The minister fanned himself languidly with his pan-ama hat. "You are right there," he said inscrutably. "Too much knowledge is a bad thing, in more ways than one."
There was a muffled knock on the door. The director interrupted his handkerchief-manipulating long enough to call out, "Pose." The door swung back and Fredericks stood there between two guards. He seemed lost in thought, his eyes directed forward but at a moderately downward inclination that struck the floor just short of where the two officials sat. He failed to raise them in company with the opening of the door, which peeled a layer of shadow from his face, brightening it by that much. There was no pain in his face; it looked younger, if anything, as when all experience has been wiped out.
He had retained his own shirt and trousers, but they were discolored to a dirty greenish-gray. Straw slippers replaced his shoes. The buttons were gone from the cuffs of his shirt and they gaped open around his wrists like great bells, with his bony wrists the clappers.
They brought him forward a pace or two and sat him on a straight-backed chair that stood just inside the door. Then they stood one on each side of him, without taking their hands from his shoulders.
"Good evening, my friend," the minister purred sardonically. "You perhaps remember me? The department chief who takes bribes? Who misinforms his government about the localities under his jurisdiction?"
Fredericks didn't seem to see him. It was as though his eyes refused him further service. They maintained that lowered dullness, showed no cognizance of the room or anyone in it.
The minister extended one hand and snapped his fingers sharply directly under Fredericks' face. The eyes never even blinked. They gave no reaction at all.
The minister turned to the director inquiringly.
"It is no use," the latter explained. "His mind is gone. He cannot understand what you say to him."
"How long has he been this way?"
"On and on for about two weeks now. The lucid spells are becoming less and less frequent. I think they will disappear entirely in a little while. Of course, we prefer them this way. They give much less trouble."
"And how long do they last, once they are like this?"
"Sometimes many years. Sometimes just a few months." The director was watching the minister closely, as if trying to read his thoughts.
"But the expense, in such cases, must be considerable," the minister protested virtuously.
"It is true, they keep on eating, and keep on taking up space. We try to keep our bills down as much as we can."
"I beheve in economy," the minister let him know firmly. "I will not only fight extravagance in every way, but I will even go so far as to reward economy, in certain justifiable cases."
The director looked at him hard and long, through his rimless glasses. Then he dropped his eyes demtirely, in perfect understanding.
The minister got up and went over and stood by Fredericks. He leaned down and brought his eyes to within ' inches of the other man's, as if he were trying to peer into his very soul. "Nothing there," he remarked. He shook him by the shoulder slightly.
Fredericks spoke dully. "Baltimore. Stop them in Baltimore. Look for them in every hotel."
The minister straightened slowly, drew back. He was smiling, not altogether displeasedly.
The director made a sign. They stood Fredericks up, and the door closed. The chair stood there empty. There wasn't even the sound of a footfall. He had gone like the ghost he already was.
The director was watching his visitor closely for signs of approval. Or, perhaps, concrete indications of them.
"Satisfactory, sir?"
"Very." The minister smiled thinly. "I shall recommend you highly in my next report. In the meantime, distribute this among your—" He opened a gold-rimmed alligator billfold and took out several banknotes of large denomination. "Well, put it wherever it is most needed at the moment," he concluded.
The director put it in his inside pocket, right over his own heart.
"And now," said the minister amiably, "I think I will go over to the jail and see how the other one is getting along."
"Bring in a pitcher of cold well water," the minister ordered, in the prison commandant's oflBce. "Have it in a crystal pitcher, so that the water can be seen clearly through it. And an empty glass."
"Is this for the senor ministro?"
"Oh, no, no," the minister said disclaimingly. "I never drink water. This is for—interrogation purposes." He made a steeple of his hands. The large emerald on one of them gave out with a flash of green. "You have followed my instructions?"
"Si, senor ministro. He has had no water for three days. And the food has all been picante, highly seasoned, as you indicated. Chile, red peppers—"
"Bueno. This is a difficult case, you understand. It requires unorthodox methods."
Cotter was brought in between two guards. He had shrunk to waist-height, legs out behind him, dragging like a two-finned tail.
"Inmate Juan Gonzaga," reported one of the guards.
"—the second," supplied the commandant.
The minister waved his hand carelessly. "You don't have to be so technical. It is no one's business if there once was another inmate called the same."
Cotter's lips had a peculiar purplish color. They were thick and gave him almost a Negroid appearance. His tongue, which continually flickered forth, was swollen.
"Water," he said huskily.
"Now hold him carefully, while I put the necessary questions," the minister instructed.
He poured a glassful of water with painstaking precision. Not a drop too much, not a drop too little; not a drop spilled. The glass immediately steamed over with the coolness of its new-found contents. It became attractive by that fact alone.
The minister allowed it to stand there, midway between them.
Cotter's already half-folded knees gave a still further dip.
"Just a drop. Oh, for the love of God—just on the tip of my tongue. Just one drop."
The minister sandwiched his hands across his own breastbone. "Now tell me. You have forgotten your Spanish yet?" The question of course, was put in the English language.
"Yes. Yes. All of it. Every word." "You are sure?"
