The Conquest of the Moon Pool/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
"I'D FOLLOW HER THROUGH HELL!"
MOMENTS must have passed as we stood in stark amazement, gazing at that incredible apparition. The two figures, although as real as any of those who stood beside me, unfantomlike as it is possible to be, had a distinct suggestion of—projection.
They were there before us—golden-eyed girl and grotesque frog-woman—complete in every line and curve. And still it was as though their bodies passed back through distances. As though, to try to express the well-nigh inexpressible, the two shapes we were looking upon were the end of an infinite number stretching in fine linked chain far away, of which the eyes saw only the nearest, while in the brain some faculty higher than sight recognized and registered the unseen others.
It crossed my mind that so we three-dimensional beings might appear to those dwellers in the hypothetical two-dimensional space we use to help us conceive the fourth dimension. And yet there was nothing of any metaphysical fourth dimension about them; they were actualities—real, breathing, complete.
The gigantic eyes of the frog-woman took us all in, unwinkingly. I could see little glints of phosphorescence shine out within the metallic green of the outer iris ring. She stood upright, her great legs bowed, the monstrous slit of a mouth slightly open, revealing a row of white teeth sharp and pointed as lancets; the paw resting on the girl's shoulder, half covering its silken surface, and from its five webbed digits long yellow claws of polished horn glistening against the delicate texture of the flesh.
But if the frog-woman regarded us all, not so did the maiden of the rosy wall. Her eyes were fastened upon Larry, drinking him in with extraordinary intentness. She was tall, far over the average of woman, almost as tall, indeed, as O'Keefe himself; not more than twenty years old, if that, I thought. Abruptly she leaned forward, the golden eyes softened and grew tender; the red lips moved as though she were speaking.
Larry took a quick step, and his face was that of one who after countless births comes at last upon the twin soul lost to him for ages. The frog woman turned her eyes upon the girl; her huge lips moved, and I knew that she was talking! The girl held out a warning hand to O'Keefe, and then raised it, resting each finger upon one of the five flowers of the carved vine close beside her. Once, twice, three times, she pressed upon the flower centers, and I noted that her hand was curiously long and slender, the digits like those wonderful tapering ones the painters we call the primitives gave to their Virgins.
Three times she pressed the flowers, and then looked intently at Larry once more. A slow, sweet smile curved the crimson lips. She stretched both hands out toward him again eagerly; and then I distinctly saw a burning blush rise swiftly over the flowerlike face.
And in that instant, like the clicking out of a cinematograph, the pulsing oval faded and golden-eyed girl and frog-woman were gone!
And thus it was that Lakla, the hand-maiden of the Silent Ones, and Larry O'Keefe first looked into each other's hearts!
"Clearly of the Ranadae," said Von Hetzdorp, "a development of the fossil Labyrinthodonts: you saw her teeth, ya?"
"Ranadae, yes," I answered. "But from the Stegocephalia; of the order Ecaudata—"
"Upon what evidence do you base your theory that she was of the Stego—"
I think I never heard such complete indignation, as was in O'Keefe's voice as he interrupted the German.
"What do you mean, fossils and Stego whatever it is?" he asked. "She was a girl, a wonder girl—a real girl, and Irish, or I'm not an O'Keefe!"
"We were talking about the frog-woman, Larry," I said, conciliatingly.
He strode swiftly over to the wall. We followed.
"It was here she put up her hand," he murmured. He pressed caressingly the carved calyxes, once, twice, a third time even as she had—and silently and softly the wall began to split. On each side a great stone pivoted slowly, and before us a portal stood, opening into a narrow corridor glowing with the same rosy lustre that had gleamed around the flame-tipped shadows.
O'Keefe leaped forward. I caught him by the arm. The far wall of the tunnel that had been revealed was not more than eight feet from where we were, and it ran, apparently, at right angles to the entrance. There was little of it to be seen, therefore, save the space just in front of us, and I will confess that my nerves were slightly shaken,
"What's the matter?" he asked.
