Three white men, Raft, Craddock, and Bill Merriday, were here. Merriday was plodding but a good research pathologist, and the three of them had worked well together.
Now the work was ready to be wound up, and presently Raft knew he'd be in New York again, rushing by air-taxi from roof night-club to club, cramming the excitement of civilization into as short a time as possible. Then a little later, he realized, he'd be feeling a familiar itch again, and would be heading for Tasmania or Ceylon or—somewhere. There were always new jobs to be tackled.
The drums were still throbbing faintly, far off in the dark. After a while Raft left Craddock in the lighted lab and wandered outside, down to the river, trying not to listen to the distant pulse of sound….
A full moon rode up from the Atlantic, brightening the great pleasure-city of Rio, swinging up the Amazon to the backlands, a huge yellow disc against a starry backdrop. But across the Jutahy was the jungle, black towering walls of it, creeping and swarming with a vitality that was incredible even to a scientist. It was the fecund womb of the world.
Hot countries mean growth, but in the Amazonas is growth gone wild. Its rich alluvial soil, washed down for ages along the rivers, is literally alive; the ground beneath your feet moves and stirs with vitality. There is something unhealthy about such abnormal rioting life, unhealthy as the flaming Brazilian orchids that batten on rottenness and blaze in the green gloom like goblin corpse-lights….
Raft thought of Craddock. Odd! That inexplicable mixture of incredulity and fear that Raft thought he sensed in the Welshman was puzzling. There was something else, too. He frowned, trying to analyze a vague shadow, and at length nodded, satisfied. Craddock was repelled by the drums but he was also drawn, attracted by them in some strange way. Well, Craddock had lived in this part of the forest for a long time. He was nearly Indio in many ways.
Something moving out on the surface of the river, sheet-silver under the moon, roused Raft from uncomfortable thoughts. In a moment he could see the outlines of a small boat, and two heads silhouetted against the silvery water. The men were pulling in toward shore and the hospital's lighted window.
"Luiz!" Raft called sharply. "Manoel! We've got visitors."
A feeble hail came across the water, and he saw the two outlines slump down, as if the last efforts of exhaustion had brought them to the landing. Then came excitement—the boys running with lights and shouts, everybody who could walk swarming to the doors and windows to watch. Raft helped beach the boat and superintended as the two almost unconscious men were carried up to the hospital.
One of them, he saw, wore an aviator's helmet and clothing; he was beyond speech. The other, a slender, bearded man, rather startlingly graceful even in this extremity, lurched toward the door.
"Senhor, senhor," he murmured, in a soft voice.
Craddock came out to help. He stopped dead still on the threshold, though crowding bodies hid the two arrivals from sight. Raft saw a look of absolute panic come over the Welshman's face. Then Craddock turned and retreated, and there was the nervous clinking of a bottle.
Bill Merriday's stolid, intent features were comfortingly normal by contrast. But as Merriday, bending over the aviator, was stripping off the man's shirt, he suddenly paused.
"I'll be hanged," he said. "I know this chap, Brian. Thomas, wait a minute. I'll have it. Da something… da Fonseca, that's it! I told you about that mapping expedition that flew in a couple of months ago, when you were in the jungle. Da Fonseca was piloting."
"Crack-up," Raft said. "What about the other man?"
Merriday glanced over his shoulder.
"I never saw him before."
The thermometer read eighty-six, far below normal.
"Shock and exhaustion," Raft surmised. "We'll run a stat C.B.C., just in case. Look at his eyes." He pulled back a lid. The pupils were pin-points.
"I'll take a look at the other man," Merriday said, turning. Raft scowled down at da Fonseca, a little uncomfortable, though he could not have said exactly why. Something seemed to have entered the room with the two men, and it was nothing that could be felt tangibly. But it could be sensed.
Frowning, Raft watched Luiz milk a specimen from the patient's finger. The overhead light fell yellow and unsteady on da Fonseca, upon a glitter of sudden brilliance from something that hung on a chain about his neck. Raft had thought it a religious medal, but now he saw that it was a tiny mirror, no larger than a half-dollar. He picked it up.
The glass was convex, lenticular, and made of a dark, bluish material less like glass than plastic. Raft glimpsed the cloudy, shapeless motion of shadows beneath its surface.
A little shock went through him. The mirror did not reflect his face, though he was staring directly into it. Instead he saw turbulent motion, though there was no such motion in the room. He thought of storm-clouds boiling and driving before a gale. He had the curious, inexplicable feeling of something familiar, an impression, an inchoate mental pattern.
Thomas da Fonseca. He caught the extraordinary impression, for a flashing, brilliant moment, that he was looking into da Fonseca's eyes. The—the personality of the man was there, suddenly. It was as though the two men were briefly en rapport.
Yet all Raft saw was the driving, cloudy motion in the mirror.
Then the storm-swirl rifted and was driven apart. From the tiny lens in his hand a vibration ran up the nerves of his arm, striking into his brain. He stared down.
Now that the clouds had cleared away, it was not a mirror, but a portrait. A portrait? Then a living portrait, for the face within it moved….
A mirror, after all, then. But no—for that was certainly not his own face that looked back at him out of the small oval.
It was a girl's face, seen against a background of incredible richness and strangeness that vanished as he looked, because she leaned forward as if into the very mirror itself, her herd blotting out the remarkable background. And it was no painted picture. She moved, she saw—Raft. He drew his breath in sharply.
There was never such a face before. He had no time to see her very clearly, for the whole unbelievable glimpse was gone in an instant. But he would have known her out of a thousand faces if they ever met again.
The look of delicate gayety and wickedness in the small, prim curve of her mouth, the enormous translucent eyes, colored like aquamarines, that looked, for a moment, into his very solemnly above the sweet, malicious, smiling mouth.
There could be no other face like it in the world.
Then the mists rolled between them as they stared. Raft remembered later that he shook the lens passionately in a childish attempt to call her back, shook it as if his own hands could part those clouds again and let him see that brilliantly alive little face, so gay and solemn, so wicked and so sweet.
But she was gone. It had all happened almost between one breath and the next, and he was left standing there staring down at the lens and remembering the tantalizing—oddness—of that face.
An oddness seen too briefly to understand except as something curiously wrong about the girl who had looked into his eyes for one fraction of a second. Her hair had been—odd.
The eyes themselves were almost round, but subtly slanted at the corners, and with a blackness ringing them that was not wholly the black of thick lashes, for a prolonged dark streak had run up from their outer comers a little way, accentuating their slant, and giving a faint Egyptian exoticism to the round, soft, dainty face with its rounded chin. So soft—he remembered that impression clearly. Incredibly soft, she had looked, and fastidious.