Jandar of Callisto

2. THE GATE BETWEEN THE WORLDS

To this very hour I can remember the thrill of shock that went through me as I first gazed upon the gates of the dead city. I can remember catching my breath with amazement, and the prickle of awe that roughened my skin and tingled at my nape as I stared at the uncanny spectacle that lay before me, drenched in the silver glamor of a brilliant moon.

The very unexpectedness of the discovery added to the air of the supernatural that hung about that timeless moment. One moment ago I had been worming my way though the dense black jungle, and in the next I stood before the frowning gates of a fantastic stone city left over from another age!

The transition was so miraculous, so swift, so unexpected, that it was as if some unseen magician had conjured the city into being before my eyes. Still, frozen, timeless, bathed in the mystery of moonlight, the city seemed an apparition. I thought of the glimmering mirages of the desert, and of that persistent image of an unknown city the Italian mariners have seen for centuries, hovering above the waters of the Straits of Messina―Fata Morgana, the superstitious fisherfolk call the floating mirage, and to this day the scientists have yet to solve the baffling mystery of the illusion that has haunted those Straits from the age of the Crusaders to this day.

Strange and very beautiful was this unknown and ruined metropolis of the Cambodian jungles that lay before me. I stood, frozen with awe, my nerves prickling with the cold premonition of the supernatural, almost as if in another breath I expected the moonlit ruins to evaporate into darkness―to vanish as swiftly and as mysteriously as they had flickered into being.

There were conical and many-sided stone towers that loomed up into the star-gemmed sky, their sides heavy with sculpted faces that glared down at me with blind eyes. Walls were thickly graven with weird hieroglyphic symbols in a tongue unknown to me, perhaps unknown and unreadable by any living man. What lost wisdom, what forgotten science, what mysterious lore, lay hidden in those huge and cryptic symbols?

Well did I know that the trackless jungles of old Cambodia were whispered as the haunt of legend and marvel and mystery. I had heard of the baffling stone ruins which lay far to the north―the jungle-grown cities and temples known as Angkor Vat and Angkor Thom. For untold centuries the jungle had concealed those colossal ruins, those vinegrown temples left over from the mysterious reign of the little-known Khmer race who had so curiously vanished from the face of the earth ages before. Was this mystery metropolis yet another monument abandoned in unknown antiquity by the strange and forgotten people we knew only as the Khmer? Lost in the unexplored jungles, had I stumbled across the threshold of an age-old secret city left behind in time's remotest dawn?

The stone gates towered before me, covered with weird glyphs. From the lintel above the arch, a heavy face of cold sandstone stared down at me with an enigmatic expression. Controlling a little shiver of uncanny awe, I stared back at that stone mask. Broad cheeks, flat nose, thick lips, wide glaring eyes―it was not a face of smiling welcome, that much was certain.

Was it a trick of moonlight and shadow, or did the faint trace of a mocking smile lurk in the dim, shadowed corners of those stone lips? Was it an illusion of my overstrained imagination, or did I glimpse the flicker of an impersonal, aloof intelligence in those wide and staring eyes, and―a chill, remote amusement?

What secret lore of unknown antiquity lay hidden behind the frozen smile of that guardian deity or demon whose face was set high above the gates of the lost city? In the cold glory of the moonlight, the stone metropolis was like a labyrinth, all black inky shadow and faint rose sandstone.

A rose-red city, half as old as time ....

Unbidden, my memory conjured up that famous line from the old poem. Dimly I recalled that John William Burgon, the author of that poem, had been writing about the stone city of Petra in the deserts of Arabia. No matter: the line fit here just as well.

Almost without volition, my feet had carried me through those frowning portals, beneath the enigma of that stone guardian with its mocking smile, and into the rubbish-choked courtyard that lay beyond.

All about me rose a forest of megalithic stone towers, built of colossal blocks hewn from solid sandstone the color of pale coral or of the faint skies of early dawn glimpsed over the gliding floods of the Orinoco. Whatever elder wisdom this vanished race had possessed, they certainly knew the secrets of stone construction. Blocks of stone weighing tons apiece were so closely fitted together to build these soaring walls and tapering spires that they needed no concrete to hold them firm. And measureless centuries of wind and rain had dislodged but few of the great building stones.

I remembered that when the French explorer and naturalist Mouhot, the first to stumble upon the vast ruins of Angkor to the north, had questioned the natives about the mystery cities, they told him they were the work of many-armed giants. It had been Pra-Eun, sorceror-king of the Dawn Age, who had commanded captive titans to raise the walls of the ancient city. Gazing now upon these mighty towers and megalithic bastions, I could well believe them to be the work of primal colossi enslaved by some mighty magician from an unknown age.

