A. E. Merritt - Dwellers in the mirage

VIP免费
2024-12-14 0 0 383.6KB 155 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
file:///F|/rah/A.Merrit/Merritt%20-%20Dwellers%20in%20the%20Mirage.txt
A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook
Title: Dwellers in the Mirage (1932)
Author: A. E. Merritt (1884-1943)
eBook No.: 0100151.txt
Edition: 1
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
Date first posted: October 2001
Date most recently updated: October 2001
This eBook was produced by: Col Choat colc@gutenberg.net.au
Production notes: Nil
Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks are created from printed editions
which are in the public domain in Australia, unless a copyright notice
is included. We do NOT keep any eBooks in compliance with a particular
paper edition.
Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this
or any other Project Gutenberg file.
To contact Project Gutenberg of Australia go to http://gutenberg.net.au
Further information on contacting Project Gutenberg, the
"legal small print" and other information about this eBook may be found
at the end of this file.
** Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Books **
** eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971 **
***** These eBooks Are Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers! *****
-----------------------------------------------------------------
A Project Gutenberg of Australia Etext
Title: Dwellers in the Mirage (1932)
Author: A. E. Merritt (1884-1943)
CONTENTS
BOOK OF KHALK'RU
CHAPTER I. SOUNDS IN THE NIGHT
CHAPTER II. RING OF THE KRAKEN
CHAPTER III. RITUAL OF KHALK'RU
CHAPTER IV. TENTACLE OF KHALK'RU
CHAPTER V. THE MIRAGE
CHAPTER VI. THE SHADOWED-LAND
CHAPTER VII. THE LITTLE PEOPLE
CHAPTER VIII. EVALIE
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X. IF A MAN COULD USE ALL HIS BRAIN
CHAPTER XI. DRUMS OF THE LITTLE PEOPLE
CHAPTER XII. ON NANSUR BRIDGE
BOOK OF THE WITCH-WOMAN
file:///F|/rah/A.Merrit/Merritt%20-%20Dwellers%20in%20the%20Mirage.txt (1 of 155) [1/15/03 4:51:35 PM]
file:///F|/rah/A.Merrit/Merritt%20-%20Dwellers%20in%20the%20Mirage.txt
CHAPTER XIII. KARAK
CHAPTER XIV. IN THE BLACK CITADEL
CHAPTER XV. THE LAKE OF THE GHOSTS
CHAPTER XVI. KISSES OF LUR
BOOK OF DWAYANU
CHAPTER XVII. ORDEAL BY KHALK'RU
CHAPTER XVIII. WOLVES OF LUR
CHAPTER XIX. THE TAKING OF SIRK
CHAPTER XX. "TSANTAWU-FAREWELL!"
BOOK OF LEIF
CHAPTER XXI. RETURN TO KARAK
CHAPTER XXII. GATE OF KHALK'RU
CHAPTER XXIII. IN KHALK'RU'S TEMPLE
* * * * *
BOOK OF KHALK'RU
CHAPTER I.
SOUNDS IN THE NIGHT
I raised my head, listening,--not only with my ears but with every
square inch of my skin, waiting for recurrence of the sound that had
awakened me. There was silence, utter silence. No soughing in the
boughs of the spruces clustered around the little camp. No stirring of
furtive life in the underbrush. Through the spires of the spruces the
stars shone wanly in the short sunset to sunrise twilight of the early
Alaskan summer.
A sudden wind bent the spruce tops, carrying again the sound--the
clangour of a beaten anvil.
I slipped out of my blanket, and round the dim embers of the fire
toward Jim. His voice halted me.
"All right, Leif. I hear it."
The wind sighed and died, and with it died the humming aftertones of
the anvil stroke. Before we could speak, the wind arose. It bore the
after-hum of the anvil stroke--faint and far away. And again the wind
died, and with it the sound.
"An anvil, Leif!"
"Listen!"
