by C. L. Moore
He shrugged his shoulders ruefully and gave it up. Hunger was beginning to gnaw at him, and his throat was dry. That meant an exploration of the jungle in search of food and water, and—he glanced down with a wry grin—he was ill equipped for hunting. Even his knife was gone. Barefoot, clad only in the tatters of salt-stiffened shirt and breeches, a little dizzy with shock and hunger and the bone-deep ache from battling last night's breakers, he had little hope of bagging anything better than a fallen fruit or two. He shrugged again and turned toward the jungle.
There was little undergrowth, and the great vine-wreathed trees stood far enough apart for him to pass easily underneath. It was quiet, very quiet. He did not realize until he had gone beyond the sound of the waves how still a place could be. It was like wading deeper and deeper into a pool of stillness. He walked softer instinctively.
He was alert for animal sounds in the undergrowth, and more than once in those first few minutes he thought he heard the small scufflings and rustlings that some rodent makes when footsteps startle it, but try as he would he could see nothing. There were bird notes overhead, too, and the stealthy sound of wings, but he could never look up quickly enough to surprise the authors of these noises. He went on deeper and deeper into the stillness, and the small denizens of the forest ran before him with the tiny, baffling sounds of flight.
Hunger was tightening its grip upon him now, and sometimes the green jungle dipped sidewise before his blurring eyes and the ground heaved underfoot. Still he saw no living thing, though the sounds of small beasts passing through the bushes tantalized him time after time, and the birds were like winged jeers hovering invisibly to mock him with the noise of their presence. Panic began to stir within him. He felt weakness rising like a slow tide and knew that if he surrendered now he would never go on again.
After a while he stumbled over a trailing creeper and lay still on the moss, making no effort to rise. It was cool and pleasant there in the flowery dimness. When he was quiet the hunger did not gnaw so fiercely. He thought at times that he must be floating free of his body. He no longer felt the earth under him and knew himself to be swinging upon currents that swayed as gently as the currents of the sea.
The silence closed round him like water, muffling his very brain. He sank into it, fathom by slow fathom, until he had the curious idea that he was drifting deeper and deeper toward some sea bottom of infinite depth, through layers of green silence. Then it was as if some deep-running tide had stirred the green depths, so that a long shudder ran through them pulsingly.
He lay there in a half coma of weariness and hunger, sinking slowly through the leagues of stillness toward—toward—toward—
His drowning brain groped vaguely toward the knowledge of what awaited him below, with dim, wavering efforts that were nearing knowledge—almost he grasped at the edges of understanding and—
But the gnawing of hunger would not let him rest. He opened reluctant eyes upon a green and flowery dimness, somehow feeling as he did so that a presence which had been very near was withdrawing as he came back to the surface of reality again. A forest-haunting presence was guiding his dimming mind into channels beyond all understanding.
A little breeze had risen; the vines shook together and tremor after shuddering tremor ran ripplingly through the leaves. With the breeze a whisper ran through the place. A whispered secret that bent the treetops down and shivered the vines with secret mirth and rustled in his ears with a maddening incoherence that verged almost on the brink of speech.
He sat up and blinked a little. The leaves had suddenly taken on a new aspect, fallen into fresh patterns. There was something vaguely human in the lines that shivered through them when the wind blew. Or no, not human, but Then for one swift instant he saw it—a mighty face, neither human nor animal—a vast, serene face whose features were unnamable, outlined in the angles of the leaves, indistinguishably. Clearly a presence hung there trembling for the space of a heartbeat before the wind broke up its pattern and shook the branches apart, and then every leaf was a tiny jeering mouth that whispered, whispered—
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SUDDENLY the jungle was alive, animate, inimical, with an alien, imponderable life. A reeling terror came over him. He stumbled to his feet and set off at a staggering run, plunging through the underbrush, ripping at the vines that whipped his face, sick with panic. He felt the nameless presence all about him, thought he saw the vast, unhuman face in every cluster of leaves whose branches limned a pattern. The trees bent down to crush him; the leaf mouths jeered and murmured. Alien and alone, the only living creature in this jungle of haunted and whispering stillness, he plunged on.
When sanity returned he was staggering heavily, blindly, through vines looping down like garlands from the branches of a mighty grove. The poignant twilight sweetness of their blossoms was heady in his nostrils. He had no recollection of how he had come here, save a vague nightmare of frenzied running. But the terror was gone now, and peace had descended upon him as gently as the evening was falling upon the jungle. He lifted his eyes and gazed ahead through the tangle of vines.
Ahead of him loomed something dark and vast. He had no clearer impression of it than that—a great wall of blindness beyond the trees. He stared with blurring eyes which strove to resolve that baffling darkness into some simpler terms which his brain could understand. The waves of his weakness washed up over him and receded again as an incoming tide creeps up about a rock, each wave a little higher than the last. He set his teeth and stumbled forward toward the wall.
