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- Herausgeber: DigiCat
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
Abraham Merritt's "The Moon Pool & The Metal Monster" intertwines fantasy and science fiction, showcasing his unique narrative style characterized by vivid descriptions and enchanting prose. Set in exotic locales, the tales explore themes of ancient civilizations, hidden realities, and humanity's quest for understanding beyond the mundane. "The Moon Pool" introduces the mysterious island of Agharta, where an otherworldly entity beckons, while "The Metal Monster" delves into the consequences of advanced technology, as humanity confronts both the sublime and the terrifying. Together, these stories epitomize Merritt's contribution to early speculative fiction and the pulp genre, underlining his ability to integrate fantasy with psychological depth. Abraham Merritt (1884-1943) was a prominent figure in early American science fiction and fantasy, whose work reflects his fascination with the supernatural and the exploration of the unknown. A journalist by profession, Merritt was influenced by his extensive travels and an avid interest in ancient mythology, which informed the richly imaginative worlds he created. His writing captured the zeitgeist of the early 20th century, grappling with contemporary anxieties surrounding science, technology, and the limits of human understanding. "The Moon Pool & The Metal Monster" is an essential read for enthusiasts of classic science fiction and fantasy. Merritt's lyrical storytelling, combined with thought-provoking themes, invites readers to embark on a journey of wonder and exploration. This work serves not only as a testament to Merritt's artistic vision but also as a reminder of the enduring allure of the unknown, challenging readers to reconsider their perceptions of reality. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The Moon Pool & The Metal Monster
Table of Contents
Introduction
This volume gathers two complete novels by A. Merritt—The Moon Pool and The Metal Monster—offering an essential pairing from a foundational voice of American pulp-era fantasy. Written during the flourishing years of magazine adventure fiction, these books exemplify Merritt’s synthesis of speculative science, archaeological mystery, and lavish imaginative spectacle. The purpose of this collection is straightforward: to present, intact, two works that established his reputation and to offer readers a coherent entrance to his most characteristic terrain. Read together, they trace a passage from oceanic ruins to mountainous immensities, united by the tension between rational inquiry and the supernormal wonders it strives to comprehend.
The texts assembled here are full-length novels, not stories or essays, and they occupy the borderlands where science fantasy, lost-world adventure, and weird fiction meet. Their narrative stance is that of an educated observer in the field, recounting expeditions into remote regions and encounters that challenge the limits of contemporary knowledge. First appearing in serialized form in the late 1910s and 1920, they subsequently reached readers in book editions, preserving the expansive architecture of Merritt’s episodes and set pieces. As novels, they combine travelogue, laboratory speculation, and mystery with a persistent drive toward awe, creating a distinctly American contribution to the scientific romance tradition.
A unifying presence runs through both works in the figure of Dr. Walter T. Goodwin, whose disciplined, first-person testimony anchors phenomena that would otherwise seem incredible. Merritt repeatedly composes scenes around thresholds—caves, passes, and chambers—where light, sound, and form behave as if governed by unfamiliar laws. His prose couples ornate description with a quasi-scientific vocabulary, allowing images of stone, metal, and radiance to accumulate into a persuasive atmosphere. Across these novels, motifs of geometry, resonance, and living structure recur, while themes of contact, wonder, and the ethical burden of discovery give the adventures their continuing resonance.
The Moon Pool begins with an expedition to a remote island complex in the South Pacific, where remnants of an ancient civilization lie partially submerged and heavily overgrown. Goodwin joins fellow investigators to study the site’s anomalies and the legends surrounding it. When a luminous phenomenon manifests from a moonlit basin, leaving behind signs of both intelligence and peril, the party is compelled to pursue knowledge as a matter of survival. The novel proceeds by alternating exacting observation with mounting marvels, pressing its explorers to test their instruments, their courage, and their readiness to accept a world larger than their training allows.
The Metal Monster relocates Goodwin to the high ranges of Central Asia, where a small group of travelers is drawn into a hidden valley dominated by structures and presences that appear metallic yet behave as though alive. There, shapes assemble, disassemble, and recombine with purposeful intricacy, suggesting an order both mathematical and animate. The expedition meets figures whose loyalties and origins are entwined with this environment, sharpening the question of what constitutes life and intelligence. Merritt heightens the contrast between human perception and inhuman design, while maintaining the investigative tone that keeps the extraordinary anchored to the plausible.
Stylistically, these novels exhibit Merritt’s signature orchestration of spectacle: carefully staged vistas, rhythms of approach and revelation, and a ceaseless dialogue between hypothesis and astonishment. His scenes are saturated with color and luminescence, yet punctuated by the diction of laboratories and field notes. The result is a rhetoric of wonder that neither abandons reason nor diminishes mystery. The narratives move from measured reportage to visionary tableau without losing continuity, encouraging readers to inhabit the elastic boundary where science, myth, and adventure converge. In both books, the unknown is not merely threatening; it is grand, ordered, and demanding of intellectual humility.
Together, The Moon Pool and The Metal Monster stand as a concise introduction to Merritt’s enduring achievement: an adventurous, intellectually curious fiction that treats the marvelous as worthy of scrutiny and reverence alike. The novels can be read independently, yet they illuminate each other through shared narrator, method, and preoccupation with forms of life beyond familiar categories. As artifacts of early twentieth-century popular literature, they bridge the scientific romance of an earlier era and the later currents of weird and science-fantastic writing. This collection invites fresh appraisal of an author whose imagined architectures and disciplined wonder remain strikingly contemporary.
Historical Context
Abraham Grace Merritt wrote The Moon Pool (serialized 1918–1919 in All-Story Weekly) and The Metal Monster (serialized 1920 in Argosy All-Story Weekly) during a moment when American pulp magazines fused reportage, science, and romance for a mass audience. A longtime journalist within the Hearst press, he drew on a newsman’s appetite for startling discoveries and exotic locales. The closing years of the 1910s brought unprecedented public fascination with scientific wonders and archaeological finds, alongside postwar unease. Within this climate, Merritt’s ornate adventures—balancing speculative physics, occult suggestion, and exploration—found readers primed for marvels that claimed a veneer of plausibility while promising encounters with the unknown.
