"You"ll give me nothing," he interrupted fiercely; then, his pa.s.sion breaking through all restraint--"Yes, you d.a.m.ned witch--you"ll give me back my sister!"
In his rage he had spoken English; she could not, of course, have understood the words, but their anger and hatred she did understand.
Her serenity quivered, broke. The strange stars within her eyes began to glitter forth as they had when she had summoned the Smiting Thing.
Unheeding, Ventnor thrust out a hand, caught her roughly by one bare, lovely shoulder.
"Give her back to me, I say!" he cried. "Give her back to me!"
The woman"s eyes grew--awful. Out of the distended pupils the strange stars blazed; upon her face was something of the G.o.ddess outraged. I felt the shadow of Death"s wings.
"No! No--Norhala! No, Martin!" the veils of inhuman calm shrouding Ruth were torn; swiftly the girl we knew looked out from them. She threw herself between the two, arms outstretched.
"Ventnor!" Drake caught his arms, held them tight; "that"s not the way to save her!"
Ventnor stood between us, quivering, half sobbing. Never until then had I realized how great, how absorbing was that love of his for Ruth. And the woman saw it, too, even though dimly; envisioned it humanly. For, under the shock of human pa.s.sion, that which I thought then as utterly unknown to her as her cold serenity was to us, the sleeping soul--I use the popular word for those emotional complexes that are peculiar to mankind--stirred, awakened.
Wrath fled from her knitted brows; her eyes dropping to the girl, lost their dreadfulness; softened. She turned them upon Ventnor, they brooded upon him; within their depths a half-troubled interest, a questioning.
A smile dawned upon the exquisite face, humanizing it, transfiguring it, touching with tenderness the sweet and sleeping mouth--as a hovering dream the lips of the slumbering maid.
And on the face of Ruth, as upon a mirror, I watched that same slow, understanding tenderness reflected!
"Come," said Norhala, and led the way through the sparkling curtains.
As she pa.s.sed, an arm around Ruth"s neck, I saw the marks of Ventnor"s fingers upon her white shoulder, staining its purity, marring it like a blasphemy.
For an instant I hung behind, watching their figures grow misty within the shining shadows; then followed hastily. Entering the mists I was conscious of a pleasant tingling, an acceleration of the pulse, an increase of that sense of well-being which, I grew suddenly aware, had since the beginning of our strange journey minimized the nervous attrition of constant contact with the abnormal.
Striving to cla.s.sify, to reduce to order, my sensations I drew close to the others, overtaking them in a dozen paces. A dozen paces more and we stepped out of the curtainings.
CHAPTER XI. THE METAL EMPEROR
We stood at the edge of a well whose walls were of that same green vaporous iridescence through which we had just come, but finer grained, compact; as though here the corpuscles of which they were woven were far closer spun. Thousands of feet above us the mighty cylinder uprose, and in the lessened circle that was its mouth I glimpsed the bright stars; and knew by this it opened into the free air.
All of half a mile in diameter was this shaft, and ringed regularly along its height by wide amethystine bands--like rings of a hollow piston. They were, in color, replicas of that I had glimpsed before our descent into this place and against whose gleaming cataracts the outlines of the incredible city had lowered. And they were in motion, spinning smoothly, and swiftly.
Only one swift glance I gave them, my eyes held by a most extraordinary--edifice--altar--machine--I could not find the word for it--then.
Its base was a scant hundred yards from where we had paused and concentric with the sides of the pit. It stood upon a thick circular pedestal of what appeared to be cloudy rock crystal supported by hundreds of thick rods of the same material.
Up from it lifted the structure, a thing of glistening cones and spinning golden disks; fantastic yet disquietingly symmetrical; bizarre as an angled headdress worn by a mountainous Javanese G.o.d--yet coldly, painfully mathematical. In every direction the cones pointed, seemingly interwoven of strands of metal and of light.
What was their color? It came to me--that of the mysterious element which stains the sun"s corona, that diadem seen only when our day star is in eclipse; the unknown element which science has named coronium, which never yet has been found on earth and that may be electricity in its one material form; electricity that is ponderable; force whose vibrations are keyed down to ma.s.s; power trans.m.u.ted into substance.
Thousands upon thousands the cones bristled, pyramiding to the base of one tremendous spire that tapered up almost to the top of the shaft itself.
