第8章 THE RED ONE(8)

But was the colour a lacquer of heat upon some familiar metal? Or was it an intrinsic quality of the metal itself? He thrust in the blue-point of his pocket-knife to test the constitution of the stuff.Instantly the entire sphere burst into a mighty whispering, sharp with protest, almost twanging goldenly, if a whisper could possibly be considered to twang, rising higher, sinking deeper, the two extremes of the registry of sound threatening to complete the circle and coalesce into the bull-mouthed thundering he had so often heard beyond the taboo distance.

Forgetful of safety, of his own life itself, entranced by the wonder of the unthinkable and unguessable thing, he raised his knife to strike heavily from a long stroke, but was prevented by Balatta.She upreared on her own knees in an agony of terror, clasping his knees and supplicating him to desist.In the intensity of her desire to impress him, she put her forearm between her teeth and sank them to the bone.

He scarcely observed her act, although he yielded automatically to his gentler instincts and withheld the knife-hack.To him, human life had dwarfed to microscopic proportions before this colossal portent of higher life from within the distances of the sidereal universe.As had she been a dog, he kicked the ugly little bushwoman to her feet and compelled her to start with him on an encirclement of the base.Part way around, he encountered horrors.Even, among the others, did he recognize the sun- shrivelled remnant of the nine-years girl who had accidentally broken Chief Vngngn's personality taboo.And, among what was left of these that had passed, he encountered what was left of one who had not yet passed.Truly had the bush-folk named themselves into the name of the Red One, seeing in him their own image which they strove to placate and please with such red offerings.

Farther around, always treading the bones and images of humans and gods that constituted the floor of this ancient charnel-house of sacrifice, he came upon the device by which the Red One was made to send his call singing thunderingly across the jungle-belts and grass-lands to the far beach of Ringmanu.Simple and primitive was it as was the Red One's consummate artifice.A great king-post, half a hundred feet in length, seasoned by centuries of superstitious care, carven into dynasties of gods,each superimposed, each helmeted, each seated in the open mouth of a crocodile, was slung by ropes, twisted of climbing vegetable parasites, from the apex of a tripod of three great forest trunks, themselves carved into grinning and grotesque adumbrations of man's modern concepts of art and god.From the striker king-post, were suspended ropes of climbers to which men could apply their strength and direction.Like a battering ram, this king-post could be driven end-onward against the mighty red- iridescent sphere.

Here was where Ngurn officiated and functioned religiously for himself and the twelve tribes under him.Bassett laughed aloud, almost with madness, at the thought of this wonderful messenger, winged with intelligence across space, to fall into a bushman stronghold and be worshipped by ape-like, man-eating and head- hunting savages.It was as if God's World had fallen into the muck mire of the abyss underlying the bottom of hell; as if Jehovah's Commandments had been presented on carved stone to the monkeys of the monkey cage at the Zoo; as if the Sermon on the Mount had been preached in a roaring bedlam of lunatics.

The slow weeks passed.The nights, by election, Bassett spent on the ashen floor of the devil-devil house, beneath the ever- swinging, slow- curing heads.His reason for this was that it was taboo to the lesser sex of woman, and therefore, a refuge for him from Balatta, who grew more persecutingly and perilously loverly as the Southern Cross rode higher in the sky and marked the imminence of her nuptials.His days Bassett spent in a hammock swung under the shade of the great breadfruit tree before the devil-devil house.There were breaks in this programme, when, in the comas of his devastating fever-attacks, he lay for days and nights in the house of heads.Ever he struggled to combat the fever, to live, to continue to live, to grow strong and stronger against the day when he would be strong enough to dare the grass-lands and the belted jungle beyond, and win to the beach, and to some labour-recruiting, black-birding ketch or schooner, and on to civilization and the men of civilization, to whom he could give news of the message from other worlds that lay, darkly worshipped by beastmen, in the black heart of Guadalcanal's midmost centre.

On the other nights, lying late under the breadfruit tree, Bassett spent long hours watching the slow setting of the western stars beyond the black wall of jungle where it had been thrust back by the clearing for the village.Possessed of more than a cursory knowledge of astronomy, he took a sick man's pleasure in speculating as to the dwellers on the unseen worlds of those incredibly remote suns, to haunt whose houses of light, life came forth, a shy visitant, from the rayless crypts of matter.He could no more apprehend limits to time than bounds to space.No subversive radium speculations had shaken his steady scientific faith in the conservation of energy and the indestructibility of matter.Always and forever must there have been stars.And surely, in that cosmic ferment, all must be comparatively alike, comparatively of the same substance, or substances, save for the freaks of the ferment.All must obey, or compose, the same laws that ran without infraction through the entire experience of man.Therefore, he argued and agreed, must worlds and life be appanages to all the suns as they were appanages to the particular of his own solar system.