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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Abraham Merritt's 'The Face in the Abyss' is a groundbreaking sci-fi classic that transports readers to a vivid and fantastical world filled with ancient mysteries and supernatural entities. Merritt's rich prose weaves a tale of exploration, adventure, and intrigue, all set against a backdrop of eerie landscapes and otherworldly beings. This work is an early example of science fiction writing that combines elements of horror and the supernatural, making it a standout in the genre. With its atmospheric descriptions and imaginative storytelling, 'The Face in the Abyss' offers readers a captivating and immersive reading experience. Abraham Merritt, a prominent journalist of his time, drew inspiration from his love of mythology and the occult, as well as his own experiences as an amateur archaeologist. His background in journalism and interest in the unknown shine through in the meticulous world-building and intricate plot of 'The Face in the Abyss'. Merritt's unique perspective and extensive research lend an air of authenticity to his narrative, enhancing the overall reading experience for fans of speculative fiction. For fans of early science fiction and supernatural tales, 'The Face in the Abyss' is a must-read. Merritt's masterful blend of genres and his vivid imagination make this novel a timeless classic that continues to captivate readers to this day. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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THE FACE IN THE ABYSS: Sci-Fi Classic
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Table of Contents
Introduction
At the brink where rational inquiry strains against immemorial mystery, The Face in the Abyss invites the reader to witness modern ambition descending into a hidden world whose beauty and menace are inseparable, forcing every step toward discovery to double as a step toward temptation, and every new marvel to ask whether the price of knowing—measured in loyalty, in identity, and in the limits of human will—might be more dangerous than the ignorance it dispels, and whether the abyss gazing back reveals a truer face than the one we bring into it.
Abraham Merritt’s The Face in the Abyss belongs to the early twentieth-century tradition of science-fantasy and lost-world romance, a hybrid that fuses speculative science with mythic antiquity. Set largely in the Andes, it springs from the pulp magazine era, with material first appearing in the 1920s and early 1930s before consolidation as a novel in the early 1930s. The book’s milieu reflects the adventurous spirit of its publication context: high-stakes exploration, occult speculation, and a fascination with hidden civilizations. Merritt, a widely read American fantasist of the period, orchestrates these elements with a storyteller’s instinct for page-turning momentum and visionary spectacle.
At the story’s outset, a band of treasure-seekers penetrates remote Andean terrain and blunders into a valley whose isolation has preserved a culture unlike any known to the outside world. Beneath its cliffs waits a cavern whose central presence—a monumental visage embedded in darkness—seems less artifact than sentience. The newcomers are swiftly entangled in rivalries and allegiances that predate their arrival, and their quest for riches becomes a negotiation with awe. Merritt allows the mystery to unfold through encounters, visions, and shifting loyalties, building tension by keeping the unknown close enough to touch while withholding the mechanisms that would domesticate it.
The novel’s voice is ornate yet propulsive, a richly embroidered register that lingers over textures, light, and mineral sheen while surging toward climactic confrontations. Merritt’s descriptive imagination favors the luminous and the abyssal, often in the same image, producing an atmosphere at once ceremonial and feral. The tone oscillates between reverent wonder and mounting dread, and the narrative cadence alternates swift action with hypnotic tableaux. Readers encounter scientific explanations, folklore, and conjecture braided together without apology, creating a dream-logic in which reason is tested rather than discarded. The result is an immersive reading experience that feels simultaneously archaic and ahead of its time.
Beneath its adventure scaffolding, the book examines the magnetism of forbidden power, the mutability of identity under extreme pressure, and the ethics of contact with the radically other. Its lost city is not simply a backdrop but a crucible in which faith, skepticism, ambition, and love are refined or consumed. The repeated pull toward the abyss asks whether revelation purifies or corrupts, and whether mastery of secret forces can ever be disentangled from surrender to them. In the tension between modern instrumentation and primordial rites, Merritt probes how knowledge is gathered, who is entitled to wield it, and what it costs.
For contemporary readers, The Face in the Abyss endures as both a fountainhead of science-fantasy imagery and a text that invites critical reflection. Its synthesis of speculative science with myth prefigures much later genre hybridity, while its visions of subterranean splendor anticipate worldbuilding techniques now common in fantasy and science fiction. At the same time, its expeditionary premise foregrounds questions of extraction, cultural encounter, and the gaze of outsiders—issues that resonate with ongoing conversations about representation and power. Read attentively, the novel offers both exhilaration and a vantage point from which to examine inherited tropes, their allure, and their limits.
Approached today with curiosity and care, Merritt’s tale rewards readers with a heightened sense of wonder balanced by a sharpening of ethical awareness. It invites us to move slowly when the prose luxuriates, and to lean forward when the plot quickens, trusting that its mixture of rapture and suspicion is intentional. As a landmark of the lost-world mode, it demonstrates how a narrative of descent can also be a journey inward, toward the boundaries of will and imagination. The Face in the Abyss remains compelling because it makes the unknown feel intimate, and makes every revelation a test of our desires.
Synopsis
Abraham Merritt’s The Face in the Abyss, first published as a novel in 1931, expands an earlier 1923 magazine story into a full-length science-fantasy romance. It opens in the Andes, where an American adventurer joins a rough company of treasure seekers chasing rumors of a lost city. Their pragmatic greed clashes with hints of something far older than local legend. A violent encounter strands the protagonist among captors who know more about the mountains’ secrets than they admit. Pressed forward by necessity rather than heroism, he enters a forbidden valley whose isolation has preserved not only wealth, but a perilous, alien wonder.
