Into the Green Prism

by A. Hyatt Verrill

  A raindrop spattered upon my head; another and another fell. In a few seconds it was raining hard, yet we continued to stare, for to both our minds had come the same thought, the same desire to see what happened to those minute people, as the rain poured down upon them.

  But we were doomed to disappointment, as we might have known we would be, if we had stopped to think or to reason. Seen through that magical prism, each descending drop of rain was as big as a Zeppelin. Each drop, as it dashed down, completely blotted out everything from view. Each, as it struck the earth, burst like a fifteen-inch shell and sent vast cataracts of water in every direction. In that chaos of flying spray, of gigantic globules, of the torrents released as they burst, the Indians and their village, the temple and the surroundings were as effectually hidden as though behind a mountain range.

  There was no sense in our getting drenched. There was nothing more to be seen, and we scurried to the shelter of our camp.

  "There won't be anything left of them now," I observed, as we threw off our soaked garments. "This rain will be infinitely worse to them than a Johnstown flood."

  Ramon snorted. "My good friend," he exclaimed, "for a scientific man you certainly say and do the most childish things at times. Do you, for one moment, suppose these incredible people have been developed, have lived, have grown to adult men and women, have built villages and temples, and have developed arts and industries all in a day or a month or a year? No, of course not. And yet it has rained here every year, rained harder than at present and steadily—for weeks at a time—and they still exist. This rain will not affect them in the least."

  "Nonsense!" I cried heatedly. “You are arguing from the point of view of our own world, on our basis of time. Those minute wondrous people must have everything in proportion to themselves—their lives, their time must be as short in proportion to ours as they are small in proportion to us. For all we know, a second of our time may be a year—several years—to them. In a day of our time they probably go through many generations, perhaps centuries of their time. But even if they didn't, how could they survive a heavy rain? Why, man alive, the spot where they were must be under an inch of water by now!"

  Professor Amador roared with laughter. "There you go again!" he cried, when he could control his merriment. "You have been so amazed, so upset and overcome by finding something that upsets all your preconceived ideas that you do not stop to reason. You assume, because one feature of the case is revolutionary and wholly beyond all preconceived scientific theories and hard facts, that everything connected with it must be as bizarre and miraculous. Your own senses would controvert what you have just said if you stopped to reason about it. Why, we were watching those midgets for nearly an hour. Did you notice any flying of time among them? Did they grow old and die? Were children born, grown up and developed into men and women during the seconds, minutes that we watched and which you claim would have been equivalent to centuries to them? Not a bit of it. The men brought in their game, it was being skinned and prepared, and the fellows were still talking about their hunt when the rain began. No, no, amigo mio, an hour to us is an hour to them. Moreover, they have the same sunshine, the same hours of darkness as we have. They have no separate planetary system. Hence their time is our time, and you may be sure they have been in existence, living as they do now, for centuries, ages. As for being destroyed by this rain, by a few inches of water. Pooh! Water wouldn't affect them any more than that lizard that crawled above their village. We've walked right over them time and time again, but it hasn't destroyed them. Possibly, if there are other villages, we may have buried hundreds of them under dirt thrown out from our excavations. Probably they looked upon it as a convulsion of nature. But rain!"

  “I admit your argument as to time is sound," I replied. 'But I still fail to see why rain or water would not destroy them. To tread over them is one thing— they are protected by the sand and pebbles and our feet do not press or crush what is beneath and between them. But water permeates everywhere. I can even conceive of a Juggernaut, some gigantic machine or even an imaginary Titan, rolling or striding across New York, crushing the buildings, spanning the city, and yet with the people escaping death in the canyon-like streets. But there would be no hope for them if the city were flooded until the highest buildings were submerged."

  "Again you forget the most rudimentary truths of science," chuckled Ramon. "Did you ever dig carefully into sand after a heavy rain? If so, you must have observed that while it appears wet—water-soaked in fact— there is much dry sand.

