CHAPTER XXVIII
In the Lair of the Dweller
It is with marked hesitation that I begin this chapter, because in itI must deal with an experience so contrary to every known law ofphysics as to seem impossible. Until this time, barring, of course,the mystery of the Dweller, I had encountered nothing that was notsusceptible of naturalistic explanation; nothing, in a word, outsidethe domain of science itself; nothing that I would have felt hesitancyin reciting to my colleagues of the International Association ofScience. Amazing, unfamiliar--_advanced_--as many of the phenomena were,still they lay well within the limits of what we have mapped as thepossible; in regions, it is true, still virgin to the mind of man, buttoward which that mind is steadily advancing.
But this--well, I confess that I have a theory that is naturalistic;but so abstruse, so difficult to make clear within the short confinesof the space I have to give it, so dependent upon conceptions thateven the highest-trained scientific brains find difficult to grasp,that I despair.
I can only say that the thing occurred; that it took place inprecisely the manner I am about to narrate, and that I experienced it.
Yet, in justice to myself, I must open up some paths of preliminaryapproach toward the heart of the perplexity. And the first path is therealization that our world _whatever_ it is, is certainly _not_ theworld as we see it! Regarding this I shall refer to a discourse upon"Gravitation and the Principle of Relativity," by the distinguishedEnglish physicist, Dr. A. S. Eddington, which I had the pleasure ofhearing him deliver before the Royal Institution.[1]
I realize, of course, that it is not true logic to argue--"The worldis not as we think it is--therefore everything we think impossible ispossible in it." Even if it _be_ different, it is governed by _law_. Thetruly impossible is that which is outside law, and as nothing _can_ beoutside law, the impossible _cannot_ exist.
The crux of the matter then becomes our determination whether what wethink is impossible may or may not be possible under laws still beyondour knowledge.
I hope that you will pardon me for this somewhat academic digression,but I felt it was necessary, and it has, at least, put me more atease. And now to resume.
We had watched, Larry and I, the frog-men throw the bodies of Yolara'sassassins into the crimson waters. As vultures swoop down upon thedying, there came sailing swiftly to where the dead men floated,dozens of the luminous globes. Their slender, varicoloured tentacleswhipped out; the giant iridescent bubbles _climbed_ over the cadavers.And as they touched them there was the swift dissolution, the meltingaway into putrescence of flesh and bone that I had witnessed when thedart touched fruit that time I had saved Rador--and upon this theMedusae gorged; pulsing lambently; their wondrous colours shifting,changing, glowing stronger; elfin moons now indeed, but satelliteswhose glimmering beauty was fed by death; alembics of enchantmentwhose glorious hues were sucked from horror.
Sick, I turned away--O'Keefe as pale as I; passed back into thecorridor that had opened on the ledge from which we had watched; metLakla hurrying toward us. Before she could speak there throbbedfaintly about us a vast sighing. It grew into a murmur, a whispering,shook us--then passing like a presence, died away in far distance.
"The Portal has opened," said the handmaiden. A fainter sighing, likean echo of the other, mourned about us. "Yolara is gone," she said,"the Portal is closed. Now must we hasten--for the Three havecommanded that you, Goodwin, and Larry and I tread that strange roadof which I have spoken, and which Olaf may not take lest his heartbreak--and we must return ere he and Rador cross the bridge."
Her hand sought Larry's.
"Come!" said Lakla, and we walked on; down and down through hall afterhall, flight upon flight of stairways. Deep, deep indeed, we must bebeneath the domed castle--Lakla paused before a curved, smooth breastof the crimson stone rounding gently into the passage. She pressed itsside; it revolved; we entered; it closed behind us.
The room, the--hollow--in which we stood was faceted like a diamond;and like a cut brilliant its sides glistened--though dully. Its shapewas a deep oval, and our path dropped down to a circular polishedbase, roughly two yards in diameter. Glancing behind me I saw that inthe closing of the entrance there had been left no trace of it savethe steps that led from where that entrance had been--and as I lookedthese steps _turned_, leaving us isolated upon the circle, only thefaceted walls about us--and in each of the gleaming faces the three ofus reflected--dimly. It was as though we were within a diamond eggwhose graven angles had been turned _inward_.
