The Valley of the Flame, Henry Kuttner [ready player one ebook .TXT] 📗

was going willingly now, or else there was force being employed. Hypnosis, perhaps, Raft thought, remembering the lens-mirror. More and more often now he recalled the exotic, paradoxical face of the girl. How she tied into the mystery he could not guess, but remembrance of her made him more willing to seek out the solution.

So they went westward toward the Ecuadorian border, where a thousand little rivers rise to pour into the great Solimoes that feeds the Amazon itself. Ten days and ten nights they traveled. …

On the eleventh morning the Indies were gone, even the faithful Luiz. No sound, no alarm—but Raft was alone when he woke. Perhaps they had deserted. Perhaps th’e jaguars had got them. The beasts had been holding a devil’s sabbath in the forest during the night. Raft didn’t find any traces.

His lips drew down more grimly, and he went on, slower because tracking was hard work, for another ten days. He pushed on doggedly through the green breathing walls of the silent jungle, which pulsated with invisible life—never sure that the next turn of the way might not bring him face to face with the deadly giboya, or one of the omnipresent jaguars, or Pereira himself.

He could not have done it at all except for the years of rigorous outdoor life and tropical experience. But he kept on his quarry’s track.

Then, in the end, he found what the dying da Fonseca had called the unseen road. *”

The day before, from the height of a crest—he was getting into mountains—he had seen the great valley, an immense horizon-reaching bowl of fertile forest stretching further than his eye could follow. It was an ocean of moving green. But the track led down into it.

There was a roughly circular space down there where the shade of green was different. It must be very large, for it was far away—miles in diameter. Partly it seemed to be cupped between mountains, and Raft caught the flash of a river far off circling around the nearer curve of it. Perhaps fifty miles in diameter, the place was, but distances are deceptive in the forest. He followed the trail, and it led him directly toward that oasis of green within the green.

Raft had stood the trip well. His face was more deeply seamed, his eyes were red-rimmed, yet he felt little weakness. A sound medical knowledge helped him there. Fevers were rife in this country. Fevers, but no Indios. Animals only, and chiefly the jaguars.

Animals! The place swarmed with life, Raft thought wearily. Everything around him was movement, the bright flutter of insects and brilliant birds, the watery gliding of a snake rippling to cover, the smooth, furtive motion of the big cats, the erratic hysteria of tapir or peccary. All about him was the jungle itself, like a vast composite animal, terribly alive.

Then, in a clearing, he saw plainly the tracks he had been following. Craddock’s, and the diamond-hunter’s. Pereira had been leading. A rare blaze of sunlight glanced down from overhead, picking out the colors of leaf and flower.

At one spot in the green wall Raft saw something curious—an oval tunnel curving away into the matted jungle as if some gigantic serpent had passed this way, pressing the vines and trees aside, flattening the floor, leaving its own shape carved out of the living vegetation. The footprints led across the clearing toward that green tunnel of gloom.

The footprints stopped halfway across the open space.

Instinctively Raft looked up. But there were no trees close enough. With a long sigh he let the pack slide from his shoulder, but he didn’t let go of the rifle.

There was a path, he saw now, beginning where the footprints stopped, six feet wide, depressed a little below the surface of the ground.

Odd!

He went forward—and jerked back, startled. Something had touched him. An invisible, cool tangibility that stood unseen here in the quiet air of the glade.

Raft put his hand out cautiously. It was halted in midair. A smooth, glassy, invisible surface. He explored the surface by touch, since sight could not help him. The thing seemed to be a hollow tube, nine or ten feet high—he threw pebbles to test that—and it was made of some perfectly transparent substance, on which not even dust could settle.

As Raft glanced along its unseeable winding length into the jungle he could observe how it pressed the trees aside to make way for it, supporting hanging orchids in midair, stopping the flight of a humming-bird that dashed itself in bewilderment against the solid air.

As he stood there, wondering, the first deep roar of the jaguar echoed through the clearing. Raft whirled, lifting his rifle. He could see the leaves vibrate to that deep-throated sound, but of the jaguar itself he could see nothing.

Yet it must be very near—it must be very large—and it must be on the verge of a charge, Raft decided, listening to the coughing breathing of the great cat.

He was in the open here. Coming to a quick decision, he bent, seized his rucksack, and tossed it behind him into the invisible tunnel. Rifle at the ready, he backed after it, and under his feet the yielding earth gave place to something hard and smooth. The great, echoing yell came once more, reverberating strangely from the tunnel walls.

Then something soughed past him. A whispering—dim, distant, fainter than a breath. Before him, like heat-waves in the air, a shimmer swept across the tunnel-mouth.

Instantly all sound ceased. Raft’s ears rang with the dead, intense silence. He reached out into empty air, and it was not empty.

Across the mouth of the tube stretched the same glass-smooth barrier that were walls and roof and floor to him. The doorway was closed. The gate—the Gate to Paititi?

A trap? Had Pereira set this snare?

