Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/106

106 virile man irresistible, that which that black magic of Mother Earth's ancient devising sends the blood leaping through the body shouting, "woman, woman!"

Lane whirled, crouched on his heels as he was, to see moving toward him from the dark the white, unmistakable form of a woman of normal size and remarkable appearance. She was not dressed in the long funereal garments which the skeleton-thin servitor of Eemeeshee had worn. Instead a brief fringed and beaded loincloth was her sole attire—except for a collar of rich Indian bead work resting upon her shoulders. So must have looked the women of his ancestral line, centuries ago before the white man came, as they moved to the marriage rites clothed in beauty and courage and becoming feminine humility and finding it covering enough.

HE pale face with its too large black eyes came closer to Lane, and one by one the men looked up at her and stared, their eyes fixed upon her as by magnetism polarized. Lane rose, and the blood leaped through him. The woman smiled. An eerie something gripped Lane. He bowed on one knee, something that he had never done. Her voice came to him then, a sultry, smiling voice, full of little undertones and an understanding of men. "You are the one named Eonee Lane. The Master has sent me to bring you and the one named Stevens to him. The Master is greatly interested that you should find your way to him still—when the men of the surface have forgotten him for so long."

"We are very interested, too. And who do we have the honor of addressing?"

"My name is Saba. I am called the Keeper of the Women. I am very glad you have come." There was an accompaniment of subtle meaning to her remark that Lane was not sure he heard or imagined. It was quite possible that she was glad to meet men from the surface if the thin robed skeleton who had met them first was a criterion of the men of the caverns. Or if "Tch Tch" was a sample of the manhood hereabout.

She turned and led off into the dark, and Lane and Stevens followed her. The women of the party turned their dark eyes upon the departing form of Saba wistfully. She was so much a woman it was hard to have one's man send his eyes after her realizing that themselves were so much less than Saba.

Lane and Stevens followed the supple silhouette through the half dark.

"Into the mysterious 'shell' of the ancient god—the 'Breath-Master'," thought Lane.

"Now we will see what the 'mighty power' so many of my ancestors have worshipped really is."

Down a long winding ramp Saba led them, never looking back, her ears telling her of their movement. A light glow lamp in her hand was the only light. Apparently Saba carried it for their benefit, for she did not appear to look at her surroundings, seemed to know her way in the utter darkness, seemed to move, like a bat, by the echo of the sounds from the surroundings. Lane and Stevens followed the tiny glow in her hand, trusted to luck and to Saba that all was well.

Quite abruptly they were no longer in a dark cavern, but had entered the titanic, brightly-lit luxury that is the God's home, when it has been left intact. This place had been treated kindly by Time, or had been carefully preserved by endless work by many hands through the centuries.

The walls were of crystal, a crystal that was cut with gigantic incut line-carvings, like Swedish cut-glass. Terrific figures of the unequalled giant physique of the Elder race moved across the transparent planes of the walls in the breathtaking splendor of form that is the Elder art work alone. The great couches of spring metal were thrown across with gleaming silk of blue, worked in gold, while a swinging incense burner exhaled a softening haze into the air, a haze that was a too-exotic scent of the Elder race's stores.

In the midst of this vaulting fabric of stone and shining crystal and carved alien figures and hazy air and utterly lonely luxury sat Eemeeshee, an Eemeeshee who was surrounded by a tremendous machine built of crystalline plastic and gleaming, glittering polished metals; or fluid flowing colorfully through coils and tubes beneath his feet; of glowing dials and leaping energies within vast cylinders before his eyes: of many great cubical screen cavities wherein the whole upper world might be brought to focus. This machine in which lay the great fat body of the motionless Eemeeshee was the work of a Master of the ancient machine art which has never been on Earth since the Golden Age.