(From _All's Well_)
It is not pleasant to have one's convictions disturbed, and that is why
I wish I had never seen that man Rounds. He seems to have crossed my
path only to shake my self-confidence. The little conversation we had
has left me dissatisfied. I look upon my collection with less interest
than I did. I am not as pleased with the result of my investigations as
they appear in my monograph on "The Saurian Family of Equatorial
America." Doubtless the mood that now possesses me will pass away, and I
shall recover my equanimity. His story would have upset most men. Worse
still was his unpleasant habit of interjecting strange opinions. Judge
for yourself.
It was when passing through the Reptile room on my way to the study that
I first saw him. I took him to be a mere common working man passing away
an idle hour; one of the ordinary Museum visitors. Two hours later, I
noticed that he was closely examining the lizard cases. Then later, he
seemed interested in my collection of prints illustrating the living
world of the ante-diluvian period. It was then that I approached him,
and, finding him apparently intelligent, with, as it seemed, a bent
towards lizards, and further, discovering that he had traveled in Peru
and Colombia, took him to the study.
The man had some unusual habits. He was absolutely lacking in that sense
of respect, as I may term it, usually accorded to one in my position.
One who is a professor and curator becomes accustomed to a certain
amount of, well, diffidence in laymen. The attitude is entirely natural.
It is a tribute. But Rounds was not that way. He was perfectly at ease.
He had an air of quiet self-possession. He refused the chair I
indicated, the chair set for visitors and students, and instead, walked
to the window and threw up the lower sash, taking a seat on the sill,
with one foot resting on the floor and the other swinging. Thus, he
looked as though he were prepared to leap, or to jump or run. He gave me
the impression of being on the alert. Without asking permission, he
filled and lit his pipe, taking his tobacco from a queerly made pouch,
and using but one hand in the process.
"What I was looking for," he said, "is a kind of lizard. Yet it is not a
lizard. It is too hard and thin in the body to be that. It runs on its
hind legs. It is white. Its bite is poisonous. It lives in the
equatorial districts of Colombia."
"Have you seen one?" I asked.
"No," was the reply. Then after a moment he asked, "Why?"
"Because there is no such living creature," I said.
"How do you know?" he said abruptly.
"The lizard group is thoroughly classified," I said. "There is nothing
answering to that description. In the first place--"
"Does that make it non-existent? Your classification of what you know?"
he interrupted.
"I have made a study of the Saurians," I said.
"No you haven't," he said. "You have read what other men have written
and that is not the same thing."
"Really," I began, but he broke in.
"I mean to say that you have never been in any new equatorial country,"
he said. "Your manner shows that. You are too quiet. Too easy. Too
sedentary. You would have been killed because of your lack of
vigilance."
That is, as nearly as I can repeat and remember, the opening of the
conversation. There was an air of challenge about the man that I found
unpleasant. Of course I admitted the fact that I was not an explorer
myself, and that mine was the humbler if more tedious task of collecting
and arranging data. At that he said that in his opinion, organized
expeditions were little more than pleasure jaunts taken at the public
expense. His viewpoint was most extraordinary.
"Such an expedition," he said, "must fail in its main purpose because
its very unwieldiness destroys or disperses the very things it was
organized to study. It cannot penetrate the wilds; it cannot get into
the dry lands. The very needs of the men and horses and dogs prevent
that. It must keep to beaten tracks and in touch with the edge of
civilization. The members of such an expedition are mere killers on a
large scale, and to kill or to hunt a thing is to not know it at all.
Further, the men in such expeditions are not hunters even. They are
destroyers who destroy while keeping themselves in safety. They have
their beaters. Their paid natives. Humbug! That's the only word to
describe that kind of thing. Staged effects they have. Then they come
back here to pose as heroes before a crowd of gaping city clerks."
I mentioned the remarkable results obtained by the Peary and Roosevelt
expeditions and pointed to the fact that the specimens brought back and
properly set up by efficient taxidermists, did, in fact, give the common
people some notion of the wonders of animal life.
"Nothing of the kind," he said. "Look at that boa-constrictor you have
out there. It is stuffed and in a glass case. Don't you know that in its
natural surroundings you yourself would come mighty near stepping on one
without seeing it? You would. If you had that thing set up as it should
be, these museum visitors of yours would pass the case believing it was
a mere collection of foliage. They wouldn't see the snake itself. See
what I mean? Set up as they are in real life they'd come near being
invisible."