Both narratives reflect early twentieth‑century Western attention to the Pacific, intensified by imperial administration and new routes. The United States acquired island footholds after 1898 and completed the Panama Canal in 1914, while Germany and later Japan controlled Micronesia under the South Seas Mandate from 1920. Archaeologists and ethnographers publicized sites such as Nan Madol on Pohnpei, described in 1909–1910 by German researcher Paul Hambruch, which newspaper features framed as a “lost city.” Merritt’s choice of remote archipelagoes and megalithic ruins echoed this reportage, offering adventure that felt topical to readers who followed Pacific surveys, colonial politics, and contested claims of antiquity.
Breakthroughs in physics and materials science supplied Merritt with imagery and metaphors. Radium’s discovery in 1898, Rutherford’s nuclear model in 1911, and the 1912–1913 development of X‑ray crystallography reoriented public ideas of matter, energy, and crystalline form. Alfred Wegener’s 1912 continental drift hypothesis invited speculation about vanished landmasses, while Arthur Eddington’s 1919 eclipse expedition popularized spacetime’s malleability. Such headlines encouraged fiction that endowed geometry with force and metals with quasi‑life. The shimmering energies and intricate lattices animating Merritt’s creations draw directly on a culture that treated atoms, crystals, and waves as secrets newly pried open by laboratories and expeditions.
Equally influential were esoteric movements that blended science with mysticism. The Theosophical Society, founded in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky, popularized notions of hidden masters, lost continents, and spiritual “vibrations,” while the Society for Psychical Research (1882) encouraged experimental language for the unseen. In New York and London, occult periodicals circulated alongside laboratory news, shaping a vocabulary that treated metaphysics as measurable. Merritt’s journalism exposed him to both currents; his fiction’s hieratic rites, luminous beings, and quasi‑scientific occultism reflect a milieu where séance rooms and lecture halls competed to explain reality, and where Atlantis and atom alike seemed newly plausible.
The First World War (1914–1918) altered cultural attitudes toward technology and power, inflecting the reception of speculative romance. Mechanized slaughter, aerial bombardment, and tanks rendered machinery both awe‑inspiring and terrifying, while the 1918 influenza pandemic deepened fears of unseen forces permeating the body and environment. In the immediate postwar years when Merritt published these tales, readers negotiated a paradox: faith in scientific progress coexisted with dread of dehumanization. The ambivalent charisma of vast energies and intricate mechanisms in his work mirrors that tension, transforming engines and emanations into characters whose beauty and menace reflect a traumatized modernity.
The magazines that carried Merritt were products of Frank A. Munsey’s transformation of cheap wood‑pulp into a nationwide entertainment industry. All‑Story Weekly and Argosy merged in 1920, creating Argosy All‑Story Weekly, where The Metal Monster appeared. Low cover prices, lurid covers, and letter columns built communities that rewarded cliffhangers, scientific gloss, and exotic settings. Serial publication shaped pacing and emphasis, encouraging pauses for exposition that mimicked popular science features. This commercial environment not only amplified Merritt’s visibility but conditioned readers to treat imaginative archaeology and physics as episodic revelations, making his ornate, world‑building narratives feel both current and compulsively readable.
Urban modernity furnished further context. New York’s 1913 Armory Show introduced avant‑garde geometry to American audiences, while the Woolworth Building the same year dramatized steel’s vertical sublime. Ford’s moving assembly line (1913) and the rhetoric of Italian Futurism (from 1909) celebrated speed, polish, and metallic sheen. These currents elevated metal and pattern from mere materials to symbols of a new order. Merritt’s intricate, faceted constructs and luminous forms resonate with an aesthetic that saw beauty in engineered surfaces and abstract structure, translating the city’s steel skeletons and the factory’s rhythms into vast, otherworldly architectures animated by ordered, dynamic energies.
Contemporary and later critics situated Merritt within an interwar web linking romance, weird fiction, and emerging science fiction. Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories debuted in 1926, defining “scientifiction” even as writers like Merritt continued in general pulps. H. P. Lovecraft’s essay Supernatural Horror in Literature (first drafted 1927) praised Merritt’s imaginative power and lush atmospheres, helping canonize him among American fantasists. Reprints and omnibus editions later framed The Moon Pool and The Metal Monster as early “science fantasy,” a hybrid attuned to the period’s scientific spectacle and metaphysical speculation. That hybridity, born of the 1910s–1920s media and intellectual climate, shaped their enduring appeal.
Synopsis (Selection)
The Moon Pool & The Metal Monster
Two scientific romances follow expeditionary narrators into hidden realms where they confront overwhelming, inhuman intelligences—one a radiant presence in ancient island ruins, the other a living architecture of metallic forms in a high mountain valley. The tone is lush and hypnotic, coupling pulp peril with cosmic awe as reason grapples with phenomena that blur science, myth, and metaphysics.
Across both novels, Merritt favors ornate description, sensory excess, and the motif of seduction by the sublime, exploring themes of transformation, human insignificance, and the perilous allure of power. The Moon Pool leans toward occult-lost-world atmosphere, while The Metal Monster pushes into abstract, geometric wonder, marking a shift from mystical exotica to quasi-scientific otherness.
The Moon Pool & The Metal Monster
The Moon Pool
The Moon Pool
FOREWORD
The publication of the following narrative of Dr. Walter T. Goodwin has been authorized by the Executive Council of the International Association of Science.
First:
To end officially what is beginning to be called the Throckmartin Mystery and to kill the innuendo and scandalous suspicions which have threatened to stain the reputations of Dr. David Throckmartin, his youthful wife, and equally youthful associate Dr. Charles Stanton ever since a tardy despatch from Melbourne, Australia, reported the disappearance of the first from a ship sailing to that port, and the subsequent reports of the disappearance of his wife and associate from the camp of their expedition in the Caroline Islands.
Second:
Because the Executive Council have concluded that Dr. Goodwin’s experiences in his wholly heroic effort to save the three, and the lessons and warnings within those experiences, are too important to humanity as a whole to be hidden away in scientific papers understandable only to the technically educated; or to be presented through the newspaper press in the abridged and fragmentary form which the space limitations of that vehicle make necessary.
For these reasons the Executive Council commissioned Mr. A. Merritt to transcribe into form to be readily understood by the layman the stenographic notes of Dr. Goodwin’s own report to the Council, supplemented by further oral reminiscences and comments by Dr. Goodwin; this transcription, edited and censored by the Executive Council of the Association, forms the contents of this book.
