Two thoughts flickered in Torres’ mind as he was sucked down. The first
was of the great white hound which had leaped after him. The second was
that the Mirror of the World told lies. That this was his end he was
certain, yet the little he had dared permit himself to glimpse in the
Mirror had given no hint of an end anything like this.
A good swimmer, as he was engulfed and sucked on in rapid, fluid
darkness, he knew fear that he might have his brains knocked out by the
stone walls or roof of the subterranean passage through which he was
being swept. But the freak of the currents was such that not once did he
collide with any part of his anatomy. Sometimes he was aware of being
banked against water-cushions that tokened the imminence of a wall or
boulder, at which times he shrank as it were into smaller compass, like
a sea-turtle drawing in its head before the onslaught of sharks.
Less than a minute, as he measured the passage of time by the holding of
his breath, elapsed, ere, in an easier-flowing stream, his head emerged
above the surface and he refreshed his lungs with great inhalations of
cool air. Instead of swimming, he contented himself with keeping afloat,
and with wondering what had happened to the hound and with what next
excitement would vex his underground adventure.
Soon he glimpsed light ahead, the dim but unmistakable light of day;
and, as the way grew brighter, he turned his face back and saw what made
him proceed to swim with a speed-stroke. What he saw was the hound,
swimming high, with the teeth of its huge jaws gleaming in the
increasing light. Under the source of the light, he saw a shelving bank
and climbed out. His first thought, which he half carried out, was to
reach into his pocket for the gems he had stolen from the Queen’s chest.
But a reverberant barking that grew to thunder in the cavern reminded
him of his fanged pursuer, and he drew forth the Queen’s dagger instead.
Again two thoughts divided his judgment for action. Should he try to
kill the swimming brute ere it landed? Or should he retreat up the rocks
toward the light on the chance that the stream might carry the hound
past him? His judgment settled on the second course of action, and he
fled upward along a narrow ledge. But the dog landed and followed with
such four-footed certainty of speed that it swiftly overtook him. Torres
turned at bay on the cramped footing, crouched, and brandished the
dagger against the brute’s leap.
But the hound did not leap. Instead, playfully, with jaws widespread of
laughter, it sat down and extended its right paw in greeting. As he took
the paw in his hand and shook it, Torres almost collapsed in the
revulsion of relief. He laughed with exuberant shrillness that
advertised semi-hysteria, and continued to pump the hound’s leg up and
down, while the hound, with wide jaws and gentle eyes, laughed as
exuberantly back.
Pursuing the shelf, the hound contentedly at heel and occasionally
sniffing his calves, Torres found that the narrow track, paralleling the
river, after an ascent descended to it again. And then Torres saw two
things, one that made him pause and shudder, and one that made his heart
beat high with hope. The first was the underground river. Rushing
straight at the wall of rock, it plunged into it in a chaos of foam and
turbulence, with stiffly serrated and spitefully spitting waves that
advertised its swiftness and momentum. The second was an opening to one
side, through which streamed white daylight. Possibly fifteen feet in
diameter was this opening, but across it was stretched a spider web more
monstrous than any product of a madman’s fancy. Most ominous of all was
the debris of bones that lay beneath. The threads of the web were of
silver and of the thickness of a lead pencil. He shuddered as he touched
a thread with his hand. It clung to his flesh like glue, and only by an
effort that agitated the entire web did he succeed in freeing his hand.
Upon his clothes and upon the coat of the dog he rubbed off the
stickiness from his skin.
Between two of the lower guys of the great web he saw that there was
space for him to crawl through the opening to the day; but, ere he
attempted it, caution led him to test the opening by helping and shoving
the hound ahead of him. The white beast crawled and scrambled out of
sight, and Torres was about to follow when it returned. Such was the
panic haste of its return that it collided with him and both fell. But
the man managed to save himself by clinging with his hands to the rocks,
while the four-footed brute, not able so to check itself, fell into the
churning water. Even as Torres reached a hand out to try to save it, the
dog was carried under the rock.
Long Torres debated. That farther subterranean plunge of the river was
dreadful to contemplate. Above was the open way to the day, and the life
of him yearned towards the day as a bee or a flower toward the sun. Yet
what had the hound encountered to drive it back in such precipitate
retreat? As he pondered, he became aware that his hand was resting on a
rounded surface. He picked the object up, and gazed into the eyeless,
noseless features of a human skull. His frightened glances played over
the carpet of bones, and, beyond all doubt, he made out the ribs and
spinal columns and thigh bones of what had once been men. This inclined
him toward the water as the way out, but at sight of the foaming madness
of it plunging through solid rock he recoiled.
