Later the boats went out again, this time drawing pieces of meat behind them on bladders. When the air sharks came in for passes at the bait, they were harpooned. Those not killed at once followed the same rising and diving tactics as the whales, but they lacked the gas-generating capabilities or the weight of the leviathans.
After a dozen sharks were killed, the ship resumed sailing. But it still lacked enough meat, so the first time it encountered another cloud of atmospheric brit, it hunted again. It was not until near the end of the long day that there was enough meat aboard to supply them until they reached Zalarapamtra.
The last whale killed gave up to the cutting butchers a prize that would have been the cause of a great celebration at any other time.
It was a round ivory-hard substance two feet in diameter, alternately striated with red, blue and black. It exuded a powerful perfume that caused drunkenness in those who came near. This was the same perfume that the little god of the ship, Ishnuvakardi, exuded.
The ball was found in one of the smaller stomachs of the whale, the creature having many stomachs distributed along the bony framework of the tail. Namalee said that a certain small creature of the air, a vrishwanka, was sometimes swallowed by a whale. It passed through the entrails that climbed around the skeleton of the tail until it was either eliminated or caught in a blind corner of a sac. If the latter happened, the digestive system of the whale secreted a substance around the vrishwanka just as an oyster did around a grain of sand.
The result, the intoxicatingly perfumed, ivory-hard vrishkaw, was a great treasure. Out of it would be carved a new little god, and the god would be put in a newly carved temple in the city of Zalarapamtra. Sometimes the uncarved vrishkaw was traded to a city with which Zalarapamtra did not happen to be warring at that time. The other city may have lost a god when a ship went down and needed a new one. Or the god may have been traded for by one of those cities that hoarded gods against the day when a shortage would occur. Or hoarded because of the belief that the more gods, the more good fortune.
Namalee, during one of their many talks during the long, long journey back, told him of how the gods of Zalarapamtra were found and "born," as she called the process of carving.
She also told him of how, when old whales died, their flesh fed their own bladders, and they rose upward where the sky became totally black in the daytime and there was little air. The mighty corpses drifted with the high winds eastward and then began to sink as, one after the other, the bladders burst from corruption. And somewhere at the foot of the insurmountable mountains to the east (which Ishmael knew were the once submarine slopes of continents) was a place where the dead whales ended up. There was a tangle of bones almost as high as the cliffs, since the beasts had been drifting there since time began. And there, of course, was an immense treasure of vrishkaw, of perfume-exuding unborn gods.
The city that found the ancient burial grounds of the wind whales would be the richest in the world and hence the most powerful.
And also the drunkenest, Ishmael thought. He envisioned a city thronged with such gods, the citizens reeling during waking hours, falling soddenly into bed, rising as intoxicated as when they went to bed.
Many a ship from many a city had put out with the sole purpose of locating the burial ground, Namalee said. But it was near the eastern cliffs that the Purple Beasts of the Stinging Death were most numerous.
"How do you know that?" Ishmael said.
"Because none of the ships that look for the burial ground ever come back," she said. "Obviously they were caught by a Purple Beast."
He raised his eyebrows and smiled.
She said, "What are you thinking?"
"That, strange as you and your people are to my way of thinking, you are still much like me and my people. The essential human has not changed. Whether that is good or not, I cannot say. Indeed, I cannot say that there is any good or evil beyond what each person thinks is beneficial or not to himself. When I think of the billions upon billions, the trillions upon trillions, who have lived and struggled for or against evil, which has been called many names but always wears a skull, then I wonder."
What the white whale had been to Ahab, time was to Ishmael.
The red sun finally went down, and the slowly chilling night came. Days and nights followed, though not swiftly. Ishmael learned everything there was to learn about sailing and navigating a ship of the air and also much about building one. He was a forecastle hand, yet he sometimes ate with the captain and Namalee. That he was clearly of a different race, of a totally unknown race, and that he claimed to be the son of a different sun and a different world, raised him above class distinctions.
There was also the possibility that they thought him insane, though quite capable in many respects. They delighted to hear him talk of his own world, but they could not comprehend much of what he said. When they heard him say that the very air through which they sailed, so many thousands of feet above the ground, had once been filled with water, and that this water was filled with life unlike that which they knew, they could not believe him.
Equally incredible was his insistence that the earth he had known shook only now and then and quite briefly.
Ishmael did not argue with them any more than he would have with Ahab. Each man's mind was cast into its own coinage, and each could be spent as currency only in a small kingdom.
As the Roolanga neared Zalarapamtra, its crew became silent. The sailors talked, but only in very low tones, and they said little most of the time. They seemed lost in themselves, as if they were searching in their own minds for what they would do if they indeed did find their native country desolated. They went frequently into the chapel, as Ishmael called it, where Namalee was spending most of her waking and many of her sleeping hours. The box was off the little god all the time now, and Ishmael could not go by the open room without feeling his senses stumble.
