As they marched rapidly, the ape-woman, who called herself Gori,
succeeded in making them understand that most of the ape-tribes,
commanded by the Duca and his caciques, were assembled in the central
community toward which they were heading, that grave danger of some sort
threatened Naida, and that the need for haste was great. But what the
danger was, the two girls could not understand.
"We can't make out what is going to happen--what they plan to do
to-night," Ivana whispered at last to Kirby. "All Gori says is that we
must rescue Naida and take her away, and must take the Duca away so that
he cannot influence the men any more. And she keeps repeating that we
must hurry."
"And you can't find out what we must rescue Naida _from_?"
Ivana shook her head.
"I'm afraid we're facing something of an appalling nature, as dangerous
to ourselves as to Naida. But I know nothing more."
By the time the silver glow which corresponded to moonlight flooded the
jungle, Gori had left the open trail, and was leading them across
country which humans could not have negotiated without the guidance she
offered. Advancing cautiously always, she stopped for long seconds at a
time to reconnoitre, shifting her huge ears about and changing their
shape, twitching her nostrils, and glancing hither and thither with
bright little eyes. Sometimes they passed immense spike-tipped flowers
ten feet in diameter, with fleshy yellow leaves which gave out a
nauseating stench. Vines with long, recurved thorns and blossoms of deep
scarlet, laced the undergrowth together and made passing dangerous.
Fire-flies drifted past, and all above and about them flapped moths as
big as bats.
Kirby, his clothes almost torn from his body, sweat pouring from every
pore, heard the labored breathing of the girls, and wondered how they
could hang on. But they did, and after a long time, Gori, halting in the
midst of a slight clearing, held up a warning hand.
* * * * *
A queer sensation came over Kirby. As he stared and listened, he
realized that the twinkles he saw far ahead were not fire-flies, as he
had thought, but lights. In the frosted moon glow, Nini and Ivana drew
close, and Kirby clasped their hands and pressed them for a second. Too
tired to exult further he was, even though they seemed close to their
goal of goals.
Gori swung her hairy arm in a signal, and with rifles clasped carefully,
they began to advance. When, five minutes later, they stood in the heart
of a rank glade beyond which they could see nothing, Gori spoke to the
two girls in her creaking whisper, and Nini laid a restraining hand on
Kirby's.
"We have gone as far as Gori dares! She says we must climb a tree here,
and watch what will go on in a clearing just beyond this thicket."
"And we still don't know what we're getting into," Kirby muttered.
But at any rate they had reached the end of their march.
Exultation did come to Kirby now, but still he was too completely
fagged, as were both girls, to give much sign. Gori pointed to a tree
some fifty feet away, which shot up to a great, foliage-crowned height.
They moved toward it, and in a moment were climbing, Gori first, the
girls after her, and Kirby last.
"Here we are," Ivana presently whispered, at the same time drawing
herself out on a limb just beneath one on which Gori and Nini had
crawled.
Kirby found himself hedged in by tasselated leaves through which he
could not see. The foliage thinned, however, and soon Ivana halted,
perched herself in a comfortable position. Kirby, making himself at ease
beside her, and seeing that Nini and Gori were in place, turned his eyes
slowly, expectantly downward.
* * * * *
At first, all that he saw from his bird's-eye perch, was a circular
clearing two hundred yards across, which was surrounded on all sides by
lowering jungle. In the exact center of the circle, like a splotch of
ink on gray paper, there gaped a deep hole which might have measured six
feet in diameter. Around this hole, eight poles as tall and stout as
telephone poles stood up in bristling array. The moonlight showed that
the whitish earth of the clearing was tamped smooth as though thousands
of creatures had danced or walked about there for centuries. But not a
living form was visible.
A grunt of disappointment escaped Kirby after that one look. When he
looked beyond the clearing, however, a change came to his feelings.
