“Yes.”
“Go ahead.”
“Listen, Garth. You may think me a traitor. I admit that I did have a chance—or rather two chances—to double-cross you. I was running from that tiger because I didn’t do it. Garth, I’ve been pretty well through the mountain. I know a good deal, I imagine, that might be useful, if you are planning another attack on the mountain—I suppose you are?”
“So it’s both ends against the middle, eh?”
Price flushed, struggled to control his voice.
“Garth, I have given you no reason to doubt my honor. I’ll tell you honestly what I have learned about our enemies. But first I must have assurance that you—and your men—will respect my life and freedom.”
Pale and icy in the moonlight, the man’s eyes glittered at Price from the broad white mask of his pouchy face.
“Very well, Durand,” he said at length. “I’ll tell you this much: We are striking about sunrise. In a few minutes Sam Sorrows is riding back to El Yerim with orders for the planes. They’re to bomb the castle. That will finish that accursed mirage?”
“If they can hit the machine. A complicated lot of mirrors and such in the dome of the highest tower.”
“Good. Your information may be worth while, after all. With the planes, the tank, and the guns, we can smash any other opposition. We are going to dynamite our way into the mountain. You tell me what you know. Go over the plan with me. I’ll promise you safety. But I’ll want to keep you under guard until after the battle.”
“One other thing—” began Price.
“You thinking about that girl? Well, Mr. Durand, you had better understand right now that I’ve promised her to de Castro, if we happen to come across her. You’ll have to forget her.”
“The injustice of the thing—”
“Justice isn’t worrying me, Durand. Gold is what I’m after. Tell me your story, if you like, and I’ll give you protection from the men. If you don’t like it, I’ll turn you over to de Castro. He’d like well enough to twist a knife in you. He’s asleep. Shall I call him?”
Argument was in vain; Price at last submitted. He was still relating the tale of his adventures, and describing the interior passages of the mountain, when there was a sudden stir among the sentries on the ridge above the camp. A warning shot, a shouted challenge.
“Jacob Garth! Jacob Garth! Jacob Garth!”
A silver voice was pealing through the moonlight. Vekyra’s voice. Price’s heart thudded. What did this mean?
“Come along.” Garth took his arm. They went back to the crest. Two hundred yards across the moon-bathed lava stood Vekyra, a vague figure, almost spectral in the argent light. She was on foot; the tiger was not visible.
“Is that she?” Garth asked Price.
“Yes. The golden woman. Name’s Vekyra.”
“What do you want?” Garth bellowed in Arabic.
The liquid voice floated back, “Jacob Garth! Jacob Garth!”
The big man hesitated. He looked back at the camp, and then peered around over the tawny, white-lit desert. His voice rolled out suddenly, calm, serene as always:
“I’m going out to talk to her. If anything goes wrong, shoot. And keep him here.” He nodded at Price. “Take good care of him; he may be useful.”
Jacob Garth strode out across the desert. The sentries stood ready on the hill, Price among them. They saw Garth stop as he came near the woman; heard a faint murmur of voices. The two presently moved a little farther away, and sat down on the ground, face to face.
It was nearly an hour later that they rose. The woman’s ghostly form ran fleetly away, until it dissolved in the moonlight, reappeared, and was gone. Jacob Garth stalked deliberately back to the sentries. Though all of them must have been bursting with curiosity, none dared address him.
“Did you satisfy yourself about my status with the woman?” asked Price.
Garth looked at him, rumbled slowly. “Yes, Durand. You must have played the fool with her. Come here.”
The man led him a little away from the sentries, lowered his voice:
“Durand, we won’t be needing you any further. And I’m convinced, from what the woman tells me, that you won’t—can’t—do us any harm. You can go.”
“Go?” asked Price, blankly.
“Get out of camp, as you came. And the quicker the better. Joao de Castro doesn’t like you. And the woman doesn’t. Better get out while you can.”
He turned to the sentries, and boomed:
“Mr. Durand is leaving us, men. Give him ten minutes to get out of bullet range.”
