Lin Carter - Callisto 1 - Jandar Of Callisto

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Jandar 1: Jandar of Callisto

By Lin Carter

1. THE LOST CITY OF MANOR

That the most far-reaching and momentous historical events often spring from

minute and seemingly inconsequential accidents is a fact which I can attest

from my own experience.

For the past four months now-insofar as I have been able to measure the

passage of time-I have dwelt on an alien world, surrounded by a thousand foes,

struggling and battling my way through innumerable perils to win a place

beside the most beautiful woman in two worlds.

And all of these adventures, these wonders and terrors, sprang from a single

cause, and that cause was a crumb of dirt half the size of my thumbnail.

As I sit, painfully and slowly setting down these words with a quill pen and

homemade ink on a sheet of rough parchment, I cannot help but wonder at the

obscure vanity which prompts me to record the tale of my incredible

adventures-a tale which began in a lost city deep in the impenetrable jungles

of southeast Asia and which ventures from there across the incredible distance

of three hundred and ninety million miles of infinite space to the surface of

a weird and alien planet. A tale, furthermore, which I deem it most unlikely

any other human eye will ever read.

Yet I write on, driven by some inexplicable urge to set down an account of the

marvels and mysteries which I alone of all men ever born on earth have

experienced. And when at last this narrative is completed, I will set it

within the Gate in the hopes that, being composed entirely of organic matter,

paper and ink as well, it may somehow be transported across the immeasurable

gulf of interplanetary space to the distant world of my birth, to which I

shall never return.

In the night sky, at certain seasons when the Inner Moons are on the other

side of our primary and the starry skies are clear, I can (I fancy) see the

earth. A remote and insignificant spark of blue fire it seems from this

distance; a tiny point of light lost amid the blackness of the infinite void.

Can it truly be that I was born and lived my first twenty-four years on that

blue spark-or was that life but a dream, and have I spent all of my days upon

this weird world of Thanator? It is a question for the philosophers to settle,

and I am but a simple warrior.

Yet I can well remember my father. He was a tall man, stern-faced and

powerfully built, with scowling brows and thick black locks. His name was

Matthew Dark; a Scotsman from Aberdeenshire, an engineer by profession, and a

wanderer by inclination, he tramped the world to its far corners searching for

the joy of life, its richness, its color, which always eluded him and always

seemed to beckon from over the next horizon.

From him I seem to have inherited my inches, for like him I am something over

six feet; from him, as well, must come my strength, for among men I am

reckoned a strong man of great endurance and stamina. But it was from my

mother came the gift of my yellow hair and blue eyes, which have none of the

dour, darkling Scot in them. She was a Danish girl from a town whose name I

cannot pronounce and she died when I was a small child. All that I can

remember of her is a soft warm voice, a sweet smiling face bending over me,

the touch of a gentle hand. And I seem to see laughing blue eyes, as calm and

deep and sparkling as the lakes of her homeland, and the gleam of pale gold

hair woven in thick braids-alas, it is only a shard of memory, a brief glimpse

into a past which I can never recapture, never completely recall.

The color of my hair and my eyes, these were the only gifts she ever gave me,

besides my life itself. But in an odd way I owe her a double debt: for it was

for reason of my yellow hair and blue eyes that my life was spared when I fell

into the cruel hands of the savage and inhuman warriors of the Yathoon-but I

am getting ahead of my own story.

If I owe my mother the double debt of life given and life saved, I at least

owe my father for my name, Jonathan Andrew Dark. He was building a great

hydroelectric project in Denmark when he met and loved and wed my laughing,

blue-eyed mother. She went with him to South America for his next job, for an

engineer must go where his work leads him, and wanderers have no home. And

thus it chanced that while my mother was a Dane and my father a Scot, and I am

now a naturalized American, I was born in Rio.

Of my early life there is little enough to tell. Or, rather, I run the risk of

telling too much-for it has little bearing on the saga of my adventures on the

fantastic world that has now become my home. A tropical fever carried off my

lovely mother when I was only three; my father I seldom saw, for he was off

building a highway in Peru, a dam in Bolivia, a bridge in Yucatan. But when

death took her from us I became his constant companion. Prim and proper folk

might be scandalized to think of a tender child amid the savage surroundings

of a jungle camp, but I thrived on the rough, exciting life, and to this I am

sure I owe my love of peril and adventure. For I saw the green, stinking

interior of the Matto Grosso before I ever saw the interior of a schoolroom,

and was familiar with the dangerous rope bridges that span the airy heights of

the high Andes before I ever saw a paved city street.