Drawing the Queen’s dagger, he crawled up between the web-guys with
infinite carefulness, saw what the hound had seen, and came back in such
vertigo of retreat that he, too, fell into the water, and, with but time
to fill his lungs with air, was drawn into the opening and into
darkness.
* * * * *
In the meanwhile, back at the lake dwelling of the Queen, events no less
portentous were occurring with no less equal rapidity. Just returned
from the ceremony at the Long House, the wedding party was in the action
of seating itself for what might be called the wedding breakfast, when
an arrow, penetrating an interstice in the bamboo wall, flashed between
the Queen and Francis and transfixed the opposite wall, where its
feathered shaft vibrated from the violence of its suddenly arrested
flight. A rush to the windows looking out upon the narrow bridge, showed
Henry and Francis the gravity of the situation. Even as they looked,
they saw the Queen’s spearman who guarded the approach to the bridge,
midway across it in flight, falling into the water with the shaft of an
arrow vibrating out of his back in similar fashion to the one in the
wall of the room. Beyond the bridge, on the shore, headed by their
priest and backed by their women and children, all the male Lost Souls
were arching the air full with feathered bolts from their bows.
A spearman of the Queen tottered into the apartment, his limbs spreading
vainly to support him, his eyes glazing, his lips beating a soundless
message which his fading life could not utter, as he fell prone, his
back bristling with arrow shafts like a porcupine. Henry sprang to the
door that gave entrance from the bridge, and, with his automatic, swept
it clear of the charging Lost Souls who could advance only in single
file and who fell as they advanced before his fire.
The siege of the frail house was brief. Though Francis, protected by
Henry’s automatic, destroyed the bridge, by no method could the besieged
put out the blazing thatch of roof ignited in a score of places by the
fire-arrows discharged under the Sun Priest’s directions.
“There is but one way to escape,” the Queen panted, on the platform
overlooking the whirl of waters, as she clasped one hand of Francis in
hers and threatened to precipitate herself clingingly into his arms. “It
wins to the world.” She pointed to the sucking heart of the whirlpool.
“No one has ever returned from that. In my Mirror I have beheld them
pass, dead always, and out to the wider world. Except for Torres, I have
never seen the living go. Only the dead. And they never returned. Nor
has Torres returned.”
All eyes looked to all eyes at sight of the dreadfulness of the way.
“There is no other way?” Henry demanded, as he drew Leoncia close to
him.
The Queen shook her head. About them already burning portions of the
thatch were falling, while their ears were deafened by the blood-lust
chantings of the Lost Souls on the lake-shore. The Queen disengaged her
hand from Francis’, with the evident intention of dashing into her
sleeping room, then caught his hand and led him in. As he stood
wonderingly beside her, she slammed down the lid on the chest of jewels
and fastened it. Next, she kicked aside the floor matting and lifted a
trap door that opened down to the water. At her indication, Francis
dragged over the chest and dropped it through.
“Even the Sun Priest does not know that hiding place,” she whispered,
ere she caught his hand again, and, running, led him back to the others
on the platform.
“It is now time to depart from this place,” she announced.
“Hold me in your arms, good Francis, husband of mine, and lift me and
leap with me,” she commanded. “We will lead the way.”
And so they leapt. As the roof was crashing down in a wrath of fire and
flying embers, Henry caught Leoncia to him, and sprang after into the
whirl of waters wherein Francis and the Queen had already disappeared.
* * * * *
Like Torres, the four fugitives escaped injury against the rocks and
were borne onward by the underground river to the daylight opening where
the great spider-web guarded the way. Henry had an easier time of it,
for Leoncia knew how to swim. But Francis’ swimming prowess enabled him
to keep the Queen up. She obeyed him implicitly, floating low in the
water, nor clutched at his arms nor acted as a drag on him in any way.
At the ledge, all four drew out of the water and rested. The two women
devoted themselves to wringing out their hair, which had been flung
adrift all about them by the swirling currents.
“It is not the first mountain I have been in the heart of with you two,”
Leoncia laughed to the Morgans, although more than for them was her
speech intended for the Queen.
