Again, as if spoken in the moonlight before him, he heard the words she had whispered, or seemed to whisper, from the bier: “Come to me at midnight... I will wait for thee... in the tomb.”It was the custom among the monticolæ to despatch each year’s dead west on the katabatic winds that blew each autumn, swirling dust and leaves from their villages and drawing out the gonfalons of their shrines. To this end, they constructed balloons of close-sewn silk, heated by braziers of slow-burning charcoal, and mounted beneath each a sarcophagus of light and resinous pine, wherein, packed about with the snow that had ensured its preservation till despatch, lay the corpse whose data the sarcophagus bore in grey characters of a forbidden necrography. And one by one at dusk, with due descant and ritual, the balloons were launched from platforms of mortarless stone, riding out upon the winds towards sunset, whose scarlet and crimson they oculated with gold and orange charcoal-glow.Clark Ashton Smith, “The Death of Ilalotha” (1937).
And one year, amid the launchings, a girl died of the village Tlazampór, whose corpse was kept no time in the snow-pits but placed right-way into a sarcophagus and sent on its way to afterlife. And she it was, being not dead but comatose, who discovered a horrid secret of the balloons, after this wise:
She woke in darkness to a sensation of great cold and constriction, seeming to hear a thundercrash echoing yet in her ear, which she cut across with an incongruous sneeze. Again she sneezed, and now heard voices muttering in fear, which raised to shrieks and dwindled, underlain with sound of running feet as she pushed and struggled against that which constricted her, to find, with horror, that she sat up in a broken-lidded sarcophagus amid sand and ventiforms. Worming herself therefrom, blue and freezing in bright sun, she stood and surveyed the collapsed balloon that had brought her, ensarcophagized, to some lowland desert. An ax lay discarded close-by, evidently that wherewith the lid was being removed when she awoke and sneezed, and through the chattering of her teeth she heard yet thief-feet fleeing down some dry desert-path. Examining the balloon, she found it spiked with arrows and realized that her atterrissage had been no accident. The balloon had been brought down by design and she shivered with more than cold to think that her corpse might at that very moment be being lifted forth to an unknown end.
Dazedly recollecting the feast that was her last memory of home (whereat, though she never knew it, she had eaten berries tainted with some comatophoric smut), she walked off down the thief-path, reasoning correctly that it led to some dwelling-place of this land’s folk, of whom she meant, reasoning incorrectly, mayhap, to ask help in her distress. But no help she received: the thieves had carried a tale of revenance in their flight, which sight of her in death-garb confirmed to the credulous and proved to the skeptical. Wherefor all fled from the adobe town she approached in time, holding out hands and crying her good intent. Stunned and oppressed now by the sun, she sought coolth and water within its houses, thereby discovering that which froze her anew and worse than snow-packed sarcophagus: that the œconomy of this balloon-downing folk was based partly on the bodies of her own folk’s dead, which never made the meads of sunset but were diverted here to permanent use of leather, of bone, and, horrider still to relate, of cuisine.
But was worst was last: weeping for sore distress as she chanted psycheleutheric prayers of her national liturgy, she entered a building wherein corpses remained intact, being of girls mummified but supple, odorous with balsams and resin, and lying each, thinly sheeted, on a pallet of its separate cell. At first she understood not the purpose to which they were dedicated; then the sponge-stick by each pallet and certain, unseemlier odors of masculinity, brought her to realization that this was a lupanar of the lowlanders, wherein she herself might have lain in time, having been mummified and scented to service a nefandous lust down many years.