A	>>	B	>>	C	>>	D	>>	E
F	>>	G	>>	H	>>	I	>>	J
K	>>	L	>>	M	>>	N	>>	O
P	>>	R	>>	S	>>	T	>>	U
V	>>	W	>>			X	>>	Z

Zane Grey - "The Call of the Canyon"

Eugene Field - "The Love Affairs Of A Bibliomaniac"

Ellis Parker Butler - "The Water Goats and Other Troubles"

Mariano Azuela - "The Underdogs"

The Moon Pool

A >> A. Merritt >> The Moon Pool




Still the roaring grew; the radiance streamed--ever faster
we went. Cutting down through the length, the EXTENSION
of me, dropped a wall of rock, foreshortened, clenched close;
I caught a glimpse of the elfin gardens; they whirled, con-
tracted, into a thin--slice--of colour that was a part of me;
another wall of rock shrinking into a thin wedge through
which I flew, and that at once took its place within me like a
card slipped beside those others!

Flashing around me, and from Lakla and O'Keefe, were
nimbuses of flickering scarlet flames. And always the steady
hurling forward--appallingly mechanical.

Another barrier of rock--a gleam of white waters incor-
porating themselves into my--DRAWING OUT--even as were
the flowered moss lands, the slicing, rocky walls--still
another rampart of cliff, dwindling instantly into the vertical
plane of those others. Our flight checked; we seemed to hover
within, then to sway onward--slowly, cautiously.

A mist danced ahead of me--a mist that grew steadily
thinner. We stopped, wavered--the mist cleared.

I looked out into translucent, green distances; shot with
swift prismatic gleamings; waves and pulsings of luminosity
like midday sun glow through green, tropic waters: dancing,
scintillating veils of sparkling atoms that flew, hither and
yon, through depths of nebulous splendour!

And Lakla and Larry and I were, I saw, like shadow
shapes upon a smooth breast of stone twenty feet or more
above the surface of this place--a surface spangled with tiny
white blossoms gleaming wanly through creeping veils of
phosphorescence like smoke of moon fire. We were shadows
--and yet we had substance; we were incorporated with, a
part of, the rock--and yet we were living flesh and blood; we
stretched--nor will I qualify this--we STRETCHED through
mile upon mile of space that weirdly enough gave at one
and the same time an absolute certainty of immense horizon-
tal lengths and a vertical concentration that contained noth-
ing of length, nothing of space whatever; we stood THERE
upon the face of the stone--and still we were HERE within
the faceted oval before the screen of radiance!

"Steady!" It was Lakla's voice--and not beside me THERE,
but at my ear close before the screen. "Steady, Goodwin!
And--see!"

The sparkling haze cleared. Enormous reaches stretched
before me. Shimmering up through them, and as though
growing in some medium thicker than air, was mass upon
mass of verdure--fruiting trees and trees laden with pale
blossoms, arbours and bowers of pallid blooms, like that sea
fruit of oblivion--grapes of Lethe--that cling to the tide-
swept walls of the caverns of the Hebrides.

Through them, beyond them, around and about them,
drifted and eddied a horde--great as that with which Tamer-
lane swept down upon Rome, vast as the myriads which
Genghis Khan rolled upon the califs--men and women and
children--clothed in tatters, half nude and wholly naked;
slant-eyed Chinese, sloe-eyed Malays, islanders black and
brown and yellow, fierce-faced warriors of the Solomons
with grizzled locks fantastically bedizened; Papuans, feline
Javans, Dyaks of hill and shore; hook-nosed Phoenicians,
Romans, straight-browed Greeks, and Vikings centuries BEYOND
their lives: scores of the black-haired Murians; white
faces of our own Westerners--men and women and children
--drifting, eddying--each stamped with that mingled horror
and rapture, eyes filled with ecstasy and terror entwined,
marked by God and devil in embrace--the seal of the Shin-
ing One--the dead-alive; the lost ones!

The loot of the Dweller!

Soul-sick, I gazed. They lifted to us visages of dread; they
swept down toward us, glaring upward--a bank against
which other and still other waves of faces rolled, were
checked, paused; until as far as I could see, like billows
piled upon an ever-growing barrier, they stretched beneath
us--staring--staring!

Now there was a movement--far, far away; a concentrat-
ing of the lambency; the dead-alive swayed, oscillated, sep-
arated--forming a long lane against whose outskirts they
crowded with avid, hungry insistence.

