The Demon of the Night
I HAD been overconfident when I had assumed that it would be possible
to go around the lake and that it formed no real bar to our progress.
Everywhere, the water extended for miles among the clumps of bamboos
and jungle, and we gave it a wide berth, keeping well up on the
hillside and searching for a dry spot where we might cross the valley.
But in this we were fated to be disappointed.
The water dwindled to a narrow lagoon barely fifty feet in width, and
then expanded into a second lake. It would have been a simple matter
to have waded across the place had it not been for the alligators or
crocodiles (I am not sure which they were); but their presence was
attested by the snouts, backs and eyes that everywhere dotted the
surface of the water like half-submerged logs. There was, however,
one way of crossing it. An immense tree had toppled from the mountain
side and had fallen athwart the black pool, its summit resting on the
opposite shore. But it was a ticklish bridge at best. It was round,
slippery, and its lower surface was in the water itself, so that as
one crossed by it, one’s feet were scarcely a yard above the pool with
its watchful, lurking inhabitants waiting with hungry jaws to dash at
one. For an hour or more we waited, trying to summon up the courage
to attempt the crossing, until at last, unable to endure the inaction
longer, I rose, removed my shoes, and telling Maliche I was going to
risk it, I slipped as silently as possible towards the roots of the
fallen tree.
Realizing that if I were to reach the farther shore in safety, I must
make a dash for it, I waited for a moment, breathing deeply, and then,
with a silent prayer and with my eyes fixed on the opposite shore,
I took my life in my hands and raced over the log. A dozen times I
slipped and nearly fell, a dozen times I had an almost irresistible
temptation to glance to one side or the other, to look down at the
water. My ears sensed the splashing of dozens of tails, the snapping
of dozens of terrible jaws. The log seemed endless, but at last, with
panting lungs and pounding heart, I covered the last few yards of the
natural bridge, stumbled through the tangle of dead branches, and
dropped, faint and trembling, upon the opposite bank.
A moment later Maliche joined me. Slowly, one by one, the baffled
alligators sank from sight, and thankful indeed that we had survived,
we resumed our way. Several hours later we reached the summit of the
mountain and to my delight saw the twin peaks of the volcanoes looming
sharp and clear a little to the east. Pointing to these landmarks, I
told Maliche our way led towards them, and to make my meaning clearer,
I showed him the codex with the volcanoes indicated upon it. Instantly
he burst out in a torrent of wild incomprehensible words, he shook his
head, his eyes were wide with fear, and he gestured excitedly. Even
when, partly calmed, he tried to explain in Tecun, I could not make
head or tail of his meaning. But when I asked him bluntly if he was
afraid to go on, and informed him I was going anyway, he shook his
head, declared he was my slave and my shadow, and denied all dread.
Poor, good, faithful Maliche! Savage cannibal though he was, yet he was
as brave, as true, as fine a man as ever lived. To him I owe a debt of
gratitude I can never repay, for without him and his companionship, all
my efforts would have been in vain. And had I but known what he was
trying to tell me, had I understood his dialect, much that followed
might have been avoided. And yet, perhaps, it was all in the plan, all
a part of the destiny that beckoned me, with an unseen but irresistible
finger, from beyond those smoking cones to the east.
We marched steadily all that day, traversing rolling hills covered with
forest, meeting with no adventure, fortunate in securing game, and
always with the twin cones in sight.
For two days this continued. The land was almost park-like in its
beauty, its open glades, its flashing streams, its giant trees. We
fared well, the weather was perfect, and all our past sufferings and
perils were forgotten. But on the third day the surroundings changed.
