Two months passed before Graydon, wounds healed and his strength back, could leave Chapin. How much of his recovery was due to the nursing of the old padre and his household, and how much to the doses the Indians had forced into him, he did not know. Nor did he know how much he had revealed in his ravings. But, he reflected, these had probably been in English, and none in Chapin, nor the Indian hunters had a word of that language. Yet it was true that the old padre had been strangely disturbed about his leaving, had talked long
about demons, their lures and devices, and of the wisdom of giving them wide berth. During his convalescence there had been plenty of time for him to analyze what he had beheld; rationalize it; dissolve its mystery. Had the three actually turned into globules of gold? There was another explanation—and a far more probable one. The cavern of the Face might be a laboratory of Nature, a crucible wherein, under unknown rays, transmutation of one element into another took place. Within the rock out of which the Face was carved might be some substance which by these rays was transformed into gold. Fulfillment of that old
dream . . . or inspiration . . . of the ancient alchemists which modern science is turning into reality. Had not Rutherford, the Englishman, succeeded in turning an entirely different element into pure copper by depriving it of an electron or two? Was not the final product of uranium, the vibrant mother of radium—dull, inert lead?
The concentration of the rays upon the Face was terrific. Beneath the bombardment of those radiant particles of energy the bodies of the three might have been swiftly disintegrated. The three droplets of gold might have been oozing from the rock behind them . . . the three had
vanished . . . he had seen the drops . . . thought the three changed into them . . . an illusion. And the Face did not really sweat and weep and slaver gold. That was the action of the ray upon it. The genius who had cut it from the stone had manipulated that . . . Of course! The lure of the Face? Its power? A simple matter of psychology—once one understood it.
That same genius had taken the stone, worked upon it, and reproduced so accurately man's hunger for power that inevitably he who looked upon it responded. The subconsciousness, the consciousness as well, leaped up in response to what the Face portrayed with such tremendous fidelity. In proportion to the strength of that desire within him was the strength of the response. Like calls to like. The stronger draws the weaker. A simple matter of
psychology. Again—of course!
The winged serpents—the Messengers? There, indeed, one's feet were solidly on scientific fact. Ambrose Bierce had deduced in his story "The Damned Thing" that there might be such things: H. G. Wells, the Englishman, had played with the same idea in his "Invisible Man"; and de Maupassant had worked it out, just before he went insane, in his haunting tale of the Horal. Science knew the thing was possible, and scientists the world over were trying to find the secret to use in the next war.
Yes, the invisible Messengers were easily explained. Conceive something that neither absorbs light nor throws it back. In such case the light rays stream over that something as water in a swift brook streams over a submerged boulder. The boulder is not visible. Nor would be the thing over which the light rays streamed. The light rays would curve over it, bringing to the eyes of the observer whatever image they carried from behind. The intervening object would be invisible. Because it neither absorbed nor threw back light, it could be nothing else