Various authors

“ More than once I felt myself on the verge of madness—thinking of Jean, and remembering Futaine's ominous words. Eventually agony brought its own surcease, and I fell into a kind of coma, lasting for how long I could not guess. Many hours had passed, I knew, before I heard footsteps coming toward my prison.
Jean moved into my range of vision. I searched her face with my eyes, seeking for some mark of a dreadful metamorphosis. I could find none. Her beauty was unmarred, save for the terrible little wounds on her throat. She went to a couch and quietly lay down. Her eyes closed. ”

“ Who longs for joy, who chooses joy,
Will reap the sorrow which it brings:
Who never yearns nor waits for joy,
Has never yearned for sorrow's end."
And an inexplicable longing for death came over me, and I yearned to die.
But in my heart, life gave battle—the instinct for self-preservation. And death and life were ominously arrayed against each other; that is catalepsy.
My eyes stared, motionless. The acrobat bent over me, and I noticed his wrinkled tricot, the greenish lid on his head, and his ruffled neck.
"Catalepsy," I wanted to stammer, but I could not open my mouth. ”

“ Most men of earth who believe their sense of hearing is very acute are in reality stone-deaf. To listen truly is a fine art. Anyone can hear a mountain fall, but only a genius can hear the music of a flower unfolding in the sun."
He paused, and gazed off toward the jagged, knife-edged cliffs. Presently he spoke again.
"I am Hi Ling," he said. "To my house you are welcome. No human soul dwells with me. And yet there are other voices besides my own, constantly echoing through my house; for every night I open my windows so that all the great winds can blow through. ”

“ If Gat Neber were not destroyed, the fire would destroy him. Wedmore bent so that his cheek brushed Kim's hair. Breath of jasmine and wisteria. No net is stronger than the blue black hair of a beloved woman. He smiled as he thought of the sudden death that Keng Yen was carrying to Gat Neber. He had neither misgivings nor regrets. With Gat Neber dead there would be no one to stand in the way of his pursuit of Kim. Yes, it might not be such a bad idea for Gat Neber to die. If there were no other way for him to possess Kim it must be done. Fortunate it was that he had given Feng Yen the knife. ”

“ Wedmore offered his arm to Kim. She bowed in acknowledgment and placed her hand upon it. He scarcely breathed so tense was the moment. Of such things are rarest dreams made. Perhaps this, too, was a dream.
And, as though he could read his thoughts, Feng Yen murmured, "All is a dream, earth, sky, the wind in the treetops. Nothing exists with any semblance of permanence. We are all but figures on a fan in the hand of some mighty god. He waves the fan and we vanish or return at his will." ”

“ Pledge your allegiance, promise your soul to him; and in fee thereof, the Demon will surely reward you. If it be your wish, he can wake again the buried past with his necromancy. Again, as King Amero, you shall reign over Calyz; and all things shall be as they were in the perished years; and the dead faces and the fields now desert shall bloom again."
"I accept the bond," said Xeethra. "I plight my fealty to Thasaidon, and I promise my soul to him if he, in return, will give me back my kingdom."
"There is more to be said," resumed the shadow. ”

“ That night Li Kan slept in a lavish chamber at the far end of the house. There were cushions and coverlets in profusion to comfort his rest. But he could not sleep. Fear gripped his heart. It made of him a pitiful thing, a shaking, cringing, fawning thing that jumped at every shadow.
After he turned out the lamps, which had added a bit of cheer to the room, it was as though reality vanished utterly. He was in a strange region of legends and odd beliefs. The blackness bore down upon him with frightful weight. It seemed to have texture like the black velvet draperies in the throneroom. ”

“ All nature had paused to watch the charming spell of Kum-Kum, who danced with the abandon of one who lived each moment to the full. Her body swayed and undulated. When she gazed at Jolly Cauldron she smiled as though she were making sport of him. She seemed to lead him on for the sheer pleasure of ultimately repulsing him. But still he did not move; still he crouched ape-like in the sand.
Then came the storm. The thunder ripped the heavens in two and the rain poured down in sheets of chilling coldness. A sharp wind rose from nowhere and played havoc with the veranda lights. ”

“ He turned his head at some slight sound and looked into the face of a girl who lay on the sand beside him.
He realized, as the march of events passed through his mind, that he must have gone through the gate of death. This, then, was that next world of which he had heard vaguely, all his life long. It was puzzling, somewhat. He was dead. He knew he must be dead. Do the dead lie on tropical beaches, under faint moonlight, and think, and feel this fresh wind from the sea? The dead, surely, do not dream. Perhaps they do dream. ”