The man walked up and down the study floor for half a minute or so, then
paused at the desk and said:
"Don't let us get to entertaining one another though. But remember this,
you only get knowledge at a cost. I mean to say that the man that would
know something, can only get the knowledge at first hand. The people who
wander around this junk shop that you call a museum, go out as empty
headed as they came in. Consider. Say a Fiji islander came here and took
back with him from the United States an electric light bulb, a stuffed
possum, an old hat, a stalactite from the Mammoth cave, a sackful of
pecan nuts, a pair of handcuffs, half a dozen photographs and a dozen
packing cases full of things gathered from here and there, and then set
the whole junk pile up under a roof in the Fiji Islands, what would his
fellow Fijians know from that of the social life of this country. Eh?
Tell me that?"
"You exaggerate," I protested. "You take an extreme point of view."
"I don't," he said.
His contradictions would have made me angry, perhaps, were they not made
in such a quiet tone of voice.
"Take anything from its natural surroundings," he went on, "and it is
meaningless. The dull-eyed men and women that wander through this Museum
of yours are just killing time. There's no education in that kind of
thing. Besides, what they see are dead things, anyway, and you can't
study human nature in a morgue."
He resumed his seat on the window sill, then took from an inner pocket a
leather wallet, and drew from that a photograph which he tossed across
so that it fell on the desk before me. I examined it carefully. It had
been badly developed and badly printed, and what was worse, roughly
handled. But still, one could distinguish certain features.
It pictured the interior of a building. It was roofless, and above the
rear wall was what I recognized as tropical vegetation, mainly by its
wild luxuriance. In the center of the rear wall was what seemed to be a
giant stone lizard, standing on its hind legs. The one foreleg that
showed was disproportionately short. The body, too, was more attenuated
than that of any lizard. The thing was headless and the statue, idol or
whatever it was, stood on a pedestal, and before that again, seemed to
be a slab of stone. Then my attention was caught by the head of the
thing, which was to be seen in a corner. It was shaped roughly
triangular. The jaws were broad at the base and the thing had, even in
the photograph, something of the same repulsive appearance as the head
of a vampire bat.
"It is the result of the imagination of some Indian," I said. "No
post-diluvian Saurian ever existed of that size."
"Good God, man, you jump to conclusions," he said. "This is only a
representation of the thing itself. Made in heroic size, so to say. But
see here!"
He leaned over my shoulder and pointed to a kind of border that ran
along the base of the pedestal. Examining closely, I made out a series
of lizards running on their hind legs.
"They," he explained, "are cut into the stone. It is a sort of red
sandstone. They are a little bigger than the thing itself as it is
living. But look at this."
The particular spot to which he pointed was blurred and dirty, as though
many fingers had pointed to it and I took the magnifying glass for
closer inspection. Even then I only saw dimly as something that bore a
resemblance to the carved figures.
"That," he said, "is as near as ever I came to seeing one of the little
devils. I think it was one of them though I am not sure. I caught sight
of it flashing across like a swiftly blown leaf. We took the picture by
flashlight you see, so I'm not sure. Somerfield, of course, was too busy
attending to his camera. He saw nothing."
"We might have another picture made," I said. "It would be interesting."
"D'ye think I'd be able to carry plunder around traveling as I was
then?" he asked. "You see, I went down there for the Company I'm working
for. I was looking out for rubber and hard woods. I'd worked from
Buenaventura. From Buenaventura down to the Rio Caqueta and then
followed that stream up to the water head, and then down the Codajaz. If
you look at the map, you'll see it's no easy trip. No chance to pack
much. All I wanted to carry was information. And there was only
Somerfield along."
"But Somerfield--he, as I take it, was the photographer, was he not? Did
he not take care of the negatives? It would not have been much for him
to take care of."
"Well you see, he did take care of his negatives. But circumstances were
different at the time. He had laid them away somewhere. After I killed
him, I just brought away the camera and that was all."
Positively, I gasped at the audacity of the man. He said the words "I
killed him," so quietly, in so matter of fact a way, that for the moment
I was breathless. Like most other men, I had never sat face to face with
one who had taken the life of another. Even soldiers, though they, we
suppose, kill men, do it in a machine-like way. The killing is
impersonal. The soldier handles the machine and it is the machine that
kills. The individual soldier does not know whether he kills or not.
That is why we are able to make much of the soldier, perhaps, I have
thought since, though it never appeared to me in that light before I met
Rounds. Actually, we are repelled at the thought of a man who kills
another deliberately. If it were not so, as Rounds pointed out, we would
make a hero of the public executioner. He should be as heroic a figure
as a general. But as I tell you, at the moment, when Rounds said, "when
I killed him," I was shocked. I had never before realized how violence
was a thing apart from my life. I had looked at the representation of
murder on the stage. I had read novels with murder as the mainspring. I
had seen shootings and stabbings in moving pictures. Yet, not until that
moment had I any suspicion that violence was so rare a thing and that
most of our lives are far, far removed from it. Actually, I have never
struck a man, nor has any man ever lifted his hand against me in anger.
