Thursday's Serial: "The Moon Pool" by A. Merritt (in English) X

CHAPTER XXIV - The Crimson Sea

                I was in the heart of a rose pearl, swinging, swinging; no, I was in a rosy dawn cloud, pendulous in space. Consciousness flooded me, in reality I was in the arms of one of the man frogs, carrying me as though I were a babe, and we were passing through some place suffused with glow enough like heart of pearl or dawn cloud to justify my awakening vagaries.

                Just ahead walked Lakla in earnest talk with Rador, and content enough was I for a time to watch her. She had thrown off the metallic robes; her thick braids of golden brown hair with their flame glints of bronze were twined in a high coronal meshed in silken net of green; little clustering curls escaped from it, clinging to the nape of the proud white neck, shyly kissing it. From her shoulders fell a loose, sleeveless garment of shimmering green belted with a high golden girdle; skirt folds dropping barely below the knees.

                She had cast aside her buskins, too, and the slender, high-arched feet were sandalled. Between the buckled edges of her kirtle I caught gleams of translucent ivory as exquisitely moulded, as delectably rounded, as those revealed so naively beneath the hem.

                Something was knocking at the doors of my consciousness - some tragic thing. What was it? Larry! Where was Larry? I remembered; raised my head abruptly; saw at my side another frog-man carrying O'Keefe, and behind him, Olaf, step instinct with grief, following like some faithful, wistful dog who has lost a loved master. Upon my movement the monster bearing me halted, looked down inquiringly, uttered a deep, booming note that held the quality of interrogation.

                Lakla turned; the clear, golden eyes were sorrowful, the sweet mouth drooping; but her loveliness, her gentleness, that undefinable synthesis of all her tender self that seemed always to circle her with an atmosphere of lucid normality, lulled my panic.

                "Drink this," she commanded, holding a small vial to my lips.

Its contents were aromatic, unfamiliar but astonishingly effective, for as soon as they passed my lips I felt a surge of strength; consciousness was restored.

"Larry!" I cried. ”Is he dead?"

Lakla shook her head; her eyes were troubled.

"No," she said;”but he is like one dead - and yet unlike -”

                "Put me down," I demanded of my bearer.

                He tightened his hold; round eyes upon the Golden Girl. She spoke - in sonorous, reverberating monosyllables - and I was set upon my feet; I leaped to the side of the Irishman. He lay limp, with a disquieting, abnormal sequacity, as though every muscle were utterly flaccid; the antithesis of the rigor mortis, thank God, but terrifyingly toward the other end of its arc; a syncope I had never known. The flesh was stone cold; the pulse barely perceptible, long intervalled; the respiration undiscoverable; the pupils of the eyes were enormously dilated; it was as though life had been drawn from every nerve.

                "A light flashed from the road. It struck his face and seemed to sink in," I said.

                "I saw," answered Rador;”but what it was I know not; and I thought I knew all the weapons of our rulers." He glanced at me curiously. ”Some talk there has been that the stranger who came with you, Double Tongue, was making new death tools for Lugur," he ended.

                Marakinoff! The Russian at work already in this storehouse of devastating energies, fashioning the weapons for his plots! The Apocalyptic vision swept back upon me -

                "He is not dead." Lakla's voice was poignant. ”He is not dead; and the Three have wondrous healing. They can restore him if they will - and they will, they will!" For a moment she was silent. ”Now their gods help Lugur and Yolara," she whispered;”for come what may, whether the Silent Ones be strong or weak, if he dies, surely shall I fall upon them and I will slay those two - yea, though I, too perish!"

                "Yolara and Lugur shall both die." Olaf's eyes were burning. ”But Lugur is mine to slay."

                That pity I had seen before in Lakla's eyes when she looked upon the Norseman banished the white wrath from them. She turned, half hurriedly, as though to escape his gaze.

                "Walk with us," she said to me, ”unless you are still weak."

I shook my head, gave a last look at O'Keefe; there was nothing I could do; I stepped beside her. She thrust a white arm into mine protectingly, the wonderfully moulded hand with its long, tapering fingers catching about my wrist; my heart glowed toward her.

"Your medicine is potent, handmaiden," I answered. ”And the touch of your hand would give me strength enough, even had I not drunk it," I added in Larry's best manner.

Her eyes danced, trouble flying.

"Now, that was well spoken for such a man of wisdom as Rador tells me you are," she laughed; and a little pang shot through me. Could not a lover of science present a compliment without it always seeming to be as unusual as plucking a damask rose from a cabinet of fossils?

Mustering my philosophy, I smiled back at her. Again I noted that broad, classic brow, with the little tendrils of shining bronze caressing it, the tilted, delicate, nut-brown brows that gave a curious touch of innocent diablerie to the lovely face - flowerlike, pure, high-bred, a touch of roguishness, subtly alluring, sparkling over the maiden Madonnaness that lay ever like a delicate, luminous suggestion beneath it; the long, black, curling lashes - the tender, rounded, bare left breast -

"I have always liked you," she murmured naively, ”since first I saw you in that place where the Shining One goes forth into your world. And I am glad you like my medicine as well as that you carry in the black box that you left behind," she added swiftly.

