The Moon Pool & Dwellers in the Mirage. Abraham Merritt

it hard to shake it off. I spoke at last in sheer desperation. “You’ve been acting damned queer, Indian.” “Tsi Tsa’lagi — I told you — I’m all Cherokee.” “Tsantawu — It is I, Degata, who speaks to you now.” I had dropped into the Cherokee; he answered:

      “What is it my brother desires to know?”

      “What it was the voices of the dead whispered that night we slept beneath the spruces? What it was you knew to be truth by the three signs they gave you. I did not hear the voices, brother — yet by the blood rite they are my ancestors as they are yours; and I have the right to know their words.”

      He said: “Is it not better to let the future unroll itself without giving heed to the thin voices of the dead? Who can tell whether the voices of ghosts speak truth?”

      “Tsantawu points his arrow in one direction while his eyes look the other. Once he called me dog slinking behind the heels of the hunter. Since it is plain he still thinks me that . . .”

      “No, no, Lief,” he broke in, dropping the tribal tongue. “I only mean I don’t know whether it’s truth. I know what Barr would call it — natural apprehensions put subconsciously in terms of racial superstitions. The voices — we’ll call them that, anyway — said great danger lay north. The Spirit that was north would destroy them for ever and for ever if I fell in its hands. They and I would be ‘as though we never had been’. There was some enormous difference between ordinary death and this peculiar death that I couldn’t understand. But the voices did. I would know by three signs that they spoke truth, by Ataga’hi, by Usunhi’yi and by the Yunwi Tsundi. I could meet the first two and still go back. But if I went on to the third — it would be too late. They begged me not to — this was peculiarly interesting, Leif — not to let them be — dissolved.”

      “Dissolved!” I exclaimed. “But — that’s the same word I used. And it was hours after!”

      “Yes, that’s why I felt creepy when I heard you. You can’t blame me for being a little preoccupied when we came across the stony flat that was like Ataga’hi, and more so when we struck the coincidence of the Shadowed-land, which is pretty much the same as Usunhi’yi, the Darkening-land. It’s why I said if we ran across the third, the Yunwi Tsundi, I’d take your interpretation rather than Barr’s. We did strike it. And if you think all those things aren’t a good reason for acting damned queer, as you put it, well — what would you think a good one?”

      Jim in the golden chains . . . Jim with the tentacle of that Dark Power creeping, creeping toward him . . . my lips were dry and stiff . . .

      “Why didn’t you tell me all that! I’d never have let you go on!”

      “I know it. But you’d have come back, wouldn’t you, old-timer?”

      I did not answer; he laughed.

      “How could I be sure until I saw all the signs?”

      “But they didn’t say you would be — dissolved,” I clutched at the straw. “They only said there was the danger.”

      “That’s all.”

      “And what would I be doing? Jim — I’d kill you with my own hand before I’d let what I saw happen in the Gobi happen to you.”

      “If you could,” he said, and I saw he was sorry he had said it.

      “If I could? What did they say about me — those damned ancestors?”

      “Not a damned thing,” he answered, cheerfully. “I never said they did. I simply reasoned that if we went on, and I was in danger, so would you be. That’s all.”

      “Jim — it isn’t all. What are you keeping back?”

      He arose, and stood over me.

      “All right. They said that even if the Spirit didn’t get me, I’d never get out. Now you have the whole works.”

      “Well,” I said, a burden rolling off me, “that’s not so bad. And, as for getting out — that may be as may be. One thing’s sure — if you stay, so do I.”

      He nodded, absently. I went on to something else that had been puzzling me.

      “The Yunwi Tsundi, Jim, what were they? You never told me anything about them that I remember. What’s the legend?”

      “Oh — the Little People,” he squatted beside me, chuckling, wide awake from his abstraction. “They were in Cherokee-land when the Cherokees got there. They were a pygmy race, like those in Africa and Australia today. Only they weren’t blacks. These small folk fit their description. Of course, the tribes did some embroidering. They had them copper-coloured and only two feet high. These are golden-skinned and average three feet. At that, they may have faded some here and put on height. Otherwise they square with the accounts — long hair, perfect shape, drums and all.”

      He went on to tell of the Little People. They had lived in caves, mostly in the region now Tennessee and Kentucky. They were earth-folk, worshippers of life; and as such at times outrageously Rabelaisian. They were friendly toward the Cherokees, but kept rigorously to themselves and seldom were seen. They frequently aided those who had got lost in the mountains, especially children. If they helped anyone, and took him into their caves, they warned him he mustn’t tell where the caves were, or he would die. And, ran the legends, if he told, he did die. If anyone ate their food he had to be very careful when he returned to his tribe, and resume his old diet slowly, or he would also die.

      The Little People were touchy. If anyone followed them in the woods, they cast a spell on him so that for days he had no sense of location. They were expert wood and metal workers, and if a hunter found in the forest a knife or arrow-head or any kind of trinket, before he picked it up he had to say: “Little People, I want to take this”. If he didn’t ask, he never killed any more game and another misfortune came upon him. One which distressed his wife.

      They were gay, the Little People, and they spent half their time in dancing and drumming. They had every kind of drum-drums that would make trees fall, drums that brought sleep, drums that drove to madness, drums that talked and thunder drums. The thunder drums sounded just like thunder, and when the Little People beat on them soon there was a real thunderstorm, because they sounded so much like the actuality that it woke up the thunderstorms, and one or more storm was sure to come poking around to gossip with what it supposed a wandering member of the family . . .

      I remembered the roll of thunder that followed the chanting; I wondered whether that had been the Little People’s defiance to Khalk’ru . . . .

      “I’ve a question or two for you, Leif.”

      “Go right ahead, Indian.”

      “Just how much do you remember of — Dwayanu?”

      I didn’t answer at once; it was the question I had been dreading ever since I had cried out to the Witch-woman on the white river’s bank.

      “If you’re thinking it over, all right. If you’re thinking of a way to stall, all wrong. I’m asking for a straight answer.”

      “Is it your idea that I’m that ancient Uighur, re-bom? If it is, maybe you have a theory as to where I’ve been during the thousands of years between this time and now.”

      “Oh, so the same idea has been worrying you, has it? No, reincarnation isn’t what I had in mind. Although at that, we know so damned little I wouldn’t rule it out. But there may be a more reasonable explanation. That’s why I ask — what do you remember of Dwayanu?”

      I determined to make a clean breast of it.

      “All right, Jim,” I said. “That same question has been riding my mind right behind Khalk’ru for three years. And if I can’t find the answer here, I’ll go back to the Gobi for it — if I can get out. When I was in that room of the oasis waiting the old priest’s call, I remembered perfectly well it had been Dwayanu’s. I knew the bed, and I knew the armour and the weapons. I stood looking at one of the metal caps and I remembered