Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/92

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OUT OF THE hideous mire of futility, out of the lost, near-forgotten glories of the Indian Race, comes again a striving— even into the present!

Out of vanished power and Empire, comes today the word of the Red Men: "We live on, and we know. We will again be great "

Under Death Valley; under Butte, Montana; under many Western states; out of the green hell of South America; out of Yucatan; of Central America; and out of Mexico—come many reports that there are large areas of the Elder caves held by Indians. These areas the white monopoly of all antique ray people, for all their mocking and their vaunting and suppression, are unable to overcome.

There, still today, something of an ancient art and wisdom vastly different in every way from that of the white-dominated ray caverns survives—untouched by the corruption and blight of modern ray evils.

There, too, survives that savagery and worship of strange Gods characterized by the Aztec ceremony of cutting the heart out of a living victim—and offering it to their "God."

There, too, survives something best characterized by the poem of Longfellow—"Hiawatha," known to all of you. That something that lives in all men, but which many Indians still call "The Great Spirit."

There, too, survives a white and pitiful thing that once was red and courageous and strong. Other things that once were men, are no longer enough like men to be so called.

I am going to tell you a story of the struggles of the Red Men in the caverns, those who have preserved their courage and their intelligence, and their noble efforts to make of the ancient secrets a powerful tool for the rehabilitation of the Red Race.

It is a historic fact that whole tribes of Indians mysteriously vanished without trace before the advance of the white man. It is not so generally known that they disappeared, in many cases, into the fearful vastnesses of the labyrinthine mysteries of the Elder Race's former home.

The traveler in the white-dominated portions of the caverns today finds the marks of their Indian cooking fires against the walls of polished and carved walls, the water jars and pottery, the crude wall paintings, sometimes overlaying the glorious work of the Elder Race. These things they have left all through the American caverns—and they are things left by Indians of culture completely the same as the Red Men of Revolutionary times. For many tribes of Indians of those times when they fled ever westward from civilization (as we whites call our social order) knew of the God caverns and the tremendous things they contained. But they apparently did not know how to use these things.

How much they did know of the operation and use of the terrific power of the Elder machines we cannot know, but we do know that for two centuries no "spiritualist" "sent his spirit" into the "spirit world" without an "Indian guide." That this ever-present "Indian-guide" in all spiritualist doings was the descendant of those same tribes who fled into the eternal darkness and fearful wonder of the underworld to escape the white man's massacre of the Indian is very plain to anyone who knows anything of the history and the customs of the caverns. That they did not use the weapons, but only the telaug, is easily understood when one knows of the Elder Race custom of sealing all weapons against casual search; within great vaults that are not casually found by the ignorant.

To those who know of the trickery and deceit always practised by the underworld peoples to hide the existence of their homes, this Indian guide to the "spiritualists" is very recognizable as the Indian race in the caverns hiding themselves with an easily committed lie. That they should assist white spiritualists at their "seances" seems to furnish a picture of their inability to find a practical use for their time in the mysterious world of darkness. To one who has seen what the Indian of the caverns has become from the effects of lack of sunlight and air and proper food, one can understand why the Red Men of the caves have not been a very potent force in American history.

That these "Indian guides" are a phenomena never encountered much of late years speaks volumes to one who knows of the constant warfare and the fragile