object:1f.lovecraft - The Mound
author class:H P Lovecraft
subject class:Fiction
genre class:Horror
class:chapter
for Zealia Bishop
I.
It is only within the last few years that most people have stopped
thinking of the West as a new land. I suppose the idea gained ground
because our own especial civilisation happens to be new there; but
nowadays explorers are digging beneath the surface and bringing up
whole chapters of life that rose and fell among these plains and
mountains before recorded history began. We think nothing of a Pueblo
village 2500 years old, and it hardly jolts us when archaeologists put
the sub-pedregal culture of Mexico back to 17,000 or 18,000 B. C. We
hear rumours of still older things, too—of primitive man
contemporaneous with extinct animals and known today only through a few
fragmentary bones and artifacts—so that the idea of newness is fading
out pretty rapidly. Europeans usually catch the sense of immemorial
ancientness and deep deposits from successive life-streams better than
we do. Only a couple of years ago a British author spoke of Arizona as
a “moon-dim region, very lovely in its way, and stark and old—an
ancient, lonely land”.
Yet I believe I have a deeper sense of the stupefying—almost
horrible—ancientness of the West than any European. It all comes from
an incident that happened in 1928; an incident which I’d greatly like
to dismiss as three-quarters hallucination, but which has left such a
frightfully firm impression on my memory that I can’t put it off very
easily. It was in Oklahoma, where my work as an American Indian
ethnologist constantly takes me and where I had come upon some
devilishly strange and disconcerting matters before. Make no
mistake—Oklahoma is a lot more than a mere pioneers’ and promoters’
frontier. There are old, old tribes with old, old memories there; and
when the tom-toms beat ceaselessly over brooding plains in the autumn
the spirits of men are brought dangerously close to primal, whispered
things. I am white and Eastern enough myself, but anybody is welcome to
know that the rites of Yig, Father of Snakes, can get a real shudder
out of me any day. I have heard and seen too much to be “sophisticated”
in such matters. And so it is with this incident of 1928. I’d like to
laugh it off—but I can’t.
I had gone into Oklahoma to track down and correlate one of the many
ghost tales which were current among the white settlers, but which had
strong Indian corroboration, and—I felt sure—an ultimate Indian source.
They were very curious, these open-air ghost tales; and though they
sounded flat and prosaic in the mouths of the white people, they had
earmarks of linkage with some of the richest and obscurest phases of
native mythology. All of them were woven around the vast, lonely,
artificial-looking mounds in the western part of the state, and all of
them involved apparitions of exceedingly strange aspect and equipment.
The commonest, and among the oldest, became quite famous in 1892, when
a government marshal named John Willis went into the mound region after
horse-thieves and came out with a wild yarn of nocturnal cavalry horses
in the air between great armies of invisible spectres—battles that
involved the rush of hooves and feet, the thud of blows, the clank of
metal on metal, the muffled cries of warriors, and the fall of human
and equine bodies. These things happened by moonlight, and frightened
his horse as well as himself. The sounds persisted an hour at a time;
vivid, but subdued as if brought from a distance by a wind, and
unaccompanied by any glimpse of the armies themselves. Later on Willis
learned that the seat of the sounds was a notoriously haunted spot,
shunned by settlers and Indians alike. Many had seen, or half seen, the
warring horsemen in the sky, and had furnished dim, ambiguous
descriptions. The settlers described the ghostly fighters as Indians,
though of no familiar tribe, and having the most singular costumes and
weapons. They even went so far as to say that they could not be sure
the horses were really horses.
The Indians, on the other hand, did not seem to claim the spectres as
kinsfolk. They referred to them as “those people”, “the old people”, or
“they who dwell below”, and appeared to hold them in too great a
frightened veneration to talk much about them. No ethnologist had been
able to pin any tale-teller down to a specific description of the
beings, and apparently nobody had ever had a very clear look at them.
The Indians had one or two old proverbs about these phenomena, saying
that “men very old, make very big spirit; not so old, not so big; older
than all time, then spirit he so big he near flesh; those old people
and spirits they mix up—get all the same”.
Now all of this, of course, is “old stuff” to an ethnologist—of a piece
with the persistent legends of rich hidden cities and buried races
which abound among the Pueblo and plains Indians, and which lured
Coronado centuries ago on his vain search for the fabled Quivira. What
took me into western Oklahoma was something far more definite and
tangible—a local and distinctive tale which, though really old, was
wholly new to the outside world of research, and which involved the
first clear descriptions of the ghosts which it treated of. There was
an added thrill in the fact that it came from the remote town of
Binger, in Caddo County, a place I had long known as the scene of a
very terrible and partly inexplicable occurrence connected with the
snake-god myth.
The tale, outwardly, was an extremely naive and simple one, and centred
in a huge, lone mound or small hill that rose above the plain about a
third of a mile west of the village—a mound which some thought a
product of Nature, but which others believed to be a burial-place or
ceremonial dais constructed by prehistoric tribes. This mound, the
villagers said, was constantly haunted by two Indian figures which
appeared in alternation; an old man who paced back and forth along the
top from dawn till dusk, regardless of the weather and with only brief
intervals of disappearance, and a squaw who took his place at night
with a blue-flamed torch that glimmered quite continuously till
morning. When the moon was bright the squaw’s peculiar figure could be
seen fairly plainly, and over half the villagers agreed that the
apparition was headless.
Local opinion was divided as to the motives and relative ghostliness of
the two visions. Some held that the man was not a ghost at all, but a
living Indian who had killed and beheaded a squaw for gold and buried
her somewhere on the mound. According to these theorists he was pacing
the eminence through sheer remorse, bound by the spirit of his victim
which took visible shape after dark. But other theorists, more uniform
in their spectral beliefs, held that both man and woman were ghosts;
the man having killed the squaw and himself as well at some very
distant period. These and minor variant versions seemed to have been
current ever since the settlement of the Wichita country in 1889, and
were, I was told, sustained to an astonishing degree by still-existing
phenomena which anyone might observe for himself. Not many ghost tales
offer such free and open proof, and I was very eager to see what
bizarre wonders might be lurking in this small, obscure village so far
from the beaten path of crowds and from the ruthless searchlight of
scientific knowledge. So, in the late summer of 1928 I took a train for
Binger and brooded on strange mysteries as the cars rattled timidly
along their single track through a lonelier and lonelier landscape.
Binger is a modest cluster of frame houses and stores in the midst of a
flat windy region full of clouds of red dust. There are about 500
inhabitants besides the Indians on a neighbouring reservation; the
principal occupation seeming to be agriculture. The soil is decently
fertile, and the oil boom has not reached this part of the state. My
train drew in at twilight, and I felt rather lost and uneasy—cut off
from wholesome and every-day things—as it puffed away to the southward
without me. The station platform was filled with curious loafers, all
of whom seemed eager to direct me when I asked for the man to whom I
had letters of introduction. I was ushered along a commonplace main
street whose rutted surface was red with the sandstone soil of the
country, and finally delivered at the door of my prospective host.
Those who had arranged things for me had done well; for Mr. Compton was
a man of high intelligence and local responsibility, while his
mother—who lived with him and was familiarly known as “Grandma
Compton”—was one of the first pioneer generation, and a veritable mine
of anecdote and folklore.
That evening the Comptons summed up for me all the legends current
among the villagers, proving that the phenomenon I had come to study
was indeed a baffling and important one. The ghosts, it seems, were
accepted almost as a matter of course by everyone in Binger. Two
generations had been born and grown up within sight of that queer, lone
tumulus and its restless figures. The neighbourhood of the mound was
naturally feared and shunned, so that the village and the farms had not
spread toward it in all four decades of settlement; yet venturesome
individuals had several times visited it. Some had come back to report
that they saw no ghosts at all when they neared the dreaded hill; that
somehow the lone sentinel had stepped out of sight before they reached
the spot, leaving them free to climb the steep slope and explore the
flat summit. There was nothing up there, they said—merely a rough
expanse of underbrush. Where the Indian watcher could have vanished to,
they had no idea. He must, they reflected, have descended the slope and
somehow managed to escape unseen along the plain; although there was no
convenient cover within sight. At any rate, there did not appear to be
any opening into the mound; a conclusion which was reached after
considerable exploration of the shrubbery and tall grass on all sides.
In a few cases some of the more sensitive searchers declared that they
felt a sort of invisible restraining presence; but they could describe
nothing more definite than that. It was simply as if the air thickened
against them in the direction they wished to move. It is needless to
mention that all these daring surveys were conducted by day. Nothing in
the universe could have induced any human being, white or red, to
approach that sinister elevation after dark; and indeed, no Indian
would have thought of going near it even in the brightest sunlight.
But it was not from the tales of these sane, observant seekers that the
chief terror of the ghost-mound sprang; indeed, had their experience
been typical, the phenomenon would have bulked far less prominently in
the local legendry. The most evil thing was the fact that many other
seekers had come back strangely impaired in mind and body, or had not
come back at all. The first of these cases had occurred in 1891, when a
young man named Heaton had gone with a shovel to see what hidden
secrets he could unearth. He had heard curious tales from the Indians,
and had laughed at the barren report of another youth who had been out
to the mound and had found nothing. Heaton had watched the mound with a
spy glass from the village while the other youth made his trip; and as
the explorer neared the spot, he saw the sentinel Indian walk
deliberately down into the tumulus as if a trap-door and staircase
existed on the top. The other youth had not noticed how the Indian
disappeared, but had merely found him gone upon arriving at the mound.
When Heaton made his own trip he resolved to get to the bottom of the
mystery, and watchers from the village saw him hacking diligently at
the shrubbery atop the mound. Then they saw his figure melt slowly into
invisibility; not to reappear for long hours, till after the dusk drew
on, and the torch of the headless squaw glimmered ghoulishly on the
distant elevation. About two hours after nightfall he staggered into
the village minus his spade and other belongings, and burst into a
shrieking monologue of disconnected ravings. He howled of shocking
abysses and monsters, of terrible carvings and statues, of inhuman
captors and grotesque tortures, and of other fantastic abnormalities
too complex and chimerical even to remember. “Old! Old! Old!” he would
moan over and over again, “great God, they are older than the earth,
and came here from somewhere else—they know what you think, and make
you know what they think—they’re half-man, half-ghost—crossed the
line—melt and take shape again—getting more and more so, yet we’re all
descended from them in the beginning—children of Tulu—everything made
of gold—monstrous animals, half-human—dead slaves—madness—Iä!
Shub-Niggurath!—that white man—oh, my God, what they did to him! . . .”
Heaton was the village idiot for about eight years, after which he died
in an epileptic fit. Since his ordeal there had been two more cases of
mound-madness, and eight of total disappearance. Immediately after
Heaton’s mad return, three desperate and determined men had gone out to
the lone hill together; heavily armed, and with spades and pickaxes.
Watching villagers saw the Indian ghost melt away as the explorers drew
near, and afterward saw the men climb the mound and begin scouting
around through the underbrush. All at once they faded into nothingness,
and were never seen again. One watcher, with an especially powerful
telescope, thought he saw other forms dimly materialise beside the
hapless men and drag them down into the mound; but this account
remained uncorroborated. It is needless to say that no searching-party
went out after the lost ones, and that for many years the mound was
wholly unvisited. Only when the incidents of 1891 were largely
forgotten did anybody dare to think of further explorations. Then,
about 1910, a fellow too young to recall the old horrors made a trip to
the shunned spot and found nothing at all.
By 1915 the acute dread and wild legendry of ’91 had largely faded into
the commonplace and unimaginative ghost-tales at present surviving—that
is, had so faded among the white people. On the nearby reservation were
old Indians who thought much and kept their own counsel. About this
time a second wave of active curiosity and adventuring developed, and
several bold searchers made the trip to the mound and returned. Then
came a trip of two Eastern visitors with spades and other apparatus—a
pair of amateur archaeologists connected with a small college, who had
been making studies among the Indians. No one watched this trip from
the village, but they never came back. The searching-party that went
out after them—among whom was my host Clyde Compton—found nothing
whatsoever amiss at the mound.
The next trip was the solitary venture of old Capt. Lawton, a grizzled
pioneer who had helped to open up the region in 1889, but who had never
been there since. He had recalled the mound and its fascination all
through the years; and being now in comfortable retirement, resolved to
have a try at solving the ancient riddle. Long familiarity with Indian
myth had given him ideas rather stranger than those of the simple
villagers, and he had made preparations for some extensive delving. He
ascended the mound on the morning of Thursday, May 11, 1916, watched
through spy glasses by more than twenty people in the village and on
the adjacent plain. His disappearance was very sudden, and occurred as
he was hacking at the shrubbery with a brush-cutter. No one could say
more than that he was there one moment and absent the next. For over a
week no tidings of him reached Binger, and then—in the middle of the
night—there dragged itself into the village the object about which
dispute still rages.
It said it was—or had been—Capt. Lawton, but it was definitely younger
by as much as forty years than the old man who had climbed the mound.
Its hair was jet black, and its face—now distorted with nameless
fright—free from wrinkles. But it did remind Grandma Compton most
uncannily of the captain as he had looked back in ’89. Its feet were
cut off neatly at the ankles, and the stumps were smoothly healed to an
extent almost incredible if the being really were the man who had
walked upright a week before. It babbled of incomprehensible things,
and kept repeating the name “George Lawton, George E. Lawton” as if
trying to reassure itself of its own identity. The things it babbled
of, Grandma Compton thought, were curiously like the hallucinations of
poor young Heaton in ’91; though there were minor differences. “The
blue light!—the blue light! . . .” muttered the object, “always down
there, before there were any living things—older than the
dinosaurs—always the same, only weaker—never death—brooding and
brooding and brooding—the same people, half-man and half-gas—the dead
that walk and work—oh, those beasts, those half-human unicorns—houses
and cities of gold—old, old, old, older than time—came down from the
stars—Great Tulu—Azathoth—Nyarlathotep—waiting, waiting. . . .” The
object died before dawn.
Of course there was an investigation, and the Indians at the
reservation were grilled unmercifully. But they knew nothing, and had
nothing to say. At least, none of them had anything to say except old
Grey Eagle, a Wichita chieftain whose more than a century of age put
him above common fears. He alone deigned to grunt some advice.
“You let um ’lone, white man. No good—those people. All under here, all
under there, them old ones. Yig, big father of snakes, he there. Yig is
Yig. Tiráwa, big father of men, he there. Tiráwa is Tiráwa. No die. No
get old. Just same like air. Just live and wait. One time they come out
here, live and fight. Build um dirt tepee. Bring up gold—they got
plenty. Go off and make new lodges. Me them. You them. Then big waters
come. All change. Nobody come out, let nobody in. Get in, no get out.
You let um ’lone, you have no bad medicine. Red man know, he no get
catch. White man meddle, he no come back. Keep ’way little hills. No
good. Grey Eagle say this.”
If Joe Norton and Rance Wheelock had taken the old chief’s advice, they
would probably be here today; but they didn’t. They were great readers
and materialists, and feared nothing in heaven or earth; and they
thought that some Indian fiends had a secret headquarters inside the
mound. They had been to the mound before, and now they went again to
avenge old Capt. Lawton—boasting that they’d do it if they had to tear
the mound down altogether. Clyde Compton watched them with a pair of
prism binoculars and saw them round the base of the sinister hill.
Evidently they meant to survey their territory very gradually and
minutely. Minutes passed, and they did not reappear. Nor were they ever
seen again.
Once more the mound was a thing of panic fright, and only the
excitement of the Great War served to restore it to the farther
background of Binger folklore. It was unvisited from 1916 to 1919, and
would have remained so but for the daredeviltry of some of the youths
back from service in France. From 1919 to 1920, however, there was a
veritable epidemic of mound-visiting among the prematurely hardened
young veterans—an epidemic that waxed as one youth after another
returned unhurt and contemptuous. By 1920—so short is human memory—the
mound was almost a joke; and the tame story of the murdered squaw began
to displace darker whispers on everybody’s tongues. Then two reckless
young brothers—the especially unimaginative and hard-boiled Clay
boys—decided to go and dig up the buried squaw and the gold for which
the old Indian had murdered her.
They went out on a September afternoon—about the time the Indian
tom-toms begin their incessant annual beating over the flat, red-dusty
plains. Nobody watched them, and their parents did not become worried
at their non-return for several hours. Then came an alarm and a
searching-party, and another resignation to the mystery of silence and
doubt.
But one of them came back after all. It was Ed, the elder, and his
straw-coloured hair and beard had turned an albino white for two inches
from the roots. On his forehead was a queer scar like a branded
hieroglyph. Three months after he and his brother Walker had vanished
he skulked into his house at night, wearing nothing but a queerly
patterned blanket which he thrust into the fire as soon as he had got
into a suit of his own clothes. He told his parents that he and Walker
had been captured by some strange Indians—not Wichitas or Caddos—and
held prisoners somewhere toward the west. Walker had died under
torture, but he himself had managed to escape at a high cost. The
experience had been particularly terrible, and he could not talk about
it just then. He must rest—and anyway, it would do no good to give an
alarm and try to find and punish the Indians. They were not of a sort
that could be caught or punished, and it was especially important for
the good of Binger—for the good of the world—that they be not pursued
into their secret lair. As a matter of fact, they were not altogether
what one could call real Indians—he would explain about that later.
Meanwhile he must rest. Better not to rouse the village with the news
of his return—he would go upstairs and sleep. Before he climbed the
rickety flight to his room he took a pad and pencil from the
living-room table, and an automatic pistol from his father’s desk
drawer.