At the valley’s heart yawns a pit whose floor holds a monumental visage, the eponymous face, at once sculpture and enigma. To those who dwell nearby, it is an object of awe, taboo, and occasionally counsel; to outsiders, it is a threat and a promise of power. The adventurer’s first encounter with it is disorienting, mingling fear with a fascination that begins to loosen his allegiance to his former companions. Through this meeting he is noticed by a woman from within the hidden society, a figure bound to ancient rites. Her guarded warnings imply that the abyss judges as much as it reveals.
Drawn into the concealed civilization, he witnesses a culture that fuses archaic ritual with sophisticated, quasi-scientific devices. Light, metal, and subtle energies are employed alongside temples, processions, and oaths; the effect is neither purely magical nor purely mechanical. The city’s rulers maintain their authority through spectacle and dread, but also through a scrupulous caretaking of knowledge inherited from an earlier age. Factions contend quietly: some seek renewal, others stability, and some merely survival. The outsider, valued for his novelty yet distrusted for his motives, learns just enough to recognize how little he understands, and how easily ambition can trigger catastrophe.
His chief interpreter is the woman who first approached him, a servant of a cult centered on a serpent mother, a numinous presence intertwined with the face in the abyss yet distinct from it. Through her, he glimpses a theology of balance, in which power must answer to memory and restraint. She also forces him to confront his complicity with the exploiters who brought him. As they move through gardens, vaults, and shrines, they encounter life and matter shaped by laws unfamiliar to surface science. The city’s splendors appear inseparable from dangers its priests and scholars can only partly control.
Opposing this wary guardianship stands a formidable leader whose reach extends from the throne to the laboratories and the barracks. He views the abyss as an instrument to consolidate rule and extend it beyond the valley, treating both faith and curiosity as tools. Diplomacy masks coercion; alliances tilt according to omens and experiments. The protagonist, given chances to leave or to enrich himself, hesitates as each revelation reframes his goals. Exploration turns into witness. He becomes aware that the valley’s survival—perhaps more—depends on a choice between mastery and stewardship, and that any misstep could awaken forces indifferent to human schemes.
Tensions converge toward an irrevocable rite in which the abyss will be asked to answer, and the city’s factions must declare themselves. The woman’s counsel and the outsider’s evolving conscience meet the ruler’s demand for control. Trials of courage are less feats of arms than acts of refusal or acceptance, enacted before intelligences that may not be entirely benign. The paths forward narrow: escape with knowledge that could corrupt the outer world, collude and gain dominion, or attempt a third way that risks everything. Merritt leads these choices to a confrontation that is decisive without exhausting the mysteries he has built.
The Face in the Abyss endures for its richly hybrid imagination: a lost-world adventure animated by speculative devices and metaphysical unease. Merritt’s ornate sensibility frames questions about the ethics of discovery, the relation between sacred and scientific power, and the cost of turning wonder into leverage. Its Andean setting and visionary artifacts became touchstones for later pulp and modern fantasy, while its restraint in naming the ultimate forces preserves their unsettling ambiguity. Without relying on puzzles alone, the book dwells on responsibility in the face of marvels—an argument that keeps its resonance whenever hidden knowledge beckons with both salvation and peril.
Historical Context
Abraham Merritt’s The Face in the Abyss emerged from America’s interwar pulp culture. The title novelette first ran in Argosy All-Story Weekly in 1923; Merritt later expanded the material with The Snake Mother (serialized in 1930), and the combined text appeared as a novel in 1931. Set in a hidden Andean realm, the story channels contemporary fascination with South American antiquities and remote geographies. Its publication spanned a period of booming magazine circulation, rapid technological change, and shifting global awareness after the First World War. The book’s composite origin exemplifies how pulp serialization shaped narrative scope, pacing, and audience expectations.
At the time, Argosy and other pulp magazines formed a nationwide institution of inexpensive, mass-circulation fiction. Distributed through newsstands and rail depots, they reached millions weekly, rewarding cliffhangers and vivid set pieces. Merritt, a prominent editor in William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper empire, including the Sunday supplement The American Weekly, wrote fiction alongside journalism, benefiting from both publicity and research resources. His ornate style, reliance on mythic motifs, and emphasis on sensational discovery fit the editorial imperatives of pulps that favored high adventure and “lost world” narratives, and he enjoyed visibility within the vast Hearst media network that shaped early twentieth-century American popular culture.
The 1910s and 1920s saw headline-making archaeological discoveries that captivated readers Merritt wrote for. Hiram Bingham’s expeditions publicized Machu Picchu to North American audiences after 1911, while Howard Carter’s 1922 discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb ignited global Egyptomania. In the same decade, Carnegie Institution projects at Chichén Itzá and National Geographic coverage popularized visions of sophisticated pre-Columbian civilizations. Such events encouraged fiction that imagined surviving remnants of ancient cultures in remote landscapes. The Face in the Abyss leverages that climate, adopting Andean settings and ritual iconography recognizable from contemporary reportage, while transforming them into a speculative tableau of hidden inheritance and peril.