Raft patted the stock of his rifle. All right, a trap, then. But he wasn’t exactly unarmed. He’d go ahead, since that had been his intention anyway. Only he would not go it blind. He would be ready.

There was no sign of the jaguar. He put the pack on his shoulders and started walking. The footing was smooth, but not slippery. Something seemed to hold his feet down. This wasn’t glass. It was, perhaps, a force-field, an invisible screen of pure energy. Da Fonseca had spoken of the unseen road.

Check.

He hiked on, across the clearing, into the forest, not letting himself wonder too much yet. There was plenty to mink about. Raft had long ago learned the trick of shutting his mind to thoughts which he was not yet ready to entertain.

He had closed his mind time after time in these twenty days to one recurring vision—the gay, solemn, radiant face of the girl in the mirror, seen impossibly in one glance, and never to be forgotten.

It was not exactly a path. Had Raft not known that he walked in a tunnel, and had it not been for the utter, dead stillness, there would have seemed no reason for alarm. The jungle still rose solid and shadowy about him.

Butterflies fluttered brilliantly past. Birds trailed their fantastic plumage through the leaves. Now and then a cloud of tiny stinging puims blew past outside the stuff that was not glass.

Magellan, very long ago, had written of Brazilian trees that gave soap and glass, distorted versions of the hevea that flows rich latex. There was often truth in legends. The Seven Cities of Cibola—they were real, even though they had never been paved with gold.

Vespucci, Raft recalled from some dark cranny of memory, had mentioned a Lake Doirada, somewhere in the sertao, with shining cities on its banks. And the kingdom of Paititi, that da Fonseca had spoken of. In the old days bands of mamelucos had gone out on more than one expedition to find Paititi.

He could recall only fragmentary scraps. Paititi, where some of the natives were dwarfs and some were giants, some had their feet turned backwards, and others had legs like birds. The usual legendary yarns.

Nobody had ever found Paititi.

Raft got the torch out of his pack. The path had been sinking deeper and deeper below ground level. Now, a few yards ahead, the black depths of a tunnel loomed. The tube .was plunging underground. It was impossible to keep one’s footing on that breakneck slant, and Raft advanced very cautiously, wondering how Pereira and Craddock had managed it.

The light stabbed out. There was nothing to see but the compressed earth walling him in. The tunnel angled down steeply. Too steeply. Raft realized abruptly that he had gone too far. Something had tricked him, a shifting of balance, a—a warping of gravity, it seemed. For, he realized unmistakably, an unknown force was keeping him upright as a fly keeps its footing on perpendicular walls.

For an instant giddiness made his head swim. This ramp was not perpendicular, of course, but he had no suction cups on his feet. Nevertheless he maintained his balance on a slope of at least forty-five degrees.

Pure energy, he thought. Walls of force!

He went on down, though now he had no way of telling whether he was climbing or descending. Only logic showed that, since it was dark, he was probably going deep into the earth.

Then, after a long time, came a sudden change. Light glowed curiously from around a curve ahead. Dim light, more like a darkness alive with twisting, coiling refractions. Raft went on warily.

It was water.

It went over and around the tunnel in a smooth, swift, glassy current, foam-marbled, perfectly silent, gleaming in the beam of the torch.

Raft thought, The Children of Israel went upon dry land in the midst of the sea, and the waters were a wall unto them.

Still another miracle occurred on a journey beginning to be laden with miracles. Raft’s jaw set a bit harder. He went ahead, vaguely hoping that what had happened to the Egyptians wouldn’t happen to him. If that wall should break, it would be unfortunate.

The wall did not break. He went forward into a long period of blackness, broken only by the light beam. He was, he realized, very far down now. For all he knew he might be descending a completely perpendicular path, the warped gravity of the tunnel making such a fantastic descent possible.

A faint glow warned him to switch off the light. Darkness closed in, but it did not last for long. His eyes adjusted them-sevles to a dim violet glow that seemed to come from all sides, above, below, everywhere. Vertigo made Raft’s head spin sickeningly.

Far, far below him, but at an impossible, angle, seen slantingly through the transparent floor, was the jagged curve of an immense cavern.

In a moment more logic asserted itself and the vertigo grew even worse, for Raft saw now that it was he himself who stood at that incredible angle, not the apparently tilted cave. It was bathed in faint violet light. The walls were crags, the roof, high above, dripped with stalactites that glittered wanly in the dimness.

The cave was narrow and curved right and left out of sight. The tunnel swept down in a dizzying arc and vanished into a spot of darkness in a distant wall. Raft knew that he should be totally unable to keep his footing on that tremendous slide. But as he advanced gingerly on the invisible flooring, it seemed the cavern and not himself was defying gravity.

Far down in the violet darkness something moved. Something alive. Raft could not see it clearly. Beyond it was another motion, and up among the crags of the walls, still more motion. The high, narrow, violently tilted cavern was coming alive all around him with those moving shadows which converged upon him as he stood frozen there in