Ray glanced at Peter and lifted his shoulders. What to make of so many wonders?
As they came to the edge of the forest, they discovered that a clearing surrounded the supposed tor, and that the formation was much broader than they had thought.
"It's the step pyramid," Peter said. He remembered the step pyramid had not been far from an open space, which must have been the ant field.
"We saw it, too," Ray said. "OBie says it wasn't there the last time he came to El Grande."
They stepped out of the abrupt edge of the forest onto a pebble-strewn causeway that flanked the stepped mound. "Looks as if the forest has been manicured," Ray observed, looking back at the sculpted topsoil and neatly chewed root ends, the lopped limbs and pruned branches.
The pyramid rose about two hundred feet and covered an area twice that in width. The walls were made of thick, dried, irregular masses of fine-chopped leaves, branches, and mud or clay, like a crazy pattern of brickwork. These masses were held
together by a dark brown mortar with a faint, viscous sheen, like dried snail slime. Overall, the pyramid was pale brown or dirty yellow, graying and brightening alternately beneath the cloud-mottled afternoon sun.
"Listen," Ray said. From within the pyramid came a subdued, whiny skirling. They approached the base and placed their hands against it.
Peter realized what might be responsible for the mound.
"Ants," he said, and backed away quickly. Ray leaped back as well, then squinted dubiously at the high mound.
"This big? It doesn't look like an ant or even a termite mound."
"What else, then?" Peter said. "Giant bees?"
"I'd hate to meet one," Ray said. "There don't seem to be any openings on this side. We came here to climb up and look around. Won't be hard to scale these walls . . ."
Peter shook his head. "We should find out what made it first."
"Yeah," Ray agreed. "No sense being reckless. Let's walk around."
The causeway made for easy hiking, level and almost as smooth as a gravel road. They rounded the first corner. "It isn't square," Ray observed.
"A pentagon, or hexagon?" Peter suggested.
"Pentagon, maybe—or irregular."
Beyond the second corner, the forest opened up into hummocky grassland, dotted with low, flat mounds each about fifty feet across and made of the same irregular mud bricks. Long elevated dikes connected the small mounds with the central step pyramid. Ray climbed over the first dike, about five feet high, and Peter followed—then froze at the sight of a bootprint.
"Did you step over here?" he asked Ray.
"No."
"Somebody did."
"Billie?"
"He wore sandals."
"Maybe OBie or your father, then."
Peter smiled broadly. "Yeah! They're probably around here doing just what we' re doing—trying to see where they are, and how to get back."
They walked on to the next dike and found more prints in the finer patches of gravel and grit. "Looks like one pair of boots to me," Ray said. "Big, too." At Peter's concerned expression, he added hastily, "But I'm no tracker."
Peter looked around in the dirt. He bent down and touched a mark apparently made by a heel, looked a pace beyond, and saw a clearer print. This one was smaller than the other, somewhat smaller than Peter's, and the tread seemed markedly different from that on his own boot, which matched his father's. He tried to remember OBie's feet. They had not been very large, but larger than this print.
"Here's another," he said. "There are two sets, but I don't think they belong to my father or OBie."
Ray knelt beside him. "You're right. Who, then?"
They continued to the third side of the mound. The clouds were building again and a high pale haze softened the sun's glare. The high-pitched skirling within the larger mound continued. Ray wiped sweat from his brow. They rounded the next corner and saw a long ramp reaching to the top of the mound's first step. Ray pushed Peter back and they peered cautiously around the corner. Several wrinkled gray mole-reptiles climbed the ramp. They made sharp whuk whuk noises to one another, accompanied by a continuous low chittering.
Peter smelled vinegar and held his nose.
"Smells like a tossed salad," Ray observed softly. The gray animals ignored them and waddled up the ramp to the first step. More followed.
One of the animals appeared half again as large as its companions, its pebbly gray hide marked with white stripes, and its longer tail forked into two large, vertical horny spikes. This forked tip twitched upward sharply several times as the animal walked.
"Same species?" Peter asked.
"I don't know," Ray said. "Did you see the front claws?"
