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object:The Shadow Out Of Time
class:short story
class:chapter
author class:H. P. Lovecraft
genre:Horror
PLOT
The Shadow Out of Time indirectly tells of the Great Race of Yith, an extraterrestrial species with the ability to travel through space and time. The Yithians accomplish this by switching bodies with hosts from the intended spatial or temporal destination. The story implies that the effect, when seen from the outside, is similar to spiritual possession. The Yithians' original purpose was to study the history of various times and places, and they have amassed a "library city" that is filled with the past and future history of multiple races, including humans. Ultimately the Yithians use their ability to escape the destruction of their planet in another galaxy by switching bodies with a race of cone-shaped plant beings who lived 250 million years ago on Earth. The cone-shaped entities (subsequently also known as the Great Race of Yith) lived in their vast library city in what would later become Australia's Great Sandy Desert (223a14aS 1250a39aE).
The story is told through the eyes of Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, an American living in the first decade of the 20th century, who is "possessed" by a Yithian. He fears he is losing his mind when he unaccountably sees strange vistas of other worlds and of the Yithian library city. He also feels himself being led about by these creatures and experiences how they live. When he is returned to his own body, he finds that those around him have judged him insane due to the actions of the Yithian that possessed his body. While he was experiencing a Yithian existence in Earth's ancient past, the Yithian occupying his body was experiencing a human one in the present day.
The narrator at first believes his episode and subsequent dreams to be the product of some kind of mental illness. His initial relief at discovering other cases like his throughout history is withered when he discovers that the other cases are too similar to his own to be without a connection. The narrator's dreams become more vivid, and he becomes obsessed with archaeology and ancient manuscripts (as was the Yithian) - but lacks any sort of proof that would demonstrate whether he was (or is) simply mad.
He discovers that the Yithians on Earth died out eons ago (their civilization destroyed by a rival, utterly alien pre-human race described as "half-polypous" creatures) but the Yithian minds will inhabit new bodies on Earth after humanity is long gone. His tenuously held sanity is challenged when he discovers the proof he seeks-and that not only do remains of the Yithians' past civilization still exist on Earth; but also still remaining are those who destroyed them. It is also mentioned that the current appearance of the Yithians is not the original; but one acquired during a previous mass-projection of the minds of their race when disaster beckoned, leaving the original inhabitants to die in the bodies of the Yithians.

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The Shadow Out of Time

The Shadow Out of Time

by H. P. Lovecraft

Written Nov 1934-Mar 1935

Published June 1936 in Astounding Stories, Vol. 17, No. 4, p. 110-54.

I

After twenty-two years of nightmare and terror, saved only by a desperate conviction of

the mythical source of certain impressions, I am unwilling to vouch for the truth of that
which I think I found in Western Australia on the night of 17-18 July 1935. There is
reason to hope that my experience was wholly or partly an hallucination - for which,
indeed, abundant causes existed. And yet, its realism was so hideous that I sometimes
find hope impossible.
If the thing did happen, then man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and
of his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralysing. He
must, too, be placed on guard against a specific, lurking peril which, though it will never
engulf the whole race, may impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain
venturesome members of it.
It is for this latter reason that I urge, with all the force of my being, final abandonment of
all the attempts at unearthing those fragments of unknown, primordial masonry which my
expedition set out to investigate.
Assuming that I was sane and awake, my experience on that night was such as has
befallen no man before. It was, moreover, a frightful confirmation of all I had sought to
dismiss as myth and dream. Mercifull there is no proof, for in my fright I lost the
awesome object which would - if real and brought out of that noxious abyss - have
formed irrefutable evidence.
When I came upon the horror I was alone - and I have up to now told no one about it. I
could not stop the others from digging in its direction, but chance and the shifting sand
have so far saved them from finding it. Now I must formulate some definite statement not only for the sake of my own mental balance, but to warn such others as may read it
seriously.
These pages - much in whose earlier parts will be familiar to close readers of the general
and scientific press - are written in the cabin of the ship that is bringing me home. I shall
give them to my son, Professor Wingate Peaslee of Miskatonic University - the only
member of my family who stuck to me after my queer amnesia of long ago, and the man
best informed on the inner facts of my case. Of all living persons, he is least likely to
ridicule what I shall tell of that fateful night.

