CHAPTER V

The Demon of the Night

I HAD been overconfident when I had assumed that it would be possible to go around the lake and that it formed no real bar to our progress. Everywhere, the water extended for miles among the clumps of bamboos and jungle, and we gave it a wide berth, keeping well up on the hillside and searching for a dry spot where we might cross the valley. But in this we were fated to be disappointed.

The water dwindled to a narrow lagoon barely fifty feet in width, and then expanded into a second lake. It would have been a simple matter to have waded across the place had it not been for the alligators or crocodiles (I am not sure which they were); but their presence was attested by the snouts, backs and eyes that everywhere dotted the surface of the water like half-submerged logs. There was, however, one way of crossing it. An immense tree had toppled from the mountain side and had fallen athwart the black pool, its summit resting on the opposite shore. But it was a ticklish bridge at best. It was round, slippery, and its lower surface was in the water itself, so that as one crossed by it, one’s feet were scarcely a yard above the pool with its watchful, lurking inhabitants waiting with hungry jaws to dash at one. For an hour or more we waited, trying to summon up the courage to attempt the crossing, until at last, unable to endure the inaction longer, I rose, removed my shoes, and telling Maliche I was going to risk it, I slipped as silently as possible towards the roots of the fallen tree.

Realizing that if I were to reach the farther shore in safety, I must make a dash for it, I waited for a moment, breathing deeply, and then, with a silent prayer and with my eyes fixed on the opposite shore, I took my life in my hands and raced over the log. A dozen times I slipped and nearly fell, a dozen times I had an almost irresistible temptation to glance to one side or the other, to look down at the water. My ears sensed the splashing of dozens of tails, the snapping of dozens of terrible jaws. The log seemed endless, but at last, with panting lungs and pounding heart, I covered the last few yards of the natural bridge, stumbled through the tangle of dead branches, and dropped, faint and trembling, upon the opposite bank.

A moment later Maliche joined me. Slowly, one by one, the baffled alligators sank from sight, and thankful indeed that we had survived, we resumed our way. Several hours later we reached the summit of the mountain and to my delight saw the twin peaks of the volcanoes looming sharp and clear a little to the east. Pointing to these landmarks, I told Maliche our way led towards them, and to make my meaning clearer, I showed him the codex with the volcanoes indicated upon it. Instantly he burst out in a torrent of wild incomprehensible words, he shook his head, his eyes were wide with fear, and he gestured excitedly. Even when, partly calmed, he tried to explain in Tecun, I could not make head or tail of his meaning. But when I asked him bluntly if he was afraid to go on, and informed him I was going anyway, he shook his head, declared he was my slave and my shadow, and denied all dread. Poor, good, faithful Maliche! Savage cannibal though he was, yet he was as brave, as true, as fine a man as ever lived. To him I owe a debt of gratitude I can never repay, for without him and his companionship, all my efforts would have been in vain. And had I but known what he was trying to tell me, had I understood his dialect, much that followed might have been avoided. And yet, perhaps, it was all in the plan, all a part of the destiny that beckoned me, with an unseen but irresistible finger, from beyond those smoking cones to the east.

We marched steadily all that day, traversing rolling hills covered with forest, meeting with no adventure, fortunate in securing game, and always with the twin cones in sight.

For two days this continued. The land was almost park-like in its beauty, its open glades, its flashing streams, its giant trees. We fared well, the weather was perfect, and all our past sufferings and perils were forgotten. But on the third day the surroundings changed. The forest gave place to scrubby, brushy jungle; the soft earth was replaced by rough, rocky, sterile ground; great boulders were to be seen here and there, and in places we crossed bare areas of jagged broken rock. Rapidly the vegetation grew more and more sparse and the rock-strewn areas wider. Aloes, cacti and spiny bromeliads took the place of vines, shrubs and trees, and by mid-afternoon we came to the last of the vegetation and halted at the edge of a vast barren expanse of raw red rock, immense black boulders and dunes of glaring multicolored sand. I had thought a desert could not exist, but here before us was a veritable desert--the burnt-out, cinder-blasted, lava-covered plain, desolated by some past eruption of the volcanoes, that now towered to the zenith within a dozen miles of where we stood.

And once more I felt that strange tingling of my scalp, that indescribable fear of the supernatural, as I remembered the prophecy--the words of Katchilcan, “and beyond the Pit of the great Zotional, even then one must cross the eight deserts.”

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BUT once again I laughed my fears away. There was nothing strange, nothing supernatural about this lava flow. It was exactly the same formation as the “Bad Lands” of our own northwest. Provided with plenty of water and food anyone could cross it. It was barely a dozen miles in width--a few hours’ tramp to the farther side--and there was only one desert.

But to cross so late in the day would be foolish. It was wiser to camp for the night, and start fresh at dawn before the cinder and lava scintillated with the heat of the tropical sun.