A quarter of a mile away, lights were twinkling--the same ones which had
been visible on the last stretch of the journey. And the moonlight
touched the little conical roofs of fully two hundred huts of the
ape-people. No sound was audible save the soughing of night wind in the
trees, the shrilling of insects. Nevertheless, there stole over Kirby
all at once a feeling that the great ape-village was crowded to
overflowing. What was more, he felt himself touched by an eery
sensation--familiar these days--of evil to come.
Ivana, seated with her rifle across her knees, stirred on the limb
beside him.
"Oh," she whispered suddenly, "I am afraid of this place!"
Kirby took her hand.
"I know. Maybe it is the sensation of all the legions of the apes herded
together so silently in their village. I wish we knew what to expect
from them. I wish--"
* * * * *
But he broke off, and called softly to Nini on the limb above. She
looked down with a drawn expression about her mouth.
"Are you all right?" Kirby whispered.
"Yes. But--Well, are both of _you_ all right? Gori says we have reached
here in time, but I--" A gasp of uneasiness escaped her, and Kirby heard
Ivana echo it. "There is something about that black, silent hole out
there in the clearing, and about those poles sticking up like fangs,
that makes me terribly, terribly afraid. Oh, what are they planning?
Where is Naida? What are they going to do to her?"
Kirby whistled in a low key. He had not thought about the black hole in
the clearing.
"Hum," he muttered, "that's interesting. Ivana, Nini, what do you
suppose--"
But he got no answer. Gori's twitching lips grimaced them to silence.
The next instant, the stillness of the night was hurled aside by a
howling, gurgling shout from a hundred, a thousand hysterically
distended ape throats. With the sickening sound came from the village
the sullen roaring of drums.
* * * * *
Ten minutes later, a Kirby who was cold with apprehension and wonder
looked down from his leaf-crowned height at such a spectacle as he knew
human eyes had never before seen. The shouting had died away, the drums
were silenced. Crammed into the clearing, their foul, hairy bodies
packed close together, the silver light glinting against rolling red
eyes and grinning white teeth, stood fully a thousand apes!
Once the first tumult of shouting in the village had died, they had come
on in silence, and in orderly procession. Those who bore the
drums--huge gourds with heads of stretched skin--had formed a line
entirely around the outer diameter of the circular clearing. Then
others, lugging vats of a dark, heady-smelling liquor, had deposited
their burden beside the drums, and formed a second circle. The balance
of the thousand had crowded itself together as best it might, leaving
bare the center of the clearing with its black hole and fangs of poles.
Kirby, looking down at these legions, did not wonder that cold sweat
wetted his back.
Capable of thinking about only one thing--Naida--he was trying with all
his strength not to think. Ivana, her face blanched in the light which
filtered their camouflage of leaves, sat rigid, her hands locked about
her cold rifle. On the branch above, Nini and Gori were as still as
mummies. No one had spoken since the vanguard of apes had appeared.
But at last Nini leaned close to Kirby.
"Have you any idea of what all this means?"
A draught of hot night air carried up a stench of drunkenness, and the
goaty odor of massed animal bodies.
"No," Kirby whispered. "I suppose, from Gori's having brought us here,
that Naida is going to appear somehow. We've simply got to trust that
Gori knows what she is about."
"But listen--" Ivana suppressed a shudder. "Suppose they should bring
Naida here presently to force her to take part in some ceremony at which
we can only guess. Gori, who thinks we can work miracles, supposes we
can rescue Naida. But I--I'm not so certain. Is there _anything_ we can
do?"
* * * * *
It was exactly that question which had made Kirby fight to keep himself
from thinking. His face turned gray before he answered. But answer he
did, finally.
"Yes, there is one thing we can do, Ivana. We've got to be frank with
each other, and so far, this is the _only_ thing I've been able to
figure out. If Naida is brought here, and they make any move to harm her
or torture her, we can, and we will, shoot her quickly, before harm or
pain comes."
