by Don Wilcox
“‘What’s the matter, Captain? Have you run out of orders?”
When Allan didn’t answer, but only scowled, Sue wondered, had he become ill? Something was wrong.
“Can’t you get your bearings?”
“That should be the pass, dead ahead . . . but there’s been a change!”
There was something in Allan’s tone that reminded her of alarm bells. Something shrill. She looked to Buni. The bright-eyed little fellow was taking it all in.
“Check my harness, Jimmy,” Allan said suddenly. The two men had donned their parachutes, and now they gave each other a final checking over. Sue was scared. But she mustn’t let them know. She was scared because of the strange way Allan was acting. Until this minute she had believed he knew exactly where he was going and why. But now—
He leaned forward, his narrowed eyes combing the massive peaks that turned slowly beneath their plane.
“I remember these mountains perfectly,” he said, “But where the devil did that come from?”
“What?”
“That tall spire of rock with the glass eye.”
“What tall spire?”
“That shaft straight ahead. You’d better swing to the right. Quick! To the right!”
Sue obeyed without asking questions. Then to her consternation, a wave of colored light passed over the nose of the plane, and her own hands at the controls caught the swift change of colors. She looked to Allan. The lines of his tense face were highlighted with purple—and then pink—then orange. A whole rainbow of colors shone in from some unseen source.
“Don’t you see it?” Allan shouted.
“Look—that way! What a sight! What a hellova sight!”
Then the colored light was gone, and again they were flying through the clear blue air among sun-tinted clouds.
Allan bent to the window, trying to look back over the wing to the rear of the plane.
“I don’t get it,” Sue said.
Allan was as breathless as if he had been kicked in the chest by an elephant. His words were half whispers.
“Nobody will ever believe . . . that we . . . that we saw such a sight . . . They just don’t . . . they could never make diamonds that big! Not even imitations! It’s unearthly! Where do you suppose it came from?”
Sue couldn’t answer, for she hadn’t seen a thing. The light, yes. The source of the light, no. And what was this talk about a big diamond? She was exasperated, and she said so.
“If you’ll please tell us what you’re raving about, Captain, I’m sure we’ll all appreciate it”
“You mean you didn’t see that jewel as big as six billboards?”
“I saw!” Buni piped up, his black eyes dancing with excitement. “I know what it is.”
But Sue knew that Jimmy hadn’t seen it, for his face wore the bewildered sag of a month-old jack-o’-lantern.
“Where did you see this?” Sue asked sharply. “Back in New York in Times Square?”
“It was there, just this minute, as plain as day,” Allan snapped. “Are you blind’ ?”
“It was where?”
“In the side of that tall shaft of rock we passed.”
“I didn’t even see any shaft of rock,” Sue protested.
“Neither did I,” said Jimmy.
Then Allan gulped. “You mean—wait a minute! You skimmed past so close that our left wing missed it by about ten feet. You didn’t know?”
“Now he tells me!” Sue said. “Why don’t I faint?”
“You saw it, didn’t you, Buni?”
“Sure,” the little fellow said. “That is the big window which the evil Scravvzek uses to see the world.”
All at once Allan was a man afire with an inspiration to act. He ordered Sue to circle back. He appeared to know exactly where he wanted to go. And, to Sue’s mounting consternation, he gauged all his directions by the shaft of rock that wasn’t there!
He was talking fast. He was making ready to leap out the door. He was dispensing farewell advice right and left. He wouldn’t take Jimmy along, he suddenly announced.
“You stay with Sue, Jimmy. I’ll take the jump alone. I’ll find your chief for you, Buni, and give him the token. So you stick close to Yippee. She’ll need native help servicing her plane.” Then he turned to Sue once again. “Don’t wait more than two days for me at Bunjojop, Yippee. If I don’t get back to the village on foot by that time, just cross me off your books.”
“Meaning what?”
