"No one," said my companion, gently pushing me up an open way towards the palace steps left clear by the sitting Martians. "It came direct from her to me this minute."

"But how?" I persisted.

"Nay," said the girl, "if we stop to talk like this we shall not be placed before she comes, and thus throw a whole year's knowledge out."

So, bottling my speculations, I allowed myself to be led up the first flight of worn, white steps to where, on the terrace between them and the next flight leading directly to the palace portico, was a flat, having a circle about twenty feet across, inlaid upon the marble with darker coloured blocks. Inside that circle, as I sat down close by it in the twilight, showed another circle, and then a final one in whose inmost middle stood a tall iron tripod and something atop of it covered by a cloth. And all round the outer circle were magic symbols—I started as I recognised the meaning of some of them—within these again the inner circle held what looked like the representations of planets, ending, as I have said, in that dished hollow made by countless dancers' feet, and its solitary tripod. Back again, I glanced towards the square where the great concourse—ten thousand of them, perhaps—were sitting mute and silent in the deepening shadows, then back to the magic circles, till the silence and expectancy of a strange scene began to possess me.

Shadow down below, star-dusted heaven above, and not a figure moving; when suddenly something like a long-drawn sigh came from the lips of the expectant multitude, and I was aware every eye had suddenly turned back to the palace porch, where, as we looked, a figure, wrapped in pale blue robes, appeared and stood for a minute, then stole down the steps with an eagerness in every movement holding us spellbound. I have seen many splendid pageants and many sights, each of which might be the talk of a lifetime, but somehow nothing ever so engrossing, so thrilling, as that ghostly figure in flowing robes stealing across the piazza in starlight and silence—the princess of a broken kingdom, the priestess of a forgotten faith coming to her station to perform a jugglery of which she knew not even the meaning. It was my versatile friend Heru, and with quick, incisive steps, her whole frame ambent for the time with the fervour of her mission, she came swiftly down to within a dozen yards of where I stood. Heru, indeed, but not the same princess as in the morning; an inspired priestess rather, her slim body wrapped in blue and quivering with emotion, her face ashine with Delphic fire, her hair loose, her feet bare, until at last when, as she stood within the limit of the magic circle, her white hands upon her breast, her eyes flashing like planets themselves in the starshine she looked so ghostly and unreal I felt for a minute I was dreaming.

Then began a strange, weird dance amongst the imagery of the rings, over which my earth planet was beginning to throw a haze of light. At first it was hardly more than a walk, a slow procession round the twin circumferences of the centred tripod. But soon it increased to an extraordinary graceful measure, a cadenced step without music or sound that riveted my eyes to the dancer. Presently I saw those mystic, twinkling feet of hers—as the dance became swifter—were performing a measured round amongst the planet signs—spelling out something, I knew not what, with quick, light touch amongst the zodiac figures, dancing out a soundless invocation of some kind as a dumb man might spell a message by touching letters. Quicker and quicker, for minute after minute, grew the dance, swifter and swifter the swing of the light blue drapery as the priestess, with eager face and staring eyes, swung panting round upon her orbit, and redder and redder over the city tops rose the circumference of the earth. It seemed to me all the silent multitude were breathing heavily as we watched that giddy dance, and whatever THEY felt, all my own senses seemed to be winding up upon that revolving figure as thread winds on a spindle.

"When will she stop?" I whispered to my friend under my breath.

"When the earth-star rests in the roof-niche of the temple it is climbing," she answered back.

"And then?"

"On the tripod is a globe of water. In it she will see the destiny of the year, and will tell us. The whiter the water stays, the better for us; it never varies from white. But we must not talk; see! she is stopping."

And as I looked back, the dance was certainly ebbing now with such smoothly decreasing undulations, that every heart began to beat calmer in response. There was a minute or two of such slow cessation, and then to say she stopped were too gross a description. Motion rather died away from her, and the priestess grounded as smoothly as a ship grounds in fine weather on a sandy bank. There she was at last, crouched behind the tripod, one corner of the cloth covering it grasped in her hand, and her eyes fixed on the shining round just poised upon the distant run.

Keenly the girl watched it slide into zenith, then the cloth was snatched from the tripod-top. As it fell it uncovered a beautiful and perfect globe of clear white glass, a foot or so in diameter, and obviously filled with the thinnest, most limpid water imaginable. At first it seemed to me, who stood near to the priestess of Mars, with that beaming sphere directly between us, and the newly risen world, that its smooth and flawless face was absolutely devoid of sign or colouring. Then, as the distant planet became stronger in the magnifying Martian air, or my eyes better accustomed to that sudden nucleus of brilliancy, a delicate and infinitely lovely network of colours came upon it. They were like the radiant prisms that sometimes flush the surface of a bubble more than aught else for a time. But as I watched that mosaic of yellow and purple creep softly to and fro upon the globe it seemed they slowly took form and meaning. Another minute or two and they had certainly congealed into a settled plan, and then, as I stared and wondered, it burst upon me in a minute that I was looking upon a picture, faithful in every detail, of the world I stood on; all its ruddy forests, its sapphire sea, both broad and narrow ones, its white peaked mountains, and unnumbered islands being mapped out with startling clearness for a spell upon that beaming orb.

Then a strange thing happened. Heru, who had been crouching in a tremulous heap by the tripod, rose stealthily and passed her hands a few times across the sphere. Colour and picture vanished at her touch like breath from a mirror. Again all was clear and pellucid.

"Now," said my companion, "now listen! For Heru reads the destiny; the whiter the globe stays the better for us—" and then I felt her hand tighten on mine with a startled grasp as the words died away upon her lips.

Even as the girl spoke, the sphere, which had been beaming in the centre of the silent square like a mighty white jewel, began to flush with angry red. Redder and redder grew the gleam—a fiery glow which seemed curdling in the interior of the round as though it were filled with flame; redder and redder, until the princess, staring into it, seemed turned against the jet-black night behind, into a form of molten metal. A spasm of terror passed across her as she stared; her limbs stiffened; her frightened hands were clutched in front, and she stood cowering under that great crimson nucleus like one bereft of power and life, and lost to every sense but that of agony. Not a syllable came from her lips, not a movement stirred her body, only that dumb, stupid stare of horror, at the something she saw in the globe. What could I do? I could not sit and see her soul come out at her frightened eyes, and not a Martian moved a finger to her rescue; the red shine gleamed on empty faces, tier above tier, and flung its broad flush over the endless rank of open-mouthed spectators, then back I looked to Heru—that winsome little lady for whom, you will remember, I had already more than a passing fancy—and saw with a thrill of emotion that while she still kept her eyes on the flaming globe like one in a horrible dream her hands were slowly, very slowly, rising in supplication to ME! It was not vanity. There was no mistaking the direction of that silent, imploring appeal.

Not a man of her countrymen moved, not even black Hath! There was not a sound in the world, it seemed, but the noisy clatter of my own shoenails on the marble flags. In the great red eye of that unholy globe the Martians glimmered like a picture multitude under the red cliff of their ruined palace. I glared round at them with contempt for a minute, then sprang forward and snatched the princess up. It was like pulling a flower up by the roots. She was stiff and stark when I lay hold of her, but when I tore her from the magic ground she suddenly gave a piercing shriek, and fainted in my arms.

Then as I turned upon my heels with her upon my breast my foot caught upon the cloths still wound about the tripod of the sphere. Over went that implement of a thousand years of sorcery, and out went the red fire. But little I cared—the princess was safe! And up the palace steps, amidst a low, wailing hum of consternation from the recovering Martians, I bore that bundle of limp and senseless loveliness up into the pale shine of her own porch, and there, laying her down upon a couch, watched her recover presently amongst her women with a varied assortment of emotions tingling in my veins.



CHAPTER VI

Beyond the first flutter of surprise, the Martians had shown no interest in the abrupt termination of the year's divinations. They melted away, a trifle more silently perhaps than usual, when I shattered the magic globe, but with their invariable indifference, and having handed the reviving Heru over to some women who led her away, apparently already half forgetful of the things that had just happened, I was left alone on the palace steps, not even An beside me, and only the shadow of a passerby now and then to break the solitude. Whereon a great loneliness took hold upon me, and, pacing to and fro along the ancient terrace with bent head and folded arms, I bewailed my fate. To and fro I walked, heedless and melancholy, thinking of the old world, that was so far and this near world so distant from me in everything making life worth living, thinking, as I strode gloomily here and there, how gladly I would exchange these poor puppets and the mockery of a town they dwelt in, for a sight of my comrades and a corner in the poorest wine-shop salon in New York or 'Frisco; idly speculating why, and how, I came here, as I sauntered down amongst the glistening, shell-like fragments of the shattered globe, and finding no answer. How could I? It was too fair, I thought, standing there in the open; there was a fatal sweetness in the air, a deadly sufficiency in the beauty of everything around falling on the lax senses like some sleepy draught of pleasure. Not a leaf stirred, the wide purple roof of the sky was unbroken by the healthy promise of a cloud from rim to rim, the splendid country, teeming with its spring-time richness, lay in rank perfection everywhere; and just as rank and sleek and passionless were those who owned it.

