The Web of the Sun (Adventure Magazine, 1922)/Chapter 3
III
CHOMBO MEONE'S flight down the mountainside lent a certain authenticity to his story which his words had failed to convey. For several moments, Lassiter stood looking down the trail, speculating on what the Bujean could have seen years ago that sent him homeward today at such a scamper. Then, too, the fact that Chombo possessed a piece of silk cord grew upon the promoter as rather inexplicable. Troglodytes, such as the Quichuas, are not given to silks.
Birdsong accepted Meone's narrative in word and substance. The Indian had adventured with the devil, and straight ahead lay the battle-ground where he, Ezekiel Birdsong, would meet and conquer the infernal hosts with the sword of the spirit. He prodded his mule forward. What daunted the Indian spurred the zealot.
The terrane up which the expedition toiled smacked of Chombo's narrative. It was of volcanic origin and it stretched up ward as scoriated as the slopes of Hinnon itself. It was a formidable landscape. It appeared to Lassiter as if a vast, gray flood had been transfixed in stone in the instant of tumultuous descent. In one place its stony waves still lashed at the sky; in another, huge swirls from some long cooled maelstrom still held its contour; in yet others washes of vitreous green slag simulated the troughs of a stormy sea. This huge and strange terrane led upward, apparently to a plateau, which formed a pass through the snowy barricade of the Andes.
A cold wind swept down from the snow fields and worried at the men's ponchos and at the Bible packs. The trail which they had followed so far ceased to exist on the lava field. They worked upward by guess and chance. Their progress upward became a tortuous ant-like twisting with endless hesitations, back-turnings and retracings.
Indeed the hugeness of their surroundings dwarfed men and mules to the proportions of insects. They might very well have been a little string of ants creeping upward on the obscure and twiddling errand of such creatures.
It all must have affected Ezekiel Birdsong's imagination as the very outlands of hell. He was a Parsifal riding against the battlements of Klingsor, or rather, since the Arkansan's mind was untouched by the Wagnerian cycle, he was a child of the living God challenging the regents of Sin and Death.
Lassiter often looked at him, a short, compact, sun-burned man with oily black hair, shoving at his mule, steadying his pack and shouting his lugubrious hymns—Lassiter often looked at him, and the thought came to the Stendill agent more than once that the apostles of Christ, the fishermen and publicans who had made these Bible packs possible, must have been just such tough, sun-browned, indomitable rustics.
At other times the promoter in Lassiter asserted itself. He thought of the tourist trade. He visioned these cyclopæn scenes unrolling beneath the hull of a dirigible. What a tourist-catcher it would be! It would soon instate itself in the world's imagination as one of those obligatory tours, such as the Alps, the Yosemite, the Pyramids, the Grand Cañon, Stratford on Avon, which all real personages perform, thereby dispersing any doubt as to their culture.
So absorbed became the financier in this idea, that he would lose consciousness of his struggle upward, of his slippery charges up glazed redoubts, of his shovings at his mule's flank. In imagination he would be floating in a Stendill air-liner high above these discomforts. The ant meditated wings.
NEAR sundown the exploring party reached the level of the pass. Once up, their going was easier. Here the lava had weathered to a soil, and even a little grass broke out, like a sort of greenish skum on disturbed waters.
The relief from climbing and the color of the sunset picked up the spirits of the expedition. Balthasar, at the flank of the lead mule, broke into whistling a gay incontinent fandango. He supplied the castanets by snapping his fingers, and then, charmed by his own music, fell to twisting and swinging his hips as he walked, or rather capered along.
Birdsong, who followed the Colombian, stopped his hymn singing at this lickerish pantomime and watched his fellow muleteer in righteous disapproval. Condemnation was written in the Arkansan's very back and stride.
Lassiter, who brought up the van, was tired from his climb, but this little dumb show amused him. He walked beside his own mule with heavy legs. Also he tilted his foot a little to one side, to protect a new blister that had formed on his left great toe. However, the color of the dying day presently weaned his mind both from the little comedy and from the trifling discomforts of his own body. The sunlight streaming through the mountain defiles behind him gave him the impression of enormous hoses playing streams of gold upon the peaks ahead, while to the eastern sides of the mountains clung the night like a blue bubble.
