Santhu

In Merritt’s “Through the Dragon Glass”, Jim Herndon crosses into a world of fantasy and monsters through a beautiful, stolen mirror. “The dragons seemed to be moving! They were moving! They were crawling round and round the glass. They moved faster and faster. The thirteenth dragon spun about the topaz globe. They circled faster and faster until they were nothing but a halo of crimson and gold flashes. As they spun, the glass itself grew misty, mistier, mistier still, until it was nothing but a green haze. I stepped over to touch it. My hand went straight through it as though nothing were there. ‘I reached in — up to the elbow, up to the shoulder. I felt my hand grasped by warm little fingers. I stepped through –‘ ‘Stepped through the glass?’ I cried. ‘Through it,’ he said, ‘and then — I felt another little hand touch my face. I saw — Santhu! Her eyes were as blue as the corn flowers, as blue as the big sapphire that shines in the forehaed of Vishnu, in his temple at Benares. And they were set wide, wide apart. Her hair was bluse-black, and fell in two long braids between her little breasts. A golden dragon crowned her, and through its paws slipped the braids. Another golden dragon girded her. She laughed into my eyes, and drew my head down until my lips touched hers. She was lithe and slender and yielding as the reeds that grow before the Shrine of Hathor that stands on the edge of the Pool of Djeeba. Who Santhu is, or where she came from — how do I know? But this I know — she is lovelier than any woman who ever lived on earth And she is a woman!'”