Savage Bride

Chapter Twenty-seven

They ran toward the front of the courtyard and darted through the opening by which he had first entered, hands linked. On the outside of the temple wall the dimly looming buildings were as silent as the moonlit mirages they appeared to be. But there was imminent death, they knew, lurking in every one of them. Her fall from the parapet had gone unheard, perhaps muffled by the encircling courtyard wall.

“We have until the sun comes up,” she whispered. “They’re bound to find out by then. That’s when she always went up there and—”

“That’s our head start, then. And how much we do with it is up to us.”

He jockeyed her around to the front of him and they went one behind the other, to be able to hug the shadows more narrowly. They scurried along where it was blackest and leaped swiftly over the light patches as in a game of hopscotch. In a little while the peripheral hovels had come, and then the undiluted foliage again, and they were clear of the city, for what that much was worth.

They went in less silence now that they were this far, for branches hissed and spat and jittered at their brusque passage, but they went in less immediate danger also, for there were no sleepers around them any longer to detect these telltale tokens of their flight.

They went fast, at a sort of padding trot, but not too fast, for they both realized this was to be a long sustained test of their endurance, and to be too spendthrift of energy now would only rob them of it later, when perhaps it would be needed even more. Even this trot they didn’t maintain evenly, but broke it at times to rest at a fast walk.

The moon had gone down long ago, while they were still in the temple. The night hung in a state of suspended blackness, waiting to break. They both looked up at it several times, as at a clock. It was the only one they had.

Presently he said, “Once they start after us, we won’t be able to stick to this trail any longer. They’ll shoot straight out along it and come up to us in no time. We’ll have to jump off it into the jungle on the side.”

“Then how will we be able to keep our bearings?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Let’s do all the distance we can while we can still use the trail.”

She had started to flag a little already, he noticed. She spurted forward again now, as if spurred by the reminder.

“Tired?”

“No, not yet.”

He wasn’t sure she was telling the truth. He couldn’t afford to disbelieve her, however, in the situation they were in. She was young, that was one thing in her favor. As young as anyone could well be and still have to run for her life like this.

They must have been going due west. She glanced back one time, not at him but at the sky behind the two of them, and even before she spoke, he was oddly disquieted to see that her face when turned that way was already paler than the rest of her. It was the first time in his life that he’d ever hated to see day come, caught himself wishing it would hold off for a while yet. Daylight, which usually spelled hope and an end to fear, to them spelled heightened danger and perhaps destruction.

“It’s starting already,” she warned, and they both sped on faster than before.

He looked back in turn. The first signs of daylight were in the east; the sky was smoked pearl back there and no longer black. It was as though it were being washed with some sort of powerful abrasive that was taking all the color out of it.

The bleach began to spill over from there onto other things as well. Branches and fronds and the trunks of trees became two-toned, lighter on one side than on the other. Chris’s laboring form, ahead of him, began to stand out more clearly, particularly when there was any opening in the intermittent canopy over them. Then at other times, when there were completely tunneled spaces they had to pass through, it would blend into the misty foliage, still dark blue with night shadows.

She was slackening a good deal now. He could tell it mostly by the way he continually kept coming up abreast of her instead of staying at her heels. He didn’t want to take the lead, for he was afraid that then he might outdistance her.

“Do you want to rest?” he asked her at last.

She could hardly draw breath any more. “Not yet,” she gasped determinedly. “Later I — may have to. I don’t want to waste any of this head start.”

He put his arm around her waist. “Lean on me, it may take a little of the weight off your own feet.”

It was an awkward palliative at best. They had to force a passage twice as wide through the interfering leafy web. It eased her a little, that was all, but slowed them much too much. They discarded it again presently, and went forward singly once more.

He looked back again. “It’s nearly here,” he said.

The eastern sky was saffron now, and beginning to fume as with some unseen chemical agent infused into it from below. The stone shapes of the building they had left behind still looked dismayingly clear and near at hand, whenever they could be seen at all through interstices in the jungle thicket. The temple in particular still bulked so large against the sky, like something immovable, that, no matter how hard they tried to get away from it, it still seemed to keep its same distance from them.

“They look so far yet,” he heard her lament.

The mountains, he knew she meant.

They are, he thought; farther than we’ll ever get to. We’ll never make them, never. He kept that thought to himself.

A golden glint, like some sort of wet spray flung after them from the end of a paintbrush, suddenly splashed far ahead of them up the trail, dyeing it and the immediate leaves on either side of it.

“It’s up!” They both said it together. They both knew it, without having to look.

They ran full tilt now, like two deer. No more trotting, no more uncertain slackening. They knew they couldn’t keep it up for very long, but they knew they had to do it while they still could. That fiery eye, as Mitty had called it, was open in the sky now behind them, staring vengefully after them.

He began to count off in his mind, while his feet pounded ahead underneath. One, two, three, four—

A great dull thud smote the air on the fifth count. It came rolling sluggishly after them, like horizontal thunder, from back there behind them. Then as the first wave spent itself, a second clap came. Then a third.

The alarm drum.

It quickened them still further, as though the ground were burning hot to their feet. She gave a wordless little whimper.

