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Portal of Dreams, a fiction by Charles Neville Buck |
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Chapter 9. A Portrait And A Temple |
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_ CHAPTER IX. A PORTRAIT AND A TEMPLE The night, however, passed without event and morning came bathing the empty edge of the forest with crystal freshness. The scene I still had to myself. My morning journey down to the water's edge for food and bathing was made with the most painful caution and I ate without relish. My world had altered overnight. I was no longer merely shipwrecked but shipwrecked among savages who might adhere to that perverted epicureanism which esteems human fare for its flesh pots. Stories of cannibalism had been plentiful at the captain's table on the Wastrel--the value of white heads for decorating native huts had been touched upon. My defense was limited to the six cartridges in the chambers of my revolver and the newly discovered slung-shot. Meantime I was hideously lonely. I turned the chest on end near the opening of my cavern and spread the newspaper portrait upon it for full inspection. The two upper corners I fastened with the curved and jewelled daggers from Jerusalem. The days which immediately followed marched slowly and were much alike. It was only in my own state of mind that there was any element of change or development. The lurking figures did not reappear at the edge of the jungle and I began to hope that they were members of some itinerant band from the opposite side of the island who had chanced upon this locality in their wanderings and might not again return. I was not even positive that they had seen me. Slowly, weirdly, while I dwelt in uncertainty and suspense the influence of the lady in the picture grew upon me and compelled me. It may have been at first, and doubtless was, a form of auto-hypnosis. Already the seed for such an influence had been planted in the dependence which young Mansfield and myself came to feel for the unknown girl's diary. Now, in utter isolation, I was doubly in need of something to avert my thoughts from channels which go down to madness and despair. The lifelike quality of the portrait made it easier to talk aloud, and as the spell grew I found myself talking with the softness of the lover. There is a power in the spoken word. The mere act of giving audible expression is a spur to thought. Sitting alone and debating how uncertainly the wretched spark of life sputtered at the wick of my being, I was the craven. When I talked to the picture whose lips smiled as though all the world were brave, I grew ashamed of my terror. Leaving my cave in the morning to forage and reconnoiter with the pistol at my belt, I would carry with me, as a fragrant memory, the gracious smile of her lips and the royal fearlessness of her eyes. Her image nerved me to endurance; gave me a shoulder touch on normal thought, and enabled me to hold in memory the world for which her evening gown and pearls were symbols--and in deeply morbid moments this saved me from losing my grip. Certainly, it was all an artificial stay--a ludicrous pretense--but it served--and that is the final test of any love or any creed. It served. As these forces worked, I, at times, forgot that the picture was that of an unknown. Its reality was so strong that it came to stand for some one I had left behind, whom I must live to rejoin; some one inexpressibly dear whose love hung over me and safeguarded me like a powerful talisman. Often, in my broken sleep, I would dream that I was sore beset by a thousand dangers and had fled to my cave as animals have fled to caves since the world began, and that I stood huddling there miserably, awaiting the end. Then, in the dream, she would come out of the picture, as Galatea stepped down from the lifelessness of granite into rosy and animated warmth. My assailants always fell back before her coming and I, despite my terror, would attempt to meet her gallantly. She would open a hidden door in the side of the rock, and lead me through it. And always, in this repeated and unvarying dream, beyond the door we stepped into a brilliantly lighted room where men and women chatted carelessly in evening dress and danced to the tinkle of stringed instruments. By these degrees the illusion grew until my pretense became a vagary and obsession and to me ceased to be a pretense. I fell back on occultism and told myself that I had succeeded by mere concentration of mind in forcing her to project her astral self across the world, until I had with me her picture and her essence of soul. Many of life's most sacred and permanent institutions are only fictions, long entertained. My fiction became so real to me that for periods I forgot to question it--then sometimes, at a moment when the illusion was strongest, some impulse of reason would strike in upon and chill me, like a sluicing from a cold bucket. It would come upon me to think of myself as I should have appeared to any unwarned stranger, who had found me talking, even lovemaking, with a sheet of lifeless paper. And from that impersonal view-point I would wonder if my brain had already crumbled to madness and imbecility. The cold sweat would bead my forehead. My finger would creep to the trigger of my pistol and linger there, twitching with the itch of self-destruction. But soon the smiling lips would reassure me; the mood would pass and again I would surrender myself to the pretense which was grateful where the truth was austere and desolate. I discovered in my tramps about the island's edge that this spot seemed to be the most favored home of the orchid. This monarch of flowers bloomed at the jungle's margin, in an infinite variety of flaunting petals, soft colors and deeply glowing life. No other flower is so ethereal and illusively lovely. None could be more fitted for a tribute to as impalpable a love as I acknowledged. It became a part of my daily program to bring back with me as I returned to the cave, masses of these splendid blossoms which I heaped before her shrine. I had reached the age of thirty-five and had heretofore been immune to feminine fascinations. I had even been characterized as a woman-hater, though this was an injustice. This new obsession, bewitching--whatever you may choose to term it--was not momentary. In defense of my consistency I declare that the thing required two weeks at least for its accomplishment. And in those two weeks other affairs were developing. Of course, I had been told, as has every traveler in the south seas, that there is not an atoll or island left for discovery. I had been informed that on every coral speck in the reef-strewn ocean, there is or has been, a white man. I knew now that this was a fallacy. My island was marked by a volcano tall enough to proclaim itself as far as a glass could sweep the horizon from a ship's lookout, and if