The valley of eyes unseen
As we neared the city, I realised more and more that my first
impression of it had erred greatly on the side of undervaluation. If it
seemed imposing from a distance, now it was of a magnificence hardly
to be conceived. Every building was of pure white marble, which must
have been plentiful in the surrounding mountains, and of a severe
beauty and grandeur that simply took my breath away. You had no need
to ask yourself where this architecture had come from. It was Greek,
magnificently and marvellously Greek. Long, broad avenues of marble
delicately cambered, and fringed with pollarded cypresses of a variety
I'd never seen before, ran between the lines of buildings rectangularly
as in the newest Yankee city, but broken here and there by gardens
of sub-tropical plants. Carved work in a perfection of outline
abounded everywhere, in ram's-horn and fruit-basket capitals of the
columns, in gleaming white statuary by the wayside, in marble friezes
and caryatides of the buildings. You would have called this city a
magnified and transfigured vision of Athens in the golden age, yet here
and there were places where the architects had seemingly experimented
with foreign styles. More than once my eye caught a glimpse of winged
figures in bas-relief and the florid honeysuckle decoration, and those
impulses, if my memory serves me, came out of ancient Assyria.
We were soon into a part of the city that was thickly populated, and it
was plain our coming had thrown the people into an intense excitement.
We too had a bodyguard now; nobody was let come near, yet despite
the distance and the mask-like reserve that seemed to be the common
attribute of the whole people, we knew we were being scanned with a
mighty, repressed curiosity. We could see this also: whatever about our
comrade caused him to be saluted with reverence by the scouts on the
mountain, that emotion was shared by the populace down here, among
whom word of us seemed to have spread like blown fire in a brushwood.
Philipson's litter was about fifty yards ahead. As it passed, the city
folk one and all prostrated themselves, and the spectacle of these
people lowering their heads to earth before a stranger from the outer
world was, to say no more of it, a striking one. The crowd, indeed,
would have been imposing in any situation, for they were about as
splendid a collection of human beings as I ever beheld, or could dream
of. The long flowing robe, great stature, and clean-cut beauty of
feature seemed to be universal; and so close the adherence to type that
it struck me at once a newcomer's prime difficulty among this people
would be the distinguishing one face from another. "Doubles," thought
I, must be plentiful, and I found afterwards that this was indeed so.
The valley couldn't have been more than a few thousand feet above sea
level, for down here the air seemed to us, after our mountaineering,
of a tropic heat. We were forced to discard our heavy clothes one by
one, and these loathsome, travel-polluted rags the attendants solemnly
carried for us. We must have cut a boorish and grotesque figure among
these clean, graceful giants of the valley, but never a smile met us
over our ridiculous appearance; if we had aroused a burning curiosity,
little showed itself on the faces of these people but a grave, silent
dignity amounting almost to awe.
We passed on, as if in some fantastic sleep-walking. One day gone,
we had been fighting for bare life in regions of terrible cold and
appalling desert solitude; now we were plunged into the midst of what
was plainly one of the highest civilisations this world has seen. Time
and again I tapped my knee sharply with the rifle that lay beside me
on the litter, to make sure it wasn't all a delirious mirage of the
mountains, but the vision, if vision it was, wouldn't disperse.
Poyning walked with wide-open eyes, muttering continually to himself.
'It can't be real, you know,' I heard him say. 'We shall wake in a
minute--in the snow. The gods are laughing at us. They've dropped us in
a dream valley, peopled with phantom Olympians!'
'How in the name of mystery do these people come to be buried here?' I
said. 'Why has the world never heard of them?'
Poyning pulled his wits together with an effort. 'That's as deep a
riddle to me,' he replied. 'But from what I remember of those ghastly
heights--supposing we _have_ left them--I should say the world hasn't
had much chance to look into the matter.'
I followed his gaze round the vast amphitheatre of mountains, which
towered into the sky on every side of the valley. I am no geologist,
and never harboured any kindness whatever for the layman who holds
forth on sciences outside his ken. For that reason I offer no
explanation as to how this broad, deep depression originally came to
exist in the heart of the greatest upheaved region on our planet. I
will be content to record soberly and barely what my own eyes saw: that
the valley was completely mountain-locked, and apparently couldn't
have been approached from any point with much less than the tremendous
difficulty and hardship we ourselves had experienced in getting here.
Then, in one breath, the pair of us raised a cry.
Away to the west, a flock of the gigantic birds were flying. And now,
from this point in the centre of the valley, we were near enough to
realise fully the stupendous proportions of those creatures. Not only
were they bigger by far than any bird now extant in the outer world:
they must have eclipsed even the greatest of the winged reptiles that
have come down to us fossilised in the Jurassic lime-stones. Poyning
had halted, grasping the edge of the litter and staring spellbound. One
of the attendants jogged him gently by the elbow, and pointed ahead,
but Poyning shook the man off, sweeping the western sky with his arm
and uttering something in the language of the valley. I saw the ghost
of a smile on the attendant's face, and heard him answer.