Interwar exploration culture reinforced these themes. Geographic societies, museum expeditions, and newspaper-sponsored journeys supplied a steady stream of dispatches on unmapped plateaus, highland peoples, and jungle ruins. Advances in portable cameras, aviation, and radio made distant terrains seem both accessible and mysterious, a tension pulp writers exploited. South America, guarded by Andean cordilleras and Amazonian basins, appeared in U.S. media as a frontier of wonders and hazards. Merritt’s narrative of a secluded highland enclave aligns with this reportage, staging encounters that echo expeditionary accounts—logistical hardship, guides and intermediaries, and the rivalries of treasure-hunters—without binding itself to any specific expedition’s documented itinerary.
The era’s occult renaissance also informs the book’s imagery. Theosophy and related esoteric movements had, since the late nineteenth century, blended Eastern philosophies, Hermetic ideas, and speculative prehistory for mass audiences. Popular nonfiction and fiction trafficked in Atlantis, subterranean races, and survival of ancient wisdom. Merritt, known to draw on mythological compendia and occult literature, channels that milieu through symbols of serpents, petrified divinities, and forbidden rites. Rather than offering academic anthropology, the narrative reflects a widespread interwar habit of translating comparative myth and folklore into adventure frameworks, where ritual power and prehistoric memory become narrative engines for wonder and dread.
The book’s assembly during 1923–1931 straddled the prosperity of the Roaring Twenties and the shock of the 1929 market crash. Pulp periodicals, sold for cents, were resilient entertainment during contraction, sustaining demand for exotic adventures and supernatural thrills. Printing innovations lowered costs; distribution chains kept titles visible despite turbulent news cycles. Within that marketplace, Merritt’s brand—sumptuous prose, high-stakes peril, and transgressive mysteries—provided reliable draw. The Face in the Abyss thus belongs to an economy of narrative escape characteristic of early Depression culture, while still bearing the exuberance of 1920s magazine fiction, with its confidence in spectacle, serial momentum, and dramatic reversals.
Like many “lost race” tales, the novel inherits conventions shaped by imperial and colonial discourse. Turn-of-the-century adventure fiction often positioned Western prospectors, scientists, or soldiers as mediators of hidden realms, a formula repeated across magazines and early cinema. U.S. reporting on Latin America frequently exoticized Indigenous cultures even while admiring monumental relics. Merritt’s Andean setting follows these templates—treasure-seekers, guides, and a concealed civilization—yet it also grants its ancient culture formidable science, art, and statecraft. Readers today can trace how popular media of the 1920s framed cultural difference, and how Merritt worked within and occasionally complicated those narrative hierarchies.
Contemporary writers of weird and adventure fiction took notice of Merritt’s achievements; H. P. Lovecraft, for example, praised his imagination and atmosphere in essays on the genre. The Face in the Abyss exemplifies an interwar synthesis of scientific romance, occult fantasy, and archaeological adventure, staging confrontations between modern seekers and immemorial forces. Its Andean backdrop, treasure motifs, and ceremonial imagery mirror the media currents that fed public curiosity about antiquity. At the same time, the book’s recurring unease about unleashed powers and moral choice reflects a broader era wrestling with the promises and perils of modern knowledge, technology, and empire.
THE FACE IN THE ABYSS: Sci-Fi Classic
1SUARRA
Nicholas Graydon ran into Starrett in Quito. Rather, Starrett sought him out there. Graydon had often heard of the big West Coast adventurer, but their trails had never crossed. It was with lively curiosity that he opened his door to his visitor.
Starrett came to the point at once. Graydon had heard the legend of the treasure train bringing to Pizarro the ransom of the Inca Atahualpa[1]? And that its leaders, learning of the murder of their monarch by the butcher-boy Conquistador, had turned aside and hidden the treasure somewhere in the Andean wilderness?
Graydon had heard it, hundreds of times; had even considered hunting for it. He said so. Starrett nodded.
“I know where it is,” he said[1q].
Graydon laughed.
In the end Starrett convinced him; convinced him, at least, that he had something worth looking into.
Graydon rather liked the big man. There was a bluff directness that made him overlook the hint of cruelty in eyes and jaw. There were two others with him, Starrett said, both old companions. Graydon asked why they had picked him out. Starrett bluntly told him—because they knew he could afford to pay the expenses of the expedition. They would all share equally in the treasure. If they didn’t find it, Graydon was a first-class mining engineer, and the region they were going into was rich in minerals. He was practically sure of making some valuable discovery on which they could cash in.
Graydon considered. There were no calls upon him. He had just passed his thirty-fourth birthday, and since he had been graduated from the Harvard School of Mines eleven years ago he had never had a real holiday. He could well afford the cost. There would be some excitement, if nothing else.
After he had looked over Starrett’s two comrades—Soames, a lanky, saturnine, hard-bitten Yankee, and Dancret, a cynical, amusing little Frenchman—they had drawn up an agreement and he had signed it.
They went down by rail to Cerro de Pasco[2] for their outfit, that being the town of any size closest to where their trek into the wilderness would begin. A week later with eight burros and six arrieros, or packmen, they were within the welter of peaks through which, Starrett’s map indicated, lay their road.
It had been the map which had persuaded Graydon. It was no parchment, but a sheet of thin gold quite as flexible. Starrett drew it out of a small golden tube of ancient workmanship, and unrolled it. Graydon examined it and was unable to see any map upon it—or anything else. Starrett held it at a peculiar angle—and the markings upon it became plain.
It was a beautiful piece of cartography. It was, in fact, less a map than a picture. Here and there were curious symbols which Starrett said were signs cut upon the rocks along the way; guiding marks for those of the old race who would set forth to recover the treasure when the Spaniards had been swept from the land.