"Yeah. Long and blunt."
"They're diggers," Ray said. "They made this mound."
That conclusion seemed obvious enough, but it was still startling. "You mean, they build like beavers . . . or prairie dogs?" Peter asked.
"Or like bees."
Peter and Ray stared at each other for a moment. "This is a hive, then?" Peter asked.
Ray shrugged.
They waited for the ramp to clear, then walked to the top of the first step.
"Maybe they're nocturnal, and there are just a few guards or workers out and about," Ray said. "They look pretty pale to be out in the bright sun."
The wall of the second level was marked by regular round indentations, like large mouse holes. These were covered with a flexible flap made of some compressed and chewed vegetable matter. Peter lifted one of the thick, papery flaps and peered down a long tunnel. The skirling noise, like dozens of ghostly bagpipes, floated with greater intensity from the tunnel. Peter held the flap up while Ray knelt and inspected the opening. Ray then stood and brushed his hands on his pants, sniffing at the air. "More tossed salad," he commented. "Too heavy on the vinegar."
Peter turned northeast and heard a faint sound, like an abrupt shout. "Did you hear that?"
"Another animal," Ray said. They heard it again.
"No animal!" Peter said excitedly. "That's a voice!" They ran along the top of the first step toward the northern face of the mound. Cast in late afternoon sunlight, the northern face was covered with quietly scurrying gray creatures. They came in at least four different varieties, the largest almost eight feet long, all of them low-slung, with wide-spread legs and intent, beady, round black eyes. The two larger varieties had horny upturned forks on the ends of their tails and heavier forelimbs with long claws. For the moment, clambering up the walls and along steep ramps leading from step to step, the mole-reptiles paid no attention to Ray and Peter.
Peter heard the shout again and looked up at the top of the mound. "It's Wetherford!" he cried, and Ray looked up as well. The Englishman stood about a hundred and sixty feet above them, waving a machete and shouting, "Halloa! All you ratty types, up here! Halloa!" In his other hand he carried a rifle.
Peter called out, "Mr. Wetherford! James Wetherford!" Ray waved his arms as well, but Wetherford did not hear them. He abruptly backed away from the edge just as a group of five large fork-tails started up the wall of the top step.
To compound the confusion, an airplane approached from the east, flying low over the jungle. It was a flying boat, Peter saw—a big, beautiful gray PBY, its motors singing a low throaty song. The plane banked to the north and rose a few dozen feet to pass directly in front of the mound. Ray and Peter waved frantically, and the plane waggled its wings as it completed its turn. The fork-tails and "ratty types" broke into confused scampering. Some brushed past their legs and leaped from the upper step, landing with heavy thumps thirty feet below. Peter peered down and saw three broken bodies; one whimpered and skirled shrilly.
"Lake Akuena!" Ray shouted. "That plane can land on the south-central lake!"
"What about the small lake?" Peter asked. "That's closer."
"Too short to land on, is my guess," Ray said.
"The central lake is miles from here!" Peter said.
Only now di
d they realize they had the attention of a good number of the mole-reptiles. Five, six, and then eight, nine, ten of the animals circled them, clacking their divided rodent-tooth beaks and hissing alarmingly. Three large fork-tails approached and the others parted to let them through.
Peter and Ray turned. Three other fork-tails crawled over the lip of the step and piped like teakettles.
The animals surrounding them suddenly sidled to the north, forcing Ray and Peter to walk to their right to keep in the middle of a confining circle.
"We're corralled," Peter said.
Ray glanced down at Peter's machete. "We could carve our way out."
Peter examined the larger animals and shook his head. "They could whack us pretty good."
"If we don't, we might end up mole food," Ray warned.
Peter made a fierce face and raised his machete. Behind them, an even more threatening hiss sounded, and they turned to face a true giant among the mole-reptiles—a dusky orange brute almost as big as a lyco, beak parted into two canine-like fangs separated by a middle row of horny serrations. Its small black eyes glared at them and it bobbed its head like a giant chuckwalla, piping and hissing steadily.
