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.
3. WORLD OF MANY MOONS
Nature is, in many ways, a merciful mother. When the flesh of her puny children has endured shock upon shock to the very limits of the intolerable, she extends to them the benison of unconsciousness.
From a heavy coma, I awoke slowly.
Awoke to a torpor of body and soul―a languor that lapped me soothingly in its folds. For a long while I simply lay without thought or feeling, in a dim stupor like the aftereffect of some powerful narcotic. I lay flat on my back against some slick, cool stone surface, staring up at the moons in the dim golden sky. Sleepily I blinked at the three shining moons in the darkly golden sky above me.
Something clamored in my mind for attention. But it felt too good to lie here motionless and numb. So I firmly closed my mind against the intrusion of unwanted thoughts and idly gazed at the triple-mooned sky of golden vapor―for now I could see that it was indeed vapor, a crawling, curdled film of dim gold light that wrinkled and glided and whorled and eddied above my head like foam on the surface of a disturbed pool, or the coiling and panchromatic arabesque of an oil slick on the pavements of New York.
There was something about that sky that obscurely troubled my placid semiconsciousness. A sky, I reasoned, ought not to be gold vapor, but some other color―blue?
I could not remember.
But there should not, I felt most definitely, be three moons aloft in that strange sky. And especially not such moons as these. For moons should be pallid white, not like these three monstrous orbs, one of which was cold lime green, the second dim rose, and the third a luminous blend of azure and silver.
And then I woke fully, tingling with shock as if a drenching gush of ice-cold water had sluiced my naked body from head to heel
My naked body?
Wildly, I cast an involuntary glance down at myself and saw that I was bare as a new-born babe. I stared around me at the broad disk of milky jade whereon I had lain upon awakening, the broad disk of jade that lay athwart a field of thick-leaved grass that was the crimson of fresh blood
A gold sky―three moons―and crimson grass!
I sprang to my feet with an inarticulate cry, and reeled, staggering for a moment. My body felt numb, as if the circulation had been suspended in every extremity. Pins and needles lanced through me with excruciating pain as the circulation began. I lurched to the edge of the milky disk of stone and fell sprawling in that springy field of thick-leaved grass that was so impossibly crimson.
Panting, my heart racing with shock, I stared around me wildly.
From dreamless sleep I had awakened into―nightmare!
The jade disk was ringed about with nine towering monoliths―featureless pillars of dark, smooth stone. All about, a field of heavy-bladed crimson grass stretched away. To one side it sloped down to a gurgling stream some fifty yards below.
Behind me, and to my right, a wall of dense foliage blocked my view of whatever lay beyond―a heavy jungle, but like no jungle I had ever seen. For the trunks of the trees, and the branches, even to the most minute twigs, were black―black as any velvet ―and gnarled and twisted into knotted, malformed shapes unlike any terrene trees with which I was familiar.
And the leafage of those trees was, again, that impossible, incredible, fantastic crimson!
It was a scene of nightmarish strangeness and phantasmagoric beauty, like something from the dreams of a painter like Hieronymus Bosch, or Hannes Bok.
And yet it was real! There was no question of that. Every detail of the scene lay clear and sharply defined before me, limned in the triple brilliance of those impossibly huge, fantastically colored moons. No dream or vision, no illusion or hallucination, could possibly have sustained such a detailed and lucid reality.
Another thought struck me as I lay there, my stunned mind striving to grapple with the impossible scenes that lay to every hand.
Could it be that I was―dead? And that this weird world of uncanny beauty and strangeness was the Afterlife? I uttered a mocking burst of laughter. Perhaps . . . perhaps . . . but, if that were so, the religions of my world were thoroughly wrong in their conceptions of the Afterlife, for this weird place of black, monstrous trees, golden sky and triple moons, and blood-colored vegetation, this was neither Hell nor Heaven, Purgatory nor Limbo.
It didn't look much like Valhalla should, or any other world that myth described beyond the portals of life and death.
These first few moments of my life on the surface of Thanator (as I later discovered to be the name by which its strange natives called their curious world) are a blur to me. But I know this: I never for one moment entertained any serious doubt as to the state of my sanity. Never once did I really question that what I saw about me was not actual but some sort of dream or hallucination.
I knew that I was alive, sane, and that the scenery about me was a real place, no figment of a mind driven into the refuge of madness. I could feel the crimson blades of grass tickling the soles of my bare feet; I could feel the warm sunlight (or what I took to be sunlight) beating upon my bare body; a slight breeze stirred the unruly locks of yellow hair that fell over my brow, and passed invisible hands over my nakedness. My nostrils drank in the unfamiliar spicy aroma of jungle growths such as I had never seen or heard of before. My ears heard the faint clashing of thorny-edged leaves struck together in the light wind, the gurgling of the brook below, the coughing grunt of some unknown creature of the jungles.