CHAPTER XII
The End of the Journey
"Say Doc!" It was Larry's voice flung back at me. "I was thinkingabout that frog. I think it was her pet. Damn me if I see anydifference between a frog and a snake, and one of the nicest women Iever knew had two pet pythons that followed her around like kittens.Not such a devilish lot of choice between a frog and a snake--excepton the side of the frog? What? Anyway, any pet that girl wants ishers, I don't care if it's a leaping twelve-toed lobster or awhale-bodied scorpion. Get me?"
By which I knew that our remarks upon the frog woman were stillbothering O'Keefe.
"He thinks of foolish nothings like the foolish sailor!" gruntedMarakinoff, acid contempt in his words. "What are their womento--this?" He swept out a hand and as though at a signal the carpoised itself for an instant, then dipped, literally dipped down intosheer space; skimmed forward in what was clearly curved flight, roseas upon a sweeping upgrade and then began swiftly to slacken itsfearful speed.
Far ahead a point of light showed; grew steadily; we were withinit--and softly all movement ceased. How acute had been the strain ofour journey I did not realize until I tried to stand--and sank back,leg-muscles too shaky to bear my weight. The car rested in a slit inthe centre of a smooth walled chamber perhaps twenty feet square. Thewall facing us was pierced by a low doorway through which we could seea flight of steps leading downward.
The light streamed through a small opening, the base of which wastwice a tall man's height from the floor. A curving flight of broad,low steps led up to it. And now it came to my steadying brain thatthere was something puzzling, peculiar, strangely unfamiliar aboutthis light. It was silvery, shaded faintly with a delicate blue andflushed lightly with a nacreous rose; but a rose that differed fromthat of the terraces of the Pool Chamber as the rose within the opaldiffers from that within the pearl. In it were tiny, gleaming pointslike the motes in a sunbeam, but sparkling white like the dust ofdiamonds, and with a quality of vibrant vitality; they were as thoughthey were alive. The light cast no shadows!
A little breeze came through the oval and played about us. It wasladen with what seemed the mingled breath of spice flowers and pines.It was curiously vivifying, and in it the diamonded atoms of lightshook and danced.
I stepped out of the car, the Russian following, and began to ascendthe curved steps toward the opening, at the top of which O'Keefe andOlaf already stood. As they looked out I saw both their faceschange--Olaf's with awe, O'Keefe's with incredulous amaze. I hurriedto their side.
At first all that I could see was space--a space filled with the samecoruscating effulgence that pulsed about me. I glanced upward, obeyingthat instinctive impulse of earth folk that bids them seek within thesky for sources of light. There was no sky--at least no sky such as weknow--all was a sparkling nebulosity rising into infinite distances asthe azure above the day-world seems to fill all the heavens--throughit ran pulsing waves and flashing javelin rays that were like shiningshadows of the aurora; echoes, octaves lower, of those brilliantarpeggios and chords that play about the poles. My eyes fell beneathits splendour; I stared outward.
Miles away, gigantic luminous cliffs sprang sheer from the limits of alake whose waters were of milky opalescence. It was from these cliffsthat the spangled radiance came, shimmering out from all theirlustrous surfaces. To left and to right, as far as the eye could see,they stretched--and they vanished in the auroral nebulosity on high!
"Look at that!" exclaimed Larry. I followed his pointing finger. Onthe face of the shining wall, stretched between two colossal columns,hung an incredible veil; prismatic, gleaming with all the colours ofthe spectrum. It was like a web of rainbows woven by the fingers ofthe daughters of the Jinn. In front of it and a little at each sidewas a semi-circular pier, or, better, a plaza of what appeared to beglistening, pale-yellow ivory. At each end of its half-circleclustered a few low-walled, rose-stone structures, each of themsurmounted by a number of high, slender pinnacles.
We looked at each other, I think, a bit helplessly--and back againthrough the opening. We were standing, as I have said, at its base.The wall in which it was set was at least ten feet thick, and so, ofcourse, all that we could see of that which was without were thedistances that revealed themselves above the outer ledge of the oval.
"Let's take a look at what's under us," said Larry.
He crept out upon the ledge and peered down, the rest of us following.A hundred yards beneath us stretched gardens that must have been likethose of many-columned Iram, which the ancient Addite King had builtfor his pleasure ages before the deluge, and which Allah, so the Arablegend tells, took and hid from man, within the Sahara, beyond allhope of finding--jealous because they were more beautiful than his inparadise. Within them flowers and groves of laced, fernlike trees,pillared pavilions nestled.
The trunks of the trees were of emerald, of vermilion, and ofazure-blue, and the blossoms, whose fragrance was borne to us, shonelike jewels. The graceful pillars were tinted delicately. I noted thatthe pavilions were double--in a way, two-storied--and that they wereoddly splotched with circles, with squares, and with oblongsof--opacity; noted too that over many this opacity stretched like aroof; yet it did not seem material; rather was it--impenetrableshadow!
Down through this city of gardens ran a broad shining greenthoroughfare, glistening like glass and spanned at regular intervalswith graceful, arched bridges. The road flashed to a wide square,where rose, from a base of that same silvery stone that formed the lipof the Moon Pool, a titanic structure of seven terraces; and along itflitted objects that bore a curious resemblance to the shell of theNautilus. Within them were--human figures! And upon tree-borderedpromenades on each side walked others!
Far to the right we caught the glint of another emerald-paved road.
And between the two the gardens grew sweetly down to the hither sideof that opalescent water across which were the radiant cliffs and thecurtain of mystery.
Thus it was that we first saw the city of the Dweller; blessed andaccursed as no place on earth, or under or above earth has everbeen--or, that force willing which some call God, ever again shall be!
"Chert!" whispered Marakinoff. "Incredible!"
"Trolldom!" gasped Olaf Huldricksson. "It is Trolldom!"
"Listen, Olaf!" said Larry. "Cut out that Trolldom stuff! There's noTrolldom, or fairies, outside Ireland. Get that! And this isn'tIreland. And, buck up, Professor!" This to Marakinoff. "What you seedown there are people--_just plain people_. And wherever there's peopleis where I live. Get me?
"There's no way in but in--and no way out but out," said O'Keefe."And there's the stairway. Eggs are eggs no matter how they'recooked--and people are just people, fellow travellers, no matter whatdish they are in," he concluded. "Come on!"
With the three of us close behind him, he marched toward the entrance.