Peter let out his breath and lowered his machete. The cordon moved them efficiently to the northern side of the mound, where all the animals stopped together. The air was thick with vinegar and other smells, some of them disgustingly foul. The vapors stung their eyes.
"They're as bad as skunks," Ray said, holding his hand up to his nose and blinking.
The wall beside them collapsed in a cloud of debris and a second lyco-sized creature poked its snout out, scooping rubble aside with heavy claws. The cordon parted and Ray and Peter were herded up to the large hole. The digger withdrew.
Peter hesitated. All the animals hissed at once, and Ray held up his hands as if surrendering. "All right!" he cried. "All right!"
He shot a panicked look at Peter, but they knew instinctively they could not survive a fight with the biggest reptiles.
Peter glanced north at the PBY, barely a dot above the green horizon of El Grande. They both bent over and a mole-reptile butted them through the fresh opening in the wall.
Chapter Nine
Peter did not enjoy enclosed spaces. In Chicago and New York, he had, for no reason he could understand, tortured himself at night, before sleep, with thoughts of being enclosed in a small sewer pipe, trying to crawl through darkness and damp to a spot of light very far away.
And then something had plugged up the light.
The tunnel into the mound was not so small, but it was dark and smelled of skunk and vinegar and foul, beery burps, and beneath all those smells, the now-familiar parrot-cage odor— making him want to vomit. He swallowed hard as Ray jostled him from behind. "They're pushing me!" Ray explained, by way of apology, and they stooped and stumbled down the shoulder-high passage.
Behind and in front of them, tremendous thumps shook the walls. Peter closed his eyes and held his nose and tried to breathe just through his mouth, but the smell still filled his head, and the pounding, and the skirling.
We 're going to die, he thought. This is it. We were being swallowed. Now we're in the stomach.
He thought of his mother, so lovely and always a little distant, reserved, puzzled and even stymied by her son's need for affection. He thought of Anthony, hating to not be someplace doing something, shunning inactivity and normality, hustling his son from city to city, trying to encourage Peter to see the world through curious, active eyes, to take part in anything and everything.
And he thought of Peter Belzoni, caught in emotional makeup somewhere between his parents, more passionate and curious than his mother and more sensible and cautious than his father. And what did it matter? The mole-reptiles would put them into a food pile and all his work at growing up and finding out who he was would come to nothing, except that he would become reptile chow.
"Communisaurs," he murmured over his shoulder to Ray. The name popped into his head.
"What?"
"Communisaurs," Peter repeated.
"Workers of the world, unite," Ray said.
Peter saw a fuzzy glow ahead. He imagined phosphorescent moss and a scene out of H. G. Wells or Jules Verne, vast caverns with multihued pillars and a huge chamber filled with servile gray creatures, and governing it all, something like the Grand Lunar. The imagined scene almost scared him witless and he felt his face tighten into a terrified mask. Not dead yet, he reminded himself. Not dead yet!
The tunnel widened into a bigger place. A few particles of light escaped from somewhere ahead, enough to see hulking shadows. The skirling had become clearer, though fortunately not louder. The thumps were now behind them.
"Smells like bad cheese," Ray said.
"Smells like a sour stomach," Peter said.
They were pushed through a curtain of long vegetal strands and the scene brightened enough for them to see an even larger space, filled with moving black lumps. Peter stopped, unwilling to step into that hip-high welter of shifting bodies. He looked up and saw shafts of light slanting down from several holes overhead. Some drifts of fresh air wafted down and Peter took a deep breath. In the middle of his inhale, a wave of farty-sweet and skunky odors washed around them and he gagged. Ray shoved up behind him and they both tumbled into the mass of chittering, squirming bodies.
Peter pushed up on his elbows and got to his knees. Something scratched his ribs and the top of his head and he screamed and kicked out. "Ow!" Ray shouted. "Watch it!"
Peter swallowed again and stood. There was no spit left in his mouth and his stomach felt full of dry clods. The bodies had parted around them. His eyes were adapting to the dingy light and he could see rounded brick walls, hanging strands of vegetable matter like tattered fabric, small dark bodies on either side, and a clear passageway between to an even brighter chamber. Bodies pushed them from behind and Ray said, "It's getting tight back here."
