II

The Montana sunset lay between two mountains like a gigantic bruise

from which dark arteries spread themselves over a poisoned sky. An

immense distance under the sky crouched the village of Fish, minute,

dismal, and forgotten. There were twelve men, so it was said, in the

village of Fish, twelve sombre and inexplicable souls who sucked a

lean milk from the almost literally bare rock upon which a mysterious

populatory force had begotten them. They had become a race apart,

these twelve men of Fish, like some species developed by an early whim

of nature, which on second thought had abandoned them to struggle and

extermination.

Out of the blue-black bruise in the distance crept a long line of

moving lights upon the desolation of the land, and the twelve men of

Fish gathered like ghosts at the shanty depot to watch the passing of

the seven o’clock train, the Transcontinental Express from Chicago.

Six times or so a year the Transcontinental Express, through some

inconceivable jurisdiction, stopped at the village of Fish, and when

this occurred a figure or so would disembark, mount into a buggy that

always appeared from out of the dusk, and drive off toward the bruised

sunset. The observation of this pointless and preposterous phenomenon

had become a sort of cult among the men of Fish. To observe, that was

all; there remained in them none of the vital quality of illusion

which would make them wonder or speculate, else a religion might have

grown up around these mysterious visitations. But the men of Fish were

beyond all religion--the barest and most savage tenets of even

Christianity could gain no foothold on that barren rock--so there was

no altar, no priest, no sacrifice; only each night at seven the silent

concourse by the shanty depot, a congregation who lifted up a prayer

of dim, anaemic wonder.

On this June night, the Great Brakeman, whom, had they deified any

one, they might well have chosen as their celestial protagonist, had

ordained that the seven o’clock train should leave its human (or

inhuman) deposit at Fish. At two minutes after seven Percy Washington

and John T. Unger disembarked, hurried past the spellbound, the agape,

the fearsome eyes of the twelve men of Fish, mounted into a buggy

which had obviously appeared from nowhere, and drove away.

After half an hour, when the twilight had coagulated into dark, the

silent negro who was driving the buggy hailed an opaque body somewhere

ahead of them in the gloom. In response to his cry, it turned upon

them a luminous disc which regarded them like a malignant eye out of

the unfathomable night. As they came closer, John saw that it was the

tail-light of an immense automobile, larger and more magnificent than

any he had ever seen. Its body was of gleaming metal richer than

nickel and lighter than silver, and the hubs of the wheels were

studded with iridescent geometric figures of green and yellow--John

did not dare to guess whether they were glass or jewel.

Two negroes, dressed in glittering livery such as one sees in pictures

of royal processions in London, were standing at attention beside the

car and, as the two young men dismounted from the buggy, they were

greeted in some language which the guest could not understand, but

which seemed to be an extreme form of the Southern negro’s dialect.

“Get in,” said Percy to his friend, as their trunks were tossed to the

ebony roof of the limousine. “Sorry we had to bring you this far in

that buggy, but of course it wouldn’t do for the people on the train

or those God-forsaken fellas in Fish to see this automobile.”

“Gosh! What a car!” This ejaculation was provoked by its interior.

John saw that the upholstery consisted of a thousand minute and

exquisite tapestries of silk, woven with jewels and embroideries, and

set upon a background of cloth of gold. The two armchair seats in

which the boys luxuriated were covered with stuff that resembled

duvetyn, but seemed woven in numberless colours of the ends of ostrich

feathers.

“What a car!” cried John again, in amazement.

“This thing?” Percy laughed. “Why, it’s just an old junk we use for a

station wagon.”

By this time they were gliding along through the darkness toward the

break between the two mountains.

“We’ll be there in an hour and a half,” said Percy, looking at the

clock. “I may as well tell you it’s not going to be like anything you

ever saw before.”

If the car was any indication of what John would see, he was prepared

to be astonished indeed. The simple piety prevalent in Hades has the

earnest worship of and respect for riches as the first article of its

creed--had John felt otherwise than radiantly humble before them, his

parents would have turned away in horror at the blasphemy.

They had now reached and were entering the break between the two

mountains and almost immediately the way became much rougher.