Why, even I, who yesterday was strong, began to come under the spell of it. But yesterday the spirit of the old world was still strong within me, yet how much things were now changing. The well-strung muscles loosening, the heart beating a slower measure, the busy mind drowsing off to listlessness. Was I, too, destined to become like these? Was the red stuff in my veins to be watered down to pallid Martian sap? Was ambition and hope to desert me, and idleness itself become laborious, while life ran to seed in gilded uselessness? Little did I guess how unnecessary my fears were, or of the incredible fairy tale of adventure into which fate was going to plunge me.

Still engrossed the next morning by these thoughts, I decided I would go to Hath. Hath was a man—at least they said so—he might sympathise even though he could not help, and so, dressing finished, I went down towards the innermost palace whence for an hour or two had come sounds of unwonted bustle. Asking for the way occasionally from sleepy folk lolling about the corridors, waiting as it seemed for their breakfasts to come to them, and embarrassed by the new daylight, I wandered to and fro in the labyrinths of that stony ant-heap until I chanced upon a curtained doorway which admitted to a long chamber, high-roofed, ample in proportions, with colonnades on either side separated from the main aisle by rows of flowery figures and emblematic scroll-work, meaning I knew not what. Above those pillars ran a gallery with many windows looking out over the ruined city. While at the further end of the chamber stood three broad steps leading to a dais. As I entered, the whole place was full of bustling girls, their yellow garments like a bed of flowers in the sunlight trickling through the casements, and all intent on the spreading of a feast on long tables ranged up and down the hall. The morning light streamed in on the white cloths. It glittered on the glass and the gold they were putting on the trestles, and gave resplendent depths of colour to the ribbon bands round the pillars. All were so busy no one noticed me standing in the twilight by the door, but presently, laying a hand on a worker's shoulder, I asked who they banqueted for, and why such unwonted preparation?

"It is the marriage-feast tonight, stranger, and a marvel you did not know it. You, too, are to be wed."

"I had not heard of it, damsel; a paternal forethought of your Government, I suppose? Have you any idea who the lady is?"

"How should I know?" she answered laughingly. "That is the secret of the urn. Meanwhile, we have set you a place at the table-head near Princess Heru, and tonight you dip and have your chance like all of them; may luck send you a rosy bride, and save her from Ar-hap."

"Ay, now I remember; An told me of this before; Ar-hap is the sovereign with whom your people have a little difference, and shares unbidden in the free distribution of brides to-night. This promises to be interesting; depend on it I will come; if you will keep me a place where I can hear the speeches, and not forget me when the turtle soup goes round, I shall be more than grateful. Now to another matter. I want to get a few minutes with your President, Prince Hath. He concentrates the fluid intelligence of this sphere, I am told. Where can I find him?"

"He is drunk, in the library, sir!"

"My word! It is early in the day for that, and a singular conjunction of place and circumstance."

"Where," said the girl, "could he safer be? We can always fetch him if we want him, and sunk in blue oblivion he will not come to harm."

"A cheerful view, Miss, which is worthy of the attention of our reformers. Nevertheless, I will go to him. I have known men tell more truth in that state than in any other."

The servitor directed me to the library, and after desolate wanderings up crumbling steps and down mouldering corridors, sunny and lovely in decay, I came to the immense lumber-shed of knowledge they had told me of, a city of dead books, a place of dusty cathedral aisles stored with forgotten learning. At a table sat Hath the purposeless, enthroned in leather and vellum, snoring in divine content amongst all that wasted labour, and nothing I could do was sufficient to shake him into semblance of intelligence. So perforce I turned away till he should have come to himself, and wandering round the splendid litter of a noble library, presently amongst the ruck of volumes on the floor, amongst those lordly tomes in tattered green and gold, and ivory, my eye lit upon a volume propped up curiously on end, and going to it through the confusion I saw by the dried fruit rind upon the sticks supporting it, that the grave and reverend tome was set to catch a mouse! It was a splendid book when I looked more closely, bound as a king might bind his choicest treasure, the sweet-scented leather on it was no doubt frayed; the golden arabesques upon the covers had long since shed their eyes of inset gems, the jewelled clasp locking its learning up from vulgar gaze was bent and open. Yet it was a lordly tome with an odour of sanctity about it, and lifting it with difficulty, I noticed on its cover a red stain of mouse's blood. Those who put it to this quaint use of mouse-trap had already had some sport, but surely never was a mouse crushed before under so much learning. And while I stood guessing at what the book might hold within, Heru, the princess, came tripping in to me, and with the abrupt familiarity of her kind, laid a velvet hand upon my wrist, conned the title over to herself.

"What does it say, sweet girl?" I asked. "The matter is learned, by its feel," and that maid, pursing up her pretty lips, read the title to me—"The Secret of the Gods."

"The Secret of the Gods," I murmured. "Was it possible other worlds had struggled hopelessly to come within the barest ken of that great knowledge, while here the same was set to catch a mouse with?"

I said, "Silver-footed, sit down and read me a passage or two," and propping the mighty volume upon a table drew a bench before it and pulled her down beside me.

"Oh! a horrid, dry old book for certain," cried that lady, her pink fingertips falling as lightly on the musty leaves as almond petals on March dust. "Where shall I begin? It is all equally dull."

"Dip in," was my answer. "'Tis no great matter where, but near the beginning. What says the writer of his intention? What sets he out to prove?"

"He says that is the Secret of the First Great Truth, descended straight to him—"

"Many have said so much, yet have lied."

"He says that which is written in his book is through him but not of him, past criticism and beyond cavil. 'Tis all in ancient and crabbed characters going back to the threshold of my learning, but here upon this passage-top where they are writ large I make them out to say, 'ONLY THE MAN WHO HAS DIED MANY TIMES BEGINS TO LIVE.'"

"A pregnant passage! Turn another page, and try again; I have an inkling of the book already."

"'Tis poor, silly stuff," said the girl, slipping a hand covertly into my own. "Why will you make me read it? I have a book on pomatums worth twice as much as this."

"Nevertheless, dip in again, dear lady. What says the next heading?" And with a little sigh at the heaviness of her task, Heru read out: "SOMETIMES THE GODS THEMSELVES FORGET THE ANSWERS TO THEIR OWN RIDDLES."

"Lady, I knew it!

"All this is still preliminary to the great matter of the book, but the mutterings of the priest who draws back the curtains of the shrine—and here, after the scribe has left these two yellow pages blank as though to set a space of reverence between himself and what comes next—here speaks the truth, the voice, the fact of all life." But "Oh! Jones," she said, turning from the dusty pages and clasping her young, milk-warm hands over mine and leaning towards me until her blushing cheek was near to my shoulder and the incense of her breath upon me. "Oh! Gulliver Jones," she said. "Make me read no more; my soul revolts from the task, the crazy brown letters swim before my eyes. Is there no learning near at hand that would be pleasanter reading than this silly book of yours? What, after all," she said, growing bolder at the sound of her own voice, "what, after all, is the musty reticence of gods to the whispered secret of a maid? Jones, splendid stranger for whom all men stand aside and women look over shoulders, oh, let me be your book!" she whispered, slipping on to my knee and winding her arms round my neck till, through the white glimmer of her single vest, I could feel her heart beating against mine. "Newest and dearest of friends, put by this dreary learning and look in my eyes; is there nothing to be spelt out there?"

And I was constrained to do as she bid me, for she was as fresh as an almond blossom touched by the sun, and looking down into two swimming blue lakes where shyness and passion were contending—books easy enough, in truth, to be read, I saw that she loved me, with the unconventional ardour of her nature.

It was a pleasant discovery, if its abruptness was embarrassing, for she was a maid in a thousand; and half ashamed and half laughing I let her escalade me, throwing now and then a rueful look at the Secret of the Gods, and all that priceless knowledge treated so unworthily.

What else could I do? Besides, I loved her myself! And if there was a momentary chagrin at having yonder golden knowledge put off by this lovely interruption, yet I was flesh and blood, the gods could wait—they had to wait long and often before, and when this sweet interpreter was comforted we would have another try. So it happened I took her into my heart and gave her the answer she asked for.

For a long time we sat in the dusky grandeur of the royal library, my mind revolving between wonder and admiration of the neglected knowledge all about, and the stirrings of a new love, while Heru herself, lapsed again into Martian calm, lay half sleeping on my shoulder, but presently, unwinding her arms, I put her down.

"There, sweetheart," I whispered, "enough of this for the moment; tonight, perhaps, some more, but while we are here amongst all this lordly litter, I can think of nothing else." Again I bid her turn the pages, noting as she did so how each chapter was headed by the coloured configuration of a world. Page by page we turned of crackling parchment, until by chance, at the top of one, my eye caught a coloured round I could not fail to recognise—'twas the spinning button on the blue breast of the immeasurable that yesterday I inhabited. "Read here," I cried, clapping my finger upon the page midway down, where there were some signs looking like Egyptian writing. "Says this quaint dabbler in all knowledge anything of Isis, anything of Phra, of Ammon, of Ammon Top?"