                "How know you of that, Lakla?" I gasped.

                "Oft and oft I came to him there, and to you, while you lay sleeping. How call you him?" She paused.

                "Larry!" I said.

"Larry!" she repeated it excellently. ”And you?"

                "Goodwin," said Rador.

I bowed quite as though I were being introduced to some charming young lady met in that old life now seemingly aeons removed.

"Yes - Goodwin." she said. ”Oft and oft I came. Sometimes I thought you saw me. And he - did he not dream of me sometime - ?" she asked wistfully.

                "He did." I said, ”and watched for you." Then amazement grew vocal. ”But how came you?" I asked.

                "By a strange road," she whispered, ”to see that all was well with him - and to look into his heart; for I feared Yolara and her beauty. But I saw that she was not in his heart." A blush burned over her, turning even the little bare breast rosy. ”It is a strange road," she went on hurriedly. ”Many times have I followed it and watched the Shining One bear back its prey to the blue pool; seen the woman he seeks" - she made a quick gesture toward Olaf -”and a babe cast from her arms in the last pang of her mother love; seen another woman throw herself into the Shining One's embrace to save a man she loved; and I could not help!" Her voice grew deep, thrilled. ”The friend, it comes to me, who drew you here, Goodwin!"

                She was silent, walking as one who sees visions and listens to voices unheard by others, Rador made a warning gesture; I crowded back my questions, glanced about me. We were passing over a smooth strand, hard packed as some beach of long-thrust-back ocean. It was like crushed garnets, each grain stained deep red, faintly sparkling. On each side were distances, the floor stretching away into them bare of vegetation - stretching on and on into infinitudes of rosy mist, even as did the space above.

                Flanking and behind us marched the giant batrachians, fivescore of them at least, black scale and crimson scale lustrous and gleaming in the rosaceous radiance; saucer eyes shining circles of phosphorescence green, purple, red; spurs clicking as they crouched along with a gait at once grotesque and formidable.

                Ahead the mist deepened into a ruddier glow; through it a long, dark line began to appear - the mouth I thought of the caverned space through which we were going; it was just before us; over us - we stood bathed in a flood of rubescence!

                A sea stretched before us - a crimson sea, gleaming like that lost lacquer of royal coral and the Flame Dragon's blood which Fu S'cze set upon the bower he built for his stolen sun maiden - that going toward it she might think it the sun itself rising over the summer seas. Unmoved by wave or ripple, it was placid as some deep woodland pool when night rushes up over the world.

                It seemed molten - or as though some hand great enough to rock earth had distilled here from conflagrations of autumn sunsets their flaming essences.

                A fish broke through, large as a shark, blunt-headed, flashing bronze, ridged and mailed as though with serrate plates of armour. It leaped high, shaking from it a sparkling spray of rubies; dropped and shot up a geyser of fiery gems.

                Across my line of vision, moving stately over the sea, floated a half globe, luminous, diaphanous, its iridescence melting into turquoise, thence to amethyst, to orange, to scarlet shot with rose, to vermilion, a translucent green, thence back into the iridescence; behind it four others, and the least of them ten feet in diameter, and the largest no less than thirty. They drifted past like bubbles blown from froth of rainbows by pipes in mouths of Titans' young. Then from the base of one arose a tangle of shimmering strands, long, slender whiplashes that played about and sank slowly again beneath the crimson surface.

                I gasped - for the fish had been a ganoid - that ancient, armoured form that was perhaps the most intelligent of all life on our planet during the Devonian era, but which for age upon age had vanished, save for its fossils held in the embrace of the stone that once was their soft bottom beds; and the half-globes were Medusae, jelly-fish - but of a size, luminosity, and colour unheard of.

                Now Lakla cupped her mouth with pink palms and sent a clarion note ringing out. The ledge on which we stood continued a few hundred feet before us, falling abruptly, though from no great height to the Crimson Sea; at right and left it extended in a long semicircle. Turning to the right whence she had sent her call, I saw rising a mile or more away, veiled lightly by the haze, a rainbow, a gigantic prismatic arch, flattened, I thought, by some quality of the strange atmosphere. It sprang from the ruddy strand, leaped the crimson tide, and dropped three miles away upon a precipitous, jagged upthrust of rock frowning black from the lacquered depths.

                And surmounting a higher ledge beyond this upthrust a huge dome of dull gold, Cyclopean, striking eyes and mind with something unhumanly alien, baffling; sending the mind groping, as though across the deserts of space, from some far-flung star, should fall upon us linked sounds, coherent certainly, meaningful surely, vaguely familiar - yet never to be translated into any symbol or thought of our own particular planet.

                The sea of crimson lacquer, with its floating moons of luminous colour - this bow of prismed stone leaping to the weird isle crowned by the anomalous, aureate excrescence - the half human batrachians-the elfland through which we had passed, with all its hidden wonders and terrors - I felt the foundations of my cherished knowledge shaking. Was this all a dream? Was this body of mine lying somewhere, fighting a fevered death, and all these but images floating through the breaking chambers of my brain? My knees shook; involuntarily I groaned.

                Lakla turned, looked at me anxiously, slipped a soft arm behind me, held me till the vertigo passed.

