THE POOL OF OBLATION
Oogalah was right. It was the return of the pilgrims, and the delighted
city, plunged for days in wondering doubt over their safety had rushed
bodily out to meet them. Our momentary importance was hopelessly
eclipsed. I dreaded lest it might undergo an inverted resurrection, and
that these potent little men, incensed over our discovered depredations,
might turn angrily upon us and destroy us. For the moment I forgot these
apprehensions in pure admiration at the novel exhibition.
When we emerged on the courtyard at the eastern entrance of the Capitol
we found the broad mound on which the gold house was erected crowded.
Immediately in front of it was a jostling mass of women, and prominent
among them, by reason of stature and position, was standing the pretty
Ziliah, arrayed in certainly her best and most becoming costume, at the
head of the broad stairway, a view down which led the eye straight
eastward over the wide thoroughfare, now fenced in by enthusiastic
multitudes. Literary reminders constantly recur to me, and just then I
was amused to find myself picturing Rome when Pompey entered it and
recalling Marullus’ proud words, in Julius Caesar:
“And when you saw his chariot but appear,
Have you not made a universal shout,
That Tiber trembled underneath her banks
To hear the replication of your sounds
Made in her concave shores?”
There was no Tiber, to be sure, but there were the people, and the
shout, albeit rather more shrill and piercing than thunderous. The air
seemed at moments and in places thick with the rising hats that were
tossed with splendid nerve, in acclamation of the advancing procession.
On it came, hardly visible at first, save as an oscillating shimmer and
movement, and accompanying the incessant rumpus of the shattering
cymbals and the thumping drums. The musicians evinced a pardonable pride
and extracted as much noise as vigor and appreciation could extort from
their very willing instruments. It was exciting enough. As the first
companies of the Eskimos approached and the cataract of sound poured
over us we sought some higher outlook. A narrow ledge like a water-table
separated the second from the first story of rooms in the communal
palace. We could, by boosting and climbing on each other, reach this,
and once there the _coup d’oeil_ would be complete. Goritz bent forward.
With the lightness of a deer Hopkins sprang up, straightened himself,
and touched the coping. He swung onto it, and—I half dreaded it would
give way—it held. Then we maneuvered the Professor up. I followed and
with a long pull we jerked Goritz off his feet and hauled him to us, and
thus rather absurdly and flagrantly placed, we awaited the event. Our
feet dangled over the crowd below and, as we were in full view of the
terrace of steps and the road, the first thing the returning “doctors”
would behold, would be our desecrating presence on the walls of the
palace. But we were oblivious to consequences just then.
Gazing down immediately underneath our perch we saw the ladies of the
Capitol bunched in a many colored knot at the head of the steps.
Crushing upon them were the servants, attendants, guards, and an
indiscriminate crowd of citizens, and down these steps, kept inviolately
clean, on either side, was a line of the taller Eskimos, a man to every
step, with a black snake coiled round his waist, but with its neck and
head held outward in an inclined position, so that a view from our seat
crossed a profile of extended snakes’ heads and necks, somewhat
symmetrically displayed in two series. It was a most peculiar bizarre
picture.
Already the first regiment of men in the procession had halted, fallen
irregularly backward along the side of the road, and then massed beyond
these was the tireless band, men and women in their tight bodices and
sacks, their naked legs, and the picturesque gold knee-caps. Almost
instantly appeared the bright gold poles, around which, when we met them
in the pine forest, had been coiled the imprisoned snakes. The snakes
were no longer on them. The companies holding these advanced, strode up
the steps, and stalwartly, with a martial erectness absent from everyone
else, lined themselves with the snake holders. The diversified and
variegated cohorts of the little people which we had noticed in the
forest, had evidently dispersed, lost here and there along the route,
for they doubtless were adventitious accretions, followers from custom
or for amusement, and with them too had vanished the very considerable
commissariat.
There remained only the jaunting cars, with their odd but impressive
little occupants, and that jolting, shivering, monstrous gold throne,
bearing the shocking effigy of the Crocodilo-Python. Yes, and here they
were! The tugging rams with snail tipped horns, and the council in
violet gowns bedizened with gold braid and chains, utterly insignificant
lilliputian creatures, with their beetle heads. True, but the deadly
power lurking in those metal tubes—What was that?—not to be gainsaid,
not to be denied. The thought of it gave me a shuddering sense of
impotence, before these caricatures of men.
