Under the Green Star

Chapter 1 THE BOOK FROM TIBET

As I sit writing these words, a weird sensation of unreality sweeps through my being.

Beyond the bay window before which my desk is drawn I can see green fields and tall trees—hickory and mountain laurel, pine and yellow poplar. And beyond those fields and hills lies the waking world, filled with busy and teeming cities, with ordinary people who lead everyday lives—lives that seldom touch on mystery and marvel.

Which is real—the fantastic adventure I feel compelled to relate—or the world beyond my windows? Have I only dreamed that I have stood where no man of my race has ever set foot before, or is this dull world of tax returns and ball-point pens, of air pollution and TV talk shows, itself but a dream? Are both worlds real?

Are—neither?

Perhaps I could begin my story in earliest youth, when wide reading brought the first intimations of the occult within the reach of my speculative imagination. But—no—I shall begin this narrative with the first moment I took into my hands that immeasurably ancient and incredibly precious book from the secret heart of Asia.

The long-dead hand that inscribed these yellowed and wrinkled vellum pages in queer crooked characters called this book the Kan Chan Ga. For a thousand years it lay in a jeweled box of gold in the most secret archives of the holy Potala—the Temple-Palace of the Dalai Lama in hidden Lhasa itself. Before that … no one can say for certain. The Commentaries say it was found in a prehistoric stone tomb in the foothills of the Trans-Himalayas long centuries before even the first God-King ruled from the Lotus Throne—but no one really knows. There were empires before Egypt, and cities older than Ur, and the sages whispered of lost lands and forgotten realms long before Plato dreamed of Atlantis and set those dreams down to excite the imagination of men forever.

The title, Kan Chan Ga, is not Tibetan. Neither are the odd, crooked little rune-like letters wherewith the vellum pages are thickly lined. The Commentaries say the book is written in Old Uighur, a language that was forgotten before Narmer the Lion brought the Two Lands together under one crown and ruled as the first Pharaoh. And certain obscure and ancient texts hint there was once an Uighur Empire amidst the trackless sands of the Gobi in Central Asia … long, long ago when all that desert was a blooming garden, before the Poles changed. I neither know nor care.

The book cost me two hundred thousand dollars and seven years. When holy Lhasa fell to the invading hordes from Red China, and the Dalai Lama fled into exile in India, the Kan Chan Ga, and certain other priceless treasures, were taken into hiding. In those confused, horrible days, when the snowy peaks of ancient Tibet were crimson with the flames of burning lamaseries and scarlet with the blood of murdered sages, the book was lost. It was to have traveled west with the Panchan Lama and his retinue, but in the snowstorms, with the roar of machine guns echoing from the rocky cliffs, one party of lamas went astray. The book was hidden in the crypts beneath a minor lamasery of little consequence, from which, after years of searching, my agents found and rescued it.

And now I held it in my hands … the book that the most ancient sages speak of with awe and reverence as The Key of The Liberation of The Soul …

My father invested wisely and well in the Market and left me with a private fortune large enough to permit me to indulge my curiosity in the occult sciences.

I am thirty years old, tall, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, and strongly-built. I have blond hair and gray eyes and am accounted a handsome man. But strength and health and handsomeness are a mockery to me, for since I was six years old I have not taken a single step without the help of mechanical aids.

All my father’s fortune could not purchase a cure for polio in the twenty years before the perfection of the Salk vaccine.

Being a cripple, it was perhaps natural that I should turn my attention inward. The lore of the occult attracted me from my earliest youth. I had the finest tutors, and mastered Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Hebrew. The ancient Eastern science called eckankar—soul-travel, the projection of the so-called “astral body”—fascinated me. In my search for the secrets of this lost art, this forgotten science, I went far. A thousand books hinted of the secret, but none could reveal it.

In that strangest of all books, the Bardo Thodol, I first heard of the old book in Uighur. The Bardo Thodol, which may be described as a geography of the travels of the soul after death and before birth, whispered of the Kan Chan Ga. Crumbling scrolls from an old abandoned monastery in the Sinkiang province of China, smuggled out through Hong Kong, told me more. A hundred agents searched the Orient at my behest, and at length the book was unearthed. The seventh of the “living gods” of Tibet—the Gupcha Lama himself—translated the Uighur for me, on my promise that the sacred book would be returned to the Dalai Lama once I possessed the wisdom that I sought—This has now been done.

I read the translation of the odd, crooked characters with an inner excitement that my reader can only dimly imagine. If the secret lay in these ancient pages, then I, who had not taken an unaided step in twenty-four years, could travel the earth as swift-winged as thought itself. Unseen, I could walk the thronged bazaars of Rangoon—peer up at the smiling enigma of the Sphinx by moonlight gaze upon the carven stone ruins of jungle-grown Angkor Vat—explore the mysterious ruins of elder and cryptic Tiahuanaco amidst the plateaus of the Andes.

Bit by bit, the secret emerged from the strange manuscript. Man is more than body and mind and soul, the nameless sage of the Gobi had written. His nature is sevenfold: the animal flesh, the material body itself; the vitalizing life-force that animates that flesh; the ego that is the conscious “I” of every man; the memory, that contains a record of all that each man has seen and felt and known: the astral body, the vehicle of the higher soul-levels on the second plane; the etheric body, that is the chalice contained within the astral vehicle; and, seventh and last, the immortal soul itself, that is the precious flame within the chalice.

Subtly linked together are these seven selves, which make up the individual man. In deep sleep or in hypnotic trance, the astral body sometimes … wanders … causing strange dreams of far-off places and visions of distant friends. But only a stern discipline can release the etheric body and the soul it contains, together with the conscious ego. That was the secret I had sought so long; and I stood upon its threshold at last.

Night after night, mind-weary from the occult disciplines I had practiced, I lay in my bed and stared wistfully up at the stars. If I could master the ancient art of soul-travel, no more would I be chained and earthbound, locked in a helpless, crippled prison of flesh. I would be free … free as few men have ever been … and how I hungered for that freedom!

