SUNFIRE

and other stories

Francis Stevens

Getrude Barrows Bennett, 1883-1948

V2, August 2021

Contents

1: Sunfire (novelette)

2: Behind the Curtain

3: Unseen— Unfeared

4: Elf Trap

5: Friend Island

6: The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar

Bibliography

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1: Sunfire

Weird Tales, Aug-Sept 1923

1: The Derelict Fleet

IT WAS close to high noon of the fourteenth day since leaving their motor-yacht, when the five men in the traveling canoe had their first view of the island of "Tata Quarahy," Fire of the Sun.

The walls of the winding river they traveled had grown steeper, higher, barren at last of vegetation. The Rio Silencioso, in its lower reaches a fever-ridden, malodorous stream, here flowed in austere purity. Its color was no longer dark, but a peculiar, brilliant hue—like red gold dissolved in crystal. The effect was. partly from reflection of the heights between which it wound, slanting walls of rock, stratified in layers of rich color, from pale lemon to a deep red-orange. The equatorial sun cast its merciless glare over all. The last half-mile of their journey bore a close resemblance to ascending a stream of molten gold flowing through a flaming furnace.

However, the lurid rock walls ended at last. Poling through a channel too narrow for the sweep-like paddles, they floated out on the lake of the island. That it was the place told of by their guide, Kuyambira-Petro, there could be no question. But in the first glance it seemed less like a sheet of water with an island in the midst, than an immense flat plate of burnished gold, and, rising out of it— a pyramid of red flame.

"There is a broad water;" Petro had said. "There is an island. On the island is a strange power and some stone houses."

Had Kuyambira-Petro been taken to view the wonders of modern New York, his report on returning to his native Moju River village would have been much the same—and about equally descriptive.

Here before them, piled terrace upon terrace, constructed of rock that seemed literally aflame in its sunset colors, towered a monstrous mass of masonry. Even from where the canoe lay they could appreciate the enormous size of those blocks which formed the lower tier. Surrounding the pyramid at water-level, extended a broad platform of golden-yellow stone. Immediately above that rose a wall, red-orange in color, thirty feet high, without any apparent breach or means of ascent. Set well back from its upper edge were the first tier of Petro's "stone houses".

They were separate buildings, all of like shape, the end walls slanting inward to a-flat roof. Eight tiers of these, growing gradually smaller toward the top, completed the pyramid. The whole effect of the ponderous artificial mountain was strangely light and airy.

Above the truncated, eight-sided peak, there seemed to hover a curious nimbus of pale light. In the general glare, however, it was easy to suspect this vague, bright crown of being merely an optical illusion.

On board the canoe, the explorer-naturalist, Bryce Otway, turned a painfully sunburned countenance to Waring, war-correspondent and writer of magazine tales.

"It's there!" he breathed. "It's real! You see it, too, don't you! And, oh! man, man, well be the first— think of it, Waring!— the first to carry back photographs and descriptions of that to the civilized world!"

"Rather!" Waring grinned. "Take one thing with another, what a story!"

The other three, the young yacht-owner, Sigsbee, the little steward, Johnny Bliekensderfer, more often known as John B., and Mr. Theron Narcisse Tellifer, pride of Washington Square in New York City, each after his own fashion agreed with the first speakers.

They had toiled hard and suffered much to reach here. Sigsbee's motor-yacht, the Wanderer, they had been forced to leave below the first rapids.  The canoe journey had begun with four caboclos, half-breed native Brazilians, beside the guide, Petro, to take the labor of paddling.

Every man of these natives had succumbed to beri-beri, inside the first week. The epidemic spared the white men, doubtless because of their living on a different diet than the farina and chibeh, or jerked beef, which is the mainstay of native Brazil. Having come so far to solve the mystery of the Rio Silencioso, the five survivors would not turn back.

Rio Silencioso— River of Silence indeed, flowing through a silent jungle-land, where ho animal life stirred or howled, where there was only the buzz of myriad stinging insects to heighten rather than break the quiet of the nights. Others before them had tried to conquer the Silencioso. None had ever returned —none, that is, save the old full-blood Indian, Kuyambira-Petro. His story had interested the party of Americans on the Wanderer, and, though the guide himself had perished, brought them at last to this strange lake and pyramid. Reluctantly, merely because even a half-mile of further paddling under the noon sun promised to be suicidal, the heavy stone, used for an anchor was dropped to a gravel bottom six feet below. Preparations were made for the mid-day meal and siesta.

From where they lay, the lake appeared as a nearly circular pool, sunk in the heart of this surviving bit of what had once been a great chapadao, or plateau, before a few thousand years of wet-season floods had washed most of it down to join the marsh and mire of Amazon Valley. The outlet by which they had entered formed the only break in its shores. It was probably fed by springs from below, accounting for the crystal purity of its waters and the clean gravel of its bottom. Reflected from the shallow depths, the heat proved almost unbearable. Yet no one felt inclined to complain.

"Gehenna in temperature," as Tellifer, the esthete of the party phrased it, "but the loveliness of yon mountain of pyramiding flame atones for all!"

Sprawled in the shade of awning and palm-thatched cabin, they panted, sweated, and waited happily for the hour of release.

Around four-thirty came a breeze like the breath of heaven. The waters of the lake stirred in smooth, molten ripples. Across them moved a canoe-load of eager optimists. The vague haze of white glare that had seemed for a time to hover above the pyramid had vanished with the passing of the worser heat.

On the side which faced the river outlet, the thirty-foot wall, which formed the first tier, boasted neither gateway nor stair. Since it seemed likely that the ancient builders had provided some means of ascent more convenient than ropes or ladders, the canoe turned and circled the pyramid's base.

On closer view, the flame-colored wall proved to be a mass of bas-relief carved work. In execution, it bore that same resemblance to Egyptian art which marks much work of the ancient South and Central American civilizations. The human figures were both male and female, the men nude, bearing platters of fruit and wine-jars, the women clad in single garments hanging from the shoulders. The men marched, but the women were presented in attitudes of ceremonial dance; also as musicians, playing upon instruments resembling Pan's pipes of several reeds.

As Tellifer remarked, it seemed a pity to have spoiled what would otherwise have been a really charming votive procession, by the introduction of certain other and monstrous forms that writhed and twined along the background, and, in some cases, actually wreathed the dancers' bodies.

"Sun-worshippers!" scoffed Waring, referring to a surmise of Otway's regarding the probable religion of the pyramid's builders. "Centipede worshippers— hundred-legger devotees— or do my eyes deceive me? Hey, Otway! What price sun-worship now?"

"Don't bother me!" Otway's voice drifted back happily from the prow. "I'm in the land of undared dreams come true."

Part way around, in that plane of its eight-sided form which faced the west, they found what they were seeking. It was a stairway, fully a hundred feet wide at the base, leading from water-level to the very height of the pyramid, with broad landings at each tier. Where its lowest tread was lipped by the lake, enormous piers of carved stone guarded the entrance. It was a stair of gorgeous coloring and Cyclopean proportion. Its grandeur and welcome invitation to ascend should have roused the exploring party to even greater jubilance. Strangely, however, none of them at first gave more than a passing glance to this triumph of long-dead builders. In rounding the pyramid, indeed, they had come upon a sight more startling—in a way—than even the pyramid itself. Drawn up near the foot of the stair floated a great- collection of boats. They ranged in size front a small native dug-out to a cabined traveling canoe even larger than Otway's; in age, from a rotting, half-waterlogged condition that told of exposure through many a long, wet season, to the comparative neatness of one craft whose owners might have left it moored there a month ago at latest.

These, however, were by no means the whole of the marvel.

Over beyond the small fleet of deserted river-craft, floating placidly on buoyant pontoons, rested a large, gray-painted, highly modern hydro-airplane!

2: To The Rescue

"THE BOATS," Otway was saying, "are a collection of many years' standing. We have to face the fact that we are not the first to reach this lake, and that, save for Kuyambira-Petro, not one of all those who preceded us has returned down that noble stairway, after ascending it. And that airplane! It has certainly not been here long. The gas in its tanks is unevaporated. Its motors are in perfect order. There is no reason why the man, or men, who came here in it should not have left in the same way—were they alive or free to do so!"

Otway, Alcot Waring and young Sigsbee stood together inside the doorway of one of the buildings in. the pyramid's first terrace. The other two, Tellifer and John B., were still on board the canoe, drawn up among the derelict fleet at the landing stage. Otway had demanded a scouting party, before landing his entire force. Though the war-correspondent and Sigsbee had insisted on sharing the reconnaissance, Tellifer had consented to remain as rear-guard on the canoe, with the steward.

Ascending the stairs, the three scouts had turned at the first terrace and entered the building at the right. As they were on the eastern side of the pyramid, and the sun was sinking, the interior was very dim and shadowy. Enough light, however, was reflected through the tall doorway and the pair of windows to let them see well enough, as their eyes grew used to the duskiness.

They had entered a large room or chamber, in shape a square, truncated pyramid, twenty-five feet high, thirty-five in length and breadth. The floor was bare, grooved and hollowed through long usage by many feet.  Around its inner walls ran a stone bench, broken at the back by an eight-foot recess. Therein, on a platform of stone slightly higher than the floor, a black jaguar-hide lay in a tumbled heap.

The hide was old and ragged. Its short, rich fur was worn off in many bald spots. Near the niche, or bed-place, a water jar of smooth clay, painted in red and yellow patterns, lay on its side as if knocked over by a hastily rising sleeper.

The walls were covered by hangings, woven of fiber and dyed in the same garish hues as the water-jar. In lifting the jaguar hide, a girdle composed of golden disks joined by fine chains dropped to the floor. The softly tanned hide itself, though worn and shabby, bore all around its edge a tinkling fringe of golden disks. Like those of the girdle, they were each adorned with an embossed hemisphere, from which short, straight lines radiated to the circumference. A crude representation of the sun, perhaps.

"Or free?" Waring inflected, repeating the naturalist's last words.

Bryce Otway flung out his hands in a meaning gesture.

"Or free!" he reiterated. "Man, look about you. These woven wall-hangings are old, but by no means ancient. In this climate, the palm-fiber and glass of which they arc made would have rotted in far leas than half a century. The animal that wore this black fur was roaming the jungle alive, not more than ten years ago. The golden ornaments— the painted pottery— they, indeed, might be coeval with the stones themselves and still appear fresh; hut fabric and fur— Why, you must understand what I mean. You must already have made the same inference. This pyramid has been inhabited by living people within recent years. And if recently—why not now?"

"I say!" Sigsbee ejaculated. "What a perfectly gorgeous thing it would be, if you are right! If you are, then the fellows that came in the airplane are probably prisoners. I suggest we move right along upward—to the rescue. There are five of us. Every darn one knows the butt of his gun from the muzzle, and then some. If there are any left-overs of a race that ought to be dead and isn't hanging around here, strafing harmless callers, they'll find us one tough handful to exterminate. Come on! I want to know what's on the big flat top of this gaudy old rock-pile!"

Otway's eyes questioned the correspondent.

"Your party,'" Waring assured. "Agree on a leader—stick to him. But I think Sig's right. That airplane― mighty recent. Something doggone queer in the whole' business. Got to be careful. And yet— well, I'd hate to find those fellows later— maybe just an hour or so too late."

To Sigsbee's frank joy, the explorer smiled suddenly and nodded.

"I want to go on up," he admitted. "But I hesitated to make the suggestion. Petro didn't tell us of any people living here. There's no knowing, though, exactly what Petro really found."

Fifteen minutes later the entire party of five, rifles at ready, pistols loose in their holsters, advanced upon the conquest of the pyramid.

The great stairway led straight to the top. For some reason, connected perhaps with the hazy glare that had seemed to hover over it at noontime, every man of the five was convinced that both the danger and the solution of the mystery Waited at the stairway's head, rather than in any of the silent buildings that stared outward with their dark little windows and doorways like so many empty eye-sockets and gaping mouths.

Ahead, at his own insistence, marched Alcot Waring. A vast mountain of flesh the correspondent appeared, obese, freckle-faced, with small, round, very bright and clear gray eyes. He carried his huge weight up the stairs with the noiseless ease of a wild elephant moving through the jungle.

Just behind him, as the party's next best rifle-marksman, came the steward. John B. was a quiet little man, with doglike brown eyes, gentle manners, and a fund of simply-told reminiscence that covered experiences ranging almost from pole to pole.

Otway, the widely famed naturalist-explorer, peering through round, shell-rimmed spectacles set on a face almost equally round, and generally beaming with cheerfulness, walked beside young Sigsbee, whose life, before the present expedition, had been rather empty of adventure, but who was ready to welcome anything in that line.

Last, Mr. Theron Narcisse Tellifer brought up the rear, not, let it be said, from caution, but because his enjoyment of the view across the lake had delayed him. Tall, lank-limbed, he kept his somber, rather melancholy countenance twisted over one shoulder, looking backward with far more interest in the color of lake and sky than in any possible adventure that might await them. It required a good deal of experience with Tellifer to learn why his intimates used his initials as a nickname for him, and considered it appropriate.

So, in loose formation, the party essayed the final stage of that journey which all those who left their boats to rot at the stairfoot had courageously pursued.

The sun was dropping, swiftly now behind the western cliffs. The vast shadow of the pyramid extended across the eastern half of the lake and darkened tire shores beyond. The stairway was swallowed in a rapidly deepening twilight

3: Scolopendra Horribilis

THE FIRST real testimony the five received that they were indeed not alone upon the artificial island of rock came on  the wings of a sound.

It was very faint, barely audible at first But it soon grew to a poignant, throbbing intensity. It was a sound like the piping of flutes—a duet of flutes, weaving a strange -monotonous melody, all in a single octave and minor key. The rhythm varied, now slow, now fast The melody repeated its few monotonous burs indefinitely.

The source of the sound was hard to place. At one moment it seemed to drift down from the air above them. At another, they could have .sworn that it issued from or through the stair itself. They all paused uncertainly. The abruptness of a tropical sunset had ended the last of the day. Great stars throbbed out in a blue-black sky. The  breeze had increased to a chill wind. All the pyramid was a mass of darkness about them, save that above the flat peak there seemed again to hover a faint, pale luminescence.

"Shall we go on?"  Instinctively, Otway put the question in a whisper, though, save for the quaint fluting sound, there was no sign of life about them.

Out of the dark, Tellifer answered, a shiver of nervous laughter in his voice:

"Can we go back? The strange thing that has drawn so many hither is calling from the heart of the pyramid. It is―"

"I say, go on," counseled Waring, not heeding him. "Find out what's up

"Oh, come along," Sigsbee urged impatiently. "We can go up softly. We've got to find out what we're in for."

Softly, they did go, or as much so as was allowed by a darkness in which the "hand before the face" test failed completely. They had brought a lantern with, them, but dared not light it. Even intermittent aid from pocket flashes was ruled out by Otway. Unseen enemies, he reminded, might be ambushed in any of the buildings to right and left. The stairs, narrower toward the top, were also more uneven. They were broken in places, causing many stumbles and hushed curses. Once, Waring observed in a bitter whisper that the party would have formed an ideal squad for scouting duty across No Man's Land; they would have drawn the fire and located the position of every Boche in the sector.

Next moment Waring caught his own foot in a broken gap. The rattle of equipment and crackle of profanity with which he landed on hands and knees, avenged the victims of his criticism. In spite of mysterious perils, smothered laughter was heard upon the pyramid. Yet none of these indiscretions or accidents brought attack from any quarter. The monotonous fluting continued. As they neared the top, its poignant obligato to their approach grew over more piercing and distinct.

The final half dozen steps were reached at last. A bare two yards wide, they sloped up with sudden steepness. Halting the party, breathlessly silent now, Otway himself crept up this lost flight. From below, his companions saw his head rise, barely visible against the ghost of white luminance that crowned the pyramid. His entire figure followed it, wriggling forward, belly-flat to the surface.

After a long five minutes, they saw him again, this time standing upright. He seemed, as nearly as they could make out, to be beckoning them on. Then he had once more vanished.

Some question entered the minds of all, whether the beckoning figure had been really that of Otway, or some being or person less friendly. With a very eerie and doubtful sensation, they crept up the narrow flight and over the edge. Waring was first. He found himself on a broad, flat platform, or rim of stone. At its inner edge a crouching figure showed against the white glow, now appearing much brighter, flooding up from an open space at the center of the peak. Certain at last that the figure was Otway's, the correspondent catfooted to his side. Over the other's shoulder he looked downward. Then, with a hissing intake of breath, he sank to his knees. Supporting himself with hands on his rifle, laid along the stone rim, he continued to stare downward.

One by one, the others joined the first pair. Very soon, a row of five sun-bronzed, fascinated faces was peering down into the hollow heart of the pyramid.

The eight-sided top consisted of a broad rim surrounding an open space, some hundred and fifty feet across and a third of that in depth. From the point where they knelt, an inner stairway, set at an angle to the eastern plane of the pyramid, led steeply to the bottom of the hollow.

In effect, the place was rather like a garden. On all sides fruit trees, flowering shrubs and palms of the smaller, more graceful varieties, grew out of soil banked off from a central court by a low parapet of yellow stone. It was not the garden effect, however, which had paralyzed the watchers.

Their eyes were fixed upon two forms, circling in a strange, rhythmic dance around a great, radiant, whitely glowing thing, that rested on a circle of eight slender pillars in the middle of the lower One of the forms was that of a woman. Her hair, falling to a little below the shoulders, tossed wildly, a curling, fluffy mass of reddish gold. Arms, legs and feet were bare. A single garment of spotted jaguar hide was draped from shoulders to mid-thigh. For ornament she wore neither bracelets nor anklets, but the jaguar skin was fastened with golden chains and fringed with tiny gold bangles. Upon the red-gold hair a circlet of star-like gems flashed in prismatic glory.

To her lips tile woman held a small instrument like a Pan's pipe or golden reeds. It was her playing upon this that produced the double fluting sound. Her dancing partner was a literal embodiment of the great demon, Terror. Its exact length was impossible to estimate. Numberless talon-like feet carried it through the dance figures with a swiftness that bewildered the eye.

The thing had the general shape of a mighty serpent. But instead of a barrel-like body and scaly skin, it was made up of short, flat segments, sandy yellow in color, every segment graced— or damned —with a pair of frightful talons, dagger-pointed, curved, murderous. At. times the monstrous, bleached-yellow length seemed to cover half the floor in a veritable pattern of fleeing segments. Again its fore part would rise, spiraling, the awful head poising high above the woman's.

At such moments it seemed that by merely straightening up a trifle higher, the demonish thing might confront its audience on the upper rim, eye to eye. For, eyes the thing possessed, though it was faceless. Two enormous yellow discs, they were, with neither retina or pupil, set in a curved, polished plate of bone-like substance. Above them a pair of whip-like, yard-long antennae lashed the air. Below the plate, four huge mandibles, that gnashed together with a dry, clashing sound, took the place of a mouth. During one of these upheavals, the head would sway and twist, giving an obviously false impression of blindness Then down it would flash, once more to encircle the woman's feet in loathsome patterns.

Not once, however, did the strange pair come in actual contact. Indifferent to her partner's perilous qualities, the woman pirouetted, posed, leaped among the coils, her bare feet falling daintily, always in clear spaces. The partner, in turn, however closely flashing by, kept its talons from grazing her garments, her flying hair, or smooth, gleaming white flesh.

The general trend of the dance was in a circle about the luminous mass on the central pillars.

"Chilopoda!" a voice muttered, at last. "Chilopoda Scolopendra! Chilopoda Scolopendra Horribilis!"

It sounded like a mystic incantation, very suitable to the occasion. But it was only the naturalist, Bryce Otway, classifying the most remarkable specimen he had ever encountered.

"Chilo-which? It's a nightmare— horrible!" This from Waring.

It remained for John B. to supply a more leisurely identification, made quite in his usual slow, mild drawl:

"When I was steward on the Southern Queen, 'Frisco to Valparaiso," said he, "Bill Flannigan, the second engineer, told me that one time in Ecuador he saw one of those things a foot and a half long. Bill Flannigan was a little careless what he said, and I didn't rightly believe him—then. Reckon maybe he was telling the truth after all. Centipede! Well, I didn't think those things ever grew this big. Real curious to look at, don't you think, Mr. Sigsbee?"

Young Mr. Sigsbee made no answer. What with the soft, glowing radiance of the central object on its pillars, the coiling involutions of one dancer, the never-ceasing gyrations of the other, it was a dizzying scene to look down upon. That was probably why Tellifer surprised every one by interrupting the dance in a highly spectacular manner.

His descent began with a faint sound as of something slipping on smooth stone. This was followed by a short, sharp shriek. Then, twenty feet below the rim, the willow-like plumes, of a group of slender assai palms swished wildly. Came a splintering crack—a dull thud— and "T.N.T." had arrived at the lower level.

It was a long drop. Fortunately, the esthete had brought down with him the entire crest of one of the assai palms. Between the springy bending of its trunk before breaking, and the buffer effect of the thick whorl of green plumes between himself and the pavement, Tellifer had escaped serious injury.

The men on the rim saw him disentangle himself from the palm-crest and crawl lamely to his feet. The girl, only a short distance off, ceased to gyrate. The golden Pan's pipes left her lips. With cessation of the fluting melody, the dry clashing of monstrous coils had also ceased. But in a moment that fainter, more dreadful sound began again.

Up over Tellifer's horrified head reared another head, frightful, polished, with dull, enormous yellow eyes— below them four awful mandibles, stretched wide in avid anticipation. Teliffer shrieked again, and dodged futilely.

4: "Sunfire"

TWO OF THE men left on the pyramid's inner rim were expert marksmen. The heavy, hollow-nosed express bullets from four rifles, all in more or less able hands, all trained upon an object several times larger than a man's head, at a range of only a dozen yards or so, should have blown that object to shattered bits of yellow shell and centipedish brain-matter in the first volley.

John B. was heard later to protest that in spite of the bad shooting light and the downward angle, he really could not have missed at that range— as, indeed, he probably did not. Some, at least, of the bullets fired must have passed through the space which the monstrous head had occupied at the moment when the first trigger was pulled.

But Scolopendra Horribilis, in spite of his awesome size, proved to have a speed like that of the hunting spider, at which a man may shoot with a pistol all day, at a one-yard range, and never score a bull's-eye.

One moment, there was Tellifer, half-crouched, empty hands outspread, face tipped back in horrified contemplation of the fate that loomed over him. There was the girl, a little way off, poised in the daintiest attitude of startled wonder. And there, coiling around and between them, and at the same time rearing well above them, was that incredible length of yellow plates, curved talons and deadly poison fangs.

From the pyramid's rim four rifles spoke in a crashing volley. Across the open level below, something that might have been a long, yellowish blur— or an optical illusion— flashed and was gone. There was still the girl. There was

Tellifer. But Scolopendra Horribilis had vanished like the figment of a dream.  One instant he was there. The next he was not. And well indeed it was for those who had fired on him that retreat had been his choice!

At the western side of the court was a round, black opening in the floor, like a large manhole. Down this hole the yellowish "optical illusion" had flashed and vanished.

As the crashing echoes of the volley died away, the girl roused from her air of tranced wonderment. She showed no inclination to follow her companion in flight. Judged by her manner, powder-flash and ricocheting bullets held no more terrors for her than had the hideous poison fangs of her recent dancing partner.

She tilted her head, coolly viewed the dim figures ranged along the eastern rim. Then, light as a blown leaf on her bare feet, she flitted toward her nearest visitor, Tellifer.

From above, Waring shouted at the latter to come up. Unless the girl were alone in the pyramid, the volley of rifle-fire must surely bring her fellow-inhabitants on the scene. Worse, the monster which had vanished down the black hole might return.

These perils, Waring phrased in a few forceful words. Seeing that, instead of heeding him, Tellifer was pausing to exchange a friendly greeting with the priestess of this devil's den, Waring added several more, this time extremely forceful words. Their only effect was to draw another brief-upward glance from the girl. Also, what seemed to be a shocked protest from Tellifer. The latter's voice did not carry so well as his friend's. Only a few phrases reached those .on the upper rim.

"Alcot, please!" was distinct enough, but some reference to a "Blessed Damozel" and the "seven stars in her hair" was largely lost. At best, it could hardly have been of a practical nature.

The big correspondent lost all  patience with his unreckonable friend.

"That—fool!" he choked. "Stay here, you fellows, I'm going after T.N.T.!"

And Waring in turn undertook the final stage of that long journey which so many others had followed, leading to the heart of this ancient pyramid. The five adventurers had the testimony of the pitiful fleet of derelicts at  the landing stage that the pyramid had a way of welcoming the coming, but neglecting to speed its departing guests. They had seen the frightful companion of this girl.

And yet when Waring, breathing wrath against his friend, reached the lower level, he did not hale Tellifer violently thence, as he had intended. Instead, those still above saw him come to an abrupt halt. After a moment, they saw him remove his hat. They watched him advance the rest of the way at a gait which somehow suggested embarrassment― even chastened meekness.

"Mr Waring is shaking hands with her now," commented John B. with mild interest.

"This is madness!" Otway's voice in turn was raised in a protesting shout "Waring! Oh, Waring! Don't forget that hundred-legger! Well, by George! You two stay here. I'll run down and make that pair of lunatics realize—"

The explorer's voice, unnaturally harsh with anxiety, died away down the inner stair.

"If they think," said Sigsbee indignantly, "that I'm going to be left out of every single interesting thing that comes along―"

The balance of his protest, also, was lost down the inner stair. John B. offered no reasons for his own descent. Being the last to go, he had no one to offer them to. But even a man of the widest experience may yield to the human instinct and "follow the crowd."

When the steward reached the center of attraction at the lower level, his sense of fitness kept him from thrusting in and claiming a handclasp of welcome, like that which had just been bestowed on his young employer. But he, too, respectfully removed his hat. He also neglected to urge the retreat which would really have been most wise.

The trouble was, as Sigsbee afterward complained, she was such a surprising sort of girl to meet in the heart of an ancient pyramid, dancing with an incredible length of centipede! Some bronzed Amazon with wild black eyes and snaky locks would have seemed not only suitable to the place, but far easier either to retreat from or hale away as a hostage.

This girl's eyes were large, a trifle mournful. Their color was a dusky shade of blue, the hue of a summer sky to eastward just at the prophetic moment before dawn. The men who had come down into her domain made no haste away. Moreover, the need for doing so seemed suddenly remote; almost trivial, in fact. The face framed in that red-gold glory of hair, crowned with stars, was impossible to associate with evil.

By the time Otway had reached the scene, however, and received his first startled knowledge that references to a "Blessed Damozel" were less out-of-place than they had seemed from above, Waring had recovered enough to laugh a little.

"Otway," he greeted, "priestess of the ancient sun-worship— centipede worship— some sort of weird religion― wants to make your acquaintance! You're the local linguist Know any scraps of pre-Adamite dialect likely to fit the occasion?"

The explorer, too, had accepted the welcoming hand and looked into the dawn-blue eyes. He drew a long breath —shook his head over Waring's question.

"I'll try her in Tupi and some of the dialects. But this is no Indian girl. Can't you see, Waring? She's pure Caucasian. Of either Anglo-Saxon or French blood, by those eyes and that hair. Perhaps a trace of Irish. The nose and—"

"For Heaven's sake! Stop discussing her in that outrageous way," urged young Sigsbee, who had fallen victim without a struggle. "I believe she understands every word you're saying."

There was a brief, embarrassed pause. Certainly the grave, sweet smile and the light in the dusky eyes had for an instant seemed very intelligent. But when Waring spoke to her again, asking if she spoke English, the girl made no reply nor sign that she understood him. Otway made a similar attempt, phrasing his question in Portuguese, Tupi—universal trade language of Brazil—and several Indian dialects. All to no avail. French, Italian and German, resorted to in desperation, all produced a negative result. The resources of the five seemed exhausted, when Tellifer added his quota in the shape of a few sounding phrases of ancient Greek.

At that the sweet, grave smile grew more pathetic. As if deprecating her inability to understand, the girl drew back a little. She made a graceful gesture with her slim, white arms— and fled lightly away around the central pillars.

"Greek!" snorted Waring. "Think the Rio Silencioso is the Hellespont, Tellifer? You've frightened her away!"

The esthete defended himself indignantly. "It was an invocation to Psyche! Your frightful German verbs were the—"

"Gentlemen, we are playing the fool with a vengeance! She's gone to call that monstrous hundred-legger up again."

"Beg pardon, Mr. Otway, but you're wrong." John B. had unassumingly moved after the lady. He called back his correction from a viewpoint commanding the western side: "She's only closing the hole where it went down—and now she's coming back."

With needless heat, Sigsbee flung out "You fellows make me tired! As if a girl like that would be capable of bringing harm to anyone, particularly to people she had just shaken hands with and— and—"

"Smiled upon," Waring finished for him heartlessly. "Otway's right, Sig. Playing the fool. And we aren't all boys. Queer place. Too almighty queer! Woman may be planning anything. We must compel her to—There she goes! Bring the whole tribe out on us, I'll bet!"

"Beg pardon, Mr. Waring." John B. was still keeping the subject of discussion well in view. She had disappeared, this time into one of several clear lanes in the banked-off shrubbery that led from the central space toward the Walls. "I don't think the young lady means to call anyone, sir. She's coming back again."

As he spoke, the girl reappeared. In her slim hands she bore a tray-like receptacle made of woven reeds and piled high with ripe mangoes, bananas and fine white guava-fruits.

Here was a situation in which the most unassuming of yacht-stewards could take part without thrusting himself unduly forward. When John B.'s young employer beat him to it by a yard, and himself gallantly took the heavy tray from their hostess, John B. looked almost actively resentful.

Sigsbee returned, triumphant. The tray was in his hands and the girl of dawn-blue eyes drifted light as a cloud beside him.

"If anyone dares suggest that she's trying to poison us with this fruit," he said forcefully, "that person will have me to deal with!"

"Cut it, Sig. Matter of common sense. Know nothing about the girl."

Waring broke off abruptly. A selection of several of the finer fruits was being extended to him in two delicate hands. For some reason, as the girl's glance met his across the offering, the big correspondent's freckled face colored deeply. He muttered something that sounded remarkably like, "Beg pardon!" and hastily accepted the offering.

" 'Her eyes,' " observed Tellifer, absently, " 'were deeper than the depth of waters stilled at even'."

"Cut it, Tellifer! Please. Girl's a mere child. Can't hurt a child by refusing a pretty, innocent little gift like this fruit.

"She means us no harm," Otway came to his rescue firmly. "As you say, Waring, the girl is a mere child. She has never willfully harmed anyone. God knows what her history has been— a white child brought up by some lingering, probably degenerate members of the race that built this place. But clearly she has been educated as a priestess or votary in their religion. The fresco below, you'll recall, represents a votive procession with women dancers, dressed like this one, playing upon Pan's pipes, with the forms of monster centi—"

"Don't!" Young Sigsbee's boyish voice sounded keenly distressed. He had set down the tray and was reverently receiving from the girl his share of the fruit. "What we saw from the upper rim was illusion—nightmare! This girl never danced with any such horrible monster."

"T.N.T.!"

The exclamation, shout rather, came from Waring. Under the glance of those dawn-blue eyes, the correspondent had been trying to devour a mango gracefully— an impossible feat— when he observed Tellifer strolling over toward the central pillars. That great, glowing, white mass which they supported was of a nature unexplained. Waring, at least, still retained enough discretion to be deeply suspicious of it.

"Come back here!" he called. "We don't know what that thing is, Tellifer. May be dangerous."

The esthete might have been stone-deaf for all the attention he gave. As he approached closer to the glowing. thing, the others saw his pace grow swifter—saw his arms rise in a strange,  almost worshipping gesture.

And next instant they saw him disappear, with the suddenness of a Harlequin vanishing through a trap in an old-fashioned pantomime.

A portion of the stone floor had tipped up under his weight, flinging him forward and down. They saw him slide helplessly into what seemed to be an open space of unknown depth which the eight pillars surrounded. A faint cry was wafted up from the treacherous pit. Then silence.

