Dwellers in the Mirage

Chapter I Sounds in the Night

I raised my head, listening,—not only with my ears but with every square inch of my skin, waiting for recurrence of the sound that had awakened me. There was silence, utter silence. No soughing in the boughs of the spruces clustered around the little camp. No stirring of furtive life in the underbrush. Through the spires of the spruces the stars shone wanly in the short sunset to sunrise twilight of the early Alaskan summer.

A sudden wind bent the spruce tops, carrying again the sound—the clangour of a beaten anvil.

I slipped out of my blanket, and round the dim embers of the fire toward Jim. His voice halted me.

"All right, Leif. I hear it."

The wind sighed and died, and with it died the humming aftertones of the anvil stroke. Before we could speak, the wind arose. It bore the after–hum of the anvil stroke—faint and far away. And again the wind died, and with it the sound.

"An anvil, Leif!"

"Listen!"

A stronger gust swayed the spruces. It carried a distant chanting; voices of many women and men singing a strange, minor theme. The chant ended on a wailing chord, archaic, dissonant.

There was a long roll of drums, rising in a swift crescendo, ending abruptly. After it a thin and clamorous confusion.

It was smothered by a low, sustained rumbling, like thunder, muted by miles. In it defiance, challenge.

We waited, listening. The spruces were motionless. The wind did not return.

"Queer sort of sounds, Jim." I tried to speak casually. He sat up. A stick flared up in the dying fire. Its light etched his face against the darkness—thin, and brown and hawk–profiled. He did not look at me.

"Every feathered forefather for the last twenty centuries is awake and shouting! Better call me Tsantawu, Leif. Tsi' Tsa'lagi—I am a Cherokee! Right now—all Indian."

He smiled, but still he did not look at me, and I was glad of that.

"It was an anvil," I said. "A hell of a big anvil. And hundreds of people singing…and how could that be in this wilderness…they didn't sound like Indians…"

"The drums weren't Indian." He squatted by the fire, staring into it. "When they turned loose, something played a pizzicato with icicles up and down my back."

"They got me, too—those drums!" I thought my voice was steady, but he looked up at me sharply; and now it was I who averted my eyes and stared at the embers. "They reminded me of something I heard…and thought I saw…in Mongolia. So did the singing. Damn it, Jim, why do you look at me like that?"

I threw a stick on the fire. For the life of me I couldn't help searching the shadows as the stick flamed. Then I met his gaze squarely.

"Pretty bad place, was it, Leif?" he asked, quietly. I said nothing. Jim got up and walked over to the packs. He came back with some water and threw it over the fire. He kicked earth on the hissing coals. If he saw me wince as the shadows rushed in upon us, he did not show it.

"That wind came from the north," he said. "So that's the way the sounds came. Therefore, whatever made the sounds is north of us. That being so—which way do we travel to–morrow?"

"North," I said.

My throat dried as I said it.

Jim laughed. He dropped upon his blanket, and rolled it around him. I propped myself against the bole of one of the spruces, and sat staring toward the north.

"The ancestors are vociferous, Leif. Promising a lodge of sorrow, I gather—if we go north…'Bad Medicine!' say the ancestors… 'Bad Medicine for you, Tsantawu! You go to Usunhi'yi, the Darkening–land, Tsantawu!…Into Tsusgina'i, the ghost country! Beware! Turn from the north, Tsantawu!'"

"Oh, go to sleep, you hag–ridden redskin!"

"All right, I'm just telling you."

Then a little later:

"'And heard ancestral voices prophesying war'—it's worse than war these ancestors of mine are prophesying, Leif."

"Damn it, will you shut up!"

A chuckle from the darkness; thereafter silence.

I leaned against the tree trunk. The sounds, or rather the evil memory they had evoked, had shaken me more than I was willing to admit, even to myself. The thing I had carried for two years in the buckskin bag at the end of the chain around my neck had seemed to stir; turn cold. I wondered how much Jim had divined of what I had tried to cover…

Why had he put out the fire? Because he had known I was afraid? To force me to face my fear and conquer it?…Or had it been the Indian instinct to seek cover in darkness?…By his own admission, chant and drum–roll had played on his nerves as they had on mine…

Afraid! Of course it had been fear that had wet the palms of my hands, and had tightened my throat so my heart had beaten in my ears like drums.

Like drums…yes!

But…not like those drums whose beat had been borne to us by the north wind. They had been like the cadence of the feet of men and women, youths and maids and children, running ever more rapidly up the side of a hollow world to dive swiftly into the void…dissolving into the nothingness…fading as they fell…dissolving… eaten up by the nothingness…

Like that accursed drum–roll I had heard in the secret temple of the Gobi oasis two years ago!

Neither then nor now had it been fear alone. Fear it was, in truth, but fear shot through with defiance…defiance of life against its negation…upsurging, roaring, vital rage…frantic revolt of the drowning against the strangling water, rage of the candle–flame against the hovering extinguisher…

Was it as hopeless as that? If what I suspected to be true was true, to think so was to be beaten at the beginning!

But there was Jim! How to keep him out of it? In my heart, I had never laughed at those subconscious perceptions, whatever they were. that he called the voices of his ancestors. When he had spoken of Usunhi'yi, the Darkening–land, a chill had crept down my spine. For had not the old Uighur priest spoken of the Shadow–land? And it was as though I had heard the echo of his words.

I looked over to where he lay. He had been more akin to me than my own brothers. I smiled at that, for they had never been akin to me. To all but my soft–voiced, deep–bosomed, Norse mother I had been a stranger in that severely conventional old house where I had been born.

The youngest son, and an unwelcome intruder; a changeling. It had been no fault of mine that I had come into the world a throw–back to my mother's yellow–haired, blue–eyed, strong–thewed Viking forefathers. Not at all a Langdon. The Langdon men were dark and slender, thin–lipped and saturnine, stamped out by the same die for generations. They looked down at me, the changeling, from the family portraits with faintly amused, supercilious hostility. Precisely as my father and my four brothers, true Langdons, each of them, looked at me when I awkwardly disposed of my bulk at their table.

It had brought me unhappiness, but it had made my mother wrap her heart around me. I wondered, as I had wondered many times, how she had come to give herself to that dark, self–centred man my father—with the blood of the sea–rovers singing in her veins. It was she who had named me Leif—as incongruous a name to tack on a Langdon as was my birth among them.

Jim and I had entered Dartmouth on the same day. I saw him as he was then—the tall, brown lad with his hawk face and inscrutable black eyes. pure blood of the Cherokees, of the clan from which had come the great Sequoiah, a clan which had produced through many centuries wisest councillors, warriors strong in cunning.

On the college roster his name was written James T. Eagles, but on the rolls of the Cherokee Nation it was written Two Eagles and his mother had called him Tsantawu. From the first we had recognized spiritual kinship. By the ancient rites of his people we had become blood–brothers, and he had given me my secret name, known only to the pair of us, Degataga—one who stands so close to another that the two are one.

My one gift, besides my strength, is an aptness at languages. Soon I spoke the Cherokee as though I had been born in the Nation. Those years in college were the happiest I had ever known. It was during the last of them that America entered the World War. Together we had left Dartmouth, gone into training camp, sailed for France on the same transport.

Sitting there, under the slow–growing Alaskan dawn, my mind leaped over the years between…my mother's death on Armistice Day…my return to New York to a frankly hostile home…Jim's recall to his clan…the finishing of my course in mining engineering…my wanderings in Asia…my second return to America and my search for Jim…this expedition of ours to Alaska, more for comradeship and the wilderness peace than for the gold we were supposed to be seeking—

A long trail since the War—the happiest for me these last two months of it. It had led us from Nome over the quaking tundras, and then to the Koyukuk, and at last to this little camp among the spruces, somewhere between the headwaters of the Koyukuk and the Chandalar in the foothills of the unexplored Endicott Range. A long trail…I had the feeling that it was here the real trail of my life began.

A ray of the rising sun struck through the trees. Jim sat up, looked over at me, and grinned.

"Didn't get much sleep after the concert, did you?"

"What did you do to the ancestors? They didn't seem to keep you awake long."

He said, too carelessly: "Oh, they quieted down." His face and eyes were expressionless. He was veiling his mind from me. The ancestors had not quieted down. He had lain awake while I had thought him sleeping. I made a swift decision. We would go south as we had planned. I would go with him as far as Circle. I would find some pretext to leave him there.

I said: "We're not going north. I've changed my mind."

"Yes. why?"

"I'll tell you after we've had breakfast," I said—I'm not so quick in thinking up lies. "Rustle up a fire, Jim. I'll go down to the stream and get some water."

"Degataga!"

I started. It was only in moments of rare sympathy or in time of peril that he used the secret name.

"Degataga, you go north! You go if I have to march ahead of you to make you follow…" he dropped into the Cherokee…"It is to save your spirit, Degataga. Do we march together—blood–brothers? Or do you creep after me—like a shivering dog at the heels of the hunter?"

The blood pounded in my temples, my hand went out toward him. He stepped back, and laughed.

"That's better, Leif."

The quick rage left me, my hand fell.

"All right, Tsantawu. We go—north. But it wasn't—it wasn't because of myself that I told you I'd changed my mind."

"I know damned well it wasn't!"

He busied himself with the fire. I went after the water. We drank the strong black tea, and ate what was left of the little brown storks they call Alaskan turkeys which we had shot the day before. When we were through I began to talk.

Chapter II Ring of the Kraken

Three years ago, so I began my story, I went into Mongolia with the Fairchild expedition. Part of its work was a mineral survey for certain British interests, part of it ethnographic and archeological research for the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania.

I never had a chance to prove my value as a mining engineer. At once I became good–will representative, camp entertainer, liaison agent between us and the tribes. My height, my yellow hair, blue eyes and freakish strength, and my facility in picking up languages were of never–ending interest to them. Tartars, Mongols, Buriats, Kirghiz—they would watch while I bent horseshoes, twisted iron bars over my knees and performed what my father used to call contemptuously my circus tricks.

Well, that's exactly what I was to them—a one–man circus. And yet I was more than that—they liked me. Old Fairchild would laugh when I complained that I had no time for technical work. He would tell me that I was worth a dozen mining engineers, that I was the expedition's insurance, and that as long as I could keep up my act they wouldn't be bothered by any trouble makers. And it is a fact that they weren't. It was the only expedition of its kind I ever knew where you could leave your stuff unwatched and return to find it still there. Also we were singularly free from graft and shake–downs.

In no time I had picked up half a dozen of the dialects and could chatter and chaff with the tribesmen in their own tongues. It made a prodigious bit with them. And now and then a Mongol delegation would arrive with a couple of their wrestlers, big fellows with chests like barrels, to pit against me. I learned their tricks, and taught them ours. We had pony lifting contests, and some of my Manchu friends taught me how to fight with the two broadswords—a sword in each hand.

Fairchild had planned on a year, but so smoothly did the days go by that he decided to prolong our stay. My act, he told me in his sardonic fashion, was undoubtedly of perennial vitality; never again would science have such an opportunity in this region—unless I made up my mind to remain and rule. He didn't know how close he came to prophecy.

In the early summer of the following year we shifted our camp about a hundred miles north. This was Uighur country. They are a strange people, the Uighurs. They say of themselves that they are descendants of a great race which ruled the Gobi when it was no desert but an earthly Paradise, with flowing rivers and many lakes and teeming cities. It is a fact that they are apart from all the other tribes, and while those others cheerfully kill them when they can, still they go in fear of them. Or rather, of the sorcery of their priests.

Seldom had Uighurs appeared at the old camp. When they did, they kept at a distance. We had been at the new camp less than a week when a band of twenty rode in. I was sitting in the shade of my tent. They dismounted and came straight to me. They paid no attention to anyone else. They halted a dozen feet from me. Three walked close up and stood, studying me. The eyes of these three were a peculiar grey–blue; those of the one who seemed to be their captain singularly cold. They were bigger, taller men than the others.

I did not know the Uighur. I gave them polite salutations in the Kirghiz. They did not answer, maintaining their close scrutiny. Finally they spoke among themselves, nodding as though they had come to some decision.

The leader then addressed me. As I stood up, I saw that he was not many inches under my own six feet four. I told him, again in the Kirghiz, that I did not know his tongue. He gave an order to his men. They surrounded my tent, standing like guards, spears at rest beside them, their wicked long–swords drawn.

At this my temper began to rise, but before I could protest the leader began to speak to me in the Kirghiz. He assured me, with deference, that their visit was entirely peaceful, only they did not wish their contact with me to be disturbed by any of my companions. He asked if I would show him my hands. I held them out. He and his two comrades bent over the palms, examining them minutely, pointing to a mark or a crossing of lines. This inspection ended, the leader touched his forehead with my right hand.

And then to my complete astonishment, he launched without explanation into what was a highly intelligent lesson in the Uighur tongue. He took the Kirghiz for the comparative language. He did not seem to be surprized at the ease with which I assimilated the tuition; indeed, I had a puzzled idea that he regarded it as something to be expected. I mean that his manner was less that of teaching me a new language, than of recalling to me one I had forgotten. The lesson lasted for a full hour. He then touched his forehead again with my hand, and gave a command to the ring of guards. The whole party walked to their horses and galloped off.

There had been something disquieting about the whole experience. Most disquieting was my own vague feeling that my tutor, if I had read correctly his manner, had been right—that I was not learning a new tongue but one I had forgotten. Certainly I never picked up any language with such rapidity and ease as I did the Uighur.

The rest of my party had been perplexed and apprehensive, naturally. I went immediately to them, and talked the matter over. Our ethnologist was the famous Professor David Barr, of Oxford. Fairchild was inclined to take it as a joke, but Barr was greatly disturbed. He said that the Uighur tradition was that their forefathers had been a fair race, yellow–haired and blue–eyed, big men of great strength. In short, men like myself. A few ancient Uighur wall paintings had been found which had portrayed exactly this type, so there was evidence of the correctness of the tradition. However, if the Uighurs of the present were actually the descendants of this race, the ancient blood must have been mixed and diluted almost to the point of extinction.

I asked what this had to do with me, and he replied that quite conceivably my visitors might regard me as of the pure blood of the ancient race. In fact, he saw no other explanation of their conduct. He was of the opinion that their study of my palms, and their manifest approval of what they had discovered there, clinched the matter.

Old Fairchild asked him, satirically, if he was trying to convert us to palmistry. Barr said, coldly, that he was a scientist. As a scientist, he was aware that certain physical resemblances can be carried on by hereditary factors through many generations. Certain peculiarities in the arrangement of the lines of the palms might persist through centuries. They could reappear in cases of atavism, such as I clearly represented.

By this time, I was getting a bit dizzy. But Barr had a few shots left that made me more so. By now his temper was well up, and he went on to say that the Uighurs might even be entirely correct in what he deduced was their opinion of me. I was a throwback to the ancient Norse. Very well. It was quite certain that the Aesir, the old Norse gods and goddesses—Odin and Thor, Frigga and Freya, Frey and Loki of the Fire and all the others—had once been real people. Without question they had been leaders in some long and perilous migration. After they had died, they had been deified, as numerous other similar heroes and heroines had been by other tribes and races. Ethnologists were agreed that the original Norse stock had come into North–eastern Europe from Asia, like other Aryans. Their migration might have occurred anywhere from 1000 B.C. to 5000 B.C. And there was no scientific reason why they should not have come from the region now called the Gobi, nor why they should not have been the blond race these present–day Uighurs called their forefathers.

No one, he went on to say, knew exactly when the Gobi had become desert—nor what were the causes that had changed it into desert. Parts of the Gobi and all the Little Gobi might have been fertile as late as two thousand years ago. Whatever it had been, whatever its causes, and whether operating slowly or quickly, the change gave a perfect reason for the migration led by Odin and the other Aesir which had ended in the colonization of the Scandinavian Peninsula. Admittedly I was a throwback to my mother's stock of a thousand years ago. There was no reason why I should not also be a throwback in other recognizable ways to the ancient Uighurs—if they actually were the original Norse.

But the practical consideration was that I was headed for trouble. So was every other member of our party. He urgently advised going back to the old camp where we would be among friendly tribes. In conclusion he pointed out that, since we had come to this site, not a single Mongol, Tartar or any other tribesman with whom I had established such pleasant relations had come near us. He sat down with a glare at Fairchild, observing that this was no palmist's advice but that of a recognized scientist.

Well, Fairchild apologized, of course, but he over–ruled Barr on returning; we could safely wait a few days longer and see what developed. Barr remarked morosely that as a prophet Fairchild was probably a total loss, but it was also probable that we were being closely watched and would not be allowed to retreat, and therefore it did not matter.

That night we heard drums beating far away, drumming between varying intervals of silence almost until dawn, reporting and answering questions of drums still further off.

The next day, at the same hour, along came the same troop. Their leader made straight for me, ignoring, as before, the others in the camp. He saluted me almost with humility. We walked back together to my tent. Again the cordon was thrown round it, and my second lesson abruptly began. It continued for two hours or more. Thereafter, day after day, for three weeks, the same performance was repeated. There was no desultory conversation, no extraneous questioning, no explanations. These men were there for one definite purpose: to teach me their tongue. They stuck to that admirably. Filled with curiosity, eager to reach the end and learn what it all meant, I interposed no obstacles, stuck as rigorously as they to the matter in hand. This, too, they seemed to take as something expected of me. In three weeks I could carry on a conversation in the Uigher as well as I can in English.

Barr's uneasiness kept growing. "They're grooming you for something!" he would say. "I'd give five years of my life to be in your shoes. But I don't like it. I'm afraid for you. I'm damned afraid!"

One night at the end of this third week, the signalling drums beat until dawn. The next day my instructors did not appear, nor the next day, nor the day after. But our men reported that there were Uighurs all around us, picketing the camp. They were in fear, and no work could be got out of them.

On the afternoon of the fourth day we saw a cloud of dust drifting rapidly down upon us from the north. Soon we heard the sound of the Uighur drums. Then out of the dust emerged a troop of horsemen. There were two or three hundred of them, spears glinting, many of them with good rifles. They drew up in a wide semi–circle before the camp. The cold–eyed leader who had been my chief instructor dismounted and came forward leading a magnificent black stallion. A big horse, a strong horse, unlike the rangy horses that carried them; a horse that could bear my weight with ease.

The Uighur dropped on one knee, handing me the stallion's reins, I took them, automatically. The horse looked me over, sniffed at me, and rested its nose on my shoulder. At once the troop raised their spears, shouting some word I could not catch, then dropped from their mounts and stood waiting.

The leader arose. He drew from his tunic a small cube of ancient jade. He sank again upon his knee, handed me the cube. It seemed solid, but as I pressed it flew open. Within, was a ring. It was of heavy gold, thick and wide. Set in it was a yellow, translucent stone about an inch and a half square. And within this stone was the shape of a black octopus.

Its tentacles spread out fan–wise from its body. They had the effect of reaching forward through the yellow stone. I could even see upon their nearer tips the sucking discs. The body was not so clearly defined. It was nebulous, seeming to reach into far distance. The black octopus had not been cut upon the jewel. It was within it.

I was aware of a curious mingling of feelings—repulsion and a peculiar sense of familiarity, like the trick of the mind that causes what we call double memory, the sensation of having experienced the same thing before. Without thinking. I slipped the ring over my thumb which it fitted perfectly, and held it up to the sun to catch the light through the stone. Instantly every man of the troop threw himself down upon his belly, prostrating himself before it.

The Uighur captain spoke to me. I had been subconsciously aware that from the moment of handing me the jade he had been watching me closely. I thought that now there was awe in his eyes.

"Your horse is ready—" again he used the unfamiliar word with which the troop had saluted me. "Show me what you wish to take with you, and your men shall carry it."

"Where do we go—and for how long?" I asked.

"To a holy man of your people," he answered. "For how long—he alone can answer."

I felt a momentary irritation at the casualness with which I was being disposed of. Also I wondered why he spoke of his men and his people as mine.

"Why does he not come to me?" I asked.

"He is old," he answered. "He could not make the journey."

I looked at the troop, now standing up beside their horses. If I refused to go, it would undoubtedly mean the wiping out of the camp if my companions attempted, as they would, to resist my taking. Besides, I was on fire with curiosity.

"I must speak to my comrades before I go," I said.

"If it please Dwayanu"—this time I caught the word—"to bid farewell to his dogs, let him." There was a nicker of contempt in his eyes as he looked at old Fairchild and the others.

Definitely I did not like what he had said, nor his manner.

"Await me here," I told him curtly, and walked over to Fairchild. I drew him into his tent, Barr and the others of the expedition at our heels. I told them what was happening. Barr took my hand, and scrutinized the ring. He whistled softly.

"Don't you know what this is?" he asked me. "It's the Kraken—that super–wise, malignant and mythical sea–monster of the old Norsemen. See, its tentacles are not eight but twelve. Never was it pictured with less than ten. It symbolized the principle that is inimical to Life—not Death precisely, more accurately annihilation. The Kraken—and here in Mongolia!"

"See here, Chief," I spoke to Fairchild. "There's only one way you can help me—if I need help. And that's to get back quick as you can to the old camp. Get hold of the Mongols and send word to that chief who kept bringing in the big wrestlers—they'll know whom I mean. Persuade or hire him to get as many able fighting men at the camp as you can. I'll be back, but I'll probably come back running. Outside of that, you're all in danger. Not at the moment, maybe, but things may develop which will make these people think it better to wipe you out. I know what I'm talking about, Chief. I ask you to do this for my sake, if not for your own."