Whether it was clue to Atahualpa’s ransom hoard or to something else—Graydon did not know. Starrett said it was. But Graydon did not believe his story of how the golden sheet had come into his possession. Nevertheless, there had been purpose in the making of the map, and stranger purpose in the cunning with which the markings had been concealed. Something interesting lay at the end of that trail.
They found the signs cut in the rocks exactly as the sheet of gold had indicated. Gay, spirits high with anticipation, three of them spending in advance their share of the booty, they followed the symbols. Steadily they were led into the uncharted wilderness.
At last the arrieros began to murmur. They were approaching, they said, a region that was accursed, the Cordillera de Carabaya, where only demons dwelt. Promises of more money, threats, pleadings, took them along a little further. One morning the four awakened to find the arrieros gone, and with them half the burros and the major portion of their supplies.
They pressed on. Then the signs failed them. Either they had lost the trail, or the map which had led them truthfully so far had lied at the last.
The country into which they had penetrated was a curiously lonely one. There had been no sign of Indians since more than a fortnight before, when they had stopped at a Quicha village and Starrett had gotten mad drunk on the fiery spirit the Quichas distill. Food was hard to find. There were few animals and fewer birds.
Worst of all was the change which had come over Graydon’s companions. As high as they had been lifted by their certitude of success, just so deep were they in depression. Starrett kept himself at a steady level of drunkenness, alternately quarrelsome and noisy, or brooding in sullen rage.
Dancret was silent and irritable. Soames seemed to have come to the conclusion that Starrett, Graydon and Dancret had combined against him; that they had either deliberately missed the trail or had erased the signs. Only when the pair of them joined Starrett and drank with him the Quicha brew with which they had laden one of the burros did the three relax. At such times Graydon had the uneasy feeling that all were holding the failure against him, and that his life might be hanging on a thin thread.
The day that Graydon’s great adventure really began, he was on his way back to the camp. He had been hunting since morning. Dancret and Soames had gone off together on another desperate search for the missing marks.
Cut off in mid-flight, the girl’s cry came to him as the answer to all his apprehensions; materialization of the menace toward which his vague fears had been groping since he had left Starrett alone at the camp, hours ago. He had sensed some culminating misfortune close—and here it was! He broke into a run, stumbling up the slope to the group of gray-green algarrobas, where the tent was pitched.
He crashed through the thick undergrowth to the clearing.
Why didn’t the girl cry out again, he wondered. A chuckle reached him, thick, satyr-toned.
Half crouching, Starrett was holding the girl bow fashion over one knee. A thick arm was clenched about her neck, the fingers clutching her mouth brutally, silencing her; his right hand fettered her wrists; her knees were caught in the vise of his bent right leg.
Graydon caught him by the hair, and locked his arm under his chin. He drew his head sharply back.
“Drop her!” he ordered.
Half paralyzed, Starrett relaxed—he writhed, then twisted to his feet.
“What the hell are you butting in for?”
His hand struck down toward his pistol. Graydon’s fist caught him on the point of the jaw. The half-drawn gun slipped to the ground and Starrett toppled over.
The girl leaped up, and away.
Graydon did not look after her. She had gone, no doubt, to bring down upon them her people, some tribe of the fierce Aymara whom even the Incas of old had never quite conquered. And who would avenge her in ways that Graydon did not like to visualize.
He bent over Starrett. Between the blow and the drink he would probably be out for some time. Graydon picked up the pistol. He wished that Dancret and Soames would get back soon to camp. The three of them could put up a good fight at any rate . . . might even have a chance to escape . . . but they would have to get back quickly . . . the girl would soon return with her avengers . . . was probably at that moment telling them of her wrongs. He turned—
She stood there, looking at him.
Drinking in her loveliness, Graydon forgot the man at his feet—forgot all else.
Her skin was palest ivory. It gleamed through the rents of the soft amber fabric, like thickest silk, which swathed her. Her eyes were oval, a little tilted, Egyptian in the wide midnight of her pupils. Her nose was small and straight; her brows level and black, almost meeting. Her hair was cloudy, jet, misty and shadowed. A narrow fillet of gold bound her low broad forehead. In it was entwined a sable and silver feather of the caraquenque—that bird whose plumage in lost centuries was sacred to the princesses of the Incas alone.
Above her elbows were golden bracelets, reaching almost to the slender shoulders. Her little high-arched feet were shod with high buskins of deerskin. She was lithe and slender as the Willow Maid who waits on Kwannon when she passes through the World of Trees pouring into them new fire of green life.
She was no Indian . . . nor daughter of ancient Incas . . . nor was she Spanish . . . she was of no race that he knew.
There were bruises on her cheeks—the marks of Starrett’s fingers. Her long, slim hands touched them. She spoke—in the Aymara tongue.
“Is he dead?”
“No,” Graydon answered.
In the depths of her eyes a small, hot flame flared; he could have sworn it was of gladness.
“That is well! I would not have him die—” her voice became meditative—“at least—not this way.”
Starrett groaned. The girl again touched the bruises on her cheek.
“He is very strong,” she murmured.
Graydon thought there was admiration in her whisper; wondered whether all her beauty was, after all, only a mask for primitive woman worshiping brute strength.
“Who are you?” he asked.
She looked at him for a long, long moment.
“I am—Suarra,” she answered, at last.
