It was Wilkes who shook me awake. It was pitch dark, or nearly so, the moon being at the moment obscured under clouds. A light, refreshing rain was falling, and my soaking wetness from head to foot evidenced a heavier shower through which both of us had slept. My wounds and bruises from that terrific melee ached and burned and throbbed. Yet I had lost little blood, it appeared, and when I stood up and had moved about somewhat, my usual agility seemed quite fully restored. The phosphorus-painted dial of my wrist-watch—which had survived that shambles intact—showed that it was half past four in the morning.
“I’ve been scouting around,” explained Wilkes. “It isn’t so bad in this light after you’ve got used to it a bit. I’ve discovered a sapodilla tree. That’s why I awakened you, Canevin—thought you could do with a bit to eat, what?”
He held out four of the round, dull-brown fruits which look like Irish potatoes. I took them eagerly, the first food in many hours. I do not recall a more satisfactory meal at any time in my life.
Greatly refreshed, I washed my hands in the rain and wiped them clean on the short wet grass. Wilkes was speaking again: “Those people, Canevin! There are no such people in the world, today—except here, I believe, what do you think? That is, if you’ve had time to think after that. Good God, man, were you a gladiator in some past existence! But, to get back to those people in there. It seems to me that—well, either those are the old-time Mayas, surviving just in this spot, wherever it may be, or else—do you suppose He could—er—make them immortal, something of the sort, what? Sounds ridiculous. I grant you that, of course, but then, this whole affair is…” He paused, leaving me to fill in the adjective. I stepped on something hard. I stooped down, picked up the enormous sword which I had carried out here to the garden when we had left the temple last night. I balanced it in my hand. I looked at Wilkes in the still dim light.
“It’s really, in a sense, the greatest puzzle of all,” I said reflectively. “You’re right, of course. No question about it, man! Those people were—well, anything but what I’d call contemporaries of ours. I’d almost be inclined to say that the immortality alternative gets my vote.”
“Let’s go back and take a look for ourselves,” said Wilkes. “We don’t seem, somehow, to have very much choice, this trip. Now seems to be one of the slack moments. Let’s go back inside there, get up behind that altar and statue, and see what’s there, in that place they all marched out from, what? Everything seems quieted down now inside; has been for hours on end, I’d say. We weren’t molested while we slept through all that rain.”
I nodded. A man can only die once, and the Power could, certainly, do as it wished with us. The rain ended, as tropical showers end, abruptly. The sweet odor of some flowering shrub poured itself out. The clouds passed from before the moon.
“Right,” said I. “Let’s get going.” And, without another word, we entered the stone anteroom, walked across it to where the doorway had opened into the temple, and—stopped there. The door was shut now. It was not, in the dim moonlight which filtered through the openings, even perceptible now. There was simply nothing to be seen there, not so much as a chink in the solid masonry of the wall, to indicate that there was a door.
“We’ll have to work around to it from the outside,” said Wilkes, after we had stood awhile in baffled silence. “There must be a way.”
I laughed. “They say that ‘where there’s a will there’s a way,’” I quoted.
“Well, let’s try it, outside,” answered Wilkes; and we walked out into the garden again.
There was no particular difficulty about finding that “way.”
We simply walked around the end of the small structure I have called the anteroom and followed along the almost endlessly high, blank stone-mason work of the temple’s outside sheathing.
The walking was not difficult, the growth being chiefly low shrubs. At last we came to the end of the temple wall, and turned the sharp corner it made at the beginning of a slight slope which ran down very gradually in the same direction in which we had been walking.
To our considerable surprise, for we had thought of nothing like this, there stretched away from us, farther than we could see in the moonlight broken by small, drifting clouds of the cirrus variety, a succession of other buildings, all of them obviously of that same early-civilization period of the first Maya empire, rounded structures for the most part, carrying the typical stone arrangement and ornamentation. Enormous as was the great temple, the area occupied by these massed and crowded buildings, close-standing, majestic in their heavy, solid grandeur, was far greater. The nearest, less than half the height of the towering temple side walls, was joined onto the temple itself, and stretched away virtually out of our sight. We stood and looked up at this.
Not a sound, not a whisper, even from a night insect, broke the deathly stillness. I remembered the Great Circle.
“It’s His territory, right enough,” I murmured; and Wilkes nodded.
“Closed for the season!” he said lightly, and lit a cigarette.
“Undoubtedly,” I agreed, standing beside him and looking up at the solid masonry, its massive lines somewhat broken, dignified and beautiful in the fickle, transient moonlight.
I sat down beside Wilkes and looked for my cigarette case. I had left it in the pocket of my drill jacket when I took it off and laid it on the ground beside Pelletier before going up the tree. Curiously, in all this time that had elapsed I had not thought of smoking. Wilkes handed me his case, and we sat there side by side saying nothing. A glance down at the heavy sword which I had laid across my knees reminded me of our current mission.
“We’ll have to go all the way to the end of this masonry-work at least,” I said, “before we can get into the enclosure!”
