HP Lovecraft - 48 Books And Short Stories

							H. P. Lovecraft

  48 Stories
                             At the Mountains of Madness
                                  By H. P. Lovecraft

Written Feb-22 Mar 1931
Published February-April 1936 in Astounding Stories, Vol. 16, No. 6 (February
1936), p. 8-32; Vol. 17, No. 1 (March 1936), p. 125-55; Vol. 17, No. 2 (April
1936), p. 132-50.

I
I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice
without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for
opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic - with its vast fossil hunt
and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice caps. And I am the more
reluctant because my warning may be in vain.
Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; yet, if I
suppressed what will seem extravagant and incredible, there would be nothing
left. The hitherto withheld photographs, both ordinary and aerial, will count in
my favor, for they are damnably vivid and graphic. Still, they will be doubted
because of the great lengths to which clever fakery can be carried. The ink
drawings, of course, will be jeered at as obvious impostures, notwithstanding a
strangeness of technique which art experts ought to remark and puzzle over.
In the end I must rely on the judgment and standing of the few scientific
leaders who have, on the one hand, sufficient independence of thought to weigh
my data on its own hideously convincing merits or in the light of certain
primordial and highly baffling myth cycles; and on the other hand, sufficient
influence to deter the exploring world in general from any rash and
over-ambitious program in the region of those mountains of madness. It is an
unfortunate fact that relatively obscure men like myself and my associates,
connected only with a small university, have little chance of making an
impression where matters of a wildly bizarre or highly controversial nature are
concerned.
It is further against us that we are not, in the strictest sense, specialists in
the fields which came primarily to be concerned. As a ge ologist, my object in
leading the Miskatonic University Expedition was wholly that of securing
deep-level specimens of rock and soil from various parts of the antarctic
continent, aided by the remarkable drill devised by Professor Frank H. Pabodie
of our engineering department. I had no wish to be a pioneer in any other field
than this, but I did hope that the use of this new mechanical appliance at
different points along previously explored paths would bring to light materials
of a sort hitherto unreached by the ordinary methods of collection.
Pabodie’s drilling apparatus, as the public already knows from our reports, was
unique and radical in its lightness, portability, and capacity to combine the
ordinary artesian drill principle with the principle of the small circular rock
drill in such a way as to cope quickly with strata of varying hardness. Steel
head, jointed rods, gasoline motor, collapsible wooden derrick, dynamiting
paraphernalia, cording, rubbish-removal auger, and sectional piping for bores
five inches wide and up to one thousand feet deep all formed, with needed
accessories, no greater load than three seven-dog sledges could carry. This was
made possible by the clever aluminum alloy of which most of the metal objects
were fashioned. Four large Dornier aeroplanes, designed especially for the
tremendous altitude flying necessary on the antarctic plateau and with added
fuel-warming and quick-starting devices worked out by Pabodie, could transport
our entire expedition from a base at the edge of the great ice barrier to
various suitable inland points, and from these points a sufficient quota of dogs
would serve us.
We planned to cover as great an area as one antarctic season - or longer, if
absolutely necessary - would permit, operating mostly in the mountain ranges and
on the plateau south of Ross Sea; regions explored in varying degree by
Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott, and Byrd. With frequent changes of camp, made by
aeroplane and involving distances great enough to be of geological significance,
we expected to unearth a quite unprecedented amount of material-especially in
the pre-Cambrian strata of which so narrow a range of antarctic specimens had
previously been secured. We wished also to obtain as great as possible a variety
of the upper fossiliferous rocks, since the primal life history of this bleak
realm of ice and death is of the highest importance to our knowledge of the
earth’s past. That the antarctic continent was once temperate and even tropical,
with a teeming vegetable and animal life of which the lichens, marine fauna,
arachnida, and penguins of the northern edge are the only survivals, is a matter
of common information; and we hoped to expand that information in variety,
accuracy, and detail. When a simple boring revealed fossiliferous signs, we
would enlarge the aperture by blasting, in order to get specimens of suitable
size and condition.
Our borings, of varying depth according to the promise held out by the upper
soil or rock, were to be confined to exposed, or nearly exposed, land surfaces -
these inevitably being slopes and ridges because of the mile or two-mile
thickness of solid ice overlying the lower levels. We could not afford to waste
drilling the depth of any considerable amount of mere glaciation, though Pabodie
had worked out a plan for sinking copper electrodes in thick clusters of borings
and melting off limited areas of ice with current from a gasoline-driven dynamo.
It is this plan - which we could not put into effect except experimentally on an
expedition such as ours - that the coming Starkweather-Moore Expedition proposes
to follow, despite the warnings I have issued since our return from the
antarctic.
The public knows of the Miskatonic Expedition through our frequent wireless
reports to the Arkham Advertiser and Associated Press, and through the later
articles of Pabodie and myself. We consisted of four men from the University -
Pabodie, Lake of the biology department, Atwood of the physics department - also
a meteorologist - and myself, representing geology and having nominal command -
besides sixteen assistants: seven graduate students from Miskatonic and nine
skilled mechanics. Of these sixteen, twelve were qualified aeroplane pilots, all
but two of whom were competent wireless operators. Eight of them understood
navigation with compass and sextant, as did Pabodie, Atwood, and I. In addition,
of course, our two ships - wooden ex-whalers, reinforced for ice conditions and
having auxiliary steam - were fully manned.
The Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation, aided by a few special contributions,
financed the expedition; hence our preparations were extremely thorough, despite
the absence of great publicity. The dogs, sledges, machines, camp materials, and
unassembled parts of our five planes were delivered in Boston, and there our
ships were loaded. We were marvelously well-equipped for our specific purposes,
and in all matters pertaining to supplies, regimen, transportation, and camp
construction we profited by the excellent example of our many recent and
exceptionally brilliant predecessors. It was the unusual number and fame of
these predecessors which made our own expedition - ample though it was - so
little noticed by the world at large.
As the newspapers told, we sailed from Boston Harbor on September 2nd, 1930,
taking a leisurely course down the coast and through the Panama Canal, and
stopping at Samoa and Hobart, Tasmania, at which latter place we took on final
supplies. None of our exploring party had ever been in the polar regions before,
hence we all relied greatly on our ship captains - J. B. Douglas, commanding the
brig Arkham, and serving as commander of the sea party, and Georg Thorflnnssen,
commanding the barque Miskatonic - both veteran whalers in antarctic waters.
As we left the inhabited world behind, the sun sank lower and lower in the
north, and stayed longer and longer above the horizon each day. At about 62°
South Latitude we sighted our first icebergs - tablelike objects with vertical
sides - and just before reaching the antarctic circle, which we crossed on
October 20th with appropriately quaint ceremonies, we were considerably troubled
with field ice. The falling temperature bothered me considerably after our long
voyage through the tropics, but I tried to brace up for the worse rigors to
come. On many occasions the curious atmospheric effects enchanted me vastly;
these including a strikingly vivid mirage - the first I had ever seen - in which
distant bergs became the battlements of unimaginable cosmic castles.
Pushing through the ice, which was fortunately neither extensive nor thickly
packed, we regained open water at South Latitude 67°, East Longitude 175° On the
morning of October 26th a strong land blink appeared on the south, and before
noon we all felt a thrill of excitement at beholding a vast, lofty, and
snow-clad mountain chain which opened out and covered the whole vista ahead. At
last we had encountered an outpost of the great unknown continent and its
cryptic world of frozen death. These peaks were obviously the Admiralty Range
discovered by Ross, and it would now be our task to round Cape Adare and sail
down the east coast of Victoria Land to our contemplated base on the shore of
McMurdo Sound, at the foot of the volcano Erebus in South Latitude 77° 9'.
The last lap of the voyage was vivid and fancy-stirring. Great barren peaks of
mystery loomed up constantly against the west as the low northern sun of noon or
the still lower horizon-grazing southern sun of midnight poured its hazy reddish
rays over the white snow, bluish ice and water lanes, and black bits of exposed
granite slope. Through the desolate summits swept ranging, intermittent gusts of
the terrible antarctic wind; whose cadences sometimes held vague suggestions of
a wild and half-sentient musical piping, with notes extending over a wide range,
and which for some subconscious mnemonic reason seemed to me disquieting and
even dimly terrible. Something about the scene reminded me of the strange and
disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich, and of the still stranger and
more disturbing descriptions of the evilly fabled plateau of Leng which occur in
the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. I was rather sorry,
later on, that I had ever looked into that monstrous book at the college
library.
On the 7th of November, sight of the westward range having been temporarily
lost, we passed Franklin Island; and the next day descried the cones of Mts.
Erebus and Terror on Ross Island ahead, with the long line of the Parry
Mountains beyond. There now stretched off to the east the low, white line of the
great ice barrier, rising perpendicularly to a height of two hundred feet like
the rocky cliffs of Quebec, and marking the end of southward navigation. In the
afternoon we entered McMurdo Sound and stood off the coast in the lee of smoking
Mt. Erebus. The scoriac peak towered up some twelve thousand, seven hundred feet
against the eastern sky, like a Japanese print of the sacred Fujiyama, while
beyond it rose the white, ghostlike height of Mt. Terror, ten thousand, nine
hundred feet in altitude, and now extinct as a volcano.
Puffs of smoke from Erebus came intermittently, and one of the graduate
assistants - a brilliant young fellow named Danforth - pointed out what looked
like lava on the snowy slope, remarking that this mountain, discovered in 1840,
had undoubtedly been the source of Poe’s image when he wrote seven years later:
  - the lavas that restlessly roll
  Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek
  In the ultimate climes of the pole -
  That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek
  In the realms of the boreal pole.
Danforth was a great reader of bizarre material, and had talked a good deal of
Poe. I was interested myself because of the antarctic scene of Poe’s only long
story - the disturbing and enigmatical Arthur Gordon Pym. On the barren shore,
and on the lofty ice barrier in the background, myriads of grotesque penguins
squawked and flapped their fins, while many fat seals were visible on the water,
swimming or sprawling across large cakes of slowly drifting ice.
Using small boats, we effected a difficult landing on Ross Island shortly after
midnight on the morning of the 9th, carrying a line of cable from each of the
ships and preparing to unload supplies by means of a breeches-buoy arrangement.
Our sensations on first treading Antarctic soil were poiguant and complex, even
though at this particular point the Scott and Shackleton expeditions had
preceded us. Our camp on the frozen shore below the volcano’s slope was only a
provisional one, headquarters being kept aboard the Arkham. We landed all our
drilling apparatus, dogs, sledges, tents, provisions, gasoline tanks,
experimental ice-melting outfit, cameras, both ordinary and aerial, aeroplane
parts, and other accessories, including three small portable wireless outfits -
besides those in the planes - capable of communicating with the Arkham’s large
outfit from any part of the antarctic continent that we would be likely to
visit. The ship’s outfit, communicating with the outside world, was to convey
press reports to the Arkham Advertiser's powerful wireless station on Kingsport
Head, Massachusetts. We hoped to complete our work during a single antarctic
summer; but if this proved impossible, we would winter on the Arkham, sending
the Miskatonic north before the freezing of the ice for another summer’s
supplies.
I need not repeat what the newspapers have already published about our early
work: of our ascent of Mt. Erebus; our successful mineral borings at several
points on Ross Island and the singular speed with which Pabodie’s apparatus
accomplished them, even through solid rock layers; our provisional test of the
small ice-melting equipment; our perilous ascent of the great barrier with
sledges and supplies; and our final assembling of five huge aeroplanes at the
camp atop the barrier. The health of our land party - twenty men and fifty-five
Alaskan sledge dogs - was remarkable, though of course we had so far encountered
no really destructive temperatures or windstorms. For the most part, the
thermometer varied between zero and 20° or 25° above, and our experience with
New England winters had accustomed us to rigors of this sort. The barrier camp
was semi-permanent, and destined to be a storage cache for gasoline, provisions,
dynamite, and other supplies.
Only four of our planes were needed to carry the actual exploring material, the
fifth being left with a pilot and two men from the ships at the storage cache to
form a means of reaching us from the Arkham in case all our exploring planes
were lost. Later, when not using all the other planes for moving apparatus, we
would employ one or two in a shuttle transportation service between this cache
and another permanent base on the great plateau from six hundred to seven
hundred miles southward, beyond Beardmore Glacier. Despite the almost unanimous
accounts of appalling winds and tempests that pour down from the plateau, we
determined to dispense with intermediate bases, taking our chances in the
interest of economy and probable efficiency.
Wireless reports have spoken of the breathtaking, four-hour, nonstop flight of
our squadron on November 21st over the lofty shelf ice, with vast peaks rising
on the west, and the unfathomed silences echoing to the sound of our engines.
Wind troubled us only moderately, and our radio compasses helped us through the
one opaque fog we encountered. When the vast rise loomed ahead, between
Latitudes 83° and 84°, we knew we had reached Beardmore Glacier, the largest
valley glacier in the world, and that the frozen sea was now giving place to a
frowning and mountainous coast line. At last we were truly entering the white,
aeon-dead world of the ultimate south. Even as we realized it we saw the peak of
Mt. Nansen in the eastern distance, towering up to its height of almost fifteen
thousand feet.
The successful establishment of the southern base above the glacier in Latitude
86° 7’, East Longitude 174° 23’, and the phenomenally rapid and effective
borings and blastings made at various points reached by our sledge trips and
short aeroplane flights, are matters of history; as is the arduous and
triumphant ascent of Mt. Nansen by Pabodie and two of the graduate students -
Gedney and Carroll - on December 13 - 15. We were some eight thousand, five
hundred feet above sea-level, and when experimental drillings revealed solid
ground only twelve feet down through the snow and ice at certain points, we made
considerable use of the small melting apparatus and sunk bores and performed
dynamiting at many places where no previous explorer had ever thought of
securing mineral specimens. The pre-Cambrian granites and beacon sandstones thus
obtained confirmed our belief that this plateau was homogeneous, with the great
bulk of the continent to the west, but somewhat different from the parts lying
eastward below South America - which we then thought to form a separate and
smaller continent divided from the larger one by a frozen junction of Ross and
Weddell Seas, though Byrd has since disproved the hypothesis.
In certain of the sandstones, dynamited and chiseled after boring revealed their
nature, we found some highly interesting fossil markings and fragments; notably
ferns, seaweeds, trilobites, crinoids, and such mollusks as linguellae and
gastropods - all of which seemed of real significance in connection with the
region’s primordial history. There was also a queer triangular, striated
marking, about a foot in greatest diameter, which Lake pieced together from
three fragments of slate brought up from a deep-blasted aperture. These
fragments came from a point to the westward, near the Queen Alexandra Range; and
Lake, as a biologist, seemed to find their curious marking unusually puzzling
and provocative, though to my geological eye it looked not unlike some of the
ripple effects reasonably common in the sedimentary rocks. Since slate is no
more than a metamorphic formation into which a sedimentary stratum is pressed,
and since the pressure itself produces odd distorting effects on any markings
which may exist, I saw no reason for extreme wonder over the striated
depression.
On January 6th, 1931, Lake, Pabodie, Danforth, the other six students, and
myself flew directly over the south pole in two of the great planes, being
forced down once by a sudden high wind, which, fortunately, did not develop into
a typical storm. This was, as the papers have stated, one of several observation
flights, during others of which we tried to discern new topographical features
in areas unreached by previous explorers. Our early flights were disappointing
in this latter respect, though they afforded us some magnificent examples of the
richly fantastic and deceptive mirages of the polar regions, of which our sea
voyage had given us some brief foretastes. Distant mountains floated in the sky
as enchanted cities, and often the whole white world would dissolve into a gold,
silver, and scarlet land of Dunsanian dreams and adventurous expectancy under
the magic of the low midnight sun. On cloudy days we had considerable trouble in
flying owing to the tendency of snowy earth and sky to merge into one mystical
opalescent void with no visible horizon to mark the junction of the two.
At length we resolved to carry out our original plan of flying five hundred
miles eastward with all four exploring planes and establishing a fresh sub-base
at a point which would probably be on the smaller continental division, as we
mistakenly conceived it. Geological specimens obtained there would be desirable
for purposes of comparison. Our health so far had remained excellent - lime
juice well offsetting the steady diet of tinned and salted food, and
temperatures generally above zero enabling us to do without our thickest furs.
It was now midsummer, and with haste and care we might be able to conclude work
by March and avoid a tedious wintering through the long antarctic night. Several
savage windstorms had burst upon us from the west, but we had escaped damage
through the skill of Atwood in devising rudimentary aeroplane shelters and
windbreaks of heavy snow blocks, and reinforcing the principal camp buildings
with snow. Our good luck and efficiency had indeed been almost uncanny.
The outside world knew, of course, of our program, and was told also of Lake’s
strange and dogged insistence on a westward - or rather, northwestward -
prospecting trip before our radical shift to the new base. It seems that he had
pondered a great deal, and with alarmingly radical daring, over that triangular
striated marking in the slate; reading into it certain contradictions in nature
and geological period which whetted his curiosity to the utmost, and made him
avid to sink more borings and blastings in the west-stretching formation to
which the exhumed fragments evidently belonged. He was strangely convinced that
the marking was the print of some bulky, unknown, and radically unclassifiable
organism of considerably advanced evolution, notwithstanding that the rock which
bore it was of so vastly ancient a date - Cambrian if not actually preCambrian -
as to preclude the probable existence not only of all highly evolved life, but
of any life at all above the unicellular or at most the trilobite stage. These
fragments, with their odd marking, must have been five hundred million to a
thousand million years old.
II
Popular imagination, I judge, responded actively to our wireless bulletins of
Lake’s start northwestward into regions never trodden by human foot or
penetrated by human imagination, though we did not mention his wild hopes of
revolutionizing the entire sciences of biology and geology. His preliminary
sledging and boring journey of January 11th to 18th with Pabodie and five others
- marred by the loss of two dogs in an upset when crossing one of the great
pressure ridges in the ice - had brought up more and more of the Archaean slate;
and even I was interested by the singular profusion of evident fossil markings
in that unbelievably ancient stratum. These markings, however, were of very
primitive life forms involving no great paradox except that any life forms
should occur in rock as definitely pre-Cambrian as this seemed to be; hence I
still failed to see the good sense of Lake’s demand for an interlude in our
time-saving program - an interlude requiring the use of all four planes, many
men, and the whole of the expedition’s mechanical apparatus. I did not, in the
end, veto the plan, though I decided not to accompany the northwestward party
despite Lake’s plea for my geological advice. While they were gone, I would
remain at the base with Pabodie and five men and work out final plans for the
eastward shift. In preparation for this transfer, one of the planes had begun to
move up a good gasoline supply from McMurdo Sound; but this could wait
temporarily. I kept with me one sledge and nine dogs, since it is unwise to be
at any time without possible transportation in an utterly tenantless world of
aeon-long death.
Lake’s subexpedition into the unknown, as everyone will recall, sent out its own
reports from the shortwave transmitters on the planes; these being
simultaneously picked up by our apparatus at the southern base and by the Arkham
at McMurdo Sound, whence they were relayed to the outside world on wave lengths
up to fifty meters. The start was made January 22nd at 4 A.M., and the first
wireless message we received came only two hours later, when Lake spoke of
descending and starting a small-scale ice-melting and bore at a point some three
hundred miles away from us. Six hours after that a second and very excited
message told of the frantic, beaver-like work whereby a shallow shaft had been
sunk and blasted, culminating in the discovery of slate fragments with several
markings approximately like the one which had caused the original puzzlement.
Three hours later a brief bulletin announced the resumption of the flight in the
teeth of a raw and piercing gale; and when I dispatched a message of protest
against further hazards, Lake replied curtly that his new specimens made any
hazard worth taking. I saw that his excitement had reached the point of mutiny,
and that I could do nothing to check this headlong risk of the whole
expedition’s success; but it was appalling to think of his plunging deeper and
deeper into that treacherous and sinister white immensity of tempests and
unfathomed mysteries which stretched off for some fifteen hundred miles to the
half-known, half-suspected coast line of Queen Mary and Knox Lands.
Then, in about an hour and a half more, came that doubly excited message from
Lake’s moving plane, which almost reversed my sentiments and made me wish I had
accompanied the party:
 "10:05 P.M. On the wing. After snowstorm, have spied mountain range ahead
 higher than any hitherto seen. May equal Himalayas, allowing for height of
 plateau. Probable Latitude 76° 15’, Longitude 113° 10’ E. Reaches far as can
 see to right and left. Suspicion of two smoking cones. All peaks black and
 bare of snow Gale blowing off them impedes navigation."
After that Pabodie, the men, and I hung breathlessly over the receiver. Thought
of this titanic mountain rampart seven hundred miles away inflamed our deepest
sense of adventure; and we rejoiced that our expedition, if not ourselves
personally, had been its discoverers. In half an hour Lake called us again:
 "Moulton's plane forced down on plateau in foothills, but nobody hurt and
 perhaps can repair. Shall transfer essentials to other three for return or
 further moves if necessary, but no more heavy plane travel needed just now
 Mountains surpass anything in imagination. Am going up scouting in Carroll’s
 plane, with all weight out.
 "You can’t imagine anything like this. Highest peaks must go over thirty-five
 thousand feet. Everest out of the running. Atwood to work out height with
 theodolite while Carroll and I go up. Probably wrong about cones, for
 formations look stratified. Possibly preCam brian slate with other strata
 mixed in. Queer skyline effects - regular sections of cubes clinging to
 highest peaks. Whole thing marvelous in red-gold light of low sun. Like land
 of mystery in a dream or gateway to forbidden world of untrodden wonder. Wish
 you were here to study."
Though it was technically sleeping time, not one of us listeners thought for a
moment of retiring. It must have been a good deal the same at McMurdo Sound,
where the supply cache and the Arkham were also getting the messages; for
Captain Douglas gave out a call congratulating everybody on the important find,
and Sherman, the cache operator, seconded his sentiments. We were sorry, of
course, about the damaged aeroplane, but hoped it could be easily mended. Then,
at 11 P.M., came another call from Lake:
  "Up with Carroll over highest foothills. Don’t dare try really tall peaks in
  present weather, but shall later. Frightful work climbing, and hard going at
  this altitude, but worth it. Great range fairly solid, hence can’t get any
  glimpses beyond. Main summits exceed Himalayas, and very queer. Range looks
  like pre-Cambrian slate, with plain signs of many other upheaved strata. Was
  wrong about volcanism. Goes farther in either direction than we can see. Swept
  clear of snow above about twenty-one thousand feet. "Odd formations on slopes
  of highest mountains. Great low square blocks with exactly vertical sides, and
  rectangular lines of low, vertical ramparts, like the old Asian castles
  clinging to steep mountains in Roerich’s paintings. Impressive from distance.
  Flew close to some, and Carroll thought they were formed of smaller separate
  pieces, but that is probably weathering. Most edges crumbled and rounded off
  as if exposed to storms and climate changes for millions of years. "Parts,
  especially upper parts, seem to be of lighter-colored rock than any visible
  strata on slopes proper, hence of evidently crystalline origin. Close flying
  shows many cave mouths, some unusually regular in outline, square or
  semicircular. You must come and investigate. Think I saw rampart squarely on
  top of one peak. Height seems about thirty thousand to thirty-five thousand
  feet. Am up twenty-one thousand, five hundred myself, in devilish, gnawing
  cold. Wind whistles and pipes through passes and in and out of caves, but no
  flying danger so far."
From then on for another half hour Lake kept up a running fire of comment, and
expressed his intention of climbing some of the peaks on foot. I replied that I
would join him as soon as he could send a plane, and that Pabodie and I would
work out the best gasoline plan-just where and how to concentrate our supply in
view of the expedition’s altered character. Obviously, Lake’s boring operations,
as well as his aeroplane activities, would require a great deal for the new base
which he planned to establish at the foot of the mountains; and it was possible
that the eastward flight might not be made, after all, this season. In
connection with this business I called Captain Douglas and asked him to get as
much as possible out of the ships and up the barrier with the single dog team we
had left there. A direct route across the unknown region between Lake and
McMurdo Sound was what we really ought to establish.
Lake called me later to say that he had decided to let the camp stay where
Moulton’s plane had been forced down, and where repairs had already progressed
somewhat. The ice sheet was very thin, with dark ground here and there visible,
and he would sink some borings and blasts at that very point before making any
sledge trips or climbing expeditions. He spoke of the ineffable majesty of the
whole scene, and the queer state of his sensations at being in the lee of vast,
silent pinnacles whose ranks shot up like a wall reaching the sky at the world’s
rim. Atwood’s theodolite observations had placed the height of the five tallest
peaks at from thirty thousand to thirty-four thousand feet. The windswept nature
of the terrain clearly disturbed Lake, for it argued the occasional existence of
prodigious gales, violent beyond anything we had so far encountered. His camp
lay a little more than five miles from where the higher foothills rose abruptly.
I could almost trace a note of subconscious alarm in his words-flashed across a
glacial void of seven hundred miles - as he urged that we all hasten with the
matter and get the strange, new region disposed of as soon as possible. He was
about to rest now, after a continuous day’s work of almost unparalleled speed,
strenuousness, and results.
In the morning I had a three-cornered wireless talk with Lake and Captain
Douglas at their widely separated bases. It was agreed that one of Lake’s planes
would come to my base for Pabodie, the five men, and myself, as well as for all
the fuel it could carry. The rest of the fuel question, depending on our
decision about an easterly trip, could wait for a few days, since Lake had
enough for immediate camp heat and borings. Eventually the old southern base
ought to be restocked, but if we postponed the easterly trip we would not use it
till the next summer, and, meanwhile, Lake must send a plane to explore a direct
route between his new mountains and McMurdo Sound.
Pabodie and I prepared to close our base for a short or long period, as the case
might be. If we wintered in the antarctic we would probably fly straight from
Lake’s base to the Arkham without returning to this spot. Some of our conical
tents had already been reinforced by blocks of hard snow, and now we decided to
complete the job of making a permanent village. Owing to a very liberal tent
supply, Lake had with him all that his base would need, even after our arrival.
I wirelessed that Pabodie and I would be ready for the northwestward move after
one day’s work and one night’s rest.
Our labors, however, were not very steady after 4 P.M., for about that time Lake
began sending in the most extraordinary and excited messages. His working day
had started unpropitiously, since an aeroplane survey of the nearly-exposed rock
surfaces showed an entire absence of those Archaean and primordial strata for
which he was looking, and which formed so great a part of the colossal peaks
that loomed up at a tantalizing distance from the camp. Most of the rocks
glimpsed were apparently Jurassic and Comanchian sandstones and Permian and
Triassic schists, with now and then a glossy black outcropping suggesting a hard
and slaty coal. This rather discouraged Lake, whose plans all hinged on
unearthing specimens more than five hundred million years older. It was clear to
him that in order to recover the Archaean slate vein in which he had found the
odd markings, he would have to make a long sledge trip from these foothills to
the steep slopes of the gigantic mountains themselves.
He had resolved, nevertheless, to do some local boring as part of the
expedition’s general program; hence he set up the drill and put five men to work
with it while the rest finished settling the camp and repairing the damaged
aeroplane. The softest visible rock - a sandstone about a quarter of a mile from
the camp - had been chosen for the first sampling; and the drill made excellent
progress without much supplementary blasting. It was about three hours
afterward, following the first really heavy blast of the operation, that the
shouting of the drill crew was heard; and that young Gedney - the acting foreman
- rushed into the camp with the startling news.
They had struck a cave. Early in the boring the sandstone had given place to a
vein of Comanchian limestone, full of minute fossil cephalopods, corals, echini,
and spirifera, and with occasional suggestions of siliceous sponges and marine
vertebrate bones-the latter probably of teleosts, sharks, and ganoids. This, in
itself, was important enough, as affording the first vertebrate fossils the
expedition had yet secured; but when shortly afterward the drill head dropped
through the stratum into apparent vacancy, a wholly new and doubly intense wave
of excitement spread among the excavators. A good-sized blast had laid open the
subterrene secret; and now, through a jagged aperture perhaps five feet across
and three feet thick, there yawned before the avid searchers a section of
shallow limestone hollowing worn more than fifty million years ago by the
trickling ground waters of a bygone tropic world.
The hollowed layer was not more than seven or eight feet deep but extended off
indefinitely in all directions and had a fresh, slightly moving air which
suggested its membership in an extensive subterranean system. Its roof and floor
were abundantly equipped with large stalactites and stalagmites, some of which
met in columnar form: but important above all else was the vast deposit of
shells and bones, which in places nearly choked the passage. Washed down from
unknown jungles of Mesozoic tree ferns and fungi, and forests of Tertiary
cycads, fan palms, and primitive angiosperms, this osseous medley contained
representatives of more Cretaceous, Eocene, and other animal species than the
greatest paleontologist could have counted or classified in a year. Mollusks,
crustacean armor, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and early mammals - great
and small, known and unknown. No wonder Gedney ran back to the camp shouting,
and no wonder everyone else dropped work and rushed headlong through the biting
cold to where the tall derrick marked a new-found gateway to secrets of inner
earth and vanished aeons.
When Lake had satisfied the first keen edge of his curiosity, he scribbled a
message in his notebook and had young Moulton run back to the camp to dispatch
it by wireless. This was my first word of the discovery, and it told of the
identification of early shells, bones of ganoids and placoderms, remnants of
labyrinthodonts and thecodonts, great mosasaur skull fragments, dinosaur
vertebrae and armor plates, pterodactyl teeth and wing bones, Archaeopteryx
debris, Miocene sharks’ teeth, primitive bird skulls, and other bones of archaic
mammals such as palaeotheres, Xiphodons, Eohippi, Oreodons, and titanotheres.
There was nothing as recent as a mastodon, elephant, true camel, deer, or bovine
animal; hence Lake concluded that the last deposits had occurred during the
Oligocene Age, and that the hollowed stratum had lain in its present dried,
dead, and inaccessible state for at least thirty million years.
On the other hand, the prevalence of very early life forms was singular in the
highest degree. Though the limestone formation was, on the evidence of such
typical imbedded fossils as ventriculites, positively and unmistakably
Comanchian and not a particle earlier, the free fragments in the hollow space
included a surprising proportion from organisms hitherto considered as peculiar
to far older periods - even rudimentary fishes, mollusks, and corals as remote
as the Silunan or Ordovician. The inevitable inference was that in this part of
the world there had been a remarkable and unique degree of continuity between
the life of over three hundred million years ago and that of only thirty million
years ago. How far this continuity had extended beyond the Oligocene Age when
the cavern was closed was of course past all speculation. In any event, the
coming of the frightful ice in the Pleistocene some five hundred thousand years
ago - a mere yesterday as compared with the age of this cavity - must have put
an end to any of the primal forms which had locally managed to outlive their
common terms.
Lake was not content to let his first message stand, but had another bulletin
written and dispatched across the snow to the camp before Moulton could get
back. After that Moulton stayed at the wireless in one of the planes,
transmitting to me - and to the Arkham for relaying to the outside world - the
frequent postscripts which Lake sent him by a succession of messengers. Those
who followed the newspapers will remember the excitement created among men of
science by that afternoon’s reports - reports which have finally led, after all
these years, to the organization of that very Starkweather-Moore Expedition
which I am so anxious to dissuade from its purposes. I had better give the
messages literally as Lake sent them, and as our base operator McTighe
translated them from the pencil shorthand:
  "Fowler makes discovery of highest importance in sandstone and limestone
  fragments from blasts. Several distinct triangular striated prints like those
  in Archaean slate, proving that source survived from over six hundred million
  years ago to Comanchian times without more than moderate morphological changes
  and decrease in average size, Comanchian prints apparently more primitive or
  decadent, if anything, than older ones. Emphasize importance of discovery in
  press. Will mean to biology what Einstein has meant to mathematics and
  physics. Joins up with my previous work and amplifies conclusions.
  "Appears to indicate, as I suspected, that earth has seen whole cycle or
  cycles of organic life before known one that begins with Archaeozoic cells.
  Was evolved and specialized not later than a thousand million years ago, when
  planet was young and recently uninhabitable for any life forms or normal
  protoplasmic structure. Question arises when, where, and how development took
  place."
  "La ter. Examining certain skeletal fragments of large land and marine
  saurians and primitive mammals, find singular local wounds or injuries to bony
  structure not attributable to any known predatory or carnivorous animal of any
  period, of two sorts-straight, penetrant bores, and apparently hacking
  incisions. One or two cases of cleanly severed bones. Not many specimens
  affected. Am sending to camp for electric torches. Will extend search area
  underground by hacking away stalactites."
  "Still later. Have found peculiar soapstone fragment about six inches across
  and an inch and a half thick, wholly unlike any visible local formation -
  greenish, but no evidences to place its period. Has curious smoothness and
  regularity. Shaped like five-pointed star with tips broken off, and signs of
  other cleavage at inward angles and in center of su.rface. Small, smooth
  depression in center of unbroken surface. Arouses much curiosity as to source
and weathering. Probably some freak of water action. Carroll, with magnifier,
thinks he can make out additional markings of geologic significance. Groups of
tiny dots in regular patterns. Dogs growing uneasy as we work, and seem to
hate this soapstone. Must see if it has any peculiar odor. Will report again
when Mills gets back with light and we start on underground area."
"10:15 P.M. Important discovery. Orrendorf and Watkins, working underground at
9:45 with light, found monstrous barrel-shaped fossil of wholly unknown
nature; probably vegetable unless overgrown specimen of unknown marine
radiata. Tissue evidently preserved by mineral salts. Tough as leather, but
astonishing flexibility retained in places. Marks of broken-off parts at ends
and around sides. Six feet end to end, three and five-tenths feet central
diameter, tapering to one foot at each end. Like a barrel with five bulging
ridges in place of staves. Lateral breakages, as of thinnish stalks, are at
equator in middle of these ridges. In furrows between ridges are curious
growths - combs or wings that fold up and spread out like fans. All greatly
damaged but one, which gives almost seven-foot wing spread. Arrangement
reminds one of certain monsters of primal myth, especially fabled Elder Things
in Necronomicon.
"Their wings seem to be membranous, stretched on frame work of glandular
tubing. Apparent minute orifices in frame tubing at wing tips. Ends of body
shriveled, giving no clue to interior or to what has been broken off there.
Must dissect when we get back to camp. Can’t decide whether vegetable or
animal. Many features obviously of almost incredible primitiveness. Have set
all hands cutting stalactites and looking for further specimens. Additional
scarred bones found, but these must wait. Having trouble with dogs. They can’t
endure the new specimen, and would probably tear it to pieces if we didn’t
keep it at a distance from them."
"11:30 P.M. Attention, Dyer, Pabodie, Douglas. Matter of highest - I might say
transcendent - importance. Arkham must relay to Kingsport Head Station at
once. Strange barrel growth is the Archaean thing that left prints in rocks.
Mills, Boudreau, and Fowler discover cluster of thirteen more at underground
point forty feet from aperture. Mixed with curiously rounded and configured
soapstone fragments smaller than one previously found - star-shaped, but no
marks of breakage except at some of the points.
"Of organic specimens, eight apparently perfect, with all appendages. Have
brought all to surface, leading off dogs to distance. They cannot stand the
things. Give close attention to description and repeat back for accuracy
Papers must get this right.
"Objects are eight feet long all over. Six-foot, five-ridged barrel torso
three and five-tenths feet central diameter, one foot end diameters. Dark
gray, flexible, and infinitely tough. Seven-foot membranous wings of same
color, found folded, spread out of furrows between ridges. Wing framework
tubular or glandular, of lighter gray, with orifices at wing tips. Spread
wings have serrated edge. Around equator, one at central apex of each of the
five vertical, stave-like ridges are five systems of light gray flexible arms
or tentacles found tightly folded to torso but expansible to maximum length of
over three feet. Like arms of primitive crinoid. Single stalks three inches
diameter branch after six inches into five substalks, each of which branches
after eight inches into small, tapering tentacles or tendrils, giving each
stalk a total of twenty-five tentacles.
"At top of torso blunt, bulbous neck of lighter gray, with gill-like
suggestions, holds yellowish five-pointed starfish-shaped apparent head
covered with three-inch wiry cilia of various prismatic colors.
"Head thick and puffy, about two feet point to point, with three-inch flexible
yellowish tubes projecting from each point. Slit in exact center of top
probably breathing aperture. At end of each tube is spherical expansion where
yellowish membrane rolls back on handling to reveal glassy, red-irised globe,
evidently an eye.
"Five slightly longer reddish tubes start from inner angles of starfish-shaped
head and end in saclike swellings of same color which, upon pressure, open to
bell-shaped orifices two inches maximum diameter and lined with sharp, white
toot hlike projections - probably mouths. All these tubes, cilia, and points
of starfish head, found folded tightly down; tubes and points clinging to
bulbous neck and torso. Flexibility surprising despite vast toughness.
"At bottom of torso, rough but dissimilarly functioning counterparts of head
arrangements exist. Bulbous light-gray pseudo-neck, without gill suggestions,
holds greenish five-pointed starfish arrangement.
"Tough, muscular arms four feet long and tapering from seven inches diameter
at base to about two and five-tenths at point. To each point is attached small
end of a greenish five-veined mem branous triangle eight inches long and six
wide at farther end. This is the paddle, fin, or pseudofoot which has made
prints in rocks from a thousand million to fifty or sixty million years old.
"From inner angles of starfish arrangement project two-foot reddish tubes
tapering from three inches diameter at base to one at tip. Orifices at tips.
All these parts infinitely tough and leathery, but extremely flexible.
Four-foot arms with paddles undoubtedly used for locomotion of some sort,
marine or otherwise. When moved, display suggestions of exaggerated
muscularity. As found, all these pro jections tightly folded over pseudoneck
and end of torso, corresponding to projections at other end.
"Cannot yet assign positively to animal or vegetable kingdom, but odds now
favor animal. Probably represents incredibly advanced evolution of radiata
without loss of certain primitive features. Echinoderm resemblances
unmistakable despite local contradictory evidences.
"Wing structure puzzles in view of probable marine habitat, but may have use
in water navigation. Symmetry is curiously vegeta blelike, suggesting
vegetable 's essential up-and-down structure rather than animal’s fore-and-aft
structure. Fabulously early date of evolution, preceding even simplest
Archaean protozoa hitherto known, baffles all conjecture as to origin.
"Complete specimens have such uncanny resemblance to certain creatures of
primal myth that suggestion of ancient existence outside antarctic becomes
inevitable. Dyer and Pabodie have read Necronomicon and seen Clark Ashton
Smith’s nightmare paintings based on text, and will understand when I speak of
 Elder Things supposed to have created all earth life as jest or mistake.
 Students have always thought conception formed from morbid imaginative
 treatment of very ancient tropical radiata. Also like prehistoric folklore
 things Wilmarth has spoken of - Cthulhu cult appendages, etc.
 "Vast field of study opened. Deposits probably of late Cretaceous or early
 Eocene period, judging from associated specimens. Massive stalagmites
 deposited above them. Hard work hewing out, but toughness prevented damage.
 State of preservation miraculous, evidently owing to limestone action. No more
 found so far, but will resume search later. Job now to get fourteen huge
 specimens to camp without dogs, which bark furiously and can’t be trusted near
 them.
 "With nine men - three left to guard the dogs-we ought to manage the three
 sledges fairly well, though wind is bad. Must establish plane communication
 with McMurdo Sound and begin shipping material. But I’ve got to dissect one of
 these things before we take any rest. Wish I had a real laboratory here. Dyer
 better kick himself for having tried to stop my westward trip. First the
 world’s greatest mountains, and then this. If this last isn’t the high spot of
 the expedition, I don’t know what is. We’re made scientifically. Congrats,
 Pabodie, on the drill that opened up the cave. Now will Arkham please repeat
 description?"
The sensations of Pabodie and myself at receipt of this report were almost
beyond description, nor were our companions much behind us in enthusiasm.
McTighe, who had hastily translated a few high spots as they came from the
droning receiving set, wrote out the entire message from his shorthand version
as soon as Lake’s operator signed off. All appreciated the epoch-making
significance of the discovery, and I sent Lake congratulations as soon as the
Arkham’s operator had repeated back the descriptive parts as requested; and my
example was followed by Sherman from his station at the McMurdo Sound supply
cache, as well as by Captain Douglas of the Arkham. Later, as head of the
expedition, I added some remarks to be relayed through the Arkham to the outside
world. Of course, rest was an absurd thought amidst this excitement; and my only
wish was to get to Lake’s camp as quickly as I could. It disappointed me when he
sent word that a rising mountain gale made early aerial travel impossible.
But within an hour and a half interest again rose to banish disappointment.
Lake, sending more messages, told of the completely successful transportation of
the fourteen great specimens to the camp. It had been a hard pull, for the
things were surprisingly heavy; but nine men had accomplished it very neatly.
Now some of the party were hurriedly building a snow corral at a safe distance
from the camp, to which the dogs could be brought for greater convenience in
feeding. The specimens were laid out on the hard snow near the camp, save for
one on which Lake was making crude attempts at dissection.
This dissection seemed to be a greater task than had been expected, for, despite
the heat of a gasoline stove in the newly raised laboratory tent, the
deceptively flexible tissues of the chosen specimen-a powerful and intact one -
lost nothing of their more than leathery toughness. Lake was puzzled as to how
he might make the requisite incisions without violence destructive enough to
upset all the structural niceties he was looking for. He had, it is true, seven
more perfect specimens; but these were too few to use up recklessly unless the
cave might later yield an unlimited supply. Accordingly he removed the specimen
and dragged in one which, though having remnants of the starfish arrangements at
both ends, was badly crushed and partly disrupted along one of the great torso
furrows.
Results, quickly reported over the wireless, were baffling and provocative
indeed. Nothing like delicacy or accuracy was possible with instruments hardly
able to cut the anomalous tissue, but the little that was achieved left us all
awed and bewildered. Existing biology would have to be wholly revised, for this
thing was no product of any cell growth science knows about. There had been
scarcely any mineral replacement, and despite an age of perhaps forty million
years, the internal organs were wholly intact. The leathery, undeteriorative,
and almost indestructible quality was an inherent attribute of the thing’s form
of organization, and pertained to some paleogean cycle of invertebrate evolution
utterly beyond our powers of speculation. At first all that Lake found was dry,
but as the heated tent produced its thawing effect, organic moisture of pungent
and offensive odor was encountered toward the thing’s uninjured side. It was not
blood, but a thick, dark-green fluid apparently answering the same purpose. By
the time Lake reached this stage, all thirty-seven dogs had been brought to the
still uncompleted corral near the camp, and even at that distance set up a
savage barking and show of restlessness at the acrid, diffusive smell.
Far from helping to place the strange entity, this provisional dissection merely
deepened its mystery. All guesses about its external members had been correct,
and on the evidence of these one could hardly hesitate to call the thing animal;
but internal inspection brought up so many vegetable evidences that Lake was
left hopelessly at sea. It had digestion and circulation, and eliminated waste
matter through the reddish tubes of its starfish-shaped base. Cursorily, one
would say that its respiration apparatus handled oxygen rather than carbon
dioxide, and there were odd evidences of air-storage chambers and methods of
shifting respiration from the external orifice to at least two other fully
developed breathing systems - gills and pores. Clearly, it was amphibian, and
probably adapted to long airless hibernation periods as well. Vocal organs
seemed present in connection with the main respiratory system, but they
presented anomalies beyond immediate solution. Articulate speech, in the sense
of syllable utterance, seemed barely conceivable, but musical piping notes
covering a wide range were highly probable. The muscular system was almost
prematurely developed.
The nervous system was so complex and highly developed as to leave Lake aghast.
Though excessively primitive and archaic in some respects, the thing had a set
of ganglial centers and connectives arguing the very extremes of specialized
development. Its five-lobed brain was surprisingly advanced, and there were
signs of a sensory equipment, served in part through the wiry cilia of the head,
involving factors alien to any other terrestrial organism. Probably it has more
than five senses, so that its habits could not be predicted from any existing
analogy. It must, Lake thought, have been a creature of keen sensitiveness and
delicately differentiated functions in its primal world - much like the ants and
bees of today. It reproduced like the vegetable crytogams, especially the
Pteridophyta, having spore cases at the tips of the wings and evidently
developing from a thallus or prothallus.
But to give it a name at this stage was mere folly. It looked like a radiate,
but was clearly something more. It was partly vegetable, but had three-fourths
of the essentials of animal structure. That it was marine in origin, its
symmetrical contour and certain other attributes clearly indicated; yet one
could not be exact as to the limit of its later adaptations. The wings, after
all, held a persistent suggestion of the aerial. How it could have undergone its
tremendously complex evolution on a new-born earth in time to leave prints in
Archaean rocks was so far beyond conception as to make Lake whimsically recall
the primal myths about Great Old Ones who filtered down from the stars and
concocted earth life as a joke or mistake; and the wild tales of cosmic hill
things from outside told by a folklorist colleague in Miskatonic’s English
department.
Naturally, he considered the possibility of the pre-Cambrian prints having been
made by a less evolved ancestor of the present specimens, but quickly rejected
this too-facile theory upon considering the advanced structural qualities of the
older fossils. If anything, the later contours showed decadence rather than
higher evolution. The size of the pseudofeet had decreased, and the whole
morphology seemed coarsened and simplified. Moreover, the nerves and organs just
examined held singular suggestions of retrogression from forms still more
complex. Atrophied and vestigial parts were surprisingly prevalent. Altogether,
little could be said to have been solved; and Lake fell back on mythology for a
provisional name - jocosely dubbing his finds "The Elder Ones."
At about 2:30 A.M., having decided to postpone further work and get a little
rest, he covered the dissected organism with a tarpaulin, emerged from the
laboratory tent, and studied the intact specimens with renewed interest. The
ceaseless antarctic sun had begun to limber up their tissues a trifle, so that
the head points and tubes of two or three showed signs of unfolding; but Lake
did not believe there was any danger of immediate decomposition in the almost
subzero air. He did, however, move all the undissected specimens close together
and throw a spare tent over them in order to keep off the direct solar rays.
That would also help to keep their possible scent away from the dogs, whose
hostile unrest was really becoming a problem, even at their substantial distance
and behind the higher and higher snow walls which an increased quota of the men
were hastening to raise around their quarters. He had to weight down the corners
of the tent cloth with heavy blocks of snow to hold it in place amidst the
rising gale, for the titan mountains seemed about to deliver some gravely severe
blasts. Early apprehensions about sudden antarctic winds were revived, and under
Atwood’s supervision precautions were taken to bank the tents, new dog corral,
and crude aeroplane shelters with snow on the mountainward side. These latter
shelters, begun with hard snow blocks during odd moments, were by no means as
high as they should have been; and Lake finally detached all hands from other
tasks to work on them.
It was after four when Lake at last prepared to sign off and advised us all to
share the rest period his outfit would take when the shelter walls were a little
higher. He held some friendly chat with Pabodie over the ether, and repeated his
praise of the really marvelous drills that had helped him make his discovery.
Atwood also sent greetings and praises. I gave Lake a warm word of
congratulations, owning up that he was right about the western trip, and we all
agreed to get in touch by wireless at ten in the morning. If the gale was then
over, Lake would send a plane for the party at my base. Just before retiring I
dispatched a final message to the Arkham with instructions about toning down the
day’s news for the outside world, since the full details seemed radical enough
to rouse a wave of incredulity until further substantiated.
III
None of us, I imagine, slept very heavily or continuously that morning. Both the
excitement of Lake’s discovery and the mounting fury of the wind were against
such a thing. So savage was the blast, even where we were, that we could not
help wondering how much worse it was at Lake’s camp, directly under the vast
unknown peaks that bred and delivered it. McTighe was awake at ten o’clock and
tried to get Lake on the wireless, as agreed, but some electrical condition in
the disturbed air to the westward seemed to prevent communication. We did,
however, get the Arkham, and Douglas told me that he had likewise been vainly
trying to reach Lake. He had not known about the wind, for very little was
blowing at McMurdo Sound, despite its persistent rage where we were.
Throughout the day we all listened anxiously and tried to get Lake at intervals,
but invariably without results. About noon a positive frenzy of wind stampeded
out of the west, causing us to fear for the safety of our camp; but it
eventually died down, with only a moderate relapse at 2 P.M. After three o’clock
it was very quiet, and we redoubled our efforts to get Lake. Reflecting that he
had four planes, each provided with an excellent short-wave outfit, we could not
imagine any ordinary accident capable of crippling all his wireless equipment at
once. Nevertheless the stony silence continued, and when we thought of the
delirious force the wind must have had in his locality we could not help making
the more direful conjectures.
By six o’clock our fears had become intense and definite, and after a wireless
consultation with Douglas and Thorfinnssen I resolved to take steps toward
investigation. The fifth aeroplane, which we had left at the McMurdo Sound
supply cache with Sherman and two sailors, was in good shape and ready for
instant use, and it seemed that the very emergency for which it had been saved
was now upon us. I got Sherman by wireless and ordered him to join me with the
plane and the two sailors at the southern base as quickly as possible, the air
conditions being apparently highly favorable. We then talked over the personnel
of the coming investigation party, and decided that we would include all hands,
together with the sledge and dogs which I had kept with me. Even so great a load
would not be too much for one of the huge planes built to our special orders for
heavy machinery transportation. At intervals I still tried to reach Lake with
the wireless, but all to no purpose.
Sherman, with the sailors Gunnarsson and Larsen, took off at 7:30; and reported
a quiet flight from several points on the wing. They arrived at our base at
midnight, and all hands at once discussed the next move. It was risky business
sailing over the antarctic in a single aeroplane without any line of bases, but
no one drew back from what seemed like the plainest necessity. We turned in at
two o’clock for a brief rest after some preliminary loading of the plane, but
were up again in four hours to finish the loading and packing.
At 7:15 A.M., January 25th, we started flying northwestward under McTighe’s
pilotage with ten men, seven dogs, a sledge, a fuel and food supply, and other
items including the plane’s wireless outfit. The atmosphere was clear, fairly
quiet, and relatively mild in temperature, and we anticipated very little
trouble in reaching the latitude and longitude designated by Lake as the site of
his camp. Our apprehensions were over what we might find, or fail to find, at
the end of our journey, for silence continued to answer all calls dispatched to
the camp.
Every incident of that four-and-a-half-hour flight is burned into my
recollection because of its crucial position in my life. It marked my loss, at
the age of fifty-four, of all that peace and balance which the normal mind
possesses through its accustomed conception of external nature and nature’s
laws. Thenceforward the ten of us - but the student Danforth and myself above
all others - were to face a hideously amplified world of lurking horrors which
nothing can erase from our emotions, and which we would refrain from sharing
with mankind in general if we could. The newspapers have printed the bulletins
we sent from the moving plane, telling of our nonstop course, our two battles
with treacherous upper-air gales, our glimpse of the broken surface where Lake
had sunk his mid-journey shaft three days before, and our sight of a group of
those strange fluffy snow cylinders noted by Amundsen and Byrd as rolling in the
wind across the endless leagues of frozen plateau. There came a point, though,
when our sensations could not be conveyed in any words the press would
understand, and a latter point when we had to adopt an actual rule of strict
censorship.
The sailor Larsen was first to spy the jagged line of witchlike cones and
pinnacles ahead, and his shouts sent everyone to the windows of the great
cabined plane. Despite our speed, they were very slow in gaining prominence;
hence we knew that they must be infinitely far off, and visible only because of
their abnormal height. Little by little, however, they rose grimly into the
western sky; allowing us to distinguish various bare, bleak, blackish summits,
and to catch the curious sense of fantasy which they inspired as seen in the
reddish antarctic light against the provocative background of iridescent
ice-dust clouds. In the whole spectacle there was a persistent, pervasive hint
of stupendous secrecy and potential revelation. It was as if these stark,
nightmare spires marked the pylons of a frightful gateway into forbidden spheres
of dream, and complex gulfs of remote time, space, and ultradimensionality. I
could not help feeling that they were evil things-mountains of madness whose
farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething,
half-luminous cloud background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal
beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial, and gave appalling reminders of
the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this
untrodden and unfathomed austral world.
It was young Danforth who drew our notice to the curious regularities of the
higher mountain skyline - regularities like clinging fragments of perfect cubes,
which Lake had mentioned in his messages, and which indeed justified his
comparison with the dreamlike suggestions of primordial temple ruins, on cloudy
Asian mountaintops so subtly and strangely painted by Roerich. There was indeed
something hauntingly Roerich-like about this whole unearthly continent of
mountainous mystery. I had felt it in October when we first caught sight of
Victoria Land, and I felt it afresh now. I felt, too, another wave of uneasy
consciousness of Archaean mythical resemblances; of how disturbingly this lethal
realm corresponded to the evilly famed plateau of Leng in the primal writings.
Mythologists have placed Leng in Central Asia; but the racial memory of man - or
of his predecessors - is long, and it may well be that certain tales have come
down from lands and mountains and temples of horror earlier than Asia and
earlier than any human world we know. A few daring mystics have hinted at a
pre-Pleistocene origin for the fragmentary Pnakotic Manuscripts, and have
suggested that the devotees of Tsathoggua were as alien to mankind as Tsathoggua
itself. Leng, wherever in space or time it might brood, was not a region I would
care to be in or near, nor did I relish the proximity of a world that had ever
bred such ambiguous and Archaean monstrosities as those Lake had just mentioned.
At the moment I felt sorry that I had ever read the abhorred Necronomicon, or
talked so much with that unpleasantly erudite folklorist Wilmarth at the
university.
This mood undoubtedly served to aggravate my reaction to the bizarre mirage
which burst upon us from the increasingly opalescent zenith as we drew near the
mountains and began to make out the cumulative undulations of the foothills. I
had seen dozens of polar mirages during the preceding weeks, some of them quite
as uncanny and fantastically vivid as the present example; but this one had a
wholly novel and obscure quality of menacing symbolism, and I shuddered as the
seething labyrinth of fabulous walls and towers and minarets loomed out of the
troubled ice vapors above our heads.
The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to
human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying
monstrous perversions of geometrical laws. There were truncated cones, sometimes
terraced or fluted, surmounted by tall cylindrical shafts here and there
bulbously enlarged and often capped with tiers of thinnish scalloped disks; and
strange beetling, table-like constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous
rectangular slabs or circular plates or five-pointed stars with each one
overlapping the one beneath. There were composite cones and pyramids either
alone or surmounting cylinders or cubes or flatter truncated cones and pyramids,
and occasional needle-like spires in curious clusters of five. All of these
febrile structures seemed knit together by tubular bridges crossing from one to
the other at various dizzy heights, and the implied scale of the whole was
terrifying and oppressive in its sheer gigantism. The general type of mirage was
not unlike some of the wilder forms observed and drawn by the arctic whaler
Scoresby in 1820, but at this time and place, with those dark, unknown mountain
peaks soaring stupendously ahead, that anomalous elder-world discovery in our
minds, and the pall of probable disaster enveloping the greater part of our
expedition, we all seemed to find in it a taint of latent malignity and
infinitely evil portent.
I was glad when the mirage began to break up, though in the process the various
nightmare turrets and cones assumed distorted, temporary forms of even vaster
hideousness. As the whole illusion dissolved to churning opalescence we began to
look earthward again, and saw that our journey’s end was not far off. The
unknown mountains ahead rose dizzily up like a fearsome rampart of giants, their
curious regularities showing with startling clearness even without a field
glass. We were over the lowest foothills now, and could see amidst the snow,
ice, and bare patches of their main plateau a couple of darkish spots which we
took to be Lake’s camp and boring. The higher foothills shot up between five and
six miles away, forming a range almost distinct from the terrifying line of more
than Himalayan peaks beyond them. At length Ropes-the student who had relieved
McTighe at the controls - began to head downward toward the left-hand dark spot
whose size marked it as the camp. As he did so, McTighe sent out the last
uncensored wireless message the world was to receive from our expedition.
Everyone, of course, has read the brief and unsatisfying bulletins of the rest
of our antarctic sojourn. Some hours after our landing we sent a guarded report
of the tragedy we found, and reluctantly announced the wiping out of the whole
Lake party by the frightful wind of the preceding day, or of the night before
that. Eleven known dead, young Gedney missing. People pardoned our hazy lack of
details through realization of the shock the sad event must have caused us, and
believed us when we explained that the mangling action of the wind had rendered
all eleven bodies unsuitable for transportation outside. Indeed, I flatter
myself that even in the midst of our distress, utter bewilderment, and
soul-clutching horror, we scarcely went beyond the truth in any specific
instance. The tremendous significance lies in what we dared not tell; what I
would not tell now but for the need of warning others off from nameless terrors.

It is a fact that the wind had brought dreadful havoc. Whether all could have
lived through it, even without the other thing, is gravely open to doubt. The
storm, with its fury of madly driven ice particles, must have been beyond
anything our expedition had encountered before. One aeroplane shelter-wall, it
seems, had been left in a far too flimsy and inadequate state - was nearly
pulverized-and the derrick at the distant boring was entirely shaken to pieces.
The exposed metal of the grounded planes and drilling machinery was bruised into
a high polish, and two of the small tents were flattened despite their snow
banking. Wooden surfaces left out in the blaster were pitted and denuded of
paint, and all signs of tracks in the snow were completely obliterated. It is
also true that we found none of the Archaean biological objects in a condition
to take outside as a whole. We did gather some minerals from a vast, tumbled
pile, including several of the greenish soapstone fragments whose odd
five-pointed rounding and faint patterns of grouped dots caused so many doubtful
comparisons; and some fossil bones, among which were the most typical of the
curiously injured specimens.
None of the dogs survived, their hurriedly built snow inclosure near the camp
being almost wholly destroyed. The wind may have done that, though the greater
breakage on the side next the camp, which was not the windward one, suggests an
outward leap or break of the frantic beasts themselves. All three sledges were
gone, and we have tried to explain that the wind may have blown them off into
the unknown. The drill and ice-melting machinery at the boring were too badly
damaged to warrant salvage, so we used them to choke up that subtly disturbing
gateway to the past which Lake had blasted. We likewise left at the camp the two
most shaken up of the planes; since our surviving party had only four real
pilots - Sherman, Danforth, McTighe, and Ropes - in all, with Danforth in a poor
nervous shape to navigate. We brought back all the books, scientific equipment,
and other incidentals we could find, though much was rather unaccountably blown
away. Spare tents and furs were either missing or badly out of condition.
It was approximately 4 P.M., after wide plane cruising had forced us to give
Gedney up for lost, that we sent our guarded message to the Arkham for relaying;
and I think we did well to keep it as calm and noncommittal as we succeeded in
doing. The most we said about agitation concerned our dogs, whose frantic
uneasiness near the biological specimens was to be expected from poor Lake’s
accounts. We did not mention, I think, their display of the same uneasiness when
sniffing around the queer greenish soapstones and certain other objects in the
disordered region-objects including scientific instruments, aeroplanes, and
machinery, both at the camp and at the boring, whose parts had been loosened,
moved, or otherwise tampered with by winds that must have harbored singular
curiosity and investigativeness.
About the fourteen biological specimens, we were pardonably indefinite. We said
that the only ones we discovered were damaged, but that enough was left of them
to prove Lake’s description wholly and impressively accurate. It was hard work
keeping our personal emotions out of this matter - and we did not mention
numbers or say exactly how we had found those which we did find. We had by that
time agreed not to transmit anything suggesting madness on the part of Lake’s
men, and it surely looked like madness to find six imperfect monstrosities
carefully buried upright in nine-foot snow graves under five-pointed mounds
punched over with groups of dots in patterns exactly those on the queer greenish
soapstones dug up from Mesozoic or Tertiary times. The eight perfect specimens
mentioned by Lake seemed to have been completely blown away.
We were careful, too, about the public’s general peace of mind; hence Danforth
and I said little about that frightful trip over the mountains the next day. It
was the fact that only a radically lightened plane could possibly cross a range
of such height, which mercifully limited that scouting tour to the two of us. On
our return at one A.M., Danforth was close to hysterics, but kept an admirably
stiff upper lip. It took no persuasion to make him promise not to show our
sketches and the other things we brought away in our pockets, not to say
anything more to the others than what we had agreed to relay outside, and to
hide our camera films for private development later on; so that part of my
present story will be as new to Pabodie, McTighe, Ropes, Sherman, and the rest
as it will be to the world in general. Indeed, Danforth is closer mouthed than
I: for he saw, or thinks he saw, one thing he will not tell even me.
As all know, our report included a tale of a hard ascent - a confirmation of
Lake’s opinion that the great peaks are of Archaean slate and other very primal
crumpled strata unchanged since at least middle Comanchian times; a conventional
comment on the regularity of the clinging cube and rampart formations; a
decision that the cave mouths indicate dissolved calcaerous veins; a conjecture
that certain slopes and passes would permit of the scaling and crossing of the
entire range by seasoned mountaineers; and a remark that the mysterious other
side holds a lofty and immense superplateau as ancient and unchanging as the
mountains themselves - twenty thousand feet in elevation, with grotesque rock
formations protruding through a thin glacial layer and with low gradual
foothills between the general plateau surface and the sheer precipices of the
highest peaks.
This body of data is in every respect true so far as it goes, and it completely
satisfied the men at the camp. We laid our absence of sixteen hours - a longer
time than our announced flying, landing, reconnoitering, and rock-collecting
program called for - to a long mythical spell of adverse wind conditions, and
told truly of our landing on the farther foothills. Fortunately our tale sounded
realistic and prosaic enough not to tempt any of the others into emulating our
flight. Had any tried to do that, I would have used every ounce of my persuasion
to stop them - and I do not know what Danforth would have done. While we were
gone, Pabodie, Sherman, Ropes, McTighe, and Williamson had worked like beavers
over Lake’s two best planes, fitting them again for use despite the altogether
unaccountable juggling of their operative mechanism.
We decided to load all the planes the next morning and start back for our old
base as soon as possible. Even though indirect, that was the safest way to work
toward McMurdo Sound; for a straightline flight across the most utterly unknown
stretches of the aeon-dead continent would involve many additional hazards.
Further exploration was hardly feasible in view of our tragic decimation and the
ruin of our drilling machinery. The doubts and horrors around us-which we did
not reveal - made us wish only to escape from this austral world of desolation
and brooding madness as swiftly as we could.
As the public knows, our return to the world was accomplished without further
disasters. All planes reached the old base on the evening of the next
day-january 27th-after a swift nonstop flight; and on the 28th we made McMurdo
Sound in two laps, the one pause being very brief, and occasioned by a faulty
rudder in the furious wind over the ice shelf after we had cleared the great
plateau. In five days more, the Arkham and Miskatonic, with all hands and
equipment on board, were shaking clear of the thickening field ice and working
up Ross Sea with the mocking mountains of Victoria Land looming westward against
a troubled antarctic sky and twisting the wind’s wails into a wide-ranged
musical piping which chilled my soul to the quick. Less than a fortnight later
we left the last hint of polar land behind us and thanked heaven that we were
clear of a haunted, accursed realm where life and death, space and time, have
made black and blasphemous alliances, in the unknown epochs since matter first
writhed and swam on the planet’s scarce-cooled crust.
Since our return we have all constantly worked to discourage antarctic
exploration, and have kept certain doubts and guesses to ourselves with splendid
unity and faithfulness. Even young Danforth, with his nervous breakdown, has not
flinched or babbled to his doctors - indeed, as I have said, there is one thing
he thinks he alone saw which he will not tell even me, though I think it would
help his psychological state if he would consent to do so. It might explain and
relieve much, though perhaps the thing was no more than the delusive aftermath
of an earlier shock. That is the impression I gather after those rare,
irresponsible moments when he whispers disjointed things to me - things which he
repudiates vehemently as soon as he gets a grip on himself again.
It will be hard work deterring others from the great white south, and some of
our efforts may directly harm our cause by drawing inquiring notice. We might
have known from the first that human curiosity is undying, and that the results
we announced would be enough to spur others ahead on the same age-long pursuit
of the unknown. Lake’s reports of those biological monstrosities had aroused
naturalists and paleontologists to the highest pitch, though we were sensible
enough not to show the detached parts we had taken from the actual buried
specimens, or our photographs of those specimens as they were found. We also
refrained from showing the more puzzling of the scarred bones and greenish
soapstones; while Dan-forth and I have closely guarded the pictures we took or
drew on the superplateau across the range, and the crumpled things we smoothed,
studied in terror, and brought away in our pockets.
But now that Starkweather-Moore party is organizing, and with a thoroughness far
beyond anything our outfit attempted. If not dissuaded, they will get to the
innermost nucleus of the antarctic and melt and bore till they bring up that
which we know may end the world. So I must break through all reticences at last
- even about that ultimate, nameless thing beyond the mountains of madness.
IV
It is only with vast hesitancy and repugnance that I let my mind go back to
Lake’s camp and what we really found there - and to that other thing beyond the
mountains of madness. I am constantly tempted to shirk the details, and to let
hints stand for actual facts and ineluctable deductions. I hope I have said
enough already to let me glide briefly over the rest; the rest, that is, of the
horror at the camp. I have told of the wind-ravaged terrain, the damaged
shelters, the disarranged machinery, the varied uneasiness of our dogs, the
missing sledges and other items, the deaths of men and dogs, the absence of
Gedney, and the six insanely buried biological specimens, strangely sound in
texture for all their structural injuries, from a world forty million years
dead. I do not recall whether I mentioned that upon checking up the canine
bodies we found one dog missing. We did not think much about that till later -
indeed, only Danforth and I have thought of it at all.
The principal things I have been keeping back relate to the bodies, and to
certain subtle points which may or may not lend a hideous and incredible kind of
rationale to the apparent chaos. At the time, I tried to keep the men’s minds
off those points; for it was so much simpler - so much more normal - to lay
everything to an outbreak of madness on the part of some of Lake’s party. From
the look of things, that demon mountain wind must have been enough to drive any
man mad in the midst of this center of all earthly mystery and desolation.
The crowning abnormality, of course, was the condition of the bodies - men and
dogs alike. They had all been in some terrible kind of conflict, and were torn
and mangled in fiendish and altogether inexplicable ways. Death, so far as we
could judge, had in each case come from strangulation or laceration. The dogs
had evidently started the trouble, for the state of their ill-built corral bore
witness to its forcible breakage from within. It had been set some distance from
the camp because of the hatred of the animals for those hellish Archaean
organisms, but the precaution seemed to have been taken in vain. When left alone
in that monstrous wind, behind flimsy walls of insufficient height, they must
have stampeded - whether from the wind itself, or from some subtle, increasing
odor emitted by the nightmare specimens, one could not say.
But whatever had happened, it was hideous and revolting enough. Perhaps I had
better put squeamishness aside and tell the worst at last - though with a
categorical statement of opinion, based on the first-hand observations and most
rigid deductions of both Danforth and myself, that the then missing Gedney was
in no way responsible for the loathsome horrors we found. I have said that the
bodies were frightfully mangled. Now I must add that some were incised and
subtracted from in the most curious, cold-blooded, and inhuman fashion. It was
the same with dogs and men. All the healthier, fatter bodies, quadrupedal or
bipedal, had had their most solid masses of tissue cut out and removed, as by a
careful butcher; and around them was a strange sprinkling of salt - taken from
the ravaged provision chests on the planes - which conjured up the most horrible
associations. The thing had occurred in one of the crude aeroplane shelters from
which the plane had been dragged out, and subsequent winds had effaced all
tracks which could have supplied any plausible theory. Scattered bits of
clothing, roughly slashed from the human incision subjects, hinted no clues. It
is useless to bring up the half impression of certain faint snow prints in one
shielded corner of the ruined inclosure - because that impression did not
concern human prints at all, but was clearly mixed up with all the talk of
fossil prints which poor Lake had been giving throughout the preceding weeks.
One had to be careful of one’s imagination in the lee of those overshadowing
mountains of madness.
As I have indicated, Gedney and one dog turned out to be missing in the end.
When we came on that terrible shelter we had missed two dogs and two men; but
the fairly unharmed dissecting tent, which we entered after investigating the
monstrous graves, had something to reveal. It was not as Lake had left it, for
the covered parts of the primal monstrosity had been removed from the improvised
table. Indeed, we had already realized that one of the six imperfect and
insanely buried things we had found - the one with the trace of a peculiarly
hateful odor - must represent the collected sections of the entity which Lake
had tried to analyze. On and around that laboratory table were strewn other
things, and it did not take long for us to guess that those things were the
carefully though oddly and inexpertly dissected parts of one man and one dog. I
shall spare the feelings of survivors by omitting mention of the man’s identity.
Lake’s anatomical instruments were missing, but there were evidences of their
careful cleansing. The gasoline stove was also gone, though around it we found a
curious litter of matches. We buried the human parts beside the other ten men;
and the canine parts with the other thirty-five dogs. Concerning the bizarre
smudges on the laboratory table, and on the jumble of roughly handled
illustrated books scattered near it, we were much too bewildered to speculate.
This formed the worst of the camp horror, but other things were equally
perplexing. The disappearance of Gedney, the one dog, the eight uninjured
biological specimens, the three sledges, and certain instruments, illustrated
technical and scientific books, writing materials, electric torches and
batteries, food and fuel, heating apparatus, spare tents, fur suits, and the
like, was utterly beyond sane conjecture; as were likewise the spatter-fringed
ink blots on certain pieces of paper, and the evidences of curious alien
fumbling and experimentation around the planes and all other mechanical devices
both at the camp and at the boring. The dogs seemed to abhor this oddly
disordered machinery. Then, too, there was the upsetting of the larder, the
disappearance of certain staples, and the jarringly comical heap of tin cans
pried open in the most unlikely ways and at the most unlikely places. The
profusion of scattered matches, intact, broken, or spent, formed another minor
enigma - as did the two or three tent cloths and fur suits which we found lying
about with peculiar and unorthodox slashings conceivably due to clumsy efforts
at unimaginable adaptations. The maltreatment of the human and canine bodies,
and the crazy burial of the damaged Archaean specimens, were all of a piece with
this apparent disintegrative madness. In view of just such an eventuality as the
present one, we carefully photographed all the main evidences of insane disorder
at the camp; and shall use the prints to buttress our pleas against the
departure of the proposed Starkweather-Moore Expedition.
Our first act after finding the bodies in the shelter was to photograph and open
the row of insane graves with the five-pointed snow mounds. We could not help
noticing the resemblance of these monstrous mounds, with their clusters of
grouped dots, to poor Lake’s descriptions of the strange greenish soapstones;
and when we came on some of the soapstones themselves in the great mineral pile,
we found the likeness very close indeed. The whole general formation, it must be
made clear, seemed abominably suggestive of the starfish head of the Archaean
entities; and we agreed that the suggestion must have worked potently upon the
sensitized minds of Lake’s overwrought party.
For madness - centering in Gedney as the only possible surviving agent - was the
explanation spontaneously adopted by everybody so far as spoken utterance was
concerned; though I will not be so naive as to deny that each of us may have
harbored wild guesses which sanity forbade him to formulate completely. Sherman,
Pabodie, and McTighe made an exhaustive aeroplane cruise over all the
surrounding territory in the afternoon, sweeping the horizon with field glasses
in quest of Gedney and of the various missing things; but nothing came to light.
The party reported that the titan barrier range extended endlessly to right and
left alike, without any diminution in height or essential structure. On some of
the peaks, though, the regular cube and rampart formations were bolder and
plainer, having doubly fantastic similitudes to Roerich-painted Asian hill
ruins. The distribution of cryptical cave mouths on the black snow-denuded
summits seemed roughly even as far as the range could be traced.
In spite of all the prevailing horrors, we were left with enough sheer
scientific zeal and adventurousness to wonder about the unknown realm beyond
those mysterious mountains. As our guarded messages stated, we rested at
midnight after our day of terror and bafflement - but not without a tentative
plan for one or more range-crossing altitude flights in a lightened plane with
aerial camera and geologist’s outfit, beginning the following morning. It was
decided that Danforth and I try it first, and we awaked at 7 A.M. intending an
early flight; however, heavy winds - mentioned in our brief, bulletin to the
outside world - delayed our start till nearly nine o’clock.
I have already repeated the noncommittal story we told the men at camp - and
relayed outside - after our return sixteen hours later. It is now my terrible
duty to amplify this account by filling in the merciful blanks with hints of
what we really saw in the hidden transmontane world - hints of the revelations
which have finally driven Danforth to a nervous collapse. I wish he would add a
really frank word about the thing which he thinks he alone saw - even though it
was probably a nervous delusion - and which was perhaps the last straw that put
him where he is; but he is firm against that. All I can do is to repeat his
later disjointed whispers about what set him shrieking as the plane soared back
through the wind-tortured mountain pass after that real and tangible shock which
I shared. This will form my last word. If the plain signs of surviving elder
horrors in what I disclose be not enough to keep others from meddling with the
inner antarctic-or at least from prying too deeply beneath the surface of that
ultimate waste of forbidden secrets and inhuman, aeon-cursed desolation - the
responsibility for unnamable and perhaps immeasurable evils will not be mine.
Danforth and I, studying the notes made by Pabodie in his afternoon flight and
checking up with a sextant, had calculated that the lowest available pass in the
range lay somewhat to the right of us, within sight of camp, and about
twenty-three thousand or twenty-four thousand feet above sea level. For this
point, then, we first headed in the lightened plane as we embarked on our flight
of discovery. The camp itself, on foothills which sprang from a high continental
plateau, was some twelve thousand feet in altitude; hence the actual height
increase necessary was not so vast as it might seem. Nevertheless we were
actually conscious of the rarefied air and intense cold as we rose; for, on
account of visibility conditions, we had to leave the cabin windows open. We
were dressed, of course, in our heaviest furs.
As we drew near the forbidding peaks, dark and sinister above the line of
crevasse-riven snow and interstitial glaciers, we noticed more and more the
curiously regular formations clinging to the slopes; and thought again of the
strange Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich. The ancient and wind-weathered rock
strata fully verified all of Lake’s bulletins, and proved that these pinnacles
had been towering up in exactly the same way since.a surprisingly early time in
earth’s history-perhaps over fifty million years. How much higher they had once
been, it was futile to guess; but everything about this strange region pointed
to obscure atmospheric influences unfavorable to change, and calculated to
retard the usual climatic processes of rock disintegration.
But it was the mountainside tangle of regular cubes, ramparts, and cave mouths
which fascinated and disturbed us most. I studied them with a field glass and
took aerial photographs while Danforth drove; and at times I relieved him at the
controls - though my aviation knowledge was purely an amateur’s - in order to
let him use the binoculars. We could easily see that much of the material of the
things was a lightish Archaean quartzite, unlike any formation visible over
broad areas of the general surface; and that their regularity was extreme and
uncanny to an extent which poor Lake had scarcely hinted.
As he had said, their edges were crumbled and rounded from untold aeons of
savage weathering; but their preternatural solidity and tough material had saved
them from obliteration. Many parts, especially those closest to the slopes,
seemed identical in substance with the surrounding rock surface. The whole
arrangement looked like the ruins of Macchu Picchu in the Andes, or the primal
foundation walls of Kish as dug up by the Oxford Field Museum Expedition in
1929; and both Danforth and I obtained that occasional impression of separate
Cyclopean blocks which Lake had attributed to his flight-companion Carroll. How
to account for such things in this place was frankly beyond me, and I felt
queerly humbled as a geologist. Igneous formations often have strange
regularities - like the famous Giants’ Causeway in Ireland-but this stupendous
range, despite Lake’s original suspicion of smoking cones, was above all else
nonvolcanic in evident structure.
The curious cave mouths, near which the odd formations seemed most abundant,
presented another albeit a lesser puzzle because of their regularity of outline.
They were, as Lake’s bulletin had said, often approximately square or
semicircular; as if the natural orifices had been shaped to greater symmetry by
some magic hand. Their numerousness and wide distribution were remarkable, and
suggested that the whole region was honeycombed with tunnels dissolved out of
limestone strata. Such glimpses as we secured did not extend far within the
caverns, but we saw that they were apparently clear of stalactites and
stalagmites. Outside, those parts of the mountain slopes adjoining the apertures
seemed invariably smooth and regular; and Danforth thought that the slight
cracks and pittings of the weathering tended toward unusual patterns. Filled as
he was with the horrors and strangenesses discovered at the camp, he hinted that
the pittings vaguely resembled those baffling groups of dots sprinkled over the
primeval greenish soapstones, so hideously duplicated on the madly conceived
snow mounds above those six buried monstrosities.
We had risen gradually in flying over the higher foothills and along toward the
relatively low pass we had selected. As we advanced we occasionally looked down
at the snow and ice of the land route, wondering whether we could have attempted
the trip with the simpler equipment of earlier days. Somewhat to our surprise we
saw that the terrain was far from difficult as such things go; and that despite
the crevasses and other bad spots it would not have been likely to deter the
sledges of a Scott, a Shackleton, or an Amundsen. Some of the glaciers appeared
to lead up to wind-bared passes with unusual continuity, and upon reaching our
chosen pass we found that its case formed no exception.
Our sensations of tense expectancy as we prepared to round the crest and peer
out over an untrodden world can hardly be described on paper; even though we had
no cause to think the regions beyond the range essentially different from those
already seen and traversed. The touch of evil mystery in these barrier
mountains, and in the beckoning sea of opalescent sky glimpsed betwixt their
summits, was a highly subtle and attenuated matter not to be explained in
literal words. Rather was it an affair of vague psychological symbolism and
aesthetic association - a thing mixed up with exotic poetry and paintings, and
with archaic myths lurking in shunned and forbidden volumes. Even the wind’s
burden held a peculiar strain of conscious malignity; and for a second it seemed
that the composite sound included a bizarre musical whistling or piping over a
wide range as the blast swept in and out of the omnipresent and resonant cave
mouths. There was a cloudy note of reminiscent repulsion in this sound, as
complex and unplaceable as any of the other dark impressions.
We were now, after a slow ascent, at a height of twenty-three thousand, five
hundred and seventy feet according to the aneroid; and had left the region of
clinging snow definitely below us. Up here were only dark, bare rock slopes and
the start of rough-ribbed glaciers - but with those provocative cubes, ramparts,
and echoing cave mouths to add a portent of the unnatural, the fantastic, and
the dreamlike. Looking along the line of high peaks, I thought I could see the
one mentioned by poor Lake, with a rampart exactly on top. It seemed to be half
lost in a queer antarctic haze - such a haze, perhaps, as had been responsible
for Lake’s early notion of volcanism. The pass loomed directly before us, smooth
and windswept between its jagged and malignly frowning pylons. Beyond it was a
sky fretted with swirling vapors and lighted by the low polar sun - the sky of
that mysterious farther realm upon which we felt no human eye had ever gazed.
A few more feet of altitude and we would behold that realm. Danforth and I,
unable to speak except in shouts amidst the howling, piping wind that raced
through the pass and added to the noise of the unmuffled engines, exchanged
eloquent glances. And then, having gained those last few feet, we did indeed
stare across the momentous divide and over the unsampled secrets of an elder and
utterly alien earth.
V
I think that both of us simultaneously cried out in mixed awe, wonder, terror,
and disbelief in our own senses as we finally cleared the pass and saw what lay
beyond. Of course, we must have had some natural theory in the back of our heads
to steady our faculties for the moment. Probably we thought of such things as
the grotesquely weathered stones of the Garden of the Gods in Colorado, or the
fantastically symmetrical wind-carved rocks of the Arizona desert. Perhaps we
even half thought the sight a mirage like that we had seen the morning before on
first approaching those mountains of madness. We must have had some such normal
notions to fall back upon as our eyes swept that limitless, tempest-scarred
plateau and grasped the almost endless labyrinth of colossal, regular, and
geometrically eurythmic stone masses which reared their crumbled and pitted
crests above a glacial sheet not more than forty or fifty feet deep at its
thickest, and in places obviously thinner.
The effect of the monstrous sight was indescribable, for some fiendish violation
of known natural law seemed certain at the outset. Here, on a hellishly ancient
table-land fully twenty thousand feet high, and in a climate deadly to
habitation since a prehuman age not less than five hundred thousand years ago,
there stretched nearly to the vision’s limit a tangle of orderly stone which
only the desperation of mental self-defense could possibly attribute to any but
conscious and artificial cause. We had previously dismissed, so far as serious
thought was concerned, any theory that the cubes and ramparts of the
mountainsides were other than natural in origin. How could they be otherwise,
when man himself could scarcely have been differentiated from the great apes at
the time when this region succumbed to the present unbroken reign of glacial
death?
Yet now the sway of reason seemed irrefutably shaken, for this Cyclopean maze of
squared, curved, and angled blocks had features which cut off all comfortable
refuge. It was, very clearly, the blasphemous city of the mirage in stark,
objective, and ineluctable reality. That damnable portent had had a material
basis after all - there had been some horizontal stratum of ice dust in the
upper air, and this shocking stone survival had projected its image across the
mountains according to the simple laws of reflection, Of course, the phantom had
been twisted and exaggerated, and had contained things which the real source did
not contain; yet now, as we saw that real source, we thought it even more
hideous and menacing than its distant image.
Only the incredible, unhuman massiveness of these vast stone towers and ramparts
had saved the frightful things from utter annihilation in the hundreds of
thousands - perhaps millions - of years it had brooded there amidst the blasts
of a bleak upland. "Corona Mundi - Roof of the World - " All sorts of fantastic
phrases sprang to our lips as we looked dizzily down at the unbelievable
spectacle. I thought again of the eldritch primal myths that had so persistently
haunted me since my first sight of this dead antarctic world - of the demoniac
plateau of Leng, of the Mi-Go, or abominable Snow Men of the Himalayas, of the
Pnakotic Manuscripts with their prehuman implications, of the Cthulhu cult, of
the Necronomicon, and of the Hyperborean legends of formless Tsathoggua and the
worse than formless star spawn associated with that semientity.
For boundless miles in every direction the thing stretched off with very little
thinning; indeed, as our eyes followed it to the right and left along the base
of the low, gradual foothills which separated it from the actual mountain rim,
we decided that we could see no thinning at all except for an interruption at
the left of the pass through which we had come. We had merely struck, at random,
a limited part of something of incalculable extent. The foothills were more
sparsely sprinkled with grotesque stone structures, linking the terrible city to
the already familiar cubes and ramparts which evidently formed its mountain
outposts. These latter, as well as the queer cave mouths, were as thick on the
inner as on the outer sides of the mountains.
The nameless stone labyrinth consisted, for the most part, of walls from ten to
one hundred and fifty feet in ice-clear height, and of a thickness varying from
five to ten feet. It was composed mostly of prodigious blocks of dark primordial
slate, schist, and sandstone - blocks in many cases as large as 4 x 6 x 8 feet -
though in several places it seemed to be carved out of a solid, uneven bed rock
of preCambrian slate. The buildings were far from equal in size, there being
innumerable honeycomb arrangements of enormous extent as well as smaller
separate structures. The general shape of these things tended to be conical,
pyramidal, or terraced; though there were many perfect cylinders, perfect cubes,
clusters of cubes, and other rectangular forms, and a peculiar sprinkling of
angled edifices whose five-pointed ground plan roughly suggested modern
fortifications. The builders had made constant and expert use of the principle
of the arch, and domes had probably existed in the city’s heyday.
The whole tangle was monstrously weathered, and the glacial surface from which
the towers projected was strewn with fallen blocks and immemorial debris. Where
the glaciation was transparent we could see the lower parts of the gigantic
piles, and we noticed the ice-preserved stone bridges which connected the
different towers at varying distances above the ground. On the exposed walls we
could detect the scarred places where other and higher bridges of the same sort
had existed. Closer inspection revealed countless largish windows; some of which
were closed with shutters of a petrified material originally wood, though most
gaped open in a sinister and menacing fashion. Many of the ruins, of course,
were roofless, and with uneven though wind-rounded upper edges; whilst others,
of a more sharply conical or pyramidal model or else protected by higher
surrounding structures, preserved intact outlines despite the omnipresent
crumbling and pitting. With the field glass we could barely make out what seemed
to be sculptural decorations in horizontal bands - decorations including those
curious groups of dots whose presence on the ancient soapstones now assumed a
vastly larger significance.
In many places the buildings were totally ruined and the ice sheet deeply riven
from various geologic causes. In other places the stonework was worn down to the
very level of the glaciation. One broad swath, extending from the plateau’s
interior, to a cleft in the foothills about a mile to the left of the pass we
had traversed, was wholly free from buildings. It probably represented, we
concluded, the course of some great river which in Tertiary times - millions of
years ago - had poured through the city and into some prodigious subterranean
abyss of the great barrier range. Certainly, this was above all a region of
caves, gulfs, and underground secrets beyond human penetration.
Looking back to our sensations, and recalling our dazedness at viewing this
monstrous survival from aeons we had thought prehuman, I can only wonder that we
preserved the semblance of equilibrium, which we did. Of course, we knew that
something - chronology, scientific theory, or our own consciousness - was
woefully awry; yet we kept enough poise to guide the plane, observe many things
quite minutely, and take a careful series of photographs which may yet serve
both us and the world in good stead. In my case, ingrained scientific habit may
have helped; for above all my bewilderment and sense of menace, there burned a
dominant curiosity to fathom more of this age-old secret - to know what sort of
beings had built and lived in this incalculably gigantic place, and what
relation to the general world of its time or of other times so unique a
concentration of life could have had.
For this place could be no ordinary city. It must have formed the primary
nucleus and center of some archaic and unbelievable chapter of earth’s history
whose outward ramifications, recalled only dimly in the most obscure and
distorted myths, had vanished utterly amidst the chaos of terrene convulsions
long before any human race we know had shambled out of apedom. Here sprawled a
Palaeogaean megalopolis compared with which the fabled Atlantis and Lemuria,
Commoriom and Uzuldaroum, and Olathoc in the land of Lomar, are recent things of
today - not even of yesterday; a megalopolis ranking with such whispered
prehuman blasphemies as Valusia, R’lyeh, Ib in the land of Mnar, and the
Nameless city of Arabia Deserta. As we flew above that tangle of stark titan
towers my imagination sometimes escaped all bounds and roved aimlessly in realms
of fantastic associations - even weaving links betwixt this lost world and some
of my own wildest dreams concerning the mad horror at the camp.
The plane’s fuel tank, in the interest of greater lightness, had been only
partly filled; hence we now had to exert caution in our explorations. Even so,
however, we covered an enormous extent of ground - or, rather, air - after
swooping down to a level where the wind became virtually negligible. There
seemed to be no limit to the mountain range, or to the length of the frightful
stone city which bordered its inner foothills. Fifty miles of flight in each
direction showed no major change in the labyrinth of rock and masonry that
clawed up corpselike through the eternal ice. There were, though, some highly
absorbing diversifications; such as the carvings on the canyon where that broad
river had once pierced the foothills and approached its sinking place in the
great range. The headlands at the stream’s entrance had been boldly carved into
Cyclopean pylons; and something about the ridgy, barrel-shaped designs stirred
up oddly vague, hateful, and confusing semi-remembrances in both Danforth and
me.
We also came upon several star-shaped open spaces, evidently public squares, and
noted various undulations in the terrain. Where a sharp hill rose, it was
generally hollowed out into some sort of rambling-stone edifice; but there were
at least two exceptions. Of these latter, one was too badly weathered to
disclose what had been on the jutting eminence, while the other still bore a
fantastic conical monument carved out of the solid rock and roughly resembling
such things as the well-known Snake Tomb in the ancient valley of Petra.
Flying inland from the mountains, we discovered that the city was not of
infinite width, even though its length along the foothills seemed endless. After
about thirty miles the grotesque stone buildings began to thin out, and in ten
more miles we came to an unbroken waste virtually without signs of sentient
artifice. The course of the river beyond the city seemed marked by a broad,
depressed line, while the land assumed a somewhat greater ruggedness, seeming to
slope slightly upward as it receded in the mist-hazed west.
So far we had made no landing, yet to leave the plateau without an attempt at
entering some of the monstrous structures would have been inconceivable.
Accordingly, we decided to find a smooth place on the foothills near our
navigable pass, there grounding the plane and preparing to do some exploration
on foot. Though these gradual slopes were partly covered with a scattering of
ruins, low flying soon disclosed an ampler number of possible landing places.
Selecting that nearest to the pass, since our flight would be across the great
range and back to camp, we succeeded about 12:30 P.M. in effecting a landing on
a smooth, hard snow field wholly devoid of obstacles and well adapted to a swift
and favorable take-off later on.
It did not seem necessary to protect the plane with a snow banking for so brief
a time and in so comfortable an absence of high winds at this level; hence we
merely saw that the landing skis were safely lodged, and that the vital parts of
the mechanism were guarded against the cold. For our foot journey we discarded
the heaviest of our flying furs, and took with us a small outfit consisting of
pocket compass, hand camera, light provisions, voluminous notebooks and paper,
geologist’s hammer and chisel, specimen bags, coil of climbing rope, and
powerful electric torches with extra batteries; this equipment having been
carried in the plane on the chance that we might be able to effect a landing,
take ground pictures, make drawings and topographical sketches, and obtain rock
specimens from some bare slope, outcropping, or mountain cave. Fortunately we
had a supply of extra paper to tear up, place in a spare specimen bag, and use
on the ancient principle of hare and hounds for marking our course in any
interior mazes we might be able to penetrate. This had been brought in case we
found some cave system with air quiet enough to allow such a rapid and easy
method in place of the usual rock-chipping method of trail blazing.
Walking cautiously downhill over the crusted snow toward the stupendous stone
labyrinth that loomed against the opalescent west, we felt almost as keen a
sense of imminent marvels as we had felt on approaching the unfathomed mountain
pass four hours previously. True, we had become visually familiar with the
incredible secret concealed by the barrier peaks; yet the prospect of actually
entering primordial walls reared by conscious beings perhaps millions of years
ago-before any known race of men could have existed - was none the less awesome
and potentially terrible in its implications of cosmic abnormality. Though the
thinness of the air at this prodigious altitude made exertion somewhat more
difficult than usual, both Danforth and I found ourselves bearing up very well,
and felt equal to almost any task which might fall to our lot. It took only a
few steps to bring us to a shapeless ruin worn level with the snow, while ten or
fifteen rods farther on there was a huge, roofless rampart still complete in its
gigantic five-pointed outline and rising to an irregular height of ten or eleven
feet. For this latter we headed; and when at last we were actually able to touch
its weathered Cyclopean blocks, we felt that we had established an unprecedented
and almost blasphemous link with forgotten aeons normally closed to our species.

