THEFORBIDDENGARDEN

by The Forbidden Garden(Lit)

  "Look!" Vartan shouted.

  It was the green spear which had split less than a dozen yards from the precipice which it seemed to grow. As if propelled, it leaped down on the spire of a mighty cathedral five hundred feet below it, shattered the whole mass into a hundred enormous bounding fragments, which in turn destroyed the turrets and elaborate palaces below them, until in ten seconds a cascade of ice like a tumbled glacier suddenly hurled down a mountain side, was thundering and pealing on its chute to destruction.

  The last echoed thunder died. They stared into one another's faces, stunned for a moment by this exhibition of what human beings glibly call the forces of nature. Vartan laughed, somewhat ashamed of his emotions, to break the spell which hung over all of them.

  "Watch where the spear broke off," he said. "There's a waterfall coming."

  He was right. The warm water which had gushed all night in tremendous volume to the very lip of the fall, only to freeze as it fell or trickled ever more slowly over the fast-forming ice, now burst suddenly through the last trivial barrier and shot straight out into the sunlight in a steaming jet. Its initial momentum lessened, the broad jet became a mighty fall, plunging unbroken over half way down to the valley, till it struck the projecting wall and thence foamed down in a broad cataract, to become a tributary of the river.

  Vartan's next remark made Marjorie's blood freeze.

  "I'm going down," he said. "If you two don't care to come, you can start back and overtake the porters after you have had a good sleep in the sunshine. Anyone coming?"

  "When?" Marjorie choked.

  "Tomorrow. We must reach the bulge where the cataract begins and be away down there the minute the fall freezes solid. It is our only chance. We shall have twelve hours without danger of ice falls, and there will be no cataract, or at worst only a little ice that low down."

  "Isn't there a safer way?" she objected.

  "There is no other way at all." He unslung his binoculars and handed them to her. "See for yourself."

  She saw. One promising descent after another ended in a precipice of hundreds of feet. Only where the falls and cataracts, aided by the diurnal onslaught of expanding ice, had cleft deep chasms in the face of the rock, was there a chance to descend. Vartan was right. A descent down the weathered watercourse nearest them by daylight would be a hazardous but feasible project, provided they could negotiate the cataract which foamed down the last five thousand feet. This probably would be impossible until the cataract either ceased to flow or froze solid. She handed back the binoculars without comment.

  "Ali?" Vartan said, offering him the glasses. Ali curtly shook his head. He had seen places almost as bad, and he was ready to take a chance. Vartan himself eagerly scanned the floor of the valley through the glasses. His previous observations were confirmed. The unmistakable patchwork of cultivated land showed that the valley was inhabited. Handing Marjorie the glasses, he called her attention to the evidences of human beings.

  "Those people down there can't have lived in that spot since the beginning of time. There must be some easier way into the valley. That is the prospect I am gambling on, for I should not care to come back this way. Probably Heindricks and Van Sluys turned back because they were unwilling to take the chance we are. Now, all hands must sleep for as much of the next twenty hours as possible. It will be warm and dry on these rocks. Let us sleep here."

  Without further ado they slipped into their sleeping bags and slept the sleep of exhaustion. When they awoke shortly before sunset, the air was already chilled. They swallowed their rations and moved their sleeping bags to the sheltered side of the outcrop. Huddling together for greater warmth, they dropped off again just as the frost gripped the rushing water, and the nightly freeze began.

  They slept till sunrise. Knowing what was ahead of them, they ate a double ration, and waited for the accumulated ice of the night to crash its descent to the valley.

  When the last echo had died, Vartan rose and strapped on his pack. The others silently prepared to follow. Vartan nodded, and they started down to the steaming river bed. Their zero hour had come.

  The first thousand feet was the worst, as the ice filled every crevice of the precipitous rock down which they cut their way a treacherous step at a time. Being the most experienced, Vartan went first and hacked out the steps. Marjorie was next, and Ali formed the anchor. If either Vartan or Marjorie missed their footing, the rope and Ali were their last hope.