28. THE SENTINEL SERPENT
“SORRY IT’S HAPPENING this way, Mr. Durand,” grinned Sam Sorrows. “But it might have been worse.”
He had gone down to his kneeling camel. He brought Price a small metal canteen full of water, stuffed his pockets with dates, dried camel-flesh, and hardtack.
“That will see you back to the oasis, sir. And good luck.”
Tears were almost in Price’s eyes as he gripped the old Kansan’s hand, and walked away beneath the menacing rifles of the sentries.
Half a mile away, a lava ridge intervened, shut him from sight of camp and sentries. He strode moodily along, through the swarthy and hostile loneliness of the moonlit lava-desert. He had fumbled everything; his last chance was gone.
But it was not in Price’s nature to quit. He never seriously intended to go meekly back to the oasis, as the others had supposed he would. And the desperate plan flashed suddenly into his mind.
He knew a way into the mountain—the way along which the unwilling snake-man, Kreor, had once guided him. He remembered it well enough to follow it alone. It might be guarded, now, but he could take the risk. And he still had the golden ax.
Within the mountain were perils that he did not like to contemplate. The fanatic acolytes of Malikar. The insidious golden man himself. The yellow snake, that he would have to pass to reach Aysa—he shuddered again at memory of the cold, ancient evil that burned hypnotic in the serpent’s eyes.
Most of all, he dreaded the aureate mist. The sinister sleep of the golden vapor had overwhelmed him on the other occasion. Even if he escaped all the other dangers, he would not have time to reach Aysa and carry her above it before it overcame him.
But perhaps he could devise some sort of protection! A rude gas mask. He ransacked his knowledge of such things. The masks used against first German attacks, at Ypres, he recalled, were mere dampened cloths. A wet cloth would be worth trying, at any rate. If the yellow gas united with or replaced the water in the human body, it must have a special affinity for it.
Filled with new hope that ignored the overwhelming chances against the success of this newest enterprise, he hastened westward, circled around the west side of the mountain. Weary after a strenuous night, he flung himself down when he reached the point where Kreor and he had begun the climb up the sheer north precipice, and rested the hour until dawn, though he dared not sleep.
Sunrise found him toiling painfully and perilously up the cliff. Droning of airplane motors reached his ears, then thuds of heavy explosions that seemed to come to him through the very rock of the mountain.
Garth, then, had attacked; with Vekyra, probably, as an ally. Price’s heart sank at a vision of what would happen, in that case, if they reached the place of the snake ahead of him. Aysa, hated as she was by Vekyra, might meet a fate worse than Joao’s embrace.
At last he reached the fissure, slipped through into the dark, winding caverns of the mountain. Soon he was beyond all light, with nothing to guide him save memory. Many times he stumbled painfully against rugged, sharp-edged stone. But at last he came into the larger cavern, and through it, into the first hewn passage.
Onward, he found his way with comparative ease, counting his paces, and turning as he and Kreor had turned. He came finally into the sloping, spiral way, and hastened downward, still through utter darkness.
Again the mass of the mountain quivered to an explosion. Then
, for a few moments, he heard confused shouting, and the distant rattle of small arms, borne to him down some corridor.
He had expected to meet watchmen. But perhaps the entire forces of Malikar had been drawn to some other part of the passage, to oppose the entrance of Jacob Garth and Vekyra. And, as he was to discover, Malikar had left a sentinel more terrible than any human.
Sounds of fighting ceased, and he came finally into air that was suffused with the faintest possible yellow light. Steadily it grew brighter as he descended, until he passed the end of the passage leading to the gallery from which he first had seen the lair of the snake.
There the light of sparkling, dancing golden atoms was strong in the air, the walls of the passage all a-glitter with rime of yellow crystals, elfin tracery of xanthic frost.
The passage flattened, straightened, and he came once more into the vast temple hall. The wonder of it smote him again. Circular, high-domed room, thick with shimmering yellow vapor, its black stone walls crusted with glittering gold.
A furious hissing roar greeted him as he ran out upon the vast, xanthic-frosted floor that lay between the entrance and the narrow bridge that spanned the giddy, green-golden abyss.
