“Professor Nordhurst,” muttered Mitchell hoarsely, keeping his temper tightly under control. “I not only believe that at one time such a race existed here on Easter Island, but that another race co-existed with them, namely the race of giants who built and erected these images. And furthermore, I’m equally convinced that we shall find sufficient evidence here to convince you.”
He half expected the other to make some form of protest, but Nordhurst merely smiled knowingly and bent to examine the carvings more closely. As the work went on, more and more carvings were found on the trunk of the stone giant which lay half-uncovered now. All in all, Mitchell judged its length to be close on sixty feet and its weight many tons. How it had been brought down from the interior of Rano Rardaku without machinery of any kind, seemed an insoluble problem.
* * *
Three weeks later, the excavations had reached a stage where a few questions had been answered to Mitchell’s satisfaction; but a hundred more had been posed. To them, there seemed no possible answer. The natives still refused to speak in spite of everything that Walton had been able to do to make them talk. None of the presents which had been offered to them, to their headman, or the religious head, had made the slightest effect on their refusal to talk.
On any other subject, they would converse for hours in an extremely friendly manner, but once he tried to turn the conversation towards the old times before their race had come to the island, to what they had discovered when they arrived there, the talk had abruptly dried up and they had politely refused to be drawn into any further conversation.
He was beginning to despair of ever finding out anything of importance with which to counter the sarcasm of Professor Nordhurst which was daily becoming less veiled and more direct in its manner. Then, one evening, shortly after dark, Walton came into his tent and sat down on the stool with his back to the flap.
For a long moment, he remained silent, then he said very softly: “I’ve been talking with one of the old men on the island. I think I’ve finally talked him around to telling you something. How important it will be, I don’t know. But it seems that he’s heard what the Professor has been saying and it must hurt his pride because he seems ready to talk.”
“Did he ask you to come and fetch me?” asked Mitchell carefully. So many times in the past, he had gone out to meet these natives, only to be disappointed when he arrived. Either they had suddenly shut up like a clam or they had talked endlessly about nothing important, merely telling him several things which he already knew.
“Yes,” Walton nodded. “I think we may be on to something this time. I think he’s a little scared, but he’ll talk. And what’s more to the point, I really believe that he knows something. Not the lies they’ve tried to give us in the past whenever they’ve claimed to tell us the old secrets, but something worth knowing.”
“Very well, I’ll come,” said Mitchell wearily, as he got to his feet. “But if this is just another false trial, then—” He left the rest of his sentence unsaid and followed the other out into the darkness. The moon was half full, lying out over the smooth water, throwing weird, grotesque shadows across the lava track which they followed around the shoulder of the hill.
Mitchell shivered as the night wind blew about him. There was sweat on his forehead and across the small of his back and it made his thin clothing stick uncomfortably to his flesh. Time seemed to pass with abnormal slowness that was oddly disconcerting and he had the feeling of eyes watching him every step of the way, unfriendly eyes, not those of the natives, but of something else which crouched in the black, moon-thrown shadows.
His ears seemed at times to catch faint sounds along the track, sounds which could not quite be identified with anything which seemed to inhabit the island normally. He wished that his senses were not so preternaturally keen in the darkness. But something in the solitude and the stillness seemed to have sharpened them above their normal pitch.
He thought of vague, irrelevant things as he stumbled close behind the other, of the strange things he had seen in other places, how they fitted in with what was here, and of the unknown, inaccessible, alien things which must have existed at the very beginning of time and which could, conceivably, still exist in such an out-of-the-way place as this, where civilization had barely touched the people, where they could still believe in the old things. This could be one of the last outposts of these alien things on earth, he reflected. He often liked to speculate about these things, but never had they seemed so vivid as at that particular moment.
Whether it was the surroundings or the utter stillness which had brought such ideas to his mind, he did not know. But in spite of everything he did, it was impossible to rid his mind of them. The deadness and the silence were virtually complete. After a while, he found himself deliberately shuffling his feet on the smooth rocks to make some kind of noise, to still the nerves which jumped and twitched spasmodically in his body.
Around him there was the suggestion of odd stirrings. Of things, half-hidden at the edge of his vision, which moved over that strange and alien landscape, lurching forward with a cumbersome manner out of the black shadows. It seemed abnormally cold, too; a coldness which could not be completely explained by the fact that they were some distance above sea level and the wind was blowing directly off the water. Nothing was so definite he could put his finger on anything wrong, and yet he felt that the swirling air about him was not uniformly quiet, that there were strange variations in pressure which made themselves felt, but which he couldn’t even begin to understand.
They made their way down the narrow, twisting path as they came over the top of the hill. In front of him, he could make out nothing but blackness, then he saw the small cluster of native huts. Walton walked directly towards one of them, climbed the narrow, swaying ladder and went inside, motioning Mitchell to follow.
For some odd reason, his heart was bumping madly inside his chest as he followed on the other’s heels. He hardly knew what to expect inside. There was a little candle flickering on a small table and behind it sat an old, wizened figure, skinny hands pressed firmly on top of the table.
Mitchell judged the other to be almost ninety, but from his features, it was impossible to be sure. He could have been far older than that, with only the black swiftly darting eyes alive in the skeletal face.
“Does he speak English?” asked Mitchell, seating himself in front of the other.
Walton shook his head. “No. But he knows some Spanish. I think you ought to be able to converse in that language.”
Mitchell nodded, tried to force his heart into a slower, more normal beat. After all, he tried to tell himself, there was nothing to fear from the other. Merely an old man who thought he knew some of the ancient secrets, who was possibly the only one on the island who did. But would he talk? And if he did, would he be telling the truth, or were there more lies to come?
“My friend tells me that you have something you wish to speak to me about,” he said slowly, loudly, speaking in Spanish.
The other’s lips moved and his voice, like a dry whisper said, “You come here asking questions about the stone faces of the island. Who made them and who carried them here?”
“That’s right. Do you know anything of this?”
The other nodded his head almost imperceptibly. “I would not have agreed to tell you these things had I not thought that you might believe,” whispered the other thinly. He sat very still, watching Mitchell unwinkingly with black, empty eyes. “But your friend has assured me that you are not like the others, that you might believe.”