Presently Lassiter's attention was drawn from this splendor by the sound of Birdsong exhorting Nunes in a queer mongrel of English, Spanish and Quichua. In the rarefied air, their voices came to him thinly.
Like so many well-meaning persons, Birdsong had endured the dance, and had suppressed his irritation to the breaking point; it had now become impossible for him to request the Colombian courteously to stop.
The first sentence Lassiter heard was Birdsong's nasal explosion—
“Look here, Brother Nunes, don't you know the devil is firing up his grill this minute, for such sinners as you are!”
The Colombian stared around at this thunderbolt out of an evening sky.
“Why is he, Señor Birdsong?” he inquired in a most amiable mood.
“To roast them dirty dances out of you!”
The Colombian drew a bit of shuck and tobacco from his green jacket and gravely began a cigaret.
“I know persons, Señor Birdsong, whom the devil himself couldn't roast a dance out of”
The colporteur looked at him hard.
“If you are trying to throw slurs on my soupleness, Brother Nunes, I'll have you understand there ain't a man in Yell County, Arkansas, that can tear down 'Cotton-Eye Joe' slicker than I can.”
“I'd enjoy seeing it done, wouldn't you, Señor Lassiter?”
Lassiter was too wary to be led into the discussion.
“Brother Nunes, I wouldn't shake a leg in 'Cotton-Eye Joe' or 'Turkey in the Straw,' not for all the filthy pleasure this world can hold.”
Nunes lit his cigaret and inhaled luxuriously.
“Señor Birdsong,” he said, in a muffled voice, talking the smoke out of his mouth and nostrils, “if you really could dance, you would not be so prejudiced against it. That is always the way. Fat men dislike the fandango; stiff men abominate the waltz; awkward men”
“Look here, Brother Nunes, when I say I can dance, I can dance.”
“Still, it's easier to talk than to dance.”
The colporteur looked straight at the muleteer, seemed to make up his mind, and next moment began humming one of those monotonous jumbles of sound such as the fiddlers among the hill-folk of Tennessee and Arkansas evoke. Next moment he gave a whoop, leaped into the air, clicked his heels together three times and landed on the tufa in a southern backwoods breakdown.
Amid the majestic surroundings, his stocky dancing figure formed a grotesque spectacle. Birdsong squatted on his heels, shooting out his legs like pistons.
“This is 'Layin' Off Corn!'” he shouted at the skeptical Colombian. Suddenly he half rose, and retained the posture with hands and feet criss-crossing in a flurry of agility.
“'Plantin' the Seed!'” he yelled.
When this was established to a machine-like virtuosity, he shifted and began switching in his toes.
“'Kiverin' the Row!'” he called. “And now I'm 'Layin' By!'”
Here he fell into a motion of such swiftness that he jiggled up and down like a marionette. He seemed to blur. He seemed to have four flying legs and two shadowy heads.
It was the most remarkable exhibition of strength and agility Lassiter had ever seen. At first he was amused and amazed. Then his amusement ceased.
Jigs or breakdowns among the mountaineers of Tennessee, Georgia and North Carolina are really expressions of their harsh, arid lives. They are awkward, fantastic, and are based on a sort of grim travesty of the labor of the hill-folk, or the movements of animals; such as turkeys scratching in straw, hogs dashing through canebrakes, men and women stooping in weariness over sterile, stony soil. But the dancing of these grotesque steps is a feat of strength.
Lassiter was too sensitive not to catch the bleakness of soul among a people who could evolve such a dance. That bleakness was written not only in Birdsong's steps and furious leaps and jerks, but it was in the rigid staring face which he maintained throughout the performance.
