The Silver Lake
At the coming of day we were walking over a gently rolling scarlet
plain, scattered with gigantic solitary boulders, that sloped gradually
down to the Silver Lake. The lake lay flat and argent white, clad in
all the ominous mystery of that strange world, calling, beckoning us
on, challenging us to learn the secret of the fartherest bank of purple
fog, with a grim warning of the doom that might await us. The red
fern-like sprays waved gently in the breeze, and the vivid, tiny white
flowers seemed to sparkle with a million glancing rays, like frost in
the sunshine; but the deep intensity of the red color lent a weird and
unpleasant suggestion of blood. Beyond the Silver Lake, low hills rose,
faint and mysterious in the purple haze.
Melvar walked beside me when the way was smooth enough; she was talking
vivaciously. She had a keen sense of humor and a lively wit. She seemed
to have an almost childishly perfect faith in my power and that of my
guns--but I was far from feeling confident.
At sunrise we stopped by a little pool of clear water, drank, and made
a meal of the abundant yellow fruit. Astran, with the scintillating
fires kindled again in its jeweled towers by the rising sun, lay far
behind and above us. When we had finished eating, Melvar stood looking
for a long moment at its glorious sparkling light. She murmured a few
words beneath her breath, in the Astranian tongue, and turned again
toward the Silver Lake.
In two hours we came to the shore of the great lake. The red scrub grew
up to the brink of a bluff a dozen feet high. Below was a broad, bare
sandy beach, with the gleaming waves, quicksilver white, rolling on it
two hundred yards away. For a few minutes we stood at the edge of the
cliff, in the fringe of crimson brush, and let our eyes wander over the
vast flat desert of flowing argent fire. We peered at the misty red
hills beyond, trying to penetrate their mysteries, and to read what
lay behind them. Then we scrambled down on the hard white sand. Naro
grasped his weapon and looked up and down the beach.
"It is along the shore of the Silver Lake," Melvar said, "that the
Purple Ones are most frequently found."
"The Purple Ones, again!" I cried. "What are they--decorated
rattlesnakes?" Then, with a sickening sensation of terror, I remembered
the horrible, half-human purple corpse that I had seen the soldiers
bringing into Astran. "Are the Purple Ones men?"
"In form, they are men and women," Melvar said, "but they dwell alone
in the thickets like beasts. All of them are old and hideous. They
are savage, and they have the strength each of many men. Our soldiers
must always hunt them, and fight them to the death. A single man,
even though armed, could do nothing against one of them, for they
are terribly strong, and they fight like demons. Their country is not
known, and no children of their kind are ever found. The priests say
that they are of a race of dwarfs that dwell beneath the Silver Lake."
Here was another of the baffling mysteries of this strange world. In
fact, I was coming upon unpleasant mysteries much faster than I could
comfortably stomach them. Lone, purple, savage animals, in the form of
emaciated humans, who prowled about the country like wolves, and like
wolves were hunted down by the Astranians! Again I shuddered at the
memory of the limp purple corpse the soldiers had carried, and with
a strange chill of the heart, I remembered the human footprints that
had been left where my ponies were taken in the desert, and of the
eerie, insane laughter that I had heard, or thought I heard, above the
whistling roar.
My thoughts ended with the construction of a mad hypothesis of a race
of purple folk who lived beyond the Silver Lake, who were accustomed
to make slave raids on the whites in torpedo-shaped airships, and who
made a practise of releasing, or turning out, the superannuated ones
of their kind to prey on the people of the crystal city. It seemed,
in fact, quite plausible at the time, but I was far from the hideous
truth. I could see no reason, if one race could attain a civilization
high enough to synthetize diamonds for building stone, why another
might not be able to build ships as marvelous as the red torpedoes.
But my reason rebelled at the acceptance of the ideas of demonic and
supernatural horrors my emotional self tried to force upon it.
* * * * *
The Touch of the Metal
Presently I roused myself and led the way down the white waves. My
companions held back nervously and warned me not to touch it, or I
would die as Jorak had done. But I succeeded in filling a test tube
with the stuff. It was not transparent. It was white, gleaming,
metallic, like mercury, or molten silver. I carried it back up to the
bluff and set about examining it, while Naro stood guard, and Melvar
watched me. She asked innumerable questions, concerning not only the
operation in hand, but on such subjects as the appearance of a cat,
and Fifth Avenue styles of ladies' garments. Upon which (the latter
subject), however, I was lamentably ignorant. And so often did I
pause, to answer her questions, to laugh at the naive quaintness of
her phrases, or to let my eyes rest on her charming face, that the
attempted analysis of the metal did not progress with any remarkable
celerity.
