I shall never forget the scene in the forest – the gray arch of the heavens swimming in mist through which the sun peered shiftily, the tall pines wavering through the fog, the preoccupied mules marching single file, the foggy bell-note of the gentle dingue in its swinging basket, and Dorothy, limp kilts dripping with dew, plodding through the white dusk.
We followed the terrible tornado-path which the mammoth had left in its wake, but there were no traces of its human victims – neither one jot of Professor Smawl nor one solitary tittle of William Spike.
And now I would be glad to end this chapter if I could; I would gladly leave myself as I was, there in the misty forest, with an arm encircling the slender body of my little companion, and the mules moving in a monotonous line, and the dingue discreetly jingling – but again that menacing shadow falls across my page, and truth bids me tell all, and I, the slave of accuracy, must remember my vows as the dauntless disciple of truth.
Towards sunset – or that pale parody of sunset which set the forest swimming in a ghastly, colorless haze – the mammoth’s trail of ruin brought us suddenly out of the trees to the shore of a great sheet of water.
It was a desolate spot; northward a chaos of somber peaks rose, piled up like thunder-clouds along the horizon; east and south the darkening wilderness spread like a pall. Westward, crawling out into the mist from our very feet, the gray waste of water moved under the dull sky, and flat waves slapped the squatting rocks, heavy with slime.
And now I understand why the trail of the mammoth continued straight into the lake, for on either hand black, filthy tamarack swamps lay under ghostly sheets of mist. I strove to creep out into the bog, seeking a footing, but the swamp quaked and the smooth surface trembled like jelly in a bowl. A stick thrust into the slime sank into unknown depths.
Vaguely alarmed, I gained the firm land again and looked around, believing there was no road open but the desolate trail we had traversed. But I was in error; already the leading mule was wading out into the water, and the others, one by one, followed.
How wide the lake might be we could not tell, because the band of fog hung across the water like a curtain. Yet out into this flat, shallow void our mules went steadily, slop! slop! slop! in single file. Already they were growing indistinct in the fog, so I bade Dorothy hasten and take off her shoes and stockings.
She was ready before I was, I having to unlace my shooting-boots, and she stepped out into the water, kilts fluttering, moving her white feet cautiously. In a moment I was beside her, and we waded forward, sounding the shallow water with our poles.
When the water had risen to Dorothy’s knees I hesitated, alarmed. But when we attempted to retrace our steps we could not find the shore again, for the blank mist shrouded everything, and the water deepened at every step.
I halted and listened for the mules. Far away in the fog I heard a dull splashing, receding as I listened. After while all sound died away, and a slow horror stole over me – a horror that froze the little network of veins in every limb. A step to the right and the water rose to my knees; a step to the left and the cold, thin circle of the flood chilled my breast. Suddenly Dorothy screamed, and the next moment a far cry answered – a far, sweet cry that seemed to come from the sky, like the rushing harmony of the world’s swift winds. Then the curtain of fog before us lighted up from behind; shadows moved on the misty screen, outlines of trees and grassy shores, and tiny birds flying. Thrown on the vapory curtain, in silhouette, a man and a woman passed under the lovely trees, arms about each other’s necks; near them the shadows of five mules grazed peacefully; a dingue gambolled close by.
‘It is a mirage!’ I muttered, but my voice made no sound. Slowly the light behind the fog died out; the vapor around us turned to rose, then dissolved, while mile on mile of a limitless sea spread away till, like a quick line pencilled at a stroke, the horizon cut sky and sea in half, and before us lay an ocean from which towered a mountain of snow – or a gigantic berg of milky ice – for it was moving.
‘Good Heavens,’ I shrieked; ‘it is alive!’
At the sound of my crazed cry the mountain of snow became a pillar, towering to the clouds, and a wave of golden glory drenched the figure to its knees! Figure? Yes – for a colossal arm shot across the sky, then curved back in exquisite grace to a head of awful beauty – a woman’s head, with eyes like the blue lake of heaven – ay, a woman’s splendid form, upright from the sky to the earth, knee-deep in the sea. The evening clouds drifted across her brow; her shimmering hair lighted the world beneath with sunset. Then, shading her white brow with one hand, she bent, and, with the other hand dipped in the sea, she sent a wave rolling at us. Straight out of the horizon it sped – a ripple that grew to a wave, then to a furious breaker which caught us up in a whirl of foam, bearing us onward, faster, faster, swiftly flying through leagues of spray until consciousness ceased and all was blank.