"And who was Isis? who Ammon Top?" asked the lady.

"Nay, read," I answered, and down the page her slender fingers went awandering till at a spot of knotted signs they stopped. "Why, here is something about thy Isis," exclaimed Heru, as though amused at my perspicuity. "Here, halfway down this chapter of earth-history, it says," and putting one pink knee across the other to better prop the book she read:

"And the priests of Thebes were gone; the sand stood untrampled on the temple steps a thousand years; the wild bees sang the song of desolation in the ears of Isis; the wild cats littered in the stony lap of Ammon; ay, another thousand years went by, and earth was tilled of unseen hands and sown with yellow grain from Paradise, and the thin veil that separates the known from the unknown was rent, and men walked to and fro."

"Go on," I said.

"Nay," laughed the other, "the little mice in their eagerness have been before you—see, all this corner is gnawed away."

"Read on again," I said, "where the page is whole; those sips of knowledge you have given make me thirsty for more. There, begin where this blazonry of initialed red and gold looks so like the carpet spread by the scribe for the feet of a sovereign truth—what says he here?" And she, half pouting to be set back once more to that task, half wondering as she gazed on those magic letters, let her eyes run down the page, then began:

"And it was the Beginning, and in the centre void presently there came a nucleus of light: and the light brightened in the grey primeval morning and became definite and articulate. And from the midst of that natal splendour, behind which was the Unknowable, the life came hitherward; from the midst of that nucleus undescribed, undescribable, there issued presently the primeval sigh that breathed the breath of life into all things. And that sigh thrilled through the empty spaces of the illimitable: it breathed the breath of promise over the frozen hills of the outside planets where the night-frost had lasted without beginning: and the waters of ten thousand nameless oceans, girding nameless planets, were stirred, trembling into their depth. It crossed the illimitable spaces where the herding aerolites swirl forever through space in the wake of careering world, and all their whistling wings answered to it. It reverberated through the grey wastes of vacuity, and crossed the dark oceans of the Outside, even to the black shores of the eternal night beyond.

"And hardly had echo of that breath died away in the hollow of the heavens and the empty wombs of a million barren worlds, when the light brightened again, and drawing in upon itself became definite and took form, and therefrom, at the moment of primitive conception, there came—"

And just then, as she had read so far as that, when all my faculties were aching to know what came next—whether this were but the idle scribbling of a vacuous fool, or something else—there rose the sound of soft flutes and tinkling bells in the corridors, as seneschals wandered piping round the palace to call folk to meals, a smell of roast meat and grilling fish as that procession lifted the curtains between the halls, and—

"Dinner!" shouted my sweet Martian, slapping the covers of The Secret of the Gods together and pushing the stately tome headlong from the table. "Dinner! 'Tis worth a hundred thousand planets to the hungry!"

Nothing I could say would keep her, and, scarcely knowing whether to laugh or to be angry at so unseemly an interruption, but both being purposeless I dug my hands into my pockets, and somewhat sulkily refusing Heru's invitation to luncheon in the corridor (Navy rations had not fitted my stomach for these constant debauches of gossamer food), strolled into the town again in no very pleasant frame of mind.



CHAPTER VII

It was only at moments like these I had any time to reflect on my circumstances or that giddy chance which had shot me into space in this fashion, and, frankly, the opportunities, when they did come, brought such an extraordinary depressing train of thought, I by no means invited them. Even with the time available the occasion was always awry for such reflection. These dainty triflers made sulking as impossible amongst them as philosophy in a ballroom. When I stalked out like that from the library in fine mood to moralise and apostrophise heaven in a way that would no doubt have looked fine upon these pages, one sprightly damsel, just as the gloomy rhetoric was bursting from my lips, thrust a flower under my nose whose scent brought on a violent attack of sneezing, her companions joining hands and dancing round me while they imitated my agony. Then, when I burst away from them and rushed down a narrow arcade of crumbling mansions, another stopped me in mid-career, and taking the honey-stick she was sucking from her lips, put it to mine, like a pretty, playful child. Another asked me to dance, another to drink pink oblivion with her, and so on. How could one lament amongst all this irritating cheerfulness?

An might have helped me, for poor An was intelligent for a Martian, but she had disappeared, and the terrible vacuity of life in the planet was forced upon me when I realised that possessing no cognomen, no fixed address, or rating, it would be the merest chance if I ever came across her again.

Looking for my friendly guide and getting more and more at sea amongst a maze of comely but similar faces, I made chance acquaintance with another of her kind who cheerfully drank my health at the Government's expense, and chatted on things Martian. She took me to see a funeral by way of amusement, and I found these people floated their dead off on flower-decked rafts instead of burying them, the send-offs all taking place upon a certain swift-flowing stream, which carried the dead away into the vast region of northern ice, but more exactly whither my informant seemed to have no idea. The voyager on this occasion was old, and this brought to my mind the curious fact that I had observed few children in the city, and no elders, all, except perhaps Hath, being in a state of sleek youthfulness. My new friend explained the peculiarity by declaring Martians ripened with extraordinary rapidity from infancy to the equivalent of about twenty-five years of age, with us, and then remained at that period however long they might live; Only when they died did their accumulated seasons come upon them; the girl turning pale, and wringing her pretty hands in sympathetic concern when I told her there was a land where decrepitude was not so happily postponed. The Martians, she said, arranged their calendar by the varying colours of the seasons, and loved blue as an antidote to the generally red and rusty character of their soil.

Discussing such things as these we lightly squandered the day away, and I know of nothing more to note until the evening was come again: that wonderful purple evening which creeps over the outer worlds at sunset, a seductive darkness gemmed with ten thousand stars riding so low in the heaven they seem scarcely more than mast high. When that hour was come my friend tiptoed again to my cheek, and then, pointing to the palace and laughingly hoping fate would send me a bride "as soft as catkin and as sweet as honey," slipped away into the darkness.

Then I remembered all on a sudden this was the connubial evening of my sprightly friends—the occasion when, as An had told me, the Government constituted itself into a gigantic matrimonial agency, and, with the cheerful carelessness of the place, shuffled the matrimonial pack anew, and dealt a fresh hand to all the players. Now I had no wish to avail myself of a sailor's privilege of a bride in every port, but surely this game would be interesting enough to see, even if I were but a disinterested spectator. As a matter of fact I was something more than that, and had been thinking a good deal of Heru during the day. I do not know whether I actually aspired to her hand—that were a large order, even if there had been no suspicion in my mind she was already bespoke in some vague way by the invisible Hath, most abortive of princes. But she was undeniably a lovely girl; the more one thought of her the more she grew upon the fancy, and then the preference she had shown myself was very gratifying. Yes, I would certainly see this quaint ceremonial, even if I took no leading part in it.

The great centre hall of the palace was full of a radiant light bringing up its ruined columns and intruding creepers to the best effect when I entered. Dinner also was just being served, as they would say in another, and alas! very distant place, and the whole building thronged with folk. Down the centre low tables with room for four hundred people were ranged, but they looked quaint enough since but two hundred were sitting there, all brand-new bachelors about to be turned into brand new Benedicts, and taking it mightily calmly it seemed. Across the hall-top was a raised table similarly arranged and ornamented; and entering into the spirit of the thing, and little guessing how stern a reality was to come from the evening, I sat down in a vacant place near to the dais, and only a few paces from where the pale, ghost-eyed Hath was already seated.

Almost immediately afterwards music began to buzz all about the hall—music of the kind the people loved which always seemed to me as though it were exuding from the tables and benches, so disembodied and difficult it was to locate; all the sleepy gallants raised their flower-encircled heads at the same time, seizing their wine-cups, already filled to the brim, and the door at the bottom of the hall opening, the ladies, preceded by one carrying a mysterious vase covered with a glittering cloth, came in.

Now, being somewhat thirsty, I had already drunk half the wine in my beaker, and whether it was that draught, drugged as all Martian wines are, or the sheer loveliness of the maids themselves, I cannot say, but as the procession entered, and, dividing, circled round under the colonnades of the hall, a sensation of extraordinary felicity came over me—an emotion of divine contentment purged of all grossness—and I stared and stared at the circling loveliness, gossamer-clad, flower-girdled, tripping by me with vapid delight. Either the wine was budding in my head, or there was little to choose from amongst them, for had any of those ladies sat down in the vacant place beside me, I should certainly have accepted her as a gift from heaven, without question or cavil. But one after another they slipped by, modestly taking their places in the shadows until at last came Princess Heru, and at the sight of her my soul was stirred.

She came undulating over the white marble, the loveliness of her fairy person dimmed but scarcely hidden by a robe of softest lawn in colour like rose-petals, her eyes aglitter with excitement and a charming blush upon her face.

She came straight up to me, and, resting a dainty hand upon my shoulder, whispered, "Are you come as a spectator only, dear Mr. Jones, or do you join in our custom tonight?"