"Wait," I answered. "Don't rush in there. Let us go together and carefully."
"Come, then, quickly," he said, curiously distrait. "I won't wait. I must follow. That's what she meant, you know."
"What she meant?" I echoed stupidly.
"What she meant when she pointed out the way to open the wall, of course," he said impatiently. "Don't you know that was why she pressed those flowers? She meant us—me—to follow her. Follow her? Why, I'd follow her through a thousand hells!"
Huldricksson stepped beside him. He set a great hand upon the Irishman's shoulder.
"Ja!" he rumbled. "That was no Troldkvindle, no black witch, that Jomfru! She was a white virgin, ja. Well I know that this is Trolldom, but she will help me find my Helma! You go, and Olaf Huldricksson's arm you have with you, always; ja, ready to hold or to strike. Come!"
His hand fell from Larry's shoulder and gripped the Irishman's own. I reached down and picked up my emergency kit.
"Have your gun ready, Olaf!" said
Larry, with Huldricksson at one end, O'Keefe at the other, both of them with automatics in hand, and Von Hetzdorp and I between them, we stepped over the threshold.
AT OUR right, a few feet away, the passage ended abruptly in a square of polished stone, from which came the faint rose radiance of what Von Hetzdorp had called the "etheric lights." The roof of the place was less than two feet over O'Keefe's head. Behind us was the portal leading into the Chamber of the Pool.
We turned to the left to look down the tunnel's length, and each of us stiffened. A yard in front of us lifted a four-foot high, gently curved barricade, stretching from wall to wall. Beyond it was blackness; an utter and appalling blackness that seemed to gather itself from infinite depths and to be thrust back by the low barrier as a dike thrusts back the menacing sea threatening ever to overwhelm it.
The rose-glow in which we stood was cut off by that blackness as though it had substance; it shimmered out to meet it, and was checked as though by a blow. Indeed, so strong was the suggestion of sinister, straining force within the rayless opacity that I shrank back, and Von Hetzdorp with me. Not so O'Keefe. Olaf beside him, he strode to the wall and peered over. He beckoned us.
"Flash your pocket-light down there," he said to me, pointing into the thick darkness below us. The little electric circle quivered down as though afraid, and came to rest upon a surface that resembled nothing so much as clear, black ice. I ran the light across, here and there. The floor of the corridor was of stone, so smooth, so polished, that no man could have walked upon it; it sloped downward at a slowly increasing angle.
"We'd have to have non-skid chains and brakes on our feet to tackle that," mused Larry. Abstractedly he ran his hands over the edge on which he was leaning. Suddenly they hesitated and then gripped tightly.
"That's a queer one!" he exclaimed. His right palm was resting upon a rounded protuberance, on the side of which were three small circular indentations.
He pressed his fingers upon the circles. They gave under the pressure much, I thought, as an automatic punch does. O'Keefe's thrusting fingers sank deep, deeper, within the stone. There was a sharp click; the slabs that had opened to let us through swung swiftly together; a curiously rapid vibration thrilled through us, a wind arose and passed over our heads. A wind that grew and grew until it became a whistling shriek, then a roar and then a mighty humming, to which every atom in our bodies pulsed in rhythm painful almost to disintegration.
The rosy wall dwindled in a flash to a point of light, and disappeared.
Wrapped in the clinging, impenetrable blackness we were racing, dropping, hurling at a frightful speed—where?
And ever that awful humming of the rushing wind and the lightning cleaving of the tangible dark—so, it came to me oddly, must the newly released soul race through the sheer blackness of outer space up to that Throne of Justice, where God sits high above all suns!
I felt Von Hetzdorp creep close to me; gripped my nerve and flashed my pocket-light; saw Larry standing, peering, peering ahead, and Huldricksson, one strong arm around his shoulders, bracing him. And then the speed began to slacken.
