We entered the building, a large room divided by the metal screening
into huge cages. A great commotion, the flapping of wings, greeted our
entrance. Travel in this realm indeed was primitive. We were to go by
air, on a gliding platform drawn by giant birds trained to harness.
Sonya pulled down a swinging tube of light from the ceiling and held it
toward one of the cages. Eight giant birds were there, soft, gray-white
feathered bodies, heads small, round and bald with black top-knots like
plumes.
They stood upon short legs, yet were as tall as myself. They seemed very
gentle; they regarded us timorously, but curiously. They knew Sonya; as
she entered the cage, they nuzzled with their beaks against her smock.
“Ah, Nana! They want sweets,” she laughed. One, more bold, pecked at her
pocket. She leaned, and with her shoulder heaved it away. Then she
produced small pieces of sweetmeat and made them each take a piece
decorously.
“They are well trained, you see?” She rested an arm against the great
curving side of one of them. I could well imagine that on its soft back
she could have ridden into the air. One had lazily opened its wings; a
feathered spread of fifteen feet at least, graceful wings, gray-white,
with tips that were solid black.
The platform was under an enclosure of the flat roof. Sonya rolled it
out, a platform some ten feet long, by six wide. Soft furs covered its
surface. It was mounted upon small wheels, with a frame set in small
cylinders of compressed gas as cushions against the shock of landing.
Midway of the platform, underneath, was a cross rod. Sonya extended its
sections sidewise, each jutting out some six feet beyond the platform
edge. To each of the ends of this rod, a bird was harnessed. The other
six were in two strings in front, three in a string, one in advance of
the other.
There were reins for the leading birds to pull their heads gently from
one side to the other, a rein to pull downward on their feet, another
rein, which when drawn upon, raised a cushion to press upward against
the bird’s throat.
It took Sonya only a few minutes to harness them. I had been inspecting
the platform. It was built of a light metal framework, upon which a
thin, strong membrane was stretched. The whole seemed light as a kite.
Beneath it, set in the space between its landing gear, was a system of
small, flexible wings, and movable cones through which the air rushed.
And there was a horizontal and vertical rudder, with flexible tips.
Flying skill was needed. There were several controls near the front of
the platform, where now the reins were held in a notched cross-bar.
“We are ready,” said Sonya. She stretched upon her side on the fur
covering of the platform with the reins and the controls before her.
We took our places beside her and behind her, lying at full length, arms
crooked into leather straps to hold us. Sonya called to the birds. Eight
of them as one, leaped upward. The great wings flapped. We moved, rolled
across the roof. At its edge we lifted with a jerk.
The low housetop, the dark trees, other roofs, the dim city lights all
slid downward into a blur of shadow. On a long slant, we headed upward
into the starlit night.
I lay on my side, clinging to that swaying, leaping platform. The wind
surged past, tearing away every sound save the flapping of those giant
wings. A graceful bird on each side of me, two strings of them slanting
upward in front, winged swiftly up into the night, drawing me after
them.
The dark world was lost and gone. The star encrusted dome of the heavens
encompassed everything.
This was not an air voyage. It was flying. The platform fluttered, slid
over the air like some swiftly drawn kite. The heavens swung with a
dizzy lurching. I gazed over the edge at the dark, moving landscape far
down.
The faint lights of the city showed a thinly-built, suburban area, then
the shore of a star-lit sea ahead. Primitive flying, with the first
startling strangeness of it gone, its romance swept over me, a magic
carpet upon which I lay, magically flying over reams of mystery, a
flight unreal—romantically miraculous.
I was brought back from roaming fancy. Dolores, lying beside me, was
pulling at my shoulder. I caught her words before the wind snatched at
them.
“Look, Leonard! There is the island!”
There was no fear of this flight upon Dolores’s face. Only an eager
wonderment, her mind struggling with these sights: romantic, awing to
me, how much more so to her so newly emerged from a life-long darkness!
“See the island, Leonard!”
We were, I suppose, no more than a thousand feet high. The shore of the
sea was nearly beneath us, a dark, curving shore of gray sand with
gentle white waves rolling upon it. Beyond the shore, some ten miles
out, a dark island showed. It seemed irregularly circular.
As we swept closer its beach became visible, gray-white sand with white
rollers. A tangle of vegetation was behind the beach, a forest jungle
with the land sloping up over gentle foothills to a cone-shaped hill
which occupied the island’s center.
Along one shore of the island, yellow and blue spots of lights were
showing among the trees at the edge of the beach. It was all dim in the
starlight. Far ahead, where the sea unbroken reached the horizon of
stars, a yellow glow had come to the sky.
Sonya gestured, “The moon is rising.”
It came with a startling abruptness. A great yellow world swung up,
twice, three times the visual size of our moon: a glowing yellow disk,
marked with the dark configurations of its mountains. It rose
horn-shaped, mounted straight up, slowly, but with a movement quite
visible. The stars paled around it. A flood of yellow light lay upon the
sea in a broad path of rippling gold.