But the oval was not perfect; at my right a screen cut it--a screenthat gleamed with fugitive, fleeting luminescences--stretching fromthe side of our standing place up to the tip of the chamber; slightlyconvex and crisscrossed by millions of fine lines like those upon aspectroscopic plate, but with this difference--that within each line Isensed the presence of multitudes of finer lines, dwindling intoinfinitude, ultramicroscopic, traced by some instrument compared towhose delicacy our finest tool would be as a crowbar to the needle ofa micrometer.
A foot or two from it stood something like the standee of a compass,bearing, like it a cradled dial under whose crystal ran concentricrings of prisoned, lambent vapours, faintly blue. From the edge of thedial jutted a little shelf of crystal, a keyboard, in which were cuteight small cups.
Within these cups the handmaiden placed her tapering fingers. Shegazed down upon the disk; pressed a digit--and the screen behind usslipped noiselessly into another angle.
"Put your arm around my waist, Larry, darlin', and stand close," shemurmured. "You, Goodwin, place your arm over my shoulder."
Wondering, I did as she bade; she pressed other fingers upon theshelf's indentations--three of the rings of vapour spun into intenselight, raced around each other; from the screen behind us grew aradiance that held within itself all spectrums--not only those seen,but those _unseen_ by man's eyes. It waxed brilliant and ever morebrilliant, all suffusing, passing through me as day streams through awindow pane!
The enclosing facets burst into a blaze of coruscations, and in eachsparkling panel I saw our images, shaken and torn like pennants in awhirlwind. I turned to look--was stopped by the handmaiden's swiftcommand: "Turn not--on your life!"
The radiance behind me grew; was a rushing tempest of light in which Iwas but the shadow of a shadow. I heard, but not with my ears--nay with_mind_ itself--a vast roaring; an _ordered_ tumult of sound that camehurling from the outposts of space; approaching--rushing--hurricaneout of the heart of the cosmos--closer, closer. It wrapped itselfabout us with unearthly mighty arms.
And brilliant, ever more brilliant, streamed the radiance through us.
The faceted walls dimmed; in front of me they melted, diaphanously,like a gelatinous wall in a blast of flame; through their vanishing,under the torrent of driving light, the unthinkable, impalpabletornado, I began to move, slowly--then ever more swiftly!
Still the roaring grew; the radiance streamed--ever faster we went.Cutting down through the length, the _extension_ of me, dropped a wallof rock, foreshortened, clenched close; I caught a glimpse of theelfin gardens; they whirled, contracted, into a thin--slice--of colourthat was a part of me; another wall of rock shrinking into a thinwedge through which I flew, and that at once took its place within melike a card slipped beside those others!
Flashing around me, and from Lakla and O'Keefe, were nimbuses offlickering scarlet flames. And always the steady hurlingforward--appallingly mechanical.
Another barrier of rock--a gleam of white waters incorporatingthemselves into my--_drawing out_--even as were the flowered moss lands,the slicing, rocky walls--still another rampart of cliff, dwindlinginstantly into the vertical plane of those others. Our flight checked;we seemed to hover within, then to sway onward--slowly, cautiously.
A mist danced ahead of me--a mist that grew steadily thinner. Westopped, wavered--the mist cleared.
I looked out into translucent, green distances; shot with swiftprismatic gleamings; waves and pulsings of luminosi
ty like midday sunglow through green, tropic waters: dancing, scintillating veils ofsparkling atoms that flew, hither and yon, through depths of nebuloussplendour!