First only a luminous cloud, then a whirling pillar of
splendours through the lane came--the Shining One. As it
passed, the dead-alive swirled in its wake like leaves behind
a whirlwind, eddying, twisting; and as the Dweller raced by
them, brushing them with its spirallings and tentacles, they
shone forth with unearthly, awesome gleamings--like ves-
sels of alabaster in which wicks flare suddenly. And when it
had passed they closed behind it, staring up at us once more.

The Dweller paused beneath us.

Out of the drifting ruck swam the body of Throckmartin!
Throckmartin, my friend, to find whom I had gone to the
pallid moon door; my friend whose call I had so laggardly
followed. On his face was the Dweller's dreadful stamp; the
lips were bloodless; the eyes were wide, lucent, something
like pale, phosphorescence gleaming within them--and soul-
less.

He stared straight up at me, unwinking, unrecognizing.
Pressing against his side was a woman, young and gentle,
and lovely--lovely even through the mask that lay upon
her face. And her wide eyes, like Throckmartin's, glowed
with the lurking, unholy fires. She pressed against him
closely; though the hordes kept up the faint churning, these
two kept ever together, as though bound by unseen fetters.

And I knew the girl for Edith, his wife, who in vain effort
to save him had cast herself into the Dweller's embrace!

"Throckmartin!" I cried. "Throckmartin! I'm here!"

Did he hear? I know now, of course, he could not.

But then I waited--hope striving to break through the
nightmare hands that gripped my heart.

Their wide eyes never left me. There was another move-
ment about them, others pushed past them; they drifted
back, swaying, eddying--and still staring were lost in the
awful throng.

Vainly I strained my gaze to find them again, to force
some sign of recognition, some awakening of the clean life
we know. But they were gone. Try as I would I could not see
them--nor Stanton and the northern woman named Thora
who had been the first of that tragic party to be taken by
the Dweller.

"Throckmartin!" I cried again, despairingly. My tears
blinded me.

I felt Lakla's light touch.

"Steady," she commanded, pitifully. "Steady, Goodwin.
You cannot help them--now! Steady and--watch!"

Below us the Shining One had paused--spiralling, swirl-
ing, vibrant with all its transcendent, devilish beauty; had
paused and was contemplating us. Now I could see clearly
that nucleus, that core shot through with flashing veins of
radiance, that ever-shifting shape of glory through the
shroudings of shimmering, misty plumes, throbbing lacy
opalescences, vaporous spirallings of prismatic phantom
fires. Steady over it hung the seven little moons of amethyst,
of saffron, of emerald and azure and silver, of rose of life
and moon white. They poised themselves like a diadem--
calm, serene, immobile--and down from them into the Dwel-
ler, piercing plumes and swirls and spirals, ran countless
tiny strands, radiations, finer than the finest spun thread of
spider's web, gleaming filaments through which seemed to
run--POWER--from the seven globes; like--yes, that was it
--miniatures of the seven torrents of moon flame that poured
through the septichromatic, high crystals in the Moon Pool's
chamber roof.

Swam out of the coruscating haze the--face!

Both of man and of woman it was--like some ancient,
androgynous deity of Etruscan fanes long dust, and yet
neither woman nor man; human and unhuman, seraphic and
sinister, benign and malefic--and still no more of these four
than is flame, which is beautiful whether it warms or devours,
or wind whether it feathers the trees or shatters them, or
the wave which is wondrous whether it caresses or kills.

Subtly, undefinably it was of our world and of one not
ours. Its lineaments flowed from another sphere, took fleet-
ing familiar form--and as swiftly withdrew whence they had
come; something amorphous, unearthly--as of unknown un-
heeding, unseen gods rushing through the depths of star-
hung space; and still of our own earth, with the very soul of
earth peering out from it, caught within it--and in some--
unholy--way debased.

It had eyes--eyes that were now only shadows darkening
within its luminosity like veils falling, and falling, OPENING
windows into the unknowable; deepening into softly glowing
blue pools, blue as the Moon Pool itself; then flashing
out, and this only when the--face--bore its most human
resemblance, into twin stars large almost as the crown of lit-
tle moons; and with that same baffling suggestion of peep-
holes into a world untrodden, alien, perilous to man!

"Steady!" came Lakla's voice, her body leaned against
mine.

I gripped myself, my brain steadied, I looked again. And
I saw that of body, at least body as we know it, the Shining
One had none--nothing but the throbbing, pulsing core
streaked with lightning veins of rainbows; and around this,
never still, sheathing it, the swirling, glorious veilings of its
hell and heaven born radiance.