“It’s all right,” he panted reassuringly. “It had to come sooner or later. It’s over with now. Just keep running.”

“How much longer can we stay on here?”

“A little while. Not too long. It’s taken us an hour to come this far. They can’t catch up with us in five or ten minutes.”

Full sunrise, with the lower rim of the flashing disk clear of the ground, already found them struggling through a solid wall of steam, temporary but blinding, as the night mists rose from the jungle in evaporation. He kept thinking of Mitty. It was the heat from the sun that was doing it. She’d worshiped that. Maybe it would destroy them. Maybe she was in it, had become a part of it. I’m going crazy, like she was, he told himself, and checked the errant train of thought.

In a little while the steam thinned again, drained off. A hot, invisible exhalation took its place, refracting things, warping them as though they were seen on a dripping wet mirror.

She kept looking back more and more frequently. He hated to make the decision to quit the trail, narrow and difficult and half obliterated as it was. Once they were off it their progress would be slowed to almost nothing. It was like capitulating, giving up their chance of reaching the mountains. But it had to be done; to stay on it meant an invitation to almost certain capture. She was staggering now, lurching, and she’d have to rest soon anyway or she’d collapse.

He held off as long as he could, until he felt that to delay any longer was dangerous. A good half an hour had already elapsed since they had heard the first warning growl of the drum. And maybe it was even more; he had no exact way of measuring time.

He tottered to a halt, and called to her, and she halted too, making a little groggy circle in her tracks that brought her around to lean up against him exhaustedly.

“Come on,” he said tersely. “This is where it begins.”

They left the trail and went stumbling and moving through the matted growth offside, he now in the lead.

It was all that he had feared it would be and worse. The trail had been a passage already sundered for them, no matter how interlocking and entangling its accompanying vegetation. Here they had to burst their own way through a veritable feather bed of green, making passage for the first time. Even at a hand span away from each other, they were at times entirely invisible to each other below the neck, so cut off were they by great padlike leaves or curved, fringe-dripping scimitars of fernery. At times there was such a choked multiplicity of flora and prismatic colorings around them all at one time, filling every cranny of the three dimensions they were travelling through, that the whole thing became a blurred, maddening pinwheel, in which white butterflies starting up were mistaken for disks of sunlight on the leaves and disks of sunlight on the leaves were mistaken for the white butterflies, and the whole became just a confusion of spots in front of the eyes.

But it was not all this prolific. There were patches that were comparatively sparse, and even occasional dells and glades where the going was almost normal. The trouble was that these clearings were all isolated from one another, and in between were stretches that were almost impassable, where it was like walking through the upper branches of a dense, spreading tree for all practical purposes, save that they could not fall through it to the ground if they should miss a step.

For a length of time that seemed to equal the time they had spent on the trail — though since they were going slower it was probably only half as long — they lurched and wavered through this botanical spume, until they’d stumbled upon a place that was almost made to order to hide and rest in. To have gone beyond it would have been suicidal. Neither of them could have by now, even had they wanted to. A tree had fallen, whether shattered by lightning or from some other cause they could not tell. Even prone, its massive trunk was nearly the height of their waists. It was festooned by a curious vinelike growth, lashing it to the ground along its entire length, but this did not cling closely to the turn of the trunk but stretched out from it taut, like a sort of green spiderweb. Close beside the trunk, therefore, it formed what amounted to a triangular bower or lean-to. To make it better still, a little rill of water ran nearby, the first they’d come upon so far.

He wouldn’t let her drink at sight, knowing what it might do to her. He dipped a corner of the rags he wore into it, and sponged her lips with it and pressed it out against her forehead and the back of her neck. Then he let her have a few tantalizing handfuls from his own hand, and promised her more later.

Within this little tent of natural green they crawled, and then collapsed, lungs beating against the cages of their breasts like swelling bladders threatening to explode.

She cried a little when she felt better. He liked that about her, that she was a girl who cried and not a damned Indian jade without emotion. “It hurts too much,” she whimpered, “even to stay alive.”

“I know, I know it does,” was all he could say.

They had been there about five minutes, and were only beginning to draw breath more slowly, when suddenly he tightened his hand on her wrist, holding it down and holding it taut, and she understood, made no move.

There wasn’t a sound or the trembling of a fern around them to show anyone was approaching. And then suddenly the green facade walling them in split into two saw-toothed edges and a figure flashed into view, at a distance of not more than ten yards from where they crouched. Cinnamon-brown, crouched low in deadly quest, making its way with a swift, soundless dexterity they never could have attained.

He was stunningly near. For a moment the hard-pitted black eyes seemed to glance over the very coverlet beneath which they lay, in their whiteness and helplessness. He slithered on, with a snake’s vertebral twistings. The saw-toothed edges of visibility on the opposite side interlocked once more behind him, and there was nothing to show they had seen what they had seen.

He let go of her wrist, but outside of that neither of them moved. She simply turned it over and left it there, supine on the ground.

“That was close,” he breathed. “They’re not sticking to the trail either. Not all of them, anyway.”

“How did you know in time?”

“I couldn’t tell you now any more. Must have been some variation in that chirping and twittering going on all around us.”

Her head bent over dejectedly. “They’ll get us.”

