BONES
The plane was Doc Savage’s ship and it flew at reduced speed, the motors throttled. It was a vague, noisy monster in the jungle steam.
Some few particularly pugnacious birds of the lang and rajawali variety sailed up and followed the craft angrily, as if resenting the encroachment of an aërial figure greater than themselves.
Doc flew the plane while his five men kept watch through the windows with binoculars. They were not feeling particularly elated.
“No sign of the three chariots,” said Monk, after scrutinizing the sky.
“Dang these clouds,” Renny rumbled.
Doc and his men had lost Sen Gat’s three planes in the vapor bank above. Where the aërial trio had gone, they had no idea. Searching for them in the massed clouds had developed into a hopeless task.
“The girl’s plane landed somewhere ahead, I think,” said Long Tom.
“My assumption corroborates that,” said big-worded Johnny.
Soon they sighted the Pagoda of the Hands. Their binoculars distinguished the strange nature of its carvings.
Doc circled the plane.
“There’s the girl’s plane,” Ham pointed out. “But where are she and Maples?”
“Yeah, and that cookie who pretended to be me,” Monk growled. “That lad’ll be ready for a nice hospital when I get done with ’im.”
Doc continued to circle the clearing, partially to reconnoiter, but also to keep an eye on the heavens, lest Sen Gat’s ships should drop down upon them after they landed and their own plane be put out of commission.
But there was no trace of Sen Gat’s trio.
Focusing screws were carefully turned as binocular lenses raked the pagoda. The profusion of carved hands came in for comment, as did the worn condition of the steps. The fact that the pagoda vicinity did not look as if h had been cleared by human hands impressed them. Most surprising of all, however, was the absence of life.
Doc Savage, with his superior sharpness of vision, gave particular notice to one side of the steps. He pointed out the spot.
“Take a look.”
The others did so; and Ham exploded, “Bloodstains, Doc! They look fresh, too.”
The bronze man landed immediately, executing a perfect three-point, and taxied the ship to a stop near the other plane. He gave the fog-ridden sky another close scrutiny before he cut the motors.
Then they alighted.
“Ee-e-yow!” Monk howled. “Lookit!”
Habeas Corpus, the pet pig, had been crouching under the other plane, out of sight.
“Come here, Habeas,” Monk called.
Habeas did not move. They could see that the shoat’s beady eyes were fixed; his big ears, instead of being erect as usual, were hanging loosely. The porker’s attitude bespoke terror.
“He’s scared of you, ape!” jeered Ham.
“Not of me!” Monk flicked a hairy hand at the strange pagoda. “He’s scared of that thing.”
Monk went over and picked Habeas up. The pig evinced some signs of delight at the reunion, but his major attention remained fixed on the weird structure with the countless carved hands. When Monk started toward the pagoda, Habeas emitted a terrified squeal.
“Blazes!” rumbled Renny. “Somethin’s happened here. That pig’s got more sense than lots of humans. He’s scared of somethin’ in that funny-lookin’ buildin’.”
“There is,” Doc said, “something queer here.”
The bronze man watched the sky for a time, detected no trace of Sen Gat’s three planes, and approached the pagoda.
The others studied the scene. They all possessed powers of observation beyond those of ordinary men. Each saw the imprints where a small hand had struck. Too, several strands of fine hair were clinging to the edge of a step.
“It was the girl,” Ham said, and grimly unsheathed his sword cane.
“We’ll go up,” Doc decided.
They did not mount the steps of the pagoda base in a group, but separated. Doc took one side. His men went up on each of the other three sides. Their advance was slow. Eyes darted, searching, and ears strained to the utmost.
Doc Savage, moving a bit more rapidly than the others, was first to gain the top. He stood for a moment, exploring with all senses.
Detecting nothing, he stepped forward. The arched entrance of the pagoda was narrow, towering, and carved a multitude of hands, these differing from the others in that they were fashioned in one form—clutching, as if seeking to grasp any who might enter.
A few feet inside the passage turned sharply to the left, and outer sunlight was shut off. The interior became surprisingly dark.
Producing a flashlight, the bronze man snapped on its beam. He jerked to a stop instantly after the light came on.
The very air inside the pagoda seemed to spawn a sound—a low, fantastic, mellow note that played up and down the musical scale, exotic as the song of some strange jungle bird. So low as to seem intangible, it nevertheless penetrated far into the strange clearing.
Those outside heard. Excitement gripped them. They knew this note. It was the sound of Doc Savage, the subconscious thing which he did in moments of mental stress.
The five men charged forward and came piling inside. The pig, Habeas Corpus, emitted a squeal, a shrill, terrified note as if he felt he were being carried into the jaws of some mysterious death.
“Holy cow!” Renny rumbled, and stared at what the pagoda held.
Somewhere outside, a tropical bird cried out raucously, as if it had taken fright at some sinister presence, and Habeas Corpus squealed again, but subsided when Monk grabbed him by one over-sized ear. The breathing of Doc’s five men was an audible chorus of sound.
Johnny, the gaunt geologist, had a pet ejaculation which he used whenever deeply moved. He employed it now.
