Avon Fantasy Reader No. 9 — page 33: what you’re looking at

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

played incessantly, were myriads of marble statues, groups as well as single figures, that were really miracles of skill and beauty. This zone merged directly with the central mass, a single building of jet- black marble, shot with dull crimson. A narrow court surrounded it, in which were fountains of marble and life-size statues of solid gold, alternating. For a hundred feet there were no openings save the four mighty gates of open fili- gree. Then the entire building broke into a riot of intricate design—pinnacles, spires, minarets, arches, long festoons of conventional floral design, dripping with marble icicles, slender fretted pillars with elaborate capitals—a fairyland of orderly-disorderly wonder and beauty. It resembled, in a way, the great carven temples of Angkor and the other lost cities of Cambodia, yet this carv- ing was not preeminently pictorial, nor yet so conventional as we see on Earth. And from its utmost peak extended a slim, pointed pinnacle, entirely formed from a vein of the blood-red marble. Above it floated a crystal sphere, like the - sphere of the ventilator, that shed the same deep rose-glow, a glow that was mirrored at half-mile intervals about each terrace by lesser spheres, hovering above metal-work towers. The effect of the entire mass was indescribably wonderful. And there was another city, a city that was to this as the Taj Mahal to Notre Dame, a city that we saw only in part—. Perhaps it was well, after all, that we could not see it as it must have been, for even as things turned out, it has been hard never to return to that wonderful empire of a wonderful people. We have sworn, but perhaps some day even oaths will not hold us. Who knows? So beautiful was the scene that lay before me, that some minutes passed before I realized the significance of what I saw. Indeed, we were a scant hun- dred feet from the upper terrace when I spoke. fn ‘Doc,” I cried, pointing to the statues, “they’re human!” “Yes,” he said slowly, “they are human. It—well it upsets nearly everything © that I thought I knew. I had believed that a type does not duplicate itself in the same relative plane of intelligence anywhere in our universe. Mathematics forbade it, or so I supposed. There would be the same broad, general types of life, perhaps a few new ones here and there, but the range of intelligence would be different, and developed along different lines, studying different phases of Life and Space and Time. I—sometimes I should have welcomed a ~ world of—civilized—ants, or spiders, or even plants. I think I would have been welcome among them. All too many are the times when I have longed to be free of the petty bickerings of my fellow men, and to submerge myself in Science, in the knowledge and understanding of our great universe! But it seems that I was wrong. I had-hoped that our God was not a jealous, selfish God, limiting understanding to a single race, but a truly great, truly scientific God, a beneficent God, who would see no race neglected, no cosmic permuta- tion untried, who would not suffer repetition of old, primitive forms lest He lose the urge of the eternally better! And—I was wrong.” 31