BETWEEN HIMYRA AND THE SUN
In the weeks that followed, many things transpired. The line of poles
stretched its length from the power station to Himyra, and men were
stringing wires. Croft made coke, ground it into powder, mixed it
with a cohesive substance, and molded it into carbon cores, to serve
his growing arcs. Also, he began experimenting in the construction
of batteries, both moist and dry cells. He succeeded with the former
from the first. And for these experiments he demanded of Robur, and
obtained, the use of an unused room in the palace, where he often
worked at nights.
Chemistry, as an exact science, was unknown on Palos, but through
consultations with the local caste of physicians Croft managed to
collect a certain number of crudely refined salts which they commonly
used as drugs. The room where Croft delved into the simpler mysteries
of nature became an apartment of wonder to Robur, who came to it first
himself, and later brought Gaya and Naia.
And on the night of their first coming, Croft explained the laws of
chemical affinity as best he could to the three, comparing the force
that drew the ions together with love, and caught a comprehending flash
from Naia's blue eyes.
Thereafter she came as she willed when he worked, and watched while he
struggled with his far from satisfactory equipment, and asked a hundred
questions, until he suggested that she assist him, whereupon she
accepted with a readiness that filled him with surprise. Night after
night thereafter she donned a coarse smock and labored at his side,
finding a new world open before her with the wide-eyed interest of a
child; beholding for the first time the deliberate manipulation of the
hidden forces of nature, beginning at length to understand man's right
and power to use them to his advantage, direct them and command, to
look upon them not as some supernatural manifestation, but as a wholly
natural thing.
Meanwhile in the motur shops, Croft's by now expert force were
assembling the first two airplanes. And in the same place, since he
could work there as well as anywhere else, and supervise their work at
the same time, he and Robur spent a part of each day constructing a
resistance coil and a temporary switch on a slab of the marble white
stone so much in evidence on Palos, against the day when the new light
should be shown to Himyra first.
At the end of two weeks, however, he moved the now finished wings
and bodies in which the moturs had been installed to the hangars
and installed a force of men with them there to complete the work.
Meanwhile at night he kept up his search for a satisfactory dry cell,
telling Naia that the success of the flying machine depended upon it;
so that when at last he succeeded, and she felt the current tingle
through her fingers for the first time, she cried out in delight.
And in those two weeks, as Gaya had planned, as Croft had known must
happen, constant association and education had its effect. As they
played ball in the mornings, and bathed, and worked, and sought for
strange, new results such as the woman had never dreamed in all her
existence, they drew closer and closer together in their aims, their
every interest, their understanding, than they had ever been. In his
own way and by his own methods, Croft was rapidly raising the woman,
whom as a woman he worshiped, toward his own mental plane. Thus in the
end she came to a realization that those things which had once seemed
as much a miracle to her as to any of her people, might very well be
manifestation of natural law within the grasp of man.
His dry cells perfected, the success of his engine ignition
assured--several arcs nearing the finished stage of their construction,
Croft had a new thought. He decided that after his demonstration of
the airplanes at Himyra, he might wish to exhibit them at Zitra, and
altered his plans somewhat as a result, and equipped each plane with a
set of buoyant pontoons, thereby converting them to the type of flying
fish more nearly than anything else. He explained his reason for this
to Naia, with whom he was now talking everything over fully, and she
smiled.
"On the water they will run as well as through the air," she said, when
he had finished. "Jason--you must teach me to fly as well as everything
else."
And as on the first afternoon of his coming to Himyra from the
mountains, Jason frowned. "I like not the thought. There is danger in
this flying."
"Danger?" Naia of Aphur arched her brows. "Think you I have any fear?"
"No," he hastened to assure her. "It is Jason who for thee would be
afraid."
For an instant she colored and then went a trifle pale. "And what of
Naia of Aphur, think you, when Jason dares this danger, my friend?"
"It is a matter of knowledge," Croft said quickly, thrilled by her
hinted meaning. "I have driven them before."
"On earth?" Naia's pupils widened swiftly, making almost black pools of
her eyes.
"Yes, on earth, where they use them also in the battles of their wars."
"Hai!" cried Naia sharply, with a quiver of her finely chiseled
nostrils as she caught the picture his words conveyed. "To rise and
wheel and fight--to struggle like great birds in the air. This earth of
which you speak must be a wonderful place."
