The Web of the Sun (Adventure Magazine, 1922)/Chapter 4
IV
ON THE following morning, the three men held a sort of inquest over the dead mules. Lassiter examined the top side of one of the brutes, the men then heaved the body over and the promotor set to work on that side. He made a minute examination, brushing the hair the wrong way to get at the skin. He did not find a single cut or puncture or scratch. The three mules lay intact.
After some half hour's investigation, he glanced up as Nunes—
“What about strangulation?”
“Not that, señor, its tongue is in its mouth, its eyes are in their sockets, there are no marks on the neck.”
Lassiter arose stiffly, brushed his palms together in an effort to rid them of the film of oil left by touching the animal.
“Suppose they were poisoned?”
“A mule will not eat at night, señor.”
“Then what could have killed them?”
The Colombian stared.
“Perhaps they were scared to death, señor.”
Lassiter looked up at the muleteer to see if he were jesting,
“What could scare the life out of a mule?”
The Colombian shrugged—
“Quien sabe, señor.”
Ezekiel Birdsong, who was over among the mule packs reassembling his Bibles into man-sized bundles, called out—
“It must have been a man with a lariat, brothers, a man on horseback. We saw that much.”
“We saw their eyes only, Señor Birdsong,” corrected Nunes.
“And I saw six eyes,” put in Lassiter wearily, for they had gone over the horseman theory several times.
“But you were excited, Brother Lassiter, no doubt you imagined the extra pair.”
“Of course that's true, I may have,” admitted the promoter, getting out a cigar and biting its end with a nervous snap, “but where did a horseman come from—out of the abyss, through the air, or up the trail?”
“It could have been a man riding up from Bujeos, who killed our mules and fled, señor."
“But how did he get away?” cried Lassiter. “Did he ride down the abyss, because whatever it was vanished in that direction right under Balthazar's pistol fire? A man couldn't ride down through space. No horse—no horse in the world—I tell you fellows it was a—a”
Lassiter's fancy wandered vaguely among condors, wyverns, dinosaurii—he recalled that the American newspapers recently carried reports of a post-diluvian monster discovered in Africa. It was a prodigious thing— Perhaps here in South America— Then he thought of the silken lariat and dropped the theory.
“It's bound to be a gaucho," drawled Birdsong with irritating complacency, “because nothing but a hoss could drag a dead mule and nobody in South America can throw them lariats without nooses except gauchos.”
Both Colombian and financier turned on the man from Arkansas.
“Who ever heard of a gaucho with a silk lariat, señor?"
“What would a gaucho be doing among the Andes, Birdsong?”
“Why should a gaucho kill our mules, señor?”
“And try to drag them over such a devilish high precipice at night, Birdsong?”
“You needn't get riled because I think it's a gaucho, brothers,” placated the colporteur as he tied a bundle.
“Well—no, certainly not”
“Pardon, señor, but—but the man who killed our mules must have come through the air, no es verdad, Señor Lassiter? And he went back the same way, absolutemente, I saw him go.”
The Stendill agent relighted his cigar and conned this new hypothesis—a flying man—a man who could fly noiselessly— The idea began to paint a new fantasia before Lassiter's mind, i
“Besides that,” droned out Birdsong, “I saw this gaucho laying right down on his horse's neck.”
The Stendill agent turned in irritation.
“Look here, Birdsong, gauchos live in the Argentine. How can you imagine one would be riding over the Andes at midnight?”
“And Señor Birdsong, how could a horse man come out of a chasm and go back into it again?”
“Brothers,” drawled the colporteur, “if God saw fit to punish my filthy dancing by bringing a”
“Mio Dios!” from Nunes.
“,” snapped the financier, “I might have known you thought”
“Brother,” explained Birdsong mildly, “last night, as I wrastled with God to get forgiveness for my filthy dancing, I asked Him to send down a miracle, if He would receive me back as His son.”
“Well—you got one,” agreed the Stendill agent, a little ashamed of his irritation. And he walked slowly back to the tent.
This carried him past the mule with the rope on its foot. It too lay scatheless, with out a hair turned from ears to fetlocks except where the silk rope ruffed its right fore ankle. Lassiter looked at the attachment of the rope. It was simply wrapped around the dead mule's foreleg, gaucho fashion, as Birdsong had said. He stooped, cut off a piece of it, and continued toward the tent, examining it. At first it seemed an ordinary cord of silk composed of four strands, but when he unwound a strand and attempted to ravel it, he found to his surprise, that it was not composed of smaller threads, but it was of a colloidal nature and resembled a string of glue or celluloid.
The New Yorker looked at it curiously. It was not silk. It was a rope manufactured, so far as he knew, out of some entirely unknown substance by some unknown method.
This discovery brought back to his mind the idea that had been edging in when Birdsong's remark had interrupted. Was it possible some man had visited them during the night with a noiseless airplane? Did an unknown civilization exist in the hinterlands of the Andes that manufactured a silken cordage out of some unknown colloid?
