nothing, but a brighter glow inthe misty canopy overhead marked the sun's position.
I knelt and brushed away the snow with my hands, hoping to undo thewind's concealing work. But I found no more footprints. Finally I tookmy bearings as well as I could and ploughed ahead in the generaldirection the girl had been traveling.
My compass told me I was heading due north.
The fog was a living, sentient thing now, secretive, shrouding thesecret that lay beyond its gray wall.
Suddenly I was conscious of a change. An electric tingle coursedthrough my body. Abruptly the fog-wall brightened. Dimly, as through atranslucent pane, I could make out vague images ahead of me.
I began to move toward the images--and suddenly the fog was gone!
Before me lay a valley. Blue-white moss carpeted it except wherereddish boulders broke the blueness. Here and there were trees--atleast I assumed they were trees, despite their unfamiliar outline.They were like banyans, having dozens of trunks narrow as bamboo.Blue-leafed, they stood like immense bird-cages on the pallid moss.The fog closed in behind the valley and above it. It was like being ina huge sun-lit cavern.
I turned my head, saw a gray wall behind me. Beneath my feet the snowwas melting and running in tiny, trickling rivulets among the moss.The air was warm and stimulating as wine.
A strange and abrupt change. Impossibly strange! I walked toward oneof the trees, stopped at a reddish boulder to examine it. And surprisecaught at my throat. It was an artifact--a crumbling ruin, the remnantof an ancient structure whose original appearance I could not fathom.The stone seemed iron-hard. There were traces of inscription on it,but eroded to illegibility. And I never did learn the history of thoseenigmatic ruins.... They did not originate on Earth.
There was no sign of the native girl, and the resilient moss retainedno tracks. I stood there, staring around, wondering what to do now. Iwas tense with excitement. But there was little to see. Just thatvalley covering perhaps a half-mile before the fog closed in aroundit.
Beyond that--I did not know what lay beyond that.
I went on, into the valley, eyeing my surroundings curiously in theshadowless light that filtered through the shifting roof of fog.Foolishly, I expected to discover Incan artifacts. The crumbled redstones should have warned me. They were, I think, harder than metal,yet they had been here long enough for the elements to erode them intofeatureless shards. Had they been of earthly origin they would haveantedated Mankind--antedated even the Neanderthaler man.
Curious how our minds are conditioned to run in anthropomorphic lines.I was, though I did not know it, walking through a land that had itsbeginnings outside the known universe. The blue trees hinted at that.The crimson ruins told me that clearly. The atmosphericconditions--the fog, the warmth high up in the Cordilleras--werecertainly not natural. Yet I thought the explanation lay in somegeological warp, volcanic activity, subterranean gas-vents....
My vision reached a half-mile, no farther. As I went on, the mistyhorizon receded. The valley was larger than I had imagined. It waslike Elysium, where the shades of dead men stroll in the Garden ofProserpine. Streamlets ran through the blue moss at intervals, chillas death from the snowy plains hidden in the fog. "A sleepy world ofstreams...."
The ruins altered in appearance as I went on. The red blocks werestill present, but there were now also remnants of other structures,made by a different culture, I thought.
The blue trees grew more numerous. Leafy vines covered most of themnow, saffron-tinted, making each strange tree a little room, screenedby the lattice of the vines. As I passed close to one a faint clickingsounded, incongruously like the tapping of typewriter keys, butmuffled. I saw movement and turned, my hand going to the pistol in mybelt.
The Thing came out of a tree-hut and halted, watching me. I _felt_ itwatching me--though _it had no eyes_!
It was a sphere of what seemed to be translucent plastic, glowing withshifting rainbow colors. And I sensed sentience--intelligence--in itshorribly human attitude of watchful hesitation. Four feet in diameterit was, and featureless save for three ivory elastic tentacles thatsupported it and a fringe of long, whip-like cilia about itsdiameter--its waist, I thought.
It looked at me, eyeless and cryptic. The shifting colors crawled overthe plastic globe. Then it began to roll forward on the threesupporting tentacles with a queer, swift gliding motion. I steppedback, jerking out my gun and leveling it.