A stronger gust swayed the spruces. It carried a distant chanting;
file:///F|/rah/A.Merrit/Merritt%20-%20Dwellers%20in%20the%20Mirage.txt (2 of 155) [1/15/03 4:51:35 PM]
file:///F|/rah/A.Merrit/Merritt%20-%20Dwellers%20in%20the%20Mirage.txt
voices of many women and men singing a strange, minor theme. The
chant ended on a wailing chord, archaic, dissonant.
There was a long roll of drums, rising in a swift crescendo, ending
abruptly. After it a thin and clamorous confusion.
It was smothered by a low, sustained rumbling, like thunder, muted by
miles. In it defiance, challenge.
We waited, listening. The spruces were motionless. The wind did not
return.
"Queer sort of sounds, Jim." I tried to speak casually, He sat up. A
stick flared up in the dying fire. Its light etched his face against
the darkness--thin, and brown and hawk-profiled. He did not look at me.
"Every feathered forefather for the last twenty centuries is awake and
shouting! Better call me Tsantawu, Leif. Tsi' Tsa'lagi--I am a Cherokee!
Right now--all Indian."
He smiled, but still he did not look at me, and I was glad of that.
"It was an anvil," I said. "A hell of a big anvil. And hundreds of
people singing . . . and how could that be in this wilderness . . . they
didn't sound like Indians. . . ."
"The drums weren't Indian." He squatted by the fire, staring into it.
"When they turned loose, something played a pizzicato with icicles up
and down my back."
"They got me, too--those drums!" I thought my voice was steady, but he
looked up at me sharply; and now it was I who averted my eyes and
stared at the embers. "They reminded me of something I heard . . . and
thought I saw . . . in Mongolia. So did the singing. Damn it, Jim, why do
you look at me like that?"
I threw a stick on the fire. For the life of me I couldn't help
searching the shadows as the stick flamed. Then I met his gaze
squarely.
"Pretty bad place, was it, Leif?" he asked, quietly. I said nothing.
Jim got up and walked over to the packs. He came back with Some water
and threw it over the fire. He kicked earth on the hissing coals. If he
saw me wince as the shadows rushed in upon us, he did not show it.
"That wind came from the north," he said. "So that's the way the sounds
came. Therefore, whatever made the sounds is north of us. That being
so--which way do we travel to-morrow?"
"North," I said.
My throat dried as I said it.
Jim laughed. He dropped upon his blanket, and rolled it around him. I
propped myself against the bole of one of the spruces, and sat staring
toward thesnorth.
"The ancestors are vociferous, Leif. Promising a lodge of sorrow, I
gather--if we go north. . . . 'Bad Medicine!' say the ancestors. . . .
'Bad Medicine for you, Tsantawu! You go to Usunhi'yi, the Darkening-land,
Tsantawu! . . . Into Tsusgina'i, the ghost country! Beware! Turn
from the north, Tsantawu!'"
file:///F|/rah/A.Merrit/Merritt%20-%20Dwellers%20in%20the%20Mirage.txt (3 of 155) [1/15/03 4:51:35 PM]
file:///F|/rah/A.Merrit/Merritt%20-%20Dwellers%20in%20the%20Mirage.txt
"Oh, go to sleep, you hag-ridden redskin!"
"All right, I'm just telling you."
Then a little later:
"'And heard ancestral voices prophesying war'--it's worse than war
these ancestors of mine are prophesying, Leif."
"Damn it, will you shut up!"
A chuckle from the darkness; thereafter silence.
I leaned against the tree trunk. The sounds, or rather the evil memory
they had evoked, had shaken me more than I was willing to admit, even
to myself. The thing I had carried for two years in the buckskin bag at
the end of the chain around my neck had seemed to stir; turn cold. I
wondered how much Jim had divined of what I had tried to cover. . . .
Why had he put out the fire? Because he had known I was afraid? To
force me to face my fear. and conquer it? . . . Or had it been the Indian
instinct to seek cover in darkness? . . . By his own admission, chant
and drum-roll had played on his nerves as they had on mine. . .
Afraid! Of course it had been fear that had wet the palms of my hands,
and had tightened my throat so my heart had beaten in my ears like
drums.
Like drums . . . yes!
