Once more Watson had taken the kind of chance he preferred--a slender
one. He took the chance that these people, however occult and advanced
they might be, were still human enough to build their prophecy out of an
old foundation. If he were right, then the person of the Jarados would
be inviolable. If the professor were prisoner, held somewhere in secret,
and it got noised about that he was the true prophet returned--it would
not only give Holcomb immense prestige, but at the same time render the
position of his captors untenable.
Chick needed no great discernment to see that he had touched a vital
spot. The philosophy of the Rhamdas was firmly bound up with spiritism;
they had gone far in science, and had passed out of mere belief into
the deeper, finer understanding that went behind the shadow for proof.
Certainly Watson inwardly rejoiced to see Rhamda Geos incredulous,
his keen face whitening like that of one who has just heard sacrilege
uttered--to see Geos rise in his place, grip the table tightly, and hear
him exclaim:
“The Jarados! Did you say--the Jarados? He has come amongst us, and we
have not known? You are perfectly sure of this?”
“I am,” stated Watson, and met the other's keen scrutiny without
flinching.
Would the game work? At least it promised action; and now that he had
the old feeling of himself he was anxious to get under way. Any feeling
of fear was gone now. He calmly nodded his head.
“Yes, it is so. But sit down. I have still a bit more to tell you.”
The Rhamda resumed his seat. Clearly, his reverence had been greatly
augmented in the past few seconds. From that time on there was a marked
difference in his manner; and his speech, when he addressed Chick,
contained the expression “my lord”--an expression that Watson found it
easy enough to become accustomed to.
“Did you doubt, Rhamda Geos, that I came from the Jarados?”
“We did not doubt. We were certain.”
“I see. You were not expecting the Jarados.”
“Not yet, my lord. The coming of the Jarados shall be close to the Day
of the Judgment. But it could not be so soon; there were to be signs and
portents. We were to solve the problem first; we were to know the reason
of the shadow and the why of the spirit. The wisdom of the Rhamda Avec
told that the day approaches; he had opened the Spot of Life and gone
through it; but he had NOT sent the fact and the substance.” Watson
smiled. There was just enough superstition, it seemed, beneath all the
Rhamda's wisdom to make him tractable. However, Chick asked:
“Tell me: as a learned man, as a Rhamda, do you believe in the prophecy
implicitly?”
“Yes, my lord. I am a spiritist; and if spiritism is truth, then the
Jarados was genuine, and his prophecy is true. After all, my lord, it is
not a case of legend, but of history. The Jarados came at a time of
high civilisation, when men would see and understand him; he gave us his
teaching in records, and imposed his laws upon the Thomahlia. Then he
departed--through the Spot of Life.”
And the Rhamda Geos went on to say that the teachings of the Jarados had
been moral as well as intellectual. Moreover, after he had formulated
his laws, he wrote out his judgment.
“What was that?”
“An exhortation, my lord, that we were to give proof of our appreciation
of intelligence. We were to use it, and to prove ourselves worthy of
it by lifting ourselves up to the level of the Spot of Life. In other
words, the spot would be opened when, and only when, we had learned the
secrets of the occult, and--had opened the Spot ourselves!”
Watson thought he understood partly. He asked:
“And that is why you doubt me?”
“You, my lord? Not so! You were found in the Temple of the Bell and
Leaf; not on the Spot itself, to be sure, but on the floor of the
temple. You were, both in your person and in your dress, of another
world; you had been promised by the Rhamda Avec; and, in a sense, you
were a part of the prophecy. We accepted you!”
“But I speak your language. Account for that, Geos.”
“It need not be accounted for, my lord. We accept it as fact. The
affinity of spirit would not be bound by the limitation of artificial
speech. That you should talk the Thomahlia language is no more strange
than that Rhamda Avec, when he passed into your world, should speak your
tongue.”
“We call our language English,” supplied Watson. “It is the tongue of
the Jarados and of myself.”
“Tell me of the Jarados, my lord!” with renewed eagerness. “In the other
world--what is he?”
It was Chick's opportunity. By telling the simple truth about Dr.
Holcomb he would enhance himself in the eyes of Rhamda Geas.
“In the other world--we call it America--the Jaradas is a Rhamda much
like yourself, the head and chief of many Rhamdas sitting in a great
institution devoted to intelligence. It is called the University of
California.”
“And this California; what is it, my lord?”
“A name,” returned Chick. “Immediately on the other side of the Spot is
a region called California.”
“The promised land, my lord!”
“The promised land indeed. There are some who call it paradise, even
there.” And for good measure he proceeded to tell much of his own land,
of the woods, the rivers, the cities, animals, mountains, the sky, the
moon, and the sun. When he came to the sun he explained that no man
dared to look at it continuously with the bare eyes. Its great heat and
splendour astounded Geos.
Concerning himself he nonchalantly stated that he was the fiance of
Holcomb's daughter; that is, son-in-law-to-be of the prophet Jarados;
that he was sort of Junior Rhamda. He declared that he had come from
the occult Rhamdas, through the other side of the Spot, in search of
the Jarados who had gone before. As to his blankness up to now, and his
perplexity--he was but a Junior; and the Spot had naturally benumbed his
senses. Even now, he apologised, it was difficult to know and to recall
everything clearly.
Through it all the Rhamda Geos Listened in something like awe. He
was hearing of wonders never before guessed in the Thomahlia. As the
prospective son-in-law of the Jarados, Watson automatically lifted
himself to a supreme height, so great that, could he only hold himself
up to it, he would have a prestige second only to that of the prophet
himself.
All of a sudden he thought of a question. It gripped him with dread,
the dread of the unknown. The question was one of TIME. “How long have I
been here, Rhamda Geos?”