It was, therefore, a startling thing to hear Rounds confess to having
killed a fellow man. It was awesome. And yet, let me say, that at once I
was possessed of a great desire to learn all about it, and down in my
heart I feared that he would decide he had said something that he should
not have said, and would either deny his statement or modify it in some
way. I wanted to hear all the details. I was hugely interested. Was it
morbidity? Then I came to myself after what was a shock, and awoke to
the fact that he was talking in his quiet, even way.
"But those Tlingas held the belief, and that was all there was to it,"
he was saying.
I came to attention and said, "Of course. It is natural," for I feared
to have him know that I was inattentive even for that short space, and
waited for elucidations.
"It seems," he went on, "that the tribe was dying out. Helm, who first
told me something of it at Buenaventura, was one of those scientists who
have to invent a new theory for every new thing they were told of. He
said it was either because of eating too much meat, or not enough. I
forget which. There had been a falling off in the birth rate. The
Tocalinian who had lived with them, and who joined us at the headwaters
of the Codajaz, maintained that there had been too much inbreeding. So
there was some arrangement by means of which they invited immigrants, as
it were. Men from other neighboring tribes were encouraged to join the
Tlingas. And they did. The Tlingas had a fat land and welcomed the
immigrants. The immigrants on their part expected to have an easy time."
"That would make for racial improvement," I hazarded.
"Why?" he asked.
"The best from other lands would tend to improve their race. That was my
idea when I spoke," I said.
He laughed quietly. "Something of the same idea that you foster here,"
he said. "I've laughed at that many's the time. America is this, that
and the other; its people are inventive, intelligent, original, free,
independent and all the rest of it because it is a result of the best
blood of other lands. Eh? Lord, man, how you fool yourself! Can't you
see that you would have a far better case if you deplored the fact that
we are a result of the worse? All the fugitives, the poor, the
ill-educated, the unfortunate, the ne'er-do-wells have been swarming
here from Europe for two centuries. Can't you see that no man who could
fight successfully against odds in his own country would emigrate? Can't
you see that? If you said that we are a people that will allow any
active minority to put anything over on us, because we are the result of
generations of poor-spirited fugitives who couldn't fight for their
personal freedom, you would be nearer the mark."
His argument of course was absurd, and at the moment I had no answer
ready, though since I have thought of the thing I should have said. As
Rounds talked, he grew quieter in his tone. He moved from his place on
the window sill and sat on the corner of my desk. I had forgotten my
uneasiness at being in the presence of one who had taken his fellow's
life. He went on:
"When there's a falling birth rate, things change. There are manners and
customs evolved that would seem strange to you. There come laws and
religions, all made to match current requirements. Celibacy and
sterility become a crime. Virginity becomes a disgrace, a something to
be ridiculed."
"It seems impossible," I said.
"No," he said. "You have that in part. You ridicule what you call old
maids, don't you?"
Again I was too slow with my reply. If I ever meet him again, I shall
show him the fallacy of many of his arguments.
"Men with most children had the most to say. The childless were
penalized, were punished. The sterile were put to death. There grew up a
religion and a priesthood, ceremonials, sacrifices and rituals. And they
had their god, in the shape of this lizard thing. Of course, like most
other gods, it was more of a malevolent creature than anything else.
Gods generally are if you will consider a little. I don't care what
creed or religion gets the upper hand, it's Fear that becomes the power.
Look around and see if I'm not right.
"Well, Somerfield and I walked into that kind of thing. Now like me, he
had worked for the Exploration Company a good few years and had been to
all kinds of places prospecting. Torres Straits, the Gold Coast,
Madagascar, Patagonia. We prospectors have to get around in queer
corners and the life's a dull one. All monotony. But Somerfield had
queer notions. He worked at the job because he could make more money
than at anything else and that gave him a chance to keep his family in
Ohio in comfort. He was mighty fond of his family. Besides, the job gave
him more time with the wife and kids than the average man gets. When he
was at home, he was at home three months on end at times. That's better
than the ordinary man. A man in a city, for example, leaves home early
and gets home late, and then he's too grouchy what with the close air
and one thing and another to find the children anything but an infernal
nuisance. Now a man away from his home for a long spell on end really
enjoys the company when he does get home, and they enjoy his company,
too. Then, too, he does not get to messing into the affairs of the
family. He's not the Lord Almighty and Supreme Court Judge all the time.