Of course the wagons could not ascend the steps, and the governors
softly alighted—it was quite delightful to see their noiseless flitting
to and fro—purring into each other’s ears as they came together, and
then separating with mimic gestures of expostulation or disgust or
approval. They looked, so we thought, almost as they had when we first
met them, and I began to wonder whether they did not harbor in their
light, frameless and bobbing little anatomies, extraordinary powers of
resistance, abnormal energies perhaps.
There was a little decorous shifting to and fro, and ceremonious bowing
and scraping, which had the most incalculably ludicrous appearance, as
if, after all, they were nothing but vaudeville puppets. Hopkins of
course appreciated all that uproariously. Finally they started up the
stairs, led by the benignant little gentleman who had told the Professor
to “speak,” and afterwards most effectively had gone through the dumb
show of telling him to “shut up,” and who, by the way, was Ziliah’s
father. They rose towards us with a mincing dignity that was really
pleasing. We noticed again their whiteness, their thinness, their long
arms, their thin fingers, their senile-like agitation, their pointed
beards, and the singular splendor of their eyes. The latter were now
uncovered, the disfiguring goggles hung from their necks by the most
delicate filaments of gold.
There were quite a number of them, perhaps thirty in all, and as they
slowly drew near to us we realized that while they belonged to the
racial configuration of the little people, they were probably immensely
removed from them, too, by an intellectual gap that bore some reference
to training or descent. The Semitic character of these little people was
irrefragable.
Hardly had the President—it turned out that such an appellation might
describe him—reached the middle of the ascent than we were treated to a
charming show of filial affection. Ziliah, ravishingly fixed up in close
fitting attire, and distinguished by some gold trinkets that became her
extremely well, ran down the steps and—fell into her father’s arms?
No—not that—exactly. There were some insurmountable difficulties,
related to the comparative sizes of the principals, that made that
commonplace impossible. Ziliah took her father _up_, hugged him, kissed
and—_set him down again_.
I heard Hopkins groan, and the query came in an undertone: “Where’s my
mother-in-law?”
[Illustration:
ZILIAH AND HER FATHER
]
After that there was a great deal of confusion. Mothers and daughters,
wives and sons, the magistrates from the city and innumerable friends
poured over the steps to meet the dignitaries, and, for all the world,
it just then resembled, allowing for the difference in latitude and
other things, the homecoming of a western deputation to your congress;
their arrival at the town hall, and their admiring reception by the
neighbors. And the democratic expression of things increased. The snake
sharps on the steps, so Hopkins designated them, disappeared with their
charges, depositing them in the enclosures in the “snake pasture,” the
gold-polemen scrambled up the steps and entered the Capitol, the rams,
jaunting cars, and the grinning throne-horror left too, but where I
could not see. We encountered the latter again under pretty startling
circumstances. Then when all this had happened the crowds from the city
jammed everything, with a shrilling of voices ascending to us that
sounded like a magnification, a megaphoning, of countless crickets. The
bigger people, the Eskimos, were scarcely visible. We felt relieved—_I
did_. We had been quite forgotten, and that spoke volumes for our
safety. We discussed the situation.
Hopkins: “Suppose we get down and join the house warming. It’s just
possible that they have something better to eat than usual on occasions
like this. I’d welcome a change of diet.”
I: “As this was a huge snake picnic, it may be they wind it up by eating
snakes.”
Hopkins: “Bah!”
The Professor: “My friends, now that the Faculty has returned Erickson
must interview them, explain our mission, establish scientific relations
with them if possible, get the records, assure them of the astonishment
which will be felt over their existence when we report it before the
scientific bodies of the world, solicit from them some demonstration of
their knowledge of transmutation, aeronautics, the X-ray; those powerful
tubes they manipulate; and then really we should be thinking of _getting
home_.”