I became a sort of pet or protege to the engineers of my father's camp. It was

that laughing bandit Pedro who taught me to throw a knife before I ever

learned my letters, and the big Swede, Swenson, who taught me every trick of

rough-and-tumble fighting his brawny, battered body had ever learned. I could

bring down a hunting jaguar with one cool steady shot straight between its

burning eyes even as it sprang for my throat-long before I had mastered the

occult mysteries of long division.

Yes, long division-for my formal schooling had been somewhat neglected while I

had learned to brew coffee with water taken from a snake-infested jungle

stream and heated over kerosene flames in a battered tin pot, to hunt and

fight like a man, to climb like a monkey, and to survive where a city-bred boy

would have succumbed to fever ticks, snakebite, or cholera. It happened when I

was about thirteen. My father had had enough of the banana republics by now;

he yearned for the dry, parched air and gorgeous nights of the desert after

years spent in the sweltering sinkhole of marshy jungles; he was thinking of

an oil-drilling project in Iraq.

But in the back alleys of a vile little jungle town named Puerto Maldonado he

ran into an American geologist named Farley, an old friend of many years

standing. Puerto Maldonado is in the back country of Peru, on the shores of a

river called Madre de Dios, "Mother of God." God, however, had nothing to do

with Farley being in Puerto Maldonado: he was hunting for the place where the

Incas had gotten their gold.

He had found nothing but ticks, mosquitoes, and a particularly nasty breed of

snake the natives called jararaca. It was a nip in the ankle from the venomous

fangs of this particular denizen of the jungles that had laid up Farley in the

backroom of the only gin mill in Puerto Maldonado for three weeks. My father

and his friend celebrated their chance meeting with copious toasts of bad gin

in fly-specked glasses, and somewhere between the second and the third bottle

my father conceived the notion that I required schooling. Here was Farley, a

distinguished geologist with a string of college degrees after his name, like

paper tags in the tail of a kite. And here was I, a tall, rawboned,

broad-shouldered and sunburnt boy, able enough to hack through the tangled and

snake-infested swamps of the Matto Grosso like a veteran, but a green-eared

novice when it came to the mystic doctrines of long division.

In less time than it takes me to describe the event, a decision had been

reached. Farley was on his way to the coast when the next mail packet came

chugging down the coiling silver length of the Madre de Dios; thence overland

to the burgeoning young city of Santo Domingo and a bush pilot named O'Mara

who would fly him to civilization. He was on his way back to what he described

as "God's Country," but what the geography books call the United States of

America, and with all possible haste, for there was a professorship open at

Harvard for a seasoned field geologist, and he was hungry for the world of

cinema, cocktail lounge, and campus. And, besides, he had been lucky this time

to have spent only three weeks sweating jararaca venom out of his guts. He

preferred not to give the wriggling little monsters the chance for a second

bite.

So I was off to America with the would-be Herr Professor, and, to tell the

truth, I didn't at all mind the idea. I had become aware in recent months that

we men shared the world with a delectable species called girls, and I would

find few specimens here in the muddy jungles of Peru, while I was given to

understand they were as common in America as was carrapato do chao, the humble

ground tick, in this part of the world.

I never saw my father again. An exploding oil pocket in the uplands of Iraq

nine months after this sent him to that El Dorado or Valhalla where all old

adventurers spend their eternities. God bless him, for the world's a poorer

place without him in it.

Not to occupy these pages with an account of the wonders of small-town

America, which must be already familiar to my reader-if ever this most unusual

journal is fortunate enough to find its way across three hundred and ninety

million miles of space to the nearest reader capable of understanding

English-I shall pass over the next several years without much more than a

summary.

My lack of anything in the way of schooling proved a bit of an impediment. But

Mr. Farley-now Assistant Professor Farley-serving in loco parentis, lined up

enough tutors for a rash program. I proved, rather surprisingly to all, and

especially to myself, an alert, bright student, and before long I was almost

up to my age group. I had seen the interior of a schoolroom at last, and found

it no less of a jungle in its way than the Matto Grosso had been. And the

abstruse mysteries of long division were at last conquered.