"But they watch the camp—" he began to object.

"They won't—after I've gone. Not for a little while at least. Everyone of them will be streaking away with me." I spoke with complete certainty, and Barr nodded acquiescence.

"The King returns to his Kingdom," he said. "All his loyal subjects with him. He's in no danger—while he's with them. But—God, if I could only go with you, Leif! The Kraken! And the ancient legend of the South Seas told of the Great Octopus, dozing on and biding his time till he felt like destroying the world and all its life. And three miles up in the air the Black Octopus is cut into the cliffs of the Andes! Norsemen—and the South Sea Islanders—and the Andeans! And the same symbol—here!"

"Please promise?" I asked Fairchild. "My life may depend on it."

"It's like abandoning you. I don't like it!"

"Chief, this crowd could wipe you out in a minute. Go back, and get the Mongols. The Tartars will help. They hate the Uighurs. I'll come back, don't fear. But I'd bet everything that this whole crowd, and more, will be at my heels. When I come, I want a wall to duck behind."

"We'll go," he said.

I went out of that tent, and over to my own. The odd–eyed Uighur followed me. I took my rifle and an automatic, stuffed a toothbrush and a shaving–kit in my pocket, and turned to go.

"Is there nothing else?" There was surprise in his question.

"If there is, I'll come back for it," I answered.

"Not after you have—remembered," he said, enigmatically.

Side by side we walked to the black stallion. I lifted myself to his back.

The troop wheeled in behind us. Their spears a barrier between me and the camp, we galloped south.

Chapter III Ritual of Khalk'ru

The stallion settled down to a steady, swinging lope. He carried my weight easily. About an hour from dusk we were over the edge of the desert. At our right loomed a low range of red sandstone hills. Close ahead was a defile. We rode into it, and picked our way through it. In about half an hour we emerged into a boulder–strewn region, upon what had once been a wide road. The road stretched straight ahead of us to the north–east, toward another and higher range of red sandstone, perhaps five miles away. This we reached just as night began, and here my guide halted, saying that we would encamp until dawn. Some twenty of the troop dismounted; the rest rode on.

Those who remained waited, looking at me, plainly expectant. I wondered what I was supposed to do; then, noticing that the stallion had been sweating, I called for something to rub him down, and for food and water for him. This, apparently, was what had been looked for. The captain himself brought me the cloths, grain and water while the men whispered. After the horse was cooled down, I fed him. I then asked for blankets to put on him, for the nights were cold. When I had finished I found that supper had been prepared. I sat beside a fire with the leader. I was hungry, and, as usual when it was possible, I ate voraciously. I asked few questions, and most of these were answered so evasively, with such obvious reluctance, that I soon asked none. When the supper was over, I was sleepy. I said so. I was given blankets, and walked over to the stallion. I spread my blankets beside him, dropped, and rolled myself up.

The stallion bent his head, nosed me gently, blew a long breath down my neck, and lay down carefully beside me. I shifted so that I could rest my head on his neck. I heard excited whispering among the Uighurs. I went to sleep.

At dawn I was awakened. Breakfast was ready. We set out again on the ancient road. It ran along the hills, skirting the bed of what had long ago been a large river. For some time the eastern hills protected us from the sun. When it began to strike directly down upon us, we rested under the shadow of some immense rocks. By mid–afternoon we were once more on our way. Shortly before sun–down, we crossed the dry river bed over what had once been a massive bridge. We passed into another defile through which the long–gone stream had flowed, and just at dusk reached its end.

Each side of the end of the shallow gorge was commanded by stone forts. They were manned by dozens of the Uighurs. They shouted as we drew near, and again I heard the word "Dwayanu" repeated again and again.

The heavy gates of the right–hand fort swung open. We went through, into a passage under the thick wall. We trotted across a wide enclosure. We passed out of it through similar gates.

I looked upon an oasis hemmed in by the bare mountains. It had once been the site of a fair–sized city, for ruins dotted it everywhere. What had possibly been the sources of the river had dwindled to a brook which sunk into the sands not far from where I stood. At the right of this brook there was vegetation and trees; to the left of it was a desolation. The road passed through the oasis and ran on across this barren. It stopped at, or entered, a huge square–cut opening in the rock wall more than a mile away, an opening that was like a door in that mountain, or like the entrance to some gigantic Egyptian tomb.

We rode straight down into the fertile side. There were hundreds of the ancient stone buildings here, and fair attempts had been made to keep some in repair. Even so, their ancientness struck against my nerves. There were tents among the trees also. And out of the buildings and tents were pouring Uighurs, men, women and children. There must have been a thousand of the warriors alone. Unlike the men at the guardhouses, these watched me in awed silence as I passed.

We halted in front of a time–bitten pile that might have been a palace—five thousand years or twice that ago. Or a temple. A colonnade of squat, square columns ran across its front. Heavier ones stood at its entrance. Here we dismounted. The stallion and my guide's horse were taken by our escort. Bowing low at the threshold, my guide invited me to enter.

I stepped into a wide corridor, lined with spearsmen and lighted by torches of some resinous wood. The Uighur leader walked beside me. The corridor led into a huge room—high–ceilinged, so wide and long that the flambeaux on the walls made its centre seem the darker. At the far end of this place was a low dais, and upon it a stone table, and seated at this table were a number of hooded men.

As I drew nearer, I felt the eyes of these hooded men intent upon me, and saw that they were thirteen—six upon each side and one seated in a larger chair at the table's end. High cressets of metal stood about them in which burned some substance that gave out a steady, clear white light. I came close, and halted. My guide did not speak. Nor did these others.

Suddenly, the light glinted upon the ring on my thumb.

The hooded man at the table's end stood up, gripping its edge with trembling hands that were like withered claws. I heard him whisper—"Dwayanu!"

The hood slipped back from his head. I saw an old, old face in which were eyes almost as blue as my own, and they were filled with stark wonder and avid hope. It touched me, for it was the look of a man long lost to despair who sees a saviour appear.

Now the others arose, slipped back their hoods. They were old men, all of them, but not so old as he who had whispered. Their eyes of cold blue–grey weighed me. The high priest, for that I so guessed him and such he turned out to be, spoke again:

"They told me—but I could not believe! Will you come to me?"

I jumped on the dais and walked to him. He drew his old face close to mine, searching my eyes. He touched my hair. He thrust his hand within my shirt and laid it on my heart. He said:

"Let me see your hands."

I placed them, palms upward, on the table. He gave them the same minute scrutiny as had the Uighur leader. The twelve others clustered round, following his fingers as he pointed to this marking and to that. He lifted from his neck a chain of golden links, drawing from beneath his robe a large, flat square of jade. He opened this. Within it was a yellow stone, larger than that in my ring, but otherwise precisely similar, the black octopus—or the Kraken—writhing from its depths. Beside it was a small phial of jade and a small, lancet–like jade knife. He took my right hand, and brought the wrist over the yellow stone. He looked at me and at the others with eyes in which was agony.

"The last test," he whispered. "The blood!"

He nicked a vein of my wrist with the knife. Blood fell, slow drop by drop upon the stone; I saw then that it was slightly concave. As the blood dripped, it spread like a thin film from bottom to lip. The old priest lifted the phial of jade, unstoppered it, and by what was plainly violent exercise of his will, held it steadily over the yellow stone. One drop of colourless fluid fell and mingled with my blood.

The room was now utterly silent, high priest and his ministers seemed not to breathe, staring at the stone. I shot a glance at the Uighur leader, and he was glaring at me, fanatic fires in his eyes.

There was an exclamation from the high priest, echoed by the others. I looked down at the stone. The pinkish film was changing colour. A curious sparkle ran through it; it changed into a film of clear, luminous green.

"Dwayanu!" gasped the high priest, and sank back into his chair, covering his face with shaking hands. The others stared at me and back at the stone and at me again as though they beheld some miracle. I looked at the Uighur leader. He lay flat upon his face at the base of the dais.

The high priest uncovered his face. It seemed to me that he had become incredibly younger, transformed; his eyes were no longer hopeless, agonized; they were filled with eagerness. He arose from his chair, and sat me in it.

"Dwayanu," he said, "what do you remember?"

I shook my head, puzzled; it was an echo of the Uighur's remark at the camp.

"What should I remember?" I asked.

His gaze withdrew from me, sought the faces of the others, questioningly; as though he had spoken to them, they looked at one another, then nodded. He shut the jade case and thrust it into his breast. He took my hand, twisted the bezel of the ring behind my thumb and closed my hand on it.

"Do you remember—" his voice sank to the faintest of whispers—"Khalk'ru?"

Again the stillness dropped upon the great chamber—this time like a tangible thing. I sat, considering. There was something familiar about that name. I had an irritated feeling that I ought to know it; that if I tried hard enough, I could remember it; that memory of it wasfirst over the border of consciousness. Also I had the feeling that it meant something rather dreadful. Something better forgotten. I felt vague stirrings of repulsion, coupled with sharp resentment.

"No," I answered.

I heard the sound of sharply exhaled breaths. The old priest walked behind me and placed his hands over my eyes.

"Do you remember—this?"

My mind seemed to blur, and then I saw a picture as clearly as though I were looking at it with my open eyes. I was galloping through the oasis straight to the great doorway in the mountain. Only now it was no oasis. It was a city with gardens, and a river ran sparkling through it. The ranges were not barren red sandstone, but green with trees. There were others with me, galloping behind me—men and women like myself, fair and strong. Now I was close to the doorway. There were immense square stone columns flanking it…and now I had dismounted from my horse…a great black stallion…I was entering…

I would not enter! If I entered, I would remember—Khalk'ru! I thrust myself back…and out…I felt hands over my eyes…I reached and tore them away…the old priest's hands. I jumped from the chair, quivering with anger. I faced him. His face was benign, his voice gentle.

"Soon," he said, "you will remember more!"

I did not answer, struggling to control my inexplicable rage. Of course, the old priest had tried to hypnotize me; what I had seen was what he had willed me to see. Not without reason had the priests of the Uighurs gained their reputation as sorcerers. But it was not that which had stirred this wrath that took all my will to keep from turning berserk. No, it had been something about that name of Khalk'ru. Something that lay behind the doorway in the mountain through which I had almost been forced.

"Are you hungry?" The abrupt transition to the practical in the old priest's question brought me back to normal. I laughed outright, and told him that I was, indeed. And getting sleepy. I had feared that such an important personage as I had apparently become would have to dine with the high priest. I was relieved when he gave me in charge of the Uighur captain. The Uighur followed me out like a dog, he kept his eyes upon me like a dog upon its master, and he waited on me like a servant while I ate. I told him I would rather sleep in a tent than in one of the stone houses. His eyes flashed at that, and for the first time he spoke other than in respectful monosyllables.

"Still a warrior!" he grunted approvingly. A tent was set up for me. Before I went to sleep I peered through the flap. The Uighur leader was squatting at the opening, and a double ring of spearsmen stood shoulder to shoulder on guard.

Early next morning, a delegation of the lesser priests called for me. We went into the same building, but to a much smaller room, bare of all furnishings. The high priest and the rest of the lesser priests were awaiting me. I had expected many questions. He asked me none; he had, apparently, no curiosity as to my origin, where I had come from, nor how I had happened to be in Mongolia. It seemed to be enough that they had proved me to be who they had hoped me to be—whoever that was. Furthermore, I had the strongest impression that they were anxious to hasten on to the consummation of a plan that had begun with my lessons. The high priest west straight to the point.

"Dwayanu," he said, "we would recall to your memory a certain ritual. Listen carefully, watch carefully, repeat faithfully each inflection, each gesture."

"To what purpose?" I asked.

"That you shall learn—" he began, then interrupted himself fiercely. "No! I will tell you now! So that this which is desert shall once more become fertile. That the Uighurs shall recover their greatness. That the ancient sacrilege against Khalk'ru, whose fruit was the desert, shall be expiated!"

"What have I, a stranger, to do with all this?" I asked.

"We to whom you have come," he answered, "have not enough of the ancient blood to bring this about. You are no stranger. You are Dwayanu—the Releaser. You are of the pure blood. Because of that, only you—Dwayanu—can lift the doom."

I thought how delighted Barr would be to hear that explanation; how he would crow over Fairchild. I bowed to the old priest, and told him I was ready. He took from my thumb the ring, lifted the chain and its pendent jade from his neck, and told me to strip. While I was doing so, he divested himself of his own robes, and the others followed suit. A priest carried the things away, quickly returning. I looked at the shrunken shapes of the old men standing mother–naked round me, and suddenly lost all desire to laugh. The proceedings were being touched by the sinister. The lesson began.

It was not a ritual; it was an invocation—rather, it was an evocation of a Being, Power, Force, named Khalk'ru. It was exceedingly curious, and so were the gestures that accompanied it. It was clearly couched in the archaic form of the Uighur. There were many words I did not understand. Obviously, it had been passed down from high priest to high priest from remote antiquity. Even an indifferent churchman would have considered it blasphemous to the point of damnation. I was too much interested to think much of that phase of it. I had the same odd sense of familiarity with it that I had felt at the first naming of Khalk'ru. I felt none of the repulsion, however. I felt strongly in earnest. How much this was due to the force of the united wills of the twelve priests who never took their eyes off me, I do not know.

I won't repeat it, except to give the gist of it. Khalk'ru was the Beginning–without–Beginning, as he would be the End–without–End. He was the Lightless Timeless Void. The Destroyer. The Eater–up of Life. The Annihilator. The Dissolver. He was not Death—Death was only a part of him. He was alive, very much so, but his quality of living was the antithesis of Life as we know it. Life was an invader, troubling Khalk'ru's ageless calm. Gods and man, animals and birds and all creatures, vegetation and water and air and fire, sun and stars and moon—all were his to dissolve into Himself, the Living Nothingness, if he so willed. But let them go on a little longer. Why should Khalk'ru care when in the end there would be only—Khalk'ru! Let him withdraw from the barren places so life could enter and cause them to blossom again; let him touch only those who were the enemies of his worshippers, so that his worshippers would be great and powerful, evidence that Khalk'ru was the All in All. It was only for a breath in the span of his eternity. Let Khalk'ru make himself manifest in the form of his symbol and take what was offered him as evidence he had listened and consented.

There was more, much more, but that was the gist of it. A dreadful prayer, but I felt no dread—then.

Three times, and I was letter–perfect. The high priest gave me one more rehearsal and nodded to the priest who had taken away the clothing. He went out and returned with the robes—but not my clothes. Instead, he produced a long white mantle and a pair of sandals. I asked for my own clothes and was told by the old priest that I no longer needed them, that hereafter I would be dressed as befitted me. I agreed that this was desirable, but said I would like to have them so I could look at them once in a while. To this he acquiesced.

They took me to another room. Faded, ragged tapestries hung on its walls. They were threaded with scenes of the hunt and of war. There were oddly shaped stools and chairs of some metal that might have been copper but also might have been gold, a wide and low divan, in one corner spears, a bow and two swords, a shield and a cap–shaped bronze helmet. Everything, except the rugs spread over the stone floor, had the appearance of great antiquity. Here I was washed and carefully shaved and my long hair trimmed—a ceremonial cleansing accompanied by rites of purification which, at times, were somewhat startling.

These ended, I was given a cotton undergarment which sheathed me from toes to neck. After this, a pair of long, loose, girdled trousers that seemed spun of threads of gold reduced by some process to the softness of silk. I noticed with amusement that they had been carefully repaired and patched. I wondered how many centuries the man who had first worn them had been dead. There was a long, blouse–like coat of the same material, and my feet were slipped into cothurms, or high buskins, whose elaborate embroidery was a bit ragged.

The old priest placed the ring on my thumb, and stood back, staring at me raptly. Quite evidently he saw nothing of the ravages of time upon my garments.

I was to him the splendid figure from the past that he thought me.

"So did you appear when our race was great," he said. "And soon, when it has recovered a little of its greatness, we shall bring back those who still dwell in the Shadow–land."

"The Shadow–land?" I asked.

"It is far to the East, over the Great Water," he said. "But we know they dwell there, those of Khalk'ru who fled at the time of the great sacrilege which changed fecund Uighuriand into desert. They will be of the pure blood like yourself, Dwayanu, and you shall find mates among the women. And in time, we of the thinned blood shall pass away, and Uighuriand again be peopled by its ancient race."

He walked abruptly away, the lesser priests following. At the door he turned.

"Wait here," he said, "until the word comes from me."

Chapter IV Tentacle of Khalk'ru

I waited for an hour, examining the curious contents of the room, and amusing myself with shadow–fencing with the two swords. I swung round to find the Uighur captain watching me from the doorway, pale eyes glowing.

"By Zarda!" he said. "Whatever you have forgotten, it is not your sword play! A warrior you left us, a warrior you have returned!"

He dropped upon a knee, bent his head: "Pardon, Dwayanu! I have been sent for you. It is time to go."

A heady exaltation began to take me. I dropped the swords, and clapped him on the shoulder. He took it like an accolade. We passed through the corridor of the spearsmen and over the threshold of the great doorway. There was a thunderous shout.

"Dwayanu!"

And then a blaring of trumpets, a mighty roll of drums and the clashing of cymbals.

Drawn up in front of the palace was a hollow square of Uighur horsemen, a full five hundred of them, spears glinting, pennons flying from their shafts. Within the square, in ordered ranks, were as many more. But now I saw that these were both men and women, clothed in garments as ancient as those I wore, and shimmering in the strong sunlight like a vast multicoloured rug of metal threads. Banners and bannerets, torn and tattered and bearing strange symbols, fluttered from them. At the far edge of the square I recognized the old priest, his lesser priests flanking him, mounted and clad in the yellow. Above them streamed a yellow banner, and as the wind whipped it straight, black upon it appeared the shape of the Kraken. Beyond the square of horsemen, hundreds of the Uighurs pressed for a glimpse of me. As I stood there, blinking, another shout mingled with the roll of the Uighur drums.

"The King returns to his people!" Barr had said. Well, it was like that.

A soft nose nudged me. Beside me was the black stallion. I mounted him. The Uighur captain at my heels, we trotted down the open way between the ordered ranks. I looked at them as I went by. All of them, men and women, had the pale blue–grey eyes; each of them was larger than the run of the race. I thought that these were the nobles, the pick of the ancient families, those in whom the ancient blood was strongest. Their tattered banners bore the markings of their clans. There was exultation in the eyes of the men. Before I had reached the priests. I had read terror in the eyes of many of the women.

I reached the old priest. The line of horsemen ahead of us parted. We two rode through the gap, side by side. The lesser priests fell in behind us. The nobles followed them. A long thin line upon each side of the cavalcade, the Uighur horsemen trotted—with the Uighur trumpets blaring, the Uighur kettle–drums and long–drums beating, the Uighur cymbals crashing, in wild triumphal rhythms.

"The King returns—"

I would to heaven that something had sent me then straight upon the Uighur spears!

We trotted through the green of the oasis. We crossed a wide bridge which had spanned the little stream when it had been a mighty river. We set our horses' feet upon the ancient road that led straight to the mountain's doorway a mile or more away. The heady exultation grew within me. I looked back at my company. And suddenly I remembered the repairs and patches on my breeches and my blouse. And my following was touched with the same shabbiness. It made me feel less a king, but it also made me pitiful. I saw them as men and women driven by hungry ghosts in their thinned blood, ghosts of strong ancestors growing weak as the ancient blood weakened, starving at it weakened, but still strong enough to clamour against extinction, still strong enough to command their brains and wills and drive them toward something the ghosts believed would feed their hunger, make them strong again.

Yes, I pitied them. It was nonsense to think I could appease the hunger of their ghosts, but there was one thing I could do for them. I could give them a damned good show! I went over in my mind the ritual the old priest had taught me, rehearsed each gesture.

I looked up to find we were at the threshold of the mountain door. It was wide enough for twenty horsemen to ride through abreast. The squat columns I had seen, under the touch of the old priest's hands, lay shattered beside it. I felt no repulsion, no revolt against entering, as I then had. I was eager to be in and to be done with it.

The spearsmen trotted up, and formed a guard beside the opening. I dismounted, and handed one of them the stallion's rein. The old priest beside me, the lesser ones behind us, we passed over the threshold of the mined doorway, and into the mountain. The passage, or vestibule, was lighted by wall cressets in which burned the clear, white flame. A hundred paces from the entrance, another passage opened, piercing inward at an angle of about fifteen degrees to the wider one. Into this the old priest turned. I glanced back. The nobles had not yet entered; I could see them dismounting at the entrance. We went along this passage in silence for perhaps a thousand feet. It opened into a small square chamber, cut in the red sandstone, at whose side was another door, covered with heavy tapestries. In this chamber was nothing except a number of stone coffers of various sizes ranged along its walls.

The old priest opened one of these. Within it was a wooden box, grey with age. He lifted its lid, and took from it two yellow garments. He slipped one of these garments over my head. It was like a smock, falling to my knees. I glanced down; woven within it, its tentacles encircling me, was the black octopus.

The other he drew over his own head. It, too, bore the octopus, but only on the breast, the tentacles did not embrace him. He bent and took from the coffer a golden staff, across the end of which ran bars. From these fell loops of small golden bells.

