THE IMAGE SPEAKS
With an abrupt change the atmosphere seemed to be charged with
electricity. Of course, thought Roger, trying to remain cool, it was
merely his fear of the outcome that made his nerves tingle.
There was no time for any choice of action.
Rising, the old man moved toward an arched opening at one side of the
stone chamber. Tip, fierce-eyed, loyal, beside Roger, realized as he
tugged at his empty holster that in some clever way he had been
disarmed. A glance behind him showed the mocking lama, holding his own
weapon. Tip gauged the chances of a leap, shrugged. It was useless.
Monastery attendants were at all the open doorways.
"Buck up!" he whispered.
"It may not be so bad," Roger tried to reassure them both.
They followed, as follow they must, down a long, echoing, empty
corridor. Far away, low, weird, they could hear male voices, deep,
rather disturbing in tone, chanting some uncouth succession of notes.
Their slow walk behind the aged conductor brought them constantly nearer
to the chant, for the voices grew louder.
At a doorway, heavily shrouded in lustrous woven velvet or other
drapery, the guide swung, and an attendant, bowing, moved the cloth to
one side. The chanting swelled suddenly.
Resistance was futile. As the guide moved aside, motioning, Roger, and
Tip after him, passed under the great stone door-lintel, into a large
square chamber full of the chanting lamas.
And at the end, in a niche, on a sort of raised dais, sat the huge
carved wooden image or statue of the Meditating Buddha or prophet of
their religion, and in its forehead glowed, in the flickering
torchlight, the great, green duplicate--it appeared--of the Eye of Om.
At first it flashed through Roger's mind that this was strange; but at
once he realized that, of course, they would have replaced the gem with
a substitute or an imitation, and would not tell many of the loss.
Thrust forward by the lama who had brought them there, Roger and Potts
were ushered down the aisle between rows of kneeling,
low-and-mocking-voiced monks or lamas, to the space below the great
figure.
Words in Tibetan, answered by hoarse responses from the crowd, seemed to
be some ceremony or invocation of judgment, in which, they sensed, the
two white people were the sacrifice or center of the rite. Standing
silently, Tip was watchful but helpless. Roger, too, kept an alert mind
but saw no means of escape.
"You seek to hear the Voice. You wish to know the secret."
The venerable man who appeared to be some sort of super-lama, to whom
even their former captor deferred, knelt and pronounced some low, weird
and long-winded invocation.
At his gesture they both knelt, submissive if not willing, and he bowed
his head to the floor and stayed that way.
All the rest were in similar positions.
And then, blood-curdling in its startling suddenness, after an interval
of suspense, there came, but not softly or in small volume as in their
recordings it had been, a scream that was as weird as the howl of a soul
in torment; and after it followed, louder, but duplicating, the
decreasing pitch and growing volume of the howl, roar and groan, that
ceased abruptly on a hoarse note.
Apparently, and they all seemed to believe it, the Image had spoken.
Certainly, to Roger, still able to be alert enough to trace sound, it
issued from the head or face, possibly the small, slitted mouth of that
statue.
"The Doom has judged," the old man told them in precise English, but in
a very formal and cold tone, "the judgment is pronounced. I am to show
you our secret and allow your science to prove its worth."
A mocking twitch took the place of a smile as he added:
"Or, from our viewpoint, its worthlessness."
As he spoke, with no sound an orifice opened in the wall behind the
idol. In its cavernous depths, dark and forbidding, Roger guessed that
the stone had withdrawn up or sidewise, or had turned on a pivot.
He and Tip, hesitating, were prodded gruffly forward.
Into the decreasing light they moved--were forced to move.
The darkness became abruptly intense. The noiseless door had closed!
Echoing still to their last footstep, the silence slowly became
complete.
"Science!" grunted Tip, "Without no scientific impediments."
"Implements." Roger spoke from habit, still too dazed to feel, with
completeness, the horror that must soon come.
And far away, the last exhalation of the "s" he had spoken was flung
mockingly back by echo, a hiss of multiplied duration, fainter as it
echoed to and fro.
Trying to hold calm, Roger felt an impulse to scream, to beat on the
callous stone, to beg for mercy.
Instead, feeling that Tip also must feel the dread he felt, he nerved
himself to be not only calm, but matter-of-fact.
"Well," he remarked, "We've heard the Voice and found the secret way.
And that's that!"