The Project Gutenberg eBook of The lake of life
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Title: The lake of life
Author: Edmond Hamilton
Illustrator: Margaret Brundage
Virgil Finlay
Release date: September 29, 2026 [eBook #79677]
Language: English
Original publication: Indianapolis, IN: Popular Fiction Publishing Company, 1937
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79677
Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LAKE OF LIFE ***
The Lake of Life
By EDMOND HAMILTON
_A weird-scientific thrill-tale of adventure, mystery and romance--of
the waters of immortality, the strange Red and Black cities, and the
dread Guardians that watched eternally over that terribly glowing lake._
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Weird Tales September, October and November 1937.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
_1. The Legion of the Damned_
The heaving blue plain of the ocean stretched far away under the brassy
sun. The wind was blowing strongly toward the west coast of equatorial
Africa, somewhere beyond the skyline. Under the hard hammering of the
gale, the schooner _Venture_ scudded eastward with ivory sails arched
taut, its forefoot chuckling steadily through the foaming water.
Clark Stannard stood by the little schooner's foremast, his dark,
virile face peering frowningly ahead, his dynamic black eyes narrowed
against the glare. The hard wind tore at his white shirt and ducks,
thrummed in the rigging, whined savagely in his ears. He was feeling
again that sick, fatal certainty that the schooner was rushing with him
and his five followers toward disaster and death.
For Clark seemed to see beyond the watery skyline the low, green,
menacing coast of the French Congo, and beyond that the steaming,
mighty jungle of hot rivers and mangrove swamps and hostile tribes
through which he must lead the way to forbidden, unknown regions. Why
had he ever accepted the leadership of this crazy expedition, this mad,
fantastic quest for the legended Lake of Life? Could that fabled Lake
of Life and its shining waters of immortality and its dreaded, unhuman
guardians have any real existence?
"Ship off the port bow!"
Clark Stannard swung sharply. Ephraim Quell, the dour, taciturn, bony
Yankee seaman who stood at the wheel of the _Venture_, was gazing
northward across the uneasy sea.
Clark strode rapidly back along the slanting white deck. Ephraim Quell
pointed a bony finger north and said in his nasal twang, "Looks like a
French gunboat to me."
"A gunboat?" Clark exclaimed, stiffening.
His keen eyes searched the northern horizon. Then he saw the ship--a
low, squat gray craft, wallowing southward toward them, the screaming
wind tearing a plume of gray smoke from its funnels.
"It _is_ a French gunboat!" Clark exclaimed. His fist clenched
unconsciously, and there was a savage twist to his hard mouth as he
cried, "We'll have to break out more sail, Quell! We've got to reach
the mouth of the Bembu River before that gunboat catches us, or this
expedition will end right here and now."
Captain Quell warned grimly, "We're carryin' more sail now than we
ought to, in this blow."
"Do you want to spend the next few years in a French prison?" Clark
demanded roughly. "That upriver country we're headed for is forbidden
to all explorers, and the French will jail us for trying to penetrate
it. Our only chance is to get into the river before they cut us off,
and get upriver on our auxiliary power."
Captain Quell made no further protest, but his bony face was an
ominous mask as he bawled the order. The four other men on the little
schooner's deck leaped to the halyards, quickly breaking out reefed
topsails.
The _Venture_, as the additional canvas took the wind, plunged
alarmingly, almost burying its bowsprit in the foaming waves. Then it
drove on at increased speed, seeming to fly across the choppy swells.
The thin plume of smoke northward drew nearer. Simultaneously, a low
green line appeared on the horizon ahead.
"There's the coast," Clark bit out, peering tautly forward. "And
there's the point north of the Bembu's mouth--steer a little more
southward, Quell."
"We may just make it," he muttered, looking again at the ominous
smoke-plume northward. "We've _got_ to make it!"
* * * * *
The four other men of the expedition were now hastening back to the
helm, stumbling precariously on the slanting deck. Mike Shinn was the
first of them to reach Clark's side.
Mike Shinn was an ex-prizefighter, a squat, gorilla-chested redhead
with a battered, merry face. He exclaimed, "Holy mother, the old tub's
nearly flyin' now! What's all the hurry about?"
"Trouble?" asked Lieutenant John Morrow in his curt fashion.
Morrow was a former U. S. army officer, a lean, habitually silent young
man with shadowed, haunted dark eyes.
Clark Stannard pointed grimly north. "Plenty of trouble, and coming
down on us fast. That's a French gunboat chasing us to challenge and
inspect us. If they learn we're trying to get up the Bembu to the
forbidden Kiridu country, they'll throw us in prison."
Link Wilson, a tall, lanky Texan cowboy with a quizzical, tanned face
and cool eyes, drawled, "Sure, I didn't join up with this outfit and
come all this way to rot in a foreign _calabozo_."
"Nor me either!" rasped the last member of the expedition as he too
joined the group.
This last was Blacky Cain, a former notorious American gangster and
bandit. He stared north with hate in his pale eyes and dark, unshaven,
predatory face.
The criminal continued harshly, "I've done enough stretches in
stir--they're not going to capture me. If they get close enough, I'll
turn loose on 'em with one of those typewriters we're packing."
Link Wilson, the Texan, patted his hip and drawled, "I'll take my old
forty-fives ahead of your submachine guns."
Clark Stannard's black eyes narrowed and he snapped forcefully, "You
men can stop this talk of firing back at the gunboat. We'll do our
damnedest to escape them, but no shooting, understand?"
Blacky Cain stared at him in sullen silence. The gangster, like the
rest of them, had found during the voyage across the Atlantic that
Clark Stannard was their leader not only in name but in fact, and that
he meant his orders to be obeyed.
Clark himself had felt since the very start of this crazy expedition
that he was leading as desperate an aggregation as had ever been
gathered together. These five men whom old Asa Brand had brought
together for the expedition were the only kind of men who would have
joined such a wild, hazardous venture. They were all men beyond the
pale of civilized society, each with a black shadow on his past.
Blacky Cain, the bandit and gangster, had eclipsed the fame of
Dillinger and Floyd, leaving a red trail of robbery across America.
Link Wilson, the tall, drawling Texan cowboy, had killed two men
in a gunfight in a border saloon. Mike Shinn, the red-headed
ex-prizefighter, had been barred from the ring for throwing a fight.
Lieutenant John Morrow had been drummed out of the army for knocking
down his superior officer in a quarrel over a woman. And Captain
Ephraim Quell, the bony, taciturn Yankee seaman, had once been master
of a large coastal passenger liner; but when a fire that should not
have happened had destroyed his ship with great loss of life, the
middle-aged Yankee skipper's certificate had been cancelled permanently.
Truly, Clark Stannard thought somberly, his five followers were a
legion of the damned, a band of ruined, hunted men; men who had nothing
more to lose, the only kind who would have joined this fantastic
expedition in search of the Lake of Life. None of them had any belief
in the existence of the lake, but for the pay old Asa Brand had
offered, they had joined the mad quest for it without qualms. And
Clark knew bitterly that he himself belonged with such a desperate
band; for he too was desperate, staking his life on the chance that he
might be able to find the fabled lake.
Captain Quell's nasal voice declared suddenly, "There's the mouth of
the Bembu, isn't it--beyond that point?"
The _Venture_ was now a mile from the low green shore. Beyond a humped
point of land could be descried the sandy flats and white breakers that
marked the mouth of the equatorial river.
Clark Stannard swung his gaze tautly back to the oncoming gunboat. It
was racing down from the north, overtaking them with alarming speed,
yet still almost two miles behind them.
"We'll make the river," Clark declared. "But it's going to be close."
_Bang!_ A puff of white smoke had issued from the gunboat's deck, and
a shot crashed into the choppy sea some distance ahead of the speeding
schooner.
"They're firing across our bows to halt us," Clark grated. "Keep right
on, captain."
A few moments later another shot came from the gunboat. It hit close
to the _Venture's_ side, fountaining spray that tore away in the gale.
Gray gulls flying low over the wild waves screamed.
"Some shootin'!" jeered Blacky Cain.
The schooner raced like a winged thing past the projecting point
into the broad, shallow bay of the river-mouth. In a few minutes,
Clark thought tensely, they would be safe inside the river where the
deeper-draft gunboat couldn't follow.
Ephraim Quell suddenly pointed and shouted, "Look at that bar! It's low
tide--we can't enter the river!"
Clark's hopes plummeted sickeningly. Plain now ahead was the mouth
of the broad, yellow Bembu, issuing from low green mangrove swamps.
And in a straight barrier across the river-mouth lay a line of wild,
bursting white breakers. The raging waters of the sea were breaking
furiously against the bar there, exploding into mad foam that hung in
the air like drifting white smoke.
Captain Quell was shouting over the ominous roar of those breakers, "We
can't get over that bar till the tide rises."
[Illustration: "Captain Quell was shouting over the ominous roar of the
breakers."]
_Bang!_ The racing gunboat was a half-mile from them, now, and its
third shot crashed through the rigging of the schooner.
"They got us, damn them!" cried Blacky Cain.
Clark exclaimed to the Yankee skipper, "No, we're going to try to go in
over the bar! There's a spot there at the south end of it that looks
deeper--steer there."
Ephraim Quell shrugged his bony shoulders, gripped the wheel and
headed the _Venture_ toward the slight gap in the breakers which Clark
had pointed out. The schooner, borne forward by a sea running with
mill-race speed, leaped eagerly toward the raving white water.
* * * * *
The roar of wind and scream of the dipping gulls and crash of breakers
ahead was deafening. The gray French gunboat, coming up after them
under forced draft, sent another shot after them that missed by yards.
Now the mad foam of the breakers was just in front.
Mike Shinn shouted gleefully, "This is more fun than riding the
water-chute at Coney."
Clark yelled, "Hang on tight, all of you!"
Ephraim Quell's bony face wore a mirthless, ghastly grin as the
schooner rushed into the white foam-smoke of the breakers. Suddenly a
grinding crash quivered through the craft's whole fabric. It ended in a
terrific shock that rocked the craft over on its side and flung them
all helter-skelter against the rail.
"We've struck!" cried Ephraim Quell. "Her whole bow must be torn
out--we can't last ten minutes on this bar."
The schooner, tilted sharply, was hanging on the bar and being smashed
and hammered by the terrific waves that rushed in and exploded against
it. The thunder of the raging waters was hideous.
Clark Stannard, bruised and shaken, was scrambling to his feet. The
other five, tense but unterrified, also regained their feet. It was
evident the schooner would quickly be battered apart.
Clark's voice rang hard and commanding over the din. "Get the equipment
and supplies into the long-boat! We'll head upriver in it, before that
gunboat can arrest us. Hurry!"
While Clark worked furiously to loosen the lashings of the big
long-boat, the other five hastened below decks and returned staggering
under the weight of rifles, ammunition boxes, rations and medicine
cases and other supplies, which they piled into the long-boat. There
was no panic and no confusion--only desperate, urgent haste.
The gunboat was standing to at a safe distance outside the bar. Now as
the last equipment was loaded into the long-boat, the cracking crash of
the schooner's rending timbers gave ominous notice that the _Venture_
was about to break up. The men leaped into the boat.
"Lower away!" Clark shouted.
Frantically, Ephraim Quell and Link Wilson paid out the ropes. As the
long-boat's keel touched the boiling surf, Mike Shinn and Blacky Cain
and Clark pushed off fiercely with the heavy oars.
The long-boat shot into the thick of the raging breakers. They were
deafened by the thunder, blinded by flying spray. Clark yelled orders,
and convulsively they pulled at the great oars, inching precariously
through the breakers into the broad river-mouth.
Then the long-boat won out of the exploding waves, glided into the calm
yellow waters of the wide, sluggish river. Before them, its marigold
expanse wound inland between thick, dull-green mangrove swamps. As they
pulled rapidly upstream toward the first bend, they heard the gunboat
firing after them from outside the breakers. The shots fell short--and
in a few moments they were around the first bend.
"We made it!" Clark exclaimed. "But we've got to keep going--that
gunboat might send boats into the river to pursue us. And it's over two
hundred miles upriver to the Kiridu country."
"Oh, Lord!" groaned Mike Shinn ruefully. "That's an awful lot of
rowin'."
Clark shrugged grimly. "You'll find it worse when we have to leave this
boat and strike into the jungle on foot."
The sun sank in a blood-red murk behind them as they pulled steadily
upriver. A humid, stifling heat and swarms of vicious mosquitoes
tortured them. On either shore were the endless mangroves, with their
impenetrable abatis of tortured, twisted gray branches and dull green
foliage. Birds screamed through them and the tall reeds of the mud
flats.
Clark looked back down the red-lit, winding river, as his shift at the
oars ended. He hoped fervently that the gunboat's officers would not
think it worth while to pursue them in small boats upriver. He knew
they'd figure he and his men were going into certain death anyway, at
the hands of the wild Kiridu tribes. And they might be right.
Clark's dark, virile face twisted in desperate resolution. Neither
French laws nor blood-lusting savages must keep this expedition from
winning through the jungles of the mysterious Kiridu to the fabled
Lake of Life. He _must_ find that lake, must bring back the shining
waters old Asa Brand craved. He dared not fail.
_2. The Lake of Life_
Clark Stannard had first learned the amazing thing Asa Brand had in
mind, in New York weeks before. He had been surprized to receive
Brand's note requesting him to call--he couldn't guess what the old
multi-millionaire wanted with a penniless young adventurer like
himself. But he had obeyed the request promptly, in a vague hope of
getting from Asa Brand the money he needed so desperately.
For ten years Clark had batted around the world in irresponsible,
adventurous exploring expeditions, heedless of his family back home.
But now his father was suddenly dead, and his mother and sisters faced
poverty, and his young brother, crippled by an accident, needed an
expensive operation if he was ever to walk again. Clark had no way
of earning the needed money--his only trade was adventure. So he had
snatched desperately at Asa Brand's cryptic request, immediately.
He knew a little about Brand, of course--everyone who read the
newspapers did. Old Asa was the third richest man in America, and for
fifty years had been reckoned the hardest, most merciless business
mogul in the country. His ramified financial interests spread their
octopus arms over the whole nation.
Asa Brand received him in bed, sitting propped up against pillows in a
luxurious bedroom of his gloomy Fifth Avenue mansion. The old man was
quite bald, and his hairless, yellowed skull and wrinkled hatchet-face
and scrawny neck made him look like an ancient, unclean vulture. He
peered at the young man with shrewd, bright blue eyes.
"Stannard, I understand you've made two exploring trips into inner
French equatorial Africa," he said in his cracked, shrill voice. "They
tell me that you know the hinterland there as well as any white man
living."
That, Clark admitted bluntly, was true. But he added, "I know the
country as far in as the Kiridu region, but not beyond. No white man
who ever went into the Kiridu has come back, not even two airplane
mapping expeditions that tried to fly in there some years ago."
Asa Brand's Adam's-apple worked in his scrawny throat and there was a
pulse of repressed eagerness in his bright blue eye as he asked, "Have
you ever heard of a weird lake that's supposed to exist deep back in
the Kiridu country--one called the Lake of Life?"
Clark nodded, surprized. "I've heard the native legends. The tribes
believe the story absolutely, and their fanaticism on the subject is
why no white man is allowed to enter the Kiridu."
Asa Brand, his bald vulture-head leaning eagerly forward, urged, "Tell
me what you've heard about it."
Clark said thoughtfully, "Well, the yarn is current among all the
Central and West Africa tribes, and they all say the Lake of Life lies
somewhere back in the Kiridu country. They say the waters of that
lake shine like light, and that those shining waters contain the pure
essence of life. They believe all life on earth began somehow from the
lake, and say that whoever drinks its waters becomes immortal, undying.
"But they also say that nobody can drink the waters of the Lake of
Life, for it is surrounded by a ring of mountains which they call the
Mountains of Death. No living thing can cross those mountains, they
claim, for there is a terrific _juju_ or spell on them that kills
instantly. And they add that even if one could cross the mountains, he
could not drink of the Lake of Life, for it is guarded by mysterious
beings, called The Guardians. The natives won't speak much of those
guardians, but say that they are very terrible and powerful, and that
they are not human."
Asa Brand's eyes were shining with tremulous emotion. His cracked
voice rasped, "Yes, yes--that is the story which I have read. Tell me,
Stannard, what do you think of it?"
Clark pursed his lips thoughtfully. "Well, it may be that mountains
really exist back in the Kiridu, and that there's a lake at the center
of them, which the blacks have seen or heard about."
"But what do you think of the story that the waters of the Lake of Life
contain the essence of life?" asked Asa Brand eagerly. "That drinking
them would vastly extend one's life-span?"
Clark stared at him. "Why, that is obviously nothing but a wild native
fable."
Asa Brand started as if stung, and demanded shrilly, "How can you be so
sure? You've never seen that lake--no white man has. How can you tell
what great powers its waters might have?"
And as Clark's black brows drew together incredulously, Brand continued
excitedly, "Since I first heard of the legended Lake of Life, I've got
hold of every possible scrap of information about it. I'm convinced the
lake exists, and that its waters do possess supernatural virtues."
The old multi-millionaire's eyes glowed with his dream. "There _must_
be more than fable to it when millions of African natives believe in
it so utterly. It's always been a belief of mankind, that some secret
spot holds the pure essence of life, the potentiality of immortality.
The ancient Hebrews thought of it as a tree of life, but the Greeks
and later the Arabs maintained it was a spring or lake. The Crusaders
sought for it in Syria, and Ponce de Leon hunted it in America.
"Why is such a thing impossible? Scientists to this day don't know how
life started on earth. The theory that life sprang from the waters of
the legended lake is no more fantastic than any other theory. And if
that lake _was_ the source of earth's life, if its shining waters hold
the pure essence of life, it must be true that anyone who drank those
waters would live vastly beyond the ordinary human span."
Clark watched the feverishly excited old man in wonder. Then Asa Brand,
abruptly calm, said flatly, "I'm going to send an expedition to that
part of Africa to find the Lake of Life."
* * * * *
"But such an expedition is impossible, sir!" Clark said, astounded.
"The natives regard the whole Kiridu country as sacred, and kill any
white man who enters it. And because such intrusions stir all the
tribes to wild turmoil, the French colonial authorities have strictly
forbidden explorers to enter the Kiridu."
He added, "Of course, it's a worthy ambition of yours to want to add to
scientific and geographical knowledge----"
"Scientific knowledge be hanged!" shrilled Asa Brand. "It's not to add
to scientific knowledge that I'm sending the expedition. It's because
that expedition is going to bring me back some of the shining waters of
the Lake of Life; waters that will prolong my life, perhaps for many
decades, when I drink them."
And as Clark stared stupefiedly, the old man's excited anger dropped
from him. He suddenly looked a shrunken, withered, fearful thing, and
his voice was a cracked, hoarse whisper.
"Stannard, I've never feared anything in my life, but I'm afraid now.
I'm afraid of dying. My doctors say I can't live more than a year or
two, and that they can't do anything for me. And I don't want to die,
I mustn't die, I _won't_ die! For I haven't lived yet! I've spent all
my life gathering money, and never took time really to live and enjoy
myself. That's why I must put off death, for a while at least--I want
to live before I die. If medical science can't help me, I'll look
elsewhere. And this Lake of Life--it's a chance. Its waters may keep me
living for many years, for decades even, if you can bring some of them
back to me."
"If _I_ can bring them back to you?" Clark repeated, startled. "You
don't mean that----"
Asa Brand nodded his vulture-head. "Yes. I've picked you to lead the
expedition. You know the country, you can do it.
"Here is the proposition. You'll be furnished what men and equipment
you need and you'll go to Africa, penetrate that unknown region, and
find the Lake of Life. You will bring me back a flask of its shining
waters. When you do that, I'll pay you a half-million dollars."
"And if I don't bring the water back?" Clark asked. "If I can't find
the lake, or if I'm killed in there?"
"Then you get nothing, and your heirs get nothing," Asa Brand snapped.
"Only when you deliver into my hands a flask of those shining waters
will you receive your pay. I believe that those waters will extend my
life greatly, but even if they prove without virtue, you will have been
paid for procuring them for me."
A cunning, menacing expression entered the old man's eyes as he added,
"But don't think you can accept my proposition and then trick me,
Stannard. Don't think you can bring back a flask of ordinary water and
fool me. The waters of the Lake of Life are shining waters unlike any
other on earth. I'll know if you try a trick, and you will receive
nothing."
The senile multi-millionaire leaned forward tensely. "Well, do you
accept the proposition?"
Clark felt himself forced to a desperate decision. The young adventurer
had no faith whatever that the waters of the fabled lake possessed
the power of immortality. But there was a good chance that a lake of
shining waters did exist back in the unknown Kiridu. Phosphorescence or
radio-activity made such a shining lake a possibility.
And if it did exist and he could reach it and bring back a flask of
its waters to this death-fearful old man, Clark would receive half a
million dollars--enough, more than enough, to make the future secure
for his helpless family.
Yet it was a deadly dangerous gamble. He knew well the slim chance any
white man had of entering the Kiridu country and escaping death from
its fanatic, savage tribes. And if he was killed in there in the wild
search for the lake, what of his sisters and brother and mother?
Clark's brown, rugged face became rock-like as he made his decision. He
told old Brand, "I'll go." He added, "I'll need four or five men, at
least--we'll have to strike into the Kiridu afoot from the headwaters
of the Bembu River, and you can't use native porters, for they won't
take white men into that sacred country. I don't know where you'll find
men who will join such a risky venture."
"I'll find the men," Asa Brand's cracked voice had promised with eager
readiness. "And they'll be men who won't balk at any danger."
Asa Brand had found just such men. By devious ways and agents, he had
brought together the five hard-bitten, ruined, hunted men who had
agreed to follow Clark Stannard to the devil himself as long as they
received the pay the old millionaire promised, when they returned.
Brand had procured the schooner and equipment, too, following Clark's
specifications and lists. And two weeks after his first meeting with
the old financier, his desperate expedition in search of the Lake of
Life had sailed for Africa.
_3. The Mountains of Death_
_Boom!_ _Boom!_ Through the suffocating noon hush of the jungle
throbbed the odd, percussive sound, like the deep quavering of muted
gongs.
Black heart of Africa, throbbing in hate and menace! Its malign whisper
was a sinister promise. _Boom! Boom! Boom!_
Mike Shinn gave up his oar to Lieutenant Morrow and scrambled back to
lie panting in the stern of the long-boat, his huge, freckled fist
dashing a rivulet of perspiration from his brow.
"I _wish_ those damned drums would stop," he panted. "This rowing's got
me hanging on the ropes anyway, without havin' to listen to that day
and night."
Blacky Cain turned his unshaven, predatory face from his oar and
snarled, "You and me both. You'd think there was a thousand jazz bands
in this damned jungle, to hear it."
Clark Stannard, his hard brown face a little gaunt from the past week's
strenuous toil, told them grimly, "Those drums are the telegraph system
of the jungle tribes. They've kept tabs on us ever since we first
entered this Kiridu country."
The long-boat was forging slowly up an upper tributary of the Bembu,
a black creek no more than a hundred feet wide. On either shore there
rose, not the obscene mangrove swamps of the coastal region, but a
solid wall of towering, stupendous trees. This was the true jungle,
the mighty equatorial forest that blanketed the heart of the dark
continent. Huge banyans and baobabs and ebony trees interlocked
branches, laced into solidity by snaky lianas and rubber-vines and
climbing palms.
