Avon Fantasy Reader No. 9 — page 48: what you’re looking at

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

[ NN sks saw enough to make us wonder at the strange beauty of this fairy city of devils. : Spire on spire it rose into the thin air, over a mile from its base to the topmost pinnacle. There were straight, slender pencils that rose unbroken to a swelling sphere-top. There were twisted, spiral towers like a narwhal’s tusk, crowned with mushroom roofs and overhanging balconies. There were great squat pyramids with level tops crowned by a pillared labyrinth. There were mazes of sky-flung columns, needle-pointed, hung with goblin arches and topped with golden spheres and ovoids. There were bulging Oriental minarets and peaked domes, somehow gone wrong. There were mad elfin pinnacles that earth has never seen, a chaos of peak and spire and arch that rivaled the twisting fungi in grotesque fantasy. And everywhere, blotting out the smooth walls of crimson marble, were the ugly, billowing vapors that were the Things. Strange that beauty and evil can be so associated. Now, Doc had handed me the two spare resonators with his own and motioned me.to the hatchway. I caught his purpose immediately. Soon we were speeding above the rocky cliffs between sea and jungle, and the combined beams of the resonators were biting deep into the rough rocks, cutting a great gash straight through the heart of the mountains, through and out into the sea. Then the chasm was the path of a raging torrent that fell relentlessly upon the swampy forests and the beautiful crimson city of the Things, burying them deep beneath the wan, white waters. Silhouetted against the tumbling flood I could see the black cloud that hesitated, then sped on in frenzy, the opalescent sphere gleaming balefully at the crest of the inky wave. Then the crystal valve was open, blasted by my resonator, and. we were struggling again in the maelstrom of the winds as the pressing atmosphere of the upper worlds rushed down to destroy the smothering life of the planet’s core. The opalescent globe hung for an instant in the clutch of the winds, then hurtled against the rocky floor, to burst in a deluge of dazzling white flame that cascaded over the rough crags, smoothing them into a . smoking, level plain. Against the frothing white of the sea a single wisp of black tossed madly and was swept away. : At last the winds lulled, and we won through to the cold bareness of the Atlantides’ dead world, stripped even of the softening death-dust by the winds that gave vengeance. Two resonators, their power supplied by the remaining globes of Luda, we left to guard the bottom of the pit. If they are able to affect the Things, the upper worlds are safe from those inky clouds until the crystal spheres of Luda cease to shine. If there are still Atlantides somewhere in the upper worlds, the dust is gone, and they may start anew to form a great empire on their strange green planet—an empire that is secure in the knowledge of its inhabitants that there ave those within reach who will give aid if it be needed. If such have sur- vived, it is not impossible that the future shall see the reappearance of Atlantis before the Gates of Hercules, for we left in the rifled library of 46 Connie ooOolkS.c@ im