Page:Weird Tales Volume 12 Issue 05 (1928-11).djvu/103

for in this formation not infrequently were to be found small fossils of mosses, lichens, and diminutive crustaceans.

"Some measure of success attending my labor, I became interested and immersed in the quest, and save for the waning light hardly noticed the passing of time until I found myself climbing the steep ascent that leads to the crest.

"This trail is merely the bottom of a great V-shaped gash that in the course of years has become partly filled with fallen fragments, and likely some day will be completely blocked by them. The way is extremely narrow, and not far from the beach it is for many yards a mere slit where two could hardly walk abreast; though for a sheer wall, maybe twenty feet high, on each side, the ramparts fall back and ascend in a series of giant steps.

"It was here that Daimler’s cries first reached me, though he states that he had shouted several times before he heard my response; a fact for which a turn of the passage just below me and his rapid approach may be held accountable. At once I answered with a loud 'Halloo' and commenced quickly to retrace my steps. The only thought I held at the moment was that he had completed his sketch, and not seeing me about had called to inform me that it was time to return. We had previously agreed to return by the road, for in the dark the shingle would be rough walking.

"So intent had I been on my chipping that the gathering dusk had gone almost unnoticed. But now I realized that some time must have elapsed since I had left him; for as I turned the corner and the bay opened before me I saw that the scarlet and crimson of the horizon were fading, and though not a hundred yards distant his figure was blurred and only just recognizable.

"He was coming toward me quickly, in fact faster than I ever rememmered seeing him move; for Daimler, though not grossly corpulent, is a big, heavy-built man, averse to rapid motion.

"At that second he called again, though I do not think he had yet seen me. He seemed to be walking in a crouching position, and his bent head was foreshortened to half its normal height above his broad shoulders. Although, as I have stated, his hastening form was somewhat blurred in the gathering dusk, yet his outline in the main was fairly well defined by the lighter-hued sands and sea that lay behind him.

"'What's the matter?' I cried sharply. The tone of his cry had surprized and startled me, it was so undeniably a cry of warning and agitation. But as I called back to him I was staring at something many feet away, a something that lay a hundred feet above him.

"I had perceived it directly I turned the bend in the trail, for it was quite impossible to miss its huge bulk. Yet one may perceive a strange and incomprehensible object without instantly grasping the enormity of its presence; we have lain so long in the rut of the known that our perceptions do not lightly rise out of it. Doubtless in the days of King Arthur they were quicker to accept and instantly tabulate the fantastic things they were taught quite commonly might be encountered; things which we dismiss with a smile as mere chimeras of ignorance and auto-suggestion. Yet now it occurs to me to wonder whether there is not a base of fact somewhere or other at the back of these dragons and ogres, centaurs and satyrs that they so often engaged in combat. For I feel certain that I, too, have seen a thing utterly opposed to sane credence, something abnormal, unknown and very horrible, yet as truly a fact as your presence at this moment.