Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 13: what you’re looking at

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

A. MERRITT 15 Then a silence fell upon us. Suddenly the sun dipped down behind the flank of the stone giant guarding the valley’s western gate; the whole vale swiftly darkened—a flood of crystal-clear shadows poured within it. It was the prelude to that miracle of unearthly beauty seen nowhere else on this earth—the sunset of Tibet. We turned expectant eyes to the west. A little, cool breeze raced down from the watching steeps like a messenger, whispered to the nodding poppies, sighed and was gone. The poppies were still. High overhead a homing kite whistled, mellowly. As if it were a signal there sprang out in the pale azure of the west- ern sky row upon row of cirrus cloudlets, rank upon rank of them, thrusting their heads into the path of the setting sun. They changed from mottled silver into faint rose, deepened to crimson. “The dragons of the sky drink the blood of the sunset,” said Chiu- Ming. As though a gigantic globe of crystal had dropped upon the heavens, their blue turned swiftly to a clear and glowing amber—then as abruptly shifted to a luminous violet. A soft green light pulsed through the valley. Under it, like hills ensorcelled, the rocky walls about it seemed to flatten. They glowed and all at once pressed forward like gigantic slices of palest emerald jade, translucent, illumined, as though by a circlet of little suns shining behind them. The light faded, robes of deepest amethyst dropped around the mountain’s mighty shoulders. And then from every snow and glacier- crowned peak! from minaret and pinnacle and towering turret, leaped forth a confusion of soft peacock flames, a host df irised prismatic gleamings, an ordered chaos of rainbows, Great and small, interlacing and shifting, they ringed the valley with an incredible vlory—as if some god of light itself had touched the eternal frocks and bidden radiant souls stand forth. Through the darkening sky swept a rosy pencil of living light; that utterly strange, pure beam whose coming never fails to clutch the throat. of the beholder with the hand of ecstasy, the ray which the Tibetans name the Ting-pa. For a moment this rosy finger pointed to the east, then arched itself, divided slowly into six shining, rosy bands; began to creep downward toward the eastern horizon where a nebulous, pulsing splendor arose to meet it. And as we watched I heard a gasp from Drake. And it was echoed by my own. ‘For the six beams were swaying, moving with ever swifter motion from side to side in ever-widening sweep, as though the hidden orb from which they sprang were swaying like a pendulum. Faster and faster the six high-flung beams swayed—and then broke— GOGO .S (GO)