The Tree of Life Page 3
reason why heneed let this blank-eyed priestess lead him up to the very maw of hergod. She had lured him into this land by what he knew now to have been atrick; might she not have worse tricks than that in store for him?
She held him, after all, by nothing stronger than the clasp of herfingers, if he could keep his eyes turned from hers. Therein lay herreal power, but he could fight it if he chose. And he began to hear moreclearly than ever the queer note of warning in the rustling whispers ofthe tree-folk who still fluttered in and out of sight among the leaves.The twilight place had taken on menace and evil.
Suddenly he made up his mind. He stopped, breaking the clasp of thegirl's hand.
"I'm not going," he said.
She swung round in a sweep of richly tinted hair, words jetting from herin a gush of incoherence. But he dared not meet her eyes, and theyconveyed no meaning to him. Resolutely he turned away, ignoring hervoice, and set out to retrace the way they had come. She called afterhim once, in a high, clear voice that somehow held a note as warning asthat in the rustling voices of the tree-people, but he kept on doggedly,not looking back. She laughed then, sweetly and scornfully, a laugh thatechoed uneasily in his mind long after the sound of it had died upon thetwilit air.
After a while he glanced back over one shoulder, half expecting to seethe luminous dazzle of her body still glowing in the dim glade where hehad left her; but the blurred tapestry-landscape was quite empty.
He went on in the midst of a silence so deep it hurt his ears, and in asolitude unhaunted even by the shy presences of the tree-folk. They hadvanished with the fire-bright girl, and the whole twilight land wasempty save for himself. He plodded on across the dark grass, crushingthe upturned flower-faces under his boots and asking himself wearily ifhe could be mad. There seemed little other explanation for this hushedand tapestried solitude that had swallowed him up. In that thunderousquiet, in that deathly solitude, he went on.
* * * * *
When he had walked for what seemed to him much longer than it shouldhave taken to reach his starting-point, and still no sign of an exitappeared, he began to wonder if there were any way out of the gray landof Thag. For the first time he realized that he had come through notangible gateway. He had only stepped out of a shadow, and--now that hethought of it--there were no shadows here. The grayness swallowedeverything up, leaving the landscape oddly flat, like a badly drawnpicture. He looked about helplessly, quite lost now and not sure in whatdirection he should be facing, for there was nothing here by which toknow directions. The trees and shrubs and the starry grass stillstretched about him, uncertainly outlined in that changeless dusk. Theyseemed to go on for ever.
But he plodded ahead, unwilling to stop because of a queer tension inthe air, somehow as if all the blurred trees and shrubs were waiting inbreathless anticipation, centering upon his stumbling figure. But alltrace of animate life had vanished with the disappearance of thepriestess' white-glowing figure. Head down, paying little heed to wherehe was going, he went on over the flowery sward.
An odd sense of voids about him startled Smith at last out of hislethargic plodding. He lifted his head. He stood just at the edge of aline of trees, dim and indistinct in the unchanging twilight. Beyondthem--he came to himself with a jerk and stared incredulously. Beyondthem the grass ran down to nothingness, merging by imperceptible degreesinto a streaked and arching void--not the sort of emptiness into which amaterial body could fall, but a solid _nothing_, curving up toward thedark zenith as the inside of a sphere curves. No physical thing couldhave entered there. It was too utterly void, an inviolable emptinesswhich no force could invade.
He stared up along the inward arch of that curving, impassable wall.Here, then, was the edge of the queer land Illar had wrested out ofspace itself. This arch must be the curving of solid space which hadbeen bent awry to enclose the magical land. There was no escape thisway. He could not even bring himself to approach any nearer to thatstreaked and arching blank. He could not have said why, but it woke inhim an inner disquiet so strong that after a moment's staring he turnedhis eyes away.
Presently he shrugged and set off along the inside of the line of treeswhich parted him from the space-wall. Perhaps there might be a breaksomewhere. It was a forlorn hope, but the best that offered. Wearily hestumbled on over the flowery grass.