This rampart, shaped like a star and perhaps three hundred feet from point to
point, was built of Jurassic sandstone blocks of irregular size, averaging 6 x 8
feet in surface. There was a row of arched loopholes or windows about four feet
wide and five feet high, spaced quite symmetrically along the points of the star
and at its inner angles, and with the bottoms about four feet from the glaciated
surface. Looking through these, we could see that the masonry was fully five
feet thick, that there were no partitions remaining within, and that there were
traces of banded carvings or bas-reliefs on the interior walls - facts we had
indeed guessed before, when flying low over this rampart and others like it.
Though lower parts must have originally existed, all traces of such things were
now wholly obscured by the deep layer of ice and snow at this point.
We crawled through one of the windows and vainly tried to decipher the nearly
effaced mural designs, but did not attempt to disturb the glaciated floor. Our
orientation flights had indicated that many buildings in the city proper were
less ice-choked, and that we might perhaps find wholly clear interiors leading
down to the true ground level if we entered those structures still roofed at the
top. Before we left the rampart we photographed it carefully, and studied its
mortar-less Cyclopean masonry with complete bewilderment. We wished that Pabodie
were present, for his engineering knowledge might have helped us guess how such
titanic blocks could have been handled in that unbelievably remote age when the
city and its outskirts were built up.
The half-mile walk downhill to the actual city, with the upper wind shrieking
vainly and savagely through the skyward peaks in the background, was something
of which the smallest details will always remain engraved on my mind. Only in
fantastic nightmares could any human beings but Danforth and me conceive such
optical effects. Between us and the churning vapors of the west lay that
monstrous tangle of dark stone towers, its outre and incredible forms impressing
us afresh at every new angle of vision. It was a mirage in solid stone, and were
it not for the photographs, I would still doubt that such a thing could be. The
general type of masonry was identical with that of the rampart we had examined;
but the extravagant shapes which this masonry took in its urban manifestations
were past all description.
Even the pictures illustrate only one or two phases of its endless variety,
preternatural massiveness, and utterly alien exoticism. There were geometrical
forms for which an Euclid would scarcely find a name - cones of all degrees of
irregularity and truncation, terraces of every sort of provocative
disproportion, shafts with odd bulbous enlargements, broken columns in curious
groups, and five-pointed or five-ridged arrangements of mad grotesqueness. As we
drew nearer we could see beneath certain transparent parts of the ice sheet, and
detect some of the tubular stone bridges that connected the crazily sprinkled
structures at various heights. Of orderly streets there seemed to be none, the
only broad open swath being a mile to the left, where the ancient river had
doubtless flowed through the town into the mountains.
Our field glasses showed the external, horizontal bands of nearly effaced
sculptures and dot groups to be very prevalent, and we could half imagine what
the city must once have looked like - even though most of the roofs and tower
tops had necessarily perished. As a whole, it had been a complex tangle of
twisted lanes and alleys, all of them deep canyons, and some little better than
tunnels because of the overhanging masonry or overarching bridges. Now,
outspread below us, it loomed like a dream fantasy against a westward mist
through whose northern end the low, reddish antarctic sun of early afternoon was
struggling to shine; and when, for a moment, that sun encountered a denser
obstruction and plunged the scene into temporary shadow, the effect was subtly
menacing in a way I can never hope to depict. Even the faint howling and piping
of the unfelt wind in the great mountain passes behind us took on a wilder note
of purposeful malignity. The last stage of our descent to the town was unusually
steep and abrupt, and a rock outcropping at the edge where the grade changed led
us to think that an artificial terrace had once existed there. Under the
glaciation, we believed, there must be a flight of steps or its equivalent.
When at last we plunged into the town itself, clambering over fallen masonry and
shrinking from the oppressive nearness and dwarfing height of omnipresent
crumbling and pitted walls, our sensations again became such that I marvel at
the amount of self-control we retained. Danforth was frankly jumpy, and began
making some offensively irrelevant speculations about the horror at the camp -
which I resented all the more because I could not help sharing certain
conclusions forced upon us by many features of this morbid survival from
nightmare antiquity. The speculations worked on his imagination, too; for in one
place - where a debris-littered alley turned a sharp corner - he insisted that
he saw faint traces of ground markings which he did not like; whilst elsewhere
he stopped to listen to a subtle, imaginary sound from some undefined point - a
muffled musical piping, he said, not unlike that of the wind in the mountain
caves, yet somehow disturbingly different. The ceaseless five-pointedness of the
surrounding architecture and of the few distinguishable mural arabesques had a
dimly sinister suggestiveness we could not escape, and gave us a touch of
terrible subconscious certainty concerning the primal entities which had reared
and dwelt in this unhallowed place.
Nevertheless, our scientific and adventurous souls were not wholly dead, and we
mechanically carried out our program of chipping specimens from all the
different rock types represented in the masonry. We wished a rather full set in
order to draw better conclusions regarding the age of the place. Nothing in the
great outer walls seemed to date from later than the Jurassic and Comanchian
periods, nor was any piece of stone in the entire place of a greater recency
than the Pliocene Age. In stark certainty, we were wandering amidst a death
which had reigned at least five hundred thousand years, and in all probability
even longer.
As we proceeded through this maze of stone-shadowed twilight we stopped at all
available apertures to study interiors and investigate entrance possibilities.
Some were above our reach, whilst others led only into ice-choked ruins as
unroofed and barren as the rampart on the hill. One, though spacious and
inviting, opened on a seemingly bottomless abyss without visible means of
descent. Now and then we had a chance to study the petrified wood of a surviving
shutter, and were impressed by the fabulous antiquity implied in the still
discernible grain. These things had come from Mesozoic gymnosperms and conifers
- especially Cretaceous cycads - and from fan palms and early angiosperms of
plainly Tertiary date. Nothing definitely later than the Pliocene could be
discovered. In the placing of these shutters - whose edges showed the former
presence of queer and long-vanished hinges - usage seemed to be varied - some
being on the outer and some on the inner side of the deep embrasures. They
seemed to have become wedged in place, thus surviving the rusting of their
former and probably metallic fixtures and fastenings.
After a time we came across a row of windows - in the bulges of a colossal
five-edged cone of undamaged apex - which led into a vast, well-preserved room
with stone flooring; but these were too high in the room to permit descent
without a rope. We had a rope with us, but did not wish to bother with this
twenty-foot drop unless obliged to-especially in this thin plateau air where
great demands were made upon the heart action. This enormous room was probably a
hall or concourse of some sort, and our electric torches showed bold, distinct,
and potentially startling sculptures arranged round the walls in broad,
horizontal bands separated by equally broad strips of conventional arabesques.
We took careful note of this spot, planning to enter here unless a more easily
gained interior were encountered.
Finally, though, we did encounter exactly the opening we wished; an archway
about six feet wide and ten feet high, marking the former end of an aerial
bridge which had spanned an alley about five feet above the present level of
glaciation. These archways, of course, were flush with upper-story floors, and
in this case one of the floors still existed. The building thus accessible was a
series of rectangular terraces on our left facing westward. That across the
alley, where the other archway yawned, was a decrepit cylinder with no windows
and with a curious bulge about ten feet above the aperture. It was totally dark
inside, and the archway seemed to open on a well of illimitable emptiness.
Heaped debris made the entrance to the vast left-hand building doubly easy, yet
for a moment we hesitated before taking advantage of the long-wished chance. For
though we had penetrated into this tangle of archaic mystery, it required fresh
resolution to carry us actually inside a complete and surviving building of a
fabulous elder world whose nature was becoming more and more hideously plain to
us. In the end, however, we made the plunge, and scrambled up over the rubble
into the gaping embrasure. The floor beyond was of great slate slabs, and seemed
to form the outlet of a long, high corridor with sculptured walls.
Observing the many inner archways which led off from it, and realizing the
probable complexity of the nest of apartments within, we decided that we must
begin our system of hare-and-hound trail blazing. Hitherto our compasses,
together with frequent glimpses of the vast mountain range between the towers in
our rear, had been enough to prevent our losing our way; but from now on, the
artificial substitute would be necessary. Accordingly we reduced our extra paper
to shreds of suitable size, placed these in a bag to be carried by Danforth, and
prepared to use them as economically as safety would allow. This method would
probably gain us immunity from straying, since there did not appear to be any
strong air currents inside the primordial masonry. If such should develop, or if
our paper supply should give out, we could of course fall back on the more
secure though more tedious and retarding method of rock chipping.
Just how extensive a territory we had opened up, it was impossible to guess
without a trial. The close and frequent connection of the different buildings
made it likely that we might cross from one to another on bridges underneath the
ice, except where impeded by local collapses and geologic rifts, for very little
glaciation seemed to have entered the massive constructions. Almost all the
areas of transparent ice had revealed the submerged windows as tightly
shuttered, as if the town had been left in that uniform state until the glacial
sheet came to crystallize the lower part for all succeeding time. Indeed, one
gained a curious impression that this place had been deliberately closed and
deserted in some dim, bygone aeon, rather than overwhelmed by any sudden
calamity or even gradual decay. Had the coming of the ice been foreseen, and had
a nameless population left en masse to seek a less doomed abode? The precise
physiographic conditions attending the formation of the ice sheet at this point
would have to wait for later solution. It had not, very plainly, been a grinding
drive. Perhaps the pressure of accumulated snows had been responsible, and
perhaps some flood from the river, or from the bursting of some ancient glacial
dam in the great range, had helped to create the special state now observable.
Imagination could conceive almost anything in connection with this place.
VI
It would be cumbrous to give a detailed, consecutive account of our wanderings
inside that cavernous, aeon-dead honeycomb of primal masonry - that monstrous
lair of elder secrets which now echoed for the first time, after uncounted
epochs, to the tread of human feet. This is especially true because so much of
the horrible drama and revelation came from a mere study of the omnipresent
mural carvings. Our flashlight photographs of those carvings will do much toward
proving the truth of what we are now disclosing, and it is lamentable that we
had not a larger film supply with us. As it was, we made crude notebook sketches
of certain salient features after all our films were used up.
The building which we had entered was one of great size and elaborateness, and
gave us an impressive notion of the architecture of that nameless geologic past.
The inner partitions were less massive than the outer walls, but on the lower
levels were excellently preserved. Labyrinthine complexity, involving curiously
irregular difference in floor levels, characterized the entire arrangement; and
we should certainly have been lost at the very outset but for the trail of torn
paper left behind us. We decided to explore the more decrepit upper parts first
of all, hence climbed aloft in the maze for a distance of some one hundred feet,
to where the topmost tier of chambers yawned snowily and ruinously open to the
polar sky. Ascent was effected over the steep, transversely ribbed stone ramps
or inclined planes which everywhere served in lieu of stairs. The rooms we
encountered were of all imaginable shapes and proportions, ranging from
five-pointed stars to triangles and perfect cubes. It might be safe to say that
their general average was about 30 x 30 feet in floor area, and 20 feet in
height, though many larger apartments existed. After thoroughly examining the
upper regions and the glacial level, we descended, story by story, into the
submerged part, where indeed we soon saw we were in a continuous maze of
connected chambers and passages probably leading over unlimited areas outside
this particular building. The Cyclopean massiveness and gigantism of everything
about us became curiously oppressive; and there was something vaguely but deeply
unhuman in all the contours, dimensions, proportions, decorations, and
constructional nuances of the blasphemously archaic stonework. We soon realized,
from what the carvings revealed, that this monstrous city was many million years
old.
We cannot yet explain the engineering principles used in the anomalous balancing
and adjustment of the vast rock masses, though the function of the arch was
clearly much relied on. The rooms we visited were wholly bare of all portable
contents, a circumstance which sustained our belief in the city’s deliberate
desertion. The prime decorative feature was the almost universal system of mural
sculpture, which tended to run in continuous horizontal bands three feet wide
and arranged from floor to ceiling in alternation with bands of equal width
given over to geometrical arabesques. There were exceptions to this rule of
arrangement, but its preponderance was overwhelming. Often, however, a series of
smooth car-touches containing oddly patterned groups of dots would be sunk along
one of the arabesque bands.
The technique, we soon saw, was mature, accomplished, and aesthetically evolved
to the highest degree of civilized mastery, though utterly alien in every detail
to any known art tradition of the human race. In delicacy of execution no
sculpture I have ever seen could approach it. The minutest details of elaborate
vegetation, or of animal life, were rendered with astonishing vividness despite
the bold scale of the carvings; whilst the conventional designs were marvels of
skillful intricacy. The arabesques displayed a profound use of mathematical
principles, and were made up of obscurely symmetrical curves and angles based on
the quantity of five. The pictorial bands followed a highly formalized
tradition, and involved a peculiar treatment of perspective, but had an artistic
force that moved us profoundly, notwithstanding the intervening gulf of vast
geologic periods. Their method of design hinged on a singular juxtaposition of
the cross section with the two-dimensional silhouette, and embodied an
analytical psychology beyond that of any known race of antiquity. It is useless
to try to compare this art with any represented in our museums. Those who see
our photographs will probably find its closest analogue in certain grotesque
conceptions of the most daring futurists.
The arabesque tracery consisted altogether of depressed lines, whose depth on
unweathered walls varied from one to two inches. When cartouches with dot groups
appeared - evidently as inscriptions in some unknown and primordial language and
alphabet - the depression of the smooth surface was perhaps an inch and a half,
and of the dots perhaps a half inch more. The pictorial bands were in
countersunk low relief, their background being depressed about two inches from
the original wall surface. In some specimens marks of a former coloration could
be detected, though for the most part the untold aeons had disintegrated and
banished any pigments which may have been applied. The more one studied the
marvelous technique, the more one admired the things. Beneath their strict
conventionalization one could grasp the minute and accurate observation and
graphic skill of the artists; and indeed, the very conventions themselves served
to symbolize and accentuate the real essence or vital differentiation of every
object delineated. We felt, too, that besides these recognizable excellences
there were others lurking beyond the reach of our perceptions. Certain touches
here and there gave vague hints of latent symbols and stimuli which another
mental and emotional background, and a fuller or different sensory equipment,
might have made of profound and poignant significance to us.
The subject matter of the sculptures obviously came from the life of the
vanished epoch of their creation, and contained a large proportion of evident
history. It is this abnormal historic-mindedness of the primal race - a chance
circumstance operating, through coincidence, miraculously in our favor - which
made the carvings so awesomely informative to us, and which caused us to place
their photography and transcription above all other considerations. In certain
rooms the dominant arrangement was varied by the presence of maps, astronomical
charts, and other scientific designs of an enlarged scale - these things giving
a naive and terrible corroboration to what we gathered from the pictorial
friezes and dadoes. In hinting at what the whole revealed, I can only hope that
my account will not arouse a curiosity greater than sane caution on the part of
those who believe me at all. It would be tragic if any were to be allured to
that realm of death and horror by the very warning meant to discourage them.
Interrupting these sculptured walls were high windows and massive twelve-foot
doorways; both now and then retaining the petrified wooden planks - elaborately
carved and polished-of the actual shutters and doors. All metal fixtures had
long ago vanished, but some of the doors remained in place and had to be forced
aside as we progressed from room to room. Window frames with odd transparent
panes - mostly elliptical - survived here and there, though in no considerable
quantity. There were also frequent niches of great magnitude, generally empty,
but once in a while containing some bizarre object carved from green soapstone
which was either broken or perhaps held too inferior to warrant removal. Other
apertures were undoubtedly connected with bygone mechanical facilities -
heating, lighting, and the like-of a sort suggested in many of the carvings.
Ceilings tended to be plain, but had sometimes been inlaid with green soapstone
or other tiles, mostly fallen now. Floors were also paved with such tiles,
though plain stonework predominated.
As I have said, all furniture and other movables were absent; but the sculptures
gave a clear idea of the strange devices which had once filled these tomblike,
echoing rooms. Above the glacial sheet the floors were generally thick with
detritus, litter, and debris, but farther down this condition decreased. In some
of the lower chambers and corridors there was little more than gritty dust or
ancient incrustations, while occasional areas had an uncanny air of newly swept
immaculateness. Of course, where rifts or collapses had occurred, the lower
levels were as littered as the upper ones. A central court - as in other
structures we had seen from the air - saved the inner regions from total
darkness; so that we seldom had to use our electric torches in the upper rooms
except when studying sculptured details. Below the ice cap, however, the
twilight deepened; and in many parts of the tangled ground level there was an
approach to absolute blackness.
To form even a rudimentary idea of our thoughts and feelings as we penetrated
this aeon-silent maze of unhuman masonry, one must correlate a hopelessly
bewildering chaos of fugitive moods, memories, and impressions. The sheer
appalling antiquity and lethal desolation of the place were enough to overwhelm
almost any sensitive person, but added to these elements were the recent
unexplained horror at the camp, and the revelations all too soon effected by the
terrible mural sculptures around us. The moment we came upon a perfect section
of carving, where no ambiguity of interpretation could exist, it took only a
brief study to give us the hideous truth - a truth which it would be naive to
claim Danforth and I had not independently suspected before, though we had
carefully refrained from even hinting it to each other. There could now be no
further merciful doubt about the nature of the beings which had built and
inhabited this monstrous dead city millions of years ago, when man’s ancestors
were primitive archaic mammals, and vast dinosaurs roamed the tropical steppes
of Europe and Asia.
We had previously clung to a desperate alternative and insisted - each to
himself - that the omnipresence of the five-pointed motifs meant only some
cultural or religious exaltation of the Archaean natural object which had so
patently embodied the quality of five-pointedness; as the decorative motifs of
Minoan Crete exalted the sacred bull, those of Egypt the scarabaeus, those of
Rome the wolf and the eagle, and those of various savage tribes some chosen
totem animal. But this lone refuge was now stripped from us, and we were forced
to face definitely the reason-shaking realization which the reader of these
pages has doubtless long ago anticipated. I can scarcely bear to write it down
in black and white even now, but perhaps that will not be necessary.
The things once rearing and dwelling in this frightful masonry in the age of
dinosaurs were not indeed dinosaurs, but far worse. Mere dinosaurs were new and
almost brainless objects - but the builders of the city were wise and old, and
had left certain traces in rocks even then laid down well nigh a thousand
million years - rocks laid down before the true life of earth had advanced
beyond plastic groups of cells - rocks laid down before the true life of earth
had existed at all. They were the makers and enslavers of that life, and above
all doubt the originals of the fiendish elder myths which things like the
Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon affrightedly hint about. They were the
great "Old Ones" that had filtered down from the stars when earth was young -
the beings whose substance an alien evolution had shaped, and whose powers were
such as this planet had never bred. And to think that only the day before
Danforth and I had actually looked upon fragments of their millennially
fossilized substance - and that poor Lake and his party had seen their complete
outlines - It is of course impossible for me to relate in proper order the
stages by which we picked up what we know of that monstrous chapter of prehuman
life. After the first shock of the certain revelation, we had to pause a while
to recuperate, and it was fully three o’clock before we got started on our
actual tour of systematic research. The sculptures in the building we entered
were of relatively late date - perhaps two million years ago-as checked up by
geological, biological, and astronomical features - and embodied an art which
would be called decadent in comparison with that of specimens we found in older
buildings after crossing bridges under the glacial sheet. One edifice hewn from
the solid rock seemed to go back forty or possibly even fifty million years - to
the lower Eocene or upper Cretaceous - and contained bas-reliefs of an artistry
surpassing anything else, with one tremendous exception, that we encountered.
That was, we have since agreed, the oldest domestic structure we traversed.
Were it not for the support of those flashlights soon to be made public, I would
refrain from telling what I found and inferred, lest I be confined as a madman.
Of course, the infinitely early parts of the patchwork tale - representing the
preterrestrial life of the star-headed beings on other planets, in other
galaxies, and in other universes - can readily be interpreted as the fantastic
mythology of those beings themselves; yet such parts sometimes involved designs
and diagrams so uncannily close to the latest findings of mathematics and
astrophysics that I scarcely know what to think. Let others judge when they see
the photographs I shall publish.
Naturally, no one set of carvings which we encountered told more than a fraction
of any connected story, nor did we even begin to come upon the various stages of
that story in their proper order. Some of the vast rooms were independent units
so far as their designs were concerned, whilst in other cases a continuous
chronicle would be carried through a series of rooms and corridors. The best of
the maps and diagrams were on the walls of a frightful abyss below even the
ancient ground level - a cavern perhaps two hundred feet square and sixty feet
high, which had almost undoubtedly been an educational center of some sort.
There were many provoking repetitions of the same material in different rooms
and buildings, since certain chapters of experience, and certain summaries or
phases of racial history, had evidently been favorites with different decorators
or dwellers. Sometimes, though, variant versions of the same theme proved useful
in settling debatable points and filling up gaps.
I still wonder that we deduced so much in the short time at our disposal. Of
course, we even now have only the barest outline - and much of that was obtained
later on from a study of the photographs and sketches we made. It may be the
effect of this later study - the revived memories and vague impressions acting
in conjunction with his general sensitiveness and with that final supposed
horror-glimpse whose essence he will not reveal even to me - which has been the
immediate source of Danforth’s present breakdown. But it had to be; for we could
not issue our warning intelligently without the fullest possible information,
and the issuance of that warning is a prime necessity. Certain lingering
influences in that unknown antarctic world of disordered time and alien natural
law make it imperative that further exploration be discouraged.
VII
The full story, so far as deciphered, will eventually appear in an official
bulletin of Miskatonic University. Here I shall sketch only the salient
highlights in a formless, rambling way. Myth or otherwise, the sculptures told
of the coming of those star-headed things to the nascent, lifeless earth out of
cosmic space - their coming, and the coming of many other alien entities such as
at certain times embark upon spatial pioneering. They seemed able to traverse
the interstellar ether on their vast membranous wings - thus oddly confirming
some curious hill folklore long ago told me by an antiquarian colleague. They
had lived under the sea a good deal, building fantastic cities and fighting
terrific battles with nameless adversaries by means of intricate devices
employing unknown principles of energy. Evidently their scientific and
mechanical knowledge far surpassed man’s today, though they made use of its more
widespread and elaborate forms only when obliged to. Some of the sculptures
suggested that they had passed through a stage of mechanized life on other
planets, but had receded upon finding its effects emotionally unsatisfying.
Their preternatural toughness of organization and simplicity of natural wants
made them peculiarly able to live on a high plane without the more specialized
fruits of artificial manufacture, and even without garments, except for
occasional protection against the elements.
It was under the sea, at first for food and later for other purposes, that they
first created earth life - using available substances according to long-known
methods. The more elaborate experiments came after the annihilation of various
cosmic enemies. They had done the same thing on other planets, having
manufactured not only necessary foods, but certain multicellular protoplasmic
masses capable of molding their tissues into all sorts of temporary organs under
hypnotic influence and thereby forming ideal slaves to perform the heavy work of
the community. These viscous masses were without doubt what Abdul Alhazred
whispered about as the "Shoggoths" in his frightful Necronomicon, though even
that mad Arab had not hinted that any existed on earth except in the dreams of
those who had chewed a certain alkaloidal herb. When the star-headed Old Ones on
this planet had synthesized their simple food forms and bred a good supply of
Shoggoths, they allowed other cell groups to develop into other forms of animal
and vegetable life for sundry purposes, extirpating any whose presence became
troublesome.
With the aid of the Shoggoths, whose expansions could be made to lift prodigious
weights, the small, low cities under the sea grew to vast and imposing
labyrinths of stone not unlike those which later rose on land. Indeed, the
highly adaptable Old Ones had lived much on land in other parts of the universe,
and probably retained many traditions of land construction. As we studied the
architecture of all these sculptured palaeogean cities, including that whose
aeon-dead corridors we were even then traversing, we were impressed by a curious
coincidence which we have not yet tried to explain, even to ourselves. The tops
of the buildings, which in the actual city around us had, of course, been
weathered into shapeless ruins ages ago, were clearly displayed in the
bas-reliefs, and showed vast clusters of needle-like spires, delicate finials on
certain cone and pyramid apexes, and tiers of thin, horizontal scalloped disks
capping cylindrical shafts. This was exactly what we had seen in that monstrous
and portentous mirage, cast by a dead city whence such skyline features had been
absent for thousands and tens of thousands of years, which loomed on our
ignorant eyes across the unfathomed mountains of madness as we first approached
poor Lake’s ill-fated camp.
Of the life of the Old Ones, both under the sea and after part of them migrated
to land, volumes could be written. Those in shallow water had continued the
fullest use of the eyes at the ends of their five main head tentacles, and had
practiced the arts of sculpture and of writing in quite the usual way - the
writing accomplished with a stylus on waterproof waxen surfaces. Those lower
down in the ocean depths, though they used a curious phosphorescent organism to
furnish light, pieced out their vision with obscure special senses operating
through the prismatic cilia on their heads - senses which rendered all the Old
Ones partly independent of light in emergencies. Their forms of sculpture and
writing had changed curiously during the descent, embodying certain apparently
chemical coating processes - probably to secure phosphorescence - which the
basreliefs could not make clear to us. The beings moved in the sea partly by
swimming - using the lateral crinoid arms - and partly by wriggling with the
lower tier of tentacles containing the pseudofeet. Occasionally they
accomplished long swoops with the auxiliary use of two or more sets of their
fanlike folding wings. On land they locally used the pseudofeet, but now and
then flew to great heights or over long distances with their wings. The many
slender tentacles into which the crinoid arms branched were infinitely delicate,
flexible, strong, and accurate in muscular-nervous coordination - ensuring the
utmost skill and dexterity in all artistic and other manual operations.
The toughness of the things was almost incredible. Even the terrific pressure of
the deepest sea bottoms appeared powerless to harm them. Very few seemed to die
at all except by violence, and their burial places were very limited. The fact
that they covered their vertically inhumed dead with five-pointed inscribed
mounds set up thoughts in Danforth and me which made a fresh pause and
recuperation necessary after the sculptures revealed it. The beings multiplied
by means of spores - like vegetable pteridophytes, as Lake had suspected - but,
owing to their prodigious toughness and longevity, and consequent lack of
replacement needs, they did not encourage the large-scale development of new
prothallia except when they had new regions to colonize. The young matured
swiftly, and received an education evidently beyond any standard we can imagine.
The prevailing intellectual and aesthetic life was highly evolved, and produced
a tenaciously enduring set of customs and institutions which I shall describe
more fully in my coming monograph. These varied slightly according to sea or
land residence, but had the same foundations and essentials.
Though able, like vegetables, to derive nourishment from inorganic substances,
they vastly preferred organic and especially animal food. They ate uncooked
marine life under the sea, but cooked their viands on land. They hunted game and
raised meat herds - slaughtering with sharp weapons whose odd marks on certain
fossil bones our expedition had noted. They resisted all ordinary temperatures
marvelously, and in their natural state could live in water down to freezing.
When the great chill of the Pleistocene drew on, however - nearly a million
years ago-the land dwellers had to resort to special measures, including
artificial heating - until at last the deadly cold appears to have driven them
back into the sea. For their prehistoric flights through cosmic space, legend
said, they absorbed certain chemicals and became almost independent of eating,
breathing, or heat conditions - but by the time of the great cold they had lost
track of the method. In any case they could not have prolonged the artificial
state indefinitely without harm.
Being nonpairing and semivegetable in structure, the Old Ones had no biological
basis for the family phase of mammal life, but seemed to organize large
households on the principles of comfortable space-utility and - as we deduced
from the pictured occupations and diversions of co-dwellers - congenial mental
association. In furnishing their homes they kept everything in the center of the
huge rooms, leaving all the wall spaces free for decorative treatment. Lighting,
in the case of the land inhabitants, was accomplished by a device probably
electro-chemical in nature. Both on land and under water they used curious
tables, chairs and couches like cylindrical frames - for they rested and slept
upright with folded-down tentacles - and racks for hinged sets of dotted
surfaces forming their books.
Government was evidently complex and probably socialistic, though no certainties
in this regard could be deduced from the sculptures we saw. There was extensive
commerce, both local and between different cities - certain small, flat
counters, five-pointed and inscribed, serving as money. Probably the smaller of
the various greenish soapstones found by our expedition were pieces of such
currency. Though the culture was mainly urban, some agriculture and much stock
raising existed. Mining and a limited amount of manufacturing were also
practiced. Travel was very frequent, but permanent migration seemed relatively
rare except for the vast colonizing movements by which the race expanded. For
personal locomotion no external aid was used, since in land, air, and water
movement alike the Old Ones seemed to possess excessively vast capacities for
speed. Loads, however, were drawn by beasts of burden - Shoggoths under the sea,
and a curious variety of primitive vertebrates in the later years of land
existence.
These vertebrates, as well as an infinity of other life forms - animal and
vegetable, marine, terrestrial, and aerial - were the products of unguided
evolution acting on life cells made by the Old Ones, but escaping beyond their
radius of attention. They had been suffered to develop unchecked because they
had not come in conflict with the dominant beings. Bothersome forms, of course,
were mechanically exterminated. It interested us to see in some of the very last
and most decadent sculptures a shambling, primitive mammal, used sometimes for
food and sometimes as an amusing buffoon by the land dwellers, whose vaguely
simian and human foreshadowings were unmistakable. In the building of land
cities the huge stone blocks of the high towers were generally lifted by
vast-winged pterodactyls of a species heretofore unknown to paleontology.
The persistence with which the Old Ones survived various geologic changes and
convulsions of the earth’s crust was little short of miraculous. Though few or
none of their first cities seem to have remained beyond the Archaean Age, there
was no interruption in their civilization or in the transmission of their
records. Their original place of advent to the planet was the Antarctic Ocean,
and it is likely that they came not long after the matter forming the moon was
wrenched from the neighboring South Pacific. According to one of the sculptured
maps the whole globe was then under water, with stone cities scattered farther
and farther from the antarctic as aeons passed. Another map shows a vast bulk of
dry land around the south pole, where it is evident that some of the beings made
experimental settlements, though their main centers were transferred to the
nearest sea bottom. Later maps, which display the land mass as cracking and
drifting, and sending certain detached parts northward, uphold in a striking way
the theories of continental drift lately advanced by Taylor, Wegener, and Joly.
With the upheaval of new land in the South Pacific tremendous events began. Some
of the marine cities were hopelessly shattered, yet that was not the worst
misfortune. Another race - a land race of beings shaped like octopi and probably
corresponding to fabulous prehuman spawn of Cthulhu - soon began filtering down
from cosmic infinity and precipitated a -monstrous war which for a time drove
the Old Ones wholly back to the sea - a colossal blow in view of the increasing
land settlements. Later peace was made, and the new lands were given to the
Cthulhu spawn whilst the Old Ones held the sea and the older lands. New land
cities were founded - the greatest of them in the antarctic, for this region of
first arrival was sacred. From then on, as before, the antarctic remained the
center of the Old Ones’ civilization, and all the cities built there by the
Cthulhu spawn were blotted out. Then suddenly the lands of the Pacific sank
again, taking with them the frightful stone city of R’lyeh and all the cosmic
octopi, so that the Old Ones were again supreme on the planet except for one
shadowy fear about which they did not like to speak. At a rather later age their
cities dotted all the land and water areas of the globe - hence the
recommendation in my coming monograph that some archaeologist make systematic
borings with Pabodie’s type of apparatus in certain widely separated regions.
The steady trend down the ages was from water to land - a movement encouraged by
the rise of new land masses, though the ocean was never wholly deserted. Another
cause of the landward movement was the new difficulty in breeding and managing
the Shoggoths upon which successful sea life depended. With the march of time,
as the sculptures sadly confessed, the art of creating new life from inorganic
matter had been lost, so that the Old Ones had to depend on the molding of forms
already in existence. On land the great reptiles proved highly tractable; but
the Shoggoths of the sea, reproducing by fission and acquiring a dangerous
degree of accidental intelligence, presented for a time a formidable problem.
They had always been controlled through the hypnotic suggestions of the Old
Ones, and had modeled their tough plasticity into various useful temporary limbs
and organs; but now their self-modeling powers were sometimes exercised
independently, and in various imitative forms implanted by past suggestion. They
had, it seems, developed a semistable brain whose separate and occasionally
stubborn volition echoed the will of the Old Ones without always obeying it.
Sculptured images of these Shoggoths filled Danforth and me with horror and
loathing. They were normally shapeless entities composed of a viscous jelly
which looked like an agglutination of bubbles, and each averaged about fifteen
feet in diameter when a sphere. They had, however, a constantly shifting shape
and volume - throwing out temporary developments or forming apparent organs of
sight, hearing, and speech in imitation of their masters, either spontaneously
or according to suggestion.
They seem to have become peculiarly intractable toward the middle of the Permian
Age, perhaps one hundred and fifty million years ago, when a veritable war of
resubjugation was waged upon them by the marine Old Ones. Pictures of this war,
and of the headless, slime-coated fashion in which the Shoggoths typically left
their slain victims, held a marvelously fearsome quality despite the intervening
abyss of untold ages. The Old Ones had used curious weapons of molecular and
atomic disturbances against the rebel entities, and in the end had achieved a
complete victory. Thereafter the sculptures showed a period in which Shoggoths
were tamed and broken by armed Old Ones as the wild horses of the American west
were tamed by cowboys. Though during the rebellion the Shoggoths had shown an
ability to live out of water, this transition was not encouraged - since their
usefulness on land would hardly have been commensurate with the trouble of their
management.
During the Jurassic Age the Old Ones met fresh adversity in the form of a new
invasion from outer space - this time by half-fungous, half-crustacean creatures
- creatures undoubtedly the same as those figuring in certain whispered hill
legends of the north, and remembered in the Himalayas as the Mi-Go, or
abominable Snow Men. To fight these beings the Old Ones attempted, for the first
time since their terrene advent, to sally forth again into the planetary ether;
but, despite all traditional preparations, found it no longer possible to leave
the earth’s atmosphere. Whatever the old secret of interstellar travel had been,
it was now definitely lost to the race. In the end the Mi-Go drove the Old Ones
out of all the northern lands, though they were powerless to disturb those in
the sea. Little by little the slow retreat of the elder race to their original
antarctic habitat was beginning.
It was curious to note from the pictured battles that both the Cthulhu spawn and
the Mi-Go seem to have been composed of matter more widely different from that
which we know than was the substance of the Old Ones. They were able to undergo
transformations and reintegrations impossible for their adversaries, and seem
therefore to have originally come from even remoter gulfs of the cosmic space.
The Old Ones, but for their abnormal toughness and peculiar vital properties,
were strictly material, and must have had their absolute origin within the known
space-time continuum - whereas the first sources of the other beings can only be
guessed at with bated breath. All this, of course, assuming that the
non-terrestrial linkages and the anomalies ascribed to the invading foes are not
pure mythology. Conceivably, the Old Ones might have invented a cosmic framework
to account for their occasional defeats, since historical interest and pride
obviously formed their chief psychological element. It is significant that their
annals failed to mention many advanced and potent races of beings whose mighty
cultures and towering cities figure persistently in certain obscure legends.
The changing state of the world through long geologic ages appeared with
startling vividness in many of the sculptured maps and scenes. In certain cases
existing science will require revision, while in other cases its bold deductions
are magnificently confirmed. As I have said, the hypothesis of Taylor, Wegener,
and Joly that all the continents are fragments of an original antarctic land
mass which cracked from centrifugal force and drifted apart over a technically
viscous lower surface - an hypothesis suggested by such things as the
complementary outlines of Africa and South America, and the way the great
mountain chains are rolled and shoved up - receives striking support from this
uncanny source.
Maps evidently showing the Carboniferous world of an hundred million or more
years ago displayed significant rifts and chasms destined later to separate
Africa from the once continuous realms of Europe (then the Valusia of primal
legend), Asia, the Americas, and the antarctic continent. Other charts - and
most significantly one in connection with the founding fifty million years ago
of the vast dead city around us - showed all the present continents well
differentiated. And in the latest discoverable specimen - dating perhaps from
the Pliocene Age - the approximate world of today appeared quite clearly despite
the linkage of Alaska with Siberia, of North America with Europe through
Greenland, and of South America with the antarctic continent through Graham
Land. In the Carboniferous map the whole globe-ocean floor and rifted land mass
alike - bore symbols of the Old Ones’ vast stone cities, but in the later charts
the gradual recession toward the antarctic became very plain. The final Pliocene
specimen showed no land cities except on the antarctic continent and the tip of
South America, nor any ocean cities north of the fiftieth parallel of South
Latitude. Knowledge and interest in the northern world, save for a study of
coast lines probably made during long exploration flights on those fanlike
membranous wings, had evidently declined to zero among the Old Ones.
Destruction of cities through the upthrust of mountains, the centrifugal rending
of continents, the seismic convulsions of land or sea bottom, and other natural
causes, was a matter of common record; and it was curious to observe how fewer
and fewer replacements were made as the ages wore on. The vast dead megalopolis
that yawned around us seemed to be the last general center of the race - built
early in the Cretaceous Age after a titanic earth buckling had obliterated a
still vaster predecessor not far distant. It appeared that this general region
was the most sacred spot of all, where reputedly the first Old Ones had settled
on a primal sea bottom. In the new city - many of whose features we could
recognize in the sculptures, but which stretched fully a hundred miles along the
mountain range in each direction beyond the farthest limits of our aerial survey
- there were reputed to be preserved certain sacred stones forming part of the
first sea-bottom city, which thrust up to light after long epochs in the course
of the general crumbling of strata.
VIII
Naturally, Danforth and I studied with especial interest and a peculiarly
personal sense of awe everything pertaining to the immediate district in which
we were. Of this local material there was naturally a vast abundance; and on the
tangled ground level of the city we were lucky enough to find a house of very
late date whose walls, though somewhat damaged by a neighboring rift, contained
sculptures of decadent workmanship carrying the story of the region much beyond
the period of the Pliocene map whence we derived our last general glimpse of the
prehuman world. This was the last place we examined in detail, since what we
found there gave us a fresh immediate objective.
Certainly, we were in one of the strangest, weirdest, and most terrible of all
the corners of earth’s globe. Of all existing lands, it was infinitely the most
ancient. The conviction grew upon us that this hideous upland must indeed be the
fabled nightmare plateau of Leng which even the mad author of the Necronomicon
was reluctant to discuss. The great mountain chain was tremendously long -
starting as a low range at Luitpold Land on the east coast of Weddell Sea and
virtually crossing the entire continent. That really high part stretched in a
mighty arc from about Latitude 82°, E. Longitude 60° to Latitude 70°, E.
Longitude 115°, with its concave side toward our camp and its seaward end in the
region of that long, ice-locked coast whose hills were glimpsed by Wilkes and
Mawson at the antarctic circle.
Yet even more monstrous exaggerations of nature seemed disturbingly close at
hand. I have said that these peaks are higher than the Himalayas, but the
sculptures forbid me to say that they are earth’s highest. That grim honor is
beyond doubt reserved for something which half the sculptures hesitated to
record at all, whilst others approached it with obvious repugnance and
trepidation. It seems that there was one part of the ancient land - the first
part that ever rose from the waters after the earth had flung off the moon and
the Old Ones had seeped down, from the stars - which had come to be shunned as
vaguely and namelessly evil. Cities built there had crumbled before their time,
and had been found suddenly deserted. Then when the first great earth buckling
had convulsed the region in the Comanchian Age, a frightful line of peaks had
shot suddenly up amidst the most appalling din and chaos - and earth had
received her loftiest and most terrible mountains.
If the scale of the carvings was correct, these abhorred things must have been
much over forty thousand feet high - radically vaster than even the shocking
mountains of madness we had crossed. They extended, it appeared, from about
Latitude 77°, E. Longitude 70° to Latitude 70°, E. Longitude 100° - less than
three hundred miles away from the dead city, so that we would have spied their
dreaded summits in the dim western distance had it not been for that vague,
opalescent haze. Their northern end must likewise be visible from the long
antarctic circle coast line at Queen Mary Land.
Some of the Old Ones, in the decadent days, had made strange prayers to those
mountains - but none ever went near them or dared to guess what lay beyond. No
human eye had ever seen them, and as I studied the emotions conveyed in the
carvings, I prayed that none ever might. There are protecting hills along the
coast beyond them - Queen Mary and Kaiser Wilhelm Lands - and I thank Heaven no
one has been able to land and climb those hills. I am not as sceptical about old
tales and fears as I used to be, and I do not laugh now at the prehuman
sculptor’s notion that lightning paused meaningfully now and then at each of the
brooding crests, and that an unexplained glow shone from one of those terrible
pinnacles all through the long polar night. There may be a very real and very
monstrous meaning in the old Pnakotic whispers about Kadath in the Cold Waste.
But the terrain close at hand was hardly less strange, even if less namelessly
accursed. Soon after the founding of the city the great mountain range became
the seat of the principal temples, and many carvings showed what grotesque and
fantastic towers had pierced the sky where now we saw only the curiously
clinging cubes and ramparts. In the course of ages the caves had appeared, and
had been shaped into adjuncts of the temples. With the advance of still later
epochs, all the limestone veins of the region were hollowed out by ground
waters, so that the mountains, the foothills, and the plains below them were a
veritable network of connected caverns and galleries. Many graphic sculptures
told of explorations deep underground, and of the final discovery of the Stygian
sunless sea that lurked at earth’s bowels.
This vast nighted gulf had undoubtedly been worn by the great river which flowed
down from the nameless and horrible westward mountains, and which had formerly
turned at the base of the Old Ones’ range and flowed beside that chain into the
Indian Ocean between Budd and Totten Lands on Wilkes’s coast line. Little by
little it had eaten away the limestone hill base at its turning, till at last
its sapping currents reached the caverns of the ground waters and joined with
them in digging a deeper abyss. Finally its whole bulk emptied into the hollow
hills and left the old bed toward the ocean dry. Much of the later city as we
now found it had been built over that former bed. The Old Ones, understanding
what had happened, and exercising their always keen artistic sense, had carved
into ornate pylons those headlands of the foothills where the great stream began
its descent into eternal darkness.
This river, once crossed by scores of noble stone bridges, was plainly the one
whose extinct course we had seen in our aeroplane survey. Its position in
different carvings of the city helped us to orient ourselves to the scene as it
had been at various stages of the region’s age-long, aeon-dead history, so that
we were able to sketch a hasty but careful map of the salient features -
squares, important buildings, and the like - for guidance in further
explorations. We could soon reconstruct in fancy the whole stupendous thing as
it was a million or ten million or fifty million years ago, for the sculptures
told us exactly what the buildings and mountains and squares and suburbs and
landscape setting and luxuriant Tertiary vegetation had looked like. It must
have had a marvelous and mystic beauty, and as I thought of it, I almost forgot
the clammy sense of sinister oppression with which the city’s inhuman age and
massiveness and deadness and remoteness and glacial twilight had choked and
weighed on my spirit. Yet according to certain carvings, the denizens of that
city had themselves known the clutch of oppressive terror; for there was a
somber and recurrent type of scene in which the Old Ones were shown in the act
of recoiling affrightedly from some object - never allowed to appear in the
design - found in the great river and indicated as having been washed down
through waving, vine-draped cycad forests from those horrible westward
mountains.
It was only in the one late-built house with the decadent carvings that we
obtained any foreshadowing of the final calamity leading to the city’s
desertion. Undoubtedly there must have been many sculptures of the same age
elsewhere, even allowing for the slackened energies and aspirations of a
stressful and uncertain period; indeed, very certain evidence of the existence
of others came to us shortly afterward. But this was the first and only set we
directly encountered. We meant to look farther later on; but as I have said,
immediate conditions dictated another present objective. There would, though,
have been a limit - for after all hope of a long future occupancy of the place
had perished among the Old Ones, there could not but have been a complete
cessation of mural decoration. The ultimate blow, of course, was the coming of
the great cold which once held most of the earth in thrall, and which has never
departed from the ill-fated poles - the great cold that, at the world’s other
extremity, put an end to the fabled lands of Lomar and Hyperborea.
Just when this tendency began in the antarctic, it would be hard to say in terms
of exact years. Nowadays we set the beginning of the general glacial periods at
a distance of about five hundred thousand years from the present, but at the
poles the terrible scourge must have commenced much earlier. All quantitative
estimates are partly guesswork, but it is quite likely that the decadent
sculptures were made considerably less than a million years ago, and that the
actual desertion of the city was complete long before the conventional opening
of the Pleistocene - five hundred thousand years ago - as reckoned in terms of
the earth’s whole surface.
In the decadent sculptures there were signs of thinner vegetation everywhere,
and of a decreased country life on the part of the Old Ones. Heating devices
were shown in the houses, and winter travelers were represented as muffled in
protective fabrics. Then we saw a series of cartouches - the continuous band
arrangement being frequently interrupted in these late carvings - depicting a
constantly growing migration to the nearest refuges of greater warmth - some
fleeing to cities under the sea off the far-away coast, and some clambering down
through networks of limestone caverns in the hollow hills to the neighboring
black abyss of subterrene waters.
In the end it seems to have been the neighboring abyss which received the
greatest colonization. This was partly due, no doubt, to the traditional
sacredness of this special region, but may have been more conclusively
determined by the opportunities it gave for continuing the use of the great
temples on the honeycombed mountains, and for retaining the vast land city as a
place of summer residence and base of communication with various mines. The
linkage of old and new abodes was made more effective by means of several
gradings and improvements along the connecting routes, including the chiseling
of numerous direct tunnels from the ancient metropolis to the black abyss -
sharply down-pointing tunnels whose mouths we carefully drew, according to our
most thoughtful estimates, on the guide map we were compiling. It was obvious
that at least two of these tunnels lay within a reasonable exploring distance of
where we were - both being on the mountainward edge of the city, one less than a
quarter of a mile toward the ancient river course, and the other perhaps twice
that distance in the opposite direction.
The abyss, it seems, had shelving shores of dry land at certain places, but the
Old Ones built their new city under water - no doubt because of its greater
certainty of uniform warmth. The depth of the hidden sea appears to have been
very great, so that the earth’s internal heat could ensure its habitability for
an indefinite period. The beings seemed to have had no trouble in adapting
themselves to part-time - and eventually, of course, whole-time - residence
under water, since they had never allowed their gill systems to atrophy. There
were many sculptures which showed how they had always frequently visited their
submarine kinsfolk elsewhere, and how they had habitually bathed on the deep
bottom of their great river. The darkness of inner earth could likewise have
been no deterrent to a race accustomed to long antarctic nights.
Decadent though their style undoubtedly was, these latest carvings had a truly
epic quality where they told of the building of the new city in the cavern sea.
The Old Ones had gone about it scientifically - quarrying insoluble rocks from
the heart of the honeycombed mountains, and employing expert workers from the
nearest submarine city to perform the construction according to the best
methods. These workers brought with them all that was necessary to establish the
new venture - Shoggoth tissue from which to breed stone lifters and subsequent
beasts of burden for the cavern city, and other protoplasmic matter to mold into
phosphorescent organisms for lighting purposes.
At last a mighty metropolis rose on the bottom of that Stygian sea, its
architecture much like that of the city above, and its workmanship displaying
relatively little decadence because of the precise mathematical element inherent
in building operations. The newly bred Shoggoths grew to enormous size and
singular intelligence, and were represented as taking and executing orders with
marvelous quickness. They seemed to converse with the Old Ones by mimicking
their voices - a sort of musical piping over a wide range, if poor Lake’s
dissection had indicated aright - and to work more from spoken commands than
from hypnotic suggestions as in earlier times. They were, however, kept in
admirable control. The phosphorescent organisms supplied light With vast
effectiveness, and doubtless atoned for the loss of the familiar polar auroras
of the outer-world night.
Art and decoration were pursued, though of course with a certain decadence. The
Old Ones seemed to realize this falling off themselves, and in many cases
anticipated the policy of Constantine the Great by transplanting especially fine
blocks of ancient carving from their land city, just as the emperor, in a
similar age of decline, stripped Greece and Asia of their finest art to give his
new Byzantine capital greater splendors than its own people could create. That
the transfer of sculptured blocks had not been more extensive was doubtless
owing to the fact that the land city was not at first wholly abandoned. By the
time total abandonment did occur - and it surely must have occurred before the
polar Pleistocene was far advanced - the Old Ones had perhaps become satisfied
with their decadent art - or had ceased to recognize the superior merit of the
older carvings. At any rate, the aeon-silent ruins around us had certainly
undergone no wholesale sculptural denudation, though all the best separate
statues, like other movables, had been taken away.
The decadent cartouches and dadoes telling this story were, as I have said, the
latest we could find in our limited search. They left us with a picture of the
Old Ones shuttling back and forth betwixt the land city in summer and the
sea-cavern city in winter, and sometimes trading with the sea-bottom cities off
the antarctic coast. By this time the ultimate doom of the land city must have
been recognized, for the sculptures showed many signs of the cold’s malign
encroachments. Vegetation was declining, and the terrible snows of the winter no
longer melted completely even in midsummer. The saunan livestock were nearly all
dead, and the mammals were standing it none too well. To keep on with the work
of the upper world it had become necessary to adapt some of the amorphous and
curiously cold-resistant Shoggoths to land life - a thing the Old Ones had
formerly been reluctant to do. The great river was now lifeless, and the upper
sea had lost most of its denizens except the seals and whales. All the birds had
flown away, save only the great, grotesque penguins.
What had happened afterward we could only guess. How long had the new sea-cavern
city survived? Was it still down there, a stony corpse in eternal blackness? Had
the subterranean waters frozen at last? To what fate had the ocean-bottom cities
of the outer world been delivered? Had any of the Old Ones shifted north ahead
of the creeping ice cap? Existing geology shows no trace of their presence. Had
the frightful Mi-Go been still a menace in the outer land world of the north?
Could one be sure of what might or might not linger, even to this day, in the
lightless and unplumbed abysses of earth’s deepest waters? Those things had
seemingly been able to withstand any amount of pressure - and men of the sea
have fished up curious objects at times. And has the killer-whale theory really
explained the savage and mysterious scars on antarctic seals noticed a
generation ago by Borchgrevingk?
The specimens found by poor Lake did not enter into these guesses, for their
geologic setting proved them to have lived at what must have been a very early
date in the land city’s history. They were, according to their location,
certainly not less than thirty million years old, and we reflected that in their
day the sea-cavern city, and indeed the cavern itself, had had no existence.
They would have remembered an older scene, with lush Tertiary vegetation
everywhere, a younger land city of flourishing arts around them, and a great
river sweeping northward along the base of the mighty mountains toward a
far-away tropic ocean.
And yet we could not help thinking about these specimens - especially about the
eight perfect ones that were missing from Lake’s hideously ravaged camp. There
was something abnormal about that whole business - the strange things we had
tried so hard to lay to somebody’s madness - those frightful graves - the amount
and nature of the missing material - Gedney - the unearthly toughness of those
archaic monstrosities, and the queer vital freaks the sculptures now showed the
race to have - Danforth and I had seen a good deal in the last few hours, and
were prepared to believe and keep silent about many appalling and incredible
secrets of primal nature.
IX
I have said that our study of the decadent sculptures brought about a change in
our immediate objective. This, of course, had to do with the chiseled avenues to
the black inner world, of whose existence we had not known before, but which we
were now eager to find and traverse. From the evident scale of the carvings we
deduced that a steeply descending walk of about a mile through either of the
neighboring tunnels would bring us to the brink of the dizzy, sunless cliffs
about the great abyss; down whose sides paths, improved by the Old Ones, led to
the rocky shore of the hidden and nighted ocean. To behold this fabulous gulf in
stark reality was a lure which seemed impossible of resistance once we knew of
the thing - yet we realized we must begin the quest at once if we expected to
include it in our present trip.
It was now 8 P.M., and we did not have enough battery replacements to let our
torches burn on forever. We had done so much studying and copying below the
glacial level that our battery supply had had at least five hours of nearly
continuous use, and despite the special dry cell formula, would obviously be
good for only about four more - though by keeping one torch unused, except for
especially interesting or difficult places, we might manage to eke out a safe
margin beyond that. It would not do to be without a light in these Cyclopean
catacombs, hence in order to make the abyss trip we must give up all further
mural deciphering. Of course we intended to revisit the place for days and
perhaps weeks of intensive study and photography - curiosity having long ago got
the better of horror - but just now we must hasten.
Our supply of trail-blazing paper was far from unlimited, and we were reluctant
to sacrifice spare notebooks or sketching paper to augment it, but we did let
one large notebook go. If worse came to worst we could resort to rock chipping -
and of course it would be possible, even in case of really lost direction, to
work up to full daylight by one channel or another if granted sufficient time
for plentiful trial and error. So at last we set off eagerly in the indicated
direction of the nearest tunnel.
According to the carvings from which we had made our map, the desired tunnel
mouth could not be much more than a quarter of a mile from where we stood; the
intervening space showing solid-looking buildings quite likely to be penetrable
still at a sub-glacial level. The opening itself would be in the basement - on
the angle nearest the foothills - of a vast five-pointed structure of evidently
public and perhaps ceremonial nature, which we tried to identify from our aerial
survey of the ruins.
No such structure came to our minds as we recalled our flight, hence we
concluded that its upper parts had been greatly damaged, or that it had been
totally shattered in an ice rift we had noticed. In the latter case the tunnel
would probably turn out to be choked, so that we would have to try the next
nearest one - the one less than a mile to the north. The intervening river
course prevented our trying any of the more southern tunnels on this trip; and
indeed, if both of the neighboring ones were choked it was doubtful whether our
batteries would warrant an attempt on the next northerly one - about a mile
beyond our second choice.
As we threaded our dim way through the labyrinth with the aid of map and compass
- traversing rooms and corridors in every stage of ruin or preservation,
clambering up ramps, crossing upper floors and bridges and clambering down
again, encountering choked doorways and piles of debris, hastening now and then
along finely preserved and uncannily immaculate stretches, taking false leads
and retracing our way (in such cases removing the blind paper trail we had
left), and once in a while striking the bottom of an open shaft through which
daylight poured or trickled down - we were repeatedly tantalized by the
sculptured walls along our route. Many must have told tales of immense
historical importance, and only the prospect of later visits reconciled us to
the need of passing them by. As it was, we slowed down once in a while and
turned on our second torch. If we had had more films, we would certainly have
paused briefly to photograph certain bas-reliefs, but time-consuming
hand-copying was clearly out of the question.
I come now once more to a place where the temptation to hesitate, or to hint
rather than state, is very strong. It is necessary, however, to reveal the rest
in order to justify my course in discouraging further exploration. We had wormed
our way very close to the computed site of the tunnel’s mouth - having crossed a
second-story bridge to what seemed plainly the tip of a pointed wall, and
descended to a ruinous corridor especially rich in decadently elaborate and
apparently ritualistic sculptures of late workmanship - when, shortly before
8:30 P.M., Danforth’s keen young nostrils gave us the first hint of something
unusual. If we had had a dog with us, I suppose we would have been warned
before. At first we could not precisely say what was wrong with the formerly
crystal-pure air, but after a few seconds our memories reacted only too
definitely. Let me try to state the thing without flinching. There was an odor -
and that odor was vaguely, subtly, and unmistakably akin to what had nauseated
us upon opening the insane grave of the horror poor Lake had dissected.
Of course the revelation was not as clearly cut at the time as it sounds now.
There were several conceivable explanations, and we did a good deal of
indecisive whispering. Most important of all, we did not retreat without further
investigation; for having come this far, we were loath to be balked by anything
short of certain disaster. Anyway, what we must have suspected was altogether
too wild to believe. Such things did not happen in any normal world. It was
probably sheer irrational instinct which made us dim our single torch - tempted
no longer by the decadent and sinister sculptures that leered menacingly from
the oppressive walls - and which softened our progress to a cautious tiptoeing
and crawling over the increasingly littered floor and heaps of debris.
Danforth’s eyes as well as nose proved better than mine, for it was likewise he
who first noticed the queer aspect of the debris after we had passed many
half-choked arches leading to chambers and corridors on the ground level. It did
not look quite as it ought after countless thousands of years of desertion, and
when we cautiously turned on more light we saw that a kind of swath seemed to
have been lately tracked through it. The irregular nature of the litter
precluded any definite marks, but in the smoother places there were suggestions
of the dragging of heavy objects. Once we thought there was a hint of parallel
tracks as if of runners. This was what made us pause again.
It was during that pause that we caught - simultaneously this time - the other
odor ahead. Paradoxically, it was both a less frightful and more frightful odor
- less frightful intrinsically, but infinitely appalling in this place under the
known circumstances - unless, of course, Gedney - for the odor was the plain and
familiar one of common petrol - every-day gasoline.
Our motivation after that is something I will leave to psychologists. We knew
now that some terrible extension of the camp horrors must have crawled into this
nighted burial place of the aeons, hence could not doubt any longer the
existence of nameless conditions - present or at least recent just ahead. Yet in
the end we did let sheer burning curiosity-or anxiety-or autohypnotism - or
vague thoughts of responsibility toward Gedney - or what not - drive us on.
Danforth whispered again of the print he thought he had seen at the alley
turning in the ruins above; and of the faint musical piping - potentially of
tremendous significance in the light of Lake’s dissection report, despite its
close resemblance to the cave-mouth echoes of the windy peaks - which he thought
he had shortly afterward half heard from unknown depths below. I, in my turn,
whispered of how the camp was left - of what had disappeared, and of how the
madness of a lone survivor might have conceived the inconceivable - a wild trip
across the monstrous mountains and a descent into the unknown, primal masonry -
But we could not convince each other, or even ourselves, of anything definite.
We had turned off all light as we stood still, and vaguely noticed that a trace
of deeply filtered upper day kept the blackness from being absolute. Having
automatically begun to move ahead, we guided ourselves by occasional flashes
from our torch. The disturbed debris formed an impression we could not shake
off, and the smell of gasoline grew stronger. More and more ruin met our eyes
and hampered our feet, until very soon we saw that the forward way was about to
cease. We had been all too correct in our pessimistic guess about that rift
glimpsed from the air. Our tunnel quest was a blind one, and we were not even
going to be able to reach the basement out of which the abyssward aperture
opened.
The torch, flashing over the grotesquely carved walls of the blocked corridor in
which we stood, showed several doorways in various states of obstruction; and
from one of them the gasoline odor-quite submerging that other hint of odor -
came with especial distinctness. As we looked more steadily, we saw that beyond
a doubt there had been a slight and recent clearing away of debris from that
particular opening. Whatever the lurking horror might be, we believed the direct
avenue toward it was now plainly manifest. I do not think anyone will wonder
that we waited an appreciable time before making any further motion.
And yet, when we did venture inside that black arch, our first impression was
one of anticlimax. For amidst the littered expanse of that sculptured Crypt - a
perfect cube with sides of about twenty feet - there remained no recent object
of instantly discernible size; so that we looked instinctively, though in vain,
for a farther doorway. In another moment, however, Danforth’s sharp vision had
descried a place where the floor debris had been disturbed; and we turned on
both torches full strength. Though what we saw in that light was actually simple
and trifling, I am none the less reluctant to tell of it because of what it
implied. It was a rough leveling of the debris, upon which several small objects
lay carelessly scattered, and at one corner of which a considerable amount of
gasoline must have been spilled lately enough to leave a strong odor even at
this extreme superplateau altitude. In other words, it could not be other than a
sort of camp - a camp made by questing beings who, like us, had been turned back
by the unexpectedly choked way to the abyss.
Let me be plain. The scattered objects were, so far as substance was concerned,
all from Lake’s camp; and consisted of tin cans as queerly opened as those we
had seen at that ravaged place, many spent matches, three illustrated books more
or less curiously smudged, an empty ink bottle with its pictorial and
instructional carton, a broken fountain pen, some oddly snipped fragments of fur
and tent cloth, a used electric battery with circular of directions, a folder
that came with our type of tent heater, and a sprinkling of crumpled papers. It
was all bad enough but when we smoothed out the papers and looked at what was on
them, we felt we had come to the worst. We had found certain inexplicably
blotted papers at the camp which might have prepared us, yet the effect of the
sight down there in the prehuman vaults of a nightmare city was almost too much
to bear.
A mad Gedney might have made the groups of dots in imitation of those found on
the greenish soapstones, just as the dots on those insane five-pointed grave
mounds might have been made; and he might conceivably have prepared rough, hasty
sketches - varying in their accuracy or lack of it - which outlined the
neighboring parts of the city and traced the way from a circularly represented
place outside our previous route - a place we identified as a great cylindrical
tower in the carvings and as a vast circular gulf glimpsed in our aerial survey
- to the present five-pointed structure and the tunnel mouth therein.
He might, I repeat, have prepared such sketches; for those before us were quite
obviously compiled, as our own had been, from late sculptures somewhere in the
glacial labyrinth, though not from the ones which we had seen and used. But what
the art-blind bungler could never have done was to execute those sketches in a
strange and assured technique perhaps superior, despite haste and carelessness,
to any of the decadent carvings from which they were taken - the characteristic
and unmistakable technique of the Old Ones themselves in the dead city’s heyday.

There are those who will say Danforth and I were utterly mad not to flee for our
lives after that; since our conclusions were now - notwithstanding their
wildness - completely fixed, and of a nature I need not even mention to those
who have read my account as far as this. Perhaps we were mad - for have I not
said those horrible peaks were mountains of madness? But I think I can detect
something of the same spirit - albeit in a less extreme form - in the men who
stalk deadly beasts through African jungles to photograph them or study their
habits. Half paralyzed with terror though we were, there was nevertheless fanned
within us a blazing flame of awe and curiosity which triumphed in the end.
Of course we did not mean to face that - or those - which we knew had been
there, but we felt that they must be gone by now. They would by this time have
found the other neighboring entrance to the abyss, and have passed within, to
whatever night-black fragments of the past might await them in the ultimate gulf
- the ultimate gulf they had never seen. Or if that entrance, too, was blocked,
they would have gone on to the north seeking another. They were, we remembered,
partly independent of light.
Looking back to that moment, I can scarcely recall just what precise form our
new emotions took - just what change of immediate objective it was that so
sharpened our sense of expectancy. We certainly did not mean to face what we
feared - yet I will not deny that we may have had a lurking, unconscious wish to
spy certain things from some hidden vantage point. Probably we had not given up
our zeal to glimpse the abyss itself, though there was interposed a new goal in
the form of that great circular place shown on the crumpled sketches we had
found. We had at once recognized it as a monstrous cylindrical tower figuring in
the very earliest carvings, but appearing only as a prodigious round aperture
from above. Something about the impressiveness of its rendering, even in these
hasty diagrams, made us think that its subglacial levels must still form a
feature of peculiar importance. Perhaps it embodied architectural marvels as yet
unencountered by us. It was certainly of incredible age according to the
sculptures in which it figured - being indeed among the first things built in
the city. Its carvings, if preserved, could not but be highly significant.
Moreover, it might form a good present link with the upper world - a shorter
route than the one we were so carefully blazing, and probably that by which
those others had descended.
At any rate, the thing we did was to study the terrible sketches - which quite
perfectly confirmed our own - and start back over the indicated course to the
circular place; the course which our nameless predecessors must have traversed
twice before us. The other neighboring gate to the abyss would lie beyond that.
I need not speak of our journey - during which we continued to leave an
economical trail of paper - for it was precisely the same in kind as that by
which we had reached the cul-de-sac; except that it tended to adhere more
closely to the ground level and even descend to basement corridors. Every now
and then we could trace certain disturbing marks in the debris or litter
underfoot; and after we had passed outside the radius of the gasoline scent, we
were again faintly conscious - spasmodically - of that more hideous and more
persistent scent. After the way had branched from our former course, we
sometimes gave the rays of our single torch a furtive sweep along the walls;
noting in almost every case the well-nigh omnipresent sculptures, which indeed
seem to have formed a main aesthetic outlet for the Old Ones.
About 9:30 P.M., while traversing a long, vaulted corridor whose increasingly
glaciated floor seemed somewhat below the ground level and whose roof grew lower
as we advanced, we began to see strong daylight ahead and were able to turn off
our torch. It appeared that we were coming to the vast circular place, and that
our distance from the upper air could not be very great. The corridor ended in
an arch surprisingly low for these megalithic ruins, but we could see much
through it even before we emerged. Beyond there stretched a prodigious round
space - fully two hundred feet in diameter - strewn with debris and containing
many choked archways corresponding to the one we were about to cross. The walls
were - in available spaces - boldly sculptured into a spiral band of heroic
proportions; and displayed, despite the destructive weathering caused by the
openness of the spot, an artistic splendor far beyond anything we had
encountered before. The littered floor was quite heavily glaciated, and we
fancied that the true bottom lay at a considerably lower depth.
But the salient object of the place was the titanic stone ramp which, eluding
the archways by a sharp turn outward into the open floor, wound spirally up the
stupendous cylindrical wall like an inside counterpart of those once climbing
outside the monstrous towers or ziggurats of antique Babylon. Only the rapidity
of our flight, and the perspective which confounded the descent with the tower’s
inner wall, had prevented our noticing this feature from the air, and thus
caused us to seek another avenue to the subglacial level. Pabodie might have
been able to tell what sort of engineering held it in place, but Danforth and I
could merely admire and marvel. We could see mighty stone corbels and pillars
here and there, but what we saw seemed inadequate to the function performed. The
thing was excellently preserved up to the present top of the tower - a highly
remarkable circumstance in view of its exposure - and its shelter had done much
to protect the bizarre and disturbing cosmic sculptures on the walls.
As we stepped out into the awesome half daylight of this monstrous cylinder
bottom - fifty million years old, and without doubt the most primally ancient
structure ever to meet our eyes - we saw that the ramp-traversed sides stretched
dizzily up to a height of fully sixty feet. This, we recalled from our aerial
survey, meant an outside glaciation of some forty feet; since the yawning gulf
we had seen from the plane had been at the top of an approximately twenty-foot
mound of crumbled masonry, somewhat sheltered for three-fourths of its
circumference by the massive curving walls of a line of higher ruins. According
to the sculptures, the original tower had stood in the center of an immense
circular plaza, and had been perhaps five hundred or six hundred feet high, with
tiers of horizontal disks near the top, and a row of needlelike spires along the
upper rim. Most of the masonry had obviously toppled outward rather than inward
- a fortunate happening, since otherwise the ramp might have been shattered and
the whole interior choked. As it was, the ramp showed sad battering; whilst the
choking was such that all the archways at the bottom seemed to have been
recently cleared.
It took us only a moment to conclude that this was indeed the route by which
those others had descended, and that this would be the logical route for our own
ascent despite the long trail of paper we had left elsewhere. The tower’s mouth
was no farther from the foothills and our waiting plane than was the great
terraced building we had entered, and any further subglacial exploration we
might make on this trip would lie in this general region. Oddly, we were still
thinking about possible later trips - even after all we had seen and guessed.
Then, as we picked our way cautiously over the debris of the great floor, there
came a sight which for the time excluded all other matters.
It was the neatly huddled array of three sledges in that farther angle of the
ramp’s lower and outward-projecting course which had hitherto been screened from
our view. There they were - the three sledges missing from Lake’s camp - shaken
by a hard usage which must have included forcible dragging along great reaches
of snowless masonry and debris, as well as much hand portage over utterly
unnavigable places. They were carefully and intelligently packed and strapped,
and contained things memorably familiar enough: the gasoline stove, fuel cans,
instrument cases, provision tins, tarpaulins obviously bulging with books, and
some bulging with less obvious contents - everything derived from Lake’s
equipment.
Alfer what we had found in that other room, we were in a measure prepared for
this encounter. The really great shock came when we stepped over and undid one
tarpaulin whose outlines had peculiarly disquieted us. It seems that others as
well as Lake had been interested in collecting typical specimens; for there were
two here, both stiffly frozen, perfectly preserved, patched with adhesive
plaster where some wounds around the neck had occurred, and wrapped with care to
prevent further damage. They were the bodies of young Gedney and the missing
dog.
X
Many people will probably judge us callous as well as mad for thinking about the
northward tunnel and the abyss so soon after our somber discovery, and I am not
prepared to say that we would have immediately revived such thoughts but for a
specific circumstance which broke in upon us and set up a whole new train of
speculations. We had replaced the tarpaulin over poor Gedney and were standing
in a kind of mute bewilderment when the sounds finally reached our consciousness
- the first sounds we had heard since descending out of the open where the
mountain wind whined faintly from its unearthly heights. Well-known and mundane
though they were, their presence in this remote world of death was more
unexpected and unnerving than any grotesque or fabulous tones ‘could possibly
have been - since they gave a fresh upsetting to all our notions of cosmic
harmony.
Had it been some trace of that bizarre musical piping over a wide range which
Lake’s dissection report had led us to expect in those others - and which,
indeed, our overwrought fancies had been reading into every wind howl we had
heard since coming on the camp horror - it would have had a kind of hellish
congruity with the aeon-dead region around us. A voice from other epochs belongs
in a graveyard of other epochs. As it was, however, the noise shattered all our
profoundly seated adjustments - all our tacit acceptance of the inner antarctic
as a waste utterly and irrevocably void of every vestige of normal life. What we
heard was not the fabulous note of any buried blasphemy of elder earth from
whose supernal toughness an age-denied polar sun had evoked a monstrous
response. Instead, it was a thing so mockingly normal and so unerringly
familiarized by our sea days off Victoria Land and our camp days at McMurdo
Sound that we shuddered to think of it here, where such things ought not to be.
To be brief - it was simply the raucous squawking of a penguin.
The muffled sound floated from subglacial recesses nearly opposite to the
corridor whence we had come - regions manifestly in the direction of that other
tunnel to the vast abyss. The presence of a living water bird in such a
direction - in a world whose surface was one of age-long and uniform
lifelessness - could lead to only one conclusion; hence our first thought was to
verify the objective reality of the sound. It was, indeed, repeated, and seemed
at times to come from more than one throat. Seeking its source, we entered an
archway from which much debris had been cleared; resuming our trail blazing -
with an added paper supply taken with curious repugnance from one of the
tarpaulin bundles on the sledges - when we left daylight behind.
As the glaciated floor gave place to a litter of detritus, we plainly discerned
some curious, dragging tracks; and once Danforth found a distinct print of a
sort whose description would be only too superfluous. The course indicated by
the penguin cries was precisely what our map and compass prescribed as an
approach to the more northerly tunnel mouth, and we were glad to find that a
bridgeless thoroughfare on the ground and basement levels seemed open. The
tunnel, according to the chart, ought to start from the basement of a large
pyramidal structure which we seemed vaguely to recall from our aerial survey as
remarkably well-preserved. Along our path the single torch showed a customary
profusion of carvings, but we did not pause to examine any of these.
Suddenly a bulky white shape loomed up ahead of us, and we flashed on the second
torch. It is odd how wholly this new quest had turned our minds from earlier
fears of what might lurk near. Those other ones, having left their supplies in
the great circular place, must have planned to return after their scouting trip
toward or into the abyss; yet we had now discarded all caution concerning them
as completely as if they had never existed. This white, waddling thing was fully
six feet high, yet we seemed to realize at once that it was not one of those
others. They were larger and dark, and, according to the sculptures, their
motion over land surfaces was a swift, assured matter despite the queerness of
their sea-born tentacle equipment. But to say that the white thing did not
profoundly frighten us would be vain. We were indeed clutched for an instant by
primitive dread almost sharper than the worst of our reasoned fears regarding
those others. Then came a flash of anticlimax as the white shape sidled into a
lateral archway to our left to join two others of its kind which had summoned it
in raucous tones. For it was only a penguin - albeit of a huge, unknown species
larger than the greatest of the known king penguins, and monstrous in its
combined albinism and virtual eyelessness.
When we had followed the thing into the archway and turned both our torches on
the indifferent and unheeding group of three, we saw that they were all eyeless
albinos of the same unknown and gigantic species. Their size reminded us of some
of the archaic penguins depicted in the Old Ones’ sculptures, and it did not
take us long to conclude that they were descended from the same
stock-undoubtedly surviving through a retreat to some warmer inner region whose
perpetual blackness had destroyed their pigmentation and atrophied their eyes to
mere useless slits. That their present habitat was the vast abyss we sought, was
not for a moment to be doubted; and this evidence of the gulf’s continued warmth
and habitability filled us with the most curious and subtly perturbing fancies.
We wondered, too, what had caused these three birds to venture out of their
usual domain. The state and silence of the great dead city made it clear that it
had at no time been an habitual seasonal rookery, whilst the manifest
indifference of the trio to our presence made it seem odd that any passing party
of those others should have startled them. Was it possible that those others had
taken some aggressive action or t-ried to increase their meat supply? We doubted
whether that pungent odor which the dogs had hated could cause an equal
antipathy in these penguins, since their ancestors had obviously lived on
excellent terms with the Old Ones - an amicable relationship which must have
survived in the abyss below as long as any of the Old Ones remained. Regretting
- in a flare-up of the old spirit of pure science - that we could not photograph
these anomalous creatures, we shortly left them to their squawking and pushed on
toward the abyss whose openness was now so positively proved to us, and whose
exact direction occasional penguin tracks made clear.
Not long afterward a steep descent in a long, low, doorless, and peculiarly
sculptureless corridor led us to believe that we were approaching the tunnel
mouth at last. We had passed two more penguins, and heard others immediately
ahead. Then the corridor ended in a prodigious open space which made us gasp
involuntarily - a perfect inverted hemisphere, obviously deep underground; fully
a hundred feet in diameter and fifty feet high, with low archways opening around
all parts of the circumference but one, and that one yawning cavernously with a
black, arched aperture which broke the symmetry of the vault to a height of
nearly fifteen feet. It was the entrance to the great abyss.
In this vast hemisphere, whose concave roof was impressively though decadently
carved to a likeness of the primordial celestial dome, a few albino penguins
waddled - aliens there, but indifferent and unseeing. The black tunnel yawned
indefinitely off at a steep, descending grade, its aperture adorned with
grotesquely chiseled jambs and lintel. From that cryptical mouth we fancied a
current of slightly warmer air, and perhaps even a suspicion of vapor proceeded;
and we wondered what living entities other than penguins the limitless void
below, and the contiguous honeycombings of the land and the titan mountains,
might conceal. We wondered, too, whether the trace of mountaintop smoke at first
suspected by poor Lake, as well as the odd haze we had ourselves perceived
around the rampart-crowned peak, might not be caused by the tortuous-channeled
rising of some such vapor from the unfathomed regions of earth’s core.
Entering the tunnel, we saw that its outline was - at least at the start - about
fifteen feet each way - sides, floor, and arched roof composed of the usual
megalithic masonry. The sides were sparsely decorated with cartouches of
conventional designs in a late, decadent style; and all the construction and
carving were marvelously well-preserved. The floor was quite clear, except for a
slight detritus bearing outgoing penguin tracks and the inward tracks of these
others. The farther one advanced, the warmer it became; so that we were soon
unbuttoning our heavy garments. We wondered whether there were any actually
igneous manifestations below, and whether the waters of that sunless sea were
hot. Alter a short distance the masonry gave place to solid rock, though the
tunnel kept the same proportions and presented the same aspect of carved
regularity. Occasionally its varying grade became so steep that grooves were cut
in the floor. Several times we noted the mouths of small lateral galleries not
recorded in our diagrams; none of them such as to complicate the problem of our
return, and all of them welcome as possible refuges in case we met unwelcome
entities on their way back from the abyss. The nameless scent of such things was
very distinct. Doubtless it was suicidally foolish to venture into that tunnel
under the known conditions, but the lure of the unplumbed is stronger in certain
persons than most suspect - indeed, it was just such a lure which had brought us
to this unearthly polar waste in the first place. We saw several penguins as we
passed along, and speculated on the distance we would have to traverse. The
carvings had led us to expect a steep downhill walk of about a mile to the
abyss, but our previous wanderings had shown us that matters of scale were not
wholly to be depended on.
Alter about a quarter of a mile that nameless scent became greatly accentuated,
and we kept very careful track of the various lateral openings we passed. There
was no visible vapor as at the mouth, but this was doubtless due to the lack of
contrasting cooler air. The temperature was rapidly ascending, and we were not
surprised to come upon a careless heap of material shudderingly familiar to us.
It was composed of furs and tent cloth taken from Lake’s camp, and we did not
pause to study the bizarre forms into which the fabrics had been slashed.
Slightly beyond this point we noticed a decided increase in the size and number
of the side galleries, and concluded that the densely honeycombed region beneath
the higher foothills must now have been reached. The nameless scent was now
curiously mixed with another and scarcely less offensive odor - of what nature
we could not guess, though we thought of decaying organisms and perhaps unknown
subterranean fungi. Then came a startling expansion of the tunnel for which the
carvings had not prepared us - a broadening and rising into a lofty,
natural-looking elliptical cavern with a level floor, some seventy-five feet
long and fifty broad, and with many immense side passages leading away into
cryptical darkness.
Though this cavern was natural in appearance, an inspection with both torches
suggested that it had been formed by the artificial destruction of several walls
between adjacent honeycombings. The walls were rough, and the high, vaulted roof
was thick with stalactites; but the solid rock floor had been smoothed off, and
was free from all debris, detritus, or even dust to a positively abnormal
extent. Except for the avenue through which we had come, this was true of the
floors of all the great galleries opening off from it; and the singularity of
the condition was such as to set us vainly puzzling. The curious new fetor which
had supplemented the nameless scent was excessively pungent here; so much so
that it destroyed all trace of the other. Something about this whole place, with
its polished and almost glistening floor, struck us as more vaguely baffling and
horrible than any of the monstrous things we had previously encountered.
The regularity of the passage immediately ahead, as well as the larger
proportion of penguin-droppings there, prevented all confusion as to the right
course amidst this plethora of equally great cave mouths. Nevertheless we
resolved to resume our paper trailblazing if any further complexity should
develop; for dust tracks, of course, could no longer be expected. Upon resuming
our direct progress we cast a beam of torchlight over the tunnel walls - and
stopped short in amazement at the supremely radical change which had come over
the carvings in this part of the passage. We realized, of course, the great
decadence of the Old Ones’ sculpture at the time of the tunneling, and had
indeed noticed the inferior workmanship of the arabesques in the stretches
behind us. But now, in this deeper section beyond the cavern, there was a sudden
difference wholly transcending explanation - a difference in basic nature as
well as in mere quality, and involving so profound and calamitous a degradation
of skill that nothing in the hitherto observed rate of decline could have led
one to expect it.
This new and degenerate work was coarse, bold, and wholly lacking in delicacy of
detail. It was countersunk with exaggerated depth in bands following the same
general line as the sparse car-touches of the earlier sections, but the height
of the reliefs did not reach the level of the general surface. Danforth had the
idea that it was a second carving - a sort of palimpsest formed after the
obliteration of a previous design. In nature it was wholly decorative and
conventional, and consisted of crude spirals and angles roughly following the
quintile mathematical tradition of the Old Ones, yet seemingly more like a
parody than a perpetuation of that tradition. We could not get it out of our
minds that some subtly but profoundly alien element had been added to the
aesthetic feeling behind the technique - an alien element, Danforth guessed,
that was responsible for the laborious substitution. It was like, yet
disturbingly unlike, what we had come to recognize as the Old Ones’ art; and I
was persistently reminded of such hybrid things as the ungainly Palmyrene
sculptures fashioned in the Roman manner. That others had recently noticed this
belt of carving was hinted by the presence of a used flashlight battery on the
floor in front of one of the most characteristic cartouches.
Since we could not afford to spend any considerable time in study, we resumed
our advance after a cursory look; though frequently casting beams over the walls
to see if any further decorative changes developed. Nothing of the sort was
perceived, though the carvings were in places rather sparse because of the
numerous mouths of smooth-floored lateral tunnels. We saw and heard fewer
penguins, but thought we caught a vague suspicion of an infinitely distant
chorus of them somewhere deep within the earth. The new and inexplicable odor
was abominably strong, and we could detect scarcely a sign of that other
nameless scent. Puffs of visible vapor ahead bespoke increasing contrasts in
temperature, and the relative nearness of the sunless sea cliffs of the great
abyss. Then, quite unexpectedly, we saw certain obstructions on the polished
floor ahead - obstructions which were quite definitely not penguins - and turned
on our second torch after making sure that the objects were quite stationary.
XI
Still another time have I come to a place where it is very difficult to proceed.
I ought to be hardened by this stage; but there are some experiences and
intimations which scar too deeply to permit of healing, and leave only such an
added sensitiveness that memory reinspires all the original horror. We saw, as I
have said, certain obstructions on the polished floor ahead; and I may add that
our nostrils were assailed almost simultaneously by a very curious
intensification of the strange prevailing fetor, now quite plainly mixed with
the nameless stench of those others which had gone before. The light of the
second torch left no doubt of what the obstructions were, and we dared approach
them only because we could see, even from a distance, that they were quite as
past all harming power as had been the six similar specimens unearthed from the
monstrous star-mounded graves at poor Lake’s camp.
They were, indeed, as lacking - in completeness as most of those we had
unearthed - though it grew plain from the thick, dark green pool gathering
around them that their incompleteness was of infinitely greater recency. There
seemed to be only four of them, whereas Lake’s bulletins would have suggested no
less than eight as forming the group which had preceded us. To find them in this
state was wholly unexpected, and we wondered what sort of monstrous struggle had
occurred down here in the dark.
Penguins, attacked in a body, retaliate savagely with their beaks, and our ears
now made certain the existence of a rookery far beyond. Had those others
disturbed such a place and aroused murderous pursuit? The obstructions did not
suggest it, for penguins’ beaks against the tough tissues Lake had dissected
could hardly account for the terrible damage our approaching glance was
beginning to make out. Besides, the huge blind birds we had seen appeared to be
singularly peaceful.
Had there, then, been a struggle among those others, and were the absent four
responsible? If so, where were they? Were they close at hand and likely to form
an immediate menace to us? We glanced anxiously at some of the smooth-floored
lateral passages as we continued our slow and frankly reluctant approach.
Whatever the conflict was, it had clearly been that which had frightened the
penguins into their unaccustomed wandering. It must, then, have arisen near that
faintly heard rookery in the incalculable gulf beyond, since there were no signs
that any birds had normally dwelt here. Perhaps, we reflected, there had been a
hideous running fight, with the weaker party seeking to get back to the cached
sledges when their pursuers finished them. One could picture the demoniac fray
between namelessly monstrous entities as it surged out of the black abyss with
great clouds of frantic penguins squawking and scurrying ahead.
I say that we approached those sprawling and incomplete obstructions slowly and
reluctantly. Would to Heaven we had never approached them at all, but had run
back at top speed out of that blasphemous tunnel with the greasily smooth floors
and the degenerate murals aping and mocking the things they had superseded-run
back, before we had seen what we did see, and before our minds were burned with
something which will never let us breathe easily again!
Both of our torches were turned on the prostrate objects, so that we soon
realized the dominant factor in their incompleteness. Mauled, compressed,
twisted, and ruptured as they were, their chief common injury was total
decapitation. From each one the tentacled starfish head had been removed; and as
we drew near we saw that the manner of removal looked more like some hellish
tearing or suction than like any ordinary form of cleavage. Their noisome
dark-green ichor formed a large, spreading pOOl; but its stench was half
overshadowed by the newer and stranger stench, here more pungent than at any
other point along our route. Only when we had come very close to the sprawling
obstructions could we trace that second, unexplainable fetor to any immediate
source - and the instant we did so Danforth, remembering certain very vivid
sculptures of the Old Ones’ history in the Permian Age one hundred and fifty
million years ago, gave vent to a nerve-tortured cry which echoed hysterically
through that vaulted and archaic passage with the evil, palimpsest carvings.
I came only just short of echoing his cry myself; for I had seen those primal
sculptures, too, and had shudderingly admired the way the nameless artist had
suggested that hideous slime coating found on certain incomplete and prostrate
Old Ones - those whom the frightful Shoggoths had characteristically slain and
sucked to a ghastly headlessness in the great war of resubjugation. They were
infamous, nightmare sculptures even when telling of age-old, bygone things; for
Shoggoths and their work ought not to be seen by human beings or portrayed by
any beings. The mad author of the Necronomicon had nervously tried to swear that
none had been bred on this planet, and that only drugged dreamers had even
conceived them. Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and
organs and processes - viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells - rubbery
fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile - slaves of suggestion,
builders of cities - more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and
more amphibious, more and more imitative! Great God! What madness made even
those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and carve such things?
And now, when Danforth and I saw the freshly glistening and reflectively
iridescent black slime which clung thickly to those headless bodies and stank
obscenely with that new, unknown odor whose cause only a diseased fancy could
envisage - clung to those bodies and sparkled less voluminously on a smooth part
of the accursedly resculptured wall in a series of grouped dots - we understood
the quality of cosmic fear to its uttermost depths. It was not fear of those
four missing others - for all too well did we suspect they would do no harm
again. Poor devils! Alter all, they were not evil things of their kind. They
were the men of another age and another order of being. Nature had played a
hellish jest on them - as it will on any others that human madness, callousness,
or cruelty may hereafter dig up in that hideously dead or sleeping polar waste -
and this was their tragic homecoming. They had not been even savages-for what
indeed had they done? That awful awakening in the cold of an unknown epoch -
perhaps an attack by the furry, frantically barking quadrupeds, and a dazed
defense against them and the equally frantic white simians with the queer
wrappings and paraphernalia ... poor Lake, poor Gedney... and poor Old Ones!
Scientists to the last - what had they done that we would not have done in their
place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible,
just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less
incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn - whatever they had
been, they were men!
They had crossed the icy peaks on whose templed slopes they had once worshipped
and roamed among the tree ferns. They had found their dead city brooding under
its curse, and had read its carven latter days as we had done. They had tried to
reach their living fellows in fabled depths of blackness they had never seen -
and what had they found? All this flashed in unison through the thoughts of
Danforth and me as we looked from those headless, slime-coated shapes to the
loathsome palimpsest sculptures and the diabolical dot groups of fresh slime on
the wall beside them - looked and understood what must have triumphed and
survived down there in the Cyclopean water city of that nighted, penguin-fringed
abyss, whence even now a sinister curling mist had begun to belch pallidly as if
in answer to Danforth’s hysterical scream.
The shock of recognizing that monstrous slime and headlessness had frozen us
into mute, motionless statues, and it is only through later conversations that
we have learned of the complete identity of our thoughts at that moment. It
seemed aeons that we stood there, but actually it could not have been more than
ten or fifteen seconds. That hateful, pallid mist curled forward as if veritably
driven by some remoter advancing bulk-and then came a sound which upset much of
what we had just decided, and in so doing broke the spell and enabled us to run
like mad past squawking, confused penguins over our former trail back to the
city, along ice-sunken megalithic corridors to the great open circle, and up
that archaic spiral ramp in a frenzied, automatic plunge for the sane outer air
and light of day.
The new sound, as I have intimated, upset much that we had decided; because it
was what poor Lake’s dissection had led us to attribute to those we had judged
dead. It was, Danforth later told me, precisely what he had caught in infinitely
muffled form when at that spot beyond the alley corner above the glacial level;
and it certainly had a shocking resemblance to the wind pipings we had both
heard around the lofty mountain caves. At the risk of seeming puerile I will add
another thing, too, if only because of the surprising way Danforth’s impressions
chimed with mine. Of course common reading is what prepared us both to make the
interpretation, though Danforth has hinted at queer notions about unsuspected
and forbidden sources to which Poe may have had access when writing his Arthur
Gordon Pym a century ago. It will be remembered that in that fantastic tale
there is a word of unknown but terrible and prodigious significance connected
with the antarctic and screamed eternally by the gigantic spectrally snowy birds
of that malign region’s core. "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" That, I may admit, is
exactly what we thought we heard conveyed by that sudden sound behind the
advancing white mist-that insidious musical piping over a singularly wide range.

We were in full flight before three notes or syllables had been uttered, though
we knew that the swiftness of the Old Ones would enable any scream-roused and
pursuing survivor of the slaughter to overtake us in a moment if it really
wished to do so. We had a vague hope, however, that nonaggressive conduct and a
display of kindred reason might cause such a being to spare us in case of
capture, if only from scientific curiosity. Alter all, if such an one had
nothing to fear for itself, it would have no motive in harming us. Concealment
being futile at this juncture, we used our torch for a running glance behind,
and perceived that the mist was thinning. Would we see, at last, a complete and
living specimen of those others? Again came that insidious musical piping-
"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" Then, noting that we were actually gaining on our
pursuer, it occurred to us that the entity might be wounded. We could take no
chances, however, since it was very obviously approaching in answer to
Danforth’s scream, rather than in flight from any other entity. The timing was
too close to admit of doubt. Of the whereabouts of that less conceivable and
less mentionable nightmare - that fetid, unglimpsed mountain of slime-spewing
protoplasm whose race had conquered the abyss and sent land pioneers to recarve
and squirm through the burrows of the hills - we could form no guess; and it
cost us a genuine pang to leave this probably crippled Old One-perhaps a lone
survivor - to the peril of recapture and a nameless fate.
Thank Heaven we did not slacken our run. The curling mist had thickened again,
and was driving ahead with increased speed; whilst the straying penguins in our
rear were squawking and screaming and displaying signs of a panic really
surprising in view of their relatively minor confusion when we had passed them.
Once more came that sinister, wide-ranged piping - "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" We
had been wrong. The thing was not wounded, but had merely paused on encountering
the bodies of its fallen kindred and the hellish slime inscription above them.
We could never know what that demon message was - but those burials at Lake’s
camp had shown how much importance the beings attached to their dead. Our
recklessly used torch now revealed ahead of us the large open cavern where
various ways converged, and we were glad to be leaving those morbid palimpsest
sculptures - almost felt even when scarcely seen-behind. Another thought which
the advent of the cave inspired was the possibility of losing our pursuer at
this bewildering focus of large galleries. There were several of the blind
albino penguins in the open space, and it seemed clear that their fear of the
oncoming entity was extreme to the point of unaccountability. If at that point
we dimmed our torch to the very lowest limit of traveling need, keeping it
strictly in front of us, the frightened squawking motions of the huge birds in
the mist might muffle our footfalls, screen our true course, and somehow set up
a false lead. Amidst the churning, spiraling fog, the littered and unglistening
floor of the main tunnel beyond this point, as differing from the other morbidly
polished burrows, could hardly form a highly distinguishing feature; even, so
far as we could conjecture, for those indicated special senses which made the
Old Ones partly, though imperfectly, independent of light in emergencies. In
fact, we were somewhat apprehensive lest we go astray ourselves in our haste.
For we had, of course, decided to keep straight on toward the dead city; since
the consequences of loss in those unknown foothill honeycombings would be
unthinkable.
The fact that we survived and emerged is sufficient proof that the thing did
take a wrong gallery whilst we providentially hit on the right one. The penguins
alone could not have saved us, but in conjunction with the mist they seem to
have done so. Only a benign fate kept the curling vapors thick enough at the
right moment, for they were constantly shifting and threatening to vanish.
Indeed, they did lift for a second just before we emerged from the nauseously
resculptured tunnel into the cave; so that we actually caught one first and only
half glimpse of the oncoming entity as we cast a final, desperately fearful
glance backward before dimming the torch and mixing with the penguins in the
hope of dodging pursuit. If the fate which screened us was benign, that which
gave us the half glimpse was infinitely the opposite; for to that flash of
semivision can be traced a full half of the horror which has ever since haunted
us.
Our exact motive in looking back again was perhaps no more than the immemorial
instinct of the pursued to gauge the nature and course of its pursuer; or
perhaps it was an automatic attempt to answer a subconscious question raised by
one of our senses. In the midst of our flight, with all our faculties centered
on the problem of escape, we were in no condition to observe and analyze
details; yet even so, our latent brain cells must have wondered at the message
brought them by our nostrils. Alterward we realized what it was-that our retreat
from the fetid slime coating on those headless obstructions, and the coincident
approach of the pursuing entity, had not brought us the exchange of stenches
which logic called for. In the neighborhood of the prostrate things that new and
lately unexplainable fetor had been wholly dominant; but by this time it ought
to have largely given place to the nameless stench associated with those others.
This it had not done - for instead, the newer and less bearable smell was now
virtually undiluted, and growing more and more poisonously insistent each
second.
So we glanced back simultaneously, it would appear; though no doubt the
incipient motion of one prompted the imitation of the other. As we did so we
flashed both torches full strength at the momentarily thinned mist; either from
sheer primitive anxiety to see all we could, or in a less primitive but equally
unconscious effort to dazzle the entity before we dimmed our light and dodged
among the penguins of the labyrinth center ahead. Unhappy act! Not Orpheus
himself, or Lot’s wife, paid much more dearly for a backward glance. And again
came that shocking, wide-ranged piping - "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"
I might as well be frank - even if I cannot bear to be quite direct - in stating
what we saw; though at the time we felt that it was not to be admitted even to
each other. The words reaching the reader can never even suggest the awfulness
of the sight itself. It crippled our consciousness so completely that I wonder
we had the residual sense to dim our torches as planned, and to strike the right
tunnel toward the dead city. Instinct alone must have carried us through -
perhaps better than reason could have done; though if that was what saved us, we
paid a high price. Of reason we certainly had little enough left.
Danforth was totally unstrung, and the first thing I remember of the rest of the
journey was hearing him lightheadedly chant an hysterical formula in which I
alone of mankind could have found anything but insane irrelevance. It
reverberated in falsetto echoes among the squawks of the penguins; reverberated
through the vaultings ahead, and-thank God-through the now empty vaultings
behind. He could not have begun it at once - else we would not have been alive
and blindly racing. I shudder to think of what a shade of difference in his
nervous reactions might have brought.
"South Station Under - Washington Under - Park Street Under-Kendall - Central -
Harvard - " The poor fellow was chanting the familiar stations of the
Boston-Cambridge tunnel that burrowed through our peaceful native soil thousands
of miles away in New England, yet to me the ritual had neither irrelevance nor
home feeling. It had only horror, because I knew unerringly the monstrous,
nefandous analogy that had suggested it. We had expected, upon looking back, to
see a terrible and incredible moving entity if the mists were thin enough; but
of that entity we had formed a clear idea. What we did see - for the mists were
indeed all too maliguly thinned - was something altogether different, and
immeasurably more hideous and detestable. It was the utter, objective embodiment
of the fantastic novelist’s "thing that should not be"; and its nearest
comprehensible analogue is a vast, onrushing subway train as one sees it from a
station platform - the great black front looming colossally out of infinite
subterranean distance, constellated with strangely colored lights and filling
the prodigious burrow as a piston fills a cylinder.
But we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead as the
nightmare, plastic column of fetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward
through its fifteen-foot sinus, gathering unholy speed and driving before it a
spiral, rethickening cloud of the pallid abyss vapor. It was a terrible,
indescribable thing vaster than any subway train - a shapeless congeries of
protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes
forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling
front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over
the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all
litter. Still came that eldritch, mocking cry- "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" and at
last we remembered that the demoniac Shoggoths - given life, thought, and
plastic organ patterns solely by the Old Ones, and having no language save that
which the dot groups expressed - had likewise no voice save the imitated accents
of their bygone masters.
XII
Danforth and I have recollections of emerging into the great sculptured
hemisphere and of threading our back trail through the Cyclopean rooms and
corridors of the dead city; yet these are purely dream fragments involving no
memory of volition, details, or physical exertion. It was as if we floated in a
nebulous world or dimension without time, causation, or orientation. The gray
half-daylight of the vast circular space sobered us somewhat; but we did not go
near those cached sledges or look again at poor Gedney and the dog. They have a
strange and titanic mausoleum, and I hope the end of this planet will find them
still undisturbed.
It was while struggling up the colossal spiral incline that we first felt the
terrible fatigue and short breath which our race through the thin plateau air
had produced; but not even fear of collapse could make us pause before reaching
the normal outer realm of sun and sky. There was something vaguely appropriate
about our departure from those buried epochs; for as we wound our panting way up
the sixty-foot cylinder of primal masonry, we glimpsed beside us a continuous
procession of heroic sculptures in the dead race’s early and undecayed technique
- a farewell from the Old Ones, written fifty million years ago.
Finally scrambling out at the top, we found ourselves on a great mound of
tumbled blocks, with the curved walls of higher stonework rising westward, and
the brooding peaks of the great mountains showing beyond the more crumbled
structures toward the east. The low antarctic sun of midnight peered redly from
the southern horizon through rifts in the jagged ruins, and the terrible age and
deadness of the nightmare city seemed all the starker by contrast with such
relatively known and accustomed things as the features of the polar landscape.
The sky above was a churning and opalescent mass of tenuous ice-vapors, and the
cold clutched at our vitals. Wearily resting the outfit-bags to which we had
instinctively clung throughout our desperate flight, we rebuttoned our heavy
garments for the stumbling climb down the mound and the walk through the
aeon-old stone maze to the foothills where our aeroplane waited. Of what had set
us fleeing from that darkness of earth’s secret and archaic gulfs we said
nothing at all.
In less than a quarter of an hour we had found the steep grade to the
foothills-the probable ancient terrace - by which we had descended, and could
see the dark bulk of our great plane amidst the sparse ruins on the rising slope
ahead. Halfway uphill toward our goal we paused for a momentary breathing spell,
and turned to look again at the fantastic tangle of incredible stone shapes
below us-once more outlined mystically against an unknown west. As we did so we
saw that the sky beyond had lost its morning haziness; the restless ice-vapors
having moved up to the zenith, where their mocking outlines seemed on the point
of settling into some bizarre pattern which they feared to make quite definite
or conclusive.
There now lay revealed on the ultimate white horizon behind the grotesque city a
dim, elfin line of pinnacled violet whose needle-pointed heights loomed
dreamlike against the beckoning rose color of the western sky. Up toward this
shimmering rim sloped the ancient table-land, the depressed course of the bygone
river traversing it as an irregular ribbon of shadow. For a second we gasped in
admiration of the scene’s unearthly cosmic beauty, and then vague horror began
to creep into our souls. For this far violet line could be nothing else than the
terrible mountains of the forbidden land - highest of earth’s peaks and focus of
earth’s evil; harborers of nameless horrors and Archaean secrets; shunned and
prayed to by those who feared to carve their meaning; untrodden by any living
thing on earth, but visited by the sinister lightnings and sending strange beams
across the plains in the polar night - beyond doubt the unknown archetype of
that dreaded Kadath in the Cold Waste beyond abhorrent Leng, whereof primal
legends hint evasively.
If the sculptured maps and pictures in that prehuman city had told truly, these
cryptic violet mountains could not be much less than three hundred miles away;
yet none the less sharply did their dim elfin essence appear above that remote
and snowy rim, like the serrated edge of a monstrous alien planet about to rise
into unaccustomed heavens. Their height, then, must have been tremendous beyond
all comparison - carrying them up into tenuous atmospheric strata peopled only
by such gaseous wraiths as rash flyers have barely lived to whisper of after
unexplainable falls. Looking at them, I thought nervously of certain sculptured
hints of what the great bygone river had washed down into the city from their
accursed slopes - and wondered how much sense and how much folly had lain in the
fears of those Old Ones who carved them so reticently. I recalled how their
northerly end must come near the coast at Queen Mary Land, where even at that
moment Sir Douglas Mawson’s expedition was doubtless working less than a
thousand miles away; and hoped that no evil fate would give Sir Douglas and his
men a glimpse of what might lie beyond the protecting coastal range. Such
thoughts formed a measure of my overwrought condition at the time - and Danforth
seemed to be even worse.
Yet long before we had passed the great star-shaped ruin and reached our plane,
our fears had become transferred to the lesser but vast-enough range whose
recrossing lay ahead of us. From these foothills the black, ruin-crusted slopes
reared up starkly and hideously against the east, again reminding us of those
strange Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich; and when we thought of the
frightful amorphous entities that might have pushed their fetidly squirming way
even to the topmost hollow pinnacles, we could not face without panic the
prospect of again sailing by those suggestive skyward cave mouths where the wind
made sounds like an evil musical piping over a wide range. To make matters
worse, we saw distinct traces of local mist around several of the summits-as
poor Lake must have done when he made that early mistake about volcanism - and
thought shiveringly of that kindred mist from which we had just escaped; of
that, and of the blasphemous, horror-fostering abyss whence all such vapors
came.
All was well with the plane, and we clumsily hauled on our heavy flying furs.
Danforth got the engine started without trouble, and we made a very smooth
take-off over the nightmare city. Below us the primal Cyclopean masonry spread
out as it had done when first we saw it, and we began rising and turning to test
the wind for our crossing through the pass. At a very high level there must have
been great disturbance, since the ice-dust clouds of the zenith were doing all
sorts of fantastic things; but at twenty-four thousand feet, the height we
needed for the pass, we found navigation quite practicable. As we drew close to
the jutting peaks the wind’s strange piping again became manifest, and I could
see Danforth’s hands trembling at the controls. Rank amateur that I was, I
thought at that moment that I might be a better navigator than he in effecting
the dangerous crossing between pinnacles; and when I made motions to change
seats and take over his duties he did not protest. I tried to keep all my skill
and self-possession about me, and stared at the sector of reddish farther sky
betwixt the walls of the pass-resolutely refusing to pay attention to the puffs
of mountain-top vapor, and wishing that I had wax-stopped ears like Ulysses’ men
off the Siren’s coast to keep that disturbing windpiping from my consciousness.
But Danforth, released from his piloting and keyed up to a dangerous nervous
pitch, could not keep quiet. I felt him turning and wriggling about as he looked
back at the terrible receding city, ahead at the cave-riddled, cube-barnacled
peaks, sidewise at the bleak sea of snowy, rampart-strewn foothills, and upward
at the seething, grotesquely clouded sky. It was then, just as I was trying to
steer safely through the pass, that his mad shrieking brought us so close to
disaster by shattering my tight hold on myself and causing me to fumble
helplessly with the controls for a moment. A second afterward my resolution
triumphed and we made the crossing safely - yet I am afraid that Danforth will
never be -the same again.
I have said that Danforth refused to tell me what final horror made him scream
out so insanely-a horror which, I feel sadly sure, is mainly responsible for his
present breakdown. We had snatches of shouted conversation above the wind’s
piping and the engine’s buzzing as we reached the safe side of the range and
swooped slowly down toward the camp, but that had mostly to do with the pledges
of secrecy we had made as we prepared to leave the nightmare city. Certain
things, we had agreed, were not for people to know and discuss lightly-and I
would not speak of them now but for the need of heading off that
Starkweather-Moore Expedition, and others, at any cost. It is absolutely
necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead
corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to
resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of
their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.
All that Danforth has ever hinted is that the final horror was a mirage. It was
not, he declares, anything connected with the cubes and caves of those echoing,
vaporous, wormily-honeycombed mountains of madness which we crossed; but a
single fantastic, demoniac glimpse, among the churning zenith clouds, of what
lay back of those other violet westward mountains which the Old Ones had shunned
and feared. It is very probable that the thing was a sheer delusion born of the
previous stresses we had passed through, and of the actual though unrecognized
mirage of the dead transmontane city experienced near Lake’s camp the day
before; but it was so real to Danforth that he suffers from it still.
He has on rare occasions whispered disjointed and irresponsible things about
"The black pit," "the carven rim," "the protoShoggoths," "the windowless solids
with five dimensions," "the nameless cylinder," "the elder Pharos,"
"Yog-Sothoth," "the primal white jelly," "the color out of space," "the wings,"
"the eyes in darkness," "the moon-ladder," "the original, the eternal, the
undying," and other bizarre conceptions; but when he is fully himself he
repudiates all this and attributes it to his curious and macabre reading of
earlier years. Danforth, indeed, is known to be among the few who have ever
dared go completely through that worm-riddled copy of the Necronomicon kept
under lock and key in the college library.
The higher sky, as we crossed the range, was surely vaporous and disturbed
enough; and although I did not see the zenith, I can well imagine that its
swirls of ice dust may have taken strange forms. Imagination, knowing how
vividly distant scenes can sometimes be reflected, refracted, and magnified by
such layers of restless cloud, might easily have supplied the rest - and, of
course, Danforth did not hint any of these specific horrors till after his
memory had had a chance to draw on his bygone reading. He could never have seen
so much in one instantaneous glance.
At the time, his shrieks were confined to the repetition of a single, mad word
of all too obvious source: "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"
                      Beyond the Wall of Sleep by H.P. Lovecraft
                              Beyond the Wall of Sleep
                                 by H.P. Lovecraft
                                   Written 1919

Published October 1919 in Pine Cones, Vol. 1, No. 6, p. 2-10


I have often wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the
occasionally titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which
they belong. Whilst the greater number of our nocturnal visions are perhaps no
more than faint and fantastic reflections of our waking experiences - Freud to
the contrary with his puerile symbolism - there are still a certain remainder
whose immundane and ethereal character permit of no ordinary interpretation, and
whose vaguely exciting and disquieting effect suggests possible minute glimpses
into a sphere of mental existence no less important than physical life, yet
separated from that life by an all but impassable barrier. From my experience I
cannot doubt but that man, when lost to terrestrial consciousness, is indeed
sojourning in another and uncorporeal life of far different nature from the life
we know, and of which only the slightest and most indistinct memories linger
after waking. From those blurred and fragmentary memories we may infer much, yet
prove little. We may guess that in dreams life, matter, and vitality, as the
earth knows such things, are not necessarily constant; and that time and space
do not exist as our waking selves comprehend them. Sometimes I believe that this
less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the
terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.
It was from a youthful revery filled with speculations of this sort that I arose
one afternoon in the winter of 1900-01, when to the state psychopathic
institution in which I served as an intern was brought the man whose case has
ever since haunted me so unceasingly. His name, as given on the records, was Joe
Slater, or Slaader, and his appearance was that of the typical denizen of the
Catskill Mountain region; one of those strange, repellent scions of a primitive
Colonial peasant stock whose isolation for nearly three centuries in the hilly
fastnesses of a little-traveled countryside has caused them to sink to a kind of
barbaric degeneracy, rather than advance with their more fortunately placed
brethren of the thickly settled districts. Among these odd folk, who correspond
exactly to the decadent element of "white trash" in the South, law and morals
are non-existent; and their general mental status is probably below that of any
other section of native American people.
Joe Slater, who came to the institution in the vigilant custody of four state
policemen, and who was described as a highly dangerous character, certainly
presented no evidence of his perilous disposition when I first beheld him.
Though well above the middle stature, and of somewhat brawny frame, he was given
an absurd appearance of harmless stupidity by the pale, sleepy blueness of his
small watery eyes, the scantiness of his neglected and never-shaven growth of
yellow beard, and the listless drooping of his heavy nether lip. His age was
unknown, since among his kind neither family records nor permanent family ties
exist; but from the baldness of his head in front, and from the decayed
condition of his teeth, the head surgeon wrote him down as a man of about forty.