The island was bathed in the golden flood. We were much closer to it
now, swooping a few hundred feet above its beach which along here was
broad and hard. The jungle was beside us, a fairyland of tropical
verdure.
Warmed by the waters of the sea, and perhaps by hidden fires of the
cone-shaped hill, the vegetation grew to giant size.
A giant forest edged with gold, mysteriously dark, romantic, amorous,
scented with spices and the heavy perfume of flowers.
We landed upon the beach where the warm waves were liquid gold beside
low, primitive, palm-thatched dwellings set like ground nests in the
verdure.
With the rush of our flight gone, I felt a new warmth in the air. Upon
my cheeks was the caressing breath of a warm breeze from the sea; it
stirred the palm-fronds to amorous whispering.
White figures were drawn back from the beach to watch us land. They
crowded forward into the moonlight, young girls, slim and white, with
long, flowing black hair.
As I stood up and stepped from the platform to the sand, some of them
scattered and fled with startled feminine cries into the enshrouded
foliage. Others came shyly forward, crowded around us—golden nymphs in
the moonlight, with a brief, veil-like garment from shoulder to thigh.
They were surprised at me, a man, here upon their island. They crowded
around Sonya, talking seemingly all at once, casting mistrustful glances
at me, and glances of curiosity and friendliness at Alice and Dolores.
What Sonya said to them I could only guess. It caused an excitement;
like fauns, many of them leaped away, running down the beach, scattering
over the village. In the distance I could hear their cries, and other
cries, shouts, a great activity beginning.
And presently there was heard the cheep of giant birds, the flapping of
their wings as they were released from their cages and brought out to be
harnessed. Far ahead down the beach in the moonlight, presently a crowd
of the girls began rolling out a huge platform.
The few girls who remained with Sonya continued talking. They were tense
now, but wholly composed, beautiful, intelligent-looking girls, most of
them a year or so older than Sonya, and very much the same type. Upon
the left leg of each, just above the knee, was a broad metal band.
The girls now were ignoring me. But Sonya called Dolores and Alice over,
and it was obvious they were welcomed.
I saw presently, some of the older women. With a few little girls among
them, they came to the edge of the forest and stood timidly regarding
us—infancy and age, common fugitives.
Alice was gesturing toward the sky. I turned. Off there in the
starlight, in the direction we had come, was a lone bird flying. In a
moment I could see its wings.
Sonya called something; and added to Alice, “A girl arriving from
Kalima.”
The bird swooped in a great descending arc, a great white bird like
those which had drawn our platform. Mounted upon its back was the figure
of a girl, her arms clinging about its neck. It soared with poised
wings, descended to the beach near us.
The girl leaped to the sand and called, “Sonya! Sonya!”
They talked in their own language; then Sonya whirled to me. Her face
had gone white.
“Alta, this girl, lives very near Ren’s house in Kalima. I do not mean
my home, his and mine. I mean that other house of his where you were
living. Alta went there to see me.”
She was talking swiftly. Alice and Dolores drew me to one side; a common
feeling of disaster was upon us all.
“Alta found the door open and went in. She read my message to Ren, that
we had come here to the island. She was leaving. In the street outside
she heard voices. From the window she saw Ren with your Jim. They were
nearly to the house.
“Then . . . a great black thing leaped upon them, a giant, with a great,
wobbling head. What we saw, Leonard! The Nameless Horror! It leaped upon
them, and there were two or three others of its kind. They seized my
cousin and Jim. Lifted them up, carried them off! She . . . Alta, took
one of my birds, and came here to tell us!”
XI
A MAN, TO PLAY A MAN’S PART
I stood a moment, transfixed with horror. Alice’s face had become as
white as Sonya’s. Dolores uttered a faint little cry, “Jim!”
“Sonya—” I began. But she had turned to give orders to the girls. They
sped away. I finished, “Sonya, get me back, at once!”
“Yes,” she agreed. “But you can do nothing—a stranger—you cannot talk
our language.”
“I can, with you to interpret for me.”
She whirled upon Alta with other questions, then back to me. “More than
ever now, I must go through with our plans. Alta says the king is not
dead. But dying, he will die at any moment. We must get back.”
Down the beach the large platform was ready. A hundred girls or more
were loading upon it. With a great flapping of the wings of the birds,
it moved down the beach. Rose into the air. It had four strings of ten
birds each, with others harnessed in tandem all along its sides.
Magnificently, it sailed upward, turned in a broad arc, and passed us
high overhead.
From everywhere now the girls were rising. Another great platform, and
still another. A score of smaller ones; and from the forest, a hundred
or more individual birds, each with a lone rider.
They flapped up from among the palms; circled overhead, with their
numbers augmenting until they headed away. The first platforms were now
mere blobs in the starlight. A thousand girls, I estimated, were up
there in flight.
We hurried to our platform. Again we were in the air. Below us still
another platform was rising; around us, three or four mounted birds
circled like a convoy. We took our place in the line and sped back to
the city.
“Is the king dead, Sonya?”
“No. I do not think so.”