"I came only as a bystander, lady, but the fascination of the opportunity is deadly—"

"And have you any preference?"—this in the softest little voice from somewhere in the nape of my neck. "Strangers sometimes say there are fair women in Seth."

"None—till you came; and now, as was said a long time ago, 'All is dross that is not Helen.' Dearest lady," I ran on, detaining her by the fingertips and gazing up into those shy and star-like eyes, "must I indeed put all the hopes your kindness has roused in me these last few days to a shuffle in yonder urn, taking my chance with all these lazy fellows? In that land whereof I was, we would not have had it so, we loaded our dice in these matters, a strong man there might have a willing maid though all heaven were set against him! But give me leave, sweet lady, and I will ruffle with these fellows; give me a glance and I will barter my life for your billet when it is drawn, but to stand idly by and see you won by a cold chance, I cannot do it."

That lady laughed a little and said, "Men make laws, dear Jones, for women to keep. It is the rule, and we must not break it." Then, gently tugging at her imprisoned fingers and gathering up her skirts to go, she added, "But it might happen that wit here were better than sword." Then she hesitated, and freeing herself at last slipped from my side, yet before she was quite gone half turned again and whispered so low that no one but I could hear it, "A golden pool, and a silver fish, and a line no thicker than a hair!" and before I could beg a meaning of her, had passed down the hall and taken a place with the other expectant damsels.

"A golden pool," I said to myself, "a silver fish, and a line of hair." What could she mean? Yet that she meant something, and something clearly of importance, I could not doubt. "A golden pool, and a silver fish—" I buried my chin in my chest and thought deeply but without effect while the preparations were made and the fateful urn, each maid having slipped her name tablet within, was brought down to us, covered in a beautiful web of rose-coloured tissue, and commenced its round, passing slowly from hand to hand as each of those handsome, impassive, fawn-eyed gallants lifted a corner of the web in turn and helped themselves to fate.

"A golden pool," I muttered, "and a silver fish"—so absorbed in my own thoughts I hardly noticed the great cup begin its journey, but when it had gone three or four places the glitter of the lights upon it caught my eye. It was of pure gold, round-brimmed, and circled about with a string of the blue convolvulus, which implies delight to these people. Ay! and each man was plunging his hand into the dark and taking in his turn a small notch-edged mother-of-pearl billet from it that flashed soft and silvery as he turned it in his hand to read the name engraved in unknown characters thereon. "Why," I said, with a start, "surely THIS might be the golden pool and these the silver fish—but the hair-fine line?" And again I meditated deeply, with all my senses on the watch.

Slowly the urn crept round, and as each man took a ticket from it, and passed it, smiling, to the seneschal behind him, that official read out the name upon it, and a blushing damsel slipped from the crowd above, crossing over to the side of the man with whom chance had thus lightly linked her for the brief Martian year, and putting her hands in his they kissed before all the company, and sat down to their places at the table as calmly as country folk might choose partners at a village fair in hay-time.

But not so with me. Each time a name was called I started and stared at the drawer in a way which should have filled him with alarm had alarm been possible to the peace-soaked triflers, then turned to glance to where, amongst the women, my tender little princess was leaning against a pillar, with drooping head, slowly pulling a convolvulus bud to pieces. None drew, though all were thinking of her, as I could tell in my fingertips. Keener and keener grew the suspense as name after name was told and each slim white damsel skipped to the place allotted her. And all the time I kept muttering to myself about that "golden pool," wondering and wondering until the urn had passed half round the tables and was only some three men up from me—and then an idea flashed across my mind. I dipped my fingers in the scented water-basin on the table, drying them carefully on a napkin, and waiting, outwardly as calm as any, yet inwardly wrung by those tremors which beset all male creation in such circumstances.

And now at last it was my turn. The great urn, blazing golden, through its rosy covering, was in front, and all eyes on me. I clapped a sunburnt hand upon its top as though I would take all remaining in it to myself and stared round at that company—only her herself I durst not look at! Then, with a beating heart, I lifted a corner of the web and slipped my hand into the dark inside, muttering to myself as I did so, "A golden pool, and a silver fish, and a line no thicker than a hair." I touched in turn twenty perplexing tablets and was no whit the wiser, and felt about the sides yet came to nothing, groping here and there with a rising despair, until as my fingers, still damp and fine of touch, went round the sides a second time, yes! there was something, something in the hollow of the fluting, a thought, a thread, and yet enough. I took it unseen, lifting it with infinite forbearance, and the end was weighted, the other tablets slipped and rattled as from their midst, hanging to that one fine virgin hair, up came a pearly billet. I doubted no longer, but snapped the thread, and showed the tablet, heard Heru's name, read from it amongst the soft applause of that luxurious company with all the unconcern I could muster.

There she was in a moment, lip to lip with me, before them all, her eyes more than ever like planets from her native skies, and only the quick heave of her bosom, slowly subsiding like a ground swell after a storm, remaining to tell that even Martian blood could sometimes beat quicker than usual! She sat down in her place by me in the simplest way, and soon everything was as merry as could be. The main meal came on now, and as far as I could see those Martian gallants had extremely good appetites, though they drank at first but little, wisely remembering the strength of their wines. As for me, I ate of fishes that never swam in earthly seas, and of strange fowl that never flapped a way through thick terrestrial air, ate and drank as happy as a king, and falling each moment more and more in love with the wonderfully beautiful girl at my side who was a real woman of flesh and blood I knew, yet somehow so dainty, so pink and white, so unlike other girls in the smoothness of her outlines, in the subtle grace of each unthinking attitude, that again and again I looked at her over the rim of my tankard half fearing she might dissolve into nothing, being the half-fairy which she was.

Presently she asked, "Did that deed of mine, the hair in the urn, offend you, stranger?"

"Offend me, lady!" I laughed. "Why, had it been the blackest crime that ever came out of a perverse imagination it would have brought its own pardon with it; I, least of all in this room, have least cause to be offended."

"I risked much for you and broke our rules."

"Why, no doubt that was so, but 'tis the privilege of your kind to have some say in this little matter of giving and taking in marriage. I only marvel that your countrywomen submit so tamely to the quaintest game of chance I ever played at.

"Ay, and it is women's nature no doubt to keep the laws which others make, as you have said yourself. Yet this rule, lady, is one broken with more credit than kept, and if you have offended no one more than me, your penance is easily done."

"But I have offended some one," she said, laying her hand on mine with gentle nervousness in its touch, "one who has the power to hurt, and enough energy to resent. Hath, up there at the cross-table, have I offended deeply tonight, for he hoped to have me, and would have compelled any other man to barter me for the maid chance assigned to him; but of you, somehow, he is afraid—I have seen him staring at you, and changing colour as though he knew something no one else knows—"

"Briefly, charming girl," I said, for the wine was beginning to sing in my head, and my eyes were blinking stupidly—"briefly, Hath hath thee not, and there's an end of it. I would spit a score of Haths, as these figs are spit on this golden skewer, before I would relinquish a hair of your head to him, or to any man," and as everything about the great hall began to look gauzy and unreal through the gathering fumes of my confusion, I smiled on that gracious lady, and began to whisper I know not what to her, and whisper and doze, and doze—

I know not how long afterwards it was, whether a minute or an hour, but when I lifted my head suddenly from the lady's shoulder all the place was in confusion, every one upon their feet, the talk and the drinking ceased, and all eyes turned to the far doorway where the curtains were just dropping again as I looked, while in front of them were standing three men.

These newcomers were utterly unlike any others—a frightful vision of ugly strength amidst the lolling loveliness all about. Low of stature, broad of shoulder, hairy, deep-chested, with sharp, twinkling eyes, set far back under bushy eyebrows, retreating foreheads, and flat noses in faces tanned to a dusky copper hue by exposure to every kind of weather that racks the extreme Martian climate they were so opposite to all about me, so quaint and grim amongst those mild, fair-skinned folk, that at first I thought they were but a disordered creation of my fancy.

I rubbed my eyes and stared and blinked, but no! they were real men, of flesh and blood, and now they had come down with as much stateliness as their bandy legs would admit of, into the full glare of the lights to the centre table where Hath sat. I saw their splendid apparel, the great strings of rudely polished gems hung round their hairy necks and wrists, the cunningly dyed skins of soft-furred animals, green and red and black, wherewith their limbs were swathed, and then I heard some one by me whisper in a frightened tone, "The envoys from over seas."

"Oh," I thought sleepily to myself, "so these are the ape-men of the western woods, are they? Those who long ago vanquished my white-skinned friends and yearly come to claim their tribute. Jove, what hay they must have made of them! How those peach-skinned girls must have screamed and the downy striplings by them felt their dimpled knees knock together, as the mad flood of barbarians came pouring over from the forest, and long ago stormed their citadels like a stream of red lava, as deadly, as irresistible, as remorseless!" And I lay asprawl upon my arms on the table watching them with the stupid indifference I thought I could so well afford.