no pearl shell or beche-de-mer trader, no blackbirder of the old days, no windswept vessel of the present had hitherto sighted that peak, it must lie too far off the course of rambling traffic, to expect a visit now. I knew that we had dropped down-world for days before the wreck, and I had heard grumbling, because of the mysterious course being steered. I was the firstcomer--and yet the faint and struggling instinct of hope urged the setting up of a tattered flag or two of sail cloth along the beetling heights. From my eyrie in the rocks, the coast line went away in a succession of broken and porous cliffs which I had explored for a distance of perhaps two miles. That two miles held all I had learned to know of this island which was clearly a large one. What the interior had behind its curtain of palm and moss and cane--back in the impenetrable jungle--belonged to the mystery of an unopened book. I did know that off to the left as one faced the sea, separated from me by four or five miles of precipitous coast line, loomed a headland from which a flag waving by day would be observable--if ever a vessel came across the shoulder of the world. To reach the point and return would be a day's journey, for the path I must take led over a trail more suited to a mountain goat than a man who had until lately been civilized. One morning I set out carrying tightly wrapped one of the pieces of sail-cloth which had come out of the mate's chest. My resolution to set my flag flying had filled me with a sort of specious exaltation. The venomous beauty of the place was beyond description, and in a measure I yielded to its lure and walked almost buoyantly. The sea to its skyline was blue with a depth of sapphire. The tangle of the jungle was aflash with vivid and sparkling color. Small, harmless snakes slid brightly aside, as multi-hued as shreds of rainbow. I had climbed and crawled for several hours, and was beginning to suffer keenly from weariness and stone bruises on my poorly protected feet, when I came to a sort of path running upward. This led me to a more commanding eminence than I had before reached and gave me a view inland over an endless blanket of green, unbroken forest. Ahead of me was a still greater height, and after a short rest I made my way to the point from which I could look across its crest. Then I halted dead in my tracks and stood fingering my revolver. A cold sweat came out on my forehead and my knees trembled, threatening to fail me. It was as though a curtain had risen on a stage set to terrify the beholder. The high ground fell steeply away into a basin whose slopes were roughly broken into rising tiers. These tiers commanded a sort of amphitheatre two hundred yards in diameter, through which ran a small thread of water cascading from the interior elevation. A quarter of a mile away began the background of timber and tangle. The bottom of the basin had been worn smooth by much treading. A boulder some four feet tall and probably of an equal thickness rose, pulpit like, at the center. Its top was hollowed out into a bowl and its sides were inscribed with crude hieroglyphics. Near it were a half-dozen upright poles, surmounted by what seemed to be cocoanuts. In a dozen places under rude stone ovens were the ashes of dead fires. Scattering piles of human bones--but nowhere a skull--told me that I had stumbled on a kai-kai temple--a place of cannibal observances and feasting. I did not at once venture into the hollow for closer scrutiny. It was not such an institution as one would care to invade carelessly. Over the whole place hung a horrible stench. Flies buzzed about it in noisy, filthy swarms. After a long interval of listening and reconnoitering I became convinced that this place of special observance was to-day as neglected as are many churches in Christian lands on week days. I crept tremblingly down into the abominable pit and made my way toward the stone altar prepared now for any atrocious sight. But the climax of discovery came when I had crawled half way and the cocoanuts on the poles resolved themselves into withered, human heads, sun dried and yellow fringed. These mummied skulls were for the most part trophies of old battles, but lying at the top of the rock was another which must have surmounted its living shoulders only a few days ago. The frizzled hair was tied into dozens of kinky knots. The facial angle was low and slanting and the coarse lips were hideously twisted in a snarl of death and defiance. On the scalp, which a war club had crushed, sat a very beautiful head-dress of gull feathers, brilliantly dyed in green and crimson and orange. The victim had worn to his obsequies such a decoration as might have crowned a princess of the Incas. He had been a warrior of rank and now, as befitted his station, his head lay drying out on a mat of yellow and brown wood pulp. A stifling nausea assaulted the pit of my stomach. My retreating steps reeled drunkenly, and when, near the rim of the basin, I turned for a final gaze in the fascination of horror, I no longer had the place to myself. Two human figures stood at the farther rim of the amphitheater, silently regarding me. Both were thin, pigmy-built men with long arms and low foreheads. Their faces, grotesquely disfigured with bone and shell ornaments spiked through noses and ears, were bestial yet not stupid. Their eyes were beady and sharp, and just now their thick lips hung pendulous with wonderment. For an instant I was incapable of motion; then, as they stood in equal petrification, I remembered and acted on the counsel of an east-side gang member whom I had once been privileged to know in New York. I had inconsequently inquired whether, in his acrimonious career, he never came eye to eye with fear. "Sure thing," he had promptly replied, "but when a guy gets your goat--stall. If you makes de play strong enough it's a cinch you gets his goat too." By that rule this was my moment to "stall." I drew myself up to the limit of stature and threw out my chest in the best semblance of arrogance I could assume. They were decked like the head of their sacrificial victim, in brilliant feather work, beautifully and harmoniously wrought. Their flint-tipped spears were elaborately carved and their necklaces were fashioned of shells and teeth. Some of the teeth were human. For perhaps thirty seconds we held the strained tableau, then I glanced over my shoulder. Between me and retreat stood a third figure. Compared to his gaudiness of decking, the raiment of the others was mean and sober. One bare shoulder and arm was covered with festering ulcers. His monkey-like face had the same slant of brow and heaviness of lip, but it worked constantly with a keen and twitching play of expression which argued speculative thought. As I turned he was leaning on a knotted war-club, and regarding me with profound gravity. _ |
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