Avon Fantasy Reader No. 14 — page 16: what you’re looking at

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

back a pace and the warriors likewise bowed and backed still farther away. In fact they seemed most blooming anxious to get as far away from that sinister ring of columns as they could. “There was a tense moment of waiting. I looked out across the lake at the high, sullen cliffs that girt the valley, at the silent city lying beneath the ris- ing moon. It was like a dead city. The whole scene was most unreal, as if Conrad and I had been transported to another planet or back into a dead and forgotten age. Then the black mute struck the gong. “At first it was a low, mellow whisper that flowed from under the black man’s steady mallet. But it swiftly grew in intensity. The sustained, increasing sound became nerve-racking—it grew unbearable. It was more than mere sound. The mute evoked a quality of vibration that entered into every nerve and racked it apart. It grew louder and louder until I felt that the most de- sirable thing in the world was complete deafness, to be like that blank-eyed _ mute who neither heard nor felt the perdition of sound he was creating. And yet I saw sweat beading his ape-like brow. Surely some thunder of that brain- shattering cataclysm re-echoed in his own soul. El-lil spoke to us and death was in his voice. Surely, if one of the terrible, black gods of past ages could speak, he would speak in just such tongue! There was neither mercy, pity nor weakness in its roar. It was the assurance of a cannibal god to whom mankind was but a plaything and a puppet to dance on his string. “Sound can grow too deep, too shrill or too loud for the human ear to record. Not so with the Voice of El-lil, which had its creation in some in- human age when dark wizards knew how to rack brain, body and soul apart, Its depth was unbearable, its volume was unbearable, yet ear and soul were keenly alive to its resonance and did not grow mercifully numb and dulled. And its terrible sweetness was beyond human endurance; it suffocated us in a smothering wave of sound that yet was barbed with golden fangs. I gasped and struggled in physical agony. Behind me I was aware that even old Sosteras had his hands over his ears, and Gorat groveled on the floor, grinding his face into the bricks. “And if it so affected me, who was just within the magic circle of columns, and those Sumerians who were outside the circle, what was it doing to Con- rad, who was inside the inner ring and beneath that domed roof that inten- sified every note? “Till the day he dies Conrad will never be closer to madness and death than he was then. He writhed in his bonds like a snake with a broken back; his face was horribly contorted, his eyes distended, and foam flecked his livid lips. But in that hell of golden, agonizing sound I could hear nothing—I could only see his gaping mouth and his frothy, flaccid lips, open and writhing like an imbecile’s. But I sensed he was howling like a dying dog. “Oh, the sacrificial daggers of the Semites were merciful. Even Moloch’s Jurid furnace was easier than the death promised by this rending and ripping vibration that armed sound-waves with venomed talons. I felt my own brain was brittle as frozen glass. I knew that a few seconds more of that torture and Conrad’s brain would shatter like a crystal goblet and he would die in the black raving of utter madness. And then something snapped me back from 14 comicbooks.com