CHAPTER XVIII. INTO THE PIT
High was the sun when I awakened; or so, I supposed, opening my eyesupon a flood of daylight. As I lay, lazily, recollection rushed upon me.
It was no sky into which I was gazing; it was the dome of Norhala'selfin home. And Drake had not aroused me. Why? And how long had I slept?
I jumped to my feet, stared about. Ruth nor Drake nor the black eunuchwas there!
"Ruth!" I shouted. "Drake!"
There was no answer. I ran to the doorway. Peering up into the whitevault of the heavens I set the time of day as close to seven; I hadslept then three hours, more or less. Yet short as that time of slumberhad been, I felt marvelously refreshed, reenergized; the effect, I wascertain, of the extraordinarily tonic qualities of the atmosphere ofthis place. But where were the others? Where Yuruk?
I heard Ruth's laughter. Some hundred yards to the left, half hiddenby a screen of flowering shrubs, I saw a small meadow. Within it ahalf-dozen little white goats nuzzled around her and Dick. She wasmilking one of them.
Reassured, I drew back into the chamber, knelt over Ventnor. Hiscondition was unchanged. My gaze fell upon the pool that had beenNorhala's bath. Longingly I looked at it; then satisfying myselfthat the milking process was not finished, slipped off my clothes andsplashed about.
I had just time to get back in my clothes when through the doorway camethe pair, each carrying a porcelain pannikin full of milk.
There was no shadow of fear or horror on her face. It was the old Ruthwho stood before me; nor was there effort in the smile she gave me. Shehad been washed clean in the waters of sleep.
"Don't worry, Walter," she said. "I know what you're thinking. ButI'm--ME again."
"Where is Yuruk?" I turned to Drake bruskly to smother the sob ofsheer happiness I felt rising in my throat; and at his wink and warninggrimace abruptly forebore to press the question.
"You men pick out the things and I'll get breakfast ready," said Ruth.
Drake picked up the teakettle and motioned me before him.
"About Yuruk," he whispered when he had gotten outside. "I gave him alittle object lesson. Persuaded him to go down the line a bit, showedhim my pistol, and then picked off one of Norhala's goats with it. Hatedto do it, but I knew it would be good for his soul.
"He gave one screech and fell on his face and groveled. Thought it wasa lightning bolt, I figure; decided I had been stealing Norhala's stuff.'Yuruk,' I told him, 'that's what you'll get, and worse, if you lay afinger on that girl inside there.'"
"And then what happened?" I asked.
"He beat it back there." He grinned, pointing toward the forest throughwhich ran the path the eunuch had shown me. "Probably hiding back of atree."
As we filled the container at the outer spring, I told him of therevelations and the offer Yuruk had made to me.
"Whew-w!" he whistled. "In the nutcracker, eh? Trouble behind us andtrouble in front of us."
"When do we start?" he asked, as we turned back.
"Right after we've eaten," I answered. "There's no use putting it off.How do you feel about it?"
"Frankly, like the chief guest at a lynching party," he said. "Curiousbut none too cheerful."
Nor was I. I was filled with a fever of scientific curiosity. But I wasnot cheerful--no!
We ministered to Ventnor as well as we could; forcing open his set jaws,thrusting a thin rubber tube down past his windpipe into his gullet anddropping through it a few ounces of the goat milk. Our own breakfastingwas silent enough.
We could not take Ruth with us upon our journey; that was certain; shemust stay here with her brother. She would be safer in Norhala's homethan where we were going, of course, and yet to leave her was mostdistressing. After all, I wondered, was there any need of both of ustaking the journey; would not one do just as well?
Drake could stay--
"No use of putting all our eggs in one basket," I broached the subject."I'll go down by myself while you stay and help Ruth. You can alwaysfollow if I don't turn up in a reasonable time."
His indignation at this proposal was matched only by her own.
"You'll go with him, Dick Drake," she cried, "or I'll never look at orspeak to you again!"
"Good Lord! Did you think for a minute I wouldn't?" Pain and wrathstruggled on his face. "We go together or neither of us goes. Ruth willbe all right here, Goodwin. The only thing she has any cause to fear isYuruk--and he's had his lesson.
"Besides, she'll have the rifles and her pistols, and she knows howto use them. What d'ye mean by making such a proposition as that?" Hisindignation burst all bounds.
Lamely I tried to justify myself.
