THEFORBIDDENGARDEN

by The Forbidden Garden(Lit)

  "Haven't I been admitting it ever since I began working for you?" Shane expostulated. "Until three weeks ago I would have backed your theory with my last dollar. These slides destroy it, as you must see."

  "You win, for the present. I grant that what you have there are merely fragments of fossilized spores."

  "And pretty badly smashed fragments at that," Shane added, "I doubt whether there are two bits of one and the same kind of spore in all of these specimens."

  "These, in your opinion, are totally different from the dust you analysed at Brassey House?"

  "Absolutely," Shane asserted decisively. "If you could only have given me a few complete spores to examine, instead of the odds and ends of broken ones still clinging to the fibres of James' original package, I could have proved conclusively that those spores had been alive within historic times. As it was, the evidence was all but complete. These, on the other hand, must have been fossilized hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of years ago."

  "But you do not reject the rest of my theory?" Charles persisted with rather pathetic hopefulness. "Remember, I was once a trained biologist. You will agree that those useless fragments of living spores which you did succeed in salvaging, could never have sprung from terrestrial plants?"

  "Of course I agree. Haven't I maintained all along that they were clear out of the range of plant evolution on this earth? Like you, I reached the only reasonable conclusion: they must have come from outside the earth. Where would be the most likely place to look for them? Obviously in uncontaminated glacial ice on the highest mountains. I forget what the exact estimate is of the amount of meteoric and other non-terrestrial dust that settles on the Himalayas in a day, but it is up in the hundreds of tons. I must say," he acknowledged, "the results of my work have been a great disappointment to me. Out of literally thousands of grains of dust from the sediments of all my black ice that I have examined, I have found less than forty that can reasonably pass as fossil remains of living things. All the rest are inorganic."

  "And those broken spores of poor James' were almost without exception traces of organic bodies?"

  "Beyond a doubt. More important, as I said before, they had been alive within human times. No, Mr. Brassey, we have not solved the puzzle yet. Your plants are not of this earth. Therefore they must have originated outside our system. How did those still living spores ever get here? We don't know. I feel sure, however, that it must have been by some rare accident – if there is such a thing in nature – that happens only once in several geologic ages. It must have been a 'chance' as rare as the full collision of two stars. Your theory is not so preposterous as a cocksure ignoramus might say it is."

  "What about Vartan's?"

  "He never told me what it was, but I guessed. From what I suspect, his 'preposterous hypothesis' might easily account for the evolution of your plants after they once reached the earth, but it could not explain how they ever got here. No–" He was interrupted by the telephone.

  "Hello? Shane speaking. Yes, Mr. Brathwaite? He is here with me now." He turned to Charles. "Mr. Brassey, one of the Brathwaites wishes to speak to you." He handed Brassey the instrument.

  "Charles Brassey speaking. Bad news, you say? All right; speak out. I'm ready."

  Over the wire Shane heard the bald statement that about thirty porters had been discovered, without their headman, in an inaccessible wilderness of the Karakorums by a party of Indian Government surveyors. Further, Vartan, Miss Driscott and the missing headman had gone on alone, into a desolate mountain region on foot. All this had been sent back, post haste, by runner, telegraph and radio to civilization by the British officers of the survey.

  "When did this happen?" Brassey asked, going pale.

  "We can't tell exactly from the porters' stories, but we should judge between four and nine days ago."

  "And they had nothing with them but their packs?"

  "Only their packs and sleeping bags. Shall I come over to the inn, or will you meet me here at the office?"

  "I'll come at once," Brassey answered, hanging up the receiver. He turned to Shane, his face as white as paper. "They must be perishing now. Good God! To think that I drove Marjorie to her death."

  "You haven't," Shane snapped. "All three are alive and well at this instant. You don't know Vartan as I do. That boy could get out of hell."

  * * *

  Shane's optimism was a trifle too rosy. For seven days of horror, Vartan and his companions had been trying to escape from the inferno which James, in his last mad gesture, had bequeathed to the world. Beaten by odds which not the most daring of men could discount, Vartan had given up hope. His one concern at the moment when Shane expressed his unlimited confidence in his former leader, was to hide his despair from Marjorie and Jamieson. James had not been mistaken.

