The Flame-tipped Shadows

: The Moon Pool

Marakinoff nodded his head solemnly as Olaf finished.



"Da!" he said. "That which comes from here took them both--the woman

and the child. Da! They came clasped within it and the stone shut upon

them. But why it left the child behind I do not understand."



"How do you know that?" I cried in amazement.



"Because I saw it," answered Marakinoff simply. "Not only did I see

it, but h
rdly had I time to make escape through the entrance before

it passed whirling and murmuring and its bell sounds all joyous. Da!

It was what you call the squeak close, that."



"Wait a moment," I said--stilling Larry with a gesture. "Do I

understand you to say that you were within this place?"



Marakinoff actually beamed upon me.



"Da, Dr. Goodwin," he said, "I went in when that which comes from it

went out!"



I gaped at him, stricken dumb; into Larry's bellicose attitude crept a

suggestion of grudging respect; Olaf, trembling, watched silently.



"Dr. Goodwin and my impetuous young friend, you," went on Marakinoff

after a moment's silence and I wondered vaguely why he did not include

Huldricksson in his address--"it is time that we have an

understanding. I have a proposal to make to you also. It is this; we

are what you call a bad boat, and all of us are in it. Da! We need all

hands, is it not so? Let us put together our knowledge and our brains

and resources--and even a poonch of a mule is a resource," he looked

wickedly at O'Keefe, "and pull our boat into quiet waters again. After

that--"



"All very well, Marakinoff," interjected Larry, "but I don't feel very

safe in any boat with somebody capable of shooting me through the

back."



Marakinoff waved a deprecatory hand.



"It was natural that," he said, "logical, da! Here is a very great

secret, perhaps many secrets to my country invaluable--" He paused,

shaken by some overpowering emotion; the veins in his forehead grew

congested, the cold eyes blazed and the guttural voice harshened.



"I do not apologize and I do not explain," rasped Marakinoff. "But I

will tell you, da! Here is my country sweating blood in an experiment

to liberate the world. And here are the other nations ringing us like

wolves and waiting to spring at our throats at the least sign of

weakness. And here are you, Lieutenant O'Keefe of the English wolves,

and you Dr. Goodwin of the Yankee pack--and here in this place may be

that will enable my country to win its war for the worker. What are

the lives of you two and this sailor to that? Less than the flies I

crush with my hand, less than midges in the sunbeam!"



He suddenly gripped himself.



"But that is not now the important thing," he resumed, almost coldly.

"Not that nor my shooting. Let us squarely the situation face. My

proposal is so: that we join interests, and what you call see it

through together; find our way through this place and those secrets

learn of which I have spoken, if we can. And when that is done we will

go our ways, to his own land each, to make use of them for our lands

as each of us may. On my part, I offer my knowledge--and it is very

valuable, Dr. Goodwin--and my training. You and Lieutenant O'Keefe do

the same, and this man Olaf, what he can of his strength, for I do not

think his usefulness lies in his brains, no."



"In effect, Goodwin," broke in Larry as I hesitated, "the professor's

proposition is this: he wants to know what's going on here but he

begins to realize it's no one man's job and besides we have the drop

on him. We're three to his one, and we have all his hardware and

cutlery. But also we can do better with him than without him--just as

he can do better with us than without us. It's an even break--for a

while. But once he gets that information he's looking for, then look

out. You and Olaf and I are the wolves and the flies and the midges

again--and the strafing will be about due. Nevertheless, with three to

one against him, if he can get away with it he deserves to. I'm for

taking him up, if you are."



There was almost a twinkle in Marakinoff's eyes.



"It is not just as I would have put it, perhaps," he said, "but in its

skeleton he has right. Nor will I turn my hand against you while we

are still in danger here. I pledge you my honor on this."



Larry laughed.



"All right, Professor," he grinned. "I believe you mean every word

you say. Nevertheless, I'll just keep the guns."



Marakinoff bowed, imperturbably.



"And now," he said, "I will tell you what I know. I found the secret

of the door mechanism even as you did, Dr. Goodwin. But by

carelessness, my condensers were broken. I was forced to wait while I

sent for others--and the waiting might be for months. I took certain

precautions, and on the first night of this full moon I hid myself

within the vault of Chau-ta-leur."



