The Web of the Sun (Adventure Magazine, 1922)/Chapter 11
XI
IT WAS so dark when Lassiter reached the baobab that he was forced to use his flashlight to find his way, thus, naturally weakening the force of his miracle. He found Tilita and her mother standing outside the baobab watching the sky. He exhibited his flashlight with rather a foolish feeling, directing its ray here and there. He even made the mistake of explaining its mechanism to Tilita the best he could.
Old Prymoxl said that Birdsong had acted quite differently. He had struck her tree with his hand and fire had flamed up; he had nothing to strike with except his hand and flames had leaped out; and as for Lassiter, making a light and no fire, a firefly could do that much—Here the talk drifted away from the flashlight, which got no further attention, although Lassiter continued snapping it on and off in an absent-minded way.
Both women were in a state of perturbation. They had been watching a light far to the north that reddened the sky. They could see glimpses of it through the trees.
Lassiter joined their observation. He found the girl's hand in the gloom, and stood looking at the light with that sense of comfort her touch always brought. Very gradually the illumination increased and spread. The jungle became filled with a reddish glow. From here and there came the call of a bird or the chatter of some animal at this untimely radiance. Strange delicate perfumes became sensible in the air from the burning of aromatic trees.
The lovers slipped their arms about each other and speculated in whispers on the origin of the light. Tilita thought it was the sun climbing down the western palisades to avenge Birdsong's impiety.
As they stood, something crashed into the baobab high over their heads, followed by a falling through the leaves. An eagle, half stunned, hit the ground within twenty feet of the watchers. No doubt it had been driven from its aerie by the flames, and had blundered into the crest of the baobab.
The huge bird filled the jungle with its shrieks when Lassiter turned his flashlight on it, and finally scuttled off through the underbrush like any turkey. From the lake came the distant laughter of loons.
A confusion of sounds so faint as to be nameless seemed gradually to arise from all over the crater. The glow increased. Presently, at some distance away, Lassiter saw three figures hurrying through the jungle toward the teocalla.
In the hope of finding some information, he ran toward them, calling and flashing his light. His answer was three shrieks, the whisper of an arrow past his head, and the fugitives vanished like partridges in a covert.
The wide commotion seemed to focus on the temple of the sun, and the first real knowledge of what was taking place came to the watchers from a man hobbling through the jungle from the west. The stranger carried a bow and arrow and featherwork shield of an Incan warrior. He had a bullet wound in his thigh. He stopped when he saw the women and old Prymoxl tied a cloth around the leg to stanch the blood.
The wounded man was still dazed. He told an uncertain tale of a terrible man who pointed his hand at him; came a flash of lightning and a terrific thunderbolt which struck him in the leg and brought him down. His comrades broke, and the Christians charged over him after the fugitives. Then he had hobbled toward the teocalla.
“There was no use in staying,” he shivered, “for who can fight the gods?”
The promoter and the girl each gave a shoulder to the wounded warrior and they set off toward the lake. Presently they found the jungle was full of refugees. Dozens of persons, some to the right, some to the left, overtook and passed them. It seemed all Motobatl was converging upon the teocalla. All were fearstruck. Each party avoided all others as if fearful, of enemies everywhere.
When the promoter reached the lake, he saw scores of boats paddling in toward the temple from the north. The flying craft were silhouetted in black against the red reflections in the water.
The promoter found Nunes' bolsa with the queer top to it. It suddenly struck him that Birdsong had planned an attack by water, too, and the top to the bolsa was meant as a sort of armor. Lassiter put the soldier and the women in this little battleship of reeds and joined the flying flotilla for the last two miles. Every boat pulled for the great piazza with a sort of silent desperation.
Out of the whole throng flying templeward, not a sound was heard save the dip of oars. In the north the fires multiplied and spread. Here and there tips of flame leaped above the northern horizon flinging up volumes of smoke, red of bottom and black of top.
Toward the east, the great façade caught the crimson light. In the piazza swarmed crowds of fugitives; their continual drone came over the water, punctuated now and then with a cry, or by the sound of sobbing.
