The Crystal World Read Online Free PDF Page A

can. There must be some way. After all, it's only fifty miles, at a pinch one could walk it."
    Louise laughed. "Not me." Just then a black-garbed figure strode past the window, heading off toward the market. "Father Balthus," Louise said. "His mission is near Mont Royal -I checked up on him too. There's a traveling companion for you."
    "I doubt it." Dr. Sanders watched the priest walk briskly away from them, his thin face lifted as he crossed the road. His head and shoulders were held stiffly, but behind him his hands moved and twisted with a life of their own. "Father Balthus is not one to make a penitential progress-I think he has other problems on his mind." Dr. Sanders stood up, finishing his brandy. "However, it's a point. I think I'll have a word with the good Father. I'll see you back at the hotel-perhaps we can have dinner together?"
    "Of course." She waved to him as he went out and then sat back against the window, her face motionless and without expression.
     
    A hundred yards away, Dr. Sanders caught sight of the priest. Balthus had reached the outskirts of the native market and was moving among the first of the stalls, turning from left to right as if looking for someone. Dr. Sanders followed at a distance. The market was almost empty and he decided to keep the priest under observation for a few minutes before approaching him. Now and then, when Father Balthus glanced about, Sanders saw his lean face, the thin nose raised critically as he peered above the heads of the native women.
    Dr. Sanders glanced down at the stalls, pausing to examine the carved statuettes and curios. The small local industry had made full use of the waste products of the mines at Mont Royal, and many of the teak and ivory carvings were decorated with fragments of calcite and fluorspar picked from the refuse heaps, ingeniously worked into the statuettes to form miniature crowns and necklaces. Many of the carvings were made from lumps of impure jade and amber, and the sculptors had abandoned all pretense to Christian imagery and produced squatting idols with pendulous abdomens and grimacing faces.
    Still keeping Father Balthus under scrutiny, Dr. Sanders examined a large statuette of a native deity in which two crystals of calcium fluoride formed the eyes, the mineral phosphorescing in the sunlight. Nodding to the stall holder, he complimented her on the piece. Making the most of her opportunity, she gave him a wide smile and then drew back a strip of faded calico that covered the rear of the stall.
    "My, that is a beauty!" Dr. Sanders reached forward to take the ornament she had exposed, but the woman held back his hands. Glittering below her in the sunlight was what appeared to be an immense crystalline orchid carved from some quartzlike mineral. The entire structure of the flower had been reproduced and then embedded within the crystal base, almost as if a living specimen had been conjured into the center of a huge cut-glass pendant. The internal faces of the quartz had been cut with remarkable skill, so that a dozen images of the orchid were refracted, one upon the other, as if seen through a maze of prisms. As Dr. Sanders moved his head, a continuous font of light poured from the jewel.
    Dr. Sanders reached into his pocket for his wallet, and the woman smiled again and drew the cover back to expose several more of the ornaments. Next to the orchid was a spray of leaves attached to a twig, carved from a translucent jadeike stone. Each of the leaves had been reproduced with exquisite craftsmanship, the veins forming a pale lattice beneath the crystal. The spray of seven leaves, faithfully rendered down to the axillary buds and the faint warping of the twig, seemed characteristic more of some medieval Japanese jeweler's art than of the crude massive sculpture of Africa.
    Next to the spray was an even more bizarre piece, a carved tree fungus that resembled a huge jeweled sponge. Both this and the spray of leaves shone with a dozen images of