Page:Weird Tales Volume 25 Number 05 (1935-05).djvu/55
were also three armored planes blazoned with the gold maple leaf of Canada flying beside them. Their concealed machine-guns were chattering savagely.
Pellets of explosive metal were erupting about his head, his arms, his feet. The last of his operators had crumpled over his dials, his head rocking grotesquely with the roll of the plane.
And then Marshal Huen Feng Zaryoti thought and saw no more. The exploding pellets reached his body. Stinging pains lanced his heart. He died standing up, a sneer of contempt on his lips, his face working crookedly.
But as he fell, his arm reached out and closed around a switch in a death grip. The weight of his falling body threw the breaker points together, completing the circuit. There came a blinding burst of red flame, and before the amazed eyes of the watchers, the giant cabin plane of the Asiatic war lord, and the six destroying planes surrounding it, vanished from sight. Nothing remained but a cloud of white powder that sifted down like snow into the waters of the Golden Gate.
The white civilization of America had again survived the menace of a combined Asiatic attack. When would the next come? No one in Aaron Carruthers' laboratory knew. They knew only that their country had beep saved at the last moment. They knew that victory had come at the darkest hour, and that Marshal Huen Feng Zaryoti had passed into oblivion. Beyond that they dared not think.
Under the Tomb
Dread beings grope and sport in gory lakes,
A foul mist creeps and feeds on swollen slugs;
From beds of perfumed plants squirm fetid snakes,
And like a flower grown from sable drugs,
A moon of steel drips blood upon a sky
Darkened by what mad phantoms prophesy.
But this hath ceased and passed, and now in that
Mephitic, crumbling woodland 'neath the tomb
The dead sup with the dead o'er flowing vat,
And searing candles cleanse the rotting gloom;
And they who stood in sorrow's joy and pain,
Tread now through hell's ecstatical refrain.
Far still beneath, where bloated babes are kept
In glacial rooms, and skulls are lit as lamps
To guide through life beyond, and where are swept
Green veils of oozing slime and deadly damps,
There is an everlasting resonance
Pealed by the tomb in glad deliverance.