  "We shall have to make better time than this," Vartan announced at the end of two hours. "Otherwise we shall be caught after sunrise tomorrow on the cataract. I'm going to try it a little to the left, and see if we can't avoid some of this ice."

  Their next two thousand feet was finger and toe work from one eight or ten inch ledge to the next, twenty or thirty feet below. Ali, like Vartan, seemed to have neither nerves nor stomach; Marjorie frequently had to be lowered bodily by the rope. This phase lasted till noon, and Vartan had difficulty in concealing his anxiety from his companions. Unless they made considerably better time on the next three or four thousand feet, they could not possibly hope to arrive at the cataract by nightfall. He began working his way back to the icy fissures under the fall.

  Again in grim silence they resumed their perilous labor of step cutting. As the afternoon wore on, the ice became more slippery, but it also, fortunately, became less abundant. It was possible, now and then, to find a cleft or chimney comparatively free, and occasionally they made rapid progress for a hundred yards down practically bare rock. They had no time to admire the beauty of the valley opening like a wild rose in the late afternoon sun beneath them; their whole attention was fixed on the desperate task before them.

  Presently water began trickling down the crevices of the rock. They guessed the cause. The fall was already beginning to freeze at its source, damning back part of the torrent which now found its outlet farther back. Before long the fall itself would freeze. But before it finally congealed, it would continue to deluge the face of the cliff with curtains of spray, swinging ever closer in toward the precipices, until once more the fantastic pinnacles and crags of ice would resume their nightly growth.

  The icy deluge rapidly gathered volume, and they were forced to flee – or rather crawl like flies – for their lives back to the steeper rock clear of the torrent. Their agonizing hand and foot descent began all over again. For an hour and a half they dropped from one ledge to another, so narrow that they could stand on them with safety only by facing the wall and pressing against it with desperate coolness.

  The sun set when they were still five hundred feet above their goal – the beginning of the cataract. That last five hundred feet in the sudden darkness was the crucial point of their whole perilous descent. Even Vartan began to despair of reaching the cataract that evening, and tried not to think of a possible ten hours in the darkness, clinging in dizzy equilibrium to the face of a six thousand foot precipice. He and Ali might have done it, but Marjorie, he dreaded, must collapse and drag them with her to destruction.

  "I'm going ahead," he announced, "to find a way back to the raft." The water had practically stopped coming down. "If the rope tightens, hang onto Miss Driscott." Feeling in his coat pocket he found his clasp knife. Opening it, he thrust the blade through his sleeve and half closed the knife so that it would cling to the sleeve without his attention. If the rope tightened, as he had expressed it, he would cut himself free and give the others their chance to live.

  With infinite caution they followed him a step at a time, planting their toes in the cracks he described minutely, coolly, and not moving a muscle until he told them how to take the next step. Ali rather enjoyed this supreme test of his mountaineering skill; Marjorie tried to pray, but was too stunned to think of any petition.

  They were now well below the line of perpetual cold. If only they could reach the head of the cataract, now dry, as the fall had frozen at its source nearly nine thousand feet higher, their sharpest dangers would be over. At last Vartan ut
tered a quiet word of encouragement. He had worked his way back into the chimney leading down to the cataract. While waiting for the others to join him, he put away his knife.

  "Thank Heaven that is over," Marjorie sighed as he grasped her by the arm. "Is that the worst?"

  "The very worst," he assured her. "The rest will be easy."

  Vartan had overlooked one danger which he should have foreseen. The comparatively easy slope of the cataract was rendered extremely dangerous by the slippery slime of algae encrusting every rock. The climbers had to use all the caution they had exercised in their descent over sheer ice, and the last five thousand feet proved as hazardous as the first.

  The gray hint of dawn found them slipping and scrambling over the precipitous slime seven hundred feet from their goal. Below them a wilderness of enormous blocks of shattered ice, tumbled together in the utmost confusion for a radius of three miles from the base of the precipice, menaced them with a new danger. Vartan had of course foreseen this, but he had erred in his estimate of the time necessary to descend the cataract.

