THEFORBIDDENGARDEN

by The Forbidden Garden(Lit)

  "Nor do I. Do you see how it begins to glow as we come into the shadow?"

  "Like moist phosphorus. Come on. It may make us pretty sick, but we must see all the sights of this enchanted valley."

  CHAPTER 16

  THE PIT

  "How black the river is," Marjorie exclaimed, as they passed swiftly under the soaring arch. The swirling waters lapped the rock ledge along which they hastened, with a thick, oily slap, and the broad expanse of the river, a full quarter of a mile from bank to bank as it rushed under the mountains, was as black as polished ebony.

  "Oil," Vartan explained briefly. "The whole valley oozes oil. There must be huge domes of it pocketed behind those three-mile precipices. Look here," he indicated a wet black stain on the smooth wall they were passing, "another leak. I shouldn't care to throw a burning match into that river. Our guards don't seem to like this enormous tunnel. Perhaps they are afraid of a possible explosion and fire."

  "I think not," she replied. "They are still howling at the entrance for us to come back. Evidently this is forbidden ground. I hope," she began, and hesitated.

  "What?" Vartan encouraged.

  "That this underground waterway is a secret path to the forbidden garden."

  "Forbidden garden?" he echoed in bewilderment. "Where did you ever hear of such a place?"

  "Nowhere. I just imagined that such a garden must exist somewhere in this horrible valley where no tree or shrub is right and every flower is deformed. You remarked how those unfortunate human beings improved steadily as we approached the caves in the cliff. The most hideously misformed were two days' journey from the comfortable, well lighted caves, far enough away never to be seen by those living in the metropolis of this diseased civilization. Do you know what I think?"

  "The cyclops and those other wretched fellows were banished?" Vartan suggested.

  "Exactly. You are a paleontologist – used to reading the lives of whole teeming populations of animals, that perished millions of years ago, from the orderly records of their fossilized remains. Do you ever, in all that sublime history, find a discordant note that jars your faith in the even unfolding of a great race, from its first feeble beginnings to its strong maturity and last, its natural, pitiable old age? In all your study of the past life of this planet, have you once found an absolute contradiction of regular evolution?"

  "Scores of them," Vartan replied promptly. "In this black tunnel, where no orthodox paleontologist is likely to jump on my neck, I don't mind confessing that two men, Grimsby and myself, have examined hundreds of fossil remains that contradict all your old-fashioned theories of slow, continuous evolution flatly. That, Miss Driscott, is why I accepted Mr. Brassey's suspiciously generous offer to head an expedition to this part of Asia.

  "The specimens brought back by Marsden and Enright from our Central Asia expedition were so revolutionary, so sensational, if you like, that Grimsby refused to permit any account of them to be published. Until the origin of those contradictory fossils is cleared up, the Geological Exploration Society of America will keep them under lock and key. Only in the past two years have we got a reasonable clue. That was the origin of my 'preposterous hypothesis', as Grimsby calls it. Only when the physicists began in their laboratories to approach the most intense radiations observed in nature, was there a reasonable prospect of creating predictable forms of life – within certain limits. Nature has done it, repeatedly. Now man stands a chance of duplicating nature. I guess that what nature had done, is capable of explaining those families of contradictory fossils found by our expedition. And I further believe that your insane lilies will yield to the same rational, perfectly natural explanation."

  "Even my forbidden garden?" she hinted significantly.

  "Yes, if I guess correctly what you mean. You believe, do you not, that the worst deformities among the flowers are not permitted to flourish where they can be seen?"

  "'Believe' is too mild," Marjorie asserted with conviction.

  "I know it."

  "But how?" he asked in amazement. "You were never here before."

  "My father was a great amateur botanist, as I told you, and I have inherited his instinct for what is true in plants. Those deformities growing by the acre in the sunshine of the valley are only a few of the many thousands of species that should be there. Not by any scheme of evolution, not even by your wildest dream, could the gaps in the series be explained. There are plants growing out there which must have been separated in their origins by ages of your geologic time. Where are the missing links?"