The forest gave place to scrubby, brushy jungle; the soft earth was
replaced by rough, rocky, sterile ground; great boulders were to be
seen here and there, and in places we crossed bare areas of jagged
broken rock. Rapidly the vegetation grew more and more sparse and the
rock-strewn areas wider. Aloes, cacti and spiny bromeliads took the
place of vines, shrubs and trees, and by mid-afternoon we came to
the last of the vegetation and halted at the edge of a vast barren
expanse of raw red rock, immense black boulders and dunes of glaring
multicolored sand. I had thought a desert could not exist, but here
before us was a veritable desert--the burnt-out, cinder-blasted,
lava-covered plain, desolated by some past eruption of the volcanoes,
that now towered to the zenith within a dozen miles of where we stood.
And once more I felt that strange tingling of my scalp, that
indescribable fear of the supernatural, as I remembered the
prophecy--the words of Katchilcan, “and beyond the Pit of the great
Zotional, even then one must cross the eight deserts.”
* * * * *
BUT once again I laughed my fears away. There was nothing strange,
nothing supernatural about this lava flow. It was exactly the same
formation as the “Bad Lands” of our own northwest. Provided with plenty
of water and food anyone could cross it. It was barely a dozen miles in
width--a few hours’ tramp to the farther side--and there was only one
desert.
But to cross so late in the day would be foolish. It was wiser to camp
for the night, and start fresh at dawn before the cinder and lava
scintillated with the heat of the tropical sun.
Moreover, and this thought quite drove any lingering foolish fears from
my mind, the fact that everything so far agreed with the codex and
with Katchilcan’s words, pointed towards my ultimate success, towards
the actual existence of the hidden city of Mictolan, though I very
much doubted if the ancient secret city would still be inhabited. More
probably, I thought, it would be in ruins, for in the two thousand
years and more that had passed since the Book of Kukulcan was made,
there was every chance that the people--always provided there had been
any--would have died out, migrated to other localities, been decimated
by wars or would have reverted to a semi-savage nomadic life. Cut off
from the rest of their race, no longer under the rule of the ancient
empire, and outside the influence of the culture and civilization
of their fellows, there was scarcely a chance that the colony had
survived as an entity, or at least as a civilized community, for twenty
centuries and more. The whole known history of the Mayas was against
it. The empire had fallen and vanished through the jealousies and feuds
of various leaders and the political wars. States and cities had been
split up, divided into factions, and I felt sure that the same causes
and the same racial traits that had caused the abandonment of such
cities as Copan, Chichen Itza, Lubaantum and other great Mayan centres
would also have resulted in the abandonment of Mictalon, if that city
had existed.
We decided to camp at the desert’s edge, as I have said, but, there
was no water at the spot, and Maliche slipped away and returned within
an hour with two large gourds or calabashes filled with water from a
stream we had passed several miles back. Even though the bare area
was so small, I felt that it would be wise to carry a supply of water
with us. In the tropical jungles, where there is always a superfluity
rather than a scarcity of water, no one ever dreams of carrying a
canteen, but the calabashes would serve excellently for the purpose.
The night passed uneventfully, and before the sun had risen, we were
up and tramping across the barren waste towards the dim shapes of
the volcanoes, whose summits emitted a soft red glow against the
rapidly-paling sky.
The air was cool and fresh, and even though the sharp bits of rock
and loose ash of the desert were hard on our feet, it was a rather
welcome change--at least to me--after the interminable jungles.
