Lin Carter - Callisto 6 - Lankar Of Callisto

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Jandar 6: Lankar of Callisto

By Lin Carter

Chapter 1

THE CITY IN THE JUNGLE

It was early afternoon when we landed at the Siem Reap airport just north of

the capital city. We had to wait in interminable lines to collect our luggage

and to go through passport examination and customs inspection. Eventually we

emerged under a darkening sky to be greeted by grinning pedicab-drivers who

shrilled out the names of hotels, vying with each other for our trade. We

selected one cheerful little man from the line who greeted us in a comical

mixture of French and Cambodian.

"Bonsoir, lok!"-which meant "good evening, mister"-he called. I think Noel was

attracted to him because of his smile, which was gleaming and colorful. I mean

that quite literally, by the way, for his teeth were inlaid with gold and

plaques of red carnelian. The Cambodian natives, it seems, regard white teeth

as bad luck, and while the poor peasants color them by chewing on betel nut,

those who can afford to do so have their teeth set with gold fillings or with

semiprecious stones like lapis or carnelian, or even with jewels.

Babbling merrily in at least three languages, our driver heaped the luggage on

the rack and we climbed in and settled ourselves while he mounted the rear of

the vehicle, taking a running start, and steered us smoothly into the flow of

traffic. These pedicabs look like an odd hybrid of bicycle and the traditional

rickshaw and most of the street traffic of the Cambodian capital is composed

of them, since gasoline has recently become very expensive due to shortages

and the cutoff of foreign imports. "Legs are cheaper than gas," is the saying

here.

For a time we were pedaled along a narrow country road beside a muddy yellow

waterway. Naked brown boys scrubbing dusty elephants amid the stream waved and

catcalled as we went clicking by; grimacing gibbons chattered from tall stands

of bamboo that rattled and clattered in the spanking breeze; birds with red

plumage screeched from immense banyans or fragrant lemon-groves. We saw entire

families up to their knees in the muddy water, scooping up silver, wriggling

fish in wicker buckets. Occasionally the waterway widened and we saw stately,

if clumsy, wooden junks competing with all manner of rivercraft for right of

way-everything from bamboo rafts to rusty packet boats, loud motorboats

scooting by graceful crafts that looked for all the world like Venetian

gondolas. Far off downstream a huge oil tanker stood at dock.

Before long we entered the city proper and moved through narrow streets lined

with open-air shops which sold an amazing profusion of odd

merchandise-wrought-silver elephants, gongs, bamboo flutes, paper good-luck

flags, incense sticks, betelnuts, begging bowls of polished wood, dogmeat

sausages (at which we shuddered), modern Chinese comic books. Buddhist monks

strolled the sidewalks in their saffron robes under yellow parasols. Old women

with shaven heads went by, wrapped from armpit to ankle in black sarongs

called sampots, with spotless white blouses. Mobs of ragamuffin children were

everywhere, chewing sugarcane-the local equivalent of lollypops-lugging

shoeshine kits, begging for pennies, munching on sunflower seeds.

Fortune-tellers squatted on the sidewalks, a jumble of mystic books, copper

amulets and magical herbs spread out before them on pieces of oilcloth. Most

of the traffic was composed of pedicabs similar to the one in which we rode,

which are called cyclos; there were very few automobiles to be seen.

Noel had brought along a street map of Phnom Penh which she had been studying

on the plane while I read Jandar's manuscript; so we were able to follow our

progress through the city easily enough. Phnom

Penh is a city of many waters, laid out so that it straddles the intersection

of the Tonle Sap and the Bassac River, where they merge with an elbow of the

mighty Mekong which empties into the ocean one hundred and thirty miles

downstream. This intersection, called the quatre bras, the "four arms," is

like a great `X' of water, and most of the local transportation is by means of

the various rivers, canals and suchlike. The country itself is quite small,

covering 66,000 square miles, about the size of the state of Washington back

home. The capital is rather small, in keeping with about four hundred thousand

inhabitants.

