H. P. Lovecraft

Kenneth Sterling

In The Walls of Eryx by H. P. Lovecraft and Kenneth Sterling - Trapped. Alone. No Way Out.

Before I try to rest I will set down these notes in preparation for the report I must make. What I have found is so singular, and so contrary to all past experience and expectations, that it deserves a very careful description. 

I reached the main landing on Venus March 18, terrestrial time; VI-9 of the planet’s calendar. Being put in the main group under Miller, I received my equip- ment—watch tuned to Venus’s slightly quicker rotation—and went through the usual mask drill. After two days I was pronounced fit for duty. 

Leaving the Crystal Company’s post at Terra Nova around dawn, VI-12, I followed the southerly route which Anderson had mapped out from the air. The going was bad, for these jungles are always half impassable after a rain. It must be the moisture that gives the tangled vines and creepers that leathery toughness; a toughness so great that a knife has to work ten minutes on some of them. By noon it was dryer—the vegetation getting soft and rubbery so that the knife went through it easily, but even then I could not make much speed. These Carter oxygen masks are too heavy—just carrying one half wears an ordinary man out. A Dubois mask with sponge-reservoir instead of tubes would give just as good air at half the weight. 

The crystal detector seemed to function well, pointing steadily in a direction verifying Anderson’s report. It is curious how that principle of affinity works, without any of the fakery of the old divining-rods back home. There must be a great deposit of crystals within a thousand miles, though I suppose those damnable man-lizards always watch and guard it. Possibly they think we are just as foolish for coming to Venus to hunt the stuff as we think they are for groveling in the mud whenever they see a piece of it, or for keeping the great mass on a pedestal in their temple.

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