The Door to Saturn by Clark Ashton Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

world of glaring light, of kaleidoscopically various forms and colors, leapt up to meet it like a reeling and ever-broadening mosaic.

    II
    T he transition from the outer sky to this internal gulf beneath the glowing red surface had occupied merely a few moments; and only men of supreme nervous alertness and presence of mind could have adjusted themselves in any degree to a situation so extraordinary. Jasper still strove to arrest the Alcyone ’s descent, while the others watched with a swift cognizance of all apparent detail the world toward which they were falling with headlong velocity. Then, turning from it to gaze upward, they saw that the unknown fiery substance was arched above them from horizon to horizon like the cope of some unnatural metallic heaven. The sudden shaft that had formed to admit them was no longer visible; and the vault presented an unbroken expanse, pouring down a blinding, fulgurating luster, though no sun was now discernible.
    The vessel was helpless in the grip of the mysterious ultragravitational force that still dragged it downward. The roar of the fulminating engines, the response of the tightened brakes and the drawn levers, all served to attest that the machinery was in perfect order, and was struggling against a power such as never before had been encountered. Volmar and his crew resigned themselves to the seemingly inevitable crash; and all the events of their intersidereal voyage were marshalled before them in a crowded flash that was virtually simultaneous with the thought-image of its disastrous end.
    However, they were still able to note with astronomic interest the unknown world that surged toward them in geometric mazes of widening forms and spreading zones of color. There were belts that suggested water, there were others that gave the impression of a many-tinted vegetation, and still others denotive of a mineraloid character, like immense plots of ground with pavements of silver and cinnabar and lapis lazuli. And at intervals of many leagues on the great plain, colossal architectural piles upreared themselves to the zenith; and each separate edifice was vaster far than any terrene city.
    The ether-ship was falling directly upon one of these piles, whose level diamond-shaped roof was outstretched below in multiform and labyrinthine patterns of a hundred hues, like parterres and flower-beds. The headlong descent began to slacken gently at an elevation of three or four miles, the vessel drifted down with a buoyant ease, it landed and was brought to rest as skillfully and adroitly as if Jasper himself had guided it.
    Volmar and his men peered through the ports on a scene that was no less unbelievable than indescribable. They had come down on a vacant space at the center of the diamond roof, which reached away for a half-mile in every direction, and was seemingly made of some mineral substance unknown to terrene geology—a highly metallic stone with striations of black and yellow and bluish green. The roof was laid out like a garden with concentric rows of bizarre plants, all of which were either set in basins of fretted stone or were standing rootlessly on the bare pavement; and was crowded with living and moving creatures no less bizarre than the plants, who began immediately to collect around the Alcyone.
    Volmar was almost startled out of his habitual ascetic reserve as he studied these beings; and the others exclaimed with frank amazement. The beings resembled a multitude of forms and types; and all of them were either clothed in shards of metal or else possessed bodies that were radically different in their biological composition from any that the vessel’s crew had ever seen. They glittered and shone in the glaring light with a myriad hues and lusters redoubled by the intricate irregular facets into which their surfaces were divided. The commonest type among them was perhaps five feet tall, with a perfectly spherical head which was joined without a neck to a triangular body that