An involuntary thrill of admiration for the man went through me at the

manifest heroism of this leap in the dark. I could see it reflected in

Larry's face.



"I hid in the vault," continued Marakinoff, "and I saw that which

comes from here come out. I waited--long hours. At last, when the moon

was low, it returned--ecstatically--with a man, a native, in embrace

enfolded. It passed through the door, and soon then the moon became

low and the door closed.



"The next night more confidence was mine, yes. And after that which

comes had gone, I looked through its open door. I said, 'It will not

return for three hours. While it is away, why shall I not into its

home go through the door it has left open?' So I went--even to here. I

looked at the pillars of light and I tested the liquid of the Pool on

which they fell. That liquid, Dr. Goodwin, is not water, and it is not

any fluid known on earth." He handed me a small vial, its neck held in

a long thong.



"Take this," he said, "and see."



Wonderingly, I took the bottle; dipped it down into the Pool. The

liquid was extraordinarily light; seemed, in fact, to give the vial

buoyancy. I held it to the light. It was striated, streaked, as though

little living, pulsing veins ran through it. And its blueness, even in

the vial, held an intensity of luminousness.



"Radioactive," said Marakinoff. "Some liquid that is intensely

radioactive; but what it is I know not at all. Upon the living skin it

acts like radium raised to the nth power and with an element most

mysterious added. The solution with which I treated him," he pointed

to Huldricksson, "I had prepared before I came here, from certain

information I had. It is largely salts of radium and its base is

Loeb's formula for the neutralization of radium and X-ray burns.

Taking this man at once, before the degeneration had become really

active, I could negative it. But after two hours I could have done

nothing."



He paused a moment.



"Next I studied the nature of these luminous walls. I concluded that

whoever had made them, knew the secret of the Almighty's manufacture

of light from the ether itself! Colossal! Da! But the substance of

these blocks confines an atomic--how would you say--atomic

manipulation, a conscious arrangement of electrons, light-emitting and

perhaps indefinitely so. These blocks are lamps in which oil and wick

are electrons drawing light waves from ether itself! A Prometheus,

indeed, this discoverer! I looked at my watch and that little guardian

warned me that it was time to go. I went. That which comes forth

returned--this time empty-handed.



"And the next night I did the same thing. Engrossed in research, I

let the moments go by to the danger point, and scarcely was I replaced

within the vault when the shining thing raced over the walls, and in

its grip the woman and child.



"Then you came--and that is all. And now--what is it you know?"



Very briefly I went over my story. His eyes gleamed now and then, but

he did not interrupt me.



"A great secret! A colossal secret!" he muttered, when I had ended.

"We cannot leave it hidden."



"The first thing to do is to try the door," said Larry, matter of

fact.



"There is no use, my young friend," assured Marakinoff mildly.



"Nevertheless we'll try," said Larry. We retraced our way through the

winding tunnel to the end, but soon even O'Keefe saw that any idea of

moving the slab from within was hopeless. We returned to the Chamber

of the Pool. The pillars of light were fainter, and we knew that the

moon was sinking. On the world outside before long dawn would be

breaking. I began to feel thirst--and the blue semblance of water

within the silvery rim seemed to glint mockingly as my eyes rested on

it.



"Da!" it was Marakinoff, reading my thoughts uncannily. "Da! We will

be thirsty. And it will be very bad for him of us who loses control

and drinks of that, my friend. Da!"



Larry threw back his shoulders as though shaking a burden from them.



"This place would give an angel of joy the willies," he said. "I

suggest that we look around and find something that will take us

somewhere. You can bet the people that built it had more ways of

getting in than that once-a-month family entrance. Doc, you and Olaf

take the left wall; the professor and I will take the right."



He loosened one of his automatics with a suggestive movement.



"After you, Professor," he bowed, politely, to the Russian. We parted

and set forth.



The chamber widened out from the portal in what seemed to be the arc

of an immense circle. The shining walls held a perceptible curve, and

from this curvature I estimated that the roof was fully three hundred

feet above us.



