Collected Short Fiction, page 449
Quickly I made camp. I hobbled the two gaunted ponies on a little patch of grass and brush that grew where water had run from the cliff, pitched my little tent, and found brush to start a tiny fire, I ate supper, using but a scanty cup of water. Then, Oppressed by the vast mysterious peaks that loomed so portentously in the east to shut out the starlight, I went in the tent and sought my blanket.
Pondering my next move in this desert wilderness, and wondering where and how I could contact Dr. Austen, I finally fell asleep.
CHAPTER II
The Abyss of the Terror-light
First I heard a faint whispering sound, rather a hiss, infinitely far away, and up, I thought, over the cliffs. I started awake to find the cloth of the tent lighted by a faint red glow thrown on it from above. I shivered and the strange spell of the mountain and the desert fell heavier upon me. I gripped my automatic tensely as the scarlet radiance shone ever brighter through the cloth.
The sound turned to a hissing, shrieking scream. It was deafening, and it seemed to plunge straight down from overhead. The red glare was almost blinding. Abruptly the tent was blown down by a sudden tempest of wind.
For perhaps a minute the terror hung about me. I lay there in a strange paralysis of fear, while a hurricane of wind tore at the canvas upon me. I heard upon the tempest, above that awful whistling, a wild, mad laugh that rang against the cliff, weirdly appalling. It was utterly inhuman, not even the laugh of a madman. Just once it rang out, then the light and the sound swept up and away.
With belated courage I tore my way from under the cloth. The stars were like jewels in the westward sky, but the ominous blackness of the mountain blotted out the eastern stars. The peaks were lighted by a vague and flickering radiance of scarlet, like the reflection of unpleasant fires beyond. Strange pulsing, exploring fingers of red seemed to thrust themselves up from behind the cliff. Somehow they gave me the feeling that an incredibly great, incredibly evil personality lurked beyond, bathed in the crimson light which shone weirdly on the wild summits of the mountain, as if they were smeared with blood.
I threw more brush on the fire and crouched over it, feeling terribly alone and troubled. When the flames flared up I looked about for the ponies, seeking companionship even in them. They were gone!
At first I thought they had broken their hobbles and strayed off, but I could neither see nor hear them. They had been in no condition to run far. I walked about a little, fruitlessly seeking them, and then went back to the fire. I sat there and watched the eerie, unwholesome glare that shone over mountain. No longer did I doubt the existence of Austen’s “world where alien terrors reign.” I knew, even as I had felt when I first saw the mountain, that some strange life and power lurked beyond it.
Presently I stretched the tent again and lay down, but I did not sleep.
At dawn I got up and went to look for my horses. I climbed one of the low dunes and gazed over the gray infinity of sand, but not a sign of them rewarded my look. I tried to trail them. I found where they had been hobbled, and followed the tracks to a place where the hoofs had cut deep in the sandy turf. Beyond there was no trace. Then I was certain of what I had already known. The Thing had carried them away.
Then I found something stranger still—the prints of bare human feet, half-erased by the wind that had blown while the terror had hung there! That unearthly laugh, and now the footprints! Was there a land of madmen behind the mountain? And what was the thing that had come and gone in the night? These were questions I could not answer, but daylight dulled my wondering fear.
THE sun would not strike my side of the mountain until nearly noon, and the cold, dark shadow of the cliff was upon me when the desert all to the west was a shimmering white in the heat of the sun. Austen’s message had mentioned a ladder. I set out to find it. Just north of the peak I came upon it, running straight up like a silver ribbon to the top of the cliff.
It was not the clumsy affair of ropes that I expected. In fact, I a.t once abandoned any idea that Austen had made it at all. It was of an odd-looking white metal, and it seemed very old, although it was corroded but little. The rungs were short white bars riveted to long straps which were fastened on the rock by spikes of the same silvery metal.
I have said that the mountain rose straight from the sand. And the ladder went on into the ground. That suggested that the sand has piled in on the base of the mountain since the ladder had been put there. At any rate, I was sure it was incredibly old.
