Collected Short Fiction, page 151
“I’m not going with you,” Price told him.
“What!”
“I’m going to try for the mountain on my own. Going to make that bird in die blue clothes guide me in. We’ll hide around here until he can walk.”
“But, Mr. Durand,” the old man cried, “I—I don’t like to see you try it, sir. I wouldn’t trust that fellow. He’s a—a snake!”
“I don’t trust him. But he’s the only shot.”
Sam Sorrows stared at him, grinned and rose and shook his hand.
“Luck, Mr. Durand. A crazy thing to do, sir. But you might make it. I’ll leave you the water-skin, and the grub. And you might find something more up in the trenches.”
Half an hour later the tank went lumbering back toward the oasis. Fastening a halter-rope about his prisoner’s neck, Price loosed his ankles and conducted him to a hiding-place among the tumbled masses of lava half a mile down the wadi. Kreor limped and grumbled, but he could walk.
Fastening him again, Price returned and searched the abandoned battlefield for food and water, finding all he could carry.
For two days Price kept the Arab bound, nursing his wounds with painful care. On the late afternoon of the second day, when Price was sleeping, the man worked loose his bonds.
Disturbed by some obscure warning of danger, perhaps some faint sound of the snake-man’s footsteps or his breathing, Price looked up to see Kreor standing above him, a jagged mass of lava raised in both hands.
18. Frost of Gold
SNATCHING at the ancient battle-ax, which he kept always beside him, Price rolled over, away from the boulder in whose shadow he had been lying. The stone came crashing down where his head had been.
With a single gliding movement, Price was on his feet, swinging up the ax. The Arab made to leap forward, then, realizing his helplessness against the ax, stopped and folded his arms and stood staring at Price with mad hatred in his eyes.
Resolutely, Price met his eyes, motionless.
“Slay me, Iru,” the Arab muttered. “Strike, that I may be gathered into the abyss of the snake.”
“Nothing doing. But tonight you are going to take me to Aysa. If you are able to murder me you are able to walk. We have plenty of moonlight. If you try any tricks it will be time enough to split your head.”
The man assented with an apparent meekness that Price found disturbing.
“Very well, Iru. Since the gods awakened you, I shall not attempt to betray you again.”
Price knotted the halter-rope about the man’s neck, to preclude any attempt at flight. They finished the remaining water and food, and then set off across the lava-fields, toward the basaltic mass of the mountain, looming dark in the moonlight.
It was five miles directly to the mountain; perhaps eight or nine by the route they took around to the north cliffs. Price held the rope, forced his guide to walk in front. The man limped somewhat, and it was past midnight when they reached the precipice.
The moon was low; it was dark in the shadow of the mountain. It would be impossible, Kreor said, to make the climb in darkness. They lay down to rest on bare lava. The Arab breathed loudly, and seemed to sleep, while Price kept his grasp on the ax, and fought slumber.
He held the rope tight. Toward dawn it loosened; he knew Kreor was creeping upon him, and jerked the rope. The Arab sprawled on the rock beside him, protesting that he had risen merely to stretch his muscles.
With the first light of day they started inching a perilous way up a narrow chimney between basalt columns. The snake-man went first, Price following, the rope tied around his waist so that he could use both hands.
Half an hour of difficult climbing found them three hundred feet up the face of an almost vertical cliff. Kreor, above, gained a narrow edge where he could stand with hands free, and began a furious attempt to untie the knot at his throat.
Cunningly, he had chosen a moment when Price required all his fingers and toes to cling to the rock. It was a desperate race, with life for the stake; the rope untied, Kreor could readily push Price to a fall of several hundred feet.
Price drew himself up with reckless haste. The Arab loosened the first knot; but Price, in anticipation of something of the kind, had tied several.
At last, trembling and panting from his effort, Price reached a crevice where he could free a hand. He seized the rope, jerked on it, almost precipitating the snake-man from the ledge.
“Lead on,” Price commanded. “And keep the rope tight.”