Along the strip of sand in front of the great piazza Lassiter saw three or four men running to and fro, meeting every boatload of fugitives that came ashore. When the promoter's bolsa drew to the sand, a little hunchback splashed into the water to pull the craft ashore, at the same time calling shrilly:
“Señor Lassiter, Gogoma wants to speak to you, if you will have the kindness. He has sent runners for you everywhere”
Lassiter recognized Quiz-Quiz. Lassiter agreed, got his crowd ashore, and the four with their guide set out across the piazza.
Along a center line of the pavement stood a regiment of men in marching order. Their spears and the color of their featherwork shields gleamed dully in the crimson light. They formed a strange picture, and as Lassiter started for the teocalla, these men marched away toward the west.
Quiz-Quiz watched the soldiers go.
“That is our second army,” he said. “The first has been cut to pieces. Nobody can stand before men with thunder in their hands.”
As the army marched away, the murmur of the fugitives fell to silence. Here and there a woman shrieked and clung to one of the warriors. During the interlude, from far across the lake came the faint staccato of Nunes' automatic.
QUIZ-QUIZ led the way to the northern side entrance. Lassiter entered a hallway cut through solid stone and lighted by several tapers suspended in bowls of oil. The ceiling itself was so high it was lost in gloom. Here and there, in the long corridor, a priest moved about on some obscure errand.
The moment the great shutters clanged shut after the promoter the tumult of the piazza was muffled to a whisper. Quiz-Quiz directed Tilita and old Prymoxl to a stone bench carved into the side of the passage; then he conducted Lassiter forward and left the women sitting in the dim light, oppressed by the peculiar desolation of a vast public building.
Off each side of the hallway gave doors. One of these the hunchback opened and bowed Lassiter into a sort of audience chamber. At one end of the chamber spread a tapestry of featherwork, rising to a frieze of dull yellow metal. All the color was subdued in the light of some dozen tapers, but Lassiter could imagine how vivid would be the sheen by day.
On a dais, against this background, overflowing a huge chair, sat the naked, yellow bulk of Gogoma. The priest and his surroundings produced such a rich decorative effect that into Lassiter's mind came the immobile figure of the woman. He became dubious, after all, whether it were not sculpture. That piece of art could not be beyond the hand that lifted Gogoma's saffron bulk into such a decorative ensemble.
The air of the cavern was neither close nor stuffy, although it held the chill of all caverns. Nevertheless sweat beaded the priest's great form.
A third man was in the room, an old Indian who stood in front Of what might be called the archiepiscopal throne. Lassiter's entrance caught him amid sentence,
“—fire from a tree with his hand, O holy Gogoma, and the tree burned up. Then he promised that all the children of my son's wife should live in Motobatl. And I asked how would there be room for all the children born to live in Motobatl, and he said his God would push back the walls of Motobatl, and unroll the mountains into a vast and fertile country, and—and—” Here the Indian struck his head with his hand “—and perhaps he could, holy Gogoma, for he dashed fire from a tree
“My son, who already has his one child, took up his lance and joined this wonder-maker. But I am old, holy Gogoma. All my niñas are in the Sun. I must join them. I ran into the jungle. The other man, who stood persuading my son's wife, lifted his hand and hurled thunder after me. It struck off this finger—” The wretch held up the stump of a digit, still bleeding. “I turned. I ran”
The high priest interrupted the narrative with a wave of his pendulous arm.
“You may go, Maulo.”
The Indian backed away, prostrating himself at every step, and gripping the stump of his severed finger to prevent bleeding.
Gogoma then dismissed the hunchback and waited impassively until the door was closed. Then he turned to Lassiter.
“Señor,” he said in his unruffled, furry voice, “I sent for you because I overheard your words to Prymoxl concerning miracles, and I knew, at last, another man of intelligence had come to Motobatl”
The Stendill agent acknowledged the naked man's compliment with a slight bow.
“So I ask you, señor, to tell me how does Señor Birdsong strike fire and hurl thunder.”
“With sulphur matches and a pistol, Gogoma.” On afterthought he added—“They are usual, much less miraculous than grass and babies.”
The behemoth nodded slightly.
“I knew they were usual, señor. What I wanted to find out was whether you possess matches and pistols?”