I went back to camp, packed together my guns, a little food, Austen’s equipment, and started up the ladder. Although it was no more than six hundred feet to the top, heavily laden as I was, I got very tired before I reached it. I stopped several times to rest. Once, looking down on the illimitable sea of rolling sand where the tiny tent and the sharp shadow of the mountain were the only definite features, I had a terrible attack of vertigo, and I almost wished I had never started up the ladder. But I knew that if I were suddenly back in Perth I would be more eager than ever to set out again.
At last I reached the top of the queer ladder and crawled up in the mouth of a narrow canyon, with black stone walls rising straight to the peaks on either side. Along the crevice ran a smooth, curving pathway, worn more by time than by human feet. It was not yet noon. I waited a few minutes to rest; then walked along the path with a very keen curiosity as to where it led. It grew so deep that the sky overhead became a dark blue ribbon in which I saw Venus gleaming whitely. Suddenly it widened, and I walked out on a broad stone platform. Below me lay—the abyss.
I stood on the brink of a great chasm whose bottom must have been miles, even, below sea level. The farther walls of the circular pit, fully forty miles away, were still black in the shadow of the morning. Clouds of red and purple mist hung in the infinity of space the chasm contained, completely hiding the farther half of the floor. Beneath me, so far away that it was as if I looked on another world, was a deep-red plain weird as the deserts of Mars.
To what it owed its color I could not tell. In the midst of the red, rose a mountain whose summit was a strange crown of scintillating fire. It looked as though it were capped, not with snow, but with an immense heap of precious jewels, set on fire with the glory of the sun, and blazing with a splendrous shifting flame of prismatic light. And the crimson upland sloped down—to “the Silver Lake.”
It was a lake shaped like a crescent moon, the horns reaching to the ring of mountains on the north and the south. In the hollow of the crescent beyond, low hills rose, impenetrable banks of purple mist lying back of them to the dark wall in the distance.
The lake gleamed like quicksilver and light waves ran upon it, reflecting the sunlight in cold blue fire. It seemed that faint purple vapors were floating up from the surface. Set like a picture in the dark-red landscape, with the black cliffs about, the argent lake was very white and bright.
CHAPTER III
Down the Silver Ladder
For a long time I gazed into the abyss, lost in the wonder and the mystery of it. Meanwhile the sun climbed over and lit the farther rim, revealing it as black or dully red, due to the dark colors of the volcanic rocks of which it is composed. The scene was so vast, so strange and wildly beautiful, that it seemed almost a dream instead of an ominous reality.
It was hard to realize that somewhere upon the red plain, or along the shores of the Silver Lake, or perhaps beneath the banks of mist beyond, Dr. Austen was in distress. I wondered from what part of this strange world had come the thing of whistling sound and red light which had taken the ponies.
It was well after noon before I ate a little lunch and took thought of the matter of descent. I found a second ladder which led down in a fine line of silver until it disappeared above the crimson upland, miles below. I climbed over the brink and started down.
Descending was easier than climbing had been, but I had infinitely farther to go. The soles of my shoes were cut through, and my hands became red and blistered on the rungs before I reached halfway. Sometimes, when I was too tired to go on, I tied myself to the ladder with a piece of rope from my pack, while I rested.
Steadily the black walls rose higher about me. The red plateau beneath, the mountain with its crown of flaming gems, and the strange white lake beyond, came slowly nearer.
I was still half a mile above the scarlet plain when the shadow of the western wall was flung fast over the valley floor, and the light purple mists beyond the argent lake deepened their hue to a dark and ominous purple-red.
But the Silver Lake did not darken. It seemed luminous, gleaming with a bright, metallic, silvery luster, even when the shadow had fallen upon it. Whenever I rested I searched keenly the whole visible floor of the abyss, but nowhere was any life or motion to be seen.