We entered the Boulevard Norodom, a broad tree-lined avenue. Here for the

first time we saw automobiles in number, mostly small foreign imports I could

not name. Our driver, pedaling away behind us, called our attention to a local

landmark, the famous Wat Phnom, a tapering, battered, weather-beaten,

spire-topped shrine which rises atop a wooded hill near the approximate center

of the city, gained by a wide flight of stone steps. We passed by it close

enough to see the stone seven-headed cobras that adorned its roof. "Wat Phnom"

means "Hill Temple," and the legend has it that six centuries ago when rainy

season floodwaters arose, they washed the trunk of a great koki tree up this

hill to the doorstep of a lady named Penh. Inside the tree were found four

bronze images of the Buddha, and the omen was interpreted to mean the gods had

withdrawn their favor from the old imperial capital, the famous jungle

metropolis of Angkor, and were searching for a new home. Rumors of the miracle

spread and a fair-sized town grew up rapidly around the central hill whereon

lived Lady Penh, who built the spired temple to house the idols. Later, when

an invasion from Thailand overran Angkor, the king of that day moved south,

settling here, making this his capital. The city has been known as Phnom Penh,

"the Hill of Lady Penh," ever since.

We reached the waterfront where we were supposed to meet Sir Malcolm's head

boy, checked our luggage in a riverside passenger station, paid our

cyclo-driver, tipping him handsomely, and, as we had plenty of time to spare,

decided on an early dinner. The station manager, or dockmaster, or whatever he

was, spoke a fair bit of English, recommending the center of the local

nightlife, an establishment called le Bar Jean, where the local members of the

French colony meet for cocktails, conversation and continental cuisine. Noel

demurred, preferring something more Cambodian to French; the stationmaster

told us how to find the Lotus d'Or, a floating restaurant serving traditional

Vietnamese dishes, which had originally been built as a movie set.

We set out on our own. The steep golden yellow roofs of the Throne Hall,

reserved for coronations, gleamed in the fires of sunset; paper lanterns

bobbled from bamboo rods above open-air shops inwardly lit by kerosene lamps;

colored paper good-luck flags fluttered from doorsills as we passed,

displaying a bizarre bestiary-the half-human Garuda bird, the three-faced god

Chak Kboun, fantastically colored elephants, and a green-faced giant named

Pipchek, borrowed from Hindu myth. Eager-faced urchins, who could spot a

"wealthy" tourist ten miles off, vied to escort us to local monuments like the

great Preah Morokoe pagoda with its famous floor of solid silver tiles. There

was certainly a motley throng filling the lamplit streets, among them a

surprising preponderance of terribly respectable-looking Chinese businessmen

in neat, gray Western business suits, with narrow, black conservative ties.

Since about a third of Phnom Penh's citizens are Chinese, and since they

control most of the trade and own nearly all of the shops, I suppose this

wasn't really surprising.

The city was crowded and colorful, a place where many different cultures meet

and mingle. Along Rue Khemarak Phoumin-over which garish paper banners

advertise soccer games and boxing matches to the sports-mad Cambodians-there

is a restaurant serving a traditional Chinese menu, crossed, in a most

unlikely fashion, with a French sidewalk cafe. But we finally settled on a

seedy little eating-place which offered Cambodian dishes and even a headwaiter

who spoke English. Shunning the dogmeat sausages, Noel asked about a dish

called chong roet, which turned out to be live locusts or cicadas broiled over

pans of charcoal.

We settled on roast trei chkowk, a local variety of lake chub roasted crisp

and tender over a pot of charcoal, served up on a bed of steaming rice. It was

tangy and delicious, topped off with heady Cambodian tea served in curious

wooden pots, with ansamcheks for dessert-rice cakes with banana centers,

wrapped in leaves and served piping hot. The restaurant was crowded and noisy,

sawdust on the floor and odorous of fish-heads. Pretty girls in gorgeous

sarongs twirled in the national folk dance, called the lamthon, in a kind of

floor show; they were followed by musicians who played eight-stringed gares, a

native orchestra of gongs and flutes and instruments called tros which look

like one-stringed violins. We ate hugely, enjoyed ourselves enormously, and

the bill came to a staggering thirty riels, which was about ninety cents

American.

After supper we went strolling among the shops. Noel wanted to pick up a few

souvenirs to bring home as gifts for her sister, the Jellerette children

across the street, and our next-door neighbors, the Roethers, who were usually

kind enough to collect our mail and newspapers for us when we were off on

trips. She also hoped to find something nice for Marie Cerut, a local antique

dealer with whom she had struck up a close friendship.

"Keep your eyes open for something to bring back for Ron Stoloff," she said,

referring to the President of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, whose

guests we would be at the annual Philcon the following month.

Everywhere we went we saw clear evidence that this was a country at war.

