CHAPTER IX. THE PORTAL OF FLAME
It was as though we were on a meteor hurtling through space. The splitair shrieked and shrilled, a keening barrier against the avalanche ofthe thunder. The blast bent us far back on thighs held rigid by themagnetic grip.
The pony spread its legs, dropped its head; through the hurricaneroaring its screaming pierced thinly, that agonizing, terriblelamentation which is of the horse and the horse alone when the limit ofits endurance is reached.
Ventnor crouched lower and lower, eyes shielded behind arms folded overhis brows, straining for a glimpse of Ruth; Drake crouched beside him,bracing him, supporting him against the tempest.
Our line of flight became less abrupt, but the speed increased, thewind-pressure became almost insupportable. I twisted, dropped upon myright arm, thrust my head against my shoulder, stared backward. Whenfirst I had looked upon the place I had sensed its immensity; now Ibegan to realize how vast it must really be--for already the gatewaythrough which we had come glimmered far away on high, shrunk to a hoopof incandescent brass and dwindling fast.
Nor was it a cavern; I saw the stars, traced with deep relief thefamiliar Northern constellations. Pit it might be, but whatever terror,whatever ordeals were before us, we would not have to face them burieddeep within earth. There was a curious comfort to me in the thought.
Suddenly stars and sky were blotted out.
We had plunged beneath the surface of the radiant sea.
Lying in the position in which I was, I was sensible of a diminutionof the cyclonic force; the blast streamed up and over the front of thecube. To me drifted only the wailings of our flight and the whimperingterror of the pony.
I turned my head cautiously. Upon the very edge of the flying blockssquatted Drake and Ventnor, grotesquely frog-like. I crawled towardthem--crawled, literally, like a caterpillar; for wherever my bodytouched the surface of the cubes the attracting force held it, allowed acreeping movement only, surface sliding upon surface--and weirdly enoughlike a human measuring-worm I looped myself over to them.
As my bare palms clung to the Things I realized with finality thatwhatever their activation, their life, they WERE metal.
There was no mistaking now the testimony of touch. Metal they were, witha hint upon contact of highly polished platinum, or at the least of ametal as finely grained as it.
Also they had temperature, a curiously pleasant warmth--the surfaceswere, I judged, around ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit. I looked deepdown into the little sparkling points that were, I knew, organs ofsight; they were like the points of contact of innumerable intersectingcrystal planes. They held strangest paradoxical suggestion of beingclose to the surface and still infinite distances away.
And they were like--what was it they were like?--it came to me with adistinct shock.
They were like the galaxies of little aureate and sapphire stars in theclear gray heavens of Norhala's eyes.
I crept beside Drake, struck him with my head.
"Can't move," I shouted. "Can't lift my hands. Stuck fast--like afly--just as you said."
"Drag 'em over your knees," he cried, bending to me. "It slides 'em outof the attraction."
Acting as he had suggested I found to my astonishment I could slip myhands free; I caught his belt, tried to lift myself by it.
"No use, Doc." The old grin lightened for a moment his tense young face."You'll have to keep praying till the power's turned off. Nothing hereyou can slide your knees on."
I nodded, waddling close to his side; then sank back on my haunches torelieve the strain upon my aching leg-muscles.
"Can you see them ahead, Walter--Ruth and the woman?" Ventnor turned hisanxious eyes toward me.
I peered into the glimmering murk; shook my head. I could see nothing.It was indeed, as though the clustered cubes sped within a bubble of thenow wanly glistening vapors; or rather as though in our passage--as aprojectile does in air--we piled before us a thick wave of the mistswhich streaming along each side, closing in behind, obscured all thatlay around.
Yet I had, persistently, the feeling that beyond these shroudings wasvast and ordered movement; marchings and counter-marchings of hostsgreater even than those Golden Hordes of Genghis which ages agone hadwashed about the outer bases of the very peaks that hid this place.Came, too, flitting shadowings of huge shapes, unnameable, movingswiftly beside our way; gleamings that thrust themselves through theveils like wheeling javelins of flame.
And always, always, everywhere that constant movement, rhythmic,terrifying--like myriads of feet of creatures of an unseen, strangerworld marking time just outside the threshold of our own. Preparing,DRILLING there in some wide vestibule of space between the known and theunknown, alert and menacing--poised for the signal which would send thempouring over it.
Once again I seemed to stand upon the brink of an abyss of incrediblerevelation, striving helplessly, struggling for realization--and sostruggling became aware that our speed was swiftly slackening, theroaring blast dying down, the veils before us thinning.
They cleared away. I saw Drake and Ventnor straighten up; raised myselfto my own aching knees.
We were at one end of a vortex, a funneling within the radiant vapors; afunnel whose further end a mile ahead broadened out into a hugecircle, its mistily outlined edges impinging upon the towering scarpof the--city. It was as though before us lay, upon its side, a cone ofcrystalline clear air against whose curved sides some radiant mediumheavier than air, lighter than water, pressed.
The top arc of its prostrate base reached a thousand feet or more up theprecipitous wall; above it all was hidden in sparkling nebulosities thatwere like still clouds of greenly glimmering fire-flies. Back fromthe curving sides of this cone, above it and below it, the pressingluminosities stretched into, it seemed, infinite distances.