Meanwhile Hath was on foot, pale and obsequious like others in the presence of those dread ambassadors, but more collected, I thought. With the deepest bows he welcomed them, handing them drink in a golden State cup, and when they had drunk (I heard the liquor running down their great throats, in the frightened hush, like water in a runnel on a wet day), they wiped their fierce lips upon their furry sleeves, and the leader began reciting the tribute for the year. So much corn, so much wine—and very much it was—so many thousands ells of cloth and webbing, and so much hammered gold, and sinah and lar, precious metal of which I knew nothing as yet; and ever as he went growling through the list in his harsh animal voice, he refreshed his memory with a coloured stick whereon a notch was made for every item, the woodmen not having come as yet, apparently, to the gentler art of written signs and symbols. Longer and longer that caravan of unearned wealth stretched out before my fancy, but at last it was done, or all but done, and the head envoy, passing the painted stick to a man behind, folded his bare, sinewy arms, upon which the red fell bristles as it does upon a gorilla's, across his ample chest, and, including us all in one general scowl, turned to Hath as he said—

"All this for Ar-hap, the wood-king, my master and yours; all this, and the most beautiful woman here tonight at your tables!"

"An item," I smiled stupidly to myself, for indeed I was very sleepy and had no nice perception of things, "which shows his majesty with the two-pronged name is a jolly fellow after all, and knows wealth is incomplete without the crown and priming of all riches. I wonder how the Martian boys will like this postscript," and chin on hand, and eyes that would hardly stay open, I watched to see what would happen next. There was a little conversation between the prince and the ape-man; then I saw Hath the traitor point in my direction and say—

"Since you ask and will be advised, then, mighty sir, there can be no doubt of it, the most beautiful woman here tonight is undoubtedly she who sits yonder by him in blue."

"A very pretty compliment!" I thought, too dull to see what was coming quickly, "and handsome of Hath, all things considered."

And so I dozed and dozed, and then started, and stared! Was I in my senses? Was I mad, or dreaming? The drunkenness dropped from me like a mantle; with a single, smothered cry I came to myself and saw that it was all too true. The savage envoy had come down the hall at Hath's vindictive prompting, had lifted my fair girl to her feet, and there, even as I looked, had drawn her, white as death, into the red circle of his arm, and with one hand under her chin had raised her sweet face to within an inch of his, and was staring at her with small, ugly eyes.

"Yes," said the enjoy, more interestedly than he had spoken yet, "it will do; the tribute is accepted—for Ar-hap, my master!" And taking shrinking Heru by the wrist, and laying a heavy hand upon her shoulder, he was about to lead her up the hall.

I was sober enough then. I was on foot in an instant, and before all the glittering company, before those simpering girls and pale Martian youths, who sat mumbling their fingers, too frightened to lift their eyes from off their half-finished dinners, I sprang at the envoy. I struck him with my clenched fist on the side of his bullet head, and he let go of Heru, who slipped insensible from his hairy chest like a white cloud slipping down the slopes of a hill at sunrise, and turned on me with a snort of rage. We stared at each other for a minute, and then I felt the wine fumes roaring in my head; I rushed at him and closed. It was like embracing a mountain bull, and he responded with a hug that made my ribs crackle. For a minute we were locked together like that, swinging here and there, and then getting a hand loose, I belaboured him so unmercifully that he put his head down, and that was what I wanted. I got a new hold of him as we staggered and plunged, roaring the while like the wild beasts we were, the teeth chattering in the Martian heads as they watched us, and then, exerting all my strength, lifted him fairly from his feet and with supreme effort swung him up, shoulder high, and with a mighty heave hurled him across the tables, flung that ambassador, whom no Martian dared look upon, crashing and sprawling through the gold and silver of the feast, whirled him round with such a splendid send that bench and trestle, tankards and flagons, chairs and cloths and candelabras all went down into thundering chaos with him, and the envoy only stayed when his sacred person came to harbour amongst the westral odds and ends, the soiled linen, and dirty platters of our wedding feast.

I remember seeing him there on hands and knees, and then the liquor I had had would not be denied. In vain I drew my hands across my drooping eyelids, in vain I tried to master my knees that knocked together. The spell of the love-drink that Heru, blushing, had held to my lips was on me. Its soft, overwhelming influence rose like a prismatic fog between me and my enemy, everything again became hazy and dreamlike, and feebly calling on Heru, my chin dropped upon my chest, my limbs relaxed, and I slipped down in drowsy oblivion before my rival.



CHAPTER VIII

They must have carried me, still under the influence of wine fumes, to the chamber where I slept that night, for when I woke the following morning my surroundings were familiar enough, though a glorious maze of uncertainties rocked to and fro in my mind.

Was it a real feast we had shared in overnight, or only a quaint dream? Was Heru real or only a lovely fancy? And those hairy ruffians of whom a horrible vision danced before my waking eyes, were they fancy too? No, my wrists still ached with the strain of the tussle, the quaint, sad wine taste was still on my lips—it was all real enough, I decided, starting up in bed; and if it was real where was the little princess? What had they done with her? Surely they had not given her to the ape-men—cowards though they were they could not have been cowards enough for that. And as I wondered a keen, bright picture of the hapless maid as I saw her last blossomed before my mind's eye, the ambassadors on either side holding her wrists, and she shrinking from them in horror while her poor, white face turned to me for rescue in desperate pleading—oh! I must find her at all costs; and leaping from bed I snatched up those trousers without which the best of heroes is nothing, and had hardly got into them when there came the patter of light feet without and a Martian, in a hurry for once, with half a dozen others behind him, swept aside the curtains of my doorway.

They peeped and peered all about the room, then one said, "Is Princess Heru with you, sir?"

"No," I answered roughly. "Saints alive, man, do you think I would have you tumbling in here over each other's heels if she were?"

"Then it must indeed have been Heru," he said, speaking in an awed voice to his fellows, "whom we saw carried down to the harbour at daybreak by yonder woodmen," and the pink upon their pretty cheeks faded to nothing at the suggestion.

"What!" I roared, "Heru taken from the palace by a handful of men and none of you infernal rascals—none of you white-livered abortions lifted a hand to save her—curse on you a thousand times. Out of my way, you churls!" And snatching up coat and hat and sword I rushed furiously down the long, marble stairs just as the short Martian night was giving place to lavender-coloured light of morning. I found my way somehow down the deserted corridors where the air was heavy with aromatic vapours; I flew by curtained niches and chambers where amongst mounds of half-withered flowers the Martian lovers were slowly waking. Down into the banquethall I sped, and there in the twilight was the litter of the feast still about—gold cups and silver, broken bread and meat, the convolvulus flowers all turning their pallid faces to the rosy daylight, making pools of brightness between the shadows. Amongst the litter little sapphire-coloured finches were feeding, twittering merrily to themselves as they hopped about, and here and there down the long tables lay asprawl a belated reveller, his empty oblivion-phial before him, his curly head upon his arms, dreaming perhaps of last night's feast and a neglected bride dozing dispassionate in some distant chamber. But Heru was not there and little I cared for twittering finches or sighing damsels. With hasty feet I rushed down the hall out into the cool, sweet air of the planet morning.

There I met one whom I knew, and he told me he had been among the crowd and had heard the woodmen had gone no farther than the river gate, that Heru was with them beyond a doubt. I would not listen to more. "Good!" I shouted. "Get me a horse and just a handful of your sleek kindred and we will pull the prize from the bear's paw even yet! Surely," I said, turning to a knot of Martian youths who stood listening a few steps away, "surely some of you will come with me at this pinch? The big bullies are very few; the sea runs behind them; the maid in their clutch is worth fighting for; it needs but one good onset, five minutes' gallantry, and she is ours again. Think how fine it will look to bring her back before yon sleepy fellows have found their weapons. You, there, with the blue tunic! you look a proper fellow, and something of a heart should beat under such gay wrappings, will you come with me?"

But blue-mantle, biting his thumbs, murmured he had not breakfasted yet and edged away behind his companions. Wherever I looked eyes dropped and timid hands fidgeted as their owners backed off from my dangerous enthusiasm. There was obviously no help to be had from them, and meantime the precious moments were flying, so with a disdainful glance I turned on my heels and set off alone as hard as I could go for the harbour.

But it was too late. I rushed through the marketplace where all was silent and deserted; I ran on to the wharves beyond and they were empty save for the litter and embers of the fires Ar-hap's men had made during their stay; I dashed out to the landing-place, and there at the hythe the last boat-loads of the villains were just embarking, two boatloads of them twenty yards from shore, and another still upon the beach. This latter was careening over as a dusky group of men lifted aboard to a heap of tumbled silks and stuffs in the stern such a sweet piece of insensible merchandise as no man, I at least of all, could mistake. It was Heru herself, and the rogues were ladling her on board like so much sandal-wood or cotton sheeting. I did not wait for more, but out came my sword, and yielding to a reckless impulse, for which perhaps last night's wine was as much to blame as anything, I sprang down the steps and leapt aboard of the boat just as it was pushed off upon the swift tide. Full of Bersark rage, I cut one brawny copper-coloured thief down, and struck another with my fist between the eyes so that he went headlong into the water, sinking like lead, and deep into the great target of his neighbour's chest I drove my blade. Had there been a man beside me, had there been but two or three of all those silken triflers, too late come on the terraces above to watch, we might have won. But all alone what could I do? That last red beast turned on my blade, and as he fell dragged me half down with him. I staggered up, and tugging the metal from him turned on the next.

