A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, February 1950 — page 63: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE SMOKING LAND 63 ward to enter the crater. It was too awful —TI had to do something. “This thing has got to be stopped,” I shouted. “I’ve got to get to some- one in authority. I’ve got to tell him what actually happened. You hear me? Don’t stand there like a pair of blithering idiots, Tell me what I’m to do! I can’t stand here while Sylvia is slaughtered like an ox. I owe her my life!” One of these bland nitwits said to me with the calmest of smiles: “It was the goddess who saved thee, my son; for what power is in the hand of her priestess ex- cept the will of the nameless name?” This answer made me hotter than ever. I told them that I would go mad unless I could get to someone with power to stop the execution. “Oh, there is no haste. For such a thing as the execution of a priestess is not quickly done. The people must be warned, and a great festival be made, and who will keep from singing and happiness on such a day as that?” I was fairly flabbergasted by this. “Woman, do you mean to say that people would sing and dance while that charming, that lovely—is being murdered ?.” The old eyes opened innocently at me. “Ah, my son,” says she, “‘and what could make us sing and laugh except the knowl- edge that the goddess—”’ “Oh, confound the goddess!” said I. They huddled away from me towards the door, terrified. “Oh, vain-hearted man, what a word dost thou apply to the nameless name?” ( I listened to them, somewhere between atiusement and disgust. If I had a bit of time, perhaps I could do something. And it seemed that because a splash of molten stone had scalded me to the bone in the exact center of my forehead, I was more or less a distinguished fellow in their eyes. In the meantime, I got certain facts straight. They were about the strangest facts that I ever heard, but I put them down in order, 1, No member of the priesthood of the land must ever enter the house of the sages. 2. If a sanctified person crossed the boundary, he must be repelled and hurled back at once into the fire, or else the headsman would put him or her to death before all the people. 3. That at such an execution, the sacrifice assumed all the guilt and all the sins. of the entire popu- lace, and that when a priestess was mur- dered in this way, her blood atoned for every crime, The criminals were even let out of the prison, and those doomed to punishment were forgiven by the state. 4. These executions of priestesses did not happen very often. As for the vicarious atonement for sin, making one person the scapegoat of many, I had heard something about that business long before. But it was a frightful shock to find that English speaking people in the Twentieth Century, at the Ice Pole or at the equator, either, should believe in this. However, the fact was there, and Sylvia would have to die because, in doing a good turn to a poor fool of a stranger, she had been cut off from return to safety. But I could understand, now, why she fainted when she saw that I was bent on carrying her to the forbidden gate. You might think that she would have preferred-a later death by the axe to an instant horror by fire. But as long as life was in her, she would not be able to be- lieve that the fire of the goddess could touch her; and if in fact she was swal- lowed by the flames, it meant that the goddess had decided to accept her, and had instantly gathered her to the divine breast ! When I made this out from what the old women told me, a good many things were clear. And if I had luck, I would beat this bloodthirsty people out of their chance to get rid so easily of all their sins! we they were talking, they brushed me offsand when they saw that I was pretty well singed, here and there, they went off and brought me a complete new outfit, about ten jumps ahead of the burned one. And now, all in purple and gold with a tremendous cloak sweeping back over one shoulder, I was taken to interview they did not know whom—they simply had been ordered to bring me to a certain door. And, when they had landed me there, at the end of several winding corridors and flights of steps, all apparently cut out of the living rock, they knocked, and turned the doorknob, and saw me inside—then scurried off.