                "Patience," she said. ”The bearers come. Soon you shall rest."

                I looked; down toward us from the bow's end were leaping swiftly another score of the frog-men. Some bore litters, high, handled, not unlike palanquins -

                "Asgard!" Olaf stood beside me, eyes burning, pointing to the arch. ”Bifrost Bridge, sharp as sword edge, over which souls go to Valhalla. And she - she is a Valkyr - a sword maiden, Ja!"

                I gripped the Norseman's hand. It was hot, and a pang of remorse shot through me. If this place had so shaken me, how must it have shaken Olaf? It was with relief that I watched him, at Lakla's gentle command, drop into one of the litters and lie back, eyes closed, as two of the monsters raised its yoke to their scaled shoulders. Nor was it without further relief that I myself lay back on the soft velvety cushions of another.

                The cavalcade began to move. Lakla had ordered O'Keefe placed beside her, and she sat, knees crossed Orient fashion, leaning over the pale head on her lap, the white, tapering fingers straying fondly through his hair.

                Presently I saw her reach up, slowly unwind the coronal of her tresses, shake them loose, and let them fall like a veil over her and him.

                Her head bent low; I heard a soft sobbing - I turned away my gaze, lorn enough in my own heart, God knew!

               

CHAPTER XXV - The Three Silent Ones

                The arch was closer - and in my awe I forgot for the moment Larry and aught else. For this was no rainbow, no thing born of light and mist, no Bifrost Bridge of myth - no! It was a flying arch of stone, stained with flares of Tyrian purples, of royal scarlets, of blues dark as the Gulf Stream's ribbon, sapphires soft as midday May skies, splashes of chromes and greens - a palette of giantry, a bridge of wizardry; a hundred, nay, a thousand, times greater than that of Utah which the Navaho call Nonnegozche and worship, as well they may, as a god, and which is itself a rainbow in eternal rock.

                It sprang from the ledge and winged its prodigious length in one low arc over the sea's crimson breast, as though in some ancient paroxysm of earth it had been hurled molten, crystallizing into that stupendous span and still flaming with the fires that had moulded it.

                Closer we came and closer, while I watched spellbound; now we were at its head, and the litter-bearers swept upon it. All of five hundred feet wide it was, surface smooth as a city road, sides low walled, curving inward as though in the jetting-out of its making the edges of the plastic rock had curled.

                On and on we sped; the high thrusting precipices upon which the bridge's far end rested, frowned close; the enigmatic, dully shining dome loomed ever greater. Now we had reached that end; were passing over a smooth plaza whose level floor was enclosed, save for a rift in front of us, by the fanged tops of the black cliffs.

                From this rift stretched another span, half a mile long, perhaps, widening at its centre into a broad platform, continuing straight to two massive gates set within the face of the second cliff wall like panels, and of the same dull gold as the dome rising high beyond. And this smaller arch leaped a pit, an abyss, of which the outer precipices were the rim holding back from the pit the red flood.

                We were rapidly approaching; now upon the platform; my bearers were striding closely along the side; I leaned far out - a giddiness seized me! I gazed down into depth upon vertiginous depth; an abyss indeed - an abyss dropping to world's base like that in which the Babylonians believed writhed Talaat, the serpent mother of Chaos; a pit that struck down into earth's heart itself.

                Now, what was that - distance upon unfathomable distance below? A stupendous glowing like the green fire of life itself. What was it like? I had it! It was like the corona of the sun in eclipse - that burgeoning that makes of our luminary when moon veils it an incredible blossoming of splendours in the black heavens.

                And strangely, strangely, it was like the Dweller's beauty when with its dazzling spirallings and writhings it raced amid its storm of crystal bell sounds!

                The abyss was behind us; we had paused at the golden portals; they swung inward. A wide corridor filled with soft light was before us, and on its threshold stood - bizarre, yellow gems gleaming, huge muzzle wide in what was evidently meant for a smile of welcome - the woman frog of the Moon Pool wall.

                Lakla raised her head; swept back the silken tent of her hair and gazed at me with eyes misty from weeping. The frog-woman crept to her side; gazed down upon Larry; spoke - spoke - to the Golden Girl in a swift stream of the sonorous, reverberant monosyllables; and Lakla answered her in kind. The webbed digits swept over O'Keefe's face, felt at his heart; she shook her head and moved ahead of us up the passage.

                Still borne in the litters we went on, winding, ascending until at last they were set down in a great hall carpeted with soft fragrant rushes and into which from high narrow slits streamed the crimson light from without.

                I jumped over to Larry, there had been no change in his condition; still the terrifying limpness, the slow, infrequent pulsation. Rador and Olaf - and the fever now seemed to be gone from him - came and stood beside me, silent.

                "I go to the Three," said Lakla. ”Wait you here." She passed through a curtaining; then as swiftly as she had gone she returned through the hangings, tresses braided, a swathing of golden gauze about her.

                "Rador," she said, ”bear you Larry - for into your heart the Silent Ones would look. And fear nothing," she added at the green dwarf's disconcerted, almost fearful start.

                Rador bowed, was thrust aside by Olaf.

                "No," said the Norseman;”I will carry him."

