THE FACE IN THE ABYSS: Sci-Fi Classic. Abraham Merritt

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      “What do you think I am?” he answered, hotly. “No man lets a thing like that go on!”

      She looked at him, curiously. Her face softened. She took a step closer to him. She touched once more the bruises on her cheek.

      “Do you not wonder,” she said, “now do you not wonder why I do not call my people to deal him the punishment he has earned?”

      “I do wonder,” Graydon’s perplexity was frank. “I wonder indeed. Why do you not call them—if they are close enough to hear?”

      “And what would you do were they to come?”

      “I would not let them have him—alive,” he answered. “Nor me.”

      “Perhaps,” she said, slowly—“perhaps that is why I do not call.”

      Suddenly she smiled upon him. He took a swift step toward her. She thrust out a warning hand.

      “I am—Suarra,” she said. “And I am—Death!”

      A chill passed through Graydon. Again he realized the alien beauty of her. Could there be truth in these legends of the haunted Cordillera? He had never doubted that there was something real behind the terror of the Indians, the desertion of the arrieros. Was she one of its spirits, one of its—demons? For an instant the fantasy seemed no fantasy. Then reason returned. This girl a demon! He laughed.

      “Do not laugh,” she said. “The death I mean is not such as you who live beyond the high rim of our hidden land know. Your body may live on—yet it is death and more than death, since it is changed in—dreadful—ways. And that which tenants your body, that which speaks through your lips, is changed—in ways more dreadful still! . . . I would not have that death come to you.”

      Strange as were her words, Graydon hardly heard them; certainly did not then realize their meaning, lost as he was in wonder at her beauty.

      “How you came by the Messengers, I do not know. How you could have passed unseen by them, I cannot understand. Nor how you came so far into this forbidden land. Tell me—why came you here at all?”

      “We came from afar,” he told her, “on the track of a great treasure of gold and gems; the treasure of Atahualpa, the Inca. There were certain signs that led us. We lost them. We found that we, too, were lost. And we wandered here.”

      “Of Atahualpa or of Incas,” the girl said, “I know nothing. Whoever they were, they could not have come to this place. And their treasure, no matter how great, would have meant nothing to us—to us of Yu-Atlanchi, where treasures are as rocks in the bed of a stream. A grain of sand it would have been, among many—” she paused, then went on, perplexedly, as though voicing her thoughts to herself—“But it is why the Messengers did not see them that I cannot understand . . . the Mother must know of this. . . . I must go quickly to the Mother. . . .”

      “The Mother?” asked Graydon.

      “The Snake Mother!” her gaze returned to him; she touched a bracelet on her right wrist. Graydon, drawing close, saw that this bracelet held a disk on which was carved in bas-relief a serpent with a woman’s head and woman’s breast and arms. It lay coiled upon what appeared to be a great bowl held high on the paws of four beasts. The shapes of these creatures did not at once register upon his consciousness, so absorbed was he in his study of that coiled figure. He stared close—and closer. And now he realized that the head reared upon the coils was not really that of a woman. No! It was reptilian.

      Snake-like—yet so strongly had the artist feminized it, so great was the suggestion of womanhood modeled into every line of it, that constantly one saw it as woman, forgetting all that was of the serpent.

      The eyes were of some intensely glittering purple stone. Graydon felt that those eyes were alive—that far, far away some living thing was looking at him through them. That they were, in fact, prolongations of some one’s—some thing’s—vision.

      The girl touched one of the beasts that held up the bowl.

      “The Xinli,” she said.

      Graydon’s bewilderment increased. He knew what those animals were. Knowing, he also knew that he looked upon the incredible.

      They were dinosaurs! The monstrous saurians that ruled earth millions upon millions of years ago, and, but for whose extinction, so he had been taught, man could never have developed.

      Who in this Andean wilderness could know or could have known the dinosaurs? Who here could have carved the monsters with such life-like detail as these possessed? Why, it was only yesterday that science had learned what really were their huge bones, buried so long that the rocks had molded themselves around them in adamantine matrix. And laboriously, with every modern resource, haltingly and laboriously, science had set those bones together as a perplexed child would a picture puzzle, and put forth what it believed to be reconstructions of these long-vanished chimerae of earth’s nightmare youth.

      Yet here, far from all science it must surely be, some one had modeled those same monsters of a woman’s bracelet. Why then—it followed that whoever had done this must have had before him the living forms from which to work. Or, if not, had copies of those forms set down by ancient men who had seen them.

      And either or both of these things were incredible.

      Who were the people to whom she belonged? There had been a name—Yu-Atlanchi.

      “Suarra,” he said, “where is Yu-Atlanchi? Is it this place?”

      “This?” She laughed. “No! Yu-Atlanchi is the Ancient Land. The Hidden Land where the six Lords and the Lords of Lords once ruled. And where now rules only the Snake Mother and—another. This place Yu-Atlanchi!” Again she laughed. “Now and then I hunt here with—the—” she hesitated, looking at him oddly—“So it was that he who lies there caught me. I was hunting. I had slipped away from my followers, for sometimes it pleases me to hunt alone. I came through these trees and saw your tetuane, your lodge. I came face to face with—him. And I was amazed—too amazed to strike with one of these.” She pointed to a low knoll a few feet away. “Before I could conquer that amaze he had caught me. Then you came.”

      Graydon looked where she had pointed. Upon the ground lay three slender, shining spears. Their slim shafts were of gold; the arrow-shaped heads of two of them were of fine opal. The third—the third was a single emerald, translucent and flawless, all of six inches long and three at its widest, ground to keenest point and cutting edge.

      There it lay, a priceless jewel tipping a spear of gold—and a swift panic shook Graydon. He had forgotten Soames and Dancret. Suppose they should return while this girl was there. This girl with her ornaments of gold, her gem-tipped spears—and her beauty!

      “Suarra,” he said, “you must go, and go quickly. This man and I are not all. There are two more, and even now they may be close. Take your spears, and go quickly. Else I may not be able to save you.”

      “You think I am—”

      “I tell you to go,” he interrupted. “Whoever you are, whatever you are, go now and keep away from this place. Tomorrow I will try to lead them away. If you have people to fight for you—well, let them come and fight if you so desire. But take your spears and go.”

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