Flinging the dripping mango aside, Waring dashed across the floor. The other three were close at his heels. Unlike the-massive construction of all other parts of the pyramid, the eight pillars were slender, graceful shafts of sunset-hued stone. Rising some dozen feet above the pavement, they were placed at the angles of an eight-sided pit, or opening.

The exact shape of the shining mass these pillars supported was more difficult to determine. Its own light melted all its outlines in a soft glory of pale radiance. The light was not dazzling, however. Drawing near to the thing, it appeared more definite. The lower surface, slightly convex, rested at the edges on the tops of the eight pillars. Rising from the eight-sided circumference, many, smaller planes, triangular in form, curved upward to the general shape of a hemisphere. The light of the mass issued from within itself, like that of a great lamp, except that there seemed to he no central brightest point, or focus. Looking at any portion, the vision was somehow aware that the entire mass was lucidly transparent. And yet so transfused with radiance was it that the eye could pierce but a little way beyond the outer surface.

Even in that excited moment, Waring had an odd, fleeting conviction that somewhere, sometime he had looked upon an object similar to this.

" 'Ware the edge," he called to his companions— and himself approached it with seeming recklessness.

He was more cautious than he appeared. There were sixteen stones in the pavement around the pillars. Eight of them were pentagonal in shape, the points laid outward. These large slabs alternated with narrow oblong blocks, each based against one of the square pillars, radiating like wheel-spokes. The large slab that had thrown Tellifer might be the only treacherous one, or all the pentagonal blocks might be pivoted beneath. Should the spoke-like oblongs drop, however, any one of them would fling its victim against one of the pillars, instead of into the pit.

Waring did not stop to think this out. He merely instinctively assumed that the spoke-like stones were comparatively safe. Running to the inner end of one of thorn, he flung his arm about the pillar and bent forward, peering into the pit.

His companions had paused a little way behind him. They all knew what a really deep regard had existed between the big correspondent and the eccentric esthete. There was something pitifully tragic in seeing that great bulk of a man poised there, one arm stiffly outstretched, staring down into the abyss that had engulfed his friend.

They heard him draw a long, quivering sigh. When he spoke, his deep tones noticeably trembled:

"Like it down there! Darn you, T.N.T.! Next time I hear your death cry— stop and smoke a cigar before I charge around any! What's wrong? Lost your voice?"

Respect for tragedy appearing suddenly out of place, the other men followed Waring to the edge.

That is, Otway and John B., having noted the correspondent's path of approach, followed to the edge. Young Sigsbee, less observant, merely avoided the particular slab that had thrown Tellifer. He stepped out on the pentagon next adjoining and took one cautious stride.

The archaic engineers who balanced those slabs had known their business perfectly. The pointed outer ends were bevelled and solidly supported by the main pavement. But the least additional weight on the inner half was enough for the purpose intended. Sigsbee tried in vain to fling himself backward. Failing in that, he sat down and slid off a forty-five degree slope to join Tellifer.

As he disappeared, there came a little, distressed cry— the first sound of any kind which the dancer had uttered. The girl ran out along one of the oblong paths to cling round a pillar and stare down after Sigsbee.

The pit beneath the lucent mass was octagonal at the top, but, below, it curved to a round bowl-shape. Dead-black at the bottom, the upper planes shaded from brown to flame-orange. It was not over a dozen feet deep at the center.  Tellifer, it seemed, had been standing in the middle, arms folded, face thrown back, contemplating the under surface of the shining mass above him with a rapt, ecstatic interest which took no heed of either his predicament or his friend's irritated protest. He had attention for nothing save the lucent mass. When Sigsbee in turn arrived, knocking the esthete's feet from under him, Tellifer emerged from the struggling heap, more indignant at being disturbed, than over his badly kicked shins.

In a moment he had resumed his attitude of entranced contemplation.

Standing ruefully up beside him, Sigsbee angered several eager questions hurled by the others, with an acerbic: "How do I know? Ask him! I can't see anything up there but a lot of white light that makes my eye? ache. I say, you fellows, won't you throw me a line or something and haul me out? Tellifer can stay here, if he admires the view so much. I can't see anything in it."

He glanced down at his clothes disgustedly, inspected a pair of hands the palms of which were black as any negro's.

"The bottom of this hole," he complained, "is an inch deep in soft soot! What a mess!"

"Soot!" Adjusting his shell-rims, Otway viewed the bottom of the bowl with new interest. "What kind of soot!"

"W-what? Why, black soot, of course. Can't you see? It's all over me, and Tellifer, too—only I don't believe he

knows it." The younger man's wrath dissolved in a sudden giggle. "Niggers! Sweeps! Is my face as bad as his?"

"You don't understand," persisted Otway eagerly. "I mean, is it dry, powdery, like the residue of burned wood, or is it— er— greasy soot, as if fat had been burned there! What I'm getting at," he peered owlishly around his own pillar toward Waring's, "is that sacrifices may have been made in this pit. Either animal or human. Probably the latter. I've a notion to fall in there myself and see—"

"Well, you can if you want to, but help me out!" Sigsbee gazed in dawning horror at the black stuff coating his hands and clothing. "It is greasy! Help me up quick, so I can wash it off!"

"Mustn't be so finicky, Sig," chuckled Waring. "You aren't the burnt offering, anyway.' At least, not yet. Hello! What's wrong with our little friend!"

Face buried in her hands, the girl had sunk to a crouching position behind the pillar. Soft, short, gasping sounds came from her throat. Her whole slender body shook in the grip of some emotion.

"Why, she's crying!" said Otway.

"Or laughing." Sigsbee looked from his hands to Tellifer's face. "I don't blame her," he added loyally.

"Beg pardon, Mr. Sigsbee, but the little lady is crying." John B. had quietly left his own post and walked out on the dancer's oblong of safety. "I can see the tears shining between her fingers," he added gravely.

Four helpless males contemplated this phenomenon through a long quarter-minute of shocked silence. Suddenly Otway flung up his hands in a gesture so violent that it nearly hurled him headlong into the pit.

"Gentlemen," he cried desperately, "what is this place! Where are the people who must be about it somewhere! Who and what is that girl! Why is she crying! And what in the name of heaven is that great thing shining there above a sooty pit surrounded by man-traps!"

It was Tellifer who took up the almost hysterical challenge. He came to life with a long sigh, as of some great decision reached.

"Your last question," he said, "in view of the object's obvious nature, I assume to be purely oratorical. The others are of small importance. I have been deciding a real and momentous question—one. the answer to which is destined to be on the lips of men in every quarter of the terrestrial globe, and but for a day or a year of fame, but through centuries of wondering worship! And yet," Tellifer waved a sooty hand in a gesture of graceful "deprecation, "with all of what I may term my superior taste and intellect, I have been unable to improve on the work of that primitive but gifted connoisseur, Kuyambira-Petro.

"He has already christened this thing of marvelous loveliness. When he told us of this island he said that there presided here an anyi —a spirit—a strange power— and he called it Tala Quarahy! We could not understand him. The poor fellow's simple language had not words to describe it further. And yet, how perfectly those two words alone did describe it! Tala Quarahy! Sunfire! Why not let the name stand! Could any other be more adequate! 'Sunfire!' Name scintillant of light. Let it be christened 'Sunfire,' that even the fancy of men not blessed to behold it with material eyes, may in fancy capture some hint of a supernal glory. But perhaps," Tellifer glanced with sudden anxiety from face to face of his bewildered companions above him, "perhaps I take too much on myself, and you do not agree."

"T.N.T.," said Waring desperately, "for just one minute, talk sense. What is that thing up there— if you know!"

Tellifer's entranced vision strayed again to the huge bulk that seemed, in its radiant nimbus, to hover above rather than rest on the eight columns.

"I beg your pardon, Alcot," he said simply. "I really believed you knew. The phosphorescent light— the lucent transparency— the divine effulgence that envelopes it like a robe of splendid— Alcot, please! There is a lady present. If you must have it in elementary language, the thing is a diamond, of course!"

5: The Bronze Lever

GETTING the two entrapped ones out of the sooty pit proved fairly easy. The sides of the bowl were smooth, but a couple of leather belts, buckled together and lowered, enabled the men below to walk up the steep curve, catch helping hands and be hauled to the solid paths behind the pillars.

Four of the men then retired from the treacherous ground, and in an excited, disputing group stood off, walked about, and from various viewpoints and distances attempted settling, then and there, whether Tellifer was or was not right in his claim that the enormous glowing mass above the pit was a diamond.

It must he admitted that for quite a time, the girl was forgotten. Only John B. failed to join in that remarkable dispute.

"Half a ton at least!" protested Waring. "Preposterous! Heard of stones big as hen's eggs. But this! Roc's egg! Haroun al Raschid— Sindbad— Arabian Nights! You're dreaming, T.N.T.! Half a ton!"

"Oh, very well, Alcot. It is true that I have some knowledge of precious stones, and that in my humble opinion Sunfire is as much a diamond as the Koh-i-noor. But of course, if you assure me that it is not―"

"How many karat is half a ton!" queried Sigsbee. "I say, Tellifer, how about that young mountain for a classy stickpin!"

"I refuse to discuss the matter further!" Tellifer's voice quivered with outraged emotion. "If cither of you had the least capacity for reverent wonder, the faintest respect for the divinely beautiful, you would—you would hate anyone who spoke flippantly about Sunfire!"

"Gentlemen,"—Otway had dropped out of the discussion us he found its heat increasing— "why not leave deciding all this for a later time! Haven't we rather lost sight of our object in ascending the pyramid? What of those air-men whom we were so eager to rescue?"

Followed a somewhat shamefaced silence. Then the disputants, even Tellifer, agreed that the surprising line of entertainment afforded by the pyramid had indeed shifted their thoughts from a

"But we haven't seen anybody in need of rescue, so far," defended Sigsbee. "There is no one here but the girl."

"Beg pardon, sir." John B. had at last rejoined the group. In his brown eyes was a sad, mildly thwarted look, somewhat like that in the eyes of a dog left outside on the doorstep. "The young lady isn't here now, sir. After you and Mr. Tellifer climbed out of the pit, she seemed real pleased for a while and stopped crying. I tried talking to her, and I tried eating some of her fruit, but she didn't seem very much interested. And just now she went away. She went," John B. pointed down one of the open lanes, "out through that door and shut it behind her."

The steward paused. "And bolted it on the other side," he finished sadly.

The four eyed one another. There was mutual scorn in their glances.

"As a rescue party," opined Otway, "we are a fraud. As explorers of a perilous mystery, we are extremely unwise. As diplomats, we are a total loss. There we had a friend from the enemy's ranks who might have been willing to help free the prisoners—if there are any. She was intelligent. We might have communicated with her by signs. Now we have offended the girl by our neglect. If she returns at all, it may be in company with hostile forces."

"We've hurt her feelings!" Sigsbee mourned.

"All too darn queer!" reiterated Waring. "Rifle-fire— shouting— produced not a sign of life anywhere— except this girl."

"Of course, she may really be alone here." Removing the shell-rims, Otway polished them thoughtfully. He replaced them to stare again at the radiant mass of "Sunfire."

"Whether that thing is or is not a diamond," he continued, "one can understand Petro's characterizing it as an anyi, or spirit. To a mind of that type, the inexplicable is always supernatural. It is obvious, too, that—something or other is frequently burned in that pit. The girl wept because two of us had fallen in! I wonder what manner of horrible sights that poor child has witnessed in this place!"

Again Sigsbee bristled. "Nothing bad that she had any hand in!"

"Did I even hint such a thing!" The explorer's own amiable tone had grown suddenly tart; then he grinned. "Between the questions of 'Is it a diamond!' and 'Why is the girl!' we shall end by going for one another's throats. Suppose that instead of wasting time in surmise, we undertake a tour of inspection. We haven't half looked the place over. There may be other exits than the one our displeased hostess locked behind her. You are sure that it is locked, Blickensderfer!"

John B. nodded. "I heard her slide a bolt across. Besides, I tried it with my shoulder, sir."

"Very well. We'll hunt for other doorways."

Viewed from the central court, the eight walls of the great place were mostly invisible. Though the greatest of the palms were not over thirty feet tall, the radiance of Sunfire was not enough to illuminate the upper heights. The lower walls were hidden by a dense-luxuriance of vine-bound foliage.

Following one. of the paved lanes cut through this artificial jungle, they discovered that another path circumscribed the entire court, between walls and shrubbery. By the use of their pocket-flashes they learned also that these inner walls were carved with Titan figures like those of the fresco which banded the pyramid's outer base.

The walls were perpendicular. At this level, there must be a considerable space between their inner surface and the outer slope. That it was not a space entirely filled with solid masonry was proved by the fact that at the end of each clear lane was a doorway. These exits, like those of the outer buildings, bore the shape of a truncated triangle. But, unlike them, they were not open, but blocked by heavy, metal doors, made of bronze or some similar metal. The one through which the girl had passed was set in the south-eastern wall. It was indeed fastened.

In circling the boundary path they encountered two more similar doors, one centering the southern wall and one the south-western, both of which resisted all efforts to push them open. Reaching the western side, however, they found, not one, but eight doors.

These were not only of different construction from the others, but all stood wide open. They faced eight very narrow paths through the greenery, running parallel with one another to: the central court. The overarching shrubbery shut out Sunfire's light But the party's pocket flashes made short work of determining where these eight portals led.

The entire party were rather silent over it, at first. There was something ominous and unpleasant in the discovery.

"Eight prison cells!" said Otway at last. "Eight cells, with chains and manacles of bronze, all empty and all invitingly neat and ready for the next batch of captives. I don't know how you fellows feel about it, but it strikes me we needn't have hurried up here. Our unlucky friends of the air-route are, I fear, beyond need of rescue."

Waring stood in the doorway of one of the empty cells. Again he flashed his light about. It was square, six feet by six at the base, in inner form bearing the shape of a truncated pyramid—save in one particular. The rear wall was missing. On that side the cell was open. A black shaft descended there. That its depth was the depth of the pyramid itself was proved when John B. tossed over the remains of a guava he had been eating. The fruit splashed faintly in water far, far below.

"For the prisoner. Choice between suicide and sacrifice," hazarded the correspondent. "Cheerful place, every way. These leg cuffs have been in recent use, too—not much doubt of that." The manacles were attached to a heavy chain of the bronze-like metal that in turn was linked to a great metal ring set in the floor. The links were bright in places, as if from being dragged about the floor by impatient feet.

"Suicide!" repeated Otway. "My dear fellow, how could a man fastened up in those things leap into the shaft behind!"

"One on me. Captive of these elephant-chains would certainly do no leaping. These triangular openings in the doors--"

"To admit light, perhaps. More likely to pass in food to the prisoner. But where are the jailers! Why are we allowed to come up, let  off our guns at the sacred temple pet, be amiably entertained by the— priestess, or whatever she is, climb in and out of the sacrificial pit, and generally make ourselves at home, without the least attempt at interference."

"Came on an off night," Waring surmised. "Nobody home but Fido and little Susan."

"Alcot!" Again the esthete's tones sounded deeply injured. "Can your flippancy spare nothing of the lovely mystery—"

But here Waring exploded in a shout, of mirth that drowned the protest and echoed irreverently from the ancient carven walls.

"Lovely mystery is right, Tellifer! Lovely idiots, too! Stand about and talk. Stairway fifty yards off. Hole of that hell-beast between stairway and us. Somebody sneak in and let Fido loose again—hm! We can't shoot him. Proved that. Might as well try to hit a radio message, en route."'

"But the noise and the flash drove him off," reminded Otway. "Remember, the courage of the invertebrate animals is of a nature entirely different from that of even the reptilia. Friend 'Fido,' as you call him, is after all only an overgrown bug—though I shatter my reputation as a naturalist in misclassifying the chilopoda as bugs."

"Oh, can him in the specimen jar later, Professor. Come on around the northern side. Haven't looked that over yet."

"Beg pardon, sir." John B. had strayed on, a little beyond the last of the eight cells. He was examining something set against the wall there.

"I wonder what this is meant for! It

feels like some sort of a handle—or lever."

His companions joined him. The steward's discovery was a heavy, straight bar of metal set upright, its lower end vanishing through an open groove in the pavement, standing about the height of a man's shoulder above it.

"It's a switch," asserted Waring gravely. "Electric light switch. Throw it over—bing! Out will go T.N.T.'s 'diamond'!"

Battle glinted again in Tellifer's moody eyes.

"It is an upright lever," said he, "intended to move something. Though I make no pretensions to the practical attitude of some others here, I can do better than stand idly ridiculing my friends when there is a simple problem to be solved in an easy and direct manner."

"TNT! I apologize! Don't!"

But Tellifer had already grasped the upright bar. He seized it near the top and flung his weight against it. The bar moved, swinging across the groove and at the same time turning in an arc. Where it had been upright, it now slanted at a sharp angle.

"Oh, Lawdy! he's done it! What'll happen now!"

The correspondent's eyes, and those of the others also, roved anxiously about what could be seen of the walls and central court. But their concern over Tellifer's rash act appeared-needless. So far as could be seen or heard; throwing over the lever had produced no result.

Tellifer alone was really disappointed.

"Old, ugly, worn-out mechanism!" he muttered. And released the lever.

As if in vengeance for Tellifer's slighting remark, the lever flew back to the upright position with a speed and violence which flung the experimenter sprawling. The reversal was accompanied by a dull, heavy crash that shook the very floor beneath their feet.

"That was out in the central court!" shouted Sigsbee. "He's wrecked his 'diamond,' I'll bet!"

"Nonsense! The light is still there."

Waring started along the nearest lane. Then turned back and went to his friend, who had not risen.

"Hurt?" he demanded.

"Only my arm and a few ribs broken and a shoulder out of joint, thank you. But that frightful crashing noise! Alcot, don't tell me that' I have destroyed— destroyed Sunfire!"

"No, no. Your diamond's shining away to beat a Tiffany show-window."

"Hey, there, Waring! Throw that lever again, Will you?"

Otway's voice hailed from the central court, whither he and Sigsbee and the steward had gone without waiting for the other two. As Tellifer's injuries were not keeping him from getting to his feet, the correspondent turned his attention to the fever.

The bar went over without heavy pressure. After a moment Otway's voice was heard again:

"All right. But let her come up easy!"

Once more Waring complied. He found that by slacking the pressure gradually the bar returned to the upright position without violence. This time no crash occurred at the end. Finding that Tellifer had deserted him, Waring left the switch and followed.

He found the other four all draped around Sunfire's supporting columns, staring down into the pit.

"He cracked the bowl," Otway greeted, "and showed us how the sacrificial remains are disposed of. That lever works the dump!"

Waring had selected his oblong safety-path and joined the observers. . He saw that one side of the great stone bowl beneath Sunfire now showed a thin, jagged crevice running from upper edge almost to the bottom.

"Don't understand," frowned Waring.

"I'll work it for you, sir."

The obliging John B. fled to take his turn at the bronze bar. A minute later, Waring saw the whole massive, bowl-shaped pit beneath him shudder, stir, and begin to tip slowly sideways. It continued to tip. revolving as upon an invisible axis. In a few seconds, instead of gazing down into a soot-blackened bowl, he was staring up at a looming hemisphere of flame-orange stone that towered nearly to Sunfire's lower surface, twice the height of a tall man above him.

"Let her down easy, Blickensderfer!" called Otway again. "Afraid of the jolt," he added in explanation. "The remarkable thing is that when Tellifer allowed it to swing back full weight that first time, it didn't smash the surrounding pavement and bring these pillars down. But it merely cracked itself a bit"

Waring gasped. "D'you mean— Did I swing all those tons of rock around with one easy little push on that bar?"

"Seeing is believing," asserted Otway, as the revolving mass turned easily back into place, and they once more looked into a hollow, sooty bowl.

"Those ancient engineers knew a lot about leverage. How were the enormous stones of this pyramid brought across the lake and lifted into their places? This bowl is somehow mounted at the sides like a smelting pot on bars that pass beneath the pavement. That pavement, by the way," and the explorer cast an eager eye across the space between the pit and the western wall, "will have to come up. Uncovering the mechanism which operates this device may give some wonderful pointers to our modern engineers."

"But what's it for?" pleaded Waring.

"Why, you saw the black depths under the bowl. Likely, there is some superstitious prejudice against touching the charred remains of victims burned here. By throwing over the lever, the pit empties itself into the depths below. As I told you before— that lever works the dump."

"What— sacrilege!" Tellifer murmured.

"Well, of course, from our viewpoint it's not a very respectful way to treat human remains. But if you'll think of the cannibalistic religious rites of many primitive peoples, this one doesn't seem so shocking."

"You misunderstood me." Tellifer cast a glance of acute distress toward the gleaming mass above the pit. "I meant the dreadful sacrilege of insulting a miracle of loveliness like that, with the agony and ugly after-sights of human sacrifice!"

"That's a viewpoint, too," grinned Otway.

"And we're still talking! Human sacrifices! Here we stand— candidates— fairly begging for it. Angered priestess gone after barbaric hordes. Shoot us down from above. Regular death-trap. We lake precautions? Not us! We'd rather talk!"

"Beg pardon, Mr. Waring, but the little lady has come back, and she hasn't brought any barbaric hordes."

John B. had returned and his voice sounded mildly reproachful. "She seems to me to be acting real considerate and pleasant. I judge she noticed the soot on Mr. Sigsbee and Mr. Tellifer, and she's gone and taken the trouble to bring some water and towels so they can wash it off!"

6: Assai Wine

THE STEWARD'S latest announcement proved correct, though not quite complete. While the guests had been entertaining themselves by inspecting the premises, the hostess must have quietly gone and returned, not once, but several times.

They found her standing beside an array of things which her slender strength could not possibly have availed to transport in a single trip.

There was a large, painted clay water jar. Neatly folded across its top lay a little heap of what might have been unbleached linen, though on examination the fabric proved to be woven of a soft, yellowish fiber, probably derived from one of the many useful species of palms.

Near this jar stood another smaller vessel, of the same general appearance, but surrounded by a half-dozen handleless bowls or cups carved out of smooth, yellow wood, highly polished. And still beside these things was another offering. Waring removed his hat again and ran his fingers through his hair.

"What's the big ideal" he demanded at large. "Water and towels —fine. Sig and TNT sure need 'em. Festive bowls. May be finger-bowls, but I doubt it. Well and good. Though I, for one, draw the line at cocktails where I don't know my bootlegger. But why all the furriers' display? Does she want us to assume the native costume?"

Otway raised the largest of five black jaguar hides which were ranged in a neat row on the pavement.

"Here's yours, Waring," he chuckled. "The beast that grew this was a lord among his kind. You see, it fastens over the shoulders with these gold clasps. And there's a chain girdle. Suppose you retire to one of those eight convenient dressing-rooms and change? Then if the rest of us like the effect—"

"Set the example yourself! I'm no cave-man. But what's her idea?"

"She is trying to drive it through our thick skulls that she means only kindness toward us!" This from Sigsbee, who, having reverently allowed his hostess to pour water over his hands was now, with equal reverence, accepting a fiber napkin to dry them.

As if handling the heavy water jar had at last wearied her, the girl thereupon surrendered it to the steward. Tellifer, with a vengeful glare at his luckier predecessor, proceeded to his ablutions.

"My experience," said Otway, "has been that among strange peoples it is always well to accept any friendly acts that are offered. No matter what one's private misgivings may be, no trace of them should show in one's manner. By that simple rule I have kept my life and liberty in many situations where others had been less fortunate. Despite our suspicions, we have shown not a trace of hostility toward this girl. We have offered no violence nor rudeness. Who knows? If we continue on our good behavior we may find ourselves accepted as friends, not only by the girl but all her foster-people. I've proved it to work out that way more than once."

"She's a mighty nice girl." Waring was weakly accepting a polished yellow cup. "But d'you think we should risk drinking this— purple stuff?"

The explorer sipped testingly at the liquor which his hostess had gracefully poured from the wine jar. "It is only assai wine," he announced. "No harm  in it— unless one indulges too freely. See— she is pouring herself a cup! We had best drink, I believe, and then indicate that we would like to meet her people."

"Sensible girl, too," approved Waring. "Cave-man costumes. Nice little gift. But no effort to force 'em on us. Well-bred kid. Out-of-place here, hm?"

"Oh, decidedly," the explorer agreed. "I shall take her away with me when we go."

Otway was a man of morally spotless reputation. As leader of the expedition, he had every right to use the first personal pronoun in. announcing his intent to rescue this white girl. Yet the statement seemed displeasing to every one of the explorer's four companions. The glances of all turned upon him with sudden hostility. Sigsbee was heard to mutter something that sounded like "Infernal cheek!"

But Otway gave their opinion no heed. Like the rest, he had drained his cup of purple wine. Innocent though he had claimed the vintage to be, it had deepened the color of his sun-burned face with amazing quickness. The cool gray eyes behind the shell-rims had grown bright and strangely eager. He swayed slightly. He took an unsteady step toward the girl, who had thus far barely stained her lips with the purple liquor.

"Sure!" he added thickly, "Queer I didn't realize that sooner. Girl I've been— waiting for— always! Never got married, just that reason. Looking for this one. Take her away now!"

"You will not!"

Waring's mighty hand closed viselike on the naturalist's shoulder, wrenching him backward.

"Tha's right, Alcot," Tellifer approved. "He couldn't half 'preciate loveliness like hers. Tha's for me! I 'preciate such things. Lovely, girl― lovely diamond— lovely place—lovely 'dventure—"

As if in adoration of the prevailing loveliness of everything, Tellifer sank to his knees, and subsided gently with his head on one of the jaguar hides. Waring discovered that he was not restraining Otway, but supporting his sagging weight. He released it, stared stupidly as the explorer's form dropped limply to the floor.

Something was very much wrong.  Waring knuckled his eyes savagely. They cleared for an instant. There stood the girl, Her dawn-blue eyes were looking straight into his. There were great tears shining in them! Her whole attitude expressed mournful, drooping dejection. The golden-yellow cup had fallen from her hand. Across the pavement a purple pool spread and crept toward the little bare white feet.

7: The Hag

WARING knew that he, too, had fallen to the floor, and that he could not rise.

Over him was bending— a face. Above it a circlet of star-white gems gleamed with a ghostly luster, The form beneath was draped in the spotted hide of a jaguar, fastened at the shoulders with fine golden chains.

But that face! Old, seamed, haggard, framed in wild locks of ragged, straying gray hair, with terrible eyes whose dark light had feasted through unnumbered years upon vicious cruelty, with toothless mouth distended in awful laughter— a hag's face, the face of a very night-hag—and up beside it rose a wrinkled, claw-like hand, and hovered above his throat!

The vision passed. Merciful oblivion ensued.

8: "Tata Quahary"

AS HE had been last to succumb under the terrific potency of that "harmless assai wine," so the correspondent was first to recover his normal senses.

After a few minutes of fogginess, he grasped the main facts of the situation well enough.

In a way, they scarcely even surprised him. Now that the thing was done, he saw with dreary dearness that this had been a foregone conclusion from the instant when five fools, ignoring all circumstantial evidence, had placed their trust in a pair of dawn-blue eyes.

Just at first he had no way of being sure that he was not the sole fool who had survived. But as the others, one by one, awakened and replied to the correspondent's sardonic inquiries, he learned that their number was still complete. Their voices, however, reached him with a muffled, hollow sound. They were accompanied by a clanking of heavy bronze chains, appropriately dismal.

Through the triangular opening in his cell door, Waring could see along a narrow lane in the greenery to the central court. The place was no longer illuminated by the ghostly radiance of Sunfire. It was daytime—and it was rainy weather. Through the open top of the pyramid the rain sluiced down in sheets and torrents, thundering on the palm-fronds, making of that small portion of Sunfire which was visible, a spectral mound of rushing water-surface. It also sent little exploring cold trickles beneath the closed doors of five prison cells— no longer empty.

"Lovely place!" groaned Waring "Oh, lovely! Friends and follow-mourners, it wasn't a new wine. It was the oldest of old stuff. K.O. drops. And we swallowed it! What's that? No, Otway. No more your fault than anyone's. I fell— you fell—we fell. The lot of us needed a keeper. From all signs, we've probably acquired one. It won't be little blue-eyed Susan, though. Her work's done. Such a well-bred kid, too! Wouldn't force native costume on anyone. Oh, no! Say, am I the only cave-man? Or is it unanimous?"

Report drifted down the line that reversion to barbaric fashions had not been forced on the correspondent alone. Not a stitch of civilized clothing, not a weapon, not a single possession with which they had entered the pyramid, had been left to any of the five. In exchange for those things, they had received each a neat stone cell, a handsome black jaguar hide, gold-trimmed, a chain adequate, as Waring had said, to restrain an elephant, —and a hope for continued life so slight as to be practically negligible.

After a time Waring informed the others of that last fading glimpse he had got of a frightful face bending over him. It was agreed that he had been privileged to look upon one of the 'tribe" who inhabited the pyramid. No one. however, was able to explain why this "tribe" had allowed all those boats to rot, some of them through years, undisturbed at the landing state. Or why all save the girl were so extremely shy about showing themselves.

The noise of the rain ceased at last. The outer court brightened with sunshine. For any sounds or signs of life about them, the five might have been chained alone in an empty pyramid at the heart of an empty land. The utter strangeness of what had occurred combined with memory of their own folly to depress them. Those cells, too, despite the increasing heat outside, were decidedly chilly. Damp, cold draughts blew up from the open shafts at the back.. Much rainwater had crept in beneath the doors.

The jaguar-hides were warm as far as they went, but from the prisoners' civilized viewpoint, that wasn't half far enough. Bare feet shifted miserably on cold stone. An occasional sneeze broke the monotony. Except for fruit, none of the party had eaten anything since noon of the previous day. The drugged liquor, too, had left an aftermath of outrageous thirst. Yet neither food nor water had been given to them.

The noon hour arrived, as they could tell by diminished shadows and fiercely down beating glare. Still, no attention had come their way.

Tellifer's cell commanded the best view of the main court. As the sun had approached the zenith, the esthete's dampened enthusiasm had to some degree revived. If the lucent mass of Sunfire had been beautiful at night, beneath the noon sun it became a living glory that gave Petro's name for it, Tata Quarahy, Fire of the Sun, new meaning. Tellifer exhausted his vocabulary in trying to do its rainbow splendors justice. But when he finally lapsed into silent adoration the other four made no effort to draw him out of it. Their more practical natures had rather lost interest in Sunfire. Diamond or not, it seemed that the sooty pit beneath it was likely to be of more concern to them.

The sun-rays were now nearly vertical. The central court grew to be a mere dazzle of multicolored refraction. Waves of heat as from a furnace beat through the openings in the cell-doors. With them drifted, wisps of white vapor.

Presently, a low hissing sound was heard. The seething noise grew louder. In the court, great clouds of white steam were rising, veiling the brightness of Sunfire. The pit beneath it seethed and bubbled like a monstrous cauldron.

Practical-minded or not, it was Tellifer who solved the simple dynamics of what was going on.

"I was afraid of this," he said. " I was afraid last night, when I first saw the atrocious manner in which that miracle of beauty has been mutilated. Practically sawn in half, for it is an octahedral stone and must originally have possessed nearly twice its present mass.. But the lower part had been ruthlessly cleaved way, and the under surface ground and polished. The faceting extends only part way up the sides. The top is a polished cabochon. The scoundrels!" Tellifer's voice shook with emotion. "The soulless vandals! Whoever the fiends were, they cut the most marvelous jewel earth ever produced to suit a vilely utilitarian purpose! Sunfire is a, great lens— a burning-glass. It is boiling the collected rainwater out of the pit now. When the pit is dry, the stone of its bowl will rise to red heat— White heat—who knows what temperature under that infernal sun? And that means—that means—"

"Death for any living thing in the pit." declared Otway quietly. "With a victim in the pit, sacrifice to the deity must occur at high noon on any day when the sky is free from clouds. But I say—" the explorer's voice was suddenly distressed—"don't take it that way, man! Why, there is always a chance so long as one has breath in one's body. Brace up!"

