Free Clarke, Arthur C - Fall of Night 02 by Beyond the Fall of Night Page B

lay in pools of shadow, and a cold wind was sweeping through the leaves.
Alvin and Theon settled down for the night beside a giant redwood whose topmost
branches were still ablaze with sunlight.
                   When at last the hidden sun
went down, the light still lingered on the dancing waters. The two boys
lay in the gathering gloom, watching the river and thinking of all that they
had seen. As Alvin fell asleep, he found himself wondering who last had come this way, and how long since.
                   The sun was high when they left the forest and
stood at last before the mountain walls of Lys . Ahead of them the ground rose steeply to
the sky in waves of barren rock. Here the river came to an end as spectacular
as its beginning, for the ground opened in its path and it sank roaring from
sight.
                   For a moment Theon stood looking at the
whirlpool and the broken land beyond. Then he pointed to a gap in the hills.
                   "Shalmirane lies in that direction,"
he said confidently. Alvin looked at him in surprise.
                   "You told me you'd never been here
before!"
                   "I haven't."
                   "Then how do you know the way?"
                   Theon looked puzzled.
                   "I don't know—I've never thought about it
before. It must be a kind of instinct, for wherever we go in Lys we always know our way about."
                   Alvin found this very difficult to believe, and
followed Theon with considerable skepticism. They were soon through the gap in
the hills, and ahead of them now was a curious plateau with gently sloping
sides. After a moment's hesitation, Theon started to climb. Alvin followed, full of doubts, and as he climbed
he began to compose a little speech. If the journey proved in vain, Theon would
know exactly what he thought of his unerring instinct.
                   As they approached the summit, the nature of
the ground altered abruptly. The lower slopes had consisted of porous, volcanic
stone, piled here and there in great mounds of slag. Now the surface turned
suddenly to hard sheets of glass, smooth and treacherous, as if the rock had
once run in molten rivers down the mountain. The rim of the plateau was almost
at their feet. Theon reached it first, and a few seconds later Alvin overtook him and stood speechless at his
side. For they stood on the edge, not of the plateau they had expected, but of
a giant bowl half a mile deep and three miles in diameter. Ahead of them the
ground plunged steeply downward, slowly leveling out at the bottom of the
valley and rising again, more and more steeply, to the opposite rim. And
although it now lay in the full glare of the sun, the whole of that great
depression was ebon black. What material formed the crater the boys could not
even guess, but it was black as the rock of a world that had never known a sun.
Nor was that all, for lying beneath their feet and ringing the entire crater
was a seamless band of metal, some hundred feet wide, tarnished by immeasurable
age but still showing no slightest trace of corrosion.
                   As their eyes grew accustomed to the unearthly
scene, Alvin and Theon realized that the blackness of the bowl was not as
absolute as they had thought. Here and there, so fugitive that they could only
see them indirectly, tiny explosions of light were flickering in the ebon
walls. They came at random, vanishing as soon as they were born, like the
reflections of stars on a broken sea.
                   "It's wonderful!" gasped Alvin . "But what is it?"
                   "It looks hke a reflector of some
kind."
                   "I can't imagine that black stuff
reflecting anything."
                   "It's only black to our eyes, remember.
We don't know what radiations they used."
                   "But