I: “Professor, I don’t think we’ll find the Faculty, as you call them,
very communicative (“Tight wads?” interjected Spruce.) I’ve learned some
things from Ziliah, and judging from her communications I believe these
people know very little about themselves and what’s more I believe they
exercise their occult powers without knowing the _rationale_ of them
either. At any rate while I can get along with their speech I know I
should be floored in any intricate matter. As to—getting home. I agree
with you, but—HOW?”
The Professor: “But Alfred, be reasonable. Learn what you can. Try them.
I do admit our return presents difficulties.”
Goritz: “There can’t be much of the naphtha launch left now.”
Hopkins: “But Antoine, you are not thinking of getting out! I believe
you intended to apply for naturalization papers.”
The Professor: “There are the—Balloons? Perhaps—”
Hopkins: “Dear Professor, cut it out. There is some difference in size
and weight between these midgets and us. Really, if you’re solicitous on
the subject of the posthumous notices you are destined to receive in the
learned journals of the world, try the balloons. None in mine. Rocking
the cradle and watching Ziliah cook snakes is preferable. And seriously
I could make a hunch at getting on here if somehow we could improve the
brand of the religion—but this snake business has me going. I guess,
too, a little eugenics might help the people. Interbreeding, I should
say, with the huskies would add something to the linear dimensions of
the inhabitants, for really the girls have some class.”
I: “It seems likely to me that one might reach Beaufort Sea by a short
overland route to the west. It’s pretty clear that Radiumopolis is far
towards the western border of the Valley of Rasselas, and the Rim, and
the sea beyond that, are not far off. Our trip to the radium country
showed that.”
The Professor: “The importance of this discovery outranks anything that
has happened in the world since the discovery of America. It’s too
astounding to be even indicated in a few words. The radium deposit alone
is the most tremendous fact in nature today. For one, I should deplore
the destruction of this most curious aboriginal culture with the ethnic
problems displayed in it, but it is our indefeasible right to proclaim
to the world the presence here of the radium. The whole aspect,
industry, economics, finance, _health_ of the world will be profoundly
modified by its exploitation.”
Goritz: “Well I should say nothing about it. Let it be. We can use what
we learn about its powers for ourselves. That seems right enough to me.
What can be the use of turning the whole world topsy-turvy, and of
course as a consequence exterminating these innocent people. Do you
suppose you could hold back for one hour the rampaging hordes that would
pour into this little valley and inundate it with hungry, riotous
savages? Put a mining town with its rum and its demons in the place of
this contented realm with its picturesque life, its peaceful ceremonies,
its long inherited customs that for centuries upon centuries have never
changed; erase or debauch a community that on the very edge of the
roaring world, since time began, has kept on its quiet hidden way in
this unassailable nook, and do you think you will ever forgive
yourselves for the ruin, the devastation? It would curse you to your
death.”
We all looked at Goritz with surprise. He did not often turn on the
oratory like this. It was a touch, I said to myself, of his old nature.
The plea was well made and it kept us silent for some time, and I think
the longer we measured its meaning the more it affected us. Suddenly
Hopkins broke the silence.
“Say, where’s everybody? There isn’t a soul in sight.” It was true; the
mound hill, the courtyards, the road, the steps, the doorway, the snake
pasture, the parapets, which it seemed but a few moments before had been
crammed with the chattering multitude, were deserted. In our absorption,
seated above the heads of the crowd on the comfortable ledge, we had
forgotten to note its disappearance. Always anxious over some possible
new development which would endanger our safety, and never confident of
the good intentions of the little wiseacres with their preternatural
powers, their minute crooked devices, and their probable deceit and
malevolence, I now felt some alarm at this silence and desertion. Was it
some new turn in affairs, a new stage in their ceremonial procedure that
portended any harm to us? I had wondered over the apparent forgetfulness
of our presence, and our absolute neglect. Was it part of some
preconcerted design, an ostentatious indifference, concealing some
mischievous plot for our undoing? For it was quite easy, indeed
unavoidable to conceive, that these little rulers, impregnable hitherto
in their power, would view suspiciously our advent among them. A
secluded bred-in civilization like this, is jealous of intrusion,
resents the foreigner, and spurns novelty. It has always been so and the
Faculty—the word the Professor complimented them with—would readily
descry in us the forerunners of a more dangerous invasion. It would be
well to watch them and—where they were?
