The A. Merritt MEGAPACK ®. Abraham Merritt
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I followed his gaze.
The towering cliffs were a scant half mile away. At some distant time there had been an enormous fall of rock. This, disintegrating, had formed a gently-curving breast which sloped down to merge with the valley’s floor. Willow and witch alder, stunted birch and poplar had found roothold, clothed it, until only their crowding outposts, thrusting forward in a wavering semicircle, held back seemingly by the blue hordes, showed where it melted into the meadows.
In the center of this breast, beginning half way up its slopes and stretching down into the flowered fields was a colossal imprint.
Gray and brown, it stood out against the green and blue of slope and level; a rectangle all of thirty feet wide, two hundred long, the heel faintly curved and from its hither end, like claws, four slender triangles radiating from it like twenty-four points of a ten-rayed star.
Irresistibly was it like a footprint—but what thing was there whose tread could leave such a print as this?
I ran up the slope—Drake already well in advance. I paused at the base of the triangles where, were this thing indeed a footprint, the spreading claws sprang from the flat of it.
The track was fresh. At its upper edges were clipped bushes and split trees, the white wood of the latter showing where they had been sliced as though by the stroke of a scimitar.
I stepped out upon the mark. It was as level as though planed; bent down and stared in utter disbelief of what my own eyes beheld. For stone and earth had been crushed, compressed, into a smooth, microscopically grained, adamantine complex, and in this matrix poppies still bearing traces of their coloring were imbedded like fossils. A cyclone can and does grip straws and thrust them unbroken through an inch board—but what force was there which could take the delicate petals of a flower and set them like inlay within the surface of a stone?
Into my mind came recollection of the wailings, the crashings in the night, of the weird glow that had flashed about us when the mist arose to hide the chained aurora.
“It was what we heard,” I said. “The sounds—it was then that this was made.”
“The foot of Shin-je!” Chiu-Ming’s voice was tremulous. “The lord of Hell has trodden here!”
I translated for Drake’s benefit.
“Has the lord of Hell but one foot?” asked Dick, politely.
“He bestrides the mountains,” said Chiu-Ming. “On the far side is his other footprint. Shin-je it was who strode the mountains and set here his foot.”
Again I interpreted.
Drake cast a calculating glance up to the cliff top.
“Two thousand feet, about,” he mused. “Well, if Shin-je is built in our proportions that makes it about right. The length of this thing would give him just about a two thousand foot leg. Yes—he could just about straddle that hill.”
“You’re surely not serious?” I asked in consternation.
“What the hell!” he exclaimed, “am I crazy? This is no foot mark. How could it be? Look at the mathematical nicety with which these edges are stamped out—as though by a die—
“That’s what it reminds me of—a die. It’s as if some impossible power had been used to press it down. Like—like a giant seal of metal in a mountain’s hand. A sigil—a seal—”
“But why?” I asked. “What could be the purpose—”
“Better ask where the devil such a force could be gotten together and how it came here,” he said. “Look—except for this one place there isn’t a mark anywhere. All the bushes and the trees, all the poppies and the grass are just as they ought to be.
“How did whoever or whatever it was that made this, get here and get away without leaving any trace but this? Damned if I don’t think Chiu-Ming’s explanation puts less strain upon the credulity than any I could offer.”
I peered about. It was so. Except for the mark, there was no slightest sign of the unusual, the abnormal.
But the mark was enough!
“I’m for pushing up a notch or two and getting into the gorge before dark,” he was voicing my own thought. “I’m willing to face anything human—but I’m not keen to be pressed into a rock like a flower in a maiden’s book of poems.” Just at twilight we drew out of the valley into the pass. We traveled a full mile along it before darkness forced us to make camp. The gorge was narrow. The far walls but a hundred feet away; but we had no quarrel with them for their neighborliness, no! Their solidity, their immutability, breathed confidence back into us.
And after we had found a deep niche capable of holding the entire caravan we filed within, ponies and all, I for one perfectly willing thus to spend the night, let the air at dawn be what it would. We dined within on bread and tea, and then, tired to the bone, sought each his place upon the rocky floor. I slept well, waking only once or twice by Chiu-Ming’s groanings; his dreams evidently were none of the pleasantest. If there was an aurora I neither knew nor cared. My slumber was dreamless.
CHAPTER III
RUTH VENTNOR
The dawn, streaming into the niche, awakened us. A covey of partridges venturing too close yielded three to our guns. We breakfasted well, and a little later were pushing on down the cleft.
Its descent, though gradual, was continuous, and therefore I was not surprised when soon we began to come upon evidences of semi-tropical vegetation. Giant rhododendrons and tree ferns gave way to occasional clumps of stately kopek and clumps of the hardier bamboos. We added a few snow cocks to our larder—although they were out of their habitat, flying down into the gorge from their peaks and table-lands for some choice tidbit.
All that day we marched on, and when at night we made camp, sleep came to us quickly and overmastering. An hour after dawn we were on our way. A brief stop we made for lunch; pressed forward.
It was close to two when we caught the first sight of the ruins.
The soaring, verdure-clad walls of the canyon had long been steadily marching closer. Above, between their rims the wide ribbon of sky was like a fantastically shored river, shimmering, dazzling; every cove and headland edged with an opalescent glimmering as of shining pearly beaches.
And as though we were sinking in that sky stream’s depths its light kept lessening, darkening imperceptibly with luminous shadows of ghostly beryl, drifting veils of pellucid aquamarine, limpid mists of glaucous chrysolite.
Fainter, more crepuscular became the light, yet never losing its crystalline quality. Now the high overhead river was but a brook; became a thread. Abruptly it vanished.
We passed into a tunnel, fern walled, fern roofed, garlanded with tawny orchids, gay with carmine fungus and golden moss. We stepped out into a blaze of sunlight.
Before us lay a wide green bowl held in the hands of the clustered hills; shallow, circular, as though, while plastic still, the thumb of God had run round its rim, shaping it. Around it the peaks crowded, craning their lofty heads to peer within.
It was about a mile in its diameter, this hollow, as my gaze then measured it. It had three openings—one that lay like a crack in the northeast slope; another, the tunnel mouth through which we had come. The third lifted itself out of the bowl, creeping up the precipitous bare scarp of the western barrier straight to the north, clinging to the ochreous rock up and up until it vanished around a far distant shoulder.
It was a wide and bulwarked road, a road that spoke as clearly as though it had tongue of human hands which had cut it there in the mountain’s breast. An ancient road weary beyond belief beneath the tread of uncounted years.
From the hollow the blind soul of loneliness groped out to greet us!
Never had I felt such loneliness as that which lapped the lip of the verdant bowl. It was tangible—as though it had been poured from some reservoir of misery. A pool of despair—