Savage Bride

Chapter Twenty-two

The outlet from the rock tomb was less secretive than the entrance to it had been. Here was no mere crevice with a detached rock slab to conceal it, but an imposing foursquare portal, hewn out of the living rock and faced with deftly joined, intricately carved stone blocks. A well-worn path led down from it, losing itself in the panorama of the troughlike valley below, with diaphanous mountain outlines enclosing it on the far side.

This valley was longer by far than it was wide, both its extremities lost to view completely.

From up above where they were emerging now, a good third of the way up the mountainside, the bird’s-eye view it presented was of flat, carpet-like green jungle. In one place, scattered about like grains of rice, were a handful of brownish-white kernels that must have been buildings or the ruins of buildings imbedded in the jungle matting. One, sharper in outline than the rest, as if pyramidal, thrust upward like a tooth. About these distant granules the green was lighter in texture than elsewhere, as if the jungle were perhaps thinned by patches of cultivation.

They were in the open again now. There was still sun, there was still sky. But that was no conclusion to him. There had been sun and sky in dim, distant times too. He didn’t want strange suns and skies, he wanted his own, the sky he belonged under. He was cold, in the full glare of the sun. Long after they had left the rocky tomb behind, he was still cold from what he had seen in there, numbed, his body and his heart refusing to warm.

They made their way down on this side in the same order in which they had made the ascent on the other, and the long journey between through the tunnel. Still single file. She was in the litter again, heading the procession, and alongside it, trudging terrifiedly along, one hand lashed to its nearest pole, the slim figure of Chris.

She was right there beside her, Chris was, head bobbing along next to her every step of the way, and that Mitty did not once turn toward her, take any notice of the agonies of fright the younger girl must be undergoing, was to him even more heinous than his own sudden oblivion in her consciousness. But then, the sixteenth-century barbarian, he thought bitterly, what pity could she be expected to know?

The trail, leveling off gradually to the horizontal, entered walls of jungle for a while, virgin and almost solid in texture, like a woven green, brown, and black matting.

The mountains behind them slowly thinned, those on the opposite side slowly thickened, as they toiled toward the midpoint of the valley floor. The sun was straight overhead now, as noon approached, and still they trudged on.

Then little by little a change began to occur in the thickets about them. More and more frequently they began to pass fungus-green, ant-swarming monoliths, toppled blocks or hewn stone overthrown by upthrusting trees, others still standing upright in the shape of sightless doorways, with no walls remaining around or behind them. Vines and creepers draped from them, and occasionally snakes coiled on them in little knots, which unraveled and disappeared when the party passed too close.

And still in other places, where the remains had become submerged entirely in the earth and no longer thrust above its surface, there were curious rounded mounds, like unburst air bubbles forcing their way up through molten lead or some other heavy element, to show what lay buried beneath.

The dead traces of some long-lost city, which must have once in its day been a rival to Cuzco and Palenque for size and splendor. This band was a little living core still remaining to it, a handful of living inhabitants still left to thread their way through its erased causeways, like an ember that still remains alive through persistent fanning in a pit of dead ashes.

Ahead, presently, a structure began to rear, topping the ebbing jungle sky line, a sort of tower or tiered edifice. It was the thing that had appeared like a jutting tooth when first sighted from the mountainside behind them. A temple, or some central structure of importance. The walls were stone up to a jagged, uncertain line three quarters of the way up, then finished or repaired with sun-baked mud that showed chocolate-colored against the early-afternoon light, as though there were no longer sufficient labor or ingenuity available to quarry any more of the immense original blocks of stone that had gone into its construction, or even set back in place those that had toppled down.

About its base, as the jungle finally receded from under their feet like an outgoing green tide, were set gray-white sugar lumps — lesser buildings. And about these in turn, piebald squares of cultivation — maize with which present-day mouths were fed, flax by which they clothed their bodies. Little thatched huts and lean-tos dotted them; not ruins now, but huts that were lived in.

The surrounding buildings became the size of child’s building blocks now, with black ants moving about among them, coming forward to meet the procession, to form around it and accompany it onward. Tillers of the soil, shaven-headed priests in flowing linen robes, even women. It was as though an entire cross-section of the original race that had built the city had remained alive to people its vestiges, but in vastly diminished numbers, perhaps one out of every ten or twenty that had once swarmed here. They were a dying race. Nature was to have the last word after all, as it always does.

They stopped and broke formation in a sort of plaza or central space of hard-packed earth in the very center of all the buildings, with no sprout of green showing any longer, the jungle held back at a distance by communal life. On one side of this the temple now bulked child-like against the sky, dwarfing everything else. Buildings of lesser height completed the enclosure on the other three sides.

The litter was lowered and she stepped from it. Slowly but with sureness of step, like one who returns to a place that she knows well, to a place where she belongs, she moved across the open space toward the looming temple walls. She turned her face neither to the left nor to the right. Her eyes were steady on the black-lined orifice waiting to receive her. She moved so slowly he had lots of time to look at her and take farewell. Her shadow followed her across the sun-white ground like a little pool of dark water. Which he wondered, was the shadow, which the actuality?

Priests, welcoming her into their midst, had made a little lane on each side of her. She entered this and her form was hidden from him, save for a flash of white peering between each two of them as she moved along. But they were old and curved, no longer held themselves straight, and her head still topped theirs for the brief span that remained before she reached the entryway.

A moment longer he saw her like this, a moment only. He saw the side of a face that he thought had been that of a wife. Familiar in its strangeness, strange in its familiarity. Eyes that he knew so well, that didn’t know him any more. Mouth that he’d kissed a hundred times, dark scintillating hair that he’d caressed. What were they, what had they been? A moment longer, and then she was gone. The stone lips of the temple entry had swallowed her whole. A peculiar empty feeling took hold of him, the sort of sensation one has at a final, irrevocable parting-

That isn’t Mitty, he thought, who just went in there. Where is Mitty, what became of her? Where did I lose her?

The priests turned and filed in after her, the last two dragging between them the resisting, cowering little form of Chris, who had been freed from her bondage beside the litter and turned over to them by the warrior escort.

The forbidden entryway gaped empty once more. The daughter of the sun had returned to her own.