The floor was of smooth, mosaic-fitted blocks of a faintly yellow

tinge. They were not light-emitting like the blocks that formed the

walls. The radiance from these latter, I noted, had the peculiar

quality of thickening a few yards from its source, and it was this

that produced the effect of misty, veiled distances. As we walked, the

seven columns of rays streaming down from the crystalline globes high

above us waned steadily; the glow within the chamber lost its

prismatic shimmer and became an even grey tone somewhat like moonlight

in a thin cloud.



Now before us, out from the wall, jutted a low terrace. It was all of

a pearly rose-coloured stone, slender, graceful pillars of the same

hue. The face of the terrace was about ten feet high, and all over it

ran a bas-relief of what looked like short-trailing vines, surmounted

by five stalks, on the tip of each of which was a flower.



We passed along the terrace. It turned in an abrupt curve. I heard a

hail, and there, fifty feet away, at the curving end of a wall

identical with that where we stood, were Larry and Marakinoff.

Obviously the left side of the chamber was a duplicate of that we had

explored. We joined. In front of us the columned barriers ran back a

hundred feet, forming an alcove. The end of this alcove was another

wall of the same rose stone, but upon it the design of vines was much

heavier.



We took a step forward--there was a gasp of awe from the Norseman, a

guttural exclamation from Marakinoff. For on, or rather within, the

wall before us, a great oval began to glow, waxed almost to a flame

and then shone steadily out as though from behind it a light was

streaming through the stone itself!



And within the roseate oval two flame-tipped shadows appeared, stood

for a moment, and then seemed to float out upon its surface. The

shadows wavered; the tips of flame that nimbused them with flickering

points of vermilion pulsed outward, drew back, darted forth again, and

once more withdrew themselves--and as they did so the shadows

thickened--and suddenly there before us stood two figures!



One was a girl--a girl whose great eyes were golden as the fabled

lilies of Kwan-Yung that were born of the kiss of the sun upon the

amber goddess the demons of Lao-Tz'e carved for him; whose softly

curved lips were red as the royal coral, and whose golden-brown hair

reached to her knees!



And the second was a gigantic frog--A woman frog, head helmeted with

carapace of shell around which a fillet of brilliant yellow jewels

shone; enormous round eyes of blue circled with a broad iris of green;

monstrous body of banded orange and white girdled with strand upon

strand of the flashing yellow gems; six feet high if an inch, and with

one webbed paw of its short, powerfully muscled forelegs resting upon

the white shoulder of the golden-eyed girl!



Moments must have passed as we stood in stark amazement, gazing at

that incredible apparition. The two figures, although as real as any

of those who stood beside me, unphantomlike as it is possible to be,

had a distinct suggestion of--projection.



They were there before us--golden-eyed girl and grotesque

frog-woman--complete in every line and curve; and still it was as

though their bodies passed back through distances; as though, to try

to express the wellnigh inexpressible, the two shapes we were looking

upon were the end of an infinite number stretching in fine linked

chain far away, of which the eyes saw only the nearest, while in the

brain some faculty higher than sight recognized and registered the

unseen others.



The gigantic eyes of the frog-woman took us all in--unwinkingly.

Little glints of phosphorescence shone out within the metallic green

of the outer iris ring. She stood upright, her great legs bowed; the

monstrous slit of a mouth slightly open, revealing a row of white

teeth sharp and pointed as lancets; the paw resting on the girl's

shoulder, half covering its silken surface, and from its five webbed

digits long yellow claws of polished horn glistened against the

delicate texture of the flesh.



But if the frog-woman regarded us all, not so did the maiden of the

rosy wall. Her eyes were fastened upon Larry, drinking him in with

extraordinary intentness. She was tall, far over the average of women,

almost as tall, indeed, as O'Keefe himself; not more than twenty years

old, if that, I thought. Abruptly she leaned forward, the golden eyes

softened and grew tender; the red lips moved as though she were

speaking.



