I did not ask, for I remembered our compact, and I closed my mind securely against her doubt of my welfare, but there are times, with thought as with the spoken word, when silence is of an equal significance.
“It is in my mind,” she told me, “that the intention which we have formed to feed your body when next we may, will give it no strength beforehand. It is in my mind, also, that the food of the Killers would hardly please you, if we could find it amid the ashes.
“Beyond this, I think that the Dwellers may return very early to resume their investigation of events which (I hope) are still of some mystery to them, and that it is well that we should be clear of this place before the darkness leaves us.”
Again I felt the silk-soft palm in mine, and the slim webbed fingers closing, and again the current of her finer life possessed and thrilled me.
It was a reluctant pleasure, since I had realised the concealed repugnance with which she touched me, but my need was too great, and the wisdom of her action, in our common interest, too evident for me to refuse.
“I am stronger now,” I replied, after a time, “shall we start?” and side by side we let ourselves down into the darkness.
Clear of the shelter which had protected us, I was conscious of a thin cold rain, and of a chilling wind from the north, which penetrated the leather rags that I had no longer the means of stitching together, and made me glad to move my stiffened limbs as rapidly as I could, while we crossed the enclosure, to where the still-smouldering ruins gave a dim, unearthly light from both before and behind us.
I drank again at the pool-side, while my companion dived for a moment in the cool darkness. We passed near enough to the great tank for her to see that there was no longer any water within it. To this end, the Dwellers must have taken some action while the fire still burned, for our vice of curiosity led us backward to view it, and she showed me that the bodies which it contained were charred beyond recognition.
Then we made for the gap in the barrier of the burning ashes where the gate had been, and left that desolation behind us for ever.
As we passed out, our steps were lighted for some distance by the glow from the line of smouldering ashes beside us, but the darkness became denser at every yard as we turned from it to cross the plateau. Yet she went on swiftly, and, in the confidence that her hand supplied, I found no difficulty while the level ground continued. When the path fell roughly I held back to a slower pace, and even then I stumbled frequently. “Can you not see at all?” she asked, “for if we can do no better than this our plan must be altered. We have eighty miles to cover before the dawn, if we are to reach the valley woods while the night-time cloaks us.”
I answered, “I cannot see when the darkness is absolute, and you go forward as though the day were round you. I suppose that other creatures are like me in this, or how would the darkness aid us? Can your eyes see when there is no light whatever?”
She replied, “When there is no light whatever, I can see nothing that is more than a few yards away, but within that space it is not my eyes only, it is my whole body that perceives what is around it. I do not see, but I know. My body is too much alive to walk into any tree that confronts it. But we must do something. If you would keep your mind blank and ready, I think I could show you always for a few steps before us.”
This we tried, and for many hours we went forward with the way visible to me for about three yards ahead, and, beyond that, blackness. It was difficult, and very tiring, for neither of us could think at all, but we made good progress. Steadily she kept me aware of things before me, but more than once my own mind wavered, and in a moment I was stumbling in the darkness. And the darkness did not lift at all. There came a cold and steady rain, without wind, which descended straightly upon us. My rags were quickly drenched, and for the most part of the remaining night this rain continued pitilessly.
Our way was often very rough, and in the darkness we could not choose it. We could only go forward directly, and take what came. For the most part we descended, but not regularly. The ground we crossed was not cultivated in any evident way, nor was it enclosed or protected--or not till we had crossed the lake, and that was later.
At times we walked on a prickly growth of some kind that was too close and stiff for our feet to break it. Often we walked, or, I might say, waded, through herbage such as we had encountered on the previous day, making our progress slow and heavy, but always her buoyant vitality sustained me.
Once we found the ground falling precipitously before us, and discovered that we were on the bank of a river. We could not tell its width, and my companion’s suggestion that we should swim it found me unwilling. Bearing leftward, we continued beside it for some miles, and then found it had left us. It was about here that we began to feel touches as of light hands on the face, in a place where trees were frequent. I was frightened at first, till I realised that they were only trailing leaves,--creepers, I thought, but they were really of the trees themselves, as we saw when the daylight came.
But the real horror of the night was at the last. For some time the ground had been flat and bare, soft from the rain, which had now ceased, but easy to traverse, so that we increased our pace, and were making good progress, when we found our feet sinking in a shaking bog, from which we pulled them with difficulty. Then it was firmer again, and then softer at times, till we were in a swamp which became worse as we went forward. For a moment we stopped, and I found myself in darkness, as my companion’s mind asked me, “Shall we not go back, if we can? If we sink deeply in such slime we cannot swim or live. Nor can either of us think clearly while I show you the way. If we move from the straight line ahead we should remember our turns. Shall I lead you only?”
I agreed, and we turned back, as we thought, with exactness. Indeed, it must have been so at first, for she saw the marks we had left, but it was unexpectedly difficult. I was in darkness now, following the guidance of her hand, and content to think that her own sight and thought were concentrated on getting us clear of the swamp, when I suddenly felt her sinking beside me.
