And then I sprawled and clutched the earth in sheer awe! I was on a broad stone platform. The road passed between two high rocks that raised themselves like a gateway.” The Hand Mountain was really much farther off. “And now I saw that what I had thought to be the low rock range at the base of the peaks was a thicker litter of ruins. What he finds, however, is pure horror, beginning with an unexpected hidden chasm in the earth. Stanton followed the signs to the mountain shaped like a hand, rumored to contain massive quantities of gold. This ominous and mysterious sign is followed by the arrival of an injured and dying man named Sinclair Stanton, another prospector. The shining beam held steady for a moment then broke into myriads of little luminous globes that swung to and fro and dropped gently. It was exactly as though it moved to push something back. As the light silhouetted it, the gigantic fingers stretched, the hand seemed to thrust itself forward. It cast no shadows.Īs it struck upward the summits were outlined hard and black and I saw that the whole mountain was shaped like a hand. It was like the flash of a searchlight through an azure mist. The beam drove up through a column of blue haze whose edges were marked as sharply as the rain that streams from the edges of a thunder cloud.

North of us a shaft of light shot half way to the zenith. “The People of the Pit” is one of Merritt’s early works, and it begins with two gold prospectors in the wilds of Alaska spotting an unearthly beam of light at night: In his 1932 Dwellers in the Mirage he introduced an entire invisible city hidden in a valley protected by a mirage.

In his 1923 The Face in the Abyss, he introduced invisible winged serpents that effectively had cloaking devices to make themselves invisible. Merritt would regularly include invisibility in his fiction.

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