Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931Various
Science
Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931
Various
Science fiction -- Periodicals; Science fiction, American -- Periodicals
I picked up the twilight zone without difficulty in the television
disc, and at full power examined the terrain.
The rich crops that fairly burst from the earth of the sunlit portion
of Antri were not to be observed here. The Antrians made no effort to
till this ground, and I doubt that it would have been profitable to do
so, even had they wished to come so close to the darkness they hated.
The ground seemed dank, and great dark slugs moved heavily upon its
greasy surface. Here and there strange pale growths grew in
patches--twisted, spotted growths that seemed somehow unhealthy and
poisonous.
I searched the country ahead, pressing further and further into the
line of darkness that was swiftly approaching. As the light of the sun
faded, our monstrous searchlights cut into the gloom ahead, their
great beams slashing the shadows.
In the dark country I had expected to find little if any vegetable
growth. Instead, I found that it was a veritable jungle through which
even our searchlight rays could not pass.
How tall the growths of this jungle might be, I could not tell, yet I
had the feeling that they were tall indeed. They were not trees, these
pale, weedy arms that reached towards the dark sky. They were soft and
pulpy, and without leaves; just long naked sickly arms that divided
and subdivided and ended in little smooth stumps like amputated limbs.
That there was some kind of activity within the shelter of this weird
jungle, was evident enough, for I could catch glimpses, now and then
of moving things. But what they might be, even the searching eye of
the television disc could not determine.
* * * * *
One of our searchlight beams, waving through the darkness like the
curious antenna of some monstrous insect, came to rest upon a spot far
ahead. I followed the beam with the disc, and bent closer, to make
sure my eyes did not deceive me.
I was looking at a vast cleared place in the pulpy jungle--a cleared
space in the center of which there was a city.
A city built of black, sweating stone, each house exactly like every
other house: tall, thin slices of stone, without windows, chimneys or
ornamentation of any kind. The only break in the walls was the
slit-like door of each house. Instead of being arranged along streets
crossing each other at right angles, these houses were built in
concentric circles broken only by four narrow streets then ran from
the open space in the center of the city to the four points of the
compass. Around the entire city was an exceedingly high wall built of
and buttressed with the black, sweating stone of which the houses were
constructed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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