“It is the first time I have been in the heart of a mountain with my
husband,” the Queen laughed back, and the barb of her dart sank deep
into Leoncia.
“Seems as though your wife, Francis, and my wife-to-be, aren’t going to
hit it off too well together,” Henry said, with the sharpness of censure
that man is wont to employ to conceal the embarrassment caused by his
womankind.
And, as inevitable result of such male men’s ways, all that Henry gained
was a silence more awkward and more embarrassing. The two women almost
enjoyed the situation. Francis cudgeled his brains vainly for some
remark that would ameliorate matters; while Henry, in desperation, arose
suddenly with the observation that he was going to “explore a bit,” and
invited, by his hand out to help her to her feet, the Queen to accompany
him. Francis and Leoncia sat on for a moment in stubborn silence. He was
the first to break it.
“For two cents I’d give you a thorough shaking, Leoncia.”
“And what have I done now?” she countered.
“As if you didn’t know. You’ve been behaving abominably.”
“It is you who have behaved abominably,” she half-sobbed, in spite of
her determination to betray no such feminine signs of weakness. “Who
asked you to marry her? You did not draw the short straw. Yet you must
volunteer, must rush in where even angels would fear to tread? Did I ask
you to? Almost did my heart stop beating when I heard you tell Henry you
would marry her. I thought I was going to faint. You had not even
consulted me; yet it was on my suggestion, in order to save you from
her, that the straws were drawn——yes, and I am not too little shameless
to admit that it was because I wanted to save you for myself. Henry does
not love me as you led me to believe you loved me. I never loved Henry
as I loved you, as I do love you even now, God forgive me.”
Francis was swept beyond himself. He caught her and pressed her to him
in a crushing embrace.
“And on your very wedding day,” she gasped reproachfully in the midmost
of his embrace.
His arm died away from about her.
“And this from you, Leoncia, at such a moment,” he murmured sadly.
“And why not?” she flared. “You loved me. You gave me to understand,
beyond all chance of misunderstanding, that you loved me; yet here,
to-day, you went out of your way, went eagerly and gladly, and married
yourself to the first woman with a white skin who presented herself.”
“You are jealous,” he charged, and knew a heart-throb of joy as she
nodded. “And I grant you are jealous; but at the same time, exercising
the woman’s prerogative of lying, you are lying now. What I did, was not
done eagerly nor gladly. I did it for your sake and my sake——or for
Henry’s sake, rather. Thank God, I have a man’s honor still left to me!”
“Man’s honour does not always satisfy woman,” she replied.
“Would you prefer me dishonorable?” he was swift on the uptake.
“I am only a woman who loves,” she pleaded.
“You are a stinging, female wasp,” he raged, “and you are not fair.”
“Is any woman fair when she loves?” she made the great confession and
acknowledgment. “Men may succeed in living in their heads of honor; but
know, and as a humble woman I humbly state my womanhood, that woman
lives only in her heart of love.”
“Perhaps you are right. Honor, like arithmetic, can be reasoned and
calculated. Which leaves a woman no morality, but only ...”
“Only moods,” Leoncia completed abjectly for him.
Calls from Henry and the Queen put an end to the conversation, for
Leoncia and Francis quickly joined the others in gazing at the great
web.
“Did you ever see so monstrous a web!” Leoncia exclaimed.
“I’d like to see the monster that made it,” said Henry.
“And I’d rather see than be it,” Francis paraphrased from the “Purple
Cow.”
“It is our good fortune that we do not have to go that way,” the Queen
said.
All looked inquiry at her, and she pointed down to the stream.
“That is the way,” she said. “I know it. Often and often, in my Mirror
of the World, have I seen the way. When my mother died and was buried in
the whirlpool, I followed her body in the Mirror, and I saw it come to
this place and go by this place still in the water.”
“But she was dead,” Leoncia objected quickly.
The rivalry between them fanned instantly.
“One of my spearmen,” the Queen went on quietly, “a handsome youth,
alas, dared to look at me as a lover. He was flung in alive. I watched
him, too, in the Mirror. When he came to this place he climbed out. I
saw him crawl under the web to the day, and I saw him retreat backward
from the day and throw himself into the stream.”
“Another dead one,” Henry commented grimly.
