Page:Weird Tales Volume 12 Issue 06 (1928-12).djvu/48

 months later I was in the Great Veldt, which my friend had just left.

I returned from the Veldt on the fifth of December; on the seventh I received a short note from Michael Salisbury. It was somewhat disconnected, but I gathered that he earnestly wished me to come down to his home some distance out on the Plain and spend a few days with him. I have given this note to the press, and I believe that it is now in the possession of Messrs. Montague and Saunders of Chancery Lane.

I arrived on the tenth of December, and I found a somewhat different Michael Salisbury from the one I had seen some years before. His rooms were hung in solid, unrelieved black; he himself wore nothing but black, stalking around most of the time in a heavy, black dressing-gown. His hair looked as if it had never been combed, and it had begun to gray at the temples. He had grown a beard which covered more than half his face. He wore a gold-rimmed pince-nez with smoked glasses. These melancholy conditions were wholly contrary to Michael Salisbury's temperament, and you can imagine that I was not slow in asking him what it all meant. But he ventured little by way of explanation.

"It's hard to cast a shadow on black, Justin," he said, an offering which whetted my curiosity still more.

"But why this aversion to shadows?" I asked at once.

"The angle at which a shadow is cast determines for the distant observer exactly the position of the object casting it."

This answer puzzled me beyond words. Surely you can not blame me when I say that I began to cast sidelong glances at Michael Salisbury, fearing at first for his sanity. I remonstrated with him.

"Never mind, Justin," he said at last. "Tomorrow I'll tell you all about it." Then he laughed and said, "And I'll explain just how it happened that I of all people got the wrong train at London a few years ago."

And with that he packed me off to bed, for it was already late at night when I arrived. It seemed to me a good sign that he remembered as a jest that adventure of four years before, and I went to bed thoroughly convinced that I was to hear something far out of the ordinary.

And I was not disappointed. A great majority of those who read this will not attach a bit of significance or truth to the strange narrative that Michael Salisbury told me on the morning of the eleventh of December. I admit that I myself doubted the tale at first.

rather an incredible tale, Justin," he began; "nevertheless, I'll vouch for it. When I came from the Veldt four years ago, I had with me a diamond, which I had taken from the domain of a certain pigmy tribe in the Veldt. The diamond was part of a makeshift idol, worshiped by these people. These dark-skinned pigmies, strangely enough, were not a fraction as barbaric as their neighbors on all sides. Their priests were the educated men of the village; three of them could speak English, having learned it from an English explorer some years before I came. These three priests were the historians of the village, the chief tradesmen, and, most important, the guardians of the idol their people worshiped. They were robed in costumes decidedly similar to those of the Egyptian priests of Ra; they wore ornaments of beaten gold and silver, and used great quantities of beaten copper. Under their leadership, the pigmies had established trade with more civilized colonies along the coast.

"The weapons these pigmies used were a queer sort of blow-guns, through which they projected grayish pellets—soft things, composed of thousands of minute microbes