A grim silence settled once more. During the last miles of march in the
jungle, there had persisted in Kirby's heart the hope that there would
be at least _something_ favorable in whatever situation they might
encounter. His spirits were so low now that he dared not speak again.
Amongst the noiseless sea of ape-men below them came, every now and
again, a little ripple of motion as some anthropoid shadow fell out of
his place, approached the liquor vats, and swilled down the black brew,
a quart at a gulp. But mostly there was little commotion. Ivana drew a
sibilant breath and said that she wished something would happen.
"I wish," Kirby answered tensely, "that we knew _what_ is going to
happen."
But the nightmare waiting was not to go on forever. Kirby leaned forward
and pointed.
It was only instinct that had made him know action must come. For a
second, no change in the expression of the ape-men, no movement in their
crammed ranks, was visible. Then, however, a queer, subdued grunting
rumbled deep down in many throats, and those who had faced the
hundred-foot space in the center of the clearing squatted down on their
hams.
In the back of the crowd necks were craned. The stronger shoved the
weaker in an effort to get a better view of the cleared stage, and a few
ape-men who had been drinking hurried on unsteady legs to their places.
"The drums!" Kirby whispered then.
* * * * *
With almost military precision, the scores of leather-faced creatures
who had led the procession into the clearing, clasped the skin-headed
gourds to their shaggy bellies, and stood with free arm raised as
though awaiting a signal. Nini moved in her position, and Kirby felt
Ivana shiver and edge close to him.
From the front rank of the crowd, there sprang up a great male creature
with the face of a gargoyle and the body of a jungle giant. Just once he
reeled on his feet, as though black alcohol had befuddled him, then he
steadied himself, flung both arms above his head, and rolled out a
command which burst upon Kirby's ears like thunder.
It was as if the whole cavern of the lower world, and the whole of the
round earth itself, had been rocked uneasily, dreadfully by the
bellowing, crashing explosion of the drums. Maddened by the turmoil he
had let loose, the gargoyle-faced giant ape-man leered about him with
blood-shot, drunken eyes, and beat on his cicatrized chest with massive
fists. Suddenly he let out a bellow. Straight up into the air he sprang
in a wild leap. When he came down, he was dancing, and the portentious,
the sickeningly mysterious ceremony for which such solemn preparation
had been made, was begun.
Kirby drew a rasping breath. Knowing that there must be some definite
reason for the dance having begun just when and as it had, he looked
beyond the solitary dancing giant, on beyond the crowded legions of the
apes, toward the village. There, where the main trail from the community
approached the clearing, he saw precisely the thing which he had both
hoped desperately and dreaded terribly to find.
* * * * *
Headed directly toward the clearing, moving down the trail with slow,
majestic pace, came a procession headed by a bodyguard of ape-men and
augmented by other men whose nakedness was covered by unmistakable,
unforgetable priestly robes of gray.
All at once the ape-people in the clearing began to scuffle apart,
opening a lane down which the procession might pass to the central
stage with its dancer, its ink spot orifice, and its fangs of tall
poles. Kirby, watching the congregation, watching the majestic approach
of gray robes through the night, wiped away from his forehead a sweat of
fear.
"I think," Nini called in a voice pitched high to outsound the drums,
"that the--the Duca is with them!"
"Yes." Kirby pointed jerkily. "In the middle of the procession, there,
surrounded by his caciques!"
The Duca!
Yet his approach did not hold Kirby. Directly behind the priests were
emerging now from the jungle a new company of ape-men. Squinting his
eyes, Kirby saw that two of them were lugging on a pole across their
shoulders a curious burden--a sort of monstrous bird cage of barked
withes. Crouched on the floor of the cage in a little motionless, white
heap--
But Kirby closed his eyes. Ivana, cowering against him, gulped as though
she were going to be sick. Nini leaned down from above and looked at
them with dilated eyes. Although none of them spoke, all knew that they
had found Naida at last.