“No; for I followed him on in the Mirror, and though all was darkness
for a time and I could see nothing, in the end, and shortly, under the
sun he emerged into the bosom of a large river, and swam to the shore,
and climbed the bank——it was the left hand bank as I remember well——and
disappeared among large trees such as do not grow in the Valley of the
Lost Souls.”
But, like Torres, the rest of them recoiled from thought of the dark
plunge through the living rock.
“These are the bones of animals and of men,” the Queen warned, “who were
daunted by the way of the water and who strove to gain the sun. Men
there are there——behold! Or at least what remains of them for a space,
the bones, ere, in time, the bones, too, pass into nothingness.”
“Even so,” said Francis, “I suddenly discover a pressing need to look
into the eye of the sun. Do the rest of you remain here while I
investigate.”
Drawing his automatic, the water-tightness of the cartridges a
guarantee, he crawled under the web. The moment he had disappeared from
view beyond the web, they heard him begin to shoot. Next, they saw him
retreating backward, still shooting. And, next, falling upon him, two
yards across from black-haired leg-tip to black-haired leg-tip, the
denizen of the web, a monstrous spider, still wriggling with departing
life, shot through and through again and again. The solid center of its
body, from which the legs radiated, was the size of a normal
waste-basket, and the substantial density of it crunched audibly as it
struck on Francis’ shoulders and back, rebounded, the hairy legs still
helplessly quivering, and pitched down into the wave-crisping water. All
four pair of eyes watched the corpse of it plunge against the wall of
rock, suck down, and disappear.
“Where there’s one, there are two,” said Henry, looking dubiously up
toward the daylight.
“It is the only way,” said the Queen. “Come, my husband, each in the
other’s arms let us win through the darkness to the sun-bright world.
Remember, I have never seen it, and soon, with you, shall I for the
first time see it.”
Her arms open in invitation, Francis could not decline.
“It is a hole in the sheer wall of a precipice a thousand feet deep,” he
explained to the others the glimpse he had caught from beyond the spider
web, as he clasped the Queen in his arms and leaped off.
Henry had gathered Leoncia to him and was about to leap, when she
stopped him.
“Why did you accept Francis’ sacrifice?” she demanded.
“Because ...” He paused and looked at her wonderingly.
“Because I wanted you,” he completed. “Because I was engaged to you as
well, while Francis was unattached. Besides, if I’m not greatly
mistaken, Francis appears to be a pretty well satisfied bridegroom.”
“No,” she shook her head emphatically. “He has a chivalrous spirit, and
he is acting his part in order not to hurt her feelings.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Remember, before the altar, at the Long House, when I
said I was going to ask the Queen to marry me, that he bragged she
wouldn’t marry me if I did ask? Well, the conclusion’s pretty obvious
that he wanted her himself. And why shouldn’t he? He’s a bachelor. And
she’s some nice woman herself.”
But Leoncia scarcely heard. With a quick movement, leaning back in his
arms away from him so that she could look him squarely in the eyes, she
demanded:
“How do you love me? Do you love me madly? Do you love me badly madly?
Do I mean that to you, and more, and more, and more?”
He could only look his bewilderment.
“Do you?—do you?” she urged passionately.
“Of course I do,” he made slow answer, “but it would never have entered
my head to describe it that way. Why, you’re the one woman for me.
Rather would I describe it as loving you deeply, and greatly, and
enduringly. Why, you seem so much a part of me that I feel almost as if
I had always known you. It was that way from the first.”
“She is an abominable woman!” Leoncia broke forth irrelevantly. “I hated
her from the first.”
“My! What a spitfire! I hate to think how much you would have hated her
had I married her instead of Francis.”
“We’d better follow them,” she put an end to the discussion.
And Henry, very much be-puzzled, clasped her tightly and leaped off into
the white turmoil of water.
* * * * *
On the bank of the Gualaca River sat two Indian girls fishing. Just
up-stream from them arose the precipitous cliff of one of the buttresses
of the lofty mountains. The main stream flowed past in chocolate-colored
spate; but, directly beneath them, where they fished, was a quiet eddy.
No less quiet was the fishing. No bites jerked their rods in token that
the bait was enticing. One of them, Nicoya, yawned, ate a banana, yawned
again, and held the skin she was about to cast aside suspended in her
hand.