Day after day I practiced the inner concentration, the “Loosening of the Bonds.” Few even of the holy sages of old Tibet had ever in truth mastered eckankar—but few of them had been driven by the motive that goaded me on.

I shall not bore my reader with a description of my labors. Nor shall I tell of the heartbreaking moments of failure and despair that overcame me at times. The task was long and arduous … it is no easier to train the muscles of the body to Olympic skills, than to train the mind and soul and spirit in this occult science. But at last the day came when I deemed myself ready for the experiment.

Having fasted and performed certain austerities and calmed my mind with the recitation of certain mantras, I informed my housekeeper that on no account was I to be disturbed, and locked myself within the upper portion of my ancestral house which served as my private quarters and library.

The good woman was accustomed to this sort of behavior. My quarters were equipped with a kitchenette and pantry, and many times in the past I had secluded myself for days on end behind locked doors while busied in my researches. I impressed upon her that she was not to interrupt me for any reason.

Emptying my mind of all trivial thoughts, I stretched out on a soft, comfortable sofa and composed myself as if for slumber. Closing my eyes, I visualized a black sphere. It hovered before my mind’s eye exact in every detail, almost as if it were a material object. My concentration was focused upon that orb of darkness with such intensity that, ere long, I was unaware of outside sounds. Then I began to will myself into the deepest trance. I began to lose all awareness of my own body; all outer sensation faded; no longer could I feel the faint brush of moving air against my face, or hear the beating of my own pulse, or feel the pressure of my crippled body against the soft fabric of my couch. All of my attention was turned inward now.

Next I visualized the black sphere as not a globular object, but an illusion—I saw it as the black, circular mouth of a tunnel, and down that endless tunnel I imagined myself traveling, until I was swallowed up in unrelieved darkness.

Deeper and deeper I descended until at length I perceived the faintest spark of light ahead, like a star against the breast of the night, like the far, dim opening at the end of the tunnel. I drifted toward it at ever-increasing speeds, until I seemed to hurtle through the black hollow darkness at an inconceivable velocity.

I emerged from darkness into dim ruby light.

For a moment I could make nothing of my surroundings. I seemed to be enclosed in a rectangular box of considerable depth, whose floor was drowned in deep gloom: and whose upper levels were awash in faint red luminosity.

Then, with a strange, tingling shock of surprise, I recognized my surroundings. I was in the very room wherein I had immersed myself in the sleep-like trance … but floating near the ceiling!

Many hours had passed, for early afternoon had given way to the hour of sunset, and the last level beams shone redly through the windows of the western wall.

Gazing down from my height I saw … myself.

I lay stretched out on a couch, my arms folded upon my chest, my face waxen-pale and curiously unfamiliar to me. It came to me then that I had never before actually seen my own face as others saw it, but always in a mirror or through the medium of some other reflective surface. Always before I had seen my face reversed, in reflection: but now I saw myself as the rest of the world saw me. It seemed a trivial difference; but it was oddly stranger than it should have been. My face was … empty; blank and expressionless.

Was this because I lay in trance-like sleep, and all of my facial muscles—which in my waking moments were in tension, giving my features what we call “expression” were now completely relaxed? Or was the strange blankness of my features due to the fact that my body was now—untenanted?

I cannot answer now, nor could I then.

Curiously, I turned my gaze upon my own being, and found that to the eyes of my immaterial self I was an invisible spirit. Indeed, now that I began to accustom myself to this peculiar state, I felt oddly unaware of myself in every way. A man in the flesh may strip himself naked and yet be aware of his bodily envelope in a thousand small ways—the roughness of a carpet against his bare soles—the chill wind blowing against naked flanks—the thousand little internal sensations of the body, tongue resting against teeth, dryness of throat, an itching finger. None of these I felt in my new spirit-state: it was as if I did not possess a body at all.

And, of course, that was the truth of the matter.

I had liberated myself from my body.

I was—free!

Chapter 2 BEYOND THE MOON

To the windows I drifted. I know of no other term whereby to describe the mode of locomotion I employed. I did not stride or even swim through the air: I … moved. In my bodiless state, the whim was father to the deed. I but thought of going over to look out of the window, and found myself there without any sensation of having propelled myself thither.

I gazed out. The sun was all but gone now, mere guttering embers burning amid the distant pines. Suddenly, I wanted to be out in the open air … and again found that I had traversed an interval of space with no sensation of having physically moved. I hovered far above the lawn, which lay drowned in darkness below. Had I been here in the body, I should have experienced the giddiness of vertigo; now I felt nothing. I hung in the air thirty feet above the wet grass, but it was like a dream of flight, rather than the physical experience.

A sudden intoxication seized me: I could go anywhere—do anything! I rose to a great height with the swiftness of thought. The hilly Connecticut countryside lay spread out beneath me, fields and forests and the checkered farms with their sown fields. The rooftops of the nearest community, Harritton, were visible from my height; I could see the white steeple of the Congregational church, the yellow marquee lights of the cinema, the red neon sign of the Cozy Oak Bar and Grill, the luminous funnels of moving headlights along the highway leading to New Haven.

At this height—in the flesh!—I would have felt intense cold, the pressure of great winds—but I felt nothing. Nor could I hear a sound, not even the beating of my own heart or the faint hollow roaring of blood moving through the arteries of the inner ear, that seashell sound that is the closest to absolute silence man ever knows.

Why should I be able to see and not to hear? True, I was as immaterial as thought itself, and sound waves passed through me without the slightest obstacle—but was not this true of light waves as well? And it was truly light by which I saw, not the ghostly luminance of some astral sun, but the light of the ordinary world. Why was I opaque to light, but transparent to sound or matter? The ancient pages of the Kan Chan Ga said nothing of this. And to this day I have no explanation to offer; I can but set down exactly what I experienced, and leave it to others wiser than myself to explain.

I looked down. The woods bordering my property lay below, all but invisible in the darkness. Within those woods was a narrow stream by whose banks I had played as a child before polio struck me down. A whim bore me there without the slightest sensation of motion. The darkness under the overhanging pine boughs was inky, but the moon was beginning to rise and a dim silver radiance pervaded the place. The stream was wider than I remembered, and the banks more deeply cut—but that should be the case, considering the years that had passed.

