Valley of Dreams Read online

pages--wavy white lines like a seismograph record on black sheetslike the material of Tweel's pouch. Tweel fumed and whistled in wrath,picked up the volume and slammed it into place on a shelf full ofothers. Leroy and I stared dumbfounded at each other.

  "Had the little thing with the fiendish face been reading? Or was itsimply eating the pages, getting physical nourishment rather thanmental? Or had the whole thing been accidental?

  "If the creature were some rat-like pest that destroyed books, Tweel'srage was understandable, but why should he try to prevent an intelligentbeing, even though of an alien race, from _reading_--if it _was_ reading? Idon't know; I did notice that the book was entirely undamaged, nor did Isee a damaged book among any that we handled. But I have an odd hunchthat if we knew the secret of the little cape-clothed imp, we'd know themystery of the vast abandoned city and of the decay of Martian culture.

  "Well, Tweel quieted down after a while and led us completely aroundthat tremendous hall. It had been a library, I think; at least, therewere thousands upon thousands of those queer black-paged volumes printedin wavy lines of white. There were pictures, too, in some; and some ofthese showed Tweel's people. That's a point, of course; it indicatedthat his race built the city and printed the books. I don't think thegreatest philologist on earth will ever translate one line of thoserecords; they were made by minds too different from ours.

  "Tweel could read them, naturally. He twittered off a few lines, andthen I took a few of the books, with his permission; he said 'no, no!'to some and 'yes, yes!' to others. Perhaps he kept back the ones hispeople needed, or perhaps he let me take the ones he thought we'dunderstand most easily. I don't know; the books are outside there in therocket.

  "Then he held that dim torch of his toward the walls, and they werepictured. Lord, what pictures! They stretched up and up into theblackness of the roof, mysterious and gigantic. I couldn't make much ofthe first wall; it seemed to be a portrayal of a great assembly ofTweel's people. Perhaps it was meant to symbolize Society or Government.But the next wall was more obvious; it showed creatures at work on acolossal machine of some sort, and that would be Industry or Science.The back wall had corroded away in part, from what we could see, Isuspected the scene was meant to portray Art, but it was on the fourthwall that we got a shock that nearly dazed us.

  "I think the symbol was Exploration or Discovery. This wall was a littleplainer, because the moving beam of daylight from that crack lit up thehigher surface and Tweel's torch illuminated the lower. We made out agiant seated figure, one of the beaked Martians like Tweel, but withevery limb suggesting heaviness, weariness. The arms dropped inertly onthe chair, the thin neck bent and the beak rested on the body, as if thecreature could scarcely bear its own weight. And before it was a queerkneeling figure, and at sight of it, Leroy and I almost reeled againsteach other. It was, apparently, a man!"

  "A man!" bellowed Harrison. "A man you say?"

  "I said apparently," retorted Jarvis. "The artist had exaggerated thenose almost to the length of Tweel's beak, but the figure had blackshoulder-length hair, and instead of the Martian four, there were _five_fingers on its outstretched hand! It was kneeling as if in worship ofthe Martian, and on the ground was what looked like a pottery bowl fullof some food as an offering. Well! Leroy and I thought we'd gonescrewy!"

  "And Putz and I think so, too!" roared the captain.

  "Maybe we all have," replied Jarvis, with a faint grin at the pale faceof the little Frenchman, who returned it in silence. "Anyway," hecontinued, "Tweel was squeaking and pointing at the figure, and saying'Tick! Tick!' so he recognized the resemblance--and never mind anycracks about my nose!" he warned the captain. "It was Leroy who made theimportant comment; he looked at the Martian and said 'Thoth! The godThoth!'"

  "_Oui!_" confirmed the biologist. "_Comme l'Egypte!_"

  "Yeah," said Jarvis. "Like the Egyptian ibis-headed god--the one withthe beak. Well, no sooner did Tweel hear the name Thoth than he set up aclamor of twittering and squeaking. He pointed at himself and said'Thoth! Thoth!' and then waved his arm all around and repeated it. Ofcourse he often did queer things, but we both thought we understood whathe meant. He was trying to tell us that his race called themselvesThoth. Do you see what I'm getting at?"