From the other coffers the lesser priests had taken drums, queerly shaped oval instruments some three feet long, with sides of sullen red metal. They sat, rolling the drumheads under their thumbs, tightening them here and there while the old priest gently shook his staff of bells, testing their chiming. They were for all the world like an orchestra tuning up. I again felt a desire to laugh;

I did not then know how the commonplace can intensify the terrible.

There were sounds outside the tapestried doorway, rustlings. There were three clangorous strokes like a hammer upon an anvil. Then silence. The twelve priests walked through the doorway with their drums in their arms. The high priest beckoned me to follow him, and we passed through after them.

I looked out upon an immense cavern, cut from the living rock by the hands of men dust now for thousands of years. It told its immemorial antiquity as clearly as though the rocks had tongue. It was more than ancient; it was primeval. It was dimly lighted, so dimly that hardly could I see the Uighur nobles. They were standing, the banners of their clans above them, their faces turned up to me, upon the stone floor, a hundred yards or so away, and ten feet below me. Beyond them and behind them the cavern extended, vanishing in darkness. I saw that in front of them was a curving trough, wide—like the trough between two long waves—and that like a wave it swept upward from the hither side of the trough, curving, its lip crested, as though that wave of sculptured stone were a gigantic comber rushing back upon them. This lip formed the edge of the raised place on which I stood.

The high priest touched my arm. I turned my head to him, and followed his eyes. A hundred feet away from me stood a girl. She was naked. She had not long entered womanhood and quite plainly was soon to be a mother. Her eyes were as blue as those of the old priest, her hair was reddish brown, touched with gold, her skin was palest olive. The blood of the old fair race was strong within her. For all she held herself so bravely, there was terror in her eyes, and the rapid rise and fall of her rounded breasts further revealed that terror.

She stood in a small hollow. Around her waist was a golden ring, and from that ring dropped three golden chains fastened to the rock floor. I recognized their purpose. She could not run, and if she dropped or fell, she could not writhe away, out of the cup. But run, or writhe away from what? Certainly not from me! I looked at her and smiled. Her eyes searched mine. The terror suddenly fled from them. She smiled back at me, trustingly.

God forgive me—I smiled at her and she trusted me! I looked beyond her, from whence had come a glitter of yellow like a flash from a huge topaz. Up from the rock a hundred yards behind the girl jutted an immense fragment of the same yellow translucent stone that formed the jewel in my ring. It was like the fragment of a gigantic shattered pane. Its shape was roughly triangular. Black within it was a tentacle of the Kraken. The tentacle swung down within the yellow stone, broken from the monstrous body when the stone had been broken. It was all of fifty feet long. Its inner side was turned toward me, and plain upon all its length clustered the hideous sucking discs.

Well, it was ugly enough—but nothing to be afraid of, I thought. I smiled again at the chained girl, and met once more her look of utter trust.

The old priest had been watching me closely. We walked forward until we were half–way between the edge and the girl. At the lip squatted the twelve lesser priests, their drums on their laps.

The old priest and I faced the girl and the broken tentacle. He raised his staff of golden bells and shook them. From the darkness of the cavern began a low chanting, a chant upon three minor themes, repeated and repeated, and intermingled.

It was as primeval as the cavern; it was the voice of the cavern itself.

The girl never took her eyes from me.

The chanting ended. I raised my hands and made the curious gestures of salutation I had been taught. I began the ritual to Khalk'ru…

With the first words, the odd feeling of recognition swept over me—with something added. The words, the gestures, were automatic. I did not have to exert any effort of memory; they remembered themselves. I no longer saw the chained girl. All I saw was the black tentacle in the shattered stone.

On swept the ritual and on…was the yellow stone dissolving from around the tentacle…was the tentacle swaying?

Desperately I tried to halt the words, the gesturing. I could not!

Something stronger than myself possessed me, moving my muscles, speaking from my throat. I had a sense of inhuman power. On to the climax of the evil evocation—and how I knew how utterly evil it was—the ritual rushed, while I seemed to stand apart, helpless to check it.

It ended.

And the tentacle quivered…it writhed…it reached outward to the chained girl…

There was a devil's roll of drums, rushing up fast and ever faster to a thunderous crescendo…

The girl was still looking at me…but the trust was gone from her eyes…her face reflected the horror stamped upon my own.

The black tentacle swung up and out!

I had a swift vision of a vast cloudy body from which other cloudy tentacles writhed. A breath that had in it the cold of outer space touched me.

The black tentacle coiled round the girl…

She screamed—inhumanly…she faded…she dissolved…her screaming faded…her screaming became a small shrill agonized piping…a sigh.

I heard the dash of metal from where the girl had stood. The clashing of the golden chains and girdle that had held her, falling empty on the rock.

The girl was gone!

I stood, nightmare horror such as I had never known in worst of nightmares paralysing me—

The child had trusted me…I had smiled at her, and she had trusted me…and I had summoned the Kraken to destroy her!

Searing remorse, white hot rage, broke the chains that held me. I saw the fragment of yellow stone in its place, the black tentacle inert within it. At my feet lay the old priest, flat on his face, his withered body shaking; his withered hands clawing at the rock. Beside their drums lay the lesser priests, and flat upon the floor of the cavern were the nobles—prostrate, abased, blind and deaf in stunned worship of that dread Thing I had summoned.

I ran to the tapestried doorway. I had but one desire—to get out of the temple of Khalk'ru. Out of the lair of the Kraken. To get far and far away from it. To get back…back to the camp–home. I ran through the little room, through the passages and, still running, reached the entrance to the temple. I stood there for an instant, dazzled by the sunlight.

There was a roaring shout from hundreds of throats—then silence. My sight cleared. They lay there, in the dust, prostrate before me—the troops of the Uighur spearsmen.

I looked for the black stallion. He was close beside me. I sprang upon his back, gave him the reins. He shot forward like a black thunderbolt through the prostrate ranks, and down the road to the oasis. We raced through the oasis. I had vague glimpses of running crowds, shouting. None tried to stop me. None could have stayed the rush of that great horse.

And now I was close to the inner gates of the stone fort through which we had passed on the yesterday. They were open. Their guards stood gaping at me. Drums began to beat, peremptorily, from the temple. I looked back. There was a confusion at its entrance, a chaotic milling. The Uighur spearsmen were streaming down the wide road.

The gates began to close. I shot the stallion forward, bowling over the guards, and was inside the fort. I reached the further gates. They were closed. Louder beat the drums, threatening, commanding.

Something of sanity returned to me. I ordered the guards to open. They stood, trembling, staring at me. But they did not obey. I leaped from the stallion and ran to them. I raised my hand. The ring of Khalk'ru glittered. They threw themselves on the ground before me—but they did not open the gates.

I saw upon the wall goatskins full of water. I snatched one of these and a sack of grain. Upon the floor was a huge slab of stone. I lifted it as though it had been a pebble, and hurled it at the gates where the two halves met. They burst asunder. I threw the skin of water and sack of grain over the high saddle, and rode through the broken gates.

The great horse skimmed through the ravine like a swallow. And now we were over the crumbling bridge and thundering down the ancient road.

We came to the end of the far ravine. I knew it by the fall of rock. I looked back. There was no sign of pursuit. But I could hear the faint throb of the drums.

It was now well past mid–afternoon. We picked our way through the ravine and came out at the edge of the sandstone range. It was cruel to force the stallion, but I could not afford to spare him. By nightfall we had readied semi–arid country. The stallion was reeking with sweat, and tired. Never once had he slackened or turned surly. He had a great heart, that horse. I made up my mind that he should rest, come what might.

I found a sheltered place behind some high boulders. Suddenly I realized that I was still wearing the yellow ceremonial smock. I tore it off with sick loathing. I rubbed the horse down with it. I watered him and gave him some of the grain. I realized, too, that I was ravenously hungry and had eaten nothing since morning. I chewed some of the grain and washed it down with the tepid water. As yet, there were no signs of pursuit, and the drums were silent. I wondered uneasily whether the Uighurs knew of a shorter road and were outflanking me. I threw the smock over the stallion and stretched myself on the ground. I did not intend to sleep. But I did go to sleep.

I awakened abruptly. Dawn was breaking. Looking down upon me were the old priest and the cold–eyed Uighur captain. My hiding place was ringed with spearsmen. The old priest spoke, gently.

"We mean you no harm, Dwayanu. If it is your will to leave us, we cannot stay you. He whose call Khalk'ru has answered has nothing to fear from us. His will is our will."

I did not answer. Looking at him, I saw again—could only see—that which I had seen in the cavern. He sighed.

"It is your will to leave us! So shall it be!"

The Uighur captain did not speak.

"We have brought your clothing, Dwayanu, thinking that you might wish to go from us as you came," said the old priest.

I stripped and dressed in my old clothes. The old priest took my faded finery. He lifted the octopus robe from the stallion. The captain spoke:

"Why do you leave us, Dwayanu? You have made our peace with Khalk'ru. You have unlocked the gates. Soon the desert will blossom as of old. Why will you not remain and lead us on our march to greatness?"

I shook my head. The old priest sighed again.

"It is his will! So shall it be! But remember, Dwayanu—he whose call Khalk'ru has answered must answer when Khalk'ru calls him. And soon or late—Khalk'ru will call him!"

He touched my hair with his trembling old hands, touched my heart, and turned. A troop of spearsmen wheeled round him. They rode away.

The Uighur captain said:

"We wait to guard Dwayanu on his journey."

I mounted the stallion. We reached the expedition's new camp. It was deserted. We rode on, toward the old camp. Late that afternoon we saw ahead of us a caravan. As we came nearer they halted, made hasty preparations for defence. It was the expedition—still on the march. I waved my hands to them and shouted.

I dropped off the black stallion, and handed the reins to the Uighur.

"Take him," I said. His face lost its sombre sternness, brightened.

"He shall be ready for you when you return to us, Dwayanu. He or his sons," he said. He touched my hand to his forehead, knelt. "So shall we all be, Dwayanu—ready for you, we or our sons. When you return."

He mounted his horse. He faced me with his troop. They raised their spears. There was one crashing shout—

"Dwayanu!"

They raced away.

I walked to where Fairchild and the others awaited me.

As soon as I could arrange it, I was on my way back to America. I wanted only one thing—to put as many miles as possible between myself and Khalk'ru's temple.

I stopped. Involuntarily my hand sought the buckskin bag on my breast.

"But now," I said, "it appears that it is not so easy to escape him. By anvil stroke, by chant and drums—Khalk'ru calls me '"

Chapter V The Mirage

Jim had sat silent, watching me, but now and again I had seen the Indian stoicism drop from his face. He leaned over and put a hand on my shoulder.

"Leif," he said quietly, "how could I have known? For the first time, I saw you afraid—it hurt me. I did not know…"

From Tsantawu, the Cherokee, this was much. "It's all right, Indian. Snap back," I said roughly. He sat for a while not speaking, throwing little twigs on the fire.

"What did you friend Barr say about it?" he asked abruptly.

"He gave me hell," I said. "He gave me hell with the tears streaming down his cheeks. He said that never had anyone betrayed science as I had since Judas kissed Christ. He was keen on mixed metaphors that got under your skin. That went deep under mine, for it was precisely what I was thinking of myself—not as to science but as to the girl. I had given her the kiss of Judas all right. Barr said that I had been handed the finest opportunity man ever had given him. I could have solved the whole mystery of the Gobi and its lost civilization. I had run away like a child from a bugaboo. I was not only atavistic in body, I was atavistic in brain. I was a blond savage cowering before my mumbo–jumbos. He said that if he had been given my chance he would have let himself be crucified to have learned the truth. He would have, too. He was not lying."

"Admirably scientific," said Jim. "But what did he say about what you saw?"

"That is was nothing but hypnotic suggestion by the old priest. I had seen what he had willed me to see—just as before, under his will, I had seen myself riding to the temple. The girl hadn't dissolved. She had probably been standing in the wings laughing at me. But if everything that my ignorant mind had accepted as true had been true then my conduct was even more unforgivable. I should have remained, studied the phenomena and brought back the results for science to examine. What I had told him of the ritual of Khalk'ru was nothing but the second law of thermo–dynamics expressed in terms of anthropomorphism. Life was an intrusion upon Chaos, using that word to describe the unformed, primal state of the universe. An invasion. An accident. In time all energy would be changed to static heat, impotent to give birth to any life whatsoever. The dead universes would float lifelessly in the illimitable void. The void was eternal, life was not. Therefore the void would absorb it. Suns, worlds, gods, men, an things animate, would return to the void. Go back to Chaos. Back to Nothingness. Back to Khalk'ru. Or if my atavistic brain preferred the term—back to the Kraken. He was bitter."

"But the others saw the girl taken, you say. How did he explain that?"

"Oh, easily. That was mass hypnotism—like the Angels of Mons, the ghostly bowmen of Crecy and other collective hallucinations of the War. I had been a catalyzer. My likeness to the traditional ancient race, my completeness as a throwback, my mastery at Khalk'ru's ritual, the faith the Uighurs had in me—all this had been the necessary element in bringing about the collective hallucination of the tentacle. Obviously the priests had long been trying to make work a drug in which an essential chemical was lacking. I, for some reason, was the missing chemical—the catalyzer. That was all." Again he sat thinking, breaking the little twigs.

"It's a reasonable explanation. But you weren't convinced?"

"No, I wasn't convinced—I saw the girl's face when the tentacle touched her." He arose, stood staring toward the north.

"Leif," he asked suddenly, "what did you do with the ring?"

I drew out the little buckskin pouch, opened it and handed the ring to him. He examined it closely, returned it to me.

"Why did you keep it, Leif?"

"I don't know." I slipped the ring over my thumb. "I didn't give it back to the old priest; he didn't ask for it. Oh, hell—I'll tell you why I kept it—for the same reason Coleridge's Ancient Mariner had the albatross tied round his neck. So I couldn't forget I'm a murderer."

I put the ring back in the buckskin bag, and dropped it down my neck. Faintly from the north came a roll of drums. It did not seem to travel with the wind this time. It seemed to travel underground, and died out deep beneath us.

"Khalk'ru!" I said.

"Well. don't let's keep the old gentleman waiting," said Jim cheerfully.

He busied himself with the packs, whistling. Suddenly he turned to me.

"Listen, Leif. Barr's theories sound good to me. I'm not saying that if I'd been in your place I would have accepted them. Maybe you're right. But I'm with Barr—until events, if–when–and–how they occur, prove him wrong."

"Fine!" I said heartily, and entirely without sarcasm.

"May your optimism endure until we get back to New York—if–when–and–how."

We shouldered the packs, and took up our rifles and started northward.

It was not hard going, but it was an almost constant climb. The country sloped upward, sometimes at a breathtaking pitch. The forest, unusually thick and high for the latitude, began to thin. It grew steadily cooler. After we had covered about fifteen miles we entered a region of sparse and stunted trees. Five miles ahead was a thousand–feet–high range of bare rocks. Beyond this range was a jumble of mountains four to five thousand feet higher, treeless, their peaks covered with snow and ice, and cut by numerous ravines which stood out glistening white like miniature glaciers. Between us and the nearer range stretched a plain, all grown over with dwarfed thickets of wild roses, blueberries and squawbemes, and dressed in the brilliant reds and blues and greens of the brief Alaskan summer.

"If we camp at the base of those hills, we'll be out of that wind," said Jim. "It's five o'clock. We ought to make it in an hour."

We set off. Bursts of willow ptarmigans shot up around us from the berry thickets like brown rockets; golden plovers and curlews were whistling on all sides; within rifle shot a small herd of caribou was feeding, and the little brown cranes were stalking everywhere. No one could starve in that country, and after we had set up camp we dined very well.

There were no sounds that night—or if there were we slept too deeply to hear them.

The next morning we debated our trail. The low range stood directly in our path north. It continued, increasing in height, both east and west. It presented no great difficulties from where we were, at least so far as we could see. We determined to climb it, taking it leisurely. It was more difficult than it had appeared; it took us two hours to wind our way to the top.

We tramped across the top toward a line of huge boulders that stretched like a wall before us. We squeezed between two of these, and drew hastily back. We were standing at the edge of a precipice that dropped hundreds of feet sheer to the floor of a singular valley. The jumble of snow–and–ice–mantled mountains clustered around it. At its far end, perhaps twenty miles away, was a pyramidal–shaped peak.

Down its centre, from tip to the floor of the valley, ran a glittering white streak, without question a glacier filling a chasm which split the mountain as evenly as though it had been made by a single sword stroke. The valley was not wide, not more than five miles, I estimated, at its widest point. A long and narrow valley, its far end stoppered by the glacier–cleft giant, its sides the walls of the other mountains, dropping, except here and there where there had been falls of rock, as precipitously into it as the cliff under us.

But it was the floor of the valley itself that riveted our attention. It seemed nothing but a tremendous level field covered with rocky rubble. At the far end, the glacier ran through this rubble for half the length of the valley. There was no trace of vegetation among the littered rocks. There was no hint of green upon the surrounding mountains; only the bare black cliffs with their ice and snow–filled gashes. It was a valley of desolation.

"It's cold here, Leif." Jim shivered.

It was cold—a cold of a curious quality, a still and breathless cold. It seemed to press out upon us from the valley, as though to force us away.

"It's going to be a job getting down there," I said.

"And hard going when we do," said Jim. "Where the hell did all those rocks come from, and what spread them out so flat?"

"Probably dropped by that glacier when it shrunk," I said. "It looks like a terminal moraine. In fact this whole place looks as though it had been scooped out by the ice."

"Hold on to my feet, Leif, I'll take a look." He lay on his belly and wriggled his body over the edge. In a minute or two I heard him call, and pulled him back.

"There's a slide about a quarter of a mile over there to the left," he said. "I couldn't tell whether it goes all the way to the top. We'll go see. Leif, how far down do you think that valley is?"

"Oh, a few hundred feet."

"It's all of a thousand if it's an inch. The cliff goes down and down. I don't understand what makes the bottom seem so much closer here. It's a queer place, this."

We picked up the packs and marched off behind the wall—like rim of boulders. In a little while we came across a big gouge in the top, running far back. Here frost and ice had bitten out the rock along some fault. The shattered debris ran down the middle of the gouge like giant stepping–stones clear to the floor of the valley.

"We'll have to take the packs off to negotiate that," said Jim. "What shall be do—leave them here while we explore, or drop them along with us as we go?"

"Take them with us. There must be an outlet off there at the base of the big mountain."

We began the descent. I was scrambling over one of the rocks about a third of the way when I heard his sharp exclamation.

Gone was the glacier that had thrust its white tongue in among the rubble. Gone was the rubble. Toward its far end, the valley's floor was covered with scores of pyramidal black stones, each marked down its centre with a streak of glistening white. They stood in ranks, spaced regularly, like the dolmens of the Druids. They marched half–down the valley. Here and there between them arose wisps of white steam, like smokes of sacrifices.

Between them and us, lapping at the black cliffs, was a blue and rippling lake! It filled the lower valley from side to side. It rippled over the edges of the shattered rocks still far below us.

Then something about the marshalled ranks of black stones struck me.

"Jim! Those pyramid–shaped rocks. Each and every one of them is a tiny duplicate of the mountain behind them! Even to the white streak!"

As I spoke, the blue lake quivered. It flowed among the black pyramids, half–submerging them, quenching the sacrificial smokes. It covered the pyramids. Again it quivered. It was gone. Where the lake had been was once more the rubble–covered floor of the valley.

There had been an odd touch of legerdemain about the transformations, like the swift work of a master magician. And it had been magic—of a kind. But I had watched nature perform that magic before.

"Hell!" I said. "It's a mirage!"

Jim did not answer. He was staring at the valley with a singular expression.

"What's the matter with you, Tsantawu? Listening to the ancestors again? It's only a mirage."

"Yes?" he said. "But which one? The lake—or the rocks?"

I studied the valley's floor. It looked real enough. The theory of a glacial moraine accounted for its oddly level appearance—that and our height above it. When we reached it we would find that distribution of boulders uncomfortably uneven enough, I would swear.

"Why, the lake of course."

"No," he said, "I think the stones are the mirage."

"Nonsense. There's a layer of warm air down there. The stones radiate the sun's heat. This cold air presses on it. It's one of the conditions that produces mirages, and it has just done it for us. That's all."

"No," he said, "it isn't all."

He leaned against the rock.

"Leif, the ancestors had a few things more to say last night than I told you."

"I know damned well they did."

"They spoke of Ataga'hi. Does that mean anything to you."

"Not a thing."

"It didn't to me—then. It does now. Ataga'hi was an enchanted lake, in the wildest part of the Great Smokies, westward from the headwaters of the Ocana–luftee. It was the medicine lake of the animals and birds. All the Cherokee knew it was there, though few had seen it. If a stray hunter came close, all he saw was a stony flat, without blade of grass, forbidding. But by prayer and fasting and an all–night vigil, he could sharpen his spiritual sight. He would then behold at daybreak a wide shallow sheet of purple water, fed by springs, spouting from the high cliffs around. And in the water all kinds of fish and reptiles, flocks of ducks and geese and other birds flying about, and around the lake the tracks of animals. They came to Ataga'hi to be cured of wounds or sickness. The Great Spirit had placed an island in the middle of the lake. The wounded, the sick animals and birds swam to it. When they had reached it—the waters of Ataga'hi had cured them. They came up on its shores—whole once more. Over Ataga'hi ruled the peace of God. All creatures were friends."

