When he came out that night, they argued, he had somehow made the whole
trip to 1928 and back; for did he not thereafter know of things which
were to happen later? And yet he had never spoken of anything to happen
after 1928. One student--an elderly eccentric of Providence, Rhode Island, who
had enjoyed a long and close correspondence with Carter--had a still
more elaborate theory, and believed that Carter had not only returned
to boyhood, but achieved a further liberation, roving at will through
the prismatic vistas of boyhood dream. After a strange vision this man
published a tale of Carter's vanishing in which he hinted that the lost
one now reigned as king on the opal throne of Ilek-Vad, that fabulous
town of turrets atop the hollow cliffs of glass overlooking the
twilight sea wherein the bearded and finny Gnorri build their singular
labyrinths. It was this old man, Ward Phillips, who pleaded most loudly against the
apportionment of Carter's estate to his heirs--all distant cousins--on
the ground that he was still alive in another time-dimension and might
well return some day. Against him was arrayed the legal talent of
one of the cousins, Ernest K. Aspinwall of Chicago, a man ten years
Carter's senior, but keen as a youth in forensic battles. For four
years the contest had raged, but now the time for apportionment had
come, and this vast, strange room in New Orleans was to be the scene of
the arrangements. It was the home of Carter's literary and financial executor--the
distinguished Creole student of mysteries and Eastern antiquities,
Etienne-Laurent de Marigny. Carter had met de Marigny during the war,
when they both served in the French Foreign Legion, and had at once
cleaved to him because of their similar tastes and outlook. When, on
a memorable joint furlough, the learned young Creole had taken the
wistful Boston dreamer to Bayonne, in the south of France, and had
shown him certain terrible secrets in the nighted and immemorial crypts
that burrow beneath that brooding, eon-weighted city, the friendship
was forever sealed. Carter's will had named de Marigny as executor, and
now that avid scholar was reluctantly presiding over the settlement of
the estate. It was sad work for him, for like the old Rhode Islander he
did not believe that Carter was dead. But what weight have the dreams
of mystics against the harsh wisdom of the world? *       *       *       *       *

Around the table in that strange room in the old French Quarter sat
the men who claimed an interest in the proceedings. There had been
the usual legal advertisements of the conference in papers wherever
Carter's heirs were thought to live; yet only four now sat listening
to the abnormal ticking of that coffin-shaped clock which told no
earthly time, and to the bubbling of the courtyard fountain beyond
half-curtained, fan-lighted windows. As the hours wore on, the faces
of the four were half shrouded in the curling fumes from the tripods,
which, piled recklessly with fuel, seemed to need less and less
attention from the silently gliding and increasingly nervous old negro. There was Etienne de Marigny himself--slim, dark, handsome, mustached,
and still young. Aspinwall, representing the heirs, was white-haired,
apoplectic-faced, side-whiskered, and portly. Phillips, the Providence
mystic, was lean, gray, long-nosed, clean-shaven, and stoop-shouldered. The fourth man was non-committal in age--lean, with a dark, bearded,
singularly immobile face of very regular contour, bound with the
turban of a high-caste Brahman and having night-black, burning, almost
irisless eyes which seemed to gaze out from a vast distance behind
the features. He had announced himself as the Swami Chandraputra, an
adept from Benares, with important information to give; and both de
Marigny and Phillips--who had corresponded with him--had been quick to
recognize the genuineness of his mystical pretensions. His speech had
an oddly forced, hollow, metallic quality, as if the use of English
taxed his vocal apparatus; yet his language was as easy, correct and
idiomatic as any native Anglo-Saxon's. In general attire he was the
normal European civilian, but his loose clothes sat peculiarly badly
on him, while his bushy black beard, Eastern turban, and large, white
mittens gave him an air of exotic eccentricity. De Marigny, fingering the parchment found in Carter's car, was speaking. "No, I have not been able to make anything of the parchment. Mr.
Phillips, here, also gives it up. Colonel Churchward declares it is
not Naacal, and it looks nothing at all like the hieroglyphics on that
Easter Island war-club. The carvings on that box, though, do strongly
suggest Easter Island images. The nearest thing I can recall to these
parchment characters--notice how all the letters seem to hang down
from horizontal word-bars--is the writing in a book poor Harley Warren
once had. It came from India while Carter and I were visiting him in
1919, and he never would tell us anything about it--said it would be
better if we didn't know, and hinted that it might have come originally
from some place other than the Earth. He took it with him in December,
when he went down into the vault in that old graveyard--but neither
he nor the book ever came to the surface again. Some time ago I sent
our friend here--the Swami Chandraputra--a memory-sketch of some of
those letters, and also a photostatic copy of the Carter parchment. He
believes he may be able to shed light on them after certain references
and consultations. "But the key--Carter sent me a photograph of that. Its curious
arabesques were not letters, but seem to have belonged to the same
culture-tradition as the parchment. Carter always spoke of being on
the point of solving the mystery, though he never gave details. Once
he grew almost poetic about the whole business. That antique silver
key, he said, would unlock the successive doors that bar our free
march down the mighty corridors of space and time to the very Border
which no man has crossed since Shaddad with his terrific genius
built and concealed in the sands of Arabia Petræa the prodigious
domes and uncounted minarets of thousand-pillared Irem. Half-starved
darvishes--wrote Carter--and thirst-crazed nomads have returned to tell
of that monumental portal, and of the hand that is sculptured above the
keystone of the arch, but no man has passed and retraced his steps to
say that his footprints on the garnet-strown sands within bear witness
to his visit. The key, he surmised, was that for which the cyclopean
sculptured hand vainly grasps. "Why Carter didn't take the parchment as well as the key, we can not
say. Perhaps he forgot it--or perhaps he forbore to take it through
recollection of one who had taken a book of like characters into a
vault and never returned. Or perhaps it was really immaterial to what
he wished to do." As de Marigny paused, old Mr. Phillips spoke in a harsh, shrill voice.