  The infernal Eden was completely sealed of from the outer world. Entrance or exit was blocked in all ways but one, and the perilous possibilities of this had been denied them unanswerably in the first half hour after James' death. They could not even begin to risk the climb up one of the crumbling cataracts. Vartan almost prayed that Marjorie and Jamieson might be taken unawares by death, and pass painlessly out of their torment as had most of the natives in the first two days of the horror. Then he could face his own certain fate unflinchingly. Barring this merciful deliverance, he must hide his hopelessness to the end, and keep their minds off the inevitable by feverish marches from one doomed spot to another, knowing that escape was impossible and that all of his assumed decisiveness was a futile pretense.

  James Brassey's mad inspiration was as effective as he had intended it to be. The spiral river, coated with at least two feet of black oil from the accumulated oozes of the valley and the caverns, thundered its gyrating course around the funnel in folds and curtains of crimson fire like the fitful involutions of a boreal aurora. Fronds of flame fingered their way over the arched dome above the funnel, obliterating at last the cold yellowish white glow of the rock ceiling, and a dense black snow of enormous soot flakes drifted slowly down into the abyss. The distant fall of the circling torrent at last made itself fully audible, finding its voice in curling banners of clear red fire that rose from the invisible last plunge of the oil, to hover for an instant above the funnel in detached clouds of flame that consumed themselves and vanished. New fissures opened suddenly with explosive reports in the red hot rocks, releasing pent up domes of oil to gush forth in fire, till the whole chamber of the river and all of its tributary caverns were a solid mass of compact flames.

  The misshapen mistakes of an evolution alien to this earth vanished instantly in wisps of vapor; spores still virulent with mad life glowed fitfully in their foul beds, the last, deep embers of a forgotten order of living things.

  Subterranean marshes evaporated in a flash; the steam of their dissolution, bursting asunder – the massive barriers of rock between one cavern and its neighbors, ripped the heart of the mountains apart, again releasing deluges of oil to feed the furnace and consume utterly the last vestige of forbidden life.

  As explosion after explosion tore the heart out of the mountains, the whole wall of the valley began to smoke in ominous prophecy of the universal fire to come. Noble precipices, that had withstood the frost and scorching suns of a million years, slowly bulged, hung suspended for a second on the void air, and thundered down in appalling avalanches of stone to the valley floor. As the tumbling rock ceased to fall, spreading fanwise in broad deltas from the base of the precipice, the dammed up oil from a score of age-old reservoirs burst forth, kindling instantly on the heated surfaces of the fractured rock. With each fourteen thousand foot avalanche of rock the main river received a new tributary of flaming oil, and the vertical wall of the valley another slow banner of flame curling up to the vacant blue a mile above the crumbling rim, until the whole three hundred mile circumference of precipices smoked and flared like the wall of a volcano.

  The destruction was cumulative; each new outburst of flaming oil engendered anothe
r, more deeply hidden in the heart of the rock, to rip apart and pulverize a huger sector of the mountain barrier. At each new explosion the rolling seas of fire surged farther toward the narrowing island of unconsumed green in the centre of the valley, where three human beings, reinforced by multitudes of scurrying insects, the last living animals in all that inferno, silently calculated the hour of their death.

  Such, in brief, was the history of the first six days after James kindled his inextinguishable fire. In the first half hour, Vartan and his two companions abandoned hope. And yet, on the afternoon of the seventh day they were still alive and unharmed, quietly determined to obey their ineradicable instinct for survival to the last.

  Only Jamieson's coolheaded directions had saved them from death in the first half hour. Barely had they quitted the chamber of the first marsh, where they had met James, than the floor heaved up, and the marsh was vaporized instantly in the sudden upgush of a sea of fire. Jamieson, alone, knew a way to the upper caves, the habitual living quarters of the less deformed inhabitants of the valley. He retraced without a single false step the tortuous way by which the guards had led him down from the upper caves to James' forbidden garden. Jamieson had the born detectives genius for remembering infallibly faces or localities once seen.