Leaping back in alarm, he saw the golden snake, coiled between him and the bridge that was the way to Aysa.
The reptile’s thick coils were gathered in a conical heap. Every scale shone xanthic yellow, glittering, metallic. The tapering gold column of its neck was lifted. Ten feet above the floor, its vast flat head swayed back and forth as it hissed.
Price stared for a moment, fascinated again by those terrible eyes. The ugly head was gold-hooded, triangular. The vast, yellow-fanged mouth yawned wide as it hissed with such startling volume of sound.
The eyes transfixed him. Dreadful eyes. Purple-black, glowing with strange fire of age-old, evil wisdom. Hard and fascinating as giant gems. Price found himself unconsciously responding with his own body to the swaying of the eyes, felt the chill of them stealing into his body, freezing his limbs, choking him, oppressing his breathing, slowing his heart.
Desperately he fought against the power of the snake. Once, when the reptile appeared in the mirage, he had broken free. He could again! And he had seen Malikar overcome the snake, whip it into submission. The serpent itself was not immune to fear.
Calling upon every atom of his will to lift each foot, Price walked stiffly, unsteadily, like a mechanical doll, directly toward the snake. Awkwardly, he raised the yellow ax, with numb and nerveless hands. Malikar, he remembered suddenly, had shouted at the snake.
Price found his throat dry, his voice a hoarse croaking. But he began gasping out the ax-song of Iru, in short, harsh phrases.
The undulatory motion of the flat head ceased. It drew back, and, still hissing, struck at him. Price called upon flagging muscles to fling up the oval buckler to guard his face.
But the yellow head did not quite reach him. The snake was afraid. It drew back again, its movement doubtful, frightened.
The chill of strange fascination thawed from Price’s body. Shouting the ax-song louder, he continued his deliberate advance.
The wedge-shaped head drew back. It sank upon xanthic coils, lay motionless. Purple-black eyes glittered at Price, alien, hostile—yet afraid.
Still he moved forward, fighting down, striving to conceal the naked terror of his revolting soul.
His legs came against the cold, smooth scales of its outermost coil. The flat head, yellow-hooded, was sunk down before him, strange eyes watching him with glittering intentness, evilly aflame with supernormal intelligence, terrible with wisdom older than men.
Shuddering, Price slapped the frightful head, as he had seen Malikar do, with his open hand. He was sick with fear, weak, trembling. Every fiber of his body shrank trembling from contact with the snake. But he was afraid not to strike it.
The thick body against his legs shook a little, but the great head, the sinister, glittering eyes, did not move.
With open hand he struck the cold, metal-scaled head a dozen times, so hard that his fingers stung, still shouting out the ax-song.
Then he turned away, forcing himself to move deliberately, not daring to look back. He walked to the end of the narrow bridge, and set foot upon the giddy way across the cavernous abyss of golden-green radiance, to the niche where he had found Aysa, sleeping.
29. GOLDEN BLOOD
ODDLY, Price felt no vertigo, nor any fear of falling, as he started once more across that dizzy span, through thick, shimmering mist of gold. A single arch of black, gold-crusted rock, springing sheer across the yellow-green, infinite void, its unrailed path not two feet wide. In his concern for the sleeping girl, he was unconscious of any danger.
In the exigencies of his uncanny struggle with the serpent, he had even forgotten the soporific influence of the yellow vapor. He was midway across the abyss before it was recalled to him by sudden and overpowering lassitude, by a dullness of brain and a heaviness of eyes.
He held his breath to run the remaining hundred feet to the great niche, with its four slabs of gold-rimmed rock, for he dared not stop above the abyss. Safely upon the shelf, he fumbled for his handkerchief, wet it from the canteen old Sam Sorrows had so generously provided, and knotted it about his head, so that it covered his nose and mouth.
Aysa still lay upon the slab. Again he saw her lovely face, a-glitter with powder of gold. Still she was sunk in deepest sleep, breathing regularly, very slowly. Fearfully he brushed her cheeks and forehead, her small hands—and voiced a shout of pure joy! Beneath yellow dust, her hands and face were softly pliant, naturally white. The dread change had not yet taken place. It must require months, perhaps even years.
