All-Story Weekly, March 1, 1919 — page 114: what you’re looking at

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

on each side. | _ Rador imitating them; O’Keefe nudged me, = - Rador drew from his girdle a ring and held it out to the first dwarf. He examined it, lowered his rod, handed it to the one _ beside him, and ‘not until each had exam- 33 weapon; containers of that terrific energy we = they called the Keth, I thought; and later was to know that I had been right. _. We stepped out; the doors closed behind us. The place was weird enough. Its pave Se ‘was a greenish-blue stone reserablifig lapis — lazuli. On each side were high pedestals holding carved figures of the same material. __ There were perhaps a score of these, but in _ the mistiness I could not make out their -__ outlines. A droning, rushing roar beat upon our ears; filled the whole cavern. /*T smell the sea,” said Larry suddenly. And then I, too, realized that the tang of ocean was strong. I felt its moisture upon my face and hands. Rador spoke again to the leader of—the priests—as I now began to think them. Fcur leading the way and four following us, we marched _ forward. The floor arose gradually, and the rushing roar grew louder, the sea breath stronger. And -now the roaring Specanie deep- -toned, : clamorous, and close in front of us a rift opened. Twenty feet in width, it cut the z cavern floor and vanished into the blue mist The priests leading us knelt, - and-we, too, dropped to our knees. We arose and went forward. Before us the cleft was spanned by one solid slab of rock not more than two yards wide. It had neither railing nor other protection. The four leading priests marched out ‘upon it one by one, and we followed. In _ the middle of the span they again we knelt. Ten feet beneath us was a torrent of blue sea-water racing with pro- _ digious speed between polished wails. It _ gave the impression of vast depth. It roared as it sped by, and far to the right was a low arch through which it disappeared. It ‘was so swift that its surface shone like _ polished blue steel, and from it came the a blessed, our worldly, familiar ocean breath = made me realize how earth-sick I! was. _ Larry, too, drew himself up, drawing deep -ALL-STORY WEEKLY. — stopped and breaths. it loses in translation its peculiar pictur- esqueness. “The Holy Cord of the Naval of the Great Waters!” is the closest I can come to it. . Whence came the stream, I marveled, forgetting for the moment as we passed on again, all else. Were we closer to the sur- face of earth than I had thought, or was this some mighty stream falling through an opening in sea floor, Heaven alone knew how many miles above us, losing itself in deeper abysses beyond these? How near and how far this was from the truth I was to learn—and never did truth come to man in more dreadful guise! The roaring fell away, the blue haze lessened. In front of us stretched a wide Rador uttered a curious phrase— flight of steps, huge as those which had let us into the courtyard of Nan-Tauach through the ruined sea-gate. We scaled it; it narrowed; from above light poured through a still narrower opening. Side by . side Larry and I passed out of it. How can I describe what I saw? Two things there are before which I falter—to picture that temple of the Shining One as it first met our eyes in all its incredible im- mensity, and what happened there; and that thing to come to pass, that twilight of the gods, in the abode of the Silent Ones on the Sea of Crimson. But I must at- tempt it, knowing full well that it is im- possible to make clear one-tenth of their grandeur, their awfulness, their soul- shaking terror. We had emerged upon an enormous plat- form of what seemed to be glistening ivory. It stretched before us for a hundred yards or more and then shelved gently into the white waters. Opposite—not a mile away— was that prodigious web of woven rainbows Rador had called the curtain of the Shining One. There it shone in all its unearthly grandeur, on each side of the Cyclopean pillars, as though a mountain should stretch up arms raising between them a fairy ban- ner of auroral glories—in front the curved, simitar sweep of the pier with its clustered, gleaming temples. Before that brief, fascinated glance was done, there dropped upon my soul a sensa- COMME KOOKS