This insanely luxuriant vegetation teemed with life. They had heard the
distant trumpeting squeal and crash of elephants many times in the last
week. The chatter of birds and scolding lemurs was silenced ever and
again by the squall of an angry leopard. Submarine-like hippopotamuses
swam from in front of the long-boat in ponderous alarm. Crocodiles
crashed and splashed through the reeds, and millions of mosquitoes
swarmed out onto them from the eternal twilight of the dank forest.
Eight days had passed since they had started up the Bembu. Eight days
of heat and mosquitoes and back-breaking toil, during which they had
crept deeper into the forbidden Kiridu country, first up the main
river and then up this narrow, unexplored tributary. Clark estimated
that they were nearly three hundred miles inland; and that they were
well into the Kiridu was indicated by the ominous throb of the native
_goudougoudous_ or signal drums, which they had been hearing for two
days.
Clark said, "I think we'll reach the end of this creek before long.
Then we'll try to get bearings on those mountains, the Mountains of
Death, that are supposed to encircle the Lake of Life."
Ephraim Quell broke his usual dour silence to say, "Queerest course
I ever sailed on--hunting for a lake whose waters give immortality,
surrounded by mountains they call the Mountains of Death."
"Yeah, it's all a wild pipe-dream of old Brand," rasped Blacky Cain.
"But what do we care, as long as he pays off? Me, I didn't come for the
pay but to get out of the country. I was gettin' too hot."
Lieutenant Morrow, tugging at his oar, remarked curtly, "There may be
more to the legend of the lake than we think. After all, science has
no idea really how life started on earth."
Mike Shinn grunted, "I'd trade you my share in the lake right now for a
dozen bottles of cold beer."
"And I'd trade mine for a tall drink of tequila and a good-lookin'
_muchacha_," drawled Link Wilson with a slow grin.
Clark sensed rebelliousness in them. He told them forcefully, "There
must be some kind of unusual lake in here. And wherever or whatever it
is, we're going to find it."
Yet Clark could not blame them for not believing. His own sober sense
rejected the possibility of the lake. It was only desperation that made
him cling to the hope of its reality; for unless it existed, unless
he reached it and returned with some of its waters, he had no hope of
getting the money his family needed so desperately.
Onward they toiled, six browned, unshaven men in solaro-cloth suits
and dirty pith helmets, forcing the heavy long-boat up the narrowing
creek. There was no complaint from any of this hard-bitten crew as they
struggled on through the stifling afternoon hours. Yet their nerves
rasped to the ceaseless, monotonous throbbing of the drums.
By midafternoon, the creek had narrowed to a shallow stream barely
thirty feet across. Huge trees interlaced arched branches above them to
shut out the searing sunlight, so that they rowed on in strange green
gloom. The dank, heavy breath of the jungle was overpowering here. Then
they rounded a bend, and at once stopped rowing. Ahead of them the
stream ended in a swampy, unnavigable slough.
"This is all the further _this_ boat's goin'!" exclaimed Mike Shinn.
Clark Stannard nodded. "From here on, we go on foot. Pull over to the
shore and we'll beach the boat there."
* * * * *
They dragged the heavy long-boat through the squashy black mud and
papyrus reeds to firm ground. There they piled out and stood, panting
and slapping vainly at the fiendish mosquitoes.
Clark cast keen eyes around the jungle. He noted a huge banyan tree
that towered far above the rest of the forest.
He ordered crisply, "Get our equipment and supplies out of the boat and
divide them among the pack-sacks. I'm going to climb that banyan. If
the mountains exist, they should be visible from up there."
Clark found it hard getting up the lower part of the giant banyan,
but once in the upper branches the climbing was fairly easy. It was a
different world up there, a swaying green world of dappled sunlight and
clinging vines and flashing birds. He reached the highest attainable
crotch, two hundred feet from the group, and then peered north and
eastward. His sweeping gaze abruptly fixed.
He was looking far across the sunlit green roof of the jungle. In the
dim distance, a short range of steep, dark mountains rose at least ten
thousand feet above the steaming forest. Huge, frowning ramparts and
scarps and ridges lifted like menacing fangs. And his heart leaped as
he saw that the frowning range was ring-shaped. He was looking at the
rumored Mountains of Death, and they were real.
Clark's black eyes slitted in excitement. If the mountains existed,
might not the shining lake supposed to lie inside them exist also?
He could not understand the reason for the extraordinary ring-shaped
formation of the range. Then, as his eyes swept along the circular
rampart, he made out the silver thread of a narrow river that seemed to
flow with great swiftness through the jungle toward the mountains.
He carefully took compass readings, and then excitedly descended. He
told the others, "The Mountains of Death lie east-northeast from here.
They're no more than forty miles away--we ought to make them by late
tomorrow afternoon."
They shouldered the heavy pack-sacks into which the equipment had been
divided, and picked up their automatic rifles. Bandoliers were slung
over their shoulders, and the packs contained a store of ammunition for
the heavy pistols in their belts.
Clark pointed out an elephant trail leading east. "We'll have to follow
the game trails. It would take days to hack a path."
They moved forward along the winding elephant trail, which was like a
tunnel through the solid green jungle. Their rifles were in the crooks
of their arms; their eyes intently scanned the walls of vegetation on
either side, alert for a sudden, yelling, savage attack.
But though they pressed on through the long, hot hours for the rest of
that day, no attack came. The drums seemed to throb faster, louder, as
they slowly advanced to the mountains. The hollow boom came from ahead,
from behind, seemingly from everywhere. It whispered of gathering
forces, of impending onslaught, Clark knew.
As they marched eastward, they glimpsed ever and again the dark,
frowning ramparts of the mysterious mountains. And when night fell, and
they made a fireless, watchful camp in a little clearing, Clark and his
men could see the distant ridges and scarps black against the African
stars, a giant and unbroken ring of titanic peaks and ridges.
"What the devil made the mountains round like that?" Mike Shinn asked,
puzzled. "They look just like a big fence put up there."
"I've no idea of the cause of that ring-shaped formation," Clark
admitted. "It's quite unprecedented, as far as I know. We may be able
to learn more about it when we reach the mountains tomorrow."
"_If_ we reach them tomorrow, you're meanin'," drawled Link Wilson,
reclining with his rifles across his knees, rolling a brown-paper
cigarette. "The _hombres_ beatin' on those tom-toms may have different
ideas."
They all listened. In the solid blackness of the jungle night, the
throbbing boom of the drums was much louder, brutal in its hate and
menace. They seemed to hear vague whispers, murmurs of stealthy
movement in the forest, ghostly gathering of phantom hordes.
The six men slept in shifts that night, waiting tautly for the expected
attack. But the unseen natives made no attack, and when the blood-red
dawn came, they shouldered their packs grimly to go on.
They made their noon halt in a game trail less than five miles from the
base of the mountains. From here they had a clear view of the steep,
dark slopes of the weird range, lying barren in the hot sun without any
speck of vegetable life on them. A feeling of awe gripped Clark's men
as they stared.
They had just started forward again, when Ephraim Quell halted
suddenly. His nasal voice exclaimed, "Listen!"
* * * * *
Clark halted with the others, listening. No sound broke the green,
twilight stillness of the damp jungle.
"The drums have stopped," said Quell tightly.
"Thank the Lord for that!" muttered Mike Shinn.
But Clark's brown face stiffened. He said, "When the blacks suddenly
stop the _goudougoudous_, it means they're ready to attack. They must
already be near us in the jungle. On toward the mountains, men!" his
voice rang harshly. "On the double quick!"
They started forward along the wide game trail on a rapid trot, heavy
packs thumping against their backs, rifles raised.
Suddenly a spear flashed out of the jungle wall like a streak of light.
Link Wilson ducked, whirled and fired in a flash, and the crack of the
rifle ended in a shriek of agony.
Instantly a tremendous roar of savage voices broke from the surrounding
forest.
"_Amafuka Kilima Amafuka!_"
At the same moment, a shower of spears shot out of the green forest
into the trail.
But the spears missed the white men. On the instant that the lank Texan
had fired, Clark Stannard had yelled to his men.
"Ambush! Into the jungle!"
He had dived toward the trees on the right, the men plunging after him.
For to remain in the open trail was to permit themselves to be stricken
down by spears to which they could not answer.
They crashed into a green gloom that seemed peopled thick with black
warriors lying there in ambush. Hideous, nightmare shapes they seemed
in that weird twilight, tall black warriors who wore head-dresses of
black plumes and whose naked bodies were painted from head to toe with
ghastly white skeleton outlines. They looked like crouching skeletons
in the forest gloom, and they were momentarily taken with surprize by
the swift crash of the white men into their midst.
Then for moments it was a wild chaos of hellish battle between Clark's
men and the natives into whom they had plunged. Hideous shrieks and the
whizz of spears rang chorus to the staccato roar of rifles as the white
men shot.
Mike Shinn, his clip emptied, clubbed his heavy rifle and with a roar
of rage crashed its butt down on a black-plumed head. Link Wilson
reeled back against a tree, gun arm running blood from a grazing
spear-wound, but with his left hand he jerked out his belt pistol
and shot with the swiftness of a wolf's snap. Clark saw a hideous,
skull-painted face drive inward beneath his last bullet, and yelled for
his men to group together around a great tree.
They had cleared that immediate portion of the jungle of the blacks,
but with a raging roar, the others who had lain in the prepared ambush
were surging wildly across the trail and through the trees toward them.
The white men were hastily jamming fresh clips into their guns, except
for Blacky Cain, who was pawing desperately in his pack-sack.
"_Kilima Amafuka!_" screamed the charging blacks.
"Here they come!" twanged Ephraim Quell's voice.
Clark and four of his men turned loose with the rifles, and over the
roar of them heard spears thudding into the tree against whose giant
trunk they stood. The skeleton-painted blacks came on.
"Stand aside!" yelled Blacky Cain's voice.
The gangster had pawed out of the pack-sack the submachine gun he had
brought with him. He had fitted a drum of ammunition, and now, holding
the deadly weapon hip-high, he let go with it.
An unseen sword of lead from the Thompson gun sliced across the
advancing skeleton-like horde, and the front rank of the blacks fell
like ripe wheat. Cain thrust in another drum, and again the deadly
stutter broke above the savage yells. The blacks recoiled through the
trees from that terrific hail of death.
"They can't take it!" yelled Blacky Cain, a wolfish, mirthless grin on
his face. "They're scramming."
"We've only checked them," Clark shouted. "There are hundreds of
them--we've got to get out of here or we'll be annihilated. Quick,
toward the mountains--they're our only chance."
They started a desperate retreat through the tangled jungle. None was
badly wounded, but Clark knew it was but a matter of minutes before the
savages recovered from their setback.
"They're Amafuka--it means People of Death," he exclaimed as they
hastened. "And they were shouting '_Kilima Amafuka_'--Mountains of
Death. There's a chance that they'll be too superstitious about the
mountains to follow us, if we can get to them."
Lieutenant Morrow, his lean young face dripping but coldly unperturbed,
nodded agreement.
"If they do follow us onto the mountains, our number will be up," he
said indifferently.
"Boy, I haven't had so much fun since my mob stuck up the Midwest
National," rasped Blacky Cain, cradling the submachine gun
affectionately as he backed after them through the gloom.
* * * * *
Spears began to flash after them through the jungle as they retreated
toward the mountains. The Amafuka were recovering from the surprize of
the machine gun, and with mad yells of heart-chilling rage were surging
through the forest after them.
Clark and his men halted for a moment and turned to send another
deadly hail of lead through the trees. Then they pressed desperately
on. Ahead, the dark, frowning slopes of the mountains were now visible
through the trees, as they approached the end of the jungle. The uproar
of the battle and retreat was sending birds and monkeys and small
animals racing ahead of them in wild panic.
Closer after them came the Amafuka, and again they had to halt and fire
back to hold the blacks off. Clark's rifle barrel was hot in his hand,
and the reek of burned powder mixed with the dank breath of the jungle
in his nostrils. Then through the thinning trees ahead, he saw the base
of the dark rock slope, a hundred yards from him.
"Run for it now!" he cried. "Once up on that slope, we'll have a chance
to hold them off if they dare pursue us there."
The six adventurers crashed through the last trees and undergrowth,
more birds and monkeys and squealing wild pigs bolting in front of
them. They emerged onto the strip of grass between the jungle and the
first outcrop of the dark rock. From that first ledge, the barren rock
slope loomed up in vast, frowning mystery, a titan wall.
The Amafuka in the jungle uttered a chorus of wild yells as they saw
the white men running toward the rock slope. Clark, in the lead, was
within twenty feet of the rock ledge when he suddenly saw something
that made his brown face go sickly gray.
"Stop, for God's sake!" he yelled, halting.
The others jerked to a halt. Clark pointed a trembling finger ahead.
"Look----"
Two of the wild pigs bolting before them had run up onto the dark rock
slope. The two animals were stricken with instant, incomprehensible
destruction.
For as the animals set foot on that dark ledge, there was a flash of
white force or fire from the rock on which they trod. It reduced the
two little running beasts instantly to scorched, shriveled carcasses.
"God above, the natives' belief about the Mountains of Death is
_true_!" Clark cried. "It's death to any living thing that sets foot on
those slopes!"
4. _Into the Mystery_
The six men stared, transfixed with stupefied horror. The frowning
slopes of the looming range suddenly seemed unearthly in menace, a
mysterious death-trap into which they had almost run. Clark Stannard's
mind was whirling madly. God! what _was_ the invisible force that
invested these mountains and that had struck like lightning?
In Clark's mind like a tolling death-bell rang the words that he
himself had spoken not long before. "The natives say that nobody can
cross those mountains, for any living thing that sets foot upon them is
slain instantly."
Incredibly, horribly, that was a fact. The Mountains of Death were a
deadly barrier that no man could cross.
"Here come the savages!" yelled Ephraim Quell's harsh voice.
Clark spun with the others. The skeleton-painted Amafuka were charging
through the trees toward the little group of petrified white men,
spears leveled, eyes flaming, shouting madly.
"_Kilima Amafuka!_"
"Good gosh!" cried Mike Shinn. "They're tryin' to force us back onto
the slope!"
The Amafuka were pouring out of the jungle in a solid mass, racing to
get within spear-throw of the white men. Clark's voice blared, instinct
for leadership flaring up in this incredible dilemma. His men knelt,
fired their rifles as fast as they could pull trigger. Then Blacky
Cain's submachine gun tore loose with the whir of a striking rattler.
An unseen death lashed among the charging savages and dropped them
in heaps. Others behind the dead tripped on the bodies, and as they
stumbled, soft-nosed rifle bullets slammed into them. The raving
warriors could not stand such punishment, and again recoiled with
shrieks of rage into the jungle.
Clark straightened and looked at his panting, desperate crew. Their
faces powder-grimed, their clothes torn by the flight through the
jungle, they were a wild-looking group. Blacky Cain, a lighted
cigarette dangling from his lips, was glaring at the jungle. The lank
Texan's lips were tightly compressed, his eyes icy with menace.
Clark, even in this desperate moment, felt a surge of pride in his
followers. Disgraced, criminal fugitives they might be, but, by heaven,
they were men! Not on one face was there any panic. They looked as
dangerous as cornered panthers.
"We've got to get out of here," Clark said swiftly. "Those Amafuka will
wait until night and then rush us and finish us."
"Don't know where we can go," said Ephraim Quell nasally. "I don't
hanker to try climbing those mountains, now."
"That's just what the cursed scouts want us to do, damn their black
hearts and hides!" said Mike Shinn wrathfully.
"Climbing the mountains is out of the question," Clark said rapidly.
"God knows what weird force clings to them, but it is deadly. It looks
as if a vast electrical charge invests the mountains and kills anything
that makes contact with it. Our only chance is to march along the base
of the mountains, holding off the Amafuka, until we can find some pass
or gap by which we can pass in through the mountains. I don't think the
Amafuka would follow us to the inside of the range."
As the six adventurers put Clark's plan into effect, the savages
started to boil out of the jungle toward them. But the men halted and
fired a rapid volley that sent the blacks back into the forest. The six
marched on, following the base of the deadly range eastward.
Clark's gaze swept desperately along the frowning peaks and buttresses
in vain search for a pass through them. His heart held a foreboding
chill, for nowhere along the titan barrier could he descry any break
or gap. And as the six pressed on, they glimpsed the ghastly painted
shapes of the Amafuka slipping along in the jungle, keeping pace with
them. For a half-hour the taut march continued. Already the sun was
declining ominously toward the west.
Then the white men stiffened as there came to their ears a dim, distant
roaring sound from ahead, throbbing through the tense silence in
unbroken rhythm. Ephraim Quell looked startled.
"That roar sounds like----" he began.
"Look, there's a pass in the range!" cried Lieutenant Morrow suddenly,
pointing a lean finger.
* * * * *
Clark had already seen, and his heart bounded with hope. A half-mile
ahead the titanic cliffs were broken by a narrow, crack-like split, a
chasm extending inward through their rock mass.
The men pressed forward with quickened pace, taut with expectation and
hope. The dull, unbroken roar from ahead came louder and louder to
their ears. Link Wilson glanced at the shadowy shapes of the Amafuka,
keeping pace with them inside the bordering forest.
"Somethin' wrong here!" muttered the lanky Texan. "They must know we're
headin' for that pass. Why don't they try to stop us?"
"Sure, they've had a taste of our guns and they don't want another
match with us," answered Mike Shinn jubilantly.
But a few minutes later, as the six men came abreast of the chasm-like
pass, they halted with cries of despair.
Across their path lay a river that flowed out of the jungle and into
that chasm. And what a river! A deep, raging body of water a hundred
yards wide that ran with mill-race swiftness between dirt banks
littered with dead trees and debris. A cataract rushed wildly and with
a steady roar, straight into the chasm in the deadly cliffs.
The chasm itself was a mere crack in the frowning range, its walls
going up vertically for thousands of feet. And the raving, roaring
waters flowing into it completely covered its bottom with their foaming
flood.
Clark Stannard, his hopes plummeting to black despair, remembered now
that he had seen this river from the top of the huge banyan when he had
first descried the Mountains of Death. Now it barred their way, trapped
them. They could never swim this mad stream.
"This," said Lieutenant Morrow calmly, "ends our retreat. For good."
"I knew those damned blacks had some object in lettin' us retreat this
way," gritted Link Wilson. "They know they've got us cornered now."
The Amafuka, as the white men halted, had halted also, extending their
line across the way Clark and his band had come, and also through the
jungle to a point farther up the river. They squatted down, a grimly
waiting horde.
"They're waiting for darkness," rasped Blacky Cain. "Then they'll rush
us and rub us out--and we can't get away."
"Sure, it looks like this is the final round, at that," said Mike
Shinn, scratching his red head.
Clark's eyes had been sweeping desperately along the raging river,
following it where it entered the chasm.
"By heaven," he exclaimed, "they may rush us at dark but we won't be
here. We're going to go down this river, through that pass in the
mountains. It's our way inside the range."
They stared incredulously at him. He added swiftly, pointing to where
the wild cataract entered the chasm:
"Look, you can see fish leaping in the water in there inside the chasm.
That means that the bed of the river is not charged with the deadly
force like the rest of the mountains--probably the waters have eroded
down to ordinary rock. And that means we can go down the river, and if
we don't touch the chasm walls, we won't be killed."
"Go down that river?" echoed Mike Shinn. "Are ye crazy, man? No swimmer
could live a minute in that hell-stream."
"We're not going to swim," Clark declared. He pointed at the debris of
dead trees and brush lining the banks. "We can make a raft, by using
some of those vines to tie dead tree logs together."
"That we can," declared Ephraim Quell suddenly. "There's plenty of
stuff there."
"Ride down that river, into those cursed mountains, on a crazy
home-made raft?" gasped Shinn.
"It's our only chance," Clark declared. "We've got to escape the
Amafuka before dark, and we've got to get into the inside of this range
somehow. This gives us a chance to do both things. Quell, you and
Morrow help me with the raft," he ordered. "Blacky, you and Link and
Mike stay up here on guard."
The Yankee captain and the ex-army officer clambered down the dirt bank
with Clark. Rapidly they selected dead trees of suitable size. Then
the hand-axes came out of their belts and they began working furiously
under the broiling late afternoon sun. Chips flew, sweat soaked their
shirts, as they trimmed and shortened the trees.
Desperation, lent by knowledge that death awaited them if they did
not make their escape by dark, drove their muscles to the last ounce
of effort. One by one, the logs were shortened and trimmed and dragged
into the quiet waters of a small eddy. The men started laboring to
fasten them with long, tough vines from the masses of debris. Suddenly
up on the bank, two rifles cracked and the submachine gun whirred
fiercely.
"Here come the savages!" yelled Mike Shinn. "They've seen what we're
doing--they know we're tryin' to get away."
Clark climbed up the bank's top swiftly. Some of the Amafuka had
reached a point where they had glimpsed the raft-building activity, and
were now coming on in wild fury.
"Quell, you and Morrow finish tying together those logs," cried Clark
to the two men below. "The rest of us will hold off the blacks till you
finish--but for God's sake hurry!"
* * * * *
The whole horde of the Amafuka was charging. The natives were mad
with rage as they saw their prey preparing to slip from their grasp,
and their skull-painted faces were hideous masks of fury. Clark threw
himself down between the Texan and Mike Shinn, and the three rifles and
the Thompson gun poured a stream of fire into the savages.
But this time the Amafuka came on! They leaped over their own dead,
their shrill yells wild over the thunder of waters. Blacky Cain dropped
the empty submachine gun, hastily dug in his pack-sack. He fished out
an oval steel object, tugged at it, then flung it forward.
_Crash!_ The thing exploded in the midst of the blacks and flattened a
score of them in bloody heaps. They sucked back in momentary terror.
Another hurtling steel object exploded amidst them.
"I thought those two pineapples would come in handy if I brought 'em
along," Blacky Cain laughed wolfishly.
"Hurry, Quell!" called Clark down to the two laboring men below.
"They'll rush us again in a moment. They're coming now!"
The Amafuka were diabolical in their rage. Again they charged forward,
spears glinting thick in the sun, plumed heads bent low as their wild
yells split the air.
Clark Stannard knew with sinking heart that they couldn't be stopped
this time. Blacky Cain, his lips curled back in a mirthless grin, had
drawn his heavy automatic.
"Raft's ready!" yelled Ephraim Quell suddenly.
"Come on!" shouted Clark to the other three.
They scrambled down the bank. There in the eddy floated the crude raft
of heavy logs, lashed precariously together with tough lianas. Morrow
stood on it with two long poles, ready to push off, and Ephraim Quell
was at a big, crude steering-oar he had affixed in an upright crotch at
the rear.
Mike Shinn and the Texan leaped onto it, followed by the snarling
gangster and Clark. Then Clark grabbed one of the long poles and he
and Morrow pushed frantically. The heavy, clumsy raft swung out with
maddening slowness toward the raging current.
The Amafuka burst into view along the bank in a solid wave. Their
screeches ripped the air as they saw their prey escaping. Their spears
flew in a deadly shower toward the raft. But the raft had swung into
the wild rush of the main current.
Instantly the raging waters gripped the clumsy craft and whirled it
around so suddenly that the men were flung down onto the rough logs.
Spinning, tossing, the raft was borne with nightmare speed down the
wild current toward the opening of the narrow chasm.
"Quell, head her around!" cried Clark over the surging roar. "If we
crash into the walls of the chasm, it's death!"
