Part 24 (1/2)

The Song of Belit

Again dawn tinged the ocean A redder glow lit the river-reat sword upon the white beach, watching the Tigress swinging out on her last voyage

There was no light in his eyes that conte blue wastes all glory and wonder had gone A fierce revulsion shook hies that deepened into purple hazes of mystery

Belit had been of the sea; she had lent it splendor and allure Without her it rolled a barren, dreary and desolate waste fro mystery he returned her He could do noblue splendor was more repellent than the leafy fronds which rustled and whispered behind him of vast e

No hand was at the sweep of the Tigress, no oars drove her through the green water But a clean tanging wind bellied her silken sail, and as a wild swan cleaves the sky to her nest, she sped seaward, flaher froure that lay lapped in scarlet on the shi+ning pyre

So passed the Queen of the Black Coast, and leaning on his red-stained sword, Conan stood silently until the red glow had faded far out in the blue hazes and dawn splashed its rose and gold over the ocean

145

Black Colossus

Black Colossus

”The Night of Pohen Fate stalked through the corridors of

the world like a colossus just risen froranite ”

E Hoffe-old silence brooded over the mysterious ruins of Kuthchemes, but Fear was there; Fear quivered in thehis breath quick and sharp against his clenched teeth

He stood, the one atom of life amidst the colossallike a black dot in the vast blue vault of the sky that the sun glazed with its heat On every hand rose the grie broken pillars, thrusting up their jagged pinnacles into the sky; long wavering lines of crues, whose horrific features the corroding winds and dust-storn of life: only the sheer breathtaking sweep of the naked desert, bisected by the wandering line of a long-dry river-course; in the s of the ruins, the colu up like brokenivory do

The base of this do from what had once been a terraced eminence on the banks of the ancient river Broad steps led up to a great bronze door in the dome, which rested on its base like the half of so The dome itself was of pure ivory, which shone as if unknown hands kept it polished Likewise shone the spired gold cap of the pinnacle, and the inscription which sprawled about the curve of the do No man on earth could read those characters, but Shevatas shuddered at the dim conjectures they raised For he came of a very old race, whose myths ran back to shapes undreamed of by contemporary tribes

Shevatas iry and lithe, as became a master-thief of Zaarment a loin-cloth of scarlet silk Like all his race, he was very dark, his narrow vulture-like face set off by his keen black eyes His long, slender and tapering fingers

146were quick and nervous as the wings of aa short, narroel-hilted sword in a sheath of ornamented leather Shevatas handled the weapon with apparently exaggerated care He even seemed to flinch away froh Nor was his care without reason

This was Shevatas, a thief a thieves, whose name was spoken with awe in the dives of the Maul and the dim shadowy recesses beneath the tes and myths for a thousand years Yet fear ate at the heart of Shevatas as he stood before the ivory do unnatural about the structure; the winds and suns of three thousand years had lashed it, yet its gold and ivory rose bright and glistening as the day it was reared by nameless hands on the bank of the na with the general aura of these devil-haunted ruins This desert was thesoutheast of the lands of Shem A few days' ride on ca the traveller within sight of the great river Styx at the point where it turned at right angles with its former course, and floard to empty at last into the distant sea At the point of its bend began the land of Stygia, the dark-bosoreat river, rose sheer out of the surrounding desert

Eastward, Shevatas knew, the desert shaded into steppes stretching to the Hyrcanian kingdo in barbaric splendor on the shores of the great inland sea A week's ride northward the desert ran into a tangle of barren hills, beyond which lay the fertile uplands of Koth, the southerned into the meadowlands of Shem, which stretched away to the ocean

All this Shevatas kneithout being particularly conscious of the knowledge, as a man knows the streets of his town He was a far traveller and had looted the treasures of dohest adventure and the htiest treasure of all

In that ivory dora Khotan, the dark sorcerer who had reigned in Kuthcheia stretched far northward of the great river, over the reat drift of the Hyborians swept southward from the cradle-land of their race near the northern pole It was a titanic drift, extending over centuries and ages But in the reign of Thugra Khotan, the last ray-eyed, tawny-haired barbarians in wolfskins and scale-mail had ridden frodom of Koth with their iron swords They had stor the one down in fire and ruin

But while they were shattering the streets of his city and cutting down his archers like ripe

147corn, Thugra Khotan had sed a strange terrible poison, and his masked priests had locked him into the tomb he himself had prepared His devotees died about that tomb in a crimson holocaust, but the barbarians could not burst the door, nor eventhe great city in ruins, and in his ivory-dora Khotan slept unnawed at the cru pillars, and the very river that watered his land in old tiht to gain the treasure which fables said lay heaped about thebones inside the dome And many a thief died at the door of the tomb, and many another was harried by monstrous dreams to die at last with the froth of madness on his lips

So Shevatas shuddered as he faced the toend of the serpent said to guard the sorcerer's bones Over allhorror and death like a pall Froreat hall wherein chained captives had knelt by the hundreds during festivals to have their heads hacked off by the priest-king in honor of Set, the Serpent-God of Stygia Somewhere near by had been the pit, dark and awful, wherein screa victims were fed to a nameless amorphic monstrosity which caend ered in a raded cult, whose votaries stamped his likeness on coins to pay the way of their dead over the great river of darkness of which the Styx was but the material shadow Shevatas had seen this likeness, on coins stolen froe was etched indelibly in his brain