Cool, but urgent, her mind called me, “I have no footing: pull.” I was up to my ankles in the slime, and found my left foot slipping from beneath me as I leant away from her. (For I had been at her left hand previously, but when we turned back we had changed hands, not positions, and I was now on her right). A step ahead, it was firmer ground. A struggle to the right, and she had footing once more. Then I went in deeply. After that we moved as best we might. One only at a time, and feeling each step carefully. I lost sense of direction entirely. And it was there--or nearly there--that the dawn found us.
But that was after,--well, I cannot hope to describe it, but I must tell it as best I can.
It was fortunate that our minds were in closest touch at the moment, or the second’s interchange of thought might have been a half-second later, and there my life would, I suppose, have ended.
Her own mind was alert to give me the indications that her sight supplied, when it suddenly changed to a great doubt, paused on the brink of consternation, recovered to the high gaiety with which it was accustomed to encounter peril, shot me a thought-swift warning, reverted to its poised serenity, and closed from me entirely; and, in the slow process of words the warning that she gave was this,--
“We come here of good right, fearing none, and we mean no harm to any. Therefore we move in security. Our minds are serene and friendly, and we walk at peace with all things. If you doubt or fear we are both lost entirely. As your body fought the Killers with the axe for both of us, so my mind fights for both now. You must help now, as I helped then. I have passed you the javelin, for there is no use for weapons here, and I must not hold it. All is well. Be quite sure to believe it. Step as I guide you. Jump when I call on you, I will tell you just how far. Separate now.”
The whole thought was instant, and in the same moment I knew that that on which we walked was swaying beneath us. Her hand pulled me quickly to the left, and we ran up something that moved from under us like a treadmill,--if we had been on the outside of the wheel,--jumped at last, landed on something smooth and slippery, like that which we had left, and having--the thought crossed me--a living softness. Then I caught my foot, stumbled, recovered, jumped again, clambered a few yards of rising ground, slimy enough, but firm also, and felt the soft touch on my cheek that I had felt before, and knew that trees were round us.
We went on for a hundred yards, while the ground sloped upward. Then it commenced to fall away, and we stopped at once. There we stayed, and there, at last, the dawn found us, still distant from the cover which we had aimed to reach in the darkness.
We were on a narrow twisting tongue of land, perhaps fifty yards broad by two-hundred long, the conformation of which had betrayed us to the swamp in the darkness. On the left hand it merged into bog and water, with occasional islands of verdure, and scattered trees. On the right hand was the deep water of the great lake that we had seen from the mountains two days before.
The sun had not yet appeared above the ridge of higher ground that ran between us and the sea, but the faint light of dawn was sufficient to show us a mile-width of still water, and beyond it a level woodland of great trees, the extent of which, from the low ground on which we stood, we could not determine.
The few trees that surrounded us were of a different character. Most of them were of the kind that had touched us in the night so weirdly. They had trunks of a livid white, not more than eight feet high, from the top of which a cluster of rising boughs rayed outward. On the length of these there were no leaves, but large flowers of a very brilliant scarlet only, while at the end of every bough grew a cluster of long ribbon-like leaves of a bright green, that hung downward, almost to the ground in the still air, or fluttered very lightly when the wind stirred them. I was not sure whether I thought them beautiful, or strange only. I had an unreasonable feeling that they were unfriendly.
In the hollow of one of these tree-tops, where the branches rose, there sat a duck-billed bird, of a halcyon blue colour, and of the size, and somewhat of the shape of a partridge. As the dawn widened, it rose and flew outward, not crossing the lake, but going up the mid-water, to the right, where it extended for many miles, gradually widening as it did so.
“It does not fear us at all,” I remarked to my companion, before it rose to leave us.
“I made peace in the night with all things,” she answered, “come and see. You will know that it was needful.”
I walked with her to the end of the tongue of land on which we stood, and, where the lake and swamp were mingling, there were huge shapes that wallowed in the mud like gigantic tadpoles, but with two forelimbs, short and thick, and ending in a row of claws of great length. A hippopotamus would have been small beside them. The most part of the head was a large-toothed mouth, flat and shallow, with one down-curving tusk, growing like a hook from the centre of the upper jaw. There were two large circular eyes, on the top of the flat head.
“They were lying closely,” she told me, “in the deeper mud. We were walking on, or slipping between them for some time before I knew they were living.
“It was only as one of them waked to consciousness of us, and began to roll over, that I became aware of that on which we were walking.
“I knew that he had already decided to spill us in the mud, so that he should reach us the more easily, and that if the others should combine against us we should be helpless. They are the Dwellers’ creatures, not of the sea, and for a moment I almost had the doubt which would have destroyed us. But I think I have not ruled the monsters that the oceans hold for so long, to lose my body at last in such talons. Also, you did well.
“A javelin, such as this, is a cunning weapon, and I had joy when I used it, but I think that our ways of peace are greater than those which you are designed to practise.
“You see the monster that still has his tusk hooked on to that projecting root, to steady him while he slept in the shallow? It was in the edge of his eye-socket that your foot caught when you stumbled.”
