Chapter 2

Truly this land is dedicated to
the powers of darkness!"

Kane's eyes burned with a dangerous light. The terrible heat, the
solitude and the knowledge of the horrors lurking on either hand were
shaking even his steely nerves.

"Keep on one fellow hat, blood-brother," admonished N'Longa with a low
gurgle of amusement. "That fellow sun, he knock you dead, suppose you
no look out."

Kane shifted the musket he had insisted on bringing and made no reply.
They mounted an eminence at last and looked down on a sort of plateau.
And in the center of this plateau was a silent city of gray and
crumbling stone. Kane was smitten by a sense of incredible age as he
looked. The walls and houses were of great stone blocks, yet they were
falling into ruin. Grass grew on the plateau, and high in the streets
of that dead city. Kane saw no movement among the ruins.

"That is their city--why do they choose to sleep in caves?"

"Maybe-so one fellow stone fall on them from roof and crush. Them
stone huts, he fall down bimeby. Maybe-so they no like to stay
together--maybe-so they eat each other, too."

"Silence!" whispered Kane; "how it hangs over all!"

"Them vampires no talk nor yell; they dead. They sleep in caves, wander
at sunset and at night. Maybe-so them black fellow bush tribes come
with spears, them vampires go to stone kraal and fight behind walls."

Kane nodded. The crumbling walls which surrounded that dead
city were still high and solid enough to resist the attack of
spearmen--especially when defended by these snout-nosed fiends.

"Blood-brother," said N'Longa solemnly, "I have mighty magic thought!
Be silent a little while."

* * * * *

Kane seated himself on a boulder and gazed broodingly at the bare
crags and slopes which surrounded them. Far away to the south he saw
the leafy green ocean that was the jungle. Distance lent a certain
enchantment to the scene. Closer at hand loomed the dark blotches that
were the mouths of the caves of horror.

N'Longa was squatting, tracing some strange pattern in the clay with
a dagger point. Kane watched him, thinking how easily they might fall
victim to the vampires if even three or four of the fiends should come
out of their caverns. And even as he thought it, a black and horrific
shadow fell across the crouching fetish-man.

Kane acted without conscious thought. He shot from the boulder where
he sat like a stone hurled from a catapult, and his musket stock
shattered the face of the hideous black thing who had stolen upon them.
Back and back Kane drove his inhuman foe staggering, never giving him
time to halt or launch an offensive, battering him with the onslaught
of a frenzied tiger.

At the very edge of the cliff the vampire wavered, then pitched back
over, to fall for a hundred feet and lie writhing on the rocks of the
plateau below. N'Longa was on his feet pointing; the hills were giving
up their dead.

Out of the caves they were swarming, the terrible black silent shapes;
up the slopes they came charging and over the boulders they came
clambering, and their red eyes were all turned toward the two humans
who stood above the silent city. The caves belched them forth in an
unholy judgment day.

N'Longa pointed to a crag some distance away and with a shout started
running fleetly toward it. Kane followed. From behind boulders
black-taloned hands clawed at them, tearing their garments. They
raced past caves, and mummied monsters came lurching out of the dark,
gibbering silently, to join in the pursuit.

The dead hands were close at their back when they scrambled up the last
slope and stood on a ledge which was the top of the crag. The fiends
halted silently a moment, then came clambering after them. Kane clubbed
his musket and smashed down into the red-eyed faces, knocking aside the
upleaping hands. They surged up like a black wave; he swung his musket
in a silent fury that matched theirs. The black wave broke and wavered
back; came on again.

He--could--not--kill--them! These words beat on his brain like a sledge
on an anvil as he shattered wood-like flesh and dead bone with his
smashing swings. He knocked them down, hurled them back, but they rose
and came on again. This could not last--what in God's name was N'Longa
doing? Kane spared one swift, tortured glance over his shoulder. The
fetish-man stood on the highest part of the ledge, head thrown back,
arms lifted as if in invocation.