Snarling with baffled hate, the Arab wriggled crabwise into a narrow crack above the ledge. Following him, but keeping the rope taut, Price reached the ledge, and slipped through the crevice into a tiny, gloomy cavern.
Kreor led the way from one damp, black chamber into another. Light of day was swiftly lost; the darkness became abysmal. Walls and roof and floor were rugged, uneven stone. Sometimes the passages were difficult to push through. Twice they had to crawl for a distance upon hands and knees.
Again and again Price warned his guide to keep the rope tight. He kept asking the man whispered questions, so that the answers would reveal his whereabouts.
They came at last into a larger cavern. Price could not estimate its size in the utter darkness, but the faint sounds of their movements came whispering back to straining ears as if from the walls of a vast chamber.
Price counted two hundred and sixty paces, as the Arab, at the end of the stretched rope, led him through mystic darkness. He was attempting to remember distances and direction of turns, so that if he indeed found Aysa, he could bring her safely out.
“Here we enter the passage, Ira,” Kreor said.
“Will there be men near?”
“I think not. These passages are remote.”
“Come back this way.”
Price tugged at the rope, led the man bade into the cavern. Kreor uttered a howling scream.
“Silence!” Price hissed. “I’m not going to kill you. Lie down!”
He struck a match to see that the man had obeyed. Then he gagged him, with a handkerchief in his mouth and a kafiyeh tied around his head.
“Get up,” he ordered. “And lead on to Aysa. I’ll turn you loose if I get out with her.”
WITH sullen reluctance, Kreor led the way from the rugged cavern to a smooth-floored, narrow tunnel. Cool damp air flowed outward through it; it was, Price supposed, intended for ventilation.
A hundred and eighty paces, and the snake-man turned to the left. They entered a wider passage, still completely dark. With a sure step the Arab led the way down it.
Green light glowed suddenly on a black wall before them; shadows danced in it, magnified, fantastic.
With a jerk of the rope, Price stopped his guide.
“What’s that?” he demanded. Then, realizing that Kreor could not reply: “Let’s get out of sight. Quick!”
The man stood still. Price was helpless. He had no idea which way to seek safety. And any struggle to make the Arab do his bidding would alarm whoever was approaching.
Three men in hooded robes of blue entered the dark hall, fifty yards ahead, from an intersecting passage. Two carried long, yellow-bladed pikes; the third, a torch flaring with a queer, vivid green flame.
Kreor made a futile attempt to scream through his gag. Price jerked savagely on the rope, and fondled the helve of his ax.
The three paused in the tunnel, the torch-bearer speaking. The two pike-men laughed a little, as if at some idle jest. And then the three started on in the opposite direction.
The green light, flickering on walls and floor and roof, framed them. Dark figures in a little square of green. The square grew small. Then the light was gone; the passage had turned.
“Lead on,” Price whispered. “And don’t try again to give the alarm.”
Again they were advancing in the darkness. The Arab seemed to require no light. Price kept the rope tight, counted paces. Kreor turned again to the left, into a passage that sloped sharply downward and curved smoothly to the left.
The slope, Price estimated, was one foot in four. By counting his paces, he could roughly calculate the amount of actual descent.
When he first became aware of the yellow light, they had descended eight hundred yards along the inclined passage. That meant that the spiral tunnel had carried them some six hundred feet downward, and perhaps three hundred feet below the level of the surrounding plain.
A vague, golden radiance, at first almost imperceptible. As they descended through the silent passage, the Arab leading sullenly at the end of his rope, it became denser, became a yellow fog of tiny, xanthic atoms, dancing endlessly.
He could see the walls of the passage, now, black basalt of the old volcano’s core, smoothly chiseled, the tool marks almost undistinguishable. The tunnel was perhaps eight feet wide, somewhat higher, curving downward in a great spiral.
They were, by Price’s estimate, two hundred feet lower in the yellow-lit passage, when they passed the end of a horizontal tunnel. When they were only a few yards beyond, Price heard voices from below. A man’s and a woman’s. Sharp, excited, angry.
“Come back,” he snarled to Kreor.
