Collected Short Fiction, page 9
My uncle was an ardent radio enthusiast, and it was over one of his experimental short wave sets that we picked up the remarkable message from my lost friend that led me to abandon my practise, and, heeding the call of adventure that has always been strong in those of my blood, to seek the half mythical Mountain of the Moon, in the heart of the unexplored region of the Great Victoria Desert of Western Australia.
The message was tantalizingly brief and hard to interpret. We picked it up five times, over a period of two weeks, always just after sunset. Evidently it was sent by one who had not recently practised his knowledge of code, and it seemed that the sender was always in a great hurry, or under a considerable nervous tension, for minor errors and omissions were frequent. The words were invariably the same. I copy them from an old notebook.
“To Winfield Fowler, physician, Perth, Australia: I, Horace Austen, am lost in an unknown new world, where alien terrors reign, that lies in a crater in the Mountain of the Moon. I implore you to come to my aid, for the sake of mankind. Bring arms, and my equipment—the Röntgen tubes and coils, and the spectrometer. Ascend ladder at west pinnacle. Find my friend Melvar, maiden of the crystal city, whom I left beyond the Silver Lake. Come, for the sake of civilization, and may whoever hears this forward it with all dispatch.”
My uncle was inclined to suspect a hoax. But after the message had come over twice I received telegrams from several other radio amateurs who had heard it, and were forwarding it to me. We took the direction of the third call and had amateurs in Adelaide do the same. The lines intersected in the Great Victoria Desert, at a point very near that at which Wellington located the Mountain of the Moon, when he sighted it and named it in 1887.
Knowing Austen, as I did, to be intensely human as a man, but grave and serious as a scientist, it was impossible for me to take the message as a practical joke, as my uncle, deriding the possibility of my friend’s being imprisoned in “an unknown new world,” insisted it was. It was equally impossible for one of my impetuous and adventurous disposition to devote himself to any prosaic business when so attractive a mystery was beckoning him away. Then I would never, in any case, have hesitated to go to Austen’s aid, if I knew him to be in need.
I got together the apparatus he had mentioned—it was some equipment he happened to have left with me as he went on—as well as my emergency medicine kit, a heavy rifle, two .45 Colt automatics, and a good supply of ammunition; and waited for more explicit signals. But the calls had never come regularly, and after the fifth no more were heard. Having waited another irksome week, I bade my uncle farewell and got on the train. I left the railway at Kanowna, and bought three ponies. I rode one and packed provisions, equipment, and water bottles on the other two. Nothing need be said of the perils of the journey. Three weeks later I came in sight of the mountain.
Wellington had christened it as he did because of an apparent similarity to the strange cliff-rimmed craters of the moon, and the appellation was an apt one. The crags rose almost perpendicularly from the sand to the jagged rim. To climb them was clearly out of the question. The rock was polished slick by wind-blown sands for many feet, but rough and sharp above. To my left, at the extreme west point of the great curve, was a dark needle spire that towered three hundred feet above its fellows. I knew that it must be Austen’s “west pinnacle.” What sort of ladder I was to ascend, I had little idea.
As the sun sank back of the rolling sea of sand, dark purple shadows rose about the barrier, and I was struck with deep forebodings of the evil mystery that lay beyond it. The gold of the desert changed to silver gray, and the gray faded swiftly, while the deep purple mantle swept up the peaks, displacing even the deep red crowns that lay like splashes of blood upon the summits. Still I felt, or fancied, a strange spirit of terror that lurked behind the mountain, even in the night.
Quickly I made camp. Just two of the ponies were left, and they were near death (I have passed over the hardships of my trip). I hobbled them 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, with but a scanty cup of water; then, oppressed by the vast mysterious peaks that loomed portentously in the east, shutting out the starlight, I went in the tent and sought my blanket. Then came the first of those terrible and inexplicable occurrences that led up to the great adventure.
