Edmond Hamilton - The Monster-God of Mamurth

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 27.09KB 11 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

The Monster-God of Mamurth

by Edmond Hamilton

This page formatted 2004 Blackmask Online.

http://www.blackmask.com

Out of the desert night he came to us, stumbling into our little circle of firelight and collapsing at once.

Mitchell and I sprang to our feet with startled exclamations, for men who travel alone and on foot are a

strange sight in the deserts of North Africa.

For the first few minutes that we worked over him I thought he would die at once, but gradually we

brought him back to consciousness. While Mitchell held a cup of water to his cracked lips I looked him

over and saw that he was too far gone to live much longer. His clothes were in rags, and his hands and

knees literally flayed, from crawling over the sands, I judged. So when he motioned feebly for more

water, I gave it to him, knowing that in any case his time was short. Soon he could talk, in a dead,

croaking voice.

I'm alone, he told us, in answer to our first question; no more out there to look for. What are you

twotraders? I thought so. No I'm an archeologist. A digger-up of the past. His voice broke for a

moment. It's not always good to dig up dead secrets. There are ionic things the past should be allowed

to hide.

He caught the look that passed between Mitchell and me.

No, I'm not mad, he said. You will hear, I'll tell you the whole tiling. But listen to me, you two, and in

his earnestness he raised himself to a sitting position, keep out of Igidi Desert. Remember that I told you

that. I had a warning, too, but I disregarded it. And I went into hellinto hell! But there, I will tell you from

the beginning.

My namethat doesn't matter now. I left Mogador more than a year ago, and came through the foot-hills

of the Atlas ranges striking out into the desert in hopes of finding some of the Carthaginian mills the

North African deserts are known to hold.

I spent months in the search, traveling among the squalid Arab villages, now near an oasis and now far

into the black, untracked desert. And as I went farther into that savage country, I found more and more

of the ruins I sought, crumbled remnants of temples and fortresses, relics, almost destroyed, of the age

when Carthage meant empire and ruled all of North Africa from her walled city. And then, on the side of

a massive block of stone, I found that which tumed me toward Igidi.

It was an inscription in the garbled Phenician of the traders of Carthage, short enough so that I

remembered it and can repeat it word for word. It read, literally, as follows:

Merchants, go not into the city of Mamurth, which lies beyond the mountain pass. For I, San-Drabat of

Carthage, entering the city with four companions in the month of Eschmoun, to trade, on the third night

of our stay came priests and seized my fellows, I escaping by hiding. My companions they sacrificed to

the evil god of the city, who has dwelt there from the beginning of time, and for whom the wise men of

Mamurth have built a great temple the like of which is not on earth elsewhere, where the people of

Mamurth worship their god. I escaped from the city and set this warning here that others may not turn

their steps to Mamurth and to death.

Perhaps you can imagine the effect that inscription had on me. I was the last trace of a city unknown to

the memory of men, a last floating spar of a civilization sunken in the sea of time. That then could have

been such a city at all seemed to me quite probable What do we know of Carthage even, but a few

names? No city, no civilization was ever so completely blotted off the earth as Carthage when Roman

Scipio ground its temples and palaces into the very dust, and plowed up the ground with salt, and the

eagles of conquer ing Rome flew across a desert where a metropolis had been.

It was on the outskirts of one of those wretched little Arab villages that I had found the block and its

inscription, and I tried to find someone in the village to accompany me, but none would do so I could

plainly see the mountain pass, a mere crack between towering blue cliffs. In reality it was miles and miles

away, but the deceptive optical qualities of the desert light made it seem very near. My maps placed that

mountain range all right, as a lower branch of the Atlas, and the expanse behind the mountains was

marked as 'Igidi Desert', but that was all I got from them. All that I could reckon on as certain was that it

was desert that lay on the other side of the pass, and I must carry enough supplies to meet it.

But the Arabs knew more! Though I offered what must have been fabulous riches to those poor devils,

not one would come with me when I let them know what place I was heading for. None had ever been

there, they would not even ride far into the desert in that direction; but all had very definite ideas of the

place beyond the mountains as a nest of devils, a haunt of evil Jinns.

Knowing how firmly superstition is implanted in their kind, I tried no longer to persuade them, and

started alone, with two scrawny camels carrying my water and supplies. So for three days I forged

across the desert under a broiling sun, and on the morning of the fourth I reached the pass.

It was only a narrow crevice to begin with, and great boulders were strewn so thickly on its floor that it

was a long, hard job getting through. And the cliffs on each side towered to such a height that the space

between was a place of shadows and whispers and semidarkness. It was late in the afternoon when I

finally came through, and for a moment I stood motionless; for from that side of the pass the desert

sloped down into a vast basin, and at the basin's center, perhaps two miles from where I stood, gleamed

the white ruins of Mamurth.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Edmond Hamilton - The Monster-God of Mamurth.pdf

共11页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Edmond Hamilton - The Monster-God of Mamurth

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: