The valley of eyes unseen
the same time, and on comparing notes afterwards I found his symptoms
had been pretty similar to my own. This the professors attributed,
unflatteringly enough, not to the strength of our will power, but to
the sluggishness of our wits: so unresponsive were we, they said, that
they had to resort, as it were, to a sort of mental bludgeoning by
sheer force.
One consolation we had, however, and that was the rapid progress we
made in the art of flight. And thereby hangs an episode which was to
turn the whole stream of our fortunes.
We had been learning to fly for some weeks now. Our great difficulty
at first, I need hardly say, was to overcome our amazement at finding
we actually could rise from the ground on wings, and even when we had
got the better of this it was some time before we could bring ourselves
to ascend to any height. There must have been always lurking at the
back of our heads the notion that if we lost control, we should stand
a better chance of escape by being at a low altitude. In point of
fact, quite the reverse was really the case: greater experience would
have told us, as the tutors did tell us, that a few hundred feet
between us and earth would afford a breathing space in which to recover
wing-purchase, whereas twenty feet would certainly not; but it must
be remembered the art was utterly strange to us, and that we started
handicapped with all the pedestrian prejudices of the biped without
feathers.
After a few days we gained confidence, and with this growing
proficiency came to me at least a tremendous keenness for the sport. I
wouldn't have missed my morning fly for all the rest of the day, for
over and above its mere fascination it took us up into the bracing
air of the higher levels, and by dint of the magnificent exercise it
afforded, kept us in the very cream of condition and muscular strength.
One morning, when we were beginning to manage our wings with some
pretensions to skill, we were flying together over the school at about
three hundred feet from the plain, when Poyning suddenly headed off
towards the city.
'Where are you going?' I shouted.
'Home,' he yelled back. 'I want to see what our house looks like from
up here.'
I'd never seen anybody fly directly over the city, and I had good
reason to believe there was a law forbidding it. I called to Poyning to
come back, and heard a faint cry from below, which also I imagine was
a command to turn about, but Poyning was by this time drawn well ahead
and apparently out of earshot. Cursing his foolhardiness I gave chase,
moved, I've no doubt, by a sort of schoolboyish idea that if there was
going to be a row it would be shabby to back down out of it; and very
soon we were soaring over the very heart of the great sea of white
buildings.
Now our troubles began. We were fairly well acquainted with the city as
it appeared from the ground level: from above, there was a bewildering
similarity about those marble roofs and courtyards. We wheeled round,
until Poyning thought he had descried our house from the maze, and with
a shout to me he began to descend, confidently enough. Then, suddenly,
he checked his flight.
'This is the wrong place,' he cried, and I saw him flap his wings in an
effort to get up again.
But it was too late. He had no room to manœuvre. His wing-tip struck
the great eave of a building at the edge of the courtyard, and to my
horror I saw his arms fly up and his body shoot straight down, dropping
to the marble paving with a thud that turned me sick to hear.
I managed to alight without mishap, and a moment later was tearing off
my wings and running to his assistance. Poyning lay on his side, in the
tangled wreck of his gear.
'It's only my foot,' he groaned, but as he said the word he rolled over
and fainted.
In a few seconds I had his body clear of the mess and was examining
him for injuries. Poyning came to himself almost at once, but when I
touched his right ankle he winced and uttered a sharp cry.
'Better get a litter, Mirlees,' he muttered between his clenched teeth.
'There's a bone broken.'
At this moment I heard a sound of light footsteps behind me, and
looking round beheld a woman, who had apparently just emerged from the
pillared doorway of the building. Poyning raised himself on one elbow,
staring at her as at some enthralling vision, and I'm afraid I so far
forgot my manners as to do likewise. The sudden apparition of such
beauty as hers might have set any man off his balance. It robbed me
of speech. The woman's skin was white as the marble everywhere around
us, her eyes more deeply purple than the skies out of which we had
fallen, her features of a clean-chiselled magnificence that literally
struck the breath from your lips as you beheld, while her hair, pure
blue-black in hue, tumbled over her shoulders in cascades of sombre
splendour. There was no mistaking the identity of that woman. She was
the princess of the blood royal, to whom we had seen Saunders Philipson
betrothed.
With a grace I cannot hope to describe she knelt beside Poyning, her
features melting into a look of compassion that almost made me regret I
wasn't the injured party myself.
'It is the little stranger,' she murmured musically. 'He has been bold
enough to soar into the heavens like Ikaros of old, and like Ikaros he
has fallen.'
She rose suddenly to her feet, and clapped her hands, whereupon several
attendants hurried out, manifestly scandalised, to the injured man.
Then a physician appeared, to whom the Princess turned with an air of
haughty command.
'There is an injury to the little stranger's foot,' she said. 'You will
bind it here, and as you value my favour you will give him no pain in
the binding. You will then see him borne to his own house and tend him
till he is recovered.'