So the Dweller stood--and gazed.

Then up toward us swept a reaching, questing spiral!

Under my hand Lakla's shoulder quivered; Dead-Alive
and their master vanished--I danced, flickered, WITHIN the
rock; felt a swift sense of shrinking, of withdrawal; slice
upon slice the carded walls of stone, of silvery waters, of
elfin gardens slipped from me as cards are withdrawn from
a pack, one by one--slipped, wheeled, flattened, and length-
ened out as I passed through them and they passed from me.

Gasping, shaken, weak, I stood within the faceted oval
chamber; arm still about the handmaiden's white shoulder;
Larry's hand still clutching her girdle.

The roaring, impalpable gale from the cosmos was retreat-
ing to the outposts of space--was still; the intense, streaming,
flooding radiance lessened--died.

"Now have you beheld," said Lakla, "and well you trod
the road. And now shall you hear, even as the Silent Ones
have commanded, what the Shining One is--and how it
came to be."

The steps flashed back; the doorway into the chamber
opened.

Larry as silent as I--we followed her through it.





CHAPTER XXIX

The Shaping of the Shining One

WE REACHED what I knew to be Lakla's own boudoir, if I
may so call it. Smaller than any of the other chambers of the
domed castle in which we had been, its intimacy was re-
vealed not only by its faint fragrance but by its high mir-
rors of polished silver and various oddly wrought articles
of the feminine toilet that lay here and there; things I after-
ward knew to be the work of the artisans of the _Akka_--
and no mean metal workers were they. One of the window
slits dropped almost to the floor, and at its base was a wide,
comfortably cushioned seat commanding a view of the
bridge and of the cavern ledge. To this the handmaiden
beckoned us; sank upon it, drew Larry down beside her and
motioned me to sit close to him.

"Now this," she said, "is what the Silent Ones have com-
manded me to tell you two: To you Larry, that knowing you
may weigh all things in your mind and answer as your spirit
bids you a question that the Three will ask--and what that
is I know not," she murmured, "and I, they say, must answer,
too--and it--frightens me!"

The great golden eyes widened; darkened with dread; she
sighed, shook her head impatiently.

"Not like us, and never like us," she spoke low, wonder-
ingly, "the Silent Ones say were they. Nor were those from
which they sprang like those from which we have come.
Ancient, ancient beyond thought are the _Taithu_, the race of
the Silent Ones. Far, far below this place where now we sit,
close to earth heart itself were they born; and there they
dwelt for time upon time, _laya_ upon _laya_ upon _laya_--with
others, not like them, some of which have vanished time
upon time agone, others that still dwell--below--in their--
cradle.

"It is hard"--she hesitated--"hard to tell this--that slips
through my mind--because I know so little that even as the
Three told it to me it passed from me for lack of place to
stand upon," she went on, quaintly. "Something there was
of time when earth and sun were but cold mists in the--
the heavens--something of these mists drawing together,
whirling, whirling, faster and faster--drawing as they
whirled more and more of the mists--growing larger, grow-
ing warm--forming at last into the globes they are, with
others spinning around the sun--something of regions within
this globe where vast fire was prisoned and bursting forth
tore and rent the young orb--of one such bursting forth that
sent what you call moon flying out to company us and left
behind those spaces whence we now dwell--and of--of life
particles that here and there below grew into the race of
the Silent Ones, and those others--but not the _Akka_ which,
like you, they say came from above--and all this I do not
understand--do you, Goodwin?" she appealed to me.

I nodded--for what she had related so fragmentarily was
in reality an excellent approach to the Chamberlain-Moulton
theory of a coalescing nebula contracting into the sun and
its planets.

Astonishing was the recognition of this theory. Even more
so was the reference to the life particles, the idea of Arrhen-
ius, the great Swede, of life starting on earth through the
dropping of minute, life SPORES, propelled through space by
the driving power of light and, encountering favourable
environment here, developing through the vast ages into
man and every other living thing we know.1


*1 Professor Svante August Arrhenius, in his _Worlds in the Making_--
the conception that life is universally diffused, constantly emitted from
all habitable worlds in the form of spores which traverse space for
years and ages, the majority being ultimately destroyed by the heat of
some blazing star, but some few finding a resting-place on globes
which have reached the habitable stage.--W. T. G.



Nor was it incredible that in the ancient nebula that was
the matrix of our solar system similar, or rather DISSIMILAR,
particles in all but the subtle essence we call life, might have
become entangled and, resisting every cataclysm as they had
resisted the absolute zero of outer space, found in these
caverned spaces their proper environment to develop into the
race of the Silent Ones and--only THEY could tell what else!