“But where do you come from? What are you?” he asked again. She did not choose to answer these questions.
“Is he your enemy?”
“No,” he said. “We travel together.”
“Then why—” she pointed again to the outstretched figure—“why did you do this to him? Why did you not let him have his way with me?”
Graydon flushed. The question, with all its subtle implications, cut.
“What do you think I am?” he answered, hotly. “No man lets a thing like that go on!”
She looked at him, curiously. Her face softened. She took a step closer to him. She touched once more the bruises on her cheek.
“Do you not wonder,” she said, “now do you not wonder why I do not call my people to deal him the punishment he has earned?”
“I do wonder,” Graydon’s perplexity was frank. “I wonder indeed. Why do you not call them—if they are close enough to hear?”
“And what would you do were they to come?”
“I would not let them have him—alive,” he answered. “Nor me.”
“Perhaps,” she said, slowly—“perhaps that is why I do not call.”
Suddenly she smiled upon him. He took a swift step toward her. She thrust out a warning hand.
“I am—Suarra,” she said. “And I am—Death!”
A chill passed through Graydon. Again he realized the alien beauty of her. Could there be truth in these legends of the haunted Cordillera? He had never doubted that there was something real behind the terror of the Indians, the desertion of the arrieros. Was she one of its spirits, one of its—demons? For an instant the fantasy seemed no fantasy. Then reason returned. This girl a demon! He laughed.
“Do not laugh,” she said. “The death I mean is not such as you who live beyond the high rim of our hidden land know. Your body may live on—yet it is death and more than death, since it is changed in—dreadful—ways. And that which tenants your body, that which speaks through your lips, is changed—in ways more dreadful still! . . . I would not have that death come to you.”
Strange as were her words, Graydon hardly heard them; certainly did not then realize their meaning, lost as he was in wonder at her beauty.
“How you came by the Messengers, I do not know. How you could have passed unseen by them, I cannot understand. Nor how you came so far into this forbidden land. Tell me—why came you here at all?”
“We came from afar,” he told her, “on the track of a great treasure of gold and gems; the treasure of Atahualpa, the Inca. There were certain signs that led us. We lost them. We found that we, too, were lost. And we wandered here.”
“Of Atahualpa or of Incas,” the girl said, “I know nothing. Whoever they were, they could not have come to this place. And their treasure, no matter how great, would have meant nothing to us—to us of Yu-Atlanchi, where treasures are as rocks in the bed of a stream. A grain of sand it would have been, among many—” she paused, then went on, perplexedly, as though voicing her thoughts to herself—“But it is why the Messengers did not see them that I cannot understand . . . the Mother must know of this. . . . I must go quickly to the Mother. . . .”
“The Mother?” asked Graydon.
“The Snake Mother!” her gaze returned to him; she touched a bracelet on her right wrist. Graydon, drawing close, saw that this bracelet held a disk on which was carved in bas-relief a serpent with a woman’s head and woman’s breast and arms. It lay coiled upon what appeared to be a great bowl held high on the paws of four beasts. The shapes of these creatures did not at once register upon his consciousness, so absorbed was he in his study of that coiled figure. He stared close—and closer. And now he realized that the head reared upon the coils was not really that of a woman. No! It was reptilian.
Snake-like—yet so strongly had the artist feminized it, so great was the suggestion of womanhood modeled into every line of it, that constantly one saw it as woman, forgetting all that was of the serpent.
The eyes were of some intensely glittering purple stone. Graydon felt that those eyes were alive—that far, far away some living thing was looking at him through them. That they were, in fact, prolongations of some one’s—some thing’s—vision.
The girl touched one of the beasts that held up the bowl.
“The Xinli,” she said.
Graydon’s bewilderment increased. He knew what those animals were. Knowing, he also knew that he looked upon the incredible.
They were dinosaurs! The monstrous saurians that ruled earth millions upon millions of years ago, and, but for whose extinction, so he had been taught, man could never have developed.
Who in this Andean wilderness could know or could have known the dinosaurs? Who here could have carved the monsters with such life-like detail as these possessed? Why, it was only yesterday that science had learned what really were their huge bones, buried so long that the rocks had molded themselves around them in adamantine matrix. And laboriously, with every modern resource, haltingly and laboriously, science had set those bones together as a perplexed child would a picture puzzle, and put forth what it believed to be reconstructions of these long-vanished chimerae of earth’s nightmare youth.
Yet here, far from all science it must surely be, some one had modeled those same monsters of a woman’s bracelet. Why then—it followed that whoever had done this must have had before him the living forms from which to work. Or, if not, had copies of those forms set down by ancient men who had seen them.
And either or both of these things were incredible.
Who were the people to whom she belonged? There had been a name—Yu-Atlanchi.
“Suarra,” he said, “where is Yu-Atlanchi? Is it this place?”
“This?” She laughed. “No! Yu-Atlanchi is the Ancient Land. The Hidden Land where the six Lords and the Lords of Lords once ruled. And where now rules only the Snake Mother and—another. This place Yu-Atlanchi!” Again she laughed. “Now and then I hunt here with—the—” she hesitated, looking at him oddly—“So it was that he who lies there caught me. I was hunting. I had slipped away from my followers, for sometimes it pleases me to hunt alone. I came through these trees and saw your tetuane, your lodge. I came face to face with—him. And I was amazed—too amazed to strike with one of these.” She pointed to a low knoll a few feet away. “Before I could conquer that amaze he had caught me. Then you came.”
