THE RED CITY
Doc remained where he had appeared in his unsuccessful effort to shout word of how to close the diving compartment hatch to those aboard the unlucky submarine. Although Mohallet and the others had not heard him, they had seen him. There was no necessity for going back in hiding.
He saw his five friends, still bound, bobbing about on the salty surface. It was fortunate they had been on deck when disaster came. They were seized like so many floating logs and hauled ashore.
Great though the confusion had been, Doc concluded every one had escaped from the Helldiver. He discerned Mohallet paddling shoreward in the wake of a hairy savage who seemed to be chief of the White Beasts.
For several minutes, monster bubbles came up from the sunken underseas boat. They made hollow coughing noises as they broke. An oil slick appeared on the surface. There was not a great deal of the oil—only that which came from saturated waste, drip pans, and possibly an open oil can or two.
It was impossible to tell from this distance how deep the submarine sank before encountering bottom.
The first savages to reach shore jumped up and down, and screamed shrilly. They walked in small circles, making gestures of tearing something to pieces and contorting their already unlovely faces into hideous grimaces. This performance seemed intended to convey the same idea which an American puts across by shaking his fist at an enemy. They were making their threats in the direction of Mohallet.
But the wily bandit chief put on a wrath act of his own the instant he reached shore. He poked his arms frantically in the direction of Doc and the girl.
Howling, the furry men raced for Doc. It was to be suspected from their actions that Mohallet had made his superstitious allies believe that Doc was responsible for the sinking of the submarine.
Doc whirled. The white-haired girl was putting her diving lung back on.
“No!” Doc told her on his fingers. “We might have trouble leaving the water. And once in it, we could not keep track of my five friends.”
His shirt, torn in the fight, was merely a few soaked rags. He discarded it and his undershirt, which was also torn. The sun, hot as it was, would not blister his bronze skin. The bronze hue was itself due to exposure to tropical suns.
Doc tied the two diving lungs at his belt. The heavy lead anklets he discarded. If necessity arose, large rocks would serve the same purpose.
“Do you know this country?” he asked the girl.
She gave a perfectly American nod of affirmation.
“What direction is best for our flight?”
She pointed to the north.
They set out, clambering up the opposite side of the small canyon. Beyond it lay other gulches, some sheer of wall, almost unscalable; others were gentle valleys.
There were a few scrawny desert shrubs, thorn-armored. Nowhere was there grass. The rocks themselves had the appearance of having once been baked in a furnace. They were heat-cracked, grooved where sand and wind had worn away veins of softer substance.
Baying like animals, the white-haired savages surged in pursuit. Their long-armed, apish forms seemed adapted to the rough going—the way was almost half steady climbing up, and down. They came on with appalling speed.
* * * *
With the passage of less than two hundred yards, the white-haired girl began to show distress. Except for the liquids taken through the bored holes, she had been without food during the long period of confinement with Mohallet inside the submarine, and was correspondingly weak. She realized her condition.
“You had better go on alone——”
Doc shook his head. “No.”
“Or I had better enter the water, while you go——”
He picked her up, handling her weight lightly, and draped her across a shoulder. One hand kept her there, firmly in position. She would not be uncomfortable.
If the girl thought they had been traveling fast, she received a surprise now. The bronze man went ahead with a speed which exceeded by many times that of their pursuers.
Instead of scrambling down rocky cliffs, he negotiated them with long drops which seemed certain to shatter his powerful legs, yet never did. Several times he spanned rocky cracks with leaps which caused the girl to make choking sounds of horror. Then her confidence in the mighty bronze man increased, and she made these sounds no more.
The pursuing White Beasts and their swarthy allies fell behind rapidly.
Doc stopped.
“What is your name?” he asked the girl, using one hand.
“Ja,” she told him.
He lowered her. “You will remain here, Ja. I will be back shortly. I’m going to persuade our pursuers to use caution.”
He left her hidden in a rocky recess and turned back. His speed now was even greater. He slowed a bit when he could hear the labored breathing of those who followed. Peering around a boulder, he saw them.
Four of the apish men had distanced all the others. They were the strongest and most agile of the White Beasts. They had lost their crude weapons in the submarine accident, it seemed, for they carried no arms, and none were concealed in their scanty hide garments.
Doc let them come close, then rushed suddenly! His fists lashed two terrific swings and dropped a savage!
The others howled in rage! But they had courage; they did not flee. Before charging the bronze giant, they groped about for small rocks to use as weapons. That was their undoing. One fell, his jaw battered out of kelter, even as his furry paws closed over a stone.
The surviving pair danced about clumsily, seeking to adopt Doc’s style of fighting with his fists. That was even more unfortunate than their pause to get rocks.
Gliding up to them, Doc weaved away from their ungainly blows, simultaneously landing punches of his own.
There was a frightful power in the bronze man’s fists. They hit with precision, searching out vulnerable spots. And they left squarish patches of crushed, broken skin which oozed scarlet.
Doc left all four big savages spread senseless on the sand. He returned to the girl. Despite his exertion, there was hardly a perceptible increase in his breath pace.
The girl had a suggestion on her finger tips. “Why not go to my people and secure their help?”
Doc considered this briefly. “Is it far?”
“They dwell in the Phantom City. It is nearly half a day’s journey from here.” She seemed to consider her late experience with Doc’s pace of travel. “But you might make it in two hours.”