  "And you have forgotten how difficult, how nearly impossible it is to secure perfect adhesion to a dry object. We pick up a stone, a pebble, and it appears wet, to be sure. But, if we examine it under a powerful lens, we will find that what appears a uniform coating of water is, in reality, composed of innumerable tiny drops; that there are appreciable dry spaces between them, and with infinitesimal particles of dust, next to the stone almost immeasurable layer of air, which is usually filled with infinitesimal particles of dust, next to the stone itself. Hence, my dear friend, these microscopic aborigines are quite safe. The rain that would soak us to the skin is composed of drops far too large to affect those little people. All they see of the descending torrent is the finest, the most microscopic spray that bounces off the sand grains and pebbles and falls like a gentle shower among the inconceivably minute crevices where they live. And the water that to us appears to cover them 'an inch deep' as you put it, appears to them like a vast dark cloud. Precisely, I might say, as that black cloud above us appears to our eyes. That cloud overhead is nothing more or less than water which, could it descend all at one time, would prove a flood many feet in depth. But because we are under that poised mass of water, we do not necessarily suffer. Do you see what I mean, my friend Do you not understand that those remarkable beings are so inconceivably minute that the molecules of water, which to our eyes and senses appears a homogeneous liquid, are visibly separate, each aqueous molecule appearing to them like a great cloud. No, no, amigo, we must entirely reconstruct all our previous ideas and conceptions of humanity, of nature, of a thousand other things. It has been too great a revelation, too great a discovery, too revolutionary, too amazing for our poor brains to assimilate all at once. I confess that I, myself, cannot really believe that we have seen what we have seen. Yet, I have always held to the theory that we were purblind, unimaginative, egotistical, self-sufficient and unreasoning beings. That we humans were so bound down by our own ideas of our important place in nature, so limited in our viewpoint by our own exalted opinions of ourselves, and so dull in our perceptive senses, that we have built up, constructed the idea that all humans must be made more or less like ourselves, that the world, as we know it, must be the only world, and that there can be no other world. Even our ideas of inhabitants of other planets are always based on our own forms or the forms of creatures familiar to us. Always, as I said, I have held that this was the utmost nonsense, the most short-sighted policy, that, for all we know, there may be countless other strata—as I might call it—of life all about us. That we may be moving in a world of one particular range of vibratory waves; that above or below our perceptions there may be others, that even within the substance of which we and other bodies are composed, there may be universes teeming with intelligent forms of life, that, as far as we are aware, every atom may be a minute planetary body with its own satellites, its own inhabitants, its own individual forms of living organisms, each and all thinking and believing like ourselves that they alone are the only reasoning, intelligent beings in the entire universe. And now I find that, in a certain way and to a certain extent, my theory is borne out. We know that under our feet there is a race of men as small as microbes. That they possess much the same forms, features, habits, passions and arts as ordinary mortals. That to them there is no other world, that we are as invisible, as inconceivable to their eyes and their senses, as they are to ours. And this, my friend, is a most remarkable feature of the case and pleases me
immensely. They are Indians—aboriginal Americans—people of my own race and blood."

  "What is more," I observed, when he ceased speaking, "they are Manabis—the same race that inhabited this place in prehistoric times, the same tribe that made the stone seats, the slabs and those minute gold beads. I cannot understand it. The Manabis were full-sized people; these microscopic beings are precisely the same except for size. Do you know, I have been wondering if by some unknown, some preposterous, improbable means, they gradually diminished in size through the ages—if it is not within the bounds of possibility that the tiny beads that puzzled us were not the work of the Manabis when they had dwindled to say—six inches in height."

  "Hardly," replied Ramon. "Of course, I admit that a six-inch gold worker would find making such beads as simple as an ordinary artisan would find the making of beads several inches in diameter. But in the first place we have found no transitory remains—no artifacts showing or indicating a diminution in the size of the Manabis. And, moreover, there is the lapis lazuli idol. The fine carving would have been simple for a six-inch man, but to cut the images of that size from lapis lazuli would have been a far greater undertaking than for a normal-sized man to sculpture an idol several hundred feet in height from a mountainside."

  "But if the theory was true, it would account for the cyclopean stone-work of the pre-Incas," I reminded him. “How do you know but that, once upon a time, giants as much larger than ourselves as these people are smaller, inhabited this land; that during countless ages they gradually decreased in size. That the Titanic stone work was not the handicraft of the race when they were still giants?"

  "For the same reason that you know the ancient Manabis were neither dwarfs nor giants," retorted Ramon. "The fragments of skeletons of the pre-Incas are those of normal-sized men and women. No, amigo mio, I cannot accept that idea. But I admit anything— even the wildest, most insane and preposterous things would not surprise me after what we have discovered."

  CHAPTER VIII

  Ordinarily, Professor Amador showed no least indication that he was Indian. When discussing scientific matters, when conversing with his equals, when mingling with white men and women, he was wholly, absolutely the educated polished white man. In fact, he was far more Anglo Saxon than Latin. He had no trace of an accent and, aside from the use of an occasional Spanish expletive or a Spanish expression now and then—such as his favorite "amigo mio" when talking to an intimate friend—no one who did not know him would have suspected that he was of Spanish descent. But often, when he was in uncivilized places, when he was among aborigines, when he was busied with some problem or when he was excited, his Indian blood came to the fore and, temporarily, at least, he would be entirely Indian. He would sit for hours, as motionless and silent as a stone statue, staring fixedly at some object or into space, oblivious of everything.

