The Shunned House

By H. P. Lovecraft

I.

From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent. Sometimes it enters directly into the
composition of the events, while sometimes it relates only to their fortuitous position among persons and
places. The latter sort is splendidly exemplified by a case in the ancient city of Providence, where in the late
forties Edgar Allan Poe used to sojourn often during his unsuccessful wooing of the gifted poetess, Mrs.
Whitman. Poe generally stopped at the Mansion House in Benefit Street—the renamed Golden Ball Inn
whose roof has sheltered Washington, Jefferson, and Lafayette—and his favourite walk led northward
along the same street to Mrs. Whitman’s home and the neighbouring hillside churchyard of St. John’s,
whose hidden expanse of eighteenth-century gravestones had for him a peculiar fascination.
Now the irony is this. In this walk, so many times repeated, the world’s greatest master of the terrible
and the bizarre was obliged to pass a particular house on the eastern side of the street; a dingy, antiquated
structure perched on the abruptly rising side-hill, with a great unkempt yard dating from a time when the
region was partly open country. It does not appear that he ever wrote or spoke of it, nor is there any
evidence that he even noticed it. And yet that house, to the two persons in possession of certain
information, equals or outranks in horror the wildest phantasy of the genius who so often passed it
unknowingly, and stands starkly leering as a symbol of all that is unutterably hideous.
The house was—and for that matter still is—of a kind to attract the attention of the curious. Originally
a farm or semi-farm building, it followed the average New England colonial lines of the middle eighteenth
century—the prosperous peaked-roof sort, with two stories and dormerless attic, and with the Georgian
doorway and interior panelling dictated by the progress of taste at that time. It faced south, with one gable
end buried to the lower windows in the eastward rising hill, and the other exposed to the foundations
toward the street. Its construction, over a century and a half ago, had followed the grading and
straightening of the road in that especial vicinity; for Benefit Street—at first called Back Street—was laid
out as a lane winding amongst the graveyards of the first settlers, and straightened only when the removal
of the bodies to the North Burial Ground made it decently possible to cut through the old family plots.
At the start, the western wall had lain some twenty feet up a precipitous lawn from the roadway; but a
widening of the street at about the time of the Revolution sheared off most of the intervening space,
exposing the foundations so that a brick basement wall had to be made, giving the deep cellar a street
frontage with door and two windows above ground, close to the new line of public travel. When the
sidewalk was laid out a century ago the last of the intervening space was removed; and Poe in his walks
must have seen only a sheer ascent of dull grey brick flush with the sidewalk and surmounted at a height of
ten feet by the antique shingled bulk of the house proper.
The farm-like grounds extended back very deeply up the hill, almost to Wheaton Street. The space
south of the house, abutting on Benefit Street, was of course greatly above the existing sidewalk level,
forming a terrace bounded by a high bank wall of damp, mossy stone pierced by a steep flight of narrow
steps which led inward between canyon-like surfaces to the upper region of mangy lawn, rheumy brick
walls, and neglected gardens whose dismantled cement urns, rusted kettles fallen from tripods of knotty
sticks, and similar paraphernalia set off the weather-beaten front door with its broken fanlight, rotting
Ionic pilasters, and wormy triangular pediment.
What I heard in my youth about the shunned house was merely that people died there in alarmingly
great numbers. That, I was told, was why the original owners had moved out some twenty years after
building the place. It was plainly unhealthy, perhaps because of the dampness and fungous growth in the
cellar, the general sickish smell, the draughts of the hallways, or the quality of the well and pump water.
These things were bad enough, and these were all that gained belief among the persons whom I knew.
Only the notebooks of my antiquarian uncle, Dr. Elihu Whipple, revealed to me at length the darker, vaguer
surmises which formed an undercurrent of folklore among old-time servants and humble folk; surmises
which never travelled far, and which were largely forgotten when Providence grew to be a metropolis with
a shifting modern population.
The general fact is, that the house was never regarded by the solid part of the community as in any
real sense “haunted”. There were no widespread tales of rattling chains, cold currents of air, extinguished
lights, or faces at the window. Extremists sometimes said the house was “unlucky”, but that is as far as
even they went. What was really beyond dispute is that a frightful proportion of persons died there; or
more accurately, had died there, since after some peculiar happenings over sixty years ago the building
had become deserted through the sheer impossibility of renting it. These persons were not all cut off
suddenly by any one cause; rather did it seem that their vitality was insidiously sapped, so that each one
died the sooner from whatever tendency to weakness he may have naturally had. And those who did not
die displayed in varying degree a type of anaemia or consumption, and sometimes a decline of the mental
faculties, which spoke ill for the salubriousness of the building. Neighbouring houses, it must be added,
seemed entirely free from the noxious quality.
This much I knew before my insistent questioning led my uncle to shew me the notes which finally
embarked us both on our hideous investigation. In my childhood the shunned house was vacant, with
barren, gnarled, and terrible old trees, long, queerly pale grass, and nightmarishly misshapen weeds in the
high terraced yard where birds never lingered. We boys used to overrun the place, and I can still recall my
youthful terror not only at the morbid strangeness of this sinister vegetation, but at the eldritch
atmosphere and odour of the dilapidated house, whose unlocked front door was often entered in quest of
shudders. The small-paned windows were largely broken, and a nameless air of desolation hung round the
precarious panelling, shaky interior shutters, peeling wall-paper, falling plaster, rickety staircases, and such
fragments of battered furniture as still remained. The dust and cobwebs added their touch of the fearful;
and brave indeed was the boy who would voluntarily ascend the ladder to the attic, a vast raftered length
lighted only by small blinking windows in the gable ends, and filled with a massed wreckage of chests,
chairs, and spinning-wheels which infinite years of deposit had shrouded and festooned into monstrous
and hellish shapes.
But after all, the attic was not the most terrible part of the house. It was the dank, humid cellar which
somehow exerted the strongest repulsion on us, even though it was wholly above ground on the street
side, with only a thin door and window-pierced brick wall to separate it from the busy sidewalk. We
scarcely knew whether to haunt it in spectral fascination, or to shun it for the sake of our souls and our
sanity. For one thing, the bad odour of the house was strongest there; and for another thing, we did not
like the white fungous growths which occasionally sprang up in rainy summer weather from the hard earth
floor. Those fungi, grotesquely like the vegetation in the yard outside, were truly horrible in their outlines;
detestable parodies of toadstools and Indian pipes, whose like we had never seen in any other situation.
They rotted quickly, and at one stage became slightly phosphorescent; so that nocturnal passers-by
sometimes spoke of witch-fires glowing behind the broken panes of the foetor-spreading windows.
We never—even in our wildest Hallowe’en moods—visited this cellar by night, but in some of our
daytime visits could detect the phosphorescence, especially when the day was dark and wet. There was
also a subtler thing we often thought we detected—a very strange thing which was, however, merely
suggestive at most. I refer to a sort of cloudy whitish pattern on the dirt floor—a vague, shifting deposit of
mould or nitre which we sometimes thought we could trace amidst the sparse fungous growths near the
huge fireplace of the basement kitchen. Once in a while it struck us that this patch bore an uncanny
resemblance to a doubled-up human figure, though generally no such kinship existed, and often there was
no whitish deposit whatever. On a certain rainy afternoon when this illusion seemed phenomenally strong,
and when, in addition, I had fancied I glimpsed a kind of thin, yellowish, shimmering exhalation rising from
the nitrous pattern toward the yawning fireplace, I spoke to my uncle about the matter. He smiled at this
odd conceit, but it seemed that his smile was tinged with reminiscence. Later I heard that a similar notion
entered into some of the wild ancient tales of the common folk—a notion likewise alluding to ghoulish,
wolfish shapes taken by smoke from the great chimney, and queer contours assumed by certain of the
sinuous tree-roots that thrust their way into the cellar through the loose foundation-stones.

II.

Not till my adult years did my uncle set before me the notes and data which he had collected concerning
the shunned house. Dr. Whipple was a sane, conservative physician of the old school, and for all his
interest in the place was not eager to encourage young thoughts toward the abnormal. His own view,
postulating simply a building and location of markedly unsanitary qualities, had nothing to do with
abnormality; but he realised that the very picturesqueness which aroused his own interest would in a boy’s
fanciful mind take on all manner of gruesome imaginative associations.
The doctor was a bachelor; a white-haired, clean-shaven, old-fashioned gentleman, and a local
historian of note, who had often broken a lance with such controversial guardians of tradition as Sidney S.
Rider and Thomas W. Bicknell. He lived with one manservant in a Georgian homestead with knocker and
iron-railed steps, balanced eerily on a steep ascent of North Court Street beside the ancient brick court and
colony house where his grandfather—a cousin of that celebrated privateersman, Capt. Whipple, who burnt
His Majesty’s armed schooner Gaspee in 1772—had voted in the legislature on May 4, 1776, for the
independence of the Rhode Island Colony. Around him in the damp, low-ceiled library with the musty
white panelling, heavy carved overmantel, and small-paned, vine-shaded windows, were the relics and
records of his ancient family, among which were many dubious allusions to the shunned house in Benefit
Street. That pest spot lies not far distant—for Benefit runs ledgewise just above the court-house along the
precipitous hill up which the first settlement climbed.
When, in the end, my insistent pestering and maturing years evoked from my uncle the hoarded lore I
sought, there lay before me a strange enough chronicle. Long-winded, statistical, and drearily genealogical
as some of the matter was, there ran through it a continuous thread of brooding, tenacious horror and
preternatural malevolence which impressed me even more than it had impressed the good doctor.
Separate events fitted together uncannily, and seemingly irrelevant details held mines of hideous
possibilities. A new and burning curiosity grew in me, compared to which my boyish curiosity was feeble
and inchoate. The first revelation led to an exhaustive research, and finally to that shuddering quest which
proved so disastrous to myself and mine. For at last my uncle insisted on joining the search I had
commenced, and after a certain night in that house he did not come away with me. I am lonely without
that gentle soul whose long years were filled only with honour, virtue, good taste, benevolence, and
learning. I have reared a marble urn to his memory in St. John’s churchyard—the place that Poe loved—the
hidden grove of giant willows on the hill, where tombs and headstones huddle quietly between the hoary
bulk of the church and the houses and bank walls of Benefit Street.
The history of the house, opening amidst a maze of dates, revealed no trace of the sinister either
about its construction or about the prosperous and honourable family who built it. Yet from the first a taint
of calamity, soon increased to boding significance, was apparent. My uncle’s carefully compiled record
began with the building of the structure in 1763, and followed the theme with an unusual amount of detail.
The shunned house, it seems, was first inhabited by William Harris and his wife Rhoby Dexter, with their
children, Elkanah, born in 1755, Abigail, born in 1757, William, Jr., born in 1759, and Ruth, born in 1761.
Harris was a substantial merchant and seaman in the West India trade, connected with the firm of Obadiah
Brown and his nephews. After Brown’s death in 1761, the new firm of Nicholas Brown & Co. made him
master of the brig Prudence, Providence-built, of 120 tons, thus enabling him to erect the new homestead
he had desired ever since his marriage.
The site he had chosen—a recently straightened part of the new and fashionable Back Street, which
ran along the side of the hill above crowded Cheapside—was all that could be wished, and the building did
justice to the location. It was the best that moderate means could afford, and Harris hastened to move in
before the birth of a fifth child which the family expected. That child, a boy, came in December; but was
still-born. Nor was any child to be born alive in that house for a century and a half.
The next April sickness occurred among the children, and Abigail and Ruth died before the month was
over. Dr. Job Ives diagnosed the trouble as some infantile fever, though others declared it was more of a
mere wasting-away or decline. It seemed, in any event, to be contagious; for Hannah Bowen, one of the
two servants, died of it in the following June. Eli Liddeason, the other servant, constantly complained of
weakness; and would have returned to his father’s farm in Rehoboth but for a sudden attachment for
Mehitabel Pierce, who was hired to succeed Hannah. He died the next year—a sad year indeed, since it
marked the death of William Harris himself, enfeebled as he was by the climate of Martinique, where his
occupation had kept him for considerable periods during the preceding decade.
The widowed Rhoby Harris never recovered from the shock of her husband’s death, and the passing of
her first-born Elkanah two years later was the final blow to her reason. In 1768 she fell victim to a mild
form of insanity, and was thereafter confined to the upper part of the house; her elder maiden sister,
Mercy Dexter, having moved in to take charge of the family. Mercy was a plain, raw-boned woman of great
strength; but her health visibly declined from the time of her advent. She was greatly devoted to her
unfortunate sister, and had an especial affection for her only surviving nephew William, who from a sturdy
infant had become a sickly, spindling lad. In this year the servant Mehitabel died, and the other servant,
Preserved Smith, left without coherent explanation—or at least, with only some wild tales and a complaint
that he disliked the smell of the place. For a time Mercy could secure no more help, since the seven deaths
and case of madness, all occurring within five years’ space, had begun to set in motion the body of fireside
rumour which later became so bizarre. Ultimately, however, she obtained new servants from out of town;
Ann White, a morose woman from that part of North Kingstown now set off as the township of Exeter, and
a capable Boston man named Zenas Low.
It was Ann White who first gave definite shape to the sinister idle talk. Mercy should have known
better than to hire anyone from the Nooseneck Hill country, for that remote bit of backwoods was then, as
now, a seat of the most uncomfortable superstitions. As lately as 1892 an Exeter community exhumed a
dead body and ceremoniously burnt its heart in order to prevent certain alleged visitations injurious to the
public health and peace, and one may imagine the point of view of the same section in 1768. Ann’s tongue
was perniciously active, and within a few months Mercy discharged her, filling her place with a faithful and
amiable Amazon from Newport, Maria Robbins.
Meanwhile poor Rhoby Harris, in her madness, gave voice to dreams and imaginings of the most
hideous sort. At times her screams became insupportable, and for long periods she would utter shrieking
horrors which necessitated her son’s temporary residence with his cousin, Peleg Harris, in Presbyterian-
Lane near the new college building. The boy would seem to improve after these visits, and had Mercy been
as wise as she was well-meaning, she would have let him live permanently with Peleg. Just what Mrs.
Harris cried out in her fits of violence, tradition hesitates to say; or rather, presents such extravagant
accounts that they nullify themselves through sheer absurdity. Certainly it sounds absurd to hear that a
woman educated only in the rudiments of French often shouted for hours in a coarse and idiomatic form of
that language, or that the same person, alone and guarded, complained wildly of a staring thing which bit
and chewed at her. In 1772 the servant Zenas died, and when Mrs. Harris heard of it she laughed with a
shocking delight utterly foreign to her. The next year she herself died, and was laid to rest in the North
Burial Ground beside her husband.
Upon the outbreak of trouble with Great Britain in 1775, William Harris, despite his scant sixteen years
and feeble constitution, managed to enlist in the Army of Observation under General Greene; and from
that time on enjoyed a steady rise in health and prestige. In 1780, as a Captain in Rhode Island forces in
New Jersey under Colonel Angell, he met and married Phebe Hetfield of Elizabethtown, whom he brought
to Providence upon his honourable discharge in the following year.
The young soldier’s return was not a thing of unmitigated happiness. The house, it is true, was still in
good condition; and the street had been widened and changed in name from Back Street to Benefit Street.
But Mercy Dexter’s once robust frame had undergone a sad and curious decay, so that she was now a
stooped and pathetic figure with hollow voice and disconcerting pallor—qualities shared to a singular
degree by the one remaining servant Maria. In the autumn of 1782 Phebe Harris gave birth to a still-born
daughter, and on the fifteenth of the next May Mercy Dexter took leave of a useful, austere, and virtuous
life.
William Harris, at last thoroughly convinced of the radically unhealthful nature of his abode, now took
steps toward quitting it and closing it forever. Securing temporary quarters for himself and his wife at the
newly opened Golden Ball Inn, he arranged for the building of a new and finer house in Westminster
Street, in the growing part of the town across the Great Bridge. There, in 1785, his son Dutee was born;
and there the family dwelt till the encroachments of commerce drove them back across the river and over
the hill to Angell Street, in the newer East Side residence district, where the late Archer Harris built his
sumptuous but hideous French-roofed mansion in 1876. William and Phebe both succumbed to the yellow
fever epidemic of 1797, but Dutee was brought up by his cousin Rathbone Harris, Peleg’s son.
Rathbone was a practical man, and rented the Benefit Street house despite William’s wish to keep it
vacant. He considered it an obligation to his ward to make the most of all the boy’s property, nor did he
concern himself with the deaths and illnesses which caused so many changes of tenants, or the steadily
growing aversion with which the house was generally regarded. It is likely that he felt only vexation when,
in 1804, the town council ordered him to fumigate the place with sulphur, tar, and gum camphor on
account of the much-discussed deaths of four persons, presumably caused by the then diminishing fever
epidemic. They said the place had a febrile smell.
Dutee himself thought little of the house, for he grew up to be a privateersman, and served with
distinction on the Vigilant under Capt. Cahoone in the War of 1812. He returned unharmed, married in
1814, and became a father on that memorable night of September 23, 1815, when a great gale drove the
waters of the bay over half the town, and floated a tall sloop well up Westminster Street so that its masts
almost tapped the Harris windows in symbolic affirmation that the new boy, Welcome, was a seaman’s
son.
Welcome did not survive his father, but lived to perish gloriously at Fredericksburg in 1862. Neither he
nor his son Archer knew of the shunned house as other than a nuisance almost impossible to rent—
perhaps on account of the mustiness and sickly odour of unkempt old age. Indeed, it never was rented
after a series of deaths culminating in 1861, which the excitement of the war tended to throw into
obscurity. Carrington Harris, last of the male line, knew it only as a deserted and somewhat picturesque
centre of legend until I told him my experience. He had meant to tear it down and build an apartment
house on the site, but after my account decided to let it stand, install plumbing, and rent it. Nor has he yet
had any difficulty in obtaining tenants. The horror has gone.

III.

It may well be imagined how powerfully I was affected by the annals of the Harrises. In this continuous
record there seemed to me to brood a persistent evil beyond anything in Nature as I had known it; an evil
clearly connected with the house and not with the family. This impression was confirmed by my uncle’s
less systematic array of miscellaneous data—legends transcribed from servant gossip, cuttings from the
papers, copies of death-certificates by fellow-physicians, and the like. All of this material I cannot hope to
give, for my uncle was a tireless antiquarian and very deeply interested in the shunned house; but I may
refer to several dominant points which earn notice by their recurrence through many reports from diverse
sources. For example, the servant gossip was practically unanimous in attributing to the fungous and
malodorous cellar of the house a vast supremacy in evil influence. There had been servants—Ann White
especially—who would not use the cellar kitchen, and at least three well-defined legends bore upon the
queer quasi-human or diabolic outlines assumed by tree-roots and patches of mould in that region. These
latter narratives interested me profoundly, on account of what I had seen in my boyhood, but I felt that
most of the significance had in each case been largely obscured by additions from the common stock of
local ghost lore.
Ann White, with her Exeter superstition, had promulgated the most extravagant and at the same time
most consistent tale; alleging that there must lie buried beneath the house one of those vampires—the
dead who retain their bodily form and live on the blood or breath of the living—whose hideous legions
send their preying shapes or spirits abroad by night. To destroy a vampire one must, the grandmothers say,
exhume it and burn its heart, or at least drive a stake through that organ; and Ann’s dogged insistence on a
search under the cellar had been prominent in bringing about her discharge.
Her tales, however, commanded a wide audience, and were the more readily accepted because the
house indeed stood on land once used for burial purposes. To me their interest depended less on this
circumstance than on the peculiarly appropriate way in which they dovetailed with certain other things—
the complaint of the departing servant Preserved Smith, who had preceded Ann and never heard of her,
that something “sucked his breath” at night; the death-certificates of fever victims of 1804, issued by Dr.
Chad Hopkins, and shewing the four deceased persons all unaccountably lacking in blood; and the obscure
passages of poor Rhoby Harris’s ravings, where she complained of the sharp teeth of a glassy-eyed, half-
visible presence.
Free from unwarranted superstition though I am, these things produced in me an odd sensation,
which was intensified by a pair of widely separated newspaper cuttings relating to deaths in the shunned
house—one from the Providence Gazette and Country-Journal of April 12, 1815, and the other from
the Daily Transcript and Chronicle of October 27, 1845—each of which detailed an appallingly grisly
circumstance whose duplication was remarkable. It seems that in both instances the dying person, in 1815
a gentle old lady named Stafford and in 1845 a school-teacher of middle age named Eleazar Durfee,
became transfigured in a horrible way; glaring glassily and attempting to bite the throat of the attending
physician. Even more puzzling, though, was the final case which put an end to the renting of the house—a
series of anaemia deaths preceded by progressive madnesses wherein the patient would craftily attempt
the lives of his relatives by incisions in the neck or wrist.
This was in 1860 and 1861, when my uncle had just begun his medical practice; and before leaving for
the front he heard much of it from his elder professional colleagues. The really inexplicable thing was the
way in which the victims—ignorant people, for the ill-smelling and widely shunned house could now be
rented to no others—would babble maledictions in French, a language they could not possibly have
studied to any extent. It made one think of poor Rhoby Harris nearly a century before, and so moved my
uncle that he commenced collecting historical data on the house after listening, some time subsequent to
his return from the war, to the first-hand account of Drs. Chase and Whitmarsh. Indeed, I could see that my
uncle had thought deeply on the subject, and that he was glad of my own interest—an open-minded and
sympathetic interest which enabled him to discuss with me matters at which others would merely have
laughed. His fancy had not gone so far as mine, but he felt that the place was rare in its imaginative
potentialities, and worthy of note as an inspiration in the field of the grotesque and macabre.
For my part, I was disposed to take the whole subject with profound seriousness, and began at once
not only to review the evidence, but to accumulate as much more as I could. I talked with the elderly
Archer Harris, then owner of the house, many times before his death in 1916; and obtained from him and
his still surviving maiden sister Alice an authentic corroboration of all the family data my uncle had
collected. When, however, I asked them what connexion with France or its language the house could have,
they confessed themselves as frankly baffled and ignorant as I. Archer knew nothing, and all that Miss
Harris could say was that an old allusion her grandfather, Dutee Harris, had heard of might have shed a
little light. The old seaman, who had survived his son Welcome’s death in battle by two years, had not
himself known the legend; but recalled that his earliest nurse, the ancient Maria Robbins, seemed darkly
aware of something that might have lent a weird significance to the French ravings of Rhoby Harris, which
she had so often heard during the last days of that hapless woman. Maria had been at the shunned house
from 1769 till the removal of the family in 1783, and had seen Mercy Dexter die. Once she hinted to the
child Dutee of a somewhat peculiar circumstance in Mercy’s last moments, but he had soon forgotten all
about it save that it was something peculiar. The granddaughter, moreover, recalled even this much with
difficulty. She and her brother were not so much interested in the house as was Archer’s son Carrington,
the present owner, with whom I talked after my experience.
 Having exhausted the Harris family of all the information it could furnish, I turned my attention to
early town records and deeds with a zeal more penetrating than that which my uncle had occasionally
shewn in the same work. What I wished was a comprehensive history of the site from its very settlement in
1636—or even before, if any Narragansett Indian legend could be unearthed to supply the data. I found, at
the start, that the land had been part of the long strip of home lot granted originally to John
Throckmorton; one of many similar strips beginning at the Town Street beside the river and extending up
over the hill to a line roughly corresponding with the modern Hope Street. The Throckmorton lot had later,
of course, been much subdivided; and I became very assiduous in tracing that section through which Back
or Benefit Street was later run. It had, a rumour indeed said, been the Throckmorton graveyard; but as I
examined the records more carefully, I found that the graves had all been transferred at an early date to
the North Burial Ground on the Pawtucket West Road.
Then suddenly I came—by a rare piece of chance, since it was not in the main body of records and
might easily have been missed—upon something which aroused my keenest eagerness, fitting in as it did
with several of the queerest phases of the affair. It was the record of a lease, in 1697, of a small tract of
ground to an Etienne Roulet and wife. At last the French element had appeared—that, and another deeper
element of horror which the name conjured up from the darkest recesses of my weird and heterogeneous
reading—and I feverishly studied the platting of the locality as it had been before the cutting through and
partial straightening of Back Street between 1747 and 1758. I found what I had half expected, that where
the shunned house now stood the Roulets had laid out their graveyard behind a one-story and attic
cottage, and that no record of any transfer of graves existed. The document, indeed, ended in much
confusion; and I was forced to ransack both the Rhode Island Historical Society and Shepley Library before I
could find a local door which the name Etienne Roulet would unlock. In the end I did find something;
something of such vague but monstrous import that I set about at once to examine the cellar of the
shunned house itself with a new and excited minuteness.
The Roulets, it seemed, had come in 1696 from East Greenwich, down the west shore of Narragansett
Bay. They were Huguenots from Caude, and had encountered much opposition before the Providence
selectmen allowed them to settle in the town. Unpopularity had dogged them in East Greenwich, whither
they had come in 1686, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and rumour said that the cause of
dislike extended beyond mere racial and national prejudice, or the land disputes which involved other
French settlers with the English in rivalries which not even Governor Andros could quell. But their ardent
Protestantism—too ardent, some whispered—and their evident distress when virtually driven from the
village down the bay, had moved the sympathy of the town fathers. Here the strangers had been granted a
haven; and the swarthy Etienne Roulet, less apt at agriculture than at reading queer books and drawing
queer diagrams, was given a clerical post in the warehouse at Pardon Tillinghast’s wharf, far south in Town
Street. There had, however, been a riot of some sort later on—perhaps forty years later, after old Roulet’s
death—and no one seemed to hear of the family after that.
For a century and more, it appeared, the Roulets had been well remembered and frequently discussed
as vivid incidents in the quiet life of a New England seaport. Etienne’s son Paul, a surly fellow whose erratic
conduct had probably provoked the riot which wiped out the family, was particularly a source of
speculation; and though Providence never shared the witchcraft panics of her Puritan neighbours, it was
freely intimated by old wives that his prayers were neither uttered at the proper time nor directed toward
the proper object. All this had undoubtedly formed the basis of the legend known by old Maria Robbins.
What relation it had to the French ravings of Rhoby Harris and other inhabitants of the shunned house,
imagination or future discovery alone could determine. I wondered how many of those who had known
the legends realised that additional link with the terrible which my wide reading had given me; that
ominous item in the annals of morbid horror which tells of the creature Jacques Roulet, of Caude, who in
1598 was condemned to death as a daemoniac but afterward saved from the stake by the Paris parliament
and shut in a madhouse. He had been found covered with blood and shreds of flesh in a wood, shortly after
the killing and rending of a boy by a pair of wolves. One wolf was seen to lope away unhurt. Surely a pretty
hearthside tale, with a queer significance as to name and place; but I decided that the Providence gossips
could not have generally known of it. Had they known, the coincidence of names would have brought some
drastic and frightened action—indeed, might not its limited whispering have precipitated the final riot
which erased the Roulets from the town?
I now visited the accursed place with increased frequency; studying the unwholesome vegetation of
the garden, examining all the walls of the building, and poring over every inch of the earthen cellar floor.
Finally, with Carrington Harris’s permission, I fitted a key to the disused door opening from the cellar
directly upon Benefit Street, preferring to have a more immediate access to the outside world than the
dark stairs, ground floor hall, and front door could give. There, where morbidity lurked most thickly, I
searched and poked during long afternoons when the sunlight filtered in through the cobwebbed above-
ground windows, and a sense of security glowed from the unlocked door which placed me only a few feet
from the placid sidewalk outside. Nothing new rewarded my efforts—only the same depressing mustiness
and faint suggestions of noxious odours and nitrous outlines on the floor—and I fancy that many
pedestrians must have watched me curiously through the broken panes.
At length, upon a suggestion of my uncle’s, I decided to try the spot nocturnally; and one stormy
midnight ran the beams of an electric torch over the mouldy floor with its uncanny shapes and distorted,
half-phosphorescent fungi. The place had dispirited me curiously that evening, and I was almost prepared
when I saw—or thought I saw—amidst the whitish deposits a particularly sharp definition of the “huddled
form” I had suspected from boyhood. Its clearness was astonishing and unprecedented—and as I watched I
seemed to see again the thin, yellowish, shimmering exhalation which had startled me on that rainy
afternoon so many years before.
Above the anthropomorphic patch of mould by the fireplace it rose; a subtle, sickish, almost luminous
vapour which as it hung trembling in the dampness seemed to develop vague and shocking suggestions of
form, gradually trailing off into nebulous decay and passing up into the blackness of the great chimney with
a foetor in its wake. It was truly horrible, and the more so to me because of what I knew of the spot.
Refusing to flee, I watched it fade—and as I watched I felt that it was in turn watching me greedily with
eyes more imaginable than visible. When I told my uncle about it he was greatly aroused; and after a tense
hour of reflection, arrived at a definite and drastic decision. Weighing in his mind the importance of the
matter, and the significance of our relation to it, he insisted that we both test—and if possible destroy—
the horror of the house by a joint night or nights of aggressive vigil in that musty and fungus-cursed cellar.

IV.

On Wednesday, June 25, 1919, after a proper notification of Carrington Harris which did not include
surmises as to what we expected to find, my uncle and I conveyed to the shunned house two camp chairs
and a folding camp cot, together with some scientific mechanism of greater weight and intricacy. These we
placed in the cellar during the day, screening the windows with paper and planning to return in the evening
for our first vigil. We had locked the door from the cellar to the ground floor; and having a key to the
outside cellar door, we were prepared to leave our expensive and delicate apparatus—which we had
obtained secretly and at great cost—as many days as our vigils might need to be protracted. It was our
design to sit up together till very late, and then watch singly till dawn in two-hour stretches, myself first
and then my companion; the inactive member resting on the cot.
The natural leadership with which my uncle procured the instruments from the laboratories of Brown
University and the Cranston Street Armoury, and instinctively assumed direction of our venture, was a
marvellous commentary on the potential vitality and resilience of a man of eighty-one. Elihu Whipple had
lived according to the hygienic laws he had preached as a physician, and but for what happened later
would be here in full vigour today. Only two persons suspect what did happen—Carrington Harris and
myself. I had to tell Harris because he owned the house and deserved to know what had gone out of it.
Then too, we had spoken to him in advance of our quest; and I felt after my uncle’s going that he would
understand and assist me in some vitally necessary public explanations. He turned very pale, but agreed to
help me, and decided that it would now be safe to rent the house.
To declare that we were not nervous on that rainy night of watching would be an exaggeration both
gross and ridiculous. We were not, as I have said, in any sense childishly superstitious, but scientific study
and reflection had taught us that the known universe of three dimensions embraces the merest fraction of
the whole cosmos of substance and energy. In this case an overwhelming preponderance of evidence from
numerous authentic sources pointed to the tenacious existence of certain forces of great power and, so far
as the human point of view is concerned, exceptional malignancy. To say that we actually believed in
vampires or werewolves would be a carelessly inclusive statement. Rather must it be said that we were not
prepared to deny the possibility of certain unfamiliar and unclassified modifications of vital force and
attenuated matter; existing very infrequently in three-dimensional space because of its more intimate
connexion with other spatial units, yet close enough to the boundary of our own to furnish us occasional
manifestations which we, for lack of a proper vantage-point, may never hope to understand.
In short, it seemed to my uncle and me that an incontrovertible array of facts pointed to some
lingering influence in the shunned house; traceable to one or another of the ill-favoured French settlers of
two centuries before, and still operative through rare and unknown laws of atomic and electronic motion.
That the family of Roulet had possessed an abnormal affinity for outer circles of entity—dark spheres
which for normal folk hold only repulsion and terror—their recorded history seemed to prove. Had not,
then, the riots of those bygone seventeen-thirties set moving certain kinetic patterns in the morbid brain
of one or more of them—notably the sinister Paul Roulet—which obscurely survived the bodies murdered
and buried by the mob, and continued to function in some multiple-dimensioned space along the original
lines of force determined by a frantic hatred of the encroaching community?
 Such a thing was surely not a physical or biochemical impossibility in the light of a newer science
which includes the theories of relativity and intra-atomic action. One might easily imagine an alien nucleus
of substance or energy, formless or otherwise, kept alive by imperceptible or immaterial subtractions from
the life-force or bodily tissues and fluids of other and more palpably living things into which it penetrates
and with whose fabric it sometimes completely merges itself. It might be actively hostile, or it might be
dictated merely by blind motives of self-preservation. In any case such a monster must of necessity be in
our scheme of things an anomaly and an intruder, whose extirpation forms a primary duty with every man
not an enemy to the world’s life, health, and sanity.
What baffled us was our utter ignorance of the aspect in which we might encounter the thing. No sane
person had even seen it, and few had ever felt it definitely. It might be pure energy—a form ethereal and
outside the realm of substance—or it might be partly material; some unknown and equivocal mass of
plasticity, capable of changing at will to nebulous approximations of the solid, liquid, gaseous, or tenuously
unparticled states. The anthropomorphic patch of mould on the floor, the form of the yellowish vapour,
and the curvature of the tree-roots in some of the old tales, all argued at least a remote and reminiscent
connexion with the human shape; but how representative or permanent that similarity might be, none
could say with any kind of certainty.
We had devised two weapons to fight it; a large and specially fitted Crookes tube operated by
powerful storage batteries and provided with peculiar screens and reflectors, in case it proved intangible
and opposable only by vigorously destructive ether radiations, and a pair of military flame-throwers of the
sort used in the world-war, in case it proved partly material and susceptible of mechanical destruction—for
like the superstitious Exeter rustics, we were prepared to burn the thing’s heart out if heart existed to
burn. All this aggressive mechanism we set in the cellar in positions carefully arranged with reference to
the cot and chairs, and to the spot before the fireplace where the mould had taken strange shapes. That
suggestive patch, by the way, was only faintly visible when we placed our furniture and instruments, and
when we returned that evening for the actual vigil. For a moment I half doubted that I had ever seen it in
the more definitely limned form—but then I thought of the legends.
Our cellar vigil began at 10 p.m., daylight saving time, and as it continued we found no promise of
pertinent developments. A weak, filtered glow from the rain-harassed street-lamps outside, and a feeble
phosphorescence from the detestable fungi within, shewed the dripping stone of the walls, from which all
traces of whitewash had vanished; the dank, foetid, and mildew-tainted hard earth floor with its obscene
fungi; the rotting remains of what had been stools, chairs, and tables, and other more shapeless furniture;
the heavy planks and massive beams of the ground floor overhead; the decrepit plank door leading to bins
and chambers beneath other parts of the house; the crumbling stone staircase with ruined wooden hand-
rail; and the crude and cavernous fireplace of blackened brick where rusted iron fragments revealed the
past presence of hooks, andirons, spit, crane, and a door to the Dutch oven—these things, and our austere
cot and camp chairs, and the heavy and intricate destructive machinery we had brought.
We had, as in my own former explorations, left the door to the street unlocked; so that a direct and
practical path of escape might lie open in case of manifestations beyond our power to deal with. It was our
idea that our continued nocturnal presence would call forth whatever malign entity lurked there; and that
being prepared, we could dispose of the thing with one or the other of our provided means as soon as we
had recognised and observed it sufficiently. How long it might require to evoke and extinguish the thing,
we had no notion. It occurred to us, too, that our venture was far from safe; for in what strength the thing
might appear no one could tell. But we deemed the game worth the hazard, and embarked on it alone and
unhesitatingly; conscious that the seeking of outside aid would only expose us to ridicule and perhaps
defeat our entire purpose. Such was our frame of mind as we talked—far into the night, till my uncle’s
growing drowsiness made me remind him to lie down for his two-hour sleep.
Something like fear chilled me as I sat there in the small hours alone—I say alone, for one who sits by a
sleeper is indeed alone; perhaps more alone than he can realise. My uncle breathed heavily, his deep
inhalations and exhalations accompanied by the rain outside, and punctuated by another nerve-racking
sound of distant dripping water within—for the house was repulsively damp even in dry weather, and in
this storm positively swamp-like. I studied the loose, antique masonry of the walls in the fungus-light and
the feeble rays which stole in from the street through the screened windows; and once, when the noisome
atmosphere of the place seemed about to sicken me, I opened the door and looked up and down the
street, feasting my eyes on familiar sights and my nostrils on the wholesome air. Still nothing occurred to
reward my watching; and I yawned repeatedly, fatigue getting the better of apprehension.
Then the stirring of my uncle in his sleep attracted my notice. He had turned restlessly on the cot
several times during the latter half of the first hour, but now he was breathing with unusual irregularity,
occasionally heaving a sigh which held more than a few of the qualities of a choking moan. I turned my
electric flashlight on him and found his face averted, so rising and crossing to the other side of the cot, I
again flashed the light to see if he seemed in any pain. What I saw unnerved me most surprisingly,
considering its relative triviality. It must have been merely the association of any odd circumstance with
the sinister nature of our location and mission, for surely the circumstance was not in itself frightful or
unnatural. It was merely that my uncle’s facial expression, disturbed no doubt by the strange dreams which
our situation prompted, betrayed considerable agitation, and seemed not at all characteristic of him. His
habitual expression was one of kindly and well-bred calm, whereas now a variety of emotions seemed
struggling within him. I think, on the whole, that it was this variety which chiefly disturbed me. My uncle, as
he gasped and tossed in increasing perturbation and with eyes that had now started open, seemed not one
but many men, and suggested a curious quality of alienage from himself.
All at once he commenced to mutter, and I did not like the look of his mouth and teeth as he spoke.
The words were at first indistinguishable, and then—with a tremendous start—I recognised something
about them which filled me with icy fear till I recalled the breadth of my uncle’s education and the
interminable translations he had made from anthropological and antiquarian articles in theRevue des Deux
Mondes. For the venerable Elihu Whipple was muttering in French, and the few phrases I could distinguish
seemed connected with the darkest myths he had ever adapted from the famous Paris magazine.
Suddenly a perspiration broke out on the sleeper’s forehead, and he leaped abruptly up, half awake.
The jumble of French changed to a cry in English, and the hoarse voice shouted excitedly, “My breath, my
breath!” Then the awakening became complete, and with a subsidence of facial expression to the normal
state my uncle seized my hand and began to relate a dream whose nucleus of significance I could only
surmise with a kind of awe.
He had, he said, floated off from a very ordinary series of dream-pictures into a scene whose
strangeness was related to nothing he had ever read. It was of this world, and yet not of it—a shadowy
geometrical confusion in which could be seen elements of familiar things in most unfamiliar and perturbing
combinations. There was a suggestion of queerly disordered pictures superimposed one upon another; an
arrangement in which the essentials of time as well as of space seemed dissolved and mixed in the most
illogical fashion. In this kaleidoscopic vortex of phantasmal images were occasional snapshots, if one might
use the term, of singular clearness but unaccountable heterogeneity.
Once my uncle thought he lay in a carelessly dug open pit, with a crowd of angry faces framed by
straggling locks and three-cornered hats frowning down on him. Again he seemed to be in the interior of a
house—an old house, apparently—but the details and inhabitants were constantly changing, and he could
never be certain of the faces or the furniture, or even of the room itself, since doors and windows seemed
in just as great a state of flux as the more presumably mobile objects. It was queer—damnably queer—and
my uncle spoke almost sheepishly, as if half expecting not to be believed, when he declared that of the
strange faces many had unmistakably borne the features of the Harris family. And all the while there was a
personal sensation of choking, as if some pervasive presence had spread itself through his body and sought
to possess itself of his vital processes. I shuddered at the thought of those vital processes, worn as they
were by eighty-one years of continuous functioning, in conflict with unknown forces of which the youngest
and strongest system might well be afraid; but in another moment reflected that dreams are only dreams,
and that these uncomfortable visions could be, at most, no more than my uncle’s reaction to the
investigations and expectations which had lately filled our minds to the exclusion of all else.
Conversation, also, soon tended to dispel my sense of strangeness; and in time I yielded to my yawns
and took my turn at slumber. My uncle seemed now very wakeful, and welcomed his period of watching
even though the nightmare had aroused him far ahead of his allotted two hours. Sleep seized me quickly,
and I was at once haunted with dreams of the most disturbing kind. I felt, in my visions, a cosmic and
abysmal loneness; with hostility surging from all sides upon some prison where I lay confined. I seemed
bound and gagged, and taunted by the echoing yells of distant multitudes who thirsted for my blood. My
uncle’s face came to me with less pleasant associations than in waking hours, and I recall many futile
struggles and attempts to scream. It was not a pleasant sleep, and for a second I was not sorry for the
echoing shriek which clove through the barriers of dream and flung me to a sharp and startled awakeness
in which every actual object before my eyes stood out with more than natural clearness and reality.

