by Clark Ashton Smith
In these after-days, when all things are touched with insoluble doubt
and dereliction, I am not sure of the purpose that had taken us into
that little visited land. I recall, however, that we had found explicit
mention, in a volume of which we possessed the one existing copy, of
certain vast prehuman ruins lying amid the bare plateaus and stark
pinnacles of the region. How we had acquired the volume I do not know;
but Sebastian Polder and I had given our youth and much of our manhood
to the quest of hidden knowledge; and this book was a compendium of all
things that men have forgotten or ignored in their desire to repudiate
the inexplicable.
We, being enamored of mystery, and seeking ever for the clues that
material science has disregarded, pondered much upon those pages
written in an antique alphabet. The location of the ruins was clearly
stated, though in terms of an obsolete geography; and I remember our
excitement when we had marked the position on a terrestrial globe. From
the very first we were eager to behold the alien city, and certain
of our ability to find it. Perhaps we wished to verify a strange and
fearful theory which we had formed regarding the nature of the earth's
primal inhabitants; perhaps we sought to recover the buried records
of a lost science ... or perhaps there was some other and darker
objective....
I recall nothing of the first stages of our journey, which must have
been long and arduous. But I recall distinctly that we travelled for
many days amid the bleak, treeless uplands that rose rapidly like a
tiered embankment toward the range of high pyramidal summits guarding
our destination. Our guide was a native of the country, sodden and
taciturn, with intelligence little above that of the llamas which
carried our supplies. He had never visited the ruins, but we had been
assured that he knew the way, which was a secret remembered by few of
his fellow countrymen. Rare and scant was the local legendry concerning
the place and its builders; and, after many queries, we could add
nothing to the knowledge gained from the immemorial volume. The city,
it seemed, was nameless; and the region about it was untrodden by man.
Desire and curiosity raged within us like a calenture; and we gave no
heed to the hazards and travails of exploration. Over us stood the
eternal azure of vacant heavens, matching in their desolation the empty
landscape. The route steepened; and above us now was a wilderness
of cragged and chasmed rohk, where nothing dwelt but the sinister
wide-winged condors.
Often we lost sight of certain eminent peaks that had served us for
landmarks. But it seemed that our guide knew the way, as if led by an
instinct more subtle than memory or intelligence; and at no time did
he hesitate. At intervals we came to the broken fragments of a paved
road that had formerly traversed the whole of this difficult region;
broad, cyclopean flags of gneiss, channeled as if by the storms of
cycles older than human history. And in some of the deeper chasms we
saw the eroded piers of great bridges that had spanned them in other
time. These ruins reassured us; for in the primordial volume there was
mention of a highway and of mighty bridges, leading to the fabulous
city.
Polder and I were exultant; and yet I think that we both shivered with
a curious terror when we tried to read certain inscriptions that were
still deeply engraved on the worn stones. No living man, tho erudite in
all the tongues of Earth, could have deciphered those characters; and
perhaps it was their very alienage that frightened us. We had sought
diligently during laborious years for all that transcends the dead
level of mortality through age or remoteness or strangeness; we had
longed ardently for the esoteric and bizarre; but such longing was not
incompatible with tear and repulsion. Better than those who had walked
always in the common paths, we knew the perils that might attend our
exorbitant and solitary researches.
Often we had debated, with variously fantastic conjectures, the enigma
of the mountain builded city. But, toward our journey's end, when the
vestiges of that pristine people multiplied around us, we fell into
long periods of silence, sharing the taciturnity of our stolid guide.
Thoughts came to us that were overly strange for utterance; the chill
of elder aeons entered our hearts from the ruins--and did not depart.
We toiled on between the desolate rocks and the sterile heavens,
breathing an air that became thin and painful to the lungs, as if with
some admixture of cosmic ether. At high noon we reached an open pass,
and saw before and above us, at the end of a long and quickly opened
perspective, the city that had been described as an unnamed ruin in a
volume antedating all other known books.
The place was built on an inner peak of the range, surrounded by
snowless summits little sterner and loftier than itself. On one side
the peak fell in a thousand-foot precipice from the overhanging
ramparts; on another, it was terraced with wild cliffs; but the third
side, facing toward us, was a steep acclivity with broken-down scarps
and chimneys that would offer small difficulty to expert mountaineers.
The rock of the whole mountain was strangely ruinous and black; but
the city walls, tho gapped and worn to a like dilapidation, were
conspicuous at a distance of leagues.
Polder and I beheld the bourn of our world-wide search with thoughts
and emotions which we did not voice. The Indian made no comment,
pointing impassively toward the far summit with its crown of ruins. We
hurried on, wishing to complete our journey by daylight; and plunging
into an abysmal valley, we began at mid-afternoon the ascent of the
slope toward the city.
