DIY History | Transcribe | Hevelin Fanzines | Fantasy Fan, v. 2, issue 3, whole no. 15, November 1934

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Fantasy Fan, v. 2, issue 3, whole no. 15, November 1934

Page 44

44    THE FANTASY FAN, November, 1934

The air was still windless, but it weighed upon us as if burdened with the wings of a thousand cacodemons. I remember that I was overwhelmingly conscious of our exposed position, for we had paused on a wide landing of the mountain-hewn steps. We could easily have concealed ourselves amid the huge fragments on the surrounding slope; but, for the nonce, we were incapable of the simplest movement.
In a close-ranged army, the Clouds mustered above and around us. They rose into the very zenith, swelling to insuperable vastness, and darkening like Tartarean gods. The sun had disappeared, leaving no faintest beam to prove that it still hung unfallen and undestroyed in the heavens.
I felt that I was crushed into the very stone by the eyeless regard of that awful assemblage, judging and condemning. We had trespassed upon a region conquered long ago by strange elemental entities; we had approached their very citadel--and now we must meet the doom our rashness had invited. Such thoughts, like a black lightning, flared in my brain.
Now, for the first time, I became aware of sound--if the word can be applied to a sensation so anomalous. It was as if the oppression that weighed upon me had grown audible; as if palpable thunders poured over and past me. I felt, I heard them in every nerve, and they roared through my brain like torrents from the opened floodgates of some tremendous weir in a world of genii.
Downward upon us, with limbless atlantean stridings, there swept the cloudy cohorts. Their swiftness was that of super-natural things. The air was riven as if by the tumult of a thousand tempests, was rife with an unmeasured elemental malignity. I recall but partially the events that ensued; but the impression of insufferable darkness, of demonic clamor and trampling, and the pressure of thunderous burdenous onset, remains forever indelible. Also, there were voices that called out with the stridor of clarions in a war of gods, uttering ominous syllables that the ear of man could never seize.
Before those vengeful Shapes; we could not stand for a moment. We hurled ourselves with a mad precipitation down the shadowed steps of the giant stairs. Polder and the guide were a little ahead of me, to the left hand, and I saw them in that baleful twilight on the verge of a deep chasm, which, in our ascent, had compelled us to much circumambulation. I saw them leap together--and yet I swear that they did not fall into the chasm: for one of the Shapes was upon them whirling and stooping, even as they sprang. There was a blasphemous, unthinkable fusion as of forms beheld in delirium: for an instant the two men were like vapors that swelled and swirled, towering high as the thing that had caught them; and the thing itself was a misty Janus, with two heads and bodies melting, no longer human, into its unearthly column...

After that, I remember nothing more, except the sense of vertiginous falling. By some miracle I must have reached the edge of the chasm and flung myself into its depths without being overtaken as the others had been. How I escaped the pursuit of those cloudy Guardians is forever an enigma. Perhaps, for some inscrutable reason of their own, they permitted me to go.
When I returned to awareness, stars were peering down upon me like chill incurious eyes between black and jagged lips

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44 THE FANTASY FAN, November, 1934 The air was still windless, but it weighed upon us as if burdened with the wings of a thousand cacodemons. I remember that I was overwhelmingly conscious of our exposed position, for we had paused on a wide landing of the mountain-hewn steps. We could easily have concealed ourselves amid the huge fragments on the surrounding slope; but, for the nonce, we were incapable of the simplest movement. In a close-ranged army, the Clouds mustered above and around us. They rose into the very zenith, swelling to insuperable vastness, and darkening like Tartarean gods. The sun had disappeared, leaving no faintest beam to prove that it still hung unfallen and undestroyed in the heavens. I felt that I was crushed into the very stone by the eyeless regard of that awful assemblage, judging and condemning. We had trespassed upon a region conquered long ago by strange elemental entities; we had approached their very citadel--and now we must meet the doom our rashness had invited. Such thoughts, like a black lightning, flared in my brain. Now, for the first time, I became aware of sound--if the word can be applied to a sensation so anomalous. It was as if the oppression that weighed upon me had grown audible; as if palpable thunders poured over and past me. I felt, I heard them in every nerve, and they roared through my brain like torrents from the opened floodgates of some tremendous weir in a world of genii. Downward upon us, with limbless atlantean stridings, there swept the cloudy cohorts. Their swiftness was that of super-natural things. The air was riven as if by the tumult of a thousand tempests, was rife with an unmeasured elemental malignity. I recall but partially the events that ensued; but the impression of insufferable darkness, of demonic clamor and trampling, and the pressure of thunderous burdenous onset, remains forever indelible. Also, there were voices that called out with the stridor of clarions in a war of gods, uttering ominous syllables that the ear of man could never seize. Before those vengeful Shapes; we could not stand for a moment. We hurled ourselves with a mad precipitation down the shadowed steps of the giant stairs. Polder and the guide were a little ahead of me, to the left hand, and I saw them in that baleful twilight on the verge of a deep chasm, which, in our ascent, had compelled us to much circumambulation. I saw them leap together--and yet I swear that they did not fall into the chasm: for one of the Shapes was upon them whirling and stooping, even as they sprang. There was a blasphemous, unthinkable fusion as of forms beheld in delirium: for an instant the two men were like vapors that swelled and swirled, towering high as the thing that had caught them; and the thing itself was a misty Janus, with two heads and bodies melting, no longer human, into its unearthly column... After that, I remember nothing more, except the sense of vertiginous falling. By some miracle I must have reached the edge of the chasm and flung myself into its depths without being overtaken as the others had been. How I escaped the pursuit of those cloudy Guardians is forever an enigma. Perhaps, for some inscrutable reason of their own, they permitted me to go. When I returned to awareness, stars were peering down upon me like chill incurious eyes between black and jagged lips