Kirby was the first to pull himself up. Opening his eyes, he stared long
at the white gowned, motionless shape within the cage. Next summing up
the whole situation--the cage surrounded by an armed band, the clearing
crammed with a thousand ape-men--he shook his head. Afterward, he made a
quick movement with his hands.
Ivana, seeing that movement, seeing the expression on his face, started
out of her daze.
"No! No! Oh, there must be some other way out for her! There must--"
* * * * *
Her cry, half a shriek, did not change Kirby's look. What he had done
with his hands was to throw a shell into the chamber of his rifle. Now
he held the rifle grimly, ready to carry it to his shoulder.
The procession with the bodyguard of ape-men at its head, the renegade
Duca and his caciques following next, and the cage bringing up the rear,
advanced relentlessly down the lane to the central stage. The
gargoyle-faced ape-man who held the stage alone danced with increasing
wildness, writhing, twisting, with weird suppleness. Upon the dancing
giant the procession bore down, and before him it finally halted.
The halt left the Duca and the king ape facing each other, and the ape
ended his dance. After each had given a salute made by raising their
arms, both Duca and the king ape turned to face the creatures who were
standing with the cage slung across their shoulders. Whereupon the
bearers of the cage advanced with it until they stood between two of the
tall poles. There, facing the ominous hole in the center of the
clearing, with a pole on either side of them, the ape-men lowered the
cage to the ground.
Kirby felt his last hope and courage ebbing. Now he noticed that each
pole was equipped with a rope which passed through a hole near its top,
like a thread through the eye of a needle. And while he stared at the
dangling ropes, the ape-men made one end of each fast to a ring in the
top of the cage. The next instant they leaped back, and began to heave
at the other end of the lines.
From the drums came a quicker pounding, a more head-splitting volume of
thunder. Over all the ape-people who watched the show, passed a shiver
of what seemed to be whole-souled, ecstatic satisfaction. Slowly, as the
two ape-men heaved hard, the cage swung off the ground, and slowly rose
higher and higher into the moonlit air.
* * * * *
When finally the thing hung high above the heads of the multitude,
swaying midway between its tall supports, the ape-men who had done the
hoisting fastened their lines to cleats on the poles. Then they turned
to the Duca and the giant king who stood behind them, executed a queer,
lumbering bow, and fell back to the rear.
The next moment it seemed as though every creature in the clearing--men
and those who were only half men--had gone crazy. The king flung himself
into the air as if he were a mass of bounding rubber. Following his
lead, the whole assembly let out howls that drowned even the drums, and
then began to sway, to squirm, to leap, even as their king was doing
before them.
The caciques and the Duca joined in the madness of foul dancing as
heartily as any there. Their eyes were flaming, their long robes
flapping, their beards streaming.
On his perch in the tree Kirby muttered an oath which was lost, swept
away like a breath, in the shrieking turmoil of sound. Then he turned to
Ivana.
"They've brought Naida here to sacrifice her."
"But _why_?" Ivana's sweet face was frozen in lines of horror. "I've
been able to guess what was going to happen to her. But--_sacrifice_.
Why will it be that?"
"Don't you see?" Looking up to include Nini, Kirby found his hands
quivering against his rifle. "It is easy to understand. In the temple
yesterday, what the Duca hoped to do was to kidnap most, or all, of the
girls for the ape-people. But he was able to get only Naida. The first
result was that the ape-men started to quarrel over the one girl. From
what Gori says, trouble started on all sides at once. It became
inadvisable to let Naida live. So the Duca, in his shrewdness, planned a
sacrifice. By sacrificing Naida, he rids himself of a source of
contention amongst the ape-men. He also hopes his act will win favor
from his Gods, and make them help him when he is ready to launch a new
attempt to capture _all_ the girls."
* * * * *
Ivana and Nini looked at each other, then at Kirby, and horror was
etched deeper into their faces.
"I think," gulped Ivana, "that you--are right. I--begin to understand."