Military vehicles were to be seen moving through the streets or parked at

corners, and there were many Cambodians in uniform, some of them carrying

weapons, mingling with the crowds along the street. The recent explosion of

rebel action in the outlying provinces and the dangers of an attempted

Communist take-over of the new Lon Nol government had caused our State

Department to be more than a little reluctant to permit Noel and me to have

passports for Cambodia. Obviously, Uncle didn't like the idea of U.S. citizens

getting into a Southeast Asian country at war, for fear of American nationals

getting mixed up in what might be an international incident. While we were in

the capital, though, we didn't see any evidence of trouble, although once we

got out on the river and down into the jungle regions, we might expect a

little more danger.

Well, we had determined to take our chances on that, and hoped that everything

turned out all right.

The streets were very crowded by now, and made a gorgeous and exotic sight,

lit by swaying paper lanterns, colored lights shining on strange brown faces,

gilded wood, signs in curious characters. I wished we had more time to sample

the nightlife, but we did not.

Back on the dock we found our transportation awaiting us, in the form of a

rusty, patched, decrepit little steam-launch that was a dead ringer for the

dilapidated craft Humphrey Bogart captained in one of our favorite movies, The

African Queen. Sir Malcolm's number-one boy, Charlie Phuong, had already

located and loaded our luggage aboard. He was a short, cheerful, grinning,

bowlegged boy of indeterminate age, who carried his life's savings around with

him in the form of a wide grin bright with gold fillings. Sparkling black eyes

greeted us under the bill of a battered old baseball cap, around which a scrap

of fluttering red scarf had been knotted for good luck, or to keep the devils

away, or maybe both. The rest of his costume consisted of muddy tennis shoes,

a ragged pair of khaki shorts, and a cast-off olive drab army shirt.

The moon had risen while we were at dinner, and the river traffic was at its

pitch as we cast off, chugging noisily, into the main channel. Brightly lit

sampans and junks floated by us; boats of every description were loading at

docks heaped with tins of pitch, bales of raw, unprocessed rubber from the

great Chup plantations to the northeast of the capital. We saw workmen, naked

to the waist, laboring under flaring torches at sacks of fragrant yieng yieng

bark from which incense is made, shoving about baskets filled with garish

peppercorns, stalks of green bananas, bundles of peacock feathers, cords of

cut bamboo, bundles of turtle shells, anteater skins and kapok. Amusingly, one

boat was unloading cases of Coca Cola bottles.

Our boat threaded its noisy path through an arrangement of mud dikes, canal

locks, and waterways. Wooden cowbells went click-clack in fields beside the

river; oil lamps gleamed in the waxed paper windows of farmhouses and huts as

we sailed downriver under star-crowded skies. Peasants worked late in flooded,

shallow ricefields, bent double and looming like black cutouts against the

moon. We sailed past bamboo forests, lemon groves, ungainly stands of banana

trees, and thick banyans. In one hillside farm a clumsy Zadrugar tractor,

imported from Yugoslavia, rumbled, belching black, oily smoke.

Noel and I struck up a conversation with our friendly pilot. Charlie Phuong,

it turned out, was not a native of Phnom Penh but hailed from a hamlet with

the delicious name of Battangbang, which I gathered was the capital of the

northwestern province. He had nothing but contempt and derision for the locals

hereabouts, whom he considered city slickers, more interested in organized

sports, movies from Hong, Kong, and political squabbles, than in the

traditional elements of Cambodian life. He was very uneducated and very

superstitious, what with his crimson head scarf to frighten off

night-wandering demons, and the copper bracelet he wore clasped about one

muscular brown bicep which was a good-luck charm. He chattered in friendly,

amiable fashion while we glided down the star-mirroring river, which widened.

He had worked nearly a calendar year for Sir Malcolm, whom he held in

good-humored veneration-his name for the British archaeologist was Lok Thom,

which means something like "Mr. Big"-and, although uneducated, he had picked

up a surprising vocabulary in English: pungent, earthy, shot through with

French cuss-words and the names of Cambodian deities and demons, all mixed

together in a patois so inimitable I will not even attempt to reproduce it in

these pages.

We passed something like an enormous, densely black, floating island, around

the edge of which Charlie Phuong maneuvered the laboring little steam-launch

while purpling the night air with a torrent of profanity in at least three

languages. This floating island turned out to be a logjam, drifting downstream

from the forest around Kratie. Native lumberjacks, only their red,

devil-frightening head-scarves visible in the gloom, scampered nimbly about

this gigantic raft of logs, keeping careful eyes peeled to be certain the

heavy hardwood logs of teak were buoyed up on hollow bamboo trunks.