And Lakla and Larry and I were, I saw, like shadow shapes upon asmooth breast of stone twenty feet or more above the surface of thisplace--a surface spangled with tiny white blossoms gleaming wanlythrough creeping veils of phosphorescence like smoke of moon fire. Wewere shadows--and yet we had substance; we were incorporated with, apart of, the rock--and yet we were living flesh and blood; westretched--nor will I qualify this--we _stretched_ through mile uponmile of space that weirdly enough gave at one and the same time anabsolute certainty of immense horizontal lengths and a verticalconcentration that contained nothing of length, nothing of spacewhatever; we stood _there_ upon the face of the stone--and still wewere _here_ within the faceted oval before the screen of radiance!
"Steady!" It was Lakla's voice--and not beside me _there_, but at my earclose before the screen. "Steady, Goodwin! And--see!"
The sparkling haze cleared. Enormous reaches stretched before me.Shimmering up through them, and as though growing in some mediumthicker than air, was mass upon mass of verdure--fruiting trees andtrees laden with pale blossoms, arbours and bowers of pallid blooms,like that sea fruit of oblivion--grapes of Lethe--that cling to thetide-swept walls of the caverns of the Hebrides.
Through them, beyond them, around and about them, drifted and eddied ahorde--great as that with which Tamerlane swept down upon Rome, vastas the myriads which Genghis Khan rolled upon the califs--men andwomen and children--clothed in tatters, half nude and wholly naked;slant-eyed Chinese, sloe-eyed Malays, islanders black and brown andyellow, fierce-faced warriors of the Solomons with grizzled locksfantastically bedizened; Papuans, feline Javans, Dyaks of hill andshore; hook-nosed Phoenicians, Romans, straight-browed Greeks, andVikings centuries _beyond_ their lives: scores of the black-hairedMurians; white faces of our own Westerners--men and women andchildren--drifting, eddying--each stamped with that mingled horror andrapture, eyes filled with ecstasy and terror entwined, marked by Godand devil in embrace--the seal of the Shining One--the dead-alive; thelost ones!
The loot of the Dweller!
Soul-sick, I gazed. They lifted to us visages of dread; they sweptdown toward us, glaring upward--a bank against which other and stillother waves of faces rolled, were checked, paused; until as far as Icould see, like billows piled upon an ever-growing barrier, theystretched beneath us--staring--staring!
Now there was a movement--far, far away; a concentrating of thelambency; the dead-alive swayed, oscillated, separated--forming a longlane against whose outskirts they crowded with avid, hungryinsistence.
First only a luminous cloud, then a whirling pillar of splendoursthrough the lane came--the Shining One. As it passed, the dead-aliveswirled in its wake like leaves behind a whirlwind, eddying, twisting;and as the Dweller raced by them, brushing them with its spirallingsand tentacles, they shone forth with unearthly, awesomegleamings--like vessels of alabaster in which wicks flare suddenly.And when it had passed they closed behind it, staring up at us oncemore.
The Dweller paused beneath us.
Out of the drifting ruck swam the body of Throckmartin! Throckmartin,my friend, to find whom I had gone to the pallid moon door; my friendwhose call I had so laggardly followed. On his face was the Dweller'sdreadful stamp; the lips were bloodless; the eyes were wide, lucent,something like pale, phosphorescence gleaming within them--andsoulless.
He stared straight up at me, unwinking, unrecognizing. Pressingagainst his side was a woman, young and gentle, and lovely--lovelyeven through the mask that lay upon her face. And her wide eyes, likeThrockmartin's, glowed with the lurking, unholy fires. She pressedagainst him closely; though the hordes kept up the faint churning,these two kept ever together, as though bound by unseen fetters.
And I knew the girl for Edith, his wife, who in vain effort to savehim had cast herself into the Dweller's embrace!
"Throckmartin!" I cried. "Throckmartin! I'm here!"
Did he hear? I know now, of course, he could not.
But then I waited--hope striving to break through the nightmare handsthat gripped my heart.
Their wide eyes never left me. There was another movement about them,others pushed past them; they drifted back, swaying, eddying--andstill staring were lost in the awful throng.
