The Metal Monster Part 10

She shook her head impatiently. A hand stole forth from beneath her veils, slender, long-fingered with nails like rosy pearls; above the wrist was coiled a golden dragon with wicked little crimson eyes. The slender white hand touched Ruth's head, turned it until the strange, flecked orbs looked directly into the misty ones of blue.

Long they gazed--and deep. Then she who had named herself Norhala thrust out a finger, touched the tear that hung upon Ruth's curled lashes, regarded it wonderingly.

Something of recognition, of memory, seemed to awaken within her.

"You are--troubled?" she asked with that halting effort.

Ruth shook her head.

"THEY--do not trouble you?"

She pointed to the huddled heaps strewing the hollow. And then I saw whence the light which had streamed from her great eyes came. For the little azure and golden stars paled, trembled, then flashed out like galaxies of tiny, cl.u.s.tered silver suns.

From that weird radiance Ruth shrank, affrighted.

"No--no," she gasped. "I weep for--HIM."

She pointed where Chiu-Ming lay, a brown blotch at the edge of the shattered men.

"For--him?" There was puzzlement in the faint voice. "For--that? But why?"

She looked at Chiu-Ming--and I knew that to her the sight of the crumpled form carried no recognition of the human, nothing of kin to her. There was a faint wonder in her eyes, no longer light-filled, when at last she turned back to us. Long she considered us.

"Now," she broke the silence, "now something stirs within me that it seems has long been sleeping. It bids me take you with me. Come!"

Abruptly she turned from us, glided to the crevice. We looked at each other, seeking council, decision.

"Chiu-Ming," Drake spoke. "We can't leave him like that. At least let's cover him from the vultures."

"Come." The woman had reached the mouth of the fissure.

"I'm afraid! Oh, Martin--I'm afraid." Ruth reached little trembling hands to her tall brother.

"Come!" Norhala called again. There was an echo of harshness, a clanging, peremptory and inexorable, in the chiming.

Ventnor shrugged his shoulders.

"Come, then," he said.

With one last look at the Chinese, the lammergeiers already circling about him, we walked to the crevice. Norhala waited, silent, brooding until we pa.s.sed her; then glided behind us.

Before we had gone ten paces I saw that the place was no fissure. It was a tunnel, a pa.s.sage hewn by human hands, its walls covered with the writhing dragon lines, its roof the mountain.

The swathed woman swept by us. Swiftly we followed her. Far, far ahead was a wan gleaming. It quivered, a faintly s.h.i.+mmering, ghostly curtain, a full mile away.

Now it was close; we pa.s.sed through it and were out of the tunnel.

Before us stretched a narrow gorge, a sword slash in the body of the towering giant under whose feet the tunnel crept. High above was the ribbon of the sky.

The sides were dark, but it came to me that here were no trees, no verdure of any kind. Its floor was strewn with boulders, fantastically shaped, almost indistinguishable in the fast closing dark.

Twin monoliths bulwarked the pa.s.sage end; the gigantic stones were leaning, crumbling. Fissures radiated from the opening, like deep wrinkles in the rock, showing where earth warping, range pressure, had long been working to close this hewn way.

"Stop," Norhala's abrupt, golden note halted us; and again through the clear eyes I saw the white stars.h.i.+ne flash.

"It may be well--" She spoke as though to herself. "It may be well to close this way. It is not needed--"

Her voice rang out again, vibrant, strangely disquieting, harmonious.

Murmurous chanting it was at first, rhythmic and low; ripples and flutings, tones and progressions utterly unknown to me; unfamiliar, abrupt, and alien themes that kept returning, droppings of crystal-clear jewels of sound, golden tollings--and all ordered, mathematical, GEOMETRIC, even as had been the gestures of the shapes; Lilliputians of the ruins, Brobdignagian of the haunted hollow.

What was it? I had it--IT WAS THOSE GESTURES TRANSFORMED INTO SOUND!

There was a movement down by the tunnel mouth. It grew more rapid, seemed to vibrate with her song. Within the darkness there were little flashes; glimmerings of light began to come and go--like little awakenings of eyes of soft, jeweled flames, like giant gorgeous fireflies; flashes of cloudy amber, gleam of rose, sparkles of diamonds and of opals, of emeralds and of rubies--blinking, gleaming.

A s.h.i.+mmering mist drew down around them--a swift and swirling mist.

It thickened, was shot with slender shuttled threads like cobweb, coruscating strands of light.

The s.h.i.+ning threads grew thicker, pulsed, were spangled with tiny vivid sparklings. They ran together, condensed--and all this in an instant, in a tenth of the time it takes me to write it.

From fiery mist and gemmed flashes came bolt upon bolt of lightning. The cliff face leaped out, a cataract of green flame. The fissures widened, the monoliths trembled, fell.

In the wake of that dazzling brilliancy came utter blackness. I opened my blinded eyes; slowly the flecks of green fire cleared. A faint lambency still clung to the cliff. By it I saw that the tunnel's mouth had vanished, had been sealed--where it had gaped were only tons of shattered rock.

Came a rus.h.i.+ng past us as of great bodies; something grazed my hand, something whose touch was like that of warm metal--but metal throbbing with life. They rushed by--and whispered down into silence.

"Come!" Norhala flitted ahead of us, a faintly luminous shape in the darkness. Swiftly we followed. I found Ruth beside me; felt her hand grip my wrist.

"Walter," she whispered, "Walter--she isn't human!"

"Nonsense," I muttered. "Nonsense, Ruth. What do you think she is--a G.o.ddess, a spirit of the Himalayas? She's as human as you or I."

"No." Even in the darkness I could sense the stubborn shake of her curly head. "Not all human. Or how could she have commanded those things? Or have summoned the lightnings that blasted the tunnel's mouth? And her skin and hair--they're too WONDERFUL, Walter.

"Why, she makes me look--look coa.r.s.e. And the light that hovers about her--why, it is by that light we are making our way. And when she touched me--I--I glowed--all through.

"Human, yes--but there is something else in her--something stronger than humanness, something that--makes it sleep!" she added astonis.h.i.+ngly.

The ground was level as a dancing floor. We followed the enigmatic glow--emanation, it seemed to me--from Norhala which was as a light for us to follow within the darkness. The high ribbon of sky had vanished--seemed to be overcast, for I could see no stars.

Within the darkness I began again to sense faint movement; soft stirring all about us. I had the feeling that on each side and behind us moved an invisible host.

"There's something moving all about us--going with us," Ruth echoed my thought.

"It's the wind," I said, and paused--for there was no wind.

From the blackness before us came a succession of curious, m.u.f.fled clickings, like a smothered mitrailleuse. The luminescence that clothed Norhala brightened, deepening the darkness.

"Cross!"