Graydon looked where she had pointed. Upon the ground lay three slender, shining spears. Their slim shafts were of gold; the arrow-shaped heads of two of them were of fine opal. The third—the third was a single emerald, translucent and flawless, all of six inches long and three at its widest, ground to keenest point and cutting edge.
There it lay, a priceless jewel tipping a spear of gold—and a swift panic shook Graydon. He had forgotten Soames and Dancret. Suppose they should return while this girl was there. This girl with her ornaments of gold, her gem-tipped spears—and her beauty!
“Suarra,” he said, “you must go, and go quickly. This man and I are not all. There are two more, and even now they may be close. Take your spears, and go quickly. Else I may not be able to save you.”
“You think I am—”
“I tell you to go,” he interrupted. “Whoever you are, whatever you are, go now and keep away from this place. Tomorrow I will try to lead them away. If you have people to fight for you—well, let them come and fight if you so desire. But take your spears and go.”
She crossed to the little knoll and picked up the spears. She held one out to him, the one that bore the emerald point.
“This,” she said, “to remember—Suarra.”
“No,” he thrust it back. “Go!”
If the others saw that jewel, never, he knew, would he be able to start them on the back trail—if they could find it. Starrett had seen it, of course, but he might be able to convince them that Starrett’s story was only a drunken dream.
The girl studied him—a quickened interest in her eyes. She slipped the bracelets from her arms, held them out to him with the three spears.
“Will you take these—and leave your comrades?” she asked. “Here are gold and gems. They are treasure. They are what you have been seeking. Take them. Take them and go, leaving that man here. Consent—and I will show you a way out of this forbidden land.”
Graydon hesitated. The emerald alone was worth a fortune. What loyalty did he owe the three, after all? And Starrett had brought this thing upon himself. Nevertheless—they were his comrades. Open-eyed he had gone into this venture with them. He had a vision of himself skulking away with the glittering booty, creeping off to safety while he left the three unwarned, unprepared, to meet—what?
He did not like that picture.
“No,” he said. “These men are of my race, my comrades. Whatever is to come—I will meet it with them and help them fight it.”
“Yet you would have fought them for my sake—indeed, did fight,” she said. “Why then do you cling to them when you can save yourself, and go free, with treasure? And why, if you will not do this, do you let me go, knowing that if you kept me prisoner, or—killed me, I could not bring my people down upon you?”
Graydon laughed.
“I couldn’t let them hurt you, of course,” he said. “And I’m afraid to make you prisoner, because I might not be able to keep you free from hurt. And I won’t run away. So talk no more, but go—go!”
She thrust the gleaming spears into the ground, slipped the golden bracelets back on her arms, held white hands out to him.
“Now,” she whispered, “now, by the Wisdom of the Mother, I will save you—if I can.”
There was the sound of a horn, far away and high in air it seemed. It was answered by others closer by; mellow, questing notes—with weirdly alien beat in them.
“They come,” the girl said. “My followers. Light your fire to-night. Sleep without fear. But do not wander beyond these trees.”
“Suarra—” he began.
“Quiet now,” she warned. “Quiet—until I am gone.”
The mellow horns sounded closer. She sprang from his side and darted away through the trees. From the ridge above the camp he heard her voice raised in one clear shout. There was a tumult of the horns about her—elfin and troubling. Then silence.
Graydon stood listening. The sun touched the high snowfields of the majestic peaks toward which he faced, touched them and turned them into robes of molten gold. The amethyst shadows that draped their sides thickened, wavered and marched swiftly forward.
Still he listened, hardly breathing.
Far, far away the horns sounded again; faint echoings of the tumult that had swept about the girl—faint, faint and fairy sweet.
The sun dropped behind the peaks; the edges of their frozen mantels glittered as though sewn with diamonds; darkened into a fringe of gleaming rubies. The golden fields dulled, grew amber and then blushed forth a glowing rose. They changed to pearl and faded into a ghostly silver, shining like cloud wraiths in the highest heavens. Down upon the algarroba clump the quick Andean dusk fell.
Not till then did Graydon, shivering with sudden, inexplicable dread, realize that beyond the calling horns and the girl’s clear shouting he had heard no other sound—no noise either of man or beast, no sweeping through of brush or grass, no fall of running feet.
Nothing but that mellow chorus of the horns.
2THE UNSEEN WATCHERS
Starrett had drifted out of the paralysis of the blow into a drunken stupor. Graydon dragged him over to the tent, thrust a knapsack under his head, and threw a blanket over him. Then he went out and built up the fire. There was a trampling through the underbrush. Soames and Dancret came up through the trees.
“Find any signs?” he asked.
“Signs? Hell—no!” snarled the New Englander. “Say, Graydon, did you hear somethin’ like a lot of horns? Damned queer horns, too. They seemed to be over here.”
Graydon nodded, he realized that he must tell these men what had happened so that they could prepare some defense. But how much could he tell?
Tell them of Suarra’s beauty, of her golden ornaments and her gem-tipped spears of gold? Tell them what she had said of Atahualpa’s treasure[3]?
If he did, there would be no further reasoning with them. They would go berserk with greed. Yet something of it he must tell them if they were to be ready for the attack which he was certain would come with the dawn.
And of the girl they would learn soon enough from Starrett.
He heard an exclamation from Dancret who had passed on into the tent; heard him come out; stood up and faced the wiry little Frenchman.