"Stop," I said, my voice shrill. "Stop!"
It stopped, quite as though it understood my words or the gesture ofmenace. The cilia fluttered about its spherical body. Bands of lambentcolor flashed. I could not rid myself of the curious certainty, thatit was trying to communicate with me.
Abruptly it came forward again purposefully. I tensed and steppedback, holding the gun aimed. My finger was tightening on the triggerwhen the Thing stopped.
I backed off, nervously tense, but the creature did not follow. AfterI had got about fifty yards away it turned back and retreated into thehut-like structure in the banyan tree. After that I watched the treeswarily as I passed them, but there were no other visitations of thatnature.
Scientists are reluctant to relinquish their so-called logic. As Iwalked I tried to rationalize the creature, to explain it in the lightof current knowledge. That it had been alive was certain. Yet it wasnot protoplasmic in nature. A plant, developed by mutation? Perhaps.But that theory did not satisfy me for the Thing had possessedintelligence, though of what order I did not know.
But there were the seven native girls, I reminded myself. My job wasto find them, and quickly, too.
I did, at last, find them. Six of them, anyway. They were sitting in arow on the blue moss, facing one of the red blocks of stone, theirbacks toward me. As I mounted a little rise I saw them, motionless asbronze statues, and as rigid.
I went down toward them, tense with excitement, expectancy. Odd thatsix native girls, sitting in a row, should fill me with such feeling.They were so motionless that I wondered as I approached them, if theywere dead....
But they were not. Nor were they--in the true sense of theword--alive.
I gripped one by the bare shoulder, found the flesh surprisingly coldand the girl seemed not to feel my touch. I swung her around to faceme, and her black, empty eyes looked off into the far distance. Herlips were tightly compressed, slightly cyanosed. The pupils of hereyes were inordinately dilated, as if she was drugged.
Indian style, she squatted cross-legged, like the others. As I pulledher around, she toppled down on the moss, making no effort to stopherself. For a moment she lay there. Then with slow, puppet-likemotions, she returned to her former position and resumed that blankstaring into space.
I looked at the others. They were alike in their sleep-likewithdrawal. It seemed as if their minds had been sucked out of them,that their very selves were elsewhere. It was a fantastic diagnosis,of course. But the trouble with those girls was nothing a physiciancould understand. It was psychic in nature, obviously.
I turned to the first one and slapped her cheeks. "Wake up!" Icommanded. "You must obey me! Waken--"
But she gave no sign of feeling, of seeing. I lit a match, and her eyesfocused on the flame. But the size of her pupils did not alter....
A shudder racked me. Then, abruptly I sensed movement behind me. Iturned....
Over the blue moss the seventh Indio girl was coming toward us."Miranda!" I said. "Can you hear me?" Fra Rafael had told me her name.Her feet, I saw, were bare and white frost-bite blotches marked them.But she did not seem to feel any pain as she walked.
Then I became aware that this was not a simple Indio girl. Somethingdeep within my soul suddenly shrank back with instinctive revulsion.My skin seemed to crawl with a sort of terror. I began to shake sothat it was difficult to draw my gun from its holster.
There was just this young native girl walking slowly toward me, herface quite expressionless, her black eyes fixed on emptiness. Yet shewas not like other Indios, not like the six other girls sitting behindme.
I can only liken her to a lamp in which a hot flame burned. Theothers were lamps that were dead, unlit.
The flame in her was not one that had been kindled on this earth, orin this universe, or in this space-time continuum, either. There waslife in the girl who had been Miranda Valle--but it was not _human_life!
Some distant, skeptical corner of my brain told me that this was pureinsanity, that I was deluded, hallucinated. Yes, I knew that. But itdid not seem to matter. The girl who was walking so quietly across theblue yielding moss had wrapped about her, like an invisible,intangible veil, something of the alienage that men, through the eons,have called divinity. No mere human, I thought, could touch her.
* * * * *
But I felt fear, loathing--emotions not associated with divinity. Iwatched, knowing that presently she would look at me, would realize mypresence. Then--well, my mind would not go beyond that point....
She came forward and quietly seated herself with the others, at theend of the line. Her body stiffened rigidly.