"Listen, Indian, are you trying to tell me this is your medicine lake?"

"I didn't say that at all. I said the name of Ataga'hi kept coming into my mind. It was a place that appeared to be a stony flat, without blade of grass, forbidding. So does this place. But under that illusion was—a lake. We saw a lake. It's a queer coincidence, that's all. Perhaps the stony flat of Ataga'hi was a mirage—" He hesitated: "Well, if some other things the ancestors mentioned turn up, I'll shift sides and take your version of that Gobi affair."

"That lake was the mirage. I'm telling you."

He shook his head, stubbornly.

"Maybe. But maybe what we see down there now is mirage, too. Maybe both are mirage. And if so, then, how deep is the real floor, and can we make our way over it?"

He stood staring silently at the valley. He shivered, and again I was aware of the curiously intense quality of the cold. I stooped and caught hold of my pack. My hands were numb.

"Well, whatever it is—let's find out."

A quiver ran through the valley floor. Abruptly it became again the shimmering blue lake. And as abruptly turned again to nibbled rock.

But not before I had seemed to see within that lake of illusion—if illusion it were—a gigantic shadowy shape, huge black tentacles stretching out from a vast and nebulous body…a body which seemed to vanish back into immeasurable distances…vanishing into the void…as the Kraken of the Gobi cavern had seemed to vanish into the void…into that void which was—Khalk'ru!

We crept between, scrambled over and slid down the huge broken fragments. The further down we went, the more intense became the cold. It had a still and creeping quality that seeped into the marrow. Sometimes we dropped the packs ahead of us, sometimes dragged them after us. And ever more savagely the cold bit into our bones.

By the frequent glimpses of the valley floor, I was more and more assured of its reality. Every mirage I had ever beheld—and in Mongolia I had seen many—had retreated, changed form, or vanished as I drew near. The valley floor did none of these things. It was true that the stones seemed to be squatter as we came closer; but I attributed that to the different angle of vision.

We were about a hundred feet above the end of the slide when I began to be less sure. The travelling had become peculiarly difficult. The slide had narrowed. At our left the rock was clean swept, stretching down to the valley as smoothly as though it had been brushed by some titantic broom. Probably an immense fragment had broken loose at this point, shattering into the boulders that lay heaped at its termination. We veered to the right, where there was a ridge of rocks, pushed to the side by that same besom of stone. Down this ridge we picked our way.

Because of my greater strength, I was carrying both our rifles, swung by a thong over my left shoulder. Also I was handling the heavier pack. We came upon an extremely awkward place. The stone upon which I was standing suddenly tipped beneath my weight. It threw me sideways. The pack slipped from my hands, toppled, and fell over on the smooth rock. Automatically I threw myself forward, catching at it. The thong holding the two rifles broke. They went slithering after the escaping pack.

It was one of those combinations of circumstances that makes one believe in a God of Mischance. The thing might have happened anywhere else on our journey without any result whatever. And even at that moment I didn't think it mattered.

"Well," I said, cheerfully, "that saves me carrying them. We can pick them up when we get to the bottom."

"That is," said Jim, "if there is a bottom."

I cocked my eye down the slide. The rifles had caught up with the pack and the three were now moving fast.

"There they stop," I said. They were almost on the rubble at the end.

"The hell they do," said Jim. "There they go!"

I rubbed my eyes, and looked and looked again. The pack and the pushing rifles should have been checked by that barrier at the slide's end. But they had not been. They had vanished.

Chapter VI The Shadowed-land

There had been a queer quivering when rifles and pack had touched the upthrust of rock. Then they had seemed to melt into it.

"I'd say they dropped into the lake," said Jim.

"There's no lake. They dropped into some break in the rock. Come on—"

He gripped my shoulder.

"Wait, Leif. Go slow."

I followed his pointing finger. The barrier of stones had vanished. Where they had been, the slide ran, a smooth tongue of stone, far out into the valley.

"Come on," I said.

We went down, testing every step. With each halt, the nibbled plain became flatter and flatter, the boulders squatted lower and lower. A cloud drifted over the sun. There were no boulders. The valley floor stretched below us, a level slate–grey waste!

The slide ended abruptly at the edge of this waste. The rocks ended as abruptly, about fifty feet ahead. They stood at the edge with the queer effect of stones set in place when the edge had been viscous. Nor did the waste appear solid; it, too, gave the impression of viscosity; through it ran a slight but constant tremor, like waves of heat over a sun–baked road—yet with every step downward the bitter, still cold increased until it was scarcely to be borne.

There was a narrow passage between the shattered rocks and the cliff at our right. We crept through it. We stood upon an immense flat stone at the very edge of the strange plain. It was neither water nor rock; more than anything, it had the appearance of a thin opaque liquid glass, or a gas that had been turned semi–liquid.

I stretched myself out on the slab, and reached out to touch it. I did touch it—there was no resistance; I felt nothing. I let my hand sink slowly in. I saw my hand for a moment as though reflected in a distorting mirror, and then I could not see it at all. But it was pleasantly warm down there where my hand had disappeared. The chilled blood began to tingle in my numbed fingers. I leaned far over the stone and plunged both arms in almost to the shoulders. It felt damned good.

Jim dropped beside me and thrust in his arms.

"It's air," he said.

"Feels like it—" I began, and then a sudden realization came to me—"the rifles and the pack! If we don't get them we're out of luck!"

He said: "If Khalk'ru is—guns aren't going to get us away from him."

"You think this—" I stopped, memory of the shadowy shape in the lake of illusion coming back to me.

"Usunhi'yi, the Darkening–land. The Shadowed–land your old priest called it, didn't he? I'd say this fits either description."

I lay quiet; no matter what the certainty of a coming ordeal a man may carry in his soul, he can't help a certain shrinking when he knows his foot is at the threshold of it. And now quite clearly and certainly I knew just that. All the long trail between Khalk'ru's Gobi temple and this place of mirage was wiped out. I was stepping from that focus of Khalk'ru's power into this one—where what had been begun in the Gobi must be ended. The old haunting horror began to creep over me. I fought it.

I would take up the challenge. Nothing on earth could stop me now from going on. And with that determination, I felt the horror sullenly retreat, leave me. For the first time in years I was wholly free of it.

"I'm going to see what's down there." Jim drew up his arms. "Hold on to my feet, Leif, and I'll slip over the edge of the stone. I felt along its edge and it seems to go on a bit further."

"I'll go first." I said. "After all, it's my party."

"And a fine chance I'd have to pull you up if you fell over, you human elephant. Here goes—catch hold."

I had just time to grip his ankles as he wriggled over the stone, and his head and shoulders passed from sight. On he went, slowly writhing along the slanting rock until my hands and arms were hidden to the shoulders. He paused—and then from the mysterious opacity in which he had vanished came a roar of crazy laughter.

I felt him twist and try to jerk his feet away from me. I pulled him, fighting against me every inch of the way, out upon the stone. He came out roaring that same mad laughter. His face was red, and his eyes were shining drunkenly; he had in fact all the symptoms of a laughing drunk. But the rapidity of his respiration told me what had happened.

"Breathe slowly," I shouted in his ear. "Breathe slowly, I tell you."

And then, as his laughter continued and his struggles to tear loose did not abate, I held him down with one arm and closed his nose and mouth with my hand. In a moment or two he relaxed. I released him; and he sat up groggily.

"Funniest things," he said, thickly. "Saw funniest faces…"

He shook his head, took a deep breath or two, and lay back on the stone.

"What the hell happened to me, Leif?"

"You had an oxygen burn, Indian," I said. "A nice cheap jag on air loaded with carbon–dioxide. And that explains a lot of things about this place. You came up breathing three to the second, which is what carbon–dioxide does to you. Works on the respiratory centres of the brain and speeds up respiration. You took in more oxygen than you could use, and you got drunk on it. What did you see before the world became so funny?"

"I saw you," he said. "And the sky. It was like looking up out of water. I looked down and around. A little below me was something like a floor of pale green mist. I couldn't see through it. It's warm in there, good and plenty warm, and it smells like trees and flowers. That's all I managed to grasp before I went goofy. Oh, yes, this rock fall keeps right on going down. Maybe we can get to the bottom of it—if we don't laugh ourselves off. I'm going right out and sit in that mirage up to my neck—my God, Leif, I'm freezing!"

I looked at him with concern. His lips were blue, his teeth chattering. The transition from the warmth to the bitter cold was having its effect, and a dangerous one.

"All right," I said, rising. "I'll go first. Breathe slowly, take deep, long breaths as slowly as you can, and breathe out just as slowly. You'll soon get used to it. Come on."

I slung the remaining pack over my back, craw–fished over the side of the stone, felt solid rock under my feet, and drew myself down within the mirage.

It was warm enough; almost as warm as the steam–room of a Turkish bath. I looked up and saw the sky above me like a circle of blue, misty at its edges. Then I saw Jim's legs dropping down toward me, his body bent back from them at an impossible angle. I was seeing him, in fact, about as a fish does an angler wading in its pool. His body seemed to telescope and he was squatting beside me.

"God, but this feels good!"

"Don't talk," I told him. "Just sit here and practise that slow breathing. Watch me."

We sat there, silently, for all of half an hour. No sound broke the stillness around us. It smelled of the jungle, of fast–growing vigorous green life, and green life falling as swiftly into decay; and there were elusive, alien fragrances. All I could see was the circle of blue sky above, and perhaps a hundred feet below us the pale green mist of which Jim had spoken. It was like a level floor of cloud, impenetrable to the vision. The rock–fall entered it and was lost to sight. I felt no discomfort, but both of us were dripping with sweat. I watched with satisfaction Jim's deep, unhurried breathing.

"Having any trouble?" I asked at last.

"Not much. Now and then I have to put the pedal down. But I think I'm getting the trick."

"All right," I said. "Soon we'll be moving. I don't believe it will get any worse as we go down."

"You talk like an old–timer. What's your idea of this place anyway, Leif?"

"Simple enough. Although the combination hasn't a chance in millions to be duplicated. Here is a wide, deep valley entirely hemmed in by precipitous cliffs. It is, in effect, a pit. The mountains enclosing it are seamed with glaciers and ice streams and there is a constant flow of cold air into this pit, even in summer. There is probably volcanic activity close beneath the valley's floor, boiling springs and the like. It may be a miniature of the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes over to the west. All this produces an excess of carbon–dioxide. There is most probably a lush vegetation which adds to the product. What we are going into is likely to be a little left–over fragment of the Carboniferous Age—about ten million years out of its time. The warm, heavy air fills the pit until it reaches the layer of cold air we've just come from. The mirage is produced where the two meet, by approximately the same causes which produce every mirage. How long it's been this way, God alone knows. Parts of Alaska never had a Glacial Age—the ice for some reason or another didn't cover them. When what is New York was under a thousand feet of ice, the Yukon Flats were an oasis filled with all sorts of animal and plant life. If this valley existed then, we're due to see some strange survivals. If it's comparatively recent, we'll probably run across some equally interesting adaptations. That's about all, except there must be an outlet of some kind somewhere at about this level, otherwise the warm air would fill the whole valley to the top, as gas does a tank. Let's be going."

"I begin to hope we find the guns," said Jim, thoughtfully.

"As you pointed out, they'd be no good against Khalk'ru—what, who, if and where he is," I said. "But they'd be handy against his attendant devils. Keep an eye out for them—I mean the guns."

We started down the rock–fall, toward the floor of green mist. The going was not very difficult. We reached the mist without having seen anything of rifles or packs. The mist looked like a heavy fog. We entered it, and that was precisely what it was. It closed around us, thick and warm. The rocks were reeking wet and slippery, and we had to feel for every foot of the way. Twice I thought our numbers were up. How deep that mist was, I could not tell, perhaps two or three hundred feet—a condensation brought about by the peculiar atmospheric conditions that produced the mirage.

The mist began to lighten. It maintained its curious green tint, but I had the idea that this was due to reflection from below. Suddenly it thinned to nothing. We came out of it upon a breast where the falling rocks had met some obstruction and had piled up into a barrier about thrice my height. We climbed that barrier.

We looked upon the valley beneath the mirage.

It lay a full thousand feet beneath us. It was filled with pale green light like that in a deep forest glade. That light was both lucent and vaporous, lucent where we stood, but hiding the distance with misty curtains of pallid emerald. To the north and on each side as far as I could see, and melting into the vaporous emerald curtains, was a vast carpet of trees. Their breath came pulsing up to me, jungle–strong, laden with the unfamiliar fragrances. At left and right, the black cliffs fell sheer to the forest edge.

"Listen!" Jim caught my arm.

At first only a faint tapping, then louder and louder, we heard from far away the beating of drums, scores of drums, in a strange staccato rhythm—shrill, mocking, jeering! But they were no drums of Khalk'ru! In them was nothing of that dreadful trampling of racing feet upon a hollow world.

They ceased. As though in answer, and from an entirely different direction, there was a fanfarade of trumpets, menacing, warlike. If brazen notes could curse, these did. Again the drums broke forth, still mocking, taunting, defiant.

"Little drums," Jim was whispering. "Drums of—" He dropped down from the rocks, and I followed. The barrier led to the east, dipping steadily downward. We followed its base. It stood like a great wall between us and the valley, barring our vision. We heard the drums no more. We descended five hundred feet at least before the barrier ended. At its end was another rock slide like that down which the rifles and pack had fallen.

We stood studying it. It descended at an angle of about forty–five degrees, and while not so smooth as the other, it had few enough foot–holds.

The air had steadily grown warmer. It was not an uncomfortable heat; there was a queer tingling life about it, an exhalation of the crowding forest or of the valley itself, I thought. It gave me a feeling of rampant, reckless life, a heady exaltation. The pack had grown tiresome. If we were to negotiate the slide, and there seemed nothing else to do, I couldn't very well carry it. I unslung it.

"Letter of introduction" I said, and sent it slithering down the rock.

"Breathe deep and slow, you poor ass," said Jim, and laughed.

His eyes were bright; he looked happy, like a man from whom some burden of fear and doubt has fallen. He looked, in fact, as I had felt when I had taken up that challenge of the unknown not so long before. And I wondered.

The slithering pack gave a little leap, and dropped completely out of sight. Evidently the slide did not go all the way to the valley floor, or, if so, it continued at a sharper angle at the point of the pack's disappearance.

I let myself over cautiously, and began to worm down the slide flat on my belly, Jim following. We had negotiated about three–quarters of it when I heard him shout. Then his falling body struck me. I caught him with one hand, but it broke my own precarious hold. We went rolling down the slide and dropped into space. I felt a jarring shock, and abruptly went completely out.

Chapter VII The Little People

I came to myself to find Jim pumping the breath back into me. I was lying on something soft. I moved my legs gingerly, and sat up. I looked around. We were on a bank of moss—in it, rather, for the tops of the moss were a foot or more above my head. It was an exceedingly overgrown moss, I thought, staring at it stupidly. I had never seen moss as big as this. Had I shrunk, or was it really so overgrown? Above me was a hundred feet of almost sheer cliff. Said Jim:

"Well, we're here."

"How did we get here?" I asked, dazed. He pointed to the cliff.

"We fell down that. We struck a ledge. You did, rather. I was on top. It bumped us right out on this nice big moss mattress. I was still on top. That's why I've been pumping breath back into you for the last five minutes. Sorry, Leif, but if it had been the other way about, you'd certainly have had to proceed on your pilgrimage alone. I haven't your resilience."

He laughed. I stood up, and looked about us. The bed of giant moss on which we had landed formed a mound between us and the forest. At the base of the cliff was piled the debris of the fall that had made the slide. I looked at these rocks and shivered. If we had struck them we would have been a jumble of broken bones and mangled flesh. I felt myself over. I was intact.

"Everything, Indian," I said piously, "is always for the best."

"God, Leif! You had me worried for awhile!" He turned abruptly. "Look at the forest."

The mound of moss was a huge and high oval, hemmed almost to the base of the cliffs by gigantic trees. They were somewhat like the sequoias of California, and quite as high. Their crowns towered; their enormous boles were columns carved by Titans. Beneath them grew graceful ferns, tall as palm trees, and curious conifers with trunks thin as bamboos, scaled red and yellow. Over them, hanging from the boles and branches of the trees, were vines and dusters of flowers of every shape and colour; there were cressets of orchids, and chandeliers of lilies; strange symmetrical trees, the tips of whose leafless branches held up flower cups as though they were candelabra; chimes of flower bells swayed from boughs and there were long ropes and garlands of small starry flowers, white and crimson and in all the blues of the tropic seas. Bees dipped into them. There was a constant flashing of great dragon–flies all in lacquered mail of green and scarlet. And mysterious shadows drifted through the forest, like the shadows of the wings of hovering unseen guardians.

It was no forest of the Carboniferous Age, at least none such as I had ever seen reconstructed by science. It was a forest of enchantment. Out of it came heady fragrances. Nor was it, for all its strangeness, in the least sinister, or forbidding. It was very beautiful.

Jim said:

"The woods of the gods! Anything might live in a place like that. Anything that is lovely—"

Ah, Tsantawu, my brother—had that but been true!

All I said was:

"It's going to be damned hard to get through."

"I was thinking that," he answered. "Maybe the best thing is to skirt the cliffs. We may run across easier going farther on. Which way—right or left?"

We tossed a coin. The coin spun right. I saw the pack not far away, and walked over to retrieve it. The moss was as unsteady as a double spring–mattress. I wondered how it came to be there; thought that probably a few of the giant trees had been felled by the rock fall and the moss had fed upon their decay. I slung the pack over my shoulders, and we tramped, waist–deep in the spongy growth, to the cliffs.

We skirted the cliffs for about a mile. Sometimes the forest pressed so closely that we had trouble clinging to the rock. Then it began to change. The giant trees retreated. We entered a brake of the immense ferns. Except for the bees and the lacquered dragon–flies, there was no sign of life amid the riotous vegetation. We passed out of the ferns and into a most singular small meadow. It was almost like a clearing. At each side were the ferns; the forest formed a palisade at one end; at the other was a sheer cliff whose black face was spangled with large cup–shaped white flowers which hung from short, reddish, rather repellantly snake–like vines whose roots I supposed were fixed in crevices in the rock.

No trees or ferns of any kind grew in the meadow. It was carpeted by a lacy grass upon whose tips were minute blue flowerlets. From the base of the cliff arose a thin veil of steam which streamed up softly high in the air, bathing the cup–shaped white blossoms.

A boiling spring, we decided. We drew closer to examine it.

We heard a wailing—despairing, agonized…Like the wail of a heart–broken, tortured child, yet neither quite human nor quite animal. It had come from the cliff, from somewhere behind the veils of steam. We stopped short, listening. The wailing began again, within it something that stirred the very depths of pity, and it did not cease. We ran toward the cliff. The steam curtain at its base was dense. We skirted it and reached its farther end.

At the base of the cliff was a long and narrow pool, like a small closed stream. Its water was black and bubbling, and from these bubbles came the steam. From end to end of the boiling pool, across the face of the black rock, ran a yard–wide ledge. Above it, spaced at regular intervals, were niches cut within the cliff, small as cradles.

In two of these niches, half–within them and half–upon the ledge, lay what at first glance seemed two children. They were outstretched upon their backs, their tiny hands and feet fastened to the stone by staples of bronze. Their hair streamed down their sides; their bodies were stark naked.

And now I saw that they were not children. They were mature—a little man and a little woman. The woman had twisted her head and was staring at the other pygmy. It was she who was wailing. She did not see us. Her eyes were intent upon him. He lay rigid, his eyes closed. Upon his breast, over his heart, was a black corrosion, as though acid had been dropped upon it.

There was a movement on the cliff above him. One of the cup–shaped white flowers was there. Could it have been that which had moved? It hung a foot above the little man's breast, and on its scarlet pistils was a slowly gathering drop which I took for nectar.

It had been the flower whose movement had caught my eye! As I looked the reddish vine trembled. It writhed like a sluggish worm an inch down the rock. The flower shook its cup as though it were a mouth trying to shake loose the gathering drop. And the flower mouth was directly over the little man's heart and the black corrosion on his breast.

I stepped out upon the narrow path, reached up and grasped the vine and tore it loose. It squirmed in my hand like a snake. Its roots dug to my fingers, and like a snake's head the flower raised itself as though to strike. Its rim was thick and fleshy, like a round white mouth. The drop of nectar fell upon my hand and a fiery agony bit into it, running up my arm like a flame. I hurled the squirming thing into the boiling pool.

Close above the little woman was another of the crawling vines. I tore it loose as I had the other. It, too, strove to strike me with its head of flower, but either there was none of that dreadful nectar in its cup, or it missed me. I threw it after the other.

I bent over the little man. His eyes were open; he was glaring up at me. Like his skin, his eyes were yellow, tilted, Mongolian. They seemed to have no pupils, and they were not wholly human; no more than had been the wailing of his woman. There was agony in them, and there was bitter hatred. His gaze wandered to my hair, and I saw amazement banish the hatred.

The flaming torment of my hand and arm was almost intolerable. By it, I knew what the pygmy must be suffering. I tore away the staples that fettered him. I lifted the little man, and passed him over to Jim. He weighed no more than a baby.

