"That is hardly royal issue, Sergeant. Where did you get it?"
Smythe seemed actually to blush. "I spent some time in America, sah. Played at cowboy for a while. It's—well, sah—you might say, a sort of souvenir, sah."
Clive released the man's wrist.
As Smythe returned the revolver to its holster, he turned it for a moment, revealing the other side of the grip. In the blue-black stone Clive saw the glimmer of a pattern of points of light. They might have been specks of white stone, inlaid against the black, or they might have been glittering chips of diamond.
They were set in the pattern of the swirling stars.
Before Clive could say anything further to Smythe, the barge surged ahead. The water was glowing here like a rapidly moving creek.
Sidi Bombay drew his staff from the water and laid it in the barge, dropping to a kneeling posture in the bow of the craft. The wooden craft surged even faster, and the darkness grew deeper. Peculiar odors assailed Clive Folliot's nostrils, and the air whipping past his face seemed filled with peculiar shapes, writhing, gibbering, taunting him, performing unspeakable acts with organs of unimaginable purpose.
There was a flash of darkness, of absolute black that stood against their surroundings as a flash of lightning will stand against even a bright daytime sky, and a clap of thunder that left Folliot's ears ringing.
He thought that the astonishing flash of darkness had blinded him, but in a while vague images appeared, indicating that his eyes were adjusting to the darkness that now surrounded him.
The barge had come to total stillness, and the air that had so oppressed Clive in the swamp was suddenly sparse, icy, crystalline. White shapes swirled like swimming creatures, their forms barely visible in the dimness.
Where were they?
Surely they were no longer in the Sudd. Perhaps they were no longer in Africa—or even on Earth! An errant thought flittered across Clive's mind: How George du Marnier would love this, could he be in my place! And how I should love to be safely back in London, in his!
"Sergeant Smythe? Sidi Bombay?" Clive heard his own voice, realized that he was whispering.
"Not yet, O Englishman." To Clive's surprise it was not Horace Hamilton Smythe but the black Sidi Bombay who spoke. "A little longer, O Englishman, a little time only. Wait until you can see."
Perfect silence descended on the barge. There were no sounds now of animals calling, of fish or reptiles swimming, of the flapping wings of aerial creatures. There were no sounds of flowing water. Clive could hear the rush of his blood and the pounding of his pulse. He could hear the deep, steady breathing of the stolid Horace Hamilton Smythe and the shallower inhalations and exhalations of the cadaverous Sidi Bombay.
Clive blinked uncertainly. In the distance, not high above eye level, a fuzzy patch of light no larger than a penny appeared. The light was pale, a faint white that pulsated slowly. It seemed to revolve, and to resolve itself into still smaller points of whiteness. The points arranged themselves into a spiral.
The slowly revolving spiral rose from eye level to a point overhead like the sun rising from horizon to zenith, but the lights separated also, increasing in brightness as they did so until they spanned the sky from horizon to horizon, slowly swirling so that a hypnotic trance threatened to overtake anyone who watched them too long.
Their brightness increased until Clive could see himself and his companions clearly, and could make out their wooden craft and its immediate surroundings.
Within a word the three men rose and climbed from the barge. It had become beached on a shore of jet-black sand that led away to a landscape of the same composition. It was like finding themselves reduced to the size of ladybirds and placed on a carefully sculpted model of a world, a world carved all of a single piece of perfect black obsidian and lighted by a swirling spiral of tiny, brilliant diamonds.
They walked from the barge, from the shore.
There was no sound.
Clive peered back to the way they had come, searching for a sign of the passage through which they traveled.
There was no such sign. The crystalline rock with its pulsating ruby heart was gone. For all that Clive could determine, there was no passageway. There had to be, his mind told him. But it was gone. If it existed at all, it was beyond his senses, beyond his reach. Whatever place he was now in, he would have to deal with.
Sidi Bombay and Horace Hamilton Smythe were waiting for him. Smythe stood at a proper parade rest, feet slightly spread, his hands clasped behind his back, the butt of his pistol showing in the holster on his hip. Sidi Bombay, tall and gaunt, his black skin almost invisible against the black backdrop, stood with an arm outstretched. Clive was reminded, oddly, of a portrait of the Christ calling men to come to his side.
