Savage Bride

Chapter Twenty

It seemed as if this journey through darkness into the center of the earth had been going on forever, and would never end. And yet it might only have been an hour or less. The trend of the tunnel was steadily downward. The angle was not too acute to maintain equilibrium, but just enough to throw the upper body slightly off balance and give the effect of hastening the footsteps involuntarily, so that they had to be checked.

It was man-made, there seemed no doubt of that. Perhaps an original fissure or fault had been made use of here and there; these had been broadened, hewn to rectangular shape, linked together to form a continuous passage.

The darkness wasn’t absolute any longer. Those at the head of the procession had long ago, as soon as the aperture was closed behind them, lighted wandlike tapers, perhaps formed of some sort of slow-burning reeds or dried stalks. To Jones, from where he was, these small, separate petal-like lights blurred into one single haze of radiance, for they were borne single file and hence tended to coalesce. At least they lighted the way. Though they gave off very little smoke, still even that little was enough to alter the already stagnant air for the worse. He coughed repeatedly, but whether from the effect of these small flame tongues far to the front, or merely from the desiccated dust raised throughout this unaired passage by the trampling of the many feet before him, he could not tell.

Once there was a peculiar series of halts and starts thrown into the even progress of the party, each successive one traveling down its length, as when a string of cars is jostled about in a freight yard. He couldn’t tell just what its cause was until he himself had finally reached the focal point of it.

In a groove worn down one side of the tunnel wall a thin jet of water was running steadily downward, almost like a solidified crystal rod, it was so silent and motionless. Each man in turn had stopped to scoop and drink a palmful or two at it, thus halting the entire line behind him. Jones stopped likewise when the figure before him had gone on, searching for it with his unaided mouth, for the binding of his hands denied him the use of them. He half expected to be thrust roughly ahead, but he was let be for a moment, long enough to find it, like an animal nuzzling for a drink, and to let some of the water run into his avid open mouth, and the rest of it by default run down his neck and chest. Then he was pushed on.

The first warning he had that the journey was nearing an end, or at least reaching some sort of climax, was when the cohered lights ahead began to fan out, so that they could at last be distinguished separately, as if the passage had widened down where they already were and the party’s heretofore rigid single file was being broken up. Then the lights began dipping down out of sight one by one, and when they came aloft again they had been transformed into more robust full-flamed torches. Every moment the light ahead grew brighter. The confined walls of the tunnel suddenly seemed to split open as he, in his turn, reached the latitude where this had taken place, and suddenly they were in a great stone burial chamber, hewn out of the living mountain.

It was honeycombed with niches hewn out of the rock walls, the great majority of them mortared up flush with the surface they were set into, so that they could scarcely be distinguished any longer. Others had been hacked open, a residue of telltale mortar clinging to their sides and giving them an irregular rough-edged shape, and peered empty into the torchlight, like eyeless sockets. One or two of the niches were in a midway condition; they had been broken open, or at least had had cavities made into them, without being emptied out. In these last could still be detected grisly, age-old mummified forms, with little or no relation to the human cores they contained beneath the scarified linen bandaging. About their feet, when the mortar had been rent sufficiently far down to expose the entire sarcophagus, were ranged earthen bowls and jugs that must have once held maize and fruits.

Above all of these niches, the desecrated and the undisturbed alike, were affixed masks, each one representing the individual whose final resting place was directly below it.

On one side of this crypt, stone steps rose in slow gradation to form a sort of dais against the wall. The niches, in turn, followed this up, each one that gave out upon it being a step higher than the one before. The topmost one of all was unusually elaborate, the mask over it seeming to be of beaten gold, with rays striking out from it. The lineaments were those of a rather hawklike, forbidding old man. The sepulcher itself, in this case, had been undisturbed. On the far side of this the niches slowly descended to floor level again, as did the steps of the platform. So even death in this place, it seemed, had its ranks and honors.

About the floors of this communal necropolis, lying in the corners of it, was a litter of refuse. Broken jugs and pottery, of the same sort that still remained intact in some of the sarcophagi; rubble and chunks of mortar that had been hewn out of those broken into; and even several complete skeletons, as well as numerous fragments of others. One skull, detached from its body, was propped squat upon the floor, its grinning teeth seeming to bite at the ground that supported it. A slender, gray-green amazingly long snake had died here, in one place, amidst all the litter, and lay in inert convolutions, just as it had last ceased to move. But then when his eyes had traced its intricate form along to one end, they came upon a small bulb-shaped appendage. It was not a snake, had never been. It was a section of rubber tubing, part of some sort of photographic apparatus for taking time-exposure pictures. His mind, already buffeted by too much strangeness, could give this no meaning for a moment.

Nearby was another baffling object. This was a large packing case of ordinary unpainted wooden slats. But slats of white, planed, modern wood. The sort of case in which supplies or tools or equipment are habitually packed. The sort of case that is to be seen on any railroad siding, on any pier, all over the world.

It was no longer intact. It had been badly battered and trampled upon. But one of the splintered slats still bore upon it the initials “A. F.” in stenciled Roman capitals.

His mind kept alighting on this fact like an intoxicated grasshopper. Initials in Roman capitals. In Roman capitals. Here in this place of hieroglyphs. “A. F.” Allan Fredericks.

It was as though strangeness, wearied of tormenting him in its own guise of strangeness alone, were now bringing to bear the added variation of familiarity-in-strangeness.

He told himself dully: He was here before me, in this place; that man from whose house I stole her, up in the faraway States. I stole my own death from his house that night.

And she belongs here, in this place.

And now she has returned to where she belongs, to where he found her, dragging me after her, captive, to be immured or sacrificed.

He turned to look at her. The torches made a ring around her, bathing her in quivering topaz light. She went slowly upward, step by step, while the rest remained below. None came after her; she ascended alone. The way she moved was like a dancer. A rhythm of religious penitence. Head thrown back, arms stiffly extended rearward from her body. The grace of age-old ceremony, instinctive in her blood and not learned by rote, swayed her every movement.

Then she fell upon her knees and, bending, swept her hand across the stones she knelt upon. Then raising it just over her head, she let the age-old dust it had collected fall upon her glossy dark hair, in atonement. The dust of the place she belonged to, the dust of the mountain and the valley she had sprung from.

Then slowly she allowed her forehead to incline until it rested flat upon the stones, and stayed that way, arms outspread, as if to say, I am back, I have returned, to the sealed-up sepulchers of her tribal ancestors before her.