Namalee sat on the floor, facing the god, with her body leaning forward almost parallel to the floor and her head bent almost touching the floor. Her long black hair was thrown forward so that it spread out like a cloud of incense.
Then the top of a mountain leaned out over the northwest horizon, and the captain called everybody to his post. They sailed all that day and into the night and when the red sun reluctantly came up again, they were overshadowed by the colossus. Dead ahead was a tremendous shelf of stone, and on the stone was the city of Zalarapamtra.
A cry arose from the ship.
The shelf was a jumble of rocks and debris.
Ishmael had asked Namalee how men could live in stone chambers that shook and trembled and threatened to come down on their heads every instant.
The answer was that few lived in the stone chambers. These were used for storage, for retreat from storms or enemies, and as places of worship they constituted the lower half of the city. The upper part was, in essence, a floating city. It consisted of two levels of hundreds of houses and larger buildings attached together and buoyed by thousands of great gas-bladders. The floating residential half was anchored at many places to the surface of the shelf, and passage between the floating city and the stone city was by means of ladders or flexible stairways.
All of this had been destroyed. Something had broken the bladders and exploded and burned the upper levels. Their charred and shattered remains were strewn and piled over the stone part. And this had been blasted open at many places to expose the chambers beneath. Piles of fragmented rock lay everywhere.
The Roolanga sailed back and forth before the tremendous shelf and several times over it before the captain decided to bring it into a dock. This was a sunken place carved into the lip of the shelf. The ship floated in with sails furled and the masts shipped. Sailors leaped off of the vessel as it slid into the rectangular depression, and they seized lines thrown them by those on the ship. The lines were run through carved stone rings projecting from the walls of the dock, looped through and then tightened. The ship slow
ed down even more and came to rest with the tip of its bow only a few inches from the rear wall of the dock. More gas was released from the great bladders, and the ship settled down until its keel almost touched the floor of the pier.
Half of the crew of thirty stayed aboard; the other half went into the ruins.
The shelf had its roots in an immense canyon, a slash in the body of the mountain. This rose so high that its top was a thread of dark blue. The massive shelf projected out into the air for perhaps half a mile, so that a shaft sunk through it would have ended in air and a view of the detritus-strewn slope beneath. Ishmael wondered that men would build on a ledge that was doomed to break off from the never-ending vibrations. But Namalee said that even if the stone did fall, it would snap off the anchors when it fell, and the two floating levels would remain in the air. That was the theory at least.
Water was provided most of the year by a spring at the base of the innermost wall of the canyon and the rest of the year by pods harvested from the vegetation at the foot of the mountain.
Ishmael thanked her for the information. He then asked her why she had been delegated to lead this party, when it would have been wiser to leave the only woman survivor, as far as anyone knew, on board. She replied that the members of the family of the Grand Admiral had many privileges which lesser beings did not have. To pay for these, they also had more obligations. Until a male member of her family was found, she was the leader and she must be at the head of any perilous undertaking.
Ishmael did not understand the reasoning behind this. If Zalarapamtra was to live again, it must have woman to bear children.
They climbed piles of stone and burned wood, skirted deep jagged holes and sometimes leaped over the holes. The blasts had ripped off the floor at many places, exposing the chambers beneath. These were partially filled with stone rubble or with the remains of the upper city.
Nowhere was there even a single bone.
"The Beast eats everything, flesh, bones, everything," Namalee said. "It settles down over the city after it has ruined it, and its stinging tentacles probe into every place and sting those who still live. And it drags out the dead into its mouth. When it has eaten everything, it sleeps. And then it floats off, looking for other prey.
"It has destroyed three cities during my lifetime: Avastshi, Prakhamarshri, and Manvrikaspa. It comes, and it kills, and it leaves few alive behind."
"But it does leave some?" Ishmael said.
He noted great streaks of some dirty white substance and wondered if the Beast left a slime.
"Avastshi and Manvrikaspa were emptied of all life," she said. "A woman and two of her babies escaped in Prakhamashri because the entrance to the chamber in which she was hiding was blocked by rubble."
"And did these cities come to life again when the whaling ships returned?" Ishmael said.
"Only Prakhamashri thrives today," she said. "Whalers of the other two also returned with their daughters of the Grand Admiral. But they were few and one thing and another happened, and presently there were no women alive. So the surviving men boarded their ships and floated away with sails furled while they sniffed in the odors of the little gods and the great god, which they carried in the flagship. Then they hurled the gods overboard into the salty sea and jumped after them and the ships drifted on until they sank against the land."
A national suttee, Ishmael told himself. If all the states have such customs, it is remarkable that mankind has survived this long. And I get the impression that there is not much of humanity walking around under this red sun.
The party proceeded slowly toward the canyon while the rocks under their feet quivered. There was nothing but devastation around them and a silence broken only thinly by them. Then they heard a cry, and a moment later a head appeared from a hole in the rock near the mouth of the canyon. Another head popped out, then two more. One woman, one man and two girl children had escaped the Purple Beast of the Stinging Death.
