So, in loose formation, the party essayed the final stage of that journey which all those who left their boats to rot at the stairfoot had courageously pursued.
The sun was dropping swiftly now behind the western cliffs. The vast shadow of the pyramid extended across the eastern half of the lake and darkened the shores beyond. The stairway was swallowed in a rapidly deepening twilight.
CHAPTER THREE
SCOLOPENDRA HORRIBILIS
The first real testimony the five received that they were indeed not alone upon the artificial island of rock came on the wings of a sound.
It was very faint, barely audible at first. But it soon grew to a poignant, throbbing intensity.
It was a sound like the piping of flutes—a duet of flutes, weaving a strange monotonous melody, all in a single octave and minor key. The rhythm varied, now slow, now fast. The melody repeated its few monotonous bars indefinitely.
The source of the sound was hard to place. At one moment it seemed to drift down from the air above them. At another, they could have sworn that it issued from or through the stair itself.
They all paused uncertainly. The abruptness of a tropical sunset had ended the last of the day. Great stars throbbed out in a blue-black sky. The breeze had increased to a chill wind. All the pyramid was a mass of darkness about them, save that above the flat peak there seemed again to hover a faint, pale luminescence.
"Shall we go on?"
Instinctively, Otway put the question in a whisper, though, save for the quaint fluting sound, there was no sign of life about them.
Out of the dark, Tellifer answered, a shiver of nervous laughter in his voice:
"Can we go back? The strange thing that has drawn so many hither is calling from the heart of the pyramid. It is—"
"I say, go on," counseled Waring, not heeding him. "Find out what’s up there."
"Oh, come along," Sigsbee urged impatiently. "We can go up softly. We’ve got to find out what we’re in for."
Softly they did go, or as much so as was allowed by a darkness in which the "hand before the face" test failed completely. They had brought a lantern with them, but dared not light it. Even intermittent aid from pocket flashes was ruled out by Otway. Unseen enemies, he reminded, might be ambushed in any of the buildings to right and left.
The stairs, narrower toward the top, were also more uneven. They were broken in places, causing many stumbles and hushed curses. Once, Waring observed in a bitter whisper that the party would have formed an ideal squad for scouting duty across No Man’s Land; they would have drawn the fire and located the position of every Boche in the sector.
Next moment Waring caught his own foot in a broken gap. The rattle of equipment and crackle of profanity with which he landed on hands and knees, avenged the victims of. his criticism. In spite of mysterious perils, smothered laughter was heard upon the pyramid.
Yet none of these indiscretions or accidents brought attack from any quarter. The monotonous fluting continued. As they neared the top, its poignant obligato to their approach grew ever more piercing and distinct.
The final half dozen steps were reached at last. A bare two yards wide, they sloped up with sudden steepness,
Halting the party, breathlessly silent now, Otway himself crept up this last flight. From below, his companions saw his head rise, barely visible against the ghost of white luminance that crowned the pyramid. His entire figure followed it, wriggling forward, belly-flat to the surface.
After a long five minutes, they saw him again, this time standing upright. He seemed, as nearly as they could make out, to be beckoning them on. Then he had once more vanished.
Some question entered the minds of all, whether the beckoning figure had been really that of Otway, or some being or person less friendly. With a very eerie and doubtful sensation, they crept up the narrow flight and over the edge.
Waring was first. He found himself on a broad, flat platform, or rim of stone. At its inner edge a crouching figure showed against the white glow, now appearing much brighter, flooding up from an open space at the center of the peak.
Certain at last that the figure was Otway’s, the correspondent catfooted to his side. Over the other’s shoulder he looked downward. Then, with a hissing intake of breath, he sank to his knees. Supporting himself with hands on his rifle, laid along the stone rim, he continued to stare downward.
One by one, the others joined the first pair. Very soon, a row of five sun-bronzed, fascinated faces was peering down into the hollow heart of the pyramid.
The eight-sided top consisted of a broad rim surrounding an open space, some hundred and fifty feet across and a third of that in depth. From the point where they knelt, an inner stairway, set at an angle to the eastern plane of the pyramid, led steeply to the bottom of the hollow.
In effect, the place was rather like a garden. On all sides fruit trees, flowering shrubs and palms of the smaller, more graceful varieties, grew out of soil banked off from a central court by a low parapet of yellow stone. It was not the garden effect, however, which had paralyzed the watchers.
Their eyes were fixed upon two forms, circling in a strange, rhythmic dance around a great, radiant, whitely glowing thing, that rested on a circle of eight slender pillars in the middle of the lower court.
One of the forms was that of a woman. Her hair, falling to a little below the shoulders, tossed wildly, a curling, fluffy mass of reddish gold. Arms, legs and feet were bare. A single garment of spotted jaguar hide was draped from shoulders to mid-thigh. For ornament she wore neither bracelets nor anklets, but the jaguar skin was fastened with golden chains and fringed with tiny gold bangles. Upon the red-gold hair a circlet of star-like gems Hashed in prismatic glory.
To her lips the woman held a small instrument like a Pan’s pipe of golden reeds. It was her playing upon this that produced the double fluting sound.
Her dancing partner was a literal embodiment of the great demon, Terror. Its exact length was impossible to estimate. Numberless talon-like feet carried it through the dance figures with a swiftness that bewildered the eye.
The thing had the general shape of a mighty serpent. But instead of a barrel-like body and scaly skin, it was made up of short, flat segments, sandy yellow in color, every segment graced—or damned—with a pair of frightful talons, dagger-pointed, curved, murderous. At times the monstrous, bleached-yellow length seemed to cover half the floor in a veritable pattern of fleeing segments. Again its fore part would rise, spiraling, the awful head poising high above the woman’s.
At such moments it seemed that by merely straightening up a trifle higher, the demonish thing might confront its audience on the upper rim, eye to eye. For, eyes the thing possessed, though it was faceless. Two enormous yellow discs, they were, with neither retina or pupil, set in a curved, polished plate of bone-like substance. Above them a pair of