"Oh, you don't understand! Let me be!" There had been a heavy clanking sound in Tellifer's cell. A thud as of a despairing form cast down. "You don't understand!" repeated the esthete sobbingly. "There's no chance I Or hardly one in a million. And it isn't being killed in that pit that's bothering me. It's— Oh, never mind, I tell you! I don't want to talk about it. The thing is too shameful— too horrible! Let me be!"

As all further questioning was met with stony silence from the central cell, his companions did "let him be," at last.

That hysterical outburst from one of their number had not tended to brighten the general mood. It seemed to them, also, that if Tellifer really foresaw any more shameful and horrible fate than being broiled alive under a burning lens, he might share his knowledge and at least let them be equally prepared for it.

The day wore wearily by, measured only by lengthening shadows and lessening glare. The sudden night fell. There, on the eight rosy pillars, the iridescent splendor of Sunfire changed slowly to its ghostly glory of the dark hours.

Meantime, in the cells, four of the prisoners had readied that stage of physical and mental misery where, being the sort they were, they spoke to each other frequently and always in jest. The jokes exchanged were of a rather feeble order, it is true. The voices that uttered them were painfully hoarse and thickened. Bui the applause for each effort, was resolutely cordial. Only Tellifer preserved his stony silence.

It was an hour past sunset. The stillness had remained unbroken since their early awakening, Death by mere chill and privation was beginning to seem a very possible alternative to the sacrificial fate they had expected, when the long waiting at last ended and their keeper came to them.

9: An Unwelcome Invitation

FOR COMFORT, THERE was little choice between sitting, lying down or standing on the cold damp stones of their cramped quarters.

The heavy bronze shackles rasped the skin from the ankles in any position, and aching bones drove them to a continual shifting. But it so happened that Sigsbee was the only man on his feet when the keeper arrived.

There had been no warning sound of approach. The first notice the four other captives received was young Sigsbee's voice, breathing a husky word that brought them all clanking up in haste to their windows.

Into that word single Sigsbee had poured a reproach for trust betrayed, a shocked amazement that the betrayer should shamelessly reappear, a wholly youthful satisfaction in being able to address that expressive "You!" to the right person, which told them instantly that their "Blessed Damozel" of yestere'en was again with them.

The triangular openings were not large enough to permit the passage of a prisoner's head. Much as they would have liked to crane their necks for a first-hand view, they must rely on Sigsbee's report. A volley of harsh questions exploded down the line. Sigsbee's voice rose against them.

"Stop that, you fellows! You're frightening her. There― I told you. She's crying again. Now she'll go away. No, it's all right. She's passing my things through the window.  Brave little girl! Now listen fellows, I don't care what you think, this girl is not responsible for what happened."

"Oh, Lawdy," groaned the deepest of the harsh voices. "He's hooked again! Wake up, Sig! With her own fair hands she poured the K.O. drops. She'll never weep her way into my heart again. Is anyone with her?"

"No, she's alone. Listen, Waring, she's coming your way. If you aren't decently civil to her, I give you fair warning I'll―"

"You'll what? Butt your head against the wall? Oh, there you are, Susan!"

The hardest voice had lowered to a base growl, suggestive of the jaguar which had once worn Waring's costume. Into his range of vision, staggering beneath the weight of a heavy reed basket, had come their fair betrayer.

There was justification for almost any degree of bitterness. Young Sigsbee's reversal of judgment appeared mere weakness. And yet, either because he feared to anger or frighten away the source of supplies, or for some other reason, the correspondent's righteous wrath received no further expression just then. He was heard to mutter something about "more damn mangos," a less depreciative, "Bananas― better than nothing!" and a final, "Water at last, thank God!"― and then the slender food-bringer was dragging her basket along to the next cell.

At close range the girl could be seen only as she reached each captive's door. A little later, however, her task finished, the empty basket deserted, she drifted out into the general range of vision.

At the opening of that lane, which faced Tellifer's person, she paused. Silhouetted against the pale glow beyond, they saw her stand an instant, silent as always, by mere attitude suggesting a boundless, pitiful dejection. Then she moved away.

Three minutes more, and Tellifer emerged from the unnatural speechlessness he had preserved all afternoon.

"She is gazing into the pit," he informed solemnly. "Now she has sunk to her knees beside one of the columns. She is weeping again, and she has much to mourn for! The human fiends whose servant she is are the inheritors of a truly monstrous crime!"

"Let her weep!" The immediate presence removed, Waring's vindictiveness had revived. "Decoy. That's all Susan is. And we aren't the first. Not by a damn sight! Those boats― the airplane. Nothing but fruit and water for starving men. Monstrous crimes is right, T.N.T.!"

The esthete sighed deeply. "The crimes to which you refer are trivial beside the far more shocking one which I am certain has been accomplished in this place. But no more of it. The subject is too dreadful. I am not a practical man, but it has struck none of you as strange that except for the one old woman whom Waring caught  a glimpse of, we have as yet seen only the girl?"

"Awake at last, eh? Been discussing nothing else all day."

"Is that true, Alcot? I was inattentive, perhaps. My mind was upon― But let me forget that. During the discussion was an probable explanation reached?"

"No, Mr Tellifer," Otway informed him gravely. "No probably explanation was reached. It is my own conviction, indeed, that no probably explanation ever will be reached. I don't say that none of us will survive to learn the true facts. Life and hope, remember; life and hope! But when those facts are ascertained, they will not be probably. Possible, perhaps, but decidedly― not― probable. The situation simply does not admit of it. Oh, Waring, how about that story?"

"Sunday Supplement stuff," disparaged the correspondent. "No magazine would dare touch it. Wonder how long we'll be left here? Safe for tonight, anyway. Fashionable beggars. All ceremonies at high noon! What news of Susan? Still weeping?"

His last question, addressed to Tellifer, was answered from another source. Out in the central court a sound had begun. As when, ascending the outer stairway, that same sound had first reached their ears, every one of the five posed through a long minute, breathless and listening.

Their reason for attention, however, had changed. Then it had been wonder and a devouring curiosity as to the source of that quaint, monotonous, double-fluted melody. Now they had no curiosity about it.  They knew exactly what instrument was being played, who was playing it, and for what astonishing purpose. And every man of them was suddenly thankful that his cell door possessed a thick, serviceable, bronze door, tightly closed, and with only one small window.

"Have to hand it to Susan," gasped Waring at last. "Fido's coming out. I can see him. She afraid? Not little blue-eyes! Oh, Lawdy, Lawdy. How much more of him is there?"

"The― ah― anterior mile of Fido has strayed over to where I also can enjoy the view," Otway asserted. "They took away my shell-rims, but I can make out that the cephalite, or head-shield, is quite well-developed. About the size of a flour barrel I should say. And the toxicognaths, or poison fangs― oh, ye gods! No, it's all right. For an instant I believed Fido was coming down my alley to call. But it was merely a thousand-legged pirouette. This dancing rite probably takes place every evening and is entirely separate from the noonday sacrifice. It is likely, also, that we are being saved up, as it were, for some special day or occasion. There being no one present tonight save the priestess, we may have no immediate fears."

"Speak for yourself!" Waring's heavy voice broke on the words. "She's bringing it― she's bringing that thing down my alley!"

The monotonous melody of the Pan's pipes had indeed approached much nearer. A moment more, and not only Waring, but all the prisoners, were given evidence that the pair of dancers were not content to exercise their art at a distance from their audience.

Between the cells and the artificial jungle was a space perhaps ten feet broad. For Scolopendra Horribilis to have elaborated his curious, coiling patterns on that cramped stage would have been impossible. Like a true artists, he did not even attempt it. When the girl swayed gracefully into view, turned to the narrow space and passed lightly along it, still piping,  the sacred monster― or a portion of him― merely followed.

As she crossed each successive band of light at the clear lanes, those in the cells caught glimpses of her awful attendant.

The head, with enormous, blind-looking yellow eyes, gaping mandibles and huge poison-fangs, hovered close above the starry circlet of gems in the girls red-gold hair. The talons of the plated length below seemed on the point of closing around her slender shoulders. Yet the girl cast not so much as a glance upward or back. In turning at the end, she took no care to avoid colliding with the frightful Death that followed.

Death for its part, however, respectfully drew aside, made a talon-fringed running loop of itself, and continued to follow. Through alternate light and shadow the girl passed back until she again reached the correspondent's prison cell.

The other four could no longer see her. In returning she had moved close to the cell-rank. There followed a clang, as of a heavy bolt thrown back. A hoarse, wordless ejaculation. Another clang, suggesting metal tossed down on a stone floor. Then the girl had stepped into view again, still playing but holding the pipes to her lips with one hand. With the other she was seen to beckon gracefully.

"Boys," came the correspondent's desperate voice, "good-bye! That infernal little Jezebel! She has opened my door! She has given me the key to these damn shackles! She's inviting me to come out! By God, I won't go out! There's that shaft behind the cell. I'll jump! Wait till I get these irons off."

A rasping sound, a crude key turning in a clumsy lock, a rattle of chains hastily discarded.

"Waring!" From the next cell Otway spoke with quiet, restraining force. Don't jump! Do whatever she wishes. The sacrifice is to the sun, remember. If she wanted that monster to destroy us tonight, why should she have bothered to bring us food? This is part of some preliminary ceremony. And your limbs will be free. Do whatever she wishes and watch your chance. It may be the chance that saves us all."

After quite a long moment, the correspondent replied. "Right, Otway. Playing the cur. Glad you spoke. I'll― I'll go out. Here, you! Can't you see I'm coming? Start that music again!"

The girl, as if weary of waiting, had lowered the pipes from her lips. The instant she did so, the swaying monster behind had ceased to sway. With an ominous, dry clashing of its avid mandibles, its head shot higher. It descended again in a curving loop that cleared the girl's head, and, too obviously, had the open cell for its object.

Seeing the prisoner obedient, however, the girl resumed her music. Immediately the menacing head swayed back to its former position.

The freed correspondent faced the pair grimly. That slender slip of a girl, whom he could have easily lifted with one hand, was for the time his master. To overcome or interfere meant death. To slay big, powerful Alcot Waring, she had only to cease the restraining music of her little golden pipes.

The dawn blue eyes were deep, sweetly mournful as ever. But even Sigsbee failed to suggest that Waring should place faith in them and act in any way save exactly as she might direct.

Her next order was given as the first had been. Once delicate hand waved in a graceful gesture.

"You're elected, Otway," informed the correspondent. "Wants me to open your door. Shall I do it? Up to you?"

The explorer affirmed his own unshaken nerve by instant consent. The same key that had released Waring having freed Otway from the bronze shackles, he stepped out beside the other.

"You know," he observed quietly, "they took my shell-rims, and everything nearer than three yards in just a blue. I hope I shan't tread on Fido!"

"Stand still!" Waring advised between his teeth. "That damned thing is all over the place. What's she after now? Oh, I see. Sig, your divinity calls you!"

"I believe she intends releasing us all," opined the explorer, still resolutely cheerful. "In that case, we'll surely get a chance among the five of us."

"Oh sure! Stiff upper lip and carry on."

To appreciate, however, the real deadliness of their peril was just then far easier than to foresee in what form that hoped-for chance was likely to come.

For one thing, "Fido's" mentality was proving to be as abnormal as his physical proportions. They had at first supposed that the monster merely answered the music as snakes writhe to their charmer's pipes. But is behaviour before the cell-rank augured both training and intelligence. It was waiting― and what it was waiting upon was the will of its mistress.

As for the thing's destructive capacity, that was obviously terrific. In lone lightning sweep it might have involved not five but a dozen men among taloned coils beside which those of a python would have been easily escapable. The huge poison-fangs with which the first segment of its body was equipped, seemed really superfluous.

John B. was the last captive to be released. The number of her victims was complete. The girl gestured toward one of the open lanes.

With their extraordinary jailors close at heel, the five moved meekly toward the outer court.

10: The Dance

THE proceedings of the next half-hour formed a study in grotesquerie exceeding anything which even the captives' experience of pyramidal customs had led them to look for.

They had, it appeared, been haled forth to take part in the same ceremonial dance which their coming had interrupted the previous evening.

After bringing them out, indeed, the girl herself practically ignored them. As her light feet carried her about the sacred circle, she seemed wholly absorbed in an ecstasy of music and rhythmic motion. But the ghastly enforcer of her will gave the captives every attention.

The thing was clearly no novice in its part. Its age, of course, was unguessable. But one could conceive that years― decades― centuries perhaps, had seen the slow growth and training of that monstrous votary. Nocturnal by nature, the vast, dull yellow eyes might have been blind as they appeared. If so, the sense of sight was replaced by those other, more mysterious, senses which creatures of its species inherit. The whiplike antennae were continually alert. The thing's intelligence, too, seemed not confined to the brain, as invertebrate animals, but instinct in every part of its active length.

The girl dancer need make no effort to avoid contact with the coils. They avoided her. Her foot could not move quickly enough to tread upon them. But of the unwilling male participants in the rite, the monster was less considerate.

A mere scratch from one of those myriad dagger-pointed talons would have amounted to a severe wound, quite aside from the infection they probably carried. The menace of them was used with amazing skill to force the prisoners around the appointed circle.

The stairway proved to be a blessed goal unreachable. At the slightest move in that direction, up would rise a barrier of clawing segments. With bare feet and limbs, to have dared overleaping or standing before it would have been madness, even had not the worser threat of the head and poison fangs hovered close above them.

Of the five, Otway's troubles were the most dismaying. In the absence of his glasses, his eyes were of little use to him at close range. Again and again, only the guiding hands of a fellow-initiate saved him from calamity. Had the explorer been alone he could not have survived even one round of that horrible, ludicrous, altogether abominable dance.

Yet the indomitable spirit of Otway was first to recognize the ridiculous side of the affair. He and Waring presently joined in a running fire of comment on its absurdities. Tellifer, solemn as ever, moved through the literal― and talon-fringed― "mazes of the dance", with an effort at classic dignity which won their high commendation. John B.'s quiet, efficient side-stepping went not unnoted. But it remained for Sigsbee to win the jesters' really whole-hearted approval.

It had dawned on them that the expedition's youngest member was not merely avoiding trouble, like the rest of them. He was modelling his steps on those of their graceful leader, and doing very well at it indeed. Sigsbee was an agile, athletic youth. The "cave-man costume" emphasized a certain grace of body and regularity of feature. Very soon, having perfected the step to suit his ambition, Sigsbee coolly deserted his fellow-captives. Taking advantage of every convenient change in the monster's running coils, he joined the girl.

"There are a lot of these steps," he called back, "that my sister at home taught me. Crazy about this― nature-dancing stuff. Oh, fine! That's a regular― fox-trot― step. Say, you fellows! I've see this girl― before, somewhere! Been trying― to remember where― ever since last night. Or else she― reminds me of someone."

"She reminded me"― Tellifer avoided a section of talons by one second's time and an undignified bound― "she reminded me," he repeated more forcibly, "of a girl in a poem. But not any more. Blessed Damozel!" Another leap and increased bitterness. "Where are her three lilies? Where is her― gold bar of heaven? Where― her sense of fitness? I could have pardoned the― jaguar-hide― if she hadn't forced one on me. I could have forgiven the― undignified dancing― if she hadn't made me join in it. Now― I disown the comparison. All she has is― the stars in her hair and the ―eyes― and they are basely deceptive. She is not a Blesses Damozel! She's a―"

He hesitated for a fresh comparison. When found, it would probably have been inoffensive enough. Tellifer's classic fancy rarely sought force in vulgarity. But young Sigsbee had again been indulging at close range in glimpses of the eyes Tellifer slandered. He came to an abrupt halt, fists clenched.

"Not another word, there!" he called sharply.

The girl was within a yard of him. As if in appreciation of her gallant defender, she swayed still nearer, stretched one hand and touched Sigsbee lightly on the shoulder. At the same time she lowered the pipes from her lips. She pointed with them toward one of the five men.

There followed a swift yellow flash― a sharp, broken-off cry.

Again the pipes were set to the girl's lips. Up swayed the colossal yellow head to resume its guardianship of the victims.  But there were only four of them now who required guarding!

The girl danced no more. She continued to play her piping melody, but the great mournful eyes beneath the star-crown grew brilliant with slowly forming tears.

11: The Sacrifice

"WHAT THE DEVIL good is her weeping, Sig? She deliberately pointed. And that horror knocked poor old T.N.T. into the pit. He's there now. Can't get out. We're locked in here. Thirty minutes at most till noon. And that little Jezebel you're infatuated with comes to weep over him! Who cares how she feels? Actions speak!"

It was the morning of the next day. That four of the party, even in the face of that yellow death, had consented to return to their cells after the abrupt end of last night's grotesque ceremony, had been due to Tellifer's own appeal.

Beyond a few bruises, the latter had not been injured. When the girl, as Waring accused, had deliberately showed her terrible familiar that Tellifer was the evening's appointed victim, the unlucky esthete had been a little apart from his companions, close to the eight-sided pit. The great cephalite or head-shield of the monster had struck Tellifer between the shoulders with battering- ram force.

Knocked off his feet, he had rolled upon one of the treacherous pentagonal slabs that surrounded the sooty pit. He had gone down head first, but sliding down the steep slope of the bowl, had arrived at the bottom without being stunned.

He had presently replied to the anxious hails of his friends. When it became clear that the latter were required to return to their cells, leaving him in the pit, he had urged them to do so. For them to be slain on the spot could do him no good. And in the hours before Sunfire should again justify its name he might escape from the pit.

Waring had made a gallant effort to join his friend. But he has been blocked by the alert yellow death's head, and finally allowed himself to be driven hack with the others. As the correspondent had been required to release his fellow-slaves, so the girl saw to it that he duly re-shackled and boxed them up.  Under the gentle glance of those pitying eyes, Waring had finished the task by adjusting his own fetters and tossing the key out to her. The thing was maddening beyond words, but there had seemed no alternative save death.

The monster had then been led back to its lair, and the girl had bolted down the bronze cover that debarred its return and departed.

It had seemed that the captive of the pit, left thus unguarded, must surely find some way to climb out and release his companions. Yet dawn had returned, bringing Tellifer's strange executioner to march slowly up the sky, and that means still remained undiscovered. Though the pit was deadly only a part of the day, alone in it Tellifer was helpless as a beetle at the bottom of a bowl.

As the morning wore on and the temperature of the court slowly rose, Tellifer ceased his efforts to climb out. The time soon came when shouted advice or questions from the cell-rank drew no response. That the victim might be already dead, or in heavy stupor, appeared the best hope left for him.

Small wonder, then, that when a slender form drifted on light feet across the central court, poised beside one of the eight columns, and at last sank down there, a figure of desolate mourning, Waring had cursed her and her grief together. Chivalry was all very well, and Waring was not deficient therein. But a weeping she-fiend who chained him in a stone cell, prepared the agonizing murder of his friend, and then came to mourn over her work while watching its progress, seemed to him outside the pale of toleration.

In young Sigsbee, grief for the victim was still strangely united with concern for their betrayer. But his view met scant sympathy in any quarter. Otway expressed his own attitude with decision.

"That woman," said he, grimly just, is acting under compulsion of some sort. Probably superstitious training. But were she what she appears, the revulsion of her nature against all this voile, cold-blooded treachery and cruelty, would not stop at mere weeping. She is of white blood, but she disgraces us. Any Indian woman, feeling as she pretends to feel, would dare the wrath of her people on earth and the gods beyond and be true to human instinct. It's no use, Sigsbee! A man is dying in that infernal hole, and she isn't doing a thing to help him― is she?"

"She goes there and cries," snarled Waring. "Cries over him!. And not the bare decency t give him a drink of water. Not a drop of water in eighteen hours! My god, Otway―"

"Steady, old man, You can be pretty sure he isn't suffering now. The chances are that he won't revive enough to realize what is happening to him. I know the sun. Under that great lens above the pit, and with no water― why, the poor fellow probably went out soon after he stopped answering our hails, two hours ago. Is the girl still hanging about there? I wonder she can endure the heat."

"She's such a kind of queer creature," offered John B. gloomily. "that I don't reckon it's possible to guess what she could or couldn't stand, sir. I've met lots of queer kinds, different places, but I didn't suppose there could be one just like her. She seems to me  lot more horrible that that big centipede, sir."

"She isn't!" cried the youthful Sigsbee despairingly. She's― Oh, I don't know what she is, but I tell you that girl is not wicked!  It's all some abominable mistake!"

"Mistake that poor old T.N.T. is dead or dying there? Mistake that she's hovering over him like― like a weeping vulture?"

"No, she isn't, Waring. She's gone away― or at least, I think she has. There's such a glare that a fellow can't see much."

"The focus," Otway observed, "must have been complete for some minutes past. My friends, poor Tellifer is―"

He paused. Indeed, to finish the sentence was needless. The sun, centered now in the brazen sky, had too obviously reached the full altitude of its murderous mission.

Waring was the worst hit, but the others felt badly enough. The esthete has been eccentric, fanciful, sometimes more than a little trying; but with all his moods and nerves, he had carried a reckless bravery; there had been a certain odd, innocent lovableness about him.

Dim against the blinding glory beyond, a slender form flitted past the sullenly silent cell-rank. To the left, where rose a bronze lever that controlled the great stone bowl, a slight, metallic grating sound was heard.

Sigsbee and Otway, whose cells were nearest the center, vaguely beheld the phantom-like rising of a huge rounded mass beneath Sunfire.

A few seconds later the faint but unmistakable splash of a solid mass striking water far below reached their ears.

12: Revenge!

"CUT it, Sig! I'm past caring. That Jezebel murdered Tellifer! Woman? Murderess― torturer― she-fiend! Tears? Yes― of the crocodile brand. Part of her stock-in-trade. Don't know what the rest of 'em are like here. Maybe there aren't any others. Maybe she and that old hag I saw are the last of a rotten crop. But fifty or a thousand, take this from me: little Susan is head-devil of the lot! We're all due to go West. One at a time or en masse. No difference. But she's going with us! Oh, she's wise. Kept out of my reach just now. If she hadn't, I'd have― But no matter. She'll release us again. She'll trust that crawling horror to protect her. And then―" The vengeful correspondent's voice sank to a sinister whisper― "then I'll get her!"

Night had returned, bringing the silent, strange little food-bearer with her basket of fruit and small water jars. She had come alone as before, but there had been a slight variation. The first time she had handed in the provisions at close range, seeming assured that the prisoners would not try to harm her.

Tonight she had brought a second, much smaller basket. Before each cell she had filled this small receptacle from the large one, and gravely extended it, keeping such distance that the reach of a man's arm through one of the triangular windows might achieve a grasp of the basket, but not of her hands. Emptied by the cell's occupant, the basket must be tossed back and used again.

The procedure indicated a clear understanding of the bitterness toward her. Yet, aside from this, there had been no change in appearance or manner. The eyes that blessed and grieved were as innocent of evil as before.

While she passed along the rank, none of the four had spoken a word to her. She had never indicated that she understood, when they had addressed her. Words were useless. Moreover, there had come to be something indescribably shocking in that difference between her acts and the promise of all gentle good in her appearance.

One flash of mockery, one taunting curl of the child-like mouth, and the whole affair, terrible though it was, would have seemed a shade more endurable. But the taunt never came. She pitied them, it seems, deeply. She had no consciousness of wrong toward them, but to witness their captivity and consider the fate on its way to them, grieved her. Sad, very sad, that in the world should be pain and mourning and the ludicrous, maddening helplessness of four strong men at the mercy of one slender maiden!

In Waring, the effect of all this came dangerously near to real madness. Agony over Tellifer's lingering death and instilled his friend with a ruthless hate, against which dissuasive arguments beat vainly. Waring's threats, uttered after the girl had gone, were sincere!

13: An Awful Crime

AN HOUR later, and again the grotesque ceremonial progress of victims and captors about the sacrificial pit.

Between this occasion and the first, however, were differences. Mot only was the captive band's number reduced to four, but these four moved with strangely absorbed interest in each other.

Otway, blinking desperately, must rely on the steward alone to warn and guide him. Sigsbee has lost his enthusiasm for "nature dancing". Silently, without admission of their purpose, he and Waring were engaged in a duel of approach and defense.

At the cells, as if aware of her danger, the girl had passed Waring by and laid on John B. the task of releasing himself and his fellows. The last had been first and the first last with such effect that when Waring finally emerged, sinister purpose in the very poise of his massive person, he had found a barrier of three men between him and his quarry.

There had been some words exchanged, then. In the very shadow of death, the quartette had come close to a violent quarrel. Unreasoning accusations of disloyalty from Waring, however, were met by a cool counter-accusation from Otway that headed off active strife. Woman-killing aside, said the naturalist, Waring had no right to rob the rest of any slim little chance for life the evening might bring.

On that score, Waring had grimly yielded. But he made no promises for his behaviour in the court's more open field. There, should he attack the dancer, he would surely be slain. But while the monster's attention was upon him, the others might grasp their "slim chance for life" and welcome.

The compromise was neither accepted nor declined, because just at that point the obligato from the Pan's pipes had ceased and the disputants had hastily taken the hint and the outward path. But though no more was said, Waring's set determination was plain enough.

The dancer, as before, danced as though alone in the hollow pyramid. The hideous, scampering coils that followed and surrounded them all might have been bodiless smoke-wreaths, so far as she was concerned. The angry maddened giant of a man whose blood-shot glance gloated threateningly on her light movements had no seeming existence for her.

But Sigsbee knew that her danger was very real indeed.

Forty-eight hours in the pyramid had reduced a big, good-humored, civilized man to a savage with one idea in his head, and one only. Waring had stood helplessly while the friend he loved was tortured to death. Now, unshaven, red-eyed, massive and dangerous as the "cave-man" he resembled, the correspondent stalked his indifferent prey while again and again Sigsbee took outrageous risks to keep his own person between them.

In actual physical conflict, the young yacht-owner would have little chance with the correspondent. For all his fleshiness, Waring was quick as a cat, light-moving almost as the little dancer herself― far more powerful than Sigsbee. Bt even a few seconds of bodily struggle would mean death for both. Neither dared pause an instant in that constant avoidance of hideous running claws.

Sigsbee got no help from the girl's official defender. Whatever its training, the monstrous guardian lacked intelligence to understand that strange duel between captives over the life of their tyrant. Its scampering talons threatened defender and attacker alike.

The end game came at last with great suddenness.

For just an instant the girl poised motionless in one of the graceful poses that interspersed the dance steps. Tellifer's avenger had achieved a place not six feet from her. Sigsbee was momentarily entrapped in a running loop, the inner edge of which had flung up knee high above the floor.

Seeing his chance, Waring took it like a flash.

In almost the same instant a number of things happened. What some of them were was understood by only one person; the rest merely found themselves in a chaos of peril.

Waring sprang. Sigsbee, taking another desperate chance, bounded over the clawing loop. He collided in mid-air with his massive opponent. The two crashed heavily down at the girl's very feet.

John B., a little distance off, saw the hovering yellow death's head slewing around with a darting motion. He shouted warningly. But the combatants on the floor were seeking each other's throats with a whole-hearted attention which ignored the shout. The girl shrank back a step― and lowered her Pan's pipes.

At that signal, John B. saw the hovering head rise a trifle. Those curved daggers, its poison-fangs, opened wide. All the scampering pattern of segments halted― the head poised―

And then, instead of shooting downward, John B. saw the head give a great, sweeping jerk sideways.

Inexplicably, it flung over and struck the side of the faceted, luminous crystal above the pit.

Next instant, it was as if a yellowish tornado had been loosed in the central court. The air seemed full of a blurred chaos of convulsive segments.

The yellow blur flashed around the pit, enveloped the eight pillars in a coiling cloud. The cloud condensed― became the taloned yellow length again., but wrapped around the columns in a straining, writhing skein. Up from this skein rose the head, twisting from side to side as if in agony.

Above the pit, a single distinct ringing sound shivered out― a quivering ping-g-g, as of a great crystal goblet sharply struck. It was followed by a silent, convulsive shock― a kind of bursting scintillance of white glare. Then, like the downward swoop of a vast black wing, utter darkness.

IN THE central court men called to one another in hoarse shouts, groped blindly, sought each other.

They could not understand! The monstrous creature of talons and venom was gone. At least, the dry rustle and clash which had accompanied its presence were no longer heard. Cautiously exploring feet found none of the dangerous segments.

In that first mad flurry of rage, convulsive agony, or whatever had smitten it, the thing had knocked John B. and the explorer off their feet, and one of the Talons, catching in Otway's furry tunic, had broken the shoulder straps and jerked it partly off him. Aside from this, no damage had been sustained by any of the four captives.

Waring and Sigsbee had forsaken their death-grapple, Meeting at last, the other couple found them like a pair of dazed children, hand in hand, seeking nothing save escape from the incomprehensible.

The light of Sunfire had exploded to a scintillant glare and left them blind. Overhead, in a humid blue-black sky, great stars winked down at them, but not brightly enough to shed one revealing ray on this last mystery of the pyramid.

Girl, monster and glowing crystal, the three presiding elements of their strange captivity, seemed to have been simultaneously wiped out of existence. The jaguar-hide tunics alone were left, an assurance that their experience had been a real one.

Suddenly, in the dark, Sigsbee grasped the arm grasped the arm of his late adversary.

"Look!" he gasped. "Look up at the rim there!  A light― and somebody crouched down beside it!"

There on the pyramid's rim indeed, fifty feet above, a small light glowed warm and yellow. It showed what seemed to be the form of a man. It was not standing, nor even looking down toward them. The form squatted with rounded shoulders and bent head. Its face was hidden in its hands. Its attitude was one of overpowering grief.

A moment later the figure had risen slowly. It raised the light, evidently a common oil lantern, and began a leisurely descent of the inner stair.

"Who in God's name?" breathed Waring― and was silent.

They were four civilized men, who did not believe in demons, apparitions, nor that, as primitive folk hold, the newly dead are restless and may rise in their lifeless flesh. Therefore they stood their ground.

It was true that for Mr. Theron Narcisse Tellifer, or any other man of flesh and blood, to have spent those last hours exposed without water in the heat of the pit, passed at least ten minutes beneath the fully focussed rays, and finally dropped five hundred feet or so to some dark pool within the pyramid's base, and still survive, was, on the face of it, more incredible than even the living-dead theory. It was also true that Waring's hand closed on Otway's bare shoulder in a grip that left the shoulder numb, and the explorer was not even conscious of it. Still― they stood their ground.

He― it― the thing that wore Tellifer's seeming body― had gotten rid of the indecorous jaguar-hide and gold bangles effect, and was again dressed for roughing it in civilized style. A very small, light rifle was carried under one arm.

Reaching the lower level, the mysterious being raised its dejected head, lifted the lantern, and spoke.

"The final consummation of an awful crime," it began, "has been accomplished. Alcot, I know that you are somewhere and  alive, for I heard you swearing. I trust that you are satisfied! You denied that Sunfire, that lost miracle of loveliness, was a diamond. You were wrong. Sunfire was a diamond, though it is now, alas, a shattered wreck of dust and fragments! Wondrous though its beauty, Sunfire was but a vast carbon crystal. The heat beating upward from the pit must long since have prepared this end. The stone could never have been recut. It could hardly have been lifted down intact from the columns. The impact of my unlucky air-gun pellet striking the side dissolved it in a shining cloud of dust! My friends, I was fairly certain yesterday that Sunfire's ruin had been wrought. But to have finished the work of those ignorant vandals with my own hand!  I wish― I wish that I had returned to New York by line from Para, as I was tempted to do!"

While the voice spoke no one had even thought of interrupting its sad discourse. As it ceased, Waring drew a great breath.

"That," he said with deep conviction, "that's Tellifer! Darn you, T.N.T.! All these hours and― yes, you even took time to shave! How'd you get out of that bowl?  Why didn't you come back sooner? D'you know, you nearly made a cold-blooded woman-killer of me? Come here with that lantern. My foot just struck something. It's the girl! Is she― is she badly hurt, Sigsbee?"

