“You may take your choice. The hot water, there—” His gesture was to the grating—“Or the cool, sweet water of Rax. But in either case, Nona shall be my Queen.”
He turned away. At the tunnel entrance, he paused. “Soon I shall come back for your answer.”
He was gone.
CHAPTER XXI
What were we to do? With such a choice, what could we say? Soon Og would return for his answer! The water of the cave still seemed ringing with his grim, sardonic voice.
Hopelessly we sat down for discussion. Nona sat on one of the seats where but a few moments before a Maagog mother had dropped and yielded up her infant to the boiling torrent beyond the grating. I shuddered and pulled Nona away. On the floor, near the center of the cave, we gathered in a huddled group. I braced my feet in the mud, for the current pressed us toward that ghastly grating, beyond which lay death.
The cave was silent save for the sinister hiss of steam beneath it. In the lurid green glow of the lamp overhead our faces were livid, death-like. Death hung all about us. An unseen, imponderable spectre, it seemed to lurk in the very water we breathed.
We were alone—yet not alone either. At the tunnel-mouth those squat black fishes circled back and forth on guard. Occasionally two or three would enter the cave. Poised before us, their eyes seemed gauging us. Uncanny eyes! Eyes almost like those of an intelligent dog whose master has set him to guard an enemy and who is watching suspiciously, expectantly, that enemy’s every move. We lowered our voices subconsciously, as though fearing that the black fishes would hear us and understand.
At first we had little to say. It was all so hopeless. We could not allow Og to return us to Rax and yield up Nona to him. That was unthinkable. And yet, if we did not— The memory of those infants’ bodies as they slid downward into the boiling torrent made us shudder with a fear that is implanted deep in every human heart.
Cowards? I do not think you could call us that. But the man who tells you he has faced death—in a calm moment of physical inactivity—without fear, is a liar.