Himself a member of the Council, Dr. Walter T. Goodwin, Ph.D., F.R.G.S. etc., is without cavil the foremost of American botanists, an observer of international reputation and the author of several epochal treaties upon his chosen branch of science. His story, amazing in the best sense of that word as it may be, is fully supported by proofs brought forward by him and accepted by the organization of which I have the honor to be president. What matter has been elided from this popular presentation — because of the excessively menacing potentialities it contains, which unrestricted dissemination might develop — will be dealt with in purely scientific pamphlets of carefully guarded circulation.
THE INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF SCIENCE Per J. B. K., President
CHAPTER I THE THING ON THE MOON PATH
For two months I had been on the d’Entrecasteaux Islands gathering data for the concluding chapters of my book upon the flora of the volcanic islands of the South Pacific. The day before I had reached Port Moresby and had seen my specimens safely stored on board the Southern Queen. As I sat on the upper deck I thought, with homesick mind, of the long leagues between me and Melbourne, and the longer ones between Melbourne and New York.
It was one of Papua’s yellow mornings when she shows herself in her sombrest, most baleful mood. The sky was smouldering ochre. Over the island brooded a spirit sullen, alien, implacable, filled with the threat of latent, malefic forces waiting to be unleashed. It seemed an emanation out of the untamed, sinister heart of Papua herself — sinister even when she smiles. And now and then, on the wind, came a breath from virgin jungles, laden with unfamiliar odours, mysterious and menacing.
It is on such mornings that Papua whispers to you of her immemorial ancientness and of her power. And, as every white man must, I fought against her spell. While I struggled I saw a tall figure striding down the pier; a Kapa–Kapa boy followed swinging a new valise. There was something familiar about the tall man. As he reached the gangplank he looked up straight into my eyes, stared for a moment, then waved his hand.
And now I knew him. It was Dr. David Throckmartin —“Throck” he was to me always, one of my oldest friends and, as well, a mind of the first water whose power and achievements were for me a constant inspiration as they were, I know, for scores other.
Coincidentally with my recognition came a shock of surprise, definitely — unpleasant. It was Throckmartin — but about him was something disturbingly unlike the man I had known long so well and to whom and to whose little party I had bidden farewell less than a month before I myself had sailed for these seas. He had married only a few weeks before, Edith, the daughter of Professor William Frazier, younger by at least a decade than he but at one with him in his ideals and as much in love, if it were possible, as Throckmartin. By virtue of her father’s training a wonderful assistant, by virtue of her own sweet, sound heart a — I use the word in its olden sense — lover. With his equally youthful associate Dr. Charles Stanton and a Swedish woman, Thora Halversen, who had been Edith Throckmartin’s nurse from babyhood, they had set forth for the Nan–Matal, that extraordinary group of island ruins clustered along the eastern shore of Ponape in the Carolines.
I knew that he had planned to spend at least a year among these ruins, not only of Ponape but of Lele — twin centres of a colossal riddle of humanity, a weird flower of civilization that blossomed ages before the seeds of Egypt were sown; of whose arts we know little enough and of whose science nothing. He had carried with him unusually complete equipment for the work he had expected to do and which, he hoped, would be his monument.
What then had brought Throckmartin to Port Moresby, and what was that change I had sensed in him?
Hurrying down to the lower deck I found him with the purser. As I spoke he turned, thrust out to me an eager hand — and then I saw what was that difference that had so moved me. He knew, of course by my silence and involuntary shrinking the shock my closer look had given me. His eyes filled; he turned brusquely from the purser, hesitated — then hurried off to his stateroom.
“‘E looks rather queer — eh?” said the purser. “Know ’im well, sir? Seems to ‘ave given you quite a start.”
I made some reply and went slowly up to my chair. There I sat, composed my mind and tried to define what it was that had shaken me so. Now it came to me. The old Throckmartin was on the eve of his venture just turned forty, lithe, erect, muscular; his controlling expression one of enthusiasm, of intellectual keenness, of — what shall I say — expectant search. His always questioning brain had stamped its vigor upon his face.
But the Throckmartin I had seen below was one who had borne some scaring shock of mingled rapture and horror; some soul cataclysm that in its climax had remoulded, deep from within, his face, setting on it seal of wedded ecstasy and despair; as though indeed these two had come to him hand in hand, taken possession of him and departing left behind, ineradicably, their linked shadows!
Yes — it was that which appalled. For how could rapture and horror, Heaven and Hell mix, clasp hands — kiss?
Yet these were what in closest embrace lay on Throckmartin’s face!
Deep in thought, subconsciously with relief, I watched the shore line sink behind; welcomed the touch of the wind of the free seas. I had hoped, and within the hope was an inexplicable shrinking that I would meet Throckmartin at lunch. He did not come down, and I was sensible of deliverance within my disappointment. All that afternoon I lounged about uneasily but still he kept to his cabin — and within me was no strength to summon him. Nor did he appear at dinner.
Dusk and night fell swiftly. I was warm and went back to my deck-chair. The Southern Queen was rolling to a disquieting swell and I had the place to myself.
Over the heavens was a canopy of cloud, glowing faintly and testifying to the moon riding behind it. There was much phosphorescence. Fitfully before the ship and at her sides arose those stranger little swirls of mist that swirl up from the Southern Ocean like breath of sea monsters, whirl for an instant and disappear.
Suddenly the deck door opened and through it came Throckmartin. He paused uncertainly, looked up at the sky with a curiously eager, intent gaze, hesitated, then closed the door behind him.
“Throck,” I called. “Come! It’s Goodwin.”
He made his way to me.
“Throck,” I said, wasting no time in preliminaries. “What’s wrong? Can I help you?”
I felt his body grow tense.
“I’m going to Melbourne, Goodwin,” he answered. “I need a few things — need them urgently. And more men — white men —”
He stopped abruptly; rose from his chair, gazed intently toward the north. I followed his gaze. Far, far away the moon had broken through the clouds. Almost on the horizon, you could see the faint luminescence of it upon the smooth sea. The distant patch of light quivered and shook. The clouds thickened again and it was gone. The ship raced on southward, swiftly.