Kane's vision blurred to the sweep of hideous black faces with red,
staring eyes. Those in front were horrible to see now, for their skulls
were shattered, their faces caved in and their limbs broken. But still
they came on and those behind reached across their shoulders to clutch
at the man who defied them.

Kane was red but the blood was all his. From the long-withered veins
of those monsters no single drop of warm red blood trickled. Suddenly
from behind him came a long piercing wail--N'Longa! Over the crash of
the flying musket-stock and the shattering of bones it sounded high and
clear--the only voice lifted in that hideous fight.

The black wave washed about Kane's feet, dragging him down. Keen talons
tore at him, flaccid lips sucked at his wounds. He reeled up again,
disheveled and bloody, clearing a space with a shattering sweep of his
splintered musket. Then they closed in again and he went down.

"This is the end!" he thought, but even at that instant the press
slackened and the sky was suddenly filled with the beat of great wings.

Then he was free and staggered up, blindly and dizzily, ready to renew
the strife. He halted, frozen. Down the slope the black horde was
fleeing and over their heads and close at their shoulders flew huge
vultures, tearing and rending avidly, sinking their beaks in the dead
black flesh, devouring the vampires as they fled.

Kane laughed, almost insanely.

"Defy man and God, but you may not deceive the vultures, sons of Satan!
They know whether a man be alive or dead!"

N'Longa stood like a prophet on the pinnacle and the great black birds
soared and wheeled about him. His arms still waved and his voice still
wailed out across the hills. And over the skylines they came, hordes
on endless hordes--vultures, vultures, vultures! come to the feast so
long denied them. They blackened the sky with their numbers, blotted
out the sun; a strange darkness fell on the land. They settled in long
dusky lines, diving into the caverns with a whir of wings and a clash
of beaks. Their talons tore at the black horrors which these caves
disgorged.

Now all the vampires were fleeing to their city. The vengeance held
back for ages had come down on them and their last hope was the heavy
walls which had kept back the desperate human foes. Under those
crumbling roofs they might find shelter. And N'Longa watched them
stream into the city, and he laughed until the crags re-echoed.

Now all were in and the birds settled like a cloud over the doomed
city, perching in solid rows along the walls, sharpening their beaks
and claws on the towers.

And N'Longa struck flint and steel to a bundle of dry leaves he
had brought with him. The bundle leaped into instant flame and he
straightened and flung the blazing thing far out over the cliffs. It
fell like a meteor to the plateau beneath, showering sparks. The tall
grass of the plateau leaped aflame.

From the silent city beneath them Fear flowed in unseen waves, like a
white fog. Kane smiled grimly.

"The grass is sere and brittle from the drouth," he said; "there has
been even less rain than usual this season; it will burn swiftly."

Like a crimson serpent the fire ran through the high dead grass. It
spread and it spread and Kane, standing high above, yet felt the
fearful intensity of the hundreds of red eyes which watched from the
stone city.

Now the scarlet snake had reached the walls and was rearing as if to
coil and writhe over them. The vultures rose on heavily flapping wings
and soared reluctantly. A vagrant gust of wind whipped the blaze about
and drove it in a long red sheet around the wall. Now the city was
hemmed in on all sides by a solid barricade of flame. The roar came up
to the two men on the high crag.

Sparks flew across the wall, lighting in the high grass in the streets.
A score of flames leaped up and grew with terrifying speed. A veil of
red cloaked streets and buildings, and through this crimson, whirling
mist Kane and N'Longa saw hundreds of black shapes scamper and writhe,
to vanish suddenly in red bursts of flame. There rose an intolerable
scent of decayed flesh burning.

Kane gazed, awed. This was truly a hell on earth. As in a nightmare he
looked into the roaring red cauldron where black insects fought against
their doom and perished. The flames leaped a hundred feet in air, and
suddenly above their roar sounded one bestial, inhuman scream like a
shriek from across nameless gulfs of cosmic space, as one vampire,
dying, broke the chains of silence which had held him for untold
centuries. High and haunting it rose, the death cry of a vanishing race.

