A. E. Merritt - The Metal Monster

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2024-12-08 0 0 789KB 206 页 5.9玖币
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A. MERRITT
THE METAL MONSTER
PROLOGUE
Before the narrative which follows was placed in my
hands, I had never seen Dr. Walter T. Goodwin, its author.
When the manuscript revealing his adventures among
the pre-historic ruins of the Nan-Matal in the Carolines
(The Moon Pool) had been given me by the International
Association of Science for editing and revision to meet the
requirements of a popular presentation, Dr. Goodwin had
left America. He had explained that he was still too shaken,
too depressed, to be able to recall experiences that must
inevitably carry with them freshened memories of those
whom he loved so well and from whom, he felt, he was
separated in all probability forever.
I had understood that he had gone to some remote part
of Asia to pursue certain botanical studies, and it was therefore
with the liveliest surprise and interest that I received
a summons from the President of the Association to meet
Dr. Goodwin at a designated place and hour.
Through my close study of the Moon Pool papers I had
formed a mental image of their writer. I had read, too,
those volumes of botanical research which have set him
high above all other American scientists in this field, gleaning
from their curious mingling of extremely technical observations
and minutely accurate but extraordinarily poetic
descriptions, hints to amplify my picture of him. It gratified
me to find I had drawn a pretty good one.
The man to whom the President of the Association introduced
me was sturdy, well-knit, a little under average height.
He had a broad but rather low forehead that reminded me
somewhat of the late electrical wizard Steinmetz. Under
level black brows shone eyes of clear hazel, kindly, shrewd,
a little wistful, lightly humorous; the eyes both of a doer
and a dreamer.
Not more than forty I judged him to be. A close-trimmed,
pointed beard did not hide the firm chin and the clean-cut
mouth. His hair was thick and black and oddly sprinkled
with white; small streaks and dots of gleaming silver that
shone with a curiously metallic luster.
His right arm was closely bound to his breast. His manner
as he greeted me was tinged with shyness. He extended
his left hand in greeting, and as I clasped the fingers I was
struck by their peculiar, pronounced, yet pleasant warmth;
a sensation, indeed, curiously electric.
The Association's President forced him gently back into
his chair.
"Dr. Goodwin," he said, turning to me, "is not entirely
recovered as yet from certain consequences of his adventures.
He will explain to you later what these are. In the
meantime, Mr. Merritt, will you read this?"
I took the sheets he handed me, and as I read them felt
the gaze of Dr. Goodwin full upon me, searching, weighing,
estimating. When I raised my eyes from the letter I found
in his a new expression. The shyness was gone; they were
filled with complete friendliness. Evidently I had passed
muster.
"You will accept, sir?" It was the president's gravely
courteous tone.
"Accept!" I exclaimed. "Why, of course, I accept. It is
not only one of the greatest honors, but to me one of the
greatest delights to act as a collaborator with Dr. Goodwin."
The president smiled.
"In that case, sir, there is no need for me to remain
longer," he said. "Dr. Goodwin has with him his manuscript
as far as he has progressed with it. I will leave you
two alone for your discussion."
He bowed to us and, picking up his old-fashioned bell-crowned
silk hat and his quaint, heavy cane of ebony, withdrew.
Dr. Goodwin turned to me.
"I will start," he said, after a little pause, "from when I
met Richard Drake on the field of blue poppies that are
like a great prayer-rug at the gray feet of the nameless
mountain."
The sun sank, the shadows fell, the lights of the city
sparkled out, for hours New York roared about me unheeded
while I listened to the tale of that utterly weird,
stupendous drama of an unknown life, of unknown creatures,
unknown forces, and of unconquerable human heroism
played among the hidden gorges of unknown Asia.
It was dawn when I left him for my own home. Nor was
it for many hours after that I laid his then incomplete manuscript
down and sought sleep--and found a troubled sleep.
A. MERRITT
CHAPTER I
VALLEY OF THE
BLUE POPPIES
In this great crucible of life we call the world--in the
vaster one we call the universe--the mysteries lie close
packed, uncountable as grains of sand on ocean's shores.
They thread gigantic, the star-flung spaces; they creep,
atomic, beneath the microscope's peering eye. They walk
beside us, unseen and unheard, calling out to us, asking
why we are deaf to their crying, blind to their wonder.