They had also escaped the men of Booragangah, who had come after the Beast had left.
They had returned to the deepest chamber and there the man had swung shut an immense door of stone which he had worked hard for years to shape. They had lived on water and food stored there for just such an emergency. But they had been lucky to get to the room, because the onslaught of the Beast had been unexpected and terrible and seemingly on all points at once.
"And then, almost immediately after it left, the ships of the Booragangah came," the man said. "It was still night, so I slipped out and hid in the rubble and listened. Men of Zalarapamtra! Namalee, daughter of the Grand Admiral! The men of Booragangah boasted that they had lured the Beast here! Their ships had sighted one headed toward their city. Perhaps it would have attacked them and perhaps it would have missed them. One never knows about the kahamwoodoo. It floats along as if it were a cloud, and it does not seem to care to do anything but float most of the time. But sometimes it changes its course and heads for a city, and that city is doomed.
"But the Booragangah whalers caught whales and fed them to the kahamwoodoo, losing two ships that got too close, though. The kahamwoodoo finally turned after them. . ."
"How?" Ishmael said. "I thought the Beast had no wing-sails."
"By a series of small controlled explosions," Namalee said. "It shoots out fire and smoke with much noise from holes in its bodies. The thing that makes the noise and smoke is also the thing it drops on the cities to blow them apart."
"A beast that shoots gunpowder and drops bombs?" Ishmael said. He used the English words for gunpowder and bombs, since these did not exist in Namalee's language.
"It shoots fire, smoke and noise, and drops stones that explode," she said.
"The men of Booragangah said that their Grand Admiral, who was in charge of their great whaling fleet, conceived the idea. His name is Shamvashra. Remember that, citizens of Zalarapamtra! Shamvashra! He is the fiend of the upper air who has destroyed our city!"
Ishmael thought that Shamvashra was only doing what they would have done if they had thought of it, but he said nothing.
"It was necessary, they said, to work harder than they ever had in their lives. They had to keep on slaying whales and launching them toward the Beast. And they lost a ship with all men aboard while they were hunting food for the Beast when one was struck by two whales diving through the brit with the boats attached to them. But the men said that the ships they had lost made a price worth paying, because they had lured the Beast to Zalarapamtra. They said that they might try to do the same with other Beasts for all of their enemies, and then they would fear no other cities, because there would be none.
"Other men said that that would be bad. What if they met a Beast that could not be lured away and it destroyed Booragangah? That would be the end of man.
"But most seemed to be happy about what they had done. So they took our great god, Zoomashmarta, and all the lesser gods, put them aboard their ships and sailed away."
At these words, a cry went up from the sailors and from Namalee; they wept and some gashed themselves.
"No gods!" Namalee cried. "Zalarapamtra is without gods! They are prisoners of Booragangah!"
"We are lost!" a sailor shouted.
The man who was telling the story said, "I heard them say that they would be coming back some day and making sure that we did not build a new great city. They would surprise the people who returned on the ships and would slay them or carry them off as slaves. And this place would know only the air sharks, sweeping above the ruins and eyeing them in vain for life on which to feed."
"We will be powerless without our gods!" another man said.
They found no other survivors. On returning to the ship, the crew spread the news. The captain, informed by Namalee, turned gray and cut himself so deeply in his grief that he came close to dying of loss of blood.
Until they landed, they had all believed that, horrible as the situation was, they would flourish again. After all, they had their gods. T
hough these might permit disaster to fall upon Zalarapamtra, they would not permit their worshippers to die out. Who then would the gods have to worship them?
They had not considered, of course, that Avastshi and Manvrikaspa had had their gods, and these had permitted their worshippers to die to the last one.
They were a gloomy crew and, what was worse, hopeless. Gloom derived from despair is something that hope can overcome, but hope can only come if something occurs to make things seem not hopeless. Even the arrival in the next three days of five whaling ships did not reassure them. If anything, the addition of more people seemed to add to the despair. The city was almost as silent as when it had held but four people in hiding.
Six more days passed. There was more activity then, since it was necessary to put to air and hunt for food. Captain Baramha died from infection of his wounds and a lack of desire to live. His ship took him out high above the dead seas and, after a short ceremony, his naked body was slid overboard from a plank.
"You still have the gods of the ships," Ishmael said. "Why can't. . .?"
"They have power only over the ship," she said. "They are very little gods. No, we must have the gods of the city and the greatest god, Zoomashmarta."
"Otherwise you just all give up and die, is that it?" Ishmael said.
They did not reply, and it was evident from their faces that that was exactly what they would do. They were sitting around a number of fires in an underground chamber which had been repaired. The fires were small and comparatively smokeless. Ventilation was provided by holes in the ceiling, and light by giant fireflies in cages. The room quivered with the earth tide.
Ishmael sat with Namalee and her five sisters and the captains of the ships around one fire. The first mates sat around another, and the second mates around still another. The sailors were in other chambers.
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