“What’s the matter wit’ Starrett, eh?” Dancret snapped. “First I t’ought he’s drunk. Then I see he’s scratched like wild cat and wit’ a lump on his jaw as big as one orange. What you do to Starrett, eh?”
Graydon had made up his mind, and was ready to answer.
“Dancret,” he said, “Soames—we’re in a bad box. I came in from hunting less than an hour ago, and found Starrett wrestling with a girl. That’s bad medicine down here—the worst, and you two know it. I had to knock Starrett out before I could get the girl away from him. Her people will probably be after us in the morning. There’s no use trying to get away. We don’t know a thing about this wilderness. Here is as good as any other place to meet them. We’d better spend the night getting it ready so we can put up a good scrap, if we have to.”
“A girl, eh?” said Dancret. “What she look like? Where she come from? How she get away?”
Graydon chose the last question to answer.
“I let her go,” he said.
“You let her go!” snarled Soames. “What the hell did you do that for? Why didn’t you tie her up? We could have held her as a hostage, Graydon—had somethin’ to do some tradin’ with when her damned bunch of Indians came.”
“She wasn’t an Indian, Soames,” said Graydon, then hesitated.
“You mean she was white—Spanish?” broke in Dancret, incredulously.
“No, not Spanish either. She was white. Yes, white as any of us. I don’t know what she was.”
The pair stared at him, then at each other.
“There’s somethin’ damned funny about this,” growled Soames, at last. “But what I want to know is why you let her go—whatever the hell she was?”
“Because I thought we’d have a better chance if I did than if I didn’t.” Graydon’s own wrath was rising. “I tell you that we’re up against something none of us knows anything about. And we’ve got just one chance of getting out of the mess. If I’d kept her here, we wouldn’t have even that chance.”
Dancret stooped, and picked up something from the ground, something that gleamed yellow in the firelight.
“Somet’ing funny is right, Soames,” he said. “Look at this!”
He handed the gleaming object over. It was a golden bracelet, and as Soames turned it over in his hand there was the green glitter of emeralds. It had been torn from Suarra’s arm, undoubtedly, in her struggle with Starrett.
“What that girl give you to let her go, Graydon, eh?” Dancret spat. “What she tell you, eh?”
Soames’s hand dropped to his automatic.
“She gave me nothing. I took nothing,” answered Graydon.
“I t’ink you damned liar,” said Dancret, viciously. “We get Starrett awake,” he turned to Soames. “We get him awake quick. I t’ink he tell us more about this, oui. A girl who wears stuff like this—and he lets her go! Lets her go when he knows there must be more where this come from—eh, Soames! Damned funny is right, eh? Come now, we see what Starrett tell us.”
Graydon watched them go into the tent. Soon Soames came out, went to a spring that bubbled up from among the trees; returned, with water.
Well, let them waken Starrett; let him tell them whatever he would. They would not kill him that night, of that he was sure. They believed that he knew too much. And in the morning—
What was hidden in the morning for them all?
That even now they were prisoners, Graydon was sure. Suarra’s warning not to leave the camp had been explicit. Since that tumult of the elfin horns, her swift vanishing and the silence that had followed, he no longer doubted that they had strayed, as she had said, within the grasp of some power as formidable as it was mysterious.
The silence? Suddenly it came to him that the night had become strangely still. There was no sound either of insect or bird, nor any stirring of the familiar after-twilight life of the wilderness.
The camp was besieged by silence!
He walked away through the algarrobas. There was a scant score of the trees. They stood like a little leafy island peak within the brush-covered savanna. They were great trees, every one of them, and set with a curious regularity; as though they had not sprung up by chance; as though indeed they had been carefully planted.
Graydon reached the last of them, rested a hand against a bole that was like myriads of tiny grubs turned to soft brown wood. He peered out. The slope that lay before him was flooded with moonlight; the yellow blooms of the chilca shrubs that pressed to the very feet of the trees shone wanly in the silver flood. The faintly aromatic fragrance of the quenuar stole around him. Movement or sign of life there was none.
And yet—
The spaces seemed filled with watchers. He felt their gaze upon him. He knew that some hidden host girdled the camp. He scanned every bush and shadow—and saw nothing. The certainty of a hidden, unseen multitude persisted. A wave of nervous irritation passed through him. He would force them, whatever they were, to show themselves.
He stepped out boldly into the full moonlight.
On the instant the silence intensified. It seemed to draw taut, to lift itself up whole octaves of stillnesses. It became alert, expectant—as though poised to spring upon him should he take one step further.
A coldness wrapped him, and he shuddered. He drew swiftly back to the shadow of the trees; stood there, his heart beating furiously. The silence lost its poignancy, drooped back upon its haunches—watchful.
What had frightened him? What was there in that tightening of the stillness that had touched him with the finger of nightmare terror? He groped back, foot by foot, afraid to turn his face from the silence. Behind him the fire flared. His fear dropped from him.
His reaction from his panic was a heady recklessness. He threw a log upon the fire and laughed as the sparks shot up among the leaves. Soames, coming out of the tent for more water, stopped as he heard that laughter and scowled at him malevolently.
“Laugh,” he said. “Laugh while you can. Maybe you’ll laugh on the other side of your mouth when we get Starrett up and he tells us what he knows.”
“That was a sound sleep I gave him, anyway,” jeered Graydon.
“There are sounder sleeps. Don’t forget it,” Dancret’s voice, cold and menacing came from the tent.
