Through them, beyond them, around and about them, drifted and eddied a
horde--great as that with which Tamerlane swept down upon Rome, vast
as the myriads which Genghis Khan rolled upon the califs--men and
women and children--clothed in tatters, half nude and wholly naked;
slant-eyed Chinese, sloe-eyed Malays, islanders black and brown and
yellow, fierce-faced warriors of the Solomons with grizzled locks
fantastically bedizened; Papuans, feline Javans, Dyaks of hill and
shore; hook-nosed Phoenicians, Romans, straight-browed Greeks, and
Vikings centuries _beyond_ their lives: scores of the black-haired
Murians; white faces of our own Westerners--men and women and children
--drifting, eddying--each stamped with that mingled horror and
rapture, eyes filled with ecstasy and terror entwined, marked by God
and devil in embrace--the seal of the Shining One--the dead-alive; the
lost ones!
The loot of the Dweller!
Soul-sick, I gazed. They lifted to us visages of dread; they swept
down toward us, glaring upward--a bank against which other and still
other waves of faces rolled, were checked, paused; until as far as I
could see, like billows piled upon an ever-growing barrier, they
stretched beneath us--staring--staring!
Now there was a movement--far, far away; a concentrating of the
lambency; the dead-alive swayed, oscillated, separated--forming a long
lane against whose outskirts they crowded with avid, hungry
insistence.
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