They began a trek across the black landscape. To eyes increasingly accustomed to the weird landscape, the illumination provided by the swirl of stars was sufficient for practical use. But a mood of depression slowly overcame Clive Folliot.
Everything was blackness. The sky, except for the slowly revolving points of light, was the sky of midnight. The earth beneath his feet was a dead black. There was vegetation—grass underfoot, taller brush, and then tall trees not far away—all of them, dead black. Still farther off, hills rose black against a black horizon, their shape distinguishable only by some subtle suggestion of texture, or perhaps a deeply buried sense of distance and mass, against the remote blackness of space.
No animal sound was heard—in fact, the only sounds were those of the three men walking abreast. And no animal life was seen; no rodent or ruminant scampered for safety, no predator stalked the three—or at least, no predator that gave evidence of its presence. No flying creature flapped its wings, be they feathered or fleshy.
Sidi Bombay floated like a ghost, his gauzy robe and tattered turban visible against the darkness.
Horace Hamilton Smythe maintained a soldierly bearing, almost marching across the landscape. His face was more visible than Sidi Bombay's; his khaki outfit, too, was visible. Now and again, as the swing of hips and the lay of the uneven landscape might dictate, the butt of his revolver could be seen protruding from its leather holster. The midnight-blue stone was black in this place, and the glittering diamonds that mirrored the swirling spiral in the sky seemed to move in cadence with the stars.
The landscape tended upward.
They had moved away from the edge of the black water where their barge had beached, and Clive Folliot's leg muscles were beginning to cry out for a respite. The other two men, Clive assumed, would suffer similarly from fatigue.
"Time for a rest—and a conference," Folliot suggested. He had more reasons than these for calling a halt. Aside from the need for a respite and an exchange of information, he felt a need to reassert his leadership of the party. Sidi Bombay and Horace Hamilton Smythe were both ostensibly in his employ and consequently subject to his command.
But increasingly, Clive had felt control slipping away. Smythe maintained his courteous and subordinate air, but there was an edge of independence beneath it. And Sidi Bombay—Sidi Bombay had appeared with the barge and conducted the party to this place. Who was this man? What master did he serve? What did he intend?
Clive found himself wondering what purpose the expedition now pursued. Its own bare survival, perhaps! The pursuit of the disappeared Neville Folliot seemed a remote goal, now—and yet it remained a goal that Clive could not permit himself to abandon.
The three men seated themselves on the earth. Clive looked closely at the local plant life, the grass and minor shrubs. These seemed normal except for their dead black coloration. The air was cool and clear, with only a slight and unidentifiable but altogether pleasant tang.
"I wonder," Clive mused aloud, "could we start a campfire here? Were we to gather some dry wood and strike flame—would it burn?"
"It might indeed, Englishman." Sidi Bombay's voice was reedy and unfamiliar in this unfamiliar world. "But we dare not stay in one place too lon
g. We have a distance to go. There would be no gain in tarrying."
"Go—go where?"
"Ahead, Englishman." Sidi Bombay nodded, his white turban dipping and rising in the blackness.
"Surely we are not still moving to the north? Toward the Sudan?"
"To the north, Englishman?" In the ghostly light of swirling stars, Sidi Bombay's irregularly spaced teeth reflected the light of distant stars like white rectangles set in a mask of blackness. "One might suppose, Englishman, that in a sense we are still moving toward the north." Again the white turban dipped and rose in mocking assent.
"But where are we? We have surely left the Sudd. As strange a place as that is, it is still Earthly. There are crocodiles there and hippos, trees and cattails and nesting birds. The sun rises and sets there, the sky is blue and the earth is brown and the plants are green. And there is life, life all around one. But here—here—"
He gestured to indicate their surroundings. "All blackness. All—death." He had not meant to be melodramatic, but involuntarily he uttered the last word in a whisper that held some portion of a sob. He looked at his companions pleadingly. For all that he was a field-grade officer and Smythe only a quartermaster sergeant—and Sidi Bombay a mere civilian guide—Folliot felt helpless and dependent upon the others.