Millions of miles, it seemed, below the sound of the unearthly hurricane I heard Larry's voice, thin and ghostlike, beneath its clamor.
"Got it!" shrilled the voice. "Got it! Don't worry!"
The wind died down to a roar, passed back into the whistling shriek and diminished to a steady whisper.
"Press all the way in these holes and she goes top-high," Larry shouted. "Diminish pressure—diminish speed. The curve of this—dashboard—here sends the wind shooting up over our heads—like a wind- shield. What's behind you?"
I flashed the light back. The mechanism on which we were ended in another wall exactly similar to that over which O'Keefe crouched.
"Well, we can't fall out, anyway," he. laughed. "Wish I knew where the brakes were! Look out!"
We dropped dizzily down an abrupt, seemingly endless slope; fell—fell as into an abyss—then shot abruptly out of the blackness into a throbbing green radiance. O'Keefe's fingers must have pressed down upon the controls, for we leaped forward almost with the speed of light. I caught a glimpse of luminous immensities, on the verge, of which we flew; of depths inconceivable, and flitting through the incredible spaces—gigantic shadows as of the wings of Israfil, which are so wide, say the Arabs, the world can cower under them like a nestling. And then again the dreadful blackness.
"What was that?" This from Larry, with the nearest approach to awe that I had yet heard from him.
"Trolldom!" croaked the voice of Olaf.
"Gott!" This from Von Hetzdorp. "What a space!
"Have you considered, Dr. Goodwin," he went on after a pause, "a curious thing? Probably the moon was hurled out of this same region we now call the Pacific when the earth was yet like molasses; almost molten, I should say. And is it not curious that that which comes from the moon chamber needs the moon rays to bring it forth? And also that the stone depends upon the moon for operating? Ja! And last, such a space in mother earth as we just glimpsed, how else could it have been torn but by some gigantic birth, like that of the moon?"
I started; there was so much that this might explain—an unkown element that responded to the moon-rays in opening the moon-door; the blue Pool with its weird radioactivity, and the peculiar mystery within it that reacted to the same light stream— What is there at the heart of earth? What of that radiant unknown element upon the moon mount Tycho? Yes—and what if Tycho's enigma had itself come from earth heart? What miracles were hidden there?
THE car seemed to poise itself for an instant, and then again dipped itself literally down into sheer space; skimmed forward in what was clearly curved flight, rose as upon a sweeping up-grade, and then began swiftly to slacken its fearful speed. I glanced at the illuminated dial of the watch on my wrist. It had been exactly twelve minutes since we had seen the roseate door fade into the blackness. But how far had we gone in those twelve minutes—scores of miles or hundreds of miles?—there was no knowing.
Far ahead a point of light showed; grew steadily; we were within. Then softly all movement ceased.
It was then I noted that the car, for so I must call it, that had brought us to this place was shaped somewhat like one of the Thames punts. Its back must have fitted with the utmost nicety into the end of the passage upon, which the inner doors of the Moon Pool Chamber had opened, for certainly when we stepped within it there had been no sign that it was other than part of the wall itself.
Where was its guiding mechanism? I could only conjecture that as the car moved away from the entrance there were slabs that slipped ingeniously into place, protecting those within from what would have been instant annihilating contact with the tunnel walls when the car ran close to them, or from pitching out when it skirted in the blackness, abysses such as that luminous green space that had sent each of our souls shivering back in awe.
The car rested in a slit in the center of a smooth walled chamber perhaps twenty feet square. The wall facing us was pierced by a low doorway through which we could see a flight of steps leading downward.
I glanced upward. The light streamed through an enormous oval opening, the base of which was twice a tall man's height from the floor. A curving flight of broad, low steps led up to it. And now it came to my steadying brain that there was something puzzling, peculiar, strangely unfamiliar about this light. It was silvery, shaded faintly with a delicate blue and flushed lightly with a nacreous rose; but a rose that differed from that of the terraces of the Pool Chamber as the rose within the opal differs from that within the pearl. In it were tiny, gleaming points like the motes in a sunbeam, but sparkling white like the dust of diamonds, and with a quality of vibrant vitality; they were as though they were alive. The light cast no shadows!