Farley was teaching at Harvard, but somehow or other I ended up at Yale. I

shall pass over these years briefly: they were happy years. I broke no fewer

bones on the football field than do most undergraduates, and no fewer hearts

in Lover's Lane, under the stimulus of a ripely golden Connecticut moon. Nor

did my own heart escape without a fracture or two; but it's all part of the

mystery of what philosophers call "growing up"-as if there was any other

direction in which to growl

Oddly enough-for all the heady pleasures of the football field-I found more

intoxication in the feel of a rapier in my hands. Quite by chance I discovered

a natural affinity for the sword, and for two years running I was captain of

Yale's famed fencing team. This, too, like the color of my hair and eyes, was

to prove an unexpected blessing when I came to wandering and warring through

the black and crimson jungles of barbaric Thanator-but again I am ahead of my

story.

Although I was an American citizen by now, the wanderlust had bitten too deep,

had struck me too young, for the quiet academic life to hold many attractions

for me. I yearned, always, to see what lay beyond the dim horizon . . . over

the next range of hills . . . beyond the bright waters of the shining sea.

Before the ink was dry on my sheepskin, I was off. A hasty farewell to the

Professor, and I began to wander. The next couple of years took me far and

wide. The restlessness, the wanderlust I had inherited from my father took me

about the globe. A brief stint of journalism in New York, then I shipped as an

ordinary seaman on a merchant tub to Stockholm. I learned to fly in India, of

all places, and this led to a bit of refugee-running out of Cuba, arms

smuggling in the Near East, and a few flights of medicine and food supplies

into blockaded Biafra.

I ended up in Vietnam, and when some technicality over my naturalization

papers looked to keep me out of the fight, I joined the Red Cross as a pilot,

running supplies and medics into the trouble spots. My thirst for adventure

had frequently carried me into trouble from which my fighting instincts had,

till now, rescued me without permanent damage. But in Vietnam, something

happened .. . .

The Viet Cong terrorists had made a strike at a small village and medical help

was needed urgently. So urgently that they hauled me out of my billet on

thirty minutes notice. I was to ride herd on a squad of choppers flying in

medics and food and flying out the seriously injured.

I had just spent a couple of weeks in Saigon on leave so I was fresh and

rested, so to speak. My group was stationed at a temporary field hacked out of

the brush on the outskirts of Hon Quan, which is about sixty-five miles north

of Saigon and only some ten miles or so from the borders of Cambodia.

We were a half hour out of Hon Quan when my chopper began to develop a bad

case of the chokes. Something was wrong with one of the fuel lines, probably a

morsel of dirt that had clogged the line. The sort of thing a full mechanic's

checkout would have spotted and corrected, but we had been scrambled on notice

too short for a full-scale check.

And that meant I was in trouble. We didn't have the big two- and three-man

combat choppers the American army used; on rescue missions like these all I

had was a little one-man copter. The cargo craft were up ahead, needed to fly

out the injured. So I was all by myself.

I radioed the rest of the squadron and told them my second-in-command would

take over as I was having engine trouble and would probably fall behind. They

went on ahead while I dropped back, trying to figure out what to do. We were

flying over some of the densest jungles on earth and there was nowhere to sit

her down safely. If I could find a flat space to sit her down I could probably

fix the trouble in no time, even if I had to unscrew one of the lines and blow

the obstruction out.

I circled for a while, hunting. There was a chance, a slim one, that the line

would clear itself, but I couldn't count on it. If the motor conked out I

would crash in the treetops. A chopper comes down slowly, even without power,

because the air catches and turns the blades, braking the rate of fall. That's

the nice thing about these flying eggbeaters.

The bad thing is you are flying too low to bail out with a parachute.

I began to sweat.

For a half-hour I played with that chopper like a virtuoso with a Bach

concerto, getting every ounce of go-power I could squeeze from my laboring

engine. I couldn't return to base because I knew there was no landing area

between there and here, having just flown over the same piece of countryside.

But-who could say? Off to the west a bit there might be a clearing. I nursed

her carefully in that direction.

A while later I spotted a flash of light, the yellow-brown glisten of a jungle

river. My chopper was fitted out with pontoon gear, of course. Half the land

in this desolate corner of the globe is swamp and marsh. If I could make it to

that river I could at least make a landing.

I began wondering just where I was. No river of that size should be in my

neighborhood. I must have flown farther afield in my search for landing space

than I had suspected.