"Yes," said Croft, as he went on and told her many things, describing
among others the aviator's dress.
"And what will Jason wear on Palos?" she asked.
Croft laughed. "I had not given it any attention. I must consider the
matter. Perhaps a garment fashioned out of gnuppa hide."
Naia nodded. Suddenly her scarlet lips were smiling. "In my mind I see
as in a painting these leather-clad men of earth. Leave the matter of
your apparel to Naia, and you will, O Jason," she replied.
And Croft assented, filled with both pleasure and surprise.
* * * * *
Then came a night to Aphur very much like that before the first motur
was finished--a night when a very few hours would see the first pair
of airplanes done. And that night Croft remained at the hangars,
examining, tuning, testing and testing again the motur he meant to
demonstrate to Robur and the gaping workmen, with the dawn. Over and
over he turned on the spark and sent the giant-voiced engine spinning
with an ever-steadying hum. Under the flare of oil slushes burning
about him, he looked into the face of the captain in charge of the
hangar crew and found his bronzed skin pale.
"Thou wilt dare it, Mouthpiece of Zitu?" the fellow said in a tone of
awed deference, meeting Croft's glance. "Thou wilt attempt in this
device to mount the air? Brave men have there been in Tamarizia, aye
and brave women, yet none like to thee before."
"Nonsense!" said Jason, and laughed with a catch in his breath. For
indeed he was thrilling with a vast sense of accomplished purpose as
the motur roared. "With the sun I shall be a thousand vestrons over
your head," he declared, meaning thereby approximately three thousand
feet. And he laughed again, more in sheer nervous tension than from
any humor as the captain instinctively tipped back his head and stared
at the hangar roof.
Satisfied at length that everything was ready, he threw himself on
a pallet, from which he rose at dawn. To his rousing cry came the
captain and his men. The doors of the hangar were opened, and the first
airplane on which Sirius had ever shone was trundled out, rolling on
wheels affixed to the bottoms of each pontoon.
And even as it appeared, a motur flashed from the blurring shadow of
Himyra's red walls and dashed toward it along the road. It was Robur
coming to witness his friend's latest venture, driving in a smother
of dust and impatience. Leaning against a vane, Croft watched his
progress, and so received a surprise. Robur was not alone.
At first Croft noted the fact with wonder, and then with a leaping
heart. Naia was with him--Naia of Aphur. He was to make his first
attempt to scale the air of Palos before her purple eyes. He caught a
deep breath, and his own eyes flashed as the motur approached, and he
went toward it, and Robur sprang out.
"Hail, Jason, Tamarizia's first man-bird!" he exclaimed, glancing from
Croft to the huge machine. "Zitu, I can scarce believe that so large a
thing can rise and take to wing."
"Bird-man, not man-bird, Rob," said Croft, giving Naia a hand to assist
her from the motur, and becoming aware that she carried a package
across her knees.
"Thy garment," she explained, extending it to him. "Go into the cote
where you house your bird and put it on."
"My thanks for it, and your presence," Croft accepted and helped her
from the car. "Hai, Rob--don't fool with the engine, will you, while I
don my new attire?" He turned away and disappeared through the hangar
doors.
And there he opened the bundle with unsteady hands and lifted what it
contained. Trousers, or rather breeches, they seemed of leather as
soft as the finest earthly ooze grain--a tunic--a helmet--leg-cases
fashioned to strap on. And Naia of Aphur had designed them, had planned
them, directed their making, had brought them to him this morning.
Croft's hand actually fumbled the buckles as he put them on. Yet in the
end the thing was done, and he stepped forth clothed from toe to head
in russet brown, save for the front of the helmet, through which shone
his face.
"Zitu!" cried Rob, and Naia's eyes were shining as he advanced toward
them followed by the hangar's crew, and mounted into his seat.
Over the fuselage edge he looked down directly into their blue depths.
And suddenly they lost their glint of pleasure, grew dark and a trifle
strained in the white oval of her face. "Take places!"
The hangar crew ran to the stations Croft had already assigned.
"Ready!" Two of the men laid hold of the propeller and sent it around.
With a roar the engine caught on. A cloud of backdriven dust half
veiled the men who steadied the huge plane against the drag of the
motur holding it, checking it as it strained and quivered like a hound
against the leash.
