The Red One Page 4
Ngurn had he failed to bribe with the inevitable curing of his head whenhe was dead. Vngngn, imbecile and chief that he was, was too imbecilic,too much under the sway of Ngurn, to be considered. Remained Balatta,who, from the time she found him and poked his blue eyes open torecrudescence of her grotesque female hideousness, had continued hisadorer. Woman she was, and he had long known that the only way to winfrom her treason of her tribe was through the woman’s heart of her.
Bassett was a fastidious man. He had never recovered from the initialhorror caused by Balatta’s female awfulness. Back in England, even atbest the charm of woman, to him, had never been robust. Yet now,resolutely, as only a man can do who is capable of martyring himself forthe cause of science, he proceeded to violate all the fineness anddelicacy of his nature by making love to the unthinkably disgustingbushwoman.
He shuddered, but with averted face hid his grimaces and swallowed hisgorge as he put his arm around her dirt-crusted shoulders and felt thecontact of her rancid oily and kinky hair with his neck and chin. But henearly screamed when she succumbed to that caress so at the very first ofthe courtship and mowed and gibbered and squealed little, queer, pig-likegurgly noises of delight. It was too much. And the next he did in thesingular courtship was to take her down to the stream and give her avigorous scrubbing.
From then on he devoted himself to her like a true swain as frequentlyand for as long at a time as his will could override his repugnance. Butmarriage, which she ardently suggested, with due observance of tribalcustom, he balked at. Fortunately, taboo rule was strong in the tribe.Thus, Ngurn could never touch bone, or flesh, or hide of crocodile. Thishad been ordained at his birth. Vngngn was denied ever the touch ofwoman. Such pollution, did it chance to occur, could be purged only bythe death of the offending female. It had happened once, since Bassett’sarrival, when a girl of nine, running in play, stumbled and fell againstthe sacred chief. And the girl-child was seen no more. In whispers,Balatta told Bassett that she had been three days and nights in dyingbefore the Red One. As for Balatta, the breadfruit was taboo to her.For which Bassett was thankful. The taboo might have been water.
For himself, he fabricated a special taboo. Only could he marry, heexplained, when the Southern Cross rode highest in the sky. Knowing hisastronomy, he thus gained a reprieve of nearly nine months; and he wasconfident that within that time he would either be dead or escaped to thecoast with full knowledge of the Red One and of the source of the RedOne’s wonderful voice. At first he had fancied the Red One to be somecolossal statue, like Memnon, rendered vocal under certain temperatureconditions of sunlight. But when, after a war raid, a batch of prisonerswas brought in and the sacrifice made at night, in the midst of rain,when the sun could play no part, the Red One had been more vocal thanusual, Bassett discarded that hypothesis.
In company with Balatta, sometimes with men and parties of women, thefreedom of the jungle was his for three quadrants of the compass. Butthe fourth quadrant, which contained the Red One’s abiding place, wastaboo. He made more thorough love to Balatta—also saw to it that shescrubbed herself more frequently. Eternal female she was, capable of anytreason for the sake of love. And, though the sight of her wasprovocative of nausea and the contact of her provocative of despair,although he could not escape her awfulness in his dream-hauntednightmares of her, he nevertheless was aware of the cosmic verity of sexthat animated her and that made her own life of less value than thehappiness of her lover with whom she hoped to mate. Juliet or Balatta?Where was the intrinsic difference? The soft and tender product ofultra-civilization, or her bestial prototype of a hundred thousand yearsbefore her?—there was no difference.
Bassett was a scientist first, a humanist afterward. In the jungle-heartof Guadalcanal he put the affair to the test, as in the laboratory hewould have put to the test any chemical reaction. He increased hisfeigned ardour for the bushwoman, at the same time increasing theimperiousness of his will of desire over her to be led to look upon theRed One face to face. It was the old story, he recognized, that thewoman must pay, and it occurred when the two of them, one day, werecatching the unclassified and unnamed little black fish, an inch long,half-eel and half-scaled, rotund with salmon-golden roe, that frequentedthe fresh water, and that were esteemed, raw and whole, fresh or putrid,a perfect delicacy. Prone in the muck of the decaying jungle-floor,Balatta threw herself, clutching his ankles with her hands kissing hisfeet and making slubbery noises that chilled his backbone up and downagain. She begged him to kill her rather than exact this ultimatelove-payment. She told him of the penalty of breaking the taboo of theRed One—a week of torture, living, the details of which she yammered outfrom her face in the mire until he realized that he was yet a tyro inknowledge of the frightfulness the human was capable of wreaking on thehuman.
