Taita and Onka rode on each side to support him and prevent him falling.
Suddenly the mouth of a tunnel appeared in the cliff face ahead behind gates of heavy wooden beams. As they approached, the gates swung open ponderously to allow them through. From a distance they saw that there were guards at the entrance. Taita was so concerned by Meren's condition that, at first, he paid them little heed. As they drew closer he saw that they were of short stature, barely half as tall as a normal man but with massively developed chests and long, swinging arms that reached almost to the ground. Their stance was hunchbacked and bow-legged. Suddenly he realized that they were not humans but large apes. What he had taken to be brown uniform coats were pelts of shaggy fur. Their foreheads sloped almost straight back above beetling eyebrows, and their jaws were so over-developed that their lips did not close fully over their fangs. They returned his scrutiny with a close-set implacable stare. Quickly Taita opened the Inner Eye and saw that their auras were rudimentary and bestial, their murderous instincts balanced on a knife edge of restraint.
'Do not look into their eyes,' Onka warned. 'Do not provoke them.
They are powerful, dangerous creatures, and single-minded in their guard duties. They can rip a man to pieces as you would dismember the carcass of a roasted quail.' He led them into the mouth of the tunnel and immediately the heavy gates boomed shut behind them. Flaming torches were set in brackets on the walls and the hoofs of the horses clattered on the rocky footing. The tunnel was only wide enough to allow two horses to pass side by side, and the riders were forced to stoop in the saddle so that the roof cleared their heads. The rock around them was murmurous with the sounds of running subterranean rivers and seething lava pipes.
They had no means of measuring the passage of time or the distance they travelled, but at last they were aware of a nimbus of natural light ahead. It grew stronger and they approached another gate similar to the first that had sealed the tunnel entrance. This gate also swung open before they reached it, to reveal another contingent of apes. They rode past them, blinking in the brilliant sunshine.
It took some time for their eyes to adjust, and then they looked around in wonder and awe. They were in an enormous volcanic crater, so wide that it would have taken even a swift horse half a day to traverse it, from one vertical wall to the other. Not even a nimble mountain ibex could have climbed those lava walls. The bottom of the crater was a concave green shield. In its centre lay a small lake of milky sapphire-tinted water.
Tendrils of steam drifted over the surface. A flake of ice melted from Taita's eyebrow and tapped his cheek as it fell. He blinked, and realized that the air in the crater was as balmy as that of an island in a tropical sea. They shed their leather capes and even Meren's condition seemed to improve in the warmer air.
'It is the water from the furnaces of the earth that heat this place.
There is no cruel winter here.' With a sweep of his arms Onka encompassed the hauntingly lovely forest that surrounded them. 'Do you see the trees and plants that flourish all around? You will find them nowhere else in the world.'
They rode on along the well-defined pathway, with Onka pointing out the remarkable features of the crater. 'Look at the colours of the cliffs,'
he invited Taita, who craned his neck to gaze up at the mighty walls.
They were not grey or black, the natural colours of volcanic rock, but covered with a motley of soft blue and ruddy gold streaked with azure.
'What seem to be multicoloured rocks are mosses as long and thick as the hair of a beautiful woman,' Onka told him.
Taita dropped his gaze from the cliffs, and looked over the forests in the basin below. 'Those are pine trees,' he exclaimed, at the towering
green spears that pierced the thickets of golden bamboo, 'and gigantic lobelias.' Incandescent blooms were suspended from the thick fleshy stems. “I would hazard that those are some strange type of euphorbia, and the thickets covered with blossoms of pink and feathery silver are proteas. The tall trees beyond are aromatic cedars, and the smaller ones are tamarind and Khaya mahogany.' I wish Fenn were here to enjoy them with me, he thought.
The mist from the heated water of the lake wafted like smoke among the mossy branches. They turned to follow a stream, but before they had gone more than a few hundred paces they heard splashing, women's voices and laughter. They came out into a clearing to see three women swimming and disporting themselves in the steaming blue waters of the pool below. In silence the women watched the men ride by. They were young and dark-skinned, their long wet hair jet black. Taita thought that they were most likely from the lands across the eastern ocean. They seemed oblivious of their nakedness. All three were with child, and leant back from the hips to balance the weight of their bulging bellies.
As they rode on Taita asked, 'How many families live in this place?
Where are the husbands of those women?'
'They may work in the sanatorium, perhaps even as surgeons.' Onka evinced little interest. 'We should be able to see it when we come out on to the lakeshore over there.'
Seen from across the smoky sapphire waters the sanatorium was a complex of low unobtrusive stone buildings. It was evident that the stone blocks of the walls had been quarried from the cliffs. They had not been lime-washed, but remained their natural dark grey. They were surrounded by trim green lawns on which flocks of wild geese grazed. Waterfowl of twenty different varieties bobbed on the lake, while storks and herons waded in the shallows. As they rode round the gravelly beach Taita noticed a few large crocodiles floating like logs in the blue water.
They left the beach and crossed the lawns to enter the courtyard of the main building through a handsome colonnade covered with flowering creepers. Grooms were waiting to take the horses, and four sturdy male attendants lifted Meren from the saddle and laid him on a litter.
When they carried him into the building Taita walked beside him. 'You are in good hands now,' he comforted Meren, but the ride up the mountain in the wind and cold had taken its toll and Meren was hovering on the edge of consciousness.
The attendants took him to a large, sparsely furnished room with a wide doorway that overlooked the lake. The walls and ceiling were tiled
with pale yellow marble. They lifted him on to a padded mattress in the middle of the white marble floor, undressed him and took away his soiled clothing. Then they sponged him with hot water from a copper pipe that ran into a basin built into a corner of the room. It had a sulphurous odour, and Taita realized that it came up from one of the hot springs.
The marble floor under their feet was pleasantly warm and he guessed that the same water ran in conduits beneath it. The warmth of the room and the water seemed to soothe Meren. The attendants dried him with linen towels, then one held a bowl to his lips and made him drink an infusion of herbs that smelt of pine. They withdrew and left Taita sitting beside his mattress. Soon Meren lapsed into a sleep so deep that Taita knew it had been induced by the potion.
This was the first chance he had had to inspect their new surroundings.
When he looked towards the corner of the wall adjacent to the washroom door he detected a human aura emanating from behind it. Without seeming to do so he focused closely on it, and realized there was a concealed peep-hole in the wall and they were observed through it. He would warn Meren as soon as he was awake. He looked away as though he was unaware of the watcher.
A short while later a man and a woman entered the room, dressed in clean white knee-length tunics. Although they wore no necklaces or bracelets of magic beads and carved figurines and carried none of the other accoutrements of the arcane arts, Taita recognized them as surgeons.