“I’ll be superamalgamated!” he mumbled.
The room was a great, arched cavern of stone. On it the hands were carved—hands with the forefingers pointing at a spot of central focus in the middle of the floor. The mysterious artisans who had done the work—centuries ago, judging from the looks of the place—had been masters of hair-raising technique.
The floor sloped toward that central focus point. It was of smooth stone, with here and there a groove, a sort of gulley which might have been intended to carry any liquid toward the center.
Doc’s men, staring fixedly, counted the objects piled in the middle.
“Must be sixty or seventy of ’em,” Monk muttered.
Once, the objects had been human beings. Clothing and flesh had long ago decomposed, leaving the yellow skeletons, with here and there a clinging mat of hair or a bit of parchmentlike tissue. The bodies had been stacked carelessly and as a result had fallen apart, the bones intermingling.
Around the edge of the pile, like a wall intended to hem it in, were weapons—knives and spears for the most part, with a few guns, revolvers, and even a light machine gun, rusted beyond any further usefulness. Mingled with the weapons were pieces of equipment—knapsacks, tents, blanket rolls, and food supplies. Of the latter, only goods enclosed in glass were intact.
“Stay back, you fellows,” Doc directed; then he advanced.
He circled warily, studying each bit of the floor before he stepped upon it. But, gaining a point where he could see the other side of the pile, he sprang forward suddenly. The heap of bones was high enough to hide him from his companions.
“Doc!” Monk yelled. “What is it?”
Heedless of the admonition to stay back, they started forward; but the bronze man reappeared. He held up for their inspection the object which he had found.
It was Lucile Copeland’s gun.
“The same weapon the girl had in London,” he explained.
“Listen, Doc,” Renny boomed. “What d’you make of this joint? I never saw anything like it before.”
Instead of answering directly, Doc Savage suggested, “Let’s search the vicinity.”
They went outside and conducted a thorough scrutiny. They found no sign of the girl, Maples, or the fake Monk, and the hunt eventually progressed to the adjacent stream.
In the water and along the bank were half a dozen buayas, the smallest of which was twenty feet long.
“A boat might have landed here,” Doc offered.
His five men looked at the enormous buayas, and said nothing. The crocodiles were incredibly hideous monsters.
Doc Savage studied the river closely on their way back, seeking to ascertain if there had been a boat on the stream recently, using as his guide whether or not tropical birds had been frightened away; but there were not enough birds near by to tell. Feathered creatures seemed to shun the place. The ground, hard-packed, bore no tracks.
Back at the pagoda, they proceeded to look for hidden recesses, getting hammers from a tool kit in the plane and beating the rock walls, hoping to sound out hollow spaces. They found nothing.
It was Doc, at Lucile Copeland’s plane, who unearthed the next discovery.
The bronze man was searching the plane, seeking anything in the nature of a clue. The equipment carried along by the fake Monk had been surprisingly complete, including even a small case holding dynamite. Opening this, Doc passed several sticks out to his men, after fusing and capping them.
They inserted the sticks in various cracks of the Pagoda of the Hands and set them off. Stone was shaken down; foundations were split. The result proved beyond a doubt that there were no secret passages or chambers in the weird pagoda, for no cavities were revealed.
The blasting had another result. One of the dynamite sticks failed to explode. Examining this, Doc made a discovery. The nitro compound had been hollowed out and replaced with a paste of face powder and water.
Inside the stick, cleverly hidden, was a slender black object enwrapped in oiled paper. It was one of the black keys.
Doc Savage went back to the case of explosive in the plane and made a further examination. He found the other two black sticks.
“Lucile Copeland was suspicious of the fake Monk,” he surmised. “She hid the black keys.”
Observing that one stick was inclosed with more than oiled paper, he hurriedly unfolded the covering. This proved to be a fragment clipped from a chart of interior Indo-China. There was a cross mark and some words inscribed in red—probably with a lipstick, The words read:
Thousand-headed Man City
“What a break for us!” Monk grinned. “How far away is it, Doc?”
The bronze man consulted the chart. “Not far. But our immediate concern is locating Lucile Copeland rather than finding the city.”
“What do you reckon happened to her, Doc?”
“She was seized, it would appear, and carried off.”
“What gets me is the way Habeas Corpus acted,” Monk muttered uneasily. “Somethin’ terrified the pig. I’d have sworn Habeas couldn’t be scared by anything that walks or flies. But you guys saw how he was actin’. Somethin’ got his goat.”
The gaunt Johnny had been using his monocle magnifier on various of the pagoda carvings. His conclusions were interesting, judging by his expression. He spun the monocle on its ribbon and eyed Doc.
“This was built seven or eight thousand years ago, unless my conclusions are amiss,” he stated. “It is manifestly a product of a prehistoric civilization. Its general architecture is not especially unique, but the configuration of the carvings is most unusual. Use of only one design—the human hand—is difficult of explanation.”
Monk eyed the place, shivered, and muttered, “You can have my part of the dump. What are we gonna do, Doc?”
“Take off in the plane,” Doc decided. “We’ll fly up and down this river. We may be able to find some trace of the girl.”