At that moment the cause of all the turmoil, roused by the fighting, came to herself, and sitting up on the piled plunder in the boat stared round for a moment with a childish horror at the barbarians whose prize she was, then at me, then at the dead man at my feet whose blood was welling in a red tide from the wound in his breast. As the full meaning of the scene dawned upon her she started to her feet, looking wonderfully beautiful amongst those dusky forms, and extending her hands to me began to cry in the most piteous way. I sprang forward, and as I did so saw an ape-man clap his hairy paw over her mouth and face—it was like an eclipse of the moon by a red earth-shadow, I thought at the moment—and drag her roughly back, but that was about the last I remembered. As I turned to hit him standing on the slippery thwart, another rogue crept up behind and let drive with a club he had in hand. The cudgel caught me sideways on the head, a glancing shot. I can recall a blaze of light, a strange medley of sounds in my ears, and then, clutching at a pile of stuffs as I fell, a tall bower of spray rising on either hand, and the cool shock of the blue sea as I plunged headlong in—but nothing after that!

How long after I know not, but presently a tissue of daylight crept into my eyes, and I awoke again. It was better than nothing perhaps, yet it was a poor awakening. The big sun lay low down, and the day was all but done; so much I guessed as I rocked in that light with an undulating movement, and then as my senses returned more fully, recognised with a start of wonder that I was still in the water, floating on a swift current into the unknown on an air-filled pile of silken stuffs which had been pulled down with me from the boat when I got my ganging from yonder rascal's mace. It was a wet couch, sodden and chilly, but as the freshening evening wind blew on my face and the darkening water lapped against my forehead I revived more fully.

Where had we come to? I turned an aching neck, and all along on both sides seemed to stretch steep, straight coasts about a mile or so apart, in the shadow of the setting sun black as ebony. Between the two the hampered water ran quickly, with, away on the right, some shallow sandy spits and islands covered with dwarf bushes—chilly, inhospitable-looking places they seemed as I turned my eyes upon them; but he who rides helpless down an evening tide stands out for no great niceties of landing-place; could I but reach them they would make at least a drier bed than this of mine, and at that thought, turning over, I found all my muscles as stiff as iron, the sinews of my neck and forearms a mass of agonies and no more fit to swim me to those reedy swamps, which now, as pain and hunger began to tell, seemed to wear the aspects of paradise.

With a groan I dropped back upon my raft and watched the islands slipping by, while over my feet the southern sky darkened to purple. There was no help there, but glancing round away on the left and a few furlongs from me, I noticed on the surface of the water two converging strands of brightness, an angle the point of which seemed to be coming towards me. Nearer it came and nearer, right across my road, until I could see a black dot at the point, a head presently developed, then as we approached the ears and antlers of a swimming stag. It was a huge beast as it loomed up against the glow, bigger than any mortal stag ever was—the kind of fellow-traveller no one would willingly accost, but even if I had wished to get out of its path I had no power to do so.

Closer and closer we came, one of us drifting helplessly, and the other swimming strongly for the islands. When we were about a furlong apart the great beast seemed to change its course, mayhap it took the wreckage on which I floated for an outlying shoal, something on which it could rest a space in that long swim. Be this as it may, the beast came hurtling down on me lip deep in the waves, a mighty brown head with pricked ears that flicked the water from them now and then, small bright eyes set far back, and wide palmated antlers on a mighty forehead, like the dead branches of a tree. What that Martian mountain elk had hoped for can only be guessed, what he met with was a tangle of floating finery carrying a numbed traveller on it, and with a snort of disappointment he turned again.

It was a poor chance, but better than nothing, and as he turned I tried to throw a strand of silk I had unwound from the sodden mass over his branching tines. Quick as thought the beast twisted his head aside and tossed his antlers so that the try was fruitless. But was I to lose my only chance of shore? With all my strength I hurled myself upon him, missing my clutch again by a hair's-breadth and going headlong into the salt furrow his chest was turning up. Happily I kept hold of the web, for the great elk then turned back, passing between me and the ruck of stuff and getting thereby the silk under his chin, and as I came gasping to the top once more round came that dainty wreckage over his back, and I clutched it, and sooner than it takes to tell I was towing to the shore as perhaps no one was ever towed before.

The big beast dragged the ruck like withered weed behind him, bellowing all the time with a voice which made the hills echo all round; and then, when he got his feet upon the shallows, rose dripping and mountainous, a very cliff of black hide and limb against the night shine, and with a single sweep of his antlers tore the webbing from me, who lay prone and breathless in the mud, and, thinking it was his enemy, hurled the limp bundle on the beach, and then, having pounded it with his cloven feet into formless shreds, bellowed again victoriously and went off into the darkness of the forests.



CHAPTER IX

I landed, stiff enough as you will guess, but pleased to be on shore again. It was a melancholy neighbourhood of low islands, overgrown with rank grass and bushes, salt water encircling them, and inside sandy dunes and hummocks with shallow pools, gleaming ghostly in the retreating daylight, while beyond these rose the black bosses of what looked like a forest. Thither I made my way, plunging uncomfortably through shallows, and tripping over blackened branches which, lying just below the surface, quivered like snakes as the evening breeze ruffled each surface, until the ground hardened under foot, and presently I was standing, hungry and faint but safe, on dry land again.

The forest was so close to the sea, one could not advance without entering it, and once within its dark arcades every way looked equally gloomy and hopeless. I struggled through tangles night made more and more impenetrable each minute, until presently I could go no further, and where a dense canopy of trees overhead gave out for a minute on the edge of a swampy hollow, I determined to wait for daylight.

Never was there a more wet or weary traveller, or one more desperately lonely than he who wrapped himself up in the miserable insufficiency of his wet rags, and without fire or supper crept amongst the exposed roots of a tree growing out of a bank, and prepared to hope grimly for morning.

Round and round meanwhile was drawn the close screen of night, till the clearing in front was blotted out, and only the tree-tops, black as rugged hills one behind the other, stood out against the heavy purple of the circlet of sky above. As the evening deepened the quaintest noises began on every hand—noises so strange and bewildering that as I cowered down with my teeth chattering, and stared hard into the impenetrable, they could be likened to nothing but the crying of all the souls of dead things since the beginning. Never was there such an infernal chorus as that which played up the Martian stars. Down there in front, where hummock grass was growing, some beast squeaked continuously, till I shouted at him, then he stopped a minute, and began again in entirely another note. Away on the hills two rival monsters were calling to each other in tones so hollow they seemed as I listened to penetrate through me, and echo out of my heart again. Far overhead, gigantic bats were flitting, the shadow of their wings dimming a dozen universes at once, and crying to each other in shrill tones that rent the air like tearing silk.

As I listened to those vampires discussing their infernal loves under the stars, from a branch right overhead broke such a deathly howl from the throat of a wandering forest cat that everything else was hushed for a moment. All about a myriad insects were making night giddy with their ghostly fires, while underground and from the labyrinths of matted roots came quaint sounds of rustling snakes and forest pigs, and all the lesser things that dig and scratch and growl.

Yet I was desperately sleepy, my sword hung heavy as lead at my side, my eyelids drooped, and so at last I dozed uneasily for an hour or two. Then, all on a sudden, I came wide awake with a shock. The night was quieter now; away in the forest depth strange noises still arose, but close at hand was a strange hush, like the hush of expectation, and, listening wonderingly, I was aware of slow, heavy footsteps coming up from the river, now two or three steps together, then a pause, then another step or two, and as I bent towards the approaching thing, staring into the darkness, my strained senses were conscious of another approach, as like as could be, coming from behind me. On they came, making the very ground quake with their weight, till I judged that both were about on the edge of the clearing, two vast rat-like shadows, but as big as elephants, and bringing a most intolerable smell of sour slime with them. There, on the edge of the amphitheatre, each for the first time appeared to become aware of the other's presence—the footsteps stopped dead. I could hear the water dripping from the fur of those giant brutes amongst the shadows and the deep breathing of the one nearest me, a scanty ten paces off, but not another sound in the stillness.

Minute after minute passed, yet neither moved. A half-hour grew to a full hour, and that hour lengthened amid the keenest tension till my ears ached with listening, and my eyes were sore with straining into the blackness. At last I began to wonder whether those earth-shaking beasts had not been an evil dream, and was just venturing to stretch out a cramped leg, and rally myself upon my cowardice, when, without warning, at my elbow rose the most ear-piercing scream of rage that ever came from a living throat. There was a sweeping rush in the darkness which I could feel but not see, and with a shock the two gladiators met in the midst of the arena. Over and over they went screaming and struggling, and slipping and plunging. I could hear them tearing at each other, and the sharp cries of pain, first one and then another gave as claw or tooth got home, and all the time, though the ground was quaking under their struggles and the air full of horrible uproar, not a thing was to be seen. I did not even know what manner of beasts they were who rocked and rolled and tore at each other's throats, but I heard their teeth snapping, and their fierce breath in the pauses of the struggle, and could but wait in a huddle amongst the roots until it was over. To and fro they went, now at the far side of the dark clearing, now so close that hot drops of blood from their jaws fell on my face like rain in the darkness. It seemed as though the fight would never end, but presently there was more of worrying in it and less of snapping; it was clear one or the other had had enough and as I marked this those black shadows came gasping and struggling towards me. There was a sudden sharp cry, a desperate final tussle—before which strong trees snapped and bushes were flattened out like grass, not twenty yards away—and then for a minute all was silent.