From the medical and court documents we learned all that could be gathered of
his case: this man, a vagabond, hunter and trapper, had always been strange in
the eyes of his primitive associates. He had habitually slept at night beyond
the ordinary time, and upon waking would often talk of unknown things in a
manner so bizarre as to inspire fear even in the hearts of an unimaginative
populace. Not that his form of language was at all unusual, for he never spoke
save in the debased patois of his environment; but the tone and tenor of his
utterances were of such mysterious wildness, that none might listen without
apprehension. He himself was generally as terrified and baffled as his auditors,
and within an hour after awakening would forget all that he had said, or at
least all that had caused him to say what he did; relapsing into a bovine,
hall-amiable normality like that of the other hilldwellers.
As Slater grew older, it appeared, his matutinal aberrations had gradually
increased in frequency and violence; till about a month before his arrival at
the institution had occurred the shocking tragedy which caused his arrest by the
authorities. One day near noon, after a profound sleep begun in a whiskey
debauch at about five of the previous afternoon, the man had roused himself most
suddenly, with ululations so horrible and unearthly that they brought several
neighbors to his cabin - a filthy sty where he dwelt with a family as
indescribable as himself. Rushing out into the snow, he had flung his arms aloft
and commenced a series of leaps directly upward in the air; the while shouting
his determination to reach some "big, big cabin with brightness in the roof and
walls and floor and the loud queer music far away." As two men of moderate size
sought to restrain him, he had struggled with maniacal force and fury, screaming
of his desire and need to find and kill a certain "thing that shines and shakes
and laughs." At length, after temporarily felling one of his detainers with a
sudden blow, he had flung himself upon the other in a demoniac ecstasy of
blood-thirstiness, shrieking fiendishly that he would "jump high in the air and
burn his way through anything that stopped him."
Family and neighbors had now fled in a panic, and when the more courageous of
them returned, Slater was gone, leaving behind an unrecognizable pulp-like thing
that had been a living man but an hour before. None of the mountaineers had
dared to pursue him, and it is likely that they would have welcomed his death
from the cold; but when several mornings later they heard his screams from a
distant ravine they realized that he had somehow managed to survive, and that
his removal in one way or another would be necessary. Then had followed an armed
searching-party, whose purpose (whatever it may have been originally) became
that of a sheriff's posse after one of the seldom popular state troopers had by
accident observed, then questioned, and finally joined the seekers.
On the third day Slater was found unconscious in the hollow of a tree, and taken
to the nearest jail, where alienists from Albany examined him as soon as his
senses returned. To them he told a simple story. He had, he said, gone to sleep
one afternoon about sundown after drinking much liquor. He had awakened to find
himself standing bloody-handed in the snow before his cabin, the mangled corpse
of his neighbor Peter Slader at his feet. Horrified, he had taken to the woods
in a vague effort to escape from the scene of what must have been his crime.
Beyond these things he seemed to know nothing, nor could the expert questioning
of his interrogators bring out a single additional fact.
That night Slater slept quietly, and the next morning he awakened with no
singular feature save a certain alteration of expression. Doctor Barnard, who
had been watching the patient, thought he noticed in the pale blue eyes a
certain gleam of peculiar quality, and in the flaccid lips an all but
imperceptible tightening, as if of intelligent determination. But when
questioned, Slater relapsed into the habitual vacancy of the mountaineer, and
only reiterated what he had said on the preceding day.
On the third morning occurred the first of the man's mental attacks. After some
show of uneasiness in sleep, he burst forth into a frenzy so powerful that the
combined efforts of four men were needed to bind him in a straightjacket. The
alienists listened with keen attention to his words, since their curiosity had
been aroused to a high pitch by the suggestive yet mostly conflicting and
incoherent stories of his family and neighbors. Slater raved for upward of
fifteen minutes, babbling in his backwoods dialect of green edifices of light,
oceans of space, strange music, and shadowy mountains and valleys. But most of
all did he dwell upon some mysterious blazing entity that shook and laughed and
mocked at him. This vast, vague personality seemed to have done him a terrible
wrong, and to kill it in triumphant revenge was his paramount desire. In order
to reach it, he said, he would soar through abysses of emptiness, burning every
obstacle that stood in his way. Thus ran his discourse, until with the greatest
suddenness he ceased. The fire of madness died from his eyes, and in dull wonder
he looked at his questioners and asked why he was bound. Dr. Barnard unbuckled
the leather harness and did not restore it till night, when he succeeded in
persuading Slater to don it of his own volition, for his own good. The man had
now admitted that he sometimes talked queerly, though he knew not why.
Within a week two more attacks appeared, but from them the doctors learned
little. On the source of Slater's visions they speculated at length, for since
he could neither read nor write, and had apparently never heard a legend or
fairy-tale, his gorgeous imagery was quite inexplicable. That it could not come
from any known myth or romance was made especially clear by the fact that the
unfortunate lunatic expressed himself only in his own simple manner. He raved of
things he did not understand and could not interpret; things which he claimed to
have experienced, but which he could not have learned through any normal or
connected narration. The alienists soon agreed that abnormal dreams were the
foundation of the trouble; dreams whose vividness could for a time completely
dominate the waking mind of this basically inferior man. With due formality
Slater was tried for murder, acquitted on the ground of insanity, and committed
to the institution wherein I held so humble a post.
I have said that I am a constant speculator concerning dream-life, and from this
you may judge of the eagerness with which I applied myself to the study of the
new patient as soon as I had fully ascertained the facts of his case. He seemed
to sense a certain friendliness in me, born no doubt of the interest I could not
conceal, and the gentle manner in which I questioned him. Not that he ever
recognized me during his attacks, when I hung breathlessly upon his chaotic but
cosmic word-pictures; but he knew me in his quiet hours, when he would sit by
his barred window weaving baskets of straw and willow, and perhaps pining for
the mountain freedom he could never again enjoy. His family never called to see
him; probably it had found another temporary head, after the manner of decadent
mountain folk.
By degrees I commenced to feel an overwhelming wonder at the mad and fantastic
conceptions of Joe Slater. The man himself was pitiably inferior in mentality
and language alike; but his glowing, titanic visions, though described in a
barbarous disjointed jargon, were assuredly things which only a superior or even
exceptional brain could conceive How, I often asked myself, could the stolid
imagination of a Catskill degenerate conjure up sights whose very possession
argued a lurking spark of genius? How could any backwoods dullard have gained so
much as an idea of those glittering realms of supernal radiance and space about
which Slater ranted in his furious delirium? More and more I inclined to the
belief that in the pitiful personality who cringed before me lay the disordered
nucleus of something beyond my comprehension; something infinitely beyond the
comprehension of my more experienced but less imaginative medical and scientific
colleagues.
And yet I could extract nothing definite from the man. The sum of all my
investigation was, that in a kind of semi-corporeal dream-life Slater wandered
or floated through resplendent and prodigious valleys, meadows, gardens, cities,
and palaces of light, in a region unbounded and unknown to man; that there he
was no peasant or degenerate, but a creature of importance and vivid life,
moving proudly and dominantly, and checked only by a certain deadly enemy, who
seemed to be a being of visible yet ethereal structure, and who did not appear
to be of human shape, since Slater never referred to it as a man, or as aught
save a thing. This thing had done Slater some hideous but unnamed wrong, which
the maniac (if maniac he were) yearned to avenge.
From the manner in which Slater alluded to their dealings, I judged that he and
the luminous thing had met on equal terms; that in his dream existence the man
was himself a luminous thing of the same race as his enemy. This impression was
sustained by his frequent references to flying through space and burning all
that impeded his progress. Yet these conceptions were formulated in rustic words
wholly inadequate to convey them, a circumstance which drove me to the
conclusion that if a dream world indeed existed, oral language was not its
medium for the transmission of thought. Could it be that the dream soul
inhabiting this inferior body was desperately struggling to speak things which
the simple and halting tongue of dullness could not utter? Could it be that I
was face to face with intellectual emanations which would explain the mystery if
I could but learn to discover and read them? I did not tell the older physicians
of these things, for middle age is skeptical, cynical, and disinclined to accept
new ideas. Besides, the head of the institution had but lately warned me in his
paternal way that I was overworking; that my mind needed a rest.
It had long been my belief that human thought consists basically of atomic or
molecular motion, convertible into ether waves or radi ant energy like heat,
light and electricity. This belief had early led me to contemplate the
possibility of telepathy or mental communication by means of suitable apparatus,
and I had in my college days prepared a set of transmitting and receiving
instruments somewhat similar to the cumbrous devices employed in wireless
telegraphy at that crude, pre-radio period. These I had tested with a
fellow-student, but achieving no result, had soon packed them away with other
scientific odds and ends for possible future use.
Now, in my intense desire to probe into the dream-life of Joe Slater, I sought
these instruments again, and spent several days in repairing them for action.
When they were complete once more I missed no opportunity for their trial. At
each outburst of Slater's violence, I would fit the transmitter to his forehead
and the receiver to my own, constantly making delicate adjustments for various
hypothetical wave-lengths of intellectual energy. I had but little notion of how
the thought-impressions would, if successfully conveyed, arouse an intelligent
response in my brain, but I felt certain that I could detect and interpret them.
Accordingly I continued my experiments, though informing no one of their nature.

It was on the twenty-first of February, 1901, that the thing occurred. As I look
back across the years I realize how unreal it seems, and sometimes wonder if old
Doctor Fenton was not right when he charged it all to my excited imagination. I
recall that he listened with great kindness and patience when I told him, but
afterward gave me a nerve-powder and arranged for the half-year's vacation on
which I departed the next week.
That fateful night I was wildly agitated and perturbed, for despite the
excellent care he had received, Joe Slater was unmistakably dying. Perhaps it
was his mountain freedom that he missed, or perhaps the turmoil in his brain had
grown too acute for his rather sluggish physique; but at all events the flame of
vitality flickered low in the decadent body. He was drowsy near the end, and as
darkness fell he dropped off into a troubled sleep.
I did not strap on the straightjacket as was customary when he slept, since I
saw that he was too feeble to be dangerous, even if he woke in mental disorder
once more before passing away. But I did place upon his head and mine the two
ends of my cosmic "radio," hoping against hope for a first and last message from
the dream world in the brief time remaining. In the cell with us was one nurse,
a mediocre fellow who did not understand the purpose of the apparatus, or think
to inquire into my course. As the hours wore on I saw his head droop awkwardly
in sleep, but I did not disturb him. I myself, lulled by the rhythmical
breathing of the healthy and the dying man, must have nodded a little later.
The sound of weird lyric melody was what aroused me. Chords, vibrations, and
harmonic ecstasies echoed passionately on every hand, while on my ravished sight
burst the stupendous spectacle ultimate beauty. Walls, columns, and architraves
of living fire blazed effulgently around the spot where I seemed to float in
air, extending upward to an infinitely high vaulted dome of indescribable
splendor. Blending with this display of palatial magnificence, or rather,
supplanting it at times in kaleidoscopic rotation, were glimpses of wide plains
and graceful valleys, high mountains and inviting grottoes, covered with every
lovely attribute of scenery which my delighted eyes could conceive of, yet
formed wholly of some glowing, ethereal plastic entity, which in consistency
partook as much of spirit as of matter. As I gazed, I perceived that my own
brain held the key to these enchanting metamorphoses; for each vista which
appeared to me was the one my changing mind most wished to behold. Amidst this
elysian realm I dwelt not as a stranger, for each sight and sound was familiar
to me; just as it had been for uncounted eons of eternity before, and would be
for like eternities to come.
Then the resplendent aura of my brother of light drew near and held colloquy
with me, soul to soul, with silent and perfect interchange of thought. The hour
was one of approaching triumph, for was not my fellow-being escaping at last
from a degrading periodic bondage; escaping forever, and preparing to follow the
accursed oppressor even unto the uttermost fields of ether, that upon it might
be wrought a flaming cosmic vengeance which would shake the spheres? We floated
thus for a little time, when I perceived a slight blurring and fading of the
objects around us, as though some force were recalling me to earth - where I
least wished to go. The form near me seemed to feel a change also, for it
gradually brought its discourse toward a conclusion, and itself prepared to quit
the scene, fading from my sight at a rate somewhat less rapid than that of the
other objects. A few more thoughts were exchanged, and I knew that the luminous
one and I were being recalled to bondage, though for my brother of light it
would be the last time. The sorry planet shell being well-nigh spent, in less
than an hour my fellow would be free to pursue the oppressor along the Milky Way
and past the hither stars to the very confines of infinity.
A well-defined shock separates my final impression of the fading scene of light
from my sudden and somewhat shamefaced awakening and straightening up in my
chair as I saw the dying figure on the couch move hesitantly. Joe Slater was
indeed awaking, though probably for the last time. As I looked more closely, I
saw that in the sallow cheeks shone spots of color which had never before been
present. The lips, too, seemed unusual, being tightly compressed, as if by the
force of a stronger character than had been Slater's. The whole face finally
began to grow tense, and the head turned restlessly with closed eyes.
I did not rouse the sleeping nurse, but readjusted the slightly disarranged
headband of my telepathic "radio," intent to catch any parting message the
dreamer might have to deliver. All at once the head turned sharply in my
direction and the eyes fell open, causing me to stare in blank amazement at what
I beheld. The man who had been Joe Slater, the Catskill decadent, was gazing at
me with a pair of luminous, expanding eyes whose blue seemed subtly to have
deepened. Neither mania nor degeneracy was `visible in that gaze, and I felt
beyond a doubt that I was viewing a face behind which lay an active mind of high
order.
At this juncture my brain became aware of a steady external influence operating
upon it. I closed my eyes to concentrate my thoughts more profoundly and was
rewarded by the positive knowledge that my long-sought mental message had come
at last. Each transmitted idea formed rapidly in my mind, and though no actual
language was employed, my habitual association of conception and expression was
so great that I seemed to be receiving the message in ordinary English.
"Joe Slater is dead," came the soul-petrifying voice of an agency from beyond
the wall of sleep. My opened eyes sought the couch of pain in curious horror,
but the blue eyes were still calmly gazing, and the countenance was still
intelligently animated. "He is better dead, for he was unfit to bear the active
intellect of cosmic entity. His gross body could not undergo the needed
adjustments between ethereal life and planet life. He was too much an animal,
too little a man; yet it is through his deficiency that you have come to
discover me, for the cosmic and planet souls rightly should never meet. He has
been in my torment and diurnal prison for forty-two of your terrestrial years.
"I am an entity like that which you yourself become in the freedom of dreamless
sleep. I am your brother of light, and have floated with you in the effulgent
valleys. It is not permitted me to tell your waking earth-self of your real
self, but we are all roamers of vast spaces and travelers in many ages. Next
year I may be dwelling in the Egypt which you call ancient, or in the cruel
empire of Tsan Chan which is to come three thousand years hence. You and I have
drifted to the worlds that reel about the red Arcturus, and dwelt in the bodies
of the insect-philosophers that crawl proudly over the fourth moon of Jupiter.
How little does the earth self know life and its extent! How little, indeed,
ought it to know for its own tranquility!
"Of the oppressor I cannot speak. You on earth have unwittingly felt its distant
presence - you who without knowing idly gave the blinking beacon the name of
Algol, the Demon-Star It is to meet and conquer the oppressor that I have vainly
striven for eons, held back by bodily encumbrances. Tonight I go as a Nemesis
bearing just and blazingly cataclysmic vengeance. Watch me in the sky close by
the Demon-Star.
"I cannot speak longer, for the body of Joe Slater grows cold and rigid, and the
coarse brains are ceasing to vibrate as I wish. You have been my only friend on
this planet - the only soul to sense and seek for me within the repellent form
which lies on this couch. We shall meet again - perhaps in the shining mists of
Orion's Sword, perhaps on a bleak plateau in prehistoric Asia, perhaps in
unremembered dreams tonight, perhaps in some other form an eon hence, when the
solar system shall have been swept away."
At this point the thought-waves abruptly ceased, the pale eyes of the dreamer -
or can I say dead man? - commenced to glaze fishily. In a half-stupor I crossed
over to the couch and felt of his wrist, but found it cold, stiff, and
pulseless. The sallow cheeks paled again, and the thick lips fell open,
disclosing the repulsively rotten fangs of the degenerate Joe Slater. I
shivered, pulled a blanket over the hideous face, and awakened the nurse. Then I
left the cell and went silently to my room. I had an instant and unaccountable
craving for a sleep whose dreams I should not remember.
The climax? What plain tale of science can boast of such a rhetorical effect? I
have merely set down certain things appealing to me as facts, allowing you to
construe them as you will. As I have already admitted, my superior, old Doctor
Fenton, denies the reality of everything I have related. He vows that I was
broken down with nervous strain, and badly in need of a long vacation on full
pay which he so generously gave me. He assures me on his professional honor that
Joe Slater was but a low-grade paranoiac, whose fantastic notions must have come
from the crude hereditary folk-tales which circulated in even the most decadent
of communities. All this he tells me - yet I cannot forget what I saw in the sky
on the night after Slater died. Lest you think me a biased witness, another pen
must add this final testimony, which may perhaps supply the climax you expect. I
will quote the following account of the star Nova Persei verbatim from the pages
of that eminent astronomical authority, Professor Garrett P. Serviss:
"On February 22, 1901, a marvelous new star was discovered by Doctor Anderson of
Edinburgh, not very far from Algol. No star had been visible at that point
before. Within twenty-four hours the stranger had become so bright that it
outshone Capella. In a week or two it had visibly faded, and in the course of a
few months it was hardly discernible with the naked eye."
                                    Celephais
                                 By H.P. Lovecraft


Written early Nov 1920
Published May 1922 in The Rainbow, No. 2, p. 10-12.


In a dream Kuranes saw the city in the valley, and the seacoast beyond, and the
snowy peak overlooking the sea, and the gaily painted galleys that sail out of
the harbour toward distant regions where the sea meets the sky. In a dream it
was also that he came by his name of Kuranes, for when awake he was called by
another name. Perhaps it was natural for him to dream a new name; for he was the
last of his family, and alone among the indifferent millions of London, so there
were not many to speak to him and to remind him who he had been. His money and
lands were gone, and he did not care for the ways of the people about him, but
preferred to dream and write of his dreams. What he wrote was laughed at by
those to whom he showed it, so that after a time he kept his writings to
himself, and finally ceased to write. The more he withdrew from the world about
him, the more wonderful became his dreams; and it would have been quite futile
to try to describe them on paper. Kuranes was not modern, and did not think like
others who wrote. Whilst they strove to strip from life its embroidered robes of
myth and to show in naked ugliness the foul thing that is reality, Kuranes
sought for beauty alone. When truth and experience failed to reveal it, he
sought it in fancy and illusion, and found it on his very doorstep, amid the
nebulous memories of childhood tales and dreams.
There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the
stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we
think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are
dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. But some of us awake in the night
with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in
the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch
down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes
that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we
know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder
which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.
Kuranes came very suddenly upon his old world of childhood. He had been dreaming
of the house where he had been born; the great stone house covered with ivy,
where thirteen generations of his ancestors had lived, and where he had hoped to
die. It was moonlight, and he had stolen out into the fragrant summer night,
through the gardens, down the terraces, past the great oaks of the park, and
along the long white road to the village. The village seemed very old, eaten
away at the edge like the moon which had commenced to wane, and Kuranes wondered
whether the peaked roofs of the small houses hid sleep or death. In the streets
were spears of long grass, and the window-panes on either side broken or ifimily
staring. Kuranes had not lingered, but had plodded on as though summoned toward
some goal. He dared not disobey the summons for fear it might prove an illusion
like the urges and aspirations of waking life, which do not lead to any goal.
Then he had been drawn down a lane that led off from the village street toward
the channel cliffs, and had come to the end of things—to the precipice and the
abyss where all the village and all the world fell abruptly into the unechoing
emptiness of infinity, and where even the sky ahead was empty and unit by the
crumbling moon and the peering stars. Faith had urged him on, over the precipice
and into the gulf, where he had floated down, down, down; past dark, shapeless,
undreamed dreams, faintly glowing spheres that may have been partly dreamed
dreams, and laughing winged things that seemed to mock the dreamers of all the
worlds. Then a rift seemed to open in the darkness before him, and he saw the
city of the valley, glistening radiantly far, far below, with a background of
sea and sky, and a snowcapped mountain near the shore.
Kuranes had awakened the very moment he beheld the city, yet he knew from his
brief glance that it was none other than Celephais, in the Valley of Ooth-Nargai
beyond the Tanarian Hills where his spirit had dwelt all the eternity of an hour
one summer afternoon very long ago, when he had slipt away from his nurse and
let the warm sea-breeze lull him to sleep as he watched the clouds from the
cliff near the village. He had protested then, when they had found him, waked
him, and carried him home, for just as he was aroused he had been about to sail
in a golden galley for those alluring regions where the sea meets the sky. And
now he was equally resentful of awaking, for he had found his fabulous city
after forty weary years.
But three nights afterward Kuranes came again to Celephais. As before, he
dreamed first of the village that was asleep or dead, and of the abyss down
which one must float silently; then the rift appeared again, and he beheld the
glittering minarets of the city, and saw the graceful galleys riding at anchor
in the blue harbour, and watched the gingko trees of Mount Man swaying in the
sea-breeze. But this time he was not snatched away, and like a winged being
settled gradually over a grassy hillside till finally his feet rested gently on
the turf. He had indeed come back to the Valley of Ooth-Nargai and the splendid
city of Celephais.
Down the hill amid scented grasses and brilliant flowers walked Kuranes, over
the bubbling Naraxa on the small wooden bridge where he had carved his name so
many years ago, and through the whispering grove to the great stone bridge by
the city gate. All was as of old, nor were the marble walls discoloured, nor the
polished bronze statues upon them tarnished. And Kuranes saw that he need not
tremble lest the things he knew be vanished; for even the sentries on the
ramparts were the same, and still as young as he remembered them. When he
entered the city, past the bronze gates and over the onyx pavements, the
merchants and camel-drivers greeted him as if he had never been away; and it Was
the same at the turquoise temple of Nath-Horthath, where the orchid-wreathed
priests told him that there is no time in Ooth-Nargai, but only perpetual youth.
Then Kuranes walked through the Street of Pillars to the seaward wall, where
gathered the traders and sailors, and strange men from the regions where the sea
meets the sky. There he stayed long, gazing out over the bright harbour where
the ripples sparkled beneath an unknown sun, and where rode lightly the galleys
from far places over the water. And he gazed also upon Mount Man rising regally
from the shore, its lower slopes green with swaying trees and its white summit
touching the sky.
More than ever Kuranes wished to sail in a galley to the far places of which he
had heard so many strange tales, and he sought again the captain who had agreed
to carry him so long ago. He found the man, Athib, sitting on the same chest of
spice he had sat upon before, and Athib seemed not to realize that any time had
passed. Then the two rowed to a galley in the harbour, and giving orders to the
oarmen, commenced to sail out into the billowy Cerenarian Sea that leads to the
sky. For several days they glided undulatingly over the water, till finally they
came to the horizon, where the sea meets the sky. Here the galley paused not at
all, but floated easily in the blue of the sky among fleecy clouds tinted with
rose. And far beneath the keel Kuranes could see strange lands and rivers and
cities of surpassing beauty, spread indolently in the sunshine which seemed
never to lessen or disappear. At length Athib told him that their journey was
near its end, and that they would soon enter the harbour of Serannian, the pink
marble city of the clouds, which is built on that ethereal coast where the west
wind flows into the sky; but as the highest of the city’s carven towers came
into sight there was a sound somewhere in space, and Kuranes awaked in his
London garret.
For many months after that Kuranes sought the marvellous city of Celephais and
its sky-bound galleys in vain; and though his dreams carried him to many
gorgeous and unheard-of places, no one whom he met could tell him how to find
Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills. One night he went flying over dark
mountains where there were faint, lone campfires at great distances apart, and
strange, shaggy herds with tinkling bells on the leaders, and in the wildest
part of this hilly country, so remote that few men could ever have seen it, he
found a hideously ancient wall or causeway of stone zigzagging along the ridges
and valleys; too gigantic ever to have risen by human hands, and of such a
length that neither end of it could be seen. Beyond that wall in the grey dawn
he came to a land of quaint gardens and cherry trees, and when the sun rose he
beheld such beauty of red and white flowers, green foliage and lawns, white
paths, diamond brooks, blue lakelets, carven bridges, and red-roofed pagodas,
that he for a moment forgot Celephais in sheer delight. But he remembered it
again when he walked down a white path toward a red-roofed pagoda, and would
have questioned the people of this land about it, had he not found that there
were no people there, but only birds and bees and butterflies. On another night
Kuranes walked up a damp stone spiral stairway endlessly, and came to a tower
window overlooking a mighty plain and river lit by the full moon; and in the
silent city that spread away from the river bank he thought he beheld some
feature or arrangement which he had known before. He would have descended and
asked the way to OothNargai had not a fearsome aurora sputtered up from some
remote place beyond the horizon, showing the ruin and antiquity of the city, and
the stagnation of the reedy river, and the death lying upon that land, as it had
lain since King Kynaratholis came home from his conquests to find the vengeance
of the gods.
So Kuranes sought fruitlessly for the marvellous city of Celephais and its
galleys that sail to Serannian in the sky, meanwhile seeing many wonders and
once barely escaping from the high-priest not to be described, which wears a
yellow silken mask over its face and dwells all alone in a prehistoric stone
monastery in the cold desert plateau of Leng. In time he grew so impatient of
the bleak intervals of day that he began buying drugs in order to increase his
periods of sleep. Hasheesh helped a great deal, and once sent him to a part of
space where form does not exist, but where glowing gases study the secrets of
existence. And a violet-coloured gas told him that this part of space was
outside what he had called infinity. The gas had not heard of planets and
organisms before, but identified Kuranes merely as one from the infinity where
matter, energy, and gravitation exist. Kuranes was now very anxious to return to
minaret-studded Celephais, and increased his doses of drugs; but eventually he
had no more money left, and could buy no drugs. Then one summer day he was
turned out of his garret, and wandered aimlessly through the streets, drifting
over a bridge to a place where the houses grew thinner and thinner. And it was
there that fulfillment came, and he met the cortege of knights come from
Celephais to bear him thither forever.
Handsome knights they were, astride roan horses and clad in shining armour with
tabards of cloth-of-gold curiously emblazoned. So numerous were they, that
Kuranes almost mistook them for an army, but they were sent in his honour; since
it was he who had created Ooth-Nargai in his dreams, on which account he was now
to be appointed its chief god for evermore. Then they gave Kuranes a horse and
placed him at the head of the cavalcade, and all rode majestically through the
downs of Surrey and onward toward the region where Kuranes and his ancestors
were born. It was very strange, but as the riders went on they seemed to gallop
back through Time; for whenever they passed through a village in the twilight
they saw only such houses and villagers as Chaucer or men before him might have
seen, and sometimes they saw knights on horseback with small companies of
retainers. When it grew dark they travelled more swiftly, till soon they were
flying uncannily as if in the air. In the dim dawn they came upon the village
which Kuranes had seen alive in his childhood, and asleep or dead in his dreams.
It was alive now, and early villagers curtsied as the horsemen clattered down
the street and turned off into the lane that ends in the abyss of dreams.
Kuranes had previously entered that abyss only at night, and wondered what it
would look like by day; so he watched anxiously as the column approached its
brink. Just as they galloped up the rising ground to the precipice a golden
glare came somewhere out of the west and hid all the landscape in effulgent
draperies. The abyss was a seething chaos of roseate and cerulean splendour, and
invisible voices sang exultantly as the knightly entourage plunged over the edge
and floated gracefully down past glittering clouds and silvery coruscations.
Endlessly down the horsemen floated, their chargers pawing the aether as if
galloping over golden sands; and then the luminous vapours spread apart to
reveal a greater brightness, the brightness of the city Celephais, and the sea
coast beyond, and the snowy peak overlooking the sea, and the gaily painted
galleys that sail out of the harbour toward distant regions where the sea meets
the sky.
And Kuranes reigned thereafter over Ooth-Nargai and all the neighboring regions
of dream, and held his court alternately in Celephais and in the cloud-fashioned
Serannian. He reigns there still, and will reign happily for ever, though below
the cliffs at Innsmouth the channel tides played mockingly with the body of a
tramp who had stumbled through the half-deserted village at dawn; played
mockingly, and cast it upon the rocks by ivy-covered Trevor Towers, where a
notably fat and especially offensive millionaire brewer enjoys the purchased
atmosphere of extinct nobility.
                                       Dagon
                                  By H.P. Lovecraft

Written Jul 1917
Published November 1919 in The Vagrant, No. 11, 23-29.

I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall
be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone,
makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself
from this garret window into the squalid street below. Do not think from my
slavery to morphine that I am a weakling or a degenerate. When you have read
these hastily scrawled pages you may guess, though never fully realise, why it
is that I must have forgetfulness or death.
It was in one of the most open and least frequented parts of the broad Pacific
that the packet of which I was supercargo fell a victim to the German
sea-raider. The great war was then at its very beginning, and the ocean forces
of the Hun had not completely sunk to their later degradation; so that our
vessel was made a legitimate prize, whilst we of her crew were treated with all
the fairness and consideration due us as naval prisoners. So liberal, indeed,
was the discipline of our captors, that five days after we were taken I managed
to escape alone in a small boat with water and provisions for a good length of
time.
When I finally found myself adrift and free, I had but little idea of my
surroundings. Never a competent navigator, I could only guess vaguely by the sun
and stars that I was somewhat south of the equator. Of the longitude I knew
nothing, and no island or coastline was in sight. The weather kept fair, and for
uncounted days I drifted aimlessly beneath the scorching sun; waiting either for
some passing ship, or to be cast on the shores of some habitable land. But
neither ship nor land appeared, and I began to despair in my solitude upon the
heaving vastness of unbroken blue.
The change happened whilst I slept. Its details I shall never know; for my
slumber, though troubled and dream-infested, was continuous. When at last I
awakened, it was to discover myself half sucked into a slimy expanse of hellish
black mire which extended about me in monotonous undulations as far as I could
see, and in which my boat lay grounded some distance away.
Though one might well imagine that my first sensation would be of wonder at so
prodigious and unexpected a transformation of scenery, I was in reality more
horrified than astonished; for there was in the air and in the rotting soil a
sinister quality which chilled me to the very core. The region was putrid with
the carcasses of decaying fish, and of other less describable things which I saw
protruding from the nasty mud of the unending plain. Perhaps I should not hope
to convey in mere words the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in absolute
silence and barren immensity. There was nothing within hearing, and nothing in
sight save a vast reach of black slime; yet the very completeness of the
stillness and the homogeneity of the landscape oppressed me with a nauseating
fear.
The sun was blazing down from a sky which seemed to me almost black in its
cloudless cruelty; as though reflecting the inky marsh beneath my feet. As I
crawled into the stranded boat I realised that only one theory could explain my
position. Through some unprecedented volcanic upheaval, a portion of the ocean
floor must have been thrown to the surface, exposing regions which for
innumerable millions of years had lain hidden under unfathomable watery depths.
So great was the extent of the new land which had risen beneath me, that I could
not detect the faintest noise of the surging ocean, strain my ears as I might.
Nor were there any sea-fowl to prey upon the dead things.
For several hours I sat thinking or brooding in the boat, which lay upon its
side and afforded a slight shade as the sun moved across the heavens. As the day
progressed, the ground lost some of its stickiness, and seemed likely to dry
sufficiently for travelling purposes in a short time. That night I slept but
little, and the next day I made for myself a pack containing food and water,
preparatory to an overland journey in search of the vanished sea and possible
rescue.
On the third morning I found the soil dry enough to walk upon with ease. The
odour of the fish was maddening; but I was too much concerned with graver things
to mind so slight an evil, and set out boldly for an unknown goal. All day I
forged steadily westward, guided by a far-away hummock which rose higher than
any other elevation on the rolling desert. That night I encamped, and on the
following day still travelled toward the hummock, though that object seemed
scarcely nearer than when I had first espied it. By the fourth evening I
attained the base of the mound, which turned out to be much higher than it had
appeared from a distance, an intervening valley setting it out in sharper relief
from the general surface. Too weary to ascend, I slept in the shadow of the
hill.
I know not why my dreams were so wild that night; but ere the waning and
fantastically gibbous moon had risen far above the eastern plain, I was awake in
a cold perspiration, determined to sleep no more. Such visions as I had
experienced were too much for me to endure again. And in the glow of the moon I
saw how unwise I had been to travel by day. Without the glare of the parching
sun, my journey would have cost me less energy; indeed, I now felt quite able to
perform the ascent which had deterred me at sunset. Picking up my pack, I
started for the crest of the eminence.
I have said that the unbroken monotony of the rolling plain was a source of
vague horror to me; but I think my horror was greater when I gained the summit
of the mound and looked down the other side into an immeasurable pit or canyon,
whose black recesses the moon had not yet soared high enough to illumine. I felt
myself on the edge of the world, peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of
eternal night. Through my terror ran curious reminiscences of Paradise Lost, and
Satan's hideous climb through the unfashioned realms of darkness.
As the moon climbed higher in the sky, I began to see that the slopes of the
valley were not quite so perpendicular as I had imagined. Ledges and
outcroppings of rock afforded fairly easy footholds for a descent, whilst after
a drop of a few hundred feet, the declivity became very gradual. Urged on by an
impulse which I cannot definitely analyse, I scrambled with difficulty down the
rocks and stood on the gentler slope beneath, gazing into the Stygian deeps
where no light had yet penetrated.
All at once my attention was captured by a vast and singular object on the
opposite slope, which rose steeply about a hundred yards ahead of me; an object
that gleamed whitely in the newly bestowed rays of the ascending moon. That it
was merely a gigantic piece of stone, I soon assured myself; but I was conscious
of a distinct impression that its contour and position were not altogether the
work of Nature. A closer scrutiny filled me with sensations I cannot express;
for despite its enormous magnitude, and its position in an abyss which had
yawned at the bottom of the sea since the world was young, I perceived beyond a
doubt that the strange object was a well-shaped monolith whose massive bulk had
known the workmanship and perhaps the worship of living and thinking creatures.
Dazed and frightened, yet not without a certain thrill of the scientist's or
archaeologist's delight, I examined my surroundings more closely. The moon, now
near the zenith, shone weirdly and vividly above the towering steeps that hemmed
in the chasm, and revealed the fact that a far-flung body of water flowed at the
bottom, winding out of sight in both directions, and almost lapping my feet as I
stood on the slope. Across the chasm, the wavelets washed the base of the
Cyclopean monolith, on whose surface I could now trace both inscriptions and
crude sculptures. The writing was in a system of hieroglyphics unknown to me,
and unlike anything I had ever seen in books, consisting for the most part of
conventionalised aquatic symbols such as fishes, eels, octopi, crustaceans,
molluscs, whales and the like. Several characters obviously represented marine
things which are unknown to the modern world, but whose decomposing forms I had
observed on the ocean-risen plain.
It was the pictorial carving, however, that did most to hold me spellbound.
Plainly visible across the intervening water on account of their enormous size
was an array of bas-reliefs whose subjects would have excited the envy of a
Dore. I think that these things were supposed to depict men -- at least, a
certain sort of men; though the creatures were shown disporting like fishes in
the waters of some marine grotto, or paying homage at some monolithic shrine
which appeared to be under the waves as well. Of their faces and forms I dare
not speak in detail, for the mere remembrance makes me grow faint. Grotesque
beyond the imagination of a Poe or a Bulwer, they were damnably human in general
outline despite webbed hands and feet, shockingly wide and flabby lips, glassy,
bulging eyes, and other features less pleasant to recall. Curiously enough, they
seemed to have been chiselled badly out of proportion with their scenic
background; for one of the creatures was shown in the act of killing a whale
represented as but little larger than himself. I remarked, as I say, their
grotesqueness and strange size; but in a moment decided that they were merely
the imaginary gods of some primitive fishing or seafaring tribe; some tribe
whose last descendant had perished eras before the first ancestor of the
Piltdown or Neanderthal Man was born. Awestruck at this unexpected glimpse into
a past beyond the conception of the most daring anthropologist, I stood musing
whilst the moon cast queer reflections on the silent channel before me.
Then suddenly I saw it. With only a slight churning to mark its rise to the
surface, the thing slid into view above the dark waters. Vast, Polyphemus-like,
and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares to the
monolith, about which it flung its gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its
hideous head and gave vent to certain measured sounds. I think I went mad then.
Of my frantic ascent of the slope and cliff, and of my delirious journey back to
the stranded boat, I remember little. I believe I sang a great deal, and laughed
oddly when I was unable to sing. I have indistinct recollections of a great
storm some time after I reached the boat; at any rate, I knew that I heard peals
of thunder and other tones which Nature utters only in her wildest moods.
When I came out of the shadows I was in a San Francisco hospital; brought
thither by the captain of the American ship which had picked up my boat in
mid-ocean. In my delirium I had said much, but found that my words had been
given scant attention. Of any land upheaval in the Pacific, my rescuers knew
nothing; nor did I deem it necessary to insist upon a thing which I knew they
could not believe. Once I sought out a celebrated ethnologist, and amused him
with peculiar questions regarding the ancient Philistine legend of Dagon, the
Fish-God; but soon perceiving that he was hopelessly conventional, I did not
press my inquiries.
It is at night, especially when the moon is gibbous and waning, that I see the
thing. I tried morphine; but the drug has given only transient surcease, and has
drawn me into its clutches as a hopeless slave. So now I am to end it all,
having written a full account for the information or the contemptuous amusement
of my fellow-men. Often I ask myself if it could not all have been a pure
phantasm -- a mere freak of fever as I lay sun-stricken and raving in the open
boat after my escape from the German man-of-war. This I ask myself, but ever
does there come before me a hideously vivid vision in reply. I cannot think of
the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very
moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient
stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of
water-soaked granite. I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to
drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind --
of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst
universal pandemonium.
The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body
lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The
window!
                              Dreams in the Witch-House
                                  By H. P. Lovecraft

Written Jan-28 Feb 1932
Published July 1933 in Weird Tales, Vol. 22, No. 1, 86-111.

Whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams
Walter Gilman did not know. Behind everything crouched the brooding, festering
horror of the ancient town, and of the mouldy, unhallowed garret gable where he
wrote and studied and wrestled with flgures and formulae when he was not tossing
on the meagre iron bed. His ears were growing sensitive to a preternatural and
intolerable degree, and he had long ago stopped the cheap mantel clock whose
ticking had come to seem like a thunder of artillery. At night the subtle
stirring of the black city outside, the sinister scurrying of rats in the wormy
partitions, and the creaking of hidden timbers in the centuried house, were
enough to give him a sense of strident pandernonium. The darkness always teemed
with unexplained sound -- and yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the noises
he heard should subside and allow him to hear certain other fainter noises which
he suspected were lurking behind them.
He was in the changeless, legend-haunted city of Arkham, with its clustering
gambrel roofs that sway and sag over attics where witches hid from the King's
men in the dark, olden years of the Province. Nor was any spot in that city more
steeped in macabre memory than the gable room which harboured him -- for it was
this house and this room which had likewise harboured old Keziah Mason, whose
flight from Salem Gaol at the last no one was ever able to explain. That was in
1692 -- the gaoler had gone mad and babbled of a small white-fanged furry thing
which scuttled out of Keziah's cell, and not even Cotton Mather could explain
the curves and angles smeared on the grey stone walls with some red, sticky
fluid.
Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-Euclidean calculus and
quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain, and when one mixes them with
folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality
behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the
chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension.
Gilman came from Haverhill, but it was only after he had entered college in
Arkham that he began to connect his mathematics with the fantastic legends of
elder magic. Something in the air of the hoary town worked obscurely on his
imagination. The professors at Miskatonic had urged him to slacken up, and had
voluntarily cut down his course at several points. Moreover, they had stopped
him from consulting the dubious old books on forbidden secrets that were kept
under lock and key in a vault at the university library. But all these
precautions came late in the day, so that Gilman had some terrible hints from
the dreaded Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, the fragmentary Book of Eibon, and
the suppressed Unaussprechlicken Kulten of von Junzt to correlate with his
abstract formulae on the properties of space and the linkage of dimensions known
and unknown.
He knew his room was in the old Witch-House -- that, indeed, was why he had
taken it. There was much in the Essex County records about Keziah Mason's trial,
and what she had admitted under pressure to the Court of Oyer and Terminer had
fascinated Gilman beyond all reason. She had told Judge Hathorne of lines and
curves that could he made to point out directions leading through the walls of
space to other spaces beyond, and had implied that such lines and curves were
frequently used at certain midnight meetings in the dark valley of the white
stone beyond Meadow Hill and on the unpeopled island in the river. She had
spoken also of the Black Man, of her oath, and of her new secret name of Nahab.
Then she had drawn those devices on the walls of her cell and vanished.
Gilman believed strange things about Keziah, and had felt a queer thrill on
learning that her dwelling was still standing after more than two hundred and
thirty-five years. When he heard the hushed Arkham whispers about Keziah's
persistent presence in the old house and the narrow streets, about the irregular
human tooth-marks left on certain sleepers in that and other houses, about the
childish cries heard near May-Eve, and Hallowmass, about the stench often noted
in the old house's attic just after those dreaded seasons, and about the small,
furry, sharp-toothed thing which haunted the mouldering structure and the town
and nuzzled people curiously in the black hours before dawn, he resolved to live
in the place at any cost. A room was easy to secure, for the house was
unpopular, hard to rent, and long given over to cheap lodgings. Gilman could not
have told what he expected to find there, but he knew he wanted to be in the
building where some circumstance had more or less suddenly given a mediocre old
woman of the Seventeenth Century an insight into mathematical depths perhaps
beyond the utmost modern delvings of Planck, Heisenberg, Einstein, and de
Sitter.
He studied the timber and plaster walls for traces of cryptic designs at every
accessible spot where the paper had peeled, and within a week managed to get the
eastern attic room where Keziah was held to have practised her spells. It had
been vacant from the first -- for no one had ever been willing to stay there
long -- but the Polish landlord had grown wary about renting it. Yet nothing
whatever happened to Gilman till about the time of the fever. No ghostly Keziah
flitted through the sombre halls and chambers, no small furry thing crept into
his dismal eyrie to nuzzle him, and no record of the witch's incantations
rewarded his constant search. Sometimes he would take walks through shadowy
tangles of unpaved musty-smelling lanes where eldritch brown houses of unknown
age leaned and tottered and leered mockingly through narrow, small-paned
windows. Here he knew strange things had happened once, and there was a faint
suggestion behind the surface that everything of that monstrous past might not
-- at least in the darkest, narrowest, and most intricately crooked alleys --
have utterly perished. He also rowed out twice to the ill-regarded island in the
river, and made a sketch of the singular angles described by the moss-grown rows
of grey standing stones whose origin was so obscure and immemorial.
Gilman's room was of good size but queerly irregular shape; the north wall
slating perceptibly inward from the outer to the inner end, while the low
ceiling slanted gently downward in the same direction. Aside from an obvious
rat-hole and the signs of other stopped-up ones, there was no access -- nor any
appearance of a former avenue of access -- to the space which must have existed
between the slanting wall and the straight outer wall on the house's north side,
though a view from the exterior showed where a window had heen boarded up at a
very remote date. The loft above the ceiling -- which must have had a slanting
floor -- was likewise inaccessible. When Gilman climbed up a ladder to the
cob-webbed level loft above the rest of the attic he found vestiges of a bygone
aperture tightly and heavily covered with ancient planking and secured by the
stout wooden pegs common in Colonial carpentry. No amount of persuasion,
however, could induce the stolid landlord to let him investigate either of these
two closed spaces.
As time wore along, his absorption in the irregular wall and ceiling of his room
increased; for he began to read into the odd angles a mathematical significance
which seemed to offer vague clues regarding their pnrpose. Old Keziah, he
reflected, might have had excellent reasons for living in a room with peculiar
angles; for was it not through certain angles that she claimed to have gone
outside the boundaries of the world of space we know? His interest gradually
veered away from the unplumbed voids beyond the slanting surfaces, since it now
appeared that the purpose of those surfaces concerned the side he was on.
The touch of brain-fever and the dreams began early in February. For some time,
apparently, the curious angles of Gilman's room had been having a strange,
almost hypnotic effect on him; and as the bleak winter advanced he had found
himself staring more and more intently at the corner where the down-slanting
ceiling met the inward-slanting wall. About this period his inability to
concentrate on his formal studies worried him considerably, his apprehensions
about the mid-year examinations being very acute. But the exaggerated sense of
bearing was scarcely less annoying. Life had become an insistent and almost
unendurable cacophony, and there was that constant, terrifying impression of
other sounds -- perhaps from regions beyond life -- trembling on the very brink
of audibility. So far as concrete noises went, the rats in the ancient
partitions were the worst. Sometimes their scratching seemed not only furtive
but deliberate. When it came from beyond the slanting north wall it was mixed
with a sort of dry rattling; and when it came from the century-closed loft above
the slanting ceiling Gilman always braced himself as if expecting some horror
which only bided its time before descending to engulf him utterly.
The dreams were wholly beyond the pale of sanity, and Gilman fell that they must
be a result, jointly, of his stndies in mathematics and in folklore. He had been
thinking too much about the vague regions which his formulae told him must lie
beyond the three dimensions we know, and about the possibility that old Keziah
Mason -- guided by some influence past all conjecture -- had actually found the
gate to those regions. The yellowed country records containing her testimony and
that of her accusers were so damnably suggestive of things beyond human
expenence -- and the descriptions of the darting little furry object which
served as her familiar were so painfully realistic despite their incredible
details.
That object -- no larger than a good-sized rat and quaintly called by the
townspeople "Brown Jenkins -- seemed to have been the fruit of a remarkable case
of sympathetic herd-delusion, for in 1692 no less than eleven persons had
testified to glimpsing it. There were recent rumours, too, with a baffling and
disconcerting amount of agreement. Witnesses said it had long hair and the shape
of a rat, but that its sharp-toothed, bearded face was evilly human while its
paws were like tiny human hands. It took messages betwixt old Keziah and the
devil, and was nursed on the witch's blood, which it sucked like a vampire. Its
voice was a kind of loathsome titter, and it could speak all languages. Of all
the bizarre monstrosities in Gilman's dreams, nothing filled him with greater
panic and nausea than this blasphemous and diminutive hybrid, whose image
flitted across his vision in a form a thousandfold more hateful than anything
his waking mind had deduced from the ancient records and the modern whispers.
Gilman's dreams consisted largely in plunges through limitless abysses of
inexplicably coloured twiliglit and baffingly disordered sound; abysses whose
material and gravitational properties, and whose relation to his own entity, he
could not even begin to explain. He did not walk or climb, fly or swim, crawl or
wriggle; yet always experienced a mode of motion partly voluntary and partly
involuntary. Of his own condition he could not well judge, for sight of his
arms, legs, and torso seemed always cut off by some odd disarrangement of
perspective; but he felt that his physical organization and faculties were
somehow marvellously transmuted and obliquely projected -- though not without a
certain grotesque relationship to his normal proportions and properties.
The abysses were by no means vacant, being crowded with indescribably angled
masses of alien-hued substance, some of which appeared to be organic while
others seemed inorganic. A few of the organic objects tended to awake vague
memories in the back of his mind, though he could form no conscious idea of what
they mockingly resembled or suggested. In the later dreams he began to
distinguish separate categories into which the organic objects appeared to be
divided, and which seemed to involve in each case a radically different species
of conduct-pattern and basic motivation. Of these categories one seemed to him
to include objects slightly less illogical and irrelevant in their motions than
the members of the other categories.
All the objects -- organic and inorganic alike -- were totally beyond
description or even comprehension. Gilman sometimes compared the inorganic
matter to prisms, labyrinths, clusters of cubes and planes, and Cyclopean
buildings; and the organic things struck him variously as groups of bubbles,
octopi, centipedes, living Hindoo idols, and intricate arabesques roused into a
kind of ophidian animation. Everything he saw was unspeakably menacing and
horrible; and whenever one of the organic entities appeared by its motions to be
noticing him, he felt a stark, hideous fright which generally jolted him awake.
Of how the organic entities moved, he could tell no more than of how he moved
himself. In time he observed a further mystery -- the tendency of certain
entities to appear suddenly out empty space, or to disappear totally with equal
suddenness. The shrieking, roaring confusion of sound which permeated the
abysses was past all analysis as to pitch, timbre or rhythm; but seemed to be
synchronous with vague visual changes in all the indefinite objects, organic and
inorganic alike. Gilman had a constant sense of dread that it might rise to some
unbearable degree of intensity during one or another of its obscure,
relentlessly inevitable fluctuations.
But it was not in these vortices of complete alienage that he saw Brown Jenkin.
That shocking little horror was reserved for certain lighter, sharper dreams
which assailed him just before he dropped into the fullest depths of sleep. He
would be lying in the dark fighting to keep awake when a faint lambent glow
would seem to shimmer around the centuried room, showing in a violet mist the
convergence of angled planes which had seized his brain so insidiously. The
horror would appear to pop out of the rat-hole in the corner and patter toward
him over the sagging, wide-planked floor with evil expectancy in its tiny,
bearded human face; but mercifully, this dream always melted away before the
object got close enough to nuzzle him. It had hellishly long, sharp, canine
teeth; Gilman tried to stop up the rat-hole every day, but each night the real
tenants of the partitions would gnaw away the obstruction, whatever it might be.
Once he had the landlord nail a tin over it, but the next night the rats gnawed
a fresh hole, in making which they pushed or dragged out into the room a curious
little fragment of bone.
Gilman did not report his fever to the doctor, for he knew he could not pass the
examinations if ordered to the college infirmary when every moment was needed
for cramming. As it was, he failed in Calculus D and Advanced General
Psychology, though not without hope of making up lost ground before the end of
the term.
It was in March when the fresh element entered his lighter preliminary dreaming,
and the nightmare shape of Brown Jenkin began to be companioned by the nebulous
blur which grew more and more to resemble a bent old woman. This addition
disturbed him more than he could account for, but finally he decided that it was
like an ancient crone whom he had twice actually encountered in the dark tangle
of lanes near the abandoned wharves. On those occasions the evil, sardonic, and
seemingly unmotivated stare of the beldame had set him almost shivering --
especially the first time when an overgrown rat darting across the shadowed
mouth of a neighbouring alley had made him think irrationally of Brown Jenkin.
Now, he reflected, those nervous fears were being mirrored in his disordered
dreams. That the influence of the old house was unwholesome he could not deny,
but traces of his early morbid interest still held him there. He argued that the
fever alone was responsible for his nightly fantasies, and that when the touch
abated he would be free from the monstrous visions. Those visions, however, were
of absorbing vividness and convincingness, and whenever he awaked he retained a
vague sense of having undergone much more than he remembered. He was hideously
sure that in unrecalled dreams he had talked with both Brown Jenkin and the old
woman, and that they had been urging him to go somewhere with them and to meet a
third being of greater potency.
Toward the end of March he began to pick up in his mathematics, though the other
stndies bothered him increasingly. He was getting an intuitive knack for solving
Riemannian equations, and astonished Professor Upham by his comprehension of
fourth-dimensional and other problems which had floored all the rest of the
class. One afternoon there was a discussion of possible freakish curvatures in
space, and of theoretical points of approach or even contact between our part of
the cosmos and various other regions as distant as the farthest stars or the
transgalactic gulfs themselves -- or even as fabulously remote as the
tentatively conceivable cosmic units beyond the whole Einsteinian space-time
continuum. Gilman's handling of this theme filled everyone with admiration, even
though some of his hypothetical illustrations caused an increase in the always
plentiful gossip about his nervous and solitary eccentricity. What made the
students shake their heads was his sober theory that a man might -- given
mathematical knowledge admittedly beyond all likelihood of human acquirement --
step deliberately from the earth to any other celestial body which might lie at
one of an infinity of specifc points in the cosmic pattern.
Such a step, he said, would require only two stages; first, a passage out of the
three-dimensional sphere we know, and second, a passage back to the
three-dimensional sphere at another point, perhaps one of infinite remoteness.
That this could be accomplished without loss of life was in many cases
conceivable. Any being from any part of three-dimensional space could probably
survive in the fourth dimension; and its survival of the second stage would
depend upon what alien part of three-dimensional space it might select for its
re-entry. Denizens of some planets might be able to live on certain others --
even planets belonging to other galaxies, or to similar dimensional phases of
other space-time continua -- though of course there must be vast numbers of
mutually uninhabitable even though mathematically juxtaposed bodies or zones of
space.
It was also possible that the inhabitants of a given dimensional realm could
survive entry to many unknown and incomprehensible realms of additional or
indefinitely multiplied dimensions -- be they within or outside the given
space-time continuum -- and that the converse would be likewise true. This was a
matter for speculation, though one could be fairly certain that the type of
mutation involved in a passage from any given dimensional plane to the next
higher one would not be destructive of biological integrity as we understand it.
Gilman could not be very clear about his reasons for this last assumption, but
his haziness here was more than overbalanced by his clearness on other complex
points. Professor Upham especially liked his demonstration of the kinship of
higher mathematics to certain phases of magical lore transmitted down the ages
from an ineffable antiquity -- human or pre-human -- whose knowledge of the
cosmos and its laws was greater than ours.
Around 1 April Gilman worried cosiderably because his slow fever did not abate.
He was also troubled by what some of his fellow lodgers said about his
sleep-walking. It seened that he was often absent from his bed and that the
creaking of his floor at certain hours of the night was remarked by the man in
the room below. This fellow also spoke of hearing the tread of shod feet in the
night; but Gilman was sure he must have been mistaken in this, since shoes as
well as other apparel were always precisely in place in the morning. One could
develop all sorts of aural delusions in this morbid old house -- for did not
Gilman himself, even in daylight, now feel certain that noises other than
rat-scratching came from the black voids beyond the slanting wall and above the
slanting ceiling? His pathologically sensitive ears began to listen for faint
footfalls in the immemorially sealed loft overhead, and sometimes the illusion
of such things was agonizingly realistic.
However, he knew that he had actually become a somnambulist; for twice at night
his room had been found vacant, though with all his clothing in place. Of this
he had been assured by Frank Elwood, the one fellow-student whose poverty forced
him to room in this squalid and unpopular house. Elwood had been studying in the
small hours and had come up for help on a differential equation, only to find
Gilman absent. It had been rather presumptuous of him to open the unlocked door
after locking had failed to rouse a response, but he had needed the help very
badly and thought that his host would not mind a gentle prodding awake. On
neither occasion, though, had Gilman been there; and when told of the matter he
wondered where he could have been wandering, barefoot and with only his night
clothes on. He resolved to investigate the matter if reports of his
sleep-walking continued, and thought of sprinkling flour on the floor of the
corridor to see where his footsteps might lead. The door was the only
conceivable egress, for there was no possible foothold outside the narrow
window.
As April advanced, Gilman's fever-sharpened ears were disturbed by the whining
prayers of a superstitious loom-fixer named Joe Mazurewicz who had a room on the
ground floor. Mazurewicz had told long, rambling stories about the ghost of old
Keziah and the furry sharp-fanged, nuzzling thing, and had said he was so badly
haunted at times that only his silver crucifix -- given him for the purpose by
Father Iwanicki of St. Stanislaus' Church -- could bring him relief. Now he was
praying because the Witches' Sabbath was drawing near. May Eve was Walpurgis
Night, when hell's blackest evil roamed the earth and all the slaves of Satan
gathered for nameless rites and deeds. It was always a very bad lime in Arkham,
even though the fine folks up in Miskatonic Avenue and High and Saltonstall
Streets pretended to know nothing about it. There would be bad doings, and a
child or two would probably be missing. Joe knew about such things, for his
grandmother in the old country had heard tales from her grandmother. It was wise
to pray and count one's beads at this season. For three months Keziah and Brown
Jenkin had not been near Joe's room, nor near Paul Choynski's room, nor anywhere
else -- and it meant no good when they held off like that. They must be up to
something.
Gilman dropped in at the doctor's office on the sixteenth of the month, and was
surprised to find his temperature was not as high as he had feared. The
physician questioned him sharply, and advised him to see a nerve specialist. On
reflection, he was glad he had not consulted the still more inquisitive college
doctor. Old Waldron, who had curtailed his activities before, would have made
him take a rest -- an impossible thing now that he was so close to great results
in his equations. He was certainly near the boundary between the known universe
and the fourth dimension, and who could say how much farther he might go?
But even as these thoughts came to him he wondered at the source of his strange
confidence. Did all of this perilous sense of immininence come from the formulae
on the sheets he covered day by day? The soft, stealthy, imaginary footsteps in
the sealed loft above were unnerving. And now, too, there was a growing feeling
that somebody was constantly persuading him to do something terrible which he
could not do. How about the somnambulism? Where did he go sometimes in the
night? And what was that faint suggestion of sound which once in a while seemed
to trickle through the confusion of identifiable sounds even in broad daylight
and full wakefulness? Its rhythm did not correspond to anything on earth, unless
perhaps to the cadence of one or two unmentionable Sabbat-chants, and sometimes
he feared it corresponded to certain attributes of the vague shrieking or
roaring in those wholly alien abysses of dream.
The dreams were meanwhile getting to be atrocious. In the lighter preliminary
phase the evil old woman was now of fiendish distinctness, and Gilman knew she
was the one who had frightened him in the slums. Her bent back, long nose, and
shrivelled chin were unmistakable, and her shapeless brown garments were like
those he remembered. The expression on her face was one of hideous malevolence
and exultation, and when he awaked he could recall a croaking voice that
persuaded and threatened. He must meet the Black Man and go with them all to the
throne of Azathoth at the centre of ultimate chaos. That was what she said. He
must sign the book of Azathoth in his own blood and take a new secret name now
that his independent delvings had gone so far. What kept him from going with her
and Brown Jenkin and the other to the throne of Chaos where the thin flutes pipe
mindlessly was the fact that he had seen the name "Azathoth" in the
Necronomicon, and knew it stood for a primal evil too horrible for description.
The old woman always appeared out of thin air near the corner where the downward
slant met the inward slant. She seemed to crystallize at a point closer to the
ceiling than to the floor, and every night she was a little nearer and more
distinct before the dream shifted. Brown Jenkin, too was always a little nearer
at the last, and its yellowish-white fangs glistened shockingly in that
unearthly violet phosphorescence. Its shrill loathsome tittering struck more and
more into Gilman's head, and he could remember in the morning how it had
pronounced the words "Azathoth" and "Nyarlathotep".
In the deeper dreams everything was likewise more distinct, and Gilman felt that
the twilight abysses around him were those of the fourth dimension. Those
organic entities whose motions seemed least flagrantly irrelevant and
unmotivated were probably projections of life-fonns from our own planet,
including human beings. What the others were in their own dimensional sphere or
spheres he dared not try to think. Two of the less irrelevantly moving things --
a rather large congeries of iridescent, prolately spheroidal bubbles and a very
much smaller polyhedron of unknown colours and rapidly shifting surface angles
-- seemed to take notice of him and follow him about or float ahead as he
changed position among the titan prisms, labyrinths, cube-and-plane clusters and
quasi-buildings; and all the while the vague shrieking and roaring waxed louder
and louder, as if approaching some monstrous climax of utterly unendurable
intensity.
During the night of 19-20 April the new development occurred. Gilman was half
involuntarily moving about in the twilight abysses with the bubble-mass and the
small polyhedron floating ahead when he noticed the peculiarly regular angles
formed by the edges of some gigantic neighbouring prism-clusters. In another
second he was out of the abyss and standing tremulously on a rocky hillside
bathed in intense, diffused green light. He was barefooted and in his
nightclothes. and when he tried to walk discovered that he could scarcely lift
his feet. A swirling vapour hid everything but the immediate sloping terrain
from sight, and he shrank from the thought of the sounds, that might surge out
of that vapour.
Then he saw the two shapes laboriously crawling toward him -- the old woman and
the little furry thing. The crone strained up to her knees and managed to cross
her arms in a singular fashion, while Brown Jenkin pointed in a certain
direction with a horribly anthropoid forepaw which it raised with evident
difficulty. Spurred by an impulse he did not originate, Gilman dragged himself
forward along a course determined by the angle of the old woman's arms and the
direction of the small monstrosity's paw, and before he had shuffled three steps
he was back in the twilight abysses. Geometrical shapes seethed around him, and
he fell dizzily and interminably. At last he woke in his bed in the crazily
angled garret of the eldritch old house.
He was good for nothing that morning, and stayed away from all his classes. Some
unknown attraction was pulling his eyes in a seemingly irrelevant direction, for
he could not help staring at a certain vacant spot on the floor. As the day
advanced, the focus of his unseeing eyes changd position, and by noon he had
conquered the impulse to stare at vacancy. About two o'clock he went out for
lunch and as he threaded the narrow lanes of the city he found himself turning
always to the southeast. Only an effort halted him at a cafeteria in Church
Street, and after the meal he felt the unknown pull still more strongly.
He would have to consult a nerve specialist after all -- perhaps there was a
connection with his somnambulism -- but meanwhile he might at least try to break
the morbid spell himself. Undoubtedly he could still manage to walk away from
the pull, so with great resolution he headed against it and draged himself
deliberately north along Garrison Street. By the time he had reached the bridge
over the Miskatonic he was in a cold perspiration, and he clutched at the iron
railing as he gazed upstream at the ill-regarded island whose regular lines of
ancient standing stones brooded sullenly in the afternoon sunlight.
Then he gave a start. For there was a clearly visible living figure on that
desolate island, and a second glance told him it was certainly the strange old
woman whose sinister aspect had worked itself so disastrously into his dreams.
The tall grass near her was noving, too, as if some other living thing were
crawling close to the ground. When the old woman began to turn toward him he
fled precipitately off the bridge and into the shelter of the town's
labyrinthine waterfront alleys. Distant though the island was, he felt that a
monstrous and invincible evil could flow from the sardonic stare of that bent,
ancient figure in brown.
The southeastwards pull still held, and only with tremendous resolution could
Gilman drag himself into the old house and up the rickety stairs. For hours he
sat silent and aimless, with his eyes shifting gradually westward. About six
o'clock his sharpened ears caught the whining prayers of Joe Mazurewicz two
floors below, and in desperation he seized his hat and walked out into the
sunset-golden streets, letting the now directly southward pull carry him where
it might. An hour later darkness found him in the open fields beyond Hangman's
Brook, with the glimmering spring stars shining ahead. The urge to walk was
gradually changing to an urge to leap mystically into space, and suddenly he
realized just where the source of the pull lay.
It was in the sky. A definite point among the stars had a caim on him and was
calling him. Apparently it was a point somewhere between Hydra and Argo Navis,
and he knew that he had been urged toward it ever since he had awaked soon after
dawn. In the morning it had been underfoot, and now it was roughly south but
stealing toward the west. What was the meaning of this new thing? Was he going
mad? How long would it last? Again mustering his resolution, Gilman turned and
dragged himself back to the sinister old house.
Mazurewicz was waiting for him at the door, and seemed both anxious and
reluctant to whisper some fresh bit of superstition. It was about the
witch-light. Joe had been out celebrating the night before -- and was Patriots'
Day in Massachusetts -- and had come home after midnight. Looking up at the
house from outside, he had thought at first that Gilman's window was dark, but
then he had seen the faint violet glow within. He wanted to warn the gentleman
about that glow, for everybody in Arkham knew it was Keziah's witch-light which
played near Brown Jenkin and the ghost of the old crone herself. He had not
mentioned this before, but now he must tell about it because it meant that
Keziah and her long-toothed familiar were haunting the yonng gentleman.
Sometimes he and Paul Choynski and Landlord Dombrowski thought they saw that
light seeping out of cracks in the sealed loft above the young gentleman's room,
but they had all agreed not to talk about that. However, it would be better for
the gentleman to take another room and get a crucifix from some good priest like
Father Iwanicki.
As the man rambled on, Gilman felt a nameless panic clutch at his throat. He
knew that Joe must have been half drunk when he came home the night before; yet
the mention of a violet light in the garret window was of frightful import. It
was a lambent gow of this sort which always played about the old woman and the
small furry thing in those lighter, sharper dreams which prefaced his plunge
into unknown abysses, and the thought that a wakeful second person could see the
dream-luminance was utterly beyond sane harborage. Yet where had the fellow got
such an odd notion? Had he himself talked as well as walked around the house in
his sleep? No, Joe said, he had not -- but he must check up on this. Perhaps
Frank Elwood could tell him something, though he hated to ask.
Fever -- wild dreams -- somnambulism -- illusions of sounds -- a pull toward a
point in the sky -- and now a suspicion of insane sleep-talking! He must stop
studying, see a nerve specialist, and take himself in hand. When he climbed to
the second storey he paused at Elwood's door but saw that the other youth was
out. Reluctantly he continued up to his garret room and sat down in the dark.
His gaze was still pulled to the southward, but he also found himself listening
intently for some sound in the closed loft above, and half imagining that an
evil violet light seeped down through an infinitesimal crack in the low,
slanting ceiling.
That night as Gilnan slept, the violet light broke upon him with heightened
intensity, and the old witch and small furry thing, getting closer than ever
before, mocked him with inhuman squeals and devilish gestures. He was glad to
sink into the vaguely roaring twilight abysses, though the pursuit of that
iridescent bubble-congeries and that kaleidoscopic little polyhedron was
menacing and irritating. Then came the shift as vast converging planes of a
slippery-looking substance loomed above and below him -- a shift which ended in
a flash of delinum and a blaze of unknown, alien light in which yellow, carmine,
and indigo were madly and inextricably blended.
He was half lying on a high, fantastically balustraded terrace about a boundless
jungle of outlandish, incredible peaks, balanced planes, domes, minarets,
horizontal disks poised on pinnacles, and numberless forms of still greater
wildness -- some of stone and some of metal -- which glittered gorgeously in the
mixed, almost blistening glare from a poly-chromatic sky. Looking upward he saw
three stupendous disks of flame, each of a different hue, and at a different
height above an infinitely distant curving horizon of low mountains. Behind him
tiers of higher terraces towered aloft as far as he could see. The city below
stretched away to the limits of vision, and he hoped that no sound would well up
from it.
The pavement from which he easily raised himself was a veined polished stone
beyond his power to identify, and the tiles were cut in bizarre-angled shapes
which struck himm as less asymmetrical than based on some unearthly symmetry
whose laws he could not comprehend. The balustrade was chest-high, delicate, and
fantastically wrought, while along the rail were ranged at short intervals
little figures of grotesque design and exquisite workmanship. They, like the
whole balustrade, seemed to be made of some sort of shining metal whose colour
could not be guessed in the chaos of mixed effulgences, and their nature utterly
defied conjecture. They represented some ridged barrel-shaped objects with thin
horizontal arms radiating spoke-like from a central ring and with vertical knobs
or bulbs projecting from the head and base of the barrel. Each of these knobs
was the hub of a system of five long, flat, triangularly tapering arms arranged
around it like the arms of a starfish -- nearly horizontal, but curving slightly
away from the central barrel. The base of the bottom knob was fused to the long
railing with so delicate a point of contact that several figures had been broken
off and were missing. The figures were about four and a half inches in height,
while the spiky arms gave them a maximum diameter of about two and a half
inches.
When Gilman stood up, the tiles felt hot to his bare feet. He was wholly alone,
and his first act was to walk to the balustrade and look dizzily down at the
endless, Cyclopean city almost two thousand feet below. As he listened he
thought a rhythmic confusion of faint musical pipings covering a wide tonal
range welled up from the narrow streets beneath, and he wished he might discern
the denizens of the place. The sight turned him giddy after a while, so that he
would have fallen to the pavement had he not clutched instinctively at the
lustrous balustrade. His right hand fell on one of the projecting figures, the
touch seeming to steady him slightly. It was too much, however, for the exotic
delicacy of the metal-work, and the spiky figure snapped off under his grasp.
Still half dazed, he continued to clutch it as his other hand seized a vacant
space on the smooth railing.
But now his over-sensitive ears caught something behind him, and he looked back
across the level terrace. Approaching him softly though without apparent
furtiveness were five figures, two of which were the sinister old woman and the
fanged, furry little animal. The other three were what sent him unconscious; for
they were living entities about eight feet high, shaped precisely like the spiky
images on the balustrade, and propelling themselves by a spider-like wriggling
of their lower set of starfish-arms.
Gilman awoke in his bed, drenched by a cold perspiration and with a smarting
sensation in his face, hands and feet. Springing to the floor, he washed and
dressed in frantic haste, as if it were necessary for him to get out of the
house as quickly as possible. He did not know where he wished to go, but felt
that once more he would have to sacrifice his classes. The odd pull toward that
spot in the sky between Hydra and Argo had abated, but another of even greater
strength had taken its place. Now he felt that he must go north -- infinitely
north. He dreaded to cross the bridge that gave a view of the desolate island in
the Miskatonic, so went over the Peabody Avenue bridge. Very often he stumbled,
for his eyes and ears were chained to an extremely lofty point in the blank blue
sky.
After about an hour he got himself under better control, and saw that he was far
from the city. All around him stretched the bleak emptiness of salt marshes,
while the narrow road ahead led to Innsmouth -- that ancient, half-deserted town
which Arkham people were so curiously unwilling to visit. Though the northward
pull had not diminished, he resisted it as he had resisted the other pull, and
finally found that he could almost balance the one against the other. Plodding
back to town and getting some coffee at a soda fountain, he dragged himself into
the public library and browsed aimlessly among the lighter magazines. Once he
met some friends who remarked how oddly sunburned he looked, but he did not tell
them of his walk. At three o'clock he took some lunch at a restaurant, noting
meanwhile that the pull had either lessened or divided itself. After that he
killed the time at a cheap cinema show, seeing the inane performance over and
over again without paying any attention to it.
About nine at night he drifted homeward and shuffled into the ancient house Joe
Mazurewicz was whining unintelligible prayers, and Gilman hastened up to his own
garret chamber without pausing to see if Elwood was in. It was when he turned on
the feeble electric light that the shock came. At once he saw there was
something on the table which did not belong there, and a second look left no
room for doubt. Lying on its side -- for it could not stand up alone -- was the
exotic spiky figure which in his monstrous dream he had broken off the fantastic
balustrade. No detail was missing. The ridged, barrel-shaped center, the thin
radiating arms, the knobs at each end, and the flat, slightly outward-curving
starfish-arms spreading from those knobs -- all were there. In the electric
light the colour seemed to be a kind of iridescent grey veined with green; and
Gilman could see amidst his horror and bewilderment that one of the knobs ended
in a jagged break, corresponding to its former point of attachment to the
dream-railing.
Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud. This
fusion of dream and reality was too much to bear. Still dazed, he clutched at
the spiky thing and staggered downstairs to Landlord Dombrowski's quarters. The
whining prayers of the superstitious loom-fixer were still sounding through the
mouldy halls, but Gilman did not mind them now. The landlord was in, and greeted
him pleasantly. No, he had not seen that thing before and did not know anything
about it. But his wife had said she found a funny tin thing in one of the teds
when she fixed the rooms at noon, and maybe that was it. Dombrowski called her,
and she waddled in. Yes, that was tine thing. She had found it in the young
gentleman's bed -- on the side next the wall. It had looked very queer to her,
but of course the young gentleman had lots of queer things in his room -- books
and curios and pictures and markings on paper. She certainly knew nothing about
it.
So Gilman climbed upstairs again in mental turmoil, convinced that he was either
still dreaming or that his somnambulism had run to incredible extremes and led
him to depredations in unknown places. Where had he got this outré thing? He did
not recall seeing it in any museum in Arkham. It must have been somewhere,
though; and the sight of it as he snatched it in his sleep must have caused the
odd dream-picture of the balustraded terrace. Next day he would make some very
guarded inquiries -- and perhaps see the nerve specialist.
Meanwhile he would try to keep track of his somnambulism. As he went upstairs
and across the garret hall he sprinkled about some flour which he had borrowed
-- with a frank admission as to its purpose -- from the landlord. He had stopped
at Etwood's door on the way, but had found all dark within. Entering his room,
he placed the spiky thing on the table, and lay down in complete mental and
physical exhaustion without pausing to undress. From the closed loft above the
slating ceiling he thought he heard a faint scratching and padding, but he was
too disorganized even to mind it. That cryptical pull from the north was getting
very strong again, though it seemed now to come from a lower place in the sky.
In the dazzling violet light of dream the old woman and the fanged, furry thing
came again and with a greater distinctness than on any former occasion. This
time they actually reached him, and he felt the crone's withered claws clutching
at him. He was pulled out of bed and into empty space, and for a moment he heard
a rhythmic roaring and saw the twilight amorphousness of the vague abysses
seething around him. But that moment was very brief, for presently he was in a
crude, windowless little space with rough beams and planks rising to a peak just
above his head, and with a curious slanting floor underfoot. Propped level on
that floor were low cases full of books of every degree of antiquity and
disintegration, and in the centre were a table and bench, both apparently
fastened in place. Small objects of unknown shape and nature were ranged on the
tops of the cases, and in the flaming violet light Gilman thought he saw a
counterpart of the spiky image which had puzzled him so horribly. On the left
the floor fell abruptly away, leaving a black triangular gulf out of which,
after a second's dry rattling, there presently climbed the hateful little furry
thing with the yellow fangs and bearded human face.
The evilly-grinning beldame still clutched him, and beyond the table stood a
figure he had never seen before -- a tall, lean man of dead black colouration
but without the slightest sign of negroid features: wholly devoid of either hair
or beard, and wearing as his only garment a shapeless robe of some heavy black
fabric. His feet were indistinguishable because of the table and bench, but he
must have been shod, since there was a clicking whenever he changed position.
The man did not speak, and bore no trace of expression on his small, regular
features. He merely pointed to a book of prodigious size which lay open on the
table, while the beldame thrust a huge grey quill into Gilman's right hand. Over
everything was a pall of intensely maddening fear, and the climax was reached
when the furry thing ran up the dreamer's clothing to his shoulders and then
down his left arm, finally biting him sharply in the wrist just below his cuff.
As the blood spurted from this wound Gilman lapsed into a faint.
He awaked on the morning of the twenty-second with a pain in his left wrist, and
saw that his cuff was brown with dried blood. His recollections were very
confused, but the scene with the black man in the unknown space stood out
vividly. The rats must have bitten him as he slept, giving rise to the climax of
that frightful dream. Opening the door, he saw that the flour on the corridor
floor was undisturbed except for the huge prints of the loutish fellow who
roomed at the other end of the garret. So he had not been sleep-walking this
time. But something would have to be done about those rats. He would speak to
the landlord about them. Again he tried to stop up the hole at the base of the
slanting wall, wedging in a candlestick which seemed of about the right size.
His ears were ringing horribly, as if with the residual echoes of some horrible
noise heard in dreams.
As he bathed and changed clothes he tried to recall what he had dreamed after
the scene in the violet-litten space, but nothing definite would crystallize in
his mind. That scene itself must have corresponded to the sealed loft overhead,
which had begun to attack his imagination so violently, but later impressions
were faint and hazy. There were suggestions of the vague, twilight abysses, and
of still vaster, blacker abysses beyond them -- abysses in which all fixed
suggestions were absent. He had been taken there by the bubble-congeries and the
little polyhedron which always dogged him; but they, like himself, had changed
to wisps of mist in this farther void of ultimate blackness. Something else had
gone on ahead -- a larger wisp which now and then condensed into nameless
approximations of form -- and he thought that their progress had not been in a
straight line, but rather along the alien curves and spirals of some ethereal
vortex which obeyed laws unknown to the physics and mathematics of any
conceivable cosmos. Eventually there had been a hint of vast, leaping shadows,
of a monstrous, half-acoustic pulsing, and of the thin, monotonous piping of an
unseen flute -- but that was all. Gilman decided he had picked up that last
conception from what he had read in the Necronomicon about the mindless entity
Azathoth, which rules all time and space from a black throne at the centre of
Chaos.
When the blood was washed away the wrist wound proved very slight, and Gilman
puzzled over the location of the two tiny punctures. It occurred to him that
there was no blood on the bedspread where he had lain -- which was very curious
in view of the amount on his skin and cuff. Had he been sleep-walking within his
room, and had the rat bitten him as he sat in some chair or paused in some less
rational position? He looked in every corner for brownish drops or stains, but
did not find any. He had better, he thought, spinkle flour within the room as
well as outside the door -- though after all no further proof of his
sleep-walking was needed. He knew he did walk and the thing to do now was to
stop it. He must ask Frank Elwood for help. This morning the strange pulls from
space seemed lessened, though they were replaced by another sensation even more
inexplicable. It was a vague, insistent impulse to fly away from his present
situation, but held not a hint of the specific direction in which he wished to
fly. As he picked up the strange spiky image on the table he thought the older
northward pull grew a trifle stronger. but even so, it was wholly overruled by
the newer and more bewildering urge.
He took the spiky image down to Elwood's room, steeling himself against the
whines of the loom-fixer which welled up from the ground floor. Elwood was in,
thank heaven, and appeared to be stirring about. There was time for a little
conversation before leaving for breakfast and college, so Gilman hurriedly
poured forth an account of his recent dreams and fears. His host was very
sympathetic, and agreed that something ought to be done. He was shocked by his
guest's drawn, haggard aspect, and noticed the queer, abnormal-looking sunburn
which others had remarked during the past week.
There was not much, though, that he could say. He had not seen Gilman on any
sleep-walking expedition, and had no idea what the curious image could be. He
had, though, heard the French~Canadian who lodged just under Gilman talking to
Mazurewicz one evening. They were telling each other how badly they dreaded the
coming of Walpurgis Night, now only a few days off; and were exchanging pitying
comments about the poor, doomed young gentleman. Desrochers, the fellow under
Gilman's room, had spoken of nocturnal footsteps shod and unshod, and of the
violet light he saw one night when he had stolen fearfully up to peer through
Gilman's keyhole. He had not dared to peer, he told Mazurewicz, after he had
glimpsed that light through the cracks around the door. There had been soft
talking, too -- and as he began to describe it his voice had sunk to an
inaudible whisper.
Elwood could not imagine what had set these superstitious creatures gossiping,
but supposed their imaginations had been roused by Gilman's late hours and
somnolent walking and talking on the one hand, and by the nearness of
traditionally-feared May Eve on the other hand. That Gilman talked in his sleep
was plain, and it was obviously from Desrochers' keyhole listenings that the
delusive notion of the violet dream-light had got abroad. These simple people
were quick to imagine they had seen any odd thing they had heard about. As for a
plan of action -- Gilman had better move down to Elwood's room and avoid
sleeping alone. Elwood would, if awake, rouse him whenever he began to talk or
rise in his sleep. Very soon, too, he must see the specialist. Meanwhile they
would take the spiky image around to the various museums and to certain
professors; seeking identification and slating that it had been found in a
public rubbish-can. Also, Dombrowski must attend to the poisoning of those rats
in the walls.
Braced up by Elwood's companionship, Gilman attended classes that day. Strange
urges still tugged at him, but he could sidetrack them with considerable
success. During a free period he showed the queer image to several professors,
all of whom were intensely interested, though none of them could shed any light
upon its nature or origin. That night he slept on a couch which Elwood had had
the landlord bring to the second-storey room, and for the first time in weeks
was wholly free from disquieting dreams. But the feverishness still hung on, and
the whines of the loom-fixer were an unnerving influence.
During the next few days Gilman enjoyed an almost perfect immunity from morbid
manifestations. He had, Elwood said, showed no tendency to talk or rise in his
sleep; and meanwhile the landlord was putting rat-poison everywhere. The only
disturbing element was the talk among the superstitious foreigners, whose
imaginations had become highly excited. Mazurewicz was always trying to make him
get a crucifix, and finally forced one upon him which he said had been blessed
by the good Father Iwanicki. Desrochers, too, had something to say; in fact, he
insisted that cautious steps had sounded in the now vacant room above him on the
first and second nights of Gilinan's absence from it. Paul Choynski thought he
heard sounds in the halls and on the stairs at night, and claimed that his door
had been softly tried, while Mrs. Dombrowski vowed she had seen Brown Jenkin for
the first time since All-Hallows. But such naïve reports could mean very little,
and Gilman let the cheap metal crucifix hang idly from a knob on his host's
dresser.
For three days Gilman and Elwood canvassed the local museums in an effort to
identify the strange spiky image, but always without success. In every quarter,
however, interest was intense; for the utter alienage of the thing was a
tremendous challenge to scientific curiosity. One of the small radiating arms
was broken off and subjected to chemical analysis. Professor Ellery found
platinum, iron and tellurium in the strange alloy; but mixed with these were at
least three other apparent elements of high atomic weight which chemistry was
absolutely powerless to classify. Not only did they fail to correspond with any
known element, but they did not even fit the vacant places reserved for probable
elements in the periodic system. The mystery remains unsolved to this day,
though the image is on exhibition at the museum of Miskatonic University.
On the morning of April twenty-seventh a fresh rat-bole appeared in the room
where Gilman was a guest, but Dombrowski tinned it up during the day. The poison
was not having much effect, for scratchings and scurryings in the walls were
virtually undiminished.
Elwood was out late that night, and Gilman waited up for him. He did not wish to
go to sleep in a room alone -- especially since he thought he had glimpsed in
the evening twilight the repellent old woman whose image had become so horribly
transferred to his dreams. He wondered who she was, and what had been near her
rattling the tin can in a rubbish-heap at the mouth of a squalid courtyard. The
crone had seemed to notice him and leer evilly at him -- though perhaps this was
merely his imagination.
The next day both youths felt very tired, and knew they would sleep like logs
when night came. In the evening they drowsily discussed the mathematical studies
which had so completely and perhaps harmfully engrossed Gilman, and speculated
about the linkage with ancient magic and folklore which seemed so darkly
probable. They spoke of old Keziah Mason, and Elwood agreed that Gilman had good
scientific grounds for thinking she might have stumbled on strange and
significant information. The hidden cults to which these witches belonged often
guarded and handed down surprising secrets from elder, forgotten eons; and it
was by no means impossible that Keziah had actually mastered the art of passing
through dimensional gates. Tradition emphasizes the uselessness of material
barriers in halting a witch's notions, and who can say what underlies the old
tales of broomstick rides through the night?
Whether a modern student could ever gain similar powers from mathematical
research alone, was still to be seen. Suceess, Gilman added, might lead to
dangerous and unthinkable situations, for who could foretell the conditions
pervading an adjacent but normally inaccessible dimension? On the other hand,
the picturesque possibilities were enormous. Time could not exist in certain
belts of space, and by entering and remaining in such a belt one might preserve
one's life and age indefinitely; never suffering organic metabolism or
deterioration except for slight amounts incurred during visits to one's own or
similar planes. One might, for example, pass into a timeless dimension and
emerge at some remote period of the earth's history as young as before.
Whether anybody had ever managed to do this, one could hardly conjecture with
any degree of authority. Old legends are hazy and ambiguous, and in historic
times all attempts at crossing forbidden gaps seem complicated by strange and
terrible alliances with beings and messengers from outside. There was the
immemorial figure of the deputy or messenger of hidden and terrible powers --
the "Black Man" of the witch-cult, and the "Nyarlathotep" of the Necronomicon.
There was, too, the baffling problem of the lesser messengers or intermediaries
-- the quasi-animals and queer hybrids which legend depicts as witches'
familiars. As Gilman and Elwood retired, too sleepy to argue further, they heard
Joe Mazurewicz reel into the house half drunk, and shuddered at the desperate
wildness of his whining prayers.
That night Gilinan saw the violet light again. In his dream he had heard a
scratching and gnawing in the partitions, and thought that someone fumbled
clumsily at the latch. Then he saw the old woman and the small furry thing
advancing toward him over the carpeted floor. The beldame's face was alight with
inhuman exultation, and the little yellow-toothed morbidity tittered mockingly
as it pointed at the heavily-sleeping form of Elwood on the other couch across
the room. A paralysis of fear stifled all attempts to cry out. As once before,
the hideous crone seized Gilman by the shoulders, yanking him out of bed and
into empty space. Again the infinitude of the shrieking abysses flashed past
him, but in another second he thought he was in a dark, muddy, unknown alley of
foetid odors with the rotting walls of ancient houses towering up on every hand.