A fat raccoon was washing its food in the gliding waters. I watched it with delight. Had I been present in the body, the wary little fellow would have vanished in the bushes on the instant: now, although it paused, to rear up and peer around with bright eyes gleaming in its comic, black-masked face, it showed no sign of being aware of my presence.

Like this fat, furry little inhabitant of the woods, I, too, was free! I could go where I would, and no walls or barrier of steel could hinder my passage.

Behind me, in the great house, my body lay in deep sleep. My heartbeat had slowed by this time, my body temperature had dropped, and my breathing was shallow. To leave my body far behind would not cause it harm in any way, so the Kan Chan Ga assured me. Were I to spend hours, or even days in this insubstantial state, I could return to my body in confidence that it had suffered in no way from the departure of its tenant. In the deep trance state in which it now lay, the fires of life burned very low. There were minimal demands on that store of vitality in this state; to remain away for days or even weeks would not mean that I would return to find a gaunt, starved corpse.

Nor did my exertions while in this astral state cause any drain of energy. I was essentially disembodied thought—free spirit—and I drew upon cosmic sources of energy as yet unstudied by Western science.

The moon was rising now; it glowed like a shield of pure silver through the black branches. A sudden heady intoxication seized me—I could travel wherever I might—to the very moon itself, if the whim pleased me!

But, no—men of my race had walked the desiccated powdery plains of that shining sphere—why should I, in the perfect freedom of my spirit-state, go where other men could travel?

I gazed beyond the moon to where the ruddy spark of Mars burned like a dim coal—Mars! The goal of the human imagination for untold centuries—I could travel there, if I willed, with the unthinkable swiftness of thought itself! What matter the vast distances of interplanetary space: a million miles or eight millions are naught to the unleashed spirit!

Upon the very thought, my soul lifted with joy. To walk the surface of another planet—to go where no man of my world had yet been in all the ages of infinite time! Vague thoughts of the books I had read with such fascination in my boyhood came back to me—memories of old Edgar Rice Burroughs and his unforgettable Martian adventure classics—now I, too, like John Carter, could stride the dead sea bottoms of mysterious and romantic Barsoom!

Again, the whim was father to the deed. In a twinkling the Earth vanished beneath me and the blackness of space closed about my being. The moon flashed by in a dim dazzle of gray-silver, and the blurred red sphere swam up before me until it filled my vision. I drifted down toward it like one in a dream, and slowly came to rest on an illimitable dim plain of dry red sand and crumbling porous rock.

About me, stretching to a horizon that seemed strangely closer than Terrestrial horizons, I stared through the dim twilight of the Martian day. The sun was only a fierce, scorching, and intolerably brilliant star at this vast distance, and it shed little light on the red desert and the low ancient hills.

I gazed up, searching for the famous twin moons, and at length I found them. They were very much smaller than I had thought they would be, and very dim, almost invisible. I looked beyond them to the Earth I had left behind, and found it, a dim, remote blue star with a minute silvery companion.

Then I stared down at the dim-litten red sands beneath me. I sought to bend and touch the sands, but I had no bodily awareness at all and do not know if my spirit-self performed the action or not. This is very difficult to describe: I was not aware of having arms wherewith to reach, or a waist wherefrom to bend; and all that chanced was that my “level” sank until “I” was closer to the ground than before.

I next ascended and floated above the endless plain, searching for some feature—either the legendary canals the early astronomers had seen, or had thought they had seen—or the immense craters NASA had photographed from Mariner.

I saw neither … instead, I saw—a city!

Excitement flamed up within me, and I sank toward it.

It lay in the shelter of encircling hills, and the red sands lapped up to drift about its squares and to sift slowly into the streets. I stared about me with heartaching wonder. A city of tall, impossibly slender, incredibly graceful fluted towers with flaring tiers and swelling domes, all fashioned from some unknown and glistening stone, like pale golden marble, faintly veined with green. There were broad avenues and mighty forums and long shadowy arcades of slim columns, and on the slopes of the encircling hills, facing upon what had once been a broad seashore a billion years ago, were the husks of lovely villas.

I drifted like a ghost through the deserted city, wondering what sort of beings had dwelt in these empty palaces and what dreams they had dreamed, gazing up at the cold mockery of the stars. And in a small square I found at last a likeness of the long-gone dwellers of the seaside, metropolis, and gazed with wonder upon the slim, graceful statue of palest alabaster, that limned the likeness of a race that had died before the first Terrestrial mammal had risen from the primordial slime.

It was manlike, slender and impossibly tall, with a featureless oval for a head. Two of its several boneless limbs were lifted to the skies, and the smooth calque of its face was tilted on its long graceful neck, as if it stared up longingly at the stars it could never reach.

At the base of the statue was an inscription, but in no tongue known to me, a lovely, elaborated script full of curlicues and flourishes.

I turned from the slim, mournful, lovely thing restlessly: this city was a necropolis. Here reigned Death and only shadows drifted through these silent streets. I wandered on, floating above the domed villas, and through the column-fronted palaces, and found murals filled with the slender, faceless beings posed against fantastic gardens that had withered to dust aeons ago. Not even a bone had been left untouched by time.

Beyond, on the stone quays where once the blue waves of a forgotten sea broke in sheeted foam beneath the hurtling glory of the moons, I raised my sight to the stars that blazed like strewn diamonds on black velvet, far clearer and more brilliant than those that glitter through the watery atmosphere of my own world.

If I could traverse the abyss between the worlds, the stars themselves were not beyond my reach, and I had no fear of becoming lost in the star-sewn immensities of the universe, no fear of traveling so far I could not find my way back to that shell of flesh that lay slumbering on Earth. For the mere act of wishing my return would cause it, even if I had no conception of distance or direction.

So again I lifted up my sight … and a strange green star caught and held my attention.

Green it was, that distant spark, as a flame of emerald, and it blazed down steadily from its height as if beckoning to me … as if calling me from the illimitable vastnesses wherein it hung.