CHAPTER II
The Abyss of the Terror-light
FIRST I heard a faint whispering sound, or rather a hiss, infinitely far away, and up, I thought, over the cliffs. Then the cloth of the tent was 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 wanted to go out and investigate; but unfamiliar terror held me powerless. I gripped my automatic and waited tensely. The scarlet radiance shone ever brighter through the cloth. The sound turned to a hissing, shrieking scream. It was deafening, and it plunged straight down. It seemed to pause, to hover 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, and afterwards I imagined it had been my fancy.
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, where the zodiacal light was still visible. The ominous blackness of the mountain blotted out the eastern stars; and 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. The crimson light 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 uncomfortably alone and terrified. When the flames had 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 run off, but I could neither see nor hear them, and they had been in no condition to run far. I walked about a little, to look for them, and then went back to the fire. I sat there and watched the eerie, unwholesome glare that shone over the 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 strange life and power lurked beyond it.
The Ladder Found
PRESENTLY I stretched the tent again, and lay down, but I did not sleep.
At dawn I got up and went to look for the ponies. 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 of each 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, that 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 the footprints! Was there a land of madmen behind the mountain? And what was the thing that had come and gone in the night? Those were questions I could not answer, but daylight dulled my wondering fear.
The sun would not rise on my side of the mountain until nearly noon, and the cold dark shadow of the cliff was upon me when the desert all about was a shimmering white in the heat of the sun. Austen’s call 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 at once abandoned any idea that Austen had made it at all. It was of an oddlooking 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 rises straight from the sand. And the ladder goes on into the ground. That suggests that the sand has piled in on the base of the mountain since the ladder was put there. At any rate, I am sure that it is incredibly old.
I went back to camp; packed together my guns, a little food, and 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, with the tiny tent and the sharp shadow of the mountain the only definite features, I had a terrible attack of vertigo, and my fears of the night returned, until I almost wished I had never started up the ladder. But I knew that if I were suddenly back in Perth again I would be more eager than ever to set out upon the adventure.
At last I reached the top and crawled up in the mouth of a narrow canyon, with the black stone walls rising straight to the peaks on either side. Down the crevice was a smooth curving pathway, very much worn, it seemed, more by? time than human feet. It was not yet noon. I waited a few minutes to rest; then walked up the path with a very keen curiosity as to where it led. It grew so deep that the sky overhead was but a dark blue ribbon in which I saw Venus gleaming whitely. It widened. I walked out on a broad stone platform. And below me lay—the abyss.
L 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—they must have been forty miles away—were still black in the shadow of the morning. Clouds of red and purple mist hung in the infinities of space the chasm contained, and completely hid 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 shelf, a scarlet 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 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 very bright.
CHAPTER III
Down the Silver Ladder
FOR a long, 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, which still was black or dully red, because of the dark colors of the volcanic rocks of which it is composed. The scene was so vast, so strange, so wildly beautiful and unearthly, 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, Austen was—or had been—alone, and in distress.
I wondered, too, from what part of this strange world had come the thing of the whistling sound and the 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 saw that a second ladder 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. Sometimes, when I was too tired to go on, I slung 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 nearer and 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. It gleamed 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, frenzied, 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, and still 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. And up the vague pathway it sped, a long slender pencil of crimson light—a narrow, sharp-tipped scarlet shape—high into the night, and over and around in a long arching curve. Down it plunged, and 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, sweeping 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, more often than anywhere else, over the crown of lights upon the hill—the gems 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—and 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 is inconceivable. I saw that it was a great red body, a cylinder with tapering ends, with 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 a terrible, 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.
In the Red Scrub
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—that I had been within a few feet of the ground when I fell; and that 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. All about grew low thick brush, covering the slightly rolling plain. The plants were scarcely knee-high, bearing narrow, feathered leaves of red. The delicate, fern-like 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 that the red vegetation had evolved from a species of cycad. Undoubtedly the greater crater had been isolated from the outer world when the great tree-ferns were reigning throughout the 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. Presently I was to meet far stranger and more amazing things than the red bush. I am inclined to believe that the extraordinary color may have been due to the quality of the atmosphere, perhaps to the high pressure, or to the purple vapors that ever rose from the region beyond the Silver Lake.