Sometimes the veils drop from a man's eyes, and he sees
--and speaks of his vision. Then those who have not seen
pass him by with the lifted brows of disbelief, or they
mock him, or if his vision has been great enough they
fall upon and destroy him.
For the greater the mystery, the more bitterly is its
verity assailed; upon what seem the lesser a man may give
testimony and at least gain for himself a hearing.
There is reason for this. Life is a ferment, and upon and
about it, shifting and changing, adding to or taking away,
beat over legions of forces, seen and unseen, known and
unknown. And man, an atom in the ferment, clings desperately
to what to him seems stable; nor greets with joy
him who hazards that what he grips may be but a broken
staff, and, so saying, fails to hold forth a sturdier one.
Earth is a ship, plowing her way through uncharted
oceans of space wherein are strange currents, hidden
shoals and reefs, and where blow the unknown winds of
Cosmos.
If to the voyagers, painfully plotting their course, comes
one who cries that their charts must be remade, nor can
tell WHY they must be--that man is not welcome--no!
Therefore it is that men have grown chary of giving testimony
upon mysteries. Yet knowing each in his own heart
the truth of that vision he has himself beheld, lo, it is
that in whose reality he most believes.
The spot where I had encamped was of a singular
beauty; so beautiful that it caught the throat and set an
ache within the breast--until from it a tranquillity distilled
that was like healing mist.
Since early March I had been wandering. It was now
mid-July. And for the first time since my pilgrimage had
begun I drank--not of forgetfulness, for that could never
be--but of anodyne for a sorrow which had held fast
upon me since my return from the Carolines a year before.
No need to dwell here upon that--it has been written.
Nor shall I recite the reasons for my restlessness--for
these are known to those who have read that history of
mine. Nor is there cause to set forth at length the steps
by which I had arrived at this vale of peace.
Sufficient is to tell that in New York one night, reading
over what is perhaps the most sensational of my books--
"The Poppies and Primulas of Southern Tibet," the result
of my travels of 1910-1911, I determined to return to that
quiet, forbidden land. There, if anywhere, might I find
something akin to forgetting.
There was a certain flower which I long had wished to
study in its mutations from the singular forms appearing
on the southern slopes of the Elburz--Persia's mountainous
chain that extends from Azerbaijan in the west to
Khorasan in the east; from thence I would follow its
modified types in the Hindu-Kush ranges and its migrations
along the southern scarps of the Trans-Himalayas--
the unexplored upheaval, higher than the Himalayas themselves,
more deeply cut with precipice and gorge, which Sven Hedin
had touched and named on his journey to Lhasa.
Having accomplished this, I planned to push across the
passes to the Manasarowar Lakes, where, legend has it,
the strange, luminous purple lotuses grow.
An ambitious project, undeniably fraught with danger;
but it is written that desperate diseases require desperate
remedies, and until inspiration or message how to rejoin
those whom I had loved so dearly came to me, nothing
less, I felt, could dull my heartache.
And, frankly, feeling that no such inspiration or message
could come, I did not much care as to the end.
In Teheran I had picked up a most unusual servant; yes,
more than this, a companion and counselor and interpreter
as well.
He was a Chinese; his name Chiu-Ming. His first thirty
years had been spent at the great Lamasery of Palkhor-Choinde
at Gyantse, west of Lhasa. Why he had gone
from there, how he had come to Teheran, I never asked.
It was most fortunate that he had gone, and that I had
found him. He recommended himself to me as the best
cook within ten thousand miles of Pekin.
For almost three months we had journeyed; Chiu-Ming
and I and the two ponies that carried my impedimenta.
We had traversed mountain roads which had echoed to
the marching feet of the hosts of Darius, to the hordes of
the Satraps. The highways of the Achaemenids--yes, and
which before them had trembled to the tramplings of the
myriads of the godlike Dravidian conquerors.
We had slipped over ancient Iranian trails; over paths
which the warriors of conquering Alexander had traversed;
dust of bones of Macedons, of Greeks, of Romans, beat
about us; ashes of the flaming ambitions of the Sassanidae
whimpered beneath our feet--the feet of an American
botanist, a Chinaman, two Tibetan ponies. We had crept
through clefts whose walls had sent back the howlings of
the Ephthalites, the White Huns who had sapped the
strength of these same proud Sassanids until at last both
fell before the Turks.
Over the highways and byways of Persia's glory, Persia's
shame and Persia's death we four--two men, two beasts
--had passed. For a fortnight we had met no human soul,
seen no sign of human habitation.