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I did not enlighten him orally before sailing, because I think he had better have the
revelation in written form. Reading and re-reading at leisure will leave with him a more
convincing picture than my confused tongue could hope to convey.
He can do anything that he thinks best with this account - showing it, with suitable
comment, in any quarters where it will be likely to accomplish good. It is for the sake of
such readers as are unfamiliar with the earlier phases of my case that I am prefacing the
revelation itself with a fairly ample summary of its background.
My name is Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, and those who recall the newspaper tales of a
generation back - or the letters and articles in psychological journals six or seven years
ago - will know who and what I am. The press was filled with the details of my strange
amnesia in 1908-13, and much was made of the traditions of horror, madness, and
witchcraft which lurked behind the ancient Massachusetts town then and now forming
my place of residence. Yet I would have it known that there is nothing whatever of the
mad or sinister in my heredity and early life. This is a highly important fact in view of the
shadow which fell so suddenly upon me from outside sources.
It may be that centuries of dark brooding had given to crumbling, whisper-haunted
Arkham a peculiar vulnerability as regards such shadows - though even this seems
doubtful in the light of those other cases which I later came to study. But the chief point
is that my own ancestry and background are altogether normal. What came, came from
somewhere else - where I even now hesitate to assert in plain words.
I am the son of Jonathan and Hannah (Wingate) Peaslee, both of wholesome old
Haverhill stock. I was born and reared in Haverhill - at the old homestead in Boardman
Street near Golden Hill - and did not go to Arkham till I entered Miskatonic University as
instructor of political economy in 1895.
For thirteen years more my life ran smoothly and happily. I married Alice Keezar of
Haverhill in 1896, and my three children, Robert, Wingate and Hannah were born in
1898, 1900, and 1903, respectively. In 1898 I became an associate professor, and in 1902
a full professor. At no time had I the least interest in either occultism or abnormal
psychology.
It was on Thursday, 14 May 1908, that the queer amnesia came. The thing was quite
sudden, though later I realized that certain brief, glimmering visions of several, hours
previous - chaotic visions which disturbed me greatly because they were so
unprecedented - must have formed premonitory symptoms. My head was aching, and I
had a singular feeling - altogether new to me - that some one else was trying to get
possession of my thoughts.
The collapse occurred about 10.20 A.M., while I was conducting a class in Political
Economy VI - history and present tendencies of economics - for juniors and a few
sophomores. I began to see strange shapes before my eyes, and to feel that I was in a
grotesque room other than the classroom.

The Shadow Out of Time
My thoughts and speech wandered from my subject, and the students saw that something
was gravely amiss. Then I slumped down, unconscious, in my chair, in a stupor from
which no one could arouse me. Nor did my rightful faculties again look out upon the
daylight of our normal world for five years, four months, and thirteen days.
It is, of course, from others that I have learned what followed. I showed no sign of
consciousness for sixteen and a half hours though removed to my home at 27 Crane
Street, and given the best of medical attention.
At 3 A.M. May my eyes opened and began to speak and my family were thoroughly
frightened by the trend of my expression and language. It was clear that I had no
remembrance of my identity and my past, though for some reason seemed anxious to
conceal his lack of knowledge. My eyes glazed strangely at the persons around me, and
the flections of my facial muscles were altogether unfamiliar.
Even my speech seemed awkward and foreign. I used my vocal organs clumsily and
gropingly, and my diction had a curiously stilted quality, as if I had laboriously learned
the English language from books. The pronunciation was barbarously alien, whilst the
idiom seemed to include both scraps of curious archaism and expressions of a wholly
incomprehensible cast.
Of the latter, one in particular was very potently - even terrifiedly - recalled by the
youngest of the physicians twenty years afterward. For at that late period such a phrase
began to have an actual currency - first in England and then in the United States - and
though of much complexity and indisputable newness, it reproduced in every least
particular the mystifying words of the strange Arkham patient of 1908.
Physical strength returned at once, although I required an odd amount of re-education in
the use of my hands, legs, and bodily apparatus in general. Because of this and other
handicaps inherent in the mnemonic lapse, I was for some time kept under strict medical
care.
When I saw that my attempts to conceal the lapse had failed, I admitted it openly, and
became eager for information of all sorts. Indeed, it seemed to the doctors that I lost
interest in my proper personality as soon as I found the case of amnesia accepted as a
natural thing.
They noticed that my chief efforts were to master certain points in history, science, art,
language, and folklore - some of them tremendously abstruse, and some childishly simple
- which remained, very oddly in many cases, outside my consciousness.
At the same time they noticed that I had an inexplicable comm and of many almost
unknown sorts of knowledge - a comm and which I seemed to wish to hide rather than
display. I would inadvertently refer, with casual assurance, to specific events in dim ages
outside of the range of accepted history - passing off such references as a jest when I saw