But . . . not like those drums whose beat had been borne to us by the
north wind. They had been like the cadence of the feet of men and
women, youths and maids and children, running ever more rapidly up the
side of a hollow world to dive swiftly into the void . . . dissolving
into the nothingness . . . fading as they fell . . dissolving . . .
eaten up by the nothingness . . . .
Like that accursed drum-roll I had heard in the secret temple of the
Gobi oasis two years ago!
Neither then nor now had it been fear alone. Fear it was, in truth, but
fear shot through with defiance . . . defiance of life against its
negation . . . upsurging, roaring, vital rage . . . frantic revolt of
the drowning against the strangling water, rage of the candle-flame
against the hovering extinguisher. . . .
Was it as hopeless as that? If what I suspected to be true was true, to
think so was to be beaten at the beginning!
But there was Jim! How to keep him out of it? In my heart, I had never
laughed at those subconscious perceptions, whatever they were. that he
called the voices of his ancestors. When he had spoken of Usunhi'yi,
the Darkening-land, a chill had crept down my spine. For had not the
old Uighur priest spoken of the Shadow-land? And it was as though I had
heard the echo of his words.
I looked over to where he lay. He had been more akin to me than my own
brothers. I smiled at that, for they had never been akin to me. To all
but my soft-voiced, deep-bosomed, Norse mother I had been a stranger
in that severely conventional old house where I had been born.
The youngest son, and an unwelcome intruder; a changeling. It had been
no fault of mine that I had come into the world a throw-back to my
file:///F|/rah/A.Merrit/Merritt%20-%20Dwellers%20in%20the%20Mirage.txt (4 of 155) [1/15/03 4:51:35 PM]
file:///F|/rah/A.Merrit/Merritt%20-%20Dwellers%20in%20the%20Mirage.txt
mother's yellow-haired, blue-eyed, strong-thewed Viking forefathers.
Not at all a Langdon. The Langdon men were dark and slender,
thin-lipped and saturnine. stamped out by the same die for generations.
They looked down at me, the changeling, from the family portraits with
faintly amused, supercilious hostility. Precisely as my father and my
four brothers, true Langdons, each of them, looked at me when I
awkwardly disposed of my bulk at their table.
It had brought me unhappiness, but it had made my mother wrap her heart
around me. I wondered, as I had wondered many times, how she had come
to give herself to that dark, self-centred man my father--with the blood
of the sea-rovers singing in her veins. It was she who had named me
Leif--as incongruous a name to tack on a Langdon as was my birth among
them.
Jim and I had entered Dartmouth on the same day. I saw him as he was
then--the tall, brown lad with his hawk face and inscrutable black eyes.
pure blood of the Cherokees, of the clan from which had come the great
Sequoiah, a clan which had produced through many centuries wisest
councillors, warriors strong in cunning.
On the college roster his name was written James T. Eagles, but on the
rolls of the Cherokee Nation it was written Two Eagles and his mother
had called him Tsantawu. From the first we had recognized spiritual
kinship. By the ancient rites of his people we had become
blood-brothers, and he had given me my secret name. known only to the
pair of us, Degataga--one who stands so close to another that the two
are one.
My one gift, besides my strength, is an aptness at languages. Soon I
spoke the Cherokee as though I had been born in the Nation. Those years
in college were the happiest I had ever known. It was during the last
of them that America entered the World War. Together we had left
Dartmouth, gone into training camp, sailed for France on the same
transport.
Sitting there, under the slow-growing Alaskan dawn, my mind leaped over
the years between . . . my mother's death on Armistice Day . . . my
return to New York to a frankly hostile home . . . Jim's recall to his
clan . . . the finishing of my course in mining engineering . . . my
wanderings in Asia . . . my second return to America and my search for
Jim . . . this expedition of ours to Alaska, more for comradeship and
the wilderness peace than for the gold we were supposed to be seeking--
A long trail since the War--the happiest for me these last two months of
it. It had led us from Nome over the quaking tundras, and then to the
Koyukuk, and at last to this little camp among the spruces, somewhere
between the headwaters of the Koyukuk and the Chandalar in the
foothills of the unexplored Endicott Range. A long trail . . . I had the
feeling that it was here the real trail of my life began.