14: Flight

ON EXAMINATION by lantern-light, the mysterious little tyrant of the pyramid was found to be still breathing. As there were no wounds on her, it was decided that she had fainted from shock or fright.

Dread that her monstrous companion might be lurking near in the darkness was soon dissipated. Over beyond the pit, a vast tangled heap of loathsome yellow proved to be the thing's lifeless body. The head shield, trailed out on the pavement, presented a very peculiar appearance. One of the eyes was pierced by  small, round bullet hole. Also, the entire head was scarred with innumerable scratches and perforations through which oozed a whitish, semi-liquid substance.

Chalmers replied listlessly to many questions, while Sigsbee and the steward bathed the unconscious girl's brow with some of the water she had brought them in their cells.

Waring watched these ministrations with concern. Discovery that her watch over a tortured man's death, and the cold-blooded dumping of his corpse afterward, had been acts only of seeming, had wrought a change in even the correspondent's feeling toward her. Why she had "gone through the motions" as Waring phrased it, was not at all clear. But Tellifer's story revealed that he had certainly not been present while she wept over his supposed agony. The thing actually dumped, when she threw the lever, was a piece of rock.

Use of the lantern for examination of the pit confirmed this tale. Near the bottom of the great bowl was now a large, irregular aperture. The shock which cracked the stone when Tellifer allowed it to swing back, full weight, the first evening, had saved the experimenter's life. There had then been a jagged, branching crevice. The shrinking effect of next day's white hot focus had completed the work.

Tellifer explained that about the time he ceased answering their hails, he had discovered that a part of the bowl's curving side was in actual fragments, only held in by pressure. With the buckle of his metal girdle he had managed to pry out one of the smaller pieces until he could get finger-grip on it. After its removal, taking out larger fragments was easy.

He had, he said, refrained from telling his friends of this, partly because he was too dry to speak easily, and partly out of consideration― lest he raise false hopes. No, he hadn't expected them to thank him for that. But how could he know he was going to get through alive? Very well. He would continue the story if there were not too many interruptions.

His first idea had been to dive into the depths. On casting down several of the rock fragments, resulting splashes told him there was water below. Well, if his friends heard no such splashes, he was not responsible for that. They were making so much noise yelling at him that the fact was not surprising. Such a dive, however, proved needless.

Through the hole he hound himself able to swing by his hands and fling himself sideways into an open floored space beneath the upper pavement. It was very dark down there, but, feeling about, he had come upon a system of great metal bars and cylinders. It dawned on him that the ancient engineers had arranged the machinery which revolved the bowl in an open horizontal shaft, probably for convenience in case of breakdown. There seemed a chance that the other end of this shaft he might find an exit.

Stumbling through the blackness, he had come upon a narrow flight of stairs, had fallen down them, and, upon recovering from that a little, had found himself near an open doorway at the back of one of the outer buildings, in the fifth terrace of the pyramid's western plane.

Though privations, a bad night and his latest tumble had left him very weak, he remembered the needs of his friends. He had managed to drag himself around to the eastern stair and down it to water level. After drinking and getting himself a little food aboard he canoe, he had lain down to rest a few minutes.

Nature had betrayed him and it was dusk when he awoke.  Yes, certainly he had slept all afternoon. While in the bowl he had hardly been able to sleep at all. Their shouts had disturbed him. Very well. He would accept the apologies and continue.

Though not a practical man, he had deemed best to be prepared in every way possible to meet difficulties. Therefore he had taken time to eat again and exchange that abominable jaguar hide for a more dignified costume. Also to shave. Yes, he felt that the moral support received from these two latter acts was worth the time expended on them. He was not a practical man―

"Oh, get on with it, T.N.T.!" grinned his friend. "Providence looks out for such as you― and us. You surely made a clean finish. Maybe the shave helped. How'd you happen to think of the air-gun?"

Tellifer had, it seemed, recalled efforts of his own to shoot loons on the northern lake. This is an impossible feat since the birds dive at the flash and are beneath the surface before the charge can reach tem. Applying past experience to the present emergency, it occurred to him that id there was no flash, the monstrous centipede would not take warning.

The air-rifle, which belonged to Otway, was a very powerful one. Because of its small caliber, however, Tellifer had not meant to use it except in dire need. Climbing to the pyramid's rim, he had seen his comrades led forth, and watched wit much interest and curiosity the singular evolutions of Waring and Sigsbee. When they finally flew at one another's throats, and the venomous yellow head poised to strike, he had perceived that the air-gun idea must be tried out at once.

The first shot struck one of the monster's enormous eyes. The second missed the head and hit the great crystal.

Like any diamond that has been subjected to high temperatures, Sunfire had acquired a brittleness that made it more fragile than glass. It had "splintered" at the impact, with such completeness as had all the effect of a silent explosion.

The monster had been slain, not by the bullets, but by Sunfire. Over a dozen feet above floor-level, Sunfire had perished without claiming any further human victims. But the head of the monstrous votary, almost in contact with the exploding crystal, had been perforated by the sharp dust and splinters.

Practical man or not, it appeared that a couple of shots from an air-gun T.N.T. had made a complete cleanup of the two main perils of the pyramid. The third― if peril she could be termed outside her relations with the other two― was left at the mercy of the victims.

It was decided to carry the girl with them to the canoe. Food, a night's rest, and counsel, were needed before any effort was made to seek out the pyramid's other and strangely retiring inhabitants. For one thing, there was the question of weapons. Beside the air-rifle, a couple of shotguns and a spare Winchester had been left aboard the canoe. But all their small fire-arms and the rifles they had carried the first night, were in the enemies' hands. Even were the "tribe" few in number, this superiority of armament made seeking them an adventure to be approached cautiously.

They had had enough of reckless indiscretion. Hereafter every act should be well considered. The conquest of the pyramid, begun by Tellifer, should be carried to a finish with the least possible risk.

So they spoke, like wide, intelligent men, the while they reviewed pityingly the unconscious form of their dethroned tyrant.

Waring, in particular, seeing her, frail, graceful, with her face of a sleeping child supported on Sigsbee's knee, felt a hot wave and shame and a great wonder at himself.

This child had been brought up in these barbaric surroundings. Doubtless religious training had fought the gentle instincts natural to her, and made her bitterly unhappy. She had done as she had been taught was right, and in the doing― suffered.

She seemed rousing, at last. Color had returned to the tender lip. The steadfast, reverent boy who held her, smoothed back a curling tendril of the red-gold hair. Waring, shamefacedly gentle, dropped to his knees and attempted to take one of the fragile wrists. His innocent intent was to feel the pulse. But Sigsbee struck at his hand in a flare of resentment which showed that a certain recent incident was neither forgotten not forgiven.

The rebuke was accepted with meekness. Waring retreated. He felt less a man at that moment that every in his life before.

The great eyes opened slowly, closed, opened again. The lantern in Tellifer's hand showed a look of frightened doubt― of dawning wonder. She struggled to raise herself.

Not one of her reed captives spoke. Perhaps they were a little curious to see how she would bear in the face of this changed situation. They were not left long in doubt.

She had risen to a half-crouching position, slender limbs drawn up under her. For a long minute she stared from figure to figure of those about her. They had never seen her show any signs of fear. But now something like abject terror was creeping into the dawn-blue eyes.

With a quick jerk of he head, she glanced behind her. The solicitous face of the youngest "cave-man" at her back seemed to reassure her not at all.

She looked down, fingered the bangles on the edge of her jaguar-hide tunic, raised the Pan's pipes, still firmly clasped in one hand, inspected the fateful instrument― and―

It happened so quickly that the five wise, intelligent men had plunged into a fresh indiscretion before they had time to think about it.

With a low cry. the girl flung the Pan's pipes from her. The slender, gathered limbs shot her erect. She sprang sideways, ducked under Waring's arm, upflung to check her, and was off across the court!

They had seen her dance. This was their first opportunity to see her run. The quondam captives charged after her, but the shadow of a flying cloud would have been as easy to catch.

The door in the south-eastern wall stood open. It closed with a clang before the pursuers had crossed half the intervening space. Reaching it, they learned hat the illusive one's panic had been genuine. She had not paused to bar the door behind her. It had swung open again an inch or so.

Hurled wide, it revealed a long flight of descending stairs. Tellifer held the lantern high. Part way down the flight, a flash of star-like jewels― the flirt of a flying jaguar-hide tunic.

Discretion? The masculine fever of the hunt had them now. Four unshaven wide-eyed cave-men and one civilized and freshly enthused esthete plunged recklessly down in pursuit of the flying tunic.

15: Down the Stair

THE DESCENT proved not so deep as it had seemed from above. Thirty seconds brought the pursuers to a blank wall and a landing.

The flirting tunic had flashed around the corner ahead of them. They turned after it. The landing proved to mark a right-angular turn in the stair.

Not very far ahead now the starry jewels glittered and bobbed to the flying leaps of their wearer. Suddenly there was a sharper plunge― and a shrill cry.

Tellifer's long legs carried him into the lead hut, but now the youngest "cave man" cleared four steps at a bound and took the lead away from him.

"She's fallen!" Sigsbee's voice wailed back in an anguish of solicitude. By the time the lantern caught up with him again he had reached the second landing― had gathered in his arms a slender, softly-moaning form that lay there.

Tellifer arrived, panting. He raised the lantern.

Sigsbee stared down at the form his arms guarded. He made a queer choking sound in his throat. Then, not roughly but with considerable haste, he laid the form down on the stone landing.

As he did so, its lower limbs trailed limply, but a claw-like hand darted scratchingly upward. A quick jerk of the head just saved Sigsbee's cheek from mutilation.

The toothless mouth of the creature he laid down moved and chattered wordlessly. Gray, ragged locks strayed from beneath a circlet of glittering stars. The spotted jaguar-hide was draped over scrawny, yellowish shoulders. The contorted face glared up with terrible eyes― eyes that had feasted long on cruelty and raged now, aware that their years of evil power were spent, but dying with a frank, though wordless, curse for the victims that had escaped.

The claw-like hand made another dash for Sigsbee's face― flung back― beat upon the floor convulsively. A shuddering heave of the upper body― a strangled, gurgling sound―

"Dead!" said Waring a minute later, "Broken spine. It's the old hag I saw. But how, in God's name― where'd the girl get to?"

The question was more interesting than any of them cared to admit. Descending those two flights of stairs, they had passed no doorway nor openings of any kind through which she might have turned aside and eluded them. Of course, there was the possibility of some disguised, secret passage. Yet, if so, why had the old woman not retreated by the same road?

It was a question which poor Sigsbee made not even an effort to answer. He was very white, looked strangely older. He was shivering in the dark, breathless chill that enveloped them.

There were no sounds down here, nor any light, save that of Tellifer's lantern.

This lower landing was really the foot of the stair. Off from it opened a triangular arch. Standing in the arch they found themselves peering into what seemed a great eight-sided vault or chamber. The lantern did not suffice to illuminate the far walls, but those nearby were chiseled in colossal forms of women, dancing as the girl had danced, charming loathsome monsters with their Pan's pipes.

The place, damp as an underground tomb, contained no furnishings. The only signs of human occupation were several vague heaps of what appeared to be clothing.

On investigation, the explorers found stacked there an accumulation of divers garments in as many stages of freshness and mouldering rot as marked the derelict fleet on the lake. Most were trade cloth shirts and more or less ragged trousers, such as the rubber-workers wear. There were also better outfits which bespoke the white man. The cassock of a Jesuit priest was among them. Also the heavy costume and hood which told them that the gray hydro-airplane on the lake might wait in vain for the return of its pilot.

The five found their own clothing and also their weapons stacked on a great pile that included rust-caked, muzzle-loading guns of dead seringueiros, some modern weapons ruined by the damp, a reed blowpipe, and a great, badly warped bow of raripari wood with a quiver of long arrows.

Nothing of theirs was missing. John B even found his precious shell-rims. But the vault reeked and dripped with malodorous dampness. The rotting garments exhaled a breath as from the tomb of their former owners.

Very silent in that lifeless place, the five returned to the stairfoot and bent above the dead thing there. The starry diamonds in its hideous hair gleamed with a cold, wicked luster.

Where was the mournful, innocent child who had entrapped them? She who had― dwelt, perhaps in this tomb-like lair?

"I am going away from here," announced Tellifer abruptly. "I don't like this place! It is― ugly!"

No one objected. Despite cave-man costumes, they were civilized men who did not believe in vampires, demons, or hideous night-hangs that dwelt in underground vaults and issued forth to trap victims with a false illusion of loveliness. Yet they felt that further investigation of the pyramid might wait for a later time. They wanted open air― they wanted it badly.

Due to their need, their return to the upper level was marked with a certain haste. The gardened court held nothing to keep them lingering. Only a very few minutes were needed to reach the rim and negotiate the outer descent.

The traveling-canoe― exceptional among derelicts― received its returning crew. There was something consoling, something mundane and home-like in the very feel of its deck-planks. But it occurred to them that the night would be passed more pleasantly at a distance from the pyramid.

Then, having paddled out a way, somebody suggested that if anything― anyone, that is― were inclined to be dissatisfied with their escape and come after them, the rest of the fleet offered a too-convenient means.

Despite fatigue and starvation, they found strength to paddle back and attend to this potential menace. In consequence, it was nearly midnight when they at last dropped anchor. By the time they had finished supper, cooked on the vapor stove, three of them were past recking of perilous pyramids, and suspicions that diabolical philosophy might have more reason in it than they believed. Sleep gripped these three like a heavy drug. Tellifer, who, having slept all afternoon  was elected watchman, gave characteristic respect to duty by drowsing off soon afterward.

Sigsbee, however did not sleep. On the foredeck, he lay for hours, staring at the mountainous black mass outlined by humid starshine. There was no faint luminescence hovering above it now. Tata Quarahy― Fire of the Sun― was destroyed. Its monstrous guardian lay dead. Its priestess―?

Young Sigsbee felt very strange and old and uncertain about it all. Yet if at any time that night a light had flashed in the dark mass, or a voice had called, he would not have roused the others. He would have taken his life in his hands and gone back alone to the pyramid.

SUNRISE, and the eastward stair a flaming height of red and orange and gold.

The reflected splendor, beating on Tellifer's face, awakened him. He opened his eyes, recalled that he was a watchman, sat up and viewed the pyramid in conscientious scrutiny.

It was still there, and its loveliness in the early morning light atoned in a measure, he decided, for the ugly things that had gone on inside of it. Those things seemed very dream-like and remote this morning. As for a vampirish night hag who could appear at will as a beautiful girl― Tellifer considered the idea with interest. Last night he had wanted nothing save to get away from it, but this morning his fanciful taste dealt with it more kindly.

Sunrise is a bad hour, however, to believe in ghosts and vampires. Tellifer regretfully shook his head. Then he uttered a sharp ejaculation, shot to his feet, dived into the cabin and was back an instant later, a pair of binoculars in his hand. En route, he had given a rousing kick to the correspondent and Otway.

Stumbling forth, they found their alert night-watchman with binoculars focused on the head of the sun lit stairs.

Far up there, against the background of flaming stone, a small, dark figure was moving.

Waring ruthlessly appropriated the binoculars by force, while equally curious Otway squeezed against his shoulder as if trying to get at least one eye to the glasses.

Sigsbee, who had dropped asleep just before dawn, roused, took in the scene, and reached the group in a bound. His boyish voice broke and crackled.

"Is it she? Is she alive? Is she coming down?"

Waring shook his head. "Somebody's coming down. But it isn't a 'she', Sig. It's― Yet how can that be? The cells were empty― and we saw―"

"I know," Tellifer cut in. "We saw his clothing down there with that of all the other dead men. But this pyramid, Alcot, is not limited as are less distinguished haunts of the un-dead. Night, noon or sunrise, its ghosts may walk as they please. The ghost of the air-pilot comes now to offer his congratulations on our escape!"

But no one was paying attention to Tellifer.

Sigsbee, in turn, had annexed the glasses. What he saw through them caused him to give a kind of choking gasp, and thereafter, on the selfish score that they were his, he kept the binoculars.

The figure, however, soon came near enough that even with the naked eye its costume, at least, was unmistakable. The goggles were pushed up visor-like on the close fitting hood. A trifle awkwardly in the loose, heavily lined suit, the mysterious air-pilot who they had once thought to rescue, accomplished the full descent.

He walked slowly forward to the broad stone landing stage. Reaching the edge he contemplated the canoe, turned his gaze to the airplane, returned it to the canoe.

Then he called across to those aboard the latter. The voice was slightly tremulous.

"I beg your pardon! After all that has happened, I dislike so much to trouble you. But you've taken all the boats away. Would you mind very much if I asked you to just― just push one in where I can reach it and paddle out to my 'plane?"

Sigsbee dropped his binoculars. They splashed unheeded in the lake. His companions were in pajamas, blanket-draped, but Sigsbee's blindly devotional foresight has led him to shave and dress before retiring the night before. Ere any of them could move, he had made a flying leap from the canoe to the nearest derelict, a crudely hollowed native dugout.

"I told you!" he flung back as he hauled in the dugout's mooring stone. "Didn't I tell you I'd seen that girl before? And I know where, now!  Just as I said. Everything absolutely all right, but you fellows― Never mind! coming, Miss Enid!"

Oars splashed, and the dugout fairly shot across to the landing stage.

Of those left on the canoe, Tellifer was the first to find voice.

"He has seen her before," said he solemnly. "Ah, yes! Her name is Miss Enid, she is an air-pilot, and these facts make everything absolutely all right. Naturally. But do you know, Alcot, despite my love for the beautiful and mysterious, I have had about enough of that pyramid? By all means, let Sig have it! I suggest that the rest of us go away now, while we are still able, and leave that pair in possession!"

16: The Story of Miss Enid Widdiup

"IT IS so good in you all," the girl began, somewhat later in the day, when they were all seated together under the big canoe's awning, "so very good in you to understand and not blame me in the least for any of it. Of course, Mr. Sigsbee's remembering me helps. I am almost sure that I recall his face, too, though I drove so many officers back and forth to Camp Upton— Oh, you were 'just a sergeant' and I didn't drive you! Why, I drove lots of the non-coms and the boys, too. We all did. Well, if you couldn't get near my car, I'm sorry. There was a crowd— Oh, you were transferred to Georgia just after I began driving at Camp Upton! And then never got across! That was stupid. But I can sympathise with you fully. They wouldn't take me in the ambulance corps, because they said I was too young and not strong enough. Wasn't that absurd! I'm not so awfully large, of course, but my physical endurance is simply endless. But I must begin at the beginning and tell this properly.

"My father, as I have already told you, was Dr. Alexander Widdiup, the archaeologist, and I was born on the Amazon, in Manaos. Mother took me home to New York when I was a baby, and I never saw Brazil again till this summer.

"I was nine years old when poor Dad wrote us that he was planning a trip up the Rio Silencioso. An Indian had brought him word that at the Silencioso's source were some remarkable ruins and relics of an ancient people. This Indian— his name was Peter or— no, Petro, that was it— I beg pardon, Mr. Otway! Yes, his name was Kuyambira-Petro. Dad said he came from some cannibal tribe on the Moju river. He was a wizard, too, and made charms to protect people from jungle and river-demons. He showed Dad one of those jaguar tunics, and two small diamonds, cut to symbolize the sun. But the expedition my father organized, never came back.

"Dad had been with us in New York only part of each year, but he and I were best pals. I used to say to myself that some day, when I grew up, I'd find a way to at least learn how he died.

"Then the War came. Mother always lets me do about as I please, and I had learned to fly a Bleriot, but of course they wouldn't take me in the aviation corps, either. So finally I had to content myself with motor-car service at home. After peace was signed, poor Major Dupont agreed to help me in my scheme to reach the source of the Rio Silencioso by the air-route. Major Dupont was English— Royal Flying Corps— but he was visiting friends in New York on six months' leave. When I told him my plan he considered it very practical and interesting.

"We decided on the hydro-airplane because we had to rise from the Amazon, and over these forests if we couldn't come down on water we couldn't come down at all.

"Mother is at Manaos now, waiting for me. She is probably terribly worried, but still she knows that I always do get through safely somehow. I beg pardon! Oh, I inherit an adventurous disposition from father, and I don't think size and physical strength count for so much in these days...

"Why, Mr. Waring! You mustn't say that! Why, I didn't mean that at all! You poor things, of course you couldn't help yourselves with that frightful beast threatening you every moment. But let me go on, and you'll understand better.

"Mother drew the line at my making this trip alone, but poor Major Dupont was so resourceful and had such a splendid flying record that when he offered, that  made it much safer, of course. The Major and I only meant to make a reconnaissance flight this first trip, but we had no trouble in finding the lake. The top of the pyramid flashed its location to us miles off. Of course, we didn't know what the flash meant. It was like an enormous, bright star shining in broad daylight, and on earth instead of up in the sky where stars belong.

"Mr. Tellifer! A fallen star— yes, that was just what poor Major Dupont said it resembled. It is a little strange that he should have used that comparison, because of what was told to me later on.

"We planed down to the lake and landed in the collapsible boat we carried. There have been several heavy rains since, and our little craft must have filled and sunk. I notice it is not among the others. Major Dupont wished me to wait and let him go up the pyramid alone, but I wouldn't, so we went up together. It was noon, but of course we had no means of knowing that noon meant anything dangerous.

"We looked over the upper rim, and there was that strange hollow place, with palms and shrubbery and in the middle— something glorious. Major Dupont said it must be the grandfather of all diamonds, and we joked over it. We knew it was fearfully hot in the court, but it was hot outside, too. We walked over to the pit. Major Dupont said there must be a furnace below it He stepped on one of the five-sided stones.―By mere chance I had one foot on the solid pavement and pulled myself back in time. I ran out on one of the oblong stones. The column I caught hold of was so hot it scorched my hands. I— I find I can't tell you much of this.... Thank you. Yes, I believe I'll just leave it out. I couldn't help him. There wasn't time. I —fainted, I think.

"Afterward, for a long while, everything was like a dream. My first memory is of looking up into the face of an old woman, very strangely dressed. I was lying on the floor of one of the outer houses. She had taken away my own clothes and dressed me like herself. This seemed a bit strange for a few minutes, and after that quite natural. I accepted everything just as one does in a dream. Some of the time I would even seem to know I was dreaming, and wonder a little why I couldn't wake up. I felt very sad always, though there didn't seem any real reason for it.

"I think it was the shock of what I had seen happen. There was a Miss Blair that mother and I knew. She was the dearest girl, but she had been at a hospital base in France when it was shelled by the Germans. For nearly a year afterward she wasn't herself at all. She cried a great deal, and couldn't take interest in anything. I used to bring her flowers, and when I called I noticed she would never do anything unless the nurse or I suggested she should. I suppose I was very much like that....

"Why yes, Mr. Waring. If any of you had asked me to release you or told me to shut that hideous creature in its hole, I think I would have done it. When you all seemed so— so annoyed over what was happening, I used to wonder why you never asked me to do differently. But then, you were just people in a dream, and dream-people never do behave consistently, you know. So I went on acting as Sifa directed me, because that was easiest.

"The old woman's name was Sifa. She spoke English and some other language that meant nothing to me. Her teeth were nearly all gone, but very soon broken accent and understood almost everything she said in English.

"I did whatever she advised me to. She didn't hurt me or even threaten. In fact she was extremely considerate and— kind, I was going to say, but that hardly expresses it. Her face and eyes were too wicked. I followed her advice because she seemed to know exactly what I ought to do, and it was such an effort to think of things for myself. Besides, I grew used to the mumbling and the broken accent and understood almost everything she said in English.

"I did whatever she advised me to. She didn't hurt me or even threaten. In fact she was extremely considerate and —kind, I was going to say, but that hardly expresses it. Her face and eyes were too wicked. I followed her advice because she seemed to know exactly what I ought to do, and it was such an effort to think of things for myself. Besides,  it was all so dream-like. Nothing mattered in the least.

"Sifa said that Ama-Hotu, Lord of the Day, had sent me in a cloud-canoe from the skies, so that the ancient worship might not fail. She was the last of her people. Many seasons ago a great sickness carried of all that were left of her people, the Oellos. I can't tell you much of the Oello people's history. You see, though I understood what she said, I didn't feel; like speaking at all to anyone, and I asked no questions.

"But Sifa, of her own accord, told me that a long time ago, at the beginning of all seasons, Ama Hotu, Lord of the Day, caused the great star Huac to descend upon the Earth. Huac the Star was jealous of his honor. So Amy-Hotu commanded that Corya, the great Earth-serpent with feet, should give him worship in the dark hours, and that the sacred women dedicated to Ama-Hotu's service should also serve Huac the Star. By Day, in return, Huac was servant to Ama-Hotu and presided over the offerings.

"Corya, the Serpent with Feet, had many children of which the Star was father. *  For seasons beyond number the children of Corya and the Star dwelt together in the pyramid, and the sacred women of Ama-Hotu danced with them in worship of the Star and Sun. But the season came when Corya, the Earth Serpent devoured her children.

_________

* There is at least a question among the naturalists, as to whether that rather curious creature, Chilopoda Scolopendra, finds it always necessary to mate in order that the species may be perpetuated.

"Two of them were saved by one of the sacred women and carried to the surrounding land. The pyramid was a place of worship. and only the sacred dancing women dwelt there. But the pair of Cotya's children multiplied. They would not harm the sacred women, whose music they loved, but they slew so many of the people that at last there were only a few left, and those came to dwell under the protection of the dancers in the pyramid. They still grew crops along the shores, but for this the sacred women must go ashore and protect them with music.

"There were so few of the Oello people left that the human offerings to Ama-Hotu could no longer be selected from their number. For many seasons, long before Sifa was born, it had been the custom to send secret emissaries who traveled upon water, which the children of Corya could not cross, and brought back victims from the outer tribes. Sometimes they would do this by force, but more often by tempting them with tales of wealth or whatever the victims most desired.

"Sifa said that after all her people died in a great sickness, she lived here many seasons alone. Sifa gave up trying to cultivate the fields on shore, and lived on fruits and nuts and fish from the lake.

"Corya, the great Earth Serpent, was content to be fed on the fruits of the Earth, her father. Flesh had never been offered to her. I suppose really they were afraid the horrible thing would acquire a taste for blood and turn on them. Corya's children ashore, by the way, had never grown to any great size― never more than eighteen inches or so. I think now that all that was merely a legend, made up to account for the common centipedes one finds in the jungle, and that Corya herself was just an unaccountable freak.

"Sifa had obtained what victims she could offer to Ama-Hotu. In the old days, her people had many friends among the forest tribes, and this dreadful cannibal wizard, Kuyamhira-Petro was one of them. She told me that sometimes Petro came to visit her. He believed that Huac the Star was the greatest of all anyi or spirits. Tata Quarahy, Life-Breath of the Sun, he called it. He brought it victims when he could to win its favor.

"I remembered the name― Petro― and it made me sad, so that I cried for hours after she had told me that. But I didn't remember my father or what I had come here for.

"She taught me to play on the little golden pipes and Corya came out of her lair. No, I wasn't afraid of the creature. I wasn't afraid of anything. I tell you, it was all just a dream to me.

"Sifa said that Corya would never harm me, because now I was a sacred woman. She danced with Corya to show me how I was to do. I have always been very fond of dancing, and I liked that part. It was the only thing that interested me, even a little.

"When I― woke up, at last, and found myself sitting there on the floor with you standing around me, I was terribly frightened. I knew for the first time that all those things I had been seeing and hearing and doing were real! And oh! I was scared! It was silly in me, but I was actually afraid you might be angry enough to kill me. Mr Waring? Oh, I thought you spoke.

"So I jumped up and ran. When I reached the doorway, there was Sifa inside. She pulled the door shut and mumbled something at me, and I heard her bare feet go pattering down the stair. The stairway is wider than the door, you may remember. I just flattened myself tight to the wall inside the doorway. After you passed I ran back in the court and hid among the shrubbery.

"Before the night was over I had collected my senses and decided the best thing I could do was tell you I was sorry and go away. So I went down after my suit― Oh yes, in the dark.  Sifa never had any lights, but I had learned to know my way around without. No, certainly we didn't live down in that musty old vault. There are ever so many passages between the inner chambers of the pyramid and the funny little houses outside. We lived outside of course. Sifa always used to be watching the river mouth in case more victims should come. I was with her when your canoe entered the lake. Sifa was watching you all the time. When you started up the stair she sent me to call forth Coryu, and directed me how to act toward you. I was to send Coryu to her hole after a while, and beckon you to come down. But poor Mr Tellifer, by falling in, changed that part and rather confused me for a few minutes...

"It didn't change things enough to hurt?  N-no― oh, no, of course not. really, if you are angry with me I can't blame you in the least... You're not? It's so dear in you all to say so. And now I― I think I must go. Why, yes, thank you, I can handle the 'plane very nicely alone, and I couldn't think of imposing on you. Why, certainly I'm not angry! But―

"Well, so long as you put it that way, I'll wait of course. Maybe a day or two of rest would make it safer. And I can show you all around the pyramid. After I've relived mother's anxiety, I'm coming back here, of course. Oh yes, I feel it's my duty. You see, poor old Dad gave his life to find this place, and I must get the― the measurements, you know, and photographs of the carvings and all that. Then I shall give the notes and pictures and what I can remember of the Oello people's history to some archaeologist who understands such things, and he can write a book about it and give the credit to my father.

"Mr Otway? I'm so glad you think that's a splendid idea! And Mr Waring, you say you write for the magazines. You won't spoil my book by telling about any of it in advance, will you?"

NOON. Ama-Hotu, Lord of the Day, glared fiercely down upon Huac the Star's empty shrine and the drying corpse of Corya, the many taloned Earth Serpent. Old Sifa, last devotee of the trio, lay also dead, her withered remains sealed up in a crypt of the pyramid. But Ama-Hotu, Lord of Day, has been worshiped in many lands. Invariably has he survived his worshipers; outlived a multitude of fellow-gods as well. The empty shrine of Huac, the drying segments of Corya, made no difference at all in the glory of Ama-Hotu.

Four hard-working humans had retreated before his potency. In one of the ancient pyramidal dwellings they lay about in pajamas, sweated, drowsed, and waited for the undisputed Lord of Day to go seek his victims elsewhere.

All morning they had been at work taking the measurements, photographs and notes which were to make the name of Widdiup famous. Sigsbee, however, was not among the toilers. The gray hydro-airplane was missing from the derelict fleet.

"Miss Enid's pyramid," yawned Waring after a time, "was a wonderful find!"

No one disputed this. He redistributed his mass to a more comfortable posture.

"We never had a chance, you know. First to last—not the ghost of one!"

Otway looked up  with a flash of philosophic gray eyes behind the shell-rims. "I am entirely willing," he said, "to surrender all the honors to Dr. Widdiup's memory."

"Of course you are! So'm I willing to surrender writing it up. T.N.T. was willing— we all were— to surrender the diamonds stored in the pyramid's crypts. Benefit of starving Armenian orphans. Splendid idea. Girl with eyes like hers, bound to think of it. Sig is willing to surrender himself. That is, if she'll have him. Ex-actly! First to last— not a chance!"

"The treacherous spirit of Kuyambira-Petro," began Tellifer— and for the first known time in his life broke off as if for lack of ideas to continue.

"Quite right," approved his friend. "Treacherous cannibal wizard, not worth mentioning. Half-ton diamond cut to broil you alive— easy. Pyramids— monsters— night-hags— burning pits— got a chance with all of 'em. But a girl like Miss Enid— never! Oh, Lawdy, Lawdy! The penalty of being fat and forty! Declined with thanks for the air-trip. Yet I've flown and Sig hasn't. What's your trouble, John B.?"

"I was just thinking, sir, that maybe I might have tried a little harder to get her to take me. Before the War, after I quit the Buffalo Bill show, I used to make exhibition flights in a little old Antoinette I got off a flyer that broke his neck in it. I had a good deal of experience. Mr. Sigsbee means well, but I can't see what real good he could be in case of accident."