He tried to wake the girl. Utterly limp, completely relaxed, she did not rouse when he shook her, nor respond to his calling of her name.
Then a rushing sibilance roared through the temple. The snake, coiled before the entrance to the Cyclopean hall, was hissing angrily again. And Vekyra was riding toward it, upon the golden tiger.
Hissing savagely, the gigantic yellow reptile threw itself toward the invaders. Vekyra flung herself nimbly from the howdah and ran to meet it, while the tiger crouched, snarling ferally.
The rich voice of the golden woman pealed out in strange, melodious syllables. Fearlessly she approached the hissing snake. It did not strike, but coiled again before her, lowering its lifted head.
She stood a while before it, her voice still ringing out, and at last it thrust its head toward her. She advanced again, caressed it, slipped her yellow arms around the great column of the neck. Her voice sank to a whisper.
Abruptly she turned, left the reptile coiled quietly. The tiger was still snarling uneasily; she silenced it with a shouted word. It sank back upon its haunches, watching the motionless snake.
Drawing from her tunic a flashing golden blade, narrow and keen as a stiletto, she ran past the snake and started swiftly across the narrow bridge. Then Price knew that she had come to murder Aysa, the sleeping girl who had innocently won her jealous hatred.
Snatching up the golden ax, Price hastened out upon the bridge to meet her. He knew that her passion for him had turned to hatred. He would have to fight for his own life, as well as Aysa’s.
The gloating triumph upon Vekyra’s painted yellow face gave way to stunned surprise. And surprise became sinister elation.
They met a hundred feet out upon the gold-frosted bridge. Vekyra stopped a dozen feet in front of him, greeted him with a mocking smile, her tawny-green, oblique eyes flashing maliciously.
“Peace upon you, Iru,” she greeted him, her silky voice taunting. “Peace—if you wish it!”
“And on you, peace,” Price replied solemnly, “if you will depart.”
“Lah! But Iru, have you yet changed your mind?” She spoke mockingly. “You know that I talked with Jacob Garth last night. I promised him all that I promised you. He accepted; together we entered the mountain. He is even now fighting Malikar, in the halls above. I brok
e past, and came here to cut this wretched slave-girl into pieces and throw her into the abyss, where she can make no more trouble.”
Price cursed her, sputtering with anger.
She smiled at him, enigmatically. “Yet, Iru, have you changed your mind? Will you forget the slave, and accept the crown of Anz?”
“Nothing doing!” snapped Price. “Get out—or fight!”
Vekyra laughed. With her rapier-like golden blade she pointed at the shining chasm below. Involuntarily, Price looked down into the illimitable gulf of golden-green; his head swam with the sheer vastness of the pit beneath the giddy bridge.
“Then you and your precious slave-girl shall be for ever together,” she taunted, “—there!”
Lightly she darted forward, yellow blade hissing.
Price met her point with the golden buckler, and swung the ancient ax. Vekyra leapt backward easily; and the force of his swing with the heavy ax almost toppled Price from the bridge.
As he struggled desperately to regain his balance, the yellow woman leapt forward again, her sword flashing at his throat. Price had to give ground to save himself, and one foot went half off the bridge.
Vekyra laughed at the sudden despair he could not keep from his face.
“Remember, Iru, the golden folk can not die!” she mocked. “And you are a mortal—though you may be born again for me to slay!”
Once more she slipped in, thrust, and repeated, with baffling swiftness. The ancient mail turned her stroke. But it was becoming evident to Price that he had met a very formidable opponent.
His shirt of mail and oval buckler gave him an advantage that was apparent only, for their weight slowed him, made it more difficult to keep his balance. And he could not swing the great ax effectively, lest the force of his own blow carry him off the bridge.
Vekyra, seemingly gifted with a perfect sense of balance, danced back and forth upon the gold-rimmed rock, thrusting, lightning-swift, with her narrow blade, easily avoiding his own awkward blows.
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