Yet ere my senses fled I heard again that strange cry – that sweet, thrilling harmony rushing out over the foaming waters, filling earth and sky with its soundless vibrations.
And I knew it was the hail of the Spirit of the North warning us back to life again.
Looking back, now, over the days that passed before we staggered into the Hudson Bay outpost at Gravel Cove, I am inclined to believe that neither Dorothy nor I was clothed entirely in our proper minds – or, if we were, our minds, no doubt, must have been in the same condition as our clothing. I remember shooting ptarmigan, and that we ate them; flashes of memory recall the steady downpour of rain through the endless twilight of shaggy forests; dim days on the foggy tundra, mud-holes from which the wild ducks rose in thousands; then the stunted hemlocks, then the forest again. And I do not even recall the moment when, at last, stumbling into the smooth path left by the Graham Glacier, we crawled through the mountain-wall, out of the unknown land, and once more into a world protected by the Lord Almighty.
A hunting party of Elbon Indians brought us in to the post, and everybody was most kind – that I remember, just before going into several weeks of unpleasant delirium mercifully mitigated with unconsciousness.
Curiously enough, Professor Van Twiller was not very much battered, physically, for I had carried her for days pickaback. But the awful experience had produced a shock which resulted in a nervous condition that lasted so long after she returned to New York that the wealthy and eminent specialist who attended her insisted upon taking her to the Riviera and marrying her. I sometimes wonder – but, as I have said, such reflections have no place in these austere pages.
However, anybody, I fancy, is at liberty to speculate upon the fate of the late Professor Smawl and William Spike, and upon the mules and the gentle dingue. Personally, I am convinced that the suggestive silhouettes I saw on that ghastly curtain of fog were cast by beatified beings in some earthly paradise – a mirage of bliss of which we caught but the colorless shadow-shapes floating ’twixt sea and sky.
At all events, neither Professor Smawl nor her William Spike ever returned; no exploring expedition has found a trace of a mule or lady, of William or the dingue. The new expedition to be organised by Barnard College may penetrate still farther. I suppose that, when the time comes, I shall be expected to volunteer. But Professor Van Twiller is married, and William and Professor Smawl ought to be, and altogether, considering the mammoth and that gigantic and splendid apparition that bent from the zenith to the ocean and sent a tidal-wave rolling from the palm of one white hand – I say, taking all these various matters under consideration, I think I shall decide to remain in New York and continue writing for the scientific periodicals.
DEATH TRAIL
Our final extract from The Slayer of Souls finds the Cleves’s joined by Sansa, one of Tressa’s temple companions. Now in Chambers’s familiar haunt of the Adirondacks, in New York State, they must track and kill another Yezidee assassin, who is making unholy magic in the woods …
The way to Fool’s Acre was under a tangled canopy of thorns, under rotting wind
falls of grey mirch, through tunnel after tunnel of fallen debris woven solidly by millions of strands of tough cat-briers which cut the flesh like barbed wire.
There was blood on Tressa, where her flannel shirt had been pierced in a score of places. Cleves and Selden had been painfully slashed.
Silent, thread-like streams flowed darkling under the tangled mass that roofed them. Sometimes they could move upright; more often they were bent double; and there were long stretches where they had to creep forward on hands and knees through sparse wild grasses, soft, rotten soil, or paths of sphagnum which cooled their feverish skin in velvety, icy depths.
At noon they rested and ate, lying prone under the matted roof of their tunnel.
Cleves and Selden had their rifles. Tressa lay like a slender boy, her brier-torn hands empty.
And, as she lay there, her husband made a sponge of a handful of sphagnum moss, and bathed her face and her arms, cleansing the dried blood from the skin, while the girl looked up at him out of grave, inscrutable eyes.
The sun hung low over the wilderness when they came to the woods of Fool’s Acre. They crept cautiously out of the briers, among ferns and open spots carpeted with pine needles and dead leaves which were beginning to burn ruddy gold under the level rays of the sun.
