Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “No. Blair, from the day I first loved you, I never wanted to keep a secret from you.”

  The policeman, that was the other half of Blair Warrender, resumed authority, suddenly, because that was his way.

  “And your father is where?” he asked her.

  “Where?” said the echo. “Where? Where?”

  She nestled closer, and laughed delightedly because she understood him. It was true they could have no secret from each other. That was his abrupt way of accepting intimacy, genuine and forever. But the echoes also laughed. They were derisive. She lowered her voice.

  “Blair, dear, please wait for the moon. Don’t you — won’t you understand I couldn’t tell you simply and solely because I couldn’t?”

  “You could have tried,” he answered.

  “Blair, if you only knew, you wouldn’t say that. While you didn’t love me, but I did love you, there was one thing I couldn’t even try to do. Would you try, now, to make me despise you? If I had tried, you would have thought me quite mad. Even if you hadn’t said so, I would have known what you thought, and I couldn’t have endured that. It was better you should think me venomous, or criminal — oh, anything was better. It isn’t as if I could have made you believe. I couldn’t.. If you hadn’t come here, you would never have seen me again. You would never have known the secret; or I think not.”

  That startled him. He spoke louder. “Do you mean—”

  “Do you mean?” an echo whispered.

  “Oh, no, I would not have killed myself. There was no need. You will understand that presently. But you would never have seen me again.”

  “Wu Tu would have killed you?”

  “Oh, no. Wu Tu wants to learn the secret from me. If she has learned it, then it would have been too late to kill me.”

  “I’m being awfully patient, sweetheart.”

  “I know it. You will soon understand. You will see my difficulty. Father discovered this placed Do you know what his passionate interests were?”

  “Passionate interests!” said an echo. It was like a mocking commentary.

  “More or less. Fourth dimension — ancient magic — showers of fish in deserts — sudden appearance of plants and animals on desert islands — Charles Fort’s books — disappearance without trace of about a hundred thousand people every year — telepathy — clairvoyance — pretty” nearly everything a soldier shouldn’t care a damn about.”

  “True, he should not have been a soldier.”

  “For God’s sake, where is he?”

  “Where is he? Where is he?” an echo whispered. “Wait, dear, for moonlight.”

  “Do you know a way out of these caverns?”

  “No. And when Chetusingh brought me, I didn’t care. It was good-by forever.”

  “But you care now?”

  “Yes. You know it. We’ll find a way out.”

  “Let’s hope Chetusingh will, somehow. He has gone for help. Better hurry if you want to show me secrets. Is your father dead?”

  “Wait, Blair — please wait. I’m doing my best. Wu Tu’s obsession is to do what he did — and return and be wiser than anyone else in the world. Wu Tu knows the legends. She believes what very few people gave father credit for, that he really knew what he was doing. He investigated ancient legends about so-called lost races of giants, that once peopled the world but vanished before history, as we know it, began to be written. He wondered why and how they vanished.

  “He was quite familiar with the writings of Einstein, Jeans, Eddington, Whately Smith, Haldane and men like that. Mathematics was like music to him; he could think in terms of mathematics. It was one of his favorite sayings that matter is nothing but theoretical dimensions in motion. He believed there is truth underlying the legend about how the Atlanteans, whoever they were, destroyed themselves and vanished, from misuse of too much knowledge. Can you imagine then what it meant to him when he discovered this place? And that priestess! Is she not plainly a hierophant? Doesn’t she guard, yet tell in silence, some tremendous secret that the ancients knew? Would he tell about this place? Would he have it plundered like Tut-ank-ahmen’s tomb? Would he have tourists let in?”

  From where they sat on the rock, with her head on his shoulder, he could look straight up through the opening to the sky. He stared at the Pleiades. Then he glanced at the cone, ghostly luminous, that seemed able to steal and concentrate the starlight, like a tiger’s eyes in darkness. “I can understand his keeping it secret,” he answered. “But you?”

