The Moon Pool, A. Merritt [books to read to get smarter txt] 📗

sky⁠—at least no sky such as we know⁠—all was a sparkling nebulosity rising into infinite distances as the azure above the day-world seems to fill all the heavens⁠—through it ran pulsing waves and flashing javelin rays that were like shining shadows of the aurora; echoes, octaves lower, of those brilliant arpeggios and chords that play about the poles. My eyes fell beneath its splendour; I stared outward.

Miles away, gigantic luminous cliffs sprang sheer from the limits of a lake whose waters were of milky opalescence. It was from these cliffs that the spangled radiance came, shimmering out from all their lustrous surfaces. To left and to right, as far as the eye could see, they stretched⁠—and they vanished in the auroral nebulosity on high!

“Look at that!” exclaimed Larry. I followed his pointing finger. On the face of the shining wall, stretched between two colossal columns, hung an incredible veil; prismatic, gleaming with all the colours of the spectrum. It was like a web of rainbows woven by the fingers of the daughters of the Jinn. In front of it and a little at each side was a semicircular pier, or, better, a plaza of what appeared to be glistening, pale-yellow ivory. At each end of its half-circle clustered a few low-walled, rose-stone structures, each of them surmounted by a number of high, slender pinnacles.

We looked at each other, I think, a bit helplessly⁠—and back again through the opening. We were standing, as I have said, at its base. The wall in which it was set was at least ten feet thick, and so, of course, all that we could see of that which was without were the distances that revealed themselves above the outer ledge of the oval.

“Let’s take a look at what’s under us,” said Larry.

He crept out upon the ledge and peered down, the rest of us following. A hundred yards beneath us stretched gardens that must have been like those of many-columned Iram, which the ancient Addite King had built for his pleasure ages before the deluge, and which Allah, so the Arab legend tells, took and hid from man, within the Sahara, beyond all hope of finding⁠—jealous because they were more beautiful than his in paradise. Within them flowers and groves of laced, fernlike trees, pillared pavilions nestled.

The trunks of the trees were of emerald, of vermilion, and of azure-blue, and the blossoms, whose fragrance was borne to us, shone like jewels. The graceful pillars were tinted delicately. I noted that the pavilions were double⁠—in a way, two-storied⁠—and that they were oddly splotched with circles, with squares, and with oblongs of⁠—opacity; noted too that over many this opacity stretched like a roof; yet it did not seem material; rather was it⁠—impenetrable shadow!

Down through this city of gardens ran a broad shining green thoroughfare, glistening like glass and spanned at regular intervals with graceful, arched bridges. The road flashed to a wide square, where rose, from a base of that same silvery stone that formed the lip of the Moon Pool, a titanic structure of seven terraces; and along it flitted objects that bore a curious resemblance to the shell of the nautilus. Within them were⁠—human figures! And upon tree-bordered promenades on each side walked others!

Far to the right we caught the glint of another emerald-paved road.

And between the two the gardens grew sweetly down to the hither side of that opalescent water across which were the radiant cliffs and the curtain of mystery.

Thus it was that we first saw the city of the Dweller; blessed and accursed as no place on Earth, or under or above Earth has ever been⁠—or, that force willing which some call God, ever again shall be!

“Chert!” whispered Marakinoff. “Incredible!”

“Trolldom!” gasped Olaf Huldricksson. “It is Trolldom!”

“Listen, Olaf!” said Larry. “Cut out that Trolldom stuff! There’s no Trolldom, or fairies, outside Ireland. Get that! And this isn’t Ireland. And, buck up, Professor!” This to Marakinoff. “What you see down there are people⁠—just plain people. And wherever there’s people is where I live. Get me?”

“There’s no way in but in⁠—and no way out but out,” said O’Keefe. “And there’s the stairway. Eggs are eggs no matter how they’re cooked⁠—and people are just people, fellow travellers, no matter what dish they are in,” he concluded. “Come on!”

With the three of us close behind him, he marched toward the entrance.

XIII Yolara, Priestess of the Shining One

“You’d better have this handy, Doc.” O’Keefe paused at the head of the stairway and handed me one of the automatics he had taken from Marakinoff.

“Shall I not have one also?” rather anxiously asked the latter.

“When you need it you’ll get it,” answered O’Keefe. “I’ll tell you frankly, though, Professor, that you’ll have to show me before I trust you with a gun. You shoot too straight⁠—from cover.”

The flash of anger in the Russian’s eyes turned to a cold consideration.

“You say always just what is in your mind, Lieutenant O’Keefe,” he mused. “Da⁠—that I shall remember!” Later I was to recall this odd observation⁠—and Marakinoff was to remember indeed.

In single file, O’Keefe at the head and Olaf bringing up the rear, we passed through the portal. Before us dropped a circular shaft, into which the light from the chamber of the oval streamed liquidly; set in its sides the steps spiralled, and down them we went, cautiously. The stairway ended in a circular well; silent⁠—with no trace of exit! The rounded stones joined each other evenly⁠—hermetically. Carved on one of the slabs was one of the five flowered vines. I pressed my fingers upon the calyxes, even as Larry had within the Moon Chamber.

A crack⁠—horizontal, four feet wide⁠—appeared on the wall; widened, and as the sinking slab that made it dropped to the level of our eyes, we looked through a hundred-feet-long rift in the living rock! The stone fell steadily⁠—and we saw that it was a Cyclopean wedge set within the slit of the passageway. It reached the level of