I smoked cigarette after cigarette, sitting in the prow, staring dreamily out

on the starry skies, the moonlit river, and the jungle thickets which lined

the river to each side; Noel dozed in the rear, pillowed on our luggage. The

trip would take hours.

Then I must have dozed off myself, for the next thing I knew was Charlie

Phuong grinning down at me, gold fillings glittering in the torchlight,

shaking me awake. I stretched and sat up and looked about me. We were pulled

over to one shore of the river, where a crude little log-built dock thrust out

on sunken pilings a few yards into the stream. The dock was crowded with

small, nimble men passing our luggage ashore, each snatching a bag and tossing

it into the waiting hands of the next.

Then a spry, sixtyish, little man with bright, inquisitive blue eyes and a

goatee of silvery white, his scrawny form clad in filthy khaki shorts and a

mud-besplattered T-shirt, popped up directly in front of me, squinted about,

spotted me, and grinned-a grin which made his entire leather-tanned face

dissolve into a mass of laughter-crinkles.

"Mr. Carter, I gather?" I nodded, still half-asleep. He rubbed bony hands

together briskly.

"Excellent! Excellent! And your charming lady, I see. Well, hop out-hop

out-you're here, you know! Welcome to the city of Arangkor; population

twenty-six-now twenty-eight! It's a five minute stroll through the brush-watch

your step, dear lady, or you'll go up to your waist in mud-the dock we built

for a reason, you know! Come-Billy-Boy, my cook, has fresh tea brewing, or

instant coffee, if you prefer . . . come along now. Careful with the

gentleman's luggage, you clumsy monkeys!"

And he bustled into the line of laborers, vanishing in the dark.

So it was that at last I met Sir Malcolm Jerrolds, distinguished author of

Unsolved Mysteries of Asia (Macmillan, 1964), Excavating the Gobi (Cassels,

1966), and A Preliminary Report on the Arangkor Discoveries (unpublished).

And so it was, also, five or six minutes later, at the end of a muddy trail

cut through some of the densest and least-explored jungles on this planet,

that I came to Arangkor itself-mystery-city of the vanished Khymer-Kings, lost

city of the ages.

Chapter 2

CONSEQUENCES OF TAKING A STROLL

"Not much to be seen by night, of course-great pity-splendid sight by

daylight, I assure you-more tea, missus?" the little, gnomelike man chirped

briskly. Noel accepted a tin cup of the steaming beverage with a smile; I

nursed a similar container filled with a rank, bitter brew Billy-Boy

mistakenly considered to be coffee, preoccupied with staring around me in a

bemused fashion.

This tea party was being held, incongruously, on worn camp-chairs amidst a

plaza of broken stony slabs where once, our spry little host assured us, the

ancient God-Kings of fabulous Kambudja had held open-air court.

Stone buildings loomed to every side, heavily-carved, fantastic sculptures

edged with moon-silver. Birds squawked in the jungle night; monkeys screeched;

somewhere, far off, a water buffalo bellowed lustily.

Noel was interrogating Sir Malcolm on archaeological methods; I was too

bone-weary, despite the bitter black coffee, sweetened with curdled, faintly

soursmelling condensed milk, and too heavy-eyed, to do much but sip the stuff,

smoke, and stare around me.

Great frowning stone masks glared down at us. They might represent Lokesvara,

a future incarnation of the Buddha, or then again they might not, Sir Malcolm

told us. The Khymer glyphs, yet undeciphered, would reveal much, he assured

us, his white goatee waggling up and down in the light of the small campfire.

We had been served a late camp-supper of good oldfashioned K rations, which

brought me back with a

resounding bump to my army days, to snow-buried tents along the Korean hills,

the faint rattle of machine gun fire in the frozen air. Talking a mile a

minute all the while, the little archaeologist had whisked crackling glossy

photographs of unknown carvings under our noses-whisked them away after a

moment's glance to shove rattling wooden trays of small stone artifacts into

our laps-then snatched these back to unfold a crisp, rustling palm-leaf codex

scrawled with brightly-painted figures, crowned with nodding plumes, sporting

birdfaces, waving many arms, and surrounded by unintelligible hieroglyphic

dialogue like something from a comic book fallen from Mars.

