CHAPTER III. The Horror in the Jungle

    _Was it a dream the nighted lotus brought?
      Then curst the dream that bought my sluggish life;
    And curst each laggard hour that does not see
      Hot blood drip blackly from the crimsoned knife._

    THE SONG OF BÊLIT

First there was the blackness of an utter void, with the cold winds of
cosmic space blowing through it. Then shapes, vague, monstrous and
evanescent, rolled in dim panorama through the expanse of nothingness,
as if the darkness were taking material form. The winds blew and a
vortex formed, a whirling pyramid of roaring blackness. From it grew
Shape and Dimension; then suddenly, like clouds dispersing, the darkness
rolled away on either hand and a huge city of dark green stone rose on
the bank of a wide river, flowing through an illimitable plain. Through
this city moved beings of alien configuration.

Cast in the mold of humanity, they were distinctly not men. They were
winged and of heroic proportions; not a branch on the mysterious stalk
of evolution that culminated in man, but the ripe blossom on an alien
tree, separate and apart from that stalk. Aside from their wings, in
physical appearance they resembled man only as man in his highest form
resembles the great apes. In spiritual, esthetic and intellectual
development they were superior to man as man is superior to the gorilla.
But when they reared their colossal city, man's primal ancestors had not
yet risen from the slime of the primordial seas.

These beings were mortal, as are all things built of flesh and blood.
They lived, loved and died, though the individual span of life was
enormous. Then, after uncounted millions of years, the Change began. The
vista shimmered and wavered, like a picture thrown on a windblown
curtain. Over the city and the land the ages flowed as waves flow over a
beach, and each wave brought alterations. Somewhere on the planet the
magnetic centers were shifting; the great glaciers and ice-fields were
withdrawing toward the new poles.

The littoral of the great river altered. Plains turned into swamps that
stank with reptilian life. Where fertile meadows had rolled, forests
reared up, growing into dank jungles. The changing ages wrought on the
inhabitants of the city as well. They did not migrate to fresher lands.
Reasons inexplicable to humanity held them to the ancient city and their
doom. And as that once rich and mighty land sank deeper and deeper into
the black mire of the sunless jungle, so into the chaos of squalling
jungle life sank the people of the city. Terrific convulsions shook the
earth; the nights were lurid with spouting volcanoes that fringed the
dark horizons with red pillars.

After an earthquake that shook down the outer walls and highest towers
of the city, and caused the river to run black for days with some lethal
substance spewed up from the subterranean depths, a frightful chemical
change became apparent in the waters the folk had drunk for millenniums
uncountable.

Many died who drank of it; and in those who lived, the drinking wrought
change, subtle, gradual and grisly. In adapting themselves to the
changing conditions, they had sunk far below their original level. But
the lethal waters altered them even more horribly, from generation to
more bestial generation. They who had been winged gods became pinioned
demons, with all that remained of their ancestors' vast knowledge
distorted and perverted and twisted into ghastly paths. As they had
risen higher than mankind might dream, so they sank lower than man's
maddest nightmares reach. They died fast, by cannibalism, and horrible
feuds fought out in the murk of the midnight jungle. And at last among
the lichen-grown ruins of their city only a single shape lurked, a
stunted abhorrent perversion of nature.

Then for the first time humans appeared: dark-skinned, hawk-faced men in
copper and leather harness, bearing bows--the warriors of pre-historic
Stygia. There were only fifty of them, and they were haggard and gaunt
with starvation and prolonged effort, stained and scratched with
jungle-wandering, with blood-crusted bandages that told of fierce
fighting. In their minds was a tale of warfare and defeat, and flight
before a stronger tribe which drove them ever southward, until they lost
themselves in the green ocean of jungle and river.

Exhausted they lay down among the ruins where red blossoms that bloom
but once in a century waved in the full moon, and sleep fell upon them.
And as they slept, a hideous shape crept red-eyed from the shadows and
performed weird and awful rites about and above each sleeper. The moon
hung in the shadowy sky, painting the jungle red and black; above the
sleepers glimmered the crimson blossoms, like splashes of blood. Then
the moon went down and the eyes of the necromancer were red jewels set
in the ebony of night.

When dawn spread its white veil over the river, there were no men to be
seen: only a hairy winged horror that squatted in the center of a ring
of fifty great spotted hyenas that pointed quivering muzzles to the
ghastly sky and howled like souls in hell.

Then scene followed scene so swiftly that each tripped over the heels of
its predecessor. There was a confusion of movement, a writhing and
melting of lights and shadows, against a background of black jungle,
green stone ruins and murky river. Black men came up the river in long
boats with skulls grinning on the prows, or stole stooping through the
trees, spear in hand. They fled screaming through the dark from red eyes
and slavering fangs. Howls of dying men shook the shadows; stealthy feet
padded through the gloom, vampire eyes blazed redly. There were grisly
feasts beneath the moon, across whose red disk a bat-like shadow
incessantly swept.

