The Arab went on, and Price waited for Jacob Garth.
“Just what do you know of these skulls?” he demanded.
“There is an unbroken line of them, extending from here to a pass in the Jebel Harb, where I found the Spaniard’s bones. Presumably they go on, to Anz—I wasn’t able to get beyond the mountains. They must have been here four hundred years ago, for Quadra y Vargas mentions them in his manuscript.”
“This skull is no four centuries old!” objected Price. “Look at it!”
“Evidently not. It must have been recently replaced.”
“But who would replace it?”
“I think I told you that I believe the people of the hidden land know more of the outer world than the outer world knows of them. I suppose they wanted to keep marked the road to the sea.”
“But why use the skulls of men for markers?”
“Durable and easy to see, I suppose—and cheap.”
Several times that day Price rode back along the line of march, to talk with the men. Few of them knew anything of camels. They distrusted the unfamiliar beasts, and were chafed and bruised by the lurching saddles. They complained of thirst and heat and the blinding flame of the brazen sky.
During the intensest heat of the day they stopped and let the camels kneel upon the bare, burning sand, to rest. Toward evening they pushed on again, until it was too dark to find the guiding skulls.
The next day was the same, and the next.
On the morning of the fourth day they came out upon a narrow plain of gravel, a dark slash through red-sand dunes. There they found a well—a square, uncovered pit, from which they drew water with leathern buckets and ropes of camel’s hair, for beasts and men. Muddy water, bitter, brackish, almost undrinkable.
It was late afternoon when the last camel had been satisfied and the last water-skin filled. Then they pushed on again, followed by the clattering tank, into another belt of loose red sand.
Two more nights they camped among the dunes. On the morning of the sixth day from the sea they came again upon hard, rolling, flinty gravel, which sloped up to a grim and rugged wall of barren mountains.
“The Jebel Harb,” Jacob Garth told Price, “where I was stopped before. We’ll see trouble before we pass them—and I don’t know what beyond.”
In the pellucid desert atmosphere the mountains looked very near. Beetling black granite ramparts, furrowed into rugged gorges and hostile, jutting salients, luridly crowned with strata of red sandstone, with pinnacles of white limestone, glaringly leprously. A basalt-ribbed wall of death. Bare and tortured cliff and peak were silent and ugly as bleaching bones. No green of vegetation lined the steep-walled canyons. Unbroken, the dark cruel scarp marched across the horizon, a sinister barrier to the accursed land.
The desert is deceptive. The barrier had looked very near, but as sunset approached on the following day, the caravan was still winding up the waterless gravel slopes, which were barren of even the ordinary sprinkling of dwarf acacia and stunted tamarisks.
Fouad was unmistakably apprehensive. Leaving his usual place at the head of the caravan, he rode back to join Price and Jacob Garth. Without his leadership, his men stopped, gazing with unconcealed fear at the grim, looming, granite escarpment.
“Sidi,” the sheikh began, unwontedly respectful again in his anxiety. “Allah forbid that we go farther! Before us are the mountains of the accursed land, that Allah gave to powers of evil. Beyond wait the djinn, to set our heads upon their poles.”
“Nonsense,” Price said. “Didn’t we show you the farengi weapons?”
Fouad muttered in his beard, and craftily demanded that he be paid the seven days’ wages due, that he might distribute the gold to encourage his timid men.
“It would only encourage them to desert,” Price told him grimly. “Not one piece, until we get back to the sea!”
“There is water in the mountains,” boomed Garth. “You know we must have water.”
“Bisshai,” Fouad agreed. “The skins are dry and the camels are thirsty. But even so—”
“Let us ride on,” Price cut him off.
And the old Bedouin, grumbling, at last returned to the head of the column. By sunset they had covered half the remaining distance to the lofty pass ahead, between cleft, towering masses of dark granite, capped with bands of somber red and livid white.
It was at sunset that they saw the first weird phenomenon that heralded the coming conflict with the alien power of the hidden land.
4. THE TIGER IN THE SKY
PRICE HAD URGED his weary camel to the head of the line again, to ride beside old Fouad and bolster the Bedouin’s courage. Jacob Garth was back among the men. As usual, the camels were strung out in single file; it was over a mile back to the tank, which brought up the rear, clattering and banging across the hard, flinty gravel.