The Shadow Out of Time
the surprise they created. And I had a way of speaking of the future which two or three
times caused actual fright.
These uncanny flashes soon ceased to appear, though some observers laid their
vanishment more to a certain furtive caution on my part than to any waning of the strange
knowledge behind them. Indeed, I seemed anomalously avid to absorb the speech,
customs, and perspectives of the age around me; as if I were a studious traveller from a
far, foreign land.
As soon as permitted, I haunted the college library at all hours; and shortly began to
arrange for those odd travels, and special courses at American and European Universities,
which evoked so much comment during the next few years.
I did not at any time suffer from a lack of learned contacts, for my case had a mild
celebrity among the psychologists of the period. I was lectured upon as a typical example
of secondary personality - even though I seemed to puzzle the lecturers now and then
with some bizarre symptoms or some queer trace of carefully veiled mockery.
Of real friendliness, however, I encountered little. Something in my aspect and speech
seemed to excite vague fears and aversions in every one I met, as if I were a being
infinitely removed from all that is normal and healthful. This idea of a black, hidden
horror connected with incalculable gulfs of some sort of distance was oddly widespread
and persistent.
My own family formed no exception. From the moment of my strange waking my wife
had regarded me with extreme horror and loathing, vowing that I was some utter alien
usurping the body of her husband. In 1910 she obtained a legal divorce, nor would she
ever consent to see me even after my return to normality in 1913. These feelings were
shared by my elder son and my small daughter, neither of whom I have ever seen since.
Only my second son, Wingate, seemed able to conquer the terror and repulsion which my
change aroused. He indeed felt that I was a stranger, but though only eight years old held
fast to a faith that my proper self would return. When it did return he sought me out, and
the courts gave me his custody. In succeeding years he helped me with the studies to
which I was driven, and today, at thirty-five, he is a professor of psychology at
Miskatonic.
But I do not wonder at the horror caused - for certainly, the mind, voice, and facial
expression of the being that awakened on l5 May 1908, were not those of Nathaniel
Wingate Peastee.
I will not attempt to tell much of my life from 1908 to 1913, since readers may glean I the
outward essentials - as I largely had to do - from files of old newspapers and scientific
journals.

The Shadow Out of Time
I was given charge of my funds, and spent them slowly and on the whole wisely, in travel
and in study at various centres of learning. My travels, however, were singular in the
extreme, involving long visits to remote and desolate places.
In 1909 I spent a month in the Himalayas, and in 1911 roused much attention through a
camel trip into the unknown deserts of Arabia. What happened on those journeys I have
never been able to learn.
During the summer of l9l2 I chartered a ship and sailed in the Arctic, north of
Spitzbergen, afterward showing signs of disappointment.
Later in that year I spent weeks - alone beyond the limits of previous or subsequent
exploration in the vast limestone cavern systems of western Virginia - black labyrinths so
complex that no retracing of my steps could even be considered.
My sojourns at the universities were marked by abnormally rapid assimilation, as if the
secondary personality had an intelligence enormously superior to my own. I have found,
also, that my rate of reading and solitary study was phenomenal. I could master every
detail of a book merely by glancing over it as fast as I could turn the leaves; while my
skill at interpreting complex figures in an instant was veritably awesome.
At times there appeared almost ugly reports of my power to influence the thoughts and
acts of others, though I seemed to have taken care to minimize displays of this faculty.
Other ugly reports concerned my intimacy with leaders of occultist groups, and scholars
suspected of connection with nameless bands of abhorrent elder-world hierophants.
These rumours, though never proved at the time, were doubtless stimulated by the known
tenor of some of my reading - for the consulltation of rare books at libraries cannot be
effected secretly.
There is tangible proof - in the form of marginal notes - that I went minutely through
such things as the Comte d'Erlette's Cultes des Goules, Ludvig Prinn's De Vermis
Mysteriis, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, the surviving fragments of the
puzzling Book of Eibon, and the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul
Alhazred. Then, too, it is undeniable that a fresh and evil wave of underground cult
activity set in about the time of my odd mutation.
In the summer of 1913 I began to display signs of ennui and flagging interest, and to hint
to various associates that a change might soon be expected in me. I spoke of returning
memories of my earlier life - though most auditors judged me insincere, since all the
recollections I gave were casual, and such as might have been learned from my old
private papers.
About the middle of August I returned to Arkham and re-opened my long-closed house in
Crane Street. Here I installed a mechanism of the most curious aspect, constructed