The silver liquid was very mobile and very light, having a specific
gravity of only .25, or not even four times that of liquid hydrogen,
which is .07. It was extremely corrosive. Tiny bits of wood or paper
were entirely consumed on contact with it, with the liberation,
apparently, of carbon dioxide and water vapor, and a dense purple gas
that I could not identify. That suggested, of course, that the stuff
contained oxygen, but as to how much, or in what combination, I had no
idea. A drop of it on a larger piece of paper set it afire. I found,
too, when testing the electrolytic qualities of the liquid, that when I
introduced into it a copper and a silver coin, electrically connected,
that the stuff was rapidly decomposed into the purple vapor, with the
generation of a powerful current. But the metal seemed not affected at
all. That was another puzzling result. My experiments, of course, were
comparatively crude, and when I had gone as far as I could, I really
knew little more about the silver liquid than in the beginning.
Despite Melvar's warning, and my own precautions, I splashed a drop
of it on my arm. She cried out in horror, and I saw that a splotch of
purple was spreading like a thin film over the skin. There was no pain,
but the muscles of the arm were seized with sudden and uncontrollable
convulsions. Melvar tried to wash the stain off with water from my
canteen. In an hour the color had faded, though the limb was still sore
and painful.
By that time, the purple disc of the sun was sinking low, and we took
thought of how to spend the night. Naro climbed up on the plain to
gather a few of the fruits for our supper, and we found a little cave
in the bluff that seemed a good place of shelter. I gathered an armful
of the red brush and made a fire.
The leaves burned fiercely, crackling as if they contained oil. The
fire produced a great volume of acrid black smoke. Combustion was
greatly accelerated on account of the increased atmospheric pressure
here, many thousand feet below sea level. Melvar and Naro were
intensely interested in the performance, although they had seen Austen
light a fire while he was in the city.
Melvar slept in the cavern, and Naro and I took turns at standing guard
at the entrance. The darting pencils of crimson were abroad again, but
they passed far overhead, and we heard the sounds of their passage only
as vast and distant sighs. In the morning we rose early, and clambered
back up the cliffs. I was in rather a puzzling situation. Clearly my
duty was to get Austen's equipment to him as quickly as possible, but
I liked neither to desert Melvar and her brother, nor to let them
accompany me into the unknown perils of the region beyond. But the
latter course seemed the best, and they were ready enough to go with me
anywhere.
* * * * *
The Land of Madness
Having retraced our course of the day before for perhaps a mile, in
order to get upon the upland, we set out for the north. The sun was
just rising above the black rim when Naro shouted and pointed at the
mist-clad red hills beyond the Silver Lake. At first I looked in vain;
then I caught a faint flicker of amber light, pulsing up through the
purple air.
Abruptly a vast mellow golden beam of light sprang from behind the
distant scarlet hills and spread up toward the zenith in a deep
yellow flood. It seemed to vibrate, to throb with incredibly rapid
fluctuations. Suddenly, bright swift-changing formless shapes of green
and red flared up within it, shot up the beam, and vanished. The
radiance dimmed and died. I could see nothing, but somehow I felt that
an invisible beam of vibrant force was still pouring up into the sky.
Here was another manifestation of the unknown power beyond the sea. The
beam had come. So far as visibility was concerned, it was gone. What
had been its meaning, its purpose?
Beyond the Silver Lake, low cliffs rose above a broad sandy beach,
faintly veiled by the purple mist. The red hills were fainter still
above them, and the thicker pall of purple haze that hung over the
hidden place beyond, stood out distinctly against the distant, steep
black wall that threw his jagged crags to the sky so far above. Out
of that vale of mystery the ray had leapt--and died. Or had it merely
faded, and was now, invisible ... pulsing still?
All seemed as it had been before, but from the attitude of my
companions I knew there was more to come. They were gazing up into the
sun-bright void above and waiting expectantly.
Then I saw, far, far above, growing gradually brighter against the sky,
as if it were being projected there by a great magic lantern behind
the hills, an upright bar of silver haze. Slowly it grew brighter and
its outlines sharper until it looked like a vertical bar of silver
metal in the sky--inconceivably huge. The length of the bar must have
been miles, its diameter, many hundreds of yards. It hung still in the
heavens, neither rising nor falling. Here was the display, indeed, of
alien science and power!
