The Last Hieroglyph (54 page)

They could now see much of the surrounding terrain. Far in the distance of the flat country below, towers or tall buildings glimmered. At their feet a series of rough projections in the stone made feasible their descent to the stream-bed where liquid pools and cascades gurgled between steep walls partly mantled with lichen or other short growth of the order of ice-plants.

They climbed down to the stream-bed, testing each of the salients carefully before trusting their full weight upon it. The pools were indistinguishable from common water at close view but might contain poisonous elements. They did not pause to test it but stepped across the stream and began to ascend the opposite side, stopping many times to try the detection instrument, which showed only minerals and metals of ordinary kind, including traces of gold, silver, iron, and mercury.

By slow degrees they worked diagonally toward the plain, crossing several ridges and streams, one of the latter a cataract which they had to circumnavigate laboriously. At last, on a downward slope, they found evidence of carborundum; and, not far away, a small deposit of zysturium. Jon started to dig. He had gone down about five feet and had struck the carborundum, Mildred stooping over him, when an interruption occurred. A heavy net of some clinging ropy material dropped over their heads and tightened. Beyond the meshes a group of incredible beings, reptile-headed but upright, bluish in color, with two hands and feet, were standing above them, holding the long handle of the net. One of these beings carried a sharp-pointed spear with which he touched them in turn, pricking through their clothes between the meshes. Unconsciousness quickly followed a spreading numbness at the touch of the spear.

Mildred awoke in a dungeon-like roofed enclosure, lit sparsely by small globes in the walls which had the look of staring violescent eyes. She was lying on a low couch of some soft and colorless material. Beside her on the floor was a flattish bowl containing, she conjectured, some sort of food-stuff. Still dazed and sick, she did not feel tempted to taste it. Anyway, the odor was not appetizing: it suggested stale fish.

She raised herself dizzily on her elbow. The floor seemed to reel, the lights in the walls to dance. Around a corner, swaying with the room’s apparent motion, walked three of the bluish reptile-headed beings. One of them strapped an apparatus like an electrode to her forehead and held the other end to his own. She noticed for the first time that his hands were four-fingered. She heard in her brain a weird buzzing which began to shape itself into sounds that she could not recognize as words until after an interval. Presently she surmised that the sounds were a telepathic attempt at translation into English from a radically different tongue, in which many letters were hissed rather than spoken. Certain words were well-nigh unpronounceable by the human mouth-structure.

Mildred made out: “To temple you must go where waits Rasasfa… to sacrifice other person not yourself. Will result for us much benefit… much learning.”

The sounds changed, becoming more rapid and less distinct, with a tone of stern command. Perhaps a hypnotic suggestion was being administered. At any rate she could not remember its nature or import when the being withdrew the instrument.

Her captors drew her upright. Their clammy touch made her shudder. Mildred’s arms were supported while a reptile mask, not blue but whitish, was fastened over her face. She became aware for the first time that she had been quite naked, when a short pale dress was draped around her. Then they led her from the room through an open doorway and up several flights of coiling stairs and along endless dim corridors.

Somewhere the hilt of a stained, blackish, upward-pointing knife was placed in her hand, and her fingers were clasped tightly around it by cold reptile pressure. She could not recall why, or for what purpose, she was to use it. But a strong sense of predestination was upon her, and a feeling that she would be enlightened in due time.

Light opened before her at a turn in the corridor. She was led through a high broad doorway into a vast edifice where a reptile being, taller than any she had yet seen, stood before an open alcove which gave forth a golden glimmering. The alcove’s entrance looked like a huge broad keyhole. The being held in his hand a sickle-butted dart. The walls of the alcove behind him seemed inlaid with oblique oblongs of yellow mosaic, and the floor was partly littered with unnamable objects.

Mildred was half-pushed, half-carried, and made to stand on an indented pedestal at the right hand of the armed entity. She faced a deeply bowing congregation of reptilians in the nave, which appeared lit by sunlight between pillars at the rear.

Still bewildered, she perceived that a man had entered at the left and had paused in front of the dart-bearer. For a while she failed to realize that the man was Jon: his features seemed blurred with the faces of others she had known, had liked or disliked in former years. An impulse of sudden hatred made her raise the black knife, and she was about to fling it toward him.

She never knew what checked her. Perhaps the hypnotic command implanted in her mind had suddenly been reversed. She paused, while the dart-bearer lifted his weapon and hurled it violently at Jon, piercing his shirt at the side as he dodged agilely with muscles trained by a multitude of tasks.

Something (perhaps a remaining part of the hypnosis) told her that the dart-bearer was Rasasfa, priest of an ultra-planetary sect. She leapt from the pedestal and stabbed him deeply in the side. Almost simultaneously, in his convulsive struggles, he scratched her breast with the dart-point before he dropped.

Jon and Mildred both underwent a strange hallucination, identical in all details, which they could never afterward forget. They had the sense of falling immeasurably, plunging through uncharted depths and dimensions, to hang insecurely poised on the verge of an alien hell, from which pointed flames, obscenely writhing monsters, dragon-like creatures with several heads and bodies, reached upward around their feet and sometimes over-towered them, breathing a fetid stench. Not the least horror was Rasasfa, standing close at hand, and thrusting with his dart at the monsters. And they, in turn, seemed to assail him with a special menace and venom, looming far up and lengthening fantastically into the skyless vault. He paid no attention to the humans, appearing oblivious of their presence.

At last the lurid glow, like ashen embers, dimmed in the depths. The figures grew vaporous, and broke up like wind-blown clouds, trailing and mingling and finally vanishing. Jon and Mildred stood alone on the precipice, which tottered and fell apart.

They awoke in the nave. The crowd had vanished. The reptile had dropped his dart but was still writhing. Pierced in a vital part by Mildred’s knife, he was dying very slowly, as snakes die.