                He lifted Larry like a child against his broad breast. The dwarf glanced quickly at Lakla; she nodded.

                "Come!" she commanded, and held aside the folds.

                Of that journey I have few memories. I only know that we went through corridor upon corridor; successions of vast halls and chambers, some carpeted with the rushes, others with rugs into which the feet sank as into deep, soft meadows; spaces illumined by the rubrous light, and spaces in which softer lights held sway.

                We paused before a slab of the same crimson stone as that the green dwarf had called the portal, and upon its polished surface weaved the same unnameable symbols. The Golden Girl pressed upon its side; it slipped softly back; a torrent of opalescence gushed out of the opening - and as one in a dream I entered.

                We were, I knew, just under the dome; but for the moment, caught in the flood of radiance, I could see nothing. It was like being held within a fire opal - so brilliant, so flashing, was it. I closed my eyes, opened them; the lambency cascaded from the vast curves of the globular walls; in front of me was a long, narrow opening in them, through which, far away, I could see the end of the wizards' bridge and the ledged mouth of the cavern through which we had come; against the light from within beat the crimson light from without - and was checked as though by a barrier.

                I felt Lakla's touch; turned.

                A hundred paces away was a dais, its rim raised a yard above the floor. From the edge of this rim streamed upward a steady, coruscating mist of the opalescence, veined even as was that of the Dweller's shining core and shot with milky shadows like curdled moonlight; up it stretched like a wall.

                Over it, from it, down upon me, gazed three faces - two clearly male, one a woman's. At the first I thought them statues, and then the eyes of them gave the lie to me; for the eyes were alive, terribly, and if I could admit the word - supernaturally - alive.

                They were thrice the size of the human eye and triangular, the apex of the angle upward; black as jet, pupilless, filled with tiny, leaping red flames.

                Over them were foreheads, not as ours - high and broad and visored; their sides drawn forward into a vertical ridge, a prominence, an upright wedge, somewhat like the visored heads of a few of the great lizards - and the heads, long, narrowing at the back, were fully twice the size of mankind's!

                Upon the brows were caps - and with a fearful certainty I knew that they were not caps - long, thick strands of gleaming yellow, feathered scales thin as sequins! Sharp, curving noses like the beaks of the giant condors; mouths thin, austere; long, powerful, pointed chins; the - flesh - of the faces white as the whitest marble; and wreathing up to them, covering all their bodies, the shimmering, curdled, misty fires of opalescence!

                Olaf stood rigid; my own heart leaped wildly. What - what were these beings?

                I forced myself to look again - and from their gaze streamed a current of reassurance, of good will - nay, of intense spiritual strength. I saw that they were not fierce, not ruthless, not inhuman, despite their strangeness; no, they were kindly; in some unmistakable way, benign and sorrowful - so sorrowful! I straightened, gazed back at them fearlessly. Olaf drew a deep breath, gazed steadily too, the hardness, the despair wiped from his face.

                Now Lakla drew closer to the dais; the three pairs of eyes searched hers, the woman's with an ineffable tenderness; some message seemed to pass between the Three and the Golden Girl. She bowed low, turned to the Norseman.

                "Place Larry there," she said softly -”there at the feet of the Silent Ones."

                She pointed into the radiant mist; Olaf started, hesitated, stared from Lakla to the Three, searched for a moment their eyes - and something like a smile drifted through them. He stepped forward, lifted O'Keefe, set him squarely within the covering light. It wavered, rolled upward, swirled about the body, steadied again - and within it there was no sign of Larry!

                Again the mist wavered, shook, and seemed to climb higher, hiding the chins, the beaked noses, the brows of that incredible Trinity - but before it ceased to climb, I thought the yellow feathered heads bent; sensed a movement as though they lifted something.

                The mist fell; the eyes gleamed out again, inscrutable.

                And groping out of the radiance, pausing at the verge of the dais, leaping down from it, came Larry, laughing, filled with life, blinking as one who draws from darkness into sunshine. He saw Lakla, sprang to her, gripped her in his arms.

                "Lakla!" he cried. ”Mavourneen!" She slipped from his embrace, blushing, glancing at the Three shyly, half-fearfully. And again I saw the tenderness creep into the inky, flame-shot orbs of the woman being; and a tenderness in the others too - as though they regarded some well-beloved child.

                "You lay in the arms of Death, Larry," she said. ”And the Silent Ones drew you from him. Do homage to the Silent Ones, Larry, for they are good and they are mighty!"

                She turned his head with one of the long, white hands - and he looked into the faces of the Three; looked long, was shaken even as had been Olaf and myself; was swept by that same wave of power and of - of - what can I call it? - holiness that streamed from them.

                Then for the first time I saw real awe mount into his face. Another moment he stared - and dropped upon one knee and bowed his head before them as would a worshipper before the shrine of his saint. And - I am not ashamed to tell it - I joined him; and with us knelt Lakla and Olaf and Rador.

                The mist of fiery opal swirled up about the Three; hid them.

                And with a long, deep, joyous sigh Lakla took Larry's hand, drew him to his feet, and silently we followed them out of that hall of wonder.