"I'll be all right," said Ruth. "I'm not afraid of Yuruk. And none ofthese Things will hurt me--not after--not after--" Her eyes fell, herlips quivered, then she faced us steadily. "Don't ask me how I knowthat," she said quietly. "Believe me, I do know it. I am closer to--themthan you two are. And if I choose I can call upon that alien strengththeir master gave me. It is for you two that I fear."
"No fear for us," Drake burst out hastily. "We're Norhala's littleplaythings. We're tabu. Take it from me, Ruth, I'd bet my head thereisn't one of these Things, great or small, and no matter how many, thatdoesn't by this time know all about us.
"We'll probably be received with demonstrations of interest by thepopulace as welcome guests. Probably we'll find a sign--'Welcome to ourCity'--hung up over the front gate."
She smiled, a trifle tremulously.
"We'll come back," he said. Suddenly he leaned forward, put his hands onher shoulders. "Do you think there is anything that could keep me fromcoming back?" he whispered.
She trembled, wide eyes searching deep into his.
"Well," I broke in, a bit uncomfortably, "we'd better be starting.I think as Drake does, that we're tabu. Barring accident there'sno danger. And if I guess right about these Things, accident isimpossible."
"As inconceivable as the multiplication table going wrong," he laughed,straightening.
And so we made ready. Our rifles would be worse than useless, we knew;our pistols we decided to carry as Drake put it, "for comfort." Canteensfilled with water; a couple of emergency rations, a few instruments,including a small spectroscope, a selection from the medical kit--allthese packed in a little haversack which he threw over his broadshoulders.
I pocketed my compact but exceedingly powerful field-glasses. To mypoignant and everlasting regret my camera had been upon the boltingpony, and Ventnor had long been out of films for his.
We were ready for our journey.
Our path led straight away, a smooth and dark-gray road whose surfaceresembled cement packed under enormous pressure. It was all of fiftyfeet wide and now, in daylight, glistened faintly as though overlaidwith some vitreous coating. It narrowed abruptly into a wedged way thatstopped at the threshold of Norhala's door.
Diminishing through the distance, it stretched straight as an arrowonward and vanished between perpendicular cliffs which formed thefrowning gateway through which the night before we had passed upon thecoursing cubes from the pit of the city. Here, as then, a mistinesschecked the gaze.
Ruth with us, we made a brief inspection of the surroundings ofNorhala's house. It was set as though in the narrowest portion ofan hour-glass. The precipitous walls marched inward from the gatewayforming the lower half of the figure; at the back they swung apart at awider angle.
This upper part of the hour-glass was filled with a park-like forest. Itwas closed, perhaps twenty miles away, by a barrier of cliffs.
How, I wondered, did the path which Yuruk had pointed out to me piercethem? Was it by pass or tunnel; and why was it the armored men had notfound and followed it?
The waist between these two mountain wedges was a valley not more thana mile wide. Norhala's house stood in its center; and it was like agarden, dotted with flowering and fragrant lilies and here and there atiny green meadow. The great globe of blue that was Norhala's dwellingseemed less to rest upon the ground tha
n to emerge from it; as thoughits basic curvatures were hidden in the earth.
What was its substance I could not tell. It was as though built of thelacquer of the gems whose colors it held. And beautiful, wondrously,incredibly beautiful it was--an immense bubble of froth of moltensapphires and turquoises.
We had not time to study its beauties. A few last instructions to Ruth,and we set forth down the gray road. Hardly had we taken a few stepswhen there came a faint cry from her.
"Dick! Dick--come here!"
He sprang to her, caught her hands in his. For a moment, half frightenedit seemed, she considered him.
"Dick," I heard her whisper. "Dick--come back safe to me!"
I saw his arms close about her, hers tighten around his neck; black hairtouched the silken brown curls, their lips met, clung. I turned away.
In a little time he joined me; head down, silent, he strode along besideme, utterly dejected.
A hundred more yards and we turned. Ruth was still standing on thethreshold of the house of mystery, watching us. She waved her hands,flitted in, was hidden from us. And Drake still silent, we pushed on.
The walls of the gateway were close. The sparse vegetation along thebase of the cliffs had ceased; the roadway itself had merged into thesmooth, bare floor of the canyon. From vertical edge to vertical edgeof the rocky portal stretched a curtain of shimmering mist. As we drewnearer we saw that this was motionless, and less like vapor of waterthan vapor of light; it streamed in oddly fixed lines like atoms ofcrystals in a still solution. Drake thrust an arm within it, waved it;the mist did not move. It seemed instead to interpenetrate the arm--asthough bone and flesh were spectral, without power to dislodge theshining particles from position.