Afterward he had no recollection of having crossed the intervening ground between himself and the darkness looming up. He advanced without conscious motion, eyes fixed in all but hypnotized stare upon that strange and nameless thing beyond the trees. He passed under the last festooning vines and the great wall towered up before him. He thought he caught a glimpse of mighty masonry blocks. It might have been a man-made wall, save for the undefinable blurring of it, so that even as near as this his eyes refused to focus directly upon those great blocks and cubes.
Then, with a gentle and inexorable force, he was drawn against the wall as a moth is flattened against a window-pane, and it was neither warm nor cool, but he felt an immense activity through all the particles of the great, half-seen thing. An activity which somehow imparted itself to him and raced through him— There was a moment of the queerest blurring, as if fusion were taking place, as if the wall drank him in.
Those atoms of nameless substance were penetrating his own being—he felt a mighty drawing power fusing them into one. For a timeless instant he was diffused and multiple, and the masonry blocks spread through the atoms that composed him, and his own flesh was a part of the wall. It was an osmosis of solids. He had no clear impression of what was happening, for the substance of his mind was as diffused and intermingled as that of his body. There were wide blank spaces in his memory afterward, as if the stony material of the wall were one with his brain.
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II.
HE WAS STANDING in darkness inside the wall.
He waited, motionless, trying to coordinate his curiously unmanageable impressions, trying to organize himself into an individual being again. And gradually the darkness lightened about him as his eyes adjusted themselves. He seemed to be standing in an arched hallway through whose walls a very faint crimson light filtered translucently.
After a while, in the utter stillness of the place, he began to sense a deeply throbbing beat, pulsing through the hall in waves that grew heavier and heavier as his senses adjusted themselves to the perception of it, until the whole dim hallway was alive and aching with its might.
Presently, with swimming head, he stepped out into the center of the passage. At the first step he staggered, regained his balance with an effort. He became aware that this hall had never been built for human feet to travel. It was a great tube, the floor curving up to meet the curving walls. He struck out along the upward slope of it after a moment of indecision. Those great beating
throbs seemed indefinably to emanate from above.
His dizziness was too strong for him to be greatly astonished or alarmed as he plodded up the tubular passage in a shimmering daze, accepting his surroundings with no more than a passing acknowledgment. Food—rest—he could think in no other terms. He stumbled on heavily up the hall.
All about him, as he made his slow way through the dimness, he felt a tremendous activity of the material that made up the passage. The very air seemed to hum with action and purpose toward some mysterious end too far removed from his understanding to be grasped. And ever that beating pulse strengthened and grew until he was lost in great, intangible surges of power, streaming by him and away.
He went on a long way up the steady slope through the humming, unseen activity, breasting the current that flowed so heavily past, realizing his surroundings with only a small part of his dimmed brain.
After many minutes, during every step of which the pulse beat heavier until his head was ringing with the cosmic thunder of it, the steady flow of that power broke without warning into a maelstrom of wild activity.
It snatched him into its vortex with a stunning suddenness, whirled him up and over and tempestuously all out of balance and control. The walls spun about Mm and the forces he could not see buffeted him with whirlpool violence until all sense of direction left him and the world was a mad upheaval of crimson darkness.
As abruptly as it had begun the tumult ended. He was flung suddenly clear of the dizzy storm center into a dark place whose vastness was one mighty ache of throbbing. It must have been the very heart of that tremendous pulse, for the power* of it was so unbearable that his brain failed him and his senses reeled into an agonized oblivion before that intolerable might.
Great beats of force throbbing through him slowly from head to foot brought him back, by degrees, into consciousness. He no longer felt dazed and bruised by the power of those unseen throbs. He no longer fought them. They were not beating against him now, but through him in mighty, unresisted pulses that thundered like heartbeats, permeating every atom of his being. He was one with the power that went surging through the dark.
He opened his eyes, blinked and drew a deep, quivering breath, half in amazement, half in wonder. Strength flowed through him headily. His mind was crystal-clear, and he was no longer conscious of hunger, thirst or weariness. In the new clarity of his mind he knew intuitively that these mighty pulses beating through him were nourishment and rest and healing for every ailment that had beset him.
With relief from his bodily ills for the first time the realization of his predicament came over him. He stared up into the darkness with awakening amazement. Where? What? Why? A tumult of questions tumbled through his brain. Dimly, he could see through the crimson night of the place that he lay in a vast chamber of the strangest shape. Two wails of it met at right angles; the other two curved and merged together into further darknesses.
The floor was curved, too, and the ceiling. The red twilight shivered with pulsing force, so that the walls seemed to contract and expand. He felt his own body contracting and expanding in rhythm with that mighty beat. The world had narrowed to a red darkness through which throbbed the pulsing of unseen thunders, and everything in the crimson dimness beat in tune.
Under his hands the floor was hard and smooth with a texture he did not recognize. Neither warm nor cold. He felt in its surface a faint hurrying and stirring, as if the atoms of it were moving with perceptible violence upon nameless errands. He looked up. Far overhead he sensed rather than saw the vast crimson roof curving down toward the curving walls. He listened, and the silence was heavy in his ears, though the force beats still pounded through him with an intensity that was greater than sound.
