I say “I awoke”, and yet I simply moved from one level of nightmare to another; for outside, high above, it was ‘day’ again, and the friendly beam once more was flickering down to me in my cold stone prison. And in that prison, cold and hungry, I was as far removed as ever from my comfortable room at The George.
It was hunger that prompted me to drag my cramped body from the stream—side, to stumble near—blind about the confines of my great coffin.
“Coffin”, indeed! When first I found the mushrooms I was so lost in morbid reverie, a reverie completely in keeping with the chill damp of the place, that I thought they were great grave—worms—fat, white and squamous—waiting for my flesh to die. But the fatness was only their lush depth, and the scales were not scales but the mottling of the pileus—covered domes.
I ate some of them, ravenously, and then I ‘slept’ once more …
VIII: Bokrug
Dream-Phase Two
[The Masters Case: From the Recordings of Dr Eugene T. Thappon]
The period of comparative lucidity—if a condition such as I was in may be couched in any such terms—in which I eventually found myself following my meal of mushrooms in the cave of the stream, was one that I found completely contrary to any previously conceived ideas of mine concerning delusions or dream—obsessions. Of the fact that the condition was psychotic, there could be little doubt, and yet everything had a quality to it of the real and solid. There was none of the fuzziness of dream or nightmare to the edges of the clearly—defined visions I saw, none of fever’s repetitious phrasing of words and sentences in conversation (oh, yes, this latter still to come!) and when I moved each motion I made produced a corresponding ache in those areas of my body bruised by my whirling dream—rush through heaven—only—knows what distances of subterranean waterway and by my blundering about the cave. And yet the things I saw, heard and felt—indeed all my sensations throughout that odd period—were certainly fantasies and figments of my own disorganized mental processes. In short, I was still dreaming … and my condition was rapidly worsening!
But more of that later. It would be best if I relate my experiences as they happened, in order to correctly define the magnitude of my fantasy.
My first impression was one of lying on my back in the lumpy loam of the fungus patch from which I had eaten, and of seeing in the near—distant darkness a glowing luminosity expanding or pulsating toward me. This vision was accompanied by an ululation, muted by distance, as of voices raised in praise, reminiscent of the prayer—like yet sepulchral sounds I had thought to hear in my semi-consciousness before I first ‘awoke’ to the confines of the dark cave.
As the eerie noises faded so the glowing light, now assuming a spherical shape some seven feet above the floor of the cave, further approached, and as it emerged it lit up the entrance to the narrow tunnel along which it had come. It also illumined the creature pacing beneath it!
I jerked bolt upright at sight of the thing, the short hairs on the back of my neck springing to attention, my scalp tingling, my unbelieving eyes taking in the whole of that alien yet strangely regal being!
Oh! I had seen likenesses of this creature before—but only likenesses! This was the living, breathing reality (or so my ruined senses would have had me believe), a walking, man-sized replica of the greenstone figurines! In fact, this was Bokrug—water-lizard god of Ib—reptilian lord of a city lost in the dim mists of time!
It kneeled before me, its short tail balancing it solidly in a posture that reminded me of certain Eastern idols, and the piercingly bright eyes in the thin—lipped, hairless face regarded me unemotionally. For a moment the thing sat there silently while I lay, propped up on my elbows, shivering uncontrollably. Then, amazingly, it spoke:
“You need not fear me, I mean you no harm.”
“Bokrug!” I whispered, at a loss for words, at which the creature sat up straighter, an almost human frown visibly forming to crease its high forehead.
“You … know me?”
Suddenly it dawned on me that my conversation was with a creature of my own imaginings, a figment of nightmare and of my sadly impaired senses. I laughed out loud and fell back weakly on my bed of mushrooms, staring up at that alien face and the halo of moving light in which it was framed.
“I know you, yes—you’re a little green god in a case at Radcar Museum—you’re a figurine in the police station at Bleakstone. Oh, I know you all right! You’re an hallucination within a dream—you’re my injured brain rotting inside my head!” I flapped my hands uselessly, scrabbling at the loam about me.
