Page:Weird Tales v01n04 (1923-06).djvu/95

94 "He was holding out his hands, looking at them. They were gray. And they writhed and twisted, but his arms were still. He was not even trembling. My tongue clove to the roof of my mouth, and my throat was dry—but at last I called to him,

Sigmund—Sigmund!' I cried, 'For God's sake—'

"He looked up, and, I tell you, I never want to see such a face again! I can never forget it. The face of a soul in torture. He looked at me and held out his arms. His hands were gone—flaked off in large, gray, writhing drops to the sand at his feet!

"He tried to smile, but couldn't.

"Another gray-Thing—dropped off. I was dizzy with sickness. It was unbelievable. And then he spoke. His voice was well-nigh unrecognizable. It croaked and broke:

Done for, my friendt. I feel it eating to my heart. Be merciful and help me. Shoot—quick, through the foreheadt!'

"His words beat through the stupor clouding my brain, I started toward him—hands out-stretched. I could not speak.

Um Gottes Willen, bleibt dat! Stop! Stop!'

"The words brought me up to a stop.

Sigmund! My friend! What—?'

Do not come near me! Vould you also be so tormented? Vat dot Gray touches it consumes. Do not argue, I say, but ''shoot! Heilige Mutter!'' Vy do you not shoot?'

"His voice rose into a shriek of agony. What was left of one arm had sloughed off—the other was almost gone. A little mound of gray grew larger at his feet. His flesh was consumed; skin, blood and bone, absorbed by that vile gray Thing, and he shrieked in agony and prayer. Both arms were gone, and the stuff at his feet had already begun to eat through his boots.

"I shot him—between his eyes. I saw him fall, and I fainted. When I came to, there was only a mound of tiny gray fungi, greedily reaching their hellish tentacles for sustenance and slowly shriveling up into tiny light gray specks of dust on a glossy patch of sand."

EN in the business of knowing things have taken a tip from the plumbers, carpenters and plasterers," announced Friar McCollister, one of the University of Chicago literati. "No longer is it possible to go to a hoary old gentleman with a pile of books and a skull on his desk and ask him any question, from the date of the birth of Copernicus to the conjugations of the verb 'to know' in Sanscrit, and get an answer. The scholar nowadays has learned to say what the plumber says when you ask him to fix the hole he has made in the wall: 'That is not in my department.' I found this out the other day when I tried to get some information on the discovery of a human skull three million years old.

"First, I went to the information office of the University. There I encountered a sprightly young man who turned out to be a professor of sociology. But he didn't know anything about men three million years old. He only studied living men, he said. 'Better go over to Haskell Museum,' he told me. 'They have some skulls and mummies over there.'

"I ran up three flights of stairs and into a dusty old room where I saw a Dr. Edgerton. He was copying strange characters out of a book yellow with age. When I put my question he replied that the only ancients he knew were Egyptian mummies. He said I should see an anthropologist. Back to the information office to see where they kept the anthropologists.

"They sent me up to Walker Museum, where a bland young man said, 'Freddie Starr is not in, but you don't want an anthropologist, anyway. You want to see an ethnologist.'

'When I found one, after dogging him all over the campus, he told me that the matter really belonged in the department of geology. From there they sent me to see the department of paleontology. At is last I located it in a cubby-hole of a museum which I didn't even know was there, although I have been on the campus three years.

But, my dear sir,' replied the head of the department to my question, 'that is not in my department. What you want is a vertebrate paleontologist, and I am only a plain paleontologist. At present we have no vertebrate paleontologist at the University. The last one died a few years ago.'

"Well, I gave up my search," said Mr. McCollister. "This age of specialization is too much for me."

HERE is an old legend to the effect that whoever molests the final resting-place of a Pharaoh will be afflicted with the curse of the ancient rulers; and recent events have revived this superstition.

After thirty-three years of patient, ceaseless toil, Howard Carter, the now famous Egyptologist, discovered the tomb of a powerful Pharaoh. He was a very sincere man, and devoted to his life work all of his energy. Just when success and reward for his labor was within his grasp, he was stricken down with a baffling disease. His condition became very serious and physicians said that if he lived he would probably be an invalid for a long time. Shortly before Carter's illness, Lord Carnarvon, who was financing the expedition, and who was personally supervising the work, suddenly died.

Nobody seems to know just what killed him. Some attribute his death to the effects of an insect bite, some say that he was poisoned by some ancient death-potion with which he came in contact while in the tomb, and others declare that his death was the vengeance of King Tut-Ankh-Amen.

If such a legend could be credited anywhere, the Theban valley would be that place. By day nothing disturbs the place except the sound of the pick-axes and shovels of the native workmen. By night the stillness is broken only by the hooting of owls and the cries of jackals and wild-cats. The spectator is awed by the solemnity of the great, precipitous sandstone cliffs that stand sentinel on either side of the valley. In the midst of the silence and solitude one feels himself standing on the brink of two worlds, gazing into a vista of the unknown.