"With her airplane and selected captive, she will arrive in Manaos," spoke Tellifer, the prophet. "I know that she will, for she is a very wise and practical person: she refused to take me! Dr. Otway, I presume you also are among the declined with regrets?"

"I am not." The philosophic eyes twinkled again. "In the first place, there was only one of us who deserved to he chosen. And in the second, I had already engaged myself to collect this material for the Widdiup book. But at least, if we are not helping her to make a flight, we are saving her the need of risking another one back here. And the honor of that is something!"

"It is much," agreed Waring, very meekly.

Author's Note

WHEN the book to be entitled "Recent Discoveries Pointing to Confirmation of the Theory of Egyptian Origin for South American Aborigines," collated from material gathered on the spot by four faithful captives, and accredited to the posthumous fame of Dr. Alexander Widdiup, is published, it will be a worthy tome of great interest to archaeologists. But I doubt if in its pages will appear the incidents of this tale.

The surrender of Alcot Waring was honorably adhered to. On his return to New York he sadly reported, "No material."

Young Mr. Sigsbee has not had leisure to tell a word of it. He is devotedly engaged in keeping up with the inherited disposition of Dr. Alexander Widdiup— an exciting occupation which suits him perfectly.

Mr. Theron Narcisse Tellifer is far too proudly impractical to commit his weird thoughts and adventures to the cold, definite keeping of paper and printer's ink. But John B. is a very good friend of mine— and John B. told it all to me!

___________________

2: Behind the Curtain

All-Story Weekly, September 21, 1918

IT WAS after nine o'clock when the bell rang, and descending to the dimly lighted hall I opened the front door, at first on the chain to be sure of my visitor. Seeing, as I had hoped, the face of our friend, Ralph Quentin, I took off the chain and he entered with a blast of sharp November air for company. I had to throw my weight upon the door to close it against the wind.

As he removed his hat and cloak he laughed good-humoredly.

"You're very cautious, Santallos. I thought you were about to demand a password before admitting me."

"It is well to be cautious," I retorted. "This house stands somewhat alone, and thieves are everywhere."

"It would require a thief of considerable muscle to make off with some of your treasures. That stone tomb-thing, for instance; what do you call it?"

"The Beni Hassan sarcophagus. Yes. But what of the gilded inner case, and what of the woman it contains? A thief of judgment and intelligence might covet that treasure and strive to deprive me of it. Don't you agree?"

He only laughed again, and counterfeited a shudder.

"The woman! Don't remind me that such a brown, shriveled, mummy-horror was ever a woman!"

"But she was. Doubtless in her day my poor Princess of Naarn was soft, appealing; a creature of red, moist lips and eyes like stars in the black Egyptian sky. The Songstress of the House' she was called, ere she became Ta-Nezem the Osirian. But I keep you standing here in the cold hall. Come upstairs with me. Did I tell you that Beatrice is not here tonight?"

"No?" His intonation expressed surprise and frank disappointment. "Then I can't say good-by to her? Didn't you receive my note? I'm to take Sanderson's place as manager of the sales department in Chicago, and I'm off tomorrow morning."

"Congratulations. Yes, we had your note, but Beatrice was given an opportunity to join some friends on a Southern trip. The notice was short, but of late she has not been so well and I urged her to go. This November air is cruelly damp and bitter."

"What was it— a yachting cruise?"

"A long cruise. She left this afternoon. I have been sitting in her boudoir, Quentin, thinking of her, and I'll tell you about it there— if you don't mind?"

"Wherever you like," he conceded, though in a tone of some surprise. I suppose he had not credited me with so much sentiment, or thought it odd that I should wish to share it with another, even so good a friend as he. "You must find it fearfully lonesome here without Bee," he continued.

"A trifle." We were ascending the dark stairs now. "After tonight, however, things will be quite different. Do you know that I have sold the house?"

"No! Why, you are full of astonishments, old chap. Found a better place with more space for your tear-jars and tombstones?"

He meant, I assumed, a witty reference to my collection of Coptic and Egyptian treasures, well and dearly bought, but so much trash to a man of Quentin's youth and temperament.

I opened the door of my wife's boudoir, and it was pleasant to pass into such rosy light and warmth out of the stern, dark cold of the hall. Yet it was an old house, full of unexpected drafts. Even here there was a draft so strong that a heavy velour curtain at the far side of the room continually rippled and billowed out, like a loose rose-colored sail. Never far enough, though, to show what was behind it.

My friend settled himself on the frail little chair that stood before my wife's dressing-table. It was the kind of chair that women love and most men loathe, but Quentin, for all his weight and stature, had a touch of the feminine about him, or perhaps of the feline. Like a cat, he moved delicately. He was blond and tall, with fine, regular features, a ready laugh, and the clean charm of youth about him— also its occasional blundering candor.

As I looked at him sitting there, graceful, at ease, I wished that his mind might have shared the litheness of his body. He could have understood me so much better.

"I have indeed found a place for my collections," I observed, seating myself near by. "In fact, with a single exception— the Ta-Nezem sarcophagus— the entire lot is going to the dealers." Seeing his expression of astonished disbelief I continued: "The truth is, my dear Quentin, that J have been guilty of gross injustice to our Beatrice. I have been too good a collector and too neglectful a husband. My 'tear-jars and tombstones,' in fact, have enjoyed an attention that might better have been elsewhere bestowed. Yes, Beatrice has left me alone, but the instant that some few last affairs are settled I intend rejoining her. And you yourself are leaving. At least, none of us three will be left to miss the others' friendship."

"You are quite surprising tonight, Santallos. But, by Jove, I'm not sorry to hear any of it! It's not my place to criticize, and Bee's not the sort to complain. But living here in this lonely old barn of a house, doing all her own work, practically deserted by her friends, must have been— "

"Hard, very hard," I interrupted him softly, "for one so young and lovely as our Beatrice. But if I have been blind at least the awakening has come. You should have seen her face when she heard the news. It was wonderful. We were standing, just she and I, in the midst of my tear-jars and tombstones— my 'chamber of horrors' she named it. You are so apt at amusing phrases, both of you. We stood beside the great stone sarcophagus from the Necropolis of Beni Hassan. Across the trestles beneath it lay the gilded inner case wherein Ta-Nezem the Osirian had slept out so many centuries. You know its appearance. A thing of beautiful, gleaming lines, like the quaint, smiling image of a golden woman.

"Then I lifted the lid and showed Beatrice that the one-time songstress, the handmaiden of Amen, slept there no more, and the case was empty. You know, too, that Beatrice never liked my princess. For a jest she used to declare that she was jealous. Jealous of a woman dead and ugly so many

thousand years! Or— but that was only in anger— that I had bought TaNezem with what would have given her, Beatrice, all the pleasure she lacked in life. Oh, she was not too patient to reproach me, Quentin, but only in anger and hot blood.

"So I showed her the empty case, and I said, 'Beloved wife, never again need you be jealous of Ta-Nezem. All that is in this room save her and her belongings I have sold, but her I could not bear to sell. That which I love, no man else shall share or own. So I have destroyed her. I have rent her body to brown, aromatic shreds. I have burned her; it is as if she had never been. And now, dearest of the dear, you shall take for your own all the care, all the keeping that heretofore I have lavished upon the Princess of Naam."

"Beatrice turned from the empty case as if she could scarcely believe her hearing, but when she saw by the look in my eyes that I meant exactly what I said, neither more nor less, you should have seen her face, my dear Quentin— you should have seen her face!"

"I can imagine." He laughed, rather shortly. For some reason my guest seemed increasingly ill at ease, and glanced continually about the little rose-and-white room that was the one luxurious, thoroughly feminine corner— that and the cold, dark room behind the curtain— in what he had justly called my "barn of a house."

"Santallos," he continued abruptly, and I thought rather rudely, "you should have a portrait done as you look tonight. You might have posed for one of those stern old hidalgos of— which painter was it who did so many Spanish dons and donesses?"

"You perhaps mean Velasquez," I answered with mild courtesy, though secretly and as always his crude personalities displeased me. "My father, you may recall, was of Cordova in southern Spain. But— must you go so soon? First drink one glass with me to our missing Beatrice. See how I was warming my blood against the wind that blows in, even here. The wine is Amontillado, some that was sent me by a friend of my father's from the very vineyards where the grapes were grown and pressed. And for many years it has ripened since it came here. Before she went, Beatrice drank of it from one of these same glasses. True wine of Montilla! See how it lives— like fire in amber, with a glimmer of blood behind it."

I held high the decanter and the light gleamed through it upon his face.

"Amontillado! Isn't that a kind of sherry? I'm no connoisseur of wines, as you know. But-Amontillado."

For a moment he studied the wine I had given him, liquid flame in the crystal glass. Then his face cleared.

"I remember the association now. The Cask of Amontillado.' Ever read the story?"

"I seem to recall it dimly."

"Horrible, fascinating sort of a yarn. A fellow takes his trustful friend down into the cellars to sample some wine, traps him and walls him up in a niche. Buries him alive, you understand. Read it when I was a youngster, and it made a deep impression, partly, I think, because I couldn't for the life of me comprehend a nature— even an Italian nature— desiring so horrible a form of vengeance. You're half Latin yourself, Santallos. Can you elucidate?"

"I doubt if you would ever understand," I responded slowly, wondering how even Quentin could be so crude, so tactless. "Such a revenge might have its merits, since the offender would be a long time dying. But merely to kill seems to me so pitifully inadequate. Now I, if I were driven to revenge, should never be contented by killing. I should wish to follow."

"What— beyond the grave?"

I laughed. "Why not? Wouldn't that be the very apotheosis of hatred? I'm trying to interpret the Latin nature, as you asked me to do."

"Confound you, for an instant I thought you were serious. The way you said it made me actually shiver!"

"Yes," I observed, "or perhaps it was the draft. See, Quentin, how that curtain billows out."

His eyes followed my glance. Continually the heavy, rose-colored curtain that wag hung before the door of my wife's bedroom bulged outward, shook and quivered like a bellying sail, as draperies will with a wind behind them.

His eyes strayed from the curtain, met mine and fell again to the wine in his glass. Suddenly he drained it, not as would a man who was a judge of wines, but hastily, indifferently, without thought for its flavor or bouquet. I raised my glass in the toast he had forgotten.

"To our Beatrice," I said, and drained mine also, though with more appreciation.

"To Beatrice— of course." He looked at the bottom of his empty glass, then before I could offer to refill it, rose from his chair.

"I must go, old man. When you write to Bee, tell her I'm sorry to have missed her."

"Before she could receive a letter from me I shall be with her— I hope. How cold the house is tonight, and the wind breathes everywhere. See how the curtain blows, Quentin."

"So it does." He set his glass on the tray beside the decanter. Upon first entering the room he had been smiling, but now his straight, fine brows were drawn in a perpetual, troubled frown, his eyes looked here and there, and would never meet mine— which were steady. "There's a wind," he added, "that blows along this wall— curious. One can't notice any draft there, either. But it must blow there, and of course the curtain billows out."

"Yes," I said. "Of course it billows out."

"Or is there another door behind that curtain?"

His careful ignorance of what any fool might infer from mere appearance brought an involuntary smile to my lips. Nevertheless, I answered him.

"Yes, of course there is a door. An open door."

His frown deepened. My true and simple replies appeared to cause him a certain irritation.

"As I feel now," I added, "even to cross the room would be an effort. I am tired and weak tonight. As Beatrice once said, my strength beside yours is as a child's to that of a grown man. Won't you close that door for me, dear friend?"

"Why— yes, I will. I didn't know you were ill. If that's the case, you shouldn't be alone in this empty house. Shall I stay with you for a while?"

As he spoke he walked across the room. His hand was on the curtain, but before it could be drawn aside my voice checked him.

"Quentin," I said, "are even you quite strong enough to close that door?"

Looking back at me, chin on shoulder, his face appeared scarcely familiar, so drawn was it in lines of bewilderment and half-suspicion.

"What do you mean? You are very odd tonight. Is the door so heavy then?

What door is it?"

I made no reply.

As if against their owner's will his eyes fled from mine, he turned and hastily pushed aside the heavy drapery.

Behind it my wife's bedroom lay dark and cold, with windows open to the invading winds.

And erect in the doorway, uncovered, stood an ancient gilded coffin-case. It was the golden casket of Ta-Nezem, but its occupant was more beautiful than the poor, shriveled Songstress of Naam.

Bound across her bosom were the strange, quaint jewels which had been found in the sarcophagus. Ta-Nezem's amulets— heads of Hathor and Horus the sacred eye, the uraeus, even the heavy dull-green scarab, the amulet for purity of heart— there they rested upon the bosom of her who had been mistress of my house, now Beatrice the Osirian. Beneath them her white, stiff body was enwrapped in the same crackling dry, brown linen bands, impregnated with the gums and resins of embalmers dead these many thousand years, which had been about the body of Ta-Nezem.

Above the white translucence of her brow appeared the winged disk, emblem of Ra. The twining golden bodies of its supporting uraeii, its cobras of Egypt, were lost in the dusk of her hair, whose soft fineness yet lived and would live so much longer than the flesh of any of us three.

Yes, I had kept my word and given to Beatrice all that had been TaNezem's, even to the sarcophagus itself, for in my will it was written that she be placed in it for final burial.

Like the fool he was, Quentin stood there, staring at the unclosed, frozen eyes of my Beatrice— and his. Stood till that which had been in the wine began to make itself felt. He faced me then, but with so absurd and childish a look of surprise that, despite the courtesy due a guest, I laughed and laughed.

I, too, felt warning throes, but to me the pain was no more than a gage— a measure of his sufferings stimulus to point the phrases in which I told him all I knew and had guessed of him and Beatrice, and thus drive home the jest.

But I had never thought that a man of Quentin's youth and strength could die so easily. Beatrice, frail though she was, had taken longer to die.

He could not even cross the room to stop my laughter, but at the first step stumbled, fell, and in a very little while lay at the foot of the gilded case.

After all, he was not so strong as I. Beatrice had seen. Her still, cold eyes saw all. How he lay there, his fine, lithe body contorted, worthless for any use till its substance should have been cast again in the melting-pot of dissolution, while I who had drunk of the same draft, suffered the same pangs, yet stood and found breath for mockery.

So I poured myself another glass of that good Cordovan wine, and I raised it to both of them and drained it, laughing.

"Quentin," I cried, "you asked what door, though your thought was that you had passed that way before, and feared that I guessed your, knowledge. But there are doors and doors, dear, charming friend, and one that is heavier than any other. Close it if you can. Close it now in my face, who otherwise will follow even whither you have gone— the heavy, heavy door of the Osiris, Keeper of the House of Death!"

Thus I dreamed of doing and speaking. It was so vivid, the dream, that awakening in the darkness of my room I could scarcely believe that it had been other than reality. True, I lived, while in my dream I had shared the avenging poison. Yet my veins were still hot with the keen passion of triumph, and my eyes filled with the vision of Beatrice, dead— dead in TaNezem's casket.

Unreasonably frightened. I sprang from bed, flung on a dressing-gown, and hurried out. Down the hallway I sped, swiftly and silently, at the end of it unlocked heavy doors with a tremulous hand, switched on lights, lights and more lights, till the great room of my collection was ablaze with them, and as my treasures sprang into view I sighed, like a man reaching home from a perilous journey.

The dream was a lie.

There, fronting me, stood the heavy empty sarcophagus; there on the trestles before it lay the gilded case, a thing of beautiful, gleaming lines, like the smiling image of a golden woman.

I stole across the room and softly, very softly, lifted the upper half of the beautiful lid, peering within. The dream indeed was a lie.

Happy as a comforted child I went to my room again. Across the hall the door of my wife's boudoir stood partly open.

In the room beyond a faint light was burning, and I could see the rose-colored curtain sway slightly to a draft from some open window.

Yesterday she had come to me and asked for her freedom. I had refused, knowing to whom she would turn, and hating him for his youth, and his crudeness and his secret scorn of me.

But had I done well? They were children, those two, and despite my dream I was certain that their foolish, youthful ideals had kept them from actual sin against my honor. But what if, time passing, they might change? Or, Quentin gone, my lovely Beatrice might favor another, young as he and not so scrupulous?

Every one, they say, has a streak of incipient madness. I recalled the frenzied act to which my dream jealousy had driven me. Perhaps it was a warning, the dream. What if my father's jealous blood should some day betray me, drive me to the insane destruction of her I held most dear and sacred.

I shuddered, then smiled at the swaying curtain. Beatrice was too beautiful for safety. She should have her freedom.

Let her mate with Ralph Quentin or whom she would, Ta-Nezem must rest secure in her gilded house of death. My brown, perfect, shriveled Princess of the Nile! Destroyed— rent to brown, aromatic shreds— burned— destroyed— and her beautiful coffin-case desecrated as I had seen it in my vision'.

Again I shuddered, smiled and shook my head sadly at the swaying, rosy curtain.

"You are too lovely, Beatrice," I said, "and my father was a Spaniard. You shall have your freedom!"

I entered my room and lay down to sleep again, at peace and content.

The dream, thank God, was a lie.

_____________________

3: Unseen— Unfeared

People's Favorite Magazine, February 10, 1919

I HAD BEEN dining with my ever-interesting friend, Mark Jenkins, at a little Italian restaurant near South Street. It was a chance meeting. Jenkins is too busy, usually, to make dinner engagements. Over our highly seasoned food and sour, thin, red wine, he spoke of little odd incidents and adventures of his profession. Nothing very vital or important, of course. Jenkins is not the sort of detective who first detects and then pours the egotistical and revealing details of achievement in the ears of every acquaintance, however appreciative.

But when I spoke of something I had seen in the morning papers, he laughed. "Poor old 'Doc' Holt! Fascinating old codger, to anyone who really knows him. I've had his friendship for years— since I was first on the city force and saved a young assistant of his from jail on a false charge. And they had to drag him into the poisoning of this young sport, Ralph Peeler!"

"Why are you so sure he couldn't have been implicated?" I asked.

But Jenkins only shook his head, with a quiet smile. "I have reasons for believing otherwise," was all I could get out of him on that score, "But," he added, "the only reason he was suspected at all is the superstitious dread of these ignorant people around him. Can't see why he lives in such a place. I know for a fact he doesn't have to. Doc's got money of his own. He's an amateur chemist and dabbler in different sorts of research work, and I suspect he's been guilty of 'showing off.' Result, they all swear he has the evil eye and holds forbidden communion with invisible powers. Smoke?"

Jenkins offered me one of his invariably good cigars, which I accepted, saying thoughtfully: "A man has no right to trifle with the superstitions of ignorant people. Sooner or later, it spells trouble."

"Did in his case. They swore up and down that he sold love charms openly and poisons secretly, and that, together with his living so near to— somebody else— got him temporarily suspected. But my tongue's running away with me, as usual!"

"As usual," I retorted impatiently, "you open up with all the frankness of a Chinese diplomat."

He beamed upon me engagingly and rose from the table, with a glance at his watch. "Sorry to leave you, Blaisdell, but I have to meet Jimmy Brennan in ten minutes."

He so clearly did not invite my further company that I remained seated for a little while after his departure; then took my own way homeward. Those streets always held for me a certain fascination, particularly at night. They are so unlike the rest of the city, so foreign in appearance, with their little shabby stores, always open until late evening, their unbelievably cheap goods, displayed as much outside the shops as in them, hung on the fronts and laid out on tables by the curb and in the street itself. Tonight, however, neither people nor stores in any sense appealed to me. The mixture of Italians, Jews and a few Negroes, mostly bareheaded, unkempt and generally unhygienic in appearance, struck me as merely revolting. They were all humans, and I, too, was human. Some way I did not like the idea.

Puzzled a trifle, for I am more inclined to sympathize with poverty than accuse it, I watched the faces that I passed. Never before had I observed how bestial, how brutal were the countenances of the dwellers in this region. I actually shuddered when an old-clothes man, a gray-bearded Hebrew, brushed me as he toiled past with his barrow.

There was a sense of evil in the air, a warning of things which it is wise for a clean man to shun and keep clear of. The impression became so strong that before I had walked two squares I began to feel physically ill. Then it occurred to me that the one glass of cheap Chianti I had drunk might have something to do with the feeling. Who knew how that stuff had been manufactured, or whether the juice of the grape entered at all into its ill-flavored composition? Yet I doubted if that were the real cause of my discomfort.

By nature I am rather a sensitive, impressionable sort of chap. In some way tonight this neighborhood, with its sordid sights and smells, had struck me wrong.

My sense of impending evil was merging into actual fear. This would never do. There is only one way to deal with an imaginative temperament like mine— conquer its vagaries. If I left South Street with this nameless dread upon me, I could never pass down it again without a recurrence of the feeling. I should simply have to stay here until I got the better of it— that was all.

I paused on a corner before a shabby but brightly lighted little drug store. Its gleaming windows and the luminous green of its conventional glass show jars made the brightest spot on the block. I realized that I was tired, but hardly wanted to go in there and rest. I knew what the company would be like at its shabby, sticky soda fountain. As I stood there, my eyes fell on a long white canvas sign across from me, and its black-and-red lettering caught my attention.

SEE THE GREAT UNSEEN!

Come in! This Means You!

FREE TO ALL!

A museum of fakes, I thought, but also reflected that if it were a show of some kind I could sit down for a while, rest, and fight off this increasing obsession of nonexistent evil. That side of the street was almost deserted, and the place itself might well be nearly empty.

ii

I walked over, but with every step my sense of dread increased. Dread of I knew not what. Bodiless, inexplicable horror had me as in a net, whose strands, being intangible, without reason for existence, I could by no means throw off. It was not the people now. None of them were about me. There, in the open, lighted street, with no sight nor sound of terror to assail me, I was the shivering victim of such fear as I had never known was possible. Yet still I would not yield.

Setting my teeth, and fighting with myself as with some pet animal gone mad, I forced my steps to slowness and walked along the sidewalk, seeking entrance. Just here there were no shops, but several doors reached in each case by means of a few iron-railed stone steps. I chose the one in the middle beneath the sign. In that neighborhood there are museums, shops and other commercial enterprises conducted in many shabby old residences, such as were these. Behind the glazing of the door I had chosen I could see a dim, pinkish light, but on either side the windows were quite dark.

Trying the door, I found it unlocked. As I opened it a party of Italians passed on the pavement below and I looked back at them over my shoulder. They were gayly dressed, men, women and children, laughing and chattering to one another; probably on their way to some wedding or other festivity.

In passing, one of the men glanced up at me and involuntarily I shuddered back against the door. He was a young man, handsome after the swarthy manner of his race, but never in my life had I see a face so expressive of pure, malicious cruelty, naked and unashamed. Our eyes met and his seemed to light up with a vile gleaming, as if all the wickedness of his nature had come to a focus in the look of concentrated hate he gave me.

They went by, but for some distance I could see him watching me, chin on shoulder, till he and his party were swallowed up in the crowd of marketers farther down the street.

Sick and trembling from that encounter, merely of eyes though it had been, I threw aside my partly smoked cigar and entered. Within there was a small vestibule, whose ancient tesselated floor was grimy with the passing of many feet. I could feel the grit of dirt under my shoes, and it rasped on my rawly quivering nerves. The inner door stood partly open, and going on I found myself in a bare, dirty hallway, and was greeted by the sour, musty, poverty-stricken smell common to dwellings of the very ill-to-do. Beyond there was a stairway, carpeted with ragged grass matting. A gas jet, turned low inside a very dusty pink globe, was the light I had seen from without.

Listening, the house seemed entirely silent. Surely, this was no place of public amusement of any kind whatever. More likely it was a rooming house, and I had, after all, mistaken the entrance.

To my intense relief, since coming inside, the worst agony of my unreasonable terror had passed away. If I could only get in some place where I could sit down and be quiet, probably I should be rid of it for good. Determining to try another entrance, I was about to leave the bare hallway when one of several doors along the side of it suddenly opened and a man stepped out into the hall.

"Well?" he said, looking at me keenly, but with not the least show of surprise at my presence.

"I beg your pardon," I replied. "The door was unlocked and I came in here, thinking it was the entrance to the exhibit— what do they call it? the 'Great Unseen.' The one that is mentioned on that long white sign. Can you tell me which door is the right one?"

"I can."

With that brief answer he stopped and stared at me again. He was a tall, lean man, somewhat stooped, but possessing considerable dignity of bearing. For that neighborhood, he appeared uncommonly well dressed, and his long, smooth-shaven face was noticeable because, while his complexion was dark and his eyes coal-black, above them the heavy brows and his hair were almost silvery-white. His age might have been anything over the threescore mark.

I grew tired of being stared at. "If you can and— won't, then never mind," I observed a trifle irritably, and turned to go. But his sharp exclamation halted me.

"No!" he said. "No— no! Forgive me for pausing— it was not hesitation, I assure you. To think that one— one, even, has come! All day they pass my sign up there— pass and fear to enter. But you are different. You are not of these timorous, ignorant foreign peasants. You ask me to tell you the right door? Here it is! Here!"

And he struck the panel of the door, which he had closed behind him, so that the sharp yet hollow sound of it echoed up through the silent house.

Now it may be thought that after all my senseless terror in the open street, so strange a welcome from so odd a showman would have brought the feeling back, full force. But there is an emotion stronger, to a certain point, than fear. This queer old fellow aroused my curiosity. What kind of museum could it be that he accused the passing public of fearing to enter? Nothing really terrible, surely, or it would have been closed by the police. And normally I am not an unduly timorous person. "So it's in there, is it?" I asked, coming toward him. "And I'm to be sole audience? Come, that will be an interesting experience." I was half laughing now.

"The most interesting in the world," said the old man, with a solemnity which rebuked my lightness.

With that he opened the door, passed inward and closed it again— in my very face. I stood staring at it blankly. The panels, I remember, had been originally painted white, but now the paint was flaked and blistered, gray with dirt and dirty finger marks. Suddenly it occurred to me that I had no wish to enter there. Whatever was behind it could be scarcely worth seeing, or he would not choose such a place for its exhibition. With the old man's vanishing my curiosity had cooled, but just as I again turned to leave, the door opened and this singular showman stuck his white-eyebrowed face through the aperture. He was frowning impatiently. "Come in— come in!" he snapped, and promptly withdrawing his head, once more closed the door.

"He has something there he doesn't want should get out," was the very natural conclusion which I drew. "Well, since it can hardly be anything dangerous, and he's so anxious I should see it— here goes!"

With that I turned the soiled white porcelain handle, and entered.

The room I came into was neither very large nor very brightly lighted. In no way did it resemble a museum or lecture room. On the contrary, it seemed to have been fitted up as a quite well-appointed laboratory. The floor was linoleum-covered, there were glass cases along the walls whose shelves were filled with bottles, specimen jars, graduates, and the like. A large table in one corner bore what looked like some odd sort of camera, and a larger one in the middle of the room was fitted with a long rack filled with bottles and test tubes, and was besides littered with papers, glass slides, and various paraphernalia which my ignorance failed to identify. There were several cases of books, a few plain wooden chairs, and in the corner a large iron sink with running water.

My host of the white hair and black eyes was awaiting me, standing near the larger table. He indicated one of the wooden chairs with a thin forefinger that shook a little, either from age or eagerness. "Sit down— sit down! Have no fear but that you will be interested, my friend. Have no fear at all— of anything!"

As he said it he fixed his dark eyes upon me and stared harder than ever. But the effect of his words was the opposite of their meaning. I did sit down, because my knees gave under me, but if in the outer hall I had lost my terror, it now returned twofold upon me. Out there the light had been faint, dingily roseate, indefinite. By it I had not perceived how this old man's face was a mask of living malice— of cruelty, hate and a certain masterful contempt. Now I knew the meaning of my fear, whose warning I would not heed. Now I knew that I had walked into the very trap from which my abnormal sensitiveness had striven in vain to save me.

iii

AGAIN I STRUGGLED within me, bit at my lip till I tasted blood, and presently the blind paroxysm passed. It must have been longer in going than I thought, and the old man must have all that time been speaking, for when I could once more control my attention, hear and see him, he had taken up a position near the sink, about ten feet away, and was addressing me with a sort of "platform" manner, as if I had been the large audience whose absence he had deplored.

"And so," he was saying, "I was forced to make these plates very carefully, to truly represent the characteristic hues of each separate organism. Now, in color work of every kind the film is necessarily extremely sensitive. Doubtless you are familiar in a general way with the exquisite transparencies produced by color photography of the single-plate type."

He paused, and trying to act like a normal human being, I observed: "I saw some nice landscapes done in that way— last week at an illustrated lecture in Franklin Hall."

He scowled, and made an impatient gesture at me with his hand. "I can proceed better without interruptions," he said. "My pause was purely oratorical."

I meekly subsided, and he went on in his original loud, clear voice. He would have made an excellent lecturer before a much larger audience— if only his voice could have lost that eerie, ringing note. Thinking of that I must have missed some more, and when I caught it again he was saying:

"As I have indicated, the original plate is the final picture. Now, many of these organisms are extremely hard to photograph, and microphotography in color is particularly difficult. In consequence, to spoil a plate tries the patience of the photographer. They are so sensitive that the ordinary darkroom ruby lamp would instantly ruin them, and they must therefore be developed either in darkness or by a special light produced by interposing thin sheets of tissue of a particular shade of green and of yellow between lamp and plate, and even that will often cause ruinous fog. Now I, finding it hard to handle them so, made numerous experiments with a view of discovering some glass or fabric of a color which should add to the safety of the green, without robbing it of all efficiency. All proved equally useless, but intermittently I persevered— until last week."

His voice dropped to an almost confidential tone, and he leaned slightly toward me. I was cold from my neck to my feet, though my head was burning, but I tried to force an appreciative smile.

"Last week," he continued impressively, "I had a prescription filled at the corner drug store. The bottle was sent home to me wrapped in a piece of what I first took to be whitish, slightly opalescent paper. Later I decided that it was some kind of membrane. When I questioned the druggist, seeking its source, he said it was a sheet of 'paper' that was around a bundle of herbs from South America. That he had no more, and doubted if I could trace it. He had wrapped my bottle so, because he was in haste and the sheet was handy.

"I can hardly tell you what first inspired me to try that membrane in my photographic work. It was merely dull white with a faint hint of opalescence, except when held against the light. Then it became quite translucent and quite brightly prismatic. For some reason it occurred to me that this refractive effect might help in breaking up the actinic rays— the rays which affect the sensitive emulsion. So that night I inserted it behind the sheets of green and yellow tissue, next the lamp prepared my trays and chemicals laid my plate holders to hand, turned off the white light and— turned on the green!"

There was nothing in his words to inspire fear. It was a wearisomely detailed account of his struggles with photography. Yet, as he again paused impressively, I wished that he might never speak again. I was desperately, contemptibly in dread of the thing he might say next.

Suddenly, he drew himself erect, the stoop went out of his shoulders, he threw back his head and laughed. It was a hollow sound, as if he laughed into a trumpet. "I won't tell you what I saw! Why should I? Your own eyes shall bear witness. But this much I'll say, so that you may better understand— later. When our poor, faultily sensitive vision can perceive a thing, we say that it is visible. When the nerves of touch can feel it, we say that it is tangible. Yet I tell you there are beings intangible to our physical sense, yet whose presence is felt by the spirit, and invisible to our eyes merely because those organs are not attuned to the light as reflected from their bodies. But light passed through the screen, which we are about to use has a wave length novel to the scientific world, and by it you shall see with the eyes of the flesh that which has been invisible since life began. Have no fear!"

He stopped to laugh again, and his mirth was yellow-toothed— menacing.

"Have no fear!" he reiterated, and with that stretched his hand toward the wall, there came a click and we were in black, impenetrable darkness. I wanted to spring up, to seek the door by which I had entered and rush out of it, but the paralysis of unreasoning terror held me fast.

I could hear him moving about in the darkness, and a moment later a faint green glimmer sprang up in the room. Its source was over the large sink, where I suppose he developed his precious "color plates."

