Gateway to Elsewhere

Chapter 9

The djinn camel was twenty feet tall, and it ambled through the night over the desert with monstrous strides. There were bright stars overhead, and a low-hung moon to cast long shadows; there was a camel-guard of djinns riding other djinn camels on every hand. Altogether the picture was one of barbaric magnificence. Wind swept past the contrivance which did duty as a cabin on the huge ship of the desert. The contrivance reminded Tony forcibly of the inside of a British miniature car, minus the instrument board. But it did not ride so smoothly. The size of the camel did not change the nature of its gait, and it would not be wise to burp while the animal was in motion.

Tony looked out a window at their escort. Ten-foot djinns on twenty-foot camels. Bearded, mustachioed, tusked and pointed-eared monstrosities, with spears as tall as their camels, with monstrous scimitars as tall as Tony himself, with garments of silk and velvet and garnished with gigantic precious stones which gleamed even in the moonlight. A hundred of them, no less, keeping close formation about the beast on which Tony and Ghail the slave girl rode.

In the moonlight, the djinn guard looked bored. It probably was boring, Tony reflected abstractedly, to be plodding at a mere forty miles an hour over endless sand, on the back of an acquaintance metamorphosized into a camel who would presently expect you to change places with him. This kind of exchange was taking place with some regularity. At least camels and their riders dropped out of formation and fell behind, and presently new camels and new riders came hurrying up from the rear to resume the place that had been vacated.

A lurching of the camel threw Ghail against him. She was veiled, now, and swathed in all the drapery of a woman dressed for travel or the street. She was singularly remote, too. Back at Barkut’s city gate, she had climbed the ladder to the camel cabin—at the height of a second-story window—with an air of extreme aloofness, ignoring the demoniac djinn guardsmen waiting about. Tony had been unable to match her dignity as he scrambled up and joined her in the small, close coupe. The guard had formed up about them and they had gone sweeping away into the desert darkness, leaving the city’s faint and twinkling light behind. Ghail had spoken no word then, and she did not speak now. The silence was burdensome. A moment later the camel lurched again. Tony was thrown almost into her lap.

“I’m sorry,” he said politely. “Bad road, this.”

“There is no road,” said Ghail composedly. “We have reached the foothills of the mountains, and the djinn are not used to walking. They wished to carry us in whirlwinds, but in your name I declined.”

“I suppose,” agreed Tony, “we’d have gotten dizzy.”

He fell silent again. Another monstrous lurch, and Ghail landed almost exactly on his knee. He helped her back into her own place again and said:

“Look here! We’d better have some system about this! I know you disapprove of me thoroughly, but in default of safety-belts I’d better put my arm around you.”

The camel seemed to stumble and Tony grabbed. They were suddenly upright again, and his arm was firmly around her and she made no protest.

“I don’t disapprove of you especially,” she said with some primness, “but all men are alike.”

“The observation is remarkably original,” he told her. “I suppose you are also prepared to tell me that I do not respect you?”

She turned her head. Her lips were close to his ear. She whispered fiercely:

“The camel is a djinn! It’s listening!”

“True,” said Tony. “Damn! No privacy even here!”

He stared gloomily out at the moonlit foothills which now had arisen from the desert and seemed to lead on through deeply shadowed moonlight toward mountains which also were alternately shadowed and shining ahead. He suddenly felt a soft hand groping for his. It pressed his fingers meaningfully. He squeezed back, encouraged beyond expectation. But the hand was snatched away.

Soft warm breath on his neck. A furious whisper in his ear:

“I wanted to tell you something! Here is lasf. In tiny glass phials you can break in case of need. Then no djinn will come near you. It is for your protection!”

Tony put out his hand again. One very small smooth glass object, the size of his thumb or smaller. He put it away. He reached again. Another. A third. He put them in separate pockets to avoid the danger of breaking them against each other. He put his lips to her ear.

“Thanks. Have you some for yourself?”

“Of course! And some for the Queen, to protect her when you lead our armies to her rescue—when you are ready to destroy the djinn. Now you had better talk, since you have begun!”