On hearing my manner of expression and my mention of the museum, the frown vanished immediately from the creature’s face. “You are a man of science then?”
For a while longer I lay there, thinking at first to ignore the hallucination, to let myself drift back into sleep within sleep. But then, as if in defiance of my own lassitude, I spoke:
“What I am makes no difference; I shall soon wake up back in The George at Bleakstone—or remain in this dream till they find me and take me off to some sanatorium or other to rot! You don’t exist—and therefore you can't help me. Go away.”
I closed my eyes, resting my aching head back in the spongy loam. A second or so passed and then I felt the pressure of powerful but gentle hands pushing under my legs and shoulders. My head fell back and I let my arms droop listlessly as I was hoisted bodily up into the air. Then, feeling the smooth movements of the creature’s walking, I opened my eyes again.
“Where are you taking me?”
The piercing eyes gazed back at me for a moment in a kind of cold compassion. “There is a place where you will be more comfortable—where food other than mushrooms alone, though not of great variety, can be brought to you—where you might live out the rest of your days less lonely than here. For there I shall visit you frequently, and I will tell you of this place while you, in return, can freshen for me the memory of your own world. But now be quiet. You are not well. Cold, hunger and exhaustion have taken their toll of you. Rest easy while we go, that I might inform you of some things you should know …
I closed my eyes again then, laughing weakly and mumbling in my delirium. “My God!—to hold a conversation with a dream—to receive succour from a vision …” Then an idea occurred to me. “Are we going to Lh-yib?”
For a second the creature paused and the gently flowing motion of my body through air ceased. I kept my eyes closed.
“You are a very learned man,” the voice slowly said. “Yes, we are going to Lh-yib … but understand, that city is forbidden to you. Only the Thuun’ha and others—that is, others of my kind—dwell there. You will see the city from on high, but never try to regain its ramparts once we have crossed them over. The Thuun'ha would destroy you; for your likeness is as the likeness of those who dwelt in Sarnath … and the men of Sarnath knew no descendants …”
IX: The Creature’s Story
Dream-Phase Three
[The Masters Case: From the Recordings of Dr Eugene T. Thappon]
“When this world was young—” the thing called Bokrug presently told me, striding with me in his arms effortlessly down that corridor along which I had seen his approach, my ancestors and their servitors the Thuun’ha came from their own dying world to settle here …”
“I know!” I said, breaking in deliriously on the being’s narrative: “Lo, they came down from the Moon one Night in a Mist; lo, they and the Lake and Ib; and there did they worship Bokrug, the great Water-Lizard …”
“Yes, that is how the coming was seen by certain primitives of the time; but in fact those ancestors did not come from the moon,” he corrected me. “No, they came from far beyond the moon. Their journey had been long and they knew that to begin their civilization again here in this new world would be hard. The plan was to settle in two regions, one in the east of this planet and the other toward the west. So Ib was raised in the eastern deserts, at a place where the instruments of my race told of vast amounts of water bel
ow the sands, and Lh-yib, the Sister City, was planned to be built at the place where the moors now grow wild and desolate above.
“But while the building of lb was easy, with none but a handful of wandering, ape-like tribesmen ever stumbling over its location in the great desert, the construction of Lh-yib presented serious problems. For one thing the land here was fertile, where already ferocious warrior clans warred to fence in and domesticate the mammoth—clans that later divided the land and gave their holdings names such as Nathis, Cimmeria and Gun-hlan—and it was seen that these peoples, particularly the early Cimmerians who were true barbarians, would not allow such as my ancestors and the Thuun’ha to remain unmolested in anything other than a fortress; and those fathers of my race on Earth were not disposed to build a garrison of that sort. Then the instruments of those ancestors discovered for them far underground a series of tremendous caves and hollows, carved by time and capable of supporting—not without certain difficulties—our civilization. And thus was Lh-yib eventually builded down here away from the sun, and the surface lands were left to be ruined by the grazing mammoth and the warring clans ..