Peter walked forward, glad that he could at least stand up.
"Now I know how a pig feels going to slaughter," Ray muttered.
Peter shook his head. "Don't say that." It was bad enough for him to think such things, worse still to know they agreed as to their probable fate.
"I'll never eat bacon again," Ray added.
Half seen gray bodies shoved them around a corner. Peter made out that they actually walked between two walls, and that a vaulted roof pierced with small bright holes rose high over them. Tiers of walkways surrounded this large chamber, which had to be somewhere near the middle of the mound. Small and medium-sized dark communisaurs scampered along the walkways.
The parrot smell overcame all others. Peter looked around and saw two of the biggest fork-tails lurching behind them. Their tails rose and they whacked them simultaneously on the chamber floor, making a single sharp, loud thump. Then they withdrew.
The way ahead was clear. All around, the skirling rose to terrifying intensity, hundreds if not thousands of communisaurs raising a ruckus, their chatter filling the chamber with a painful din.
Suddenly, the ruckus subsided. The chamber fell silent.
Peter heard someone quietly swearing, not Ray.
"OBie!" Ray called.
"Who's there?"
That was Anthony's voice! "Father!" Peter shouted.
A yeasty cloud of scent billowed over them. Peter looked up in time to see the silhouette of a huge pair of limbs reach over the wall. Long, curving, blunt claws surrounded his midriff and lifted him into the air like a baby.
Chapter Ten
Every bone in his body seemed to rattle and his teeth clacked together painfully as claws and horny pads clamped and abraded his chest. Peter could hardly breathe. Something dry and cool thrust into his face and snuffled. Whatever held him was immensely strong, at least the size of the big fork-tails, and smelled like parrot and fresh bread and drunken burps. He tried to cry out but couldn't suck in enough air. His head swam and he felt as if he would black out. Suddenly, he was released
and fell on his feet, immediately collapsing to his hands and knees.
Anthony called his name.
Peter's head hung low. He dropped to his elbows and side, and finally managed to draw in enough of the thick air to let out a gasp. His vision returned but what he saw made little sense: thick hard mud ridges radiating from a central pile of irregular bricks, topped by a bristling clump of sticks and logs, all dimly illuminated by the bright holes overhead. He rolled on his back, too weak to do anything but feel his chest heave. An orange outline passed nearby—hunched ridge of spine supporting porcupine-like bristles, suggestions of rippling fat, slow, splayed limbs, and then the flat crown of an immense head, mouth a dark crescent beneath. The mouth seemed at least a yard wide, but it was very close and he could not yet judge distance and size.
He heard his father yelling for him to be still. And then another word, perhaps spoken by OBie—it sounded like "expectation." Peter closed his eyes and concentrated on breathing. He felt as if his ribs had been crushed, but decided the pain wasn't sharp enough to prove that. He could move his hands and feet, so his back hadn't been broken. The beast near him brushed past Peter's left side and lifted itself with a casual moan up the curved wall, arms spread wide like a lizard's, claws scraping against the hard mud surface. It reached over the wall and Peter saw Ray lifted into the air, kicking and shouting. The arms contracted and pulled Ray up against the beast's muzzle, and again Peter heard the snuffing sound. A miasma of choking civet smell sank around him.
The arms dropped Ray on the other side of the pit, behind the pile. Peter turned his head and caught a glimpse of more large, dark shapes, surrounded by smaller pale forms that skirled and scurried over the ridges, climbing in and out of the central clump of sticks and logs. He heard mewling whistles.
This is a nest, he thought. His eyes had adapted to the dark enough to show more details: dust drifting in puffs above the nest, dozens of small gray communisaurs, mouths stuffed with leaves and branches, moving in orderly lines on a ramp overlooking the nest, and the biggest of them all—a great, orange shape mottled with black spots, lying with both ends slopping over the sides of the nest, vast flanks rising and falling slowly. This behemoth was three times the size of the large fork-tails. Peter could barely see the top of its head.