“ Even without this to follow, the strong musk pervading the night air woüld have enabled me to trace whoever had gone ahead.
I was led—not away from the house—but deeper into the garden, straight to the curb of the well- behind the house. And over the curb into the well, where I saw for the first time in the glow of the flashlight the cunningly fashioned steps which led down into that dark maw; So great was the discharge of blood at the well curb, that I was confident I had mortally wounded the intruder. It was that confidence which impelled me to follow, despite the manifest danger. ”

“ Where the mists begin, time ceases to be, an hour, a day, a year, are all one. But as time is measured in Singapore they dwelt together through a thousand moons. Then gradually Gat Neber began to long for his accustomed life in Singapore. He turned away from Kim, plotting to escape from a land that was in itself the most complete escape whereof anyone might dream. At last the opportunity came and he fled back into the world of men, into the world of bleak reality where so little, if any, peace exists. ”

“ I felt that I had stepped from the solid earth into a gulf of seething, menacing, madness-haunted shadow, and was lost henceforward to all rightful sense of location or direction. It was all too hideous—and too doubtful and unreal. The change in Cyprian self was no less bewildering, and hardly less horrifying, than the vile phantom of the bookshop, and the demon sculptures that displayed a magisterial art. It was as if the man had become possessed by some satanic energy or entity. ”

“ Sustained only by the vision of his lost kingdom, the youth wandered for many moons throughout Zothique. People derided him when he spoke of his kingship and made inquiry concerning Calyz; but many, thinking madness a sacred thing, offered him shelter and sustenance. Amid the far-stretching fruitful vineyards of Zhel, and into Istanam of the myriad cities; over the high passes of Ymorth, where snow tarried at the autumn's beginning; and across the salt-pale desert of Dhir, Xeethra followed that bright imperial dream which had now become his only memory. ”

“ The Barbadian had entered the Gulf Stream, and the malevolent fury of the sea increased with daylight. Hewitt came on deck, and, leaning against the jamb of a partly opened hatch on the protected lee-side, looked out upon a world of heaving gray-green water with that feeling of awe which the sea in all its many moods invariably awakened in him. A gust of wind caught his unbuttoned coat, and out of a pocket and onto the wet, heaving deck slid the morocco-bound Testament which his mother had given him years before. ”

“ The lurking fear dwelt in the shunned and deserted Martense mansion, which crowned the high but gradual eminence whose liability to frequent thunderstorms gave it the name of Tempest Mountain. For over a hundred years the antique, grove-circled stone house had been the subject of stories incredibly wild and monstrously hideous; stories of a silent colossal creeping death which stalked abroad in summer. With whimpering insistence the squatters told tales of a demon which seized lone wayfarers after dark, either carrying them off or leaving them in a frightful state of gnawed dismemberment ”

“ As he beheld it, the last spark of his reason flickered out, for he recognized The Poppy Pearl, as smart and trim as the day she first sailed; and yet The Poppy Pearl lay a moldering, shapeless thing on the reefs, her back broken, her masts and rigging converted into huts. Nearer and nearer came the phantom ship. It was the most tremendous moment of Guy's life. He was the first man who had ever pierced the film of reality and peered into the spirit world. ”

“ When he opened his eyes, he was lying on a white coral beach. It was morning. The storm had passed. The weather had swung to the other extreme, as is its habit in the tropics. In the dazzling brilliance the waters shone as though they; had become a sea of liquid gold.
Guy sat up and gazed stupidly about him. There was not the slightest vestige of a human being anywhere in sight, nor any sign of habitation. About two hundred yards from the beach The Poppy Pearl clung perilously to a reef, her stern far out of the water, her bow almost submerged. ”

“ He was returning to another abode than the squalid hut of Pornos, built of clay and brushwood. In a high-domed city, gates of burnished metal would open for him, and fiery-colored banners would stream on the perfumed air; and silver trumpets and the voices of blonde odalisques and black chamberlains would greet him as king in a thousand-columned hall. The ancient pomp of royalty, familiar as air and light, would surround him, and he, the King Amero, who had newly come to the throne, would rule as his fathers had ruled over all the kingdom of Calyz by the orient sea. ”