Ahead was the robed black man he had seen in the peaked space in the other
dream, while from a lesser distance the old woman was beckoning and grimacing
imperiously. Brown Jenkin was rubbing itself with a kind of affectionate
playfulness around the ankles of the black man, which the deep mud largely
concealed. There was a dark open doorway on the right, to which the black man
silently pointed. Into this the grinning crone started, dragging Gilman after
her by his pajama sleeves. There were evil-smelling staircases which creaked
ominously, and on which the old woman seemed to radiate a faint violet light;
and finally a door leading off a landing. The crone fumbled with the latch and
pushed the door open, motioning to Gilman to wait, and disappearing inside the
black aperture.
The youth's over-sensitive ears caught a hideous strangled cry, and presently
the beldame came out of the room bearing a small, senseless form which she
thrust at the dreamer as if ordering him to carry it. The sight of this form,
and the expression on its face, broke the spell. Still too dazed to cry out, he
plunged recklessly down the noisome staircase and into the mud outside, halting
only when seized and choked by the waiting black man. As consciousness departed
he heard the faint, shrill tittering of the fanged, rat-like abnormality.
On the morning of the twenty-ninth Gilman awaked into a maelstrom of horror. The
instant he opened his eyes he knew something was terribly wrong, for he was back
in his old garret room with the slanting wall and ceiling, sprawled on the now
unmade bed. His throat was aching inexplicably, and as he struggled to a sitting
posture he saw with growing fright that his feet and pajama bottoms were brown
with caked mud. For the moment his recollections were hopelessly hazy, but he
knew at least that he must have been sleep-walking. Elwood had been lost too
deeply in slumber to hear and stop him. On the floor were confused muddy prints,
but oddly enough they did not extend all the way to the door. The more Gilman
looked at them, the more peculiar they seemed; for in addition to those he could
recognize as his there were some smaller, almost round markings -- such as the
legs of a large chair or a table might make, except that most of them tended to
be divided into halves. There were also some curious muddy rat-tracks leading
out of a fresh hole and back into it again. Utter bewilderment and the fear of
madness racked Oilman as he staggered to the door and saw that there were no
muddy prints outside. The more he remembered of his hideous dream the more
terrified he felt, and it added to his desperation to hear Joe Mazurewicz
chanting mournfully two floors below.
Descending to Elwood's room he roused his still-sleeping host and began telling
of how he had found himself, but Elwood could form no idea of what might really
have happened. Where Gilman could have been, how he got back to his room without
making tracks in the hall, and how the muddy, furniture-like prints came to be
mixed with his in the garret chamber, were wholly beyond conjecture. Then there
were those dark, livid marks on his throat, as if he had tried to strangle
himself. He put his hands up to them, but found that they did not even
approximately fit. While they were talking, Desrochers dropped in to say that he
had heard a terrific clattering overhead in the dark small hours. No, there had
been no one on the stairs after midnight, though just before midnight he had
heard faint footfalls in the garret, and cautiously descending steps he did not
like. It was, he added, a very bad time of year for Arkham. The young gentleman
had better be sure to wear the circifix Joe Mazurewicz had given him. Even the
daytime was not safe, for after dawn there had been strange sounds in the house
-- especially a thin, childish wail hastily choked off.
Gilman mechanically attended classes that morning, but was wholly unable to fix
his mind on his studies. A mood of hideous apprehension and expectancy had
seized him, and he seemed to be awaiting the fall of some annihilating blow. At
noon he lunched at the University spa, picking up a paper from the next seat as
he waited for dessert. But he never ate that dessert; for an item on the paper's
first page left him limp, wild-eyed, and able only to pay his check and stagger
back to Elwood's room.
There had been a strange kidnapping the night before in Orne's Gangway, and the
two-year-old child of a clod-like laundry worker named Anastasia Wolejko had
completely vanished from sight. The mother, it appeared, had feared the event
for some time; but the reasons she assigned for her fear were so grotesque that
no one took them seriously. She had, she said, seen Brown Jenkin about the place
now and then ever since early in March, and knew from its grimaces and
titterings that little Ladislas must be marked for sacrifice at the awful Sabbat
on Walpurgis Night. She had asked her neighbour Mary Czanek to sleep in the room
and try to protect the child, but Mary had not dared. She could not tell the
police, for they never believed such things. Children had been taken that way
every year ever since she could remember. And her friend Pete Stowacki would not
help because he wanted the child out of the way.
But what threw Gilman into a cold perspiration was the report of a pair of
revellers who had been walking past the mouth of the gangway just after
midnight. They admitted they had been drunk, but both vowed they had seen a
crazily dressed trio furtively entering the dark passageway. There had, they
said, been a huge robed negro, a little old woman in rags, and a young white man
in his night-clothes. The old woman had been dragging the youth, while around
the feet of the negro a tame rat was rubbing and weaving in the brown mud.
Gilman sat in a daze all the afternoon, and Elwood -- who had meanwhile seen the
papers and formed terrible conjectures from them -- found him thus when he came
home. This time neither could doubt but that something hideously serious was
closing in around them. Between the phantasms of nightmare and the realities of
the objective world a monstrous and unthinkable relationship was crystallizing,
and only stupendous vigilance could avert still more direful developments.
Gilman must see a specialist sooner or later, but not just now, when all the
papers were full of this kidnapping business.
Just what had really happened was maddeningly obscure, and for a moment both
Gilman and Elwood exchanged whispered theories of the wildest kind. Had Gilman
unconsciously succeeded better than he knew in his studies of space and its
dimensions? Had he actually slipped outside our sphere to points unguessed and
unimaginable? Where -- if anywhere -- had he been on those nights of demoniac
alienage? The roaring twilight abysses -- the green hillside -- the blistering
terrace -- the pulls from the stars -- the ultimate black vortex - the black man
-- the muddy alley and the stairs -- the old witch and the fanged, furry horror
-- the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron -- the strange sunburn -- the
wrist-wound -- the unexplained image -- the muddy feet -- the throat marks --
the tales and fears of the superstitious foreigners -- what did all this mean?
To what extent could the laws of sanity apply to such a case?
There was no sleep for either of them that night, but next day they both cut
classes and drowsed. This was April thirtieth, and with the dusk would come the
hellish Sabbat-time which all the foreigners and the superstitious old folk
feared. Mazurewicz came home at six o'clock and said people at the mill were
whispering that the Walpurgis revels would be held in the dark ravine beyond
Meadow Hill where the old white stone stands in a place queerly devoid of all
plant-life. Some of them had even told the police and advised them to look there
for the missing Wolejko child, but they did not believe anything would be done.
Joe insisted that the poor young gentleman wear his nickel-chained crucifix, and
Gilman put it on and dropped it inside his shirt to humour the fellow.
Late at night the two youths sat drowsing in their chairs, lulled by the praying
of the loom-fixer on the floor below. Gilman listened as he nodded, his
preternaturally sharpened hearing seeming to strain for some subtle, dreaded
murmur beyond the noises in the ancient house. Unwholesome recollections of
things in the Necronomicon and the Black Book welled up, and he found himself
swaying to infandous rhythms said to pertain to the blackest ceremonies of the
Sabbat and to have an origin outside the time and space we comprehend.
Presently he realized what he was listening for -- the hellish chant of the
celebrants in the distant black valley. How did he know so much about what they
expected? How did he know the time when Nahab and her acolyte were due to bear
the brimming bowl which would follow the black cock and the black goat? He saw
that Elwood had dropped asleep, and tried to call out and waken him. Something,
however, closed his throat. He was not his own master. Had he signed the black
man's book after all?
Then his fevered, abnormal bearing caught the distant, windborne notes. Over
miles of hill and field and alley they came, but he recognized them none the
less. The fires must be lit, and the dancers must be starting in. How could he
keep himself from going? What was it that had enmeshed him? Mathematics --
folklore -- the house -- old Keziah -- Brown Jenkin ... and now he saw that
there was a fresh rat-hole in the wall near his couch. Above the distant
chanting and the nearer praying of Joe Mazurewicz came another sound -- a
stealthy, determined scratching in the partitions. He hoped the electric lights
would not go out. Then he saw the fanged, bearded little face in the rat-hole --
the accursed little face which he at last realized bore such a shocking, mocking
resemblance to old Keziah's -- and heard the faint fumbling at the door.
The screaming twilight abysses flashed before him, and he felt himself helpless
in the formless grasp of the iridescent bubble-congeries. Ahead raced the small,
kaleidoscopic polyhedron and all through the churning void there was a
heightening and acceleration of the vague tonal pattern which seemed to
foreshadow some unutterable and unendurable climax. He seemed to know what was
coming -- the monstrons burst of Walpurgis-rhythm in whose cosmic timbre would
be coneentrated all the primal, ultimate space-time seethings which lie behind
the massed spheres of matter and sometimes break forth in measured
reverberations that penetrate faintly to every layer of entity and give hideous
significance throughout the worlds to certain dreaded periods.
But all this vanished in a second. He was again in the cramped, violet-litten
peaked space with the slanting floor, the low cases of ancient books, the bench
and table, the queer objects, and the triangular gulf at one side. On the table
lay a small white figure -- an infant boy, unclothed and unconscious -- while on
the other side stood the monstrous, leering old woman with a gleaming,
grotesque-hafted knife in her right hand, and a queerly proportioned pale metal
bowl covered with curiously chased designs and having delicate lateral handles
in her left. She was intoning some croaking ritual in a language which Gilman
could not understand, but which seemed like something guardedly quoted in the
Necronomicon.
As the scene grew clearer he saw the ancient crone bend forward and extend the
empty bowl across the table -- and unable to control his own emotions, he
reached far forward and took it in both hands, noticing as he did so its
comparative lightness. At the same moment the disgusting form of Brown Jenkin
scrambled up over the brink of the triangular black gulf on his left. The crone
now motioned him to hold the bowl in a certain position while she raised the
huge, grotesque knife above the small white victim as high as her right hand
could reach. The fanged, furry thing began tittering a continuation of the
unknown ritual, while the witch croaked loathsome responses. Gilman felt a
gnawing poignant abhorrence shoot through his mental and emotional paralysis,
and the light metal bowl shook in his grasp. A second later the downward motion
of the knife broke the spell conpletely, and he dropped the bowl with a
resounding bell-like clangour while his hands darted out frantically to stop the
monstrous deed.
In an instant he had edged up the slanting floor around the end of the table and
wrenched the knife from the old woman's claws; sending it clattering over the
brink of the narrow triangular gulf. In another instant, however, matters were
reversed; for those murderous claws had locked themselves tightly around his own
throat, while the wrinkled face was twisted with insane fury. He felt the chain
of the cheap crucifix grinding into his neck, and in his peril wondered how the
sight of the object itself would affect the evil creature. Her strength was
altogether superhuman, but as she continued her choking he reached feebly in his
skirt and drew out the metal symbol, snapping the chain and pulling it free.
At sight of the device the witch seemed struck with panic, and her grip relaxed
long enough to give Gilman a chance to break it entirely. He pulled the
steel-like claws from his neck, and would have dragged the beldame over the edge
of the gulf had not the claws received a fresh access of strength and closed in
again. This time he resolved to reply in kind, and his own hands reached out for
the creature's throat. Before she saw what he was doing he had the chain of the
crucifix twisted about her neck, and a moment later he had tightened it enough
to cut off her breath. During her last struggle he felt something bite at his
ankle, and saw that Brown Jenkin had come to her aid. With one savage kick he
sent the morbidity over the edge of the gulf and heard it whimper on some level
far below.
Whether he had killed the ancient crone he did not know, but he let her rest on
the floor where she had fallen. Then, as he turned away, he saw on the table a
sight which nearly snapped the last thread of his reason. Brown Jenkin, tough of
sinew and with four tiny hands of demoniac dexterity, had been busy while the
witch was throttling him, and his efforts had been in vain. What he had
prevented the knife from doing to the victim's chest, the yellow fangs of the
furry blasphemy had done to a wrist -- and the bowl so lately on the floor stood
full beside the small lifeless body.
In his dream-delirium Gilman heard the hellish alien-rhythmed chant of the
Sabbat coming from an infinite distance, and knew the black man must be there.
Confused memories mixed themselves with his mathematics, and he believed his
subconscious mind held the angles which he needed to guide him back to the
normal world alone and unaided for the first time. He felt sure he was in the
immemorially sealed loft above his own room, but whether he could ever escape
through the slanting floor or the long-stooped egress he doubted greatly.
Besides, would not an escape from a dream-loft bring him merely into a
dream-house -- an abnormal projection of the actual place he sought? He was
wholly bewildered as to the relation betwixt dream and reality in all his
experiences.
The passage through the vague abysses would be frightful, for the
Walpurgis-rhythm would be vibrating, and at last he would have to hear that
hitherto-veiled cosmic pulsing which he so mortally dreaded. Even now he could
detect a low, monstrous shaking whose tempo he suspected all too well. At
Sabbat-time it always mounted and reached through to the worlds to summon the
initiate to nameless rites. Half the chants of the Sabbat were patterned on this
faintly overheard pulsing which no earthly ear could endure in its unveiled
spatial fulness. Gilman wondered, too, whether he could trust his instincts to
take him back to the right part of space. How could he be sure he would not land
on that green-litten hillside of a far planet, on the tessellated terrace above
the city of tentacled monsters somewhere beyond the galaxy or in the spiral
black vortices of that ultimate void of Chaos where reigns the mindless
demon-sultan Azathoth?
Just before he made the plunge the violet light went out and left him in utter
blackness. The witch -- old Keziah -- Nahab -- that must have meant her death.
And mixed with the distant chant of the Sabbat and the whimpers of Brown Jenkin
in the gulf below he thought he heard another and wilder whine from unknown
depths. Joe Mazurewicz -- the prayers against the Crawling Chaos now turning to
an inexplicably triumphant shriek worlds of sardonic actuality impinging on
vortices of febrile dream -- Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thonsand
Young...
They found Gilman on the floor of his queerly-angled old garret room long before
dawn, for the terrible cry had brought Desrochers and Choynski and Dombrowski
and Mazurewicz at once, and had even wakened the soundly sleeping Elwood in his
chair. He was alive, and with open, staring eyes, but seemed largely
unconscious. On his throat were the marks of murderous hands, and on his left
ankle was a distressing rat-bite. His clothing was badly rumpled and Joe's
crucifix was missing, Elwood trembled, afraid even to speculate what new form
his friend's sleep-walking had taken. Mazurewicz seemed half dazed because of a
"sign" he said he had had in response to his prayers, and he crossed himself
frantically when the squealing and whimpering of a rat sounded from beyond the
slanting partition.
When the dreamer was settled on his couch in Elwood's room they sent for Doctor
Malkowski -- a local practitioner who would repeat no tales where they might
prove embarrassing -- and he gave Gilman two hypodermic injections which caused
him to relax in something like natural drowsiness. During the day the patient
regained consciousness at times and whispered his newest dream disjointedly to
Elwood. It was a painful process, and at its very start brought out a fresh and
disconcerting fact.
Gilman -- whose ears had so lately possessed an abnormal sensitiveness -- was
now stone-deaf. Doctor Malkowski, summoned again in haste, told Elwood that both
ear-drums were ruptured, as if by the impact of some stupendous sound intense
beyond all human conception or endurance. How such a sound could have been heard
in the last few hours without arousing all the Miskatonic Valley was more than
the honest physician could say.
Elwood wrote his part of the colloquy on paper, so that a fairly easy
communication was maintained. Neither knew what to make of the whole chaotic
business, and decided it would be better if they thought as little as possible
about it. Both, though, agreed that they must leave this ancient and accursed
house as soon as it could be arranged. Evening papers spoke of a police raid on
some curious revellers in a ravine beyond Meadow Hill just before dawn, and
mentioned that the white stone there was an object of age-long superstitions
regard. Nobody had been caught, but among the scattering fugitives had been
glimpsed a huge negro. In another column it was stated that no trace of the
missing child Ladislas Wolejko had been found.
The crowning horror came that very night. Elwood will never forget it, and was
forced to stay out of college the rest of the term because of the resulting
nervous breakdown. He had thought he heard rats in the partition all the
evening, but paid little attention to them. Then, long after both he and Gilman
had retired, the atrocious shrieking began. Elwood jumped up, turned on the
lights and rushed over to his guest's couch. The occupant was emitting sounds of
veritably inhuman nature, as if racked by some torment beyond description. He
was writhing under the bedclothes, and a great stain was beginning to appear on
the blankets.
Elwood scarcely dared to touch him, but gradually the screaming and writhing
subsided. By this time Dombrowski, Choynski, Desrochers, Mazurewicz, and the
top-floor lodger were all crowding into the doorway, and the landlord had sent
his wife back to telephone for Doctor Malkowaki. Everybody shrieked when a large
rat-like form suddenly jumped out from beneath the ensanguined bedclothes and
scuttled across the floor to a fresh, open hole close by. When the doctor
arrived and began to pull down those frightful covers Walter Gilman was dead.
It would be barbarous to do more than suggest what had killed Gilman. There had
been virtually a tunnel through his body -- something had eaten his heart out.
Dombrowski, frantic at the failure of his rat-poisoning efforts, cast aside all
thought of his lease and within a week had moved with all his older lodgers to a
dingy but less ancient house in Walnut Street. The worst thing for a while was
keeping Joe Mazurewicz quiet; for the brooding loom-fixer would never stay
sober, and was constantly whining and muttering about spectral and terrible
things.
It seems that on that last hideous night Joe had stooped to look at the crimson
rat-tracks which led from Gilman's couch to the near-by hole. On the carpet they
were very indistinct, but a piece of open flooring intervened between the
carpet's edge and the baseboard. There Mazurewicz had found something monstrous
-- or thought he had, for no one else could quite agree with him despite the
undeniable queerness of the prints. The tracks on the flooring were certainly
vastly unlike the average prints of a rat but even Choynski and Desrochers would
not admit that they were like the prints of four tiny human hands.
The house was never rented again. As soon as Dombrowski left it the pall of its
final desolation began to descend, for people shunned it both on account of its
old reputation and because of the new foetid odour. Perhaps the ex-landlord's
rat-poison had worked after all, for not long after his departure the place
became a neighbourhood nuisance. Health officials traced the smell to the closed
spaces above and beside the eastern garret room, and agreed that the number of
dead rats must be enormous. They decided, however, that it was not worth their
while to hew open and disinfect the long-sealed spaces; for the foetor would
soon be over, and the locality was not one which encouraged fastidious
standards. Indeed, there were always vague local tales of unexplained stenches
upstairs in the Witch-House just after May-Eve and Haflowmass. The neighbours
acquiesced in the inertia -- but the foetor none the less formed an additional
count against the place. Toward the last the house was condemned as a habitation
by the building inspector.
Gilman's dreams and their attendant circumstances have never been explained.
Elwood, whose thoughts on the entire episode are sometimes almost maddening,
came back to college the next autumn and was graduated in the following June. He
found the spectral gossip of the town much disminished, and it is indeed a fact
that -- notwithstanding certain reports of a ghostly tittering in the deserted
house which lasted almost as long as that edifice itself -- no fresh appearances
either of Old Keziah or of Brown Jenkin have been mutered of since Gilman's
death. It is rather fortunate that Elwood was not in Arkham in that later year
when certain events abruptly renewed the local whispers about elder horrors. Of
course he heard about the matter afterward and suffered untold torments of black
and bewildered speculation; but even that was not as bad as actual nearness and
several possible sights would have been.
In March, 1931, a gale wrecked the roof and great chimney of the vacant
Witch-House, so that a chaos of crumbling bricks, blackened, moss-grown
shingles, and rotting planks and timbers crashed down into the loft and broke
through the floor beneath. The whole attic storey was choked with debris from
above, but no one took the trouble to touch the mess before the inevitable
razing of the decrepit structure. That ultimate step came in the following
December, and it was when Gilman's old room was cleared out by reluctant,
apprehensive workmen that the gossip began.
Among the rubbish which had crashed through the ancient slanting ceiling were
several things which made the workmen pause and call in the police. Later the
police in turn called in the coroner and several professors from the university.
There were bones -- badly crushed and splintered, but clearly recognizable as
human -- whose manifestly modern date conflicted puzzlingly with the remote
period at which their only possible lurking place, the low, slant-floored loft
overhead, had supposedly been sealed from all human access. The coroner's
physician decided that some belonged to a small child, while certain others --
found mixed with shreds of rotten brownish cloth -- belonged to a rather
undersized, bent female of advanced years. Careful sifting of debris also
disclosed many tiny bones of rats caught in the collapse, as well as older
rat-bones gnawed by small fangs in a fashion now and then highly productive of
controversy and reflection.
Other objects found included the mangled fragments of many books and papers,
together with a yellowish dust left from the total disintegration of still older
books and papers. All, without exception, appeared to deal with black magic in
its most advanced and horrible forms; and the evidently recent date of certain
items is still a mystery as unsolved as that of the modern human bones. An even
greater mystery is the absolute homogeneity of the crabbed, archaic writing
found on a wide range of papers whose conditions and watermarks suggest age
differences of at least one hundred and fifty to two hundred years. To some,
though, the greatest mystery of all is the variety of utterly inexplicable
objects -- objects whose shapes, materials, types of workmanship, and purposes
baffle all conjecture -- found scattered amidst the wreckage in evidently
diverse states of injury. One of these things -- which excited several
Miskatonie professors profoundly is a badly damaged monstrosity plainly
resembling the strange image which Gilman gave to the college museum, save that
it is large, wrought of some peculiar bluish stone instead of metal, and
possessed of a singularly angled pedestal with undecipherable hieroglyphics.
Archaeologists and anthropologists are still trying to explain the bizarre
designs chased on a crushed bowl of light metal whose inner side bore ominous
brownish stains when found. Foreigners and credulous grandmothers are equally
garrulous about the modern nickel crucifix with broken chain mixed in the
rubbish and shiveringly identified by Joe Maturewicz as that which he had given
poor Gilman many years before. Some believe this crucifix was dragged up to the
sealed loft by rats, while others think it must have been on the floor in some
corner of Gilman's old room at the time. Still others, including Joe himself,
have theories too wild and fantastic for sober credence.
When the slanting wall of Gilman's room was torn out, the once-sealed triangular
space between that partition and the house's north wall was found to contain
much less structural debris, even in proportion to its size, than the room
itself, though it had a ghastly layer of older materials which paralyzed the
wreckers with horror. In brief, the floor was a veritable ossuary of the bones
of small children -- some fairly modern, but others extending back in infinite
gradations to a period so remote that crumbling was almost complete. On this
deep bony layer rested a knife of great size, obvious antiquity, and grotesque,
ornate, and exotic design -- above which the debris was piled.
In the midst of this debris, wedged between a fallen plank and a cluster of
cemented bricks from the ruined chimney, was an object destined to cause more
bafflement, veiled fright, and openly superstitious talk in Arkham than anything
else discovered in the haunted and accursed building.
This object was the partly crushed skeleton of a huge diseased rat, whose
abnormalities of form are still a topic of debate and source of singular
reticence among the members of Miskatonic's department of comparative anatomy.
Very little concerning this skeleton has leaked out, but the workmen who found
it whisper in shocked tones about the long, brownish hairs with which it was
associated.
The bones of the tiny paws, it is rumoured, imply prehensile characteristics
more typical of a diminutive monkey than of a rat, while the small skull with
its savage yellow fangs is of the utmost anomalousness, appearing from certain
angles like a miniature, monstrously degraded parody of a human skull. The
workmen crossed themselves in fright when they came upon this blasphemy, but
later burned candles of gratitude in St. Stanislaus' Church because of the
shrill, ghostly tittering they felt they would never hear again.
                                    Ex Oblivione
                                  By H.P. Lovecraft
                                       1920

When the last days were upon me, and the ugly trifles of existence began to
drive me to madness like the small drops of water that torturers let fall
ceaselessly upon one spot of their victims body, I loved the irradiate refuge of
sleep. In my dreams I found a little of the beauty I had vainly sought in life,
and wandered through old gardens and enchanted woods.
Once when the wind was soft and scented I heard the south calling, and sailed
endlessly and languorously under strange stars.
Once when the gentle rain fell I glided in a barge down a sunless stream under
the earth till I reached another world of purple twilight, iridescent arbours,
and undying roses.
And once I walked through a golden valley that led to shadowy groves and ruins,
and ended in a mighty wall green with antique vines, and pierced by a little
gate of bronze.
Many times I walked through that valley, and longer and longer would I pause in
the spectral half-light where the giant trees squirmed and twisted grotesquely,
and the grey ground stretched damply from trunk to trunk, some times disclosing
the mould-stained stones of buried temples. And alway the goal of my fancies was
the mighty vine-grown wall with the little gate of bronze therein.
After a while, as the days of waking became less and less bearable from their
greyness and sameness, I would often drift in opiate peace through the valley
and the shadowy groves, and wonder how I might seize them for my eternal
dwelling-place, so that I need no more crawl back to a dull world stript of
interest and new colours. And as I looked upon the little gate in the mighty
wall, I felt that beyond it lay a dream-country from which, once it was entered,
there would be no return.
So each night in sleep I strove to find the hidden latch of the gate in the
ivied antique wall, though it was exceedingly well hidden. And I would tell
myself that the realm beyond the wall was not more lasting merely, but more
lovely and radiant as well.
Then one night in the dream-city of Zakarion I found a yellowed papyrus filled
with the thoughts of dream-sages who dwelt of old in that city, and who were too
wise ever to be born in the waking world. Therein were written many things
concerning the world of dream, and among them was lore of a golden valley and a
sacred grove with temples, and a high wall pierced by a little bronze gate. When
I saw this lore, I knew that it touched on the scenes I had haunted, and I
therefore read long in the yellowed papyrus.
Some of the dream-sages wrote gorgeously of the wonders beyond the irrepassable
gate, but others told of horror and disappointment. I knew not which to believe,
yet longed more and more to cross for ever into the unknown land; for doubt and
secrecy are the lure of lures, and no new horror can be more terrible than the
daily torture of the commonplace. So when I learned of the drug which would
unlock the gate and drive me through, I resolved to take it when next I awaked.
Last night I swallowed the drug and floated dreamily into the golden valley and
the shadowy groves; and when I came this time to the antique wall, I saw that
the small gate of bronze was ajar. From beyond came a glow that weirdly lit the
giant twisted trees and the tops of the buried temples, and I drifted on
songfully, expectant of the glories of the land from whence I should never
return.
But as the gate swung wider and the sorcery of the drug and the dream pushed me
through, I knew that all sights and glories were at an end; for in that new
realm was neither land nor sea, but only the white void of unpeopled and
illimitable space. So, happier than I had ever dared hope to be, I dissolved
again into that native infinity of crystal oblivion from which the daemon Life
had called me for one brief and desolate hour.
               Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family
                                  By H.P. Lovecraft

Written 1920
Published March 1921 in The Wolverine, No. 9, p. 3-11.

I
Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer
daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous.
Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the
ultimate exterminator of our human species—if separate species we be—for its
reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed
upon the world. If we knew what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur Jermyn did;
and Arthur Jermyn soaked himself in oil and set fire to his clothing one night.
No one placed the charred fragments in an urn or set a memorial to him who had
been; for certain papers and a certain boxed object were found which made men
wish to forget. Some who knew him do not admit that he ever existed.
Arthur Jermyn went out on the moor and burned himself after seeing the boxed
object which had come from Africa. It was this object, and not his peculiar
personal appearance, which made him end his life. Many would have disliked to
live if possessed of the peculiar features of Arthur Jermyn, but he had been a
poet and scholar and had not minded. Learning was in his blood, for his
great-grandfather, Sir Robert Jermyn, Bt., had been an anthropologist of note,
whilst his great-great-great-grandfather, Sir Wade Jermyn, was one of the
earliest explorers of the Congo region, and had written eruditely of its tribes,
animals, and supposed antiquities. Indeed, old Sir Wade had possessed an
intellectual zeal amounting almost to a mania; his bizarre conjectures on a
prehistoric white Congolese civilisation earning him much ridicule when his
book, Observation on the Several Parts of Africa, was published. In 1765 this
fearless explorer had been placed in a madhouse at Huntingdon.
Madness was in all the Jermyns, and people were glad there were not many of
them. The line put forth no branches, and Arthur was the last of it. If he had
not been, one can not say what he would have done when the object came. The
Jermyns never seemed to look quite right—something was amiss, though Arthur was
the worst, and the old family portraits in Jermyn House showed fine faces enough
before Sir Wade’s time. Certainly, the madness began with Sir Wade, whose wild
stories of Africa were at once the delight and terror of his few friends. It
showed in his collection of trophies and specimens, which were not such as a
normal man would accumulate and preserve, and appeared strikingly in the
Oriental seclusion in which he kept his wife. The latter, he had said, was the
daughter of a Portuguese trader whom he had met in Africa; and did not like
English ways. She, with an infant son born in Africa, had accompanied him back
from the second and longest of his trips, and had gone with him on the third and
last, never returning. No one had ever seen her closely, not even the servants;
for her disposition had been violent and singular. During her brief stay at
Jermyn House she occupied a remote wing, and was waited on by her husband alone.
Sir Wade was, indeed, most peculiar in his solicitude for his family; for when
he returned to Africa he would permit no one to care for his young son save a
loathsome black woman from Guinea. Upon coming back, after the death of Lady
Jermyn, he himself assumed complete care of the boy.
But it was the talk of Sir Wade, especially when in his cups, which chiefly led
his friends to deem him mad. In a rational age like the eighteenth century it
was unwise for a man of learning to talk about wild sights and strange scenes
under a Congo moon; of the gigantic walls and pillars of a forgotten city,
crumbling and vine-grown, and of damp, silent, stone steps leading interminably
down into the darkness of abysmal treasure-vaults and inconceivable catacombs.
Especially was it unwise to rave of the living things that might haunt such a
place; of creatures half of the jungle and half of the impiously aged
city—fabulous creatures which even a Pliny might describe with scepticism;
things that might have sprung up after the great apes had overrun the dying city
with the walls and the pillars, the vaults and the weird carvings. Yet after he
came home for the last time Sir Wade would speak of such matters with a
shudderingly uncanny zest, mostly after his third glass at the Knight’s Head;
boasting of what he had found in the jungle and of how he had dwelt among
terrible ruins known only to him. And finally he had spoken of the living things
in such a manner that he was taken to the madhouse. He had shown little regret
when shut into the barred room at Huntingdon, for his mind moved curiously. Ever
since his son had commenced to grow out of infancy, he had liked his home less
and less, till at last he had seemed to dread it. The Knight’s Head had been his
headquarters, and when he was confined he expressed some vague gratitude as if
for protection. Three years later he died.
Wade Jermyn’s son Philip was a highly peculiar person. Despite a strong physical
resemblance to his father, his appearance and conduct were in many particulars
so coarse that he was universally shunned. Though he did not inherit the madness
which was feared by some, he was densely stupid and given to brief periods of
uncontrollable violence. In frame he was small, but intensely powerful, and was
of incredible agility. Twelve years after succeeding to his title he married the
daughter of his gamekeeper, a person said to be of gypsy extraction, but before
his son was born joined the navy as a common sailor, completing the general
disgust which his habits and misalliance had begun. After the close of the
American war he was heard of as sailor on a merchantman in the African trade,
having a kind of reputation for feats of strength and climbing, but finally
disappearing one night as his ship lay off the Congo coast.
In the son of Sir Philip Jermyn the now accepted family peculiarity took a
strange and fatal turn. Tall and fairly handsome, with a sort of weird Eastern
grace despite certain slight oddities of proportion, Robert Jermyn began life as
a scholar and investigator. It was he who first studied scientifically the vast
collection of relics which his mad grandfather had brought from Africa, and who
made the family name as celebrated in ethnology as in exploration. In 1815 Sir
Robert married a daughter of the seventh Viscount Brightholme and was
subsequently blessed with three children, the eldest and youngest of whom were
never publicly seen on account of deformities in mind and body. Saddened by
these family misfortunes, the scientist sought relief in work, and made two long
expeditions in the interior of Africa. In 1849 his second son, Nevil, a
singularly repellent person who seemed to combine the surliness of Philip Jermyn
with the hauteur of the Brightholmes, ran away with a vulgar dancer, but was
pardoned upon his return in the following year. He came back to Jermyn House a
widower with an infant son, Alfred, who was one day to be the father of Arthur
Jermyn.
Friends said that it was this series of griefs which unhinged the mind of Sir
Robert Jermyn, yet it was probably merely a bit of African folklore which caused
the disaster. The elderly scholar had been collecting legends of the Onga tribes
near the field of his grandfather’s and his own explorations, hoping in some way
to account for Sir Wade’s wild tales of a lost city peopled by strange hybrid
creatures. A certain consistency in the strange papers of his ancestor suggested
that the madman’s imagination might have been stimulated by native myths. On
October 19, 1852, the explorer Samuel Seaton called at Jermyn House with a
manuscript of notes collected among the Ongas, believing that certain legends of
a gray city of white apes ruled by a white god might prove valuable to the
ethnologist. In his conversation he probably supplied many additional details;
the nature of which will never be known, since a hideous series of tragedies
suddenly burst into being. When Sir Robert Jermyn emerged from his library he
left behind the strangled corpse of the explorer, and before he could be
restrained, had put an end to all three of his children; the two who were never
seen, and the son who had run away. Nevil Jermyn died in the successful defence
of his own two-year-old son, who had apparently been included in the old man’s
madly murderous scheme. Sir Robert himself, after repeated attempts at suicide
and a stubborn refusal to utter an articulate sound, died of apoplexy in the
second year of his confinement.
Sir Alfred Jermyn was a baronet before his fourth birthday, but his tastes never
matched his title. At twenty he had joined a band of music-hall performers, and
at thirty-six had deserted his wife and child to travel with an itinerant
American circus. His end was very revolting. Among the animals in the exhibition
with which he travelled was a huge bull gorilla of lighter colour than the
average; a surprisingly tractable beast of much popularity with the performers.
With this gorilla Alfred Jermyn was singularly fascinated, and on many occasions
the two would eye each other for long periods through the intervening bars.
Eventually Jermyn asked and obtained permission to train the animal,,
astonishing audiences and fellow performers alike with his success. One morning
in Chicago, as the gorilla and Alfred Jermyn were rehearsing an exceedingly
clever boxing match, the former delivered a blow of more than the usual force,
hurting both the body and the dignity of the amateur trainer. Of what followed,
members of “The Greatest Show On Earth” do not like to speak. They did not
expect to hear Sir Alfred Jermyn emit a shrill, inhuman scream, or to see him
seize his clumsy antagonist with both hands, dash it to the floor of the cage,
and bite fiendishly at its hairy throat. The gorilla was off its guard, but not
for long, and before anything could be done by the regular trainer, the body
which had belonged to a baronet was past recognition.
II
Arthur Jermyn was the son of Sir Alfred Jermyn and a music-hall singer of
unknown origin. When the husband and father deserted his family, the mother took
the child to Jermyn House; where there was none left to object to her presence.
She was not without notions of what a nobleman’s dignity should be, and saw to
it that her son received the best education which limited money could provide.
The family resources were now sadly slender, and Jermyn House had fallen into
woeful disrepair, but young Arthur loved the old edifice and all its contents.
He was not like any other Jermyn who had ever lived, for he was a poet and’ a
dreamer. Some of the neighbouring families who had heard tales of old Sir Wade
Jermyn’s unseen Portuguese wife declared that her Latin blood must be showing
itself; but most persons merely sneered at his sensitiveness to beauty,
attributing it to his music-hall mother, who was socially unrecognised. The
poetic delicacy of Arthur Jermyn was the more remarkable because of his uncouth
personal appearance. Most of the Jermyns had possessed a subtly odd and
repellent cast, but Arthur’s case was very striking. It is hard to say just what
he resembled, but his expression, his facial angle, and the length of his arms
gave a thrill of repulsion to those who met him for the first time.
It was the mind and character of Arthur Jermyn which atoned for his aspect.
Gifted and learned, he took highest honours at Oxford and seemed likely to
redeem the intellectual fame of his family. Though of poetic rather than
scientific temperament, he planned to continue the work of his forefathers in
African ethnology and antiquities, utilising the truly wonderful though strange
collection of Sir Wade. With his fanciful mind he thought often of the
prehistoric civilisation in which the mad explorer had so implicitly believed,
and would weave tale after tale about the silent jungle city mentioned in the
latter’s wilder notes and paragraphs. For the nebulous utterances concerning a
nameless, unsuspected race of jungle hybrids he had a peculiar feeling of
mingled terror and attraction, speculating on the possible basis of such a
fancy, and seeking to obtain light among the more recent data gleaned by his
great-grandfather and Samuel Seaton amongst the Ongas.
In 1911, after the death of his mother, Sir Arthur Jermyn determined to pursue
his investigations to the utmost extent. Selling a portion of his estate to
obtain the requisite money, he outfitted an expedition and sailed for the Congo.
Arranging with the Belgian authorities for a party of guides, he spent a year in
the Onga and Kahn country, finding data beyond the highest of his expectations.
Among the Kaliris was an aged chief called Mwanu, who possessed not only a
highly retentive memory, but a singular degree of intelligence and interest in
old legends. This ancient confirmed every tale which Jermyn had heard, adding
his own account of the stone city and the white apes as it had been told to him.

According to Mwanu, the gray city and the hybrid creatures were no more, having
been annihilated by the warlike N’bangus many years ago. This tribe, after
destroying most of the edifices and killing the live beings, had carried off the
stuffed goddess which had been the object of their quest; the white ape-goddess
which the strange beings worshipped, and which was held by Congo tradition to be
the form of one who had reigned as a princess among these beings. Just what the
white apelike creatures could have been, Mwanu had no idea, but he thought they
were the builders of the ruined city. Jermyn could form no conjecture, but by
close questioning obtained a very picturesque legend of the s.tuffed goddess.
The ape-princess, it was said, became the consort of a great white god who had
come out of the West. For a long time they had reigned over the city together,
but when they had a son, all three went away. Later the god and princess had
returned, and upon the death of the princess her divine husband had mummified
the body and enshrined it in a vast house of stone, where it was worshipped.
Then he departed alone. The legend here seemed to present three variants.
According to one story, nothing further happened save that the stuffed goddess
became a symbol of supremacy for whatever tribe might possess it. It was for
this reason that the N’bangus carried it off. A second story told of a god’s
return and death at the feet of his enshrined wife. A third told of the return
of the son, grown to manhood—or apehood or godhood, as the case might be—yet
unconscious of his identity. Surely the imaginative blacks had made the most of
whatever events might lie behind the extravagant legendry.
Of the reality of the jungle city described by old Sir Wade, Arthur Jermyn had
no further doubt; and was hardly astonished when early in 1912 he came upon what
was left of it. Its size must have been exaggerated, yet the stones lying about
proved that it was no mere Negro village. Unfortunately no carvings could be
found, and the small size of the expedition prevented operations toward clearing
the one visible passageway that seemed to lead down into the system of vaults
which Sir Wade had mentioned. The white apes and the stuffed goddess were
discussed with all the native chiefs of the region, but it remained for a
European to improve on the data offered by old Mwanu. M. Verhaeren, Belgian
agent at a trading-post on the
Congo, believed that he could not only locate but obtain the stuffed goddess, of
which he had vaguely heard; since the once mighty N’bangus were now the
submissive servants of King Albert’s government, and with but little persuasion
could be induced to part with the gruesome deity they had carried off. When
Jermyn sailed for England, therefore, it was with the exultant probability that
he would within a few months receive a priceless ethnological relic confirming
the wildest of his great-great-great-grandfather’s narratives—that is, the
wildest which he had ever heard. Countrymen near Jermyn House had perhaps heard
wilder tales handed down from ancestors who had listened to Sir Wade around the
tables of the Knight’s Head.
Arthur Jermyn waited very patiently for the expected box from M. Verhaeren,
meanwhile studying with increased diligence the manuscripts left by his mad
ancestor. He began to feel closely akin to Sir Wade, and to seek relics of the
latter’s personal life in England as well as of his African exploits. Oral
accounts of the mysterious and secluded wife had been numerous, but no tangible
relic of her stay at Jermyn House remained. Jermyn wondered what circumstance
had prompted or permitted such an effacement, and decided that the husband’s
insanity was the prime cause. His great-great-great-grandmother, he recalled,
was said to have been the daughter of a Portuguese trader in Africa. No doubt
her practical heritage and superficial knowledge of the Dark Continent had
caused her to flout Sir Wade’s tales of the interior, a thing which such a man
would not be likely to forgive. She had died in Africa, perhaps dragged thither
by a husband determined to prove what he had told. But as Jermyn indulged in
these reflections he could not but smile at their futility, a century and a half
after the death of both his strange progenitors.
In June, 1913, a letter arrived from M. Verhaeren, telling of the finding of the
stuffed goddess. It was, the Belgian averred, a most extraordinary object; an
object quite beyond the power of a layman to classify. Whether it was human or
simian only a scientist could determine, and the process of determination would
be greatly hampered by its imperfect condition. Time and the Congo climate are
not kind to mummies; especially when their preparation is as amateurish as
seemed to be the case here. Around the creature’s neck ‘had been found a golden
chain bearing an empty locket on which were armorial designs; no doubt some
hapless traveller’s keepsake, taken by the N’bangus and hung upon the goddess as
a charm. In commenting on the contour of the mummy’s face, M. Verhaeren
suggested a whimsical comparison; or rather, expressed a humorous wonder just
how it would strike his corespondent, but was too much interested scientifically
to waste many words in levity. The stuffed. goddess, he wrote, would arrive duly
packed about a month after receipt of the letter.
The boxed object was delivered at Jermyn House on the afternoon of August 3,
1913, being conveyed immediately to the large chamber which housed the
collection of African specimens as arranged by Sir Robert and Arthur. What
ensued can best be gathered from the tales of servants and from things and
papers later examined. Of the various tales, that of aged Soames, the family
butler, is most ample and coherent. According to this trustworthy man, Sir
Arthur Jermyn dismissed everyone from the room before opening the box, though
the instant sound of hammer and chisel showed that he did not delay the
operation. Nothing was heard for some time; just how long Soames cannot exactly
estimate, but it was certainly less than a quarter of an hour later that the
horrible scream, undoubtedly in Jermyn’s voice, was heard. Immediately afterward
Jermyn emerged from the room, rushing frantically toward the front of the house
as if pursued by some hideous enemy. The expression on his face, a face ghastly
enough in repose, was beyond description. When near the front door he seemed to
think of something, and turned back in his flight, finally disappearing down the
stairs to the cellar. The servants were utterly dumbfounded, and watched at the
head of the stairs, but their master did not return. A smell of oil was all that
came up from the regions below. After dark a rattling was heard at the door
leading from the cellar into the courtyard; and a stable-boy saw Arthur Jermyn,
glistening from head to foot with oil and redolent of that fluid, steal
furtively out and vanish on the black moor surrounding the house. Then, in an
exaltation of supreme horror, everyone saw the end. A spark appeared on the
moor, a flame arose, and a pillar of human fire reached to the heavens. The
house of Jermyn no longer existed.
The reason why Arthur Jermyn’s charred fragments were not collected and buried
lies in what was found afterward, principally the thing in the box. The stuffed
goddess was a nauseous sight, withered and eaten away, but it was clearly a
mummified white ape of some unknown species, less hairy than any recorded
variety, and infinitely nearer mankind—quite shockingly so. Detailed description
would be rather unpleasant, but two salient particulars must be told, for they
fit in revoltingly with certain notes of Sir Wade Jermyn’s African expeditions
and with the Congolese legends of the white god and the ape-princess. The two
particulars in question are these: the arms on the golden locket about the
creature’s neck were the Jermyn arms, and the jocose suggestion of M. Verhaeren
about certain resemblance as connected with the shrivelled face applied with
vivid, ghastly, and unnatural horror to none other than the sensitive Arthur
Jermyn, great-great-great-grandson of Sir Wade Jermyn and an unknown wife.
Members of the Royal Anthropological Institute burned the thing and threw the
locket into a well, and some of them do not admit that Arthur Jermyn ever
existed.
                                    From Beyond
                                  By H. P. Lovecraft

Written in 1920, and first published in "The Fantasy Fan" June 1934.

Horrible beyond conception was the change which had taken place in my best
friend, Crawford Tillinghast. I had not seen him since that day, two months and
a half before, when he told me toward what goal his physical and meta-physical
researches were leading; when he had answered my awed and almost frightened
remonstrance's by driving me from his laboratory and his house in a burst of
fanatical rage, I had known that he now remained mostly shut in the attic
laboratory with that accursed electrical machine, eating little and excluding
even the servants, but I had not thought that a brief period of ten weeks could
so alter and disfigure any human creature. It is not pleasant to see a stout man
sud-denly grown thin, and it is even worse when the baggy skin becomes yellowed
or grayed, the eyes sunken, circled, and uncannily glowing, the forehead veined
and corrugated, and the hands tremulous and twitching. And if added to this
there be a repellent unkemptness, a wild disorder of dress, a bushiness of dark
hair white at the roots, and an unchecked growth of white beard on a face once
clean-shaven, the cu-mulative effect is quite shocking. But such was the aspect
of Crawford Tilllinghast on the night his half coherent message brought me to
his door after my weeks of exile; such was the specter that trembled as it
admitted me, candle in hand, and glanced furtively over its shoulder as if
fearful of unseen things in the ancient, lonely house set back from Benevolent
street.
That Crawford Tilinghast should ever have studied science and philosophy was a
mistake. These things should be left to the frigid and impersonal investigator
for they offer two equally tragic alternatives to the man of feeling and action;
despair, if he fail in his quest, and terrors unutterable and unimaginable if he
succeed. Tillinghast had once been the prey of failure, solitary and melancholy;
but now I knew, with nauseating fears of my own, that he was the prey of
success. I had indeed warned him ten weeks before, when he burst forth with his
tale of what he felt himself about to discover. He had been flushed and excited
then, talking in a high and unnatural, though always pedantic, voice.
"What do we know," he had said, "of the world and the universe about us? Our
means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding
objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them,
and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we
pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with
wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very
dif-ferently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter,
energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the
senses we have. I have always believed that such strange, inaccessible worlds
exist at our very elbows, and now I believe I have found a way to break dawn the
barriers. I am not joking. Within twenty-four hours that machine near the table
will generate waves acting on unrecognized sense organs that exist in us as
atrophied or rudimentary vestiges. Those waves will open up to us many vistas
unknown to man and several unknown to anything we consider organic life. We
shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up
their ears after midnight. We shall see these things, and other things which no
breathing creature has yet seen. We shall overleap time, space, and dimensions,
and without bodily motion peer to the bottom of creation."
When Tilliinghaut said these things I remonstrated, for I knew him well enough
to be frightened rather than amused; but he was a fanatic, and drove me from the
house. Now he was no less a fanatic, but his desire to speak had conquered his
resentment, and he had written me imperatively in a hand I could scarcely
recognize. As I entered the abode of the friend so suddenly metamorphosed to a
shivering gargoyle, I became infected with the terror which seemed stalking in
all the shadows. The words and beliefs expressed ten weeks before seemed bodied
forth in the darkness beyond the small circle of candle light, and I sickened at
the hollow, altered voice of my host. I wished the servants were about, and did
not like it when he said they had all left three days previously. It seemed
strange that old Gregory, at least, should desert his master without telling as
tried a friend as I. It was he who had given me all the information I had of
Tillinghast after I was repulsed in rage.
Yet I soon subordinated all my fears to my growing curiosity and fascination.
Just what Crawford Tillinghast now wished of me I could only guess, but that he
had some stupendous secret or discovery to impart, I could not doubt. Before I
had protested at his unnatural pryings into the unthinkable; now that he had
evidently succeeded to some degree I almost shared his spirit, terrible though
the cost of victory appeared. Up through the dark emptiness of the house I
followed the bobbing candle in the hand of this shaking parody on man. The
electricity seemed to be turned off, and when I asked my guide he said it was
for a definite reason.
"It would he too much . . . I would not dare," he contin-ued to mutter. I
especially noted his new habit of muttering, for it was not like him to talk to
himself. We entered the laboratory in the attic, and I observed that detestable
elec-trical machine, glowing with a sickly, sinister violet luminos-ity. It was
connected with a powerful chemical battery, but seemed to be receiving no
current; for I recalled that in experimental stage it had sputtered and purred
when in action. In reply to my question Tillinghast mumbled that this permanent
glow was not electrical in any sense that I could understand.
He now seated me near the machine, so that it was on my right, and turned a
switch somewhere below the crowning cluster of glass bulbs. The usual sputtering
began, turned to a whine, and terminated in a drone so soft as to suggest a
return to silence. Meanwhile the luminosity increased, waned again, then assumed
a pale, ontre colour or blend of colours which I could neither place nor
describe. Tillinghast had been watching me, and noted my puzzled expression.
"Do you know what that is?" he whispered, "that is ultra-violet." He chuckled
oddly at my surprise. "You thought ultra-violet was invisible, and so it is --
but you can see that and many other invisible things now."
"Listen to me! The waves from that thing are waking a thousand sleeping senses
in us; senses which we inherit from aeons of evolution from the state of
detached electrons to the state of organic humanity. I have seen the truth, and
I intend to show it to you. Do you wonder how it will seem? I will tell you."
Here Trninghast seated himself directly opposite me, blowing out his candle and
staring hideously into my eyes. "Your existing sense-organs -- ears first, I
think -- will pick up many of the impressions, for they are closely connected
with the dormant organs. Then there will be others. You have heard of the pineal
gland? I laugh at the shallow endocrinologist, fellow - dupe and fellow -
parvenu of the Freudian. That gland is the great sense organ of organs -- I have
found out. It is like sight in the end, and transmits visual pictures to the
brain. If you are normal, that is the way you ought to get most of it . . . I
mean get most of the evidence from beyond."
I looked about the immense attic room with the sloping south wall, dimly lit by
rays which the every day eye cannot see. The far corners were all shadows and
the whole place took on a hazy unreality which obscured its nature and in-vited
the imagination to symbolism and phantasm. During the interval that Tillinghast
was long silent I fancied myself in some vast incredible temple of long-dead
gods; some vague edifice of innumerable black stone columns reaching up from a
floor of damp slabs to a cloudy height beyond the range of my vision. The
picture was very vivid for a while, but gradually gave way to a more horrible
conception; that of utter, absolute solitude in infinite, sightless, soundless
space. There seemed to a void, and nothing more, and I felt a childish fear
which prompted me to draw from my hip pocket the revolver I carried after dark
since the night I was held up in East Providence. Then from the farthermost
regions of remoteness, the sound softly glided into existence. It was infinitely
faint, subtly vibrant, and unmistakably musi-cal, but held a quality of
surpassing wildness which made its impact feel like a delicate torture of my
whole body. I felt sensations like those one feels when accidentally scratching
ground glass. Simultaneously there developed something like a cold draught,
which apparently swept past me from the direction of the distant sound. As I
waited breathlessly I perceived that both sound and wind were increasing; the
ef-fect being to give me an odd notion of myself as tied to a pair of rails in
the path of a gigantic approaching locomotive. I began to speak to Tillinghast,
and as I did so all the unusual impressions abruptly vanished. I saw only the
man, the glowing machines, and the dim apartment. Tillinghast was grinning
repulsively at the revolver which I had almost unconsciously drawn, but from his
expression I was sure he had seen and heard as much as I, if not a great deal
more. I whispered what I had experienced and he bade me to re-main as quiet and
receptive as possible.
"Don't move," he cautioned, 'for in these rays we are able to be seen as well as
to see. I told you the servants left, but I didn't tell you how. It was that
thick-witted house-keeper - - she turned on the lights downstairs after I had
warned her not to, and the wires picked up sympathetic vibrations. It must have
been frightful -- I could hear the screams up here in spite of all I was seeing
and hearing from another direction, and later it was rather awful to find those
empty heaps of clothes around the house. Mrs. Updike's clothes were close to the
front hall switch that's how I know she did it. It got them all. But go long as
we don't move we're fairly safe. Remember we're dealing with a hideous world in
which we are practically helpless. . . . Keep still!"
The combined shock of the revelation and of the abrupt command gave me a kind of
paralysis, and in my terror my mind again opened to the impressions coming from
what Til-linghast called "beyond." I was now in a vortex of sound and motion,
with confused pictures before my eyes. I saw the blurred outlines of the room,
but from some point in space there seemed to be pouring a seething column of
unrecognizable shapes or clouds, penetrating the solid roof at a point ahead and
to the right of me. Then I glimpsed the temple - like effect again, but this
time the pillars reached up into an aerial ocean of light, which sent down one
blinding beam along the path of the cloudy column I had seen before. After that
the scene was almost wholly kaleidoscopic, and in the jumble of sights, sounds,
and unidentified sense-impressions I felt that I was about to dissolve or in
some way lose the solid form. One definite flash I shall always remember. I
seemed for an instant to behold a patch of strange night sky filled with
shining, revolving spheres, and as it receded I saw that the glowing suns formed
a constellation or galaxy of settled shape; this shape being the distorted face
of Crawford Tillinghast. At another time I felt the huge animate things brushing
past me and occasionally walking or drifting through my supposedly solid body,
and thought I saw TiIiiinghast look at them as though his better trained senses
could catch them visually. I recalled what he had said of the pineal gland, and
wondered what he saw with this preternatural eye.
Suddenly I myself became possessed of a kind of augmented sight. Over and above
the luminous and shadowy chaos arose a picture which, though vague, held the
elements of consist-ency and permanence. It was indeed somewhat familiar, for
the unusual part was superimposed upon the usual terrestrial scene much as a
cinema view may be thrown upon the painted curtain of a theater. I saw the attic
laboratory, the electrical machine, and the unsightly form of Tillinghast
op-posite me; but of all the space unoccupied by familiar objects not one
particle was vacant. Indescribable shapes both alive and otherwise were mixed in
disgusting disarray, and close to every known thing were whole worlds of alien,
unknown entities. It likewise seemed that all the known things entered into the
composition of other unknown things and vice versa. Foremost among the living
objects were inky, jellyfish mon-strosities which flabbily quivered in harmony
with the vibra-tions from the machine. They were present in loathsome profusion,
and I saw to my horror that they overlapped; that they were semi - fluid and
capable of passing through one an-other and through what we know as solids.
These things were never still, but seemed ever floating about with some
malignant purpose. Sometimes they appeared to devour one another, the attacker
launching itself at its victim and instan-taneously obliterating the latter from
sight. Shudderingly I felt that I knew what had obliterated the unfortunate
serv-ants, and could not exclude the thing from my mind as I strove to observe
other properties of the newly visible world that lies unseen around us. But
Tillinghast had been watching me and was speaking.
"You see them? You see them? You see the things that float and flop about you
and through you every moment of your life? You see the creatures that form what
men call the pure air and the blue sky? Have I not succeeded in breaking down
the barrier; have I not shown you worlds that no other living men have seen?" I
heard his scream through the hor-rible chaos, and looked at the wild face thrust
so offensively close to mine. His eyes were pits of flame, and they glared at me
with what I now saw was overwhelming hatred. The machine droned detestably.
"You think those floundering things wiped Out the servants? Fool, they are
harmless! But the servants are gone, aren't they? You tried to stop me; you
discouraged me when I needed every drop of encouragement I could get; you were
afraid of the cosmic truth, you damned coward, but now I've got you! What swept
up the servants? What made them scream so loud? . . . Don't know, ehl You'll
know soon enough. Look at me -- listen to what I say - - do you suppose there
are really any such things as time and magnitude? Do you fancy there are such
things as form or matter? I tell you, I have struck depths that your little
brain can't picture. I have seen beyond the bounds of infinity and drawn down
daemons from the stars . . . I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world
to world to sow death and madness. . . . Space belongs to me, do you hear?
Things are hunting me now - - the things that devour and dissolve - - but I know
how to elude them. It is you they will get, as they got the servants. . . .
Stirring. dear sir? I told you it was dangerous to move, I have saved you so far
by telling you to keep still - - saved you to see more sights and to listen to
me. If you had moved, they would have been at you long ago. Don't worry, they
won't hurt you. They didn't hurt the servants - - it was the seeing that made
the poor devils scream so. My pets are not pretty, for they come out of places
where aes-thetic standards are very different. Disintegration is quite painless,
I assure you - - but I want you to see them. I almost saw them, but I knew how
to stop. You are curious? I always knew you were no scientist Trembling, eh.
Trembling with anxiety to see the ultimate things I have discovered. Why don't
you move, then? Tired? Well, don't worry, my friend, for they are coming . . .
Look, look, curse you, look . . . it's just over your left shoulder. . . . "
What remains to be told is very brief, and may be familiar to you from the
newspaper accounts. The police heard a shot in the old Tillinghast house and
found us there - - Tillinghast dead and me unconscious They arrested me because
the revolver was in my hand, but released me in three hours, after they found it
was apoplexy which had finished Tillinghast and saw that my shot had been
directed at the noxious machine which now lay hopelessly shattered on the
laboratory floor. I did not tell very much of what I had seen, for I feared the
coroner would be skeptical; but from the evasive outline I did give, the doctor
told me that I had undoubtedly been hypnotized by the vindictive and homicidal
madman.
I wish I could believe that doctor. It would help my shaky nerves if I could
dismiss what I now have to think of the air and the sky about and above me. I
never feel alone or comfortable, and a hideous sense of pursuit sometimes comes
chillingly on me when I am weary. What prevents me from never' g the doctor is
this simple fact - - that the police never found the bodies of those servants
whom they say Crawford Tillinghast murdered.
                                Hallowe'en in a Suburb
                                 By H. P. Lovecraft

Published March 1926 in The National Amateur Vol. 48 No. 4

The steeples are white in the wild moonlight,
 And the trees have a silver glare;
Past the chimneys high see the vampires fly,
 And the harpies of upper air,
 That flutter and laugh and stare.
For the village dead to the moon outspread
 Never shone in the sunset's gleam,
But grew out of the deep that the dead years keep
 Where the rivers of madness stream
 Down the gulfs to a pit of dream.
A chill wind blows through the rows of sheaves
 In the meadows that shimmer pale,
And comes to twine where the headstones shine
 And the ghouls of the churchyard wail
 For harvests that fly and fail.
Not a breath of the strange grey gods of change
 That tore from the past its own
Can quicken this hour, when a spectral power
 Spreads sleep o'er the cosmic throne,
 And looses the vast unknown.
So here again stretch the vale and plain
 That moons long-forgotten saw,
And the dead leap gay in the pallid ray,
 Sprung out of the tomb's black maw
 To shake all the world with awe.
And all that the morn shall greet forlorn,
 The ugliness and the pest
Of rows where thick rise the stones and brick,
 Shall some day be with the rest,
 And brood with the shades unblest.
Then wild in the dark let the lemurs bark,
 And the leprous spires ascend;
For new and old alike in the fold
 Of horror and death are penned,
 For the hounds of Time to rend.
                               Herbert West: Reanimator
                                  By H.P. Lovecraft

Written Sep 1921-mid 1922
Published in five parts, February-July 1922 in Home Brew, Vol. 1, Nos. 1-6.
I. From The Dark
Published Februrary 1922 in Home Brew Vol. 1, No. 1, p. 19-25.


Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak
only with extreme terror. This terror is not due altogether to the sinister
manner of his recent disappearance, but was engendered by the whole nature of
his life-work, and first gained its acute form more than seventeen years ago,
when we were in the third year of our course at the Miskatonic University
Medical School in Arkham. While he was with me, the wonder and diabolism of his
experiments fascinated me utterly, and I was his closest companion. Now that he
is gone and the spell is broken, the actual fear is greater. Memories and
possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.
The first horrible incident of our acquaintance was the greatest shock I ever
experienced, and it is only with reluctance that I repeat it. As I have said, it
happened when we were in the medical school1 where West had already made himself
notorious through his wild theories on the nature of death and the possibility
of overcoming it artificially. His views, which were widely ridiculed by the
faculty and by his fellow-students, hinged on the essentially mechanistic nature
of life; and concerned means for operating the organic machinery of mankind by
calculated chemical action after the failure of natural processes. In his
experiments with various animating solutions, he had killed and treated immense
numbers of rabbits, guinea-pigs, cats, dogs, and monkeys, till he had become the
prime nuisance of the college. Several times he had actually obtained signs of
life in. animals supposedly dead; in many cases violent sign5; but he soon saw
that the perfection of his process, if indeed possible, would necessarily
involve a lifetime of research. It likewise became clear that, since the same
solution never worked alike on different organic species, he would require human
subjects for further and more specialised progress. It was here that he first
came into conflict with the college authorities, and was debarred from future
experiments by no less a dignitary than the dean of the medical school himself
-- the learned and benevolent Dr. Allan Halsey, whose work in behalf of the
stricken is recalled by every old resident of Arkham.
I had always been exceptionally tolerant of West’s pursuits, and we frequently
discussed his theories, whose ramifications and corollaries were almost
infinite. Holding with Haeckel that all life is a chemical and physical process,
and that the so-called "soul" is a myth, my friend believed that artificial
reanimation of the dead can depend only on the condition of the tissues; and
that unless actual decomposition has set in, a corpse fully equipped with organs
may with suitable measures be set going again in the peculiar fashion known as
life. That the psychic or intellectual life might be impaired by the slight
deterioration of sensitive brain-cells which even a short period of death would
be apt to cause, West fully realised. It had at first been his hope to find a
reagent which would restore vitality before the actual advent of death, and only
repeated failures on animals had shewn him that the natural and artificial
life-motions were incompatible. He then sought extreme freshness in his
specimens, injecting his solutions into the blood immediately after the
extinction of life. It was this circumstance which made the professors so
carelessly sceptical, for they felt that true death had not occurred in any
case. They did not stop to view the matter closely and reasoningly.
It was not long after the faculty had interdicted his work that West confided to
me his resolution to get fresh human bodies in some manner, and continue in
secret the experiments he could no longer perform openly. To hear him discussing
ways and means was rather ghastly, for at the college we had never procured
anatomical specimens ourselves. Whenever the morgue proved inadequate, two local
negroes attended to this matter, and they were seldom questioned. West was then
a small, slender, spectacled youth with delicate features, yellow hair, pale
blue eyes, and a soft voice, and it was uncanny to hear him dwelling on the
relative merits of Christchurch Cemetery and the potter’s field. We finally
decided on the potter’s field, because practically every body in Christchurch
was embalmed; a thing of course ruinous to West’s researches.
I was by this time his active and enthralled assistant, and helped him make all
his decisions, not only concerning the source of bodies but concerning a
suitable place for our loathsome work. It was I who thought of the deserted
Chapman farmhouse beyond Meadow Hill, where we fitted up on the ground floor an
operating room and a laboratory, each with dark curtains to conceal our midnight
doings. The place was far from any road, and in sight of no other house, yet
precautions were none the less necessary; since rumours of strange lights,
started by chance nocturnal roamers, would soon bring disaster on our
enterprise. It was agreed to call the whole thing a chemical laboratory if
discovery should occur. Gradually we equipped our sinister haunt of science with
materials either purchased in Boston or quietly borrowed from the college --
materials carefully made unrecognisable save to expert eyes -- and provided
spades and picks for the many burials we should have to make in the cellar. At
the college we used an incinerator, but the apparatus was too costly for our
unauthorised laboratory. Bodies were always a nuisance -- even the small
guinea-pig bodies from the slight clandestine experiments in West’s room at the
boarding-house.
We followed the local death-notices like ghouls, for our specimens demanded
particular qualities. What we wanted were corpses interred soon after death and
without artificial preservation; preferably free from malforming disease, and
certainly with all organs present. Accident victims were our best hope. Not for
many weeks did we hear of anything suitable; though we talked with morgue and
hospital authorities, ostensibly in the college’s interest, as often as we could
without exciting suspicion. We found that the college had first choice in every
case, so that it might be necessary to remain in Arkham during the summer, when
only the limited summer-school classes were held. In the end, though, luck
favoured us; for one day we heard of an almost ideal case in the potter’s field;
a brawny young workman drowned only the morning before in Summer’s Pond, and
buried at the town’s expense without delay or embalming. That afternoon we found
the new grave, and determined to begin work soon after midnight.
It was a repulsive task that we undertook in the black small hours, even though
we lacked at that time the special horror of graveyards which later experiences
brought to us. We carried spades and oil dark lanterns, for although electric
torches were then manufactured, they were not as satisfactory as the tungsten
contrivances of today. The process of unearthing was slow and sordid -- it might
have been gruesomely poetical if we had been artists instead of scientists --
and we were glad when our spades struck wood. When the pine box was fully
uncovered, West scrambled down and removed the lid, dragging out and propping up
the contents. I reached down and hauled the contents out of the grave, and then
both toiled hard to restore the spot to its former appearance. The affair made
us rather nervous, especially the stiff form and vacant face of our first
trophy, but we managed to remove all traces of our visit. When we had patted
down the last shovelful of earth, we- put the specimen in a canvas sack and set
out for the old Chapman place beyoiid Meadow Hill.
On an improvised dissecting-table in the old farmhouse, by the light of a
powerful acetylene lamp, the specimen was not very spectral looking. It had been
a sturdy and apparently unimaginative youth of wholesome plebeian type --
large-framed, grey-eyed, and brown-haired -- a sound animal without
psychological subtleties, and probably having vital processes of the simplest
and healthiest sort. Now, with the eyes closed, it looked more asleep than dead;
though the expert test of my friend soon left no doubt on that score. We had at
last what West had always longed for -- a real dead man of the ideal kind, ready
for the solution as prepared according to the most careful calculations and
theories for human use. The tension on our part became very great. We knew that
there was scarcely a chance for anything like complete success, and could not
avoid hideous fears at possible grotesque results of partial animation.
Especially were we apprehensive concerning the mind and impulses of the
creature, since in the space following death some of the more delicate cerebral
cells might well have suffered deterioration. I, myself, still held some curious
notions about the traditional "soul" of man, and felt an awe at the secrets that
might be told by one returning from the dead. I wondered what sights this placid
youth might have seen in inaccessible spheres, and what he could relate if fully
restored to life. But my wonder was not overwhelming, since for the most part I
shared the materialism of my friend. He was calmer than I as he forced a large
quantity of his fluid into a vein of the body’s arm, immediately binding the
incision securely.
The waiting was gruesome, but West never faltered. Every now and then he applied
his stethoscope to the specimen, and bore the negative results philosophically.
After about three-quarters of an hour without the least sign of life he
disappointedly pronounced the solution inadequate, but determined to make the
most of his opportunity and try one change in the formula before disposing of
his ghastly prize. We had that afternoon dug a grave in the cellar, and would
have to fill it by dawn -- for although we had fixed a lock on the house, we
wished to shun even the remotest risk of a ghoulish discovery. Besides, the body
would not be even approximately fresh the next night. So taking the solitary
acetylene lamp into the adjacent laboratory, we left our silent guest on the
slab in the dark, and bent every energy to the mixing of a new solution; the
weighing and measuring supervised by West with an almost fanatical care.
The awful event was very sudden, and wholly unexpected. I was pouring something
from one test-tube to another, and West was busy over the alcohol blast-lamp
which had to answer for a Bunsen burner in this gasless edifice, when from the
pitch-black room we had left there burst the most appalling and daemoniac
succession of cries that either of us had ever heard. Not more unutterable could
have been the chaos of hellish sound if the pit itself had opened to release the
agony of the damned, for in one inconceivable cacophony was centered all the
supernal terror and unnatural despair of animate nature. Human it could not have
been -- it is not in man to make such sounds -- and without a thought of our
late employment or its possible discovery, both West and I leaped to the nearest
window like stricken animals; overturning tubes, lamp, and retorts, and vaulting
madly into the starred abyss of the rural night. I think we screamed ourselves
as we stumbled frantically toward the town, though as we reached the outskirts
we put on a semblance of restraint -- just enough to seem like belated revellers
staggering home from a debauch.
We did not separate, but managed to get to West’s room, where we whispered with
the gas up until dawn. By then we had calmed ourselves a little with rational
theories and plans for investigation, so that we could sleep through the day --
classes being disregarded. But that evening two items in the paper, wholly
unrelated, made it again impossible for us to sleep. The old deserted Chapman
house had inexplicably burned to an amorphous heap of ashes; that we could
understand because of the upset lamp. Also, an attempt had been made to disturb
a new grave in the potter’s field, as if by futile and spadeless clawing at the
earth. That we could not understand, for we had patted down the mould very
carefully.
And for seventeen years after that West would look frequently over his shoulder,
and complain of fancied footsteps behind him. Now he has disappeared.
II. The Plague-Daemon
Published March 1922 in Home Brew Vol. 1, No. 2, p. 45-50.
I shall never forget that hideous summer sixteen years ago, when like a noxious
afrite from the halls of Eblis typhoid stalked leeringly through Arkham. It is
by that satanic scourge that most recall the year, for truly terror brooded with
bat-wings over the piles of coffins in the tombs of Christchurch Cemetery; yet
for me there is a greater horror in that time -- a horror known to me alone now
that Herbert West has disappeared.
West and I were doing post-graduate work in summer classes at the medical school
of Miskatonic University, and my friend had attained a wide notoriety because of
his experiments leading toward the revivification of the dead. After the
scientific slaughter of uncounted small animals the freakish work had ostensibly
stopped by order of our sceptical dean, Dr. Allan Halsey; though West had
continued to perform certain secret tests in his dingy boarding-house room, and
had on one terrible and unforgettable occasion taken a human body from its grave
in the potter’s field to a deserted farmhouse beyond Meadow Hill.
I was with him on that odious occasion, and saw him inject into the still veins
the elixir which he thought would to some extent restore life’s chemical and
physical processes. It had ended horribly -- in a delirium of fear which we
gradually came to attribute to our own overwrought nerves -- and West had never
afterward been able to shake off a maddening sensation of being haunted and
hunted. The body had not been quite fresh enough; it is obvious that to restore
normal mental attributes a body must be very fresh indeed; and the burning of
the old house had prevented us from burying the thing. It would have been better
if we could have known it was underground.
After that experience West had dropped his researches for some time; but as the
zeal of the born scientist slowly returned, he again became importunate with the
college faculty, pleading for the use of the dissecting-room and of fresh human
specimens for the work he regarded as so overwhelmingly important. His pleas,
however, were wholly in vain; for the decision of Dr. Halsey was inflexible, and
the other professors all endorsed the verdict of their leader. In the radical
theory of reanimation they saw nothing but the immature vagaries of a youthful
enthusiast whose slight form, yellow hair, spectacled blue eyes, and soft voice
gave no hint of the supernormal -- almost diabolical -- power of the cold brain
within. I can see him now as he was then -- and I shiver. He grew sterner of
face, but never elderly. And now Sefton Asylum has had the mishap and West has
vanished.
West clashed disagreeably with Dr. Halsey near the end of our last undergraduate
term in a wordy dispute that did less credit to him than to the kindiy dean in
point of courtesy. He felt that he was needlessly and irrationally retarded in a
supremely great work; a work which he could of course conduct to suit himself in
later years, but which he wished to begin while still possessed of the
exceptional facilities of the university. That the tradition-bound elders should
ignore his singular results on animals, and persist in their denial of the
possibility of reanimation, was inexpressibly disgusting and almost
incomprehensible to a youth of West’s logical temperament. Only greater maturity
could help him understand the chronic mental limitations of the
"professor-doctor" type -- the product of generations of pathetic Puritanism;
kindly, conscientious, and sometimes gentle and amiable, yet always narrow,
intolerant, custom-ridden, and lacking in perspective. Age has more charity for
these incomplete yet high-souled characters, whose worst real vice is timidity,
and who are ultimately punished by general ridicule for their intellectual sins
-- sins like Ptolemaism, Calvinism, anti-Darwinism, anti-Nietzscheism, and every
sort of Sabbatarianism and sumptuary legislation. West, young despite his
marvellous scientific acquirements, had scant patience with good Dr. Halsey and
his erudite colleagues; and nursed an increasing resentment, coupled with a
desire to prove his theories to these obtuse worthies in some striking and
dramatic fashion. Like most youths, he indulged in elaborate daydreams of
revenge, triumph, and final magnanimous forgiveness.
And then had come the scourge, grinning and lethal, from the nightmare caverns
of Tartarus. West and I had graduated about the time of its beginning, but had
remained for additional work at the summer school, so that we were in Arkham
when it broke with full daemoniac fury upon the town. Though not as yet licenced
physicians, we now had our degrees, and were pressed frantically into public
service as the numbers of the stricken grew. The situation was almost past
management, and deaths ensued too frequently for the local undertakers fully to
handle. Burials without embalming were made in rapid succession, and even the
Christchurch Cemetery receiving tomb was crammed with coffins of the unembalmed
dead. This circumstance was not without effect on West, who thought often of the
irony of the situation -- so many fresh specimens, yet none for his persecuted
researches! We were frightfully overworked, and the terrific mental and nervous
strain made my friend brood morbidly.
But West’s gentle enemies were no less harassed with prostrating duties. College
had all but closed, and every doctor of the medical faculty was helping to fight
the typhoid plague. Dr. Halsey in particular had distinguished himself in
sacrificing service, applying his extreme skill with whole-hearted energy to
cases which many others shunned because of danger or apparent hopelessness.
Before a month was over the fearless dean had become a popular hero, though he
seemed unconscious of his fame as he struggled to keep from collapsing with
physical fatigue and nervous exhaustion. West could not withhold admiration for
the fortitude of his foe, but because of this was even more determined to prove
to him the truth of his amazing doctrines. Taking advantage of the
disorganisation of both college work and municipal health regulations, he
managed to get a recently deceased body smuggled into the university
dissecting-room one night, and in my presence injected a new modification of his
solution. The thing actually opened its eyes, but only stared at the ceiling
with a look of soul-petrifying horror before collapsing into an inertness from
which nothing could rouse it. West said it was not fresh enough -- the hot
summer air does not favour corpses. That time we were almost caught before we
incinerated the thing, and West doubted the advisability of repeating his daring
misuse of the college laboratory.
The peak of the epidemic was reached in August. West and I were almost dead, and
Dr. Halsey did die on the 14th. The students all attended the hasty funeral on
the 15th, and bought an impressive wreath, though the latter was quite
overshadowed by the tributes sent by wealthy Arkham citizens and by the
municipality itself. It was almost a public affair, for the dean had surely been
a public benefactor. After the entombment we were all somewhat depressed, and
spent the afternoon at the bar of the Commercial House; where West, though
shaken by the death of his chief opponent, chilled the rest of us with
references to his notorious theories. Most of the students went home, or to
various duties, as the evening advanced; but West persuaded me to aid him in
"making a night of it" West’s landlady saw us arrive at his room about two in
the morning, with a third man between us; and told her husband that we had all
evidently dined and wined rather well.
Apparently this acidulous matron was right; for about 3 a.m. the whole house was
aroused by cries coming from West’s room, where when they broke down the door,
they found the two of us unconscious on the blood-stained carpet, beaten,
scratched, and mauled, and with the broken remnants of West’s bottles and
instruments around us. Only an open window told what had become of our
assailant, and many wondered how he himself had fared after the terrific leap
from the second story to the lawn which he must have made. There were some
strange garments in the room, but West upon regaining consciousness said they
did not belong to the stranger, but were specimens collected for bacteriological
analysis in the course of investigations on the transmission of germ diseases.
He ordered them burnt as soon as possible in the capacious fireplace. To the
police we both declared ignorance of our late companion’s identity. He was, West
nervously said, a congenial stranger whom we had met at some downtown bar of
uncertain location. We had all been rather jovial, and West and I did not wish
to have our pugnacious companion hunted down.
That same night saw the beginning of the second Arkham horror -- the horror that
to me eclipsed the plague itself. Christ-church Cemetery was the scene of a
terrible killing; a watchman having been clawed to death in a manner not only
too hideous for description, but raising a doubt as to the human agency of the
deed. The victim had been seen alive considerably after midnight -- the dawn
revealed the unutterable thing. The manager of a circus at the neighbouring town
of Bolton was questioned, but he swore that no beast had at any time escaped
from its cage. Those who found the body noted a trail of blood leading to the
receiving tomb, where a small pool of red lay on the concrete just outside the
gate. A fainter trail led away toward the woods, but it soon gave out.
The next night devils danced on the roofs of Arkham, and unnatural madness
howled in the wind. Through the fevered town had crept a curse which some said
was greater than the plague, and which some whispered was the embodied
daemon-soul of the plague itself. Eight houses were entered by a nameless thing
which strewed red death in its wake -- in all, seventeen maimed and shapeless
remnants of bodies were left behind by the voiceless, sadistic monster that
crept abroad. A few persons had half seen it in the dark, and said it was white
and like a malformed ape or anthropomorphic fiend. It had not left behind quite
all that it had attacked, for sometimes it had been hungry. The number it had
killed was fourteen; three of the bodies had been in stricken homes and had not
been alive.
On the third night frantic bands of searchers, led by the police, captured it in
a house on Crane Street near the Miskatonic campus. They had organised the quest
with care, keeping in touch by means of volunteer telephone stations, and when
someone in the college district had reported hearing a scratching at a shuttered
window, the net was quickly spread. On account of the general alarm and
precautions, there were only two more victims, and the capture was effected
without major casualties. The thing was finally stopped by a bullet, though not
a fatal one, and was rushed to the local hospital amidst universal excitement
and loathing.
For it had been a man. This much was clear despite the nauseous eyes, the
voiceless simianism, and the daemoniac savagery. They dressed its wound and
carted it to the asylum at Sefton, where it beat its head against the walls of a
padded cell for sixteen years -- until the recent mishap, when it escaped under
circumstances that few like to mention. What had most disgusted the searchers of

Arkham was the thing they noticed when the monster’s face was cleaned -- the
mocking, unbelievable resemblance to a learned and self-sacrificing martyr who
had been entombed but three days before -- the late Dr. Allan Halsey, public
benefactor and dean of the medical school of Miskatonic University.
To the vanished Herbert West and to me the disgust and horror were supreme. I
shudder tonight as I think of it; shudder even more than I did that morning when
West muttered through his bandages, "Damn it, it wasn’t quite fresh enough!"
III. Six Shots by Moonlight
Published April 1922 in Home Brew Vol. 1, No. 3, p. 21-26.
It is uncommon to fire all six shots of a revolver with great suddenness when
one would probably be sufficient, but many things in the life of Herbert West
were uncommon. It is, for instance, not often that a young physician leaving
college is obliged to conceal the principles which guide his selection of a home
and office, yet that was the case with Herbert West. When he and I obtained our
degrees at the medical school of Miskatonic University, and sought to relieve
our poverty by setting up as general practitioners, we took great care not to
say that we chose our house because it was fairly well isolated, and as near as
possible to the potter’s field.
Reticence such as this is seldom without a cause, nor indeed was ours; for our
requirements were those resulting from a life-work distinctly unpopular.
Outwardly we were doctors only, but beneath the surface were aims of far greater
and more terrible moment -- for the essence of Herbert West’s existence was a
quest amid black and forbidden realms of the unknown, in which he hoped to
uncover the secret of life and restore to perpetual animation the graveyard’s
cold clay. Such a quest demands strange materials, among them fresh human
bodies; and in order to keep supplied with these indispensable things one must
live quietly and not far from a place of informal interment.
West and I had met in college, and I had been the only one to sympathise with
his hideous experiments. Gradually I had come to be his inseparable assistant,
and now that we were out of college we had to keep together. It was not easy to
find a good opening for two doctors in company, but finally the influence of the
university secured us a practice in Bolton -- a factory town near Arkham, the
seat of the college. The Bolton Worsted Mills are the largest in the Miskatonic
Valley, and their polyglot employees are never popular as patients with the
local physicians. We chose our house with the greatest care, seizing at last on
a rather run-down cottage near the end of Pond Street; five numbers from the
closest neighbour, and separated from the local potter’s field by only a stretch
of meadow land, bisected by a narrow neck of the rather dense forest which lies
to the north. The distance was greater than we wished, but we could get no
nearer house without going on the other side of the field, wholly out of the
factory district. We were not much displeased, however, since there were no
people between us and our sinister source of supplies. The walk was a trifle
long, but we could haul our silent specimens undisturbed.
Our practice was surprisingly large from the very first -- large enough to
please most young doctors, and large enough to prove a bore and a burden to
students whose real interest lay elsewhere. The mill-hands were of somewhat
turbulent inclinations; and besides their many natural needs, their frequent
clashes and stabbing affrays gave us plenty to do. But what actually absorbed
our minds was the secret laboratory we had fitted up in the cellar -- the
laboratory with the long table under the electric lights, where in the small
hours of the morning we often injected West’s various solutions into the veins
of the things we dragged from the potter’s field. West was experimenting madly
to find something which would start man’s vital motions anew after they had been
stopped by the thing we call death, but had encountered the most ghastly
obstacles. The solution had to be differently compounded for different types --
what would serve for guinea-pigs would not serve for human beings, and different
human specimens required large modifications.
The bodies had to be exceedingly fresh, or the slight decomposition of brain
tissue would render perfect reanimation impossible. Indeed, the greatest problem
was to get them fresh enough -- West had had horrible experiences during his
secret college researches with corpses of doubtful vintage. The results of
partial or imperfect animation were much more hideous than were the total
failures, and we both held fearsome recollections of such things. Ever since our
first daemoniac session in the deserted farmhouse on Meadow Hill in Arkham, we
had felt a brooding menace; and West, though a calm, blond, blue-eyed scientific
automaton in most respects, often confessed to a shuddering sensation of
stealthy pursuit. He half felt that he was followed -- a psychological delusion
of shaken nerves, enhanced by the undeniably disturbing fact that at least one
of our reanimated specimens was still alive -- a frightful carnivorous thing in
a padded cell at Sefton. Then there was another -- our first -- whose exact fate
we had never learned.
We had fair luck with specimens in Bolton -- much better than in Arkham. We had
not been settled a week before we got an accident victim on the very night of
burial, and made it open its eyes with an amazingly rational expression before
the solution failed. It had lost an arm -- if it had been a perfect body we
might have succeeded better. Between then and the next January we secured three
more; one total failure, one case of marked muscular motion, and one rather
shivery thing -- it rose of itself and uttered a sound. Then came a period when
luck was poor; interments fell off, and those that did occur were of specimens
either too diseased or too maimed for use. We kept track of all the deaths and
their circumstances with systematic care.
One March night, however, we unexpectedly obtained a specimen which did not come
from the potter’s field. In Bolton the prevailing spirit of Puritanism had
outlawed the sport of boxing -- with the usual result. Surreptitious and
ill-conducted bouts among the mill-workers were common, and occasionally
professional talent of low grade was imported. This late winter night there had
been such a match; evidently with disastrous results, since two timorous Poles
had come to us with incoherently whispered entreaties to attend to a very secret
and desperate case. We followed them to an abandoned barn, where the remnants of
a crowd of frightened foreigners were watching a silent black form on the floor.

The match had been between Kid O’Brien -- a lubberly and now quaking youth with
a most un-Hibernian hooked nose -- and Buck Robinson, "The Harlem Smoke." The
negro had been knocked out, and a moment’s examination shewed us that he would
permanently remain so. He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally
long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up
thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon.
The body must have looked even worse in life -- but the world holds many ugly
things. Fear was upon the whole pitiful crowd, for they did not know what the
law would exact of them if the affair were not hushed up; and they were grateful
when West, in spite of my involuntary shudders, offered to get rid of the thing
quietly -- for a purpose I knew too well.
There was bright moonlight over the snowless landscape, but we dressed the thing
and carried it home between us through the deserted streets and meadows, as we
had carried a similar thing one horrible night in Arkham. We approached the
house from the field in the rear, took the specimen in the back door and down
the cellar stairs, and prepared it for the usual experiment. Our fear of the
police was absurdly great, though we had timed our trip to avoid the solitary
patrolman of that section.
The result was wearily anticlimactic. Ghastly as our prize appeared, it was
wholly unresponsive to every solution we injected in its black arm; solutions
prepared from experience with white specimens only. So as the hour grew
dangerously near to dawn, we did as we had done with the others -- dragged the
thing across the meadows to the neck of the woods near the potter’s field, and
buried it there in the best sort of grave the frozen ground would furnish. The
grave was not very deep, but fully as good as that of the previous specimen --
the thing which had risen of itself and uttered a sound. In the light of our
dark lanterns we carefully covered it with leaves and dead vines, fairly certain
that the police would never find it in a forest so dim and dense.
The next day I was increasingly apprehensive about the police, for a patient
brought rumours of a suspected fight and death. West had still another source of
worry, for he had been called in the afternoon to a case which ended very
threateningly. An Italian woman had become hysterical over her missing child --
a lad of five who had strayed off early in the morning and failed to appear for
dinner -- and had developed symptoms highly alarming in view of an always weak
heart. It was a very foolish hysteria, for the boy had often run away before;
but Italian peasants are exceedingly superstitious, and this woman seemed as
much harassed by omens as by facts. About seven o’clock in the evening she had
died, and her frantic husband had made a frightful scene in his efforts to kill
West, whom he wildly blamed for not saving her life. Friends had held him when
he drew a stiletto, but West departed amidst his inhuman shrieks, curses and
oaths of vengeance. In his latest affliction the fellow seemed to have forgotten
his child, who was still missing as the night advanced. There was some talk of
searching the woods, but most of the family’s friends were busy with the dead
woman and the screaming man. Altogether, the nervous strain upon West must have
been tremendous. Thoughts of the police and of the mad Italian both weighed
heavily.
We retired about eleven, but I did not sleep well. Bolton had a surprisingly
good police force for so small a town, and I could not help fearing the mess
which would ensue if the affair of the night before were ever tracked down. It
might mean the end of all our local work -- and perhaps prison for both West and
me. I did not like those rumours of a fight which were floating about. After the
clock had struck three the moon shone in my eyes, but I turned over without
rising to pull down the shade. Then came the steady rattling at the back door.
I lay still and somewhat dazed, but before long heard West’s rap on my door. He
was clad in dressing-gown and slippers, and had in his hands a revolver and an
electric flashlight. From the revolver I knew that he was thinking more of the
crazed Italian than of the police.
"We’d better both go," he whispered. "It wouldn’t do not to answer it anyway,
and it may be a patient -- it would be like one of those fools to try the back
door."
So we both went down the stairs on tiptoe, with a fear partly justified and
partly that which comes only from the soul of the weird small hours. The
rattling continued, growing somewhat louder. When we reached the door I
cautiously unbolted it and threw it open, and as the moon streamed revealingly
down on the form silhouetted there, West did a peculiar thing. Despite the
obvious danger of attracting notice and bringing down on our heads the dreaded
police investigation -- a thing which after all was mercifully averted by the
relative isolation of our cottage -- my friend suddenly, excitedly, and
unnecessarily emptied all six chambers of his revolver into the nocturnal
visitor.
For that visitor was neither Italian nor policeman. Looming hideously against
the spectral moon was a gigantic misshapen thing not to be imagined save in
nightmares -- a glassy-eyed, ink-black apparition nearly on all fours, covered
with bits of mould, leaves, and vines, foul with caked blood, and having between
its glistening teeth a snow-white, terrible, cylindrical object terminating in a
tiny hand.
IV. The Scream of the Dead
Published May 1922 in Home Brew Vol. 1, No. 4, p. 53-58.
The scream of a dead man gave to me that acute and added horror of Dr. Herbert
West which harassed the latter years of our companionship. It is natural that
such a thing as a dead man’s scream should give horror, for it is obviously, not
a pleasing or ordinary occurrence; but I was used to similar experiences, hence
suffered on this occasion only because of a particular circumstance. And, as I
have implied, it was not of the dead man himself that I became afraid.
Herbert West, whose associate and assistant I was, possessed scientific
interests far beyond the usual routine of a village physician. That was why,
when establishing his practice in Bolton, he had chosen an isolated house near
the potter’s field. Briefly and brutally stated, West’s sole absorbing interest
was a secret study of the phenomena of life and its cessation, leading toward
the reanimation of the dead through injections of an excitant solution. For this
ghastly experimenting it was necessary to have a constant supply of very fresh
human bodies; very fresh because even the least decay hopelessly damaged the
brain structure, and human because we found that the solution had to be
compounded differently for different types of organisms. Scores of rabbits and
guinea-pigs had been killed and treated, but their trail was a blind one. West
had never fully succeeded because he had never been able to secure a corpse
sufficiently fresh. What he wanted were bodies from which vitality had only just
departed; bodies with every cell intact and capable of receiving again the
impulse toward that mode of motion called life. There was hope that this second
and artificial life might be made perpetual by repetitions of the injection, but
we had learned that an ordinary natural life would not respond to the action. To
establish the artificial motion, natural life must be extinct -- the specimens
must be very fresh, but genuinely dead.
The awesome quest had begun when West and I were students at the Miskatonic
University Medical School in Arkham, vividly conscious for the first time of the
thoroughly mechanical nature of life. That was seven years before, but West
looked scarcely a day older now -- he was small, blond, clean-shaven,
soft-voiced, and spectacled, with only an occasional flash of a cold blue eye to
tell of the hardening and growing fanaticism of his character under the pressure
of his terrible investigations. Our experiences had often been hideous in the
extreme; the results of defective reanimation, when lumps of graveyard clay had
been galvanised into morbid, unnatural, and brainless motion by various
modifications of the vital solution.
One thing had uttered a nerve-shattering scream; another had risen violently,
beaten us both to unconsciousness, and run amuck in a shocking way before it
could be placed behind asylum bars; still another, a loathsome African
monstrosity, had clawed out of its shallow grave and done a deed -- West had had
to shoot that object. We could not get bodies fresh enough to shew any trace of
reason when reanimated, so had perforce created nameless horrors. It was
disturbing to think that one, perhaps two, of our monsters still lived -- that
thought haunted us shadowingly, till finally West disappeared under frightful
circumstances. But at the time of the scream in the cellar laboratory of the
isolated Bolton cottage, our fears were subordinate to our anxiety for extremely
fresh specimens. West was more avid than I, so that it almost seemed to me that
he looked half-covetously at any very healthy living physique.
It was in July, 1910, that the bad luck regarding specimens began to turn. I had
been on a long visit to my parents in Illinois, and upon my return found West in
a state of singular elation. He had, he told me excitedly, in all likelihood
solved the problem of freshness through an approach from an entirely new angle
-- that of artificial preservation. I had known that he was working on a new and
highly unusual embalming compound, and was not surprised that it had turned Out
well; but until he explained the details I was rather puzzled as to how such a
compound could help in our work, since the objectionable staleness of the
specimens was largely due to delay occurring before we secured them. This, I now
saw, West had clearly recognised; creatuig his embalming compound for future
rather than immediate use, and trusting to fate to supply again some very recent
and unburied corpse, as it had years before when we obtained the negro killed in
the Bolton prize-fight. At last fate had been kind, so that on this occasion
there lay in the secret cellar laboratory a corpse whose decay could not by any
possibility have begun. What would happen on reanimation, and whether we could
hope for a revival of mind and reason, West did not venture to predict. The
experiment would be a landmark in our studies, and he had saved the new body for
my return, so that both might share the spectacle in accustomed fashion.
West told me how he had obtained the specimen. It had been a vigorous man; a
well-dressed stranger just off the train on his way to transact some business
with the Bolton Worsted Mills. The walk through the town had been long, and by
the time the traveller paused at our cottage to ask the way to the factories,
his heart had become greatly overtaxed. He had refused a stimulant, and had
suddenly dropped dead only a moment later. The body, as might be expected,
seemed to West a heaven-sent gift. In his brief conversation the stranger had
made it clear that he was unknown in Bolton, and a search of his pockets
subsequently revealed him to be one Robert Leavitt of St. Louis, apparently
without a family to make instant inquiries about his disappearance. If this man
could not be restored to life, no one would know of our experiment. We buried
our materials in a dense strip of woods between the house and the potter’s
field. If, on the other hand, he could be restored, our fame would be
brilliantly and perpetually established. So without delay West had injected into
the body’s wrist the compound which would hold it fresh for use after my
arrival. The matter of the presumably weak heart, which to my mind imperilled
the success of our experiment, did not appear to trouble West extensively. He
hoped at last to obtain what he had never obtained before -- a rekindled spark
of reason and perhaps a normal, living creature.
So on the night of July 18, 1910, Herbert West and I stood in the cellar
laboratory and gazed at a white, silent figure beneath the dazzling arc-light.
The embalming compound had worked uncannily well, for as I stared fascinatedly
at the sturdy frame which had lain two weeks without stiffening, I was moved to
seek West’s assurance that the thing was really dead. This assurance he gave
readily enough; reminding me that the reanimating solution was never used
without careful tests as to life, since it could have, no effect if any of the
original vitality were present. As West proceeded to take preliminary steps, I
was impressed by the vast intricacy of the new experiment; an intricacy so vast
that he could trust no hand less delicate than his own. Forbidding me to touch
the body, he first injected a drug in the wrist just beside the place his needle
had punctured when injecting the embalming compound. This, he said, was to
neutralise the compound and release the system to a normal relaxation so that
the reanimating solution might freely work when injected. Slightly later, when a
change and a gentle tremor seemed to affect the dead limbs; West stuffed a
pillow-like object violently over the twitching face, not withdrawing it until
the corpse appeared quiet and ready for our attempt at reanimation. The pale
enthusiast now applied some last perfunctory tests for absolute lifelessness,
withdrew satisfied, and finally injected into the left arm an accurately
measured amount of the vital elixir, prepared during the afternoon with a
greater care than we had used since college days, when our feats were new and
groping. I cannot express the wild, breathless suspense with which we waited for
results on this first really fresh specimen -- the first we could reasonably
expect to open its lips in rational speech, perhaps to tell of what it had seen
beyond the unfathomable abyss.
West was a materialist, believing in no soul and attributing all the working of
consciousness to bodily phenomena; consequently he looked for no revelation of
hideous secrets from gulfs and caverns beyond death’s barrier. I did not wholly
disagree with him theoretically, yet held vague instinctive remnants of the
primitive faith of my forefathers; so that I could not help eyeing the corpse
with a certain amount of awe and terrible expectation. Besides -- I could not
extract from my memory that hideous, inhuman shriek we heard on the night we
tried our first experiment in the deserted farmhouse at Arkham.
Very little time had elapsed before I saw the attempt was not to be a total
failure. A touch of colour came to cheeks hitherto chalk-white, and spread out
under the curiously ample stubble of sandy beard. West, who had his hand on the
pulse of the left wrist, suddenly nodded significantly; and almost
simultaneously a mist appeared on the mirror inclined above the body’s mouth.
There followed a few spasmodic muscular motions, and then an audible breathing
and visible motion of the chest. I looked at the closed eyelids, and thought I
detected a quivering. Then the lids opened, shewing eyes which were grey, calm,
and alive, but still unintelligent and not even curious.
In a moment of fantastic whim I whispered questions to the reddening ears;
questions of other worlds of which the memory might still be present. Subsequent
terror drove them from my mind, but I think the last one, which I repeated, was:
"Where have you been?" I do not yet know whether I was answered or not, for no
sound came from the well-shaped mouth; but I do know that at that moment I
firmly thought the thin lips moved silently, forming syllables which I would
have vocalised as "only now" if that phrase had possessed any sense or
relevancy. At that moment, as I say, I was elated with the conviction that the
one great goal had been attained; and that for the first time a reanimated
corpse had uttered distinct words impelled by actual reason. In the next moment
there was no doubt about the triumph; no doubt that the solution had truly
accomplished, at least temporarily, its full mission of restoring rational and
articulate life to the dead. But in that triumph there came to me the greatest
of all horrors -- not horror of the thing that spoke, but of the deed that I had
witnessed and of the man with whom my professional fortunes were joined.
For that very fresh body, at last writhing into full and terrifying
consciousness with eyes dilated at the memory of its last scene on earth, threw
out its frantic hands in a life and death struggle with the air, and suddenly
collapsing into a second and final dissolution from which there could be no
return, screamed out the cry that will ring eternally in my aching brain:
"Help! Keep off, you cursed little tow-head fiend -- keep that damned needle
away from me!"
V. The Horror From the Shadows
Published June 1922 in Home Brew Vol. 1, No. 5, p. 45-50.
Many men have related hideous things, not mentioned in print, which happened on
the battlefields of the Great War. Some of these things have made me faint,
others have convulsed me with devastating nausea, while still others have made
me tremble and look behind me in the dark; yet despite the worst of them I
believe I can myself relate the most hideous thing of all -- the shocking, the
unnatural, the unbelievable horror from the shadows.
In 1915 I was a physician with the rank of First Lieutenant in a Canadian
regiment in Flanders, one of many Americans to precede the government itself
into the gigantic struggle. I had not entered the army on my own initiative, but
rather as a natural result of the enlistment of the man whose indispensable
assistant I was -- the celebrated Boston surgical specialist, Dr. Herbert West.
Dr. West had been avid for a chance to serve as surgeon in a great war, and when
the chance had come, he carried me with him almost against my will. There were
reasons why I could have been glad to let the war separate us; reasons why I
found the practice of medicine and the companionship of West more and more
irritating; but when he had gone to Ottawa and through a colleague’s influence
secured a medical commission as Major, I could not resist the imperious
persuasion of one determined that I should accompany him in my usual capacity.
When I say that Dr. West was avid to serve in battle, I do not mean to imply
that he was either naturally warlike or anxious for the safety of civilisation.
Always an ice-cold intellectual machine; slight, blond, blue-eyed, and
spectacled; I think he secretly sneered at my occasional martial enthusiasms and
censures of supine neutrality. There was, however, something he wanted in
embattled Flanders; and in order to secure it had had to assume a military
exterior. What he wanted was not a thing which many persons want, but something
connected with the peculiar branch of medical science which he had chosen quite
clandestinely to follow, and in which he had achieved amazing and occasionally
hideous results. It was, in fact, nothing more or less than an abundant supply
of freshly killed men in every stage of dismemberment.
Herbert West needed fresh bodies because his life-work was the reanimation of
the dead. This work was not known to the fashionable clientele who had so
swiftly built up his fame after his arrival in Boston; but was only too well
known to me, who had been his closest friend and sole assistant since the old
days in Miskatonic University Medical School at Arkham. It was in those college
days that he had begun his terrible experiments, first on small animals and then
on human bodies shockingly obtained. There was a solution which he injected into
the veins of dead things, and if they were fresh enough they responded in
strange ways. He had had much trouble in discovering the proper formula, for
each type of organism was found to need a stimulus especially adapted to it.
Terror stalked him when he reflected on his partial failures; nameless things
resulting from imperfect solutions or from bodies insufficiently fresh. A
certain number of these failures had remained alive -- one was in an asylum
while others had vanished -- and as he thought of conceivable yet virtually
impossible eventualities he often shivered beneath his usual stolidity.
West had soon learned that absolute freshness was the prime requisite for useful
specimens, and had accordingly resorted to frightful and unnatural expedients in
body-snatching. In college, and during our early practice together in the
factory town of Bolton, my attitude toward him had been largely one of
fascinated admiration; but as his boldness in methods grew, I began to develop a
gnawing fear. I did not like the way he looked at healthy living bodies; and
then there came a nightmarish session in the cellar laboratory when I learned
that a certain specimen had been a living body when he secured it. That was the
first time he had ever been able to revive the quality of rational thought in a
corpse; and his success, obtained at such a loathsome cost, had completely
hardened him.
Of his methods in the intervening five years I dare not speak. I was held to him
by sheer force of fear, and witnessed sights that no human tongue could repeat.
Gradually I came to find Herbert West himself more horrible than anything he did
-- that was when it dawned on me that his once normal scientific zeal for
prolonging life had subtly degenerated into a mere morbid and ghoulish curiosity
and secret sense of charnel picturesqueness. His interest became a hellish and
perverse addiction to the repellently and fiendishly abnormal; he gloated calmly
over artificial monstrosities which would make most healthy men drop dead from
fright and disgust; he became, behind his pallid intellectuality, a fastidious
Baudelaire of physical experiment -- a languid Elagabalus of the tombs.
Dangers he met unflinchingly; crimes he committed unmoved. I think the climax
came when he had proved his point that rational life can be restored, and had
sought new worlds to conquer by experimenting on the reanimation of detached
parts of bodies. He had wild and original ideas on the independent vital
properties of organic cells and nerve-tissue separated from natural
physiological systems; and achieved some hideous preliminary results in the form
of neverdying, artificially nourished tissue obtained from the nearly hatched
eggs of an indescribably tropical reptile. Two biological points he was
exceedingly anxious to settle -- first, whether any amount of consciousness and
rational action be possible without the brain, proceeding from the spinal cord
and various nerve-centres; and second, whether any kind of ethereal, intangible
relation distinct from the material cells may exist to link the surgically
separated parts of what has previously been a single living organism. All this
research work required a prodigious supply of freshly slaughtered human flesh --
and that was why Herbert West had entered the Great War.
The phantasmal, unmentionable thing occurred one midnight late in March, 1915,
in a field hospital behind the lines of St. Eloi. I wonder even now if it could
have been other than a daemoniac dream of delirium. West had a private
laboratory in an east room of the barn-like temporary edifice, assigned him on
his plea that he was devising new and radical methods for the treatment of
hitherto hopeless cases of maiming. There he worked like a butcher in the midst
of his gory wares -- I could never get used to the levity with which he handled
and classified certain things. At times he actually did perform marvels of
surgery for the soldiers; but his chief delights were of a less public and
philanthropic kind, requiring many explanations of sounds which seemed peculiar
even amidst that babel of the damned. Among these sounds were frequent
revolver-shots -- surely not uncommon on a battlefield, but distinctly uncommon
in an hospital. Dr. West’s reanimated specimens were not meant for long
existence or a large audience. Besides human tissue, West employed much of the
reptile embryo tissue which he had cultivated with such singular results. It was
better than human material for maintaining life in organless fragments, and that
was now my friend’s chief activity. In a dark corner of the laboratory, over a
queer incubating burner, he kept a large covered vat full of this reptilian
cell-matter; which multiplied and grew puffily and hideously.
On the night of which I speak we had a splendid new specimen -- a man at once
physically powerful and of such high mentality that a sensitive nervous system
was assured. It was rather ironic, for he was the officer who had helped West to
his commission, and who was now to have been our associate. Moreover, he had in
the past secretly studied the theory of reanimation to some extent under West.
Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, D.S.O., was the greatest surgeon in our
division, and had been hastily assigned to the St. Eloi sector when news of the
heavy fighting reached headquarters. He had come in an aeroplane piloted by the
intrepid Lieut. Ronald Hill, only to be shot down when directly over his
destination. The fall had been spectacular and awful; Hill was unrecognisable
afterward, but the wreck yielded up the great surgeon in a nearly decapitated
but otherwise intact condition. West had greedily seized the lifeless thing
which had once been his friend and fellow-scholar; and I shuddered when he
finished severing the head, placed it in his hellish vat of pulpy reptile-tissue
to preserve it for future experiments, and proceeded to treat the decapitated
body .on the operating table. He injected new blood, joined certain veins,
arteries, and nerves at the headless neck, and closed the ghastly aperture with
engrafted skin from an unidentified specimen which had borne an officer’s
uniform. I knew what he wanted -- to see if this highly organised body could
exhibit, without its head, any of the signs of mental life which had
distinguished Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee. Once a student of reanimation, this
silent trunk was now gruesomely called upon to exemplify it.
I can still see Herbert West under the sinister electric light as he injected
his reanimating solution into the arm of the headless body. The scene I cannot
describe -- I should faint if I tried it, for there is madness in a room full of
classified charnel things, with blood and lesser human debris almost ankle-deep
on the slimy floor, and with hideous reptilian abnormalities sprouting,
bubbling, and baking over a winking bluish-green spectre of dim flame in a far
corner of black shadows.
The specimen, as West repeatedly observed, had a splendid nervous system. Much
was expected of it; and as a few twitching motions began to appear, I could see
the feverish interest on West’s face. He was ready, I think, to see proof of his
increasingly strong opinion that consciousness, reason, and personality can
exist independently of the brain -- that man has no central connective spirit,
but is merely a machine of nervous matter, each section more or less complete in
itself. In one triumphant demonstration West was about to relegate the mystery
of life to the category of myth. The body now twitched more vigorously, and
beneath our avid eyes commenced to heave in a frightful way. The arms stirred
disquietingly, the legs drew up, and various muscles contracted in a repulsive
kind of writhing. Then the headless thing threw out its arms in a gesture which
was unmistakably one of desperation -- an intelligent desperation apparently
sufficient to prove every theory of Herbert West. Certainly, the nerves were
recalling the man’s last act in life; the struggle to get free of the falling
aeroplane.
What followed, I shall never positively know. It may have been wholly an
hallucination from the shock caused at that instant by the sudden and complete
destruction of the building in a cataclysm of German shell-fire -- who can
gainsay it, since West and I were the only proved survivors? West liked to think
that before his recent disappearance, but there were times when he could not;
for it was queer that we both had the same hallucination. The hideous occurrence
itself was very simple, notable only for what it implied.
The body on the table had risen with a blind and terrible groping, and we had
heard a sound. I should not call that sound a voice, for it was too awful. And
yet its timbre was not the most awful thing about it. Neither was its message --
it had merely screamed, "Jump, Ronald, for God’s sake, jump!" The awful thing
was its source.
For it had come from the large covered vat in that ghoulish corner of crawling
black shadows.
VI. The Tomb-Legions
Published July 1922 in Home Brew Vol. 1, No. 6, p. 57-62.
When Dr. Herbert West disappeared a year ago, the Boston police questioned me
closely. They suspected that I was holding something back, and perhaps suspected
graver things; but I could not tell them the truth because they would not have
believed it. They knew, indeed, that West had been connected with activities
beyond the credence of ordinary men; for his hideous experiments in the
reanimation of dead bodies had long been too extensive to admit of perfect
secrecy; but the final soul-shattering catastrophe held elements of daemoniac
phantasy which make even me doubt the reality of what I saw.
I was West’s closest friend and only confidential assistant. We had met years
before, in medical school, and from the first I had shared his terrible
researches. He had slowly tried to perfect a solution which, injected into the
veins of the newly deceased, would restore life; a labour demanding an abundance
of fresh corpses and therefore involving the most unnatural actions. Still more
shocking were the products of some of the experiments -- grisly masses of flesh
that had been dead, but that West waked to a blind, brainless, nauseous
ammation. These were the usual results, for in order to reawaken the mind it was
necessary to have specimens so absolutely fresh that no decay could possibly
affect the delicate brain-cells.
This need for very fresh corpses had been West’s moral undoing. They were hard
to get, and one awful day he had secured his specimen while it was still alive
and vigorous. A struggle, a needle, and a powerful alkaloid had transformed it
to a very fresh corpse, and the experiment had succeeded for a brief and
memorable moment; but West had emerged with a soul calloused and seared, and a
hardened eye which sometimes glanced with a kind of hideous and calculating
appraisal at men of especially sensitive brain and especially vigorous physique.
Toward the last I became acutely afraid of West, for he began to look at me that
way. People did not seem to notice his glances, but they noticed my fear; and
after his disappearance used that as a basis for some absurd suspicions.
West, in reality, was more afraid than I; for his abominable pursuits entailed a
life of furtiveness and dread of every shadow. Partly it was the police he
feared; but sometimes his nervousness was deeper and more nebulous, touching on
certain indescribable things into which he had injected a morbid life, and from
which he had not seen that life depart. He usually finished his experiments with
a revolver, but a few times he had not been quick enough. There was that first
specimen on whose rifled grave marks of clawing were later seen. There was also
that Arkham professor’s body which had done cannibal things before it had been
captured and thrust unidentified into a madhouse cell at Sefton, where it beat
the walls for sixteen years. Most of the other possibly surviving results were
things less easy to speak of -- for in later years West’s scientific zeal had
degenerated to an unhealthy and fantastic mania, and he had spent his chief
skill in vitalising not entire human bodies but isolated parts of bodies, or
parts joined to organic matter other -than human. It had become fiendishly
disgusting by the time he disappeared; many of the experiments could not even be
hinted at in print. The Great War, through which both of us served as surgeons,
had intensified this side of West.
In saying that West’s fear of his specimens was nebulous, I have in mind
particularly its complex nature. Part of it came merely from knowing of the
existence of such nameless monsters, while another part arose from apprehension
of the bodily harm they might under certain circumstances do him. Their
disappearance added horror to the situation -- of them all, West knew the
whereabouts of only one, the pitiful asylum thing. Then there was a- more subtle
fear -- a very fantastic sensation resulting from a curious experiment in the
Canadian army in 1915. West, in the midst of a severe battle, had reanimated
Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, D.S.O., a fellow-physician who knew about
his experiments and could have duplicated them. The head had been removed, so
that the possibilities of quasi-intelligent life in the trunk might be
investigated. Just as the building was wiped out by a German shell, there had
been a success. The trunk had moved intelligently; and, unbelievable to relate,
we were both sickeningly sure that articulate sounds had come from the detached
head as it lay in a shadowy corner of the laboratory. The shell had been
merciful, in a way -- but West could never feel as certain as he wished, that we
two were the only survivors. He used to make shuddering conjectures about the
possible actions of a headless physician with the power of reanimating the dead.

