stay here long.'
'Carry him inside,' Raft said. 'Bill, get a hypo. Adrenalin.'
Da Fonseca had collapsed completely by the time he was laid gently on a cot. His heart had stopped. Merriday came running with a syringe.
He had put on a long needle, guessing Raft's intention.
Raft made the injection directly into the heart muscle. Then he waited, stethoscope ready. He was conscious of something—different. Something changed.
Abruptly he knew what it was. The drums. They were louder, shouting, triumphant. Their beat was like the throbbing of a monster heart—of the jungle's heart, dark and immense.
Da Fonseca responded. Raft heard the soft pounding through the instrument, and those heart-beats were timed exactly to the rhythm of the Jutahy drums. His lids lifted slowly. His voice was hollow, chanting.
'He goes back now—and the gate of Doirada opens to his coming—He goes back—to the sleeping Flame. By the unseen road, where the devils of Paititi watch at the gate of Doirada….'
Louder roared the drums. Louder beat da Fonseca's heart. His voice grew stronger.
'The sun was wrong. And the river was slow—too slow. There was a devil there, under the ice. It was— was—'
He tore again at his throat, gasping for breath. His eyes held madness.
'Curupuri!' he screamed, and the drums crashed an echo.
And were still.
There was silence, blank and empty. As though at a signal, the Jutahy drums had stopped.
Da Fonseca fell back like a dead man on the cot. Raft, sweat cold on his skin, leaned forward, searching with his stethoscope at the bared chest.
He heard nothing.
Then, far out in the jungle, a drum muttered once and was still.
Da Fonseca's dead heart stirred with it.
And fell silent.
CHAPTER III.
GATE TO PAITITI
WITH FIVE INDIOS Dr. Brian Raft went up the Jutahy after Craddock and Pereira. He went with his lips thinned grimly, and a deep doubt in his mind. Merriday he left at the base hospital, to wind up the experiment and send the records back to the Institute.
'You can't go alone,' Merriday had said. 'You're crazy, Brian.'
Raft nodded.
'Maybe. But we worked with Dan for nearly a year, and he's a white man. As for Pereira, sometimes I'm not entirely sure that he was a—man.'
Stolid Merriday blinked.
'Oh, but that's nonsense.'
'I told you what happened. He had no heartbeat. His temperature was crazy. And the way he walked through the laboratory wall wasn't strictly normal, was it?'
'Da Fonseca said some queer things before he died, too. You're not starting to believe them, are you?'
'No,' Raft said. 'Not yet. Not without a devil of a lot of proof. Just the same, I wish I'd got a chance at that notebook of Craddock's. Pereira said he was returning it. And that stuff about the sun and the river being too slow. Two people mentioned that, you know; da Fonseca and Pereira. Moreover, Dan seemed to understand what it meant.'
'More than I do,' Merriday grunted. 'It's dangerous for you to go up-river alone.'
'I've got a hunch Craddock went up-river, a long time ago. What he found there is a mystery.' Raft shook his head. 'I don't know. I just don't know, Bill. Anyway, they didn't have much fuel aboard, and I think I can catch up with them.'
'I wish you'd let me go with you.'
But Raft wouldn't agree to that. In the end, he went out alone, the Indies paddling the big canoa untiringly up against the current. He had supplies—what he could get hastily together—and guns and ammunition. The natives helped him find Pereira's track. For, all too soon, the diamond-hunter left the river.
'Two men walking,' Luiz said, eyeing the underbrush.
Walking. That meant either that Craddock was going willingly now, or else there was force being employed. Hypnosis, perhaps, Raft thought, remembering the lens-mirror. More and more often now he recalled the exotic, paradoxical face of the girl. How she tied into the mystery he could not guess, but remembrance of her made him more willing to seek out the solution.
So they went westward toward the Ecuadorian border, where a thousand little rivers rise to pour into the great Solimoes that feeds the Amazon itself. Ten days and ten nights they traveled. …
On the eleventh morning the Indies were gone, even the faithful Luiz. No sound, no alarm—but Raft was alone when he woke. Perhaps they had deserted. Perhaps the jaguars had got them. The beasts had been holding a devil's sabbath in the forest during the night. Raft didn't find any traces.
His lips drew down more grimly, and he went on, slower because tracking was hard work, for another ten days. He pushed on doggedly through the green breathing walls of the silent jungle, which pulsated with invisible life—never sure that the next turn of the way might not bring him face to face with the deadly giboya, or one of the omnipresent jaguars, or Pereira himself.
He could not have done it at all except for the years of rigorous outdoor life and tropical experience. But he kept on his quarry's track.
Then, in the end, he found what the dying da Fonseca had called the 'unseen road.'
The day before, from the height of a crest—he was getting into mountains—he had seen the great valley, an immense horizon-reaching bowl of fertile forest stretching further than his eye could follow. It was an ocean of moving green. But the track led down into it.
There was a roughly circular space down there where the shade of green was different. It must be very large, for it was far away—miles in diameter. Partly it seemed to be cupped between mountains, and Raft caught the flash of a river far off circling around the nearer curve of it. Perhaps fifty miles in diameter, the place was, but distances are deceptive in the forest. He followed the trail, and it led him directly toward that oasis of green within the green.
Raft had stood the trip well. His face was more deeply seamed, his eyes were red-rimmed, yet he felt little weakness. A sound medical knowledge helped him there. Fevers were rife in this country. Fevers, but no Indios. Animals only, and chiefly the jaguars.
Animals! The place swarmed with life, Raft thought wearily. Everything around him was movement, the bright flutter of insects and brilliant birds, the watery gliding of a snake rippling to cover, the smooth, furtive motion of the big cats, the erratic hysteria of tapir or peccary. All about him was the jungle itself, like a vast composite animal, terribly alive.
Then, in a clearing, he saw plainly the tracks he had been following. Craddock's, and the diamond-hunter's. Pereira had been leading. A rare blaze of sunlight glanced down from overhead, picking out the colors of leaf and flower.
At one spot in the green wall Raft saw something curious—an oval tunnel curving away into the matted jungle as if some gigantic serpent had passed this way, pressing the vines and trees aside, flattening the floor, leaving its own shape carved out of the living vegetation. The footprints led across the clearing toward that green tunnel of gloom.
The footprints stopped halfway across the open space.
Instinctively Raft looked up. But there were no trees close enough. With a long sigh he let the pack slide from his shoulder, but he didn't let go of the rifle.
There was a path, he saw now, beginning where the footprints stopped, six feet wide, depressed a little