Why this particular star, out of the millions that jeweled the Martian night, seized my attention I cannot say. Perhaps it was only that green is a rare hue for stars and that I could not recall having ever seen a star of this strange color before. Or there may have been some other and far stranger reason for the fascination which now seized upon me—and of this I shall speak at another time and in another place.

Suffice it to say that floating there amid the impossibly slim towers of the Martian city, I was rapt and held by the flame of emerald green that blazed above me through the night. And I thought to myself—why not?—mere distance is no hurdle to a bodiless spirit—I could circumnavigate the Universe itself, if so I desired.

And I soared up from the barren surface of Mars and left the ghostly city behind me to its shadows and its immemorial memories, and flew out into the greater universe that lay beyond.

By now all conception of time had left me. In this bodiless spirit-realm, both time and space—distance and duration—were without real meaning, and I discovered that the awareness of passing time is only a habit of the flesh-bound consciousness, no more.

Thus I cannot say whether my flight to the Green Star was as swift as a flashing instant, or occupied some duration. I was not aware of any slightest sensation of motion. The dim red disk of Mars shrank and vanished beneath me; the fierce star-like beacon of the sun dwindled and was lost in the jeweled mists of clustered stars that gemmed the night. I flashed on through darkness in a strange dreamlike flight and it may have been an aeon—or an instant—before the Green Star swung before me like a tremendous globe of vernal flame.

For a long moment I floated there in space before the terrific orb of furious light.

Then a world swam into view out of the darkness—a planet, like the one whereon I had been born, or the one from whose surface I had flown hither, an instant or an aeon ago.

On sudden impulse, I directed my flight toward the dim, silvery orb whose surface was wreathed in lacy mists. Down through its atmosphere I flashed … down to the surface of a new and unknown world … and into an adventure more strange and perilous and thrilling than any other man has ever lived!

Chapter 3 WORLD OF THE GREEN STAR

And I found myself in the midst of an astounding scene, unlike any surroundings I had ever seen before.

Imagine a world whose skies are a dome of dim, pearly mists through which but faintly a sun like a sphere of incandescent emerald blazes.

A world of colossal trees—trees which loomed about me on all sides—trees of such unthinkable girth and height that beside their like the titanic Redwoods of California would dwindle to saplings—trees that must have towered two full miles into the misty, luminous air!

I had come to rest an enormous distance above the surface of this strange new world. Near me soared the vast bole of a tree taller than many Earthly mountains. Its trunk soared aloft, hidden from me by innumerable branches of comparable size—branches as broad as six-lane highways—from which burst an infinite number of strangely yellow leaves larger than men.

Below me, the trunk of this forest titan dwindled thousands of feet down until it also became obscured and finally concealed by the tangle of immense boughs and the thickness of innumerous leaves. I could see perhaps half a mile in every direction, but everywhere I looked my vision eventually ended in masses of pale yellow leaves or entangled oak-like boughs of enormous size. I felt like an ant amid Sequoiae, or a mote floating among the towers of Manhattan.

The rays of the Green Star above the mists shone down through the immense foliage whose yellow leaves filtered the light into a strange dim green-gold gloom.

In this mystic half-light I began to perceive forms of higher life. Perhaps six hundred feet from where I hovered, a scarlet reptile with a sawtoothed spine clung with sucker-feet to the underside of one colossal bough thrice the breadth of Broadway. The scarlet lizard itself was the size of twin Bengal tigers.

I caught a flicker of movement below me—a twinkle of jeweled brilliance, the glitter of gold, the sheen of sheeted opal—and in the next instant my attention was riveted upon the most fantastic steed and rider imaginable.

The steed was like a dragonfly—but larger than a Percheron. Four long narrow oval translucent wings flickered in the currents of air … wings like thin slices of glassy opal, veined with crawling threads of glistening jades.

A head like a glittering helmet of burnished gold, crowned with branching antennae of crimson velvet, soft as down; and, for eyes, the fabulous creature had two immense, curving, teardrop-shaped protuberances of faceted jet.

Its long, tapering, and cylindrical body was plated with overlapping fiat rings of flashing silver, powdered with dust of azure. Like the goblin steed of some impossible elf-knight, it flashed through the dim amber gloom on its undreamable mission!

Then my dazzlement woke to astonished awe—for I glimpsed tasseled, silken reins affixed to the base of the delicate antennae—a saddle of padded and sumptuous velvet belted about the torpedo-like torso of the winged creature—and seated therein—an elfin knight in truth!

Graceful—slim as a ballet dancer—feminine in his delicate beauty—the chevalier mounted upon this airy courser was all but nude. A cuirass of gilt leather formed a broad flat collar about his slim throat and shielded his hairless, girlish chest, tapering to join the girdle he wore low about his hips. Gems flashed and winked in the gilt leather—red, green, and indigo.

This elfin chevalier wore a strange, complicated helm of glittering glass: the design was vaguely like that of antique Japanese armor. A long gauzy plume of gossamer white floated back from the horns of this fantastical helm.

Beneath the helm, this face was elfin in its delicate beauty—large amber-golden eyes set aslant in a fine-boned, heart-shaped, point-chinned face. His skin was the mellow tone of old ivory and his mouth a dainty pink rosebud.

His shoulders and arms were bare, as were his long graceful legs, but he wore stiff brocade gauntlets, heavy with gold wire and flashing purple stones, and high swash-topped corsair boots of scarlet leather, with high gilt heels and jeweled buckles.

A long cloth of purple was wound about his supple loins, and attached to his warrior-harness he wore a long rapier like a curved glass needle.

As I hung in mid-air, stunned with amazement at this gorgeous vision, the glittering elf-knight on his dragonfly-steed flashed by me in a twinkling and was gone.

But in his track came yet another, this one cloaked in drifting veils of misty gray, his loincloth of deep blue, his helm of intricate and diamond-studded silver, his plume a wisp of shimmering gold.

The second rider bore a slim lance of sharp glass, from which a long banderole of sulphurous yellow, charged with a nine-pointed star of deep black, slowly uncoiled behind him in his flight.