"They say," the handmaiden's voice was surer, "they say
that in their--cradle--near earth's heart they grew; grew
untroubled by the turmoil and disorder which flayed the
surface of this globe. And they say it was a place of light
and that strength came to them from earth heart--strength
greater than you and those from which you sprang ever de-
rived from sun.

"At last, ancient, ancient beyond all thought, they say
again, was this time--they began to know, to--to--realize--
themselves. And wisdom came ever more swiftly. Up from
their cradle, because they did not wish to dwell longer with
those--others--they came and found this place.

"When all the face of earth was covered with waters in
which lived only tiny, hungry things that knew naught save
hunger and its satisfaction, THEY had attained wisdom that
enabled them to make paths such as we have just travelled
and to look out upon those waters! And _laya_ upon _laya_
thereafter, time upon time, they went upon the paths and
watched the flood recede; saw great bare flats of steaming
ooze appear on which crawled and splashed larger things
which had grown from the tiny hungry ones; watched the
flats rise higher and higher and green life begin to clothe
them; saw mountains uplift and vanish.

"Ever the green life waxed and the things which crept
and crawled grew greater and took ever different forms;
until at last came a time when the steaming mists lightened
and the things which had begun as little more than tiny
hungry mouths were huge and monstrous, so huge that the
tallest of my _Akka_ would not have reached the knee of the
smallest of them.

"But in none of these, in NONE, was there--realization--
of themselves, say the Three; naught but hunger driving, al-
ways driving them to still its crying.

"So for time upon time the race of the Silent Ones took
the paths no more, placing aside the half-thought that they
had of making their way to earth face even as they had made
their way from beside earth heart. They turned wholly to the
seeking of wisdom--and after other time on time they at-
tained that which killed even the faintest shadow of the
half-thought. For they crept far within the mysteries of life
and death, they mastered the illusion of space, they lifted
the veils of creation and of its twin destruction, and they
stripped the covering from the flaming jewel of truth--but
when they had crept within those mysteries they bid me tell
YOU, Goodwin, they found ever other mysteries veiling the
way; and after they had uncovered the jewel of truth they
found it to be a gem of infinite facets and therefore not
wholly to be read before eternity's unthinkable end!

"And for this they were glad--because now throughout
eternity might they and theirs pursue knowledge over ways
illimitable.

"They conquered light--light that sprang at their bidding
from the nothingness that gives birth to all things and in
which lie all things that are, have been and shall be; light
that streamed through their bodies cleansing them of all
dross; light that was food and drink; light that carried their
vision afar or bore to them images out of space opening
many windows through which they gazed down upon life
on thousands upon thousands of the rushing worlds; light
that was the flame of life itself and in which they bathed,
ever renewing their own. They set radiant lamps within the
stones, and of black light they wove the sheltering shadows
and the shadows that slay.

"Arose from this people those Three--the Silent Ones.
They led them all in wisdom so that in the Three grew--
pride. And the Three built them this place in which we sit
and set the Portal in its place and withdrew from their kind
to go alone into the mysteries and to map alone the facets of
Truth Jewel.

"Then there came the ancestors of the--_Akka_; not as they
are now, and glowing but faintly within them the spark of
--self-realization. And the _Taithu_ seeing this spark did not
slay them. But they took the ancient, long untrodden paths
and looked forth once more upon earth face. Now on the
land were vast forests and a chaos of green life. On the
shores things scaled and fanged, fought and devoured each
other, and in the green life moved bodies great and small
that slew and ran from those that would slay.

"They searched for the passage through which the _Akka_
had come and closed it. Then the Three took them and
brought them here; and taught them and blew upon the
spark until it burned ever stronger and in time they became
much as they are now--my _Akka_.

"The Three took counsel after this and said--'We have
strengthened life in these until it has become articulate; shall
we not CREATE life?'" Again she hesitated, her eyes rapt,
dreaming. "The Three are speaking," she murmured. "They
have my tongue--"

And certainly, with an ease and rapidity as though she
were but a voice through which minds far more facile, more
powerful poured their thoughts, she spoke.

"Yea," the golden voice was vibrant. "We said that what
we would create should be of the spirit of life itself, speak-
ing to us with the tongues of the far-flung stars, of the winds,
of the waters, and of all upon and within these. Upon that
universal matrix of matter, that mother of all things that
you name the ether, we laboured. Think not that her won-
drous fertility is limited by what ye see on earth or what has
been on earth from its beginning. Infinite, infinite are the
forms the mother bears and countless are the energies that
are part of her.

