I ran to the tapestried doorway. I had but one desire—to get out of the temple of Khalk’ru. Out of the lair of the Kraken. To get far and far away from it. To get back…back to the camp-home. I ran through the little room, through the passages and, still running, reached the entrance to the temple. I stood there for an instant, dazzled by the sunlight.
There was a roaring shout from hundreds of throats—then silence. My sight cleared. They lay there, in the dust, prostrate before me—the troops of the Uighur spearsmen.
I looked for the black stallion. He was close beside me. I sprang upon his back, gave him the reins. He shot forward like a black thunderbolt through the prostrate ranks, and down the road to the oasis. We raced through the oasis. I had vague glimpses of running crowds, shouting. None tried to stop me. None could have stayed the rush of that great horse.
And now I was close to the inner gates of the stone fort through which we had passed on the yesterday. They were open. Their guards stood gaping at me. Drums began to beat, peremptorily, from the temple. I looked back. There was a confusion at its entrance, a chaotic milling. The Uighur spearsmen were streaming down the wide road.
The gates began to close. I shot the stallion forward, bowling over the guards, and was inside the fort. I reached the further gates. They were closed. Louder beat the drums, threatening, commanding.
Something of sanity returned to me. I ordered the guards to open. They stood, trembling, staring at me. But they did not obey. I leaped from the stallion and ran to them. I raised my hand. The ring of Khalk’ru glittered. They threw themselves on the ground before me—but they did not open the gates.
I saw upon the wall goatskins full of water. I snatched one of these and a sack of grain. Upon the floor was a huge slab of stone. I lifted it as though it had been a pebble, and hurled it at the gates where the two halves met. They burst asunder. I threw the skin of water and sack of grain over the high saddle, and rode through the broken gates.
The great horse skimmed through the ravine like a swallow. And now we were over the crumbling bridge and thundering down the ancient road.
We came to the end of the far ravine. I knew it by the fall of rock. I looked back. There was no sign of pursuit. But I could hear the faint throb of the drums.
It was now well past mid-afternoon. We picked our way through the ravine and came out at the edge of the sandstone range. It was cruel to force the stallion, but I could not afford to spare him. By nightfall we had readied semi-arid country. The stallion was reeking with sweat, and tired. Never once had he slackened or turned surly. He had a great heart, that horse. I made up my mind that he should rest, come what might.
I found a sheltered place behind some high boulders. Suddenly I realized that I was still wearing the yellow ceremonial smock. I tore it off with sick loathing. I rubbed the horse down with it. I watered him and gave him some of the grain. I realized, too, that I was ravenously hungry and had eaten nothing since morning. I chewed some of the grain and washed it down with the tepid water. As yet, there were no signs of pursuit, and the drums were silent. I wondered uneasily whether the Uighurs knew of a shorter road and were outflanking me. I threw the smock over the stallion and stretched myself on the ground. I did not intend to sleep. But I did go to sleep.
I awakened abruptly. Dawn was breaking. Looking down upon me were the old priest and the cold-eyed Uighur captain. My hiding place was ringed with spearsmen. The old priest spoke, gently.
“We mean you no harm, Dwayanu. If it is your will to leave us, we cannot stay you. He whose call Khalk’ru has answered has nothing to fear from us. His will is our will.”
I did not answer. Looking at him, I saw again—could only see—that which I had seen in the cavern. He sighed.
“It is your will to leave us! So shall it be!”
The Uighur captain did not speak.
“We have brought your clothing, Dwayanu, thinking that you might wish to go from us as you came,” said the old priest.
I stripped and dressed in my old clothes. The old priest took my faded finery. He lifted the octopus robe from the stallion. The captain spoke:
“Why do you leave us, Dwayanu? You have made our peace with Khalk’ru. You have unlocked the gates. Soon the desert will blossom as of old. Why will you not remain and lead us on our march to greatness?”
I shook my head. The old priest sighed again.
