Collected Short Fiction, page 178
CHAPTER II
The Girl Who Rode an Eagle
l “Miles!” I called, and ran uncertainly toward him, my Filipino boy, Carlos, hovering close behind in case I needed assistance.
He studied me in the moonlight as I seized his moist hand, and cried suddenly:
“Brandy! It’s old Brandy! How are you?”
There was real concern in his query; it was no meaningless formula. And I answered him.
“About the same, Miles. Always will be, I guess. But I’ve the Moth and the freedom of the seas. Could be worse.”
His wet hand closed upon mine, and. he paused before he spoke again.
“Some luck you happened along, Brandy. Saved us a long swim to Spain.”
And he turned to assist his shivering companion.
“We’re all okay, Sue!” he cried, encouragingly. “Not one thing left to worry about. Forget the faces, now.” And he added a murmuring word that I did not understand.
I saw then that his fellow passenger in the doomed airplane had been a girl; He helped her to the deck. Her dripping, shapeless clothing adhered to her body, so I saw even in the moonlight that she was youthfully graceful.
Her long, streaming hair looked quite dark. Her face, I could see, was very white, her dark eyes wide and bewildered. Her teeth were chattering, and she looked up and down the deck in mute wonder.
With a little nervous, fluttering movement, she clutched Miles’s arm and spoke to him. Her voice was deeply and richly musical. The words were liquid, the vowels prolonged, the consonants softened and trilled. It was no language that I knew.
Intently Miles listened, as if he had some difficulty in understanding.
“What is it?” he then asked in English.
She repeated her sonorous phrases.
“That’s all right, Sue,” again he replied in English. “These are friends of mine. And don’t worry about the faces. We’ll bamboozle them yet!” And he introduced us. “Su-Ildra, Dr. Roscoe Brander.”
“Doctair Rusco Br-r-rander,” she approximated the sound.
Both of them being not only exceedingly wet but shivering with cold, I sent them below at once, in charge of Carlos and the steward. There were vacant staterooms. My own clothing being hopelessly small, I borrowed a suit from tall McLendon for Miles, and to the girl I sent a pair of my own pajamas.
Half an hour later, Miles came back upon the deck, warm after a hot bath, his great shoulders almost bursting the coat of his borrowed suit, though the pants fitted well enough. The pearly hint of dawn was just appearing in the east; the air was bracingly cool.
“The young lady—” I questioned.
“Su-Ildra is asleep,” he said. “It’s been an exhausting time for her, poor girl.”
He came to stand in front of my deck chair. With quick, nervous motions that revealed his own great fatigue, he lighted a cigarette that he must have obtained since coming aboard. Its cherry tip waxed and waned against his tense face. In the cold light he seemed pale, worried, very tired.
“Excuse my not rising,” I offered. “I find any excitement very tiring.”
“Certainly,” he said. “I’m sorry, Brandy.”
“I’m interested in your companion, Miles. Where did you find her?”
“Didn’t exactly find her, Brandy. She found me. She’s a flier, too, in her own way. When I first saw her she was riding on an eagle.” He chuckled at my astonishment. “Or a huge bird, anyhow, that looked to me like an eagle.”
“Tell me about it, Miles, and those shining globes.”
He shook his head wearily. “Please let me off a while, Brandy. Dead on my feet. If you knew—”
“That’s all right,” I said. “Sit down.” I pointed to another chair.
“It’s a long story, and a queer one, Brandy. Couldn’t do justice to it now. Go to sleep in the middle of it.” I saw that he was swaying a little on his feet, from sheer fatigue; but he disregarded my invitation to seat himself. He asked suddenly, “Where are you bound, Brandy?”
“Malaga. At least, that is what I told Captain McLendon. It makes no difference.”
His strained face was very anxious.
“Could you take us to Marseilles, then?” he asked earnestly. “As fast as possible! I told Su-Ildra not to worry. But there is yet danger. You see, Brandy, I’m afraid—well, we’re hunted!”