Ephraim Quell was straining at his big, crude steering-oar to swing the
craft around in the current, to bring it front-foremost. His bony form
tensed, his face crimsoned, as he fought the current.
The long raft's bow came slowly around. The yelling Amafuka on the bank
had already dropped far back, and now the craft was rushing and dipping
over the foaming waters, right into the chasm in the looming range.
To Clark Stannard, kneeling precariously on the rough logs at the
front, it was as though they had been suddenly transported out of the
hot sunlight into another world--a world of weird twilight, of dull,
thunderous, bellowing sound.
On either side of them, the dark, jagged sides of the chasm soared
upward out of sight, stupendous rock walls through which the river ran
with nightmare speed. Its deafening roar reverberated hollowly between
those walls like the bawling and bantering of hoarse, titanic voices.
On they rushed, through the unearthly, shadowy twilight, at breakneck
speed.
The chasm, and the river in it, turned sharply not far ahead. The raft,
slow to turn even in the swift current, was flung toward the rock wall
that it was death for any life to touch.
"Fend off!" screamed Clark to Morrow, kneeling and thrusting furiously
with his long pole toward the rock wall. Morrow did the same, while
Quell fought frantically with his oar to help them.
Their poles hit the rock wall--and white flashes of fire-like force
leaped from the rock and burned and scorched the ends of the poles.
Clark and the ex-army officer were almost thrown off the raft by the
thrust against their poles. But they clung to it, and the raft veered
from the menacing wall, whirled round the turn in the chasm.
On and on--a nightmare, crazy rush through the deadly walls, borne on
the raving, foaming flood. Again they had to thrust wildly to keep
the raft from scraping along the rock side. Clark glimpsed Shinn and
Link Wilson and Blacky Cain crouching at the center of the raft--the
prizefighter's battered face stupefied, the Texan's eyes narrowed to
slits, Blacky's harsh visage wearing its fighting snarl.
"Raft's beginning to come apart!" yelled Ephraim Quell over the din of
waters, pointing wildly with one hand.
The hastily-lashed vines that tied the logs together were beginning
to loosen under the battering of the current. The raft threatened to
disintegrate under them.
"It'll last a little longer!" Clark cried. "We must be nearly through
the range by now!"
He knew that already, so tremendous the speed of this unthinkable
current, they had rushed for miles into the heart of the Mountains of
Death. And they were still dipping and racing forward, still riding
the foam-maned waters down the twilight length of that narrow, titanic
canyon.
The waters roared louder. Clark Stannard glimpsed that ahead the river
dropped in a long, steeper grade at the bottom of the chasm, a rapid
of breathtaking incline, down which the waters rushed as though with
wings. And the raft was almost at the head of that rapid.
"Here we go!" cried Mike Shinn, eyes blazing.
* * * * *
The raft seemed to poise a moment at the very brink of that incredibly
slanting rapid. Then with a wild, sickening swoop, it flashed down the
current with dizzying speed.
Dark walls of rock flashing past, wild roar of maddened waters in
their ears, a giddy sensation of falling like that in a diving
airplane--these were Clark's chaotic, numbed sensations.
He glimpsed Quell working futilely with his steering-oar, trying to
steady the raft, and glimpsed the liana lashings bursting and breaking
rapidly. Down, down, they rushed--and ahead Clark suddenly glimpsed the
end of the chasm, saw sunlight beyond it.
The raft flashed forward like a winged thing, shooting down the last
of that sickening water-slant, and plunged suddenly out of the weird,
roaring twilight of the chasm into hot sunlight and open air. Before
them stretched a vast space.
"We're _through_!" yelled Lieutenant Morrow. "We're through the
mountains--inside the range."
"Good God, look at that!" cried Mike Shinn wildly, pointing westward.
"A city!"
Clark Stannard's senses seemed to reel. There stretched before him in
the blazing, waning sunlight the space that lay inside the ring of the
Mountains of Death--a circle of mingled forest and plain, fully fifty
miles across, ringed round by the vast, deadly range. Straight into
this prisoned land the raving river flowed with unabated speed.
And over there, miles away to the west, close to the inside wall of the
looming mountains, rose a crimson city--a fantastic city of blood-red
domes and roofs and streets, belted round with a high, scarlet wall.
Incredible red city of this fantastic, hidden realm! Clark wondered
fleetingly, did that city hold the legended Lake of Life?
"Here goes the raft!" bawled Ephraim Quell. "We'll have to swim for it!"
He managed by frenzied effort to steer the disintegrating raft almost
to the bank of the raving river. But now the logs were giving way,
spreading under them, as the last lashing came apart.
"Grab your packs--let the rifles and bandoliers go!" Clark yelled to
his men.
_Crash!_ Almost on his word, the raft struck a hidden rock. Instantly
the few remaining lashings burst, and as the logs flew apart under
them, they were all thrown into the crazy current.
_5. The Crimson City_
The only thing that saved Clark Stannard and his companions was the
fact that the rock on which the raft had split was near the shore. Had
the raft broken up in the middle of that wild, foaming flood, they must
inevitably have been drowned. As it was, Clark rose out of the waters,
one hand gripping his heavy pack, and found that a few convulsive
strokes brought him to water in which he could stand.
Quell and Lieutenant Morrow had reached the same safety, and Link
Wilson was fighting to their side. But Blacky Cain would have been
swept past in the current had not Mike Shinn reached and grabbed his
collar. The prizefighter exerted his tremendous strength, drew the
gangster into the shallower, quieter water. He stood up, spitting and
sputtering disgustedly. Then they climbed up onto the bank, flung down
their soaked packs, and for a few minutes stood gasping for breath.
Clark stared westward at that weird city which he had glimpsed in the
tense moment when the raft first emerged from the chasm. From here
he could see only the crimson tips of the few high domes and towers
in it, lent an additional blood-like brilliance by the glinting red
sunset. The others were staring too, a dripping, desperate little band.
"A city, here inside the Mountains of Death!" Clark muttered. "Who'd
have dreamed it? It means there must be people here----"
"Yeah, and maybe those people won't exactly welcome us with the glad
hand," said Blacky Cain grimly. "We've got our pistols and a few
hundred shells for them in the packs, and that's all."
Clark's hopes were suddenly soaring. They had done what had seemed so
impossible, had penetrated the seemingly impassable barrier of the
deadly mountains. If the shining lake really existed in here they would
find it somehow. And he felt now that some sort of lake must exist in
here, for the legend of the Mountains of Death was already verified.
"It's jest come to my mind," Ephraim Quell's nasal voice twanged, "that
we're in here where we were trying to get, but that there ain't any way
out. We can't climb over those mountains and we can't float _up_ that
plaguy river."
"Gosh, that's so, isn't it?" said Mike Shinn, scratching his red head.
"I never thought of that."
"We'll worry about getting out when the time comes," Clark said
sharply. "Our object right now is to find where the shining lake lies.
I think we'll first reconnoiter that red city, and if its people look
friendly, we can enter it and ask about the Lake of Life."
"That's the stuff," nodded Blacky Cain approvingly. "Always case a
joint carefully before you try a job there."
They started across the grassy plain dotted with clumps of brush and
trees, heading toward the red city and the blazing sunset. Clark's eyes
swept puzzledly around the inside of the great ring-like range, as they
advanced. It looked like a vast crater, now that they were inside it.
It looked--the thought startled him--like one of the giant craters on
the moon, formed long ago by the impact of colossal meteors.
"Someone comin'!" hissed Link Wilson suddenly. "Over there!"
His keen ears had perceived a movement. Clark whispered a command, and
he and his men crouched low in a thicket of brush. Their automatics
were in their hands. Then they heard the unmistakable sharp thud of
horses' hooves. The lank Texan's eyes brightened at that sound.
The rushing of hoofbeats came closer, then slower. Peering from the
brush, Clark saw that a band of a dozen men had ridden up from the
east. Now they had halted in the brush, a hundred yards away, and were
dismounting from their horses.
They were white-skinned men, Clark saw. They wore cap-like black metal
helmets and short tunics of woven black metal-mesh, and had long swords
at their belts. He heard Mike Shinn gasp in surprize at sight of them.
"Don't show yourselves," Clark warned. "They don't look friendly to me."
"Nor me either," muttered the ex-prizefighter. "Lookit the size of the
toad-stickers they're wearin'."
A slender young fellow who seemed the leader of the black-armored men
was giving orders in a low, authoritative voice. The band split up. Two
remained holding the horses while the rest moved stealthily through the
brush, parallel with Clark's hiding-place, toward the west.
It came to Clark that these black-armored men were spying on the red
city, for all their attention was directed on the distant towers and
domes that blazed crimson in the sunset. They had their swords in their
hands, and their extreme caution betokened strong desire on their part
to remain undiscovered by the inhabitants of the red city. It flashed
over Clark that these must be men of a different city or people. He
decided quickly that the best part for his band was to lie low.
But Clark's intentions were all over-turned in a moment. The
black-armored ones suddenly became aware of their presence. One had
cast a cautious glance toward their hiding-place, then at sight of a
waving bush had uttered a low cry. Instantly all of them spun around.
Their slender young leader rapped out a sharp command. They came in a
silent deadly rush toward Clark and his men, swords raised, white faces
grim. Concealment was no longer possible, and Clark and his five men
leaped up.
"Fire, men!" Clark exclaimed.
Their pistols blazed a stream of flame into the middle of the charging
group, Link Wilson's big forty-five booming over the sharper rattle of
the automatics. Five of the black-armored attackers fell, one of them
being the slender young leader. The others halted aghast, obviously
never having witnessed the effect of firearms before.
Then they made off in a wild, scrambling run for their horses, leaving
their five dead behind them. Blacky Cain raised his gun to fire after
them, but Clark struck it down.
"No, no more shooting! That repulsed them, and we'll need all the
ammunition we have."
"Look at 'em go!" cried Mike Shinn gleefully. "Knocked out in the first
round!"
* * * * *
Clark was not feeling so elated--they had repulsed the attack, but
they had also been discovered. His brown face grim, he strode forward
to examine the dead men. He turned one over. His face was a white,
aquiline one with long thin nose and thin lips. His sword was of fine
steel, well worked. The black armor was bronze, somehow tinted.
"Here's one that's still alive," said Lieutenant Morrow suddenly. He
was bending over the young leader who had fallen. Clark saw as he came
up that a bullet had merely grazed his temple, stunning him.
"Put him out of his misery," rasped Blacky Cain, raising his gun.
"None of that," Clark said sharply. "We may be able to get information
from this fellow about the Lake of Life."
He pulled the black bronze helmet off the unconscious youth's head.
Then he stared in stupefied surprize. From under the helmet fell a
thick torrent of silky, blue-black hair that dropped down around the
pale, unconscious face.
"Good grief, it's a dame!" stuttered Shinn.
"Yeah, a regular gun-moll," said Blacky Cain, surprized. "She was
leading the others when they charged us."
The girl's breast rose and fell under her woven black metal tunic. Then
her eyes opened. Deep blue eyes they were, not static and serene but
flashing with electric sparks like stormy summer skies. Her features
were small, chiseled, stamped with a fiery, challenging force. As she
looked up at Clark, remembrance came to her and she struggled to rise,
her white face flaming with wrath, feeling wildly for the sword that
had dropped from her hand.
He gripped her, but it was like struggling with a wildcat. Her supple,
chain-encased body twisted with mad frenzy, naked arms and legs
thrashing, her bare knee digging into his stomach. Her blazing eyes
raged at him without a spark of fear, only hate and fury, as he grabbed
her wrists and held her.
"Stop it!" Clark said roughly. "No one's going to hurt you."
The girl could not understand his English, of course. But she hissed
snarling words that, to his amazement, he _could_ partly understand.
They were in a language that seemed much akin to Arabic, which he knew;
not the same at all, but so similar that that tongue might have been an
ancestor to Arabic in the dim past.
"Dogs of Reds!" she hissed. "What magic did you use to slay my men?
Give me my sword, and I'll face it!"
"There was no magic," Clark told her in Arabic. "We killed your men
because you tried to kill us. We are not Reds."
She understood, though his modern Arabic must have had a strange sound
to her ears. But her fighting, tigress face did not relax; her chiseled
nostrils flared with fury.
"You seek to trick me with lies!" she raged. "Even now your hearts are
glad that you can take me prisoner to Thargo. Well will he reward you
for using your magic to capture Lurain, daughter of Kimor."
"What the devil is she ravin' about?" Mike Shinn asked eagerly. "You
seem to get it, chief."
"She thinks we belong to that crimson city," Clark said rapidly,
holding the struggling girl. "Undoubtedly she and the other
black-armored ones are from a race or city enemy to the red city."
Then he turned back to the raging girl and told her emphatically,
"Lurain, listen to the truth. We are not of the red city or of this
land at all. We are men from outside the mountains."
"Lie upon lie!" snarled Lurain. "All men know that no living thing can
cross those mountains, whose very touch is death. Though you wield
strange weapons and wear strange garb, I know you are Thargo's dogs,
seeking like your evil master to do the thing unholy, to drink of the
forbidden lake."
"The lake?" cried Clark Stannard, his heart leaping excitedly. "You
mean the Lake of Life? Where does it lie? Is it in the red city?"
"You know well where the lake lies, blasphemer," said Lurain, staring
in cold, bitter hate. "These many generations have you and your
forebears sought to win to it and drink its forbidden waters."
"By heaven, the Lake of Life--some kind of lake at least--does exist
here!" Clark told the others excitedly. "And this girl knows where. If
we can find out----"
Link Wilson's guns leaped suddenly into his hands. They all spun
around. From the west, the sound of many galloping horses came to their
ears. Lurain's blue eyes blazed in soaring hope.
"The men we routed must have come back with others!" Clark cried.
"Quick, into the brush."
"Too late," twanged Ephraim Quell.
For these horsemen were already in sight of them, a full hundred,
galloping in a solid troop from the direction of the crimson city. And
these men wore _red_ armor, instead of black. At first sight of them,
the hope died in Lurain's face.
The Red horsemen dashed up and at a shouted order from their leader,
split into a thin line that encircled Clark and his band. Then they sat
their horses, their swords raised ominously.
"Shall we give it to them?" snarled Blacky.
"Not yet," Clark commanded swiftly. "There are too many of them for us
to rout, this time. Wait--they're not attacking."
* * * * *
The leader of the Red horsemen had dismounted and was approaching. He
was a man of about thirty years, with a smooth white face and cunning
eyes. As his gaze fell on the girl in Clark's grasp, exultation leaped
into his eyes. Wonder and doubt replaced it as he stared at the grim,
tense little band of six adventurers.
"Who be you, stranger?" he asked in the same vague Arabic tongue the
girl had used. "You are not of our city of K'Lamm; that I know. Neither
can you be of Dordona, or you would not have slain these Blacks that
lie here."
"How do you know we killed them?"
"We know," said the Red leader firmly. "Guards on our city wall heard
strange, sharp sounds from this spot and saw Black spies riding away in
terror from you. That is why we came out to investigate.
"I am Dral, third captain in the army of the great king Thargo," he
added. "Tell me, strangers, from whence came you? And how did you kill
these Blacks, when you have no swords?"
"We come from beyond the mountains," Clark said in hard tones. "We
killed the Blacks with the weapons in our hands."
Dral glanced at the pistols and his smile became mocking. "Truly, those
do not look like weapons."
"Yet they are, and terrible ones," Clark said grimly. "Watch!"
A big, red-winged bird had just alighted on a near-by bush. Clark
raised his pistol and fired. The bird fell to the ground.
At the report, Dral and his men recoiled, and the horses plunged and
reared wildly. Dral's eyes were wide, not mocking now, when he came
back to face Clark.
"Truly, they _are_ weapons of power," he muttered, swift, inscrutable
thoughts racing excitedly behind his eyes. Then with greatly increased
respect in his manner, he informed Clark, "Thargo, king of K'Lamm,
would welcome you, strangers. Indeed, he would welcome anyone who
captured for us, as you did, this wildcat daughter of our old enemy,
Kimor."
His gaze flickered with hate toward Lurain's contemptuous face as he
spoke. Clark did not like that look.
"We did not capture the girl for you or Thargo," Clark said sharply.
"She is _our_ prisoner, not yours."
"We could take her from you, strangers," said Dral, flushing in anger.
"Remember the bird that just died," Clark told him pointedly. "Are you
sure you could take her from us?"
Again doubt and other stronger emotions struggled in Dral's cunning
eyes. Clark could see clearly that the man was fearful of the pistols,
but that he was utterly determined to take Lurain a prisoner to his
lord. Presently he smiled and said smoothly:
"Be it so; the girl is your prisoner. Will you come with us--and your
prisoner--into K'Lamm?"
It was Clark's turn to feel doubt. Somehow, he did not want to take the
girl, snarling, fierce little tigress though she was, into the city of
her deadly enemies. But he knew that he could not release her either,
now that the Red warriors were on the scene.
As long as she was his prisoner, Clark felt, he could guard her safely.
And he wanted very much to see this Thargo who ruled the crimson city
K'Lamm. It seemed that his only hope of reaching the mysterious Lake of
Life lay in the Red warriors.
"Will Thargo be willing to help me win to the Lake of Life?" he asked
Dral bluntly.
Sudden triumph flashed into Dral's eyes at the question. But the Red
captain said quickly:
"Thargo desires above all things to attain the shining waters of the
lake. For ages, indeed, we of K'Lamm have sought to drink of those
waters of immortality, and have only been prevented by the dogs of
Blacks, the people of rotting Dordona."
"Aye," broke in Lurain fiercely, "and never will you blasphemers reach
the sacred lake while one man is alive in Dordona. And even though we
all die, the Guardians will keep you from it."
Clark began to understand. Dordona was the city of the Blacks,
somewhere inside this giant crater. And the Lake of Life was either at
or near Dordona, for the Blacks had apparently constituted themselves
the defenders of the sacred waters.
That decided Clark. There was, obviously, no hope of reaching the
lake by going to the Black city. And if these warriors of K'Lamm
wanted the same thing as he did, to reach the lake, he would string
along with them, for the time being, at least. Even though they too
seemed to believe in the superstition that the lake's waters conferred
immortality, they might make good allies.
"We go to K'Lamm with you," Clark told Dral curtly. "But remember--the
girl is our own prisoner."
"It is so agreed, strangers," Dral said in quick assent, though his
eyes hid a gleam.
He shouted an order, and horses were brought forward, their riders
mounting behind other warriors. The girl's hands were bound and she was
placed in the saddle in front of Clark Stannard.
* * * * *
Link Wilson uttered a long sigh as he vaulted lightly into the queer,
high-pommeled saddle of his mount.
"Sure feels good to fork a horse again," the lank Texan said, his eyes
alight.
Clark told them briefly what had happened, and of his decision. Blacky
Cain nodded his predatory face in agreement.
"Looks like we're heading into the hangout of the local big-shot," the
gangster rasped; "but what the hell--if he gets tough, we can always
shoot our way out."
"Forward!" cried Dral.
With wild yells, the whole troop of Red warriors urged their horses
forward. Clark and his five men rode in the van with Dral, heading
straight west toward the crimson towers and roofs.
Lurain rode stiff and unbending in front of Clark, and the glimpses he
got of her chiseled white face showed it proud, fierce and unwavering.
The girl knew she was on the way into the stronghold of her bitterest
enemies, but she showed no sign of fear. She might have been a queen
riding to a triumph, so straight and proud she sat. Involuntary respect
for the little wildcat stirred in Clark Stannard, even though he was
still savagely angry at her merciless attempt to kill them.
Now they galloped, with thunder of thudding hoofs, the Red warriors
bending eagerly forward in their saddles. Link Wilson rode like a
centaur, the Texan drinking in the wind, his reckless face lit with
pleasure. Blacky Cain rode joltingly with harsh face fixed on the city
ahead, and Quell and Mike Shinn and Lieutenant Morrow were behind.
Full before them in the dying blaze of the red sunset lay the great
Red City, crimson roofs and domes and walls standing out in blinding,
blood-like splendor. Gardens and pasturing herds lay outside its walls.
Somewhere in here, Clark thought, was Thargo, the king who desired
like himself to attain to the mysterious Lake of Life. He must be
careful--careful!
Then they were right to the city, thundering in a rushing troop through
its wide-open red metal gates, the hooves of their steeds clashing now
on a red stone pavement, riding with their prisoner and their fierce
escort, right into the crimson city K'Lamm.
_6. The King of K'Lamm_
The city K'Lamm was circular in outline and more than two miles in
diameter, surrounded by a forty-foot wall. The wall and buildings and
cobbled streets were all of quarried stone, stained bright red by
some secret of pigmentation. The buildings were mostly flat-roofed,
one-story ones, shops and stalls and dwellings. The inhabitants were
swarming excitedly out of them as the cavalcade rode down the street.
Clark saw that at least half the men wore the crimson armor and the
long swords--it was a strongly military population. The helmeted
warriors, the simple architecture and weapons, all looked medieval to
Clark, as though the civilization of this isolated, prisoned people had
not progressed further than the Middle Ages of the outside world. There
were many women, wearing extremely scanty white tunics that came only
to their knees and left half their white breasts bare.
"Say, there's some good-lookin' dames in this burg," said Mike Shinn,
the prizefighter's eyes sweeping the crowd.
"And there are a lot of hard-looking warriors here too," Clark reminded
him grimly. "Hands off, Mike."
"What the devil, we could put the blast on this mob easy," sneered
Blacky Cain. "There isn't a gat in the whole crowd."
The men and women of K'Lamm seemed inspired with savage fury as they
saw the girl prisoner in black armor, in front of Clark.
"Death to Lurain of Dordona!" they yelled, shaking swords and fists in
imprecation. "Death and torture for the Dordonan wench!"
Lurain looked neither to right nor left. Again that strong, unwilling
respect for the girl stirred in Clark Stannard.
"You are still _our_ prisoner," he leaned forward to tell her. "They
shall not take you from us."
"I do not fear them--nor you," snarled Lurain without turning. "The day
comes when this Red spawn go to their doom."
At the end of the broad avenue down which they rode loomed the largest
building in the city. It was an hexagonal scarlet tower, blunt
and truncated, a hundred feet high, a squat, ugly structure. They
dismounted in front of it, and the Red captain Dral strode to them.
"The king Thargo has been already informed of your coming and anxiously
awaits you," he informed Clark smoothly.
"Lead the way," Clark said curtly. "Our prisoner goes with us." And as
they started forward he muttered to his men, "Keep close together and
don't make a move unless we're attacked."
They followed Dral into the building, past red-armored guards and down
corridors. Dral clanked in the lead, Clark following with the girl, her
dark head high, his five men rolling belligerently along and staring
about with frank curiosity.
They emerged into a large, round banqueting-hall with red stone walls,
lit by shafts of sunset from slit-like windows. All around it were
tables, empty now except for one raised on a dais. There alone sat a
man in the red helmet and armor, a great jewel blazing on his breast.
Behind him hovered a wrinkled-faced, withered old man with sly eyes.
"The strangers and the captive, great king," announced Dral as he
paused and bowed to the sitting man. The man stood up.
"You are welcome, strangers," Thargo told Clark. "Yes, more than
welcome, when you bring as captive Lurain of Dordona."
Thargo, king of K'Lamm, was a big man. Well over six feet he towered,
and his shoulders were as broad as Mike Shinn's. His shining red armor
well set off that towering, great-thewed figure.
