Drome

By John Martin Leahy
Illustrated By John Martin Leahy
FANTASY PUBLISHING COMPANY, INC. Los Angeles, California
Copyright 1952 By John Martin Leahy Copyright 1925 By Weird Tales Magazine
Manufactured in the U. S. A.
For there is one descent into this region. — Josephus : Discourse to the Greeks Concerning Hades.
But please to remember that although we can prove to our own satisfaction that some things really exist, we can not prove that any imaginable thing outside our experience can not possibly exist. Imagine the wildest impossibility you can think of; you will not induce a modern man of science to admit the impossibility of it as an absolute. — F. Marion Crawford : Whosoever Shall Offend.
On my return from the Antarctic, it was with surprise and grief that I learned of the very strange and wholly inexplicable disappearance of Milton Rhodes and William Carter. The special work of Rhodes was in a department of science very different from that to which my own pertains; but we were much interested in each other's investigations and problems, and, indeed, we even conducted some experiments together.
It will be quite patent, then, that, as the Multnomah made her way northward, I was looking forward with much pleasure anticipated to the meeting with my friend—with all that I had to tell him of our adventures and discoveries in the region of the Southern Pole, picturing to myself the astonishment that would most certainly be his on seeing some of the things brought from that mysterious region; above all, imagining his reaction when we would behold our poor Sleeping Beauty in her crystal coffin, in which she had lain (neither living nor dead, as I believe; or as my friend Bond McQuestion has it, in a living death) from some awful day in that period men call the Pliocene.
And then to come back and find that Milton Rhodes had disappeared, and with him William Carter!
They had vanished as suddenly and mysteriously as though a secret departure had been made for the moon or Mars or Venus.