“Hunted?”
His intent eyes searched my face—wide blue eyes, greenish, flecked with steel-blue glints. Always they had seemed invincible, resolute. Now, for the first time, I read worry in them, doubt, apprehension.
“You saw the fight? The globes?”
“We saw, but not to understand. The globes—what were they?”
“I don’t know, Brandy—not altogether. They’re things. Instrumentalities, I might call them, for they aren’t alive. They were sent after Su-Ildra.
“Tomorrow—or rather today—I’ll tell you the whole story, Brandy. It’s a big thing that I’ve run across—amazing—ten times older than Egypt. And there’s a lot ahead of us, I think, in some ways. There’s terror in it, Brandy—danger!
“Just how much danger, or exactly what it is, I don’t know. A lot Su-Ildra hasn’t been able to tell me, yet. But as I understand it, Brandy, those globes and the force behind them are about the most deadly things that have ever been turned loose.
“—But we can steam north? Fast?”
“Yes. No trouble about that. I’ll tell the officer at once.”
“Have me called by three this afternoon. I may be rather a hog for sleep. Strain, lately. All safe enough until tonight. Sun somehow interferes with the globes. S’long, Brandy.”
He took my hand a moment. The familiar, unconquerable grin flickered across his weary face, a grin maliciously twisted by the livid scar of the Malay’s blade across his temple. And then he walked away from me, reeling a little with fatigue.
l At three I sent Carlos to Miles’s room.
He was still sleeping soundly, and I had not the heart to have him disturbed. A few minutes later I heard a low, deep-toned cry of wonder behind me, and saw that the strange girl had come on deck.
In my white pajamas, she looked a little odd, and despite them, it was easy to see that she was beautiful. Her long hair she had combed and wound about her head to make a bright coronal. Dry, it was dark no longer, but copper-hued, and glinting with rich splendor under the low Mediterranean sun. Her eyes, which had seemed black, were darkly, pensively blue. Her face was very fair, firm, and serious and lovely.
She stood a moment watching the sapphire brilliance of the sea, as if in entranced wonder, and then came tripping to my chair upon white and lovely bare feet—no one, apparently, had thought to provide shoes for her, and she had been picked up with none of her own.
“Good evening, Miss Ildra,” I greeted her.
She said something then, in her strange language. The melody of her voice was pure delight but, of course, I did not understand. I shook my head. She laughed a little.
“My tongue you not talk. Where Miles is?” she asked awkwardly.
“Miles is asleep.”
“Sleep? Ah, sleep! Miles need sleep. Much tired.”
“Are you hungry?”
She understood that at once, nodded eagerly, her eyes bright. I rang for Carlos, and had a little table brought out beneath the deck awning, and a simple meal set upon it. Then Miles came striding across the deck, evidently much refreshed by his sleep, the old, infectious recklessness in his greenish eyes.
With a little eager cry, Su-Ildra ran to meet him. I thought she was about to embrace him, but she merely took his hand, child-like, and came smiling with him to where I sat.
He murmured something to her in her own musical language, and she answered, melodiously.
“Afternoon, Brandy,” he said to me. “Guess you are all ears for the yarn. Sorry I had to make you wait, but I was half-dead. You’ll understand, when you hear.”
I nodded sympathetically.
He looked anxiously about at the azure bowl of the sky, squinted calculatingly at the sun.
“Marseilles?” he asked.
“At full speed.”
“Thanks, Brandy.” Feelingly. “It’s a deadly peril. You’ll understand. Safe enough, anyhow, till dark.”
When we were seated around the little table, with the attentive Carlos to serve us, he began his astounding tale. It went slowly at first, for Miles was eating with a most excellent appetite. But presently he finished the meal and leaned back in his chair with his big hands locked at the back of his neck, his greenish eyes roving between Su-Ildra and me and the lowering sun, as he talked.