  "I see, all right," said Harrison. "You think the Martians paid a visitto the earth, and the Egyptians remembered it in their mythology. Well,you're off, then; there wasn't any Egyptian civilization fifteenthousand years ago."

  "Wrong!" grinned Jarvis. "It's too bad we _haven't_ an archeologistwith us, but Leroy tells me that there was a stone-age culture in Egyptthen, the pre-dynastic civilization."

  "Well, even so, what of it?"

  "Plenty! Everything in that picture proves my point. The attitude of theMartian, heavy and weary--that's the unnatural strain of terrestrialgravitation. The name Thoth; Leroy tells me Thoth was the Egyptian godof philosophy and the inventor of _writing_! Get that? They must havepicked up the idea from watching the Martian take notes. It's too muchfor coincidence that Thoth should be beaked and ibis-headed, and thatthe beaked Martians call themselves Thoth."

  "Well, I'll be hanged! But what about the nose on the Egyptian? Do youmean to tell me that stone-age Egyptians had longer noses than ordinarymen?"

  "Of course not! It's just that the Martians very naturally cast theirpaintings in Martianized form. Don't human beings tend to relateeverything to themselves? That's why dugongs and manatees started themermaid myths--sailors thought they saw human features on the beasts. Sothe Martian artist, drawing either from descriptions or imperfectphotographs, naturally exaggerated the size of the human nose to adegree that looked normal to him. Or anyway, that's my theory."

  "Well, it'll do as a theory," grunted Harrison. "What I want to hear iswhy you two got back here looking like a couple of year-before-lastbird's nests."

  Jarvis shuddered again, and cast another glance at Leroy. The littlebiologist was recovering some of his accustomed poise, but he returnedthe glance with an echo of the chemist's shudder.

  "We'll get to that," resumed the latter. "Meanwhile I'll stick to Tweeland his people. We spent the better part of three days with them, as youknow. I can't give every detail, but I'll summarize the important factsand give our conclusions, which may not be worth an inflated franc. It'shard to judge this dried-up world by earthly standards.

  "We took pictures of everything possible; I even tried to photographthat gigantic mural in the library, but unless Tweel's lamp wasunusually rich in actinic rays, I don't suppose it'll show. And that's apity, since it's undoubtedly the most interesting object we've found onMars, at least from a human viewpoint.

  "Tweel was a very courteous host. He took us to all the points ofinterest--even the new water-works."

  Putz's eyes brightened at the word. "Vater-vorks?" he echoed. "For vot?"

  "For the canal, naturally. They have to build up a head of water todrive it through; that's obvious." He looked at the captain. "You toldme yourself that to drive water from the polar caps of Mars to theequator was equivalent to forcing it up a twenty-mile hill, because Marsis flattened at the poles and bulges at the equator just like theearth."

  "That's true," agreed Harrison.

  "Well," resumed Jarvis, "this city was one of the relay stations toboost the flow. Their power plant was the only one of the giantbuildings that seemed to serve any useful purpose, and that was worthseeing. I wish you'd seen it, Karl; you'll have to make what you canfrom our pictures. It's a sun-power plant!"

  Harrison and Putz stared. "Sun-power!" grunted the captain. "That'sprimitive!" And the engineer added an emphatic "_Ja!_" of agreement.

  "Not as primitive as all that," corrected Jarvis. "The sunlight focusedon a queer cylinder in the center of a big concave mirror, and they drewan electric current from it. The juice worked the pumps."

  "A t'ermocouple!" ejaculated Putz.

  "That sounds reasonable; you can judge by the pictures. But thepower-plant had some queer things about it. The queerest was that
themachinery was tended, not by Tweel's people, but by some of thebarrel-shaped creatures like the ones in Xanthus!" He gazed around atthe faces of his auditors; there was no comment.

  "Get it?" he resumed. At their silence, he proceeded, "I see you don't.Leroy figured it out, but whether rightly or wrongly, I don't know. Hethinks that the barrels and Tweel's race have a reciprocal arrangementlike--well,