Three hours later the shot rang out. Ed Clay had put a bullet neatly
through his temples with a pistol clutched in his left hand, leaving a
sparsely written sheet of paper on the rickety table near his bed. He
had, it later appeared from the whittled pencil-stub and stove full of
charred paper, originally written much more; but had finally decided
not to tell what he knew beyond vague hints. The surviving fragment was
only a mad warning scrawled in a curiously backhanded script—the
ravings of a mind obviously deranged by hardships—and it read thus;
rather surprisingly for the utterance of one who had always been stolid
and matter-of-fact:
For gods sake never go nere that mound it is part of some kind of a
world so devilish and old it cannot be spoke about me and Walker
went and was took into the thing just melted at times and made up
agen and the whole world outside is helpless alongside of what they
can do—they what live forever young as they like and you cant tell
if they are really men or just gostes—and what they do cant be spoke
about and this is only 1 entrance—you cant tell how big the whole
thing is—after what we seen I dont want to live aney more France was
nothing besides this—and see that people always keep away o god they
wood if they see poor walker like he was in the end.
Yrs truely
Ed Clay
At the autopsy it was found that all of young Clay’s organs were
transposed from right to left within his body, as if he had been turned
inside out. Whether they had always been so, no one could say at the
time, but it was later learned from army records that Ed had been
perfectly normal when mustered out of the service in May, 1919. Whether
there was a mistake somewhere, or whether some unprecedented
metamorphosis had indeed occurred, is still an unsettled question, as
is also the origin of the hieroglyph-like scar on the forehead.
That was the end of the explorations of the mound. In the eight
intervening years no one had been near the place, and few indeed had
even cared to level a spy glass at it. From time to time people
continued to glance nervously at the lone hill as it rose starkly from
the plain against the western sky, and to shudder at the small dark
speck that paraded by day and the glimmering will-o’-the-wisp that
danced by night. The thing was accepted at face value as a mystery not
to be probed, and by common consent the village shunned the subject. It
was, after all, quite easy to avoid the hill; for space was unlimited
in every direction, and community life always follows beaten trails.
The mound side of the village was simply kept trailless, as if it had
been water or swampland or desert. And it is a curious commentary on
the stolidity and imaginative sterility of the human animal that the
whispers with which children and strangers were warned away from the
mound quickly sank once more into the flat tale of a murderous Indian
ghost and his squaw victim. Only the tribesmen on the reservation, and
thoughtful old-timers like Grandma Compton, remembered the overtones of
unholy vistas and deep cosmic menace which clustered around the ravings
of those who had come back changed and shattered.
It was very late, and Grandma Compton had long since gone upstairs to
bed, when Clyde finished telling me this. I hardly knew what to think
of the frightful puzzle, yet rebelled at any notion to conflict with
sane materialism. What influence had brought madness, or the impulse of
flight and wandering, to so many who had visited the mound? Though
vastly impressed, I was spurred on rather than deterred. Surely I must
get to the bottom of this matter, as well I might if I kept a cool head
and an unbroken determination. Compton saw my mood and shook his head
worriedly. Then he motioned me to follow him outdoors.
We stepped from the frame house to the quiet side street or lane, and
walked a few paces in the light of a waning August moon to where the
houses were thinner. The half-moon was still low, and had not blotted
many stars from the sky; so that I could see not only the westering
gleams of Altair and Vega, but the mystic shimmering of the Milky Way,
as I looked out over the vast expanse of earth and sky in the direction
that Compton pointed. Then all at once I saw a spark that was not a
star—a bluish spark that moved and glimmered against the Milky Way near
the horizon, and that seemed in a vague way more evil and malevolent
than anything in the vault above. In another moment it was clear that
this spark came from the top of a long distant rise in the outspread
and faintly litten plain; and I turned to Compton with a question.
“Yes,” he answered, “it’s the blue ghost-light—and that is the mound.
There’s not a night in history that we haven’t seen it—and not a living
soul in Binger that would walk out over that plain toward it. It’s a
bad business, young man, and if you’re wise you’ll let it rest where it
is. Better call your search off, son, and tackle some of the other
Injun legends around here. We’ve plenty to keep you busy, heaven
knows!”
II.
But I was in no mood for advice; and though Compton gave me a pleasant
room, I could not sleep a wink through eagerness for the next morning
with its chances to see the daytime ghost and to question the Indians
at the reservation. I meant to go about the whole thing slowly and
thoroughly, equipping myself with all available data both white and red
before I commenced any actual archaeological investigations. I rose and
dressed at dawn, and when I heard others stirring I went downstairs.
Compton was building the kitchen fire while his mother was busy in the
pantry. When he saw me he nodded, and after a moment invited me out
into the glamorous young sunlight. I knew where we were going, and as
we walked along the lane I strained my eyes westward over the plains.
There was the mound—far away and very curious in its aspect of
artificial regularity. It must have been from thirty to forty feet
high, and all of a hundred yards from north to south as I looked at it.
It was not as wide as that from east to west, Compton said, but had the
contour of a rather thinnish ellipse. He, I knew, had been safely out
to it and back several times. As I looked at the rim silhouetted
against the deep blue of the west I tried to follow its minor
irregularities, and became impressed with a sense of something moving
upon it. My pulse mounted a bit feverishly, and I seized quickly on the
high-powered binoculars which Compton had quietly offered me. Focussing
them hastily, I saw at first only a tangle of underbrush on the distant
mound’s rim—and then something stalked into the field.
It was unmistakably a human shape, and I knew at once that I was seeing
the daytime “Indian ghost” I did not wonder at the description, for
surely the tall, lean, darkly robed being with the filleted black hair
and seamed, coppery, expressionless, aquiline face looked more like an
Indian than anything else in my previous experience. And yet my trained
ethnologist’s eye told me at once that this was no redskin of any sort
hitherto known to history, but a creature of vast racial variation and
of a wholly different culture-stream. Modern Indians are
brachycephalic—round-headed—and you can’t find any dolichocephalic or
long-headed skulls except in ancient Pueblo deposits dating back 2500
years or more; yet this man’s long-headedness was so pronounced that I
recognised it at once, even at his vast distance and in the uncertain
field of the binoculars. I saw, too, that the pattern of his robe
represented a decorative tradition utterly remote from anything we
recognise in southwestern native art. There were shining metal
trappings, likewise, and a short sword or kindred weapon at his side,
all wrought in a fashion wholly alien to anything I had ever heard of.
As he paced back and forth along the top of the mound I followed him
for several minutes with the glass, noting the kinaesthetic quality of
his stride and the poised way he carried his head; and there was borne
in upon me the strong, persistent conviction that this man, whoever or
whatever he might be, was certainly not a savage. He was the product of
a civilisation, I felt instinctively, though of what civilisation I
could not guess. At length he disappeared beyond the farther edge of
the mound, as if descending the opposite and unseen slope; and I
lowered the glass with a curious mixture of puzzled feelings. Compton
was looking quizzically at me, and I nodded non-committally, “What do
you make of that?” he ventured. “This is what we’ve seen here in Binger
every day of our lives.”
That noon found me at the Indian reservation talking with old Grey
Eagle—who, through some miracle, was still alive; though he must have
been close to a hundred and fifty years old. He was a strange,
impressive figure—this stern, fearless leader of his kind who had
talked with outlaws and traders in fringed buckskin and French
officials in knee-breeches and three-cornered hats—and I was glad to
see that, because of my air of deference toward him, he appeared to
like me. His liking, however, took an unfortunately obstructive form as
soon as he learned what I wanted; for all he would do was to warn me
against the search I was about to make.
“You good boy—you no bother that hill. Bad medicine. Plenty devil under
there—catchum when you dig. No dig, no hurt. Go and dig, no come back.
Just same when me boy, just same when my father and he father boy. All
time buck he walk in day, squaw with no head she walk in night. All
time since white man with tin coats they come from sunset and below big
river—long way back—three, four times more back than Grey Eagle—two
times more back than Frenchmen—all same after then. More back than
that, nobody go near little hills nor deep valleys with stone caves.
Still more back, those old ones no hide, come out and make villages.
Bring plenty gold. Me them. You them. Then big waters come. All change.
Nobody come out, let nobody in. Get in, no get out. They no die—no get
old like Grey Eagle with valleys in face and snow on head. Just same
like air—some man, some spirit. Bad medicine. Sometimes at night spirit
come out on half-man–half-horse-with-horn and fight where men once
fight. Keep ’way them place. No good. You good boy—go ’way and let them
old ones ’lone.”
That was all I could get out of the ancient chief, and the rest of the
Indians would say nothing at all. But if I was troubled, Grey Eagle was
clearly more so; for he obviously felt a real regret at the thought of
my invading the region he feared so abjectly. As I turned to leave the
reservation he stopped me for a final ceremonial farewell, and once
more tried to get my promise to abandon my search. When he saw that he
could not, he produced something half-timidly from a buckskin pouch he
wore, and extended it toward me very solemnly. It was a worn but finely
minted metal disc about two inches in diameter, oddly figured and
perforated, and suspended from a leathern cord.
“You no promise, then Grey Eagle no can tell what get you. But if
anything help um, this good medicine. Come from my father—he get from
he father—he get from he father—all way back, close to Tiráwa, all
men’s father. My father say, ‘You keep ’way from those old ones, keep
’way from little hills and valleys with stone caves. But if old ones
they come out to get you, then you shew um this medicine. They know.
They make him long way back. They look, then they no do such bad
medicine maybe. But no can tell. You keep ’way, just same. Them no
good. No tell what they do.’”
As he spoke, Grey Eagle was hanging the thing around my neck, and I saw
it was a very curious object indeed. The more I looked at it, the more
I marvelled; for not only was its heavy, darkish, lustrous, and richly
mottled substance an absolutely strange metal to me, but what was left
of its design seemed to be of a marvellously artistic and utterly
unknown workmanship. One side, so far as I could see, had borne an
exquisitely modelled serpent design; whilst the other side had depicted
a kind of octopus or other tentacled monster. There were some
half-effaced hieroglyphs, too, of a kind which no archaeologist could
identify or even place conjecturally. With Grey Eagle’s permission I
later had expert historians, anthropologists, geologists, and chemists
pass carefully upon the disc, but from them I obtained only a chorus of
bafflement. It defied either classification or analysis. The chemists
called it an amalgam of unknown metallic elements of heavy atomic
weight, and one geologist suggested that the substance must be of
meteoric origin, shot from unknown gulfs of interstellar space. Whether
it really saved my life or sanity or existence as a human being I
cannot attempt to say, but Grey Eagle is sure of it. He has it again,
now, and I wonder if it has any connexion with his inordinate age. All
his fathers who had it lived far beyond the century mark, perishing
only in battle. Is it possible that Grey Eagle, if kept from accidents,
will never die? But I am ahead of my story.
When I returned to the village I tried to secure more mound-lore, but
found only excited gossip and opposition. It was really flattering to
see how solicitous the people were about my safety, but I had to set
their almost frantic remonstrances aside. I shewed them Grey Eagle’s
charm, but none of them had ever heard of it before, or seen anything
even remotely like it. They agreed that it could not be an Indian
relic, and imagined that the old chief’s ancestors must have obtained
it from some trader.
When they saw they could not deter me from my trip, the Binger citizens
sadly did what they could to aid my outfitting. Having known before my
arrival the sort of work to be done, I had most of my supplies already
with me—machete and trench-knife for shrub-clearing and excavating,
electric torches for any underground phase which might develop, rope,
field-glasses, tape-measure, microscope, and incidentals for
emergencies—as much, in fact, as might be comfortably stowed in a
convenient handbag. To this equipment I added only the heavy revolver
which the sheriff forced upon me, and the pick and shovel which I
thought might expedite my work.
I decided to carry these latter things slung over my shoulder with a
stout cord—for I soon saw that I could not hope for any helpers or
fellow-explorers. The village would watch me, no doubt, with all its
available telescopes and field-glasses; but it would not send any
citizen so much as a yard over the flat plain toward the lone hillock.
My start was timed for early the next morning, and all the rest of that
day I was treated with the awed and uneasy respect which people give to
a man about to set out for certain doom.
When morning came—a cloudy though not a threatening morning—the whole
village turned out to see me start across the dustblown plain.
Binoculars shewed the lone man at his usual pacing on the mound, and I
resolved to keep him in sight as steadily as possible during my
approach. At the last moment a vague sense of dread oppressed me, and I
was just weak and whimsical enough to let Grey Eagle’s talisman swing
on my chest in full view of any beings or ghosts who might be inclined
to heed it. Bidding au revoir to Compton and his mother, I started off
at a brisk stride despite the bag in my left hand and the clanking pick
and shovel strapped to my back; holding my field-glass in my right hand
and taking a glance at the silent pacer from time to time. As I neared
the mound I saw the man very clearly, and fancied I could trace an
expression of infinite evil and decadence on his seamed, hairless
features. I was startled, too, to see that his goldenly gleaming
weapon-case bore hieroglyphs very similar to those on the unknown
talisman I wore. All the creature’s costume and trappings bespoke
exquisite workmanship and cultivation. Then, all too abruptly, I saw
him start down the farther side of the mound and out of sight. When I
reached the place, about ten minutes after I set out, there was no one
there.
There is no need of relating how I spent the early part of my search in
surveying and circumnavigating the mound, taking measurements, and
stepping back to view the thing from different angles. It had impressed
me tremendously as I approached it, and there seemed to be a kind of
latent menace in its too regular outlines. It was the only elevation of
any sort on the wide, level plain; and I could not doubt for a moment
that it was an artificial tumulus. The steep sides seemed wholly
unbroken, and without marks of human tenancy or passage. There were no
signs of a path toward the top; and, burdened as I was, I managed to
scramble up only with considerable difficulty. When I reached the
summit I found a roughly level elliptical plateau about 300 by 50 feet
in dimensions; uniformly covered with rank grass and dense underbrush,
and utterly incompatible with the constant presence of a pacing
sentinel. This condition gave me a real shock, for it shewed beyond
question that the “Old Indian”, vivid though he seemed, could not be
other than a collective hallucination.
I looked about with considerable perplexity and alarm, glancing
wistfully back at the village and the mass of black dots which I knew
was the watching crowd. Training my glass upon them, I saw that they
were studying me avidly with their glasses; so to reassure them I waved
my cap in the air with a show of jauntiness which I was far from
feeling. Then, settling to my work I flung down pick, shovel, and bag;
taking my machete from the latter and commencing to clear away
underbrush. It was a weary task, and now and then I felt a curious
shiver as some perverse gust of wind arose to hamper my motion with a
skill approaching deliberateness. At times it seemed as if a
half-tangible force were pushing me back as I worked—almost as if the
air thickened in front of me, or as if formless hands tugged at my
wrists. My energy seemed used up without producing adequate results,
yet for all that I made some progress.
By afternoon I had clearly perceived that, toward the northern end of
the mound, there was a slight bowl-like depression in the root-tangled
earth. While this might mean nothing, it would be a good place to begin
when I reached the digging stage, and I made a mental note of it. At
the same time I noticed another and very peculiar thing—namely, that
the Indian talisman swinging from my neck seemed to behave oddly at a
point about seventeen feet southeast of the suggested bowl. Its
gyrations were altered whenever I happened to stoop around that point,
and it tugged downward as if attracted by some magnetism in the soil.
The more I noticed this, the more it struck me, till at length I
decided to do a little preliminary digging there without further delay.
As I turned up the soil with my trench-knife I could not help wondering
at the relative thinness of the reddish regional layer. The country as
a whole was all red sandstone earth, but here I found a strange black
loam less than a foot down. It was such soil as one finds in the
strange, deep valleys farther west and south, and must surely have been
brought from a considerable distance in the prehistoric age when the
mound was reared. Kneeling and digging, I felt the leathern cord around
my neck tugged harder and harder, as something in the soil seemed to
draw the heavy metal talisman more and more. Then I felt my implements
strike a hard surface, and wondered if a rock layer rested beneath.
Prying about with the trench-knife, I found that such was not the case.
Instead, to my intense surprise and feverish interest, I brought up a
mould-clogged, heavy object of cylindrical shape—about a foot long and
four inches in diameter—to which my hanging talisman clove with
glue-like tenacity. As I cleared off the black loam my wonder and
tension increased at the bas-reliefs revealed by that process. The
whole cylinder, ends and all, was covered with figures and hieroglyphs;
and I saw with growing excitement that these things were in the same
unknown tradition as those on Grey Eagle’s charm and on the yellow
metal trappings of the ghost I had seen through my binoculars.
Sitting down, I further cleaned the magnetic cylinder against the rough
corduroy of my knickerbockers, and observed that it was made of the
same heavy, lustrous unknown metal as the charm—hence, no doubt, the
singular attraction. The carvings and chasings were very strange and
very horrible—nameless monsters and designs fraught with insidious
evil—and all were of the highest finish and craftsmanship. I could not
at first make head or tail of the thing, and handled it aimlessly until
I spied a cleavage near one end. Then I sought eagerly for some mode of
opening, discovering at last that the end simply unscrewed.
The cap yielded with difficulty, but at last it came off, liberating a
curious aromatic odour. The sole contents was a bulky roll of a
yellowish, paper-like substance inscribed in greenish characters, and
for a second I had the supreme thrill of fancying that I held a written
key to unknown elder worlds and abysses beyond time. Almost
immediately, however, the unrolling of one end shewed that the
manuscript was in Spanish—albeit the formal, pompous Spanish of a
long-departed day. In the golden sunset light I looked at the heading
and the opening paragraph, trying to decipher the wretched and
ill-punctuated script of the vanished writer. What manner of relic was
this? Upon what sort of a discovery had I stumbled? The first words set
me in a new fury of excitement and curiosity, for instead of diverting
me from my original quest they startlingly confirmed me in that very
effort.
