When age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men;
when grey cities reared to smoky skies tall towers grim and ugly, in
whose shadow none might dream of the sun or of spring’s flowering
meads; when learning stripped earth of her mantle of beauty, and poets
sang no more save of twisted phantoms seen with bleared and
inward-looking eyes; when these things had come to pass, and childish
hopes had gone away forever, there was a man who travelled out of life
on a quest into the spaces whither the world’s dreams had fled.
Of the name and abode of this man but little is written, for they were
of the waking world only; yet it is said that both were obscure. It is
enough to know that he dwelt in a city of high walls where sterile
twilight reigned, and that he toiled all day among shadow and turmoil,
coming home at evening to a room whose one window opened not on the
fields and groves but on a dim court where other windows stared in dull
despair. From that casement one might see only walls and windows,
except sometimes when one leaned far out and peered aloft at the small
stars that passed. And because mere walls and windows must soon drive
to madness a man who dreams and reads much, the dweller in that room
used night after night to lean out and peer aloft to glimpse some
fragment of things beyond the waking world and the greyness of tall
cities. After years he began to call the slow-sailing stars by name,
and to follow them in fancy when they glided regretfully out of sight;
till at length his vision opened to many secret vistas whose existence
no common eye suspects. And one night a mighty gulf was bridged, and
the dream-haunted skies swelled down to the lonely watcher’s window to
merge with the close air of his room and make him a part of their
fabulous wonder.
There came to that room wild streams of violet midnight glittering with
dust of gold; vortices of dust and fire, swirling out of the ultimate
spaces and heavy with perfumes from beyond the worlds. Opiate oceans
poured there, litten by suns that the eye may never behold and having
in their whirlpools strange dolphins and sea-nymphs of unrememberable
deeps. Noiseless infinity eddied around the dreamer and wafted him away
without even touching the body that leaned stiffly from the lonely
window; and for days not counted in men’s calendars the tides of far
spheres bare him gently to join the dreams for which he longed; the
dreams that men have lost. And in the course of many cycles they
tenderly left him sleeping on a green sunrise shore; a green shore
fragrant with lotus-blossoms and starred by red camalotes.
Return to “Azathoth”
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