The Touch of the Metal
Presently I roused myself and led the way down the white waves. My companions held back nervously and warned me not to touch it, or I would die as Jorak had done. But I succeeded in filling a test tube with the stuff. It was not transparent. It was white, gleaming, metallic, like mercury, or molten silver. I carried it back up to the bluff and set about examining it, while Naro stood guard, and Melvar watched me. She asked innumerable questions, concerning not only the operation in hand, but on such subjects as the appearance of a cat, and Fifth Avenue styles of ladies' garments. Upon which (the latter subject), however, I was lamentably ignorant. And so often did I pause, to answer her questions, to laugh at the naive quaintness of her phrases, or to let my eyes rest on her charming face, that the attempted analysis of the metal did not progress with any remarkable celerity.
The silver liquid was very mobile and very light, having a specific gravity of only .25, or not even four times that of liquid hydrogen, which is .07. It was extremely corrosive. Tiny bits of wood or paper were entirely consumed on contact with it, with the liberation, apparently, of carbon dioxide and water vapor, and a dense purple gas that I could not identify. That suggested, of course, that the stuff contained oxygen, but as to how much, or in what combination, I had no idea. A drop of it on a larger piece of paper set it afire. I found, too, when testing the electrolytic qualities of the liquid, that when I introduced into it a copper and a silver coin, electrically connected, that the stuff was rapidly decomposed into the purple vapor, with the generation of a powerful current. But the metal seemed not affected at all. That was another puzzling result. My experiments, of course, were comparatively crude, and when I had gone as far as I could, I really knew little more about the silver liquid than in the beginning.
Despite Melvar's warning, and my own precautions, I splashed a drop of it on my arm. She cried out in horror, and I saw that a splotch of purple was spreading like a thin film over the skin. There was no pain, but the muscles of the arm were seized with sudden and uncontrollable convulsions. Melvar tried to wash the stain off with water from my canteen. In an hour the color had faded, though the limb was still sore and painful.
By that time, the purple disc of the sun was sinking low, and we took thought of how to spend the night. Naro climbed up on the plain to gather a few of the fruits for our supper, and we found a little cave in the bluff that seemed a good place of shelter. I gathered an armful of the red brush and made a fire.
The leaves burned fiercely, crackling as if they contained oil. The fire produced a great volume of acrid black smoke. Combustion was greatly accelerated on account of the increased atmospheric pressure here, many thousand feet below sea level. Melvar and Naro were intensely interested in the performance, although they had seen Austen light a fire while he was in the city.
Melvar slept in the cavern, and Naro and I took turns at standing guard at the entrance. The darting pencils of crimson were abroad again, but they passed far overhead, and we heard the sounds of their passage only as vast and distant sighs. In the morning we rose early, and clambered back up the cliffs. I was in rather a puzzling situation. Clearly my duty was to get Austen's equipment to him as quickly as possible, but I liked neither to desert Melvar and her brother, nor to let them accompany me into the unknown perils of the region beyond. But the latter course seemed the best, and they were ready enough to go with me anywhere.
The Land of Madness
Having retraced our course of the day before for perhaps a mile, in order to get upon the upland, we set out for the north. The sun was just rising above the black rim when Naro shouted and pointed at the mist-clad red hills beyond the Silver Lake. At first I looked in vain; then I caught a faint flicker of amber light, pulsing up through the purple air.