Avon Fantasy Reader No. 7 — page 106: what you’re looking at

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

2 102 ee FRANK BELKNAP LONG, JR. “And a gun?” I queried. eS “It does no good to shoot when you see the eyes. They are invulnerable. But a knife you might find useful.” | “A gun should be sufficient,” I insisted. “And I do not think that I shall take a knife!” , | “You must take a knife, too,” said Miss Beardsley. “And if the native girls—.” Her eyes hardened, and I saw that there were possibilities and depths in her which I had not suspected. 2 That night I camped in the gray and ominously deserted temple of Ishtar. It wasn’t pleasant. The wind swept in from the desert and whistled eerily about lonely altars and dark amorphous piles. Locusts alighted upon my nose and ears; and they made molasses upon my beard and refused to disem-. bark. Nothing is more repulsive to me than insects, and yet it was no good being angry with them. I sat and dozed, or stared drowzily into the darkness, and thought of the charnel worms which the mad Arab Alhazred bred in the bellies of slain camels. I wondered if I should have the moral courage to face the apparition when it came. It would be necessary to challenge and expose it. What impressed me above all things was the survival of the Ishtar legend among the natives. I recalled the horrible rites connected with her worship, and curiously enough, I could not rid my mind of a vague longing to sit enraptured at the spectacle of a living sacrifice to the Assyrian pantheon on the dark, ageless altar before me. Like an idiot, I imagined one. The sacrifice took the most loathsome form. The victim was fastened to the gray stone altar by six hooded priests of Ishtar and hacked to pieces with little knives. And while the horrid priests wrought their unhallowed butchery Ishtar smiled, and standing at the base of the altar comforted the victim by stroking his hair. And yet in spite of Ishtar’s cruelty the Babylonians and Assyrians had wor- shipped her with a curious devotion. Ishtar, I had been told, was so beautiful that no man could look upon her unveiled face and retain the sight of his _ eyes. Her hair was bronzed, like the sands of the desert near an oasis, and her lips placed the beholder in immediate danger. Men forgot their wives, and sometimes even their merchandise and camels, and fell down and worshipped. All day over the smooth sands processions of men crawled toward her on their hands and knees. Imperial edicts had been levied against her; but men risked death and exile and crawled toward her on their hands and knees. She was more beautiful than the dawn when it comes up all white and purple cComichooksscom