She heard him and his comrade walking away over dried leaves; their steps receded; a dry stick cracked distantly; then silence stealthily invaded the place like a cautious living thing, creeping unseen through the golden twilight of the woods.
Seated in her blanket, she drank the coffee; ate a little; then lay down again in the early sun, feeling the warmth of the heap of whitening coals at her feet, also.
For an hour she dozed awake, drowsily opening her eyes now and then to look across the glade at the pool over which a single dragon-fly glittered on guard.
Finally she rose resolutely, grasped a bit of soap, and went down to the edge of the pool.
Tressa was in flannel shirt and knickers when her husband and Selden hailed the camp and presently appeared walking slowly toward the dead fire.
Their grave faces checked her smile of greeting; her husband came up and laid one hand on her arm, looking at her out of thoughtful, preoccupied eyes.
"What is the Tchordagh?" he said in a low voice.
The girl"s quiet face went white.
"The--the Tchordagh!" she stammered.
"Yes, dear. What is it?"
"I don"t--don"t know where you heard that term," she whispered. "The Tchordagh is the--the power of Erlik. It is a term.... In it is comprehended all the evil, all the cunning, all the perverted spiritual intelligence of Evil,--its sinister might,--its menace. It is an Alouad-Yezidee term, and it is written in bra.s.s in Eighur characters on the Eight Towers, and on the Rampart of Gog and Magog;--nowhere else in the world!"
"It is written on a pine tree a few paces from this camp," said Cleves absently.
Selden said: "It has not been there more than an hour or two, Mrs.
Cleves. A square of bark was cut out and on the white surface of the wood this word is written in English."
"Can you tell us what it signifies?" asked Cleves, quietly.
Tressa"s studied effort at self-control was apparent to both men.
She said: "When that word is written, then it is a death struggle between all the powers of Darkness and those who have read the written letters of that word.... For it is written in The Iron Book that no one but the a.s.sa.s.sin of Khora.s.san--excepting the Eight Sheiks--shall read that written word and live to boast of having read it."
"Let us sit here and talk it over," said Selden soberly.
And when Tressa was seated on a fallen log, and Cleves settled down cross-legged at her feet, Selden spoke again, very soberly:
"On the edges of these woods, to the northwest, lies a sea of briers, close growing, interwoven and matted, strong and murderous as barbed wire.
"Miles out in this almost impenetrable region lies a patch of trees called Fool"s Acre.
"At Wells I heard that the only man who had ever managed to reach Fool"s Acre was a trapper, and that he was still living.
"I found him at Rainbow Lake--a very old man, who had a fairly clear recollection of Fool"s Acre and his exhausting journey there.
"And he told me that man had been there before he had. For there was a roofless stone house there, and the remains of a walled garden. And a skull deep in the wild gra.s.ses."
Selden paused and looked down at the recently healed scars on his wrists and hands.
"It was a rotten trip," he said bluntly. "It took me three days to cut a tunnel through that accursed tangle of matted brier and grey birch....
Fool"s Acre is a grove of giant trees--first growth pine, oak, and maple. Great outcrops of limestone ledges bound it on the east. A brook runs through the woods.
"There is a house there, _no longer roofless_, and built of slabs of fossil-pitted limestone. The gla.s.s in the windows is so old that it is iridescent.
"A seven-foot wall encloses the house, built also of slabs blasted out of the rock outcrop, and all pitted with fossil sh.e.l.ls.
"Inside is a garden--not the _remains_ of one--a beautiful garden full of unfamiliar flowers. And in this garden I saw the Yezidee on his knees _making living things out of lumps of dead earth_!"
"The Tchordagh!" whispered the girl.
"What was the Yezidee doing?" demanded Cleves nervously.
Involuntarily all three drew nearer each other there in the sunshine.
"It was difficult for me to see," said Selden in his quiet, serious voice. "It was nearly twilight: I lay flat on top of the wall under the curving branches of a huge syringa bush in full bloom. The Yezidees----"
"Were there two!" exclaimed Cleves.
"Two. They were squatting on the old stone path bordering one of the flower-beds." He turned to Tressa: "They both wore white cloths twisted around their heads, and long soft garments of white. Under these their bare, brown legs showed, but they wore things on their naked feet which were shaped like what we call Turkish slippers--only different."
"Black and green," nodded Tressa with the vague horror growing in her face.
"Yes. The soles of their shoes were bright green."
"Green is the colour sacred to Islam," said Tressa. "The priests of Satan defile it by staining with green the soles of their footwear."
After an interval: "Go on," said Cleves nervously.
Selden drew closer, and they bent their heads to listen:
"I don"t, even now, know what the Yezidees were actually doing. In the twilight it was hard to see clearly. But I"ll tell you what it looked like to me. One of these squatting creatures would scoop out a handful of soil from the flower-bed, and mould it for a few moments between his lean, sinewy fingers, and then he"d open his hands and--and something _alive_--something small like a rat or a toad, or G.o.d knows what, would escape from between his palms and run out into the gra.s.s----"
Selden"s voice failed and he looked at Cleves with sickened eyes.
"I can"t--can"t make you understand how repulsive to me it was to see a wriggling live thing creep out between their fingers and--and go running or scrambling away--little loathsome things with humpy backs that hopped or scurried through the gra.s.s----"
"What on earth _were_ these Yezidees doing, Tressa?" asked Cleves almost roughly.
The girl"s white face was marred by the imprints of deepening horror.
"It is the Tchor-Dagh," she said mechanically. "They are using every resource of h.e.l.l to destroy me--testing the gigantic power of Evil--as though it were some vast engine charged with thunderous destruction!--and they were testing it to discover its terrific capacity to annihilate----"
Her voice died in her dry throat; she dropped her bloodless visage into both hands and remained seated so.
Both men looked at her in silence, not daring to interfere. Finally the girl lifted her pallid face from her hands.
"That is what they were doing," she said in a dull voice. "Out of inanimate earth they were making things animate--living creatures--to--to test the h.e.l.lish power which they are storing--concentrating--for my destruction."