Moreover, and this thought quite drove any lingering foolish fears from my mind, the fact that everything so far agreed with the codex and with Katchilcan’s words, pointed towards my ultimate success, towards the actual existence of the hidden city of Mictolan, though I very much doubted if the ancient secret city would still be inhabited. More probably, I thought, it would be in ruins, for in the two thousand years and more that had passed since the Book of Kukulcan was made, there was every chance that the people--always provided there had been any--would have died out, migrated to other localities, been decimated by wars or would have reverted to a semi-savage nomadic life. Cut off from the rest of their race, no longer under the rule of the ancient empire, and outside the influence of the culture and civilization of their fellows, there was scarcely a chance that the colony had survived as an entity, or at least as a civilized community, for twenty centuries and more. The whole known history of the Mayas was against it. The empire had fallen and vanished through the jealousies and feuds of various leaders and the political wars. States and cities had been split up, divided into factions, and I felt sure that the same causes and the same racial traits that had caused the abandonment of such cities as Copan, Chichen Itza, Lubaantum and other great Mayan centres would also have resulted in the abandonment of Mictalon, if that city had existed.

We decided to camp at the desert’s edge, as I have said, but, there was no water at the spot, and Maliche slipped away and returned within an hour with two large gourds or calabashes filled with water from a stream we had passed several miles back. Even though the bare area was so small, I felt that it would be wise to carry a supply of water with us. In the tropical jungles, where there is always a superfluity rather than a scarcity of water, no one ever dreams of carrying a canteen, but the calabashes would serve excellently for the purpose. The night passed uneventfully, and before the sun had risen, we were up and tramping across the barren waste towards the dim shapes of the volcanoes, whose summits emitted a soft red glow against the rapidly-paling sky.

The air was cool and fresh, and even though the sharp bits of rock and loose ash of the desert were hard on our feet, it was a rather welcome change--at least to me--after the interminable jungles. Maliche, however, was ill at ease. As the sun rose higher, he glanced apprehensively about, kept close to me and seemed nervous. Possibly it was merely the Indian’s inherent dread of the unknown, perhaps it was superstition, or a premonition, or again it may have been merely the effect of the strangeness, the newness of a desert, upon a man accustomed all his life to forests and jungles. As the sun rose higher we suffered from the heat and glare, but we had already made good headway, and I flattered myself we would be at the farther side of the desert before the hottest part of the day. But though we tramped for hours, though the sun reached the zenith, although the ashes under our blistered feet felt like redhot iron, though the air was like the blast from a furnace, though our eyes ached and blurred with the blinding glare, we seemed no nearer the distant volcanoes, and the farther side of the desert seemed ever to recede as we advanced. Our throats were parched and dry and the warm water in the gourds seemed only to add to our thirst. Still we kept on, and by the middle of the afternoon we could see that we actually were making progress, that the green hillsides behind us were faint and hazy in the distance, that the vegetation ahead was nearer, clearer, though the twin cones seemed as far away as ever. Not until the sun was sinking in the west did we reach the edge of the blasted plain and the vegetation beyond it. But the spot that had appeared green and cool from a distance was little better than the desert itself; a growth of harsh dry grass, dull-green cacti, stiff-leaved aloes, thorny bromeliads, stunted shrubs and bushes and a few spiny-stemmed dwarf palms. Farther in, the growth was thicker, greener and more promising, but there was no water, and the few drops remaining in our calabashes barely wetted our dry and dusty mouths. Maliche, however, had the instincts of the primitive savage, the ability to make the most of Nature’s scantiest resources, and though I am quite sure he had never before seen a desert or desert plants, though he had never been in want of water, yet he at once rose to the emergency. Cutting off the top of a huge barrel-shaped cactus, and scooping out the pithy interior, he soon had several quarts of clear cool sap which--although slightly bitter in taste--was the most delicious draught that ever passed my lips. Too tired to go a step farther, we stopped where we were, ate what remained of our meat, and slept on the bare sand. Little did we know what lay before us when, on the following morning, we rose with aching limbs and swollen feet, and with only cactus sap to allay our hunger, again resumed our way. We were buoyed up with the expectations of finding water and game, of traveling through the cool forests once more; we felt the worst was over, and we pushed our way through the dusty thorn-covered vegetation, but we had not gone one hundred yards when the brush thinned and before us stretched a second ash-covered plain. The vegetation that I had thought was the limit of the desert was merely a narrow strip, a hedge between the desert we had crossed and the one before us.

* * * * *

WEARY, hungry, blistered as we were, there was no choice but to continue. The plain before us was smaller than the first, and having filled our gourds with the cactus juice, we grimly faced the burned-out world and the sufferings we knew were ahead of us. By noonday we had crossed it, had reached the luring vegetation on the farther side, only to find that beyond that was still another desert.

But we were slightly better off now. Maliche stalked and killed a gopher-like animal that resembled a giant prairie-dog; we tasted the pulpy fruits of a cactus and found them edible, and I discovered a hollow in the sand filled with the eggs of some large lizard. With our stomachs filled, we felt far better, and the barren waste ahead appearing small, we decided to attempt the crossing before dark. The next few days--I lost all track of time--were a nightmare. Whether there were eight or eighty deserts I shall never know. They seemed interminable, endless, each promising to be the last, only to deceive us as another appeared beyond. And still those silent smoking peaks with their baleful glare at night seemed as distant as ever. My brain reeled, visions hovered before my bloodshot, smarting eyes; my entire body seemed shrivelled, dried, desiccated.