V.

I had been lying with my face away from my uncle’s chair, so that in this sudden flash of awakening I saw
only the door to the street, the more northerly window, and the wall and floor and ceiling toward the
north of the room, all photographed with morbid vividness on my brain in a light brighter than the glow of
the fungi or the rays from the street outside. It was not a strong or even a fairly strong light; certainly not
nearly strong enough to read an average book by. But it cast a shadow of myself and the cot on the floor,
and had a yellowish, penetrating force that hinted at things more potent than luminosity. This I perceived
with unhealthy sharpness despite the fact that two of my other senses were violently assailed. For on my
ears rang the reverberations of that shocking scream, while my nostrils revolted at the stench which filled
the place. My mind, as alert as my senses, recognised the gravely unusual; and almost automatically I
leaped up and turned about to grasp the destructive instruments which we had left trained on the mouldy
spot before the fireplace. As I turned, I dreaded what I was to see; for the scream had been in my uncle’s
voice, and I knew not against what menace I should have to defend him and myself.
Yet after all, the sight was worse than I had dreaded. There are horrors beyond horrors, and this was
one of those nuclei of all dreamable hideousness which the cosmos saves to blast an accursed and
unhappy few. Out of the fungus-ridden earth steamed up a vaporous corpse-light, yellow and diseased,
which bubbled and lapped to a gigantic height in vague outlines half-human and half-monstrous, through
which I could see the chimney and fireplace beyond. It was all eyes—wolfish and mocking—and the rugose
insect-like head dissolved at the top to a thin stream of mist which curled putridly about and finally
vanished up the chimney. I say that I saw this thing, but it is only in conscious retrospection that I ever
definitely traced its damnable approach to form. At the time it was to me only a seething, dimly
phosphorescent cloud of fungous loathsomeness, enveloping and dissolving to an abhorrent plasticity the
one object to which all my attention was focussed. That object was my uncle—the venerable Elihu
Whipple—who with blackening and decaying features leered and gibbered at me, and reached out dripping
claws to rend me in the fury which this horror had brought.
It was a sense of routine which kept me from going mad. I had drilled myself in preparation for the
crucial moment, and blind training saved me. Recognising the bubbling evil as no substance reachable by
matter or material chemistry, and therefore ignoring the flame-thrower which loomed on my left, I threw
on the current of the Crookes tube apparatus, and focussed toward that scene of immortal
blasphemousness the strongest ether radiations which man’s art can arouse from the spaces and fluids of
Nature. There was a bluish haze and a frenzied sputtering, and the yellowish phosphorescence grew
dimmer to my eyes. But I saw the dimness was only that of contrast, and that the waves from the machine
had no effect whatever.
Then, in the midst of that daemoniac spectacle, I saw a fresh horror which brought cries to my lips and
sent me fumbling and staggering toward that unlocked door to the quiet street, careless of what abnormal
terrors I loosed upon the world, or what thoughts or judgments of men I brought down upon my head. In
that dim blend of blue and yellow the form of my uncle had commenced a nauseous liquefaction whose
essence eludes all description, and in which there played across his vanishing face such changes of identity
as only madness can conceive. He was at once a devil and a multitude, a charnel-house and a pageant. Lit
by the mixed and uncertain beams, that gelatinous face assumed a dozen—a score—a hundred—aspects;
grinning, as it sank to the ground on a body that melted like tallow, in the caricatured likeness of legions
strange and yet not strange.
I saw the features of the Harris line, masculine and feminine, adult and infantile, and other features
old and young, coarse and refined, familiar and unfamiliar. For a second there flashed a degraded
counterfeit of a miniature of poor mad Rhoby Harris that I had seen in the School of Design Museum, and
another time I thought I caught the raw-boned image of Mercy Dexter as I recalled her from a painting in
Carrington Harris’s house. It was frightful beyond conception; toward the last, when a curious blend of
servant and baby visages flickered close to the fungous floor where a pool of greenish grease was
spreading, it seemed as though the shifting features fought against themselves, and strove to form
contours like those of my uncle’s kindly face. I like to think that he existed at that moment, and that he
tried to bid me farewell. It seems to me I hiccoughed a farewell from my own parched throat as I lurched
out into the street; a thin stream of grease following me through the door to the rain-drenched sidewalk.
The rest is shadowy and monstrous. There was no one in the soaking street, and in all the world there
was no one I dared tell. I walked aimlessly south past College Hill and the Athenaeum, down Hopkins
Street, and over the bridge to the business section where tall buildings seemed to guard me as modern
material things guard the world from ancient and unwholesome wonder. Then grey dawn unfolded wetly
from the east, silhouetting the archaic hill and its venerable steeples, and beckoning me to the place where
my terrible work was still unfinished. And in the end I went, wet, hatless, and dazed in the morning light,
and entered that awful door in Benefit Street which I had left ajar, and which still swung cryptically in full
sight of the early householders to whom I dared not speak.
The grease was gone, for the mouldy floor was porous. And in front of the fireplace was no vestige of
the giant doubled-up form in nitre. I looked at the cot, the chairs, the instruments, my neglected hat, and
the yellowed straw hat of my uncle. Dazedness was uppermost, and I could scarcely recall what was dream
and what was reality. Then thought trickled back, and I knew that I had witnessed things more horrible
than I had dreamed. Sitting down, I tried to conjecture as nearly as sanity would let me just what had
happened, and how I might end the horror, if indeed it had been real. Matter it seemed not to be, nor
ether, nor anything else conceivable by mortal mind. What, then, but some exotic emanation; some
vampirish vapour such as Exeter rustics tell of as lurking over certain churchyards? This I felt was the clue,
and again I looked at the floor before the fireplace where the mould and nitre had taken strange forms. In
ten minutes my mind was made up, and taking my hat I set out for home, where I bathed, ate, and gave by
telephone an order for a pickaxe, a spade, a military gas-mask, and six carboys of sulphuric acid, all to be
delivered the next morning at the cellar door of the shunned house in Benefit Street. After that I tried to
sleep; and failing, passed the hours in reading and in the composition of inane verses to counteract my
mood.
At 11 a.m. the next day I commenced digging. It was sunny weather, and I was glad of that. I was still
alone, for as much as I feared the unknown horror I sought, there was more fear in the thought of telling
anybody. Later I told Harris only through sheer necessity, and because he had heard odd tales from old
people which disposed him ever so little toward belief. As I turned up the stinking black earth in front of
the fireplace, my spade causing a viscous yellow ichor to ooze from the white fungi which it severed, I
trembled at the dubious thoughts of what I might uncover. Some secrets of inner earth are not good for
mankind, and this seemed to me one of them.
My hand shook perceptibly, but still I delved; after a while standing in the large hole I had made. With
the deepening of the hole, which was about six feet square, the evil smell increased; and I lost all doubt of
my imminent contact with the hellish thing whose emanations had cursed the house for over a century and
a half. I wondered what it would look like—what its form and substance would be, and how big it might
have waxed through long ages of life-sucking. At length I climbed out of the hole and dispersed the
heaped-up dirt, then arranging the great carboys of acid around and near two sides, so that when
necessary I might empty them all down the aperture in quick succession. After that I dumped earth only
along the other two sides; working more slowly and donning my gas-mask as the smell grew. I was nearly
unnerved at my proximity to a nameless thing at the bottom of a pit.
Suddenly my spade struck something softer than earth. I shuddered, and made a motion as if to climb
out of the hole, which was now as deep as my neck. Then courage returned, and I scraped away more dirt
in the light of the electric torch I had provided. The surface I uncovered was fishy and glassy—a kind of
semi-putrid congealed jelly with suggestions of translucency. I scraped further, and saw that it had form.
There was a rift where a part of the substance was folded over. The exposed area was huge and roughly
cylindrical; like a mammoth soft blue-white stovepipe doubled in two, its largest part some two feet in
diameter. Still more I scraped, and then abruptly I leaped out of the hole and away from the filthy thing;
frantically unstopping and tilting the heavy carboys, and precipitating their corrosive contents one after
another down that charnel gulf and upon the unthinkable abnormality whose titan elbow I had seen.
The blinding maelstrom of greenish-yellow vapour which surged tempestuously up from that hole as
the floods of acid descended, will never leave my memory. All along the hill people tell of the yellow day,
when virulent and horrible fumes arose from the factory waste dumped in the Providence River, but I know
how mistaken they are as to the source. They tell, too, of the hideous roar which at the same time came
from some disordered water-pipe or gas main underground—but again I could correct them if I dared. It
was unspeakably shocking, and I do not see how I lived through it. I did faint after emptying the fourth
carboy, which I had to handle after the fumes had begun to penetrate my mask; but when I recovered I
saw that the hole was emitting no fresh vapours.
The two remaining carboys I emptied down without particular result, and after a time I felt it safe to
shovel the earth back into the pit. It was twilight before I was done, but fear had gone out of the place. The
dampness was less foetid, and all the strange fungi had withered to a kind of harmless greyish powder
which blew ash-like along the floor. One of earth’s nethermost terrors had perished forever; and if there be
a hell, it had received at last the daemon soul of an unhallowed thing. And as I patted down the last
spadeful of mould, I shed the first of the many tears with which I have paid unaffected tribute to my
beloved uncle’s memory.
The next spring no more pale grass and strange weeds came up in the shunned house’s terraced
garden, and shortly afterward Carrington Harris rented the place. It is still spectral, but its strangeness
fascinates me, and I shall find mixed with my relief a queer regret when it is torn down to make way for a
tawdry shop or vulgar apartment building. The barren old trees in the yard have begun to bear small, sweet
apples, and last year the birds nested in their gnarled boughs.