He leaned back, as well as he could considering the violent and erratic movements of the djinn camel’s gait. He suddenly began to feel better. After all, qualified privacy on a djinn’s back might have its points.

“Hm…” he said aloud. “In my country the djinn have been subdued so long—they’re kept on reservations—that humans don’t bother about them any more. I’ve even forgotten the stuff one learns about them in first grade at school. It seems extraordinary to me that they can change their size so much. Their shape, yes. In my country even human women can do remarkable things to their shapes with girdles and falsies. You’d hardly believe! And of course they change their coloring. But size, absolute size, no…”

Ghail stirred uneasily. But she spoke as primly as before.

“Djinns are elastic,” she said. “With the same amount of substance they can be as large as a whirlwind. Or as small as a grain of sand, though no one could possibly pick them up—for always they weigh the same.”

“You mean,” asked Tony, with interest, “that a djinn in the shape of a bug or—hm—a moth’s egg, weighs as much as when he or she is a camel and that sort of thing?”

Ghail caught hold of his right hand, and held it firmly. “That is it, yes,” she said shortly.

“Then that,” said Tony blithely, “explains why the bench in the courtyard turned over. A djinn beetle was climbing on it. It explains a lot of things.”

Ghail held his left hand. She ground her teeth. “Thanks,” said Tony. “Since we don’t get thrown around so much this ride is much more fun, isn’t it?”

Ghail turned her head and whispered in his ear, strangling with fury:

“As soon as you have destroyed the djinn I am going to kill you!”

Tony beamed in the darkness inside the small cabin on top of the lurching camel. Ghail held his hands, muttering fiercely. His arm was about her shoulders. The combination made the bumping and swaying and unholy undulations of the beast not at all annoying—to Tony.

“There’s another thing I’d like to ask about,” he said cheerfully. “When you were teaching me to speak your language, you wore a very sensible hot-weather costume. I mean, there wasn’t too much of it. About like the bathing suits girls wear back at home. And you very properly didn’t seem embarrassed. But that was only when you thought I was a djinn. As soon as you found out I wasn’t, you got all bothered. In fact, you blushed in the most unlikely places… Why?”

She said through clenched teeth:

“Djinns are not human. I would not be embarrassed before a cat, either. Or a slave. But a man, yes!”

“Yet Esir and Esim—”

“They would have been embarrassed too, before they were given to you and were your slaves.” Her voice quivered with fury. “I am dressed as I am because I travel with you.”

Then she hissed into his ear:

“When this is over I will see that you are boiled in oil! You will be fed to dogs! You will be torn into little pieces—”

Tony’s ear tingled pleasantly. He continued to beam in the darkness as the twenty-foot camel which was actually a djinn went swaying and lurching through the night.

It had been two hours’ journey across the desert proper—a caravan might make forty miles a day if pressed, but this camel made that much in an hour—and it was another hour before the djinn king’s court appeared to be nearing. The evidence of approach was fairly obvious. The troop of djinn guards approached a narrow pass between precipitous cliffs. It was guarded by two colossal shapes with flaming eyes. They stood forty feet high, in gleaming armor, and they carried battle-axes whose blades were more than a man-height wide, with shafts the size of palm trees. They challenged in voices like thunder. The cavalcade halted. A guttural voice gave a countersign. The gigantic guards drew back. Tony watched with interest.

“Very impressive,” he said judicially. “But actually, you tell me these are simply djinn who have extended themselves—decompressed themselves, you might say—to reach those rather excessive dimensions. At that size they’re not much more substantial than so much fog, are they? How can they handle such axes?”

“The axes,” said Ghail shortly, “are a part of themselves. Djinns can take the appearance of a chest of coins or jewels, which seem like many objects. But to pull away one coin or jewel would be to pull away a part of the djinn. You could not. The axes are a part of their form. So are their garments and the ornaments they wear.”

“Hm,” said Tony, “I see.”