West’s last quarters were in a venerable house of much elegance, overlooking one
of the oldest burying-grounds in Boston. He had chosen the place for purely
symbolic and fantastically aesthetic reasons, since most of the interments were
of the colonial period and therefore of little use to a scientist seeking very
fresh bodies. The laboratory was in a sub-cellar secretly constructed by
imported workmen, and contained a huge incinerator for the quiet and complete
disposal of such bodies, or fragments and synthetic mockeries of bodies, as
might remain from the morbid experiments and unhallowed amusements of the owner.
During the excavation of this cellar the workmen had struck some exceedingly
ancient masonry; undoubtedly connected with the old burying-ground, yet far too
deep to correspond with any known sepulchre therein. After a number of
calculations West decided that it represented some secret chamber beneath the
tomb of the Averills, where the last interment had been made in 1768. I was with
him when he studied the nitrous, dripping walls laid bare by the spades and
mattocks of the men, and was prepared for the gruesome thrill which would attend
the uncovering of centuried grave-secrets; but for the first time West’s new
timidity conquered his natural curiosity, and he betrayed his degenerating fibre
by ordering the masonry left intact and plastered over. Thus it remained till
that final hellish night; part of the walls of the secret laboratory. I speak of
West’s decadence, but must add that it was a purely mental and intangible thing.
Outwardly he was the same to the last -- calm, cold, slight, and yellow-haired,
with spectacled blue eyes and a general aspect of youth which years and fears
seemed never to change. He seemed calm even when he thought of that clawed grave
and looked over his shoulder; even when he thought of the carnivorous thing that
gnawed and pawed at Sefton bars.
The end of Herbert West began one evening in our joint study when he was
dividing his curious glance between the newspaper and me. A strange headline
item had struck at him from the crumpled pages, and a nameless titan claw had
seemed to reach down through sixteen years. Something fearsome and incredible
had happened at Sefton Asylum fifty miles away, stunning the neighbourhood and
baffling the police. In the small hours of the morning a body of silent men had
entered the grounds, and their leader had aroused the attendants. He was a
menacing military figure who talked without moving his lips and whose voice
seemed almost ventriloquially connected with an immense black case he carried.
His expressionless face was handsome to the point of radiant beauty, but had
shocked the superintendent when the hall light fell on it -- for it was a wax
face with eyes of painted glass. Some nameless accident had befallen this man. A
larger man guided his steps; a repellent hulk whose bluish face seemed half
eaten away by some unknown malady. The speaker had asked for the custody of the
cannibal monster committed from Arkham sixteen years before; and upon being
refused, gave a signal which precipitated a shocking riot. The fiends had
beaten, trampled, and bitten every attendant who did not flee; killing four and
finally succeeding in the liberation of the monster. Those victims who could
recall the event without hysteria swore that the creatures had acted less like
men than like unthinkable automata guided by the wax-faced leader. By the time
help could be summoned, every trace of the men and of their mad charge had
vanished.
From the hour of reading this item until midmght, West sat almost paralysed. At
midnight the doorbell rang, startling him fearfully. All the servants were
asleep in the attic, so I answered the bell. As I have told the police, there
was no wagon in the street, but only a group of strange-looking figures bearing
a large square box which they deposited in the hallway after one of them had
grunted in a highly unnatural voice, "Express -- prepaid." They filed out of the
house with a jerky tread, and as I watched them go I had an odd idea that they
were turning toward the ancient cemetery on which the back of the house abutted.
When I slammed the door after them West came downstairs and looked at the box.
It was about two feet square, and bore West’s correct name and present address.
It also bore the inscription, "From Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, St. Eloi,
Flanders." Six years before, in Flanders, a shelled hospital had fallen upon the
headless reanimated trunk of Dr. Clapham-Lee, and upon the detached head which
-- perhaps -- had uttered articulate sounds.
West was not even excited now. His condition was more ghastly. Quickly he said,
"It’s the finish -- but let’s incinerate -- this." We carried the thing down to
the laboratory -- listening. I do not remember many particulars -- you can
imagine my state of mind -- but it is a vicious lie to say it was Herbert West’s
body which I put into the incinerator. We both inserted the whole unopened
wooden box, closed the door, and started the electricity. Nor did any sound come
from the box, after all.
It was West who first noticed the falling plaster on that part of the wall where
the ancient tomb masonry had been covered up. I was going to run, but he stopped
me. Then I saw a small black aperture, felt a ghoulish wind of ice, and smelled
the charnel bowels of a putrescent earth. There was no sound, but just then the
electric lights went out and I saw outlined against some phosphorescence of the
nether world a horde of silent toiling things which only insanity -- or worse --
could create. Their outlines were human, semi-human, fractionally human, and not
human at all -- the horde was grotesquely heterogeneous. They were removing the
stones quietly, one by one, from the centuried wall. And then, as the breach
became large enough, they came out into the laboratory in single file; led by a
talking thing with a beautiful head made of wax. A sort of mad-eyed monstrosity
behind the leader seized on Herbert West. West did not resist or utter a sound.
Then they all sprang at him and tore him to pieces before my eyes, bearing the
fragments away into that subterranean vault of fabulous abominations. West’s
head was carried off by the wax-headed leader, who wore a Canadian officer’s
uniform. As it disappeared I saw that the blue eyes behind the spectacles were
hideously blazing with their first touch of frantic, visible emotion.
Servants found me unconscious in the morning. West was gone. The incinerator
contained only unidentifiable ashes. Detectives have questioned me, but what can
I say? The Sef ton tragedy they will not connect with West; not that, nor the
men with the box, whose existence they deny. I told them of the vault, and they
pointed to the unbroken plaster wall and laughed. So I told them no more. They
imply that I am either a madman or a murderer -- probably I am mad. But I might
not be mad if those accursed tomb-legions had not been so silent.
                                      Hypnos
                                  By H.P. Lovecraft

Written Mar 1922
Published May 1923 in The National Amateur, Vol. 45, No. 5, pages 1-3.

Apropos of sleep, that sinister adventure of all our nights, we may say that men
go to bed daily with an audacity that would be incomprehensible if we did not
know that it is the result of ignorance of the danger.
-Baudelaire
May the merciful gods, if indeed there be such, guard those hours when no power
of the will, or drug that the cunning of man devises, can keep me from the chasm
of sleep. Death is merciful, for there is no return therefrom, but with him who
has come back out of the nethermost chambers of night, haggard and knowing,
peace rests nevermore. Fool that I was to plunge with such unsanctioned phrensy
into mysteries no man was meant to penetrate; fool or god that he was-my only
friend, who led me and went before me, and who in the end passed into terrors
which may yet be mine!
We met, I recall, in a railway station, where he was the center of a crowd of
the vulgarly curious. He was unconscious, having fallen in a kind of convulsion
which imparted to his slight black-clad body a strange rigidity. I think he was
then approaching forty years of age, for there were deep lines in the face, wan
and hollow-cheeked, but oval and actually beautiful; and touches of gray in the
thick, waving hair and small full beard which had once been of the deepest raven
black. His brow was white as the marble of Pentelicus, and of a height and
breadth almost god-like.
I said to myself, with all the ardor of a sculptor, that this man was a faun's
statue out of antique Hellas, dug from a temple's ruins and brought somehow to
life in our stifling age only to feel the chill and pressure of devastating
years. And when he opened his immense, sunken, and wildly luminous black eyes I
knew he would be thence-forth my only friend-the only friend of one who had
never possessed a friend before-for I saw that such eyes must have looked fully
upon the grandeur and the terror of realms beyond normal consciousness and
reality; realms which I had cherished in fancy, but vainly sought. So as I drove
the crowd away I told him he must come home with me and be my teacher and leader
in unfathomed mysteries, and he assented without speaking a word. Afterward I
found that his voice was music-the music of deep viols and of crystalline
spheres. We talked often in the night, and in the day, when I chiseled busts of
him and carved miniature heads in ivory to immortalize his different
expressions.
Of our studies it is impossible to speak, since they held so slight a connection
with anything of the world as living men conceive it. They were of that vaster
and more appalling universe of dim entity and consciousness which lies deeper
than matter, time, and space, and whose existence we suspect only in certain
forms of sleep- those rare dreams beyond dreams which come never to common men,
and but once or twice in the lifetime of imaginative men. The cosmos of our
waking knowledge, born from such an universe as a bubble is born from the pipe
of a jester, touches it only as such a bubble may touch its sardonic source when
sucked back by the jester's whim. Men of learning suspect it little and ignore
it mostly. Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed. One man
with Oriental eyes has said that all time and space are relative, and men have
laughed. But even that man with Oriental eyes has done no more than suspect. I
had wished and tried to do more than suspect, and my friend had tried and partly
succeeded. Then we both tried together, and with exotic drugs courted terrible
and forbidden dreams in the tower studio chamber of the old manor-house in hoary
Kent.
Among the agonies of these after days is that chief of torments-
inarticulateness. What I learned and saw in those hours of impious exploration
can never be told-for want of symbols or suggestions in any language. I say this
because from first to last our discoveries partook only of the nature of
sensations; sensations correlated with no impression which the nervous system of
normal humanity is capable of receiving. They were sensations, yet within them
lay unbelievable elements of time and space-things which at bottom possess no
distinct and definite existence. Human utterance can best convey the general
character of our experiences by calling them plungings or soarings; for in every
period of revelation some part of our minds broke boldly away from all that is
real and present, rushing aerially along shocking, unlighted, and fear-haunted
abysses, and occasionally tearing through certain well-marked and typical
obstacles describable only as viscous, uncouth clouds of vapors.
In these black and bodiless flights we were sometimes alone and sometimes
together. When we were together, my friend was always far ahead; I could
comprehend his presence despite the absence of form by a species of pictorial
memory whereby his face appeared to me, golden from a strange light and
frightful with its weird beauty, its anomalously youthful cheeks, its burning
eyes, its Olympian brow, and its shadowing hair and growth of beard.
Of the progress of time we kept no record, for time had become to us the merest
illusion. I know only that there must have been something very singular
involved, since we came at length to marvel why we did not grow old. Our
discourse was unholy, and always hideously ambitious-no god or daemon could have
aspired to discoveries and conquest like those which we planned in whispers. I
shiver as I speak of them, and dare not be explicit; though I will say that my
friend once wrote on paper a wish which he dared not utter with his tongue, and
which made me burn the paper and look affrightedly out of the window at the
spangled night sky. I will hint-only hint- that he had designs which involved
the rulership of the visible universe and more; designs whereby the earth and
the stars would move at his command, and the destinies of all living things be
his. I affirm-I swear-that I had no share in these extreme aspirations. Anything
my friend may have said or written to the contrary must be erroneous, for I am
no man of strength to risk the unmentionable spheres by which alone one might
achieve success.
There was a night when winds from unknown spaces whirled us irresistibly into
limitless vacua beyond all thought and entity. Perceptions of the most
maddeningly untransmissible sort thronged upon us; perceptions of infinity which
at the time convulsed us with joy, yet which are now partly lost to my memory
and partly incapable of presentation to others. Viscous obstacles were clawed
through in rapid succession, and at length I felt that we had been borne to
realms of greater remoteness than any we had previously known.
My friend was vastly in advance as we plunged into this awesome ocean of virgin
aether, and I could see the sinister exultation on his floating, luminous,
too-youthful memory-face. Suddenly that face became dim and quickly disappeared,
and in a brief space I found myself projected against an obstacle which I could
not penetrate. It was like the others, yet incalculably denser; a sticky clammy
mass, if such terms can be applied to analogous qualities in a non-material
sphere.
I had, I felt, been halted by a barrier which my friend and leader had
successfully passed. Struggling anew, I came to the end of the drug-dream and
opened my physical eyes to the tower studio in whose opposite corner reclined
the pallid and still unconscious form of my fellow dreamer, weirdly haggard and
wildly beautiful as the moon shed gold-green light on his marble features.
Then, after a short interval, the form in the corner stirred; and may pitying
heaven keep from my sight and sound another thing like that which took place
before me. I cannot tell you how he shrieked, or what vistas of unvisitable
hells gleamed for a second in black eyes crazed with fright. I can only say that
I fainted, and did not stir till he himself recovered and shook me in his
phrensy for someone to keep away the horror and desolation.
That was the end of our voluntary searchings in the caverns of dream. Awed,
shaken, and portentous, my friend who had been beyond the barrier warned me that
we must never venture within those realms again. What he had seen, he dared not
tell me; but he said from his wisdom that we must sleep as little as possible,
even if drugs were necessary to keep us awake. That he was right, I soon learned
from the unutterable fear which engulfed me whenever consciousness lapsed.
After each short and inevitable sleep I seemed older, whilst my friend aged with
a rapidity almost shocking. It is hideous to see wrinkles form and hair whiten
almost before one's eyes. Our mode of life was now totally altered. Heretofore a
recluse so far as I know-his true name and origin never having passed his
lips-my friend now became frantic in his fear of solitude. At night he would not
be alone, nor would the company of a few persons calm him. His sole relief was
obtained in revelry of the most general and boisterous sort; so that few
assemblies of the young and gay were unknown to us.
Our appearance and age seemed to excite in most cases a ridicule which I keenly
resented, but which my friend considered a lesser evil than solitude. Especially
was he afraid to be out of doors alone when the stars were shining, and if
forced to this condition he would often glance furtively at the sky as if hunted
by some monstrous thing therein. He did not always glance at the same place in
the sky-it seemed to be a different place at different times. On spring evenings
it would be low in the northeast. In the summer it would be nearly overhead. In
the autumn it would be in the northwest. In winter it would be in the east, but
mostly if in the small hours of morning.
Midwinter evenings seemed least dreadful to him. Only after two years did I
connect this fear with anything in particular; but then I began to see that he
must be looking at a special spot on the celestial vault whose position at
different times corresponded to the direction of his glance-a spot roughly
marked by the constellation Corona Borealis.
We now had a studio in London, never separating, but never discussing the days
when we had sought to plumb the mysteries of the unreal world. We were aged and
weak from our drugs, dissipations, and nervous overstrain, and the thinning hair
and beard of my friend had become snow-white. Our freedom from long sleep was
surprising, for seldom did we succumb more than an hour or two at a time to the
shadow which had now grown so frightful a menace.
Then came one January of fog and rain, when money ran low and drugs were hard to
buy. My statues and ivory heads were all sold, and I had no means to purchase
new materials, or energy to fashion them even had I possessed them. We suffered
terribly, and on a certain night my friend sank into a deep-breathing sleep from
which I could not awaken him. I can recall the scene now-the desolate,
pitch-black garret studio under the eaves with the rain beating down; the
ticking of our lone clock; the fancied ticking of our watches as they rested on
the dressing-table; the creaking of some swaying shutter in a remote part of the
house; certain distant city noises muffled by fog and space; and, worst of all,
the deep, steady, sinister breathing of my friend on the couch-a rhythmical
breathing which seemed to measure moments of supernal fear and agony for his
spirit as it wandered in spheres forbidden, unimagined, and hideously remote.
The tension of my vigil became oppressive, and a wild train of trivial
impressions and associations thronged through my almost unhinged mind. I heard a
clock strike somewhere-not ours, for that was not a striking clock-and my morbid
fancy found in this a new starting-point for idle wanderings.
Clocks-time-space-infinity- and then my fancy reverted to the locale as I
reflected that even now, beyond the roof and the fog and the rain and the
atmosphere, Corona Borealis was rising in the northeast. Corona Borealis, which
my friend had appeared to dread, and whose scintillant semicircle of stars must
even now be glowing unseen through the measureless abysses of aether. All at
once my feverishly sensitive ears seemed to detect a new and wholly distinct
component in the soft medley of drug-magnified sounds-a low and damnably
insistent whine from very far away; droning, clamoring, mocking, calling, from
the northeast.
But it was not that distant whine which robbed me of my faculties and set upon
my soul such a seal of fright as may never in life be removed; not that which
drew the shrieks and excited the convulsions which caused lodgers and police to
break down the door. It was not what I heard, but what I saw; for in that dark,
locked, shuttered, and curtained room there appeared from the black northeast
corner a shaft of horrible red-gold light-a shaft which bore with it no glow to
disperse the darkness, but which streamed only upon the recumbent head of the
troubled sleeper, bringing out in hideous duplication the luminous and strangely
youthful memory-face as I had known it in dreams of abysmal space and unshackled
time, when my friend had pushed behind the barrier to those secret, innermost
and forbidden caverns of nightmare.
And as I looked, I beheld the head rise, the black, liquid, and deep-sunken eyes
open in terror, and the thin, shadowed lips part as if for a scream too
frightful to be uttered. There dwelt in that ghastly and flexible face, as it
shone bodiless, luminous, and rejuvenated in the blackness, more of stark,
teeming, brain-shattering fear than all the rest of heaven and earth has ever
revealed to me.
No word was spoken amidst the distant sound that grew nearer and nearer, but as
I followed the memory-face's mad stare along that cursed shaft of light to its
source, the source whence also the whining came, I, too, saw for an instant what
it saw, and fell with ringing ears in that fit of shrieking epilepsy which
brought the lodgers and the police. Never could I tell, try as I might, what it
actually was that I saw; nor could the still face tell, for although it must
have seen more than I did, it will never speak again. But always I shall guard
against the mocking and insatiate Hypnos, lord of sleep, against the night sky,
and against the mad ambitions of knowledge and philosophy.
Just what happened is unknown, for not only was my own mind unseated by the
strange and hideous thing, but others were tainted with a forgetfulness which
can mean nothing if not madness. They have said, I know not for what reason,
that I never had a friend; but that art, philosophy, and insanity had filled all
my tragic life. The lodgers and police on that night soothed me, and the doctor
administered something to quiet me, nor did anyone see what a nightmare event
had taken place. My stricken friend moved them to no pity, but what they found
on the couch in the studio made them give me a praise which sickened me, and now
a fame which I spurn in despair as I sit for hours, bald, gray-bearded,
shriveled, palsied, drug-crazed, and broken, adoring and praying to the object
they found.
For they deny that I sold the last of my statuary, and point with ecstasy at the
thing which the shining shaft of light left cold, petrified, and unvocal. It is
all that remains of my friend; the friend who led me on to madness and wreckage;
a godlike head of such marble as only old Hellas could yield, young with the
youth that is outside time, and with beauteous bearded face, curved, smiling
lips, Olympian brow, and dense locks waving and poppy-crowned. They say that
that haunting memory-face is modeled from my own, as it was at twenty-five; but
upon the marble base is carven a single name in the letters of Attica-HYPNOS.
                                   Nyarlathotep
                                 By H.P. Lovecraft

Written early Dec 1920
Published November 1920 in The United Amateur, Vol. 20, No. 2, p. 19-21.


Nyarlathotep... the crawling chaos... I am the last... I will tell the audient
void...
I do not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago. The general
tension was horrible. To a season of political and social upheaval was added a
strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger
widespread and all-embracing, such a danger as may be imagined only in the most
terrible phantasms of the night. I recall that the people went about with pale
and worried faces, and whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared
consciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense of
monstrous guilt was upon the land, and out of the abysses between the stars
swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places. There was a
demoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons—the autumn heat lingered
fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed
from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were
unknown.
And it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt. Who he was, none could
tell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh. The fellahin
knelt when they saw him, yet could not say why. He said he had risen up out of
the blackness of twenty-seven centuries, and that he had heard messages from
places not on this planet. Into the lands of civilisation came Nyarlathotep,
swarthy, slender, and sinister, always buying strange instruments of glass and
metal and combining them into instruments yet stranger. He spoke much of the
sciences—of electricity and psychology—and gave exhibitions of power which sent
his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame to exceeding
magnitude. Men advised one another to see Nyarlathotep, and shuddered. And where
Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished, for the small hours were rent with the screams
of nightmare. Never before had the screams of nightmare been such a public
problem; now the wise men almost wished they could forbid sleep in the small
hours, that the shrieks of cities might less horribly disturb the pale, pitying
moon as it glimmered on green waters gliding under bridges, and old steeples
crumbling against a sickly sky.
I remember when Nyarlathotep came to my city—the great, the old, the terrible
city of unnumbered crimes. My friend had told me of him, and of the impelling
fascination and allurement of his revelations, and I burned with eagerness to
explore his uttermost mysteries. My friend said they were horrible and
impressive beyond my most fevered imaginings; and what was thrown on a screen in
the darkened room prophesied things none but Nyarlathotep dared prophesy, and in
the sputter of his sparks there was taken from men that which had never been
taken before yet which shewed only in the eyes. And I heard it hinted abroad
that those who knew Nyarlathotep looked on sights which others saw not.
It was in the hot autumn that I went through the night with the restless crowds
to see Nyarlathotep; through the stifling night and up the endless stairs into
the choking room. And shadowed on a screen, I saw hooded forms amidst ruins, and
yellow evil faces peering from behind fallen monuments. And I saw the world
battling against blackness; against the waves of destruction from ultimate
space; whirling, churning, struggling around the dimming, cooling sun. Then the
sparks played amazingly around the heads of the spectators, and hair stood up on
end whilst shadows more grotesque than I can tell came out and squatted on the
heads. And when I, who was colder and more scientific than the rest, mumbled a
trembling protest about “imposture” and “static electricity,” Nyarlathotep drove
us all out, down the dizzy stairs into the damp, hot, deserted midnight streets.
I screamed aloud that I was not afraid; that I never could be afraid; and others
screamed with me for solace. We swore to one another that the city was exactly
the same, and still alive; and when the electric lights began to fade we cursed
the company over and over again, and laughed at the queer faces we made.
I believe we felt something coming down from the greenish moon, for when we
began to depend on its light we drifted into curious involuntary marching
formations and seemed to know our destinations though we dared not think of
them. Once we looked at the pavement and found the blocks loose and displaced by
grass, with scarce a line of rusted metal to shew where the tramways had run.
And again we saw a tram-car, lone, windowless, dilapidated, and almost on its
side. When we gazed around the horizon, we could not find the third tower by the
river, and noticed that the silhouette of the second tower was ragged at the
top. Then we split up into narrow columns, each of which seemed drawn in a
different direction. One disappeared in a narrow alley to the left, leaving only
the echo of a shocking moan. Another filed down a weed-choked subway entrance,
howling with a laughter that was mad. My own column was sucked toward the open
country, and presently I felt a chill which was not of the hot autumn; for as we
stalked out on the dark moor, we beheld around us the hellish moon-glitter of
evil snows. Trackless, inexplicable snows, swept asunder in one direction only,
where lay a gulf all the blacker for its glittering walls. The column seemed
very thin indeed as it plodded dreamily into the gulf. I lingered behind, for
the black rift in the green-litten snow was frightful, and I thought I had heard
the reverberations of a disquieting wail as my companions vanished; but my power
to linger was slight. As if beckoned by those who had gone before, I
half-floated between the titanic snowdrifts, quivering and afraid, into the
sightless vortex of the unimaginable.
Screamingly sentient, dumbly delirious, only the gods that were can tell. A
sickened, sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled
blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with
sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them
flicker low. Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen
columns of unsanctifled temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and
reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness. And through
this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of
drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable,
unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto
dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods—the
blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.
                                  Pickman's Model
                                  By H. P. Lovecraft

Written 1926
Published October 1927 in Weird Tales, Vol. 10, No. 4, p. 505-14.


You needn't think I'm crazy, Eliot - plenty of others have queerer prejudices
than this. Why don't you laugh at Oliver's grandfather, who won't ride in a
motor? If I don't like that damned subway, it's my own business; and we got here
more quickly anyhow in the taxi. We'd have had to walk up the hill from Park
Street if we'd taken the car.
I know I'm more nervous than I was when you saw me last year, but you don't need
to hold a clinic over it. There's plenty of reason, God knows, and I fancy I'm
lucky to be sane at all. Why the third degree? You didn't use to be so
inquisitive.
Well, if you must hear it, I don't know why you shouldn't. Maybe you ought to,
anyhow, for you kept writing me like a grieved parent when you heard I'd begun
to cut the Art Club and keep away from Pickman. Now that he's disappeared I go
round to the club once in a while, but my nerves aren't what they were.
No, I don't know what's become of Pickman, and I don't like to guess. You might
have surmised I had some inside information when I dropped him - and that's why
I don't want to think where he's gone. Let the police find what they can - it
won't be much, judging from the fact that they don't know yet of the old North
End place he hired under the name of Peters.
I'm not sure that I could find it again myself - not that I'd ever try, even in
broad daylight!
Yes, I do know, or am afraid I know, why he maintained it. I'm coming to that.
And I think you'll understand before I'm through why I don't tell the police.
They would ask me to guide them, but I couldn't go back there even if I knew the
way. There was something there - and now I can't use the subway or (and you may
as well have your laugh at this, too) go down into cellars any more.
I should think you'd have known I didn't drop Pickman for the same silly reasons
that fussy old women like Dr. Reid or Joe Minot or Rosworth did. Morbid art
doesn't shock me, and when a man has the genius Pickman had I feel it an honour
to know him, no matter what direction his work takes. Boston never had a greater
painter than Richard Upton Pickman. I said it at first and I say it still, and I
never swenved an inch, either, when he showed that 'Ghoul Feeding'. That, you
remember, was when Minot cut him.
You know, it takes profound art and profound insight into Nature to turn out
stuff like Pickman's. Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and
call it a nightmare or a Witches' Sabbath or a portrait of the devil, but only a
great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because
only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of
fear - the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent
instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and
lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness. I don't have to tell
you why a Fuseli really brings a shiver while a cheap ghost-story frontispiece
merely makes us laugh. There's something those fellows catch - beyond life -
that they're able to make us catch for a second. Doré had it. Sime has it.
Angarola of Chicago has it. And Pickman had it as no man ever had it before or -
I hope to Heaven - ever will again.
Don't ask me what it is they see. You know, in ordinary art, there's all the
difference in the world between the vital, breathing things drawn from Nature or
models and the artificial truck that commercial small fry reel off in a bare
studio by rule. Well, I should say that the really weird artist has a kind of
vision which makes models, or summons up what amounts to actual scenes from the
spectral world he lives in. Anyhow, he manages to turn out results that differ
from the pretender's mince-pie dreams in just about the same way that the life
painter's results differ from the concoctions of a correspondence-school
cartoonist. If I had ever seen what Pickman saw - but no! Here, let's have a
drink before we get any deeper. Gad, I wouldn't be alive if I'd ever seen what
that man - if he was a man - saw !
You recall that Pickman's forte was faces. I don't believe anybody since Goya
could put so much of sheer hell into a set of features or a twist of expression.
And before Goya you have to go back to the mediaeval chaps who did the gargoyles
and chimaeras on Notre Dame and Mont Saint-Michel. They believed all sorts of
things - and maybe they saw all sorts of things, too, for the Middle Ages had
some curious phases I remember your asking Pickman yourself once, the year
before you went away, wherever in thunder he got such ideas and visions. Wasn't
that a nasty laugh he gave you? It was partly because of that laugh that Reid
dropped him. Reid, you know, had just taken up comparative pathology, and was
full of pompous 'inside stuff' about the biological or evolutionary significance
of this or that mental or physical symptom. He said Pickman repelled him more
and more every day, and almost frightened him towards the last - that the
fellow's features and expression were slowly developing in a way he didn't like;
in a way that wasn't human. He had a lot of talk about diet, and mid Pickman
must be abnormal and eccentric to the last degree. I suppose you told Reid, if
you and he had any correspondence over it, that he'd let Pickman's paintings get
on his nerves or harrow up his imagination. I know I told him that myself -
then.
But keep in mind that I didn't drop Pickman for anything like this. On the
contrary, my admiration for him kept growing; for that 'Ghoul Feeding' was a
tremendous achievement. As you know, the club wouldn't exhibit it, and the
Museum of Fine Arts wouldn't accept it as a gift; and I can add that nobody
would buy it, so Pickman had it right in his house till he went. Now his father
has it in Salem - you know Pickman comes of old Salem stock, and had a witch
ancestor hanged in 1692.
I got into the habit of calling on Pickman quite often, especially after I began
making notes for a monograph on weird art. Probably it was his work which put
the idea into my head, and anyhow, I found him a mine of data and suggestions
when I came to develop it. He showed me all the paintings and drawings he had
about; including some pen-and-ink sketches that would, I verily believe, have
got him kicked out of the club if many of the members had seen them. Before long
I was pretty nearly a devotee, and would listen for hours like a schoolboy to
art theories and philosophic speculations wild enough to qualify him for the
Danvers asylum. My hero-worship, coupled with the fact that people generally
were commencing to have less and less to do with him, made him get very
confidential with me; and one evening he hinted that if I were fairly
close-mouthed and none too squeamish, he might show me something rather unusual
- something a bit stronger than anything he had in the house.
'You know,' he said, 'there are things that won't do for Newbury Street - things
that are out of place here, and that can't be conceived here, anyhow. It's my
business to catch the overtones of the soul, and you won't find those in a
parvenu set of artificial streets on made land. Back Bay isn't Boston - it isn't
anything yet, because it's had no time to pick up memories and attract local
spirits. If there are any ghosts here, they're the tame ghosts of a salt marsh
and a shallow cove; and I want human ghosts - the ghosts of beings highly
organized enough to have looked on hell and known the meaning of what they saw.
'The place for an artist to live is the North End. If any aesthete were sincere,
he'd put up with the slums for the sake of the massed traditions. God, man!
Don't you realize that places like that weren't merely made, but actually grew?
Generation after generation lived and felt and died there, and in days when
people weren't afraid to live and fed and die. Don't you know there was a mill
on Copp's Hill in 1632, and that half the present streets were laid out by 1650?
I can show you houses that have stood two centuries and a half and more; houses
that have witnessed what would make a modern house crumble into powder. What do
moderns know of life and the forces behind it? You call the Salem witchcraft a
delusion, but I'll wager my four-times-great-grandmother could have told you
things. They hanged her on Gallows Hill, with Cotton Mather looking
sanctimoniously on. Mather, damn him, was afraid somebody might succeed in
kicking free of this accursed cage of monotony - I wish someone had laid a spell
on him or sucked his blood in the night!
'I can show you a house he lived in, and I can show you another one he was
afraid to enter in spite of all his fine bold talk. He knew things he didn't
dare put into that stupid Magnalia or that puerile Wonders of the Invisible
World. Look here, do you know the whole North End once had a set of tunnels that
kept certain people in touch with each other's houses, and the burying ground,
and the sea? Let them prosecute and persecute above ground - things went on
every day that they couldn't reach, and voices laughed at night that they
couldn't place!
'Why, man, out of ten surviving houses built before 1700 and not moved since
I'll wager that in eight I can show you something queer in the cellar. There's
hardly a month that you don't read of workmen finding bricked-up arches and
wells leading nowhere in this or that old place as it comes down - you could see
one near Henchman Street from the elevated last year. There were witches and
what their spells summoned; pirates and what they brought in from the sea;
smugglers; privateers - and I tell you, people knew how to live, and how to
enlarge the bounds of life, in the old time! This wasn't the only world a bold
and wise man could know - faugh! And to think of today in contrast, with such
pale-pink brains that even a club of supposed artists gets shudders and
convulsions if a picture goes beyond the feelings of a Beacon Street tea-table!
'The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to question
the past very closely. What do maps and records and guide-books really tell of
the North End? Bah! At a guess I'll guarantee to lead you to thirty or forty
alleys and networks of alleys north of Prince Street that aren't suspected by
ten living beings outside of the foreigners that swarm them. And what do those
Dagoes know of their meaning? No, Thurber, these ancient places are dreaming
gorgeously and over-flowing with wonder and terror and escapes from the
commonplace, and yet there's not a living soul to understand or profit by them.
Or rather, there's only one living soul - for I haven't been digging around in
the past for nothing !
'See here, you're interested in this sort of thing. What if I told you that I've
got another studio up there, where I can catch the night-spirit of antique
horror and paint things that I couldn't even think of in Newbury Street?
Naturally I don't tell those cursed old maids at the club - with Reid, damn him,
whispering even as it is that I'm a sort of monster bound down the toboggan of
reverse evolution. Yes, Thurber, I decided long ago that one must paint terror
as well as beauty from life, so I did some exploring in places where I had
reason to know terror lives.
'I've got a place that I don't believe three living Nordic men besides myself
have ever seen. It isn't so very far from the elevated as distance goes, but
it's centuries away as the soul goes. I took it because of the queer old brick
well in the cellar - one of the sort I told you about. The shack's almost
tumbling down so that nobody else would live there, and I'd hate to tell you how
little I pay for it. The windows are boarded up, but I like that all the better,
since I don't want daylight for what I do. I paint in the cellar, where the
inspiration is thickest, but I've other rooms furnished on the ground floor. A
Sicilian owns it, and I've hired it under the name of Peters.
'Now, if you're game, I'll take you there tonight. I think you'd enjoy the
pictures, for, as I said, I've let myself go a bit there. It's no vast tour - I
sometimes do it on foot, for I don't want to attract attention with a taxi in
such a place. We can take the shuttle at the South Station for Battery Street,
and after that the wall isn't much.'
Well, Eliot, there wasn't much for me to do after that harangue but to keep
myself from running instead of walking for the first vacant cab we could sight.
We changed to the elevated at the South Station, and at about twelve o'clock had
climbed down the steps at Battery Street and struck along the old waterfront
past Constitution Wharf. I didn't keep track of the cross streets, and can't
tell you yet which it was we turned up, but I know it wasn't Greenough Lane.
When we did turn, it was to climb through the deserted length of the oldest and
dirtiest alley I ever saw in my life, with crumbling-looking gables, broken
small-paned windows, and archaic chimneys that stood out half-disintegrated
against the moonlit sky. I don't believe there were three houses in sight that
hadn't been standing in Cotton Mather's time - certainly I glimpsed at least two
with an overhang, and once I thought I saw a peaked roof-line of the almost
forgotten pre-gambrel type, though antiquarians tell us there are none left in
Boston.
From that alley, which had a dim light, we turned to the left into an equally
silent and still narrower alley with no light at all: and in a minute made what
I think was an obtuse-angled bend towards the right in the dark. Not long after
this Pickman produced a flashlight and revealed an antediluvian ten-panelled
door that looked damnably worm-eaten. Unlocking it, he ushered me into a barren
hallway with what was once splendid dark-oak panelling - simple, of course, but
thrillingly suggestive of the times of Andros and Phipps and the Witchcraft.
Then he took me through a door on the left, lighted an oil lamp, and told me to
make myself at home.
Now, Eliot, I'm what the man in the street would call fairly 'hard-boiled,' but
I'll confess that what I saw on the walls of that room gave me a bad turn. They
were his pictures, you know - the ones he couldn't paint or even show in Newbury
Street - and he was right when he said he had 'let himself go.' Here - have
another drink - I need one anyhow!
There's no use in my trying to tell you what they were like, because the awful,
the blasphemous horror, and the unbelievable loathsomeness and moral foetor came
from simple touches quite beyond the power of words to classify. There was none
of the exotic technique you see in Sidney Sime, none of the trans-Saturnian
landscapes and lunar fungi that Clark Ashton Smith uses to freeze the blood. The
backgrounds were mostly old churchyards, deep woods, cliffs by the sea, brick
tunnels, ancient panelled rooms, or simple vaults of masonry. Copp's Hill
Burying Ground, which could not be many blocks away from this very house, was a
favourite scene.
The madness and monstrosity lay in the figures in the foreground - for Pickman's
morbid art was pre-eminently one of daemoniac portraiture. These figures were
seldom completely human, but often approached humanity in varying degree. Most
of the bodies, while roughly bipedal, had a forward slumping, and a vaguely
canine cast. The texture of the majority was a kind of unpleasant rubberiness.
Ugh! I can see them now! Their occupations - well, don't ask me to be too
precise. They were usually feeding - I won't say on what. They were sometimes
shown in groups in cemeteries or underground passages, and often appeared to be
in battle over their prey - or rather, their treasure-trove. And what damnable
expressiveness Pickman sometimes gave the sightless faces of this charnel booty!
Occasionally the things were shown leaping through open windows at night, or
squatting on the chests of sleepers, worrying at their throats. One canvas
showed a ring of them baying about a hanged witch on Gallows Hill, whose dead
face held a close kinship to theirs.
But don't get the idea that it was all this hideous business of theme and
setting which struck me faint. I'm not a three-year-old kid, and I'd seen much
like this before. It was the faces, Eliot, those accursed faces, that leered and
slavered out of the canvas with the very breath of life! By God, man, I verily
believe they were alive! That nauseous wizard had waked the fires of hell in
pigment, and his brush had been a nightmare-spawning wand. Give me that
decanter, Eliot!
There was one thing called 'The Lesson' - Heaven pity me, that I ever saw it!
Listen - can you fancy a squatting circle of nameless dog-like things in a
churchyard teaching a small child how to feed like themselves? The price of a
changeling, I suppose - you know the old myth about how the weird people leave
their spawn in cradles in exchange for the human babes they steal. Pickman was
showing what happens to those stolen babes - how they grow up - and then I began
to see a hideous relationship in the faces of the human and non-human figures.
He was, in all his gradations of morbidity between the frankly non-human and the
degradedly human, establishing a sardonic linkage and evolution. The dog-things
were developed from mortals!
And no sooner had I wondered what he made of their own young as left with
mankind in the form of changelings, than my eye caught a picture embodying that
very thought. It was that of an ancient Puritan interior - a heavily beamed room
with lattice windows, a settle, and clumsy seventeenth-century furniture, with
the family sitting about while the father read from the Scriptures. Every face
but one showed nobility and reverence, but that one reflected the mockery of the
pit. It was that of a young man in years, and no doubt belonged to a supposed
son of that pious father, but in essence it was the kin of the unclean things.
It was their changeling - and in a spirit of supreme irony Pickman had given the
features a very perceptible resemblance to his own.
By this time Pickman had lighted a lamp in an adjoining room and was politely
holding open the door for me; asking me if I would care to see his 'modern
studies.' I hadn't been able to give him much of my opinions - I was too
speechless with fright and loathing - but I think he fully understood and felt
highly complimented. And now I want to assure you again, Eliot, that I'm no
mollycoddle to scream at anything which shows a bit of departure from the usual.
I'm middle-aged and decently sophisticated, and I guess you saw enough of me in
France to know I'm not easily knocked out. Remember, too, that I'd just about
recovered my wind and gotten used to those frightful pictures which turned
colonial New England into a kind of annexe of hell. Well, in spite of all this,
that next room forced a real scream out of me, and I had to clutch at the
doorway to keep from keeling over. The other chamber had shown a pack of ghouls
and witches over-running the world of our forefathers, but this one brought the
horror right into our own daily life!
Gad, how that man could paint! There was a study called 'Subway Accident,' in
which a flock of the vile things were clambering up from some unknown catacomb
through a crack in the floor of the Boylston Street subway and attacking a crowd
of people on the platform. Another showed a dance on Copp's Hill among the tombs
with the background of today. Then there were any number of cellar views, with
monsters creeping in through holes and rifts in the masonry and grinning as they
squatted behind barrels or furnaces and waited for their first victim to descend
the stairs.
One disgusting canvas seemed to depict a vast cross-section of Beacon Hill, with
ant-like armies of the mephitic monsters squeezing themselves through burrows
that honeycombed the ground. Dances in the modern cemeteries were freely
pictured, and another conception somehow shocked me more than all the rest - a
sense in an unknown vault, where scores of the beasts crowded about one who hod
a well-known Boston guidebook and was evidently reading aloud. All were pointing
to a certain passage, and every face seemed so distorted with epileptic and
reverberant laughter that I almost thought I heard the fiendish echoes. The
title of the picture was, 'Holmes, Lowell and Longfellow Lie Buried in Mount
Auburn.'
As I gradually steadied myself and got readjusted to this second room of
deviltry and morbidity, I began to analyse some of the points in my sickening
loathing. In the first place, I said to myself, these things repelled because of
the utter inhumanity and callous crudity they showed in Pickman. The fellow must
be a relentless enemy of all mankind to take such glee in the torture of brain
and flesh and the degradation of the mortal tenement. In the second place, they
terrified because of their very greatness. Their art was the art that convinced
- when we saw the pictures we saw the daemons themselves and were afraid of
them. And the queer part was, that Pickman got none of his power from the use of
selectiveness or bizarrerie. Nothing was blurred, distorted, or
conventionalized; outlines were sharp and lifelike, and details were almost
painfully defined. And the faces!
It was not any mere artist's interpretation that we saw; it was pandemonium
itself, crystal clear in stark objectivity. That was it, by Heaven! The man was
not a fantaisiste or romanticist at all - he did not even try to give us the
churning, prismatic ephemera of dreams, but coldly and sardonically reflected
some stable, mechanistic, and well--established horror - world which he saw
fully, brilliantly, squarely, and unfalteringly. God knows what that world can
have been, or where he ever glimpsed the blasphemous shapes that loped and
trotted and crawled through it; but whatever the baffling source of his images,
one thing was plain. Pickman was in every sense - in conception and in execution
- a thorough, painstaking, and almost scientific realist.
My host was now leading the way down the cellar to his actual studio, and I
braced myself for some hellish efforts among the unfinished canvases. As we
reached the bottom of the damp stairs he fumed his flash-light to a comer of the
large open space at hand, revealing the circular brick curb of what was
evidently a great well in the earthen floor. We walked nearer, and I saw that it
must be five feet across, with walls a good foot thick and some six inches above
the ground level - solid work of the seventeenth century, or I was much
mistaken. That, Pickman said, was the kind of thing he had been talking about -
an aperture of the network of tunnels that used to undermine the hill. I noticed
idly that it did not seem to be bricked up, and that a heavy disc of wood formed
the apparent cover. Thinking of the things this well must have been connected
with if Pickman's wild hints had not been mere rhetoric, I shivered slightly;
then turned to follow him up a step and through a narrow door into a room of
fair size, provided with a wooden floor and furnished as a studio. An acetylene
gas outfit gave the light necessary for work.
The unfinished pictures on easels or propped against the walls were as ghastly
as the finished ones upstairs, and showed the painstaking methods of the artist.
Scenes were blocked out with extreme care, and pencilled guide lines told of the
minute exactitude which Pickman used in getting the right perspective and
proportions. The man was great - I say it even now, knowing as much as I do. A
large camera on a table excited my notice, and Pickman told me that he used it
in taking scenes for backgrounds, so that he might paint them from photographs
in the studio instead of carting his oufit around the town for this or that
view. He thought a photograph quite as good as an actual scene or model for
sustained work, and declared he employed them regularly.
There was something very disturbing about the nauseous sketches and
half-finished monstrosities that leered round from every side of the room, and
when Pickman suddenly unveiled a huge canvas on the side away from the light I
could not for my life keep back a loud scream - the second I had emitted that
night. It echoed and echoed through the dim vaultings of that ancient and
nitrous cellar, and I had to choke back a flood of reaction that threatened to
burst out as hysterical laughter. Merciful Creator! Eliot, but I don't know how
much was real and how much was feverish fancy. It doesn't seem to me that earth
can hold a dream like that!
It was a colossal and nameless blasphemy with glaring red eyes, and it held in
bony claws a thing that had been a man, gnawing at the head as a child nibbles
at a stick of candy. Its position was a kind of crouch, and as one looked one
felt that at any moment it might drop its present prey and seek a juicier
morsel. But damn it all, it wasn't even the fiendish subject that made it such
an immortal fountain - head of all panic - not that, nor the dog face with its
pointed ears, bloodshot eyes, flat nose, and drooling lips. It wasn't the scaly
claws nor the mould-caked body nor the half-hooved feet - none of these, though
any one of them might well have driven an excitable man to madness.
It was the technique, Eliot - the cursed, the impious, the unnatural technique!
As I am a living being, I never elsewhere saw the actual breath of life so fused
into a canvas. The monster was there - it glared and gnawed and gnawed and
glared - and I knew that only a suspen-sion of Nature's laws could ever let a
man paint a thing like that without a model - without some glimpse of the nether
world which no mortal unsold to the Fiend has ever had.
Pinned with a thumb-tack to a vacant part of the canvas was a piece of paper now
badly curled up - probably, I thought, a photograph from which Pickman meant to
paint a background as hideous as the night-mare it was to enhance. I reached out
to uncurl and look at it, when suddenly I saw Pickman start as if shot. He had
been listening with peculiar intensity ever since my shocked scream had waked
unaccus-tomed echoes in the dark cellar, and now he seemed struck with a fright
which, though not comparable to my own, had in it more of the physical than of
the spiritual. He drew a revolver and motioned me to silence, then stepped out
into the main cellar and closed the door behind him.
I think I was paralysed for an instant. Imitating Pickman's listening, I fancied
I heard a faint scurrying sound somewhere, and a series of squeals or beats in a
direction I couldn't determine. I thought of huge rats and shuddered. Then there
came a subdued sort of clatter which somehow set me all in gooseflesh - a
furtive, groping kind of clatter, though I can't attempt to convey what I mean
in words. It was like heavy wood falling on stone or brick - wood on brick -
what did that make me think of?
It came again, and louder. There was a vibration as if the wood had fallen
farther than it had fallen before. After that followed a sharp grating noise, a
shouted gibberish from Pickman, and the deafening dis-charge of all six chambers
of a revolver, fired spectacularly as a lion--tamer might fire in the air for
effect. A muffled squeal or squawk, and a thud. Then more wood and brick
grating, a pause, and the opening of the door - at which I'll confess I started
violently. Pickman reappeared with his smoking weapon, cursing the bloated rats
that infested the ancient well.
'The deuce knows what they eat, Thurber,' he grinned, 'for those archaic tunnels
touched graveyard and witch-den and sea-coast. But whatever it is, they must
have run short, for they were devilish anxious to get out. Your yelling stirred
them up, I fancy. Better be cautious in these old places- our rodent friends are
the one drawback, though I sometimes think they're a positive asset by way of
atmosphere and colour.'
Well, Eliot, that was the end of the night's adventure. Pickman had promised to
show me the place, and Heaven knows he had done it. He led me out of that tangle
of alleys in another direction, it seems, for when we sighted a lamp-post we
were in a half-familiar street with monotonous rows of mingled tenement blocks
and old houses. Charter Street, it turned out to be, but I was too flustered to
notice just where we hit it. We were too late for the elevated, and walked back
downtown through Hanover Street. I remember that wall:. We switched from Tremont
up Beacon, and Pickman left me at the corner of Joy, where I turned off. I never
spoke to him again.
Why did I drop hirn? Don't be impatient. Wait till I ring for coffee. We've had
enough of the other stuff, but I for one need something. No -it wasn't the
paintings I saw in that place; though I'll swear they were enough to get him
ostracised in nine-tenths of the homes and clubs of Boston, and I guess you
won't wonder now why I have to steer clear of subways and cellars. It was -
something I found in my coat the next morning. You know, the curled-up paper
tacked to the frightful canvas in the cellar; the thing I thought was a
photograph of some scene he meant to use as a background for that monster. That
last scare had come while I was reaching to uncurl it, and it seems I had
vacantly crumpled it into my pocket. But here's the coffee - take it black,
Eliot, if you're wise.
Yes, that paper was the reason I dropped Pickman; Richard Upton Pickman, the
greatest artist I have ever known - and the foulest being that ever leaped the
bounds of life into the pits of myth and madness. Eliot - old Reid was right. He
wasn't strictly human. Either he was born in strange shadow, or he'd found a way
to unlock the forbidden gate. It's all the same now, for he's gone - back into
the fabulous darkness he loved to haunt. Here, let's have the chandelier going.
Don't ask me to explain or even conjecture about what I burned. Don't ask me,
either, what lay behind that mole-like scrambling Pickman was so keen to pass
off as rats. There are secrets, you know, which might have come down from old
Salem times, and Cotton Mather tells even stranger things. You know how damned
lifelike Pickman's paintings were - how we all wondered where he got those
faces.
Well - that paper wasn't a photograph of any background, after all. What it
showed was simply the monstrous being he was painting on that awful canvas. It
was the model he was using - and its background was merely the wall of the
cellar studio in minute detail. But by God, Eliot, it was a photograph from
life!
                                 Poetry and the Gods
                       By H.P. Lovecraft and Anna Helen Crofts

Written 1920
Published September 1920 in The United Amateur, Vol. 20, No. 1, p. 1-4.


A damp gloomy evening in April it was, just after the close of the Great War,
when Marcia found herself alone with strange thoughts and wishes, unheard-of
yearnings which floated out of the spacious twentieth-century drawing room, up
the deeps of the air, and eastward to olive groves in distant Arcady which she
had seen only in her dreams. She had entered the room in abstraction, turned off
the glaring chandeliers, and now reclined on a soft divan by a solitary lamp
which shed over the reading table a green glow as soothing as moonlight when it
issued through the foliage about an antique shrine.
Attired simply, in a low-cut black evening dress, she appeared outwardly a
typical product of modern civilization; but tonight she felt the immeasurable
gulf that separated her soul from all her prosaic surroundings. Was it because
of the strange home in which she lived, that abode of coldness where relations
were always strained and the inmates scarcely more than strangers? Was it that,
or was it some greater and less explicable misplacement in time and space,
whereby she had been born too late, too early, or too far away from the haunts
of her spirit ever to harmonize with the unbeautiful things of contemporary
reality? To dispel the mood which was engulfing her more and more deeply each
moment, she took a magazine from the table and searched for some healing bit of
poetry. Poetry had always relieved her troubled mind better than anything else,
though many things in the poetry she had seen detracted from the influence. Over
parts of even the sublimest verses hung a chill vapor of sterile ugliness and
restraint, like dust on a window-pane through which one views a magnificent
sunset.
Listlessly turning the magazine’s pages, as if searching for an elusive
treasure, she suddenly came upon something which dispelled her languor. An
observer could have read her thoughts and told that she had discovered some
image or dream which brought her nearer to her unattained goal than any image or
dream she had seen before. It was only a bit of vers libre, that pitiful
compromise of the poet who overleaps prose yet falls short of the divine melody
of numbers; but it had in it all the unstudied music of a bard who lives and
feels, who gropes ecstatically for unveiled beauty. Devoid of regularity, it yet
had the harmony of winged, spontaneous words, a harmony missing from the formal,
convention-bound verse she had known. As she read on, her surroundings gradually
faded, and soon there lay about her only the mists of dream, the purple,
star-strewn mists beyond time, where only Gods and dreamers walk.
  Moon over Japan,
  White butterfly moon!
  Where the heavy-lidded Buddhas dream
  To the sound of the cuckoo’s call...
 The white wings of moon butterflies
 Flicker down the streets of the city,
 Blushing into silence the useless wicks of sound-lanterns in the hands of
girls
 Moon over the tropics,
 A white-curved bud
 Opening its petals slowly in the warmth of heaven...
 The air is full of odours
 And languorous warm sounds...
 A flute drones its insect music to the night
 Below the curving moon-petal of the heavens.
 Moon over China,
 Weary moon on the river of the sky,
 The stir of light in the willows is like the flashing of a thousand silver
minnows
 Through dark shoals;
 The tiles on graves and rotting temples flash like ripples,
 The sky is flecked with clouds like the scales of a dragon.
Amid the mists of dream the reader cried to the rhythmical stars, of her delight
at the coming of a new age of song, a rebirth of Pan. Half closing her eyes, she
repeated words whose melody lay hidden like crystals at the bottom of a stream
before dawn, hidden but to gleam effulgently at the birth of day.
 Moon over Japan,
 White butterfly moon!
 Moon over the tropics,
 A white curved bud
 Opening its petals slowly in the warmth of heaven.
 The air is full of odours
 And languorous warm sounds...
 Moon over China,
 Weary moon on the river of the sky...
Out of the mists gleamed godlike the torm ot a youth, in winged helmet and
sandals, caduceus-bearing, and of a beauty like to nothing on earth. Before the
face of the sleeper he thrice waved the rod which Apollo had given him in trade
for the nine-corded shell of melody, and upon her brow he placed a wreath of
myrtle and roses. Then, adoring, Hermes spoke:
"0 Nymph more fair than the golden-haired sisters of Cyene or the sky-inhabiting
Atlantides, beloved of Aphrodite and blessed of Pallas, thou hast indeed
discovered the secret of the Gods, which lieth in beauty and song. 0 Prophetess
more lovely than the Sybil of Cumae when Apollo first knew her, thou has truly
spoken of the new age, for even now on Maenalus, Pan sighs and stretches in his
sleep, wishful to wake and behold about him the little rose-crowned fauns and
the antique Satyrs. In thy yearning hast thou divined what no mortal, saving
only a few whom the world rejects, remembereth: that the Gods were never dead,
but only sleeping the sleep and dreaming the dreams of Gods in lotos-filled
Hesperian gardens beyond the golden sunset. And now draweth nigh the time of
their awakening, when coldness and ugliness shall perish, and Zeus sit once more
on Olympus. Already the sea about Paphos trembleth into a foam which only
ancient skies have looked on before, and at night on Helicon the shepherds hear
strange murmurings and half-remembered notes. Woods and fields are tremulous at
twilight with the shimmering of white saltant forms, and immemorial Ocean yields
up curious sights beneath thin moons. The Gods are patient, and have slept long,
but neither man nor giant shall defy the Gods forever. In Tartarus the Titans
writhe and beneath the fiery Aetna groan the children of Uranus and Gaea. The
day now dawns when man must answer for centuries of denial, but in sleeping the
Gods have grown kind and will not hurl him to the gulf made for deniers of Gods.
Instead will their vengeance smite the darkness, fallacy and ugliness which have
turned the mind of man; and under the sway of bearded Saturnus shall mortals,
once more sacrificing unto him, dwell in beauty and delight. This night shalt
thou know the favour of the Gods, and behold on Parnassus those dreams which the
Gods have through ages sent to earth to show that they are not dead. For poets
are the dreams of Gods, and in each and every age someone hath sung unknowingly
the message and the promise from the lotosgardens beyond the sunset.”
Then in his arms Hermes bore the dreaming maiden through the skies. Gentle
breezes from the tower of Aiolas wafted them high above warm, scented seas, till
suddenly they came upon Zeus, holding court upon double-headed Parnassus, his
golden throne flanked by Apollo and the Muses on the right hand, and by
ivy-wreathed Dionysus and pleasure-flushed Bacchae on the left hand. So much of
splendour Marcia had never seen before, either awake or in dreams, but its
radiance did her no injury, as would have the radiance of lofty Olympus; for in
this lesser court the Father of Gods had tempered his glories for the sight of
mortals. Before the laurel-draped mouth of the Corycian cave sat in a row six
noble forms with the aspect of mortals, but the countenances of Gods. These the
dreamer recognized from images of them which she had beheld, and she knew that
they were none else than the divine Maeonides, the avernian Dante, the more than
mortal Shakespeare, the chaos-exploring Milton, the cosmic Goethe and the
musalan Keats. These were those messengers whom the Gods had sent to tell men
that Pan had passed not away, but only slept; for it is in poetry that Gods
speak to men. Then spake the Thunderer:
"0 Daughter—for, being one of my endless line, thou art indeed my
daughter—behold upon ivory thrones of honour the august messengers Gods have
sent down that in the words and writing of men there may be still some traces of
divine beauty. Other bards have men justly crowned with enduring laurels, but
these hath Apollo crowned, and these have I set in places apart, as mortals who
have spoken the language of the Gods. Long have we dreamed in lotosgardens
beyond the West, and spoken only through our dreams; but the time approaches
when our voices shall not be silent. It is a time of awakening and change. Once
more hath Phaeton ridden low, searing the fields and drying the streams. In Gaul
lone nymphs with disordered hair weep beside fountains that are no more, and
pine over rivers turned red with the blood of mortals. Ares and his train have
gone forth with the madness of Gods and have returned Deimos and Phobos glutted
with unnatural delight. Tellus moons with grief, and the faces of men are as the
faces of Erinyes, even as when Astraea fled to the skies, and the waves of our
bidding encompassed all the land saving this high peak alone. Amidst this chaos,
prepared to herald his coming yet to conceal his arrival, even now toileth our
latest born messenger, in whose dreams are all the images which other messengers
have dreamed before him. He it is that we have chosen to blend into one glorious
whole all the beauty that the world hath known before, and to write words
wherein shall echo all the wisdom and the loveliness of the past. He it is who
shall proclaim our return and sing of the days to come when Fauns and Dryads
shall haunt their accustomed groves in beauty. Guided was our choice by those
who now sit before the Corycian grotto on thrones of ivory, and in whose songs
thou shalt hear notes of sublimity by which years hence thou shalt know the
greater messenger when he cometh. Attend their voices as one by one they sing to
thee here. Each note shall thou hear again in the poetry which is to come, the
poetry which shall bring peace and pleasure to thy soul, though search for it
through bleak years thou must. Attend with diligence, for each chord that
vibrates away into hiding shall appear again to thee after thou hast returned to
earth, as Alpheus, sinking his waters into the soul of Hellas, appears as the
crystal arethusa in remote Sicilia."
Then arose Homeros, the ancient among bards, who took his lyre and chanted his
hymn to Aphrodite. No word of Greek did Marcia know, yet did the message not
fall vainly upon her ears, for in the cryptic rhythm was that which spake to all
mortals and Gods, and needed no interpreter.
So too the songs of Dante and Goethe, whose unknown words dave the ether with
melodies easy to ready and adore. But at last remembered accents resounded
before the listener. It was the Swan of Avon, once a God among men, and still a
God among Gods:
 Write, write, that from the bloody course of war,
 My dearest master, your dear son, may hie;
 Bless him at home in peace, whilst I from far,
 His name with zealous fervour sanctify.
Accents still more familiar arose as Milton, blind no more, declaimed immortal
harmony:
 Or let thy lamp at midnight hour
 Be seen in some high lonely tower,
 Where I might oft outwatch the Bear
 With thrice-great Hermes, or unsphere
 The spirit of Plato, to unfold
 What worlds or what vast regions hold
 The immortal mind, that hath forsook
 Her mansion in this fleshy nook.
   *****
 Sometime let gorgeous tragedy
 In sceptered pall come sweeping by,
 Presenting Thebes, or Pelop’s line,
 Or the tale of Troy divine.
 Last of all came the young voice of Keats, closest of all the messengers to
the beauteous faun-folk:
  Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
  Are sweeter, therefore, yet sweep pipes, play on...
   *****
  When old age shall this generation waste,
  Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
  Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st
  "Beauty is truth -- truth beauty" -- that is all
  Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
As the singer ceased, there came a sound in the wind blowing from far Egypt,
where at night Aurora mourns by the Nile for her slain Memnon. To the feet of
the Thunderer flew the rosy-fingered Goddess and, kneeling, cried, "Master, it
is time I unlocked the Gates of the East.” And Phoebus, handing his lyre to
Calliope, his bride among the Muses, prepared to depart for the jewelled and
column-raised Palace of the Sun, where fretted the steeds already harnessed to
the golden car of Day. So Zeus descended from his caryen throne and placed his
hand upon the head of Marcia, saying:
"Daughter, the dawn is nigh, and it is well that thou shouldst return before the
awakening of mortals to thy home. Weep not at the bleakness of thy life, for the
shadow of false faiths will soon be gone and the Gods shall once more walk among
men. Search thou unceasingly for our messenger, for in him wilt thou find peace
and comfort. By his word shall thy steps be guided to happiness, and in his
dreams of beauty shall thy spirit find that which it craveth.” As Zeus ceased,
the young Hermes gently seized the maiden and bore her up toward the fading
stars, up and westward over unseen seas.
   ***
Many years have passed since Marcia dreamt of the Gods and of their Parnassus
conclave. Tonight she sits in the same spacious drawing-room, but she is not
alone. Gone is the old spirit of unrest, for beside her is one whose name is
luminous with celebrity: the young poet of poets at whose feet sits all the
world. He is reading from a manuscript words which none has ever heard before,
but which when heard will bring to men the dreams and the fancies they lost so
many centuries ago, when Pan lay down to doze in Arcady, and the great Gods
withdrew to sleep in lotos-gardens beyond the lands of the Hesperides. In the
subtle cadences and hidden melodies of the bard the spirit of the maiden had
found rest at last, for there echo the divinest notes of Thracian Orpheus, notes
that moved the very rocks and trees by Hebrus’ banks. The singer ceases, and
with eagerness asks a verdict, yet what can Marcia say but that the strain is
"fit for the Gods"?
And as she speaks there comes again a vision of Parnassus and the far-off sound
of a mighty voice saying, “By his word shall thy steps be guided to happiness,
and in his dreams of beauty shall thy spirit find all that it craveth."
                                      Polaris
                                 By H.P. Lovecraft
                                       1918


Into the North Window of my chamber glows the Pole Star with uncanny light. All
through the long hellish hours of blackness it shines there. And in the autumn
of the year, when the winds from the north curse and whine, and the red-leaved
trees of the swamp mutter things to one another in the small hours of the
morning under the horned waning moon, I sit by the casement and watch that star.
Down from the heights reels the glittering Cassiopeia as the hours wear on,
while Charles' Wain lumbers up from behind the vapour-soaked swamp trees that
sway in the night wind. Just before dawn Arcturus winks ruddily from above the
cemetary on the low hillock, and Coma Berenices shimmers weirdly afar off in the
mysterious east; but still the Pole Star leers down from the same place in the
black vault, winking hideously like an insane watching eye which strives to
convey some strange message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a message
to convey. Sometimes, when it is cloudy, I can sleep.
Well do I remember the night of the great Aurora, when over the swamp played the
shocking corruscations of the daemon light. After the beam came clouds, and then
I slept.
And it was under a horned waning moon that I saw the city for the first time.
Still and somnolent did it lie, on a strange plateau in a hollow between strange
peaks. Of ghastly marble were its walls and its towers, its columns, domes, and
pavements. In the marble streets were marble pillars, the upper parts of which
were carven into the images of grave bearded men. The air was warm and stirred
not. And overhead, scarce ten degrees from the zenith, glowed that watching Pole
Star. Long did I gaze on the city, but the day came not. When the red Aldebaran,
which blinked low in the sky but never set, had crawled a quarter of the way
around the horizon, I saw light and motion in the houses and the streets. Forms
strangely robed, but at once noble and familiar, walked abroad and under the
horned waning moon men talked wisdom in a tongue which I understood, though it
was unlike any language which I had ever known. And when the red Aldebaran had
crawled more than half-way around the horizon, there were again darkness and
silence.
When I awaked, I was not as I had been. Upon my memory was graven the vision of
the city, and within my soul had arisen another and vaguer recollection, of
whose nature I was not then certain. Thereafter, on the cloudy nights when I
could not sleep, I saw the city often; sometimes under the hot, yellow rays of a
sun which did not set, but which wheeled low in the horizon. And on the clear
nights the Pole Star leered as never before.
Gradually I came to wonder what might be my place in that city on the strange
plateau betwixt strange peaks. At first content to view the scene as an
all-observant uncorporeal presence, I now desired to define my relation to it,
and to speak my mind amongst the grave men who conversed each day in the public
squares. I said to myself, "This is no dream, for by what means can I prove the
greater reality of that other life in the house of stone and brick south of the
sinister swamp and the cemetery on the low hillock, where the Pole Star peeps
into my north window each night?"
One night as I listened to the discourses in the large square containing many
statues, I felt a change; and perceived that I had at last a bodily form. Nor
was I a stranger in the streets of Olathoe, which lies on the plateau of Sarkia,
betwixt the peaks of Noton and Kadiphonek. It was my friend Alos who spoke, and
his speech was one that pleased my soul, for it was the speech of a true man and
patriot. That night had the news come of Daikos' fall, and of the advance of the
Inutos; squat, hellish yellow fiends who five years ago had appeared out of the
unknown west to ravage the confines of our kingdom, and to besiege many of our
towns. Having taken the fortified places at the foot of the mountains, their way
now lay open to the plateau, unless every citizen could resist with the strength
of ten men. For the squat creatures were mighty in the arts of war, and knew not
the scruples of honour which held back our tall, grey-eyed men of Lomar from
ruthless conquest.
Alos, my friend, was commander of all the forces on the plateau, and in him lay
the last hope of our country. On this occasion he spoke of the perils to be
faced and exhorted the men of Olathoe, bravest of the Lomarians, to sustain the
traditions of their ancestors, who when forced to move southward from Zobna
before the advance of the great ice sheet (even as our descendents must some day
flee from the land of Lomar) valiently and victoriously swept aside the hairly,
long-armed, cannibal Gnophkehs that stood in their way. To me Alos denied the
warriors part, for I was feeble and given to strange faintings when subjected to
stress and hardships. But my eyes were the keenest in the city, despite the long
hours I gave each day to the study of the Pnakotic manuscripts and the wisdom of
the Zobnarian Fathers; so my friend, desiring not to doom me to inaction,
rewarded me with that duty which was second to nothing in importance. To the
watchtower of Thapnen he sent me, there to serve as the eyes of our army. Should
the Inutos attempt to gain the citadel by the narrow pass behind the peak Noton
and thereby surprise the garrison, I was to give the signal of fire which would
warn the waiting soldiers and save the town from immediate disaster.
Alone I mounted the tower, for every man of stout body was needed in the passes
below. My brain was sore dazed with excitement and fatigue, for I had not slept
in many days; yet was my purpose firm, for I loved my native land of Lomar, and
the marble city Olathoe that lies betwixt the peaks Noton and Kadiphonek.
But as I stood in the tower's topmost chamber, I beheld the horned waning moon,
red and sinister, quivering through the vapours that hovered over the distant
valley of Banof. And through an opening in the roof glittered the pale Pole
Star, fluttering as if alive, and leering like a fiend and tempter. Methought
its spirit whispered evil counsel, soothing me to traitorous somnolence with a
damnable rhythmical promise which it repeated over and over:
Slumber, watcher, till the spheres,
Six and twenty thousand years
Have revolv'd, and I return
To the spot where now I burn.
Other stars anon shall rise
To the axis of the skies;
Stars that soothe and stars that bless
With a sweet forgetfulness:
Only when my round is o'er
Shall the past disturb thy door.
Vainly did I struggle with my drowsiness, seeking to connect these strange words
with some lore of the skies which I had learnt from the Pnakotic manuscripts. My
head, heavy and reeling, drooped to my breast, and when next I looked up it was
in a dream, with the Pole Star grinning at me through a window from over the
horrible and swaying trees of a dream swamp. And I am still dreaming.
In my shame and despair I sometimes scream frantically, begging the
dream-creatures around me to waken me ere the Inutos steal up the pass behind
the peak Noton and take the citadel by surprise; but these creatures are
daemons, for they laugh at me and tell me I am not dreaming. They mock me whilst
I sleep, and whilst the squat yellow foe may be creeping silently upon us. I
have failed in my duties and betrayed the marble city of Olathoe; I have proven
false to Alos, my friend and commander. But still these shadows of my dreams
deride me. They say there is no land of Lomar, save in my nocturnal imaginings;
that in these realms where the Pole Star shines high, and red Aldebaran crawls
low around the horizon, there has been naught save ice and snow for thousands of
years of years, and never a man save squat, yellow creatures, blighted by the
cold, called "Esquimaux."
And as I writhe in my guilty agony, frantic to save the city whose peril every
moment grows, and vainly striving to shake off this unnatural dream of a house
of stone and brick south of a sinister swamp and a cemetery on a low hillock,
the Pole Star, evil and monstrous, leers down from the black vault, winking
hideously like an insane watching eye which strives to convey some message, yet
recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey.
                                    Quest of Iranon
                                   By H.P. Lovecraft


   Into the granite city of Teloth wandered the youth, vine-crowned, his
yellow hair glistening with myrrh and his purple robe torn with briers of
the mountain Sidrak that lies across the antique bridge of stone. The men
of Teloth are dark and stern, and dwell in square houses, and with frowns
they asked the stranger whence he had come and what were his name and
fortune. So the youth answered:

   "I am Iranon, and come from Aira, a far city that I recall only
dimly but seek to find again. I am a singer of songs that i learned in
the far city, and my calling is to make beauty with the things remembered
of childhood. My wealth is in little memories and dreams, and in hopes
that I sing in gardens when the moon is tender and the west wind stirs
the lotus-buds."

   When the men of Teloth heard these things they whispered to one
another; for though in the granite city there is no laughter or song, the
stern men sometimes look to the Karthian hills in the spring and think of
the lutes of distant Oonai whereof travellers have told. And thinking
thus, they bade the stranger stay and sing in the square before the Tower
of Mlin, though they liked not the colour of his tattered robe, nor the
myrrh in his hair, nor his chaplet of vine-leaves, nor the youth in his
golden voice. At evening Iranon sang, and while he sang an old man prayed
and a blind man said he saw a nimbus over the singer's head. But most of
the men of Teloth yawned, and some laughed and some went to sleep; for
Iranon told nothing useful, singing only his memories, his dreams, and
his hopes.

   "I remember the twilight, the moon, and soft songs, and the window
where I was rocked to sleep. And through the window was the street where
the golden lights came, and where the shadows danced on houses of marble.
I remember the square of moonlight on the floor, that was not like any
other light, and the visions that danced on the moonbeams when my mother
sang to me. And too, I remember the sun of morning bright above the
many-coloured hills in summer, and the sweetness of flowers borne on the
south wind that made the trees sing.

    "Oh Aira, city of marble and beryl, how many are thy beauties! How i
loved the warm and fragrant groves across the hyline Nithra, and the
falls of the tiny Kra that flowed though the verdant valley! In those
groves and in the vale the children wove wreathes for one another, and at
dusk I dreamed strange dreams under the yath-trees on the mountain as i
saw below me the lights of the city, and the curving Nithra reflecting a
ribbon of stars.

    "And in the city were the palaces of veined and tinted marble, with
golden domes and painted walls, and green gardens with cerulean pools and
crystal fountains. Often I played in the gardens and waded in the pools,
and lay and dreamed among the pale flowers under the trees. And sometimes
at sunset i would climb the long hilly street to the citadel and the open
place, and look down upon Aira, the magic city of marble and beryl,
splendid in a robe of golden flame.

   "Long have I missed thee, Aira, for i was but young when we went
into exile; but my father was thy King and I shall come again to thee,
for it is so decreed of Fate. All through seven lands have I sought thee,
and some day shall I reign over thy groves and gardens, thy streets and
palaces, and sing to men who shall know whereof I sing, and laugh not nor
turn away. For I am Iranon, who was a Prince in Aira."

   That night the men of Teloth lodged the stranger in a stable, and in
the morning an archon came to him and told him to go to the shop of Athok
the cobbler, and be apprenticed to him.

   "But I am Iranon, a singer of songs, " he said, "and have no heart
for the cobbler's trade."

   "All in Teloth must toil," replied the archon, "for that is the
law." Then said Iranon:

    "Wherefore do ye toil; is it not that ye may live and be happy? And
if ye toil only that ye may toil more, when shall happiness find you? Ye
toil to live, but is not life made of beauty and song? And if ye suffer
no singers among you, where shall be the fruits of your toil? Toil
without song is like a weary journey without an end. Were not death more
pleasing?" But the archon was sullen and did not understand, and rebuked
the stranger.

    "Thou art a strange youth, and I like not thy face or thy voice. The
words thou speakest are blasphemy, for the gods of Teloth have said that
toil is good. Our gods have promised us a haven of light beyond death,
where shall be rest without end, and crystal coldness amidst which none
shall vex his mind with thought or his eyes with beauty. Go thou then to
Athok the cobbler or be gone out of the city by sunset. All here must
serve, and song is folly."

    So Iranon went out of the stable and walked over the narrow stone
streets between the gloomy square house of granite, seeking something
green, for all was of stone. On the faces of men were frowns, but by the
stone embankment along the sluggish river Zuro sat a young boy with sad
eyes gazing into the waters to spy green budding branches washed down
from the hills by the freshets. And the boy said to him:

    "Art thou not indeed he of whom the archons tell, who seekest a far
city in a fair land? I am Romnod, and borne of the blood of Teloth, but
am not olf in the ways of the granite city, and yearn daily for the warm
groves and the distant lands of beauty and song. Beyond the Karthian
hills lieth Oonai, the city of lutes and dancing, which men whisper of
and say is both lovely and terrible.Thither would I go were I old enough
to find the way, and thither shouldst thou go and thou wouldst sing and
have men listen to thee. Let us leave the city of Teloth and fare
together among the hills of spring. Thou shalt shew me the ways of travel
and I will attend thy songs at evening when the stars one by one bring
dreams to the minds of dreamers. And peradventure it may be that Oonai
the city of lutes and dancing is even the fair Aira thou seekest, for it
is told that thou hast not known Aira since the old days, and a name
often changeth. Let us go to Oonai, O Iranon of the golden head, where
men shall know our longings and welcome us as brothers, nor even laugh or
frown at what we say." And Iranon answered:

    "Be it so, small one; if any in this stone place yearn for beauty he
must seek the mountains and beyond, and I would not leave thee to pine by
the sluggish Zuro. But think not that delight and understanding dwell
just across the Karthian hills, or in any spot thou canst find in a day's,
or a year's, or a lustrum's journey. Behold, when I was small like thee I
dwelt in the valley of Narthos by the frigid Xari, where none would
listen to my dreams; and I told myself that when older i would go to
Sinara on the southern slope, and sing to smiling dromedary-men in the
marketplace. But when I went to Sinara i found the dromedary-men all
drunken and ribald, and saw that their songs were not as mine, so I
travelled in a barge down the Xari to onyx-walled Jaren. And the soldiers
at Jaren laughed at me and drave me out, so that I wandered to many
cities. I have seen Stethelos that is below the great cataract, and have
gazed on the marsh where Sarnath once stood. I have been to thraa,
Ilarnek, and Kadatheron on the winding river Ai, and have dwelt long in
Olathoe in the land of Lomar. But though i have had listeners sometimes,
they have ever been few. and I know that welcome shall wait me only in
Aira, the city of marble and beryl where my father once ruled as King. So
for Aira shall we seek, though it were well to visit distant and
lute-blessed oonai across the Karthianhills, which may indeed be Aira,
though i think not. Aira's beauty is past imagining, and none can tell of
it without rapture, whilist of Oonai the camel-drivers whisper leeringly."

   At the sunset Iranon and small Romnod went forth from Teloth, and
for long wandered amidst the green hills and cool forests. The way was
rough and obscure, and never did they seem nearer to oonai the city of
lutes and dancing; but in the dusk as the stars came out Iranon would
sing of Aira and its beauties and Romnod would listen, so that they were
both happy after a fashion. They ate plentifully of fruit and red
berries, and marked not the passing of time, but many years must have
slipped away. Small Romnod was now not so small, and spoke deeply instead
of shrilly, though Iranon was always the same, and decked his golden hair
with vines and fragrant resins found in the woods. So it came to pass
that Romnod seemed older than Iranon, though he had been very small when
Iranon had found him watching for green budding branches in Teloth beside
the sluggish stone-banked Zuro.

Then one night when the moon was full the travellers came to a mountain
crest and looked down upon the myriad light of Oonai. Peasants had told
them they were near, and Iranon knew that this was not his native city of
Aira. The lights of Oonai were not like those of Aira; for they were
harsh and glaring, while the lights of Aira shine as softly and magically
as shone the moonlight on the floor by the window where Iranon's mother
once rocked him to sleep with song. But Oonai was a city of lutes and
dancing, so Iranon and Romnod went down the steep slope that they might
find men to whom sings and dreams would bring pleasure. And when they
were come into the town they found rose-wreathed revellers bound from
house to house and leaning from windows and balconies, who listened to
the songs of Iranon and tossed him flowers and applauded when he was
done. Then for a moment did Iranon believe he had found those who thought
and felt even as he, though the town was not a hundredth as fair as Aira.

When dawn came Iranon looked about with dismay, for the domes of Oonai
were not golden in the sun, but grey and dismal. And the men of Oonai
were pale with revelling, and dull with wine, and unlike the radient men
of Aira. But because the people had thrown him blossoms and acclaimed his
sings Iranon stayed on, and with him Romnod, who liked the revelry of the
town and wore in his dark hair roses and myrtle. Often at night Iranon
sang to the revellers, but he was always as before, crowned only in the
vine of the mountains and remembering the marble streets of Aira and the
hyaline Nithra. In the frescoed halls of the Monarch did he sing, upon a
crystal dais raised over a floor that was a mirror, and as he sang, he
brought pictures to his hearers till the floor seemed to reflect old,
beautiful, and half-remembered things instead of the wine-reddened
feasters who pelted him with roses. And the King bade him put away his
tattered purple, and clothed him in satin and cloth-of-gold, with rings
of green jade and bracelets of tinted ivory, and lodged him in a gilded
and tapestried chamber on a bed of sweet carven wood with canopies and
coverlets of flower-embroidered silk. Thus dwelt Iranon in Oonai, the
city of lutes and dancing.
    It is not known how long Iranon tarried in Oonai, but one day the
King brought to the palace some wild whirling dancers from the Liranian
desert, and dusky flute-players from Drinen in the East, and after that
the revellers threw their roses not so much at Iranon as at the dancers
and flute-players. And day by day that Romnod who had been a small boy in
granite Teloth grew coarser and redder with wine, till he dreamed less
and less, amd listened with less delight to the songs of Iranon. But
though Iranon was sad he ceased not to sing, and at evening told again of
his dreams of Aira, the city of marble and beryl. Then one night the
reddened and fattened Romnod snorted heavily amidst the poppied silks of
his banquet-couch and died writhing, whilst Iranon, pale and slender,
sang to himself in a far corner. And when Iranon had wept over the grave
of Romnod and strewn it with green branches, such as Romnod used to love,
he put aside his silks and gauds and went forgotten out of Oonai the city
of lutes and dancing clad only in the ragged purple in which he had come,
and garlanded with fresh vines from the mountains.

   Into the sunset wandered Iranon, seeking still for his native land
and for men who would understand his songs and dreams. In all the cities
of Cydathria and in the lands beyond the Bnazie desert gay-faced children
laughed at his olden songs and tattered robe of purple; but Iranon stayed
ever young, and wore wreathes upon his golden head whilst he sang of
Aira, delight of the past and hope of the future.

   So came he one night to the squallid cot of an antique shepherd,
bent and dirty, who kept flocks on a stony slope above a quicksand marsh.
To this man Iranon spoke, as to so many others:

   "Canst thou tell me where I may find Aira, the city of marble and
beryl, where flows the hyaline nithra and where the falls of the tiny Kra
sing to the verdant valleys and hills forested with yath trees?" and the
shepherd, hearing, looked long and strangely at Iranon, as if recalling
something very far away in time, and noted each line of the stranger's
face, and his golden hair, and his crown of vine-leaves. But he was old,
and shook his head as he replied:

   "O stranger, i have indeed heard the name of Aira, and the other
names thou hast spoken, but they come to me from afar down the waste of
long years.I heard them in my youth from the lips of a playmate, a
beggar's boy given to strange dreams, who would weave long tales about
the moon and the flowers and the west wind. We used to laugh at him, for
we knew him from his birth though he thought himself a King's son. He was
comely, even as thou, but full of folly and strangeness; and he ranaway
when small to find those who would listen gladly to his songs and dreams.
How often hath he sung to me of lands that never were, and things that
never can be! Of Aira did he speak much; of Aira and the river Nithra,
and the falls of the tiny Kra. There would he ever say he once dwelt as a
Prince, though here we knew him from his birth.Nor was there ever a
marble city of Aira, or those who could delight in strange songs, save in
the dreams of mine old playmate Iranon who is gone."

    And in the twilight, as the stars came out one by one and the moon
cast on the marsh a radiance like that which a child sees quivering on
the floor as he is rocked to sleep at evening, there walked into the
lethal quicksands a very old man in tattered purple, crowned wiht
whithered vine-leaves and gazing ahead as if upon the golden domes of a
fair city where dreams are understood. That night something of youth and
beauty died in the elder world.
                          Supernatural Horror In Literature
                                By H. P. Lovecraft