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

By H. P. Lovecraft

Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvellous 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. It 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 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 prophetick to the eager sound of lutes and song; unclosing faery 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
flights flung endlessly down to where those streets of elder witchery lay outspread and beckoning.
When for the third time he awaked 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 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 shewn 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 unknown Kadath, but no man had ever suspected in what part of space it may lie;
whether it be in the dreamlands around our world, or in those surrounding some unguessed companion of
Fomalhaut or Aldebaran. If in our dreamland, it might conceivably be reached; but only three fully 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 farewell 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 dream. 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 Celephaïs 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-gulfs 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 near the centre of the wood, where a circle of great mossy stones in what
was once a clearing 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 greater 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 length 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, recognising
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 Olathoë 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 wife 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 pier 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 neighbourhood 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-Kla 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 Barzai the Wise
had been drawn screaming into the sky for climbing merely the known peak of Hatheg-Kla. 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-Kla 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 recognise 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
realised 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 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 on 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 tessellated 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 arose 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 Giants’ 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
earth’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 fail 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 mole 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 stealthily 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 though 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 own 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 recognised the templed terraces of Zar,
abode of forgotten dreams; the spires of infamous Thalarion, that daemon-city of a thousand wonders
where the eidolon Lathi reigns; the charnal gardens of Xura, 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 malodorous 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
on Kadath, had decided to take him away and deliver him to Nyarlathothep 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 the 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 wholesome or suitable gods, and in the symmetries of the
broken columns there seemed to lurk 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-strown 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 recognised as akin to that solitary moon-tree in the enchanted wood of earth,
from whose sap the small brown zoogs ferment their peculiar 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 curiously
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 fore paws. 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 these slaves—the fatter ones, whom a sort of
overseer would pinch experimentally—were unloaded from ships and nailed in crates which workers
pushed into low warehouses or loaded on great lumbering vans.
Once a van was hitched up 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 grey 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 and 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 each
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 Manx; 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 beginning of the solid circles of 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 petted
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 recognised
the prisoner as a sworn friend of his kind on earth and in the land of dream.
A yowl now came from a 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 of 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 a far
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 mole 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 Baharna, 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 the water was stronger, and soon passed from sight of any
land. On the fifth day the sailors were nervous, but the captain apologised 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 a 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 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 Baharna a mighty city. The wharves of Baharna 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 Baharna’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 shore 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 back 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 olden 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 knick-knacks taken away, and all around 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 led uphill through wilder and partly wooded country, and he saw only the huts of
charcoal-burners and the camps 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 men 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 had 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 tavern-keeper’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 Baharna, 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 Baharna’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 slope, 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
strown 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 blanket 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 slopes 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 road 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 around; 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 hand-holds and foot-holds 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 the 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 foot-holds, 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, black against the white of the frozen peak. 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 down at sunset in the cryptic 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 gods’ 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 Celephaïs 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 Celephaïs, and it was clear that these could be no others than the half-
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 Celephaïs he must go, far distant from the isle of Oriab, and in such
parts as would take him back to Dylath-Leen 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 Cerenerian 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, without a warning sound in the dark, Carter felt his curved scimitar drawn stealthily out of
his belt by some unseen hand. Then he heard it clatter down over the rocks below. And between him and
the Milky Way he thought he saw a very terrible outline of something noxiously thin and horned and tailed
and bat-winged. Other things, too, had begun to blot out patches of stars west of him, as if a flock of vague
entities were flapping thickly and silently out of that inaccessible cave in the face of the precipice. Then a
sort of cold rubbery arm seized his neck and something else seized his feet, and he was lifted
inconsiderately up and swung about in space. Another minute and the stars were gone, and Carter knew
that the night-gaunts had got him.
They bore him breathless into that cliffside cavern and through monstrous labyrinths beyond. When
he struggled, as at first he did by instinct, they tickled him with deliberation. They made no sound at all
themselves, and even their membraneous wings were silent. They were frightfully cold and damp and
slippery, and their paws kneaded one detestably. Soon they were plunging hideously downward through
inconceivable abysses in a whirling, giddying, sickening rush of dank, tomb-like air; and Carter felt they
were shooting into the ultimate vortex of shrieking and daemonic madness. He screamed again and again,
but whenever he did so the black paws tickled him with greater subtlety. Then he saw a sort of grey
phosphorescence about, and guessed they were coming even to that inner world of subterrene horror of
which dim legends tell, and which is litten only by the pale death-fire wherewith reeks the ghoulish air and
the primal mists of the pits at earth’s core.
At last far below him he saw faint lines of grey and ominous pinnacles which he knew must be the
fabled Peaks of Thok. Awful and sinister they stand in the haunted dusk of sunless and eternal depths;
higher than man may reckon, and guarding terrible valleys where the bholes crawl and burrow nastily. But
Carter preferred to look at them than at his captors, which were indeed shocking and uncouth black beings
with smooth, oily, whale-like surfaces, unpleasant horns that curved inward toward each other, bat-wings
whose beating made no sound, ugly prehensile paws, and barbed tails that lashed needlessly and
disquietingly. And worst of all, they never spoke or laughed, and never smiled because they had no faces at
all to smile with, but only a suggestive blankness where a face ought to be. All they ever did was clutch and
fly and tickle; that was the way of night-gaunts.
As the band flew lower the Peaks of Thok rose grey and towering on all sides, and one saw clearly that
nothing lived on that austere and impassive granite of the endless twilight. At still lower levels the death-
fires in the air gave out, and one met only the primal blackness of the void save aloft where the thin peaks
stood out goblin-like. Soon the peaks were very far away, and nothing about but great rushing winds with
the dankness of nethermost grottoes in them. Then in the end the night-gaunts landed on a floor of unseen
things which felt like layers of bones, and left Carter all alone in that black valley. To bring him thither was
the duty of the night-gaunts that guard Ngranek; and this done, they flapped away silently. When Carter
tried to trace their flight he found he could not, since even the Peaks of Thok had faded out of sight. There
was nothing anywhere but blackness and horror and silence and bones.
Now Carter knew from a certain source that he was in the vale of Pnath, where crawl and burrow the
enormous bholes; but he did not know what to expect, because no one has ever seen a bhole or even
guessed what such a thing may be like. Bholes are known only by dim rumour, from the rustling they make
amongst mountains of bones and the slimy touch they have when they wriggle past one. They cannot be
seen because they creep only in the dark. Carter did not wish to meet a bhole, so listened intently for any
sound in the unknown depths of bones about him. Even in this fearsome place he had a plan and an
objective, for whispers of Pnath and its approaches were not unknown to one with whom he had talked
much in the old days. In brief, it seemed fairly likely that this was the spot into which all the ghouls of the
waking world cast the refuse of their feastings; and that if he but had good luck he might stumble upon
that mighty crag taller even than Thok’s peaks which marks the edge of their domain. Showers of bones
would tell him where to look, and once found he could call to a ghoul to let down a ladder; for strange to
say, he had a very singular link with these terrible creatures.
A man he had known in Boston—a painter of strange pictures with a secret studio in an ancient and
unhallowed alley near a graveyard—had actually made friends with the ghouls and had taught him to
understand the simpler part of their disgusting meeping and glibbering. This man had vanished at last, and
Carter was not sure but that he might find him now, and use for the first time in dreamland that far-away
English of his dim waking life. In any case, he felt he could persuade a ghoul to guide him out of Pnath; and
it would be better to meet a ghoul, which one can see, than a bhole, which one cannot see.
So Carter walked in the dark, and ran when he thought he heard something among the bones
underfoot. Once he bumped into a stony slope, and knew it must be the base of one of Thok’s peaks. Then
at last he heard a monstrous rattling and clatter which reached far up in the air, and became sure he had
come nigh the crag of the ghouls. He was not sure he could be heard from this valley miles below, but
realised that the inner world has strange laws. As he pondered he was struck by a flying bone so heavy that
it must have been a skull, and therefore realising his nearness to the fateful crag he sent up as best he
might that meeping cry which is the call of the ghoul.
Sound travels slowly, so that it was some time before he heard an answering glibber. But it came at
last, and before long he was told that a rope ladder would be lowered. The wait for this was very tense,
since there was no telling what might not have been stirred up among those bones by his shouting. Indeed,
it was not long before he actually did hear a vague rustling afar off. As this thoughtfully approached, he
became more and more uncomfortable; for he did not wish to move away from the spot where the ladder
would come. Finally the tension grew almost unbearable, and he was about to flee in panic when the thud
of something on the newly heaped bones nearby drew his notice from the other sound. It was the ladder,
and after a minute of groping he had it taut in his hands. But the other sound did not cease, and followed
him even as he climbed. He had gone fully five feet from the ground when the rattling beneath waxed
emphatic, and was a good ten feet up when something swayed the ladder from below. At a height which
must have been fifteen or twenty feet he felt his whole side brushed by a great slippery length which grew
alternately convex and concave with wriggling, and thereafter he climbed desperately to escape the
unendurable nuzzling of that loathsome and overfed bhole whose form no man might see.
For hours he climbed with aching arms and blistered hands, seeing again the grey death-fire and
Thok’s uncomfortable pinnacles. At last he discerned above him the projecting edge of the great crag of
the ghouls, whose vertical side he could not glimpse; and hours later he saw a curious face peering over it
as a gargoyle peers over a parapet of Notre Dame. This almost made him lose his hold through faintness,
but a moment later he was himself again; for his vanished friend Richard Pickman had once introduced him
to a ghoul, and he knew well their canine faces and slumping forms and unmentionable idiosyncrasies. So
he had himself well under control when that hideous thing pulled him out of the dizzy emptiness over the
edge of the crag, and did not scream at the partly consumed refuse heaped at one side or at the squatting
circles of ghouls who gnawed and watched curiously.
He was now on a dim-litten plain whose sole topographical features were great boulders and the
entrances of burrows. The ghouls were in general respectful, even if one did attempt to pinch him while
several others eyed his leanness speculatively. Through patient glibbering he made inquiries regarding his
vanished friend, and found he had become a ghoul of some prominence in abysses nearer the waking
world. A greenish elderly ghoul offered to conduct him to Pickman’s present habitation, so despite a
natural loathing he followed the creature into a capacious burrow and crawled after him for hours in the
blackness of rank mould. They emerged on a dim plain strown with singular relics of earth—old
gravestones, broken urns, and grotesque fragments of monuments—and Carter realised with some
emotion that he was probably nearer the waking world than at any other time since he had gone down the
seven hundred steps from the cavern of flame to the Gate of Deeper Slumber.
There, on a tombstone of 1768 stolen from the Granary Burying Ground in Boston, sat the ghoul which
was once the artist Richard Upton Pickman. It was naked and rubbery, and had acquired so much of the
ghoulish physiognomy that its human origin was already obscure. But it still remembered a little English,
and was able to converse with Carter in grunts and monosyllables, helped out now and then by the
glibbering of ghouls. When it learned that Carter wished to get to the enchanted wood and from there to
the city Celephaïs in Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills, it seemed rather doubtful; for these ghouls of
the waking world do no business in the graveyards of upper dreamland (leaving that to the web-footed
wamps that are spawned in dead cities), and many things intervene betwixt their gulf and the enchanted
wood, including the terrible kingdom of the gugs.
The gugs, hairy and gigantic, once reared stone circles in that wood and made strange sacrifices to the
Other Gods and the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep, until one night an abomination of theirs reached the ears
of earth’s gods and they were banished to caverns below. Only a great trap-door of stone with an iron ring
connects the abyss of the earth-ghouls with the enchanted wood, and this the gugs are afraid to open
because of a curse. That a mortal dreamer could traverse their cavern realm and leave by that door is
inconceivable; for mortal dreamers were their former food, and they have legends of the toothsomeness
of such dreamers even though banishment has restricted their diet to the ghasts, those repulsive beings
which die in the light, and which live in the vaults of Zin and leap on long hind legs like kangaroos.
So the ghoul that was Pickman advised Carter either to leave the abyss at Sarkomand, that deserted
city in the valley below Leng where black nitrous stairways guarded by winged diorite lions lead down from
dreamland to the lower gulfs, or to return through a churchyard to the waking world and begin the quest
anew down the seventy steps of light slumber to the cavern of flame and the seven hundred steps to the
Gate of Deeper Slumber and the enchanted wood. This, however, did not suit the seeker; for he knew
nothing of the way from Leng to Ooth-Nargai, and was likewise reluctant to awake lest he forget all he had
so far gained in this dream. It were disastrous to his quest to forget the august and celestial faces of those
seamen from the north who traded onyx in Celephaïs, and who, being the sons of gods, must point the way
to the cold waste and Kadath where the Great Ones dwell.
After much persuasion the ghoul consented to guide his guest inside the great wall of the gugs’
kingdom. There was one chance that Carter might be able to steal through that twilight realm of circular
stone towers at an hour when the giants would be all gorged and snoring indoors, and reach the central
tower with the sign of Koth upon it, which has the stairs leading up to that stone trap-door in the
enchanted wood. Pickman even consented to lend three ghouls to help with a tombstone lever in raising
the stone door; for of ghouls the gugs are somewhat afraid, and they often flee from their own colossal
graveyards when they see feasting there.
He also advised Carter to disguise as a ghoul himself; shaving the beard he had allowed to grow (for
ghouls have none), wallowing naked in the mould to get the correct surface, and loping in the usual
slumping way, with his clothing carried in a bundle as if it were a choice morsel from a tomb. They would
reach the city of the gugs—which is coterminous with the whole kingdom—through the proper burrows,
emerging in a cemetery not far from the stair-containing Tower of Koth. They must beware, however, of a
large cave near the cemetery; for this is the mouth of the vaults of Zin, and the vindictive ghasts are always
on watch there murderously for those denizens of the upper abyss who hunt and prey on them. The ghasts
try to come out when the gugs sleep, and they attack ghouls as readily as gugs, for they cannot
discriminate. They are very primitive, and eat one another. The gugs have a sentry at a narrow place in the
vaults of Zin, but he is often drowsy and is sometimes surprised by a party of ghasts. Though ghasts cannot
live in real light, they can endure the grey twilight of the abyss for hours.
So at length Carter crawled through endless burrows with three helpful ghouls bearing the slate
gravestone of Col. Nehemiah Derby, obiit 1719, from the Charter Street Burying Ground in Salem. When
they came again into open twilight they were in a forest of vast lichened monoliths reaching nearly as high
as the eye could see and forming the modest gravestones of the gugs. On the right of the hole out of which
they wriggled, and seen through aisles of monoliths, was a stupendous vista of Cyclopean round towers
mounting up illimitable into the grey air of inner earth. This was the great city of the gugs, whose doorways
are thirty feet high. Ghouls come here often, for a buried gug will feed a community for almost a year, and
even with the added peril it is better to burrow for gugs than to bother with the graves of men. Carter now
understood the occasional titan bones he had felt beneath him in the vale of Pnath.
Straight ahead, and just outside the cemetery, rose a sheer perpendicular cliff at whose base an
immense and forbidding cavern yawned. This the ghouls told Carter to avoid as much as possible, since it
was the entrance to the unhallowed vaults of Zin where gugs hunt ghasts in the darkness. And truly, that
warning was soon well justified; for the moment a ghoul began to creep toward the towers to see if the
hour of the gugs’ resting had been rightly timed, there glowed in the gloom of that great cavern’s mouth
first one pair of yellowish-red eyes and then another, implying that the gugs were one sentry less, and that
ghasts have indeed an excellent sharpness of smell. So the ghoul returned to the burrow and motioned his
companions to be silent. It was best to leave the ghasts to their own devices, and there was a possibility
that they might soon withdraw, since they must naturally be rather tired after coping with a gug sentry in
the black vaults. After a moment something about the size of a small horse hopped out into the grey
twilight, and Carter turned sick at the aspect of that scabrous and unwholesome beast, whose face is so
curiously human despite the absence of a nose, a forehead, and other important particulars.
 Presently three other ghasts hopped out to join their fellow, and a ghoul glibbered softly at Carter that
their absence of battle-scars was a bad sign. It proved that they had not fought the gug sentry at all, but
merely slipped past him as he slept, so that their strength and savagery were still unimpaired and would
remain so till they had found and disposed of a victim. It was very unpleasant to see those filthy and
disproportioned animals, which soon numbered about fifteen, grubbing about and making their kangaroo
leaps in the grey twilight where titan towers and monoliths arose, but it was still more unpleasant when
they spoke among themselves in the coughing gutturals of ghasts. And yet, horrible as they were, they
were not so horrible as what presently came out of the cave after them with disconcerting suddenness.
It was a paw, fully two feet and a half across, and equipped with formidable talons. After it came
another paw, and after that a great black-furred arm to which both of the paws were attached by short
forearms. Then two pink eyes shone, and the head of the awakened gug sentry, large as a barrel, wobbled
into view. The eyes jutted two inches from each side, shaded by bony protuberances overgrown with
coarse hairs. But the head was chiefly terrible because of the mouth. That mouth had great yellow fangs
and ran from the top to the bottom of the head, opening vertically instead of horizontally.
But before that unfortunate gug could emerge from the cave and rise to his full twenty feet, the
vindictive ghasts were upon him. Carter feared for a moment that he would give an alarm and arouse all
his kin, till a ghoul softly glibbered that gugs have no voice, but talk by means of facial expression. The
battle which then ensued was truly a frightful one. From all sides the venomous ghasts rushed feverishly at
the creeping gug, nipping and tearing with their muzzles, and mauling murderously with their hard pointed
hooves. All the time they coughed excitedly, screaming when the great vertical mouth of the gug would
occasionally bite into one of their number, so that the noise of the combat would surely have aroused the
sleeping city had not the weakening of the sentry begun to transfer the action farther and farther within
the cavern. As it was, the tumult soon receded altogether from sight in the blackness, with only occasional
evil echoes to mark its continuance.
Then the most alert of the ghouls gave the signal for all to advance, and Carter followed the loping
three out of the forest of monoliths and into the dark noisome streets of that awful city whose rounded
towers of Cyclopean stone soared up beyond the sight. Silently they shambled over that rough rock
pavement, hearing with disgust the abominable muffled snortings from great black doorways which
marked the slumber of the gugs. Apprehensive of the ending of the rest hour, the ghouls set a somewhat
rapid pace; but even so the journey was no brief one, for distances in that town of giants are on a great
scale. At last, however, they came to a somewhat open space before a tower even vaster than the rest,
above whose colossal doorway was fixed a monstrous symbol in bas-relief which made one shudder
without knowing its meaning. This was the central tower with the sign of Koth, and those huge stone steps
just visible through the dusk within were the beginning of the great flight leading to upper dreamland and
the enchanted wood.
There now began a climb of interminable length in utter blackness; made almost impossible by the
monstrous size of the steps, which were fashioned for gugs, and were therefore nearly a yard high. Of their
number Carter could form no just estimate, for he soon became so worn out that the tireless and elastic
ghouls were forced to aid him. All through the endless climb there lurked the peril of detection and pursuit;
for though no gug dares lift the stone door to the forest because of the Great Ones’ curse, there are no
such restraints concerning the tower and the steps, and escaped ghasts are often chased even to the very
top. So sharp are the ears of gugs, that the bare feet and hands of the climbers might readily be heard
when the city awoke; and it would of course take but little time for the striding giants, accustomed from
their ghast-hunts in the vaults of Zin to seeing without light, to overtake their smaller and slower quarry on
those Cyclopean steps. It was very depressing to reflect that the silent pursuing gugs would not be heard at
all, but would come very suddenly and shockingly in the dark upon the climbers. Nor could the traditional
fear of gugs for ghouls be depended upon in that peculiar place where the advantages lay so heavily with
the gugs. There was also some peril from the furtive and venomous ghasts, which frequently hopped up
into the tower during the sleep hour of the gugs. If the gugs slept long, and the ghasts returned soon from
their deed in the cavern, the scent of the climbers might easily be picked up by those loathsome and ill-
disposed things; in which case it would almost be better to be eaten by a gug.
Then, after aeons of climbing, there came a cough from the darkness above; and matters assumed a
very grave and unexpected turn. It was clear that a ghast, or perhaps even more, had strayed into that
tower before the coming of Carter and his guides; and it was equally clear that this peril was very close.
After a breathless second the leading ghoul pushed Carter to the wall and arranged his two kinsfolk in the
best possible way, with the old slate tombstone raised for a crushing blow whenever the enemy might
come in sight. Ghouls can see in the dark, so the party was not as badly off as Carter would have been
alone. In another moment the clatter of hooves revealed the downward hopping of at least one beast, and
the slab-bearing ghouls poised their weapon for a desperate blow. Presently two yellowish-red eyes
flashed into view, and the panting of the ghast became audible above its clattering. As it hopped down to
the step just above the ghouls, they wielded the ancient gravestone with prodigious force, so that there
was only a wheeze and a choking before the victim collapsed in a noxious heap. There seemed to be only
this one animal, and after a moment of listening the ghouls tapped Carter as a signal to proceed again. As
before, they were obliged to aid him; and he was glad to leave that place of carnage where the ghast’s
uncouth remains sprawled invisible in the blackness.
At last the ghouls brought their companion to a halt; and feeling above him, Carter realised that the
great stone trap-door was reached at last. To open so vast a thing completely was not to be thought of, but
the ghouls hoped to get it up just enough to slip the gravestone under as a prop, and permit Carter to
escape through the crack. They themselves planned to descend again and return through the city of the
gugs, since their elusiveness was great, and they did not know the way overland to spectral Sarkomand
with its lion-guarded gate to the abyss.
Mighty was the straining of those three ghouls at the stone of the door above them, and Carter helped
push with as much strength as he had. They judged the edge next the top of the staircase to be the right
one, and to this they bent all the force of their disreputably nourished muscles. After a few moments a
crack of light appeared; and Carter, to whom that task had been entrusted, slipped the end of the old
gravestone in the aperture. There now ensued a mighty heaving; but progress was very slow, and they had
of course to return to their first position every time they failed to turn the slab and prop the portal open.
Suddenly their desperation was magnified a thousandfold by a sound on the steps below them. It was
only the thumping and rattling of the slain ghast’s hooved body as it rolled down to lower levels; but of all
the possible causes of that body’s dislodgment and rolling, none was in the least reassuring. Therefore,
knowing the ways of gugs, the ghouls set to with something of a frenzy; and in a surprisingly short time had
the door so high that they were able to hold it still whilst Carter turned the slab and left a generous
opening. They now helped Carter through, letting him climb up to their rubbery shoulders and later guiding
his feet as he clutched at the blessed soil of the upper dreamland outside. Another second and they were
through themselves, knocking away the gravestone and closing the great trap-door while a panting became
audible beneath. Because of the Great Ones’ curse no gug might ever emerge from that portal, so with a
deep relief and sense of repose Carter lay quietly on the thick grotesque fungi of the enchanted wood
while his guides squatted near in the manner that ghouls rest.
Weird as was that enchanted wood through which he had fared so long ago, it was verily a haven and
a delight after the gulfs he had now left behind. There was no living denizen about, for zoogs shun the
mysterious door in fear, and Carter at once consulted with his ghouls about their future course. To return
through the tower they no longer dared, and the waking world did not appeal to them when they learned
that they must pass the priests Nasht and Kaman-Thah in the cavern of flame. So at length they decided to
return through Sarkomand and its gate of the abyss, though of how to get there they knew nothing. Carter
recalled that it lies in the valley below Leng, and recalled likewise that he had seen in Dylath-Leen a
sinister, slant-eyed old merchant reputed to trade on Leng. Therefore he advised the ghouls to seek out
Dylath-Leen, crossing the fields to Nir and the Skai and following the river to its mouth. This they at once
resolved to do, and lost no time in loping off, since the thickening of the dusk promised a full night ahead
for travel. And Carter shook the paws of those repulsive beasts, thanking them for their help and sending
his gratitude to the beast which once was Pickman; but could not help sighing with pleasure when they
left. For a ghoul is a ghoul, and at best an unpleasant companion for man. After that Carter sought a forest
pool and cleansed himself of the mud of nether earth, thereupon reassuming the clothes he had so
carefully carried.
It was now night in that redoubtable wood of monstrous trees, but because of the phosphorescence
one might travel as well as by day; wherefore Carter set out upon the well-known route toward Celephaïs,
in Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills. And as he went he thought of the zebra he had left tethered to
an ash tree on Ngranek in far-away Oriab so many aeons ago, and wondered if any lava-gatherer had fed
and released it. And he wondered, too, if he would ever return to Baharna and pay for the zebra that was
slain by night in those ancient ruins by Yath’s shore, and if the old tavern-keeper would remember him.
Such were the thoughts that came to him in the air of the regained upper dreamland.
But presently his progress was halted by a sound from a very large hollow tree. He had avoided the
great circle of stones, since he did not care to speak with zoogs just now; but it appeared from the singular
fluttering in that huge tree that important councils were in session elsewhere. Upon drawing nearer he
made out the accents of a tense and heated discussion; and before long became conscious of matters
which he viewed with the greatest concern. For a war on the cats was under debate in that sovereign
assembly of zoogs. It all came from the loss of the party which had sneaked after Carter to Ulthar, and
which the cats had justly punished for unsuitable intentions. The matter had long rankled; and now, or
within at least a month, the marshalled zoogs were about to strike the whole feline tribe in a series of
surprise attacks, taking individual cats or groups of cats unawares, and giving not even the myriad cats of
Ulthar a proper chance to drill and mobilise. This was the plan of the zoogs, and Carter saw that he must
foil it before leaving on his mighty quest.
Very quietly therefore did Randolph Carter steal to the edge of the wood and send the cry of the cat
over the starlit fields. And a great grimalkin in a nearby cottage took up the burden and relayed it across
leagues of rolling meadow to warriors large and small, black, grey, tiger, white, yellow, and mixed; and it
echoed through Nir and beyond the Skai even into Ulthar, and Ulthar’s numerous cats called in chorus and
fell into a line of march. It was fortunate that the moon was not up, so that all the cats were on earth.
Swiftly and silently leaping, they sprang from every hearth and housetop and poured in a great furry sea
across the plains to the edge of the wood. Carter was there to greet them, and the sight of shapely,
wholesome cats was indeed good for his eyes after the things he had seen and walked with in the abyss.
He was glad to see his venerable friend and one-time rescuer at the head of Ulthar’s detachment, a collar
of rank around his sleek neck, and whiskers bristling at a martial angle. Better still, as a sub-lieutenant in
that army was a brisk young fellow who proved to be none other than the very little kitten at the inn to
whom Carter had given a saucer of rich cream on that long-vanished morning in Ulthar. He was a strapping
and promising cat now, and purred as he shook hands with his friend. His grandfather said he was doing
very well in the army, and that he might well expect a captaincy after one more campaign.
Carter now outlined the peril of the cat tribe, and was rewarded by deep-throated purrs of gratitude
from all sides. Consulting with the generals, he prepared a plan of instant action which involved marching
at once upon the zoog council and other known strongholds of zoogs; forestalling their surprise attacks and
forcing them to terms before the mobilisation of their army of invasion. Thereupon without a moment’s
loss that great ocean of cats flooded the enchanted wood and surged around the council tree and the great
stone circle. Flutterings rose to panic pitch as the enemy saw the newcomers, and there was very little
resistance among the furtive and curious brown zoogs. They saw that they were beaten in advance, and
turned from thoughts of vengeance to thoughts of present self-preservation.
Half the cats now seated themselves in a circular formation with the captured zoogs in the centre,
leaving open a lane down which were marched the additional captives rounded up by the other cats in
other parts of the wood. Terms were discussed at length, Carter acting as interpreter, and it was decided
that the zoogs might remain a free tribe on condition of rendering to the cats a large annual tribute of
grouse, quail, and pheasants from the less fabulous parts of their forest. Twelve young zoogs of noble
families were taken as hostages to be kept in the Temple of the Cats at Ulthar, and the victors made it plain
that any disappearances of cats on the borders of the zoog domain would be followed by consequences
highly disastrous to zoogs. These matters disposed of, the assembled cats broke ranks and permitted the
zoogs to slink off one by one to their respective homes, which they hastened to do with many a sullen
backward glance.
The old cat general now offered Carter an escort through the forest to whatever border he wished to
reach, deeming it likely that the zoogs would harbour dire resentment against him for the frustration of
their warlike enterprise. This offer he welcomed with gratitude; not only for the safety it afforded, but
because he liked the graceful companionship of cats. So in the midst of a pleasant and playful regiment,
relaxed after the successful performance of its duty, Randolph Carter walked with dignity through that
enchanted and phosphorescent wood of titan trees, talking of his quest with the old general and his
grandson whilst others of the band indulged in fantastic gambols or chased fallen leaves that the wind
drove among the fungi of the primeval floor. And the old cat said that he had heard much of unknown
Kadath in the cold waste, but did not know where it was. As for the marvellous sunset city, he had not even
heard of that, but would gladly relay to Carter anything he might later learn.
He gave the seeker some passwords of great value among the cats of dreamland, and commended
him especially to the old chief of the cats in Celephaïs, whither he was bound. That old cat, already slightly
known to Carter, was a dignified Maltese; and would prove highly influential in any transaction. It was
dawn when they came to the proper edge of the wood, and Carter bade his friends a reluctant farewell.
The young sub-lieutenant he had met as a small kitten would have followed him had not the old general
forbidden it, but that austere patriarch insisted that the path of duty lay with the tribe and the army. So
Carter set out alone over the golden fields that stretched mysterious beside a willow-fringed river, and the
cats went back into the wood.
Well did the traveller know those garden lands that lie betwixt the wood and the Cerenerian Sea, and
blithely did he follow the singing river Oukranos that marked his course. The sun rose higher over gentle
slopes of grove and lawn, and heightened the colours of the thousand flowers that starred each knoll and
dingle. A blessed haze lies upon all this region, wherein is held a little more of the sunlight than other
places hold, and a little more of the summer’s humming music of birds and bees; so that men walk through
it as through a faery place, and feel greater joy and wonder than they ever afterward remember.
By noon Carter reached the jasper terraces of Kiran which slope down to the river’s edge and bear that
temple of loveliness wherein the King of Ilek-Vad comes from his far realm on the twilight sea once a year
in a golden palanquin to pray to the god of Oukranos, who sang to him in youth when he dwelt in a cottage
by its banks. All of jasper is that temple, and covering an acre of ground with its walls and courts, its seven
pinnacled towers, and its inner shrine where the river enters through hidden channels and the god sings
softly in the night. Many times the moon hears strange music as it shines on those courts and terraces and
pinnacles, but whether that music be the song of the god or the chant of the cryptical priests, none but the
King of Ilek-Vad may say; for only he has entered the temple or seen the priests. Now, in the drowsiness of
day, that carven and delicate fane was silent, and Carter heard only the murmur of the great stream and
the hum of the birds and bees as he walked onward under an enchanted sun.
All that afternoon the pilgrim wandered on through perfumed meadows and in the lee of gentle
riverward hills bearing peaceful thatched cottages and the shrines of amiable gods carven from jasper or
chrysoberyl. Sometimes he walked close to the bank of Oukranos and whistled to the sprightly and
iridescent fish of that crystal stream, and at other times he paused amidst the whispering rushes and gazed
at the great dark wood on the farther side, whose trees came down clear to the water’s edge. In former
dreams he had seen quaint lumbering buopoths come shyly out of that wood to drink, but now he could
not glimpse any. Once in a while he paused to watch a carnivorous fish catch a fishing bird, which it lured
to the water by shewing its tempting scales in the sun, and grasped by the beak with its enormous mouth
as the winged hunter sought to dart down upon it.
Toward evening he mounted a low grassy rise and saw before him flaming in the sunset the thousand
gilded spires of Thran. Lofty beyond belief are the alabaster walls of that incredible city, sloping inward
toward the top and wrought in one solid piece by what means no man knows, for they are more ancient
than memory. Yet lofty as they are with their hundred gates and two hundred turrets, the clustered towers
within, all white beneath their golden spires, are loftier still; so that men on the plain around see them
soaring into the sky, sometimes shining clear, sometimes caught at the top in tangles of cloud and mist,
and sometimes clouded lower down with their utmost pinnacles blazing free above the vapours. And
where Thran’s gates open on the river are great wharves of marble, with ornate galleons of fragrant cedar
and calamander riding gently at anchor, and strange bearded sailors sitting on casks and bales with the
hieroglyphs of far places. Landward beyond the walls lies the farm country, where small white cottages
dream between little hills, and narrow roads with many stone bridges wind gracefully among streams and
gardens.
Down through this verdant land Carter walked at evening, and saw twilight float up from the river to
the marvellous golden spires of Thran. And just at the hour of dusk he came to the southern gate, and was
stopped by a red-robed sentry till he had told three dreams beyond belief, and proved himself a dreamer
worthy to walk up Thran’s steep mysterious streets and linger in bazaars where the wares of the ornate
galleons were sold. Then into that incredible city he walked; through a wall so thick that the gate was a
tunnel, and thereafter amidst curved and undulant ways winding deep and narrow between the
heavenward towers. Lights shone through grated and balconied windows, and the sound of lutes and pipes
stole timid from inner courts where marble fountains bubbled. Carter knew his way, and edged down
through darker streets to the river, where at an old sea-tavern he found the captains and seamen he had
known in myriad other dreams. There he bought his passage to Celephaïs on a great green galleon, and
there he stopped for the night after speaking gravely to the venerable cat of that inn, who blinked dozing
before an enormous hearth and dreamed of old wars and forgotten gods.
In the morning Carter boarded the galleon bound for Celephaïs, and sat in the prow as the ropes were
cast off and the long sail down to the Cerenerian Sea began. For many leagues the banks were much as
they were above Thran, with now and then a curious temple rising on the farther hills toward the right, and
a drowsy village on the shore, with steep red roofs and nets spread in the sun. Mindful of his search, Carter
questioned all the mariners closely about those whom they had met in the taverns of Celephaïs, asking the
names and ways of the strange men with long, narrow eyes, long-lobed ears, thin noses, and pointed chins
who came in dark ships from the north and traded onyx for the carved jade and spun gold and little red
singing birds of Celephaïs. Of these men the sailors knew not much, save that they talked but seldom and
spread a kind of awe about them.
Their land, very far away, was called Inganok, and not many people cared to go thither because it was
a cold twilight land, and said to be close to unpleasant Leng; although high impassable mountains towered
on the side where Leng was thought to lie, so that none might say whether this evil plateau with its
horrible stone villages and unmentionable monastery were really there, or whether the rumour were only
a fear that timid people felt in the night when those formidable barrier peaks loomed black against a rising
moon. Certainly, men reached Leng from very different oceans. Of other boundaries of Inganok those
sailors had no notion, nor had they heard of the cold waste and unknown Kadath save from vague
unplaced report. And of the marvellous sunset city which Carter sought they knew nothing at all. So the
traveller asked no more of far things, but bided his time till he might talk with those strange men from cold
and twilight Inganok who are the seed of such gods as carved their features on Ngranek.
Late in the day the galleon reached those bends of the river which traverse the perfumed jungles of
Kled. Here Carter wished he might disembark, for in those tropic tangles sleep wondrous palaces of ivory,
lone and unbroken, where once dwelt fabulous monarchs of a land whose name is forgotten. Spells of the
Elder Ones keep those places unharmed and undecayed, for it is written that there may one day be need of
them again; and elephant caravans have glimpsed them from afar by moonlight, though none dares
approach them closely because of the guardians to which their wholeness is due. But the ship swept on,
and dusk hushed the hum of the day, and the first stars above blinked answers to the early fireflies on the
banks as that jungle fell far behind, leaving only its fragrance as a memory that it had been. And all through
the night that galleon floated on past mysteries unseen and unsuspected. Once a lookout reported fires on
the hills to the east, but the sleepy captain said they had better not be looked at too much, since it was
highly uncertain just who or what had lit them.
In the morning the river had broadened out greatly, and Carter saw by the houses along the banks
that they were close to the vast trading city of Hlanith on the Cerenerian Sea. Here the walls are of rugged
granite, and the houses peakedly fantastic with beamed and plastered gables. The men of Hlanith are more
like those of the waking world than any others in dreamland; so that the city is not sought except for
barter, but is prized for the solid work of its artisans. The wharves of Hlanith are of oak, and there the
galleon made fast while the captain traded in the taverns. Carter also went ashore, and looked curiously
upon the rutted streets where wooden ox-carts lumbered and feverish merchants cried their wares
vacuously in the bazaars. The sea-taverns were all close to the wharves on cobbled lanes salt with the
spray of high tides, and seemed exceedingly ancient with their low black-beamed ceilings and casements of
greenish bull’s-eye panes. Ancient sailors in those taverns talked much of distant ports, and told many
stories of the curious men from twilight Inganok, but had little to add to what the seamen of the galleon
had told. Then, at last, after much unloading and loading, the ship set sail once more over the sunset sea,
and the high walls and gables of Hlanith grew less as the last golden light of day lent them a wonder and
beauty beyond any that men had given them.
Two nights and two days the galleon sailed over the Cerenerian Sea, sighting no land and speaking but
one other vessel. Then near sunset of the second day there loomed up ahead the snowy peak of Aran with
its gingko-trees swaying on the lower slopes, and Carter knew that they were come to the land of Ooth-
Nargai and the marvellous city of Celephaïs. Swiftly there came into sight the glittering minarets of that
fabulous town, and the untarnished marble walls with their bronze statues, and the great stone bridge
where Naraxa joins the sea. Then rose the green gentle hills behind the town, with their groves and
gardens of asphodels and the small shrines and cottages upon them; and far in the background the purple
ridge of the Tanarians, potent and mystical, behind which lay forbidden ways into the waking world and
toward other regions of dream.
The harbour was full of painted galleys, some of which were from the marble cloud-city of Serannian,
that lies in ethereal space beyond where the sea meets the sky, and some of which were from more
substantial ports on the oceans of dreamland. Among these the steersman threaded his way up to the
spice-fragrant wharves, where the galleon made fast in the dusk as the city’s million lights began to twinkle
out over the water. Ever new seemed this deathless city of vision, for here time has no power to tarnish or
destroy. As it has always been is still the turquoise of Nath-Horthath, and the eighty orchid-wreathed
priests are the same who builded it ten thousand years ago. Shining still is the bronze of the great gates,
nor are the onyx pavements ever worn or broken. And the great bronze statues on the walls look down on
merchants and camel drivers older than fable, yet without one grey hair in their forked beards.
Carter did not at once seek out the temple or the palace or the citadel, but stayed by the seaward wall
among traders and sailors. And when it was too late for rumours and legends he sought out an ancient
tavern he knew well, and rested with dreams of the gods on unknown Kadath whom he sought. The next
day he searched all along the quays for some of the strange mariners of Inganok, but was told that none
were now in port, their galley not being due from the north for full two weeks. He found, however, one
Thorabonian sailor who had been to Inganok and had worked in the onyx quarries of that twilight place;
and this sailor said there was certainly a desert to the north of the peopled region, which everybody
seemed to fear and shun. The Thorabonian opined that this desert led around the utmost rim of
impassable peaks into Leng’s horrible plateau, and that this was why men feared it; though he admitted
there were other vague tales of evil presences and nameless sentinels. Whether or not this could be the
fabled waste wherein unknown Kadath stands he did not know; but it seemed unlikely that those
presences and sentinels, if indeed they truly existed, were stationed for naught.
On the following day Carter walked up the Street of the Pillars to the turquoise temple and talked with
the high-priest. Though Nath-Horthath is chiefly worshipped in Celephaïs, all the Great Ones are
mentioned in diurnal prayers; and the priest was reasonably versed in their moods. Like Atal in distant
Ulthar, he strongly advised against any attempt to see them; declaring that they are testy and capricious,
and subject to strange protection from the mindless Other Gods from Outside, whose soul and messenger
is the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep. Their jealous hiding of the marvellous sunset city shewed clearly that
they did not wish Carter to reach it, and it was doubtful how they would regard a guest whose object was
to see them and plead before them. No man had ever found Kadath in the past, and it might be just as well
if none ever found it in the future. Such rumours as were told about that onyx castle of the Great Ones
were not by any means reassuring.
Having thanked the orchid-crowned high-priest, Carter left the temple and sought the bazaar of the
sheep-butchers, where the old chief of Celephaïs’ cats dwelt sleek and contented. That grey and dignified
being was sunning himself on the onyx pavement, and extended a languid paw as his caller approached.
But when Carter repeated the passwords and introductions furnished him by the old cat general of Ulthar,
the furry patriarch became very cordial and communicative; and told much of the secret lore known to cats
on the seaward slopes of Ooth-Nargai. Best of all, he repeated several things told him furtively by the timid
waterfront cats of Celephaïs about the men of Inganok, on whose dark ships no cat will go.
It seems that these men have an aura not of earth about them, though that is not the reason why no
cat will sail on their ships. The reason for this is that Inganok holds shadows which no cat can endure, so
that in all that cold twilight realm there is never a cheering purr or a homely mew. Whether it be because
of things wafted over the impassable peaks from hypothetical Leng, or because of things filtering down
from the chilly desert to the north, none may say; but it remains a fact that in that far land there broods a
hint of outer space which cats do not like, and to which they are more sensitive than men. Therefore they
will not go on the dark ships that seek the basalt quays of Inganok.
The old chief of the cats also told him where to find his friend King Kuranes, who in Carter’s latter
dreams had reigned alternately in the rose-crystal Palace of the Seventy Delights at Celephaïs and in the
turreted cloud-castle of sky-floating Serannian. It seems that he could no more find content in those
places, but had formed a mighty longing for the English cliffs and downlands of his boyhood; where in little
dreaming villages England’s old songs hover at evening behind lattice windows, and where grey church
towers peep lovely through the verdure of distant valleys. He could not go back to these things in the
waking world because his body was dead; but he had done the next best thing and dreamed a small tract
of such countryside in the region east of the city, where meadows roll gracefully up from the sea-cliffs to
the foot of the Tanarian Hills. There he dwelt in a grey Gothic manor-house of stone looking on the sea,
and tried to think it was ancient Trevor Towers, where he was born and where thirteen generations of his
forefathers had first seen the light. And on the coast nearby he had built a little Cornish fishing village with
steep cobbled ways, settling therein such people as had the most English faces, and seeking ever to teach
them the dear remembered accents of old Cornwall fishers. And in a valley not far off he had reared a
great Norman Abbey whose tower he could see from his window, placing around it in the churchyard grey
stones with the names of his ancestors carved thereon, and with a moss somewhat like Old England’s
moss. For though Kuranes was a monarch in the land of dream, with all imagined pomps and marvels,
splendours and beauties, ecstacies and delights, novelties and excitements at his command, he would
gladly have resigned forever the whole of his power and luxury and freedom for one blessed day as a
simple boy in that pure and quiet England, that ancient, beloved England which had moulded his being and
of which he must always be immutably a part.
So when Carter bade that old grey chief of the cats adieu, he did not seek the terraced palace of rose-
crystal but walked out the eastern gate and across the daisied fields toward a peaked gable which he
glimpsed through the oaks of a park sloping up to the sea-cliffs. And in time he came to a great hedge and
a gate with a little brick lodge, and when he rang the bell there hobbled to admit him no robed and
anointed lackey of the palace, but a small stubbly old man in a smock who spoke as best he could in the
quaint tones of far Cornwall. And Carter walked up the shady path between trees as near as possible to
England’s trees, and climbed the terraces among gardens set out as in Queen Anne’s time. At the door,
flanked by stone cats in the old way, he was met by a whiskered butler in suitable livery; and was presently
taken to the library where Kuranes, Lord of Ooth-Nargai and the Sky around Serannian, sat pensive in a
chair by the window looking on his little sea-coast village and wishing that his old nurse would come in and
scold him because he was not ready for that hateful lawn-party at the vicar’s, with the carriage waiting and
his mother nearly out of patience.
Kuranes, clad in a dressing-gown of the sort favoured by London tailors in his youth, rose eagerly to
meet his guest; for the sight of an Anglo-Saxon from the waking world was very dear to him, even if it was
a Saxon from Boston, Massachusetts, instead of from Cornwall. And for long they talked of old times,
having much to say because both were old dreamers and well versed in the wonders of incredible places.
Kuranes, indeed, had been out beyond the stars in the ultimate void, and was said to be the only one who
had ever returned sane from such a voyage.
At length Carter brought up the subject of his quest, and asked of his host those questions he had
asked of so many others. Kuranes did not know where Kadath was, or the marvellous sunset city; but he
did know that the Great Ones were very dangerous creatures to seek out, and that the Other Gods had
strange ways of protecting them from impertinent curiosity. He had learned much of the Other Gods in
distant parts of space, especially in that region where form does not exist, and coloured gases study the
innermost secrets. The violet gas S’ngac had told him terrible things of the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep,
and had warned him never to approach the central void where the daemon-sultan Azathoth gnaws
hungrily in the dark. Altogether, it was not well to meddle with the Elder Ones; and if they persistently
denied all access to the marvellous sunset city, it were better not to seek that city.
Kuranes furthermore doubted whether his guest would profit aught by coming to the city even were
he to gain it. He himself had dreamed and yearned long years for lovely Celephaïs and the land of Ooth-
Nargai, and for the freedom and colour and high experience of life devoid of its chains, conventions, and
stupidities. But now that he was come into that city and that land, and was the king thereof, he found the
freedom and the vividness all too soon worn out, and monotonous for want of linkage with anything firm
in his feelings and memories. He was a king in Ooth-Nargai, but found no meaning therein, and drooped
always for the old familiar things of England that had shaped his youth. All his kingdom would he give for
the sound of Cornish church bells over the downs, and all the thousand minarets of Celephaïs for the steep
homely roofs of the village near his home. So he told his guest that the unknown sunset city might not hold