Could it be the Mekong? If so, I was in trouble. The Mekong isn't in Vietnam

at all, but over the border in Cambodia. It traverses eastern Cambodia from

north to south and empties into the South China Sea. And Cambodia is a place

we were not supposed to be. A so-called "neutral" country, its ruler, Prince

Sihanouk, might be a jolly host to visiting American VIP's like Jackie

Kennedy, but he was mighty inhospitable when it came to lost or strayed or

crashed American pilots who violated what he laughingly called the neutrality

of his borders-which the Cong are suspected to cross regularly.

But beggars cannot be choosers. Just as my chopper came over the broad,

gliding floods of the jungle river, my exhausted engine gave one last

strangled croak and died. The chopper fell like a stone. Then the uprush of

air caught the dead blades. They creaked and began to turn. The rate of

descent lessened-not much, but just enough.

The muddy yellow river swung up to smash me like a flyswatter in the hand of a

giant. Just before I hit I caught one fleeting glimpse of thick green jungle

lining either bank like a solid wall. Then I smacked the water and everything

went black.

Well, as Carmody, the guy who taught me how to fly in India, used to say, any

landing you can walk away from is a good one. I have a hunch even Carmody

would not have thought much of the way I hit that river. Yellow-brown water

smashed over the bubble canopy as we hit the surface with a jolt that knocked

me against the panel. When I came to I had a cut on my brow streaming blood. I

ached all over like one big bruise. But I was alive, at least.

But that belly flop had sprung leaks in both pontoons and they were filling up

fast. I tore off my safety harness and inflated a rubber raft. Then I grabbed

the emergency gear, prepacked in a knapsack for just such a spot, and got out.

The knapsack was packed with everything from snakebite serum to signal flares,

and it made a bulky package. I wrestled it into the bobbing raft and climbed

out dizzily. One pontoon was underwater already and the chopper was riding at

a forty-degree angle, just about to slide under. I pushed away from the

pontoon with one paddle, backed water a bit, and sat glumly, watching my one

link with civilization go under. Then I roused myself and took along sour look

around at the depressing scenery. The jungle was packed, green and thick, on

either side of the river. It looked unpleasant. But with the raft I could get

downriver and maybe be lucky enough to find a settlement of some kind. I began

to paddle a bit, but the river whipped right along and I didn't need to work

very hard to keep moving.

Pretty soon I was soaked with sweat and busy keeping off the bugs. The air was

thick and soupy and hot. It stank of stagnant water and rotting vegetation and

slimy mud, but I wouldn't have traded that river for the jungle. I could stand

flies and stink and sweat, but the jungles hereabouts are somewhat less

wholesome. They are crawling with unfriendly creatures, of which cobras are

only one variety. Not to mention tigers and wild boar and elephants. I would

take my chances with the river.

After a while, I sat and rested aching arms and sourly watched endless jungle

whip by on either side of me. The Cambodian jungles are among the world's

least hospitable places, thick with teak and dense bamboo and rubbery

rhododendron bushes, the ground a sloppy quagmire of knee-deep leaf mold and

greasy mud. I had carried off a machete from the helicopter, but I had no

desire to have to use it. Let the river current do the work, was my motto. If

worst came to worst, I was perfectly willing to simply glide downstream all

the way to the sea.

I began to do some serious thinking about where I was. Our base at Hon Quan

was some ten miles or so on the other side of the Cambodian border, but the

Mekong itself lay farther away. I cudgeled my memory, trying to picture the

maps I had seen. There was a map case in the bubble canopy, and a compass as

well, but I had gotten out of the chopper so fast they had been left behind.

Could this be the Mekong? As far ac I could remember, the Mekong at its

closest point to the border lay some fifty miles northwest of Hon Quan. Was it

possible I had flown that far afield while searching for a spot to bring her

down safely? Well . . . it was possible, but just barely. A chopper eats up

the miles unobtrusively. I could have come that far, but I wondered: could

this be another river? I recalled to mind the maps of Cambodia that I had

studied. In the center lay something called the Tonle Sap, the Great Lake.

This, I vaguely remembered, was supposed to have been the last shrinking

remnant of a mighty prehistoric sea. Lots of rivers fed into it: I might have

crashlanded on one of these tributaries and not on the Mekong. In which case,

God alone knew where I was being carried by the swift gliding current of the

muddy waters.

It was late afternoon by now and getting dark. The startlingly sudden night of

the jungle was coming down across the sky. And here was another problem. Up to

now I had been kept busy not so much by paddling, for the current was very

swift, but by the necessity of shoving my rubber raft clear of half-sunken

teak-wood logs and other river debris. All I needed was to brush up against

one of those half-submerged snags. My raft would tear and sink in seconds.