It was a dance of desolation, of blind graceless reaction against suppression. It formed an illuminating commentary to Lassiter on all the mouthings of hell-fire, Satan's power, eternal damnation, everlasting flames, and a hundred other revivalistic catch-phrases he had heard fall from Birdsong's lips. The jig held a spiritual tragedy in its unloveliness.
What Balthasar thought of this gringo dance, he gave no indication. His Latin courtesy probably repressed a smile, or a shudder.
Birdsong stopped as abruptly as he began, dripping with sweat. His thick-barreled chest heaved. For a moment he stood staring at his audience of two.
“Señor Birdsong,” began the Colombian, “that was a—an unusual dance, a remarkable”
He broke off because Birdsong's face underwent a queer change. The colporteur whitened under his sweat. Amid his panting he gasped out:
“My God, what have I done? Merciful Redeemer—what have I done? Me, a vessel of the Blessed Truth”
He lapsed into the silence and the stoicism of his kind.
Lassiter looked at him. Such remorse was written even in his hard-lined face that the agent was moved to express a doubt whether such an acrobatic performance was a dance.
Birdsong shook his head gloomily.
“I know you mean well, Brother Lassiter, but the devil is using your tongue to lead me to destruction—The devil is right here, watching us this minute—he's here! Right now! Just as shore as when he choked Chombo Meone's mule!”
The colporteur's gesture, the look of the huge, igneous pass, and the memory of Chombo's tale, all helped produce an illusion of some veritable malign presence. Birdsong caught his mule, which had backed away from its master's uncanny performance. The little company started ahead again, but the incident completely removed all lilt of gaiety that had inspired them.
Balthasar resumed his lead. He seemed to be pondering something, and presently he said—
“Señor Birdsong, you have a queer religion—mostly about the devil.”
“He is our arch enemy, Brother Nunes. See how he tempted me to pride in my strength—lowly worm of the dust that I am.”
“Surely there is no harm in kicking one's legs?”
“Suppose my blessed Redeemer had called me home while I was jigging like that, don't you know I would have gone as straight to hell as you'll go when you die, heathen though you be, and child of the living God though I be.”
Birdsong's continual contrast of his own righteousness to Nunes's sinfulness pricked the skin of the easy-going Colombian. He seemed about to retort when he broke off abruptly and the forward mule came to a halt; then it began to back away with that down-dropping of its haunches characteristic of frightened mules. Balthasar remained staring downward. Birdsong came up with him and fell into the same transfixed gaze. Lassiter hurried forward and a moment later joined their amazement.
BEFORE the trio, the plateau dropped away into a vast chasm. The abyss was as unheralded as the Grand Canon, and appeared more prodigious. How deep it was, Lassiter could form no idea because night already had curtained its profundity. Its width, he was equally unable to gauge because the yellow haze of sunset veiled its eastward reach. Although Lassiter was twenty feet from the brink, a sense of vertigo caused him to back away.
After a long gaze, Nunes said—
“Señores, this is the end of the trail.”
And Birdsong replied—
“If we are forced to stop here, brothers, it is because I have just proved myself an unworthy vessel.”
A faint mirth stirred in Lassiter's brain.
“I fancy this chasm would have been here, Birdsong, if you hadn't danced.”
“That may be true, Brother Lassiter, but God in His foreknowledge must have foreseen that I would fall from grace just where I did, and He prepared this huge holler as a signal of His divine displeasure.”
“Preparedness,” said the Stendill agent soberly.
“If He don't show me the way across this bottomless pit tomorrow,” said the Arkansan somberly, “I'll know my name ain't recorded in the Book of Life.”
At that moment from far down in the darkness of the abyss there shot up into the eyes of the travelers a beam of scarlet light. It looked as if it were shining out of immense depth. It stared out of the very bowels of the earth.
Balthasar gasped and crossed himself. A shivery sensation went over even Lassiter himself. Only Birdsong entirely kept his courage. He advanced to the margin of the abyss calling on God to burn the filth and wickedness out of his heart.
At that moment the light winked out as abruptly as it had sprung into view. It gave Lassiter the impression that the bowels of the earth had closed over it. The promoter stood looking down into the blackness.