The yellow scroll with the green script began with a bold, identifying
caption and a ceremoniously desperate appeal for belief in incredible
revelations to follow:
RELACIÓN DE PÁNFILO DE ZAMACONA Y NUÑEZ, HIDALGO DE LUARCA EN
ASTURIAS, TOCANTE AL MUNDO SOTERRÁNEO DE XINAIÁN, A. D. MDXLV
En el nombre de la santísima Trinidad, Padre, Hijo, y
Espíritu-Santo, tres personas distintas y un solo. Dios verdadero, y
de la santísima Virgen muestra Señora, YO, PÁNFILO DE ZAMACONA, HIJO
DE PEDRO GUZMAN Y ZAMACONA, HIDALGO, Y DE LA DOÑA YNÉS ALVARADO Y
NUÑEZ, DE LUARCA EN ASTURIAS, juro para que todo que deco está
verdadero como sacramento. . . .
I paused to reflect on the portentous significance of what I was
reading. “The Narrative of Pánfilo de Zamacona y Nuñez, gentleman, of
Luarca in Asturias, Concerning the Subterranean World of Xinaián, A. D.
1545” . . . Here, surely, was too much for any mind to absorb all at
once. A subterranean world—again that persistent idea which filtered
through all the Indian tales and through all the utterances of those
who had come back from the mound. And the date—1545—what could this
mean? In 1540 Coronado and his men had gone north from Mexico into the
wilderness, but had they not turned back in 1542! My eye ran questingly
down the opened part of the scroll, and almost at once seized on the
name Francisco Vásquez de Coronado. The writer of this thing, clearly,
was one of Coronado’s men—but what had he been doing in this remote
realm three years after his party had gone back? I must read further,
for another glance told me that what was now unrolled was merely a
summary of Coronado’s northward march, differing in no essential way
from the account known to history.
It was only the waning light which checked me before I could unroll and
read more, and in my impatient bafflement I almost forgot to be
frightened at the onrush of night in this sinister place. Others,
however, had not forgotten the lurking terror, for I heard a loud
distant hallooing from a knot of men who had gathered at the edge of
the town. Answering the anxious hail, I restored the manuscript to its
strange cylinder—to which the disc around my neck still clung until I
pried it off and packed it and my smaller implements for departure.
Leaving the pick and shovel for the next day’s work, I took up my
handbag, scrambled down the steep side of the mound, and in another
quarter-hour was back in the village explaining and exhibiting my
curious find. As darkness drew on, I glanced back at the mound I had so
lately left, and saw with a shudder that the faint bluish torch of the
nocturnal squaw-ghost had begun to glimmer.
It was hard work waiting to get at the bygone Spaniard’s narrative; but
I knew I must have quiet and leisure for a good translation, so
reluctantly saved the task for the later hours of night. Promising the
townsfolk a clear account of my findings in the morning, and giving
them an ample opportunity to examine the bizarre and provocative
cylinder, I accompanied Clyde Compton home and ascended to my room for
the translating process as soon as I possibly could. My host and his
mother were intensely eager to hear the tale, but I thought they had
better wait till I could thoroughly absorb the text myself and give
them the gist concisely and unerringly.
Opening my handbag in the light of a single electric bulb, I again took
out the cylinder and noted the instant magnetism which pulled the
Indian talisman to its carven surface. The designs glimmered evilly on
the richly lustrous and unknown metal, and I could not help shivering
as I studied the abnormal and blasphemous forms that leered at me with
such exquisite workmanship. I wish now that I had carefully
photographed all these designs—though perhaps it is just as well that I
did not. Of one thing I am really glad, and that is that I could not
then identify the squatting octopus-headed thing which dominated most
of the ornate cartouches, and which the manuscript called “Tulu”.
Recently I have associated it, and the legends in the manuscript
connected with it, with some new-found folklore of monstrous and
unmentioned Cthulhu, a horror which seeped down from the stars while
the young earth was still half-formed; and had I known of the connexion
then, I could not have stayed in the same room with the thing. The
secondary motif, a semi-anthropomorphic serpent, I did quite readily
place as a prototype of the Yig, Quetzalcoatl, and Kukulcan
conceptions. Before opening the cylinder I tested its magnetic powers
on metals other than that of Grey Eagle’s disc, but found that no
attraction existed. It was no common magnetism which pervaded this
morbid fragment of unknown worlds and linked it to its kind.
At last I took out the manuscript and began translating—jotting down a
synoptic outline in English as I went, and now and then regretting the
absence of a Spanish dictionary when I came upon some especially
obscure or archaic word or construction. There was a sense of ineffable
strangeness in thus being thrown back nearly four centuries in the
midst of my continuous quest—thrown back to a year when my own forbears
were settled, homekeeping gentlemen of Somerset and Devon under Henry
the Eighth, with never a thought of the adventure that was to take
their blood to Virginia and the New World; yet when that new world
possessed, even as now, the same brooding mystery of the mound which
formed my present sphere and horizon. The sense of a throwback was all
the stronger because I felt instinctively that the common problem of
the Spaniard and myself was one of such abysmal timelessness—of such
unholy and unearthly eternity—that the scant four hundred years between
us bulked as nothing in comparison. It took no more than a single look
at that monstrous and insidious cylinder to make me realise the
dizzying gulfs that yawned between all men of the known earth and the
primal mysteries it represented. Before that gulf Pánfilo de Zamacona
and I stood side by side; just as Aristotle and I, or Cheops and I,
might have stood.
III.
Of his youth in Luarca, a small, placid port on the Bay of Biscay,
Zamacona told little. He had been wild, and a younger son, and had come
to New Spain in 1532, when only twenty years old. Sensitively
imaginative, he had listened spellbound to the floating rumours of rich
cities and unknown worlds to the north—and especially to the tale of
the Franciscan friar Marcos de Niza, who came back from a trip in 1539
with glowing accounts of fabulous Cíbola and its great walled towns
with terraced stone houses. Hearing of Coronado’s contemplated
expedition in search of these wonders—and of the greater wonders
whispered to lie beyond them in the land of buffaloes—young Zamacona
managed to join the picked party of 300, and started north with the
rest in 1540.
History knows the story of that expedition—how Cíbola was found to be
merely the squalid Pueblo village of Zuñi, and how de Niza was sent
back to Mexico in disgrace for his florid exaggerations; how Coronado
first saw the Grand Canyon, and how at Cicuyé, on the Pecos, he heard
from the Indian called El Turco of the rich and mysterious land of
Quivira, far to the northeast, where gold, silver, and buffaloes
abounded, and where there flowed a river two leagues wide. Zamacona
told briefly of the winter camp at Tiguex on the Pecos, and of the
northward start in April, when the native guide proved false and led
the party astray amidst a land of prairie-dogs, salt pools, and roving,
bison-hunting tribes.
When Coronado dismissed his larger force and made his final
forty-two-day march with a very small and select detachment, Zamacona
managed to be included in the advancing party. He spoke of the fertile
country and of the great ravines with trees visible only from the edge
of their steep banks; and of how all the men lived solely on
buffalo-meat. And then came mention of the expedition’s farthest
limit—of the presumable but disappointing land of Quivira with its
villages of grass houses, its brooks and rivers, its good black soil,
its plums, nuts, grapes, and mulberries, and its maize-growing and
copper-using Indians. The execution of El Turco, the false native
guide, was casually touched upon, and there was a mention of the cross
which Coronado raised on the bank of a great river in the autumn of
1541—a cross bearing the inscription, “Thus far came the great general,
Francisco Vásquez de Coronado”.
This supposed Quivira lay at about the fortieth parallel of north
latitude, and I see that quite lately the New York archaeologist Dr.
Hodge has identified it with the course of the Arkansas River through
Barton and Rice Counties, Kansas. It is the old home of the Wichitas,
before the Sioux drove them south into what is now Oklahoma, and some
of the grass-house village sites have been found and excavated for
artifacts. Coronado did considerable exploring hereabouts, led hither
and thither by the persistent rumours of rich cities and hidden worlds
which floated fearfully around on the Indians’ tongues. These northerly
natives seemed more afraid and reluctant to talk about the rumoured
cities and worlds than the Mexican Indians had been; yet at the same
time seemed as if they could reveal a good deal more than the Mexicans
had they been willing or dared to do so. Their vagueness exasperated
the Spanish leader, and after many disappointing searches he began to
be very severe toward those who brought him stories. Zamacona, more
patient than Coronado, found the tales especially interesting; and
learned enough of the local speech to hold long conversations with a
young buck named Charging Buffalo, whose curiosity had led him into
much stranger places than any of his fellow-tribesmen had dared to
penetrate.
It was Charging Buffalo who told Zamacona of the queer stone doorways,
gates, or cave-mouths at the bottom of some of those deep, steep,
wooded ravines which the party had noticed on the northward march.
These openings, he said, were mostly concealed by shrubbery; and few
had entered them for untold aeons. Those who went to where they led,
never returned—or in a few cases returned mad or curiously maimed. But
all this was legend, for nobody was known to have gone more than a
limited distance inside any of them within the memory of the
grandfathers of the oldest living men. Charging Buffalo himself had
probably been farther than anyone else, and he had seen enough to curb
both his curiosity and his greed for the rumoured gold below.
Beyond the aperture he had entered there was a long passage running
crazily up and down and round about, and covered with frightful
carvings of monsters and horrors that no man had ever seen. At last,
after untold miles of windings and descents, there was a glow of
terrible blue light; and the passage opened upon a shocking nether
world. About this the Indian would say no more, for he had seen
something that had sent him back in haste. But the golden cities must
be somewhere down there, he added, and perhaps a white man with the
magic of the thunder-stick might succeed in getting to them. He would
not tell the big chief Coronado what he knew, for Coronado would not
listen to Indian talk any more. Yes—he could shew Zamacona the way if
the white man would leave the party and accept his guidance. But he
would not go inside the opening with the white man. It was bad in
there.
The place was about a five days’ march to the south, near the region of
great mounds. These mounds had something to do with the evil world down
there—they were probably ancient closed-up passages to it, for once the
Old Ones below had had colonies on the surface and had traded with men
everywhere, even in the lands that had sunk under the big waters. It
was when those lands had sunk that the Old Ones closed themselves up
below and refused to deal with surface people. The refugees from the
sinking places had told them that the gods of outer earth were against
men, and that no men could survive on the outer earth unless they were
daemons in league with the evil gods. That is why they shut out all
surface folk, and did fearful things to any who ventured down where
they dwelt. There had been sentries once at the various openings, but
after ages they were no longer needed. Not many people cared to talk
about the hidden Old Ones, and the legends about them would probably
have died out but for certain ghostly reminders of their presence now
and then. It seemed that the infinite ancientness of these creatures
had brought them strangely near to the borderline of spirit, so that
their ghostly emanations were more commonly frequent and vivid.
Accordingly the region of the great mounds was often convulsed with
spectral nocturnal battles reflecting those which had been fought in
the days before the openings were closed.
The Old Ones themselves were half-ghost—indeed, it was said that they
no longer grew old or reproduced their kind, but flickered eternally in
a state between flesh and spirit. The change was not complete, though,
for they had to breathe. It was because the underground world needed
air that the openings in the deep valleys were not blocked up as the
mound-openings on the plains had been. These openings, Charging Buffalo
added, were probably based on natural fissures in the earth. It was
whispered that the Old Ones had come down from the stars to the world
when it was very young, and had gone inside to build their cities of
solid gold because the surface was not then fit to live on. They were
the ancestors of all men, yet none could guess from what star—or what
place beyond the stars—they came. Their hidden cities were still full
of gold and silver, but men had better let them alone unless protected
by very strong magic.
They had frightful beasts with a faint strain of human blood, on which
they rode, and which they employed for other purposes. The things, so
people hinted, were carnivorous, and like their masters, preferred
human flesh; so that although the Old Ones themselves did not breed,
they had a sort of half-human slave-class which also served to nourish
the human and animal population. This had been very oddly recruited,
and was supplemented by a second slave-class of reanimated corpses. The
Old Ones knew how to make a corpse into an automaton which would last
almost indefinitely and perform any sort of work when directed by
streams of thought. Charging Buffalo said that the people had all come
to talk by means of thought only; speech having been found crude and
needless, except for religious devotions and emotional expression, as
aeons of discovery and study rolled by. They worshipped Yig, the great
father of serpents, and Tulu, the octopus-headed entity that had
brought them down from the stars; appeasing both of these hideous
monstrosities by means of human sacrifices offered up in a very curious
manner which Charging Buffalo did not care to describe.
Zamacona was held spellbound by the Indian’s tale, and at once resolved
to accept his guidance to the cryptic doorway in the ravine. He did not
believe the accounts of strange ways attributed by legend to the hidden
people, for the experiences of the party had been such as to
disillusion one regarding native myths of unknown lands; but he did
feel that some sufficiently marvellous field of riches and adventure
must indeed lie beyond the weirdly carved passages in the earth. At
first he thought of persuading Charging Buffalo to tell his story to
Coronado—offering to shield him against any effects of the leader’s
testy scepticism—but later he decided that a lone adventure would be
better. If he had no aid, he would not have to share anything he found;
but might perhaps become a great discoverer and owner of fabulous
riches. Success would make him a greater figure than Coronado
himself—perhaps a greater figure than anyone else in New Spain,
including even the mighty viceroy Don Antonio de Mendoza.
On October 7, 1541, at an hour close to midnight, Zamacona stole out of
the Spanish camp near the grass-house village and met Charging Buffalo
for the long southward journey. He travelled as lightly as possible,
and did not wear his heavy helmet and breastplate. Of the details of
the trip the manuscript told very little, but Zamacona records his
arrival at the great ravine on October 13th. The descent of the thickly
wooded slope took no great time; and though the Indian had trouble in
locating the shrubbery-hidden stone door again amidst the twilight of
that deep gorge, the place was finally found. It was a very small
aperture as doorways go, formed of monolithic sandstone jambs and
lintel, and bearing signs of nearly effaced and now undecipherable
carvings. Its height was perhaps seven feet, and its width not more
than four. There were drilled places in the jambs which argued the
bygone presence of a hinged door or gate, but all other traces of such
a thing had long since vanished.
At sight of this black gulf Charging Buffalo displayed considerable
fear, and threw down his pack of supplies with signs of haste. He had
provided Zamacona with a good stock of resinous torches and provisions,
and had guided him honestly and well; but refused to share in the
venture that lay ahead. Zamacona gave him the trinkets he had kept for
such an occasion, and obtained his promise to return to the region in a
month; afterward shewing the way southward to the Pecos Pueblo
villages. A prominent rock on the plain above them was chosen as a
meeting-place; the one arriving first to pitch camp until the other
should arrive.
In the manuscript Zamacona expressed a wistful wonder as to the
Indian’s length of waiting at the rendezvous—for he himself could never
keep that tryst. At the last moment Charging Buffalo tried to dissuade
him from his plunge into the darkness, but soon saw it was futile, and
gestured a stoical farewell. Before lighting his first torch and
entering the opening with his ponderous pack, the Spaniard watched the
lean form of the Indian scrambling hastily and rather relievedly upward
among the trees. It was the cutting of his last link with the world;
though he did not know that he was never to see a human being—in the
accepted sense of that term—again.
Zamacona felt no immediate premonition of evil upon entering that
ominous doorway, though from the first he was surrounded by a bizarre
and unwholesome atmosphere. The passage, slightly taller and wider than
the aperture, was for many yards a level tunnel of Cyclopean masonry,
with heavily worn flagstones under foot, and grotesquely carved granite
and sandstone blocks in sides and ceiling. The carvings must have been
loathsome and terrible indeed, to judge from Zamacona’s description;
according to which most of them revolved around the monstrous beings
Yig and Tulu. They were unlike anything the adventurer had ever seen
before, though he added that the native architecture of Mexico came
closest to them of all things in the outer world. After some distance
the tunnel began to dip abruptly, and irregular natural rock appeared
on all sides. The passage seemed only partly artificial, and
decorations were limited to occasional cartouches with shocking
bas-reliefs.
Following an enormous descent, whose steepness at times produced an
acute danger of slipping and tobogganing, the passage became
exceedingly uncertain in its direction and variable in its contour. At
times it narrowed almost to a slit or grew so low that stooping and
even crawling were necessary, while at other times it broadened out
into sizeable caves or chains of caves. Very little human construction,
it was plain, had gone into this part of the tunnel; though
occasionally a sinister cartouche or hieroglyphic on the wall, or a
blocked-up lateral passageway, would remind Zamacona that this was in
truth the aeon-forgotten high-road to a primal and unbelievable world
of living things.
For three days, as best he could reckon, Pánfilo de Zamacona scrambled
down, up, along, and around, but always predominately downward, through
this dark region of palaeogean night. Once in a while he heard some
secret being of darkness patter or flap out of his way, and on just one
occasion he half glimpsed a great, bleached thing that set him
trembling. The quality of the air was mostly very tolerable; though
foetid zones were now and then met with, while one great cavern of
stalactites and stalagmites afforded a depressing dampness. This
latter, when Charging Buffalo had come upon it, had quite seriously
barred the way; since the limestone deposits of ages had built fresh
pillars in the path of the primordial abyss-denizens. The Indian,
however, had broken through these; so that Zamacona did not find his
course impeded. It was an unconscious comfort to him to reflect that
someone else from the outside world had been there before—and the
Indian’s careful descriptions had removed the element of surprise and
unexpectedness. More—Charging Buffalo’s knowledge of the tunnel had led
him to provide so good a torch supply for the journey in and out, that
there would be no danger of becoming stranded in darkness. Zamacona
camped twice, building a fire whose smoke seemed well taken care of by
the natural ventilation.
