Avon Fantasy Reader No. 7 — page 107: what you’re looking at

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

THE WERE-SNAKE meee and fragrant with the odors of paradise. There was something in her move- ments, in the way in which she held her head, in the curve of her elbow or _ in the glimmer of light on her tapering ankles that sent a bright, impossible joy into the hearts of her devotees; and no man who had once beheld Ishtar could be satisfied for long with an ordinary woman. =e I awoke from a dream of Ishtar and incredible, antique dawns and stared ____into a darkness that shamed the stars. Only in the desert does the darkness thicken, like whipped cream, and stream past with an audible whisper. og The darkness was like a great black beetle covering the world with its wings. No shadows moved in it and no one breathed in it, but the dark itself was alive, and it whispered. The night was like an old woman that had given birth to the darkness, Up beyond the darkness sat the mother of the darkness, with her changeling upon her knees. And then in that desolate wilderness of smothering black I saw two luminous green eyes that stared and did not blink. 3 | | I got nervously to my feet and told the eyes that I didn’t care. The sound of my own voice reassured me. “You are not really the eyes of Ishtar!” I said. “This is some trick—some ridiculous, shameful trick! You take advan- _ _Aage of Americans. But I shall inform the consul. We are not to be trifled with. Our consul has red hair, and he beats his wife and he judges men by the color of their skin. He will not even complain to our government. He will take a delightfully unconventional view of the affair. He has a nervous dislike for imposters. He will fasten you to a post, and pull out your teeth, and tickle you upon the soles of your feet until you scream, and gibber, and a nameless horror fastens upon your brain.” : _ The eyes did not even blink. The eyes were green coals in a whispering void, They stared lidlessly in the dark and I thought: “These are surely the eyes of Ishtar!” An extraordinary numbness passed over me. It seemed to me then that nothing mattered; and my excitement gradually gave way to a stoical indif- ference. And yet in the back of my mind there lurked godless horror, and my heart beat with tragic unsteadiness. The eyes were a seal of the unspeakable 3 horror of the night. They confirmed my hatred of the dark, made the dark more mephitic, more vividly malevolent. The eyes emitted two greenish rays, _which traversed the dark but did not illume it. I walked forward toward the eyes, holding out my arms to preserve my conmiclooolks.conn ie)