                But why, in going, did the thought come to me that from where the Three sat throned they ever watched the cavern mouth that was the door into their abode; and looked down ever into the unfathomable depth in which glowed and pulsed that mystic flower, colossal, awesome, of green flame that had seemed to me fire of life itself?

               

CHAPTER XXVI - The Wooing of Lakla

                I had slept soundly and dreamlessly; I wakened quietly in the great chamber into which Rador had ushered O'Keefe and myself after that culminating experience of crowded, nerve-racking hours - the facing of the Three.

                Now, lying gazing upward at the high-vaulted ceiling, I heard Larry's voice:

                "They look like birds." Evidently he was thinking of the Three; a silence - then:”Yes, they look like birds - and they look, and it's meaning no disrespect to them I am at all, they look like lizards" - and another silence -”they look like some sort of gods, and, by the good sword-arm of Brian Boru, they look human, too! And it's none of them they are either, so what - what the - what the sainted St. Bridget are they?" Another short silence, and then in a tone of awed and absolute conviction:”That's it, sure! That's what they are - it all hangs in - they couldn't be anything else -”

                He gave a whoop; a pillow shot over and caught me across the head.

                "Wake up!" shouted Larry. ”Wake up, ye seething caldron of fossilized superstitions! Wake up, ye bogy-haunted man of scientific unwisdom!"

                Under pillow and insults I bounced to my feet, filled for a moment with quite real wrath; he lay back, roaring with laughter, and my anger was swept away.

                "Doc," he said, very seriously, after this, ”I know who the Three are!"

                "Yes?" I queried, with studied sarcasm.

                "Yes?" he mimicked. ”Yes! Ye - ye" He paused under the menace of my look, grinned. ”Yes, I know," he continued. ”They're of the Tuatha De, the old ones, the great people of Ireland, that's who they are!"

                I knew, of course, of the Tuatha De Danann, the tribes of the god Danu, the half-legendary, half-historical clan who found their home in Erin some four thousand years before the Christian era, and who have left so deep an impress upon the Celtic mind and its myths.

                "Yes," said Larry again, ”the Tuatha De - the Ancient Ones who had spells that could compel Mananan, who is the spirit of all the seas, an' Keithor, who is the god of all green living things, an' even Hesus, the unseen god, whose pulse is the pulse of all the firmament; yes, an' Orchil too, who sits within the earth an' weaves with the shuttle of mystery and her three looms of birth an' life an' death - even Orchil would weave as they commanded!"

                He was silent - then:

                "They are of them - the mighty ones - why else would I have bent my knee to them as I would have to the spirit of my dead mother? Why else would Lakla, whose gold-brown hair is the hair of Eilidh the Fair, whose mouth is the sweet mouth of Deirdre, an' whose soul walked with mine ages agone among the fragrant green myrtle of Erin, serve them?" he whispered, eyes full of dream.

                "Have you any idea how they got here?" I asked, not unreasonably.

                "I haven't thought about that," he replied somewhat testily. ”But at once, me excellent man o' wisdom, a number occur to me. One of them is that this little party of three might have stopped here on their way to Ireland, an' for good reasons of their own decided to stay a while; an' another is that they might have come here afterward, havin' got wind of what those rats out there were contemplatin', and have stayed on the job till the time was ripe to save Ireland from 'em; the rest of the world, too, of course," he added magnanimously, ”but Ireland in particular. And do any of those reasons appeal to ye?"

                I shook my head.

                "Well, what do you think?" he asked wearily.

                "I think," I said cautiously, ”that we face an evolution of highly intelligent beings from ancestral sources radically removed from those through which mankind ascended. These half-human, highly developed batrachians they call the Akka prove that evolution in these caverned spaces has certainly pursued one different path than on earth. The Englishman, Wells, wrote an imaginative and very entertaining book concerning an invasion of earth by Martians, and he made his Martians enormously specialized cuttlefish. There was nothing inherently improbable in Wells' choice. Man is the ruling animal of earth today solely by reason of a series of accidents; under another series spiders or ants, or even elephants, could have become the dominant race.

                "I think," I said, even more cautiously, ”that the race to which the Three belong never appeared on earth's surface; that their development took place here, unhindered through aeons. And if this be true, the structure of their brains, and therefore all their reactions, must be different from ours. Hence their knowledge and command of energies unfamiliar to us - and hence also the question whether they may not have an entirely different sense of values, of justice - and that is rather terrifying," I concluded.

                Larry shook his head.

                "That last sort of knocks your argument, Doc," he said. ”They had sense of justice enough to help me out - and certainly they know love - for I saw the way they looked at Lakla; and sorrow - for there was no mistaking that in their faces.

                "No," he went on. ”I hold to my own idea. They're of the Old People. The little leprechaun knew his way here, an' I'll bet it was they who sent the word. An' if the O'Keefe banshee comes here - which save the mark! - I'll bet she'll drop in on the Silent Ones for a social visit before she an' her clan get busy. Well, it'll make her feel more at home, the good old body. No, Doc, no," he concluded, ”I'm right; it all fits in too well to be wrong."

                I made a last despairing attempt.

                "Is there anything anywhere in Ireland that would indicate that the Tuatha De ever looked like the Three?" I asked - and again I had spoken most unfortunately.

