'Good morning.'
The Garden of the Gods
'Now,' said Sally, 'I know we're dead. I've suspected it for a long time but it's nice that we should still be together, isn't it? *
Count Axel nodded. 'We all died together in the sphere —quite painlessly. There is no other explanation for ... all this!'
'You are mistaken I think.' A gentle humour twitched the lips of the man beyond the cactus hedge. 'You do not look at all dead to me.'
The McKay's eyes were popping out of his head. With a rudeness quite contrary to his nature he ignored the stranger and addressed the others. 'He's speaking English. I heard him—can you hear him too?'
The man on the island seemed to be more amused than ever. 'I speak in English because I heard you use that language,' he said, 'but, if you prefer it I can talk with you in any one of the five tongues which are most commonly used in the modern world and I know enough of several others to get about without difficulty.'
'To get about?' exclaimed Nicky. 'Just listen now—he's talking as though he might set off at any moment on an autumn cruise!'
'My surprise at this meeting is almost equal to your own,' remarked the man, 'as there is no record of any human from the upper world having penetrated here before—but not quite so great, for we at least had knowledge of your upper world whereas you were naturally ignorant of this. My name is Nahou and I am, what you would call, an Atlantean.'
Count Axel stepped forward to the brink of the water-249
filled ditch with a belated effort to show some courtesy. 'Sir,' he said gravely, 'if my belief that we are dead is right you are surely the subject of a gentle God. If I am wrong you are a civilised and cultured man. In either case I beg your pity and protection for myself and my friends. We have suffered much on our journey here. Our endurance is almost at an end, and we shall surely become the prey of evil things unless you grant us sanctuary in your island paradise.'
The Atlantean eyed him with equal gravity and spoke again with the same gentleness. 'Humans in such a desperate situation would have my sympathy in any case but your words, Sir, show you to be one of the elect—a twice-born— and for your sake, if no other, I make your party welcome here. Yet your request for sanctuary raises a problem which we have never had to face before. You will, I fear, find some difficulty in crossing our broad ditch.'
'We can swim,' said the McKay abruptly. 'Our real trouble's going to be when we have to try to scale that beastly cactus hedge.'
'All problems solve themselves with a little thought,' declared Nahou easily. 'I will fetch bedding to cast over the needle-thorns; then, if you can swim, I will haul you up one by one.' He turned away and the greenery closed behind him.
'By Crikey!' exclaimed Vladimir, 'I am either drunk or should be locked in a cushioned cell.'
'We all feel a bit that way I think,' agreed the McKay, 'but we've just got to hang on to ourselves and see what happens next.'
Camilla laughed—quite naturally. 'We're neither,' she said obscurely. 'This is only a very vivid dream. We'll wake up in our beds tomorrow in the hotel in Madeira. Doctor Tisch and his expedition to find Atlantis have never happened really.'
'Forgive me, Gnadige Hertzogin,' protested the Doctor who was just behind her, 'but I am quite real—also this cut in the calf of my leg which hurts greatly.'
Nahou returned and with him came a girl. 'This is Lulluma,' he introduced her as he began to pile a great bundle of finely woven linen, which he carried, on to the cactus wall. The others are away and so may not be disturbed to welcome you.'
They did not seek to probe the meaning of his last words because all their eyes were riveted on the girl. A head and a half shorter than Nahou, she too was dark, with smooth neatly parted hair which ended abruptly in a mass of thick curls on the nape of her neck, but her face bore not the slightest resemblance to the man's in racial characteristics. He was a pure Mediterranean type, or might even have been a fair-skinned Berber from North Africa. She had all the dark liveliness of a Celtic woman, but there was an added squareness and stockiness about her build which, together with the proud directness of her gaze, suggested a dash of the courageous aristocratic Norman blood. Her forehead was very broad, her head perhaps a trifle large for her short, beautifully rounded, body. Her eyes were very big and limpid, her skin clear and soft with the lustre of perfect health. Her lips were full, smiling, and moistly red.
Count Axel was long past his first youth and had known many women but now, on the instant he saw Luiluma, he knew that she was a being apart. It was not only her bodily loveliness but the very spirit of eternal youth and sparkling merriment which she seemed to carry with her as she moved. She might grow old in body but to her dying day she would retain a courageous gaiety despite every attempt of fate to break it down. Yet the laughter in her eyes as she gazed with surprise and pleasure on the strangers was not all of her. Count Axel guessed rightly that she was born under the sign of Scorpio and therefore thought deeply, kept her own secrets well and, under the beautiful gay mask could be intently serious and practical; turning her hand when necessity arose to any business just as easily as she could spend hours of idleness guzzling more good things to eat and drink, than were strictly good for her, between bursts of infectious laughter.
She was wearing red, the colour of the Scorpions, which set off her warm dark beauty in such a way that it was impossible to look at her and not feel a new vitality pulse through one's own body.
'Come now—the rest lies with you,' declared Nahou when he had arranged the bedding across the prickly hedge. 'We will help you over.'
'Vladimir—you will go first, then you can give the girls a
hand in landing,' ordered the McKay who was still nominally in command of the party. 'Nicky, you go after the girls —then the Doctor and Count Axel. I will come last.'
The Prince plunged into the narrow canal. His feet could not touch bottom and its sides were sheer so he would have found it impossible to gain a foothold on the island if Nahou had not reached down, gripped his wrist, and hauled him up. Sally pinned up her skirts and swam the fifteen feet of water, then the three on the opposite shore pulled her over the hedge into safety. Camilla followed her example, then the rest of the party splashed into the channel one by one and, in a quarter of an hour had entered—by this prosaic and most undignified manner—into Paradise.
The McKay introduced each member of his party by name and gave a short, very garbled, version of how they came to be there, then Nahou and Lulluma led them towards the centre of the vegetation where the palm trees rose towards the cavern's roof. The island was hardly a garden in the strict sense of the word for it lacked paths and borders, but the thick jungle-like growth which hid its interior from external view gave way, after a few yards, to a variegated orchard in which the trees were set wide apart, giving light and air to great clumps of flowers or little single coloured blossoms that starred the grass beside their footsteps.
'I'm afraid things are not looking quite their best just now,' Nahou apologised, apparently unnecessarily, as he led them forward. 'If you had visited us a fortnight earlier you would have found the Styglomenes in full bloom.'
Lulluma gave a deep chuckle. It was like gurgling water bubbling from a secret well that held the source of all the world's merriment. 'And if you had come a fortnight later,' she said seriously, 'the Prathatontecs would have been out for you to see I'