There was power in his face, not only the arrogant consciousness of
utter authority, but hard power innate in the man himself. It was in
the square, merciless mouth, in the flaring nostrils, strongest of all
in the black, penetrating eyes behind which little devil-lights of
mockery and amused contempt seemed to dance.
"Be ready for trouble," Clark muttered to his men. "It may pop right
this minute."
For Dral, the Red captain, was now making a respectful report to his
lord. And Thargo stiffened as he heard.
"So you claim the Black girl as your prisoner?" he said to Clark, his
eyes narrowing.
Clark nodded curtly, "We do. We took her, and she is ours."
"Now why, strangers from outside, did you penetrate this land?" Thargo
asked thoughtfully. "No others from outside have ever crossed the death
mountains and entered. What object brought you here?"
"In the great world outside," Clark told him, "there are legends of a
strange, shining lake in this land. We came in search of that lake, and
once we find it, will return with some of its waters to our own land."
"The legends you heard were true, strangers," said Thargo, with changed
expression. "That shining Lake of Life does exist in this land, but
not here, not at K'Lamm. For many generations we of K'Lamm have been
striving also to win to that lake. It may be," he added craftily,
"that you and I should become allies. Dral tells me your weapons are
strange and powerful. Together we would have no trouble in winning to
the Lake of Life."
"Never will you win to the Lake, Red dog!" lashed Lurain's silver voice
suddenly. "Even if you conquered us of Dordona, there are still--the
Guardians."
"The Guardians?" echoed Thargo, then uttered a deep laugh. "Why, the
Guardians are but a myth, a legend. For ages that myth has kept you of
Dordona from the lake, but it shall not keep us. No!"
His nostrils were flaring with abrupt passion, his black eyes suddenly
all devil. Clark seemed to glimpse in the man's wolfish face a
long-repressed, eating ambition, a desire of superhuman intensity,
baffled and raging. Then Thargo smiled smoothly at him.
"We shall talk of these things later, strangers. Meanwhile, you are
welcome in K'Lamm. Tonight we banquet here in your honor, and until
then the finest rooms in this palace are yours."
"Our prisoner goes with us," Clark said coolly.
"Your prisoner goes with you, of course," Thargo agreed smoothly. "But
guard the little wildcat well, I warn you. I do not think she could
escape from this palace"--a gleam of mirth crossed his eyes--"no, I do
not think that, but she might do harm if not guarded.
"Dral will conduct you to your rooms," he finished courteously. "Until
tonight, strangers."
Clark bowed curtly. Then, taking Lurain's tensed arm, he followed the
suave captain out of the great banquet hall. His five men strode after
him, and Dral led the way up a broad stone stair to an upper floor of
stone-walled corridors and rooms. He conducted them into a suite of
four large rooms.
* * * * *
Tapestries depicting combats of red and black-armored soldiers hung on
the walls, and lay on the floor. There were chairs and couches, and a
series of great windows whose unshuttered openings looked out on the
flat red roofs of K'Lamm, gleaming in the sunset. Dral bowed and left
them, closing the door. The girl Lurain went over to the window and
stood, a slim figure, looking silently out over K'Lamm.
"Say, what was all the powwow about?" Blacky Cain asked Clark. "This
moll seemed to get the big-shot's goat."
Clark told them briefly what had passed between him and Thargo.
"As far as I can see," Clark finished, "our best course is to play
along with Thargo until we find out where we stand. He wants to get
to the lake, that's evident--he believes that stuff about its waters
conferring immortality. It's also evident that Lurain's people, the
Dordonans, prevent him from reaching the lake and would prevent us
also. Our best chance to reach this Lake of Life may be to throw in
with Thargo."
"Why didn't you give up this girl to the Red king, then?" asked
Lieutenant Morrow. "It would put us in solid with him."
"But Thargo would likely have had her killed or tortured," Clark
objected. "It's plain he'd like nothing better."
"Well, what if he did?" shrugged the young ex-army officer
indifferently. And Morrow's face was bitter with memory as he added,
"Keeping her our own prisoner may wreck everything--it won't be the
first time a woman's done it."
"Why, ye heartless scut," said Mike Shinn wrathfully, "would ye give up
a spunky girl like that to be killed?"
"We're not giving her up," Clark said decisively. "I want to question
her about the Lake of Life."
He advanced toward Lurain, and the Dordonan girl turned and met his
gaze defiantly, with hot, stormy blue eyes.
"Lurain, just where is the Lake of Life?" Clark asked. "If you told us
that, it may be we'd let you escape from here."
"Would you?" asked Lurain doubtfully, coming closer to him. Clark
nodded quickly, in affirmation.
"Yes, we would. Can you tell us how to reach the lake?"
Lurain came so close that the haunting perfume of her blue-black hair
was in his nostrils, her troubled eyes raised.
"I cannot tell the secrets of the sacred lake," she said slowly,
worriedly. "But I can tell you--_this_!"
And her hand suddenly jerked out the sheath-knife at Clark's belt, and
stabbed it with lightning speed at his heart.
_7. Thargo's Treachery_
Instinct can save itself where the momentary delay of reason would be
fatal. It was not the first time in his life that Clark Stannard had
seen the swift deadly flicker of steel licking toward his heart. The
sight exploded his brain and body into instant action.
He threw himself staggeringly backward, and the bleak steel whizzed
down through the front of his shirt, scoring his breast like a
white-hot wire. Before Lurain could turn the blade and strike upward,
Clark's brown hand grabbed her wrist. He twisted it, and was not
gentle. There was a cold, savage anger in his brain. The knife
clattered to the floor from the twisted hand. Lurain's blue eyes blazed
out of a paper-white face, but she uttered no cry of pain or fear, hate
throbbing from her.
"So you'd trick me, would you?" spat Clark harshly. "You'd kill me to
keep me from reaching your sacred lake, eh?"
"Yes, I would!" Lurain's voice cracked like a silver whip. "You
who would become Thargo's ally, who would help him and the other
blasphemers of K'Lamm who lust for the lake--you deserve death!"
"I warned you," Lieutenant Morrow told Clark bitterly. "All women are
alike--just playing you for a sucker."
"Say, the dame's got nerve!" said Blacky Cain, respect and admiration
in the gangster's pale eyes.
"She sure has," grinned Link Wilson. "Reminds me of a little Mex down
in Agua Prieta who tried to knife me one night, when----"
"Hell, we can do without autobiography," rasped Clark. "Bring cords and
we'll tie her hands--she's not safe unbound."
When they had finished securing the bonds around Lurain's wrists, the
Dordonan girl sat and glared at them fiercely.
"Someone has to stay here and watch her while we're down at this
banquet," Clark declared. "Not only because she might escape, but
because I don't trust Thargo too far. Quell, will you stay?"
"I'll watch her," Ephraim Quell nodded dourly. "Don't figger I'd care
much for the goings-on down there, anyway."
Night fell quickly. From the window, K'Lamm stretched a mass of dark,
flat roofs in the starlight, with windows and doors spilling red
torchlight. Somber against the climbing stars bulked the looming,
mighty barrier of the Mountains of Death.
Clark and his men shaved, brushed their clothes, and made what
improvements they could in their appearance, by the light of the
flickering torches servants had brought. Then Dral appeared, his long
sword clanking on the stone floor as he entered.
"The lord Thargo awaits you at the banquet, strangers," he said, his
eyes flickering toward the bound girl.
* * * * *
The great, round banquet hall flared brightly with ruddy torchlight
when Clark Stannard and his four companions entered it after Dral. Now
the tables that ran around the room were laden heavily with cooked
meats and fruits and big glass flagons of black and yellow wines. At
them sat more than a hundred men and women, the nobles and aristocrats
of feudal, medieval K'Lamm.
The men wore the red metal-mesh tunics and their swords, even at table.
The women wore chitons of red stuffs much like the garments of the
women they had seen in the city, but richer, embroidered with gold and
jewels. Their upper breasts and arms were bare as in the old Cretan
costume. They drank and laughed with the male feasters. But they and
all in the hall fell silent, staring in eager curiosity at these five
swaggering strangers who first in all the history of this land had
entered from outside the deadly mountains.
"Welcome to our feast, strangers," Thargo greeted in his powerful
voice. "Here are seats for you, and here are wine and meats and women,
for we count you as ourselves who are, we hope, to be our allies in the
great quest we soon shall make."
The Red king's face was frank and open, the sincerity of his greeting
warming. But, Clark wondered, was there not a suppressed gleam in his
black eyes, a quirk of secret amusement?
Clark took the backless metal chair held out for him, beside Thargo
himself. His four followers were distributed further along the table.
On the other side of Clark sat a languorous beauty introduced to him
as Yala, the sister of Thargo. Despite his inward alertness, Clark
could not but be moved to admiration by the coal-black hair, smooth
ivory skin and audaciously revealed rounded figure of this princess of
K'Lamm. Her velvety black eyes met his curiously.
But he turned toward Thargo. He felt that the time had come to learn
what he could of the mysteries surrounding him.
"You still wish us, then, to become your allies in an attempt to reach
the Lake of Life?" he asked bluntly.
"Very much I wish it," Thargo avowed frankly. "You carry weapons of a
power unknown here, and they will make certain our victory; though I am
sure that even without them, we still could crush Dordona."
"Where is the lake?" Clark demanded directly.
"It lies beneath us," Thargo answered.
"Beneath us?"
"Aye," the Red king nodded. "Deep beneath this prisoned land, under
leagues of solid rock, exists a great cavern, and in that cavern lies
the shining Lake of Life."
"Then how in the world can you hope to reach it?" exploded Clark,
stiffening.
"There is only one way down to that cavern of the lake," Thargo told
him, "It is a pit, or shaft, whose mouth is in the city of our enemies,
Dordona, near the eastern edge of this land. The river that flows
through the mountains runs across this whole land, and drops into that
pit.
"Long ago," Thargo continued, "our ancestors came into this land from
the outside world. They climbed over the mountains, for at that time,
so legend says, it was not death to tread the mountains, as it is now.
They explored the land, and found the pit into which the river falls,
and went down that pit into the cavern where lies the Lake of Life.
And they learned that if they drank those waters they would become
immortal, but they were forbidden to drink of them.
"They were forbidden, they said, by strange, unhuman beings who
dwelled down in the cavern of the lake and guarded its waters of
immortality. These beings, the Guardians, bade those exploring humans
to return to the surface, and never again come down to drink of the
waters, since that was an unholy thing. So the men returned in fear to
the surface, obeying the command. And legend says that the Guardians
then cast a deadly force on the mountains around this land, which still
invests them, so that no more men might enter this land in future.
"The people who were already within this land founded a city around the
mouth of that shaft to the underworld. They called the city Dordona
and over the mouth of the pit they built a temple. They considered
it blasphemy for any to think of descending the pit to the Lake of
Immortality and, in their superstition, they slew any who dared to try
it. For they were in great fear of the Guardians they believed dwelling
below, though none but the first explorers had ever seen those beings.
"But as generations passed, age after age, rebellion grew up in the
city Dordona. Many of its people said, 'Why should we die when beneath
our feet lie the waters of immortality? Who are the Guardians, to
forbid us the lake? Let us not allow them to monopolize the waters
of immortality longer; let us go down and drink of them whether they
permit it or not, so that we may become undying.'"
Thargo's fist clenched, his eyes glittered, as he continued, "Thus
spake the rebellious ones in Dordona! They sought by force to enter
the pit and descend to the lake. But most of the Dordonans were still
swayed by superstitious fears of the mysterious Guardians. They put
down the rebels by force, prevented them from entering the pit. After
that, the rebels deserted Dordona and came here to the western edge of
this land and founded a new city, this city of K'Lamm.
"And ever since then, we of K'Lamm have desired to go back and conquer
the Dordonans and go down the pit to the Lake of Life. We had not the
strength, at first. But during past generations, more and more people
have deserted from Dordona to our city, coming to believe as we do that
it is folly to grow old and die when immortality is in our grasp. So
that now, stranger, we of K'Lamm are powerful enough at last to attack
Dordona, crush the superstitious Blacks, force our way down to the
shining lake, and drink its waters and achieve immortality!"
"You actually believe, then," Clark Stannard said incredulously, "that
the waters of the lake would confer immortality?"
"I am sure of it!" Thargo said, his eyes flashing. "If we drink of them
we shall never die, for they contain the pure essence of life itself.
_That_ fact, our exploring ancestors were sure about."
"Yet you're not afraid of meeting the legended Guardians, if you
penetrate to the lake?" Clark asked curiously.
Thargo laughed contemptuously. "The Guardians do not frighten us, for
we do not think they still watch down there by the lake. No man has
seen them for ages, and even the few who saw them ages ago were not
slain by them. I think that even if the Guardians still exist down
there, they will not be able to stop us."
Here was a frank, unfearing skeptic, Clark thought. It was odd that
while Thargo was so skeptical of the dreaded Guardians, he still
believed in the impossible virtues of the shining lake.
"Why," Clark asked bluntly, "do you want our help, if you have enough
forces to overwhelm Dordona, as you say?"
"We want it," Thargo said frankly, "not because we need your
help--easily can we overcome Dordona--but because we do not want you
_against_ us, strangers, with your strange, powerful weapons. And for
reward for joining us," the Red king added, "you shall drink the waters
of the Lake of Life with us. You will become immortal, strangers, as we
will."
* * * * *
Thargo's black eyes flashed with strange light, his fist clenched
tight, his voice pregnant with emotion.
"To be immortal--think what that will mean! To stride the world
undying, generation after generation, feared and worshipped by the
races that continue to die! By the sun, once I have drunk those waters
of undying life, I will go forth from this prisoned land, will rule----"
He stopped abruptly, glancing at Clark with narrowed eyes. Then he
continued in a smooth, lower tone.
"But what is your answer, stranger, now that you know the situation? Do
you join forces with us to attack Dordona?"
Clark hesitated. A strong instinct told him not to commit himself.
"I think we will join you," he said slowly, "but before I give my word
on it, I must speak with my followers. If we do join you, our reward is
to be as much of the shining waters as we wish to take."
"Has that Dordonan wench Lurain tried to turn you against me?" Thargo
asked suspiciously. "Has she endeavored to make you an ally of her
doomed people?"
"She tried to kill me, but an hour ago," Clark said tartly. "There's no
danger of my becoming her ally."
Yet it seemed to him that smoldering suspicion persisted in Thargo's
eyes. Then the Red king laughed and exclaimed:
"But we will talk further of this in the morning. We neglect the
feast."
He raised his big hand in a signal. From an alcove suddenly thrummed
music, weird harmonies of plucked strings. It throbbed louder, wilder,
and a score of supple girls in shimmering veils rushed lightly to the
center of the torchlit hall.
They began to dance in the space between the tables, swaying, whirling
and undulating to the barbaric rush of the music, their white limbs
gleaming through the gossamer of the swirling veils.
[Illustration: "She whirled and undulated to the barbaric rush of the
music."]
"Whoopee!" shouted Mike Shinn happily over the wild music, from down
the table. "This is better than a night-club."
"Don't bother me, Mike," drawled Link Wilson, his tanned reckless face
bending toward a laughing girl beside him. "I'm doin' right fine in
sign-language with this _muchacha_."
"I'll say this beats that damned jungle, anyway," Clark heard Blacky
Cain saying with a rasping chuckle.
But Lieutenant Morrow sat drinking and staring moodily, with bitter
eyes, at the whirling, weaving girls.
"You do not drink, lord from outside?" a soft voice reproached Clark.
It was Yala, the sister of Thargo, bending toward him, her slender
white fingers extending a goblet of the black, thick wine. "Is our wine
then so poor beside that of the outside world?"
Clark took the goblet, tasted the liquor. It was heady stuff, potent,
strangely scented. Yala's languorous eyes approved as he drained the
cup. An alert servant refilled it from a flagon.
"Aye, drink all!" boomed Thargo's powerful voice over the music. "Drink
to the day that is almost here, the day when we of K'Lamm win at last
to the shining waters that will make us all undying."
"To the day!" shouted the excited, half-intoxicated feasters, draining
the goblets and setting them down with a crash.
Clark Stannard felt sudden heady exaltation as he set down the goblet
for the second time. The wine sang in his veins and suddenly life
seemed wild, sweet, thrilling. It was good to have done with the old
and outworn things of the world he had known, to sit here with this
company in feast.
They were a good crowd, he thought warmly, as he drained the goblet
again. They were making his men welcome, for now Mike Shinn was
standing up and bellowing an Irish song, and they were laughing and
applauding. Morrow was drinking heavily, silently, and the lank Texan
had his arm around the girl next to him, and only Blacky Cain's dark,
predatory face still remained watchful as the gangster sat there. What
the deuce was Blacky so watchful about?--everyone here was their friend.
Thargo's powerful face had a smile of complete friendliness on it.
Damned good scout, Thargo--by heaven, he and his men would help Thargo
conquer those superstitious Dordonans! And the girl Yala swaying
languorously closer to him, perfumed white shoulders and breasts rising
out of her red chiton like a great lily, brooding sweetness of her
black eyes making Clark's swimming senses reel!
"Are many men of the outer world as hard and handsome of face as you,
lord from outside?" she whispered.
"That may be," Clark laughed, "but of this I'm sure--no women of that
outer world are as beautiful as you, princess."
Her eyes were melting as she swayed closer, and slender satin fingers
touched and twined about his in electrical contact.
Then as he bent unsteadily toward Yala, Clark just glimpsed an upward,
meaning flash of her dark eyes, directed at Thargo. It chilled
instantly through the winy haze around Clark's brain.
Danger here! shouted an alarmed voice inside him. He realized suddenly
how near he was to intoxication. That wine--he'd already tossed off
three or four goblets of it. And Yala was proffering him another beaker
of the black stuff, with a soft smile.
"Wine brings gracious compliments from you, lord from outside. I would
hear more--so drink."
Clark took the goblet. But now his half-hazy brain raced. Yala was
trying to get him drunk, that was certain, and from the glance he had
intercepted, he knew it was at Thargo's orders.
Nevertheless he took the goblet. But as he raised it, Clark feigned
a far greater dazedness than he felt, letting his gaze wander dully,
making his tongue thick when he spoke.
"Shouldn't drink any more," he muttered thickly to the leaning
princess. "Doesn't take much--to knock me out."
"But you do not wish, surely, to deprive me of further compliments?"
Yala's red, ripe mouth pouted bewitchingly.
Clark laughed unsteadily, though inwardly he was cold and alert.
"Never--never say no to a lady. Here's to your eyes!"
He drained the goblet. The heady wine made his half-numbed senses
spin, but he resolutely kept his head. Yet he feigned now a complete
intoxication, hurled the glass away with a drunken laugh.
"Yala, I could give you compliments all night," he said maudlinly.
"You're most--most beautiful woman--ever lived."
As his eyelids pretended to droop, Clark caught again that significant
glance from the girl to her brother. Then she was leaning, her warm
breath whispering in his ears.
"Would you rather tell me those things where there are not so many to
listen, lord from outside?" she murmured.
"Sure, that's what we need--a little more quiet," Clark said sleepily.
"My head, too--feels funny----"
"Come with me," she whispered softly. "I will take you where it is
quiet--and where you can tell me all those things."
Her soft hand under his elbow impelled him to his feet. Clark swayed
unsteadily, blinking owlishly over the torchlit hall and the noisy,
riotous feasters. His dulled gaze was really keenly alert. He perceived
that Shinn and Link Wilson were at the height of merriment with their
Red neighbors, and that Morrow was still drinking heavily. But Blacky
Cain was still alert, could be depended on to watch the others.
* * * * *
None of the feasters, in the din of laughter, clinking goblets and
shouting voices, noticed as Clark Stannard stumbled out of the hall
with Yala half supporting him. Yet Clark glimpsed Thargo looking keenly
after them.
He stumbled with the princess of K'Lamm down shadowy stone halls, and
finally into a great chamber which breathed of femininity. Silken
hangings of yellow were on the walls, in the soft light of low-burning
torches. Across the room was a low, soft silken couch, and above it a
great window looked across the starlit roofs of K'Lamm.
Yala spoke a few soft words, and the two submissive-looking girls who
had hurried forward, hastily withdrew. The Red princess led Clark to
the couch, and as he sat down unsteadily, looking heavily about, she
poured more of the black wine from a flagon in the room.
She drank also, her dark eyes looking over the rim of the glass with an
expression that, despite himself, stirred his blood. Then she held the
glass to his lips, her fingertips caressing his cheek.
"Drink with me to our--friendship," she murmured.
Clark drank. His brain seemed to float inside his skull as the
additional alcohol leaped into his blood, but every fiber in him was
taut and alert. He blinked at Yala as though she was hard for him to
see. She came temptingly closer to him.
"Does the wine make me look--more beautiful?" she asked provocatively.
Her arms went softly around his neck.
"Don't need wine for that," muttered Clark. He set his lips against her
half-opened ones, his hands tightening on her bare, perfumed shoulders.
He knew the kiss was as feigned on her part as on his own. But for all
that, it was none the less wildly thrilling. Then as she drew back a
little from his embrace, eyes searching his dazed-looking face, Yala
asked him seductively:
"Lord, tell me--am I more beautiful than the Dordonan girl you took
captive--Lurain?"
"Much--much more beautiful," stammered Clark, his eyelids drooping.
"She's just--little wildcat."
"Has Lurain asked you and your men to help Dordona in the coming war?"
Yala asked him swiftly. "Has she made any offers to get you to ally
yourselves with Dordona?"
_Now_, Clark knew suddenly, he had discovered the reason for this
subtle temptation by Yala. Thargo was suspicious! Suspicious that Clark
might have agreed with the Dordonan girl to aid her people, that he
might be intending to betray K'Lamm! Thargo had had this girl, one
capable of tempting an angel, get him intoxicated to question him.
"Lurain has not asked me to help Dordona," Clark said thickly, his eyes
closing, his body swaying sleepily against Yala. "I--wouldn't listen
to her if she did. The Dordonans she led tried to kill me and my men.
We're--going to help Thargo conquer their city."
He heard the hiss of Yala's indrawn breath. Then she murmured softly,
"You are tired, lord from outside. You must rest."
He let himself fall like a log onto the soft couch as she lowered him.
Then he heard Yala stand up quickly. She bent over him as he lay with
eyes closed, her breath warm on his face. He breathed in long snores,
pretending heavy, drunken sleep.
Satisfied, Yala went to the door of the chamber and uttered a low call.
Almost at once, Clark heard the tramp of heavier feet entering the
chamber, two pairs of them. The first voice that spoke was Thargo's. He
guessed the Red king had been waiting outside.
"You heard?" Yala was saying swiftly. "He is safely on our side--he
will have nothing to do with Dordona."
"Yes, I heard," Thargo said. "I was suspicious because he would not
give up the Dordonan princess to us. But no doubt he is keeping the
girl for himself, simply because she is pretty."
"That half-boy fighting cat!" said Yala scornfully. "What would any man
want with her?"
The voice of Thargo's companion interrupted. It was an age-cracked,
ominous voice Clark guessed to be that of the withered old counsellor
he had seen with Thargo when he had first met the Red king.
"Better to slay all these strangers tonight, by surprize, and make
sure," he warned. "We of K'Lamm have more than enough force to conquer
Dordona and win to the lake. We do not need the strangers' help."
"No, we will not slay them, Shama--not yet," Thargo said
authoritatively. "Their weapons are powerful, from what Dral says.