Written 1926-27, Revised 1933
Published in The Recluse in 1927


I. Introduction
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and
strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists
will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the
genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form. Against
it are discharged all the shafts of a materialistic sophistication which clings
to frequently felt emotions and external events, and of a naïvely insipid
idealism which deprecates the æsthetic motive and calls for a didactic
literature to "uplift" the reader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism.
But in spite of all this opposition the weird tale has survived, developed, and
attained remarkable heights of perfection; founded as it is on a profound and
elementary principle whose appeal, if not always universal, must necessarily be
poignant and permanent to minds of the requisite sensitiveness.
The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from
the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from
everyday life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily
routine to respond to tappings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and
events, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will
always take first place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of
course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience. But
the sensitive are always with us, and sometimes a curious streak of fancy
invades an obscure corner of the very hardest head; so that no amount of
rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the
chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood. There is here involved a
psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental
experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the
religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it, and too much a part
of our innermost biological heritage to lose keen potency over a very important,
though not numerically great, minority of our species.
Man's first instincts and emotions formed his response to the environment in
which he found himself. Definite feelings based on pleasure and pain grew up
around the phenomena whose causes and effects he understood, whilst around those
which he did not understand -- and the universe teemed with them in the early
days -- were naturally woven such personifications, marvelous interpretations,
and sensations of awe and fear as would be hit upon by a race having few and
simple ideas and limited experience. The unknown, being likewise the
unpredictable, became for our primitive forefathers a terrible and omnipotent
source of boons and calamities visited upon mankind for cryptic and wholly
extra-terrestrial reasons, and thus clearly belonging to spheres of existence
whereof we know nothing and wherein we have no part. The phenomenon of dreaming
likewise helped to build up the notion of an unreal or spiritual world; and in
general, all the conditions of savage dawn -- life so strongly conduced toward a
feeling of the supernatural, that we need not wonder at the thoroughness with
which man's very hereditary essence has become saturated with religion and
superstition. That saturation must, as a matter of plain scientific fact, be
regarded as virtually permanent so far as the subconscious mind and inner
instincts are concerned; for though the area of the unknown has been steadily
contracting for thousands of years, an infinite reservoir of mystery still
engulfs most of the outer cosmos, whilst a vast residuum of powerful inherited
associations clings round all the objects and processes that were once
mysterious; however well they may now be explained. And more than this, there is
an actual physiological fixation of the old instincts in our nervous tissue,
which would make them obscurely operative even were the conscious mind to be
purged of all sources of wonder.
Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than pleasure, and
because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the unknown have from the
first been captured and formalised by conventional religious rituals, it has
fallen to the lot of the darker and more maleficent side of cosmic mystery to
figure chiefly in our popular supernatural folklore. This tendency, too, is
naturally enhanced by the fact that uncertainty and danger are always closely
allied; thus making any kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil
possibilities. When to this sense of fear and evil the inevitable fascination of
wonder and curiosity is superadded, there is born a composite body of keen
emotion and imaginative provocation whose vitality must of necessity endure as
long as the human race itself. Children will always be afraid of the dark, and
men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the
thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in
the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy
dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.
With this foundation, no one need wonder at the existence of a literature of
cosmic fear. It has always existed, and always will exist; and no better
evidence of its tenacious vigour can be cited than the impulse which now and
then drives writers of totally opposite leanings to try their hands at it in
isolated tales, as if to discharge from their minds certain phantasmal shapes
which would otherwise haunt them. Thus Dickens wrote several eerie narratives;
Browning, the hideous poem Childe Roland; Henry James, The Turn of the Screw;
Dr. Holmes, the subtle novel Elsie Venner; F. Marion Crawford, The Upper Berth
and a number of other examples; Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, social worker,
The Yellow Wall Paper; whilst the humorist, W. W. Jacobs, produced that able
melodramatic bit called The Monkey's Paw.
This type of fear-literature must not be confounded with a type externally
similar but psychologically widely different; the literature of mere physical
fear and the mundanely gruesome. Such writing, to be sure, has its place, as has
the conventional or even whimsical or humorous ghost story where formalism or
the author's knowing wink removes the true sense of the morbidly unnatural; but
these things are not the literature of cosmic fear in its purest sense. The true
weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted
form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and
unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be
a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of
that most terrible conception of the human brain -- a malign and particular
suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard
against the assaults of chaos and the dæmons of unplumbed space.
Naturally we cannot expect all weird tales to conform absolutely to any
theoretical model. Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their
dull spots. Moreover, much of the choicest weird work is unconscious; appearing
in memorable fragments scattered through material whose massed effect may be of
a very different cast. Atmosphere is the all-important thing, for the final
criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot but the creation of a
given sensation. We may say, as a general thing, that a weird story whose intent
is to teach or produce a social effect, or one in which the horrors are finally
explained away by natural means, is not a genuine tale of cosmic fear; but it
remains a fact that such narratives often possess, in isolated sections,
atmospheric touches which fulfill every condition of true supernatural
horror-literature. Therefore we must judge a weird tale not by the author's
intent, or by the mere mechanics of the plot; but by the emotional level which
it attains at its least mundane point. If the proper sensations are excited,
such a "high spot" must be admitted on its own merits as weird literature, no
matter how prosaically it is later dragged down. The one test of the really
weird is simply this -- whether of not there be excited in the reader a profound
sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle
attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the
scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim.
And of course, the more completely and unifiedly a story conveys this atmosphere
the better it is as a work of art in the given medium.
II. The Dawn Of The Horror Tale
As may naturally be expected of a form so closely connected with primal emotion,
the horror-tale is as old as human thought and speech themselves.
Cosmic terror appears as an ingredient of the earliest folklore of all races,
and is crystallised in the most archaic ballads, chronicles, and sacred
writings. It was, indeed, a prominent feature of the elaborate ceremonial magic,
with its rituals for the evocation of dæmons and spectres, which flourished from
prehistoric times, and which reached its highest development in Egypt and the
Semitic nations. Fragments like the Book of Enoch and the Claviculae of Solomon
well illustrate the power of the weird over the ancient Eastern mind, and upon
such things were based enduring systems and traditions whose echoes extend
obscurely even to the present time. Touches of this transcendental fear are seen
in classic literature, and there is evidence of its still greater emphasis in a
ballad literature which paralleled the classic stream but vanished for lack of a
written medium. The Middle Ages, steeped in fanciful darkness, gave it an
enormous impulse toward expression; and East and West alike were busy preserving
and amplifying the dark heritage, both of random folklore and of academically
formulated magic and cabalism, which had descended to them. Witch, werewolf,
vampire, and ghoul brooded ominously on the lips of bard and grandam, and needed
but little encouragement to take the final step across the boundary that divides
the chanted tale or song from the formal literary composition. In the Orient,
the weird tale tended to assume a gorgeous colouring and sprightliness which
almost transmuted it into sheer phantasy. In the West, where the mystical Teuton
had come down from his black boreal forests and the Celt remembered strange
sacrifices in Druidic groves, it assumed a terrible intensity and convincing
seriousness of atmosphere which doubled the force of its half-told, half-hinted
horrors.
Much of the power of Western horror-lore was undoubtedly due to the hidden but
often suspected presence of a hideous cult of nocturnal worshippers whose
strange customs -- descended from pre-Aryan and pre-agricultural times when a
squat race of Mongoloids roved over Europe with their flocks and herds -- were
rooted in the most revolting fertility-rites of immemorial antiquity. Ibis
secret religion, stealthily handed down amongst peasants for thousands of years
despite the outward reign of the Druidic, Graeco-Roman, and Christian faiths in
the regions involved, was marked by wild "Witches' Sabbaths" in lonely woods and
atop distant hills on Walpurgis-Night and Hallowe'en, the traditional
breeding-seasons of the goats and sheep and cattle; and became the source of
vast riches of sorcery-legend, besides provoking extensive witchcraft --
prosecutions of which the Salem affair forms the chief American example. Akin to
it in essence, and perhaps connected with it in fact, was the frightful secret
system of inverted theology or Satan-worship which produced such horrors as the
famous "Black Mass"; whilst operating toward the same end we may note the
activities of those whose aims were somewhat more scientific or philosophical --
the astrologers, cabalists, and alchemists of the Albertus Magnus or Ramond
Lully type, with whom such rude ages invariably abound. The prevalence and depth
of the mediæval horror-spirit in Europe, intensified by the dark despair which
waves of pestilence brought, may be fairly gauged by the grotesque carvings
slyly introduced into much of the finest later Gothic ecclesiastical work of the
time; the dæmoniac gargoyles of Notre Dame and Mont St. Michel being among the
most famous specimens. And throughout the period, it must be remembered, there
existed amongst educated and uneducated alike a most unquestioning faith in
every form of the supernatural; from the gentlest doctrines of Christianity to
the most monstrous morbidities of witchcraft and black magic. It was from no
empty background that the Renaissance magicians and alchemists -- Nostradamus,
Trithemius, Dr. John Dee, Robert Fludd, and the like -- were born.
In this fertile soil were nourished types and characters of sombre myth and
legend which persist in weird literature to this day, more or less disguised or
altered by modern technique. Many of them were taken from the earliest oral
sources, and form part of mankind's permanent heritage. The shade which appears
and demands the burial of its bones, the dæmon lover who comes to bear away his
still living bride, the death-fiend or psychopomp riding the night-wind, the
man-wolf, the sealed chamber, the deathless sorcerer -- all these may be found
in that curious body of mediæval lore which the late Mr. Baring-Gould so
effectively assembled in book form. Wherever the mystic Northern blood was
strongest, the atmosphere of the popular tales became most intense; for in the
Latin races there is a touch of basic rationality which denies to even their
strangest superstitions many of the overtones of glamour so characteristic of
our own forest-born and ice-fostered whisperings.
Just as all fiction first found extensive embodiment in poetry, so is it in
poetry that we first encounter the permanent entry of the weird into standard
literature. Most of the ancient instances, curiously enough, are in prose; as
the werewolf incident in Petronius, the gruesome passages in Apuleius, the brief
but celebrated letter of Pliny the Younger to Sura, and the odd compilation On
Wonderful Events by the Emperor Hadrian's Greek freedman, Phlegon. It is in
Phlegon that we first find that hideous tale of the corpse-bride, Philinnion and
Machates, later related by Proclus and in modem times forming the inspiration of
Goethe's Bride of Corinth and Washington Irving's German Student. But by the
time the old Northern myths take literary form, and in that later time when the
weird appears as a steady element in the literature of the day, we find it
mostly in metrical dress; as indeed we find the greater part of the strictly
imaginative writing of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The Scandinavian Eddas
and Sagas thunder with cosmic horror, and shake with the stark fear of Ymir and
his shapeless spawn; whilst our own Anglo-Saxon Beowulf and the later
Continental Nibelung tales are full of eldritch weirdness. Dante is a pioneer in
the classic capture of macabre atmosphere, and in Spenser's stately stanzas will
be seen more than a few touches of fantastic terror in landscape, incident, and
character. Prose literature gives us Malory's Morte d'Arthur, in which are
presented many ghastly situations taken from early ballad sources -- the theft
of the sword and silk from the corpse in Chapel Perilous by Sir Galahad --
whilst other and cruder specimens were doubtless set forth in the cheap and
sensational "chapbooks" vulgarly hawked about and devoured by the ignorant. In
Elizabethan drama, with its Dr. Faustus, the witches in Macbeth, the ghost in
Hamlet, and the horrible gruesomeness of Webster we may easily discern the
strong hold of the dæmoniac on the public mind; a hold intensified by the very
real fear of living witchcraft, whose terrors, wildest at first on the
Continent, begin to echo loudly in English ears as the witch-hunting crusades of
James the First gain headway. To the lurking mystical prose of the ages is added
a long line of treatises on witchcraft and dæmonology which aid in exciting the
imagination of the reading world.
Through the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century we behold a growing mass
of fugitive legendry and balladry of darksome cast; still, however, held down
beneath the surface of polite and accepted literature. Chapbooks of horror and
weirdness multiplied, and we glimpse the eager interest of the people through
fragments like Defoe's Apparition of Mrs. Veal, a homely tale of a dead woman's
spectral visit to a distant friend, written to advertise covertly a badly
selling theological disquisition on death. The upper orders of society were now
losing faith in the supernatural, and indulging in a period of classic
rationalism. Then, beginning with the translations of Eastern tales in Queen
Anne's reign and taking definite form toward the middle of the century, comes
the revival of romantic feeling -- the era of new joy in nature, and in the
radiance of past times, strange scenes, bold deeds, and incredible marvels. We
feel it first in the poets, whose utterances take on new qualities of wonder,
strangeness, and shuddering. And finally, after the timid appearance of a few
weird scenes in the novels of the day -- such as Smollett's Adventures of
Ferdinand, Count Fathom -- the release instinct precipitates itself in the birth
of a new school of writing; the "Gothic" school of horrible and fantastic prose
fiction, long and short, whose literary posterity is destined to become so
numerous, and in many cases so resplendent in artistic merit. It is, when one
reflects upon it, genuinely remarkable that weird narration as a fixed and
academically recognized literary form should have been so late of final birth.
The impulse and atmosphere are as old as man, but the typical weird tale of
standard literature is a child of the eighteenth century.
III. The Early Gothic Novel
The shadow-haunted landscapes of Ossian, the chaotic visions of William Blake,
the grotesque witch dances in Burns's Tam O'Shanter, the sinister dæmonism of
Coleridge's Christobel and Ancient Mariner, the ghostly charm of James Hogg's
Kilmeny, and the more restrained approaches to cosmic horror in Lamia and many
of Keats's other poems, are typical British illustrations of the advent of the
weird to formal literature. Our Teutonic cousins of the Continent were equally
receptive to the rising flood, and Burger's Wild Huntsman and the even more
famous dæmon-bridegroom ballad of Lenore -- both imitated in English by Scott,
whose respect for the supernatural was always great -- are only a taste of the
eerie wealth which German song had commenced to provide. Thomas Moore adapted
from such sources the legend of the ghoulish statue-bride (later used by Prosper
Merimée in The Venus of Ille, and traceable back to great antiquity) which
echoes so shiveringly in his ballad of The Ring; whilst Goethe's deathless
masterpiece Faust, crossing from mere balladry into the classic, cosmic tragedy
of the ages, may be held as the ultimate height to which this German poetic
impulse arose.
But it remained for a very sprightly and worldly Englishman -- none other than
Horace Walpole himself -- to give the growing impulse definite shape and become
the actual founder of the literary horror-story as a permanent form. Fond of
mediæval romance and mystery as a dilettante's diversion, and with a quaintly
imitated Gothic castle as his abode at Strawberry Hill, Walpole in 1764
published The Castle of Otranto; a tale of the supernatural which, though
thoroughly unconvincing and mediocre in itself, was destined to exert an almost
unparalleled influence on the literature of the weird. First venturing it only
as a "translation" by one "William Marshal, Gent." from the Italian of a
mythical "Onuphrio Muralto," the author later acknowledged his connection with
the book and took pleasure in its wide and instantaneous popularity -- a
popularity which extended to many editions, early dramatization, and wholesale
imitation both in England and in Germany.
The story -- tedious, artificial, and melodramatic -- is further impaired by a
brisk and prosaic style whose urbane sprightliness nowhere permits the creation
of a truly weird atmosphere. It tells of Manfred, an unscrupulous and usurping
prince determined to found a line, who after the mysterious sudden death of his
only son Conrad on the latter's bridal morn, attempts to put away his wife
Hippolita and wed the lady destined for the unfortunate youth -- the lad, by the
way, having been crushed by the preternatural fall of a gigantic helmet in the
castle courtyard. Isabella, the widowed bride, flees from his design; and
encounters in subterranean crypts beneath the castle a noble young preserver,
Theodore, who seems to be a peasant yet strangely resembles the old lord Alfonso
who ruled the domain before Manfred's time. Shortly thereafter supernatural
phenomena assail the castle in diverse ways; fragments of gigantic armour being
discovered here and there, a portrait walking out of its frame, a thunderclap
destroying the edifice, and a colossal armoured spectre of Alfonso rising out of
the rains to ascend through parting clouds to the bosom of St. Nicholas.
Theodore, having wooed Manfred's daughter Matilda and lost her through death --
for she is slain by her father by mistake -- is discovered to be the son of
Alfonso and rightful heir to the estate. He concludes the tale by wedding
Isabella and preparing to live happily ever after, whilst Manfred -- whose
usurpation was the cause of his son's supernatural death and his own
supernatural harassings -- retires to a monastery for penitence; his saddened
wife seeking asylum in a neighbouring convent.
Such is the tale; flat, stilted, and altogther devoid of the true cosmic horror
which makes weird literature. Yet such was the thirst of the age for those
touches of strangeness and spectral antiquity which it reflects, that it was
seriously received by the soundest readers and raised in spite of its intrinsic
ineptness to a pedestal of lofty importance in literary history. What it did
above all else was to create a novel type of scene, puppet-characters, and
incidents; which, handled to better advantage by writers more naturally adapted
to weird creation, stimulated the growth of an imitative Gothic school which in
turn inspired the real weavers of cosmic terror -- the line of actual artists
beginning with Poe. This novel dramatic paraphernalia consisted first of all of
the Gothic castle, with its awesome antiquity, vast distances and ramblings,
deserted or ruined wings, damp corridors, unwholesome hidden catacombs, and
galaxy of ghosts and appalling legends, as a nucleus of suspense and dæmoniac
fright. In addition, it included the tyrannical and malevolent nobleman as
villain; the saintly, long-persecuted, and generally insipid heroine who
undergoes the major terrors and serves as a point of view and focus for the
reader's sympathies; the valorous and immaculate hero, always of high birth but
often in humble disguise; the convention of high-sounding foreign names, mostly
Italian, for the characters; and the infinite array of stage properties which
includes strange lights, damp trap-doors, extinguished lamps, mouldy hidden
manuscripts, creaking hinges, shaking arras, and the like. All this
paraphernalia reappears with amusing sameness, yet sometimes with tremendous
effect, throughout the history of the Gothic novel; and is by no means extinct
even today, though subtler technique now forces it to assume a less naive and
obvious form. An harmonious milieu for a new school had been found, and the
writing world was not slow to grasp the opportunity.
German romance at once responded to the Walpole influence, and soon became a
byword for the weird and ghastly. In England one of the first imitators was the
celebrated Mrs. Barbauld, then Miss Aikin, who in 1773 published an unfinished
fragment called Sir Bertrand, in which the strings of genuine terror were truly
touched with no clumsy hand. A nobleman on a dark and lonely moor, attracted by
a tolling bell and distant light, enters a strange and ancient turreted castle
whose doors open and close and whose bluish will-o'-the-wisps lead up mysterious
staircases toward dead hands and animated black statues. A coffin with a dead
lady, whom Sir Bertrand kisses, is finally reached; and upon the kiss the scene
dissolves to give place to a splendid apartment where the lady, restored to
life, holds a banquet in honor of her rescuer. Walpole admired this tale, though
he accorded less respect to an even more prominent offspring of his Otranto --
The Old English Baron, by Clara Reeve, published in 1777. Truly enough, this
tale lacks the real vibration to the note of outer darkness and mystery which
distinguishes Mrs. Barbauld's fragment; and though less crude than Walpole's
novel, and more artistically economical of horror in its possession of only one
spectral figure, it is nevertheless too definitely insipid for greatness. Here
again we have the virtuous heir to the castle disguised as a peasant and
restored to his heritage through the ghost of his father; and here again we have
a case of wide popularity leading to many editions, dramatization, and ultimate
translation into French. Miss Reeve wrote another weird novel, unfortunately
unpublished and lost.
The Gothic novel was now settled as a literary form, and instances multiply
bewilderingly as the eighteenth century draws toward its close. The Recess,
written in 1785 by Mrs. Sophia Lee, has the historic element, revolving round
the twin daughters of Mary, Queen of Scots; and though devoid of the
supernatural, employs the Walpole scenery and mechanism with great dexterity.
Five years later, and all existing lamps are paled by the rising of a fresh
luminary order -- Mrs. Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), whose famous novels made
terror and suspense a fashion, and who set new and higher standards in the
domain of macabre and fear-inspiring atmosphere despite a provoking custom of
destroying her own phantoms at the last through labored mechanical explanations.
To the familiar Gothic trappings of her predecessors Mrs. Radcliffe added a
genuine sense of the unearthly in scene and incident which closely approached
genius; every touch of setting and action contributing artistically to the
impression of illimitable frightfulness which she wished to convey. A few
sinister details like a track of blood on castle stairs, a groan from a distant
vault, or a weird song in a nocturnal forest can with her conjure up the most
powerful images of imminent horror; surpassing by far the extravagant and
toilsome elaborations of others. Nor are these images in themselves any the less
potent because they are explained away before the end of the novel. Mrs.
Radcliffe's visual imagination was very strong, and appears as much in her
delightful landscape touches -- always in broad, glamorously pictorial outline,
and never in close detail -- as in her weird phantasies. Her prime weaknesses,
aside from the habit of prosaic disillusionment, are a tendency toward erroneous
geography and history and a fatal predilection for bestrewing her novels with
insipid little poems, attributed to one or another of the characters.
Mrs. Radcliffe wrote six novels; The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A
Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1792), The Mysteries of
Udolpho (1794), The Italian (1797), and Gaston de Blondeville, composed in 1802
but first published posthumously in 1826. Of these Udolpho is by far the most
famous, and may be taken as a type of the early Gothic tale at its best. It is
the chronicle of Emily, a young Frenchwoman transplanted to an ancient and
portentous castle in the Apennines through the death of her parents and the
marriage of her aunt to the lord of the castle -- the scheming nobleman,
Montoni. Mysterious sounds, opened doors, frightful legends, and a nameless
horror in a niche behind a black veil all operate in quick succession to unnerve
the heroine and her faithful attendant, Annette; but finally, after the death of
her aunt, she escapes with the aid of a fellow-prisoner whom she has discovered.
On the way home she stops at a chateau filled with fresh horrors -- the
abandoned wing where the departed chatelaine dwelt, and the bed of death with
the black pall -- but is finally restored to security and happiness with her
lover Valancourt, after the clearing-up of a secret which seemed for a time to
involve her birth in mystery. Clearly, this is only familiar material re-worked;
but it is so well re-worked that Udolpho will always be a classic. Mrs.
Radcliffe's characters are puppets, but they are less markedly so than those of
her forerunners. And in atmospheric creation she stands preëminent among those
of her time.
Of Mrs. Radcliffe's countless imitators, the American novelist Charles Brockden
Brown stands the closest in spirit and method. Like her, he injured his
creations by natural explanations; but also like her, he had in uncanny
atmospheric power which gives his horrors a frightful vitality as long as they
remain unexplained. He differed from her in contemptuously discarding the
external Gothic paraphernalia and properties and choosing modern American scenes
for his Mysteries; but this repudiation did not extend to the Gothic spirit and
type of incident. Brown's novels involve some memorably frightful scenes, and
excel even Mrs. Radcliffe's in describing the operations of the perturbed mind.
Edgar Hunily starts with a sleep-walker digging a grave, but is later impaired
by touches of Godwinian didacticism. Ormond involves a member of a sinister
secret brotherhood. That and Arthur Mervyn both describe the plague of yellow
fever, which the author had witnessed in Philadelphia and New York. But Brown's
most famous book is Wieland; or, the Transformation (1798), in which a
Pennsylvania German, engulfed by a wave of religious fanaticism, hears "voices"
and slays his wife and children as a sacrifice. His sister Clara, who tells the
story, narrowly escapes. The scene, laid at the woodland estate of Mittingen on
the Schuylkill's remote reaches, is drawn with extreme vividness; and the
terrors of Clara, beset by spectral tones, gathering fears, and the sound of
strange footsteps in the lonely house, are all shaped with truly artistic force.
In the end a lame ventriloquial explanation is offered, but the atmosphere is
genuine while it lasts. Carwin, the malign ventriloquist, is a typical villain
of the Manfred or Montoni type.
IV. The Apex Of Gothic Romance
Horror in literature attains a new malignity in the work of Matthew Gregory
Lewis (1773-1818), whose novel The Monk (1796) achieved marvelous popularity and
earned him the nickname "Monk" Lewis. This young author, educated in Germany and
saturated with a body of wild Teuton lore unknown to Mrs. Radcliffe, turned to
terror in forms more violent than his gentle predecessor had ever dared to think
of; and produced as a result a masterpiece of active nightmare whose general
Gothic cast is spiced with added stores of ghoulishness. The story is one of a
Spanish monk, Ambrosio, who from a state of over-proud virtue is tempted to the
very nadir of evil by a fiend in the guise of the maiden Matilda; and who is
finally, when awaiting death at the Inquisition's hands, induced to purchase
escape at the price of his soul from the Devil, because he deems both body and
soul already lost. Forthwith the mocking Fiend snatches him to a lonely place,
tells him he has sold his soul in vain since both pardon and a chance for
salvation were approaching at the moment of his hideous bargain, and completes
the sardonic betrayal by rebuking him for his unnatural crimes, and casting his
body down a precipice whilst his soul is borne off for ever to perdition. The
novel contains some appalling descriptions such as the incantation in the vaults
beneath the convent cemetery, the burning of the convent, and the final end of
the wretched abbot. In the sub-plot where the Marquis de las Cisternas meets the
spectre of his erring ancestress, The Bleeding Nun, there are many enormously
potent strokes; notably the visit of the animated corpse to the Marquis's
bedside, and the cabalistic ritual whereby the Wandering Jew helps him to fathom
and banish his dead tormentor. Nevertheless The Monk drags sadly when read as a
whole. It is too long and too diffuse, and much of its potency is marred by
flippancy and by an awkwardly excessive reaction against those canons of decorum
which Lewis at first despised as prudish. One great thing may be said of the
author; that he never ruined his ghostly visions with a natural explanation. He
succeeded in breaking up the Radcliffian tradition and expanding the field of
the Gothic novel. Lewis wrote much more than The Monk. His drama, The Castle
Spectre, was produced in 1798, and he later found time to pen other fictions in
ballad form -- Tales of Terror (1799), The Tales of Wonder (1801), and a
succession of translations from the German. Gothic romances, both English and
German, now appeared in multitudinous and mediocre profusion. Most of them were
merely ridiculous in the light of mature taste, and Miss Austen's famous satire
Northanger Abbey was by no means an unmerited rebuke to a school which had sunk
far toward absurdity. This particular school was petering out, but before its
final subordination there arose its last and greatest figure in the person of
Charles Robert Maturin (1782-1824), an obscure and eccentric Irish clergyman.
Out of an ample body of miscellaneous writing which includes one confused
Radcliffian imitation called The Fatal Revenge; or, the Family of Montorio
(1807), Maturin at length envolved the vivid horror-masterpiece of Melmoth, the
Wanderer (1820), in which the Gothic tale climbed to altitudes of sheer
spiritual fright which it had never known before.
Melmoth is the tale of an Irish Gentleman who, in the seventeenth century,
obtained a preternaturally extended life from the Devil at the price of his
soul. If he can persuade another to take the bargain off his hands, and assume
his existing state, he can be saved; but this he can never manage to effect, no
matter how assiduously he haunts those whom despair has made reckless and
frantic. The framework of the story is very clumsy; involving tedious length,
digressive episodes, narratives within narratives, and labored dovetailing and
coincidence; but at various points in the endless rambling there is felt a pulse
of power undiscoverable in any previous work of this kind -- a kinship to the
essential truth of human nature, an understanding of the profoundest sources of
actual cosmic fear, and a white heat of sympathetic passion on the writer's part
which makes the book a true document of æsthetic self-expression rather than a
mere clever compound of artifice. No unbiased reader can doubt that with Melmoth
an enormous stride in the evolution of the horror-tale is represented. Fear is
taken out of the realm of the conventional and exalted into a hideous cloud over
mankind's very destiny. Maturin's shudders, the work of one capable of
shuddering himself, are of the sort that convince. Mrs. Radcliffe and Lewis are
fair game for the parodist, but it would be difficult to find a false note in
the feverishly intensified action and high atmospheric tension of the Irishman
whose less sophisticated emotions and strain of Celtic mysticism gave him the
finest possible natural equipment for his task. Without a doubt Maturin is a man
of authentic genius, and he was so recognized by Balzac, who grouped Melmoth
with Molière's Don Juan, Gothe's Faust, and Byron's Manfred as the supreme
allegorical figures of modern European literature, and wrote a whimsical piece
called Melmoth Reconciled, in which the Wanderer succeeds in passing his
infernal bargain on to a Parisian bank defaulter, who in turn hands it along a
chain of victims until a reveling gambler dies with it in his possession, and by
his damnation ends the curse. Scott, Rossetti, Thackeray and Baudelaire are the
other titans who gave Maturin their unqualified admiration, and there is much
significance in the fact that Oscar Wilde, after his disgrace and exile, chose
for his last days in Paris the assumed name of "Sebastian Melmoth."
Melmoth contains scenes which even now have not lost their power to evoke dread.
It begins with a deathbed -- an old miser is dying of sheer fright because of
something he has seen, coupled with a manuscript he has read and a family
portrait which hangs in an obscure closet of his centuried home in County
Wicklow. He sends to Trinity College, Dublin, for his nephew John; and the
latter upon arriving notes many uncanny things. The eyes of the portrait in the
closet glow horribly, and twice a figure strangely resembling the portrait
appears momentarily at the door. Dread hangs over that house of the Melmoths,
one of whose ancestors, "J. Melmoth, 1646," the portrait represents. The dying
miser declares that this man -- at a date slightly before 1800 -- is alive.
Finally the miser dies, and the nephew is told in the will to destroy both the
portrait and a manuscript to be found in a certain drawer. Reading the
manuscript, which was written late in the seventeenth century by an Englishman
named Stanton, young John learns of a terrible incident in Spain in 1677, when
the writer met a horrible fellow-countryman and was told of how he had stared to
death a priest who tried to denounce him as one filled with fearsome evil.
Later, after meeting the man again in London, Stanton is cast into a madhouse
and visited by the stranger, whose approach is heralded by spectral music and
whose eyes have a more than mortal glare. Melmoth the Wanderer -- for such is
the malign visitor -- offers the captive freedom if he will take over his
bargain with the Devil; but like all others whom Melmoth has approached, Stanton
is proof against temptation. Melmoth's description of the horrors of a life in a
madhouse, used to tempt Stanton, is one of the most potent passages of the book.
Stanton is at length liberated, and spends the rest of his life tracking down
Melmoth, whose family and ancestral abode he discovers. With the family he
leaves the manuscript, which by young John's time is badly ruinous and
fragmentary. John destroys both portrait and manuscript, but in sleep is visited
by his horrible ancestor, who leaves a black and blue mark on his wrist.
Young John soon afterward receives as a visitor a shipwrecked Spaniard, Alonzo
de Moncada, who has escaped from compulsory monasticism and from the perils of
the Inquisition. He has suffered horribly -- and the descriptions of his
experiences under torment and in the vaults through which he once essays escape
are classic -- but had the strength to resist Melmoth the Wanderer when
approached at his darkest hour in prison. At the house of a Jew who sheltered
him after his escape he discovers a wealth of manuscript relating other exploits
of Melmoth, including his wooing of an Indian island maiden, Immalee, who later
comes into her birthright in Spain and is known as Donna Isidora; and of his
horrible marriage to her by the corpse of a dead anchorite at midnight in the
ruined chapel of a shunned and abhorred monastery. Moncada's narrative to young
John takes up the bulk of Maturin's four-volume book; this disproportion being
considered one of the chief technical faults of the composition.
At last the colloquies of John and Moncada are interrupted by the entrance of
Melmoth the Wanderer himself, his piercing eyes now fading, and decrepitude
swiftly overtaking him. The term of his bargain has approached its end, and he
has come home after a century and a half to meet his fate. Warning all others
from the room, no matter what sounds they may hear in the night, he awaits the
end alone. Young John and Moncada hear frightful ululations, but do not intrude
till silence comes toward morning. They then find the room empty. Clayey
footprints lead out a rear door to a cliff overlooking the sea, and near the
edge of the precipice is a track indicating the forcible dragging of some heavy
body. The Wanderer's scarf is found on a crag some distance below the brink, but
nothing further is ever seen or heard of him.
Such is the story, and none can fail to notice the difference between this
modulated, suggestive, and artistically moulded horror and -- to use the words
of Professor George Saintsbury -- "the artful but rather jejune rationalism of
Mrs. Radcliffe, and the too often puerile extravagance, the bad taste, and the
sometimes slipshod style of Lewis." Maturin's style in itself deserves
particular praise, for its forcible directness and vitality lift it altogether
above the pompous artificialities of which his predecessors are guilty.
Professor Edith Birkhead, in her history of the Gothic novel, justly observes
that "with all his faults Maturin was the greatest as well as the last of the
Goths." Melmoth was widely read and eventually dramatized, but its late date in
the evolution of the Gothic tale deprived it of the tumultuous popularity of
Udolpho and The Monk.
V. The Aftermath Of Gothic Fiction
Meanwhile other hands had not been idle, so that above the dreary plethora of
trash like Marquis von Grosse's Horrid Mysteries (1796), Mrs. Roche's Children
of the Abbey (1798), Mrs. Dacre's Zofloya; or, the Moor (1806), and the poet
Shelley's schoolboy effusions Zastro (1810) and St. Irvine (1811) (both
imitations of Zofloya) there arose many memorable weird works both in English
and German. Classic in merit, and markedly different from its fellows because of
its foundation in the Oriental tale rather than the Walpolesque Gothic novel, is
the celebrated History of the Caliph Vathek by the wealthy dilettante William
Beckford, first written in the French language but published in an English
translation before the appearance of the original. Eastern tales, introduced to
European literature early in the eighteenth century through Galland's French
translation of the inexhaustibly opulent Arabian Nights, had become a reigning
fashion; being used both for allegory and for amusement. The sly humour which
only the Eastern mind knows how to mix with weirdness had captivated a
sophisticated generation, till Bagdad and Damascus names became as freely strewn
through popular literature as dashing Italian and Spanish ones were soon to be.
Beckford, well read in Eastern romance, caught the atmosphere with unusual
receptivity; and in his fantastic volume reflected very potently the haughty
luxury, sly disillusion, bland cruelty, urbane treachery, and shadowy spectral
horror of the Saracen spirit. His seasoning of the ridiculous seldom mars the
force of his sinister theme, and the tale marches onward with a phantasmagoric
pomp in which the laughter is that of skeletons feasting under arabesque domes.
Vathek is a tale of the grandson of the Caliph Haroun, who, tormented by that
ambition for super-terrestrial power, pleasure and learning which animates the
average Gothic villain or Byronic hero (essentially cognate types), is lured by
an evil genius to seek the subterranean throne of the mighty and fabulous
pre-Adamite sultans in the fiery halls of Eblis, the Mahometan Devil. The
descriptions of Vathek's palaces and diversions, of his scheming soweress-mother
Carathis and her witch-tower with the fifty one-eyed negresses, of his
pilgrimage to the haunted ruins of Istakhar (Persepolis) and of the impish bride
Nouronihar whom he treacherously acquired on the way, of Istakhar's primordial
towers and terraces in the burning moonlight of the waste, and of the terrible
Cyclopean halls of Eblis, where, lured by glittering promises, each victim is
compelled to wander in anguish for ever, his right hand upon his blazingly
ignited and eternally burning heart, are triumphs of weird colouring which raise
the book to a permaneat place in English letters. No less notable are the three
Episodes of Vathek, intended for insertion in the tale as narratives of Vathek's
fellow-victims in Eblis' infernal halls, which remained unpublished throughout
the author's lifetime and were discovered as recently as 1909 by the scholar
Lewis Melville whilst collecting material for his Life and Letters of William
Beckford. Beckford, however, lacks the essential mysticism which marks the
acutest form of the weird; so that his tales have a certain knowing Latin
hardness and clearness preclusive of sheer panic fright.
But Beckford remained alone in his devotion to the Orient. Other writers, closer
to the Gothic tradition and to European life in general, were content to follow
more faithfully in the lead of Walpole. Among the countless producers of
terror-literature in these times may be mentioned the Utopian economic theorist
William Godwin, who followed his famous but non-supernatural Caleb Williams
(1794) with the intendedly weird St. Leon (1799), in which the theme of the
elixir of life, as developed by the imaginary secret order of "Rosicrucians," is
handled with ingeniousness if not with atmospheric convincingness. This element
of Rosicrucianism, fostesed by a wave of popular magical interest exemplified in
the vogue of the charlatan Cagliostro and the publication of Francis Barrett's
The Magus (1801), a curious and compendious treatise on occult principles and
ceremonies, of which a reprint was made as lately as 1896, figures in
Bulwer-Lytton and in many late Gothic novels, especially that remote and
enfeebled posterity which straggled far down into the nineteenth century and was
represented by George W.M. Reynold's Faust and the Demon and Wagner the
Wehr-Wolf. Caleb Williams, though non-supernatural, has many authentic touches
of terror. It is the tale of a servant persecuted by a master whom he has found
guilty of murder, and displays an invention and skill which have kept it alive
in a fashion to this day. It was dramatized as The Iron Chest, and in that form
was almost equally celebrated. Godwin, however, was too much the conscious
teacher and prosaic man of thought to create a genuine weird masterpiece.
His daughter, the wife of Shelley, was much more successful; and her inimitable
Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1817) is one of the horror-classics of
all time. Composed in competition with her husband, Lord Byron, and Dr. John
William Polidori in an effort to prove supremacy in horror-making, Mrs.
Shelley's Frankenstein was the only one of the rival narratives to be brought to
an elaborate completion; and criticism has failed to prove that the best parts
are due to Shelley rather than to her. The novel, somewhat tinged but scarcely
marred by moral didacticism, tells of the artificial human being moulded from
charnel fragments by Victor Frankenstein, a young Swiss medical student. Created
by its designer "in the mad pride of intellectuality," the monster possesses
full intelligence but owns a hideously loathsome form. It is rejected by
mankind, becomes embittered, and at length begins the successive murder of all
whom Frankenstein loves best, friends and family. It demands that Frankenstein
create a wife for it; and when the student finally refuses in horror lest the
world be populated with such monsters, it departs with a hideous threat "to be
with him on his wedding night." Upon that night the bride is strangled, and from
that time on Frankenstein hunts down the monster, even into the wastes of the
Arctic. In the end, whilst seeking shelter on the ship of the man who tells the
story, Frankenstein himself is killed by the shocking object of his search and
creation of his presumptuous pride. Some of the scenes in Frankenstein are
unforgettable, as when the newly animated monster enters its creator's room,
parts the curtains of his bed, and gazes at him in the yellow moonlight with
watery eyes -- "if eyes they may be called." Mrs. Shelley wrote other novels,
including the fairly notable Last Man; but never duplicated the success of her
first effort. It has the true touch of cosmic fear, no matter how much the
movement may lag in places. Dr. Polidori developed his competing idea as a long
short story, The Vampyre; in which we behold a suave villain of the true Gothic
or Byronic type, and encounter some excellent passages of stark fright,
including a terrible nocturnal experience in a shunned Grecian wood.
In this same period Sir Walter Scott frequently concerned himself with the
weird, weaving it into many of his novels and poems, and sometimes producing
such independent bits of narration as The Tapestried Chamber or Wandering
Willie's Tale in Redgauntlet, in the latter of which the force of the spectral
and the diabolic is enhanced by a grotesque homeliness of speech and atmosphere.
In 1830 Scott published his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, which still
forms one of our best compendia of European witch-lore. Washington Irving is
another famous figure not unconnected with the weird; for though most of his
ghosts are too whimsical and humorous to form genuinely spectral literature, a
distinct inclination in this direction is to be noted in many of his
productions. The German Student in Tales of a Traveler (1824) is a slyly concise
and effective presentation of the old legend of the dead bride, whilst woven
into the cosmic tissue of The Money Diggers in the same volume is more than one
hint of piratical apparitions in the realms which Captain Kidd once roamed.
Thomas Moore also joined the ranks of the macabre artists in the poem Alciphron,
which he later elaborated into the prose novel of The Epicurean (1827). Though
merely relating the adventures of a young Athenian duped by the artifice of
cunning Egyptian priests, Moore manages to infuse much genuine horror into his
account of subterranean frights and wonders beneath the primordial temples of
Memphis. De Quincey more than once revels in grotesque and arabesque terrors,
though with a desultoriness and learned pomp which deny him the rank of
specialist.
This era likewise saw the rise of William Harrison Ainsworth, whose romantic
novels teem with the eerie and the gruesome. Capt. Marryat, besides writing such
short tales as The Werewolf, made a memorable contribution in The Phantom Ship
(1839), founded on the legend of the Flying Dutchman, whose spectral and
accursed vessel sails for ever near the Cape of Good Hope. Dickens now rises
with occasional weird bits like The Signalman, a tale of ghastly warning
conforming to a very common pattern and touched with a verisimilitude which
allied it as much with the coming psychological school as with the dying Gothic
school. At this time a wave of interest in spiritualistic charlatanry,
mediumism, Hindoo theosophy, and such matters, much like that of the present
day, was flourishing; so that the number of weird tales with a "Psychic" or
pseudo-scientific basis became very considerable. For a number of these the
prolific and popular Edward Bulwer-Lytton was responsible; and despite the large
doses of turgid rhetoric and empty romanticism in his products, his success in
the weaving of a certain kind of bizarre charm cannot be denied.
The House and the Brain, which hints of Rosicrucianism and at a malign and
deathless figure perhaps suggested by Louis XV's mysterious courtier St.
Germain, yet survives as one of the best short haunted-house tales ever written.
The novel Zanoni (1842) contains similar elements more elaborately handled, and
introduces a vast unknown sphere of being pressing on our own world and guarded
by a horrible "Dweller of the Threshold" who haunts those who try to enter and
fail. Here we have a benign brotherhood kept alive from age to age till finally
reduced to a single member, and as a hero an ancient Chaldaean sorcerer
surviving in the pristine bloom of youth to perish on the guillotine of the
French Revolution. Though full of the conventional spirit of romance, marred by
a ponderous network of symbolic and didactic meanings, and left unconvincing
through lack of perfect atmospheric realization of the situations hinging on the
spectral world, Zanoni is really an excellent performance as a romantic novel;
and can be read with genuine interest by the not too sophisticated reader. It is
amusing to note that in describing an attempted initiation into the ancient
brotherhood the author cannot escape using the stock Gothic castle of Walpolian
lineage.
In A Strange Story (1862) Bulwer-Lytton shows a marked improvement in the
creation of weird images and moods. The novel, despite enormous length, a highly
artificial plot bolstered up by opportune coincidences, and an atmosphere of
homiletic pseudo-science designed to please the matter-of-fact and purposeful
Victorian reader, is exceedingly effective as a narrative; evoking instantaneous
and unflagging interest, and furnishing many potent -- if somewhat melodramatic
-- tableaux and climaxes. Again we have the mysterious user of life's elixir in
the person of the soulless magician Margrave, whose dark exploits stand out with
dramatic vividness against the modern background of a quiet English town and of
the Australian bush; and again we have shadowy intimations of a vast spectral
world of the unknown in the very air about us -- this time handled with much
greater power and vitality than in Zanoni. One of the two great incantation
passages, where the hero is driven by a luminous evil spirit to rise at night in
his sleep, take a strange Egyptian wand, and evoke nameless presences in the
haunted and mausoleum-facing pavilion of a famous Renaissance alchemist, truly
stands among the major terror scenes of literature. Just enough is suggested,
and just little enough is told. Unknown words are twice dictated to the
sleep-walker, and as he repeats them the ground trembles, and all the dogs of
the countryside begin to bay at half-seen amorphous shadows that stalk athwart
the moonlight. When a third set of unknown words is prompted, the sleep-walker's
spirit suddenly rebels at uttering them, as if the soul could recognize ultimate
abysmal horrors concealed from the mind; and at last an apparition of an absent
sweetheart and good angel breaks the malign spell. This fragment well
illustrates how far Lord Lytton was capable of progressing beyond his usual pomp
and stock romance toward that crystalline essence of artistic fear which belongs
to the domain of poetry. In describing certain details of incantations, Lytton
was greatly indebted to his amusingly serious occult studies, in the course of
which he came in touch with that odd French scholar and cabalist Alphonse Louis
Constant ("Eliphas Levy"), who claimed to possess the secrets of ancient magic,
and to have evoked the spectre of the old Grecian wizard Apollonius of Tyana,
who lived in Nero's times.
The romantic, semi-Gothic, quasi-moral tradition here represented was carried
far down the nineteenth century by such authors as Joseph Sheridan LeFanu,
Wilkie Collins, the late Sir H. Rider Haggard (whose She is really remarkably
good), Sir A. Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and Robert Louis Stevenson -- the latter
of whom, despite an atrocious tendency toward jaunty mannerisms, created
permanent classics in Markheim, The Body Snatcher, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Indeed, we may say that this school still survives; for to it clearly belong
such of our contemporary horror-tales as specialise in events rather than
atmospheric details, address the intellect rather than a malign tensity or
psychological verisimilitude, and take a definite stand in sympathy with mankind
and its welfare. It has its undeniable strength, and because of its "human
element" commands a wider audience than does the sheer artistic nightmare. If
not quite so potent as the latter, it is because a diluted product can never
achieve the intensity of a concentrated essence.
Quite alone both as a novel and as a piece of terror-literature stands the
famous Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë, with its mad vistas of bleak,
windswept Yorkshire moors and the violent, distorted lives they foster. Though
primarily a tale of life, and of human passions in agony and conflict, its
epically cosmic setting affords room for horror of the most spiritual sort.
Heathcliff, the modified Byronic villain-hero, is a strange dark waif found in
the streets as a small child and speaking only a strange gibberish till adopted
by the family he ultimately ruins. That he is in truth a diabolic spirit rather
than a human being is more than once suggested, and the unreal is further
approached in the experience of the visitor who encounters a plaintive
child-ghost at a bough-brushed upper window. Between Heathcliff and Catherine
Earnshaw is a tie deeper and more terrible than human love. After her death he
twice disturbs her grave, and is haunted by an impalpable presence which can be
nothing less than her spirit. The spirit enters his life more and more, and at
last he becomes confident of some imminent mystical reunion. He says he feels a
strange change approaching, and ceases to take nourishment. At night he either
walks abroad or opens the casement by his bed. When he dies the casement is
still swinging open to the pouring rain, and a queer smile pervades the
stiffened face. They bury him in a grave beside the mound he has haunted for
eighteen years, and small shepherd boys say that he yet walks with his Catherine
in the churchyard and on the moor when it rains. Their faces, too, are sometimes
seen on rainy nights behind that upper casement at Wuthering Heights. Miss
Brontë's eerie terror is no mere Gothic echoe, but a tense expression of man's
shuddering reaction to the unknown. In this respect, Wuthering Heights becomes
the symbol of a literary transition, and marks the growth of a new and sounder
school.
VI. Spectral Literature On The Continent
On the continent literary horror fared well. The celebrated short tales and
novels of Ernst Theodor Wihelm Hoffmann (1776-1822) are a by-word for mellowness
of background and maturity of form, though they incline to levity and
extravagance, and lack the exalted moments of stark, breathless terror which a
less sophisticated writer might have achieved. Generally they convey the
grotesque rather than the terrible. Most artistic of all the continental weird
tales is the German classic Undine (1814), by Friedrich Heinrich Karl, Baron de
la Motte Fouqué. In this story of a water-spirit who married a mortal and gained
a human soul there is a delicate fineness of craftsmanship which makes it
notable in any department of literature, and an easy naturalness which places it
close to the genuine folk-myth. It is, in fact, derived from a tale told by the
Renaissance physician and alchemist Paracelsus in his Treatise on Elemental
Sprites.
Undine, daughter of a powerful water-prince, was exchanged by her father as a
small child for a fisherman's daughter, in order that she might acquire a soul
by wedding a human being. Meeting the noble youth Huldbrand at the cottage of
her fosterfather by the sea at the edge of a haunted wood, she soon marries him,
and accompanies him to his ancestral castle of Ringstetten. Huldbrand, however,
eventually wearies of his wife's supernatural affiliations, and especially of
the appearances of her uncle, the malicious woodland waterfall-spirit Kuhleborn;
a weariness increased by his growing affection for Bertalda, who turns out to be
the fisherman's child for whom Undine was changed. At length, on a voyage down
the Danube, he is provoked by some innocent act of his devoted wife to utter the
angry words which consign her back to her supernatural element; from which she
can, by the laws of her species, return only once -- to kill him, whether she
will or no, if ever he prove unfaithful to her memory. Later, when Huldbrand is
about to be married to Bertalda, Undine returns for her sad duty, and bears his
life away in tears. When he is buried among his fathers in the village
churchyard a veiled, snow-white female figure appears among the mourners, but
after the prayer is seen no more. In her place is seen a little silver spring,
which murmurs its way almost completely around the new grave, and empties into a
neighboring lake. The villagers show it to this day, and say that Undine and her
Huldbrand are thus united in death. Many passages and atmospheric touches in
this tale reveal Fouqué as an accomplished artist in the field of the macabre;
especially the descriptions of the haunted wood with its gigantic snow-white man
and various unnamed terrors, which occur early in the narrative.
Not so well known as Undine, but remarkable for its convincing realism and
freedom from Gothic stock devices, is the Amber Witch of Wilhelm Meinhold,
another product of the German fantastic genius of the earlier nineteenth
century. This tale, which is laid in the time of the Thirty Years' War, purports
to be a clergyman's manuscript found in an old church at Coserow, and centres
round the writer's daughter, Maria Schweidler, who is wrongly accused of
witchcraft. She has found a deposit of amber which she keeps secret for various
reasons, and the unexplained wealth obtained from this lends colour to the
accusation; an accusation instigated by the malice of the wolf-hunting nobleman
Wittich Appelmann, who has vainly pursued her with ignoble designs. The deeds of
a real witch, who afterward comes to a horrible supernatural end in prison, are
glibly imputed to the hapless Maria; and after a typical witchcraft trial with
forced confessions under torture she is about to be burned at the stake when
saved just in time by her lover, a noble youth from a neighboring district.
Meinhold's great strength is in his air of casual and realistic verisimilitude,
which intensifies our suspense and sense of the unseen by half persuading us
that the menacing events must somehow be either the truth or very dose to the
truth. Indeed, so thorough is this realism that a popular magazine once
published the main points of The Amber Witch as an actual occurrence of the
seventeenth century!
In the present generation German horror-fiction is most notably represented by
Hanns Heinz Ewers, who brings to bear on his dark conceptions an effective
knowledge of modern psychology. Novels like The Sorcerer's Apprentice and
Alrune, and short stories like The Spider, contain distinctive qualities which
raise them to a classic level.
But France as well as Germany has been active in the realm of weirdness. Victor
Hugo, in such tales as Hans of Iceland, and Balzac, in The Wild Ass's Skin,
Seraphita, and Louis Lambert, both employ supernaturalism to a greater or less
extent; though generally only as a means to some more human end, and without the
sincere and dæmonic intensity which characterizes the born artist in shadows. It
is in Theophile Gautier that we first seem to find an authentic French sense of
the unreal world, and here there appears a spectral mystery which, though not
continuously used, is recognizable at once as something alike genuine and
profound. Short tales like Avatar, The Foot of the Mummy, and Clarimonde display
glimpses of forbidden vistas that allure, tantalize, and sometime horrify;
whilst the Egyptian visions evoked in One of Cleopatra's Nights are of the
keenest and most expressive potency. Gautier captured the inmost soul of
æon-weighted Egypt, with its cryptic life and Cyclopean architecture, and
uttered once and for all the eternal horror of its nether world of catacombs,
where to the end of time millions of stiff, spiced corpses will stare up in the
blackness with glassy eyes, awaiting some awesome and unrelatable summons.
Gustave Flaubert ably continued the tradition of Gautier in orgies of poetic
phantasy like The Temptation of St. Anthony, and but for a strong realistic bias
might have been an arch-weaver of tapestried terrors. Later on we see the stream
divide, producing strange poets and fantaisistes of the symbolic and decadent
schools whose dark interests really centre more in abnormalities of human
thought and instinct than in the actual supernatural, and subtle story-tellers
whose thrills are quite directly derived from the night-black wells of cosmic
unreality. Of the former class of "artists in sin" the illustrious poet
Baudelaire, influenced vastly by Poe, is the supreme type; whilst the
psychological novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, a true child of the
eighteen-nineties, is at once the summation and finale. The latter and purely
narrative class is continued by Prosper Merimée, whose Venus of Ille presents in
terse and convincing prose the same ancient statue-bride theme which Thomas
Moore cast in ballad form in The Ring.
The horror-tales of the powerful and cynical Guy de Maupassant, written as his
final madness gradually overtook him, present individualities of their own;
being rather the morbid outpourings of a realistic mind in a pathological state
than the healthy imaginative products of a vision naturally disposed toward
phantasy and sensitive to the normal illusions of the unseen. Nevertheless they
are of the keenest interest and poignancy; suggesting with marvelous force the
imminence of nameless terrors, and the relentless dogging of an ill-starred
individual by hideous and menacing representatives of the outer blackness. Of
these stories The Horla is generally regarded as the masterpiece. Relating the
advent to France of an invisible being who lives on water and milk, sways the
minds of others, and seems to be the vanguard of a horde of extra-terrestrial
organisms arrived on earth to subjugate and overwhelm mankind, this tense
narrative is perhaps without a peer in its particular department;
notwithstanding its indebtedness to a tale by the American Fitz-James O'Brien
for details in describing the actual presence of the unseen monster. Other
potently dark creations of de Maupassant are Who Knows?, The Spectre, He, The
Diary of a Madman, The White Wolf, On the River, and the grisly verses entitled
Horror.
The collaborators Erckmann-Chatrian enriched French literature with many
spectral fancies like The Man-Wolf, in which a transmitted curse works toward
its end in a traditional Gothic-castle setting. Their power of creating a
shuddering midnight atmosphere was tremendous despite a tendency toward natural
explanations and scientific wonders; and few short tales contain greater horror
than The Invisible Eye, where a malignant old hag weaves nocturnal hypnotic
spells which induce the successive occupants of a certain inn chamber to hang
themselves on a cross-beam. The Owl's Ear and The Waters of Death are full of
engulfing darkness and mystery, the latter embodying the familiar
over-grown-spider theme so frequently employed by weird fictionists. Villiers de
l'Isle Adam likewise followed the macabre school; his Torture by Hope, the tale
of a stake-condemned prisoner permitted to escape in order to feel the pangs of
recapture, being held by some to constitute the most harrowing short story in
literature. This type, however, is less a part of the weird tradition than a
class peculiar to itself -- the so-called conte cruel, in which the wrenching of
the emotions is accomplished through dramatic tantalizations, frustrations, and
gruesome physical horrors. Almost wholly devoted to this form is the living
writer Maurice Level, whose very brief episodes have lent themselves so readily
to theatrical adaptation in the "thrillers" of the Grand Guignol. As a matter of
fact, the French genius is more naturally suited to this dark realism than to
the suggestion of the unseen; since the latter process requires, for its best
and most sympathetic development on a large scale, the inherent mysticism of the
Northern mind.
A very flourishing, though till recently quite hidden, branch of weird
literature is that of the Jews, kept alive and nourished in obscurity by the
sombre heritage of early Eastern magic, apocalyptic literature, and cabbalism.
The Semitic mind, like the Celtic and Teutonic, seems to possess marked mystical
inclinations; and the wealth of underground horror-lore surviving in ghettoes
and synagogues must be much more considerable than is generally imagined.
Cabbalism itself, so prominent during the Middle Ages, is a system of philosophy
explaining the universe as emanations of the Deity, and involving the existence
of strange spiritual realms and beings apart from the visible world of which
dark glimpses may be obtained through certain secret incantations. Its ritual is
bound up with mystical interpretations of the Old Testament, and attributes an
esoteric significance to each letter of the Hebrew alphabet -- a circumstance
which has imparted to Hebrew letters a sort of spectral glamour and potency in
the popular literature of magic. Jewish folklore has preserved much of the
terror and mystery of the past, and when more thoroughly studied is likely to
exert considerable influence on weird fiction. The best examples of its literary
use so far are the German novel The Golem, by Gustave Meyrink, and the drama The
Dyhbuk, by the Jewish writer using the pseudonym "Ansky." The former, with its
haunting shadowy suggestions of marvels and horrors just beyond reach, is laid
in Prague, and describes with singular mastery that city's ancient ghetto with
its spectral, peaked gables. The name is derived from a fabulous artificial
giant supposed to be made and animated by mediæval rabbis according to a certain
cryptic formula. The Dyhbuk, translated and produced in America in 1925, and
more recently produced as an opera, describes with singular power the possession
of a living body by the evil soul of a dead man. Both golems and dyhbuks are
fixed types, and serve as frequent ingredients of later Jewish tradition.
VII. Edgar Allan Poe
In the eighteen-thirties occurred a literary dawn directly affecting not only
the history of the weird tale, but that of short fiction as a whole; and
indirectly moulding the trends and fortunes of a great European æsthetic school.
It is our good fortune as Americans to be able to claim that dawn as our own,
for it came in the person of our most illustrious and unfortunate
fellow-countryman Edgar Allan Poe. Poe's fame has been subject to curious
undulations, and it is now a fashion amongst the "advanced intelligentsia" to
minimize his importance both as an artist and as an influence; but it would be
hard for any mature and reflective critic to deny the tremendous value of his
work and the persuasive potency of his mind as an opener of artistic vistas.
True, his type of outlook may have been anticipated; but it was he who first
realized its possibilities and gave it supreme form and systematic expression.
True also, that subsequent writers may have produced greater single tales than
his; but again we must comprehend that it was only he who taught them by example
and precept the art which they, having the way cleared for them and given an
explicit guide, were perhaps able to carry to greater lengths. Whatever his
limitations, Poe did that which no one else ever did or could have done; and to
him we owe the modern horror-story in its final and perfected state.
Before Poe the bulk of weird writers had worked largely in the dark; without an
understanding of the psychological basis of the horror appeal, and hampered by
more or less of conformity to certain empty literary conventions such as the
happy ending, virtue rewarded, and in general a hollow moral didacticism,
acceptance of popular standards and values, and striving of the author to
obtrude his own emotions into the story and take sides with the partisans of the
majority's artificial ideas. Poe, on the other hand, perceived the essential
impersonality of the real artist; and knew that the function of creative fiction
is merely to express and interpret events and sensations as they are, regardless
of how they tend or what they prove -- good or evil, attractive or repulsive,
stimulating or depressing, with the author always acting as a vivid and detached
chronicler rather than as a teacher, sympathizer, or vendor of opinion. He saw
clearly that all phases of life and thought are equally eligible as a subject
matter for the artist, and being inclined by temperament to strangeness and
gloom, decided to be the interpreter of those powerful feelings and frequent
happenings which attend pain rather than pleasure, decay rather than growth,
terror rather than tranquility, and which are fundamentally either adverse or
indifferent to the tastes and traditional outward sentiments of mankind, and to
the health, sanity, and normal expansive welfare of the species.
Poe's spectres thus acquired a convincing malignity possessed by none of their
predecessors, and established a new standard of realism in the annals of
literary horror. The impersonal and artistic intent, moreover, was aided by a
scientific attitude not often found before; whereby Poe studied the human mind
rather than the usages of Gothic fiction, and worked with an analytical
knowledge of terror's true sources which doubled the force of his narratives and
emancipated him from all the absurdities inherent in merely conventional
shudder-coining. This example having been set, later authors were naturally
forced to conform to it in order to compete at all; so that in this way a
definite change begin to affect the main stream of macabre writing. Poe, too,
set a fashion in consummate craftsmanship; and although today some of his own
work seems slightly melodramatic and unsophisticated, we can constantly trace
his influence in such things as the maintenance of a single mood and achievement
of a single impression in a tale, and the rigorous paring down of incidents to
such as have a direct bearing on the plot and will figure prominently in the
climax. Truly may it be said that Poe invented the short story in its present
form. His elevation of disease, perversity, and decay to the level of
artistically expressible themes was likewise infinitely far-reaching in effect;
for avidly seized, sponsored, and intensified by his eminent French admirer
Charles Pierre Baudelaire, it became the nucleus of the principal æsthetic
movements in France, thus making Poe in a sense the father of the Decadents and
the Symbolists.
Poet and critic by nature and supreme attainment, logician and philosopher by
taste and mannerism, Poe was by no means immune from defects and affectations.
His pretence to profound and obscure scholarship, his blundering ventures in
stilted and laboured pseudo-humor, and his often vitriolic outbursts of critical
prejudice must all be recognized and forgiven. Beyond and above them, and
dwarfing them to insignificance, was a master's vision of the terror that stalks
about and within us, and the worm that writhes and slavers in the hideously
close abyss. Penetrating to every festering horror in the gaily painted mockery
called existence, and in the solemn masquerade called human thought and feeling,
that vision had power to project itself in blackly magical crystallisations and
transmutations; till there bloomed in the sterile America of the thirties and
forties such a moon-nourished garden of gorgeous poison fungi as not even the
nether slopes of Saturn might boast. Verses and tales alike sustain the burthen
of cosmic panic. The raven whose noisome beak pierces the heart, the ghouls that
toll iron bells in pestilential steeples, the vault of Ulalume in the black
October night, the shocking spires and domes under the sea, the "wild, weird
clime that lieth, sublime, out of Space -- out of Time" -- all these things and
more leer at us amidst maniacal rattlings in the seething nightmare of the
poetry. And in the prose there yawn open for us the very jaws of the pit --
inconceivable abnormalities slyly hinted into a horrible half-knowledge by words
whose innocence we scarcely doubt till the cracked tension of the speaker's
hollow voice bids us fear their nameless implications; dæmoniac patterns and
presences slumbering noxiously till waked for one phobic instant into a
shrieking revelation that cackles itself to sudden madness or explodes in
memorable and cataclysmic echoes. A Witches' Sabbath of horror flinging off
decorous robes is flashed before us -- a sight the more monstrous because of the
scientific skill with which every particular is marshaled and brought into an
easy apparent relation to the known gruesomeness of material life.
Poe's tales, of course, fall into several classes; some of which contain a purer
essence of spiritual horror than others. The tales of logic and ratiocination,
forerunners of the modern detective story, are not to be included at all in
weird literature; whilst certain others, probably influenced considerably by
Hoffmann, possess an extravagance which relegates them to the borderline of the
grotesque. Still a third group deal with abnormal psychology and monomania in
such a way as to express terror but not weirdness. A substantial residuum,
however, represent the literature of supernatural horror in its acutest form;
and give their author a permanent and unassailable place as deity and
fountainhead of all modern diabolic fiction. Who can forget the terrible swollen
ship poised on the billow-chasm's edge in MS. Found in a Bottle -- the dark
intimations of her unhallowed age and monstrous growth, her sinister crew of
unseeing greybeards, and her frightful southward rush under full sail through
the ice of the Antarctic night, sucked onward by some resistless devil-current
toward a vortex of eldritch enlightenment which must end in destruction?
Then there is the unutterable M. Valdemar, kept together by hypnotism for seven
months after his death, and uttering frantic sounds but a moment before the
breaking of the spell leaves him "a nearly liquid mass of loathsome, of
detestable putrescence." In the Narrative of A. Gordon Pym the voyagers reach
first a strange south polar land of murderous savages where nothing is white and
where vast rocky ravines have the form of titanic Egyptian letters spelling
terrible primal arcana of earth; and thereafter a still more mysterious realm
where everything is white, and where shrouded giants and snowy-plumed birds
guard a cryptic cataract of mist which empties from immeasurable celestial
heights into a torrid milky sea. Metzengerstein horrifies with its malign hints
of a monstrous metempsychosis -- the mad nobleman who burns the stable of his
hereditary foe; the colossal unknown horse that issues from the blazing building
after the owner has perished therein; the vanishing bit of ancient tapestry
where was shown the giant horse of the victim's ancestor in the Crusades; the
madman's wild and constant riding on the great horse, and his fear and hatred of
the steed; the meaningless prophecies that brood obscurely over the warring
houses; and finally, the burning of the madman's palace and the death therein of
the owner, borne helpless into the flames and up the vast staircase astride the
beast he had ridden so strangely. Afterward the rising smoke of the ruins take
the form of a gigantic horse. The Man of the Crowd, telling of one who roams day
and night to mingle with streams of people as if afraid to be alone, has quieter
effects, but implies nothing less of cosmic fear. Poe's mind was never far from
terror and decay, and we see in every tale, poem, and philosophical dialogue a
tense eagerness to fathom unplumbed wells of night, to pierce the veil of death,
and to reign in fancy as lord of the frightful mysteries of time and space.
Certain of Poe's tales possess an almost absolute perfection of artistic form
which makes them veritable beacon-lights in the province of the short story. Poe
could, when he wished, give to his prose a richly poetic cast; employing that
archaic and Orientalised style with jeweled phrase, quasi-Biblical repetition,
and recurrent burthen so successfully used by later writers like Oscar Wilde and
Lord Dunsany; and in the cases where he has done this we have an effect of
lyrical phantasy almost narcotic in essence -- an opium pageant of dream in the
language of dream, with every unnatural colour and grotesque image bodied forth
in a symphony of corresponding sound. The Masque of the Red Death, Silence, a
Fable, and Shadow, a Parable, are assuredly poems in every sense of the word
save the metrical one, and owe as much of their power to aural cadence as to
visual imagery. But it is in two of the less openly poetic tales, Ligeia and The
Fall of the House of Usher -- especially the latter -- that one finds those very
summits of artistry whereby Poe takes his place at the head of fictional
miniaturists. Simple and straightforward in plot, both of these tales owe their
supreme magic to the cunning development which appears in the selection and
collocation of every least incident. Ligeia tells of a first wife of lofty and
mysterious origin, who after death returns through a preternatural force of will
to take possession of the body of a second wife; imposing even her physical
appearance on the temporary reanimated corpse of her victim at the last moment.
Despite a suspicion of prolixity and topheaviness, the narrative reaches its
terrific climax with relentless power. Usher, whose superiority in detail and
proportion is very marked, hints shudderingly of obscure life in inorganic
things, and displays an abnormally linked trinity of entities at the end of a
long and isolated family history -- a brother, his twin sister, and their
incredibly ancient house all sharing a single soul and meeting one common
dissolution at the same moment.
These bizarre conceptions, so awkward in unskillful hands, become under Poe's
spell living and convincing terrors to haunt our nights; and all because the
author understood so perfectly the very mechanics and physiology of fear and
strangeness -- the essential details to emphasise, the precise incongruities and
conceits to select as preliminaries or concomitants to horror, the exact
incidents and allusions to throw out innocently in advance as symbols or
prefigurings of each major step toward the hideous dénouement to come, the nice
adjustments of cumulative force and the unerring accuracy in linkage of parts
which make for faultless unity throughout and thunderous effectiveness at the
climactic moment, the delicate nuances of scenic and landscape value to select
in establishing and sustaining the desired mood and vitalising the desired
illusion -- principles of this kind, and dozens of obscurer ones too elusive to
be described or even fully comprehended by any ordinary commentator. Melodrama
and unsophistication there may be -- we are told of one fastidious Frenchman who
could not bear to read Poe except in Baudelaire's urbane and Gallically
modulated translation -- but all traces of such things are wholly overshadowed
by a potent and inborn sense of the spectral, the morbid, and the horrible which
gushed forth from every cell of the artist's creative mentality and stamped his
macabre work with the ineffaceable mark of supreme genius. Poe's weird tales are
alive in a manner that few others can ever hope to be.
Like most fantaisistes, Poe excels in incidents and broad narrative effects
rather than in character drawing. His typical protagonist is generally a dark,
handsome, proud, melancholy, intellectual, highly sensitive, capricious,
introspective, isolated, and sometimes slightly mad gentleman of ancient family
and opulent circumstances; usually deeply learned in strange lore, and darkly
ambitious of penetrating to forbidden secrets of the universe. Aside from a
high-sounding name, this character obviously derives little from the early
Gothic novel; for he is clearly neither the wooden hero nor the diabolical
villain of Radcliffian or Ludovician romance. Indirectly, however, he does
possess a sort of genealogical connection; since his gloomy, ambitious and
anti-social qualities savour strongly of the typical Byronic hero, who in turn
is definitely an offspring,of the Gothic Manfreds, Montonis, and Ambrosios. More
particular qualities appear to be derived from the psychology of Poe himself,
who certainly possessed much of the depression, sensitiveness, mad aspiration,
loneliness, and extravagant freakishness which he attributes to his haughty and
solitary victims of Fate.
VIII. The Weird Tradition In America
The public for whom Poe wrote, though grossly unappreciative of his art, was by
no means accustomed to the horrors with which he dealt. America, besides
inheriting the usual dark folk-lore of Europe, had an additional fund of weird
associations to draw upon; so that spectral legends had already been recognised
as fruitful subject-matter for literature. Charles Brockden Brown had achieved
phenomenal fame with his Radcliffian romances, and Washington Irving's lighter
treatment of eerie themes had quickly become classic. This additional fund
proceeded, as Paul Elmer More has pointed out, from the keen spiritual and
theological interests of the first colonists, plus the strange and forbidding
nature of the scene into which they were plunged. The vast and gloomy virgin
forests in whose perpetual twilight all terrors might well lurk; the hordes of
coppery Indians whose strange, saturnine visages and violent customs hinted
strongly at traces of infernal origin; the free rein given tinder the influence
of Puritan theocracy to all manner of notions respecting man's relation to the
stern and vengeful God of the Calvinists, and to the sulphureous Adversary of
that God, about whom so much was thundered in the pulpits each Sunday; and the
morbid introspection developed by an isolated backwoods life devoid of normal
amusements and of the recreational mood, harassed by commands for theological
self-examination, keyed to unnatural emotional repression, and forming above all
a mere grim struggle for survival -- all these things conspired to produce an
environment in which the black whisperings of sinister grandams were heard far
beyond the chimney corner, and in which tales of witchcraft and unbelievable
secret monstrosities lingered long after the dread days of the Salem nightmare.
Poe represents the newer, more disillusioned, and more technically finished of
the weird schools that rose out of this propitious milieu. Another school -- the
tradition of moral values, gentle restraint, and mild, leisurely phantasy tinged
more or less with the whimsical -- was represented by another famous,
misunderstood, and lonely figure in American letters -- the shy and sensitive
Nathaniel Hawthorne, scion of antique Salem and great-grandson of one of the
bloodiest of the old witchcraft judges. In Hawthorne we have none of the
violence, the daring, the high colouring, the intense dramatic sense, the cosmic
malignity, and the undivided and impersonal artistry of Poe. Here, instead, is a
gentle soul cramped by the Puritanism of early New England; shadowed and
wistful, and grieved at an unmoral universe which everywhere transcends the
conventional patterns thought by our forefathers to represent divine and
immutable law. Evil, a very real force to Hawthorne, appears on every hand as a
lurking and conquering adversary; and the visible world becomes in his fancy a
theatre of infinite tragedy and woe, with unseen half-existent influences
hovering over it and through it, battling for supremacy and moulding the
destinies of the hapless mortals who form its vain and self-deluded population.
The heritage of American weirdness was his to a most intense degree, and he saw
a dismal throng of vague specters behind the common phenomena of life; but he
was not disinterested enough to value impressions, sensations, and beauties of
narration for their own sake. He must needs weave his phantasy into some quietly
melancholy fabric of didactic or allegorical cast, in which his meekly resigned
cynicism may display with naive moral appraisal the perfidy of a human race
which he cannot cease to cherish and mourn despite his insight into its
hypocrisy. Supernatural horror, then, is never a primarily object with
Hawthorne; though its impulses were so deeply woven into his personality that he
cannot help suggesting it with the force of genius when he calls upon the unreal
world to illustrate the pensive sermon he wishes to preach.
Hawthorne's intimations of the weird, always gentle, elusive, and restrained,
may be traced throughout his work. The mood that produced them found one
delightful vent in the Teutonised retelling of classic myths for children
contained in A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales, and at other times exercised
itself in casting a certain strangeness and intangible witchery or malevolence
over events not meant to be actually supernatural; as in the macabre posthumous
novel Dr. Grimshawe's Secret, which invests with a peculiar sort of repulsion a
house existing to this day in Salem, and abutting on the ancient Charter Street
Burying Ground. In The Marble Faun, whose design was sketched out in an Italian
villa reputed to be haunted, a tremendous background of genuine phantasy and
mystery palpitates just beyond the common reader's sight; and glimpses of
fabulous blood in mortal veins are hinted at during the course of a romance
which cannot help being interesting despite the persistent incubus of moral
allegory, anti-Popery propaganda, and a Puritan prudery which has caused the
modern writer D. H. Lawrence to express a longing to treat the author in a
highly undignified manner. Septimius Felton, a posthumous novel whose, idea was
to have been elaborated and incorporated into the unfinished Dolliver Romance,
touches on the Elixir of Life in a more or less capable fashion whilst the notes
for a never-written tale to be called The Ancestral Footstep show what Hawthorne
would have done with an intensive treatment of an old English superstition --
that of an ancient and accursed line whose members left footprints of blood as
they walked-which appears incidentally in both Septimius Felton and Dr.
Grimshawe's Secret.
Many of Hawthorne's shorter tales exhibit weirdness, either of atmosphere or of
incident, to a remarkable degree. Edward Randolph's Portrait, in Legends of the
Province House, has its diabolic moments. The Minister's Black Veil (founded on
an actual incident) and The Ambitious Guest imply much more than they state,
whilst Ethan Grand -- a fragment of a longer work never completed -- rises to
genuine heights of cosmic fear with its vignette of the wild hill country and
the blazing, desolate lime-kilns, and its delineation of the Byronic
"unpardonable sinner," whose troubled life ends with a peal of fearful laughter
in the night as he seeks rest amidst the flames of the furnace. Some of
Hawthorne's notes tell of weird tales he would have written had he lived longer
-- an especially vivid plot being that concerning a baffling stranger who
appeared now and then in public assemblies, and who was at last followed and
found to come and go from a very ancient grave.
But foremost as a finished, artistic unit among all our author's weird material
is the famous and exquisitely wrought novel, The House of the Seven Gables, in
which the relentless working out of an ancestral curse is developed with
astonishing power against the sinister background of a very ancient Salem house
-- one of those peaked Gothic affairs which formed the first regular building-up
of our New England coast towns but which gave way after the seventeenth century
to the more familiar gambrel-roofed or classic Georgian types now known as
"Colonial." Of these old gabled Gothic houses scarcely a dozen are to be seen
today in their original condition throughout the United States, but one well
known to Hawthorne still stands in Turner Street, Salem, and is pointed out with
doubtful authority as the scene and inspiration of the romance. Such an edifice,
with its spectral peaks, its clustered chimneys, its overhanging second story,
its grotesque corner-brackets, and its diamond-paned lattice windows, is indeed
an object well calculated to evoke sombre reflections; typifying as it does the
dark Puritan age of concealed horror and witch-whispers which preceded the
beauty, rationality, and spaciousness of the eighteenth century. Hawthorne saw
many in his youth, and knew the black tales connected with some of them. He
heard, too, many rumours of a curse upon his own line as the result of his
great-grandfather's severity as a witchcraft judge in 1692.
From this setting came the immortal tale -- New England's greatest contribution
to weird literature -- and we can feel in an instant the authenticity of the
atomosphere presented to us. Stealthy horror and disease lurk within the
weather-blackened, moss-crusted, and elm-shadowed walls of the archaic dwelling
so vividly displayed, and we grasp the brooding malignity of the place when we
read that its builder -- old Colonel Pyncheon -- snatched the land with peculiar
ruthlessness from its original settler, Matthew Maule, whom he condemned to the
gallows as a wizard in the year of the panic. Maule died cursing old Pyncheon --
"God will give him blood to drink" -- and the waters of the old well on the
seized land turned bitter. Maule's carpenter son consented to build the great
gabled house for his fathet's triumphant enemy, but the old Colonel died
strangely on the day of its dedication. Then followed generations of odd
vicissitudes, with queer whispers about the dark powers of the Maules, and
sometimes terrible ends befalling the Pyncheons.
The overshadowing malevolence of the ancient house -- almost as alive as Poe's
House of Usher, though in a subtler way -- pervades the tale as a recurrent
motif pervades in operatic tragedy; and when the main story is reached, we
behold the modern Pyncheons in a pitiable state of decay. Poor old Hepzibah, the
eccentric reduced gentlewoman; childlike, unfortunate Clifford, just released
from undeserved imprisonment; sly and treacherous judge Pyncheon, who is the old
Colonel an over again -- all these figures are tremendous symbols, and are well
matched by the stunted vegetation and anæmic fowls in the garden. It was almost
a pity to supply a fairly happy ending, with a union of sprightly Phœbe, cousin
and last scion of the Pyncheons, to the prepossessing young man who turns out to
be the last of the Maules. This union, presumably, ends the curse. Hawthorne
avoids all violence of diction or movement, and keeps his implications of terror
well in the background; but occasional glimpses amply serve to sustain the mood
and redeem the work from pure allegorical aridity. Incidents like the bewitching
of Alice Pyncheon in the early eighteenth century, and the spectral music of her
harpsichord which precedes a death in the family -- the latter a variant of an
immemorial type of Aryan myth -- link the action directly with the supernatural;
whilst the dead nocturnal vigil of old judge Pyncheon in the ancient parlour,
with his frightfully ticking watch, is stark horror of the most poignant and
genuine sort. The way in which the judge's death is first adumbrated by the
motions and sniffing of a strange cat outside the window, long before the fact
is suspected by the reader or by any of the characters, is a stroke of genius
which Poe could not have surpassed. Later the strange cat watches intently
outside that same window in the night and on the next day, for -- something. It
is clearly the psychopomp of primeval myth, fitted and adapted with infinite
deftness to its latter-day setting.
But Hawthorne left no well-defined literary posterity. His mood and attitude
belonged to the age which closed with him, and it is the spirit of Poe -- who so
clearly and realistically understood the natural basis of the horror-appeal and
the correct mechanics of its achievement -- which survived and blossomed. Among
the earliest of Poe's disciples may be reckoned the brilliant young Irishman
Fitz James O'Brien (1828-1862), who became naturalised as an American and
perished honourably in the Civil War. It is he who gave us What Was It?, the
first well-shaped short story of a tangible but invisible being, and the
prototype of de Maupassant's Horla; he also who created the inimitable Diamond
Lens, in which a young microscopist falls in love with a maiden of in
infinitesimal world which he has discovered in a drop of water. O'Brien's early
death undoubtedly deprived us of some masterful tales of strangeness and terror,
though his genius was not, properly speaking, of the same titan quality which
characterised Poe and Hawthorne.
Closer to real greatness was the eccentric and saturnine journalist Ambrose
Bierce, born in 1842; who likewise entered the Civil War, but survived to write
some immortal tales and to disappear in 1913 in as great a cloud of mystery as
any he ever evoked from his nightmare fancy. Bierce was a satirist and
pamphleteer of note, but the bulk of his artistic reputation must rest upon his
grim and savage short stories; a large number of which deal with the Civil War
and form the most vivid and realistic expression which that conflict has yet
received in fiction. Virtually all of Bierce's tales are tales of horror; and
whilst many of them treat only of the physical and psychological horrors within
Nature, a substantial proportion admit the malignly supernatural and form a
leading element in America's fund of weird literature. Mr. Samuel Loveman, a
living poet and critic who was personally acquainted with Bierce, thus sums up
the genius of the great "shadow-maker" in the preface to some of his letters:
  In Bierce the evocation of horror becomes for the first time not so much the
  prescription or perversion of Poe and Maupassant, but an atmosphere definite
  and uncannily precise. Words, so simple that one would be prone to ascribe
  them to the limitations of a literary hwk, take on an unholy horror, a new and
  unguessed transformation. In Poe one finds it a tour de force, in Maupassant a
  nervous engagement of the flagellated climax. To Bierce, simply and sincerely,
  diabolism held in its tormented death a legitimate and reliant means to the
  end. Yet a tacit confirmation with Nature is in every instance insisted upon.
  In The Death of Halpin Frayser flowers, verdure, and the boughs and leaves of
  trees are magnificently placed as an opposing foil to unnatural malignity. Not
  the accustomed golden world, but a world pervaded with the mystery of blue and
  the breathless recalcitrance of dreams is Bierces. Yet, curiously, inhumanity
  is not altogether absent.
The "inhumanity" mentioned by Mr. Loveman finds vent in a rare strain of
sardonic comedy and graveyard humour, and a kind of delight in images of cruelty
and tantalising disappointment. The former quality is well illustrated by some
of the subtitles in the darker narratives; such as "One does not always eat what
is on the table", describing a body laid out for a coroner's inquest, and "A man
though naked may be in rags," referring to a frightfully mangled corpse.
Bierce's work is in general somewhat uneven. Many of the stories are obviously
mechanical, and marred by a jaunty and commonplacely artificial style derived
from journalistic models; but the grim malevolence stalking through all of them
is unmistakable, and several stand out as permanent mountain-peaks of American
weird writing. The Death of Halpin Frayser, called by Frederic Taber Cooper the
most fiendishly ghastly tale in the literature of the Anglo-Saxon race, tells of
a body skulking by night without a soul in a weird and horribly ensanguined
wood, and of a man beset by ancestral memories who met death at the claws of
that which had been his fervently loved mother. The Damned Thing, frequently
copied in popular anthologies, chronicles the hideous devastations of an
invisible entity that waddles and flounders on the hills and in the wheatfields
by night and day. The Suitable Surroundings evoke's with singular subtlety yet
apparent simplicity a piercing sense of the terror which may reside in the
written word. In the story the weird author Colston says to his friend Marsh,
"You are brave enough to read me in a street-car, but -- in a deserted house --
alone -- in the forest -- at night! Bah! I have a manuscript in my pocket that
would kill you!" Marsh reads the manuscript in "the suitable surroundings -- and
it does kill him. The Middle Toe of the Right Foot is clumsily developed, but
has a powerful climax. A man named Manton has horribly killed his two children
and his wife, the latter of whom lacked the middle toe of the right foot. Ten
years later he returns much altered to the neighbourhood; and, being secretly
recognised, is provoked into a bowie-knife duel in the dark, to be held in the
now abandond house where his crime was committed. When the moment of the duel
arrives a trick is played upon him; and he is left without an antagonist, shut
in a night-black ground floor room of the reputedly haunted edifice, with the
thick dust of a decade on every hand. No knife is drawn against him, for only a
thorough scare is intended; but on the next day he is found crouched in a corner
with distorted face, dead of sheer fright at something he has seen. The only
clue visible to the discoverers is one having terrible implications: "In the
dust of years that lay thick upon the floor -- leading from the door by which
they had entered, straight across the room to within a yard of Manton's
crouching corpse -- were three parallel lines of footprints -- light but
definite impressions of bare feet, the outer ones those of small children, the
inner a woman's. From the point at which they ended they did not return; they
pointed all one way." And, of course, the woman's prints showed a lack of the
middle toe of the right foot. The Spook House, told with a severely homely air
of journalistic verisimilitude, conveys terrible hints of shocking mystery. In
1858 an entire family of seven persons disappears suddenly and unaccountably
from a plantation house in eastern Kentucky, leaving all its possessions
untouched -- furniture, clothing, food supplies, horses, cattle, and slaves.
About a year later two men of high standing are forced by a storm to take
shelter in the deserted dwelling, and in so doing stumble into a strange
subterranean room lit by an unaccountable greenish light and having an iron door
which cannot be opened from within. In this room lie the decayed corpses of all
the missing family; and as one of the discoverers rushes forward to embrace a
body he seems to recognise, the other is so overpowered by a strange foetor that
he accidentally shuts his companion in the vault and loses consciousness.
Recovering his senses six weeks later, the survivor is unable to find the hidden
room; and the house is burned during the Civil War. The imprisoned discoverer is
never seen or heard of again.
Bierce seldom realises the atmospheric possibilities of his themes as vividly as
Poe; and much of his work contains a certain touch of naiveté, prosaic
angularity, or early-American provincialism which contrasts somewhat with the
efforts of later horror-masters. Nevertheless the genuineness and artistry of
his dark intimations are always unmistakable, so that his greatness is in no
danger of eclipse. As arranged in his definitively collected works, Bierce's
weird tales occur mainly in two volumes, Can Such Things Be? and In the Midst of
Life. The former, indeed, is almost wholly given over to, the supernatural.
Much of the best in American horror-literature has come from pens not mainly
devoted to that medium. Oliver Wendell Holmes's historic Elsie Venner suggests
with admirable restraint an unnatural ophidian element in a young woman
prenatally influenced, and sustains the atmosphere with finely discriminating
landscape touches. In The Turn of the Screw Henry James triumphs over his
inevitable pomposity and prolixity sufficiently well to create a truly potent
air of sinister menace; depicting the hideous influence of two dead and evil
servants, Peter Quint and the governess, Miss Jessel, over a small boy and girl
who had been under their care. James is perhaps too diffuse, too unctuously
urbane, and too much addicted to subtleties of speech to realise fully all the
wild and devastating horror in his situations; but for all that there is a rare
and mounting tide of fright, culminating in the death of the little boy, which
gives the novelette a permanent place in its special class.
F. Marion Crawford produced several weird tales of varying quality, now
collected in a volume entitled Wandering Ghosts. For the Blood Is the Life
touches powerfully on a case of moon-cursed vampirism near an ancient tower on
the rocks of the lonely South Italian seacoast. The Dead Smile treats of family
horrors in an old house and an ancestral vault in Ireland, and introduces the
banshee with considerable force. The Upper Berth, however, is Crawford's weird
masterpiece; and is one of the most tremendous horror-stories in all literature.
In this tale of a suicide-haunted stateroom such things as the spectral
saltwater dampness, the strangely open porthole, and the nightmare struggle with
the nameless object are handled with incomparable dexterity.
Very genuine, though not without the typical mannered extravagance of the
eighteen-nineties, is the strain of horror in the early work of Robert W.
Chambers, since renowned for products of a very different quality. The King in
Yellow, a series of vaguely connected short stories having as a background a
monstrous and suppressed book whose perusal brings fright, madness, and spectral
tragedy, really achieves notable heights of cosmic fear in spite of uneven
interest and a somewhat trivial and affected cultivation of the Gallic studio
atmosphere made popular by Du Maurier's Trilby. The most powerful of its tales,
perhaps, is The Yellow Sign, in which is introduced a silent and terrible
churchyard watchman with a face like a puffy grave-worm's. A boy, describing a
tussle he has had with this creature, shivers and sickens as he relates a
certain detail. "Well, it's Gawd's truth that when I 'it 'im 'e grabbed me
wrists, Sir, and when I twisted 'is soft, mushy fist one of 'is fingers come off
in me 'and." An artist, who after seeing him has shared with another a strange
dream of a nocturnal hearse, is shocked by the voice with which the watchman
accosts him. The fellow emits a muttering sound that fills the head "like thick
oily smoke from a fat-rendering vat or an odour of noisome decay." What he
mumbles is merely this: "Have you found the Yellow Sign?"
A weirdly hieroglyphed onyx talisman, picked up on the street by the sharer of
his dream, is shortly given the artist; and after stumbling queerly upon the
hellish and forbidden book of horrors the two learn, among other hideous things
which no sane mortal should know, that this talisman is indeed the nameless
Yellow Sign handed down from the accursed cult of Hastur -- from primordial
Carcosa, whereof the volume treats, and some nightmare memory of which seeks to
lurk latent and ominous at the back of all men's minds. Soon they hear the
rumbling of the black-plumed hearse driven by the flabby and corpse-faced
watchman. He enters the night-shrouded house in quest of the Yellow Sign, all
bolts and bars rotting at his touch. And when the people rush in, drawn by a
scream that no human throat could utter, they find three forms on the floor --
two dead and one dying. One of the dead shapes is far gone in decay. It is the
churchyard watchman, and the doctor exclaims, "That man must have been dead for
months." It is worth observing that the author derives most of the names and
allusions connected with his eldritch land of primal memory from the tales of
Ambrose Bierce. Other early works of Mr. Chambers displaying the outré and
macabre element are The Maker of Moons and In Search of the Unknown. One cannot
help regretting that he did not further develop a vein in which he could so
easily have become a recognised master.
Horror material of authentic force may be found in the work of the New England
realist Mary E. Wilkins, whose volume of short tales, The Wind in the Rosebush,
contains a number of noteworthy achievements. In The Shadows on the Wall we are
shown with consummate skill the response of a staid New England household to
uncanny tragedy; and the sourceless shadow of the poisoned brother well prepares
us for the climactic moment when the shadow of the secret murderer, who has
killed himself in a neighbouring city, suddenly appears beside it. Charlotte
Perkins Gilman, in The Yellow Wall Paper, rises to a classic level in subtly
delineating the madness which crawls over a woman dwelling in the hideously
papered room where a madwoman was once confined.
In The Dead Valley the eminent architect and mediævalist Ralph Adams Cram
achieves a memorably potent degree of vague regional horror through subtleties
of atmosphere and description.
Still further carrying on our spectral tradition is the gifted and versatile
humourist Irvin S. Cobb, whose work both early and recent contains some finely
weird specimens. Fishhead, an early achievement, is banefully effective in its
portrayal of unnatural affinities between a hybrid idiot and the strange fish of
an isolated lake, which at the last avenge their biped kinsman's murder. Later
work of Mr. Cobb introduces an element of possible science, as in the tale of
hereditary memory where a modern man with a negroid strain utters words in
African jungle speech when run down by a train under visual and aural
circumstances recalling the maiming of his black ancestor by a rhinoceros a
century before.
Extremely high in artistic stature is the novel The Dark Chamber (1927) by the
late Leonard Cline. This is the tale of a man who -- with the characteristic
ambition of the Gothic or Byronic hero-villain -- seeks to defy nature and
recapture every moment of his past life through the abnormal stimulation of
memory. To this end he employs endless notes, records, mnemonic objects, and
pictures -- and finally odours, music, and exotic drugs. At last his ambition
goes beyond his personal life and readies toward the black abysses of hereditary
memory -- even back to pre-human days amidst the steaming swamps of the
carboniferous age, and to still more unimaginable deeps of primal time and
entity. He calls for madder music and takes stranger drugs, and finally his
great dog grows oddly afraid of him. A noxious animal stench encompasses him,
and he grows vacant-faced and subhuman. In the end he takes to the woods,
howling at night beneath windows. He is finally found in a thicket, mangled to
death. Beside him is the mangled corpse of his dog. They have killed each other.
The atmosphere of this novel is malevolently potent, much attention being paid
to the central figure's sinister home and household.
A less subtle and well-balanced but nevertheless highly effective creation is
Herbert S. Gorman's novel, The Place Called Dagon, which relates the dark
history of a western Massachusetts back-water where the descendants of refugees
from the Salem witchcraft still keep alive the morbid and degenerate horrors of
the Black Sabbat.
Sinister House, by Leland Hall, has touches of magnificent atmosphere but is
marred by a somewhat mediocre romanticism.
Very notable in their way are some of the weird conceptions of the novelist and
short-story writer Edward Lucas White, most of whose themes arise from actual
dreams. The Song of The Siren has a very persuasive strangeness, while such
things as Lukundoo and The Snout arouse darker apprehensions. Mr. White imparts
a very peculiar quality to his tales -- an oblique sort of glamour which has its
own distinctive type of convincingness.
Of younger Americans, none strikes the note of cosmic horror so well as the
California poet, artist and fictionist Clark Ashton Smith, whose bizarre
writing, drawings, paintings and stories are the delight of a sensitive few. Mr.
Smith has for his background a universe of remote and paralysing fright-jungles
of poisonous and iridescent blossoms on the moons of Saturn, evil and grotesque
temples in Atlantis, Lemuria, and forgotten elder worlds, and dank morasses of
spotted death-fungi in spectral countries beyond earth's rim. His longest and
most ambitious poem, The Hashish-Eater, is in pentameter blank verse; and opens
up chaotic and incredible vistas of kaleidoscopic nightmare in the spaces
between the stars. In sheet dæmonic strangeness and fertility of conception, Mr.
Smith is perhaps unexcelled by, any, other writer dead or living. Who else has
seen such gorgeous, luxuriant, and feverishly distorted visions of infinite
spheres and multiple dimensions and lived to tell the tale? His short stories
deal powerfully with other galaxies, worlds, and dimensions, as well as with
strange regions and æons on the earth. He tells of primal Hyperborea and its
black amorphous god Tsathoggua; of the lost continent Zothique, and of the
fabulous, Vampire-curst land of Averoigne in mediæval France. Some of Mr.
Smith's best work can be found in the brochure entitled The Double Shadow and
Other Fantasies (1933).
IX. The Weird Tradition In The British Isles
Recent British literature, besides including the three or four greatest
fantaisistes of the present age, has been gratifyingly fertile in the element of
the weird. Rudyard Kipling has often approached it, and has, despite the
omnipresent mannerisms, handled it with indubitable mastery in such tales as The
Phantom Rickshaw, The Finest Story in the World, The Recrudescence of Imray, and
The Mark of the Beast. This latter is of particular poignancy; the pictures of
the naked leper-priest who mewed like an otter, of the spots which appeared on
the chest of the man that priest cursed, of the growing carnivorousness of the
victim and of the fear which horses began to display toward him, and of the
eventually half-accomplished transformation of that victim into a leopard, being
things which no reader is ever likely to forget. The final defeat of the
malignant sorcery does not impair the force of the tale or the validity of its
mystery.
Lafcadio Hearn, strange, wandering, and exotic, departs still farther from the
realm of the real; and with the supreme artistry of a sensitive poet weaves
phantasies impossible to an author of the solid roast beef type. His Fantastics,
written in America, contains some of the most impressive ghoulishness in all
literature; whilst his Kwaidan, written in Japan, crystallises with matchless
skill and delicacy the eerie lore and whispered legends of that richly colourful
nation. Still more of Helm's wizardry of language is shown in some of his
translations from the French, especially from Gautier and Flaubert. His version
of the latter's Temptation of St. Anthony is a classic of fevered and riotous
imagery clad in the magic of singing words.
Oscar Wilde may likewise be given a place amongst weird writers, both for
certain of his exquisite fairy tales, and for his vivid Picture of Dorian Gray,
in which a marvellous portrait for years assumes the duty of aging and
coarsening instead of its original, who meanwhile plunges into every excess of
vice and crime without the outward loss of youth, beauty, and freshness. There
is a sudden and potent climax when Dorian Gray, at last become a murderer, seeks
to destroy the painting whose changes testify to his moral degeneracy. He stabs
it with a knife, and a hideous cry and crash are heard; but when the servants
enter they find it in all its pristine loveliness. "Lying on the floor was a
dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered,
wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not until they had examined the rings
that they recognised who he was."
Matthew Phipps Shiel, author of many weird, grotesque, and adventurous novels
and tales, occasionally attains a high level of horrific magic. Xelucha is a
noxiously hideous fragment, but is excelled by Mr. Shiel's undoubted
masterpiece, The House of Sounds, floridly written in the "yellow nineties," and
recast with more artistic restraint in the early twentieth century. Ibis story,
in final form, deserves a place among the foremost things of its kind. It tells
of a creeping horror and menace trickling down the centuries on a sub-arctic
island off the coast of Norway; where, amidst the sweep of daemon winds and the
ceaseless din of hellish waves and cataracts, a vengeful dead man built a brazen
tower of terror. It is vaguely like, yet infinitely unlike, Poe's Fall of the
House of Usher. In the novel The Purple Cloud Mr. Shiel describes with
tremendous power a curse which came out of the arctic to destroy mankind, and
which for a time appears to have left but a single inhabitant on our planet. The
sensations of this lone survivor as he realises his position, and roams through
the corpse-littered and treasure-strewn cities of the world as their absolute
master, are delivered with a skill and artistry falling little short of actual
majesty. Unfortunately the second half of the book, with its conventionally
romantic element, involves a distinct letdown.
Better known than Shiel is the ingenious Bram Stoker, who created many starkly
horrific conceptions in a series of novels whose poor technique sadly impairs
their net effect. The Lair of the White Worm, dealing with a gigantic primitive
entity that lurks in a vault beneath an ancient castle, utterly ruins a
magnificent idea by a development almost infantile. The Jewel of Seven Stars,
touching on a strange Egyptian resurrection, is less crudely written. But best
of all is the famous Dracula, which has become almost the standard modern
exploitation of the frightful vampire myth. Count Dracula, a vampire, dwells in
a horrible castle in the Carpathians, but finally migrates to England with the
design of populating the country with fellow vampires. How an Englishman fares
within Dracula's stronghold of terrors, and how the dead fiend's plot for
domination is at last defeated, are elements which unite to form a tale now
justly assigned a permanent place in English letters. Dracula evoked many
similar novels of supernatural horror, among which the best are perhaps The
Beetle, by Richard Marsh, Brood of the Witch-Queen, by "Sax Rohmer" (Arthur
Sarsfield Ward), and The Door of the Unreal, by Gerald Bliss. The latter handles
quite dexterously the standard werewolf superstition. Much subtler and more
artistic, and told with singular skill through the juxtaposed narratives of the
several characters, is the novel Cold Harbour, by Francis Brett Young, in which
an ancient house of strange malignancy is powerfully delineated. The mocking and
well-nigh omnipotent fiend Humphrey Furnival holds echoes of the Manfred-Montoni
type of early Gothic "villain," but is redeemed from triteness by many clever
individualities. Only the slight diffuseness of explanation at the close, and
the somewhat too free use of divination as a plot factor, keep this tale from
approaching absolute perfection.
In the novel Witch Wood John Buchan depicts with tremendous force a survival of
the evil Sabbat in a lonely district of Scotland. The description of the black
forest with the evil stone, and of the terrible cosmic adumbrations when the
horror is finally extirpated, will repay one for wading through the very gradual
action and plethora of Scottish dialect. Some of Mr. Buchan's short stories are
also extremely vivid in their spectral intimations; The Green Wildebeest, a tale
of African witchcraft, The Wind in the Portico, with its awakening of dead
Britanno-Roman horrors, and Skule Skerry, with its touches of sub-arctic fright,
being especially remarkable.
Clemence Housman, in the brief novelette The Werewolf, attains a high degree of
gruesome tension and achieves to some extent the atmosphere of authentic
folklore. In The Elixir of Life Arthur Ransome attains some darkly excellent
effects despite a general naiveté of plot, while H. B. Drake's The Shadowy Thing
summons up strange and terrible vistas. George Macdonald's Lilith has a
compelling bizarrerie all its own, the first and simpler of the two versions
being perhaps the more effective.
Deserving of distinguished notice as a forceful craftsman to whom an unseen
mystic world is, ever a dose and vital reality is the poet Walter de la Mare,
whose haunting verse and exquisite prose alike bear consistent traces of a
strange vision reaching deeply into veiled spheres of beauty and terrible and
forbidden dimensions of being. In the novel The Return we see the soul of a dead
man reach out of its grave of two centuries and fasten itself upon the flesh of
the living, so that even the face of the victim becomes that which had long ago
returned to dust. Of the shorter tales, of which several volumes exist, many are
unforgettable for their command of fear's and sorcery's darkest ramifications;
notably Seaton's Aunt, in which there lowers a noxious background of malignant
vampirism; The Tree, which tells of a frightful vegetable growth in the yard of
a starving artist; Out of the Deep, wherein we are given leave to imagine what
thing answered the summons of a dying wastrel in a dark lonely house when he
pulled a long-feared bell-cord in the attic of his dread-haunted boyhood; A
Recluse, which hints at what sent a chance guest flying from a house in the
night; Mr. Kempe, which shows us a mad clerical hermit in quest of the human
soul, dwelling in a frightful sea-cliff region beside an archaic abandoned
chapel; and All-Hallows, a glimpse of dæmoniac forces besieging a lonely
mediaeval church and miraculously restoring the rotting masonry. De la Mare does
not make fear the sole or even the dominant element of most of his tales, being
apparently more interested in the subtleties of character involved. Occasionally
he sinks to sheer whimisical phantasy of the Barrie order. Still he is among the
very few to whom unreality is a vivid, living presence; and as such he is able
to put into his occasional fear-studies a keen potency which only a rare master
can achieve. His poem The Listeners restores the Gothic shudder to modern verse.

