At the end of an hour, Kirby was taking a turn of guard duty at the foot
of the steps, while the others remained with Elana in a chamber above.
To Kirby, with things thus far along, it seemed that the seizure of the
tower had proved a shrewd stroke.
It seemed that the tower was to the Duca what hair was to Sampson. From
Naida had come the information that the Duca lived hidden within the
great shaft of obsidion, and appeared but seldom even before his
caciques. Apparently a large part of his hold upon his subjects was
maintained by the mystery with which he kept himself surrounded. And now
his retreat was lost to him! Such had been the moral effect of the loss
upon both Duca and caciques, that his whole first hour had gone by
without their doing anything.
Kirby, standing just around the first turn of the winding stairway,
presently cocked his ears to listen to the conclave being held in the
amphitheatre.
"Why not starve them out, O Holy One?" he heard one of the caciques ask
of the Duca, only to be answered by a growl of negation.
The Duca, Kirby had gathered before this, wanted to fight.
"But there is no food in the tower, is there?" the cacique still pressed
on, and this time he was supported by other voices.
"No," the Duca rumbled back. "But am I to be deprived of my retreat,
left here like a common dog amongst other dogs, while these accursed
fiends starve slowly to death? No! I tell you, you must fight for me!"
* * * * *
But he had told them so several times before and nothing had happened.
Kirby grinned at the thought of the caste the Duca was losing by being
driven to this belittling parley.
"Holy One," exclaimed a new priest in answer to the urge to fight, "what
can we do against the golden haired fiend? The stairs are so narrow that
he could defend them alone. And then there are the gates of bronze. If
we could shatter the first, at the foot of the steps, we should only
encounter others. The Duca must remember that his tower was built to
withstand attack."
"Even so," the Duca snapped back, "it must be attacked! I--"
But then he fell silent, having been made so by the sounds of dissension
which arose amongst his caciques. Kirby, laughing to himself, turned
away from his listening post, and tip-toed up the steps.
After he had closed and bolted behind him three of the bronze portals so
feared by the caciques, he turned to the entrance of the chamber in
which he had left Naida and the others. Here all was silent, and he
found his friends grouped about a couch on which lay Elana. Feeling the
solemnity of the moment, he would have taken his place quietly amongst
the mourners.
Naida, however, came to him at once, and in a low voice asked for news
from the amphitheatre, and when Kirby answered that the caciques were
unanimously in favor of leaving them alone until they starved, she
exclaimed:
"Oh, then it is good news!"
After that, however, a shadow of doubt flickered in her great eyes.
"And yet, is it? It means temporary immunity, of coarse.
But--starvation!"
Kirby assured her with a grin.
"If we had to starve we might worry. But there is more food here than
the Duca thinks. Look!"
* * * * *
From a bulging pocket of his tunic he fished a strip of the roots on
which he had subsisted so comfortably. Naida's eyes widened, and several
of the girls gave low cries.
"Yes," Naida exclaimed, "but such food! Why--why, do you know what you
are offering us? Why, this is the sacred Peyote! Only the Duca eats it,
and, at rare intervals, his priests."
Kirby was really startled now.
"But surely you and the others have taken quantities of the stuff away
from the Valley of the Geyser. Do you mean--"
"Because we gathered the Peyote does not mean that we have ever tasted
it. We gather it for the Duca. To taste would be complete, utter
sacrilege. Have _you_ been eating it?"
Inwardly Kirby was chuckling at this added proof of the buncumbe with
which the Duca--and other Ducas--had fooled all.
"Of course I've been eating the Peyote."
"And--and nothing has happened to you?" Naida asked.
"Hardly. I certainly haven't been blasted by the Lords of the Sun and
Moon, or the Serpent either!"
Naida and all the others were silent. The conflict between their
reverence for the food and their clear desire to eat it, now that it was
become the food of their leader, was pathetic.
Kirby put one of the strips in Naida's hand.
"Why not?" he asked. "We have bested the Duca in fair fight. We have
seized his tower. Why not eat his food?"
As he had hoped it would, the suggestion at last settled the matter. A
moment later, as Naida nibbled her first bite, she smiled.
"Why, it--it's good!"
With the question of provisions settled at least for a time, Kirby's
next thought was of the tower. The present lull of peace seemed made for
exploration.
"Come along," he said to Naida, "we've plenty to do," and then, when he
explained, they set out, accompanied by Nini, a cousin of Naida's, and
Ivana, a younger sister.