Then I would really have problems!

But how could I continue keeping the raft clear of snags when the impenetrable

darkness of the jungle night closed down over the river? As it would be doing

before very much longer ....

I decided on the only course that seemed advisable, and began to put in

towards the nearer shore. I would just have to take my chances on spending the

night in the jungle, and push on down river with dawn.

It was tough work breaking free of the rushing current, and it was pitch dark

by the time I came to shore. I got out, my boots sinking to the knee in the

foulsmelling mud, and dragged the lightweight raft up out of the water. It was

marshy and soft on this part of the bank, and I fought my way through tall

stiff grasses up to solid land, tying the raft securely to the limb of a

fallen tree.

Then I sat down on the log and made a meal of sorts out of the emergency

rations, washing it down with a swig of fresh water from one of the canteens.

I was thirsty enough from the sweltering heat of my river journey to drink the

whole canteen, but I knew that would be most unwise. It might be days before I

came to a riverfront town or settlement, and I would need every drop of my

water supplies. I had half a pack of cigarettes, so I rationed them as well. I

sat and smoked and batted flies and watched the stars come out by the score.

They burned bright and fierce against the night, like fistfuls of blue-white

diamonds strewn across black velvet.

It was a beautiful sight, but I was in no mood to appreciate beauty just then.

I began to wonder how I was supposed to sleep. I could lie down on the ground

and take my chances with the cobras, or I could curl up in the rubber raft.

But the raft would hardly be a barrier to any really determined cobra, and

anyway there were other creatures infesting these jungles who might be

inclined to come down to the barks of the river for a little drink.

The only alternative was to climb a tree and find a comfortable crotch. Then

all I would have to worry about was falling asleep-and falling out. But it was

too dark to see clearly and most of the trees nearby were unclimbable.

And then I saw the light.

It shone in the heavens above like a pale beacon. I froze, snuffing out my

cigarette in the leaf mold, wondering about Viet Cong. Who else would have a

searchlight operating in these jungles? If this was Cambodia, there certainly

could be no friendly American camp nearby.

And I began to sweat again.

I was in enough trouble already without falling into enemy hands. I had seen

some examples of what happened to Americans during "interrogation" at the

hands of the Viet Cong. I began to wish I had kept going on the river awhile

longer.

The light shone on. It was pallid and ghostly, a stationary pillar of faint

light standing up against the stars. It seemed to waver rhythmically. It

throbbed. It pulsed like a beating heart. My curiosity became overwhelming.

And I knew that I could never dare sleep this close to whatever was making

that jungle beacon without satisfying my curiosity. I had to discover the

cause of this mystery.

Whatever was causing the light was not very far inland from the river. A few

hundred yards at most.

Surely, if I watched my step, I could make my way close enough to the source

of the weird pulsing column of light. I resolved to try, anyway.

Taking up my machete and slinging the pack across my shoulder, I started

straight for it. I went slowly and tried to be as careful as possible, to

avoid making any more noise than was necessary. But I really didn't have to

worry about the noise my passage made as I squeezed through the thick

underbrush. For the whole jungle had come alive around me with the onset of

darkness. For night is the jungle's day. The big predators are aprowl, and the

little scuttling things scurry through the brush seeking food and water. Only

the monkeys sleep in the trees above, huddled together along the branches.

With every step my boots sank to the ankle and sometimes halfway to the knee

in the slimy mulch of decaying leaves and reeking mud. I wormed through thick

groves of bamboo and crept through gigantic rhododendron bushes. Their rubbery

leaves swished against my face and slapped my shoulders. I hoped I would not

disturb a sleeping boar. Or, for that matter, one of the slithering reptiles

that infested this rotting hellhole.

Soon the light became dimly visible through the densely packed trees. It waxed

and waned like a living thing of light. I paused from time to time to listen.

No sound of diesel engines, no guttural Viet Cong voices, no chatter of radio

static. Just the slap and wash of the river against the reedy shore, the

rustle of small things sliding through the leaves, the thousand little

ordinary sounds of the jungle.

I pushed forward, and came to the edge of a clearing. And stopped dead in my

tracks, staring.

Before me, rising tier on tier out of the swampy bush, were the crumbling

ramparts of an old stone city. Conical towers, covered with carved faces and

wreathed with jungle vines, loomed up into the darkness.