Wilkes tossed away the stub of his cigarette, stood up, and stretched his arms.
“All right,” said he, “let’s do it.”
Chapter 12
It took us a quarter of an hour of steady walking before we came to a corner. We turned this, walked past that enormous building’s end, and emerged in a kind of open space much like the quadrangle of a modern university, only many times larger in area, surrounded by more buildings dim in the present light, one side bounded by the edge of the great structure we had been skirting. The moonlight shone somewhat brighter on this side, against that long plain wall of masonry.
Suddenly Wilkes caught me by the arm. He uttered a typically British expletive.
“My hat!” said Wilkes, “Look, Canevin! There isn’t a window in the place!”
We stood looking up at the building.
“Curious,” commented Wilkes. “Other old Maya architecture has windows—that little anteroom effect we called in at before going into the temple has windows, both sides. Why not this?”
“Perhaps it’s a kind of storehouse,” I suggested. “If so, it wouldn’t need windows.”
“I doubt that—sort of instinct, perhaps,” returned Wilkes. “All along I’ve had the idea that the—er—congregation came out of this into the temple. It’s attached—we saw that outside there, built right onto it; we had to walk around it on just that account.”
“If you’re right,” I said, reflecting, “if there are people in there—well, then they don’t need windows—light.”
“If so, why?” threw out Wilkes; and I had no answer.
We stood staring up at the blank, unornamented, solid wall. “Curious!” vouchsafed Wilkes again. “Curious, no end!” Then: “Might bear out my idea, rather—you remember, Canevin? That ‘immortality’ idea I mean. If He has them—er—preserved, so to speak, ready to be revived, started going when He wants them, or needs them, what? As you remarked, they weren’t exactly ‘contemporaries’ of ours! He’s been going at this whole affair His own way, all through; not the way we human beings would go at it. If you ask me, He—er—ne
eded them to scrag us in there, in the temple I mean. They tried, you know! Failed, rather! We’re still on deck, Canevin! And, back of that—why, for the sake of argument, did He set us down here, on Earth once more, but not at the same old stand, not where we parked the old bus, in that circle of grass, under that tree? Perhaps it’s a small matter but—well, why, Canevin? Why here, I mean to say, rather than there? It’s a point to consider at any rate. Looks to me, if you ask me, as though He were trying, in His own peculiar way, to do us in, and had, so far, failed.”
I pondered over this long speech of Wilkes’, the longest I had heard him make. He was, like many engineering fellows, inclined to be monosyllabic rather than garrulous. It was, I thought, a curious piece of reasoning. Yet, anything coming from this stanch comrade in a pinch such as he had proved himself to be, was worth consideration. It might be what he called “instinct,” or indeed, anything. It might be the truth.
I was very far from realizing at that moment—and so, too, I think, was Wilkes himself, despite this curiously suggestive set of ideas—that within a very short time this utterly strange adventure upon which we were embarked was to give us its final, and, thoughtfully considered, perhaps its most poignant, surprise. Even warned as I should have been by Wilkes’ strange surmise, I was quite unprepared for what we found inside.
We proceeded slowly along what I have called the inner wall of the vast structure which joined the temple at its farther end. We walked for minute after minute along beside it, always glancing up at it, constantly on the lookout for an entrance. The walls remained entirely blank, without either apertures or ornamentation. The huge building might, to all appearances, have been some prehistoric warehouse or granary.
At last we came to its end, the end structurally joined onto the temple’s rearmost wall. We walked directly up to this point, where the two structures made a sharp corner.
There was no entrance except, presumably, through the temple, from the inside, there behind the altar. We had had half an hour’s walk around these massive survivals of ancient architecture for nothing. It was five oh three by my watch in the moon’s clear light. The clouds had retreated toward the horizon by now, as we stood there at that corner, baffled.
We turned, rather wearily now, away at right angles from our course just finished, and plodded along the grassy ground under the towering rear wall of the temple.
And, halfway along it, we came to an opening, an arched doorway without a door. We stopped, point-blank, and looked at each other.
“Shall we…?” whispered Wilkes.
I nodded, and stepped through, the great sword, which I had been carrying like a musket over my shoulder, now gripped, business-fashion, in my right hand.
We stepped through into an ambulatory, a semicircular passageway behind the altar. We turned to our left, in the direction of the temple’s corner against which was built the building we had been encircling, walking once more through heaped dust such as had clogged the nave, our footfalls soundless in an equally soundless environment.
Emerging from that semicircular course at the altar’s side, we were able to see from this point of vantage the overhead opening through which the rays of the late-afternoon sun had streamed down the day before. This was a wide space left vacant in the roofing, far above, overhung by what seemed another roof-structure twenty or thirty feet higher up, an arrangement plainly designed to keep out the rain while letting in the rays of the declining sun.
Now, in the moonlight of pre-dawn, both altar and statue took on an unearthly beauty. We stood rapt, looking along the altar directly toward the face of the statue.
This time it was I who jogged Wilkes’ elbow.