“How deep is it?” he asked of nobody. A thought came to him. He drew out his watch and marked the second hand in the yellow light. “Heave over a stone, Balthasar, I'll measure its depth by seconds.”
The Colombian shook his head. “No, señor, I'd heave over a stone and crush a man's head at once, but when the King of the Jivaros stares up at me—that's different.”
“Chuck something in, Birdsong.”
The man from Yell picked up a ten-pound boulder and flung it into the abyss. Balthasar backed away as if expecting some monster to emerge from the emptiness. The two Americans stood listening ten—fifteen—twenty seconds—but no sound ever returned from their plummet. Lassiter slowly restored his watch to his pocket.
“I don't guess it's got no bottom, Brother Lassiter,” said the Arkansan, who took such a phenomenon quite simply.
The trio set about pitching camp. With this friendly task, the Stendill agent shook off somewhat his feeling of the abnormous. He and Birdsong put up the tent, unrolled the bedding and picked up wood for a camp-fire while Nunes tethered the mules and gathered grass for their provender.
By the time the three men got down to their own supper, the last touch of carmine burned on the peaks and a few pale stars glittered over the shoulders of the mountains.
After supper the men sat speculating on the light they had seen in the profound. The beam had not suggested fire. The financial agent ran over a list of possibilities, a phosphorescent display, a searchlight, a signal fire, even a vent in the volcano.
Nunes was convinced that he had looked into the baleful eye of the King of the Jivaros. Even to Lassiter, Chombo Meone's story did not seem so improbable now as it did in Bujeo.
Birdsong was the gloomiest of the three companions. He had seen the gates of hell gaping at him as a reproof because he had driven another spear into the side of Christ by his wicked dancing.
From what the agent could gather, Birdsong believed that the abyss and the mysterious light were created by the Supreme Being for the single and particular purpose of rebuking his ungainly antics.
Such vast and unconscious egotism amazed Lassiter. He tried to show the colporteur the infinite disparity between a man's ephemeral tenure of life and the ageless foundations of the earth.
“Brother Lassiter,” drawled the revivalist, “I'll be resting in the bosom of Abraham when these here mountains are washed down in the bottom of the sea.” He looked up at the immemorial peaks standing dark against the star-powdered sky.
The Stendill agent sat looking at the fellow with his oily black hair gleaming and winking in the gleam and wink of the fire light. He was warming himself by a couple of fagots—and forecasting his existence for æons to come. The essential irony of it filled the promoter with a kind of melancholy.
“I hope He forgives my sin, Brother Lassiter.”
“I hope so, Birdsong.”
“I'm going to wrastle with Him in prayer tonight. I'll wrastle all night or git my answer. If He sends His miraculous power and helps me down into this bottomless pit tomorrow, so's I can spread His holy Word, I'll know He's received me as His child again. I'm sorry I displeased Him, Brother Lassiter.”
The promoter allowed the conversation to lapse, and smoked a cigar to dull his thoughts for sleep. As the camp-fire died down, the promoter wrapped himself in his blankets and settled himself for the night. Birdsong got up and went outside to his prayer.
The Stendill agent lay awake for upward of an hour, looking at the coals, watching sparks flare into tiny brilliance and die, listening to the drone of the colporteur's prayer as he prayed never to die.
Lassiter never knew quite when he fell asleep, or whether he fell asleep at all or not. It seemed to him that one moment he heard the colporteur outside praying, and the next, Birdsong was by his side, shaking his shoulder and flashing an electric torch in his face. Birdsong was undressed and evidently had been in bed. Now he leaned down and whispered to Lassiter that something was bothering the mules.
The Stendill agent got to attention with difficulty and after some blinking reflection managed to inquire what the mules were bothered about.
The man from Yell did not waste speech, but aroused Nunes by flashing the light in his face. The Colombian sat up suddenly, gasping out—
“Señores, she is innocent—do not imagine”
The Arkansan hustled his companions
into their faculties and bade them listen outside. The men listened. In the direction of the mules they heard a queer scratching and a padded bumping.