Every instant, as my eyes became accustomed to the dimness, I could see more clearly. Green light is peculiar. It may be far fainter than red, and at the same time far more illuminating. The old man was standing beneath it, and his face by that ghastly radiance had the exact look of a dead man's. Besides this, however, I could observe nothing appalling.

"That," continued the man, "is the simple developing light of which I have spoken— now watch, for what you are about to behold no mortal man but myself has ever seen before."

For a moment he fussed with the green lamp over the sink. It was so constructed that all the direct rays struck downward. He opened a flap at the side, for a moment there was a streak of comforting white luminance from within, then he inserted something, slid it slowly in— and closed the flap.

The thing he put in— that South American "membrane" it must have been— instead of decreasing the light increased it— amazingly. The hue was changed from green to greenish-gray, and the whole room sprang into view, a livid, ghastly chamber, filled with— overcrawled by— what?

My eyes fixed themselves, fascinated, on something that moved by the old man's feet. It writhed there on the floor like a huge, repulsive starfish, an immense, armed, legged thing, that twisted convulsively. It was smooth, as if made of rubber, was whitish-green in color; and presently raised its great round blob of a body on tottering tentacles, crept toward my host and writhed upward— yes, climbed up his legs, his body. And he stood there, erect, arms folded, and stared sternly down at the thing which climbed.

But the room— the whole room was alive with other creatures than that. Everywhere I looked they were— centipedish things, with yard-long bodies, detestable, furry spiders that lurked in shadows, and sausage-shaped translucent horrors that moved— and floated through the air. They dived— here and there between me and the light, and I could see its bright greenness through their greenish bodies.

Worse, though; far worse than these were the things with human faces. Mask-like, monstrous, huge gaping mouths and slit-like eyes— I find I cannot write of them. There was that about them which makes their memory even now intolerable.

The old man was speaking again, and every word echoed in my brain like the ringing of a gong. "Fear nothing! Among such as these do you move every hour of the day and night. Only you and I have seen, for God is merciful and has spared our race from sight. But I am not merciful! I loathe the race which gave these creatures birth— the race which might be so surrounded by invisible, unguessed but blessed beings— and chooses these for its companions! All the world shall see and know. One by one shall they come here, learn the truth, and perish. For who can survive the ultimate of terror? Then I, too, shall find peace, and leave the earth to its heritage of man-created horrors. Do you know what these are— whence they come?"

This voice boomed now like a cathedral bell. I could not answer, him, but he waited for no reply. "Out of the ether— out of the omnipresent ether from whose intangible substance the mind of God made the planets, all living things, and man— man has made these! By his evil thoughts, by his selfish panics, by his lusts and his interminable, never-ending hate he has made them, and they are everywhere! Fear nothing— but see where there comes to you, its creator, the shape and the body of your FEAR!"

And as he said it I perceived a great Thing coming toward me— a Thing— but consciousness could endure no more. The ringing, threatening voice merged in a roar within my ears, there came a merciful dimming of the terrible, lurid vision, and blank nothingness succeeded upon horror too great for bearing.

iv

THERE WAS a dull, heavy pain above my eyes. I knew that they were closed, that I was dreaming, and that the rack full of colored bottles which I seemed to see so clearly was no more than a part of the dream. There was some vague but imperative reason why I should rouse myself. I wanted to awaken, and thought that by staring very hard indeed I could dissolve this foolish vision of blue and yellow-brown bottles. But instead of dissolving they grew clearer, more solid and substantial of appearance, until suddenly the rest of my senses rushed to the support of sight, and I became aware that my eyes were open, the bottles were quite real, and that I was sitting in a chair, fallen sideways so that my cheek rested most uncomfortably on the table which held the rack.

I straightened up slowly and with difficulty, groping in my dulled brain for some clue to my presence in this unfamiliar place, this laboratory that was lighted only by the rays of an arc light in the street outside its three large windows. Here I sat, alone, and if the aching of cramped limbs meant anything, here I had sat for more than a little time.

Then, with the painful shock which accompanies awakening to the knowledge of some great catastrophe, came memory. It was this very room, shown by the street lamp's rays to be empty of life, which I had seen thronged with creatures too loathsome for description. I staggered to my feet, staring fearfully about. There were the glass-floored cases, the bookshelves, the two tables with their burdens, and the long iron sink above which, now only a dark blotch of shadow, hung the lamp from which had emanated that livid, terrifically revealing illumination. Then the experience had been no dream, but a frightful reality. I was alone here now.

With callous indifference my strange host had allowed me to remain for hours unconscious, with not the least effort to aid or revive me. Perhaps, hating me so, he had hoped that I would die there.

At first I made no effort to leave the place. Its appearance filled me with reminiscent loathing. I longed to go, but as yet felt too weak and ill for the effort. Both mentally and physically my condition was deplorable, and for the first time I realized that a shock to the mind may react upon the body as vilely as any debauch of self-indulgence.

Quivering in every nerve and muscle, dizzy with headache and nausea, I dropped back into the chair, hoping that before the old man returned I might recover sufficient self-control to escape him. I knew that he hated me, and why. As I waited, sick, miserable, I understood the man. Shuddering, I recalled the loathsome horrors he had shown me. If the mere desires and emotions of mankind were daily carnified in such forms as those, no wonder that he viewed his fellow beings with detestation and longed only to destroy them.

I thought, too, of the cruel, sensuous faces I had seen in the streets outside— seen for the first time, as if a veil had been withdrawn from eyes hitherto blinded by self-delusion. Fatuously trustful as a month-old puppy, I had lived in a grim, evil world, where goodness is a word and crude selfishness the only actuality. Drearily my thoughts drifted back through my own life, its futile purposes, mistakes and activities. All of evil that I knew returned to overwhelm me. Our gropings toward divinity were a sham, a writhing sunward of slime-covered beasts who claimed sunlight as their heritage, but in their hearts preferred the foul and easy depths.

Even now, though I could neither see nor feel them, this room, the entire world, was acrawl with the beings created by our real natures. I recalled the cringing, contemptible fear to which my spirit had so readily yielded, and the faceless Thing to which the emotion had given birth.

Then abruptly, shockingly, I remembered that every moment I was adding to the horde. Since my mind could conceive only repulsive incubi, and since while I lived I must think, feel, and so continue to shape them, was there no way to check so abominable a succession? My eyes fell on the long shelves with their many-colored bottles. In the chemistry of photography there are deadly poisons— I knew that. Now was the time to end it— now! Let him return and find his desire accomplished. One good thing I could do, if one only. I could abolish my monster-creating self.

v

MY FRIEND Mark Jenkins is an intelligent and usually a very careful man. When he took from "Smiler" Callahan a cigar which had every appearance of being excellent, innocent Havana, the act denoted both intelligence and caution. By very clever work he had traced the poisoning of young Ralph Peeler to Mr. Callahan's door, and he believed this particular cigar to be the mate of one smoked by Peeler just previous to his demise. And if, upon arresting Callahan, he had not confiscated this bit of evidence, it would have doubtless been destroyed by its regrettably unconscientious owner.

But when Jenkins shortly afterward gave me that cigar, as one of his own, he committed one of those almost inconceivable blunders which, I think, are occasionally forced upon clever men to keep them from overweening vanity. Discovering his slight mistake, my detective friend spent the night searching for his unintended victim, myself; and that his search was successful was due to Pietro Marini, a young Italian of Jenkins' acquaintance, whom he met about the hour of 2:00 A.M. returning from a dance.

Now, Marini had seen me standing on the steps of the house where Doctor Frederick Holt had his laboratory and living rooms, and he had stared at me, not with any ill intent, but because he thought I was the sickest-looking, most ghastly specimen of humanity that he had ever beheld. And, sharing the superstition of his South Street neighbors, he wondered if the worthy doctor had poisoned me as well as Peeler. This suspicion he imparted to Jenkins, who, however, had the best of reasons for believing otherwise. Moreover, as he informed Marini, Holt was dead, having drowned himself late the previous afternoon. An hour or so after our talk in the restaurant, news of his suicide reached Jenkins.

It seemed wise to search any place where a very sick-looking young man had been seen to enter, so Jenkins came straight to the laboratory. Across the fronts of those houses was the long sign with its mysterious inscription, "See the Great Unseen," not at all mysterious to the detective. He knew that next door to Doctor Holt's the second floor had been thrown together into a lecture room, where at certain hours a young man employed by settlement workers displayed upon a screen stereopticon views of various deadly bacilli, the germs of diseases appropriate to dirt and indifference. He knew, too, that Doctor Holt himself had helped the educational effort along by providing some really wonderful lantern slides, done by microcolor photography.

On the pavement outside, Jenkins found the two-thirds remnant of a cigar, which he gathered in and came up the steps, a very miserable and self-reproachful detective. Neither outer nor inner door was locked, and in the laboratory he found me, alive, but on the verge of death by another means that he had feared.

In the extreme physical depression following my awakening from drugged sleep, and knowing nothing of its cause, I believed my adventure fact in its entirety. My mentality was at too low an ebb to resist its dreadful suggestion. I was searching among Holt's various bottles when Jenkins burst in. At first I was merely annoyed at the interruption of my purpose, but before the anticlimax of his explanation the mists of obsession drifted away and left me still sick in body, but in spirit happy as any man may well be who has suffered a delusion that the world is wholly bad— and learned that its badness springs from his own poisoned brain.

The malice which I had observed in every face, including young Marini's, existed only in my drug-affected vision. Last week's "popular-science" lecture had been recalled to my subconscious mind— the mind that rules dreams and delirium— by the photographic apparatus in Holt's workroom. "See the Great Unseen" assisted materially, and even the corner drug store before which I had paused, with its green-lit show vases, had doubtless played a part. But presently, following something Jenkins told me, I was driven to one protest. "If Holt was not here," I demanded, "if Holt is dead, as you say, how do you account for the fact that I, who have never seen the man, was able to give you an accurate description which you admit to be that of Doctor Frederick Holt?"

He pointed across the room. "See that?" It was a life-size bust portrait, in crayons, the picture of a white-haired man with bushy eyebrows and the most piercing black eyes I had ever seen— until the previous evening. It hung facing the door and near the windows, and the features stood out with a strangely lifelike appearance in the white rays of the arc lamp just outside. "Upon entering," continued Jenkins, "the first thing you saw was that portrait, and from it your delirium built a living, speaking man. So, there are your white-haired showman, your unnatural fear, your color photography and your pretty green golliwogs all nicely explained for you, Blaisdell, and thank God you're alive to hear the explanation. If you had smoked the whole of that cigar— well, never mind. You didn't. And now, my very dear friend, I think it's high time that you interviewed a real, flesh-and-blood doctor. I'll phone for a taxi."

"Don't," I said. "A walk in the fresh air will do me more good than fifty doctors."

"Fresh air! There's no fresh air on South Street in July," complained Jenkins, but reluctantly yielded.

I had a reason for my preference. I wished to see people, to meet face to face even such stray prowlers as might be about at this hour, nearer sunrise than midnight, and rejoice in the goodness and kindliness of the human countenance— particularly as found in the lower classes.

But even as we were leaving there occurred to me a curious inconsistency.

"Jenkins," I said, "you claim that the reason Holt, when I first met him in the hall, appeared to twice close the door in my face, was because the door never opened until I myself unlatched it."

"Yes," confirmed Jenkins, but he frowned, foreseeing my next question.

"Then why, if it was from that picture that I built so solid, so convincing a vision of the man, did I see Holt in the hall before the door was open?"

"You confuse your memories," retorted Jenkins rather shortly.

"Do I? Holt was dead at that hour, but— I tell you I saw Holt outside the door! And what was his reason for committing suicide?"

Before my friend could reply I was across the room, fumbling in the dusk there at the electric lamp above the sink. I got the tin flap open and pulled out the sliding screen, which consisted of two sheets of glass with fabric between, dark on one side, yellow on the other. With it came the very thing I dreaded— a sheet of whitish, parchment-like, slightly opalescent stuff.

Jenkins was beside me as I held it at arm's length toward the windows. Through it the light of the arc lamp fell— divided into the most astonishingly brilliant rainbow hues. And instead of diminishing the light, it was perceptibly increased in the oddest way. Almost one thought that the sheet itself was luminous, and yet when held in shadow it gave off no light at all.

"Shall we— put it in the lamp again— and try it?" asked Jenkins slowly, and in his voice there was no hint of mockery.

I looked him straight in the eyes. "No," I said, "we won't. I was drugged. Perhaps in that condition I received a merciless revelation of the discovery that caused Holt's suicide, but I don't believe it. Ghost or no ghost, I refuse to ever again believe in the depravity of the human race. If the air and the earth are teeming with invisible horrors, they are not of our making, and— the study of demonology is better let alone. Shall we burn this thing, or tear it up?"

"We have no right to do either," returned Jenkins thoughtfully, "but you know, Blaisdell, there's a little too darn much realism about some parts of your 'dream.' I haven't been smoking any doped cigars; but when you held that up to the light, I'll swear I saw— well, never mind. Burn it— send it back to the place it came from."

"South America?" said I.

"A hotter place than that. Burn it."

So he struck a match and we did. It was gone in one great white flash.

A LARGE place was given by morning papers to the suicide of Doctor Frederick Holt, caused, it was surmised, by mental derangement brought about by his unjust implication in the Peeler murder. It seemed an inadequate reason, since he had never been arrested, but no other was ever discovered.

Of course, our action in destroying that "membrane" was illegal and rather precipitate, but, though he won't talk about it, I know that Jenkins agrees with me— doubt is sometimes better than certainty, and there are marvels better left unproved. Those, for instance, which concern the Powers of Evil.

__________________

4: Elf Trap

Argosy, July 5, 1919

IN THIS our well-advertised, modern world, crammed with engines, death-dealing shells, life-dealing serums, and science, he who listens to "old wives' tales" is counted idle. He who believes them, a superstitious fool. Yet there are some legends which have a strange, deathless habit of recrudescence in many languages and lands.

Of one such I have a story to tell. It was related to me by a well-known specialist in nervous diseases, not as an instance of the possible truth behind fable, but as a curious case in which— I quote his words— "the delusions of a diseased brain were reflected by a second and otherwise sound mentality."

No doubt his view was the right one. And yet, at the finish, I had the strangest flash of feeling. As if, somewhere, some time, I, like young Wharton, had stood and seen against blue sky— Elva, of the sky-hued scarf and the yellow honeysuckles.

But my part is neither to feel nor surmise. I will tell the story as I heard it, save for substitution of fictitious names for the real ones. My quotations from the red notebook are verbatim.

Theron Tademus, A.A.S., F.E.S., D.S., et cetera, occupied the chair of biology in a not-unfamed university. He was the author of a treatise on cytology, since widely used as a textbook, and of several important brochures on the more obscure infusoria. As a boy he had been— in appearance— a romantically charming person. The age of thirty-seven found him still handsome in a cold, fine-drawn manner, but almost inhumanly detached from any save scientific interests.

Then, at the height of his career, he died. Having entered his class-room with intent to deliver the first lecture of the fall term, he walked to his desk, laid down a small, red note-book, turned, opened his mouth, went ghastly white and subsided. His assistant, young Wharton, was first to reach him and first to discover the shocking truth.

Tademus was unmarried, and his will bequeathed all he possessed to the university.

The little red book was not at first regarded as important. Supposed to contain notes for his lecture, it was laid aside. On being at last read, however, by his assistant in course of arranging his papers, the book was found to contain not notes, but a diary covering the summer just passed.

Barring the circumstances of one peculiar incident, Wharton already knew the main facts of that summer.

Tademus, at the insistence of his physician— the specialist aforesaid— had spent July and August in the Carolina Mountains not far north from the famous resort, Asheville. Dr. Locke was friend as well as medical adviser, and he lent his patient the use of a bungalow he owned there.

It was situated in a beautiful, but lonely spot, to which the nearest settlement was Carcassonne. In the valley below stood a tiny railroad station, but Carcassonne was not built up around this, nor was it a town at all in the ordinary sense.

A certain landscape painter had once raised him a house on that mountainside, at a place chosen for its magnificent view. Later, he was wont to invite thither, for summer sketching, one or two of his more favored pupils. Later still, he increased this number. For their accommodation other structures were raised near his mountain studio, and the Blue Ridge summer class became an established fact, with a name of its own and a rather large membership.

Two roads led thither from the valley. One, that most in use by the artist colonists, was as good and broad as any Carolina mountain road could hope to be. The other, a winding, narrow, yellow track, passed the lonely bungalow of Dr. Locke, and at last split into two paths, one of which led on to further heights, the second to Carcassonne.

The distance between colony and bungalow was considerable, and neither was visible to the other. Tademus was not interested in art, and, as disclosed by the red book, he was not even aware of Carcassonne's existence until some days after his arrival at the bungalow.

Solitude, long walks, deep breathing, and abstinence from work or sustained thought had been Dr. Locke's prescription, accepted with seeming meekness by Tademus.

Nevertheless, but a short time passed till Wharton received a telegram from the professor ordering him to pack and send by express certain apparatus, including a microscope and dissecting stand. The assistant obeyed.

Another fortnight and Dr. Locke in turn received an urgent wire. It was from Jake Higgins, the Negro caretaker whom he had "lent" to Tademus along with the bungalow.

Leaving his practice to another man's care, Dr. Locke fled for the Carolina Blue Ridge.

He found his caretaker and his bungalow, but no Tademus.

By Jake's story, the professor had gone to walk one afternoon and had not returned. Having wired Locke, the caretaker had otherwise done his best. He notified the county sheriff, and search parties scoured the mountains. At his appeal, too, the entire Carcassonnian colony, male and female, turned out with enthusiasm to hunt for Tademus. Many of them carried easel and sketch-box along, and for such it is to be feared that their humane search ended with the discovery of any tempting "tit" in the scenic line.

However, the colony's efforts were at least as successful as the sheriff's or indeed those of anyone else.

Shortly before Tademus' vanishment, a band of gypsies had settled themselves in a group of old, empty, half-ruined shacks, about a mile from Locke's bungalow.

Suspicion fell upon them. A posse visited the encampment, searched it and questioned every member of the migrant band. They were a peculiarly ill-favoured set, dirty and villainous of feature. Nothing, however, could be found of either the missing professor or anything belonging to him.

The posse left, after a quarrel that came near to actual fighting. A dog— a wretched, starved yellow cur— had attacked one of the deputies and set its teeth in his boot. He promptly shot it. In their resentment, the dog's owners drew knives.

The posse were more efficiently armed, and under threat of the latter's rifles and shotguns, the gypsies reconsidered. They were warned to pack up and leave, and following a few days' delay, they obeyed the mandate.

On the very morning of their departure, which was also the eighth day after Tademus' disappearance, Dr. Locke sat down gloomily to breakfast. The search, he thought, must be further extended. Let it cover the whole Blue Ridge, if need be. Somewhere in those mountains was a friend and patient whom he did not propose to lose.

At one side of the breakfast room was a door. It led into the cleared-out bedroom which Locke had, with indignation, discovered to have been converted into a laboratory by the patient he had sent here to "rest."

Suddenly this door opened. Out walked Theron Tademus.

He seemed greatly amazed to find Locke there, and said that he had come in shortly after midnight and been in his laboratory ever since.

Questioned as to his whereabouts before that, he replied surprisingly that throughout the week he had been visiting with friends in Carcassonne.

Dr. Locke doubted his statement. And reasonably.

Artists are not necessarily liars, and every artist and near-artist in the Carcassonne colony had not only denied knowledge of the professor, but spent a good part of the week helping hunt for him.

Later, after insisting that Locke accompany him to Carcassonne and meet his friends there, Tademus suddenly admitted that he had not previously been near the place. He declined, however, either to explain his untruthful first statement, or give any other account of his mysterious absence.

One week ago Tademus had left the bungalow, carrying nothing but a light cane, and wearing a white flannel suit, canvas shoes, and a Panama. That was his idea of a tramping costume. He had returned, dressed in the same suit, hat and shoes. Moreover, though white, they looked neat as when he started, save for a few grass stains and the road's inevitable yellow clay about his shoe-soles.

If he had spent the week vagrant-wise, he had been remarkably successful in keeping his clothes clean.

"Asheville," thought the doctor. "He went by train, stopped at a hotel, and has returned without the faintest memory of his real doings. Lame, overtaxed nerves can play that sort of trick with a man's brain."

But he kept the opinion to himself. Like a good doctor, he soon dropped the whole subject, particularly because he saw that Tademus was deeply distressed and trying to conceal the fact.

On plea of taking a long-delayed vacation of his own, Locke remained some time at the bungalow, guarded his friend from the curiosity of those who had combed the hills for him, and did all in his power to restore him to health and a clear brain.

He was so far successful that Tademus returned to his classes in the fall, with Locke's consent.

To his classes— and death.

WHARTON had known all this. He knew that Tademus' whereabouts during that mysterious week had never been learned. But the diary in the red book purported to cover the summer, including that week.

To Wharton, the record seemed so supremely curious that he took a liberty with what was now the university's property. He carried the book to Dr. Locke.

It was evening, and the latter was about to retire after a day's work that began before dawn.

"Personal, you say?" Locke handled the book, frowning slightly.

"Personal. But I feel— when you've finished reading that. I have a rather queer thing to tell you in addition. You can't understand till you've read it. I am almost sure that what is described here has a secret bearing on Professor Tademus' death."

"His heart failed. Overwork. There was no mystery in that."

"Maybe not, doctor. And yet— won't you please read?"

"Run through it aloud for me," said the doctor. "I couldn't read one of my own prescriptions tonight, and you are more familiar with that microscopic writing of his."

Wharton complied.

Monday, July 3.

Arrived yesterday. Not worse than expected, but bad enough. If Locke were here, he should be satisfied. I have absolutely no occupation. Walked and climbed for two hours, as prescribed. Spent the rest of day pacing up and down indoors. Enough walking, at least. I can't sit idle. I can't stop thinking. Locke is a fool!

Thursday, July 6.

Telegraphed Wharton today. He will express me the Swift binocular, some slides, cover-glasses, and a very little other apparatus. Locke is a fool! I shall follow his advice, but within reason. There is a room here lighted by five windows. Old Jake has cleared the bedroom furniture out. It has qualities as a laboratory. Not, of course, that I intend doing any real work. An hour or so a day of micrological observation will only make "resting" tolerable.

Tuesday, July 11.

Jake hitched up his "ol' gray mule" and has brought my three cases from the station' I unpacked the old Stephenson-Swift and set it up. The mere touch of it brought tears to my eyes. Locke's "rest-cure" has done that to my nerves!

After unpacking, though, I resolutely let the microscope and other things be. Walked ten miles up-hill and down. Tried to admire the landscape, as Locke advised, but can't see much in it. Rocks, trees, lumpy hills, yellow roads, sky, clouds, buzzards. Beauty! What beauty is there in this vast, clumsy world that is the outer husk for nature's real and delicate triumphs?

I saw a man painting today. He was swabbing at a canvas with huge, clumsy brushes. He had his easel set up by the road, and I stopped to see what any human being could find hereabout worth picturing.

And what had this painter, this artist, this lover of beauty chosen for a subject? Why, about a mile from here there is a clump of ugly, dark trees. A stream runs between them and the road. It is yellow with clay, and too swift. The more interesting microorganisms could not exist in it. A ramshackle, plank bridge crosses it, leading to the grove, and there, between the trees, stand and lean some dreary, half-ruined huts.

That scene was the one which my "artist" had chosen for his subject.

For sheer curiosity I got into conversation with the fellow.

Unusual gibberish of chiaroscuro, flat tones, masses, et cetera. Not a definite thought in his head as to why he wished to paint those shacks. I learned one thing, though. He wasn't the isolated specimen of his kind I had thought him. Locke failed to tell me about Carcassonne. Think of it! Nearly a hundred of these insane pursuers of "beauty" are spending the summer within walking distance of the house I have promised to live in!

And the one who was painting the grove actually invited me to call on him!

I smiled noncommittally, and came home. On the way I passed the branch road that leads to the place. I had always avoided that road, but I didn't know why until today. Imagine it! Nearly a hundred. Some of them women, I suppose. No, I shall keep discreetly away from Carcassonne.

Saturday, July 15.

Jake informs me that a band of gypsies have settled themselves in the grove which my Carcassonnian acquaintance chose to paint. They are living in the ruined huts. Now I shall avoid that road, too. Talk of solitude! Why, the hills are fairly swarming with artists, gypsies, and Lord knows who else. One might as well try to rest in a beehive!

Found some interesting variations of the ciliara living in a near-by pond. Wonderful! Have recorded over a dozen specimens in which the macronucleus is unquestionably double. Not lobed, not pulverate, as in Oxytricha, but double! My summer has not, after all, been wasted.

Felt singularly slack and tired this morning, and realized that I have hardly been out of the house in three days. Shall certainly take a long tramp tomorrow.

Monday, July 17.

Absent-mindedness betrayed me today. I had a very unpleasant experience. Resolutely keeping my promise to Locke, I sallied forth this afternoon and walked briskly for some distance. I had, however, forgotten the gypsies and took my old route.

Soon I met a woman, or rather a girl. She was arrayed in the tattered, brilliantly colored garments which women of these wandering tribes affect. There was a scarf about her head. I noticed because its blue was exactly the same brilliant hue of the sky over the mountains behind her. There was a stripe of yellow in it, too, and thrust in her sash she carried a great bunch of yellow flowers— wild honeysuckle, I think.

Her face was not dark, like the swart faces of most gypsies. On the contrary, the skin of it had a smooth, firm whiteness. Her features were fine and delicate.

Passing, we looked at one another, and I saw her eyes brighten in the strangest, most beautiful manner. I am sure that there was nothing bold or immodest in her glance. It was rather like the look of a person who recognizes an old acquaintance, and is glad of it. Yet we never met before. Had we met, I could not have forgotten her.

We passed without speaking, of course, and I walked on.

Meeting the girl, I had hardly thought of her as a gypsy, or indeed tried to classify her in any way. The impression she left was new in my experience. It was only on reaching the grove that I came to myself, as it were, and remembered Jake's story of the gypsies who are camping there.

Then I very quickly emerged from the vague, absurd happiness which sight of the girl had brought.

While talking with my Carcassonnian, I had observed that grove rather carefully. I had thought it perfect— that nothing added could increase the somber ugliness of its trees, nor the desolation of its gray, ruined, tumbledown old huts.

Today I learned better. To be perfect, ugliness must include sordid humanity.

The shacks, dreary in themselves, were hideous now. In their doorways lounged fat, unclean women nursing their filthy offspring. Older children, clothed in rags, caked with dirt, sprawled and fought among themselves. Their voices were the snarls of animals.

I realized that the girl with the sky-like scarf had come from here— out of this filth unspeakable!

A yellow cur, the mere, starved skeleton of a dog, came tearing down to the bridge. A rusty, jangling bell was tied about its neck with a string. The beast stopped on the far side and crouched there, yapping. Its anger seemed to surpass mere canine savagery. The lean jaws fairly writhed in maniacal but loathsomely feeble ferocity.

A few men, whiskered, dirty-faced, were gathered about a sort of forge erected in the grove. They were making something, beating it with hammers in the midst of showers of sparks. As the dog yapped, one of the men turned and saw me. He spoke to his mates, and to my dismay they stopped work and transferred their attention to me.

I was afraid that they would cross the bridge, and the idea of having to talk to them was for some reason inexpressibly revolting.

They stayed where they were, but one of them suddenly laughed out loudly, and held up to my view the thing upon which they had been hammering.

It was a great, clumsy, rough, iron trap. Even at that distance I could see the huge, jagged teeth, fit to maim a bear— or a man. It was the ugliest instrument I have ever seen.

I turned away and began walking toward home, and when I looked back they were at work again.

The sun shone brightly, but about the grove there seemed to be a queer darkness. It was like a place alone and aloof from the world. The trees, even, were different from the other mountain trees. Their heavy branches did not stir at all in the wind. They had a strange, dark, flat look against the sky, as though they had been cut from dark paper, or rather like the flat trees woven in a tapestry. That was it. The whole scene was like a flat, dark, unreal picture in tapestry.

I came straight home. My nerves are undoubtedly in bad shape, and I think I shall write Locke and ask him to prescribe medicine that will straighten me up. So far, his "rest-cure" has not been notably successful.

Wednesday, July 19.

I have met her again.

Last night I could not sleep at all. Round midnight I ceased trying, rose, dressed, and spent the rest of the night with the good old Stephenson Swift. My light for night-work— a common oil lamp— is not very brilliant. This morning I suffered considerable pain behind the eyes, and determined to give Locke's "walking and open air" treatment another trial, though discouraged by previous results.

This time I remembered to turn my back on the road which leads to that hideous grove. The sunlight seemed to increase the pain I was already suffering. The air was hot, full of dust, and I had to walk slowly. At the slightest increase of pace my heart would set up a kind of fluttering, very unpleasant and giving me a sense of suffocation.

Then I came to the girl.

She was seated on a rock, her lap heaped with wild honeysuckle, and she was weaving the flower stems together.

Seeing me, she smiled.

"I have your garland finished," she said, "and mine soon will be."

One would have thought the rock a trysting place at which we had for a long time been accustomed to meet! In her hand she was extending to me a wreath, made of the honeysuckle flowers.

I can't imagine what made me act as I did. Weariness and the pain behind my eyes may have robbed me of my usual good sense.

Anyway, rather to my own surprise, I took her absurd wreath and sat down where she made room for me on the boulder.

After that we talked.

At this moment, only a few hours later, I couldn't say whether or not the girl's English was correct, nor exactly what she said. But I can remember the very sound of her voice.

I recall, too, that she told me her name Elva, and that when I asked for the rest of it, she informed me that one good name was enough for one good person.

That struck me as a charmingly humorous sally. I laughed like a boy— or a fool, God knows which!

Soon she had finished her second garland, and laughingly insisted that we each crown the other with flowers.

Imagine it. Had one of my students come by then, I am sure he would have been greatly startled. Professor Theron Tademus, seated on a rock with a gypsy girl, crowned with wild honeysuckle and adjusting a similar wreath to the girl's blue-scarfed head!

Luckily, neither the student nor anyone else passed, and in a few minutes she said something that brought me to my senses. Due to that inexplicable dimness of memory, I quote the sense, not her words.

"My father is a ruler among our people. You must visit us. For my sake, the people and my father will make you welcome."

She spoke with the gracious air of a princess, but I rose hastily from beside her. A vision of the grove had returned— dark, oppressive— like an old, dark tapestry, woven with the ugly forms and foliage. I remembered the horrible, filthy tribe from which this girl had sprung.

Without a word of farewell, I left her there on the rock. I did not look back, nor did she call after me. Not until reaching home, when I met old Jake at the door and saw him stare, did I remember the honeysuckle wreath. I was still wearing it, and carrying my hat.

Snatching at the flowers, I flung them in the ditch and retreated with what dignity I might into the bungalow's seclusion.

It is night now, and, a little while since, I went out again. The wreath is here in the room with me. The flowers were unsoiled by the ditch, and seem fresh as when she gave them to me. They are more fragrant than I had thought even wild honeysuckle could be.

Elva. Elva of the sky-blue scarf and the yellow honeysuckle

My eyes are heavy, but the pain behind them is gone. I think I shall sleep tonight.

Friday, July 21.

Is there any man so gullible as he who prides himself on his accuracy of observation?

I ask this in humility, for I am that man.

Yesterday I rose, feeling fresher than for weeks past. After all, Locke's treatment seemed worthy of respect. With that in mind, I put in only a few hours staining some of my binucleate cilia and finishing the slides.

All the last part of the afternoon I faithfully tramped the roads. There is undoubtedly a sort of broad, coarse charm in mere landscape, with its reaches of green, its distant purples, and the sky like a blue scarf flung over it all. Had the pain of my eyes not returned, I could almost have enjoyed those vistas.

Having walked farther than usual, it was deep dusk when I reached home. As if from ambush, a little figure dashed out from behind some rhododendrons. It seemed to be a child, a boy, though I couldn't see him clearly, nor how he was dressed.