I had stumbled upon a lost city, buried for ages in the jungles of Cambodia.

2. THE GATE BETWEEN THE WORLDS

To this very hour I can remember the thrill of shock that went through me as I

first gazed upon the gates of the dead city. I can remember catching my breath

with amazement, and the prickle of awe that roughened my skin and tingled at

my nape as I stared at the uncanny spectacle that lay before me, drenched in

the silver glamor of a brilliant moon.

The very unexpectedness of the discovery added to the air of the supernatural

that hung about that timeless moment. One moment ago I had been worming my way

though the dense black jungle, and in the next I stood before the frowning

gates of a fantastic stone city left over from another age!

The transition was so miraculous, so swift, so unexpected, that it was as if

some unseen magician had conjured the city into being before my eyes. Still,

frozen, timeless, bathed in the mystery of moonlight, the city seemed an

apparition. I thought of the glimmering mirages of the desert, and of that

persistent image of an unknown city the Italian mariners have seen for

centuries, hovering above the waters of the Straits of Messina-Fata Morgana,

the superstitious fisherfolk call the floating mirage, and to this day the

scientists have yet to solve the baffling mystery of the illusion that has

haunted those Straits from the age of the Crusaders to this day.

Strange and very beautiful was this unknown and ruined metropolis of the

Cambodian jungles that lay before me. I stood, frozen with awe, my nerves

prickling with the cold premonition of the supernatural, almost as if in

another breath I expected the moonlit ruins to evaporate into darkness-to

vanish as swiftly and as mysteriously as they had flickered into being.

There were conical and many-sided stone towers that loomed up into the

star-gemmed sky, their sides heavy with sculpted faces that glared down at me

with blind eyes. Walls were thickly graven with weird hieroglyphic symbols in

a tongue unknown to me, perhaps unknown and unreadable by any living man. What

lost wisdom, what forgotten science, what mysterious lore, lay hidden in those

huge and cryptic symbols?

Well did I know that the trackless jungles of old Cambodia were whispered as

the haunt of legend and marvel and mystery. I had heard of the baffling stone

ruins which lay far to the north-the jungle-grown cities and temples known as

Angkor Vat and Angkor Thom. For untold centuries the jungle had concealed

those colossal ruins, those vinegrown temples left over from the mysterious

reign of the little-known Khmer race who had so curiously vanished from the

face of the earth ages before. Was this mystery metropolis yet another

monument abandoned in unknown antiquity by the strange and forgotten people we

knew only as the Khmer? Lost in the unexplored jungles, had I stumbled across

the threshold of an age-old secret city left behind in time's remotest dawn?

The stone gates towered before me, covered with weird glyphs. From the lintel

above the arch, a heavy face of cold sandstone stared down at me with an

enigmatic expression. Controlling a little shiver of uncanny awe, I stared

back at that stone mask. Broad cheeks, flat nose, thick lips, wide glaring

eyes-it was not a face of smiling welcome, that much was certain.

Was it a trick of moonlight and shadow, or did the faint trace of a mocking

smile lurk in the dim, shadowed corners of those stone lips? Was it an

illusion of my overstrained imagination, or did I glimpse the flicker of an

impersonal, aloof intelligence in those wide and staring eyes, and-a chill,

remote amusement?

What secret lore of unknown antiquity lay hidden behind the frozen smile of

that guardian deity or demon whose face was set high above the gates of the

lost city? In the cold glory of the moonlight, the stone metropolis was like a

labyrinth, all black inky shadow and faint rose sandstone.

A rose-red city, half as old as time ....

Unbidden, my memory conjured up that famous line from the old poem. Dimly I

recalled that John William Burgon, the author of that poem, had been writing

about the stone city of Petra in the deserts of Arabia. No matter: the line

fit here just as well.

Almost without volition, my feet had carried me through those frowning

portals, beneath the enigma of that stone guardian with its mocking smile, and

into the rubbish-choked courtyard that lay beyond.

All about me rose a forest of megalithic stone towers, built of colossal

blocks hewn from solid sandstone the color of pale coral or of the faint skies

of early dawn glimpsed over the gliding floods of the Orinoco. Whatever elder

wisdom this vanished race had possessed, they certainly knew the secrets of

stone construction. Blocks of stone weighing tons apiece were so closely

fitted together to build these soaring walls and tapering spires that they

needed no concrete to hold them firm. And measureless centuries of wind and

rain had dislodged but few of the great building stones.