“No,” admitted the promoter. “I had some matches, but Birdsong took them all.”
“Can you make more matches or pistols, señor?”
“I haven't the materials, or the skill, Gogoma.”
The high priest looked at Lassiter.
“Are you so poor a man, señor, as not to be able to make what you consume?”
“Wait, don't judge me hastily. In my country, Gogoma, each man does one thing well, and nothing else. Take my shoe, for instance—” the promoter held out his foot—“the labor of five thousand men went into that shoe. One man killed the cow, others stripped the hide, a whole tannery of men cured it, thousands of men worked over it in a shoe factory. Still another army of men grew the cotton and made the laces for the eyes. Look at the metal tip on this lace. It requires three men at machines to put the tip on the lace; that is all three men do, put tips on strings. So that is why I cannot make matches nor pistols.”
Certain faint movements of the hairs of the behemoth's nose and brows betrayed the astonishment he felt at his first glimpse of the highly specialized labor of a modern factory.
“By Pachacamac!” he rumbled. “Your countrymen must be as the leaves of the jungle to have so many workers. Just see what can be accomplished with the lives of many children—your priests must let all your babies live.”
Lassiter looked curiously at the mountain.
“Don't you?”
The bulk shook a jellied negative.
“That is another point I wished to speak about, Señor Lassiter.”
“About babies?”
“Si, señor.”
The promoter stared at the vast man curiously.
“What do you want to say about babies?”
“I wanted to show you why it is impossible for all babies born in Motobatl—to live.”
Lassiter's regard slowly filled with horror.
“Do you mean you”
The bulk nodded impassively.
“Thousands every year, senior.”
As the promoter gaped at the vast man, slowly there dawned upon him the significance of many riddles in Motobatl—old Prymoxl's babies living in the sun—the joy of the ill-starred Chacala at the promise of life for his child—the insurrection that at this moment fired Motobatl.
It was because many babies were not allowed in Motobatl. This huge brown polyp of a priest forbade life to children. He must have destroyed hundreds, thousands of innocents. The priest swelled in Lassiter's eyes into a vast Moloch.
As all the implications of this murderous gelatinous creature struck home at Lassiter, horror tickled his throat with its nasty feather; saliva formed in a little pool under his tongue, and he swallowed sickly. The cool air of the cavern grew clammy—the murderer of thousands of babies—it reminded him of the New York apartments, where landlords forbid children—sweat broke out on his forehead.
Gogoma, who sat watching the promoter, heaved his bulk slowly out of his chair, took a waddle to the American's side, then lifted him bodily and seated him in the huge seat. The promoter's slimness occupied perhaps a fifth of it. The behemoth clapped his pulpy hands. Quiz-Quiz appeared. The priest ordered a goblet of wine and gave it to Lassiter.
The Stendill agent drank. The enormous brown man stood studying his guest's face until its color flowed back. Then he continued standing beside the archiepiscopal throne and began one of the strangest, and not the least adroit, pleas that had ever been made at that seat of power.
“Señor Lassiter,” he purred, “your heart does you honor, but all men have hearts and few have brains. I wish to touch your brain.
“Look at Motobatl, señor, a little space, the width of a stride cramped in moveless bounds—and yet it is a place of sunlight and flowering, of amorous days and teasing nights.
“In Motobatl, señor, our maidens wed at thirteen years; and thereafter at each nine months or ten, their niñas nuzzle them with milky mouths. Within each ten months, señor, our population adds a half. Within thirteen years our people would be eight times as numerous as at present. During the fourteenth year, with new marriages, our people could increase three fourths our whole number; the next year it would double, and so with increasing strides to twice, thrice, fourfold—and Motobatl is but a little space, the width of a stride, imprisoned in moveless bounds.
“How could we house or feed or clothe so huge a press of life?”
The rhythm of the naked man's address held Lassiter's ear, and now the wine had restored his poise sufficiently for him to follow the thread of the argument. He was not sure whether this were a rhetorical pause or a question to be answered. But presently he said—
“Gogoma, the civilized way, the merciful way to deal with the question of population is to allow lack of food to starve—” And then the hideousness of his own solution brought him to silence. Never before had Lassiter put the conditions of modern life simply and frankly before himself.