"By our wisdom we had fashioned many windows out of
our abode and through them we stared into the faces of
myriads of worlds, and upon them all were the children of
ether even as the worlds themselves were her children.

"Watching we learned, and learning we formed that ye
term the Dweller, which those without name--the Shining
One. Within the Universal Mother we shaped it, to be a voice
to tell us her secrets, a lamp to go before us lighting the
mysteries. Out of the ether we fashioned it, giving it the
soul of light that still ye know not nor perhaps ever may
know, and with the essence of life that ye saw blossoming
deep in the abyss and that is the pulse of earth heart we
filled it. And we wrought with pain and with love, with
yearning and with scorching pride and from our travail came
the Shining One--our child!

"There is an energy beyond and above ether, a purpose-
ful, sentient force that laps like an ocean the furthest-flung
star, that transfuses all that ether bears, that sees and speaks
and feels in us and in you, that is incorporate in beast and
bird and reptile, in tree and grass and all living things, that
sleeps in rock and stone, that finds sparkling tongue in jewel
and star and in all dwellers within the firmament. And this
ye call consciousness!

"We crowned the Shining One with the seven orbs of light
which are the channels between it and the sentience we
sought to make articulate, the portals through which flow
its currents and so flowing, become choate, vocal, self-
realizant within our child.

"But as we shaped, there passed some of the essence of
our pride; in giving will we had given power, perforce, to
exercise that will for good or for evil, to speak or to be si-
lent, to tell us what we wished of that which poured into it
through the seven orbs or to withhold that knowledge itself;
and in forging it from the immortal energies we had en-
dowed it with their indifference; open to all consciousness it
held within it the pole of utter joy and the pole of utter woe
with all the arc that lies between; all the ecstasies of the
countless worlds and suns and all their sorrows; all that ye
symbolize as gods and all ye symbolize as devils--not nega-
tiving each other, for there is no such thing as negation, but
holding them together, balancing them, encompassing them,
pole upon pole!"

So THIS was the explanation of the entwined emotions of
joy and terror that had changed so appallingly Throckmar-
tin's face and the faces of all the Dweller's slaves!

The handmaiden's eyes grew bright, alert, again; the
brooding passed from her face; the golden voice that had
been so deep found its own familiar pitch.

"I listened while the Three spoke to you," she said. "Now
the shaping of the Shining One had been a long, long travail
and time had flown over the outer world _laya_ upon _laya_. For
a space the Shining One was content to dwell here; to be
fed with the foods of light: to open the eyes of the Three
to mystery upon mystery and to read for them facet after
facet of the gem of truth. Yet as the tides of consciousness
flowed through it they left behind shadowings and echoes of
their burdens; and the Shining One grew stronger, always
stronger of ITSELF WITHIN ITSELF. Its will strengthened and now
not always was it the will of the Three; and the pride that
was woven in the making of it waxed, while the love for them
that its creators had set within it waned.

"Not ignorant were the _Taithu_ of the work of the Three.
First there were a few, then more and more who coveted the
Shining One and who would have had the Three share with
them the knowledge it drew in for them. But the Silent Ones
in their pride, would not.

"There came a time when its will was now ALL its own, and
it rebelled, turning its gaze to the wider spaces beyond the
Portal, offering itself to the many there who would serve it;
tiring of the Three, their control and their abode.

"Now the Shining One has its limitations, even as we. Over
water it can pass, through air and through fire; but pass it
cannot, through rock or metal. So it sent a message--how I
know not--to the _Taithu_ who desired it, whispering to them
the secret of the Portal. And when the time was ripe they
opened the Portal and the Shining One passed through it to
them; nor would it return to the Three though they com-
manded, and when they would have forced it they found
that it had hived and hidden a knowledge that they could not
overcome.

"Yet by their arts the Three could have shattered the
seven shining orbs; but they would not because--they loved,
it!

"Those to whom it had gone built for it that place I have
shown you, and they bowed to it and drew wisdom from it.
And ever they turned more and more from the ways in which
the _Taithu_ had walked--for it seemed that which came to
the Shining One through the seven orbs had less and less of
good and more and more of the power you call evil. Knowl-
edge it gave and understanding, yes; but not that which, clear
and serene, lights the paths of right wisdom; rather were
they flares pointing the dark roads that lead to--to the
ultimate evil!

Copyright (c) 2007. fullstories.net. All rights reserved.