A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, July 1950 — page 26: what you’re looking at

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

A. MERRITT’S FANTASY aware that he was staring straight into two little points of vivid light that seemed at once far, far away and very close. They were odd, he thought. What was it so odd about them? Was it their color? They were purple,-a curiously intense purple. As he stared, it seemed to him that they grew larger, but the puzzling double aspect of distance and nearness did not alter. It was very curious, he thought. He had seen two eyes—yes, they were eyes— of that peculiar purple somewhere, not long ago. But he could not remember just where—there was a drowsiness cloud- ing his thought. He would look at them no more. He raised his gaze, slowly and with perceptible effort, to the leafy screen ~ above him. Unwinkingly the brilliant orbs stared back at him from it. He forced his gaze downward. There, too, they were. And now he knew them—the eyes that had glittered from Suarra’s bracelet of the dinosaurs! The eyes of that mingled ser- pent and woman she had called the Snake Mother! They were drawing him—drawing him— He realized that his lids had closed; yet, closing they had not shut out the globes of vivid purple. His lethargy in- creased, but was of the body, not of the mind. All his consciousness had concen- trated, been gathered, into the focus of the weird, invading eyes. Abruptly they retreated. And like line streaming out of a reel the consciousness of Graydon streamed out of him and after _ them—out of his body, out of the camp, through the grove and out into the land beyond! It seemed to him that he passed swiftly over the moonlit wastes. They flashed beneath him, unrolling like panorama under racing plane. Ahead of him frowned a black barrier. It shrouded him and was gone. He had a glimpse of a wide, circular valley rimmed by sky-piercing peaks; towering scarps of rock. There was the _ silver glint of a lake, the liquid silver of a mighty torrent pouring out of the heart of a precipice. He caught, wheeling, sight of carved collossi, gigantic shapes that sat bathed in the milky flood of the moon guarding each the mouth of a cavern. _ A city rushed up to meet him, a city ruby roofed and opal turreted and fan- tastic as though built by jinn out of the stuff of dreams. And then it seemed to him that he came to rest with a vast and columned hall from whose high roof fell beams of soft and dimly azure light. High arose those columns, unfolding far above into wide wondrous petalings of opal and of emerald and turquoise flecked with gold. Before him were the eyes that in this dream—if dream it were—had drawn him to this place. And as the consciousness which was he and yet had, he knew, neither visible shape nor shadow, beheld it, it recoiled, feeling terror of the un- known; struggled to make its way back to the body from which it had been lured ; fluttered like a serpent trapped bird; at last, like the bird, gave itself up to the serpent fascination. For Graydon looked upon—the Snake Mother! She lay just beyond the lip of a wide alcove set high above the pillared floor. Between her and him the azure beams fell, curtaining the great niche with a ‘misty radiance that half-shadowed; half- revealed her. Her face was ageless, neither young nor old; she came to him—free from time forever, free from the etching acid of the years. She might have been born yester- day or a million years ago. Her eyes, set wide apart, weré round and luminous; they were living jewels filled with purple fires. Above them rose her forehead wide and high and sloping sharply back. The nose was long and delicate, the nostrils dilated ; the chin small and pointed. The mouth was small, too, and heart shaped and the lips a scarlet flame. OWN her narrow, childlike shoulders flowed hair that gleamed like spun silver. The shining argent strands arrow- headed into a point upon her forehead; coifed, they gave to her face that same heart shape in which her lips were molded, a heart of which the chin was the tip. She had high little breasts, uptilted. And face and neck, shoulders and breasts were the hue of pearls suffused faintly with rose; and like rosy pearls they glis- tened. Below her breasts_he omicbooksi< orn i) —