The Shadow Out of Time
piecemeal by different makers of scientific apparatus in Europe and America, and
guarded carefully from the sight of any one intelligent enough to analyse it.
Those who did see it - a workman, a servant, and the new housekeeper - say that it was a
queer mixture of rods, wheels, and mirros, though only about two feet tall, one foot wide,
and one foot thick. The central mirror was circular and convex. All this is borne out by
such makers of parts as can be located.
On the evening of Friday, 26 September, I dismissed the housekeeper and the maid until
noon of the next day. Lights burned in the house till late, and a lean, dark, curiously
foreign-looking man called in an automobile.
It was about one A.M. that the lights were last seen. At 2.15 A.M. a policeman observed
the place in darkness, but the strager's motor still at the curb. By 4 o'clock the motor was
certainly gone.
It was at 6 o'clock that a hesitant, foreign voice on the telephone asked Dr Wilson to call
at my house and bring me out of a peculiar faint. This call - a long-distance one - was
later traced to a public booth in the North Station in Boston, but no sign of the lean
foreigner was ever unearthed.
When the doctor reached my house he found me unconscious in the sitting room - in an
easy-chair with a table drawn up before it. On the polished top were scratches showing
where some heavy object had rested. The queer machine was gone, nor was anything
afterward heard of it. Undoubtedly the dark, lean foreigner had taken it away.
In the library grate were abundant ashes, evidently left from the burning of the every
remainmg scrap of paper on which I had written since the advent of the amnesia. Dr
Wilson found my breathing very peculiar, but after a hypodermic injection it became
more regular.
At 11.15 A.M., 27 September, I stirred vigorously, and my hitherto masklike face began
to show signs of expression. Dr Wilson remarked that the expression was not that of my
secondary personality, but seemed much like that of my normal self. About 11.30 I
muttered some very curious syllables - syllables which seemed unrelated to any human
speech. I appeared, too, to struggle against something. Then, just afternoon - the
housekeeper and the maid having meanwhile returned - I began to mutter in English.
"- of the orthodox economists of that period, Jevons typifies the prevailing trend toward
scientific correlation. His attempt to link the commercial cycle of prosperity and
depression with the physical cycle of the solar spots forms perhaps the apex of -"
Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee had come back - a spirit in whose time scale it was still
Thursday morning in 1908, with the economics class gazing up at the battered desk on
the platform.

The Shadow Out of Time
II
My reabsorption into normal life was a painful and difficult process. The loss of over five
years creates more complications than can be imagined, and in my case there were
countless matters to be adjusted.
What I heard of my actions since 1908 astonished and disturbed me, but I tried to view
the matter as philosophically as I could. At last, regaining custody of my second son,
Wingate, I settled down with him in the Crane Street house and endeavoured to resume
my teaching - my old professorship having been kindly offered me by the college.
I began work with the February, 1914, term, and kept at it just a year. By that time I
realized how badly my experience had shaken me. Though perfectly sane - I hoped - and
with no flaw in my original personality, I had not the nervous energy of the old days.
Vague dreams and queer ideas continually haunted me, and when the outbreak of the
World War turned my mind to history I found myself thinking of periods and events in
the oddest possible fashion.
My conception of time, my ability to distinguish between consecutiveness and
simultaneousness - seemed subtly disordered so that I formed chimerical notions about
living in one age and casting one's mind all over etenity for knowledge of past and future
ages.
The war gave me strange impressions of remembering some of its far-off consequences as if I knew how it was coming out and could look back upon it in the light of future
information. All such quasi-memories were attended with much pain, and with a feeling
that some artificial psychological barrier was set a against them.
When I diffidently hinted to others about my impressions I met with varied responses.
Some persons looked uncomfortably at me, but men in the mathematics department
spoke of new developments in those theories of relativity - then discussed only in learned
circles - which were later to become so famous. Dr. Albert Einstein, they said, was
rapidly reducing time to the status of a mere dimension.
But the dreams and disturbed feelings gained on me, so that I had to drop my regular
work in 1915. Certainly the impressions were taking an annoying shape - giving me the
persistent notion that my amnesia had formed some unholy sort of exchange; that the
secondary personality had indeed had had suffered displacement. been an inThus I was driven to vague and fright speculations concerning the whereabouts of my
true self during the years that another had held my body. The curious knowledge and
strange conduct of my body's late tenant troubled me more and more as I learned further
details from persons, papers, and magazines.
Queernesses that had baffled others seemed to harmonize terribly with some background
of black knowledge which festered in the chasms of my subconscious. I began to search