I leaped to the ground and the rest at once followed. We ran around the
corner of the building, first to the north—in which direction the city
was far less expanded than southward and eastward—and the same emptiness
confronted us. But to the south and at the west the contrast was
startling. The areas were packed with streaming throngs; crowds from
streets were discharging into the broad highway leading westward, that
one on which we had just returned from the radium hunt, and, as we
hastened to the west side of the Capitol, we saw that the concourse was
passing out on the same boulevard towards the swamp land just outside
the ranges of the city. Our elevation enabled us to trace the variegated
ribbon of people, made up of the little folk for the most part, and
occasionally a towering figure, moving _silently_ outward in an enormous
evacuation of the city. What had preceded them or what they followed we
could not undertake to determine.
Fragments and sections of the formal parade, as it had returned from the
ceremonial circuit, were embedded in the stream, and we guessed the
Council led the procession. Glancing into the broad central hall of the
Capitol—where the radium lamps were—nothing was seen. The big communal
house of government was bare and abandoned. Goritz’s hand passed
enviously over the broad encrusting plates of gold which now any
ruthless pillager could have torn away, but he did not attempt to remove
one. We certainly would have interposed had he tried it. It required no
deliberation on our part to conclude to mingle in the crowds. It might
be that if their destination was the swamps we now might learn something
of the uses of that mystery-shrouded depression and reservoir.
Running down the western terrace of steps we were soon immersed in the
multitude, though by reason of our physical proportions we rose above
them like tall saplings among bushes. Some familiarization with us had
been gained by the Radiumopolites, and although we never stirred abroad
without awakening interest, they no longer regarded us with the first
unsubdued wonder and curiosity. And on this occasion we were less likely
to excite attention, as a more dreadful expectation filled their minds.
Slowly we made our way for a mile or so until the sombre thickets and
enshrouding vegetation of the swamps came into view. And then a rapid
dispersal began. Down innumerable paths and trails, all more or less
artificially finished, the people vanished. Files of them entered these
forest alleyways and the quickly thinning throngs left us comparatively
free. We passed a broad road leading to the left, down which in the
distance we discerned a line of vans pulled by Eskimos, and on them
prostrate and bandaged or chained figures, some moving, we thought! For
the moment we were rooted with horror. What could they be? What was
this? A public execution, a sacrifice, a holocaust? Good God—could it be
a cannibalistic feast? Great as were our suspicion and terror, the
constraining power of a savage curiosity drove us on. Down the very next
lane we met, we rushed _pele-mele_, with something like rage, something
like disgust, something like a sickening fear, a blend hard to analyze.
Perhaps we had run a half a mile, when we burst through the last
encircling hedge of bushes and found ourselves on the shore of a turbid,
muddy, malodorous pool, confined by a low wall of clay, paved with tile,
and then surrounded by the outstretched cordons of the adult
population—not a child was visible—of Radiumopolis! And immediately
above us, at the side, so that we could inspect the actions of its
occupants, was a low platform, also of clay, perhaps twenty feet high.
On this platform, ranged in a circle, were those detestable worthies (?)
and behind them stood the vans, and on the vans—motionless bodies in
small low heaps, like fagoted wood! Yes! They were dead—all dead—_quite
dead_. God be praised for that!
From somewhere back of the platform the cymbals began their clamorous
cries, but whether it was due to an augmented band or an exasperated
effort, the noise seemed redoubled, rising into a screeching tumult
quite indescribable. And then the people shouted. It sounded like
_Lam-bo-o, Lam-bo-oo_.
It was a curious vocality and perhaps as nearly as anything might be
likened to the querulous squeal of monkeys, with just a faint
amelioration of disapproval on the assumption that it was singing.
That—the combined discord of the cymbals and the singing—continued for
perhaps fifteen minutes, with intervals of a minute or so. It was
altogether unearthly. Now we began to see that the pond or pool or swamp
connected by a narrow neck of water with more remote basins, that may
have had interminable connections in all directions, forming a web of
waterways.