“What’s the good of giving up before we have to?”

Twice he left her after that, but for just a short distance, and not upright but creeping out on his hands and knees. Once to bring her more water — he dipped his entire shirt in this time, and they both squeezed it out into their mouths — and the second time to bring back some berries.

He tried them himself first, and made her wait a while. Then, finding that he’d had no ill effects from them, he gave her some.

Then after that they lay still; breathing, surviving, nothing else. Waiting for the friendly night to return. To lie hidden like that in one place was the safest thing to do during the daylight hours. In that way they had only one dangerous series of movements to guard against: their enemies’. Had they moved about themselves, they would have had two: their enemies’ and their own as well, which might have worked toward one another when they least expected it.

He looked at her and her eyes were closed. She’d dropped into a sound sleep, head pillowed against his recumbent shoulder.

He was glad she could sleep. Only the very young could sleep that way, with imminent death all around them, with life hanging by a thread, hanging on the rustle of a leaf, the turn of a blade of grass.

His own eyes flickered, but he forced them open again. Someone had to watch.

The dazzling sun beating down on their leafy covering spilled through the innumerable little criss-cross, waffle-like gaps, and fell all over them in leprous disks that burned, almost like the centering of rays through a ground lens. It was like being covered with spangles.

Night came on slowly. He’d never wanted to see it before. Where was the vaunted swift nightfall of the tropics, which was supposed to drop like a curtain? It came on slowly, but at last it came. The sun began to redden for its landfall.

He waited, biding his time. The spangled disks slowly went out. Then the shell-like glow, reflecting from above on her upturned face, dimmed too. Cool green and blue shadows began to settle in the hollows of everything, like fungus. Light was leaving the world.

When a gas-green sky over the black jungle was the only remaining vestige of daylight, he finally woke her. He woke her in a strange way. Or at least, it seemed so to him at the time. For when the whisper of her name close down beside her ear and a light touch upon her shoulder failed to rouse her, he put his lips on her forehead and woke her with a kiss.

She was frightened for a moment, upon first awakening in the dark and in a place she didn’t remember, and stared up at the smothering leaves and clung to him.

“It’s all right,” he soothed her. “We’re in here, don’t you remember? That place we crawled into. We’ve got to go on soon.”

He brought her some more water, and they waited just a brief while longer. Then he crawled out and helped her to her feet after him, and they started on the second lap. This one would-have to decide their safety or destruction, he knew. Their strength and ability to stay on their feet wouldn’t survive another night without food.

In a little while there was more light to see by. The process of extinguishment was arrested, even reversed itself partially. A coppery haze appeared in the eastern sky, like brick dust floating around in the night. A little open space and a rise of ground in one place gave them a direction finder. From there they found one pole, and by going opposite to it, that gave them the other. Off in the distance the shape of the temple was silhouetted against a late rising apricot moon. That meant that in a straight line from there, if they continued with their backs toward it, they were bound to find the mountains. The jungle closed around them again as they resumed their way, and blotted it out.

The going was hard. He hadn’t the use of a machete or anything to cut with. He had to find other ways of getting through. He detoured around obstacles, crawled under them when they weren’t too low, and often used his own body as a breastwork to give her passage through some thicket or bramble that was particularly thorny.

Once they had a bad few moments with some sort of spongy, fibrous creeper, about the thickness of a gas tube. It snarled around her throat and tightened, and she couldn’t go forward and she couldn’t go back. They even thought for a horrifying moment it might be something animal, a snake of the boa or anaconda variety, but it wasn’t, it didn’t move, it was vegetable. He found he couldn’t sever it with his hands, and when he tried to do so, that only tightened it more. He had her spade her hands in under it, as a sort of protective pad between it and her throat. He cursed his own witlessness in leaving the knife in the body of the warrior back in the temple. As it was, he had only one cutting edge about him to use against it, and so he used it, though she pleaded with him not to. His teeth.

“It may be poisonous. Look out. Don’t.”

“It won’t be,” he said, and hoped he was right.

He gnawed through it. Some kind of juice came out of it that was flamingly bitter and flowed around in his mouth, but he did the job. At last his teeth met through it, and it was in two.

They flung it off her and went on. He spent the next five minutes expectorating energetically as he traveled along.

They put on every ounce of speed the night and the jungle and their weakened, punished frames would allow them. The mountains, frosty blue along their tops in the moonlight and visible only when the curtain before them dipped low enough now and then, looked nearer than they had in the daylight the day before, but that might have only been because of the moonlight.

“We’ve got to hit that tomb entrance pretty accurately, don’t forget. There isn’t any other way out.”

“Suppose they’ve already got there ahead of us, and are waiting?”

He’d thought of that himself, long ago, and hadn’t liked the thought much. “We’re not there yet. Don’t let’s worry about that till we are.”

They had no way of telling whether their pursuers were ahead of them or behind them, or even dispersed all around them, so that they were advancing blindly through a sac of them. They never knew from one minute to the next when they might blunder into them, and once a racket of outraged parrots and monkeys, starting up spontaneously out of the slumbering jungle drone around them, showed they very nearly had.

They crouched low in sudden immobility and waited. It didn’t come again, just that once, and then after a long cautious time they went on again.

