Price laughed weakly and uncertainly, for pure joy, when he came into the hot, white noonday light of the hidden garden. He stood a while in the sun, half blind, drinking up the blazing radiance, the warm fresh air.
Presently he stumbled to the fountain and washed his mouth and drank. Collapsing upon the grass beside the pool, he dropped into the sleep of complete exhaustion.
Upon the dawn of a clear, still day, he woke, ravenously hungry. His head was clear again, the bruise of Malikar’s mace subsiding. As he found food from the slender remaining store, and ate, his mind was busy with the problem of Aysa’s rescue.
It was characteristic of Price that he did not pause to wonder whether he could liberate the girl. His only problem was how.
It was in the soft earth where water had overflowed from the pool that he found the tiger’s tracks, after he had eaten. At first he could not think what had made them, they were so amazingly huge. Though shaped like those of any cat, they were large as an elephant’s.
Eagerly he followed the deep prints along the side of the garden, out of the walled court, and off among the sand-heaped ruins of Anz. The wind had not yet moved sufficient sand to efface them.
At once he determined to follow the tiger’s trail. That, surely, would be the shortest path to Aysa. He did not pause to reflect upon the dangers and difficulties that might lie before him, except in order to prepare to meet them. He did not consider his probable failure; procrastination was not in his nature, for Price was a man of action.
Delay would mean disaster. The loose red sand, flowing almost like a liquid beneath the wind, would soon obliterate the prints. But he had to make a few preparations before taking the trail.
First he searched the oasis for a stick of hardwood, carved out a new helve and fitted it to the golden ax, which was now his only weapon.
Then he saddled the two camels, which had regained much of their lost strength upon the lush vegetation of the oasis, and packed the full water-skins, and a bundle of green forage, upon Aysa’s beast.
Mounting his own hejin and leading the other, he rode out of the hidden oasis where he had found the zenith of happiness and the nadir of despair, rode through the shattered piles of sand-leaguered Anz, and over a yellow-red dune that had conquered the black walls.
All day he followed the gigantic tracks. Straight northward they led him, across a billowing sea of crescent hills. The trail, at first, was easy enough to follow. But in the blazing afternoon a breath of wind arose, furnace-hot, and the obliterating drift-sand crept rustling before it.
By sunset the trail was hardly distinguishable. A dozen times Price lost it on the upward slope of a dune, only to pick it up again in the hollow beyond. At dusk he had to stop.
The camels were weary. They had not completely recovered from the terrible journey to Anz. And Price, in his desperate haste, had urged them on unsparingly. He fed them the green forage, ate and drank meagerly, and rolled himself in his blanket, praying that the wind would stop.
It blew harder, instead. All night dry sands whispered with the desert’s ghostly voice, mockingly, as if they taunted Price with Aysa’s fate at the hands of the golden Malikar. Long before dawn the trail was swept out completely.
Before sunrise Price saddled the hejins again, and rode on in the same direction that the trail had led him, driving the jaded animals to the limit of their endurance.
That afternoon his own mount fell down upon the hot sand and died. He gave most of the remaining water to Aysa’s dromedary, and rode on, into the unknown north. From the next dune he looked back at the white shape sprawled in the sun… a hardy beast; it had served him well and he regretted to leave so… and he rode on over the crest.
Some time on the next day—the shadow of the desert’s madness was already descending upon him; he never remembered whether it was morning or afternoon—he came out of the dunes, upon a vast flat plain of yellow clay.
Upon that, he reasoned with the dull effort that precedes delirium, the giant tracks would not have been obliterated by the wind. After an hour’s riding back and forth, he found the enormous prints again, and followed them doggedly across the clay-pan.
The water was all gone that night. He lay down near the camel, in a dry wadi. His mouth was swollen and dry; he was too thirsty to sleep. But even if he could not sleep, he dreamed. Dreamed that he was back with Aysa at the lost oasis, drinking from the stone-rimmed pools and plucking fresh fruit. The dreams verged oddly into reality. He caught himself speaking to Aysa, and woke again with a start to his desolate surroundings.