Doc nodded. “We will go there, Ja,” he told her.
He did not add that his purpose in going was to get her to a place of safety, leaving himself free to go into action unhampered.
They set out to the northward.
* * * *
It was a city carved from solid rock—a mountain of stone, hewn and hollowed into walls, streets, and dwellings. The rock was a pale red in color.
Doc Savage, from a distance of possibly a mile studied the strange sight. He had noted specimens of the red stone in the course of their two-hour journey. The stuff was porous, easily worked. Yet a fabulous amount of labor had gone into the carving of the Phantom City.
The fantastic metropolis was situated at a considerable height above the level of the salt marshes. Beyond it, mountains towered even higher. Down these precipitous slopes crawled a stream of fair size. No doubt it was fed by springs, so that it ran the year around.
Vegetation rimmed the creek. On level ground below the city of rock were small patches of growing crops, obviously irrigated. Doc stared at these tiny plots of grain. They were most interesting.
The crops were not green, but strangely white—a color akin to the hair of the people who lived here.
“Is the water in that stream drinkable?” Doc asked.
“Yes,” explained the girl. “It is the only drinkable water for a distance of countless qasabahs. The White Beasts also get their water for drinking and bathing from it.”
Doc was silent a bit. The luster of the sun seemed to kindle small flames in his golden eyes, an indication that he was pondering the puzzle of the white hair, the white grain fields.
Then he got it.
“It is something in the water that makes your hair white, isn’t it, Ja?” he asked.
“It must be,” she replied. “The stranger who taught us the talk of the hands had black hair when he came, but it became as our own hair when he had dwelt a while.”
Idly, Doc reflected that an American beauty specialist could clean up if he had this stream available. The bleaching compound was no doubt dissolved from a formation somewhere near the stream’s source. Whether drinking the water, or bathing in it was responsible for the whitening process, it was difficult to say. But the shade of white was beautiful.
Ja was rested now. She ran by Doc’s side as he swung toward the Phantom City. The going was somewhat smoother here.
In the past two hours, Doc had managed to pick up a great deal of the girl’s language. His very complete knowledge of Arabic root words made that simpler. He had simply to ask her for the word which corresponded with one transmitted on his fingers in English.
It was necessary for her to give him the words only once; that was enough to fix them in his retentive memory.
The red rock walls of the strange metropolis shoved up ahead of them. The fact that they were one great mass of stone, without joints anywhere, gave the place a modernistic aspect.
There was no sign of life; but this did not alarm the girl.
“They do not know whether we are friends or enemies,” she said, speaking slowly, trying to use words Doc had learned. “They will remain hidden until they are sure.”
The walls were perforated with a massive gate. Coming close, Doc observed these gates with interest. They were of metal. It was covered with a corrosion. But at points the corrosion film had been scraped off. The metal below had the color of silver, only a bit deeper.
* * * *
As they came nearer, Ja pointed a slender hand at these gates and said: “That is the metal of which I told you—the metal which you called platinum.”
Doc was shocked into one of his rare exhibits of surprise. Those gates were solid, massive. They must weigh tons. He glided close, studied the metal; he picked up a rock and scraped it through the gray-green corrosion.
He spun on the girl. “Listen, Ja, was the jewelry you wore when Mohallet found you——”
His query was never finished. With a lusty groaning, the monster metal gates swung ajar. There had been no sound from within. No one had appeared.
There was no sound now. Nor did men show themselves. The gates simply opened, actuated by some crude but efficient mechanism contained in chambers hollowed out within the walls. The effect was ghostly, one befitting the eerie name of Phantom City.
“Come!” The girl started within the walls.
“Wait!” Doc said sharply in her tongue. “I do not like this!”
The girl hesitated, then retreated a few paces from the gates.
“It is strange that they have not hailed us!” she murmured.
Doc, not understanding some of her words, nevertheless got enough of them to secure her meaning.
“Lift your voice and call to them,” he suggested.
The girl complied. Loudness seemed to detract nothing from the quality of her musical voice.
For some seconds after her cry, no answer came.
A man appeared abruptly within the gate, and a little distance back from it. He was a tall man—handsome and powerful of build. He had the same remarkable snow-white hair as Ja.
This individual spoke so rapidly in the strange tongue that Doc could not catch the words, slight as was his familiarity with the language.
“He says that there has been a great fight with the White Beasts,” the girl translated slowly. “Many are wounded, and he is the only one at the gates. He asks us to hurry in, that he may shut the gates, should the White Beasts again come.”
Very careless, Doc reflected, to have only one lookout at the gates. Or perhaps other fighting men, tired from combat, were sleeping near at hand where they could be called in case of an attack by the White Beasts.
He entered the gates at Ja’s side.
A street stretched ahead—a ditch cut in the solid rock, the sides perforated with doors, all of which seemed of exactly the same size.
Bodies lay in the streets—men killed in recent combat. Some were those of white-haired folk, powerfully formed; by far the greater number were the apish White Beasts.
They approached the single living figure, the man who had summoned them in. He stared at them. There was something rigid, queer, about his stance.
Suddenly the man screamed words in the dialect.
The white-haired girl whirled.
“A trap!” she shrieked. “He was promised his life if he would decoy us in——”
Out of doorways around them, simian White Beasts bounded. They flooded the vicinity of the gate, blocking egress there.