We passed within it--side by side.
Instantly I knew that whatever these veils were, they were not moisture.The air we breathed was dry, electric. I was sensible of a decidedstimulation, a pleasant tingling along every nerve, a gaiety almostlight-headed. We could see each other quite plainly, the rocky floor onwhich we trod as well. Within this vapor of light there was no ghostof sound; it was utterly empty of it. I saw Drake turn to me, his mouthopen in a laugh, his lips move in speech--and although he bent close tomy ear, I heard nothing. He frowned, puzzled, and walked on.
Abruptly we stepped into an opening, a pocket of clear air. Our earswere filled with a high, shrill humming as unpleasantly vibrant as theshriek of a sand blast. Six feet to our right was the edge of theledge on which we stood; beyond it was a sheer drop into space. A shaftpiercing down into the void and walled with the mists.
But it was not that shaft that made us clutch each other. No! It wasthat through it uprose a colossal column of the cubes. It stood ahundred feet from us. Its top was another hundred feet above the levelof our ledge and its length vanished in the depths.
And its head was a gigantic spinning wheel, yards in thickness, taperingat its point of contact with the cliff wall into a diameter half thatof the side closest the column, gleaming with flashes of green flame andgrinding with tremendous speed at the face of the rock.
Over it, attached to the cliff, was a great vizored hood of some paleyellow metal, and it was this shelter that cutting off the vaporouslight like an enormous umbrella made the pocket of clarity in which westood, the shaft up which sprang the pillar.
All along the length of that column as far as we could see themyriad tiny eyes of the Metal People shone out upon us, not twinklingmischievously, but--grotesque as this may seem, I cannot help it--widewith surprise.
Only an instant longer did the great wheel spin. I saw the screamingrock melting beneath it, dropping like lava. Then, as though it hadreceived some message, abruptly its motion now ceased.
It tilted; looked down upon us!
I noted that its grinding surface was studded thickly with the smallerpyramids and that the tips of these were each capped with what seemedto be faceted gems gleaming with the same pale yellow radiance as theShrine of the Cones.
The column was bending; the wheel approaching.
Drake seized me by the arm, drew me swiftly back into the mists. We wereshrouded in their silences. Step by step we went on, peering forthe edge of the shelf, feeling in fancy that prodigious wheeled facestealing upon us; afraid to look behind lest in looking we might steptoo close to the unseen verge.
Yard after yard we slowly covered. Suddenly the vapors thinned; wepassed out of them--
A chaos of sound beat about us. The clanging of a million anvils; theclamor of a million forges; the crashing of a hundred years of thunder;the roarings of a thousand hurricanes. The prodigious bellowings of thePit beating against us now as they had when we had flown down the longramp into the depths of the Sea of Light.
Instinct with unthinkable power was that clamor; the very voice ofForce. Stunned, nay BLINDED, by it, we covered ears and eyes.
As before, the clangor died, leaving in its wake a bewildered silence.Then that silence began to throb with a vast humming, and through thathumming rang a murmur as that of a river of diamonds.
We opened our eyes, felt awe grip our throats as though a hand hadclutched them.
Difficult, difficult almost beyond thought is it for me now to essay todraw in words the scene before us then. For although I can set down whatit was we saw, I nor any man can transmute into phrases its essence, itsspirit, the intangible wonder that was its synthesis--the appallinglybeautiful, soul-shaking strangeness of it, its grandeur, its fantasy,and its alien terror.
The Domain of the Metal Monster--it was filled like a chalice with Itswill; was the visible expression of that will.
We stood at the very rim of a wide ledge. We looked down into an immensepit, shaped into a perfect oval, thirty miles in length I judged, andhalf that as wide, and rimmed with colossal precipices. We were at theupper end of this deep valley and on the tip of its axis; I mean thatit stretched longitudinally before us along the line of greatest length.Five hundred feet below was the pit's floor. Gone were the clouds oflight that had obscured it the night before; the air crystal clear;every detail standing out with stereoscopic sharpness.
First the eyes rested upon a broad band of fluorescent amethyst, ringingthe entire rocky wall. It girdled the cliffs at a height of ten thousandfeet, and from this flaming zone, as though it clutched them, fell thecurtains of sparkling mist, the enigmatic, sound-slaying vapors.