He too flashed past me, and now I saw that the two elfin warriors were ascending to a higher level—perhaps to the immensely broad branch far above me.

They were the fore guard of a stately train, for now came three in blazing yellow surcoats, the black star on their breasts, their slim-featured faces masked behind visors of silver cloth, riding abreast like an honor guard.

And behind them, borne through the misty golden twilight like Titania in her chariot, came a delicate car of fluted pearl shaped like a scallop shell, drawn by four gigantic dragonflies. Throned therein on many-colored pillows was a man in a long narrow robe of fierce yellow with a spiky crown of black crystals on his brows and fathomless eyes of emerald flame, cold and intelligent and subtle. In his ungauntleted hand he bore a scepter like a rod of black crystal.

This aerial entourage ascended to the vast branch above me, and, drawn by a fascination I cannot describe, I floated on their heels—to a vision of supernal beauty transcending description.

For atop the broad level branch ran a great boulevard of gray stone. And half a mile away, where the bough met and joined with the colossal trunk of the forest giant, a city built of ten thousand jewels flashed and glittered in the crotch of the tremendous tree!

Thus I first looked upon the gemmy ramparts of Phaolon the Glorious—Jewel City of the Goddess-Queen—capital of the airy kingdom of the Laonese—wherein I was to find my heart, my destiny, and my own peculiar doom!

As one enmeshed in dream I followed the flying entourage to the landing place before the high-turreted gates of the Jewel City.

Their dragonfly steeds drifted to a landing, as did the team which drew the pearly chariot of the man in yellow robes who wore the spiky miter of flashing black crystals.

A party of fairy knights came forth to greet them with high ceremony. Elfin heralds in jeweled tabards like glittering tapestries flourished long, fluted silvery horns. An honor guard in colors of gold and emerald saluted stiffly and led the way through gates that blazed with turquoise and topaz … and I followed after, bedazzled by such beauty.

Into the faerie metropolis the party of visitors swept, and up a tall narrow staircase of shimmering crystals toward a towered edifice, like Queen Mab’s palace.

Drawn up to either side, the elfin populace watched, but with no cheering. Mute and sullen and unhappy were their expressions, or fiercely resentful, or tragic and bitter. It was as if a cruel and conquering emperor had arrived at their gates to demand utter surrender.

Into the mosque-domed palace they swept with regal and imperious stride. Through a tall, Gothic-pointed gateway studded with immense, glittering jewels they swaggered, the gaunt, cold-eyed man with the crown of spiky black crystals striding before them with the proud stance of a conqueror. And at their heels, unseen, I flitted like an invisible spirit attendant on the presence of some master sorcerer.

The visiting party at length entered a vast, domed audience hall, floored with milky jade and roofed with a vaulted dome of lucent ruby through which struck level shafts of burning and sanguine splendor.

Here was assembled a princely company, begowned and begemmed in fantastic panoply—the court of some Princess of Faerie—the Hall of a Goblin Queen! They stood silent, with closed faces, bending inscrutable gaze on the tall man in narrow robes of fierce, incandescent yellow, who strode through the throng, glancing neither to right nor left, bearing himself with all the arrogance of an emperor.

They neither bowed nor made any salute as he passed, and their elfin features were impassive and unreadable; but I saw anguish in the eyes of the women, and despair was written on many a brow. Intrigued by the mystery, by the strange and pregnant drama of the scene upon which I had intruded, I lingered a time to see what would occur.

In the midst of the immensity of the ruby-domed hall a slim throne towered atop a pedestal of sparkling crystal. The chair, with its curved and slender legs of gilt, and high, fluted back, resembled for all the world a chair from the reign of Louis XIV.

The throne stood empty; slim-legged heralds, resting the belled mouths of long silver bugles on their hips, stood in a semicircle about the untenanted throne, gems twinkling on their tabards. A bald, fat-paunched chamberlain in thick robes of imperial purple strode from the throng to bow stiffly before the cruel-faced man in the narrow yellow robes.

There ensued a lengthy pause in which I sensed, but could not hear, the taut-stretched, aching silence.

And then the bugles blew!

As a field of gorgeous flowers bows beneath a wave of wind, all that splendid and glittering company sank in profound obeisance before the young woman who appeared in a tall, pointed doorway. She swept through the kneeling throng, past the tall, cold-faced man crowned with black crystals, mounted the several tall steps of the dais, and seated herself in the gold throne.

And for the first time I looked upon the incredible, the heart-shaking beauty of Niamh—Niamh of Phaolon, Goddess-Queen of the Jewel City!

Niamh—the Queen of the Green Star! And queen of my heart from that first, breathless moment to the last moment of my life!

Chapter 4 PRINCESS OF THE JEWEL CITY

How can I describe her as I first saw her, enthroned in her golden chair under that immense dome of dim and luminous ruby? Words, I think, fail and falter before the task of describing such utter perfection of feminine beauty.

She was young, a girl, a mere child: she looked perhaps fourteen when I saw her first in the Great Hall of Phaolon. Slim and graceful as a dancing girl, with her slight, tip-tilted breasts and long, slender legs, she had the coltish grace of an adolescent which contrasted with her regal, queenly dignity.

She wore robes of dull, heavy plush—plush with a shimmering silvery nap—plush the dim hue of damask roses. A scooping neckline exposed the upper slopes of her shallow, adolescent breasts, laid bare her slim shoulders and the fragility of her slender throat. All of her upper bosom was the creamy hue of old mellow ivory.

The bodice of her gown fitted her like a second skin, and clung seductively to the slender waist and smooth, boyish hips of Niamh. But from her girdle, slung low about her hips in the style of the Renaissance, the rose plush skirts of the gown swelled out like the open petals of some soft, lovely flower. This gown was slit up the sides, demurely revealing the silken loveliness of her soft, smooth long legs, naked to the upper thigh, and from beneath the hem of this gown could be glimpsed the tiny, exquisite foot of a Mandarin princess, shod in slippers of golden filigree.