All of the others remained with little Elana.
* * * * *
While they climbed spiral stairs, Naida explained that the chamber they
had just left was used by the Duca as a place in which he prayed before
and after contacts with caciques or subjects. A sort of halfway station
between earth and heaven, as it were, where the Duca might be purged of
any sullying influence gained from human relationships.
At thought of the rank, egotistical hypocrisy implied by the story,
Kirby smiled grimly. Then they came to a new door, heavier than that
which barricaded the prayer chamber. Unlocked, the thing swung
ponderously at Kirby's push, and with the three girls pressing close
beside him, he entered--and stopped.
"Naida!" he gasped.
"Oh, _oh_!" she cried, and while Nini and Ivana gasped, she clapped her
hands in an instinctive, feminine reaction of joy. "But there are things
here which I believe none but the Ducas of our race have ever seen! Oh!
Why, the sacred girdle is as nothing compared to this display!"
By "display" she meant a treasure which took Kirby's breath away, which
made his heart act queerly.
The walls of the chamber were fashioned of polished blocks of obsidion
on which stood out in heavy bas-relief a maze of decorative figures
fashioned of pure, beaten gold--the same kind of gold which had gone
into the making of the cylinder of gold. With his first glance at the
gorgeously wrought motifs of Feathered Serpent and Sun and Moon symbols,
Kirby knew to a certainty whence the golden cylinder had come
originally.
But even the gold--literally tons of it there must have been--was
nothing compared to the gems.
* * * * *
They were spread out in blinding array upon a great table in the center
of the room. There were pearls as big as turkey eggs and whiter, softer
than the light of a June morning growing in the East. There were rubies.
One amongst the many was the size of a baseball and glowed like the
heart of a red star. The least of the two or three hundred gems would
have outclassed the greatest treasures of the Crown jewels of England
and Russia combined.
Most overwhelming of all, however, was the jewel which rested against a
square of black cloth all its own in the center of the table. While his
heart still acted queerly, while Naida, Nini, and Ivana hung back,
delighted, but still too bewildered to move, Kirby advanced and took
gingerly in his hands a single white diamond about eighteen inches long,
and almost as wide and deep as it was long.
The thing was carved with exquisite cunning to a likeness of the living
head of Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent.
Kirby dared not guess how many pounds the carven hunk of flashing,
blue-white carbon weighed. He knew only that like it there was no other
diamond in the world, and that the thing was real. Naida and the two
girls were silent now, and suddenly Kirby realized that to their awe of
the gem was added awe of deepest religious nature. Slowly he put the
diamond head of the Serpent back upon its square of cloth.
"We--we had heard that this thing existed," Naida said presently, voice
hushed, "but no one except the holy men of our race has ever beheld
it."
"But, what is it?" Kirby asked. "Whence came it?"
However, when Naida would have answered, he interrupted.
"But wait! Tell me as we go. We could stay here for the rest of our
lives without much trouble, but we've got to cover the rest of the tower
and get back to the others."
* * * * *
It was after they had closed the door to the treasure room that Naida
told him the story.
"There is not so much to tell," she began. "The diamond itself is so
gorgeous that it is hard to talk about. But here is the story. A great
many ages ago one of the Ducas of our race found the diamond, decided to
carve it into a perfect likeness of the head of the Serpent God. All of
the craftsmen of the race helped him and when they were done, they took
their image to Quetzalcoatl himself, and showed him what they had done.
"Quetzalcoatl was pleased. So pleased, that he promised all of the wise
men that he would cease to prey upon them as he had in the past, and
henceforward would take his toll of sacrifice from the ape-men alone.
Them he hated and would continue to hate because they worshipped not him
but Xlotli.
"And so it came about," Naida went on slowly, looking up at Kirby as
they still mounted wide steps to the upper reaches of the tower, "that
our people gained immunity from a God which had always before harmed and
destroyed them. Our race presently began to build this castle here on
the high plateau, and Quetzalcoatl kept his compact with them. He still
comes out of his chasm at intervals and preys upon the ape-men, but no
one of our race has seen him for thousands of years, and he has always
let us alone. And there is the whole myth and explanation of why the
great diamond is revered among us as a holy of holies."
* * * * *
They had mounted to a new door which Kirby guessed might give entrance
to the Duca's living quarters. But he was in no mood to open it at
once.
