object:1f.lovecraft - The Green Meadow
author class:H P Lovecraft
subject class:Fiction
genre class:Horror
class:chapter
and Winifred V. Jackson
Translated by Elizabeth Neville Berkeley and Lewis Theobald, Jun.
INTRODUCTORY NOTE: The following very singular narrative or record
of impressions was discovered under circumstances so extraordinary
that they deserve careful description. On the evening of Wednesday,
August 27, 1913, at about 8:30 o’clock, the population of the small
seaside village of Potowonket, Maine, U.S.A., was aroused by a
thunderous report accompanied by a blinding flash; and persons near
the shore beheld a mammoth ball of fire dart from the heavens into
the sea but a short distance out, sending up a prodigious column of
water. The following Sunday a fishing party composed of John
Richmond, Peter B. Carr, and Simon Canfield caught in their trawl
and dragged ashore a mass of metallic rock, weighing 360 pounds, and
looking (as Mr. Canfield said) like a piece of slag. Most of the
inhabitants agreed that this heavy body was none other than the
fireball which had fallen from the sky four days before; and Dr.
Richmond M. Jones, the local scientific authority, allowed that it
must be an aerolite or meteoric stone. In chipping off specimens to
send to an expert Boston analyst, Dr. Jones discovered imbedded in
the semi-metallic mass the strange book containing the ensuing tale,
which is still in his possession.
In form the discovery resembles an ordinary notebook, about 5 × 3
inches in size, and containing thirty leaves. In material, however,
it presents marked peculiarities. The covers are apparently of some
dark stony substance unknown to geologists, and unbreakable by any
mechanical means. No chemical reagent seems to act upon them. The
leaves are much the same, save that they are lighter in colour, and
so infinitely thin as to be quite flexible. The whole is bound by
some process not very clear to those who have observed it; a process
involving the adhesion of the leaf substance to the cover substance.
These substances cannot now be separated, nor can the leaves be torn
by any amount of force. The writing is Greek of the purest classical
quality, and several students of palaeography declare that the
characters are in a cursive hand used about the second century B. C.
There is little in the text to determine the date. The mechanical
mode of writing cannot be deduced beyond the fact that it must have
resembled that of the modern slate and slate-pencil. During the
course of analytical efforts made by the late Prof. Chambers of
Harvard, several pages, mostly at the conclusion of the narrative,
were blurred to the point of utter effacement before being read; a
circumstance forming a well-nigh irreparable loss. What remains of
the contents was done into modern Greek letters by the palaeographer
Rutherford and in this form submitted to the translators.
Prof. Mayfield of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who
examined samples of the strange stone, declares it a true meteorite;
an opinion in which Dr. von Winterfeldt of Heidelberg (interned in
1918 as a dangerous enemy alien) does not concur. Prof. Bradley of
Columbia College adopts a less dogmatic ground; pointing out that
certain utterly unknown ingredients are present in large quantities,
and warning that no classification is as yet possible.
The presence, nature, and message of the strange book form so
momentous a problem, that no explanation can even be attempted. The
text, as far as preserved, is here rendered as literally as our
language permits, in the hope that some reader may eventually hit
upon an interpretation and solve one of the greatest scientific
mysteries of recent years.
—E.N.B.—L.T., Jun.
(THE STORY)
It was a narrow place, and I was alone. On one side, beyond a margin of
vivid waving green, was the sea; blue, bright, and billowy, and sending
up vaporous exhalations which intoxicated me. So profuse, indeed, were
these exhalations, that they gave me an odd impression of a coalescence
of sea and sky; for the heavens were likewise bright and blue. On the
other side was the forest, ancient almost as the sea itself, and
stretching infinitely inland. It was very dark, for the trees were
grotesquely huge and luxuriant, and incredibly numerous. Their giant
trunks were of a horrible green which blended weirdly with the narrow
green tract whereon I stood. At some distance away, on either side of
me, the strange forest extended down to the water’s edge; obliterating
the shore line and completely hemming in the narrow tract. Some of the
trees, I observed, stood in the water itself; as though impatient of
any barrier to their progress.
I saw no living thing, nor sign that any living thing save myself had
ever existed. The sea and the sky and the wood encircled me, and
reached off into regions beyond my imagination. Nor was there any sound
save of the wind-tossed wood and of the sea.
As I stood in this silent place, I suddenly commenced to tremble; for
though I knew not how I came there, and could scarce remember what my
name and rank had been, I felt that I should go mad if I could
understand what lurked about me. I recalled things I had learned,
things I had dreamed, things I had imagined and yearned for in some
other distant life. I thought of long nights when I had gazed up at the
stars of heaven and cursed the gods that my free soul could not
traverse the vast abysses which were inaccessible to my body. I
conjured up ancient blasphemies, and terrible delvings into the papyri
of Democritus; but as memories appeared, I shuddered in deeper fear,
for I knew that I was alone—horribly alone. Alone, yet close to
sentient impulses of vast, vague kind; which I prayed never to
comprehend nor encounter. In the voice of the swaying green branches I
fancied I could detect a kind of malignant hatred and daemoniac
triumph. Sometimes they struck me as being in horrible colloquy with
ghastly and unthinkable things which the scaly green bodies of the
trees half hid; hid from sight but not from consciousness. The most
oppressive of my sensations was a sinister feeling of alienage. Though
I saw about me objects which I could name—trees, grass, sea, and sky; I
felt that their relation to me was not the same as that of the trees,
grass, sea, and sky I knew in another and dimly remembered life. The
nature of the difference I could not tell, yet I shook in stark fright
as it impressed itself upon me.
