Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 55: what you’re looking at

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

A. MERRITT 57 through the blackness over the shaft of phosphorescence, the ribban of pale light that I had watched pierce it and knew now was but an- other span of the cubes that but a little before had fled past us. Beneath the span, on each side of it, I sensed illimitable void. We were over; rushing along in darkness. There began a mighty tumult, a vast crashing and roaring. The clangor waxed, beat about us with tremendous strokes of sound. Far away was a dim glowing, as of rising sun through heavy mists ~ of dawn. The mists faded—miles away gleamed what at first glimpse seemed indeed to be the rising sun; a gigantic orb, whose lower litnb just touched, was sharply, horizontally cut by the blackness, as though at its base that blackness was frozen. | | | The sun? Reason returned to me; told me this globe could not be that. | What was it then? Ra-Harmachis, of the Egyptians, stripped of his wings, exiled and growing old in the corridors of the Dead? Or that mocking luminary, the cold phantom of the God of light and warmth which the old Norsemen believed was set in their frozen hell to tor- ment the damned? | I thrust aside the fantasies, impatiently. But sun or no sun, light streamed from this orb, light in multicolored, lanced rays, banishing the blackness through which we had been flying. | Closer we came and closer; lighter it grew about us, and by the grow- ing light I saw that still beside us ran the abyss. And even louder, more thunderous, became the clamor. “At the foot of the radiant disk I glimpsed a luminous pool. Into it, out of the depths, protruded a tremendous rectangular tongue, glearning like gray steel. On the tongue an inky shape appeared; it lifted itself from the abyss, rushed upon the disk and took form. Like a gigantic spider it was, squat and horned. For an instant it was silhouetted against the shining sphere, poised itself—and vanished through it. | Now, not far ahead, silhouetted as had been the. spider shape, black- ened into sight a cube and on it Ruth and Norhala. It seemed to hover, to wait. | | | | “It’s a door,” Drake’s shout beat thinly in my ears against the hurri- cane of sound. | | ‘What I thought had been an orb was indeed a gateway, a portal; and it was gigantic. | . | “The light streamed through it, the flaming colors, the lightning glare, the drifting shadows were all beyond it. The suggestion of sphere had been an illusion, born of the darkness in which we were moving afd in ECOMC OOO (GO)