"Let go!"
The men fell back. The plane quivered, moved slowly in advance. Out
across that same desert where once Jason had driven the first motur in
a mad, reckless dash to save Naia of Aphur's life, he now shot forward
in the first quickening dash of Aphur's first airplane. Forward--faster
and faster--faster and faster--then up. Obedient to his shifting of
the controls, the huge machine tilted, seemed to rear on its haunches,
lifting its nose, its wheels, rising, rising--free of the ground at
last--free and rising, higher and higher, up! up!
* * * * *
Up, up! A spear-point of the rising sun caught it and set it aglisten
as it rose. Up, up, its well-tuned motur roaring out the song of a
marvel's birth. Up and up against the pink and blue of morning. Up and
up, smaller and smaller to them who watched it from beside the hangar.
Then, as they watched, it turned. It turned and flew back above them,
five hundred feet in air. It began to spiral, ever rising higher above
the ground. And suddenly, though Croft did not know it at the time, and
Robur, lost in amazement, did not sense it, Naia of Aphur ran swiftly
to the motur and, carrying something crushed to her bosom, from there
to the doors of the hangar, and disappeared.
Over the fuselage Croft looked down. The hangar was a little shed
beneath him. The cluster of watchers were a group of ants. A vast
elation filled his breast. Once more his efforts were crowned with
complete success. With no more than some minor changes, he felt that
his mastery of the Palosian atmosphere was assured. He altered the
inclination of his vanes and began sliding swiftly down, gliding
gracefully back to a rolling stop at the end.
"My friend!" cried Robur, running up. He caught Jason's hand as Croft
climbed out, and stood clinging to it.
And though an hour before Croft would have been well satisfied with
such recognition, he became aware now of hunger for something else.
Naia--it was her praise, her congratulations, he wished. He turned his
head, seeking her presence, and found it, and gasped.
For Naia of Aphur had changed since he left. No more was she a glowing
girl in her fluttering garments, waiting to see him essay human flight
with bated breath. Gone were the filmy draperies that had swathed her;
and instead, she stood before him, habited like himself, in a smaller
suit of brown, which clung to her graceful limbs and supple torso like
a loosely fitted skin. Gone even were the masses of her golden hair,
veiled under a helmet of brown.
But as he met them, her blue eyes were the same. And they were fired
with a light of excited anticipation. "Again!" she cried. "Again--and
this time I shall go with you, Jason--I would fly!"
"Naia! My cousin!" Robur started forward a pace in instinctive protest.
"Nay." She wheeled upon him, stamping a small foot incased in the soft,
brown leather. "Nay, Robur, I shall be the first woman in all Tamarizia
to fly." She stretched out slender, appealing arms. "Jason--is there
not place between your wings for me?"
"Yes." There was something almost a veiled suggestion of wider meaning
in her words, and Croft caught it as he gave her his hand. The thing
was madness--but--it thrilled him--excited his admiration afresh as he
realized that the whole thing was no matter of the instant, no impulse,
but something she had thought out, planned--for which she had caused
her costume to be made at the same time as his own. And he had not the
heart to deny her, in the flush of his recent success.
"Come," he said instead as Robur fell back, and caught her under the
arms, lifting her lightly up, until her foot gained a supporting hold
and she climbed to her place in the pit of the fuselage.
And then, settling himself once more in position, Croft cried to
his men, and once more the engine roared. Briefly he glimpsed his
companion's face. It was eager, expectant, in the morning light. Her
breast rose and fell in a barely quickened rhythm under its covering of
brown.
"Let go!"
Once more the plane advanced, jolting, tipping a little, swaying to the
slight irregularities of the ground it ran ahead. Croft moved a lever.
The obedient monster answered. The desert fell away beneath. Up, up,
Jason of earth and Naia of Aphur, daughter of Ga, and child of Palos,
swam toward a brightening sky of pink and gold. Up and up. Once more he
stole a sidelong glance at his companion's face. It was lifted, tilted
a little back--its blue eyes closed.
"Naia!" Croft spoke to her above the motor's roar.
She lifted her lids, met his somewhat anxious regard, and smiled.