In their grouping the mind caught infinite calculations carried into infinity; an apotheosis of geometry compa.s.sing the rhythms of unknown spatial dimensions; concentration of the equations of the star hordes.
The mathematics of the Cosmos.
From the left of the crystalline base swept an enormous sphere. It was twice the height of a tall man, and it was a paler blue than any of these Things I had seen, almost, indeed, an azure; different, too, in other subtle, indefinable ways.
Behind it glided a pair of the pyramidal shapes, their pointed tips higher by a yard or more than the top of the sphere. They paused--regarding us. Out from the opposite arc of the crystal pedestal moved six other globes, somewhat smaller than the first and of a deep purplish l.u.s.ter.
They separated, lining up on each side of the leader now standing a little in advance of the twin tetrahedrons, rigid and motionless as watching guards.
There they stood--that enigmatic row, intent, studying us beneath their G.o.d or altar or machine of cones and disks within their cylinder walled with light.
And at that moment there crystallized within my consciousness the sublimation of all the strangenesses of all that had gone before, a panic loneliness as though I had wandered into an alien world--a world as unfamiliar to humanity, as unfamiliar with it as our own would seem to a thinking, mobile crystal adrift among men.
Norhala raised her white arms in salutation; from her throat came a lilting theme of her weirdly ordered, golden chanting. Was it speech, I wondered; and if so--prayer or entreaty or command?
The great sphere quivered and undulated. Swifter than the eye could follow it dilated; opened!
Where the azure globe had been, flashed out a disk of flaming splendors, the very secret soul of flowered flame! And simultaneously the pyramids leaped up and out behind it--two gigantic, four-rayed stars blazing with cold blue fires.
The green auroral curtainings flared out, ran with streaming radiance--as though some Spirit of Jewels had broken bonds of enchantment and burst forth jubilant, flooding the shaft with its freed glories. Norhala"s song ceased; an arm dropped down upon the shoulders of Ruth.
Then woman and girl began to float toward the radiant disk.
As one, the three of us sprang after them. I felt a shock that was like a quick, abrupt tap upon every nerve and muscle, stiffening them into helpless rigidity.
Paralyzing that sharp, unseen contact had been, but nothing of pain followed it. Instead it created an extraordinary acuteness of sight and hearing, an abnormal keying up of the observational faculties, as though the energy so mysteriously drawn from our motor centers had been thrown back into the sensory.
I could take in every minute detail of the flashing miracle of gemmed fires and its flaming ministers. Halfway between them and us Norhala and Ruth drifted; I could catch no hint of voluntary motion on their part and knew that they were not walking, but were being borne onward by some manifestation of that same force which held us motionless.
I forgot them in my contemplation of the Disk.
It was oval, twenty feet in height, I judged, and twelve in its greatest width. A broad band, translucent as sun golden chrysolite, ran about its periphery.
Set within this zodiac and s.p.a.ced at mathematically regular intervals were nine ovoids of intensely living light. They shone like nine gigantic cabochon cut sapphires; they ranged from palest, watery blue up through azure and purple and down to a ghostly mauve shot with sullen undertones of crimson.
In each of them was throned a flame that seemed the very fiery essence of vitality.
The--BODY--was convex, swelling outward like the boss of a shield; shimmering rosy-gray and crystalline. From the vital ovoids ran a pattern of sparkling threads, irised and brilliant as floss of molten jewels; converging with interfacings of spirals, of volutes and of triangles into the nucleus.
And that nucleus, what was it?
Even now I can but guess--brain in part as we understand brain, certainly; but far, far more than that in its energies, its powers.
It was like an immense rose. An incredible rose of a thousand close cl.u.s.tering petals. It blossomed with a myriad shifting hues. And instant by instant the flood of varicolored flame that poured into its petalings down from the sapphire ovoids waxed and waned in crescendoes and diminuendoes of relucent harmonies--ecstatic, awesome.
The heart of the rose was a star of incandescent ruby.
From the flaming crimson center to aureate, flashing penumbra it was instinct with and poured forth power--power vast and conscious.
Not with that same completeness could I realize the ministering star shapes, half hidden as they were by the Disk. Their radiance was less, nor had they its miracle of pulsing gem fires. Blue they were, blue of a peculiar vibrancy, and blue were the glistening threads that ran down from blue-black circular convexities set within each of the points visible to me.