A Feast Unknown (15 page)

I dream, of course, as every human dreams. A psychologist
once checked me out on that because I was convinced that I had had only one dream in my entire life. He awoke me when the proper eye movements told him I was dreaming, and I remembered my dreams.

That I now was aware of this dream indicated how deeply Doctor Caliban had affected me.

In the morning, I continued down the mountain. I was hungry and thirsty, and I wished I had cut Noli’s liver and heart out instead of wasting him for the sake of revenge. I knocked over a rock hyrax with a stone and ate that. Later, I found some grubs under a pile of dirt and I scooped up several handfuls of ants. In the afternoon, I caught a gray lizard which looked much like an American horned toad.

I also came across some fresh goat droppings. I passed these up. I was not hungry enough for them yet. I have survived at various times by eating the spoor of animals. Antelope and elephant turds are not too distasteful. Zebra excrement is almost relishable. Lion shit and that of other meat eaters is very unpalatable and only as a last resort would I eat them. But I have. If I had not done so, I would not now be alive.

At the bottom of the next-to-last ascent was a number of scattered bones of men and women. Some were very old and might have been lying out under the African sun for fifty years or more. A few seemed to be recent. The vultures, jackals, and ants had quickly stripped the flesh after their owners died falling off the face of the mountain, and the animals and the winds had scattered their bones.

The mountain which had killed them was very steep and smooth. It required professional mountain-climbers’ equipment,
if you did not know where to look. The Nine forbade any artificial aids whatsoever. There were places where a climber unafraid of heights, or with great courage, and equipped with strong fingers and toes, could clamber up the face of the four-thousand-foot cliff. I do not know how old these digit-holds are, but I would not be surprised to find out that humans—and subhumans—have been using them for at least thirty thousand years. The Nine could tell but have not, and no one dares ask.

Dusk fell when I was only 500 feet up. I crawled onto a ledge with a partial overhang and tried to sleep. The cold of the night did not bother me too much. I seem to be able to endure extremes of temperature that would dehydrate or give pneumonia to other men. What made my sleep fitful was the bronze giant with the glowing golden-bronze eyes and the big knife. He seemed to be prowling all night through the jungle of my dreams.

At dawn, I resumed climbing. The really difficult part of the ascent was behind me, and I went up like a monkey on a stick. Just as the sun began its slide down from the zenith, I reached the top of this cliff. There was a level stretch of rock about thirty yards square here, and another thousand feet of climbing. First, I had to get rid of all weapons and clothing. No one approached the Nine unless he or she was naked and empty-handed.

A shoulder-high granite boulder at one corner of the plateau looked as if it had fallen from above. A stranger would have passed it by without a second glance. I placed my hand three times in rapid succession on an egg-shaped projection on the boulder, waited nine seconds, and pressed six times. A section of the boulder slid up. A shelf inside contained a depression from
which water bubbled. I drank deeply of this and then I put my belt, sheath, and knife and rope on the shelf beside a number of other articles. These had been left by predecessors. Among them was a bronze-colored belt with pockets which contained a number of interesting and puzzling devices. It had been worn, of course, by Doc Caliban. I thought he had been naked when last I saw him, but he was so far off I had not detected the belt. Now this was discarded.

Beside the belt was a bronze-colored square of paper. I picked it up. The handwriting was bold but beautiful:

I rescued your Albanian friend and sent him on an errand for me. I also detected the dirt in his rifle. He seemed shaken and grateful. I expect him to get over both states quickly. But I told him I would track him down and torture him as only a medical doctor with vast scientific resources could do if he failed me. He seemed to believe me. Also, my errand will enable him to revenge himself more than satisfactorily on you and will profit him monetarily. He will contact my agents, who will expedite his entry into England and thence to Castle Grandrith, where your wife now is. He will hold her until I get there. Of course, he may betray me and take matters into his own hands.

There was no signature, or need for one.

I bellowed with frustration and rage. Since I could not get my hands on Caliban, I attacked his possessions. I threw the belt, sheath, and knife over the ledge. I ripped the note to pieces and
scattered them out over the face of the cliff. After that, I climbed swiftly, too swiftly, up the last cliff. Three times I almost fell off because of my lack of caution. With an effort, I cooled myself down, though it was some time before my shaking ceased.

The man’s speed was very impressive. He had come along behind me and taken Noli from the ledge and then he had passed me. Of course I was not racing him; I had taken it relatively easy.

