Chapter II: The Abyss of the Terror-light

First I heard a faint whispering sound, or rather a hiss, infinitely far away, and up, I thought, over the cliffs. Then the cloth of the tent was lighted by a faint red glow thrown on it from above. I shivered and the strange spell of the mountain and the desert fell heavier upon me. I wanted to go out and investigate; but unfamiliar terror held me powerless. I gripped my automatic and waited tensely. The scarlet radiance shone ever brighter through the cloth. The sound turned to a hissing, shrieking scream. It was deafening, and it plunged straight down. It seemed to pause, to hover overhead. The red glare was almost blinding. Abruptly the tent was blown down by a sudden tempest of wind. For perhaps a minute the terror hung about me. I lay there in a strange paralysis of fear, while a hurricane of wind tore at the canvas upon me. I heard upon the tempest, above that awful whistling, a wild mad laugh that rang against the cliff, weirdly appalling. It was utterly inhuman, not even the laugh of a madman. Just once it rang out, and afterwards I imagined it had been my fancy.

Then the light and the sound swept up and away. With belated courage I tore my way from under the cloth. The stars were like jewels in the westward sky, where the zodiacal light was still visible. The ominous blackness of the mountain blotted out the eastern stars; and the peaks were lighted by a vague and flickering radiance of scarlet, like the reflection of unpleasant fires beyond. Strange pulsing, exploring fingers of red seemed to thrust themselves up from behind the cliff. Somehow they gave me the feeling that an incredibly great, incredibly evil personality lurked beyond. The crimson light shone weirdly on the wild summits of the mountain, as if they were smeared with blood.

I threw more brush on the fire, and crouched over it, feeling uncomfortably alone and terrified. When the flames had flared up I looked about for the ponies, seeking companionship even in them. They were gone! At first I thought they had broken their hobbles and run off, but I could neither see nor hear them, and they had been in no condition to run far. I walked about a little, to look for them, and then went back to the fire. I sat there and watched the eerie, unwholesome glare that shone over the mountain. No longer did I doubt the existence of Austen's "world where alien terrors reign." I knew, even as I had felt when I first saw the mountain, that strange life and power lurked beyond it.

* * * * *

The Ladder Found

Presently I stretched the tent again, and lay down, but I did not sleep.

At dawn I got up and went to look for the ponies. I climbed one of the low dunes and gazed over the gray infinity of sand, but not a sign of them rewarded my look. I tried to trail them. I found where they had been hobbled, and followed the tracks of each to a place where the hoofs had cut deep in the sandy turf. Beyond there was no trace. Then I was certain of what I had already known, that the Thing had carried them away.

Then I found something stranger still--the prints of bare human feet, half erased by the wind that had blown while the terror had hung there. That unearthly laugh, and the footprints! Was there a land of madmen behind the mountain? And what was the thing that had come and gone in the night? Those were questions I could not answer, but daylight dulled my wondering fear.

The sun would not rise on my side of the mountain until nearly noon, and the cold dark shadow of the cliff was upon me when the desert all about was a shimmering white in the heat of the sun. Austen's call had mentioned a ladder. I set out to find it. Just north of the peak I came upon it, running straight up like a silver ribbon to the top of the cliff. It was not the clumsy affair of ropes that I expected. In fact, I at once abandoned any idea that Austen had made it at all. It was of an odd-looking white metal, and it seemed very old, although it was corroded but little. The rungs were short white bars, riveted to long straps which were fastened on the rock by spikes of the same silvery metal. I have said that the mountain rises straight from the sand. And the ladder goes on into the ground. That suggests that the sand has piled in on the base of the mountain since the ladder was put there. At any rate, I am sure that it is incredibly old.

I went back to camp; packed together my guns, a little food, and Austen's equipment; and started up the ladder. Although it was no more than six hundred feet to the top, heavily laden as I was, I got very tired before I reached it. I stopped several times to rest. Once, looking down on the illimitable sea of rolling sand, with the tiny tent and the sharp shadow of the mountain the only definite features, I had a terrible attack of vertigo, and my fears of the night returned, until I almost wished I had never started up the ladder. But I knew that if I were suddenly back in Perth again I would be more eager than ever to set out upon the adventure.

At last I reached the top and crawled up in the mouth of a narrow canyon, with the black stone walls rising straight to the peaks on either side. Down the crevice was a smooth curving pathway, very much worn, it seemed, more by time than human feet. It was not yet noon. I waited a few minutes to rest; then walked up the path with a very keen curiosity as to where it led. It grew so deep that the sky overhead was but a dark blue ribbon in which I saw Venus gleaming whitely. It widened. I walked out on a broad stone platform. And below me lay--the abyss.

I stood on the brink of a great chasm whose bottom must have been miles, even, below sea level. The farther walls of the circular pit--they must have been forty miles away--were still black in the shadow of the morning. Clouds of red and purple mist hung in the infinities of space the chasm contained, and completely hid the farther half of the floor. Beneath me, so far away that it was as if I looked on another world, was a deep red shelf, a scarlet plain weird as the deserts of Mars. To what it owed its color I could not tell. In the midst of the red, rose a mountain whose summit was a strange crown of scintillating fire. It looked as though it were capped, not with snow, but with an immense heap of precious jewels, set on fire with the glory of the sun, and blazing with a splendrous shifting flame of prismatic light. And the crimson upland sloped down--to "the Silver Lake." It was a lake shaped like a crescent moon, the horns reaching to the mountains on the north and the south. In the hollow of the crescent beyond, low hills rose, impenetrable banks of purple mist lying back of them to the dark wall in the distance. The lake gleamed like quicksilver and light waves ran upon it, reflecting the sunlight in cold blue fire. It seemed that faint purple vapors were floating up from the surface. Set like a picture in the dark red landscape, with the black cliffs about, the argent lake was very white, and very bright.