Lost Worlds, Unknown Horizons, page 6
The hall ended in a chamber of immense, indefinite scope, whose walls and roof were doubtful with unremoving shadows. In the center, amid the pavement of mammoth blocks, there was a circular pit above which there seemed to float a fountain of flame that soared in one eerie, slowly lengthening jet. This flame was the sole illumination; and also it was the source of the wild, unearthly music. Even with my purposely deafened ears, I was wooed by the shrill and starry sweetness of its singing. I felt the voluptuous lure, the high, vertiginous exaltation.
I knew immediately that the place was a shrine, and the transdimension beings who accompanied me were visiting pilgrims. There were scores of them—perhaps hundreds; but all were dwarfed in the cosmic immensity of that chamber. They were gathered before the flame in various attitudes of worship. They bowed their heads or made mysterious gestures of adoration with unhuman hands and members. And the voices of several, deep as booming drums, or sharp as the stridulation of giant insects, were audible amind the singing of the fountain.
Spellbound, I went foward and joined them. Enthralled by the music and by the vision of the soaring flame, I paid as little heed to my outlandish compansions as they to me.
The fountain rose and rose, till its light flickered on the limbs and features of throned, colossal statues behind it—or heroes or gods or demons from the earlier cycles of alien time, staring in stone from a dusk of illimitable mystery. The fire was green and dazzling. It was pure as the central flame of a star.
It blinded me, and when I turned my eyes away, the air was filled with webs of intricate color, with swiftly changing arabesques whose numberless, unwonted hues and patterns were such as no mundane eye had ever beheld. I felt a stimulating warmth that filled my very marrow with intenser life.
The music mounted with the flame and I understood now its recurrent ebb and flow. As I looked and listened, a mad thought was born in my mind—the thought of how marvelous and ecstatical it would be to run forward and leap headlong into the singing fire. The music seemed to tell me that I should find in that moment of flaring dissolution all the delight and triumph, all the splendor and exaltation it had promised from afar. It besought me; it pleaded with tones of supernal melody. And despite the wadding in my ears, the seduction was well-nigh irresistible.
However, it had not robbed me of all sanity. With a sudden start of terror, like one who has been tempted to fling himself from a high precipice, I drew back. Then I saw that the same dreadful impulse was shared by some of my companions. The two entities with scarlet wings, whom I have previously mentioned, were standing a little apart from the rest of us. Now with a great fluttering, they rose and flew toward the flame like moths toward a candle. For a brief moment the light shone redly through their half-transparent wings, ere they disappeared in the leaping incandescence, which flared briefly and then burned as before.
Then, in rapid succession, a number of other beings, who represented the most divergent trends of biology, sprang forward and immolated themselves in the flame. There were creatures with translucent bodies, and some that shone with all the hues of the opal. There were winged colossi, and titans who strode as with seven-league boots. There was one being with useless, abortive wings who crawled rather than ran, to seek the same glorious doom as the rest. But among them there was none of the city’s people. The city’s inhabitants merely stood and looked on, impassive and statuelike as ever.
I saw that the fountain had now reached its greatest height and was beginning to decline. It sank steadily but slowly to half its former elevation. During this interval there were no more acts of self-sacrificing. Several of the beings beside me turned abruptly and went away, as if they had overcome the lethal spell.
One of the tall armored entities, as he left, addressed me in words that were like clarion notes, with unmistakable accents of warning. By a mighty effort of will in a turmoil of conflicting emotions, I followed him. At every step the madness and delirium of the music warred with my instincts of selfpreservation. More than once, I started to go back. My homeward journey was as blurred and doubtful as the wanderings of a man in an opium-trance. The music sang behind me and told me of the rapture I had missed, of the flaming dissolution whose brief instant was better than aeons of mortal life.
August 9th
I have tried to go on with a new story, but have made no progress. Anything that I can imagine, or frame in language, seems flat and puerile beside the world of unsearchable mystery to which I have found admission. The temptation to return is more cogent than ever, the call of that remembered music is sweeter than the voice of a loved woman. And always I am tormented by the problem of it all, and tantalized by the little which I have perceived and understood. What forces are those whose existence and working I have merely apprehended? Who are the inhabitants of the city? And who are the beings that visit the enshrined flame? What rumor or legend has drawn them from outland realms to that place of blissful danger and destruction? And what is the fountain itself, and what the secret of its lure and its deadly singing? These problems admit of infinite surmise, but no conceivable solution.
I am planning to go back once more—but not alone. Someone must go with me this time, as a witness to the wonder and the peril. It is all too strange for credence—I must have human corroboration of what I have seen and felt and conjectured. Also, another might understand where I have failed to do more than apprehend.
Whom shall I take? It will be necessary to invite someone here from the outer world—someone of high intellectual and aesthetic capacity. Shall I ask Philip Hastane, my fellow fiction-writer? Hastane would be too busy, I fear. But there is the Californian artist, Felix Ebbonly, who has illustrated some of my fantastic novels.
Ebbonly would be the man to see and appreciate the new dimension, if he can come. With his bent for the bizarre and the unearthly, the spectacle of that plain and city, the Babelian buildings and arcades, and the temple of the flame, will simply enthrall him. I shall write immediately to his San Francisco address.