Yet did Bassett insist on having his man’s will satisfied, at the woman’srisk, that he might solve the mystery of the Red One’s singing, thoughshe should die long and horribly and screaming. And Balatta, being merewoman, yielded. She led him into the forbidden quadrant. An abruptmountain, shouldering in from the north to meet a similar intrusion fromthe south, tormented the stream in which they had fished into a deep andgloomy gorge. After a mile along the gorge, the way plunged sharplyupward until they crossed a saddle of raw limestone which attracted hisgeologist’s eye. Still climbing, although he paused often from sheerphysical weakness, they scaled forest-clad heights until they emerged ona naked mesa or tableland. Bassett recognized the stuff of itscomposition as black volcanic sand, and knew that a pocket magnet couldhave captured a full load of the sharply angular grains he trod upon.
And then holding Balatta by the hand and leading her onward, he came toit—a tremendous pit, obviously artificial, in the heart of the plateau.Old history, the South Seas Sailing Directions, scores of remembered dataand connotations swift and furious, surged through his brain. It wasMendana who had discovered the islands and named them Solomon’s,believing that he had found that monarch’s fabled mines. They hadlaughed at the old navigator’s child-like credulity; and yet here stoodhimself, Bassett, on the rim of an excavation for all the world like thediamond pits of South Africa.
But no diamond this that he gazed down upon. Rather was it a pearl, withthe depth of iridescence of a pearl; but of a size all pearls of earthand time, welded into one, could not have totalled; and of a colourundreamed of in any pearl, or of anything else, for that matter, for itwas the colour of the Red One. And the Red One himself Bassett knew itto be on the instant. A perfect sphere, full two hundred feet indiameter, the top of it was a hundred feet below the level of the rim.He likened the colour quality of it to lacquer. Indeed, he took it to besome sort of lacquer, applied by man, but a lacquer too marvellouslyclever to have been manufactured by the bush-folk. Brighter than brightcherry-red, its richness of colour was as if it were red builded uponred. It glowed and iridesced in the sunlight as if gleaming up fromunderlay under underlay of red.
In vain Balatta strove to dissuade him from descending. She threwherself in the dirt; but, when he continued down the trail that spiralledthe pit-wall, she followed, cringing and whimpering her terror. That thered sphere had been dug out as a precious thing, was patent. Consideringthe paucity of members of the federated twelve villages and theirprimitive tools and methods, Bassett knew that the toil of a myriadgenerations could scarcely have made that enormous excavation.
He found the pit bottom carpeted with human bones, among which, batteredand defaced, lay village gods of wood and stone. Some, covered withobscene totemic figures and designs, were carved from solid tree trunksforty or fifty feet in length. He noted the absence of the shark andturtle gods, so common among the shore villages, and was amazed at theconstant recurrence of the helmet motive. What did these jungle savagesof the dark heart of Guadalcanal know of helmets? Had Mendana’smen-at-arms worn helmets and penetrated here centuries before? And ifnot, then whence had th
e bush-folk caught the motive?
Advancing over the litter of gods and bones, Balatta whimpering at hisheels, Bassett entered the shadow of the Red One and passed on under itsgigantic overhang until he touched it with his finger-tips. No lacquerthat. Nor was the surface smooth as it should have been in the case oflacquer. On the contrary, it was corrugated and pitted, with here andthere patches that showed signs of heat and fusing. Also, the substanceof it was metal, though unlike any metal, or combination of metals, hehad ever known. As for the colour itself, he decided it to be noapplication. It was the intrinsic colour of the metal itself.
He moved his finger-tips, which up to that had merely rested, along thesurface, and felt the whole gigantic sphere quicken and live and respond.It was incredible! So light a touch on so vast a mass! Yet did itquiver under the finger-tip caress in rhythmic vibrations that becamewhisperings and rustlings and mutterings of sound—but of sound sodifferent; so elusively thin that it was