The Tree of Life
By C. L. MOORE
[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Weird Tales October1936. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Over time-ruined Illar the searching planes swooped and circled.Northwest Smith, peering up at them with a steel-pale stare from theshelter of a half-collapsed temple, thought of vultures wheeling abovecarrion. All day long now they had been raking these ruins for him.Presently, he knew, thirst would begin to parch his throat and hunger tognaw at him. There was neither food nor water in these ancient Martianruins, and he knew that it could be only a matter of time before theurgencies of his own body would drive him out to signal those wheelingPatrol ships and trade his hard-won liberty for food and drink. Hecrouched lower under the shadow of the temple arch and cursed theaccuracy of the Patrol gunner whose flame-blast had caught his dodgingship just at the edge of Illar's ruins.
Presently it occurred to him that in most Martian temples of the ancientdays an ornamental well had stood in the outer court for the benefit ofwayfarers. Of course all water in it would be a million years dry now,but for lack of anything better to do he rose from his seat at the edgeof the collapsed central dome and made his cautious way by still intactcorridors toward the front of the temple. He paused in a tangle ofwreckage at the courtyard's edge and looked out across the sun-drenchedexpanse of pavement toward that ornate well that once had servedtravelers who passed by here in the days when Mars was a green planet.
It was an unusually elaborate well, and amazingly well preserved. Itsrim had been inlaid with a mosaic pattern whose symbolism must once haveborne deep meaning, and above it in a great fan of time-defying bronzean elaborate grille-work portrayed the inevitable tree-of-life patternwhich so often appears in the symbolism of the three worlds. Smithlooked at it a bit incredulously from his shelter, it was somiraculously preserved amidst all this chaos of broken stone, casting adelicate tracery of shadow on the sunny pavement as perfectly as it musthave done a million years ago when dusty travelers paused here to drink.He could picture them filing in at noontime through the great gatesthat——
The vision vanished abruptly as his questing eyes made the circle of theruined walls. There had been no gate. He could not find a trace of itanywhere around the outer wall of the court. The only entrance here, asnearly as he could tell from the foundations that remained, had been thedoor in whose ruins he now stood. Queer. This must have been a privatecourt, then, its great grille-crowned well reserved for the use of thepriests. Or wait—had there not been a priest-king Illar after whom thecity was named? A wizard-king, so legend said, who ruled temple as wellas palace with an iron hand. This elaborately patterned well, ofmaterial royal enough to withstand the weight of ages, might well havebeen sacrosanct for the use of that long-dead monarch. It might——
Across the sun-bright pavement swept the shadow of a plane. Smith dodgedback into deeper hiding while the ship circled low over the courtyard.And it was then, as he crouched against a crumbled wall and waited,motionless, for the danger to pass, that he became aware for the firsttime of a sound that startled him so he could scarcely credit