THE RECLUSE
took on the appearance of a walking corpse. A nameless fear began to creep through him, and he went on faster toward the mountains towering beyond the hills. An utter solitude and silence had settled over the dreary waste. The features of the country the traveller had crossed crouched faintly luminous far behind, but he turned not. Once he looked at the vault above, but the entire concameration was completely and desolately empty of all save blackness and that westward-waning moon. Only the steady, low pad of his steps broke the appalling silence; all things that lay on every side as far as he could see conspired to give him a sense of minuteness in an infinitude that bounded, ceaseless, upward and outward through the vacua overhead.
And as the wanderer mounted the trail that was now winding through the base of the mountains, the rocks and trees in some indescribable way began to absorb the light that fell on them, until they moved stealthily in slow corruption. And as he continued, it seemed to him that they changed their positions…as if to block his path. He accidentally touched a stone. A shiver of fear ran through him, for the stone was living panting like some monstrous toad. In a sudden anger, he grasped his sword and smote the rock. It was cleft, so that the halves fell apart. And even as the sword touched it, the rock shrieked. From its core poured forth a horde of worms… And the rocks began to converge toward him, like crawling heaps of liquescence, and the trees began to walk. Gasping, he slashed about him. He could do nothing. Wet, cold things were gathering about his legs and creeping up them…Dead horrors caressed his flesh…And in his despair, he though of Loma: There came to his mind the picture of her slim, willowy body and half-shut eyes…
With a start, he came to himself. The rocks and trees were still and lifeless. The moon had sunk with all its pale deathliness.
For hours he wandered on. The path steadily rose and wound upward through tremendous mountains that towered on every side. Darkness reigned, but the path lay distinct.
It was only when he had ascended nearly to the top of the central range of mountains that the gloom again lightened. Ahead of him loomed a cup-shaped circle of giants over which hung a faint and almost impalpable phosphoresence that illuminated slightly the grandeur of stupendous and colossal peaks which reared upward. But he paused not to survey the scene: he followed the path where it led through a rift in the cup into the hollow itself.
The phosphoresence shimmered everywhere, and, as he passed, seemed to be thickening. The air suddenly and indescribably became fraught with expectation. It was as if his arrival were awaited.
When he reached the center of the cup, he stopped; and when he stopped, It began. The slow-drifting phosphorescence leaped into life and rushed toward the walls of the mountains in one cataclysmic surge. There the sweeping luminosity collected and condensed, and around him, in a great circle, sprang up a low, running line of flame. In a moment, the circle was completed and the light rose upward. Almost before he could move, a solid wall of cold radiance burned about him, mounting in immense waves.
And all the light was flame; and all the flame was gold.
And now there began to come a sound, a faint sound, as of the moan of distant waters, while higher, higher, higher mounted the liquid waves of light around the cup.
And all the light was flame; and all the flame was red.
And the distant moaning came louder and louder, rising in the ever-growing roar of mighty, warring seas. The light began to converge in a funnel-shapen roof above his head, drawing after it the thicker waves.
And all the light was flame; and all the flame was green.
A titanic wash filled the air alive in quickening motion, and a thunderous roar as of all the billion billion waters of all the worlds boomed with a space-annihilating crash of sundering stars toward the funnel. And the sheeted flame above commenced a spinning motion until it whirled furiously and dizzily in a twisten wrack of shifting radiance.
And all the light was flame; and all the flame was black.
(twenty)