And then, in a spot where I had before discerned nothing but the misty
sea, I beheld the Green Meadow; separated from me by a vast expanse of
blue rippling water with sun-tipped wavelets, yet strangely near. Often
I would peep fearfully over my right shoulder at the trees, but I
preferred to look at the Green Meadow, which affected me oddly.
It was while my eyes were fixed upon this singular tract, that I first
felt the ground in motion beneath me. Beginning with a kind of
throbbing agitation which held a fiendish suggestion of conscious
action, the bit of bank on which I stood detached itself from the
grassy shore and commenced to float away; borne slowly onward as if by
some current of resistless force. I did not move, astonished and
startled as I was by the unprecedented phenomenon; but stood rigidly
still until a wide lane of water yawned betwixt me and the land of
trees. Then I sat down in a sort of daze, and again looked at the
sun-tipped water and the Green Meadow.
Behind me the trees and the things they may have been hiding seemed to
radiate infinite menace. This I knew without turning to view them, for
as I grew more used to the scene I became less and less dependent upon
the five senses that once had been my sole reliance. I knew the green
scaly forest hated me, yet now I was safe from it, for my bit of bank
had drifted far from the shore.
But though one peril was past, another loomed up before me. Pieces of
earth were constantly crumbling from the floating isle which held me,
so that death could not be far distant in any event. Yet even then I
seemed to sense that death would be death to me no more, for I turned
again to watch the Green Meadow, imbued with a curious feeling of
security in strange contrast to my general horror.
Then it was that I heard, at a distance immeasurable, the sound of
falling water. Not that of any trivial cascade such as I had known, but
that which might be heard in the far Scythian lands if all the
Mediterranean were poured down an unfathomable abyss. It was toward
this sound that my shrinking island was drifting, yet I was content.
Far in the rear were happening weird and terrible things; things which
I turned to view, yet shivered to behold. For in the sky dark vaporous
forms hovered fantastically, brooding over trees and seeming to answer
the challenge of the waving green branches. Then a thick mist arose
from the sea to join the sky-forms, and the shore was erased from my
sight. Though the sun—what sun I knew not—shone brightly on the water
around me, the land I had left seemed involved in a daemoniac tempest
where clashed the will of the hellish trees and what they hid, with
that of the sky and the sea. And when the mist vanished, I saw only the
blue sky and the blue sea, for the land and the trees were no more.
It was at this point that my attention was arrested by the singing in
the Green Meadow. Hitherto, as I have said, I had encountered no sign
of human life; but now there arose to my ears a dull chant whose origin
and nature were apparently unmistakable. While the words were utterly
undistinguishable, the chant awaked in me a peculiar train of
associations; and I was reminded of some vaguely disquieting lines I
had once translated out of an Egyptian book, which in turn were taken
from a papyrus of ancient Meroë. Through my brain ran lines that I fear
to repeat; lines telling of very antique things and forms of life in
the days when our earth was exceeding young. Of things which thought
and moved and were alive, yet which gods and men would not consider
alive. It was a strange book.
As I listened, I became gradually conscious of a circumstance which had
before puzzled me only subconsciously. At no time had my sight
distinguished any definite objects in the Green Meadow, an impression
of vivid homogeneous verdure being the sum total of my perception. Now,
however, I saw that the current would cause my island to pass the shore
at but a little distance; so that I might learn more of the land and of
the singing thereon. My curiosity to behold the singers had mounted
high, though it was mingled with apprehension.
Bits of sod continued to break away from the tiny tract which carried
me, but I heeded not their loss; for I felt that I was not to die with
the body (or appearance of a body) which I seemed to possess. That
everything about me, even life and death, was illusory; that I had
overleaped the bounds of mortality and corporeal entity, becoming a
free, detached thing; impressed me as almost certain. Of my location I
knew nothing, save that I felt I could not be on the earth-planet once
so familiar to me. My sensations, apart from a kind of haunting terror,
were those of a traveller just embarked upon an unending voyage of
discovery. For a moment I thought of the lands and persons I had left
behind; and of strange ways whereby I might some day tell them of my
adventurings, even though I might never return.
I had now floated very near the Green Meadow, so that the voices were
clear and distinct; but though I knew many languages I could not quite
interpret the words of the chanting. Familiar they indeed were, as I
had subtly felt when at a greater distance, but beyond a sensation of
vague and awesome remembrance I could make nothing of them. A most
extraordinary quality in the voices—a quality which I cannot
describe—at once frightened and fascinated me. My eyes could now
discern several things amidst the omnipresent verdure—rocks, covered
with bright green moss, shrubs of considerable height, and less
definable shapes of great magnitude which seemed to move or vibrate
amidst the shrubbery in a peculiar way. The chanting, whose authors I
was so anxious to glimpse, seemed loudest at points where these shapes
were most numerous and most vigorously in motion.
And then, as my island drifted closer and the sound of the distant
waterfall grew louder, I saw clearly the source of the chanting, and in
one horrible instant remembered everything. Of such things I cannot,
dare not tell, for therein was revealed the hideous solution of all
which had puzzled me; and that solution would drive you mad, even as it
almost drove me. . . . I knew now the change through which I had
passed, and through which certain others who once were men had passed!
and I knew the endless cycle of the future which none like me may
escape. . . . I shall live forever, be conscious forever, though my
soul cries out to the gods for the boon of death and oblivion. . . .
All is before me: beyond the deafening torrent lies the land of
Stethelos, where young men are infinitely old. . . . The Green
Meadow . . . I will send a message across the horrible immeasurable
abyss. . . .
[At this point the text becomes illegible.]
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