I could not resist the urge of my curiosity, and began to explore the ruined metropolis. I prowled through stone-paved streets, down long galleries where weird and monstrous caryatids bore up stone architraves carved with snarling devilmasks and beaked demons. Time hung heavy here; its invisible weight pressed on my soul. There was an almost palpable aura of an immense and unbelievable antiquity that hung about these moldering ruins from time's dawn. I felt the shudder of superstitious awe go through me. It was as if I walked through a shadowy necropolis where gods themselves lay buried; as if with every step I risked awakening mummified wizards or unseen guardians who had slumbered the ages away, and into whose time-haunted precincts mine was the first intruder's step.

Who were the mysterious Khmer kings who had built these sprawling metropoli of ancient stone? Where had they gone, leaving behind this wilderness of carved stone, the haunt of shadows and silence, a kingdom given over to the whispering dominion of the patient spider? And I thought of the lost and ocean-whelmed cities of elder Atlantis and prehistoric Mu . . . of the stone enigma of the Ponape ruins, which A. Merritt had described in the opening pages of his great romance, The Moon Pool.

With every step I ventured deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of aeon-lost and time-forgotten mysteries. A fragment of a verse by Clark Ashton Smith came to my memory:

... search, in cryptic galleries, The void sarcophagi, the broken urns Of many a vanished avatar; Or haunt the gloom of crumbling pylons vast In temples that enshrine the shadowy past.

Were these dim colonnades and glyphic walls and megalithic temples the work of the long-lost Khmer kings? I knew the remains of Angkor Vat were among the most curious and baffling ruins on earth, and that science has for many years sought to solve the enigma of their antiquity. But I knew, as well, that the vast stone wreckage of Angkor lay far to the north of this place, in the jungles north of the Tonle Sap, on the right banks of the river Siem Reap, a tributary of which fed into the great lake at Cambodia's heart. Never had I heard of any mysterious ruined cities this far south―unless ....

Could this stone city be long-lost, legendary Arangkor itself, the primal city from which the mighty line of the Khmer kings had sprung in mythic aeons before the beginning of time? I knew something of the weird epic literature of this mystery-haunted corner of oldest Asia; science had never found the lost and secret city wherein the first of the Khmer kings had arisen to rule the dawn age. Could this shadowy city of moonlight and silence be the fabulous and antique Arangkor? Why, even the Khmer themselves had forgotten the whereabouts of the cradle of their own race .

... long-lost and legended Arangkor, Thou age-forgotten City of the Dawn, Wherein doth stand the Gate Between The Worlds, Handwork of ancient Gods whose very names Are long since silence on the lips of men ....

Dim and tall, a column of throbbing radiance thrust above the lost city into the star-gemmed sky.

Enthralled in the crumbling mystery of lost Arangkor (as in my heart I somehow knew this forgotten city to be), I had forgotten the beacon of pulsing light that had caught my attention in the jungle, and which had called me to the stone gates of the ruined metropolis like a beckoning finger of lambent light.

Now, as I glimpsed it above the conical towers, I remembered how I had come here to investigate that light. And instantly caution awoke within me. I had, for some unknown length of time, been prowling the rubbish-choked avenues and squares of the dead city, careless of the noise my boots made, not thinking it possible that ruins of such evident neglect and antiquity could be inhabited.

But now I froze, cursing my carelessness. That throbbing beam of mysterious light was no natural phenomenon, surely. Some stranger shared the lonely streets of the dead city with me, and it was yet to be determined if he were friend or foe!

I went forward more cautiously now, watching every step, my machete in my hand like a sword.

The pillar of pulsing luminance rose from the very center of lost Arangkor. As I made my way towards that glowing beacon, I puzzled over its cause and purpose. Straight up into the midnight sky it blazed, that ray of pale light that throbbed and flickered and throbbed. Looking up, I saw the yellow spark of distant Jupiter directly overhead. I thought nothing of this at the time.

I came at last into a great stone-paved plaza at the very heart of the deserted city.

Stone colossi squatted in a vast ring about that which lay at the center of this plaza. Tailor-fashion they sat, raising many arms, hands clutching meaningless attributes, skulls, keys, flowers, wheels, swords, and stylized thunderbolts. Heavy stone faces glared inward to the unknown thing at the center of the circle of gods: some howled, some smiled, some wept, some leered, and some looked down at the source of the column of radiance with the placid and immobile features of a Buddha.

Nowhere could I see a sign of life, although my eyes searched the shadows that clung about the bases of the circle of stone gods.

I went forward between two of the stone titans and looked at last upon the source of the mysterious light. A gasp broke from my lips.

In the very center of the great plaza, encircled by the towering carven gods, lay―a well!

Wide was the mouth of this well; a man could fall therein with ease; and that it descended to a very great depth I did not question. Sunk deep in the stone pave was this curious well, and its margin was a thick lip of some pallid translucent stone that reminded me of milky jade, although were that lucent substance truly jade, the mineral must have been the most gigantic piece of worked jade known to archaeology. Fifteen feet across from side to side the mouth of the great well stretched, and the lip of the well was ten feet broad, set flush with the stone floor of the plaza. The imagination reels, imagining the boulder that had yielded up so huge a single slab of the semiprecious mineral. A very mountain of jade would have been required! For I could see no jointure in all that flawless circle of milky stone: incredible, almost impossible, but it was all o f one piece.

