep.

It devoured Pouting Lip.¹⁵ They find his final tablet on the wall — a heartrending farewell scratched as the monster closed in. Baron¹ pipes deadly gas into the sealed chamber, killing it painlessly. The grateful Soodopsies build him a boat from the polished shell.

Baron¹ and Bulger² sail their tortoise-shell boat down the dark river, fire lizards flickering around them. Without warning, huge white crabs seize both oars, then chain themselves across the stream in a living blockade, body gripped to body. More swarm the rudder while Bulger² braces the tiller ropes in his teeth.

The creatures begin dragging the boat toward shore. Baron¹ fires both pistols into the water simultaneously — the concussion splits thousands of shells, and the stunned swarm parts. They row for their lives into ever-colder water, past floating ice, into vast frozen caverns.

And then, impossibly, real sunlight — streaming through a gigantic natural lens of rock crystal set in the sloping mountainside. The light floods this ice world with brilliance but carries no warmth, illuminating a palace of ice perched on terraces above them.

Two fur-clad sentinels guard the ice staircase — Koltykwerps, or Cold Bodies, subjects of King Gelidus,⁵ who welcomes Baron¹ but warns him not to touch anything with his dangerously warm hands. Princess Schneeboule,⁶ a dimpled girl of fifteen, squeals when Baron's¹ thumb seemingly burns her finger.

The Koltykwerps eat meat quarried from animals frozen during ancient ice ages, and Lord Bullibrain,⁹ a rare hot-headed citizen kept in a triple-walled ice cell, tells Baron¹ their history — originally from a warm Greenland, driven underground by advancing glaciers.

One day Schneeboule⁶ leads Baron¹ to her favorite grotto and shows him a chimpanzee seated in easy posture inside a crystal-clear block of ice, eyes open, a collar of gold and silver disks around its neck. She calls him the Little Man with the Frozen Smile.¹³ Baron¹ becomes utterly obsessed with reading whatever inscription the collar might hold.

The king's councillors refuse Baron's¹ request to open the ice block, but Baron's¹ bitter disappointment raises his temperature so alarmingly that the Koltykwerps panic, fearing their world will melt. Gelidus⁵ relents. Quarrymen cleave the block with flint wedges into perfect halves.

Baron¹ unwraps the chimpanzee¹³ and examines the collar — crushing disappointment: no writing, only crude sun carvings. That night, Bulger² leaves Baron's¹ side, crawls beside the frozen creature, and presses his warm body against its icy form. Hours later, Bulger² tugs Baron¹ awake.

The chimpanzee¹³ is alive — blinking, whimpering, shivering against the cold. Baron¹ names it Fuffcoojah¹³ after the sounds it murmurs. Accused of black magic by the court, Baron¹ defends himself: the only sorcery was a dog's love, carrying warmth to a frozen brother.

Keeping Fuffcoojah¹³ alive in the ice kingdom proves disastrous. Extra lamps melt the walls; the Koltykwerps panic. Schneeboule's⁶ solution: Baron¹ must carry Fuffcoojah¹³ in a fur hood on his back. The slight weight grows monstrous — nightmares plague him, fever mounts.

One morning his flushed face sends the entire population fleeing, shrieking that the little baron is burning. In the deserted palace, Baron¹ collapses on a divan. While he sleeps, Fuffcoojah¹³ wriggles free and crawls into Schneeboule's⁶ waiting arms. She holds him close, but her body steals what warmth remains.

He dies a second time, cradled by the one who loved him most. The quarrymen seal him back into his crystal cell, frozen smile restored. Schneeboule,⁶ grief-stricken, later chooses a husband by kissing a sleeping lamp-trimmer whose cold cheek preserves the imprint.

Thirteen sealed ice corridors lead outward. Baron¹ has quarrymen bore test holes through each; Bulger² sniffs every one until, at the eleventh, he barks and scratches furiously — earth and rock beyond. The wall is hewn open and sealed behind them forever.

Almost immediately, the ice beneath Baron¹ cracks free, becoming a runaway sledge that hurtles ninety miles down black slopes in a grinding, phosphorescent terror. It deposits them near a glowing river where luminous sea creatures create twelve-hour days. Baron¹ briefly visits the Happy Forgetters — people who have deliberately shrunk their brains by unlearning everything, their shriveled minds rattling inside their skulls like dried seeds.

Expelled through a revolving marble door into a tunnel, Baron¹ and Bulger² are caught by howling wind, then a torrent that shoots them from a spouting well into a Siberian lake. They swim ashore, blinking in real sunshine, and begin the long journey home to Castle Trump.