Throckmartin dropped into his chair. He lighted a cigarette with a hand that trembled; then turned to me with abrupt resolution.
“Goodwin,” he said. “I do need help. If ever man needed it, I do. Goodwin — can you imagine yourself in another world, alien, unfamiliar, a world of terror, whose unknown joy is its greatest terror of all; you all alone there, a stranger! As such a man would need help, so I need —”
He paused abruptly and arose; the cigarette dropped from his fingers. The moon had again broken through the clouds, and this time much nearer. Not a mile away was the patch of light that it threw upon the waves. Back of it, to the rim of the sea was a lane of moonlight; a gigantic gleaming serpent racing over the edge of the world straight and surely toward the ship.
Throckmartin stiffened to it as a pointer does to a hidden covey. To me from him pulsed a thrill of horror — but horror tinged with an unfamiliar, an infernal joy. It came to me and passed away — leaving me trembling with its shock of bitter sweet.
He bent forward, all his soul in his eyes. The moon path swept closer, closer still. It was now less than half a mile away. From it the ship fled — almost as though pursued. Down upon it, swift and straight, a radiant torrent cleaving the waves, raced the moon stream.
“Good God!” breathed Throckmartin, and if ever the words were a prayer and an invocation they were.
And then, for the first time — I saw — IT!
The moon path stretched to the horizon and was bordered by darkness. It was as though the clouds above had been parted to form a lane-drawn aside like curtains or as the waters of the Red Sea were held back to let the hosts of Israel through. On each side of the stream was the black shadow cast by the folds of the high canopies And straight as a road between the opaque walls gleamed, shimmered, and danced the shining, racing, rapids of the moonlight.
Far, it seemed immeasurably far, along this stream of silver fire I sensed, rather than saw, something coming. It drew first into sight as a deeper glow within the light. On and on it swept toward us — an opalescent mistiness that sped with the suggestion of some winged creature in arrowed flight. Dimly there crept into my mind memory of the Dyak legend of the winged messenger of Buddha — the Akla bird whose feathers are woven of the moon rays, whose heart is a living opal, whose wings in flight echo the crystal clear music of the white stars — but whose beak is of frozen flame and shreds the souls of unbelievers.
Closer it drew and now there came to me sweet, insistent tinklings — like pizzicati on violins of glass; crystal clear; diamonds melting into sounds!
Now the Thing was close to the end of the white path; close up to the barrier of darkness still between the ship and the sparkling head of the moon stream. Now it beat up against that barrier as a bird against the bars of its cage. It whirled with shimmering plumes, with swirls of lacy light, with spirals of living vapour. It held within it odd, unfamiliar gleams as of shifting mother-of-pearl. Coruscations and glittering atoms drifted through it as though it drew them from the rays that bathed it.
Nearer and nearer it came, borne on the sparkling waves, and ever thinner shrank the protecting wall of shadow between it and us. Within the mistiness was a core, a nucleus of intenser light — veined, opaline, effulgent, intensely alive. And above it, tangled in the plumes and spirals that throbbed and whirled were seven glowing lights.
Through all the incessant but strangely ordered movement of the — THING— these lights held firm and steady. They were seven — like seven little moons. One was of a pearly pink, one of a delicate nacreous blue, one of lambent saffron, one of the emerald you see in the shallow waters of tropic isles; a deathly white; a ghostly amethyst; and one of the silver that is seen only when the flying fish leap beneath the moon.
The tinkling music was louder still. It pierced the ears with a shower of tiny lances; it made the heart beat jubilantly — and checked it dolorously. It closed the throat with a throb of rapture and gripped it tight with the hand of infinite sorrow!
Came to me now a murmuring cry, stilling the crystal notes. It was articulate — but as though from something utterly foreign to this world. The ear took the cry and translated with conscious labour into the sounds of earth. And even as it compassed, the brain shrank from it irresistibly, and simultaneously it seemed reached toward it with irresistible eagerness.
Throckmartin strode toward the front of the deck, straight toward the vision, now but a few yards away from the stern. His face had lost all human semblance. Utter agony and utter ecstasy — there they were side by side, not resisting each other; unholy inhuman companions blending into a look that none of God’s creatures should wear — and deep, deep as his soul! A devil and a God dwelling harmoniously side by side! So must Satan, newly fallen, still divine, seeing heaven and contemplating hell, have appeared.
And then — swiftly the moon path faded! The clouds swept over the sky as though a hand had drawn them together. Up from the south came a roaring squall. As the moon vanished what I had seen vanished with it — blotted out as an image on a magic lantern; the tinkling ceased abruptly — leaving a silence like that which follows an abrupt thunder clap. There was nothing about us but silence and blackness!
Through me passed a trembling as one who has stood on the very verge of the gulf wherein the men of the Louisades says lurks the fisher of the souls of men, and has been plucked back by sheerest chance.
Throckmartin passed an arm around me.
“It is as I thought,” he said. In his voice was a new note; the calm certainty that has swept aside a waiting terror of the unknown. “Now I know! Come with me to my cabin, old friend. For now that you too have seen I can tell you”— he hesitated —“what it was you saw,” he ended.
As we passed through the door we met the ship’s first officer. Throckmartin composed his face into at least a semblance of normality.
“Going to have much of a storm?” he asked.
“Yes,” said the mate. “Probably all the way to Melbourne.”
Throckmartin straightened as though with a new thought. He gripped the officer’s sleeve eagerly.
“You mean at least cloudy weather — for”— he hesitated —“for the next three nights, say?”
“And for three more,” replied the mate.
“Thank God!” cried Throckmartin, and I think I never heard such relief and hope as was in his voice.
The sailor stood amazed. “Thank God?” he repeated. “Thank — what d’ye mean?”
But Throckmartin was moving onward to his cabin. I started to follow. The first officer stopped me.
“Your friend,” he said, “is he ill?”
“The sea!” I answered hurriedly. “He’s not used to it. I am going to look after him.”
Doubt and disbelief were plain in the seaman’s eyes but I hurried on. For I knew now that Throckmartin was ill indeed — but with a sickness the ship’s doctor nor any other could heal.
CHAPTER II “DEAD! ALL DEAD!”
He was sitting, face in hands, on the side of his berth as I entered. He had taken off his coat.
