ARRY and I followed Lakla into the chamber. It was her own boudoir, if so I may call it. Smaller than any of the other chambers of the domed castle in which I had been, its intimacy was revealed not only by its faint fragrance but by its high mirrors of polished silver and various oddly wrought articles of the feminine toilet that lay here and there; things I afterward knew to be the work of the artisans of the Akka—and no mean metal workers were they.
One of the window slits dropped almost to the floor, and at its base was a wide, comfortably cushioned seat commanding a view of the bridge r and of the cavern ledge. To it the handmaiden beckoned us; sank upon it, drew Larry down beside her and, smiling witchingly, motioned me to sit close to him.
"Now this," she said, "is what the Silent Ones have commanded me to tell you two: To you, Larry, that knowing, you may weigh all things in your mind and answer as your spirit bids you a question that the Three will ask. And what that is I know not," she murmured. "And I, they say, must answer, too—and it—frightens me!"
The great golden eyes widened; darkened with dread. She sighed, shook her head impatiently, leaned over toward me.
"And to you, Goodwin," she went on, "that you may understand; and understanding carry to your own world, if so it be that you attain it, a new wisdom and a warning. And be not afraid, they say, to speak, for what they utter through me is truth. Truth more eternal than that sun of yours which I so long to see, and may, perhaps, never behold—" She paused wistfully.
"Not like us, and never like us," she spoke low, wonderingly, "the Silent Ones say were they. Nor were those from which they sprang like those from which we have come. Although like these last they were born, lived and died; and like us now they live and die. But they pass only when they will it! Ancient, ancient beyond thought are the Taithu, the race of the Silent Ones. Far, far below this place where now we sit, close to earth heart itself were they born. And there they dwelt for time upon time, laya upon laya upon laya, with others, not like them, some of which have vanished time upon time agone, others that still dwelt in their—cradle.
"It is hard"—she hesitated—"hard to tell this, that slips through my mind because I know so little that even as the Three told it to me, it passed from me for lack of place to stand upon," she went on, quaintly. "Something there was of time when earth and sun were but cold mists in the—the heavens. Something of these mists drawing together, whirling, whirling, faster and faster. Drawing as they whirled more and more of the mists—growing larger, growing warm—forming at last into the globes they are, with others spinning around the sun.
"Something, too, of regions within this globe where vast fire was prisoned, and bursting forth tore and rent the young orb. Of one such bursting forth that sent what you call moon flying out to company us and left behind those spaces whence we now dwell—and of—of life particles that here and there below grew into the race of the Silent Ones, and those others. But not the Akka which, like you, they say came from above. And all this I do not understand. Do you, Goodwin?" she appealed to me.
I nodded—for what she had related so fragmentarily was in reality an excellent approach to the theory of a coalescing nebula contracting into the sun and its planets. And of the hurling out of the moon in a cataclysm of earth.
Here, too, was something of the theory of life starting on earth through the dropping upon portions favorable to their development of similar minute, life spores, propelled through space by the driving power of light and developing through the vast ages into man and every other living thing we know.
Nor was it incredible that in the ancient nebula that was the matrix of our solar system similar, or rather dissimilar particles in all but the subtle essence we call life, might have become entangled and, resisting every cataclysm as they had resisted the absolute zero of outer space, found in these caverned spaces their proper environment. Here they may have developed into the race of the Silent Ones and—only they could tell what else!
"I understand," I replied, "and although it is all very—marvelous—still, I believe."