quite the content he sought, and that perhaps it had better remain a glorious and half-remembered
dream. For he had visited Carter often in the old waking days, and knew well the lovely New England slopes
that had given him birth.
At the last, he was very certain, the seeker would long only for the early remembered scenes; the glow
of Beacon Hill at evening, the tall steeples and winding hill streets of quaint Kingsport, the hoary gambrel
roofs of ancient and witch-haunted Arkham, and the blessed miles of meads and valleys where stone walls
rambled and white farmhouse gables peeped out from bowers of verdure. These things he told Randolph
Carter, but still the seeker held to his purpose. And in the end they parted each with his own conviction,
and Carter went back through the bronze gate into Celephaïs and down the Street of the Pillars to the old
sea-wall, where he talked more with the mariners of far parts and waited for the dark ship from cold and
twilight Inganok, whose strange-faced sailors and onyx-traders had in them the blood of the Great Ones.
One starlight evening when the Pharos shone splendid over the harbour the longed-for ship put in,
and strange-faced sailors and traders appeared one by one and group by group in the ancient taverns
along the sea-wall. It was very exciting to see again those living faces so like the godlike features on
Ngranek, but Carter did not hasten to speak with the silent seamen. He did not know how much of pride
and secrecy and dim supernal memory might fill those children of the Great Ones, and was sure it would
not be wise to tell them of his quest or ask too closely of that cold desert stretching north of their twilight
land. They talked little with the other folk in those ancient sea-taverns; but would gather in groups in
remote corners and sing among themselves the haunting airs of unknown places, or chant long tales to one
another in accents alien to the rest of dreamland. And so rare and moving were those airs and tales, that
one might guess their wonders from the faces of those who listened, even though the words came to
common ears only as strange cadence and obscure melody.
For a week the strange seamen lingered in the taverns and traded in the bazaars of Celephaïs, and
before they sailed Carter had taken passage on their dark ship, telling them that he was an old onyx-miner
and wishful to work in their quarries. That ship was very lovely and cunningly wrought, being of teakwood
with ebony fittings and traceries of gold, and the cabin in which the traveller lodged had hangings of silk
and velvet. One morning at the turn of the tide the sails were raised and the anchor lifted, and as Carter
stood on the high stern he saw the sunrise-blazing walls and bronze statues and golden minarets of ageless
Celephaïs sink into the distance, and the snowy peak of Mount Aran grow smaller and smaller. By noon
there was nothing in sight save the gentle blue of the Cerenerian Sea, with one painted galley afar off
bound for that cloud-hung realm of Serannian where the sea meets the sky.
And night came with gorgeous stars, and the dark ship steered for Charles’ Wain and the Little Bear as
they swung slowly round the pole. And the sailors sang strange songs of unknown places, and then stole
off one by one to the forecastle while the wistful watchers murmured old chants and leaned over the rail
to glimpse the luminous fish playing in bowers beneath the sea. Carter went to sleep at midnight, and rose
in the glow of a young morning, marking that the sun seemed farther south than was its wont. And all
through that second day he made progress in knowing the men of the ship, getting them little by little to
talk of their cold twilight land, of their exquisite onyx city, and of their fear of the high and impassable
peaks beyond which Leng was said to be. They told him how sorry they were that no cats would stay in the
land of Inganok, and how they thought the hidden nearness of Leng was to blame for it. Only of the stony
desert to the north they would not talk. There was something disquieting about that desert, and it was
thought expedient not to admit its existence.
On later days they talked of the quarries in which Carter said he was going to work. There were many
of them, for all the city of Inganok was builded of onyx, whilst great polished blocks of it were traded in
Rinar, Ogrothan, and Celephaïs, and at home with the merchants of Thraa, Ilarnek, and Kadatheron, for the
beautiful wares of those fabulous ports. And far to the north, almost in that cold desert whose existence
the men of Inganok did not care to admit, there was an unused quarry greater than all the rest; from which
had been hewn in forgotten times such prodigious lumps and blocks that the sight of their chiselled
vacancies struck terror to all who beheld. Who had mined those incredible blocks, and whither they had
been transported, no man might say; but it was thought best not to trouble that quarry, around which such
inhuman memories might conceivably cling. So it was left all alone in the twilight, with only the raven and
the rumoured shantak-bird to brood on its immensities. When Carter heard of this quarry he was moved to
deep thought, for he knew from old tales that the Great Ones’ castle atop unknown Kadath is of onyx.
Each day the sun wheeled lower and lower in the sky, and the mists overhead grew thicker and
thicker. And in two weeks there was not any sunlight at all, but only a weird grey twilight shining through a
dome of eternal cloud by day, and a cold starless phosphorescence from the under side of that cloud by
night. On the twentieth day a great jagged rock in the sea was sighted from afar, the first land glimpsed
since Aran’s snowy peak had dwindled behind the ship. Carter asked the captain the name of that rock, but
was told that it had no name and had never been sought by any vessel because of the sounds that came
from it at night. And when, after dark, a dull and ceaseless howling arose from that jagged granite place,
the traveller was glad that no stop had been made, and that the rock had no name. The seamen prayed
and chanted till the noise was out of earshot, and Carter dreamed terrible dreams within dreams in the
small hours.
Two mornings after that there loomed far ahead and to the east a line of great grey peaks whose tops
were lost in the changeless clouds of that twilight world. And at the sight of them the sailors sang glad
songs, and some knelt down on the deck to pray; so that Carter knew they were come to the land of
Inganok and would soon be moored to the basalt quays of the great town bearing that land’s name.
Toward noon a dark coast-line appeared, and before three o’clock there stood out against the north the
bulbous domes and fantastic spires of the onyx city. Rare and curious did that archaic city rise above its
walls and quays, all of delicate black with scrolls, flutings, and arabesques of inlaid gold. Tall and many-
windowed were the houses, and carved on every side with flowers and patterns whose dark symmetries
dazzled the eye with a beauty more poignant than light. Some ended in swelling domes that tapered to a
point, others in terraced pyramids whereon rose clustered minarets displaying every phase of strangeness
and imagination. The walls were low, and pierced by frequent gates, each under a great arch rising high
above the general level and capped by the head of a god chiselled with that same skill displayed in the
monstrous face on distant Ngranek. On a hill in the centre rose a sixteen-angled tower greater than all the
rest and bearing a high pinnacled belfry resting on a flattened dome. This, the seamen said, was the
Temple of the Elder Ones, and was ruled by an old high-priest sad with inner secrets.
At intervals the clang of a strange bell shivered over the onyx city, answered each time by a peal of
mystic music made up of horns, viols, and chanting voices. And from a row of tripods on a gallery round the
high dome of the temple there burst flares of flame at certain moments; for the priests and people of that
city were wise in the primal mysteries, and faithful in keeping the rhythms of the Great Ones as set forth in
scrolls older than the Pnakotic Manuscripts. As the ship rode past the great basalt breakwater into the
harbour the lesser noises of the city grew manifest, and Carter saw the slaves, sailors, and merchants on
the docks. The sailors and merchants were of the strange-faced race of the gods, but the slaves were squat,
slant-eyed folk said by rumour to have drifted somehow across or around the impassable peaks from
valleys beyond Leng. The wharves reached wide outside the city wall and bore upon them all manner of
merchandise from the galleys anchored there, while at one end were great piles of onyx both carved and
uncarved awaiting shipment to the far markets of Rinar, Ogrothan, and Celephaïs.
It was not yet evening when the dark ship anchored beside a jutting quay of stone, and all the sailors
and traders filed ashore and through the arched gate into the city. The streets of that city were paved with
onyx, and some of them were wide and straight whilst others were crooked and narrow. The houses near
the water were lower than the rest, and bore above their curiously arched doorways certain signs of gold
said to be in honour of the respective small gods that favoured each. The captain of the ship took Carter to
an old sea-tavern where flocked the mariners of quaint countries, and promised that he would next day
shew him the wonders of the twilight city, and lead him to the taverns of the onyx-miners by the northern
wall. And evening fell, and little bronze lamps were lighted, and the sailors in that tavern sang songs of
remote places. But when from its high tower the great bell shivered over the city, and the peal of the horns
and viols and voices rose cryptical in answer thereto, all ceased their songs or tales and bowed silent till
the last echo died away. For there is a wonder and a strangeness on the twilight city of Inganok, and men
fear to be lax in its rites lest a doom and a vengeance lurk unsuspectedly close.
Far in the shadows of that tavern Carter saw a squat form he did not like, for it was unmistakably that
of the old slant-eyed merchant he had seen so long before in the taverns of Dylath-Leen, who was reputed
to trade with the horrible stone villages of Leng which no healthy folk visit and whose evil fires are seen at
night from afar, and even 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. This man had seemed to
shew a queer gleam of knowing when Carter asked the traders of Dylath-Leen about the cold waste and
Kadath; and somehow his presence in dark and haunted Inganok, so close to the wonders of the north, was
not a reassuring thing. He slipped wholly out of sight before Carter could speak to him, and sailors later
said that he had come with a yak caravan from some point not well determined, bearing the colossal and
rich-flavoured eggs of the rumoured shantak-bird to trade for the dexterous jade goblets that merchants
brought from Ilarnek.
On the following morning the ship-captain led Carter through the onyx streets of Inganok, dark under
their twilight sky. The inlaid doors and figured house-fronts, carven balconies and crystal-paned oriels, all
gleamed with a sombre and polished loveliness; and now and then a plaza would open out with black
pillars, colonnades, and the statues of curious beings both human and fabulous. Some of the vistas down
long and unbending streets, or through side alleys and over bulbous domes, spires, and arabesqued roofs,
were weird and beautiful beyond words; and nothing was more splendid than the massive height of the
great central Temple of the Elder Ones with its sixteen carven sides, its flattened dome, and its lofty
pinnacled belfry, overtopping all else, and majestic whatever its foreground. And always to the east, far
beyond the city walls and the leagues of pasture land, rose the gaunt grey sides of those topless and
impassable peaks across which hideous Leng was said to lie.
The captain took Carter to the mighty temple, which is set with its walled garden in a great round
plaza whence the streets go as spokes from a wheel’s hub. The seven arched gates of that garden, each
having over it a carven face like those on the city’s gates, are always open; and the people roam reverently
at will down the tiled paths and through the little lanes lined with grotesque termini and the shrines of
modest gods. And there are fountains, pools, and basins there to reflect the frequent blaze of the tripods
on the high balcony, all of onyx and having in them small luminous fish taken by divers from the lower
bowers of ocean. When the deep clang from the temple’s belfry shivers over the garden and the city, and
the answer of the horns and viols and voices peals out from the seven lodges by the garden gates, there
issue from the seven doors of the temple long columns of masked and hooded priests in black, bearing at
arm’s length before them great golden bowls from which a curious steam rises. And all the seven columns
strut peculiarly in single file, legs thrown far forward without bending the knees, down the walks that lead
to the seven lodges, wherein they disappear and do not appear again. It is said that subterrene paths
connect the lodges with the temple, and that the long files of priests return through them; nor is it
unwhispered that deep flights of onyx steps go down to mysteries that are never told. But only a few are
those who hint that the priests in the masked and hooded columns are not human priests.
Carter did not enter the temple, because none but the Veiled King is permitted to do that. But before
he left the garden the hour of the bell came, and he heard the shivering clang deafeningly above him, and
the wailing of the horns and viols and voices loud from the lodges by the gates. And down the seven great
walks stalked the long files of bowl-bearing priests in their singular way, giving to the traveller a fear which
human priests do not often give. When the last of them had vanished he left that garden, noting as he did
so a spot on the pavement over which the bowls had passed. Even the ship-captain did not like that spot,
and hurried him on toward the hill whereon the Veiled King’s palace rises many-domed and marvellous.
The ways to the onyx palace are steep and narrow, all but that broad curving one where the king and
his companions ride on yaks or in yak-drawn chariots. Carter and his guide climbed up an alley that was all
steps, between inlaid walls bearing strange signs in gold, and under balconies and oriels whence
sometimes floated soft strains of music or breaths of exotic fragrance. Always ahead loomed those titan
walls, mighty buttresses, and clustered and bulbous domes for which the Veiled King’s palace is famous;
and at length they passed under a great black arch and emerged in the gardens of the monarch’s pleasure.
There Carter paused in faintness at so much of beauty; for the onyx terraces and colonnaded walks, the
gay parterres and delicate flowering trees espaliered to golden lattices, the brazen urns and tripods with
cunning bas-reliefs, the pedestalled and almost breathing statues of veined black marble, the basalt-
bottomed lagoons and tiled fountains with luminous fish, the tiny temples of iridescent singing birds atop
carven columns, the marvellous scrollwork of the great bronze gates, and the blossoming vines trained
along every inch of the polished walls all joined to form a sight whose loveliness was beyond reality, and
half-fabulous even in the land of dream. There it shimmered like a vision under that grey twilight sky, with
the domed and fretted magnificence of the palace ahead, and the fantastic silhouette of the distant
impassable peaks on the right. And ever the small birds and the fountains sang, while the perfume of rare
blossoms spread like a veil over that incredible garden. No other human presence was there, and Carter
was glad it was so. Then they turned and descended again the onyx alley of steps, for the palace itself no
visitor may enter; and it is not well to look too long and steadily at the great central dome, since it is said to
house the archaic father of all the rumoured shantak-birds, and to send out queer dreams to the curious.
After that the captain took Carter to the north quarter of the town, near the Gate of the Caravans,
where are the taverns of the yak-merchants and the onyx-miners. And there, in a low-ceiled inn of
quarrymen, they said farewell; for business called the captain whilst Carter was eager to talk with miners
about the north. There were many men in that inn, and the traveller was not long in speaking to some of
them; saying that he was an old miner of onyx, and anxious to know somewhat of Inganok’s quarries. But
all that he learnt was not much more than he knew before, for the miners were timid and evasive about
the cold desert to the north and the quarry that no man visits. They had fears of fabled emissaries from
around the mountains where Leng is said to lie, and of evil presences and nameless sentinels far north
among the scattered rocks. And they whispered also that the rumoured shantak-birds are no wholesome
things; it being indeed for the best that no man has ever truly seen one (for that fabled father of shantaks
in the king’s dome is fed in the dark).
The next day, saying that he wished to look over all the various mines for himself and to visit the
scattered farms and quaint onyx villages of Inganok, Carter hired a yak and stuffed great leathern saddle-
bags for a journey. Beyond the Gate of the Caravans the road lay straight betwixt tilled fields, with many
odd farmhouses crowned by low domes. At some of these houses the seeker stopped to ask questions;
once finding a host so austere and reticent, and so full of an unplaced majesty like to that in the huge
features on Ngranek, that he felt certain he had come at last upon one of the Great Ones themselves, or
upon one with full nine-tenths of their blood, dwelling amongst men. And to that austere and reticent
cotter he was careful to speak very well of the gods, and to praise all the blessings they had ever accorded
him.
That night Carter camped in a roadside meadow beneath a great lygath-tree to which he tied his yak,
and in the morning resumed his northward pilgrimage. At about ten o’clock he reached the small-domed
village of Urg, where traders rest and miners tell their tales, and paused in its taverns till noon. It is here
that the great caravan road turns west toward Selarn, but Carter kept on north by the quarry road. All the
afternoon he followed that rising road, which was somewhat narrower than the great highway, and which
now led through a region with more rocks than tilled fields. And by evening the low hills on his left had
risen into sizeable black cliffs, so that he knew he was close to the mining country. All the while the great
gaunt sides of the impassable mountains towered afar off at his right, and the farther he went, the worse
tales he heard of them from the scattered farmers and traders and drivers of lumbering onyx-carts along
the way.
On the second night he camped in the shadow of a large black crag, tethering his yak to a stake driven
in the ground. He observed the greater phosphorescence of the clouds at this northerly point, and more
than once thought he saw dark shapes outlined against them. And on the third morning he came in sight of
the first onyx quarry, and greeted the men who there laboured with picks and chisels. Before evening he
had passed eleven quarries; the land being here given over altogether to onyx cliffs and boulders, with no
vegetation at all, but only great rocky fragments scattered about a floor of black earth, with the grey
impassable peaks always rising gaunt and sinister on his right. The third night he spent in a camp of quarry
men whose flickering fires cast weird reflections on the polished cliffs to the west. And they sang many
songs and told many tales, shewing such strange knowledge of the olden days and the habits of gods that
Carter could see they held many latent memories of their sires the Great Ones. They asked him whither he
went, and cautioned him not to go too far to the north; but he replied that he was seeking new cliffs of
onyx, and would take no more risks than were common among prospectors. In the morning he bade them
adieu and rode on into the darkening north, where they had warned him he would find the feared and
unvisited quarry whence hands older than men’s hands had wrenched prodigious blocks. But he did not
like it when, turning back to wave a last farewell, he thought he saw approaching the camp that squat and
evasive old merchant with slanting eyes, whose conjectured traffick with Leng was the gossip of distant
Dylath-Leen.
After two more quarries the inhabited part of Inganok seemed to end, and the road narrowed to a
steeply rising yak-path among forbidding black cliffs. Always on the right towered the gaunt and distant
peaks, and as Carter climbed farther and farther into this untraversed realm he found it grew darker and
colder. Soon he perceived that there were no prints of feet or hooves on the black path beneath, and
realised that he was indeed come into strange and deserted ways of elder time. Once in a while a raven
would croak far overhead, and now and then a flapping behind some vast rock would make him think
uncomfortably of the rumoured shantak-bird. But in the main he was alone with his shaggy steed, and it
troubled him to observe that this excellent yak become more and more reluctant to advance, and more
and more disposed to snort affrightedly at any small noise along the route.
The path now contracted between sable and glistening walls, and began to display an even greater
steepness than before. It was a bad footing, and the yak often slipped on the stony fragments strown
thickly about. In two hours Carter saw ahead a definite crest, beyond which was nothing but dull grey sky,
and blessed the prospect of a level or downward course. To reach this crest, however, was no easy task; for
the way had grown nearly perpendicular, and was perilous with loose black gravel and small stones.
Eventually Carter dismounted and led his dubious yak; pulling very hard when the animal balked or
stumbled, and keeping his own footing as best he might. Then suddenly he came to the top and saw
beyond, and gasped at what he saw.
The path indeed led straight ahead and slightly down, with the same lines of high natural walls as
before; but on the left hand there opened out a monstrous space, vast acres in extent, where some archaic
power had riven and rent the native cliffs of onyx in the form of a giants’ quarry. Far back into the solid
precipice ran that Cyclopean gouge, and deep down within earth’s bowels its lower delvings yawned. It was
no quarry of man, and the concave sides were scarred with great squares yards wide which told of the size
of the blocks once hewn by nameless hands and chisels. High over its jagged rim huge ravens flapped and
croaked, and vague whirrings in the unseen depths told of bats or urhags or less mentionable presences
haunting the endless blackness. There Carter stood in the narrow way amidst the twilight with the rocky
path sloping down before him; tall onyx cliffs on his right that led on as far as he could see, and tall cliffs on
the left chopped off just ahead to make that terrible and unearthly quarry.
All at once the yak uttered a cry and burst from his control, leaping past him and darting on in a panic
till it vanished down the narrow slope toward the north. Stones kicked by its flying hooves fell over the
brink of the quarry and lost themselves in the dark without any sound of striking bottom; but Carter
ignored the perils of that scanty path as he raced breathlessly after the flying steed. Soon the left-hand
cliffs resumed their course, making the way once more a narrow lane; and still the traveller leaped on after
the yak whose great wide prints told of its desperate flight.
Once he thought he heard the hoofbeats of the frightened beast, and doubled his speed from this
encouragement. He was covering miles, and little by little the way was broadening in front till he knew he
must soon emerge on the cold and dreaded desert to the north. The gaunt grey flanks of the distant
impassable peaks were again visible above the right-hand crags, and ahead were the rocks and boulders of
an open space which was clearly a foretaste of the dark and limitless plain. And once more those hoofbeats
sounded in his ears, plainer than before, but this time giving terror instead of encouragement because he
realised that they were not the frightened hoofbeats of his fleeing yak. These beats were ruthless and
purposeful, and they were behind him.
Carter’s pursuit of the yak became now a flight from an unseen thing, for though he dared not glance
over his shoulder he felt that the presence behind him could be nothing wholesome or mentionable. His
yak must have heard or felt it first, and he did not like to ask himself whether it had followed him from the
haunts of men or had floundered up out of that black quarry pit. Meanwhile the cliffs had been left behind,
so that the oncoming night fell over a great waste of sand and spectral rocks wherein all paths were lost.
He could not see the hoofprints of his yak, but always from behind him there came that detestable
clopping; mingled now and then with what he fancied were titanic flappings and whirrings. That he was
losing ground seemed unhappily clear to him, and he knew he was hopelessly lost in this broken and
blasted desert of meaningless rocks and untravelled sands. Only those remote and impassable peaks on
the right gave him any sense of direction, and even they were less clear as the grey twilight waned and the
sickly phosphorescence of the clouds took its place.
Then dim and misty in the darkling north before him he glimpsed a terrible thing. He had thought it for
some moments a range of black mountains, but now he saw it was something more. The phosphorescence
of the brooding clouds shewed it plainly, and even silhouetted parts of it as low vapours glowed behind.
How distant it was he could not tell, but it must have been very far. It was thousands of feet high,
stretching in a great concave arc from the grey impassable peaks to the unimagined westward spaces, and
had once indeed been a ridge of mighty onyx hills. But now those hills were hills no more, for some hand
greater than man’s had touched them. Silent they squatted there atop the world like wolves or ghouls,
crowned with clouds and mists and guarding the secrets of the north forever. All in a great half circle they
squatted, those dog-like mountains carven into monstrous watching statues, and their right hands were
raised in menace against mankind.
It was only the flickering light of the clouds that made their mitred double heads seem to move, but as
Carter stumbled on he saw arise from their shadowy laps great forms whose motions were no delusion.
Winged and whirring, those forms grew larger each moment, and the traveller knew his stumbling was at
an end. They were not any birds or bats known elsewhere on earth or in dreamland, for they were larger
than elephants and had heads like a horse’s. Carter knew that they must be the shantak-birds of ill rumour,
and wondered no more what evil guardians and nameless sentinels made men avoid the boreal rock
desert. And as he stopped in final resignation he dared at last to look behind him; where indeed was
trotting the squat slant-eyed trader of evil legend, grinning astride a lean yak and leading on a noxious
horde of leering shantaks to whose wings still clung the rime and nitre of the nether pits.
Trapped though he was by fabulous and hippocephalic winged nightmares that pressed around in
great unholy circles, Randolph Carter did not lose consciousness. Lofty and horrible those titan gargoyles
towered above him, while the slant-eyed merchant leaped down from his yak and stood grinning before
the captive. Then the man motioned Carter to mount one of the repugnant shantaks, helping him up as his
judgment struggled with his loathing. It was hard work ascending, for the shantak-bird has scales instead of
feathers, and those scales are very slippery. Once he was seated, the slant-eyed man hopped up behind
him, leaving the lean yak to be led away northward toward the ring of carven mountains by one of the
incredible bird colossi.
There now followed a hideous whirl through frigid space, endlessly up and eastward toward the gaunt
grey flanks of those impassable mountains beyond which Leng was said to lie. Far above the clouds they
flew, till at last there lay beneath them those fabled summits which the folk of Inganok have never seen,
and which lie always in high vortices of gleaming mist. Carter beheld them very plainly as they passed
below, and saw upon their topmost peaks strange caves which made him think of those on Ngranek; but he
did not question his captor about these things when he noticed that both the man and the horse-headed
shantak appeared oddly fearful of them, hurrying past nervously and shewing great tension until they were
left far in the rear.
The shantak now flew lower, revealing beneath the canopy of cloud a grey barren plain whereon at
great distances shone little feeble fires. As they descended there appeared at intervals lone huts of granite
and bleak stone villages whose tiny windows glowed with pallid light. And there came from those huts and
villages a shrill droning of pipes and a nauseous rattle of crotala which proved at once that Inganok’s
people are right in their geographick rumours. For travellers have heard such sounds before, and know that
they float only from the cold desert plateau which healthy folk never visit; that haunted place of evil and
mystery which is Leng.
Around the feeble fires dark forms were dancing, and Carter was curious as to what manner of beings
they might be; for no healthy folk have ever been to Leng, and the place is known only by its fires and
stone huts as seen from afar. Very slowly and awkwardly did those forms leap, and with an insane twisting
and bending not good to behold; so that Carter did not wonder at the monstrous evil imputed to them by
vague legend, or the fear in which all dreamland holds their abhorrent frozen plateau. As the shantak flew
lower, the repulsiveness of the dancers became tinged with a certain hellish familiarity; and the prisoner
kept straining his eyes and racking his memory for clues to where he had seen such creatures before.
They leaped as though they had hooves instead of feet, and seemed to wear a sort of wig or
headpiece with small horns. Of other clothing they had none, but most of them were quite furry. Behind
they had dwarfish tails, and when they glanced upward he saw the excessive width of their mouths. Then
he knew what they were, and that they did not wear any wigs or headpieces after all. For the cryptic folk of
Leng were of one race with the uncomfortable merchants of the black galleys that traded rubies at Dylath-
Leen; those not quite human merchants who are the slaves of the monstrous moon-things! They were
indeed the same dark folk who had shanghaied Carter on their noisome galley so long ago, and whose kith
he had seen driven in herds about the unclean wharves of that accursed lunar city, with the leaner ones
toiling and the fatter ones taken away in crates for other needs of their polypous and amorphous masters.
Now he saw where such ambiguous creatures came from, and shuddered at the thought that Leng must be
known to these formless abominations from the moon.
But the shantak flew on past the fires and the stone huts and the less than human dancers, and soared
over sterile hills of grey granite and dim wastes of rock and ice and snow. Day came, and the
phosphorescence of low clouds gave place to the misty twilight of that northern world, and still the vile
bird winged meaningly through the cold and silence. At times the slant-eyed man talked with his steed in a
hateful and guttural language, and the shantak would answer with tittering tones that rasped like the
scratching of ground glass. All this while the land was getting higher, and finally they came to a windswept
table-land which seemed the very roof of a blasted and tenantless world. There, all alone in the hush and
the dusk and the cold, rose the uncouth stones of a squat windowless building, around which a circle of
crude monoliths stood. In all this arrangement there was nothing human, and Carter surmised from old
tales that he was indeed come to that most dreadful and legendary of all places, the remote and
prehistoric monastery wherein dwells uncompanioned the high-priest not to be described, which wears a
yellow silken mask over its face and prays to the Other Gods and their crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.
The loathsome bird now settled to the ground, and the slant-eyed man hopped down and helped his
captive alight. Of the purpose of his seizure Carter now felt very sure; for clearly the slant-eyed merchant
was an agent of the darker powers, eager to drag before his masters a mortal whose presumption had
aimed at the finding of unknown Kadath and the saying of a prayer before the faces of the Great Ones in
their onyx castle. It seemed likely that this merchant had caused his former capture by the slaves of the
moon-things in Dylath-Leen, and that he now meant to do what the rescuing cats had baffled; taking the
victim to some dread rendezvous with monstrous Nyarlathotep and telling with what boldness the seeking
of unknown Kadath had been tried. Leng and the cold waste north of Inganok must be close to the Other
Gods, and there the passes to Kadath are well guarded.
The slant-eyed man was small, but the great hippocephalic bird was there to see he was obeyed; so
Carter followed where he led, and passed within the circle of standing rocks and into the low arched
doorway of that windowless stone monastery. There were no lights inside, but the evil merchant lit a small
clay lamp bearing morbid bas-reliefs and prodded his prisoner on through mazes of narrow winding
corridors. On the walls of the corridors were painted frightful scenes older than history, and in a style
unknown to the archaeologists of earth. After countless aeons their pigments were brilliant still, for the
cold and dryness of hideous Leng keep alive many primal things. Carter saw them fleetingly in the rays of
that dim and moving lamp, and shuddered at the tale they told.
Through those archaic frescoes Leng’s annals stalked; and the horned, hooved, and wide-mouthed
almost-humans danced evilly amidst forgotten cities. There were scenes of old wars, wherein Leng’s
almost-humans fought with the bloated purple spiders of the neighbouring vales; and there were scenes
also of the coming of the black galleys from the moon, and of the submission of Leng’s people to the
polypous and amorphous blasphemies that hopped and floundered and wriggled out of them. Those
slippery greyish-white blasphemies they worshipped as gods, nor ever complained when scores of their
best and fatted males were taken away in the black galleys. The monstrous moon-beasts made their camp
on a jagged isle in the sea, and Carter could tell from the frescoes that this was none other than the lone
nameless rock he had seen when sailing to Inganok; that grey accursed rock which Inganok’s seamen shun,
and from which vile howlings reverberate all through the night.
And in those frescoes was shewn the great seaport and capital of the almost-humans; proud and
pillared betwixt the cliffs and the basalt wharves, and wondrous with high fanes and carven places. Great
gardens and columned streets led from the cliffs and from each of the six sphinx-crowned gates to a vast
central plaza, and in that plaza was a pair of winged colossal lions guarding the top of a subterrene
staircase. Again and again were those huge winged lions shewn, their mighty flanks of diorite glistening in
the grey twilight of the day and the cloudy phosphorescence of the night. And as Carter stumbled past
their frequent and repeated pictures it came to him at last what indeed they were, and what city it was
that the almost-humans had ruled so anciently before the coming of the black galleys. There could be no
mistake, for the legends of dreamland are generous and profuse. Indubitably that primal city was no less a
place than storied Sarkomand, whose ruins had bleached for a million years before the first true human
saw the light, and whose twin titan lions guard eternally the steps that lead down from dreamland to the
Great Abyss.
Other views shewed the gaunt grey peaks dividing Leng from Inganok, and the monstrous shantak-
birds that build nests on the ledges half way up. And they shewed likewise the curious caves near the very
topmost pinnacles, and how even the boldest of the shantaks fly screaming away from them. Carter had
seen those caves when he passed over them, and had noticed their likeness to the caves on Ngranek. Now
he knew that the likeness was more than a chance one, for in these pictures were shewn their fearsome
denizens; and those bat-wings, curving horns, barbed tails, prehensile paws, and rubbery bodies were not
strange to him. He had met those silent, flitting, and clutching creatures before; those mindless guardians
of the Great Abyss whom even the Great Ones fear, and who own not Nyarlathotep but hoary Nodens as
their lord. For they were the dreaded night-gaunts, who never laugh or smile because they have no faces,
and who flop unendingly in the dark betwixt the Vale of Pnath and the passes to the outer world.
The slant-eyed merchant had now prodded Carter into a great domed space whose walls were carved
in shocking bas-reliefs, and whose centre held a gaping circular pit surrounded by six malignly stained
stone altars in a ring. There was no light in this vast and evil-smelling crypt, and the small lamp of the
sinister merchant shone so feebly that one could grasp details only little by little. At the farther end was a
high stone dais reached by five steps; and there on a golden throne sat a lumpish figure robed in yellow silk
figured with red and having a yellow silken mask over its face. To this being the slant-eyed man made
certain signs with his hands, and the lurker in the dark replied by raising a disgustingly carven flute of ivory
in silk-covered paws and blowing certain loathsome sounds from beneath its flowing yellow mask. This
colloquy went on for some time, and to Carter there was something sickeningly familiar in the sound of
that flute and the stench of the malodorous place. It made him think of a frightful red-litten city and of the
revolting procession that once filed through it; of that, and of an awful climb through lunar countryside
beyond, before the rescuing rush of earth’s friendly cats. He knew that the creature on the dais was
without doubt the high-priest not to be described, of which legend whispers such fiendish and abnormal
possibilities, but he feared to think just what that abhorred high-priest might be.
Then the figured silk slipped a trifle from one of the greyish-white paws, and Carter knew what the
noisome high-priest was. And in that hideous second stark fear drove him to something his reason would
never have dared to attempt, for in all his shaken consciousness there was room only for one frantic will to
escape from what squatted on that golden throne. He knew that hopeless labyrinths of stone lay betwixt
him and the cold table-land outside, and that even on that table-land the noxious shantak still waited; yet
in spite of all this there was in his mind only the instant need to get away from that wriggling, silk-robed
monstrosity.
The slant-eyed man had set his curious lamp upon one of the high and wickedly stained altar-stones by
the pit, and had moved forward somewhat to talk to the high-priest with his hands. Carter, hitherto wholly
passive, now gave that man a terrific push with all the wild strength of fear, so that the victim toppled at
once into that gaping well which rumour holds to reach down to the hellish Vaults of Zin where gugs hunt
ghasts in the dark. In almost the same second he seized the lamp from the altar and darted out into the
frescoed labyrinths, racing this way and that as chance determined and trying not to think of the stealthy
padding of shapeless paws on the stones behind him, or of the silent wrigglings and crawlings which must
be going on back there in lightless corridors.
After a few moments he regretted his thoughtless haste, and wished he had tried to follow backward
the frescoes he had passed on the way in. True, they were so confused and duplicated that they could not
have done him much good, but he wished none the less he had made the attempt. Those he now saw were
even more horrible than those he had seen then, and he knew he was not in the corridors leading outside.
In time he became quite sure he was not followed, and slackened his pace somewhat; but scarce had he
breathed in half-relief when a new peril beset him. His lamp was waning, and he would soon be in pitch
blackness with no means of sight or guidance.
When the light was all gone he groped slowly in the dark, and prayed to the Great Ones for such help
as they might afford. At times he felt the stone floor sloping up or down, and once he stumbled over a step
for which no reason seemed to exist. The farther he went the damper it seemed to be, and when he was
able to feel a junction or the mouth of a side passage he always chose the way which sloped downward the
least. He believed, though, that his general course was down; and the vault-like smell and incrustations on
the greasy walls and floor alike warned him he was burrowing deep in Leng’s unwholesome table-land. But
there was not any warning of the thing which came at last; only the thing itself with its terror and shock
and breath-taking chaos. One moment he was groping slowly over the slippery floor of an almost level
place, and the next he was shooting dizzily downward in the dark through a burrow which must have been
well-nigh vertical.
Of the length of that hideous sliding he could never be sure, but it seemed to take hours of delirious
nausea and ecstatic frenzy. Then he realised he was still, with the phosphorescent clouds of a northern
night shining sickly above him. All around were crumbling walls and broken columns, and the pavement on
which he lay was pierced by straggling grass and wrenched asunder by frequent shrubs and roots. Behind
him a basalt cliff rose topless and perpendicular; its dark side sculptured into repellent scenes, and pierced
by an arched and carven entrance to the inner blacknesses out of which he had come. Ahead stretched
double rows of pillars, and the fragments and pedestals of pillars, that spoke of a broad and bygone street;
and from the urns and basins along the way he knew it had been a great street of gardens. Far off at its end
the pillars spread to mark a vast round plaza, and in that open circle there loomed gigantic under the lurid
night clouds a pair of monstrous things. Huge winged lions of diorite they were, with blackness and shadow
between them. Full twenty feet they reared their grotesque and unbroken heads, and snarled derisive on
the ruins around them. And Carter knew right well what they must be, for legend tells of only one such
twain. They were the changeless guardians of the Great Abyss, and these dark ruins were in truth
primordial Sarkomand.
Carter’s first act was to close and barricade the archway in the cliff with fallen blocks and odd debris
that lay around. He wished no follower from Leng’s hateful monastery, for along the way ahead would lurk
enough of other dangers. Of how to get from Sarkomand to the peopled parts of dreamland he knew
nothing at all; nor could he gain much by descending to the grottoes of the ghouls, since he knew they
were no better informed than he. The three ghouls which had helped him through the city of gugs to the
outer world had not known how to reach Sarkomand in their journey back, but had planned to ask old
traders in Dylath-Leen. He did not like to think of going again to the subterrene world of gugs and risking
once more that hellish tower of Koth with its Cyclopean steps leading to the enchanted wood, yet he felt
he might have to try this course if all else failed. Over Leng’s plateau past the lone monastery he dared not
go unaided; for the high-priest’s emissaries must be many, while at the journey’s end there would no
doubt be the shantaks and perhaps other things to deal with. If he could get a boat he might sail back to
Inganok past the jagged and hideous rock in the sea, for the primal frescoes in the monastery labyrinth had
shewn that this frightful place lies not far from Sarkomand’s basalt quays. But to find a boat in this aeon-
deserted city was no probable thing, and it did not appear likely that he could ever make one.
Such were the thoughts of Randolph Carter when a new impression began beating upon his mind. All
this while there had stretched before him the great corpse-like width of fabled Sarkomand with its black
broken pillars and crumbling sphinx-crowned gates and titan stones and monstrous winged lions against
the sickly glow of those luminous night clouds. Now he saw far ahead and on the right a glow that no
clouds could account for, and knew he was not alone in the silence of that dead city. The glow rose and fell
fitfully, flickering with a greenish tinge which did not reassure the watcher. And when he crept closer,
down the littered street and through some narrow gaps between tumbled walls, he perceived that it was a
campfire near the wharves with many vague forms clustered darkly around it, and a lethal odour hanging
heavily over all. Beyond was the oily lapping of the harbour water with a great ship riding at anchor, and
Carter paused in stark terror when he saw that the ship was indeed one of the dreaded black galleys from
the moon.
Then, just as he was about to creep back from that detestable flame, he saw a stirring among the
vague dark forms and heard a peculiar and unmistakable sound. It was the frightened meeping of a ghoul,
and in a moment it had swelled to a veritable chorus of anguish. Secure as he was in the shadow of
monstrous ruins, Carter allowed his curiosity to conquer his fear, and crept forward again instead of
retreating. Once in crossing an open street he wriggled worm-like on his stomach, and in another place he
had to rise to his feet to avoid making a noise among heaps of fallen marble. But always he succeeded in
avoiding discovery, so that in a short time he had found a spot behind a titan pillar whence he could watch
the whole green-litten scene of action. There, around a hideous fire fed by the obnoxious stems of lunar
fungi, there squatted a stinking circle of the toad-like moon-beasts and their almost-human slaves. Some of
these slaves were heating curious iron spears in the leaping flames, and at intervals applying their white-
hot points to three tightly trussed prisoners that lay writhing before the leaders of the party. From the
motions of their tentacles Carter could see that the blunt-snouted moon-beasts were enjoying the
spectacle hugely, and vast was his horror when he suddenly recognised the frantic meeping and knew that
the tortured ghouls were none other than the faithful trio which had guided him safely from the abyss and
had thereafter set out from the enchanted wood to find Sarkomand and the gate to their native deeps.
The number of malodorous moon-beasts about that greenish fire was very great, and Carter saw that
he could do nothing now to save his former allies. Of how the ghouls had been captured he could not
guess; but fancied that the grey toad-like blasphemies had heard them inquire in Dylath-Leen concerning
the way to Sarkomand and had not wished them to approach so closely the hateful plateau of Leng and the
high-priest not to be described. For a moment he pondered on what he ought to do, and recalled how near
he was to the gate of the ghouls’ black kingdom. Clearly it was wisest to creep east to the plaza of twin
lions and descend at once to the gulf, where assuredly he would meet no horrors worse than those above,
and where he might soon find ghouls eager to rescue their brethren and perhaps to wipe out the moon-
beasts from the black galley. It occurred to him that the portal, like other gates to the abyss, might be
guarded by flocks of night-gaunts; but he did not fear these faceless creatures now. He had learned that
they are bound by solemn treaties with the ghouls, and the ghoul which was Pickman had taught him how
to glibber a password they understood.
So Carter began another silent crawl through the ruins, edging slowly toward the great central plaza
and the winged lions. It was ticklish work, but the moon-beasts were pleasantly busy and did not hear the
slight noises which he twice made by accident among the scattered stones. At last he reached the open
space and picked his way among the stunted trees and briers that had grown up therein. The gigantic lions
loomed terrible above him in the sickly glow of the phosphorescent night clouds, but he manfully persisted
toward them and presently crept round to their faces, knowing it was on that side he would find the
mighty darkness which they guard. Ten feet apart crouched the mocking-faced beasts of diorite, brooding
on Cyclopean pedestals whose sides were chiselled into fearsome bas-reliefs. Betwixt them was a tiled
court with a central space which had once been railed with balusters of onyx. Midway in this space a black
well opened, and Carter soon saw that he had indeed reached the yawning gulf whose crusted and mouldy
stone steps lead down to the crypts of nightmare.
Terrible is the memory of that dark descent, in which hours wore themselves away whilst Carter
wound sightlessly round and round down a fathomless spiral of steep and slippery stairs. So worn and
narrow were the steps, and so greasy with the ooze of inner earth, that the climber never quite knew when
to expect a breathless fall and hurtling down to the ultimate pits; and he was likewise uncertain just when
or how the guardian night-gaunts would suddenly pounce upon him, if indeed there were any stationed in
this primeval passage. All about him was a stifling odour of nether gulfs, and he felt that the air of these
choking depths was not made for mankind. In time he became very numb and somnolent, moving more
from automatic impulse than from reasoned will; nor did he realise any change when he stopped moving
altogether as something quietly seized him from behind. He was flying very rapidly through the air before a
malevolent tickling told him that the rubbery night-gaunts had performed their duty.
Awaked to the fact that he was in the cold, damp clutch of the faceless flutterers, Carter remembered
the password of the ghouls and glibbered it as loudly as he could amidst the wind and chaos of flight.
Mindless though night-gaunts are said to be, the effect was instantaneous; for all tickling stopped at once,
and the creatures hastened to shift their captive to a more comfortable position. Thus encouraged, Carter
ventured some explanations; telling of the seizure and torture of three ghouls by the moon-beasts, and of
the need of assembling a party to rescue them. The night-gaunts, though inarticulate, seemed to
understand what was said; and shewed greater haste and purpose in their flight. Suddenly the dense
blackness gave place to the grey twilight of inner earth, and there opened up ahead one of those flat sterile
plains on which ghouls love to squat and gnaw. Scattered tombstones and osseous fragments told of the
denizens of that place; and as Carter gave a loud meep of urgent summons, a score of burrows emptied
forth their leathery, dog-like tenants. The night-gaunts now flew low and set their passenger upon his feet,
afterward withdrawing a little and forming a hunched semicircle on the ground while the ghouls greeted
the newcomer.
Carter glibbered his message rapidly and explicitly to the grotesque company, and four of them at
once departed through different burrows to spread the news to others and gather such troops as might be
available for the rescue. After a long wait a ghoul of some importance appeared, and made significant signs
to the night-gaunts, causing two of the latter to fly off into the dark. Thereafter there were constant
accessions to the hunched flock of night-gaunts on the plain, till at length the slimy soil was fairly black
with them. Meanwhile fresh ghouls crawled out of the burrows one by one, all glibbering excitedly and
forming in crude battle array not far from the huddled night-gaunts. In time there appeared that proud and
influential ghoul which was once the artist Richard Pickman of Boston, and to him Carter glibbered a very
full account of what had occurred. The erstwhile Pickman, surprised to greet his ancient friend again,
seemed very much impressed, and held a conference with other chiefs a little apart from the growing
throng.
Finally, after scanning the ranks with care, the assembled chiefs all meeped in unison and began
glibbering orders to the crowds of ghouls and night-gaunts. A large detachment of the horned flyers
vanished at once, while the rest grouped themselves two by two on their knees with extended fore legs,
awaiting the approach of the ghouls one by one. As each ghoul reached the pair of night-gaunts to which
he was assigned, he was taken up and borne away into the blackness; till at last the whole throng had
vanished save for Carter, Pickman, and the other chiefs, and a few pairs of night-gaunts. Pickman explained
that night-gaunts are the advance guard and battle steeds of the ghouls, and that the army was issuing
forth to Sarkomand to deal with the moon-beasts. Then Carter and the ghoulish chiefs approached the
waiting bearers and were taken up by the damp, slippery paws. Another moment and all were whirling in
wind and darkness; endlessly up, up, up to the gate of the winged lions and the spectral ruins of primal
Sarkomand.
When, after a great interval, Carter saw again the sickly light of Sarkomand’s nocturnal sky, it was to
behold the great central plaza swarming with militant ghouls and night-gaunts. Day, he felt sure, must be
almost due; but so strong was the army that no surprise of the enemy would be needed. The greenish flare
near the wharves still glimmered faintly, though the absence of ghoulish meeping shewed that the torture
of the prisoners was over for the nonce. Softly glibbering directions to their steeds, and to the flock of
riderless night-gaunts ahead, the ghouls presently rose in wide whirring columns and swept on over the
bleak ruins toward the evil flame. Carter was now beside Pickman in the front rank of ghouls, and saw as
they approached the noisome camp that the moon-beasts were totally unprepared. The three prisoners lay
bound and inert beside the fire, while their toad-like captors slumped drowsily about in no certain order.
The almost-human slaves were asleep, even the sentinels shirking a duty which in this realm must have
seemed to them merely perfunctory.
The final swoop of the night-gaunts and mounted ghouls was very sudden, each of the greyish toad-
like blasphemies and their almost-human slaves being seized by a group of night-gaunts before a sound
was made. The moon-beasts, of course, were voiceless; and even the slaves had little chance to scream
before rubbery paws choked them into silence. Horrible were the writhings of those great jellyish
abnormalities as the sardonic night-gaunts clutched them, but nothing availed against the strength of
those black prehensile talons. When a moon-beast writhed too violently, a night-gaunt would seize and
pull its quivering pink tentacles; which seemed to hurt so much that the victim would cease its struggles.
Carter expected to see much slaughter, but found that the ghouls were far subtler in their plans. They
glibbered certain simple orders to the night-gaunts which held the captives, trusting the rest to instinct;
and soon the hapless creatures were borne silently away into the Great Abyss, to be distributed impartially
amongst the bholes, gugs, ghasts, and other dwellers in darkness whose modes of nourishment are not
painless to their chosen victims. Meanwhile the three bound ghouls had been released and consoled by
their conquering kinsfolk, whilst various parties searched the neighbourhood for possible remaining moon-
beasts, and boarded the evil-smelling black galley at the wharf to make sure that nothing had escaped the
general defeat. Surely enough, the capture had been thorough; for not a sign of further life could the
victors detect. Carter, anxious to preserve a means of access to the rest of dreamland, urged them not to
sink the anchored galley; and this request was freely granted out of gratitude for his act in reporting the
plight of the captured trio. On the ship were found some very curious objects and decorations, some of
which Carter cast at once into the sea.
Ghouls and night-gaunts now formed themselves in separate groups, the former questioning their
rescued fellows anent past happenings. It appeared that the three had followed Carter’s directions and
proceeded from the enchanted wood to Dylath-Leen by way of Nir and the Skai, stealing human clothes at
a lonely farmhouse and loping as closely as possible in the fashion of a man’s walk. In Dylath-Leen’s taverns
their grotesque ways and faces had aroused much comment; but they had persisted in asking the way to
Sarkomand until at last an old traveller was able to tell them. Then they knew that only a ship for Lelag-
Leng would serve their purpose, and prepared to wait patiently for such a vessel.
But evil spies had doubtless reported much; for shortly a black galley put into port, and the wide-
mouthed ruby merchants invited the ghouls to drink with them in a tavern. Wine was produced from one
of those sinister bottles grotesquely carven from a single ruby, and after that the ghouls found themselves
prisoners on the black galley as Carter had once found himself. This time, however, the unseen rowers
steered not for the moon but for antique Sarkomand; bent evidently on taking their captives before the
high-priest not to be described. They had touched at the jagged rock in the northern sea which Inganok’s
mariners shun, and the ghouls had there seen for the first time the real masters of the ship; being sickened
despite their own callousness by such extremes of malign shapelessness and fearsome odour. There, too,
were witnessed the nameless pastimes of the toad-like resident garrison—such pastimes as give rise to the
night-howlings which men fear. After that had come the landing at ruined Sarkomand and the beginning of
the tortures, whose continuance the present rescue had prevented.
Future plans were next discussed, the three rescued ghouls suggesting a raid on the jagged rock and
the extermination of the toad-like garrison there. To this, however, the night-gaunts objected; since the
prospect of flying over water did not please them. Most of the ghouls favoured the design, but were at a
loss how to follow it without the help of the winged night-gaunts. Thereupon Carter, seeing that they could
not navigate the anchored galley, offered to teach them the use of the great banks of oars; to which
proposal they eagerly assented. Grey day had now come, and under that leaden northern sky a picked
detachment of ghouls filed into the noisome ship and took their seats on the rowers’ benches. Carter
found them fairly apt at learning, and before night had risked several experimental trips around the
harbour. Not till three days later, however, did he deem it safe to attempt the voyage of conquest. Then,
the rowers trained and the night-gaunts safely stowed in the forecastle, the party set sail at last; Pickman
and the other chiefs gathering on deck and discussing modes of approach and procedure.
On the very first night the howlings from the rock were heard. Such was their timbre that all the
galley’s crew shook visibly; but most of all trembled the three rescued ghouls who knew precisely what
those howlings meant. It was not thought best to attempt an attack by night, so the ship lay to under the
