[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.And its surface was so perfect that even the late sunlight, striking through my windows, reflected no glare but a pure beam of light which lit my study in a dream-engendering effulgence.Nitocris’ Mirror!Nitocris.Now there was a woman—or a monster—whichever way one chooses to think of her.A sixth-dynasty Queen who ruled her terror-stricken subjects with a will of supernatural iron from her seat at Gizeh—who once invited all her enemies to a feast in a temple below the Nile, and drowned them by opening the water-gates—whose mirror allowed her glimpses of the nether-pits where puffed Shoggoths and creatures of the Dark-Spheres carouse and sport in murderous lust and depravity.Just suppose this was the real thing, the abhorred glass which they placed in her tomb before sealing her up alive; where could Brown-Farley have got hold of it?Before I knew it, it was nine, and the light had grown so poor that the mirror was no more than a dull golden glow across the room in the shadow of the wall.I put on my study light, in order to read Brown-Farley’s diary, and immediately—on picking up that small, flat book, which seemed to fall open automatically at a well-turned page—I became engrossed with the story which began to unfold.It appeared that the writer had been a niggardly man, for the pages were too closely-written, in a crabbed hand, from margin to margin and top to bottom, with barely an eighth of an inch between lines.Or perhaps he had written these pages in haste, begrudging the seconds wasted in turning them and therefore determined to turn as few as possible?The very first word to catch my eye was—Nitocris!The diary told of how Brown-Farley had heard it put about that a certain old Arab had been caught selling items of fabulous antiquity in the markets of Cairo.The man had been jailed for refusing to tell the authorities whence the treasures had come.Yet every night in his cell he had called such evil things down on the heads of his jailers that eventually, in fear, they let him go.And he had blessed them in the name of Nitocris! Yet Abu Ben Reis was not one of those tribesmen who swore by her name—or against it! He was not a Gizeh man, nor even one of Cairo’s swarthy sons.His home tribe was a band of rovers wandering far to the west, beyond the great desert.Where, then, had he come into contact with Nitocris’ name? Who had taught him her foul blessing—or where had he read of it? For through some kink of fate and breeding Abu Ben Reis had an uncommon knack with tongues and languages other than his own.Just as thirty-five years earlier the inexplicable possessions of one Mohammad Hamad had attracted archaeologists of the caliber of Herbert E.Winlock to the eventual discovery of the tomb of Thutmosis III’s wives, so now did Abu Ben Reis’s hinted knowledge of ancient burial grounds—and in particular the grave of the Queen of elder horror—suffice to send Brown-Farley to Cairo to seek his fortune.Apparently he had not gone unadvised; the diary was full of bits and pieces of lore and legend in connection with the ancient Queen.Brown-Farley had faithfully copied from Wardle’s Notes on Nitocris; and in particular the paragraph on her “Magical Mirror”: “…handed down to their priests by the hideous gods of inner-Earth before the earliest civilizations of the Nile came into existence—a ‘gateway’ to unknown spheres and worlds of hellish horror in the shape of a mirror.Worshipped, it was, by the pre-Imer Nyahites in Ptathlia at the dawn of Man’s domination of the Earth, and eventually enshrined by Nephren-Ka in a black, windowless crypt on the banks of the Shibeli.Side-by-side, it lay, with the Shining Trapezohedron, and who can say what things might have been reflected in its depths? Even the Haunter of the Dark may have bubbled and blasphemed before it! Stolen, it remained hidden, unseen for centuries in the bat-shrouded labyrinths of Kith, before finally falling into Nitocris’ foul clutches.Numerous the enemies she locked away, the mirror as sole company, full knowing that by the next morning the death-cell would be empty save for the sinister, polished glass on the wall.Numerous the vilely chuckled hints she gave of the features of those who leered at midnight from out the bronze-barriered gate.But not even Nitocris herself was safe from the horrors locked in the mirror, and at the midnight hour she was wise enough to gaze but fleetingly upon it…”The midnight hour! Why! It was ten already.Normally I would have been preparing for bed by this time; yet here I was, so involved, now, with the diary that I did not give my bed a second thought.Better, perhaps, if I had…I read on.Brown-Farley had eventually found Abu Ben Reis and had plied him with liquor and opium until finally he managed to do that which the proper authorities had found impossible.The old Arab gave up his secret—though the book hinted that this knowledge had not been all that easy to extract—and the next morning Brown-Farley had taken a little-used camel-track into the wastes beyond those pyramids wherein lay Nitocris’ first burial place.But from here on there were great gaps in the writing—whole pages having been torn out or obliterated with thick, black strokes, as though the writer had realized that too much was revealed by what he had written—and there were rambling, incoherent paragraphs on the mysteries of death and the lands beyond the grave
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]