Other Earths (collection)

“And so as much as I was full of wonder at the dismal choirs of rock, the ghostly chapels with their dripping columns sixty feet above my head, I found myself studying the ground as well, looking for marks of the outlaw’s passage. I remembered the way Madame Mylecraine had leaped to his defense and wondered at the connection between them. At the same time I first noticed a shard of broken pottery such as is often found where Cherokees have camped—a distinctive piece, ridges of black on a dull surface. I swung my lantern over one of these, allowing my companions to go ahead. I thought I had seen several of these shards, broken into rough trapezoids, and resolved to look for them. I passed by the Devil’s Looking Glass, a sheet of fallen rock. And in a chamber called the Snow Room, where any shout or call brings from the ceiling a shower of crystal flakes, I found what I was looking for—away from the path, where the salt dust was undisturbed, a piece of my broken pot, and beyond a naked footprint.

“I let the torches diminish as the men passed into the Deserted Chamber. I did not call them back. To do so would have dusted me as if with snow. Instead I remembered my promise to Madame Mylecraine, or Kate, as she would have had me call her. With my lantern held in front, I took a few steps forward, around a buttress of the rock. There was a twisting corridor, another piece of pottery. Fifty yards on, I found a hole, a round passage perhaps four feet tall, and in front of it, another footprint.

“Like Robinson Crusoe, I crouched over it. My dear sister, I do not know why I continued, except because there are always choices of this nature in the lives of men, to creep forward in the dark or else fall back. I could feel a wind from the round hole, not enough to threaten my flame. I knelt and pushed up an ascending passage until it opened up into a great space. My light could not reach the ceiling. And I found myself at the edge of a cliff. A spar or promontory of rock protruded thirty feet over the black chasm, ending in a rough point. From the cliff I could see no trace of the far wall, or of the bottom, or of the roof. It was a place at the edge of the world, a strip of rock that passed into the darkness at both sides. I crossed it in five paces, shuffling through the half-burned canes that were as thick here as the saline crystals had been back beyond the hole, piles of them.

“I stretched my lamp over the abyss. Now I could hear at a great distance the rushing of a stream, while some wisps of vapor lifted toward the light. And I could see also the remnants of a painted geometric pattern on the limestone promontory, even on the underside, daubed there by some brave or chief’s son as he hung suspended over the depths. On the top I saw three timbers wrapped in bundles of bleached cloth, carved poles or images sacred to the first inhabitants of that place and hidden there, I guessed, from men like me.

“Nor could I keep from my mind the rumors I had heard of buried treasure, purses robbed along the road or the lost gold of these ancient tribes. Even though I understood the foolishness of such tales, I could not stop myself from setting my lantern in a crevice in the rock, carved there, as I saw, for the purpose. On my hands and knees, I climbed out on the base of the promontory, placing my feet in the shallow steps. And I had just promised myself to turn back, to abandon this search or else to call out to my friends, as I still supposed them to be. But then I heard a noise behind me, the chink of an iron chain, while at the same time the light trembled. I turned to see a man against the rock wall behind me, though whether he had followed me out of the hole or had crept toward me from somewhere further on along the ledge, I could not then determine. For a moment I was motionless with horror, because I was convinced that this was Benbourgisse himself, a huge man clad only in leather breeches, with naked legs and a black, naked, hairless chest. He had no beard and no hair on his oiled scalp. He pulled at the swinging torch, and when he turned to me and smiled, his features showed his Cherokee or African parentage. But more horrifying still was what he intended at that moment, as I saw him wrench the iron bar from its crevice in the rocks. Ah, God, he could not leave me here, and so I gathered myself on my stone promontory and leaped at him across the intervening space. In the middle of my jump, he swung the lantern toward me, only high beyond my grasp, launching it out over the abyss, where it fell and was extinguished at once.