Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [84]
Everything was as the Portuguese merchant had said it would be, even unto the mysterious summoning force that emanated from some location to the west. The Portuguese had fought against that pull and had won his struggle, but Smithers and Brewster had no wish to do the same, and they rode onward, wrapping their faces against the burning wind and the scouring gusts of airborne sand. The sounds grew more distinct. It seemed to them both that the voices they heard were those of revelers, laughing and singing in the marketplace of a populous city; but there could be no cities here, in this abysmal trackless wilderness of sand and thin tufts of grass and empty sky. There was nothing here whatever.
And then they entered a narrow canyon that showed a shadowy slit at its farther end. They went toward it—there was scarcely any choice, now, so strong was the pull—and passed through it, and, suddenly, without any sense of transition, they were out of the desert and in some new and altogether unexpected realm. It was more than an oasis; it was like an entire faery kingdom. Before them stretched groves of palms and lemon trees along gently flowing canals, and beyond those gardens were rows of angular, many-windowed buildings rising rank upon rank above a swiftly flowing river that descended out of low, softly rounded green hills in the west. Brewster and Smithers stared at each other in amazement and wonder. When they looked back they no longer could see the desert, for a thick gray film, a kind of solid vapor, stretched like an impenetrable band across the mouth of the canyon.
“A moment later,” said Brewster, “we found ourselves surrounded by the inhabitants of this place. They rose up out of nowhere, like phantoms indeed, a great colorful horde of them, and danced a welcome about us in circles, singing and waving their arms aloft and crying out in what we could only interpret as tones of gladness.”
THE PEOPLE OF the hidden valley, Brewster told us, were a tall, handsome folk, plainly of the Caucasian race, dark-eyed but light-skinned, with sharp cheekbones and long narrow noses. They seemed rather like Persians in appearance, he thought. They dressed in loose robes of the most vibrant colors, greens, reds, brilliant yellows, the men wearing red or gold pointed skullcaps or beautiful soft-hued turbans striped with bright bands of lemon, pink, yellow, or white, and the women in voluminous mantles, filmy clouds of crepe, shawls shot through with gold brocade, and the like. Below their cascading robes both sexes wore white trousers of a ballooning sort, and an abundance of silver anklets. Their feet were bare. Of course throughout India one sees all manner of flamboyant exotic garb, varying somewhat from region to region but all of it colorful and almost magical in its beauty, and the way these people looked was not fundamentally different from the look of the dwellers in this district of Hindustan or that one, and yet there was a difference, a certain quaint touch of antique glamour, an element of the fantastic, that left the two travelers thinking that they had drifted not into some unknown valley but into the thousand-year-old pages of the Thousand Nights and a Night.
At no time did they feel as though they were in danger. Perhaps these people might be ghosts of some sort, but goblins, ghouls, demons, no. They were too amiable for that. The welcoming party, never ceasing its prancing