The physician lowered his forehead almost to the pavement and at once
knelt on one side of Poyning, the Princess kneeling on the other. While
his foot was being put into a padded splint she laid her wonderful
white hand on his brow. I saw her speak to the physician, then to
Poyning, in a tone so low that I could only catch the tail end of what
she said. She was looking into his eyes with an expression that seemed
most curiously to combine tenderness with an astonishing intensity of
will.
'Have no fear for your injury, little one,' she said slowly. 'Our most
skilful healers will give you of their utmost skill, and within three
days from now you will walk and fly again. These things will assuredly
be as I have said. Farewell!'
Poyning's lips began to move, but I heard no sound come from them.
Bewilderment and frank adoration struggled for the mastery of his
face; and if there was any shadow of pain, I didn't see it. His broken
foot he seemed to have forgotten. A moment later the Princess had
disappeared. Poyning was raised on a litter borne by eight attendants,
and we moved off towards our own quarters.
Kalliboas, unusually stern and grim, was there almost as soon as we.
He had evidently heard of our flight over the city and our descent
into the courtyard of the royal palaces--that was the place where we
had blundered; yet beyond directing the physicians who were to treat
Poyning, he said no word.
And now once more I witnessed an exhibition of the amazing surgery of
these people of the valley. I can be perfectly sure of every word I
write about it, for I saw the whole thing from no farther away, this
time, than the side of the couch on which my companion had been laid.
The broken bone had been set before he left the royal courtyard, and
that ingenious padded splint was not removed now. The physicians bathed
the leg above and such surfaces of Poyning's ankle as were exposed, in
warm water which I shrewdly suspected to be merely a more concentrated
essence of the healing water we used in our baths. Then two of the
curious wooden boxes were produced and laid one on either side of
the damaged foot. The physician fixed into each a silver appliance
shaped for all the world like a boat-rowlock--I imagine a specially
fashioned "lead" was kept for various parts of the body--slid the horns
of the rowlock over Poyning's leg just below the calf, and made some
adjustment of the silent "battery." This was left in position for fully
half an hour, then removed.
The physician gave Poyning a draught from a small vial, and began
to speak to him. I heard the same words spoken over and over again,
from which I knew hypnotism formed part of the treatment and that a
suggestion was being made to the patient.
'You will now sleep,' the level, monotonous voice said. 'On awaking you
will be already well towards recovery. The bone will be united and the
pain and swelling vanished. In three days from now you will set your
foot to the ground and you will find it strong as ever. These things
cannot possibly happen otherwise, for thus it has been said and the
speaking is true. You will now sleep. On awaking--'
This went on for two or three minutes, and I veritably declare I was
almost asleep myself. I pulled myself up with an effort, and noticed
that the physician had passed from assurances to questions; he was, as
it were, driving the suggestion home.
'What will you do now?' he demanded.
'I am going to sleep,' came the drowsy voice of Poyning.
'And on awaking?'
'I shall be already well towards recovery.'
'And after three days?'
'I shall set my foot to the ground. It will be strong as ever. In three
days....'
Poyning's words ran off into an incoherent mumble. Then silence. The
physician turned to me.
'He will sleep for twenty-four hours,' he said. 'Try not to wake him
before, and when he wakes, tell him nothing of what I have said to him
now, for he will not remember. But in three days his other soul will
remember for him, and he will walk again.'
That night Kalliboas came to me as I sat alone in our guest-room, and
rated me soundly for allowing Poyning to stray from the flying school,
and over a forbidden quarter at that. The old man seemed to regard
me, being a good deal the elder, as responsible for both of us; and I
judged well at that moment to pretend a contrition I assuredly didn't
feel. I particularly wanted to be in the good graces of Kalliboas, for
I was determined to extract from him the secret of those mysterious
boxes, if it were humanly possible. But it wasn't.
'They contain,' said the old man icily, in answer to my question, 'a
force not to be understood of untaught minds. Beware lest you pry too
deeply into our secrets, stranger, and the knowledge be too strong for
you.'
With that he was gone, leaving me to solve the riddle as best I
might. I lay awake hour after hour, striving to imagine what that
force could be, and when at last I had exhausted every possibility
suggested by my scant knowledge of natural science, and come to the
only conclusion left, I had to confess that my solution was more
bewildering than the riddle itself. Kalliboas had mentioned, as I
remembered, what he conceived to be the greatest force in the world,
and I had long suspected that those healing boxes and the mechanism of
the power-driven wings were only different manifestations of the same
thing. It seemed to me that by some wizard process--perhaps analogous
to the way electricity is imprisoned in the material substances of an
accumulator--_both had been charged with the force of the human mind_.
Poyning awoke in the following forenoon, remembering nothing of what
had happened after he swallowed the draught. I stayed beside his
couch most of that day, doing what I could to cheer him, but Poyning
was curiously moody and depressed, and beyond remarking absently once
or twice that Philipson's betrothed seemed to him to be an uncommonly
pleasant lady and that it was a lucky disaster, after all, that had