Vainly I strained my gaze to find them again, to force some sign ofrecognition, some awakening of the clean life we know. But they weregone. Try as I would I could not see them--nor Stanton and thenorthern woman named Thora who had been the first of that tragic partyto be taken by the Dweller.
"Throckmartin!" I cried again, despairingly. My tears blinded me.
I felt Lakla's light touch.
"Steady," she commanded, pitifully. "Steady, Goodwin. You cannot helpthem--now! Steady and--watch!"
Below us the Shining One had paused--spiralling, swirling, vibrantwith all its transcendent, devilish beauty; had paused and wascontemplating us. Now I could see clearly that nucleus, that core shotthrough with flashing veins of radiance, that ever-shifting shape ofglory through the shroudings of shimmering, misty plumes, throbbinglacy opalescences, vaporous spirallings of prismatic phantom fires.Steady over it hung the seven little moons of amethyst, of saffron, ofemerald and azure and silver, of rose of life and moon white. Theypoised themselves like a diadem--calm, serene, immobile--and downfrom them into the Dweller, piercing plumes and swirls and spirals,ran countless tiny strands, radiations, finer than the finest spunthread of spider's web, gleaming filaments through which seemed torun--_power_--from the seven globes; like--yes, that was it--miniaturesof the seven torrents of moon flame that poured through theseptichromatic, high crystals in the Moon Pool's chamber roof.
Swam out of the coruscating haze the--face!
Both of man and of woman it was--like some ancient, androgynous deityof Etruscan fanes long dust, and yet neither woman nor man; human andunhuman, seraphic and sinister, benign and malefic--and still no moreof these four than is flame, which is beautiful whether it warms ordevours, or wind whether it feathers the trees or shatters them, orthe wave which is wondrous whether it caresses or kills.
Subtly, undefinably it was of our world and of one not ours. Itslineaments flowed from another sphere, took fleeting familiarform--and as swiftly withdrew whence they had come; somethingamorphous, unearthly--as of unknown unheeding, unseen gods rushingthrough the depths of star-hung space; and still of our own earth,with the very soul of earth peering out from it, caught within it--andin some--unholy--way debased.
It had eyes--eyes that were now only shadows darkening within itsluminosity like veils falling, and falling, _opening_ windows into theunknowable; deepening into softly glowing blue pools, blue as the MoonPool itself; then flashing out, and this only when the--face--bore itsmost human resemblance, into twin stars large almost as the crown oflittle moons; and with that same baffling suggestion of peep-holesinto a world untrodden, alien, perilous to man!
"Steady!" came Lakla's voice, her body leaned against mine.
I gripped myself, my brain steadied, I looked again. And I saw thatof body, at least body as we know it, the Shining One hadnone--nothing but the throbbing, pulsing core streaked with lightningveins of rainbows; and around this, never still, sheathing it, theswirling, glorious veilings of its hell and heaven born radiance.
So the Dweller stood--and gazed.
Then up toward us swept a reaching, questing spiral!
Under my hand Lakla's shoulder quivered; dead-alive and their mastervanished--I danced, flickered, _within_ the rock; felt a swift sense ofshrinking, of withdrawal; slice upon slice the carded walls of stone,of silvery waters, of elfin gardens slipped from me as cards arewithdrawn from a pack, one by one--slipped, wheeled, flattened, andlengthened out as I passed through them and they passed from me.
Gasping, shaken, weak, I stood within the faceted oval chamber; armstill about the handmaiden's white shoulder; Larry's hand
stillclutching her girdle.
The roaring, impalpable gale from the cosmos was retreating to theoutposts of space--was still; the intense, streaming, floodingradiance lessened--died.
"Now have you beheld," said Lakla, "and well you trod the road. Andnow shall you hear, even as the Silent Ones have commanded, what theShining One is--and how it came to be."
The steps flashed back; the doorway into the chamber opened.
Larry as silent as I--we followed her through it.
[1] Reprinted in full in _Nature_, in which those sufficiently interestedmay peruse it.--W. T. G.