At this point in his tale Bokrug paused, coming to a halt in a part of the tunnel that he obviously recognized. There he directed me to look at something resting upon a natural ledge worn in the side of the passage. At first I had difficulty making out what the thing was, but as the cloud of fire about my doubtful rescuer’s head descended to the level of the ledge, I saw that the object of the lizard-thing’s interest was a rotting harness with twin air-bottles and an arrangement of valves—an aqualung, as used by ocean divers and certain daring speleologists.
“You are not the first of your kind to find the way to Lh-yib,” the creature told me. “Others were here before you …”
I thought back on the report I had read in the police station at Bleakstone—of those cavers who had tried to navigate the rushing waters of Devil’s Pool—and I shuddered …
Tirelessly the creature then commenced once more to stride out, and I lay back again to listen as he continued the story of the history of his race:
“... But while Lh-yib has lain safe here in the bowels of Earth for twenty thousand years, lb, in its eastern desert, suffered destruction in less than half that time, at the hands of an Arab race that settled on the farther shore of the lake which my ancestors had forced from the desert’s depths. My peoples foresaw the massacre, taking steps to visit revenge on their prematurely triumphant murderers—and a doom came to the city of Sarnath such as no doom ever before known in all the lands of men. Now Lh-yib is the last seat of my race, and I and my brothers and our servants are faced with a different problem: one which threatens to swallow us even as lb was swallowed by those doomed men of Sarnath.
“For even now men of the surface world—of your own kind—plan the drilling of great wells in the moors, and we fear that such interference may well bring about cataclysms which we could not hope to survive. They search for gasses and oils, your brothers, little knowing that an ancient and honourable civilization flourishes here in these caves of rock. It is fortunate indeed for your surface-dwelling brothers that our original sciences are all but forgotten …
“Though I once tried, I have since seen the futility of attempting to beg a cessation of such experimental drilling for even were it presented with irrefutable proofs, your race is so narrow—minded as to refuse them; and if your peoples could be convinced … then such convictions would only make them ambitious of learning Lh-yib’s secrets.
“As our ancestors in distant, ancient Ib waited for the destruction they knew was coming, so must we wait in Lh-yib—yet there is still hope that the plans of your brothers on the surface might be abandoned. That would be a blessing.
“But there, soon we shall come to the Sister City! Can you walk now? If so then follow close behind me and do not speak; it is not seemly that I should be heard conversing with one such as you, nor would it be right for a god to be seen slavishly bearing in his arms a creature moulded in the likeness of Ib's ancient foes.”
As the creature spoke he lowered me to my feet. I looked ahead—beyond the being called Bokrug and along the tunnel to where a light faintly showed—then followed closely in his tracks as he made for that light.
The darkness quickly dispersed, so that soon even the glowing halo over the lizard—thing’s head dimmed and seemed to vanish …
X: Lh-yib
Dream-Phase Four
[The Masters Case: From the Recordings of Dr Eugene T. Thoppon]
Stumbling closely on Bokrug’s heels, I emerged from the tunnel onto a tremendous, steeply terraced escarpment overlooking a cavern whose proportions were quite literally unbelievable. My first sight of the fantastic city beneath the moors was breathtaking. In one instant I thought of Pellucidar, of Mu and drowned Atlantis before those places sank, and of a dozen other such fabled cities of myth and fancy, yet could find little in anything I had read to compare with this!
When I say ‘first sight’, I do not wish to convey the idea of that sight coming to me immediately after I left the tunnel: no, for at first I was blinded by the brilliance of a light so bright in comparison with that darkness in the cave of the mushrooms as to make me certain that I had somehow been miraculously transported back to the waking, surface world. But then, as my eyes grew more accustomed to the glare, I saw that this was not so, and even the wonders of the city itself could not fully hold my eye as I surveyed in awe the immensity of the domed cave wherein that city reared its towers and parapets.