“Over eleven months, by our system of reckoning. You were found on the
floor of the temple three hundred and fifty-seven days ago; you were
in a lifeless condition; you must have been there some hours, my lord,
before we discovered you.”
“Eleven months!” It had seemed but that many minutes. “And I was
unconscious--”
“All the time, my lord. Had we caught you immediately upon your
coming, we could have brought you around within three days, but in the
circumstances it was impossible to restore you before we did. You have
been under the care of the greatest specialists in all Thomahlia.”
Geos himself had been one of these. “The council of Rhamdas went into
special session, my lord, immediately after your materialisation, and
has been sitting almost continually since. And now that you are revived,
they are waiting in person for you to show yourself.
“They accept you. They do not know who you are, my lord; none of us has
guessed even a part of the truth. The entire council awaits!”
But Chick wanted more. Besides, he looked at his clothing.
“I would have my own garments, Geos; also, whatever else was found on my
person.”
For Watson was thinking of a small but powerful pistol, an automatic,
that he had carried on the night when he fell through the Blind Spot.
This question of materiality was still a puzzle; if he himself had
survived there was a chance that the firearm had done the same. It might
and it might not preclude the occult. Anyway, he treasured the thought
of that automatic; with it in his possession he would not be bare-handed
in case of emergency.
They returned to the room in which Chick had awakened. The Rhamda left
him. A few moments later he came back with a squad of men. Chick noted
their discipline, movement, and uniforms, and classed them as soldiers.
Two men were stationed outside the door--one, a stout, dark individual
in a blue uniform; and the other a lithe, athletic chap, blond and
blue-eyed, wearing a bright crimson dress. Chick instinctively preferred
both man and garb in crimson; there was a touch of honour, of lightness
and strength that just suited him. The other was dark, heavy and
sinister.
Both wore sandals, and upon their heads curious shakos, made of the
finest down, not fur. Both displayed a heavy silken braid looped from
one shoulder. Each carried a spear-like weapon, of some shining black
material, straight-tapered to a needle-point; but no other arms.
Watson pointed to the two uniforms.
“What is the significance, Geos?”
“One is from the queen, my lord; the other from Bar Senestro. The blue
is the cloth of the Bars; the red, that of the queens. The Bar and the
queen send this bodyguard with their respective compliments.”
Chick took the bundle that Geos had brought, and proceeded to don his
own clothes, finding deep satisfaction in the fact that they had arrived
as intact as he. He felt carefully in his hip pocket; the automatic
was still there, likewise the extra magazine of cartridges that he had
carried about with him on that night.
In his other pockets he found two packets of cigarettes, a pouch of
tobacco, some papers, a few coins, a little money and two photographs,
one of Bertha and the other of her father. Not a thing had been
disturbed.
He announced himself ready.
The Rhamda conducted him down the corridor, which he found to be lined
with guards; red on one side, blue on the other. These men fell in
behind in two parallel files, one of the one colour and one of the
other.
It was a building of great size. The corridors were long and high, all
with the wide-coved ceiling, and of colours that melted from one shade
to another as they turned, not corners, but curves. Apparently each
colour had its own suggestive reason. Such rooms as Chick could look
into were uniformly large, beautiful, and distinctly lighted.
The guard moved in silent rhythm; the chief sound was that made by
Watson's leather-heeled shoes, drowning out, for once, the everlasting
tinkling undertone of those unseen fairy-bells; that running cadence,
never ceasing, silver, liquid, like the soul of sound.
Though Watson walked with head erect, he had eyes for every little thing
he passed. He noted the material of the structure and tried to name it;
neither plaster nor stone, the walls were highly polished and, somehow
or other, capable of emitting perfume--light and wholesome, not heavy
and oppressive. And in dark passages the walls glowed.
The corridor widened, and with a graceful curve opened upon a wide
stairway that descended, or rather sank--to use Watson's own words
for the feeling--into the depths of the building. To the right of one
landing was a large window reaching to the floor; its panes were clear
and not frosted as had been the others.
Chick got his first glimpse here of what lay outside--an iridescent
landscape, at first view astonishingly like an ocean of opals; for it
was of many hues, red and purple and milky white, splashed violantin
blue and fluorescence--a maze and shimmer of dancing, joyful colours,
whirring in an uncertainty of polychromatic harmony. Such was his first
fleeting impression.
At the next landing he looked closer. It was not unlike a monster
bowl of bubbles; the same illusion of movement, the same delicacy
and witchery of colour, only here the sensation was not that of
decomposition but of life; of flowers, delicate as the rainbow, tenuous,
sinuous, breathing--weaving in a serpentine maze of daedalian hues; long
tendrils of orchidian beauty, lifting, weaving, drooping--a vast sea of
equatorial bloom; but--no trees.
“This is our landscape,” spoke the Rhamda. “According to the Jarados, it
is not like that of the next world--your world, my lord. After you meet
the Rhamdas, I shall take you into the Mahovisal for a closer view of it
all.”
They reached the bottom of the stairway. Chick noted the architecture in
the entrance-way at this point; the seeming solidness of structure, as
if the whole had been chiselled, not built. The vestibule was really
a hall, domed and high, large enough to shelter a hundred. Like the
corridor outside Chick's room, it was lined with a row each of red and
blue uniformed guards.
Invariably the one belonged to the blond, lithe, quick-feeling type,
the others heavy, sturdy, formidable. The extremities of the two lines
converged on an oval-topped doorway, very large, having above it a
design conventionalised from the three-leafed clover. One leaf was
scarlet, one blue, the other green.
The door opened. The guards halted. Geos stepped aside with a bow, and
Watson strode forward into the presence of the Council of the Rhamdas.