A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, February 1950 — page 60: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

60 into water—except that I knew that the liquid in this case, was molten rock and metals ! : At the same time, the heat was trebled, and the air was thick with the stink of sulphur. I looked back now toward the door from which we had come, but it was closed, and I had a frightful stifling feel- ing, as though he had been thrust into an oven and left to bake. And bake we would > have, if we had lingered. The heat was so great that it seemed to lift the lids of the eyes and pry under them against the nerves of the eyeballs. : It was perfectly plain that the smoking mountain was ready for something more than smoke. And the girl and I ran until we were hardly a dozen steps from the second gate. Then she touched my arm, and holding out her hand she pointed. . “Thou seest the shield,” said she; “strike on it, and the door will instantly open, even if the liquid fire were flowing at that moment outside it. As for me, I must go back. This door is forbidden to me!” Through the fold of cloth that covered “my mouth to shut out the fumes, I shouted at her. “You can’t go back! You've got to come on with me, or else I’ve got to go back with you. I can’t let you be alone!” I saw enough of her face to notice the calm smile on it. She simply said, “Oh, my friend, I cannot be alone. The goddess is with me to the end. Farewell!” Now, as she said this, and while I said to myself that she was the bravest creature in the world, the same fountain of gleam- ing white which I had seen when I first looked into the crater now burst upward again, and from the same spot. It scat- tered, dissolved in overmastering bril- liancy all the green glow, and shooting upward to a prodigious height, it thrust its head into the very top of the crater, filling it from lip to lip, while streams _and showers more brilliant than diamonds \fell back, and great masses dropped, with -furling rims of bluish smoke here and there about them. T felt a drop of liquid on my forehead, and it burned to the bone. It was like an electric shock. And I saw fire rain on Sylvia’s clothes, and the curling of flame A. MERRITT’S FANTASY 0 2 SO RE as it shot up. The heat seemed much worse. But, in this moment, as she said good- by to me, she turned and started to walk straight back along the ridge—yes, al- though the path was showered over by the terrible rain of that white fire, which every moment grew thicker, so that the whole interior of the volcano was a roar- ing and flaring mass of white flame, a thing to be dreamed of, and never truly conceived even in a dream. Vast forms seemed to be leaping and whirling in it, and voices thundered and shouted. It might be the purpose of the priestess, Sylvia, to trust the goddess and go straight back the way that she had come, but I could not let her do that. I caught up with her in a bound, and grabbed her up, burn- ing clothes and all. She resisted. She put her hands against my face and thrust me away. Her voice came thin and high and clear to me. “Let me go! To pass that gate is death for me! Let me go!” . I heard the words, but they had no meaning to me. I mean to say, there was too mtich else going on, and the one. thing that mattered was to get the pair of us out of the touch of that ocean of liquid fire, And I reached the shield and beat on > it like a madman. It seemed to me, as I turned my back on the towering Fountain of Life, that the thing bloomed greater behind me, and reached for me with mil- lions of hands. For only one thing could I be grateful, and this was that Sylvia no longer strug- gled to get away. Instead, she lay limply against me, her head fallen to the side— she had fainted. pee enough for that, of course, but to see her so stupefied me almost more than the fire that was roaring around me. The heat caught me on the back of the head and the neck and filled my brain with flaring red—and then the door was no longer a solid wall before me. Hands caught at me, and snatched me in along with Sylvia. And the great rock panel closed with a crash. My poor head was still spinning; and the frightful heat did not seem to disappear suddenly, but rather it retreated in waves.