Nini leaned close to them.
"Tell us, then, _how_ this sacrifice is to be made."
Silent at that, Kirby presently made a heavy gesture toward the
maelstrom of howling, leaping animals below them.
"I couldn't guess at first. Now I think I can. They have placed her in
that cage and swung it high above the black hole you were afraid of.
What can that mean except that she is to be offered to--to--"
It was a monstrous theory which had stunned his hope and courage, and to
voice the thing in words was too gruesome.
His bare suggestion, however, made Ivana pass a hand limply over her
forehead and look at him with blank, stricken eyes. Nini tottered so
uncertainly that Gori, who had remained motionless and silent
throughout, had to steady her with muscular arms. If it was impossible
for Kirby to utter his fears aloud, he had no need to speak to make them
understood.
"And--and we can do nothing?" Nini choked at last.
"You can see for yourself how she is surrounded. If we had been able to
get here sooner, we might have done something. Now--"
Kirby's voice trailed off, and he gave an agonized look at his rifle.
* * * * *
The terrific dance in the clearing was going forward with madness which
increased second by second. It had been a general debauch at first, with
the whole thousand of the apes bellowing and squirming. Now a change was
becoming apparent. Red eyes which had caught the glare of ultimate
madness, focused upon the caciques, the Duca, and the great king, all of
whom were swaying together on the central stage. As they looked, the
horde of ape-men broke loose with a heightened frenzy of noise and
movement too overwhelming for Kirby to follow. He leaned forward, making
an effort to see what actions of Duca and king could be so influencing
the congregation. And then he saw.
Both of those central figures, the one with hair-covered giant's body
and evilly grimacing face, the other with white robes and whipping
silver hair, were definitely emulating the motions of a serpent!
It was as if the angles and joints had disappeared from their bodies.
They were become gliding lengths of muscle as swift, as loathsome in
their supple dartings and coilings as any snake lashing across the
expanses of primeval jungle. Lost in what they did, unconscious of the
nightmare, demoniac legion before which they danced, they had eyes only
for the empty, ominous hole beneath Naida's cage. As they circled the
hole, drawing ever and ever closer to it, they opened and closed their
arms with the motion of great serpent jaws biting and striking.
"God in Heaven!" Kirby cried in a voice which shrilled with horror and
then broke.
It was not alone the Duca's dance which had wrung the shout from him. As
Nina and Ivana shrieked and cowered, as Gori twitched, gasped, buried
her head in trembling arms, Kirby knew that Naida was fully aware of
what was going on--had been, perhaps, from the beginning.
Slowly, numbly she raised herself from her huddled position, rose to her
knees, and clutching with despairing hands at the sides of her cage,
looked out from between the bars.
* * * * *
The king and Duca edged closer to the hole until they were dancing upon
its very brink. From that position, they stared down into the depths,
their faces tense and strained. And then their look became radiant,
exalted, joyous. Suddenly the Duca leaped back. He shrieked something
at the gargoyle ape, and they flung their arms high in a commanding,
mighty signal which was directed across the nightmare legion of ape-men,
to the drums.
As Kirby winced in expectancy, the drums ceased to roar. Over the night
smashed a hideous concussion of silence, deafening, absolute. And the
ape-men--all of them--and the Duca, his caciques, and the king, ceased
to dance. As if a whirlwind had hurled them, the caciques scattered in
all directions. The Duca, having already leaped back from the gaping
orifice, suddenly turned and ran with blurred speed over to the
slobbering, deadly still front rank of the congregation. An instant
later the king crouched down beside him, and the whole stage was left
bare and deserted.
Kirby gave one look at Naida, found her staring down, deeper and deeper
down, into the hole which yawned beneath her so blackly. Then Kirby
lowered his eyes until he, too, stared at the opening.
Amidst the pressing silence there stole from the earth an uneasy sound
as of some immense thing waking and stirring. Came a hissing note as of
escaping steam. The tribes of the ape-men waited in silent rapture.