  "Hurry!" he shouted, setting the example recklessly.

  As the sun rose they entered the labyrinth of shattered blocks.

  "We can't make it," he said. "The farther we go now, the greater the danger. Back to the base of the cliff!"

  Huddled against the slimy rock, and protected as well as might be in front by a huge square block of ice which towered up like an office building, they waited tensely for the opening shot of the morning bombardment from above. The first sharp crack of splitting ice, nearly fourteen thousand feet above them, whistled thinly down to the valley as the great green spear snapped, and they huddled closer to the slimy wall. They heard the shattered spear descending, at first a faint, far-off rush like a flaming torch hurled over a precipice, then a shrill swish which rose instantly to an ever sharper shriek as the spear flashed down to shatter itself on the icy wilderness before them.

  The avalanche of ruined cathedrals was already thundering down to destruction with an appalling volume of sound that stunned the listeners all but senseless. When the ice-fall crashed in a never-ending succession of splintering detonations, and thousands of colossal fragments bounded high into the air to come down a mile from where they first struck, the helpless watchers were without feeling. Had they been struck by a fragment of that gigantic hail, they would have expired without pain. Such is nature's blessed anaesthetic of rational fear.

  They had chosen their refuge well. Although the fall of ice seemed never ending, it lasted at the most a bare five minutes. It was over. For some moments they were too stunned to move, or to breathe their thanks for a merciful deliverance. Ali recovered first. He groaned, and mechanically strapped on his heavy pack. Vartan assisted Marjorie to her feet, and silently turned to seek a way out of the icy labyrinth.

  Three hours later they had emerged on a mossy meadow, vivid with innumerable flowers. The mild air of the little paradise in which they found themselves invited rest. It was the first balmy air they had breathed since leaving Srinagar. Too weary to remove their packs, they flung themselves on the flowers in a stupor of exhaustion.

  Their descent the previous day had not passed unobserved. Certain inhabitants of the valley, their sight trained by long years of observation to the acuteness of the sharpest of animal instincts, had followed every move of the three from the moment they emerged from the icy cleft to try their luck on the dry, precipitous face of the cliff. At nightfall the watchers naturally had lost sight of their quarry. Resuming their guard shortly before daybreak, they easily picked out the three moving spots on the last sharp slope of the cataract. Guessing instinctively that the three would take shelter from the ice-fall at the base of the Cliffs, they had waited patiently for the last block of ice to subside in its hazardous, random wanderings to its final resting place. Then they ascended a slight rise, and sat down silently on the flowery knoll to await the emergence of their prey.

  The fan shaped wilderness of ice was perhaps ten miles in circumference. Sitting motionless, without word or sound of any kind, the watchers scanned the edge of the fan incessantly, sweeping their gaze back and forth over every yard of the possible exit. At last their patience was rewarded. Three human figures emerged onto the sunny meadow. At a gesture from the leader, the five rose and silently made their way down to the exhausted forms half buried in the lush flowers a quarter of a mile away.

  The sleepers could not be aroused by any ordinary shaking, and the silent patrol quickly desisted from its efforts to wake the intruders. They sat motionless on the grass, and let six hours slip by in the mellow sunlight. Then the leader tried again. He succeeded in eliciting a petulant curse from Ali Baba. Seeing the sleeper's lips move, the leader persisted in his efforts until Ali awoke fully. His amazed shout instantly roused Vartan and Marjorie.

  At first they thought they were still in the throes of a horrible nightmare induced by their nerve-racking descent. But, at the second glance, they realized that the hideous five gathered in a silent ring around them were real and at least part human. Closer inspection revealed to their amazement that their visitors were wholly human, although hideously, almost incredibly deformed. The five of the patrol and the three intruders sat silently staring into one another's faces. Not a word was said on either side. An expressive dumb show by the leader of the patrol presently explained the silence on one side at least; an ignored question, asked first in half a dozen languages by Ali Baba, and then repeated in a shout without attracting the slightest attention, threw further light on the physical deficiencies of the five monstrous human creatures. To a man they were deaf mutes.