One of them had killed, and as I sat rooted to the spot I was forced to listen while his enemy tore him up and ate him. Many a banquet have I been at, but never an uglier one than that. I sat in the darkness while the unknown thing at my feet ripped the flesh from his half-dead rival in strips, and across the damp night wind came the reek of that abominable feast—the reek of blood and spilt entrails—until I turned away my face in loathing, and was nearly starting to my feet to venture a rush into the forest shadows. But I was spellbound, and remained listening to the heavy munch of blood-stained jaws until presently I was aware other and lesser feasters were coming. There was a twinkle of hungry eyes all about the limits of the area, the shine of green points of envious fire that circled round in decreasing orbits, as the little foxes and jackals came crowding in. One fellow took me for a rock, so still I sat, putting his hot, soft paws upon my knee for a space, and others passed me so near I could all but touch them.

The big beast had taken himself off by this time, and there must have been several hundreds of these newcomers. A merry time they had of it; the whole place was full of the green, hurrying eyes, and amidst the snap of teeth and yapping and quarrelling I could hear the flesh being torn from the red bones in every direction. One wolf-like individual brought a mass of hot liver to eat between my feet, but I gave him a kick, and sent him away much to his surprise. Gradually, however, the sound of this unholy feast died away, and, though you may hardly believe it, I fell off into a doze. It was not sleep, but it served the purpose, and when in an hour or two a draught of cool air roused me, I awoke, feeling more myself again.

Slowly morning came, and the black wall of forest around became full of purple interstices as the east brightened. Those glimmers of light between bough and trunk turned to yellow and red, the day-shine presently stretched like a canopy from point to point of the treetops on either side of my sleeping-place, and I arose.

All my limbs were stiff with cold, my veins emptied by hunger and wounds, and for a space I had not even strength to move. But a little rubbing softened my cramped muscles presently and limping painfully down to the place of combat, I surveyed the traces of that midnight fight. I will not dwell upon it. It was ugly and grim; the trampled grass, the giant footmarks, each enringing its pool of curdled blood; the broken bushes, the grooved mud-slides where the unknown brutes had slid in deadly embrace; the hollows, the splintered boughs, their ragged points tufted with skin and hair—all was sickening to me. Yet so hungry was I that when I turned towards the odious remnants of the vanquished—a shapeless mass of abomination—my thoughts flew at once to breakfasting! I went down and inspected the victim cautiously—a huge rat-like beast as far as might be judged from the bare uprising ribs—all that was left of him looking like the framework of a schooner yacht. His heart lay amongst the offal, and my knife came out to cut a meal from it, but I could not do it. Three times I essayed the task, hunger and disgust contending for mastery; three times turned back in loathing. At last I could stand the sight no more, and, slamming the knife up again, turned on my heels, and fairly ran for fresh air and the shore, where the sea was beginning to glimmer in the light a few score yards through the forest stems. There, once more out on the open, on a pebbly beach, I stripped, spreading my things out to dry on the stones, and laying myself down with the lapping of the waves in my ears, and the first yellow sunshine thawing my limbs, tried to piece together the hurrying events of the last few days.

What were my gay Martians doing? Lazy dogs to let me, a stranger, be the only one to draw sword in defence of their own princess! Where was poor Heru, that sweet maiden wife? The thought of her in the hands of the ape-men was odious. And yet was I not mad to try to rescue, or even to follow her alone? If by any chance I could get off this beast-haunted place and catch up with the ravishers, what had I to look for from them except speedy extinction, and that likely enough by the most painful process they were acquainted with?

The other alternative of going back empty handed was terribly ignominious. I had lectured the amiable young manhood of Seth so soundly on the subject of gallantry, and set them such a good example on two occasions, that it would be bathos to saunter back, hands in pockets, and confess I knew nothing of the lady's fate and had been daunted by the first night alone in the forest. Besides, how dull it would be in that beautiful, tumble-down old city without Heru, with no expectation day by day of seeing her sylph-like form and hearing the merry tinkle of her fairy laughter as she scoffed at the unknown learning collected by her ancestors in a thousand laborious years. No! I would go on for certain. I was young, in love, and angry, and before those qualifications difficulties became light.

Meanwhile, the first essential was breakfast of some kind. I arose, stretched, put on my half-dried clothes, and mounting a low hummock on the forest edge looked around. The sun was riding up finely into the sky, and the sea to the eastward shone for leagues and leagues in the loveliest azure. Where it rippled on my own beach and those of the low islands noted over night, a wonderful fire of blue and red played on the sands as though the broken water were full of living gems. The sky was full of strange gulls with long, forked tails, and a lovely little flying lizard with transparent wings of the palest green—like those of a grasshopper—was flitting about picking up insect stragglers.

All this was very charming, but what I kept saying to myself was "Streaky rashers and hot coffee: rashers and coffee and rolls," and, indeed, had the gates of Paradise themselves opened at that moment I fear my first look down the celestial streets within would have been for a restaurant. They did not, and I was just turning away disconsolate when my eye caught, ascending from behind the next bluff down the beach, a thin strand of smoke rising into the morning air.

It was nothing so much in itself—a thin spiral creeping upwards mast-high, then flattening out into a mushroom head—but it meant everything to me. Where there was fire there must be humanity, and where there was humanity—ay, to the very outlayers of the universe—there must be breakfast. It was a splendid thought; I rushed down the hillock and went gaily for that blue thread amongst the reeds. It was not two hundred yards away, and soon below me was a tiny bay with bluest water frilling a silver beach, and in the midst of it a fire on a hearth dancing round a pot that simmered gloriously. But of an owner there was nothing to be seen. I peered here and there on the shore, but nothing moved, while out to sea the water was shining like molten metal with not a dot upon it!—what did it matter? I laughed as, pleased and hungry, I slipped down the bank and strode across the sands; it pleased Fate to play bandy with me, and if it sent me supperless to bed, why, here was restitution in the way of breakfast. I took up a morsel of the stuff in the kettle on a handy stick and found it good—indeed, I knew it at once as a very dainty mess made from the roots of a herb the Martians greatly liked; An had piled my platter with it when we supped that night in the market-place of Seth, and the sweet white stuff had melted into my corporal essence, it seemed, without any gross intermediate process of digestion. And here I was again, hungry, sniffing the fragrant breath of a full meal and not a soul in sight—I should have been a fool not to have eaten. So thinking, down I sat, taking the pot from its place, and when it was a little cool plunging my hands into it and feasting with as good an appetite as ever a man had before.

It was gloriously ambrosial, and deeper and deeper I went, with the tall stalk of the smoke in front growing from the hearth-stones like some strange new plant, the pleasant sunshine on my back, and never a thought for anything but the task in hand. Deeper and deeper, oblivious of all else, until to get the very last drops I lifted the pipkin up and putting back my head drank in that fashion.

It was only when with a sigh of pleasure I lowered it slowly again that over the rim as it sank there dawned upon me the vision of a Martian standing by an empty canoe on the edge of the water and regarding me with calm amazement. I was, in fact, so astonished that for a minute the empty pot stood still before my face, and over its edge we stared at each other in mute surprise, then with all the dignity that might be I laid the vessel down between my feet and waited for the newcomer to speak. She was a girl by her yellow garb, a fisherwoman, it seemed, for in the prow of her craft was piled a net upon which the scales of fishes were twinkling—a Martian, obviously, but something more robust than most of them, a savour of honest work about her sunburnt face which my pallid friends away yonder were lacking in, and when we had stared at each other for a few moments in silence she came forward a step or two and said without a trace of fear or shyness, "Are you a spirit, sir?

"Why," I answered, "about as much, no more and no less, than most of us."

"Aye," she said. "I thought you were, for none but spirits live here upon this island; are you for good or evil?"

"Far better for the breakfast of which I fear I have robbed you, but wandering along the shore and finding this pot boiling with no owner, I ventured to sample it, and it was so good my appetite got the better of manners."

The girl bowed, and standing at a respectful distance asked if I would like some fish as well; she had some, but not many, and if I would eat she would cook them for me in a minute—it was not often, she added lightly, she had met one of my kind before. In fact, it was obvious that simple person did actually take me for a being of another world, and was it for me to say she was wrong? So adopting a dignity worthy of my reputation I nodded gravely to her offer. She fetched from the boat four little fishes of the daintiest kind imaginable. They were each about as big as a hand and pale blue when you looked down upon them, but so clear against the light that every bone and vein in their bodies could be traced. These were wrapped just as they were in a broad, green leaf and then the Martian, taking a pointed stick, made a hollow in the white ashes, laid them in side by side, and drew the hot dust over again.