"Buck up, sah," Smythe encouraged. "Everything will sort itself out in time."
"You know that, Sergeant?"
"I hope it, sah. If I may say as much, I pray it."
"But you don't know it?"
"P'raps we'd best be on our way again, sah." He reached into a pocket of his khaki trousers and pulled out a massive stem-wound turnip watch. For some reason the incongruity of the action made Clive Folliot laugh. He was reminded of the white rabbit in the Mr. Dodgson's fantasy.
Smythe caught the laughter and joined in.
Even Sidi Bombay permitted himself a dry chuckle.
But Folliot realized that he had scored a partial victory. He had reasserted himself as a figure to be reckoned with. He said, "Very well. As none of us is suffering from excessive fatigue—or hunger or thirst—let us continue."
Their path led steadily upward, upward into the blackness. The air grew perceptibly thinner and cooler, but the swirling, spiraling stars that provided their illumination continued on their majestic courses. Other than that, there was no indication of the passage of time.
They might have marched for hours or for centuries, but in fact, Folliot mused, they marched through some timeless realm where neither hours nor centuries had meaning. Clive wondered what hour Horace Hamilton Smythe's pocket watch would indicate— but then he realized that it would not matter in the least. Should the watch indicate that it was six o'clock or twelve o'clock, it would make no difference.
He uttered a solitary chuckle. He found himself humming familiar tunes beneath his breath. One of them, he realized, was an air that his friend du Maurier had sung in the burlesque Cox and Box. He smiled ruefully. Oh, du Maurier, if you could only see me now. If your mystical mental communion were actually linking our minds at this moment...
Renewed thoughts of du Maurier brought his mind back to thoughts of London, and of Annabella Leighton. Her lips, her face, seemed to float in the air before him. The eerie blackness of this weird world set off the redness of her lips, the whiteness of her flesh. He saw her partially disrobed, her curves illuminated by the warm hearth of her London flat. How she teased him at times, as she slowly removed her garments, posing in camisole and garters, smiling at him and—
"Englishman!"
Folliot drew up short, Sidi Bombay's bony hand clutching his shoulder through the khaki bush jacket. Clive was standing on the brink of a precipice. The black landscape had risen to a bluff. Inches beyond his boot tips the terrain fell away, dropping what must be thousands of feet in an almost vertical cliff.
"One more step, Englishman, and you would learn the answer to all the mysteries of being!"
Stretching for miles from the base of the cliff was a black landscape. Brilliant starlight glimmered even to this height from the surface of a river that flowed from the base of the cliff across a stark plain.
And far out on the midnight plain, lights glittering enticingly, a magnificent city thrust black towers gracefully, high into the cold black night.
Clive Folliot stood side by side with the gaunt, white-robed guide, drawing breath after slow breath, letting the awesome sight sink slowly into his consciousness.
Then, "Major Folliot, sah! Sidi Bombay!"
Sidi Bombay dropped his hand from Clive's shoulder and they turned toward Horace Hamilton Smythe.
"Come and see what's been left here," the sergeant urged.
CHAPTER 12
The Silent City
Clive sprinted to the side of Sergeant Smythe.
"Have a look, sah!"
Smythe had fallen to one knee before a round-topped, oblong object. It was as black as the rest of this world, carved of smooth black stone. It was as long as a man is tall, as wide as a man is wide, and deep enough to hold . . .
"It is a coffin, yes, that it surely is." The dry voice of Sidi Bombay sounded from behind Clive Folliot's shoulder.
"But whose—what—?" Clive stammered in bafflement.
"Don't see how it could've got up here, sah?" Sergeant Smythe inquired, his voice husky.
Sidi Bombay held out his arms and intoned, "The coffin of the Prophet rose through the air and was taken into Paradise. Surely the coffin of some lesser one could be lifted to this mountain peak."
Smythe grunted. "Huh! That's as it may be, Sidi Bombay. I don't banter theology with the likes of you."