But now I saw that all of these veils were not motionless like thosethrough which we had just passed. To the northwest they were pulsinglike the aurora, and like the aurora they were shot through with swiftiridescences, spectrums, polychromatic gleamings. And always these wereordered, geometric--like immense and flitting prismatic crystals flyingswiftly to the very edges of the veils, then darting as swiftly back.
From zone and veils the gaze leaped to the incredible City towering nottwo miles away from us.
Blue black, shining, sharply cut as though from polished steel, itreared full five thousand feet on high!
How great it was I could not tell, for the height of its precipitouswalls barred the vision. The frowning facade turned toward us was, Iestimated, five miles in length. Its colossal scarp struck the eyeslike a blow; its shadow, falling upon us, checked the heart. It wasoverpowering--dreadful as that midnight city of Dis that Dante sawrising up from another pit.
It was a metal city, mountainous.
Featureless, smooth, the immense wall of it heaved heavenward. It shouldhave been blind, that vast oblong face--but it was not blind. From itradiated alertness, vigilance. It seemed to gaze toward us as thoughevery foot were manned with sentinels; guardians invisible to the eyeswhose concentration of watchfulness was caught by some subtle hiddensense higher than sight.
It was a metal city, mountainous and--AWARE.
About its base were huge openings. Through and around these portalsswirled hordes of the Metal People; in units and in combinations comingand going, streaming in and out, forming as they came and went patternsabout the openings like the fretted spume of
great breakers surginginto, retreating from, ocean-bitten gaps in some iron-bound coast.
From the immensity of the City the eyes dropped back to the Pit in whichit lay. Its floor was plaquelike, a great plane smooth as though turnedby potter's wheel, broken by no mound nor hillock, slope nor terrace;level, horizontal, flawlessly flat. On it was no green living thing--notree nor bush, meadow nor covert.
It was alive with movement. A ferment that was as purposeful as it wasmechanical, a ferment symmetrical, geometrical, supremely ordered--
The surging of the Metal Hordes.
There they moved beneath us, these enigmatic beings, in a countlesshost. They marched and countermarched in battalions, in regiments, inarmies. Far to the south I glimpsed a company of colossal shapes likemobile, castellated and pyramidal mounts. They were circling, weavingabout each other with incredible rapidity--like scores of great pyramidscrowned with gigantic turrets and dancing. From these turrets came vividflashes, lightning bright--on their wake the rolling echoes of farawaythunder.
Out of the north sped a squadron of obelisks from whose tops flamedand flared the immense spinning wheels, appearing at this distance likefiery whirling disks.
Up from their setting the Metal People lifted themselves in a thousandincredible shapes, shapes squared and globed and spiked and shiftingswiftly into other thousands as incredible. I saw a mass of them drawthemselves up into the likeness of a tent skyscraper high; hang so foran instant, then writhe into a monstrous chimera of a dozen toweringlegs that strode away like a gigantic headless and bodiless tarantula insteps two hundred feet long. I watched mile-long lines of them shape andreshape into circles, into interlaced lozenges and pentagons--then liftin great columns and shoot through the air in unimaginable barrage.
Through all this incessant movement I sensed plainly purpose, knewthat it was definite activity toward a definite end, caught the clearsuggestion of drill, of maneuver.
And when the shiftings of the Metal Hordes permitted we saw that allthe flat floor of the valley was stripped and checkered, stippled andtessellated with every color, patterned with enormous lozenges andsquares, rhomboids and parallelograms, pentagons and hexagons anddiamonds, lunettes, circles and spirals; harlequined yet harmonious;instinct with a grotesque suggestion of a super-Futurism.
But always this patterning was ordered, always COHERENT. As thoughit were a page on which was spelled some untranslatable other worldmessage.
Fourth Dimensional revelations by some Euclidean deity! Commandmentstraced by some mathematical God!
Looping across the vale, emerging from the sparkling folds of thesouthernmost curtainings and vanishing into the gleaming veils of theeasternmost, ran a broad ribbon of pale-green jade; not straightly butwith manifold convolutions and flourishes. It was like a sentence inArabic.
It was margined with sapphire blue. All along its twisting course twobroad bands of jet margined the cerulean shore. It was spanned by scoresof flashing crystal arches. Nor were these bridges--even from thatdistance I knew they were no bridges. From them came the crystallinemurmurings.