And from him she let her gaze wander over the whole vast panorama of
desert and mountain and the Central Ocean, blue and green and black
and gold, with a froth on the nearer waves like a fringe of white to
their shadowed flanks as it caught the light, and Himyra--the red city
beginning to glow as Sirius shot his shafts against its ruddy walls,
and like a dull chain, supporting the red jewel of the city on the
breast of Aphur, the yellow Na, outlined as far as the eye could reach
by a band of shimmering green.
And suddenly her breast lifted, her lips parted, and she began to
sing--to sing as she had once cried to Croft that the birds she envied
sang as they rose against the morning--gladly--clearly--freely as a
bird itself might sing.
So sang Naia of Aphur, between Himyra and the sun.
After that Croft taught her how to fly. Having once yielded, he could
not well again refuse. And Naia had her way with him, as she had
meant to do ever since she first was taken with the notion of herself
controlling one of the new machines that he had made.
* * * * *
But the promise to teach her she exacted that same morning after they
had returned to the palace. Robur ran off to tell Gaya concerning the
success of the trial flight, and Naia dared Croft to bathe. Afterward
he was half inclined to think she adopted the time and place to a
gaining of her point. Woman she would not have been had she not
realized her beauty and its appeal. But at the time he gave the matter
no thought.
"You will surely teach me to fly?" she said almost as soon as they
floated side by side.
"No," he denied in a somewhat uncertain fashion. "This morning I
yielded because of your great desire to be the first woman of Palos to
take to the air. In that I was not altogether wise. Again I would not
dare."
"Yet and you yielded to my desire in the matter of this morning,
your excuse should be the same in yielding to me again, no less. Ah,
Jason"--her hand crept out and lay upon his arm--"now know I the
feeling of a bird when it rises and sings from pure joy, for the first
time in my life, and the knowledge thrills me; I would know it again,
because--" She broke off with a little, gasping breath.
"Because of what?" Croft turned his head and looked into her
pansy-purple eyes.
"Because," said she very slowly, "it is to me as though I was no longer
mortal--as though I had in some way left the body--cast off all the
weight of the flesh."
"Naia!" Croft stammered. "Thou knowest?" and paused, strangely shaken
at the knowledge her words showed.
"Aye--since the last time you called me to you. Come and I shall show
you, Jason." She turned and dived.
Croft followed. Down, down, he followed her gleaming form through the
clear water. Down, down, until he swam beside it. And then lost, buried
deep in its liquid embrace, screened from all observation by the play
of the sun upon its surface, she turned still closer to him, and for
the first time since old Zud's blunder had brought misunderstanding she
offered him her scarlet mouth.
From that kiss man and woman came up gasping almost as to a new birth.
Misunderstanding, all barriers of restraint, seemed to have been washed
away in the shimmering pool's soft flood. "Ah, Acquor, Acquor," Naia
panted, "thou has caught thy little fish at last."
"Fear not, little fish," said Croft in a voice which quivered, "I shall
not eat you, but--this time I shall surely hold you fast."
"And you will teach me to fly?" There was witchery in Naia's words
and in her smile; witchery, whimsy, almost a conscious knowledge that
now--now--she could not be denied.
"Yes," said Croft in open surrender. "And Zitu pity me if aught befall
thee."
"Nay, I will be careful," Naia sobered. "And--and--"
"And what--is there something more, beloved?" Croft questioned softly.
"Nay." She lowered her eyes. "I must go fasten my girdle about me lest
we be late for the morning's meal." She swam toward the sunken steps.
And suddenly Croft knew--the thought that had stirred her soul, and
it set his own soul glowing. In one swift stroke he overtook her.
"Beloved, beloved," he whispered to her, "on the day the new light
comes to Himyra I shall once more fasten thy girdle with Azil's seal."
"The new light--" The fires in her blue eyes quickened. "Aye, Jason,
I would wear it in the new light," she said as, side by side, they
clambered from the pool. "Once in these waters I sought the mouth of
Zilla, and in them today I found Azil's, beloved, in the touch of
yours."
Half an hour later Croft met Gaya, and she stopped him. "Wise man, and
one of great wisdom, are you, Jason, as Robur, my husband, tells me,
saying, accompanied by Naia, you have conquered the air." She put out
her hand.
Croft took it. He bent toward her. "Hark you, Gaya, my sweet friend,"
he said, speaking softly. "The air is nothing. I have conquered
something else."