I told myself that I should turn back and get to England as swiftly as possible. However, Caliban might be lying to me so that I would do just that. If I failed to appear before the Nine at the appointed time, I would get no second chance for immortality. And the time I would have to stay in the caverns was very short compared to the time it would take Noli to get back to civilization. Unless Noli had been instructed to report to Simmons and Rivers, who would radio for a plane.

I knew that my wife would have insisted that I go on and let her take care of herself. She was extremely capable. If she had not been, she would long ago have been killed. She would not want me to lose the elixir for any reason and especially because of this situation.

There was also another reason, the strongest, for not turning back at once. Caliban would be waiting for me somewhere between here and the entrance to the caverns.

I had to make a decision which would take many civilized men days to agonize over. This decision took me two minutes, and that was the longest, slowest time I have ever taken.

Late that afternoon, I reached the top of the second cliff and drank from a small spring. The exit from the plateau led through a series of canyons several hundred feet deep and so
narrow that both sides brushed my shoulders quite frequently. An hour’s journey brought me out of them, but not before I caught a small snake that was in the act of swallowing a rodent. I ate both of them and, feeling much stronger, pushed on.

The canyon abruptly widened onto an apron of rock about thirty feet wide and sixty long. At its end was a crevasse which fell for three thousand feet to a river. The river was always in shadow at this point. It was between sister peaks, not over eighty feet apart at this height.

A natural bridge of granite spanned the abyss. It was twenty feet wide along the bottom and sixty feet deep. The Nine had had its upper portion carved away for a depth of twenty feet, so that, like the razor’s edge bridge between the Heaven and Earth of the Muslims, a blade of rock was the only passage across. The only way across had to be on a surface three inches wide and eighty feet long.

At the other end of the arch was a broad ledge and an overhang and a blank wall of rock at the end of the ledge.

There was a seemingly natural fissure in the back of the recess. Behind this window stood a sentinel, one of whose duties was to make sure that every traveler walked across. Those who lost their nerves and sat down to scoot across were killed and tossed down into the river.

I have never seen anybody fall off the narrow arch or been thrown off, but then I have never seen anyone try to walk over it. I have always been unaccompanied when I made my required visits. I think that the Nine arrange matters so that the pilgrims of eternity do not see each other while on the way.

However, when I got into the caverns, I usually saw the
same people. My wife always went at a different time, and I had never seen Caliban there. I suspected that the Nine, for reasons of their own, which I might or might not learn, had arranged our visits to coincide.

It did not matter. What did matter was that Caliban was waiting for me, as I had expected.

Naked, his arms extended for balance, he stood in the center of the bridge with one foot behind the other. He grinned when he saw me; the teeth were peculiarly white in the metallic reddish-brown face.

20

That penis was like a dark-bronze python sliding out of a nest of brown-red leaves. It gave me a slight shock to see it, it was so enormous. It was soft, yet it must have been at least three inches wide and eight inches long. The testicles were correspondingly huge.

The genitals were the one disproportion of the magnificent body. Revealed, they made him a freak.

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I stopped at the edge of the abyss and set one foot on the bridge. The rock was black granite, smooth and cold when felt by the hand. My soles did not feel the stone, since the calluses on them were as thick and as tough as rhinoceros hide.

He seemed to expect me to say something, perhaps to ask him why he was after me. I saw no reason to talk. It was too late for words. The sooner I got him out of the way, the sooner I would get my business over with and the sooner I could get to England.

I stepped out on the bridge and slowly approached him, one foot behind the other, my hands held out. The wind blowing up from the river was cold. I was sweating despite the height and the lack of sun and the wind.

My penis was rising like a drawbridge.

Caliban looked at it and then shouted, savagely, “I will tear your prick off, my friend, and keep it for a trophy! It was with that that you raped my cousin, my beautiful Trish!”

I said nothing. I continued to advance.

“You killed her!” he shouted. “You raped and murdered her and you threw her body to the hyenas!”

I did not know what he was talking about. It was evident that he thought I had committed some crime upon someone he loved. I knew it was useless to reason with him, so I kept on walking toward him. And my penis was now rigid and at a 45-degree angle to my belly. It seemed ready to burst with blood. This bothered me, because I needed every bit of energy for the combat. Also, I must admit, I felt ridiculous and so was at a disadvantage. This feeling resulted in anger, and I did not want my judgment dissolved in its heat.