Lying flat behind an enormous oak, they remained listening for a while. Selden pointed through the woods, eastward, whispering that the house stood there not far away.
‘Don’t you think we might risk the chance and use our rifles?’ asked Cleves in a low voice.
‘No. It is the Tchor-Dagh that confronts us. I wish to talk to Sansa,’ she murmured.
A moment later Selden touched her arm.
‘My God,’ he breathed, ‘who is that!’
‘It is Sansa,’ said Tressa calmly, and sat up among the ferns. And the next instant Sansa stepped daintily out of the red sunlight and seated herself among them without a sound.
Nobody spoke. The newcomer glanced at Selden, smiled slightly, blushed, then caught a glimpse of Cleves where he lay in the brake, and a mischievous glimmer came into her slanting eyes.
‘Did I not tell my lord truths?’ she inquired in a demure whisper. ‘As surely as the sun is a dragon, and the flaming pearl burns between his claws, so surely burns the soul of Heart of Flame between thy guarding hands. There are as many words as there are demons, my lord, but it is written that Niaz is the greatest of all words save only the name of God.’
She laughed without any sound, sweetly malicious where she sat among the ferns.
‘Heart of Flame,’ she said to Tressa, ‘you called me and I made the effort.’
‘Darling,’ said Tressa in her thrilling voice, ‘the Yezidees are making living things out of dust – as Sanang Noïane made that thing in the Temple … And slew it before our eyes.’
‘The Tchor-Dagh,’ said Sansa calmly.
‘The Tchor-Dagh,’ whispered Tressa.
Sansa’s smooth little hands crept up to the collar of her odd, blue tunic; grasped it.
‘In the name of God the Merciful,’ she said without tremor, ‘listen to me, Heart of Flame, and may my soul be ransom for yours!’
‘I hear you, Sansa.’
Sansa said, her fingers still grasping the embroidered collar of her tunic:
‘Yonder, behind walls, two Tower Chiefs meddle with the Tchor-Dagh, making living things out of the senseless dust they scrape from the garden.’
Selden moistened his dry lips. Sansa said:
‘The Yezidees who have come into this wilderness are Arrak Sou-Sou, the Squirrel; and Tiyang Khan … May God remember them in Hell!’
‘May God remember them,’ said Tressa mechanically.
‘And those two Yezidee Sorcerers,’ continued Sansa coolly, ‘have advanced thus far in the Tchor-Dagh; for they now roam these woods, digging like demons for the roots of Ginseng; and thou knowest, O Heart of Flame, what that indicates.’
‘Does Ginseng grow in these woods!’ exclaimed Tressa with a new terror in her widening eyes.
‘Ginseng grows here, little Rose-Heart, and the roots are as perfect as human bodies. And Tiyang Khan squats in the walled garden moulding the Ginseng roots in his unclean hands, while Sou-Sou the Squirrel scratches among the dead leaves of the woods for roots as perfect as a naked human body.
‘All day long the Sou-Sou rummages among the trees; all day long Tiyang pats and rubs and moulds the Ginseng roots in his skinny fingers. It is the Tchor-Dagh, Heart of Flame. And these Sorcerers must be destroyed.’
‘Are their bodies here?’
‘Arrak is in the body. And thus it shall be accomplished: listen attentively, Rose Heart Afire! – I shall remain here with—’ she looked at Selden and flushed a trifle, ‘—with you, my lord. And when the Squirrel comes a-digging, so shall my lord slay him with a bullet … And when I hear his soul bidding his body farewell, then I shall make prisoner his soul … And send it to the Dark Star … And the rest shall be in the hands of Allah.’
She turned to Tressa and caught her hands in both of her own:
‘It is written on the Iron Pages,’ she whispered, ‘that we belong to Erlik and we return to him. But in the Book of Gold it is written otherwise: “God preserve us from Satan who was stoned!” … Therefore, in the name of Allah! Now then, Heart of Flame, do your duty!’
A burning flush leaped over Tressa’s features.
‘Is my soul, then, my own!’
‘It belongs to God,’ said Sansa gravely.
‘And – Sanang?’
‘God is greatest.’
‘But – was God there – at the Lake of the Ghosts?’