With a growing apprehension, I realized that I would not have time to reach the ground before dark. I had no desire to be sticking like a fly to the face of the cliff when the Thing that had made the red light was moving about. Disregarding my fatigue and pain, I clambered down as fast as I could force my wearied limbs to move. The process of motion had become almost automatic. Hands and feet moved regularly, rhythmically, without orders from the brain. But sometimes they fumbled or slipped. Then I had to grasp frenziedly at the rungs to save my life.
Night fell like a black curtain rolled quickly over the top of the pit, but the half-moon of the Silver Lake still shone with its white metallic light. And strange, moving shapes of red appeared in the mist in the hollow of the crescent. The light that fell upon the rock was faint, but still enough to help, so I hurried, forcing hands and feet to follow down and find the rungs. And fearfully I looked over my shoulder at the bank of mist.
SUDDENLY a long, pale finger of red—a delicate rosy ray—shot high out of it. Up the vague pathway it sped, a slender pencil of crimson light, that rose high into the night, and over and around in a long, arching curve. Down it plunged, back into the mist. Presently I heard its sound, that strange whistling sigh that rolled majestically and rose and fell, vast as the roar of an erupting volcano. Other things sprang out of the purple bank, slender, searching needles of brilliant scarlet that swept over the valley and high into the starlit sky above.
Following paths that were smooth and arched, with incredible speed they swept about like a swarm of strange insects, always with amazing ease, and always shooting back into the cloud, leaving faint purple tracks behind them. And the great rushing sounds rose and fell. Those lights were incredible entities, intelligent—and evil.
They flew most often over the crown of lights upon the hill, the gems that still shone with a faint, beautiful glow of mingled colors. Whenever one swept near the mountain, a pale blue ray shot toward it from the cap of jewels. And the red things fled from the ray. More and more the flying things of crimson were drawn to the mountain top, wheeling swiftly and ceaselessly, ever evading the feeble beams of blue. Their persistence was inhuman, terrible. They were like insects wheeling about a light.
All the while I climbed down as fast as I could, driving my worn-out limbs beyond the limit of endurance while I prayed that the things might not observe me. Then one passed within a half-mile with a deep, awful, whistling roar, flinging ahead its dusky red pathway and hurtling along with a velocity that was inconceivable. I saw that it was a great red cylindrical body with tapering ends and a bright green light shining on the forward part.
It did not pause, but swept on along its comet-like path and down behind the Silver Lake. Behind it was left a vague purple phosphorescent track, like the path of a meteor, that lasted several minutes.
After it was gone, I hurried on for a few minutes, breathing easier. Then another went by, so close that a hot wind laden with the purple mist of its track blew against my face. I was gripped with deathly, unutterable terror. I let myself down in the haste of desperation.
Then the third one came. As it approached it paused in its path, and drifted slowly and deliberately toward me. The very cliff trembled with the roaring blast of its sound. The green light in the forward end stared at me like an animate evil eye.
Exactly how it happened I never knew. I suppose my foot slipped, or my bleeding hands failed to grasp a rung. I have a vague recollection of the nightmare sensation of falling headlong, of the air whistling briefly about my ears, of the dark earth looming up below. I think I fell on my back and that my head struck a rock.
THE next I knew it was day, and the sun was shining in my eyes. I struggled awkwardly and painfully to my feet. My whole body was bruised and sore, and the back of my head was caked with dried blood. My exhausted muscles had stiffened during the night, and to stand upon my cut and blistered feet was torturing. But I had something to be thankful for. I had been within a few feet of the ground when I fell. The red thing had departed and left me lying there, perhaps thinking me dead.
I leaned against the base of the metal ladder and looked about. I had fallen into a thicket of low, red bushes which covered the slightly rolling plain. The plants were scarcely knee-high, bearing narrow, feathered leaves of red. The delicate, fernlike sprays of crimson rippled in the breeze like waves on a sea of blood. The leaves had a peculiar bright and greasy appearance and a strange, pungent odor. The shrubs bore innumerable tiny snow-white flowers that gleamed like stars against the deep red background.
