Argosy All-Story Weekly, Vol. 124, No. 3 — page 100: what you’re looking at

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

a4 beyond these shroudings was vast and or- dered movement; marchings and counter- marchings of hosts greater even than those Golden Hordes of Genghis which ages agone had washed about the outer bases of the very peaks that. hid this ensorceled place. Came, too, flitting shadowings of huge shapes, unnameable, moving swiftly beside our way; gleamings that thrust themselves through the veils like wheeling javelins of flame. And always, always, everywhere that constant movement, rhythmic, terrifying— like myriads of feet of creatures of an un- seen, stranger world marking time just out- side the threshold of our own! Preparing, drilling there in some wide vestibule of space between the known and the unknown, alert and menacing—potsed for the signal, which would send them pouring over it! Once again I seemed to stand upon the brink of an abyss of incredible revelation, striving helplessly, struggling for realization —and so struggling became aware that our speed was swiftly slackening, the roarmg blast dying down, the veils before us thin- ning. They cleared away. I saw Drake and Ventnor straighten up rigidly; raised my- self to my own aching knees, gazing as did they with mazed, incredulous eyes! We were at one end of a vortex, a fun- meling within the ‘Yadiant vapors; a funnel whose further end a mile ahead broadened out into a huge circle, its mistily outhned edges impinging upon the towering scarp of the—city. It was as though before us lay, upon its side, a cone of crystalline clear air: agaimst whose curved sides some radiant medium, heavier than air, hghter than water, pressed. . The top arc of its prostrate bese reached . a thousand feet or more up the precipitous wal; above it all was hidden in sparkling nebulosities that were like still clouds of greenly, glimmering fireflies. Back frem the curving sides of this cone, above it and below it, the pressing luminosities stretched, into, it seemed, infinite distances. Through them, suddenly, thousands of bright beams began to dart, to dance, weav- ing and interweaving, shooting hither and yon—like myriads of great searchlights in ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. a phosphorescent sea fog, like coundless lances of the aurora thrusting threugh its own iridescent vells! And in the play of these beams was something appallingly or- dered, appallingly rhythmic. It was—how can I describe it >— pur pose- ful; purposeful as the geometric shiftings of the Little Things of the ruims, of the summoning song of Norhala, of the Protean changes of the Smiting Shape and the Fol- lowmg Thing; and like all of these it was as laden with that baffling certainty of bid- den meanings, of messages that the brain recognized as such yet knew it never could read. The rays seemed to spring upward from the earth." Now they were like countless lances of light borne by marching armies ef Titans; now they crossed amd angled and flew as though they were clouds of javelins hurled by battling swarms of the Genii of Light; and now they stood up- right while through them, thrusting them aside, bending them passed vast, vague Shapes like mountains forming and dissolv- ing; like darkening monsters of some world of light pushing through thick forests of slender, high-reaching trees of cold flame; shifting shadows of monstrous chisnerae slipping through jungles of bamboo with trunks of diamond fire; phantasmal levia- thans swimming through brakes of giant reeds of radiance rising from the sparking ooze of a sea of star shine! Whence came the force, the mechanism that produced this cone of clanty, this noi searchlight, but unlight in the midst of light? Not from behind, that was certain— for turning I saw that behind us the mast was as thick. I turned again—it came to me, why I knew not, yet with an ab- solute certainty, that the energy, the ferce emanated from the distant wall itself! The funnel, the cone, did not expand from where we stood, now motionless. It began at the wall and focused upon us! But how? an tee Baie Of all scieece— how? Withm the preat circle the sarface of the wall was smooth, utterly blank; and it was windowless, apertureless; upon it was no trace of those flitting lights we had seen before we had plunged down teward the ECORIC OOOKS. COs