“It might not have been,” he whispered guardedly. “Some big cat, maybe, springing for one of those monkeys.”

It took will power to keep pushing on; the brief tumult had come from ahead of them, rather than in their wake. They diverged a little, bypassing the exact direction as far as they were able to determine it.

He noticed something that he didn’t like. Her mind was beginning to wander a little from time to time. He knew it was probably nothing more than excess fatigue, but it was a bad sign, a warning signal. Once she said unexpectedly, “Is my dad going to be waiting for us, where we’re going?”

He didn’t know what to say. And then before he could answer, she asked in self-startlement, “What did I say just then?”

The ground was already starting to rise under them. Not steadily, but by fits and starts that augured well. They should be out of the tangle sometime before the end of the night if they could hold out that long.

The moon set again — the same moon that had seen Mitty’s death the night before — and now the night was on the wane. They kept going steadily for some time after that, to squeeze the last possible inch of distance they could out of the sheltering darkness. Then they had to drop down again and rest, even if it meant extinction on the spot. Flesh and blood couldn’t possibly stand any more.

She didn’t sleep this time. He wouldn’t let her. He wouldn’t let himself either. He kept digging his own nails into the soft underpart of his hands, so the pain would keep his eyelids up. He counted off ten minutes, and just when rest was beginning to penetrate their racked frames to a depth sufficient to take hold, he broke it off short again.

In pulling her up after him this time, he nearly toppled down again himself. They leaned against one another inertly for a moment, like two slanted poles that support one another by their very inclination, then tottered on. The stars overheard were flickering to contraction point, the sky behind them was turning pewter-colored.

Day and the jungle broke nearly simultaneously. Just as it got light enough to see by, they came out of the lush vegetation into an arid foothill region, dotted with occasional clumps of stunted trees that dwindled as they went along and finally died out altogether.

“Look,” he whispered almost in awe. “Look, Chris, the mountains.” He saw her eyes brim with tears of exhaustion and thankfulness. He stroked her tangled hair inattentively, his own eyes sighted upward to their still remote, serried tops. “On the other side, Chris,” he breathed, “on the other side of those mountains it’s the twentieth century.”

They stood there and they scanned the looming tilt before them for the tomb entrance, which was the only possible way through to the other side. They searched frontally first, and it was nowhere in evidence. Then over to the left as far as eye could reach. It wasn’t there either; no sign of it. Then over to the right, the only direction left. Nor was it there either.

He swallowed and tried to keep his heart from going down too far. “It’s got to be somewhere along there,” he murmured. “We came out through there. We both remember that. That was no dream.”

But what was? And what wasn’t?

He tried to take bearings as best he could. “We went off the trail to the left,” he said, speaking aloud to convince himself as well as her. “That means we’ve got the trail to our right, unless we recrossed it since in the dark without knowing it. So if we work our way back toward the right, we should come upon the tomb entrance eventually.” He looked at her questioningly. “We’ll take the chance, Chris, shall we? I don’t want to fool you; it’s just a chance. But I’m afraid if we go off to our left, we’re liable to work our way blindly entirely around the inside of the valley without ever getting out again.”

“Let’s take the chance, Larry,” she said feebly.

They retraced their way a little, first of all, to take themselves back a little deeper into the jungle cover, so that they wouldn’t be so exposed to view. Then they skirted the jungle just short of the point at which it lost full density. Not that there was a hard-and-fast, razor-clean line where jungle ended and barren foothills began; sometimes the growth sent out tongues, crept fairly high up the inclined mountainside. At other times, by reverse process, there were arid strips where the jungle wall receded far back to the other side of them.

Tiredness had no meaning to them any longer, or hunger, or anything else. If they were going to succumb to fatigue, they would have succumbed long ago, when it was still new and sharp. Now it was old and dull, so old they scarcely took account of it any more. Just a glassiness of the eye, a stricture of the stomach cords.

There was a fairly prominent outthrust shoulder of mountain they had to round, they found as they progressed. On the other side of this the succeeding line of mountains fell back considerably; there was a recession, more evident at first by a change of tint than anything else. The coloring beyond was more transparent, less opaque. Then as they drew nearer they saw the variation was one of proximity and not shading.

Then as some certain, invisible line of longitude on the slopes beyond worked itself clear to their advancing gaze, their hands flew toward one another and clenched tightly. They saw it. It was there. The flanking projection had covered it from them until now. There was no mistaking it. They saw the artificial man-made flatness of the grooved stones framing it, leaning slightly back in conformity with the tilt of the native rock wall. A slot, a window in the mountain. It looked awfully small, it looked awfully high up. But it was there. Every detail stood out distinct in the crystal-clear air.

They’d come out of the jungle a good half day’s journey off their course. But they’d corrected it now. They were back again on course. They could see where they were going now. And they were still up on their own feet, they were still untaken, that was the main thing.

Slowly it inched abreast of them, until at last the trail itself, leading down from it, came into view. Up there it was just a rut, a fold, tucked into the mountain skin. But it could be seen, there was a lividness to it that revealed it against the topsoil pelt, as when a fine wire is drawn too tightly over something and leaves a shiny trace behind.

