“There will be a full moon.”
What the hell had that to do with it? He was not there to talk about
moonshine! The new-born sense of intimacy, sudden and delicious, that for the
first time in his life had withdrawn the veil between him and any woman,
produced a characteristic reaction. He was a trained and trusted public
servant, whose personal delights came last, not first.
“Where is your father?” he demanded in a quiet voice, cautious not to stir
too many echoes. “Don’t forget I came here looking for him.”
“Please, Blair, you must wait for moonlight.”
He turned the torchlight on her. Her hand trembled as she laid the empty
automatics on a fold of the rock. But she was less tired than he was.
Stockingless, lithe, athletic, in a torn frock that revealed most of one
thigh, she looked gorgeous—like a Sabine woman, plundered and all the
more precious for that.
He strode nearer and she recognized the unsecret, possessive, and
strong-willed light that glowed from his eyes. No word passed between them.
He switched o(T the torchlight, took her in his arms, kissed and crushed her
, breathless.
There was no India, no job, nothing for a while except they
two—until the night shut down solidly black, and away up near the ,
summit of Gaglajung the Pleiades, like jewels, twinkled through, the gap.
“No more secrets,” he said then.
“No more secrets!” said an echo. Every spoken word produced a hollow
murmur, but some words came back unexpectedly in an exaggerated whisper.
“No. Blair, from the day I first loved you, I never wanted to keep a
secret from you.”
The policeman, that was the other half of Blair Warrender, resumed
authority, suddenly, because that was his way.
“And your father is where?” he asked her.
“Where?” said the echo. “Where? Where?”
She nestled closer, and laughed delightedly because she understood him. It
was true they could have no secret from each other. That was his abrupt way
of accepting intimacy, genuine and forever. But the echoes also laughed. They
were derisive. She lowered her voice.
“Blair, dear, please wait for the moon. Don’t you—won’t you
understand I couldn’t tell you simply and solely because I couldn’t?”
“You could have tried,” he answered.
“Blair, if you only knew, you wouldn’t say that. While you didn’t love me,
but I did love you, there was one thing I couldn’t even try to do. Would you
try, now, to make me despise you? If I had tried, you would have thought me
quite mad. Even if you hadn’t said so, I would have known what you thought,
and I couldn’t have endured that. It was better you should think me venomous,
or criminal—oh, anything was better. It isn’t as if I could have made
you believe. I couldn’t.. If you hadn’t come here, you would never have seen
me again. You would never have known the secret; or I think not.”
That startled him. He spoke louder. “Do you mean—”
“Do you mean?” an echo whispered.
“Oh, no, I would not have killed myself. There was no need. You will
understand that presently. But you would never have seen me again.”
“Wu Tu would have killed you?”
“Oh, no. Wu Tu wants to learn the secret from me. If she has learned it,
then it would have been too late to kill me.”
“I’m being awfully patient, sweetheart.”
“I know it. You will soon understand. You will see my difficulty. Father
discovered this placed Do you know what his passionate interests were?”
“Passionate interests!” said an echo. It was like a mocking
commentary.
“More or less. Fourth dimension—ancient magic—showers of fish
in deserts—sudden appearance of plants and animals on desert
islands—Charles Fort’s books—disappearance without trace of about
a hundred thousand people every
year—telepathy—clairvoyance—pretty” nearly everything a
soldier shouldn’t care a damn about.”
“True, he should not have been a soldier.”
“For God’s sake, where is he?”
“Where is he? Where is he?” an echo whispered. “Wait, dear, for
moonlight.”
“Do you know a way out of these caverns?”
“No. And when Chetusingh brought me, I didn’t care. It was good-by
forever.”
“But you care now?”
“Yes. You know it. We’ll find a way out.”
“Let’s hope Chetusingh will, somehow. He has gone for help. Better hurry
if you want to show me secrets. Is your father dead?”
“Wait, Blair—please wait. I’m doing my best. Wu Tu’s obsession is to
do what he did— and return and be wiser than anyone else in the world.
Wu Tu knows the legends. She believes what very few people gave father credit
for, that he really knew what he was doing. He investigated ancient legends
about so-called lost races of giants, that once peopled the world but
vanished before history, as we know it, began to be written. He wondered why
and how they vanished.
