The Face in the Abyss | Page 3

at last.
"But where do you come from? What are you?" he asked again. She did not choose to
answer these questions.
"Is he your enemy?"
"No," he said. "We travel together."
"Then why--" she pointed again to the outstretched figure--"why did you do this to him?

Why did you not let him have his way with me?"
Graydon flushed. The question, with all its subtle implications, cut.
"What do you think I am?" he answered, hotly. "No man lets a thing like that go on!"
She looked at him, curiously. Her face softened. She took a step closer to him. She
touched once more the bruises on her cheek.
"Do you not wonder," she said, "now do you not wonder why I do not call my people to
deal him the punishment he has earned?"
"I do wonder," Graydon's perplexity was frank. "I wonder indeed. Why do you not call
them--if they are close enough to hear?"
"And what would you do were they to come?"
"I would not let them have him--alive," he answered. "Nor me."
"Perhaps," she said, slowly--"perhaps that is why I do not call."
Suddenly she smiled upon him. He took a swift step toward her. She thrust out a warning
hand. "I am--Suarra," she said. "And I am--Death!" A chill passed through Graydon.
Again he realized the alien beauty of her. Could there be truth in these legends of the
haunted Cordillera? He had never doubted that there was something real behind the terror
of the Indians, the desertion of the arrieros. Was she one of its spirits, one of its--demons?
For an instant the fantasy seemed no fantasy. Then reason returned. This girl a demon!
He laughed.
"Do not laugh," she said. "The death I mean is not such as you who live beyond the high
rim of our hidden land know. Your body may live on--yet it is death and more than death,
since it is changed in--dreadful--ways. And that which tenants your body, that which
speaks through your lips, is changed--in ways more dreadful still!... I would not have that
death come to you."
Strange as were her words, Graydon hardly heard them: certainly did not then realize
their meaning, lost as he was in wonder at her beauty.
"How you came by the Messengers, I do not know. How you could have passed unseen
by them, I cannot understand. Nor how you came so far into this forbidden land. Tell
me--why came you here at all?"
"We came from afar," he told her, "on the track of a great treasure of gold and gems; the
treasure of Atahualpa, the Inca. There were certain signs that led us. We lost them. We
found that we, too, were lost. And we wandered here."
"Of Atahualpa or of Incas," the girl said, "I know nothing. Whoever they were, they
could not have come to this place. And their treasure, no matter how great, would have

meant nothing to us--to us of Yu-Atlanchi, where treasures are as rocks in the bed of a
stream. A grain of sand it would have been, among many--" she paused, then went on,
perplexedly, as though voicing her thoughts to herself--"But it is why the Messengers did
not see them that I cannot understand... the Mother must know of this.... I must go
quickly to the Mother...."
"The Mother?" asked Graydon.
"The Snake Mother!" her gaze returned to him; she touched a bracelet on her right wrist.
Graydon, drawing close, saw that this bracelet held a disk on which was carved in
bas-relief a serpent with a woman's head and woman's breast and arms. It lay coiled upon
what appeared to be a great bowl held high on the paws of four beasts. The shapes of
these creatures did not at once register upon his consciousness, so absorbed was he in his
study of that coiled figure. He stared close--and closer. And now he realized that the head
reared upon the coils was not really that of a woman. No! It was reptilian.
Snake-like--yet so strongly had the artist feminized it, so great was the suggestion of
womanhood modeled into every line of it, that constantly one saw it as woman, forgetting
all that was of the serpent.
The eyes were of some intensely glittering purple stone. Graydon felt that those eyes
were alive--that far, far away some living thing was looking at him through them. That
they were, in fact, prolongations of some one's--some thing's--vision.
The girl touched one of the beasts that held up the bowl. "The Xinii," she said. Graydon's
bewilderment increased. He knew what those animals were. Knowing, he also knew that
he looked upon the incredible.
They were dinosaurs! The monstrous saurians that ruled earth millions upon millions of
years ago, and, but for whose