A ray of the rising sun struck through the trees. Jim sat up, looked
over at me, and grinned.
"Didn't get much sleep after the concert, did you?"
"What did you do to the ancestors? They didn't seem to keep you awake
long."
He said, too carelessly: "Oh, they quieted down." His face and eyes
were expressionless. He was veiling his mind from me. The ancestors had
not quieted down. He had lain awake while I had thought him sleeping. I
file:///F|/rah/A.Merrit/Merritt%20-%20Dwellers%20in%20the%20Mirage.txt (5 of 155) [1/15/03 4:51:35 PM]
file:///F|/rah/A.Merrit/Merritt%20-%20Dwellers%20in%20the%20Mirage.txt
made a swift decision. We would go south as we had planned. I would go
with him as far as Circle. I would find some pretext to leave him
there.
I said: "We're not going north. I've changed my mind."
"Yes. why?"
"I'll tell you after we've had breakfast," I said--I'm not so quick in
thinking up lies. "Rustle up a fire, Jim. I'll go down to the stream
and get some water."
"Degataga!"
I started. It was only in moments of rare sympathy or in time of peril
that he used the secret name.
"Degataga, you go north! You go if I have to march ahead of you to make
you follow. . ." he dropped into the Cherokee. . . . "It is to save
your spirit, Degataga. Do we march together--blood-brothers? Or do you
creep after me--like a shivering dog at the heels of the hunter?"
The blood pounded in my temples, my hand went out toward him. He
stepped back, and laughed.
"That's better, Leif."
The quick rage left me, my hand fell.
"All right, Tsantawu. We go--north. But it wasn't--it wasn't because of
myself that I told you I'd changed my mind."
"I know damned well it wasn't!"
He busied himself with the fire. I went after the water. We drank the
strong black tea, and ate what was left of the little brown storks they
call Alaskan turkeys which we had shot the day before. When we were
through I began to talk.
CHAPTER II.
RING OF THE KRAKEN
Three years ago, so I began my story, I went into Mongolia with the
Fairchild expedition. Part of its work was a mineral survey for certain
British interests, part of it ethnographic and archeological research
for the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania.
I never had a chance to prove my value as a mining engineer. At once I
became good-will representative, camp entertainer, liaison agent
between us and the tribes. My height, my yellow hair, blue eyes and
freakish strength, and my facility in picking up languages were of
never-ending interest to them. Tartars, Mongols, Buriats, Kirghiz--they
would watch while I bent horseshoes, twisted iron bars over my knees
and performed what my father used to call contemptuously my circus
tricks.
Well, that's exactly what I was to them--a one-man circus. And yet I was
file:///F|/rah/A.Merrit/Merritt%20-%20Dwellers%20in%20the%20Mirage.txt (6 of 155) [1/15/03 4:51:35 PM]
file:///F|/rah/A.Merrit/Merritt%20-%20Dwellers%20in%20the%20Mirage.txt
more than that--they liked me. Old Fairchild would laugh when I
complained that I had no time for technical work. He would tell me that
I was worth a dozen mining engineers, that I was the expedition's
insurance, and that as long as I could keep up my act they wouldn't be
bothered by any trouble makers. And it is a fact that they weren't. It
was the only expedition of its kind I ever knew where you could leave
your stuff unwatched and return to find it still there. Also we were
singularly free from graft and shake-downs.
In no time I had picked up half a dozen of the dialects and could
chatter and chaff with the tribesmen in their own tongues. It made a
prodigious bit with them. And now and then a Mongol delegation would
arrive with a couple of their wrestlers, big fellows with chests like
barrels, to pit against me. I learned their tricks, and taught them
ours. We had pony lifting contests, and some of my Manchu friends
taught me how to fight with the two broadswords--a sword in each hand.