August 12th
Ebbonly is here—the mysterious hints in my letter regarding some novel pictorial subjects along his own line were too provocative for him to resist. Now I have explained fully and given him a detailed account of my adventures. I can see that he is a little incredulous, for which I hardly blame him. But he will not remain incredulous very long, for tomorrow we shall visit, together, the city of the singing flame.
August 13th
I must concentrate my disordered faculties. I must choose my words and write with exceeding care. This will be the last entry in my journal, and the last writing I shall ever do. When I have finished, I shall wrap the journal up and address it to Philip Hastane, who can make such disposition of it as he sees fit.
I took Ebbonly into the other dimension today. He was impressed, even as I had seen, by the two isolated boulders on Crater Ridge.
“They look like the guttered ends of columns established by prehuman gods,” he remarked. “I begin to believe you now.”
I told him to go first, and indicated the place where he should step. He obeyed without hesitation, and I had the singular experience of seeing a man melt into utter, instantaneous nothingness. One moment he was there—and the next, there was only bare ground and the far-off tamaracks whose view his body had obstructed. I followed and found him standing in speechless awe on the violet grass.
“This,” he said at last, “is the sort of thing whose existence I have hitherto merely suspected, and have never even been able to hint at in my most imaginative drawings.”
We spoke little as we followed the range of monolithic boulders toward the plain. Far in the distance, beyond those high and stately trees with their sumptuous foliage, the golden-brown vapors had parted, showing vistas of an immense horizon. Past the horizon were range on range of gleaming orbs and fiery, flying motes in the depths of the amber heaven. It was as if the veil of another universe than ours had been drawn back.
We crossed the plain, and came at length within earshot of the siren music. I warned Ebbonly to stuff his ears with cotton wadding. But he refused.
“I don’t want to deaden any new sensation which I may experience,” he observed.
We entered the city. My companion was a veritable rhapsody of artistic delight when he beheld the enormous buildings and the people. I could see, too, that the music had taken hold upon him. His look soon became fixed and dreamy as that of an opium-eater. At first he made many comments on the architecture and the various beings who passed us, and called my attention to details which I had not perceived heretofore.
However, as we drew nearer to the temple of the flame, his observational interest seemed to lag, and was replaced by more and more of an ecstatic inward absorption. His remarks became fewer and fewer. He did not even seem to hear my questions. It was evident that the sound had wholly bemused and bewitched him.
Even as on my former visit, there were many pilgrims going toward the shrine—and few that were coming away from it. Most of them belonged to the evolutionary types I had seen before. Among those that were new to me I recall one gorgeous creature with golden and cerulean wings like those of a giant lepidopteran and scintillating jewel-like eyes that must have been designed to mirror the glories of some Edenic world.
I, too, felt, as before, the captious thralldom and bewitchment, the insidious, gradual perversion of thought and instinct as if the music were working on my brain like a subtle alkaloid. Since I had taken my usual precaution, my subscription to the influence was less complete than that of Ebbonly. But nevertheless it was enough to make me forget a number of things—among them, the initial concern which I had felt when my companion had refused to employ the same mode of protection as myself. I no longer thought of his danger or my own, except as something very distant and immaterial.
The streets were like the prolonged and bewildering labyrinth of a nightmare. But the music led us forthrightly; and always there were other pilgrims. Like men in the grip of some powerful current we were drawn to our destination.
As we passed along the hall of gigantic columns and neared the abode of the fiery fountain, a sense of our peril quickened momentarily in my brain, and I sought to warn Ebbonly once more. But all my protests and remonstrances were futile. He was deaf as a machine, and wholly impervious to anything but the lethal music. His expression and his movements were those of a somnambulist. Even when I seized and shook him with such violence as I could muster, he remained oblivious of my presence.
The throng of worshippers was larger than upon my first visit. The jet of pure, incandescent flame was mounting steadily as we entered, and it sang with the pure ardor and ecstasy of a star alone in space. Again, with ineffable tones, it told me the rapture of a moth-like death in its lofty soaring, the exultation and triumph of a momentary union with its elemental essence.
The flame rose to its apex; and even for me, the mesmeric lure was well-nigh irresistible. Many of our companions succumbed. The first to immolate himself was the giant lepidopterous being. Four others, of diverse evolutional types, followed in appallingly swift succession.
In my own partial subjection to the music, my own effort to resist that deadly enslavement, I had almost forgotten the very presence of Ebbonly. It was too late for me to even think of stopping him, when he ran forward in a series of leaps that were both solemn and frenzied, like the beginning of some sacerdotal dance, and hurled himself headlong into the flame. The fire enveloped him. It flared up for an instant with a more dazzling greenness. And that was all.
Slowly, as if from benumbed brain-centers, a horror crept upon my conscious mind, and helped to annul the perilous mesmerism. I turned, while many others were following Ebbonly’s example, and fled from the shrine and from the city. But somehow the horror diminished as I went, and more and more I found myself envying my companion’s fate, and wondering as to the sensations he had felt in that moment of fiery dissolution . . .