I remembered that when the French explorer and naturalist Mouhot, the first to

stumble upon the vast ruins of Angkor to the north, had questioned the natives

about the mystery cities, they told him they were the work of many-armed

giants. It had been Pra-Eun, sorceror-king of the Dawn Age, who had commanded

captive titans to raise the walls of the ancient city. Gazing now upon these

mighty towers and megalithic bastions, I could well believe them to be the

work of primal colossi enslaved by some mighty magician from an unknown age.

I could not resist the urge of my curiosity, and began to explore the ruined

metropolis. I prowled through stone-paved streets, down long galleries where

weird and monstrous caryatids bore up stone architraves carved with snarling

devilmasks and beaked demons. Time hung heavy here; its invisible weight

pressed on my soul. There was an almost palpable aura of an immense and

unbelievable antiquity that hung about these moldering ruins from time's dawn.

I felt the shudder of superstitious awe go through me. It was as if I walked

through a shadowy necropolis where gods themselves lay buried; as if with

every step I risked awakening mummified wizards or unseen guardians who had

slumbered the ages away, and into whose time-haunted precincts mine was the

first intruder's step.

Who were the mysterious Khmer kings who had built these sprawling metropoli of

ancient stone? Where had they gone, leaving behind this wilderness of carved

stone, the haunt of shadows and silence, a kingdom given over to the

whispering dominion of the patient spider? And I thought of the lost and

ocean-whelmed cities of elder Atlantis and prehistoric Mu . . . of the stone

enigma of the Ponape ruins, which A. Merritt had described in the opening

pages of his great romance, The Moon Pool.

With every step I ventured deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of aeon-lost

and time-forgotten mysteries. A fragment of a verse by Clark Ashton Smith came

to my memory:

. . search, in cryptic galleries, The void sarcophagi, the broken urns Of many

a vanished avatar; Or haunt the gloom of crumbling pylons vast In temples that

enshrine the shadowy past.

Were these dim colonnades and glyphic walls and megalithic temples the work of

the long-lost Khmer kings? I knew the remains of Angkor Vat were among the

most curious and baffling ruins on earth, and that science has for many years

sought to solve the enigma of their antiquity. But I knew, as well, that the

vast stone wreckage of Angkor lay far to the north of this place, in the

jungles north of the Tonle Sap, on the right banks of the river Siem Reap, a

tributary of which fed into the great lake at Cambodia's heart. Never had I

heard of any mysterious ruined cities this far south-unless ....

Could this stone city be long-lost, legendary Arangkor itself, the primal city

from which the mighty line of the Khmer kings had sprung in mythic aeons

before the beginning of time? I knew something of the weird epic literature of

this mystery-haunted corner of oldest Asia; science had never found the lost

and secret city wherein the first of the Khmer kings had arisen to rule the

dawn age. Could this shadowy city of moonlight and silence be the fabulous and

antique Arangkor? Why, even the Khmer themselves had forgotten the whereabouts

of the cradle of their own race .

. . . long-lost and legended Arangkor, Thou age-forgotten City of the Dawn,

Wherein doth stand the Gate Between The Worlds, Handwork of ancient Gods whose

very names Are long since silence on the lips of men ....

Dim and tall, a column of throbbing radiance thrust above the lost city into

the star-gemmed sky.

Enthralled in the crumbling mystery of lost Arangkor (as in my heart I somehow

knew this forgotten city to be), I had forgotten the beacon of pulsing light

that had caught my attention in the jungle, and which had called me to the

stone gates of the ruined metropolis like a beckoning finger of lambent light.

Now, as I glimpsed it above the conical towers, I remembered how I had come

here to investigate that light. And instantly caution awoke within me. I had,

for some unknown length of time, been prowling the rubbish-choked avenues and

squares of the dead city, careless of the noise my boots made, not thinking it

possible that ruins of such evident neglect and antiquity could be inhabited.

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Jandar1:JandarofCallistoByLinCarter1.THELOSTCITYOFMANORThatthemostfar-reachingandmomentoushistoricaleventsoftenspringfromminuteandseeminglyinconsequentialaccidentsisafactwhichIcanattestfrommyownexperience.Forthepastfourmonthsnow-insofarasIhavebeenabletomeasurethepassageoftime-Ihavedweltonanalienworl...

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Lin Carter - Callisto 1 - Jandar Of Callisto

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