From these distant bayous and lagoons now issued three or four or five
sinuous monsters, rushing forward upon the waves of their own
disturbance, their saurian heads raised slightly, and the huge
convolutions of their tails discerned in the wash of their wakes, as
they hastened, as if with some anticipatory avidity for their meal,
towards us, towards the platform, from where the immolation awaited
them. They were the _Crocodilo-Pythons_. We recognized at once the
white-green beasts we had seen in the Saurian Sea. Yes, the same
obscene, unspeakable beasts.
They only revealed their terrifying bulk as they approached the platform
and finally came to rest before it. Then inserting their muscular
posteriors in the mud, beyond which lazily rolled the python-like tails
in portentous folds, their heads and fore-quarters slowly rose into the
air. This exposure made us quail and yet exult, with an excitement no
language can convey. The same repulsive coloring masked them, the
greenish-yellow skin, the agitated and red blotches. Higher and higher,
mounted the snapping jaws, and at moments the mucus covered eyes emerged
with a baleful glitter; the long neck swayed and the short front legs
beat the air, as if in expostulation at delay. The fascinating thrill of
horror which such a sight causes can be understood; only the painter can
justify it.
And, sir, they were fed—_fed_ with corpses, while the infernal cymbals
banged on, and the insignificant people wailed their “_Lam-bo-oo,
Lam-bo-oo!_”
The bodies were naked and they were the dead of both races; the gaping
jaws caught them as the sea lion catches with inerrant skill the tossed
fish, that no sooner reaches the expectant jaws than it vanishes with a
hollow-sounding gulp. So for the most part did these small bodies go,
the dilating necks of the animals marking their descent to the cavernous
abdomens. A few vicious twirls maybe, a shivering hammering together of
the jaws, accompanied at times with a dip beneath the water, sending
muddy waves to the banks, indicated the less easy negotiation of the
larger bodies.
Revolted and overcome by the pervading half-sickening stench—in part the
exhalations from the vile saurians—we turned away. As we went back I
caught a full view of the little dignitaries in their violet gowns,
their glittering chains and their beehive hats, and what an incongruous
contrast it made. In their frailness, their whiteness, their chirping
volubility, with their overmade heads, their tenuous shanks and their
globed eyes they took on, to me, the whimsical likeness to delicately
cut and animated _netsukes_ in ivory, dressed like toys; and I thought
too their enlarged heads might keep company with their compressed
hearts, though certainly we could not say yet, and religious habits
often accompany many horrors, much bad taste, and a lot of antiquated
humbug.
[Illustration:
THE POOL OF OBLATION
]
We got away, the Professor reluctantly. He said the “mandibular action”
merited longer observation, and Hopkins inquired, “I wonder how the
undertakers of Radiumopolis relish this sort of burial? It certainly
saves the mourner considerable in flowers and gravestones, but I don’t
believe I would cotton to finding my ancestors in the bones of an
alligator. It’s decidedly composite you know, like as in “The Yarn of
the Nancy Bell,” when the man who had eaten a good deal of everybody,
sang:
“‘Oh, I am the cook and a captain bold,
And the mate of the Nancy brig,
And a bo’s’n tight, and a midshipmite,
And the crew of the captain’s gig.’”
Long after we had regained the highway, and were on our solitary way to
the city we could hear the smashing cymbals, the thudding drums, and the
dolorous salutation of the—Well WHAT? Worshippers. Ugh! But we did meet
Oogalah and he was in dreadfully low spirits, with a face full of
misery, wringing his hands in distress. When he saw the Professor he ran
up to him and stood before him in a woe-begone way, quite incapable of
explaining his grief. Goritz could make him out fairly well and he asked
him “What is the matter? Sick?”
“No! No! Oogalah not sick, but the Big Men have thrown his dead mother
to the Serpent!”
Of course we were interested, and Goritz extorted from our friend an
astonishing story. Briefly, it was this. Every year at the winter
solstice (for later we found that these people possessed a calendar) a
ceremony of sacrifice was celebrated at the Pool of Oblation—so I named
it. Formerly, many, many decades before this, live men and women had
been thrown to the carnivorous saurians, but that had been altered (“by
the Progressives,” Hopkins suggested), and now the dead only, and not
more than a dozen or so, were thrown to them; a reduction in numbers
because the beasts sometimes refused some of them, and the bodies
corrupted the pool.
Every five years the great lustration of the Forest Temples took place.