They might kill many of us before we slew them all, and that would be
bad for the minds of our people at this time when we are on the very
verge of our long-planned attack on Dordona. Besides, why not make use
of these strangers to make our conquest even easier?
"This is what we shall do," he continued in a hard, rapid voice. "Four
days from now, as we have planned, we ride to attack Dordona, and the
strangers go with us. In the attack on the Black city, we will put them
in the forefront. As soon as we have won Dordona and our way down to
the Lake of Life lies clear and open, _then_ we shall turn suddenly on
the strangers and kill them all."
_8. The Fight at the Gate_
It was all Clark Stannard could do to keep his body from stiffening
betrayingly as he lay in pretended drunken sleep, listening to those
calmly treacherous words. Blind fury burned in him as he heard Thargo's
callous plan to make use of him, then dispose of him. Yet he managed to
preserve his appearance of intoxicated stupor. His muscles tensed as he
heard Thargo's strong step come over to the couch, and he knew that the
Red king was looking down at him.
"This drunken fool!" said Thargo contemptuously. "If he is a sample of
the men of the outside world, they will not be hard for us to rule,
once we have drunk of the lake and are immortal."
"Be not so sure," warned the old counsellor, Shama. "This man and his
comrades have courage and cunning, or they could not have penetrated
the death mountains no men ever came through before."
"He was not cunning enough," Thargo said scornfully, "to prevent a
woman's eyes from making a sot of him. You did well what I asked, my
sister. In fact, the task did not seem distasteful to you."
"Perhaps not," Yala said with a soft laugh. "Fool he may be, but this
man is--different. Until he and his men ride with your forces to
Dordona four days hence, I think to find him amusing."
"That is your affair," Thargo said indifferently. "Best get him back
to his chambers now before his men miss him. Shama and I return to the
feast."
Clark heard the ruthless plotter and the aged counsellor leave. Then
Yala bent over him, holding a pungent liquid to his nose and shaking
him softly.
"Wake, lord from outside," she said tenderly. "You must not stay here
longer--my brother would be angry."
Clark was careful to awake slowly, blinking and rubbing his eyes
dazedly. "More wine," he muttered thickly. "Got to have more wine--so I
can tell you--how beautiful you are----"
"You shall have opportunity for that in the next few days," Yala
promised with a provocative smile. "You had best return to your
chambers now and sleep, my lord. It seems that you are almost overcome
by my beauty--or the wine!"
She went to the door and called, as Clark stumbled to his feet. A
warrior in the crimson armor answered quickly.
"This soldier will conduct you to your chambers," Yala told him. "Until
tomorrow, lord from outside."
Her fingers clung warmly to his in caressing promise. Clark nodded
dazedly and staggered out into the hall. He stumbled with his guide by
shadowy, torchlit corridors, up a stair to the upper floor. The warrior
took him to the door of their chambers, bowed and left.
But Clark's apparently owlish gaze took in the fact that now there
were a score of armored guards posted unobtrusively along the corridor
outside their chambers. That showed that Thargo was still taking no
chances--and that was going to make things difficult.
* * * * *
Ephraim Quell looked up in surprize when Clark stumbled into the
torchlit rooms and slammed the door. Quell's eyes ran over Clark's
disordered hair and flushed face, and the girl Lurain, sitting taut as
a trapped tigress in a chair, watched with bitter contempt.
"There's a Book that says, 'Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging,'"
twanged Quell, his bony face condemnatory. "Figger you might ought to
have read that, before you went down there."
"I'm not drunk," Clark rasped. "But I've found out a lot and it adds up
to the total news that our lives are not worth a plugged nickel if we
stay around here."
Quell jumped to his feet in alarm.
"Go down and get the others up here," Clark told him. "Don't appear too
urgent about it--but _get_ them!"
Ephraim Quell nodded tightly, and went out of the room. Clark Stannard
went rapidly across the room to Lurain.
Clark's mind, racing at top speed ever since he had discovered Thargo's
contemplated treachery, had hit upon a desperate plan. It was a
hazardous one but the only one, as far as he could see, that would give
him and his men a chance to reach the Lake of Life now.
To stay longer in K'Lamm would merely allow Thargo to make pawns of
them and then kill them. There was but one other possible course of
action by which they might win to the lake.
Lurain's blue eyes blazed hatred as Clark approached. To her amazement,
he cut her bonds.
"Lurain, I must talk with you and talk fast," he said swiftly. "I've
discovered that Thargo intends to kill me and my men, as soon as we've
helped him conquer your city of Dordona."
"I am glad!" she blazed. "Now you learn the full evil of these Red
spawn. They will kill me, but you also will die."
"Listen, you and your men came spying on K'Lamm to learn when Thargo
and his forces will attack your city, didn't you?" Clark demanded,
heedless of her hate. "Well, I can tell you that. Thargo and his men
will ride toward Dordona in four days."
"Four days?" whispered Lurain, her face suddenly going dead-white.
"But we did not dream he would attack so soon--my people will be
surprized--he will overwhelm Dordona!"
"Exactly," rasped Clark. "He will, unless we carry a warning to
Dordona."
"You mean you strangers will help me escape, help me warn Dordona?" the
girl exclaimed, with sudden desperate hope.
"We will," Clark said grimly, "and what is more, we will fight on the
side of Dordona in the coming battle. You have seen how powerful our
weapons are--it may be that our help will turn the tide against K'Lamm.
But, for all this, there is a price."
"What price, for your aid?" Lurain demanded.
"The price," Clark told her, "is this: that when we reach Dordona, you
shall take me down the pit to the Lake of Life, so that I may fill a
flask with its shining waters to take back to the world outside. For
that price, I and my men will aid your people."
"No!" flamed Lurain, leaping erect, her face blazing with wrath. "By
the sun, never will I pay that price! Ages on ages have we of Dordona
faithfully obeyed the commandments given us long ago by the Guardians
below. Never have we permitted one blasphemer to descend to the lake.
To allow you to do so would be supreme sacrilege. I reject your
proposal. I would rather die!"
"But Dordona will die too, if it is not warned," Clark pointed out.
"Yes, all its people will perish when Thargo leads the armies of
K'Lamm into the city in surprize attack. And then Thargo will be able
to descend to the lake and drink of it."
"The Guardians are there and will destroy Thargo and his horde if they
dare descend," Lurain retorted fiercely.
"Are you so sure the Guardians are there?" Clark said. "Are you sure
they exist? None in your city has seen them for ages."
"The Guardians are there!" Complete, unshakable faith of generations
rang in the girl's voice. "Though Thargo and his spawn doubt their
existence, they exist and still ward the sacred lake. Their powers are
vast and they will slay any who approaches the lake, doubt it not."
"But then, why not agree to let me descend to the lake?" Clark pressed
quickly. "If the Guardians are there, they will not let me touch the
shining waters anyway, will they? The blame will not be yours, for
you warned me. And by agreeing to let me go down there, you will save
Dordona from surprize and death."
Lurain's face expressed doubt, hesitation, agony for her imperilled
city. Clark hung on her answer. He was hoping the girl's blind faith in
the legended Guardians of the lake was strong enough so that she would
agree to let him go, as she supposed, to his death.
She said finally, her voice low and shaken, "It is true that the
Guardians will kill you when you descend to the lake. The sin of
letting you descend there will be on my soul. But--Dordona will be
warned in time to prepare for Thargo's attack.
"Yes, I agree," she continued with desperate resolution on her face.
"Help me escape from K'Lamm, promise to give my city your help in the
coming war, and when we reach Dordona I will show you how you may
descend the sacred shaft."
"Good!" Clark exclaimed, his heart quickening with excitement. "Now if
we can just get safely out of K'Lamm----"
* * * * *
The door opened, and Ephraim Quell grimly entered, followed by Clark's
other four followers. Mike Shinn was fighting drunk, bawling a song,
his battered face glistening. Link Wilson too was flushed with wine,
but Lieutenant Morrow and Blacky Cain were sober--the first because the
drink had not affected him, the second from abstinence.
"What's the lay, chief?" rasped Blacky. "Something wrong?"
"A lot wrong," Clark snapped. He told them in curt sentences of
Thargo's plot. A vicious oath ripped from the gangster.
"Double-crossing us, eh? We'll go down and put the blast on him, damn
him!"
"Sure, I'll choke the dirty scut with me bare hands!" raged Mike Shinn
furiously.
"Listen," Clark rapped, "we'll have all we can do to escape this trap
without bothering for revenge on Thargo. We're going to get out of
here, at once--and join the people of Dordona."
Rapidly he told them of the agreement he had made with Lurain. The
Dordonan girl stood tense and pale as he talked.
"It's a great idea!" exclaimed Blacky. The gangster laughed. "We'll
hand Thargo a double-cross, and when we get to this other burg,
Dordona, we can easy lift the water from the lake below."
"How are we going to get out of K'Lamm?" Lieutenant Morrow asked
quickly. "How out of this palace, even?"
"We can't go down through the palace itself," Clark said emphatically.
"The guards posted out there in the corridor would give the alarm.
There's the way we'll have to take out."
He pointed to one of the big, open windows, that looked out across the
dark city and the starry sky.
"We'll slide down from that window on a rope of some kind," Clark said
quickly. "Behind the palace I noticed a court where the horses of the
palace guards are evidently kept at night. If we can sneak back there
and get mounts, we'll make a dash out through the city."
"That's the idea," approved Link Wilson, his eyes lighting. "We can
ride right out through these _hombres_."
"What if the gates of the city wall are closed?" Morrow asked.
Clark shrugged. "I don't think they will be. I doubt if they close
those gates every night--this city fears no attack from Dordona."
The six adventurers acted rapidly. While Ephraim Quell listened
watchfully at the door, Clark and the others tore down the wall
hangings and converted them into heavy, knotted rope. They tied the end
of the rope to a heavy chest, then dropped it into the darkness outside.
The men quickly shouldered their packs. Clark peered from the window.
There were no sentries in the palace yard immediately beneath, though
he heard movement of some at the front of the building. The walled
courts in the rear of the palace were silent except for an occasional
stamping of the restless horses back there.
* * * * *
Clark hung for a moment, transfixed by the weird beauty of the scene.
The moon was rising above the mountain wall in the east, a flood of
silvery light pouring across the prisoned land. And bathed in the moon
slept the city K'Lamm, a sea of dully gleaming roofs and streets and
squares. Solemn and somber bulked the dark mountains, crouched above
the city. Then Clark Stannard snapped out of the spell.
"Come on, that moonlight will make it harder for us," he whispered
urgently. "Lurain, you follow me closely."
"Yes, Stannar," she whispered, approximating as closely as she could
the name she had heard the others call him.
Clark swung over the stone window-rail and slid softly down the knotted
rope through the moonlight, to the ground. He poised there in the
shadow, gun in hand. No sound broke the sleeping hush.
Now Lurain was following, her black metal-mesh tunic gleaming in the
silver moon. Mike Shinn and Lieutenant Morrow came after, and in a
moment they all stood in the shadow of the looming palace wall, their
pistols glinting in their hands.
They moved at once toward the rear of the sleeping palace, stepping
soundlessly on the stone paving. There seemed no guards outside the big
building. Neither were there any outside the broad wooden door of the
walled horse-court. The door creaked, and they slipped inside.
There were a score of horses in the court, and as the strangers
entered, the animals stamped nervously, tossed their heads suspiciously
in the moonlight. Clark's gaze searched the court desperately. But it
was Link Wilson who spotted the saddles and bridles, hanging on a rail
at one side of the court. Quickly they grasped these and approached the
restless horses.
The horses snorted, stamped, wheeled away with hoofs ringing loudly on
the paving. Clark cursed inwardly as they again approached the nervous
steeds. Link Wilson talked to the horses in a low, soothing monotone as
he advanced. The ex-cowboy was soon saddling one of them, and Morrow
too and also Lurain had got others to stand still. Clark noticed that
the girl worked as silently and swiftly as any of the men, her face
showing no particle of fear in the silver light. His heart warmed again
to her proud, unwavering courage.
He got one of the restive horses by the mane, and quickly attached the
high, queer saddle and the rude bridle. Quell also managed to saddle
one, but Mike Shinn and Blacky were having the devil's own time,
hanging onto horses that had begun to plunge and rear.
"Help Mike, Link," whispered Clark quickly to the Texan. As the other
obeyed, Clark hurried to aid the gangster, leading his own saddled
steed.
"This damned goat has got the devil himself in him!" whispered Blacky
furiously as Clark reached him. "I wish we had a good eight-cylinder
jaloppy for the getaway, instead of these plugs."
Clark grabbed the saddle from the gangster and threw it over the
plunging, rearing animal.
"Guards!" cried Lurain suddenly, her silver voice stabbing.
Clark whirled, still holding the mane of the plunging horse. Two
armored guards, attracted by the commotion in the horse-court, stood
framed in the half-opened door, staring. Then with a yell of alarm,
drawing their swords, they rushed forward.
Blacky Cain's automatic sprang into his hand, and with a snarl on his
lips, the gangster shot. The reports cracked in close succession and
the two charging soldiers fell in heaps.
"That ties it!" cried the gangster. "Now we got to crash our way out!"
"More guards come," called Lurain's high voice, completely calm and
unfearful but urgent, as she snatched up one of the swords of the
fallen men.
The yell of alarm had been repeated near the looming palace, and there
was a clank of running men. Clark Stannard fought furiously to tie
the girths of the struggling horse. He finally succeeded, and then he
yelled to Blacky Cain.
"Here you are! Mount at once, all of you!"
Now an uproar was spreading through the whole pile of the hexagonal
palace, and shouts and clash of arms could be heard from all around it,
converging on the horse-court.
Clark swung into the saddle. As he jerked the reins to control the
rearing animal, he saw that outside the horse-court a scattered body
of twenty or thirty Red guards were rushing forward with drawn swords
gleaming in the moonlight.
"We'll have to break out through them!" Clark yelled. "Ride!"
And he dug his heels into his steed's flanks. The nervous animal needed
no further urging, and sprang forward toward the door with hoofs
clanging on the pavement. Right beside Clark rode Link Wilson, the
Texan sitting easily in the saddle, the rest thundering after.
Straight into the scattered band of guards at the door of the court
they rode. Clark glimpsed their drawn swords, then heard the boom of a
gun beside him, over the din of hoofs and yells. Link Wilson had drawn
one of his forty-fives and was shooting as they charged. Three of the
guards slumped down as the heavy slugs hit them.
They crashed through the other guards, a mad whirlwind of riders
and steeds, the soldiers and stabbing swords seeming to spin around
them. Then, with the swiftness of a cinema film, they were through
the soldiers, riding full tilt around the big palace toward the great
avenue that led to the city wall.
Other guards ran wildly out from the palace, swords raised in the
moonlight. Clark had his own gun out now and fired, and heard Link
Wilson's pistol booming again. He saw Lurain bending low over her
mount's neck and slashing at a guard whose spear struck toward her. The
man went down and she rode right over him, and the little band raced
clattering down the wide street of the awakening city.
"The spawn of K'Lamm cannot stand against us, Stannar!" cried Lurain's
silver, pealing voice as she rode.
"_Yippee!_" yelled Link Wilson, the ex-cowboy, drunk with reckless
excitement as his horse galloped furiously over the paving.
"The whole city is rousing!" shouted Lieutenant Morrow, spurring his
horse beside Clark's.
They thundered down that wide dark street to the accompaniment of mad
yells of rage from behind them, and startled cries along the street. A
few men ran out as though to intercept them, but recoiled abruptly as
the desperate little band rode down on them.
Clanging of hoofs on stone, chorus of yells and orders, were wild
music in Clark Stannard's ears as he and his men and the Dordonan girl
thundered down the street of moonlit K'Lamm. He saw torches flickering
and bobbing ahead of them.
"Look!" yelled Ephraim Quell suddenly over the din. "The gates----"
"Faster!" cried Clark wildly, as he saw at what the Yankee skipper
pointed.
The great gates in the city wall had been open, as Clark had guessed.
But now, alarmed by the clamor at the distant palace, the guards around
those gates were hastily pushing against the mighty bronze valves, were
_closing_ them.
_9. Dordona_
"If they close those gates, we're trapped!" yelled Clark.
They spurred desperately forward. From the guard-towers on either side
of the gate, several dozen soldiers had run out and formed a line in
front of the gate. Behind that line, a half-dozen other Red warriors
were slowly forcing the great valves shut.
"Ride through them!" Clark shouted. "It's now or never."
They crashed into that solid line of guards--and stopped! For these
soldiers grabbed their bridles and stirrups and clung to them, holding
them, stabbing at them with their swords. The crazed horses whirled and
plunged in a mad inferno of struggle, the riders rising like swimmers
above a wave of armored men and slashing swords.
Clark felt a blade sear along his forearm, and glimpsed the brutal face
of the Red warrior stabbing at him. His gun kicked in his hand and
the man fell with his forehead driven in. Clark shot again, trying to
clear away the men clinging to his bridle. Link Wilson's heavy gun was
booming, while Blacky Cain, his eyes blazing and a frozen killer mask
on his face, was viciously shooting the men trying to pull him down.
"Dordona! Dordona!" pealed a silver cry from the girl Lurain, wielding
her sword with wildcat swiftness and fury.
The gates were almost closed! And from far back at the palace of
Thargo, masses of soldiers were coming on the run. Clark had a cold,
sinking sense that they were trapped. Then he heard a hoarse cry.
"Out of my way, you scum!" Ephraim Quell shouted, forcing through his
attackers, clubbing his reversed gun on their heads.
Quell broke through them. Clark saw the bony Yankee skipper break
through on his mount to the half-dozen men who now had pushed the gates
within a foot of closing. Ephraim Quell's gun-butt smashed down among
them, sent them reeling, his horse trampling them. The Yankee leaped
from his horse, swiftly pulled on one of the great valves.
He pulled it open a few yards, by frenzied, tremendous effort. But
the men he had scattered were on their feet again, rushing at him and
stabbing with their swords. Quell reeled back from them.
Clark shouted, his voice ringing over the mad din, and the others heard
and pushed desperately forward. The horses, maddened by the struggle
to the pitch of frenzy, surged forward crazily toward the gate-opening
that promised freedom, trampling down the clinging guards.
Clark's gun blazed the last of its clip, and the men stabbing at Quell
fell. Link Wilson spurred in, grabbed the Yankee skipper's horse,
helped haul the bony seaman up onto it. Then before the guards they
had broken through could reach them again, their horses were bolting
out through the opened gates. Wild from the battle and unaccustomed
gun-fire, they plunged for freedom, Clark's and Lurain's steeds jamming
momentarily in the narrow opening.
Then they were all out in the open moonlight of the plain, the dark
walls and confusion and raging shouts of K'Lamm behind them. Plunging,
racing, snorting, the horses galloped wildly over the moonlit sea of
grass and brush. The wild uproar of the Red city receded swiftly.
"Which way to Dordona?" cried Clark to Lurain, shouting to her over the
rush of wind.
"We follow the way now," she cried. "Due east from here it lies--we go
to the river, and along it to my city."
Now the horses were settling to a steady, rushing lope as their frenzy
of panic quieted a little. Clark turned in the saddle, but there was no
sign of pursuit as yet from K'Lamm.
But none of them had escaped unscathed. Mike Shinn had a bleeding cut
on his forehead; Blacky Cain had one sleeve slashed to ribbons; the
rest all had small cut or stab wounds. Only Ephraim Quell, riding
grimly forward with jacket buttoned tightly against the wind, appeared
to have escaped without injury.
Clark leaned toward the Dordonan girl riding close beside him. Lurain
had a cut across one bare knee, but it was not serious. As they
galloped, she looked tautly back to where K'Lamm had dropped from sight
in the moonlight.
"They will try to follow but they cannot trail us by night, and they
dare not go too close to Dordona in small parties," she said. Then she
laughed. "I would like to see Thargo's face now."
Ahead in the dim moonlight there soon loomed vaguely a long, low
line of dark trees. It marked the river, and they reached it in a
quarter-hour. The dull roar of the stream was loud, as it raced with
the swiftness of a mountain-flume toward Dordona.
As they rode along it, heading east, the first gray streak of dawn
showed ahead. Clark's hopes were soaring. Every beat of the hoofs
brought them nearer to Dordona, where lay the pit that was entrance to
the Lake of Life. He'd yet succeed in reaching it--he had the girl's
word now that he could descend to it.
* * * * *
Ephraim Quell suddenly toppled stiffly from his horse. They reined in
hastily and Clark ran to the Yankee's side. Quell's bony face was a
ghastly, stiff mask, his eyes closed. From under his coat welled a dark
stain, and when Clark ripped the coat open, he saw that beneath it had
been concealed two deep sword-wounds.
"Good God! Quell was badly wounded when he kept the gate from closing,
but he said nothing to us!" Clark exclaimed.
Ephraim Quell's glazed eyes flickered at Clark's drawn, tense
countenance. A smile glimmered in them.
"I'm--'bout ready to cast anchor," Quell muttered. "Felt the life
running out of me, as I rode----"
"Quell, you're not dying!" Clark said desperately. "We'll get you to
Dordona, and pull you through."
"No, I'm done for," whispered the seaman. "And--I don't mind. Ever
since my ship burned and they took my certificate, I--haven't cared
much about living."
His glazed eyes fixed on the eastern sky, pale with dawn. A cool breeze
had begun to blow from there, stirring the grass. The Yankee skipper's
lips moved, almost inaudibly.
"Fair skies and a good wind--today----" he whispered. Then his head
lolled laxly, his eyes dull, dead.
Clark let him down and got to his feet. There was a hard lump in his
throat but he made his voice harsh.
"Mike--Blacky--keep a watch to the south and west. Link and Morrow and
I will bury him."
In the paling dawn, they scooped a grave under a tree beside the
roaring river, using a little camp-spade from one of the packs. White
mists of morning made everything unreal as they put Ephraim Quell's
stiff body into the shallow grave, and covered it.
"Mount! Forward!" Clark ordered.
Again they galloped, hoofs thudding above the river roar, bearing them
on through swirling white mists.
"I'm kind of glad," said Link Wilson's drawling voice finally, "that we
buried him where he can hear water."
"Yeah," muttered Mike Shinn. "Quell was a good guy. He was a _great_
guy."
An hour later, Lurain suddenly reined in her horse and pointed eagerly
ahead.
"There is Dordona!"
Five miles ahead rose the eastern wall of the great crater, the mighty,
looming barrier of the mountains. Close under the frowning cliffs
brooded ancient, crumbling Dordona. Black, silent, brooding like a
withered ancient who has long ago fallen from greatness, it lay in the
chill white mists, strange contrast to the city from which they had
come.
Behind the black battlements of an encircling wall whose top had
crumbled at places, rose a mass of antique towers and roofs of dull
black stone, weathered by the winds and rains of ages. Under a
water-gate in the dilapidated wall ran the roaring, mill-race river
they had followed. It ran straight toward a building at the center of
the city, a huge black dome that towered two hundred feet into the air.
The gates in the black wall were pushed open as they approached.
Soldiers in black armor waved their swords in the air and yelled joyful
greetings to Lurain, riding now at the head of the little troop. And as
they rode on into the city, from somber, crumbling buildings poured men
and women with shouts of gladness.
"Lurain! The princess Lurain has returned!" they shouted.
Clark Stannard, looking about keenly, saw that indeed Dordona had long
passed the zenith of its glory. Many of the black stone buildings were
untenanted, falling to ruins. Green grass grew between the blocks of
black paving in the streets.