At what he considered the end of the third day—though his cocksure
guesswork chronology is not at any time to be given the easy faith that
he gave it—Zamacona encountered the prodigious descent and subsequent
prodigious climb which Charging Buffalo had described as the tunnel’s
last phase. As at certain earlier points, marks of artificial
improvement were here discernible; and several times the steep gradient
was eased by a flight of rough-hewn steps. The torch shewed more and
more of the monstrous carvings on the walls, and finally the resinous
flare seemed mixed with a fainter and more diffusive light as Zamacona
climbed up and up after the last downward stairway. At length the
ascent ceased, and a level passage of artificial masonry with dark,
basaltic blocks led straight ahead. There was no need for a torch now,
for all the air was glowing with a bluish, quasi-electric radiance that
flickered like an aurora. It was the strange light of the inner world
that the Indian had described—and in another moment Zamacona emerged
from the tunnel upon a bleak, rocky hillside which climbed above him to
a seething, impenetrable sky of bluish coruscations, and descended
dizzily below him to an apparently illimitable plain shrouded in bluish
mist.
He had come to the unknown world at last, and from his manuscript it is
clear that he viewed the formless landscape as proudly and exaltedly as
ever his fellow-countryman Balboa viewed the new-found Pacific from
that unforgettable peak in Darien. Charging Buffalo had turned back at
this point, driven by fear of something which he would only describe
vaguely and evasively as a herd of bad cattle, neither horse nor
buffalo, but like the things the mound-spirits rode at night—but
Zamacona could not be deterred by any such trifle. Instead of fear, a
strange sense of glory filled him; for he had imagination enough to
know what it meant to stand alone in an inexplicable nether world whose
existence no other white man suspected.
The soil of the great hill that surged upward behind him and spread
steeply downward below him was dark grey, rock-strown, without
vegetation, and probably basaltic in origin; with an unearthly cast
which made him feel like an intruder on an alien planet. The vast
distant plain, thousands of feet below, had no features he could
distinguish; especially since it appeared to be largely veiled in a
curling, bluish vapour. But more than hill or plain or cloud, the
bluely luminous, coruscating sky impressed the adventurer with a sense
of supreme wonder and mystery. What created this sky within a world he
could not tell; though he knew of the northern lights, and had even
seen them once or twice. He concluded that this subterraneous light was
something vaguely akin to the aurora; a view which moderns may well
endorse, though it seems likely that certain phenomena of
radio-activity may also enter in.
At Zamacona’s back the mouth of the tunnel he had traversed yawned
darkly; defined by a stone doorway very like the one he had entered in
the world above, save that it was of greyish-black basalt instead of
red sandstone. There were hideous sculptures, still in good
preservation and perhaps corresponding to those on the outer portal
which time had largely weathered away. The absence of weathering here
argued a dry, temperate climate; indeed, the Spaniard already began to
note the delightfully spring-like stability of temperature which marks
the air of the north’s interior. On the stone jambs were works
proclaiming the bygone presence of hinges, but of any actual door or
gate no trace remained. Seating himself for rest and thought, Zamacona
lightened his pack by removing an amount of food and torches sufficient
to take him back through the tunnel. These he proceeded to cache at the
opening, under a cairn hastily formed of the rock fragments which
everywhere lay around. Then, readjusting his lightened pack, he
commenced his descent toward the distant plain; preparing to invade a
region which no living thing of outer earth had penetrated in a century
or more, which no white man had ever penetrated, and from which, if
legend were to be believed, no organic creature had ever returned sane.
Zamacona strode briskly along down the steep, interminable slope; his
progress checked at times by the bad walking that came from loose rock
fragments, or by the excessive precipitousness of the grade. The
distance of the mist-shrouded plain must have been enormous, for many
hours’ walking brought him apparently no closer to it than he had been
before. Behind him was always the great hill stretching upward into a
bright aërial sea of bluish coruscations. Silence was universal; so
that his own footsteps, and the fall of stones that he dislodged,
struck on his ears with startling distinctness. It was at what he
regarded as about noon that he first saw the abnormal footprints which
set him to thinking of Charging Buffalo’s terrible hints, precipitate
flight, and strangely abiding terror.
The rock-strown nature of the soil gave few opportunities for tracks of
any kind, but at one point a rather level interval had caused the loose
detritus to accumulate in a ridge, leaving a considerable area of
dark-grey loam absolutely bare. Here, in a rambling confusion
indicating a large herd aimlessly wandering, Zamacona found the
abnormal prints. It is to be regretted that he could not describe them
more exactly, but the manuscript displayed far more vague fear than
accurate observation. Just what it was that so frightened the Spaniard
can only be inferred from his later hints regarding the beasts. He
referred to the prints as ‘not hooves, nor hands, nor feet, nor
precisely paws—nor so large as to cause alarm on that account’. Just
why or how long ago the things had been there, was not easy to guess.
There was no vegetation visible, hence grazing was out of the question;
but of course if the beasts were carnivorous they might well have been
hunting smaller animals, whose tracks their own would tend to
obliterate.
Glancing backward from this plateau to the heights above, Zamacona
thought he detected traces of a great winding road which had once led
from the tunnel downward to the plain. One could get the impression of
this former highway only from a broad panoramic view, since a trickle
of loose rock fragments had long ago obscured it; but the adventurer
felt none the less certain that it had existed. It had not, probably,
been an elaborately paved trunk route; for the small tunnel it reached
seemed scarcely like a main avenue to the outer world. In choosing a
straight path of descent Zamacona had not followed its curving course,
though he must have crossed it once or twice. With his attention now
called to it, he looked ahead to see if he could trace it downward
toward the plain; and this he finally thought he could do. He resolved
to investigate its surface when next he crossed it, and perhaps to
pursue its line for the rest of the way if he could distinguish it.
Having resumed his journey, Zamacona came some time later upon what he
thought was a bend of the ancient road. There were signs of grading and
of some primal attempt at rock-surfacing, but not enough was left to
make the route worth following. While rummaging about in the soil with
his sword, the Spaniard turned up something that glittered in the
eternal blue daylight, and was thrilled at beholding a kind of coin or
medal of a dark, unknown, lustrous metal, with hideous designs on each
side. It was utterly and bafflingly alien to him, and from his
description I have no doubt but that it was a duplicate of the talisman
given me by Grey Eagle almost four centuries afterward. Pocketing it
after a long and curious examination, he strode onward; finally
pitching camp at an hour which he guessed to be the evening of the
outer world.
The next day Zamacona rose early and resumed his descent through this
blue-litten world of mist and desolation and preternatural silence. As
he advanced, he at last became able to distinguish a few objects on the
distant plain below—trees, bushes, rocks, and a small river that came
into view from the right and curved forward at a point to the left of
his contemplated course. This river seemed to be spanned by a bridge
connected with the descending roadway, and with care the explorer could
trace the route of the road beyond it in a straight line over the
plain. Finally he even thought he could detect towns scattered along
the rectilinear ribbon; towns whose left-hand edges reached the river
and sometimes crossed it. Where such crossings occurred, he saw as he
descended, there were always signs of bridges either ruined or
surviving. He was now in the midst of a sparse grassy vegetation, and
saw that below him the growth became thicker and thicker. The road was
easier to define now, since its surface discouraged the grass which the
looser soil supported. Rock fragments were less frequent, and the
barren upward vista behind him looked bleak and forbidding in contrast
to his present milieu.
It was on this day that he saw the blurred mass moving over the distant
plain. Since his first sight of the sinister footprints he had met with
no more of these, but something about that slowly and deliberately
moving mass peculiarly sickened him. Nothing but a herd of grazing
animals could move just like that, and after seeing the footprints he
did not wish to meet the things which had made them. Still, the moving
mass was not near the road—and his curiosity and greed for fabled gold
were great. Besides, who could really judge things from vague, jumbled
footprints or from the panic-twisted hints of an ignorant Indian?
In straining his eyes to view the moving mass Zamacona became aware of
several other interesting things. One was that certain parts of the now
unmistakable towns glittered oddly in the misty blue light. Another was
that, besides the towns, several similarly glittering structures of a
more isolated sort were scattered here and there along the road and
over the plain. They seemed to be embowered in clumps of vegetation,
and those off the road had small avenues leading to the highway. No
smoke or other signs of life could be discerned about any of the towns
or buildings. Finally Zamacona saw that the plain was not infinite in
extent, though the half-concealing blue mists had hitherto made it seem
so. It was bounded in the remote distance by a range of low hills,
toward a gap in which the river and roadway seemed to lead. All
this—especially the glittering of certain pinnacles in the towns—had
become very vivid when Zamacona pitched his second camp amidst the
endless blue day. He likewise noticed the flocks of high-soaring birds,
whose nature he could not clearly make out.
The next afternoon—to use the language of the outer world as the
manuscript did at all times—Zamacona reached the silent plain and
crossed the soundless, slow-running river on a curiously carved and
fairly well-preserved bridge of black basalt. The water was clear, and
contained large fishes of a wholly strange aspect. The roadway was now
paved and somewhat overgrown with weeds and creeping vines, and its
course was occasionally outlined by small pillars bearing obscure
symbols. On every side the grassy level extended, with here and there a
clump of trees or shrubbery, and with unidentifiable bluish flowers
growing irregularly over the whole area. Now and then some spasmodic
motion of the grass indicated the presence of serpents. In the course
of several hours the traveller reached a grove of old and alien-looking
evergreen-trees which he knew, from distant viewing, protected one of
the glittering-roofed isolated structures. Amidst the encroaching
vegetation he saw the hideously sculptured pylons of a stone gateway
leading off the road, and was presently forcing his way through briers
above a moss-crusted tessellated walk lined with huge trees and low
monolithic pillars.
At last, in this hushed green twilight, he saw the crumbling and
ineffably ancient facade of the building—a temple, he had no doubt. It
was a mass of nauseous bas-reliefs; depicting scenes and beings,
objects and ceremonies, which could certainly have no place on this or
any sane planet. In hinting of these things Zamacona displays for the
first time that shocked and pious hesitancy which impairs the
informative value of the rest of his manuscript. We cannot help
regretting that the Catholic ardour of Renaissance Spain had so
thoroughly permeated his thought and feeling. The door of the place
stood wide open, and absolute darkness filled the windowless interior.
Conquering the repulsion which the mural sculptures had excited,
Zamacona took out flint and steel, lighted a resinous torch, pushed
aside curtaining vines, and sallied boldly across the ominous
threshold.
For a moment he was quite stupefied by what he saw. It was not the
all-covering dust and cobwebs of immemorial aeons, the fluttering
winged things, the shriekingly loathsome sculptures on the walls, the
bizarre form of the many basins and braziers, the sinister pyramidal
altar with the hollow top, or the monstrous, octopus-headed abnormality
in some strange, dark metal leering and squatting broodingly on its
hieroglyphed pedestal, which robbed him of even the power to give a
startled cry. It was nothing so unearthly as this—but merely the fact
that, with the exception of the dust, the cobwebs, the winged things,
and the gigantic emerald-eyed idol, every particle of substance in
sight was composed of pure and evidently solid gold.
Even the manuscript, written in retrospect after Zamacona knew that
gold is the most common structural metal of a nether world containing
limitless lodes and veins of it, reflects the frenzied excitement which
the traveller felt upon suddenly finding the real source of all the
Indian legends of golden cities. For a time the power of detailed
observation left him, but in the end his faculties were recalled by a
peculiar tugging sensation in the pocket of his doublet. Tracing the
feeling, he realised that the disc of strange metal he had found in the
abandoned road was being attracted strongly by the vast octopus-headed,
emerald-eyed idol on the pedestal, which he now saw to be composed of
the same unknown exotic metal. He was later to learn that this strange
magnetic substance—as alien to the inner world as to the outer world of
men—is the one precious metal of the blue-lighted abyss. None knows
what it is or where it occurs in Nature, and the amount of it on this
planet came down from the stars with the people when great Tulu, the
octopus-headed god, brought them for the first time to this earth.
Certainly, its only known source was a stock of pre-existing artifacts,
including multitudes of Cyclopean idols. It could never be placed or
analysed, and even its magnetism was exerted only on its own kind. It
was the supreme ceremonial metal of the hidden people, its use being
regulated by custom in such a way that its magnetic properties might
cause no inconvenience. A very weakly magnetic alloy of it with such
base metals as iron, gold, silver, copper, or zinc, had formed the sole
monetary standard of the hidden people at one period of their history.
Zamacona’s reflections on the strange idol and its magnetism were
disturbed by a tremendous wave of fear as, for the first time in this
silent world, he heard a rumble of very definite and obviously
approaching sound. There was no mistaking its nature. It was a
thunderously charging herd of large animals; and, remembering the
Indian’s panic, the footprints, and the moving mass distantly seen, the
Spaniard shuddered in terrified anticipation. He did not analyse his
position, or the significance of this onrush of great lumbering beings,
but merely responded to an elemental urge toward self-protection.
Charging herds do not stop to find victims in obscure places, and on
the outer earth Zamacona would have felt little or no alarm in such a
massive, grove-girt edifice. Some instinct, however, now bred a deep
and peculiar terror in his soul; and he looked about frantically for
any means of safety.
There being no available refuge in the great, gold-patined interior, he
felt that he must close the long-disused door; which still hung on its
ancient hinges, doubled back against the inner wall. Soil, vines, and
moss had entered the opening from outside, so that he had to dig a path
for the great gold portal with his sword; but he managed to perform
this work very swiftly under the frightful stimulus of the approaching
noise. The hoofbeats had grown still louder and more menacing by the
time he began tugging at the heavy door itself; and for a while his
fears reached a frantic height, as hope of starting the age-clogged
metal grew faint. Then, with a creak, the thing responded to his
youthful strength, and a frenzied siege of pulling and pushing ensued.
Amidst the roar of unseen stampeding feet success came at last, and the
ponderous golden door clanged shut, leaving Zamacona in darkness but
for the single lighted torch he had wedged between the pillars of a
basin-tripod. There was a latch, and the frightened man blessed his
patron saint that it was still effective.
Sound alone told the fugitive the sequel. When the roar grew very near
it resolved itself into separate footfalls, as if the evergreen grove
had made it necessary for the herd to slacken speed and disperse. But
feet continued to approach, and it became evident that the beasts were
advancing among the trees and circling the hideously carven temple
walls. In the curious deliberation of their tread Zamacona found
something very alarming and repulsive, nor did he like the scuffling
sounds which were audible even through the thick stone walls and heavy
golden door. Once the door rattled ominously on its archaic hinges, as
if under a heavy impact, but fortunately it still held. Then, after a
seemingly endless interval, he heard retreating steps and realised that
his unknown visitors were leaving. Since the herds did not seem to be
very numerous, it would have perhaps been safe to venture out within a
half-hour or less; but Zamacona took no chances. Opening his pack, he
prepared his camp on the golden tiles of the temple’s floor, with the
great door still securely latched against all comers; drifting
eventually into a sounder sleep than he could have known in the
blue-litten spaces outside. He did not even mind the hellish,
octopus-headed bulk of great Tulu, fashioned of unknown metal and
leering with fishy, sea-green eyes, which squatted in the blackness
above him on its monstrously hieroglyphed pedestal.
Surrounded by darkness for the first time since leaving the tunnel,
Zamacona slept profoundly and long. He must have more than made up the
sleep he had lost at his two previous camps, when the ceaseless glare
of the sky had kept him awake despite his fatigue, for much distance
was covered by other living feet while he lay in his healthily
dreamless rest. It is well that he rested deeply, for there were many
strange things to be encountered in his next period of consciousness.
IV.
What finally roused Zamacona was a thunderous rapping at the door. It
beat through his dreams and dissolved all the lingering mists of
drowsiness as soon as he knew what it was. There could be no mistake
about it—it was a definite, human, and peremptory rapping; performed
apparently with some metallic object, and with all the measured quality
of conscious thought or will behind it. As the awakening man rose
clumsily to his feet, a sharp vocal note was added to the
summons—someone calling out, in a not unmusical voice, a formula which
the manuscript tries to represent as “oxi, oxi, giathcán ycá relex”.
Feeling sure that his visitors were men and not daemons, and arguing
that they could have no reason for considering him an enemy, Zamacona
decided to face them openly and at once; and accordingly fumbled with
the ancient latch till the golden door creaked open from the pressure
of those outside.
As the great portal swung back, Zamacona stood facing a group of about
twenty individuals of an aspect not calculated to give him alarm. They
seemed to be Indians; though their tasteful robes and trappings and
swords were not such as he had seen among any of the tribes of the
outer world, while their faces had many subtle differences from the
Indian type. That they did not mean to be irresponsibly hostile, was
very clear; for instead of menacing him in any way they merely probed
him attentively and significantly with their eyes, as if they expected
their gaze to open up some sort of communication. The longer they
gazed, the more he seemed to know about them and their mission; for
although no one had spoken since the vocal summons before the opening
of the door, he found himself slowly realising that they had come from
the great city beyond the low hills, mounted on animals, and that they
had been summoned by animals who had reported his presence; that they
were not sure what kind of person he was or just where he had come
from, but that they knew he must be associated with that dimly
remembered outer world which they sometimes visited in curious dreams.