But a few miles ahead the colossal rugged precipices of black granite plunged upward to red-and-white crowns of sandstone and limestone, forming twin towers that grimly guarded the pass.
“Ya Allah!” the Arab renegade shrieked suddenly, terror-stricken. “Be merciful!” Beneath his dark abba he raised a lean arm that shook with fear, and pointed above the pass.
Lifting his eyes, Price saw a strange thing in the sky, beyond the yawning gap, above dark, tumbling rocks that were incarnadined with the red glare of sunset.
Penciled rays of light were streaming upward in a vast, spreading fan, against the violet-blue of the east. Thin, pale beams of rose and saffron, flung out as if from a single radiant point hidden below the black range.
Price was startled; something about the luminescent display seemed weirdly artificial. Fighting back his momentary fear, he turned to the trembling Fouad, who had gone white as his pigmentation allowed.
“What is it?”
“The evil djinn of the accursed land rise beyond the hills!”
“Nonsense! Just the rays of the sun shining past a cloud, and seeming to converge in the distance. A natural phenomenon.”
Price rapidly scanned the sky for a cloud to prove his theory, but found its indigo dome, as usual, perfectly clear. He hesitated, then went on rapidly:
“A mirage, perhaps. We always see them in the morning and the evening. They are queer, sometimes. Once, in the Sind desert, hundreds of miles from the sea, I saw a steamer. Funnels and smoke and all. Even made out the boats in their davits. Simply reflection and refraction of light, in the atmosphere.”
“Bismillah wa Allahu akbar!” the old sheikh was groaning, too overcome to listen.
Price then saw that a picture was taking form above the fan of colored rays, somewhat as if projected upon the sky by a colossal magic lantern. Yet it seemed weirdly real, stereoscopic.
What he saw was madness. He knew that it should be mirage, grotesque fancy, illusion. It should have been hallucination, merely the projection of the Arabs’ fears against the sky. But he knew that it was not, knew that it was, in some strange way, a reflection of actual existence.
“The tiger of the accursed land!” Fouad was screaming. “The yellow woman of the mirage, whose fatal beauty lures men across the desert to die. And the golden god, the king of evil djinn!”
Abruptly the old Bedouin lifted his camel-stick, shouted at his mount, turned in panic flight.
Drawing himself back from the apparition in the sky, Price drew his automatic and called to the Arab in a deadly voice:
“Stop! You aren’t going to run off. I can kill you quicker than all the ’ifrits in Arabia!”
Fouad sputtered and cursed, but he brought his white camel to a halt. His dark eyes, wide with fear, went back to the pass.
A tiger had appeared in the sky, above the spreading rays of rose and topaz. Huge as a cloud, its image was incredibly vivid and real. A sleek, powerful beast, magnified incredibly, floating above the jagged peaks. Its sides were barred with bright, rufous gold. Vast muscles bulged its thick, massive limbs. It looked down from the sky with tawny, terrible eyes, narrowed to bla
ck slits.
A curious, box-like saddle of black wood was strapped upon the back of the uncanny beast, like a howdah on an elephant. In it were two persons.
One was a man, golden-bearded, yellow-skinned, clad in red robes and wearing a crimson skull-cap. His face was sullenly cruel, marked with the stamp of sinister power. Balanced on his knee was a great spiked mace, of yellow metal.
The other was a woman, green-robed, reclining in an attitude of voluptuous ease. Her skin, also, was yellow; and her long hair, flying free, was red-golden. Slim, green-cased, her body was lithely graceful, and on her face was a perilous beauty.
Her slightly oblique eyes were tawny-green, oddly like the tiger’s. Their lids were darkened, as if with kohl. Her lips were crimsoned, her golden cheeks touched with rouge, her slender fingers henna-reddened. Hers was a loveliness exotic and sinister.
Fouad’s furtive movement called back Price’s eyes. He saw that the whole caravan had stopped. Even the tank’s clatter had ceased. He sensed the fear that ran electric along the line, from man to awestruck man, fear that might readily become disastrous panic.