The moment Lassiter hit on this theory, the various threads in this snarl of facts began to straighten. The killing of the mules, the selection of the spot, the light he had seen in the abyss, all became amenable to human motives.
“Besides that,” drawled out Birdsong, evidently continuing some soliloquy, “them gauchos may have silk lassoes, I don't know”
Lassiter was so pleased over his idea, this did not annoy him. He called back cheerfully—
“This isn't silk.”
“Oh, it ain't,” drawled the colporteur calmly. “I thought you said it was.”
“I did, but it isn't.”
Lassiter expected the man from Arkansas to ask its material; instead, Birdsong merely remarked—
“Then you see, maybe God did send a gaucho after all.”
Lassiter burst out laughing.
“No, I don't. This is a new sort of rope, unknown to commerce. I am sure because the Stendill lines handle every sort of cordage from sisal to manilla hemp, from Egyptian”
Balthasar Nunes turned and was staring at the colporteur's assistant.
“The Stendill lines, señor—what are the Stendill lines?”
Lassiter collected his wits.
“It's a rope factory in America where I used to work and—er—make lines—er—ropes and all sorts of cordage.”
Nunes stroked his black mustache, cast an eye around at Birdsong and nodded agreeably.
Birdsong pursued the topic.
“Brother Lassiter, maybe the Lord provided that gaucho with a miraculous rope to get me past this bottomless pit made by the devil.”
“No doubt—no doubt—” and he returned to his study of the rope.
The Colombian joined Lassiter and helped him study the new find. The two men walked into the tent to sit and smoke and talk. Birdsong continued his work outside.
“This will explain Chombo Meone's story,” began Lassiter. “Take the supposition of the Jivaros, a small, but highly civilized people here in the Andes. If they wished to discourage contact with less cultured tribes, such as the Bujeans, would they not post guards in these mountains and kill the stock of travelers in an effort to frighten them?”
“Why wouldn't they kill the travelers themselves, señor?”
“Because they are civilized. You and I, for instance, we would avoid murder to the last extremity.”
“Oh—certainemente, absolutemente,” Balthasar nodded, strongly, “but, señor, why do you think the Jivaros are highly civilized?”
“This cordage suggests it. I never saw anything like it in the Stendill factories”
The agent was rather pleased at the casual way in which he corroborated his own story.
“A noiseless airship would prove it; it would explain why we saw that searchlight in the abyss last night; it explains why our own lives were spared— Just think, they have flying machines which they can use indifferently as a tractor to draw a dead mule, or to sail away into the void. It will be many a year before our civilization duplicates that, my dear Balthasar.”
Lassiter had a tenable theory now, and he felt good. He was hitting has conversational stride.
“But, señor, I thought the Jivaros were the fiends of hell.”
“Natural enough, my dear Balthasar. No doubt the Jivaros have been working for years trying to inculcate exactly that belief among all the surrounding savages. It's high time some civilized person was getting in touch with these people, negotiating trade relations—Why, great goodness, man, think of the tonnage from an entirely untouched territory—ships could sail right out of here”
“Ships! Ships sail out of here, señor!” cried Nunes in genuine alarm. “Surely, señor, last night's adventure has not turned your”
The Colombian paused, staring at the American.
“I mean the ships of the Jivaros—the airships,” explained the promotor, after a moment—“the sort we saw last night.”
Nunes looked away over the chasm before them, then glanced back at Lassiter, then at the chasm again.
“I see,” he nodded.
By this time, both men felt that the other was not talking frankly, and they dropped the subject of the Jivaros. The muleteer turned to neutral topics.
“I wonder what Señor Birdsong is going to do?”
LASSITER watched him. The short blocky rustic was carrying his newly made parcels one by one to the very edge of the abyss. Both Nunes and Lassiter jumped up and started toward him.
“Hey, Birdsong, what you want done?” called the promoter. “We make two hands, you know.”
The colporteur turned about.
“Well,” he said with his uncomfortable frankness, “I'm getting ready to go down into this place. I know you two fellows don't take much stock in the Lord's work. I didn't want to call on you to do anything.”
“I don't like that,” cried the New Yorker. “I'll admit I'm not the enthusiast you are, Birdsong, but when I start with a man I mean to see him— Say, how are you going to get down?”
Birdsong looked at him.
“I hate to tell you, Brother Lassiter.”
“Why?” cried the agent, greatly surprized.
“Because when I mention anything about my Lord and Master, it seems like it kinder throws you and Brother Nunes in a bad temper.”
Birdsong's drawl was monotonous as usual, but his words painted clearly enough his loneliness of soul. A qualm of self-reproach went through Lassiter.
“I'll help you carry the Bibles to the edge, Zeke,” he proffered fraternally, “and you can tell me how you are going to get down if you care to.” He followed the man from Yell to his bundles, picked up one and started to the edge.
