Jakara stayed on his Lookout until the sun went down. It was very lonely then. He climbed down the Lookout to his hut, not whistling. From Maiad village came the plaintive fluting of the burral, sweet but sad. The villages slept. The Islands slept. The sea never sleeps: she dreams sometimes, as does the night. Upon their mats the people slept coiled up like tired children, a wealth of resting limbs and tangled tresses abandoned in dreaming repose. Outside, all was utter silence; even Nature dreamed and leased the air and the land and the sea to the spirit folk and the unknown energy that is.
Within the Zogo-house sat C’Zarcke the dreaded, C’Zarcke the all-powerful, C’Zarcke the hungry seeker after knowledge. He communed in silent company, for skulls do not talk, at least, in words that humans hear. Twenty were his company, once men whose individual history was a lifetime spent in acquiring knowledge. Each had its characteristics, and each a personality of its own which grimaced: “Read me now, if you can!” There were two characteristics common to all: their silence, and the roominess of the brain cavities. For his personal souvenirs, C’Zarcke collected only those relics whose bony walls had once held brains that reasoned, that sought to know things.
Though mostly of black and brown people, there were representatives of high civilization there, for a Spanish don leered over one shoulder while C’Zarcke stared straight into the eye-sockets of an English captain. A blueness illuminated the shadowy room; the light was diffused from the sockets of a box-shaped skull. Other things were in that room, a nameless feeling of presences in the heavy air; the vagueness, and the possibility of what might be, gave to that ghostly, dimly-lighted place a fearfulness that belonged to darkness. Yet something – to the human mind a repellant feeling of uncanny power – would not be denied, and that heavy silence and darkness seemed to be its element. Not nearly so repugnant were the sentinel forms of men stretched mummified. Their appearance was dreadful, so let them stay shrouded in the night. Then there was a “something” from the rafters that stared straight down upon C’Zarcke’s head. It had once been a woman. So terrible was it that no stranger would have looked twice, although he would at once have realized that the woman had triumphed over death, for she was still beautiful.
C’Zarcke sat as in a death-like trance, made horrible, however, because his “dead” face was so expressive of life and burning expectancy; inside the massive head all reasoning was concentrated to absorb something coming to him through the air. Presently his eyes clouded as if to dim his vision and focus sight straight back upon the brain within. Then in his eyes appeared that intense, blue-black glitter. He sighed lingeringly, and his splendid chest barely moved, while through his eyes, and possibly his ears, he was drinking in mind-energy sent to him from all the Zogo-le of the Strait, aye, and from every Maid-le priest of the Bomai-Malu Cult far south down the Australian coast, and to north-west right up along the New Guinea shores. Each of these sat in a comfortable position inside his Zogo-house, and, if compass lines had been drawn from every island, the three groups of the Zogo-le and every man of the Maid-le priesthood would have been found staring straight towards C’Zarcke. In a crescent around each man, with his own head as the centre, were evenly-placed skulls, though it is believed that these were kept not because the present Zogo-le believed them to possess a really tangible power, but because their ancestors in dim ages had superstitiously used them in first seeking after knowledge. Each skull grinned on a level with, and at, the priest’s head. All else was darkness, a waiting, almost a living silence, and every man of them – some with brutal, but all with intellectual, faces, drawn taut and strained, and their queer, bright eyes with the purple glitter staring inwards and outwards – strove to hypnotize his body and brain and force out towards C’Zarcke that deep inner consciousness which, they firmly believe, quits the body temporarily in sleep, but for ever in death.
Presently, the Zogo of Eroob sighed, his body sagged, his thick brown arms slid down beside him queerly reminiscent of dying snakes. His head settled upon his chest, he fought to control the stream of his consciousness going out, out – and C’Zarcke the receiver awaited with chest expanding and big eyes widening, intensely bright. When the Zogo of Eroob crouched limp as a man dead, C’Zarcke whimpered like a baby in gratification, for within his brain-cells he had stored the reasoning life of his lesser priest.
The Zogo of Ugar was the next to lend tribute of reasoning force. With him, visibly at least, the forcing out of his consciousness was painful. He moaned in sore distress while his legs and arms shot out with the jerky, stiffly-controlled movement of an automaton. His muscles bunched, his sinews stretched the skin like tautened bow-strings. Moaning horribly, he rolled back with open mouth, shrunken in body and with stiffened limbs all crooked.
Then, in quick and urgent succession, as C’Zarcke accumulated each man’s power of reasoning, so into trance slipped each one of the Zogo-le and the lesser far-scattered priests of the Bomai-Malu Cult.
C’Zarcke, though trained during many intense years and with the knowledge of others gone before to help him, could not have absorbed more vibratory energy, or else even his great mind would have burst under pressure of the force within. As the last priest surrendered his reason, C’Zarcke stood up, not of his volition, and raised knotted arms to the roof. The physical strength of the man, immense at any time, was now supernatural. Vitality electrified the muscles that appeared straining from the body. His face was radiant as at a vision of deified power. His hands snatched at a salvaged bar; with a smile of intense joy he bent that iron, tied it in knots, and twisted it until the hot metal snapped and clattered to his feet. He fastened his teeth in a hardened beam of Wongai wood, and the timber splintered like a match chewed by a child.
Then something unexplainable happened within C’Zarcke, for that portion of his mind which he had first purposely put to sleep, was endeavouring to control and combine the reasoning individualities which he had absorbed. We know how it is with a man dreaming, who is aware that he is dreaming and determines that he must remember his dream and impress it on his mind for reference in waking hours, and who, on awakening, remembers that he had a dream – remembers perfectly that he tried to impress the vision upon his conscious mind – but now remembers nothing of the dream itself. With C’Zarcke the reverse was the case. In years of study he had striven to impress his conscious mind to take control after he had fallen asleep; for then every physical motion released his surplus power back to the Zogo-le from whence it had come. They were starving for its return, as demagnetized iron might starve for that of which it had been robbed. C’Zarcke was like an engine under terrific pressure, whose dreamy driver hesitates which button to press in order to control its strength so that every atom will be utilized as directed, and this power was attached by invisible threads to those who craved its return. C’Zarcke was quivering to expend his borrowed energy on a mad excess of physical exertion. It had always been so, the fight of the physical to take command, the resolve of the mind to control the physical and also to impress the waking memory with the wondrous things which in these flights he saw.
For C’Zarcke sought to transplant his mind out into the world of space. Such has been a mind-dream of men in many ages.
With but a partly-trained reason directing him, he reached up and, like a child handling a toy, slid back a portion of the roof. Under this was a rude couch; C’Zarcke leaped up, lay flat on his back, settled his body to perfect ease, and then rolling back his tongue attempted to swallow it. As he lost consciousness the glorious star of Kaek smiled down and enveloped the priest in dazzling affinity with existences in space. At long last, after the Zogo-le were deep in exhausted sleep, C’Zarcke’s eyes opened vacantly to the risen sun. Long he lay, then covered his face with his arms. C’Zarcke the feared sobbed like a heart-broken child. He had glimpsed the vision splendid and could not remember it – only fantasies of an entrancing dream. And, as time sped on, the Zogo-le and the priests of Bomai would