The cavalcade went on. The pass through the mountains grew more narrow and more straight. The cliffs above it grew steeper, until the giant camels with their giant riders rode in utter darkness with only a ribbon of star-studded sky above them. Then the pass turned, and widened a little and narrowed again. The entrance to the farther and still narrower part of the pass was completely closed by something only bright starlight enabled Tony to believe he saw. It was the head of a dragon with closed eyes, seemingly dozing. It completely filled the pass. Great nostrils the size of subway tunnels gave out leisurely puffs of smoke the size of subway trains.

The caravan moved up to it and halted. The leader of the guard bellowed. The great eyes of the dragon’s head opened. Each was as large—so Tony estimated—as one of Macy’s plate-glass windows. They looked balefully down at the djinn trooper.

He bellowed again. The nostrils puffed. Then the gigantic mouth opened. It looked rather like the raising of a drawbridge for the passage of a tow of coal barges. It gaped wide. Flames played luridly, far down the exposed throat.

The caravan moved smartly into the wide-held jaws. It went comfortably down into the flame-lined maw—

And suddenly the low-hanging moon shone brightly on a wide valley with the palace of the djinn king in the distance. It was huge. It was ablaze with lights. And the passageway to it was lined with giants whose feet, only, were visible. Legs thicker than the thickest tree trunks rose overhead. Bellies protruded rather like fleshy stratocumuli, hundreds of feet above the camels of the caravan. The heads of the giants were invisible. Tony felt very small. To reassure himself he said amiably to Ghail:

“It must be a fairly calm night. If not, expanded as they are, even a light breeze would make these giants wobble all over the place like captive balloons.”

Ghail put Tony’s right hand firmly in front of him. She released it. She took his left arm and removed it firmly from her shoulders.

“We are almost there,” she said shortly. “You will ask that I be taken to our Queen in her prison, that she may have the solace of a human woman to weep with her in her captivity.”

There was sudden uneasiness, even anxiety, in her voice. In fact, it wavered a little. And Tony knew why she was frightened. She traveled as his slave. Here, among the djinn—

“I’ll do that,” he told her almost remorsefully. “I’ve been pretty much of a beast, haven’t I? But I’ll see that you’re toddled off to your Queen while I see the king and listen to his offers of bribes.”

She adjusted her veil and swathing robes.

“You will not see him tonight!” she said bitterly. “You will be shown to your apartment, and there he will send refreshments and entertainment to beguile you so that you will wish alliance with him instead of Barkut! There will be wine, and djinnees in the form of women, and everything that is disreputable to appeal to a man!”

Tony managed to look shocked. Actually, it sounded interesting.

“You mean that djinn are as immoral as all that?”

“Of course!” she said more bitterly still. “They are stupid! They are unbelievably stupid! So of course they are immoral! And if they were not stupid, and probably if they were not immoral, we humans would have no chance against them at all! And it is because men are so stupid that they are so immoral, and—and—”

Suddenly, she was crying. And Tony patted her shoulder comfortingly, and took aside her veil and wiped her eyes. And as suddenly she was not crying at all, but looking at him very strangely.

“What—what do you think of me now?” she asked in a small voice.

“My dear,” said Tony with a sigh, “I think you are probably the most intelligent girl I ever met in my life.”

The caravan halted before the intricately sculptured gateway of the djinn king’s palace, and there was no more time for even semiprivate conversation.

Tony descended from the camel in a very stately fashion. To the gorgeously robed djinn chamberlain who greeted him in the king’s name, he relayed Ghail’s request—that she be allowed to share the captivity of the Queen of Barkut during his visit. Shortly, Ghail went away behind a djinnee who was at the moment some twelve feet tall, of a greenish complexion, and wearing a necklace of diamonds each one of which was a good deal larger than a baseball. Tony chatted amiably with the chamberlain who greeted him as a prince and a general of Barkut.

“A most comfortable journey!” said Tony, as a procession formed up to escort him to his quarters. “Your camels, in particular, arouse my admiration!”

He swaggered in exactly the manner of the solitary general he had come in contact with in the greatest war of the human race.

“Admirable!” he repeated in that general’s very tones. “The one who carried me is a very pearl among camels!” The camel he had ridden turned its head. It looked at him sentimentally. It sighed gustily. It giggled.

Nasim.