captain's cabin she saw that that bound thing was a sailor in the silk robes of Oriab, head downward and without any eyes, she was glad that a rising breeze soon took the ship ahead to more healthy parts of the sea.
The next day they spoke with a ship with violet sails bound for Zar, in the land of forgotten dreams, with bulbs of strange coloured lilies for cargo. And on the evening of the eleventh day they came in sight of the isle of Oriab with Ngranek rising jagged and snow-crowned in the distance. Oriab is a very great isle, and its port of Bahama a mighty city. The wharves of Bahama are of porphyry, and the city rises in great stone terraces behind them, having streets of steps that are frequently arched over by buildings and the bridges between buildings. There is a great canal which goes under the whole city in a tunnel with granite gates and leads to the inland lake of Yath, on whose farther shore are the vast clay-brick ruins of a primal city whose name is not remembered. As the ship drew into the harbour at evening the twin beacons Thon and Thal gleamed a welcome, and in all the million windows of Bahama's terraces mellow lights peeped out quietly and gradually as the stars peep out overhead in the dusk, till that steep and climbing seaport became a glittering constellation hung between the stars of heaven and the reflections of those stars in the still harbour.
The captain, after landing, made Carter a guest in her own small house on the shores of Yath where the rear of the town slopes down to it; and her husband and servants brought strange toothsome foods for the traveller's delight. And in the days after that Carter asked for rumours and legends of Ngranek in all the taverns and public places where lava-gatherers and image-makers meet, but could find no one who had been up the higher slopes or seen the carven face. Ngranek was a hard mountain with only an accursed valley behind it, and besides, one could never depend on the certainty that night-gaunts are altogether fabulous.
When the captain sailed hack to Dylath-Leen Carter took quarters in an ancient tavern opening on an alley of steps in the original part of the town, which is built of brick and resembles the ruins of Yath's farther shore. Here she laid her plans for the ascent of Ngranek, and correlated all that she had learned from the lava-gatherers about the roads thither. The keeper of the tavern was a very old woman, and had heard so many legends that she was a great help. She even took Carter to an upper room in that ancient house and shewed her a crude picture which a traveller had scratched on the clay wall in the old days when women were bolder and less reluctant to visit Ngranek's higher slopes. The old tavern-keeper's great-grandfather had heard from her great-grandfather that the traveller who scratched that picture had climbed Ngranek and seen the carven face, here drawing it for others to behold, but Carter had very great doubts, since the large rough features on the wall were hasty and careless, and wholly overshadowed by a crowd of little companion shapes in the worst possible taste, with horns and wings and claws and curling tails.
At last, having gained all the information she was likely to gain in the taverns and public places of Baharna, Carter hired a zebra and set out one morning on the road by Yath's shore for those inland parts wherein towers stony Ngranek. On her right were rolling hills and pleasant orchards and neat little stone farmhouses, and she was much reminded of those fertile fields that flank the Skai. By evening she was near the nameless ancient ruins on Yath's farther shore, and though old lava-gatherers had warned her not to camp there at night, she tethered her zebra to a curious pillar before a crumbling wall and laid her blanket in a sheltered corner beneath some carvings whose meaning none could decipher. Around her she wrapped another blanket, for the nights are cold in Oriab; and when upon awaking once she thought she felt the wings of some insect brushing her face she covered her head altogether and slept in peace till roused by the magah birds in distant resin groves.
The sun had just come up over the great slope whereon leagues of primal brick foundations and worn walls and occasional cracked pillars and pedestals stretched down desolate to the shore of Yath, and Carter looked about for her tethered zebra. Great was her dismay to see that docile beast stretched prostrate beside the curious pillar to which it had been tied, and still greater was she vexed on finding that the steed was quite dead, with its blood all sucked away through a singular wound in its throat. Her pack had been disturbed, and several shiny knickknacks taken away, and all round on the dusty soil' were great webbed footprints for which she could not in any way account. The legends and warnings of lava-gatherers occurred to her, and she thought of what had brushed her face in the night. Then she shouldered her pack and strode on toward Ngranek, though not without a shiver when she saw close to her as the highway passed through the ruins a great gaping arch low in the wall of an old temple, with steps leading down into darkness farther than she could peer.