Kirby saw Naida still looking down, and felt Ivana crouch against him,
fainting. He held his rifle tighter, and continued to stare.
Something red, like two small flames, licked up above the edge of the
pit. Then Kirby gasped and all but went limp. Up and out into the
moonlight slid a glistening white lump that moved from side to side and
licked at the night with flickering black and red tipped forked tongue.
The glistening white lump was the head of Quetzalcoatl, buried God of
the People of the Temple. It was wider and bigger than an elephant's,
and the round snake body could not have been encircled by a man's two
arms. Kirby guessed at the probable length of the Serpent in terms of
hundreds of feet.
* * * * *
Sick, numb, he glanced at Naida, who was still staring silently, and
hitched his rifle half up to his shoulder. But he did not look down the
sights yet. Although it was time, and more than time, that he fired, he
would not do it until the last possible second, when nothing else
remained.
Slowly from the hole slid a fifteen or twenty-foot column of the body,
and Quetzalcoatl, thus reared, looked about him with a pair of eyes
immense and not like snake's eyes, but heavily lidded and lashed; eyes
that stared in a wise, evil way; eyes glittering and round and black as
ink. After a time the mouth opened in a silent snarl, showing great
white fangs and recurved simitars of teeth. The head was snow white,
leperous in its scabby, scaly roughness, with here and there a patch of
what looked like greenish fungus. From the rounded body trailed a short,
unnatural, sickening growth of--feathers. Old and evil and very wise the
Feathered Serpent seemed as his forked tongue flickered in and out and
he stared at the ape horde, who stared back silently.
He seemed in no hurry to devote his attention to the cage set forth for
his delectation. The black eyes rolled beneath their lashes, staring now
at the Duca in his robes, and again at the huddled ape-people. But after
ghastly seconds, Quetzalcoatl at last had seen enough.
Again the moonlight glinted against simitar teeth as the great, white,
puffy mouth yawned in its silent snarl. Quetzalcoatl reared his head a
little higher, slid further from his hole, and then looked up at the
dangling cage of barked withes.
In Kirby's mind stirred cloudily a remembrance of moments in the past:
the feel of Naida's first kiss, her look as they advanced to the altar
in the temple. Then he saw things as they were now, with Naida
surrounded by all the tribes of the apes, and with Quetzalcoatl staring
from beneath heavily lidded lashes at the whiteness of her.
Suddenly Kirby stirred to free his shoulder of Ivana's supine weight
against it, and he made himself look down his rifle. He let the breath
half out of his lungs, and nursed the trigger.
* * * * *
But he did not fire.
All at once he started so violently that he almost hurtled from the
tree. Suddenly, trembling, he lowered his rifle.
"Oh, thank God!" he yelped in the silence of the night.
The idea which had transformed him was perhaps the conception of a
lunatic. But it was still an idea, and offered a chance.
Again Kirby peered down his rifle. But he no longer aimed at Naida. As
Quetzalcoatl lifted white fangs, Kirby aimed deliberately at him, and
turned loose his fire.
With the first shot, the Serpent lurched back from the cage, snapped his
jaws, and closed evil, black eyes. From one lidded socket squirted dark
blood. As a second and third shot crashed into the cavernous fanged
mouth, and others ripped into the flat skull, Quetzalcoatl seemed dazed.
His head wavered back and forth and his hiss filled the night, but he
did nothing.
But all at once Kirby felt that he was _going_ to do something in a
second, and a great calm came upon him. He quickly jammed home a fresh
clip of shells.
"Nini! Ivana! Fire at the Serpent. Give him everything you've got! Do
you understand? Fire! He thinks that the ape-people have hurt him, and
he will be after them in a second. If we have any luck, he will do to
them what we never could have done, and maybe destroy himself at the
same time! Me, I'm going down there and get Naida now!"