“We have been very quiet, Concordia,” she observed to her companion,
“and it has won us no fish. Now shall I make a noise and a splash. Since
they say ‘what goes up must come down,’ why should not something come up
after something has gone down? I am going to try. There!”
She threw the banana peel into the water and lazily watched the point
where it had struck.
“If anything comes up I hope it will be big,” Concordia murmured with
equal laziness.
And upon their astonished gaze, even as they looked, arose up out of the
brown depths a great white hound. They jerked their poles up and behind
them on the bank, threw their arms about each other, and watched the
hound gain the shore at the lower end of the eddy, climb the sloping
bank, pause to shake himself, and then disappear among the trees.
Nicoya and Concordia giggled.
“Try it again,” Concordia urged.
“No; you this time. And see what you can bring up.”
Quite unbelieving, Concordia tossed in a clod of earth. And almost
immediately a helmeted head arose on the flood. Clutching each other
very tightly, they watched the man under the helmet gain the shore where
the hound had landed and disappear into the forest.
Again the two Indian girls giggled; but this time, urge as they would,
neither could raise the courage to throw anything into the water.
Some time later, still giggling over the strange occurrences, they were
espied by two young Indian men, who were hugging the bank as they
paddled their canoe up against the stream.
“What makes you laugh,” one of them greeted.
“We have been seeing things,” Nicoya gurgled down to them.
“Then have you been drinking pulque,” the young man charged.
Both girls shook their heads, and Concordia said:
“We don’t have to drink to see things. First, when Nicoya threw in a
banana skin, we saw a dog come up out of the water——a white dog that was
as big as a tiger of the mountains——”
“And when Concordia threw in a clod,” the other girl took up the tale,
“up came a man with a head of iron. It is magic. Concordia and I can
work magic.”
“José,” one of the Indians addressed his mate, “this merits a drink.”
And each, in turn, while the other with his paddle held the canoe in
place, took a swig from a square-face Holland gin bottle part full of
pulque.
“No,” said José, when the girls had begged him for a drink. “One drink
of pulque and you might see more white dogs as big as tigers or more
iron-headed men.”
“All right,” Nicoya accepted the rebuff. “Then do you throw in your
pulque bottle and see what you will see. We drew a dog and a man. Your
prize may be the devil.”
“I should like to see the devil,” said José, taking another drain at the
bottle. “The pulque is a true fire of bravery. I should very much like
to see the devil.”
He passed the bottle to his companion with a gesture to finish it.
“Now throw it into the water,” José commanded.
The empty bottle struck with a forceful splash, and the evoking was
realized with startling immediacy, for up to the surface floated the
monstrous, hairy body of the slain spider. Which was too much for
ordinary Indian flesh and blood. So suddenly did both young men recoil
from the sight that they capsized the canoe. When their heads emerged
from the water they struck out for the swift current, and were swiftly
borne away down stream, followed more slowly by the swamped canoe.
Nicoya and Concordia had been too frightened to giggle. They held on to
each other and waited, watching the magic water and out of the tails of
their eyes observing the frightened young men capture the canoe, tow it
to shore, and run out and hide on the bank.
The afternoon sun was getting low in the sky ere the girls summoned
courage again to evoke the magic water. Only after much discussion did
they agree both to fling in clods of earth at the same time. And up
arose a man and a woman——Francis and the Queen. The girls fell over
backward into the bushes, and were themselves unobserved as they watched
Francis swim with the Queen to shore.
“It may just have happened——all these things may just have happened at
the very times we threw things into the water,” Nicoya whispered to
Concordia five minutes later.
“But when we threw one thing in, only one came up,” Concordia argued.
“And when we threw two, two came up.”
“Very well,” said Nicoya. “Let us now prove it. Let us try again, both
of us. If nothing comes up, then have we no power of magic.”
Together they threw in clods, and uprose another man and woman. But this
pair, Henry and Leoncia, could swim, and they swam side by side to the
natural landing place, and, like the rest that had preceded them, passed
on out of sight among the trees.
Long the two Indian girls lingered. For they had agreed to throw
nothing, and, if something arose, then would coincidence be proved. But
if nothing arose, because nothing further was by them evoked, they could
only conclude that the magic was truly theirs. They lay hidden and
watched the water until darkness hid it from their eyes; and, slowly and
soberly, they took the trail back to their village, overcome by an
awareness of having been blessed by the gods.