第10章 THE RED ONE(10)

"It is better so.A sick man who cannot get well is foolish to live on for so little a while.Also is it better for the living that he should go.

You have been much in the way of late.Not but what it was good for me to talk to such a wise one.But for moons of days we have held little talk.Instead, you have taken up room in the house of heads, making noises like a dying pig, or talking much and loudly in your own language which I do not understand.This has been a confusion to me, for I like to think on the great things of the light and dark as I turn the heads in the smoke.Your much noise has thus been a disturbance to the long-learning and hatching of the final wisdom that will be mine before I die.As for you, upon whom the dark has already brooded, it is well that you die now.And I promise you, in the long days to come when I turn your head in the smoke, no man of the tribe shall come in to disturb us.And I will tell you many secrets, for I am an old man and very wise, and I shall be adding wisdom to wisdom as I turn your head in the smoke."So a litter was made, and, borne on the shoulders of half a dozen of the men, Bassett departed on the last little adventure that was to cap the total adventure, for him, of living.With a body of which he was scarcely aware, for even the pain had been exhausted out of it, and with a bright clear brain that accommodated him to a quiet ecstasy of sheer lucidness of thought, he lay back on the lurching litter and watched the fading of the passing world, beholding for the last time the breadfruit tree before the devil- devil house, the dim day beneath the matted jungle roof, the gloomy gorge between the shouldering mountains, the saddle of raw limestone, and the mesa of black volcanic sand.

Down the spiral path of the pit they bore him, encircling the sheening, glowing Red One that seemed ever imminent to iridesce from colour and light into sweet singing and thunder.And over bones and logs of immolated men and gods they bore him, past the horrors of other immolated ones that yet lived, to the three-king- post tripod and the huge king-post striker.

Here Bassett, helped by Ngurn and Balatta, weakly sat up, swaying weakly from the hips, and with clear, unfaltering, all-seeing eyes gazed upon the Red One.

"Once, O Ngurn," he said, not taking his eyes from the sheening, vibrating surface whereon and wherein all the shades of cherry-red playedunceasingly, ever a-quiver to change into sound, to become silken rustlings, silvery whisperings, golden thrummings of cords, velvet pipings of elfland, mellow distances of thunderings.

"I wait," Ngurn prompted after a long pause, the long-handled tomahawk unassumingly ready in his hand.

"Once, O Ngurn," Bassett repeated, "let the Red One speak so that I may see it speak as well as hear it.Then strike, thus, when I raise my hand; for, when I raise my hand, I shall drop my head forward and make place for the stroke at the base of my neck.But, O Ngurn, I, who am about to pass out of the light of day for ever, would like to pass with the wonder-voice of the Red One singing greatly in my ears.""And I promise you that never will a head be so well cured as yours," Ngurn assured him, at the same time signalling the tribesmen to man the propelling ropes suspended from the king-post striker."Your head shall be my greatest piece of work in the curing of heads."Bassett smiled quietly to the old one's conceit, as the great carved log, drawn back through two-score feet of space, was released.The next moment he was lost in ecstasy at the abrupt and thunderous liberation of sound.But such thunder! Mellow it was with preciousness of all sounding metals.Archangels spoke in it; it was magnificently beautiful before all other sounds; it was invested with the intelligence of supermen of planets of other suns; it was the voice of God, seducing and commanding to be heard.And - the everlasting miracle of that interstellar metal! Bassett, with his own eyes, saw colour and colours transform into sound till the whole visible surface of the vast sphere was a-crawl and titillant and vaporous with what he could not tell was colour or was sound.In that moment the interstices of matter were his, and the interfusings and intermating transfusings of matter and force.

Time passed.At the last Bassett was brought back from his ecstasy by an impatient movement of Ngurn.He had quite forgotten the old devil-devil one.A quick flash of fancy brought a husky chuckle into Bassett's throat.His shot-gun lay beside him in the litter.All he had to do, muzzle to head, was to press the trigger and blow his head into nothingness.

But why cheat him? was Bassett's next thought.Head-hunting, cannibal beast of a human that was as much ape as human, nevertheless Old Ngurn had, according to his lights, played squarer than square.Ngurn was in himself a forerunner of ethics and contract, of consideration, and gentleness in man.No, Bassett decided; it would be a ghastly pity and an act of dishonour to cheat the old fellow at the last.His head was Ngurn's, and Ngurn's head to cure it would be.

And Bassett, raising his hand in signal, bending forward his head as agreed so as to expose cleanly the articulation to his taut spinal cord, forgot Balatta, who was merely a woman, a woman merely and only and undesired.He knew, without seeing, when the razor- edged hatchet rose in the air behind him.And for that instant, ere the end, there fell upon Bassett the shadows of the Unknown, a sense of impending marvel of the rending of walls before the imaginable.Almost, when he knew the blow had started and just ere the edge of steel bit the flesh and nerves it seemed that he gazed upon the serene face of the Medusa, Truth - And, simultaneous with the bite of the steel on the onrush of the dark, in a flashing instant of fancy, he saw the vision of his head turning slowly, always turning, in the devil-devil house beside the breadfruit tree.

Waikiki, Honolulu, MAY 22, 1916.