“He was quite familiar with the writings of Einstein, Jeans, Eddington,
Whately Smith, Haldane and men like that. Mathematics was like music to him;
he could think in terms of mathematics. It was one of his favorite sayings
that matter is nothing but theoretical dimensions in motion. He believed
there is truth underlying the legend about how the Atlanteans, whoever they
were, destroyed themselves and vanished, from misuse of too much knowledge.
Can you imagine then what it meant to him when he discovered this place? And
that priestess! Is she not plainly a hierophant? Doesn’t she guard, yet tell
in silence, some tremendous secret that the ancients knew? Would he tell
about this place? Would he have it plundered like Tut-ank-ahmen’s tomb? Would
he have tourists let in?”
From where they sat on the rock, with her head on his shoulder, he could
look straight up through the opening to the sky. He stared at the Pleiades.
Then he glanced at the cone, ghostly luminous, that seemed able to steal and
concentrate the starlight, like a tiger’s eyes in darkness. “I can understand
his keeping it secret,” he answered. “But you?”
“I can’t remember the time when he and I weren’t friends. He told me
everything except about Wu Tu. I couldn’t help him much about this, but I did
what I could. You see, I don’t understand mathematics. Symbology seems as
difficult to me as Chinese. There were thin metal plates, that he found by
opening a gold box. He had to smash the box to open it. The gold was as hard
as iron, so the plates got damaged. I helped to photograph them and the
photography revealed marks which father concluded were mathematical symbols,
dealing with the fourth dimension. He and I came back for the other boxes,
which he had left here because it seemed the safest place to leave them. But
by that time Wu Tu’s agents had terrorized the Bat-Brahmin and found their
way in. They took the boxes. I suppose they melted them.
“Father nearly went frantic with disappointment. He almost decided to fell
the government about it there and then, to, prevent further looting. But it
wouldn’t have looked well, would it? He had kept it secret so long and he
himself had taken three boxes, and smashed one. The mildest thing the
government would be likely to do would be to transfer him and completely
close the place, on the ground of religious prejudice. If they did admit
anyone, it would be some orthodox expert, who would measure everything and
understand nothing. You know the kind of man I mean—one of those mild,
safe, unimaginative scientists—the kind of man who says the Great
Pyramid of Egypt is a tomb built by Cheops.
“It seemed better to run risks—take consequences, whatever they
might be. It was obvious that the Woman within that cone had been immured,
perhaps hundreds of thousands of years ago, by people who knew how to make
liquid stone take shape and solidify and become transparent. Also they knew
how to harden gold, and how to close up a gold box without leaving a seam. So
they probably knew a great deal more than that. Blair, did you ever imagine
the fourth dimension?”
“No,” he said. “Three give me trouble enough!”
“I can’t imagine a fourth. But I know the theory. Something like, this:
One dimension is a straight line, without breadth or depth. If you move that
at right angles to itself you get a place of two dimensions, don’t you? You
get three dimensions—that is to say a cube—if you move the, plane
at right angles to itself. It has depth then, as well as length and breadth.
An inhabitant of a two-dimensional plane, supposing there were one, couldn’t
see or understand three dimensions. The two-dimensional person couldn’t see
the depth, could he? He’d be unconscious of it. Anything lifted off his plane
in the direction of the third dimension would go out of his consciousness. He
would call that, magic, because he couldn’t explain it. Is that clear?”
“Go on. I’m listening.”
“To arrive at the fourth dimension one must now try to imagine the cube
moved at right angles to itself. We three-dimensional people find that
difficult. Most of us can’t imagine it at all, but mathematicians understand
the theory, and they know what some of the properties of the fourth dimension
are. The point is, that if anything were tilted, or in some way removed into
the fourth dimension, we three dimensional people would no longer be
conscious of it. It would look like magic, wouldn’t it? Well—you have
heard of the ancient rope trick?”
“Never met a man who saw it done.” Blair answered. But he glanced at the
cone in the midst of the pit, loaded and aglow with starlight. The word
impossible died on his lips.