He stopped at last and dropped down with her behind a little hummock that looked out through spindly tree trunks. “We’ll stay down below here, under cover, until we’re ready,” he puffed. “We’re as close as we can get now without overreaching it and going too far to the other side.” And this was their final rest before the final break, the dash that would carry them up, and in, and through.

The place he’d chosen gave good cover. Yet they could command the tomb entrance. And the downward trail from it had swung very close athwart their way now, entered the jungle almost directly ahead of where they lay. They were as close to it as he intended to risk going.

They lay there like two wilted, discarded tendrils, her head resting in the notch just above his hip. The safest thing of all to do, he knew, would be to wait until nightfall. But the law of diminishing returns was already in full swing against them. He didn’t think their strength would hold that long.

She fell asleep, and this time he let her, wanted her to. His own eyes closed for the first time since the second night before, and it was as though there were mucilage on the lids. No sooner had they touched than they adhered. Not all the will power at his command could have pried them apart again.

It seemed they’d only been like that a moment, when she was already shaking him awake. She was frightened, cautioning him even as she did so. “Larry, don’t move. Look. Look up there.”

Three warriors were standing by the tomb entrance. Then suddenly four. Then five. Every moment there was another one. They were coming out, one by one. A party that must have entered it in search of them was now reappearing, frustrated.

He could feel her heart pounding wildly against him. She had pressed herself close. “Can they see us from there?”

They were obviously scanning the jungle rim from their lofty perch; he could tell by the way their buckshot-sized heads moved in deadly, slow-sweeping unison.

“I don’t think so.”

“But we can see them. I can even see the sun flash from their knives.”

“They have nothing but bare rocks for a background, they stand out against them. We have leaves and tree shadows and all sorts of other screens to deflect the aim of the eye. But lie still whatever you do, don’t stir.”

They started down the trail single file, the first of them already well on toward the bottom before the last had finished emerging from the tomb orifice. He counted ten of them. The warriors made a slow zigzag coming down, lengthily spaced, and at every moment danger increased, for as they descended they were being brought continuously nearer to their hiding place.

The warriors grew larger, too; from puppet size they swelled to man size, as each one passed close to them and went on to be engulfed in the static green tidal wave that was the jungle, poised but never shattering into spray high over all their heads. Brief patches of coppery skin would reappear, as if it were indeed green water they were being submerged by, and then they would be gone for good.

The last trembling leaf stilled, the last shuddering reed quieted, the downgrade trail coursed empty. Nothing but time still stirred. They were gone as though they had never been. But what reckless impunity to count on that!

Finally he gave her, indirectly, the signal that the moment had come. “Can you get all the way up there to it, do you think?”

She nodded bravely. “I can try. I’m ready.”

“Once we start we’ll have to go fast. We’ll be in the open from here on up, no more jungle skulking. And some of them may have stayed behind, for all we know.”

He stood up slowly, with an uneasy naked, defenseless feeling. “Stay down a minute longer.”

She crouched submissive at his feet, flattening her hair back with both hands to get it out of her way.

Finally he nodded. She stood up beside him.

“Are you all right, Chris?”

“I’m all right, Larry.”

“Say a prayer before we go.”

“Out loud?”

“I don’t care. I guess so.”

She tilted her face a little, lidded her eyes for a moment. “Take us through. Somebody,” she said fervently. “Oh, Somebody, whoever you are, be on our side for just this one time.”

He stiffened his arm around her. “Take my hand,” he said curtly. “Here we go.”

They broke jungle at a tired sort of trot, which was the best they could muster. Again the process of exposure wasn’t immediate; the jungle slowly thinned, opened out about them. Still at some indeterminate point, the area of their bodies that could be seen from a distance was greater than the area that could not, and from then on danger had set in full force.

The going was immensely difficult for them, particularly in their weakened condition. Almost at once the ground left the strictly horizontal; at every step the angle was sharpened. It seemed to them that all the troubles of crashing through undergrowth were as nothing compared to this. Lifting the entire bodily weight taxed the wind and leg muscles far more than any intricate brambles could have.

The jungle rapidly receded behind them like an outgoing tide. Its texture seemed to knit itself together, and presently it had become a smooth green pile carpet spread considerably below, unruffled as far as the eye could reach.

At about a third of the distance up, their incoming diagonal brought them onto the trail. There was no longer any added danger to be courted in following it; they were already visible off it as they would be on it; so they clove to it from then on. It made for surer footing and swifter direction than the uncharted climb about it.

They kept looking back, not both together but alternately, first he, then she. Continued silence of the one told the other each time that nothing was as yet amiss. The halfway point, indicated by a sharp turn that they had marked from below, was rapidly descending to meet them.

He felt her hand twitch convulsively in his. She had no breath to scream with. She gave a sort of choked bleat, and he knew at once before he’d even glanced back below them. Immunity had ended, and the tomb entrance was still equidistant from them to the jungle they had left behind.

The jungle edge, innocuous only a moment ago, had spewed two fast-running figures, breaking away from it, starting up the serpentine trail in furious pursuit. A third broke cover in twice the space separating the first two. One or more members of the party they had seen returning not long before must have lingered behind the others, caught sight of them, raised the alarm.

