"THE FIRES OF THE ASAS!"
Midnight was chiming from a distant church-tower as Idris and Godfrey
stood on the edge of the upland that overlooked the valley of
Ravensdale.
They had left Wave Crest at eleven o'clock, and following a circuitous
route, and favoured by the late hour, had succeeded in reaching their
destination without attracting notice.
Beatrice had begged hard to accompany them, but this Godfrey would
not permit. So she watched them from the garden-gate till they were
out of sight, and then returned indoors to alarm herself by reading
the adventures of Belzoni in the Great Pyramid, finding some sort of
affinity between the expedition of Idris and that of the enterprizing
Paduan.
The night was lovely and cloudless, with a full moon shining from a sky
of darkest blue.
Shimmering white in the hallowed radiance arose the lofty tomb of the
long-buried Viking, and as the two friends made their way towards it
the character of the undertaking began to oppress the mind of Godfrey
with various strange fancies. What the interior of the hillock would
reveal he could not tell; but he had forebodings of something grim
and ghostly. Though it was of his own free will that he came, yet
now, brought close to the intended task, he shrank from it, and found
himself yielding to a spirit of fear.
He could not but admire the unconcern of his companion, who strode
gallantly forward, humming the chorus of a hunting-song.
"Confound yon bright moon!" muttered Idris. "If any of the coast-guard
should stroll this way, we are certain to be seen."
Arrived at the northernmost point of the tumulus, he flung down the
sack that he had carried containing the implements necessary for
excavation, and turning his eyes upon the side of the hillock began to
look about for the white-flowering mandrake that betokened the point of
ingress.
He glanced quickly from right to left, but, to his surprise, the plant
was nowhere to be seen.
"Here's a mystery! What has become of the mandrake?--No matter: there's
the pile of pebbles I set up on the spot where the shadow of the stone
fell. I have but to repeat my former experiment."
Making his way to the little heap Idris faced about, and then began to
walk towards the hillock, keeping in a direct line with the stone upon
its apex.
On reaching the base of the tumulus he paused and remained stationary,
with his back to Godfrey, and his gaze riveted on the side of the
mound. There was something so peculiar in the rigidity of his attitude,
and in his long-continued silence, that Godfrey's heart quickened with
an unknown fear, a fear that deepened, when Idris, with a scared face
turned slowly round, and, as if the power of speech had left him,
beckoned with his finger for the surgeon to come forward.
"Look there!" he said in a hoarse voice, clutching Godfrey with one
hand, and pointing with the other. "Tell me whether I see aright.
What's that?"
And there, protruding from the side of the hillock in the place where
the mandrake had grown, was--a human hand!
A human hand, rising from the earth, motionless and rigid, the crooked
fingers seeming to tell of the agony of a death by suffocation.
Some one, since the morning, had been trying to force a way through
the soil at the entrance of the passage, and had lost his life in the
attempt.
Such was Idris' first thought. A closer inspection, however, showed
that the event had not happened that day. The nails had fallen from the
fingers, and there was, besides, a decayed, vegetable look about the
hand, differing altogether from the aspect presented by the skin of the
newly-dead. How Idris came to overlook it during his morning visit was
a mystery, since the hand must have been in its present position for
several days, if not for several weeks. Its sudden exposure was perhaps
due to the afternoon storm, which had washed away a portion of the soil.
To endeavour to ascertain the identity of the victim by pulling at
the withered hand, and thus bringing the decayed form to view, was an
act that not only Idris shrank from, but even Godfrey, the surgeon,
familiar with the _disjecta membra_ of the dissecting room.
Then Idris, bending forward to examine the hand more closely, gave vent
to a peal of laughter.
"Brave heroes we are to be frightened by a plant! It is nothing but the
root of the mandrake."
Godfrey drew a breath of relief, as he assured himself by a nearer view
that what he had taken for a human hand was indeed the withered root of
the mandrake, so apt to assume strange and unaccountable shapes.
Yet, to save his life, he durst not put forth his hand to touch it.
If such were the terrors guarding the exterior of the tomb, what might
he not expect to find in the interior?
"Now, Godfrey, our silly fright being over, to work! I will dig while
you watch. Take a seat on this boulder here, and if you should see
anybody coming, give the word and I will suspend operations for a
while. There cannot be more than five or six feet of earth to knock
away, and then the passage will be open to our view. The work ought not
to take long."
Godfrey did as desired, and Idris flung off ulster, coat, and vest.
Rolling his shirt-sleeves above the elbow, he drew the tools from the
sack and selected a spade.
"Now to disturb the repose of old Orm the Golden!" he cried, excitement
sparkling from his eyes. "Now to evoke the fires of the Asas!"
