Conan Of The Isles

Now exhaustion had sapped even his iron vigor. The gray, gaunt old wolf lay sprawled in chain mail upon the silken coverlets, his great broadsword near his hand, in a drugged but restless slumber.

And in this sleep, he dreamed.

It seemed to Conan that he heard a distant voice. The echoing call was loud enough to rouse him but so fogged and unclear that he could not understand the repeated phrase that whispered eerily through his chamber.

He came to his feet, saw that his mighty limbs were bare, and knew that it was but a dream. Looking back, he saw his own body lying deep in slumber. As the deep chest rose and fell, mail glinted like silver in the moonlight that shone through the tall, narrow windows.

Again came that distant, murmuring call, and the note of urgency rang within it. And in a fashion he could never quite remember afterwards, the old king went forward from the moonlit darkness of his chamber, through barriers of space and time, until swirling mists as gray as his own grizzled beard closed about him, blotting everything from sight. Yet still he advanced, in some form of progress unlike the ways of the material world he had left behind -forward, through grayness that obscured his vision like the clammy embrace of a night-born fog.

Out of the shifting mists came, again and again, that haunting call that had summoned his spirit forth from its mansion of flesh and into this world of eery darkness.and phantom mists. Gradually the call of the voice, repeated over and over, became clearer: 'Conan of Cimmeria -Conan of Aquilonia! - Conan of the Isles!'

Yes, he could hear it distinctly now. But he was puzzled: what meant the name 'Conan of the Isles'? Never had this term been linked with his name in all the wide-ranging years of his wanderings.

Now he came to where he could stand on a solid footing. And it seemed, in his dream, that the gray fog cleared away. A dim, unearthly light struck through the blur of vapor. Now he stood in a hall of titanic proportions, whose ebon walls and lofty, vaulted roof seemed carved from the dead-black stuff of Old Night itself. The faint, mystic radiance seemed to shine from the very walls themselves, whereon he could dimly discern colossal carvings., which stretched from the floor to the arched ceiling far above.

Every inch of the black walls was cut and worked into a stupendous pageant of tiny figures - a vast, sweeping panorama peopled with millions of struggling, warring men. Peering closer, he marveled vaguely at the strangeness of their raiment and weaponry, derived from distant realms and remote aeons.

It was like a titanic tapestry of cold stone, a bird's-eye view of the history of man himself, from the forgotten days before the Cataclysm, when Atlantis and Lemuria, Valusia and old Grondar strove for the mastery of the earth; and even earlier, when the stooped and hairy ancestors of men slouched through the jungle, and black-winged Ka, the Bird of Creation, first flew out of the unknown East to lay the foundations of Time.

Above this straggling pageant of ancient kings and heroes loomed other shapes as well - malformed, uncouth, and terrible. In his soul, Conan knew them for the Nameless Old Ones, who had ruled the star-thronged universe a billion aeons before the birth of Gayomar the First of All Men.

Then Conan knew that he walked through a timeless dream, wherein his spirit had been summoned by an ancient Force which guarded and watched over the race of man. With an inward queasiness natural to his blunt, barbaric soul, he knew that the foot of mortal man had not stirred the impalpable dust that filmed this ebon floor . for ages beyond reckoning. Aye, he knew all this and more, for once in earlier years he had stood upon this very spot and passed down the yawning black throat of this colossal hall in a strange, magical dream.

More than a score of years had passed since that distant day, but what are the ephemeral generations of mortal men to him who sleeps forever in the black halls of timeless Golamira, the Mount of Eternal Time?

Conan came upon a broad, curving stair, which rose in steep ramps of black stone to unguessable heights. Here, the clifflike walls were adorned with cryptic symbols in some esoteric script, so ancient and so suggestive that they woke within him vestigial memories inherited from ancestors scarce risen above the primal, shambling beast-men of Time's dawn. And at the stir of these racial memories of Elder Time, the skin seemed to crawl on his naked flanks. He hastily averted his eyes from these enigmatic glyphs.