Jade? This stream jade? If so then it must be in truth molten, for Icaught its swift and polished rushing! It was no jade. It was in truth ariver; a river running like a writing across a patterned plane.
I looked upward--up to the circling peaks. They were a stupendouscoronet thrusting miles deep into the dazzling sky. I raised my glasses,swept them. In color they were an immense and variegated flower withcountless multiform petals of stone; in outline they were a ring offortresses built by fantastic unknown Gods.
Up they thrust--domed and arched, spired and horned, pyramided, fangedand needled. Here were palisades of burning orange with barbicans ofincandescent bronze; there aiguilles of azure rising from bastions ofcinnabar red; turrets of royal purple, obelisks of indigo; titanic fortswhose walls were splashed with vermilion, with citron yellows and withrust of rubies; watch towers of flaming scarlet.
Scattered among them were the flashing emeralds of the glaciers and theimmense pallid baroques of the snow fields.
Like a diadem the summits ringed the Pit. Below them ran the ring offlashing amethyst with its aural mists. Between them lay the vast andpatterned flat covered with still symbol and inexplicable movement.Under their summits brooded the blue black, metallic mass of the SeeingCity.
Within circling walls, over plain and from the City hovered a cosmicspirit not to be understood by man. Like an emanation of stars andspace, it was yet gem fine and gem hard, crystalline and metallic,lapidescent and--
Conscious!
Down from the ledge where we stood fell a steep ramp, similar to that bywhich, in the darkness, we had descended. It dropped at an angle of atleast forty-five degrees; its surface was smooth and polished.
Through the mists at our back stole a shining block. It paused, seemedto perk itself; spun so that in turn each of its six faces took us in.
I felt myself lifted upon it by multitudes of little invisible hands;saw Drake whirling up beside me. I moved toward him--through the forcethat held us. A block swept away from the ledge, swayed for a moment.Under us, as though we were floating in air, the Pit lay stretched.There was a rapid readjustment, a shifting of our two selves uponanother surface. I looked down upon a tremendous, slender pillar of thecubes, dropping below, five hundred feet to the valley's floor a columnof which the block that held us was the top.
Gone was the whirling wheel that had crowned it, but I knew this for theGrinding Thing from which we had fled; the questing block had been itsscout. As though curious to know more of us, the Shape had sought us outthrough the mists, its messenger had caught us, delivered us to it.
The pillar leaned over--bent like that shining pillar that had bridgedfor us, at Norhala's commands, the abyss. The floor of the valley aroseto meet us. Further and further leaned the pillar. Again there was arapid shifting of us to another surface of the crowning cube. Fast nowswept up toward us the valley floor. A dizziness clouded my sight. Therewas a little shock, a rolling over the Thing that had held us--
We stood upon the floor of the Pit.
And breaking from the immense and prostrate shaft on whose top we hadridden downward came score upon score of the cubes. They broke from it,disintegrating it; circled about us, curiously, interestedly, twinklingat us from their deep sparkling points of eyes.
Helplessly we gazed at those who circled around us. Then suddenly I feltmyself lifted once more, was tossed to the surface of the nearest block.Upon it I spun while the tiny eyes searched me. Then like a human ballit tossed me to another. I caught a glimpse of Drake's tall figuredrifting through the air.
The play became more rapid, breathtaking. It was play; I recognizedthat. But it was perilous play for us. I felt myself as fragile as adoll of glass in the hands of careless children.
I was tossed to a waiting cube. On the ground, not ten feet from me,was Drake, swaying dizzily. Suddenly the cube that held me tightened itsgrip; tightened it so that it drew me irresistibly flat down upon itssurface. Before I dropped, Drake's body leaped toward me as though drawnby a lasso. He fell at my side.
Then pursued by scores of the Things and like some mischievous boybearing off the spoils, the block that held us raced away, straight foran open portal. A blaze of incandescent blue flame blinded me; againas the dazzlement faded I saw Drake beside me--a skeleton form. Swiftlyflesh melted back upon him, clothed him.
The cube stopped, abruptly; the hosts of little unseen hands raisedus, slid us gently over its edge, set us upright beside it. And it spedaway.
All about us stretched another of those vast halls in which on highburned the pale-gilt suns. Between its colossal columns streamedthousands of the Metal Folk; no longer hurriedly, but quietly,deliberately, sedately.
We were within the City--even as Ventnor had commanded.