Besides that, the wife and children get a kind of independence.
"Now this being so, Somerfield was what he was. He had ideas about
religion. He was full of the notion that things are arranged so that if
you live up to a certain code, you'll get a reward. 'Do right, and
you'll come out right,' was one of his sayings. 'The wages of sin is
death,' was another. Point out to him that virtue got paid in the same
coin, and he'd argue. No use. In a way he was like a man who wouldn't
walk under a ladder or spill salt. You know.
"Naturally, for him things were awkward at the Tlinga village. We stayed
there quite a while, I should say. He lived in his own shack, cooking
for himself and all that. He was full of ideas of duty to his wife and
so on. I fell in with the local customs and took up with a sweetheart,
and handled things so well that there was one of their ceremonials
pretty soon in which I was central figure. Ista, it seems, made a public
announcement. That would be natural enough with a tribe so concerned
about the family birth rate. But it made me sorter mad to hear the
natives everlastingly accusing Somerfield of being an undesirable. But
they never let up trying to educate him and make him a Tlinga citizen.
They were patient and persistent enough. On the other hand, I was looked
on as a model young man, and received into the best society.
"About the time we were ready to strike west, Ista, that was my girl,
told me that there would have to be a new ceremonial. She took my going
in good part, for there was nothing more I could do. They were sensible
enough to know that man was only an instrument in the great game as they
understood it. Ista had led me out to a quiet place to put me next. I
remember that vividly because of a little thing that happened that
doesn't mean anything. I often wonder why resultless things sometimes
stick in the mind. We were sitting at the base of a tall tree and there
was a certain bush close by with bright red berries when they were
unripe. They look good to eat. But when they ripened, they grew fat and
juicy, the size of a grape, and of a liverish color. I thought that one
of them had fallen on my left forearm and went to flick it off. Instead
of being that, the thing burst into a blood splotch as soon as I hit it.
That was the first time I had been bitten by one of those bugs. They are
about the size of a sheep tick when empty, but they get on you and suck
and suck, till they are full of your blood and size of a grape. Queer
things, but ugly. Ista laughed as you would laugh if you saw a nigger
afraid of a harmless snake. It's queer that it should be considered a
joke when one fears something that another does not.
"But that has nothing to do with the story. What has, is that Ista
wanted to tell me about the ceremonial. She did not believe in it at
all. Privately, she was a kind of atheist among her people, but kept her
opinions to herself. You must not think that because you see, hear or
read of savage rites, that all the savages believe in those things. No
sir. There is as much disbelief amongst them as with us. Perhaps more.
They think things out. I might say that in a way they think more than
the average civilized man. You see, a civilized child thinks for itself
up until it is six or seven or so, and then the schools get hold of it,
and from then on, it's tradition and believing what it's told to
believe. That goes on through school life. Then at work, the man who
would dare to vary on his own account is not wanted. So independent
thought is not possible there. Work finished, it's the evening paper and
editorial opinions. So really, man does not get much of a chance to
think straight at any time. I guess if he did, the whole scheme would
fall to pieces. That's why I say civilized man does not only not think,
but perhaps can't think. His brains are not trained to it. Give the
average man something with real, straight, original, first-hand thought
in it, and he's simply unable to tackle it. His brain has not been
cultivated. He wilts mentally. It's like putting the work of a man on a
boy. Catch what I mean? Now a savage gets more of a chance. It was that
way with Ista. She had thought out things for herself and had her own
beliefs, but they were not the beliefs the Tlingas were supposed to
hold. But after all she did not tell me much besides her own disbeliefs.
When you think of it, no one can tell another much. What you know you
have to discover alone. All she told me was what was going to be done,
and that was about as disappointing as the information you might get
about what would take place in initiation in a secret society. Some was
lost in transmission.
"Well, at last the ceremonial started up with a great banging of drums
and all that. It was a great scene, let me tell you, with the tumbled
vegetation, glaringly colored as if a scene painter had gone crazy.
There were the flashing birds--blood-colored and orange scarlet and
yellow, gold and green. Butterflies, too,--great gaudy things that
looked like moving flowers. And the noise and chatterings and whistlings
in the trees of birds and insects. There were flowers and fruits, and
eatings and speech-makings. As far as I could gather, the chief speakers
were congratulating the hearers upon their luck in belonging to the
Tlingas, which was the greatest tribe on earth and the favorite of Naol,
the lizard god. We capered round the tribal pole, I capering with the
rest of them of course. Somerfield took a picture of it. Then there was
a procession of prospective mothers with Ista among them. Rotten, I
thought it. Don't imagine female beauty, by the way, as some of the
writers on savage life would have you imagine it. Nothing of the kind.
