Page:Weird Tales Volume 29 Number 1 (1937-01).djvu/97

  minarets and towers of Bel Yarnak, that had lain naked and beautiful beneath the glowing light of the triple moons, for he should never see that place any more.

He turned his head again, and for the last time, blinded with his tears and with his doom upon him. As he leaped forward he heard a frightful despairing shriek, and then half-god and man were spinning dizzily downward, seeing the precipice rushing up past them. For Vor-vadoss had said that thus, and only thus, could the spell be lifted.

And the cliff wall curved inward as it swept down, so presently it receded into the dim gray haze, and the Sindara fell in empty mist and into final unstirring darkness.





AWOKE abruptly from a horrible dream and stared wildly about. Then, seeing the high, arched ceiling and the narrow stained windows of my friend's room, a flood of uneasy revelation coursed over me; and I knew that all of Andrew's hopes had been realized. I lay supine in a large bed, the posts of which reared upward in dizzy perspective; while on vast shelves about the chamber were the familiar books and antiques I was accustomed to seeing in that secluded corner of the crumbling and ancient mansion which had formed our joint home for many years. On a table by the wall stood a huge candelabrum of early workmanship and design, and the usual light window-curtains had been replaced by hangings of somber black, which took on a faint, ghostly luster in the dying light.

I recalled forcibly the events preceding my confinement and seclusion in this veritable medieval fortress. They were not pleasant, and I shuddered anew when I remembered the couch that had held me before my tenancy of the present one—the couch that everyone supposed would be my last. Memory burned afresh regarding those hideous circumstances which had compelled me to choose between a true death and a hypothetical one—with a later re-animation by therapeutic methods known only to my comrade, Marshall Andrews. The whole thing had begun when I returned from the Orient a year before and discovered, to my utter horror, that I had contracted leprosy while abroad. I had known that I was taking grave chances in caring for my stricken brother in the Philippines, but no hint of my own affliction appeared until I returned to my native land. Andrews himself had made the discovery, and kept it from me as long as possible; but our close acquaintance soon disclosed the awful truth.

At once I was quartered in our ancient 