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AND THEN it came to him what this great hall had been built to represent. A heart. That tube corridor along which he had come was shaped into an artery—this chamber was a ventricle of a mighty heart. Even that tumult which had flung him headlong into the place was the valve-action controlling the inflow.
He knit his brows and pressed both hands to the floor. No, it was not a thing of flesh—after all he had seen the masonry blocks that built the outer wall, and this, too, must be the work of hands—but it was more than an inanimate building. A force had entered it and quickened it with a mighty life, flowing through the veins and arteries, pounding out from this huge heart in force beats instead of blood.
What hands had built the place on this uncharted island? What strange, unnamable life quickened it into a simulation of flesh? And if it had a heart and a vascular system, must there not also be a brain? The thought staggered him.
Was it a building? Some age-old temple to a forgotten god, infused still by the great presence of divinity? Then what animal form did it represent? Man? The artery, valve, heart ventricle were of exquisite accuracy so far as his limited knowledge went. Did that accuracy extend to the osmosis process of the wall? Could there once have dwelt here beings who combined the vascular system of mammals with the osmosis system of plants? Or had that curious absorptive power been bestowed upon the walls so that none might gain entrance save those whom the dweller within desired to receive?
If he could only get outside this building—temple—whatever it might be—and see the outer shape into which it had been wrought. -But he remembered the blurring of the walls under his gaze. Had that been the result of his weakness, or some inner, unseeable quality of the walls themselves? Some quality that hovered on the edge of invisibility, or the brink of another dimension?
He remembered that mighty face which had manifested itself briefly to him in the jungle, the brooding presence he had felt as he lay half swooning in the green silences. He felt quite sure now that he was hovering upon the brink of some discovery so vast that his brain could scarcely compass it.
Then his wonderings and his questions and almost his entire consciousness flashed away into nothing as something whirled him with dizzying suddenness into a maelstrom of violence. It swept him irresistibly along paths of whirlpool madness out of the ventricle, through the wild activity of the valve, out along the artery, on and on dizzily through the red twilight down a tube corridor.
He was acutely one with this living temple of a violently living god. The force that was its blood swept through him, unresisted. He whirled on its current through the great artery and out of it, into smaller passages, into yet smaller ones, into great echoing cavities and down corridors once more.
Vaguely, through his reeling brain went the realization that this temple had not been built in the simulacrum of a human body. Inaccurate as his knowledge was of man's inner organs, he recognized differences in the long, dim way he went. There were cavities and darknesses which had no correspondence to human anatomy.
After a long while of buffeting and daze and dark, whirling on long beats of that mighty pulse which flowed so thunderously through the dimness, the. force that bore him along the unquiet ways flashed him into a place of sudden light and sound, deposited him not ungently upon the floor of a great chamber and died away in diffuse murmurs and sighs. He blinked painfully and sat up.
The room he was staring about had no similarity to anything he could recognize as an animal organ. It was arched and lofty, irregular in shape, and the floor curved gently up to the pink-veined walls as all the floors here curved. Vividly he realized anew that this place had never been designed for human feet to travel. By human hands it might have been made, but for no tangible human occupant.
The thing that dwelt in this throbbing dark, animating these corridors and cavities and this great, lighted chamber was no palpable creature. The temple had been built for its invisible presence to permeate from wall to wall, and for no other creature to invade. If he was here now, it was by the summoning of that dweller. He felt sure of that. His heart beat a little heavily at the thought.
All about him through the throbbing air went tiny murmurs and breathings and vagrant scents and sounds which had no meaning to him. The light
which made visible the whole rose-veined place filtered through a windowlike opening high up in one wall, paned with one vast, translucent lens through which vague colors moved milkily. The light itself was diffused and clouded with nameless colors, illuminating the room with a misty, moving uncertainty.
He saw rows of great, circular openings high on the walls around the window, ranged in a symmetry he could not quite grasp. There were other openings, too, so alien in form and purpose that he could do little more than realize their presence. They conveyed no meaning at all to his groping mind. From these apertures the sounds he had heard came softly, sweet and meaningless. Other openings, high along the walls, emitted namelessnesses that were neither sight nor scent nor sound.
Through one orifice pale streamers like smoke wavered continually, and the odor of them was exquisite. They made a dim, soft sound of unearthly sweetness, and through him as he watched and listened went wavers of inexplicable happiness and well-being. He sensed that there were other manifestations than sight and sound and odor coming from them, too, caressing and soft. He had no faculty for perceiving them, but he sensed their presence,
If, as he realized after a while, this window corresponded remotely to an eye, and the openings from which sound came were the inner orifices of ears, then this being in whose image the temple was built must have had many more faculties than man, more senses than humanity's five. A fragment of verse went through his memory:
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A being who hears me tapping
The five-sensed cane of mind
Amid such greater glories
That I am worse than blind.
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Some being such as this, perhaps, whose organs of perception opened upon greater glories than man ever dreamed of.