They found their way from the temple, meeting no one. Jon had picked up the dart and carried it. The sun had abandoned the skies, leaving a multitude of stars, among which hung the nebula. Using a small pocket-compass, of which his captors had not deprived him, they left the city. The place lay entirely dark and silent, as if deserted by its inhabitants; and quitting its narrow, tortuous streets, they returned toward the mountains. They surmised that the slaying of Rasasfa had wrought profound terror. Doubtless the people had believed him a supernatural or immortal being.

They traveled across a semi-desert land. The sun finally rose, and leaned over them, warm until evening. They followed the compass toward a magnetic pole in what they liked to believe was the north. The air was very cold at night, and they slept a few hours in each other’s arms.

Fearing pursuit, they peered often backward at the city, which sank gradually on the horizon. Presently they found the tracks of the reptile people going city-ward from the mountains, often deeply printed because of the weight of the unconscious humans whom they carried. No doubt there were other cities in this world; but Jon and Mildred were glad to forgo any curiosity concerning them. Their one experience had been enough for several lifetimes.

They had suffered severely from thirst and hunger during that outward trip. There had been a few brackish pools from which they drank sparingly, hoping that the contents were rain-water; and a few bushes bearing a sourish red fruit of which they ate a small amount.

Late in the second afternoon the footsteps led them to the hollow in which Jon had been digging when they were captured by the falling net. Their tools and sacks and thermos lay where they had left them, their captors plainly thinking these appurtenances of no particular account. They saw with relief that the space-flier still occupied its shelf above.

The coffee was still warm in the thermos. They gulped some of it down eagerly. Then Jon resumed his digging while Mildred remained on the ridge watching the remote city, which seemed to waver and flicker like a mirage. Jon had filled one of the sacks with crude carborundum and was beginning to uncover the zysturium when Mildred cried out in warning. Hastily he climbed the ridge beside her, taking with him the dart-weapon and a pistol snatched from his pack.

A half dozen of the reptile men, climbing noiselessly, were hard upon them. All were armed with darts. They paused uncertainly when Jon brandished Rasasfa’s weapon, as if realizing its weird powers and superiority to their own. Then they resumed their advance. Jon dropped two of them with the pistol, which was a sort of flame-thrower, and short-ranged. The others fell back and concealed themselves behind boulders. They had estimated closely the range of the flame-thrower.

“Take over while I get some of the zysturium,” Jon instructed, giving Mildred the pistol. She obeyed, while Jon finished laying bare the needed element and partly filled his other sack. He attached the tools and sacks to his shoulder-band, and telling Mildred to follow, began his escalade toward the space-flier.

It was a close race, especially in rounding the cataract. He heard the snap and hiss of the pistol and Mildred’s cry of triumph as at least one of their pursuers fell back.

At length, half blinded by sweat, with heart and lungs heaving stertorously, he was climbing the flier’s ladder. Pushing his loads through the manhole, he hung at one side, and made sure that Mildred preceded him, snatching the pistol from her hand as she went past. One of the reptile-men had started to mount the ladder, but dropped into the ravine when Jon fired. Jon went through the manhole and made fast the outer and inner lids.

They worked on their repairs for much of that night, hearing the baffled cries of the reptiles and the futile crash of their weapons against the hull and windows.

The furnaces had done their fusing, and the rod was welded and left to cool.

At earliest morning they took off and regained the outer skies.

A
PPENDIX
O
NE:
S
TORY
N
OTES

Abbreviations Used:

AHT
Arkham House Transcripts: a set of transcriptions and excerpts from the letters of H. P. Lovecraft prepared by Donald Wandrei and August Derleth after Lovecraft’s death in preparation
for what would be five volumes of
Selected Letters
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1965–1976).

AWD
August W. Derleth (1909–1971), Wisconsin novelist,
Weird Tales
author, and co-founder of Arkham House.

AY
The Abominations of Yondo
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1960).

BB
The Black Book of Clark Ashton Smith
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1979).

BL
Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.

CAS
Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961).

DAW
Donald A. Wandrei (1908–1987), poet,
Weird Tales
writer and co-founder of Arkham House.

DS
The Door to Saturn: The Collected Fantasies
of Clark Ashton Smith, Volume Two.
Ed. Scott Connors and Ron Hilger (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2007).

EOD Emperor of Dreams: A Clark Ashton Smith Bio-Bibliography
by Donald Sidney-Fryer et al. (West Kingston, RI: Donald M. Grant, 1978).

ES The End of the Story: The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith, Volume One.
Ed. Scott Connors and Ron Hilger (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2006).

FFT The Freedom of Fantastic Things
. Ed. Scott Connors (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2006).

F&SF The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
, a digest magazine founded in 1949 by Anthony Boucher and Robert Mills.

FW
Farnsworth Wright (1888–1940), editor of
Weird Tales
from 1924 to 1940.

GL
Genius Loci and Other Tales
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1948).

HPL
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937), informal leader of a circle of
writers for
Weird Tales
and related magazines, and probably the leading exponent of weird fiction in the twentieth century.

JHL
Clark Ashton Smith Papers and H. P. Lovecraft Collection, John Hay Library, Brown University.

LL
Letters to H. P. Lovecraft
. Ed. Steve Behrends (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1987).

LW
Lost Worlds
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1944).

ME
The Maze of the Enchanter: The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith, Volume Four.
Ed. Scott Connors and Ron Hilger (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2009).

MHS
Donald Wandrei Papers, Minnesota Historical Society.

OD Other Dimensions
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1970).

OST
Out of Space and Time
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1942).

PD
Planets and Dimensions: Collected Essays.
Ed. Charles K. Wolfe (Baltimore: Mirage Press, 1973).