The Valley of the Flame

CHAPTER V. VALLEY OF WONDERS

AGAIN, AND EVER after that, he was conscious of the indefinable strangeness about the lost land that set it apart from any other of which he had heard. Raft had read tales of hidden civilizations, of Atlantis, Lemuria, and fantastic survivals from the past.

But in Paititi he found nothing of such arabesques—no jewel-city set down on an uncharted sea, no isolated world cut off from the earth outside. Nevertheless Paititi was as secret, as isolated, as if it had been on another planet.

It was too alive to be regarded as anything but a vivid, vital reality. Mixed with mat tremendous vitality which pulsed through Paititi was the strangeness that hung like an intangible veil between earth and sky, the thing that had made mis secret valley a place blessed and cursed as no spot on earth ever had before been.

Something had leaned down and touched the soil of Paititi, the trees of Paititi, the very air that breathed through alien leaves, and there had come a change. It was as though the touch of that unearthly thing had altered all that dwelt here, changing and transmuting until what remained was different.

It was a valley, probably a meteoric one, Raft thought, remembering that fifty-mile-wide circle of jungle he had seen from above. But it was well camouflaged. No earthly trees could have fulfilled that task, and no earthly trees grew here. Looking out across that dim twilit land, he was reminded of the columnar pillars that had marched across the hall where the invisible tube ended. Pillars of Karnak—but dwarfed by comparison with these trees that might have upheld the sky itself.

Yggdrasil is the tree of life which Norsemen say supports the world.

Only the largest California redwoods could have approached their sheer magnitude. For each one, in diameter, was as thick as a city block is long. They grew at irregular intervals, a half-mile or more apart, and they towered up to a luminous green ceiling which was incredibly far above. A tree five miles high!

Up they plunged into that green sky, and down into the depths those vast columns fell, like arrows of titan gods deeply embedded in the earth.

Their roots, Raft thought, might tap the very roof of Hell. Without branches, smooth and straight, they grew until, at their tops, they burst into a rank lushness of green.

Yet that green vault was translucent. At one point, almost directly overhead, an emerald brilliance told of the noonday tropic sun. But in the valley itself hung a clear, cool dawnlight that hid nothing.

Transparent as the air was, the trees themselves made a barrier. Raft could see a curving arch winding down from where he stood, fifty yards or more to a path that disappeared into that mighty forest. From far away came a very low, scarcely audible rumble, almost below the threshold of hearing.

That was all. Except that Vann tilted back his head and stared up questioningly. Raft followed his example.

Behind him were smooth walls and towers, the bulk of Parror's palace that jutted out from the base of a rock cliff, an escarpment which swept up and up till it vanished amid the ceiling of green. And dropping toward them with nightmare slowness was a cloud of rubble and stone.

"It's only a landslide," Vann said casually. He pushed Raft forward. "There's no danger."

"No danger!"

"Of course not." The soldier was surprised. "Surely you know why."

Again Raft looked up. The avalanche was perceptibly nearer, but by no means as close as it should normally have been. A great boulder struck a ledge, bounded out, and Raft fixed his gaze upon it.

It fell slowly—slowly!

It drifted down, revolving gently as it fell, floating out in an arc that ended briefly at one of the castle's turrets. It rebounded, doing no harm to the structure that Raft could see. It dropped past him, so sluggishly that he could make out every detail of its craggy surface, and embedded itself in the ground below.

That boulder had not been featherlight. Yet it had floated down as slowly as any feather.

"Move, Craddock," Vann said, and pushed Raft away from a watermelon-sized rock that struck the ramp and bounded away gently. The other soldiers, looking up, shifted casually to avoid the falling stones. Raft, utterly dumbfounded, stared up.

"I thought it would wreck the castle," he said.

"No. The ones who built here built for an eternity," Vann told him. "Not our race, but they were very great once."

"What the devil made those rocks fall so slowly?"

The soldier shrugged.

"They fell faster now than in the days of our fathers. But they are still not dangerous. Only living things can harm one of us. Now we've talked enough. Come."

He took Raft's arm firmly and led him down the aerial pathway. The soldiers followed, their arms clinking softly, mesh-armor murmuring metallically against steel blades.

Yes, Raft thought, they had talked enough. Or else not nearly enough. Mystery after mystery was piling up here, and no sooner did he seem to solve one puzzle than another appeared.

The fact that this race sprang from feline stock explained much but it certainly did not begin to explain boulders that dropped from the sky as lightly as air-inflated, toy balloons.