White, black or yellow, I never saw a stark woman that looked beautiful
yet. That's all bunk. Muscular and strong, yes. That's a kind of beauty
in its way. True as God, I believe that one of the causes of unhappy
marriages among white folk is that the lads are fed upon false notions
about womanly beauty, and when they get the reality they think that
they've captured a lemon.
"Presently the crowd quieted down and the men were set around in a
semicircle with me and Somerfield at the end. Then a red-eyed old hag
tottered out and began cursing Somerfield. She spat in his face and
called him all outrageous names that came to her vindictive tongue.
Luckily it was that he had been put next, and so, forewarned, was able
to grin and bear it. But Lord, how she did tongue-lash him. Then she
took a flat piece of wood, shaped like a laurel leaf, which was fastened
to a thin strip of hide, and showed him that. It was a kind of charm,
and on it was cut one of the running lizards. She wanted him to rub it
on his forehead. Of course with his notions of religion he wouldn't do
it. That's natural. When she passed it to me, I did what she wanted
done. I never was particular that way. Symbols mean nothing anyway and
if fools are in the majority, it's no use stirring up trouble. It's
playing a lie of course, but then that's the part of wisdom it seems to
me, sometimes. It's in a line with protective coloring. You remember
what I said about the proper mounting of your specimens don't you? Well,
it's like that. That's why persecutions have never stamped out opinions
nor prohibitions appetites. The wisest keep their counsel and go on as
usual. The martyrs are the weak fools. But let's see. Where was I? Oh,
yes. The old woman and the piece of wood.
"She began running from this one to that, kind of working herself up
into a frenzy. Then she started to chant some old nonsense. There was a
rhythm to it. She sang:
'Nao calls for the useless.'
"Then the rest of them would shout
'Nao calls. Nao calls.'
"There was a terrible lot of it. The main purport was that this Nao was
the ruling devil or god of the place. It called for the sacrifice of the
useless. Many men were needed so that the one should be born who would
lead the Tlingas to victory. That was the tone of it, and at the end of
every line she sang, the crowd joined in with the refrain.
'Nao calls. Nao calls.'
"Of course they became worked up. She handled them pretty much the same
as a skillful speaker does things at a political meeting or an
evangelist at a revival. The same spirit was there. Instead of a flag,
there was the tribal pole. There was the old gag of their nation or
tribe being the chosen one. I don't care where you go, there is always
the same thing. Every tribe and nation is cock-sure that theirs is the
best. They have the bravest and the wisest men and the best women. But I
kept nudging Somerfield. It was hard on him. He was the Judas and the
traitor and all that. 'Damn-fool superstition,' he muttered to me time
and again. But of course he was a bit nervous, and so was I. Being in
the minority is awkward. The human brain simply isn't strong enough to
encounter organized opposition. It wears. You spend too much energy
being on the defensive.
"After a time, when the song was done, the old hag seemed pretty well
played out. Then she passed the piece of wood I told you of to a big
buck, and he started to whirling it round and round. He was a skillful
chap at the trick, and in a little had it whirling and screaming. Then
presently some of the birds fell to noise making just as you will hear
canaries sing when some one whistles, or women talk when a piano
commences to play. I saw something of the same down in Torres Straits.
They call it the Twanyirika there. In the Malay Peninsula they use
something of the kind to scare the elephants out of the plantations.
They've got it on the Gold Coast as well. It's called the Oro there.
Really it's all over the world. I've seen Scotch herd boys use something
like it to scare the cattle, and Mexican sheep herders in Texas to make
the sheep run together when they scatter too far. Of course there's
really nothing to be scared of, but when it comes near you, you feel
inclined to duck. To me, it was the feeling that the flat piece of wood
would fly off and hit me. You always duck when you hear a whizzing.
Still, the priests or medicine men trade on the head-ducking tendency.
So, somehow, in the course of time, it gets so that those that listen
have to bow down. Oh, yes! You say it's ridiculous and fanciful and all
that sort of thing. I know. I have heard others say the same. It's only
a noise and nothing to be scared of. But then, when you come to think of
it, most men are scared of noise. They're like animals in that respect.
What is a curse but a noise? Yet most men are secretly afraid of
curses. They're uneasy under them. Yet they know it's only noise. Then
look at thunderings from the pulpit. Look at excommunications. Look at
denunciations. All noises to be sure. But there's the threat of force
behind some of them. The blow may come and again it may not.