“It is his will! So shall it be! But remember, Dwayanu—he whose call Khalk’ru has answered must answer when Khalk’ru calls him. And soon or late—Khalk’ru will call him!”
He touched my hair with his trembling old hands, touched my heart, and turned. A troop of spearsmen wheeled round him. They rode away.
The Uighur captain said:
“We wait to guard Dwayanu on his journey.”
I mounted the stallion. We reached the expedition’s new camp. It was deserted. We rode on, toward the old camp. Late that afternoon we saw ahead of us a caravan. As we came nearer they halted, made hasty preparations for defence. It was the expedition—still on the march. I waved my hands to them and shouted.
I dropped off the black stallion, and handed the reins to the Uighur.
“Take him,” I said. His face lost its sombre sternness, brightened.
“He shall be ready for you when you return to us, Dwayanu. He or his sons,” he said. He touched my hand to his forehead, knelt. “So shall we all be, Dwayanu—ready for you, we or our sons. When you return.”
He mounted his horse. He faced me with his troop. They raised their spears. There was one crashing shout—
“Dwayanu!”
They raced away.
I walked to where Fairchild and the others awaited me.
As soon as I could arrange it, I was on my way back to America. I wanted only one thing—to put as many miles as possible between myself and Khalk’ru’s temple.
I stopped. Involuntarily my hand sought the buckskin bag on my breast.
“But now,” I said, “it appears that it is not so easy to escape him. By anvil stroke, by chant and drums—Khalk’ru calls me!”
CHAPTER V.
THE MIRAGE
Jim had sat silent, watching me, but now and again I had seen the Indian stoicism drop from his face. He leaned over and put a hand on my shoulder.
“Leif,” he said quietly, “how could I have known? For the first time, I saw you afraid—it hurt me. I did not know…”
From Tsantawu, the Cherokee, this was much. “It’s all right, Indian. Snap back,” I said roughly. He sat for a while not speaking, throwing little twigs on the fire.
“What did you friend Barr say about it?” he asked abruptly.
“He gave me hell,” I said. “He gave me hell with the tears streaming down his cheeks. He said that never had anyone betrayed science as I had since Judas kissed Christ. He was keen on mixed metaphors that got under your skin. That went deep under mine, for it was precisely what I was thinking of myself—not as to science but as to the girl. I had given her the kiss of Judas all right. Barr said that I had been handed the finest opportunity man ever had given him. I could have solved the whole mystery of the Gobi and its lost civilization. I had run away like a child from a bugaboo. I was not only atavistic in body, I was atavistic in brain. I was a blond savage cowering before my mumbo-jumbos. He said that if he had been given my chance he would have let himself be crucified to have learned the truth. He would have, too. He was not lying.”
“Admirably scientific,” said Jim. “But what did he say about what you saw?”
“That is was nothing but hypnotic suggestion by the old priest. I had seen what he had willed me to see—just as before, under his will, I had seen myself riding to the temple. The girl hadn’t dissolved. She had probably been standing in the wings laughing at me. But if everything that my ignorant mind had accepted as true had been true then my conduct was even more unforgivable. I should have remained, studied the phenomena and brought back the results for science to examine. What I had tol
d him of the ritual of Khalk’ru was nothing but the second law of thermo-dynamics expressed in terms of anthropomorphism. Life was an intrusion upon Chaos, using that word to describe the unformed, primal state of the universe. An invasion. An accident. In time all energy would be changed to static heat, impotent to give birth to any life whatsoever. The dead universes would float lifelessly in the illimitable void. The void was eternal, life was not. Therefore the void would absorb it. Suns, worlds, gods, men, an things animate, would return to the void. Go back to Chaos. Back to Nothingness. Back to Khalk’ru. Or if my atavistic brain preferred the term—back to the Kraken. He was bitter.”
“But the others saw the girl taken, you say. How did he explain that?”
