We crept between, scrambled over and slid down the huge broken fragments. The further down we went, the more intense became the cold. It had a still and creeping quality that seeped into the marrow. Sometimes we dropped the packs ahead of us, sometimes dragged them after us. And ever more savagely the cold bit into our bones.
By the frequent glimpses of the valley floor, I was more and more assured of its reality. Every mirage I had ever beheld—and in Mongolia I had seen many—had retreated, changed form, or vanished as I drew near. The valley floor did none of these things. It was true that the stones seemed to be squatter as we came closer; but I attributed that to the different angle of vision.
We were about a hundred feet above the end of the slide when I began to be less sure. The travelling had become peculiarly difficult. The slide had narrowed. At our left the rock was clean swept, stretching down to the valley as smoothly as though it had been brushed by some titantic broom. Probably an immense fragment had broken loose at this point, shattering into the boulders that lay heaped at its termination. We veered to the right, where there was a ridge of rocks, pushed to the side by that same besom of stone. Down this ridge we picked our way.
Because of my greater strength, I was carrying both our rifles, swung by a thong over my left shoulder. Also I was handling the heavier pack. We came upon an extremely awkward place. The stone upon which I was standing suddenly tipped beneath my weight. It threw me sideways. The pack slipped from my hands, toppled, and fell over on the smooth rock. Automatically I threw myself forward, catching at it. The thong holding the two rifles broke. They went slithering after the escaping pack.
It was one of those combinations of circumstances that makes one believe in a God of Mischance. The thing might have happened anywhere else on our journey without any result whatever. And even at that moment I didn't think it mattered.
"Well," I said, cheerfully, "that saves me carrying them. We can pick them up when we get to the bottom."
"That is," said Jim, "if there is a bottom."
I cocked my eye down the slide. The rifles had caught up with the pack and the three were now moving fast.
"There they stop," I said. They were almost on the rubble at the end.
"The hell they do," said Jim. "There they go!"
I rubbed my eyes, and looked and looked again. The pack and the pushing rifles should have been checked by that barrier at the slide's end. But they had not been. They had vanished.
Chapter VI
The Shadowed-land
There had been a queer quivering when rifles and pack had touched the upthrust of rock. Then they had seemed to melt into it.
"I'd say they dropped into the lake," said Jim.
"There's no lake. They dropped into some break in the rock. Come on—"
He gripped my shoulder.
"Wait, Leif. Go slow."
I followed his pointing finger. The barrier of stones had vanished. Where they had been, the slide ran, a smooth tongue of stone, far out into the valley.
"Come on," I said.
We went down, testing every step. With each halt, the nibbled plain became flatter and flatter, the boulders squatted lower and lower. A cloud drifted over the sun. There were no boulders. The valley floor stretched below us, a level slate–grey waste!
The slide ended abruptly at the edge of this waste. The rocks ended as abruptly, about fifty feet ahead. They stood at the edge with the queer effect of stones set in place when the edge had been viscous. Nor did the waste appear solid; it, too, gave the impression of viscosity; through it ran a slight but constant tremor, like waves of heat over a sun–baked road—yet with every step downward the bitter, still cold increased until it was scarcely to be borne.
There was a narrow passage between the shattered rocks and the cliff at our right. We crept through it. We stood upon an immense flat stone at the very edge of the strange plain. It was neither water nor rock; more than anything, it had the appearance of a thin opaque liquid glass, or a gas that had been turned semi–liquid.
I stretched myself out on the slab, and reached out to touch it. I did touch it—there was no resistance; I felt nothing. I let my hand sink slowly in. I saw my hand for a moment as though reflected in a distorting mirror, and then I could not see it at all. But it was pleasantly warm down there where my hand had disappeared. The chilled blood began to tingle in my numbed fingers. I leaned far over the stone and plunged both arms in almost to the shoulders. It felt damned good.
Jim dropped beside me and thrust in his arms.
"It's air," he said.
"Feels like it—" I began, and then a sudden realization came to me—"the rifles and the pack! If we don't get them we're out of luck!"
He said: "If Khalk'ru is—guns aren't going to get us away from him."
"You think this—" I stopped, memory of the shadowy shape in the lake of illusion coming back to me.
"Usunhi'yi, the Darkening–land. The Shadowed–land your old priest called it, didn't he? I'd say this fits either description."
I lay quiet; no matter what the certainty of a coming ordeal a man may carry in his soul, he can't help a certain shrinking when he knows his foot is at the threshold of it. And now quite clearly and certainly I knew just that. All the long trail between Khalk'ru's Gobi temple and this place of mirage was wiped out. I was stepping from that focus of Khalk'ru's power into this one—where what had been begun in the Gobi must be ended. The old haunting horror began to creep over me. I fought it.
I would take up the challenge. Nothing on earth could stop me now from going on. And with that determination, I felt the horror sullenly retreat, leave me. For the first time in years I was wholly free of it.
"I'm going to see what's down there." Jim drew up his arms. "Hold on to my feet, Leif, and I'll slip over the edge of the stone. I felt along its edge and it seems to go on a bit further."
"I'll go first." I said. "After all, it's my party."
"And a fine chance I'd have to pull you up if you fell over, you human elephant. Here goes—catch hold."
I had just time to grip his ankles as he wriggled over the stone, and his head and shoulders passed from sight. On he went, slowly writhing along the slanting rock until my hands and arms were hidden to the shoulders. He paused—and then from the mysterious opacity in which he had vanished came a roar of crazy laughter.
I felt him twist and try to jerk his feet away from me. I pulled him, fighting against me every inch of the way, out upon the stone. He came out roaring that same mad laughter. His face was red, and his eyes were shining drunkenly; he had in fact all the symptoms of a laughing drunk. But the rapidity of his respiration told me what had happened.
"Breathe slowly," I shouted in his ear. "Breathe slowly, I tell you."
And then, as his laughter continued and his struggles to tear loose did not abate, I held him down with one arm and closed his nose and mouth with my hand. In a moment or two he relaxed. I released him; and he sat up groggily.
"Funniest things," he said, thickly. "Saw funniest faces…"
He shook his head, took a deep breath or two, and lay back on the stone.
"What the hell happened to me, Leif?"
"You had an oxygen burn, Indian," I said. "A nice cheap jag on air loaded with carbon–dioxide. And that explains a lot of things about this place. You came up breathing three to the second, which is what carbon–dioxide does to you. Works on the respiratory centres of the brain and speeds up respiration. You took in more oxygen than you could use, and you got drunk on it. What did you see before the world became so funny?"