From heavy, belting puffed sleeves, her slim arms extended, bare and unadorned. In all that splendid company, Niamh alone wore no gems at breast or throat, lobe or brow or fingers. She had no need of the frozen mineral fire to add luster or brilliance to her loveliness.

Her face was fine-boned, heart-shaped, exquisite. Beneath delicately arched brows, her eyes were enormous wells of depthless amber flame wherein flakes of gold fire trembled. Thick jetty lashes enshadowed the dark flame of her eyes, but her hair, elaborately teased and twisted and coiffed, was startlingly white: a fantastic confection of frosted sugar, an exquisite construction of spun silver.

Her mouth was a luscious rosebud, daintily pink, moistly seductive.

A delicate flower of superb and breathtaking loveliness was Niamh the Fair, when first I looked upon her there on the gilt throne, bathed in shafts of somber and ruby light from the hollow dome above.

The portly chamberlain rang his great silver mace of office against the polished tiles; and there commenced a scene of dramatic confrontation which baffled and maddened me—for, not only was it conducted in a language unknown to me, but a language whose tones I could not even hear!

The spirit-state in which I floated unseen had annoying properties. Although I could see clearly, by the agency of some interaction of forces inexplicable to me then and now, no sound whatsoever reached my impalpable senses. Thus it was that the tense drama now enacted before me was conducted in total silence, insofar as I was concerned.

The tall gaunt man with the cruel face and intense eyes, whose name was Akhmim, as I later learned, seemed to be presenting the princess with an ultimatum of some sort. He set forth his terms with vehement gestures and emphatic curtness, dictating, as I gathered, from a position of superiority. That his terms were unpalatable I assumed from the glum expressions on the faces of those courtiers nearest to me; and that they were peremptory and affrontive I gathered from the stiffness of Niamh’s posture and from the rich color that glowed in her cheeks.

There was a sneering insolence in Akhmim’s arrogant posture, in the negligent courtesy he made to the throne, and in the insufferable smugness wherewith he rested his case, awaiting with folded arms and lofty expression the reply of the princess.

As for Niamh, long lashes hooded the amber fire of her eyes, but indignation colored her cheeks and her breasts rose and fell, panting with suppressed fury.

As for me, although I understood none of this, I longed to seize Akhmim by the scruff of the neck and the seat of his robe and chuck him out of the hall in a most unceremonious manner, calculated to bruise his self-importance, if not even more tender portions of his physical anatomy. And if I read correctly the outrage and insult that smoldered in the gaze of many of Niamh’s courtiers, there were many in the hall that day who would have applauded such an act had it been possible for me to perform it.

Still Niamh hesitated before giving her answer to the ultimatum of Akhmim. I somehow sensed that her reply, once given, would be irrevocable.

Then something caught my attention, and drew me from this scene of tension. Niamh’s gilt throne rose on a many-tiered pedestal in the center of the hall; but the hall itself was cruciform, like the crux formed by the two passages of a cathedral, and, where the nave of a cathedral would be, there rose a most curious structure. It was like an immense sarcophagus, but one built of delicate blown glass, chased with arabesques and painted with inscriptions in a tongue unknown to me.

Within this crystal coffin there reposed the body of a man so perfectly preserved that his appearance was in all details utterly lifelike. Indeed, you would have unhesitatingly sworn he was not dead at all, but lay in light slumber. The bloom of life was on his cheeks, his grim lips were moist, almost you saw his deep chest tremble to the susurration of light breathing.

In no way did he resemble the dainty, effeminate men of Phaolon. Where they were small and exquisite, he was tall, broad of shoulder, with great arms and thighs of mighty girth. Where their limbs were delicate as those of smooth young girls, his were corded with sinews, thick with swelling thews. Where their faces were fine-boned and elfin, his was a rude frame of jutting bone, square and massive of jaw, swarthy of hue, and, lacking their smoothness, rough and harsh as from the burning kiss of tropic suns and the lash of stinging tempests.

He had been a mighty warrior, I guessed, and perhaps had led many a war-host in the field: for the stern, grim-lipped air of command lay about him like a crimson cloak.

He was unclothed, the Sleeping One—which, as I later learned, was what the folk of Phaolon called the warrior in the crystal coffin—and his great arms lay folded upon his breast, where they were clenched about the massive pommel of a gigantic broadsword of blue steel. A glittering scarlet crystal flashed and winked in the pommel of that sword.

Something about the Sleeping One caught my attention, drew me to the glass sarcophagus wherein he lay enshrined. I cannot explain the fascination that mighty form exerted upon my imagination; it was as if every line and lineament of those grim features was engraved upon the tablets of my memory—as if I had known him, somewhere, somewhen, perhaps in some former life …

I drifted down toward the great figure, where it lay stretched out upon a pallet of sumptuous velvets. And then there occurred a miracle, the strangest among the many I had thus far experienced; for my spirit-self floated down to scrutinize the body of the Sleeping One—and entered it

And lived again in human flesh!

The transition from disembodied spirit to a spirit which dwelt in living flesh was instantaneous and utterly astounding. In my spirit-state I had been aware of no bodily sensations whatsoever—now the pulse thundered in my temples, the heart labored in my breast, and my lungs ached, starving for air!

With an involuntary start of surprise, my thews convulsed; I rose from my pallet, brandishing my arms, and the great broadsword to which I clung clove through the glass sarcophagus, shattering it to ten thousand ringing shards!

The explosion of shattering glass filled the hall with ringing echoes. A hundred startled eyes turned to see me rise from my place among the glorious dead. The miracle of my resurrection wrung a gasp of stupefied amazement from a hundred throats.

But none in all that place were more astounded at this turn of events than was I myself!

For I had not willed myself down into that dead or sleeping form. Hovering near, I had been caught helpless in the attraction of some force unknown to me, sucked down as by a vortex into that body, helpless to resist the suction as any chip caught in a maelstrom.

Niamh stared at me with unbelief in her wide eyes and astonishment written in her face.

From where he stood before the throne, Akhmim regarded me as if I were an apparition. I sensed that something in my resurrection—perhaps its timing, which had come almost as if in answer to his ultimatum—disconcerted him, shook his arrogance, struck doubt into the armor of his confidence.