Presently I recovered from my first wonder, and became conscious
that the blue eyes of Melvar were upon me quite as much as on the
astonishing thing in the sky. "Melvar, have you seen it before?" I
asked. "Is it real--natural? Is it made by man?" I found to my surprise
that my voice was odd and quavery. I had not realized the intensity of
my nervous strain. I waited eagerly for the reassurance that she could
not give.
"It comes often," she replied. "Every day for many months of the year.
The priests say that it is the evil goddess of the under-earth, who
loves the Purple Sun and flies to the sky to meet him. But the Sun goes
on unheeding, and the goddess cries silver tears until her Lord is gone
from the sky. But there is yet more to see."
I looked up again and saw that a faint colored mist was gathering
about the bar. It grew brighter, condensed, seemed drawn into swirling
rings by a sort of magnetic attraction. And the iridescent mist-rings
swam about the bar, moved ever faster until they were whirling madly.
Their coruscating shapes grew brighter, plainer, until they were vivid,
spinning flames of color in the sunshine. I noticed that the red was
about the center of the silver bar, and that the bands of color above
and below ran regularly to the other end of the spectrum, with rings
of violet at the bottom and at the top. During all this time I heard no
sound. It was as still as death.
Still the color-rings spun and changed, growing ever brighter and
sharper edged. The red band grew larger about the center, until its
diameter was the length of the cylinder. It gleamed with a lurid
scarlet light. Below and above were spinning, burning circles of
orange, yellow, green, and blue, each thinner than the one next nearer
the center, and of smaller diameter. And the violet rings had shrunk to
great globes of violet fire, shining with painful intensity.
Indeed, as Melvar had said, there had been more to see. The thing was
so utterly strange, so utterly inexplicable, that I was grasped in
a paralysis of unfamiliar terror, my breath choked off and my heart
beating wild with fear, staring straight at it. It was so definitely
directed by intelligence that I felt it must spring from a weird and
awful mind. Indeed, it seemed that I felt the power of a vast and alien
will stealing over me, seizing command of me, making me the slave of
itself. I struggled against it. I clenched my hands and knotted my
muscles with the intensity of my resistance to the spell. Wheeling
sparks of red fire swam before my eyes.
Then my efforts weakened. I could hold out no longer. The alien will
had won. Reason and feeling and love flowed away and left me as cold
and cruel as a rock in a stormy, wintry coast--a savage, inhuman
animal. Care had left me. My soul had lost her throne. I laughed. A
wild, unearthly sound it was, like that I had heard as I lay beneath
the tent beyond the barrier.
I whirled around fiercely, but a firm arresting hand was laid on my
shoulder. From afar off, deep blue eyes looked into mine--eyes that
were cool and sane and brave. They shone through the red curtains of
insanity in my brain. They broke the spell of fear.
Suddenly I was very weak, and trembling and sick. Melvar's lithe arms
were close about me. Her throbbing heart was close to mine. And in her
dark, warm blue eyes, so close to mine, were sympathy, and tenderness,
and love. She was human; she was real. I knew that her love would
shield me from these terrors. I smiled at her, and sank down weakly in
the red brush. But she had saved my mind. I had wandered on the brink
of the fearful insanity of terror, and she had brought me back.
I looked from her sweet face, so full of anxious concern to the thing
in the sky. But now it seemed remote, unreal, and I gazed at it with
weak indifference. Presently I saw that the whole thing was beginning
to sink as though a weight were being accumulated upon it. Suddenly
an immense gleaming globule of silver fell from the lower violet
globe and dropped straight for the Silver Lake, while the weird form
of lights that had made it floated back to its former elevation. The
great shining sphere fell and struck the white lake with a deafening
roar, sending out great concentric waves in all directions. The amazing
thing sank again, released a second huge drop, and rose. The process
was repeated again and again, the interval being, by my watch, about 3
minutes, 15.2 seconds. All day it went on, with the great waves washing
up the bluffs above the beach, and before night the level of the Silver
Lake stood perceptibly higher.
Here was the mystery of the origin of the Silver Lake explained, but
by a phenomenon far more inexplicable than the sea itself. In vain I
tried to account for it in some rational way, or to assign some natural
cause for the thing. My mind could hardly grasp it. It was almost
unbelievable, even as I looked upon it. My reason would not admit that
such a thing could be in a rational world.