Up from the mouth of the jade well the mighty beam of radiance shone. Fifteen feet across, the throbbing pillar of luminance sprang into the night sky, pointing, as it seemed, at the distant spark of Jupiter.

The column of light had only the faintest suggestion of color. Dull white, a cold hue as of moonbeams, the colossal ray rose up from the bottom of the world to fling a shining spear against the citadels of the stars.

Rhythmically, a wave of sparkling gold ascended the luminous shaft of that beam of pallid radiance. A mist of gold-dust, a calyx of powdered gold, a tissue of flickering, gemmy golden sparks―I blinked in fascination and awe at the mysterious phenomenon. The ripples of gold light were what gave the illusion that the shaft of light dimmed and grew brighter, dimmed and again grew brighter. The secret of the throbbing rhythm I had glimpsed from afar was solved―one mystery, at least!

For when the wave of sparkling gold particles went gliding up the dim shaft of the beam, the beam seemed brighter through the added brilliance of the fiery mist.

But what were those rising flakes of golden fire? What unseen and unimaginable lamp deep in the bowels of the planet thrust forth this shining beacon against the stars? And why?

Incautiously, I stepped forward to investigate this luminous enigma.

As I stepped out on the shimmering ring of milky jade, I lost my footing. For the lucent substance was as slick as oiled glass!

I fell headlong, my machete flying, the knapsack slipping from my shoulders to thud against the sleekstone.

And now I saw something I had not noticed earlier. The broad ring of milky, luminous stone was ever so slightly concave.

The jade lip of this mysterious well sloped inward towards the mouth, and I was helplessly sliding into the throbbing beam of light that speared up against the midnight sky!

My palms struck out but slid futilely, unable to stay my progress. Frantically I groped for a handhold, but there was none that I could find or feel.

Feet first, I slid into the golden, pulsing glory of the ray

Strange―strange beyond words―is the uncanny experience I must next relate.

My vague, distorted memories of that flashing and timeless moment are blurred and meaningless.

For months I have pondered over the sensory record stamped in my mind. At length I believe I have pieced together some explanation of what followed as I slid down the sloping mouth of that mysterious well, straight into the throbbing beam of luminance. Perhaps my imagination has contributed something to the account I must give you now; perhaps remembered fragments from a hundred science fiction stories I have read have gone into the crucible of memory, and result in the following description of that which cannot adequately be described. If so, so be it! But here, as accurately as I can picture the experience in the inadequate medium of written words, is what seemed to occur.

A blinding light enveloped my body.

I squeezed my eyes shut against the awful brightness, but to no avail! The blaze of radiance pierced through me. I could feel it beating against my flesh. I could feel it warm against my very bones, like desert sunlight.

Then all bodily sensation left me. Numb, I seemed to float like a cloud of insubstantial vapor amid a glory of dazzling light. But―no―a ghost of sensation filtered to me through the shining splendor.

I felt a storm of fiery particles beating against naked flesh. The particles I had seen before―the flakes of golden fire that swept up the column of the ray? I cannot say; I will never know.

Like a drumming hail they beat upon me from beneath, and I felt myself rising, rising up that column of shining glory . . . faster and ever faster, until my velocity became a soundless rush of hurricane force.

I could not see, I could not speak. I felt bodiless, devoid of substance, without weight. A ghost of streaming mist, impelled upwards by some unthinkable force, I hurtled into the sky.

Had the unknown radiance, in some manner inexplicable to me, sundered the bonds of interatomic energy, the binding force that holds matter together? Was I now but a dematerialized cloud of racing neutrons and electrons, driven up that beam of radiant force by some ionic thrust?

Science would scoff at the thought. But I know of no other explanation whereby to explain the inexplicable.

Now I was vaguely conscious of intensest cold―a supra-arctic cold such as might lie in the dark abyss between the stars.

There was a moment of utter blackness.

A sensation of incredible speed, as though I now traveled faster than light itself.

The cold bit deep―the blackness closed about me―I flew like a meteor through unguessable immensities at the speed of thought itself.

Ahead of me I caught one flashing glimpse―incredible sight! A colossal, banded globe of brown and orange flame, with a cyclopean eye of fire!

A cold, dead orb of jagged rock swung towards me, like the frozen, airless satellite of some planetary giant.

For a single flashing instant I stared down―or up? ―at splintered mountains of frozen black rock―valleys of frozen blue methane snow―a jumbled, jagged, wintry wilderness in which a man could not survive for a second.

Then the features of the frozen stone orb hurtling towards me with unthinkable velocity blurred.

Changed―in a miraculous transformation)

I caught one single swift flying glimpse of thick jungles, shining rivers, cloud-crested mountains, glittering barbaric cities―and the next instant I felt as if the walls of the universe had closed with a deafening crash upon the flying mote of light that was myself.

And I knew no more.