  “I can’t remember the time when he and I weren’t friends. He told me everything except about Wu Tu. I couldn’t help him much about this, but I did what I could. You see, I don’t understand mathematics. Symbology seems as difficult to me as Chinese. There were thin metal plates, that he found by opening a gold box. He had to smash the box to open it. The gold was as hard as iron, so the plates got damaged. I helped to photograph them and the photography revealed marks which father concluded were mathematical symbols, dealing with the fourth dimension. He and I came back for the other boxes, which he had left here because it seemed the safest place to leave them. But by that time Wu Tu’s agents had terrorized the Bat-Brahmin and found their way in. They took the boxes. I suppose they melted them.

  “Father nearly went frantic with disappointment. He almost decided to fell the government about it there and then, to, prevent further looting. But it wouldn’t have looked well, would it? He had kept it secret so long and he himself had taken three boxes, and smashed one. The mildest thing the government would be likely to do would be to transfer him and completely close the place, on the ground of religious prejudice. If they did admit anyone, it would be some orthodox expert, who would measure everything and understand nothing. You know the kind of man I mean — one of those mild, safe, unimaginative scientists — the kind of man who says the Great Pyramid of Egypt is a tomb built by Cheops.

  “It seemed better to run risks — take consequences, whatever they might be. It was obvious that the Woman within that cone had been immured, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years ago, by people who knew how to make liquid stone take shape and solidify and become transparent. Also they knew how to harden gold, and how to close up a gold box without leaving a seam. So they probably knew a great deal more than that. Blair, did you ever imagine the fourth dimension?”

  “No,” he said. “Three give me trouble enough!”

  “I can’t imagine a fourth. But I know the theory. Something like, this: One dimension is a straight line, without breadth or depth. If you move that at right angles to itself you get a place of two dimensions, don’t you? You get three dimensions — that is to say a cube — if you move the, plane at right angles to itself. It has depth then, as well as length and breadth. An inhabitant of a two-dimensional plane, supposing there were one, couldn’t see or understand three dimensions. The two-dimensional person couldn’t see the depth, could he? He’d be unconscious of it. Anything lifted off his plane in the direction of the third dimension would go out of his consciousness. He would call that, magic, because he couldn’t explain it. Is that clear?”

  “Go on. I’m listening.”

  “To arrive at the fourth dimension one must now try to imagine the cube moved at right angles to itself. We three-dimensional people find that difficult. Most of us can’t imagine it at all, but mathematicians understand the theory, and they know what some of the properties of the fourth dimension are. The point is, that if anything were tilted, or in some way removed into the fourth dimension, we three dimensional people would no longer be conscious of it. It would look like magic, wouldn’t it? Well — you have heard of the ancient rope trick?”

  “Never met a man who saw it done.” Blair answered. But he glanced at the cone in the midst of the pit, loaded and aglow with starlight. The word impossible died on his lips.

  “Father saw it — twice,” said Henrietta. “He photographed it both times. A man threw a rope in the air. climbed the rope, disappeared, and pulled the rope after him.
It was the same man each time. The photographs showed the man climbing.”

  “Where are the photographs?”

  “Somewhere in the Secret Service files. Father came to the conclusion that the man merely moved away into the fourth dimension — that he knew how to do that, and to return at will — or perhaps he couldn’t help returning. Father developed a theory that perhaps a small percentage of the hundred thousand or more people who disappear unaccountably every year, have slipped or stumbled off into the fourth dimension by accident. It is a theory that can’t be disproved, no matter who ridicules it. And by reversing it, one arrives at another theory, equally impossible to disprove; that vegetation — insects — animals — even human beings, when conditions are right, are sometimes perhaps expelled from the fourth dimension into our three-dimensional existence, by what Charles Fort called teleportation. The theory offers a not impossible explanation for all sorts of phenomena that can’t be explained otherwise.”

  “Dreams, for instance?”

