I saw one of them approach the burning abyss, step indifferently off the edge, and levitate across. Drifting safely to the secure rock on the other side, it began its stiff, clumsy walking again. They could ignore gravity. Only for short distances, it seemed, or they wouldn’t need legs. Probably they kept that talent for emergencies. Without it, in an environment so elemental, so everlastingly shattered and riven, I could not see how they’d survive a year.
With the vague transition that comes in dreams, I drifted to a far end of the cavern and saw a ship, a spaceship I supposed, bigger than an aircraft carrier, smooth, gleaming and featureless. It glided into a huge stone bay or dock. I boarded it. Looking down, I saw legs of mineral with stony hooves striding stiffly and knew they were mine, just as I knew that my clustered eyes saw all around me as those of my fellows did. I was one of these creatures.
The floor beneath me, when I willed it, became transparent, but I knew it only seemed so; that cunning optical devices in the hull transmitted all the vistas below to the floor on which I was standing. The ship rose smoothly into the sky. The energies that gripped it made no blatant displays like heat or bellowing noise. Receding below us I saw a landscape of stark igneous rock, an island of mountains and crevasses floating in a scarlet magma sea where black crust formed briefly, split and vanished again, on the crests of waves big as mountains. The floating island, large as it was, looked frail as a balsa raft in that context.
This was Earth in the time before its crust set. The time in which the rocks of Leng had formed. Our ship rose through a dreadful, raging sky and did not even quiver in the fiery clouds or winds. It ignored little inconveniences like gravity and inertia, moving through the atmosphere, then beyond it. Through the curving anterior wall, again by willing it, I saw the glowing pink-white moon I had beheld in another dream, only a quarter as far away as the moon Roy Orlanski knew. The dark areas Orlanski’s race misnamed the lunar seas were still forming. An Apollo mission that landed on it in this age — if there could be one — would meet utter destruction at once. This moon was still hot and the tidal forces of Earth worked on it constantly.
Duration altered for me then. Hanging between an Earth that still thundered with the fires of its formation, and a partly molten moon, I began to see both under a terrific acceleration of time. It was like the speeded-up films of plants in a forest battling for the light, but a million times faster. The black slag crust thickened. Lava still burst through in apocalyptic fountains and spreading fiery seas, but it cooled and darkened, the solid state increasing. Incandescent gas erupted into the atmosphere. Clouds thickened. Water eventually condensed, high in the air, began to fall, and hissed back into steam before it came close to the surface.
Finally the naked rock crust cooled enough for water to reach it. In a worldwide pall of steam, hot rain came down at last. It rained for thousands of years. Raw new oceans surged across the land, filling the basins. I kept sight of the mass that had been an island in a sea of seething magma, the island that would one day be Leng. Somehow I knew that. Somehow a weird anomaly of time preserved it from being altered. Tectonic plates ground together, subducted, formed continents and supercontinents, yet that strange highland with a shape that looked, to me, like a swimming platypus seen from above, never changed much and yet could never quite be plainly seen.
Shallow steaming seas covered nearly all the surface. The person, the thing I had seemed to be, with its partly molten rocky body, had vanished, and I seemed to have no physical form now, but to drift like a phantom. In a limitless swamp filled with crawling vapor, I saw a pulsating mass huge as a hill that was alive, and, I supposed, organic, pulpy and gray-white. A hundred million things like itself, but tiny, rolled off its sides like drops of sweat and vanished in the muck. I’m a scientist, and still, the thing was revolting. Had that, wherever it came from, been the source of earthly life based on protein, the first selfreplicating molecules that would be driven by the sun’s energy to more and more complex forms?
If it was, I understood for the first time since I’d been a child why so many people like fairy tales better.
Leng at one time became submerged, stayed deep in green water for ages, and then emerged again. It had accumulated chalk and sand in layers, then lost them to erosion, but its original rock was never reduced to dust, or changed its primal shape, almost as if time was dividing like a river to flow around it. Even when the Asian continent formed around Leng, it only assimilated the plateau, never crushed or transformed it, and Leng’s distinctive shape remained.
I’ve said it made me think of a swimming platypus seen from above. So it did. The body was arched in two-thirds of a circle, the broad duck-bill nearly parallel to the tail, as though the creature was turning sharply in the water, with a small offshoot of the main plateau resembling one web-footed foreleg. That, a remote part of me thought, should be easy to recognize in a satellite photograph — if Leng showed up in such pictures. But that was not certain.
There were glimpses, vistas, of huge occurrences on the globe, like the cities and wars of the Old Ones with star-shaped heads to which I’ve been told the Necronomicon refers, and which the expedition to the Antarctic in the 1930s confirmed. It looked like the Carboniferous Age to me, but that was peripheral to the things I was seeing. Always the central focus was on that strange plateau, maybe a hundred miles from end to end. Even in my dream I wondered how large it would seem if you reached it and had to traverse it.
Leng was not richly forested. Except when it had lain under an ancient sea, it was a highland, drier than most of the planet. The mineral beings that lived there while the surface was still largely molten were gone ages before, their citadels and their bodies inert, frozen rock deep under the plateau. If they survived, they must have gone deeper into the mantle and concentrated stores of the radioactive matter they — I assumed — needed to exist. More probably by far, they had gone where the trilobites went.
The dinosaurs arose and a race of humanoid reptiles, fanged like cobras, appeared. The other dinosaurs vanished or evolved into birds, and the serpent-men flourished, though they retreated into hiding as the mammals arose. Again, I saw them vaguely and fleetingly, and they never inhabited Leng, if the dreamvisions I had were true.
The first intelligent race to enter that dry plateau were the ancestral Tcho-Tcho, and they were as hideous as the tales of them asserted. I saw them survive a cataclysm of the Earth’s crust that, as Connie said, must have occurred in distorted time or nothing would have lived through it, and then a second cataclysm, the one described in the Nemedian Chronicles, leaving the globe’s topography as it is now.
I saw the plateau waver and tremble like a mirage, as though it was shifting between dimensions. Its links with this world appeared to lie in the region east of Tibet, but nothing looked sure. As my vision of it steadied again, I saw tall olive-skinned people who, if the Chronicles were more than the fantasy I’d always thought them, would be Hyrkanians, forging through the gray granite mountain passes on ponies. They wore leather and furs. Their weapons were lances, swords and bows. Pressing upward past the cliffs and gorges that were the natural ramparts of Leng, they came at last to the windy plateau with its ancient, abandoned city, its curious towers and its windowless stone temple, or monastery, standing huge and apart. The new settlers left these alone, maybe after some nasty experiences, and built strong stone villages instead, for defense against the debased Tcho-Tcho. They regarded these as only questionably human. I shouldn’t wonder if there was more to that judgement than ethnocentric arrogance, because I had glimpses of the Tcho-Tcho’s rites and customs, and they were sickening. In the dream I saw one of their gatherings, lit by blue fires in the sky. They were like blazing nebulae such as were never seen in earthly skies. Then, over the feasting, chanting throng, I saw an unnatural thing like a huge winged hyena, or canine sphinx, swoop down and crouch with wings folded, as though presiding. It turned its head towards me and I looked into its face.