“Never mind. I’ll try to square this with you in time—but don’t wait.”
“I’ll wait a week,” Sue said stubbornly.
“Don’t do it. I may be here a long time.”
Jimmy put in a protest. “Don’t say it that way, Captain.”
“That’s the way it is, Jimmy. I’ve just had a crazy hunch that fortune teller was right. Those eighty dead men may not be dead after all. I’ll know more as soon as I float down to the base of this—more elevation, Yippee. You’ve only got fifty feet clearance.”
Sue gulped. “Clearance from what?”
“The shaft with the eye. The shaft that isn’t there . . . Here we come. So long, friends. Watch everything!”
Allan opened the door and leaped. A moment later his parachute had ballooned out full and he was floating down over the purple valley like a lazy yellow cloud.
Sue’s knuckles were tight and she felt the clammy perspiration on her forehead. She echoed Allan’s final words in a tone tinged with sarcasm.
“He says, ‘Watch everything!’ That’s swell advice for us poor folks who can’t see anything—except what’s there. Hey! Jimmy! Where are you going?”
Jimmy was at the door. “I figure he needs watchin’ more ‘n anything.”
Sue shrugged and gave him a little farewell salute. “I knew you’d do it. Happy landings!”
“It was darned nice knowin’ you, Miss Yippee.” Then Jimmy opened the door and jumped.
Sue circled gathering altitude as a precaution against unseen dangers. Buni, pressing his nose against the window, supplied in his broken English a regular radio narrator’s description of the descent of the two parachutes.
“They pass through colored light again.”
Yes, Sue agreed. She too saw the rainbow hues sweeping over the billowing parachutes.
“Now they go down, and down, and down, and down—”
“All right. Don’t be a stuck record.”
“—and down and down. They sink very slowly. Deep valley down there under the tall mountain.”
“Now don’t you start seeing it again.”
“I see into it,” Buni said, quite self-assured.
“You see all the people in it?”
“Now stop that; Buni! Just tell me where our two men are. I’ve lost sight.”
“They fall down into mountain. It swallow them up.”
“Buni!”
The little fellow was thoroughly absorbed in what he seemed to be seeing, far down in the canyon below the plane.
“They still falling inside the hollow mountain, The people down there don’t see. Nobody sees them come down.”
“Stop it! Stop it!” Sue commanded. “I’m taking you right home. And if you say another word of foolishness, I’ll wash your mouth with soap! You understand?”
Quick as a wink the dark-skinned boy shifted his tactics in the interests of safety.
“I don’t see anything more.” Then he added innocently, “I don’t see captain landing on that big red floor inside the mountain. I don’t see Jimmy land beside him—”
But by this time the plane had swooped down over the bank of mountain peaks on its way back to Bunjojop, and all of the things that Buni “didn’t see” were lost in the distance.
CHAPTER IX
The world beneath the radiant mountain was running true to form on this particular morning. The sunshine streamed in through the transparent sides of the great mountain shaft, which was neither stone nor glass, though it appeared to possess some of
the qualities of both. The material was translucent. In form it resembled sides of a gigantic candle adorned with streams of melted tallow frozen in fantastic designs. A thousand hues and tones were set ablaze by the morning sun and the light shone through to the vast spaces within. Across the red stone floor these patterns of light played their own fanciful games of crisscrossing, intensifying each other, cancelling each other, racing each ether toward any chance goal, such as the white stone monument in the center of the floor, or one of the circular benches along the wall, or the sandaled foot of some dignitary who stood with a group of his fellows to discuss their favorite theme of how to hasten the self-destruction of the world.
In the presence of all this splendor of colored light and natural architecture, it might seem incongruous that a guard, on duty at the foot of the shaft, should find no better occupation for his eyes than to close them in sleep.
The stupid fellow didn’t sleep all the time, however. In his wakeful moments he drank. And when he had drunk deeply, he could again sleep with little likelihood of being disturbed.