  “Some dreams, not all. Some sorts of visions, too, that have been seen by people whose veracity isn’t in doubt. People on battlefields see visions. There were the Angels of Lyons. Lots of people see, at times, into the fourth dimension. Very religious people sometimes do it. There must be a point or a plane at which dimensions merge or meet or extend into one another. According to father’s theory, light, which nobody really understands, has something to do with it.

  “He made experiments, here, in this cavern, bearing in mind the legends, and wondering why there are no graves and only that one giantess immured in stone. There are skeletons in the crypt, it’s true, where Ranjeet’s queen burned herself and her woman to death; and there are a lew in the tunnel, but those are obviously modern; the Bat-Brahmin admits they are those of people who got in, and were sent in and never got out again.

  “Ever since Ranjeet’s queen cremated herself, if she did, and the heat cracked the sealed wall of the crypt, the Bat-Brahmins have known of these caverns. People who were too persistently inquisitive were admitted, and shut in, to die of hunger or by falling into holes in the dark. That is how the secret has been kept. But father noticed there are no ancient skeletons, although the legend is that a whole race perished in here.”

  “Perished in here!” said an echo.

  Blair glanced again at the opening, high up, inaccessible, through which the Pleiades were twinkling now less brightly in the light of the rising moon. He shuddered but reserved comment, hoping Chetusingh would solve the problem of escape from the caverns. Wu Tu had said she knew no way out.

  “Father decided,” Henrietta went on, “that perhaps those ancients used this cavern as a means of escape into the fourth dimension. Perhaps they didn’t like to die. Perhaps they saw there is no need to die. Perhaps that giantess was somebody who died before her time; she may have been immured, as she stands, as a warning or something like that. Or perhaps she was deliberately killed and set there as a monument to symbolize something or other; for instance, ‘naked we came into the world, naked we leave it.’ He thought of that. It was no use dismissing a thought unexamined; he had to use his imagination if he was to find out anything at all.”

  “Did he discuss all this with you?”

  “Yes. But I wasn’t with him when he stumbled on the right solution. He was in here on a night of full moon, and he had with him a servant who, I think, was one of Wu Tu’s spies, although the man pretended to be deaf and dumb: I always thought he was pretending, but father thought not; that was why he chose him. He and the servant went where I will take you presently. The deaf-and-dumb man — he was a Bombay boy — had hurt himself rather badly. He was only wearing a loin-cloth because of the heat; father always carried a pocket first-aid kit, with iodine and that kind of thing. He signed to him to take off his loin-cloth and show the injury. The servant obeyed. He vanished — instantly.”

  “You mean into the fourth dimension?”

  “That was father’s theory. He could imagine no other.”

  “Did he report the disappearance?”

  “No. Who would have believed it? Wu Tu — I am sure it was she — introduced him to a woman who was in her service. I did not meet. her, but I knew about her. I believe the woman drugged him. I can’t prove it, but I believe he used to tell her all he knew. Anyhow, Wu Tu learned what had happened to the deaf-and-dumb man, and from that time there was no shaking her off. She threatened to have father accused of murder unless he would take her into partnership and tell her all he knew. She threatened to have him accused of looting the caverns.”

  “Why don’t blackmailed people come to the police?” Blair wondered. “What a damned fool!”

  “Was he? I don’t think he cared for the blackmail at all. He made no bargain with Wu Tu; He knew she would not dare to accuse him, because it was she and her agents who had looted the gold. What he decided to do was to come back and look for the servant, even if he had to follow him into the fourth dimension.”

  “Did he think he could bring him back?”

  “He didn’t know.”

  “And you agreed?”

  “I wasn’t asked. He went and did it. What would have been the use of my telling you, for instance, what I thought had happened? Would you have believed me? You believe me now. But would you have believed me then?”

  “If you weren’t consulted, how do you know what he did?”

  “I will show you presently. But I should have been very stupid not to guess what, he had done. He left a note for me saying where he was going, and reminding me that he had already conveyed his property to me by deed of trust. He asked me to burn the note and say nothing. L did. We had often talked over what it might mean to step off into the fourth dimension, and perhaps meet each other there.