We ate whatever came our way--lizards, snakes, horned-toads, even insects. Maliche’s ribs and joints seemed on the point of breaking through his skin; my face and hands were raw; streamers of skin hung in shreds from my neck and wrists, but still we kept on, and at last, more dead than alive, came to the end of the hellish wastes of lava and ash and reached the black basaltic ridges that led up to the flanks of the mighty volcanoes now close at hand. Between the frowning cliffs a stream flowed through a green swale, and with our last remaining strength, we reached the bank and plunged into the water.

For hours we lay there, our burned, tortured bodies laved by the cool water, absorbing it, reveling in it, until at last, refreshed, our smarting raw flesh comforted and eased, hunger forced us to emerge and search for food.

Alone I might have starved after all, but Maliche was a child of the wilderness; he seemed able literally to smell game if it were near, and he soon secured two pheasant-like birds, while I felt quite proud of myself for having captured a dozen or more big crayfish from beneath the stones in the river’s bed.

We had been through a terrible ordeal, and I thanked God that the “whirlwind that cut the rocks” had been spared us, even though all the other terrors of Katchilcan’s story had materialized according to schedule. Still--and I glanced apprehensively about and shivered at the thought--there was yet time, for despite my common sense and reason I was becoming imbued with the idea, obsessed with the conviction that the Book of Kukulcan would be borne out to the letter. Indeed, so foolishly (or so I considered it) superstitious, or credulous, had I become that my half-formed fears of what was to come were allayed by remembrance of the old priest’s statement that the way would be made easy to him who owned the codex. I rather smiled at the thought. If our way across those terrible deserts had been “easy,” then Heaven have mercy on the unfortunate to whom the passage was hard!

But whatever might be in store, there seemed nothing threatening in the spot where we were at the moment, and I cannot hope to describe the delight, the comfort, the luxury of the soft green foliage, the cool moss-covered earth, and the babbling of the stream after those nightmarish days of endless sand, lava and scorching, blistering sun.

With our stomachs filled with good food, with our weary limbs rested, with the musical sound of the brook and the chirping of insects in our ears, we stretched ourselves upon the soft earth and slept.

With a start, an involuntary yell, I leaped up, dazed, bewildered, trembling. Was it a nightmare or a reality that had awakened me, terrified me? Maliche too, was awake. He, too, was shaking, glancing about with terror on his face. Had the same thing aroused him, to leave him weak, filled with nameless dread, or had my yell, my movement, awakened him? With stammering tongue, I formed a question. But the words died on my lips, my face blanched and I shook, shivered, cowered as the still night air was rent by a blood-curdling, piercing, demoniacal scream from somewhere in the blackness.

As the terrible, unearthly, banshee-like wail died down in a long-drawn quavering howl, I could hear Maliche’s teeth chatter, and chills ran up and down my own spine. What was it? What dread creature had emitted that awful sound? I had heard jaguars, pumas, ocelots, every wild beast and bird of America--but none were like this; nothing, no other cry or sound held in it the terror, the weird, the ghastly, nightmarish, supernatural quality of this cry. Then, once more, the night was shattered by that cry that might have issued from a tortured soul in Purgatory. Maliche fairly babbled with fear, I had an insane desire to cover my head, to flatten myself on the ground, to stuff my ears, to shut out that unearthly sound that rose and fell and that seemed to come from every side. And then, as with fear-wide eyes I glanced up, scream after scream came from my lips. Above us, moving swiftly, silently back and forth, a great black shadow against the starlit sky, was an immense shape--a monstrous something with huge eyes that glowed like green fire. Maliche saw it at the same instant. With a scream of abject terror he flung himself on the earth. “Izputeque!” he yelled, “Izputeque!”

Like a volplaning airplane the thing swooped towards us, uttering that blood-freezing shriek as it came. In a frenzy of fear, powerless to move, bereft of thought, I unconsciously whipped out my revolver, and as fast as I could press trigger, fired all six shots at the horrible thing. As the reports of the shots thundered and echoed from the surrounding cliffs, a scream more horrible than those that had gone before came from the huge, winged thing. I felt a rush of wind, a nauseating odor filled my nostrils; there was a terrific crash, and all was still.

* * * * *

[Illustration: A giant pterodactyl swooped down, apparently heading straight in our direction]

* * * * *

Trembling, shaken, wide-eyed we sat there. But only the chirping of inserts, the burbling of the stream, the soft sighing of the night wind and the occasional cry of an owl broke the silence. Whatever the terrible thing was, it was not supernatural. It had not been immune to soft-nosed .45 calibre bullets, and somewhere in the dark shadows it was lying dead, crushed and forever stilled.

But there was no more sleep for us that night, and neither of us could summon up enough courage to investigate the fallen demon of the night in the darkness.

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