The Secret of Sarek, Maurice Leblanc [the ebook reader .txt] 📗

“And you, Otto, are you afraid too?”

Otto did not reply: and Vorski himself did not seem eager to risk the attempt, for he ended by saying:

“After all, there’s no hurry. Let’s wait till daylight comes. We will cut down the tree with an axe: and that will show us better than anything how things stand and how to go to work.”

They agreed accordingly. But, as the signal had been seen by others besides themselves and as they must not allow themselves to be forestalled, they resolved to sit down opposite the tree, under the shelter offered by the huge table of the Fairies’ Dolmen.

“Otto,” said Vorski, “go to the Priory, fetch us something to drink and also bring an axe, some ropes and anything else that we’re likely to want.”

The rain was beginning to pour in torrents. They settled themselves under the dolmen and each in turn kept watch while the other slept.

Nothing happened during the night. The storm was very violent. They could hear the waves roaring. Then gradually everything grew quiet.

At daybreak they attacked the oak-tree, which they soon overthrew by pulling upon the ropes.

They now saw that, inside the tree itself, amid the rubbish and the dry rot, a sort of trench had been dug, which extended through the mass of sand and stones packed about the roots.

They cleared the ground with a pickaxe. Some steps at once came into sight: there was a sudden drop of earth: and they saw a staircase which followed a perpendicular wall and led down into the darkness. They threw the light of their lantern before them. A cavern opened beneath their feet.

Vorski was the first to venture down. The others followed him cautiously.

The steps, which at first consisted of earthen stairs reinforced by flints, were presently hewn out of the rock. The cave which they entered was in no way peculiar and seemed rather to be a vestibule. It communicated, in fact, with a sort of crypt, which had a vaulted ceiling and walls of rough masonry of unmortared stones.

All around, like shapeless statues, stood twelve small menhirs, each of which was surmounted by a horse’s skull. Vorski touched one of these skulls; it crumbled into dust.

“No one has been to this crypt,” he said, “for twenty centuries. We are the first men to tread the floor of it, the first to behold the traces of the past which it contains.”

He added, with increasing emphasis:

“It is the mortuary-chamber of a great chieftain. They used to bury his favourite horses with him⁠ ⁠… and his weapons too. Look, here are axes⁠ ⁠… and a flint knife; and we also find the remains of certain funeral rites, as this piece of charcoal shows and, over there, those charred bones.⁠ ⁠…”

His voice was husky with emotion. He muttered: “I am the first to enter here. I was expected. A whole world awakens at my coming.”

Conrad interrupted him:

“There are other doorways, another passage; and there’s a sort of light showing in the distance.”

A narrow corridor brought them to a second chamber, through which they reached yet a third. The three crypts were exactly alike, with the same masonry, the same upright stones, the same horses’ skulls.

“The tombs of three great chieftains,” said Vorski. “They evidently lead to the tomb of a king; and the chieftains must have been the king’s guards, after being his companions during his lifetime. No doubt it’s the next crypt.”

He hesitated to go farther, not from fear, but from excessive excitement and a sense of inflamed vanity which he was enjoying to the full:

“I am on the verge of knowledge,” he declaimed, in dramatic tones. “Vorski is approaching the goal and has only to put out his hand to be regally rewarded for his labours and his struggles. The God-Stone is there. For ages and ages men have sought to fathom the secret of the island and not one has succeeded. Vorski came and the God-Stone is his. So let it show itself to me and give me the promised power. There is nothing between it and Vorski, nothing but my will. And I declare my will! The prophet has risen out of the night. He is here. If there be, in this kingdom of the dead, a shade whose duty it is to lead me to the divine stone and place the golden crown upon my head, let that shade arise! Here stands Vorski.”

He went in.

The fourth room was much larger and shaped like a dome with a slightly flattened summit. In the middle of the flattened part was a round hole, no wider than the hole left by a very small flue; and from it there fell a shaft of half-veiled light which formed a very plainly-defined disk on the floor.

The centre of this disk was occupied by a little block of stones set together. And on this block, as though purposely displayed, lay a metal rod.

In other respects, this crypt did not differ from the first three. Like them it was adorned with menhirs and horses’ heads, like them it contained traces of sacrifices.

Vorski did not take his eyes off the metal rod. Strange to say, the metal gleamed as though no dust had ever covered it. He put out his hand.

“No, no,” said Conrad, quickly.

“Why not?”

“It may be the one Maguennoc touched and burnt his hand with.”

“You’re mad.”

“Still⁠ ⁠…”

“Oh, I’m not afraid of anything!” Vorski declared taking hold of the rod.

It was a leaden sceptre, very clumsily made, but nevertheless revealing a certain artistic intention. Round the handle was a snake, here encrusted in the lead, there standing out in relief. Its huge, disproportionate head formed the pommel and was studded with silver nails and little green pebbles transparent as emeralds.

“Is it the God-Stone?” Vorski muttered.

He handled the thing and examined it all over with respectful awe; and he soon observed that the pommel shifted almost loose. He fingered it, turned it to the left, to the right, until at length it gave a click and the snake’s head became