  "Probably with the reptile-mammals between my little eight-eyed monster and the first human beings – dead and fossilized millions of years ago. Only the intermediate weeds have survived."

  "But it contradicts all evolution," she protested.

  "What of it? About twenty years ago, Muller, pottering with an X-ray tube and some insignificant vinegar flies did better than that. He did not contradict evolution, he improved on it radically."

  "How?" she demanded.

  "Watch your step! You were nearly into the oil then. No more argument now; we've got to apply the law of self-preservation to ourselves."

  The vast tunnel arching over the river had taken a sudden turn to the right. The last of the faint daylight, glimmering after them from the distant arch, faded, and they groped their hazardous way in total darkness. Only the feel of the wall and the oily lapping of the swift water at their left, guided them through the pitchy air, heavy with the fumes of slowly evaporating oil.

  "I'd strike a match if–"

  "Don't!" she cried, before he could finish. "This air must be as explosive as gas."

  "I won't," he promised. "It may not be necessary. Do you notice anything? On your left?"

  "Is it only my imagination, or does the water seem to shine?"

  "Yellowish white, isn't it, but very faint? You get it too?"

  "It is like the luminous paint on the dial of a watch, only much dimmer."

  "Exactly. I suspect it will brighten considerably as we go on. There's something better than luminous paint in the rock bottom of this river bed. My hypothesis begins to be proved. Look!"

  The tunnel had again turned, and for nearly a mile bored straight as a stretched string into the rock core of the mountains. Barely luminous at the point where they stood, the surface of the water increased rapidly in smoky brilliance as the river rushed into the distance, until at the limit, where the tunnel swerved again to the right, the lofty vault above the waters was as softly bright as the dawn of a summer day. They hastened on through the growing light till, rounding the blue-black buttress which marked the last bend, they saw the flaming end of the river, but not the hidden sea into which it plunged.

  At first they had eyes only for the vaulted ceiling of the stupendous chamber at whose portal they stood silent, stunned and amazed. A full thousand feet above them soared the flaming spans of jagged rock, arched over the glowing bowl three miles or more in diameter, into which the river rushed. This was no work of any puny race of men. The vaulted ceiling was not carved smooth to any petty design of interlacing arches. Rough hewn, as when nature finished it, the vast dome above them shone like a bed of colossal white embers, fanned by an eddying wind that made no sound, revealing with every passing second new and unpredictable patterns of light in the transient intricacies of its infinitely various design. All the pictures of the ages, nature's masterpieces, flashed out on those living rocks instinct with light, to vanish like the irrevocable memories of a dream before the mind recorded them and the eye tired of their dynamic beauty.

  The man and woman watching the cold white flames on that seemingly infinite dome of fire were dwarfed in space and time. Their own ambitions, the very aspirations of their whole race, ceased to exist. What were they, and of what value were their hopes and fears, in that icy furnace of almost intolerable light, which had burned, as fiercely as it now burned, ages before the last of the great reptiles left its futile armor to fossilize in the mud, and the first
feeble mammals scurried through the marshes, free at last of their tyrannous rulers? What were their human values worth in such a light? Nothing, perhaps less than nothing, they felt.

  That fiery ceiling, still flaming out the all but inexhaustible life of the slowly dying atoms in its rich elements, would continue to burn, ever more slowly to its final, black extinction, for ages after the last human being had joined the noble reptiles in oblivion. Only an egoist imbecile would affirm that the mind, the human mind, because of its crawling evolution to an understanding of its imminent annihilation, can rise above the unliving things which shall outlast it in the semblance of life.