Day came, and he rode on. The fevered dreams did not stop. He was back in Anz, with the lovely Aysa. He was with her in the deep tomb of Iru, fighting Malikar. He was back in the camp on the road of skulls freeing her from the clutches of Joao de Castro.
But through all the visions of his half-delirium, a single idea reigned in his spinning brain. A fixed purpose dominated him. And he urged the flagging camel northward, along the trail of a gigantic tiger.
Again the trail became more difficult to follow. The clay was flinty, harder; the great feet had left but slight impressions. In the afternoon the hard yellow pan gave way to bare black lava, to a flat, volcanic plateau whose sharp-edged, fire-twisted rocks were hard going for the foot-sore camel, and upon which the golden tiger had left no mark.
There the tracks were hopelessly lost. Price abandoned any attempt to find traces of the huge pads, and rode straight on over the rocky terrain, into the north. Night came, and moonless darkness. And still he urged the half-dead dromedary on, toward the pole-star, glittering pale above the desert horizon.
Polaris danced and beckoned and taunted. Strange pageantries of madness appeared and dissolved upon the star-lit desert. And Price rode on. Sometimes he forgot the reason, and wondered what he would find beneath the star. But still he rode on.
12. “THE ROCK OF HELL”
PRICE woke in the dawn, chilled and shivering beneath his blanket. The emaciated hejin sprawled beside him. He staggered to his feet, trying in vain to recall when he had stopped, and saw the mountain.
In the cold, motionless desert air, it looked very near, only a few miles across the barren, black volcanic plain, a mountain shaped like a truncated cone, rugged, steep-walled. On its summit was a bright coronal, a golden crest that exploded into scintillant splendor when the first sunlight touched it.
Price feared at first that it was mirage or delirium; but complete sanity had come back to him for a little while, with the chill of the dawn, and he knew the mountain was no dream. And it was too early for mirage; the mountain was too motionlessly real.
He remembered the old Arab’s story of a black mountain, Hajar Jehannum, or “Rock of Hell,” upon which golden djinn dwelt in a palace of yellow metal.
The parchment of Quadra y Vargas, the old Spanish soldier of fortune, came back to his mind, with its fantastic account of golden folk—“idols of gold that live and move”—dwelling upon a mountain in la casa dorado, and worshipped like gods by the people of the oasis below.
It had all seemed impossible. But he had seen the golden tiger, and its yellow riders, had fought with Malikar, and followed the tiger’s trail for grim long days. Now here was the mountain, with its crown of gold. Impossible. But was it, like so many impossible things, true?
He goaded the staggering, grumbling hejin to its feet, climbed into the saddle, and rode on, toward the mountain. Aysa had been taken there, he knew, upon the golden tiger, by her yellow captor. And there he was going after her. It might not be easy to find her and set her free, but he was going to do it. If he himself failed, there was yet the Durand luck.
All day he went on toward the mountain. Sometimes the camel reeled and staggered. Then he dismounted and stumbled along on foot, driving it for a distance, until it could rest.
The grim lava tableland seemed to stretch out as he advanced. But at sunset he could distinguish the towers and spires of the glittering castle, shimmering, splendid, drawing h
im with resistless fascination.
Once more he toiled on, far into the night. At dawn the black rock seemed no nearer, but merely larger. Its black walls, of columnar basalt, frowned precipitously grim. They seemed unscalable. Price, in the more lucid periods of his brain-fevered advance, wondered how the castle could be reached.
A crenellated wall of black stone skirted the top of the cliffs—a wall apparently useless, for half a mile of sheer precipice hung below it. Within rose the piles of the unattainable castle. The blazing fulgor of gold, and the brilliant white of alabaster. Twisted domes and turrets. Slim towers. Balconied minarets. Broad roofs and pointed spires. Yellow gold, and white marble.
The high castle was not all of gold. But even so, the value of the yellow metal blazing from it was incalculable, Price knew. The treasure before his eyes might rival in value the monetary gold in the vaults of all the world.
