The going was immensely difficult for them, particularly in their weakened condition. Almost at once the ground left the strictly horizontal; at every step the angle was sharpened. It seemed to them that all the troubles of crashing through undergrowth were as nothing compared to this. Lifting the entire bodily weight taxed the wind and leg muscles far more than any intricate brambles could have.
The jungle rapidly receded behind them like an outgoing tide. Its texture seemed to knit itself together, and presently it had become a smooth green pile carpet spread considerably below, unruffled as far as the eye could reach.
At about a third of the distance up, their incoming diagonal brought them onto the trail. There was no longer any added danger to be courted in following it; they were already visible off it as they would be on it; so they clove to it from then on. It made for surer footing and swifter direction than the uncharted climb about it.
They kept looking back, not both together but alternately, first he, then she. Continued silence of the one told the other each time that nothing was as yet amiss. The halfway point, indicated by a sharp turn that they had marked from below, was rapidly descending to meet them.
He felt her hand twitch convulsively in his. She had no breath to scream with. She gave a sort of choked bleat, and he knew at once before he’d even glanced back below them. Immunity had ended, and the tomb entrance was still equidistant from them to the jungle they had left behind.
The jungle edge, innocuous only a moment ago, had spewed two fast-running figures, breaking away from it, starting up the serpentine trail in furious pursuit. A third broke cover in twice the space separating the first two. One or more members of the party they had seen returning not long before must have lingered behind the others, caught sight of them, raised the alarm.
They were spurred to a frenzy of threshing motion they had not dreamed was still left in them. Their one remaining chance, they knew, was to get inside the sheltering darkness of the tomb entrance before they were overtaken by the winged furies down below. He shunted her in front of him and pushed her before him, sometimes using only a steadying hand, sometimes his entire shoulder when the going was particularly steep or difficult.
She wasn’t breathing any more, she was sobbing. They couldn’t afford the luxury of looking behind them any more, save where a differential in the trail let them do so automatically; every turn of the head cost too much in momentum.
The pursuers came on fast. Their legs seemed to work like pistons under them, blurred by their rapidity of motion. The gap between was closing inexorably. They were getting bigger every minute, like something onrushing in a bad dream. But the black-mouthed sanctuary above came nearer, nearer.
One last spurt to reach it. Breath a flame searing through their lungs, black motes fuming before their eyes like cultures seen through a microscope. A girl, an emaciated man, and the will to live. They couldn’t have cried out. This was no time for crying out. This was only a time for living or for dying. They could only choke suffocatingly and flounder crazily upward, and upward, and upward.
Suddenly shade fell behind them, like a dark-blue guillotine blade that had just missed the backs of their heads, and they were in.
The coolness was so sharp it seemed to congeal their skins, curdle them, like some sort of etherized astringent sprayed on. They couldn’t see for a minute. Gloom welled up about them like a sooty fog, and in their momentary safety was nearly their final undoing. But they had never broken contact with one another’s forms, from the first moment of discovery of the pursuit, and his shoulder now was still pressed closely behind hers, carrying it forward, his arm circled to her opposite side. Joined together like that, they waded uncertainly forward through the shoals of dimness, a hollowness to their footsteps that showed they were enclosed on four sides.
Then in a second or two, salvation peered through at them again. A lamp had been left lit, apparently by those who had just been in there before looking for them. It was a trivial, sparklike thing, lost in all that immensity of space. Yet for them it was a beacon brighter than the most flashing lighthouse. For it stood directly offside to the inner tunnel bore leading through the bowels of the mountain; it marked it, out of all the other niches, indentations, and cavities that honeycombed the walls.
A feeble stain came from it, like a smear of very dark amber honey, that scarcely tinctured the floor before it or the rock wall backing it. But it gave them their lives for minutes more — for who knew how long more? It showed them the way out of this Stygian trap. It showed them the pear-shaped gap, the deeper darkness within the dimness, that led off from the tomb itself.
“Go in! Go in!” He shoved her through into the nothingness beyond, then stooped aside and snatched the thing up. It was a metal vessel of some kind, filled with fluid, but he had no wish or time to identify it. It was heavy. Not too heavy for an unspent, untired man to carry, perhaps, but its added ounces of weight now might mean the difference between life and death to him. Then too, it would have served as a beacon to their enemies, just as it had to them now, guiding them infallibly in their wake, had he attempted to take it with him.
So he raised it with both hands high over his head, and flung it forward out of the tomb to do away with it, to hamper them as much as he and she would now be hampered.
A strange, phosphorescent apparition marked it extinction. It left a comet-like luminous trail across the vault of the dark, which was its flame expanded behind itself in flight. Then it struck the far wall someplace over the dais. There was a sudden curtain of fire as the released liquid burned now unconfined, splashing out and down. And in the middle of this, for a single moment, no more, Mitty’s face stood out, illumined. The twice-gone face which he never wanted to remember again, never would forget. The musk above the burial niche was laved for a moment by the brightly flickering fluid dripping down over it. For an instant he had the illusion it was she looking at him like that, palely illumined, through the murk of eternity. Then the features dimmed, went out forever, as the tricking drops expired with their own downfall.
Farewell, the farewell of two who had never been meant to meet, by immutable laws greater than either one of them. Double farewell, across forty-eighty hours, across five hundred years.
He turned and staggered into the passageway and found Chris by the sound of her hysteric breathing, lingering there waiting for him. He sent her on again before him, keeping his hand outthrust to her shoulder to avoid treading on her heels. She was invisible to him in all that density of darkness, close as she was before him.
They had to go circumspectly, unsure of any sudden turn the groove might make. They told off the sides of it with their hands, he on one side, she on the other, to keep from grazing them too closely. The confined air in here made breathing far more difficult; the only thing gained was that they no longer had the acute grade of the mountain slope outside to contend with. But their inability to see neutralized that advantage.
And already there was an echoing behind them of oncoming footfalls in the dark. Once the sound had set in, it dogged them with a maniac persistency that they couldn’t shake off or leave behind, try as they might. It was as inexorable, as maddening as that nocturnal drumbeat at La Escondida had been a lifetime ago. It was the soft, slapping sound of bare soles trotting along the damp, rocky flooring, amplified by the nature of the place itself so that it carried forward to them only too well.