He made the Arab enter the horizontal way. It was the same size as the other. Lucent, glistening yellow mist filled it with shadowless, xanthic radiance.
Golden mist. The phrase throbbed suddenly in Price’s brain. The snake-man had told him that Aysa slept, deep in the mountain, in golden vapor that was changing her to living metal. Was this weird light his golden mist? Was his fantastic story true?
As Price followed the sullen Arab along the tunnel, he noticed an extraordinary thing about its walls. They were covered with yellow frost. Over the smoothly hewn, jet-black basalt was a rime of glittering crystals, a delicate tracery of golden flakes. Even the floor was dusted with it. Golden frost!
It was amazing. The gleaming crystals, he knew, must have been deposited from the yellow mist. That meant that the mist was some volatile compound of actual, metallic gold, formed, probably, in the natural laboratory of the volcanic fissures beneath the mountain.
Price roughly understood the process of petrification, in which every minutest cell and tissue of an animal may be perfectly replaced with mineral, to endure as geologic records for a million years. It was easy enough to see how such a process might turn an animal—or a human being—into gold.
But could it take place without destroying life?
Obviously not, if the tissues were replaced with pure gold. But this yellow vapor was not pure gold. To exist in the form of vapor at such temperatures, it must be roughly as volatile as water.
Water is the basis of life, of all protoplasmic compounds. Was this yellow mist a compound of gold, distilled in the vast natural retort of the volcano, that could replace the water in the body, without upsetting any chemical balance? The idea was astonishing, but not impossible.
Busy with this conjecture, Price had almost forgotten the gagged man at the end of his rope. And suddenly he discovered that the rope was slack in his hands. He had come out of the tunnel, upon a narrow, stone-railed balcony. Beyond and below was sheer space, gold-misted.
From beside the tunnel’s entrance, the snake-man leapt upon him with silent ferocity.
19. For the Mastery of the Serpent
IT WAS sheer instinct for Price to drop the end of the rope tied to the Arab’s neck, as he leapt back before that unexpected attack, and swung up the great ax to defend himself. And Kreor must have been expecting something of the kind, for he turned suddenly from the suicidal charge and bolted up the gold-frosted passage, coiling the rope as he ran.
Price sprang into instant pursuit, but the snake-man’s limp seemed miraculously cured. He dashed back along the passage, gaining steadily, and disappeared where it gave into the spiral way.
Reaching the sloping tunnel only a few moments later, Price peered up and down through dancing golden mists. The Arab had vanished, soundlessly.
Cursing his carelessness in allowing Kreor to escape, Price could not help a certain admiration for his late prisoner. To be sure, the Arab was the acolyte of the insidious Malikar, the branded adherent of an evil snake-cult; he had tried to murder Price at every opportunity. It was his very determination and ruthless enterprise that had won him Price’s regard as a worthy opponent.
While Price knew the man would hasten to spread an alarm, he could not be wholly sorry to see him escape.
For a moment Price stood at the end of the passage, uncertain whether to return to the balcony where Kreor had escaped, or to go on down the slanting way. Curiosity drew him back to the balcony; it was a strange and wonderful sight he had glimpsed from it in the brief second before the Arab’s flight and his own pursuit.
The balcony was twenty feet wide and twice as long, with a low stone railing. Beyond the railing was a Cyclopean space, a circular room, fully four hundred feet in diameter, hewn in the living rock. The roof was a vast, unbroken dome, yellow-crusted, like the walls, with frost of gold.
That colossal, rock-hewn room was filled with sparkling yellow mist. The immensity and strangeness of it awed Price. Almost timidly he crept to the edge of the high gallery and looked over the railing.
The floor was hundreds of feet below. Frosted, like the walls, with a glitter of yellow crystals, it filled a great half-circle, opposite him. The side of the amazing room directly below the gallery had no floor. The gold-rimed rock ended in a ragged line. Below was cavernous space, a far-flung void filled with xanthic mist. Mile upon awesome mile—or so it seemed—it fell beneath him, golden-green with depth upon illimitable depth.