                "Is there?" he shouted. ”Is there? By the kilt of Cormack MacCormack, I'm glad ye reminded me. It was worryin' me a little meself. There was Daghda, who could put on the head of a great boar an' the body of a giant fish and cleave the waves an' tear to pieces the birlins of any who came against Erin; an' there was Rinn -”

                How many more of the metamorphoses of the Old People I might have heard, I do not know, for the curtains parted and in walked Rador.

                "You have rested well," he smiled, ”I can see. The handmaiden bade me call you. You are to eat with her in her garden."

                Down long corridors we trod and out upon a gardened terrace as beautiful as any of those of Yolara's city; bowered, blossoming, fragrant, set high upon the cliffs beside the domed castle. A table, as of milky jade, was spread at one corner, but the Golden Girl was not there. A little path ran on and up, hemmed in by the mass of verdure. I looked at it longingly; Rador saw the glance, interpreted it, and led me up the stepped sharp slope into a rock embrasure.

                Here I was above the foliage, and everywhere the view was clear. Below me stretched the incredible bridge, with the frog people hurrying back and forth upon it. A pinnacle at my side hid the abyss. My eyes followed the cavern ledge. Above it the rock rose bare, but at the ends of the semicircular strand a luxuriant vegetation began, stretching from the crimson shores back into far distances. Of browns and reds and yellows, like an autumn forest, was the foliage, with here and there patches of dark-green, as of conifers. Five miles or more, on each side, the forests swept, and then were lost to sight in the haze.

                I turned and faced an immensity of crimson waters, unbroken, a true sea, if ever there was one. A breeze blew - the first real wind I had encountered in the hidden places; under it the surface, that had been as molten lacquer, rippled and dimpled. Little waves broke with a spray of rose-pearls and rubies. The giant Medusae drifted - stately, luminous kaleidoscopic elfin moons.

                Far down, peeping around a jutting tower of the cliff, I saw dipping with the motion of the waves a floating garden. The flowers, too, were luminous - indeed sparkling - gleaming brilliants of scarlet and vermilions lighter than the flood on which they lay, mauves and odd shades of reddish-blue. They gleamed and shone like a little lake of jewels.

                Rador broke in upon my musings.

                "Lakla comes! Let us go down."

                It was a shy Lakla who came slowly around the end of the path and, blushing furiously, held her hands out to Larry. And the Irishman took them, placed them over his heart, kissed them with a tenderness that had been lacking in the half-mocking, half-fierce caresses he had given the priestess. She blushed deeper, holding out the tapering fingers - then pressed them to her own heart.

                "I like the touch of your lips, Larry," she whispered. ”They warm me here" - she pressed her heart again -”and they send little sparkles of light through me." Her brows tilted perplexedly, accenting the nuance of diablerie, delicate and fascinating, that they cast upon the flower face.

                "Do you?" whispered the O'Keefe fervently. ”Do you, Lakla?" He bent toward her. She caught the amused glance of Rador; drew herself aside half-haughtily.

                "Rador," she said, ”is it not time that you and the strong one, Olaf, were setting forth?"

                "Truly it is, handmaiden," he answered respectfully enough - yet with a current of laughter under his words. ”But as you know the strong one, Olaf, wished to see his friends here before we were gone - and he comes even now," he added, glancing down the pathway, along which came striding the Norseman.

                As he faced us I saw that a transformation had been wrought in him. Gone was the pitiful seeking, and gone too the just as pitiful hope. The set face softened as he looked at the Golden Girl and bowed low to her. He thrust a hand to O'Keefe and to me.

                "There is to be battle," he said. ”I go with Rador to call the armies of these frog people. As for me - Lakla has spoken. There is no hope for - for mine Helma in life, but there is hope that we destroy the Shining Devil and give mine Helma peace. And with that I am well content, ja! Well content!" He gripped our hands again. ”We will fight!" he muttered. ”Ja! And I will have vengeance!" The sternness returned; and with a salute Rador and he were gone.

                Two great tears rolled from the golden eyes of Lakla.

                "Not even the Silent Ones can heal those the Shining One has taken," she said. ”He asked me - and it was better that I tell him. It is part of the Three's - punishment - but of that you will soon learn," she went on hurriedly. ”Ask me no questions now of the Silent Ones. I thought it better for Olaf to go with Rador, to busy himself, to give his mind other than sorrow upon which to feed."

                Up the path came five of the frog-women, bearing platters and ewers. Their bracelets and anklets of jewels were tinkling; their middles covered with short kirtles of woven cloth studded with the sparkling ornaments.

                And here let me say that if I have given the impression that the Akka are simply magnified frogs, I regret it. Frog-like they are, and hence my phrase for them - but as unlike the frog, as we know it, as man is unlike the chimpanzee. Springing, I hazard, from the stegocephalia, the ancestor of the frogs, these batrachians followed a different line of evolution and acquired the upright position just as man did his from the four-footed folk.

                The great staring eyes, the shape of the muzzle were frog-like, but the highly developed brain had set upon the head and shape of it vital differences. The forehead, for instance, was not low, flat, and retreating - its frontal arch was well defined. The head was, in a sense, shapely, and with the females the great horny carapace that stood over it like a fantastic helmet was much modified, as were the spurs that were so formidable in the male; colouration was different also. The torso was upright; the legs a little bent, giving them their crouching gait - but I wander from my subject.[1]

                They set their burdens down. Larry looked at them with interest.