I snapped the staples from the slab on which lay the little woman. There was no fear nor hatred in her eyes. They were filled with wonder and unmistakable gratitude. I carried her over and set her beside her man.

I looked back, up the face of the black cliff. There was movement all over it; the reddish ropes of the vines writhing, the white flowers swaying, raising and lowering their cups.

It was rather hideous…

The little man lay quietly, yellow eyes turning from me to Jim and back to me again. The woman spoke, in trilling, bird–like syllables. She darted away across the meadow, into the forest.

Jim was staring down upon the golden pygmy like a man in a dream. I heard him whisper:

"The Yunwi Tsundi! The Little People! It was all true then! All true!"

The little woman came running out of the fern brake. Her hands were full of thick, heavily veined leaves. She darted a look at me, as of apology. She bent over her man. She squeezed some of the leaves over his breast. A milky sap streamed through her fingers and dropped upon the black, corroded spot. It spread over the spot like a film. The little man stiffened and groaned, relaxed and lay still.

The little woman took my hand. Where the nectar had touched, the skin had turned black. She squeezed the juice of the leaves upon it. A pang, to which all the torment that had gone before was nothing, ran through hand and arm. Then, almost instantly, there was no pain.

I looked at the little man's breast. The black corrosion had disappeared. There was a wound like an old burn, red and normal. I looked at my hand. It was inflamed, but the blackness was no longer there.

The little woman bowed before me. The little man arose. He looked at my eyes and ran his gaze along my bulk. I watched suspicion grow, and the return of bitter hate. He spoke to his woman. She answered at some length, pointing to the cliff, to my inflamed hand, and to the ankles and wrists of both of them. The little man beckoned to me; by gesture asked me to bend down to him. I did, and he touched my yellow hair; he ran it through his tiny fingers. He laid his hand on my heart… then laid his head on my heart, listening to its beat.

He struck me with his small hand across my mouth. It was no blow; I knew it for a caress.

The little man smiled at me, and trilled. I could not understand, and shook my head helplessly. He looked up at Jim and trilled another question. Jim tried him in the Cherokee. This time it was the little man who shook his head. He spoke again to his woman. Clearly I caught the word ev–ah–lee in the bird–like sounds. She nodded.

Motioning us to follow, they ran across the meadow, toward the further brake of fern. How little they were—hardly to my thighs. They were beautifully formed. Their long hair was chestnut brown, fine and silky. Their hair floated behind them like cobwebs.

They ran like small deer. We were hard put to keep up with them. They entered the fern brake toward which we had been heading, and here they slowed their pace. On and on we went through the giant ferns. I could see no path, but the golden pygmies knew their way.

We came out of the ferns. Before us was a wide sward covered with the flowerets whose blue carpet ran to the banks of a wide river, to the banks of a strange river, a river all milky white, over whose placid surface hovered swirls of opalescent mist. Through the swirls I caught glimpses of green, level plains upon the white river's further side, and of green scarps.

The little man halted. He bent his ear to the ground. He leaped back into the brake, motioning us to follow. In a few minutes we came across a half–ruined watch tower. Its entrance gaped open. The pygmies slipped within it, beckoning.

Inside the tower was a crumbling flight of stones leading to its top. The little man and woman danced up them, with us close behind them. There was a small chamber at the tower's top through the chinks of whose stones the green light streamed. I peered through one of the crevices, down upon the blue sward and the white river. I heard the faint trampling of horses' feet and the low chanting of women; closer they drew, and closer.

A woman came riding down the blue sward. She was astride a great black mare. She wore, like a hood, the head of a white wolf. Its pelt covered her shoulders and back. Over that silvery pelt her hair fell in two thick braids of flaming red. Her high, round breasts were bare, and beneath them the paws of the white wolf were clasped like a girdle. Her eyes were blue as the cornflower and set wide apart under a broad, low forehead. Her skin was milky–white flushed with soft rose. Her mouth was full–lipped, crimson, and both amorous and cruel.

She was a strong woman, tall almost as I. She was like a Valkyrie, and like those messengers of Odin she carried on her saddle before her, held by one arm, a body. But it was no soul of a slain warrior snatched up for flight to Valhalla. It was a girl. A girl whose arms were bound to her sides by stout thongs, with head bent hopelessly on her breast. I could not see her face; it was hidden under the veil of her hair. But the hair was russet red and her skin as fair as that of the woman who held her.

Over the Wolf–woman's head flew a snow–white falcon, dipping and circling and keeping pace with her as she rode.

Behind her rode a half–score other women, young and strong–thewed, pink–skinned and blue–eyed, their hair of copper–red, rust–red, bronzy–red, plaited around their heads or hanging in long braids down their shoulders. They were bare–breasted, kirtled and buskined. They carried long, slender spears and small round targes. And they, too, were like Valkyries, each of them a shield–maiden of the Aesir. As they rode, they sang, softly, muted, a strange chant.

The Wolf–woman and her captive passed around a bend of the sward and out of sight. The chanting women followed and were hidden.

There was a gleam of silver from the white falcon's wing as it circled and dropped, circled and dropped. Then it, too, was gone.

Chapter VIII Evalie

The golden pygmies hissed; their yellow eyes were molten with hatred.

The little man touched my hand, talking in the rapid trilling syllables, and pointing over the white river. Clearly he was telling me we must cross it. He stopped, listening. The little woman ran down the broken stairs. The little man twittered angrily, darted to Jim, beat at his legs with his fists as though to arouse him, then shot after the woman.

"Snap out of it, Indian!" I said, impatiently. "They want us to hurry."

He shook his head, like a man shaking away the last cobwebs of some dream.

We sped down the broken steps. The little man was waiting for us; or at least he had not run away, for, if waiting for us, he was doing so, in a most singular manner. He was dancing in a small circle, waving his arms and hands oddly, and trilling a weird melody upon four notes, repeated over and over in varying progressions. The woman was nowhere in sight.

A wolf howled. It was answered by other wolves farther away in the flowered forest—like a hunting pack whose leader has found the scent.

The little woman came racing through the fern brake; the little man stopped dancing. Her hands were filled with small purplish fruits resembling fox–grapes. The little man pointed toward the white river, and they set off through the screening brake of ferns. We followed.

We came out of the brake, crossed the blue sward and stood on the bank of the river.

The howl of the wolf sounded again, answered by the others, and closer.

The little man leaped upon me, twittering frantically; he twined his legs about my waist and strove to tear my shirt from me. The woman was trilling at Jim, waving in her hands the bunches of purple fruit.

"They want us to take off our clothes," said Jim. "They want us to be quick about it."

We stripped, hastily. There was a crevice in the bank into which I pushed the pack. Quickly we rolled up our clothes and boots, and threw a strap around them and slung them over our shoulders.

The little woman threw a handful of the purple fruit to her man. She motioned Jim to bend, and as he did so she squeezed the berries over his head and hands, his breasts and thighs and feet. The little man was doing the same for me. The fruit had an oddly pungent odour that made my eyes water.

I straightened up and looked out over the white river.

The head of a serpent broke through its milky surface; then another and another. Their heads were as large as those of the anaconda, and were scaled in vivid emerald. They were crested by brilliant green spines which continued along their backs and were revealed as they swirled and twisted in the white water. Quite definitely, I did not like plunging into that water, but now I thought I knew the purpose of our anointing, and that most certainly the golden pygmies intended us no harm. And just as certainly, I assumed, they knew what they were about.

The howling of the wolves came once more, not only much nearer, but from the direction along which had gone the troop of women.

The little man dived into the water, motioning me to follow. I obeyed, and heard the small splash of the woman and the louder one of Jim. The little man glanced back at me, nodded, and began to swim across like an eel, at a speed that I found difficult to emulate.

The crested serpents did not molest us. Once I felt the slither of scales across my loins; once I shook the water from my eyes to find one of them swimming beside me, matching in play my speed, or so it seemed; racing me.

The water was warm, as warm as the milk it resembled, and curiously buoyant. The river at this point was about a thousand feet wide. I had covered half of it when I heard a shrill shriek and felt the buffeting of wings about my head. I rolled over, beating up with my hands to drive off whatever it was that had attacked me.

It was the white falcon of the Wolf–woman, hovering, dropping, rising again, threshing me with its pinions!

I heard a cry from the bank, a bell–like contralto, vibrant, imperious—in archaic Uighur:

"Come back! Come back. Yellow–hair!"

I swung round to see. The falcon ceased its bufferings. Upon the farther bank was the Wolf–woman upon her great black mare, the captive girl still clasped in her ann. The Wolf–woman's eyes were like sapphire stars, her free hand was raised in summons.

And all around her, heads lowered, glaring at me with eyes as green as hers were blue, was a pack of snow–white wolves!

"Come back!" she cried again.

She was very beautiful—the Wolf–woman. It would not have been hard to have obeyed. But no—she was not a Wolf–woman! What was she? Into my mind came a Uighur word, an ancient word that I had not blown I knew. She was the Salur'da—the Witch–woman. And with it came angry resentment of her summons. Who was she—the Salur'da—to command me! Me, Dwayanu, who in olden time long forgot would have had her whipped with scorpions for such insolence!

I raised myself high above the white water.

"Back to your den, Salur'da!" I shouted. "Does Dwayanu come to your call? When I summon you, then see that you obey!"

She stared at me, stark amazement in her eyes; the strong arm that held the girl relaxed so that the captive almost dropped from the mare's high pommel. I struck out across the water to the farther shore.

I heard the Witch–woman whistle. The falcon circling round my head screamed, and flew. I heard the white wolves snarling; I heard the thud of the black mare's hoofs racing over the blue sward. I reached the bank and climbed it. Only then did I turn. Witch–woman, falcon and white wolves—all of them were gone.

Across my wake the emerald–headed, emerald–crested serpents swam and swirled and dived.

The golden pygmies had climbed upon the bank.

Jim asked:

"What did you say to her?"

"The Witch–woman comes to my call—not I to hers," I answered, and wondered as I did so what it was that compelled the words.

"Still very much—Dwayanu, aren't you, Leif? What touched the trigger on you this time?"

"I don't know." The inexplicable resentment against the woman was still strong, and, because I could not understand it, irritating to a degree. "She ordered me to come back, and a little fire–cracker went off in my brain. Then I—I seemed to know her for what she is, and that her command was rank insolence. I told her so. She was no more surprised by what I said than I am. It was like someone else speaking. It was like—" I hesitated—"well, it was like when I started that cursed ritual and couldn't stop."

He nodded, then began to put on his clothes. I followed suit. They were soaking wet. The pygmies watched us wriggle into them with frank amazement. I noticed that the angry red around the wound on the little man's breast had paled, and that while the wound itself was raw, it was not deep and had already begun to heal. I looked at my own hand; the red had almost disappeared, and only a slight tenderness betrayed where the nectar had touched it.

When we had laced our boots, the golden pygmies trotted off, away from the river toward a line of cliffs about a mile ahead. The vaporous green light half hid them, as it had wholly hidden our view to the north when we had first looked over the valley. For half the distance the ground was level and covered with the blue–flowered grass. Then ferns began, steadily growing higher. We came upon a trail little wider than a deer path which threaded into a greater brake. Into this we turned.

We had eaten nothing since early morning, and I thought regretfully of the pack I had left behind. However, it is my training to eat heartily when I can, and philosophically go without when I must. So I tightened my belt and glanced back at Jim, close upon my heels.

"Hungry?" I asked.

"No. Too busy thinking."

"Indian—what brought the red–headed beauty back?"

"The wolves. Didn't you hear them howling after her? They found our track and gave her the signal."

"I thought so—but it's incredible! Hell—then she is a Witch–woman."

"Not because of that. You're forgetting your Mowgli and the Grey Companions. Wolves aren't hard to train. But she's a Witch–woman, nevertheless. Don't hold back Dwayanu when you deal with her, Leif."

The little drums again began to beat. At first only a few, then steadily more and more until there were scores of them. This time the cadences were lilting, gay, tapping out a dancing rhythm that lifted all weariness. They did not seem far away. But now the ferns were high over our heads and impenetrable to the sight, and the narrow path wove in and out among them like a meandering stream

The pygmies hastened their pace. Suddenly the trail came out of the ferns, and the pair halted. In front of us the ground sloped sharply upward for three or four hundred feet. The slope, except where the path ran, was covered from bottom to top with a tangle of thick green vines studded along all their lengths with wicked three–inch thorns; a living chevaux–de–frise which no living creature would penetrate. At the end of the path was a squat tower of stone, and from this came the glint of spear–heads.

In the tower a shrill–voiced drum chattered an unmistakable alarm. Instantly the lilting drums were silent. The same shrill chatter was taken up and repeated from point to point, diminishing in the far distance; and now I saw that the slope was like an immense circular fortification, curving far out toward the unbroken palisade of the giant ferns, and retreating at our right toward the sheer wall of black cliff, far away. Everywhere upon it was the thicket of thorn.

The little man twittered to his woman, and walked up the trail toward the tower. He was met by other pygmies streaming out of it. The little woman stayed with us, nodding and smiling and patting our knees reassuringly.

Another drum, or a trio of them, began to beat from the tower. I thought there were three because their burden was on three different notes, soft, caressing, yet far–carrying. They sang a word, a name, those drums, as plainly as though they had lips, the name I had heard in the trilling of the pygmies…

Ev–ah–lee…Ev–ah–lee…Ev–ah–lee…Over and over and over. The drums in the other towers were silent.

The little man beckoned us. We went forward, avoiding with difficulty the thorns. We came to the top of the path beside the small tower. A score of the little men stepped out and barred our way. None was taller than the one I had saved from the white flowers. All had the same golden skin, the same half–animal yellow eyes; like his, their hair was long and silky, floating almost to their tiny feet, They wore twisted loin–cloths of what appeared to be cotton; around their waists were broad girdles of silver, pierced like lace–work in intricate designs. Their spears were wicked weapons for all their apparent frailty, long–handled, hafted in some black wood, and with foot–deep points of red metal, and barbed like a muskalonge hook from tip to base. Swung on their backs were black bows with long arrows barbed in similar manner; and in their metal girdles were slender sickle–shaped knives of the red metal, like scimitars of gnomes.

They stood staring at us, like small children. They made me feel as Gulliver must have felt among the Liliputians. Also, there was that about them which gave me no desire to tempt them to use their weapons. They looked at Jim with curiosity and interest and with no trace of unfriendliness. They looked at me with little faces that grew hard and fierce. Only when their eyes roved to my yellow hair did I see wonder and doubt lighten suspicion—but they never dropped the points of the spears turned toward me.

Ev–ah–lee…Ev–ah–lee…Ev–ah–lee…sang the drums.

There was an answering roll from beyond, and they were silent.

I heard a sweet, low–pitched voice at the other side of the tower trilling the bird–like syllables of the Little People—And then—I saw Evalie.

Have you watched a willow bough swaying in spring above some clear sylvan pool, or a slender birch dancing with the wind in a secret woodland and covert, or the flitting green shadows in a deep forest glade which are dryads half–tempted to reveal themselves? I thought of them as she came toward us.

She was a dark girl, and a tall girl. Her eyes were brown under long black lashes, the clear brown of the mountain brook in autumn; her hair was black, the jetty hair that in a certain light has a sheen of darkest blue. Her face was small, her features certainly neither classic nor regular—the brows almost meeting in two level lines above her small, straight nose; her mouth was large but finely cut, and sensitive. Over her broad, low forehead the blue–black hair was braided like a coronal. Her skin was clear amber. Like polished fine amber it shone under the loose, yet clinging, garment that clothed her, knee–long, silvery, cobweb fine and transparent. Around her hips was the white loin–cloth of the Little People. Unlike them, her feet were sandalled.

But it was the grace of her that made the breath catch in your throat as you looked at her, the long flowing line from ankle to shoulder, delicate and mobile as the curve of water flowing over some smooth breast of rock, a liquid grace of line that changed with every movement.

It was that—and the life that burned in her like the green flame of the virgin forest when the kisses of spring are being changed for the warmer caresses of summer. I knew now why the old Greeks had believed in the dryads, the naiads, the nereids—the woman souls of trees, of brooks and waterfalls and fountains, and of the waves.

I could not tell how old she was—hers was the pagan beauty which knows no age.

She examined me, my clothes and boots, in manifest perplexity; she glanced at Jim, nodded, as though to say there was nothing in him to be disturbed about; then turned back to me, studying me. The small soldiers ringed her, their spears ready.

The little man and his woman had stepped forward. They were both talking at once, pointing to his breast, to my hand, to my yellow hair. The girl laughed, drew the little woman to her and covered her lips with a hand. The little man went on trilling and twittering.

Jim had been listening with a puzzled intensity whenever the girl had done the talking. He caught my arm.

"It's Cherokee they're speaking! Or something like it—Listen…there was a word…it sounded like 'Yun'–wini'giski'…it means 'Man–eaters.' Literally, 'They eat people'…if that's what it was…and look…he's showing how the vines crawled down the cliffs…"

The girl began speaking again. I listened intently. The rapid enunciation and the trilling made understanding difficult, but I caught sounds that seemed familiar—and now I heard a combination that I certainly knew.

"It's some kind of Mongolian tongue, Jim. I got a word just then that means 'serpent–water' in a dozen different dialects."

"I know—she called the snake 'aha'nada' and the Cherokees say 'inadu'—but it's Indian, not Mongolian."

"It might be both. The Indian dialects are Mongolian. Maybe it's the ancient mother–tongue. If we could only get her to speak slower, and tune down on the trills."

"It might be that. The Cherokees called themselves 'the oldest people' and their language 'the first speech'—wait—"

He stepped forward, hand upraised; he spoke the word which in the Cherokee means, equally, friend or one who comes with good intentions. He said it several times. Wonder and comprehension crept into the girl's eyes. She repeated it as he had spoken it, then turned to the pygmies, passing the word on to them—and I could distinguish it now plainly within the trills and pipings. The pygmies came closer, staring up at Jim.

He said, slowly: "We come from outside. We know nothing of this place. We know none within it."

Several times he had to repeat this before she caught it. She looked gravely at him, and at me doubtfully—yet as one who would like to believe. She answered haltingly.

"But Sri"—she pointed to the little man—"has said that in the water he spoke the tongue of evil."

"He speaks many tongues," said Jim—then to me:

"Talk to her. Don't stand there like a dummy, admiring her. This girl can think—and we're in a jam. Your looks make no hit with the dwarfs, Leif, in spite of what you did."

"Is it any stranger that I should have spoken that tongue than that I now speak yours, Evalie?" I said. And asked the same question in two of the oldest dialects of the Mongolian that I knew. She studied me, thoughtfully.

"No," she said at last—"no; for I, too, know something of it, yet that does not make me evil."

And suddenly she smiled, and trilled some command to the guards. They lowered their spears, regarding me with something of the friendly interest they had showed toward Jim. Within the tower, the drums began to roll a cheerful tattoo. As at a signal, the other unseen drums which the shrill alarm had silenced, resumed their lilting rhythm.

The girl beckoned us. We walked behind her, the little soldiers ringing us, between a portcullis of thorn and the tower.

We passed over the threshold of the Land of the Little People and of Evalie.

Chapter IX

The green light that filled the Shadowed–land was darkening. As the green forest darkens at dusk. The sun must long since have dipped beneath the peaks circling that illusory floor which was the sky of the Shadowed–land. Yet here the glow faded slowly, as though it were not wholly dependent upon the sun, as though the place had some luminosity of its own.

We sat beside the tent of Evalie. It was pitched on a rounded knoll not far from the entrance of her lair within the cliff. All along the base of the cliff were the lairs of the Little People, tiny openings through which none larger than they could creep into the caves that were their homes, their laboratories, their workshops, their storehouses and granaries, their impregnable fortresses.

It had been hours since we had followed her over the plain between the watch–tower and her tent. The golden pygmies had swarmed from every side, curious as children, chattering and trilling, questioning Evalie, twittering her answers to those on the outskirts of the crowd. Even now there was a ring of them around the base of the knoll, dozens of little men and little women, staring up at us with their yellow eyes, chirping and laughing. In the arms of the women were babies like tiniest dolls, and like larger dolls were the older children who clustered at their knees.

Child–like, their curiosity was soon satisfied; they went back to their occupations and their play. Others, curiosity not yet quenched, took their places.

I watched them dancing upon the smooth grass. They danced in circling measures to the lilting rhythm of their drums. There were other knolls upon the plain, larger and smaller than that on which we were, and all of them as rounded and as symmetrical. Around and over them the golden pygmies danced to the throbbing of the little drums.

They had brought us little loaves of bread, and oddly sweet but palatable milk and cheese, and unfamiliar delicious fruits and melons. I was ashamed of the number of platters I had cleaned. The little people had only watched, and laughed, and urged the women to bring me more.

Jim said, laughingly:"It's the food of the Yunwi Tsundsi you're eating. Fairy food, Leif! You can never eat mortal food again."

I looked at Evalie, and at the wine and amber beauty of her. Well, I could believe Evalie had been brought up on something more than mortal food.

I studied the plain for the hundredth time. The slope on which stood the squat towers was an immense semi–circle, the ends of whose arcs met the black cliffs. It must enclose, I thought, some twenty square miles. Beyond the thorned vines were the brakes of the giant fern; beyond them, on the other side of the river, I could glimpse the great trees. If there were forests on this side, I could not tell. Nor what else there might be of living things. There was something to be guarded against, certainly, else why the fortification, the defences?