Through them, suddenly, thousands of bright beams began to dart, todance, weaving and interweaving, shooting hither and yon--like myriadsof great searchlights in a phosphorescent sea fog, like countless lancesof the aurora thrusting through its own iridescent veils! And in theplay of these beams was something appallingly ordered, appallinglyrhythmic.
It was--how can I describe it?--PURPOSEFUL; purposeful as the geometricshiftings of the Little Things of the ruins, of the summoning song ofNorhala, of the Protean changes of the Smiting Shape and the FollowingThing; and like all of these it was as laden with that bafflingcertainty of hidden meanings, of messages that the brain recognized assuch yet knew it never could read.
The rays seemed to spring upward from the earth. Now they were likecountless lances of light borne by marching armies of Titans; now theycrossed and angled and flew as though they were clouds of javelinshurled by battling swarms of the Genii of Light. And now they stoodupright while through them, thrusting them aside, bending them, passedvast, vague shapes like mountains forming and dissolving; like darkeningmonsters of some world of light pushing through thick forests ofslender, high-reaching trees of cold flame; shifting shadows ofmonstrous chimerae slipping through jungles of bamboo with trunks ofdiamond fire; phantasmal leviathans swimming through brakes of giantreeds of radiance rising from the sparking ooze of a sea of star shine.
Whence came the force, the mechanism that produced this cone of clarity,this NOT searchlight, but unlight in the midst of light? Not frombehind, that was certain--for turning I saw that behind us the mist wasas thick. I turned again--it came to me, why I knew not, yet with anabsolute certainty, that the energy, the force emanated from the distantwall itself.
The funnel, the cone, did not expand from where we were standing, nowmotionless.
It began at the wall and focused upon us.
Within the great circle the surface of the wall was smooth, utterlyblank; upon it was no trace of those flitting lights we had seen beforewe had plunged down toward the radiant sea. It shone with a pale bluephosphorescence. It was featureless, smooth, a blind cliff of polished,blue metal--and that was all.
"Ruth!" groaned Ventnor. "Where is she?
"
Aghast at my mental withdrawal from him, angry at myself for mycallousness, awkwardly I tried to crawl over to him, to touch him,comfort him as well as I might.
And then, as though his cry had been a signal, the great cone began tomove. Slowly the circled base slipped down the shimmering facades; down,steadily down; I realized that we had paused at the edge of some steepdeclivity, for the bottom of the cone was now at a decided angle whilethe upper edge of the circle had dropped a full two hundred feet belowthe place where it had rested--and still it fell.
There came a gasp of relief from Ventnor, a sigh from Drake while, frommy own heart, a weight rolled. Not ten yards ahead of us and still deepwithin the luminosity had appeared the regal head of Norhala, the lovelyhead of Ruth. The two rose out of the glow like swimmers floating fromthe depths. Now they were clear before us, and now we could see thesurface of the cube on which they rode.
But neither turned to us; each stared straightly, motionless along theaxis of the sinking cone, the woman's left arm holding Ruth close to herside.
Drake's hand caught my shoulder in a grip that hurt--nor did he need topoint toward that which had wrung the exclamation from him. The funnelhad broken from its slow falling; it had made one swift, startlingdrop and had come to rest. Its recumbent side was now flattened into atriangular plane, widening from the narrow tip in which we stood to allof five hundred feet where its base rested against the blue wall, andfalling at a full thirty-degree pitch.
The misty-edged circle had become an oval, a flattened ellipse anotherfive hundred feet high and three times that in length. And in its exactcenter, shining forth as though it opened into a place of pale azureincandescence was another rectangular Cyclopean portal.
On each side of it, in the apparently solid face of the gleaming,metallic cliffs, a slit was opening.
They began as thin lines a hundred yards in height through whichthe intense light seemed to hiss; quickly they opened--widening likemonstrous cat pupils until at last, their widening ceasing, they glaredforth, the blue incandescence gushing from them like molten steel froman opened sluice.
Deep within them I sensed a movement. Scores of towering shapes swamwithin and glided out of them, each reflecting the vivid light as thoughthey themselves were incandescent. Around their crests spun wide andflaming coronets.
They rushed forth, wheeling, whirling, driven like leaves in awhirlwind. Out they swirled from the cat's eyes of the glimmering wall,these dervish obelisks crowded with spinning fires. They vanished in themists. Instantly with their going, the eyes contracted; were but slits;were gone. And before us within the oval was only the waiting portal.
The leading block leaped forward. As abruptly, those that bore usfollowed. Again under that strain of projectile flight we clutched eachother; the pony screamed in terror. The metal cliff rushed to meet uslike a thunder cloud of steel; the portal raced upon us--a square mouthof cold blue flame.
And into it we swept; were devoured by it.
Light in blinding, intolerable flood beat about us, blackening the sightwith agony. We pressed, the three of us, against the side of the pony,burying our faces in its shaggy coat, striving to hide our eyes from theradiance which, strain closely as we might, seemed to pierce through thebody of the little beast, through our own heads, searing the sight.