How he read all this in the gaze of the two or three leaders he could
not possibly explain; though he learned why a moment later.
As it was, he attempted to address his visitors in the Wichita dialect
he had picked up from Charging Buffalo; and after this failed to draw a
vocal reply he successively tried the Aztec, Spanish, French, and Latin
tongues—adding as many scraps of lame Greek, Galician, and Portuguese,
and of the Bable peasant patois of his native Asturias, as his memory
could recall. But not even this polyglot array—his entire linguistic
stock—could bring a reply in kind. When, however, he paused in
perplexity, one of the visitors began speaking in an utterly strange
and rather fascinating language whose sounds the Spaniard later had
much difficulty in representing on paper. Upon his failure to
understand this, the speaker pointed first to his own eyes, then to his
forehead, and then to his eyes again, as if commanding the other to
gaze at him in order to absorb what he wanted to transmit.
Zamacona, obeying, found himself rapidly in possession of certain
information. The people, he learned, conversed nowadays by means of
unvocal radiations of thought; although they had formerly used a spoken
language which still survived as the written tongue, and into which
they still dropped orally for tradition’s sake, or when strong feeling
demanded a spontaneous outlet. He could understand them merely by
concentrating his attention upon their eyes; and could reply by
summoning up a mental image of what he wished to say, and throwing the
substance of this into his glance. When the thought-speaker paused,
apparently inviting a response, Zamacona tried his best to follow the
prescribed pattern, but did not appear to succeed very well. So he
nodded, and tried to describe himself and his journey by signs. He
pointed upward, as if to the outer world, then closed his eyes and made
signs as of a mole burrowing. Then he opened his eyes again and pointed
downward, in order to indicate his descent of the great slope.
Experimentally he blended a spoken word or two with his gestures—for
example, pointing successively to himself and to all of his visitors
and saying “un hombre”, and then pointing to himself alone and very
carefully pronouncing his individual name, Pánfilo de Zamacona.
Before the strange conversation was over, a good deal of data had
passed in both directions. Zamacona had begun to learn how to throw his
thoughts, and had likewise picked up several words of the region’s
archaic spoken language. His visitors, moreover, had absorbed many
beginnings of an elementary Spanish vocabulary. Their own old language
was utterly unlike anything the Spaniard had ever heard, though there
were times later on when he was to fancy an infinitely remote linkage
with the Aztec, as if the latter represented some far stage of
corruption, or some very thin infiltration of loan-words. The
underground world, Zamacona learned, bore an ancient name which the
manuscript records as “Xinaián”, but which, from the writer’s
supplementary explanations and diacritical marks, could probably be
best represented to Anglo-Saxon ears by the phonetic arrangement
K’n-yan.
It is not surprising that this preliminary discourse did not go beyond
the merest essentials, but those essentials were highly important.
Zamacona learned that the people of K’n-yan were almost infinitely
ancient, and that they had come from a distant part of space where
physical conditions are much like those of the earth. All this, of
course, was legend now; and one could not say how much truth was in it,
or how much worship was really due to the octopus-headed being Tulu who
had traditionally brought them hither and whom they still reverenced
for aesthetic reasons. But they knew of the outer world, and were
indeed the original stock who had peopled it as soon as its crust was
fit to live on. Between glacial ages they had had some remarkable
surface civilisations, especially one at the South Pole near the
mountain Kadath.
At some time infinitely in the past most of the outer world had sunk
beneath the ocean, so that only a few refugees remained to bear the
news to K’n-yan. This was undoubtedly due to the wrath of space-devils
hostile alike to men and to men’s gods—for it bore out rumours of a
primordially earlier sinking which had submerged the gods themselves,
including great Tulu, who still lay prisoned and dreaming in the watery
vaults of the half-cosmic city Relex. No man not a slave of the
space-devils, it was argued, could live long on the outer earth; and it
was decided that all beings who remained there must be evilly
connected. Accordingly traffic with the lands of sun and starlight
abruptly ceased. The subterraneous approaches to K’n-yan, or such as
could be remembered, were either blocked up or carefully guarded; and
all encroachers were treated as dangerous spies and enemies.
But this was long ago. With the passing of ages fewer and fewer
visitors came to K’n-yan, and eventually sentries ceased to be
maintained at the unblocked approaches. The mass of the people forgot,
except through distorted memories and myths and some very singular
dreams, that an outer world existed; though educated folk never ceased
to recall the essential facts. The last visitors ever
recorded—centuries in the past—had not even been treated as
devil-spies; faith in the old legendry having long before died out.
They had been questioned eagerly about the fabulous outer regions; for
scientific curiosity in K’n-yan was keen, and the myths, memories,
dreams, and historical fragments relating to the earth’s surface had
often tempted scholars to the brink of an external expedition which
they had not quite dared to attempt. The only thing demanded of such
visitors was that they refrain from going back and informing the outer
world of K’n-yan’s positive existence; for after all, one could not be
sure about these outer lands. They coveted gold and silver, and might
prove highly troublesome intruders. Those who had obeyed the injunction
had lived happily, though regrettably briefly, and had told all they
could about their world—little enough, however, since their accounts
were all so fragmentary and conflicting that one could hardly tell what
to believe and what to doubt. One wished that more of them would come.
As for those who disobeyed and tried to escape—it was very unfortunate
about them. Zamacona himself was very welcome, for he appeared to be a
higher-grade man, and to know much more about the outer world, than
anyone else who had come down within memory. He could tell them
much—and they hoped he would be reconciled to his life-long stay.
Many things which Zamacona learned about K’n-yan in that first colloquy
left him quite breathless. He learned, for instance, that during the
past few thousand years the phenomena of old age and death had been
conquered; so that men no longer grew feeble or died except through
violence or will. By regulating the system, one might be as
physiologically young and immortal as he wished; and the only reason
why any allowed themselves to age, was that they enjoyed the sensation
in a world where stagnation and commonplaceness reigned. They could
easily become young again when they felt like it. Births had ceased,
except for experimental purposes, since a large population had been
found needless by a master-race which controlled Nature and organic
rivals alike. Many, however, chose to die after a while; since despite
the cleverest efforts to invent new pleasures, the ordeal of
consciousness became too dull for sensitive souls—especially those in
whom time and satiation had blinded the primal instincts and emotions
of self-preservation. All the members of the group before Zamacona were
from 500 to 1500 years old; and several had seen surface visitors
before, though time had blurred the recollection. These visitors, by
the way, had often tried to duplicate the longevity of the underground
race; but had been able to do so only fractionally, owing to
evolutionary differences developing during the million or two years of
cleavage.
These evolutionary differences were even more strikingly shewn in
another particular—one far stranger than the wonder of immortality
itself. This was the ability of the people of K’n-yan to regulate the
balance between matter and abstract energy, even where the bodies of
living organic beings were concerned, by the sheer force of the
technically trained will. In other words, with suitable effort a
learned man of K’n-yan could dematerialise and rematerialise
himself—or, with somewhat greater effort and subtler technique, any
other object he chose; reducing solid matter to free external particles
and recombining the particles again without damage. Had not Zamacona
answered his visitors’ knock when he did, he would have discovered this
accomplishment in a highly puzzling way; for only the strain and bother
of the process prevented the twenty men from passing bodily through the
golden door without pausing for a summons. This art was much older than
the art of perpetual life; and it could be taught to some extent,
though never perfectly, to any intelligent person. Rumours of it had
reached the outer world in past aeons; surviving in secret traditions
and ghostly legendry. The men of K’n-yan had been amused by the
primitive and imperfect spirit tales brought down by outer-world
stragglers. In practical life this principle had certain industrial
applications, but was generally suffered to remain neglected through
lack of any particular incentive to its use. Its chief surviving form
was in connexion with sleep, when for excitement’s sake many
dream-connoisseurs resorted to it to enhance the vividness of their
visionary wanderings. By the aid of this method certain dreamers even
paid half-material visits to a strange, nebulous realm of mounds and
valleys and varying light which some believed to be the forgotten outer
world. They would go thither on their beasts, and in an age of peace
live over the old, glorious battles of their forefathers. Some
philosophers thought that in such cases they actually coalesced with
immaterial forces left behind by these warlike ancestors themselves.
The people of K’n-yan all dwelt in the great, tall city of Tsath beyond
the mountains. Formerly several races of them had inhabited the entire
underground world, which stretched down to unfathomable abysses and
which included besides the blue-litten region a red-litten region
called Yoth, where relics of a still older and non-human race were
found by archaeologists. In the course of time, however, the men of
Tsath had conquered and enslaved the rest; interbreeding them with
certain horned and four-footed animals of the red-litten region, whose
semi-human leanings were very peculiar, and which, though containing a
certain artificially created element, may have been in part the
degenerate descendants of those peculiar entities who had left the
relics. As aeons passed, and mechanical discoveries made the business
of life extremely easy, a concentration of the people of Tsath took
place; so that all the rest of K’n-yan became relatively deserted.
It was easier to live in one place, and there was no object in
maintaining a population of overflowing proportions. Many of the old
mechanical devices were still in use, though others had been abandoned
when it was seen that they failed to give pleasure, or that they were
not necessary for a race of reduced numbers whose mental force could
govern an extensive array of inferior and semi-human industrial
organisms. This extensive slave-class was highly composite, being bred
from ancient conquered enemies, from outer-world stragglers, from dead
bodies curiously galvanised into effectiveness, and from the naturally
inferior members of the ruling race of Tsath. The ruling type itself
had become highly superior through selective breeding and social
evolution—the nation having passed through a period of idealistic
industrial democracy which gave equal opportunities to all, and thus,
by raising the naturally intelligent to power, drained the masses of
all their brains and stamina. Industry, being found fundamentally
futile except for the supplying of basic needs and the gratification of
inescapable yearnings, had become very simple. Physical comfort was
ensured by an urban mechanisation of standardised and easily maintained
pattern, and other elemental needs were supplied by scientific
agriculture and stock-raising. Long travel was abandoned, and people
went back to using the horned, half-human beasts instead of maintaining
the profusion of gold, silver, and steel transportation machines which
had once threaded land, water, and air. Zamacona could scarcely believe
that such things had ever existed outside dreams, but was told he could
see specimens of them in museums. He could also see the ruins of other
vast magical devices by travelling a day’s journey to the valley of
Do-Hna, to which the race had spread during its period of greatest
numbers. The cities and temples of this present plain were of a far
more archaic period, and had never been other than religious and
antiquarian shrines during the supremacy of the men of Tsath.
In government, Tsath was a kind of communistic or semi-anarchical
state; habit rather than law determining the daily order of things.
This was made possible by the age-old experience and paralysing ennui
of the race, whose wants and needs were limited to physical
fundamentals and to new sensations. An aeon-long tolerance not yet
undermined by growing reaction had abolished all illusions of values
and principles, and nothing but an approximation to custom was ever
sought or expected. To see that the mutual encroachments of
pleasure-seeking never crippled the mass life of the community—this was
all that was desired. Family organisation had long ago perished, and
the civil and social distinction of the sexes had disappeared. Daily
life was organised in ceremonial patterns; with games, intoxication,
torture of slaves, day-dreaming, gastronomic and emotional orgies,
religious exercises, exotic experiments, artistic and philosophical
discussions, and the like, as the principal occupations.
Property—chiefly land, slaves, animals, shares in the common city
enterprise of Tsath, and ingots of magnetic Tulu-metal, the former
universal money standard—was allocated on a very complex basis which
included a certain amount equally divided among all the freemen.
Poverty was unknown, and labour consisted only of certain
administrative duties imposed by an intricate system of testing and
selection. Zamacona found difficulty in describing conditions so unlike
anything he had previously known; and the text of his manuscript proved
unusually puzzling at this point.
Art and intellect, it appeared, had reached very high levels in Tsath;
but had become listless and decadent. The dominance of machinery had at
one time broken up the growth of normal aesthetics, introducing a
lifelessly geometrical tradition fatal to sound expression. This had
soon been outgrown, but had left its mark upon all pictorial and
decorative attempts; so that except for conventionalised religious
designs, there was little depth or feeling in any later work.
Archaistic reproductions of earlier work had been found much preferable
for general enjoyment. Literature was all highly individual and
analytical, so much so as to be wholly incomprehensible to Zamacona.
Science had been profound and accurate, and all-embracing save in the
one direction of astronomy. Of late, however, it was falling into
decay, as people found it increasingly useless to tax their minds by
recalling its maddening infinitude of details and ramifications. It was
thought more sensible to abandon the deepest speculations and to
confine philosophy to conventional forms. Technology, of course, could
be carried on by rule of thumb. History was more and more neglected,
but exact and copious chronicles of the past existed in the libraries.
It was still an interesting subject, and there would be a vast number
to rejoice at the fresh outer-world knowledge brought in by Zamacona.
In general, though, the modern tendency was to feel rather than to
think; so that men were now more highly esteemed for inventing new
diversions than for preserving old facts or pushing back the frontier
of cosmic mystery.
Religion was a leading interest in Tsath, though very few actually
believed in the supernatural. What was desired was the aesthetic and
emotional exaltation bred by the mystical moods and sensuous rites
which attended the colourful ancestral faith. Temples to Great Tulu, a
spirit of universal harmony anciently symbolised as the octopus-headed
god who had brought all men down from the stars, were the most richly
constructed objects in all K’n-yan; while the cryptic shrines of Yig,
the principle of life symbolised as the Father of all Serpents, were
almost as lavish and remarkable. In time Zamacona learned much of the
orgies and sacrifices connected with this religion, but seemed piously
reluctant to describe them in his manuscript. He himself never
participated in any of the rites save those which he mistook for
perversions of his own faith; nor did he ever lose an opportunity to
try to convert the people to that faith of the Cross which the
Spaniards hoped to make universal.
Prominent in the contemporary religion of Tsath was a revived and
almost genuine veneration for the rare, sacred metal of Tulu—that dark,
lustrous, magnetic stuff which was nowhere found in Nature, but which
had always been with men in the form of idols and hieratic implements.
From the earliest times any sight of it in its unalloyed form had
impelled respect, while all the sacred archives and litanies were kept
in cylinders wrought of its purest substance. Now, as the neglect of
science and intellect was dulling the critically analytical spirit,
people were beginning to weave around the metal once more that same
fabric of awestruck superstition which had existed in primitive times.
Another function of religion was the regulation of the calendar, born
of a period when time and speed were regarded as prime fetiches in
man’s emotional life. Periods of alternate waking and sleeping,
prolonged, abridged, and inverted as mood and convenience dictated, and
timed by the tail-beats of Great Yig, the Serpent, corresponded very
roughly to terrestrial days and nights; though Zamacona’s sensations
told him they must actually be almost twice as long. The year-unit,
measured by Yig’s annual shedding of his skin, was equal to about a
year and a half of the outer world. Zamacona thought he had mastered
this calendar very well when he wrote his manuscript, whence the
confidently given date of 1545; but the document failed to suggest that
his assurance in this matter was fully justified.
As the spokesman of the Tsath party proceeded with his information,
Zamacona felt a growing repulsion and alarm. It was not only what was
told, but the strange, telepathic manner of telling, and the plain
inference that return to the outer world would be impossible, that made
the Spaniard wish he had never descended to this region of magic,
abnormality, and decadence. But he knew that nothing but friendly
acquiescence would do as a policy, hence decided to coöperate in all
his visitors’ plans and furnish all the information they might desire.
They, on their part, were fascinated by the outer-world data which he
managed haltingly to convey.
It was really the first draught of reliable surface information they
had had since the refugees straggled back from Atlantis and Lemuria
aeons before, for all their subsequent emissaries from outside had been
members of narrow and local groups without any knowledge of the world
at large—Mayas, Toltecs, and Aztecs at best, and mostly ignorant tribes
of the plains. Zamacona was the first European they had ever seen, and
the fact that he was a youth of education and brilliancy made him of
still more emphatic value as a source of knowledge. The visiting party
shewed their breathless interest in all he contrived to convey, and it
was plain that his coming would do much to relieve the flagging
interest of weary Tsath in matters of geography and history.
The only thing which seemed to displease the men of Tsath was the fact
that curious and adventurous strangers were beginning to pour into
those parts of the upper world where the passages to K’n-yan lay.
Zamacona told them of the founding of Florida and New Spain, and made
it clear that a great part of the world was stirring with the zest of
adventure—Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English. Sooner or later
Mexico and Florida must meet in one great colonial empire—and then it
would be hard to keep outsiders from the rumoured gold and silver of
the abyss. Charging Buffalo knew of Zamacona’s journey into the earth.
Would he tell Coronado, or somehow let a report get to the great
viceroy, when he failed to find the traveller at the promised
meeting-place? Alarm for the continued secrecy and safety of K’n-yan
shewed in the faces of the visitors, and Zamacona absorbed from their
minds the fact that from now on sentries would undoubtedly be posted
once more at all the unblocked passages to the outside world which the
men of Tsath could remember.
V.
The long conversation of Zamacona and his visitors took place in the
green-blue twilight of the grove just outside the temple door. Some of
the men reclined on the weeds and moss beside the half-vanished walk,
while others, including the Spaniard and the chief spokesman of the
Tsath party, sat on the occasional low monolithic pillars that lined
the temple approach. Almost a whole terrestrial day must have been
consumed in the colloquy, for Zamacona felt the need of food several
times, and ate from his well-stocked pack while some of the Tsath party
went back for provisions to the roadway, where they had left the
animals on which they had ridden. At length the prime leader of the
party brought the discourse to a close, and indicated that the time had
come to proceed to the city.