  The terrified inhabitants were already streaming into the dry caverns, familiar homes and supposed havens of safety, when the three reached the upper caverns on their way to an exit to the valley.

  In vain did Vartan and Marjorie, by all the acting at their command, seek to warn the fleeing wretches of their impending destruction. Stunned and bewildered, the hapless deformities huddled together in the caves they deemed safe, until a sudden inrush of carbon monoxide gas from new fissures in the rock mercifully asphyxiated them before the flame took their bodies. Only Jamieson seemed impatient of these delays; to him it was a foregone conclusion that the last inhabitant would prefer death in Eden to the slim chance of an untried life elsewhere.

  On reaching the exit on the face of the cliff overlooking the valley, they saw, as far as vision could reach, the whole panicstricken population streaming toward the cliff and imagined safety. It was useless to warn those already in the caves, by gesture and action, to flee for their lives. They were not to be persuaded. Abandoning the stunned wretches to the fate they seemed voluntarily to prefer, the three made their way down the face of the cliff to the valley. Reaching the bottom, they fled toward the centre of the valley, to be as far as possible from the precipices which, Vartan foresaw, must soon begin to crumble or be hurled violently down on the valley floor as pockets of pent up gas and oil exploded.

  For the first twenty four hours their flight was a dazed nightmare of instinctive running till they dropped, only to stagger to their feet when they were rested, and reel on again toward the narrowing zone of comparative safety in the centre of the valley.

  They felt no hunger in their urgency to survive. As the sultry heat rose almost beyond endurance, they slaked their parched throats with the tasteless berries which Marjorie's guide had shown her, not daring to kneel and drink from any of the numerous pools in the fields. In the terrific heat as one blazing inundation after another gushed out over the valley, grass, flowers and leaves twenty miles from the flaming precipices wilted and fell. Only the human beings resisted the onslaught of the scorching heat in their determination to live to the last moment.

  Hobbling deformities, their blistered faces blank with terror, blundered past them day and night, making their slow way back to the crumbling caves and, Vartan hoped, a merciful death by suffocation in the gases that leaked from the cracked ground before each fresh outburst of flame.

  By the early morning of the second day they had reached the centre of the valley.

  "We may as well camp here," Vartan said, "till the worst of it is over. Those explosions can't go on forever. You lie down, Miss Driscott, and get some sleep, while Jamieson and I forage for blue potatoes and a gas jet to cook them, by. We had better not try any of the other fruits, I suppose."

  They left her to sleep, and went in search of food. Like a soldier in the trenches, wearied out by incessant battle, she fell asleep immediately. When wakened, Jamieson and Vartan were piling up dozens of the huge balls of puffed 'blue potatoes' on a bare, gravelly spot some fifty feet away.

  "Have you been gone long?" she called.

  "About eight hours," Vartan answered. "Better have something to eat. Stay there; I'll bring it to you."

  She stood up and silently contemplated the smoking girdle of fire which hemmed them in. Since she had fallen asleep, a dozen new torrents of flaming oil had burst from the cliffs, some of them fifty miles from the initial conflagration, and the deltas of fire had advanced at least three miles, on their ceaseless march toward the centre of the valley.

  "You two lie down now and rest," she said, "while I watch."

  "Watch what?" Vartan asked with a grim smile.

  "For the first sign of this letting up."

  Her reply was drowned in the terrific concussion of a new explosion, twenty five miles away, in the valley wall almost diametrically opposite the caves. They turned and silently waited for the flames to gush forth, knowing that there would be no cessation of the destruction until the last precipices were shattered and the whole valley was ringed with an ever advancing tide of fire. Vartan and Jamieson flung themselves on the ground without a word and were instantly asleep.