  "Deaf and dumb from birth," Vartan remarked in a shocked voice, "in addition to their other afflictions. Look at that poor devil's feet."

  Their gaze followed his to the clumsy, toeless stumps which served one of the five as feet. No sooner had they silently apprehended this misfortune, than their eyes were attracted by that of his right hand neighbor. This man, as if to compensate his companion's lack, had eight toes on each foot, and four fingers and two enormous thumbs on each hand. Not one of the five had a normal foot or hand. The twisted bodies of all were covered by long, matted yellow hair, like that of an unwashed collie dog. Apparently unconscious of their abnormalities, the men of the patrol eyed the three intruders in amazed astonishment, frequently expressing their disgust by gestures that all but spoke.

  Marjorie was the first to note and exclaim at the crowning eccentricity of their captors. A stunted monster, muscular as a gorilla – as indeed were all five – was a cyclops. One, and only one, enormous red eye glowed and rolled lasciviously, not from the centre of his forehead, but from the side of his head where his right ear should have been.

  They were not 'freaks of nature;' far from it. They were the natural and indeed inevitable offspring of the enviroment in which nature had nurtured them, and they could not have been other than they were. This the three 'normal' human beings were to realize to the hilt when, as they did in the next few days, they got a profound insight into the origin of what most of us call 'normality' of the human stock. But for a happy chance, we also might have been like those five monsters. In their own habitat they were the 'normal' human beings; Vartan, Ali and Marjorie were the repulsive deformities.

  It presently became plain that the muscular monsters considered the three intruders their prisoners, and desired to take them into custody. Seeing the exhausted state of their captives, the patrol exhibited at least the beginnings of human decency. The gorilla-like cyclops was loaded with the three packs, which he unconcernedly carried by the straps around his muscular neck.

  With a glance at the sun, as if to assure himself of the time, the cyclops hustled the party off in the direction of the main river.

  "No use resisting," Vartan observed. "Besides, I really am curious to see where these fellows live, and what they do for a living."

  Marjorie scarcely heard, and Ali seemed absorbed in his own thoughts. Marjorie, as a matt
er of fact, was lost in contemplation of the strange beauties at her feet.

  "Look," she cried. "Literally hundreds of new species of the most gorgeously exquisite flowers imaginable."

  "How do you know they are new?" Vartan asked. "I admit they are the most beautiful I ever saw. But are you sure they are new?"

  "Positive. The very structure is different from that of any species recorded. I know, from my Work at Brassey House."

  She stooped to pluck a low-growing saffron lily. "Seventeen petals," she counted, "twenty nine stamens, eleven pistils. Botanically, it is impossible. Yet there it grows by the acre."

  "Not impossible," he said. "Merely a mutation – like those poor fellows. Lord! I'm glad we risked that climb. It all begins to dovetail together like a beautiful physical experiment. Look at that butterfly – that shining green one. Now, I'll bet you another dinner." His enthusiasm suddenly rose to a sharp shout of triumph. "Fossils!"

  They were marching down what might have been the bed of a dry creek, whose bleached ochre walls towered up forty or fifty feet on either hand. The conglomerate of the cliffs was a dense compact of fossilized bones, of every conceivable size, from enormous femurs to tiny, birdlike skulls half exposed in the sandy cement. Vartan, escaping from his guard, dashed to the nearest wall.

  "Not Grimsby's or Marsden and Enright's beds, but better, richer, infinitely more varied," he exulted. The toeless guard gently extinguished Vartan's enthusiasm and induced him to rejoin the party. For the next half hour Vartan had eyes only for the extraordinarily rich stratum of fossils which the dry creek cleft through.

  Emerging presently onto a gentle slope above the main river, they saw their objective before them. A long flat boat, little more than a raft pointed at either end, was moored to a stunted tree on the bank of the flashing river. Evidently the patrol intended taking its prisoners to their destination by water.