phosphorescent clouds to wait for the dawn of a greyish day. When the light was ample and the howlings
still the rowers resumed their strokes, and the galley drew closer and closer to that jagged rock whose
granite pinnacles clawed fantastically at the dull sky. The sides of the rock were very steep; but on ledges
here and there could be seen the bulging walls of queer windowless dwellings, and the low railings
guarding travelled high roads. No ship of men had ever come so near the place, or at least, had never come
so near and departed again; but Carter and the ghouls were void of fear and kept inflexibly on, rounding
the eastern face of the rock and seeking the wharves which the rescued trio described as being on the
southern side within a harbour formed of steep headlands.
The headlands were prolongations of the island proper, and came so closely together that only one
ship at a time might pass between them. There seemed to be no watchers on the outside, so the galley was
steered boldly through the flume-like strait and into the stagnant foetid harbour beyond. Here, however,
all was bustle and activity; with several ships lying at anchor along a forbidding stone quay, and scores of
almost-human slaves and moon-beasts by the waterfront handling crates and boxes or driving nameless
and fabulous horrors hitched to lumbering lorries. There was a small stone town hewn out of the vertical
cliff above the wharves, with the start of a winding road that spiralled out of sight toward higher ledges of
the rock. Of what lay inside that prodigious peak of granite none might say, but the things one saw on the
outside were far from encouraging.
At sight of the incoming galley the crowds on the wharves displayed much eagerness; those with eyes
staring intently, and those without eyes wriggling their pink tentacles expectantly. They did not, of course,
realise that the black ship had changed hands; for ghouls look much like the horned and hooved almost-
humans, and the night-gaunts were all out of sight below. By this time the leaders had fully formed a plan;
which was to loose the night-gaunts as soon as the wharf was touched, and then to sail directly away,
leaving matters wholly to the instincts of those almost mindless creatures. Marooned on the rock, the
horned flyers would first of all seize whatever living things they found there, and afterward, quite helpless
to think except in terms of the homing instinct, would forget their fear of water and fly swiftly back to the
abyss; bearing their noisome prey to appropriate destinations in the dark, from which not much would
emerge alive.
The ghoul that was Pickman now went below and gave the night-gaunts their simple instructions,
while the ship drew very near to the ominous and malodorous wharves. Presently a fresh stir rose along
the waterfront, and Carter saw that the motions of the galley had begun to excite suspicion. Evidently the
steersman was not making for the right dock, and probably the watchers had noticed the difference
between the hideous ghouls and the almost-human slaves whose places they were taking. Some silent
alarm must have been given, for almost at once a horde of the mephitic moon-beasts began to pour from
the little black doorways of the windowless houses and down the winding road at the right. A rain of
curious javelins struck the galley as the prow hit the wharf, felling two ghouls and slightly wounding
another; but at this point all the hatches were thrown open to emit a black cloud of whirring night-gaunts
which swarmed over the town like a flock of horned and Cyclopean bats.
The jellyish moon-beasts had procured a great pole and were trying to push off the invading ship, but
when the night-gaunts struck them they thought of such things no more. It was a very terrible spectacle to
see those faceless and rubbery ticklers at their pastime, and tremendously impressive to watch the dense
cloud of them spreading through the town and up the winding roadway to the reaches above. Sometimes a
group of the black flutterers would drop a toad-like prisoner from aloft by mistake, and the manner in
which the victim would burst was highly offensive to the sight and smell. When the last of the night-gaunts
had left the galley the ghoulish leaders glibbered an order of withdrawal, and the rowers pulled quietly out
of the harbour between the grey headlands while still the town was a chaos of battle and conquest.
The Pickman ghoul allowed several hours for the night-gaunts to make up their rudimentary minds
and overcome their fear of flying over the sea, and kept the galley standing about a mile off the jagged rock
while he waited and dressed the wounds of the injured men. Night fell, and the grey twilight gave place to
the sickly phosphorescence of low clouds, and all the while the leaders watched the high peaks of that
accursed rock for signs of the night-gaunts’ flight. Toward morning a black speck was seen hovering timidly
over the topmost pinnacle, and shortly afterward the speck had become a swarm. Just before daybreak the
swarm seemed to scatter, and within a quarter of an hour it had vanished wholly in the distance toward
the northeast. Once or twice something seemed to fall from the thinning swarm into the sea; but Carter
did not worry, since he knew from observation that the toad-like moon-beasts cannot swim. At length,
when the ghouls were satisfied that all the night-gaunts had left for Sarkomand and the Great Abyss with
their doomed burdens, the galley put back into the harbour betwixt the grey headlands; and all the
hideous company landed and roamed curiously over the denuded rock with its towers and eyries and
fortresses chiselled from the solid stone.
Frightful were the secrets uncovered in those evil and windowless crypts; for the remnants of
unfinished pastimes were many, and in various stages of departure from their primal state. Carter put out
of the way certain things which were after a fashion alive, and fled precipitately from a few other things
about which he could not be very positive. The stench-filled houses were furnished mostly with grotesque
stools and benches carven from moon-trees, and were painted inside with nameless and frantic designs.
Countless weapons, implements, and ornaments lay about; including some large idols of solid ruby
depicting singular beings not found on the earth. These latter did not, despite their material, invite either
appropriation or long inspection; and Carter took the trouble to hammer five of them into very small
pieces. The scattered spears and javelins he collected, and with Pickman’s approval distributed among the
ghouls. Such devices were new to the dog-like lopers, but their relative simplicity made them easy to
master after a few concise hints.
The upper parts of the rock held more temples than private homes, and in numerous hewn chambers
were found terrible carven altars and doubtfully stained fonts and shrines for the worship of things more
monstrous than the mild gods atop Kadath. From the rear of one great temple stretched a low black
passage which Carter followed far into the rock with a torch till he came to a lightless domed hall of vast
proportions, whose vaultings were covered with daemoniac carvings and in whose centre yawned a foul
and bottomless well like that in the hideous monastery of Leng where broods alone the high-priest not to
be described. On the distant shadowy side, beyond the noisome well, he thought he discerned a small door
of strangely wrought bronze; but for some reason he felt an unaccountable dread of opening it or even
approaching it, and hastened back through the cavern to his unlovely allies as they shambled about with an
ease and abandon he could scarcely feel. The ghouls had observed the unfinished pastimes of the moon-
beasts, and had profited in their fashion. They had also found a hogshead of potent moon-wine, and were
rolling it down to the wharves for removal and later use in diplomatic dealings, though the rescued trio,
remembering its effect on them in Dylath-Leen, had warned their company to taste none of it. Of rubies
from lunar mines there was a great store, both rough and polished, in one of the vaults near the water; but
when the ghouls found they were not good to eat they lost all interest in them. Carter did not try to carry
any away, since he knew too much about those which had mined them.
Suddenly there came an excited meeping from the sentries on the wharves, and all the loathsome
foragers turned from their tasks to stare seaward and cluster round the waterfront. Betwixt the grey
headlands a fresh black galley was rapidly advancing, and it could be but a moment before the almost-
humans on deck would perceive the invasion of the town and give the alarm to the monstrous things
below. Fortunately the ghouls still bore the spears and javelins which Carter had distributed amongst
them; and at his command, sustained by the being that was Pickman, they now formed a line of battle and
prepared to prevent the landing of the ship. Presently a burst of excitement on the galley told of the crew’s
discovery of the changed state of things, and the instant stoppage of the vessel proved that the superior
numbers of the ghouls had been noted and taken into account. After a moment of hesitation the
newcomers silently turned and passed out between the headlands again, but not for an instant did the
ghouls imagine that the conflict was averted. Either the dark ship would seek reinforcements, or the crew
would try to land elsewhere on the island; hence a party of scouts was at once sent up toward the pinnacle
to see what the enemy’s course would be.
In a very few minutes a ghoul returned breathless to say that the moon-beasts and almost-humans
were landing on the outside of the more easterly of the rugged grey headlands, and ascending by hidden
paths and ledges which a goat could scarcely tread in safety. Almost immediately afterward the galley was
sighted again through the flume-like strait, but only for a second. Then, a few moments later, a second
messenger panted down from aloft to say that another party was landing on the other headland; both
being much more numerous than the size of the galley would seem to allow for. The ship itself, moving
slowly with only one sparsely manned tier of oars, soon hove in sight betwixt the cliffs, and lay to in the
foetid harbour as if to watch the coming fray and stand by for any possible use.
By this time Carter and Pickman had divided the ghouls into three parties, one to meet each of the
two invading columns and one to remain in the town. The first two at once scrambled up the rocks in their
respective directions, while the third was subdivided into a land party and a sea party. The sea party,
commanded by Carter, boarded the anchored galley and rowed out to meet the undermanned galley of
the newcomers; whereat the latter retreated through the strait to the open sea. Carter did not at once
pursue it, for he knew he might be needed more acutely near the town.
Meanwhile the frightful detachments of the moon-beasts and almost-humans had lumbered up to the
top of the headlands and were shockingly silhouetted on either side against the grey twilight sky. The thin
hellish flutes of the invaders had now begun to whine, and the general effect of those hybrid, half-
amorphous processions was as nauseating as the actual odour given off by the toad-like lunar blasphemies.
Then the two parties of the ghouls swarmed into sight and joined the silhouetted panorama. Javelins
began to fly from both sides, and the swelling meeps of the ghouls and the bestial howls of the almost-
humans gradually joined the hellish whine of the flutes to form a frantick and indescribable chaos of
daemon cacophony. Now and then bodies fell from the narrow ridges of the headlands into the sea outside
or the harbour inside, in the latter case being sucked quickly under by certain submarine lurkers whose
presence was indicated only by prodigious bubbles.
For half an hour this dual battle raged in the sky, till upon the west cliff the invaders were completely
annihilated. On the east cliff, however, where the leader of the moon-beast party appeared to be present,
the ghouls had not fared so well; and were slowly retreating to the slopes of the pinnacle proper. Pickman
had quickly ordered reinforcements for this front from the party in the town, and these had helped greatly
in the earlier stages of the combat. Then, when the western battle was over, the victorious survivors
hastened across to the aid of their hard-pressed fellows; turning the tide and forcing the invaders back
again along the narrow ridge of the headland. The almost-humans were by this time all slain, but the last of
the toad-like horrors fought desperately with the great spears clutched in their powerful and disgusting
paws. The time for javelins was now nearly past, and the fight became a hand-to-hand contest of what few
spearmen could meet upon that narrow ridge.
As fury and recklessness increased, the number falling into the sea became very great. Those striking
the harbour met nameless extinction from the unseen bubblers, but of those striking the open sea some
were able to swim to the foot of the cliffs and land on tidal rocks, while the hovering galley of the enemy
rescued several moon-beasts. The cliffs were unscalable except where the monsters had debarked, so that
none of the ghouls on the rocks could rejoin their battle-line. Some were killed by javelins from the hostile
galley or from the moon-beasts above, but a few survived to be rescued. When the security of the land
parties seemed assured, Carter’s galley sallied forth between the headlands and drove the hostile ship far
out to sea; pausing to rescue such ghouls as were on the rocks or still swimming in the ocean. Several
moon-beasts washed on rocks or reefs were speedily put out of the way.
Finally, the moon-beasts’ galley being safely in the distance and the invading land army concentrated
in one place, Carter landed a considerable force on the eastern headland in the enemy’s rear; after which
the fight was short-lived indeed. Attacked from both sides, the noisome flounderers were rapidly cut to
pieces or pushed into the sea, till by evening the ghoulish chiefs agreed that the island was again clear of
them. The hostile galley, meanwhile, had disappeared; and it was decided that the evil jagged rock had
better be evacuated before any overwhelming horde of lunar horrors might be assembled and brought
against the victors.
So by night Pickman and Carter assembled all the ghouls and counted them with care, finding that
over a fourth had been lost in the day’s battles. The wounded were placed on bunks in the galley, for
Pickman always discouraged the old ghoulish custom of killing and eating one’s own wounded, and the
able-bodied troops were assigned to the oars or to such other places as they might most usefully fill. Under
the low phosphorescent clouds of night the galley sailed, and Carter was not sorry to be departing from
that island of unwholesome secrets, whose lightless domed hall with its bottomless well and repellent
bronze door lingered restlessly in his fancy. Dawn found the ship in sight of Sarkomand’s ruined quays of
basalt, where a few night-gaunt sentries still waited, squatting like black horned gargoyles on the broken
columns and crumbling sphinxes of that fearful city which lived and died before the years of man.
The ghouls made camp amongst the fallen stones of Sarkomand, despatching a messenger for enough
night-gaunts to serve them as steeds. Pickman and the other chiefs were effusive in their gratitude for the
aid Carter had lent them; and Carter now began to feel that his plans were indeed maturing well, and that
he would be able to command the help of these fearsome allies not only in quitting this part of dreamland,
but in pursuing his ultimate quest for the gods atop unknown Kadath, and the marvellous sunset city they
so strangely withheld from his slumbers. Accordingly he spoke of these things to the ghoulish leaders;
telling what he knew of the cold waste wherein Kadath stands and of the monstrous shantaks and the
mountains carven into double-headed images which guard it. He spoke of the fear of shantaks for night-
gaunts, and of how the vast hippocephalic birds fly screaming from the black burrows high up on the gaunt
grey peaks that divide Inganok from hateful Leng. He spoke, too, of the things he had learnt concerning
night-gaunts from the frescoes in the windowless monastery of the high-priest not to be described; how
even the Great Ones fear them, and how their ruler is not the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep at all, but hoary
and immemorial Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss.
All these things Carter glibbered to the assembled ghouls, and presently outlined that request which
he had in mind, and which he did not think extravagant considering the services he had so lately rendered
the rubbery, dog-like lopers. He wished very much, he said, for the services of enough night-gaunts to bear
him safely through the air past the realm of shantaks and carven mountains, and up into the cold waste
beyond the returning tracks of any other mortal. He desired to fly to the onyx castle atop unknown Kadath
in the cold waste to plead with the Great Ones for the sunset city they denied him, and felt sure that the
night-gaunts could take him thither without trouble; high above the perils of the plain, and over the
hideous double heads of those carven sentinel mountains that squat eternally in the grey dusk. For the
horned and faceless creatures there could be no danger from aught of earth, since the Great Ones
themselves dread them. And even were unexpected things to come from the Other Gods, who are prone
to oversee the affairs of earth’s milder gods, the night-gaunts need not fear; for the outer hells are
indifferent matters to such silent and slippery flyers as own not Nyarlathotep for their master, but bow
only to potent and archaic Nodens.
A flock of ten or fifteen night-gaunts, Carter glibbered, would surely be enough to keep any
combination of shantaks at a distance; though perhaps it might be well to have some ghouls in the party to
manage the creatures, their ways being better known to their ghoulish allies than to men. The party could
land him at some convenient point within whatever walls that fabulous onyx citadel might have, waiting in
the shadows for his return or his signal whilst he ventured inside the castle to give prayer to the gods of
earth. If any ghouls chose to escort him into the throne-room of the Great Ones, he would be thankful, for
their presence would add weight and importance to his plea. He would not, however, insist upon this but
merely wished transportation to and from the castle atop unknown Kadath; the final journey being either
to the marvellous sunset city itself, in case the gods proved favourable, or back to the earthward Gate of
Deeper Slumber in the enchanted wood in case his prayers were fruitless.
Whilst Carter was speaking all the ghouls listened with great attention, and as the moments advanced
the sky became black with clouds of those night-gaunts for which messengers had been sent. The winged
horrors settled in a semicircle around the ghoulish army, waiting respectfully as the dog-like chieftains
considered the wish of the earthly traveller. The ghoul that was Pickman glibbered gravely with its fellows,
and in the end Carter was offered far more than he had at most expected. As he had aided the ghouls in
their conquest of the moon-beasts, so would they aid him in his daring voyage to realms whence none had
ever returned; lending him not merely a few of their allied night-gaunts, but their entire army as they
encamped, veteran fighting ghouls and newly assembled night-gaunts alike, save only a small garrison for
the captured black galley and such spoils as had come from the jagged rock in the sea. They would set out
through the air whenever he might wish, and once arrived on Kadath a suitable train of ghouls would
attend him in state as he placed his petition before earth’s gods in their onyx castle.
Moved by a gratitude and satisfaction beyond words, Carter made plans with the ghoulish leaders for
his audacious voyage. The army would fly high, they decided, over hideous Leng with its nameless
monastery and wicked stone villages; stopping only at the vast grey peaks to confer with the shantak-
frightening night-gaunts whose burrows honeycombed their summits. They would then, according to what
advice they might receive from those denizens, choose their final course; approaching unknown Kadath
either through the desert of carven mountains north of Inganok, or through the more northerly reaches of
repulsive Leng itself. Dog-like and soulless as they are, the ghouls and night-gaunts had no dread of what
those untrodden deserts might reveal; nor did they feel any deterring awe at the thought of Kadath
towering lone with its onyx castle of mystery.
 About midday the ghouls and night-gaunts prepared for flight, each ghoul selecting a suitable pair of
horned steeds to bear him. Carter was placed well up toward the head of the column beside Pickman, and
in front of the whole a double line of riderless night-gaunts was provided as a vanguard. At a brisk meep
from Pickman the whole shocking army rose in a nightmare cloud above the broken columns and
crumbling sphinxes of primordial Sarkomand; higher and higher, till even the great basalt cliff behind the
town was cleared, and the cold, sterile table-land of Leng’s outskirts laid open to sight. Still higher flew the
black host, till even this table-land grew small beneath them; and as they worked northward over the
windswept plateau of horror Carter saw once again with a shudder the circle of crude monoliths and the
squat windowless building which he knew held that frightful silken-masked blasphemy from whose
clutches he had so narrowly escaped. This time no descent was made as the army swept bat-like over the
sterile landscape, passing the feeble fires of the unwholesome stone villages at a great altitude, and
pausing not at all to mark the morbid twistings of the hooved, horned almost-humans that dance and pipe
eternally therein. Once they saw a shantak-bird flying low over the plain, but when it saw them it screamed
noxiously and flapped off to the north in grotesque panic.
At dusk they reached the jagged grey peaks that form the barrier of Inganok, and hovered about those
strange caves near the summits which Carter recalled as so frightful to the shantaks. At the insistent
meeping of the ghoulish leaders there issued forth from each lofty burrow a stream of horned black flyers;
with which the ghouls and night-gaunts of the party conferred at length by means of ugly gestures. It soon
became clear that the best course would be that over the cold waste north of Inganok, for Leng’s
northward reaches are full of unseen pitfalls that even the night-gaunts dislike; abysmal influences centring
in certain white hemispherical buildings on curious knolls, which common folklore associates unpleasantly
with the Other Gods and their crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.
Of Kadath the flutterers of the peaks knew almost nothing, save that there must be some mighty
marvel toward the north, over which the shantaks and the carven mountains stand guard. They hinted at
rumoured abnormalities of proportion in those trackless leagues beyond, and recalled vague whispers of a
realm where night broods eternally; but of definite data they had nothing to give. So Carter and his party
thanked them kindly; and, crossing the topmost granite pinnacles to the skies of Inganok, dropped below
the level of the phosphorescent night clouds and beheld in the distance those terrible squatting gargoyles
that were mountains till some titan hand carved fright into their virgin rock.
There they squatted, in a hellish half-circle, their legs on the desert sand and their mitres piercing the
luminous clouds; sinister, wolf-like, and double-headed, with faces of fury and right hands raised, dully and
malignly watching the rim of man’s world and guarding with horror the reaches of a cold northern world
that is not man’s. From their hideous laps rose evil shantaks of elephantine bulk, but these all fled with
insane titters as the vanguard of night-gaunts was sighted in the misty sky. Northward above those
gargoyle mountains the army flew, and over leagues of dim desert where never a landmark rose. Less and
less luminous grew the clouds, till at length Carter could see only blackness around him; but never did the
winged steeds falter, bred as they were in earth’s blackest crypts, and seeing not with any eyes, but with
the whole dank surface of their slippery forms. On and on they flew, past winds of dubious scent and
sounds of dubious import; ever in thickest darkness, and covering such prodigious spaces that Carter
wondered whether or not they could still be within earth’s dreamland.
Then suddenly the clouds thinned and the stars shone spectrally above. All below was still black, but
those pallid beacons in the sky seemed alive with a meaning and directiveness they had never possessed
elsewhere. It was not that the figures of the constellations were different, but that the same familiar
shapes now revealed a significance they had formerly failed to make plain. Everything focussed toward the
north; every curve and asterism of the glittering sky became part of a vast design whose function was to
hurry first the eye and then the whole observer onward to some secret and terrible goal of convergence
beyond the frozen waste that stretched endlessly ahead. Carter looked toward the east where the great
ridge of barrier peaks had towered along all the length of Inganok, and saw against the stars a jagged
silhouette which told of its continued presence. It was more broken now, with yawning clefts and
fantastically erratic pinnacles; and Carter studied closely the suggestive turns and inclinations of that
grotesque outline, which seemed to share with the stars some subtle northward urge.
They were flying past at a tremendous speed, so that the watcher had to strain hard to catch details;
when all at once he beheld just above the line of the topmost peaks a dark and moving object against the
stars, whose course exactly paralleled that of his own bizarre party. The ghouls had likewise glimpsed it, for
he heard their low glibbering all about him, and for a moment he fancied the object was a gigantic shantak,
of a size vastly greater than that of the average specimen. Soon, however, he saw that this theory would
not hold; for the shape of the thing above the mountains was not that of any hippocephalic bird. Its outline
against the stars, necessarily vague as it was, resembled rather some huge mitred head or pair of heads
infinitely magnified; and its rapid bobbing flight through the sky seemed most peculiarly a wingless one.
Carter could not tell which side of the mountains it was on, but soon perceived that it had parts below the
parts he had first seen, since it blotted out all the stars in places where the ridge was deeply cleft.
Then came a wide gap in the range, where the hideous reaches of transmontane Leng were joined to
the cold waste on this side by a low pass through which the stars shone wanly. Carter watched this gap
with intense care, knowing that he might see outlined against the sky beyond it the lower parts of the vast
thing that flew undulantly above the pinnacles. The object had now floated ahead a trifle, and every eye of
the party was fixed on the rift where it would presently appear in full-length silhouette. Gradually the huge
thing above the peaks neared the gap, slightly slackening its speed as if conscious of having outdistanced
the ghoulish army. For another minute suspense was keen, and then the brief instant of full silhouette and
revelation came; bringing to the lips of the ghouls an awed and half-choked meep of cosmic fear, and to
the soul of the traveller a chill that has never wholly left it. For the mammoth bobbing shape that
overtopped the ridge was only a head—a mitred double head—and below it in terrible vastness loped the
frightful swollen body that bore it; the mountain-high monstrosity that walked in stealth and silence; the
hyaena-like distortion of a giant anthropoid shape that trotted blackly against the sky, its repulsive pair of
cone-capped heads reaching half way to the zenith.
Carter did not lose consciousness or even scream aloud, for he was an old dreamer; but he looked
behind him in horror and shuddered when he saw that there were other monstrous heads silhouetted
above the level of the peaks, bobbing along stealthily after the first one. And straight in the rear were three
of the mighty mountain shapes seen full against the southern stars, tiptoeing wolf-like and lumberingly,
their tall mitres nodding thousands of feet in the air. The carven mountains, then, had not stayed squatting
in that rigid semicircle north of Inganok with right hands uplifted. They had duties to perform, and were
not remiss. But it was horrible that they never spoke, and never even made a sound in walking.
Meanwhile the ghoul that was Pickman had glibbered an order to the night-gaunts, and the whole
army soared higher into the air. Up toward the stars the grotesque column shot, till nothing stood out any
longer against the sky; neither the grey granite ridge that was still nor the carven and mitred mountains
that walked. All was blackness beneath as the fluttering legions surged northward amidst rushing winds
and invisible laughter in the aether, and never a shantak or less mentionable entity rose from the haunted
wastes to pursue them. The farther they went, the faster they flew, till soon their dizzying speed seemed to
pass that of a rifle ball and approach that of a planet in its orbit. Carter wondered how with such speed the
earth could still stretch beneath them, but knew that in the land of dream dimensions have strange
properties. That they were in a realm of eternal night he felt certain, and he fancied that the constellations
overhead had subtly emphasised their northward focus; gathering themselves up as it were to cast the
flying army into the void of the boreal pole, as the folds of a bag are gathered up to cast out the last bits of
substance therein.
Then he noticed with terror that the wings of the night-gaunts were not flapping any more. The
horned and faceless steeds had folded their membraneous appendages, and were resting quite passive in
the chaos of wind that whirled and chuckled as it bore them on. A force not of earth had seized on the
army, and ghouls and night-gaunts alike were powerless before a current which pulled madly and
relentlessly into the north whence no mortal had ever returned. At length a lone pallid light was seen on
the skyline ahead, thereafter rising steadily as they approached, and having beneath it a black mass that
blotted out the stars. Carter saw that it must be some beacon on a mountain, for only a mountain could
rise so vast as seen from so prodigious a height in the air.
Higher and higher rose the light and the blackness beneath it, till half the northern sky was obscured
by the rugged conical mass. Lofty as the army was, that pale and sinister beacon rose above it, towering
monstrous over all peaks and concernments of earth, and tasting the atomless aether where the cryptical
moon and the mad planets reel. No mountain known of man was that which loomed before them. The high
clouds far below were but a fringe for its foothills. The gasping dizziness of topmost air was but a girdle for
its loins. Scornful and spectral climbed that bridge betwixt earth and heaven, black in eternal night, and
crowned with a pshent of unknown stars whose awful and significant outline grew every moment clearer.
Ghouls meeped in wonder as they saw it, and Carter shivered in fear lest all the hurtling army be dashed to
pieces on the unyielding onyx of that Cyclopean cliff.
Higher and higher rose the light, till it mingled with the loftiest orbs of the zenith and winked down at
the flyers with lurid mockery. All the north beneath it was blackness now; dread, stony blackness from
infinite depths to infinite heights, with only that pale winking beacon perched unreachably at the top of all
vision. Carter studied the light more closely, and saw at last what lines its inky background made against
the stars. There were towers on that titan mountain-top; horrible domed towers in noxious and
incalculable tiers and clusters beyond any dreamable workmanship of man; battlements and terraces of
wonder and menace, all limned tiny and black and distant against the starry pshent that glowed
malevolently at the uppermost rim of sight. Capping that most measureless of mountains was a castle
beyond all mortal thought, and in it glowed the daemon-light. Then Randolph Carter knew that his quest
was done, and that he saw above him the goal of all forbidden steps and audacious visions; the fabulous,
the incredible home of the Great Ones atop unknown Kadath.
Even as he realised this thing, Carter noticed a change in the course of the helplessly wind-sucked
party. They were rising abruptly now, and it was plain that the focus of their flight was the onyx castle
where the pale light shone. So close was the great black mountain that its sides sped by them dizzily as
they shot upward, and in the darkness they could discern nothing upon it. Vaster and vaster loomed the
tenebrous towers of the nighted castle above, and Carter could see that it was well-nigh blasphemous in its
immensity. Well might its stones have been quarried by nameless workmen in that horrible gulf rent out of
the rock in the hill pass north of Inganok, for such was its size that a man on its threshold stood even as an
ant on the steps of earth’s loftiest fortress. The pshent of unknown stars above the myriad domed turrets
glowed with a sallow, sickly flare, so that a kind of twilight hung about the murky walls of slippery onyx.
The pallid beacon was now seen to be a single shining window high up in one of the loftiest towers, and as
the helpless army neared the top of the mountain Carter thought he detected unpleasant shadows flitting
across the feebly luminous expanse. It was a strangely arched window, of a design wholly alien to earth.
The solid rock now gave place to the giant foundations of the monstrous castle, and it seemed that the
speed of the party was somewhat abated. Vast walls shot up, and there was a glimpse of a great gate
through which the voyagers were swept. All was night in the titan courtyard, and then came the deeper
blackness of inmost things as a huge arched portal engulfed the column. Vortices of cold wind surged
dankly through sightless labyrinths of onyx, and Carter could never tell what Cyclopean stairs and corridors
lay silent along the route of his endless aërial twisting. Always upward led the terrible plunge in darkness,
and never a sound, touch, or glimpse broke the dense pall of mystery. Large as the army of ghouls and
night-gaunts was, it was lost in the prodigious voids of that more than earthly castle. And when at last
there suddenly dawned around him the lurid light of that single tower room whose lofty window had
served as a beacon, it took Carter long to discern the far walls and high, distant ceiling, and to realise that
he was indeed not again in the boundless air outside.
Randolph Carter had hoped to come into the throne-room of the Great Ones with poise and dignity,
flanked and followed by impressive lines of ghouls in ceremonial order, and offering his prayer as a free
and potent master among dreamers. He had known that the Great Ones themselves are not beyond a
mortal’s power to cope with, and had trusted to luck that the Other Gods and their crawling chaos
Nyarlathotep would not happen to come to their aid at the crucial moment, as they had so often done
before when men sought out earth’s gods in their home or on their mountains. And with his hideous escort
he had half hoped to defy even the Other Gods if need were, knowing as he did that ghouls have no
masters, and that night-gaunts own not Nyarlathotep but only archaick Nodens for their lord. But now he
saw that supernal Kadath in its cold waste is indeed girt with dark wonders and nameless sentinels, and
that the Other Gods are of a surety vigilant in guarding the mild, feeble gods of earth. Void as they are of
lordship over ghouls and night-gaunts, the mindless, shapeless blasphemies of outer space can yet control
them when they must; so that it was not in state as a free and potent master of dreamers that Randolph
Carter came into the Great Ones’ throne-room with his ghouls. Swept and herded by nightmare tempests
from the stars, and dogged by unseen horrors of the northern waste, all that army floated captive and
helpless in the lurid light, dropping numbly to the onyx floor when by some voiceless order the winds of
fright dissolved.
Before no golden dais had Randolph Carter come, nor was there any august circle of crowned and
haloed beings with narrow eyes, long-lobed ears, thin nose, and pointed chin whose kinship to the carven
face on Ngranek might stamp them as those to whom a dreamer might pray. Save for that one tower room
the onyx castle atop Kadath was dark, and the masters were not there. Carter had come to unknown
Kadath in the cold waste, but he had not found the gods. Yet still the lurid light glowed in that one tower
room whose size was so little less than that of all outdoors, and whose distant walls and roof were so
nearly lost to sight in thin, curling mists. Earth’s gods were not there, it was true, but of subtler and less
visible presences there could be no lack. Where the mild gods are absent, the Other Gods are not
unrepresented; and certainly, the onyx castle of castles was far from tenantless. In what outrageous form
or forms terror would next reveal itself, Carter could by no means imagine. He felt that his visit had been
expected, and wondered how close a watch had all along been kept upon him by the crawling chaos
Nyarlathotep. It is Nyarlathotep, horror of infinite shapes and dread soul and messenger of the Other Gods,
that the fungous moon-beasts serve; and Carter thought of the black galley that had vanished when the
tide of battle turned against the toad-like abnormalities on the jagged rock in the sea.
Reflecting upon these things, he was staggering to his feet in the midst of his nightmare company
when there rang without warning through that pale-litten and limitless chamber the hideous blast of a
daemon trumpet. Three times pealed that frightful brazen scream, and when the echoes of the third blast
had died chucklingly away Randolph Carter saw that he was alone. Whither, why, and how the ghouls and
night-gaunts had been snatched from sight was not for him to divine. He knew only that he was suddenly
alone, and that whatever unseen powers lurked mockingly around him were no powers of earth’s friendly
dreamland. Presently from the chamber’s uttermost reaches a new sound came. This, too, was a rhythmic
trumpeting; but of a kind far removed from the three raucous blasts which had dissolved his grisly cohorts.
In this low fanfare echoed all the wonder and melody of ethereal dream; exotic vistas of unimagined
loveliness floating from each strange chord and subtly alien cadence. Odours of incense came to match the
golden notes; and overhead a great light dawned, its colours changing in cycles unknown to earth’s
spectrum, and following the song of the trumpet in weird symphonic harmonies. Torches flared in the
distance, and the beat of drums throbbed nearer amidst waves of tense expectancy.
Out of the thinning mists and the cloud of strange incense filed twin columns of giant black slaves with
loin-cloths of iridescent silk. Upon their heads were strapped vast helmet-like torches of glittering metal,
from which the fragrance of obscure balsams spread in fumous spirals. In their right hands were crystal
wands whose tips were carven into leering chimaeras, while their left hands grasped long, thin silver
trumpets which they blew in turn. Armlets and anklets of gold they had, and between each pair of anklets
stretched a golden chain that held its wearer to a sober gait. That they were true black men of earth’s
dreamland was at once apparent, but it seemed less likely that their rites and costumes were wholly things
of our earth. Ten feet from Carter the columns stopped, and as they did so each trumpet flew abruptly to
its bearer’s thick lips. Wild and ecstatic was the blast that followed, and wilder still the cry that chorused
just after from dark throats somehow made shrill by strange artifice.
Then down the wide lane betwixt the two columns a lone figure strode; a tall, slim figure with the
young face of an antique Pharaoh, gay with prismatic robes and crowned with a golden pshent that glowed
with inherent light. Close up to Carter strode that regal figure; whose proud carriage and swart features
had in them the fascination of a dark god or fallen archangel, and around whose eyes there lurked the
languid sparkle of capricious humour. It spoke, and in its mellow tones there rippled the mild music of
Lethean streams.
“Randolph Carter,” said the voice, “you have come to see the Great Ones whom it is unlawful for men
to see. Watchers have spoken of this thing, and the Other Gods have grunted as they rolled and tumbled
mindlessly to the sound of thin flutes in the black ultimate void where broods the daemon-sultan whose
name no lips dare speak aloud.
“When Barzai the Wise climbed Hatheg-Kla to see the Great Ones dance and howl above the clouds in
the moonlight he never returned. The Other Gods were there, and they did what was expected. Zenig of
Aphorat sought to reach unknown Kadath in the cold waste, and his skull is now set in a ring on the little
finger of one whom I need not name.
“But you, Randolph Carter, have braved all things of earth’s dreamland, and burn still with the flame
of quest. You came not as one curious, but as one seeking his due, nor have you failed ever in reverence
toward the mild gods of earth. Yet have these gods kept you from the marvellous sunset city of your
dreams, and wholly through their own small covetousness; for verily, they craved the weird loveliness of
that which your fancy had fashioned, and vowed that henceforward no other spot should be their abode.
“They are gone from their castle on unknown Kadath to dwell in your marvellous city. All through its
palaces of veined marble they revel by day, and when the sun sets they go out in the perfumed gardens
and watch the golden glory on temples and colonnades, arched bridges and silver-basined fountains, and
wide streets with blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows. And when night comes they
climb tall terraces in the dew, and sit on carved benches of porphyry scanning the stars, or lean over pale
balustrades to gaze at the town’s steep northward slopes, where one by one the little windows in old
peaked gables shine softly out with the calm yellow light of homely candles.
“The gods love your marvellous city, and walk no more in the ways of the gods. They have forgotten
the high places of earth, and the mountains that knew their youth. The earth has no longer any gods that
are gods, and only the Other Ones from outer space hold sway on unremembered Kadath. Far away in a
valley of your own childhood, Randolph Carter, play the heedless Great Ones. You have dreamed too well,
O wise arch-dreamer, for you have drawn dream’s gods away from the world of all men’s visions to that
which is wholly yours; having builded out of your boyhood’s small fancies a city more lovely than all the
phantoms that have gone before.
“It is not well that earth’s gods leave their thrones for the spider to spin on, and their realm for the
Others to sway in the dark manner of Others. Fain would the powers from outside bring chaos and horror
to you, Randolph Carter, who are the cause of their upsetting, but that they know it is by you alone that
the gods may be sent back to their world. In that half-waking dreamland which is yours, no power of
uttermost night may pursue; and only you can send the selfish Great Ones gently out of your marvellous
sunset city, back through the northern twilight to their wonted place atop unknown Kadath in the cold
waste.
“So, Randolph Carter, in the name of the Other Gods I spare you and charge you to serve my will. I
charge you to seek that sunset city which is yours, and to send thence the drowsy truant gods for whom
the dream-world waits. Not hard to find is that roseal fever of the gods, that fanfare of supernal trumpets
and clash of immortal cymbals, that mystery whose place and meaning have haunted you through the halls
of waking and the gulfs of dreaming, and tormented you with hints of vanished memory and the pain of
lost things awesome and momentous. Not hard to find is that symbol and relic of your days of wonder, for
truly, it is but the stable and eternal gem wherein all that wonder sparkles crystallised to light your evening
path. Behold! It is not over unknown seas but back over well-known years that your quest must go; back to
the bright strange things of infancy and the quick sun-drenched glimpses of magic that old scenes brought
to wide young eyes.
“For know you, that your gold and marble city of wonder is only the sum of what you have seen and
loved in youth. It is the glory of Boston’s hillside roofs and western windows aflame with sunset; of the
flower-fragrant Common and the great dome on the hill and the tangle of gables and chimneys in the violet
valley where the many-bridged Charles flows drowsily. These things you saw, Randolph Carter, when your
nurse first wheeled you out in the springtime, and they will be the last things you will ever see with eyes of
memory and of love. And there is antique Salem with its brooding years, and spectral Marblehead scaling
its rocky precipices into past centuries, and the glory of Salem’s towers and spires seen afar from
Marblehead’s pastures across the harbour against the setting sun.
“There is Providence, quaint and lordly on its seven hills over the blue harbour, with terraces of green
leading up to steeples and citadels of living antiquity, and Newport climbing wraith-like from its dreaming
breakwater. Arkham is there, with its moss-grown gambrel roofs and the rocky rolling meadows behind it;
and antediluvian Kingsport hoary with stacked chimneys and deserted quays and overhanging gables, and
the marvel of high cliffs and the milky-misted ocean with tolling buoys beyond.
“Cool vales in Concord, cobbled lanes in Portsmouth, twilight bends of rustic New-Hampshire roads
where giant elms half hide white farmhouse walls and creaking well-sweeps. Gloucester’s salt wharves and
Truro’s windy willows. Vistas of distant steepled towns and hills beyond hills along the North Shore, hushed
stony slopes and low ivied cottages in the lee of huge boulders in Rhode-Island’s back country. Scent of the
sea and fragrance of the fields; spell of the dark woods and joy of the orchards and gardens at dawn.
These, Randolph Carter, are your city; for they are yourself. New-England bore you, and into your soul she
poured a liquid loveliness which cannot die. This loveliness, moulded, crystallised, and polished by years of
memory and dreaming, is your terraced wonder of elusive sunsets; and to find that marble parapet with
curious urns and carven rail, and descend at last those endless balustraded steps to the city of broad
squares and prismatic fountains, you need only to turn back to the thoughts and visions of your wistful
boyhood.
“Look! through that window shine the stars of eternal night. Even now they are shining above the
scenes you have known and cherished, drinking of their charm that they may shine more lovely over the
gardens of dream. There is Antares—he is winking at this moment over the roofs of Tremont Street, and
you could see him from your window on Beacon Hill. Out beyond those stars yawn the gulfs from whence
my mindless masters have sent me. Some day you too may traverse them, but if you are wise you will
beware such folly; for of those mortals who have been and returned, only one preserves a mind
unshattered by the pounding, clawing horrors of the void. Terrors and blasphemies gnaw at one another
for space, and there is more evil in the lesser ones than in the greater; even as you know from the deeds of
those who sought to deliver you into my hands, whilst I myself harboured no wish to shatter you, and
would indeed have helped you hither long ago had I not been elsewhere busy, and certain that you would
yourself find the way. Shun, then, the outer hells, and stick to the calm, lovely things of your youth. Seek
out your marvellous city and drive thence the recreant Great Ones, sending them back gently to those
scenes which are of their own youth, and which wait uneasy for their return.
“Easier even than the way of dim memory is the way I will prepare for you. See! There comes hither a
monstrous shantak, led by a slave who for your peace of mind had best keep invisible. Mount and be
ready—there! Yogash the black will help you on the scaly horror. Steer for that brightest star just south of
the zenith—it is Vega, and in two hours will be just above the terrace of your sunset city. Steer for it only
till you hear a far-off singing in the high aether. Higher than that lurks madness, so rein your shantak when
the first note lures. Look then back to earth, and you will see shining the deathless altar-flame of Ired-Naa
from the sacred roof of a temple. That temple is in your desiderate sunset city, so steer for it before you
heed the singing and are lost.
“When you draw nigh the city steer for the same high parapet whence of old you scanned the
outspread glory, prodding the shantak till he cry aloud. That cry the Great Ones will hear and know as they
sit on their perfumed terraces, and there will come upon them such a homesickness that all of your city’s
wonders will not console them for the absence of Kadath’s grim castle and the pshent of eternal stars that
crowns it.
“Then must you land amongst them with the shantak, and let them see and touch that noisome and
hippocephalic bird; meanwhile discoursing to them of unknown Kadath, which you will so lately have left,
and telling them how its boundless halls are lonely and unlighted, where of old they used to leap and revel
in supernal radiance. And the shantak will talk to them in the manner of shantaks, but it will have no
powers of persuasion beyond the recalling of elder days.
“Over and over must you speak to the wandering Great Ones of their home and youth, till at last they
will weep and ask to be shewn the returning path they have forgotten. Thereat can you loose the waiting
shantak, sending him skyward with the homing cry of his kind; hearing which the Great Ones will prance
and jump with antique mirth, and forthwith stride after the loathly bird in the fashion of gods, through the
deep gulfs of heaven to Kadath’s familiar towers and domes.
“Then will the marvellous sunset city be yours to cherish and inhabit forever, and once more will
earth’s gods rule the dreams of men from their accustomed seat. Go now—the casement is open and the
stars await outside. Already your shantak wheezes and titters with impatience. Steer for Vega through the
night, but turn when the singing sounds. Forget not this warning, lest horrors unthinkable suck you into the
gulf of shrieking and ululant madness. Remember the Other Gods; they are great and mindless and terrible,
and lurk in the outer voids. They are good gods to shun.
“Hei! Aa-shanta ’nygh! You are off! Send back earth’s gods to their haunts on unknown Kadath, and
pray to all space that you may never meet me in my thousand other forms. Farewell, Randolph Carter, and
beware; for I am Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos!”
And Randolph Carter, gasping and dizzy on his hideous shantak, shot screamingly into space toward
the cold blue glare of boreal Vega; looking but once behind him at the clustered and chaotic turrets of the
onyx nightmare wherein still glowed the lone lurid light of that window above the air and the clouds of
earth’s dreamland. Great polypous horrors slid darkly past, and unseen bat-wings beat multitudinous
around him, but still he clung to the unwholesome mane of that loathly and hippocephalic scaled bird. The
stars danced mockingly, almost shifting now and then to form pale signs of doom that one might wonder
one had not seen and feared before; and ever the winds of aether howled of vague blackness and
loneliness beyond the cosmos.
Then through the glittering vault ahead there fell a hush of portent, and all the winds and horrors
slunk away as night things slink away before the dawn. Trembling in waves that golden wisps of nebula
made weirdly visible, there rose a timid hint of far-off melody, droning in faint chords that our own
universe of stars knows not. And as that music grew, the shantak raised its ears and plunged ahead, and
Carter likewise bent to catch each lovely strain. It was a song, but not the song of any voice. Night and the
spheres sang it, and it was old when space and Nyarlathotep and the Other Gods were born.
Faster flew the shantak, and lower bent the rider, drunk with the marvels of strange gulfs, and
whirling in the crystal coils of outer magic. Then came too late the warning of the evil one, the sardonic
caution of the daemon legate who had bidden the seeker beware the madness of that song. Only to taunt
had Nyarlathotep marked out the way to safety and the marvellous sunset city; only to mock had that
black messenger revealed the secret of those truant gods whose steps he could so easily lead back at will.
For madness and the void’s wild vengeance are Nyarlathotep’s only gifts to the presumptuous; and frantick
though the rider strove to turn his disgusting steed, that leering, tittering shantak coursed on impetuous
and relentless, flapping its great slippery wings in malignant joy, and headed for those unhallowed pits
whither no dreams reach; that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion where bubbles and
blasphemes at infinity’s centre the mindless daemon-sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak
aloud.
Unswerving and obedient to the foul legate’s orders, that hellish bird plunged onward through shoals
of shapeless lurkers and caperers in darkness, and vacuous herds of drifting entities that pawed and
groped and groped and pawed; the nameless larvae of the Other Gods, that are like them blind and
without mind, and possessed of singular hungers and thirsts.
Onward unswerving and relentless, and tittering hilariously to watch the chuckling and hysterics into
which the siren song of night and the spheres had turned, that eldritch scaly monster bore its helpless
rider; hurtling and shooting, cleaving the uttermost rim and spanning the outermost abysses; leaving
behind the stars and the realms of matter, and darting meteor-like through stark formlessness toward
those inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time wherein black Azathoth gnaws shapeless and
ravenous amidst the muffled, maddening beat of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed
flutes.
Onward—onward—through the screaming, cackling, and blackly populous gulfs—and then from some
dim blessed distance there came an image and a thought to Randolph Carter the doomed. Too well had
Nyarlathotep planned his mocking and his tantalising, for he had brought up that which no gusts of icy
terror could quite efface. Home—New England—Beacon Hill—the waking world.
“For know you, that your gold and marble city of wonder is only the sum of what you have seen and
loved in youth . . . the glory of Boston’s hillside roofs and western windows aflame with sunset; of the
flower-fragrant Common and the great dome on the hill and the tangle of gables and chimneys in the violet
valley where the many-bridged Charles flows drowsily . . . this loveliness, moulded, crystallised, and
polished by years of memory and dreaming, is your terraced wonder of elusive sunsets; and to find that
marble parapet with curious urns and carven rail, and descend at last those endless balustraded steps to
the city of broad squares and prismatic fountains, you need only to turn back to the thoughts and visions of
your wistful boyhood.”
Onward—onward—dizzily onward to ultimate doom through the blackness where sightless feelers
pawed and slimy snouts jostled and nameless things tittered and tittered and tittered. But the image and
the thought had come, and Randolph Carter knew clearly that he was dreaming and only dreaming, and
that somewhere in the background the world of waking and the city of his infancy still lay. Words came
again—“You need only turn back to the thoughts and visions of your wistful boyhood.” Turn—turn—
blackness on every side, but Randolph Carter could turn.
Thick though the rushing nightmare that clutched his senses, Randolph Carter could turn and move.
He could move, and if he chose he could leap off the evil shantak that bore him hurtlingly doomward at the
orders of Nyarlathotep. He could leap off and dare those depths of night that yawned interminably down,
those depths of fear whose terrors yet could not exceed the nameless doom that lurked waiting at chaos’
core. He could turn and move and leap—he could—he would—he would—
Off that vast hippocephalic abomination leaped the doomed and desperate dreamer, and down
through endless voids of sentient blackness he fell. Aeons reeled, universes died and were born again, stars
became nebulae and nebulae became stars, and still Randolph Carter fell through those endless voids of
sentient blackness.
Then in the slow creeping course of eternity the utmost cycle of the cosmos churned itself into
another futile completion, and all things became again as they were unreckoned kalpas before. Matter and
light were born anew as space once had known them; and comets, suns, and worlds sprang flaming into
life, though nothing survived to tell that they had been and gone, been and gone, always and always, back
to no first beginning.
And there was a firmament again, and a wind, and a glare of purple light in the eyes of the falling
dreamer. There were gods and presences and wills; beauty and evil, and the shrieking of noxious night
robbed of its prey. For through the unknown ultimate cycle had lived a thought and a vision of a dreamer’s
boyhood, and now there were re-made a waking world and an old cherished city to body and to justify
these things. Out of the void S’ngac the violet gas had pointed the way, and archaic Nodens was bellowing
his guidance from unhinted deeps.
Stars swelled to dawns, and dawns burst into fountains of gold, carmine, and purple, and still the
dreamer fell. Cries rent the aether as ribbons of light beat back the fiends from outside. And hoary Nodens
raised a howl of triumph when Nyarlathotep, close on his quarry, stopped baffled by a glare that seared his
formless hunting-horrors to grey dust. Randolph Carter had indeed descended at last the wide marmoreal
flights to his marvellous city, for he was come again to the fair New England world that had wrought him.
So to the organ chords of morning’s myriad whistles, and dawn’s blaze thrown dazzling through purple
panes by the great gold dome of the State House on the hill, Randolph Carter leaped shoutingly awake
within his Boston room. Birds sang in hidden gardens and the perfume of trellised vines came wistful from
arbours his grandfather had reared. Beauty and light glowed from classic mantel and carven cornice and
walls grotesquely figured, while a sleek black cat rose yawning from hearthside sleep that his master’s start
and shriek had disturbed. And vast infinities away, past the Gate of Deeper Slumber and the enchanted
wood and the garden lands and the Cerenerian Sea and the twilight reaches of Inganok, the crawling chaos
Nyarlathotep strode brooding into the onyx castle atop unknown Kadath in the cold waste, and taunted
insolently the mild gods of earth whom he had snatched abruptly from their scented revels in the
marvellous sunset city.