"I swear," Cotter panted. "Every word." "What does si mean?"
Cotter shook his head violently. "I don't know. I've forgotten."
The minister craftily edged the glass forward a little, with the back of his folded knuckles. "Quiere heher?" he coaxed dulcetly.
Cotter moaned, shuddered all up and down his length, closed his eyes, didn't answer.
"Tiene sed? Tome," the minister invited silkily. He edged the glass forward a little more.
Cotter grimaced, began to cry soundlessly, his eyes creased into slits.
The minister picked up the glass, came around the desk with it, held it in front of Cotter's face.
"Pero tenga, homhre," he insisted, as if growing slightly impatient with a refusal he could not understand. "Aqui estd."
A sob of helplessness floated in Cotter's throat, like a gas bubble, and burst with a little clucking sound.
"Let him come forward a little," the minister instructed the two guards holding him, with a wink. "Slowly. He cannot reach it from where you are holding him."
But as they did so, he withdrew the glass, so that the distance between remained the same.
Cotter was sticking out his tongue, desperately trying to lick the side of it with that.
The minister dexterously kept a distance of approximately a quarter of an inch, or perhaps it was an eighth between the two. He had a very steady hand and eye.
"Say just one word, say the Spanish word for water, and you can have this. One word is not much, one word is not a whole language."
"Water," said Cotter insanely. "Water."
"In Spanish. What is it called in Spanish?"
"I don't know! I can't! I've forgotten!"
"It's here, so near you. It's yours. Just say it in Spanish."
"Agu
a!" bellowed Cotter, agonized.
The minister slowly tilted the glass in front of his very face. All the water ran out of it in a thin, even column, and splashed to the floor. Cotter hung limp in the guard's grip, as though he had gone down with the water.
"That was one word too many. You still haven't forgotten. Take him back to his cell. Even if it takes five years, you'll stay here until you have forgotten every last word."
Chapter Twenty-two
The outlet from the rock tomb was less secretive than the entrance to it had been. Here was no mere crevice with a detached rock slab to conceal it, but an imposing foursquare portal, hewn out of the living rock and faced with deftly joined, intricately carved stone blocks. A well-worn path led down from it, losing itself in the panorama of the troughlike valley below, with diaphanous mountain outlines enclosing it on the far side.
This valley was longer by far than it was wide, both its extremities lost to view completely.
From up above where they were emerging now, a good third of the way up the mountainside, the bird's-eye view it presented was of flat, carpet-like green jungle. In one place, scattered about like grains of rice, were a handful of brownish-white kernels that must have been buildings or the ruins of buildings imbedded in the jungle matting. One, sharper in outline than the rest, as if pyramidal, thrust upward like a tooth. About these distant granules the green was lighter in texture than elsewhere, as if the jungle were perhaps thinned by patches of cultivation.
They were in the open again now. There was still sun, there was still sky. But that was no conclusion to him. There had been sun and sky in dim, distant times too. He didn't want strange suns and skies, he wanted his own, the sky he belonged under. He was cold, in the full glare of the sun. Long after they had left the rocky tomb behind, he was still cold from what he had seen in there, numbed, his body and his heart refusing to warm.
They made their way down on this side in the same order in which they had made the ascent on the other, and the long journey between through the tunnel. Still single file. She was in the litter again, heading the procession, and alongside it, trudging terrifiedly along, one hand lashed to its nearest pole, the slim figure of Chris. She was right there beside her, Chris was, head bobbing along next to her every step of the way, and that Mitty did not once turn toward her, take any notice of the agonies of fright the younger girl must be undergoing, was to him even more heinous than his own sudden oblivion in her consciousness. But then, the sixteenth-century barbarian, he thoughtbitterly, what pity could she be expected to know?
The trail, leveling off gradually to the horizontal, entered walls of jungle for a while, virgin and almost solid in texture, like a woven green, brown, and black matting.
The mountains behind them slowly thinned, those on the opposite side slowly thickened, as they toiled toward the midpoint of the valley floor. The sun was straight overhead now, as noon approached, and still they trudged on.
Then little by little a change began to occur in the thickets about them. More and more frequently they began to pass fungus-green, ant-swarming monoliths, toppled blocks or hewn stone overthrown by upthrusting trees, others still standing upright in the shape of sightless doorways, with no walls remaining around or behind them. Vines and creepers draped from them, and occasionally snakes coiled on them in little knots, which unraveled and disappeared when the party passed too close. And still in other places, where the remains had become submerged entirely in the earth and no longer thrust above its surface, there were curious rounded mounds, like unburst air bubbles forcing their way up through molten lead or some other heavy element, to show what lay buried beneath.
The dead traces of some long-lost city, which must have once in its day been a rival to Cuzco and Palenque for size and splendor. This band was a little living core still remaining to it, a handful of living inhabitants still left to thread their way through its erased causeways, like an ember that still remains alive through presistent fanning in a pit of dead ashes.
