Page:Weird Tales volume 31 number 02.djvu/110

236 more than the sixteenth of on inch at which it had originally been fixed was it protruding.

The professor laughed when I showed that to him; and he laughed again when I asked him why he hadn't shown the record to me to prove I was wrong instead of so hurriedly taking it from the hidden phonograph. Then I asked him why the ghastly groaning had stopped precisely when I ripped that pipe from the Bhutanese; and he called me a gullible, sophomoric fool.

"When you threw the old man into the sofa the impact jarred the phonograph, halting the record."

That forced upon me how the mind of a scientist, no less than the zealous religionist's, can become grooved and open only to orthodoxy. But as I turned angrily to leave, I saw one more thing. And what I saw, coupled with the furious outburst I got from Professor Du Bois when I mentioned it, made me fly off the handle and tell the professor the strong but true words for which he now would have me expelled.

I saw the arms of Richford Mason, the lifeless arms which had been folded across his chest in a posture of serene repose–I saw them hanging limply, almost trailing to the floor from the sides of the table bed.

From Time's disintegrating wall I watched the regiments of moons March down the avenue of night, The flying columns and platoons Of suns receding disappear Beyond horizons of sound and sight; I heard the systems, world on world, Down battlements of darkness hurled, And saw the spheres in bright parade Demolished by the cavalcade Of doom, the nebulas undone, The constellations' slow retreat, The meteors swift oblivion… I watched from Time's low crumbling wall; I know their passwords and their signs– In uniform of yielding breath, Ally of stars, I write these lines Above the signature of Death!