PHANTOM
Sudden appearance of the hairy white savages told a story in itself. They had taken the Phantom City, capturing or slaying the inhabitants. This explained why no one had appeared upon the walls. The White Beasts had waited, and with an animal cunning had thought of the decoy trick.
The decoy had repented too late. His warning accomplished nothing but his own death. For, with a hideous bellow, a hairy man smashed a club against the fellow’s head. He tumbled down, instantly dead.
A stone-headed spear came hurtling at Ja. Only Doc’s quick wrench which pulled her to her knees saved her. The spear, rotating rapidly as it flew, hissed on and smacked its head into a thousand fragments on a red stone wall.
It was imperative that they get out of the street.
“To the right—the house roofs!” Doc rapped.
Fighting silently, he strove to open the way. Some one threw a heavy club. Doc saw it coming, but did not get out of its way. Instead, when it was half an arm’s length from his head, he caught it, stepping backward in the fashion of a baseball catcher absorbing the jar of a fast ball.
An instant later, the club thrower was down, several ribs broken by his own weapon, which had come back at him too swiftly for his eyes to follow.
There were too many of the White Beasts. They closed upon the girl, grasped her, and hauled her to the street, which was also of hard red rock.
Doc, a windmill of dangerous fists, churned in to help her. It was hopeless. Even his fighting qualities had a limit. The hideous foes were so thick they clambered atop each other to get into the fight.
Despite his best efforts, Doc was forced away from the girl. He did, however, manage to maneuver under a wall. He crouched, then sailed upward in a great leap.
His fingers gripped the edge of a roof. He swung up. A flung club smashed against one arm as he went over. It bounced back as if it had collided with steel springs.
Doc ran across the roof—it was flat like the top of a stone block. There was another street beyond, rather narrow. He cleared it easily, with a leap that would have seemed prodigious to another man.
He examined his arm where the club had hit. There was a great ache in it; the skin was broken slightly. But the giant muscles and the bone beneath were not damaged seriously.
A weird sort of hound-and-hare game now ensued. The apish savages, lacking the agility to leap the streets, were greatly handicapped. But what they lacked in grace, they made up in persistence. Back and forth, the chase led.
From the roof tops, Doc discovered he could see over the city walls for a considerable distance. To the eastward lay the marshes. They stretched so far they were lost in distant haze, like a sea.
There should, Doc reflected, be water grass growing in the brine or around its edges. None was evident. A moment later, he understood the reason.
This salt marsh must be one of many which covered a considerable area. Of these, the outer world knew. The other marshes, no doubt situated on higher ground, fed into this one. The closing of the underground river had caused the brine to rise. That was why no water grass was visible. It had been covered to a depth of many feet.
Doc dropped down and entered a hollowed stone house. He discovered passages leading downward, and it speedily became evident that there were corridors and cross-corridors undermining the whole city. Doc entered these.
His anthropoid pursuers were as unfamiliar with this underground labyrinth as was Doc. Their pursuit lagged. Before long, they had no idea where, in the many acres the Phantom City covered, Doc was lurking.
They had made no more progress by nightfall.
* * * *
Dry clarity of the desert air made the night heavens a thing of brilliant splendor. The moon seemed to come thousands of miles nearer the earth; the stars were distinct as distant electric lights.
Doc Savage left a subterranean chamber of rock where he had concealed himself, and made for the city walls. They were not so high but that he could drop over them safely.
With his agility, he could have quitted the city of stone at any time during the afternoon, and escaped. But he had remained behind—for a reason. He had wanted to eavesdrop on the White Beasts and get a line on any plans they might have.
He had succeeded. Conversation of two warriors, spoken lazily because they were tired and the afternoon hot, had been slow enough for Doc’s comprehension.
The prisoners from the submarine would, no doubt, be brought here. There was no word of that, for the savages in the Phantom City as yet knew nothing of the submarine episode. But here was to be the future headquarters of the hairy men, in this city of solid stone.
The white-haired girl, Ja, still lived. She had been placed with perhaps two-score other persons—the sole survivors of the Phantom City inhabitants.
These captives, Doc had gathered, were to be sacrificed, a few at a time, by being tossed in the underground river. Poised near the city walls, Doc waited. His eyes probed the brilliant moonlight, both in search of the party who held his five friends prisoners, and to consider various avenues of flight.
Toward the marsh seemed to be the best route; down the river. During the afternoon, Doc had noted numerous small, irregularly shaped objects scattered along the bank some distance downstream. He had figured out what they were.
Inflated camel hides used for boats. Rafts, rather. Such craft were used by Arabian nomads along the River Jordan. A small incision was made in a slain camel, and flesh and bones removed—the camel was taken out of his skin, instead of the skin from the camel. Once this was done, holes were sewn tightly, and the skin blown up with air.
These camel rafts would support much weight, but Doc did not have a high opinion of their sailing qualities.
Camels seemed fairly plentiful in the surrounding desert. In the course of the afternoon Doc had glimpsed a number of them. They were drinking, not from the river, but from the salty brine of the marsh. This verified scientific reports that this great desert held such a species of camel.
As for the water from the stream, Doc had quenched his thirst from a jar of that which he found in a dwelling. The stuff had a pronounced but not unpleasant taste of chemicals in solution. Doc was now quite sure bathing in the stuff was what turned the hair white. The chemical content simply bleached the hair.