                "You surely have those things well trained, Lakla," he said.

                "Things!" The handmaiden arose, eyes flashing with indignation. ”You call my Akka things!"

                "Well," said Larry, a bit taken aback, ”what do you call them?"

                "My Akka are a people," she retorted. ”As much a people as your race or mine. They are good and loyal, and they have speech and arts, and they slay not, save for food or to protect themselves. And I think them beautiful, Larry, beautiful!" She stamped her foot. ”And you call them - things!"

                Beautiful! These? Yet, after all, they were, in their grotesque fashion. And to Lakla, surrounded by them, from babyhood, they were not strange, at all. Why shouldn't she think them beautiful? The same thought must have struck O'Keefe, for he flushed guiltily.

                "I think them beautiful, too, Lakla," he said remorsefully. ”It's my not knowing your tongue too well that traps me. Truly, I think them beautiful - I'd tell them so, if I knew their talk."

                Lakla dimpled, laughed - spoke to the attendants in that strange speech that was unquestionably a language; they bridled, looked at O'Keefe with fantastic coquetry, cracked and boomed softly among themselves.

                "They say they like you better than the men of Muria," laughed Lakla.

                "Did I ever think I'd be swapping compliments with lady frogs!" he murmured to me. ”Buck up, Larry - keep your eyes on the captive Irish princess!" he muttered to himself.

                "Rador goes to meet one of the ladala who is slipping through with news," said the Golden Girl as we addressed ourselves to the food. ”Then, with Nak, he and Olaf go to muster the Akka - for there will be battle, and we must prepare. Nak," she added, ”is he who went before me when you were dancing with Yolara, Larry." She stole a swift, mischievous glance at him. ”He is headman of all the Akka."

                "Just what forces can we muster against them when they come, darlin'?" said Larry.

                "Darlin'?" - the Golden Girl had caught the caress of the word -”what's that?"

                "It's a little word that means Lakla," he answered. ”It does - that is, when I say it; when you say it, then it means Larry."

                "I like that word," mused Lakla.

                "You can even say Larry darlin'!" suggested O'Keefe.

                "Larry darlin'!" said Lakla. ”When they come we shall have first of all my Akka -”

                "Can they fight, mavourneen?" interrupted Larry.

                "Can they fight! My Akka!" Again her eyes flashed. ”They will fight to the last of them - with the spears that give the swift rotting, covered, as they are, with the jelly of those Saddu there -” She pointed through a rift in the foliage across which, on the surface of the sea, was floating one of the moon globes - and now I know why Rador had warned Larry against a plunge there. ”With spears and clubs and with teeth and nails and spurs - they are a strong and brave people, Larry - darlin', and though they hurl the Keth at them, it is slow to work upon them, and they slay even while they are passing into the nothingness!"

                "And have we none of the Keth?" he asked.

                "No" - she shook her head -”none of their weapons have we here, although it was - it was the Ancient Ones who shaped them."

                "But the Three are of the Ancient Ones?" I cried. ”Surely they can tell -”

                "No," she said slowly. ”No - there is something you must know - and soon; and then the Silent Ones say you will understand. You, especially, Goodwin, who worship wisdom."

                "Then," said Larry, ”we have the Akka; and we have the four men of us, and among us three guns and about a hundred cartridges - an' - an' the power of the Three - but what about the Shining One, Fireworks -”

                "I do not know." Again the indecision that had been in her eyes when Yolara had launched her defiance crept back. ”The Shining One is strong - and he has his - slaves!"

                "Well, we'd better get busy good and quick!" the O'Keefe's voice rang. But Lakla, for some reason of her own, would pursue the matter no further. The trouble fled from her eyes - they danced.

                "Larry darlin'?" she murmured. ”I like the touch of your lips -”

                "You do?" he whispered, all thought flying of anything but the beautiful, provocative face so close to his. ”Then, acushla, you're goin' to get acquainted with 'em! Turn your head, Doc!" he said.

                And I turned it. There was quite a long silence, broken by an interested, soft outburst of gentle boomings from the serving frog-maids. I stole a glance behind me. Lakla's head lay on the Irishman's shoulder, the golden eyes misty sunpools of love and adoration; and the O'Keefe, a new look of power and strength upon his clear-cut features, was gazing down into them with that look which rises only from the heart touched for the first time with that true, all-powerful love, which is the pulse of the universe itself, the real music of the spheres of which Plato dreamed, the love that is stronger than death itself, immortal as the high gods and the true soul of all that mystery we call life.

                Then Lakla raised her hands, pressed down Larry's head, kissed him between the eyes, drew herself with a trembling little laugh from his embrace.

                "The future Mrs. Larry O'Keefe, Goodwin," said Larry to me a little unsteadily.

                I took their hands - and Lakla kissed me!

                She turned to the booming - smiling - frog-maids; gave them some command, for they filed away down the path. Suddenly I felt, well, a little superfluous.

                "If you don't mind," I said, ”I think I'll go up the path there again and look about."