Maliche, however, was ill at ease. As the sun rose higher, he glanced
apprehensively about, kept close to me and seemed nervous. Possibly
it was merely the Indian’s inherent dread of the unknown, perhaps it
was superstition, or a premonition, or again it may have been merely
the effect of the strangeness, the newness of a desert, upon a man
accustomed all his life to forests and jungles. As the sun rose higher
we suffered from the heat and glare, but we had already made good
headway, and I flattered myself we would be at the farther side of the
desert before the hottest part of the day. But though we tramped for
hours, though the sun reached the zenith, although the ashes under
our blistered feet felt like redhot iron, though the air was like
the blast from a furnace, though our eyes ached and blurred with the
blinding glare, we seemed no nearer the distant volcanoes, and the
farther side of the desert seemed ever to recede as we advanced. Our
throats were parched and dry and the warm water in the gourds seemed
only to add to our thirst. Still we kept on, and by the middle of the
afternoon we could see that we actually were making progress, that
the green hillsides behind us were faint and hazy in the distance,
that the vegetation ahead was nearer, clearer, though the twin cones
seemed as far away as ever. Not until the sun was sinking in the west
did we reach the edge of the blasted plain and the vegetation beyond
it. But the spot that had appeared green and cool from a distance was
little better than the desert itself; a growth of harsh dry grass,
dull-green cacti, stiff-leaved aloes, thorny bromeliads, stunted shrubs
and bushes and a few spiny-stemmed dwarf palms. Farther in, the growth
was thicker, greener and more promising, but there was no water, and
the few drops remaining in our calabashes barely wetted our dry and
dusty mouths. Maliche, however, had the instincts of the primitive
savage, the ability to make the most of Nature’s scantiest resources,
and though I am quite sure he had never before seen a desert or desert
plants, though he had never been in want of water, yet he at once rose
to the emergency. Cutting off the top of a huge barrel-shaped cactus,
and scooping out the pithy interior, he soon had several quarts of
clear cool sap which--although slightly bitter in taste--was the most
delicious draught that ever passed my lips. Too tired to go a step
farther, we stopped where we were, ate what remained of our meat, and
slept on the bare sand. Little did we know what lay before us when,
on the following morning, we rose with aching limbs and swollen feet,
and with only cactus sap to allay our hunger, again resumed our way.
We were buoyed up with the expectations of finding water and game, of
traveling through the cool forests once more; we felt the worst was
over, and we pushed our way through the dusty thorn-covered vegetation,
but we had not gone one hundred yards when the brush thinned and before
us stretched a second ash-covered plain. The vegetation that I had
thought was the limit of the desert was merely a narrow strip, a hedge
between the desert we had crossed and the one before us.
* * * * *
WEARY, hungry, blistered as we were, there was no choice but to
continue. The plain before us was smaller than the first, and having
filled our gourds with the cactus juice, we grimly faced the burned-out
world and the sufferings we knew were ahead of us. By noonday we had
crossed it, had reached the luring vegetation on the farther side, only
to find that beyond that was still another desert.
But we were slightly better off now. Maliche stalked and killed a
gopher-like animal that resembled a giant prairie-dog; we tasted the
pulpy fruits of a cactus and found them edible, and I discovered a
hollow in the sand filled with the eggs of some large lizard. With
our stomachs filled, we felt far better, and the barren waste ahead
appearing small, we decided to attempt the crossing before dark. The
next few days--I lost all track of time--were a nightmare. Whether
there were eight or eighty deserts I shall never know. They seemed
interminable, endless, each promising to be the last, only to deceive
us as another appeared beyond. And still those silent smoking peaks
with their baleful glare at night seemed as distant as ever. My brain
reeled, visions hovered before my bloodshot, smarting eyes; my entire
body seemed shrivelled, dried, desiccated.
We ate whatever came our way--lizards, snakes, horned-toads, even
insects. Maliche’s ribs and joints seemed on the point of breaking
through his skin; my face and hands were raw; streamers of skin hung
in shreds from my neck and wrists, but still we kept on, and at last,
more dead than alive, came to the end of the hellish wastes of lava and
ash and reached the black basaltic ridges that led up to the flanks of
the mighty volcanoes now close at hand. Between the frowning cliffs
a stream flowed through a green swale, and with our last remaining
strength, we reached the bank and plunged into the water.
For hours we lay there, our burned, tortured bodies laved by the cool
water, absorbing it, reveling in it, until at last, refreshed, our
smarting raw flesh comforted and eased, hunger forced us to emerge and
search for food.
Alone I might have starved after all, but Maliche was a child of the
wilderness; he seemed able literally to smell game if it were near, and
he soon secured two pheasant-like birds, while I felt quite proud of
myself for having captured a dozen or more big crayfish from beneath
the stones in the river’s bed.