CHAPTER III
The Well
l “It doesn’t matter how I came to be flying for the Berbers, in the first place,” Miles began. “But I’ve always admired their spirit of independence and I didn’t think the foreigners were giving them a square deal. Anyhow, I had to fight for somebody. Thought it might as well be them as anybody.
“I’ve been in Morocco a couple of years. Interesting country. But I won’t bother to tell about our little war.
“About two weeks ago, my military duties took me over the High Atlas. Idrden Draen, the Berbers call them—‘Mountains of Mountains.’ They are pretty rugged, you know, and rather less than half-explored.
“It was south of the plain of Marrakesh, beyond the highest range and the peak named Tinzar, between the barrier range, you know, and the Sahara. Rough a country as you could want—and as desolate. The desert, you might say, breaks like a wave on the mountain wall. The hills keep out the rain, so there isn’t much forest, but the country is all chopped up with gorges and canyons. A man couldn’t cross it in a year except by air—not even if he could find water and if the hill tribes didn’t get him.
“You understand I didn’t have to go that way, Brandy.” And Miles grinned his familiar, dear old grin, twisted maliciously by the scar of the kris, his greenish eyes twinkling. I smiled in understanding; Miles could be counted upon to take the most adventurous way.
“You see, a certain Berber Amin, a man I had a good deal of confidence in, had told me a story of a gigantic city of ifrits in that forsaken land, upon a mountain no man could reach. The Amin claimed that he had seen it from a peak in the edge of the desert region, a forest of gigantic green minarets. A man of modern ideas, was the Amin; he realized the possibilities of exploration by air.
“Anyhow—and considerably to my surprise—I found the city in the heart of the roughest country I ever flew over. Not so high as the barrier range, but a sort of cosmic dump-heap. Sand-mountains, old lava beds, colossal boulder fields, cragged peaks, all slashed through with dry canyons—the edge of the Sahara, scrambled and tossed up into the sky.
“The city stands on a flat-topped mountain. The sides of it are so abrupt that a man couldn’t climb it even if he could get to the foot. But the top is a level mesa—or would be level but for the mountains on it that are the ruins of the old city, about four miles by six.
“I can’t give you any idea of that shattered city, Brandy. I can’t imagine, myself, what it looked like when it was lived in. But the most of New York is a mud village compared to what that city once was. It was that big.
“The whole plateau is covered with broken towers, pylons—I don’t know what to call them. Some of them must yet be five or six hundred feet high. They are just stumps of the buildings that once were there. That’s the word—stumps!
“They are spaced wide apart, at least a thousand feet. The ground all between them is scattered with the fallen material; great square green boulders—the city is all of green. That gives you an idea of the city, Brandy—a field covered with colossal, square green stumps.
“I landed, of course. Anybody would quit a war for such a discovery as that. It wasn’t easy to find a landing place. The plateau is covered with those fallen rocks so thick you have to climb across it, rather than walk. But I found a clearer place that must have been a park. Even that was scattered with the stones, so I came near cracking up, I had to pancake, and I saw right away that I had several weeks’ work to clear a runway to take off again.
“I wasn’t worried about having to stay. I’d brought a pretty good stock of rations in the plane, knowing the country, and there was water in a little lake in the park—an artificial reservoir, I think.
“I couldn’t explore the ruins, Brandy. They were too big for that. All I could do was climb about, over mountains of broken green blocks, wondering like a kid in a museum. Every acre had enough on it to keep an expedition busy a year. Why, just a fragment of that green stone, whatever it is, would put the science department of dear old Stanford into a panic.
“For the green stuff isn’t any ordinary rock, Brandy. It’s dark green, translucent. Looks something like porcelain. But it’s nearly as tough as steel, and it wasn’t crumbling; it didn’t show any sign of weathering.
“The whole plateau is covered with fallen blocks of it, but they didn’t fall because they were decaying. Earthquakes shook them down, perhaps. Or it might have been the ice piled on them, because I think, Brandy—I’m sure—that city is older than the last Ice Age!