That was the festival whose beginning and termination we had seen. At
these times the whole woodland where the chosen trees are cleared—the
Tree Temples—would be traversed, and at each Tree Temple chants would be
sung, a black snake left, and some gold offering attached to the tree
itself. Shorter pilgrimages occurred four times each year. The snake
pasture was kept up as a nursery for the supply of the wood temples, for
the snakes did not long survive in the pine forest. This year the Great
Lustration had been unaccountably delayed—Oogalah did not know why, but
he had heard that the “Big Men” (“A decided catachresis,” said the
Professor, “for they literally are pygmies”), were very angry about
something (my heart jumped with a sudden fear when Goritz told us this).
Oogalah’s mother died while we were away with him in the radium country,
and the Magistrates of the city, who saw to the gathering of the yearly
hecatomb, had _attached_ her. Deaths were not numerous, it appeared; the
supply of corpses—adequate, that is, for a satisfactory oblation—was not
always secured, and a few sheep or goats made up the deficiency, their
saurian majesties being at the same time importuned not to resent the
substitution. “A Radiumopolite,” commented Hopkins, “may be a sweet
morsel, but, under the circumstances, I surely would prefer mutton.”)
Oogalah could not tell us much about the “Serpent” (our
Crocodilo-Python), or his worship. He said it had always been so, and
that the “big ponds” toward the south were full of them. He had
traversed these once on a raft, and apparently had got the scare of his
life, for the beasts wobbled about him and, except for an inconvenient
satiety at the moment, might have picked him and his companions off like
crumbs from a plate. He said too that it was in the savannahs, morasses
and meadows of the “southland” that the food for the black snakes in the
“serpent pasture” was foraged. “A typical surviving remnant, doubtless,”
said the Professor, “of _Cretaceo-Juro-Triassic_ scenery.”)
Oogalah’s communications quite restored his peace of mind, and the gift
of a pocket knife from Goritz put him into such blissful acceptance of
his domestic bereavement, that the theft of two or three dead mothers
would have been thankfully condoned for a similar exchange in the case
of each.
We had again reached the city but in darkness. The clouds had thickened
in an impenetrable curtain over the Stationary Sun, and the deepest
gloom had settled over everything. Forebodings filled my mind.
Superstitiously watching every symptom of nature I dreaded the effect of
this eclipse on the people, and their cunning little governors, who
might at any moment change their deferential behavior into a ruthless
malignancy. After their rite of propitiation this darkening of the sun
might indicate to them a yet unappeased deity, for, as the Professor had
put it, the “Serpent and the Sun had a consentaneous meaning in many old
mythologies.” Why then was he unappeased? _The Strangers and their
profanation of the Shrines._ I always returned to this suspicion with
dread. A few moments later my worst fears were confirmed.
We had ascended the western terrace of steps and were immediately
beneath the western facade of the Capitol, still to all appearances
empty, when a flying figure met us, and in another instant the arms of
Ziliah were about Spruce Hopkins’ neck, and—my conclusion on the matter
can scarcely be questioned—his were probably about hers. It certainly
was a bad case of nerves. Ziliah was in a sort of hysteria, moaning and
gasping with (so Hopkins called it) a “_strangle hold_” on his
“wind-pipe,” that also quite robbed her lover of the power of utterance.
I intervened. The incident might have terminated in their mutual
suffocation—so it seemed to me.
The fair and stricken Ziliah told her story.
She had not gone to the Oblation. No; she did not like it. But then
there was something else. “Spooce” was in danger, her own “Spooce”—and
all of us, _all_. The governors did not like us; they were afraid of us,
afraid we might bring more—her father was as bad as the rest of them.
And they had found out something, she did not know what, something we
had done. We were enemies of the _Serpent_, and—Ziliah’s agitation at
this juncture quite robbed her narrative of coherency, but in a lucid
interval I understood her—we were to be sacrificed; we would be fed to
the Serpent!!!
“Zerubbabel and Heliopolis,” shouted Hopkins. “You don’t mean it? Does
she say so? Well so help me—if we don’t blow the pack into kingdom
come—and twice as far. How much powder have we got left?”
“_The tubes_,” I remonstrated.