"As I said, every one bowed down and of course so did I, on general
principles. Somerfield didn't and the old buck whirled that bull-roarer
over him ever so long, and the red-eyed hag cursed and spat at him, but
he never budged. That sort of conduct is damned foolishness according to
my notion. But then, you see, in a kind of a way he was backing his
prejudices against theirs and prejudices are pretty solid things when
you consider. Still, he took a hell of a chance.
"On the trail next day, for we left the following morning, I argued with
him about that, but he couldn't be budged. He said he stood for truth
and all that kind of thing. I put it to him that he would expect any
foreigner to conform to his national customs. He'd expect a Turk to give
up his polygamy, I said, no matter what heart-breakings it cost some of
the family. But he had a kink in his thinking, holding that his people
had the whole, solid, unchanging truth. Of course, the argument came
down with a crash then, for it worked around to a question of what is
truth. There you are. There was the limit. So we quit. As I tell you,
the human brain is not constituted to do much thinking. It's been
crippled by lack of use. We are mentally stunted in growth. I remember
that I began to say something about the possibility of there being
several gods, meaning that some time or other men with imagination had
defied some natural thing, but it came to me that I was talking
nonsense, so I quit. Yet I know right well that many tribes have made
gods of things of which they were afraid. But it's small profit to
theorize.
"It was near sundown when we came to that building shown in that
photograph. The vegetation was so thick thereabouts that the temple, for
I suppose it was that, appeared before us suddenly. One moment we were
crawling like insects between the trunks of great jungle trees that shot
upwards seventy feet or more without a branch, as if they were racing
for dear life skyward, and then everything fell away and there was the
old building. It startled the both of us. We got the sensation that you
get when you see a really good play. You forget your bodily presence and
you are only a bundle of nerves. You walk or sit or stand, but without
any effort or knowledge that you are doing it. We had been talking, and
the sight of that building, so unexpected, startled us into silence. It
would any one. Believe me, your imperturbable man with perfect, cool,
self-possession does not exist. Man's a jumpy thing, given to nerves.
You may deny it and talk about the unexcitability of the American
citizen and all that bunk, but let me tell you that your journalists and
moving picture producers and preachers and politicians have caught on to
the fact that man is jumpy, and they trade on their discovery, believe
me. They've got man on the hop every which way and keep him going.
"There had been a gateway there once, but for some reason or other it
had become blocked with a rank vegetation. The old gap was chocked full
with a thorny, flower-bearing bush so thick that a cat could not have
passed through. Somerfield switched on one of his theories as soon as he
got over his first surprise. Worshipers, he held, had brought flowers
there and the seeds that had dropped had sprouted. It looked reasonable.
"Above the lintel was carved one of those running lizards. That you
noticed early. You can't see that in the picture because we took that
from the edge of a broken wall. You see, all the walls stood except that
to the left of this doorway and that had partly fallen and what was left
was chin high. We saw at a glance that the people who had built that
temple were handy with tools. The stones of the wall were quite big--two
feet or more square, and fitted closely. There was no mortar to hold
them but the ends had been made with alternate grooves and projections
that fitted well. The stone was a kind of red sandstone. But I told you
that before.
"When we looked over the broken wall and saw that stone lizard, we had
another shock. I don't care how you school yourself, there's a scare in
every man. That's what annoys me, to see men posing and letting
themselves be written up and speechified over as fearless. Fearless
General this and Admiral that. Our fearless boys in the trenches. It
sickens me. Why the whole race has been fed up on fear for ages.
Fearlessness is impossible. Hell-fire, boogermen, devils, witches, the
wrath of God--it's all been fear. Things that we know nothing of and
have no proof of have been added to things that we do know of that will
hurt, and, on top of that there has been the everlasting 'cuidado' lest
you say a word that will run foul of current opinion--so what wonder
that man is scary? It's a wonder that he's sane.
"After we took that picture we debated for the first time where we
should camp that night. A new scare possessed us. In the end, we decided
to camp inside the temple because of the greater security afforded by
the walls. The truth is that some half fear of a giant lizard had gotten
hold of us. So, as it was the lizard that scared us, we decided to stay
in the lizard temple. Man's built that way. He likes to keep close to
the thing that he fears. I heard a man who was a banker once say that he
always mistrusted the man who would not take a vacation. As I take it,
his idea was that the man who knew some danger was nigh, wanted to be
around where he could catch the first intimation of a crash. But then,
too, besides that, there is a sense of comfort in being within walls,
especially with a floor paved as this one was. Besides, it was a change
from the trees with their wild-tangled vines and their snake-like
lianas. So we decided on the temple.
