I dropped a little behind them to examine a bit of carving --and, after all, they did not want me.I watched them pacing slowly ahead, his arm around her, black hair close to bronze-gold ringlets.Then I followed.Half were they over the bridge when through the roar of the imprisoned stream Iheard my name called softly.
"Goodwin! Dr.Goodwin!"
Amazed, I turned.From behind the pedestal of a carved group slunk--Marakinoff! My premonition had been right.
Some way he had escaped, slipped through to here.He held his hands high, came forward cautiously.
"I am finished," he whispered--"Done! I don't care what THEY'LL do to me." He nodded toward the handmaiden and Larry, now at the end of the bridge and passing on, oblivious of all save each other.He drew closer.His eyes were sunken, burning, mad; his face etched with deep lines, as though a graver's tool had cut down through it.I took a step back-ward.
A grin, like the grimace of a fiend, blasted the Russian's visage.He threw himself upon me, his hands clenching at my throat!
"Larry!" I yelled--and as I spun around under the shock of his onslaught, saw the two turn, stand paralyzed, then race toward me.
"But YOU'LL carry nothing out of here!" shrieked Marakinoff."No!"My foot, darting out behind me, touched vacancy.The roaring of the racing stream deafened me.I felt its mists about me; threw myself forward.
I was falling--falling--with the Russian's hand strangling me.I struck water, sank; the hands that gripped my throat relaxed for a moment their clutch.I strove to writhe loose;felt that I was being hurled with dreadful speed on--full realization came--on the breast of that racing torrent drop-ping from some far ocean cleft and rushing--where? A little time, a few breathless instants, I struggled with the devil who clutched me--inflexibly, indomitably.
Then a shrieking as of all the pent winds of the universe in my ears--blackness!
Consciousness returned slowly, agonizedly.
"Larry!" I groaned."Lakla!"
A brilliant light was glowing through my closed lids.It hurt.I opened my eyes, closed them with swords and needles of dazzling pain shooting through them.Again I opened them cautiously.It was the sun!
I staggered to my feet.Behind me was a shattered wall of basalt monoliths, hewn and squared.Before me was the Pa-cific, smooth and blue and smiling.
And not far away, cast up on the strand even as I had been, was--Marakinoff!
He lay there, broken and dead indeed.Yet all the waters through which we had passed--not even the waters of death themselves--could wash from his face the grin of triumph.
With the last of my strength I dragged the body from the strand and pushed it out into the waves.A little billow ran up, coiled about it, and carried it away, ducking and bend-ing.Another seized it, and another, playing with it.It floated from my sight--that which had been Marakinoff, with all his schemes to turn our fair world into an undreamed-of-hell.
My strength began to come back to me.I found a thicket and slept; slept it must have been for many hours, for when I again awakened the dawn was rosing the east.I will not tell my sufferings.Suffice it to say that I found a spring and some fruit, and just before dusk had recovered enough to writhe up to the top of the wall and discover where I was.
The place was one of the farther islets of the Nan-Matal.
To the north I caught the shadows of the ruins of Nan-Tauach, where was the moon door, black against the sky.
Where was the moon door--which, someway, somehow, Imust reach, and quickly.
At dawn of the next day I got together driftwood and bound it together in shape of a rough raft with fallen creep-ers.Then, with a makeshift paddle, I set forth for Nan-Tauach.Slowly, painfully, I crept up to it.It was late after-noon before I grounded my shaky craft on the little beach between the ruined sea-gates and, creeping up the giant steps, made my way to the inner enclosure.
And at its opening I stopped, and the tears ran streaming down my cheeks while I wept aloud with sorrow and with disappointment and with weariness.
For the great wall in which had been set the pale slab whose threshold we had crossed to the land of the Shining One lay shattered and broken.The monoliths were heaped about; the wall had fallen, and about them shone a film of water, half covering them.
There was no moon door!
Dazed and weeping, I drew closer, climbed upon their out-lying fragments.I looked out only upon the sea.There had been a great subsidence, an earth shock, perhaps, tilting downward all that side--the echo, little doubt, of that cata-clysm which had blasted the Dweller's lair!
The little squared islet called Tau, in which were hidden the seven globes, had entirely disappeared.Upon the waters there was no trace of it.
The moon door was gone; the passage to the Moon Pool was closed to me--its chamber covered by the sea!
There was no road to Larry--nor to Lakla!
And there, for me, the world ended.
End