Hopkins was silent; he remembered their power, and it was not so many
hours since something of the same inscrutable influence had nearly
brought us all to the verge of extinction.
Never, to the last day of my life, Mr. Link, will I comprehend what
happened then. Was it the hand of God—or was it telepathy. WHAT? Ziliah
repeated the words I had uttered—exactly. She loosened Hopkins’ embrace,
she moved stealthily towards me, I saw her deep, sweet eyes raised to
mine, her hands closed on my cheeks; the boreal dusk light that comes
from the firmament even when clouded, made her whole face visible. In it
shone a strange divination; she repeated the words, “_the tubes_,” and
then sighed; seized with a sudden inspiration, I forced my mind upon
hers; my brain contracted (it felt so), as with a fierce concentration
of will I projected the sense of my words and all they implied upon, in,
through, the spirit before me—the spirit that itself leaped to their
comprehension.
She crouched slightly, moved away, but her soft fingers closed around my
hand, and she drew me towards her.
We entered the broad hall of the Capitol, Ziliah holding me tightly and
leading me. We turned into a passage-way. At its dark end we stumbled on
a half raised arched tile. Ziliah raised it, and seemed sinking below
me, as I felt her pull me down. I stooped and felt the edges of an
opening. My wary foot detected a stairway. Together we descended and in
a dozen or more steps reached the floor of a chamber whose walls seemed
only a few feet off on every side of us. Ziliah led me to the corner of
this room, pushed upon a wooden door and we entered what proved to be a
much larger room. Then telling me to wait, my guide left me. Another
instant and a soft radiance filled the place. It came from a radium lamp
which Ziliah had uncovered. She pointed to a table in the center of this
apartment. On it lay a metal box—a leaden trunk. Ziliah raised its lid.
I leaped forward. I already knew what to expect.
In the bottom of the box lay, neatly aligned in rows, thirty leaden
tubes, one probably for each of the governors. Here at last in our
power, our possession, were the murderous little vials. But were they
charged with their life-arresting power? And how to use them? I stood
perplexed, and Ziliah remained motionless by me gazing at me with a mute
happiness, as she realized she had attained my wishes. But it was plain
that the dear creature knew nothing about them. No—the clever little
doctors were not such fools as to popularize their peculiar knowledge,
and the dark beauty, tears yet bepearling her long lashes, was just a
child before them, _as I was_. But why had they left them here at all?
They must have been deposited after the return, for the doctors
indubitably had worn them in their girdles when we so inauspiciously
dropped onto the road in the pine forest. Did they have a duplicate set?
The thought unnerved me.
Now not the least remarkable circumstance in this startling episode was
that I had not talked to Ziliah at all, though we understood each other.
Telepathy, or sympathy, or suggestion, had done its perfect work so far;
not a word had passed between us, but at this obstructive ignorance
staring me, so to speak, in the face I opened my mouth.
“Ziliah are these all?”
“ALL,” came the answer very quietly, but with a frankness and certainty
that assured me.
“Do you know anything about them Ziliah? How they work?”
Ziliah knew nothing. “The—,” I understood her to mean the doctors,
including her precious father, “will kill you all—Ah! Spooce, too. No!
No! Take them away,” pointing to the chest, “AWAY—AWAY.”
The girl’s nerves were reasserting themselves; time was running away
too, my friends were deserted, and detection was imminent at any moment.
Another glance at the desperate little instruments, and then—_nolens,
volens_—I picked them up and pushed them under my tunic, so that I felt
their cold surfaces chilling my skin.
Then I shook Ziliah and pointed to the door, closing the lid of the
chest. She understood. Our way back was as noiseless as our entrance had
been. Unless our footprints remained as silent betrayers of our robbery,
there was no reason for suspicion, no proof of our misdeeds. Misdeed
indeed; it was our SALVATION.
In five minutes I was back with my friends, and Ziliah, reaching the
limit of her endurance comfortably fled to her familiar refuge—Hopkins’
arms.
Now you may ask incredulously—Why did you not in the first place ask
Ziliah where were _the tubes_; why impair the credibility of your story
by injecting this transcendental nonsense about—_telepathy_.
I don’t know, sir; the facts are just as I have related them.
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