Fairchild had planned on a year, but so smoothly did the days go by
that he decided to prolong our stay. My act, he told me in his sardonic
fashion, was undoubtedly of perennial vitality; never again would
science have such an opportunity in this region--unless I made up my
mind to remain and rule. He didn't know how close he came to prophecy.
In the early summer of the following year we shifted our camp about a
hundred miles north. This was Uighur country. They are a strange
people, the Uighurs. They say of themselves that they are descendants
of a great race which ruled the Gobi when it was no desert but an
earthly Paradise, with flowing rivers and many lakes and teeming
cities. It is a fact that they are apart from all the other tribes, and
while those others cheerfully kill them when they can, still they go in
fear of them. Or rather, of the sorcery of their priests.
Seldom had Uighurs appeared at the old camp. When they did, they kept
at a distance. We had been at the new camp less than a week when a band
of twenty rode in. I was sitting in the shade of my tent. They dismounted
and came straight to me. They paid no attention to anyone else.
They halted a dozen feet from me. Three walked close up and stood,
studying me. The eyes of these three were a peculiar grey-blue; those
of the one who seemed to be their captain singularly cold. They were
bigger, taller men than the others.
I did not know the Uighur. I gave them polite salutations in the
Kirghiz. They did not answer, maintaining their close scrutiny. Finally
they spoke among themselves, nodding as though they had come to some
decision.
The leader then addressed me. As I stood up, I saw that he was not many
inches under my own six feet four. I told him, again in the Kirghiz,
that I did not know his tongue. He gave an order to his men. They
surrounded my tent, standing like guards, spears at rest beside them,
their wicked long-swords drawn.
At this my temper began to rise, but before I could protest the leader
began to speak to me in the Kirghiz. He assured me, with deference,
that their visit was entirely peaceful, only they did not wish their
contact with me to be disturbed by any of my companions. He asked if I
would show him my hands. I held them out. He and his two comrades bent
over the palms, examining them minutely, pointing to a mark or a
crossing of lines. This inspection ended, the leader touched his
forehead with my right hand.
And then to my complete astonishment, he launched without explanation
file:///F|/rah/A.Merrit/Merritt%20-%20Dwellers%20in%20the%20Mirage.txt (7 of 155) [1/15/03 4:51:35 PM]
file:///F|/rah/A.Merrit/Merritt%20-%20Dwellers%20in%20the%20Mirage.txt
into what was a highly intelligent lesson in the Uighur tongue. He took
the Kirghiz for the comparative language. He did not seem to be
surprized at the ease with which I assimilated the tuition; indeed, I
had a puzzled idea that he regarded it as something to be expected. I
mean that his manner was less that of teaching me a new language, than
of recalling to me one I had forgotten. The lesson lasted for a full
hour. He then touched his forehead again with my hand, and gave a
command to the ring of guards. The whole party walked to their horses
and galloped off.
There had been something disquieting about the whole experience. Most
disquieting was my own vague feeling that my tutor, if I had read
correctly his manner, had been right--that I was not learning a new
tongue but one I had forgotten. Certainly I never picked up any
language with such rapidity and ease as I did the Uighur.
The rest of my party had been perplexed and apprehensive, naturally. I
went immediately to them, and talked the matter over. Our ethnologist
was the famous Professor David Barr, of Oxford. Fairchild was inclined
to take it as a joke, but Barr was greatly disturbed. He said that the
Uighur tradition was that their forefathers had been a fair race,
yellow-haired and blue-eyed, big men of great strength. In short, men
like myself. A few ancient Uighur wall paintings had been found which
had portrayed exactly this type, so there was evidence of the
correctness of the tradition. However, if the Uighurs of the present
were actually the descendants of this race, the ancient blood must have
been mixed and diluted almost to the point of extinction.
I asked what this had to do with me, and he replied that quite
conceivably my visitors might regard me as of the pure blood of the
ancient race. In fact, he saw no other explanation of their conduct. He
was of the opinion that their study of my palms, and their manifest
approval of what they had discovered there, clinched the matter.