  The man, knowing that his species must cease to be ages before the last explosive atom should disintegrate and cease to emit light, leaving only a pretty ring in the lifeless rock, wondered whether his knowledge and the long effort of his race to attain it through tens of centuries of cold and hunger, bigotry and oppression, partial success and complete failure, were worth its bitter cost. And here, he reflected, was a sufficient supply of radioactive ores for the manufacture of a limitless supply of atomic bombs. Either for that, or for the longest step forward the human race had yet taken. Which should it be? The man gave it up. The woman, enslaved to a human ideal of loyalty, of which nature knows nothing and cares less, marvelled that she should ever have devoted her life to what, until she entered the flaming chamber, she had considered her natural, human duty. Even while she wondered, she knew that the revelation was not for her, and that the vista of timeless eternity which she had glimpsed must dissolve, as it always does, in a mirage of urgent trivialities. Like the man standing silent at her side she realized, but more overwhelmingly than he, that brute humanity must triumph, and cold, impersonal nature be defeated as long as there are human senses and human greeds to be fed. Unashamed, she admitted to herself that all of what she saw was of less value than the happiness of a single human being. If necessary to maintain that happiness, all of this might ruthlessly be destroyed. Her eyes wandered from the coruscating dome to the vast funnel-shaped bowl which was the floor of the tunnel.

  Although the rock sides of the funnel also emitted light, it was at first not evident. The greater glare from the dome, where the main deposit of radioactive minerals seemed to be lodged, dimmed the fainter glow on the floor. As their eyes became accustomed to the lesser light, details of the natural wonder beneath them emerged, one by one, till all fused into a single miracle of design.

  At their left the river, black as pitch, shot swirling into the chamber, impinged with all its force on the lip of the funnel a hundred yards from where they stood and, impelled by its own momentum, followed the almost horizontal channel which it had cut in the living rock, half way round the cavern. Fragments of the ceiling jostling at random on the gently sloping surface of the funnel: determined the further course of the jet when its initial force was all but spent. Diametrically opposite them, and all of three miles away, the circling river first began to spiral down the funnel. For thousands and tens of thousands of years it had hurled its massive waters at the casual barriers in its natural path, gradually grooving out the quickest descent down the arched funnel, cutting its deep channel deeper and ever deeper into the living rock as one temporary obstruction after another blocked its descent for a century or two, until finally, overcoming the last, it had found its deep spiral way down the funnel, to vanish in one last leap to the ultimate depths.

  Only the faint rumor of that last, invisible plunge haunted the air of the cavern. The mighty volume of the river found its outlets from the mountain barriers so far beneath the flaming dome, that only the confused echo of its fall vibrated on the air in a dull thunder that was felt rather than heard. Yet now and then, coming and going like the rhythmic surge of the wind in a forest of pines, they heard the echo of a clearer sound, as of innumerable rivers meeting, and mingling in one concerted surge to the freedom of illimitable deserts.

  To see, to the scientific mind, is to speculate in the hope of explaining. Vartan became scientific. The naive side of his nature was glutted by what his physical eye had seen; the sophisticated half of him fretted for an explanation which would tabulate the sublimity before him as but another of nature's commonplaces. His own preposterous hypothesis had prepared his mind to appreciate what he now saw.

  Radioactive minerals of some sort, and in large deposits, he had expected to find in the vicinity of his and Grimsby's unexplained fossil beds. The white spot on his map of the Marsden and Enright expedition was not far from the place where the "suppressed" fossils had been found. But, as Marjorie had suspected, and he had acknowledged, the whole valley with its fourteen thousand foot precipices, was a totally unexpected discovery. Following the natural extensions of the contours on Marsden and Enright's map, Vartan had expected to walk down a gentle slope to the desert where the explorers had found their sensational fossil beds. Instead, he had found a jumping off place nearly three miles high. The explanation had flashed into his mind the first time the valley glowed out beneath his wondering eyes. But, until he stood in the chamber of the white fire, marvelling like any novice, he had not dared credit his simple explanation, even to himself.

  One does not find splintered holes in the armor of a battleship, unless, in general, it has been struck by an explosive shell. Nor does one find tremendous non-volcanic craters on the surface of the earth, like the famous one in Utah, unless the earth has been hit by a high-powered projectile from space. The so-called craters on the moon, or at least some of them, fifty miles across, are presumably the shell holes of bombardments from outer space by sizeable meteors or small planets, or even vagrants from far beyond the solar system.