“Throck,” I cried. “What was it? What are you flying from, man? Where is your wife — and Stanton?”
“Dead!” he replied monotonously. “Dead! All dead!” Then as I recoiled from him —“All dead. Edith, Stanton, Thora — dead — or worse. And Edith in the Moon Pool — with them — drawn by what you saw on the moon path — that has put its brand upon me — and follows me!”
He ripped open his shirt.
“Look at this,” he said. Around his chest, above his heart, the skin was white as pearl. This whiteness was sharply defined against the healthy tint of the body. It circled him with an even cincture about two inches wide.
“Burn it!” he said, and offered me his cigarette. I drew back. He gestured — peremptorily. I pressed the glowing end of the cigarette into the ribbon of white flesh. He did not flinch nor was there odour of burning nor, as I drew the little cylinder away, any mark upon the whiteness.
“Feel it!” he commanded again. I placed my fingers upon the band. It was cold — like frozen marble.
He drew his shirt around him.
“Two things you have seen,” he said. “IT— and its mark. Seeing, you must believe my story. Goodwin, I tell you again that my wife is dead — or worse — I do not know; the prey of — what you saw; so, too, is Stanton; so Thora. How —”
Tears rolled down the seared face.
“Why did God let it conquer us? Why did He let it take my Edith?” he cried in utter bitterness. “Are there things stronger than God, do you think, Walter?”
I hesitated.
“Are there? Are there?” His wild eyes searched me.
“I do not know just how you define God,” I managed at last through my astonishment to make answer. “If you mean the will to know, working through science —”
He waved me aside impatiently.
“Science,” he said. “What is our science against — that? Or against the science of whatever devils that made it — or made the way for it to enter this world of ours?”
With an effort he regained control.
“Goodwin,” he said, “do you know at all of the ruins on the Carolines; the cyclopean, megalithic cities and harbours of Ponape and Lele, of Kusaie, of Ruk and Hogolu, and a score of other islets there? Particularly, do you know of the Nan–Matal and the Metalanim?”
“Of the Metalanim I have heard and seen photographs,” I said. “They call it, don’t they, the Lost Venice of the Pacific?”
“Look at this map,” said Throckmartin. “That,” he went on, “is Christian’s chart of Metalanim harbour and the Nan–Matal. Do you see the rectangles marked Nan–Tauach?”
“Yes,” I said.
“There,” he said, “under those walls is the Moon Pool and the seven gleaming lights that raise the Dweller in the Pool, and the altar and shrine of the Dweller. And there in the Moon Pool with it lie Edith and Stanton and Thora.”
“The Dweller in the Moon Pool?” I repeated half-incredulously.
“The Thing you saw,” said Throckmartin solemnly.
A solid sheet of rain swept the ports, and the Southern Queen began to roll on the rising swells. Throckmartin drew another deep breath of relief, and drawing aside a curtain peered out into the night. Its blackness seemed to reassure him. At any rate, when he sat again he was entirely calm.
“There are no more wonderful ruins in the world,” he began almost casually. “They take in some fifty islets and cover with their intersecting canals and lagoons about twelve square miles. Who built them? None knows. When were they built? Ages before the memory of present man, that is sure. Ten thousand, twenty thousand, a hundred thousand years ago — the last more likely.
“All these islets, Walter, are squared, and their shores are frowning seawalls of gigantic basalt blocks hewn and put in place by the hands of ancient man. Each inner water-front is faced with a terrace of those basalt blocks which stand out six feet above the shallow canals that meander between them. On the islets behind these walls are time-shattered fortresses, palaces, terraces, pyramids; immense courtyards strewn with ruins — and all so old that they seem to wither the eyes of those who look on them.
“There has been a great subsidence. You can stand out of Metalanim harbour for three miles and look down upon the tops of similar monolithic structures and walls twenty feet below you in the water.
“And all about, strung on their canals, are the bulwarked islets with their enigmatic walls peering through the dense growths of mangroves — dead, deserted for incalculable ages; shunned by those who live near.
“You as a botanist are familiar with the evidence that a vast shadowy continent existed in the Pacific — a continent that was not rent asunder by volcanic forces as was that legendary one of Atlantis in the Eastern Ocean.1 My work in Java, in Papua, and in the Ladrones had set my mind upon this Pacific lost land. Just as the Azores are believed to be the last high peaks of Atlantis, so hints came to me steadily that Ponape and Lele and their basalt bulwarked islets were the last points of the slowly sunken western land clinging still to the sunlight, and had been the last refuge and sacred places of the rulers of that race which had lost their immemorial home under the rising waters of the Pacific.
“I believed that under these ruins I might find the evidence that I sought.
“My — my wife and I had talked before we were married of making this our great work. After the honeymoon we prepared for the expedition. Stanton was as enthusiastic as ourselves. We sailed, as you know, last May for fulfilment of my dreams.
“At Ponape we selected, not without difficulty, workmen to help us — diggers. I had to make extraordinary inducements before I could get together my force. Their beliefs are gloomy, these Ponapeans. They people their swamps, their forests, their mountains, and shores, with malignant spirits — ani they call them. And they are afraid — bitterly afraid of the isles of ruins and what they think the ruins hide. I do not wonder — now!
“When they were told where they were to go, and how long we expected to stay, they murmured. Those who, at last, were tempted made what I thought then merely a superstitious proviso that they were to be allowed to go away on the three nights of the full moon. Would to God we had heeded them and gone too!”
“We passed into Metalanim harbour. Off to our left — a mile away arose a massive quadrangle. Its walls were all of forty feet high and hundreds of feet on each side. As we drew by, our natives grew very silent; watched it furtively, fearfully. I knew it for the ruins that are called Nan–Tauach, the ‘place of frowning walls.’ And at the silence of my men I recalled what Christian had written of this place; of how he had come upon its ‘ancient platforms and tetragonal enclosures of stonework; its wonder of tortuous alleyways and labyrinth of shallow canals; grim masses of stonework peering out from behind verdant screens; cyclopean barricades,’ and of how, when he had turned ‘into its ghostly shadows, straight-way the merriment of guides was hushed and conversation died down to whispers.’”
He was silent for a little time.
“Of course I wanted to pitch our camp there,” he went on again quietly, “but I soon gave up that idea. The natives were panic-stricken — threatened to turn back. ‘No,’ they said, ‘too great ani there. We go to any other place — but not there.’