Then the flames dropped suddenly. The conflagration had been a typical
grass fire, short and fierce. Now the plateau showed a blackened
expanse and the city a charred and smoking mass of crumbling stone. Not
one corpse lay in view, not even a charred bone. Above all whirled the
dark swarms of the vultures, but they, too, were beginning to scatter.

Kane gazed hungrily at the clean blue sky. Like a strong sea wind
clearing a fog of horror was the sight to him. From somewhere sounded
the faint and far-off roaring of a distant lion. The vultures were
flapping away in black, straggling lines.

_5. Palaver Set!_

Kane sat in the mouth of the cave where Zunna lay, submitting to the
fetish-man's bandaging.

The Puritan's garments hung in tatters about his frame; his limbs and
breast were deeply gashed and darkly bruised, but he had had no mortal
wound in that deathly fight on the cliff.

"Mighty men, we be!" declared N'Longa with deep approval. "Vampire city
be silent now, sure 'nough! No walking dead man live along these hills."

"I do not understand," said Kane, resting chin on hand. "Tell me,
N'Longa, how have you done things? How talked you with me in my dreams;
how came you into the body of Kran; and how summoned you the vultures?"

"My blood-brother," said N'Longa, discarding his pride in his pidgin
English, to drop into the river language understood by Kane, "I am so
old that you would call me a liar if I told you my age. All my life I
have worked magic, sitting first at the feet of mighty ju-ju men of
the south and the east; then I was a slave to the Buckra--the white
man--and learned more. My brother, shall I span all these years in a
moment and make you understand with a word, what has taken me so long
to learn? I could not even make you understand how these vampires have
kept their bodies from decay by drinking the lives of men.

"I sleep and my spirit goes out over the jungle and the rivers to talk
with the sleeping spirits of my friends. There is a mighty magic on the
voodoo staff I gave you--a magic out of the Old Land which draws my
ghost to it as a white man's magnet draws metal."

Kane listened unspeaking, seeing for the first time in N'Longa's
glittering eyes something stronger and deeper than the avid gleam of
the worker in black magic. To Kane it seemed almost as if he looked
into the far-seeing and mystic eyes of a prophet of old.

"I spoke to you in dreams," N'Longa went on, "and I made a deep sleep
come over the souls of Kran and of Zunna, and remove them to a far dim
land, whence they shall soon return, unremembering. All things bow to
magic, blood-brother, and beasts and birds obey the master words. I
worked strong voodoo, vulture-magic, and the flying people of the air
gathered at my call.

"These things I know and am a part of, but how shall I tell you of
them? Blood-brother, you are a mighty warrior, but in the ways of magic
you are as a little child lost. And what has taken me long dark years
to know, I may not divulge to you so you would understand. My friend,
you think only of bad spirits, but were my magic always bad, should I
not take this fine young body in place of my old wrinkled one and keep
it? But Kran shall have his body back safely.

"Keep the voodoo staff, blood-brother. It has mighty power against all
sorcerers and serpents and evil things. Now I return to the village on
the Coast where my true body sleeps. And what of you, my blood-brother?"

Kane pointed silently eastward.

"The call grows no weaker. I go."

N'Longa nodded, held out his hand. Kane grasped it. The mystical
expression had gone from the dusky face and the eyes twinkled snakily
with a sort of reptilian mirth.

"Me go now, blood-brother," said the fetish-man, returning to his
beloved jargon, of which knowledge he was prouder than all his
conjuring tricks. "You take care--that one fellow jungle, she pluck
your bones yet! Remember that voodoo stave, brother. _Ai ya_, palaver
set!"

He fell back on the sand, and Kane saw the keen sly expression of
N'Longa fading from the face of Kran. His flesh crawled again.
Somewhere back on the Slave Coast, the body of N'Longa, withered and
wrinkled, was stirring in the ju-ju hut, was rising as if from a deep
sleep. Kane shuddered.

Kran sat up, yawned, stretched and smiled. Beside him the girl Zunna
rose, rubbing her eyes.

"Master," said Kran apologetically, "we must have slumbered."