And the people pouring forth were not nearly so numerous as the
Reds, he saw. Clark sensed despair under their momentary joy, read
hopelessness on their pale faces, the hopelessness of great fear.
"Say, we'll be the white-haired boys in this joint for bringing back
the girl," Mike Shinn said happily.
"There aren't enough men here to defend this city properly," Lieutenant
Morrow told Clark keenly. "The place is too big now for its population,
and the wall hasn't been kept up."
Clark nodded grimly. "From what Thargo said, the population of this
place has been steadily dwindling for a long time."
"We go to the Temple of the Shaft," Lurain called to Clark. "My father,
the lord Kimor, will be there."
They rode after her toward the huge, black-domed temple that brooded
at the center of the city. It loomed massively in front of them,
incomparably the largest and most ancient building they had seen in
this land. For it was old, the stone paving in front of it worn deep by
ages of tramping feet, its slot-windows crumbling at the edges.
* * * * *
Guards took their horses, and swung open the high bronze doors of the
temple. Lurain led the way inside, her slim, boyish figure striding
with her sheathed sword rattling on the stone floor. Clark and his men,
following her inside, paused for a moment, thunderstruck.
The interior of the temple was one colossal room, dim and dusky and
vast, its only illumination shafts of sunlight from the slot-like
windows. And it was throbbing and quivering to a thunder of bellowing
sound that was deafening, an unbroken, tremendous roar of waters.
The racing river from outside ran right into the temple, through a gap
in one wall. The waters rushed with blinding speed across the floor of
the vast room, in a deep, wide canal, toward a round, black opening a
hundred feet across that yawned at the center of the floor. Into this
gaping abyss, the river tumbled with a reverberating thunder.
Clark and his men moved nearer the pit, stood on the very edge of the
abyss. He peered down into an impenetrable darkness that seemed to go
down to the bowels of the earth. He could make out that the vertical
sides of the pit were of rough rock, in which had been carved the steps
of a narrow, spiraling stair. The head of this stair was closed by
a barred gate guarded by Black warriors. And the raging cataract of
waters, leaping out over the edge of the pit, tumbled down its center
in a tremendous waterfall, dropping into the dark.
"Good God! _this_ must be the way down to the cavern far below--to the
Lake of Life!" exclaimed Clark, stupefiedly.
"Say, I don't hanker to go down there," said Mike Shinn, awed. "It
looks to me like the doorway down to purgatory."
Lurain was coming around the edge of the pit now, bringing with her a
half-dozen Dordonan men in black armor.
"My father, Stannar!" she said.
Clark turned to confront Kimor, the ruler of Dordona.
Kimor was sixty years old, at least, a tall, arrow-straight, superbly
muscled man with white hair and pointed white beard, and fierce, shaggy
white eyebrows over keen, watchful blue eyes.
"Strangers, you are welcome!" he told Clark. "My daughter has told me
how you helped her escape K'Lamm and bring us warning of the attack
which Thargo plans for three days hence. We expected no attack for
weeks--there is hardly time to prepare.
"We of Dordona will be grateful for your help in the coming battle,"
Kimor continued. "Lurain informs me you are from outside the mountains,
and bear weapons of great and strange power. You can aid us much, and
any reward we can give you will be yours."
"Why, we ask but one reward," Clark said, looking puzzledly at Lurain.
"It is what I told your daughter--that we be allowed to go down that
stair in the pit to the Lake of Life, and bring back a flask of its
waters. For that reward, we have joined you."
Kimor's fierce face turned dead-white as he heard. His eyes blazed
fire of outraged, fanatical fury, and he ripped out his sword from its
sheath. And from the Dordonans behind him came wrathful, raging cries
as they too drew their weapons, their faces contorted.
"You ask _that_?" thundered Kimor to Clark. "You ask leave from us to
commit the supreme sacrilege that no man may commit and live? Your very
request is a sacrilege to this Temple of the Shaft! Nobles of Dordona,
kill these men for their blasphemy!"
_10. Down the Stair_
Blacky Cain's gun leaped into his hands, and the others followed his
example swiftly as the Dordonan warriors leaped forward with upraised
swords, wild wrath on their faces.
"Don't shoot!" Clark yelled tensely.
For Lurain had sprung in front of the charging nobles and her fanatical
father, halting them with an urgent gesture.
"Wait!" she cried. "These are strangers from outside our land--they do
not know that it is blasphemy they speak. They will not ask for such a
thing when they understand that it is a sacrilege."
"So this," Clark grated to the girl, "is how you keep the bargain you
made with me!"
"I do not understand you, stranger," she said coldly, and turned back
to Kimor. "You will forgive their ignorance, father?"
"They should be slain for such blasphemy," said Kimor fiercely. But
slowly, reluctantly, he sheathed his sword, and said, "They are
forgiven because they are strangers who know not the law. But let them
repeat their blasphemy, let them even but glance at the sacred shaft,
and it shall mean their deaths."
"Looks like the girl's double-crossed us," rasped Blacky Cain. "Shall
we try to crash our way down into that pit? It looks like suicide to me
to go down that damned stair, but we'll do it if you say."
"Put away your guns," Clark said quickly to the gangster and the
others. "There are too many of them here for us, and the whole city
would come running. Later on, we may be able to enter the pit."
Then he turned back to Kimor and Lurain. The girl showed no sign of
emotion as she met his bitterly accusing gaze.
"We withdraw our request, since it is against your law," Clark told the
fierce old Dordonan ruler.
"Well that you do," said Kimor grimly, "for I tell you no man for ages
has been permitted to enter the sacred shaft."
He continued, "You shall be given a dwelling for your use, and food and
wine. If you wish to help us against the Reds, your help is welcome.
But whether you help or not, you cannot go near this pit. You are
forbidden from now on to enter this temple, under pain of death."
"We understand," Clark said tightly. His gaze again sought Lurain's
face, charged with his bitter scorn.
Two of the black-armored warriors, at Kimor's command, led Clark and
his men out of the temple. They conducted them along the crumbling
streets, whose occupants watched the strangers curiously.
Clark's thoughts were bitter. Lurain had tricked him neatly--had had no
intention of fulfilling the promise she had made him. They were here in
Dordona, but as far from the shining lake as ever.
The two Dordonan guides left them outside a weathered, one-story
building of black stone, with a promise that food and drink would
be brought them. The interior of the building, they found when they
entered, was one of dark, gloomy rooms, its furniture and floor covered
with dust, everything here exuding antiquity.
"Just as lief bed down in a mausoleum!" grunted Mike Shinn in disgust
as he tossed his pack into a corner and sat down.
"What," Lieutenant Morrow asked Clark keenly, "are we going to do now?"
"We're going to get into that pit, somehow, by force or stealth,"
Clark declared. "We'll wait until tonight, steal into the temple, and
overpower the guards at the head of the stair. Then we can get down the
shaft, and I think they're too superstitious to pursue us."
"But they'll be waitin' for us when we come back up," reminded Link
Wilson. "That is, if we do come back up."
"It will be up to us then to fight our way through them," Clark said
grimly. He added bitterly, "Lurain broke her bargain with us; so our
promise to help them in the coming war no longer holds. If we get back
up with the flask of water from the lake, we'll get out of Dordona as
soon as we can."
* * * * *
The day passed slowly. Clark Stannard and his men went out into the
streets of the crumbling black city for a time. Apparently they
sauntered idly, but in reality were mapping a route to the temple, one
that they could follow with less chance of being observed. He noticed
the Dordonan people now shunned them, looking at them in half-veiled
hate. News of their blasphemy had apparently spread in the city.
Night fell, and Clark watched the moon rise over the ancient city.
Then after some hours had passed, he led the others into the dark
back rooms of their dwelling, intending to slip out that way. But as
he entered the darkness there, he glimpsed a moving figure in the
blackness. Instantly he leaped at the other, grasped him by the throat.
"It's a spy!" he grated. "If they've found out what we're planning,
we're sunk." And he rasped in the language of Dordona to his prisoner,
"One shout and you die."
"Release me--I will not shout," gasped a voice.
"Lurain!" he exclaimed. "What in the world----"
He dragged the girl over to one of the windows, where the moonlight
illuminated her white, strange face and distended eyes.
"What are you doing, spying on us?" Clark demanded, his face hardening
as he remembered.
"No, I came to fulfill the promise I made you, to lead you down to the
holy lake!" she gasped. Her words poured forth in a torrent as Clark
stood in stunned surprize. "Stannar, why did you tell my father Kimor
you wished to descend to the lake? That was madness!"
"But you had promised me that you would see that I got down the shaft,"
Clark said bewilderedly.
"You do not understand," Lurain told him. "I made that promise,
yes--but what I meant was that I would secretly take you down the
shaft; for if my father knew of it he would slay us instantly for the
sacrilege--yes, even me, his daughter. I thought you understood that
and would be silent about the lake until I could fulfill my promise."
"Lord, I've misjudged you, Lurain," Clark told her impulsively. "Come
to think of it, it was rather asinine of me to blurt out my whole
business without making sure how things stood. But I hadn't had time
to think, I guess, in the rush of our escape."
"And I had to pretend ignorance when you reproached me," she said. "But
I have come now, Stannar. I shall fulfill my promise and take you down
to the cavern of the Lake of Life. The sin will be on my head, not
on my father and people. And my sin will be expiated, for surely the
Guardians will slay us down there for our sacrilege."
She was trembling violently, though her voice was steady. Clark
Stannard stared at her, frowning.
"You believe that?--believe we're both going to die down there, Lurain?
And yet you're willing to keep your promise?"
"Yes," the girl told him. "I gave you my word, and you brought warning
to Dordona as you promised. My death matters not."
Clark suddenly put his arms around her, and as he held her quivering
figure he could feel the pounding of her heart.
"Lurain, you're not going to die--neither of us will die," he told her
reassuringly. "There are no Guardians down there--that is legend only.
Even if they were there, I have my weapon."
She said nothing, but he knew she was convinced of the futility of all
human weapons against those mysterious warders. He turned to his four
men, who had listened tensely in the dark room.
"You'll stay here," Clark told them. "I should be back by morning with
the waters from the lake, if all goes well."
"Why don't we go with you?" Blacky demanded.
But when Lurain understood the question, she shook her head. "No, I
promised but to take you, Stannar. Your men would only be destroyed
down there as we will be, and their help will be needed here when
Thargo comes to attack Dordona."
"Remember, you're bound by my promise to help these Blacks against
Thargo," Clark told his men, "whether or not I return."
Then Clark brought from his pack the leaden flask he had brought so
far, along such a dangerous trail in preparation for this time. He
paused then for a moment, before the silent quartet.
"Good luck, boys, if I don't come back," he said.
"The same to you, chief, and it's me thinks you're going to need it,"
muttered Mike Shinn, as they shook hands.
"We go out the back of this dwelling," whispered Lurain, to Clark.
"Follow me--and be very silent."
He emerged with her into the checkered moonlight and shadow of one
of Dordona's silent streets. The girl, he saw now, carried a short,
pointed metal bar. She led by deserted alleys of crumbling ruins, not
toward the great temple, but toward a ruined, deserted stone building a
quarter-mile from the great dome.
* * * * *
Clark followed her wonderingly into the ruin. She led across a room
strewn with debris of crumbling stone, and knelt on the corner of the
stone floor. He knelt puzzledly beside her, turning his tiny flashlight
beam on the weathered blocks of the floor.
"Dig out these blocks," whispered Lurain, pointing to the floor. "I
will hold the light."
"But I don't----" Clark began, then halted and obeyed. It was evident
that Lurain knew what she was about.
With the metal bar she had brought, he soon dug out four of the big
blocks. There was revealed beneath them a dark, burrow-like opening
in the earth, the mouth of a horizontal underground passage. Lurain
dropped quickly down into this, and Clark followed. Turning his beam,
he discovered the passage was shoulder-high, extending away through
the solid rock.
"This passage," Lurain whispered, "was dug secretly many generations
ago, by plotters in the city who wished to reach the pit and go down
the stairs to the Lake of Life. They were of the rebels of that time
who finally left Dordona to found the city K'Lamm. They could not enter
the pit from the temple, for the stair-head there is always guarded, as
you saw. So they dug this passage, opening into the pit below.
"Just as they finished their sacrilegious work," she continued, "their
plot was detected. They were slain before they could make use of the
passage, and it was blocked up and its existence kept secret. But the
rulers of Dordona have known of it, and as daughter of the present
ruler I knew of it. It is the one way we can enter the pit, for if we
tried to enter it in the temple, the guards there would kill us at
once."
Clark's hopes bounded. "Let's get on, then."
He led the way, flashing his beam ahead. As they advanced in the
passage, they heard a dull roar that became louder and louder. Clark
knew it was the sound of the cataract falling into the sacred shaft,
and his excitement increased. Lurain, pressing on behind him, was
shivering.
They reached the end of the passage. They crouched, petrified by the
stupefying view ahead. The opening in which they crouched was twenty
feet below the floor of the temple, in the rock side of the stupendous
pit. Right below and outside this opening lay the narrow steps of the
spiraling stone stair.
Out there in the pit, not ten yards from them, there gleamed in
the faint light from above the falling waters of the thundering
cataract, the river from far away that tumbled headlong down into this
unguessable abyss. Its roar seemed to shatter their ears, and its
flying spray was cold on their white faces.
Clark gripped his nerves and crawled out onto the stone steps. The
steps were not four feet wide, grown with the slimy green moss of ages,
drenched and dripping with spray. Looking up, he could just glimpse the
moonlit interior of the great temple, could just see the heads of the
armored guards on duty at the head of the stair.
Looking down, he could see nothing--nothing but an unplumbed abyss of
darkness into which the waters tumbled, and round whose side dropped
the coils of the spiral stair. Clark's nerves shrank, appalled for
the moment from the thought of venturing down into that enigmatic
gulf, along that slippery, ancient way. Then his jaw set in renewed
resolution. Below lay what he had come so far to seek.
"Lurain, we go downward now," he told the girl, raising his voice over
the roar. "Would you rather wait here?"
"No, Stannar--I go with you," she cried. "My promise was to lead you to
the lake itself."
Cautiously, every nerve strung taut, Clark stepped downward, feeling
with his foot for the next step. He dared not use the flashlight here,
so near the surface. The wet, mossy stone was slippery under his feet,
threatening to send him slipping and sliding off the unrailed stair.
Sick dizziness swept him as he visualized himself plunging downward,
racing those tumbling waters in a nightmare fall.
Now he and Lurain had followed the spiral stair twice around the
falling cataract, were deeper below the surface. They were in almost
complete darkness. Spray stung their cheeks, gusty air-currents howled
up the great shaft, the thunder of the falling waters beside them
was brain-numbing. Still down and down they crept, feeling for each
slippery step, groping down through somber, eternal night toward the
mystic Lake of Life and its legended warders.
_11. The Temptation_
They were in utter darkness now, a stygian obscurity in which the
ear-splitting roar of the falling waters and the shriek of howling
winds were more nerve-cracking. Looking up, pressed desperately against
the wet rock side of the pit, Clark Stannard could see no glimmer of
light at the mouth of the pit, in the temple far above. The flying
spray and mist obscured the light up there.
He thought it safe, therefore, to turn on his flashlight. The bright
little beam, quivering out into the solid blackness, seemed to
accentuate rather than dispel the gloom. Its ray showed the wet, mossy
stone stair on whose narrow steps they stood. It showed the edge of the
falling cataract, close by, and it disclosed Lurain, her naked white
limbs and tight, black metal-mesh tunic wet with spray, her face pale
with age-old terror.
Clark pressed her hand in encouragement, and then started again picking
his way carefully downward. Round and round the side of the pit they
followed the dropping spiral of the stair, circling the stupendous
waterfall again and again as they descended. The green, slimy moss was
treacherously thick on the stone steps. Clark realized, with a sudden
quaking of the spirit, that the unbroken growth of that mass showed
that in truth no one had descended this stair for ages. He and Lurain
were the first for perhaps countless centuries to venture down this
dizzy path.
Deeper and deeper they went. Clark had tried at first to keep count of
the number of spirals, and thus roughly to estimate their depth beneath
the surface. But as time went on, he lost all track of his count. The
brain-numbing roar of the waters, the utter and extreme tension under
which they moved, the knowledge that one slip meant hideous death,
banished all from his mind except the primal necessity of safety. He
could only vaguely remember, in that dazed fixedness of attention, just
why he and Lurain were descending this awful path. It seemed that he
and the girl had been going down into this roaring, shrieking darkness
for an endless time.
As they halted to rest, clinging to the rough rock wall, Clark wondered
dully how far below the surface they now were. It must be thousands
of feet, he guessed. God, how deep into the bowels of earth did this
hell-shaft penetrate? Then he and Lurain started downward again,
endlessly circling the giddy, dropping spiral.
"Look, Stannar!" cried Lurain suddenly, her shout thin over the roar
of the cataract. She was pointing downward into the abyss. "There is
light!"
"No, I don't--_yes_, I do see it!" Clark exclaimed, peering down with
every nerve and muscle suddenly taut. He snapped out his flashlight,
and then the light below came stronger to his eyes.
It was a dim, misty white luminescence that seemed to well up feebly
from far below, touching the spray and fog around the falling cataract
into a faint glow.
"By heaven, we must be nearing the lake!" Clark Stannard cried, his
consuming purpose returning to him in sudden excitement. "The Lake of
Life is supposed to be one of shining, glowing waters."
"Yes, we near the sacred lake and near our doom," answered Lurain, her
chiseled white face tragic in terror.
Clark encouraged her, and moved on down the winding stair with
accelerated speed. Now a feverish excitement held him as he neared
the thing he had come so far to find, through such deadly dangers.
Behind him, the Dordonan girl followed bravely but hopelessly, like one
walking to her execution.
The glow beneath grew steadily stronger. The thunderous sound of the
cataract seemed changing in tone, from a dull, deafening roar into
a crashing splash and hammering. And as they moved farther down the
stair, Clark Stannard beheld, by the feeble glow beneath, the cause of
that change in sound.
Far below, he glimpsed the pit's _bottom_. It was a jagged black rock
floor, upon which the waters that had tumbled clear down the depth of
the awful shaft fell with a crashing splash and explosion of white
foam-smoke. Those foaming, broken waters flowed away, through an
opening at the side of the pit's bottom.
Clark and Lurain, in fifteen minutes, stood at the bottom of the pit,
on the last step of the stair. They were drenched with mist and spray
here, and the unceasing, explosive crashing of the falling waters was
stunning. Presently by the faint glow here, Clark made out the opening
in the side of the pit. It was an arched aperture twelve or fifteen
feet in height, and beyond it lay a glimmering natural rock tunnel
along whose floor the foaming waters flowed away.
There was a narrow footpath in the tunnel, a rock strip crowded between
the raging waters and the wall. The two moved along this, in single
file because of the narrowness of the way. Now Clark perceived that the
faint glow of light came from ahead, a misty luminescence that seeped
back along this tunnel to the giant shaft.
The tunnel ran no more than a thousand feet, then debouched abruptly
into a vast, glowing-lit space. Clark and Lurain hurried forward, and
stepped out into that half-glimpsed space. Then the two stood, frozen
with awe, staring wildly.
"The Lake of Life!" Clark Stannard breathed, in a tense, hoarse whisper.
"The sacred lake that I sin in beholding!" gasped Lurain, her eyes
distended with awe and religious terror.
* * * * *
The scene was stupefying. They looked out into a vast, cavernous space,
at whose eastern wall they stood. It was impossible to see more than
a mile into it, because of the haze of shining mists that filled it.
The sheer black rock wall behind them rose into that concealing, misty
glow, and marched away on either side into it, in a vast curve. Clark
guessed that the cavern was dozens, scores of miles, in length and
breadth. It flashed over him that this vast space must lie deep under
all the land inside the ring of the Mountains of Death.
But it was the stupendous cavern's source of light that held their
eyes. From where they stood, a black rock floor stretched a thousand
feet outward. From there on, extended a vast lake whose waters glowed
like pure liquid light, a shining, shimmering sheet that stretched far
away and was lost in the misty haze of the cavern's farther reaches.
The legended Lake of Light!
The foaming waters that rushed out of the water-tunnel from which Clark
and Lurain had just emerged, flowed across the rock floor and into the
lake. As soon as the foaming waters entered that shimmering sea, they
seemed instantly to become glowing like it. The Lake of Light was fed
by these waters from above, ordinary waters that took on that weird
glow the moment they joined the shining lake.
After a few moments Clark felt his frozen awe replaced by a wild urge
of exultation. By heaven, he had succeeded! He had fought his way
through countless dangers to this shining lake that only legend had
recorded. His spirit soared, his virile brown face blazed with triumph.
"Come on, Lurain!" he cried, plucking the girl's bare arm.
"Yes, Stannar." Her voice was quiet, but the unconquerable terror
was still in her eyes. The Dordonan girl, he realized as he started
forward, was bravely ready for the death she thought inevitable.
He had no time to encourage her. He hastened forward over the rough,
uneven rock floor. But with the first steps that they took, they saw
something ahead that momentarily froze them in their tracks.
It was a statue, a great figure of pale stone that stood upon a
pedestal on the shore of the Lake of Life, facing the mouth of the
tunnel. It was so placed that anyone who emerged from the tunnel would
inevitably be confronted by it.
"God, it--it's not human," muttered Clark, staring.
"It is an image of the Guardians!" cried Lurain, blanched to deathly
white. "A sign that they are watching!"
The stone figure in no sense was modeled after a human being. The body
that had been sculptured was oddly man-like, in that it was bipedal and
carried its brain-case erect. But it was more like a strange, erect
seal-creature than anything else, a rotund, soft-looking body with
thick arms and limbs ending in flippers instead of hands or feet.
The head was round and bulbous, without any ears apparent. The face
was rounded--and alien. Two large circular eyes, with below them flat
nostril-openings and a straight, wide mouth.
But the expression of that stone face! Immense and alien intellectual
power was stamped on it, power and knowledge beyond anything human.
But dominating these was--weariness. A sick, dull weariness as of
superhuman fatigue and frustration, a deep and utter despair.
The weariness and frustration on that alien, carved face were so naked
in their awful agony that they crushed down Clark's spirit to behold.
This statue, he felt dimly, was symbolic of some superhuman tragedy,
some great disaster of long ago. One arm of the figure was raised in
a warning gesture, flipper-palm outward. The sick, weary eyes in the
stone face seemed trying to convey a dark, horrible message. Clark
felt awed fear creeping like a subtle poison through him, and with
difficulty he tore his gaze away from the unearthly figure's face.
"It is an image of the Guardians," Lurain repeated in a fearful
whisper. "Stannar, look--its hand is held up, barring the way to the
Lake of Life. It is a token of their ancient commandment to humanity,
to abstain from the lake."
"Don't get afraid because of that statue, Lurain," Clark told her,
forcing her to turn her awed eyes away from the stone figure. "If the
Guardians looked like this statue, then it must have been millions of
years ago that they lived--no creatures such as those have existed on
earth within all known history. They may have put up the statue here
long ago, but they must all be gone, themselves."
"No!" Lurain cried in desperate terror. "The Guardians die not,
Stannar. Somewhere, here, they are still living. From somewhere here,
they watch us even now."
Her fear-widened eyes gazed out over the shimmering lake, into the haze
of shining mists that hid the farther reaches of the vast cavern from
view, as though she expected to see weird creatures like the stone
figure emerging at any moment.