‘God is everywhere. It is so written in the Book of Gold,’ replied Sansa, pressing her hands tenderly.
‘Recite the Fatha, Heart of Flame. Thy lips shall not stiffen; God listens.’
Tressa rose in the sunset glory and stood as though dazed, and all crimsoned in the last fiery bars of the declining sun.
Cleves also rose.
Sansa laughed noiselessly: ‘My lord would go whither thou goest, Heart of Fire!’ she whispered. ‘And thy ways shall be his ways!’
Tressa’s cheeks flamed and she turned and looked at Cleves.
Then Sansa rose and laid a hand on Tressa’s arm and on her husband’s:
‘Listen attentively. Tiyang Khan must be destroyed. The signal sounds when my lord’s rifle-shot makes a loud noise here among these trees.’
‘Can I prevail against the Tchor-Dagh?’ asked Tressa, steadily.
‘Is not that event already in God’s hands, darling?’ said Sansa softly. She smiled and resumed her seat beside Selden, amid the drooping fern fronds.
‘Bid thy dear lord leave his rifle here,’ she added quietly.
Cleves laid down his weapon. Selden pointed eastward in silence.
So they went together into the darkening woods.
In the dusk of heavy foliage overhanging the garden, Tressa lay flat as a lizard on the top of the wall. Beside her lay her husband.
In the garden below them flowers bloomed in scented thickets, bordered by walks of flat stone slabs split from boulders. A little lawn, very green, centered the garden.
And on this lawn, in the clear twilight still tinged with the somber fires of sundown, squatted a man dressed in a loose white garment.
Save for a twisted breadth of white cloth, his shaven head was bare. His sinewy feet were naked, too, the lean, brown toes buried in the grass.
Tressa’s lips touched her husband’s ear.
‘Tiyang Khan,’ she breathed. ‘Watch what he does!’
Shoulder to shoulder they lay there, scarcely daring to breathe. Their eyes were fastened on the Mongol Sorcerer, who, squatted below on his haunches, grave and deliberate as a great gray ape, continued busy with the obscure business which so intently preoccupied him.
In a short semi-circle on the grass in front of him he had placed a dozen wild Ginseng roots. The roots were enormous, astoundingly shaped like the human b
ody, almost repulsive in their weird symmetry.
The Yezidee had taken one of these roots into his hands. Squatting there in the semi-dusk, he began to massage it between his long, muscular fingers, rubbing, moulding, pressing the root with caressing deliberation.
His unhurried manipulation, for a few moments, seemed to produce no result. But presently the Ginseng root became lighter in colour and more supple, yielding to his fingers, growing ivory pale, sinuously limber in a newer and more delicate symmetry.
‘Look!’ gasped Cleves, grasping his wife’s arm. ‘What is that man doing!’
‘The Tchor-Dagh!’ whispered Tressa. ‘Do you see what lies twisting there in his hands!’
The Ginseng root had become the tiny naked body of a woman – a little ivory-white creature, struggling to escape between the hands that had created it – dark, powerful, masterly hands, opening leisurely now, and releasing the living being they had fashioned.
The thing scrambled between the fingers of the Sorcerer, leaped into the grass, ran a little way and hid, crouched down, panting, almost hidden by the long grass. The shocked watchers on the wall could still see the creature. Tressa felt Cleves’s body trembling beside her. She rested a cool, steady hand on his.
‘It is the Tchor-Dagh,’ she breathed close to his face. ‘The Mongol Sorcerer is becoming formidable.’
‘Oh, God!’ murmured Cleves, ‘that thing he made is alive! I saw it. I can see it hiding there in the grass. It’s frightened – breathing! It’s alive!’
His pistol, clutched in his right hand, quivered. His wife laid her hand on it and cautiously shook her head.
‘No,’ she said, ‘that is of no use.’
‘But what that Yezidee is doing is – is blasphemous—’
‘Watch him! His mind is stealthily feeling its way among the laws and secrets of the Tchor-Dagh. He has found a thread. He is following it through the maze into hell’s own labyrinth! He has created a tiny thing in the image of the Creator. He will try to create a larger being now. Watch him with his Ginseng roots!’
Out of the Dark Page 45