The weird short story has fared well of late, an important contributor being the
versatile E. F. Benson, whose The Man Who Went Too Far breathes whisperingly of
a house at the edge of a dark wood, and of Pan's hoof-mark on the breast of a
dead man. Mr. Benson's volume, Visible and Invisible, contains several stories
of singular power; notably Negotiam Perambulans, whose unfolding reveals an
abnormal monster from an ancient ecclesiastical panel which performs an act of
miraculous vengeance in a lonely village on the Cornish coast, and The
Horror-Horn, through which lopes a terrible half-human survival dwelling on
unvisited Alpine peaks. The Face, in another collection, is lethally potent, in
its relentless aura of doom. H. R. Wakefield, in his collections, They Return at
Evening and Others Who Return, manages now and then to achieve great heights of
horror despite a vitiating air of sophistication. The most notable stories are
The Red Lodge with its slimy acqueous evil, He Cometh and He Passeth By, And He
Shall Sing, The Cairn, Look Up There, Blind Man's Buff, and that bit of lurking
millennial horror, The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster. Mention has been made of
the weird work of H.G. Wells and A. Conan Doyle. The former, in The Ghost of
Fear, reaches a very high level while all the items in Thirty Strange Stories
have strong fantastic implications. Doyle now and then struck a powerfully
spectral note, as in The Captain of the Pole-Star, a tale of arctic ghostliness,
and Lot No. 249, wherein the reanimated mummy theme is used with more than
ordinary skill. Hugh Walpole, of the same family as the founder of Gothic
fiction, has sometimes approached the bizarre with much success, his short story
Mrs. Lunt carrying a very poignant shudder. John Metcalfe, in the collection
published as The Smoking Leg, attains now and then a rare pitch of potency, the
tale entitled The Bad Lands, containing graduations of horror that strongly
savour of genius. More whimiscial and inclined toward the amiable and innocuous
phantasy of Sir J. M. Barrie are the short tales of E.M. Forster, grouped under
the title of The Celestial Omnibus. Of these only one, dealing with a glimpse of
Pan and his aura of fright, may be said to hold the true element of cosmic
horror. Mrs. H.D. Everett, though adhering to very old and conventional models,
occasionally reaches singular heights of spiritual terror in her collection of
short stories, The Death Mask. L. P. Hartley is notable for his incisive and
extremely ghastly tale, A Visitor from Down Under, May Sinclair's Uncanny
Stories contain more of traditional "occultism" than of that creative treatment
of fear which marks mastery in this field, and are inclined to lay more stress
on human emotions and psychological delving than upon the stark phenomena of a
cosmos utterly unreal. It may be well to remark here that occult believers are
probably less effective than materialists in delineating the spectral and the
fantastic, since to them the phantom world is so commonplace a reality that they
tend to refer to it with less awe, remoteness, and impressiveness thin do those
who see in it an absolute and stupendous violation of the natural order.
Of rather uneven stylistic quality, but vast occasional power in its suggestion
of lurking worlds and beings behind the ordinary surface of life, is the work of
William Hope Hodgson, known today far less than it deserves to be. Despite a
tendency toward conventionally sentimental conceptions of the universe, and of
man's relation to it and to his fellows, Mr. Hodgson is perhaps second only to
Algernon Blackwood in his serious treatment of unreality. Few can equal him in
adumbrating the nearness of nameless forces and monstrous besieging entities
through casual hints and insignificant details, or in conveying feelings of the
spectral and the abnormal in connection with regions or buildings.
In The Boats of the Glen Carrig (1907) we are shown a variety of malign marvels
and accursed unknown lands as encountered by the survivors of a sunken ship. The
brooding menace in the earlier parts of the book is impossible to surpass,
though a letdown in the direction of ordinary romance and adventure occurs
toward the end. An inaccurate and pseudo-romantic attempt to reproduce
eighteenth-century prose detracts from the general effect, but the really
profound nautical erudition everywhere displayed is a compensating factor.
The House on the Borderland (1908) -- perhaps the greatest of all Mr. Hodgson's
works -- tells of a lonely and evilly regarded house in Ireland which forms a
focus for hideous otherworld forces and sustains a siege by blasphemous hybrid
anomalies from a hidden abyss below. The wanderings of the Narrator's spirit
through limitless light-years of cosmic space and Kalpas of eternity, and its
witnessing of the solar system's final destruction, constitute something almost
unique in standard literature. And everywhere there is manifest the author's
power to suggest vague, ambushed horrors in natural scenery. But for a few
touches of commonplace sentimentality this book would be a classic of the first
water.
The Ghost Pirates (1909), regarded by Mr. Hodgson as rounding out a trilogy with
the two previously mentioned works, is a powerful account of a doomed and
haunted ship on its last voyage, and of the terrible sea-devils (of quasi-human
aspect, and perhaps the spirits of bygone buccaneers) that besiege it and
finally drag it down to an unknown fate. With its command of maritime knowledge,
and its clever selection of hints and incidents suggestive of latent horrors in
nature, this book at times reaches enviable peaks of power.
The Night Land (1912) is a long-extended (538 pp.) tale of the earth's
infinitely remote future-billions of billions of years ahead, after the death of
the sun. It is told in a rather clumsy fashion, as the dreams of a man in the
seventeenth century, whose mind merges with its own future incarnation; and is
seriously marred by painful verboseness, repetitiousness, artificial and
nauseously sticky romantic sentimentality, and an attempt at archaic language
even more grotesque and absurd than that in Glen Carrig.
Allowing for all its faults, it is yet one of the most potent pieces of macabre
imagination ever written. The picture of a night-black, dead planet, with the
remains of the human race concentrated in a stupendously vast mental pyramid and
besieged by monstrous, hybrid, and altogether unknown forces of the darkness, is
something that no reader can ever forget: Shapes and entities of an altogether
non-human and inconceivable sort -- the prowlers of the black, man-forsaken, and
unexplored world outside the pyramid -- are suggested and partly described with
ineffable potency; while the night-land landscape with its chasms and slopes and
dying volcanism takes on an almost sentient terror beneath the author's touch.
Midway in the book the central figure ventures outside the pyramid on a quest
through death-haunted realms untrod by man for millions of years -- and in his
slow, minutely described, day-by-day progress over unthinkable leagues of
immemorial blackness there is a sense of cosmic alienage, breathless mystery,
and terrified expectancy unrivalled in the whole range of literature. The last
quarter of the book drags woefully, but fails to spoil the tremendous power of
the whole. Mr. Hodgson's later volume, Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder, consists of
several longish short stories published many years before in magazines. In
quality it falls conspicuously below the level of the other books. We here find
a more or less conventional stock figure of the "infallible detective" type --
the progeny of M. Dupin and Sherlock Holmes, and the close kin of Algernon
Blackwood's John Silence -- moving through scenes and events badly marred by an
atmosphere of professional "occultism." A few of the episodes, however, are of
undeniable power, and afford glimpses of the peculiar genius characteristic of
the author.
Naturally it is impossible in brief sketch to trace out all the classic modern
uses of the terror element. The ingredient must of necessity enter into all
work, both prose and verse, treating broadly of life; and we are therefore not
surprised to find a share in such writers as the poet Browning, whose Childe
Roland to the Dark Tower Came is instinct with hideous menace, or the novelist
Joseph Conrad, who often wrote of the dark secrets within the sea, and of the
dæmoniac driving power of Fate as influencing the lives of lonely and maniacally
resolute men. Its trail is one of infinite ramifications; but we must here
confine ourselves to its appearance in a relatively unmixed state, where it
determines and dominates the work of art containing it.
Somewhat separate from the main British stream is that current of weirdness in
Irish literature which came to the fore in the Celtic Renaissance of the later
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ghost and fairy lore have always been
of great prominence in Ireland, and for over a hundred years have been recorded
by a line of such faithful transcribers and translators as William Carleton, T.
Crofton Croker, Lady Wilde -- mother of Oscar Wilde -- Douglas Hyde, and W.B.
Yeats. Brought to notice by the modern movement, this body of myth has been
carefully collected and studied; and its salient features reproduced in the work
of later figures like Yeats, J. M. Synge, "A. E.," Lady Gregory, Padraic Colum,
James Stephens and their colleagues.
Whilst on the whole more whimsically fantastic than terrible, such folklore and
its consciously artistic counterparts contain much that falls truly within the
domain of cosmic horror. Tales of burials in sunken churches beneath haunted
lakes, accounts of death-heralding banshees and sinister changelings, ballads of
spectres and "the unholy creatures of the Raths" -- all these have their
poignant and definite shivers, and mark a strong and distinctive element in
weird literature. Despite homely grotesqueness and absolute naiveté, there is
genuine nightmare in the class of narrative represented by the yarn of Teig
O'Kane, who in punishment for his wild life was ridden all night by a hideous
corpse that demanded burial and drove him from churchyard to churchyard as the
dead rose up loathsomely in each one and refused to accommodate the newcomer
with a berth. Yeats, undoubtedly the greatest figure of the Irish revival if not
the greatest of all living poets, has accomplished notable things both in
original work and in the codification of old legends.
X. The Modern Masters
The best horror-tales of today, profiting by the long evolution of the type,
possess a naturalness, convincingness, artistic smoothness, and skilful
intensity of appeal quite beyond comparison with anything in the Gothic work of
a century or more ago. Technique, craftsmanship, experience, and psychological
knowledge have advanced tremendously with the passing years, so that much of the
older work seems naive and artificial; redeemed, when redeemed at all, only by a
genius which conquers heavy limitations. The tone of jaunty and inflated
romance, full of false motivation and investing every conceivable event with a
counterfeit significance and carelessly inclusive glamour, is now confined to
lighter and more whimiscal phases of supernatural writing. Serious weird stories
are either made realistically intense by dose consistency and perfect fidelity
to Nature except in the one supernatural direction which the author allows
himself, or else cast altogether in the realm of phantasy, with atmosphere
cunningly adapted to the visualisation of a delicately exotic world of unreality
beyond space and time, in which almost anything may happen if it but happen in
true accord with certain types of imagination and illusion normal to the
sensitive human brain. This, at least, is the dominant tendency; though of
course many great contemporary writers slip occasionally into some of the flashy
postures of immature romanticism or into bits of the equally empty and absurd
jargon of pseudo-scientific "occultism," now at one of its periodic high tides.
Of living creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few if any
can hope to equal the versatile Arthur Machen, author of some dozen tales long
and short, in which the elements of hidden horror and brooding fright attain an
almost incomparable substance and realistic acuteness. Mr. Machen, a general man
of letters and master of an exquisitely lyrical and expressive prose style, has
perhaps put more conscious effort into his picaresque Chronicles of Clemendy,
his refreshing essays, his vivid autobiographical volumes, his fresh and
spirited translations, and above all his memorable epic of the sensitive
æsthetic mind, The Hill of Dreams, in which the youthful hero responds to the
magic of that ancient Welsh environment which is the author's own, and lives a
dream-life in the Roman city of Isca Silurum, now shrunk to the relic-strown
village of Caerleon-on-Usk. But the fact remains that his powerful
horror-material of the nineties and earlier nineteen-hundreds stands alone in
its class, and marks a distinct epoch in the history of this literary form.
Mr. Machen, with an impressionable Celtic heritage linked to keen youthful
memories of the wild domed hills, archaic forests, and cryptical Roman ruins of
the Gwent countryside, has developed an imaginative life of rare beauty,
intensity, and historic background. He has absorbed the mediaeval mystery of
dark woods and ancient customs, and is a champion of the Middle Ages in all
things -- including the Catholic faith. He has yielded, likewise, to the spell
of the Britanno-Roman life which once surged over his native region; and finds
strange magic in the fortified camps, tessellated pavements, fragments of
statues, and kindred things which tell of the day when classicism reigned and
Latin was the language of the country. A young American poet, Frank Belknap
Long, has well summarised this dreamer's rich endowments and wizardry of
expression in the sonnet On Reading Arthur Machen:
  There is a glory in the autumn wood,
  The ancient lanes of England wind and climb
  Past wizard oaks and gorse and tangled thyme
  To where a fort of mighty empire stood:
  There is a glamour in the autumn sky;
  The reddened clouds are writhing in the glow
  Of some great fire, and there are glints below
  Of tawny yellow where the embers die.
  I wait, for he will show me, clear and cold,
  High-rais'd in splendour, sharp against the North,
  The Roman eagles, and through mists of gold
  The marching legions as they issue forth:
  I wait, for I would share with him again
  The ancient wisdom, and the ancient pain.
Of Mr. Machen's horror-tales the most famous is perhaps The Great God Pan (1894)
which tells of a singular and terrible experiment and its consequences. A young
woman, through surgery of the brain-cells, is made to see the vast and monstrous
deity of Nature, and becomes an idiot in consequence, dying less than a year
later. Years afterward a strange, ominous, and foreign-looking child named Helen
Vaughan is placed to board with a family in rural Wales, and haunts the woods in
unaccountable fashion. A little boy is thrown out of his mind at sight of
someone or something he spies with her, and a young girl comes to a terrible end
in similar fashion. All this mystery is strangely interwoven with the Roman
rural deities of the place, as sculptured in antique fragments. After another
lapse of years, a woman of strangely exotic beauty appears in society, drives
her husband to horror and death, causes an artist to paint unthinkable paintings
of Witches' Sabbaths, creates an epidemic of suicide among the men of her
acquaintance, and is finally discovered to be a frequenter of the lowest dens of
vice in London, where even the most callous degenerates are shocked at her
enormities. Through the clever comparing of notes on the part of those who have
had word of her at various stages of her career, this woman is discovered to be
the girl Helen Vaughan, who is the child -- by no mortal father -- of the young
woman on whom the brain experiment was made. She is a daughter of hideous Pan
himself, and at the last is put to death amidst horrible transmutations of form
involving changes of sex and a descent to the most primal manifestations of the
life-principle.
But the charm of the tale is in the telling. No one could begin to describe the
cumulative suspense and ultimate horror with which every paragraph abounds
without following fully the precise order in which Mr. Machen unfolds his
gradual hints and revelations. Melodrama is undeniably present, and coincidence
is stretched to a length which appears absurd upon analysis; but in the malign
witchery of the tale as a whole these trifles are forgotten, and the sensitive
reader reaches the end with only an appreciative shudder and a tendency to
repeat the words of one of the characters: "It is too incredible, too monstrous;
such things can never be in this quiet world.... Why, man, if such a case were
possible, our earth would be a nightmare."
Less famous and less complex in plot than The Great God Pan, but definitely
finer in atmosphere and general artistic value, is the curious and dimly
disquieting chronicle called The White People, whose central portion purports to
be the diary or notes of a little girl whose nurse has introduced her to some of
the forbidden magic and soul-blasting traditions of the noxious witch-cult --
the cult whose whispered lore was handed down long lines of peasantry throughout
Western Europe, and whose members sometimes stole forth at night, one by one, to
meet in black woods and lonely places for the revolting orgies of the Witches'
Sabbath. Mr. Machen's narrative, a triumph of skilful selectiveness and
restraint, accumulates enormous power as it flows on in a stream of innocent
childish prattle, introducing allusions to strange "nymphs," "Dols," "voolas,"
"white, green, and scarlet ceremonies," "Aklo letters," "Chian language," "Mao
games," and the like. The rites learned by the nurse from her witch grandmother
are taught to the child by the time she is three years old, and her artless
accounts of the dangerous secret revelations possess a lurking terror generously
mixed with pathos. Evil charms well known to anthropologists are described with
juvenile naiveté, and finally there comes a winter afternoon journey into the
old Welsh hills, performed under an imaginative spell which lends to the wild
scenery an added weirdness, strangeness, and suggestion of grotesque sentience.
The details of this journey are given with marvellous vividness, and form to the
keen critic a masterpiece of fantastic writing, with almost unlimited power in
the intimation of potent hideousness and cosmic aberration. At length the child
-- whose age is then thirteen -- comes upon a cryptic and banefully beautiful
thing in the midst of a dark and inaccessible wood. In the end horror overtakes
her in a manner deftly prefigured by an anecdote in the prologue, but she
poisons herself in time. Like the mother of Helen Vaughan in The Great God Pan,
she has seen that frightful deity. She is discovered dead in the dark wood
beside the cryptic thing she found; and that thing -- a whitely luminous statue
of Roman workmanship about which dire mediæval rumours had clustered -- is
affrightedly hammered into dust by the searchers.
In the episodic novel of The Three Impostors, a work whose, merit as a whole is
somewhat marred by an imitation of the jaunty Stevenson manner, occur certain
tales which perhaps represent the highwater mark of Machen's skill as a
terror-weaver. Here we find in its most artistic form a favourite weird
conception of the author's; the notion that beneath the mounds and rocks of the
wild Welsh hills dwell subterraneously that squat primitive race whose vestiges
gave rise to our common folk legends of fairies, elves, and the "little people,"
and whose acts are even now responsible for certain unexplained disappearances,
and occasional substitutions of strange dark "changelings" for normal infants.
This theme receives its finest treatment in the episode entitled The Novel Of
The Black Seal; where a professor, having discovered a singular identity between
certain characters scrawled on Welsh limestone rocks and those existing in a
prehistoric black seal from Babylon, sets out on a course of discovery which
leads him to unknown and terrible things. A queer passage in the ancient
geographer Solinus, a series of mysterious disappearances in the lonely reaches
of Wales, a strange idiot son born to a rural mother after a fright in which her
inmost faculties were shaken; all these things suggest to the professor a
hideous connection and a condition revolting to any friend and respecter of the
human race. He hires the idiot boy, who jabbers strangely at times in a
repulsive hissing voice, and is subject to odd epileptic seizures. Once, after
such a seizure in the professor's study by night, disquieting odours and
evidences of unnatural presences are found; and soon after that the professor
leaves a bulky document and goes into the weird hills with feverish expectancy
and strange terror in his heart. He never returns, but beside a fantastic stone
in the wild country are found his watch, money, and ring, done up with catgut in
a parchment bearing the same terrible characters as those on the black
Babylonish seal and the rock in the Welsh mountains.
The bulky document explains enough to bring up the most hideous vistas.
Professor Gregg, from the massed evidence presented by the Welsh disappearances,
the rock inscription, the accounts of ancient geographers, and the black seal,
has decided that a frightful race of dark primal beings of immemorial antiquity
and wide former diffusion still dwell beneath the hills of unfrequented Wales.
Further research has unriddled the message of the black seal, and proved that
the idiot boy, a son of some father more terrible than mankind, is the heir of
monstrous memories and possibilities. That strange night in the study the
professor invoked "the awful transmutation of the hills" by the aid of the black
seal, and aroused in the hybrid idiot the horrors of his shocking paternity. He
"saw his body swell and become distended as a bladder, while the face blackened.
. . ." And then the supreme effects of the invocation appeared, and Professor
Gregg knew the stark frenzy of cosmic panic in its darkest form. He knew the
abysmal gulfs of abnormality that he had opened, and went forth into the wild
hills prepared and resigned. He would meet the unthinkable "Little People" --
and his document ends with a rational observation: "If unhappily I do not return
from my journey, there is no need to conjure up here a picture of the awfulness
of my fate."
Also in The Three Imposters is the Novel of the White Powder, which approaches
the absolute culmination of loathsome fright. Francis Leicester, a young law
student nervously worn out by seclusion and overwork, has a prescription filled
by an old apothecary none too careful about the state of his drugs. The
substance, it later turns out, is an unusual salt which time and varying
temperature have accidentally changed to something very strange and terrible;
nothing less, in short, than the mediæval vinum sabbati, whose consumption at
the horrible orgies of the Witches' Sabbath gave rise to shocking
transformations and -- if injudiciously used -- to unutterable consequences.
Innocently enough, the youth regularly imbibes the powder in a glass of water
after meals; and at first seems substantially benefited. Gradually, however, his
improved spirits take the form of dissipation; he is absent from home a great
deal, and appears to have undergone a repellent psychological change. One day an
odd livid spot appears on his right hand, and he afterward returns to his
seclusion; finally keeping himself shut within his room and admitting none of
the household. The doctor calls for an interview, and departs in a palsy of
horror, saying that he can do no more in that house. Two weeks later the
patient's sister, walking outside, sees a monstrous thing at the sickroom
window; and servants report that food left at the locked door is no longer
touched. Summons at the door bring only a sound of shuffling and a demand in a
thick gurgling voice to be let alone. At last an awful happening is reported by
a shuddering housemaid. The ceiling of the room below Leicester's is stained
with a hideous black fluid, and a pool of viscid abomination has dripped to the
bed beneath. Dr. Haberden, now persuaded to return to the house, breaks down the
young man's door and strikes again and again with an iron bar at the blasphemous
semiliving thing he finds there. It is "a dark and putrid mass, seething with
corruption and hideous rottenness, neither liquid nor solid, but melting and
changing." Burning points like eyes shine out of its midst, and before it is
dispatched it tries to lift what might have been an arm. Soon afterward the
physician, unable to endure the memory of what he has beheld, dies at sea while
bound for a new life in America. Mr. Machen returns to the dæmoniac "Little
People" in The Red Hand and The Shining Pyramid; and in The Terror, a wartime
story, he treats with very potent mystery the effect of man's modern repudiation
of spirituality on the beasts of the world, which are thus led to question his
supremacy and to unite for his extermination. Of utmost delicacy, and passing
from mere horror into true mysticism, is The Great Return, a story of the Graal,
also a product of the war period. Too well known to need description here is the
tale of The Bowmen; which, taken for authentic narration, gave rise to the
widespread legend of the "Angels of Mons" -- ghosts of the old English archers
of Crecy and Agincourt who fought in 1914 beside the hard-pressed ranks of
England's glorious "Old Contemptibles."
Less intense than Mr. Machen in delineating the extremes of stark fear, yet
infinitely more closely wedded to the idea of an unreal world constantly
pressing upon ours is the inspired and prolific Algernon Blackwood, amidst whose
voluminous and uneven work may be found some of the finest spectral literature
of this or any age. Of the quality of Mr. Blackwood's genius there can be no
dispute; for no one has even approached the skill, seriousness, and minute
fidelity with which he records the overtones of strangeness in ordinary things
and experiences, or the preternatural insight with which he builds up detail by
detail the complete sensations and perceptions leading from reality into
supernormal life or vision. Without notable command of the poetic witchery of
mere words, he is the one absolute and unquestioned master of weird atmosphere;
and can evoke what amounts almost to a story from a simple fragment of
humourless psychological description. Above all others he understands how fully
some sensitive minds dwell forever on the borderland of dream, and how
relatively slight is the distinction betwixt those images formed from actual
objects and those excited by the play of the imagination.
Mr. Blackwood's lesser work is marred by several defects such as ethical
didacticism, occasional insipid whimsicality, the flatness of benignant
supernaturalism, and a too free use of the trade jargon of modem "occultism." A
fault of his more serious efforts is that diffuseness and long-windedness which
results from an excessively elaborate attempt, under the handicap of a somewhat
bald and journalistic style devoid of intrinsic magic, colour, and vitality, to
visualise precise sensations and nuances of uncanny suggestion. But in spite of
all this, the major products of Mr. Blackwood attain a genuinely classic level,
and evoke as does nothing else in literature in awed convinced sense of the
imminence of strange spiritual spheres of entities.
The well-nigh endless array of Mr. Blackwood's fiction includes both novels and
shorter tales, the latter sometimes independent and sometimes arrayed in series.
Foremost of all must be reckoned The Willows, in which the nameless presences on
a desolate Danube island are horribly felt and recognised by a pair of idle
voyagers. Here art and restraint in narrative reach their very highest
development, and an impression of lasting poignancy is produced without a,
single strained passage or a single false note. Another amazingly potent though
less artistically finished tale is The Wendigo, where we are confronted by
horrible evidences of a vast forest dæmon about which North Woods lumbermen
whisper at evening. The manner in which certain footprints tell certain
unbelievable things is really a marked triumph in craftsmanship. In An Episode
in a Lodging House we behold frightful presences summoned out of black space by
a sorcerer, and The Listener tells of the awful psychic residuum creeping about
an old house where a leper died. In the volume titled Incredible Adventures
occur some of the finest tales which the author has yet produced, leading the
fancy to wild rites on nocturnal hills, to secret and terrible aspects lurking
behind stolid scenes, and to unimaginable vaults of mystery below the sands and
pyramids of Egypt; all with a serious finesse and delicacy that convince where a
cruder or lighter treatment would merely amuse. Some of these accounts are
hardly stories at all, but rather studies in elusive impressions and
half-remembered snatches of dream. Plot is everywhere negligible, and atmosphere
reigns untrammelled.
John Silence -- Physician Extraordinary is a book of five related tales, through
which a single character runs his triumphant course. Marred only by traces of
the popular and conventional detective-story atmosphere -- for Dr. Silence is
one of those benevolent geniuses who employ their remarkable powers to aid
worthy fellow-men in difficulty -- these narratives contain some of the author's
best work, and produce an illusion at once emphatic and lasting. The opening
tale, A Psychical Invasion, relates what befell a sensitive author in a house
once the scene of dark deeds, and how a legion of fiends was exorcised. Ancient
Sorceries, perhaps the finest tale in the book, gives an almost hypnotically
vivid account of an old French town where once the unholy Sabbath was kept by
all the people in the form of cats. In The Nemesis of Fire a hideous elemental
is evoked by new-spilt blood, whilst Secret Worship tells of a German school
where Satanism held sway, and where long afterward an evil aura remained. The
Camp of the Dog is a werewolf tale, but is weakened by moralisation and
professional "occultism."
Too subtle, perhaps, for definite classification as horror-tales, yet possibly
more truly artistic in an absolute sense, are such delicate phantasies as Jimbo
or The Centaur. Mr. Blackwood achieves in these novels a close and palpitant
approach to the inmost substance of dream, and works enormous havoc with the
conventional barriers between reality and imagination.
Unexcelled in the sorcery of crystalline singing prose, and supreme in the
creation of a gorgeous and languorous world of iridescently exotic vision, is
Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Eighteenth Baron Dunsany, whose tales and
short plays form an almost unique element in our literature. Inventor of a new
mythology and weaver of surprising folklore, Lord Dunsany stands dedicated to a
strange world of fantastic beauty, and pledged to eternal warfare against the
coarseness and ugliness of diurnal reality. His point of view is the most truly
cosmic of any held in the literature of any period. As sensitive as Poe to
dramatic values and the significance of isolated words and details, and far
better equipped rhetorically through a simple lyric style based on the prose of
the King James Bible, this author draws with tremendous effectiveness on nearly
every body of myth and legend within the circle of European culture; producing a
composite or eclectic cycle of phantasy in which Eastern colour, Hellenic form,
Teutonic sombreness and Celtic wistfulness are so superbly blended that each
sustains and supplements the rest without sacrifice or perfect congruity and
homogeneity. In most cases Dunsany's lands are fabulous -- "beyond the East," or
"at the edge of the world." His system of original personal and place names,
with roots drawn from classical, Oriental, and other sources, is a marvel of
versatile inventiveness and poetic discrimination; as one may see from such
specimens as "Argimenes," "Bethmoora," "Poltarnees," "Camorak," "Iluriel," or
"Sardathrion."
Beauty rather than terror is the keynote of Dunsany's work. He loves the vivid
green of jade and of copper domes, and the delicate flush of sunset on the ivory
minarets of impossible dream-cities. Humour and irony, too, are often present to
impart a gentle cynicism and modify what might otherwise possess a naïve
intensity. Nevertheless, as is inevitable in a master of triumphant unreality,
there are occasional touches of cosmic fright which come well within the
authentic tradition. Dunsany loves to hint slyly and adroitly of monstrous
things and incredible dooms, as one hints in a fairy tale. In The Book of Wonder
we read of Hlo-Hlo, the gigantic spider-idol which does not always stay at home;
of what the Sphinx feared in the forest; of Slith, the thief who jumps over the
edge of the world after seeing a certain light lit and knowing who lit it; of
the anthropophagous; Gibbelins, who inhabit an evil tower and guard a treasure;
of the Gnoles, who live in the forest and from whom it is not well to steal; of
the City of Never, and the eyes that watch in the Under Pits; and of kindred
things of darkness. A Dreamer's Tales tells of the mystery that sent forth all
men from Bethmoora in the desert; of the vast gate of Perdondaris, that was
carved from a single piece of ivory; and of the voyage of poor old Bill, whose
captain cursed the crew and paid calls on nasty-looking isles new-risen from the
sea, with low thatched cottages having evil, obscure windows.
Many of Dunsany's short plays are replete with spectral fear. In The Gods of the
Mountain seven beggars impersonate the seven green idols on a distant hill, and
enjoy ease and honour in a city of worshippers until they hear that the real
idols are missing from their wonted seats. A very ungainly sight in the dusk is
reported to them -- "rock should not walk in the evening" -- and at last, as
they sit awaiting the arrival of a troop of dancers, they note that the
approaching footsteps are heavier than those of good dancers ought to be. Then
things ensue, and in the end the presumptuous blasphemers are turned to green
jade statues by the very walking statues whose sanctity they outraged. But mere
plot is the very least merit of this marvellously effective play. The incidents
and developments are those of a supreme master, so that the whole forms one of
the most important contributions of the present age not only to drama, but to
literature in general. A Night at an Inn tells of four thieves who have stolen
the emerald eye of Klesh, a monstrous Hindoo god. They lure to their room and
succeed in slaying the three priestly avengers who are on their track, but in
the night Mesh comes gropingly for his eye; and having gained it and departed,
calls each of the despoilers out into the darkness for an unnamed punishment. In
The Laughter of the Gods there is a doomed city at the jungle's edge, and a
ghostly lutanist heard only by those about to die (cf. Alice's spectral
harpsichord in Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables); whilst The Queen's
Enemies retells the anecdote of Herodotus in which a vengeful princess invites
her foes to a subterranean banquet and lets in the Nile to drown them. But no
amount of mere description can convey more than a fraction of Lord Dunsany's
pervasive charm. His prismatic cities and unheard of rites are touched with a
sureness which only mastery can engender, and we thrill with a sense of actual
participation in his secret mysteries. To the truly imaginative he is a talisman
and a key unlocking rich storehouses of dream and fragmentary memory; so that we
may think of him not only as a poet, but as one who makes each reader a poet as
well.
At the opposite pole of genius from Lord Dunsany, and gifted with an almost
diabolic power of calling horror by gentle steps from the midst of prosaic daily
life, is the scholarly Montague Rhodes James, Provost of Eton College, antiquary
of note, and recognized authority on mediæval manuscripts and cathedral history.
Dr. James, long fond of telling spectral tales at Christmastide, has become by
slow degrees a literary weird fictionist of the very first rank; and has
developed a distinctive style and method likely to serve as models for an
enduring line of disciples.
The art of Dr. James is by no means haphazard, and in the preface to one of his
collections he has formulated three very sound rules for macabre composition. A
ghost story, he believes, should have a familiar setting in the modem period, in
order to approach closely the reader's sphere of experience. Its spectral
phenomena, moreover, should be malevolent rather than beneficent; since fear is
the emotion primarily to be excited. And finally, the technical patois of
"occultism" or pseudo-science ought carefully to be avoided; lest the charm of
casual verisimilitude be smothered in unconvincing pedantry.
Dr. James, practicing what he preaches, approaches his themes in a light and
often conversational way. Creating the illusion of every-day events, he
introduces his abnormal phenomena cautiously and gradually; relieved at every
turn by touches of homely and prosaic detail, and sometimes spiced with a snatch
or two of antiquarian scholarship. Conscious of the dose relation between
present weirdness and accumulated tradition, he generally provides remote
historical antecedents for his incidents; thus being able to utilise very aptly
his exhaustive knowledge of the past, and his ready and convincing command of
archaic diction and colouring. A favourite scene for a James tale is some
centuried cathedral, which the author can describe with all the familiar
minuteness of a specialist in that field.
Sly humourous vignettes and bits of lifelike genre portraiture and
characterisation are often to be found in Dr. James's narratives, and serve in
his skilled hands to augment the general effect rather than to spoil it, as the
same qualities would tend to do with a lesser craftsman. In inventing a new type
of ghost, he has departed considerably from the conventional Gothic tradition;
for where the older stock ghosts were pale and stately, and apprehended chiefly
through the sense of sight, the average James ghost is lean, dwarfish, and hairy
-- a sluggish, hellish night -- abomination midway betwixt beast and man -- and
usually touched before it is seen. Sometimes the spectre is of still more
eccentric composition; a roll of flannel with spidery eyes, or an invisible
entity which moulds itself in bedding and shows a face of crumpled linen. Dr.
James has, it is clear, an intelligent and scientific knowledge of human nerves
and feelings; and knows just how to apportion statement, imagery, and subtle
suggestions in order to secure the best results with his readers. He is an
artist in incident and arrangement rather than in atmosphere, and reaches the
emotions more often through the intellect than directly. This method, of course,
with its occasional absences of sharp climax, has its drawbacks as well as its
advantages; and many will miss the thorough atmospheric tension which writers
like Machen are careful to build up with words and scenes. But only a few of the
tales are open to the charge of tameness. Generally the laconic unfolding of
abnormal events in adroit order is amply sufficient to produce the desired
effect of cumulative horror.
The short stories of Dr. James are contained in four small collections, entitled
respectively Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary,
A Thin Ghost and Others, and A Warning to the Curious. There is also a
delightful juvenile phantasy, The Five Jars, which has its spectral
adumbrations. Amidst this wealth of material it is hard to select a favourite or
especially typical tale, though each reader will no doubt have such preferences
as his temperament may determine.
Count Magnus is assuredly one of the best, forming as it does a veritable
Golconda of suspense and suggestion. Mr. Wraxall is an English traveller of the
middle nineteenth century, sojourning in Sweden to secure material for a book.
Becoming interested in the ancient family of De La Gardie, near the village of
Raback, he studies its records; and finds particular fascination in the builder
of the existing Manor-house, one Count Magnus, of whom strange and terrible
things are whispered. The Count, who flourished early in the seventeenth
century, was a stern landlord, and famous for his severity toward poachers and
delinquent tenants. His cruel punishments were bywords, and there were dark
rumours of influences which even survived his interment in the great mausoleum
he built near the church -- as in the case of the two peasants who hunted on his
preserves one night a century after his death. There were hideous screams in the
woods, and near the tomb of Count Magnus an unnatural laugh and the clang of a
great door. Next morning the priest found the two men; one a maniac, and the
other dead, with the flesh of his face sucked from the bones.
Mr. Wraxall hears all these tales, and stumbles on more guarded references to a
Black Pilgrimage once taken by the Count, a pilgrimage to Chorazin in Palestine,
one of the cities denounced by Our Lord in the Scriptures, and in which old
priests say that Antichrist is to be born. No one dares to hint just what that
Black Pilgrimage was, or what strange being or thing the Count brought back as a
companion. Meanwhile Mr. Wraxall is increasingly anxious to explore the
mausoleum of Count Magnus, and finally secures permission to do so, in the
company of a deacon. He finds several monuments and three copper sarcophagi, one
of which is the Count's. Round the edge of this latter are several bands of
engraved scenes, including a singular and hideous delineation of a pursuit --
the pursuit of a frantic man through a forest by a squat muffled figure with a
devil-fish's tentacle, directed by a tall cloaked man on a neighbouring hillock.
The sarcophagus has three massive steel padlocks, one of which is lying open on
the floor, reminding the traveller of a metallic clash he heard the day before
when passing the mausoleum and wishing idly that he might see Count Magnus.
His fascination augmented, and the key being accessible, Mr. Wraxall pays the
mausoleum a second and solitary visit and finds another padlock unfastened. The
next day, his last in Raback, he again goes alone to bid the long-dead Count
farewell. Once more queerly impelled to utter a whimsical wish for a meeting
with the buried nobleman, he now sees to his disquiet that only one of the
padlocks remains on the great sarcophagus. Even as he looks, that last lock
drops noisily to the floor, and there comes a sound as of creaking hinges. Then
the monstrous lid appears very slowly to rise, and Mr. Wraxall flees in panic
fear without refastening the door of the mausoleum.
During his return to England the traveller feels a curious uneasiness about his
fellow-passengers on the canal-boat which he employs for the earlier stages.
Cloaked figures make him nervous, and he has a sense of being watched and
followed. Of twenty-eight persons whom he counts, only twenty-six appear at
meals; and the missing two are always a tall cloaked man and a shorter muffled
figure. Completing his water travel at Harwich, Mr. Wraxall takes frankly to
flight in a closed carriage, but sees two cloaked figures at a crossroad.
Finally he lodges at a small house in a village and spends the time making
frantic notes. On the second morning he is found dead, and during the inquest
seven jurors faint at sight of the body. The house where he stayed is never
again inhabited, and upon its demolition half a century later his manuscript is
discovered in a forgotten cupboard.
In The Treasure of Abbot Thomas a British antiquary unriddles a cipher on some
Renaissance painted windows, and thereby discovers a centuried hoard of gold in
a niche halfway down a well in the courtyard of a German abbey. But the crafty
depositor had set a guardian over that treasure, and something in the black well
twines its arms around the searcher's neck in such a manner that the quest is
abandoned, and a clergyman sent for. Each night after that the discoverer feels
a stealthy presence and detects a horrible odour of mould outside the door of
his hotel room, till finally the clergyman makes a daylight replacement of the
stone at the mouth of the treasure-vault in the well -- out of which something
had come in the dark to avenge the disturbing of old Abbot Thomas's gold. As he
completes his work the cleric observes a curious toad-like carving on the
ancient well-head, with the Latin motto "Depositum custodi -- keep that which is
committed to thee."
Other notable James tales are The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral, in which a
grotesque carving comes curiously to life to avenge the secret and subtle murder
of an old Dean by his ambitious successor: Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You,
which tells of the horror summoned by a strange metal whistle found in a
mediævel church ruin; and An Episode of Cathedral History, where the dismantling
of a pulpit uncovers an archaic tomb whose lurking daemon spreads panic and
pestilence. Dr. James, for all his light touch, evokes fright and hideousness in
their most shocking form, and will certainly stand as one of the few really
creative masters in his darksome province.
For those who relish speculation regarding the future, the tale of supernatural
horror provides an interesting field. Combated by a mounting wave of plodding
realism, cynical flippancy, and sophisticated disillusionment, it is yet
encouraged by a parallel tide of growing mysticism, as developed both through
the fatigued reaction of "occultists" and religious fundamentalists against
materialistic discovery and through the stimulation of wonder and fancy by such
enlarged vistas and broken barriers as modern science has given us with its
intra-atomic chemistry, advancing astrophysics, doctrines of relativity, and
probings into biology and human thought. At the present moment the favouring
forces would appear to have somewhat of an advantage; since there is
unquestionably more cordiality shown toward weird writings than when, thirty
years ago, the best of Arthur Machen's work fell on the stony ground of the
smart and cocksure 'nineties. Ambrose Bierce, almost unknown in his own time,
has now reached something like general recognition.
Startling mutations, however, are not to be looked for in either direction. In
any case an approximate balance of tendencies will continue to exist; and while
we may justly expect a further subtilisation of technique, we have no reason to
think that the general position of the spectral in literature will be altered.
It is a narrow though essential branch of human expression, and will chiefly
appeal as always to a limited audience with keen special sensibilities. Whatever
universal masterpiece of tomorrow may be wrought from phantasm or terror will
owe its acceptance rather to a supreme workmanship than to a sympathetic theme.
Yet who shall declare the dark theme a positive handicap? Radiant with beauty,
the Cup of the Ptolemies was carven of onyx.
                                  The Alchemist
                                 By H.P. Lovecraft
                                      1908


High up, crowning the grassy summit of a swelling mount whose sides are wooded
near the base with the gnarled trees of the primeval forest stands the old
chateau of my ancestors. For centuries its lofty battlements have frowned down
upon the wild and rugged countryside about, serving as a home and stronghold for
the proud house whose honored line is older even than the moss-grown castle
walls. These ancient turrets, stained by the storms of generations and crumbling
under the slow yet mighty pressure of time, formed in the ages of feudalism one
of the most dreaded and formidable fortresses in all France. From its
machicolated parapets and mounted battlements Barons, Counts, and even Kings had
been defied, yet never had its spacious halls resounded to the footsteps of the
invader.
But since those glorious years, all is changed. A poverty but little above the
level of dire want, together with a pride of name that forbids its alleviation
by the pursuits of commercial life, have prevented the scions of our line from
maintaining their estates in pristine splendour; and the falling stones of the
walls, the overgrown vegetation in the parks, the dry and dusty moat, the
ill-paved courtyards, and toppling towers without, as well as the sagging
floors, the worm-eaten wainscots, and the faded tapestries within, all tell a
gloomy tale of fallen grandeur. As the ages passed, first one, then another of
the four great turrets were left to ruin, until at last but a single tower
housed the sadly reduced descendants of the once mighty lords of the estate.
It was in one of the vast and gloomy chambers of this remaining tower that I,
Antoine, last of the unhappy and accursed Counts de C-, first saw the light of
day, ninety long years ago. Within these walls and amongst the dark and shadowy
forests, the wild ravines and grottos of the hillside below, were spent the
first years of my troubled life. My parents I never knew. My father had been
killed at the age of thirty-two, a month before I was born, by the fall of a
stone somehow dislodged from one of the deserted parapets of the castle. And my
mother having died at my birth, my care and education devolved solely upon one
remaining servitor, an old and trusted man of considerable intelligence, whose
name I remember as Pierre. I was an only child and the lack of companionship
which this fact entailed upon me was augmented by the strange care exercised by
my aged guardian, in excluding me from the society of the peasant children whose
abodes were scattered here and there upon the plains that surround the base of
the hill. At that time, Pierre said that this restriction was imposed upon me
because my noble birth placed me above association with such plebeian company.
Now I know tht its real object was to keep from my ears the idle tales of the
dread curse upon our line that were nightly told and magnified by the simple
tenantry as they conversed in hushed accents in the glow of their cottage
hearths.
Thus isolated, and thrown upon my own resources, I spent the hours of my
childhood in poring over the ancient tomes that filled the shadow-haunted
library of the chateau, and in roaming without aim or purpose through the
perpetual dust of the spectral wood that clothes the side of the hill near its
foot. It was perhaps an effect of such surroundings that my mind early acquired
a shade of melancholy. Those studies and pursuits which partake of the dark and
occult in nature most strongly claimed my attention.
Of my own race I was permitted to learn singularly little, yet what small
knowledge of it I was able to gain seemed to depress me much. Perhaps it was at
first only the manifest reluctance of my old preceptor to discuss with me my
paternal ancestry that gave rise to the terror which I ever felt at the mention
of my great house, yet as I grew out of childhood, I was able. to piece together
disconnected fragments of discourse, let slip from the unwilling tongue which
had begun to falter in approaching senility, that had a sort of relation to a
certain circumstance which I had always deemed strange, but which now became
dimly terrible. The circumstance to which I allude is the early age at which all
the Counts of my line had met their end. Whilst I had hitherto considered this
but a natural attribute of a family of short-lived men, I afterward pondered
long upon these premature deaths, and began to connect them with the wanderings
of the old man, who often spoke of a curse which for centuries had prevented the
lives of the holders of my title from much exceeding the span of thirty-two
years. Upon my twenty-first birthday, the aged Pierre gave to me a family
document which he said had for many generations been handed down from father to
son, and continued by each possessor. Its contents were of the most startling
nature, and its perusal confirmed the gravest of my apprehensions. At this time,
my belief in the supernatural was firm and deep-seated, else I should have
dismissed with scorn the incredible narrative unfolded before my eyes.
The paper carried me back to the days of the thirteenth century, when the old
castle in which I sat had been a feared and impregnable fortress. It told of a
certain ancient man who had once dwelled on our estates, a person of no small
accomplishments, though little above the rank of peasant, by name, Michel,
usually designated by the surname of Mauvais, the Evil, on account of his
sinister reputation. He had studied beyond the custom of his kind, seeking such
things as the Philosopher's Stone or the Elixir of Eternal Life, and was reputed
wise in the terrible secrets of Black Magic and Alchemy. Michel Mauvais had one
son, named Charles, a youth as proficient as himself in the hidden arts, who had
therefore been called Le Sorcier, or the Wizard. This pair, shunned by all
honest folk, were suspected of the most hideous practices. Old Michel was said
to have burnt his wife alive as a sacrifice to the Devil, and the unaccountable
disappearance of many small peasant children was laid at the dreaded door of
these two. Yet through the dark natures of the father and son ran one redeeming
ray of humanity; the evil old man loved his offspring with fierce intensity,
whilst the youth had for his parent a more than filial affection.
One night the castle on the hill was thrown into the wildest confusion by the
vanishment of young Godfrey, son to Henri, the Count. A searching party, headed
by the frantic father, invaded the cottage of the sorcerers and there came upon
old Michel Mauvais, busy over a huge and violently boiling cauldron. Without
certain cause, in the ungoverned madness of fury and despair, the Count laid
hands on the aged wizard, and ere he released his murderous hold, his victim was
no more. Meanwhile, joyful servants were proclaiming the finding of young
Godfrey in a distant and unused chamber of the great edifice, telling too late
that poor Michel had been killed in vain. As the Count and his associates turned
away from the lowly abode of the alchemist, the form of Charles Le Sorcier
appeared through the trees. The excited chatter of the menials standing about
told him what had occurred, yet he seemed at first unmoved at his father's fate.
Then, slowly advancing to meet the Count, he pronounced in dull yet terrible
accents the curse that ever afterward haunted the house of C-.
`May ne'er a noble of they murd'rous line
Survive to reach a greater age than thine!'
spake he, when, suddenly leaping backwards into the black woods, he drew from
his tunic a phial of colourless liquid which he threw into the face of his
father's slayer as he disappeared behind the inky curtain of the night. The
Count died without utterance, and was buried the next day, but little more than
two and thirty years from the hour of his birth. No trace of the assassin could
be found, though relentless bands of peasants scoured the neighboring woods and
the meadowland around the hill.
Thus time and the want of a reminder dulled the memory of the curse in the minds
of the late Count's family, so that when Godfrey, innocent cause of the whole
tragedy and now bearing the title, was killed by an arrow whilst hunting at the
age of thirty-two, there were no thoughts save those of grief at his demise. But
when, years afterward, the next young Count, Robert by name, was found dead in a
nearby field of no apparent cause, the peasants told in whispers that their
seigneur had but lately passed his thirty-second birthday when surprised by
early death. Louis, son to Robert, was found drowned in the moat at the same
fateful age, and thus down through the centuries ran the ominous chronicle:
Henris, Roberts, Antoines, and Armands snatched from happy and virtuous lives
when little below the age of their unfortunate ancestor at his murder.
That I had left at most but eleven years of further existence was made certain
to me by the words which I had read. My life, previously held at small value,
now became dearer to me each day, as I delved deeper and deeper into the
mysteries of the hidden world of black magic. Isolated as I was, modern science
had produced no impression upon me, and I laboured as in the Middle Ages, as
wrapt as had been old Michel and young Charles themselves in the acquisition of
demonological and alchemical learning. Yet read as I might, in no manner could I
account for the strange curse upon my line. In unusually rational moments I
would even go so far as to seek a natural explanation, attributing the early
deaths of my ancestors to the sinister Charles Le Sorcier and his heirs; yet,
having found upon careful inquiry that there were no known descendants of the
alchemist, I would fall back to occult studies, and once more endeavor to find a
spell, that would release my house from its terrible burden. Upon one thing I
was absolutely resolved. I should never wed, for, since no other branch of my
family was in existence, I might thus end the curse with myself.
As I drew near the age of thirty, old Pierre was called to the land beyond.
Alone I buried him beneath the stones of the courtyard about which he had loved
to wander in life. Thus was I left to ponder on myself as the only human
creature within the great fortress, and in my utter solitude my mind began to
cease its vain protest against the impending doom, to become almost reconciled
to the fate which so many of my ancestors had met. Much of my time was now
occupied in the exploration of the ruined and abandoned halls and towers of the
old chateau, which in youth fear had caused me to shun, and some of which old
Pierre had once told me had not been trodden by human foot for over four
centuries. Strange and awesome were many of the objects I encountered.
Furniture, covered by the dust of ages and crumbling with the rot of long
dampness, met my eyes. Cobwebs in a profusion never before seen by me were spun
everywhere, and huge bats flapped their bony and uncanny wings on all sides of
the otherwise untenanted gloom.
Of my exact age, even down to days and hours, I kept a most careful record, for
each movement of the pendulum of the massive clock in the library told off so
much of my doomed existence. At length I approached that time which I had so
long viewed with apprehension. Since most of my ancestors had been seized some
little while before they reached the exact age of Count Henri at his end, I was
every moment on the watch for the coming of the unknown death. In what strange
form the curse should overtake me, I knew not; but I was resolved at least that
it should not find me a cowardly or a passive victim. With new vigour I applied
myself to my examination of the old chateau and its contents.
It was upon one of the longest of all my excursions of discovery in the deserted
portion of the castle, less than a week before that fatal hour which I felt must
mark the utmost limit of my stay on earth, beyond which I could have not even
the slightest hope of continuing to draw breath. that I came upon the
culminating event of my whole life. I had spent the better part of the morning
in climbing up and down half ruined staircases in one of the most dilapidated of
the ancient turrets. As the afternoon progressed, I sought the lower levels,
descending into what appeared to be either a mediaeval place of confinement, or
a more recently excavated storehouse for gunpowder. As I slowly traversed the
nitre-encrusted passageway at the foot of the last staircase, the paving became
very damp, and soon I saw by the light of my flickering torch that a blank,
water-stained wall impeded my journey. Turning to retrace my steps, my eye fell
upon a small trapdoor with a ring, which lay directly beneath my foot. Pausing,
I succeeded with difficulty in raising it, whereupon there was revealed a black
aperture, exhaling noxious fumes which caused my torch to sputter, and
disclosing in the unsteady glare the top of a flight of stone steps.
As soon as the torch which I lowered into the repellent depths burned freely and
steadily, I commenced my descent. The steps were many, and led to a narrow
stone-flagged passage which I knew must be far underground. This passage proved
of great length, and terminated in a massive oaken door, dripping with the
moisture of the place, and stoutly resisting all my attempts to open it. Ceasing
after a time my efforts in this direction, I had proceeded back some distance
toward the steps when there suddenly fell to my experience one of the most
profound and maddening shocks capable of reception by the human mind. Without
warning, I heard the heavy door behind me creak slowly open upon its rusted
hinges. My immediate sensations were incapable of analysis. To be confronted in
a place as thoroughly deserted as I had deemed the old castle with evidence of
the presence of man or spirit produced in my brain a horror of the most acute
description. When at last I turned and faced the seat of the sound, my eyes must
have started from their orbits at the sight that they beheld.
There in the ancient Gothic doorway stood a human figure. It was that of a man
clad in a skull-cap and long mediaeval tunic of dark colour. His long hair and
flowing beard were of a terrible and intense black hue, and of incredible
profusion. His forehead, high beyond the usual dimensions; his cheeks,
deep-sunken and heavily lined with wrinkles; and his hands, long, claw-like, and
gnarled, were of such a deadly marble-like whiteness as I have never elsewhere
seen in man. His figure, lean to the proportions of a skeleton, was strangely
bent and almost lost within the voluminous folds of his peculiar garment. But
strangest of all were his eyes, twin caves of abysmal blackness, profound in
expression of understanding, yet inhuman in degree of wickedness. These were now
fixed upon me, piercing my soul with their hatred, and rooting me to the spot
whereon I stood.
At last the figure spoke in a rumbling voice that chilled me through with its
dull hollowness and latent malevolence. The language in which the discourse was
clothed was that debased form of Latin in use amongst the more learned men of
the Middle Ages, and made familiar to me by my prolonged researches into the
works of the old alchemists and demonologists. The apparition spoke of the curse
which had hovered over my house, told me of my coming end, dwelt on the wrong
perpetrated by my ancestor against old Michel Mauvais, and gloated over the
revenge of Charles Le Sorcier. He told how young Charles has escaped into the
night, returning in after years to kill Godfrey the heir with an arrow just as
he approached the age which had been his father's at his assassination; how he
had secretly returned to the estate and established himself, unknown, in the
even then deserted subterranean chamber whose doorway now framed the hideous
narrator, how he had seized Robert, son of Godfrey, in a field, forced poison
down his throat, and left him to die at the age of thirty-two, thus maintaing
the foul provisions of his vengeful curse. At this point I was left to imagine
the solution of the greatest mystery of all, how the curse had been fulfilled
since that time when Charles Le Sorcier must in the course of nature have died,
for the man digressed into an account of the deep alchemical studies of the two
wizards, father and son, speaking most particularly of the researches of Charles
Le Sorcier concerning the elixir which should grant to him who partook of it
eternal life and youth.
His enthusiasm had seemed for the moment to remove from his terrible eyes the
black malevolence that had first so haunted me, but suddenly the fiendish glare
returned and, with a shocking sound like the hissing of a serpent, the stranger
raised a glass phial with the evident intent of ending my life as had Charles Le
Sorcier, six hundred years before, ended that of my ancestor. Prompted by some
preserving instinct of self-defense, I broke through the spell that had hitherto
held me immovable, and flung my now dying torch at the creature who menaced my
existence. I heard the phial break harmlessly against the stones of the passage
as the tunic of the strange man caught fire and lit the horrid scene with a
ghastly radiance. The shriek of fright and impotent malice emitted by the
would-be assassin proved too much for my already shaken nerves, and I fell prone
upon the slimy floor in a total faint.
When at last my senses returned, all was frightfully dark, and my mind,
remembering what had occurred, shrank from the idea of beholding any more; yet
curiosity over-mastered all. Who, I asked myself, was this man of evil, and how
came he within the castle walls? Why should he seek to avenge the death of
Michel Mauvais, and how bad the curse been carried on through all the long
centuries since the time of Charles Le Sorcier? The dread of years was lifted
from my shoulder, for I knew that he whom I had felled was the source of all my
danger from the curse; and now that I was free, I burned with the desire to
learn more of the sinister thing which had haunted my line for centuries, and
made of my own youth one long-continued nightmare. Determined upon further
exploration, I felt in my pockets for flint and steel, and lit the unused torch
which I had with me.
First of all, new light revealed the distorted and blackened form of the
mysterious stranger. The hideous eyes were now closed. Disliking the sight, I
turned away and entered the chamber beyond the Gothic door. Here I found what
seemed much like an alchemist's laboratory. In one corner was an immense pile of
shining yellow metal that sparkled gorgeously in the light of the torch. It may
have been gold, but I did not pause to examine it, for I was strangely affected
by that which I had undergone. At the farther end of the apartment was an
opening leading out into one of the many wild ravines of the dark hillside
forest. Filled with wonder, yet now realizing how the man had obtained access to
the chauteau, I proceeded to return. I had intended to pass by the remains of
the stranger with averted face but, as I approached the body, I seemed to hear
emanating from it a faint sound,. as though life were not yet wholly extinct.
Aghast, I turned to examine the charred and shrivelled figure on the floor.
Then all at once the horrible eyes, blacker even than the seared face in which
they were set, opened wide with an expression which I was unable to interpret.
The cracked lips tried to frame words which I could not well understand. Once I
caught the name of Charles Le Sorcier, and again I fancied that the words
`years' and `curse' issued from the twisted mouth. Still I was at a loss to
gather the purport of his disconnnected speech. At my evident ignorance of his
meaning, the pitchy eyes once more flashed malevolently at me, until, helpless
as I saw my opponent to be, I trembled as I watched him.
Suddenly the wretch, animated with his last burst of strength, raised his
piteous head from the damp and sunken pavement. Then, as I remained, paralyzed
with fear, he found his voice and in his dying breath screamed forth those words
which have ever afterward haunted my days and nights. `Fool!' he shrieked, `Can
you not guess my secret? Have you no brain whereby you may recognize the will
which has through six long centuries fulfilled the dreadful curse upon the
house? Have I not told you of the great elixir of eternal life? Know you not how
the secret of Alchemy was solved? I tell you, it is I! I! I! that have lived for
six hundred years to maintain my revenge, for I am Charles Le Sorcier!'
                                The Beast in the Cave
                                 By H.P. Lovecraft
                                   April 21, 1905


The horrible conclusion which had been gradually obtruding itself upon my
confused and reluctant mind was now an awful certainty. I was lost, completely,
hopelessly lost in the vast and labyrinthine recess of the Mammoth Cave. Turn as
I might, In no direction could my straining vision seize on any object capable
of serving as a guidepost to set me on the outward path. That nevermore should I
behold the blessed light of day, or scan the pleasant bills and dales of the
beautiful world outside, my reason could no longer entertain the slightest
unbelief. Hope had departed. Yet, indoctrinated as I was by a life of
philosophical study, I derived no small measure of satisfaction from my
unimpassioned demeanour; for although I had frequently read of the wild frenzies
into which were thrown the victims of similar situation, I experienced none of
these, but stood quiet as soon as I clearly realised the loss of my bearings.
Nor did the thought that I had probably wandered beyond the utmost limits of an
ordinary search cause me to abandon my composure even for a moment. If I must
die, I reflected, then was this terrible yet majestic cavern as welcome a
sepulchre as that which any churchyard might afford, a conception which carried
with it more of tranquillity than of despair.
Starving would prove my ultimate fate; of this I was certain. Some, I knew, had
gone mad under circumstances such as these, but I felt that this end would not
be mine. My disaster was the result of no fault save my own, since unknown to
the guide I had separated myself from the regular party of sightseers; and,
wandering for over an hour in forbidden avenues of the cave, had found myself
unable to retrace the devious windings which I had pursued since forsaking my
companions.
Already my torch had begun to expire; soon I would be enveloped by the total and
almost palpable blackness of the bowels of the earth. As I stood in the waning,
unsteady light, I idly wondered over the exact circumstances of my coming end. I
remembered the accounts which I had heard of the colony of consumptives, who,
taking their residence in this gigantic grotto to find health from the
apparently salubrious air of the underground world, with its steady, uniform
temperature, pure air, and peaceful quiet, had found, instead, death in strange
and ghastly form. I had seen the sad remains of their ill-made cottages as I
passed them by with the party, and had wondered what unnatural influence a long
sojourn in this immense and silent cavern would exert upon one as healthy and
vigorous as I. Now, I grimly told myself, my opportunity for settling this point
had arrived, provided that want of food should not bring me too speedy a
departure from this life.
As the last fitful rays of my torch faded into obscurity, I resolved to leave no
stone unturned, no possible means of escape neglected; so, summoning all the
powers possessed by my lungs, I set up a series of loud shoutings, in the vain
hope of attracting the attention of the guide by my clamour. Yet, as I called, I
believed in my heart that my cries were to no purpose, and that my voice,
magnified and reflected by the numberless ramparts of the black maze about me,
fell upon no ears save my own.
All at once, however, my attention was fixed with a start as I fancied that I
heard the sound of soft approaching steps on the rocky floor of the cavern.
Was my deliverance about to be accomplished so soon? Had, then, all my horrible
apprehensions been for naught, and was the guide, having marked my unwarranted
absence from the party, following my course and seeking me out in this limestone
labyrinth? Whilst these joyful queries arose in my brain, I was on the point of
renewing my cries, in order that my discovery might come the sooner, when in an
instant my delight was turned to horror as I listened; for my ever acute ear,
now sharpened in even greater degree by the complete silence of the cave, bore
to my benumbed understanding the unexpected and dreadful knowledge that these
footfalls were not like those of any mortal man. In the unearthly stillness of
this subterranean region, the tread of the booted guide would have sounded like
a series of sharp and incisive blows. These impacts were soft, and stealthy, as
of the paws of some feline. Besides, when I listened carefully, I seemed to
trace the falls of four instead of two feet.
I was now convinced that I had by my own cries aroused and attracted some wild
beast, perhaps a mountain lion which had accidentally strayed within the cave.
Perhaps, I considered, the Almighty had chosen for me a swifter and more
merciful death than that of hunger; yet the instinct of self-preservation, never
wholly dormant, was stirred in my breast, and though escape from the on-coming
peril might but spare me for a sterner and more lingering end, I determined
nevertheless to part with my life at as high a price as I could command. Strange
as it may seem, my mind conceived of no intent on the part of the visitor save
that of hostility. Accordingly, I became very quiet, In the hope that the
unknown beast would, In the absence of a guiding sound, lose its direction as
had I, and thus pass me by. But this hope was not destined for realisation, for
the strange footfalls steadily advanced, the animal evidently having obtained my
scent, which in an atmosphere so absolutely free from all distracting influences
as is that of the cave, could doubtless be followed at great distance.
Seeing therefore that I must be armed for defense against an uncanny and unseen
attack in the dark, I groped about me the largest of the fragments of rock which
were strewn upon all parts of the floor of the cavern In the vicinity, and
grasping one in each hand for immediate use, awaited with resignation the
inevitable result. Meanwhile the hideous pattering of the paws drew near.
Certainly, the conduct of the creature was exceedingly strange. Most of the
time, the tread seemed to be that of a quadruped, walking with a singular lack
of unison betwixt hind and fore feet, yet at brief and infrequent intervals I
fancied that but two feet were engaged in the process of locomotion. I wondered
what species of animal was to confront me; it must, I thought, be some
unfortunate beast who had paid for its curiosity to investigate one of the
entrances of the fearful grotto with a life-long confinement in its interminable
recesses. It doubtless obtained as food the eyeless fish, bats and rats of the
cave, as well as some of the ordinary fish that are wafted in at every freshet
of Green River, which communicates in some occult manner with the waters of the
cave. I occupied my terrible vigil with grotesque conjectures of what alteration
cave life might have wrought In the physical structure of the beast, remembering
the awful appearances ascribed by local tradition to the consumptives who had
died after long residence in the cave. Then I remembered with a start that, even
should I succeed in felling my antagonist, I should never behold its form, as my
torch had long since been extinct, and I was entirely unprovided with matches.
The tension on my brain now became frightful. My disordered fancy conjured up
hideous and fearsome shapes from the sinister darkness that surrounded me, and
that actually seemed to press upon my body. Nearer, nearer, the dreadful
footfalls approached. It seemed that I must give vent to a piercing scream, yet
had I been sufficiently irresolute to attempt such a thing, my voice could
scarce have responded. I was petrified, rooted to the spot. I doubted if my
right arm would allow me to hurl its missile at the oncoming thing when the
crucial moment should arrive. Now the steady pat, pat, of the steps was close at
hand; now very close. I could hear the laboured breathing of the animal, and
terror-struck as I was, I realised that it must have come from a considerable
distance, and was correspondingly fatigued. Suddenly the spell broke. My right
hand, guided by my ever trustworthy sense of hearing, threw with full force the
sharp-angled bit of limestone which it contained, toward that point in the
darkness from which emanated the breathing and pattering, and, wonderful to
relate, it nearly reached its goal, for I heard the thing jump landing at a
distance away, where it seemed to pause.
Having readjusted my aim, I discharged my second missile, this time moat
effectively, for with a flood of joy I listened as the creature fell in what
sounded like a complete collapse and evidently remained prone and unmoving.
Almost overpowered by the great relief which rushed over me, I reeled back
against the wall. The breathing continued, in heavy, gasping inhalation. and
expirations, whence I realised that I had no more than wounded the creature. And
now all desire to examine the thing ceased. At last something allied to
groundless, superstitious fear had entered my brain, and I did not approach the
body, nor did I continue to cast stones at it in order to complete the
extinction of its life. Instead, I ran at full speed in what was, as nearly as I
could estimate in my frenzied condition, the direction from which I had come.
Suddenly I heard a sound or rather, a regular succession of sounds. In another
Instant they had resolved themselves into a series of sharp, metallic clicks.
This time there was no doubt. It was the guide. And then I shouted, yelled,
screamed, even shrieked with joy as I beheld in the vaulted arches above the
faint and glimmering effulgence which I knew to be the reflected light of an
approaching torch. I ran to meet the flare, and before I could completely
understand what had occurred, was lying upon the ground at the feet of the
guide, embracing his boots and gibbering. despite my boasted reserve, in a most
meaningless and idiotic manner, pouring out my terrible story, and at the same
time overwhelming my auditor with protestations of gratitude. At length, I awoke
to something like my normal consciousness. The guide had noted my absence upon
the arrival of the party at the entrance of the cave, and had, from his own
intuitive sense of direction, proceeded to make a thorough canvass of
by-passages just ahead of where he had last spoken to me, locating my
whereabouts after a quest of about four hours.
By the time he had related this to me, I, emboldened by his torch and his
company, began to reflect upon the strange beast which I had wounded but a short
distance back in the darkness, and suggested that we ascertain, by the
flashlight's aid, what manner of creature was my victim. Accordingly I retraced
my steps, this time with a courage born of companionship, to the scene of my
terrible experience. Soon we descried a white object upon the floor, an object
whiter even than the gleaming limestone itself. Cautiously advancing, we gave
vent to a simultaneous ejaculation of wonderment, for of all the unnatural
monsters either of us had in our lifetimes beheld, this was in surpassing degree
the strangest. It appeared to be an anthropoid ape of large proportions,
escaped, perhaps, from some itinerant menagerie. Its hair was snow-white, a
thing due no doubt to the bleaching action of a long existence within the inky
confines of the cave, but it was also surprisingly thin, being indeed largely
absent save on the head, where it was of such length and abundance that it fell
over the shoulders in considerable profusion. The face was turned away from us,
as the creature lay almost directly upon it. The inclination of the limbs was
very singular, explaining, however, the alternation in their use which I bad
before noted, whereby the beast used sometimes all four, and on other occasions
but two for its progress. From the tips of the fingers or toes, long rat-like
claws extended. The hands or feet were not prehensile, a fact that I ascribed to
that long residence in the cave which, as I before mentioned, seemed evident
from the all-pervading and almost unearthly whiteness so characteristic of the
whole anatomy. No tail seemed to be present.
The respiration had now grown very feeble, and the guide had drawn his pistol
with the evident intent of despatching the creature, when a sudden sound emitted
by the latter caused the weapon to fall unused. The sound was of a nature
difficult to describe. It was not like the normal note of any known species of
simian, and I wonder if this unnatural quality were not the result of a long
continued and complete silence, broken by the sensations produced by the advent
of the light, a thing which the beast could not have seen since its first
entrance into the cave. The sound, which I might feebly attempt to classify as a
kind of deep-tone chattering, was faintly continued.
All at once a fleeting spasm of energy seemed to pass through the frame of the
beast. The paws went through a convulsive motion, and the limbs contracted. With
a jerk, the white body rolled over so that its face was turned in our direction.
For a moment I was so struck with horror at the eyes thus revealed that I noted
nothing else. They were black, those eyes, deep jetty black, in hideous contrast
to the snow-white hair and flesh. Like those of other cave denizens, they were
deeply sunken in their orbits, and were entirely destitute of iris. As I looked
more closely, I saw that they were set in a face less prognathous than that of
the average ape, and infinitely less hairy. The nose was quite distinct. As we
gazed upon the uncanny sight presented to our vision, the thick lips opened, and
several sounds issued from them, after which the thing relaxed in death.
The guide clutched my coatsleeve and trembled so violently that the light shook
fitfully, casting weird moving shadows on the walls.
I made no motion, but stood rigidly still, my horrified eyes fixed upon the
floor ahead.
The fear left, and wonder, awe, compassion, and reverence succeeded in its
place, for the sounds uttered by the stricken figure that lay stretched out on
the limestone had told us the awesome truth. The creature I had killed, the
strange beast of the unfathomed cave, was, or had at one time been a MAN!!!
                                     The Call of Cthulhu
                                      By H.P. Lovecraft

       Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a
       survival... a survival of a hugely remote period when...
       consciousness was manifest, perhaps, in shapes and forms
       long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing
       humanity... forms of which poetry and legend alone have
       caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters,
       mythical beings of all sorts and kinds...
                                              - ALGERNON BLACKWOOD


                               I. THE HORROR IN CLAY

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability
of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We
live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas
of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have
hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together
of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas
of reality and of our frightful position therein, that we shall
either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly
light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of
the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form
transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survival in
terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a
bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the
single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I
think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse,
like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an
accidental piecing together of separated things - in this case
an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I
hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out;
certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so
hideous a chain. I think that the professor, too, intended to
keep silent regarding the part he knew, and that he would
have destroyed his notes had not sudden death seized him.

My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 1926-7
with the death of my great-uncle, George Gammell Angell,
Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages in Brown University
Providence, Rhode Island. Professor Angell was widely
known as an authority on ancient inscriptions, and had
frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent
museums so that his passing at the age of ninety-two may be
recalled by many. Locally, interest was intensified by the
obscurity of the cause of death. The professor had been
stricken whilst returning from the Newport boat; falling
suddenly, as witnesses said, after having been jostled by a
nautical-looking negro who had come from one of the queer
dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short
cut from the waterfront to the deceased's home in Williams
Street. Physicians were unable to find any visible disorder,
but concluded after perplexed debate that some obscure
lesion of the heart, induced by the brisk ascent of so steep a
hill by so elderly a man, was responsible for the end. At the
time I saw no reason to dissent from this dictum, but latterly
I am inclined to wonder - and more than wonder.

As my great-uncle's heir and executor, for he died a
childless widower, I was expected to go over his papers with
some thoroughness; and for that purpose moved his entire set
of files and boxes to my quarters in Boston. Much of the
material which I correlated will be later published by the
American Archaeological Society, but there was one box
which I found exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much
averse from showing to other eyes. It had been locked, and I
did not find the key till it occurred to me to examine the
personal ring which the professor carried always in his
pocket. Then, indeed, I succeeded in opening it, but when I
did so seemed only to be confronted by a greater and more
closely locked barrier. For what could be the meaning of the
queer clay bas-relief and the disjointed jottings, ramblings
and cuttings which I found? Had my uncle, in his latter
years, become credulous of the most superficial impostures?
I resolved to search out the eccentric sculptor responsible for
this apparent disturbance of an old man's peace of mind.
The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch
thick and about five by six inches in area; obviously of
modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from modern
in atmosphere and suggestion; for, although the vagaries of
cubism and futurism are many and wild, they do not often
reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric
writing. And writing of some kind the bulk of these designs
seemed certainly to be; though my memory, despite much
familiarity with the papers and collections of my uncle, failed
in any way to identify this particular species, or even hint at
its remotest affiliations.

Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of
evidently pictorial intent, though its impressionistic execution
forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be
a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form
which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my
somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous
pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I
shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy,
tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with
rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole
which made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure
was a vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural
background

The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a
stack of press cuttings, in Professor Angell's most recent
hand; and made no pretension to literary style. What seemed
to be the main document was headed 'CTHULHU CULT'
in characters painstakingly printed to avoid the erroneous
reading of a word so unheard-of. This manuscript was
divided into two sections, the first of which was headed
'1925 - Dream and Dream Work of H. A. Wilcox, 7 Thomas
St., Providence, R. I.,' and the second; 'Narrative of Inspector
John R. Legrasse, 121 Bienville St., New Orleans,
La., at 1908 A. A, S. Mtg. - Notes on Same, & Prof. Webb's
Acct.' The other manuscript papers were all brief notes,
some of them accounts of the queer dreams of different
persons, some of them citations from theosophical books and
magazines (notably W. Scott-Elliott's Atlantis and the Lost
Lemuria), and the rest comments on long-surviving secret
societies and hidden cults, with references to passages in
such mythological and anthropological source-books as
Frazer's Golden Bough and Miss Murray's Witch-Cult in
Western Europe. The cuttings largely alluded to outré mental
illness and outbreaks of group folly or mania in the spring of
1925.

The first half of the principal manuscript told a very
peculiar tale. It appears that on 1 March 1925, a thin, dark
young man of neurotic and excited aspect had called upon
Professor Angell bearing the singular clay bas-relief, which
was then exceedingly damp and fresh. His card bore the
name of Henry Anthony Wilcox, and my uncle had recognized
him as the youngest son of an excellent family slightly
known to him, who had latterly been studying sculpture at
the Rhode Island School of Design and living alone at the
Fleur-de-Lys Building near that institution. Wilcox was a,
precocious youth of known genius but great eccentricity, and
had from childhood excited attention through the strange
stories and odd dreams he was in the habit of relating. He
called himself 'psychically hypersensitive,' but the staid folk
of the ancient commercial city dismissed him as merely
'queer'. Never mingling much with his kind, he had dropped
gradually from social visibility, and was now known only to a
small group of aesthetes from other towns. Even the Providence
Art Club, anxious to preserve its conservatism, had
found him quite hopeless.

On the occasion of the visit, ran the professor's manuscript,
the sculptor abruptly asked for the benefit of his host's
archaeological knowledge in identifying the hieroglyphics on
the bas-relief. He spoke in a dreamy, stilted manner which
suggested pose and alienated sympathy; and my uncle
showed some sharpness in replying, for the conspicuous
freshness of the tablet implied kinship with anything but
archaeology. Young Wilcox's rejoinder, which impressed my
uncle enough to make him recall and record it verbatim, was
of a fantastically poetic cast which must have typified his
whole conversation, and which I have since found highly
characteristic of him. He said, 'It is new, indeed, for I made it
last night in a dream of strange cities; and dreams are older
than brooding Tyre or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-
girdled Babylon.'

It was then that he began that rambling tale which
suddenly played upon a sleeping memory and won the
fevered interest of my uncle. There had been a slight earth-
quake tremor the night before, the most considerable felt in
New England for some years; and Wilcox's imaginations had
been keenly affected. Upon retiring, he had had an
unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of Titan blocks
and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and
sinister with latent horror. Hieroglyphics had covered the
walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point below
had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation
which only fancy could transmute into sound, but which he
attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble
of letters 'Cthulhu fhtagn'

This verbal jumble was the key to the recollection which
excited and disturbed Professor Angell. He questioned the
sculptor with scientific minuteness; and studied with almost
frantic intensity the bas-relief on which the youth had found
himself working, chilled and clad only in his nightclothes,
when waking had stolen bewilderingly over him. My uncle
blamed his old age, Wilcox afterward said, for his slowness
in recognizing both hieroglyphics and pictorial design.
Many of his questions seemed highly out of place to his
visitor especially those which tried to connect the latter with
strange cults or societies; and Wilcox could not understand
the repeated promises of silence which he was offered in
exchange for an admission of membership in some widespread
mystical or paganly religious body. When Professor
Angell became convinced that the sculptor was indeed
ignorant of any cult or system of cryptic lore, he besieged his
visitor with demands for future reports of dreams. This bore
regular fruit, for after the first interview the manuscript
records daily calls of the young man, during which he related
startling fragments of nocturnal imagery whose burden was
always some terrible Cyclopean vista of dark and dripping
stone, with a subterrene voice or intelligence shouting
monotonously in enigmatical sense-impacts uninscribable
save gibberish. The two sounds most frequently repeated
are those rendered by the letters 'Cthulhu' and 'R'lyeh.'

On 23 March the manuscript continued, Wilcox failed to
appear; and inquiries at his quarters revealed that he had
been stricken with an obscure sort of fever and taken to the
home of his family in Waterman Street. He had cried out in
the night, arousing several other artists in the building, and
had manifested since then only alternations of unconsciousness
and delirium. My uncle at once telephoned the
family, and from that time forward kept close watch of the
case; calling often at the Thayer Street office of Dr Tobey,
whom he learned to be in charge. The youth's febrile mind,
apparently, was dwelling on strange things; and the doctor
shuddered now and then as he spoke of them. They included
not only a repetition of what he had formerly dreamed, but
touched wildly on a gigantic thing 'miles high' which walked
or lumbered about. He at no time fully described this object
but occasional frantic words, as repeated by Dr Tobey,
convinced the professor that it must be identical with the
nameless monstrosity he had sought to depict in his dream
-sculpture. Reference to this object, the doctor added, was
invariably a prelude to the young man's subsidence into
lethargy. His temperature, oddly enough, was not greatly
above normal; but the whole condition was otherwise such as
to suggest true fever rather than mental disorder.

On 2 April at about 3 P.M. every trace of Wilcox's malady
suddenly ceased. He sat upright in bed, astonished to find
himself at home and completely ignorant of what had
happened in dream or reality since the night of 22 March.
Pronounced well by his physician, he returned to his
quarters in three days; but to Professor Angell he was of no
further assistance. All traces of strange dreaming had
vanished with his recovery, and my uncle kept no record of
his night-thoughts after a week of pointless and irrelevant
accounts of thoroughly usual visions.

Here the first part of the manuscript ended, but references
to certain of the scattered notes gave me much material for
thought - so much, in fact, that only the ingrained
scepticism then forming my philosophy can account for my
continued distrust of the artist. The notes in question were
those descriptive of the dreams of various persons covering
the same period as that in which young Wilcox had had his
strange visitations. My uncle, it seems, had quickly
instituted a prodigiously far-flung body of inquiries amongst
nearly all the friends whom he could question without
impertinence, asking for nightly reports of their dreams, and
the dates of any notable visions for some time past. The
reception of his request seems to have been varied; but he
must at the very least, have received more responses than
any ordinary man could have handled without a secretary.
This original correspondence was not preserved but his
notes formed a thorough and really significant digest.
Average people in society and business - New England's
traditional 'salt of the earth' - gave an almost completely
negative result, though scattered cases of uneasy but formless
nocturnal impressions appear here and there, always
between 23 March and 2 April - the period of young Wilcox's
delirium. Scientific men were little more affected, though
four cases of vague description suggest fugitive glimpses of
strange landscapes, and in one case there is mentioned a
dread of something abnormal.

It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers
came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had
they been able to compare notes. As it was, lacking their
original letters, I half suspected the compiler of having asked
leading questions, or of having edited the correspondence in
corroboration of what he had latently resolved to see. That is
why I continued to feel that Wilcox, somehow cognizant of
old data which my uncle had possessed, had been
imposing on the veteran scientist. These responses from
aesthetes told a disturbing tale. From 28 February to 2 April
a large proportion of the dreams being immeasurable the stronger
during the period of the sculptor's delirium. Over a fourth of
those who reported anything, reported scenes and half-sounds
not unlike those which Wilcox had described; and
some of the dreamers confessed acute fear of the gigantic
nameless thing visible towards the last. One case, which the
note describes with emphasis, was very sad. The subject, a
widely known architect with leanings towards theosophy
and occultism, went violently insane on the date of young
Wilcox's seizure, and expired several months later after
incessant screamings to be saved from some escaped denizen
of hell. Had my uncle referred to these cases by name instead
of merely by number, I should have attempted some
corroboration and personal investigation; but as it was, I
succeeded in tracing down only a few. All of these, however,
bore out the notes in full. I have often wondered if all the
objects of the professor's questioning felt as puzzled as did
this fraction. It is well that no explanation shall ever reach
them.

The press cuttings, as I have intimated, touched on cases
of panic, mania, and eccentricity during the given period.
Professor Angell must have employed a cutting bureau, for
the number of extracts was tremendous, and the sources
scattered throughout the globe. Here was a nocturnal suicide
in London, where a lone sleeper had leaped from a window
after a shocking cry. Here likewise a rambling letter to the
editor of a paper in South America, where a fanatic deduces a
dire future from visions he has seen. A dispatch from
California describes a theosophist colony as donning white
robes en masse for some 'glorious fulfilment' which never
arrives, whilst items from India speak guardedly of serious
native unrest towards the end of March. Voodoo orgies
multiply in Haiti, and African outposts report ominous
mutterings. American officers in the Philippines find certain
tribes bothersome about this time, and New York policemen
are mobbed by hysterical Levantines on the night of 22-23
March The west of Ireland, too, is full of wild rumour and
legendry and a fantastic painter named Ardois-Boonot
hangs a blasphemous Dream Landscape in the Paris spring
salon of 1926. And so numerous are the recorded troubles in
insane asylums that only a miracle can have stopped the
medical fraternity from noting strange parallelisms and
drawing mystified conclusions. A weird bunch of cuttings,
all told; and I can at this date scarcely envisage the callous
rationalism with which I set them aside. But I was then
convinced that young Wilcox had known of the older
matters mentioned by the professor.

               II. THE TALE OF INSPECTOR LEGRASSE

The old matters which had made the sculptor's dream and
bas-relief so significant to my uncle formed the subject of
the second half of his long manuscript. Once before, it
appears Professor Angell had seen the hellish outlines of
the nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the unknown
hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which can
be rendered only as 'Cthulhu'; and all this in so stirring and
horrible a connection that it is small wonder he pursued
young Wilcox with queries and demands for data.

This earlier experience had come in 1908, seventeen
years before when the American Archaeological Society
held its annual meeting in St Louis. Professor Angell, as
befitted one of his authority and attainments, had had a
prominent part in all the deliberations, and was one of the
first to be approached by the several outsiders who took
advantage of the convocation to offer questions for correct
answering and problems for expert solution.

The chief of these outsiders, and in a short time the focus
of interest for the entire meeting, was a commonplace-looking
middle-aged man who had travelled all the way from
New Orleans for certain special information unobtainable
from any local source. His name was John Raymond
Legrasse, and he was by profession an inspector of police
With him he bore the subject of his visit, a grotesque,
repulsive, and apparently very ancient stone statuette whose
origin he was at a loss to determine.

It must not be fancied that Inspector Legrasse had the
least interest in archaeology. On the contrary, his wish for
enlightenment was prompted by purely professional
considerations. The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was,
had been captured some months before in the wooden
swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed
voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites
connected with it, that the police could not but realize that
they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them,
and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the
African voodoo circles. Of its origin, apart from the erratic
and unbelieveable tales extorted from the captured
members, absolutely nothing was to be discovered; hence the
anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore which might
help them to place the frightful symbol, and through it track
down the cult to its fountain-head.

Inspector Legrasse was scarcely prepared for the
sensation which his offering created. One sight of the thing
had been enough to throw the assembled men of science into
a state of tense excitement, and they lost no time in crowding
around him to gaze at the diminutive figure whose utter
strangeness and air of genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted so
potently at unopened and archaic vistas. No recognized
school of sculpture had animated this terrible object, yet
centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in its
dim and greenish surface of unplaceable stone.

The figure, which was finally passed slowly from man to
man for close and careful study, was between seven and
eight inches in height, and of exquisitely artistic workmanship.
It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline,
but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass
of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws
on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This
thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural
malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence,
and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or
pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips
of the wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat
occupied the centre, whilst the long, curved claws of the
doubled-up, crouching hind legs gripped the front edge
and extended a quarter of the way down towards the
bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent
forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the
backs of huge fore-paws which clasped the croucher's
elevated knees. The aspect of the whole was abnormally
lifelike, and the more subtly fearful because its source was
so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable
age was unmistakable; yet not one link did it show with
any known type of art belonging to civilization's youth - or
indeed to any other time.
Totally separate and apart, its very material was a
mystery; for the soapy, greenish-black stone with its
golden or iridescent flecks and striations resembled
nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy. The characters
along the base were equally baffling; and no member
present, despite a representation of half the world's expert
learning in this field, could form the least notion of even
their remotest linguistic kinship. They, like the subject and
material, belonged to something horribly remote and distinct
from mankind as we know it; something frightfully
suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which our
world and our conceptions have no part.

And yet, as the members severally shook their heads and
confessed defeat at the inspector's problem, there was one
man in that gathering who suspected a touch of bizarre
familiarity in the monstrous shape and writing, and who
presently told with some diffidence of the odd trifle he knew.
This person was the late William Channing Webb, professor
of anthropology in Princeton University, and an explorer of
no slight note.

Professor Webb had been engaged, forty-eight years before,
in a tour of Greenland and Iceland in search of some
Runic inscriptions which he failed to unearth; and whilst
high up on the West Greenland coast had encountered a
singular tribe or cult of degenerate Eskimos whose religion, a
curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate
bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which
other Eskimos knew little, and which they mentioned only
with shudders, saying that it had come down from horribly
ancient aeons before ever the world was made. Besides
nameless rites and human sacrifices there were certain queer
hereditary rituals addressed to a supreme elder devil or
tornasuk; and of this Professor Webb had taken a careful
phonetic copy from an aged angekok or wizard-priest, expressing
the sounds in Roman letters as best he knew how. But
just now of prime significance was the fetish which this cult
had cherished, and around which they danced when the
aurora leaped high over the ice cliffs. It was, the professor
stated, a very crude bas-relief of stone, comprising a hideous
picture and some cryptic writing. And as far as he could tell,
it was rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial
thing now lying before the meeting.

These data, received with suspense and astonishment by
the assembled members, proved doubly exciting to Inspector
Legrasse; and he began at once to ply his informant with
questions. Having noted and copied an oral ritual among the
swamp cult-worshippers his men had arrested, he besought
the professor to remember as best he might the syllables
taken down amongst the diabolist Eskimos. There then
followed an exhaustive comparison of details, and a moment
of really awed silence when both detective and scientist
agreed on the virtual identity of the phrase common to two
hellish rituals so many worlds of distance apart. What, in
substance, both the Eskimo wizards and the Louisiana
swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols was something
very like this - the word-divisions being guessed at
from traditional breaks in the phrase as chanted aloud;

  'Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.'

Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for
several among his mongrel prisoners had repeated to him
what older celebrants had told them the words meant. This
text, as given, ran something like this:

 'In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.'

And now, in response to a general urgent demand, Inspector
Legrasse related as fully as possible his experience
with the swamp worshippers; telling a story to which I could
see my uncle attached profound significance. It savoured of
the wildest dreams of myth-maker and theosophist, and
disclosed an astonishing degree of cosmic imagination
among such half-castes and pariahs as might be least
expected to possess it.

On 1 November 1907, there had come to New Orleans
police a frantic summons from the swamp and lagoon
country to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive
but good-natured descendants of Lafitte's men, were in the
grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen
upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but
voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had ever known;
and some of their women and children had disappeared
since the malevolent tom-tom had begun its incessant
beating far within the black haunted woods where no
dweller ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing
screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames;
and, the frightened messenger added, the people could
stand it no more.

So a body of twenty police, filling two carriages and an
automobile, had set out in the late afternoon with the
shivering squatter as a guide. At the end of the passable
road they alighted, and for miles splashed on in silence
through the terrible cypress woods where day never came.
Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss
beset them, and now and then a pile of dank stones or
fragments of a rotting wall intensified by its hint of morbid
habitation a depression which every malformed tree and
every fungous islet combined to create. At length the
squatter settlement, a miserable huddle of huts, hove in
sight; and hysterical dwellers ran out to cluster around the
group of bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of tom-toms
was now faintly audible far, far ahead; and a curdling
shriek came at infrequent intervals when the wind shifted.
A reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through the pale
undergrowth beyond endless avenues of forest night.
Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of the cowed
squatters refused point-blank to advance another inch
towards the scene of unholy worship, so Inspector
Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on unguided
into black arcades of horror that none of them had ever
trod before.

The region now entered by the police was one of
traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and
untraversed by white men. There were legends of a hidden
lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge,
formless white polypus thing with luminous eyes; and
squatters whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of
caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight. They said
it had been there before D'lberville, before La Salle, before
the Indians, and before even the wholesome beasts and
birds of the woods. It was nightmare itself, and to see it was
to die. But it made men dream, and so they knew enough to
keep away. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the
merest fringe of this abhorred area, but that location was
bad enough; hence perhaps the very place of the worship
had terrified the squatters more than the shocking sounds
and incidents.

Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises
heard by Legrasse's men as they ploughed on through the
black morass towards the red glare and the muffled tom-
toms. There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal
qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one
when the source should yield the other. Animal fury and
orgiastic licence here whipped themselves to demoniac
heights by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and
reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential
tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less
organized ululations would cease, and from what seemed a
well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in singsong
chant that hideous phrase or ritual:

'Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.'

Then the men, having reached a spot where the trees
were thinner, came suddenly in sight of the spectacle itself.
Four of them reeled, one fainted, and two were shaken into
a frantic cry which the mad cacophony of the orgy fortunately
deadened. Legrasse dashed swamp water on the
face of the fainting man, and all stood trembling and nearly
hypnotized with horror.
In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of
perhaps an acre's extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On
this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of
human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola
could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were
braying, bellowing and writhing about a monstrous
ringshaped bonfire; in the centre of which, revealed by
occasional rifts in the curtain of flame, stood a great granite
monolith some eight feet in height; on top of which,
incongruous in its diminutiveness, rested the noxious carven
statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular
intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head
downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters
who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of
worshippers jumped and roared, the general direction of the
mass motion being from left to right in endless bacchanale
between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire.

It may have been only imagination and it may have been
only echoes which induced one of the men, an excitable
Spaniard, to fancy he heard antiphonal responses to the
ritual from some far and unillumined spot deeper within the
wood of ancient legendry and horror. This man, Joseph D.
Galvez, I later met and questioned; and he proved distractingly imaginative. He indeed
went so far as to hint of the
faint beating of great wings, and of a glimpse of shining eyes
and mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest trees - but
I suppose he had been hearing too much native superstition.

Actually, the horrified pause of the men was of comparatively
brief duration. Duty came first; and although there
must have been nearly a hundred mongrel celebrants in the
throng, the police relied on their firearms and plunged
determinedly into the nauseous rout. For five minutes the
resultant din and chaos were beyond description. Wild
blows were struck, shots were fired, and escapes were made;
but in the end Legrasse was able to count some forty-seven
sullen prisoners, whom he forced to dress in haste and fall
into line between two rows of policemen. Five of the
worshippers lay dead, and two severely wounded ones were
carried away on improvised stretchers by their
fellow-prisoners. The image on the monolith, of course, was
carefully removed and carried back by Legrasse.

Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain
and weariness, the prisoners all proved to be men of a very
low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most
were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattos,
largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape
Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the
heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked
it became manifest that something far deeper and older
than negro fetishism was involved. Degraded and ignorant
as they were, the creatures held with suprising consistency
to the central idea of their loathsome faith.

They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who
lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the
young world out of the sky. These Old Ones were gone
now inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead
bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first man,
who formed a cult which had never died. This was that
cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and
always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark
places all over the world until the time when the great
priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of
R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth
again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the
stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be
waiting to liberate him.

Meanwhile no more must be told. There was a secret
which even torture could not extract. Mankind was not
absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth, for
shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few. But these
were not the Great Old Ones. No man had ever seen the Old
Ones. The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none might
say whether or not the others were precisely like him. No one
could read the old writing now, but things were told by word
of mouth. The chanted ritual was not the secret - that was
never spoken aloud, only whispered. The chant meant only
this: 'In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.'

Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be
hanged, and the rest were committed to various institutions.
All denied a part in the ritual murders, and averred that the
killing had been done by Black-winged Ones which had
come to them from their immemorial meeting-place in the
haunted wood. But of those mysterious allies no coherent
account could ever be gained. What the police did extract
came mainly from an immensely aged mestizo named
Castro, who claimed to have sailed to strange ports and
talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of
China.

Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled
the speculations of theosophists and made man and the
world seem recent and transient indeed. There had been
aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had
had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless
Chinamen had told him, were still to be found as Cyclopean
stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of
time before man came, but there were arts which could
revive Them when the stars had come round again to the
right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed,
come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images
with Them.

These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not
composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape
for did not this star-fashioned image prove it? - but that
shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right,
They could plunge from world to world through the sky;
but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But
although They no longer lived, They would never really
die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of
R'lyeh preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a
glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might
once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force
from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The
spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented
Them from making an initial move, and They could only
lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions
of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the
universe, for Their mode of speech was transmitted
thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When,
after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old
Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their
dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the
fleshy minds of mammals.

Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult
around small idols which the Great Ones showed them;
idols brought in dim eras from dark stars. That cult would
never die till the stars came right again, and the secret
priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive
His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would
be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as
the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and
evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men
shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the
liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout
and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth

would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.
Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the
memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy
of their return.

In the elder time chosen men had talked with the
entombed Old Ones in dreams, but then something had
happened. The great stone city R'lyeh, with its monoliths
and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep
waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not
even thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse.
But memory never died, and high priests said that the city
would rise again when the stars were right. Then came out of
the earth the black spirits of earth, mouldy and shadowy, and
full of dim rumours picked up in caverns beneath forgotten
sea-bottoms. But of them old Castro dared not speak much.
He cut himself off hurriedly, and no amount of persuasion or
subtlety could elicit more in this direction. The size of the Old
Ones, too, he curiously declined to mention. Of the cult, he
said that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless deserts
of Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden
and untouched. It was not allied to the European witch-cult,
and was virtually unknown beyond its members. No book
had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen
said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of
the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might
read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:

       That is not dead which can eternal lie,
       And with strange aeons even death may die.

Legrasse, deeply impressed and not a little bewildered,
had inquired in vain concerning the historic affiliations of the
cult. Castro, apparently, had told the truth when he said that
it was wholly secret. The authorities at Tulane University
could shed no light upon either cult or image, and now the
detective had come to the highest authorities in the
country and met with no more than the Greenland tale of
Professor Webb.

The feverish interest aroused at the meeting by
Legrasse's tale, corroborated as it was by the statuette, is
echoed in the subsequent correspondence of those who
attended; although scant mention occurs in the formal
publication of the society. Caution is the first care of those
accustomed to face occasional charlatanry and imposture.
Legrasse for some time lent the image to Professor Webb,
but at the latter's death it was returned to him and
remains in his possession, where I viewed it not long ago.
It is truly a terrible thing, and unmistakably akin to the
dream-sculpture of young Wilcox.

That my uncle was excited by the tale of the sculptor I
did not wonder, for what thoughts must arise upon
hearing after a knowledge of what Legrasse had learned of
the cult, of a sensitive young man, who had dreamed not
only the figure and exact hieroglyphics of the swamp-
found image and the Greenland devil tablet, but had come
in his dreams upon at least three of the precise words of the
formula uttered alike by Eskimo diabolists and mongrel
Louisianans? Professor Angell's instant start on an
investigation of the utmost thoroughness was eminently
natural; though privately I suspected young Wilcox of
having heard of the cult in some indirect way, and of
having invented a series of dreams to heighten and
continue the mystery at my uncle's expense. The dream-
narratives and cuttings collected by the professor were, of
course, strong corroboration; but the rationalism of my
mind and the extravagance of the whole subject led me to
adopt what I thought the most sensible conclusions. So,
after thoroughly studying the manuscript again and
correlating the theosophical and anthropological notes
with the cult narrative of Legrasse, I made a trip to
Providence to see the sculptor and give him the rebuke I
thought proper for so boldly imposing upon a learned and
aged man.

Wilcox still lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys Building in
Thomas Street, a hideous Victorian imitation of
seventeenth-century Breton architecture which flaunts its
stuccoed front amidst the lovely Colonial houses on the
ancient hill, and under the very shadow of the finest
Georgian steeple in America. I found him at work in his
rooms, and at once conceded from the specimens scattered
about that his genius is indeed profound and authentic. He
will, I believe, be heard from some time as one of the great
decadents; for he has crystallized in clay and will one day
mirror in marble those nightmares and fantasia which
Arthur Machen evokes in prose, and Clark Ashton Smith
makes visible in verse and in painting.

Dark, frail, and somewhat unkempt in aspect, he turned
languidly at my knock and asked me my business without
rising. When I told him who I was, he displayed some
interest; for my uncle had excited his curiosity in probing
his strange dreams, yet had never explained the reason for
the study. I did not enlarge his knowledge in this regard,
but sought with some subtlety to draw him out.

In a short time I became convinced of his absolute
sincerity for he spoke of the dreams in a manner none
could mistake. They and their subconscious residuum had
influenced his art profoundly, and he showed me a morbid
statue whose contours almost made me shake with the
potency of its black suggestion. He could not recall having
seen the original of this thing except in his own dream
bas-relief, but the outlines had formed themselves in-
sensibly under his hands. It was, no doubt, the giant shape
he had raved of in delirium. That he really knew nothing
of the hidden cult, save from what my uncle's relentless
catechism had let fall, he soon made clear; and again I
strove to think of some way in which he could possibly have
received the weird impressions.

He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion;
making me see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean
city of slimy green stone - whose geometry, he oddly said, was
all wrong - and hear with frightened expectancy the
ceaseless, half-mental calling from underground: 'Cthulhu
fhtagn, Cthulhu fhtagn.'

These words had formed part of that dread ritual which
told of dead Cthulhu's dream-vigil in his stone vault at
R'lyeh, and I felt deeply moved despite my rational beliefs.
Wilcox, I was sure, had. heard of the cult in some casual
way, and had soon forgotten it amidst the mass of his
equally weird reading and imagining. Later, by virtue of its
sheer impressiveness, it had found subconscious expression
in dreams, in the bas-relief, and in the terrible statue I now
beheld; so that his imposture upon my uncle had been a
very innocent one. The youth was of a type, at once slightly
affected and slightly ill-mannered, which I could never like;
but I was willing enough now to admit both his genius and
his honesty. I took leave of him amicably, and wish him all
the success his talent promises.

The matter of the cult still remained to fascinate me, and
at times I had visions of personal fame from researches into
its origin and connections. I visited New Orleans, talked
with Legrasse and others of that old-time raiding-party,
saw the frightful image, and even questioned such of the
mongrel prisoners as still survived. Old Castro, unfortunately,
had been dead for some years. What I now heard
so graphically at first hand, though it was really no more
than a detailed confirmation of what my uncle had written,
excited me afresh; for I felt sure that I was on the track of a
very real, very secret, and very ancient religion whose
discovery would make me an anthropologist of note. My
attitude was still one of absolute materialism as I wish it still
were, and I discounted with a most inexplicable perversity
the coincidence of the dream notes and odd cuttings collected
by Professor Angell.

One thing which I began to suspect, and which I now fear
I know, is that my uncle's death was far from natural. He fell
on a narrow hill street leading up from an ancient waterfront
swarming with foreign mongrels, after a careless push from a
negro sailor. I did not forget the mixed blood and marine
pursuits of the cult-members in Louisiana, and would not be
surprised to learn of secret methods and poison needles as
ruthless and as anciently known as the cryptic rites and
beliefs. Legrasse and his men, it is true, have been let alone;
but in Norway a certain seaman who saw things is dead.
Might not the deeper inquiries of my uncle after encountering
the sculptor's data have come to sinister ears? I
think Professor Angel1 died because he knew too much, or
because he was likely to learn too much. Whether I shall go
as he did remains to be seen, for I have learned much now.

               III. THE MADNESS FROM THE SEA

If heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it will be a total
effacing of the results of a mere chance which fixed my eye
on a certain stray piece of shelf-paper. It was nothing on
which I would naturally have stumbled in the course of
my daily round, for it was an old number of an Australian
journal, Sydney Bulletin for 18 April 1925. It had escaped
even the cutting bureau which had at the time of its
issuance been avidly collecting material for my uncle's
research.

I had largely given over my inquiries into what Professor
Angell called the 'Cthulhu Cult,' and was visiting a
learned friend of Paterson, New Jersey; the curator of a
local museum and a mineralogist of note. Examining one
day the reserve specimens roughly set on the storage
shelves in a rear room of the museum, my eye was caught
by an odd picture in one of the old papers spread beneath
the stones. It was the Sydney Bulletin I have mentioned, for
my friend has tide affiliations in all conceivable foreign
parts; and the picture was a half-tone cut of a hideous
stone image almost identical with that which Legrasse had
found in the swamp.

Eagerly clearing the sheet of its precious contents, I
scanned the item in detail, and was disappointed to find it
of only moderate length. What it suggested, however, was
of portentous significance to my flagging quest; and I
carefully tore it out for immediate action. It read as
follows:

               MYSTERY DERELICT FOUND AT SEA

   Vigilant Arrives with Helpless Armed New Zealand
   Yacht in Tow. One Survivor and Dead Man Found
   Aboard. Tale of Desperate Battle and Deaths at Sea.
   Rescued Seaman Refuses Particulars of Strange Experi-
   ence. Odd Idol Found in His Possession. Inquiry to
   Follow.

The Morrison Co's freighter Vigilant, bound from
Valparaiso, arrived this morning at its wharf in Darling
Harbour having in tow the battled and disabled but
heavily armed steam yacht Alert of Dunedin NZ, which
was sighted 12 April in S. Latitude 34° 21', W. Longitude
152° 17', with one living and one dead man aboard.

The Vigilant left Valparaiso 25 March, and on 2 April was
driven considerably south of her course by exceptionally
heavy storms and monster waves. On 12 April the derelict
was sighted; and though apparently deserted, was found
upon boarding to contain one survivor in a half-delirious
condition and one man who had evidently been dead for
more than a week.

The living man was clutching a horrible stone idol of
unknown origin, about a foot in height, regarding whose
nature authorities at Sydney University, the Royal Society,
and the Museum in College Street all profess complete
bafflement, and which the survivor says he found in the cabin
of the yacht, in a small carved shrine of common pattern.

This man, after recovering his senses, told an exceedingly
strange story of piracy and slaughter. He is Gustaf Johansen,
a Norwegian of some intelligence, and had been second mate
of the two-masted schooner Emma of Auckland, which sailed
for Callao 20 February, with a complement of eleven men.

The Emma, he says, was delayed and thrown widely south
of her course by the great storm of 1 March, and on 22
March, in S. Latitude 49º 51', W. Longitude 128º 34',
encountered the Alert, manned by a queer and evil-looking
crew of Kanakas and half-castes. Being ordered
peremptorily to turn back, Capt. Collins refused; whereupon
the strange crew began to fire savagely and without warning
upon the schooner with a peculiarly heavy battery of brass
cannon forming part of the yacht's equipment.

The Emma's men showed fight, says the survivor, and
though the schooner began to sink from shots beneath the
waterline they managed to heave alongside their enemy and
board her, grappling with the savage crew on the yacht's
deck, and being forced to kill them all, the number being
slightly superior, because of their particularly abhorrent and
desperate though rather clumsy mode of fighting.

Three of Emma's men, including Capt. Collins and First
Mate Green, were killed; and the remaining eight under
Second Mate Johansen proceeded to navigate the captured
yacht, going ahead in their original direction to see if any
reason for their ordering back had existed.

The next day, it appears, they raised and landed on a small
island, although none is known to exist in that part of the
ocean; and six of the men somehow died ashore, though
Johansen is queerly reticent about this part of his story and
speaks only of their falling into a rock chasm.

Later, it seems, he and one companion boarded the yacht
and tried to manage her, but were beaten about by the storm
of 2 April.

From that time till his rescue on the 12th, the man
remembers little, and he does not even recall when William
Briden, his companion, died. Briden's death reveals no
apparent cause, and was probably due to excitement or
exposure.

Cable advices from Dunedin report that the Alert was well
known there as an island trader, and bore an evil reputation
along the waterfront. It was owned by a curious group of
half-castes whose frequent meetings and night trips to the
woods attracted no little curiosity; and it had set sail in great
haste just after the storm and earth tremors of 1 March.

Our Auckland correspondent gives the Emma and her crew
an excellent reputation, and Johansen is described as a sober
and worthy man.

The admiralty will institute an inquiry on the whole
matter, beginning tomorrow, at which every effort will be
made to induce Johansen to speak more freely than he has
done hitherto.

This was all, together with the picture of the hellish image;
but what a train of ideas it started in my mind! Here were
new treasuries of data on the Cthulhu Cult, and evidence
that it had strange interests at sea as well as on land. What
motive prompted the hybrid crew to order back the Emma as
they sailed about with their hideous idol? What was the
unknown island on which six of the Emma's crew had died,
and about which the mate Johansen was so secretive? What
had the vice-admiralty's investigation brought out, and what
was known of the noxious cult in Dunedin? And most
marvellous of all, what deep and more than natural linkage
of dates was this which gave a malign and now undeniable
significance to the various turns of events so carefully noted
by my uncle?

1 March - our 28 February according to the International
Date Line - the earthquake and storm had come. From
Dunedin the Alert and her noisome crew had darted eagerly
forth as if imperiously summoned, and on the other side of
the earth poets and artists had begun to dream of a strange,
dank Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had moulded in
his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu. 23 March the crew
of the Emma landed on an unknown island and left six men
dead; and on that date the dreams of sensitive men assumed
a heightened vividness and darkened with dread of a giant
monster's malign pursuit, whilst an architect had gone mad
and a sculptor had lapsed suddenly into delirium! And what
of this storm of 2 April - the date on which all dreams of the
dank city ceased, and Wilcox emerged unharmed from the
bondage of strange fever? What of all this - and of those hints
of old Castro about the sunken, star-born Old Ones and their
coming reign; their faithful cult and their mastery of dreams?
Was I tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man's
power to bear? If so, they must be horrors of the mind alone,
for in some way the second of April had put a stop to
whatever monstrous menace had begun its seige of mankind's
soul.

That evening, after a day of hurried cabling and
arranging, I bade my host adieu and took a train for San
Francisco. In less than a month I was in Dunedin: where,
however, I found that little was known of the strange cult-
members who had lingered in the old sea taverns.
Waterfront scum was far too common for special mention;
though there was vague talk about one inland trip these
mongrels had made, during which faint drumming and red
flame were noted on the distant hills.
In Auckland I learned that Johansen had returned with
yellow hair turned white after a perfunctory and inconclusive
questioning at Sydney, and had thereafter sold his cottage
in West Street and sailed with his wife to his old home in
Oslo. Of his stirring experience he would tell his friends no
more than he had told the admiralty officials, and all they
could do was to give me his Oslo address.

After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with
seamen and members of the vice-admiralty court. I saw
the Alert, now sold and in commercial use, in Circular
Quay at Sydney Cove, but gained nothing from its
noncommittal bulk. The crouching image with its
cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings, and
hieroglyphed pedestal, was preserved in the Museum at
Hyde Park; and I studied it long and well, finding it a
thing of balefully exquisite workmanship, and with the
same utter mystery, terrible antiquity, and unearthly
strangeness of material which I had noted in Legrasse's
smaller specimen. Geologists, the curator told me, had
found it a monstrous puzzle; for they vowed that the world
held no rock like it. Then I thought with a shudder of
what old Castro had told Legrasse about the primal Great
Ones: 'They had come from the stars, and had brought
Their images with Them.'

Shaken with such a mental revolution as I had never
before known, I now resolved to visit Mate Johansen in Oslo.
Sailing for London, I re-embarked at once for the Norwegian
capital; and one autumn day landed at the trim wharves in
the shadow of the Egeberg.

Johansen's address, I discovered, lay in the Old Town of
King Harold Haardrada, which kept alive the name of Oslo
during all the centuries that the greater city masqueraded as
'Christiania.' I made the brief trip by taxicab, and knocked
with palpitant heart at the door of a neat and ancient
building with plastered front. A sad-faced woman in black
answered my summons, and I was stung with disappointment
when she told me in halting English that Gustaf
Johansen was no more.

He had not long survived his return, said his wife, for the
doings at sea in 1925 had broken him. He had told her no
more than he had told the public, but had left a long
manuscript - of 'technical matters' as he said - written in
English, evidently in order to safeguard her from the peril of
casual perusal. During a walk through a narrow lane near
the Gothenburg dock, a bundle of papers falling from an attic
window had knocked him down. Two Lascar sailors at once
helped him to his feet, but before the ambulance could reach
him he was dead. Physicians found no adequate cause for the
end, and laid it to heart trouble and a weakened constitution.

I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will
never leave me till I, too, am at rest; 'accidentally' or
otherwise. Persuading the widow that my connection with
her husband's 'technical matters' was sufficient to entitle me
to his manuscript, I bore the document away and began to
read it on the London boat.

It was a simple, rambling thing - a naïve sailor's effort at a
postfacto diary - and strove to recall day by day that last
awful voyage. I cannot attempt to transcribe it verbatim in
all its cloudiness and redundance, but I will tell its gist
enough to show why the sound of the water against the
vessel's sides became so unendurable to me that I stopped
my ears with cotton.

Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though
he saw the city and the Thing, but I shall never sleep calmly
again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind
life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed
blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea,
known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to
loose them on the world whenever another earthquake shall
heave their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air.

Johansen's voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-
admiralty. The Emma, in ballast, had cleared Auckland on 20
February, and had felt the full force of that earthquake-born
tempest which must have heaved up from the sea-bottom the
horrors that filled men's dreams. Once more under control,
the ship was making good progress when held up by the Alert
on 22 March, and I could feel the mate's regret as he wrote of
her bombardment and sinking. Of the swarthy cult-fiends on
the Alert he speaks with significant horror. There was some
peculiarly abominable quality about them which made their
destruction seem almost a duty, and Johansen shows ingenuous
wonder at the charge of ruthlessness brought against
his party during the proceedings of the court of inquiry.
Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht
under Johansen's command, the men sight a great stone
pillar sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude 47º 9', W.
Longitude 126º 43', come upon a coastline of mingled mud,
ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing
less than the tangible substance of earth's supreme terror-
the nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh, that was built in
measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome
shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great
Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and
sending out at last, after cycles incalculable, the thoughts
that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive and called
imperiously to the faithful to come on a pilgrimage of
liberation and restoration. All this Johansen did not
suspect, but God knows he soon saw enough!

I suppose that only a single mountain-top, the hideous
monolith-crowned citadel whereon great Cthulhu was
buried, actually emerged from the waters. When I think of
the extent of all that may be brooding down there I almost
wish to kill myself forthwith. Johansen and his men were
awed by the cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon of
elder daemons, and must have guessed without guidance
that it was nothing of this or any sane planet. Awe at the
unbelievable size of the greenish stone blocks, at the
dizzying height of the great carven monolith, and at the
stupefying identity of the colossal statues and bas-reliefs
with the queer image found in the shrine on the Alert, is
poignantly visible in every line of the mate's frightened
description.

Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen
achieved something very close to it when he spoke of the
city; for instead of describing any definite structure or
building, he dwells only on the broad impressions of vast
angles and stone surfaces - surfaces too great to belong to
anything right or proper for this earth, and impious with
horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about
angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of
his awful dreams. He had said that the geometry of the
dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and
loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from
ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst
gazing at the terrible reality.

Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on
this monstrous acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over
titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal
staircase. The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when
viewed through the polarizing miasma welling out from this
sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense
lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven
rock where a second glance showed concavity after the first
showed convexity.

Something very like fright had come over all the explorers
before anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed
was seen. Each would have fled had he not feared the scorn
of the others, and it was only half-heartedly that they
searched - vainly, as it proved - for some portable souvenir
to bear away.

It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot
of the monolith and shouted of what he had found. The rest
followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved
door with the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It was,
Johansen said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that
it was a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and
jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it
lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-
door. As Wilcox would have said, the geometry of the place
was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the
ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of
everything else seemed fantasmally variable.