There were, he affirmed, several extra beasts in the cavalcade, upon
one of which Zamacona could ride. The prospect of mounting one of those
ominous hybrid entities whose fabled nourishment was so alarming, and a
single sight of which had set Charging Buffalo into such a frenzy of
flight, was by no means reassuring to the traveller. There was,
moreover, another point about the things which disturbed him
greatly—the apparently preternatural intelligence with which some
members of the previous day’s roving pack had reported his presence to
the men of Tsath and brought out the present expedition. But Zamacona
was not a coward, hence followed the men boldly down the weed-grown
walk toward the road where the things were stationed.
And yet he could not refrain from crying out in terror at what he saw
when he passed through the great vine-draped pylons and emerged upon
the ancient road. He did not wonder that the curious Wichita had fled
in panic, and had to close his eyes a moment to retain his sanity. It
is unfortunate that some sense of pious reticence prevented him from
describing fully in his manuscript the nameless sight he saw. As it is,
he merely hinted at the shocking morbidity of these great floundering
white things, with black fur on their backs, a rudimentary horn in the
centre of their foreheads, and an unmistakable trace of human or
anthropoid blood in their flat-nosed, bulging-lipped faces. They were,
he declared later in his manuscript, the most terrible objective
entities he ever saw in his life, either in K’n-yan or in the outer
world. And the specific quality of their supreme terror was something
apart from any easily recognisable or describable feature. The main
trouble was that they were not wholly products of Nature.
The party observed Zamacona’s fright, and hastened to reassure him as
much as possible. The beasts or gyaa-yothn, they explained, surely were
curious things; but were really very harmless. The flesh they ate was
not that of intelligent people of the master-race, but merely that of a
special slave-class which had for the most part ceased to be thoroughly
human, and which indeed was the principal meat stock of K’n-yan.
They—or their principal ancestral element—had first been found in a
wild state amidst the Cyclopean ruins of the deserted red-litten world
of Yoth which lay below the blue-litten world of K’n-yan. That part of
them was human, seemed quite clear; but men of science could never
decide whether they were actually the descendants of the bygone
entities who had lived and reigned in the strange ruins. The chief
ground for such a supposition was the well-known fact that the vanished
inhabitants of Yoth had been quadrupedal. This much was known from the
very few manuscripts and carvings found in the vaults of Zin, beneath
the largest ruined city of Yoth. But it was also known from these
manuscripts that the beings of Yoth had possessed the art of
synthetically creating life, and had made and destroyed several
efficiently designed races of industrial and transportational animals
in the course of their history—to say nothing of concocting all manner
of fantastic living shapes for the sake of amusement and new sensations
during the long period of decadence. The beings of Yoth had undoubtedly
been reptilian in affiliations, and most physiologists of Tsath agreed
that the present beasts had been very much inclined toward reptilianism
before they had been crossed with the mammal slave-class of K’n-yan.
It argues well for the intrepid fire of those Renaissance Spaniards who
conquered half the unknown world, that Pánfilo de Zamacona y Nuñez
actually mounted one of the morbid beasts of Tsath and fell into place
beside the leader of the cavalcade—the man named Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn, who
had been most active in the previous exchange of information. It was a
repulsive business; but after all, the seat was very easy, and the gait
of the clumsy gyaa-yoth surprisingly even and regular. No saddle was
necessary, and the animal appeared to require no guidance whatever. The
procession moved forward at a brisk gait, stopping only at certain
abandoned cities and temples about which Zamacona was curious, and
which Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn was obligingly ready to display and explain. The
largest of these towns, B’graa, was a marvel of finely wrought gold,
and Zamacona studied the curiously ornate architecture with avid
interest. Buildings tended toward height and slenderness, with roofs
bursting into a multitude of pinnacles. The streets were narrow,
curving, and occasionally picturesquely hilly, but Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn said
that the later cities of K’n-yan were far more spacious and regular in
design. All these old cities of the plain shewed traces of levelled
walls—reminders of the archaic days when they had been successively
conquered by the now dispersed armies of Tsath.
There was one object along the route which Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn exhibited on
his own initiative, even though it involved a detour of about a mile
along a vine-tangled side path. This was a squat, plain temple of black
basalt blocks without a single carving, and containing only a vacant
onyx pedestal. The remarkable thing about it was its story, for it was
a link with a fabled elder world compared to which even cryptic Yoth
was a thing of yesterday. It had been built in imitation of certain
temples depicted in the vaults of Zin, to house a very terrible black
toad-idol found in the red-litten world and called Tsathoggua in the
Yothic manuscripts. It had been a potent and widely worshipped god, and
after its adoption by the people of K’n-yan had lent its name to the
city which was later to become dominant in that region. Yothic legend
said that it had come from a mysterious inner realm beneath the
red-litten world—a black realm of peculiar-sensed beings which had no
light at all, but which had had great civilisations and mighty gods
before ever the reptilian quadrupeds of Yoth had come into being. Many
images of Tsathoggua existed in Yoth, all of which were alleged to have
come from the black inner realm, and which were supposed by Yothic
archaeologists to represent the aeon-extinct race of that realm. The
black realm called N’kai in the Yothic manuscripts had been explored as
thoroughly as possible by these archaeologists, and singular stone
troughs or burrows had excited infinite speculation.
When the men of K’n-yan discovered the red-litten world and deciphered
its strange manuscripts, they took over the Tsathoggua cult and brought
all the frightful toad images up to the land of blue light—housing them
in shrines of Yoth-quarried basalt like the one Zamacona now saw. The
cult flourished until it almost rivalled the ancient cults of Yig and
Tulu, and one branch of the race even took it to the outer world, where
the smallest of the images eventually found a shrine at Olathoë, in the
land of Lomar near the earth’s north pole. It was rumoured that this
outer-world cult survived even after the great ice-sheet and the hairy
Gnophkehs destroyed Lomar, but of such matters not much was definitely
known in K’n-yan. In that world of blue light the cult came to an
abrupt end, even though the name of Tsath was suffered to remain.
What ended the cult was the partial exploration of the black realm of
N’kai beneath the red-litten world of Yoth. According to the Yothic
manuscripts, there was no surviving life in N’kai, but something must
have happened in the aeons between the days of Yoth and the coming of
men to the earth; something perhaps not unconnected with the end of
Yoth. Probably it had been an earthquake, opening up lower chambers of
the lightless world which had been closed against the Yothic
archaeologists; or perhaps some more frightful juxtaposition of energy
and electrons, wholly inconceivable to any sort of vertebrate minds,
had taken place. At any rate, when the men of K’n-yan went down into
N’kai’s black abyss with their great atom-power searchlights they found
living things—living things that oozed along stone channels and
worshipped onyx and basalt images of Tsathoggua. But they were not
toads like Tsathoggua himself. Far worse—they were amorphous lumps of
viscous black slime that took temporary shapes for various purposes.
The explorers of K’n-yan did not pause for detailed observations, and
those who escaped alive sealed the passage leading from red-litten Yoth
down into the gulfs of nether horror. Then all the images of Tsathoggua
in the land of K’n-yan were dissolved into the ether by disintegrating
rays, and the cult was abolished forever.
Aeons later, when naive fears were outgrown and supplanted by
scientific curiosity, the old legends of Tsathoggua and N’kai were
recalled, and a suitably armed and equipped exploring party went down
to Yoth to find the closed gate of the black abyss and see what might
still lie beneath. But they could not find the gate, nor could any man
ever do so in all the ages that followed. Nowadays there were those who
doubted that any abyss had ever existed, but the few scholars who could
still decipher the Yothic manuscripts believed that the evidence for
such a thing was adequate, even though the middle records of K’n-yan,
with accounts of the one frightful expedition into N’kai, were more
open to question. Some of the later religious cults tried to suppress
remembrance of N’kai’s existence, and attached severe penalties to its
mention; but these had not begun to be taken seriously at the time of
Zamacona’s advent to K’n-yan.
As the cavalcade returned to the old highway and approached the low
range of mountains, Zamacona saw that the river was very close on the
left. Somewhat later, as the terrain rose, the stream entered a gorge
and passed through the hills, while the road traversed the gap at a
rather higher level close to the brink. It was about this time that
light rainfall came. Zamacona noticed the occasional drops and drizzle,
and looked up at the coruscating blue air, but there was no diminution
of the strange radiance. Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn then told him that such
condensations and precipitations of water-vapour were not uncommon, and
that they never dimmed the glare of the vault above. A kind of mist,
indeed, always hung about the lowlands of K’n-yan, and compensated for
the complete absence of true clouds.
The slight rise of the mountain pass enabled Zamacona, by looking
behind, to see the ancient and deserted plain in panorama as he had
seen it from the other side. He seems to have appreciated its strange
beauty, and to have vaguely regretted leaving it; for he speaks of
being urged by Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn to drive his beast more rapidly. When he
faced frontward again he saw that the crest of the road was very near;
the weed-grown way leading starkly up and ending against a blank void
of blue light. The scene was undoubtedly highly impressive—a steep
green mountain wall on the right, a deep river-chasm on the left with
another green mountain wall beyond it, and ahead, the churning sea of
bluish coruscations into which the upward path dissolved. Then came the
crest itself, and with it the world of Tsath outspread in a stupendous
forward vista.
Zamacona caught his breath at the great sweep of peopled landscape, for
it was a hive of settlement and activity beyond anything he had ever
seen or dreamed of. The downward slope of the hill itself was
relatively thinly strown with small farms and occasional temples; but
beyond it lay an enormous plain covered like a chess board with planted
trees, irrigated by narrow canals cut from the river, and threaded by
wide, geometrically precise roads of gold or basalt blocks. Great
silver cables borne aloft on golden pillars linked the low, spreading
buildings and clusters of buildings which rose here and there, and in
some places one could see lines of partly ruinous pillars without
cables. Moving objects shewed the fields to be under tillage, and in
some cases Zamacona saw that men were ploughing with the aid of the
repulsive, half-human quadrupeds.
But most impressive of all was the bewildering vision of clustered
spires and pinnacles which rose afar off across the plain and shimmered
flower-like and spectral in the coruscating blue light. At first
Zamacona thought it was a mountain covered with houses and temples,
like some of the picturesque hill cities of his own Spain, but a second
glance shewed him that it was not indeed such. It was a city of the
plain, but fashioned of such heaven-reaching towers that its outline
was truly that of a mountain. Above it hung a curious greyish haze,
through which the blue light glistened and took added overtones of
radiance from the million golden minarets. Glancing at Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn,
Zamacona knew that this was the monstrous, gigantic, and omnipotent
city of Tsath.
As the road turned downward toward the plain, Zamacona felt a kind of
uneasiness and sense of evil. He did not like the beast he rode, or the
world that could provide such a beast, and he did not like the
atmosphere that brooded over the distant city of Tsath. When the
cavalcade began to pass occasional farms, the Spaniard noticed the
forms that worked in the fields; and did not like their motions and
proportions, or the mutilations he saw on most of them. Moreover, he
did not like the way that some of these forms were herded in corrals,
or the way they grazed on the heavy verdure. Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn indicated
that these beings were members of the slave-class, and that their acts
were controlled by the master of the farm, who gave them hypnotic
impressions in the morning of all they were to do during the day. As
semi-conscious machines, their industrial efficiency was nearly
perfect. Those in the corrals were inferior specimens, classified
merely as livestock.
Upon reaching the plain, Zamacona saw the larger farms and noted the
almost human work performed by the repulsive horned gyaa-yothn. He
likewise observed the more manlike shapes that toiled along the
furrows, and felt a curious fright and disgust toward certain of them
whose motions were more mechanical than those of the rest. These,
Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn explained, were what men called the y’m-bhi—organisms
which had died, but which had been mechanically reanimated for
industrial purposes by means of atomic energy and thought-power. The
slave-class did not share the immortality of the freemen of Tsath, so
that with time the number of y’m-bhi had become very large. They were
dog-like and faithful, but not so readily amenable to thought-commands
as were living slaves. Those which most repelled Zamacona were those
whose mutilations were greatest; for some were wholly headless, while
others had suffered singular and seemingly capricious subtractions,
distortions, transpositions, and graftings in various places. The
Spaniard could not account for this condition, but Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn made
it clear that these were slaves who had been used for the amusement of
the people in some of the vast arenas; for the men of Tsath were
connoisseurs of delicate sensation, and required a constant supply of
fresh and novel stimuli for their jaded impulses. Zamacona, though by
no means squeamish, was not favourably impressed by what he saw and
heard.
Approached more closely, the vast metropolis became dimly horrible in
its monstrous extent and inhuman height. Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn explained that
the upper parts of the great towers were no longer used, and that many
had been taken down to avoid the bother of maintenance. The plain
around the original urban area was covered with newer and smaller
dwellings, which in many cases were preferred to the ancient towers.
From the whole mass of gold and stone a monotonous roar of activity
droned outward over the plain, while cavalcades and streams of wagons
were constantly entering and leaving over the great gold- or
stone-paved roads.
Several times Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn paused to shew Zamacona some particular
object of interest, especially the temples of Yig, Tulu, Nug, Yeb, and
the Not-to-Be-Named One which lined the road at infrequent intervals,
each in its embowering grove according to the custom of K’n-yan. These
temples, unlike those of the deserted plain beyond the mountains, were
still in active use; large parties of mounted worshippers coming and
going in constant streams. Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn took Zamacona into each of
them, and the Spaniard watched the subtle orgiastic rites with
fascination and repulsion. The ceremonies of Nug and Yeb sickened him
especially—so much, indeed, that he refrained from describing them in
his manuscript. One squat, black temple of Tsathoggua was encountered,
but it had been turned into a shrine of Shub-Niggurath, the All-Mother
and wife of the Not-to-Be-Named One. This deity was a kind of
sophisticated Astarte, and her worship struck the pious Catholic as
supremely obnoxious. What he liked least of all were the emotional
sounds emitted by the celebrants—jarring sounds in a race that had
ceased to use vocal speech for ordinary purposes.
Close to the compact outskirts of Tsath, and well within the shadow of
its terrifying towers, Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn pointed out a monstrous circular
building before which enormous crowds were lined up. This, he
indicated, was one of the many amphitheatres where curious sports and
sensations were provided for the weary people of K’n-yan. He was about
to pause and usher Zamacona inside the vast curved facade, when the
Spaniard, recalling the mutilated forms he had seen in the fields,
violently demurred. This was the first of those friendly clashes of
taste which were to convince the people of Tsath that their guest
followed strange and narrow standards.
Tsath itself was a network of strange and ancient streets; and despite
a growing sense of horror and alienage, Zamacona was enthralled by its
intimations of mystery and cosmic wonder. The dizzy giganticism of its
overawing towers, the monstrous surge of teeming life through its
ornate avenues, the curious carvings on its doorways and windows, the
odd vistas glimpsed from balustraded plazas and tiers of titan
terraces, and the enveloping grey haze which seemed to press down on
the gorge-like streets in low ceiling-fashion, all combined to produce
such a sense of adventurous expectancy as he had never known before. He
was taken at once to a council of executives which held forth in a
gold-and-copper palace behind a gardened and fountained park, and was
for some time subjected to close, friendly questioning in a vaulted
hall frescoed with vertiginous arabesques. Much was expected of him, he
could see, in the way of historical information about the outside
earth; but in return all the mysteries of K’n-yan would be unveiled to
him. The one great drawback was the inexorable ruling that he might
never return to the world of sun and stars and Spain which was his.
A daily programme was laid down for the visitor, with time apportioned
judiciously among several kinds of activities. There were to be
conversations with persons of learning in various places, and lessons
in many branches of Tsathic lore. Liberal periods of research were
allowed for, and all the libraries of K’n-yan both secular and sacred
were to be thrown open to him as soon as he might master the written
languages. Rites and spectacles were to be attended—except when he
might especially object—and much time would be left for the enlightened
pleasure-seeking and emotional titillation which formed the goal and
nucleus of daily life. A house in the suburbs or an apartment in the
city would be assigned him, and he would be initiated into one of the
large affection-groups, including many noblewomen of the most extreme
and art-enhanced beauty, which in latter-day K’n-yan took the place of
family units. Several horned gyaa-yothn would be provided for his
transportation and errand-running, and ten living slaves of intact body
would serve to conduct his establishment and protect him from thieves
and sadists and religious orgiasts on the public highways. There were
many mechanical devices which he must learn to use, but Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn
would instruct him immediately regarding the principal ones.
Upon his choosing an apartment in preference to a suburban villa,
Zamacona was dismissed by the executives with great courtesy and
ceremony, and was led through several gorgeous streets to a cliff-like
carven structure of some seventy or eighty floors. Preparations for his
arrival had already been instituted, and in a spacious ground-floor
suite of vaulted rooms slaves were busy adjusting hangings and
furniture. There were lacquered and inlaid tabourets, velvet and silk
reclining-corners and squatting-cushions, and infinite rows of teakwood
and ebony pigeon-holes with metal cylinders containing some of the
manuscripts he was soon to read—standard classics which all urban
apartments possessed. Desks with great stacks of membrane-paper and
pots of the prevailing green pigment were in every room—each with
graded sets of pigment brushes and other odd bits of stationery.