“We finally picked for our base the islet called Uschen–Tau. It was close to the isle of desire, but far enough away from it to satisfy our men. There was an excellent camping-place and a spring of fresh water. We pitched our tents, and in a couple of days the work was in full swing.”
1. For more detailed observations on these points refer to G. Volkens, Uber die Karolinen Insel Yap, in Verhandlungen Gesellschaft Erdkunde Berlin, xxvii (1901); J. S. Kubary, Ethnographische Beitrage zur Kentniss des Karolinen Archipel (Leiden, 1889–1892); De Abrade Historia del Conflicto de las Carolinas, etc. (Madrid, 1886). — W. T. G.
CHAPTER III THE MOON ROCK
“I do not intend to tell you now,” Throckmartin continued, “the results of the next two weeks, nor of what we found. Later — if I am allowed, I will lay all that before you. It is sufficient to say that at the end of those two weeks I had found confirmation for many of my theories.
“The place, for all its decay and desolation, had not infected us with any touch of morbidity — that is not Edith, Stanton, or myself. But Thora was very unhappy. She was a Swede, as you know, and in her blood ran the beliefs and superstitions of the Northland — some of them so strangely akin to those of this far southern land; beliefs of spirits of mountain and forest and water werewolves and beings malign. From the first she showed a curious sensitivity to what, I suppose, may be called the ‘influences’ of the place. She said it ‘smelled’ of ghosts and warlocks.
“I laughed at her then —
“Two weeks slipped by, and at their end the spokesman for our natives came to us. The next night was the full of the moon, he said. He reminded me of my promise. They would go back to their village in the morning; they would return after the third night, when the moon had begun to wane. They left us sundry charms for our ‘protection,’ and solemnly cautioned us to keep as far away as possible from Nan–Tauach during their absence. Half-exasperated, half-amused I watched them go.
“No work could be done without them, of course, so we decided to spend the days of their absence junketing about the southern islets of the group. We marked down several spots for subsequent exploration, and on the morning of the third day set forth along the east face of the breakwater for our camp on Uschen–Tau, planning to have everything in readiness for the return of our men the next day.
“We landed just before dusk, tired and ready for our cots. It was only a little after ten o’clock that Edith awakened me.
“‘Listen!’ she said. ‘Lean over with your ear close to the ground!’
“I did so, and seemed to hear, far, far below, as though coming up from great distances, a faint chanting. It gathered strength, died down, ended; began, gathered volume, faded away into silence.
“‘It’s the waves rolling on rocks somewhere,’ I said. ‘We’re probably over some ledge of rock that carries the sound.’
“‘It’s the first time I’ve heard it,’ replied my wife doubtfully. We listened again. Then through the dim rhythms, deep beneath us, another sound came. It drifted across the lagoon that lay between us and Nan–Tauach in little tinkling waves. It was music — of a sort; I won’t describe the strange effect it had upon me. You’ve felt it —”
“You mean on the deck?” I asked. Throckmartin nodded.
“I went to the flap of the tent,” he continued, “and peered out. As I did so Stanton lifted his flap and walked out into the moonlight, looking over to the other islet and listening. I called to him.
“‘That’s the queerest sound!’ he said. He listened again. ‘Crystalline! Like little notes of translucent glass. Like the bells of crystal on the sistrums of Isis at Dendarah Temple,’ he added half-dreamily. We gazed intently at the island. Suddenly, on the sea-wall, moving slowly, rhythmically, we saw a little group of lights. Stanton laughed.
“‘The beggars!’ he exclaimed. ‘That’s why they wanted to get away, is it? Don’t you see, Dave, it’s some sort of a festival — rites of some kind that they hold during the full moon! That’s why they were so eager to have us KEEP away, too.’
“The explanation seemed good. I felt a curious sense of relief, although I had not been sensible of any oppression.
“‘Let’s slip over,’ suggested Stanton — but I would not.
“‘They’re a difficult lot as it is,’ I said. ‘If we break into one of their religious ceremonies they’ll probably never forgive us. Let’s keep out of any family party where we haven’t been invited.’
“‘That’s so,’ agreed Stanton.
“The strange tinkling rose and fell, rose and fell —
“‘There’s something — something very unsettling about it,’ said Edith at last soberly. ‘I wonder what they make those sounds with. They frighten me half to death, and, at the same time, they make me feel as though some enormous rapture were just around the corner.’
“‘It’s devilish uncanny!’ broke in Stanton.
“And as he spoke the flap of Thora’s tent was raised and out into the moonlight strode the old Swede. She was the great Norse type — tall, deep-breasted, moulded on the old Viking lines. Her sixty years had slipped from her. She looked like some ancient priestess of Odin.
“She stood there, her eyes wide, brilliant, staring. She thrust her head forward toward Nan–Tauach, regarding the moving lights; she listened. Suddenly she raised her arms and made a curious gesture to the moon. It was — an archaic — movement; she seemed to drag it from remote antiquity — yet in it was a strange suggestion of power, Twice she repeated this gesture and — the tinklings died away! She turned to us.
“‘Go!’ she said, and her voice seemed to come from far distances. ‘Go from here — and quickly! Go while you may. It has called —’ She pointed to the islet. ‘It knows you are here. It waits!’ she wailed. ‘It beckons — the — the —”
“She fell at Edith’s feet, and over the lagoon came again the tinklings, now with a quicker note of jubilance — almost of triumph.
“We watched beside her throughout the night. The sounds from Nan–Tauach continued until about an hour before moon-set. In the morning Thora awoke, none the worse, apparently. She had had bad dreams, she said. She could not remember what they were — except that they had warned her of danger. She was oddly sullen, and throughout the morning her gaze returned again and again half-fascinatedly, half-wonderingly to the neighbouring isle.
“That afternoon the natives returned. And that night on Nan–Tauach the silence was unbroken nor were there lights nor sign of life.
“You will understand, Goodwin, how the occurrences I have related would excite the scientific curiosity. We rejected immediately, of course, any explanation admitting the supernatural.