A ghastly smile split Sidi Bombay's scrawny features. "The English sergeant has learned when not to challenge, I see, yes."
"But whose remains can it contain?" Clive returned to the subject.
"There is but one way to learn that, O Englishman." Sidi Bombay moved closer to the coffin. He searched for a way to open it, but his manner was more that of a man seeking for something he knows is present, than that of a man merely exploring. There were no visible hinges, but an inlaid panel showed a different texture of blackness.
Clive Folliot, watching over Sidi Bombay's shoulder, caught a glimpse of the now familiar star-spiral pattern. He watched long, bony fingers play over the glittering points in a sequence of moves too rapid to hope to duplicate.
As if on perfectly machined gears and hinges oiled to utter silence, the whole propelled by a tightly wound spring, the lid of the coffin arced away From the three men. Within the casket, lying against glistening black satin padding, lay a cadaver.
The face was utterly like that of Clive Folliot: only the different style of facial hair marking the one man from the other. The skin was pale in death, the clothing was the uniform of a major of the Royal Somerset Grenadier Guards. The corpse's hands were folded across the chest of its brilliant uniform tunic, clutching a small leather-bound volume.
"Neville!" Clive Folliot cried.
Sergeant Smythe placed a strong hand on Folliot's shoulder. "Steady, sah! Steady on! '
"But—it is my brother! My twin! My—" Clive Folliot fell to his knees beside the coffin, his forearms resting on the obsidian edge, staring thunderstruck into the face of the cadaver, the face that so astonishingly resembled his own.
"He never made it through the Sudd. Somehow he passed through that same—passage, channel, gateway—that crystal and ruby portal. He came here, also."
"Yes, Englishman. So must he, for behold, here he is, indeed." Sidi Bombay had moved closer to Clive. As he nodded his head, his ragged white turban fell and rose solemnly.
Clive raised his face to address Sidi Bombay and Horace Hamilton Smythe. "That gives me no answer as to how he died, or why he is here. But it proves that he was not alone here, for he is laid out in this casket and the whole has been placed here for some purpose—and by some persons."
He paused, then went on. "With due respect to your religion, Sidi Bombay, I do not belie
ve that Allah carried Neville up here in his coffin. Someone living and material did that. Probably," and he extended his arm over the open coffin, pointing at the cluster of graceful towers that rose from the black plain beneath the mountain wall, "someone from that city."
Sergeant Smythe pushed himself upright and stood at the edge of the bluff. "Maybe your Allah can fly us down there, Sidi Bombay. If not, it's a long walk round the edge of this mountain, till we find some way down. We can't go back the way we came, I don't think."
"Allah could carry us in the palm of His hand, O Sergeant. To the All-Merciful the task would be as naught. But we are our own masters here, and it is ours to make what we will of our plight."
A cold sweat had broken out on Clive's forehead. "There may be a clue . . ." he whispered. With trembling hands he reached for his dead brother's fingers, to unclasp them from the journal. The fingers were icy and stiff, and Clive had to pry them away from the book.
As soon as it was free he pulled it from Neville's dead hands and rose to his feet, holding the book before him. When he attempted to open it he found that a small lock, like those used by giggling schoolgirls to protect their diaries, held it closed.
Clive turned the book over, searching for a clue as to how to open it. As a last resort he or his companions could smash the lock. He studied the book in the weird light of the swirling stars. It was bound in jet-black leather and bore no title on its cover or spine. The only marking was a miniature representation of the starry spiral Clive knew so well.
A sound like the whisper of hands on cloth made
Clive look up. Sidi Bombay and Horace Hamilton Smythe had stepped away from the casket, and the cadaver of Major Neville Folliot seemed almost to struggle, moving restlessly within its casket.
But Clive realized that this was not at all the case. Neville Folliot—if this was truly Neville—was crumbling away. The flesh that lay pallid and drab against the casket's padding was disintegrating into death's final dissolution. The uniform Neville wore—the splendid parade dress of his Guards unit, with its brass trim and frogging of woven gold—was shredding and turning to tatters and threads.
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