But Clark, his first awe and amazement at sight of the statue now
passing, hastened eagerly past it toward the lake. She followed slowly,
and as he reached the edge of the radiant, glowing waters, she looked
down with distended gaze.
* * * * *
Clark knelt by the edge of the shimmering lake, drawing out his leaden
flask. He bent eagerly over the shining waters. What made them glow
like this? Did they carry radio-active matter in suspension?
Little curls and wisps of shining vapor rose from the surface of the
glowing waters. And as he inhaled that vapor-laden air, Clark Stannard
felt strange, singing life flowing through his veins, a wine-like fire
that banished all fatigue. The vapor-laden air made him feel suddenly
strong, young, vibrant with energy and life, all pain and fatigue
dropping from him like a cloak.
He stared transfixed, as this breath of life sang inside him. There
fell slowly upon him an awful doubt, a terrible thought that seemed to
let him stare of a sudden into ghastly gulfs of alien knowledge, into
terrific, undreamed secrets of the universe.
"This lake--God, can the legend be _true_?" he said thickly, his eyes
wild in the misty glow. "These waters, giving immortality if you drink
them----"
"It is true!" cried Lurain. "These waters that our blaspheming eyes
behold have in them the pure essence of life."
"But then if I drank them----" Clark's mind reeled at the tremendous
impact of that thought.
He had forgotten Asa Brand, forgotten the whole purpose of his quest
up to now, forgotten everything in the terrific implications of that
possibility. He, first of men for ages, had penetrated to these
hidden, shining waters, and if they could confer undying life, he had
immortality in his grasp.
_Immortality!_ To live on and on without fear of death, once the secret
essence of life in these waters impregnated his frame. To stride the
world god-like, watching the ephemeral generations come and go; to soar
to dizzy heights of knowledge and power; to feel the fire of undying
life shoot through his veins, even as the dim breath of it now was
entering his nostrils with the shining vapors he was breathing; to
drink--to drink, and never to die!
Clark Stannard felt vast new vistas of hitherto undreamed possibilities
unscrolling in his rioting mind. He, immortal! Walking the earth,
gathering wisdom and power, for age after age, while other men were
born and lived and died. Why, he would _rule_ those ephemeral peoples
by sheer weight of knowledge, would rule the earth itself.
Glowing with light beckoned the radiant waters, their shimmering
luminosity a brilliant promise. They held his eyes hypnotically. They
were waiting for him, the legended waters of immortality, that he alone
had won to through the ages. The greatest desire of every man who ever
lived lay now at his feet, his for the taking.
Slowly his hand descended toward the shining waters with the leaden
flask. His whole body tense, his eyes fixed and wild with the
superhuman urge that drove him, Clark dipped the flask, filled it with
the glowing waters. And as slowly, he raised it toward his face.
"Stannar, drink not!" Lurain's voice, gasping in ghastly horror as she
saw his white face, saw him raising the flask with quivering purpose.
She tugged weakly at his arm.
"Drink not, Stannar! I love you--I know you love me--do not commit this
supreme sin! Immortality is not for us----"
Clark thrust her back from him. His eyes were burning, his voice was
suddenly a harsh, unhuman croak.
"Never to die," he was muttering thickly. "To live on and on and on----"
His hand trembling with the strain of tremendous purpose, he lifted the
leaden flask toward his lips.
_12. The Attack_
As Clark tilted back his face, raising the flask of glowing waters
toward his lips, he heard Lurain's heart-broken cry, as from a great
distance. The mouth of the flask was but an inch from his lips, when
his arm suddenly froze rigid.
For his upturned gaze had suddenly rested upon the face of the alien
statue that towered over them, here at the shore. At that angle, it was
as though the weary, sick, dull eyes of the unhuman sculptured figure
were looking right down into his own. And again, but a hundred times
stronger, Clark felt that awful sense of utter tragedy and weariness
and dull despair that the statue conveyed.
He remained rigid, staring wildly up into the stone face. And it seemed
almost that the bitter frustration and futility and tiredness in the
carven features were those of a living face. It almost seemed to Clark
that the stone lips moved dully, that they whispered to him.
"Drink not of the waters! There are depths of suffering in the universe
of which you do not dream, and you open doors into black abysses if you
dare drink the shining waters of immortality."
God, _was_ that stone figure whispering to him? As though in a dream,
Clark stared up at the weary, tragic face.
"Be content to live and die, and seek no undying life. Night is good
after day, and death is good after life. Who would live in an endless
day, without ever attaining the rest of night?"
Lurain's pleading cry came to him from far away as he stood frozen,
staring shakenly up at the alien countenance of stone.
"Stannar, for my sake, do not drink!"
_Immortality!_ sang the wine-like, racing desire in his blood. You will
never, never die!
"Horror, horror undreamed," the carven, tragic face seemed to murmur.
With a sudden wild, clumsy gesture, Clark Stannard flung the leaden
flask far away, its shining contents spilling as it flew. He reeled
around, grasped Lurain's sobbing figure blindly.
"Lurain--my God, I nearly did it! I nearly drank!" he gasped. "That
statue--something in its eyes seemed to speak to me--warn me."
For a few moments he held the sobbing girl, stroking her hair, soothing
her. And when he looked up, at the glowing, beckoning waters, all that
wild thirst that had possessed him was dead and gone. He knew, now, in
his soul he was sure, that those waters _would_ bring immortality--but
the wild desire for undying life had burned to ashes in him.
For he knew now that that message he had seemed to read in the tragic,
unhuman face of the stone figure was deepest truth; that immortality
was not a thing to be sought after, but to be shunned. But suddenly
Clark stiffened as he stared at the shining waters.
_What if Thargo reached this lake?_ What if the hordes of K'Lamm,
behind that powerful, evil king, overcame the Dordonans and forced
their way down here to the waters of immortality? Until now, the
possibility had not greatly disturbed Clark, for he had had no belief
in the virtues of the fabled lake. But now--he knew now that if Thargo
and his human wolves reached the lake and drank its waters, they
_would_ become immortal.
Clark's mind shuddered back from appalling vistas of potential disaster
in that possibility. He was remembering swiftly the thing Thargo had
hinted when he had been the Red king's guest in K'Lamm: "When we drink
of the lake, and go forth immortal to the outer world----"
That was Thargo's plan, and the Red king would do it. There rushed
over Clark a nightmare vision of the wolf-like horde of K'Lamm, become
immortal, going forth into the Twentieth Century world, to dominate it
by virtue of their unnatural immortality, living in pomp and power for
ages, while passing generations of men labored for their glory.
"No, by heaven!" The exclamation was torn from Clark's lips by
desperate resolution. His face was dark and drawn. "Thargo and his men
are not going to reach this lake!"
"Thargo?" Lurain looked up, startled. "I had almost forgotten the Red
king. But in three days comes his attack on Dordona, his attempt to
reach the lake. Stannar, we can stop him?"
"We've got to," declared Clark, his narrowed gaze sweeping over the
radiant waters into the distant haze. "If we don't, it means a race of
immortal tyrants saddled on the world."
"But if the Guardians exist," faltered Lurain, though doubt was in her
eyes now.
"The Guardians, if it was they who put up this warning statue, must
have been gone for ages," Clark told her. "We must rely on our own
resistance, Lurain, to keep Thargo's forces out of here."
The doubt was deeper in the girl's eyes, mixed with a new, great fear.
She whispered, "I have never believed that Thargo could drink of the
lake, even if he killed all in Dordona, because I believed that the
Guardians existed down here and would stop him. But--they did not stop
you when you were about to drink of the waters. If you are right,
if the Guardians do not exist, then I fear Thargo will win to these
waters! We of Dordona will be far outnumbered by his forces when he
comes."
"We'll hold him back--we've got to," Clark declared fiercely. "Come,
Lurain, we must return quickly to the surface. We will have only two
days to organize all the resistance we can."
His hand on the girl's bare arm, the wonder of radiant lake and vast,
haze-hidden cavern forgotten now, Clark ran with her toward the tunnel.
Soon he and the Dordonan girl were ascending in the pit, climbing the
spiral stair in darkness, the cataract thundering beside them.
At long last, they neared the surface, could discern the glimmer of
moonlight up there in the temple. It was still night, he knew. When
they reached the aperture in the wall of the pit, they slipped into the
dark little passage that had been hollowed by the plotters of long ago.
The roar of waters receded behind them as they followed it. Reaching
its end, Clark Stannard drew himself up into the dark interior of the
crumbling old building there, and pulled Lurain up after him.
"Now to see your father, Kimor," he said tautly. "We've got to work
fast, organizing all Dordona's resistance----"
"You shall see Kimor--_now_!" rang a fierce voice beside them in the
darkness.
"My father's voice!" cried Lurain.
* * * * *
Men sprang out of the dark on Clark and the girl, seized them and held
them pinioned by a dozen hands while they bound the two, hand and foot.
Then they were dragged out into the street.
Torches flared out there now, and by the red, quivering light, Clark
saw a dozen Dordonan warriors in black armor. And among them was Kimor,
king of Dordona. The old ruler's fierce hawk-face was awful in its
rage, his white beard quivering, as he surveyed the two.
"The curse of the Guardians on you!" he shrilled. "You have done the
forbidden, unholy thing, have entered the sacred shaft. You, stranger,
and you, girl who is no longer my daughter, shall die as penalty for
the black sin and for the shame it has brought on Dordona."
His thin hand quivered in rage as he told the girl, "And your sin is
greatest of the two of you, for it was you who led this man into the
sacred shaft by that forgotten passage dug by the plotters generations
ago. Yes, when you were missing from my palace tonight, I bethought me
of that ancient passage, and that you knew of it, and so I came with
guards to see if you had dared enter it. And you did, blasphemers!"
"Wait!" cried Clark desperately. "Listen to me, Kimor! We entered the
pit, it is true, and descended to the Lake of Life, but we did not
drink of it. We committed no sacrilege."
Kimor struck him across the face. "Lies, lies! You did not descend to
the holy lake, for if you had done so, you would have been slain by the
Guardians. But you entered the sacred shaft, and for that sacrilege
alone you die.
"Take them to the temple!" he cried to the warriors. "Summon the people
that they may see these two slain on the temple steps as is the custom
with those who commit sacrilege against the ancient commandment of the
Guardians."
"There are no Guardians!" Clark shouted desperately. "And you will need
the help of myself and my men, to keep Thargo and the hordes of K'Lamm
from the lake when they come."
"To the temple!" shouted Kimor fiercely, unheeding.
Clark and Lurain, still bound hand and foot, were dragged through
the streets by the Dordonan warriors, toward the near-by dome of the
temple. Now torches were flaring along many streets and excited crowds
of the Black people converged hastily, as the news spread, toward the
great domed edifice.
They crowded fiercely forward, as they saw Clark and the girl tossed
helplessly down on the broad steps of the big building. Their faces
were contorted with superstitious rage in the flickering torchlight,
and from them came cries of hate and vengeance-lust.
"Death to the blasphemers!"
"I got you into this," said Clark despairingly, trying vainly to snap
his bonds. "Lurain, if I could save you----"
"Stannar, I am not afraid to die, with you!" cried Lurain.
Kimor pointed down at the two, fanatical fervor in every line of his
face. "Kill the blasphemers, now!" he ordered.
_Crack! Crack!_ A volley of sharp reports put a period to the din of
the raging mob, and the Dordonan warriors who had advanced with swords
on the two helpless captives, turned quickly. The crowd was splitting
in panic, and four men in stained, torn solaro suits and leggings,
bareheaded and grim of face, were forging through it.
Blacky Cain was in the lead, his harsh, predatory face menacing,
his automatic raised. The lank Texan, Link Wilson, had both his big
forty-fives in his hand. Lieutenant Morrow's lean face was hard as he
raised his service pistol, and Mike Shinn's battered face was flaming.
Blacky's rasping voice cut across the stunned silence to Clark.
"We heard the fuss and saw them taking you for a ride, chief," rasped
the gangster. "So we're muscling in."
He and the other three were still advancing, their eyes deadly, and
fingers crooked on their pistol-triggers.
"They seek to rescue the condemned ones!" cried Kimor fiercely. "Seize
them--slay them with their blaspheming friends!"
"Father, wait----" appealed Lurain wildly, but the fanatical old man's
shout interrupted her.
"Seize them--men of Dordona!"
The Dordonan warriors, recovering from their surprize, sprang between
the two bound captives and the advancing quartet. Blacky Cain raised
his automatic swiftly.
"Let 'em have it, fellows!" he rasped.
"No, Blacky--wait!" cried Clark. "Don't----"
Suddenly the whole tableau froze, the crowding mob and warriors in the
torchlit streets around the temple, the four adventurers advancing and
the two captives, all struck motionless. From all around the city of
Dordona had come a sudden wild, distant roar--a roar of thousands of
savage voices, over which rose shrill, terrified screams. Then from the
dark edge of the city came racing a warrior on horseback, bleeding and
dying from a half-dozen fresh sword-wounds in throat and breast. He
reeled and fell from his steed, almost at the feet of old Kimor.
"They attack!" choked the dying Dordonan. "The hordes of K'Lamm have
surprized the walls, and Thargo leads them into the city now!"
_13. Thargo Drinks_
A great, horror-stricken cry shuddered up from thousands of throats.
And as though echoing it, there came louder the fierce roar of voices
from all around the city, as the forces of K'Lamm poured ravening into
Dordona.
Clark Stannard, frozen like all the others in a moment of paralyzing
shock, realized with sinking heart what had happened. Thargo had
guessed that Clark and Lurain would bring warning to Dordona of the Red
attack scheduled for three days hence. So Thargo had not waited until
then, but had gathered his forces and swept down on the Black city in
the night, and now had suddenly forced his way inside.
Down the nighted streets of Dordona toward the temple came Thargo's
cavalry now, wild riders of K'Lamm whose red armor and upraised swords
glinted in the red torchlight. They thundered right into the thronged
square around the temple, and hewing, stabbing, yelling like demons,
forced their way through the seething Blacks toward the temple steps.
"To the defense!" shrilled old Kimor over the wild din. "While one of
us lives, the Red spawn must not reach the sacred shaft they seek to
enter!"
"Dordona! Dordona!" answered a wild chorus of shouts as the Black
warriors tore out their swords and sprang to meet the Red riders.
But more of Thargo's fierce cavalry was charging into the plaza of
the temple from other directions. In the red light of the scattered
torches, the great space around the temple had become a mad confusion
of battling men and horses, gleaming swords and panicky fugitives.
Clark and Lurain lay upon the temple steps, still bound and helpless.
Clark strained wildly to break his bonds.
"Blacky! Mike! This way!" he yelled desperately through the uproar of
combat.
He glimpsed his four followers, out there a hundred yards away on the
battle-choked plaza, trying to force their way through the crazy fight
to him. Blacky Cain's eyes were blazing as he shot a slow way through
the conflict, bringing down Red after Red.
But a new troop of the fierce horsemen of K'Lamm had crashed into the
plaza from the west. At their head Clark glimpsed Dral, that suave,
cunning-eyed captain of Thargo's, and at the same moment Dral glimpsed
Clark and the Dordonan girl lying helpless.
Dral shouted to his men, and they spurred their horses through a gap in
the battle. The Red captain's sword was raised, and he was bending low
as he and his men charged, his intention being only too obviously that
of slaying the two bound captives.
"Stannar, they come to kill us!" cried Lurain, as she too saw the
deadly, oncoming troop.
"Blacky!" yelled Clark, and saw even as he shouted that Blacky Cain and
the others were still fifty yards away, trying to force through the mad
mêlée of combatants.
Then Clark saw split-second action. Link Wilson, the lank, tall Texan
who had been fighting behind Blacky, had glimpsed the desperate peril
of Clark and Lurain. The ex-cowboy acted with blurring speed. He made a
sudden fierce spring at one of the Red horsemen near by, avoiding the
warrior's descending sword and pulling him from his mount. Then with a
single incomparably skilful motion, the Texan vaulted into the saddle,
turned the maddened horse, and urged it across the crowded palace in a
wild, crashing gallop toward Dral's riders.
Dral and his charging horsemen were but a few hundred feet from Clark
and Lurain, when Link Wilson galloped past Clark, heading right into
the oncoming troop. Clark glimpsed the Texan's tanned, set face and
blazing eyes, and heard his trailing cry as he passed.
"_Adios_, partner!"
And as he shouted that, as he charged the oncoming riders, Link was
dropping his reins and jerking out both his big forty-fives.
The guns boomed and Dral and three other of his charging men threw up
wild hands toward the sky and fell. The charge of that Red troop halted
momentarily, the horsemen milling madly around Link Wilson and striking
furiously at him with their swords.
And the Texan sat his plunging steed in the middle of them with the
great guns in his hands belching fire and death into the frantic circle
of his attackers, laughing hard, his reckless eyes blazing.
Blacky Cain and Mike Shinn and Lieutenant Morrow now had managed to
force through the raging conflict to Clark and Lurain, and Morrow was
rapidly untying them.
"Link, look out!" yelled Blacky madly. "Behind you!"
Through the battle toward that crazy fight of the Texan against a
score, was forging a solid, irresistible mass of K'Lamm cavalry. Thargo
rode at their head, the Red king's powerful face afire, his great sword
raised. He spurred his mount behind the shooting Texan.
"Look out for Thargo--behind you!" screamed Blacky again, the gangster
shooting as he yelled that vain warning.
"God, Thargo's got him!" cried Mike Shinn wildly.
For Thargo's blade had stabbed into Link Wilson's back, and the
fighting Texan toppled and fell.
Blacky Cain, raging madly, started toward the Red king. "I'll get
Thargo--by God, I will!"
* * * * *
Clark Stannard's heart was swollen with wild anger, as he witnessed the
death of the Texan who had sacrificed himself in that reckless attack
to save his leader and Lurain. Yet Clark held the raging gangster back.
"No, Blacky--you haven't a chance! Into the temple--that's our only
chance now, for the Reds have won the battle!"
It was the truth. Thargo's overpowering forces had by their surprize
attack swept away almost the last of the Dordonan resistance, in this
terrific battle around the temple. Only a few knots of the Black
warriors were left struggling in the midst of the forces from K'Lamm,
and these were going down one by one.
Thargo was already shouting to his red-armored followers, leading them
toward the domed temple. There was no possibility of escape through the
hundreds of his soldiers in the plaza--the only possible refuge for
Clark and his men was the temple itself, on whose steps they were. He
raced with them toward the great doors.
"My father Kimor--I saw him slain!" Lurain was crying. She stooped and
snatched up a fallen sword, wildcat hate blazing in her face as she
exclaimed, "We die soon, but I will die happy if I can kill Thargo."
Clark and Lieutenant Morrow also snatched up swords as they ran into
the building. For Clark knew their ammunition was perilously near its
end. They heard the wolf-like shouting of the horde from K'Lamm,
following Thargo toward the temple.
They pushed shut the great doors, and slammed down the bar that
fell across them on the inside. An instant later, the Red soldiers
crashed against the outside of the doors, and they could hear Thargo's
bull-voice urging them to break them down.
"They've got us trapped," Lieutenant Morrow said coolly. "They hold the
whole city, they're all around this temple, and it's only a question of
minutes until they break in."
"When they do break in," rasped Blacky Cain, "I'm getting Thargo. He
killed Link, and he's mine."
The gangster's predatory face was tigerish in expression. He and the
ex-cowboy had, strangely, been closer to each other than any other of
the oddly assorted group of adventurers. Smoldering hate and desire for
vengeance burned now in his eyes.
Clark Stannard turned his back to the great doors against which the Red
hordes were banging. His eyes tensely searched the vast interior of the
temple, glimmeringly illuminated by shafts of moonlight from the slits
in the high dome.
There at the center of the huge room yawned the round black abyss of
the sacred shaft, the pit descending to the cavern far below. And into
that pit with an uninterrupted, thunderous roar, there still fell the
cataract of tumbling waters from the river that entered the western
wall of the temple. The barred gate which lay at the head of the spiral
stair down into the pit was not guarded now by Dordonan warriors--the
guards there had run out to join the battle at the first alarm.
"They'll be in here in a minute!" cried Morrow, as the bronze doors
bulged ominously inward from the battering outside.
"Men, we'll go down the stair to the bottom, and try to hold them
there," Clark said swiftly. "Down there we'll have a far better chance.
And though it looks as though there's no hope for escape, we'll at
least sell our lives as dearly as possible."
"Okay by me," cried Mike Shinn. "They ain't counted ten over us yet."
"Come on!" Clark cried, grabbing Lurain's arm and hurrying toward the
pit.
The temple doors were now bulging far inward, the bar that held them
slowly bending to the breaking-point. Clark swung aside the barred gate
at the top of the spiral stair. Mike Shinn paused to tear a great metal
bar off the gate, exerting sudden, tremendous strength.
"Shells all gone," grunted the red-headed prizefighter, tossing away
his useless automatic.
"Mine too," said Lieutenant Morrow. He had in his hand the sword he had
snatched up outside.
Clark thrust Lurain down the first steps of the stair, and Morrow and
Mike followed. But Blacky Cain was missing, and Clark turned quickly to
perceive that the gangster had not followed the rest of them across the
huge room to the pit.
Blacky was still standing right inside the great doors, coldly watching
them as they bulged inward from the hammering assault outside. The
gangster had his heavy automatic in his hand, and from somewhere in his
pockets had fished a last crumpled cigarette. It drooped from between
his lips, smoke curling from it, as he faced the door.
"Blacky, come on!" cried Clark, shouting over the dull roar of the
cataract. "You've no chance there--that mob will overwhelm you in a
minute! On the stair we can hold them."
"I'm staying right here," rasped Blacky without turning. "I've got one
last clip in my rod, and I'm putting the heat on Thargo before I get
mine."
Then he turned a little and said harshly, to Clark and Shinn and
Morrow, "So long, pals. This has been as good a mob as I ever traveled
with."
* * * * *
Clark leaped up from the stair, intent on running to the gangster and
dragging him to the pit with him by force. But at that moment the bar
broke, the temple doors crashed open.
In through the doors poured a flood of Red warriors, a torrent of
raging swords. Thargo was in the forefront, shouting with bull-voice,
"On--we are close to the Lake of Life! In minutes now we drink of
immortality!"
Then the inbursting warriors of K'Lamm glimpsed Blacky Cain right in
front of them, facing them with feet wide apart, cigarette drooping
from his contemptuous lips, gun raised in his hand.
Thargo, swift alarm and understanding on _his_ face as he saw the
leveled weapon, threw himself aside. The automatic broke into flaming
life at the same moment. One bullet grazed past Thargo's side, the
others drove into the Red warriors as they charged. A half-dozen of
those warriors toppled with lead slugs in their heads.
Clark saw Blacky Cain, with a harsh laugh, fling the empty gun right
into the faces of the others as they overwhelmed him with a torrent
of stabbing swords. And then they were coming on over the gangster's
fallen body, Thargo leaping back into the lead, the Red king's face
contorted from pain of his wound.
"On, men of K'Lamm!" he roared. "There are but these few now standing
between you and the waters of undying life!"
Clark had but three shells left in his gun, and he was grimly resolved
to save two of them for Lurain and himself, rather than to let
themselves be captured by Thargo and tortured.
He snapped the other shot at the Red king, as he leaped back onto the
stair. But in the wild rush of charging Reds, Thargo had moved too
swiftly and the bullet killed the man behind him.
"Down the stair!" cried Clark to Lurain and Shinn and Morrow. "There's
a place at the bottom where it will be easier to hold them back, and
where there is more light to fight by."