The sickly, withered mandrake-root, with its resemblance to a human
hand, fronted him, and as if in contempt of his former fears, he
drove the edge of the spade clean through the stalk. The separated
parts seemed to quiver and writhe in a manner extremely suggestive of
animal-life.
A thrill of terror shot through his frame, and, spade in hand, he
paused, staring at the root; for, simultaneously with its dissection,
there came a sound, bearing resemblance to a plaintive human cry.
It was not the creation of his fancy, since Godfrey too had heard it.
"In the name of all that's holy what was that?" he asked, starting up
from the stone upon which he had been sitting.
"That is what I should like to know," said Idris, trying to look
unconcerned. "It came--or seemed to come--from this plant here. The
poet speaks of:--
'Shrieks like mandrakes torn from the ground!'
but I never thought to hear them in my own person."
He toyed idly with the spade, desirous, yet almost afraid, of making a
second stroke.
In all his life Godfrey had never been so much alarmed as he was at
that moment.
"Idris, let us leave this business--at least, for to-night."
His words acted as a stimulus to the other's courage.
"Leave it? Never! till I have forced my way to the heart of this
hillock, and wrested the secret from it. On the very point of discovery
must we turn back, frightened by a sound, the cry, probably, of some
night-bird? We are not the first to break into a Norse barrow at
midnight. Shall we be outdone in enterprise by others? No: though the
dead Viking rise up, sword in hand, to repel me, yet will I go on."
And with this Idris lifted the spade, and attacked the side of the
hillock, savagely cutting the mandrake root to fragments, half
expecting to hear the weird cry again. But the sound, whatever its
origin, was not repeated.
Finding the earth to be hard conglomerate, and not easily susceptible
to impressions from the spade, Idris laid that tool aside, and, fitting
the wooden shaft of a pickaxe into its iron head, proceeded to reduce
the conglomerate to a crumble, which he then tossed aside with the
spade, labouring alternately with the two implements.
No word escaped him: he was too much interested in the work to waste
his breath in words. His efforts soon unearthed two large unhewn blocks
of stone standing a little distance apart.
Fired to fresh energy by this sight, a proof that he was working in the
right direction, he continued his excavations between the two blocks.
After the lapse of a few minutes he paused, and thrust his arm up to
the shoulder through an aperture appearing in the conglomerate.
"_Io triumphe!_" he exclaimed. "Empty space behind this. A little more
labour, and we shall be able to crawl into the passage beyond."
Declining Godfrey's repeated offers of assistance, Idris resumed his
work enthusiastically, dealing stroke after stroke upon the wall of
earth that barred his way. Down came the black soil with a rush, as if
glad to meet free air after an imprisonment of centuries. Wider and
wider grew the aperture, revealing an open space beyond: and, at last,
flinging down his tools, Idris declared that the way was now open to
the interior.
"Where's the lantern, Godfrey?"
The surgeon was already fumbling about in the sack. With an exclamation
of dismay he rose to his feet and gave it a shake, but nothing came
forth.
"By heaven! Godfrey, don't say that we have left the lantern behind!"
"That is just what we have done."
"At least, the match-box is there."
"No: that, too, is a minus article."
Idris breathed a malediction. As he himself had attended to the putting
up of their paraphernalia, the omission was his own, and no blame
attached to Godfrey.
The neglect seemed irremediable. It was out of the question to return
to Ormsby for the lantern, and yet, without a light, it would be
hazardous to grope their way through darkness to the interior of the
hillock. To be so near the point of discovery, and yet so far off, was
maddening.
"I shall not return without some attempt at exploration," cried Idris.
"We'll have to grope about in the dark and try what we can discover in
that way."
Godfrey was almost ready to drop at this weird suggestion.
"Stay a moment!" continued Idris, stooping over his vest, and feeling
in the pockets, "surely I have some matches here. Yes," he added, with
a cry of delight, drawing forth a metallic box. "Here they are! How
many? Three, as I live! Three only! Humph! we shall have to economize
our slender resources. We must feel our way along the passage. I'll
walk a few steps ahead of you, so that if any hurt should befall me,
take warning yourself, and help me if you can. We'll not strike these
vestas till we are fairly within the central chamber. We may learn
something from their glimmer."
Idris, having resumed his coat and vest, was on the point of leading
the way, when he suddenly became impressed with the idea that there
might be some hidden danger within the hillock, and for Beatrice's sake
it was not right that Godfrey should be drawn into it.
But the surgeon, though indeed reluctant to go forward, was
nevertheless unwilling to be considered a coward, and demurred to the
suggestion that he should remain at the entrance till Idris had first
paid a visit to the interior.