“Oh, easily. That was mass hypnotism—like the Angels of Mons, the ghostly bowmen of Crecy and other collective hallucinations of the War. I had been a catalyzer. My likeness to the traditional ancient race, my completeness as a throwback, my mastery at Khalk’ru’s ritual, the faith the Uighurs had in me—all this had been the necessary element in bringing about the collective hallucination of the tentacle. Obviously the priests had long been trying to make work a drug in which an essential chemical was lacking. I, for some reason, was the missing chemical—the catalyzer. That was all.” Again he sat thinking, breaking the little twigs.
“It’s a reasonable explanation. But you weren’t convinced?”
“No, I wasn’t convinced—I saw the girl’s face when the tentacle touched her.” He arose, stood staring toward the north.
“Leif,” he asked suddenly, “what did you do with the ring?”
I drew out the little buckskin pouch, opened it and handed the ring to him. He examined it closely, returned it to me.
“Why did you keep it, Leif?”
“I don’t know.” I slipped the ring over my thumb. “I didn’t give it back to the old priest; he didn’t ask for it. Oh, hell—I’ll tell you why I kept it—for the same reason Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner had the albatross tied round his neck. So I couldn’t forget I’m a murderer.”
I put the ring back in the buckskin bag, and dropped it down my neck. Faintly from the north came a roll of drums. It did not seem to travel with the wind this time. It seemed to travel underground, and died out deep beneath us.
“Khalk’ru!” I said.
“Well, don’t let’s keep the old gentleman waiting,” said Jim cheerfully.
He busied himself with the packs, whistling. Suddenly he turned to me.
“Listen, Leif. Barr’s theories sound good to me. I’m not saying that if I’d been in your place I would have accepted them. Maybe you’re right. But I’m with Barr—until events, if-when-and-how they occur, prove him wrong.”
“Fine!” I said heartily, and entirely without sarcasm.
“May your optimism endure until we get back to New York—if-when-and-how.”
We shouldered the packs, and took up our rifles and started northward.
It was not hard going, but it was an almost constant climb. The country sloped upward, sometimes at a breathtaking pitch. The forest, unusually thick and high for the latitude, began to thin. It grew steadily cooler. After we had covered about fifteen miles we entered a region of sparse and stunted trees. Five miles ahead was a thousand-feet-high range of bare rocks. Beyond this range was a jumble of mountains four to five thousand feet higher, treeless, their peaks covered with snow and ice, and cut by numerous ravines which stood out glistening white like miniature glaciers. Between us and the nearer range stretched a plain, all grown over with dwarfed thickets of wild roses, blueberries and squawbemes, and dressed in the brilliant reds and blues and greens of the brief Alaskan summer.
“If we camp at the base of those hills, we’ll be out of that wind,” said Jim. “It’s five o’clock. We ought to make it in an hour.”
We set off. Bursts of willow ptarmigans shot up around us from the berry thickets like brown rockets; golden plovers and curlews were whistling on all sides; within rifle shot a small herd of caribou was feeding, and the little brown cranes were stalking everywhere. No one could starve in that country, and after we had set up camp we dined very well.
There were no sounds that night—or if there were we slept too deeply to hear them.
The next morning we debated our trail. The low range stood directly in our path north. It continued, increasing in height, both east and west. It presented no great difficulties from where we were, at least so far as we could see. We determined to climb it, taking it leisurely. It was more difficult than it had appeared; it took us two hours to wind our way to the top.
We tramped across the top toward a line of huge boulders that stretched like a wall before us. We squeezed between two of these, and drew hastily back. We were standing at the edge of a precipice that dropped hundreds of feet sheer to the floor of a singular valley. The jumble of snow-and-ice-mantled mountains clustered around it. At its far end, perhaps twenty miles away, was a pyramidal-shaped peak.
Down its centre, from tip to the floor of the valley, ran a glittering white streak, without question a glacier filling a chasm which split the mountain as evenly as though it had been made by a single sword stroke. The valley was not wide, not more than five miles, I estimated, at its widest point. A long and narrow valley, its far end stoppered by the glacier-cleft giant, its sides the walls of the other mountains, dropping, except here and there where there had been falls of rock, as precipitously into it as the cliff under us.
