I whirled around fiercely, but a firm arresting hand was laid on my shoulder. From afar off, deep blue eyes looked into mine—eyes that were cool and sane and brave. They shone through the red curtains of insanity in my brain. They broke the spell of fear.
Suddenly I was very weak, and trembling and sick. Melvar's lithe arms were close about me. Her throbbing heart was close to mine. And in her dark, warm blue eyes, so close to mine, were sympathy, and tenderness, and love. She was human; she was real. I knew that her love would shield me from these terrors. I smiled at her, and sank down weakly in the red brush. But she had saved my mind. I had wandered on the brink of the fearful insanity of terror, and she had brought me back.
I looked from her sweet face, so full of anxious concern to the thing in the sky. But now it seemed remote, unreal, and I gazed at it with weak indifference. Presently I saw that the whole thing was beginning to sink as though a weight were being accumulated upon it. Suddenly an immense gleaming globule of silver fell from the lower violet globe and dropped straight for the Silver Lake, while the weird form of lights that had made it floated back to its former elevation. The great shining sphere fell and struck the white lake with a deafening roar, sending out great concentric waves in all directions. The amazing thing sank again, released a second huge drop, and rose. The process was repeated again and again, the interval being, by my watch, about 3 minutes, 15.2 seconds. All day it went on, with the great waves washing up the bluffs above the beach, and before night the level of the Silver Lake stood perceptibly higher.
Here was the mystery of the origin of the Silver Lake explained, but by a phenomenon far more inexplicable than the sea itself. In vain I tried to account for it in some rational way, or to assign some natural cause for the thing. My mind could hardly grasp it. It was almost unbelievable, even as I looked upon it. My reason would not admit that such a thing could be in a rational world.
CHAPTER VIII
Stalked by the Purple Beast
So weak was I after that terrible experience that it was noon before I felt able to go on. The thing, as I have said, continued to hang in the sky all day, and to drop regularly its burden of the silver liquid. But presently I became accustomed to it, and realized that it threatened us with no immediate danger.
After a light lunch of the yellow fruit, and a deep draught of water from a little stream that seemed almost parallel to our route of march for a mile or two, we retired to the higher ground where the scrub was not so dense as in the bottom of the valley, and set out for the north again. Still I was feeling mentally limp—dully indifferent to what was passing about—and physically exhausted as well. I was not as much on my guard against the weird perils of the place as I should have been.
Several times Naro stopped and listened, declaring that something was following us, keeping in the cover of waist-high brush in the bottom of the little valley along the side of which we were traveling. But I could hear nothing. Melvar, for once, had ceased her eager interrogation, and was entertaining me with the legendary account of the past great heroes of Astran. She sang me a few passages from the epic in her native tongue. Her voice was clear and pure and very beautiful. And though the words were strange to me, their sound was noble and suggestive, and there was a powerful, compelling rhythm in the lines. She translated the story into English. It was about such an epic poem as might have been expected, dealing with the adventures of an immortal hero, who had once conquered the Purple Ones, set up the vast palaces of Astran, and at last lost his life on an expedition across the Silver Lake to battle the Krimlu.