Lankar of Callisto

“Eho, friend Lankar! Any sign of anything?”

It was Glypto. Having reached the furthest extent of the cliffs, he and Dr. Abziz were trudging back to where we had left the gig.

“Come here quick!” I cried. Alarmed at my tone of voice, the scrawny little man drew his knife and sprinted towards where I stood. Behind him, clutching his maps and glasses against his bosom, the scarlet-faced Soraban followed at a clumsy pace, puffing and blowing.

Glypto came up to where I stood and glanced about with a quick, keen eye.

“Now, Prince, whatever is wrong―and where has the dear beast gotten to?”

“That’s just it, Glypto. Bozo has disappeared!” I cried.

He regarded rime curiously, arching one brow.

“Eh? How’s that again? What do you mean `disappeared’?”

“Just that,” I said vaguely. “Disappeared. Jumped right into the cliff-wall somewhere about here, and―and―vanished!”

“Vanished? But how could the dear brute have vanished? There’s naught here―not so much as a crevice,” he muttered incredulously.

“I know it, but, well, that’s what happened,” I said helplessly. The little rogue stared at me for a long moment with one bright, inquisitive eye, fingering his great beak of a nose with one hand while toying nervously with his knife in the other.

“… vanished, eh?” he muttered.

“Impossible. Quite impossible, sir,” wheezed the Doctor, glaring at me severely as if accusing me of having deliberately contrived the occurrence in order to embarrass him.

I was beginning to lose my temper. “I know that,” I said shortly. “But 1 saw it happen. Right about, um―here,” I said, turning to slap the side of the cliff with the palm of my hand.

But my hand passed through seemingly solid rock, vanishing to the wrist.

Glypto yelped, jumped a foot, and paled. Abziz rolled up his eyes and moaned faintly. I blinked, staring at my hand in amazement. My arm simply ended at the wrist, whose stump seemed to be pressed flat against the smooth, unbroken surface of stone. But my hand was still attached to the end of my wrist, I knew, because when I waggled my fingers I could feel them in motion, even though I could not see them.

A breath of the unknown blew over us, cold and chill. We stood and stared at one another in dead silence.

“Oh, my,” whispered Dr. Abziz in a faint voice. “Oh my!”

I withdrew my hand from the solid rock, and it was whole and perfectly normal looking. I wiggled my fingers again, staring down at them blankly, then turning my gaze on the gray, pitted stretch of rock into which my hand had been buried a moment before up to the wrist.

Suddenly, Glypto’s eyes sparkled. He darted forward, knife glittering. The point of his blade grated and squeaked along the surface of the cliff until it reached a spot near which my hand had so inexplicably vanished into the stone. At that point his wicked little blade sank into the stone, too, vanishing halfway to the hilt. He stretched on tiptoe, rasping the knife along the edges of an invisible entrance. His knife clinked to one side of an unseen opening, then the top, then the far side. Abziz and I watched in awe. To us it seemed he was dragging his knife through solid rock.

“Triangular!” he chirped brightly, eyes dancing. “An entrance pointed at the top, the sides widening to the base! An invisible, triangular doorway sunk in yon solid stone, by some weird magic. Aye, that, then, be the meaning of the pyramid-shapen mark on the medallion! We thought it were a pyramid―a buildin’, like, forgetting that a triangle be the selfsame shape as a pyramid! And that a doorway can be trianglelike in shape!”

He regarded me with curious respect in his eyes.

“My friend from another world,” he said softly, his manner suddenly formal, “to you has been given the privilege of discovering the very Gates of Kuur… ”

The Gates of Kuur ...

But actually, the credit belonged to Bozo.

The tension of the scene, tightly drawn, relaxed suddenly with the solution, or at least the partial solution, of the mystery of Bozo’s disappearance. The emotional relief hit me suddenly, as an incongruous parallel suggested itself to me. It struck me as being terribly funny, and I’m afraid I giggled a trifle hysterically.

“What be the matter now?” asked Glypto.

“Dwellers in the Mirage,” I laughed.

“Eh? Give me that one again?”

“Oh, sorry, that was in English, wasn’t it? Let’s see if I can translate―I don’t think you have a word for `mirage’, or if you do I guess I haven’t learned it yetwell, no matter!”

“Your lordship, what do you be talking about?”

“It’s the title of one of my favorite books―a novel by A. Merritt, a writer of whom you could never have heard―well, anyway, in a book called Dwellers in the Mirage, Merritt has a mysterious race of beings living in a deep craterlike valley which is screened from discovery by anybody from the outer world because of a `mirage’—a barrier of illusion, artificially ‘maintained . don’t you see?”