"That night I was a long time getting to sleep. The memory of the old
hag and the bull-roarer was in my mind. I kept thinking of Ista, too. It
was a warmer night than usual, and, after the moon dropped, pitchy dark.
I slept stripped as I generally do, with a light blanket across my legs
so that I could find it if needed without waking up.
"I awoke presently, feeling something run lightly and swiftly across my
face. I thought it was a spider. It seemed to run in a zig-zag. Then
feeling nothing more I set it down to fancy and dropped off to sleep
again, face turned towards that idol. Later, I felt the same kind of
thing run across my neck. I knew it was no fancy then, and my scare
vanished because here was something to do. So I waited with my right
hand poised to grab. I waited a long time, too, but I have lots of
patience. Presently it ran down my body starting at my left shoulder and
I brought down my hand at a venture, claw fashion, and caught the thing
on the blanket. I felt the blanket raise and then fall again, just a
little, of course, as I lifted my hand with the thing in it, and by that
knew that it had claws. Yet bet I held tight. It seemed to be hard and
smooth. It was a wiry, wriggling thing, somewhat like a lizard. But it
was much more vigorous than any lizard. I tried to crush it, but could
not. As to thickness, it seemed to be about the diameter of one of those
lead pencils. It was like this I had it."
Rounds picked up a couple of lead pencils from the desk and took my hand
in his. He told me to close my fist and then placed one pencil
lengthwise so that an end of it was between my first and second finger
and the rubber-tipped end lay across my wrist. The other pencil he
thrust crosswise so that the pointed end stuck out between the second
and third finger and the blunt end between the index finger and thumb.
"There you have it," he said. "That's how I held the little devil. Now
grip hard and try to crush the pencils and you'll have something of the
same sensation as I had. Holding it thus, I could feel its head jerking
this way and that, violently, and its tail, long and lithe, lashing at
my wrist. The little claws were trying to tear, but they were evidently
softish. I could hear, or thought I could, the snap of its little jaws.
It was about the nastiest sensation that I ever experienced. I don't
know why I thought that it was venomous, but I did. I tried to smash the
thing in my hand--tried again and again, and I have a good grip--but
might just as well have tried to crush a piece of wire. There was no
give to it. It tried to wriggle backwards but I had it under its jaws.
So there we were: it wriggling, writhing and lashing and me laying there
holding it at arms length. I felt the sweat start on me and the hair at
the nap of my neck raise up, and I did some quick and complicated
thinking. Of course, I dared not throw it away, but I got to my feet and
as I did so, tried to bend its head backwards against the stone floor.
But the head slipped sideways. I called on Somerfield for a light then,
and he struck one hurriedly and it went out immediately. All that I saw
was that the thing was white and had a triangular shaped head.
"Somehow I ran against Somerfield before he got another match struck and
he swore at me, saying that I had cut him. I knew that I had touched him
with my outstretched hand that held the beast. I drew back my hand a
little and remembered afterwards that I then felt a slight, elastic
resistance as if the thing that I held had caught on to something, as it
had before to my blanket. Afterwards I found that the thing had gotten
Somerfield's neck. As he struck another match, I saw the low place in
the wall and flung the thing away with a quick jerk. You know the kind
of a motion you'd make getting rid of some unseen noxious thing like
that. That's how I never really saw the beast and can only conjecture
what it was like from the feel of it.
"On Somerfield's neck, just below the angle of the jaw, was a clean-cut
little oval place about half an inch in length. It did not bleed much,
but it seemed to pain him a lot. He maintained that the thing was some
kind of rodent. Anyway we put a little chewed tobacco on the place and,
after awhile, tried to sleep again. We didn't do much good at it,
neither of us. He was tossing and grumbling like a man with the
toothache.
"Next morning the bitten place had swollen up to the size of an apple
and was a greenish yellow color. He was feeling sick and a bit feverish,
so I made him comfortable after looking around to see whether there was
anything to harm him in the courtyard, and went to hunt water. I
remember that I gave the head of the idol a kick with the flat of my
foot for spite, as I passed it. Like a kid, that was, wasn't it? Now I
was running back and forth all the morning with the canteen, for he
drank a terrible quantity. His eyes grew bright, too, and his skin
flushed. Towards noon, he began to talk wild, imagining that he was at
home. Then I judged it best to let him stay there in the temple where
he was, so to speak, corraled. Coming back shortly after from one
water-hunting trip, I heard singing, and, looking over the wall, saw him
sitting on the slab in front of the idol. He must have fancied that he
had his kids before him for he was beating time with his hands and
snapping his fingers and thumbs and singing:
'London bridge is fallen down,
Fallen down, fallen down.'
