Part 22 (2/2)

Was it a dreaht?

Then curst the dreaard hour that does not see Hot blood drip blackly fro of Belit

First there was the blackness of an utter void, with the cold winds of cosue, h the expanse of nothingness, as if the darkness were takingpyrarew Shape and Di, the darkness rolled away on either hand and a huge city of dark green stone rose on the bank of a wide river, flowing through an illis of alien configuration

Cast in the ed and of heroic proportions; not a branch on the mysterious stalk of evolution that culminated in man, but the ripe blossom on an alien tree, separate and apart fros, in physical appearance they resereat apes In spiritual, esthetic and intellectual developorilla But when they reared their colossal city, man's primal ancestors had not yet risen from the slis were s built of flesh and blood They lived, loved, and died, though the individual span of life was enoran The vista shi+mmered and wavered, like a picture thrown on a wind-blown curtain Over the city and the land the ages flowed as waves flow over a beach, and each wave brought alterations So; the great glaciers and ice-fields ithdrawing toward the new poles

The littoral of the great river altered Plains turned into swamps that stank with reptilian life

Where fertile les The changing ages wrought on the inhabitants of the city as well They did not rate to fresher lands

Reasons inexplicable to humanity held them to the ancient city and their doohty land sank deeper and deeper into the blackjungle life sank the people of the city Terrific convulsions shook the earth; the nights were lurid with spouting volcanoes that fringed the dark horizons with red pillars

After an earthquake that shook down the outer walls and highest towers of the city, and caused the river to run black for days with some lethal substance spewed up froe became apparent in the waters the folk had drunk for millenniums uncountable

Many died who drank of it; and in those who lived, the drinking wrought change, subtle, gradual and grisly In adapting the conditions, they had sunk far below their original level But the lethal waters altered theeneration They who had been winged Gods became pinioned dee distorted and perverted and twisted into ghastly paths As they had risen higher than htmares reach They died fast, by cannibalisht jungle And at last ale shape lurked, a stunted abhorrent perversion of nature

Then for the first time humans appeared: dark-skinned, hawk-facedbows the warriors of pre-historic Stygia There were only fifty of theed effort, stained and scratched with jungle-wandering, with blood-crusted bandages that told of fierce fighting In their ht before a stronger tribe which drove thereen ocean of jungle and river

Exhausted they lay down a the ruins where red blossoms that bloom but once in a century waved in the full moon, and sleep fell upon them And as they slept, a hideous shape crept red- eyed from the shadows and performed weird and awful rites about and above each sleeper The le red and black; above the sleepers

137glimmered the crimson blossoms, like splashes of blood Then the moon went down and the eyes of the necroht

When dawn spread its white veil over the river, there were no ed horror that squatted in the center of a ring of fifty great spotted hyenas that pointed quivering hastly sky and howled like souls in hell

Then scene followed scene so swiftly that each tripped over the heels of its predecessor There was a confusion of ainst a background of black jungle, green stone ruins, andboats with skulls grinning on the prows, or stole stooping through the trees, spear in hand

They fled screas Howls of dying loorisly feasts beneath the moon, across whose red disk a bat-like shadow incessantly swept

Then abruptly, etched clearly in contrast to these iled point in the whitening daept a long galley, thronged with shi+ning ebon figures, and in the bows stood a white-skinned giant in blue steel

It was at this point that Conan first realized that he was drea Until that instant he had had no consciousness of individual existence But as he saw hinized both the existence and the dreah he did not awaken

Even as he wondered, the scene shi+fted abruptly to a jungle glade where N'Gora and nineteen black spear someone Even as he realized that it was he for whom they waited, a horror swooped down from the skies and their stolidity was broken by yells of fear

Like men maddened by terror, they threay their weapons and raced wildly through the jungle, pressed close by the slavering s above the which Conan feebly struggled to awake

Di cluster of black blossoms, while froe effort he broke the unseen bonds which held hiht

Bewilderlare he cast about him Near him swayed the dusky lotus, and he hastened to draay froy soil near by there was a track as if an ani from the bushes, then had withdrawn it It looked like the spoor of an unbelievably large hyena

He yelled for N'Gora Prile, in which his yells sounded brittle and hollow as mockery He could not see the sun, but his wilderness-trained instinct told hiht that he had lain senseless for hours He hastily followed the tracks of the spearmen, which lay plain in the daed into a glade to stop short, the skin crawling between his shoulders as he recognized it as the glade he had seen in his lotus-drugged dream

shi+elds and spears lay scattered about as if dropped in headlong flight