The old sheikh had been edging his camel away.
“Keep still,” Price warned him, “or I’ll kill you!”
He was certain that the danger was not immediate, and he knew the Arabs would not desert without their leader.
His eyes went back to the picture in the sky, silent and awful in its magnitude, infinitely appalling for its eldritch strangeness. The yellow man’s crafty, leering eyes scanned the caravan. And the woman was smiling down, Price saw, at him.
No kind smile was it. Mysterious, enigmatic, mocking. Its evasive challenge raised in Price a vague and nameless anger; yet somehow the exotic golden beauty stirred faint awakenings of desire.
The oval, aureate face was lovely, alluring, yet subtly malicious. The greenish, tawny eyes hinted of hot passion, of burning desire and withering hate, of caprice unchecked by fear or law. They were wise with an ancient knowledge not all of good. They were bold with power unlimited and carelessly held. They watched Price, speculatively, tauntingly…
The yellow-beard moved. In both great hands he raised the spiked golden mace, flourished it over the pass, in a gesture definitely hostile, menacing. On his harsh face was warning… and hate.
The woman smiled down at Price, with a challenge in her tawny eyes, and ran slim, reddened fingers through the golden masses of her hair.
“See, Howeja!” Fouad hissed. “He warns us to go back!”
Price did not answer. His gaze was still upward, meeting the woman’s enigmatic orbs, giving challenge for challenge. His own eyes were hard. Abruptly, to the old Arab’s manifest surprise, he laughed, laughed long and harshly, jeeringly, at the woman, and turned away.
“A modern Lilith, eh?” he muttered. “Well, strut your stuff. We can play the game.”
Then, slowly as the picture had appeared, it faded, dissolved in the darkening amethystine sky, vanished. The fan of narrow rays died beyond the pass.
The black ramparts of the Jebel Harb loomed hostile against the dusk.
Price sat on his camel, his automatic still covering Fouad El Akmet—and wondered.
The weird beings of the accursed land, then, were not all fiction. People lived beyond the mountains, people whose skins were the color of gold—not the yellow-brown of the Mongolian, but golden; people who had domesticated the tiger, and who must command strange powers of science.
The apparition, he was sure, had been some sort of mirage. He recalled the Fata Morgana, that he had seen once at the Strait of Messina, remembered accounts of that uncanny light-phenomenon of the German mountains, known as the Specter of the Brocken, in which colossal shadows are cast upon the clouds. But had this lost race mastered the laws of the mirage? Did they rule illusion?
If this fantastic madness had already greeted them, what would they encounter beyond the range?
5. THE SIGN OF THE SNAKE
“CONSIDER THIS ALSO,” Price said: “if any man turns back, we shall pursue him with the chariot of death, and leave his skull to make a nest for scorpions.”
Fouad El Akmet muttered, and twisted his finger in his scrawny beard. The Arabs had refused to go farther, on the night before, had protested, even, at camping on the spot. Now, on the following morning, the old sheikh was vainly opposing any further advance.
“Sidi, you know that the shadow was a warning. We may yet save our lives from the golden king of djinn—”
“If we go on and conquer him!”
“There is water in the pass,” Garth said. “A clear, sweet well. And you know the bitter waters of the last well are many days behind. Few of you would live to taste them.”
Fouad wavered visibly.
“Remember the chariot of death,” Price urged. “And the gold in it that is already yours, if you but stay.”
“Wallah!” the Bedouin cried at last, though with obviously tepid enthusiasm. “We ride into the pass.”
The rugged masses of the Jebel Harb loomed ragged and black against a pallid glow of pearl in the east, as the caravan toiled wearily upward again, over rolling foothills that were darkly purple in the dawn.
The long line of camels wound into the pass, between soaring, cyclopean walls of elemental granite. The patch of sky ahead became a lurid high curtain of scarlet flame; the desert behind was lit with pastel hues of saffron and lavender.
Price rode in the lead, beside Fouad, to keep alive the uncertain spark of the old man’s courage. Garth was back among the men; the tank, as usual, at the rear.