Mechanical writing devices stood on ornate golden tripods, while over
all was shed a brilliant blue light from energy-globes set in the
ceiling. There were windows, but at this shadowy ground-level they were
of scant illuminating value. In some of the rooms were elaborate baths,
while the kitchen was a maze of technical contrivances. Supplies were
brought, Zamacona was told, through the network of underground passages
which lay beneath Tsath, and which had once accommodated curious
mechanical transports. There was a stable on that underground level for
the beasts, and Zamacona would presently be shewn how to find the
nearest runway to the street. Before his inspection was finished, the
permanent staff of slaves arrived and were introduced; and shortly
afterward there came some half-dozen freemen and noblewomen of his
future affection-group, who were to be his companions for several days,
contributing what they could to his instruction and amusement. Upon
their departure, another party would take their place, and so onward in
rotation through a group of about fifty members.
VI.
Thus was Pánfilo de Zamacona y Nuñez absorbed for four years into the
life of the sinister city of Tsath in the blue-litten nether world of
K’n-yan. All that he learned and saw and did is clearly not told in his
manuscript; for a pious reticence overcame him when he began to write
in his native Spanish tongue, and he dared not set down everything.
Much he consistently viewed with repulsion, and many things he
steadfastly refrained from seeing or doing or eating. For other things
he atoned by frequent countings of the beads of his rosary. He explored
the entire world of K’n-yan, including the deserted machine-cities of
the middle period on the gorse-grown plain of Nith, and made one
descent into the red-litten world of Yoth to see the Cyclopean ruins.
He witnessed prodigies of craft and machinery which left him
breathless, and beheld human metamorphoses, dematerialisations,
rematerialisations, and reanimations which made him cross himself again
and again. His very capacity for astonishment was blunted by the
plethora of new marvels which every day brought him.
But the longer he stayed, the more he wished to leave, for the inner
life of K’n-yan was based on impulses very plainly outside his radius.
As he progressed in historical knowledge, he understood more; but
understanding only heightened his distaste. He felt that the people of
Tsath were a lost and dangerous race—more dangerous to themselves than
they knew—and that their growing frenzy of monotony-warfare and
novelty-quest was leading them rapidly toward a precipice of
disintegration and utter horror. His own visit, he could see, had
accelerated their unrest; not only by introducing fears of outside
invasion, but by exciting in many a wish to sally forth and taste the
diverse external world he described. As time progressed, he noticed an
increasing tendency of the people to resort to dematerialisation as an
amusement; so that the apartments and amphitheatres of Tsath became a
veritable Witches’ Sabbath of transmutations, age-adjustments,
death-experiments, and projections. With the growth of boredom and
restlessness, he saw, cruelty and subtlety and revolt were growing
apace. There was more and more cosmic abnormality, more and more
curious sadism, more and more ignorance and superstition, and more and
more desire to escape out of physical life into a half-spectral state
of electronic dispersal.
All his efforts to leave, however, came to nothing. Persuasion was
useless, as repeated trials proved; though the mature disillusion of
the upper classes at first prevented them from resenting their guest’s
open wish for departure. In a year which he reckoned as 1543 Zamacona
made an actual attempt to escape through the tunnel by which he had
entered K’n-yan, but after a weary journey across the deserted plain he
encountered forces in the dark passage which discouraged him from
future attempts in that direction. As a means of sustaining hope and
keeping the image of home in mind, he began about this time to make
rough draughts of the manuscript relating his adventures; delighting in
the loved, old Spanish words and the familiar letters of the Roman
alphabet. Somehow he fancied he might get the manuscript to the outer
world; and to make it convincing to his fellows he resolved to enclose
it in one of the Tulu-metal cylinders used for sacred archives. That
alien, magnetic substance could not but support the incredible story he
had to tell.
But even as he planned, he had little real hope of ever establishing
contact with the earth’s surface. Every known gate, he knew, was
guarded by persons or forces that it were better not to oppose. His
attempt at escape had not helped matters, for he could now see a
growing hostility to the outer world he represented. He hoped that no
other European would find his way in; for it was possible that later
comers might not fare as well as he. He himself had been a cherished
fountain of data, and as such had enjoyed a privileged status. Others,
deemed less necessary, might receive rather different treatment. He
even wondered what would happen to him when the sages of Tsath
considered him drained dry of fresh facts; and in self-defence began to
be more gradual in his talks on earth-lore, conveying whenever he could
the impression of vast knowledge held in reserve.
One other thing which endangered Zamacona’s status in Tsath was his
persistent curiosity regarding the ultimate abyss of N’kai, beneath
red-litten Yoth, whose existence the dominant religious cults of
K’n-yan were more and more inclined to deny. When exploring Yoth he had
vainly tried to find the blocked-up entrance; and later on he
experimented in the arts of dematerialisation and projection, hoping
that he might thereby be able to throw his consciousness downward into
the gulfs which his physical eyes could not discover. Though never
becoming truly proficient in these processes, he did manage to achieve
a series of monstrous and portentous dreams which he believed included
some elements of actual projection into N’kai; dreams which greatly
shocked and perturbed the leaders of Yig and Tulu-worship when he
related them, and which he was advised by friends to conceal rather
than exploit. In time those dreams became very frequent and maddening;
containing things which he dared not record in his main manuscript, but
of which he prepared a special record for the benefit of certain
learned men in Tsath.
It may have been unfortunate—or it may have been mercifully
fortunate—that Zamacona practiced so many reticences and reserved so
many themes and descriptions for subsidiary manuscripts. The main
document leaves one to guess much about the detailed manners, customs,
thoughts, language, and history of K’n-yan, as well as to form any
adequate picture of the visual aspect and daily life of Tsath. One is
left puzzled, too, about the real motivations of the people; their
strange passivity and craven unwarlikeness, and their almost cringing
fear of the outer world despite their possession of atomic and
dematerialising powers which would have made them unconquerable had
they taken the trouble to organise armies as in the old days. It is
evident that K’n-yan was far along in its decadence—reacting with mixed
apathy and hysteria against the standardised and time-tabled life of
stultifying regularity which machinery had brought it during its middle
period. Even the grotesque and repulsive customs and modes of thought
and feeling can be traced to this source; for in his historical
research Zamacona found evidence of bygone eras in which K’n-yan had
held ideas much like those of the classic and renaissance outer world,
and had possessed a national character and art full of what Europeans
regard as dignity, kindness, and nobility.
The more Zamacona studied these things, the more apprehensive about the
future he became; because he saw that the omnipresent moral and
intellectual disintegration was a tremendously deep-seated and
ominously accelerating movement. Even during his stay the signs of
decay multiplied. Rationalism degenerated more and more into fanatical
and orgiastic superstition, centring in a lavish adoration of the
magnetic Tulu-metal, and tolerance steadily dissolved into a series of
frenzied hatreds, especially toward the outer world of which the
scholars were learning so much from him. At times he almost feared that
the people might some day lose their age-long apathy and brokenness and
turn like desperate rats against the unknown lands above them, sweeping
all before them by virtue of their singular and still-remembered
scientific powers. But for the present they fought their boredom and
sense of emptiness in other ways; multiplying their hideous emotional
outlets and increasing the mad grotesqueness and abnormality of their
diversions. The arenas of Tsath must have been accursed and unthinkable
places—Zamacona never went near them. And what they would be in another
century, or even in another decade, he did not dare to think. The pious
Spaniard crossed himself and counted his beads more often than usual in
those days.
In the year 1545, as he reckoned it, Zamacona began what may well be
accepted as his final series of attempts to leave K’n-yan. His fresh
opportunity came from an unexpected source—a female of his
affection-group who conceived for him a curious individual infatuation
based on some hereditary memory of the days of monogamous wedlock in
Tsath. Over this female—a noblewoman of moderate beauty and of at least
average intelligence named T’la-yub—Zamacona acquired the most
extraordinary influence; finally inducing her to help him in an escape,
under the promise that he would let her accompany him. Chance proved a
great factor in the course of events, for T’la-yub came of a primordial
family of gate-lords who had retained oral traditions of at least one
passage to the outer world which the mass of people had forgotten even
at the time of the great closing; a passage to a mound on the level
plains of earth which had, in consequence, never been sealed up or
guarded. She explained that the primordial gate-lords were not guards
or sentries, but merely ceremonial and economic proprietors,
half-feudal and baronial in status, of an era preceding the severance
of surface-relations. Her own family had been so reduced at the time of
the closing that their gate had been wholly overlooked; and they had
ever afterward preserved the secret of its existence as a sort of
hereditary secret—a source of pride, and of a sense of reserve power,
to offset the feeling of vanished wealth and influence which so
constantly irritated them.
Zamacona, now working feverishly to get his manuscript into final form
in case anything should happen to him, decided to take with him on his
outward journey only five beast-loads of unalloyed gold in the form of
the small ingots used for minor decorations—enough, he calculated, to
make him a personage of unlimited power in his own world. He had become
somewhat hardened to the sight of the monstrous gyaa-yothn during his
four years of residence in Tsath, hence did not shrink from using the
creatures; yet he resolved to kill and bury them, and cache the gold,
as soon as he reached the outer world, since he knew that even a
glimpse of one of the things would drive any ordinary Indian mad. Later
he could arrange for a suitable expedition to transport the treasure to
Mexico. T’la-yub he would perhaps allow to share his fortunes, for she
was by no means unattractive; though possibly he would arrange for her
sojourn amongst the plains Indians, since he was not overanxious to
preserve links with the manner of life in Tsath. For a wife, of course,
he would choose a lady of Spain—or at worst, an Indian princess of
normal outer-world descent and a regular and approved past. But for the
present T’la-yub must be used as a guide. The manuscript he would carry
on his own person, encased in a book-cylinder of the sacred and
magnetic Tulu-metal.
The expedition itself is described in the addendum to Zamacona’s
manuscript, written later, and in a hand shewing signs of nervous
strain. It set out amidst the most careful precautions, choosing a
rest-period and proceeding as far as possible along the faintly lighted
passages beneath the city. Zamacona and T’la-yub, disguised in slaves’
garments, bearing provision-knapsacks, and leading the five laden
beasts on foot, were readily taken for commonplace workers; and they
clung as long as possible to the subterranean way—using a long and
little-frequented branch which had formerly conducted the mechanical
transports to the now ruined suburb of L’thaa. Amidst the ruins of
L’thaa they came to the surface, thereafter passing as rapidly as
possible over the deserted, blue-litten plain of Nith toward the
Grh-yan range of low hills. There, amidst the tangled underbrush,
T’la-yub found the long disused and half-fabulous entrance to the
forgotten tunnel; a thing she had seen but once before—aeons in the
past, when her father had taken her thither to shew her this monument
to their family pride. It was hard work getting the laden gyaa-yothn to
scrape through the obstructing vines and briers, and one of them
displayed a rebelliousness destined to bear dire consequences—bolting
away from the party and loping back toward Tsath on its detestable
pads, golden burden and all.
It was nightmare work burrowing by the light of blue-ray torches
upward, downward, forward, and upward again through a dank, choked
tunnel that no foot had trodden since ages before the sinking of
Atlantis; and at one point T’la-yub had to practice the fearsome art of
dematerialisation on herself, Zamacona, and the laden beasts in order
to pass a point wholly clogged by shifting earth-strata. It was a
terrible experience for Zamacona; for although he had often witnessed
dematerialisation in others, and even practiced it himself to the
extent of dream-projection, he had never been fully subjected to it
before. But T’la-yub was skilled in the arts of K’n-yan, and
accomplished the double metamorphosis in perfect safety.
Thereafter they resumed the hideous burrowing through stalactited
crypts of horror where monstrous carvings leered at every turn;
alternately camping and advancing for a period which Zamacona reckoned
as about three days, but which was probably less. At last they came to
a very narrow place where the natural or only slightly hewn cave-walls
gave place to walls of wholly artificial masonry, carved into terrible
bas-reliefs. These walls, after about a mile of steep ascent, ended
with a pair of vast niches, one on each side, in which monstrous,
nitre-encrusted images of Yig and Tulu squatted, glaring at each other
across the passage as they had glared since the earliest youth of the
human world. At this point the passage opened into a prodigious vaulted
and circular chamber of human construction; wholly covered with
horrible carvings, and revealing at the farther end an arched
passageway with the foot of a flight of steps. T’la-yub knew from
family tales that this must be very near the earth’s surface, but she
could not tell just how near. Here the party camped for what they meant
to be their last rest-period in the subterraneous world.
It must have been hours later that the clank of metal and the padding
of beasts’ feet awakened Zamacona and T’la-yub. A bluish glare was
spreading from the narrow passage between the images of Yig and Tulu,
and in an instant the truth was obvious. An alarm had been given at
Tsath—as was later revealed, by the returning gyaa-yoth which had
rebelled at the brier-choked tunnel-entrance—and a swift party of
pursuers had come to arrest the fugitives. Resistance was clearly
useless, and none was offered. The party of twelve beast-riders proved
studiously polite, and the return commenced almost without a word or
thought-message on either side.
It was an ominous and depressing journey, and the ordeal of
dematerialisation and rematerialisation at the choked place was all the
more terrible because of the lack of that hope and expectancy which had
palliated the process on the outward trip. Zamacona heard his captors
discussing the imminent clearing of this choked place by intensive
radiations, since henceforward sentries must be maintained at the
hitherto unknown outer portal. It would not do to let outsiders get
within the passage, for then any who might escape without due treatment
would have a hint of the vastness of the inner world and would perhaps
be curious enough to return in greater strength. As with the other
passages since Zamacona’s coming, sentries must be stationed all along,
as far as the very outermost gate; sentries drawn from amongst all the
slaves, the dead-alive y’m-bhi, or the class of discredited freemen.
With the overrunning of the American plains by thousands of Europeans,
as the Spaniard had predicted, every passage was a potential source of
danger; and must be rigorously guarded until the technologists of Tsath
could spare the energy to prepare an ultimate and entrance-hiding
obliteration as they had done for many passages in earlier and more
vigorous times.
Zamacona and T’la-yub were tried before three gn’agn of the supreme
tribunal in the gold-and-copper palace behind the gardened and
fountained park, and the Spaniard was given his liberty because of the
vital outer-world information he still had to impart. He was told to
return to his apartment and to his affection-group; taking up his life
as before, and continuing to meet deputations of scholars according to
the latest schedule he had been following. No restrictions would be
imposed upon him so long as he might remain peacefully in K’n-yan—but
it was intimated that such leniency would not be repeated after another
attempt at escape. Zamacona had felt that there was an element of irony
in the parting words of the chief gn’ag—an assurance that all of his
gyaa-yothn, including the one which had rebelled, would be returned to
him.
The fate of T’la-yub was less happy. There being no object in retaining
her, and her ancient Tsathic lineage giving her act a greater aspect of
treason than Zamacona’s had possessed, she was ordered to be delivered
to the curious diversions of the amphitheatre; and afterward, in a
somewhat mutilated and half-dematerialised form, to be given the
functions of a y’m-bhi or animated corpse-slave and stationed among the
sentries guarding the passage whose existence she had betrayed.
Zamacona soon heard, not without many pangs of regret he could scarcely
have anticipated, that poor T’la-yub had emerged from the arena in a
headless and otherwise incomplete state, and had been set as an
outermost guard upon the mound in which the passage had been found to
terminate. She was, he was told, a night-sentinel, whose automatic duty
was to warn off all comers with a torch; sending down reports to a
small garrison of twelve dead slave y’m-bhi and six living but partly
dematerialised freemen in the vaulted, circular chamber if the
approachers did not heed her warning. She worked, he was told, in
conjunction with a day-sentinel—a living freeman who chose this post in
preference to other forms of discipline for other offences against the
state. Zamacona, of course, had long known that most of the chief
gate-sentries were such discredited freemen.
It was now made plain to him, though indirectly, that his own penalty
for another escape-attempt would be service as a gate-sentry—but in the
form of a dead-alive y’m-bhi slave, and after amphitheatre-treatment
even more picturesque than that which T’la-yub was reported to have
undergone. It was intimated that he—or parts of him—would be reanimated
to guard some inner section of the passage; within sight of others,
where his abridged person might serve as a permanent symbol of the
rewards of treason. But, his informants always added, it was of course
inconceivable that he would ever court such a fate. So long as he
remained peaceably in K’n-yan, he would continue to be a free,
privileged, and respected personage.
Yet in the end Pánfilo de Zamacona did court the fate so direfully
hinted to him. True, he did not really expect to encounter it; but the
nervous latter part of his manuscript makes it clear that he was
prepared to face its possibility. What gave him a final hope of
scatheless escape from K’n-yan was his growing mastery of the art of
dematerialisation. Having studied it for years, and having learned
still more from the two instances in which he had been subjected to it,
he now felt increasingly able to use it independently and effectively.
The manuscript records several notable experiments in this art—minor
successes accomplished in his apartment—and reflects Zamacona’s hope
that he might soon be able to assume the spectral form in full,
attaining complete invisibility and preserving that condition as long
as he wished.
Once he reached this stage, he argued, the outward way lay open to him.
Of course he could not bear away any gold, but mere escape was enough.
He would, though, dematerialise and carry away with him his manuscript
in the Tulu-metal cylinder, even though it cost additional effort; for
this record and proof must reach the outer world at all hazards. He now
knew the passage to follow; and if he could thread it in an
atom-scattered state, he did not see how any person or force could
detect or stop him. The only trouble would be if he failed to maintain
his spectral condition at all times. That was the one ever-present
peril, as he had learned from his experiments. But must one not always
risk death and worse in a life of adventure? Zamacona was a gentleman
of Old Spain; of the blood that faced the unknown and carved out half
the civilisation of the New World.
For many nights after his ultimate resolution Zamacona prayed to St.