For a breathless moment he stood, twisted about awkwardly in his stiff robes, looking uncomfortable and somehow foolish. And he knew it, for he paled and bit his lip and tugged at his garments as if to rearrange them.

For a long moment the entire company stood frozen in shock. No one spoke or moved. Then, from among a rank of courtiers who stood in a semicircle behind Niamh’s throne, one elderly sage thrust himself to the fore and addressed me. From the rising lilt of his tones I gathered it was an interrogation. The only trouble was that the question was spoken in a language completely unknown to me—a fluid, musical tongue that sounded rather like a cross between Hawaiian and French, with a sibilant tang of old Castilian.

The question thus addressed to me was spoken in loud, clear tones fully audible to all who stood within the ruby-domed hall. Whatever the nature of the query may have been, I sensed from the breathless silence that followed upon the old man’s words, and from the keen and alert fixity with which all eyes were trained upon me, that it was one of enormous importance. Without exception, all who stood there waited in tense expectancy for my reply.

From the moment I had stood up, shattering free of the glass sarcophagus, I had stood motionlessly, my face impassive, clenching the mighty broadsword in one scarred fist. I had not chosen this immobile stance consciously—the fact of the matter was that I was suffering exquisitely from the torment of renewed circulation. How long this trance-bound body had slept in its transparent tomb I did not know, but the pins-and-needles sensation of numb flesh awakening and the intolerable ache of long-unused muscles forced to work again, combined in a torture beyond description.

In my agony, I scarcely heard the sage’s query, and it was not until long after that I realized its importance, and the import of my answer. By pure accident, without even thinking, I did precisely the right thing.

I nodded.

And in the next instant the ruby dome above rang to a peal of thunderous acclamation. Joy blazed in the eyes of the throng; exaltation shone in their happy faces. Indescribable relief and bliss glowed in the face of Niamh the Fair. Her eyes shone down on me, brilliant with an inexplicable fervor, and she clasped her small hands to her throbbing heart in an ecstasy beyond all my comprehension.

A burly, hard-faced guard captain, who stood very near the foot of his princess’ dais, turned upon me a gaze of wordless adoration. Then he removed his sword from his scabbard and raised it aloft in salute to me.

A hundred swords leaped from their scabbards to flash aloft like narrow mirrors in the rich glory from above.

And from a hundred throats rang one word

“Chong! Chong! CHONG!”

And I knew it was no word, but a name.

My name!

Chapter 5 THE WISDOM OF KHIN-NOM

At the command of my royal hostess, a gorgeously-appointed suite of apartments was reserved for me, and a squadron of guards-warriors vied for the honor of serving me, led by the hard-faced captain who had been the first of all to hail me. His name was Panthon.

My own name I first mistook to be Kyr-Chong, for thus I was addressed by all who spoke to me, including Panthon and his warriors. It was only later, as I became familiar with the oddly musical language spoken by the Laonese, as the folk of Phaolon term their race, that I came to understand the phoneme kyr was a prefix of honor, denoting something like “Lord Chong” or perhaps “Sir Chong”; as for “Chong” itself, it was an affectionate diminutive, used in a blending of respect and love, as the Englishmen of old referred to Richard the Lionhearted as “stout old Rick” or as those of a later age spoke of Henry V as “Hal” or “Harry.”

My full name, it seemed, was Chongaphon tai-Vena-Vena, and the allusions above to the Lionheart and the victor of Agincourt are not far off the mark. For Lord Chong had been a warrior hero of mythic fame, a doer of legendary deeds. No doubt existed in those who clustered about me on my rare public appearances but that I was that mighty man, reborn again in my original body, which had been perfectly preserved against just such an eventuality. An ancient prophecy had been made that someday in great time of need I would return again to lead the warriors of Phaolon the Jewel City to victories and triumphs as of old, and to save the realm from doom in its hour of ultimate peril.

I am certain that my total ignorance of the Laonese, of their history, their language, and their ways, was carefully kept secret from the courtiers and the commonfolk. The most embarrassing element in my “amnesia”—for thus it was regarded—was my lack of any familiarity with the language. This was first on the agenda of my education.

My tutor in all things was the same elderly sage who had addressed me across the frozen throng on the day of my revivification. His name was Khin-nom and he was one of the chief advisors of the princess. I am at a loss to find an office relative to his in terms of Terrene history. It is not that he was premier or prime minister or secretary of state or a politician of any kind, such offices being thoroughly unknown among the Laonese, who place all authority and power in the hands of the monarch alone. He was simply a man of great age and wit and learning, with experience in every field of knowledge: call him a philosopher and you will not be far from the truth.

Khin-nom treated me with the utmost deference during our linguistic sessions, but he was too shrewd, too intelligent, to regard me with the awe and veneration others displayed toward me, which amounted virtually to worship. For several hours each day he practiced with me in the Laonese tongue, and his method of teaching was strikingly practical. The first such session opened with him calling my attention to his lifted forefinger; he pronounced in clear tones the word phos, which I repeated aloud, immediately catching onto the idea that this was to be a language lesson.

Next he opened the fingers of his closed fist one by one, and spoke the word phosa, which I assumed correctly to be the plural. Then, indicating his entire hand, he pronounced the word ephosa; he then gave me the Laonese words for the wrist, forearm, elbow, shoulder, neck, chin, and so on, indicating each bodily part and speaking the relevant Laonese word in clear enunciation. That first session lasted all of one afternoon, and once I had been introduced to a dozen or fifteen words in this manner, we relaxed and he refreshed me on what I had learned by pointing to random parts of his anatomy and eliciting from me its name in Laonese. I made few errors.

Thereafter we met every day, immediately following the noon meal. Each subsequent lesson opened with a quick review of what I had learned in the last, before continuing on to a fresh group of words. These early sessions were quite easy. Parts of the body, colors, garments, the names of substances like stone, wood, crystal, and metal, these I mastered with surprising ease, almost as if I were merely remembering a language I had once known, rather than attempting to learn a new one. The sessions gradually became much more difficult, as we passed beyond physical objects into abstractions such as verbs, adverbs, and adjectives.