I think the red vegetation evolved from a species of cycad. Undoubtedly the great crater had been isolated from the outer world when the great tree-ferns were reigning throughout Earth. And, as I was presently to find, the order of evolution in the deep, warm pit had been vastly different from that which had produced man as its highest form of life.
Nowhere did I see any living thing, nor hear any sound of life. In fact, one of the strange things of the place was the complete absence of the lower forms of life, even of the smaller insects. The silence hung oppressively.
Far away to the right and left the walls of the pit rose straight and black to the azure infinity that arched the top. To the left of me, five or six miles away, towered the gem-crowned hill, its summit a blaze of ever-changing polychromatic flame. Beyond it, all along the east, the red plateau fell away to the Silver Lake, which lay like a curved scimitar of polished steel, with the faint bank of purple mist shrouding the low, red hills that rose inside the curve beyond. The sun was just above the eastern peaks, shining purple through the mist.
After a time I limped slowly down the nearest of the little valleys. As I went my roving eye caught the bright glitter of brass on the ground at my feet. Searching in the red shrubs, I picked up three fired cartridges from a .45-caliber automatic. I held them in my hand and gazed over the weird scene before me, lost in wonder. They were concrete proof that Austen had passed this way, had here fought off some danger. He must yet be somewhere in this strange crater. But where was I to find “Melvar, maiden of the crystal city,” and what was she to do for me?
Presently I went on. I wanted water to bathe my cuts and bruises. I was thirsty as well as hungry. My pack was an irksome burden, but I dared not discard anything.
I carried the heavy rifle ready in my hand. After a painful half-mile I came to a tiny pool in a thicket of the red scrub. I lay down and drank the cool, clear water until I was half-sick. I threw away the remnants of my shoes and bathed my feet.
SUDDENLY my attention was arrested by a crystal, clashing sound. There was a marching rhythm in it, and the clatter of weapons. I crouched down the shrubbery and peered fearfully about. I saw a line of men, queerly equipped soldiers, marching in single file over the nearest knoll. They wore closely fitting chain-mail of silvery metal, and they had helmets, breastplates and shields that threw off the sunlight in scintillant flashes of red, as if made of rubies. Their long swords flashed like diamonds. Their crystal armor tinkled in time to their marching feet.
The leader boomed out an order in a hearty, mellow voice. They passed straight by, within fifty yards of me. I saw that they were tall men of magnificent physique, white-skinned, with blond hair and blue eyes. On they went in the direction of the fire-topped mountain. They passed out of sight in a slight declivity, and the music died away.
Needless to say, I was excited. A race of fair-haired men in a weird Australian valley! What a sensational discovery! Obviously they had built the metal ladder and come down it into the valley, but whence had they come? Or was the Mountain of the Moon the original cradle of humanity, the lost Garden of Eden?
The crystal weapons of the soldiery suggested that they used some transparent crystalline substance in lieu of metal, and that the iridescent crown upon the mountain might be the city of the race. Was it Austen’s “crystal city” ? That would suggest a high civilization, but I had seen no sign of the mechanical devices that are the outstanding features of our own civilized achievement. Certainly the soldiers had carried no modern weapons.
I thought of the footprints and the eerie laugh. I wondered what contact Austen had had with these people. Had they been friends or foes? Had it been these men of the crystal city who had paid me a visit outside the cliffs? If so, the red torpedoshapes of the night must be aircraft, and they must have advanced the art of aerial navigation to a very high degree.
I determined, first of all, to do some spying, learning as much as possible about the strange race before I revealed my presence. I was not in a very good trim for battle, but I had little doubt that my guns were so far superior to their crystal swords that I could fight them at any odds if they proved unfriendly.
So presently I bound my feet with bandages from my medicine kit, attended as best I could to the wound on the back of my head, and walked slowly in the direction of the mountain. Although I could only limp painfully along, the red vegetation offered no serious impediment to my progress. The low bushes crushed easily underfoot, burdening the air with their unfamiliar, pungent odor. The Silver Lake shimmered in the distance—a bright, white, metallic sheet.