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Facts concerning the Late

Arthur Jermyn and His Family
By H. P. Lovecraft

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, Observations 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 cannot 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 shewed 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 shewed 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 shewn 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 mesalliance had begun. After the close of the American war he was
heard of as a 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 grey 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 any 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 usual force,
hurting both the body and 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 shewing 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 Kaliri 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 grey 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 those beings. Just what the white ape-like 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 stuffed 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 the 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 had
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 the 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
talk 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 of 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 correspondent, 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 shewed 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 a 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.

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In the Walls of Eryx

By H. P. Lovecraft
With Kenneth Sterling

Before I try to rest I will set down these notes in preparation for the report I must make. What I have found
is so singular, and so contrary to all past experience and expectations, that it deserves a very careful
description.
I reached the main landing on Venus March 18, terrestrial time; VI, 9 of the planet’s calendar. Being
put in the main group under Miller, I received my equipment—watch tuned to Venus’s slightly quicker
rotation—and went through the usual mask drill. After two days I was pronounced fit for duty.
Leaving the Crystal Company’s post at Terra Nova around dawn, VI, 12, I followed the southerly route
which Anderson had mapped out from the air. The going was bad, for these jungles are always half
impassable after a rain. It must be the moisture that gives the tangled vines and creepers that leathery
toughness; a toughness so great that a knife has to work ten minutes on some of them. By noon it was
dryer—the vegetation getting soft and rubbery so that the knife went through it easily—but even then I
could not make much speed. These Carter oxygen masks are too heavy—just carrying one half wears an
ordinary man out. A Dubois mask with sponge-reservoir instead of tubes would give just as good air at half
the weight.
The crystal-detector seemed to function well, pointing steadily in a direction verifying Anderson’s
report. It is curious how that principle of affinity works—without any of the fakery of the old ‘divining rods’
back home. There must be a great deposit of crystals within a thousand miles, though I suppose those
damnable man-lizards always watch and guard it. Possibly they think we are just as foolish for coming to
Venus to hunt the stuff as we think they are for grovelling in the mud whenever they see a piece of it, or
for keeping that great mass on a pedestal in their temple. I wish they’d get a new religion, for they have no
use for the crystals except to pray to. Barring theology, they would let us take all we want—and even if
they learned to tap them for power there’d be more than enough for their planet and the earth besides. I
for one am tired of passing up the main deposits and merely seeking separate crystals out of jungle river-
beds. Sometime I’ll urge the wiping out of these scaly beggars by a good stiff army from home. About
twenty ships could bring enough troops across to turn the trick. One can’t call the damned things men for
all their “cities” and towers. They haven’t any skill except building—and using swords and poison darts—
and I don’t believe their so-called “cities” mean much more than ant-hills or beaver-dams. I doubt if they
even have a real language—all the talk about psychological communication through those tentacles down
their chests strikes me as bunk. What misleads people is their upright posture; just an accidental physical
resemblance to terrestrial man.
I’d like to go through a Venus jungle for once without having to watch out for skulking groups of them
or dodge their cursed darts. They may have been all right before we began to take the crystals, but they’re
certainly a bad enough nuisance now—with their dart-shooting and their cutting of our water pipes. More
and more I come to believe that they have a special sense like our crystal-detectors. No one ever knew
them to bother a man—apart from long-distance sniping—who didn’t have crystals on him.
Around 1 p.m. a dart nearly took my helmet off, and I thought for a second one of my oxygen tubes
was punctured. The sly devils hadn’t made a sound, but three of them were closing in on me. I got them all
by sweeping in a circle with my flame pistol, for even though their colour blended with the jungle, I could
spot the moving creepers. One of them was fully eight feet tall, with a snout like a tapir’s. The other two
were average seven-footers. All that makes them hold their own is sheer numbers—even a single regiment
of flame throwers could raise hell with them. It is curious, though, how they’ve come to be dominant on
the planet. Not another living thing higher than the wriggling akmans and skorahs, or the flying tukahs of
the other continent—unless of course those holes in the Dionaean Plateau hide something.
About two o’clock my detector veered westward, indicating isolated crystals ahead on the right. This
checked up with Anderson, and I turned my course accordingly. It was harder going—not only because the
ground was rising, but because the animal life and carnivorous plants were thicker. I was always slashing
ugrats and stepping on skorahs, and my leather suit was all speckled from the bursting darohs which struck
it from all sides. The sunlight was all the worse because of the mist, and did not seem to dry up the mud in
the least. Every time I stepped my feet sank down five or six inches, and there was a sucking sort
of blup every time I pulled them out. I wish somebody would invent a safe kind of suiting other than
leather for this climate. Cloth of course would rot; but some thin metallic tissue that couldn’t tear—like the
surface of this revolving decay-proof record scroll—ought to be feasible some time.
I ate about 3:30—if slipping these wretched food tablets through my mask can be called eating. Soon
after that I noticed a decided change in the landscape—the bright, poisonous-looking flowers shifting in
colour and getting wraith-like. The outlines of everything shimmered rhythmically, and bright points of
light appeared and danced in the same slow, steady tempo. After that the temperature seemed to
fluctuate in unison with a peculiar rhythmic drumming.
The whole universe seemed to be throbbing in deep, regular pulsations that filled every corner of
space and flowed through my body and mind alike. I lost all sense of equilibrium and staggered dizzily, nor
did it change things in the least when I shut my eyes and covered my ears with my hands. However, my
mind was still clear, and in a very few minutes I realised what had happened.
I had encountered at last one of those curious mirage-plants about which so many of our men told
stories. Anderson had warned me of them, and described their appearance very closely—the shaggy stalk,
the spiky leaves, and the mottled blossoms whose gaseous, dream-breeding exhalations penetrate every
existing make of mask.
Recalling what happened to Bailey three years ago, I fell into a momentary panic, and began to dash
and stagger about in the crazy, chaotic world which the plant’s exhalations had woven around me. Then
good sense came back, and I realised all I need do was retreat from the dangerous blossoms; heading away
from the source of the pulsations, and cutting a path blindly—regardless of what might seem to swirl
around me—until safely out of the plant’s effective radius.
Although everything was spinning perilously, I tried to start in the right direction and hack my way
ahead. My route must have been far from straight, for it seemed hours before I was free of the mirage-
plant’s pervasive influence. Gradually the dancing lights began to disappear, and the shimmering spectral
scenery began to assume the aspect of solidity. When I did get wholly clear I looked at my watch and was
astonished to find that the time was only 4:20. Though eternities had seemed to pass, the whole
experience could have consumed little more than a half-hour.
Every delay, however, was irksome, and I had lost ground in my retreat from the plant. I now pushed
ahead in the uphill direction indicated by the crystal-detector, bending every energy toward making better
time. The jungle was still thick, though there was less animal life. Once a carnivorous blossom engulfed my
right foot and held it so tightly that I had to hack it free with my knife; reducing the flower to strips before
it let go.
In less than an hour I saw that the jungle growths were thinning out, and by five o’clock—after passing
through a belt of tree-ferns with very little underbrush—I emerged on a broad mossy plateau. My progress
now became rapid, and I saw by the wavering of my detector-needle that I was getting relatively close to
the crystal I sought. This was odd, for most of the scattered, egg-like spheroids occurred in jungle streams
of a sort not likely to be found on this treeless upland.
The terrain sloped upward, ending in a definite crest. I reached the top about 5:30, and saw ahead of
me a very extensive plain with forests in the distance. This, without question, was the plateau mapped by
Matsugawa from the air fifty years ago, and called on our maps “Eryx” or the “Erycinian Highland.” But
what made my heart leap was a smaller detail, whose position could not have been far from the plain’s
exact centre. It was a single point of light, blazing through the mist and seeming to draw a piercing,
concentrated luminescence from the yellowish, vapour-dulled sunbeams. This, without doubt, was the
crystal I sought—a thing possibly no larger than a hen’s egg, yet containing enough power to keep a city
warm for a year. I could hardly wonder, as I glimpsed the distant glow, that those miserable man-lizards
worship such crystals. And yet they have not the least notion of the powers they contain.
Breaking into a rapid run, I tried to reach the unexpected prize as soon as possible; and was annoyed
when the firm moss gave place to a thin, singularly detestable mud studded with occasional patches of
weeds and creepers. But I splashed on heedlessly—scarcely thinking to look around for any of the skulking
man-lizards. In this open space I was not very likely to be waylaid. As I advanced, the light ahead seemed to
grow in size and brilliancy, and I began to notice some peculiarity in its situation. Clearly, this was a crystal
of the very finest quality, and my elation grew with every spattering step.
It is now that I must begin to be careful in making my report, since what I shall henceforward have to
say involves unprecedented—though fortunately verifiable—matters. I was racing ahead with mounting
eagerness, and had come within an hundred yards or so of the crystal—whose position on a sort of raised
place in the omnipresent slime seemed very odd—when a sudden, overpowering force struck my chest and
the knuckles of my clenched fists and knocked me over backward into the mud. The splash of my fall was
terrific, nor did the softness of the ground and the presence of some slimy weeds and creepers save my
head from a bewildering jarring. For a moment I lay supine, too utterly startled to think. Then I half-
mechanically stumbled to my feet and began to scrape the worst of the mud and scum from my leather
suit.
Of what I had encountered I could not form the faintest idea. I had seen nothing which could have
caused the shock, and I saw nothing now. Had I, after all, merely slipped in the mud? My sore knuckles and
aching chest forbade me to think so. Or was this whole incident an illusion brought on by some hidden
mirage-plant? It hardly seemed probable, since I had none of the usual symptoms, and since there was no
place near by where so vivid and typical a growth could lurk unseen. Had I been on the earth, I would have
suspected a barrier of N-force laid down by some government to mark a forbidden zone, but in this
humanless region such a notion would have been absurd.
Finally pulling myself together, I decided to investigate in a cautious way. Holding my knife as far as
possible ahead of me, so that it might be first to feel the strange force, I started once more for the shining
crystal—preparing to advance step by step with the greatest deliberation. At the third step I was brought
up short by the impact of the knife-point on an apparently solid surface—a solid surface where my eyes
saw nothing.
After a moment’s recoil I gained boldness. Extending my gloved left hand, I verified the presence of
invisible solid matter—or a tactile illusion of solid matter—ahead of me. Upon moving my hand I found
that the barrier was of substantial extent, and of an almost glassy smoothness, with no evidence of the
joining of separate blocks. Nerving myself for further experiments, I removed a glove and tested the thing
with my bare hand. It was indeed hard and glassy, and of a curious coldness as contrasted with the air
around. I strained my eyesight to the utmost in an effort to glimpse some trace of the obstructing
substance, but could discern nothing whatsoever. There was not even any evidence of refractive power as
judged by the aspect of the landscape ahead. Absence of reflective power was proved by the lack of a
glowing image of the sun at any point.
Burning curiosity began to displace all other feelings, and I enlarged my investigations as best I could.
Exploring with my hands, I found that the barrier extended from the ground to some level higher than I
could reach, and that it stretched off indefinitely on both sides. It was, then, a wall of some kind—though
all guesses as to its materials and its purpose were beyond me. Again I thought of the mirage-plant and the
dreams it induced, but a moment’s reasoning put this out of my head.
Knocking sharply on the barrier with the hilt of my knife, and kicking at it with my heavy boots, I tried
to interpret the sounds thus made. There was something suggestive of cement or concrete in these
reverberations, though my hands had found the surface more glassy or metallic in feel. Certainly, I was
confronting something strange beyond all previous experience.
The next logical move was to get some idea of the wall’s dimensions. The height problem would be
hard if not insoluble, but the length and shape problem could perhaps be sooner dealt with. Stretching out
my arms and pressing close to the barrier, I began to edge gradually to the left—keeping very careful track
of the way I faced. After several steps I concluded that the wall was not straight, but that I was following
part of some vast circle or ellipse. And then my attention was distracted by something wholly different—
something connected with the still-distant crystal which had formed the object of my quest.
I have said that even from a greater distance the shining object’s position seemed indefinably queer—
on a slight mound rising from the slime. Now—at about an hundred yards—I could see plainly despite the
engulfing mist just what that mound was. It was the body of a man in one of the Crystal Company’s leather
suits, lying on his back, and with his oxygen mask half buried in the mud a few inches away. In his right
hand, crushed convulsively against his chest, was the crystal which had led me here—a spheroid of
incredible size, so large that the dead fingers could scarcely close over it. Even at the given distance I could
see that the body was a recent one. There was little visible decay, and I reflected that in this climate such a
thing meant death not more than a day before. Soon the hateful farnoth-flies would begin to cluster about
the corpse. I wondered who the man was. Surely no one I had seen on this trip. It must have been one of
the old-timers absent on a long roving commission, who had come to this especial region independently of
Anderson’s survey. There he lay, past all trouble, and with the rays of the great crystal streaming out from
between his stiffened fingers.
For fully five minutes I stood there staring in bewilderment and apprehension. A curious dread
assailed me, and I had an unreasonable impulse to run away. It could not have been done by those slinking
man-lizards, for he still held the crystal he had found. Was there any connexion with the invisible wall?
Where had he found the crystal? Anderson’s instrument had indicated one in this quarter well before this
man could have perished. I now began to regard the unseen barrier as something sinister, and recoiled
from it with a shudder. Yet I knew I must probe the mystery all the more quickly and thoroughly because of
this recent tragedy.
Suddenly—wrenching my mind back to the problem I faced—I thought of a possible means of testing
the wall’s height, or at least of finding whether or not it extended indefinitely upward. Seizing a handful of
mud, I let it drain until it gained some coherence and then flung it high in the air toward the utterly
transparent barrier. At a height of perhaps fourteen feet it struck the invisible surface with a resounding
splash, disintegrating at once and oozing downward in disappearing streams with surprising rapidity.
Plainly, the wall was a lofty one. A second handful, hurled at an even sharper angle, hit the surface about
eighteen feet from the ground and disappeared as quickly as the first.
I now summoned up all my strength and prepared to throw a third handful as high as I possibly could.
Letting the mud drain, and squeezing it to maximum dryness, I flung it up so steeply that I feared it might
not reach the obstructing surface at all. It did, however, and this time it crossed the barrier and fell in the
mud beyond with a violent spattering. At last I had a rough idea of the height of the wall, for the crossing
had evidently occurred some twenty or 21 feet aloft.
With a nineteen- or twenty-foot vertical wall of glassy flatness, ascent was clearly impossible. I must,
then, continue to circle the barrier in the hope of finding a gate, an ending, or some sort of interruption.
Did the obstacle form a complete round or other closed figure, or was it merely an arc or semicircle? Acting
on my decision, I resumed my slow leftward circling, moving my hands up and down over the unseen
surface on the chance of finding some window or other small aperture. Before starting, I tried to mark my
position by kicking a hole in the mud, but found the slime too thin to hold any impression. I did, though,
gauge the place approximately by noting a tall cycad in the distant forest which seemed just on a line with
the gleaming crystal an hundred yards away. If no gate or break existed I could now tell when I had
completely circumnavigated the wall.
I had not progressed far before I decided that the curvature indicated a circular enclosure of about an
hundred yards’ diameter—provided the outline was regular. This would mean that the dead man lay near
the wall at a point almost opposite the region where I had started. Was he just inside or just outside the
enclosure? This I would soon ascertain.
As I slowly rounded the barrier without finding any gate, window, or other break, I decided that the
body was lying within. On closer view, the features of the dead man seemed vaguely disturbing. I found
something alarming in his expression, and in the way the glassy eyes stared. By the time I was very near I
believed I recognised him as Dwight, a veteran whom I had never known, but who was pointed out to me
at the post last year. The crystal he clutched was certainly a prize—the largest single specimen I had ever
seen.
I was so near the body that I could—but for the barrier—have touched it, when my exploring left hand
encountered a corner in the unseen surface. In a second I had learned that there was an opening about
three feet wide, extending from the ground to a height greater than I could reach. There was no door, nor
any evidence of hinge-marks bespeaking a former door. Without a moment’s hesitation I stepped through
and advanced two paces to the prostrate body—which lay at right angles to the hallway I had entered, in
what seemed to be an intersecting doorless corridor. It gave me a fresh curiosity to find that the interior of
this vast enclosure was divided by partitions.
Bending to examine the corpse, I discovered that it bore no wounds. This scarcely surprised me, since
the continued presence of the crystal argued against the pseudo-reptilian natives. Looking about for some
possible cause of death, my eyes lit upon the oxygen mask lying close to the body’s feet. Here, indeed, was
something significant. Without this device no human being could breathe the air of Venus for more than
thirty seconds, and Dwight—if it were he—had obviously lost his. Probably it had been carelessly buckled,
so that the weight of the tubes worked the straps loose—a thing which could not happen with a Dubois
sponge-reservoir mask. The half-minute of grace had been too short to allow the man to stoop and recover
his protection—or else the cyanogen content of the atmosphere was abnormally high at the time. Probably
he had been busy admiring the crystal—wherever he may have found it. He had, apparently, just taken it
from the pouch in his suit, for the flap was unbuttoned.
I now proceeded to extricate the huge crystal from the dead prospector’s fingers—a task which the
body’s stiffness made very difficult. The spheroid was larger than a man’s fist, and glowed as if alive in the
reddish rays of the westering sun. As I touched the gleaming surface I shuddered involuntarily—as if by
taking this precious object I had transferred to myself the doom which had overtaken its earlier bearer.
However, my qualms soon passed, and I carefully buttoned the crystal into the pouch of my leather suit.
Superstition has never been one of my failings.
Placing the man’s helmet over his dead, staring face, I straightened up and stepped back through the
unseen doorway to the entrance hall of the great enclosure. All my curiosity about the strange edifice now
returned, and I racked my brain with speculations regarding its material, origin, and purpose. That the
hands of men had reared it I could not for a moment believe. Our ships first reached Venus only 72 years
ago, and the only human beings on the planet have been those at Terra Nova. Nor does human knowledge
include any perfectly transparent, non-refractive solid such as the substance of this building. Prehistoric
human invasions of Venus can be pretty well ruled out, so that one must turn to the idea of native
construction. Did a forgotten race of highly evolved beings precede the man-lizards as masters of Venus?
Despite their elaborately built cities, it seemed hard to credit the pseudo-reptiles with anything of this
kind. There must have been another race aeons ago, of which this is perhaps the last relique. Or will other
ruins of kindred origin be found by future expeditions? The purpose of such a structure passes all
conjecture—but its strange and seemingly non-practical material suggests a religious use.
Realising my inability to solve these problems, I decided that all I could do was to explore the invisible
structure itself. That various rooms and corridors extended over the seemingly unbroken plain of mud I felt
convinced; and I believed that a knowledge of their plan might lead to something significant. So, feeling my
way back through the doorway and edging past the body, I began to advance along the corridor toward
those interior regions whence the dead man had presumably come. Later on I would investigate the
hallway I had left.
Groping like a blind man despite the misty sunlight, I moved slowly onward. Soon the corridor turned
sharply and began to spiral in toward the centre in ever-diminishing curves. Now and then my touch would
reveal a doorless intersecting passage, and I several times encountered junctions with two, three, or four
diverging avenues. In these latter cases I always followed the inmost route, which seemed to form a
continuation of the one I had been traversing. There would be plenty of time to examine the branches
after I had reached and returned from the main regions. I can scarcely describe the strangeness of the
experience—threading the unseen ways of an invisible structure reared by forgotten hands on an alien
planet!
At last, still stumbling and groping, I felt the corridor end in a sizeable open space. Fumbling about, I
found I was in a circular chamber about ten feet across; and from the position of the dead man against
certain distant forest landmarks I judged that this chamber lay at or near the centre of the edifice. Out of it
opened five corridors besides the one through which I had entered, but I kept the latter in mind by sighting
very carefully past the body to a particular tree on the horizon as I stood just within the entrance.
There was nothing in this room to distinguish it—merely the floor of thin mud which was everywhere
present. Wondering whether this part of the building had any roof, I repeated my experiment with an
upward-flung handful of mud, and found at once that no covering existed. If there had ever been one, it
must have fallen long ago, for not a trace of debris or scattered blocks ever halted my feet. As I reflected, it
struck me as distinctly odd that this apparently primordial structure should be so devoid of tumbling
masonry, gaps in the walls, and other common attributes of dilapidation.
What was it? What had it ever been? Of what was it made? Why was there no evidence of separate
blocks in the glassy, bafflingly homogeneous walls? Why were there no traces of doors, either interior or
exterior? I knew only that I was in a round, roofless, doorless edifice of some hard, smooth, perfectly
transparent, non-refractive, and non-reflective material, an hundred yards in diameter, with many
corridors, and with a small circular room at the centre. More than this I could never learn from a direct
investigation.
I now observed that the sun was sinking very low in the west—a golden-ruddy disc floating in a pool of
scarlet and orange above the mist-clouded trees of the horizon. Plainly, I would have to hurry if I expected
to choose a sleeping-spot on dry ground before dark. I had long before decided to camp for the night on
the firm, mossy rim of the plateau near the crest whence I had first spied the shining crystal, trusting to my
usual luck to save me from an attack by the man-lizards. It has always been my contention that we ought
to travel in parties of two or more, so that someone can be on guard during sleeping hours, but the really
small number of night attacks makes the Company careless about such things. Those scaly wretches seem
to have difficulty in seeing at night, even with curious glow-torches.
Having picked out again the hallway through which I had come, I started to return to the structure’s
entrance. Additional exploration could wait for another day. Groping a course as best I could through the
spiral corridor—with only general sense, memory, and a vague recognition of some of the ill-defined weed
patches on the plain as guides—I soon found myself once more in close proximity to the corpse. There
were now one or two farnoth-flies swooping over the helmet-covered face, and I knew that decay was
setting in. With a futile instinctive loathing I raised my hand to brush away this vanguard of the
scavengers—when a strange and astonishing thing became manifest. An invisible wall, checking the sweep
of my arm, told me that—notwithstanding my careful retracing of the way—I had not indeed returned to
the corridor in which the body lay. Instead, I was in a parallel hallway, having no doubt taken some wrong
turn or fork among the intricate passages behind.
Hoping to find a doorway to the exit hall ahead, I continued my advance, but presently came to a
blank wall. I would, then, have to return to the central chamber and steer my course anew. Exactly where I
had made my mistake I could not tell. I glanced at the ground to see if by any miracle guiding footprints
had remained, but at once realised that the thin mud held impressions only for a very few moments. There
was little difficulty in finding my way to the centre again, and once there I carefully reflected on the proper
outward course. I had kept too far to the right before. This time I must take a more leftward fork
somewhere—just where, I could decide as I went.
As I groped ahead a second time I felt quite confident of my correctness, and diverged to the left at a
junction I was sure I remembered. The spiralling continued, and I was careful not to stray into any
intersecting passages. Soon, however, I saw to my disgust that I was passing the body at a considerable
distance; this passage evidently reached the outer wall at a point much beyond it. In the hope that another
exit might exist in the half of the wall I had not yet explored, I pressed forward for several paces, but
eventually came once more to a solid barrier. Clearly, the plan of the building was even more complicated
than I had thought.
I now debated whether to return to the centre again or whether to try some of the lateral corridors
extending toward the body. If I chose this second alternative, I would run the risk of breaking my mental
pattern of where I was; hence I had better not attempt it unless I could think of some way of leaving a
visible trail behind me. Just how to leave a trail would be quite a problem, and I ransacked my mind for a
solution. There seemed to be nothing about my person which could leave a mark on anything, nor any
material which I could scatter—or minutely subdivide and scatter.
My pen had no effect on the invisible wall, and I could not lay a trail of my precious food tablets. Even
had I been willing to spare the latter, there would not have been even nearly enough—besides which the
small pellets would have instantly sunk from sight in the thin mud. I searched my pockets for an old-
fashioned notebook—often used unofficially on Venus despite the quick rotting-rate of paper in the
planet’s atmosphere—whose pages I could tear up and scatter, but could find none. It was obviously
impossible to tear the tough, thin metal of this revolving decay-proof record scroll, nor did my clothing
offer any possibilities. In Venus’s peculiar atmosphere I could not safely spare my stout leather suit, and
underwear had been eliminated because of the climate.
I tried to smear mud on the smooth, invisible walls after squeezing it as dry as possible, but found that
it slipped from sight as quickly as did the height-testing handfuls I had previously thrown. Finally I drew out
my knife and attempted to scratch a line on the glassy, phantom surface—something I could recognise
with my hand, even though I would not have the advantage of seeing it from afar. It was useless, however,
for the blade made not the slightest impression on the baffling, unknown material.
Frustrated in all attempts to blaze a trail, I again sought the round central chamber through memory.
It seemed easier to get back to this room than to steer a definite, predetermined course away from it, and I
had little difficulty in finding it anew. This time I listed on my record scroll every turn I made—drawing a
crude hypothetical diagram of my route, and marking all diverging corridors. It was, of course, maddeningly
slow work when everything had to be determined by touch, and the possibilities of error were infinite; but
I believed it would pay in the long run.
The long twilight of Venus was thick when I reached the central room, but I still had hopes of gaining
the outside before dark. Comparing my fresh diagram with previous recollections, I believed I had located
my original mistake, so once more set out confidently along the invisible hallways. I veered further to the
left than during my previous attempts, and tried to keep track of my turnings on the record scroll in case I
was still mistaken. In the gathering dusk I could see the dim line of the corpse, now the centre of a
loathsome cloud of farnoth-flies. Before long, no doubt, the mud-dwelling sificlighs would be oozing in
from the plain to complete the ghastly work. Approaching the body with some reluctance, I was preparing
to step past it when a sudden collision with a wall told me I was again astray.
I now realised plainly that I was lost. The complications of this building were too much for offhand
solution, and I would probably have to do some careful checking before I could hope to emerge. Still, I was
eager to get to dry ground before total darkness set in; hence I returned once more to the centre and
began a rather aimless series of trials and errors—making notes by the light of my electric lamp. When I
used this device I noticed with interest that it produced no reflection—not even the faintest glistening—in
the transparent walls around me. I was, however, prepared for this; since the sun had at no time formed a
gleaming image in the strange material.
I was still groping about when the dusk became total. A heavy mist obscured most of the stars and
planets, but the earth was plainly visible as a glowing, bluish-green point in the southeast. It was just past
opposition, and would have been a glorious sight in a telescope. I could even make out the moon beside it
whenever the vapours momentarily thinned. It was now impossible to see the corpse—my only
landmark—so I blundered back to the central chamber after a few false turns. After all, I would have to
give up hope of sleeping on dry ground. Nothing could be done till daylight, and I might as well make the
best of it here. Lying down in the mud would not be pleasant, but in my leather suit it could be done. On
former expeditions I had slept under even worse conditions, and now sheer exhaustion would help to
conquer repugnance.
So here I am, squatting in the slime of the central room and making these notes on my record scroll by
the light of the electric lamp. There is something almost humorous in my strange, unprecedented plight.
Lost in a building without doors—a building which I cannot see! I shall doubtless get out early in the
morning, and ought to be back at Terra Nova with the crystal by late afternoon. It certainly is a beauty—
with surprising lustre even in the feeble light of this lamp. I have just had it out examining it. Despite my
fatigue, sleep is slow in coming, so I find myself writing at great length. I must stop now. Not much danger
of being bothered by those cursed natives in this place. The thing I like least is the corpse—but fortunately
my oxygen mask saves me from the worst effects. I am using the chlorate cubes very sparingly. Will take a
couple of food tablets now and turn in. More later.

Later—Afternoon, VI, 13

There has been more trouble than I expected. I am still in the building, and will have to work quickly
and wisely if I expect to rest on dry ground tonight. It took me a long time to get to sleep, and I did not
wake till almost noon today. As it was, I would have slept longer but for the glare of the sun through the
haze. The corpse was a rather bad sight—wriggling with sificlighs, and with a cloud of farnoth-flies around
it. Something had pushed the helmet away from the face, and it was better not to look at it. I was doubly
glad of my oxygen mask when I thought of the situation.
At length I shook and brushed myself dry, took a couple of food tablets, and put a new potassium
chlorate cube in the electrolyser of the mask. I am using these cubes slowly, but wish I had a larger supply.
I felt much better after my sleep, and expected to get out of the building very shortly.
Consulting the notes and sketches I had jotted down, I was impressed by the complexity of the
hallways, and by the possibility that I had made a fundamental error. Of the six openings leading out of the
central space, I had chosen a certain one as that by which I had entered—using a sighting-arrangement as a
guide. When I stood just within the opening, the corpse fifty yards away was exactly in line with a particular
lepidodendron in the far-off forest. Now it occurred to me that this sighting might not have been of
sufficient accuracy—the distance of the corpse making its difference of direction in relation to the horizon
comparatively slight when viewed from the openings next to that of my first ingress. Moreover, the tree
did not differ as distinctly as it might from other lepidodendra on the horizon.
 Putting the matter to a test, I found to my chagrin that I could not be sure which of three openings
was the right one. Had I traversed a different set of windings at each attempted exit? This time I would be
sure. It struck me that despite the impossibility of trailblazing there was one marker I could leave. Though I
could not spare my suit, I could—because of my thick head of hair—spare my helmet; and this was large
and light enough to remain visible above the thin mud. Accordingly I removed the roughly hemispherical
device and laid it at the entrance of one of the corridors—the right-hand one of the three I must try.
I would follow this corridor on the assumption that it was correct; repeating what I seemed to recall as
the proper turns, and constantly consulting and making notes. If I did not get out, I would systematically
exhaust all possible variations; and if these failed, I would proceed to cover the avenues extending from
the next opening in the same way—continuing to the third opening if necessary. Sooner or later I could not
avoid hitting the right path to the exit, but I must use patience. Even at worst, I could scarcely fail to reach
the open plain in time for a dry night’s sleep.
Immediate results were rather discouraging, though they helped me eliminate the right-hand opening
in little more than an hour. Only a succession of blind alleys, each ending at a great distance from the
corpse, seemed to branch from this hallway; and I saw very soon that it had not figured at all in the
previous afternoon’s wanderings. As before, however, I always found it relatively easy to grope back to the
central chamber.
About 1 p.m. I shifted my helmet marker to the next opening and began to explore the hallways
beyond it. At first I thought I recognised the turnings, but soon found myself in a wholly unfamiliar set of
corridors. I could not get near the corpse, and this time seemed cut off from the central chamber as well,
even though I thought I had recorded every move I made. There seemed to be tricky twists and crossings
too subtle for me to capture in my crude diagrams, and I began to develop a kind of mixed anger and
discouragement. While patience would of course win in the end, I saw that my searching would have to be
minute, tireless, and long-continued.
Two o’clock found me still wandering vainly through strange corridors—constantly feeling my way,
looking alternately at my helmet and at the corpse, and jotting data on my scroll with decreasing
confidence. I cursed the stupidity and idle curiosity which had drawn me into this tangle of unseen walls—
reflecting that if I had let the thing alone and headed back as soon as I had taken the crystal from the body,
I would even now be safe at Terra Nova.
Suddenly it occurred to me that I might be able to tunnel under the invisible walls with my knife, and
thus effect a short cut to the outside—or to some outward-leading corridor. I had no means of knowing
how deep the building’s foundations were, but the omnipresent mud argued the absence of any floor save
the earth. Facing the distant and increasingly horrible corpse, I began a course of feverish digging with the
broad, sharp blade.
There was about six inches of semi-liquid mud, below which the density of the soil increased sharply.
This lower soil seemed to be of a different colour—a greyish clay rather like the formations near Venus’s
north pole. As I continued downward close to the unseen barrier I saw that the ground was getting harder
and harder. Watery mud rushed into the excavation as fast as I removed the clay, but I reached through it
and kept on working. If I could bore any kind of a passage beneath the wall, the mud would not stop my
wriggling out.
About three feet down, however, the hardness of the soil halted my digging seriously. Its tenacity was
beyond anything I had encountered before, even on this planet, and was linked with an anomalous
heaviness. My knife had to split and chip the tightly packed clay, and the fragments I brought up were like
solid stones or bits of metal. Finally even this splitting and chipping became impossible, and I had to cease
my work with no lower edge of wall in reach.
The hour-long attempt was a wasteful as well as futile one, for it used up great stores of my energy
and forced me both to take an extra food tablet, and to put an additional chlorate cube in the oxygen
mask. It has also brought a pause in the day’s gropings, for I am still much too exhausted to walk. After
cleaning my hands and arms of the worst of the mud I sat down to write these notes—leaning against an
invisible wall and facing away from the corpse.
That body is simply a writhing mass of vermin now—the odour has begun to draw some of the slimy
akmans from the far-off jungle. I notice that many of the efjeh-weeds on the plain are reaching out
necrophagous feelers toward the thing; but I doubt if any are long enough to reach it. I wish some really
carnivorous organisms like the skorahs would appear, for then they might scent me and wriggle a course
through the building toward me. Things like that have an odd sense of direction. I could watch them as
they came, and jot down their approximate route if they failed to form a continuous line. Even that would
be a great help. When I met any the pistol would make short work of them.
But I can hardly hope for as much as that. Now that these notes are made I shall rest a while longer,
and later will do some more groping. As soon as I get back to the central chamber—which ought to be
fairly easy—I shall try the extreme left-hand opening. Perhaps I can get outside by dusk after all.

Night—VI, 13

New trouble. My escape will be tremendously difficult, for there are elements I had not suspected.
Another night here in the mud, and a fight on my hands tomorrow. I cut my rest short and was up and
groping again by four o’clock. After about fifteen minutes I reached the central chamber and moved my
helmet to mark the last of the three possible doorways. Starting through this opening, I seemed to find the
going more familiar, but was brought up short in less than five minutes by a sight that jolted me more than
I can describe.
It was a group of four or five of those detestable man-lizards emerging from the forest far off across
the plain. I could not see them distinctly at that distance, but thought they paused and turned toward the
trees to gesticulate, after which they were joined by fully a dozen more. The augmented party now began
to advance directly toward the invisible building, and as they approached I studied them carefully. I had
never before had a close view of the things outside the steamy shadows of the jungle.
The resemblance to reptiles was perceptible, though I knew it was only an apparent one, since these
beings have no point of contact with terrestrial life. When they drew nearer they seemed less truly
reptilian—only the flat head and the green, slimy, frog-like skin carrying out the idea. They walked erect on
their odd, thick stumps, and their suction-discs made curious noises in the mud. These were average
specimens, about seven feet in height, and with four long, ropy pectoral tentacles. The motions of those
tentacles—if the theories of Fogg, Ekberg, and Janat are right, which I formerly doubted but am now more
ready to believe—indicated that the things were in animated conversation.
I drew my flame pistol and was ready for a hard fight. The odds were bad, but the weapon gave me a
certain advantage. If the things knew this building they would come through it after me, and in this way
would form a key to getting out, just as carnivorous skorahs might have done. That they would attack me
seemed certain; for even though they could not see the crystal in my pouch, they could divine its presence
through that special sense of theirs.
Yet, surprisingly enough, they did not attack me. Instead they scattered and formed a vast circle
around me—at a distance which indicated that they were pressing close to the unseen wall. Standing there
in a ring, the beings stared silently and inquisitively at me, waving their tentacles and sometimes nodding
their heads and gesturing with their upper limbs. After a while I saw others issue from the forest, and these
advanced and joined the curious crowd. Those near the corpse looked briefly at it but made no move to
disturb it. It was a horrible sight, yet the man-lizards seemed quite unconcerned. Now and then one of
them would brush away the farnoth-flies with its limbs or tentacles, or crush a wriggling sificligh or akman,
or an out-reaching efjeh-weed, with the suction discs on its stumps.
Staring back at these grotesque and unexpected intruders, and wondering uneasily why they did not
attack me at once, I lost for the time being the will power and nervous energy to continue my search for a
way out. Instead I leaned limply against the invisible wall of the passage where I stood, letting my wonder
merge gradually into a chain of the wildest speculations. An hundred mysteries which had previously
baffled me seemed all at once to take on a new and sinister significance, and I trembled with an acute fear
unlike anything I had experienced before.
I believed I knew why these repulsive beings were hovering expectantly around me. I believed, too,
that I had the secret of the transparent structure at last. The alluring crystal which I had seized, the body of
the man who had seized it before me—all these things began to acquire a dark and threatening meaning.
It was no common series of mischances which had made me lose my way in this roofless, unseen
tangle of corridors. Far from it. Beyond doubt, the place was a genuine maze—a labyrinth deliberately built
by these hellish beings whose craft and mentality I had so badly underestimated. Might I not have
suspected this before, knowing of their uncanny architectural skill? The purpose was all too plain. It was a
trap—a trap set to catch human beings, and with the crystal spheroid as bait. These reptilian things, in
their war on the takers of crystals, had turned to strategy and were using our own cupidity against us.
Dwight—if this rotting corpse were indeed he—was a victim. He must have been trapped some time
ago, and had failed to find his way out. Lack of water had doubtless maddened him, and perhaps he had
run out of chlorate cubes as well. Probably his mask had not slipped accidentally after all. Suicide was a
likelier thing. Rather than face a lingering death he had solved the issue by removing the mask deliberately
and letting the lethal atmosphere do its work at once. The horrible irony of his fate lay in his position—only
a few feet from the saving exit he had failed to find. One minute more of searching and he would have
been safe.
And now I was trapped as he had been. Trapped, and with this circling herd of curious starers to mock
at my predicament. The thought was maddening, and as it sank in I was seized with a sudden flash of panic
which set me running aimlessly through the unseen hallways. For several moments I was essentially a
maniac—stumbling, tripping, bruising myself on the invisible walls, and finally collapsing in the mud as a
panting, lacerated heap of mindless, bleeding flesh.
The fall sobered me a bit, so that when I slowly struggled to my feet I could notice things and exercise
my reason. The circling watchers were swaying their tentacles in an odd, irregular way suggestive of sly,
alien laughter, and I shook my fist savagely at them as I rose. My gesture seemed to increase their hideous
mirth—a few of them clumsily imitating it with their greenish upper limbs. Shamed into sense, I tried to
collect my faculties and take stock of the situation.
After all, I was not as badly off as Dwight had been. Unlike him, I knew what the situation was—and
forewarned is forearmed. I had proof that the exit was attainable in the end, and would not repeat his
tragic act of impatient despair. The body—or skeleton, as it would soon be—was constantly before me as a
guide to the sought-for aperture, and dogged patience would certainly take me to it if I worked long and
intelligently enough.
I had, however, the disadvantage of being surrounded by these reptilian devils. Now that I realised the
nature of the trap—whose invisible material argued a science and technology beyond anything on earth—I
could no longer discount the mentality and resources of my enemies. Even with my flame pistol I would
have a bad time getting away—though boldness and quickness would doubtless see me through in the long
run.
But first I must reach the exterior—unless I could lure or provoke some of the creatures to advance
toward me. As I prepared my pistol for action and counted over my generous supply of ammunition it
occurred to me to try the effect of its blasts on the invisible walls. Had I overlooked a feasible means of
escape? There was no clue to the chemical composition of the transparent barrier, and conceivably it
might be something which a tongue of fire could cut like cheese. Choosing a section facing the corpse, I
carefully discharged the pistol at close range and felt with my knife where the blast had been aimed.
Nothing was changed. I had seen the flame spread when it struck the surface, and now I realised that my
hope had been vain. Only a long, tedious search for the exit would ever bring me to the outside.
So, swallowing another food tablet and putting another cube in the electrolyser of my mask, I
recommenced the long quest; retracing my steps to the central chamber and starting out anew. I
constantly consulted my notes and sketches, and made fresh ones—taking one false turn after another,
but staggering on in desperation till the afternoon light grew very dim. As I persisted in my quest I looked
from time to time at the silent circle of mocking starers, and noticed a gradual replacement in their ranks.
Every now and then a few would return to the forest, while others would arrive to take their places. The
more I thought of their tactics the less I liked them, for they gave me a hint of the creatures’ possible
motives. At any time these devils could have advanced and fought me, but they seemed to prefer watching
my struggles to escape. I could not but infer that they enjoyed the spectacle—and this made me shrink
with double force from the prospect of falling into their hands.
With the dark I ceased my searching, and sat down in the mud to rest. Now I am writing in the light of
my lamp, and will soon try to get some sleep. I hope tomorrow will see me out; for my canteen is low, and
lacol tablets are a poor substitute for water. I would hardly dare to try the moisture in this slime, for none
of the water in the mud-regions is potable except when distilled. That is why we run such long pipe lines to
the yellow clay regions—or depend on rain-water when those devils find and cut our pipes. I have none too
many chlorate cubes either, and must try to cut down my oxygen consumption as much as I can. My
tunnelling attempt of the early afternoon, and my later panic flight, burned up a perilous amount of air.
Tomorrow I will reduce physical exertion to the barest minimum until I meet the reptiles and have to deal
with them. I must have a good cube supply for the journey back to Terra Nova. My enemies are still on
hand; I can see a circle of their feeble glow-torches around me. There is a horror about those lights which
will keep me awake.