“It’s a quarter past five,” I warned him. “If we’re going to get a look at those people, we’d better do it now, before daylight. We haven’t very long. And if they’re—well, regular people, ordinary human beings, a segregated nation and not—er—‘embalmed,’ or whatever it is that you had in mind, we’d best take a quick glance and get away before they are awake!”
We turned away from those shimmering, pale glories which were the altar and the statue, the one jeweled, the other shining, resplendent, toward the predicated passageway that must lead out of the temple to where its erstwhile worshipers took their repose.
We could have told where it began if we had been blind men, by the feel of the heavily-trodden dust under our feet, dust not heaped and soft as we had experienced it-dust matted into the consistency of felt by the pressure of ten thousand feet.
Along that carpet over the stone flooring of a wide passageway we walked, warily now, not knowing what we might confront, toward a high, wide archway which marked the entrance proper into the windowless barrack or storehouse we had so lately scrutinized.
Here the moonlight shone scantily. We could not see very far before us, but we could see far enough to show us what kind of place it was into whose purlieus we had penetrated. We paused, just beyond the archway, paused and looked… There, in that storehouse laid out before us as far as the dim moonlight permitted our vision to reach, straight before us until their regular ranks were no longer visible except to the agitated eye of the mind, lay endless, regularly spaced rows of bodies, endless rows, rank upon serried rank; still, motionless, mummy-like, in the ineffable calm of latency; life suspended; life merged into one vast, incalculable coma. This was a storehouse indeed, in very fact: the last abiding place of those old Mayas of the first civilization, that classical puzzle of the archeologists—a puzzle no longer to Wilkes and me of all modern men; a civilization, a nation, in bond to the Power that still held us in an ironical, unrelenting, grasp—to that One Whom these very ancients worshipped and propitiated, the Prince of the Powers of the Air…
Chapter 13
Without a word we hastened out of that grim house of a living death and back into the temple, and, with no more than a glance toward the altar and statue, hurried silently back through the ambulatory and out through the doorless archway again into the breaking dawn of another day, under the fading stars of a new morning.
And, as we emerged, toward us, diagonally across what I have called the “quadrangle,” in regular formation, disciplined, there marched unfaltering, resolute, a vast horde of tall, brown men, led by two figures who stepped gravely in their van, ahead of those serried thousands. He on the left was a tall, brown man of majestic carriage, bearing in his hand a small burning torch, young, yet of a commanding dignity as one used to rule. Upon the right marched beside him a heavy, lumbering figure, who walked wearily, yet not without a certain heavy dignity of his own, a figure of a certain familiarity—the figure of Pelletier!
My immediate instinct was to cry out in sudden relief, to rush incontinently forward. I felt suddenly as though my heart would burst Pelletier, of all the men this old planet could possibly produce, here! Pelletier, the most welcome sight…
I could not have done so, however, even though I had actually yielded to that impulse I have named. For Pelletier was calling out to me, in a curious kind of voice, I noted at once, with some puzzlement—in a kind of rude, improvised chant.
“Steady, Canevin, steady does it, as the British Navy says! Walk toward us, both of you, side by side; stand up straight; make it as dignified as you know how—slow; like two big guns conferring a favor on the populace. Pay no attention to anybody but me. Stop in front of me. We’ll bow to each other; not too low. Then, when He bows, put your hands on his head—like a blessing, do you understand? On this big fellow beside me, I mean. Don’t botch it now, either of you. It’s important…Good! That’s the ticket! Keep it up now; carry the whole works through just the way I’m telling you.”
We carried out these amazing instructions to the letter. They were, of course, apart from the general idea of making an impression on Pelletier’s inexplicable following, quite unintelligible to us. But, we went through with them precise
ly according to these weird, chanted instructions—like the directions of some madman, a paranoiac for choice! “Delusions of grandeur!” The old phrase came inevitably into my mind. Even the young chieftain did his part, kneeling with gravity before us as soon as we had finished our salutation to Pelletier, and he had majestically returned it.
Immediately after these ceremonial performances which were received in a solemn silence by the army—for the orderly ranks were numerous enough to deserve such a distinctive title—Pelletier drew us aside and spoke with haste tempering his gravity.
“I’ll explain all this later. Tell me, first, how long have you been in this place?”
We told him we had spent the night here and started to outline our adventures, but Pelletier cut in.
“Another time,” he said curtly. “This is vital, pressing. Is there anything here—I don’t know, precisely, how to make clear exactly what I mean; you’ll have to use your wits; I haven’t the time to hold a long palaver now, and we mustn’t waste a minute—anything, I mean, that would correspond to that tree you fellows went up; something, in other words, that would serve—er—Him as a bridge, a means, of access to Earth? I don’t know how to make it any clearer. Maybe you catch what I mean.”
“There’s a temple back of us,” said Wilkes, “with an altar—”
“And a statue,” I finished for him, “a magnificent thing, heroic in size; looks for all the world like the figure of Aquarius in the signs of the zodiac. Possibly—”
The Adventure Novella MEGAPACK® Page 27