I hurried forward. At first all that I could see was space. A space filled with the same corcuscating effulgence that pulsed about me. I glanced upward, obeying that instinctive impulse of earth folk that bids them seek within the sky for sources of light. There was no sky. All was a sparkling nebulosity rising into infinite distances as the azure above the day-world seems to fill all the heavens. Through it ran pulsing waves and flashing javelin rays that were like shining shadows of the aurora; echoes, octaves lower, of those brilliant arpeggios and chords that play about the poles. My eyes fell beneath its splendor; I started outward.
And now I saw, miles away, gigantic luminous cliffs springing sheer from the limits of a lake whose waters were of milky opalescence. It was from these cliffs that the spangled radiance came, shimmering out from all their lustrous surfaces. To left and to right, as far as the eye could see, they stretched, and they vanished in the auroral nebulosity on high.
"Look at that!" exclaimed Larry. I followed his pointing finger. On the face of the shining wall, stretched between two colossal columns, hung an incredible veil; prismatic, gleaming with all the colors of the spectrum. It was like a web of rainbows woven by the fingers of the daughters of the Jinni. In front of it and a little at each side was a semicircular pier, or better, a plaza of what appeared to be glistening, pale-yellow ivory. At each end of its half-circle clustred a few low-walled rose-stone structures, each of them surmounted by a number of high, slender pinnacles.
"Of a hugeness, that!" It was Von Hetzdorp. "Have you considered that those precipices must from eight to ten miles away be, Dr. Goodwin? And, if so, how great must that so strange, prismatic curtain that we see so clearly be, eh? What hands could carve those columns between which it hangs? It is in my mind that we will carry back with us many new things. Dr. Goodwin—if we carry back at all," he concluded slowly.
We looked at each other, helplessly, and back again through the opening. We were standing, as I have said, at its base. The wall in which it was set was at least ten feet thick, and so, of course, all that we could see of that which was without were the distances that revealed themselves above the outer ledge of the oval.
"Let's take a look at what's under us," said Larry.
He crept out upon the ledge and peered down, the rest of us following. We stared in utter silence. A hundred yards beneath us stretched gardens that must have been like those of many-columned Iram, which the ancient Addite King had built for his pleasure ages before the deluge. And which Allah, so the Arab legend tells, took and hid from man, within the Sahara, beyond all hope of finding—jealous because they were more beautiful than his in paradise. Within them flowers and groves of laced, fernlike trees, pillard pavilions nestled.
The trunks of the trees were of emerald, of vermilion, and of azure-blue, and the blossoms, whose fragrance was borne to us, shone like jewels. The graceful pillars were tinted delicately. I noted that the pavilions were double—in a way, two-storied—and that they were oddly splotched with circles, with squares, and with oblongs of opacity. I noted, too, that over many this opacity stretched like a roof.
Yet it did not seem material; rather was it—impenetrable shadow!
Down through this city of gardens ran a broad, shining green thoroughfare, glistening like glass and spanned at regular intervals with graceful, arched bridges. The road flashed to a wide square, where rose, from a base of that same silvery stone that formed the lip of the Moon Pool, a Titanic tower of seven terraces; and along it flitted objects that bore a curious resemblance to the shell of the nautilus. Within them were human figures. And upon tree-bordered promenades on each side walked others.
Far to the right we caught the glint of another emerald paved road.
And between the two the gardens grew sweetly down to the hither side of that opalescent water across which were the radiant cliffs and the curtain of mystery.
Thus it was that we first saw the city of the Dweller; blessed and accursed as no place on earth, or under or above earth has ever been—or, that force willing which some call God, ever again shall be!