Then abruptly, etched clearly in contrast to these impressionistic
glimpses, around the jungled point in the whitening dawn swept a long
galley, thronged with shining ebon figures, and in the bows stood a
white-skinned ghost in blue steel.

It was at this point that Conan first realized that he was dreaming.
Until that instant he had had no consciousness of individual existence.
But as he saw himself treading the boards of the _Tigress_, he
recognized both the existence and the dream, although he did not awaken.

Even as he wondered, the scene shifted abruptly to a jungle glade where
N'Gora and nineteen black spearmen stood, as if awaiting someone. Even
as he realized that it was he for whom they waited, a horror swooped
down from the skies and their stolidity was broken by yells of fear.
Like men maddened by terror, they threw away their weapons and raced
wildly through the jungle, pressed close by the slavering monstrosity
that flapped its wings above them.

Chaos and confusion followed this vision, during which Conan feebly
struggled to awake. Dimly he seemed to see himself lying under a nodding
cluster of black blossoms, while from the bushes a hideous shape crept
toward him. With a savage effort he broke the unseen bonds which held
him to his dreams, and started upright.

Bewilderment was in the glare he cast about him. Near him swayed the
dusky lotus, and he hastened to draw away from it.

In the spongy soil near by there was a track as if an animal had put out
a foot, preparatory to emerging from the bushes, then had withdrawn it.
It looked like the spoor of an unbelievably large hyena.

He yelled for N'Gora. Primordial silence brooded over the jungle, in
which his yells sounded brittle and hollow as mockery. He could not see
the sun, but his wilderness-trained instinct told him the day was near
its end. A panic rose in him at the thought that he had lain senseless
for hours. He hastily followed the tracks of the spearmen, which lay
plain in the damp loam before him. They ran in single file, and he soon
emerged into a glade--to stop short, the skin crawling between his
shoulders as he recognized it as the glade he had seen in his
lotus-drugged dream. Shields and spears lay scattered about as if
dropped in headlong flight.

And from the tracks which led out of the glade and deeper into the
fastnesses, Conan knew that the spearmen had fled, wildly. The
footprints overlay one another; they weaved blindly among the trees. And
with startling suddenness the hastening Cimmerian came out of the jungle
onto a hill-like rock which sloped steeply, to break off abruptly in a
sheer precipice forty feet high. And something crouched on the brink.

At first Conan thought it to be a great black gorilla. Then he saw that
it was a giant black man that crouched ape-like, long arms dangling,
froth dripping from the loose lips. It was not until, with a sobbing
cry, the creature lifted huge hands and rushed towards him, that Conan
recognized N'Gora. The black man gave no heed to Conan's shout as he
charged, eyes rolled up to display the whites, teeth gleaming, face an
inhuman mask.

With his skin crawling with the horror that madness always instils in
the sane, Conan passed his sword through the black man's body; then,
avoiding the hooked hands that clawed at him as N'Gora sank down, he
strode to the edge of the cliff.

For an instant he stood looking down into the jagged rocks below, where
lay N'Gora's spearmen, in limp, distorted attitudes that told of crushed
limbs and splintered bones. Not one moved. A cloud of huge black flies
buzzed loudly above the blood-splashed stones; the ants had already
begun to gnaw at the corpses. On the trees about sat birds of prey, and
a jackal, looking up and seeing the man on the cliff, slunk furtively
away.

For a little space Conan stood motionless. Then he wheeled and ran back
the way he had come, flinging himself with reckless haste through the
tall grass and bushes, hurdling creepers that sprawled snake-like
across his path. His sword swung low in his right hand, and an
unaccustomed pallor tinged his dark face.

The silence that reigned in the jungle was not broken. The sun had set
and great shadows rushed upward from the slime of the black earth.
Through the gigantic shades of lurking death and grim desolation Conan
was a speeding glimmer of scarlet and blue steel. No sound in all the
solitude was heard except his own quick panting as he burst from the
shadows into the dim twilight of the river-shore.

He saw the galley shouldering the rotten wharf, the ruins reeling
drunkenly in the gray half-light.

And here and there among the stones were spots of raw bright color, as
if a careless hand had splashed with a crimson brush.

Again Conan looked on death and destruction. Before him lay his
spearmen, nor did they rise to salute him. From the jungle-edge to the
riverbank, among the rotting pillars and along the broken piers they
lay, torn and mangled and half devoured, chewed travesties of men.

All about the bodies and pieces of bodies were swarms of huge
footprints, like those of hyenas.

Conan came silently upon the pier, approaching the galley above whose
deck was suspended something that glimmered ivory-white in the faint
twilight. Speechless, the Cimmerian looked on the Queen of the Black
Coast as she hung from the yard-arm of her own galley. Between the yard
and her white throat stretched a line of crimson clots that shone like
blood in the gray light.