DEATH?
I had gone no great distance, and the sun had yet scarcely cleared the
horizon, when I came to a high cavity in the cliff-wall.
It was of such height that an elephant would have looked a pigmy as he
passed inward, and of a shape too regular to have been formed without
the tools of some controlling mind.
The level sun shone into it, and illumed it, a very spacious tunnel, for
a considerable distance. Then it bent out of sight. I went inward a few
steps, and hesitated.
Anyone who, on a strange and lonely road, has reached a place where it
branches in two directions, without knowledge or sign to guide his
choice, will understand my feeling. Still in doubt, I walked back to the
cave-mouth, and then, down the middle of the opal way, came something
very swift and light. Someone who was neither man, nor beast, nor
monkey. Someone who ran without effort, but as in urgent and silent
fear.
She did not see me until she was level with the gap from which I watched
her, and when she did, she leapt sideways with incredible agility. The
leap took her to the very edge of the opal way, and her left foot
pressed for a second on the purple soil beyond. As it did so, with the
speed of light itself, the nearest of the bright-green globes shot open
in a score of writhing tentacles, of which one caught the slipping foot,
and dragged its victim down.
There came one scream, intense and dreadful, high and shrill, and then I
watched a lithe furred human-seeming body which struggled against the
clinging, twisting arm which dragged her in.
The tentacles were very long and thin, and of a brick-red colour. The
one which reached her first was not thicker, toward its end, than a
man’s finger, but for a moment only was there any doubt of the issue.
Then a stronger tentacle got a firm grip of its victim’s body, and as it
did so the scream came again, but shriller, louder, and more exultant,
and I realised that it was the plant that screamed, and not the prize it
had captured.
I don’t think I should have interfered but for that second scream of
triumph, but there was something in its tone so hateful, so bestial,
that an impulse of pity for its victim broke across the blank amazement
of my mind, and with the feeling, as thought that answered thought, I
knew that she was calling to me to help her.
The axe lay ready to my hand on the cave-floor, and I picked it up and
ran forward.
I brought the blade down on the nearest tentacle with such force as
would have severed a branch of a well-grown tree, but it only dented a
skin that was soft and flexible, but tough, like rubber.
As I swung the axe again, a long arm caught me round both ankles and
pulled. Had I not been so strange to it, had it better gauged my
strength and weight, or had it not been occupied with its earlier
capture, I suppose that the next minute would have ended my experience,
but as it was, the clutch only stirred me to a desperation of terror
that brought the axe down with double force, and the severed limb fell
quivering to the ground.
As it did so, the creature screamed again. It was a cry of the most
utter terror, abject and hellish beyond any possibility of words to tell
it.
And the forest answered.
It answered in a hundred voices that screamed, and clamoured, and
questioned, and replied.
I had never known before the strength which panic and loathing may give
to human muscles.
Backward writhed the frightened tentacles, their victim dropped and
forgotten, and every axe-stroke that followed gashed or severed one of
them, and where they were cut through, a wine-red semi-liquid jelly
slowly welled from the gap.
I think as the creature contracted and closed its petals I might have
stayed the blows if it had not screamed for mercy on a note which gave
me a feeling of nausea, and a lust to kill, so that I struck till the
great flesh-like leaves were gashed and shredded; till, as the cries
continued, I realised that the centre of its life was underground,
beyond my power to reach it.
Then I lowered the axe, and looked round.
Dimly I was aware that my heart was beating wildly, and that I was
breathing with difficulty.
Still the forest was screaming around me in deafening tones of fear and
hate and menace.
I looked back to the comparative safety of the cave I had left, and I
saw the one that I had saved slowly dragging herself towards it, and as
I did so I was conscious that she knew my thought, and answered.
I became aware for the first time that the soil on which I stood was
hot, and that my feet were scorching.
I threw the axe towards the cave, and went to help the one that I had
ventured to rescue, and doing this, I had a strange feeling of
repulsion, as from an alien body, and of attraction, as to a kindred
soul.
I knew that she was mortally injured, and feared that I must horribly
hurt the limp body as I picked it up.
I was startled by its lightness, and surprised that it made no sound.
As I lifted her, I was conscious again of the interchange of wordless
thought, but when I answered mechanically with a spoken word I was
rebuffed by the expression of repulsion and wonder which crossed her
eyes.
But as I laid her down in the cave-mouth, wondering what I could do to
aid her further, her thought answered mine clearly, “Do not touch my
body. It is dead.”
Then our minds met, and for some moments wrestled abortively, till I
realised that I could not understand unless my own were willing, and
blank, and receptive. Nor could she understand my thought unless it were
consciously approached to hers.
After that, we conversed in silence for some time, but very slowly. So
wide was the gulf of separation in knowledge and experience, so baffling
the mental shorthand by which agreed fact is implied without expression,
so difficult was it to avoid the continual byways of explanation which
only led to others, that it was a long time before I could receive even
a blurred outline of the urgent facts which she was striving to give me.
By this time I realised that she regarded me as something strange and
beast-like, and that any noise from my mouth would intensify this
feeling against me, and confirm the judgment. I knew also that she
recognised me as sympathetic, and in some measure intelligent, however
physically repulsive--a repulsion made more acute by the clothes I wore,
of which I was made to feel a sense of acute shame, so strongly did her
mind impress my own with a conception of their indecency.
I thought that she regarded me much as we should do a half-tamed dog,
ferocious, but amenable to kindness and reason, and of a possible
loyalty.
I knew also that she regarded her body as a broken and negligible thing,
and that her mind had concentrated on persuading me to undertake, and
enabling me to understand, an errand which the accident had interrupted,
and which was of a very urgent nature.
So I sat there at the cave-mouth, while the sun rose clear from the
hateful vivid green of the forest, that was still vocal with fear and
excitement, while I slowly took my first and very difficult lesson in
the new world I had entered.
“And now,” she thought, “if that be all, and you understand, I shall be
very glad to die. You will not touch me when I am dead? If you are a
beast that needs such food, you will find that the jelly in the
tentacles will supply you. You must wait here till the twilight.”
And then she turned over, with a movement of surprising ease in the
broken limbs, and curled up, and I knew that she had left the cave.
And I sat there thinking of all she had told me, and felt a great
loneliness, and a great fear.