How long he had gone on along that almost imperceptibly curving line ofborder he could not have said, but after a timeless interval of graysolitude he gradually became aware that a tiny rustling and whisperingamong the leaves had been growing louder by degrees for some time. Helooked up. In and out among the trees which bordered that solid wall ofnothingness little, indistinguishable figures were flitting. Thetree-men had returned. Queerly grateful for their presence, he went on abit more cheerfully, paying no heed to their timid dartings to and fro,for Smith was wise in the ways of wild life.
Presently, when they saw how little heed he paid them, they began togrow bolder, their whispers louder. And among those rustling voices hethought he was beginning to catch threads of familiarity. Now and againa word reached his ears that he seemed to recognize, lost amidst thegibberish of their speech. He kept his head down and his hands quiet,plodding along with a cunning stillness that began to bear results.
From the corner of his eye he could see that a little dark tree-man haddarted out from cover and paused midway between bush and tree to inspectthe queer, tall stranger. Nothing happened to this daring venturer, andsoon another risked a pause in the open to stare at the quiet walkeramong the trees. In a little while a small crowd of the tree-people wasmoving slowly parallel with his course, staring with all the avidcuriosity of wild things at Smith's plodding figure. And among them therustling whispers grew louder.
Presently the ground dipped down into a little hollow ringed with trees.It was a bit darker here than it had been on the higher level, and as hewent down the slope of its side he saw that among the underbrush whichfilled it were cunningly hidden huts twined together out of the livingbushes. Obviously the hollow was a tiny village where the tree-folkdwelt.
He was surer of this when they began to grow bolder as he went down intothe dimness of the place. The whispers shrilled a little, and theboldest among his watchers ran almost at his elbow, twittering theirqueer, broken speech in hushed syllables whose familiarity stillbothered him with its haunting echo of words he knew. When he hadreached the center of the hollow he became aware that the little folkhad spread out in a ring to surround him. Wherever he looked theirsmall, anxious faces and staring eyes confronted him. He grinned tohimself and came to a halt, waiting gravely.
None of them seemed quite brave enough to constitute himself spokesman,but among several a hurried whispering broke out in which he caught thewords "Thag" and "danger" and "beware." He recognized the meaning ofthese words without placing in his mind their origins in some tongue heknew. He knit his sun-bleached brows and concentrated harder, strivingto wrest from that curious, murmuring whisper some hint of its originalroot. He had a smattering of more tongues than he could have countedoffhand, and it was hard to place these scattered words among any onespeech.
But the word "Thag" had a sound like that of the very ancient drylandtongue, which upon Mars is considered at once the oldest and the mostuncouth of all the planet's languages. And with that clue to guide himhe presently began to catch other syllables which were remotely likesyllables from the dryland speech. They were almost unrecognizable, far,far more ancient than the very oldest versions of the tongue he had everheard repeated, almost primitive in their crudity and simplicity. Andfor a moment the sheerest awe came over him, as he realized thesignificance of what he listened to.
* * * * *
The dryland race today is a handful of semi-brutes, degenerate from theages of past time when they were a mighty people at the apex of analmost forgotten glory. That day is millions of years gone now, too farin the past to have record save in the vaguest folklore. Yet here was apeople wh
o spoke the rudiments of that race's tongue as it must havebeen spoken in the race's dim beginnings, perhaps a million yearsearlier even than that immemorial time of their triumph. The reeling ofmillenniums set Smith's mind awhirl with the effort at compassing theirspan.
There was another connotation in the speaking of that tongue by thesetimid bush-dwellers, too. It must mean that the forgotten wizard king,Illar, had peopled his sinister, twilight land with the ancestors oftoday's dryland dwellers. If they shared the same tongue they must sharethe same lineage. And humanity's remorseless adaptability had done therest.
It had been no kinder here than in the outside world, where the ancientplains-men who had roamed Mars' green prairies had dwindled with theirdying plains, degenerating at last into a shrunken, leather-skinnedbestiality. For here that same race root had declined into these tiny,slinking creatures with their dusky skins and great, staring eyes andtheir voices