Angel Island. Inez Haynes Gillmore

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СКАЧАТЬ enormous. They flew with amazing strength, swiftness, and grace; but for the most part they about a fixed area like bees at a honey-pot. It was a limited area, but within it they dipped, dropped, curved, wove in and out.

      “Well, I’ll be—.”

      “They’re those black spots we saw the first day, Pete,” Billy Fairfax said breathlessly. “We thought it was the sun.”

      “That’s what I heard in the night,” Frank Merrill gasped to Ralph Addington.

      “But what are they?” asked Honey Smith in a voice that had a falsetto note of wonder. “They laugh like a woman—take it from me.”

      “Eagles—buzzards—vultures—condors—rocs—phoenixes,” Pete Murphy recited his list in an or of imaginative conjecture.

      “They’re some lost species—something left over from a prehistoric era,” Frank Merrill explained, shaking with excitement. “No vulture or eagle or condor could be as big as that at this distance. At least I think so.” He paused here, as one studying the problem in the scientific spirit. “Often in the Rockies I’ve confused a nearby chicken-hawk, at first, with a far eagle. But the human eye has its own system of triangulation. Those are not little birds nearby, but big birds far off. See how heavily they soar. Do you realize what’s happened? We’ve made a discovery that will shake the whole scientific world. There, there, they’re going!”

      “My God, look at them beat it!” said Honey; and there was awe in his voice.

      “Why, they’re monster size,” Frank Merrill went on, and his voice had grown almost hysterical. “They could carry one of us off. We’re not safe. We must take measures at once to protect ourselves. Why, at night—We must make traps. If we can capture one, or, better, a pair, we’re famous. We’re a part of history now.”

      They watched the strange birds disappear over the water. For more than an hour, the men sat still, waiting for them to return. They did not come back, however. The men hung about camp all day long, talking of nothing else. Night came at last, but sleep was not in them. The dark seemed to give a fresh impulse to conversation. Conjecture battled with theory and fact jousted with fancy. But one conclusion was as futile as another.

      Frank Merrill tried to make them devise some system of defense or concealment, but the others laughed at him. Talk as he would, he could not seem to convince them of their danger. Indeed, their state of mind was entirely different from his. Mentally he seemed to boil with interest and curiosity, but it was the sane, calm, open-minded excitement of the scientist. The others were alert and preoccupied in turn, but there was an element of reserve in their attitude. Their eyes kept going off into space, fixing there until their look became one brooding question. They avoided conversation. They avoided each other’s gaze.

      Gradually they drew off from the fire, settled themselves to rest, fell into the splendid sleep that followed their long out-of-doors days.

      In the middle of the night, Billy Fairfax came out of a dream to the knowledge that somebody was shaking him gently, firmly, furtively. “Don’t move!” Honey Smith’s voice whispered; “keep quiet till I wake the others.”

      It was a still and moon-lighted world. Billy Fairfax lay quiet, his wide-open eyes fixed on the luminous sky. The sense of drowse was being brushed out of his brain as though by a mighty whirlwind, and in its place came a vague sensation of confusion, of excitement, of a miraculous abnormality. He heard Honey Smith crawl slowly from man to man, heard him whisper his adjuration once, twice, three times. “Now,” Honey called finally.

      The men looked seawards. Then, simultaneously they leaped to their feet.

      The semi-tropical moon was at its full. Huge, white, embossed, cut out, it did not shine—it glared from the sky. It made a melted moonstone of the atmosphere. It faded the few clouds to a sapphire-gray, just touched here and there with the chalky dot of a star. It slashed a silver trail across a sea jet-black except where the waves rimmed it with snow. Up in the white enchantment, but not far above them, the strange air-creatures were flying. They were not birds; they were winged women!

      Darting, diving, glancing, curving, wheeling, they interwove in what seemed the premeditated figures of an aerial dance. If they were conscious of the group of men on the beach, they did not show it; they seemed entirely absorbed in their flying. Their wings, like enormous scimitars, caught the moonlight, flashed it back. For an interval, they played close in a group inextricably intertwined, a revolving ball of vivid color. Then, as if seized by a common impulse, they stretched, hand in hand, in a line across the sky-drifted. The moonlight flooded them full, caught glitter and gleam from wing-sockets, shot shimmer and sheen from wing-tips, sent cataracts of iridescent color pulsing between. Snow-silver one, brilliant green and gold another, dazzling blue the next, luminous orange a fourth, flaming flamingo scarlet the last, their colors seemed half liquid, half light. One moment the whole figure would flare into a splendid blaze, as if an inner mechanism had suddenly turned on all the electricity; the next, the blaze died down to the fairy glisten given by the moonlight.

      As if by one impulse, they began finally to fly upward. Higher and higher they rose, still hand in hand. Detail of color and movement vanished. The connotation of the sexed creature, of the human thing, evaporated. One instant, relaxed, they seemed tiny galleons, all sails set, that floated lazily, the sport of an aerial sea; another, supple and sinuous, they seemed monstrous fish whose fins triumphantly clove the air, monarchs of that aerial sea.

      A little of this and then came another impulse. The great wings furled close like blades leaping back to scabbard; the flying-girls dropped sheer in a dizzying fall. Half-way to the ground, they stopped simultaneously as if caught by some invisible air plateau. The great feathery fans opened—and this time the men got the whipping whirr of them—spread high, palpitated with color. From this lower level, the girls began to fall again, but gently, like dropping clouds.

      Nearer they came to the petrified group on the beach, nearer and nearer. Undoubtedly they had known all the time that an audience was there; undoubtedly they had planned this; they looked down and smiled.

      And now the men had every detail of them—the brown seaweeds and green sea-grasses that swathed them, their bodies just short of heroic size, deep-bosomed, broad-waisted, long-limbed; their arms round like a woman’s and strong like a man’s; their hair that fell, a braid over each ear, twined with brilliant flowers and green vines; their faces super-humanly beautiful, though elvish; the gaminerie in their laughing eyes, which sparkled through half-closed, thick-lashed lids, the gaminerie in their smiling mouths, which showed twin rows of pearl gleaming in tricksy mirth; their big, strong-looking, long-fingered hands; their slimly smooth, exquisitely shaped, too-tiny, transparent feet; their strong wrists; their stem-like, breakable ankles. Closer and closer and closer they came. And now the men could almost touch them. They paused an instant and fluttered—fluttered like a swarm of butterflies undecided where to fly. As though choosing to rest, they hovered-hovered with a gentle, slow, seductive undulation of wings, of hands, of feet.

      Then another impulse took them.

      They broke handclasps and up they went, like arrows straight up—up—up—up. Then they turned out to sea, streaming through the air in line still, but one behind the other. And for the first time, sound came from them; they threw off peals of girl-laughter that fell like handfuls of diamonds. Their mirth ended in a long, eerie cry. Then straight out to the eastern horizon they went and away and off.

      They were dwindling rapidly.

      They were spots.

      They were specks.

      They СКАЧАТЬ