“Well—it's just this,” began Birdsong with a certain humble boldness, “I'm doing my part in spreaden the blessed Word among the heathen and I know the Lord'll do His. He'll git 'em down there somehow”
“You—you expect a miracle to lift these books to the bottom of the cliff?”
“Yes, and me too, Brother Lassiter,” agreed Birdsong simply; then he added, “You needn't carry none unless you want to, Brother Lassiter.”
“Oh—I—I'll help”
The steamship agent's nerves teetered on the edge of mirth, pity for, and wonder at this indomitable monomaniac. Then, with a queer feeling, Lassiter recalled how Birdsong had simply walked out into Madison Square and waited for a berth on the Brazilian—and it had come. Now he was just as simply lugging his Bibles to the brink of the precipice— However, there was this difference between the two events. In New York, Birdsong had one chance in about a million. Here, he had none at all.
He had no chance because the expedition had been stopped by the crater of a volcano. Not exactly a crater either, but the sides of a volcano whose top had crushed in some millions of years ago. The ruins of such cataclysms are fairly frequent in Ecuador. This one had left a vast circular hole in the earth which appeared to be about a mile or a mile and a quarter in depth and about eighteen or twenty miles in width.
In daylight it did not appear so enormous as at sunset, but Lassiter realized that at this hour it was really larger than it seemed. He judged it must be wider than the Grand Cañon, and perhaps deeper. It was huger than the crater of Kilauea in Hawaii because it was not a crater, but the circular ramparts of a volcano truncated by its summit crashing into its base. That long-gone catastrophe left a vast concavity, with walls five or six thousand feet high that leaned strongly inward. Into this impossible place, Birdsong expected to be translated.
The walls of this enormous barricade were colorful with a red cast that varied into grays and blues. And the vast circuit was molded into strange architectural shapes, something like the mesas of New Mexico and Utah.
Its bottom was lined with a verdure which showed vividly green, even from that great height. This green expanse was broken only in a place or two, and by a lake near the center of the volcano, and a stream that led away to its eastern side. No doubt, this lake, which slept so tranquilly in the heart of the great inclosure, furnished the steam, millions of years ago, which demolished one of the smoking Andes and left this splendid ruin in its stead.
Lassiter did not mention this probable geologic history to Birdsong, because he knew the colporteur would instantly affirm that that explosion æons ago had been staged for the express purpose of testing his, Ezekiel Birdsong's, faith in this day of grace.
And Lassiter knew if Birdsong said that, he would get angry and they would quarrel again.
The Stendill agent was just hefting the last pack to a tired shoulder when Nunes, who was walking about the rim, admiring the view below, paused, bent over, and after a moment called Lassiter to come there, that he had found some more rope of the Jivaros.
The financier veered and approached the spot with his last bundle. He laid it down wearily, wriggled his shoulder in relief and asked Nunes where. The Colombian pointed to a bit of the stuff just protruding over the inner scarp of the precipice.
The American was afraid to walk down and look at it, but he laid down on his stomach, told Nunes to hold his legs, and inched forward until his head protruded over the edge.
The vast depth, the lean of the wall on which he was poised gave Lassiter a swift sickening feeling of lurching forward in a mile-long plunge. He shut his eyes tightly, and drew a shivery breath, but for a full half a minute he could still feel himself falling inward with the swing of the wall. Presently he saw nothing except the red light filtering through his closed eyelids. He opened them in a tiny crack.
By eliminating the vastitude of the abyss, he overcame his sense of falling given by the concave walls. So he lay and looked with nerves more or less steady. To his surprize, then to his amazement, he saw that a strand of the Jivaros rope extended from the rim of the crater downward and inward for about a hundred and fifty feet and attached to one of the huge irregularities or folds in the stony circuit that gave the opposite side of the great palisades its peculiar sculptured appearance.
How the rope ever became connected between the two places, Lassiter could not imagine, because a plumb line would have missed the ledge below by a good fifty feet. Then he saw that the upper end of the rope, immediately under his eyes, was merely glued to the rocky face of the precipice.
Lassiter could scarcely believe his senses. To attach a rope to anything by gluing—it was fantastic. Yet, brief reflection told him this would be the only method of anchoring a line on bare stone. He reached down gingerly, and pulled at the rope. It was tightly drawn from point and his pull did not budge the glue in the slightest degree. Indeed, it held with the same sort of firmness as does a wire rope anchored in a suspension bridge. While Lassiter was making these investigations, Nunes drew him back by his legs. The promotor made no objections. In fact, he felt a sense of relief when good solid stone shut off the vertiginous depth beneath him.
Nunes pulled him in and asked anxiously, “Are you well, señor?”
“Yes, why?”
The fellow seemed shaken.
“I—I was talking to you, señor, and you did not answer—why, you are as white as a ghost. What did you see?”
“A rope.”
“A rope! Mio Dios, is that all? Do you lie half an hour stretched out looking at a rope!”
“Half an hour—” Lassiter stared at the Colombian, then realized, with a queer sensation, that he had fainted.