"A. E. Merritt - Dwellers in the mirage" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merritt A. E)

atavistic in brain. I was a blond savage cowering before my
mumbo-jumbos. He said that if he had been given my chance he would have
let himself be crucified to have learned the truth. He would have, too.
He was not lying."

"Admirably scientific," said Jim. "But what did he say about what you
saw?"

"That is was nothing but hypnotic suggestion by the old priest. I had
seen what he had willed me to see--just as before, under his will, I
had seen myself riding to the temple. The girl hadn't dissolved. She
had probably been standing in the wings laughing at me. But if
everything that my ignorant mind had accepted as true had been true
then my conduct was even more unforgivable. I should have remained,
studied the phenomena and brought back the results for science to
examine. What I had told him of the ritual of Khalk'ru was nothing but
the second law of thermo-dynamics expressed in terms of
anthropomorphism. Life was an intrusion upon Chaos, using that word to
describe the unformed, primal state of the universe. An invasion. An
accident. In time all energy would be changed to static heat, impotent
to give birth to any life whatsoever. The dead universes would float
lifelessly in the illimitable void. The void was eternal, life was not.
Therefore the void would absorb it. Suns, worlds, gods, men, an things
animate, would return to the void. Go back to Chaos. Back to
Nothingness. Back to Khalk'ru. Or if my atavistic brain preferred the
term--back to the Kraken. He was bitter."

"But the others saw the girl taken, you say. How did he explain that?"


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"Oh, easily. That was mass hypnotism-like the Angels of Mons, the
ghostly bowmen of Crecy and other collective hallucinations of the War.
I had been a catalyzer. My likeness to the traditional ancient race,
my completeness as a throwback, my mastery at Khalk'ru's ritual, the
faith the Uighurs had in me--all this had been the necessary element in
bringing about the collective hallucination of the tentacle. Obviously
the priests had long been trying to make work a drug in which an essential
chemical was lacking. I, for some reason, was the missing chemical--the
catalyzer. That was all." Again he sat thinking, breaking the little
twigs.

"It's a reasonable explanation. But you weren't convinced?"

"No, I wasn't convinced--I saw the girl's face when the tentacle touched
her." He arose, stood staring toward the north.