We had been through a terrible ordeal, and I thanked God that the
“whirlwind that cut the rocks” had been spared us, even though all
the other terrors of Katchilcan’s story had materialized according to
schedule. Still--and I glanced apprehensively about and shivered at the
thought--there was yet time, for despite my common sense and reason I
was becoming imbued with the idea, obsessed with the conviction that
the Book of Kukulcan would be borne out to the letter. Indeed, so
foolishly (or so I considered it) superstitious, or credulous, had I
become that my half-formed fears of what was to come were allayed by
remembrance of the old priest’s statement that the way would be made
easy to him who owned the codex. I rather smiled at the thought. If our
way across those terrible deserts had been “easy,” then Heaven have
mercy on the unfortunate to whom the passage was hard!
But whatever might be in store, there seemed nothing threatening in
the spot where we were at the moment, and I cannot hope to describe
the delight, the comfort, the luxury of the soft green foliage, the
cool moss-covered earth, and the babbling of the stream after those
nightmarish days of endless sand, lava and scorching, blistering sun.
With our stomachs filled with good food, with our weary limbs rested,
with the musical sound of the brook and the chirping of insects in our
ears, we stretched ourselves upon the soft earth and slept.
With a start, an involuntary yell, I leaped up, dazed, bewildered,
trembling. Was it a nightmare or a reality that had awakened me,
terrified me? Maliche too, was awake. He, too, was shaking, glancing
about with terror on his face. Had the same thing aroused him, to
leave him weak, filled with nameless dread, or had my yell, my
movement, awakened him? With stammering tongue, I formed a question.
But the words died on my lips, my face blanched and I shook, shivered,
cowered as the still night air was rent by a blood-curdling, piercing,
demoniacal scream from somewhere in the blackness.
As the terrible, unearthly, banshee-like wail died down in a long-drawn
quavering howl, I could hear Maliche’s teeth chatter, and chills ran
up and down my own spine. What was it? What dread creature had emitted
that awful sound? I had heard jaguars, pumas, ocelots, every wild beast
and bird of America--but none were like this; nothing, no other cry
or sound held in it the terror, the weird, the ghastly, nightmarish,
supernatural quality of this cry. Then, once more, the night was
shattered by that cry that might have issued from a tortured soul in
Purgatory. Maliche fairly babbled with fear, I had an insane desire
to cover my head, to flatten myself on the ground, to stuff my ears,
to shut out that unearthly sound that rose and fell and that seemed
to come from every side. And then, as with fear-wide eyes I glanced
up, scream after scream came from my lips. Above us, moving swiftly,
silently back and forth, a great black shadow against the starlit sky,
was an immense shape--a monstrous something with huge eyes that glowed
like green fire. Maliche saw it at the same instant. With a scream of
abject terror he flung himself on the earth. “Izputeque!” he yelled,
“Izputeque!”
Like a volplaning airplane the thing swooped towards us, uttering that
blood-freezing shriek as it came. In a frenzy of fear, powerless to
move, bereft of thought, I unconsciously whipped out my revolver, and
as fast as I could press trigger, fired all six shots at the horrible
thing. As the reports of the shots thundered and echoed from the
surrounding cliffs, a scream more horrible than those that had gone
before came from the huge, winged thing. I felt a rush of wind, a
nauseating odor filled my nostrils; there was a terrific crash, and all
was still.
* * * * *
[Illustration: A giant pterodactyl swooped down, apparently heading
straight in our direction]
* * * * *
Trembling, shaken, wide-eyed we sat there. But only the chirping of
inserts, the burbling of the stream, the soft sighing of the night
wind and the occasional cry of an owl broke the silence. Whatever the
terrible thing was, it was not supernatural. It had not been immune to
soft-nosed .45 calibre bullets, and somewhere in the dark shadows it
was lying dead, crushed and forever stilled.
But there was no more sleep for us that night, and neither of us could
summon up enough courage to investigate the fallen demon of the night
in the darkness.