Whatever else it might be, this guarded land of the golden pygmies was a small Paradise, with its stands of grain, its orchards, its vines and berries and its green fields.

I thought over what Evalie had told us of herself, carefully and slowly tuning down the trilling syllables of the little people into vocables we could understand. It was an ancient tongue she spoke—one whose roots struck far deeper down in the soil of Time than any I knew, unless it were the archaic Uighur itself. Minute by minute I found myself mastering it with ever greater ease, but not so rapidly as Jim. He had even essayed a few trills, to the pygmies' delight. More than that, however, they had understood him. Each of us could follow Evalie's thought better than she could ours.

Whence had the Little People come into the Shadowed–land? And where had they learned that ancient tongue? I asked myself that, and answered that as well ask how it came that the Sumerians, whose great city the Bible calls Ur of the Chaldees, spoke a Mongolian language. They, too, were a dwarfish race, masters of strange sorceries, students of the stars. And no man knows whence they came into Mesopotamia with their science full–blown. Asia is the Ancient Mother, and to how many races she has given birth and watched blown away in dust none can say.

The transformation of the tongue into the bird–like speech of the Little People, I thought I understood. Obviously, the smaller the throat, the higher are the sounds produced. Unless by some freak, one never hears a child with a bass voice. The tallest of the Little People was no bigger than a six–year–old child. They could not, perforce, sound the gutturals and deeper tones; so they had to substitute other sounds. The natural thing, when you cannot strike a note in a lower octave, is to strike that same note in a higher. And so they had, and in time this had developed into the overlying pattern of trills and pipings, beneath which, however, the essential structure persisted.

She remembered, Evalie had told us, a great stone house. She thought she remembered a great water. She remembered a land of trees which had become "white and cold". There had been a man and a woman…then there was only the man…and it was all like mist. All she truly remembered was the Little People…she had forgotten there had ever been anything else…until we had come. She remembered when she had been no bigger than the Little People…and how frightened she was when she began to be bigger than they. The Little People, the Rrrllya—it is the closest I can come to the trill—loved her; they did as she told them to do. They had fed and clothed and taught her, especially the mother of Sri, whose life I had saved from the Death Flower. Taught her what? She looked at us oddly, and only repeated—"taught me." Sometimes she danced with the Little People and sometimes she danced for them—again the oddly secretive, half–amused glance. That was all. How long ago had she been as small as the Little People? She did not know—long and long ago. Who had named her Evalie? She did not know.

I studied her, covertly. There was not one thing about her to give a clue to her race. Foundling, I knew, she must have been, the vague man and woman her father and mother. But what had they been—of what country? No more than could her lips, did her eyes or hair, colouring or body hint at answer.

She was more changeling than I. A changeling of the mirage! Nurtured on food from Goblin Market!

I wondered whether she would change back again into everyday woman if I carried her out of the Shadowed–land.

I felt the ring touch my breast with the touch of ice.

Carry her away! There was Khalk'ru to meet first—and the Witch–woman!

The green twilight deepened; great fire–flies began to flash lanterns of pale topaz through the flowering trees; a little breeze stole over the fern brakes, laden with the fragrances of the far forest. Evalie sighed.

"You will not leave me, Tsantawu?"

If he heard her, he did not answer. She turned to me.

"You will not leave me—Leif?"

"No!" I said…and seemed to hear the drums of Khalk'ru beating down the lilting tambours of the Little People like far–away mocking laughter.

The green twilight had deepened into darkness, a luminous darkness, as though a full moon were shining behind a cloud–veiled sky. The golden pygmies had stilled their lilting drums; they were passing into their cliff lairs. From the distant towers came the tap–tap–tap of the drums of the guards, whispering to each other across the thorn–covered slopes. The fire–flies' lights were like the lanterns of a goblin watch; great moths floated by on luminous silvery wings, like elfin planes.

"Evalie," Jim spoke. "The Yunwi Tsundsi—the Little People—how long have they dwelt here?"

"Always, Tsantawu—or so they say."

"And those others—the red–haired women?"

We had asked her of those women before, and she had not answered, had tranquilly ignored the matter, but now she replied without hesitation.

"They are of the Ayjir—it was Lur the Sorceress who wore the wolfskin. She rules the Ayjir with Yodin the High Priest and Tibur–Tibur the Laugher, Tibur the Smith. He is not so tall as you, Leif, but he is broader of shoulder and girth, and he is strong—strong! I will tell you of the Ayjir. Before it was as though a hand were clasped over my lips—or was it my heart? But now the hand is gone.

"The Little People say the Ayjir came riding here long and long and long ago. Then the Rrrllya held the land on each side of the river. There were many of the Ayjir—and many. Far more than now, many men and women where now are mainly women and few men. They came as though in haste from far away, or so the little people say their fathers told them. They were led by a—by a—I have no word! It has a name, but that name I will not speak—no, not even within me! Yet it has a shape…I have seen it on the banners that float from the towers of Karak…and it is on the breasts of Lur and Tibur when they…"

She shivered and was silent. A silver–winged moth dropped upon her hand, lifting and dropping its shining wings; gently she raised it to her lips, wafted it away.

"All this the Rrrllya—whom you call the Little People—did not then know. The Ayjir rested. They began to build Karak, and to cut within the cliff their temple to—to what had led them here. They built quickly at first, as though they feared pursuit; but when none came, they built more slowly. They would have made my little ones their servants, their slaves. The Rrrllya would not have it so. There was war. The Little Ones lay in wait around Karak, and when the Ayjir came forth, they killed them; for the Little Ones know all the—the life of the plants, and so they know how to make their spears and arrows slay at once those whom they only touch. And so, many of the Ayjir died.

"At last a truce was made, and not because the Little People were being beaten, for they were not. But for another reason. The Ayjir were cunning; they laid traps for the little ones, and caught a number. Then this they did—they carried them to the temple and sacrificed them to—to that which had led them here. By sevens they took them to the temple, and one out of each seven they made watch that sacrifice, then released him to carry to the Rrrllya the tale of what he had seen.

"The first they would not believe, so dreadful was the story of that sacrifice—but then came the second and third and fourth with the same story. And a great dread and loathing and horror fell upon the Little People. They made a covenant. They would dwell upon this side of the river; the Ayjir should have the other. In return the Ayjir swore by what had led them that never more should one of the Little People be given in sacrifice to it. If one were caught in Ayjirland, he would be killed—but not by the Sacrifice. And if any of the Ayjir should flee Karak, seek refuge among the Rrrllya, they must kill that fugitive. To all of this, because of that great horror, the Little People agreed. Nansur was broken, so none could cross—Nansur, that spanned Nanbu, the white river, was broken. All boats both of the Ayjir and the Rrrllya were destroyed, and it was agreed no more should be built. Then, as further guard, the Little People took the dalan'usa and set them in Nanbu, so none could cross by its waters. And so it has been—for long and long and long."

"Dalan'usa, Evalie—you mean the serpents?"

"Tlanu'se—the leech," said Jim.

"The serpents—they are harmless. I think you would not have stopped to talk to Lur had you seen one of the dalan'usa, Leif," said Evalie, half–maliciously.

I filed that enigma for further reference.

"Those two we found beneath the death flowers. They had broken the truce?"

"Not broken it. They knew what to expect if found, and were ready to pay. There are plants that grow on the farther side of white Nanbu—and other things the Little Ones need, and they are not to be found on this side. And so they swim Nanbu to get them—the dalan'usa are their friends—and not often are they caught there. But this day Lur was hunting a runaway who was trying to make her way to Sirk, and she crossed their trail and ran them down, and laid them beneath the Death Flowers."

"But what had the girl done—she was one of them?"

"She had been set apart for the Sacrifice. Did you not see—she was taluli…with child…ripening for…for…"

Her voice trailed into silence. A chill touched me.

"But, of course, you know nothing of that," she said. "Nor will I speak of it—now. If Sri and Sra had found the girl before they, themselves, had been discovered, they would have guided her past the dalan'usa—as they guided you; and here she would have dwelt until the time came that she must pass–out of herself. She would have passed in sleep, in peace, without pain…and when she awakened it would have been far from here…perhaps with no memory of it…free. So it is that the Little People who love life send forth those who must be sent."

She said it tranquilly, with clear eyes, untroubled.

"And are many sent forth so?"

"Not many, since few may pass the dalan'usa—yet many try."

"Both men and women, Evalie?"

"Can men bear children?"

"What do you mean by that?" I asked, roughly enough; there had been something in the question that somehow touched me in the raw.

"Not now," she answered. "Besides, men are few in Karak, as I told you. Of children born, not one in twenty is a man child. Do not ask me why, for I do not know."

She arose, stood looking at us dreamily.

"Enough for to–night. You shall sleep in my tent. On the morrow you shall have one of your own, and the Little People will cut you a lair in the cliff next mine. And you shall look on Karak, standing on broken Nansur—and you shall see Tibur the Laugher, since he always comes to Nansur's other side when I am there. You shall see it all…on the morrow…or the morrow after…or on another morrow. What does it matter, since every morrow shall be ours, together. Is it not so?"

And again Jim made no answer.

"It is so, Evalie," I said.

She smiled at us, sleepily. She turned from us and floated toward the darker shadow on the cliff which was the door to her cave. She merged into the shadow, and was gone.

Chapter X If a Man Could Use All His Brain

The drums of the sentinel dwarfs beat on softly, talking to one another along the miles of circling scarp. And suddenly I had a desperate longing for the Gobi. I don't know why, but its barren and burning, wind–swept and sand–swept body was more desirable than any woman's. It was like strong homesickness. I found it hard to shake it off. I spoke at last in sheer desperation. "You've been acting damned queer, Indian." "Tsi Tsa'lagi—I told you—I'm all Cherokee." "Tsantawu—It is I, Degata, who speaks to you now." I had dropped into the Cherokee; he answered:

"What is it my brother desires to know?"

"What it was the voices of the dead whispered that night we slept beneath the spruces? What it was you knew to be truth by the three signs they gave you. I did not hear the voices, brother—yet by the blood rite they are my ancestors as they are yours; and I have the right to know their words."

He said: "Is it not better to let the future unroll itself without giving heed to the thin voices of the dead? Who can tell whether the voices of ghosts speak truth?"

"Tsantawu points his arrow in one direction while his eyes look the other. Once he called me dog slinking behind the heels of the hunter. Since it is plain he still thinks me that…"

"No, no, Lief," he broke in, dropping the tribal tongue. "I only mean I don't know whether it's truth. I know what Barr would call it—natural apprehensions put subconsciously in terms of racial superstitions. The voices—we'll call them that, anyway—said great danger lay north. The Spirit that was north would destroy them for ever and for ever if I fell in its hands. They and I would be 'as though we never had been.' There was some enormous difference between ordinary death and this peculiar death that I couldn't understand. But the voices did. I would know by three signs that they spoke truth, by Ataga'hi, by Usunhi'yi and by the Yunwi Tsundi. I could meet the first two and still go back. But if I went on to the third—it would be too late. They begged me not to—this was peculiarly interesting, Leif—not to let them be—dissolved."

"Dissolved!" I exclaimed. "But—that's the same word I used. And it was hours after!"

"Yes, that's why I felt creepy when I heard you. You can't blame me for being a little preoccupied when we came across the stony flat that was like Ataga'hi, and more so when we struck the coincidence of the Shadowed–land, which is pretty much the same as Usunhi'yi, the Darkening–land. It's why I said if we ran across the third, the Yunwi Tsundi, I'd take your interpretation rather than Barr's. We did strike it. And if you think all those things aren't a good reason for acting damned queer, as you put it, well—what would you think a good one?"

Jim in the golden chains…Jim with the tentacle of that Dark Power creeping, creeping toward him…my lips were dry and stiff…

"Why didn't you tell me all that! I'd never have let you go on!"

"I know it. But you'd have come back, wouldn't you, old–timer?"

I did not answer; he laughed.

"How could I be sure until I saw all the signs?"

"But they didn't say you would be—dissolved," I clutched at the straw. "They only said there was the danger."

"That's all."

"And what would I be doing? Jim—I'd kill you with my own hand before I'd let what I saw happen in the Gobi happen to you."

"If you could," he said, and I saw he was sorry he had said it.

"If I could? What did they say about me—those damned ancestors?"

"Not a damned thing," he answered, cheerfully. "I never said they did. I simply reasoned that if we went on, and I was in danger, so would you be. That's all."

"Jim—it isn't all. What are you keeping back?"

He arose, and stood over me.

"All right. They said that even if the Spirit didn't get me, I'd never get out. Now you have the whole works."

"Well," I said, a burden rolling off me, "that's not so bad. And, as for getting out—that may be as may be. One thing's sure—if you stay, so do I."

He nodded, absently. I went on to something else that had been puzzling me.

"The Yunwi Tsundi, Jim, what were they? You never told me anything about them that I remember. What's the legend?"

"Oh—the Little People," he squatted beside me, chuckling, wide awake from his abstraction. "They were in Cherokee–land when the Cherokees got there. They were a pygmy race, like those in Africa and Australia to–day. Only they weren't blacks. These small folk fit their description. Of course, the tribes did some embroidering. They had them copper–coloured and only two feet high. These are golden–skinned and average three feet. At that, they may have faded some here and put on height. Otherwise they square with the accounts—long hair, perfect shape, drums and all."

He went on to tell of the Little People. They had lived in caves, mostly in the region now Tennessee and Kentucky. They were earth–folk, worshippers of life; and as such at times outrageously Rabelaisian. They were friendly toward the Cherokees, but kept rigorously to themselves and seldom were seen. They frequently aided those who had got lost in the mountains, especially children. If they helped anyone, and took him into their caves, they warned him he mustn't tell where the caves were, or he would die. And, ran the legends, if he told, he did die. If anyone ate their food he had to be very careful when he returned to his tribe, and resume his old diet slowly, or he would also die.

The Little People were touchy. If anyone followed them in the woods, they cast a spell on him so that for days he had no sense of location. They were expert wood and metal workers, and if a hunter found in the forest a knife or arrow–head or any kind of trinket, before he picked it up he had to say: "Little People, I want to take this." If he didn't ask, he never killed any more game and another misfortune came upon him. One which distressed his wife.

They were gay, the Little People, and they spent half their time in dancing and drumming. They had every kind of drum—drums that would make trees fall, drums that brought sleep, drums that drove to madness, drums that talked and thunder drums. The thunder drums sounded just like thunder, and when the Little People beat on them soon there was a real thunderstorm, because they sounded so much like the actuality that it woke up the thunderstorms, and one or more storms was sure to come poking around to gossip with what it supposed a wandering member of the family…

I remembered the roll of thunder that followed the chanting; I wondered whether that had been the Little People's defiance to Khalk'ru…

"I've a question or two for you, Leif."

"Go right ahead, Indian."

"Just how much do you remember of—Dwayanu?"

I didn't answer at once; it was the question I had been dreading ever since I had cried out to the Witch–woman on the white river's bank.

"If you're thinking it over, all right. If you're thinking of a way to stall, all wrong. I'm asking for a straight answer."

"Is it your idea that I'm that ancient Uighur, re–born? If it is, maybe you have a theory as to where I've been during the thousands of years between this time and now."

"Oh, so the same idea has been worrying you, has it? No, reincarnation isn't what I had in mind. Although at that, we know so damned little I wouldn't rule it out. But there may be a more reasonable explanation. That's why I ask—what do you remember of Dwayanu?"

I determined to make a clean breast of it.

"All right, Jim," I said. "That same question has been riding my mind right behind Khalk'ru for three years. And if I can't find the answer here, I'll go back to the Gobi for it—if I can get out. When I was in that room of the oasis waiting the old priest's call, I remembered perfectly well it had been Dwayanu's. I knew the bed, and I knew the armour and the weapons. I stood looking at one of the metal caps and I remembered that Dwayanu—or I—had got a terrific clout with a mace when wearing it. I took it down, and there was a dent in it precisely where I remembered it had been struck. I remembered the swords, and recalled that Dwayanu—or I—had the habit of using a heavier one in the left hand than in the right. Well, one of them was much heavier than the other. Also, in a fight I use my left hand better than I do my right. These memories, or whatever they were, came in flashes. For a moment I would be Dwayanu, plus myself, looking with amused interest on old familiar things—and the next moment I would be only myself and wondering, with no amusement, what it all meant."

"Yes, what else?"

"Well, I wasn't entirely frank about the ritual matter," I said, miserably. "I told you it was as though another person had taken charge of my mind and gone on with it. That was true, in a way—but God help me, I knew all the time that other person was—myself! It was like being two people and one at the same time. It's hard to make clear…you know how you can be saying one thing and thinking another. Suppose you could be saying one thing and thinking two things at once. It was like that. One part of me was in revolt, horror–stricken, terrified. The other part was none of those things; it knew it had power and was enjoying exercising that power—and it had control of my will. But both were—I. Unequivocally, unmistakably—I. Hell, man—if I'd really believed it was somebody, something, besides myself, do you suppose I'd feel the remorse I do? No, it's because I knew it was I—the same part of me that knew the helm and the swords, that I've gone hag–ridden ever since."

"Anything else?"

"Yes. Dreams."

He leaned over, and spoke sharply.

"What dreams?"

"Dreams of battles—dreams of feasts…a dream of war against yellow men, and of a battlefield beside a river and of arrows flying overhead in clouds…of hand–to–hand fights in which I wield a weapon like a huge hammer against big yellow–haired men I know are like myself… dreams of towered cities through which I pass and where white, blue–eyed women toss garlands down for my horse to trample…When I wake the dreams are vague, soon lost. But always I know that while I dreamed them, they were clear, sharp–cut—real as life…"

"Is that how you knew the Witch–woman was Witch–woman—through those dreams?"

"If so, I don't remember. I only knew that suddenly I recognized her for what she was—or that other self did."

He sat for a while in silence.

"Leif," he asked, "in those dreams do you ever take any part in the service of Khalk'ru? Have anything at all to do with his worship?"

"I'm sure I don't. I'd remember that, by God! I don't even dream of the temple in the Gobi!"

He nodded, as though I had confirmed some thought in his own mind; then was quiet for so long that I became jumpy.

"Well, Old Medicine Man of the Tsalagi', what's the diagnosis? Reincarnation, demonic possession, or just crazy?"

"Leif, you never had any of those dreams before the Gobi?"

"I did not."

"Well—I've been trying to think as Barr would, and squaring it with my own grey matter. Here's the result. I think that everything you've told me is the doing of your old priest. He had you under his control when you saw yourself riding to the Temple of Khalk'ru—and wouldn't go in. You don't know what else he might have suggested at that time, and have commanded you to forget consciously when you came to yourself. That's a simple matter of hypnotism. But he had another chance at you. When you were asleep that night. How do you know he didn't come in and do some more suggesting? Obviously, he wanted to believe you were Dwayanu. He. wanted you to 'remember'—but having had one lesson, he didn't want you to remember what went on with Khalk'ru. That would explain why you dreamed about the pomp and glory and the pleasant things, but not the unpleasant. He was a wise old gentleman—you say that yourself. He knew enough of your psychology to foresee you would balk at a stage of the ritual. So you did—but he had tied you well up. Instantly the post–hypnotic command to the subconscious operated. You couldn't help going on. Although your conscious self was wide–awake, fully aware, it had no control over your will. I think that's what Barr would say. And I'd agree with him. Hell, there are drugs that do all that to you. You don't have to go into migrations of the soul, or demons, or any medieval matter to account for it."

"Yes," I said, hopefully but doubtfully. "And how about the Witch–woman?"

"Somebody like her in your dreams, but forgotten. I think the explanation is what I've said. If it is, Leif, it worries me."

"I don't follow you there," I said.

"No? Well, think this over. If all these things that puzzle you come from suggestions the old priest made—what else did he suggest? Clearly, he knew something of this place. Suppose he foresaw the possibility of your finding it. What would he want you to do when you did find it? Whatever it was, you can bet your chances of getting out that he planted it deep in your subconscious. All right—that being a reasonable deduction, what is it you will do when you come in closer contact with those red–headed ladies we saw, and with the happy few gentlemen who share their Paradise? I haven't the slightest idea—nor have you. And if that isn't something to worry about, tell me what is. Come on—let's go to bed."

We went into the tent. We had been in it before with Evalie. It had been empty then except for a pile of soft pelts and silken stuffs at one side. Now there were two such piles. We shed our clothes in the pale green darkness and turned in. I looked at my watch.

"Ten o'clock," I said. "How many months since morning?"

"At least six. If you keep me awake I'll murder you. I'm tired."

So was I; but I lay long, thinking. I was not so convinced by Jim's argument, plausible as it was. Not that I believed I had been lying dormant in some extra–spatial limbo for centuries. Nor that I had ever been this ancient Dwayanu. There was a third explanation, although I didn't like it a bit better than that of reincarnation; and it had just as many unpleasant possibilities as that of Jim's.

Not long ago an eminent American physician and psychologist had said he had discovered that the average man used only about one–tenth of his brain; and scientists generally agreed he was right. The ablest thinkers, all–round geniuses, such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were, might use a tenth more. Any man who could use all his brain could rule the world—but probably wouldn't want to. In the human skull was a world only one–fifth explored at the most.

