Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 11: what you’re looking at

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

A. MERRITT 13 Macedons, of Greeks, of Romans, beat about us; ashes of the flaming ambitions.of the Sassanidae whimpered beneath our feet—the feet of an American botanist, a Chinaman, two Tibetan ponies. We had crept through clefts whose walls had sent back the howlings of the Ephthal- ites, the White Huns who had sapped the strength of these same proud Sassanids until at last both fell before the Turks. Over the highways arid byways of Persia’s glory, Persia’s shame and Persia’s death we four—two men, two beasts—had passed. For a fort- night we had met no human soul, seen no sign of human habitation. Game had been plentiful—green things Chiu-Ming might lack for his cooking, but meat never. About us was a welter of mighty summits. We were, I knew, somewhere within the blending of the Hindu-Kush with the Trans- Himalaya. That morning we had come out of a ragged defile into this valley of enchantment, and here, though it had been so early, I had ones my tent, determining to go no farther till the morrow. It was a Phocean vale; a gigantic cup filled with tranquillity. A spirit brooded over it, serene, majestic, immutable—like the untroubled calm which rests, the Burmese believe, over every place which has guarded the Buddha, sleeping. At its eastern end towered the colossal scarp of the unnamed peak through one of whose gorges we had crept. On his head was a cap of silver set_with pale emeralds—the snow fields and glaciers that crowned him. Far to the west another gray and ochreous giant reared its bulk, closing the vale. North and south, the horizon was a chaotic sky land of pinnacles, spired and minareted; steepled and turreted and domed, each diademed with its green and argent of eternal ice and snow. And all the valley was carpeted with the blue poppies in wide, -un- broken fields, luminous as the morning skies of mid-June; they rippled mile after mile over the path we had followed, over the still untrodden path which we must take. They nodded, they leaned toward each other, they seemed to whisper—then to lift their heads and look up like crowd- ing swarms of little azure fays, halt impudently, wholly trustfully, into the faces of the jeweled giants standing guard over them. And when the little breeze walked upon them it was as though they bent beneath the soft tread and were brushed by the sweeping skirts of unseen, hasten- ing Presences. Like a vast prayer-rug, sapphire and silken, the poppies stretched to the gray feet of the mountain. Between their southern edge and’ the clustering summits a row of faded brown, low hills knelt—like brown- -tobed, withered and weary old men, backs bent, faces hidden between outstretched arms, palms.to the earth and brows touching earth within them—in the East’ s immemorial attitude of wosship.. ECOMC OOO (GO)