Briden pushed at the stone in several places without
result. Then Donovan felt over it delicately around the
edge, pressing each point separately as he went. He climbed
interminably along the grotesque stone moulding - that is,
one would call it climbing if the thing was not after all
horizontal - and the men wondered how any door in the
universe could be so vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the
acre-great panel began to give inward at the top; and they
saw that it was balanced.

Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down or
along the jamb and rejoined his fellows, and everyone
watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven
portal. In this fantasy of prismatic distortion it moved
anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of
matter and perspective seemed upset.

The aperture was black with a darkness almost material.
That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it
obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been
revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its
aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it
slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping
membranous wings. The odour arising from the newly
opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-
eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound
down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening
still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly
squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black
doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of
madness.

Poor Johansen's handwriting almost gave out when he
wrote of this. Of the six men who never reached the ship, he
thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant.
The Thing cannot be described - there is no language for
such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such
eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic
order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder
that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor
Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The
Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had
awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and
what an age-old cult had failed to do by designs, a band of
innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of
years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for
delight.

Three men were swept up by the flabby claws before
anybody turned. God rest them, if there be any rest in the
universe. They were Donovan, Guerrera and Angstrom.
Parker slipped as the other three were plunging frenziedly
over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to the boat, and
Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of
masonry which shouldn't have been there; an angle which
was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse. So only Briden
and Johansen reached the boat, and pulled desperately for
the Alert as the mountainous monstrosity flopped down the
slimy stones and hesitated, floundering at the edge of the
water.

Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite
the departure of all hands for the shore; and it was the work of
only a few moments of feverish rushing up and down between
wheels and engines to get the Alert under way. Slowly, amidst
the distorted horrors of the indescribable scene, she began to
chum the lethal waters; whilst on the masonry of that
charnel shore that was not of earth the titan Thing from the
stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the
fleeing ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied
Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and
began to pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic
potency. Briden looked back and went mad, laughing at
intervals till death found him one night in the cabin whilst
Johansen was wandering deliriously.

But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the
Thing could surely overtake the Alert until steam was fully
up, he resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the
engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed
the wheel. There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the
noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher
the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the
pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the
stern of a demon galleon. The awful squid-head with
writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy
yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly.

There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy
nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand
opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put
on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid
and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a
venomous seething astern; where - God in heaven! - the
scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was
nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its
distance widened every second as the Alert gained impetus
from its mounting steam.

That was all. After that Johansen only brooded over the
idol in the cabin and attended to a few matters of food for
himself and the laughing maniac by his side. He did not try to
navigate after the first bold flight; for the reaction had taken
something out of his soul. Then came the storm of 2 April,
and a gathering of the clouds about his consciousness. There
is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity,
of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet's tail,
and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from
the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating
chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green,
bat-winged mucking imps of Tartarus.

Out of that dream came rescue - the Vigilant the vice-
admiralty court, the streets of Dunedin, and the long voyage
back home to the old house by the Egeberg He could not tell
-they would think him mad. He would write of what he knew
before death came, but his wife must not guess. Death would
be a boon if only it could blot out the memories.

That was the document I read, and now I have placed it in
the tin box beside the bas-relief and the papers of Professor
Angell. With it shall go this record of mine - this test of my
own sanity, wherein is pieced together that which I hope may
never be pieced together again. I have looked upon all that
the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring
and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to
me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went,
as poor Johansen went, so shall I go. I know too much, and
the cult still lives.

Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of
stone which has shielded him since the sun was young. His
accursed city is sunken once more, for the Vigilant sailed over
the spot after the April storm; but his ministers on earth still
bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in
lonely places. He must have been trapped by the sinking
whilst within his black abyss, or else the world would by now
be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end?
What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise.
Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay
spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come -
but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do not
survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution
before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.
                                  The Cats of Ulthar
                                  By H.P. Lovecraft

Written 15 Jun 1920
Published November 1920 in The Tryout, Vol. 6, No. 11, p. 3-9.



It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a
cat; and this I can verily believe as I gaze upon him who sitteth purring before
the fire. For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot
see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten
cities in Meroe and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle’s lords, and heir to the
secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks
her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which
she hath forgotten.
In Ulthar, before ever the burgesses forbade the killing of cats, there dwelt an
old cotter and his wife who delighted to trap and slay the cats of their
neighbors. Why they did this I know not; save that many hate the voice of the
cat in the night, and take it ill that cats should run stealthily about yards
and gardens at twilight. But whatever the reason, this old man and woman took
pleasure in trapping and slaying every cat which came near to their hovel; and
from some of the sounds heard after dark, many villagers fancied that the manner
of slaying was exceedingly peculiar. But the villagers did not discuss such
things with the old man and his wife; because of the habitual expression on the
withered faces of the two, and because their cottage was so small and so darkly
hidden under spreading oaks at the back of a neglected yard. In truth, much as
the owners of cats hated these odd folk, they feared them more; and instead of
berating them as brutal assassins, merely took care that no cherished pet or
mouser should stray toward the remote hovel under the dark trees. When through
some unavoidable oversight a cat was missed, and sounds heard after dark, the
loser would lament impotently; or console himself by thanking Fate that it was
not one of his children who had thus vanished. For the people of Ulthar were
simple, and knew not whence it is all cats first came.
One day a caravan of strange wanderers from the South entered the narrow cobbled
streets of Ulthar. Dark wanderers they were, and unlike the other roving folk
who passed through the village twice every year. In the market-place they told
fortunes for silver, and bought gay beads from the merchants. What was the land
of these wanderers none could tell; but it was seen that they were given to
strange prayers, and that they had painted on the sides of their wagons strange
figures with human bodies and the heads of cats, hawks, rams and lions. And the
leader of the caravan wore a headdress with two horns and a curious disk betwixt
the horns.
There was in this singular caravan a little boy with no father or mother, but
only a tiny black kitten to cherish. The plague had not been kind to him, yet
had left him this small furry thing to mitigate his sorrow; and when one is very
young, one can find great relief in the lively antics of a black kitten. So the
boy whom the dark people called Menes smiled more often than he wept as he sat
playing with his graceful kitten on the steps of an oddly painted wagon.
On the third morning of the wanderers’ stay in Ulthar, Menes could not find his
kitten; and as he sobbed aloud in the market-place certain villagers told him of
the old man and his wife, and of sounds heard in the night. And when he heard
these things his sobbing gave place to meditation, and finally to prayer. He
stretched out his arms toward the sun and prayed in a tongue no villager could
understand; though indeed the villagers did not try very hard to understand,
since their attention was mostly taken up by the sky and the odd shapes the
clouds were assuming. It was very peculiar, but as the little boy uttered his
petition there seemed to form overhead the shadowy, nebulous figures of exotic
things; of hybrid creatures crowned with horn-flanked disks. Nature is full of
such illusions to impress the imaginative.
That night the wanderers left Ulthar, and were never seen again. And the
householders were troubled when they noticed that in all the village there was
not a cat to be found. From each hearth the familiar cat had vanished; cats
large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow and white. Old Kranon, the
burgomaster, swore that the dark folk had taken the cats away in revenge for the
killing of Menes’ kitten; and cursed the caravan and the little boy. But Nith,
the lean notary, declared that the old cotter and his wife were more likely
persons to suspect; for their hatred of cats was notorious and increasingly
bold. Still, no one durst complain to the sinister couple; even when little
Atal, the innkeeper’s son, vowed that he had at twilight seen all the cats of
Ulthar in that accursed yard under the trees, pacing very slowly and solemnly in
a circle around the cottage, two abreast, as if in performance of some
unheard-of rite of beasts. The villagers did not know how much to believe from
so small a boy; and though they feared that the evil pair had charmed the cats
to their death, they preferred not to chide the old cotter till they met him
outside his dark and repellent yard.
So Ulthar went to sleep in vain anger; and when the people awakened at
dawn—behold! every cat was back at his accustomed hearth! Large and small,
black, grey, striped, yellow and white, none was missing. Very sleek and fat did
the cats appear, and sonorous with purring content. The citizens talked with one
another of the affair, and marveled not a little. Old Kranon again insisted that
it was the dark folk who had taken them, since cats did not return alive from
the cottage of the ancient man .and his wife. But all agreed on one thing: that
the refusal of all the cats to eat their portions of meat or drink their saucers
of milk was exceedingly curious. And for two whole days the sleek, lazy cats of
Ulthar would touch no food, but only doze by the fire or in the sun.
It was fully a week before the villagers noticed that no lights were appearing
at dusk in the windows of the cottage under the trees. Then the lean Nith
remarked that no one had seen the old man or his wife since the night the cats
were away. In another week the burgomaster decided to overcome his fears and
call at the strangely silent dwelling as a matter of duty, though in so doing he
was careful to take with him Shang the blacksmith and Thul the cutter of stone
as witnesses. And when they had broken down the frail door they found only this:
two cleanly picked human skeletons on the earthen floor, and a number of
singular beetles crawling in the shadowy corners.
There was subsequently much talk among the burgesses of Ulthar. Zath, the
coroner, disputed at length with Nith, the lean notary; and Kranon and Shang and
Thul were overwhelmed with questions. Even little Atal, the innkeeper’s son, was
closely questioned and given a sweetmeat as reward. They talked of the old
cotter and his wife, of the caravan of dark wanderers, of small Menes and his
black kitten, of the prayer of Menes and of the sky during that prayer, of the
doings of the cats on the night the caravan left, and of what was later found in
the cottage under the dark trees in the repellent yard.
And in the end the burgesses passed that remarkable law which is told of by
traders in Hatheg and discussed by travelers in Nir; namely, that in Ulthar no
man may kill a cat.
                                 The Crawling Chaos
                       By H.P. Lovecraft and Elizabeth Berkeley


Written 1920/21
Published April 1921 in The United Co-operative, Vol. 1, No. 3, p. 1-6.



Of the pleasures and pains of opium much has been written. The ecstasies and
horrors of De Quincey and the paradis artificiels of Baudelaire are preserved
and interpreted with an art which makes them immortal, and the world knows well
the beauty, the terror and the mystery of those obscure realms into which the
inspired dreamer is transported. But much as has been told, no man has yet dared
intimate the nature of the phantasms thus unfolded to the mind, or hint at the
direction of the unheard-of roads along whose ornate and exotic course the
partaker of the drug is so irresistibly borne. De Quincey was drawn back into
Asia, that teeming land of nebulous shadows whose hideous antiquity is so
impressive that "the vast age of the race and name overpowers the sense of youth
in the individual," but farther than that he dared not go. Those who have gone
farther seldom returned, and even when they have, they have been either silent
or quite mad. I took opium but once -- in the year of the plague, when doctors
sought to deaden the agonies they could not cure. There was an overdose -- my
physician was worn out with horror and exertion -- and I travelled very far
indeed. In the end I returned and lived, but my nights are filled with strange
memories, nor have I ever permitted a doctor to give me opium again.
The pain and pounding in my head had been quite unendurable when the drug was
administered, Of the future I had no heed; to escape, whether by cure,
unconsciousness, or death, was all that concerned me. I was partly delirious, so
that it is hard to place the exact moment of transition, but I think the effect
must have begun shortly before the pounding ceased to be painful. As I have
said, there was an overdose; so my reactions were probably far from normal. The
sensation of falling, curiously dissociated from the idea of gravity or
direction, was paramount; though there was subsidiary impression of unseen
throngs in incalculable profusion, throngs of infinitely di-verse nature, but
all more or less related to me. Sometimes it seemed less as though I were
falling, than as though the universe or the ages were falling past me. Suddenly
my pain ceased, and I began to associate the pounding with an external rather
than internal force. The falling had ceased also, giving place to a sensation of
uneasy, temporary rest; and when I listened closely, I fancied the pounding was
that of the vast, inscrutable sea as its sinister, colossal breakers lacerated
some desolate shore after a storm of titanic magnitude. Then I opened my eyes.
For a moment my surroundings seemed confused, like a projected image hopelessly
out of focus, but gradually I realised my solitary presence in a strange and
beautiful room lighted by many windows. Of the exact nature of the apartment I
could form no idea, for my thoughts were still far from settled, but I noticed
van-coloured rugs and draperies, elaborately fashioned tables, chairs, ottomans,
and divans, and delicate vases and ornaments which conveyed a suggestion of the
exotic without being actually alien. These things I noticed, yet they were not
long uppermost in my mind. Slowly but inexorably crawling upon my consciousness
and rising above every other impression, came a dizzying fear of the unknown; a
fear all the greater because I could not analyse it, and seeming to concern a
stealthily approaching menace; not death, but some nameless, unheard-of thing
inexpressibly more ghastly and abhorrent.
Presently I realised that the direct symbol and excitant of my fear was the
hideous pounding whose incessant reverberations throbbed maddeningly against my
exhausted brain. It seemed to come from a point outside and below the edifice in
which I stood, and to associate itself with the most terrifying mental images. I
felt that some horrible scene or object lurked beyond the silk-hung walls, and
shrank from glancing through the arched, latticed windows that opened so
bewilderingly on every hand. Perceiving shutters attached to these windows, I
closed them all, averting my eyes from the exterior as I did so. Then, employing
a flint and steel which I found on one of the small tables, I lit the many
candles reposing about the walls in arabesque sconces. The added sense of
security brought by closed shutters and artificial light calmed my nerves to
some degree, but I could not shut out the monotonous pounding. Now that I was
calmer, the sound became as fascinating as it was fearful, and I felt a
contradictory desire to seek out its source despite my still powerful shrinking.
Opening a portiere at the side of the room nearest the pounding, I beheld a
small and richly draped corridor ending in a cavern door and large oriel window.
To this window I was irresistibly drawn, though my ill-defined apprehensions
seemed almost equally bent on holding me back. As I approached it I could see a
chaotic whirl of waters in the distance. Then, as I attained it and glanced out
on all sides, the stupendous picture of my surroundings burst upon me with full
and devastating force.
I beheld such a sight as I had never beheld before, and which no living person
can have seen save in the delirium of fever or the inferno of opium. The
building stood on a narrow point of land -- or what was now a narrow point of
land -- fully three hundred feet above what must lately have been a seething
vortex of mad waters. On either side of the house there fell a newly washed-out
precipice of red earth, whilst ahead of me the hideous waves were still rolling
in frightfully, eating away the land with ghastly monotony and deliberation. Out
a mile or more there rose and fell menacing breakers at least fifty feet in
height, and on the far horizon ghoulish black clouds of grotesque contour were
resting and brooding like unwholesome vultures. The waves were dark and
purplish, almost black, and clutched at the yielding red mud of the bank as if
with uncouth, greedy hands. I could not but feel that some noxious marine mind
had declared a war of extermination upon all the solid ground, perhaps abetted
by the angry sky.
Recovering at length from the stupor into which this unnatural spectacle had
thrown me, I realized that my actual physical danger was acute. Even whilst I
gazed, the bank had lost many feet, and it could not be long before the house
would fall undermined into the awful pit of lashing waves. Accordingly I
hastened to the opposite side of the edifice, and finding a door, emerged at
once, locking it after me with a curious key which had hung inside. I now beheld
more of the strange region about me, and marked a singular division which seemed
to exist in the hostile ocean and firmament. On each side of the jutting
promontory different conditions held sway. At my left as I faced inland was a
gently heaving sea with great green waves rolling peacefully in under a brightly
shining sun. Something about that sun’s nature and position made me shudder, but
I could not then tell, and cannot tell now, what it was. At my right also was
the sea, but it was blue, calm, and only gently undulating, while the sky above
it was darker and the washed-out bank more nearly white than reddish.
I now turned my attention to the land, and found occasion for fresh surprise;
for the vegetation resembled nothing I had ever seen or read about. It was
apparently tropical or at least sub-tropical -- a conclusion borne out by the
intense heat of the air. Sometimes I thought I could trace strange analogies
with the flora of my native land, fancying that the well-known plants and shrubs
might assume such forms under a radical change of climate; but the gigantic and
omnipresent palm trees were plainly foreign. The house I had just left was very
small -- hardly more than a cottage -- but its material was evidently marble,
and its architecture was weird and composite, involving a quaint fusion of
Western and Eastern forms. At the corners were Corinthian columns, but the red
tile roof was like that of a Chinese pagoda. From the door inland there
stretched a path of singularly white sand, about four feet wide, and lined on
either side with stately palms and unidentifiable flowering shrubs and plants.
It lay toward the side of the promontory where the sea was blue and the bank
rather whitish. Down this path I felt impelled to flee, as if pursued by some
malignant spirit from the pounding ocean. At first it was slightly uphill, then
I reached a gentle crest. Behind me I saw the scene I had left; the entire point
with the cottage and the black water, with the green sea on one side and the
blue sea on the other, and a curse unnamed and unnamable lowering over all. I
never saw it again, and often wonder.... After this last look I strode ahead and
surveyed the inland panorama before me.
The path, as I have intimated, ran along the right-hand shore as one went
inland. Ahead and to the left I now viewed a magnificent valley comprising
thousands of acres, and covered with a swaying growth of tropical grass higher
than my head. Almost at the limit of vision was a colossal palm tree which
seemed to fascinate and beckon me. By this time wonder and’ escape from the
imperilled peninsula had largely dissipated my fear, but as I paused and sank
fatigued to the path, idiy digging with my hands into the warm, whitish-golden
sand, a new and acute sense of danger seized me. Some terror in the swishing
tall grass seemed added to that of the diabolically pounding sea, and I started
up crying aloud and disjointedly, "Tiger? Tiger? Is it Tiger? Beast? Beast? Is
it a Beast that I am afraid of?" My mind wandered back to an ancient and
classical story of tigers which I had read; I strove to recall the author, but
had difficulty. Then in the midst of my fear I remembered that the tale was by
Rudyard Kipling; nor did the grotesqueness of deeming him an ancient author
occur to me; I wished for the volume containing this story, and had almost
started back toward the doomed cottage to procure it when my better sense and
the lure of the palm prevented me.
Whether or not I could have resisted the backward beckoning without the
counter-fascination of the vast palm tree, I do not know. This attraction was
now dominant, and I left the path and crawled on hands and knees down the
valley’s slope despite my fear of the grass and of the serpents it might
contain. I resolved to fight for life and reason as long as possible against all
menaces of sea or land, though I sometimes feared defeat as the maddening swish
of the uncanny grasses joined the still audible and irritating pounding of the
distant breakers. I would frequently pause and put my hands to my ears for
relief, but could never quite shut out the detestable sound. It was, as it
seemed to me, only after ages that I finally dragged myself to the beckoning
palm tree and lay quiet beneath its protecting shade.
There now ensued a series of incidents which transported me to the opposite
extremes of ecstasy and horror; incidents which I tremble to recall and dare not
seek to interpret. No sooner had I crawled beneath the overhanging foliage of
the palm, than there dropped from its branches a young child of such beauty as I
never beheld before. Though ragged and dusty, this being bore the features of a
faun or demigod, and seemed almost to diffuse a radiance in the dense shadow of
the tree. It smiled and extended its hand, but before I could arise and speak I
heard in the upper air the exquisite melody of singing; notes high and low blent
with a sublime and ethereal harmoniousness. The sun had by this time sunk below
the horizon, and in the twilight I saw an aureole of lambent light encircled the
child’s head. Then in a tone of silver it addressed me: “It is the end. They
have come down through the gloaming from the stars. Now all is over, and beyond
the Arinurian streams we shall dwell blissfully in Teloe.” As the child spoke, I
beheld a soft radiance through the leaves of the palm tree, and rising, greeted
a pair whom I knew to be the chief singers among those I had heard. A god and
goddess they must have been, for such beauty is not mortal; and they took my
hands, saying, “Come, child, you have heard the voices, and all is well. In
Teloe beyond the Milky Way and the Arinurian streams are cities all of amber and
chalcedony. And upon their domes of many facets glisten the images of strange
and beautiful stars. Under the ivory bridges of Teloe flow rivers of liquid gold
bearing pleasure-barges bound for blossomy Cytharion of the Seven Suns. And in
Teloe and Cytharion abide only youth, beauty, and pleasure, nor are any sounds
heard, save of laughter, song, and the lute. Only the gods dwell in Teloe of the
golden rivers, but among them shalt thou dwell.”
As I listened, enchanted, I suddenly became aware of a change in my
surroundings. The palm tree, so lately overshadowing my exhausted form, was now
some distance to my left and considerably below me. I was obviously floating in
the atmosphere; companioned not only by the strange child and the radiant pair,
but by a constantly increasing throng of half-luminous, vine-crowned youths and
maidens with wind-blown hair and joyful countenance. We slowly ascended
together, as if borne on a fragrant breeze which blew not from the earth but
from the golden nebulae, and the child whispered in my ear that I must look
always upward to the pathways of light, and never backward to the sphere I had
just left. The youths and maidens now chanted mellifluous choriambics to the
accompaniment of lutes, and I felt enveloped in a peace and happiness more
profound than any I had in life imagined, when the intrusion of a single sound
altered my destiny and shattered my soul. Through the ravishing strains of the
singers and the lutanists, as if in mocking, daemoniac concord, throbbed from
gulfs below the damnable, the detestable pounding of that hideous ocean. As
those black breakers beat their message into my ears I forgot the words of the
child and looked back, down upon the doomed scene from which I thought I had
escaped.
Down through the aether I saw the accursed earth slowly turning, ever turning,
with angry and tempestuous seas gnawing at wild desolate shores and dashing foam
against the tottering towers of deserted cities. And under a ghastly moon there
gleamed sights I can never describe, sights I can never forget; deserts of
corpselike clay and jungles of ruin and decadence where once stretched the
populous plains and villages of my native land, and maelstroms of frothing ocean
where once rose the mighty temples of my forefathers. Mound the northern pole
steamed a morass of noisome growths and miasmal vapours, hissing before the
onslaught of the ever-mounting waves that curled and fretted from the shuddering
deep. Then a rending report dave the night, and athwart the desert of deserts
appeared a smoking rift. Still the black ocean foamed and gnawed, eating away
the desert on either side as the rift in the center widened and widened.
There was now no land left but the desert, and still the fuming ocean ate and
ate. All at once I thought even the pounding sea seemed afraid of something,
afraid of dark gods of the inner earth that are greater than the evil god of
waters, but even if it was it could not turn back; and the desert had suffered
too much from those nightmare waves to help them now. So the ocean ate the last
of the land and poured into the smoking gulf, thereby giving up all it had ever
conquered. From the new-flooded lands it flowed again, uncovering death and
decay; and from its ancient and immemorial bed it trickled loathsomely,
uncovering nighted secrets of the years when Time was young and the gods unborn.
Above the waves rose weedy remembered spires. The moon laid pale lilies of light
on dead London, and Paris stood up from its damp grave to be sanctified with
star-dust. Then rose spires and monoliths that were weedy but not remembered;
terrible spires and monoliths of lands that men never knew were lands.
There was not any pounding now, but only the unearthly roaring and hissing of
waters tumbling into the rift. The smoke of that rift had changed to steam, and
almost hid the world as it grew denser and denser. It seared my face and hands,
and when I looked to see how it affected my companions I found they had all
disappeared. Then very suddenly it ended, and I knew no more till I awaked upon
a bed of convalescence. As the cloud of steam from the Plutonic gulf finally
concealed the entire surface from my sight, all the firmament shrieked at a
sudden agony of mad reverberations which shook the trembling aether. In one
delirious flash and burst it happened; one blinding, deafening holocaust of
fire, smoke, and thunder that dissolved the wan moon as it sped outward to the
void.
And when the smoke cleared away, and I sought to look upon the earth, I beheld
against the background of cold, humorous stars only the dying sun and the pale
mournful planets searching for their sister.
                                   The Descendant
                                  By H. P. Lovecraft


Written 1926
Published 1938 in Leaves, Vol. 2, p. 107-10.


In London there is a man who screams when the church bells ring. He lives all
alone with his streaked cat in Gray's Inn, and people call him harmlessly mad.
His room is filled with books of the tamest and most puerile kind, and hour
after hour he tries to lose himself in their feeble pages. All he seeks from
life is not to think. For some reason thought is very horrible to him, and
anything which stirs the imagination he flees as a plague. He is very thin and
grey and wrinkled, hut there are those who declare he is not nearly so old as he
looks. Fear has its grisly claws upon him, and a sound will make him start with
staring eyes and sweat-beaded forehead. Friends and companions he shuns, for he
wishes to answer no questions. Those who once knew him as scholar and aesthete
say it is very pitiful to see him now. He dropped them all years ago, and no one
feels sure whether he left the country or merely sank from sight in some hidden
byway. It is a decade now since he moved into Gray's Inn, and of where he had
been he would say nothing till the night young Williams bought the Necronomicon.

Williams was a dreamer, and only twenty-three, and when he moved into the
ancient house he felt a strangeness and a breath of cosmic wind about the grey
wizened man in the next room. He forced his friendship where old friends dared
not force theirs, and marvelled at the fright that sat upon this gaunt, haggard
watcher and listener. For that the man always watched and listened no one could
doubt. He watched and listened with his mind more than with his eyes and ears,
and strove every moment to drown something in his ceaseless poring over gay,
insipid novels. And when the church bells rang he would stop his ears and
scream, and the grey cat that dwelt with him would howl in unison till the last
peal died reverberantly away.
But try as Williams would, he could not make his neighbour speak of anything
profound or hidden. The old man would not live up to his aspect and manner, but
would feign a smile and a light tone and prattle feverishly and frantically of
cheerful trifles; his voice every moment rising and thickening till at last it
would split in a piping and incoherent falsetto. That his learning was deep and
thorough, his most trivial remarks made abundantly clear; and Williams was not
surprised to hear that he had been to Harrow and Oxford. Later it developed that
he was none other than Lord Northam, of whose ancient hereditary castle on the
Yorkshire coast so many odd things were told; but when Williams tried to talk of
the castle, and of its reputed Roman origin, he refused to admit that there was
anything unusual about it. He even tittered shrilly when the subject of the
supposed under crypts, hewn out of the solid crag that frowns on the North Sea,
was brought up.
So matters went till that night when Williams brought home the infamous
Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. He had known of the dreaded volume
since his sixteenth year, when his dawning love of the bizarre had led him to
ask queer questions of a bent old bookseller in Chandos Street; and he had
always wondered why men paled when they spoke of it. The old bookseller had told
him that only five copies were known to have survived the shocked edicts of the
priests and lawgivers against it and that all of these were locked up with
frightened care by custodians who had ventured to begin a reading of the hateful
black-letter. But now, at last, he had not only found an accessible copy but had
made it his own at a ludicrously low figure. It was at a Jew's shop in the
squalid precincts of Glare Market, where he had often bought strange things
before, and he almost fancied the gnarled 'old Levite smiled amidst tangles of
beard as the great discovery was made. The bulky leather cover with the brass
clasp had been so prominently visible, and the price was so absurdly slight.
The one glimpse he had had of the title was enough to send him into transports,
and some of the diagrams set in the vague Latin text excited the tensest and
most disquieting recollections in his brain. He felt it was highly necessary to
get the ponderous thing home and begin deciphering it, and bore it out of the
shop with such precipitate haste that the old Jew chuckled disturbingly behind
him But when at last it was safe in his room he found the combination of
black-letter and debased idiom too much for his powers as a linguist, and
reluctantly called on his strange, frightened friend for help with the twisted,
mediaeval Latin. Lord Northam was simpering inanities to his streaked cat, and
started violently when the young man entered. Then he saw the volume and
shuddered wildly, and fainted altogether when Williams uttered the title. It was
when he regained his senses that he told his story; told his fantastic figment
of madness in frantic whispers, lest his friend be not quick to burn the
accursed book and give wide scattering to its ashes.
* * * *
There must, Lord Northam whispered, have been something wrong at the start; but
it would never have come to a head if he had not explored too far. He was the
nineteenth Baron of a line whose beginings went uncomfortiblly far back into the
past- unbelievably far, if vague tradition could be heeded, for there were
familytales of a descent from pre-Saxon times, when a certain Cnaeus Gabinius
Capito, military tribune in the Third Augustan Legion then stationed at Lindum
in Roman Britain, had been summarily expelled from his command for participation
in Certain rites unconnected with any known religion. Gabinius had, the rumour
ran, come upon a cliffside cavern where strange folk met together and made the
Elder Sign in the dark; strange folk whom the Britons knew not save in fear, and
who were the last to survive from a great land in the west that had sunk,
leaving only the islands with the raths and circles and shrines of which
Stonehenge was the greatest. There was no certainty, of course, in the legend
that Gabinius had built an impregnable fortress over the forbidden cave and
founded a line which Pict and Saxon, Dane and Norman were powerless to
obliterate; or in the tacit assumption that from this line sprang the bold
companion and lieutenant of the Black Prince whom Edward Third created Baron of
Northam. These things were not certain, yet they were often told; and in truth
the stonework of Northam Keep did look alarmingly like the masonry of Hadrian's
Wall. As a child Lord Northam had had peculiar dreams when sleeping in the older
parts of the castle, and had acquired a constant habit of looking back through
his memory for half-amorphous scenes and patterns and impressions which formed
no part of his waking experience. He became a dreamer who found life tame and
unsatisfying; a searcher for strange realms and relationships once familiar, yet
lying nowhere in the visible regions of earth.
Filled with a feeling that our tangible world is only an atom in a fabric vast
and ominous, and that unknown demesnes press on and permeate the sphere of the
known at every point, Northam in youth and young manhood drained in turn the
founts of formal religion and occult mystery. Nowhere, however, could he find
ease and content; and as he grew older the staleness and limitations of life
became more and more maddening to him. During the 'nineties he dabbled in
Satanism, and at all times he devoured avidly any doctrine or theory which
seemed to promise escape from the dose vistas of science and the dully unvarying
laws of Nature. Books like Ignatius Donnelly's chimerical account of Atlantis he
absorbed with zest, and a dozen obscure precursors of Charles Fort enthralled
him with their vagaries. He would travel leagues to follow up a furtive village
tale of abnormal wonder, and once went into the desert of Araby to seek a
Nameless City of faint report, which no man has ever beheld. There rose within
him the tantalising faith that somewhere an easy gate existed, which if one
found would admit him freely to those outer deeps whose echoes rattled so dimly
at the back of his memory. It might be in the visible world, yet it might be
only in his mind and soul. Perhaps he held within his own half-explored brain
that cryptic link which would awaken him to elder and future lives in forgotten
dimensions; which would bind him to the stars, and to the infinities and
eternities beyond them.
                           The Doom That Came to Sarnath
                                 By H.P. Lovecraft


Written 3 Dec 1919
Published June 1920 in The Scot, No. 44, p. 90-8.



There is in the land of Mnar a vast still lake that is fed by no stream, and out
of which no stream flows. Ten thousand years ago there stood by its shore the
mighty city of Sarnath, but Sarnath stands there no more.
It is told that in the immemorial years when the world was young, before ever
the men of Sarnath came to the land of Mnar, another city stood beside the lake;
the gray stone city of Ib, which was old as the lake itseli, and peopled with
beings not pleasing to behold. Very odd and ugly were these beings, as indeed
are most beings of a world yet inchoate and rudely fashioned. It is written on
the brick cylinders of Kadatheron that the beings of lb were in hue as green as
the lake and the mists that rise above it; that they had bulging eyes, pouting,
flabby lips, and curious ears, and were without voice. It is also written that
they descended one night from the moon in a mist; they and the vast still lake
and gray stone city lb. However this may be, it is certain that they worshipped
a sea-green stone idol chiseled in the likeness of Bokrug, the great
water-lizard; before which they danced horribly when the moon was gibbous. And
it is written in the papyrus of Ilarnek, that they one day discovered fire, and
thereafter kindled flames on many ceremonial occasions. But not much is written
of these beings, because they lived in very ancient times, and man is young, and
knows but little of the very ancient living things.
After many eons men came to the land of Mnar, dark shepherd folk with their
fleecy flocks, who built Thraa, Ilarnek, and Kadatheron on the winding river Ai.
And certain tribes, more hardy than the rest, pushed on to the border of the
lake and built Sarnath at a spot where precious metals were found in the earth.
Not far from the gray city of lb did the wandering tribes lay the first stones
of Sarnath, and at the beings of lb they marveled greatly. But with their
marveling was mixed hate, for they thought it not meet that beings of such
aspect should walk about the world of men at dusk. Nor did they like the strange
sculptures upon the gray monoliths of Ib, for why those sculptures lingered so
late in the world, even until the coming men, none can tell; unless it was
because the land of Mnar is very still, and remote from most other lands, both
of waking and of dream.
As the men of Sarnath beheld more of the beings of lb their hate grew, and it
was not less because they found the beings weak, and soft as jelly to the touch
of stones and arrows. So one day the young warriors, the slingers and the
spearmen and the bowmen, marched against lb and slew all the inhabitants
thereof, pushing the queer bodies into the lake with long spears, because they
did not wish to touch them. And because they did not like the gray sculptured
monoliths of lb they cast these also into the lake; wondering from the greatness
of the labor how ever the stones were brought from afar, as they must have been,
since there is naught like them in the land of Mnar or in the lands adjacent.
Thus of the very ancient city of lb was nothing spared, save the sea-green stone
idol chiseled in the likeness of Bokrug, the water-lizard. This the young
warriors took back with them as a symbol of conquest over the old gods and
beings of Th, and as a sign of leadership in Mnar. But on the night after it was
set up in the temple, a terrible thing must have happened, for weird lights were
seen over the lake, and in the morning the people found the idol gone and the
high-priest Taran-Ish lying dead, as from some fear unspeakable. And before he
died, Taran-Ish had scrawled upon the altar of chrysolite with coarse shaky
strokes the sign of DOOM.
After Taran-Ish there were many high-priests in Sarnath but never was the
sea-green stone idol found. And many centuries came and went, wherein Sarnath
prospered exceedingly, so that only priests and old women remembered what
Taran-Ish had scrawled upon the altar of chrysolite. Betwixt Sarnath and the
city of flarnek arose a caravan route, and the precious metals from the earth
were exchanged for other metals and rare cloths and jewels and books and tools
for artificers and all things of luxury that are known to the people who dwell
along the winding river Ai and beyond. So Sarnath waxed mighty and learned and
beautiful, and sent forth conquering armies to subdue the neighboring cities;
and in time there sate upon a throne in Sarnath the kings of all the land of
Mnar and of many lands adjacent.
The wonder of the world and the pride of all mankind was Sarnath the
magnificent. Of polished desert-quarried marble were its walls, in height three
hundred cubits and in breadth seventy-five, so that chariots might pass each
other as men drove them along the top. For full five hundred stadia did they
run, being open only on the side toward the lake where a green stone sea-wall
kept back the waves that rose oddly once a year at the festival of the
`destroying of lb. In Sarnath were fifty streets from the lake to the gates of
the caravans, and fifty more intersecting them. With onyx were they paved, save
those whereon the horses and camels and elephants trod, which were paved with
granite. And the gates of Sarnath were as many as the landward ends of the
streets, each of bronze, and flanked by the figures of lions and elephants
carven from some stone no longer known among men. The houses of Sarnath were of
glazed brick and chalcedony, each having its walled garden and crystal lakelet.
With strange art were they builded, for no other city had houses like them; and
travelers from Thraa and Ilarnek and Kadatheron marveled at the shining domes
wherewith they were surmounted.
But more marvelous still were the palaces and the temples, and the gardens made
by Zokkar the olden king. There were many palaces, the last of which were
mightier than any in Thraa or Ilarnek or Kadatheron. So high were they that one
within might sometimes fancy himself beneath only the sky; yet when lighted with
torches dipt in the oil of Dother their walls showed vast paintings of kings and
armies, of a splendor at once inspiring and stupefying to the beholder. Many
were the pillars of the palaces, all of tinted marble, and carven into designs
of surpassing beauty. And in most of the palaces the floors were mosaics of
beryl and lapis lazuli and sardonyx and carbuncle and other choice materials, so
disposed that the beholder might fancy himself walking over beds of the rarest
flowers. And there were likewise fountains, which cast scented waters about in
pleasing jets arranged with cunning art. Outshining all others was the palace of
the kings of Mnar and of the lands adjacent. On a pair of golden crouching lions
rested the throne, many steps above the gleaming floor. And it was wrought of
one piece of ivory, though no man lives who knows whence so vast a piece could
have come. In that palace there were also many galleries, and many amphitheaters
where lions and men and elephants battled at the pleasure of the kings.
Sometimes the amphitheaters were flooded with water conveyed from the lake in
mighty aqueducts, and then were enacted stirring sea-fights, or combats betwixt
swimmers and deadly marine things.
Lofty and amazing were the seventeen tower-like temples of Sarnath, fashioned of
a bright multi-colored stone not known elsewhere. A full thousand cubits high
stood the greatest among them, wherein the high-priests dwelt with a
magnificence scarce less than that of the kings. On the ground were halls as
vast and splendid as those of the palaces; where gathered throngs in worship of
Zo-Kalar and Tamash and Lobon, the chief gods of Sarnath, whose
incense-enveloped shrines were as the thrones of monarchs. Not like the eikons
of other gods were those of Zo-Kalar and Tamash and Lobon. For so close to life
were they that one might swear the graceful bearded gods themselves sate on the
ivory thrones. And up unending steps of zircon was the tower-chamber, wherefrom
the high-priests looked out over the city and the plains and the lake by day;
and at the cryptic moon and significant stars and planets, and their reflections
in the lake, at night. Here was done the very secret and ancient rite in
detestation of Bokrug, the water-lizard, and here rested the altar of chrysolite
which bore the Doom-scrawl of Taran-Ish.
Wonderful likewise were the gardens made by Zokkar the olden king. In the center
of Sarnath they lay, covering a great space and encircled by a high wall. And
they were surmounted by a mighty dome of glass, through which shone the sun and
moon and planets when it was clear, and from which were hung fulgent images of
the sun and moon and stars and planets when it was not clear. In summer the
gardens were cooled with fresh odorous breezes skilfully wafted by fans, and in
winter they were heated with concealed fires, so that in those gardens it was
always spring. There ran little streams over bright pebbles, dividing meads of
green and gardens of many hues, and spanned by a multitude of bridges. Many were
the waterfalls in their courses, and many were the hued lakelets into which they
expanded. Over the streams and lakelets rode white swans, whilst the music of
rare birds chimed in with the melody of the waters. In ordered terraces rose the
green banks, adorned here and there with bowers of vines and sweet blossoms, and
seats and benches of marble and porphyry. And there were many small shrines and
temples where one might rest or pray to small gods.
Each year there was celebrated in Sarnath the feast of the destroying of lb, at
which time wine, song, dancing, and merriment of every kind abounded. Great
honors were then paid to the shades of those who had annihilated the odd ancient
beings, and the memory of those beings and of their elder gods was derided by
dancers and lutanists crowned with roses from the gardens of Zokkar. And the
kings would look out over the lake and curse the bones of the dead that lay
beneath it.
At first the high-priests liked not these festivals, for there had descended
amongst them queer tales of how the sea-green eikon had vanished, and how
Taran-Ish had died from fear and left a warning. And they said that from their
high tower they sometimes saw lights beneath the waters of the lake. But as many
years passed without calamity even the priests laughed and cursed and joined in
the orgies of the feasters. Indeed, had they not themselves, in their high
tower, often performed the very ancient and secret rite in detestation of
Bokrug, the water-lizard? And a thousand years of riches and delight passed over
Sarnath, wonder of the world.
Gorgeous beyond thought was the feast of the thousandth year of the destroying
of lb. For a decade had it been talked of in the land of Mnar, and as it drew
nigh there came to Sarnath on horses and camels and elephants men from Thraa,
llarnek, and Kadetheron, and all the cities of Mnar and the lands beyond. Before
the marble walls on the appointed night were pitched the pavilions of princes
and the tents of travelers. Within his banquet-hall reclined Nargis-Hei, the
king, drunken with ancient wine from the vaults of conquered Pnoth, and
surrounded by feasting nobles and hurrying slaves. There were eaten many strange
delicacies at that feast; peacocks from the distant hills of linplan, heels of
camels from the Bnazic desert, nuts and spices from Sydathrian groves, and
pearls from wave-washed Mtal dissolved in the vinegar of Thraa. Of sauces there
were an untold number, prepared by the subtlest cooks in all Mnar, and suited to
the palate of every feaster. But most prized of all the viands were the great
fishes from the lake, each of vast size, and served upon golden platters set
with rubies and diamonds.
Whilst the king and his nobles feasted within the palace, and viewed the
crowning dish as it awaited them on golden platters, others feasted elsewhere.
In the tower of the great temple the priests held revels, and in pavilions
without the walls the princes of neighboring lands made merry. And it was the
high-priest Gnai-Kah who first saw the shadows that descended from the gibbous
moon into the lake, and the damnable green mists that arose from the lake to
meet the moon and to shroud in a sinister haze the towers and the domes of fated
Sarnath. Thereafter those in the towers and without the walls beheld strange
lights on the water, and saw that the gray rock Akurion, which was wont to rear
high above it near the shore, was almost submerged. And fear grew vaguely yet
swiftly, so that the princes of Ilarnek and of far Rokol took down and folded
their tents and pavilions and departed, though they scarce knew the reason for
their departing.
Then, close to the hour of midnight, all the bronze gates of Sarnath burst open
and emptied forth a frenzied throng that blackened the plain, so that all the
visiting princes and travelers fled away in fright. For on the faces of this
throng was writ a madness born of horror unendurable, and on their tongues were
words so terrible that no hearer paused for proof. Men whose eyes were wild with
fear shrieked aloud of the sight within the king's banquet-hall, where through
the windows were seen no longer the forms of Nargis-Hei and his nobles and
slaves, but a horde of indescribable green voiceless things with bulging eyes,
pouting, flabby lips, and curious ears; things which danced horribly, bearing in
their paws golden platters set with rubies and diamonds and containing uncouth
flames. And the princes and travelers, as they fled from the doomed city of
Sarnath on horses and camels and elephants, looked again upon the mist-begetting
lake and saw the gray rock Akurion was quite submerged. Through all the land of
Mnar and the land adjacent spread the tales of those who had fled from Sarnath,
and caravans sought that accursed city and its precious metals no more. It was
long ere any travelers went thither, and even then only the brave and
adventurous young men of yellow hair and blue eyes, who are no kin to the men of
Mnar. These men indeed went to the lake to view Sarnath; but though they found
the vast still lake itself, and the gray rock Akurion which rears high above it
near the shore, they beheld not the wonder of the world and pride of all
mankind. Where once had risen walls of three hundred cubits and towers yet
higher, now stretched only the marshy shore, and where once had dwelt fifty
million of men now crawled the detestable water-lizard. Not even the mines of
precious metal remained. DOOM had come to Sarnath.
But half buried in the rushes was spied a curious green idol; an exceedingly
ancient idol chiseled in the likeness of Bokrug, the great water-lizard. That
idol, enshrined in the high temple at llarnek, was subsequently worshipped
beneath the gibbous moon throughout the land of Mnar.
                        The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath
                                By H. P. Lovecraft


Written Autumn? 1926-22 Jan 1927
Published in Beyond the Wall of Sleep, Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1943, p.
76-134


Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvelous city, and three times was
he snatched away while still he paused on the high terrace above it. All golden
and lovely it blazed in the sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades and arched
bridges of veined marble, silver-basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad
squares and perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between delicate trees
and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows; while on steep
northward slopes climbed tiers of red roofs and old peaked gables harbouring
little lanes of grassy cobbles. h was a fever of the gods, a fanfare of supernal
trumpets and a clash of immortal cymbals. Mystery hung about it as clouds about
a fabulous unvisited mountain; and as Carter stood breathless and expectant on
that balustraded parapet there swept up to him the poignancy and suspense of
almost-vanished memory, the pain of lost things and the maddening need to place
again what once had been an awesome and momentous place.
He knew that for him its meaning must once have been supreme; though in what
cycle or incarnation he had known it, or whether in dream or in waking, he could
not tell. Vaguely it called up glimpses of a far forgotten first youth, when
wonder and pleasure lay in all the mystery of days, and dawn and dusk alike
strode forth prophetic to the eager sound of lutes and song, unclosing fiery
gates toward further and surprising marvels. But each night as he stood on that
high marble terrace with the curious urns and carven rail and looked off over
that hushed sunset city of beauty and unearthly immanence he felt the bondage of
dream's tyrannous gods; for in no wise could he leave that lofty spot, or
descend the wide marmoreal fights flung endlessly down to where those streets of
elder witchery lay outspread and beckoning.
When for the third time he awakened with those flights still undescended and
those hushed sunset streets still untraversed, he prayed long and earnestly to
the hidden gods of dream that brood capricious above the clouds on unknown
Kadath, in the cold waste where no man treads. But the gods made no answer and
shewed no relenting, nor did they give any favouring sign when he prayed to them
in dream, and invoked them sacrificially through the bearded priests of Nasht
and Kaman-Thah, whose cavern-temple with its pillar of flame lies not far from
the gates of the waking world. It seemed, however, that his prayers must have
been adversely heard, for after even the first of them he ceased wholly to
behold the marvellous city; as if his three glimpses from afar had been mere
accidents or oversights, and against some hidden plan or wish of the gods.
At length, sick with longing for those glittering sunset streets and cryptical
hill lanes among ancient tiled roofs, nor able sleeping or waking to drive them
from his mind, Carter resolved to go with bold entreaty whither no man had gone
before, and dare the icy deserts through the dark to where unknown Kadath,
veiled in cloud and crowned with unimagined stars, holds secret and nocturnal
the onyx castle of the Great Ones.
In light slumber he descended the seventy steps to the cavern of flame and
talked of this design to the bearded priests Nasht and Kaman-Thah. And the
priests shook their pshent-bearing heads and vowed it would be the death of his
soul. They pointed out that the Great Ones had shown already their wish, and
that it is not agreeable to them to be harassed by insistent pleas. They
reminded him, too, that not only had no man ever been to Kadath, but no man had
ever suspected in what part of space it may lie; whether it be in the dreamlands
around our own world, or in those surrounding some unguessed companion of
Fomalhaut or Aldebaran. If in our dreamland, it might conceivably be reached,
but only three human souls since time began had ever crossed and recrossed the
black impious gulfs to other dreamlands, and of that three, two had come back
quite mad. There were, in such voyages, incalculable local dangers; as well as
that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered
universe, where no dreams reach; that last amorphous blight of nethermost
confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity - the
boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who
gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the
muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of
accursed flutes; to which detestable pounding and piping dance slowly,
awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic Ultimate gods, the blind, voiceless,
tenebrous, mindless Other gods whose soul and messenger is the crawling chaos
Nyarlathotep.
Of these things was Carter warned by the priests Nasht and Kaman-Thah in the
cavern of flame, but still he resolved to find the gods on unknown Kadath in the
cold waste, wherever that might be, and to win from them the sight and
remembrance and shelter of the marvellous sunset city. He knew that his journey
would be strange and long, and that the Great Ones would be against it; but
being old in the land of dream he counted on many useful memories and devices to
aid him. So asking a formal blessing of the priests and thinking shrewdly on his
course, he boldly descended the seven hundred steps to the Gate of Deeper
Slumber and set out through the Enchanted Wood.
In the tunnels of that twisted wood, whose low prodigious oaks twine groping
boughs and shine dim with the phosphorescence of strange fungi, dwell the
furtive and secretive Zoogs; who know many obscure secrets of the dream world
and a few of the waking world, since the wood at two places touches the lands of
men, though it would be disastrous to say where. Certain unexplained rumours,
events, and vanishments occur among men where the Zoogs have access, and it is
well that they cannot travel far outside the world of dreams. But over the
nearer parts of the dream world they pass freely, flitting small and brown and
unseen and bearing back piquant tales to beguile the hours around their hearths
in the forest they love. Most of them live in burrows, but some inhabit the
trunks of the great trees; and although they live mostly on fungi it is muttered
that they have also a slight taste for meat, either physical or spiritual, for
certainly many dreamers have entered that wood who have not come out. Carter,
however, had no fear; for he was an old dreamer and had learnt their fluttering
language and made many a treaty with them; having found through their help the
splendid city of Celephais in Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills, where
reigns half the year the great King Kuranes, a man he had known by another name
in life. Kuranes was the one soul who had been to the star-gulls and returned
free from madness.
Threading now the low phosphorescent aisles between those gigantic trunks,
Carter made fluttering sounds in the manner of the Zoogs, and listened now and
then for responses. He remembered one particular village of the creatures was in
the centre of the wood, where a circle of great mossy stones in what was once a
cleaning tells of older and more terrible dwellers long forgotten, and toward
this spot he hastened. He traced his way by the grotesque fungi, which always
seem better nourished as one approaches the dread circle where elder beings
danced and sacrificed. Finally the great light of those thicker fungi revealed a
sinister green and grey vastness pushing up through the roof of the forest and
out of sight. This was the nearest of the great ring of stones, and Carter knew
he was close to the Zoog village. Renewing his fluttering sound, he waited
patiently; and was at last rewarded by an impression of many eyes watching him.
It was the Zoogs, for one sees their weird eyes long before one can discern
their small, slippery brown outlines.
Out they swarmed, from hidden burrow and honeycombed tree, till the whole
dim-litten region was alive with them. Some of the wilder ones brushed Carter
unpleasantly, and one even nipped loathsomely at his ear; but these lawless
spirits were soon restrained by their elders. The Council of Sages, recognizing
the visitor, offered a gourd of fermented sap from a haunted tree unlike the
others, which had grown from a seed dropt down by someone on the moon; and as
Carter drank it ceremoniously a very strange colloquy began. The Zoogs did not,
unfortunately, know where the peak of Kadath lies, nor could they even say
whether the cold waste is in our dream world or in another. Rumours of the Great
Ones came equally from all points; and one might only say that they were
likelier to be seen on high mountain peaks than in valleys, since on such peaks
they dance reminiscently when the moon is above and the clouds beneath.
Then one very ancient Zoog recalled a thing unheard-of by the others; and said
that in Ulthar, beyond the River Skai, there still lingered the last copy of
those inconceivably old Pnakotic Manuscripts made by waking men in forgotten
boreal kingdoms and borne into the land of dreams when the hairy cannibal
Gnophkehs overcame many-templed Olathoe and slew all the heroes of the land of
Lomar. Those manuscripts he said, told much of the gods, and besides, in Ulthar
there were men who had seen the signs of the gods, and even one old priest who
had scaled a great mountain to behold them dancing by moonlight. He had failed,
though his companion had succeeded and perished namelessly.
So Randolph Carter thanked the Zoogs, who fluttered amicably and gave him
another gourd of moon-tree wine to take with him, and set out through the
phosphorescent wood for the other side, where the rushing Skai flows down from
the slopes of Lerion, and Hatheg and Nir and Ulthar dot the plain. Behind him,
furtive and unseen, crept several of the curious Zoogs; for they wished to learn
what might befall him, and bear back the legend to their people. The vast oaks
grew thicker as he pushed on beyond the village, and he looked sharply for a
certain spot where they would thin somewhat, standing quite dead or dying among
the unnaturally dense fungi and the rotting mould and mushy logs of their fallen
brothers. There he would turn sharply aside, for at that spot a mighty slab of
stone rests on the forest floor; and those who have dared approach it say that
it bears an iron ring three feet wide. Remembering the archaic circle of great
mossy rocks, and what it was possibly set up for, the Zoogs do not pause near
that expansive slab with its huge ring; for they realise that all which is
forgotten need not necessarily be dead, and they would not like to see the slab
rise slowly and deliberately.
Carter detoured at the proper place, and heard behind him the frightened
fluttering of some of the more timid Zoogs. He had known they would follow him,
so he was not disturbed; for one grows accustomed to the anomalies of these
prying creatures. It was twilight when he came to the edge of the wood, and the
strengthening glow told him it was the twilight of morning. Over fertile plains
rolling down to the Skai he saw the smoke of cottage chimneys, and on every hand
were the hedges and ploughed fields and thatched roofs of a peaceful land. Once
he stopped at a farmhouse well for a cup of water, and all the dogs barked
affrightedly at the inconspicuous Zoogs that crept through the grass behind. At
another house, where people were stirring, he asked questions about the gods,
and whether they danced often upon Lerion; but the farmer and his wile would
only make the Elder Sign and tell him the way to Nir and Ulthar.
At noon he walked through the one broad high street of Nir, which he had once
visited and which marked his farthest former travels in this direction; and soon
afterward he came to the great stone bridge across the Skai, into whose central
piece the masons had sealed a living human sacrifice when they built it
thirteen-hundred years before. Once on the other side, the frequent presence of
cats (who all arched their backs at the trailing Zoogs) revealed the near
neighborhood of Ulthar; for in Ulthar, according to an ancient and significant
law, no man may kill a cat. Very pleasant were the suburbs of Ulthar, with their
little green cottages and neatly fenced farms; and still pleasanter was the
quaint town itself, with its old peaked roofs and overhanging upper stories and
numberless chimney-pots and narrow hill streets where one can see old cobbles
whenever the graceful cats afford space enough. Carter, the cats being somewhat
dispersed by the half-seen Zoogs, picked his way directly to the modest Temple
of the Elder Ones where the priests and old records were said to be; and once
within that venerable circular tower of ivied stone - which crowns Ulthar's
highest hill - he sought out the patriarch Atal, who had been up the forbidden
peak Hatheg-Kia in the stony desert and had come down again alive.
Atal, seated on an ivory dais in a festooned shrine at the top of the temple,
was fully three centuries old; but still very keen of mind and memory. From him
Carter learned many things about the gods, but mainly that they are indeed only
Earth's gods, ruling feebly our own dreamland and having no power or habitation
elsewhere. They might, Atal said, heed a man's prayer if in good humour; but one
must not think of climbing to their onyx stronghold atop Kadath in the cold
waste. It was lucky that no man knew where Kadath towers, for the fruits of
ascending it would be very grave. Atal's companion Banni the Wise had been drawn
screaming into the sky for climbing merely the known peak of Hatheg-Kia. With
unknown Kadath, if ever found, matters would be much worse; for although Earth's
gods may sometimes be surpassed by a wise mortal, they are protected by the
Other Gods from Outside, whom it is better not to discuss. At least twice in the
world's history the Other Gods set their seal upon Earth's primal granite; once
in antediluvian times, as guessed from a drawing in those parts of the Pnakotic
Manuscripts too ancient to be read, and once on Hatheg-Kia when Barzai the Wise
tried to see Earth's gods dancing by moonlight. So, Atal said, it would be much
better to let all gods alone except in tactful prayers.
Carter, though disappointed by Atal's discouraging advice and by the meagre help
to be found in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan,
did not wholly despair. First he questioned the old priest about that marvellous
sunset city seen from the railed terrace, thinking that perhaps he might find it
without the gods' aid; but Atal could tell him nothing. Probably, Atal said, the
place belonged to his especial dream world and not to the general land of vision
that many know; and conceivably it might be on another planet. In that case
Earth's gods could not guide him if they would. But this was not likely, since
the stopping of the dreams shewed pretty clearly that it was something the Great
Ones wished to hide from him.
Then Carter did a wicked thing, offering his guileless host so many draughts of
the moon-wine which the Zoogs had given him that the old man became
irresponsibly talkative. Robbed of his reserve, poor Atal babbled freely of
forbidden things; telling of a great image reported by travellers as carved on
the solid rock of the mountain Ngranek, on the isle of Oriab in the Southern
Sea, and hinting that it may be a likeness which Earth's gods once wrought of
their own features in the days when they danced by moonlight on that mountain.
And he hiccoughed likewise that the features of that image are very strange, so
that one might easily recognize them, and that they are sure signs of the
authentic race of the gods.
Now the use of all this in finding the gods became at once apparent to Carter.
It is known that in disguise the younger among the Great Ones often espouse the
daughters of men, so that around the borders of the cold waste wherein stands
Kadath the peasants must all bear their blood. This being so, the way to find
that waste must be to see the stone face on Ngranek and mark the features; then,
having noted them with care, to search for such features among living men. Where
they are plainest and thickest, there must the gods dwell nearest; and whatever
stony waste lies back of the villages in that place must be that wherein stands
Kadath.
Much of the Great Ones might be learnt in such regions, and those with their
blood might inherit little memories very useful to a seeker. They might not know
their parentage, for the gods so dislike to be known among men that none can be
found who has seen their faces wittingly; a thing which Carter realized even as
he sought to scale Kadath. But they would have queer lofty thoughts
misunderstood by their fellows, and would sing of far places and gardens so
unlike any known even in the dreamland that common folk would call them fools;
and from all this one could perhaps learn old secrets of Kadath, or gain hints
of the marvellous sunset city which the gods held secret. And more, one might in
certain cases seize some well-loved child of a god as hostage; or even capture
some young god himself, disguised and dwelling amongst men with a comely peasant
maiden as his bride.
Atal, however, did not know how to find Ngranek on its isle of Oriab; and
recommended that Carter follow the singing Skai under its bridges down to the
Southern Sea; where no burgess of Ulthar has ever been, but whence the merchants
come in boats or with long caravans of mules and two-wheeled carts. There is a
great city there, Dylath-Leen, but in Ulthar its reputation is bad because of
the black three-banked galleys that sail to it with rubies from no clearly named
shore. The traders that come from those galleys to deal with the jewellers are
human, or nearly so, but the rowers are never beheld; and it is not thought
wholesome in Ulthar that merchants should trade with black ships from unknown
places whose rowers cannot be exhibited.
By the time he had given this information Atal was very drowsy, and Carter laid
him gently on a couch of inlaid ebony and gathered his long beard decorously on
his chest. As he turned to go, he observed that no suppressed fluttering
followed him, and wondered why the Zoogs had become so lax in their curious
pursuit. Then he noticed all the sleek complacent cats of Ulthar licking their
chops with unusual gusto, and recalled the spitting and caterwauling he had
faintly heard, in lower parts of the temple while absorbed in the old priest's
conversation. He recalled, too, the evilly hungry way in which an especially
impudent young Zoog had regarded a small black kitten in the cobbled street
outside. And because he loved nothing on earth more than small black kittens, he
stooped and petted the sleek cats of Ulthar as they licked their chops, and did
not mourn because those inquisitive Zoogs would escort him no farther.
It was sunset now, so Carter stopped at an ancient inn on a steep little street
overlooking the lower town. And as he went out on the balcony of his room and
gazed down at the sea of red tiled roofs and cobbled ways and the pleasant
fields beyond, all mellow and magical in the slanted light, he swore that Ulthar
would be a very likely place to dwell in always, were not the memory of a
greater sunset city ever goading one onward toward unknown perils. Then twilight
fell, and the pink walls of the plastered gables turned violet and mystic, and
little yellow lights floated up one by one from old lattice windows. And sweet
bells pealed in. the temple tower above, and the first star winked softly above
the meadows across the Skai. With the night came song, and Carter nodded as the
lutanists praised ancient days from beyond the filigreed balconies and
tesselated courts of simple Ulthar. And there might have been sweetness even in
the voices of Ulthar's many cats, but that they were mostly heavy and silent
from strange feasting. Some of them stole off to those cryptical realms which
are known only to cats and which villagers say are on the moon's dark side,
whither the cats leap from tall housetops, but one small black kitten crept
upstairs and sprang in Carter's lap to purr and play, and curled up near his
feet when he lay down at last on the little couch whose pillows were stuffed
with fragrant, drowsy herbs.
In the morning Carter joined a caravan of merchants bound for Dylath-Leen with
the spun wool of Ulthar and the cabbages of Ulthar's busy farms. And for six
days they rode with tinkling bells on the smooth road beside the Skai; stopping
some nights at the inns of little quaint fishing towns, and on other nights
camping under the stars while snatches of boatmen's songs came from the placid
river. The country was very beautiful, with green hedges and groves and
picturesque peaked cottages and octagonal windmills.
On the seventh day a blur of smoke rose on the horizon ahead, and then the tall
black towers of Dylath-Leen, which is built mostly of basalt. Dylath-Leen with
its thin angular towers looks in the distance like a bit of the Giant's
Causeway, and its streets are dark and uninviting. There are many dismal
sea-taverns near the myriad wharves, and all the town is thronged with the
strange seamen of every land on earth and of a few which are said to be not on
earth. Carter questioned the oddly robed men of that city about the peak of
Ngranek on the isle of Oriab, and found that they knew of it well.
Ships came from Baharna on that island, one being due to return thither in only
a month, and Ngranek is but two days' zebra-ride from that port. But few had
seen the stone face of the god, because it is on a very difficult side of
Ngranek, which overlooks only sheer crags and a valley of sinister lava. Once
the gods were angered with men on that side, and spoke of the matter to the
Other Gods.
It was hard to get this information from the traders and sailors in
Dylath-Leen's sea taverns, because they mostly preferred to whisper of the black
galleys. One of them was due in a week with rubies from its unknown shore, and
the townsfolk dreaded to see it dock. The mouths of the men who came from it to
trade were too wide, and the way their turbans were humped up in two points
above their foreheads was in especially bad taste. And their shoes were the
shortest and queerest ever seen in the Six Kingdoms. But worst of all was the
matter of the unseen rowers. Those three banks of oars moved too briskly and
accurately and vigorously to be comfortable, and it was not right for a ship to
stay in port for weeks while the merchants traded, yet to give no glimpse of its
crew. It was not fair to the tavern-keepers of Dylath-Leen, or to the grocers
and butchers, either; for not a scrap of provisions was ever sent aboard. The
merchants took only gold and stout black slaves from Parg across the river. That
was all they ever took, those unpleasantly featured merchants and their unseen
rowers; never anything from the butchers and grocers, but only gold and the fat
black men of Parg whom they bought by the pound. And the odours from those
galleys which the south wind blew in from the wharves are not to be described.
Only by constantly smoking strong thagweed could even the hardiest denizen of
the old sea-taverns bear them. Dylath-Leen would never have tolerated the black
galleys had such rubies been obtainable elsewhere, but no mine in all Barth's
dreamland was known to produce their like.
Of these things Dylath-Leen's cosmopolitan folk chiefly gossiped whilst Carter
waited patiently for the ship from Baharna, which might bear him to the isle
whereon carven Ngranek towers lofty and barren. Meanwhile he did not fall to
seek through the haunts of far travellers for any tales they might have
concerning Kadath in the cold waste or a marvellous city of marble walls and
silver fountains seen below terraces in the sunset. Of these things, however, he
learned nothing; though he once thought that a certain old slant-eyed merchant
looked queerly intelligent when the cold waste was spoken of. This man was
reputed to trade with the horrible stone villages on the icy desert plateau of
Leng, which no healthy folk visit and whose evil fires are seen at night from
afar. He was even rumoured to have dealt with that High-Priest Not To Be
Described, which wears a yellow silken mask over its face and dwells all alone
in a prehistoric stone monastery. That such a person might well have had
nibbling traffick with such beings as may conceivably dwell in the cold waste
was not to be doubted, but Carter soon found that it was no use questioning him.

Then the black galley slipped into the harbour past the basalt wale and the tall
lighthouse, silent and alien, and with a strange stench that the south wind
drove into the town. Uneasiness rustled through the taverns along that
waterfront, and after a while the dark wide-mouthed merchants with humped
turbans and short feet clumped steathily ashore to seek the bazaars of the
jewellers. Carter observed them closely, and disliked them more the longer he
looked at them. Then he saw them drive the stout black men of Parg up the
gangplank grunting and sweating into that singular galley, and wondered in what
lands - or if in any lands at all - those fat pathetic creatures might be
destined to serve.
And on the third evening of that galley's stay one of the uncomfortable
merchants spoke to him, smirking sinfully and hinting of what he had heard in
the taverns of Carter's quest. He appeared to have knowledge too secret for
public telling; and although the sound of his voice was unbearably hateful,
Carter felt that the lore of so far a traveller must not be overlooked. He bade
him therefore be his guest in locked chambers above, and drew out the last of
the Zoogs' moon-wine to loosen his tongue. The strange merchant drank heavily,
but smirked unchanged by the draught. Then he drew forth a curious bottle with
wine of his own, and Carter saw that the bottle was a single hollowed ruby,
grotesquely carved in patterns too fabulous to be comprehended. He offered his
wine to his host, and though Carter took only the least sip, he felt the
dizziness of space and the fever of unimagined jungles. All the while the guest
had been smiling more and more broadly, and as Carter slipped into blankness the
last thing he saw was that dark odious face convulsed with evil laughter and
something quite unspeakable where one of the two frontal puffs of that orange
turban had become disarranged with the shakings of that epileptic mirth.
Carter next had consciousness amidst horrible odours beneath a tent-like awning
on the deck of a ship, with the marvellous coasts of the Southern Sea flying by
in unnatural swiftness. He was not chained, but three of the dark sardonic
merchants stood grinning nearby, and the sight of those humps in their turbans
made him almost as faint as did the stench that filtered up through the sinister
hatches. He saw slip past him the glorious lands and cities of which a
fellow-dreamer of earth - a lighthouse-keeper in ancient Kingsport - had often
discoursed in the old days, and recognized the templed terraces of Zak, abode of
forgotten dreams; the spires of infamous Thalarion, that daemon-city of a
thousand wonders where the eidolon Lathi reigns; the charnel gardens of Zura,
land of pleasures unattained, and the twin headlands of crystal, meeting above
in a resplendent arch, which guard the harbour of Sona-Nyl, blessed land of
fancy.
Past all these gorgeous lands the malodourous ship flew unwholesomely, urged by
the abnormal strokes of those unseen rowers below. And before the day was done
Carter saw that the steersman could have no other goal than the Basalt Pillars
of the West, beyond which simple folk say splendid Cathuria lies, but which wise
dreamers well know are the gates of a monstrous cataract wherein the oceans of
earth's dreamland drop wholly to abysmal nothingness and shoot through the empty
spaces toward other worlds and other stars and the awful voids outside the
ordered universe where the daemon sultan Azathoth gnaws hungrily in chaos amid
pounding and piping and the hellish dancing of the Other Gods, blind, voiceless,
tenebrous, and mindless, with their soul and messenger Nyarlathotep.
Meanwhile the three sardonic merchants would give no word of their intent,
though Carter well knew that they must be leagued with those who wished to hold
him from his quest. It is understood in the land of dream that the Other Gods
have many agents moving among men; and all these agents, whether wholly human or
slightly less than human, are eager to work the will of those blind and mindless
things in return for the favour of their hideous soul and messenger, the
crawling chaos Nyarlathotep. So Carter inferred that the merchants of the humped
turbans, hearing of his daring search for the Great Ones in their castle of
Kadath, had decided to take him away and deliver him to Nyarlathotep for
whatever nameless bounty might be offered for such a prize. What might be the
land of those merchants in our known universe or in the eldritch spaces outside,
Carter could not guess; nor could he imagine at what hellish trysting-place they
would meet the crawling chaos to give him up and claim their reward. He knew,
however, that no beings as nearly human as these would dare approach the
ultimate nighted throne of the daemon Azathoth in the formless central void.
At the set of sun the merchants licked their excessively wide lips and glared
hungrily and one of them went below and returned from some hidden and offensive
cabin with a pot and basket of plates. Then they squatted close together beneath
the awning and ate the smoking meat that was passed around. But when they gave
Carter a portion, he found something very terrible in the size and shape of it;
so that he turned even paler than before and cast that portion into the sea when
no eye was on him. And again he thought of those unseen rowers beneath, and of
the suspicious nourishment from which their far too mechanical strength was
derived.
It was dark when the galley passed betwixt the Basalt Pillars of the West and
the sound of the ultimate cataract swelled portentous from ahead. And the spray
of that cataract rose to obscure the stars, and the deck grew damp, and the
vessel reeled in the surging current of the brink. Then with a queer whistle and
plunge the leap was taken, and Carter felt the terrors of nightmare as earth
fell away and the great boat shot silent and comet-like into planetary space.
Never before had he known what shapeless black things lurk and caper and
flounder all through the aether, leering and grinning at such voyagers as may
pass, and sometimes feeling about with slimy paws when some moving object
excites their curiosity. These are the nameless larvae of the Other Gods, and
like them are blind and without mind, and possessed of singular hungers and
thirsts.
But that offensive galley did not aim as far as Carter had feared, for he soon
saw that the helmsman was steering a course directly for the moon. The moon was
a crescent shining larger and larger as they approached it, and shewing its
singular craters and peaks uncomfortably. The ship made for the edge, and it
soon became clear that its destination was that secret and mysterious side which
is always turned away from earth, and which no fully human person, save perhaps
the dreamer Snireth-Ko, has ever beheld. The close aspect of the moon as the
galley drew near proved very disturbing to Carter, and he did not like the size
and shape of the ruins which crumbled here and there. The dead temples on the
mountains were so placed that they could have glorified no suitable or wholesome
gods, and in the symmetries of the broken columns there seemed to be some dark
and inner meaning which did not invite solution. And what the structure and
proportions of the olden worshippers could have been, Carter steadily refused to
conjecture.
When the ship rounded the edge, and sailed over those lands unseen by man, there
appeared in the queer landscape certain signs of life, and Carter saw many low,
broad, round cottages in fields of grotesque whitish fungi. He noticed that
these cottages had no windows, and thought that their shape suggested the huts
of Esquimaux. Then he glimpsed the oily waves of a sluggish sea, and knew that
the voyage was once more to be by water - or at least through some liquid. The
galley struck the surface with a peculiar sound, and the odd elastic way the
waves received it was very perplexing to Carter.
They now slid along at great speed, once passing and hailing another galley of
kindred form, but generally seeing nothing but that curious sea and a sky that
was black and star-strewn even though the sun shone scorchingly in it.
There presently rose ahead the jagged hills of a leprous-looking coast, and
Carter saw the thick unpleasant grey towers of a city. The way they leaned and
bent, the manner in which they were clustered, and the fact that they had no
windows at all, was very disturbing to the prisoner; and he bitterly mourned the
folly which had made him sip the curious wine of that merchant with the humped
turban. As the coast drew nearer, and the hideous stench of that city grew
stronger, he saw upon the jagged hills many forests, some of whose trees he
recognized as akin to that solitary moon-tree in the enchanted wood of earth,
from whose sap the small brown Zoogs ferment their curious wine.
Carter could now distinguish moving figures on the noisome wharves ahead, and
the better he saw them the worse he began to fear and detest them. For they were
not men at all, or even approximately men, but great greyish-white slippery
things which could expand and contract at will, and whose principal shape -
though it often changed - was that of a sort of toad without any eyes, but with
a curious vibrating mass of short pink tentacles on the end of its blunt, vague
snout. These objects were waddling busily about the wharves, moving bales and
crates and boxes with preternatural strength, and now and then hopping on or off
some anchored galley with long oars in their forepaws. And now and then one
would appear driving a herd of clumping slaves, which indeed were approximate
human beings with wide mouths like those merchants who traded in Dylath-Leen;
only these herds, being without turbans or shoes or clothing, did not seem so
very human after all. Some of the slaves - the fatter ones, whom a sort of
overseer would pinch experimentally - were unloaded from ships and nailed in
crates which workers pushed into the low warehouses or loaded on great lumbering
vans.
Once a van was hitched and driven off, and the, fabulous thing which drew it was
such that Carter gasped, even after having seen the other monstrosities of that
hateful place. Now and then a small herd of slaves dressed and turbaned like the
dark merchants would be driven aboard a galley, followed by a great crew of the
slippery toad-things as officers, navigators, and rowers. And Carter saw that
the almost-human creatures were reserved for the more ignominious kinds of
servitude which required no strength, such as steering and cooking, fetching and
carrying, and bargaining with men on the earth or other planets where they
traded. These creatures must have been convenient on earth, for they were truly
not unlike men when dressed and carefully shod and turbaned, and could haggle in
the shops of men without embarrassment or curious explanations. But most of
them, unless lean or ill-favoured, were unclothed and packed in crates and drawn
off in lumbering lorries by fabulous things. Occasionally other beings were
unloaded and crated; some very like these semi-humans, some not so similar, and
some not similar at all. And he wondered if any of the poor stout black men of
Parg were left to be unloaded and crated and shipped inland in those obnoxious
drays.
When the galley landed at a greasy-looking quay of spongy rock a nightmare horde
of toad-things wiggled out of the hatches, and two of them seized Carter and
dragged him ashore. The smell and aspect of that city are beyond telling, and
Carter held only scattered images of the tiled streets and black doorways and
endless precipices of grey vertical walls without windows. At length he was
dragged within a low doorway and made to climb infinite steps in pitch
blackness. It was, apparently, all one to the toad-things whether it were light
or dark. The odour of the place was intolerable, and when Carter was locked into
a chamber and left alone he scarcely had strength to crawl around and ascertain
its form and dimensions. It was circular, and about twenty feet across.
From then on time ceased to exist. At intervals food was pushed in, but Carter
would not touch it. What his fate would be, he did not know; but he felt that he
was held for the coming of that frightful soul and messenger of infinity's Other
Gods, the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep. Finally, after an unguessed span of hours
or days, the great stone door swung wide again, and Carter was shoved down the
stairs and out into the red-litten streets of that fearsome city. It was night
on the moon, and all through the town were stationed slaves bearing torches.
In a detestable square a sort of procession was formed; ten of the toad-things
and twenty-four almost human torch-bearers, eleven on either side, and one each
before and behind. Carter was placed in the middle of the line; five toad-things
ahead and five behind, and one almost-human torch-bearer on either side of him.
Certain of the toad-things produced disgustingly carven flutes of ivory and made
loathsome sounds. To that hellish piping the column advanced out of the tiled
streets and into nighted plains of obscene fungi, soon commencing to climb one
of the lower and more gradual hills that lay behind the city. That on some
frightful slope or blasphemous plateau the crawling chaos waited, Carter could
not doubt; and he wished that the suspense might soon be over. The whining of
those impious flutes was shocking, and he would have given worlds for some even
half-normal sound; but these toad-things had no voices, and the slaves did not
talk.
Then through that star-specked darkness there did come a normal sound. It rolled
from the higher hills, and from all the jagged peaks around it was caught up and
echoed in a swelling pandaemoniac chorus. It was the midnight yell of the cat,
and Carter knew at last that the old village folk were right when they made low
guesses about the cryptical realms which are known only to cats, and to which
the elders among cats repair by stealth nocturnally, springing from high
housetops. Verily, it is to the moon's dark side that they go to leap and gambol
on the hills and converse with ancient shadows, and here amidst that column of
foetid things Carter heard their homely, friendly cry, and thought of the steep
roofs and warm hearths and little lighted windows of home.
Now much of the speech of cats was known to Randolph Carter, and in this far
terrible place he uttered the cry that was suitable. But that he need not have
done, for even as his lips opened he heard the chorus wax and draw nearer, and
saw swift shadows against the stars as small graceful shapes leaped from hill to
hill in gathering legions. The call of the clan had been given, and before the
foul procession had time even to be frightened a cloud of smothering fur and a
phalanx of murderous claws were tidally and tempestuously upon it. The flutes
stopped, and there were shrieks in the night. Dying almost-humans screamed, and
cats spit and yowled and roared, but the toad-things made never a sound as their
stinking green ichor oozed fatally upon that porous earth with the obscene
fungi.
It was a stupendous sight while the torches lasted, and Carter had never before
seen so many cats. Black, grey, and white; yellow, tiger, and mixed; common,
Persian, and Marix; Thibetan, Angora, and Egyptian; all were there in the fury
of battle, and there hovered over them some trace of that profound and inviolate
sanctity which made their goddess great in the temples of Bubastis. They would
leap seven strong at the throat of an almost-human or the pink tentacled snout
of a toad-thing and drag it down savagely to the fungous plain, where myriads of
their fellows would surge over it and into it with the frenzied claws and teeth
of a divine battle-fury. Carter had seized a torch from a stricken slave, but
was soon overborne by the surging waves of his loyal defenders. Then he lay in
the utter blackness hearing the clangour of war and the shouts of the victors,
and feeling the soft paws of his friends as they rushed to and fro over him in
the fray.
At last awe and exhaustion closed his eyes, and when he opened them again it was
upon a strange scene. The great shining disc of the earth, thirteen times
greater than that of the moon as we see it, had risen with floods of weird light
over the lunar landscape; and across all those leagues of wild plateau and
ragged crest there squatted one endless sea of cats in orderly array. Circle on
circle they reached, and two or three leaders out of the ranks were licking his
face and purring to him consolingly. Of the dead slaves and toad-things there
were not many signs, but Carter thought he saw one bone a little way off in the
open space between him and the warriors.
Carter now spoke with the leaders in the soft language of cats, and learned that
his ancient friendship with the species was well known and often spoken of in
the places where cats congregate. He had not been unmarked in Ulthar when he
passed through, and the sleek old cats had remembered how he patted them after
they had attended to the hungry Zoogs who looked evilly at a small black kitten.
And they recalled, too, how he had welcomed the very little kitten who came to
see him at the inn, and how he had given it a saucer of rich cream in the
morning before he left. The grandfather of that very little kitten was the
leader of the army now assembled, for he had seen the evil procession from a far
hill and recognized the prisoner as a sworn friend of his kind on earth and in
the land of dream.
A yowl now came from the farther peak, and the old leader paused abruptly in his
conversation. It was one of the army's outposts, stationed on the highest of the
mountains to watch the one foe which Earth's cats fear; the very large and
peculiar cats from Saturn, who for some reason have not been oblivious of the
charm of our moon's dark side. They are leagued by treaty with the evil
toad-things, and are notoriously hostile to our earthly cats; so that at this
juncture a meeting would have been a somewhat grave matter.
After a brief consultation of generals, the cats rose and assumed a closer
formation, crowding protectingly around Carter and preparing to take the great
leap through space back to the housetops of our earth and its dreamland. The old
field-marshal advised Carter to let himself be borne along smoothly and
passively in the massed ranks of furry leapers, and told him how to spring when
the rest sprang and land gracefully when the rest landed. He also offered to
deposit him in any spot he desired, and Carter decided on the city of
Dylath-Leen whence the black galley had set out; for he wished to sail thence
for Oriab and the carven crest Ngranek, and also to warn the people of the city
to have no more traffick with black galleys, if indeed that traffick could be
tactfully and judiciously broken off. Then, upon a signal, the cats all leaped
gracefully with their friend packed securely in their midst; while in a black
cave on an unhallowed summit of the moon-mountains still vainly waited the
crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.
The leap of the cats through space was very swift; and being surrounded by his
companions Carter did not see this time the great black shapelessnesses that
lurk and caper and flounder in the abyss. Before he fully realised what had
happened he was back in his familiar room at the inn at Dylath-Leen, and the
stealthy, friendly cats were pouring out of the window in streams. The old
leader from Ulthar was the last to leave, and as Carter shook his paw he said he
would be able to get home by cockcrow. When dawn came, Carter went downstairs
and learned that a week had elapsed since his capture and leaving. There was
still nearly a fortnight to wait for the ship bound toward Oriab, and during
that time he said what he could against the black galleys and their infamous
ways. Most of the townsfolk believed him; yet so fond were the jewellers of
great rubies that none would wholly promise to cease trafficking with the
wide-mouthed merchants. If aught of evil ever befalls Dylath-Leen through such
traffick, it will not be his fault.
In about a week the desiderate ship put in by the black wale and tall
lighthouse, and Carter was glad to see that she was a barque of wholesome men,
with painted sides and yellow lateen sails and a grey captain in silken robes.
Her cargo was the fragrant resin of Oriab's inner groves, and the delicate
pottery baked by the artists of Bahama, and the strange little figures carved
from Ngranek's ancient lava. For this they were paid in the wool of Ulthar and
the iridescent textiles of Hatheg and the ivory that the black men carve across
the river in Parg. Carter made arrangements with the captain to go to Baharna
and was told that the voyage would take ten days. And during his week of waiting
he talked much with that captain of Ngranek, and was told that very few had seen
the carven face thereon; but that most travellers are content to learn its
legends from old people and lava-gatherers and image-makers in Baharna and
afterward say in their far homes that they have indeed beheld it. The captain
was not even sure that any person now living had beheld that carven face, for
the wrong side of Ngranek is very difficult and barren and sinister, and there
are rumours of caves near the peak wherein dwell the night-gaunts. But the
captain did not wish to say just what a night-gaunt might be like, since such
cattle are known to haunt most persistently the dreams of those who think too
often of them. Then Carter asked that captain about unknown Kadath in the cold
waste, and the marvellous sunset city, but of these the good man could truly
tell nothing.
Carter sailed out of Dylath-Leen one early morning when the tide turned, and saw
the first rays of sunrise on the thin angular towers of that dismal basalt town.
And for two days they sailed eastward in sight of green coasts, and saw often
the pleasant fishing towns that climbed up steeply with their red roofs and
chimney-pots from old dreaming wharves and beaches where nets lay drying. But on
the third day they turned sharply south where the roll of water was stronger,
and soon passed from sight of any land. On the fifth day the sailors were
nervous, but the captain apologized for their fears, saying that the ship was
about to pass over the weedy walls and broken columns of a sunken city too old
for memory, and that when the water was clear one could see so many moving
shadows in that deep place that simple folk disliked it. He admitted, moreover,
that many ships had been lost in that part of the sea; having been hailed when
quite close to it, but never seen again.
That night the moon was very bright, and one could see a great way down in the
water. There was so little wind that the ship could not move much, and the ocean
was very calm. Looking over the rail Carter saw many fathoms deep the dome of
the great temple, and in front of it an avenue of unnatural sphinxes leading to
what was once a public square. Dolphins sported merrily in and out of the ruins,
and porpoises revelled clumsily here and there, sometimes coming to the surface
and leaping clear out of the sea. As the ship drifted on a little the floor of
the ocean rose in hills, and one could clearly mark the lines of ancient
climbing streets and the washed-down walls of myriad little houses.
Then the suburbs appeared, and finally a great lone building on a hill, of
simpler architecture than the other structures, and in much better repair. It
was dark and low and covered four sides of a square, with a tower at each
corner, a paved court in the centre, and small curious round windows all over
it. Probably it was of basalt, though weeds draped the greater part; and such
was its lonely and impressive place on that far hill that it may have been a
temple or a monastery. Some phosphorescent fish inside it gave the small round
windows an aspect of shining, and Carter did not blame the sailors much for
their fears. Then by the watery moonlight he noticed an odd high monolith in the
middle of that central court, and saw that something was tied to it. And when
after getting a telescope from the captain's cabin he saw that that bound thing
was a sailor in the silk robes of Oriab, head downward and without any eyes, he
was glad that a rising breeze soon took the ship ahead to more healthy parts of
the sea.
The next day they spoke with a ship with violet sails bound for Zar, in the land
of forgotten dreams, with bulbs of strange coloured lilies for cargo. And on the
evening of the eleventh day they came in sight of the isle of Oriab with Ngranek
rising jagged and snow-crowned in the distance. Oriab is a very great isle, and
its port of Bahama a mighty city. The wharves of Bahama are of porphyry, and the
city rises in great stone terraces behind them, having streets of steps that are
frequently arched over by buildings and the bridges between buildings. There is
a great canal which goes under the whole city in a tunnel with granite gates and
leads to the inland lake of Yath, on whose farther shore are the vast clay-brick
ruins of a primal city whose name is not remembered. As the ship drew into the
harbour at evening the twin beacons Thon and Thal gleamed a welcome, and in all
the million windows of Bahama's terraces mellow lights peeped out quietly and
gradually as the stars peep out overhead in the dusk, till that steep and
climbing seaport became a glittering constellation hung between the stars of
heaven and the reflections of those stars in the still harbour.
The captain, after landing, made Carter a guest in his own small house on the
shores of Yath where the rear of the town slopes down to it; and his wife and
servants brought strange toothsome foods for the traveller's delight. And in the
days after that Carter asked for rumours and legends of Ngranek in all the
taverns and public places where lava-gatherers and image-makers meet, but could
find no one who had been up the higher slopes or seen the carven face. Ngranek
was a hard mountain with only an accursed valley behind it, and besides, one
could never depend on the certainty that night-gaunts are altogether fabulous.
When the captain sailed hack to Dylath-Leen Carter took quarters in an ancient
tavern opening on an alley of steps in the original part of the town, which is
built of brick and resembles the ruins of Yath's farther shore. Here he laid his
plans for the ascent of Ngranek, and correlated all that he had learned from the
lava-gatherers about the roads thither. The keeper of the tavern was a very old
man, and had heard so many legends that he was a great help. He even took Carter
to an upper room in that ancient house and shewed him a crude picture which a
traveller had scratched on the clay wall in the old days when men were bolder
and less reluctant to visit Ngranek's higher slopes. The old tavern-keeper's
great-grandfather had heard from his great-grandfather that the traveller who
scratched that picture had climbed Ngranek and seen the carven face, here
drawing it for others to behold, but Carter had very great doubts, since the
large rough features on the wall were hasty and careless, and wholly
overshadowed by a crowd of little companion shapes in the worst possible taste,
with horns and wings and claws and curling tails.
At last, having gained all the information he was likely to gain in the taverns
and public places of Baharna, Carter hired a zebra and set out one morning on
the road by Yath's shore for those inland parts wherein towers stony Ngranek. On
his right were rolling hills and pleasant orchards and neat little stone
farmhouses, and he was much reminded of those fertile fields that flank the
Skai. By evening he was near the nameless ancient ruins on Yath's farther shore,
and though old lava-gatherers had warned him not to camp there at night, he
tethered his zebra to a curious pillar before a crumbling wall and laid his
blanket in a sheltered corner beneath some carvings whose meaning none could
decipher. Around him he wrapped another blanket, for the nights are cold in
Oriab; and when upon awaking once he thought he felt the wings of some insect
brushing his face he covered his head altogether and slept in peace till roused
by the magah birds in distant resin groves.
The sun had just come up over the great slope whereon leagues of primal brick
foundations and worn walls and occasional cracked pillars and pedestals
stretched down desolate to the shore of Yath, and Carter looked about for his
tethered zebra. Great was his dismay to see that docile beast stretched
prostrate beside the curious pillar to which it had been tied, and still greater
was he vexed on finding that the steed was quite dead, with its blood all sucked
away through a singular wound in its throat. His pack had been disturbed, and
several shiny knickknacks taken away, and all round on the dusty soil' were
great webbed footprints for which he could not in any way account. The legends
and warnings of lava-gatherers occurred to him, and he thought of what had
brushed his face in the night. Then he shouldered his pack and strode on toward
Ngranek, though not without a shiver when he saw close to him as the highway
passed through the ruins a great gaping arch low in the wall of an old temple,
with steps leading down into darkness farther than he could peer.
His course now lay uphill through wilder and partly wooded country, and he saw
only the huts of charcoal-burners and the camp of those who gathered resin from
the groves. The whole air was fragrant with balsam, and all the magah birds sang
blithely as they flashed their seven colours in the sun. Near sunset he came on
a new camp of lava-gatherers returning with laden sacks from Ngranek's lower
slopes; and here he also camped, listening to the songs and tales of the men,
and overhearing what they whispered about a companion they had lost. He had
climbed high to reach a mass of fine lava above him, and at nightfall did not
return to his fellows. When they looked for him the next day they found only his
turban, nor was there any sign on the crags below that he had fallen. They did
not search any more, because the old man among them said it would be of no use.
No one ever found what the night-gaunts took, though those beasts themselves
were so uncertain as to be almost fabulous. Carter asked them if night-gaunts
sucked blood and liked shiny things and left webbed footprints, but they all
shook their heads negatively and seemed frightened at his making such an
inquiry. When he saw how taciturn they had become he asked them no more, but
went to sleep in his blanket.
The next day he rose with the lava-gatherers and exchanged farewells as they
rode west and he rode east on a zebra he bought of them. Their older men gave
him blessings and warnings, and told him he had better not climb too high on
Ngranek, but while he thanked them heartily he was in no wise dissuaded. For
still did he feel that he must find the gods on unknown Kadath; and win from
them a way to that haunting and marvellous city in the sunset. By noon, after a
long uphill ride, he came upon some abandoned brick villages of the hill-people
who had once dwelt thus close to Ngranek and carved images from its smooth lava.
Here they had dwelt till the days of the old tavernkeeper's grandfather, but
about that time they felt that their presence was disliked. Their homes had
crept even up the mountain's slope, and the higher they built the more people
they would miss when the sun rose. At last they decided it would be better to
leave altogether, since things were sometimes glimpsed in the darkness which no
one could interpret favourably; so in the end all of them went down to the sea
and dwelt in Bahama, inhabiting a very old quarter and teaching their sons the
old art of image-making which to this day they carry on. It was from these
children of the exiled hill-people that Carter had heard the best tales about
Ngranek when searching through Bahama's ancient taverns.
All this time the great gaunt side of Ngranek was looming up higher and higher
as Carter approached it. There were sparse trees on the lower slopes and feeble
shrubs above them, and then the bare hideous rock rose spectral into the sky, to
mix with frost and ice and eternal snow. Carter could see the rifts and
ruggedness of that sombre stone, and did not welcome the prospect of climbing
it. In places there were solid streams of lava, and scoriac heaps that littered
slopes and ledges. Ninety aeons ago, before even the gods had danced upon its
pointed peak, that mountain had spoken with fire and roared with the voices of
the inner thunders. Now it towered all silent and sinister, bearing on the
hidden side that secret titan image whereof rumour told. And there were caves in
that mountain, which might be empty and alone with elder darkness, or might - if
legend spoke truly - hold horrors of a form not to be surmised.
The ground sloped upward to the foot of Ngranek, thinly covered with scrub oaks
and ash trees, and strewn with bits of rock, lava, and ancient cinder. There
were the charred embers of many camps, where the lava-gatherers were wont to
stop, and several rude altars which they had built either to propitiate the
Great Ones or to ward off what they dreamed of in Ngranek's high passes and
labyrinthine caves. At evening Carter reached the farthermost pile of embers and
camped for the night, tethering his zebra to a sapling and wrapping himself well
in his blankets before going to sleep. And all through the night a voonith
howled distantly from the shore of some hidden pool, but Carter felt no fear of
that amphibious terror, since he had been told with certainty that not one of
them dares even approach the slope of Ngranek.
In the clear sunshine of morning Carter began the long ascent, taking his zebra
as far as that useful beast could go, but tying it to a stunted ash tree when
the floor of the thin wood became too steep. Thereafter he scrambled up alone;
first through the forest with its ruins of old villages in overgrown clearings,
and then over the tough grass where anaemic shrubs grew here and there. He
regretted coming clear of the trees, since the slope was very precipitous and
the whole thing rather dizzying. At length he began to discern all the
countryside spread out beneath him whenever he looked about; the deserted huts
of the image-makers, the groves of resin trees and the camps of those who
gathered from them, the woods where prismatic magahs nest and sing, and even a
hint very far away of the shores of Yath and of those forbidding ancient ruins
whose name is forgotten. He found it best not to look around, and kept on
climbing and climbing till the shrubs became very sparse and there was often
nothing but the tough grass to cling to.
Then the soil became meagre, with great patches of bare rock cropping out, and
now and then the nest of a condor in a crevice. Finally there was nothing at all
but the bare rock, and had it not been very rough and weathered, he could
scarcely have ascended farther. Knobs, ledges, and pinnacles, however, helped
greatly; and it was cheering to see occasionally the sign of some lava-gatherer
scratched clumsily in the friable stone, and know that wholesome human creatures
had been there before him. After a certain height the presence of man was
further shewn by handholds and footholds hewn where they were needed, and by
little quarries and excavations where some choice vein or stream of lava had
been found. In one place a narrow ledge had been chopped artificially to an
especially rich deposit far to the right of the main line of ascent. Once or
twice Carter dared to look around, and was almost stunned by the spread of
landscape below. All the island betwixt him and the coast lay open to his sight,
with Baharna's stone terraces and the smoke of its chimneys mystical in the
distance. And beyond that the illimitable Southern Sea with all its curious
secrets.
Thus far there had been much winding around the mountain, so that the farther
and carven side was still hidden. Carter now saw a ledge running upward and to
the left which seemed to head the way he wished, and this course he took in the
hope that it might prove continuous. After ten minutes he saw it was indeed no
cul-de-sac, but that it led steeply on in an arc which would, unless suddenly
interrupted or deflected, bring him after a few hours' climbing to that unknown
southern slope overlooking the desolate crags and the accursed valley of lava.
As new country came into view below him he saw that it was bleaker and wilder
than those seaward lands he had traversed. The mountain's side, too, was
somewhat different; being here pierced by curious cracks and caves not found on
the straighter route he had left. Some of these were above him and some beneath
him, all opening on sheerly perpendicular cliffs and wholly unreachable by the
feet of man. The air was very cold now, but so hard was the climbing that he did
not mind it. Only the increasing rarity bothered him, and he thought that
perhaps it was this which had turned the heads of other travellers and excited
those absurd tales of night-gaunts whereby they explained the loss of such
climbers as fell from these perilous paths. He was not much impressed by
travellers' tales, but had a good curved scimitar in case of any trouble. All
lesser thoughts were lost in the wish to see that carven face which might set
him on the track of the gods atop unknown Kadath.
At last, in the fearsome iciness of upper space, he came round fully to the
hidden side of Ngranek and saw in infinite gulfs below him the lesser crags and
sterile abysses of lava which marked olden wrath of the Great Ones. There was
unfolded, too, a vast expanse of country to the south; but it was a desert land
without fair fields or cottage chimneys, and seemed to have no ending. No trace
of the sea was visible on this side, for Oriab is a great island. Black caverns
and odd crevices were still numerous on the sheer vertical cliffs, but none of
them was accessible to a climber. There now loomed aloft a great beetling mass
which hampered the upward view, and Carter was for a moment shaken with doubt
lest it prove impassable. Poised in windy insecurity miles above earth, with
only space and death on one side and only slippery walls of rock on the other,
he knew for a moment the fear that makes men shun Ngranek's hidden side. He
could not turn round, yet the sun was already low. If there were no way aloft,
the night would find him crouching there still, and the dawn would not find him
at all.
But there was a way, and he saw it in due season. Only a very expert dreamer
could have used those imperceptible footholds, yet to Carter they were
sufficient. Surmounting now the outward-hanging rock, he found the slope above
much easier than that below, since a great glacier's melting had left a generous
space with loam and ledges. To the left a precipice dropped straight from
unknown heights to unknown depths, with a cave's dark mouth just out of reach
above him. Elsewhere, however, the mountain slanted back strongly, and even gave
him space to lean and rest.
He felt from the chill that he must be near the snow line, and looked up to see
what glittering pinnacles might be shining in that late ruddy sunlight. Surely
enough, there was the snow uncounted thousands of feet above, and below it a
great beetling crag like that. he had just climbed; hanging there forever in
bold outline. And when he saw that crag he gasped and cried out aloud, and
clutched at the jagged rock in awe; for the titan bulge had not stayed as
earth's dawn had shaped it, but gleamed red and stupendous in the sunset with
the carved and polished features of a god.
Stern and terrible shone that face that the sunset lit with fire. How vast it
was no mind can ever measure, but Carter knew at once that man could never have
fashioned it. It was a god chiselled by the hands of the gods, and it looked
down haughty and majestic upon the seeker. Rumour had said it was strange and
not to be mistaken, and Carter saw that it was indeed so; for those long narrow
eyes and long-lobed ears, and that thin nose and pointed chin, all spoke of a
race that is not of men but of gods.
He clung overawed in that lofty and perilous eyrie, even though it was this
which he had expected and come to find; for there is in a god's face more of
marvel than prediction can tell, and when that face is vaster than a great
temple and seen looking downward at sunset in the scyptic silences of that upper
world from whose dark lava it was divinely hewn of old, the marvel is so strong
that none may escape it.
Here, too, was the added marvel of recognition; for although he had planned to
search all dreamland over for those whose likeness to this face might mark them
as the god's children, he now knew that he need not do so. Certainly, the great
face carven on that mountain was of no strange sort, but the kin of such as he
had seen often in the taverns of the seaport Celephais which lies in Ooth-Nargai
beyond the Tanarian Hills and is ruled over by that King Kuranes whom Carter
once knew in waking life. Every year sailors with such a face came in dark ships
from the north to trade their onyx for the carved jade and spun gold and little
red singing birds of Celephais, and it was clear that these could be no others
than the hall-gods he sought. Where they dwelt, there must the cold waste lie
close, and within it unknown Kadath and its onyx castle for the Great Ones. So
to Celephais he must go, far distant from the isle of Oriab, and in such parts
as would take him back to Dylath-Teen and up the Skai to the bridge by Nir, and
again into the enchanted wood of the Zoogs, whence the way would bend northward
through the garden lands by Oukranos to the gilded spires of Thran, where he
might find a galleon bound over the Cerenarian Sea.
But dusk was now thick, and the great carven face looked down even sterner in
shadow. Perched on that ledge night found the seeker; and in the blackness he
might neither go down nor go up, but only stand and cling and shiver in that
narrow place till the day came, praying to keep awake lest sleep loose his hold
and send him down the dizzy miles of air to the crags and sharp rocks of the
accursed valley. The stars came out, but save for them there was only black
nothingness in his eyes; nothingness leagued with death, against whose beckoning
he might do no more than cling to the rocks and lean back away from an unseen
brink. The last thing of earth that he saw in the gloaming was a condor soaring
close to the westward precipice beside him, and darting screaming away when it
came near the cave whose mouth yawned just out of reach.
Suddenly, wit