Night—VI, 14

Another full day of searching and still no way out! I am beginning to be worried about the water
problem, for my canteen went dry at noon. In the afternoon there was a burst of rain, and I went back to
the central chamber for the helmet which I had left as a marker—using this as a bowl and getting about
two cupfuls of water. I drank most of it, but have put the slight remainder in my canteen. Lacol tablets
make little headway against real thirst, and I hope there will be more rain in the night. I am leaving my
helmet bottom up to catch any that falls. Food tablets are none too plentiful, but not dangerously low. I
shall halve my rations from now on. The chlorate cubes are my real worry, for even without violent
exercise the day’s endless tramping burned a dangerous number. I feel weak from my forced economies in
oxygen, and from my constantly mounting thirst. When I reduce my food I suppose I shall feel still weaker.
There is something damnable—something uncanny—about this labyrinth. I could swear that I had
eliminated certain turns through charting, and yet each new trial belies some assumption I had thought
established. Never before did I realise how lost we are without visual landmarks. A blind man might do
better—but for most of us sight is the king of the senses. The effect of all these fruitless wanderings is one
of profound discouragement. I can understand how poor Dwight must have felt. His corpse is now just a
skeleton, and the sificlighs and akmans and farnoth-flies are gone. The efjeh-weeds are nipping the leather
clothing to pieces, for they were longer and faster-growing than I had expected. And all the while those
relays of tentacled starers stand gloatingly around the barrier laughing at me and enjoying my misery.
Another day and I shall go mad if I do not drop dead from exhaustion.
However, there is nothing to do but persevere. Dwight would have got out if he had kept on a minute
longer. It is just possible that somebody from Terra Nova will come looking for me before long, although
this is only my third day out. My muscles ache horribly, and I can’t seem to rest at all lying down in this
loathsome mud. Last night, despite my terrific fatigue, I slept only fitfully, and tonight I fear will be no
better. I live in an endless nightmare—poised between waking and sleeping, yet neither truly awake nor
truly asleep. My hand shakes, I can write no more for the time being. That circle of feeble glow-torches is
hideous.

Late Afternoon—VI, 15

Substantial progress! Looks good. Very weak, and did not sleep much till daylight. Then I dozed till
noon, though without being at all rested. No rain, and thirst leaves me very weak. Ate an extra food tablet
to keep me going, but without water it didn’t help much. I dared to try a little of the slime water just once,
but it made me violently sick and left me even thirstier than before. Must save chlorate cubes, so am
nearly suffocating for lack of oxygen. Can’t walk much of the time, but manage to crawl in the mud. About
2 p.m. I thought I recognised some passages, and got substantially nearer to the corpse—or skeleton—than
I had been since the first day’s trials. I was sidetracked once in a blind alley, but recovered the main trail
with the aid of my chart and notes. The trouble with these jottings is that there are so many of them. They
must cover three feet of the record scroll, and I have to stop for long periods to untangle them.
My head is weak from thirst, suffocation, and exhaustion, and I cannot understand all I have set down.
Those damnable green things keep staring and laughing with their tentacles, and sometimes they
gesticulate in a way that makes me think they share some terrible joke just beyond my perception.
It was three o’clock when I really struck my stride. There was a doorway which, according to my notes,
I had not traversed before; and when I tried it I found I could crawl circuitously toward the weed-twined
skeleton. The route was a sort of spiral, much like that by which I had first reached the central chamber.
Whenever I came to a lateral doorway or junction I would keep to the course which seemed best to repeat
that original journey. As I circled nearer and nearer to my gruesome landmark, the watchers outside
intensified their cryptic gesticulations and sardonic silent laughter. Evidently they saw something grimly
amusing in my progress—perceiving no doubt how helpless I would be in any encounter with them. I was
content to leave them to their mirth; for although I realised my extreme weakness, I counted on the flame
pistol and its numerous extra magazines to get me through the vile reptilian phalanx.
Hope now soared high, but I did not attempt to rise to my feet. Better to crawl now, and save my
strength for the coming encounter with the man-lizards. My advance was very slow, and the danger of
straying into some blind alley very great, but none the less I seemed to curve steadily toward my osseous
goal. The prospect gave me new strength, and for the nonce I ceased to worry about my pain, my thirst,
and my scant supply of cubes. The creatures were now all massing around the entrance—gesturing,
leaping, and laughing with their tentacles. Soon, I reflected, I would have to face the entire horde—and
perhaps such reinforcements as they would receive from the forest.
I am now only a few yards from the skeleton, and am pausing to make this entry before emerging and
breaking through the noxious band of entities. I feel confident that with my last ounce of strength I can put
them to flight despite their numbers, for the range of this pistol is tremendous. Then a camp on the dry
moss at the plateau’s edge, and in the morning a weary trip through the jungle to Terra Nova. I shall be
glad to see living men and the buildings of human beings again. The teeth of that skull gleam and grin
horribly.

Toward Night—VI, 15

Horror and despair. Baffled again! After making the previous entry I approached still closer to the
skeleton, but suddenly encountered an intervening wall. I had been deceived once more, and was
apparently back where I had been three days before, on my first futile attempt to leave the labyrinth
Whether I screamed aloud I do not know—perhaps I was too weak to utter a sound. I merely lay dazed in
the mud for a long period, while the greenish things outside leaped and laughed and gestured.
After a time I became more fully conscious. My thirst and weakness and suffocation were fast gaining
on me, and with my last bit of strength I put a new cube in the electrolyser—recklessly, and without regard
for the needs of my journey to Terra Nova. The fresh oxygen revived me slightly, and enabled me to look
about more alertly.
It seemed as if I were slightly more distant from poor Dwight than I had been at that first
disappointment, and I dully wondered if I could be in some other corridor a trifle more remote. With this
faint shadow of hope I laboriously dragged myself forward—but after a few feet encountered a dead end
as I had on the former occasion.
This, then, was the end. Three days had taken me nowhere, and my strength was gone. I would soon
go mad from thirst, and I could no longer count on cubes enough to get me back. I feebly wondered why
the nightmare things had gathered so thickly around the entrance as they mocked me. Probably this was
part of the mockery—to make me think I was approaching an egress which they knew did not exist.
I shall not last long, though I am resolved not to hasten matters as Dwight did. His grinning skull has
just turned toward me, shifted by the groping of one of the efjeh-weeds that are devouring his leather suit.
The ghoulish stare of those empty eye-sockets is worse than the staring of those lizard horrors. It lends a
hideous meaning to that dead, white-toothed grin.
I shall lie very still in the mud and save all the strength I can. This record—which I hope may reach and
warn those who come after me—will soon be done. After I stop writing I shall rest a long while. Then, when
it is too dark for those frightful creatures to see, I shall muster up my last reserves of strength and try to
toss the record scroll over the wall and the intervening corridor to the plain outside. I shall take care to
send it toward the left, where it will not hit the leaping band of mocking beleaguerers. Perhaps it will be
lost forever in the thin mud—but perhaps it will land in some widespread clump of weeds and ultimately
reach the hands of men.
If it does survive to be read, I hope it may do more than merely warn men of this trap. I hope it may
teach our race to let those shining crystals stay where they are. They belong to Venus alone. Our planet
does not truly need them, and I believe we have violated some obscure and mysterious law—some law
buried deep in the arcana of the cosmos—in our attempts to take them. Who can tell what dark, potent,
and widespread forces spur on these reptilian things who guard their treasure so strangely? Dwight and I
have paid, as others have paid and will pay. But it may be that these scattered deaths are only the prelude
of greater horrors to come. Let us leave to Venus that which belongs only to Venus.

* * *

I am very near death now, and fear I may not be able to throw the scroll when dusk comes. If I cannot,
I suppose the man-lizards will seize it, for they will probably realise what it is. They will not wish anyone to
be warned of the labyrinth—and they will not know that my message holds a plea in their own behalf. As
the end approaches I feel more kindly toward the things. In the scale of cosmic entity who can say which
species stands higher, or more nearly approaches a space-wide organic norm—theirs or mine?

* * *

I have just taken the great crystal out of my pouch to look at in my last moments. It shines fiercely and
menacingly in the red rays of the dying day. The leaping horde have noticed it, and their gestures have
changed in a way I cannot understand. I wonder why they keep clustered around the entrance instead of
concentrating at a still closer point in the transparent wall.

* * *

I am growing numb and cannot write much more. Things whirl around me, yet I do not lose
consciousness. Can I throw this over the wall? That crystal glows so, yet the twilight is deepening.

* * *

Dark. Very weak. They are still laughing and leaping around the doorway, and have started those
hellish glow-torches.

* * *

Are they going away? I dreamed I heard a sound . . . light in the sky.

* * *
 REPORT OF WESLEY P. MILLER, SUPT. GROUP A,
VENUS CRYSTAL CO.

(Terra Nova on Venus—VI, 16)

Our Operative A-49, Kenton J. Stanfield of 5317 Marshall Street, Richmond, Va., left Terra Nova early
on VI, 12, for a short-term trip indicated by detector. Due back 13th or 14th. Did not appear by evening of
15th, so Scouting Plane FR-58 with five men under my command set out at 8 p.m. to follow route with
detector. Needle shewed no change from earlier readings.
Followed needle to Erycinian Highland, played strong searchlights all the way. Triple-range flame-guns
and D-radiation-cylinders could have dispersed any ordinary hostile force of natives, or any dangerous
aggregation of carnivorous skorahs.
When over the open plain on Eryx we saw a group of moving lights which we knew were native glow-
torches. As we approached, they scattered into the forest. Probably 75 to 100 in all. Detector indicated
crystal on spot where they had been. Sailing low over this spot, our lights picked out objects on the ground.
Skeleton tangled in efjeh-weeds, and complete body ten feet from it. Brought plane down near bodies, and
corner of wing crashed on unseen obstruction.
Approaching bodies on foot, we came up short against a smooth, invisible barrier which puzzled us
enormously. Feeling along it near the skeleton, we struck an opening, beyond which was a space with
another opening leading to the skeleton. The latter, though robbed of clothing by weeds, had one of the
company’s numbered metal helmets beside it. It was Operative B-9, Frederick N. Dwight of Koenig’s
division, who had been out of Terra Nova for two months on a long commission.
Between this skeleton and the complete body there seemed to be another wall, but we could easily
identify the second man as Stanfield. He had a record scroll in his left hand and a pen in his right, and
seemed to have been writing when he died. No crystal was visible, but the detector indicated a huge
specimen near Stanfield’s body.
We had great difficulty in getting at Stanfield, but finally succeeded. The body was still warm, and a
great crystal lay beside it, covered by the shallow mud. We at once studied the record scroll in the left
hand, and prepared to take certain steps based on its data. The contents of the scroll forms the long
narrative prefixed to this report; a narrative whose main descriptions we have verified, and which we
append as an explanation of what was found. The later parts of this account shew mental decay, but there
is no reason to doubt the bulk of it. Stanfield obviously died of a combination of thirst, suffocation, cardiac
strain, and psychological depression. His mask was in place, and freely generating oxygen despite an
alarmingly low cube supply.
Our plane being damaged, we sent a wireless and called out Anderson with Repair Plane FG-7, a crew
of wreckers, and a set of blasting materials. By morning FR-58 was fixed, and went back under Anderson
carrying the two bodies and the crystal. We shall bury Dwight and Stanfield in the company graveyard, and
ship the crystal to Chicago on the next earth-bound liner. Later, we shall adopt Stanfield’s suggestion—the
sound one in the saner, earlier part of his report—and bring across enough troops to wipe out the natives
altogether. With a clear field, there can be scarcely any limit to the amount of crystal we can secure.
In the afternoon we studied the invisible building or trap with great care, exploring it with the aid of
long guiding cords, and preparing a complete chart for our archives. We were much impressed by the
design, and shall keep specimens of the substance for chemical analysis. All such knowledge will be useful
when we take over the various cities of the natives. Our type C diamond drills were able to bite into the
unseen material, and wreckers are now planting dynamite preparatory to a thorough blasting. Nothing will
be left when we are done. The edifice forms a distinct menace to aërial and other possible traffic.
In considering the plan of the labyrinth one is impressed not only with the irony of Dwight’s fate, but
with that of Stanfield’s as well. When trying to reach the second body from the skeleton, we could find no
access on the right, but Markheim found a doorway from the first inner space some fifteen feet past
Dwight and four or five past Stanfield. Beyond this was a long hall which we did not explore till later, but on
the right-hand side of that hall was another doorway leading directly to the body. Stanfield could have
reached the outside entrance by walking 22 or 23 feet if he had found the opening which lay
directly behind him—an opening which he overlooked in his exhaustion and despair.

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The Man of Stone
By H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald

Ben Hayden was always a stubborn chap, and once he had heard about those strange statues in the upper
Adirondacks, nothing could keep him from going to see them. I had been his closest acquaintance for
years, and our Damon and Pythias friendship made us inseparable at all times. So when Ben firmly decided
to go—well, I had to trot along too, like a faithful collie.
“Jack,” he said, “you know Henry Jackson, who was up in a shack beyond Lake Placid for that beastly
spot in his lung? Well, he came back the other day nearly cured, but had a lot to say about some devilish
queer conditions up there. He ran into the business all of a sudden and can’t be sure yet that it’s anything
more than a case of bizarre sculpture; but just the same his uneasy impression sticks.
“It seems he was out hunting one day, and came across a cave with what looked like a dog in front of
it. Just as he was expecting the dog to bark he looked again, and saw that the thing wasn’t alive at all. It
was a stone dog—such a perfect image, down to the smallest whisker, that he couldn’t decide whether it
was a supernaturally clever statue or a petrified animal. He was almost afraid to touch it, but when he did
he realised it was surely made of stone.
“After a while he nerved himself up to go into the cave—and there he got a still bigger jolt. Only a little
way in there was another stone figure—or what looked like it—but this time it was a man’s. It lay on the
floor, on its side, wore clothes, and had a peculiar smile on its face. This time Henry didn’t stop to do any
touching, but beat it straight for the village, Mountain Top, you know. Of course he asked questions—but
they did not get him very far. He found he was on a ticklish subject, for the natives only shook their heads,
crossed their fingers, and muttered something about a ‘Mad Dan’—whoever he was.
“It was too much for Jackson, so he came home weeks ahead of his planned time. He told me all about
it because he knows how fond I am of strange things—and oddly enough, I was able to fish up a
recollection that dovetailed pretty neatly with his yarn. Do you remember Arthur Wheeler, the sculptor
who was such a realist that people began calling him nothing but a solid photographer? I think you knew
him slightly. Well, as a matter of fact, he ended up in that part of the Adirondacks himself. Spent a lot of
time there, and then dropped out of sight. Never heard from again. Now if stone statues that look like men
and dogs are turning up around there, it looks to me as if they might be his work—no matter what the
rustics say, or refuse to say, about them. Of course a fellow with Jackson’s nerves might easily get flighty
and disturbed over things like that; but I’d have done a lot of examining before running away.
“In fact, Jack, I’m going up there now to look things over—and you’re coming along with me. It would
mean a lot to find Wheeler—or any of his work. Anyhow, the mountain air will brace us both up.”
So less than a week later, after a long train ride and a jolting bus trip through breathlessly exquisite
scenery, we arrived at Mountain Top in the late, golden sunlight of a June evening. The village comprised
only a few small houses, a hotel, and the general store at which our bus drew up; but we knew that the
latter would probably prove a focus for such information. Surely enough, the usual group of idlers was
gathered around the steps; and when we represented ourselves as health-seekers in search of lodgings
they had many recommendations to offer.
Though we had not planned to do any investigating till the next day, Ben could not resist venturing
some vague, cautious questions when he noticed the senile garrulousness of one of the ill-clad loafers. He
felt, from Jackson’s previous experience, that it would be useless to begin with references to the queer
statues; but decided to mention Wheeler as one whom we had known, and in whose fate we consequently
had a right to be interested.
The crowd seemed uneasy when Sam stopped his whittling and started talking, but they had slight
occasion for alarm. Even this barefoot old mountain decadent tightened up when he heard Wheeler’s
name, and only with difficulty could Ben get anything coherent out of him.
“Wheeler?” he had finally wheezed. “Oh, yeh—that feller as was all the time blastin’ rocks and cuttin’
’em up into statues. So yew knowed him, hey? Wal, they ain’t much we kin tell ye, and mebbe that’s too
much. He stayed out to Mad Dan’s cabin in the hills—but not so very long. Got so he wa’nt wanted no
more . . . by Dan, that is. Kinder soft-spoken and got around Dan’s wife till the old devil took notice. Pretty
sweet on her, I guess. But he took the trail sudden, and nobody’s seen hide nor hair of him since. Dan must
a told him sumthin’ pretty plain—bad feller to get agin ye, Dan is! Better keep away from thar, boys, for
they ain’t no good in that part of the hills. Dan’s ben workin’ up a worse and worse mood, and ain’t seen
about no more. Nor his wife, neither. Guess he’s penned her up so’s nobody else kin make eyes at her!”
As Sam resumed his whittling after a few more observations, Ben and I exchanged glances. Here,
surely, was a new lead which deserved intensive following up. Deciding to lodge at the hotel, we settled
ourselves as quickly as possible; planning for a plunge into the wild hilly country on the next day.
 At sunrise we made our start, each bearing a knapsack laden with provisions and such tools as we
thought we might need. The day before us had an almost stimulating air of invitation—through which only
a faint undercurrent of the sinister ran. Our rough mountain road quickly became steep and winding, so
that before long our feet ached considerably.
After about two miles we left the road—crossing a stone wall on our right near a great elm and
striking off diagonally toward a steeper slope according to the chart and directions which Jackson had
prepared for us. It was rough and briery travelling, but we knew that the cave could not be far off. In the
end we came upon the aperture quite suddenly—a black, bush-grown crevice where the ground shot
abruptly upward, and beside it, near a shallow rock pool, a small, still figure stood rigid—as if rivalling its
own uncanny petrification.
It was a grey dog—or a dog’s statue—and as our simultaneous gasp died away we scarcely knew what
to think. Jackson had exaggerated nothing, and we could not believe that any sculptor’s hand had
succeeded in producing such perfection. Every hair of the animal’s magnificent coat seemed distinct, and
those on the back were bristled up as if some unknown thing had taken him unaware. Ben, at last half-
kindly touching the delicate stony fur, gave vent to an exclamation.
“Good God, Jack, but this can’t be any statue! Look at it—all the little details, and the way the hair lies!
None of Wheeler’s technique here! This is a real dog—though heaven only knows how he ever got in this
state. Just like stone—feel for yourself. Do you suppose there’s any strange gas that sometimes comes out
of the cave and does this to animal life? We ought to have looked more into the local legends. And if this is
a real dog—or was a real dog—then that man inside must be the real thing too.”
It was with a good deal of genuine solemnity—almost dread—that we finally crawled on hands and
knees through the cave-mouth, Ben leading. The narrowness looked hardly three feet, after which the
grotto expanded in every direction to form a damp, twilight chamber floored with rubble and detritus. For
a time we could make out very little, but as we rose to our feet and strained our eyes we began slowly to
descry a recumbent figure amidst the greater darkness ahead. Ben fumbled with his flashlight, but
hesitated for a moment before turning it on the prostrate figure. We had little doubt that the stony thing
was what had once been a man, and something in the thought unnerved us both.
When Ben at last sent forth the electric beam we saw that the object lay on its side, back toward us. It
was clearly of the same material as the dog outside, but was dressed in the mouldering and unpetrified
remains of rough sport clothing. Braced as we were for a shock, we approached quite calmly to examine
the thing; Ben going around to the other side to glimpse the averted face. Neither could possibly have been
prepared for what Ben saw when he flashed the light on those stony features. His cry was wholly
excusable, and I could not help echoing it as I leaped to his side and shared the sight. Yet it was nothing
hideous or intrinsically terrifying. It was merely a matter of recognition, for beyond the least shadow of a
doubt this chilly rock figure with its half-frightened, half-bitter expression had at one time been our old
acquaintance, Arthur Wheeler.
Some instinct sent us staggering and crawling out of the cave, and down the tangled slope to a point
whence we could not see the ominous stone dog. We hardly knew what to think, for our brains were
churning with conjectures and apprehensions. Ben, who had known Wheeler well, was especially upset;
and seemed to be piecing together some threads I had overlooked.
Again and again as we paused on the green slope he repeated “Poor Arthur, poor Arthur!” but not till
he muttered the name “Mad Dan” did I recall the trouble into which, according to old Sam Poole, Wheeler
had run just before his disappearance. Mad Dan, Ben implied, would doubtless be glad to see what had
happened. For a moment it flashed over both of us that the jealous host might have been responsible for
the sculptor’s presence in this evil cave, but the thought went as quickly as it came.
The thing that puzzled us most was to account for the phenomenon itself. What gaseous emanation or
mineral vapour could have wrought this change in so relatively short a time was utterly beyond us. Normal
petrification, we know, is a slow chemical replacement process requiring vast ages for completion; yet here
were two stone images which had been living things—or at least Wheeler had—only a few weeks before.
Conjecture was useless. Clearly, nothing remained but to notify the authorities and let them guess what
they might; and yet at the back of Ben’s head that notion about Mad Dan still persisted. Anyhow, we
clawed our way back to the road, but Ben did not turn toward the village, but looked along upward toward
where old Sam had said Dan’s cabin lay. It was the second house from the village, the ancient loafer had
wheezed, and lay on the left far back from the road in a thick copse of scrub oaks. Before I knew it Ben was
dragging me up the sandy highway past a dingy farmstead and into a region of increasing wildness.
It did not occur to me to protest, but I felt a certain sense of mounting menace as the familiar marks of
agriculture and civilisation grew fewer and fewer. At last the beginning of a narrow, neglected path opened
up on our left, while the peaked roof of a squalid, unpainted building shewed itself beyond a sickly growth
of half-dead trees. This, I knew, must be Mad Dan’s cabin; and I wondered that Wheeler had ever chosen
so unprepossessing a place for his headquarters. I dreaded to walk up that weedy, uninviting path, but
could not lag behind when Ben strode determinedly along and began a vigorous rapping at the rickety,
musty-smelling door.
There was no response to the knock, and something in its echoes sent a series of shivers through one.
Ben, however, was quite unperturbed; and at once began to circle the house in quest of unlocked
windows. The third that he tried—in the rear of the dismal cabin—proved capable of opening, and after a
boost and a vigorous spring he was safely inside and helping me after him.
The room in which we landed was full of limestone and granite blocks, chiselling tools and clay models,
and we realised at once that it was Wheeler’s erstwhile studio. So far we had not met with any sign of life,
but over everything hovered a damnably ominous dusty odour. On our left was an open door evidently
leading to a kitchen on the chimney side of the house, and through this Ben started, intent on finding
anything he could concerning his friend’s last habitat. He was considerably ahead of me when he crossed
the threshold, so that I could not see at first what brought him up short and wrung a low cry of horror from
his lips.
In another moment, though, I did see—and repeated his cry as instinctively as I had done in the cave.
For here in this cabin—far from any subterranean depths which could breed strange gases and work
strange mutations—were two stony figures which I knew at once were no products of Arthur Wheeler’s
chisel. In a rude armchair before the fireplace, bound in position by the lash of a long rawhide whip, was
the form of a man—unkempt, elderly, and with a look of fathomless horror on its evil, petrified face.
On the floor beside it lay a woman’s figure; graceful, and with a face betokening considerable youth
and beauty. Its expression seemed to be one of sardonic satisfaction, and near its outflung right hand was a
large tin pail, somewhat stained on the inside, as with a darkish sediment.
We made no move to approach those inexplicably petrified bodies, nor did we exchange any but the
simplest conjectures. That this stony couple had been Mad Dan and his wife we could not well doubt, but
how to account for their present condition was another matter. As we looked horrifiedly around we saw
the suddenness with which the final development must have come—for everything about us seemed,
despite a heavy coating of dust, to have been left in the midst of commonplace household activities.
The only exception to this rule of casualness was on the kitchen table; in whose cleared centre, as if to
attract attention, lay a thin, battered, blank-book weighted down by a sizeable tin funnel. Crossing to read
the thing, Ben saw that it was a kind of diary or set of dated entries, written in a somewhat cramped and
none too practiced hand. The very first words riveted my attention, and before ten seconds had elapsed he
was breathlessly devouring the halting text—I avidly following as I peered over his shoulder. As we read
on—moving as we did so into the less loathsome atmosphere of the adjoining room—many obscure things
became terribly clear to us, and we trembled with a mixture of complex emotions.
This is what we read—and what the coroner read later on. The public has seen a highly twisted and
sensationalised version in the cheap newspapers, but not even that has more than a fraction of the
genuine terror which the simple original held for us as we puzzled it out alone in that musty cabin among
the wild hills, with two monstrous stone abnormalities lurking in the death-like silence of the next room.
When we had finished Ben pocketed the book with a gesture half of repulsion, and his first words were
“Let’s get out of here.”
Silently and nervously we stumbled to the front of the house, unlocked the door, and began the long
tramp back to the village. There were many statements to make and questions to answer in the days that
followed, and I do not think that either Ben or I can ever shake off the effects of the whole harrowing
experience. Neither can some of the local authorities and city reporters who flocked around—even though
they burned a certain book and many papers found in attic boxes, and destroyed considerable apparatus in
the deepest part of that sinister hillside cave. But here is the text itself:
“Nov. 5—My name is Daniel Morris. Around here they call me ‘Mad Dan’ because I believe in powers
that nobody else believes in nowadays. When I go up on Thunder Hill to keep the Feast of the Foxes they
think I am crazy—all except the back country folks that are afraid of me. They try to stop me from
sacrificing the Black Goat at Hallow Eve, and always prevent my doing the Great Rite that would open the
gate. They ought to know better, for they know I am a Van Kauran on my mother’s side, and anybody this
side of the Hudson can tell what the Van Kaurans have handed down. We come from Nicholas Van Kauran,
the wizard, who was hanged in Wijtgaart in 1587, and everybody knows he had made the bargain with the
Black Man.
“The soldiers never got his Book of Eibon when they burned his house, and his grandson, William Van
Kauran, brought it over when he came to Rensselaerwyck and later crossed the river to Esopus. Ask
anybody in Kingston or Hurley about what the William Van Kauran line could do to people that got in their
way. Also, ask them if my Uncle Hendrik didn’t manage to keep hold of theBook of Eibon when they ran
him out of town and he went up the river to this place with his family.
“I am writing this—and am going to keep writing this—because I want people to know the truth after I
am gone. Also, I am afraid I shall really go mad if I don’t set things down in plain black and white.
Everything is going against me, and if it keeps up I shall have to use the secrets in the Bookand call in
certain Powers. Three months ago that sculptor Arthur Wheeler came to Mountain Top, and they sent him
up to me because I am the only man in the place who knows anything except farming, hunting, and
fleecing summer boarders. The fellow seemed to be interested in what I had to say, and made a deal to
stop here for $13.00 a week with meals. I gave him the back room beside the kitchen for his lumps of stone
and his chiselling, and arranged with Nate Williams to tend to his rock blasting and haul his big pieces with
a drag and yoke of oxen.
“That was three months ago. Now I know why that cursed son of hell took so quick to the place. It
wasn’t my talk at all, but the looks of my wife Rose, that is Osborne Chandler’s oldest girl. She is sixteen
years younger than I am, and is always casting sheep’s eyes at the fellows in town. But we always managed
to get along fine enough till this dirty rat shewed up, even if she did balk at helping me with the Rites on
Roodmas and Hallowmass. I can see now that Wheeler is working on her feelings and getting her so fond of
him that she hardly looks at me, and I suppose he’ll try to elope with her sooner or later.
“But he works slow like all sly, polished dogs, and I’ve got plenty of time to think up what to do about
it. They don’t either of them know I suspect anything, but before long they’ll both realise it doesn’t pay to
break up a Van Kauran’s home. I promise them plenty of novelty in what I’ll do.
“Nov. 25—Thanksgiving Day! That’s a pretty good joke! But at that I’ll have something to be thankful
for when I finish what I’ve started. No question but that Wheeler is trying to steal my wife. For the time
being, though, I’ll let him keep on being a star boarder. Got the Book of Eibon down from Uncle Hendrik’s
old trunk in the attic last week, and am looking up something good which won’t require sacrifices that I
can’t make around here. I want something that’ll finish these two sneaking traitors, and at the same time
get me into no trouble. If it has a twist of drama in it, so much the better. I’ve thought of calling in the
emanation of Yoth, but that needs a child’s blood and I must be careful about the neighbours. The Green
Decay looks promising, but that would be a bit unpleasant for me as well as for them. I don’t like certain
sights and smells.
“Dec. 10—Eureka! I’ve got the very thing at last! Revenge is sweet—and this is the perfect climax!
Wheeler, the sculptor—this is too good! Yes, indeed, that damned sneak is going to produce a statue that
will sell quicker than any of the things he’s been carving these past weeks! A realist, eh? Well—the new
statuary won’t lack any realism! I found the formula in a manuscript insert opposite page 679 of
the Book. From the handwriting I judge it was put there by my great-grandfather Bareut Picterse Van
Kauran—the one who disappeared from New Paltz in 1839. Iä! Shub-Niggurath!The Goat with a Thousand
Young!
“To be plain, I’ve found a way to turn those wretched rats into stone statues. It’s absurdly simple, and
really depends more on plain chemistry than on the Outer Powers. If I can get hold of the right stuff I can
brew a drink that’ll pass for home-made wine, and one swig ought to finish any ordinary being short of an
elephant. What it amounts to is a kind of petrification infinitely speeded up. Shoots the whole system full
of calcium and barium salts and replaces living cells with mineral matter so fast that nothing can stop it. It
must have been one of those things great-grandfather got at the Great Sabbat on Sugar-Loaf in the
Catskills. Queer things used to go on there. Seems to me I heard of a man in New Paltz—Squire
Hasbrouck—turned to stone or something like that in 1834. He was an enemy of the Van Kaurans. First
thing I must do is order the five chemicals I need from Albany and Montreal. Plenty of time later to
experiment. When everything is over I’ll round up all the statues and sell them as Wheeler’s work to pay
for his overdue board bill! He always was a realist and an egoist—wouldn’t it be natural for him to make a
self-portrait in stone, and to use my wife for another model—as indeed he’s really been doing for the past
fortnight? Trust the dull public not to ask what quarrythe queer stone came from!
“Dec. 25—Christmas. Peace on earth, and so forth! These two swine are goggling at each other as if I
didn’t exist. They must think I’m deaf, dumb, and blind! Well, the barium sulphate and calcium chloride
came from Albany last Thursday, and the acids, catalytics, and instruments are due from Montreal any day
now. The mills of the gods—and all that! I’ll do the work in Allen’s Cave near the lower wood lot, and at the
same time will be openly making some wine in the cellar here. There ought to be some excuse for offering
a new drink—though it won’t take much planning to fool those moonstruck nincompoops. The trouble will
be to make Rose take wine, for she pretends not to like it. Any experiments that I make on animals will be
down at the cave, and nobody ever thinks of going there in winter. I’ll do some wood-cutting to account for
my time away. A small load or two brought in will keep him off the track.
“Jan. 20—It’s harder work than I thought. A lot depends on the exact proportions. The stuff came from
Montreal, but I had to send again for some better scales and an acetylene lamp. They’re getting curious
down at the village. Wish the express office weren’t in Steenwyck’s store. Am trying various mixtures on
the sparrows that drink and bathe in the pool in front of the cave—when it’s melted. Sometimes it kills
them, but sometimes they fly away. Clearly, I’ve missed some important reaction. I suppose Rose and that
upstart are making the most of my absence—but I can afford to let them. There can be no doubt of my
success in the end.
“Feb. 11—Have got it at last! Put a fresh lot in the little pool—which is well melted today—and the
first bird that drank toppled over as if he were shot. I picked him up a second later, and he was a perfect
piece of stone, down to the smallest claws and feather. Not a muscle changed since he was poised for
drinking, so he must have died the instant any of the stuff got to his stomach. I didn’t expect the
petrification to come so soon. But a sparrow isn’t a fair test of the way the thing would act with a large
animal. I must get something bigger to try it on, for it must be the right strength when I give it to those
swine. I guess Rose’s dog Rex will do. I’ll take him along the next time and say a timber wolf got him. She
thinks a lot of him, and I shan’t be sorry to give her something to sniffle over before the big reckoning. I
must be careful where I keep this book. Rose sometimes pries around in the queerest places.
“Feb. 15—Getting warm! Tried it on Rex and it worked like a charm with only double the strength. I
fixed the rock pool and got him to drink. He seemed to know something queer had hit him, for he bristled
and growled, but he was a piece of stone before he could turn his head. The solution ought to have been
stronger, and for a human being ought to be very much stronger. I think I’m getting the hang of it now, and
am about ready for that cur Wheeler. The stuff seems to be tasteless, but to make sure I’ll flavour it with
the new wine I’m making up at the house. Wish I were surer about the tastelessness, so I could give it to
Rose in water without trying to urge wine on her. I’ll get the two separately—Wheeler out here and Rose
at home. Have just fixed a strong solution and cleared away all strange objects in front of the cave. Rose
whimpered like a puppy when I told her a wolf had got Rex, and Wheeler gurgled a lot of sympathy.
“March 1—Iä R’lyeh! Praise the Lord Tsathoggua! I’ve got the son of hell at last! Told him I’d found a
new ledge of friable limestone down this way, and he trotted after me like the yellow cur he is! I had the
wine-flavoured stuff in a bottle on my hip, and he was glad of a swig when we got here. Gulped it down
without a wink—and dropped in his tracks before you could count three. But he knows I’ve had my
vengeance, for I made a face at him that he couldn’t miss. I saw the look of understanding come into his
face as he keeled over. In two minutes he was solid stone.
“I dragged him into the cave and put Rex’s figure outside again. That bristling dog shape will help to
scare people off. It’s getting time for the spring hunters, and besides, there’s a damned ‘lunger’ named
Jackson in a cabin over the hill who does a lot of snooping around in the snow. I wouldn’t want my
laboratory and storeroom to be found just yet! When I got home I told Rose that Wheeler had found a
telegram at the village summoning him suddenly home. I don’t know whether she believed me or not but it
doesn’t matter. For form’s sake, I packed Wheeler’s things and took them down the hill, telling her I was
going to ship them after him. I put them in the dry well at the abandoned Rapelye place. Now for Rose!
“March 3—Can’t get Rose to drink any wine. I hope that stuff is tasteless enough to go unnoticed in
water. I tried it in tea and coffee, but it forms a precipitate and can’t be used that way. If I use it in water I’ll
have to cut down the dose and trust to a more gradual action. Mr. and Mrs. Hoog dropped in this noon,
and I had hard work keeping the conversation away from Wheeler’s departure. It mustn’t get around that
we say he was called back to New York when everybody at the village knows no telegram came, and that
he didn’t leave on the bus. Rose is acting damned queer about the whole thing. I’ll have to pick a quarrel
with her and keep her locked in the attic. The best way is to try to make her drink that doctored wine—and
if she does give in, so much better.
“March 7—Have started in on Rose. She wouldn’t drink the wine so I took a whip to her and drove her
up in the attic. She’ll never come down alive. I pass her a platter of salty bread and salt meat, and a pail of
slightly doctored water, twice a day. The salt food ought to make her drink a lot, and it can’t be long before
the action sets in. I don’t like the way she shouts about Wheeler when I’m at the door. The rest of the time
she is absolutely silent.
“March 9—It’s damned peculiar how slow that stuff is in getting hold of Rose. I’ll have to make it
stronger—probably she’ll never taste it with all the salt I’ve been feeding her. Well, if it doesn’t get her
there are plenty of other ways to fall back on. But I would like to carry this neat statue plan through! Went
to the cave this morning and all is well there. I sometimes hear Rose’s steps on the ceiling overhead, and I
think they’re getting more and more dragging. The stuff is certainly working, but it’s too slow. Not strong
enough. From now on I’ll rapidly stiffen up the dose.
“March 11—It is very queer. She is still alive and moving. Tuesday night I heard her piggling with a
window, so went up and gave her a rawhiding. She acts more sullen than frightened, and her eyes look
swollen. But she could never drop to the ground from that height and there’s nowhere she could climb
down. I have had dreams at night, for her slow, dragging pacing on the floor above gets on my nerves.
Sometimes I think she works at the lock on the door.
“March 15—Still alive, despite all the strengthening of the dose. There’s something queer about it. She
crawls now, and doesn’t pace very often. But the sound of her crawling is horrible. She rattles the
windows, too, and fumbles with the door. I shall have to finish her off with the rawhide if this keeps up. I’m
getting very sleepy. Wonder if Rose has got on her guard somehow. But she must be drinking the stuff. This
sleepiness is abnormal—I think the strain is telling on me. I’m sleepy. . . .”
(Here the cramped handwriting trails out in a vague scrawl, giving place to a note in a firmer, evidently
feminine handwriting, indicative of great emotional tension.)
“March 16—4 a.m.—This is added by Rose C. Morris, about to die. Please notify my father, Osborne E.
Chandler, Route 2, Mountain Top, N.Y. I have just read what the beast has written. I felt sure he had killed
Arthur Wheeler, but did not know how till I read this terrible notebook. Now I know what I escaped. I
noticed the water tasted queer, so took none of it after the first sip. I threw it all out of the window. That
one sip has half paralysed me, but I can still get about. The thirst was terrible, but I ate as little as possible
of the salty food and was able to get a little water by setting some old pans and dishes that were up here
under places where the roof leaked.
“There were two great rains. I thought he was trying to poison me, though I didn’t know what the
poison was like. What he has written about himself and me is a lie. We were never happy together and I
think I married him only under one of those spells that he was able to lay on people. I guess he hypnotised
both my father and me, for he was always hated and feared and suspected of dark dealings with the devil.
My father once called him The Devil’s Kin, and he was right.
“No one will ever know what I went through as his wife. It was not simply common cruelty—though
God knows he was cruel enough, and beat me often with a leather whip. It was more—more than anyone
in this age can ever understand. He was a monstrous creature, and practiced all sorts of hellish ceremonies
handed down by his mother’s people. He tried to make me help in the rites—and I don’t dare even hint
what they were. I would not, so he beat me. It would be blasphemy to tell what he tried to make me do. I
can say he was a murderer even then, for I know what he sacrificed one night on Thunder Hill. He was
surely the Devil’s Kin. I tried four times to run away, but he always caught and beat me. Also, he had a sort
of hold over my mind, and even over my father’s mind.
“About Arthur Wheeler I have nothing to be ashamed of. We did come to love each other, but only in
an honourable way. He gave me the first kind treatment I had ever had since leaving my father’s, and
meant to help me get out of the clutches of that fiend. He had several talks with my father, and was going
to help me get out west. After my divorce we would have been married.
“Ever since that brute locked me in the attic I have planned to get out and finish him. I always kept the
poison overnight in case I could escape and find him asleep and give it to him somehow. At first he waked
easily when I worked on the lock of the door and tested the conditions at the windows, but later he began
to get more tired and sleep sounder. I could always tell by his snoring when he was asleep.
“Tonight he was so fast asleep I forced the lock without waking him. It was hard work getting
downstairs with my partial paralysis, but I did. I found him here with the lamp burning—asleep at the table,
where he had been writing in this book. In the corner was the long rawhide whip he had so often beaten
me with. I used it to tie him to the chair so he could not move a muscle. I lashed his neck so that I could
pour anything down his throat without his resisting.
“He waked up just as I was finishing and I guess he saw right off that he was done for. He shouted
frightful things and tried to chant mystical formulas, but I choked him off with a dish towel from the sink.
Then I saw this book he had been writing in, and stopped to read it. The shock was terrible, and I almost
fainted four or five times. My mind was not ready for such things. After that I talked to that fiend for two or
three hours steady. I told him everything I had wanted to tell him through all the years I had been his slave,
and a lot of other things that had to do with what I had read in this awful book.
“He looked almost purple when I was through, and I think he was half delirious. Then I got a funnel
from the cupboard and jammed it into his mouth after taking out the gag. He knew what I was going to do,
but was helpless. I had brought down the pail of poisoned water, and without a qualm, I poured a good
half of it into the funnel.
“It must have been a very strong dose, for almost at once I saw that brute begin to stiffen and turn a
dull stony grey. In ten minutes I knew he was solid stone. I could not bear to touch him, but the tin
funnel clinked horribly when I pulled it out of his mouth. I wish I could have given that Kin of the Devil a
more painful, lingering death, but surely this was the most appropriate he could have had.
“There is not much more to say. I am half-paralysed, and with Arthur murdered I have nothing to live
for. I shall make things complete by drinking the rest of the poison after placing this book where it will be
found. In a quarter of an hour I shall be a stone statue. My only wish is to be buried beside the statue that
was Arthur—when it is found in that cave where the fiend left it. Poor trusting Rex ought to lie at our feet. I
do not care what becomes of the stone devil tied in the chair. . . .”
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The Picture in the House