Game had been plentiful--green things Chiu-Ming
might lack for his cooking, but meat never. About us was
a welter of mighty summits. We were, I knew, somewhere
within the blending of the Hindu-Kush with the Trans-Himalayas.
That morning we had come out of a ragged defile into
this valley of enchantment, and here, though it had been
so early, I had pitched my tent, determining to go no
farther till the morrow.
It was a Phocean vale; a gigantic cup filled with tranquillity.
A spirit brooded over it, serene, majestic, immutable--like
the untroubled calm which rests, the Burmese believe, over
every place which has guarded the Buddha, sleeping.
At its eastern end towered the colossal scarp of the
unnamed peak through one of whose gorges we had crept.
On his head was a cap of silver set with pale emeralds--the
snow fields and glaciers that crowned him. Far to the west
another gray and ochreous giant reared its bulk, closing the
vale. North and south, the horizon was a chaotic sky land
of pinnacles, spired and minareted, steepled and turreted
and domed, each diademed with its green and argent of
eternal ice and snow.
And all the valley was carpeted with the blue poppies
in wide, unbroken fields, luminous as the morning skies of
mid-June; they rippled mile after mile over the path we
had followed, over the still untrodden path which we must
take. They nodded, they leaned toward each other, they
seemed to whisper--then to lift their heads and look up
like crowding swarms of little azure fays, half impudently,
wholly trustfully, into the faces of the jeweled giants
standing guard over them. And when the little breeze
walked upon them it was as though they bent beneath the
soft tread and were brushed by the sweeping skirts of
unseen, hastening Presences.
Like a vast prayer-rug, sapphire and silken, the poppies
stretched to the gray feet of the mountain. Between their
southern edge and the clustering summits a row of faded
brown, low hills knelt--like brown-robed, withered and
weary old men, backs bent, faces hidden between outstretched
arms, palms to the earth and brows touching
earth within them--in the East's immemorial attitude of
worship.
I half expected them to rise--and as I watched a man
appeared on one of the bowed, rocky shoulders, abruptly,
with the ever-startling suddenness which in the strange
light of these latitudes objects spring into vision. As he
stood scanning my camp there arose beside him a laden
pony, and at its head a Tibetan peasant. The first figure
waved its hand; came striding down the hill.
As he approached I took stock of him. A young giant,
three good inches over six feet, a vigorous head with unruly
clustering black hair; a clean-cut, clean-shaven American face.
"I'm Dick Drake," he said, holding out his hand. "Richard
Keen Drake, recently with Uncle's engineers in France."
"My name is Goodwin." I took his hand, shook it
warmly. "Dr. Walter T. Goodwin."
"Goodwin the botanist--? Then I know you!" he exclaimed.
"Know all about you, that is. My father admired
your work greatly. You knew him--Professor Alvin
Drake."
I nodded. So he was Alvin Drake's son. Alvin, I knew,
had died about a year before I had started on this journey.
But what was his son doing in this wilderness?
"Wondering where I came from?" he answered my unspoken
question. "Short story. War ended. Felt an irresistible
desire for something different. Couldn't think of
anything more different from Tibet--always wanted to go
there anyway. Went. Decided to strike over toward Turkestan.
And here I am."
I felt at once a strong liking for this young giant. No
doubt, subconsciously, I had been feeling the need of
companionship with my own kind. I even wondered, as I
led the way into my little camp, whether he would care to
join fortunes with me in my journeyings.
His father's work I knew well, and although this stalwart
lad was unlike what one would have expected Alvin
Drake--a trifle dried, precise, wholly abstracted with his
experiments--to beget, still, I reflected, heredity like the
Lord sometimes works in mysterious ways its wonders to
perform.
It was almost with awe that he listened to me instruct
Chiu-Ming as to just how I wanted supper prepared, and
his gaze dwelt fondly upon the Chinese busy among his
pots and pans.
We talked a little, desultorily, as the meal was prepared
--fragments of traveler's news and gossip, as is the
habit of journeyers who come upon each other in the silent
places. Ever the speculation grew in his face as he made
away with Chiu-Ming's artful concoctions.
Drake sighed, drawing out his pipe.
"A cook, a marvel of a cook. Where did you get him?"
Briefly I told him.
Then a silence fell upon us. Suddenly the sun dipped
down behind the flank of the stone giant guarding the
valley's western gate; the whole vale swiftly darkened--a
flood of crystal-clear shadows poured within it. It was the
prelude to that miracle of unearthly beauty seen nowhere
else on this earth--the sunset of Tibet.