                But they were so engrossed with each other that they did not even hear me - so I walked away, up to the embrasure where Rador had taken me. The movement of the batrachians over the bridge had ceased. Dimly at the far end I could see the cluster of the garrison. My thoughts flew back to Lakla and to Larry.

                What was to be the end?

                If we won, if we were able to pass from this place, could she live in our world? A product of these caverns with their atmosphere and light that seemed in some subtle way to be both food and drink - how would she react to the unfamiliar foods and air and light of outer earth? Further, here so far as I was able to discover, there were no malignant bacilli - what immunity could Lakla have then to those microscopic evils without, which only long ages of sickness and death have bought for us a modicum of protection? I began to be oppressed. Surely they had been long enough by themselves. I went down the path.

                I heard Larry.

                "It's a green land, mavourneen. And the sea rocks and dimples around it - blue as the heavens, green as the isle itself, and foam horses toss their white manes, and the great clean winds blow over it, and the sun shines down on it like your eyes, acushla -”

                "And are you a king of Ireland, Larry darlin'?" Thus Lakla -

But enough!

                At last we turned to go - and around the corner of the path I caught another glimpse of what I have called the lake of jewels. I pointed to it.

                "Those are lovely flowers, Lakla," I said. ”I have never seen anything like them in the place from whence we come."

                She followed my pointing finger - laughed.

                "Come," she said, ”let me show you them."

                She ran down an intersecting way, we following; came out of it upon a little ledge close to the brink, three feet or more I suppose about it. The Golden Girl's voice rang out in a high-pitched, tremulous, throbbing call.

                The lake of jewels stirred as though a breeze had passed over it; stirred, shook, and then began to move swiftly, a shimmering torrent of shining flowers down upon us! She called again, the movement became more rapid; the gem blooms streamed closer - closer, wavering, shifting, winding - at our very feet. Above them hovered a little radiant mist. The Golden Girl leaned over; called softly, and up from the sparkling mass shot a green vine whose heads were five flowers of flaming ruby - shot up, flew into her hand and coiled about the white arm, its quintette of lambent blossoms - regarding us!

                It was the thing Lakla had called the Yekta; that with which she had threatened the priestess; the thing that carried the dreadful death - and the Golden Girl was handling it like a rose!

                Larry swore - I looked at the thing more closely. It was a hydroid, a development of that strange animal-vegetable that, sometimes almost microscopic, waves in the sea depths like a cluster of flowers paralyzing its prey with the mysterious force that dwells in its blossom heads![2]

                "Put it down, Lakla," the distress in O'Keefe's voice was deep. Lakla laughed mischievously, caught the real fear for her in his eyes; opened her hand, gave another faint call - and back it flew to its fellows.

                "Why, it wouldn't hurt me, Larry!" she expostulated. ”They know me!"

                "Put it down!" he repeated hoarsely.

                She sighed, gave another sweet, prolonged call. The lake of gems - rubies and amethysts, mauves and scarlet-tinged blues - wavered and shook even as it had before - and swept swiftly back to that place whence she had drawn them!

                Then, with Larry and Lakla walking ahead, white arm about his brown neck; the O'Keefe still expostulating, the handmaiden laughing merrily, we passed through her bower to the domed castle.

                Glancing through a cleft I caught sight again of the far end of the bridge; noted among the clustered figures of its garrison of the frog-men a movement, a flashing of green fire like marshlights on spear tips; wondered idly what it was, and then, other thoughts crowding in, followed along, head bent, behind the pair who had found in what was Olaf's hell, their true paradise.

[1] The Akka are viviparous. The female produces progeny at five-year intervals, never more than two at a time. They are monogamous, like certain of our own Ranidae. Pending my monograph upon what little I had time to learn of their interesting habits and customs, the curious will find instruction and entertainment in Brandes and Schvenichen's Brutpfleige der Schwanzlosen Bat rachier, p. 395; and Lilian V. Sampson's Unusual Modes of Breeding among Anura, Amer. Nat. xxxiv., 1900. - W. T. G.

[2] The Yekta of the Crimson Sea, are as extraordinary developments of hydroid forms as the giant Medusae, of which, of course, they are not too remote cousins. The closest resemblances to them in outer water forms are among the Gymnoblastic Hydroids, notably Clavetella prolifera, a most interesting ambulatory form of six tentacles. Almost every bather in Southern waters, Northern too, knows the pain that contact with certain”jelly fish" produces. The Yekta's development was prodigious and, to us, monstrous. It secretes in its five heads an almost incredibly swiftly acting poison which I suspect, for I had no chance to verify the theory, destroys the entire nervous system to the accompaniment of truly infernal agony; carrying at the same time the illusion that the torment stretches through infinities of time. Both ether and nitrous oxide gas produce in the majority this sensation of time extension, without of course the pain symptom. What Lakla called the Yekta kiss is I imagine about as close to the orthodox idea of Hell as can be conceived. The secret of her control over them I had no opportunity of learning in the rush of events that followed. Knowledge of the appalling effects of their touch came, she told me, from those few”who had been kissed so lightly" that they recovered. Certainly nothing, not even the Shining One, was dreaded by the Murians as these were - W. T. G.