It was as if I stood on the steps of an amphitheatre of the gods. Behind me, to right and left, great tiers of stone—hewn slabs sloped up and back, steplike, to a height of at least two hundred feet, there to join with the towering, inward curving higher walls; and in front, reaching forward and steeply down, those same steps—broken here and there by stone—balustraded balconies and wide, sweeping landings—plunged another two hundred feet to a great floor that must have been all of a mile across.
Spanning this subterranean vista, stretching in what seemed to me a rather precarious splendour, great grey bridges arched from wall to terraced wall; some of them obviously wrought by nature, others—grafted in places to enormous stalactites depending from the dizzy ceiling—plainly artificial though of unknown architecture.
The centrepiece of this awesome scene was nothing less than fantastic. What could only be the world’s greatest stalactite hung from the apex of the titan—spiked ceiling, meeting with an upthrusting stalagmite of equally tremendous proportions looming from the centre of the city itself. Even at the ‘narrow’ point where these two primeval pillars met, the diameter of the column they formed could have been no less than one hundred feet; and all the way up the length of that vast column—adorning its vertiginous sides—lines of small, square—cut windows peeped out from behind supported balconies, showing that even within that phenomenal freak of nature lesser builders had been at work …
The city itself was of grey stone, with tall, narrow buildings and spires, many of them forming supports for the spindly—looking bridges, rearing dizzily up towards the cavern roof. Smaller bridges cojoined many of those buildings, with jutting balconies defying gravity at every hand, and from each edifice small windows looked out over the city in general.
One structure stood quite apart from the city proper; a great pyramidal thing, drawing my eye in wonder of its purpose. A small stream passed under the base of the strangely enigmatic pyramid, to wander unrestricted—yet altered in colour to a deep green—from that place and across the plain to a spot where it vanished into the wall at the right of the cavern.
I traced the streamlet back from the building to its source, seeing that it sprang from high in the step—hewn wall to my left, down a concourse cut to contain its flow, to the plain below. Even as I watched, silver fish leapt in the sparkling water plunging down the steep channel. I stared again at the great pyramid.
“The Place of Worship!” the lizard—thing s
aid, as if reading my thoughts. “Come.”
He led me to the right and upwards, climbing the steps until the arched tunnel of entry lay below, then made for one of the natural bridges whose nearest root stemmed from the perpendicular wall some three hundred yards away. From what I could see at that distance, no steps led up to the bridge’s broad back, yet I seemed to sense that Bokrug intended we should cross the cavern by that means. Also, the bridge, unlike many of the others, had no parapets that I could see; and, hastily scanning its length, I saw with alarm that it narrowed frighteningly toward its centre!
Now, the creature leading me on might well have the agility of a mountain goat and an equally unshakable balance, I did not know … but I simply did not have a head for heights. Indeed, the mere thought of a fall from that dizzy aerial pathway, through over three hundred feet of thin air to the spires or streets of the greystone city below, was one which made my stomach turn over!
However, I relaxed somewhat as we passed over a wide landing and began to descend the steps, until, with the curve of the fearsome bridge looming fifty feet above us, we again made a turn to the right. There, cut back into the stone, another tunnel led into darkness.
Once more I was reduced to stumbling in the wake of that halo of alien light marking the lizard—thing’s route; but after many rising, spiralling turns and twists, we settled down to a straight if somewhat upward course which somehow filled me with an odd uneasiness. True, my sense of direction had never been reliable (and, taking into account the winding path I had followed in the darkness, that sense might now safely be reckoned to be knocked even more out of phase), yet I could not rid myself of the crazy idea that this new direction in which we headed lay straight out over the city-floored abyss! I put this unfounded—indeed, impossible—notion away in the face of other, more puzzling problems.
Somehow it came quite naturally to me to question the strange figure of my own dreams and imaginings now striding out so, well, positively along the narrow, climbing corridor in front of me: “How is it that Lh-yib has daylight—or whatever light it is? What’s the source?” The answer came back immediately: