Sunfire by Francis Stevens

Book Details

In Sunfire by Francis Stevens, five explorers travel by canoe to the headwaters of the Rio Silencioso, to a hidden lake with an ancient pyramid. There they are seduced and trapped, and are fated to become human sacrifices to an ancient god.

Sunfire (1923) – Harrowing and Weird Events Startle the Five Adventurers Who Land Upon a Far-off Island
Chapter One – The Derelict Fleet
Chapter Two – To The Rescue
Chapter Three – Scolopendra Horribilis
Chapter Four – “Sunfire”
Chapter Five – The Bronze Lever
Chapter Six – Assai Wine
Chapter Seven – The Hag
Chapter Eight – “Tata Quarahy”

Part Two – A Resume Of The Early Chapters
Chapter Nine – An Unwelcome Invitation
Chapter Ten – The Dance
Chapter Eleven – The Sacrifice
Chapter Twelve – Revenge!
Chapter Thirteen – An Awful Chime
Chapter Fourteen – Flight
Chapter Fifteen – Down The Stair
Chapter Sixteen – The Story Of Miss Enid Widdiup

Francis Stevens was the pen-name of Gertrude Barrows Bennett (1883-1948). Bennett has been credited as having “the best claim at creating the new genre of dark fantasy”.

Bennett was the first major female writer of fantasy and science fiction in the United States, and has been called the most important female fantasy writer between Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and C.L. Moore. It has been said that she influenced both H.P. Lovecraft and A. Merritt, both of whom “emulated Bennett’s earlier style and themes”.”

Sunfire was Bennett’s last published work. It was serialized in two parts in Weird Tales in 1923.

Sunfire contains 2 illustrations.

Files:

1. FStevens-Sunfire.epub

Excerpt: Sunfire

Chapter One

The Derelict Fleet

IT WAS close to high noon of the fourteenth day since leaving their motor-yacht, when the five men in the traveling canoe had their first view of the island of “Tata Quarahy,” Fire of the Sun.

The walls of the winding river they traveled had grown steeper, higher, barren at last of vegetation. The Rio Silencioso, in its lower reaches a fever-ridden, malodorous stream, here flowed in austere purity. Its color was no longer dark, but a peculiar, brilliant hue—like red gold dissolved in crystal. The effect was partly from reflection of the heights between which it wound, slanting walls of rock, stratified in layers of rich color, from pale lemon to a deep red-orange.

The equatorial sun cast its merciless glare over all. The last half-mile of their journey bore a close resemblance to ascending a stream of molten gold flowing through a flaming furnace.

However, the lurid rock walls ended at last. Poling through a channel too narrow for the sweeplike paddles, they floated out on the lake of the island.

That it was the place told of by their guide, Kuyambira-Petro, there could be no question. But in the first glance it seemed less like a sheet of water with an island in the midst, than an immense flat plate of burnished gold, and, rising out of it—a pyramid of red flame.

“There is a broad water,” Petro had said. “There is an island. On the island is a strange power and some stone houses.”

Had Kuyambira-Petro been taken to view the wonders of modern New York, his report on returning to his native Moju River village would have been much the same—and about equally descriptive.

Here before them, piled terrace upon terrace, constructed of rock that seemed literally aflame in its sunset colors, towered a monstrous mass of masonry. Even from where the canoe lay they could appreciate the enormous size of those blocks which formed the lower tier.

Surrounding the pyramid at water-level, extended a broad platform of golden-yellow stone. Immediately above that rose a wall, red-orange in color, thirty feet high, without any apparent breach or means of ascent. Set well back from its upper edge were the first tier of Petro’s “stone houses.”

They were separate buildings, all of like shape, the end walls slanting inward to a flat roof. Eight tiers of these, growing gradually smaller toward the top, completed the pyramid. The whole effect of the ponderous artificial mountain was strangely light and airy.

Above the truncated, eight-sided peak, there seemed to hover a curious nimbus of pale light. In the general glare, however, it was easy to suspect this vague, bright crown of being merely an optical illusion.

On board the canoe, the explorer-naturalist, Bryce Otway, turned a painfully sunburned countenance to Waring, war-correspondent and writer of magazine tales.

“It’s there!” he breathed. “It’s real! You see it, too, don’t you? And, oh! man, man, we’ll be the first—think of it, Waring!—the first to carry back photographs and descriptions of that to the civilized world!”

“Rather!” Waring grinned. “Take one thing with another, what a story!”

The other three, the young yacht-owner, Sigsbee, the little steward, Johnny Blickensderfer, more often known as John B., and Mr. Theron Narcisse Tellifer, pride of Washington Square in New York City, each after his own fashion agreed with the first speakers.

They had toiled hard and suffered much to reach here. Sigsbee’s motor-yacht, the Wanderer, they had been forced to leave below the first rapids. The canoe journey had begun with four caboclos, half-breed native Brazilians, beside the guide, Petro, to take the labor of paddling.

Every man of these natives had succumbed to beri-beri inside the first week. The epidemic spared the white men, doubtless because of their living on a different diet than the farina and chibeh, or jerked beef, which is the mainstay of native Brazil. Having come so far to solve the mystery of the Rio Silencioso, the five survivors would not turn back.

Rio Silencioso—River of Silence indeed, flowing through a silent jungle-land, where no animal life stirred or howled, where there was only the buzz of myriad stinging insects to heighten rather than break the quiet of the nights. Others before them had tried to conquer the Silencioso. None had ever returned —none, that is, save the old full-blood Indian, Kuyambira-Petro. His story had interested the party of Americans on the Wanderer, and, though the guide himself had perished, brought them at last to this strange lake and pyramid.”

Excerpt From: Francis Stevens. “Sunfire.”