"Wait a minute," he said as they all paused. "You say that, although
none of your race has seen Quetzalcoatl since the diamond head was
carved, he still comes out of his chasm and makes trouble for the
ape-men. Just what does that mean?"
"Why--" Naida looked at him wonderingly. "I mean what I have said. The
Serpent comes out of his chasm and--"
"What chasm?" Kirby asked sharply.
"Why, the one we crossed this morning. It extends to the far reaches of
our country, beyond the Rorroh forest, where the ape-men dwell but which
our people never visit. It is in that distant part of the chasm that the
Serpent dwells."
"But--but--Oh, good Lord!" Kirby whistled softly. "Naida, do you mean to
tell me that Quetzalcoatl was not simply a mythical monster, but an
actual, living serpent which is alive _now_?"
Naida and the others shrugged.
"Why not?" she answered. "Sometimes we have captured a few ape-men, and
they tell us stories of how Quetzalcoatl kills them. _They_ say he is
very much alive."
"But," Kirby mumbled in increasing wonder, "is this living creature the
same which your ancestors worshipped first as long ago, perhaps, as a
million years?"
"That," Naida answered unhesitatingly, "I'm not sure of. Our caciques
believe that the Serpent, although it lives longer than any other
sentient thing, finally dies and is succeeded by a new Serpent which is
reproduced by itself, within its own body."
So overwhelming did Kirby find this unexpected sequel to their discovery
of the great diamond head, so staggered was he by the fact that
Quetzalcoatl, of Aztecan myth, might exist as a sentient creature here
in this cavern world, that he had little heart left for exploring other
wonders.
* * * * *
Nevertheless, he presently pushed open the new door before which they
had paused, and behind it found, as he had expected, the Duca's living
quarters.
These were as severe as the jewel chamber had been gorgeous. A thin
pallet spread upon a frame of wood formed the bed, and beside it stood a
single stiff chair. That was all. The walls of glistening obsidion were
bare.
There was, however, a door in one circular wall, and as Kirby flung this
open, his previous disappointment changed to delight. For shelves along
the walls of the small chamber held roll after roll of parchment covered
with script. And in one corner lay six undamaged, almost new Mannlichers
and several hundred rounds of ammunition!
"Naida," he exclaimed, "do you know what those are?"
"I suppose that they are weapons of the sort you used against the
ape-men this morning?"
Kirby grinned.
"They are the same kind I used, and then some. With these weapons we can
do what we never could with the smaller one. How did they get here?"
"They came when I was much younger," Naida answered with a shade of
sadness in her voice. "The men who had them penetrated the Valley of the
Geyser, coming by a different route from the one you followed. When the
Duca learned they were there, he sent such men of the race as were still
able to fight to kill them. That order of the Duca's was one of the
first things to turn me against him. The men were not harming us, and
they should have been permitted to go away. But the Duca insisted that
they be killed, and in the fight were lost eight of our youngest and
strongest men."
* * * * *
Kirby stooped to inspect the rifles.
"Has no one learned to use these weapons?"
"No," Naida answered. "The Duca kept them for himself."
"We think," put in Ivana, "that he hoped to learn to use them, and was
afraid for us to have the knowledge."
Kirby filled one of the magazines, and felt the heft of the gun with
pleasure.
"Very well," he said. "It looks to me as though your time to learn the
art of shooting has come at last. Come, I think we had better be getting
back downstairs."
Kirby took three guns himself, and with the others lugging the rest,
they started back. The parchment rolls, he decided, must be left for
examination later on.
They were all elated when they rejoined the girls in the prayer chamber,
and high spirits were still further increased by the report, promptly
given, that all had remained quiet in the amphitheatre. Save only for
the presence of Elana, radiant and calm in death, the give and take of
questions would have been accompanied by actual gaiety.
But the time of peace did not last much longer. While Naida was in the
midst of answering incessant questions about the wonders of the jewel
chamber, Kirby heard a sound from below, and suddenly went over to the
downward-winding steps.
"Listen," he called sharply back to the others.
He had not been mistaken. Many footsteps echoed from the amphitheatre,
and he made out that the caciques were coming toward the bolted gate at
the foot of the steps. While he listened, and Naida came eagerly to his
side, silence fell.
But then clear words came up to them.
"Let the upper-world man come to the foot of the steps," called the
Duca. "I have an offer to make him!"