He thrust something into my hand. To my astonishment, the thing was a spray of wild honeysuckle.

"Elva - Elva - Elva!"

The strange youngster was fairly dancing up and down before me, repeating the girl's name and nothing else.

Recovering myself, I surmised that Elva must have sent this boy, and sure enough, at my insistence he managed to stop prancing long enough to deliver her message.

Elva's grandmother, he said, was very ill. She had been ailing for days, but tonight the sickness was worse— much worse. Elva feared that her grandmother would die, and, "of course," the boy said, "no doctor will come for our sending!" She had remembered me, as the only friend she knew among the "outside people." Wouldn't I come and look at her poor, sick grandmother? And if I had any of the outside people's medicine in my house, would I please bring that with me?

Well, yes, I did hesitate. Aside from practical and obvious suspicions, I was possessed with a senseless horror for not only the gypsy tribe, but the grove itself.

But there was the spray of honeysuckle. In her need, she had sent that for a token— and sent it to me! Elva, of the sky-like scarf and laughing mouth.

"Wait here," I said to the boy, rather brusquely, and entered the house. I had remembered a pocket-case of simple remedies, none of which I had ever used, but there was a direction pamphlet with them. If I must play amateur physician, that might help. I looked for Jake, meaning to inform him of my proposed expedition. Though he had left a chicken broiling on the kitchen range, he was not about. He might have gone to the spring for water.

Passing out again, I called the boy, but received no answer. It was very dark. Toward sunset, the sky had clouded over, so that now I had not even the benefit of starlight.

I was angry with the boy for not waiting, but the road was familiar enough, even in the dark. At least, I thought it was, till, colliding with a clump of holly. I realized that I must have strayed off and across a bare stretch of yellow clay which defaces the Mountainside above Locke's bungalow.

I looked back for the guiding lights of its windows, but the trees hid them. However, the road couldn't be far off. After some stumbling about, I was sure that my feet were in the right track again. Somewhat later I perceived a faint, ruddy point of light, to the left and ahead of me.

As I walked toward it, the rapid rush and gurgle of water soon apprized me that I had reached the stream with the plank bridge across it.

There I stood for several minutes, staring toward the ruddy light. That was all I could see. It seemed, somehow, to cast no illumination about it.

There came a scamper of paws, the tinkle of a bell, and then a wild yapping broke out on the stream's far side. That vile, yellow cur, I thought. Elva, having imposed on my kindness to the extent of sending for me, might at least have arranged a better welcome than this.

When I pictured her, crouched in her bright, summer-colored garments, tending the dreadful old hag that her grandmother must be. The rest of the tribe were probably indifferent. She could not desert her sick— and there stood I, hesitant as any other coward!

For the dog's sake I took a firm grip on my cane. Feeling about with it, I found the bridge and crossed over.

Instantly something flung itself against my legs and was gone before I could hit out. I heard the dog leaping and barking all around me. It suddenly struck me that the beast's voice was not like that of the yellow cur. There was nothing savage in it. This was the cheerful, excited bark of a well-bred dog that welcomes its master, or its master's friend. And the bell that tinkled to every leap had a sweet, silvery note, different from the cracked jangle of the cur's bell.

I had hated and loathed that yellow brute, and to think that I need not combat the creature was a relief. The huts, as I recalled them, weren't fifty yards beyond the stream. There was no sign of a campfire. Just that one ruddy point of light.

I advanced —

WHARTON paused suddenly in his reading. "Here," he interpolated, "begins that part of the diary which passed from commonplace to amazing. And the queer part is that in writing it, Professor Tademus seems to have been unaware that he was describing anything but an unusually pleasant experience."

Dr. Locke's heavy brows knit in a frown. "Pleasant!" he snapped. "The date of that entry?"

"July twenty-one.

"The day he disappeared. I see. Pleasant! And that gypsy girl— faugh! What an adventure for such a man! No wonder he tried to lie out of it. I don't think I care to hear the rest, Wharton. Whatever it is, my friend is dead. Let him rest."

"Oh, but wait," cried the young man, with startled earnestness. "Good Lord, doctor, do you believe I would bring this book even to you if it contained that kind of story— about Professor Tademus? No. Its amazing quality is along different lines than you can possibly suspect."

"Get on, then," grumbled Locke, and Wharton continued.

SUDDENLY, as though at a signal, not one, but a myriad of lights blazed into existence.

It was like walking out of a dark closet into broad day. The first dazzlement passing, I perceived that instead of the somber grove and ruined huts, I was facing a group of very beautiful houses.

It is curious how a previous and false assumption— will rule a man. Having believed myself at the gypsy encampment, several minutes passed before I could overcome my bewilderment and realize that after losing my road I had not actually regained it.

That I had somehow wandered into the other branch road, and reached, not the grove, but Carcassonne!

I had no idea, either, that this artists' colony could be such a really beautiful place. It is cut by no streets. The houses are set here and there over the surface of such green lawns as I have never seen in these mountains of rock and yellow clay.

(DR. LOCKE started slightly in his chair. Carcassonne, as he had himself seen it, flashed before his memory. He did not interrupt, but from that moment his attention was alertly set, like a man who listens for the key word of a riddle.)

Everywhere were lights, hung in the flowering branches of trees, glowing upward from the grass, blazing from every door and window. Why they should have been turned on so abruptly, after that first darkness, I do not yet know.

Out of the nearest house a girl came walking. She was dressed charmingly,

in thin, bright-colored silks. A bunch of wild honeysuckle was thrust in the girdle, and over her hair was flung a scarf of sky-like blue. I knew her instantly, and began to see a glimmering of the joke that had been played on me.

The dog bounded toward the girl. He was a magnificent collie. A tiny silver bell was attached to his neck by a broad ribbon.

I take credit for considerable aplomb in my immediate behavior. The girl had stopped a little way off. She was laughing, but I had certainly allowed myself to be victimized.

On my accusation, she at once admitted to having deceived me. She explained that, perceiving me to be misled by her appearance into thinking her one of the gypsies, she could not resist carrying out the joke. She had sent her small brother with the token and message.

I replied that the boy deserted me, and that I had nearly invaded the camp of real gypsies while looking for her and the fictitious dying grandmother.

At this she appeared even more greatly amused. Elva's mirth has a peculiarly contagious quality. Instead of being angry, I found myself laughing with her.

By this time quite a throng of people had emerged on the lawns, and leading me to a dignified, fine-looking old man who she said was her father, she presented me. In the moment, I hardly noticed that she used my first name only, Theron, which I had told her when we sat on the roadside boulder. I have observed since that all these people use the single name only, in presentation and intercourse. Though lacking personal experience with artists, I have heard that they are inclined to peculiar "fads" of unconventionality. I had never, however, imagined that they could be attractive to a man like myself, or pleasant to know.

I am enlightened. These Carcassonnian "colonists" are the only charming, altogether delightful people whom I have ever met.

One and all, they seemed acquainted with Elva's amusing jest at my expense. They laughed with us, but in recompense have made me one of themselves in the pleasantest manner.

I dined in the house of Elva's father. The dining-room, or rather hall, is a wonderful place. Due to much microscopic work, I am inclined to see only clumsiness— largeness— in what other people characterize as beauty. Carcassonne is different. There is a minute perfection about the

architecture of these artists' houses, the texture of their clothes, and even the delicate contour of their faces, which I find amazingly agreeable.

There is no conventionality of costume among them. Both men and women dress as they please. Their individual taste is exquisite, and the result is an array of soft fabrics, and bright colors, flowerlike, rather than garish.

Till last night I never learned the charm of what is called "fancy dress," nor the genial effect it may exert on even a rather somber nature, such as I admit mine to be.

Elva, full of good-natured mischief, insisted that I must "dress for dinner." Her demand was instantly backed by the whole laughing throng. Carried off my feet in a way to which I am not at all used, I let them drape me in white robes, laced with silver embroideries like the delicate crystallization of hoarfrost. Dragged hilariously before a mirror, I was amazed at the change in my appearance.

Unlike the black, scarlet-hooded gown of my university, these glittering robes lent me not dignity, but a kind of— I can only call it a noble youthfulness. I looked younger, and at the same time keener— more alive. And either the contagious spirit of my companions, or some resurgence of boyishness filled me with a sudden desire to please; to be merry with the merry-makers, and— I must be frank— particularly to keep Elva's attention where it seemed temporarily fixed— on myself.

My success was unexpectedly brilliant. There is something in the very atmosphere of Carcassonne which, once yielded to, exhilarates like wine. I have never danced, nor desired to learn. Last night, after a banquet so perfect that I hardly recall its details, I danced. I danced with Elva— and with Elva— and always with Elva. She laughed aside all other partners. We danced on no polished floors, but out on the green lawns, under white, laughing stars. Our music was not orchestral. Wherever the light-footed couples chose to circle, there followed a young flutist, piping on his flute of white ivory.

Fluttering wings, driving clouds, wind tossed leaves— all the light, swift things of the air were in that music. It lifted and carried one with it. One did not need to learn. One danced! It seems, as I write, that the flute's piping is still in my ears, and that its echoes will never cease. Elva's voice is like the ivory flute's. Last night I was mad with the music and her voice. We danced— I know not how long, nor when we ceased.

This morning I awakened in a gold-and-ivory room, with round windows that were full of blue sky and crossed by blossoming branches. Dimly I recalled that Elva's father had urged me to accept his hospitality for the night.

Too much of such new happiness may have gone to my head, I'm afraid. At least, it was nothing stronger. At dinner I drank only one glass of wine― sparkling, golden stuff, but mild and with a taste like the fragrance of Elva's wild honeysuckle blooms.

It is midmorning now, and I am writing this seated on a marble bench beside a pool in the central court of my host's house. I am waiting for Elva, who excused herself to attend to some duty or other. I found this book in my pocket, and thought best to make an immediate record of not only a good joke on myself, but the only really pleasant social experience I have ever enjoyed.

I must lay aside these fanciful white robes, bid Elva good-by, and return to my lonely bungalow and Jake. The poor old man is probably tearing his hair over my unexplained absence. But I hope for another invitation to Carcassonne!

Saturday, July 22.

I seem to be "staying on" indefinitely. This won't do. I spoke to Elva of my extended visit, and she laughingly informed me that people who have drunk the wine and worn the woven robes of Carcassonne seldom wish to leave. She suggested that I give up trying to "escape" and spend my life here. Jest, of course; but I half wished her words were earnest. She and her people are spoiling me for the common, workaday world.

Not that they are idle, but their occupations as well as pleasures are of a delicate, fascinating beauty.

Whole families are stopping here, including the children. I don't care for children, as a rule, but these are harmless as butterflies. I met Elva's messenger, her brother. He is a funny, dear little elf. How even in the dark I fancied him one of those gypsy brats is hard to conceive. But then I took Elva herself for a gypsy!

My new friends engage in many pursuits besides painting. "Crafts," I believe they are called. This morning Elva took me around the shops— shops like architectural blossoms, carved out of the finest marble.

They make jewelry, weave fabrics, tool leather, and follow many other interesting occupations. Set in the midst of the lawns is a forge. Every part of it, even to the iron anvil, is embellished with a fernlike inlay of other metals. Several amateur silversmiths were at work there, but Elva hurried me away before I could see what they were about.

I have inquired for the young painter who first told me of Carcassonne and invited me to visit him there. I can't recall his name, but on describing him to Elva she replied vaguely that not every "outsider" was permanently welcome among her people.

I didn't press the question. Remembering the ugliness which that same painter had been committing to canvas, I could understand that his welcome among these exquisite workers might be short-lived. He was probably banished, or banished himself, soon after our interview on the road.

I must be careful, lest I wear out my own welcome. Yet the very thought of that old, rough, husk of a world that I must return to, brings back the sickness, and the pain behind my eyes that I had almost forgotten.

Sunday, July 23.

Elva! Her presence alone is delight. The sky is not bluer than her scarf and eyes. Sunlight is a duller gold than the wild honeysuckle she weaves in garlands for our heads.

Today, like child sweethearts, we carved our names on the smooth trunk of a tree. "Elva— Theron." And a wreath to shut them in. I am happy. Why— why, indeed should I leave Carcassonne?

Monday, July 24.

Still here, but this is the last night that I shall impose upon these regally hospitable people. An incident occurred today, pathetic from one viewpoint, outrageous from another. I was asleep when it happened, and only woke up at the sound of the gunshot.

Some rough young mountaineers rode into Carcassonne and wantonly killed Elva's collie dog. They claimed, I believe, that the unlucky animal attacked one of their number. A lie! The dog was gentle as a kitten. He probably leaped and barked around their horses and annoyed the young brutes. They had ridden off before I reached the scene.

Elva was crying, and no wonder. They had blown her pet's head clean off with a shotgun. Don't know what will be done about it. I wanted to go straight to the county sheriff, but Elva wouldn't have that. I pretended to give in but if her father doesn't see to the punishment of those men, I will.

Murderous devils! Elva is too forgiving.

Wednesday, July 26.

I watched the silversmiths today. Elva was not with me. I had no idea that silver was worked like iron. They must use some peculiar amalgam, or it would melt in the furnace, Instead of emerging white-hot, to be beaten with tiny, delicate hammers.

They were making a strange looking contraption. It was all silver, beaten into floral patterns, but the general shape was a riddle to me. Finally I asked one of the smiths what they were about. He is a tall fellow, with a merry, dark face.

"Guess!" he demanded.

"Can't. To my ignorance, it resembles a Chinese puzzle.'

"Something more curious than that."

"What?"

"An— elf-trap!" He laughed mischievously.

"Please!"

"Well, it's a trap anyway. See this?" The others had stepped back good-naturedly. With his hammer he pressed on a lever. Instantly two slender, jaw-like parts of the queer machine opened wide. They were set with needle-like points, or teeth. It was all red-hot, and when he removed his hammer the jaws clashed in a shower of sparks.

"It's a trap, of course." I was still puzzled.

"Yes, and a very remarkable one. This trap will not only catch, but it will recatch."

"I don't understand."

"If any creature, man, say— " he was laughing again-"walks into this trap, he may escape it. But sooner or later— soon, I should think— it will catch him again. That is why we call it an elf-trap!"

I perceived suddenly that he was making pure game of me. His mates were all laughing at the nonsense. I moved off, not offended, but perturbed in another way.

He and his absurd silver trap-toy had reminded me of the gypsies. What a horrible, rough iron thing that was which they had held up to me from their forge. Men capable of creating such an uncouthly cruel instrument as that jag toothed trap would be terrible to meet in the night. And I had come near blundering in among them— at night!

This won't do. I have been happy. Don't let me drop back into the morbidly nervous condition which invested those gypsies with more than human horror. Elva is calling me. I have been too long alone.

Friday, July 28.

Home again. I am writing this in my bungalow-laboratory. Gray dawn is breaking, and I have been at work here since midnight. Feel strangely depressed. Need breakfast, probably.

Last night Elva and I were together in the court of her father's house. The pool in the center of it is lighted from below to a golden glow. We were watching the goldfish, with their wide, filmy tails of living lace.

Suddenly I gave a sharp cry. I had seen a thing in the water more important than goldfish. Snatching out the small collecting bottle, without which I never go abroad, I made a quick pass at the pool's glowing surface.

Elva had started back, rather frightened.

"What is it?"

I held the bottle up and peered closely. There was no mistake.

"Dysteria," I said triumphantly. "Dysteria ciliata. Dysterius giganticus, to give a unique specimen the separate name he deserves. Why, Elva, this enormous creature will give me a new insight on his entire species!"

"What enormous creature?"

For the first time I saw Elva nearly petulant. But I was filled with enthusiasm. I let her look in the bottle.

"There!" I ejaculated. "See him?"

"Where? I can't see anything but water— and a tiny speck in it."

"That," I explained proudly, "is dysterius giganticus. Large enough to be seen by the naked eye. Why, child, he's a monster of his kind. A freshwater variety, too!"

I thrust the bottle in my pocket.

"Where are you going?"

"Home, of course. I can't get this fellow under the microscope any too quickly."

I had forgotten how wide apart are the scientific and artistic temperaments. No explanation I could make would persuade Elva that my remarkable capture was worth walking a mile to examine properly.

"You are all alike!" she cried. "All! You talk of love, but your love is for gold, or freedom, or some pitiful foolish nothingness like that speck of life you call by a long name— and leave me for!"

"But," I protested, "only for a little while. I shall come back."

She shook her head. This was Elva in a new mood, dark brows drawn, laughing mouth drooped to a sullen curve. I felt sorry to leave her angry, but my visit had already been preposterously long. Besides, a rush of desire had swept me to get back to my natural surroundings. I wanted the feel of the micrometer adjuster in my fingers, and to see the round, speckled white field under the lens pass from blurred chaos to perfect definition.

She let me go at last. I promised solemnly to come to her whenever she should send or call. Foolish child! Why, I can walk over to Carcassonne every day, if she likes.

I hear Jake rattling about in the breakfast-room. Conscience informs me that I have treated him rather badly. Wonder where he thought I was? Couldn't have been much worried, or he would have hunted me up in Carcassonne.

August 30.

I shall not make any further entries in this book. My day for the making of records is over, I think. Any sort of records. I go back to my classes next month. God knows what I shall say to them! Elva.

I may as well finish the story here.

Every day I find it harder to recall the details. If I hadn't this book, with what I wrote in it when I was— when I was there, I should believe that my brain had failed in earnest.

Locke said I couldn't have been in Carcassonne. He stood in the breakfast room, with the sunlight striking across him. I saw him clearly. I saw the huge, coarse, ugly creature that he was. And in that minute, I knew.

But I wouldn't admit it, even to myself. I made him go with me to Carcassonne. There was no stream. There was no bridge.

The houses were wretched bungalows, set about on the bare, flat, yellow clay of the Mountainside. The people— artists, save the mark!— were a common, carelessly dressed, painting-aproned crowd who fulfilled my original idea of an artists colony.

Their coarse features and thick skins sickened me. Locke walked home beside me, very silent. I could hardly bear his company.

He was gross— coarse— human!

Toward evening, managing to escape his company, I stole up the road to the gypsy's grove. The huts were empty. That queer look, as of a flat, dark tapestry, was gone from the grove.

I crossed the plank bridge. Among the trees I found ashes, and a depression where the forge had stood. Something else, too. A dog, or rather its unburied remains. The yellow cur. Its head had been blown off by a shotgun. An ugly little bell lay in the mess, tied to a piece of string.

One of the trees— it had a smooth trunk— and carved in the bark— I can't write it. I went away and left those two names carved there.

The wild honeysuckle has almost ceased to bloom. I can leave now. Locke says I am well, and that I can return to my classes.

I have not entered my laboratory since that morning. Locke admires my "willpower" for dropping all that till physical health should have returned. Will-power! I shall never, as long as I live, look into a microscope again.

Perhaps she will know that somehow, and send or call for me quickly.

I have drunk the wine and worn the woven robes of her people. They made me one of them. Is it right that they should cast me out, because I did not understand what I have since guessed the meaning of so well?

I can't bear the human folk about me. They are clumsy, revolting. And I can't work.

God only knows what I shall say to my classes.

Here is the end of my last record— till she calls!

THERE WAS silence in Locke's private study. At last the doctor expelled his breath in a long sigh. He might have been holding it all the time.

"Great-Heavens!" he ejaculated. "Poor old Tademus! And I thought his trouble in the summer there was a temporary lapse. But he talked like a sane man. Acted like one, too, by Jove! With his mind in that condition! And in spite of the posse, he must have been with the gypsies all that week. You can see it. Even through his delusions, you catch occasional notes of reality.

"I heard of that dog-shooting, and he speaks of being asleep when it happened. Where was he concealed that the posse didn't find him? Drugged and hidden under some filthy heap of rags in one of the huts, do you think? And why hide him at all, and then let him go? He returned the very day they left."

At the volley of questions, Wharton shook his head.

"I can't even guess about that. He was certainly among the gypsies. But as for his delusions, to call them so, there is a kind of beauty and coherence about them which I— well, which I don't like!"

The doctor eyed him sharply.

"You can't mean that you―"

"Doctor," said Wharton softly, "do you recall what he wrote of the silversmiths and their work? They were making an elf-trap. Well, I think the elf-trap— caught him!"

"What?"

Locke's tired eyes opened wide. A look of alarm flashed into them. The alarm was for Wharton, not himself.

"Wait!" said the latter. "I haven't finished. You know that I was in the classroom at the moment when Professor Tademus died?"

"Yes?"

"Yes! I was the first to reach him. But before that, I stood near the desk. There are three windows at the foot of that room. Every other man there faced the desk. I faced the windows. The professor entered, laid down his book and turned to the class. As he did so, a head appeared in one of those windows. They are close to the ground, and a person standing outside could easily look in.

"The head was a woman's. No, I am not inventing this. I saw her head, draped in a blue scarf. I noticed, because the scarf's blueness gave me the strangest thrill of delight. It was the exact blue of the sky behind it. Then she had raised her hand. I saw it. In her fingers was a spray of yellow flowers— yellow as sunshine. She waved them in a beckoning motion. Like this.

"Then Tademus dropped.

"And there are legends, you know, of strange people, either more or less than human, who appear as gypsies, but are not the real gypsies, that possess queer powers. Their outer appearance is rough and vile, but behind that, as a veil, they live a wonderful hidden life of their own.

"And a man who has been with them once is caught— caught in the real elf-trap, which the smiths' work only symbolized. He may escape, but he can't forget nor be joined again with his own race, while to return among them, he must walk the dark road that Tademus had taken when she called.

"Oh, I've scoffed at 'old wives' tales' with the rest of our overeducated, modern kind. I can't ever scoff again, you see, because—

"What's that? A prescription? For me? Why, doctor, you don't yet understand. I saw her, I tell you. Elva! Elva! Elva, of the wild honeysuckle and the sky-like scarf!"

____________________

5: Friend Island

All-Story Weekly, September 7, 1918

IT WAS UPON the waterfront that I first met her, in one of the shabby little tea shops frequented by able sailoresses of the poorer type. The uptown, glittering resorts of the Lady Aviators' Union were not for such as she.

Stern of feature, bronzed by wind and sun, her age could only be guessed, but I surmised at once that in her I beheld a survivor of the age of turbines and oil engines—a true sea-woman of that elder time when woman's superiority to man had not been so long recognized. When, to emphasize their victory, women in all ranks were sterner than today's need demands.

The spruce, smiling young maidens—engine-women and stokers of the great aluminum rollers, but despite their profession, very neat in gold-braided blue knickers and boleros—these looked askance at the hard-faced relic of a harsher day, as they passed in and out of the shop.

I, however, brazenly ignoring similar glances at myself, a mere male intruding on the haunts of the world's ruling sex, drew a chair up beside the veteran. I ordered a full pot of tea, two cups and a plate of macaroons, and put on my most ingratiating air. Possibly my unconcealed admiration and interest were wiles not exercised in vain. Or the macaroons and tea, both excellent, may have loosened the old sea-woman's tongue. At any rate, under cautious questioning, she had soon launched upon a series of reminiscences well beyond my hopes for color and variety.

"When I was a lass," quoth the sea-woman, after a time, "there was none of this high-flying, gilt-edged, leather-stocking luxury about the sea. We sailed by the power of our oil and gasoline. If they failed on us, like as not 'twas the rubber ring and the rolling wave for ours."

She referred to the archaic practice of placing a pneumatic affair called a life-preserver beneath the arms, in case of that dreaded disaster, now so unheard of, shipwreck.

"In them days there was still many a man bold enough to join our crews. And I've knowed cases," she added condescendingly, "where just by the muscle and brawn of such men some poor sailor lass has reached shore alive that would have fed the sharks without 'em. Oh, I ain't so down on men as you might think. It's the spoiling of them that I don't hold with. There's too much preached nowadays that man is fit for nothing but to fetch and carry and do nurse-work in big child-homes. To my mind, a man who hasn't the nerve of a woman ain't fitted to father children, let alone raise 'em. But that's not here nor there. My time's past, and I know it, or I wouldn't be setting here gossipin' to you, my lad, over an empty teapot."

I took the hint, and with our cups replenished, she bit thoughtfully into her fourteenth macaroon and continued.

"There's one voyage I'm not likely to forget, though I live to be as old as Cap'n Mary Barnacle, of the Shouter. 'Twas aboard the old Shouter that this here voyage occurred, and it was her last and likewise Cap'n Mary's. Cap'n Mary, she was then that decrepit, it seemed a mercy that she should go to her rest, and in good salt water at that.

"I remember the voyage for Cap'n Mary's sake, but most I remember it because 'twas then that I come the nighest in my life to committin' matrimony. For a man, the man had nerve; he was nearer bein' companionable than any other man I ever seed; and if it hadn't been for just one little event that showed up the—the mannishness of him, in a way I couldn't abide, I reckon he'd be keepin' house for me this minute."

"We cleared from Frisco with a cargo of silkateen petticoats for Brisbane. Cap'n Mary was always strong on petticoats. Leather breeches or even half-skirts would ha' paid far better, they being more in demand like, but Cap'n Mary was three-quarters owner, and says she, land women should buy petticoats, and if they didn't it wouldn't be the Lord's fault nor hers for not providing 'em.

"We cleared on a fine day, which is an all sign—or was, then when the weather and the seas o' God still counted in the trafficking of the humankind. Not two days out we met a whirling, mucking bouncer of a gale that well nigh threw the old Shouter a full point off her course in the first wallop. She was a stout craft, though. None of your featherweight, gas-lightened, paper-thin alloy shells, but toughened aluminum from stern to stern. Her turbine drove her through the combers at a forty-five knot clip, which named her a speedy craft for a freighter in them days.

"But this night, as we tore along through the creaming green billows, something unknown went 'way wrong down below.

"I was forward under the shelter of her long over-sloop, looking for a hairpin I'd dropped somewheres about that afternoon. It was a gold hairpin, and gold still being mighty scarce when I was a girl, a course I valued it. But suddenly I felt the old Shouter give a jump under my feet like a plane struck by a shell in full flight. Then she trembled all over for a full second, frightened like. Then, with the crash of doomsday ringing in my ears, I felt myself sailing through the air right into the teeth o' the shrieking gale, as near as I could judge. Down I come in the hollow of a monstrous big wave, and as my ears doused under I thought I heard a splash close by. Coming up, sure enough, there close by me was floating a new, patent, hermetic, thermo-ice-chest. Being as it was empty, and being as it was shut up air-tight, that ice-chest made as sweet a life-preserver as a woman could wish in such an hour. About ten foot by twelve, it floated high in the raging sea. Out on its top I scrambled, and hanging on by a handle I looked expectant for some of my poor fellow-women to come floating by. Which they never did, for the good reason that the Shouter had blowed up and went below, petticoats, Cap'n Mary and all."

"What caused the explosion?" I inquired.

"The Lord and Cap'n Mary Barnacle can explain," she answered piously. "Besides the oil for her turbines, she carried a power of gasoline for her alternative engines, and likely 'twas the cause of her ending so sudden like. Anyways, all I ever seen of her again was the empty ice-chest that Providence had well-nigh hove upon my head. On that I sat and floated, and floated and sat some more, till by-and-by the storm sort of blowed itself out, the sun come shining—this was next morning—and I could dry my hair and look about me. I was a young lass, then, and not bad to look upon. I didn't want to die, any more than you that's sitting there this minute. So I up and prays for land. Sure enough toward evening a speck heaves up low down on the horizon. At first I took it for a gas liner, but later found it was just a little island, all alone by itself in the great Pacific Ocean.

"Come, now, here's luck, thinks I, and with that I deserts the ice-chest, which being empty, and me having no ice to put in it, not likely to have in them latitudes, is of no further use to me. Striking out I swum a mile or so and set foot on dry land for the first time in nigh three days.

"Pretty land it were, too, though bare of human life as an iceberg in the Arctic.

"I had landed on a shining white beach that run up to a grove of lovely, waving palm trees. Above them I could see the slopes of a hill so high and green it reminded me of my own old home, up near Couquomgomoc Lake in Maine. The whole place just seemed to smile and smile at me. The palms waved and bowed in the sweet breeze, like they wanted to say, 'Just set right down and make yourself to home. We've been waiting a long time for you to come.' I cried, I was that happy to be made welcome. I was a young lass then, and sensitive-like to how folks treated me. You're laughing now, but wait and see if or not there was sense to the way I felt.

"So I up and dries my clothes and my long, soft hair again, which was well worth drying, for I had far more of it than now. After that I walked along a piece, until there was a sweet little path meandering away into the wild woods.

"Here, thinks I, this looks like inhabitants. Be they civil or wild, I wonder? But after traveling the path a piece, lo and behold it ended sudden like in a wide circle of green grass, with a little spring of clear water. And the first thing I noticed was a slab of white board nailed to a palm tree close to the spring. Right off I took a long drink, for you better believe I was thirsty, and then I went to look at this board. It had evidently been tore off the side of a wooden packing box, and the letters was roughly printed in lead pencil.

"'Heaven help whoever you be,' I read. 'This island ain't just right. I'm going to swim for it. You better too. Good-by. Nelson Smith.' That's what it said, but the spellin' was simply awful. It all looked quite new and recent, as if Nelson Smith hadn't more than a few hours before he wrote and nailed it there.

"Well, after reading that queer warning I begun to shake all over like in a chill. Yes, I shook like I had the ague, though the hot tropic sun was burning down right on me and that alarming board. What had scared Nelson Smith so much that he had swum to get away? I looked all around real cautious and careful, but not a single frightening thing could I behold. And the palms and the green grass and the flowers still smiled that peaceful and friendly like. 'Just make yourself to home,' was wrote all over the place in plainer letters than those sprawly lead pencil ones on the board.

"Pretty soon, what with the quiet and all, the chill left me. Then I thought, 'Well, to be sure, this Smith person was just an ordinary man, I reckon, and likely he got nervous of being so alone. Likely he just fancied things which was really not. It's a pity he drowned himself before I come, though likely I'd have found him poor company. By his record I judge him a man of but common education.'

"So I decided to make the most of my welcome, and that I did for weeks to come. Right near the spring was a cave, dry as a biscuit box, with a nice floor of white sand. Nelson had lived there too, for there was a litter of stuff—tin cans—empty—scraps of newspapers and the like. I got to calling him Nelson in my mind, and then Nelly, and wondering if he was dark or fair, and how he come to be cast away there all alone, and what was the strange events that drove him to his end. I cleaned out the cave, though. He had devoured all his tin-canned provisions, however he come by them, but this I didn't mind. That there island was a generous body. Green milk-coconuts, sweet berries, turtle eggs and the like was my daily fare.

"For about three weeks the sun shone every day, the birds sang and the monkeys chattered. We was all one big, happy family, and the more I explored that island the better I liked the company I was keeping. The land was about ten miles from beach to beach, and never a foot of it that wasn't sweet and clean as a private park.

"From the top of the hill I could see the ocean, miles and miles of blue water, with never a sign of a gas liner, or even a little government running-boat. Them running-boats used to go most everywhere to keep the seaways clean of derelicts and the like. But I knowed that if this island was no more than a hundred miles off the regular courses of navigation, it might be many a long day before I'd be rescued. The top of the hill, as I found when first I climbed up there, was a wore-out crater. So I knowed that the island was one of them volcanic ones you run across so many of in the seas between Capricorn and Cancer.

"Here and there on the slopes and down through the jungly tree-growth, I would come on great lumps of rock, and these must have came up out of that crater long ago. If there was lava it was so old it had been covered up entire with green growing stuff. You couldn't have found it without a spade, which I didn't have nor want."

"Well, at first I was happy as the hours was long. I wandered and clambered and waded and swum, and combed my long hair on the beach, having fortunately not lost my side-combs nor the rest of my gold hairpins. But by-and-by it begun to get just a bit lonesome. Funny thing, that's a feeling that, once it starts, it gets worse and worser so quick it's perfectly surprising. And right then was when the days begun to get gloomy. We had a long, sickly hot spell, like I never seen before on an ocean island. There was dull clouds across the sun from morn to night. Even the little monkeys and parrakeets, that had seemed so gay, moped and drowsed like they was sick. All one day I cried, and let the rain soak me through and through—that was the first rain we had—and I didn't get thorough dried even during the night, though I slept in my cave. Next morning I got up mad as thunder at myself and all the world.