“Father saw it—twice,” said Henrietta. “He photographed it both
times. A man threw a rope in the air. climbed the rope, disappeared, and
pulled the rope after him. It was the same man each time. The photographs
showed the man climbing.”
“Where are the photographs?”
“Somewhere in the Secret Service files. Father came to the conclusion that
the man merely moved away into the fourth dimension— that he knew how
to do that, and to return at will—or perhaps he couldn’t help
returning. Father developed a theory that perhaps a small percentage of the
hundred thousand or more people who disappear unaccountably every year, have
slipped or stumbled off into the fourth dimension by accident. It is a theory
that can’t be disproved, no matter who ridicules it. And by reversing it, one
arrives at another theory, equally impossible to disprove; that
vegetation—insects—animals —even human beings, when
conditions are right, are sometimes perhaps expelled from the fourth
dimension into our three-dimensional existence, by what Charles Fort called
teleportation. The theory offers a not impossible explanation for all sorts
of phenomena that can’t be explained otherwise.”
“Dreams, for instance?”
“Some dreams, not all. Some sorts of visions, too, that have been seen by
people whose veracity isn’t in doubt. People on battlefields see visions.
There were the Angels of Lyons. Lots of people see, at times, into the fourth
dimension. Very religious people sometimes do it. There must be a point or a
plane at which dimensions merge or meet or extend into one another. According
to father’s theory, light, which nobody really understands, has something to
do with it.
“He made experiments, here, in this cavern, bearing in mind the legends,
and wondering why there are no graves and only that one giantess immured in
stone. There are skeletons in the crypt, it’s true, where Ranjeet’s queen
burned herself and her woman to death; and there are a lew in the tunnel, but
those are obviously modern; the Bat-Brahmin admits they are those of people
who got in, and were sent in and never got out again.
“Ever since Ranjeet’s queen cremated herself, if she did, and the heat
cracked the sealed wall of the crypt, the Bat-Brahmins have known of these
caverns. People who were too persistently inquisitive were admitted, and shut
in, to die of hunger or by falling into holes in the dark. That is how the
secret has been kept. But father noticed there are no ancient skeletons,
although the legend is that a whole race perished in here.”
“Perished in here!” said an echo.
Blair glanced again at the opening, high up, inaccessible, through which
the Pleiades were twinkling now less brightly in the light of the rising
moon. He shuddered but reserved comment, hoping Chetusingh would solve the
problem of escape from the caverns. Wu Tu had said she knew no way out.
“Father decided,” Henrietta went on, “that perhaps those ancients used
this cavern as a means of escape into the fourth dimension. Perhaps they
didn’t like to die. Perhaps they saw there is no need to die. Perhaps that
giantess was somebody who died before her time; she may have been immured, as
she stands, as a warning or something like that. Or perhaps she was
deliberately killed and set there as a monument to symbolize something or
other; for instance, ‘naked we came into the world, naked we leave it.’ He
thought of that. It was no use dismissing a thought unexamined; he had to use
his imagination if he was to find out anything at all.”
“Did he discuss all this with you?”
“Yes. But I wasn’t with him when he stumbled on the right solution. He was
in here on a night of full moon, and he had with him a servant who, I think,
was one of Wu Tu’s spies, although the man pretended to be deaf and dumb: I
always thought he was pretending, but father thought not; that was why he
chose him. He and the servant went where I will take you presently. The
deaf-and-dumb man—he was a Bombay boy—had hurt himself rather
badly. He was only wearing a loin-cloth because of the heat; father always
carried a pocket first-aid kit, with iodine and that kind of thing. He signed
to him to take off his loin-cloth and show the injury. The servant obeyed. He
vanished—instantly.”
“You mean into the fourth dimension?”
“That was father’s theory. He could imagine no other.”
“Did he report the disappearance?”
“No. Who would have believed it? Wu Tu —I am sure it was
she—introduced him to a woman who was in her service. I did not meet.
her, but I knew about her. I believe the woman drugged him. I can’t prove it,
but I believe he used to tell her all he knew. Anyhow, Wu Tu learned what had
happened to the deaf-and-dumb man, and from that time there was no shaking
her off. She threatened to have father accused of murder unless he would take
her into partnership and tell her all he knew. She threatened to have him
accused of looting the caverns.”