The Treasure of Atlantis - J. Allan Dunn (finding audrey .TXT) 📗

the pisanos would dare go with you. It is a land of ghosts who dwell sometimes on the land and sometimes in the sky. Have I not seen it? Did not Mirradoche see the Sky City and the people walking?”

“Nevertheless we will go,” declared Morse, “even if we go alone. Where is the way?”

“You are strong men and brave,” said the chief thoughtfully, “and friends of my friend. Therefore I warn you. But you men of other jungles are all mad and most stubborn. Yet, maybe you are magicians. Have I not heard of him who swings in the trees and talks to the apes like a brother?”

It was somewhat of an exaggeration; but Laidlaw, who had long ago mastered the key language of the Amazonian dialects, laughed.

“But that will not help you scale the walls,” Tagua went on. “The way leads by the stairs that Mirradoche told you of, but they are broken and the ghosts have sealed the cliff. Give it up, senhors. Maybe tomorrow you may see the Sky City from the campo. I myself will lead you opposite the stairway. Then return while still your bodies hold your soul.”

They quizzed him, but he could add nothing to the dim legend that once the Indians had been forced to work in the Land of the Ghost People and had been driven out at the end of their task, his ancestor bringing with him the golden vase he had taken.

Morse opened a pack and produced it, setting it on the camp table. A cover for the vase had been made at his direction, carefully designed to conform with the original. This was soldered tightly to the bowl.

“This cup,” he said, “was given me by our friend. In it are his ashes. I shall give them burial within the city of Dor. I swear it!” he added, setting one hand upon the urn.

Tagua looked at him with astonished admiration.

“If you say so, then I believe you will do it.”

Outside the hut, the night was filled with weird noises when they emerged. Tagua had declared a feast in his visitor’s honor. Fires blazed at the ends of the mud-caked street, and villagers dressed in gaudy prints, bedecked with strings of alligator teeth, feathers, and

lustrous bird skins paraded up and down behind musicians beating loudly on drums and blowing piercing notes through reed flutes in rude rhythm. With them mingled the bearers and machete men. Native liquors were in evidence, and the crowd sang and danced at will.

At the appearance of Tagua and his guests the crowd entered a big hut decorated with fresh palm trees and lit by tallow dips along the walls. The chief conducted Morse and Laidlaw to a platform at one end to watch the dancing, which took place on the uneven mud floor with much stamping of feet to the drums and flutes. It was evident that before long the native ferments would be in full possession.

Morse took advantage of the first pause brought about by temporary exhaustion and stated the object of the expedition. With the first mention of the Sky City a silence fell upon the mob. He concluded with a call for volunteers, promising a rifle to each man and other rewards that would make them comparatively rich for life.

The men shuffled their feet and whispered among themselves, and Tagua spoke.

“I am old and useless,” he said. “Also I am afraid of the Ghost People. Yet would I go with these two if only that shame should not be set upon my village and Apara be called the abode of cowards. Maya”—he singled out a tall warrior hung with rows of alligator teeth—“what say you?” The men stepped forward. His chest bore the scars of close encounter with some sharp-clawed jungle denizen; he carried his head high, and was evidently regarded as a sub-chief.

“If I send an arrow against a jaguar or a man,” he said, “I know when I have hit. If I miss, it is my fault. But how can one fight against ghosts when the arrow pierces a shadow and is lost in a cloud? Yet am I no coward. What one dares I dare! Xolo! Will you follow these strangers with me?”

Xolo, long and lean, streaks of gray in his black hair, not an ounce of spare flesh on his body, naked save for a breechclout, corded with stringy muscles, came to the side of Maya.

“I will go,” he said simply.

But that was the end of the recruiting. The men who

had accompanied the expedition were paid, and neither Morse’s offer of high payment nor Tagua’s persuasive powers could coax another warrior into service. Maya and Xolo were the best hunters of the district, Tagua said, and both had performed notable deeds in war against hostile tribes. Better still, while both were adepts with spear and bow and blow gun, Tagua had intrusted them from time to time with the use of the rifle given him by Murdock, and they were accustomed to its use and fairly good shots.

It was not Morse’s idea to make an entry into the mystic city with any force that might be construed as an attempt at invasion, but he had hoped to secure enough men to bear the bulk of his equipment. With only Maya and Xolo available, he and Laidlaw were forced to spend the morning reducing their outfit to only the most necessary articles. The two Indians were intrusted with rifles; Morse and Laidlaw, besides these, armed themselves with automatic pistols. A few presents, a compass, powerful flashlights, some few canned provisions, with ammunition, made up the bulk of what they selected to take with them.

The rest Morse gave into Tagua’s charge.

“If we do not return for these before the rainy season, they are yours,” he said, after opening one bale that contained cotton goods of startling color and design, which he gave outright to the chief.

They set out in mid-afternoon for the spot where Murdock had camped across the canyon from the stone steps. Tagua accompanied them. Close to sunset they came out of a clump of carrasco upon the edge of the precipice. The wall dropped almost sheer five hundred feet to the torrent, which, swollen by the recent rain, swirled and seethed from bank to bank. The opposing cliff was far higher than the one they stood upon, a perpendicular scarp of rock on the rim lifting up to almost a thousand feet.

The setting sun was almost level with the flat summit of the plateau behind them and painted the farther cliff with a broad band of rose. Beneath their feet the canyon was in shadow, in which the foaming rapids showed like a cavalry charge of gray horses.

Morse imagined that he could dimly make out the

stone steps leading halfway up the cliff. Laidlaw was gazing at the summit of the opposing wall, sharp against the eastern sky of pale turquoise-matrix green, flecked here and there with little rosy clouds, the heralds of the gorgeous afterglow to follow.

Suddenly he drew in his breath sharply, and Morse looked up. Tagua, Maya, and Xolo were on their hands and knees, their heads resting on the ground.

In the sky, ethereal, slightly tremulous, but distinct, was the vision of a city built upon the shores of a lake that held the reflections of its stone buildings and of colonnaded temples that seemed to be hewn out of the solid rock. On the lake, ships were being rowed shoreward with banks of oars, some propelled by sails of striped material, a multitude of people were passing along a paved highway by the edge of the water. Luxuriant verdure set off the buildings, and, reared from the back cliff, there rose a snow-capped dome with a plume of smoke lazily curling from its peak.

As the sun dropped behind the western edge of the plateau, the colors of the mirage blended with the afterglow, the waters of the lake seemed to slowly rise and inundate the city, the plume of smoke became a floating cloud, and the vision vanished.

Morse and Laidlaw turned in common impulse and clasped hands. There was no need for words. It was the city of Dor, cloud-painted indeed, but a sky canvas copied from an original that lay somewhere beyond the high precipice that now bent a grim frown upon them, the rosy band vanished with the descending sun.