It was impossible not to like Sir Malcolm Jerrolds from the first moment you

met him. He was a small, spry wisp of a man, leathery-tanned, with peering,

keen eyes and a nervous manner that made him jiggle and fidget around in the

most amusing manner. For all his jittery manner and irresistible flow of

conversation, he was what I would call a perfect host. By this I mean that,

within a few moments, he was treating you as if he had known you for years and

felt free to relax and be comfortable with you, and he made you feel the same

way about him. He was adorable, and Noel simply loved him from the start. She

had always been enthusiastic about ancient history and archaeology, and her

alert, sincere interest and intelligent, pointed questions touched a chord

within the little capering Britisher. He beamed upon her fondly, for her

enthusiasm matched his own lifelong passion to learn the secrets of our

ancient ancestors. He danced attendance upon my wife and ransacked his files

for curious and interesting objects and fragments, which he displayed

tenderly, with touching confidence, as a shy child will show you her beloved

dolls.

The work of the expedition was not so much to excavate Arangkor, he told us,

as to clear away the rubbish. That is, the ancient Khymer metropolis was not

buried under fathoms of earth as Babylon or Pompeii had been, but simply

overgrown with jungle. Vines netted the towers carven with leering stone

masks, bushes choked doorways or blocked passages, centuries of rotting leaves

hid the streets under a carpet of squelching mold. Since arriving here, Sir

Malcolm and his native boys had been, in a very real sense, performing the

work of street cleaners. He showed us the mountain of leaf mulch piled outside

the half-toppled city wall; all of that his boys had removed in wicker

baskets.

By this time, however, most of the underbrush and fallen leaves and branches

had been cleared away. The work, from this point on in, was that of

photographing and measuring and taking notes, making rubbings of temple

carvings, and things like that.

"Much-much easier, dear lady, I assure you!than the digging-up of Amgash under

a broilin' Mesopotamy sun-or scratchin' up tons of dried clay from the rubble

of Timnash back in '58, with the bloody Arabs and the bloody Israelis bangin'

away at each other right over ourbloody heads!" he said perkily.

Noel nodded and said something interestedly, smothering a slight yawn with one

hand. Her eyes were sleepy, I noticed, and was about to interrupt Sir Malcolm

and suggest we discuss it tomorrow, when the old fellow noticed my wife's

sleepiness himself and curtly bade one of his toothily grinning boys to get

our tent ready.

"Talk here all night if I don't pop th' two o' you into your cots show you

around tomorrow, dear lady: some sights to be seen here that will astonish

Europe when I send my first batch of pictures to the Journal of Asian

Antiquity! And when I publish my Preliminary Report, well, dash it, I've data

there will topple the prevailing theories of Khymer dating into the dungheaps,

I assure you! Yes, my dear sir, theories will fall to every side like

tree-trunks in monsoon weather! Must ask you to glance over my manuscript in

first draft-advice of a genuine professional, very valuable-write too damned

fast, that's my trouble! Ideas all there in good enough order, quite, quite;

but gettin'

it down in readable fashion-always been my problem. But, here, the both of you

are yawning-off to bed now; up with first dawn, you know. Lots to be seen!

We'll talk more tomorrow . . . ."

And off he went, bawling out a scurry of native boys, leaving us to our friend

with the colorful smile, Charlie Phuong, who would show us where we could wash

up, and would then escort us to our beds.

The beds proved to be stiff, narrow cots set side by side in a tiny tent

pitched on a side street off the plaza, with a wooden packing crate stood on

its end between the cots to serve, obviously, as a night table. I put thereon

my change, cigarettes, keys and sunglasses, arranging these in a half-circle

around a spluttering oil lamp, by whose wavering, smoky light we undressed

sleepily. So much had happened that day we were exhausted, and the voluble Sir

Malcolm's rapid-fire conversation had worn out our vocal cords. We said

goodnight and crawled-into the sleeping bags.

That night, as might have been expected, I just couldn't get to sleep.

Although I was worn out after the excitement of the day, the clammy chill of

the jungle night, combined with the hard cot and the discomforts of a sleeping

bag, militated against my attaining that cozy serenity requisite to slipping

off to slumberland. Also, I must confess, I was accustomed to the warm,

breathing weight of one or another of our dogs sleeping at my feet.

Noel fell asleep without trouble-I could hear her breathing in the chilly

darkness of the tent. But I tossed and turned, unable to get comfortable,

unable to turn off my mind. After about an hour of this I decided to hell with

it; I got up, slipped into my khakis, breeches, and boots and unzipped the

tent, thinking to walk around a bit and view the marvels of Arangkor by

moonlight while smoking a cigarette or two.