The sweating tun agreed with an oscillation of the fat that draped his arm.
“That is true, Señor Lassiter, and for many years such was our custom in Motobatl. We allowed hunger to reduce our numbers, but hunger is much more cruel, Señor Lassiter. Moreover it demoralized our people. It made of them murderers, liars, lechers, beggars. The strong ill-used the weak. Armies rose up and fought for food and starved other armies. Starvation became part of military tactics.
“Such horrors took place that no human being could imagine it, had not our fore fathers knotted all this lore in the quippus which you or any literate man may unknot for himself. When our forefathers saw all these terrible things, señor, the priests made a law that all babies, save the first, should die.”
Lassiter had leaned back against the archiepiscopal chair. He nodded faintly.
“But it was a crude law. Our women hid their babies, and when found they fought the priests; they tore their flesh, and when their babies were destroyed, some sat on their babies' graves and wept, some driveled to the stars, some flung away all modesty and stalked the day as naked as I, and many died.
“And then the high priest, Vaihue, prayed to Pachacamac to send some means to take our babies to the bright mansions of the Sun and keep them there until the mothers came. One morning he awoke to find the web of the sun spread where it is today—a miraculous net, señor, and as the sun dips beneath the lake, babies in the web are transported to its effulgent halls—and the women are content”
“They believe it?”
The high priest lifted his hands.
“Señor, they must, else they would go mad and die. All humanity must have some religion, or the horrors of life will overcome them. Pachacamac is the god of the living, not the god of the dead.”
A silence fell between the men. From out on the piazza came the tumult of the people clamoring for their babies. It might have been the roaring of the sea against the coast.
“Why have you told me this, Gogoma?”
“So you can tell your friend, Señor Birdsong.”
“Birdsong?”
“Si, señor. Tell Señor Birdsong that he may become the high priest, that his God may become the God of Motobatl, if he will only preserve the web of the sun. That alone is necessary. Señor Birdsong would make a good high priest. He is hard and cruel, and unmarried. He seems to have no desire for marriage.”
“Why shouldn't a priest marry?”
“Because no man can have children of his own and attend the sacrifices.”
The South American agent sat in the huge chair and brooded over this strange request. He looked at the sweating brown man.
“Birdsong would not listen to me, Gogoma.”
“Will he not listen to reason?”
“No—he goes by a book.”
“Does his book permit babies?”
“Yes, it is a book for an open country—and a cool country.”
“But is Birdsong not a priest in his own country?”
“No, just a follower.”
The naked ecclesiast shook his head slowly.
“Such is the danger of lifting ignorant men to the priesthood—they believe what they teach. They serve the letter of the law, not its spirit. They serve the god of the dead, not the god of the living”
The high priest seemed to shake off some settling despondency.
“Go to him, señor—all you can do is to go to him and explain”
“He will probably kill me.”
“Very likely, my brother—I will pray”
“To whom?”
“I, Gogoma, the high priest, will pray, my brother.”
Lassiter got slowly out of the priestly seat. He felt queerly weak. It seemed hardly worth while to walk out of the door, or to speak to Birdsong, or to do anything. Somehow Gogoma's talk had stripped the veil off of things that were best left veiled. He walked out into the corridor.
On the stone bench, Tilita still sat. The taper over her head had guttered out.
Somehow the sight of the maiden seated at the door of the temple melted some frozen thing in Lassiter's heart. Suddenly he understood why women, always, were the religious moiety of mankind. They have so much more at stake.
A great tenderness ached in his throat. He ran to her and caught her in his arms. He kissed her with an intolerable compassion on her womanhood. His tears dropped on her neck and bosom.
The girl herself sobbed in sympathy, not knowing why.
Beside them, old Prymoxl snuffled, thinking of her niñas in the Sun. She was no obstacle to their fondling. So much of the masculine had she held in her that she was epicene; so many children had she borne that her personality was scattered; she was life's point of departure, an old caravanserai without traffic, deserted
Here and there-through the vast dimly lighted corridor moved a priest of the Sun on some obscure errand.