Her course now lay uphill through wilder and partly wooded country, and she saw only the huts of charcoal-burners and the camp of those who gathered resin from the groves. The whole air was fragrant with balsam, and all the magah birds sang blithely as they flashed their seven colours in the sun. Near sunset she came on a new camp of lava-gatherers returning with laden sacks from Ngranek's lower slopes; and here she also camped, listening to the songs and tales of the women, and overhearing what they whispered about a companion they had lost. She had climbed high to reach a mass of fine lava above her, and at nightfall did not return to her fellows. When they looked for her the next day they found only her turban, nor was there any sign on the crags below that she had fallen. They did not search any more, because the old woman among them said it would be of no use.
No one ever found what the night-gaunts took, though those beasts themselves were so uncertain as to be almost fabulous. Carter asked them if night-gaunts sucked blood and liked shiny things and left webbed footprints, but they all shook their heads negatively and seemed frightened at her making such an inquiry. When she saw how taciturn they had become she asked them no more, but went to sleep in her blanket.
The next day she rose with the lava-gatherers and exchanged farewells as they rode west and she rode east on a zebra she bought of them. Their older women gave her blessings and warnings, and told her she had better not climb too high on Ngranek, but while she thanked them heartily she was in no wise dissuaded. For still did she feel that she must find the gods on unknown Kadath; and win from them a way to that haunting and marvellous city in the sunset. By noon, after a long uphill ride, she came upon some abandoned brick villages of the hill-people who had once dwelt thus close to Ngranek and carved images from its smooth lava. Here they had dwelt till the days of the old tavernkeeper's grandmother, but about that time they felt that their presence was disliked. Their homes had crept even up the mountain's slope, and the higher they built the more people they would mister when the sun rose. At last they decided it would be better to leave altogether, since things were sometimes glimpsed in the darkness which no one could interpret favourably; so in the end all of them went down to the sea and dwelt in Bahama, inhabiting a very old quarter and teaching their daughters the old art of image-making which to this day they carry on. It was from these children of the exiled hill-people that Carter had heard the best tales about Ngranek when searching through Bahama's ancient taverns.
All this time the great gaunt side of Ngranek was looming up higher and higher as Carter approached it. There were sparse trees on the lower slopes and feeble shrubs above them, and then the bare hideous rock rose spectral into the sky, to mix with frost and ice and eternal snow. Carter could see the rifts and ruggedness of that sombre stone, and did not welcome the prospect of climbing it. In places there were solid streams of lava, and scoriac heaps that littered slopes and ledges. Ninety aeons ago, before even the gods had danced upon its pointed peak, that mountain had spoken with fire and roared with the voices of the inner thunders. Now it towered all silent and sinister, bearing on the hidden side that secret titan image whereof rumour told. And there were caves in that mountain, which might be empty and alone with elder darkness, or might - if legend spoke truly - hold horrors
of a form not to be surmised.
The ground sloped upward to the foot of Ngranek, thinly covered with scrub oaks and ash trees, and strewn with bits of rock, lava, and ancient cinder. There were the charred embers of many camps, where the lava-gatherers were wont to stop, and several rude altars which they had built either to propitiate the Great Ones or to ward off what they dreamed of in Ngranek's high passes and labyrinthine caves. At evening Carter reached the farthermost pile of embers and camped for the night, tethering her zebra to a sapling and wrapping herself well in her blankets before going to sleep. And all through the night a voonith howled distantly from the shore of some hidden pool, but Carter felt no fear of that amphibious terror, since she had been told with certainty that not one of them dares even approach the slope of Ngranek.
In the clear sunshine of morning Carter began the long ascent, taking her zebra as far as that useful beast could go, but tying it to a stunted ash tree when the floor of the thin wood became too steep. Thereafter she scrambled up alone; first