The full moon of Cambodia was an immense pallid orb of ghostly light silvering

the carven faces on the stone gates and towers. The moonlight hid the scars of

time's decay behind a veil of shimmering glamor. Almost, it seemed, the city

lived untouched by the erosion of the ages. The cracks that zigzagged the worn

stone facing of the temple were invisible in the silvery dimness; the

rubble-choked streets were brimming with dense gloom. At any moment I half

expected barbaric priests in feather headdresses to appear on the upper tiers

and begin some primordial chant to the moon gods, or masked princelings of a

lost age to be glimpsed amidst the shadows of the long arcade, bound for

assignations with naked, barbaric courtesans.

It was all impossibly romantic.

For a time I smoked and dreamed, my imagination peopling the shadowy streets

with ghostly processions ....

Then I saw the light.

It appeared suddenly, like an apparition. One moment the city was dark and

dead and still, gilded by the jungle moon: in the next instant a dazzling

shaft of amazing light sprang out of nowhere to thrust like a shining lance

against the jeweled skies. It was like a huge searchlight, impossibly

brilliant, very unexpected. Vague thoughts of air raids stirring in my mind, I

headed towards it, impelled by devouring curiosity. I entered a curving street

lined with frowning monoliths, then passed through a gloom-drenched arcade of

partially-fallen pillars, and found myself on the edge of an immense

stone-paved plaza.

Before me, in the center of a circle of huge stone idols, lay an opening in

the stone floor, round as the mouth of a well. It was from deep in the

subterranean shaft of this well that the beam of sparkling radiance soared

skyward. And then, of course, I knew it . . . and the prickling of

superstitious awe roughened the skin of my arms and stirred the nape-hairs on

the back of my neck.

For it could be none other than that mysterious, jade-lined well Jandar had

seen a year and a half ago . . . and the weird beam of sparkling force was,

must be, the transdimensional gateway he had called "the

Gate Between the Worlds." . . .

Within me, my imagination awoke. I shivered slightly as to the cold breath of

the Unknown. For the scene that lay before me now was in no detail different

from the scene he had described in that first volume of his memoirs which I

had titled Jandar of Callisto . . . there before me, bathed in the dim silver

of the moonlight, the ring of stone colossi squatted, facing inwards to turn

their enigmatic carven eyes upon the mystic Well that formed a magic pathway

to other planets.

There they sat, the nameless gods of a primal and mysterious race, many arms

brandishing aloft the emblems of their forgotten divinity, wheels and keys and

stone flowers, stylized thunderbolts and odd-looking swords and skulls . . .

and the restless, pulsing light of the Well cast ripples of luminance across

their sculptured features. As wave on wave of sparkling force moved up the

stationary beam, it seemed they frowned or smiled or grimaced; and the moving,

throbbing heart beats of light lent the flicker of motion and the illusion of

cold, watchful intelligence to their carven eyes.

It was an unforgettable scene of weird grandeur and strange majesty-as awesome

and magical as anything in the pages of Haggard or Merritt-and it was really

happening! Not on the written page; but in the real world of everyday life.

It was too strange, too fantastic, to be frightening. I was caught in the grip

of a supernatural awe such as I have never before experienced. Without

consciously thinking about it, I stepped forward, entering the plaza. The

throbbing heartbeat of living radiance flickered before my eyes with

mesmerizing force. I went forward between two of the stone gods to stand on

the very brink of the Well, and all I could see before me was that soaring

shaft of mysterious light that blazed up and up until it dimmed the stars and

paled the ghostly glory of the Cambodian moon . . . .

And then my boots slid out from under me and I fell, sliding down a shallow

incline towards the very edge of the Well!

Too late for caution, I remembered that the margin of the Well was fashioned

of a slick, glassy stone like pale, smooth jade.

Too late to avoid the peril, I remembered that Jandar himself had made exactly

the same mistake. He, too, had slipped and fallen on the glossy stone . . .

but I, at least, had been forewarned!

The jade lip of the Well was slick as if oiled; ever so slightly concave, it

sloped inward towards the mouth of the Well.

I slid down the depression helplessly, skinning the palms of my hands against

the stone as I instinctively sought to arrest my progress. There was no

handhold, nothing I could catch hold of, no way I could keep from falling into

the Well . . . .

