A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, July 1950 — page 15: what you’re looking at

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

treasure. If we do, my throat will proba- bly be the first to be cut. Further down in the bag were two: par- cels, each most carefully and securely wrapped. Opening the first I found a long black feather oddly marked with white. 1] did not recognize the plume as belonging to any bird I knew. Its shaft was inlaid with little bands of gold, al- together a curiously delicate bit of gold- smith’s work. But the contents of the second package make me gasp with amazement. It was a golden bracelet, clearly exceedingly an- ae the band an inch broad and ex- nding into an oval disk perhaps three inches long by two wide. That disk held in high relief the most extraordinary bit of carving I had ever seen. Four mon- sters held on uplifted paws, a disk on which lay coiled a serpent with a woman’s face and woman’s breasts. Nor had I ever beheld such suggestion of united wisdom and weirdness as the maker had stamped upon the snake woman’s face. Yet it was not that which called forth the full measure of my wonder; no. There are certain pictures, certain sculptures, certain works of art which carry to their beholders conviction that no fantasy, no imagination, went into their making and that they are careful, accurate copies of something seen by those who made them. This carving carried that conviction. The four monsters which held up the snake woman were—dinosaurs! There was no mistaking them. I had examined too many of the reconstructions made by scientists from the fossil bones of these gigantic, monstrous reptillian creatures to be in error. But these giants were supposed to have died off millions of years before man first appeared on earth! Yet here they were, carved with such fidelity to detail, such impress of photo- graphic accuracy, that it was impossible to believe that the ancient goldsmith who made this thing had not had before him living models! Marveling, I held the bracelet closer to the light and, as I did so, I thought I heard far away in the black- ness of those high mountains a sound like a tiny bugle. In that note there was some- thing profoundly, alienly weird. I went to the window and listened, but the sound z é THE FACE IN THE ABYSS hr 42)” 6*, ™ de has A 1 did not come again. I turned to find the eyes of Graydon opened and regarding | me. For a moment he had slipped from the thrall of the fever—and the thought came to me that it had been that elfin bugling which had awakened him. It was six weeks before I had Graydon well out of danger. And in that time he had told me bit by bit that well nigh in-' credible experience of his in the haunted hills of the Cordillera de Carabaya and what it was that had sent him so far dow into the valley of the shadow. Three years it has been since then. Three years and I have heard nothing of him. Three years and he has not returned from his journey back to the Cordillera de Carabaya where he went to seek mystery, ancient beyond all memory of man, he be- lieved was hidden there. But more than that—to seek Suarra. “If you don’t hear from me in three years, tell the story and let the people who knew me know what became of me,” he said, as I left him at the beginning of | that strange trail he had determined to re- trace. And so I tell it, reconstructing it from his reticences as well as his confidences, since only so, may a full measure of judgment of that story be gained. CHAPTER 2 Suarra RAYDON had run into Sterrett (5 in Quito. Or, rather, Sterrett sought him out there. Graydon had often heard of the giant West Coast adventurer, but their trails had never crossed. It was with a lively curiosity, then, that he opened the door of his room to this visitor. And he had rather liked Sterrett. There was a bluff directness about the big man that made him overlook a certain cruelty of eye and a touch of brutality about mouth and jaw. Sterrett came to the point at once. Graydon had no doubt heard the story of the treasure train which had been brought to Pizarro, the ransom of the Inca Ata- hualpa ? And learning of the murder of that monarch had turned back and buried that treasure yammbco rice ook com ‘com Rie — * - —_ ears