While they cooked we chatted as though the acquaintance were the most casual thing in the world, and I found it was indeed an island we were on and not the mainland, as I had hoped at first. Seth, she told me, was far away to the eastward, and if the woodmen had gone by in their ships they would have passed round to the north-west of where we were.

I spent an hour or two with that amiable individual, and, it is to be hoped, sustained the character of a spiritual visitant with considerable dignity. In one particular at least, that, namely, of appetite, I did honour to my supposed source, and as my entertainer would not hear of payment in material kind, all I could do was to show her some conjuring tricks, which greatly increased her belief in my supernatural origin, and to teach her some new hitches and knots, using her fishing-line as a means of illustration, a demonstration which called from her the natural observation that we must be good sailors "up aloft" since we knew so much about cordage, then we parted.

She had seen nothing of the woodmen, though she had heard they had been to Seth and thought, from some niceties of geographical calculation which I could not follow, they would have crossed to the north, as just stated, of her island. There she told me, with much surprise at my desire for the information, how I might, by following the forest track to the westward coast, make my way to a fishing village, where they would give me a canoe and direct me, since such was my extraordinary wish, to the place where, if anywhere, the wild men had touched on their way home.

She filled my wallet with dried honey-cakes and my mouth with sugar plums from her little store, then down on her knees went that poor waif of a worn-out civilisation and kissed my hands in humble farewell, and I, blushing to be so saluted, and after all but a sailor, got her by the rosy fingers and lifted her up shoulder high, and getting one hand under her chin and the other behind her head kissed her twice upon her pretty cheeks; and so, I say, we parted.



CHAPTER X

Off into the forest I went, feeling a boyish elation to be so free nor taking heed or count of the reckless adventure before me. The Martian weather for the moment was lovely and the many-coloured grass lush and soft under foot. Mile after mile I went, heeding the distance lightly, the air was so elastic. Now pressing forward as the main interest of my errand took the upper hand, and remembrance of poor Heru like a crushed white flower in the red grip of those cruel ravishers came upon me, and then pausing to sigh with pleasure or stand agape—forgetful even of her—in wonder of the unknown loveliness about me.

And well might I stare! Everything in that forest was wonderful! There were plants which turned from colour to colour with the varying hours of the day. While others had a growth so swift it was dangerous to sit in their neighbourhood since the long, succulent tendrils clambering from the parent stem would weave you into a helpless tangle while you gazed, fascinated, upon them. There were plants that climbed and walked; sighing plants who called the winged things of the air to them with a noise so like to a girl sobbing that again and again I stopped in the tangled path to listen. There were green bladder-mosses which swam about the surface of the still pools like gigantic frog-broods. There were on the ridges warrior trees burning in the vindictiveness of a long forgotten cause—a blaze of crimson scimitar thorns from root to topmost twig; and down again in the cool hollows were lady-bushes making twilight of the green gloom with their cloudy ivory blossoms and filling the shadows with such a heavy scent that head and heart reeled with fatal pleasure as one pushed aside their branches. Every river-bed was full of mighty reeds, whose stems clattered together when the wind blew like swords on shields, and every now and then a bit of forest was woven together with the ropey stems of giant creepers till no man or beast could have passed save for the paths which constant use had kept open through the mazes.

All day long I wandered on through those wonderful woodlands, and in fact loitered so much over their infinite marvels that when sundown came all too soon there was still undulating forest everywhere, vistas of fairy glades on every hand, peopled with incredible things and echoing with sounds that excited the ears as much as other things fascinated the eyes, but no sign of the sea or my fishing village anywhere.

It did not matter; a little of the Martian leisureliness was getting into my blood: "If not today, why then tomorrow," as An would have said; and with this for comfort I selected a warm, sandy hollow under the roots of a big tree, made my brief arrangements for the night, ate some honey cakes, and was soon sleeping blissfully.

I woke early next morning, after many hours of interrupted dreams, and having nothing to do till the white haze had lifted and made it possible to start again, rested idly a time on my elbow and watched the sunshine filter into the recesses.

Very pretty it was to see the thick canopy overhead, by star-light so impenetrable, open its chinks and fissures as the searching sun came upon it; to see the pin-hole gaps shine like spangles presently, the spaces broaden into lesser suns, and even the thick leafage brighten and shine down on me with a soft sea-green radiance. The sunward sides of the tree-stems took a glow, and the dew that ran dripping down their mossy sides trickled blood-red to earth. Elsewhere the shadows were still black, and strange things began to move in them—things we in our middle-aged world have never seen the likeness of: beasts half birds, birds half creeping things, and creeping things which it seemed to me passed through lesser creations down to the basest life that crawls without interruption or division.

It was not for me, a sailor, to know much of such things, yet some I could not fail to notice. On one grey branch overhead, jutting from a tree-stem where a patch of velvet moss made in the morning glint a fairy bed, a wonderful flower unfolded. It was a splendid bud, ivory white, cushioned in leaves, and secured to its place by naked white roots that clipped the branch like fingers of a lady's hand. Even as I looked it opened, a pale white star, and hung pensive and inviting on its mossy cushion. From it came such a ravishing odour that even I, at the further end of the great scale of life, felt my pulses quicken and my eyes brighten with cupidity. I was in the very act of climbing the tree, but before I could move hand or foot two things happened, whether you take my word for them or no.

Firstly, up through a glade in the underwood, attracted by the odour, came an ugly brown bird with a capacious beak and shining claws. He perched near by, and peeped and peered until he made out the flower pining on her virgin stem, whereat off he hopped to her branch and there, with a cynical chuckle, strutted to and fro between her and the main stem like an ill genius guarding a fairy princess.

Surely Heaven would not allow him to tamper with so chaste a bud! My hand reached for a stone to throw at him when happened the second thing. There came a gentle pat upon the woodland floor, and from a tree overhead dropped down another living plant like to the one above yet not exactly similar, a male, my instincts told me, in full solitary blossom like her above, cinctured with leaves, and supported by half a score of thick white roots that worked, as I looked, like the limbs of a crab. In a twinkling that parti-coloured gentleman vegetable near me was off to the stem upon which grew his lady love; running and scrambling, dragging the finery of his tasselled petals behind, it was laughable to watch his eagerness. He got a grip of the tree and up he went, "hand over hand," root over root. I had just time to note others of his species had dropped here and there upon the ground, and were hurrying with frantic haste to the same destination when he reached the fatal branch, and was straddling victoriously down it, blind to all but love and longing. That ill-omened bird who stood above the maiden-flower let him come within a stalk's length, so near that the white splendour of his sleeping lady gleamed within arms' reach, then the great beak was opened, the great claws made a clutch, the gallant's head was yanked from his neck, and as it went tumbling down the maw of the feathered thing his white legs fell spinning through space, and lay knotting themselves in agony upon the ground for a minute or two before they relaxed and became flaccid in the repose of death. Another and another vegetable suitor made for that fatal tryst, and as each came up the snap of the brown bird's beak was all their obsequies. At last no more came, and then that Nemesis of claws and quills walked over to the girl-flower, his stomach feathers ruffled with repletion, the green blood of her lovers dripping from his claws, and pulled her golden heart out, tore her white limbs one from the other, and swallowed her piecemeal before my very eyes! Then up in wrath I jumped and yelled at him till the woods echoed, but too late to stay his sacrilege.

By this time the sun was bathing everything in splendour, and turning away from the wonders about me, I set off at best pace along the well-trodden path which led without turning to the west coast village where the canoes were.

It proved far closer than expected. As a matter of fact the forest in this direction grew right down to the water's edge; the salt-loving trees actually overhanging the waves—one of the pleasantest sights in nature—and thus I came right out on top of the hamlet before there had been an indication of its presence. It occupied two sides of a pretty little bay, the third side being flat land given over to the cultivation of an enormous species of gourd whose characteristic yellow flowers and green, succulent leaves were discernible even at this distance.

I branched off along the edge of the surf and down a dainty little flowery path, noticing meanwhile how the whole bay was filled by hundreds of empty canoes, while scores of others were drawn up on the strand, and then the first thing I chanced upon was a group of people—youthful, of course, with the eternal Martian bloom—and in the splendid simplicity of almost complete nakedness. My first idea was that they were bathing, and fixing my eyes on the tree-tops with great propriety, I gave a warning cough. At that sound instead of getting to cover, or clothes, all started up and stood staring for a time like a herd of startled cattle. It was highly embarrassing; they were right in the path, a round dozen of them, naked and so little ashamed that when I edged away modestly they began to run after me. And the farther they came forward the more I retired, till we were playing a kind of game of hide-and-seek round the tree-stems. In the middle of it my heel caught in a root and down I went very hard and very ignominiously, whereon those laughing, light-hearted folk rushed in, and with smiles and jests helped me to my feet.