Nor did it solve the mystery that surrounded Parror's actions, or Janissa's. At first the girl had seemed friendly. Then she had given up to Parror without an argument. Moreover, the soldiers thought he was Dan Craddock.

Parror had taken advantage of that twist very neatly, and Raft knew there was no use trying to prove his identity to Vann. But when he was taken to the Great Lord, presumably the ruler of Paititi, there would be a chance then. Unless, of course, the Great Lord was a hairy savage who wore human skulls at his belt.

Raft grinned wryly. Savagery there was in this land, he knew already, but it was not barbarous. There was a high culture here, an intelligent civilization, though it was alien. A feline world would be strikingly different from a human one, yet the same basics would apply. An isosceles triangle was the same on Earth or Mars.

Unfortunately, he probably would not be dealing in geometry. The subtler pitfalls of psychology loomed before him, and in that feline and anthropoid might be very dissimilar. A cat people, in fact, would not be builders.

They would be artisans. Vann had already said that some other race had built Parror's castle. A race that had been very great once. When? A thousand years ago? Or a million? It had taken man eons to evolve into rational beings, and evolution moved at a predetermined rate. Not even mutations could create an intelligent cat-race from feline stock in a few generations.

There was no use even in wondering about such things now. He stepped from the smooth footing of the ramp on to an ordinary dirt pathway that led off among the colossal trees. Now, with his feet actually touching the ground of Paititi, he felt the strangeness of his surroundings more strongly than ever. Those incredible columns seemed to be moving toward him, a giant Birnam Wood malignantly alive. Trees!

For they were trees, not Jurassic cycads, not tree-ferns. He could tell that. They were true trees, but they should have grown on a planet as large as Jupiter, not on Earth.

They were sanctuaries as well, retreats for living organisms, he saw as the trail passed near the towering wall of one. From a distance he had thought the bark smooth. Instead, it was literally covered with irregular bumps and swellings.

Vines slid across the trunk like snakes, creeping with a slowness that belied the sudden flash of tendrils as—tongues?—snapped out to capture the insects and birds that fluttered past.

Rainbow flowers glowed on the leafless vines, and a heavy, sweet scent drifted into Raft's nostrils. From something like a shallow shell that jutted from the trunk a lizard darted out, seized a vine, and carried it back, writhing, to its water-brimming den. There it proceeded to drown the snaky thing and devour it at leisure.

But the reptile was no lizard. It was, Raft decided, a saurian. Only three feet long, it nevertheless reminded him of the great caymans that teem in Brazilian rivers. Except, of course, that crocs are meat eaters.

The saurian was no freak, for there were others just like it.

Swelling pale excrescences bulged on the tree, like wasps' nests thirty feet tall, with myriad window-openings from which bright eyes glittered at Raft. Furry brown bodies moved rapidly across these nests, little mammals with tapir-snouts, but adapted to tree-life.

There were other parasites on that enormous tree, like the great crimson leech that clung to the bark and sucked sap out to nourish its hideous length, and the inch-long, hairless, white creatures like monkeys that lived like lice upon the sloth things that clambered with extraordinary agility in pursuit of insect prey.

It would have been symbiosis, except that the parasites had nothing to give the trees upon which they lived as on a world. Trees and living vines and the rubbery pale moss that bordered the path, there was no other vegetation here.

But of the fantastic there was much. Before Raft's amazement had died they crossed a brook, a half mile further on, by a narrow bridge that might have been made of glowing plastics. No fish were visible through that glassy translucence, and as Raft looked down, he felt that nothing remotely normal could ever exist in those enchanted waters. For the stream, too, was wrong.

It was silent. It did not purl and ripple softly over the rocky bed. Small cascades and waterfalls dropped, with hypnotic, quiet slowness, into the pools beneath. Ripples spread out very gently, very slowly, to die against the mossy banks.

It was not water. Water it could not be. It seemed half congealed.

Yet when Raft, with a questioning glance at Vann, knelt beside the brook and lifted cupped hands to his mouth, it was water. Droplets escaped from between his fingers and floated down gently to fall upon the thirsty moss.

Slowly as the boulders that had dropped upon Parror's castle the waters glided on—silently. It was Oberon's glade, where sorcery lay heavy. The sweet fragrance of the living vine-flowers hung on the clear air.

What spell holds this land, Raft thought? What magic stooped and touched it once, long ago? Surely a god walked here once. But what god? One of Earth, or one from beyond even the stars?