But gold meant nothing, now, to Price Durand. He was fighting back the mists of madness, battling vision and delirium, ignoring the tortures of exhaustion, of thirst that parched his whole body. He was seeking a girl. A girl with gay violet eyes, whose name was Aysa.
Again he was riding on. The bloody, implacable sun rose once more, on his right, and flooded the lava plain with cruel light. The brief sanity of the dawn deserted, and madness of thirst rode back upon stinging barbs of radiation.
It was some time later in the day that the hejin lifted its white, snake-like neck, and looked eastward, with more of life than it had displayed for days. Thereafter it tried continually to turn aside. But Price, with merciless mas’hab stick, drove it on toward the mountain.
After a time he could make out men standing upon the high black walls. Tiny dolls in blue. Little more than moving blue specks. But he thought they were jeering at him, taunting him with Aysa’s captivity, with their walled security upon the cliffs. He found himself cursing them, in a voice that was a whispering croak.
Then, again, when he was nearer the mountain, men rode to meet him. Men in hooded robes of blue, upon white racing-camels. Nine of them, armed with long, yellow-bladed pikes, and golden yataghans.
Price drove his staggering hejin on toward them, whispering insane curses. He knew that they were branded with the mark of the golden snake, that they were the human slaves of the golden man, of Malikar, who had stolen Aysa.
They stopped on the bare lava before him, and awaited his coming.
With a thin arm he lifted the golden ax that was slung to the pommel of his saddle. Trying in vain to goad his dromedary to a trot, he advanced, croaking out the syllables of the ax-song of Iru.
And abruptly the nine whirled, as if in consternation, before this gaunt, golden-armored warrior upon a reeling skeleton of a camel, and fled back toward the mountain, and around it.
Price’s mount was still trying to turn off toward the right, but he followed on after the nine. They left him far behind, but at last he rounded the sheer shoulder of crystalline basalt, that leapt up in colossal hexagonal columns toward the bright castle, and came to the east side of the mountain.
The men were again in view, sitting still upon their camels and looking apprehensively back, when Price came around the mountain. They delayed a little longer, and then retreated again. They rode directly into the mountain.
Again Price followed. At the top of a short slope he saw a square black tunnel in the cliff, the opening of a horizontal shaft driven straight into the basalt.
He started up the lava slope. The hejin fell weakly to its knees, and refused to get up again. Price got out of the saddle, took the golden ax and the yellow oval shield, and started on afoot.
A heavy clang of metal reached his ears, and he saw that the mouth of the tunnel had vanished. In its place was a square of bright gold, inlaid in the black mountain wall.
It was madness. He knew that he had driven himself harder than a man, by rights, can go. He knew that he could not longer trust his senses. Perhaps, after all, there had been no tunnel. The men who fled might have been figments of delirium.
But he reeled on up the slope, in the bright mail of Iru, with the ax and the buckler of the old king of Anz.
He came to the yellow square in the basaltic mountain’s flank. His eyes had not deceived him; there had been a tunnel. Golden gates had closed it. He saw the seam down the middle, the massive hinges on either side. Broad panels of yellow gold, twenty feet high, smooth, polished so that he could see his reflection in them.
He paused an instant, wondering. Was this Price Durand? This thin, stern figure, with staring, sunken, glassy eyes. With black, swollen lips. With madness and death upon a wild and haggard face. Was Price Durand this gaunt specter in golden mail, carrying the arms of a king centuries dust?
The wonder at himself came and fled, like any idea of his desert-maddened brain—like any idea save the one that did not change, the single idea that he must find Aysa.
Then his croaking voice was demanding in Arabic that the golden doors be opened. He heard a subdued stirring beyond the xanthic panels, but they did not move.
He whispered the ax-song of Iru, and hammered upon the mocking golden valves with the battle-ax. And yet they did not open.
Still he beat upon the gates, and shrilled dry-voiced curses, and croaked Aysa’s name. And shining silence taunted him.
Then the dominating purpose that had driven him through terrible days was broken. His reason found sanctity in madness from suffering in a land too cruel for life. And Price was left the creature of delirium.