This morning, as the men of the hollow mountain began to stir about, the guard under the shaft was aware that they were passing with more than ordinary briskness. In one of the adjoining halls there was to be a meeting this afternoon, and this event was already causing a flurry of footsteps.
The guard snuggled closer to his carved stone seat. He had spent some hours of honest toil, it may be said to his credit, in shaping the soft, sandy stone into a saucer-shaped lounge that accommodated his rotundity; and he had furnished the seat with a covering, upholstered with fiber from the African village of Bunjojop.
The room was carved out of stone, whose overhead curves helped to resound his gentle snores. More or less unconsciously he reveled in this resonant music, for it added depth to his pleasure of sleeping.
He was, officially speaking, a guard. He was engaged in watching the shaft, and the duty might have been an important one, if there had been any regular traffic from the outside world. The shaft served an important function in this under-mountain realm. It might appear to be a huge tooth-shaped mountain peak. But by the very nature of its construction, it remained an open and a penetrable thing.
The shaft was a freak of nature. In terms of everyday concepts of three dimensions and solid substances, the shaft had no definable existence: and some scientists on the outside might have amassed arguments to prove that it simply did not exist either in time or space. The dwellers of these depths, however, who had come through death to rediscover a strange sort of life in these hidden palaces of rock, had adjusted themselves to things for which the accepted sciences could not account. They themselves might feel uneasy over the lack of rationalizations to explain themselves and their fate. But after all, here they were, dwelling in their own separate world-and liking it. And they could hardly deny their own existence.
They knew that, in the nature of things, the one passage through which visitors might enter, unobserved, was this penetrable shaft—this tall towering mountain peak.
Hence they had placed the guard in charge. Originally they had charged him, on pain of death, never to allow a stranger to pass through this vertical portal without reporting him to the Scravvzek’s high officers.
The guard had always privately scoffed at this warning. Along with the other seventy-nine men who comprised the evil Scravvzek’s society, he had already withstood death. That threat could never frighten him again.
During his two years of standing guard (or, more accurately, sitting guard) he had never had a customer.
It was still early morning when he was aroused by a superior officer who stopped to poke fun at him.
“Any invaders yet, General Snoozy?”
“Huh?”
“Too bad you’re kept so busy. Need any help?”
“Umh.” The guard yawned and would have closed his eyes, but the superior officer prodded him.
“There’s a demonstration this afternoon. I came to tell you, you could desert your post long enough to attend. Take a good half-day off and see the show.”
“What show?”
“What show! Go to sleep, snoozy. The mountain could cave in and you wouldn’t know the difference.”
Snoozy roused up and registered ambition. “Wanna drink?”
“Don’t you ·know what’s coming this afternoon? They’re poisoning the tribe.”
“Poison? Who?”
“The top staff. They’ve got the tribal pojaks already poisoned to the point of destruction. Now the tribe has been herded in, and they’ll get their first taste this afternoon. You can watch it happen over at the Glass Arena.”
The guard mumbled a question about the poison. Where would the top staff get any poison down in these mountains?
His superior officer laughed. “Not that kind of poison, you clod. This is Scravvzek poison—the kind he’s been using for centuries. It ought to be good sport, watching the whole tribe break down under it.”
The superior officer started to explain how the top staff had begun the experiment. But just then the sound of voices from the one of the wide stairways caused him to fall silent. He stood back in the shadows of the guard’s alcove to watch the approach of a party.
“It’s the chief of Bunjojop,” he whispered.
The sleepy guard opened his eyes for a bleary glimpse.
Four of the Scravvzek’s high officers—White Sharks, as they were popularly known—were accompanying the Chief, and they were acting the part of cordial hosts.
The chief of Bunjojop wasn’t enjoying it. In his own language he was saying to himself, “What are these schemers going to do with my people?”