What was in the terra incognita of the brain—the unexplored eight–tenths?

Well, for one thing there might be a storehouse of ancestral memories, memories reaching back to those of the hairy, ape–like ancestors who preceded man, reaching beyond them even to those of the flippered creatures who crawled out of the ancient seas to begin their march to men—and further back to their ancestors who had battled and bred in the steaming oceans when the continents were being born.

Millions upon millions of years of memories! What a reservoir of knowledge if man's consciousness could but tap it!

There was nothing more unbelievable in this than that the physical memory of the race could be contained in the two single cells which start the cycle of birth. In them are all the complexities of the human body—brain and nerves, muscles, bone and blood. In them, too, are those traits we call hereditary—family resemblances, resemblances not only of face and body but of thought, habits, emotions, reactions to environment: grandfather's nose, great–grandmother's eyes, great–great–grandfather's irascibility, moodiness or what not. If all this can be carried in those seven and forty, and eight and forty, microscopic rods within the birth cells which biologists call the chromosomes, tiny mysterious gods of birth who determine from the beginning what blend of ancestors a boy or girl shall be, why could they not carry, too, the accumulated experiences, the memories of those ancestors?

Somewhere in the human brain might be a section of records, each neatly graven with lines of memories, waiting only for the needle of consciousness to run over them to make them articulate.

Maybe the consciousness did now and then touch and read them. Maybe there were a few people who by some freak had a limited power of tapping their contents.

If that were true, it would explain many mysteries. Jim's ghostly voices, for example. My own uncanny ability of picking up languages.

Suppose that I had come straight down from this Dwayanu. And that in this unknown world of my brain, my consciousness, that which now was I, could and did reach in and touch those memories that had been Dwayanu. Or that those memories stirred and reached my consciousness? When that happened—Dwayanu would awaken and live. And I would be both Dwayanu and Leif Langdon!

Might it not be that the old priest had known something of this? By words and rites and by suggestion, even as Jim had said, had reached into that terra incognita and wakened these memories that were—Dwayanu?

They were strong—those memories. They had not been wholly asleep; else I would not have learned so quickly the Uighur…nor experienced those strange, reluctant flashes of recognition before ever I met the old priest…

Yes, Dwayanu was strong. And in some way I knew he was ruthless. I was afraid of Dwayanu—of those memories that once had been Dwayanu. I had no power to arouse them, and I had no power to control them. Twice they had seized my will, had pushed me aside.

What if they grew stronger?

What if they became—all of me?

Chapter XI Drums of the Little People

Six times the green light of the Shadowed–land had darkened into the pale dusk that was its night, and I had heard nothing, seen nothing of the Witch–woman or of any of those who dwelt on the far side of the white river. They had been six days and nights of curious interest. We had gone with Evalie among the golden pygmies over all their guarded plain; and we had gone at will among them, alone.

We had watched them at their work and at their play, listened to their drumming and looked on in wonder at their dances—dances so intricate, so extraordinary, that they were more like complex choral harmonies than steps and gestures. Sometimes the Little People danced in small groups of a dozen or so, and then it was like some simple song. But sometimes they were dancing by the hundreds, interlaced, over a score of the smooth–turfed dancing greens; and then it was like symphonies translated into choreographic measures.

They danced always to the music of their drums; they had no other music, nor did they need any. The drums of the Little People were of many shapes and sizes, in range covering all of ten octaves, and producing not only the semitones of our own familiar scale, but quarter and eighth–tones and even finer gradations that oddly affect the listener—at least, they did me. They ranged in pitch from the pipe organ's deepest bass to a high staccato soprano. Some, the pygmies played with thumbs and fingers, and some with palms of their hands, and some with sticks. There were drums that whispered, drums that hummed, drums that laughed, and drums that sang.

Dances and drums, but especially the drums, were evocative of strange thoughts, strange pictures; the drums beat at the doors of another world—and now and then opened them wide enough to give a glimpse of fleeting, weirdly beautiful, weirdly disturbing, images.

There must have been between four and five thousand of the Little People in the approximately twenty square miles of cultivated, fertile plain enclosed by their wall; how many outside of it, I had no means of knowing. There were a score or more of small colonies, Evalie told us. These were like hunting or mining posts from which came the pelts, the metals and other things the horde fashioned to their uses. At Nansur Bridge was a strong warrior post. Some balance of nature, so far as I could learn from her, kept them at about the same constant; they grew quickly into maturity and their lives were not long.

She told us of Sirk, the city of those who had fled from the Sacrifice. From her description an impregnable place, built against the cliffs; walled; boiling springs welling up at the base of its battlements and forming an impassable moat. There was constant warfare between the people of Sirk and the white wolves of Lur, lurking in the encompassing forest, keeping watch to intercept those fleeing to it from Karak. I had the feeling that there was furtive intercourse between Sirk and the golden pygmies, that perhaps the horror of the Sacrifice which both shared, and the revolt of those in Sirk against the worshippers of Khalk'ru was a bond. And that when they could, the Little People helped them, and would even join hands with them, were it not for the deep ancient fear of what might follow should they break the compact their forefathers had made with the Ayjir.

It was a thing Evalie said that made me think that.

"If you had turned the other way, Leif—and if you had escaped the wolves of Lur—you would have come to Sirk. And a great change might have grown from that, for Sirk would have welcomed you, and who knows what might have followed, with you as their leader. Nor would my Little People then…"

She stopped there, nor would she complete the sentence, for all my urging. So I told her there were too many ifs about the matter, and I was content that the dice had fallen as they had. It pleased her.

I had one experience not shared by Jim. Its significance I did not then recognize. The Little People were as I have said—worshippers of life. That was their whole creed and faith. Here and there about the plain were small cairns, altars in fact, upon which, cut from wood or stone or fossil ivory, were the ancient symbols of fertility; sometimes singly, sometimes in pairs, and sometimes in a form curiously like that same symbol of the old Egyptians—the looped cross, the crux ansata which Osiris, God of the Resurrection, carried in his hand and touched, in the Hall of the Dead, those souls which had passed all tests and had earned immortality.

It happened on the third day. Evalie bade me go with her, and alone. We walked along the well–kept path that ran along the base of the cliffs in which the pygmies had their lairs. The tiny golden–eyed women peeped out at us and trilled to their dolls of children as we passed. Groups of elders, both men and women, came dancing toward us and fell in behind us as we went on. Each and all carried drums of a type I had not yet seen. They did not beat them, nor did they talk; group by group they dropped in behind us, silently.

After awhile I noticed that there were no more lairs. At the end of half an hour we turned a bastion of the dins. We were at the edge of a small meadow carpeted with moss, fine and soft as the pile of a silken carpet. The meadow was perhaps five hundred feet wide and about as many feet deep. Opposite me was another bastion. It was as though a rounded chisel had been thrust down, cutting out a semicircle in the precipice. At the far end of the meadow was what, at first glance, I thought a huge domed building, and then saw was an excrescence from the cliff itself.

In this rounded rock was an oval entrance, not much larger than an average door. As I stood, wondering, Evalie took my hand and led me toward it. We went through it.

The domed rock was hollow.

It was a temple of the Little People—I knew that, of course, as soon as I had crossed the threshold. Its walls of some cool, green stone curved smoothly up. It was not dark within the temple. The rocky dome had been pierced as though by the needle of a lace–maker, and through hundreds of the frets light streamed. The walls caught it, and dispersed it from thousands of crystalline angles within the stone. The floor was carpeted with the thick, soft moss, and this was faintly luminous, adding to the strange pellucid light; it must have covered at least two acres.

Evalie drew me forward. In the exact centre of the floor was a depression, like an immense bowl. Between it and me stood one of the looped–cross symbols, thrice the height of a tall man. It was polished, and glimmered as though cut from some enormous amethystine crystal. I glanced behind me. The pygmies who had followed us were pouring through the oval doorway.

They crowded close behind us as Evalie again took my hand and led me toward the cross. She pointed, and I peered down into the bowl.

I looked upon the Kraken!

There it lay, sprawled out within the bowl, black tentacles spread fanwise from its bloated body, its huge black eyes staring inscrutably up into mine!

Resurgence of the old horror swept me. I jumped back with an oath.

The pygmies were crowding around my knees, staring up at me intently. I knew that my horror was written plain upon my face. They began an excited trilling, nodding to one another, gesticulating. Evalie watched them gravely, and then I saw her own face lighten as though with relief.

She smiled at me, and pointed again to the bowl. I forced myself to look. And now I saw that the shape within it had been cunningly carved. The dreadful, inscrutable eyes were of jet–like jewel. Through the end of each of the fifty–foot–long tentacles had been driven one of the crux ansatas, pinioning it like a spike; and through the monstrous body had been driven a larger one. I read the meaning: life fettering the enemy of life; rendering it impotent; prisoning it with the secret, ancient and holy symbol of that very thing it was bent upon destroying. And the great looped–cross above—watching and guarding like the god of life.

I heard a rippling and rustling and rushing from the drums. On and on it went in quickly increasing tempo. There was triumph in it—the triumph of onrushing conquering waves, the triumph of the free rushing wind; and there was peace and surety of peace in it—like the rippling song of little waterfalls chanting their faith that "they will go on and on for ever," the rippling of little waves among the sedges of the river–bank, and the rustling of the rain bringing life to all the green things of earth.

Round the amethystine cross Evalie began to dance, circling it slowly to the rippling, the rustling and the rushing music of the drums. And she was the spirit of that song they sang, and the spirit of all those things of which they sang.

Three times she circled it. She came dancing to me, took my hand once more and led me away, out through the portal. From behind us, as we passed through, there came a sustained rolling of the little drums, no longer rippling, rustling, rushing—defiant now, triumphal.

But of that ceremony, or of its reasons, or of the temple itself she would speak no word thereafter, question her as I might.

And we still had to stand upon Nansur Bridge and look on towered Karak.

"On the morrow," she would say; and when the morrow came, again she would say—"on the morrow." When she answered me, she would drop long lashes over the clear brown eyes and glance at me from beneath them, strangely; or touch my hair and say that there were many morrows and what did it matter on which of them we went, since Nansur would not run away. There was some reluctance I could not fathom. And day by day her sweetness and her beauty wound a web around my heart until I began to wonder whether it might become a shield against the touch of what I carried on my breast.

But the Little People still had their doubts about me, temple ceremony or none; that was plain enough. Jim, they had taken to their hearts; they twittered and trilled and laughed with him as though he were one of them. They were polite and friendly enough to me, but they watched me. Jim could take up the tiny doll–like children and play with them. The mothers didn't like me to do that and showed it very clearly. I received direct confirmation of how they felt about me that morning.

"I'm going to leave you for two or three days, Leif," he told me when we had finished breakfasting. Evalie had floated away on some call from her small folk.

"Going to leave me!" I gaped at him in astonishment. "What do you mean? Where are you going?"

He laughed.

"Going to look at the tlanusi—what Evalie calls the dalanusa—the big leeches. The river guards she told us the pygmies put on the job when the bridge was broken."

She had not spoken about them again, and I had forgotten all about them.

"What are they, Indian?"

"That's what I'm going to find out. They sound like the great leech of Tianusi'yi. The tribes said it was red with white stripes and as big as a house. The Little People don't go that far. They only say they're as big as you are."

"Listen, Indian—I'm going along."

"Oh, no, you're not."

"I'd like to know why not."

"Because the Little People won't let you. Now listen to me, old–timer—the plain fact is that they're not entirely satisfied about you. They're polite, and they wouldn't hurt Evalie's feelings for the world, but—they'd much rather be without you."

"You're telling me nothing new," I said.

"No, but here is something new. A party that's been on a hunting trip down the other end of the valley came in yesterday. One of them remembered his grandfather had told him that when the Ayjir came riding into this place they all had yellow hair like yours. Not the red they have now. It's upset them."

"I thought they'd been watching me pretty damned close the last twenty–four hours," I said. "So that's the reason, is it?"

"That's the reason, Leif. It's upset them. It's also the reason for this expedition to the tianusi. They're going to increase the river guard. It involves some sort of ceremony, I gather. They want me to go along. I think it better that I do."

"Does Evalie know all this?"

"Sure she does. And she wouldn't let you go, even if the pygmies would."

Jim left with a party of about a hundred of the pygmies about noon. I bade him a cheerful good–bye. If it puzzled Evalie that I took his departure so calmly, and asked her no questions she did not show it. But she was very quiet that day, speaking mostly in monosyllables abstractedly. Once or twice I caught her looking at me with a curious wonder in her eyes. And once I had taken her hand, and she had quivered and leaned toward me, and then snatched it away, half–angrily. And once when she had forgotten her moodiness and had rested against my shoulder, I had fought hard against taking her in my arms.

The worst of it was that I could find no cogent argument why I shouldn't take her. A voice within my mind was whispering that if I so desired, why should I not? And there were other things besides that whisper which sapped my resistance. It had been a queer day even for this queer place. The air was heavy, as though a storm brooded. The heady fragrances from the far forest were stronger, clinging amorously, confusing. The vaporous veils that hid the distances had thickened; at the north they were almost smoke colour, and they marched slowly but steadily nearer.

We sat, Evalie and I, beside her tent. She broke a long silence.

"You are sorrowful, Leif—and why?"

"Not sorrowful, Evalie—just wondering."

"I, too, am wondering. Is it what you wonder?"

"How do I know—who know nothing of your mind?"

She stood up, abruptly.

"You like to watch the smiths. Let us go to them."

I looked at her, struck by the anger in her voice. She frowned down upon me, brows drawn to a straight line over bright, half–contemptuous eyes.

"Why are you angry, Evalie? What have I done?"

"I am not angry. And you have done nothing." She stamped her foot. "I say you have done—nothing! Let us watch the smiths."

She walked away. I sprang up, and followed her. What was the matter with her? I had done something to irritate her, that was certain. But what? Well, I'd know, sooner or later. And I did like to watch the smiths. They stood beside their small anvils beating out the sickled knives, the spear and arrowheads, shaping the earrings and bracelets of gold for their tiny women.

Tink–a–tink, tink–a–clink, cling–clang, clink–a–tink went their little hammers.

They stood beside their anvils like gnomes, except that there was no deformity about them. Miniature men they were, perfectly shaped, gleaming golden in the darkening light, long hair coiled about their heads, yellow eyes intent upon their forgings. I forgot Evalie and her wrath, watching them as ever, fascinated.

Tink–a–tink! Cling–clang! Clink—

The little hammers hung suspended in air; the little smiths stood frozen. Speeding from the north came the horn of a great gong, a brazen stroke that seemed to break overhead. It was followed by another and another and another. A wind wailed over the plain; the air grew darker, the vaporous smoky veils quivered and marched closer.

The clangour of the gongs gave way to a strong chanting, the singing of many people; the chanting advanced and retreated, rose and waned as the wind rose and fell, rose and fell in rhythmic pulse. From all the walls the drums of the guards roared warning.

The little smiths dropped their hammers and raced to the lairs. Over all the plain there was turmoil, movement of the golden pygmies racing to the cliffs and to the circling slope to swell the garrisons there.

Through the strong chanting came the beat of other drums. I knew them—the throb of the Uighur kettle–drums, the war drums. And I knew the chant—it was the war song, the battle song of the Uighurs. Not the Uighurs, no—not the patched and paltry people I had led from the oasis! War song of the ancient race! The great race—the Ayjir!

The old race! My people! I knew the song—well did I know it! Often and often had I heard it in the olden days…when I had gone forth to battle…By Zarda of the Thirsty Spears…by Zarda God of Warriors, but it was like drink to a parched throat to hear it again!

My blood drummed in my ears…I opened my throat to roar that song…"Leif! Leif! What is the matter?" Evalie's hands were on my shoulders, shaking me! I glared at her, uncomprehending for a moment. I felt a strange, angry bafflement. Who was this dark girl that checked me on my way to war? And abruptly the obsession left me. It left me trembling, shaken at though by some brief wild tempest of the mind. I put my own hands upon those on my shoulders, drew reality from the touch. I saw that there was amazement in Evalie's eyes, and something of fear. And around us was a ring of the Little People, staring up at me. I shook my head, gasping for breath, "Leif! What is the matter?" Before I could answer, chanting and drums were drowned in a bellow of thunder. Peal upon peal of thunder roared and echoed over the plain, beating back, beating down the sounds from the north—roaring over them, rolling over them, sweeping them back.

I stared stupidly around me. All along the cliffs were the golden pygmies, scores of them, beating upon great drums high as their waists. From those drums came the pealing of thunder, claps and shattering strokes of the bolt's swift fall, and the shouting reverberations that follow it.

The Thunder Drums of the Little People!

On and on roared the drums, yet through their rolling diapason beat ever the battle chant and those other drums…like thrusts of lances…like trampling of horses and of marching men…by Zarda, but the old race still was strong…

A ring of the Little People was dancing around me. Another ring joined them. Beyond them I saw Evalie, watching me with wide, astonished eyes. And around her was another ring of the golden pygmies, arrows at readiness, sickled knives in hand.

Why was she watching me…why were the arms of the Little People turned against me…and why were they dancing? That was a strange dance…it made you sleepy to look at it…what was this lethargy creeping over me…God, but I was sleepy! So sleepy that my dull ears could hardly hear the Thunder Drums…so sleepy I could hear nothing else…so sleepy…I knew, dimly, that I had dropped to my knees, then had fallen prone upon the soft turf…then slept.

I awakened, every sense alert. The drums were throbbing all around me. Not the Thunder Drums, but drums that sang, drums that throbbed and sang to some strange lilting rhythm that set the blood racing through me in tune and in time with its joyousness. The throbbing, singing notes were like tiny, warm, vital blows that whipped my blood into ecstasy of life.

I leaped to my feet. I stood upon a high knoll, round as a woman's breast. Over all the plain were lights, small fires burning, ringing the little altars of the pygmies. And around the fires the Little People were dancing to the throbbing drums. Around the fires and the altars they danced and leaped like little golden flames of life made animate.

Circling the knoll on which I stood was a triple ring of the dwarfs, women and men, weaving, twining, swaying.

They and the burden of the drums were one.

A soft and scented wind was blowing over the knoll. It hummed as it streamed by—and its humming was akin to dance and drum.

In and out, and round about and out and in and back again, the golden pygmies danced around the knoll. And round and round and back again they circled the fire–ringed altars.

I heard a sweet low voice singing—singing to the cadence, singing the song of the drums, singing the dancing of the Little People.

Close by was another knoll like that on which I was—like a pair of woman's high breasts they stood above the plain. It, too, was circled by the dancing dwarfs.

On it sang and danced Evalie.

Her singing was the soul of drum song and dance—her dancing was the sublimation of both. She danced upon the knoll—cobweb veils and girdle gone, clothed only in the silken, rippling cloak of her blue–black hair.

She beckoned, and she called to me—a high–pitched, sweet call.

The fragrant, rushing wind pushed me toward her as I ran down the mound.

The dancing pygmies parted to let me through. The throbbing of the drums grew swifter; their song swept into a higher octave.

Evalie came dancing down to meet me…she was beside me, her arms round my neck, her lips pressed to mine…The drums beat faster. My pulses matched them.

The two rings of little yellow living flames of life joined. They became one swirling circle that drove us forward. Round and round and round us they swirled, driving us on and on to the pulse of the drums. I ceased to think—drum–throb, drum–song, dance–song were all of me.

Yet still I knew that the fragrant wind thrust us on and on, caressing, murmuring, laughing.

We were beside an oval doorway. The silken, scented tresses of Evalie streamed in the wind and kissed me. Beyond and behind us sang the drums. And ever the wind pressed us on…

Drums and wind drove us through the portal of the domed rock.

They drove us into the temple of the Little People…

The soft moss glimmered…the amethystine cross gleamed…

Evalie's arms were around my neck . I held her close…the touch of her lips to mine was like the sweet, secret fire of life…

It was silent in the temple of the Little People. Their drums were silent. The glow of the looped cross above the pit of the Kraken was dim.

Evalie stirred, and cried out in her sleep. I touched her lips and she awoke.

"What is the matter, Evalie?"

"Leif, beloved—I dreamed a white falcon tried to dip its beak into my heart!"

"It was but a dream, Evalie."

She shuddered; she raised her head and bent over me so that her hair covered our faces.

"You drove the falcon away—but then a white wolf came…and leaped upon me."

"It was only a dream, Evalie—bright flame of my heart."

She bent closer to me under the tent of her hair, lips close to mine.

"You drove the wolf away. And I would have kissed you…but a face came between ours…"

"A face, Evalie?"

She whispered:

"The face of Lur! She laughed at me…and then you were gone… with her…and I was alone…"

"It was a lying dream, that! Sleep, beloved."

She sighed. There was a long silence; then drowsily:

"What is it you carry round your neck, Leif? Something from some woman that you treasure?"

"Nothing of woman, Evalie. That is truth."

She kissed me—and slept.

Fool that I was not to have told her then, under the shadow of the ancient symbol…Fool that I was—I did not!

Chapter XII On Nansur Bridge

When we went out of the temple into the morning there were half a hundred of the elders, men and women, patiently awaiting our appearance. I thought they were the same who had followed into the domed rock when I had first entered it.