"Seriously speaking," said Idris, "I do not see what danger there can
be, but still there _is_ the possibility of it, and I ought to meet it
alone. Beatrice would never forgive me if harm should befall you. Stay
here till I have made a brief exploration."
While speaking he caught sight of the walking-stick with which
Godfrey's grandfather had been accustomed to perform his feats of
divination. It was curiously shaped, carved so as to represent a
serpent twining round a wand, the head of the reptile being set with
two green, glittering stones in imitation of eyes.
"Pass me your ancestral _caduceus_," he said. "It will serve to guide
my steps. I wish these eyes were lamps!"
Then, waving the surgeon back, he stepped within the dark hole, which
seemed, in Godfrey's imagination, to gape like the mouth of a great
dragon about to swallow its victim.
Idris' sensations on entering the passage were far from agreeable.
Though the moonlight without was brilliantly white, not a ray of it
found entrance to the passage; the air within was black and terrible,
and as solid-looking as if formed of ebony.
His progress was slow and tedious, from the necessity imposed upon
him of halting at each step to feel his way. Before lifting his foot
he carefully explored the ground in front of him with the stick, and
he touched in turn the sides of the passage as well as the roof. The
corridor, judged by this test, was about seven feet in height and four
in width. Roof, walls, and flooring were composed apparently of solid
masonry.
After taking about twenty paces Idris, extending the rod on each side
of him, found that it touched nothing. The passage had opened out into
something wider.
He judged that he had entered the mortuary chamber, and was now
standing in the presence of the dead.
What awesome sight did the black darkness hide?
For all he knew to the contrary, not one, but many Vikings might be
entombed here, disposed at different points of the chamber, their
bodies preserved from decay by embalming. Like the lost and frozen dead
men, seen sometimes by navigators in northern seas, they might be in
sitting posture, staring with fixed and glassy eyes as if daring him to
advance.
The temptation to obtain a glimpse of the place by striking one of the
matches was very great, but he refrained from the action, resolving
that Godfrey should share the sight.
Before calling upon him to follow, a sudden desire came upon Idris to
grope his way once around the interior.
Exploring the darkness with his stick he soon hit upon the chamber-wall
at the point where it shot off at right angles to the side of the
passage. Passing his hand over its surface, an action accompanied on
his part by a feeling of disgust, the masonry being wet and slimy, he
discovered what seemed to be a rusty rod extending in a horizontal line
along the wall at the height of about six feet from the ground. Puzzled
at first to account for its use he came to the conclusion that it had
once served to uphold the tapestry with which the interiors of these
old Norse tombs were sometimes decorated. The tapestry itself was gone,
crumbled to dust, perhaps, with the lapse of time, but the metallic rod
remaining would serve to conduct him round the chamber.
He shot a glance through the passage just traversed by him: the
darkness swallowed up its perspective, rendering it impossible for the
eye to form any judgment as to its length. The entrance seemed close
by, a square patch of white light, in which was framed a dark stooping
figure, that of Godfrey, vainly endeavouring to keep an eye on his
venturesome friend.
Idris turned from the passage, and holding the rod with his left hand,
and grasping the stick in his right, he advanced slowly and cautiously
along the side of the chamber-wall, over ground that had, perhaps, been
untrodden for ten centuries.
After taking six paces he was brought to a halt by the wall inclining
again at right angles. He had evidently reached one corner of the stone
chamber.
Turning his face in this new direction, and still submitting to the
guidance of the supposed tapestry-rod, he continued his progress,
exploring the way before him with the stick.
He paused again as his left hand came in contact with a small
triangular shred of cloth hanging to the rod. It was apparently a
fragment of tapestry. There might be other and larger portions farther
on, which, in view of their antiquity, would be of considerable
value. Pleased with the idea that he would not come away from the tomb
altogether empty-handed he was about to move forward again, when his
attention was suddenly diverted to the stick he was carrying.
Without the exercise of any volition on his part it was slowly
inclining itself downwards. There was no mistaking the fact, and the
knowledge came upon him as a disagreeable surprise. It was as if the
serpent-rod had suddenly become instinct with life.
His first impulse was to cast it from him, but thinking that its
downward motion might be due to the relaxed state of his muscles,
he raised and extended the stick horizontally: he kept it in that
position, but it was evident to his sense of feeling that the rod
manifested a tendency to assume an oblique direction, just as if a
thread were tied to its extremity, and some one below lightly pulling
it.
What was the cause of this? Must he dismiss his former scepticism,
and believe in the powers of the divining rod? Had this staff of
witch-hazel, electrified by the nervous force of his own body, become
transformed for the moment into a sort of magnet, capable of being
attracted by metals? Was he standing on the site of the Viking's buried
treasure? Was the very treasure itself lying upon the clay flooring at
his feet? If he struck a match would his eye be caught by the sparkle
of silver and gold? No: he would reserve the light, and make what
discoveries he could without it.
