"I AM GOING BACK TO HER!"
Gradon awakened. "Suarra! Beloved!" he whispered, and stretched out
eager arms.
Memory rushed back to him; he leaped to his feet, stared around him. He
was in a dim forest glade. Beside him his burro nibbled placidly the
grass.
"Suarra!" he cried again loudly.
A figure stirred in the shadow; came toward him. It was an Indian,
but one of a type Graydon had never seen before. His features were
delicate, fine. He wore a corselet and kilt of padded yellow silk.
There was a circlet of gold upon his head and bracelets of the same
metal on his upper arms.
The Indian held out a package wrapped in silk. He opened it. Within it
was Suarra's bracelet of the dinosaurs and the _caraquenque_ feather she
wore when first he had seen her.
Graydon restored the feather in its covering, thrust it into the pocket
over his heart. The bracelet, and why he did it he never knew, he
slipped over his own wrist.
He spoke to the Indian in the Aymara. He smiled; shook his head. Nor
did he seem to understand any of the half dozen other dialects that
Graydon tried. He pointed to the burro and then ahead. Graydon knew
that he was telling him that he must go, and that he would show him the
way.
They set forth. He tried to etch every foot of the path upon his
memory, planning already for return. In a little while they came to
the edge of a steep hill. Here the Indian paused, pointing down. Fifty
feet or so below him Graydon saw a well marked trail. There was an easy
descent, zigzagging down the hillside to it. Again the Indian pointed,
and he realized that he was indicating which way to take upon the lower
trail. The Indian stood aside, bowed low and waited for him to pass
down with the burro. He began the downward climb. The Indian stood
watching him; and as Graydon reached a turn in the trail, he waved his
hand in farewell and slipped back into the forest.
Graydon plodded slowly on for perhaps a mile farther. There he waited
for an hour. Then he turned resolutely back; retraced his way to the
hillside and driving his burro before him, quietly reclimbed it.
In his brain and in his heart were but one thought and one desire--to
return to Suarra. No matter what the peril--to go back to her.
He slipped over the edge of the hill and stood there for a moment,
listening. He heard nothing. He pushed ahead of the burro; softly bade
it follow; strode forward.
Instantly close above his head he heard a horn note sound, menacing,
angry. There was a whirring of great wings.
Instinctively he threw up his arm. It was the one upon which he had
slipped Suarra's bracelet. As he raised it, the purple stones that were
the eyes of the snake-woman carved upon it, flashed in the sun.
He heard the horn note again, protesting; curiously--startled. There
was a whistling flurry in the air close beside him as of some unseen
winged creature striving frantically to check its flight.
Something struck the bracelet a glancing blow. He felt another sharp
blow against his shoulder. A searing pain darted through the muscles.
He felt blood gush from shoulder and neck. The buffet threw him
backward. He fell and rolled over the edge of the hill and down its
side.
In that fall his head struck a stone, stunning him. When he came to his
senses he was lying at the foot of the slope, with the burro standing
beside him. He must have lain there unconscious for considerable time,
for the stained ground showed that he had lost much blood. The wound
was in an awkward place for examination, but so far as he could see it
was a clean puncture that had passed like a rapier thrust through the
upper shoulder and out at the neck. It must have missed the artery by a
hair.
And well he knew what had made that sound. One of the feathered
serpents of the abyss.
The cliff or hill marked no doubt the limits of Yu-Atlanchi at that
point. Had the strange Indian placed the creature there in anticipation
of his return, or had it been one of those "Watchers" of whom Suarra
had spoken and this frontier one of its regular points of observation?
The latter, he was inclined to think, for the Indian had unquestionably
been friendly.
And did not the bracelet and the _ceraquenque_ feather show that he had
been Suarra's own messenger?
But Graydon could not go back, into the unknown perils, with such a
wound. He must find help. That night the fever took him. The next day
he met some friendly Indians. They ministered to him as best they
could. But the fever grew worse and the wound a torment. He made up his
mind to press on to Chupan, the nearest village where he might find
better help than the Indians could give him.
