They had entered the cleft now, that secretive tuck in the living rock flesh of the mountain along which he had followed Mitty that day to where she stood wreathed by smoke, signaling to the unburied past. Her palanquin for a while skimmed the surface of the ground — or seemed to — the bearers under it hidden by the cleft in which they trod. It was like a skiff or boat sailing on solidified waves of rocky earth. The top of an occasional feather cropped up before or behind it. The figure in it was motionless as a doll; motionless as the living idol it had been transmuted into. The sun, about to blaze upward into untrammeled space, was filling the air with golden motes now, like a sort of vaporized pollen.
Then suddenly the slow-coursing litter was submerged, sank from sight, as perpendicularly as if it had been sucked into quicksand. It had been ahead of him around a curve, so that he could mark its going at a tangent, as on a curving train one can sometimes see something ahead before one’s own car has breasted it.
When finally this turn, the last convolution of all along the trail they were following, had straightened out and was no more, he received for a moment a startling impression that the toiling line ahead of him was telescoping itself into nothingness, consuming itself individual by individual until soon there would be nothing left of it. For the mountain face, obliterating the cleft, rose squarely before them; no one was going up that surface, and yet the distance between himself and it kept lessening man by man.
But this was just for a moment, and because the shoulder before him impeded full perspective ahead. At second glance he discovered the palanquin standing empty and at a tilt on the upcurving ground to one side of the defile, with two members of the party who had detached themselves bending over it, rapidly dismantling it into its original components of staves and branches. Evidently they wished to leave no telltale vestige of it behind.
A few paces beyond them, marking the party’s actual extinction point, which had baffled him until now, a curious slab of rock, tapering, triangular, and looking almost planed in its smoothness of surface, rested upright against the frontal rise that blocked off further advance, that choked off the sunken defile. Beside it was its complement, a black chasm in the rock face, which matched it in every detail of proportioning, as though one had been pried away from the other. Which it obviously had. Into this needle-like fissure, little more than hip-wide, one by one the marauders blotted themselves out, lowering their heads to a point at which they could safely be trusted to pass through. Two of their number, larger and more powerful than the rest, stood waiting by the reversed slab or rock, to draw it around after them and seal the fissure up after the last of their cohorts had gone in. He balked instinctively as this terminus of light and of the known, this maw of the past and the unknown, crept up flush with him. It was not the fear of suffocation that gripped him, made him rigid with recalcitrance; it was rather the premonition of entering upon some totally different plane from this point on, of leaving the world behind in a sense even worse than that of physical death.
The heel before him that he had watched was gone now; a curtain of darkness fell over it. It was his turn now. He bucked and tried to bolt sideways. The tilt of the defile facing would have defeated him even had he been unhindered. He went up it two, three steps by sheer momentum, then started to fall back again, pulled down by gravity. A hand seized his bound arms, wrenching him back to his starting place. Another caught at his neck, forcing his head down low. He was propelled forward.
The lips of rock narrowed over him, sucked him in. Darkness.
For a little while, as he went stumbling on, propelled like that, there was a little ghostly light behind him, where the opening was; the memory of light, glinting feebly on the moist rock walls and chill rock floor of this tunnel passage.
Then suddenly it was blotted out, too suddenly for lengthening distance alone to have killed it. There was a grinding and hollow reverberation, back there where it had been, carried forward along the bore, and the entrance slab had been drawn into place, sealing the opening up.
A drop of sweat rolled down his face, chilled before it had even left his pores. The present was gone. The past had claimed him for its own.
Chapter Nineteen
The second-floor corridor in the government building at Puerto Santo was cool and twilight-dim compared to the broiling glare of the streets outside. It was not the most uncomfortable place in town to have to sit and wait for any prolonged length of time, as Fredericks and Cotter were having to do now. It was no mere passage but a broad gallery, tile-floored and roofed by a succession of stone archways. Set within the arbitrary subdivisions these created along the wall space were a succession of rather monastic doors. As a matter of fact, the building had once been the Palace of the Inquisition.
Opposite the first of these doors, first both in importance and in location, was placed a wooden bench, back to wall, and on it sat Fredericks and his companion, beginning to wilt now after their third successive day of interminable waiting. Facing them, on guard before the stubbornly closed portal whose entrance they sought to gain, stood a high-cheeked, flat-nosed mestizo soldier, in rather sloppy-fitting khaki, a very efficient and unsloppy-looking Mauser planted stock to floor before him.
Cotter came back to the bench, after a brief period of pacing back and forth to relieve the tedium of posture, and sank down on it once more.
“This one’s keeping us waiting the longest of all,” he grunted bitterly.
“The higher you go, the harder they are to see.”
“Well, we’ve worked our way up to the top. After him there’s no one.” He leaned forward, let his hands hang down dejectedly, elbows to knees. “If there was only an American consul in the place we could appeal to, maybe we could get some action, slash through some of this red tape.”
“An American consul wouldn’t be able to give orders over the heads of the departmental officials. Besides, there isn’t one. This country’s not even important enough to have one of our consular representatives accredited to it. It’s lumped in with one of the neighboring republics, and the same consul takes care of both.”
Cotter dispirtedly let his head dangle now, in alignment with his hands. Then presently he raised it again.
“What’s the good anyway?” he remarked. “We’re too late. It’s a solid month since it happened.” Then he added, “If that’s what it was.”
“If that’s what it was! What else was it?” Fredericks caught him up sharply. “Do you have to be told? They disappeared completely, from a place right on the slope of the mountain. The drums were heard. Let others doubt it. We should know what that means, of all people.”
Cotter elevated his eyebrows in moody acceptance of the rebuke, but he let it go without answering.
“You’re willing to turn around and go back, I see.” Fredericks had turned toward him, was looking at him steadily. “Well, I’m not.”
“It’s not that, exactly. But if it’s too late, what then? What good will it do?” He elevated his shoulders, let them drop again. “What do we owe him, after all?”
“Life,” said Fredericks quietly. “We — that is, I — am responsible for this happening to him.”
“No, you’re not. Who told him to run off with her? Who told him to bring her down here, of all places?”
“I have a peculiar sense of duty, then. Indirect and roundabout. But a strong one. You go back if you want to, Cotter.”