CHAPTER VI

The Temple of the Stars

Far from echoing the agitation I felt, Rawson seemed actually pleased at the turn of events. It piqued his imagination to think that we should be so far beneath the sea; and he conjured up all manner of alluring possibilities that testified more to his youth than to his common sense. He suggested that we were the discoverers of a great and magnificent empire which we should explore, conquer and then annex to the United States; and he formed his plans regardless of the probability that we should never see the United States again, and almost as though there were regular transportation facilities to the upper world. The sheer scientific difficulties--the apparent impossibility that a cavern free from water could exist beneath the ocean, the even more striking impossibility that human beings could inhabit such a cavern--seemed to make little impression upon the illogical mind of Rawson; and he was convinced that only by the rarest good fortune had we been entombed in these fantastic and dream-like depths.

So intense was his enthusiasm, that he urged me to descend at once with him to the many-templed city. But I did not willingly accede; I pointed out that it would be wiser to hasten back to the submarine, inform Captain Gavison of what we had seen, and return here--if we returned at all--in greater numbers than at present. Besides, as I reminded Rawson, the Captain had ordered us back within twenty-four hours; and, if we dallied, some mischance might delay us until too late.

Had Rawson but had a dim prevision of the black hours ahead, he would certainly have accepted my suggestions. But, perversely enough, he seemed to be almost without his usual fears just when those fears might have proved most useful. And since of course I could not allow myself to be outdone in bravery by a mere boy, I had to signify a grudging assent to his proposal. I must confess, however, that my motives were not unmixed, for pictures of the iridescent dancing girl kept flitting before my mind and would give me no peace; and I may have had hopes (I will not say that I did) of meeting her again in this city of fountains and palaces.

But not a living creature could be seen stirring in the avenues of that strange town as Rawson and I began our slow descent. Once or twice we thought we saw the glimmer of a light or the flash of some moving thing in the far distance, but we could not be sure; and the silence and the immobility gave the general effect of a city of the dead. There was something ghostly about that calm, still atmosphere, something that might have made me turn back in alarm had it not been for the presence of Rawson; but there was also something soothingly peaceful, a charmed quiet that brought to mind the fairy tales I had heard in childhood, and in particular that enchanted palace where the Sleeping Beauty had slumbered for a hundred years. Here, I thought, one might dream away a hundred years or a thousand, and never know that time had passed at all; here, conceivably, the ancient world might lapse into the modern, and the modern into the far future without apparent change.

My reveries were interrupted by our arrival at the gates of the city. We passed beneath a high arch almost Roman in style, with marble base and facade ornamented with strange blue sea-shells; then, proceeding along a winding cement walk inlaid with mother-of-pearl, we approached the most stately palace of all. In architecture, it was totally dissimilar to anything we had ever before observed: although perhaps five hundred feet in length, it was as much like a great statue as like a building; it had none of those features common in edifices for the shelter of man and his works, but seemed to have been erected exclusively as a piece of art. Its form was that of a woman, a woman reclining at full length, her breast to the ground, her head slightly elevated, propped meditatively upon her palm; and the structure as a whole had been planned with such subtlety and skill, with such consummate attention to every detail of the woman’s position, form and garments and to the beatific and yet lifelike expression of the face, that Rawson and I could only pause in bewildered silence and stare and stare as though this work had been created through no human agency but by some superhuman master hand.

In that first spellbound moment, it did not occur to us that there might be an entrance to the palace. But at length, where a lock of the woman’s dark, sculptured hair fell across her breast, we noted a little doorway so skilfully concealed that it had originally escaped our attention. Since the gate swung wide upon the hinges, curiosity, of course, prompted us to glance within--and with results that proved but a further spur to curiosity. All that we could see was a pale, golden glitter against a background of black; but imagination supplied that which our physical sight could not reveal, and we had visions of gorgeous halls and corridors which we longed to inspect.

* * * * *

Had our courage been sufficient, we would have entered at once. The idea, in fact, came to both of us simultaneously, but at first neither of us could summon up the requisite boldness. There seemed to be something mysteriously, almost irresistibly, attractive about that twinkling darkness, something that held us fascinated and forbade us to leave; and for several minutes we stood hesitating, and straining our eyes, yet making no motion to invade the unknown.

Then, when the suspense had become so protracted as to be ridiculous, Rawson surprised me by exclaiming, suddenly, “I’m not afraid!” And at the same time he slapped his sides energetically as though to prove to himself that he had no fears. “I’m going right in!” he announced, with what I thought to be unnecessary loudness. And, feeling for his revolver with a hand that trembled perceptibly, Rawson strode resolutely into the building.

There was nothing for me to do but follow. But, somehow, I could not help wishing that my friend had not been so rash; and, somehow, I foresaw that we might not be able to leave this strange edifice so easily as we had entered.

But, once within, we forgot our misgivings in contemplation of the magnificent scene around us. I had been in luxurious galleries before; I had seen the most ornate salons of the Old World, and the most lavishly bedecked of mosques and cathedrals; but never had I viewed or imagined so utterly sublime a hall. Here was a new art of the interior decorator, an art that seemed wholly without parallel in human experience; I was scarcely conscious that I was indoors, but rather felt myself to be in the open, in the open at night, under the wide and glittering heavens, with the light of innumerable stars above me, and the dim cloudy arch of the Milky Way. How the artist had produced his effect was more than I could say, but somehow, in his limited space, he had given the impression of vastness and distance, of the mystery and infinite silence of the starlight; and as I stood there entranced, I could almost imagine that I was back again on earth, gazing out into the night-skies as I had gazed so often from the Vermont hills with Alma Huntley.... And yet, perfectly patterned as they were, these skies were not the skies I had known. As I stood there watching, I became aware that certain of the constellations were slightly, almost indistinguishably out of position, the stars not quite in their proper relations to one another--and why this was, I could not attempt to say. But more striking was another alteration that had been wrought deliberately and with subtle artistry: above the stars, and about the thin girdle of the Milky Way, were filmy formations of light, which--perhaps it was only my imagination--gradually resolved themselves into tenuous human figures. One, an exquisitely graceful woman, seemed to be playing upon some lyre-like instrument; another, a youth with head uplifted as though in enraptured contemplation, impressed me as the spirit of all human aspiration; and still others, no less consummately outlined, appeared to represent the hopes and loves and immortal yearnings of man.

But while I remained rooted there in ecstatic contemplation, filled with wonder at the paradox of beholding the stars thousands of feet beneath the sea, there occurred one of those changes by which occasionally a beautiful dream becomes distorted into a nightmare. Imagine the consternation of one who, while gazing at the cloudless night-skies, finds blackness suddenly sweeping all about him--a blackness that has quenched the stars as a storm might quench a candle flame. Such consternation was ours, and even greater horror, for without so much as a flicker of warning, the lights of the seeming heavens flashed out, and darkness stretched above us and all about us, a darkness so all-consuming that not even a shadow remained. With half-suppressed cries of terror, Rawson and I turned to one another, each totally invisible in the blank night; and before we had had time for coherent speech, there came a rattling and a slamming from behind us, and we knew that the one possible exit had been closed and that we were prisoners in this unknown place.

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