13. THE GOLDEN LAND
THROUGH several days Price drifted lazily back from temporary insanity into slow awareness. He was among Arabs. Arabs who dressed oddly, and spoke a curious archaic dialect. They were his friends, or rather, awe-struck worshippers. They called him Iru.
He recalled vaguely that somewhere he had heard this strange dialect before. He had even heard the name Iru. But it was several days before he remembered the circumstances of his hearing either.
He lay upon rugs and cushions in a long room, dark and cool, with smoothly plastered mud walls. A guard of the strange Arabs was always near him. And a man who seemed their leader had come many times to see him.
Yarmud was his name. A typical Arab, tall, thin-lipped, hawk-nosed. Price liked him. His dark eyes were straight and piercing. He carried himself with a simple, reserved dignity. Upon his lean, brown face was fierce, stern pride, almost regal.
Yarmud plainly was the ruler of these Arabs; yet he appeared to defer to Price as if to a greater potentate.
Price slept most of the time. He made no exertion save to drink the water and camel’s milk, to eat the simple fare, that his hosts offered him where he lay. He did not try to question them, or even to think. The hardships of his terrible march upon the tiger’s trail had brought him near death, indeed. Tortured body and fevered mind recovered but slowly.
Then one afternoon, when Yarmud entered the room, a stately, august figure in his long, oddly fashioned black abba, Price awoke. His mind was suddenly sane and clear again. He rose to meet the old Arab, though his limbs felt yet weak.
Old Yarmud smiled flashingly in pleasure, to see him rise.
“Salaam aleikum, Lord Iru,” he called. And, to Price’s astonishment, he dropped to his knees on the floor.
Price returned the immemorial desert formula, and Yarmud rose, anxiously inquiring about his health.
“Oh, I’m coming round all right,” he assured the Arab. “How long have I been here?”
“Five days ago your camel—or the camel of the maiden Aysa, who went to wake you—came to the lake. You, Iru, were fastened upon the beast, with a halter-rope around your body and the pommels of the saddle.”
He knew, then, that this must be the town of El Yerim, from which Aysa had fled. These people thought him the legendary king of Anz, awakened to free them from bondage to the golden beings. No great wonder that, since he had ridden out of the desert with the weapons of the ancient ruler, looking more dead than alive.
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br /> “The mountain where Malikar lives,” he asked, “is it near?”
Yarmud gestured with a lean arm. “Northwest. The journey of half a day.”
Price realized then that his hejin, when it tried to turn aside on the last day of the ride to the mountain, had been trying to come to the oasis here. He supposed that, after abandoning his insane hammering upon the golden gate, he had retained consciousness enough to mount the dromedary and tie himself to the saddle, though he recalled nothing of it. And the loyal animal had brought him here.
“Aysa?” he asked Yarmud, eagerly. “Know you where she is?”
“No. She was chosen by Malikar to go to the mountain with the snake’s tribute. She escaped, none knew how,” the old Arab glanced at Price, with the suggestion of a wink, “and went in search of Anz, the lost city, to waken you. You know not where she is?”
Price’s heart went out to Yarmud, with the certainty that he had connived at Aysa’s escape.
“No. Malikar came, and carried her off. He left me locked in the old catacombs. I got out, and followed the tracks of his tiger. They led to the mountain.”
“We shall free her,” said Yarmud, “when we destroy the golden folk.”
Noticing Price’s weakness, the old ruler soon departed, leaving him to decide one problem that had risen. These Arabs obviously considered Price the miraculous resurrection of their ancient king. As such, they were no doubt ready to follow him in a war against the golden beings.
Since he had the old king’s arms—mail, ax and shield were beside his bed—and since he knew the ax-song, it might be easy enough for him to play the part. But Price was naturally frank, straightforward. Everything in him revolted at assuming false colors.
Next morning he was feeling stronger. And he had made his decision.
When Yarmud entered again, and was about to kneel, Price stopped him. “Wait. You call me by the name of the king of lost Anz. But I am not Iru. My name is Price Durand.”
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