"What mean you?" Gaya questioned.
"That Naia of Aphur, on the day the new light comes, will wear my
seal," Croft told her.
"Zitu," she exclaimed, smiling, "you have spoken, then, at last. Wise
man I have confessed you, yet to me you have seemed most blind in this
as most men are with women. Glad though am I for you both. But now she
was in my chamber, and radiant as Ga. She declared you would teach her
to fly, and easily deceived as I was, I thought it that."
* * * * *
After that two causes hastened Croft's arrangements for the celebration
of the coming of the light. One was the renewal of his formal betrothal
with Naia, of course. The other was of a wholly different sort.
As for Naia, save for the hours he spent in the shops, he was with
her the greater part of the time, either teaching her the control of
a plane, which she mastered quickly both on land and water, or in the
laboratory, or, in the evening, sometimes speaking with her alone,
sometimes with Robur and his wife. And in the laboratory, one evening
shortly after the day of their first flight together, Croft spoke to
her of love as he had spoken once before but with a different meaning.
Taking two salts in solution, he poured them together.
"Behold," said he, as he mixed them and formed a substance compounded
of their blending which fell slowly to the bottom of the glass,
"behold, beloved, the chemistry of love--how each atom draws the other
atom to it, until they blend and are no more, but lose themselves each
one within the other to form a definite something which was not before!
"Behold--for even so, beloved, it is with the souls of men and
women--each drawing the other to it; each blending with the other,
until in the will of Zitu, and they are truly mated, they melt into
perfect union, and a perfect spirit is born!" It was one way of
portraying the doctrine of twin souls, the "marriage of the lamb,"
the birth into angelhood, dependent on the union of the two original
spiritual halves, and Naia nodded with a widening of her eyes.
"Each draws the other to it," she said, coming close beside him. "Ah,
Jason, did I draw you to me really from the earth?"
"Aye, by Zitu," he swore, and slipped an arm about her.
"Thy need of me brought you unto Palos, even as thou hast called my
spirit from my flesh."
"Aye," Croft said in a voice gone husky with emotion. It was the first
time she had mentioned those astral meetings in a fashion so direct.
She eyed the new-formed substance in the glass before them. And
suddenly she smiled. Face, eyes and lips, her whole fair being glowed.
"They meet and mingle, melt into one another," she went on softly, and
lifted his other arm and drew it about her form to meet the other. "Ah,
Jason, thou messenger of Azil to me--that first night you lay in the
palace, yet came and bade the presence of my spirit, and held me even
so as you are holding me now; it was as though I forgot all else and
knew thee only; as though I was not, save as a part of thee truly, save
that I felt the strong fire of thy mouth."
And, again, on a night when the sky was cloudless and the triple moons
had turned all the Palosian world to a dreamland of silvered plain
and sea and mountain, Croft spoke to her of love. That night he drove
her to the hangars, and they entered a machine. Up, up they whirled
through an air aquiver with moonbeams; up, up to a land of dreams. And
there between the heavens and the far-flung landscape they swam in a
dream world of their own making, while the plane wheeled in wide spun
circles, like some huge, dark bat against the skies.
"Behold Palos!" Croft cried to her above the roar of the whirling
propeller, heard as it swept them forward, yet not seen. "Is it not
lovely, is it not fair--this one of all the millions of stars on which
we live? And yet why is it; for what purpose; why was it brought into
existence, even as you and I, beloved, and sent spinning through the
void from Zitu's hand, save for love; save that a million million men
and women might find a spot whereon their spirits, the real they,
should be given substance, in order that they should live and meet,
and know one another, and--love. Wherefore is the body of man no more
than the servant to give to love expression, since this is Zitu's plan:
that no man's spirit is complete without the woman's, that no woman's
spirit is complete without the man's; so that in his wisdom, each ever
seeks the other to make it whole and satisfy its longing. Thus then is
love assured, and life inspired."
He shut off the engine and began a long, slanting, coasting down a
moonlighted, sloping path.
"Love," said the girl beside him, "love so great that it spans the
space between the stars. And did I call you to me, without knowing,
yet now it seems to me, beloved, that I should know and find some means
to answer, no matter where you were."
In a long sweep Croft brought the plane back to the ground. And then
without any verbal reply, he lifted her from her seat and bore her back
to the motur in his arms.