“Our — symptoms let me call them — could all very easily be accounted for. It is unquestionable that the vibrations created by certain musical instruments have definite and sometimes extraordinary effect upon the nervous system. We accepted this as the explanation of the reactions we had experienced, hearing the unfamiliar sounds. Thora’s nervousness, her superstitious apprehensions, had wrought her up to a condition of semi-somnambulistic hysteria. Science could readily explain her part in the night’s scene.
“We came to the conclusion that there must be a passage-way between Ponape and Nan–Tauach known to the natives — and used by them during their rites. We decided that on the next departure of our labourers we would set forth immediately to Nan–Tauach. We would investigate during the day, and at evening my wife and Thora would go back to camp, leaving Stanton and me to spend the night on the island, observing from some safe hiding-place what might occur.
“The moon waned; appeared crescent in the west; waxed slowly toward the full. Before the men left us they literally prayed us to accompany them. Their importunities only made us more eager to see what it was that, we were now convinced, they wanted to conceal from us. At least that was true of Stanton and myself. It was not true of Edith. She was thoughtful, abstracted — reluctant.
“When the men were out of sight around the turn of the harbour, we took our boat and made straight for Nan–Tauach. Soon its mighty sea-wall towered above us. We passed through the water-gate with its gigantic hewn prisms of basalt and landed beside a half-submerged pier. In front of us stretched a series of giant steps leading into a vast court strewn with fragments of fallen pillars. In the centre of the court, beyond the shattered pillars, rose another terrace of basalt blocks, concealing, I knew, still another enclosure.
“And now, Walter, for the better understanding of what follows — and — and —” he hesitated. “Should you decide later to return with me or, if I am taken, to — to — follow us — listen carefully to my description of this place: Nan–Tauach is literally three rectangles. The first rectangle is the sea-wall, built up of monoliths — hewn and squared, twenty feet wide at the top. To get to the gateway in the sea-wall you pass along the canal marked on the map between Nan–Tauach and the islet named Tau. The entrance to the canal is bidden by dense thickets of mangroves; once through these the way is clear. The steps lead up from the landing of the sea-gate through the entrance to the courtyard.
“This courtyard is surrounded by another basalt wall, rectangular, following with mathematical exactness the march of the outer barricades. The sea-wall is from thirty to forty feet high — originally it must have been much higher, but there has been subsidence in parts. The wall of the first enclosure is fifteen feet across the top and its height varies from twenty to fifty feet — here, too, the gradual sinking of the land has caused portions of it to fall.
“Within this courtyard is the second enclosure. Its terrace, of the same basalt as the outer walls, is about twenty feet high. Entrance is gained to it by many breaches which time has made in its stonework. This is the inner court, the heart of Nan–Tauach! There lies the great central vault with which is associated the one name of living being that has come to us out of the mists of the past. The natives say it was the treasure-house of Chau-te-leur, a mighty king who reigned long ‘before their fathers.’ As Chan is the ancient Ponapean word both for sun and king, the name means, without doubt, ‘place of the sun king.’ It is a memory of a dynastic name of the race that ruled the Pacific continent, now vanished — just as the rulers of ancient Crete took the name of Minos and the rulers of Egypt the name of Pharaoh.
“And opposite this place of the sun king is the moon rock that hides the Moon Pool.
“It was Stanton who discovered the moon rock. We had been inspecting the inner courtyard; Edith and Thora were getting together our lunch. I came out of the vault of Chau-te-leur to find Stanton before a part of the terrace studying it wonderingly.
“‘What do you make of this?’ he asked me as I came up. He pointed to the wall. I followed his finger and saw a slab of stone about fifteen feet high and ten wide. At first all I noticed was the exquisite nicety with which its edges joined the blocks about it. Then I realized that its colour was subtly different — tinged with grey and of a smooth, peculiar — deadness.
“‘Looks more like calcite than basalt,’ I said. I touched it and withdrew my hand quickly for at the contact every nerve in my arm tingled as though a shock of frozen electricity had passed through it. It was not cold as we know cold. It was a chill force — the phrase I have used — frozen electricity — describes it better than anything else. Stanton looked at me oddly.
“‘So you felt it too,’ he said. ‘I was wondering whether I was developing hallucinations like Thora. Notice, by the way, that the blocks beside it are quite warm beneath the sun.’
“We examined the slab eagerly. Its edges were cut as though by an engraver of jewels. They fitted against the neighbouring blocks in almost a hair-line. Its base was slightly curved, and fitted as closely as top and sides upon the huge stones on which it rested. And then we noted that these stones had been hollowed to follow the line of the grey stone’s foot. There was a semicircular depression running from one side of the slab to the other. It was as though the grey rock stood in the centre of a shallow cup — revealing half, covering half. Something about this hollow attracted me. I reached down and felt it. Goodwin, although the balance of the stones that formed it, like all the stones of the courtyard, were rough and age-worn — this was as smooth, as even surfaced as though it had just left the hands of the polisher.
“‘It’s a door!’ exclaimed Stanton. ‘It swings around in that little cup. That’s what makes the hollow so smooth.’
“‘Maybe you’re right,’ I replied. ‘But how the devil can we open it?’
“We went over the slab again — pressing upon its edges, thrusting against its sides. During one of those efforts I happened to look up — and cried out. A foot above and on each side of the corner of the grey rock’s lintel was a slight convexity, visible only from the angle at which my gaze struck it.
“We carried with us a small scaling-ladder and up this I went. The bosses were apparently nothing more than chiseled curvatures in the stone. I laid my hand on the one I was examining, and drew it back sharply. In my palm, at the base of my thumb, I had felt the same shock that I had in touching the slab below. I put my hand back. The impression came from a spot not more than an inch wide. I went carefully over the entire convexity, and six times more the chill ran through my arm. There were seven circles an inch wide in the curved place, each of which communicated the precise sensation I have described. The convexity on the opposite side of the slab gave exactly the same results. But no amount of touching or of pressing these spots singly or in any combination gave the slightest promise of motion to the slab itself.
“‘And yet — they’re what open it,’ said Stanton positively.
“‘Why do you say that?’ I asked.
“‘I— don’t know,’ he answered hesitatingly. ‘But something tells me so. Throck,’ he went on half earnestly, half laughingly, ‘the purely scientific part of me is fighting the purely human part of me. The scientific part is urging me to find some way to get that slab either down or open. The human part is just as strongly urging me to do nothing of the sort and get away while I can!’