We turned expectant eyes to the west. A little, cool
breeze raced down from the watching steeps like a messenger,
whispered to the nodding poppies, sighed and was
gone. The poppies were still. High overhead a homing kite
whistled, mellowly.
As if it were a signal there sprang out in the pale azure
of the western sky row upon row of cirrus cloudlets, rank
upon rank of them, thrusting their heads into the path of
the setting sun. They changed from mottled silver into
faint rose, deepened to crimson.
"The dragons of the sky drink the blood of the sunset,"
said Chiu-Ming.
As though a gigantic globe of crystal had dropped upon
the heavens, their blue turned swiftly to a clear and glowing
amber--then as abruptly shifted to a luminous violet
A soft green light pulsed through the valley.
Under it, like hills ensorcelled, the rocky walls about it
seemed to flatten. They glowed and all at once pressed
forward like gigantic slices of palest emerald jade, translucent,
illumined, as though by a circlet of little suns shining
behind them.
The light faded, robes of deepest amethyst dropped
around the mountain's mighty shoulders. And then from
every snow and glacier-crowned peak, from minaret and
pinnacle and towering turret, leaped forth a confusion of
soft peacock flames, a host of irised prismatic gleamings,
an ordered chaos of rainbows.
Great and small, interlacing and shifting, they ringed
the valley with an incredible glory--as if some god of
light itself had touched the eternal rocks and bidden radiant
souls stand forth.
Through the darkening sky swept a rosy pencil of living
light; that utterly strange, pure beam whose coming never
fails to clutch the throat of the beholder with the hand of
ecstasy, the ray which the Tibetans name the Ting-Pa.
For a moment this rosy finger pointed to the east, then
arched itself, divided slowly into six shining, rosy bands;
began to creep downward toward the eastern horizon where
a nebulous, pulsing splendor arose to meet it.
And as we watched I heard a gasp from Drake. And it
was echoed by my own.
For the six beams were swaying, moving with ever
swifter motion from side to side in ever-widening sweep,
as though the hidden orb from which they sprang were
swaying like a pendulum.
Faster and faster the six high-flung beams swayed--and
then broke--broke as though a gigantic, unseen hand had
reached up and snapped them!
An instant the severed ends ribboned aimlessly, then
bent, turned down and darted earthward into the welter of
clustered summits at the north and swiftly were gone,
while down upon the valley fell night.
"Good God!" whispered Drake. "It was as though something
reached up, broke those rays and drew them down--
like threads."
"I saw it." I struggled with bewilderment. "I saw it. But
I never saw anything like it before," I ended, most inadequately.
"It was PURPOSEFUL," he whispered. "It was DELIBERATE.
As though something reached up, juggled with the rays,
broke them, and drew them down like willow withes."
"The devils that dwell here!" quavered Chiu-Ming.
"Some magnetic phenomenon." I was half angry at myself
for my own touch of panic. "Light can be deflected
by passage through a magnetic field. Of course that's it.
Certainly."
"I don't know." Drake's tone was doubtful indeed. "It
would take a whale of a magnetic field to have done THAT
--it's inconceivable." He harked back to his first idea. "It
was so--so DAMNED deliberate," he repeated.
"Devils--" muttered the frightened Chinese.
"What's that?" Drake gripped my arm and pointed to
the north. A deeper blackness had grown there while we
had been talking, a pool of darkness against which the
mountain summits stood out, blade-sharp edges faintly
luminous.
A gigantic lance of misty green fire darted from the
blackness and thrust its point into the heart of the zenith;
following it, leaped into the sky a host of the sparkling
spears of light, and now the blackness was like an ebon
hand, brandishing a thousand javelins of tinseled flame.
"The aurora," I said.
"It ought to be a good one," mused Drake, gaze intent
upon it. "Did you notice the big sun spot?"
I shook my head.
"The biggest I ever saw. Noticed it first at dawn this
morning. Some little aurora lighter--that spot. I told you
--look at that!" he cried.
The green lances had fallen back. The blackness gathered
itself together--then from it began to pulse billows of
radiance, spangled with infinite darting swarms of flashing
corpuscles like uncounted hosts of dancing fireflies.