The little women clustered around Evalie. They had brought wraps and swathed her from head to feet. She walked off among them with never a glance nor a word for me. There was something quite ceremonial about it all; she looked for all the world like a bride being led away by somewhat mature elfin bridesmaids.

The little men clustered around me. Sri was there. I was glad of that, for, whatever the doubts of the others about me, I knew he had none. They bade me go with them, and I obeyed without question.

It was raining, and it was both jungle–wet and jungle–warm. The wind was blowing in the regular, rhythmic gusts of the night before. The rain seemed less to fall than to condense in great drops from the air about, except when the wind blew and then the rain drove by in almost level lines. The air was like fragrant wine. I felt like singing and dancing. There was thunder all around—not the drums, but real thunder.

I had been wearing only my shirt and my trousers. I had discarded my knee–high boots for sandals. It was only a minute or two before I was soaking wet. We came to a steaming pool. and there we halted. Sri told me to strip and plunge in.

The pool was hot and invigorating and as I splashed around in it I kept feeling better and better. I reflected that whatever had been in the minds of the Little People when they had driven Evalie and me into the temple, their fear of me had been exorcised—for the time at any rate. But I thought I knew what had been in their minds. They suspected that Khalk'ru had some hold on me, as over the people I resembled. Not much of a hold maybe—but still it was not to be ignored. Very well—the remedy, since they couldn't kill me without breaking Evalie's heart, was to spike me down as they had the Kraken which was Khalk'ru's symbol. So they had spiked me down with Evalie.

I climbed out of the pool, more thoughtful than I had gone into it. They wrapped a loin cloth around me, in curious folds and knots. Then they trilled and twittered and laughed, and danced.

Sri had my clothes and belt. I didn't want to lose them, so when we started off I kept close behind him. Soon we stopped—in front of Evalie's lair.

After a while there was a great commotion, singing and beating of drums, and along came Evalie with a crowd of the little women dancing around her. They led her to where I was waiting. Then all of them danced away.

That was all there was to it. The ceremony, if ceremony it was, was finished. But, somehow, I felt very much married.

I looked down at Evalie. She looked up at me, demurely. Her hair was no longer free, but braided cunningly around head and ears and neck. The swathings were gone. She wore the little apron of the pygmy matrons and the silvery cobweb veils. She laughed, and took my hand, and we went into the lair.

Next day, late in the afternoon, we heard a fanfare of trumpets that sounded rather close. They blew long and loudly, as though summoning someone. We stepped out into the rain, to listen better. I noted that the wind had changed from north to west, and was blowing steadily and strongly. By this time I knew that the acoustics of the land under the mirage were peculiar and that there was no way of telling just how close the trumpets were. They were on the far side of the river bank of course, but how far away the pygmies' guarded slope was from the river, I did not know. There was some bustling on the wall, but no excitement.

There came a final trumpet blast, raucous and derisive. It was followed by a roar of laughter more irritatingly mocking because of its human quality. It brought me out of my indifference with a jump. It made me see red.

"That," said Evalie, "was Tibur. I suppose he has been hunting with Lur. I think he was laughing at—you, Leif."

Her delicate nose was turned up disdainfully, but there was a smile at the corner of her lips as she watched my quick anger flare up.

"See here, Evalie, just who is this Tibur?"

"I told you. He is Tibur the Smith, and he rules the Ayjir with Lur. Always does he come when I stand on Nansur. We have talked together—often. He is very strong—oh, strong."

"Yes?" I said, still more irritated. "And why does Tibur come when you are there?"

"Why, because he desires me, of course," she said tranquilly.

My dislike for Tilbur the Laugher increased.

"He'll not laugh if I ever get an opening at him," I muttered.

"What did you say?" she asked. I translated, as best t could. She nodded and began to speak—and then I saw her eyes open wide and stark terror fill them. I heard a whirring over my head.

Out of the mists had flown a great bird. It hovered fifty feet over us, glaring down with baleful yellow eyes. A great bird—a white bird…

The white falcon of the Witch–woman!

I thrust Evalie back into the lair, and watched it. Thrice it circled over me, and then, screaming, hurtled up into the mists and vanished.

I went in to Evalie. She was crouched on the couch of skins. She had undone her hair and it streamed over her head and shoulders, hiding her like a cloak. I bent over her, and parted it. She was crying. She put her arms around my neck, and held me close, close. I felt her heart beating like a drum against mine.

"Evalie, beloved—there's nothing to be afraid of."

"The—white falcon, Leif!"

"It is only a bird."

"No—Lur sent it."

"Nonsense, dark sweetheart. A bird flies where it wills. It was hunting—or it had lost its way in the mists."

She shook her head.

"But, Leif, I—dreamed of a white falcon…"

I held her tight, and after a while she pushed me away and smiled at me. But there was little of gaiety the remainder of that day. And that night her dreams were troubled, and she held me close to her, and cried and murmured in her sleep.

The next day Jim came back. I had been feeling a bit uncomfortable about his return. What would he think of me? I needn't have worried. He showed no surprise at all when I laid the cards before him. And then I realized that of course the pygmies must have been talking to one another by their drums, and that they would have gone over matters with him.

"Good enough," said Jim, when I had finished. "If you don't get out, it's the best thing for both of you. If you do get out, you'll take Evalie with you—or won't you?"

That stung me.

"Listen, Indian—I don't like the way you're talking! I love her."

"All right. I'll put it another way. Does Dwayanu love her?"

That question was like a slap on my mouth. While I struggled for an answer, Evalie ran out. She went over to Jim and kissed him. He patted her shoulder and hugged her like a big brother. She glanced at me, and came to me, and drew my head down to her and kissed me too, but not exactly the way she had kissed him.

I glanced over her head at Jim. Suddenly I noticed that he looked tired and haggard.

"You're, feeling all right, Jim?"

"Sure. Only a bit weary. I've—seen things."

"What do you mean?"

"Well," he hesitated, "well—the tlanusi—the big leeches—for one thing. I'd never have believed it if I hadn't seen them, and if I had seen them before we dived into the river, I'd have picked the wolves as cooing doves in comparison."

He told me they had camped at the far end of the plain that night.

"This place is bigger than we thought, Leif. It must be, because I've gone more miles than would be possible if it were only as large as it looked before we went through the mirage. Probably the mirage foreshortened it—confused us."

The next day they had gone through forest and jungle and cane–brake and marsh. They had come at last to a steaming swamp. A raised path ran across it. They had taken that path, and eventually came to another transecting it. Where the two causeways met, there was a wide, circular and gently rounded mound rising from the swamp. Here the pygmies had halted. They had made fires of fagots and leaves. The fires sent up a dense and scented smoke which spread slowly out from the mound over the swamp. When the fires were going well, the pygmies began drumming—a queerly syncopated beat. In a few moments he had seen a movement in the swamp, close by the mound.

"There was a ring of pygmies between me and the edge," he said, "and when I saw the thing that crawled out I was glad of it. First there was an upheaval of the mud, and then up came the back of what I thought was an enormous red slug. The slug raised itself, and crept out on land. It was a leech all right, and that was all it was—but it made me more than a bit sick. It was its size that did that. It must have been seven feet long, and it lay there, blind and palpitating, its mouth gaping, listening to the drums and luxuriating in that scented smoke. Then another and another came out. After a while there were a hundred of the things grouped around in a semi–circle, eyeless heads all turned to us—sucking in the smoke, palpitating to the drums.

"Some of the pygmies got up, took burning sticks from the fire and started off on the intersecting causeway, drumming as they went. The others quenched the fires. The leeches writhed along after the torch–bearers. The other pygmies fell in behind, herding them. I stuck in the rear. We went along until we came to the bank of the river. Those in the lead stopped drumming. They threw their smoking, blazing sticks into the water, and they cast into it handfuls of crushed berries—not the ones Sri and Sra rubbed on us. Red berries. The big leeches went writhing over the bank and into the river, following, I suppose, the smoke and the scent of the berries. Anyway, they went in—each and all of them.

"We went back, and out of the marsh. We camped on its edge. All that night they talked with the drums.

"They had talked the night before, and were uneasy; but I took it that it was the same worry they had when we started. They must have known what was going on, but they didn't tell me then. Yesterday morning, though, they were happy and care–free. I knew something must have happened—that they must have got good news in the night. They were so good–natured that they told me why they were. Not just as you have—but the sense was the same—"

He chuckled.

"That morning we herded up a couple of hundred more of the tianusi and put them where the Little People think they'll do the most good. Then we started back—and here I am."

"Yes," I asked suspiciously. "And is that all?"

"All for to–night, anyway," he said. "I'm sleepy. I'm going to turn in. You go with Evalie and leave me strictly alone till to–morrow."

I left him to sleep, determined to find out in the morning what he was holding back; I didn't think it was entirely the journey and the leeches that accounted for his haggardness.

But in the morning I forgot all about it.

In the first place, when I awoke, Evalie was missing. I went over to the tent, looking for Jim. He was not there. The Little People had long since poured out of the cliffs, and were at work; they always worked in the morning—afternoons and nights they played and drummed and danced. They said Evalie and Tsantawu had gone into council with the elders. I went back to the tent.

In a little while Evalie and Jim came up. Evalie's face was white and her eyes were haunted. Also they were misty with tears. Also, she was madder than hell. Jim was doing his best to be cheerful.

"What's the matter?" I asked.

"You're due for a little trip," said Jim. "You've been wanting to see Nansur Bridge, haven't you?"

"Yes." I said.

"Well," said Jim. "That's where we're going. Better put on your travelling clothes and your boots. If the trail is anything like what I've just gone over, you'll need them. The Little People can slip through things—but we're built different."

I studied them, puzzled. Of course I'd wanted to see Nansur Bridge—but why should the fact we were to go there make them behave so oddly? I went to Evalie, and turned her face up to mine.

"You've been crying, Evalie. What's wrong?"

She shook her head, slipped out of my arms and into the lair. I followed her. She was bending over a coffer, taking yards and yards of veils out of it. I swung her away from it and lifted her until her eyes were level with mine.

"What's wrong, Evalie?"

A thought struck me. I lowered her to her feet.

"Who suggested going to Nansur Bridge?"

"The Little People…the elders…I fought against it…I don't want you to go…they say you must…"

"I must go?" The thought grew clearer. "Then you need not go—nor Tsantawu. Unless you choose?"

"Let them try to keep me from going with you." She stamped a foot furiously.

The thought was crystal clear, and I began to feel a bit irritated by the Little People. They were thorough to the point of annoyance. I now understood perfectly why I was to go to Nansur Bridge. The pygmies were not certain that their magic—including Evalie—had thoroughly taken. Therefore I was to look upon the home of the enemy—and be watched for my reactions. Well, that was fair enough, at that. Maybe the Witch–woman would be there. Maybe Tibur—Tibur who desired Evalie—Tibur who had laughed at me. Suddenly I was keen for going to Nansur Bridge. I began to put on my old clothes. As I was tying the high shoes, I glanced over at Evalie. She had coiled her hair and covered it with a cap; she had swathed her body from neck to knees in the veils and she was lacing high sandals that covered her feet and legs as completely as my boots did mine. She smiled faintly at my look of wonder.

"I do not like Tibur to look on me—not now!" she said.

I bent over her and took her in my arms. She set her lips to mine in a kiss that bruised them…When we came out, Jim and about fifty of the pygmies were waiting.

We struck diagonally across the plain away from the cliffs, heading north toward the river. We went over the slope, past one of the towers, and put feet on a narrow path like that which we had trod when coming into the land of the Little People. It wound through a precisely similar fern–brake. We went along it single file, and, perforce, in silence. We came out of it into a forest of close–growing, coniferous trees, through which the trail wound tortuously. We went through this for an hour or more, without once resting, the pygmies trotting along tirelessly. I looked at my watch. We had been going for four hours and had covered, I calculated, about twelve miles. There was no sign of bird or animal life.

Evalie seemed deep in thought and Jim had fallen into one of his fits of Indian taciturnity. I didn't feel much like talking. It was a silent journey; not even the golden pygmies chattered, as was their habit. We came to a sparkling spring, and drank. One of the dwarfs swung a small cylindrical drum in front of him and began to tap out some message. It was answered at length from far ahead by other tappings.

We swung into our way once more. The conifers began to thin. At our left and far below us I began to catch glimpses of the white river and of the dense forest on its opposite bank. The conifers ceased and we came out upon a rocky waste. Just ahead of us was an outthrust of cliff along whose base streamed the white river. The outthrust cut off our view of what lay beyond. Here the pygmies halted and sent another drum message. The answer was startlingly close. Then around the edge of the cliff, half–way up, spear tips glinted. A group of little warriors stood there, scrutinizing us. They signalled, and we marched forward, over the waste.

There was a broad road up the side of the cliff, wide enough for six horses abreast. We climbed it. We came to the top, and I looked on Nansur Bridge and towered Karak.

Once, thousands or hundreds of thousands of years ago, there had been a small mountain here, rising from the valley floor. Nanbu, the white river, had eaten it away—all except a vein of black adamantine rock.

Nanbu had fallen, fallen, steadily gnawing at the softer stone until at last it was spanned by a bridge that was like a rainbow of jet. That gigantic bow of black rock winged over the abyss with the curved flight of an arrow.

Its base, on each side, was a mesa—sculptured as Nansur had been from the original mount.

The mesa, at whose threshold I stood, was flat–topped. But on the opposite side of the river, thrusting up from the mesa–top, was a huge, quadrangular pile of the same black rock as the bow of Nansur. It looked less built from than cut out of that rock. It covered I judged about half a square mile. Towers and turrets both square and round sprang up from it. It was walled.

There was something about that immense ebon citadel that struck me with the same sense of fore–knowledge that I had felt when I had ridden into the ruins of the Gobi oasis. Also I thought it looked like that city of Dis which Dante glimpsed in Hades. And its antiquity hung over it like a sable garment.

Then I saw that Nansur was broken. Between the arch that winged from the side on which we stood and the arch that swept up and out from the side of the black citadel, there was a gap. It was as though a gigantic hammer had been swung down on the soaring bow, shattering it at its centre. I thought of Bifrost Bridge over which the Valkyries rode, bearing the souls of the warriors to Valhalla; and I thought it had been as great a blasphemy to have broken Nansur Bridge as it would have been to have broken Bifrost.

Around the citadel were other buildings, hundreds of them outside its walls—buildings of grey and brown stone, with gardens; they stretched over acres. And on each side of this city were fertile fields and flowering groves. There was a wide road stretching far, far away to cliffs shrouded in the green veils. I thought I saw the black mouth of a cavern at its end.

"Karak!" whispered Evalie. "And Nansur Bridge! And Oh, Leif, beloved…but my heart is heavy…so heavy!"

I hardly heard her, looking at Karak. Stealthy memories had begun to stir. I trod on them, and put my arm around Evalie. We went on, and now I saw why Karak had been built where it was, for on the far side the black citadel commanded both ends of the valley, and when Nansur had been unbroken, it had commanded this approach as well.

Suddenly I felt a feverish eagerness to run out upon Nansur and look down on Karak from the broken end. I was restive at the slowness of the pygmies. I started forward. The garrison came crowding around me, staring up at me, whispering to one another, studying me with their yellow eyes. Drums began to beat.

They were answered by trumpets from the citadel.

I walked ever more rapidly toward Nansur. The fever of eagerness had become consuming. I wanted to run. I pushed the golden pygmies aside impatiently. Jim's voice came to me, warningly:

"Steady, Leif—steady!"

I paid no heed. I went out upon Nansur. Vaguely, I realized that it was wide and that low parapets guarded its edges, and that the stone was ramped for the tread of horses and the tread of marching men. And that if the white river had shaped it, the hands of men had finished its carving.

I reached the broken end. A hundred feet below me the white river raced smoothly. There were no serpents. A dull red body, slug–like, monstrous, lifted above the milky current; then another and another, round mouths gaping—the leeches of the Little People, on guard.

There was a broad plaza between the walls of the dark citadel and the end of the bridge. It was empty. Set in the walls were massive gates of bronze. I felt a curious quivering inside me, a choking in my throat. I forgot Evalie; I forgot Jim; I forgot everything in watching those gates.

There was a louder blaring of the trumpets, a clanging of bars, and the gates swung open. Through them galloped a company, led by two riders, one on a great black horse, the other upon a white. They raced across the plaza, dropped from their mounts and came walking over the bridge. They stood facing me across the fifty–foot gap.

The one who had ridden the black horse was the Witch–woman, and the other I knew for Tibur the Smith—Tibur the Laugher. I had no eyes just then for the Witch–woman or her followers. I had eyes only for Tibur.

He was a head shorter than I, but strength great or greater than mine spoke from the immense shoulders, the thick body. His red hair hung sleekly straight to his shoulders. He was red–bearded. His eyes were violet–blue and lines of laughter crinkled at their corners; and the wide, loose mouth was a laughing mouth. But the laughter which had graven those lines on Tibur's face was not the kind to make the bearer merry.

He wore a coat of mail. At his left side hung a huge war hammer. He looked me over from head to foot and back again with narrowed, mocking eyes. If I had hated Tibur before I had seen him, it was nothing to what I felt now.

I looked from him to the Witch–woman. Her cornflower–blue eyes were drinking me in; absorbed, wondering—amused. She, too, wore a coat of mail, over which streamed her red braids. Those who were clustered behind Tibur and the Witch–woman were only a blur to me.

Tibur leaned forward.

"Welcome—Dwayanu!" he jeered. "What has brought you out of your skulking place? My challenge?"

"Was it you I heard baying yesterday?" I said. "Hai—you picked a safe distance ere you began to howl, red dog!"

There was a laugh from the group around the Witch–woman, and I saw that they were women, fair and red–haired like herself, and that there were two tall men with Tibur. But the Witch–woman said nothing, still drinking me in, a curious speculation in her eyes.

Tibur's face grew dark. One of the men leaned, and whispered to him. Tibur nodded, and swaggered forward. He called out to me:

"Have you grown soft during your wanderings, Dwayanu? By the ancient custom, by the ancient test, we must learn that before we acknowledge you—great Dwayanu. Stand fast—"

His hand dropped to the battle–hammer at his side. He hurled it at me.

The hammer was hurtling through the air at me with the speed of a bullet—yet it seemed to come slowly. I could even see the thong that held it to Tibur's arm slowly lengthening as it flew…

Little doors were opening in my brain…the ancient test… Hai! but I knew that play…I waited motionless as the ancient custom prescribed…but they should have given me a shield…no matter…how slowly the great sledge seemed to come…and it seemed to me that the hand I thrust out to catch it moved as slowly…

I caught it. Its weight was all of twenty pounds, yet I caught it squarely, effortlessly, by its metal shaft. Hai! but did I not know the trick of that?…The little doors were opening faster now…and I knew another. With my other hand I gripped the thong that held the battle–hammer to Tibur's arm and jerked him toward me.

The laugh was frozen on Tibur's face. He tottered on Nansur's broken edge. I heard behind me the piping shout of the pygmies…

The Witch–woman sliced down a knife and severed the thong. She jerked Tibur back from the verge. Rage swept me…that was not in the play…by the ancient test it was challenger and challenged alone…I swung the great hammer around my head and around, and hurled it back at Tibur; it whistled as it flew and the severed thong streamed rigid in its wake. He threw himself aside, but not quickly enough. The sledge struck him on a shoulder. A glancing blow, but it dropped him.

And now I laughed across the gulf.

The Witch–woman leaned forward, incredulity flooding the speculation in her eyes. She was no longer amused. No! And Tibur jerked himself up on one knee, glaring at me, his laughter lines twisted into nothing like mirth of any kind.

Still other doors, tiny doors, opening in my brain…They wouldn't believe I was Dwayanu…Hai! I would show them. I dipped into the pocket of my belt. Ripped open the buckskin pouch. Drew out the ring of Khalk'ru. I held it up. The green light glinted on it. The yellow stone seemed to expand. The black octopus to grow…

"Am I Dwayanu? Look on this! Am I Dwayanu?"

I heard a woman scream—I knew that voice. And I heard a man calling, shouting to me—and that voice I knew too. The little doors clicked shut, the memories that had slipped through them darted back before they closed…

Why, it was Evalie who was screaming! And Jim who was shouting at me! What was the matter with them? Evalie was facing me, arms outstretched. And there was stark unbelief and horror—and loathing—in the brown eyes fastened on me. And rank upon rank, the Little People were closing around the pair of them—barring me from them. Their spears and arrows were levelled at me. They were hissing like a horde of golden snakes, their faces distorted with hatred, their eyes fastened on the ring of Khalk'ru still held high above my head.

And now I saw that hatred reflected upon the face of Evalie—and the loathing deepen in her eyes.

"Evalie!" I cried, and would have leaped toward her…Back went the hands of the pygmies for the throwing cast; the arrows trembled in their bows.

"Don't move, Leif! I'm coming!" Jim jumped forward. Instantly the pygmies swarmed round and upon him. He swayed and went down under them.

"Evalie!" I cried again.

I saw the loathing fade, and heart–break come into her face. She called some command.

A score of pygmies shot by her, on each side, casting down their bows and spears as they raced toward me. Stupidly, I watched them come; among them I saw Sri.

They struck me like little living battering rams. I was thrust backward. My foot struck air—

The pygmies clinging to my legs, harrying me like terriers, I toppled over the edge of Nansur.