The lower pass was a titanic gorge, a gargantuan gash through living rock. Its beetling walls, marching in rough parallel, seemed almost to close above its rugged, boulder-strewn floor. As Price and the old Arab picked a cautious way upward for the tender-footed camels, the sun rose to touch the high cliffs with a brush of scarlet fire, but the canyon remained shadow-filled.
Scanning the narrowing walls ahead, Price saw a glittering flash at the base of a sandstone column, a mile up the gorge. Instinctively he goaded his camel into cover behind a gigantic fallen mass of granite.
“The pass is guarded,” he called out to Fouad. “I saw the gleam of a blade, ahead. Better have your men take cover.”
The old Arab groaned.
Price saw that the old sheikh, struck motionless with terror, was staring at the man who had been riding just behind him.
That man was the Arab Mustafa, a young warrior, mounting a black she-camel of whose gait and endurance he was inordinately proud. From the shelter of the fallen megalith, Price saw Mustafa freeze suddenly into strange immobility.
The young Arab and his black camel became utterly motionless. The camel was poised rigid, in the very act of stepping, one forefoot lifted. The man leaned forward, mute wonder on his thin face, one hand lifted as if to shade his eyes. His brown abba and flowing white kafiyeh had become stiff as cast metal.
“Ya, Mustafa!” old Fouad howled, in terror.
A strange, swift change came over the motionless figure. Glittering tracery of white was drawn over man and camel. In seconds, a frosty film covered both. The mounted man had become a statue in white, bright with an icy sparkle.
Staring in dazed and unbelieving wonder, Price heard abrupt, crackling sounds from the figure. A breath of air cold as an arctic blizzard struck Price’s face, chilled the sweat on his forehead.
Then he knew! Not, of course, how it had been done. But he knew that Mustafa had been frozen to death! By some strange agency, the temperature of his body had been suddenly lowered to a point far below zero. It was so cold that frost condensed upon it from the air.
For a moment Price was dazed by the discovery, with all that it implied of the perils ahead. Then a mind and body trained to meet unexpected emergencies responded smoothly, almost automatically.
“Quick,” he called to the men behind. “Get over by the cliff, out of sight.” He gestured.
A score of the Bedouins and a few of the wh
ites had been close enough to see the weird tragedy. As Price’s words broke their spell of terror, they wheeled with one accord in panic flight, goading weary camels to a run. In vain he shouted at them to halt, as they vanished down the canyon.
Dismounting swiftly, he slipped to the edge of the sheltering boulder and cautiously surveyed the gorge ahead. He saw nothing moving; ominous silence hung expectant between the frowning walls. He studied the base of the sandstone monolith, where he had seen that fleeting, betraying gleam that had saved him from Mustafa’s fate, and quickly estimated the range.
Then, hastening back, he found the whole caravan gathered in confusion about the tank, where Jacob Garth had succeeded in stopping the fleeing Arabs. The frightened clamor ceased as he rode up.
“Refrigeration to the nth degree,” he explained tersely. “The man was frozen—instantly. The white is frost. I saw the glitter of the thing that did it, up the canyon.”
The pale, fat face, the cold, deep-set eyes of Jacob Garth revealed neither wonder nor fear.
“They saw us, last night,” he boomed. “In that—mirage. They are ready—as they were before.”
“We’ll give them a run for the money,” announced Price. He turned to the men and began shouting brisk orders.
“Müller, take your crews and mount the Krupps for action. Bear on the base of that sandstone cliff.” He pointed. “Range is about four thousand yards.”
“Yes, sir!” The little Teuton, who had been a captain of artillery in the Austrian army, saluted briskly and ran toward the baggage-camels that carried the mountain guns.
Rapidly Price gave commands to have the machine-guns unpacked and set up, to cover the ancient cannon. He had rifles and automatics served out, stationed snipers to pick off any of the unseen enemy that might appear.
When the weapons were unpacked, he sent the camels back to the rear, with Arab herdsmen. The camels were to be guarded at all costs, for their loss would mean inevitable ruin.
Jacob Garth watched silently as Price rapped out his orders, the bland white face showing neither satisfaction nor disapproval.
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