Old Fairchild asked him, satirically, if he was trying to convert us to
palmistry. Barr said, coldly, that he was a scientist. As a scientist,
he was aware that certain physical resemblances can be carried on by
hereditary factors through many generations. Certain peculiarities in
the arrangement of the lines of the palms might persist through
centuries. They could reappear in cases of atavism, such as I clearly
represented.
By this time, I was getting a bit dizzy. But Barr had a few shots left
that made me more so. By now his temper was well up, and he went on to
say that the Uighurs might even be entirely correct in what he deduced
was their opinion of me. I was a throwback to the ancient Norse. Very
well. It was quite certain that the Aesir. the old Norse gods and
goddesses--Odin and Thor, Frigga and Freya, Frey and Loki of the Fire
and all the others--had once been real people. Without question they
had been leaders in some long and perilous migration. After they had
died, they had been deified, as numerous other similar heroes and
heroines had been by other tribes and races. Ethnologists were agreed
that the original Norse stock had come into North-eastern Europe from
Asia, like other Aryans. Their migration might have occurred anywhere
from 1000 B.C. to 5000 B.C. And there was no scientific reason why they
should not have come from the region now called the Gobi, nor why they
should not have been the blond race these present-day Uighurs called
their forefathers.
No one, he went on to say, knew exactly when the Gobi had become
desert--nor what were the causes that had changed it into desert. Parts
of the Gobi and all the Little Gobi might have been fertile as late as
file:///F|/rah/A.Merrit/Merritt%20-%20Dwellers%20in%20the%20Mirage.txt (8 of 155) [1/15/03 4:51:35 PM]
file:///F|/rah/A.Merrit/Merritt%20-%20Dwellers%20in%20the%20Mirage.txt
two thousand years ago. Whatever it had been, whatever its causes, and
whether operating slowly or quickly, the change gave a perfect reason
for the migration led by Odin and the other Aesir which had ended in
the colonization of the Scandinavian Peninsula. Admittedly I was a
throwback to my mother's stock of a thousand years ago. There was no
reason why I should not also be a throwback in other recognizable ways
to the ancient Uighurs--if they actually were the original Norse.
But the practical consideration was that I was headed for trouble. So
was every other member of our party. He urgently advised going back to
the old camp where we would be among friendly tribes. In conclusion he
pointed out that, since we had come to this site, not a single Mongol,
Tartar or any other tribesman with whom I had established such pleasant
relations had come near us. He sat down with a glare at Fairchild,
observing that this was no palmist's advice but that of a recognized
scientist.
Well, Fairchild apologized, of course, but he over-ruled Barr on
returning; we could safely wait a few days longer and see what
developed. Barr remarked morosely that as a prophet Fairchild was
probably a total loss, but it was also probable that we were being
closely watched and would not be allowed to retreat, and therefore it
did not matter. .
That night we heard drums beating far away, drumming between varying
intervals of silence almost until dawn, reporting and answering
questions of drums still further off.
The next day, at the same hour, along came the same troop. Their leader
made straight for me, ignoring, as before, the others in the camp. He
saluted me almost with humility. We walked back together to my tent.
Again the cordon was thrown round it, and my second lesson abruptly
began. It continued for two hours or more. Thereafter, day after day,
for three weeks, the same performance was repeated. There was no
desultory conversation, no extraneous questioning, no explanations.
These men were there for one definite purpose: to teach me their
tongue. They stuck to that admirably. Filled with curiosity, eager to
reach the end and leam what it all meant, I interposed no obstacles,
stuck as rigorously as they to the faatter in hand. This, too, they
seemed to take as something expected of me. In three weeks I could
carry on a conversation in the Uigher as well as I can in English.
Barr's uneasiness kept growing. "They're grooming you for something!"
he would say. "I'd give five years of my life to be in your shoes. But
I don't like it. I'm afraid for you. I'm damned afraid!"
One night at the end of this third week, the signalling drums beat
until dawn. The next day my instructors did not appear, nor the next
day, nor the day after. But our men reported that there were Uighers
all around us, picketing the camp. They were in fear, and no work could
be got out of them.