“I know they told us at the university that the cave man was the elite of civilization, then. But I got into rooms, great halls, in those stumps of buildings, and everything but the green stone is gone. Dust, Brandy. Dust! Feet of it! Not even a trace of metal.
“That city was lying there, lost in the desert hills, when Egypt was born, cradling its dead secrets. It may be older than Mankind, Brandy. I found nothing to show what its builders were—no utensils, no sculpture. But they had science, Brandy. We couldn’t build a city like that. We have nothing like the green stone.
“But the city was only the beginning!
l “Three days I had been there, when I found the Well.
“I had been climbing across the heaps of broken stone toward the center of the city, among shattered green piles as big as the Great Pyramid. And then I came to a curving wall.
“The wall is of the same dark green, perdurable substance. It seemed to have been cast—formed—all in one piece; I couldn’t find a seam in it. It hasn’t even begun to crumble.
“The wall is curved. It encloses a circular space about a thousand feet across, in the center of the city. In some places it is two hundred feet high; in others, the heaps of stone reach almost to the edge.
“At once I was filled with a singularly intense desire to know what was inside of the wall. I went all around it, but nowhere did the debris reach quite to the top. Selecting the best place, I began to build a stair of the smaller loose green blocks.
“In three hours I had a platform high enough so that I could stand on it and reach the top of the wall. I hooked my fingers over it and scrambled up. The top of the wall was flat, like a curving green road, and about forty feet wide.
“I walked across it and looked down into—the Well!
“Down, down, down! The pit inside of that green wall reaches down into the heart of the earth, Brandy. It made me dizzy to look into it, much as I’ve flown. I had to lie down on my face to look over the edge.
“The Well is about a thousand feet across. It’s lined with that dark green stone. How deep is it? I don’t know. A little below the top it was dark. The green walls became almost black. And down they fell, sheer, smoothly curved, unmarred by any visible seam. Down, down, down. You can’t imagine it, Brandy!
“At the bottom of the Well was a little disk of gray light. I thought at first that it must be the reflection of the sky in water. It looked very tiny, yet I knew it must be a thousand feet across. It must be ten miles below.
“Can you picture that, Brandy? Ten miles, when all we know of the earth’s interior is based upon a very imperfect exploration of the first two miles of its crust! And I know now that the space below the Well extends far deeper; the shaft is merely a doorway.
“I soon learned that the disk of silver in the bottom was not water. It didn’t fade when night came. There was light below!
“I stayed there on the wall a long time, Brandy, wondering. I already had known that the builders of the city had possessed a strange science. Our world, I tell you, Brandy, could build nothing like it!
“It was three days later that Su-Ildra came.
“I was still clambering about the central section of the ruins, no more than skimming, the volumes of its wonders. The mystery of the Well fascinated me—the disk of luminous silver in the bottom of it. Two or three times a day I climbed the wall and looked down into it.
“Why had the Well been dug? What was below? What made the light? Could the Well explain the desertion of the city, the vanishing of its builders from the earth? Though I hadn’t even begun to clear off a field for the plane, I was wondering if I could fly down into the Well.
“Every night, of course, I had to go back to my plane and the lake. One morning I was climbing back to the Well when I saw a bird rise above the green wall. A bigger bird, Brandy, than I had ever seen before—a lot bigger than a condor. It has come to me since that the air would be denser in the world below the Well, better adapted to the development of large birds.
“It looked like an eagle. Its feathers were a glistening, red-brown, almost scarlet beneath. It flew with slow, labored wing-beats, as if nearly dead with exhaustion. Over the wall it collapsed, and came struggling down on the rocks outside.
“It was falling when I first glimpsed the girl on its back.
“I knew, of course, that it had come up out of the Well. And I was hardly as much surprised as might have been expected. I had already imagined—perhaps upon a rather flimsy foundation—that there might be a hidden world beneath the Well, to which the vanished builders of the city had gone, for some unknown reason.