  The earth's protective atmosphere blankets it from the great majority of the random missiles it encounters, but a massive projectile, like the ancient one that struck Utah head-on, or the more recent visitor that grazed Siberia a glancing blow that was felt for a hundred miles, occasionally breaks through before it is burned up in dust and vapor. The almost circular ellipse of the valley, its perpendicular walls, and the utter unexpectedness of an apparent crater in such a locality, plainly indicated a celestial shell hole and marked, as on an artillery map, the almost vertical trajectory of the huge projectile shot at our earth from beyond the solar system. A mere planetoid of such size could hardly have interfered at such an angle with our earth, a member of the same solar system. Therefore, Vartan concluded, the great shell had struck the earth practically head-on, and it had come from the depths of interstellar space.

  There was no tradition of such a shot in the folklore of any of the races of Central Asia. The geological evidence seemed to place it just prior to the epoch in which the crusted sediments were elevated into the Himalaya and Karakorum ranges. The great shell, possibly sixty or seventy miles in diameter, had crashed into the crust, to bury itself miles below the surface of the earth. As the mountains were thrust up, the hole, narrowed, of course, was thrust up too, like a pore in the skin of a squeezed orange. This made the valley in the spot where the unfinished map said no valley should exist.

  In its shattering smash into the earth's tough armor, the huge shell splintered. Fragments of it penetrated the crust as the main mass burrowed its way to rest. Encountering strata of varying densities, the splinters zigzagged till their momentum was spent, raising minor furrows, cutting sharp gashes, or boring crooked tunnels in the resistant rock. One of these was the river's channel; the funnel, no doubt, marked the deflected course of the splinter. Another, perhaps, was the desolate rock valley of the hot springs. The main mass of the projectile, as highly radioactive as the splinter which had bored the tunnel and blasted out the chamber of the funnel, had doubtless drilled its way clear through the outer crust of the earth to the pliant basalt beneath. For ages this huge mass of highly radioactive minerals had been discharging its penetrating rays into the miles of rock, earth and tainted atmosphere above it, changing the normal course of evolution for all living things in its vicinity – plants, animals an
d human beings.

  "Shall we follow the spiral of the river and see what is at the bottom of that funnel?" Vartan suggested.

  Marjorie nodded. "We had better hurry before the guards report our escape. This is evidently forbidden ground for at least some of the cave dwellers."

  "But not for all of them, Vartan added. "Look, over there to the left, about a quarter way round the rim of the funnel. Do you see something moving on the rock?"

  She peered through the phosphorescent haze to the spot he indicated.

  "There are several dark objects like sleeping walruses or lumps of black rock," she said. "But I don't see any of them moving. Yes, I do," she cried. "Watch the one lowest down."

  For a moment they stood stock still, silently debating whether to continue their rash enterprise. The slowly moving lump of black life, lumbering its awkward way down the arched slope of the funnel, even at the distance of a quarter of a mile, had a strangely sinister appearance. Vartan, recovering first, marched rapidly forward to take his chance. After a moment's hesitation, Marjorie followed. Twenty yards from the knot of black lumps they stopped.

  There were eight of the slow-moving, lethargic creatures sprawled over the luminous rocks. One had already disappeared over the curve of the funnel. Each was the size of a large cow. The bodies of all, prostrate on the rocks, were mere bags of flesh contained in leathery black hides, like the sacks of enormous octopi. Their tough skins gleamed in the fierce light from above, as all had been drenched in crude oil. Creeping a few steps closer, Vartan saw that it was not oil which smeared their bodies, but a coating of gelatinous black slime. All seemed to be completely exhausted, and indeed at the point of death.

  "What are they?" Marjorie whispered, joining Vartan.

  "Heavens only knows," he replied in an undertone. "Degenerates of some ghastly sort, I suspect. Mutations, if you prefer."

  "Mutations of what?"