But, as the world now knows, John Dalhousie did not carry out his plan. For on that night he vanished, only to be found three nights later as Constable French and Henry Lucas were found before him — wrapped in ineffably beautiful snow, like spun gauze, scintillating and gleaming in the wan moonlight, like those others who had suffered the vengeance of Ithaqua, the Snow-Thing, the god of the great white silence.
The department scattered the Indians throughout the provinces, and all persons were forbidden to enter the forest bordering the unused Olassie trail. But somewhere, in the forest night, sometime they may gather again, murmur and bow low, offer their children and their enemies as sacrifices to the elemental object of their worship, and cry out to him as Lucas cried,
The Lair of the Star-Spawn
AUGUST DERLETH & MARK SCHORER
If there ever be a reader to this, my first and only word on that matter which has robbed me of all hope of security in this world, I ask him only to read what I have written, and then, if he is incredulous, to go himself to that mountainous expanse of Burma, deep in its most secret places, and see there the wreck of the greenstone city in the center of the Lake of Dread on the long-lost Plateau of Sung. And if he is not yet satisfied, to go to the village of Bangka in the province of Shan-si and ask for the philosopher and scientist, Doctor Fo-Lan, once far-famed among the scholars of the world and now lost to them of his own volition. Doctor Fo-Lan may tell what I will not. For I write in the hope of forgetting; I want to put away from me for all time the things that I chronicle in this document.
Well within the memory of my generation, the Hawks Expedition set out for the little-explored secret fastnesses of Burma. In all the newspapers of the world was announced, not three months after the setting-out from New York, the tragic end of that expedition. In the files of any newspaper may be found the story of how the expedition was attacked by what were apparently bandits, and killed to the last man, mercilessly and brutally, the party looted, and the bodies left exposed to the hot, unwavering rays of the Burma sun. In most chronicles, there were two additional details — the first telling of the discovery of the body of a native guide about a mile or more from the scene of the ghastly slaughter, and the second of the utter disappearance of Eric Marsh, student and assistant to Geoffrey Hawks, famed explorer and scholar, whose life was lost in the unfortunate Burmese expedition.
I am Eric Marsh. My return was chronicled almost a month later, less sensationally, for which I am grateful. Yet, while these papers state the manner in which I found my way once more into civilization, they laugh at me a little when they say I will not talk, and condole with me a little less when they say that my mind is no longer sound. Perhaps my mind has been affected; I can no longer judge.
It is with the events of that period between the murderous attack on the Hawks Expedition and my own return to the known world with which this document is concerned. Of the beginning, I need tell little. For the very curious, there are the easily obtained periodical accounts. Let me only say at the outset that our attackers were not bandits. On the contrary, they were a horde of little men, the tallest of them no more than four feet, with singularly small eyes set deep in dome-like, hairless heads. These queer attackers fell upon the party and had killed men and animals with their bright swords almost before our men could extract their weapons.
My own escape occurred only through the merest chance. It had so happened that my superior, Hawks, had somehow lost his compass case, which he always carried at his side. We had been travelling no more than two hours that morning, and he knew that the case had been at his belt when we started. Some one had to go back, for the compasses were indispensable to us. We looked to one of the natives to return quickly along the trail, but to our surprise every native we had with us refused point-blank to return alone. A strange uneasiness had been current among them for all of the last day, ever since we had come within sight of the range of high hills where lay the so- called lost Plateau of Sung. It is true that strange legends had reached us even before we had left Ho-Nan province of a weird race of little people, to whom the natives applied the odd name, “Tcho-Tcho,” supposedly living near or on the Plateau of Sung. Indeed, it had been our intention to pry into these legends if possible, despite the reticence and obvious fear of the natives, who looked upon the lost plateau as a place of evil.
Annoyed at this delay, and yet desirous of pushing on, Hawks was not favorable toward the plan that we all return, and in the end I volunteered to cover the distance myself while the party went on more slowly until my return. I found the case of compasses without trouble lying in the center of our trail only five miles back, and veered my mount to rejoin the party. A mile away, I heard their screams, and the few shots they were enabled to fire. At the moment I was screened from view of the party by a low mound on which grew short bushes. I stopped the horse and dropped to the ground. I crawled slowly up the slope and looked across the flat land beyond to where the party was being massacred. Through my glasses I saw that the attackers outnumbered the party by at least four to one, that they had had a great advantage, for they had evidently attacked just as the party was stringing out to enter a defile at the base of the range of high hills beyond. I realized at once that I could do nothing to help. Consequently I remained hidden until the strange little men had vanished; then I rode cautiously forward to the scene of the carnage.
I found there only dead bodies; no living thing had been left behind. The cavalcade, I discovered at once, had been plundered, but fortunately for me, the marauders had taken neither food nor water, contenting themselves, curiously enough, with our plans and implements. Thus I was without even a shovel with which I might have given my companions something like a burial.