  He would assume the tone, voice, manner of the Indian; would speak in their poetic, oratorical, symbolic way, and would relapse into his ancestral Quichua.* He could be as perverse, stubborn and determined as any aborigine, and he was as untiring, as immune to personal discomfort as any of his pure-blooded relatives. Not that I liked him any the less for this. My long association with Indians had taught me to appreciate many of their admirable qualities, and in some ways, I rather liked Ramon better as an Indian than as a Spaniard. Now, however, he had become obviously predominantly Indian once more. He had been talking like any fellow scientist, discoursing learnedly; but with his final words, he seemed to become suddenly transformed. The thought, the idea that had been suggested, had gripped his imaginative fancy, had appealed to the Indian love of the mysterious, to the Indian's pride of race, and he had become obsessed with the idea. Here were these amazing, these most marvelous of human beings, a race never dreamed of by anyone, and they were Indians! No wonder he was proud that he was of their race. News of their existence, of our startling discovery would set the whole world agog, and word that the smallest of all known organisms were human beings, and that they were Indians, would lift the aboriginal race into prominence above all other, races. Ramon, I knew, was thinking of this. His eyes were fixed, a far-away look in them, his lips were set and he had frozen into immobility. His words, too, had set me to thinking. It was strange, a most remarkable fact that these minute people should be Indians, for—a wild thought had possessed me—was it not probable that they were the most ancient of races on the planet? Was it not possible that from these microscopic beings man had evolved to his present size? Or, was it the other way about? Had the Manabis diminished in size until they had become invisible to the naked eye? Or,—wilder and wilder thoughts were racing through my brain—were all the various human races represented in atomic-sized individuals? Was there another, a totally distinct sphere of existence going on, unseen and unsuspected all about us, a world of microscopic dimensions, a minute replica of our own? If so, was it not possible that there were larger spheres, spheres as much bigger than ours as we were bigger than these tiny mites whose world was a patch of sand? My mind was in a turmoil. Within the space of a little more than an hour, all my ideas, my conceptions, my knowledge, my beliefs and convictions of a lifetime had been utterly upset and destroyed. I could make neither head nor tail of it all. If I kept on thinking I should go mad, and, heedless of Ramon's detachment, I seized his shoulder, shook him into consciousness and insisted on talking to him.

  *A South American Indian language.

  Of course our conversation was all of the fantastic, miniature Indians we had seen and whom, even now, I could not force myself to believe we had seen.

  It was too unreal, and yet Ramon appeared to have accustomed his mind to their reality. In that way, I admit, he was superior to myself. Or it may be that it was his Indian blood, the superstitious tendency the aborigine to believe in anything, no matter how impossible or incredible. My own mind was a chaos. I knew in my heart that we had seen the beings. I knew the impossible had happened, and yet my better reason told me there were no such things, that we had been subjected to an hallucination or an illusion of some sort. Oddly enough, too, I found myself constantly striving to convince myself that this was the case, mentally arguing that the people did not, could not exist, and I began arguing with Ramon on this line.

  Wasn't it more sensible, I demanded, to think we had been deceived, to assume that, as I had suggested before, we had been looking at the reflected images of normal Indians at some distant point?

  "You forget they are Manabis," Ramon reminded me. "Can you tell me where there are living Manabis?"

  "No, but it would be more reasonable, more possible for Manabis to exist and to follow out their arts unknown to us—in some remote mountain or desert retreat—than for microscopic people to exist."

  "Granted! Then how do you account for that beast they had killed, that six-legged, shining creature?'

  "I don't," I admitted, "but even that would be more within reason if it were of normal size. Possibly there are such creatures somewhere in the interior."

  Ramon grinned. "And assuming that is so, how about that lizard that crawled over the village and looked like a dark cloud?"

  "Illusion," I replied, knowing perfectly well I was arguing against my own convictions. "The lizard was normal, but it was transposed, the reflected image of the village merely appeared to be beneath it—something like a double-exposed photographic negative."

  "You are perfectly aware it was nothing of the kind.” cried Ramon, testily.

  "Like all scientific men—and most white men, I might add, you are not willing to admit the existence of anything to which you are not accustomed, which science has not approved, which is outside your hidebound ideas and conceptions, which you cannot explain by what you term possible or probable rules, laws and beliefs, which are all stuff and nonsense. There the savage, the primitive man is superior to the civilized white man. The aborigine takes things as he finds them. He does not try to reason that they cannot be because they are beyond his comprehension. He does not
say this or that is impossible. He believes what he sees and a great deal that he does not see. You call it superstition. A few years ago, belief in radio, in hypnotism, in any one of a thousand things we know today, would have been termed superstition. What is superstition? Belief in something one cannot explain, that is not generally accepted by dense, pig-headed tradition-bound men! Yet you cannot explain a lot of things you believe in—electricity, light, the rotation of the earth, the planetary system, the spark of life, the working of the mind. Thank God, amigo mio, I have Quichua blood and can believe in anything! I can believe that anything is possible to God, that there are countless things in nature we cannot explain, that matters are transpiring all about us of which we know nothing, of which we do not even dream. But this matter is simpler. We can see these tiny beings. For Heaven's sake, why can't you believe in what you see? Why try to convince yourself it is impossible?"

  "Good Lord. I do believe in them!" I exclaimed. "But do you think for one minute, you or I could make anyone else believe in them? That's the trouble, Ramon. I am thinking of it from the scientific viewpoint. Yet, I must admit, there is nothing scientifically impossible about those people. We know there are innumerable forms of life of microscopic size; undoubtedly there are as many more too minute to be seen even through the most powerful microscope. If one form of life of minute proportions can exist, there is no scientific reason why there should not be others. But vertebrates! Human beings! I don't know. Somehow that makes it different. Somehow, I suppose, it is merely because we are accustomed to it—human beings must be of more or less normal size."