We were impressed anew by the abnormal and manifold cleavages of the
granite. It was like climbing amid the overthrown and fire-blasted
blocks of a Titan citadel. Everywhere the slope was rent into huge,
obliquely angled masses, often partly vitrified, which made the ascent
a more arduous problem than we had expected. Plainly, at some former
time, the stone had been subjected to the action of heat; and yet there
were no volcanic craters amid the nearby mountains. Puzzling greatly, I
recalled a passage in the old volume, hinting ambiguously at the dark
fate that had long ago destroyed the city's inhabitants. But from this
passage I could still draw no definite conclusion: for the ideation was
too fantastic to be understood as anything more than a dubious figure
of speech.
We had left our three llamas at the slope's bottom, merely taking with
us provisions for a night. Thus unhampered, we made fair progress in
spite of the ever-varying obstacles offered by the shattered scarps.
After a while we came to the hewn steps of a stairway mounting to the
summit; but the steps had been wrought for the feet of colossi, and, in
many places, they were part of the heaved and tilted ruin; so they did
not greatly facilitate our climbing.
The sun was still high above the western pass behind us; and for this
reason, as we went on, I was much surprised by a sudden deepening of
the char-like blackness on the rocks. Turning, I saw that several
greyish vapory masses, which might have been either cloud or smoke,
were drifting idly about the summits that overlooked the pass; and one
of these masses rearing like a limbless figure, upright and colossal,
had interposed itself between us and the sun.
Sebastian and the guide had also noted this phenomenon. Clouds were
almost unheard-of amid those mountains in summer; and the presence
of smoke would have been equally hard to explain. Moreover, the grey
masses were wholly detached from each other and showed a peculiar
opacity and sharpness of outline. At second glance they did not really
resemble any cloud forms we had ever seen; for about them there was a
baffling suggestion of weight and solidity. Moving sluggishly into the
heavens above the pass, they preserved their original contours and
their separateness. They seemed to swell and tower, coming toward us
on the blue air from which, as yet, no lightest stirring of wind had
reached us. Floating thus, they maintained the rectitude of massive
columns or of giants marching on a broad plain.
I think we all felt an alarm that was none the less urgent for its
vagueness. Somehow, from that instant, it seemed that we were penned
up by unknown powers and were cut off from all possibility of retreat.
We had ventured into a place of hidden peril--and the peril was upon
us. In the movement of the strange clouds there was something alert,
deliberate--and implacable. Polder spoke with a sort of horror in his
voice, uttering the thought which had already occurred to me.
"They are the sentinels who guard this region--and they have espied us!"
We heard a harsh cry from the Indian. Following his gaze, we saw that
several of the unnatural cloud-shapes had appeared on the summit toward
which we were climbing, above the megalithic ruins. Some arose half
hidden by the walls, as if from behind a breastwork; others stood, as
it were, on the topmost towers and battlements, bulking in portentous
menace, like the cumuli of a thunder-storm.
Then, with terrifying swiftness, many more of the cloud-presences
towered simultaneously from the four quarters, emerging from behind the
gaunt peaks or assuming sudden visibility in mid-air. With equal and
effortless speed, as if convoked by an unheard command, they gathered
in converging lines upon the eyre-like ruins. We the climbers, and the
whole slope about us and the valley below, were plunged in a twilight
weird and awesome as that of central eclipse.
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 flood-gates 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 supernatural 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
forevermore 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 of rock. The air
had turned sharp with the coldness of nightfall in a mountain land. My
body ached with a hundred bruises and my right forearm was limp and
useless when I tried to raise myself. A dark mist of horror stifled
my thoughts. Struggling to my feet with pain-racked effort, I called
aloud, though I knew that none would answer me. Then, striking match
after match, I searched the chasm and found myself, as I had expected,
alone. Nowhere was there any trace of my companions: they had vanished
utterly--as clouds vanish.
Somehow, by night, with a broken arm, I must have climbed from the
steep fissure, I must have made my way down the frightful mountainside
and out of that namelessly haunted and guarded land. I remember that
the sky was clear, that the stars were undimmed by any semblance of
cloud; and that somewhere in the valley I found one of our llamas,
still laden with its stock of provisions....
Plainly I was not pursued by the Guardians. Perhaps they were concerned
only with the warding of that mysterious primal city from human
intrusion. Never shall I learn the secret of those ruinous walls and
crumbling keeps, nor the fate of my companions. But still, through my
nightly dreams and diurnal visions, the dark Shapes move with the
tumult and thunder of a thousand storms; and my soul is crushed into
the earth with the burden of their imminence; and They pass over me
with the speed and vastness of vengeful gods; and I hear Their voices
calling like clarions in the sky, with ominous, world-shaking syllables
that the ear can never seize.