（外文电子版资料）The.Treader.of.the.Dust.docVIP

The Treader of the Dust Clark Ashton Smith . . .The olden wizards knew him, and named him Quachil Uttaus. Seldom is he revealed: for he dwelleth beyond the outermost circle, in the dark limbo of unsphered time and space. Dreadful is the word that calleth him, though the word be unspoken save in thought: For Quachil Uttaus is the ultimate corruption; and the instant of his coming is like the passage of many ages; and neither flesh nor stone may abide his treading, but all things crumble beneath it atom from atom. And for this, some have called him The Treader of the Dust. --The Testaments of Carnamagos. It was after interminable debate and argument with himself, after many attempts-to. exorcise the dim, bodiless legion of his fears, that John Sebastian returned to the house-he had left so hurriedly. He had been absent only for three days but even this was an interruption without precedent in the life of reclusion and study to which he had given himself completely following his inheritance of the old Mansion together with a generous income. At no time would he have defined fully the reason of his flight; nevertheless, flight had seemed imperative. There was some horrible urgency that had driven him forth; but now, since had determined to go back,. the urgency was resolved into a matter of nerves overwrought by too close and prolonged application to his books. He had fancied certain things, but the fancies were patently absurd and baseless. Even if the phenomena that had perturbed-him were not all imaginary, there must be some natural solution that had not occurred to his overheated mind at the time. The sudden. yellowing of a newly purchased notebook, the crumbling of the sheets at their edges, Were no doubt due to a latent imperfection of the paper, and the queer fading of his entries, which, almost overnight, had become faint as age old writing, was clearly the result of cheap, faulty chemicals in the ink. The aspect of sheer, brittle, worm-hollowed antiqui