  So it went for six and a half days. On the afternoon of the seventh, their island in the sea of fire had narrowed to a tiny spot less than five miles across. Another day, they knew, must end it all. They would not see the end. Long before the first surge of flames swept over the withered grass of their refuge, they would have been suffocated in the furnace heat. Even now each labored breath was an agony, and their fast diminishing store of red berries, which all three had feverishly gathered as the fires crept ever closer upon them, failed to assuage their intolerable thirst. The thick black soot from a thousand raging hells streamed steadily upward on the still air, shutting off completely their last sight of the valley wall. The precipices had long since crumbled in avalanches of flaming stone, and only an occasional detonation, followed by a distant rumble, warned them that unexploded reservoirs of oil and gas must still exist beneath the valley floor.

  At any moment the fires might find their way through the maze of subterranean galleries to these vaster deposits, and hurl the whole valley flaming onto the surrounding mountains. They could only pray that they might not live to experience the awful certainty of that last moment of full consciousness when they, lifted with the heaving earth, should know for one second all the eternity of fear in a violent death.

  "Let us get some sleep," Vartan panted.

  They knew what he meant. Better to die in a troubled dream than to fight, choking and conscious, to the last.

  "Goodnight," Jamieson said, composing himself to rest.

  "Goodnight." Vartan replied. "This has been worth a long sleep, and we've earned it. Miss Driscott? Why not try to join us?"

  "I'm listening," she gasped. "Do you hear anything?"

  Vartan sat up.

  "Only the rustle of flames," he said, and paused, listening with every nerve. "Am I going mad?" he muttered.

  "No!" she cried, leaping to her feet. "I see them!"

  CHAPTER 22

  THE INSPECTOR'S THEORY

  Although Shane was impetuous by temperment, he could keep cool enough in a real crisis. And now, he realized when Brassey had taken his hurried departure to confer with the Brathwaites, was the crucial time of his life to show what he was made of.

  Grasping his two canes, he hobbled after his chief to the conference. His reasonable scheme had crystallized in a flash. He must now convince Brassey that the moment had come to spend money without stint to save three human lives. Vartan, the man he adored, and Marjorie, the girl he hoped might some day love him, were cut off from civilization in a desperate venture that not the hardiest explorers could
hope to bring to success.

  Not dreaming of the desperate plight in which his friends actually were at the moment, Shane, nevertheless, guided by the irrefutable logic of events, acted in the one way which could be of any practical value.

  The three, he reasoned, had advanced into a wilderness, where food was all but unobtainable, with nothing but their packs. Therefore they must now be on the verge of starvation, if indeed they had not already perished. The one thing that mattered for the moment was to get help to them immediately.

  He found his friends in a deadlock. They had agreed on principles in the first three minutes, but so far had seen no possible way of materializing their common agreement into action. Speed alone would count. But how was speed possible over the most forbidding mountain barrier in the world? Shane had mentally recalled every incident of the expedition as he himself had participated in it, from its start at Brassey House to its end for him, when he broke his ankles and was carried back to Srinagar. With crystal distinctness one apparently trivial incident flashed upon his mind. He saw before him once more the ruined garden in which he, Marjorie and Vartan had read the first installment Charles Brassey's charge to them, and again he visioned a blue chasm in the mountains, and heard once more the distant drone of the mail plane. A fragment of a forgotten conversation rang in his ears.

  "Progress" – from Vartan.

  "Yes, damn it!" – from himself.

  Within fifteen minutes the details of the proposed rescue expedition were on the table. It remained only to put them into execution. Luckily the government surveyor at the mountain outpost had taken pains to learn, as accurately as he could from the porters the approximate location of the rocky defile with the hot springs where they had turned back. That was the obvious place from which to start in an attempt to overtake the three who had so rashly ventured into an unmapped wilderness.

  Shane of course was fairly familiar with Vartan's map of the Marsden-Enright expedition, and he was aware of Vartan' intention of proceeding first to the rich fossil beds. Putting together the porters' information and what he recalled of Vartan's map, Shane drew the easy inference that Vartan had gone ahead confidently over a presumed short cut to the fossil beds. High powered planes, with expert pilots and mechanics, could cover in a matter of hours the arduous route which it would take me on foot months to traverse. The planes must be fuelled to capacity in order to permit of safe return in the event of failure to locate the lost explorers on a first scouting expedition, or to fly on with the rescued to civilization should they be happily discovered.