object:1f.lovecraft - The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
author class:H P Lovecraft
subject class:Fiction
genre class:Horror
class:chapter
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 temple 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.
Return to The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
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