They started down the stair in desperate haste. Incredible scene for
that nightmare retreat! The three men and the slim, armored girl,
retreating down the spiral around and around the side of the pit, while
at the center of the great shaft there thundered downward the foaming,
awful cataract.
After them came the vanguard of the Red horde, hundreds of eager
warriors pressing down the dark stair with upraised swords, wildly
athirst for the promised waters of immortality; Thargo leading them,
his bull-voice roaring over the cataract, to urge them on.
Recklessly, Clark and Lurain and their two companions ran down the
high-flung, dizzy stairway, until at last they were penetrating the
feeble glow in the lower part of the shaft. And then, gasping for
breath, they reached the bottom of the pit, where the falling cataract
broke upon the rock and flowed away through the water-tunnel toward the
Lake of Life.
Clark stopped with his companions in the narrow path that ran beside
the racing river in the water-tunnel.
"Here's where we can hold them longest," he panted. "They can only come
at us a few at a time."
"Then we die here!" cried Lurain, clinging hard to Clark, her face
flaming. "Stannar, I am not afraid!"
Clark kissed her, setting his lips against hers with bruising force.
His heart was leaden. "I know you're not afraid, Lurain, of death. But
we've failed in everything--we can't keep that horde from the Lake of
Life now. God, the horror it will mean for the outside world when those
human wolves go forth, immortal!"
Lieutenant Morrow was gazing at Clark and the clinging girl with a
strange, bitter look in his memory-haunted eyes.
"It is something," he said, "to know that the woman you love is glad to
die with you. I envy you, Stannard."
"Well, it looks like this is my final bout, but it sure ought to be a
swell one!" grinned Mike Shinn, flourishing his great metal bar.
"Here they come!" Clark cried suddenly.
Down the stair into the bottom of the pit were pouring the vanguard
of the Red warriors, Thargo's great form in the lead. They saw the
water-tunnel, and the narrow path.
"This way!" Thargo bawled. "This passage must lead to the Lake of
Immortality!"
Along the path they came, not glimpsing for a moment Clark and Morrow
and Shinn drawn up across it. Then the swords of Clark and the army
officer smote like lightning brands, and Mike Shinn's whirling bar
crashed helmets and skulls like egg-shells.
For a moment the warriors of K'Lamm recoiled from that terrific and
unexpected resistance. Then Thargo, face crimson with rage, shouted and
they advanced again, eyes gleaming wolfishly in the glowing light.
"Come on, ye scuts!" roared Mike Shinn, swinging his huge bar like a
reed. "We're waitin' for ye!"
Clark Stannard struck and struck like a madman with his sword as the
torrent of attackers poured down on them again. The narrowness of the
path between the tunnel wall and the raging river made the fight a
bloody, choked confusion.
Clark felt steel ripping into his shoulder and thigh, was aware that he
was bleeding. Beside him Lieutenant Morrow, his lean face glistening,
his eyes terrible, was slashing and stabbing in saber-fashion. Mike
Shinn was a man gone mad, his battered face wild and scarlet, his eyes
icy flames as his huge arm swung the giant bar. Its sweeping blows
crushed down warrior after warrior into writhing, broken things.
"Come on, there's plenty more for ye!" Shinn's raging voice was
bellowing.
"Morrow, look out!" screamed Clark, lunging wildly.
Morrow's foot had slipped in blood, and as the lieutenant staggered,
a Red warrior stabbed up from beneath at his heart. The young ex-army
officer fell without a sound.
The next moment, Clark's sword sliced the throat of his killer. But
another length of steel tore into Clark's leg below the knee. He reeled
faint now from loss of blood, would have fallen as he stumbled had not
Lurain fiercely held him, striking with her own sword in wildcat fury.
* * * * *
Thargo, keeping cannily a little back from the forefront of the raging
fight, was urging his men forward, shouting promises of the Lake of
Life that lay now almost within their grasp. And with immortality
dangling before them, the men of K'Lamm pushed forward irresistibly,
forcing Clark and Mike and Lurain back and back along the water-tunnel,
back until they were at the end of the tunnel, with behind them the
vast cavern of gleaming haze, the glowing, shimmering sea of the lake.
And at sight of those radiant waters for which their race had thirsted
for generations, the men of K'Lamm came on with wild-beast fury.
Clark stood with the crazily shouting Shinn, keeping Lurain behind him,
and fought like a staggering madman. Clark knew in his dazed mind that
it was all over, that nothing now could keep Thargo's horde from the
lake, but he was wildly determined to kill and kill while life remained
in him.
Then a flashing sword-blade grazed down across Clark's forehead in a
stunning blow. Blood ran into his eyes, and he felt himself swaying
backward, collapsing strengthlessly upon the black rock floor of the
cavern, just beyond the tunnel mouth. He felt Lurain bending over him,
frantically seeking to revive him.
And Mike Shinn held the path!
Alone, dripping with blood from a dozen wounds, a crimsoned, terrible
figure roaring in defiance, the ex-prizefighter stood in the end of
the tunnel, whirling that giant metal mace whose end was bright with
new blood. Upon him pressed the horde of K'Lamm, and for the moment,
ravening as they were at sight of the shining lake, they could not pass
him.
Then Thargo, pushing forward in the attacking throng, whirled his sword
around and cast it javelin-wise. The keen blade tore into Shinn's
throat. For a moment, even the horde of attackers was motionless, as
the great redhead swayed and staggered. His voice was a choked, bloody
murmur.
"I guess--I guess that's--the bell----"
He toppled in a dead heap. With wild, triumphant cries, Thargo and his
red-armored horde pushed past his body, across the black rock shore
toward the radiant, beckoning Lake of Life.
They paid no heed at this moment, in their mad lust for the glowing
waters, to Clark lying half senseless on the rock with Lurain bending
over him. They pushed unheedingly past the forbidding stone statue
of the strange, seal-like figure, with its upraised arm and tragic,
despairing face. They flung themselves down on the shore of the lake,
and bent their heads, hundreds of them, drinking the radiant waters.
"They drink!" cried Lurain in a sob that only half penetrated Clark's
dim brain. "Stannar, they become immortal!"
Thargo and his men, straightening now from their quaffing of the
waters, were beginning to change. Their bodies were beginning
to _glow_. Clark Stannard's dimmed, half-conscious eyes saw the
incredible, ghastly miracle: the bodies of Thargo and his horde,
glowing now with shimmering light like the lake itself, radiant with
weird luminosity.
Thargo's glowing mouth opened and from the weirdly changed king of
K'Lamm came a great, triumphant cry.
"Immortal! Now we are immortal!"
_14. The Guardians_
As Thargo's mad, exultant cry was echoed by a thunderous shout from the
glowing horde that had now drunk of the lake, Clark Stannard reeled
half blindly to his feet. A blood-smeared, terrible figure, he raised
his pistol from his belt. Unnoticed by the triumphant, yelling horde in
this wild moment, he aimed at Thargo's breast.
In Clark's crazed mind was room for just one thought--to kill Thargo.
He had in the pistol the two bullets that he had saved for Lurain and
himself. Now, swaying drunkenly, he pulled the trigger and sent the two
leaden slugs crashing into Thargo's breast.
The sharp double crack of the gun was followed by a momentary tense
silence. The eyes of all the shining horde turned on their king.
Thargo was looking unbelievingly down at his own glowing breast. Out of
a big hole over his heart was flowing a trickle of blood as radiant as
the waters of the lake.
_Then Thargo laughed!_ He laughed loudly, wildly, in supreme, soaring
mirth. He drew out the sword that he had sheathed a few moments before.
And still laughing loudly, he strode over the jagged rock toward Clark
and Lurain. A glowing, weird figure--a man with two bullets through his
heart who walked toward them laughing!
[Illustration: "A glowing weird figure--a man with two bullets through
his heart."]
"You fool!" Thargo's great voice mocked Clark, his glowing face supreme
in unshakable sense of power. "Do you think that your weapons can ever
kill me _now_?"
"Gods!" gasped Lurain. "Now that he has drunk of the lake, he will
never die--and he cannot even be killed!"
_Thargo and his men could not be killed!_ The awful knowledge struck
through the dazed mind of Clark Stannard.
He saw it now, in terrible clarity. The pure essence of life in the
shining waters, once drunk by any man, imbued every atom of his body
with a flame of life that nothing could extinguish. No matter if his
vital organs were shattered, no matter if he were hacked into tiny
pieces, each of those remnants of him would remain living, would retain
a portion of his consciousness.
Thargo and his glowing, evil followers could not be killed--and would
never die. They would remain living as long as the earth endured.
Nothing could prevent it. Nothing could end the strange new flame of
life that shone from every fiber of their bodies.
"For you and this wench of Dordona--death now!" cried Thargo, his sword
raised toward the frozen pair. "And then we who are immortal go forth
from here, out over the mountains to world conquest."
"World conquest!" howled the horde from K'Lamm in great chorus, from
hundreds of glowing throats. "We cannot be killed now and the world is
ours for the taking!"
Thargo swung his sword up, poised it for the downward sweep, his
radiant face hideous with hate. Clark blindly thrust Lurain behind him,
before the sword could fall.
The sword did not fall. From somewhere in the howling, immortal horde
had suddenly come a wild shriek, a thrilling, terrible cry that spun
the gaze of all of them, even that of Thargo, sharply around. The one
who had cried out was pointing out into the shimmering sea of the lake,
out into the shining mists that veiled its farther reaches.
Something was coming out of those gleaming mists. Something vast and
dark, a high, stupendous bulk, was emerging with majestic slowness
from the shrouding haze, moving over the surface of the glowing waters
toward the shore where they stood.
It bulked bigger, nearer, as they stared rigidly. It was a dark mass
thousands of feet in width, hundreds in height, that floated on the
surface of the shining lake, and glided silently over it. Clark
Stannard's dimmed gaze perceived vague outlines of _buildings_ in that
floating, advancing mass.
Then as it emerged completely from the shrouding mists, a great sigh
went up from hundreds of throats, a sigh of horror and stupefaction.
Thargo and the men of K'Lamm, a crowd of motionless, glowing statues,
stared with wild emotion on their shining features.
It was a floating city that was advancing out of the mists. It was
built upon a huge, square plate of black metal that floated like cork
upon the radiant waters. The plate, and the city it supported, were a
half-mile square. The buildings that rose from this floating foundation
were black, cubical, roofless metal ones, severely angular of outline.
And standing in a solemn, silent throng at the near edge of the
advancing city, were a thousand or more weird figures--figures,
creatures, who glowed with the same immortal, radiant life as now did
Thargo and his horde. But these glowing creatures, not men----
Clark heard Lurain cry out chokingly as she discerned the nature
of those glowing inhabitants of the floating city. They were
creatures exactly like the stone statue that towered here on the
shore--seal-like, amphibian-looking beings, with rotund, erect bodies
and bulbous heads and flipper-limbs.
"The Guardians!" Lurain was crying hoarsely. "Stannar, the Guardians
come!"
"Too late," muttered Clark thickly. "They can't kill Thargo and this
horde now--no one can. Too late!"
But the floating city came on, until its edge grated against the black
rock shore. And as Thargo and his men remained rooted, paralyzed as
though by unheard command, the glowing Guardians solemnly, slowly,
trooped ashore.
In silent, weird procession they came, he who seemed their leader
advancing to where Thargo stood frozen near Clark and Lurain,
the others following, two bearing between them a white, box-like
instrument. Weird, incredible scene from nightmare--the vast cavern of
gleaming haze, the shimmering lake upon which floated the unearthly
city, the unhuman, glowing creatures trooping from it and confronting
the glowing horde of frozen, paralyzed men.
The leader of the Guardians stopped, facing the king of K'Lamm. And now
Clark's eyes saw clearly the faces of these creatures. Like the face of
the stone statue they were, in features and in expression. The low,
bulbous forehead, the great, circular eyes, the flat nostril-openings
and straight wide mouth, were the same.
And that expression of immense and alien intellectual power, of
knowledge and capacities beyond anything human, was on these glowing
faces. And dominating them, as in the statue, that sick, dull weariness
of superhuman fatigue and frustration, that deep and utter despair.
Yes, the agony of awful tragedy that looked now out of the eyes of
these beings was crushed, creeping like a cold poison through Clark
Stannard's reeling mind. One read in these glowing orbs, haunting,
horrible memories of superhuman aspiration and tragedy and despair.
"The--the Guardians!" Thargo choked hoarsely, his glowing face hideous
in its naked terror.
* * * * *
The leader of the unhuman creatures spoke, in a heavy, solemn whisper,
like the hollow voice of the speaking dead.
"Aye, the Guardians, whom you disbelieved in and scorned, you who
wished to become immortal," the creature said slowly.
"You sought for immortality--and it is yours!" continued the solemn
voice of the Guardian leader. "Aye, we could have killed you from afar
before ever you drank of the lake. But because of your evil, we let you
drink, so that you might know a doom more terrible than death, a doom
that is ours also.
"Yes, for we too sinned and drank!" Strong, strong was the throbbing
of tragedy in the Guardian leader's hollow voice. "Ages ago, when our
amphibian race ruled the earth and when man did not yet exist, we
found this place where a giant meteor from far away had crashed into
the earth, hollowing out this great space for itself, flinging up the
mountains around it and the rock that fell back over it, bringing to
earth the alien, radiant element that kindles life, that is the spark,
the essence, of life.
"We too forced our way down here, carving the stair in the pit that the
falling waters had eroded. And we found the Lake of Life, the shining
waters that contained in solution that alien, radiant element that had
started life upon earth. We drank of the waters, as you have done, felt
the essence of inextinguishable life flood through our bodies as it now
floods through yours. Yes, we committed that sin.
"For greatest of sins it is! To live for ever is the most terrible of
fates--to experience every possible emotion, every possible event,
until the soul sickens within from the unvarying monotony of ages.
_That_ is why, when we realized the horror of what we had done, we
determined that no others should ever do the hideous thing we had done,
no others should ever drink of the Lake of Life. That is why, long ago,
we gave our command to the men above, not to drink of the lake."
The Guardian leader raised a glowing arm, and his flipper-like hand
pointed in bitter accusation at the paralyzed Thargo.
"You scoffed at our ancient commandment, you forced your way down here
and drank, and you and your followers now are drunken with immortality.
And your sin was greater even than ours, for we quaffed the cup of
undying life long ago only because we hoped to reap greater knowledge
from our immortality. You have drunk, not to gain great knowledge from
undying life, but to gain great power over the outside world. So is
your sin the greater.
"And so," rolled the Guardian's toneless whisper, "we shall close the
Lake of Life now to the world for ever, lest any others should force
their way down here as you have done, and drink as you have drunk.
And the thing that we do now brings doom upon you and upon ourselves
also. But it is a doom that we tired ones welcome, for though it is not
death, it is the closest to death to which we immortals can aspire."
Now the glowing Guardian leader turned his tragic, haunted eyes toward
Clark and Lurain.
Thargo and all his horde remained frozen, as the creature spoke to the
bloody, swaying figure of Clark, and the girl.
"You two alone are guiltless," the Guardian was whispering. "You did
not drink of the lake when you reached it, before, for from afar we
were watching and were ready to slay you if you started to drink. And
you have fought, you and your companions, to keep these evil ones from
reaching the lake.
"Therefore we give you life. Hasten both of you up to the upper world,
and flee swiftly toward the mountains around this land. We have removed
the deadly force with which we invested the mountains long ago, and
unless you reach them quickly, you will perish when we do the thing
that we prepare now to do."
The Guardian extended a shining arm, pointing solemnly toward the
tunnel leading to the shaft.
"Go--and quickly!"
Clark Stannard, hardly able to stand, reeled with Lurain past the
frozen form of Thargo, past the silent, glowing Guardians and the
paralyzed, glowing horde from K'Lamm, toward the tunnel.
He and the girl glanced back as they entered it, shaken with awe. They
saw all the radiant forms there, of men and Guardians, standing utterly
motionless, in a terrible, unbroken silence. But two of the Guardians
were bending over the white, box-like instrument.
Clark staggered through the tunnel, the sobbing girl's arm supporting
him. Then they were on the stair, in the deafening thunder of the
falling cataract, struggling upward. He slipped and fell upon the
steps, and Lurain had to drag him erect.
"Hurry, Stannar--we _must_ reach the surface! Something terrible is
going to happen!"
"Go--you go on, Lurain," he gasped, as he stumbled again. But she clung
fiercely to him.
"No! We escape or perish together!"
It was a wild, nightmare climb in a dream to Clark, the struggle up the
stair. A crazy, unreal ascent, with the thundering cataract bellowing
mockery at his attempts to hasten, with the Dordonan girl's arms half
supporting, half dragging him.
Then light and cool air hit his face, and he discovered they were
climbing out of the pit, into the wrecked temple. It was deserted save
for strewn bodies. They stumbled through its doors into the street
outside. The dawn was breaking over conquered Dordona.
* * * * *
No man or woman moved in the black city's streets! The Black people had
perished to the last one, lay dead around the places they had tried to
defend, slain by Thargo's horde. And Thargo and his warriors were all
down there, in the cavern of the lake.
Lurain with frantic haste caught two of the riderless horses that were
stamping, snorting, and trotting nervously about, whinnying in strange
panic. She helped Clark climb onto one, then leaped into the saddle of
the other. They galloped down the street toward the gate of the city,
raced out of it onto the grassy plain.
"To the mountains!" Lurain cried. "Ride hard, Stannar!"
The panicky horses bolted like mad across the plain, toward the steep,
dark rampart of the Mountains of Death that rose close behind conquered
Dordona. The animals' legs seemed to fly, and to Clark's dazed mind it
was a vague, rocket-like rush through space.
They were within a few hundred feet of the first slopes of the
mountains, when from deep in the earth below came a long, grinding,
wrenching sound as of riven worlds. Lurain shouted, and the horses
plunged with insane speed toward the slope.
They dashed up onto the rocky slope of the mountains. Clark, vaguely
expecting the blue flash of death as they climbed onto the rock,
remembered now what the Guardian leader had said about withdrawing the
fatal force from the mountains.
The tremendous, muttering roar from deep in the earth was growing
louder. The mountains themselves were quivering now, and Lurain slipped
from her rearing horse, held the bridle of Clark's. They turned, stared
with blood freezing, back out over the plain.
The whole fifty-mile circle of land within the mountains was heaving
and rumpling like a sea in storm, as the grinding roll beneath grew
louder. The city Dordona rocked like a ship. Then huge cracks appeared
in the plain, rifts and splits that were widening----
"The land sinks!" Lurain cried wildly.
All the country inside the ring of the mountains was subsiding with
a prolonged and awful roar. Dordona vanished, shattered amid falling
masses of rock. And far away they glimpsed the scarlet towers of K'Lamm
plunging and falling also, in the world-shaking cataclysm.
Then vast clouds of dust rose up that hid all from their view. The
roar died away, the mountains ceased quivering. And when the dust began
to drift away, Clark and Lurain looked, appalled.
"God!" muttered Clark thickly. "The whole land--gone for ever!"
"The Guardians kept their promise!" cried Lurain. "_This_ was the
way in which they closed the Lake of Life to the world for ever--and
brought doom to Thargo and his horde, and to themselves. They used
forces that caused all the land over the great cavern of the lake to
collapse inward on it!"
For inside the Mountains of Death now there lay only a tremendous
depression, a raw new crater of broken rock, thousands of feet deeper
than the former level of the land. Thousands of feet of shattered rock
buried all that had been in the cavern beneath.
"The Lake of Life--buried for ever!" Lurain was crying. "And the
Guardians, and the horde of Thargo, crushed under all that stone!"
"Yes," muttered Clark, his whole body trembling as he visualized
the greatest horror of that awful doom. "Thargo and his men and the
Guardians, crushed and imprisoned for ever beneath the rock--but still
immortal, still _living_."
_15. Epilog_
The Belgian colonial officer in charge of that little trading-post on
the Ubangi River rose from the chair on the bungalow veranda and stared
with unbelieving eyes at the two people who had just emerged from the
green gloom of the jungle. They were walking doubtfully toward him.
One was a hard-bodied young man in a tattered, stained solaro suit, his
black head bare, his brown face gaunt from hardship. The other was a
girl--an astonishing-looking girl with a torrent of blue-black hair
and challenging blue eyes, her legs and arms naked, her only garment a
tight short tunic of black metal-mesh.
"_Mon Dieu!_" muttered the officer, staring at them, his jaw dropping.
"I am delirious--I am dreaming----"
Then his eyes flashed with excitement. "I recognize you now,
_m'sieu_--from the newspaper pictures! The river boat brought the
papers but yesterday. You are the Monsieur Stannard who led a crazy
expedition into the Kiridu country!"
"I am," Clark Stannard admitted, stopping with his arm around the
wondering-eyed girl. "And I'm the only one of the expedition left."
"But it was all in the story, _m'sieu_!" cried the Belgian, utterly
excited. "An American millionaire, one Asa Brand, had you undertake
a search for the Lake of Life which the natives talk about, so the
story said. You got through the French authorities but it was thought
you were killed by the tribes in the Kiridu. And when that report
reached America, this Monsieur Brand died soon after, of a broken heart
they say, because he thought all chance of getting the waters of the
legended lake was gone."
"So Asa Brand is dead?" Clark's face was strange for a moment. "And
the search he sent me on, then, indirectly brought about the death he
feared so much."
"Yes, it is so," cried the officer, "but the newspaper said that before
he died, in remorse for having sent you as he thought to your death, he
bequeathed to your surviving family a million dollars."
Clark Stannard drew a long breath. That old shadow of fear for his
helpless family was lifted from him, at last.
"Did you find the lake, _m'sieu_?" asked the Belgian eagerly. "Of
course, the waters of immortality are just a native fable, but did you
discover anything unusual in there? There were rumors of an earthquake
or something that caused the natives of the Kiridu to flee in panic."
"No," Clark said shortly. "My companions were killed by natives, and
I found no trace of the legended lake. As you say, it was all only a
native fable."
"But this girl?" persisted the other, staring at Lurain's strange
costume. "Where--how----"
"This is my wife," Clark told him briefly. "She is a white girl I
found back in the interior and brought out with me." He added, before
the eager Belgian could ask any more questions, "When will the next
down-river boat be here? And can you relay a cable message for me?"
A week later, as a small liner pulled out from the port of Boma
on the Belgian Congo coast, Clark Stannard stood with Lurain--a
different-looking Lurain in her modern dress--by the rail. They looked
back at the low green African coast, sinking back down behind the
horizon.
Lurain's bright blue eyes winked tears. "I am alone now, Stannar. My
people, my city, my land--gone, lost for ever."
"You'll never be alone," he told her, his arm drawing her closer. "Not
while I'm living."
"But Dordona," she said. "I seem to see it now, there beneath the
rock--broken and shattered----"
Clark, too, was gazing intently toward the receding shoreline, as
though he too could see far inland to the strange mountain-ringed land
that was no more. But it was not the perished city that he was seeing,
but his five followers who lay buried there.
Ruined, hunted men, disgraced and hard-bitten and lawless--but loyal,
staunch and unfearing. They lay there where they had fallen fighting,
forgotten by the world. But Clark Stannard's hand went up in a vague
gesture, that was half salute and half farewell.
"Good-bye, fellows," he whispered. And then he whispered the words that
Mike Shinn once had spoken of another. "You were good guys. You were
_great_ guys."
THE END
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