They were spurred to a frenzy of threshing motion they had not dreamed was still left in them. Their one remaining chance, they knew, was to get inside the sheltering darkness of the tomb entrance before they were overtaken by the winged furies down below. He shunted her in front of him and pushed her before him, sometimes using only a steadying hand, sometimes his entire shoulder when the going was particularly steep or difficult.

She wasn’t breathing any more, she was sobbing. They couldn’t afford the luxury of looking behind them any more, save where a differential in the trail let them do so automatically; every turn of the head cost too much in momentum.

The pursuers came on fast. Their legs seemed to work like pistons under them, blurred by their rapidity of motion. The gap between was closing inexorably. They were getting bigger every minute, like something onrushing in a bad dream. But the black-mouthed sanctuary above came nearer, nearer.

One last spurt to reach it. Breath a flame searing through their lungs, black motes fuming before their eyes like cultures seen through a microscope. A girl, an emaciated man, and the will to live. They couldn’t have cried out. This was no time for crying out. This was only a time for living or for dying. They could only choke suffocatingly and flounder crazily upward, and upward, and upward.

Suddenly shade fell behind them, like a dark-blue guillotine blade that had just missed the backs of their heads, and they were in.

The coolness was so sharp it seemed to congeal their skins, curdle them, like some sort of etherized astringent sprayed on. They couldn’t see for a minute. Gloom welled up about them like a sooty fog, and in their momentary safety was nearly their final undoing. But they had never broken contact with one another’s forms, from the first moment of discovery of the pursuit, and his shoulder now was still pressed closely behind hers, carrying it forward, his arm circled to her opposite side. Joined together like that, they waded uncertainly forward through the shoals of dimness, a hollowness to their footsteps that showed they were enclosed on four sides.

Then in a second or two, salvation peered through at them again. A lamp had been left lit, apparently by those who had just been in there before looking for them. It was a trivial, sparklike thing, lost in all that immensity of space. Yet for them it was a beacon brighter than the most flashing lighthouse. For it stood directly offside to the inner tunnel bore leading through the bowels of the mountain; it marked it, out of all the other niches, indentations, and cavities that honeycombed the walls.

A feeble stain came from it, like a smear of very dark amber honey, that scarcely tinctured the floor before it or the rock wall backing it. But it gave them their lives for minutes more — for who knew how long more? It showed them the way out of this Stygian trap. It showed them the pear-shaped gap, the deeper darkness within the dimness, that led off from the tomb itself.

“Go in! Go in!” He shoved her through into the nothingness beyond, then stooped aside and snatched the thing up. It was a metal vessel of some kind, filled with fluid, but he had no wish or time to identify it. It was heavy. Not too heavy for an unspent, untired man to carry, perhaps, but its added ounces of weight now might mean the difference between life and death to him. Then too, it would have served as a beacon to their enemies, just as it had to them now, guiding them infallibly in their wake, had he attempted to take it with him.

So he raised it with both hands high over his head, and flung it forward out of the tomb to do away with it, to hamper them as much as he and she would now be hampered.

A strange, phosphorescent apparition marked it extinction. It left a comet-like luminous trail across the vault of the dark, which was its flame expanded behind itself in flight. Then it struck the far wall someplace over the dais. There was a sudden curtain of fire as the released liquid burned now unconfined, splashing out and down. And in the middle of this, for a single moment, no more, Mitty’s face stood out, illumined. The twice-gone face which he never wanted to remember again, never would forget. The musk above the burial niche was laved for a moment by the brightly flickering fluid dripping down over it. For an instant he had the illusion it was she looking at him like that, palely illumined, through the murk of eternity. Then the features dimmed, went out forever, as the tricking drops expired with their own downfall.

Farewell, the farewell of two who had never been meant to meet, by immutable laws greater than either one of them. Double farewell, across forty-eighty hours, across five hundred years.

He turned and staggered into the passageway and found Chris by the sound of her hysteric breathing, lingering there waiting for him. He sent her on again before him, keeping his hand outthrust to her shoulder to avoid treading on her heels. She was invisible to him in all that density of darkness, close as she was before him.

They had to go circumspectly, unsure of any sudden turn the groove might make. They told off the sides of it with their hands, he on one side, she on the other, to keep from grazing them too closely. The confined air in here made breathing far more difficult; the only thing gained was that they no longer had the acute grade of the mountain slope outside to contend with. But their inability to see neutralized that advantage.

And already there was an echoing behind them of oncoming footfalls in the dark. Once the sound had set in, it dogged them with a maniac persistency that they couldn’t shake off or leave behind, try as they might. It was as inexorable, as maddening as that nocturnal drumbeat at La Escondida had been a lifetime ago. It was the soft, slapping sound of bare soles trotting along the damp, rocky flooring, amplified by the nature of the place itself so that it carried forward to them only too well.

Their own harried breathing was magnified to a loud snorting, their own stumbling steps dinned in their ears, but nothing could drown out that nagging, vindictive underscoring murmuring in their wake, now close, now hanging back a little: pad, pad, pad.

