第72章

Gasping, legs aching, we lay prone, relaxed, drawing back strength and breath.Rador was first to rise.Thrice he bent low as in homage, then--"Give thanks to the Silent Ones--for their power has been over us!" he exclaimed.

Dimly I wondered what he meant.Something about the fern leaf at which I had been staring aroused me.I leaped to my feet and ran to its base.This was no fern, no! It was fern MOSS! The largest of its species I had ever found in tropic jungles had not been more than two inches high, and this was--twenty feet! The scientific fire I had experienced in the tunnel returned uncontrollable.I parted the fronds, gazed out--My outlook commanded a vista of miles--and that vista!

A _Fata Morgana_ of plantdom! A land of flowered sorcery!

Forests of tree-high mosses spangled over with blooms of every conceivable shape and colour; cataracts and clusters, avalanches and nets of blossoms in pastels, in dulled metal-lics, in gorgeous flamboyant hues; some of them phosphor-escent and shining like living jewels; some sparkling as though with dust of opals, of sapphires, of rubies and topazes and emeralds; thickets of convolvuli like the trumpets of the seven archangels of Mara, king of illusion, which are shaped from the bows of splendours arching his highest heaven!

And moss veils like banners of a marching host of Titans;pennons and bannerets of the sunset; gonfalons of the Jinn;webs of faery; oriflammes of elfland!

Springing up through that polychromatic flood myriads of pedicles--slender and straight as spears, or soaring in spirals, or curving with undulations gracile as the white serpents of Tanit in ancient Carthaginian groves--and all surmounted by a fantasy of spore cases in shapes of minaret and turret, domes and spires and cones, caps of Phrygia and bishops'

mitres, shapes grotesque and unnameable--shapes delicate and lovely!

They hung high poised, nodding and swaying--like gob-lins hovering over _Titania's_ court; cacophony of Cathay ac-centing the _Flower Maiden_ music of "Parsifal"; _bizarrerie_of the angled, fantastic beings that people the Javan pan-theon watching a bacchanal of houris in Mohammed's para-dise!

Down upon it all poured the amber light; dimmed in the distances by huge, drifting darkenings lurid as the flying mantles of the hurricane.

And through the light, like showers of jewels, myriads of birds, darting, dipping, soaring, and still other myriads of gigantic, shimmering butterflies.

A sound came to us, reaching out like the first faint susur-rus of the incoming tide; sighing, sighing, growing stronger --now its mournful whispering quivered all about us, shook us--then passing like a Presence, died away in far distances.

"The Portal!" said Rador."Lugur has entered!"He, too, parted the fronds and peered back along our path.Peering with him we saw the barrier through which we had come stretching verdure-covered walls for miles three or more away.Like a mole burrow in a garden stretched the trail of the tunnel; here and there we could look down within the rift at its top; far off in it I thought I saw the glint of spears.

"They come!" whispered Rador."Quick! We must not meet them here!"And then--

"Holy St.Brigid!" gasped Larry.

From the rift in the tunnel's continuation, nigh a mile beyond the cleft through which we had fled, lifted a crown of horns--of tentacles--erect, alert, of mottled gold and crimson; lifted higher--and from a monstrous scarlet head beneath them blazed two enormous, obloid eyes, their depths wells of purplish phosphorescence; higher still--noseless, earless, chinless; a livid, worm mouth from which a slender scarlet tongue leaped like playing flames! Slowly it rose--its mighty neck cuirassed with gold and scarlet scales from whose polished surfaces the amber light glinted like flakes of fire; and under this neck shimmered something like a palely luminous silvery shield, guarding it.The head of hor-ror mounted--and in the shield's centre, full ten feet across, glowing, flickering, shining out--coldly, was a rose of white flame, a "flower of cold fire" even as Rador had said.

Now swiftly the Thing upreared, standing like a scaled tower a hundred feet above the rift, its eyes scanning that movement I had seen along the course of its lair.There was a hissing; the crown of horns fell, whipped and writhed like the tentacles of an octopus; the towering length dropped back.

"Quick!" gasped Rador and through the fern moss, along the path and down the other side of the steep we raced.

Behind us for an instant there was a rushing as of a tor-rent; a far-away, faint, agonized screaming--silence!

"No fear NOW from those who followed," whispered the green dwarf, pausing.

"Sainted St.Patrick!" O'Keefe gazed ruminatively at his automatic."An' he expected me to kill THAT with this.Well, as Fergus O'Connor said when they sent him out to slaugh-ter a wild bull with a potato knife: 'Ye'll niver rayilize how I appreciate the confidence ye show in me!'

"What was it, Doc?" he asked.

"The dragon worm!" Rador said.

"It was Helvede Orm--the hell worm!" groaned Olaf.

"There you go again--" blazed Larry; but the green dwarf was hurrying down the path and swiftly we followed, Larry muttering, Olaf mumbling, behind me.

The green dwarf was signalling us for caution.He pointed through a break in a grove of fifty-foot cedar mosses--we were skirting the glassy road! Scanning it we found no trace of Lugur and wondered whether he too had seen the worm and had fled.Quickly we passed on; drew away from the _coria_ path.The mosses began to thin; less and less they grew, giving way to low clumps that barely offered us shelter.

Unexpectedly another screen of fern moss stretched before us.Slowly Rador made his way through it and stood hesitat-ing.