“ Guy lay where he had fallen, fighting to get back his breath. He writhed in agony. His face was blue. His ears seemed like percussion caps that were in danger of exploding. His heart tore at his chest as though it were a spirit in prison struggling to get free. He was thoroughly beaten, yet Jolly Cauldron had not struck him once, merely squeezed his throat, throwing his world into chaos. The minutes dragged like years. Finally he ceased to struggle. Life wasn't worth fighting for. ”

“ Men marvel at their staying qualities. Few realize that in the make-up of the Chinese there is the something more that makes them great among all people. Kim took the news of Gat Neber's desertion stoically but she commenced to droop like a flower. All grandeur had departed from her life. Do you wonder that I, too, grieved? For the fault was mine. I had attempted to permit two worlds to blend in a supreme romance that was worthy of the gods. But Gat Neber was a mortal. He could not vision the wide sweep and glory of an eternal love. And so he went back to Singapore. ”

“ Hesitating, he tried to remember certain legends that Pornos had once told him: legends that concerned such hidden caverns as the one on which he had stumbled. But it seemed that the tales had faded now from his mind, leaving only a dim sense of things that were perilous, forbidden and magical. He thought that the cavern was the portal of some undiscovered world—and the portal had opened to permit his entrance. Being of a nature both venturesome and visionary, he was undeterred by the fears that others might have felt in his place. ”

“ Bitter was the heart of Xeethra, thinking himself a dreamer beguiled by some idle dream. He shrank from the high splendor of Canopus, as if from a flame too bright to bear; but, ere he could turn away, it seemed that a column of shadow, darker than the night and thicker than any cloud, rose upward before him from the terrace and blotted out the effulgent star. Out of the solid stone the shadow grew, towering tall and colossal ”

“ As for the fog, I find it pleasant."
"It changes the whole city," declared Wedmore. "It repaints the houses and alters the shape of familiar objects. It turns Buitenzorg into a ghost city."
"This fog," Feng Yen said slowly, "is on yesterday's edge. Hidden within it is the city that used to be here, or rather the many cities that have been built through the ages one upon the other. So many billions of people have died since the earth cooled from molten intensity, that there is scarcely a bit of dust anywhere that was not at one time or other part of human flesh. ”

“ Much happened on that ship that I should like to relate, but if I did it would be like singing an endless, mournful chantey of the sea. Day followed day, week followed week in utter monotony. On all that ship there were no two men who trusted each other, no two who were even casual friends. They had known all the horrors and hatreds of life, and their faith in things was utterly shattered. Gradually I grew as crafty as the rest. I fawned over Jolly Cauldron, became a thing of the most despicable hyprocrisy. ”

“ I was not alone, for foolhardiness was not then mixed with that love of the grotesque and the terrible which has made my career a series of quests for strange horrors in literature and in life. With me were two faithful and muscular men for whom I had sent when the time came; men long associated with me in my ghastly explorations because of their peculiar fitness.
We had started quietly from the village because of the reporters who still lingered about after the eldritch panic of a month before—the nightmare creeping death. ”

“ In the course of their fourth emergence, the two, rolling over and over upon the bottom sand of the shore shallows, shot out upon the beach, and Hewitt, finding his feet, with a great wrench, raised the sea-tiger in his hands and with a great sweeping motion which bent the iron-like head and its cruel jaws towards the rigid, mackerel-like tail, cracked the giant killer’s backbone, and flung the barracuda down on the sand where it lay, crushed and broken, writhing out its life in convulsive leaps. ”

“ He cried out to the emissary: "I have lost the bargain that I made with Thasaidon. Take now my soul and bear it before him where he sits aloft on his throne of ever-burning brass; for I would fulfil my bond to the uttermost."
"There is no need to take your soul," said the emissary, with an ominous rumble as of departing storm in the desolate night. "Remain here with the lepers, or return to Pornos and his goats, as you will: it matters little. At all times and in all places your soul shall be part of the dark empire of Thasaidon." ”

“ It was not a man who stood there, but a travesty of a man. I know that for one cataclysmic moment I thought consciousness would leave me; but a sense of urgency coupled with an awareness of acute danger swept over me, and without a moment's hesitation, I fired four times, at such range that I knew each shot had found harbor in the body of the bestial thing that leaned over Dr. Charriere's desk in that darkened study.
Of what followed I have, mercifully, only the vaguest memory. A wild thrashing about—the escape of the invader—my own uncertain pursuit. ”