“If the moon shone down here, you’d see that we’re in a big gulch,”

said Percy, trying to peer out of the window. He spoke a few words

into the mouthpiece and immediately the footman turned on a

searchlight and swept the hillsides with an immense beam.

“Rocky, you see. An ordinary car would be knocked to pieces in half an

hour. In fact, it’d take a tank to navigate it unless you knew the

way. You notice we’re going uphill now.”

They were obviously ascending, and within a few minutes the car was

crossing a high rise, where they caught a glimpse of a pale moon newly

risen in the distance. The car stopped suddenly and several figures

took shape out of the dark beside it--these were negroes also. Again

the two young men were saluted in the same dimly recognisable dialect;

then the negroes set to work and four immense cables dangling from

overhead were attached with hooks to the hubs of the great jewelled

wheels. At a resounding “Hey-yah!” John felt the car being lifted

slowly from the ground--up and up--clear of the tallest rocks on both

sides--then higher, until he could see a wavy, moonlit valley

stretched out before him in sharp contrast to the quagmire of rocks

that they had just left. Only on one side was there still rock--and

then suddenly there was no rock beside them or anywhere around.

It was apparent that they had surmounted some immense knife-blade of

stone, projecting perpendicularly into the air. In a moment they were

going down again, and finally with a soft bump they were landed upon

the smooth earth.

“The worst is over,” said Percy, squinting out the window. “It’s only

five miles from here, and our own road--tapestry brick--all the way.

This belongs to us. This is where the United States ends, father

says.”

“Are we in Canada?”

“We are not. We’re in the middle of the Montana Rockies. But you are

now on the only five square miles of land in the country that’s never

been surveyed.”

“Why hasn’t it? Did they forget it?”

“No,” said Percy, grinning, “they tried to do it three times. The

first time my grandfather corrupted a whole department of the State

survey; the second time he had the official maps of the United States

tinkered with--that held them for fifteen years. The last time was

harder. My father fixed it so that their compasses were in the

strongest magnetic field ever artificially set up. He had a whole set

of surveying instruments made with a slight defection that would allow

for this territory not to appear, and he substituted them for the ones

that were to be used. Then he had a river deflected and he had what

looked like a village built up on its banks--so that they’d see it, and

think it was a town ten miles farther up the valley. There’s only one

thing my father’s afraid of,” he concluded, “only one thing in the

world that could be used to find us out.”

“What’s that?”

Percy sank his voice to a whisper.

“Aeroplanes,” he breathed. “We’ve got half a dozen anti-aircraft guns

and we’ve arranged it so far--but there’ve been a few deaths and a

great many prisoners. Not that we mind _that_, you know, father

and I, but it upsets mother and the girls, and there’s always the

chance that some time we won’t be able to arrange it.”

Shreds and tatters of chinchilla, courtesy clouds in the green moon’s

heaven, were passing the green moon like precious Eastern stuffs

paraded for the inspection of some Tartar Khan. It seemed to John that

it was day, and that he was looking at some lads sailing above him in

the air, showering down tracts and patent medicine circulars, with

their messages of hope for despairing, rock-bound hamlets. It seemed

to him that he could see them look down out of the clouds and

stare--and stare at whatever there was to stare at in this place

whither he was bound-- What then? Were they induced to land by some

insidious device to be immured far from patent medicines and from

tracts until the judgment day--or, should they fail to fall into the

trap, did a quick puff of smoke and the sharp round of a splitting

shell bring them drooping to earth--and “upset” Percy’s mother and

sisters. John shook his head and the wraith of a hollow laugh issued

silently from his parted lips. What desperate transaction lay hidden

here? What a moral expedient of a bizarre Croesus? What terrible and

golden mystery?...

The chinchilla clouds had drifted past now and outside the Montana

night was bright as day. The tapestry brick of the road was smooth to

the tread of the great tyres as they rounded a still, moonlit lake;

they passed into darkness for a moment, a pine grove, pungent and

cool, then they came out into a broad avenue of lawn, and John’s

exclamation of pleasure was simultaneous with Percy’s taciturn “We’re

home.”

