Part 12 (1/2)

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 prehistoric 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 glimmered 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 batlike 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 waken

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 for he 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

And frolade and deeper into the fastnesses, Conan knew that the spearmen had fled, wildly The footprints overlay one another, they weaved blindly a suddenness the hastening Cile onto a hill-like rock which sloped steeply, to break off abruptly in a sheer precipice forty feet high And soht it to be a great black gorilla Then he saw that it was a giant blackfro cry, the creature lifted huge hands and rushed toward hiave no heed to Conan's shout as he charged, eyes rolled up to display the whites, teeth glea with the horror that madness always instils in the sane, Conan passed his sword through the blackthe hooked hands that clawed at hie of the cliff

For an instant he stood looking down into the jagged rocks belohere lay N'Gora's spearmen, in limp, distorted attitudes that told of crushed lie black flies buzzed loudly above the blood-splashed stones; the ants had already begun to gnaw at the corpses On the trees about sat birds of prey, and a jackal, looking up and seeing the man on the cliff, slunk furtively away

For a little space Conan stood motionless Then he wheeled and ran back the way he had corass and bushes, hurdling creepers that sprawled snakelike across his path His sword swung low in his right hand, and an unaccustoned in the jungle was not broken The sun had set, and great shadows rushed upward froantic shades of lurking death and grilimmer of scarlet and blue steel No sound in all the solitude was heard except his own quick panting as he burst froht of the river shore

He saw the galley shouldering the rotten wharf, the ruins reeling drunkenly in the gray half-light