“I shall die swiftly and easily now, instead of slowly, by starvation,” Lhar said.
A moment later a thought crossed my mind, faint and intangible as a snowflake and I knew Lhar was saying goodbye.
I left the valley. Once I looked back, but there was only a veil of snow behind me.
And out of the greatest adventure the cosmic gods ever conceived—only this: For a little while the eternal veil of time was ripped away and the door to the unknown was held ajar.
But now the door is closed once more. Below Huascan a robot guards a tomb, that is all.
The snow fell faster. Shivering, I ploughed through the deepening drifts. My compass needle pointed north. The spell that had enthralled the valley was gone.
Half an hour later I found the trail, and the road to safety lay open before me. Fra Rafael would be waiting to hear my story.
But I did not think that he would believe it. …
Colophon
Short Fiction
was published between 1936 and 1954 by
Henry Kuttner.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Robin Whittleton,
and is based on transcriptions produced between 2010 and 2022 by
Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan, Alex White, Sankar Viswanathan, The Online Distributed Proofreaders Canada, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
Construction in Blue,
a painting completed in 1925 by
Paul Gaulois.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.
The first edition of this ebook was released on
September 9, 2024, 6:58 p.m.
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