Full in the light of the stars, an exquisite château rose from the

borders of the lake, climbed in marble radiance half the height of an

adjoining mountain, then melted in grace, in perfect symmetry, in

translucent feminine languor, into the massed darkness of a forest of

pine. The many towers, the slender tracery of the sloping parapets,

the chiselled wonder of a thousand yellow windows with their oblongs

and hectagons and triangles of golden light, the shattered softness of

the intersecting planes of star-shine and blue shade, all trembled on

John’s spirit like a chord of music. On one of the towers, the

tallest, the blackest at its base, an arrangement of exterior lights

at the top made a sort of floating fairyland--and as John gazed up in

warm enchantment the faint acciaccare sound of violins drifted down in

a rococo harmony that was like nothing he had ever heard before. Then

in a moment the car stopped before wide, high marble steps around

which the night air was fragrant with a host of flowers. At the top of

the steps two great doors swung silently open and amber light flooded

out upon the darkness, silhouetting the figure of an exquisite lady

with black, high-piled hair, who held out her arms toward them.

“Mother,” Percy was saying, “this is my friend, John Unger, from

Hades.”

Afterward John remembered that first night as a daze of many colours,

of quick sensory impressions, of music soft as a voice in love, and of

the beauty of things, lights and shadows, and motions and faces. There

was a white-haired man who stood drinking a many-hued cordial from a

crystal thimble set on a golden stem. There was a girl with a flowery

face, dressed like Titania with braided sapphires in her hair. There

was a room where the solid, soft gold of the walls yielded to the

pressure of his hand, and a room that was like a platonic conception

of the ultimate prison--ceiling, floor, and all, it was lined with an

unbroken mass of diamonds, diamonds of every size and shape, until,

lit with tall violet lamps in the corners, it dazzled the eyes with a

whiteness that could be compared only with itself, beyond human wish,

or dream.

Through a maze of these rooms the two boys wandered. Sometimes the

floor under their feet would flame in brilliant patterns from lighting

below, patterns of barbaric clashing colours, of pastel delicacy, of

sheer whiteness, or of subtle and intricate mosaic, surely from some

mosque on the Adriatic Sea. Sometimes beneath layers of thick crystal

he would see blue or green water swirling, inhabited by vivid fish and

growths of rainbow foliage. Then they would be treading on furs of

every texture and colour or along corridors of palest ivory, unbroken

as though carved complete from the gigantic tusks of dinosaurs extinct

before the age of man ....

Then a hazily remembered transition, and they were at dinner--where

each plate was of two almost imperceptible layers of solid diamond

between which was curiously worked a filigree of emerald design, a

shaving sliced from green air. Music, plangent and unobtrusive,

drifted down through far corridors--his chair, feathered and curved

insidiously to his back, seemed to engulf and overpower him as he

drank his first glass of port. He tried drowsily to answer a question

that had been asked him, but the honeyed luxury that clasped his body

added to the illusion of sleep--jewels, fabrics, wines, and metals

blurred before his eyes into a sweet mist ....

“Yes,” he replied with a polite effort, “it certainly is hot enough

for me down there.”

He managed to add a ghostly laugh; then, without movement, without

resistance, he seemed to float off and away, leaving an iced dessert

that was pink as a dream .... He fell asleep.

When he awoke he knew that several hours had passed. He was in a great

quiet room with ebony walls and a dull illumination that was too

faint, too subtle, to be called a light. His young host was standing

over him.

“You fell asleep at dinner,” Percy was saying. “I nearly did, too--it

was such a treat to be comfortable again after this year of school.

Servants undressed and bathed you while you were sleeping.”

“Is this a bed or a cloud?” sighed John. “Percy, Percy--before you go,

I want to apologise.”

“For what?”

“For doubting you when you said you had a diamond as big as the

Ritz-Carlton Hotel.”

Percy smiled.

“I thought you didn’t believe me. It’s that mountain, you know.”

“What mountain?”

“The mountain the château rests on. It’s not very big, for a mountain.

But except about fifty feet of sod and gravel on top it’s solid

diamond. _One_ diamond, one cubic mile without a flaw. Aren’t you

listening? Say----”

But John T. Unger had again fallen asleep.