“He laughed again — shamefacedly.
“‘Which shall it be?’ he asked — and I thought that in his tone the human side of him was ascendant.
“‘It will probably stay as it is — unless we blow it to bits,’ I said.
“‘I thought of that,’ he answered, ‘and I wouldn’t dare,’ he added soberly enough. And even as I had spoken there came to me the same feeling that he had expressed. It was as though something passed out of the grey rock that struck my heart as a hand strikes an impious lip. We turned away — uneasily, and faced Thora coming through a breach on the terrace.
“‘Miss Edith wants you quick,’ she began — and stopped. Her eyes went past me to the grey rock. Her body grew rigid; she took a few stiff steps forward and then ran straight to it. She cast herself upon its breast, hands and face pressed against it; we heard her scream as though her very soul were being drawn from her — and watched her fall at its foot. As we picked her up I saw steal from her face the look I had observed when first we heard the crystal music of Nan–Tauach — that unhuman mingling of opposites!”
CHAPTER IV THE FIRST VANISHINGS
“We carried Thora back, down to where Edith was waiting. We told her what had happened and what we had found. She listened gravely, and as we finished Thora sighed and opened her eyes.
“‘I would like to see the stone,’ she said. ‘Charles, you stay here with Thora.’ We passed through the outer court silently — and stood before the rock. She touched it, drew back her hand as I had; thrust it forward again resolutely and held it there. She seemed to be listening. Then she turned to me.
“‘David,’ said my wife, and the wistfulness in her voice hurt me —‘David, would you be very, very disappointed if we went from here — without trying to find out any more about it — would you?’
“Walter, I never wanted anything so much in my life as I wanted to learn what that rock concealed. Nevertheless, I tried to master my desire, and I answered —‘Edith, not a bit if you want us to do it.’
“She read my struggle in my eyes. She turned back toward the grey rock. I saw a shiver pass through her. I felt a tinge of remorse and pity!
“‘Edith,’ I exclaimed, ‘we’ll go!’
“She looked at me again. ‘Science is a jealous mistress,’ she quoted. ‘No, after all it may be just fancy. At any rate, you can’t run away. No! But, Dave, I’m going to stay too!’
“And there was no changing her decision. As we neared the others she laid a hand on my arm.
“‘Dave,’ she said, ‘if there should be something — well — inexplicable tonight — something that seems — too dangerous — will you promise to go back to our own islet tomorrow, if we can — and wait until the natives return?’
“I promised eagerly — the desire to stay and see what came with the night was like a fire within me.
“We picked a place about five hundred feet away from the steps leading into the outer court.
“The spot we had selected was well hidden. We could not be seen, and yet we had a clear view of the stairs and the gateway. We settled down just before dusk to wait for whatever might come. I was nearest the giant steps; next me Edith; then Thora, and last Stanton.
“Night fell. After a time the eastern sky began to lighten, and we knew that the moon was rising; grew lighter still, and the orb peeped over the sea; swam into full sight. I glanced at Edith and then at Thora. My wife was intently listening. Thora sat, as she had since we had placed ourselves, elbows on knees, her hands covering her face.
“And then from the moonlight flooding us there dripped down on me a great drowsiness. Sleep seemed to seep from the rays and fall upon my eyes, closing them — closing them inexorably. Edith’s hand in mine relaxed. Stanton’s head fell upon his breast and his body swayed drunkenly. I tried to rise — to fight against the profound desire for slumber that pressed on me.
“And as I fought, Thora raised her head as though listening; and turned toward the gateway. There was infinite despair in her face — and expectancy. I tried again to rise — and a surge of sleep rushed over me. Dimly, as I sank within it, I heard a crystalline chiming; raised my lids once more with a supreme effort.
“Thora, bathed in light, was standing at the top of the stairs.
“Sleep took me for its very own — swept me into the heart of oblivion!
“Dawn was breaking when I wakened. Recollection rushed back; I thrust a panic-stricken hand out toward Edith; touched her and my heart gave a great leap of thankfulness. She stirred, sat up, rubbing dazed eyes. Stanton lay on his side, back toward us, head in arms.
“Edith looked at me laughingly. ‘Heavens! What sleep!’ she said. Memory came to her.
“‘What happened?’ she whispered. ‘What made us sleep like that?’
“Stanton awoke.
“‘What’s the matter!’ he exclaimed. ‘You look as though you’ve been seeing ghosts.’
“Edith caught my hands.
“‘Where’s Thora?’ she cried. Before I could answer she had run out into the open, calling.
“‘Thora was taken,’ was all I could say to Stanton, ‘together we went to my wife, now standing beside the great stone steps, looking up fearfully at the gateway into the terraces. There I told them what I had seen before sleep had drowned me. And together then we ran up the stairs, through the court and to the grey rock.
“The slab was closed as it had been the day before, nor was there trace of its having opened. No trace? Even as I thought this Edith dropped to her knees before it and reached toward something lying at its foot. It was a little piece of gay silk. I knew it for part of the kerchief Thora wore about her hair. She lifted the fragment. It had been cut from the kerchief as though by a razor-edge; a few threads ran from it — down toward the base of the slab; ran on to the base of the grey rock and — under it!
“The grey rock was a door! And it had opened and Thora had passed through it!
“I think that for the next few minutes we all were a little insane. We beat upon that portal with our hands, with stones and sticks. At last reason came back to us.
“Goodwin, during the next two hours we tried every way in our power to force entrance through the slab. The rock resisted our drills. We tried explosions at the base with charges covered by rock. They made not the slightest impression on the surface, expending their force, of course, upon the slighter resistance of their coverings.
“Afternoon found us hopeless. Night was coming on and we would have to decide our course of action. I wanted to go to Ponape for help. But Edith objected that this would take hours and after we had reached there it would be impossible to persuade our men to return with us that night, if at all. What then was left? Clearly only one of two choices: to go back to our camp, wait for our men, and on their return try to persuade them to go with us to Nan–Tauach. But this would mean the abandonment of Thora for at least two days. We could not do it; it would have been too cowardly.
“The other choice was to wait where we were for night to come; to wait for the rock to open as it had the night before, and to make a sortie through it for Thora before it could close again.
“Our path lay clear before us. We had to spend that night on Nan–Tauach!