He had stumbled on to Chupan, reached it on his last strength.
* * * * *
Such was Graydon's story.
If you ask me whether I believe it, or whether I think it the vagaries
of a fever-stricken wanderer, I answer--I do believe it. Yes, from the
first to the last, I believe it true. For remember, I saw his wound,
I saw the bracelet of the dinosaurs and I listened to Graydon in his
delirium. A man does not tell percisely the same things in the cool
blood of health that he raves of in delirium, not at least if these
things are but fancies born of that delirium. He cannot. He forgets.
There was one thing that I found it hard to explain by any normal
process.
"You say you saw this--well, Being--you call the Snake Mother as a
phantom in that cavern of the Face?" I asked. "But are you sure of
that, Graydon? Are you sure that this was not hallucination--or some
vision of your fever that you carried into waking?"'
"No," he said. "No. I am very sure. I would not call what I saw
a phantom. I only used that word to describe it. It was more--a
projection of her image. You forget, don't you, that other exercise
of this inexplicable power of projection the night I was drawn into
Yu-Atlanchi by her eyes? Well--of the reality of that first experience
there cannot be the slightest doubt. I do not find the other more
unbelievable than it.
"The cavern of the Face," he went on, thoughtfully. "That I think was a
laboratory of Nature, a gigantic crucible where under certain rays of
light a natural transmutation of one element into another took place.
"Within the rock, out of which the Face was carved, was some mineral
which under these rays was transformed into gold. A purely chemical
process of which our race itself is not far from learning the secret,
as you know.
"The Face! I think that it was an after-thought of some genius of
Yu-Atlanchi. He had taken the rock, worked upon it and symbolized
so accurately man's universal hunger for gold, that inevitably he
who looked upon it responded to its call. The subconsciousness, the
consciousness, too, leaped out in response to what the Face portrayed
with such tremendous power. In proportion to the strength of that
hunger, so was the strength of the response. Like calls to like the
world over."
"But do you think that Soames and Sterrett and little Dancre really
turned into gold?" I asked him.
"Frankly, of that I have my doubts," he answered. "It looked so. But
the whole scene was so--well, so damnably devilish--that I can't quite
trust to my impressions of that. It is possible that something else
occured. Unquestionably the concentration of the rays on the region
about the Face was terrific. Beneath the bombardment of those radiant
particles of force--whatever they were--the bodies of the three may
simply have disintegrated. The droplets of gold may have been oozing
from the rock behind them and their position in the exact place where
the three disappeared may also have been only a vivid coincidence."
"That the flying serpents were visible in that light and not in normal
light shows, I should think, that it must have been extraordinarily
rich in the ultraviolet vibrations," I suggested.
He nodded.
"Of course that was it," he said. "Invisible in day or night light,
it took the violet rays to record their outlines. They are probably
a development of some form of flying saurian such as the ancient
pterodactyls."
He mused for a moment.
"But they must have possessed a high degree of intelligence," he
went on at last; "those serpents. Intelligence higher even than the
dog--intelligence perhaps on a par with that of the elephant. The
creature that struck me certainly recognized Suarra's bracelet. It was
that recognition which checked it, I am sure. It tried to stop its
thrust, but it was too late to do more than divert it.
"And that is why I think I am going to find her," he whispered.
"She wanted me to come back. She knew that I would. I think the
bracelet is a talisman--or better still, a passport to carry me by the
watchers, as she called them. It was not just as a remembrance that she
gave it to me. No!"
"I will come back--and with her," he told me on that day we clasped
hands in farewell. I watched him until he and the little burro were
hidden by the trees of the trail he must follow until he had reached
the frontier of the haunted Cordillera, the gateway of those mysteries
with which he had determined to grapple to wrest from them the maid he
named Suarra.
But he has not come back.
END