Then I slid over the brink, and the golden, throbbing splendor of the mystic

light enveloped me, -and I lost all consciousness.

Was it a dream-a distorted fancy of my mind alone?

I seemed as unaware of my physical body as if I had been transformed into a

dimly sentient thing of impalpable vapor.

Yet somehow my senses functioned: I was aware of the sensation of flight. It

seemed to me that I was thrust upwards at an inconceivable velocity.

Only for a brief, flashing instant was I aware of hurtling through space at

fantastic speed.

There was a moment when intense darkness closed about me, black as the cold

gulf that yawns between the stars.

For a flashing instant I shuddered in the grip of intolerable, super-arctic

cold.

I was hurled through space at frightful velocity.

Ahead of me, a dim radiance expanded with magical swiftness into an ochre,

banded sphere.

Particles of frozen rock circled the width of the luminous giant.

One granule of parched, frigid rock swung up before me, unfolding like a magic

flower.

For a blurred instant I saw needle-sharp peaks of black rock stabbing up at me

as I fell downward now . . . and the valleys between the fanglike peaks were

choked with smooth expanses of cold blue snow . . . frozen methane or ammonia

. . . .

Then the vision before me went hazy, as if I hurtled through an immaterial

barrier of illusion . . . .

I caught a brief, swift glimpse of what lay behind the mirage of a dead,

frozen world.

I saw vast plains of weird scarlet, fantastic jungles of black trees with

crimson foliage, glittering rivers and shining seas. Barbaric stone cities

sprinkled the plains, stood beside the shores of river and sea, looking like

wonderfully detailed toy metropolises designed by Frazetta or Hannes Bok.

Then black and crimson jungles swept up to engulf me.

And my consciousness went out like a blown candle.

Chapter 3

ON ANOTHER PLANET

My back was cold, as if I was laying on some hard, uncomfortable surface of

glass.

I opened my eyes and looked into arching skies of crawling gold. It was as if

the heavens had been domed over with auric glass, crawling with a film of

liquid.

I rolled over on my side, levering myself up on one elbow, and became suddenly

conscious of two things.

For one thing I was stark naked. My khaki shirt and jacket and whipcord

riding-breeches were gone. So were my boots; even my undershorts and socks.

For another thing I was staring upon an incredible landscape. Before me lay a

vista of smooth meadows, rising from a distant stream to the edge of a dense

forest or jungle. The meadow grasses were the color of new-shed blood,'

impossible, pure scarlet. And the jungle, or as much of it as I could see from

my recumbent position, was composed of weird trees, black as India ink, whose

trunks and branches and roots were fantastically gnarled and knotted, unlike

those of any tree I had ever seen or heard of.

And the leaves of those black trees were an incredible shade of crimson.

Beyond meadow and forest, the landscape dwindled into dimness at the horizon;

a horizon which seemed curiously near.

I looked down at myself. Every stitch of clothing I had worn was gone. So were

my rings, the plain gold wedding band I wore on the fourth finger of my left

hand and the carven brown carnelian seal-ring I wore on the middle finger of

my right.

Gone, too, was the aluminum POW/MIA bracelet I had worn for months on my left

wrist. As an example of the haziness that clouded my mind in those first few

moments after my awakening, I will cite the thought which passed through my

brain, that the Capt. Michael McCuistion-the missing-in-action American

officer whose name was inscribed on the VIVA bracelet-had himself disappeared

somewhere in Cambodia or Laos or Vietnam. And now I was lost or missing,

although I knew, with a sinking feeling deep within me, that I was far more

lost than he.

I knew where I was, of course.

The scarlet plain, those black, gnarled trees with crimson foliage, the dim

skies of misted gold-I knew them, although I had never before seen them. I had

read descriptions of this landscape in Jandar of Callisto.

I grinned, trying to find an element of ironic humor in the despair of my

predicament.

For I was, must be, on the world of Callisto, moon of Jupiter! Like Jandar

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Jandar6:LankarofCallistoByLinCarterChapter1THECITYINTHEJUNGLEItwasearlyafternoonwhenwelandedattheSiemReapairportjustnorthofthecapitalcity.Wehadtowaitininterminablelinestocollectourluggageandtogothroughpassportexaminationandcustomsinspection.Eventuallyweemergedunderadarkeningskytobegreetedbygrinningp...

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Lin Carter - Callisto 6 - Lankar Of Callisto

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