Pamphilus and other guardian saints, and counted the beads of his
rosary. The last entry in the manuscript, which toward the end took the
form of a diary more and more, was merely a single sentence—“Es más
tarde de lo que pensaba—tengo que marcharme”. . . . “It is later than I
thought; I must go.” After that, only silence and conjecture—and such
evidence as the presence of the manuscript itself, and what that
manuscript could lead to, might provide.
VII.
When I looked up from my half-stupefied reading and note-taking the
morning sun was high in the heavens. The electric bulb was still
burning, but such things of the real world—the modern outer world—were
far from my whirling brain. I knew I was in my room at Clyde Compton’s
at Binger—but upon what monstrous vista had I stumbled? Was this thing
a hoax or a chronicle of madness? If a hoax, was it a jest of the
sixteenth century or of today? The manuscript’s age looked appallingly
genuine to my not wholly unpracticed eyes, and the problem presented by
the strange metal cylinder I dared not even think about.
Moreover, what a monstrously exact explanation it gave of all the
baffling phenomena of the mound—of the seemingly meaningless and
paradoxical actions of diurnal and nocturnal ghosts, and of the queer
cases of madness and disappearance! It was even an accursedly plausible
explanation—evilly consistent—if one could adopt the incredible. It
must be a shocking hoax devised by someone who knew all the lore of the
mound. There was even a hint of social satire in the account of that
unbelievable nether world of horror and decay. Surely this was the
clever forgery of some learned cynic—something like the leaden crosses
in New Mexico, which a jester once planted and pretended to discover as
a relique of some forgotten Dark Age colony from Europe.
Upon going down to breakfast I hardly knew what to tell Compton and his
mother, as well as the curious callers who had already begun to arrive.
Still in a daze, I cut the Gordian Knot by giving a few points from the
notes I had made, and mumbling my belief that the thing was a subtle
and ingenious fraud left there by some previous explorer of the mound—a
belief in which everybody seemed to concur when told of the substance
of the manuscript. It is curious how all that breakfast group—and all
the others in Binger to whom the discussion was repeated—seemed to find
a great clearing of the atmosphere in the notion that somebody was
playing a joke on somebody. For the time we all forgot that the known,
recent history of the mound presented mysteries as strange as any in
the manuscript, and as far from acceptable solution as ever.
The fears and doubts began to return when I asked for volunteers to
visit the mound with me. I wanted a larger excavating party—but the
idea of going to that uncomfortable place seemed no more attractive to
the people of Binger than it had seemed on the previous day. I myself
felt a mounting horror upon looking toward the mound and glimpsing the
moving speck which I knew was the daylight sentinel; for in spite of
all my scepticism the morbidities of that manuscript stuck by me and
gave everything connected with the place a new and monstrous
significance. I absolutely lacked the resolution to look at the moving
speck with my binoculars. Instead, I set out with the kind of bravado
we display in nightmares—when, knowing we are dreaming, we plunge
desperately into still thicker horrors, for the sake of having the
whole thing over the sooner. My pick and shovel were already out there,
so I had only my handbag of smaller paraphernalia to take. Into this I
put the strange cylinder and its contents, feeling vaguely that I might
possibly find something worth checking up with some part of the
green-lettered Spanish text. Even a clever hoax might be founded on
some actual attribute of the mound which a former explorer had
discovered—and that magnetic metal was damnably odd! Grey Eagle’s
cryptic talisman still hung from its leathern cord around my neck.
I did not look very sharply at the mound as I walked toward it, but
when I reached it there was nobody in sight. Repeating my upward
scramble of the previous day, I was troubled by thoughts of what might
lie close at hand if, by any miracle, any part of the manuscript were
actually half-true. In such a case, I could not help reflecting, the
hypothetical Spaniard Zamacona must have barely reached the outer world
when overtaken by some disaster—perhaps an involuntary
rematerialisation. He would naturally, in that event, have been seized
by whichever sentry happened to be on duty at the time—either the
discredited freeman, or, as a matter of supreme irony, the very
T’la-yub who had planned and aided his first attempt at escape—and in
the ensuing struggle the cylinder with the manuscript might well have
been dropped on the mound’s summit, to be neglected and gradually
buried for nearly four centuries. But, I added, as I climbed over the
crest, one must not think of extravagant things like that. Still, if
there were anything in the tale, it must have been a monstrous fate to
which Zamacona had been dragged back . . . the amphitheatre . . .
mutilation . . . duty somewhere in the dank, nitrous tunnel as a
dead-alive slave . . . a maimed corpse-fragment as an automatic
interior sentry. . . .
It was a very real shock which chased this morbid speculation from my
head, for upon glancing around the elliptical summit I saw at once that
my pick and shovel had been stolen. This was a highly provoking and
disconcerting development; baffling, too, in view of the seeming
reluctance of all the Binger folk to visit the mound. Was this
reluctance a pretended thing, and had the jokers of the village been
chuckling over my coming discomfiture as they solemnly saw me off ten
minutes before? I took out my binoculars and scanned the gaping crowd
at the edge of the village. No—they did not seem to be looking for any
comic climax; yet was not the whole affair at bottom a colossal joke in
which all the villagers and reservation people were concerned—legends,
manuscript, cylinder, and all? I thought of how I had seen the sentry
from a distance, and then found him unaccountably vanished; thought
also of the conduct of old Grey Eagle, of the speech and expressions of
Compton and his mother, and of the unmistakable fright of most of the
Binger people. On the whole, it could not very well be a village-wide
joke. The fear and the problem were surely real, though obviously there
were one or two jesting daredevils in Binger who had stolen out to the
mound and made off with the tools I had left.
Everything else on the mound was as I had left it—brush cut by my
machete, slight, bowl-like depression toward the north end, and the
hole I had made with my trench-knife in digging up the
magnetism-revealed cylinder. Deeming it too great a concession to the
unknown jokers to return to Binger for another pick and shovel, I
resolved to carry out my programme as best I could with the machete and
trench-knife in my handbag; so extracting these, I set to work
excavating the bowl-like depression which my eye had picked as the
possible site of a former entrance to the mound. As I proceeded, I felt
again the suggestion of a sudden wind blowing against me which I had
noticed the day before—a suggestion which seemed stronger, and still
more reminiscent of unseen, formless, opposing hands laid on my wrists,
as I cut deeper and deeper through the root-tangled red soil and
reached the exotic black loam beneath. The talisman around my neck
appeared to twitch oddly in the breeze—not in any one direction, as
when attracted by the buried cylinder, but vaguely and diffusely, in a
manner wholly unaccountable.
Then, quite without warning, the black, root-woven earth beneath my
feet began to sink cracklingly, while I heard a faint sound of sifting,
falling matter far below me. The obstructing wind, or forces, or hands
now seemed to be operating from the very seat of the sinking, and I
felt that they aided me by pushing as I leaped back out of the hole to
avoid being involved in any cave-in. Bending down over the brink and
hacking at the mould-caked root-tangle with my machete, I felt that
they were against me again—but at no time were they strong enough to
stop my work. The more roots I severed, the more falling matter I heard
below. Finally the hole began to deepen of itself toward the centre,
and I saw that the earth was sifting down into some large cavity
beneath, so as to leave a good-sized aperture when the roots that had
bound it were gone. A few more hacks of the machete did the trick, and
with a parting cave-in and uprush of curiously chill and alien air the
last barrier gave way. Under the morning sun yawned a huge opening at
least three feet square, and shewing the top of a flight of stone steps
down which the loose earth of the collapse was still sliding. My quest
had come to something at last! With an elation of accomplishment almost
overbalancing fear for the nonce, I replaced the trench-knife and
machete in my handbag, took out my powerful electric torch, and
prepared for a triumphant, lone, and utterly rash invasion of the
fabulous nether world I had uncovered.
It was rather hard getting down the first few steps, both because of
the fallen earth which had choked them and because of a sinister
up-pushing of a cold wind from below. The talisman around my neck
swayed curiously, and I began to regret the disappearing square of
daylight above me. The electric torch shewed dank, water-stained, and
salt-encrusted walls fashioned of huge basalt blocks, and now and then
I thought I descried some trace of carving beneath the nitrous
deposits. I gripped my handbag more tightly, and was glad of the
comforting weight of the sheriff’s heavy revolver in my right-hand coat
pocket. After a time the passage began to wind this way and that, and
the staircase became free from obstructions. Carvings on the walls were
now definitely traceable, and I shuddered when I saw how clearly the
grotesque figures resembled the monstrous bas-reliefs on the cylinder I
had found. Winds and forces continued to blow malevolently against me,
and at one or two bends I half fancied the torch gave glimpses of thin,
transparent shapes not unlike the sentinel on the mound as my
binoculars had shewed him. When I reached this stage of visual chaos I
stopped for a moment to get a grip on myself. It would not do to let my
nerves get the better of me at the very outset of what would surely be
a trying experience, and the most important archaeological feat of my
career.
But I wished I had not stopped at just that place, for the act fixed my
attention on something profoundly disturbing. It was only a small
object lying close to the wall on one of the steps below me, but that
object was such as to put my reason to a severe test, and bring up a
line of the most alarming speculations. That the opening above me had
been closed against all material forms for generations was utterly
obvious from the growth of shrub-roots and accumulation of drifting
soil; yet the object before me was most distinctly not many generations
old. For it was an electric torch much like the one I now
carried—warped and encrusted in the tomb-like dampness, but none the
less perfectly unmistakable. I descended a few steps and picked it up,
wiping off the evil deposits on my rough coat. One of the nickel bands
bore an engraved name and address, and I recognised it with a start the
moment I made it out. It read “Jas. C. Williams, 17 Trowbridge St.,
Cambridge, Mass.”—and I knew that it had belonged to one of the two
daring college instructors who had disappeared on June 28, 1915. Only
thirteen years ago, and yet I had just broken through the sod of
centuries! How had the thing got there? Another entrance—or was there
something after all in this mad idea of dematerialisation and
rematerialisation?
Doubt and horror grew upon me as I wound still farther down the
seemingly endless staircase. Would the thing never stop? The carvings
grew more and more distinct, and assumed a narrative pictorial quality
which brought me close to panic as I recognised many unmistakable
correspondences with the history of K’n-yan as sketched in the
manuscript now resting in my handbag. For the first time I began
seriously to question the wisdom of my descent, and to wonder whether I
had not better return to the upper air before I came upon something
which would never let me return as a sane man. But I did not hesitate
long, for as a Virginian I felt the blood of ancestral fighters and
gentlemen-adventurers pounding a protest against retreat from any peril
known or unknown.
My descent became swifter rather than slower, and I avoided studying
the terrible bas-reliefs and intaglios that had unnerved me. All at
once I saw an arched opening ahead, and realised that the prodigious
staircase had ended at last. But with that realisation came horror in
mounting magnitude, for before me there yawned a vast vaulted crypt of
all-too-familiar outline—a great circular space answering in every
least particular to the carving-lined chamber described in the Zamacona
manuscript.
It was indeed the place. There could be no mistake. And if any room for
doubt yet remained, that room was abolished by what I saw directly
across the great vault. It was a second arched opening, commencing a
long, narrow passage and having at its mouth two huge opposite niches
bearing loathsome and titanic images of shockingly familiar pattern.
There in the dark unclean Yig and hideous Tulu squatted eternally,
glaring at each other across the passage as they had glared since the
earliest youth of the human world.
From this point onward I ask no credence for what I tell—for what I
think I saw. It is too utterly unnatural, too utterly monstrous and
incredible, to be any part of sane human experience or objective
reality. My torch, though casting a powerful beam ahead, naturally
could not furnish any general illumination of the Cyclopean crypt; so I
now began moving it about to explore the giant walls little by little.
As I did so, I saw to my horror that the space was by no means vacant,
but was instead littered with odd furniture and utensils and heaps of
packages which bespoke a populous recent occupancy—no nitrous reliques
of the past, but queerly shaped objects and supplies in modern,
every-day use. As my torch rested on each article or group of articles,
however, the distinctness of the outlines soon began to grow blurred;
until in the end I could scarcely tell whether the things belonged to
the realm of matter or to the realm of spirit.
All this while the adverse winds blew against me with increasing fury,
and the unseen hands plucked malevolently at me and snatched at the
strange magnetic talisman I wore. Wild conceits surged through my mind.
I thought of the manuscript and what it said about the garrison
stationed in this place—twelve dead slave y’m-bhi and six living but
partly dematerialised freemen—that was in 1545—three hundred and
eighty-three years ago. . . . What since then? Zamacona had predicted
change . . . subtle disintegration . . . more dematerialisation . . .
weaker and weaker . . . was it Grey Eagle’s talisman that held them at
bay—their sacred Tulu-metal—and were they feebly trying to pluck it off
so that they might do to me what they had done to those who had come
before? . . . It occurred to me with shuddering force that I was
building my speculations out of a full belief in the Zamacona
manuscript—this must not be—I must get a grip on myself—
But, curse it, every time I tried to get a grip I saw some fresh sight
to shatter my poise still further. This time, just as my will power was
driving the half-seen paraphernalia into obscurity, my glance and
torch-beam had to light on two things of very different nature; two
things of the eminently real and sane world; yet they did more to
unseat my shaky reason than anything I had seen before—because I knew
what they were, and knew how profoundly, in the course of Nature, they
ought not to be there. They were my own missing pick and shovel, side
by side, and leaning neatly against the blasphemously carved wall of
that hellish crypt. God in heaven—and I had babbled to myself about
daring jokers from Binger!
That was the last straw. After that the cursed hypnotism of the
manuscript got at me, and I actually saw the half-transparent shapes of
the things that were pushing and plucking; pushing and plucking—those
leprous palaeogean things with something of humanity still clinging to
them—the complete forms, and the forms that were morbidly and
perversely incomplete . . . all these, and hideous other entities—the
four-footed blasphemies with ape-like face and projecting horn . . .
and not a sound so far in all that nitrous hell of inner earth. . . .
Then there was a sound—a flopping; a padding; a dull, advancing sound
which heralded beyond question a being as structurally material as the
pickaxe and the shovel—something wholly unlike the shadow-shapes that
ringed me in, yet equally remote from any sort of life as life is
understood on the earth’s wholesome surface. My shattered brain tried
to prepare me for what was coming, but could not frame any adequate
image. I could only say over and over again to myself, “It is of the
abyss, but it is not dematerialised.” The padding grew more distinct,
and from the mechanical cast of the tread I knew it was a dead thing
that stalked in the darkness. Then—oh, God, I saw it in the full beam
of my torch; saw it framed like a sentinel in the narrow passage
between the nightmare idols of the serpent Yig and the octopus
Tulu. . . .
Let me collect myself enough to hint at what I saw; to explain why I
dropped torch and handbag and fled empty-handed in the utter blackness,
wrapped in a merciful unconsciousness which did not wear off until the
sun and the distant yelling and the shouting from the village roused me
as I lay gasping on the top of the accursed mound. I do not yet know
what guided me again to the earth’s surface. I only know that the
watchers in Binger saw me stagger up into sight three hours after I had
vanished; saw me lurch up and fall flat on the ground as if struck by a
bullet. None of them dared to come out and help me; but they knew I
must be in a bad state, so tried to rouse me as best they could by
yelling in chorus and firing off revolvers.
It worked in the end, and when I came to I almost rolled down the side
of the mound in my eagerness to get away from that black aperture which
still yawned open. My torch and tools, and the handbag with the
manuscript, were all down there; but it is easy to see why neither I
nor anyone else ever went after them. When I staggered across the plain
and into the village I dared not tell what I had seen. I only muttered
vague things about carvings and statues and snakes and shaken nerves.
And I did not faint again until somebody mentioned that the
ghost-sentinel had reappeared about the time I had staggered half way
back to town. I left Binger that evening, and have never been there
since, though they tell me the ghosts still appear on the mound as
usual.
But I have resolved to hint here at last what I dared not hint to the
people of Binger on that terrible August afternoon. I don’t know yet
just how I can go about it—and if in the end you think my reticence
strange, just remember that to imagine such a horror is one thing, but
to see it is another thing. I saw it. I think you’ll recall my citing
early in this tale the case of a bright young man named Heaton who went
out to that mound one day in 1891 and came back at night as the village
idiot, babbling for eight years about horrors and then dying in an
epileptic fit. What he used to keep moaning was “That white man—oh, my
God, what they did to him. . . .”
Well, I saw the same thing that poor Heaton saw—and I saw it after
reading the manuscript, so I know more of its history than he did. That
makes it worse—for I know all that it implies; all that must be still
brooding and festering and waiting down there. I told you it had padded
mechanically toward me out of the narrow passage and had stood
sentry-like at the entrance between the frightful eidola of Yig and
Tulu. That was very natural and inevitable—because the thing was a
sentry. It had been made a sentry for punishment, and it was quite
dead—besides lacking head, arms, lower legs, and other customary parts
of a human being. Yes—it had been a very human being once; and what is
more, it had been white. Very obviously, if that manuscript was as true
as I think it was, this being had been used for the diversions of the
amphitheatre before its life had become wholly extinct and supplanted
by automatic impulses controlled from outside.
On its white and only slightly hairy chest some letters had been gashed
or branded—I had not stopped to investigate, but had merely noted that
they were in an awkward and fumbling Spanish; an awkward Spanish
implying a kind of ironic use of the language by an alien inscriber
familiar neither with the idiom nor the Roman letters used to record
it. The inscription had read “Secuestrado a la voluntad de Xinaián en
el cuerpo decapitado de Tlayúb”—“Seized by the will of K’n-yan in the
headless body of T’la-yub.”
Return to “The Mound”
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