Silently, he let Vann urge him along the path. The sooner he reached his destination, the sooner his questions might be answered.

But the monotony of the journey grew tiring at last. Once a castle, a small structure compared to Parror's fortress, was visible under the shelter of the forest, but the soldiers by-passed it without a glance. Raft eyed the scar-faced Vann.

"How much further have we to go?"

"It is still a long way."

He was right. The hours dragged past, and Raft's occasional glances at his wristwatch made him conscious of a puzzling new factor. They must have covered more than fifteen miles, but his watch said that only fifteen minutes had passed. Overhead that brightness in the green vault had not moved. The sun, apparently, stood still over Paititi.

Nor had it moved when, a long while later, they came out of the forest at the edge of a mile-wide clearing—or what seemed to be a clearing.

Directly ahead, blocking the way, stood a turreted palace that would have seemed huge except for the trees that dwarfed it. Even so, it was an enormous structure.

What lay beyond it Raft could not see, but he could make out a shapeless pale cloud that hung in the sky beyond those thrusting pinnacles, a formless whiteness that seethed and curled slowly into new suggestions of luminous hugeness.

A broad river ran toward the castle, and under it. The torrent plunged into a high-arched opening beneath that architectural colossus, and was lost.

Raft was stumbling and exhausted. The two long journeys, first through the underground tube that led to Paititi, and then this fast hike, had turned his muscles to water. He was so utterly tired by now that he saw his destination through a sort of mist; and Vann's voice came from a long distance away. He let himself be urged forward, mechanically moving his legs to keep up with the soldiers.

There was a courtyard. Figures moved about it. A throng of brightly clad figures, with the half-Egyptian faces of the cat-people, all intent on the spectacle in their midst. A high-pitched singing came from a man crouching atop a high stone block.

Exultant wildness shrilled out as he chanted a song in the language Raft did not understand. The crouching man played some complicated string instrument that sounded vaguely like the bagpipes.

In the center of the courtyard two men were fighting. One was a giant, tall, smoothly-muscled, with a strong face already masked by blood. The other man was more remarkable. Raft's eyes were drawn to him.

He was like Parror, and yet unlike. In place of the sleek, powerful look of the puma, this man was as lithe and swift as the hunting cheetahs of the old Hindu rajahs.

Supple and light, his hair a fine mist about that strong, delicate face, the man sprang out of his opponent's way, laughing, and slashed down with claws.

He wore a glove, a gauntlet, that was tipped with three curved metal blades like talons. Needle-sharp they were, for three long cuts opened like mouths across the larger man's bare chest, and blood spouted.

The minstrel's song rose to a thin shrilling in which there was something drunken and almost mad. The music sang and sang. It cried of love and death, and in it was the choking, musty smell of fresh blood.

Turn and dodge and slay.

Metal grated as the two taloned gloves clawed together. The men bounded apart as though on springs instead of muscles of flesh. The giant shook his head, wiping crimson from his eyes. The other paused, with a careless gesture, to glance at Raft. His irises were blazing yellow. He had slit-like pupils.

His blond hair, almost orange, was oddly marked by shadowy patterns of cloudy black. As he smiled, Raft almost expected to see the sharp teeth of a predatory leopard. Red droplets fell from those murderous gauntlets to a brown thigh. He called a question.

Vann answered, and the yellow-haired man lifted one shoulder impatiently. He spoke a few casual syllables, and turned back to the giant, lifting a taloned glove.

For answer his opponent leaped in, and the two agile figures were again lost in that deadly, graceful dance. Vann, his eyes glowing, touched Raft's arm.

"Come. You must sleep now."

Raft's brief excitement had died. The dull stupor of exhaustion made a protective barrier around Raft. Without another glance at the duel, he went with Vann through a portal, along halls and up spiraling ramps, lost in a foggy dimness of sheer physical tiredness. He felt Vann's hand halt him at last.

"Sleep, now. Darum will see you after you've rested."

"Darum?" Raft saw cushions at his feet, and dropped heavily upon them. "Who's Darum?"

"You just saw him fighting. He is the Great Lord. He rules. But now he fights, and after that—"

Vann's voice died away, merging with the faint, drowsy humming of—of what?

A purring, sub-sonic vibration thrilled through Raft. Deep, comforting it throbbed through the very structure of the castle. As though the castle lived. As though the hidden pulse of life stirred in the stone.

That alien whisper lulled Raft to sleep.