Larry took a quick step, and his face was that of one who after

countless births comes at last upon the twin soul lost to him for

ages. The frog-woman turned her eyes upon the girl; her huge lips

moved, and I knew that she was talking! The girl held out a warning

hand to O'Keefe, and then raised it, resting each finger upon one of

the five flowers of the carved vine close beside her. Once, twice,

three times, she pressed upon the flower centres, and I noted that her

hand was curiously long and slender, the digits like those wonderful

tapering ones the painters we call the primitive gave to their

Virgins.



Three times she pressed the flowers, and then looked intently at Larry

once more. A slow, sweet smile curved the crimson lips. She stretched

both hands out toward him again eagerly; a burning blush rose swiftly

over white breasts and flowerlike face.



Like the clicking out of a cinematograph, the pulsing oval faded and

golden-eyed girl and frog-woman were gone!



And thus it was that Lakla, the handmaiden of the Silent Ones, and

Larry O'Keefe first looked into each other's hearts!



Larry stood rapt, gazing at the stone.



"Eilidh," I heard him whisper; "Eilidh of the lips like the red, red

rowan and the golden-brown hair!"



"Clearly of the Ranadae," said Marakinoff, "a development of the

fossil Labyrinthodonts: you saw her teeth, da?"



"Ranadae, yes," I answered. "But from the Stegocephalia; of the order

Ecaudata--"



Never such a complete indignation as was in O'Keefe's voice as he

interrupted.



"What do you mean--fossils and Stego whatever it is?" he asked. "She

was a girl, a wonder girl--a real girl, and Irish, or I'm not an

O'Keefe!"



"We were talking about the frog-woman, Larry," I said, conciliatingly.



His eyes were wild as he regarded us.



"Say," he said, "if you two had been in the Garden of Eden when Eve

took the apple, you wouldn't have had time to give her a look for

counting the scales on the snake!"



He strode swiftly over to the wall. We followed. Larry paused,

stretched his hand up to the flowers on which the tapering fingers of

the golden-eyed girl had rested.



"It was here she put up her hand," he murmured. He pressed

caressingly the carved calyxes, once, twice, a third time even as she

had--and silently and softly the wall began to split; on each side a

great stone pivoted slowly, and before us a portal stood, opening into

a narrow corridor glowing with the same rosy lustre that had gleamed

around the flame-tipped shadows!



"Have your gun ready, Olaf!" said Larry. "We follow Golden Eyes," he

said to me.



"Follow?" I echoed stupidly.



"Follow!" he said. "She came to show us the way! Follow? I'd follow

her through a thousand hells!"



And with Olaf at one end, O'Keefe at the other, both of them with

automatics in hand, and Marakinoff and I between them, we stepped over

the threshold.



At our right, a few feet away, the passage ended abruptly in a square

of polished stone, from which came faint rose radiance. The roof of

the place was less than two feet over O'Keefe's head.



A yard at left of us lifted a four-foot high, gently curved barricade,

stretching from wall to wall--and beyond it was blackness; an utter

and appalling blackness that seemed to gather itself from infinite

depths. The rose-glow in which we stood was cut off by the blackness

as though it had substance; it shimmered out to meet it, and was

checked as though by a blow; indeed, so strong was the suggestion of

sinister, straining force within the rayless opacity that I shrank

back, and Marakinoff with me. Not so O'Keefe. Olaf beside him, he

strode to the wall and peered over. He beckoned us.



"Flash your pocket-light down there," he said to me, pointing into the

thick darkness below us. The little electric circle quivered down as

though afraid, and came to rest upon a surface that resembled nothing

so much as clear, black ice. I ran the light across--here and there.

The floor of the corridor was of a substance so smooth, so polished,

that no man could have walked upon it; it sloped downward at a slowly

increasing angle.



"We'd have to have non-skid chains and brakes on our feet to tackle

that," mused Larry. Abstractedly be ran his hands over the edge on

which he was leaning. Suddenly they hesitated and then gripped

tightly.



"That's a queer one!" he exclaimed. His right palm was resting upon a

rounded protuberance, on the side of which were three small circular

indentations.



"A queer one--" he repeated--and pressed his fingers upon the circles.



There was a sharp click; the slabs that had opened to let us through

swung swiftly together; a curiously rapid vibration thrilled through

us, a wind arose and passed over our heads--a wind that grew and grew

until it became a whistling shriek, then a roar and then a mighty

humming, to which every atom in our bodies pulsed in rhythm painful

almost to disintegration!



