"It's no use!" I said. "Let's go on to the top."
CHAPTER XIX
The Hill of Horror
We climbed up the last few yards to the summit, and gazed across toward the dim blue cliffs that rimmed this world on the north. We stood on a great divide. A vast valley lay before us, stretching away until it was veiled with a faint rosy haze. The curious checkered expanse of green plain and purple woodland sloped far, far away to the north. Perhaps twenty miles away was the vague outline of a great silver lake, dyed with the light of the crimson sky.
Just back of the lake seemed to be a shore of low black cliffs. And beyond those ragged peaks, and beneath the towering and rugged columns of blue that threw themselves up to the bloody sky, was a strange sight indeed!
There was a weird flicker of dancing lights in that far-flung crimson mist, as if it reflected strange infernal fires in a pit behind the low black wall. There were faint and moving gleams of violet—of pale violet flames that changed and rose and fell. Vague tongues of violet fire wove themselves throughout that distant rose-colored mist, with a writhing, rhythmic motion. They formed curious shapes of flame, that faded strangely and came again!
But my description is futile. The important thing was not what we saw, but what we felt! A curiously unpleasant sensation of helplessness, and of strange horror, came over me. I felt as if I were stealing a forbidden glimpse of an ancient and incredible hell! Fear swept over me—alien, inconceivable terror—like a keen and bitter wind that numbed my brain! I felt the horror of a sentient force, utterly inhuman, devoid of all human knowledge or understanding, as cold and remote as the frozen night of space!
It was terrible—an intangible aura of fear that reached out of that pit and tugged at our souls with the icy hand of stark horror! I can give the world no conception of the overwhelming terror of it! Nor would I if I could, for such things are better forgotten. I dropped my rifle and clenched my hands, trembling. I braced my feet as though against the force of a physical wind that was striving to carry me toward that abyss of nebulous horror-light!
I looked at Sam. He stood very still, leaning back, with hands raised and jaw dropped. In his eyes was the look of the fresh and innocent soul that struggles with a pitiless terror that it cannot know or understand! Such a look I had never seen before—and God grant that I may never see it again!