On the afternoon of the fourth day we saw a cloud of dust drifting
rapidly down upon us from the north. Soon we heard the sound of the
Uigher drums. Then out of the dust emerged a troop of horsemen. There
were two or three hundred of them, spears glinting, many of them with
good rifles. They drew up in a wide semi-circle before the camp. The
cold-eyed leader who had been my chief instructor dismounted and came
forward leading a magnificent black stallion. A big horse, a strong
horse, unlike the rangy horses that carried them; a horse that could
bear my weight with ease.
file:///F|/rah/A.Merrit/Merritt%20-%20Dwellers%20in%20the%20Mirage.txt (9 of 155) [1/15/03 4:51:35 PM]
file:///F|/rah/A.Merrit/Merritt%20-%20Dwellers%20in%20the%20Mirage.txt
The Uighur dropped on one knee, handing me the stallion's reins, I took
them, automatically. The horse looked me over, sniffed at me, and
rested its nose on my shoulder. At once the troop raised their spears,
shouting some word I could not catch, then dropped from their mounts
and stood waiting.
The leader arose. He drew from his tunic a small cube of ancient jade.
He sank again upon his knee, handed me the cube. It seemed solid, but
as I pressed it flew open. Within, was a ring. It was of heavy gold,
thick and wide. Set in it was a yellow, translucent stone about an inch
and a half square. And within this stone was the shape of a black
octopus.
Its tentacles spread out fan-wise from its body. They had the effect of
reaching forward through the yellow stone. I could even see upon their
nearer tips the sucking discs. The body was not so clearly defined. It
was nebulous, seeming to reach into far distance. The black octopus had
not been cut upon the jewel. It was within it.
I was aware of a curious mingling of feelings--repulsion and a peculiar
sense of familiarity, like the trick .of the mind that causes what we
call double memory, the sensation of having experienced the same thing
before. Without thinking. I slipped the ring over my thumb which it
fitted perfectly, and held it up to the sun to catch the light through
the stone. Instantly every man of the troop threw himself down upon his
belly, prostrating himself before it.
The Uigher captain spoke to me. I had been subconsciously aware that
from the moment of handing me the jade he had been watching me closely.
I thought that now there was awe in his eyes.
"Your horse is ready--" again he used the unfamiliar word with which the
troop had saluted me. "Show me what you wish to take with you, and your
men shall carry it."
"Where do we go--and for how long?" I asked.
"To a holy man of your people," he answered. "For how long--he alone can
answer."
I felt a momentary irritation at the casualness with which I was being
disposed of. Also I wondered why he spoke of his men and his people as
mine.
"Why does he not come to me?" I asked.
"He is old," he answered. "He could not make the journey."
I looked at the troop, now standing up beside their horses. If I
refused to go, it would undoubtedly mean the wiping out of the camp if
my companions attempted, as they would, to resist my taking. Besides, I
was on fire with curiosity.
"I must speak to my comrades before I go," I said.
"If it please Dwayanu"--this time I caught the word--"to bid farewell to
his dogs, let him." There was a nicker of contempt in his eyes as he
looked at old Fairchild and the others.
Definitely I did not like what he had said, nor his manner.
"Await me here," I told him curtly, and walked over to Fairchild. I
drew him into his tent, Barr and the others of the expedition at our
file:///F|/rah/A.Merrit/Merritt%20-%20Dwellers%20in%20the%20Mirage.txt (10 of 155) [1/15/03 4:51:35 PM]
摘要：

file:///F|/rah/A.Merrit/Merritt%20-%20Dwellers%20in%20the%20Mirage.txtAProjectGutenbergofAustraliaeBookTitle:DwellersintheMirage(1932)Author:A.E.Merritt(1884-1943)eBookNo.:0100151.txtEdition:1Language:EnglishCharactersetencoding:ASCIIDatefirstposted:October2001Datemostrecentlyupdated:October2001This...

展开>> 收起<<
A. E. Merritt - Dwellers in the mirage.pdf

共155页,预览31页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：155 页 大小：383.6KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-14

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 配电装置 动力学连接体 力的合成 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 155
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注