"When I looked out the black clouds was billowing across the sky. I could hear nothing but great breakers roaring in on the beaches, and the wild wind raving through the lashing palms.

"As I stood there a nasty little wet monkey dropped from a branch almost on my head. I grabbed a pebble and slung it at him real vicious. 'Get away, you dirty little brute!' I shrieks, and with that there come a awful blinding flare of light. There was a long, crackling noise like a bunch of Chinese fireworks, and then a sound as if a whole fleet of Shouters had all went up together.

"When I come to, I found myself 'way in the back of my cave, trying to dig further into the rock with my finger nails. Upon taking thought, it come to me that what had occurred was just a lightning-clap, and going to look, sure enough there lay a big palm tree right across the glade. It was all busted and split open by the lightning, and the little monkey was under it, for I could see his tail and his hind legs sticking out.

"Now, when I set eyes on that poor, crushed little beast I'd been so mean to, I was terrible ashamed. I sat down on the smashed tree and considered and considered. How thankful I had ought to have been. Here I had a lovely, plenteous island, with food and water to my taste, when it might have been a barren, starvation rock that was my lot. And so, thinking, a sort of gradual peaceful feeling stole over me. I got cheerfuller and cheerfuller, till I could have sang and danced for joy.

"Pretty soon I realized that the sun was shining bright for the first time that week. The wind had stopped hollering, and the waves had died to just a singing murmur on the beach. It seemed kind o' strange, this sudden peace, like the cheer in my own heart after its rage and storm. I rose up, feeling sort of queer, and went to look if the little monkey had came alive again, though that was a fool thing, seeing he was laying all crushed up and very dead. I buried him under a tree root, and as I did it a conviction come to me.

"I didn't hardly question that conviction at all. Somehow, living there alone so long, perhaps my natural womanly intuition was stronger than ever before or since, and so I knowed. Then I went and pulled poor Nelson Smith's board off from the tree and tossed it away for the tide to carry off. That there board was an insult to my island!"

The sea-woman paused, and her eyes had a far-away look. It seemed as if I and perhaps even the macaroons and tea were quite forgotten.

"Why did you think that?" I asked, to bring her back. "How could an island be insulted?"

She started, passed her hand across her eyes, and hastily poured another cup of tea.

"Because," she said at last, poising a macaroon in mid-air, "because that island—that particular island that I had landed on—had a heart!

"When I was gay, it was bright and cheerful. It was glad when I come, and it treated me right until I got that grouchy it had to mope from sympathy. It loved me like a friend. When I flung a rock at that poor little drenched monkey critter, it backed up my act with an anger like the wrath o' God, and killed its own child to please me! But it got right cheery the minute I seen the wrongness of my ways. Nelson Smith had no business to say, 'This island ain't just right,' for it was a righter place than ever I seen elsewhere. When I cast away that lying board, all the birds begun to sing like mad. The green milk-coconuts fell right and left. Only the monkeys seemed kind o' sad like still, and no wonder. You see, their own mother, the island, had rounded on one o' them for my sake!

"After that I was right careful and considerate. I named the island Anita, not knowing her right name, or if she had any. Anita was a pretty name, and it sounded kind of South Sea like. Anita and me got along real well together from that day on. It was some strain to be always gay and singing around like a dear duck of a canary bird, but I done my best. Still, for all the love and gratitude I bore Anita, the company of an island, however sympathetic, ain't quite enough for a human being. I still got lonesome, and there was even days when I couldn't keep the clouds clear out of the sky, though I will say we had no more tornadoes.

"I think the island understood and tried to help me with all the bounty and good cheer the poor thing possessed. None the less my heart give a wonderful big leap when one day I seen a blot on the horizon. It drawed nearer and nearer, until at last I could make out its nature."

"A ship, of course," said I, "and were you rescued?"

"'Tweren't a ship, neither," denied the sea-woman somewhat impatiently. "Can't you let me spin this yarn without no more remarks and fool questions? This thing what was bearing down so fast with the incoming tide was neither more nor less than another island!

"You may well look startled. I was startled myself. Much more so than you, likely. I didn't know then what you, with your book-learning, very likely know now—that islands sometimes float. Their underparts being a tangled-up mess of roots and old vines that new stuff's growed over, they sometimes break away from the mainland in a brisk gale and go off for a voyage, calm as a old-fashioned, eight-funnel steamer. This one was uncommon large, being as much as two miles, maybe, from shore to shore. It had its palm trees and its live things, just like my own Anita, and I've sometimes wondered if this drifting piece hadn't really been a part of my island once—just its daughter like, as you might say.

"Be that, however, as it might be, no sooner did the floating piece get within hailing distance than I hears a human holler and there was a man dancing up and down on the shore like he was plumb crazy. Next minute he had plunged into the narrow strip of water between us and in a few minutes had swum to where I stood.

"Yes, of course it was none other than Nelson Smith!

"I knowed that the minute I set eyes on him. He had the very look of not having no better sense than the man what wrote that board and then nearly committed suicide trying to get away from the best island in all the oceans. Glad enough he was to get back, though, for the coconuts was running very short on the floater what had rescued him, and the turtle eggs wasn't worth mentioning. Being short of grub is the surest way I know to cure a man's fear of the unknown."

"Well, to make a long story short, Nelson Smith told me he was a aeronauter. In them days to be an aeronauter was not the same as to be an aviatress is now. There was dangers in the air, and dangers in the sea, and he had met with both. His gas tank had leaked and he had dropped into the water close by Anita. A case or two of provisions was all he could save from the total wreck.

"Now, as you might guess, I was crazy enough to find out what had scared this Nelson Smith into trying to swim the Pacific. He told me a story that seemed to fit pretty well with mine, only when it come to the scary part he shut up like a clam, that aggravating way some men have. I give it up at last for just man-foolishness, and we begun to scheme to get away.

"Anita moped some while we talked it over. I realized how she must be feeling, so I explained to her that it was right needful for us to get with our kind again. If we stayed with her we should probably quarrel like cats, and maybe even kill each other out of pure human cussedness. She cheered up considerable after that, and even, I thought, got a little anxious to have us leave. At any rate, when we begun to provision up the little floater, which we had anchored to the big island by a cable of twisted bark, the green nuts fell all over the ground, and Nelson found more turtle nests in a day than I had in weeks.

"During them days I really got fond of Nelson Smith. He was a companionable body, and brave, or he wouldn't have been a professional aeronauter, a job that was rightly thought tough enough for a woman, let alone a man. Though he was not so well educated as me, at least he was quiet and modest about what he did know, not like some men, boasting most where there is least to brag of.

"Indeed, I misdoubt if Nelson and me would not have quit the sea and the air together and set up housekeeping in some quiet little town up in New England, maybe, after we had got away, if it had not been for what happened when we went. I never, let me say, was so deceived in any man before nor since. The thing taught me a lesson and I never was fooled again.

"We was all ready to go, and then one morning, like a parting gift from Anita, come a soft and favoring wind. Nelson and I run down the beach together, for we didn't want our floater to blow off and leave us. As we was running, our arms full of coconuts, Nelson Smith, stubbed his bare toe on a sharp rock, and down he went. I hadn't noticed, and was going on.

"But sudden the ground begun to shake under my feet, and the air was full of a queer, grinding, groaning sound, like the very earth was in pain.

"I turned around sharp. There sat Nelson, holding his bleeding toe in both fists and giving vent to such awful words as no decent sea-going lady would ever speak nor hear to!

"'Stop it, stop it!' I shrieked at him, but 'twas too late.

"Island or no island, Anita was a lady, too! She had a gentle heart, but she knowed how to behave when she was insulted.

"With one terrible, great roar a spout of smoke and flame belched up out o' the heart of Anita's crater hill a full mile into the air!

"I guess Nelson stopped swearing. He couldn't have heard himself, anyways. Anita was talking now with tongues of flame and such roars as would have bespoke the raging protest of a continent.

"I grabbed that fool man by the hand and run him down to the water. We had to swim good and hard to catch up with our only hope, the floater. No bark rope could hold her against the stiff breeze that was now blowing, and she had broke her cable. By the time we scrambled aboard great rocks was falling right and left. We couldn't see each other for a while for the clouds of fine gray ash.

"It seemed like Anita was that mad she was flinging stones after us, and truly I believe that such was her intention. I didn't blame her, neither!

"Lucky for us the wind was strong and we was soon out of range.

"'So!' says I to Nelson, after I'd got most of the ashes out of my mouth, and shook my hair clear of cinders. 'So, that was the reason you up and left sudden when you was there before! You aggravated that island till the poor thing druv you out!'

"'Well,' says he, and not so meek as I'd have admired to see him, 'how could I know the darn island was a lady?'

"'Actions speak louder than words,' says I. 'You should have knowed it by her ladylike behavior!'

"'Is volcanoes and slingin' hot rocks ladylike?' he says. 'Is snakes ladylike? T'other time I cut my thumb on a tin can, I cussed a little bit. Say—just a li'l' bit! An' what comes at me out o' all the caves, and out o' every crack in the rocks, and out o' the very spring o' water where I'd been drinkin'? Why snakes! Snakes, if you please, big, little, green, red and sky-blue-scarlet! What'd I do? Jumped in the water, of course. Why wouldn't I? I'd ruther swim and drown than be stung or swallowed to death. But how was I t' know the snakes come outta the rocks because I cussed?'

"'You, couldn't,' I agrees, sarcastic. 'Some folks never knows a lady till she up and whangs 'em over the head with a brick. A real, gentle, kind-like warning, them snakes were, which you would not heed! Take shame to yourself, Nelly,' says I, right stern, 'that a decent little island like Anita can't associate with you peaceable, but you must hurt her sacredest feelings with language no lady would stand by to hear!'

"I never did see Anita again. She may have blew herself right out of the ocean in her just wrath at the vulgar, disgustin' language of Nelson Smith. I don't know. We was took off the floater at last, and I lost track of Nelson just as quick as I could when we was landed at Frisco.

"He had taught me a lesson. A man is just full of mannishness, and the best of 'em ain't good enough for a lady to sacrifice her sensibilities to put up with.

"Nelson Smith, he seemed to feel real bad when he learned I was not for him, and then he apologized. But apologies weren't no use to me. I could never abide him, after the way he went and talked right in the presence of me and my poor, sweet lady friend, Anita!"

NOW I am well versed in the lore of the sea in all ages. Through mists of time I have enviously eyed wild voyagings of sea rovers who roved and spun their yarns before the stronger sex came into its own, and ousted man from his heroic pedestal. I have followed— across the printed page— the wanderings of Odysseus. Before Gulliver I have burned the incense of tranced attention; and with reverent awe considered the history of one Munchausen, a baron. But alas, these were only men!

In what field is not woman our subtle superior?

Meekly I bowed my head, and when my eyes dared lift again, the ancient mariness had departed, leaving me to sorrow for my surpassed and outdone idols. Also with a bill for macaroons and tea of such incredible proportions that in comparison therewith I found it easy to believe her story!

___________________

6: The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar

(as by G. M. Barrows)

Argosy March 1904

Text and page images provided by "Granny Grump", of MobileReads forum. This seems to be Francis Stevens' first story.

I CAME BACK into conscious existence with a sighing in my ears like the deep breathing of a great monster; it was everywhere, pervading space, filling my mind to the exclusion of thought.

Just a sound— regular, even soothing in its nature— but it seemed to bear some weird significance to my clouded brain. That was thought trying to force its way in.

Then waves and waves of whispering that washed all thought away— till I grasped again at some confused and wandering idea.

It was the definite sensation of a cool, firm hand laid on my brow that lifted me up at last through that surging ocean of sighs. As a diver from the depths I came up— up— and emerged suddenly, it seemed, into the world.

I opened my eyes wide and looked straight up into the face of a man. A man— but everything was swimming before my eyes, and at first his face seemed no more than part of a lingering dream.

And fantastic visions of the Orient! What a face! It was wrinkled as finely as the palm of a woman’s hand, and in as many directions.

It was yellow in hue, and round like a baby’s. And the eyes were narrow, and black, and they slanted, shining like a squirrel’s.

I thought that of them at first; but sometimes when you just happened to look at him, they seemed to have widened and to be possessed of strange depths and hues.

In height he was not more than four feet five, and, of all contrasts, this little, weazened curiosity with the countenance of a Chinese god was clad in the very careful and appropriate afternoon attire of a very careful and appropriate American gentleman!

The long sighing was still in my ears, but no longer at war with thought. I lay in a neat white bedstead in a plainly furnished room. I lifted my hand (it took an astonishing effort to do it), rubbed my eyes, and stared at the man who sat beside me.

His expression was kind, and in spite of its ugliness there was something in the strange face which encouraged me to friendliness.

“What— what’s the matter with me?” I asked, and I was surprised to note the question was a mere whisper.

“Nothing now, except that you are very weak.”

His voice was full, strong, and of a peculiar resonant quality. He spoke perfect English, with a kind of clear cut clip to the words.

“You had an accident— an automobile went over you— but you’re all right now, and don’t need to think about it.”

“What is it— that whispering noise? Are we near the sea?”

He smiled and shook his head. His smile merely accentuated the wrinkles—it could not multiply them.

“You are very near my laboratory— that is all. Here, drink this, and then you must rest.”

I obeyed him meekly, like a child, weak of mind and body.

I wondered a little why I was with him instead of at a hospital or with friends, but I soon dropped off. I was really quite weak just then.

Yet before I slept I did ask one more question.

“Would you tell me— if you don’t mind— your name?”

“Lawrence.”

“Lawrence what?” I whispered. “Just—?”

“Yes,” he smiled (and his face ran into a very tempest of wrinkles) “just Lawrence. No more.”

Then I slept.

And I did little but sleep, and wake, and eat, and sleep again, for some five days. And during this time I learned marvelously little of my host and his manner of life.

Most questions he evaded cleverly, but he told me that it was his auto which had nearly ruined my earthly tenement; Lawrence had himself taken me from the scene of the accident with out waiting for an ambulance, telling the police and bystanders that I was an acquaintance. He had carried me to his own house, because, he said, he felt somewhat responsible for my injuries and wanted to give me a better chance for my life than the doctors would allow me.

He seemed to be possessed of a great scorn for all doctors. I knew long after that he had studied the profession very thoroughly, and in many countries, and truly held the right to the title he contemptuously denied himself.

At the time I considered only that he had cured me up in wonderfully short order, considering the extent of the injuries I had received, and that I had suffered not at all. Therefore I was grateful.

Also he told me, on I forget what occasion, that his mother was a Japanese woman of very ancient descent, his father a scholarly and rather wealthy American. And for some eccentric reason of his own, his dwarfed son had chosen to eschew his family patronymic and use merely his Christian name.

During the time I lay in bed I saw no servants; Lawrence did all things necessary. And never, day or night, did the humming and sighing of the machines cease.

Lawrence spoke vaguely of great dynamos, but on this subject, as on most others, he was very reticent. Frequently I saw him in the dress of a mechanic, for he would come in to see me at all hours of the day, and I imagine must have inconvenienced himself considerably for my welfare.

I had no particular friends to worry about my whereabouts, and so I lay quiet and at peace with the world for those five days in inert contentment.

Then an hour came— it was in the morning, and Lawrence had left me to go to his laboratory— when I became suddenly savagely impatient of the dull round. Weak though I was, I determined to dress and get out into the open air— out into the world.

Mind you, during those five days I had seen no face save that of my dwarfed host, heard no voice but his. And so my impatience overcame my good judgment and his counsels, and l declared to myself that I was well enough to join once more in the rush of life.

Slowly, and with trembling limbs that belied that assertion, I got into my clothes. Very slowly— though in foolish terror lest Lawrence should catch me putting aside his mandates— I hurried my toilet as best I could.

At last I stood, clothed and in my right mind, as I told myself, though I had already begun to regret my sudden resolve.

I opened the door and looked into the bare, narrow hall. No one in sight, up or down.

I made my way, supporting myself, truth to tell, by the wall, toward a door at the far end, which stood slightly ajar.

I had almost reached it when I heard a terrible screaming. It was harsh, rough, tense with some awful agony, and to my startled senses preeminently human.

I stopped, shaking from head to foot with the shock. Then I flung myself on the door, from behind which the noise seemed to issue. It was not locked, and I plunged almost headlong into a great room, shadowy with whirring machinery under great arc lights.

Before a long table, loaded with retorts and the paraphernalia of the laboratory, stood Lawrence. His back was toward me, but he had turned his head angrily at my sudden entrance, and his queer, narrow eyes were blazing with annoyance.

In the room were two or three other men, evidently common mechanics. and none save Lawrence had more than glanced round. The screaming had ceased.

“Well?” his voice was little better than a snarl.

“That— that noise!” I gasped, already wondering if I had not made a fool of myself. “What was it?”

“Eh? Oh, that was nothing— the machinery— why are you—”

He was interrupted by a crash and splash from the far end of the place, followed by an exclamation of terror and horror, and a nice collection of French and English oaths from the men.

Lawrence had been holding in his hand while he spoke to me what looked like a peculiar piece of metal. It was cylindrical in shape, and little shades of color played over its surface continually.

Now he thrust this into my hands with a muttered injunction to be careful of it, and rushed off to the scene of the catastrophe. I followed him, at my best pace, with the thing in my hand.

At the end of the room were two immense vats of enameled iron, their edges flush with the floor, half filled with some livid, seething acid mixture, through which little currents writhed and wriggled.

The farther side of the largest vat sloped up at an angle of about thirty degrees, a smooth, slimy slide of zinc about ten feet from top to bottom and extending the full length of the vat.

The surface of this slide was covered to about half an inch in thickness with some kind of yellowish paste, whose ultimate destination was the mixture in the vat.

Above towered an engine of many wheels and pistons, and this operated two great pestles or stamps, slant-faced to fit the slide; these, running from one end of the zinc to the other, worked the paste with a grinding motion, as an artist mixes his paints with a palette knife.

The grinding motion was quite swift, but the lateral movement was comparatively slow. I should say that it must have taken about four minutes for the two stamps to pass from one end of the fifteen-foot vat to the other.

In the vat floated a plank. On the surface of the slide, almost in the middle, sprawled a man, his arms spread out on either side, not daring to move an inch on the slippery paste, for the slightest motion meant a slip downward into the hissing acid.

Worst of all, there seemed to be no means of getting across to him. The great engine occupied one side entirely to the wall— on the other the second vat barred passage.

Beyond the vats the room extended some little distance, and there was a door there, open, through which one could see a fenced yard piled high with ashes and cinders.

And the great stamps, twenty cubic feet of solid metal in each, were making their inevitable way toward the man. When they reached him— well, their smooth surface would afford him no finger-hold, even if their rapid movement allowed him to clutch them. They must push him down— they might stun him first, but most certainly they would push him down.

I need hardly say that I did not take in the full significance of all this at the time— it was only afterward that I fully understood the details.

Even as Lawrence ran he shouted:

“Stop that engine! Quick, men!”

I saw two stalwart workmen spring at the levers of the stamp machine—saw them twisting at a wheel— heard another crash, and a deep groan from all! The guiding mechanism had slipped a cog, or broken a rod, or something.

In my excitement, shaking so from weakness that I could hardly stand, I had half fallen against a piece of machinery that seemed to be at a standstill. Unconsciously my fingers grasped at a sort of handle.

I heard a whirring noise, felt something like a tremendous shock, and a burning pain. I let go the handle in a hurry, just as Lawrence wheeled on me with the cry, “For God’s sake, you fool—”

But I could give no heed either to what I had done or to him. My eyes were still fixed on the unfortunate man on the slide. The stamps were not more than five feet from his body now, and their low rattle and swish sounded in my ears loud as the tread of an army.

“A rope!” cried Lawrence in despair.

And then, in my horror, and in the sheer impossibility of standing by quiescent and seeing a fellow-being done to death in this manner, I did a mad thing.

Wild with resentment, as if it were a living thing I could have fought, I flung myself on the great, swiftly revolving fly-wheel of the engine, seized its rim in my fingers, and braced back with all the force in my arms and shoulders. By all precedent and reason my hands should have been crushed to a jelly in the maze of machinery, but to my intense astonishment the wheel stopped under my grasp with no very great effort on my part.

For a moment I held it so (it seemed to me to pull with no more force than is in the arms of a child), and then there was a loud report somewhere within the intestines of the monster, I saw a guiding rod as thick as my wrist double up and twist like a wire cable, things generally went to smash inside the engine, and the stamps stopped— not three inches from the man’s head! And even as they ceased to grind, men came running in at the door on the farther side of the vats— they had had to go clean round the workshop to reach it— and were at the top of the slide with a rope which they let down. In a moment the fellow was drawn to safety out of the reach of as horrible a death as a man can die— death in a bath consisting largely of sulphuric acid!

I stood as one in a stupor, still grasping the eccentric, dazed by the suddenness of it all— hardly able to believe that the danger was over.

A touch on my shoulder roused me, and I turned to look down into the narrow eyes of Lawrence. He was gazing at me with something very like awe in his expression.

“Well,” I said, smiling shakily, “I’m afraid I’ve spoiled your engine.”

“Spoiled the engine!” he said slowly, but emphatically. “What kind of a man are you, Mr. Dunbar? Do you know that that is a three hundred horse-power Danbury stamp? That the force required to stop that wheel in the way you did would run a locomotive— pick up the whole mass of that engine itself as easily as I would a pound weight?”

“It stopped very easily,” I muttered.

For some ridiculous reason I felt a little ashamed— as if such an exhibition of strength were really a trifle indecent. And I couldn’t understand.

Of course, I thought, he exaggerated the power used, but though I am naturally quite strong, still I could, before my accident, boast of nothing abnormal— and was I not just up from a sickbed, only a moment ago barely able to stand or walk without support?

I found that I was nervously clenching and unclenching my hands, and became suddenly conscious that they felt as if they had been burned— the minute I began to think about it the pain became really excruciating.

I glanced at them. They were in a terrible condition— especially my right. They looked as if they had been clasped about a piece of red-hot iron.

“What is it? ” asked Lawrence quickly. He bent over my hands, peering at them with his little black eyes.

Then he looked up quickly, and I saw the dawning of a curious expression in his wrinkled face— a strange excitement, a pale flash of triumph, I could have sworn.

Then, “Where is it?” he cried imperatively, his voice sharp and strenuous. “What have you done with it?”

He dropped my hands and fell quickly to his knees on the floor, his head bent, and began searching— feeling about in the shadows of the engines.

“Here— you there!” he cried to one of the men. “A light here! God! If it should be lost now— after all these years— all these years!”

“What?” said I stupidly.

“The new element,” he cried impatiently. “Stellarite, I call it. Oh—” glancing up quickly— “of course you don’t know. That little piece of metal I gave you to hold—the iridescent cylinder— don’t you remember?”

He spoke irritably, as if it was almost impossible for him to restrain himself to civil language.

“Oh, yes— that.” I looked around vaguely. “Why, yes, I had it in my hand— of course. I must have dropped it when I grabbed the fly-wheel. It’s on the floor somewhere probably; but, if you don’t mind, could I have something for my hands? They hurt pretty badly.”

Indeed, the air was full of black, swimming dots before my eyes, and iridescent cylinders had very little interest for me just then.

He almost snapped at me.

“Wait! If it’s lost— but it couldn’t be! Ah, the light at last. Now we can see something.”

Still he was hunting, and now the men were helping him. I looked on dully.

Then an unreasonable anger seized me at their neglect— their indifference to my very real agony. I leaned forward, and, in spite of the added pain the raw flesh of my hand gave me, I took hold of Lawrence’s collar and started to shake him.

He felt curiously light— rather like a piece of cork, in fact. I picked him up from the ground as you would a kitten and held him at arm’s length. Then suddenly I realized that what I was doing was somewhat unusual, and let go of his collar. He lit on his feet like a cat.

I expected anger, but he only said impatiently, “Don’t do that— help me hunt, can’t you?” quite as if it were an ordinary incident.

The queerness of it all came over me in full force; I felt as if I were in a dream.

I stooped down and helped him search. But it was no use. The little cylinder of stellarite seemed to have disappeared.

Suddenly Lawrence rose to his feet, his face, whose multitudinous wrinkles had a moment before been twitching with mingled triumph and despair, wiped clean of emotion, like a blank slate from which all significance has been erased.

“Come, Mr. Dunbar,” he said quietly, “it is quite time those hands of yours were seen to. You, Johnson, Duquirke, go on hunting. But I’m afraid it’s no use, boys. That vat of acid is too near.”

“You think—”

“I’m afraid it rolled in,” he said.

I was silent, dimly conscious that I stood, as it were, just inside the ring of some great catastrophe whose influence, barely reaching me, had this little wrinkled man in the grip of its vortex.

I followed him to a small office, opening off the laboratory; fitted up much like a doctor’s, it was, with its cabinet of shining instruments. He explained its convenience while he bound up my hands with all the skilled gentleness of an experienced surgeon.

“Accidents are always on view in such a place as mine out there,” he observed, with a nod of his head toward the laboratory.

“I wish you’d tell me what I've done,” I said at last when the thing was over.

I felt no weakness, nor any desire for rest, which was odd, seeing the excitement I had been through and my recent illness.

“Two things, then, to be brief,” he replied, smiling rather sadly, I thought. “You’ve accidentally stumbled on a magnificent fact, and you’ve at the same time destroyed, I fear, all results that might have flowed from that fact.”

I stared at him, puzzled.

“You lifted me just now like a feather,” he said abruptly. “You think, possibly, that I don’t weigh much— I’m not a giant. Duquirke,” he called, “come here a minute, will you, please?”

Duquirke appeared, a very mountain of a man, all muscle, too. I am up to the six-foot mark myself, and fairly broad in the shoulders, but this fellow could better me by three good inches in any direction.

“You can’t use your hands, of course,” said Lawrence to me; “but just stoop down and stretch out your arm, will you? Now, Duquirke, just seat yourself on his arm. That’s it. Oh, don’t be afraid— he can hold you all right. Ah, I thought so!”

We had both obeyed him, I in some doubt, the Canadian with stolid indifference. But what was my amazement to find that this great big man weighed really comparatively nothing.

I rose, still with my arm outstretched, with perfect ease, and there the fellow sat, perched precariously, his mouth open, his eyes fixed on his master in almost a dog-like appeal.

“What are you all made of?” I gasped. “Cork?”

I let my arm drop, really expecting to see the man fall light as a feather— instead of which he tumbled with a crash that shook the house, and lay for a minute, swearing violently.

Then he got to his feet in a hurry and backed out of the door, his eyes on me to the last, his tongue, really unconsciously I believe, letting go a string of such language as would have done credit to a canal-boat driver.

“What is the matter with you all,” I cried, “or—” my voice sank with the thought “—with me?”

“Sit down,” said Lawrence. “Don’t lose your head.”

His eyes had widened, and the strange colors I had sometimes caught a glimpse of were blazing in their depths. His wrinkled face was almost beautiful in its animation— lighted as by a fire from within.

“There’s nothing at all astonishing or miraculous about any of it—it’s the simple working of a law. Now listen. When we heard La Due fall (the fool had tried to walk across a plank laid over that death trap to save going round the shop— he was well repaid by the fright), I handed you the cylinder of stellarite. I did not lay it on my worktable, because that is made of aluminum, and this cylinder must not come into contact with any other metal, for the simple reason that stellarite has such an affiliation for all other metals that for it to touch one of them means absorption into it. All its separate molecules interpenetrate, or assimilate, molecules, and— stellarite ceases to have its ‘individual being.’ So I gave it to you, because I wanted my hands free, and ran down to the vats with you at my heels. I confess I would never have been so careless if I had not allowed myself to become unduly excited by a mere matter of life and death.”

He paused regretfully.

“However, to continue, you for some reason seized hold of the lever of a dynamo of very great voltage and started the armatage revolving, at the same time stepping on to the plate of its base. Now, in the ordinary course of things you would probably be at this moment lying on that couch over there— dead!”

I looked at the couch with sudden interest.

“But you are not.”

I murmured that such was indeed the case.

“No— instead of that thunderbolt burning the life out of you, like that”— he snapped his fingers melodramatically— “it passed directly through your body into the cylinder of stellarite, which, completing the circuit, sent the current back through your chest, but possessed of a new quality.”

“And that quality?”

“Ah, there you have me! What that quality was I fear it is now too late for the world ever to know. Well, you dropped the lever, and, I think, the cylinder, too, when I shouted. A moment after you seized the fly wheel of the stamp machine, stopped it as if it had been the balance of a watch— and, well, incidentally you saved La Due‘s life.”

He ceased, the light faded out of his wrinkled face, his eyes darkened and narrowed. His head sank forward on to his chest.

“But to think of it— years— years of effort thrown away just at the moment of conquest!”

“I don’t understand,” I said, seeming to catch little glimpses of his full meaning, as through a torn veil. “Do you intend to say—”

“I intend to say,” he snapped, with a sudden return of irritability, “that in that minute when you held the stellarite and the lever of the dynamo you absorbed enough of the life principle to vivify a herd of elephants. Why, what is strength, man? Is a muscle strong in itself? Can a mere muscle lift so much as a pin? It’s the life principle, I tell you— and I had it under my hand!”

“But this stellarite,” I protested. “You can make more, surely?”

“Make!” he scoffed. “It’s an element, I say! And it was, so far as I know, all there was in all the world!”

“Maybe it will be found yet,” I argued.

“Or— if it went into the acid vat, would it have been absorbed by the metal— or what?”

“No— at the touch of that bath it would evaporate into thin air— an odorless, colorless gas. I have but one hope— that it rolled against some of the iron machinery and was absorbed. In that case I may be able to place it by the increased bulk of the assimilating metal. Well, I can but go to work again, test every particle of machinery in the vicinity of the vats— and work— and work. If I had but known before that it was electricity and animal magnetism that were needed to complete the combination— but now, it means years of patience at best.”

He shook his head dismally.

“And I?” I mused, rather to myself than to him.

“Oh— you!” he smiled, and his face ran into that tempest of wrinkles. “You can pose as Samson, if you like! Your strength is really almost limitless!”

End

Bibliography of Francis Stevens' stories (n/a: not available).

The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar, The Argosy, March 1904

The Nightmare, All-Story Weekly, April 14, 1917

The Labyrinth, All-Story Weekly, July 27-Aug 10, 1918 (3 parts) (n/a)

Friend Island, All-Story Weekly, Sep 7, 1918

Citadel of Fear , The Argosy, Sept 14-Oct 26, 1918 (7 parts)

Behind the Curtain, All-Story Weekly, Sep 21, 1918

Unseen― Unfeared, People's Favorite Magazine, Feb 10, 1919

The Elf Trap, Argosy, July 5, 1919

The Heads of Cerberus, The Thrill Book, Aug 15-Oct 15, 1919 (5 parts)

Claimed, Argosy, March 6-20, 1920 (3 parts)

Avalon, Argosy, Aug 16-Sep 6, 1919 (4 parts) (straight, non-genre, n/a)

Serapion, Argosy, June 19-July 10, 1920 (4 parts)

Sunfire, Weird Tales, July/Aug-Sep 1923 (2 parts)

In the MobileRead editions, those available are:

The Heads of Cerberus (novel)

Claimed! (Novelette)

Serapion (Novel)

Citadel of Fear (novel)

Nightmare

Sunfire (Collection)

1: Sunfire (novelette)

2: Behind the Curtain

3: Unseen— Unfeared

4: Elf Trap

5: Friend Island

6: The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar

Table of Contents

1: Sunfire (novelette)

2: Behind the Curtain

3: Unseen— Unfeared

4: Elf Trap

5: Friend Island

6: The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar

Bibliography