This brief horror tale set about the campfire of wayfaring westerners—and one rude easterner—is, I suspect an inspiration for the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, John Carter of Mars and also of Robert E. Howard’s The Valley of the Lost, with the latter owing more to the Bierce story. Bierce would vanish mysteriously during an expedition into Mexico. That fact, as much as the dark bent and Southwestern setting of this tale, might have inspired that later generation of writers who dreamt of dimension doors and windows to lost worlds among the hidden corners of the American Southwest.

My favorite passage from the story must be:

“…yield to the deforming stresses and torsions of his environment.”

The reading by Mike Bennett is simply excellent.