Higher the waves rolled--phosphorescent green and iridescent
violet, weird copperous yellows and metallic saffrons
and a shimmer of glittering ash of rose--then
wavered, split and formed into gigantic, sparkling, marching
curtains of splendor.
A vast circle of light sprang out upon the folds of the
flickering, rushing curtains. Misty at first, its edges sharpened
until they rested upon the blazing glory of the northern
sky like a pale ring of cold flame. And about it the
aurora began to churn, to heap itself, to revolve.
Toward the ring from every side raced the majestic
folds, drew themselves together, circled, seethed around it
like foam of fire about the lip of a cauldron, and poured
through the shining circle as though it were the mouth of
that fabled cavern where old Aeolus sits blowing forth
and breathing back the winds that sweep the earth.
Yes--into the ring's mouth the aurora flew, cascading
in a columned stream to earth. Then swiftly, a mist swept
over all the heavens, veiled that incredible cataract.
"Magnetism?" muttered Drake. "I guess NOT!"
"It struck about where the Ting-Pa was broken and
seemed drawn down like the rays," I said.
"Purposeful," Drake said. "And devilish. It hit on all
my nerves like a--like a metal claw. Purposeful and
deliberate. There was intelligence behind that."
"Intelligence? Drake--what intelligence could break the
rays of the setting sun and suck down the aurora?"
"I don't know," he answered.
"Devils," croaked Chiu-Ming. "The devils that defied
Buddha--and have grown strong--"
"Like a metal claw!" breathed Drake.
Far to the west a sound came to us; first a whisper,
then a wild rushing, a prolonged wailing, a crackling. A
great light flashed through the mist, glowed about us and
faded. Again the wailing, the vast rushing, the retreating
whisper.
Then silence and darkness dropped embraced upon the
valley of the blue poppies.
CHAPTER II
THE SIGIL
ON THE ROCKS
Dawn came. Drake had slept well. But I, who had not
his youthful resiliency, lay for long, awake and uneasy.
I had hardly sunk into troubled slumber before dawn
awakened me.
As we breakfasted, I approached directly that matter
which my growing liking for him was turning into strong
desire.
"Drake," I asked. "Where are you going?"
"With you," he laughed. "I'm foot loose and fancy free.
And I think you ought to have somebody with you to help
watch that cook. He might get away."
The idea seemed to appall him.
"Fine!" I exclaimed heartily, and thrust out my hand to
him. "I'm thinking of striking over the range soon to the
Manasarowar Lakes. There's a curious flora I'd like to
study."
"Anywhere you say suits me," he answered.
We clasped hands on our partnership and soon we were
on our way to the valley's western gate; our united caravans
stringing along behind us. Mile after mile we trudged
through the blue poppies, discussing the enigmas of the
twilight and of the night.
In the light of day their breath of vague terror was
dissipated. There was no place for mystery nor dread
under this floor of brilliant sunshine. The smiling sapphire
floor rolled ever on before us.
Whispering little playful breezes flew down the slopes
to gossip for a moment with the nodding flowers. Flocks
of rose finches raced chattering overhead to quarrel with
the tiny willow warblers, the chi-u-teb-tok, holding fief of
the drooping, graceful bowers bending down to the little
laughing stream that for the past hour had chuckled and
gurgled like a friendly water baby beside us.
I had proven, almost to my own satisfaction, that what
we had beheld had been a creation of the extraordinary
atmospheric attributes of these highlands, an atmosphere
so unique as to make almost anything of the kind possible.
But Drake was not convinced.
"I know," he said. "Of course I understand all that--
superimposed layers of warmer air that might have bent
the ray; vortices in the higher levels that might have
produced just that effect of the captured aurora. I admit
it's all possible. I'll even admit it's all probable, but damn
me, Doc, if I BELIEVE it! I had too clearly the feeling of a
CONSCIOUS force, a something that KNEW exactly what it
was doing--and had a REASON for it."
It was mid-afternoon.
The spell of the valley upon us, we had gone leisurely.
The western mount was close, the mouth of the gorge
through which we must pass, now plain before us. It did
摘要：

A.MERRITTTHEMETALMONSTERPROLOGUEBeforethenarrativewhichfollowswasplacedinmyhands,IhadneverseenDr.WalterT.Goodwin,itsauthor.Whenthemanuscriptrevealinghisadventuresamongthepre-historicruinsoftheNan-MatalintheCarolines(TheMoonPool)hadbeengivenmebytheInternationalAssociationofScienceforeditingandrevisio...

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