absurdity of it made me laugh hysterically. Your ray had been extinguished thousands of years in my Past. I tried the myrdoscope—to locate the image of the girl—to verify our direction, for abruptly I realized I had, in that empty black void, nothing by which I might locate our position.
"The myrdoscope was inoperative! I could not locate the girl-image—nor anything else. I tried with the electro-telescope at its greatest power—tried frantically to pick up some star-image behind us. I could not. I did not think they were as yet beyond its range—it merely had gone dead. The current in it would not hum. It was dead like the myrdoscope. We wondered then if our dials were working accurately. In our panic we doubted everything. And knew, with a stark terror upon us—knew that we were lost. Lost perhaps in Size and Time. And lost in black Space, empty, soundless, unfathomable!"
The meeting with the girl, and the thrilling encounter with giants
dwindling out of unfathomable largeness, will be described in
the thrilling chapters which bring this story to a conclusion
in next month's issue.
The Song of the Bats
By ROBERT E. HOWARD
The dusk was on the mountain
And the stars were dim and frail
When the bats came flying, flying
From the river and the vale
To wheel against the twilight
And sing their witchly tale.
"We were kings of eld!" they chanted,
"Rulers of a world enchanted;
"Every nation of creation
"Owned our lordship over men.
"Diadems of power crowned us,
"Then rose Solomon to confound us,
"Flung his web of magic round us,
"In the forms of beasts he bound us,
"So our rule was broken then."
Whirling, wheeling into westward,
Fled they in their phantom flight;
Was it but a wing-beat music
Murmured through the star-gemmed night?
Or the singing of a ghost clan
Whispering of forgotten night?
