And in the sudden, dead silence broken only by the hum of an idling car and the wail of a frightened baby, a new sound became audible. It was the tramp of marching feet. With it came a curious clanking and clattering noise. And then a marked command, which was definitely not in the English language.
Down the street of a suburb of Joplin, Missouri, on June 5, in the Year of Our Lord 1935, came a file of spear-armed, shield-bearing soldiers in the short, skirt-like togas of ancient Rome. They wore helmets upon their heads. They peered about as if they were as blankly amazed as the citizens of Joplin who regarded them. A long column of marching men came into view, every man with shield and spear and the indefinable air of being used to just such weapons.
They halted at another barked order. A wizened little man with a short sword snapped a question at the staring Americans. The high-school boy jumped. The wizened man roared his question again. The high-school boy stammered, and painfully formed syllables with his lips. The wizened man grunted in satisfaction. He talked, articulating clearly if impatiently. And the high-school boy turned dazedly to the other Americans.
“He wants to know the name of this town,” he said, unbelieving his own ears. “He’s talking Latin, like I learn in school. He says this town isn’t on the road maps, and he doesn’t know where he is. But all the same he takes possession of it in the name of the Emperor Valerius Fabricius, emperor of Rome and the far corners of the earth.” And then the school-boy stuttered, “He-he says these are the first six cohorts of the Forty second Legion, on garrison duty in Messalia. “That-that’s supposed to be two days march up that way.” He pointed in the direction of St. Louis.
The idling motor car roared suddenly into life. Its gears whined and it came rolling out into the street. Its horn honked peremptorily for passage through the shield-clad soldiers. They gaped at it. It honked again and moved toward them. A roared order, and they flung themselves upon it, spears thrusting, short swords stabbing. Up to this instant there was not one single inhabitant of Joplin who did not believe the spear-armed soldiers were motion picture actors, or masqueraders, or something else equally insane but credible. But there was nothing make-believe about their attack on the car. They assaulted it as if it were a strange and probably deadly beast. They flung themselves into battle with it in a grotesquely reckless valor.
And there was nothing at all make-believe in the thoroughness and completeness with which they speared Mr. Horace B. Davis, who had only intended to drive down to the cotton-brokerage office of which he was chief clerk. They thought he was driving this strange beast to slaughter them, and they slaughtered him instead. The high-school boy saw them do it, growing whiter and whiter as he watched. When a swordsman approached the wizened man and displayed the severed head of Mr. Davis, with the spectacles dangling grotesquely from-one ear, the high-school boy fainted dead away.
II
It was sunrise of June 5, 1935. Cyrus Harding gulped down his breakfast in the pale-gray dawn. He had felt very dizzy and sick for just a moment, some little while since, but he was himself again now. The smell of frying filled the kitchen. His wife cooked. Cyrus Harding ate.
He made noises as he emptied his plate. His hands were gnarled and work-worn, but his expression was of complacent satisfaction. He looked at a calendar hung on the wall, a Christmas sentiment from the Bryan Feed & Fertilizer Co., in Bryan, Ohio.
“Sheriff’s goin’ to sell out Amos today,” he said comfortably. “I figger I’ll get that north forty cheap.”
His wife said tiredly, “He’s been offerin’ to sell it to you for a year.”
“Yep,” agreed Cyrus Harding more complacently still. “Comin’ down on the price, too. But nobody’ll bid against me at the sale. They know I want it bad, and I ain’t a good neighbor to have when somebuddy takes somethin’ from under my nose. Folks know it. I’ll git it a lot cheaper’n Amos offered it to me for. He waited to sell it to meet his interest and hold on another year. I’ll git it for half that.”
He stood up and wiped his mouth. He strode to the door.
“That hired man shoulda got a good start with his harrowin’,” he said expansively. “I’ll take a look and go over to the sale.”
He went to the kitchen door and opened it. Then his mouth dropped open. The view from this doorway was normally that of a not especially neat barnyard, with beyond it farmland flat as a floor and cultivated to the very fence rails, with a promising crop of corn as a border against the horizon. Now the view was quite otherwise. All was normal as far as the barn. But beyond the barn was delirium.
Huge, spreading tree ferns soared upward a hundred feet. Lacy, foliated branches formed a roof of incredible density above sheer jungle such as no man on earth had ever seen before. The jungles of the Amazon basin were parklike by comparison with its thickness. It was a riotous tangle of living vegetation in which growth was battle, and battle was life, and life was deadly, merciless conflict.
No man could have forced his way ten feet through such a wilderness. From it came a fetid exhalation which was part decay and part lush, rank, growing things, and part the overpowering perfumes of glaringly vivid flowers. It was jungle such as paleobotanists have described as existing in the Carboniferous period; as the source of our coal beds.
“It—it ain’t so!” said Cyrus Harding weakly. “It ain’t so!”
His wife did not reply. She had not seen. Wearily, she began to clean up after her lord and master’s meal.
He went down the kitchen steps, staring and shaken. He moved toward this impossible apparition which covered his crops. It did not disappear as he neared it. He went within twenty feet of it and stopped, still staring, still unbelieving, beginning to entertain the monstrous supposition that he had gone insane.
Then, something moved in the jungle. A long, snaky neck, feet thick at its base and tapering to a mere sixteen inches behind a head the size of a barrel. The neck reached out the twenty feet to him. Cold eyes regarded him abstractedly. The mouth opened. Cyrus Harding screamed.
His wife raised her eyes. She looked through the open door and saw the jungle. She saw the jaws close upon her husband. She saw colossal, abstracted eyes half close as the something gulped; and partly choked, and swallowed .... She saw a lump in the monstrous neck move from the relatively slender portion just behind the head to the feet thick section projecting from the jungle. She saw the head withdraw into the jungle and instantly be lost to sight.
Cyrus Harding’s widow was very pale. She put on her hat and went out of the front door. She began to walk toward the house of the nearest neighbor. As she went, she said steadily to herself:
“It’s come. I’m crazy. They’ll have to put me in an asylum. But I won’t have to stand him anymore. I won’t have to stand him any more!”
It was noon of June 5, 1935. The cell door opened and a very grave, whiskered man in a curious gray uniform came in. He tapped the prisoner gently on the shoulder.
“I’m Dr. Holloway,” he said encouragingly. “Suppose you tell me, suh, just what happened to you? I’m right sure it can all be straightened out.”
The prisoner sputtered: “What—why—dammit,” he protested, “I drove down from Louisville this morning. I had a dizzy spell and—well—I must have missed my road, because suddenly I noticed that everything around me was unfamiliar. And then a man in a gray uniform yelled at me, and a minute later he began to shoot, and the first thing I knew they’d arrested me for having the American flag painted on my car! I’m a traveling salesman for the Uncle Sam Candy Bar Co.! Dammit, it’s funny when a man can’t fly his own country’s flag ....”