Citadel of Fear

Citadel of Fear
by Francis Stevens
1918
CHAPTER I
Hidden in the Hills

"DON'T leave me -- All -- in --" The words were barely distinguishable,
but the tall figure in the lead, striding heavily through the soft,
impeding sand, heard the mutter of them and paused without turning.
He stood with drooped head and shoulders, as if the oppression of the
cruel, naked sun were an actual weight that pressed him earthward. His
companion, plowing forward with an ultimate effort, sagged from the
hips and fell face downward in the sand.
Apathetically the tall man looked at the twitching heap beside him.
Then he raised his head and stared through a reddening film at the vast,
encircling torture pen in which they both were trapped.
The sun, he thought, had grown monstrous and swallowed all the sky.
No blue was anywhere. Brass above, soft, white-hot iron beneath, and
all tinged to redness by the film of blood over sand-tormented eyes.
Beyond a radius of thirty yards his vision blurred and ceased, but into
that radius something flapped down and came tilting awkwardly across
the sand, long wings half-spread, yellow head lowered, bold with an
avid and loathsome curiosity.
"You!" whispered the man hoarsely, and shook one great, red fist at the
thing. "You'll not get your dinner off me nor him while my one foot can

follow the other!"
And with that he knelt down by the prostrate one, drew the limp arms
about his own neck, bowed powerful shoulders to support the body,
and heaved himself up again. Swaying, he stood for a moment with feet
spread, then began a new and staggering progress. The king-vulture
flapped lazily from his path and upward to renew its circling patience.
After years in hell, where he was doomed forever to bear an intolerable
burden across seas of smoking fire, the tall man regained a glimmering
of reason. It came with the discovery that he was lying flat on his
stomach, arms and breast immersed in liquid coolness, and that he was
gulping water as fast and as greedily as swollen tongue and lips would
permit.
With a self-control that saved two lives, he forced himself to cease
drinking, but laved in the water, played in it with his hands, could
scarcely believe in it, and at the same time thanked God for its reality.
So sanity came closely back, and with clearing vision he saw the
stream that meant salvation to sundrained tissues.
It was a deep, narrow, rapid flood, rushing darkly by and tugging at his
arms with the force of its turbulent current. Flowing out from a rocky
gorge, it lost itself again round a curving height of rocks.
What of the white-hot torture-pit? He was in shadow now, blessed, cool,
revivifying. But--alone.
Dragging himself by sheer will-power from the water, the tall man
wiped at his eyes and stared about. There close by lay a motionless
heap of brown, coated with sand in dusty patches, white sand in the
tumble of black hair at one end of it.
Very cautiously the tall man got to his feet and took an uncertain step
toward the huddled figure. Then he shook one dripping red fist toward
a wide, shimmering expanse that lay beyond the shadow of the rocks.
"You missed us," he muttered with a chuckle almost childishly

triumphant, "and you'll never get us--not while my one foot can follow
the other!"
Then he set himself to revive the companion he had carried through
torment on his shoulders, bathing the face, administering salvation by
cautious driblets on the blackened, leather-dry lips and tongue. He
himself had drunk more and faster. His already painful stomach and
chest told him that.
But this other man, having a friend to minister, need take no such
chance with his life. From his face the sand was washed in little white
rivulets; his throat muscles began to move in convulsive twitches of
swallowing.
As he worked, the tall man cast an occasional glance at the gorge from
which flowed the stream. Below was the desert; above, craggy heaps
and barren stretches of stone towered skyward. Blind and senseless, led
by some inner guidance, say instinct rather than sense, he had dragged
himself and his fellow-prospector from the desert's hot, dry clutch.
Would the hills prove kinder? Water was here, but what of food?
He glanced again up the gorge and saw that beside the swift water there
was room for a man to walk. And downstream drifted a green, leafy
branch, hurrying and twisting with the current.

As liquid iron cools, withdrawn from the fire, so the desert cooled with
the setting of the sun, its furnace. Intolerable whiteness became purple
mystery, overhung by a vault of soft and tender blue, that deepened,
darkened,