Graydon turned his back to the tent, and deliberately faced that silence from which he had just fled. He seated himself, and after awhile he dozed.
He awakened with a jump. Halfway between him and the tent Starrett was charging on him like a madman, bellowing.
Graydon leaped to his feet, but before he could defend himself the giant was upon him. The next moment he was down, overborne by sheer weight. The big adventurer crunched a knee into his arm and gripped his throat.
“Let her go, did you!” he roared. “Knocked me out and then let her go! Here’s where you go, too, damn you!”
Graydon tried to break the grip on his throat. His lungs labored; there was a deafening roaring in his ears, and flecks of crimson began to dance across his vision. Starrett was strangling him. Through fast dimming sight he saw two black shadows leap through the firelight and clutch the strangling hands.
The fingers relaxed. Graydon staggered up. A dozen paces away stood Starrett. Dancret, arms around his knees, was hanging to him like a little terrier. Beside him was Soames, the barrel of his automatic pressed against his stomach.
“Why don’t you let me kill him!” raved Starrett. “Didn’t I tell you the girl had enough green ice on her to set us up the rest of our lives? There’s more where it came from! And he let her go! Let her go, the—”
Again his curses flowed.
“Now look here, Starrett,” Soames’s voice was deliberate. “You be quiet, or I’ll do for you. We ain’t goin’ to let this thing get by us, me and Dancret. We ain’t goin’ to let this double-crossin’ louse do us, and we ain’t goin’ to let you spill the beans by killin’ him. We’ve struck somethin’ big. All right, we’re goin’ to cash in on it. We’re goin’ to sit down peaceable, and Mister Graydon is goin’ to tell us what happened after he put you out, what dicker he made with the girl and all of that. If he won’t do it peaceable, then Mister Graydon is goin’ to have things done to him that’ll make him give up. That’s all. Danc’, let go his legs. Starrett, if you kick up any more trouble until I give the word I’m goin’ to shoot you. From now on I boss this crowd—me and Danc. You get me, Starrett?”
Graydon, head once more clear, slid a cautious hand down toward the pistol holster. It was empty. Soames grinned, sardonically.
“We got it, Graydon,” he said. “Yours, too, Starrett. Fair enough. Sit down everybody.”
He squatted by the fire, still keeping Starrett covered. And after a moment the latter, grumbling, followed suit. Dancret dropped beside him.
“Come over here, Graydon,” said Soames. “Come over here and cough up. What’re you holdin’ out on us? Did you make a date with her to meet you after you got rid of us? If so, where is it—because we’ll all go together.”
“Where’d you hide those gold spears?” growled Starrett. “You never let her get away with them, that’s sure.”
“Shut up, Starrett,” ordered Soames. “I’m holdin’ this inquest. Still—there’s something in that. Was that it, Graydon? Did she give you the spears and her jewelry to let her go?”
“I’ve told you,” answered Graydon. “I asked for nothing, and took nothing. Starrett’s drunken folly had put us all in jeopardy. Letting the girl go free was the first vital step toward our own safety. I thought it was the best thing to do. I still think so.”
“Yeah?” sneered the lank New Englander, “is that so? Well, I’ll tell you, Graydon, if she’d been an Indian maybe I’d agree with you. But not when she was the kind of lady Starrett says she was. No, sir, it ain’t natural. You know damned well that if you’d been straight you’d have kept her here till Danc’ and me got back. Then we could all have got together and figured what was the best thing to do. Hold her until her folks came along and paid up to get her back undamaged. Or give her the third degree until she gave up where all that gold and stuff she was carrying came from. That’s what you would have done, Graydon—if you weren’t a dirty, lyin’, double-crossin’ hound.”
Graydon’s anger flared up.
“All right, Soames,” he said. “I’ll tell you. What I’ve said about freeing her for our own safety is true. But outside of that I would as soon have thought of trusting a child to a bunch of hyenas as I would of trusting that girl to you three. I let her go a damned sight more for her sake than I did for our own. Does that satisfy you?”
“Aha!” jeered Dancret. “Now I see! Here is this strange lady of so much wealth and beauty. She is too pure and good for us to behold. He tell her so and bid her fly. ‘My hero!’ she say, ‘take all I have and give up this bad company.’ ‘No, no,’ he tell her, t’inking all the time if he play his cards right he get much more, and us out of the way so he need not divide, ‘no, no,’ he tell her. ‘But long as these bad men stay here you will not be safe.’ ‘My hero,’ she say, ‘I will go and bring back my family and they shall dispose of your bad company. But you they shall reward, my hero, oui!’ Aha, so that is what it was!”
Graydon flushed; the little Frenchman’s malicious travesty had shot uncomfortably close. After all, Suarra’s unasked promise to save him could be construed as Dancret had suggested. Suppose he told them he had warned her that whatever the fate in store for them he was determined to share it, and would stand by them to the last? They would not believe him.
Soames had been watching him, closely.
“By God, Danc’,” he said, “I guess you hit it. He changed color. He’s sold us out.”
He raised his automatic, held it on Graydon—then lowered it.
“No,” he said, deliberately. “This is too big a thing to let slip by bein’ too quick on the trigger. If your dope is right, Danc’, and I guess it is, the lady was mighty grateful. All right—we ain’t got her, but we have got him. As I figure it, bein’ grateful, she won’t want him to get killed. She’ll be back. Well, we’ll trade him for what they got that we want. Tie him up.”