His thoughts snapped suddenly to the present. Coming through the moonlight was a file of savages and burnoosed brown men. The serpentine caravan crawled closer. Coarse shouts pealed from the red stone walls of the Phantom City. Other yells came back from the newcomers.
Doc discerned the form of Mohallet. With a burly, bleached savage, evidently the chief of the White Beasts, he led the caravan.
Doc’s five friends marched about halfway back. Their wrists were bound at their backs.
The massive gates of whitish metal swung open to admit the arrivals.
* * * *
A great excitement seized Mohallet the instant he saw those gates. He ran to them, scratched them with a dagger which he had managed to salvage somewhere, and his ecstasy increased at the shine of the metal beneath.
“Platinum!” he screamed in Arabic. “Wallah! It is platinum! These gates are alone worth millions of dollars!”
It was impossible for Mohallet to be sure the gates were of platinum, since they were in the moon shadow beneath the walls, Doc reflected. Mohallet must have been certain he would find much of the metal which composed the bracelet the white-haired girl had been wearing when his men found her wandering on the Arabian coast.
There was a great rejoicing around the gates. All of Mohallet’s swarthy men joined in. They considered their fortunes made. For the time being, how they would get out of the country was forgotten.
Doc’s five friends stood by, grimly silent.
The White Beasts also stood around, unable to understand why shiny metal should drive their allies to a species of insanity.
The march was eventually resumed.
A bronze ghost of a figure haunted the journey through darkened streets of stone. Doc could move with uncanny stealth—he had perfected this ability by studying the methods of masters of stealth, the hunting carnivora of the jungles. None saw him.
A burnoosed brown man, spying a dead man in a side street, and noting the form was clad in a mailed suit of the shiny metal, could not resist the impulse to slip away from the column and secure the armor.
He was wrapping the metallic garment in a bundle when some kind of a monster seemed to swallow the world. At least, that was the swarthy fellow’s impression. There was a great blackness before his eyes, a roaring—unconsciousness.
Doc Savage lowered the senseless bundle of bones. His fist, landing on a vulnerable nerve center, had produced unconsciousness about as quickly as was possible.
He wanted the man’s burnoose to use as a disguise. Securing the flowing garment required only a moment. He did not fancy the smell of the thing, but it was no time for squeamishness. He donned it.
Several of Mohallet’s followers stared suspiciously as the burnoosed figure of a man glided up and joined them. They had noticed the fellow depart; perhaps now in their subconscious minds was the thought that the one who had returned was a bit larger than he who had departed.
Doc used a simple method in allaying their suspicions. From his burnoose he tugged an end of the metal armor. The others, seeing it, grinned widely. Their suspicions, never quite real, vanished. They could understand a side trip for pilfering.
The column tramped on, no one aware that Doc Savage had affixed himself to it. It was dark in the streets, and Doc kept his hood pulled well over his features.
* * * *
The cavalcade came finally to a structure hewn in what had been the peak of the red rock mound which had been sculptured to create the Phantom City.
They entered a large amphitheater, open to the sky. This was undoubtedly an audience chamber where rulers, in the heyday of this weird city, had received the populace.
Doc now secured one of the important pieces of information he was after. The prisoners were confined in a large room opening off the amphitheater.
Doc was among the group who conducted Renny, Monk, and the others to the prison room. The interior was lighted with torches of thornwood. Doc saw Ja. She was not hurt seriously, however.
Most of the other captives were marked with wounds of more or less degree. All, however, were capable of keeping their feet.
A metal door was shut on the prisoners.
In the center of the amphitheater, a conference got under way. Mohallet was losing no time. Confronting the chief of the White Beasts, he spoke in a loud voice, slow and distinct enough that all could hear. His own men naturally could not comprehend the tongue of the White Beasts, in which Mohallet spoke.
Doc, due to the effort Mohallet made to speak slowly and distinctly, understood most of it.
“The bronze man and the five who accompanied him are demons!” Mohallet announced. “They have closed the outlet of the marsh. You have noticed the water is rising. It will continue to rise, until this city and all the rest of the world is flooded.”
Mohallet was exaggerating greatly, Doc reflected. But the white-furred savages, ignorant as they were, believed him. A loud, angry rumble went around—largely composed of threats against Doc and the others.
“You must kill the bronze man; then maybe the river will flow under the mountains again!” bellowed Mohallet.
“Will it flow if we slay him?” demanded the chief of the White Beasts.
“It may, but I cannot be sure!” said the canny Mohallet.
“Will it flow if we slay not only the bronze one, but his five men, and our other captives as well?”
“You will try and see!” directed Mohallet cold-bloodedly. “But I have told you I can guarantee nothing.”
“Shall we make the sacrifices immediately?” pondered the bewildered chief. “The lake has risen much, and my people are greatly worried. They think the rising of the waters is a curse upon us for taking this city!”
“Nonsense!” shouted Mohallet. “The curse is this white metal which you have come in contact with. You must get rid of it—send it where you will not touch it and be contaminated.”
He allowed time for this statement to be absorbed, then went on: “You will gather all the metal together and have your men convey it far into the desert to the southward—to a spot to which I shall direct you.”
Watching intently, Doc decided the ignorant White Beasts would comply with this ridiculous suggestion. It was merely a slick scheme Mohallet had hatched for getting the metal transported much of the distance down to the sea coast.
“First,” Mohallet continued, “you must capture the bronze man and slay him.”
Unnoticed, Doc Savage walked slowly to the single guard at the door of the chamber which held the prisoners. With a single terrific fist blow, he felled the sentry.