They were goaded onward by it, in knee-twisting, groping flurries of haste that ebbed and flowed from them like valvular spurts, carrying them along the rock-rimmed conduit. They hurt and bruised themselves against the walls, for they couldn’t run true, and when there were shifts in direction, and there were many, they could only find them out by trial and error. Not once but several times she stumbled and went down, and he was only saved from going down on top of her by the fact that they weren’t going very fast any more, they couldn’t. She would have lain here spent, but he drew her weakly up again each time and supported her until her own legs could find themselves once more, and that remorseless pad, pad, pad, looming on them in these brief halts, drove her on again like a flash.

Their ears were no good to them any more. The blood was singing in them too much for them to be able to tell whether they were losing ground or maintaining the same distance they had started out with. They could only be sure they hadn’t gained on their pursuers, for coming still upright on two legs could have gone much slower than the reeling amble to which they were now reduced.

They came to the place where the water was. It gave a faint tinkling warning just before they reached it, and he dreaded its arrival, parched and expiring of thirst as they both were, for he was afraid they wouldn’t be able to tear themselves away from it again, wouldn’t have the strength of mind.

She went down on all fours and pressed her face flat against the rock, there where the water traced its way down, and he stood over her slantwise and let it find his own agonized face higher up. He felt as though he’d gone without water all his life. He felt as though death would be a cheap exchange for standing here a stolen moment longer.

Pad, pad, pad swelled out at them, like a trip-hammering of doom, every instant nearer, surer.

He took her by the back of the neck and pried her stubborn head away. “Don’t swallow any more, hold the rest of it in your mouth,” he warned her.

She struggled to get back to it for a moment, then her reason reasserted itself and she turned docilely away.

They went on again, the pad, pad, pad closer and clearer. Then it desisted for a moment, in the place where the water was. But faint and far back, even when it had stopped, a ghostly repetition of it could still be heard. The pursuit was multiple, but one member of it had far outdistanced the others. And the quickness with which he reached the water, following their own departure, showed how sickeningly close he was. Almost at their very heels.

A moment only this foremost tread relented, then at struck out again. Swifter, fresher, for he had needed less restoring.

They could even hear his breathing now, hoarse and rasping, welling through the tunnel after them.

Suddenly she made an abrupt turnabout, and they collided with one another, and both of them nearly fell together.

“It’s stopped, it’s ended,” she gasped. “I can’t find the way.”

He struck out with his hands, all over, up and down, and felt only rock. It blocked them off, sealed them up.

And then a little paleness revealed itself at the sides. A shadow of a gleam. A thread of grayness unraveling in the dark.

“The slab!” he choked.

He rammed his shoulder into it, and it wouldn’t move. The gleam brightened a little, like a flame that is blown on, then dimmed again.

The pad, pad, pad was rising now to a crescendo of vengeful triumph.

He ran back a little, and turned, and rushed at the impediment, and it wavered, the foursquare gleam around its edges brightened further, only to contract again. It wouldn’t go down, it wouldn’t let them out. Safety lay so near and yet so far. Life was six or eight inches away from them.

He was crazed for a minute, clawed at it futilely with his bare hands. She had collapsed into a whimpering huddle somewhere in the dark at his feet.

Then suddenly he desisted and, as if stung to a berserk fury, goaded to self-destruction, turned and rushed headlong toward the oncoming pad, pad, pad.

He dropped to the ground, flattened himself crosswise on the floor of the tunnel, and lay there still.

It came on. He could feel the very rock floor under him vibrate to its approach. Pad, pad, pad, pad...

And then the last one never sounded, never fell.

Instead a bare foot gouged into his side, delivering an inadvertent kick that rocked him from head to toe. A body off balance, flying through the air in an arc, came crashing down, partly over but mostly beyond him. Only its futilely scissoring legs landed actually on top of him.

The thundering crash of the fall thudded through the vault. The savage must have been stunned by the impact; a reflex twitching was all the movement he made for a minute. And by that time Jones had reared up and was at his throat.

Then he found that he hadn’t the strength of grip necessary to squeeze out life quickly. This was no time to give quarter or to fight up to a mere point of mastery, then desist. This was kill or be killed.

He shifted his grasp and caught the two coils of long, coarse Indian hair in a double-fisted grip, one at each side of the head. The heavy thud resumed again, but this time it wasn’t feet running along the rock-floored passageway. He could feel the skull shatter and disintegrate somewhere in between the levers of his grasp.

He left him brained, and jumped up and ran back to her. Still others were coming, but they were still some distance off. A little time, a minute or two, had been gained.

“Push hard against it, with all your strength, as I go into it.”

He made a sort of bumper of his interlocked arms, and careened into it. The light brightened almost intolerably this time, like flashlight-powder sizzling all around the rim of the slab. There was a moment while it stayed ajar against all edicts of gravity, and there was nothing but brightness and open space in front of their dazzling eyes.

They were back in the world again.

Pad, pad, pad was coming up behind them like a drumbeat. He pulled her through after him, scarcely able to see in the sudden new incandescence beating around them. The sun was low but it was still daylight.

They ran through the meandering gully, the cleft of Mitty’s former longings and reveries. Its earthen ramparts were all that kept them on course for a while until their eyes became accustomed again to the light.