The rosy wall dwindled in a flash to a point of light and disappeared!



Wrapped in the clinging, impenetrable blackness we were racing,

dropping, hurling at a frightful speed--where?



And ever that awful humming of the rushing wind and the lightning

cleaving of the tangible dark--so, it came to me oddly, must the newly

released soul race through the sheer blackness of outer space up to

that Throne of Justice, where God sits high above all suns!



I felt Marakinoff creep close to me; gripped my nerve and flashed my

pocket-light; saw Larry standing, peering, peering ahead, and

Huldricksson, one strong arm around his shoulders, bracing him. And

then the speed began to slacken.



Millions of miles, it seemed, below the sound of the unearthly

hurricane I heard Larry's voice, thin and ghostlike, beneath its

clamour.



"Got it!" shrilled the voice. "Got it! Don't worry!"



The wind died down to the roar, passed back into the whistling shriek

and diminished to a steady whisper. In the comparative quiet O'Keefe's

tones now came in normal volume.



"Some little shoot-the-chutes, what?" he shouted. "Say--if they had

this at Coney Island or the Crystal Palace! Press all the way in these

holes and she goes top-high. Diminish pressure--diminish speed. The

curve of this--dashboard--here sends the wind shooting up over our

heads--like a windshield. What's behind you?"



I flashed the light back. The mechanism on which we were ended in

another wall exactly similar to that over which O'Keefe crouched.



"Well, we can't fall out, anyway," he laughed. "Wish to hell I knew

where the brakes were! Look out!"



We dropped dizzily down an abrupt, seemingly endless slope; fell--fell

as into an abyss--then shot abruptly out of the blackness into a

throbbing green radiance. O'Keefe's fingers must have pressed down

upon the controls, for we leaped forward almost with the speed of

light. I caught a glimpse of luminous immensities on the verge of

which we flew; of depths inconceivable, and flitting through the

incredible spaces--gigantic shadows as of the wings of Israfel, which

are so wide, say the Arabs, the world can cower under them like a

nestling--and then--again the living blackness!



"What was that?" This from Larry, with the nearest approach to awe

that he had yet shown.



"Trolldom!" croaked the voice of Olaf.



"Chert!" This from Marakinoff. "What a space!"



"Have you considered, Dr. Goodwin," he went on after a pause, "a

curious thing? We know, or, at least, is it not that nine out of ten

astronomers believe, that the moon was hurled out of this same region

we now call the Pacific when the earth was yet like molasses; almost

molten, I should say. And is it not curious that that which comes from

the Moon Chamber needs the moon-rays to bring it forth; is it not? And

is it not significant again that the stone depends upon the moon for

operating? Da! And last--such a space in mother earth as we just

glimpsed, how else could it have been torn but by some gigantic

birth--like that of the moon? Da! I do not put forward these as

statements of fact--no! But as suggestions--"



I started; there was so much that this might explain--an unknown

element that responded to the moon-rays in opening the moon door; the

blue Pool with its weird radioactivity, and the force within it that

reacted to the same light stream--



It was not inconceivable that a film had drawn over the world wound, a

film of earth-flesh which drew itself over that colossal abyss after

our planet had borne its satellite--that world womb did not close

when her shining child sprang forth--it was possible; and all that we

know of earth depth is four miles of her eight thousand.



What is there at the heart of earth? What of that radiant unknown

element upon the moon mount Tycho? What of that element unknown to us

as part of earth which is seen only in the corona of the sun at

eclipse that we call coronium? Yet the earth is child of the sun as

the moon is earth's daughter. And what of that other unknown element

we find glowing green in the far-flung nebulae--green as that we had

just passed through--and that we call nebulium? Yet the sun is child

of the nebulae as the earth is child of the sun and the moon is child

of the earth.



And what miracles are there in coronium and nebulium which, as the

child of nebula and sun, we inherit? Yes--and in Tycho's enigma which

came from earth heart?



We were flashing down to earth heart! And what miracles were hidden

there?



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