By H. P. Lovecraft

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven
mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down
black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the
desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But
the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification
of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark
elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.
Most horrible of all sights are the little unpainted wooden houses remote from travelled ways, usually
squatted upon some damp, grassy slope or leaning against some gigantic outcropping of rock. Two hundred
years and more they have leaned or squatted there, while the vines have crawled and the trees have swelled
and spread. They are almost hidden now in lawless luxuriances of green and guardian shrouds of shadow; but
the small-paned windows still stare shockingly, as if blinking through a lethal stupor which wards off madness by
dulling the memory of unutterable things.
In such houses have dwelt generations of strange people, whose like the world has never seen. Seized with
a gloomy and fanatical belief which exiled them from their kind, their ancestors sought the wilderness for
freedom. There the scions of a conquering race indeed flourished free from the restrictions of their fellows, but
cowered in an appalling slavery to the dismal phantasms of their own minds. Divorced from the enlightenment
of civilisation, the strength of these Puritans turned into singular channels; and in their isolation, morbid self-
repression, and struggle for life with relentless Nature, there came to them dark furtive traits from the
prehistoric depths of their cold Northern heritage. By necessity practical and by philosophy stern, these folk
were not beautiful in their sins. Erring as all mortals must, they were forced by their rigid code to seek
concealment above all else; so that they came to use less and less taste in what they concealed. Only the silent,
sleepy, staring houses in the backwoods can tell all that has lain hidden since the early days; and they are not
communicative, being loath to shake off the drowsiness which helps them forget. Sometimes one feels that it
would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream.
It was to a time-battered edifice of this description that I was driven one afternoon in November, 1896, by a
rain of such chilling copiousness that any shelter was preferable to exposure. I had been travelling for some time
amongst the people of the Miskatonic Valley in quest of certain genealogical data; and from the remote,
devious, and problematical nature of my course, had deemed it convenient to employ a bicycle despite the
lateness of the season. Now I found myself upon an apparently abandoned road which I had chosen as the
shortest cut to Arkham; overtaken by the storm at a point far from any town, and confronted with no refuge
save the antique and repellent wooden building which blinked with bleared windows from between two huge
leafless elms near the foot of a rocky hill. Distant though it was from the remnant of a road, the house none the
less impressed me unfavourably the very moment I espied it. Honest, wholesome structures do not stare at
travellers so slyly and hauntingly, and in my genealogical researches I had encountered legends of a century
before which biassed me against places of this kind. Yet the force of the elements was such as to overcome my
scruples, and I did not hesitate to wheel my machine up the weedy rise to the closed door which seemed at once
so suggestive and secretive.
I had somehow taken it for granted that the house was abandoned, yet as I approached it I was not so sure;
for though the walks were indeed overgrown with weeds, they seemed to retain their nature a little too well to
argue complete desertion. Therefore instead of trying the door I knocked, feeling as I did so a trepidation I could
scarcely explain. As I waited on the rough, mossy rock which served as a doorstep, I glanced at the neighbouring
windows and the panes of the transom above me, and noticed that although old, rattling, and almost opaque
with dirt, they were not broken. The building, then, must still be inhabited, despite its isolation and general
neglect. However, my rapping evoked no response, so after repeating the summons I tried the rusty latch and
found the door unfastened. Inside was a little vestibule with walls from which the plaster was falling, and
through the doorway came a faint but peculiarly hateful odour. I entered, carrying my bicycle, and closed the
door behind me. Ahead rose a narrow staircase, flanked by a small door probably leading to the cellar, while to
the left and right were closed doors leading to rooms on the ground floor.
 Leaning my cycle against the wall I opened the door at the left, and crossed into a small low-ceiled chamber
but dimly lighted by its two dusty windows and furnished in the barest and most primitive possible way. It
appeared to be a kind of sitting-room, for it had a table and several chairs, and an immense fireplace above
which ticked an antique clock on a mantel. Books and papers were very few, and in the prevailing gloom I could
not readily discern the titles. What interested me was the uniform air of archaism as displayed in every visible
detail. Most of the houses in this region I had found rich in relics of the past, but here the antiquity was curiously
complete; for in all the room I could not discover a single article of definitely post-revolutionary date. Had the
furnishings been less humble, the place would have been a collector’s paradise.
As I surveyed this quaint apartment, I felt an increase in that aversion first excited by the bleak exterior of
the house. Just what it was that I feared or loathed, I could by no means define; but something in the whole
atmosphere seemed redolent of unhallowed age, of unpleasant crudeness, and of secrets which should be
forgotten. I felt disinclined to sit down, and wandered about examining the various articles which I had noticed.
The first object of my curiosity was a book of medium size lying upon the table and presenting such an
antediluvian aspect that I marvelled at beholding it outside a museum or library. It was bound in leather with
metal fittings, and was in an excellent state of preservation; being altogether an unusual sort of volume to
encounter in an abode so lowly. When I opened it to the title page my wonder grew even greater, for it proved
to be nothing less rare than Pigafetta’s account of the Congo region, written in Latin from the notes of the sailor
Lopez and printed at Frankfort in 1598. I had often heard of this work, with its curious illustrations by the
brothers De Bry, hence for a moment forgot my uneasiness in my desire to turn the pages before me. The
engravings were indeed interesting, drawn wholly from imagination and careless descriptions, and represented
negroes with white skins and Caucasian features; nor would I soon have closed the book had not an exceedingly
trivial circumstance upset my tired nerves and revived my sensation of disquiet. What annoyed me was merely
the persistent way in which the volume tended to fall open of itself at Plate XII, which represented in gruesome
detail a butcher’s shop of the cannibal Anziques. I experienced some shame at my susceptibility to so slight a
thing, but the drawing nevertheless disturbed me, especially in connexion with some adjacent passages
descriptive of Anzique gastronomy.
I had turned to a neighbouring shelf and was examining its meagre literary contents—an eighteenth-century
Bible, a Pilgrim’s Progress of like period, illustrated with grotesque woodcuts and printed by the almanack-maker
Isaiah Thomas, the rotting bulk of Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, and a few other books of
evidently equal age—when my attention was aroused by the unmistakable sound of walking in the room
overhead. At first astonished and startled, considering the lack of response to my recent knocking at the door, I
immediately afterward concluded that the walker had just awakened from a sound sleep; and listened with less
surprise as the footsteps sounded on the creaking stairs. The tread was heavy, yet seemed to contain a curious
quality of cautiousness; a quality which I disliked the more because the tread was heavy. When I had entered the
room I had shut the door behind me. Now, after a moment of silence during which the walker may have been
inspecting my bicycle in the hall, I heard a fumbling at the latch and saw the panelled portal swing open again.
In the doorway stood a person of such singular appearance that I should have exclaimed aloud but for the
restraints of good breeding. Old, white-bearded, and ragged, my host possessed a countenance and physique
which inspired equal wonder and respect. His height could not have been less than six feet, and despite a
general air of age and poverty he was stout and powerful in proportion. His face, almost hidden by a long beard
which grew high on the cheeks, seemed abnormally ruddy and less wrinkled than one might expect; while over a
high forehead fell a shock of white hair little thinned by the years. His blue eyes, though a trifle bloodshot,
seemed inexplicably keen and burning. But for his horrible unkemptness the man would have been as
distinguished-looking as he was impressive. This unkemptness, however, made him offensive despite his face
and figure. Of what his clothing consisted I could hardly tell, for it seemed to me no more than a mass of tatters
surmounting a pair of high, heavy boots; and his lack of cleanliness surpassed description.
The appearance of this man, and the instinctive fear he inspired, prepared me for something like enmity; so
that I almost shuddered through surprise and a sense of uncanny incongruity when he motioned me to a chair
and addressed me in a thin, weak voice full of fawning respect and ingratiating hospitality. His speech was very
curious, an extreme form of Yankee dialect I had thought long extinct; and I studied it closely as he sat down
opposite me for conversation.
“Ketched in the rain, be ye?” he greeted. “Glad ye was nigh the haouse en’ hed the sense ta come right in. I
calc’late I was asleep, else I’d a heerd ye—I ain’t as young as I uster be, an’ I need a paowerful sight o’ naps
naowadays. Trav’lin’ fur? I hain’t seed many folks ’long this rud sence they tuk off the Arkham stage.”
I replied that I was going to Arkham, and apologised for my rude entry into his domicile, whereupon he
continued.
“Glad ta see ye, young Sir—new faces is scurce arount here, an’ I hain’t got much ta cheer me up these
days. Guess yew hail from Bosting, don’t ye? I never ben thar, but I kin tell a taown man when I see ’im—we hed
one fer deestrick schoolmaster in ’eighty-four, but he quit suddent an’ no one never heerd on ’im sence—” Here
the old man lapsed into a kind of chuckle, and made no explanation when I questioned him. He seemed to be in
an aboundingly good humour, yet to possess those eccentricities which one might guess from his grooming. For
some time he rambled on with an almost feverish geniality, when it struck me to ask him how he came by so
rare a book as Pigafetta’s Regnum Congo. The effect of this volume had not left me, and I felt a certain hesitancy
in speaking of it; but curiosity overmastered all the vague fears which had steadily accumulated since my first
glimpse of the house. To my relief, the question did not seem an awkward one; for the old man answered freely
and volubly.
“Oh, thet Afriky book? Cap’n Ebenezer Holt traded me thet in ’sixty-eight—him as was kilt in the war.”
Something about the name of Ebenezer Holt caused me to look up sharply. I had encountered it in my
genealogical work, but not in any record since the Revolution. I wondered if my host could help me in the task at
which I was labouring, and resolved to ask him about it later on. He continued.
“Ebenezer was on a Salem merchantman for years, an’ picked up a sight o’ queer stuff in every port. He got
this in London, I guess—he uster like ter buy things at the shops. I was up ta his haouse onct, on the hill, tradin’
hosses, when I see this book. I relished the picters, so he give it in on a swap. ’Tis a queer book—here, leave me
git on my spectacles—” The old man fumbled among his rags, producing a pair of dirty and amazingly antique
glasses with small octagonal lenses and steel bows. Donning these, he reached for the volume on the table and
turned the pages lovingly.
“Ebenezer cud read a leetle o’ this—’tis Latin—but I can’t. I hed two er three schoolmasters read me a bit,
and Passon Clark, him they say got draownded in the pond—kin yew make anything outen it?” I told him that I
could, and translated for his benefit a paragraph near the beginning. If I erred, he was not scholar enough to
correct me; for he seemed childishly pleased at my English version. His proximity was becoming rather
obnoxious, yet I saw no way to escape without offending him. I was amused at the childish fondness of this
ignorant old man for the pictures in a book he could not read, and wondered how much better he could read the
few books in English which adorned the room. This revelation of simplicity removed much of the ill-defined
apprehension I had felt, and I smiled as my host rambled on:
“Queer haow picters kin set a body thinkin’. Take this un here near the front. Hev yew ever seed trees like
thet, with big leaves a-floppin’ over an’ daown? And them men—them can’t be niggers—they dew beat all.
Kinder like Injuns, I guess, even ef they be in Afriky. Some o’ these here critters looks like monkeys, or half
monkeys an’ half men, but I never heerd o’ nothing like this un.” Here he pointed to a fabulous creature of the
artist, which one might describe as a sort of dragon with the head of an alligator.
“But naow I’ll shew ye the best un—over here nigh the middle—” The old man’s speech grew a trifle thicker
and his eyes assumed a brighter glow; but his fumbling hands, though seemingly clumsier than before, were
entirely adequate to their mission. The book fell open, almost of its own accord and as if from frequent
consultation at this place, to the repellent twelfth plate shewing a butcher’s shop amongst the Anzique
cannibals. My sense of restlessness returned, though I did not exhibit it. The especially bizarre thing was that the
artist had made his Africans look like white men—the limbs and quarters hanging about the walls of the shop
were ghastly, while the butcher with his axe was hideously incongruous. But my host seemed to relish the view
as much as I disliked it.
“What d’ye think o’ this—ain’t never see the like hereabouts, eh? When I see this I telled Eb Holt, ‘That’s
suthin’ ta stir ye up an’ make yer blood tickle!’ When I read in Scripter about slayin’—like them Midianites was
slew—I kinder think things, but I ain’t got no picter of it. Here a body kin see all they is to it—I s’pose ’tis sinful,
but ain’t we all born an’ livin’ in sin?—Thet feller bein’ chopped up gives me a tickle every time I look at ’im—I
hev ta keep lookin’ at ’im—see whar the butcher cut off his feet? Thar’s his head on thet bench, with one arm
side of it, an’ t’other arm’s on the graound side o’ the meat block.”
As the man mumbled on in his shocking ecstasy the expression on his hairy, spectacled face became
indescribable, but his voice sank rather than mounted. My own sensations can scarcely be recorded. All the
terror I had dimly felt before rushed upon me actively and vividly, and I knew that I loathed the ancient and
abhorrent creature so near me with an infinite intensity. His madness, or at least his partial perversion, seemed
beyond dispute. He was almost whispering now, with a huskiness more terrible than a scream, and I trembled as
I listened.
“As I says, ’tis queer haow picters sets ye thinkin’. D’ye know, young Sir, I’m right sot on this un here. Arter I
got the book off Eb I uster look at it a lot, especial when I’d heerd Passon Clark rant o’ Sundays in his big wig.
Onct I tried suthin’ funny—here, young Sir, don’t git skeert—all I done was ter look at the picter afore I kilt the
sheep for market—killin’ sheep was kinder more fun arter lookin’ at it—” The tone of the old man now sank very
low, sometimes becoming so faint that his words were hardly audible. I listened to the rain, and to the rattling of
the bleared, small-paned windows, and marked a rumbling of approaching thunder quite unusual for the season.
Once a terrific flash and peal shook the frail house to its foundations, but the whisperer seemed not to notice it.
“Killin’ sheep was kinder more fun—but d’ye know, ’twan’t quite satisfyin’. Queer haow a cravin’gits a holt
on ye— As ye love the Almighty, young man, don’t tell nobody, but I swar ter Gawd thet picter begun ta make
me hungry fer victuals I couldn’t raise nor buy—here, set still, what’s ailin’ ye?—I didn’t do nothin’, only I
wondered haow ’twud be ef I did— They say meat makes blood an’ flesh, an’ gives ye new life, so I wondered ef
’twudn’t make a man live longer an’ longer ef ’twas more the same—” But the whisperer never continued. The
interruption was not produced by my fright, nor by the rapidly increasing storm amidst whose fury I was
presently to open my eyes on a smoky solitude of blackened ruins. It was produced by a very simple though
somewhat unusual happening.
The open book lay flat between us, with the picture staring repulsively upward. As the old man whispered
the words “more the same” a tiny spattering impact was heard, and something shewed on the yellowed paper of
the upturned volume. I thought of the rain and of a leaky roof, but rain is not red. On the butcher’s shop of the
Anzique cannibals a small red spattering glistened picturesquely, lending vividness to the horror of the
engraving. The old man saw it, and stopped whispering even before my expression of horror made it necessary;
saw it and glanced quickly toward the floor of the room he had left an hour before. I followed his glance, and
beheld just above us on the loose plaster of the ancient ceiling a large irregular spot of wet crimson which
seemed to spread even as I viewed it. I did not shriek or move, but merely shut my eyes. A moment later came
the titanic thunderbolt of thunderbolts; blasting that accursed house of unutterable secrets and bringing the
oblivion which alone saved my mind.

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Polaris
By H. P. Lovecraft

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 cemetery
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 coruscations
of the daemon-light. After the beams 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 betwixt 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 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 sleep, I saw the city often; sometimes under that horned waning moon, and
sometimes under the hot yellow rays of a sun which did not set, but which wheeled low around 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
peers into my north window each night?”
One night as I listened to the discourse 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 Olathoë, which lies on the
plateau of Sarkis, betwixt the peaks 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 finally to besiege 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 Olathoë, 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 descendants must some day flee from the land of
Lomar), valiantly and victoriously swept aside the hairy, long-armed, cannibal Gnophkehs that stood in their
way. To me Alos denied a warrior’s 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 watch-
tower 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 of Olathoë that lies betwixt the peaks of 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 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 duty and betrayed the marble
city of Olathoë; I have proven false to Alos, my friend and commander. But still these shadows of my dream
deride me. They say there is no land of Lomar, save in my nocturnal imaginings; that in those 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, and never a man save squat yellow creatures, blighted by the cold, whom they
call “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 strange message, yet recalls nothing save
that it once had a message to convey.
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“Till A’ the Seas”

By H. P. Lovecraft and R. H. Barlow

Upon an eroded cliff-top rested the man, gazing far across the valley. Lying thus, he could see a great
distance, but in all the sere expanse there was no visible motion. Nothing stirred the dusty plain, the
disintegrated sand of long-dry river-beds, where once coursed the gushing streams of Earth’s youth. There
was little greenery in this ultimate world, this final stage of mankind’s prolonged presence upon the planet.
For unnumbered aeons the drought and sandstorms had ravaged all the lands. The trees and bushes had
given way to small, twisted shrubs that persisted long through their sturdiness; but these, in turn, perished
before the onslaught of coarse grasses and stringy, tough vegetation of strange evolution.
The ever-present heat, as Earth drew nearer to the sun, withered and killed with pitiless rays. It had not
come at once; long aeons had gone before any could feel the change. And all through those first ages man’s
adaptable form had followed the slow mutation and modelled itself to fit the more and more torrid air. Then
the day had come when men could bear their hot cities but ill, and a gradual recession began, slow yet
deliberate. Those towns and settlements closest to the equator had been first, of course, but later there
were others. Man, softened and exhausted, could cope no longer with the ruthlessly mounting heat. It
seared him as he was, and evolution was too slow to mould new resistances in him.
Yet not at first were the great cities of the equator left to the spider and the scorpion. In the early years
there were many who stayed on, devising curious shields and armours against the heat and the deadly
dryness. These fearless souls, screening certain buildings against the encroaching sun, made miniature
worlds of refuge wherein no protective armour was needed. They contrived marvellously ingenious things,
so that for a while men persisted in the rusting towers, hoping thereby to cling to old lands till the searing
should be over. For many would not believe what the astronomers said, and looked for a coming of the mild
olden world again. But one day the men of Dath, from the new city of Niyara, made signals to Yuanario, their
immemorially ancient capital, and gained no answer from the few who remained therein. And when
explorers reached that millennial city of bridge-linked towers they found only silence. There was not even
the horror of corruption, for the scavenger lizards had been swift.
Only then did the people fully realize that these cities were lost to them; know that they must forever
abandon them to nature. The other colonists in the hot lands fled from their brave posts, and total silence
reigned within the high basalt walls of a thousand empty towns. Of the dense throngs and multitudinous
activities of the past, nothing finally remained. There now loomed against the rainless deserts only the
blistered towers of vacant houses, factories, and structures of every sort, reflecting the sun’s dazzling
radiance and parching in the more and more intolerable heat.
Many lands, however, had still escaped the scorching blight, so that the refugees were soon absorbed in
the life of a newer world. During strangely prosperous centuries the hoary deserted cities of the equator
grew half-forgotten and entwined with fantastic fables. Few thought of those spectral, rotting towers . . .
those huddles of shabby walls and cactus-choked streets, darkly silent and abandoned. . . .
Wars came, sinful and prolonged, but the times of peace were greater. Yet always the swollen sun
increased its radiance as Earth drew closer to its fiery parent. It was as if the planet meant to return to that
source whence it was snatched, aeons ago, through the accidents of cosmic growth.
After a time the blight crept outward from the central belt. Southern Yarat burned as a tenantless
desert—and then the north. In Perath and Baling, those ancient cities where brooding centuries dwelt, there
moved only the scaly shapes of the serpent and the salamander, and at last Loton echoed only to the fitful
falling of tottering spires and crumbling domes.
Steady, universal, and inexorable was the great eviction of man from the realms he had always known.
No land within the widening stricken belt was spared; no people left unrouted. It was an epic, a titan tragedy
whose plot was unrevealed to the actors—this wholesale desertion of the cities of men. It took not years or
even centuries, but millennia of ruthless change. And still it kept on—sullen, inevitable, savagely devastating.
Agriculture was at a standstill, the world fast became too arid for crops. This was remedied by artificial
substitutes, soon universally used. And as the old places that had known the great things of mortals were
left, the loot salvaged by the fugitives grew smaller and smaller. Things of the greatest value and importance
were left in dead museums—lost amid the centuries—and in the end the heritage of the immemorial past
was abandoned. A degeneracy both physical and cultural set in with the insidious heat. For man had so long
dwelt in comfort and security that this exodus from past scenes was difficult. Nor were these events received
phlegmatically; their very slowness was terrifying. Degradation and debauchery were soon common;
government was disorganized, and the civilizations aimlessly slid back toward barbarism.
When, forty-nine centuries after the blight from the equatorial belt, the whole western hemisphere was
left unpeopled, chaos was complete. There was no trace of order or decency in the last scenes of this titanic,
wildly impressive migration. Madness and frenzy stalked through them, and fanatics screamed of an
Armageddon close at hand.
Mankind was now a pitiful remnant of the elder races, a fugitive not only from the prevailing conditions,
but from his own degeneracy. Into the northland and the antarctic went those who could; the rest lingered
for years in an incredible saturnalia, vaguely doubting the forthcoming disasters. In the city of Borligo a
wholesale execution of the new prophets took place, after months of unfulfilled expectations. They thought
the flight to the northland unnecessary, and looked no longer for the threatened ending.
How they perished must have been terrible indeed—those vain, foolish creatures who thought to defy
the universe. But the blackened, scorched towns are mute. . . .
These events, however, must not be chronicled—for there are larger things to consider than this
complex and unhastening downfall of a lost civilization. During a long period morale was at lowest ebb
among the courageous few who settled upon the alien arctic and antarctic shores, now mild as were those of
southern Yarat in the long-dead past. But here there was respite. The soil was fertile, and forgotten pastoral
arts were called into use anew. There was, for a long time, a contented little epitome of the lost lands;
though here were no vast throngs or great buildings. Only a sparse remnant of humanity survived the aeons
of change and peopled those scattered villages of the later world.
How many millennia this continued is not known. The sun was slow in invading this last retreat; and as
the eras passed there developed a sound, sturdy race, bearing no memories or legends of the old, lost lands.
Little navigation was practiced by this new people, and the flying machine was wholly forgotten. Their
devices were of the simplest type, and their culture was simple and primitive. Yet they were contented, and
accepted the warm climate as something natural and accustomed.
But unknown to these simple peasant-folk, still further rigours of nature were slowly preparing
themselves. As the generations passed, the waters of the vast and unplumbed ocean wasted slowly away;
enriching the air and the desiccated soil, but sinking lower and lower each century. The splashing surf still
glistened bright, and the swirling eddies were still there, but a doom of dryness hung over the whole watery
expanse. However, the shrinkage could not have been detected save by instruments more delicate than any
then known to the race. Even had the people realized the ocean’s contraction, it is not likely that any vast
alarm or great disturbance would have resulted, for the losses were so slight, and the seas so great. . . . Only
a few inches during many centuries—but in many centuries; increasing—

* * *

So at last the oceans went, and water became a rarity on a globe of sun-baked drought. Man had slowly
spread over all the arctic and antarctic lands; the equatorial cities, and many of later habitation, were
forgotten even to legend.
And now again the peace was disturbed, for water was scarce, and found only in deep caverns. There
was little enough, even of this; and men died of thirst wandering in far places. Yet so slow were these deadly
changes, that each new generation of man was loath to believe what it heard from its parents. None would
admit that the heat had been less or the water more plentiful in the old days, or take warning that days of
bitterer burning and drought were to come. Thus it was even at the end, when only a few hundred human
creatures panted for breath beneath the cruel sun; a piteous huddled handful out of all the unnumbered
millions who had once dwelt on the doomed planet.
And the hundreds became small, till man was to be reckoned only in tens. These tens clung to the
shrinking dampness of the caves, and knew at last that the end was near. So slight was their range that none
had ever seen the tiny, fabled spots of ice left close to the planet’s poles—if such indeed remained. Even had
they existed and been known to man, none could have reached them across the trackless and formidable
deserts. And so the last pathetic few dwindled. . . .
It cannot be described, this awesome chain of events that depopulated the whole Earth; the range is too
tremendous for any to picture or encompass. Of the people of Earth’s fortunate ages, billions of years
before, only a few prophets and madmen could have conceived that which was to come—could have
grasped visions of the still, dead lands, and long-empty sea-beds. The rest would have doubted . . . doubted
alike the shadow of change upon the planet and the shadow of doom upon the race. For man has always
thought himself the immortal master of natural things. . . .

II.

When he had eased the dying pangs of the old woman, Ull wandered in a fearful daze out into the
dazzling sands. She had been a fearsome thing, shrivelled and so dry; like withered leaves. Her face had been
the colour of the sickly yellow grasses that rustled in the hot wind, and she was loathsomely old.
But she had been a companion; someone to stammer out vague fears to, to talk to about this incredible
thing; a comrade to share one’s hopes for succour from those silent other colonies beyond the mountains.
He could not believe none lived elsewhere, for Ull was young, and not certain as are the old.
For many years he had known none but the old woman—her name was Mladdna. She had come that
day in his eleventh year, when all the hunters went to seek food, and did not return. Ull had no mother that
he could remember, and there were few women in the tiny group. When the men vanished, those three
women, the young one and the two old, had screamed fearfully, and moaned long. Then the young one had
gone mad, and killed herself with a sharp stick. The old ones buried her in a shallow hole dug with their nails,
so Ull had been alone when this still older Mladdna came.
She walked with the aid of a knotty pole, a priceless relique of the old forests, hard and shiny with years
of use. She did not say whence she came, but stumbled into the cabin while the young suicide was being
buried. There she waited till the two returned, and they accepted her incuriously.
That was the way it had been for many weeks, until the two fell sick, and Mladdna could not cure them.
Strange that those younger two should have been stricken, while she, infirm and ancient, lived on. Mladdna
had cared for them many days, and at length they died, so that Ull was left with only the stranger. He
screamed all the night, so she became at length out of patience, and threatened to die too. Then,
hearkening, he became quiet at once; for he was not desirous of complete solitude. After that he lived with
Mladdna and they gathered roots to eat.
Mladdna’s rotten teeth were ill suited to the food they gathered, but they contrived to chop it up till she
could manage it. This weary routine of seeking and eating was Ull’s childhood.
Now he was strong, and firm, in his nineteenth year, and the old woman was dead. There was naught to
stay for, so he determined at once to seek out those fabled huts beyond the mountains, and live with the
people there. There was nothing to take on the journey. Ull closed the door of his cabin—why, he could not
have told, for no animals had been there for many years—and left the dead woman within. Half-dazed, and
fearful at his own audacity, he walked long hours in the dry grasses, and at length reached the first of the
foothills. The afternoon came, and he climbed until he was weary, and lay down on the grasses. Sprawled
there, he thought of many things. He wondered at the strange life, passionately anxious to seek out the lost
colony beyond the mountains; but at last he slept.
When he awoke there was starlight on his face, and he felt refreshed. Now that the sun was gone for a
time, he travelled more quickly, eating little, and determining to hasten before the lack of water became
difficult to bear. He had brought none; for the last people, dwelling in one place and never having occasion
to bear their precious water away, made no vessels of any kind. Ull hoped to reach his goal within a day, and
thus escape thirst; so he hurried on beneath the bright stars, running at times in the warm air, and at other
times lapsing into a dogtrot.
So he continued until the sun arose, yet still he was within the small hills, with three great peaks
looming ahead. In their shade he rested again. Then he climbed all the morning, and at mid-day surmounted
the first peak, where he lay for a time, surveying the space before the next range.
Upon an eroded cliff-top rested the man, gazing far across the valley. Lying thus he could see a great
distance, but in all the sere expanse there was no visible motion. . . .
The second night came, and found Ull amid the rough peaks, the valley and the place where he had
rested far behind. He was nearly out of the second range now, and hurrying still. Thirst had come upon him
that day, and he regretted his folly. Yet he could not have stayed there with the corpse, alone in the
grasslands. He sought to convince himself thus, and hastened ever on, tiredly straining.
And now there were only a few steps before the cliff wall would part and allow a view of the land
beyond. Ull stumbled wearily down the stony way, tumbling and bruising himself even more. It was nearly
before him, this land where men were rumoured to have dwelt; this land of which he had heard tales in his
youth. The way was long, but the goal was great. A boulder of giant circumference cut off his view; upon this
he scrambled anxiously. Now at last he could behold by the sinking orb his long-sought destination, and his
thirst and aching muscles were forgotten as he saw joyfully that a small huddle of buildings clung to the base
of the farther cliff.
Ull rested not; but, spurred on by what he saw, ran and staggered and crawled the half mile remaining.
He fancied that he could detect forms among the rude cabins. The sun was nearly gone; the hateful,
devastating sun that had slain humanity. He could not be sure of details, but soon the cabins were near.
They were very old, for clay blocks lasted long in the still dryness of the dying world. Little, indeed,
changed but the living things—the grasses and these last men.
Before him an open door swung upon rude pegs. In the fading light Ull entered, weary unto death,
seeking painfully the expected faces.
Then he fell upon the floor and wept, for at the table was propped a dry and ancient skeleton.

* * *

He rose at last, crazed by thirst, aching unbearably, and suffering the greatest disappointment any
mortal could know. He was, then, the last living thing upon the globe. His the heritage of the Earth . . . all the
lands, and all to him equally useless. He staggered up, not looking at the dim white form in the reflected
moonlight, and went through the door. About the empty village he wandered, searching for water and sadly
inspecting this long-empty place so spectrally preserved by the changeless air. Here there was a dwelling,
there a rude place where things had been made—clay vessels holding only dust, and nowhere any liquid to
quench his burning thirst.
Then, in the centre of the little town, Ull saw a well-curb. He knew what it was, for he had heard tales of
such things from Mladdna. With pitiful joy, he reeled forward and leaned upon the edge. There, at last, was
the end of his search. Water—slimy, stagnant, and shallow, but water—before his sight.
Ull cried out in the voice of a tortured animal, groping for the chain and bucket. His hand slipped on the
slimy edge; and he fell upon his chest across the brink. For a moment he lay there—then soundlessly his
body was precipitated down the black shaft.
There was a slight splash in the murky shallowness as he struck some long-sunken stone, dislodged
aeons ago from the massive coping. The disturbed water subsided into quietness.
And now at last the Earth was dead. The final, pitiful survivor had perished. All the teeming billions; the
slow aeons; the empires and civilizations of mankind were summed up in this poor twisted form—and how
titanically meaningless it all had been! Now indeed had come an end and climax to all the efforts of
humanity—how monstrous and incredible a climax in the eyes of those poor complacent fools of the
prosperous days! Not ever again would the planet know the thunderous tramping of human millions—or
even the crawling of lizards and the buzz of insects, for they, too, had gone. Now was come the reign of
sapless branches and endless fields of tough grasses. Earth, like its cold, imperturbable moon, was given over
to silence and blackness forever.
The stars whirred on; the whole careless plan would continue for infinities unknown. This trivial end of a
negligible episode mattered not to distant nebulae or to suns new-born, flourishing, and dying. The race of
man, too puny and momentary to have a real function or purpose, was as if it had never existed. To such a
conclusion the aeons of its farcically toilsome evolution had led.
But when the deadly sun’s first rays darted across the valley, a light found its way to the weary face of a
broken figure that lay in the slime.

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What the Moon Brings

By H. P. Lovecraft

I hate the moon—I am afraid of it—for when it shines on certain scenes familiar and loved it sometimes
makes them unfamiliar and hideous.
It was in the spectral summer when the moon shone down on the old garden where I wandered; the
spectral summer of narcotic flowers and humid seas of foliage that bring wild and many-coloured dreams.
And as I walked by the shallow crystal stream I saw unwonted ripples tipped with yellow light, as if those
placid waters were drawn on in resistless currents to strange oceans that are not in the world. Silent and
sparkling, bright and baleful, those moon-cursed waters hurried I knew not whither; whilst from the
embowered banks white lotos blossoms fluttered one by one in the opiate night-wind and dropped
despairingly into the stream, swirling away horribly under the arched, carven bridge, and staring back with
the sinister resignation of calm, dead faces.
And as I ran along the shore, crushing sleeping flowers with heedless feet and maddened ever by the
fear of unknown things and the lure of the dead faces, I saw that the garden had no end under that moon;
for where by day the walls were, there stretched now only new vistas of trees and paths, flowers and
shrubs, stone idols and pagodas, and bendings of the yellow-litten stream past grassy banks and under
grotesque bridges of marble. And the lips of the dead lotos-faces whispered sadly, and bade me follow, nor
did I cease my steps till the stream became a river, and joined amidst marshes of swaying reeds and
beaches of gleaming sand the shore of a vast and nameless sea.
Upon that sea the hateful moon shone, and over its unvocal waves weird perfumes brooded. And as I
saw therein the lotos-faces vanish, I longed for nets that I might capture them and learn from them the
secrets which the moon had brought upon the night. But when the moon went over to the west and the
still tide ebbed from the sullen shore, I saw in that light old spires that the waves almost uncovered, and
white columns gay with festoons of green seaweed. And knowing that to this sunken place all the dead had
come, I trembled and did not wish again to speak with the lotos-faces.
Yet when I saw afar out in the sea a black condor descend from the sky to seek rest on a vast reef, I
would fain have questioned him, and asked him of those whom I had known when they were alive. This I
would have asked him had he not been so far away, but he was very far, and could not be seen at all when
he drew nigh that gigantic reef.
So I watched the tide go out under that sinking moon, and saw gleaming the spires, the towers, and
the roofs of that dead, dripping city. And as I watched, my nostrils tried to close against the perfume-
conquering stench of the world’s dead; for truly, in this unplaced and forgotten spot had all the flesh of the
churchyards gathered for puffy sea-worms to gnaw and glut upon.
Over those horrors the evil moon now hung very low, but the puffy worms of the sea need no moon to
feed by. And as I watched the ripples that told of the writhing of worms beneath, I felt a new chill from afar
out whither the condor had flown, as if my flesh had caught a horror before my eyes had seen it.
Nor had my flesh trembled without cause, for when I raised my eyes I saw that the waters had ebbed
very low, shewing much of the vast reef whose rim I had seen before. And when I saw that this reef was
but the black basalt crown of a shocking eikon whose monstrous forehead now shone in the dim moonlight
and whose vile hooves must paw the hellish ooze miles below, I shrieked and shrieked lest the hidden face
rise above the waters, and lest the hidden eyes look at me after the slinking away of that leering and
treacherous yellow moon.
And to escape this relentless thing I plunged gladly and unhesitatingly into the stinking shallows where
amidst weedy walls and sunken streets fat sea-worms feast upon the world’s dead.