Poyning stumbled on, biting his lips.
'What does he say?' I cried. 'Have they a name for the things?'
'Yes,' said Stephen Poyning, 'and a very simple one. They are not birds
at all. They are men.'
CHAPTER IX
THE WOMAN OF MYSTERY
I stared at the great wheeling, swooping forms till I thought my eyes
would have dropped out of my head. We moved on, but I was still gazing
when the low gable of a building came between and shut them from our
view, yet not by any manner of means could I bring myself to believe
I'd been looking at men. That could only mean men flying on artificial
wings. The flight of those creatures was, on a grand scale, the
graceful, easy, perfectly poised flight of a gull or a swallow, which
no human ingenuity could imitate. Clearly Poyning had mistaken what the
attendant said to him--an explanation credible enough when I remembered
that he himself admitted there were words in the language of this
people that he could merely guess. And there, for the time being, I had
to be content to let the mystery rest.
The crowd had steadily grown denser as we advanced, and our bodyguard
had more and more difficulty in screening us from close scrutiny. The
cumulative effect of these ranks upon ranks of gigantic folk was most
peculiar: it gave me the impression that I was of dumpy stature, while
Poyning, as I noticed from my place on the litter, looked a downright
dwarf against such a background. In all that throng I saw no full-grown
man under six feet, many stood well above, and giants of seven feet
were by no means rare. Everywhere we saw the bare heads of dark brown
or black hair, the wonderfully chiselled clean-shaven faces, and the
penetrating black eyes of the men who had first met us on the hillside.
There were women in the crowd, too, clad not greatly unlike the men,
but whereas the hair of the latter usually reached no lower than the
shoulders and was sometimes even shorter, the women wore theirs in
luxuriant coils bound over the nape of the neck. It was impressive and
profoundly fascinating to watch these people. Not only was there on
every face a dignity which, while it never became solemn, broke into
lighter shades very seldom indeed, but the whole concourse moved with a
superb, willowy grace that to my mind was poetry itself.
At length we came to a halt. Philipson's litter detached itself
from the procession and disappeared through the pillared portals of
a broad-faced building that reminded me of "restorations" of the
Erechtheum of Athens, while we passed on to a house of similar cast,
but smaller and plainly of less importance. The building was of one
tallish storey, approached by a flight of low steps in white marble;
Ionic columns supported the massive portico, with its blank cornice and
gently gabled roof, and behind this, in the wall proper, a door of
some dark wood gave entrance to the interior.
The tall greyhead, whose name we had discovered to be Kalliboas--that
is the nearest I can get in our letters to the very musical way we
always heard it pronounced--now led through to rooms that had been made
ready for us. They were severe and undecorated, these chambers, but
after the barbarisms of camp life in the Tibetan mountains they seemed
absolutely luxurious. The walls were all plain marble, built in great
blocks beautifully smoothed and united by a white cream-like mortar,
very little of which appeared, however, as the blocks fitted almost
face to face. The floor was likewise marble, bare except for here and
there a rug about half an inch thick, made of a fabric that was put to
a variety of uses in the valley. It seemed to me to be a sort of linen,
extremely soft and fine in texture, and so woven and interwoven as to
give it the stoutness of felt. This same lawn-like material was used to
upholster the couches, the only furniture, which were built of the same
dark wood as the house door. We discovered afterwards that chairs were
unknown, and that the tables used for meals consisted of low platforms
placed between the couches, the diners always reclining to take their
food.
It seemed strange there should be no tables of our pattern, if only
for writing purposes, but the explanation was stranger than the fact.
Writing was comparatively neglected. I found out before I had been in
the valley long that there was a drama among that community, and an
exuberant literary art, but these were practised for the greater part
orally and in public; and so keen were the powers of memory commonly
possessed, that writing for the sake of recording accurately was hardly
necessary. What writing was done mainly took the form of decorative
carving on stone. We had passed close by several examples of this on
our way into the city, and if we still harboured any doubt as to the
true origin of the language, those inscriptions finally dispelled it.
The styles of chisel-writing were many, from straight-lined majuscules
to the most ornate and flowing hand, but the base of it all was
unquestionably the alphabet known to the world at large as Greek.
Two sandalled attendants appeared, crossing the marble floor with
scarcely a sound, and to these Kalliboas turned us over with orders
to see to our wants. We were taken to one side of the building, where
we found a row of baths, each built into the floor and filled with
enough warm water to float a grown man--even one of the giants of the
valley--comfortably. The attendants relieved us of the rest of our
travel-smirched rags, laid down a pile of towels of the ubiquitous
linen-like stuff, and with a word to Poyning, whom they had discovered
to be our linguist, they went.
Poyning crowed with delight as he stared at the water. I am open to
admit that I was grinning--at Poyning. I couldn't help it. When I