The New Yorker was not impressed that anything could be done until the colporteur opened the flap of the tent and motioned his companions to follow him. Lassiter crawled out of his blankets without enthusiasm, found his shoes, then followed shivering into the cold night air.
THERE was no moon. The conformation of the lava lay uncertain in the starlight. The colporteur walked toward the mules playing his light in front of him. It illuminated the burned ground for twelve or fifteen feet, then faded into darkness. Lassiter shivered from the chill. Presently the three dark figures behind the spurt of light could see the bulk of two mules lying down.
By this time all unusual sounds had died down. Lassiter was inclined to get back to his blankets. But with a countryman's persistence, Birdsong stood switching his light here and there, looking for the third mule.
“H-He can't hobble far in his tether,” chattered Balthasar.
“Yes, but he may fall over the cliff.”
Birdsong turned his light in this direction and peered into the darkness.
The three stood for several moments, listening, trying to locate the lost mule when with a sense of relief Lassiter saw the animal's eyes shining some fifty feet back toward their camp. He pointed it out.
“Now we got to round it up careful,” cautioned the Arkansan. “A mule's a plumb fool at night. We don't want it loping off that clift. We better spread out and git between it and the jump-off.”
The men accepted the directions and began a deploying movement around the stray. Lassiter kept his eyes fixed on the glowing points and knocked his shins against cusps of lava in the darkness. His climb the preceding day had made the inside of his thighs and his shoulders sore. He kept sidling around his quarry, mentally querulous of his discomfort, when he chanced to observe another pair of eyes glowing beside those of the mule.
For a full half minute, Lassiter kept sidling among the stones, so near asleep was he, before the significance of these new eyes dawned upon him. By this time he had stepped into a refractive angle where he saw still another pair of sparks glittering at him from the blackness.
The Stendill agent stopped stock still. A curious tickling sensation flowed from his scalp to his toes. With much crisper steps he got back to Birdsong and the light. He reached out and took the Arkansan by the arm.
“Zeke”
“Did you know there was something else … something …”
“Yeh, I see its eyes.”
“What is it, Zeke?” asked Lassiter nervously. “You—you understand about stock”
“Something layin' flat on that old mule's neck.”
“But what?”
“I got to ketch her and see,” whispered the man from Yell, and next moment he strode briskly forward.
At Birdsong's approach the glints withdrew at the rate of the man's approach; then a strange thing happened. A heavy bumping and thumping set up not at the glints at all, but about ten feet to one side of the stalkers. Lassiter was startled. Birdsong switched his light on the commotion.
Next moment, in the harsh black and white light appeared the body of the third mule dragging and bumping over the stones.
At the same instant Balthasar opened fire with his automatic. Its spurt of flames stabbed the darkness, and by the position of each flash, Lassiter saw the Colombian was charging whatever man or creature lay before him.
The promoter shouted a warning about the cliff. At that moment the automatic was exhausted. An abrupt silence took the place of its hard chatter.
Lassiter stood staring into absolute blackness, shivering violently.
“Balthasar!” he called. “Balthasar!”
Birdsong whisked the light about and after a few seconds picked up the Colombian on his knees, jamming cartridges into his pistol's butt. He suddenly began cursing a string of Spanish oaths.
“What's the matter?” cried the Stendill agent.
“He tried to lariat me, him! He threw me down! I'd have got him, señor! I'd have got the devil himself, him!”
The two men ran up, and sure enough there was a rope around Balthasar's legs. He got out with some difficulty. Then they took the flashlight and examined the edge of the abyss for eighty or a hundred yards up and down in front of their tent. It was quite empty. They went back to the rope which had tripped Balthasar. It was heavy silk. Then they walked over to the body of the third mule, and found a similar cord attached to it. This must have been a sort of tow rope used to drag the brute's carcass toward the abyss.
The mule itself was quite dead. A little further investigation showed the other two mules had also been killed.