But it was the floor of the valley itself that riveted our attention. It seemed nothing but a tremendous level field covered with rocky rubble. At the far end, the glacier ran through this rubble for half the length of the valley. There was no trace of vegetation among the littered rocks. There was no hint of green upon the surrounding mountains; only the bare black cliffs with their ice and snow-filled gashes. It was a valley of desolation.
“It’s cold here, Leif.” Jim shivered.
It was cold—a cold of a curious quality, a still and breathless cold. It seemed to press out upon us from the valley, as though to force us away.
“It’s going to be a job getting down there,” I said.
“And hard going when we do,” said Jim. “Where the hell did all those rocks come from, and what spread them out so flat?”
“Probably dropped by that glacier when it shrunk,” I said. “It looks like a terminal moraine. In fact this whole place looks as though it had been scooped out by the ice.”
“Hold on to my feet, Leif, I’ll take a look.” He lay on his belly and wriggled his body over the edge. In a minute or two I heard him call, and pulled him back.
“There’s a slide about a quarter of a mile over there to the left,” he said. “I couldn’t tell whether it goes all the way to the top. We’ll go see. Leif, how far down do you think that valley is?”
“Oh, a few hundred feet.”
“It’s all of a thousand if it’s an inch. The cliff goes down and down. I don’t understand what makes the bottom seem so much closer here. It’s a queer place, this.”
We picked up the packs and marched off behind the wall—like rim of boulders. In a little while we came across a big gouge in the top, running far back. Here frost and ice had bitten out the rock along some fault. The shattered debris ran down the middle of the gouge like giant stepping-stones clear to the floor of the valley.
“We’ll have to take the packs off to negotiate that,” said Jim. “What shall be do—leave them here while we explore, or drop them along with us as we go?”
“Take them with us. There must be an outlet off there at the base of the big mountain.”
We began the descent. I was scrambling over one of the rocks about a third of the way when I heard his sharp exclamation.
Gone was the glacier that had thrust its white tongue in among the rubble. Gone was the rubble. Toward its far end, the valley’s floor was covered with scores of pyramidal black stones, each marked down its centre with a streak of glistening white. They stood in ranks,
spaced regularly, like the dolmens of the Druids. They marched half-down the valley. Here and there between them arose wisps of white steam, like smokes of sacrifices.
Between them and us, lapping at the black cliffs, was a blue and rippling lake! It filled the lower valley from side to side. It rippled over the edges of the shattered rocks still far below us.
Then something about the marshalled ranks of black stones struck me.
“Jim! Those pyramid-shaped rocks. Each and every one of them is a tiny duplicate of the mountain behind them! Even to the white streak!”
As I spoke, the blue lake quivered. It flowed among the black pyramids, half-submerging them, quenching the sacrificial smokes. It covered the pyramids. Again it quivered. It was gone. Where the lake had been was once more the rubble-covered floor of the valley.
There had been an odd touch of legerdemain about the transformations, like the swift work of a master magician. And it had been magic—of a kind. But I had watched nature perform that magic before.
“Hell!” I said. “It’s a mirage!”
Jim did not answer. He was staring at the valley with a singular expression.
“What’s the matter with you, Tsantawu? Listening to the ancestors again? It’s only a mirage.”
“Yes?” he said. “But which one? The lake—or the rocks?”
I studied the valley’s floor. It looked real enough. The theory of a glacial moraine accounted for its oddly level appearance—that and our height above it. When we reached it we would find that distribution of boulders uncomfortably uneven enough, I would swear.
“Why, the lake of course.”
“No,” he said, “I think the stones are the mirage.”
“Nonsense. There’s a layer of warm air down there. The stones radiate the sun’s heat. This cold air presses on it. It’s one of the conditions that produces mirages, and it has just done it for us. That’s all.”
“No,” he said, “it isn’t all.”
The A. Merritt Megapack Page 141