descended from above I saw a file of beings even stranger than the Star-Warriors. They were great, writhing pillars of light, moving like tremendous flames, colored purple and white, dazzling in their intensity. These gigantic beings from outer space descended swiftly, circling the Plateau of Sung, and from them great rays of stabbing light shot out toward the hidden fastnesses below. And at the same time, the earth began to tremble.
Shuddering, I put out my hand to touch Fo-Lan’s arm. He was utterly unmoved, save in triumphant joy at the spectacle of the destruction of Alaozar. “The Ancient Ones themselves have come!” he cried out.
I remember wanting to say something, but I saw suddenly one of those inconceivable pillars of light bending over Fo-Lan and me, and I felt slithering tentacles gently reaching around me; then I knew no more.
There is little more to write. I came to my senses near Bangka, miles from the Plateau of Sung, and at my side was Fo-Lan, unhurt and smiling. We had been transported within the second by the Ancient God who had bent to save us from the destruction of the things beneath the earth.
The statement of Eric Marsh ends thus abruptly. However, what surmises might be made from it, this paper will not state. Mr. Marsh had appended to his curious statement several newspaper clippings, all of
them dated within ten days of his appearance at Bangka, where he evidently stayed with Doctor Fo-Lan before returning to America. There is room for only a brief summary of the clippings.
The first was from a Tokyo paper announcing the strange reappearance of Doctor Fo-Lan. Another clipping from the same issue of that paper tells of a curious electrical display witnessed from several observatories in the Orient, seemingly centered in its elemental force somewhere in Burma. Still another paragraph concerns an apparition (thus it is called), supposedly seen in the night during which Doctor Fo-Lan and Eric Marsh so mysteriously returned to Bangka; it was that of a gigantic pillar of light, towering far into the sky, and alive with movement; it was seen by forty-seven persons in and around Bangka.
The final clipping was dated ten days later; it was taken from an eminent London paper, and is the verbatim report of an aviator who flew over Burma in the endeavor to trace the source of a fetid odor which was sweeping the country, nauseating India and China for hundreds of miles around. The heart of this report is briefly:
The Lord of Illusion
E. HOFFMANN PRICE
They tell a tale of a certain Randolph Carter, and of a silver key wherewith he sought to unlock the hierarchy of gates that bar the march of man from this tri-dimensional fantasy we call reality, and into the super-spatial world we name illusion.
It is said that Randolph Carter upon finding that silver key of archaic workmanship, tarnished blue-black from ages of disuse, so that the cryptic runes with which it was engraved were scarcely legible to whatever eye might have read their prodigious syllables, went at once to his ancestral home at Arkham; and there he sought what in the old days was called the snake den, a deep grotto in an ominously shaded spot where few natives of the region cared to go, much less linger. Carter since that day has not been seen; and it has been hinted that he achieved his old dream of marching into the Land of Illusion.
There the chronicle ends, leaving a tale whose exquisite beauty is matched only by its incompleteness. The learned chronicler, who has in all probability peered further into the realms of mystery and the ultra-cosmic abysses than any of his contemporaries, released only what he knew, and withheld all but a hint of that which he suspected. Four years, however, have passed; and sundry startling developments have resulted in a well founded conviction that Randolph Carter has not been irretrievably lost in the gulfs which, after sounding in fancy, he finally plumbed in person. The last of these bits of evidence warrants a statement, which will tend to show that the chronicler’s intuition was amazingly correct, and lacking only in detail.
Randolph Carter, it must be remembered, left in his car, on the day of his disappearance, a carved oaken chest. He took with him that antique silver key which was to unlock the successive doors that barred his free march down the mighty corridors of space and time, to the very Border which no man has crossed since Shadded with his terrific genius built and concealed in the sands of Arabia Petraea the prodigious domes and uncounted minarets of thousand-pillared Irem. Half starved darwishes, and thirst-crazed nomads have returned to tell of glimpses of its monumental portal, and of the Hand that is sculptured above the keystone of the arch; but no man has passed, and returned to say that his footprints on the garnet-strewn sands within bear witness to his visit. Carter, therefore, took with him that key for which the sculptured hand is said vainly to grasp; but Carter through ignorance or the absentmindedness of exultation left behind him the palimpsest which was found in that disquietingly carved oaken chest, several days after his disappearance had aroused comment and vain search.
That yellow parchment, whose reed-scribed characters baffled scholars familiar with lost languages, fell into the hands of the chronicler who first sought to account for Carter’s disappearance; but in the light of subsequent events, particularly a chance meeting in New Orleans in the summer of 1932, it seems that Randolph Carter would have done well to have taken scroll as well as key. Such, at least, was the contention of an old man who, motionless and silent, save for an occasional muttering, and an occasional replenishment of the olibanum whose fumes rose from the oddly wrought iron tripods that flanked the wine-red Bokhara rug on which he sat. But more, in due course, of that scroll, and that old man who muttered.
Randolph Carter, with the silver key in his pocket, picked his way along a familiar, though almost obliterated path, long unused. That afternoon, Carter observed that the cleft in the granite hillside seemed strangely like the crudely shaped bastions on each side of the gates of a certain walled city. But this change, instead of disturbing Carter, served but to assure him that the day was auspicious and the hour also. And, unhappily, his exaltation at possessing the Key conspired with his scholarly forgetfulness to make him quite oblivious of any possible need for the scroll. Although, in view of the fate that overtook one who with Carter, years previous, had ventured to read a similar scroll, it may be that Carter deemed it more prudent not to have that portentous screed with him in the strange domain he proposed invading, and thus intentionally abandoned it.
As Carter strode into the dimness and took from his pocket the silver key, and a flashlight with which to illuminate that grotto which he knew was beyond the narrow fissure at the back of the anteroom, for such he considered the cave in which he stood, he was for a moment amazed to find that there was ample illumination. Whereupon he abandoned his flashlight, and, key in hand, as he now realized should be his procedure, he advanced into what he expected would be the high-ceiled grotto that he had once, as a boy, explored.
His expectation, however, was exceeded. And for several bemused moments, he was unaware of the old man who had civilly greeted him as he stepped into the vault. For, strangely enough, it was into a vast chamber rather than into a grotto that Carter had entered. A hemispherical ceiling curved over him with a mighty sweep that dwarfed all comparison that he made as he stood seeking to reconcile the immensity of the dome with the outer bulk of the hill which contained it. He wondered how a part could exceed the whole; and then he realized that this prodigious vault might not, and need not, be a part of the hill in whose center it presumably curved.
The cyclopean pillars which supported the vault caused him still to ignore the civil old man who had approached Carter. There was a rugged enormity that disturbed Carter, and left him with the impression that neither nature nor the chisel of any mason had worked the stone into its solemn and majestic simplicity. He sought for a moment to name to himself the curve of the dome, which he now perceived was not truly hemispherical as he had at first thought, but of a curvature that transcended not only spheres, but the ellipsoids of revolution, and the paraboloids with which he was familiar.
Then, with a start, Carter realized that he had not returned the old man’s civil greeting, and, somewhat disconcerted, he wished to make amends for his lack of courtesy. But he was at a loss to think of a suitable remark