"It was rotten to hear that out there, but I was halfway glad to see him
that way, knowing that he wasn't miserable. After a little, he quit
babbling and took more water; emptied the canteen, in fact, so back I
had to start for more.
"Returning, I found things changed. He was going around, crouched like a
hunting Indian, peering here and there, behind the idol then across to
the head as if seeking some one. He had the _facon_ in his hand. 'Rounds
stabbed me,' he was saying. 'It was Rounds, damn him, that killed me.'
Over and over again he said that. He was talking to invisible people,
creatures of his mad brain. One would have thought, if one had not seen,
that the temple court was crowded with spectators. Then he rose to his
feet and, with the knife held close to his breast, began walking round
and round as if seeking an outlet. He passed me once, he on one side of
the wall and I on the other, and he looked me square in the eye, but
never saw me. So round and round he went with long strides, knees bent
and heels never touching the ground. He eyes were fixed and staring and
his teeth clenched. Now and then he made long, slashing stabs in the air
with the _facon_.
"Suddenly he saw me, and there was a change. The blood lust was in his
eyes. He was standing on the slab in front of the idol, then made a
great leap and started for the broken wall where I was. I saw then that
the lump on his neck had swollen to the size of a big goitre. His whole
body was a-quiver. There was an animal-like celerity in his movements
that made me shudder. Then I knew that I dared not let him get on the
same side of the wall as me. But he leaped at the gap from a distance
that I would have thought no human could compass, and hung on to the
wall with one arm over. He snarled like an animal. Then I smashed him
over the head with the canteen, gripping the strap with my right hand.
He fell back with the force of the blow, but immediately came at the gap
again, then changed his mind and went to tearing around the chamber with
great leaps. He was a panther newly caged. He sprang on to the head of
the idol and from that to the pedestal, and then to the slab in front of
it. Then he went across and across the floor, sometimes screaming and
yelling, and then again moaning and groaning. One side of his face was
all bloody where I had smashed it with the canteen. Seeing him so, a
thing not human, but with all the furtive quickness of an animal and its
strength, too, I felt sorry no more. I hated him with a wild hate. He
was dangerous to me and I had to conquer him. That's fundamental. So I
stood, gripping the strap of the canteen, watching, waiting. He came at
me again, striding and leaping. That time he got one leg over with both
hands gripping the top stones. The _facon_ he dropped on my side of the
wall, but I had no time to stoop for it just then. There were other
things to do. He was getting over. It took some frantic beating with the
canteen and he seemed to recover from the blows quicker than I could get
the swing to strike again. But I beat him down at last, though I saw
that he had lots more life in him than I, with that devil of madness
filling him. So, when I saw him stumble, then recover and begin that
running again, I picked up the knife and leaped over the wall to settle
the matter once and for all. It was an ugly thing to do, but it had to
be done and done quickly. At the root of things it's life against life."
Rounds ceased and fell to filling his pipe. I waited for him to
recommence, but he made as if to leave, but paused a moment at my desk
to pick up and examine a piece of malachite. I felt it incumbent upon me
to say something to relieve the tension that I felt.
"I understand," said I. "It was a horrible necessity. It is a terrible
thing to have to kill a fellow creature."
"That wasn't a fellow creature," he said. "What I killed was not the
partner I knew. Don't you understand?"
"Yes, I understand," I replied. Then I asked, "Did you bury him?"
"Bury him? What for? How?" Rounds seemed indignant. "How could I bury
him in a stone-paved court? How could I lift a dead man over a wall chin
high?"
"Of course. Of course," I said. "I had forgotten that. But to us who
lead quiet lives, it seems terrible to leave a dead man unburied."
"Do you feel that way about that mummy you have out there?" he asked,
indicating the museum with his thumb. "If not, why not? But if you want
the story to the bitter end, I dragged him to the only clean spot in the
place, which was that slab in front of the idol. There I left him, or
it. But things take odd turns. By the time I got back to the Tlinga
village, they knew all about it and the priests used the affair to their
own advantage. Mine was incidental. Yet I did reap some benefit.
According to the priests, I had accepted the whole blessed lizard
theory, or religion or whatever it was, and had sacrificed the
unbeliever to the lizard god. Ista helped things along, I suspect, for
with me as a former mate, there was some fame for her. Anyway, they met
and hailed me as a hero and brought tribute to me. Gold dust. I wanted
them to quit their damned foolishness and tried to explain, but it was
no use. You can't teach a mob to have sense. Well, adios. But remember
this: Don't be too cocksure."