Page:Weird Tales v33n05 (1939-05).djvu/144

142 imprisoned in one of these discarded vehicles. You might call it a 'dead soul'."

"What an awful idea!" said Lawson with a shiver. "Wherever did you unearth that ghastly belief? What conceivable thing could cause the death of a soul?"

Sternberg coolly hunted for another cigarette.

"Did you ever have a nightmare?" he asked grimly.

"Why, yes." Lawson's tone was puzzled.

"Then," pursued the Austrian deliberately, "you will remember that on occasions it has seemed to you that you were hunted through dark corridors and fathomless spaces by nameless horrors from which you strove frantically to escape. On these occasions you have been paralyzed with terror, but always you have awakened in time to save your soul from the clutch of the demons which were upon it, and you have never realized when you awoke how real had been your peril. Now, do you understand how a soul dies?"

"You mean?"

"Yes, I mean just that. Some people never awaken from their nightmares. They are found dead in their beds. Their 'souls' while absent from their bodies in sleep have been overpowered by some malevolent power and their progress in the scheme of existence indefinitely arrested. These mysterious deaths are popularly ascribed to 'heart failure.' Oh well"

He rose abruptly, and, crumpling his cigarette into a shapeless mass with nervous fingers, pitched it over the rail. "Let us go around to the other side and join the rest," he said.

They passed round the corner of the deck house and crossed over to the star- board side of the deck, where the majority of the passengers of the Amenothes II were clustered in little groups along the rail, chatting and gazing idly into the swirls and sparkles of the silver-splashed water overside.

A little apart from the rest Von Schrimm and Mrs. Lawson were engaged in an animated conversation. He was pointing out across the desert and describing something, evidently humorous, with his characteristic intensity, and as Lawson came into ear-shot the sound of his wife's laugh floated toward him through the stillness of the moonlight.

H THE devil!"

Lawson leaned across the rail and gazed disgustedly at the low march of sun-smitten thirsty earth that marked the confines of the shallow, turgid river.

The Nile was low, very low for the season, and the gaunt ribs of brown sand and mud which the receding waters were laying bare stretched here and there in full view in the channel, their low ridges crowned with the marshaled rows of river fowl, sleepily digesting their morning catch of fish.

Around these miniature sandy islets the shallow current of the river swept muddily, and in other places the ripple and quiver of the torrent revealed the presence of submerged shoals that formed a constant menace to navigation.

It was on one of these submerged bars that the Amenothes II lay stranded. Stranding had become the boat's habit. On her leisurely course up the Nile, since the night when Sternberg and Lawson had sat in the lee of the deck house and wandered in their conversation from Von Schrimm to mystery, stranding had followed stranding with monotonous regularity, and even the most vigilant use of the medreh in the hands of the Egyptian pilot seemed powerless to read the soundings in time to prevent disaster.

"Oh, the devil!" Lawson muttered again.

He glared savagely at the toiling efforts