The circular room was hewn in the basalt, above the great cave. And half the room had only that cave for a floor. A colossal temple it was, above the natural laboratory in whose volcanic crucibles was born the puzzling golden vapor.
Leaning over the gold-frosted stone parapet, Price saw the bridge, a narrow span of black stone, flung across that sheer, golden-green abyss. From the wall, directly under his gallery, it leapt across to meet the ragged edge of the floor, near the center of the vast room. Incredibly narrow, it was little more than a black line from his point of view.
The room was like a theater. The half a floor was the stage. The abyss that the narrow bridge spanned was the orchestra pit—with the bottom fallen out. The high balcony upon which Price stood was a lone box.
PRICE was still looking over the railing when the actors came upon that stage, to perform a weird and amazing drama.
Side by side they strode from the square opening of a rock-hewn passage, out upon the yellow-crusted floor. Malikar and Vekyra. So far below they looked like puppets.
Malikar, the golden man whom Price had twice fought. Thick-bodied, yellow-bearded, robed in crimson and wearing a red skull-cap. Coiled in one great hand was a thick, long whip.
Price had not seen Vekyra before, save in those extraordinary projections upon the sky. Her exotic beauty, wild and passionate, was almost startling. Slim, yellow-limbed, her body was cased in green. Red-golden hair was bound with a wide black band. Lids of oblique, tawny-green eyes were darkened; lips and cheeks and fingers reddened.
The two walked a little apart, and they seemed to be quarreling; Price knew at once that it was their voices he had heard upon the spiral way. Their voices reached him, Vekyra’s high and clear, even in anger; Malikar’s harshly unpleasant.
The words of their conversation, however, Price did not understand. They spoke rapidly; the sound was swallowed in the ringing echoes of the vast room. He was not sure even that they spoke a familiar language.
The woman ran suddenly away from Malikar, and up the ramp that led to a stone platform, suggestive of an altar, set within a niche at the end of the great stage.
Price had not noticed the platform in detail before. Now, for the first time, he saw the snake. The real golden reptile whose dread reflection he had seen in the mirage. Huge, motionless, golden scales gleaming in the unshadowed light. Coiled in a heap of gleaming, undulating loops, the graceful pillar of its bright neck lifted in the center.
Vekyra stopped on the edge of the altar before it, and began to sing. She flung up bare yellow arms in the golden light. Her voice was keen, liquidly and tantalizingly sweet. And the song had a queer, archaic rhythm.
The evil, triangular head of the serpent swayed in time to Vekyra’s singing, and the purple-black eyes watched her, smoldering with immemorial flames. Slowly the head was thrust out toward Vekyra, sank to the level of her shoulders.
The song stopped, then, and she ran up to it. Her yellow arms slipped around the motionless, horizontal column of the neck, in strange caress. She stroked the flat golden head.
Then Price heard Malikar’s angry shout. Evidently displeased with what was happening, he was stalking belligerently toward the platform, swinging the heavy whip.
Springing suddenly away from the serpent, Vekyra ran down the ramp to meet him, calling out to the snake behind her with a strange, pealing shout.
The snake uncoiled its bright, undulating length; it glided after her down the ramp. It was, Price saw, fully the size of the largest boa; its length, he estimated, was at least fifty feet.
Vekyra stopped at the foot of the ramp, and the snake swept past her, toward Malikar. The triangular head was high, mouth yawning, bright tongue flickering, twin golden fangs gleaming evilly. And the snake hissed as it struck at Malikar; a sibilant, menacing roar, astonishingly loud, reverberating eerily in the vast temple.
Malikar stood boldly in its path, shouted with a voice like a brazen clang.
The serpent stopped, arrested, before him. Still it hissed, angrily, tempestuously. Vekyra ran after it, calling out in a high, urgent tone. The snake struck, drove its fanged head at Malikar.
With surprizing alertness, the priest leapt back, and swung the black whip. It cracked like a pistol. The flat head recoiled, as if hurt. Malikar strode forward, brandishing the whip. He began to shout at the serpent, his voice brazen, ringing.
The snake writhed back before him, its hiss sinking to an uncertain whisper of hate.