Relinquishing his hold of the metallic rod he dropped upon his knees,
and with his face bent low, put forth his hands.
* * * * * *
Hark! What was that?
The silent watcher at the entrance started.
A faint cry from the interior of the hillock as of one calling for
help, and then stillness.
For some time Godfrey had kept his ear close to the flooring of the
passage, a position which enabled him to follow the footsteps of Idris.
But now these footsteps had ceased, their cessation being followed
shortly afterwards by the cry.
Godfrey continued to listen, but though straining his ear to the
utmost he could not detect the faintest sound. A suspiciously horrible
stillness prevailed within.
"Idris! Idris!" he called out, sending the full volume of his voice
along the passage: and "Idris! Idris!" was echoed from the roof in
tones that seemed like a mockery of his own. If the dead in the
sepulchral chamber were gibing at him the effect could not have been
more weird.
Again he called aloud, and again there was no answer, save the echoes
of his own voice.
"My God! what has happened?" he cried.
There fell upon him a terror like that which has turned men's hair grey
in a single night. He did not doubt, he _could_ not doubt, that some
disaster had happened: he must hasten to the rescue: duty, humanity,
friendship, honour--all these blending together in a voice of thunder
urged him forward. Every moment was precious; and yet to venture into
the dark chamber without a light seemed a piece of folly, for what was
there to prevent him from meeting with the same fate as Idris?
He rose to his feet and turned his eyes towards the cliffs and
sea-beach in the hope of seeing a coast-guard whose lantern would at
this juncture be of inestimable service. But alas! no coast-guard was
visible, and to go off in search of one was out of the question, when a
minute might make all the difference between life and death.
No: he must venture in alone, and without a light, and he nerved
himself for the task. Casting one glance at the sky, the sea, the
land, as objects he might never see again, he snatched up the pickaxe
to serve as a weapon of defence, against he knew not whom or what, and
plunged into the mouth of the excavation that yawned black and grim
before him.
His course through the passage was much quicker than that of Idris had
been. There could be no danger here, seeing that Idris had traversed it
in safety. Therefore the surgeon groped his way swiftly along the wall
of the corridor until it suddenly turned off at right angles, whence he
concluded that he was at the entrance of the sepulchral chamber.
"Idris, where are you?" he cried.
There was no vocal reply, but a faint splash greeted his ears like the
movement of a hand through water, a sound which Godfrey interpreted as
an answer.
For a terrible idea had seized him. The floor of the chamber was of
earth only, and not of masonry, he thought: and the rain of centuries,
percolating through the roof, had converted this flooring into a
quagmire incapable of supporting the lightest weight. Idris had become
immersed in it: had just sunk below the surface: his voice was gone: he
had just given his last gasp!
How was he to save him? One step forward, and he himself might be in
the abyss of mud.
To test his opinion he flung the pickaxe forward, taking care to avoid
the spot whence came the splash. As it fell Godfrey drew a breath of
relief. The clangour made by the falling implement proved that the
quagmire was the creation of his fancy. Still, what had become of Idris
that he made no reply? He must be somewhere within this chamber, seeing
that there was no egress from it except by the passage. O for a light,
if only that of a match! Its momentary gleam would suffice to dispel
the mystery.
He listened for Idris' breathing, but failed to detect any sound:
Idris, if he were really here, was as still as the dead.
There was no other course for Godfrey than to grope about until he came
upon the body of Idris, an unpleasant task, seeing that it might bring
him into contact with the bones of Vikings!
He started forward at random. Five paces, and his knee knocked against
some obstruction. Putting out his hand he ascertained that directly in
front of him was something formed of hewn stone.
With an instinctive feeling that this was a tomb, Godfrey gave it a
wide range, and in so doing stumbled and fell over another object.
It was a human body. In a moment Godfrey was upon his knees, and
passing his hand quickly over the prostrate figure he discovered that
it was Idris in a state of coma.
Quickly he felt for the match-box which Idris had put into his vest
pocket, and on finding it, drew it forth. Taking out one of the
wax-lights he struck it on the side of the box.
Never within Godfrey's experience had the striking of a match been
attended with a result so appalling, for he immediately found himself
in an atmosphere of many-coloured flame. The hot breath of a fiery
furnace glowed around, dazzling his eyes, scorching his face.
In that moment of bewilderment and terror the words of the runic
ring flashed through his mind, and found expression in his gasping
articulation:
"_The fires of the Asas!_"
Simultaneously with the illumination a fierce detonation like a
powder-blast rent the air, and Godfrey, flung backwards as by a giant
hand, tumbled senseless to the ground.