The Collected SF & Fantasy Works. Abraham Merritt
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into the faces of the jeweled giants standing guard over them. And when the little breeze walked upon them it was as though they bent beneath the soft tread and were brushed by the sweeping skirts of unseen, hastening Presences.
Like a vast prayer-rug, sapphire and silken, the poppies stretched to the gray feet of the mountain. Between their southern edge and the clustering summits a row of faded brown, low hills knelt — like brown-robed, withered and weary old men, backs bent, faces hidden between outstretched arms, palms to the earth and brows touching earth within them — in the East’s immemorial attitude of worship.
I half expected them to rise — and as I watched a man appeared on one of the bowed, rocky shoulders, abruptly, with the ever-startling suddenness which in the strange light of these latitudes objects spring into vision. As he stood scanning my camp there arose beside him a laden pony, and at its head a Tibetan peasant. The first figure waved its hand; came striding down the hill.
As he approached I took stock of him. A young giant, three good inches over six feet, a vigorous head with unruly clustering black hair; a clean-cut, clean-shaven American face.
“I’m Dick Drake,” he said, holding out his hand. “Richard Keen Drake, recently with Uncle’s engineers in France.”
“My name is Goodwin.” I took his hand, shook it warmly. “Dr. Walter T. Goodwin.”
“Goodwin the botanist —? Then I know you!” he exclaimed. “Know all about you, that is. My father admired your work greatly. You knew him — Professor Alvin Drake.”
I nodded. So he was Alvin Drake’s son. Alvin, I knew, had died about a year before I had started on this journey. But what was his son doing in this wilderness?
“Wondering where I came from?” he answered my unspoken question. “Short story. War ended. Felt an irresistible desire for something different. Couldn’t think of anything more different from Tibet — always wanted to go there anyway. Went. Decided to strike over toward Turkestan. And here I am.”
I felt at once a strong liking for this young giant. No doubt, subconsciously, I had been feeling the need of companionship with my own kind. I even wondered, as I led the way into my little camp, whether he would care to join fortunes with me in my journeyings.
His father’s work I knew well, and although this stalwart lad was unlike what one would have expected Alvin Drake — a trifle dried, precise, wholly abstracted with his experiments — to beget, still, I reflected, heredity like the Lord sometimes works in mysterious ways its wonders to perform.
It was almost with awe that he listened to me instruct Chiu–Ming as to just how I wanted supper prepared, and his gaze dwelt fondly upon the Chinese busy among his pots and pans.
We talked a little, desultorily, as the meal was prepared — fragments of traveler’s news and gossip, as is the habit of journeyers who come upon each other in the silent places. Ever the speculation grew in his face as he made away with Chiu–Ming’s artful concoctions.
Drake sighed, drawing out his pipe.
“A cook, a marvel of a cook. Where did you get him?”
Briefly I told him.
Then a silence fell upon us. Suddenly the sun dipped down behind the flank of the stone giant guarding the valley’s western gate; the whole vale swiftly darkened — a flood of crystal-clear shadows poured within it. It was the prelude to that miracle of unearthly beauty seen nowhere else on this earth — the sunset of Tibet.
We turned expectant eyes to the west. A little, cool breeze raced down from the watching steeps like a messenger, whispered to the nodding poppies, sighed and was gone. The poppies were still. High overhead a homing kite whistled, mellowly.
As if it were a signal there sprang out in the pale azure of the western sky row upon row of cirrus cloudlets, rank upon rank of them, thrusting their heads into the path of the setting sun. They changed from mottled silver into faint rose, deepened to crimson.
“The dragons of the sky drink the blood of the sunset,” said Chiu–Ming.
As though a gigantic globe of crystal had dropped upon the heavens, their blue turned swiftly to a clear and glowing amber — then as abruptly shifted to a luminous violet A soft green light pulsed through the valley.
Under it, like hills ensorcelled, the rocky walls about it seemed to flatten. They glowed and all at once pressed forward like gigantic slices of palest emerald jade, translucent, illumined, as though by a circlet of little suns shining behind them.
The light faded, robes of deepest amethyst dropped around the mountain’s mighty shoulders. And then from every snow and glacier-crowned peak, from minaret and pinnacle and towering turret, leaped forth a confusion of soft peacock flames, a host of irised prismatic gleamings, an ordered chaos of rainbows.
Great and small, interlacing and shifting, they ringed the valley with an incredible glory — as if some god of light itself had touched the eternal rocks and bidden radiant souls stand forth.
Through the darkening sky swept a rosy pencil of living light; that utterly strange, pure beam whose coming never fails to clutch the throat of the beholder with the hand of ecstasy, the ray which the Tibetans name the Ting–Pa. For a moment this rosy finger pointed to the east, then arched itself, divided slowly into six shining, rosy bands; began to creep downward toward the eastern horizon where a nebulous, pulsing splendor arose to meet it.
And as we watched I heard a gasp from Drake. And it was echoed by my own.
For the six beams were swaying, moving with ever swifter motion from side to side in ever-widening sweep, as though the hidden orb from which they sprang were swaying like a pendulum.
Faster and faster the six high-flung beams swayed — and then broke — broke as though a gigantic, unseen hand had reached up and snapped them!
An instant the severed ends ribboned aimlessly, then bent, turned down and darted earthward into the welter of clustered summits at the north and swiftly were gone, while down upon the valley fell night.
“Good God!” whispered Drake. “It was as though something reached up, broke those rays and drew them down — like threads.”
“I saw it.” I struggled with bewilderment. “I saw it. But I never saw anything like it before,” I ended, most inadequately.
“It was PURPOSEFUL,” he whispered. “It was DELIBERATE. As though something reached up, juggled with the rays, broke them, and drew them down like willow withes.”
“The devils that dwell here!” quavered Chiu–Ming.
“Some magnetic phenomenon.” I was half angry at myself for my own touch of panic. “Light can be deflected by passage through a magnetic field. Of course that’s it. Certainly.”
“I don’t know.” Drake’s tone was doubtful indeed. “It would take a whale of a magnetic field to have done THAT— it’s inconceivable.” He harked back to his first idea. “It was so — so DAMNED deliberate,” he repeated.
“Devils —” muttered the frightened Chinese.
“What’s that?” Drake gripped my arm and pointed to the north. A deeper blackness had grown there while we had been talking, a pool of darkness against which the mountain summits stood out, blade-sharp edges faintly luminous.
A gigantic lance of misty green fire darted from the blackness and thrust its point into the heart of the zenith; following it, leaped into the sky a host of the sparkling spears of light, and now the blackness was like an ebon hand, brandishing a thousand javelins of tinseled flame.
“The aurora,” I said.
“It ought to be a good one,” mused Drake, gaze intent upon it. “Did you notice the big sun spot?”
I shook my head.
“The biggest I ever saw. Noticed it first at dawn this morning. Some little aurora lighter — that spot. I