The A. Merritt MEGAPACK ®. Abraham Merritt
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And when next we tried to go through the hollow, to search for another outlet—we couldn’t. You know why,” he ended abruptly.
“But men in ancient armor. Men like those of Darius.” Dick broke the silence that had followed this amazing recital. “It’s incredible!”
“Yes,” agreed Ventnor, “isn’t it. But there they were. Of course, I don’t maintain that they were relics of Darius’s armies. They might have been of Xerxes before him—or of Artaxerxes after him. But there they certainly were, Drake, living, breathing replicas of exceedingly ancient Persians.
“Why, they might have been the wall carvings on the tomb of Khosroes come to life. I mention Darius because he fits in with the most plausible hypothesis. When Alexander the Great smashed his empire he did it rather thoroughly. There wasn’t much sympathy for the vanquished in those days. And it’s entirely conceivable that a city or two in Alexander’s way might have gathered up a fleeting regiment or so for protection and have decided not to wait for him, but to hunt for cover.
“Naturally, they would have gone into the almost inaccessible heart of the high ranges. There is nothing impossible in the theory that they found shelter at last up here. As long as history runs this has been a well-nigh unknown land. Penetrating some mountain-guarded, easily defended valley they might have decided to settle down for a time, have rebuilt a city, raised a government; laying low, in a sentence, waiting for the storm to blow over.
“Why did they stay? Well, they might have found the new life more pleasant than the old. And they might have been locked in their valley by some accident—landslides, rockfalls sealing up the entrance. There are a dozen reasonable possibilities.”
“But those who hunted you weren’t locked in,” objected Drake.
“No,” Ventnor grinned ruefully. “No, they certainly weren’t. Maybe we drifted into their preserves by a way they don’t know. Maybe they’ve found another way out. I’m sure I don’t know. But I do know what I saw.”
“The noises, Martin,” I said, for his description of these had been the description of those we had heard in the blue valley. “Have you heard them since?”
“Yes,” he answered, hesitating oddly.
“And you think those—those soldiers you saw are still hunting for you?”
“Haven’t a doubt of it,” he replied more cheerfully. “They didn’t look like chaps who would give up a hunt easily—at least not a hunt for such novel, interesting, and therefore desirable and delectable game as we must have appeared to them.”
“Martin,” I said decisively, “where’s your pony? We’ll try the hollow again, at once. There’s Ruth—and we’d never be able to hold back such numbers as you’ve described.”
“You feel strong enough to try it?”
CHAPTER IV
METAL WITH A BRAIN
The eagerness, the relief in his voice betrayed the tension, the anxiety which until now he had hidden so well; and hot shame burned me for my shrinking, my dread of again passing through that haunted vale.
“I certainly do.” I was once more master of myself. “Drake—don’t you agree?”
“Sure,” he replied. “Sure. I’ll look after Ruth—er—I mean Miss Ventnor.”
The glint of amusement in Ventnor’s eyes at this faded abruptly; his face grew somber.
“Wait,” he said. “I carried away some—some exhibits from the crevice of the noises, Goodwin.”
“What kind of exhibits?” I asked, eagerly.
“Put ’em where they’d be safe,” he continued. “I’ve an idea they’re far more curious than our armored men—and of far more importance. At any rate, we must take them with us.
“Go with Ruth, you and Drake, and look at them. And bring them back with the pony. Then we’ll make a start. A few minutes more probably won’t make much difference—but hurry.”
He turned back to his watch. Ordering Chiu-Ming to stay with him I followed Ruth and Drake down the ruined stairway. At the bottom she came to me, laid little hands on my shoulders.
“Walter,” she breathed, “I’m frightened. I’m so frightened I’m afraid to tell even Mart. He doesn’t like them, either, these little things you’re going to see. He likes them so little that he’s afraid to let me know how little he does like them.”
“But what are they? What’s to fear about them?” asked Drake.
“See what you think!” She led us slowly, almost reluctantly toward the rear of the fortress. “They lay in a little heap at the mouth of the cleft where we heard the noises. Martin picked them up and dropped them in a sack before we ran through the hollow.
“They’re grotesque and they’re almost cute, and they make me feel as though they were the tiniest tippy-tip of the claw of some incredibly large cat just stealing around the corner, a terrible cat, a cat as big as a mountain,” she ended breathlessly.
We climbed through the crumbling masonry into a central, open court. Here a clear spring bubbled up in a ruined and choked stone basin; close to the ancient well was their pony, contentedly browsing in the thick grass that grew around it. From one of its hampers Ruth took a large cloth bag.
“To carry them,” she said, and trembled.
We passed through what had once been a great door into another chamber larger than that we had just left; and it was in better preservation, the ceiling unbroken, the light dim after the blazing sun of the court. Near its center she halted us.
Before me ran a two-feet-wide ragged crack, splitting the floor and dropping down into black depths. Beyond was an expanse of smooth flagging, almost clear of debris.
Drake gave a low whistle. I followed his pointing finger. In the wall at the end whirled two enormous dragon shapes, cut in low relief. Their gigantic wings, their monstrous coils, covered the nearly unbroken surface, and these chimerae were the shapes upon the upthrust blocks of the haunted roadway.
In Ruth’s gaze I read a nameless fear, a half shuddering fascination.
But she was not looking at the cavern dragons.
Her gaze was fixed upon what at my first glance seemed to be a raised and patterned circle in the dust-covered floor. Not more than a foot in width, it shone wanly with a pale, metallic bluish luster, as though, I thought, it had been recently polished. Compared with the wall’s tremendous winged figures this floor design was trivial, ludicrously insignificant. What could there be about it to stamp that dread upon Ruth’s face?
I leaped the crevice; Dick joined me. Now I could see that the ring was not continuous. Its broken circle was made of sharply edged cubes about an inch in height, separated from each other with mathematical exactness by another inch of space. I counted them—there were nineteen.
Almost touching them with their bases were an equal number of pyramids, of tetrahedrons, as sharply angled and of similar length. They lay on their sides with tips pointing starlike to six spheres clustered like a conventionalized five petaled primrose in the exact center. Five of these spheres—the petals—were, I roughly calculated, about an inch and a half in diameter, the ball they enclosed larger by almost an inch.
So orderly was their arrangement, so much like a geometrical design nicely done by some clever child that I hesitated to disturb it. I bent, and stiffened, the first touch of dread upon me.
For within the ring, close to the clustering globes, was a miniature replica of the giant track in the poppied valley!
It stood out from the dust with the same hint of crushing force, the same die cut sharpness, the same metallic suggestion—and pointing toward the globes were the claw marks of the four spreading star points.
I reached down and picked up one