He was a proud person. As a rule, white men had respected his dignity and his integrity. He had the solid backing of his provincial government. His own tribe had always been one hundred percent loyal. They never questioned his decisions.
“But what have the tribal gods done to me?” he wailed inwardly. He had been deceived into ordering his whole tribe into this hidden mountain retreat—and what was going to become of them?
This place was strange to him. All his life he had heard legends of the evil Scravvzek that dwelt somewhere in the towering mountains. Now, within the space of three days, the mountains at the very back door of his village had opened like a hungry mouth, and he and his tribe, had walked in. What did it mean?
Marching along with his four escorts, the chief was inwardly rebelling at every step. Suddenly he stopped and whirled about. His spinning caused streaks of light, reflected from the tiny mirrors in his high brass crown, to flash around the wide room.
“Walking too fast for you, chief?” one of the White Sharks asked. “Short-winded, eh? Are all of you African kings built like beer barrels?”
“He’s looking for someone,” another White Shark suggested, adjusting his starchy white tunic. “What do you need, chief? Your whole tribe’s down here inside the Scravvzek mountain. You know that, or at least you should. All of you came together except the tribal pojaks who were already here.”
“One boy is missing,” the chief said, restraining the anxiety in his low, mellow voice.
“How could that be? We had you count them personally when they came in.”
“I sent one out.”
This admission jolted the White Sharks. The chief felt their glares, and he knew he was no guest, but a prisoner.
“Oh, so you sent one out! Why?
Asking for help? Sending a message, no doubt. To whom?”
“I only sent for a token-a gift for the Scravvzek.”
“Oh, a gift.” The White Sharks, exchanging glances, shook their heads. The Scravvzek wouldn’t be bought off with any gifts, not if they knew his purpose correctly.
“What is your gift?” One of them asked.
“A coin with an eagle.”
“Gold?”
“Silver. It is American and it has magic power. It makes friends for me.”
“Ho! He must mean an American doll
ar. Where did you get it, Chief?”
“Have you heard of Captain Burgess?”
“Heard of him? . Hell, yes. He was the one that drove us into this devilish mess. So that’s where your dollar came from! Well, take our word for it, Chief, the captain is thousands of ‘miles away. He hasn’t any power over us. Hell, he wouldn’t weigh a grain of sand to the Scravvzek!”
The chief felt that the last solid ground was melting away beneath his feet, figuratively speaking. But he straightened, drew a proud breath, and uttered a speech, partly in English and partly in his native tribal language, expressing the hope that his tribe would be released soon.
“We’ll give you your dues, all right,” one of the White Sharks said with a wink. “But don’t be counting on any magic coins to buy you out of our good graces. An American dollar doesn’t have any hocus pocus down here. Come on.”
“I hope my boy comes back safe,” said the chief, glancing back toward the stairs.
They ushered him on.
The officer who had listened from the guard’s alcove chuckled over the delicious earful he had picked up in passing. He went on his way, and the guard, after treating himself to a drink, resumed his sleep.
The big empty hall beneath the mountain shaft was again quiet.
CHAPTER X
The parachute had opened like a full blown rose and Allan Burgess was descending slowly. Already the roar of the plane was fading away into the distance.
The mountain air was clear and cold, and Allan inhaled deeply of the thin odors of frosty ozone. His breathing was paced by excitement and eagerness that had been accumulating ever since his visit with Madam Lasanda. At last the moment of discovery was near at hand.
Excitement was an emotional state he preferred never to reveal in the presence of others. It could too easily be mistaken for panic. He well remembered the day that he had forced a hundred men up through these rugged mountains. It had been a superhuman task to keep them moving along the suicidal trail. Their fears had seemingly paralyzed them, and at times mysterious invisible forces had tried to turned them back. With almost superhuman will power he had driven them on. Those who had gone wild with terror and had tried to dodge past him he had shot dead. Ten of them. And seventy others had unaccountably gone down, over the precipice, as if dropping from the side of a sinking ship.