Now, as I write this, I am wondering why I came back again to the human world. Words are futile to express what I have beheld and experienced, and the change that has come upon me beneath the play of incalculable forces in a world of which no other mortal is even cognizant.
Literature is nothing more than shadow. And life, with its drawn-out length of monotonous, reiterative days, is unreal and without meaning now in comparison with the splendid death which I might have had—the glorious doom which is still in store. I have no longer any will to fight the ever-insistent music which I hear in memory. And there seems to be no reason at all why I should fight it out. Tomorrow I shall return to the city.
The Sunken Land
FRITZ LEIBER
Of all of San Francisco’s many literary figures, Fritz Leiber is probably the most conspicuous-not only because of his willingness to make public appearances, signing autographs or reading his own work on behalf of this charity or that, but also because of his giant stature and imposing presence. Surprisingly often, driving through the compact, foggy city by the bay, I see the towering form of Leiber striding through the mists, and honk and wave as I pass him by. He is eminent in more than height, though; few modern writers of fantasy and science fiction have achieved such popularity as he has, as his cluttered shelf of Hugo, Nebula, and miscellaneous other trophies attests. Perhaps his most widely beloved stories are those recounting the adventures of the giant barbarian Fafhrd and his wily companion, the Gray Mouser, in the world of Nehwon, which exists somewhere across the gulf of dimensions from our own. The chronicles of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser fill at least five volumes by now, and Leiber, who has been writing them since 1939, still continues to return to Nehwon every few years. Here is one of the earliest of the series, a story of the Atlantis of Newhon, the lost land of Simorgya.
“I was born with luck as a twin!” roared Fafhrd jovially, leaping up so swiftly that the cranky sloop rocked a little in spite of its outriggers. “I catch a fish in the middle of the ocean. I rip up its belly. And look, little man, what I find!”
The Gray Mouser drew back from the fish-bloodied hand thrust almost into his face, wrinkled his nose with sneering fastidiousness, raised his left eyebrow and peered. The object did not seem very small even on Fafhrd’s broad palm, and although slimed-over a little, was indubitably gold. It was both a ring and a key, the key part set at a right angle, so that it would lie along the finger when worn. There were carvings of some sort. Instinctively the Gray Mouser did not like the object. It somehow focused the vague uneasiness he had felt now for several days.
To begin with, he did not like the huge, salty Outer Sea, and only Fafhrd’s bold enthusiasm and his own longing for the land of Lankhmar had impelled him to embark on this long, admittedly risky voyage across uncharted deeps. He did not like the fact that a school of fish was making the water boil at such a great distance from any land. Even the uniformly stormless weather and favorable winds disturbed him, seeming to indicate correspondingly great misfortunes held in store, like a growing thundercloud in quiet air. Too much good luck was always dangerous. And now this ring, acquired without effort by an astonishingly lucky chance.
They peered at it more closely, Fafhrd slowly turning it around. The carving on the ring part, as far as one could make out, represented a sea monster dragging down a ship. It was highly stylized, however, and there was little detail. One might be mistaken. What puzzled the Mouser most, since he had traveled to far places and knew much of the world, was that he did not recognize the style.
But in Fafhrd it roused strange memories. Recollections of certain legends told around flickering driftwood fires through the long Northern nights; tales of great seafarings and distant raids made in ancient days; firelight glimpses of certain bits of loot taken by some unaccountably distant ancestor and considered too traditionally significant to barter or sell or even give away; ominous vague warnings used to frighten little boys who were inclined to swim or sail too far out. For a moment his green eyes clouded and his wind-burned face became serious, but only for a moment.
“A pretty enough thing, you’ll agree,” he said, laughing. “Whose door do you think it unlocks? Some king’s mistress, I’d say. It’s big enough for a king’s finger.” He tossed it up, caught it, and wiped it on the rough cloth of his tunic.
“I wouldn’t wear it,” said the Mouser. “It was probably eaten from a drowned man’s hand and sucked poison from the sea ooze. Throw it back.”
“And fish for a bigger one?” asked Fafhrd, grinning. “No, I’m content with this.” He thrust it down on the middle finger of his left hand, doubled up his fist, and surveyed it critically. “Good for bashing people with, too,” he remarked.
Then, seeing a big fish flash out of the water and almost flop into the cockpit, he snatched up his bow, fitted to the string a featherless arrow whose head was barbed and heavily weighted, and stared down over the side, one foot extended along the outrigger. A light, waxed line was attached to the arrow.
The Mouser watched him, not without envy. Fafhrd, big rangy man that he was, seemed to acquire an altogether new litheness and sureness of movement whenever they were on shipboard. He became as nimble as the Mouser was on shore. The Mouser was no landlubber and could swim as well as Fafhrd, but he always felt a trifle uneasy when there was only water in sight, day in and day out, just as Fafhrd felt uneasy in cities, though relishing taverns and street fights. On shipboard the Mouser became cautious and apprehensive; he made a point of watching for slow leaks, creeping fires, tainted food and rotten cordage. He disapproved of Fafhrd’s constant trying out of new rigs and waiting until the last moment before reefing sail. It irked him a little that he couldn’t quite call it foolhardy.