Ahead, presently, a structure began to rear, topping the ebbing jungle sky line, a sort of tower or tiered edifice. It was the thing that had appeared like a jutting tooth when first sighted from the mountainside behind them. A temple, or some central structure of importance. The walls were stone up to a jagged, uncertain line three quarters of the way up, then finished or repaired with sun-baked mud that showed chocolate-colored against the early-afternoon light, as though there were no longer sufficient labor or ingenuity available to quarry any more of the immense original blocks of stone that had gone into its construction, or even set back in place those that had toppled down.
About its base, as the jungle finally receded from under their feet like an outgoing green tide, were set gray-white sugar lumps—lesser buildings. And about these in turn, piebald squares of cultivation—maize with which present-day mouths were fed, flax by which they clothed their bodies. Little thatched huts and lean-tos dotted them; not ruins now, but huts that were lived in.
The surrounding buildings became the size of child's building blocks now, with black ants moving about among them, coming forward to meet the procession, to form around it and accompany it onward. Tillers of the soil, shaven-headed priests in flowing linen robes, even women. It was as though an entire cross-section of the original race that had built the city had remained alive to people its vestiges, but in vastly diminished numbers, perhaps one out of every ten or twenty that had once swarmed here. They were a dying race. Nature was to have the last word after all, as it always does.
They stopped and broke formation in a sort of plaza or central space of hard-packed earth in the very center of all the buildings, with no sprout of green showing any longer, the jungle held back at a distance by communal life. On one side of this the temple now bulked chflFlike against the sky, dwarfing everything else. Buildings of lesser height completed the enclosure on the other three sides.
The litter was lowered and she stepped from it. Slowly but with sureness of step, like one who returns to a place that she knows well, to a place where she belongs, she moved across the open space toward the looming temple walls. She turned her face neither to the left nor to the right. Her eyes were steady on the black-lined orifice waiting to receive her. She moved so slowly he had lots of time to look at her and take farewell. Her shadow followed her across the sun-white ground like a little pool of dark water. Which he wondered, was the shadow, which the actuality?
Priests, welcoming her into their midst, had made a little lane on each side of her. She entered this and her form was hidden from him, save for a flash of white peering between each two of them as she moved along. But they were old and curved, no longer held themselves straight, and her head still topped theirs for the brief span that remained before she reached the entryway.
A moment longer he saw her like this, a moment only. He saw the side of a face that he thoughthad been that of a wife. Familiar in its strangeness, strange in its fa-miharty. Eyes that he knew so well, that didn't know him any more. Mouth that he'd kissed a hundred times, dark scintillating hair that he'd caressed. What were they, what had they been? A moment longer, and then she was gone. The stone lips of the temple entry had swallowed her whole. A peculiar empty feeling took hold of him, the sort of sensation one has at a final, irrevocable parting-
That isn't Mitty, he thought, who just went in there. Where is Mitty, what became of her? Where did I lose her?
The priests turned and filed in after her, the last two dragging between them the resisting, cowering little form of Chris, who had been freed from her bondage beside the litter and turned over to them by the warrior escort. The forbidden entryway gaped empty once more. The daughter of the sun had returned to her own.
Chapter Twenty-Three
A MURKY grotto-green twilight was the most that ever entered their dungeon, even at high noon on the brightest of days. It was below ground level for about three quarters of its height, with just a single squat orifice, a sort of horizontal slit, high up
on the wall near its jimc-ture with the ceiling. This was on the outer side. Then on the opposite side, the inner side, there was a wooden barrier or sHde arrangement that was lashed fast when it was secured, and heaved aside (they did not seem to have discovered the use of hinges or tlie wheel or pulleys) when entry was desired to bring them food. In this there was in turn a small squared opening through which they could be watched without the necessity for dislodging the entire cumbersome panel.
Here to this place they were brought, and here in this' place they were left to their misery and despair.
"But why'd they bring us here?" Mallory kept asking over and over, the first few days. "Why didn't they kill us right away, down at the finca? What are they saving us for? What are they going to do to us, now that they've brought us all the way back?"
After a while he stopped asking. Jones couldn't give him the answer; he didn't know it himself. He used to sigh patiently and turn his face away against the waU, as a mute hint to the other to stop tormenting the two of them.
He knew the thought that was in the back of Mallory's mind, because it was also the thought that was in tbe back of his own mind: torture. But he didn't dare to bring it forth into the open between them. That was why he didn't answer the questions; that was why Mallory finally stopped asking them, too. Sooner or later, something unspeakable—
Each was lashed by his left wrist, by means of thongs, to iron rings bedded in the soHd masonry of the walls. These rings or hoops had already been there when they were first thrust into the place, showing that it must have formerly been used for keeping captives in, just as it was now being used once more. There were about a dozen rings all told, riveted about three sides of the enclosure. All but the two they were affixed to were idle. Looking at them, he used to wonder how many human lives, trapped, held fast, as they were now, each one of them had to its credit.
They could stand upright, it was true, and even advance a short distance out from the wall toward the center of the cell, but only by dropping one shoulder lower than the other, for the hoops were imbedded at a low level, so that the only position they were allowed to maintain without bodily distortion was sitting, backs to the wall. At night they could lie down flat on their backs, but only so long as they stretched their legs out toward the center, at right angles to the wall. If they attempted to he parallel with it, they interfered with one another, the hoops being set too close together.
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