I have always had a knack for languages, and in my youth had taught myself, or had learned from private tutors, not only German, Latin, and a sketchy familiarity with Tibetan and Hebrew, but also Greek and Sanskrit. However, I had never before had any reason to master a language so quickly, and without already sharing a common tongue with the man who was teaching me; so my Laonese lessons were simultaneously easier and more difficult than my previous linguistic studies, if you see what I mean.

However, working steadily away at it for hours at a time, day after day, I learned the language in what seems a remarkably short time—enough of it to be able to handle myself in casual conversation, at least. My tutor seemed quite satisfied with the progress I was making, and I was quite impressed with it myself.

This Khin-nom was a dignified, aristocratic man of elderly years. He looked about sixty, but actually this is only a guess on my part and I have no idea as to his precise age, for among the Laonese it is considered poor manners to inquire into the subject, which is taboo with them for some reason I never learned.

He was rather tall for his race, three or four inches under six feet, and of slender build, with long beautiful hands, expressive eyes, and a lean, bony face the color of old parchment. I believe he was bald, as is commonly the case among those of the Laonese who attain to a dignified old age, but as he habitually wore a tall, five-sided hat of stiff brocade, I cannot be certain. He had a long, pointed chin which was adorned by a narrow beard he kept dyed in prismatic colors to match the high-necked, long-sleeved robes he wore. The colors he favored were generally indigo, rust, chartreuse, and a virulent shade of green.

I have said that Khin-nom approached the task of instructing me in the Laonese tongue in a practical manner. By this I mean that we plunged at once into our language lessons and did not deviate from them into other areas of discussion. Every afternoon he appeared in my suite, bowed gracefully with both hands pressed together, seated himself on a stool of carved ivory, and proceeded at once with the lessons. Later on, as I became steadily more proficient in the Laonese tongue, I attempted to make halting conversation with him several times, in order to learn the answers to some of the many questions which tormented my curiosity. But to each of these conversational overtures he gracefully declined comment. I assumed that either he had been ordered to answer none of my questions, or that he preferred not to for reasons of his own.

As I gradually became able to understand the language and to make myself understood in it, however, I sought answers to some of the mysteries that plagued me from the warriors who attended me, principally from grizzled Panthon.

He was a stern-faced soldier of about forty, his thin hair cut short and grizzled at the temples, his bearing stiff and martial, and there was about him none of the daintiness or languor which lent most of the male Laonese, regardless of age, a certain elfin effeminacy.

“Panthon,” I would ask him, when we were alone, “who do your people think me to be?”

“Chong the Mighty come again, lord,” he would reply gruffly.

“Is it a precept of your religion that the dead are reborn and live again?”

The question seemed to baffle him, and he fumbled for a reply. I eventually gathered that my case was without precedent and that the Laonese religion had no especial teaching on the matter of rebirth: but, as it was self-evident that I was Chong the Mighty, and as my rebirth had been witnessed by the entire court, the fact of it was obvious.

“Does it not puzzle those who think me Chong the Mighty returned to life, that I need to be taught your language all over again, that I need to be instructed in your language as if I had never before known it?” I asked. Again he did not seem to know how to answer me. A simple man of few words, my honest, faithful Panthon, and not very much given to thinking things out on his own. I gathered from his halting reply that my seclusion kept very many from knowing that I had to be taught the language; and, anyway, I was Chong. If Chong wished to be taught something, who could question it? My reasons, doubtless, were my own: and that was that.

Simple, loyal Panthon!

Once in a while, on formal occasions, I dined in state before the assembled court and in the company of the exquisite young princess, in the grand banquet hall of her palace.

These feasts were ceremonial functions, performed periodically, to which members of the various ranks of the aristocracies were invited on a sort of rotation system. The Laonese culture was very ancient and had been stable for millennia, until by now it had become so encrusted with tradition that formalities and precedents governed every detail of dress and deportment, every facet of daily life. Such banquets, stiff with punctilio, elaborately ceremonious to the point of boredom, were virtually unendurable. But en route to one of them, accompanied by the sage Khin-nom, I encountered something which moved me deeply.

We had descended a coiling staircase of carven alabaster and were about to enter a long, high-roofed corridor lined with an honor guard of bejeweled and beplumed Laonese chivalry, when I stopped short, my gaze caught by a most imposing monument.

There was a huge rotunda at the base of this spiral stairway from which the corridor branched off, and rising from the exact center of this rotunda was a colossal statue of a heroic youth shielding his breast with an arrow-studded buckler, lifting his face defiantly to heaven, thrusting skyward with the hilt of a broken sword.

The substance from which some Laonese Michelangelo or Canova had carved this heroic colossus was a sparkling crystal which resembled diamond in its purity and multicolored fire, but which was in fact, as I later learned, organic. The crystalline substance, however, was enormously rare and valuable, in that respect also not unlike diamond.

And the statue was thirty feet high!

I stared up at it in amazement, struck not only by the fabulous richness of the thing, but by the brilliance of its artistic genius.

As I paused, old Khin-nom halted, and eyed me shrewdly and with a touch of humor in the sly expression of his eyes as I stood gaping.

“Does my lord recognize the figure?” he purred.

I admitted that I did not—which must have amused the wise old philosopher, although he was too clever to show it.

“It is yourself, my lord, in the fourteenth of your Deeds, the time you battled against and slew the Great Ythid of Diompharna,” he said casually.

I knew enough of the language of this strange, mist-veiled world of the Green Star by now to recognize the word. To the Laonese, the ythid is a monster so dread as to have become symbolic and mythological, save that such reptiles, though rare, do indeed exist.

We walked on in silence. As for myself, I was somewhat shaken. It is, after all, not every day that a man finds out he is a dragon slayer!

I began to entertain doubts as to the wisdom of continuing my imposture of a legendary hero miraculously returned to life. It is all very well to be the reincarnation of a famous dragon killer of yore, but what if my royal hostess suddenly called upon me to repeat my celebrated deed?