Then when they did, the vista of the downslope cohered before them like a slowly forming pattern on a photographic plate soaking in solution, strengthening, darkening, moment by moment. There was the little spring far below them, and standing motionless at it, two men on horses. Carbines were slung at their shoulders, the sun winking back from their barrels. Perhaps they were drawn this far up by their duties of policing the outer side of the slope, or perhaps they had been detailed to search for someone who had disappeared.

He threw up his arm and swung it hysterically at them, even as he kept running, tumbling, scraping down toward them, sending jets of dust and ropes of little stones down ahead of him.

The men saw them; there was a sudden rigid locking of posture that told that unmistakably. They both became taller on their saddles. Their mounts’ necks, reined up from the pool, remained suspended. They stared up at them, motionless, as if unable to make out where they’d come from.

He looked back, and one of the savages had come out into full sight past the mouth of the chasm. The sun was low in the west and it caught him squarely, in all his flaming hate and gaudy barbarism. Ruddy copper body, pulsing at the ribs with its long run; kilt about the waist; knife to hip; tuft of brilliant scarlet hummingbird feathers sprouting at his crown. A blue shadow, such as all men cast, was leaning awry behind him on the slope. His arm was back, balancing a poised javelin.

The javelin flew out, swift as a light ray, and she, not having turned as he had, would not see it in time. He caught at her, flung her aside so violently she crumpled to the steep-pitched ground. And he was left there in her place. It seemed to sunder his chest in two, and when he looked down with a sort of calm surprise, it was to find two feet of it protruding forward beyond his swaying body.

He went over and down with a sort of barrel-like roll, first upon his knees, then forehead pasted flat to ground, with a little spurt of dust flowering about his head. The shaft cracked and broke beneath his arched body. He curled over on his side, then flattened and lay still. There was pain, like current streaking through electric wiring, packed in his chest, then none, only tiredness and no regret at being prone.

His eardrums seemed to close up. As through a thick filter he could hear her screaming down to the two men on horses below them. “Shoot! Don’t you see him standing there? Mátalo!”

He lifted his head a little and watched, with a sort of detached interest, as though none of this really concerned him any more.

They only needed one bullet. It was an easy shot; a dead certainty. He was in full view above them.

The rifle report, in that rock-rimmed area, had a strangely flat, crunching sound, like the collapsing of an inflated paper bag.

Stones and earth globules spilled downward, with an oddly looped, liquid effect, like successive tiers of a falling necklace. Then his body came down, coasting on its face, almost to where they were, with that blue shadow patch still skipping after it, like the air-borne tail to a ground-dragged kite.

The little tuft of scarlet feathers seemed to sprout straight up from the soil now, like some solitary mountain flower. For sap, it oozed a sluggish little thread of blackened red, which died out amidst the rocks.

She was kneeling there beside Jones, holding the broken-off forward part of the javelin in her two hands, dazedly, as though it were some sort of linear measure that she was trying to hold up to her grief and loss to see how immeasurable it was, when the horsemen finally reached them, dismounted, and crouched down over the two of them.

He looked up at them blurredly.

“You were just a minute too late,” he said, “but thanks anyway.”

He closed his eyes again, but whether in weariness or because of some sort of inward pang of realization, they couldn’t tell. They gave the two of them water from their canteens, one from each, and he drank with his eyes closed, with his throat rippling, and a little water coming out at the edge of his mouth, tinged red.

“Help me get them up on the horses, Ramon. We’ve got to get them down to the lowland right away. He needs medical attention, and she needs rest and food. They’ve probably been wandering around lost for weeks back there in the emptiness on the other side.”

“In the emptiness on the other side,” Jones murmured wryly, without opening his eyes.

The second charro had been cautiously examining the fragment of javelin that he had taken from Chris’s unresisting hands. He held it near his nose, then with slow precaution traced it across the heel of his hand, just under the thumb joint. Then he looked closely at his hand in the fading sunlight, for some gloss or telltale shiny track.

“We’ll never get him all the way down,” he said softly in Spanish to his companion. “It was poisoned.” He flung it down curtly.

Chris picked it up again and looked at it dazedly.

“Put us both on the same horse,” Jones said quietly, with his eyes still closed. “Let me hold her in my arms on the way down. We mustn’t be apart any more.”

Picking its way painfully, the little procession started out, the two charros on foot, one leading the carrier horse, the other supporting Jones on its saddle with his shoulder and encircling arm.

Riding slowly down the slope, holding her cradled in his arm, he spoke to her low, his mouth close to her ear.

“Don’t be frightened, Chris. You’ll have to finish this ride out alone. I’m going to leave you soon.”

She answered equally low, unheard by the world around them. “You aren’t leaving me. We’re going to be together. To the very end of the ride.”

She opened her hand, disengaged the javelin tip, which she had held imbedded into her own flesh and blood, and flung it off.

Their heads close together, they went slowly down the mountain, down into the deeps, as successive tides of evening and infinity washed upward and over them in ever darkening hue; first ultramarine, then indigo, then midnight purple, then starless black.

His name was Lawrence Kingsley Tones.

He was just like any man, like you, like me; and yet, that is what happened to him.