  “Neither of us ever had the least doubt of a life after death. But we agreed in not liking the prospect of death, it’s such a messy and sometimes such a cruel business. I like life. I love it. But the thought of life in love with you. and you indifferent, was such a drab, unlovely prospect that I made up my mind to follow father if I could get into the caverns. I had been unable to get in lately. So when Chetusingh brought me a message, that I thought couldn’t possibly be from you, I pretended to believe, and I came like a shot,”

  “Like a shot!” said a whispering echo.

  “Wu Tu wants to follow him?”

  “I think she wants to look into the fourth dimension. Wu Tu craves power. She believes she can learn black magic. She believes in it, and I believe she’s afraid of it.”

  “Yes, she does, and she is.” said Blair. “Well, she’s afraid of prison. She’s afraid of death. She’ll learn all about both, if we ever gel out of here alive. She’ll have to swing tor killing Zaman Ali — not. that he didn’t deserve it. I feel sorry for her. But when a woman like Wu Tu slips up, she has too many debtors and rivals and other sorts of deadly enemies to have a chance to escape the gallows. I know many a worse blackguard than Wu Tu who won’t get hanged, but who will laugh with relief when it happens to her.”

  “You’re not vindictive?”

  “No. Vindictive people are all contemptible, and most of them are self-righteous swine. Wu Tu is about the opposite of my idea of a desirable, but if I could. I’d save her for the sake of what she has taught me, about crooks and half a hundred other things.”.

  “Look!” said Henrietta.

  The rind of the moon rose golden in the gap, and the Pleiades vanished. The entire cavern became filled with dim light: but the great cone glittered in the midst as if cold fire burned within. The woman remained invisible, but there were swirling shapes, like opal clouds, inside the cone. They changed each second, with each fractional change of the moon’s height.

  “Wait!” said Henrietta.

  “Wait! Wait!” echoes whispered.

  They stood up, hand in hand. Second by second the cone grew brighter, until its summit glowed like molten silver — changing — changing — the glow descending. Slowly, as the full moon s
tole upward past the brim of the gap, the entire cone grew suddenly silver — and then suddenly transparent. The silver vanished. It gleamed pure crystal. The giantess stared forth like a splendid statue, dead and yet strangely lifelike.

  “Come,” said Henrietta.

  “Come!” an echo whispered in Blair’s ear. But he stared and stood still. It was nearly a minute before he yielded to the tug of Henrietta’s hand and followed her. Even the echoes of their footsteps were like sounds in a dream.

  There was no longer need for the electric torch. Moonlight filled the cavern: the cone diffused it, conquering all shadows except in the segment behind the mound: even there it was not totally dark. Henrietta led into the shadow until the cone stood straight between them and the moon, and they could see the Woman, weirdly radiant. She looked alive, in motion, walking forward; tired eyes refused to believe she was not moving. From beneath, at that angle, she seemed to be staring upward at the ledge that surrounded the pit.

  At the rear of the mound, illuminated dimly by the all-pervading glow, a flight of wide stone steps ascended fifty or sixty feet to a narrow egg-shaped opening. Steps and opening were probably invisible from the ledge: they curved on the face of the mound and were flanked by a natural balustrade of cream-hued stalagmite, worn soap-smooth where ancient hands, ascending and descending, had pressed on its upper surface. They were irregular steps: no two were alike: several of them were three feet higher than the step below. It was a stairway for a giant, worn on the surface by ages of use.

  They ascended together, laboring up hand-in-hand, until they stood exhausted before the egg-shaped opening. Its small end was downward, and around its edge were vaguely snake-like tracings on the stone. Within was darkness. Blair switched on the torch. They ascended a smooth-walled passage, ten feet high, four feet wide, that spiraled gradually upward, worn along its midst into a shallow trough by feet that must always have marched in Indian file.