The Shadow Out of Time
feverishly for every scrap of information bearing on the studies and travels of that other
one during the dark years.
Not all of my troubles were as semi-abstract as this. There were the dreams - and these
seemed to grow in vividness and concreteness. Knowing how most would regard them, I
seldom mentioned them to anyone but my son or certain trusted psychologists, but
eventually I commenced a scientific study of other cases in order to see how typical or
nontypical such visions might be among amnesia victims.
My results, aided by psychologists, historians, anthropologists, and mental specialists of
wide experience, and by a study that included all records of split personalities from the
days of daemonic-possession legends to the medically realistic present, at first bothered
me more than they consoled me.
I soon found that my dreams had, indeed, no counterpart in the overwhelming bulk of
true amnesia cases. There remained, however, a tiny residue of accounts which for years
baffled and shocked me with their parallelism to my own experience. Some of them were
bits of ancient folklore; others were case histories in the annals of medicine; one or two
were anecdotes obscurely buried in standard histories.
It thus appeared that, while my special kind of affliction was prodigiously rare, instances
of it had occurred at long intervals ever since the beginnig of men's annals. Some
centuries might contain one, two, or three cases, others none - or at least none whose
record survived.
The essence was always the same - a person of keen thoughtfulness seized a strange
secondary life and leading for a greater or lesser period an utterly alien existence typified
at first by vocal and bodily awkwardness, an later by a wholesale acquisition of scientific,
historic, artistic, and anthropologic knowledge; an acquisition carried on with feverish
zest and with a wholly abnormal absorptive power. Then a sudden return of rightful
consciousness, intermittently plagued ever after with vague unplaceable dreams
suggesting fragments of some hideous memory elaborately blotted out.
And the close resemblance of those nightmares to my own - even in some of the smallest
particulars - left no doubt in my mind of their significantly typical nature. One or two of
the cases had an added ring of faint, blasphemous familiarity, as if I had heard of them
before through some cosmic channel too morbid and frightful to contemplate. In three
instances there was specific mention of such an unknown machine as had been in my
house before the second change.
Another thing that worried me during my investigation was the somewhat greater
frequency of cases where a brief, elusive glimpse of the typical nightmares was afforded
to persons not visited well-defined amnesia.
These persons were largely of mediocre mind or less - some so primitive that they could
scarcely be thought of as vehicles forabnormal scholarship and preternatural mental

The Shadow Out of Time
acquisitions. For a second they would be fired with alien force - then a backward lapse,
and a thin, swift-fading memory of unhuman horrors.
There had been at least three such cases during the past half century - one only fifteen
years before. Had something been groping blindly through time from some unsuspected
abyss in Nature? Were these faint cases monstrous, sinister experiments of a kind and
authorship uttely beyond same belief?
Such were a few of the forless speculations of my weaker hours - fancies abetted by
myths which my studies uncovered. For I could not doubt but that certain persistent
legends of immemorial antiquity, apparently unknown to the victims and physicians
connected with recent amnesia cases, formed a striking and awesome elaboration of
memory lapses such as mine.
Of the nature of the dreams and impressions which were growing so clamorous I still
almost fear to speak. They seemed to savor of madness, and at times I believed I was
indeed going mad. Was there a special type of delusion afflicting those who had suffered
lapses of memory? Conceivably, the efforts of the subconscious mind to fill up a
perplexing blank with pseudo-memories might give rise to strange imaginative vagaries.
This indeed - though an alternative folklore theory finally seemed to me more plausible was the belief of many of the alienists who helped me in my search for parallel cases, and
who shared my puzzlement at the exact resemblances sometimes discovered.
They did not call the condition true insanity, but classed it rather among neurotic
disorders. My course in trying to track down and analyze it, instead of vaintly seeking to
dismiss or forget it, they heartily endorsed as correct according to the best psychological
principles. I especially valued the advice of such physicians as had studied me during my
possession by the other personality.
My first disturbances were not visual at all, but concerned the more abstract matters
which I have mentioned. There was, too, a feeling of profound and inexplicable horror
concerning myself. I developed a queer fear of seeing my own form, as if my eyes would
find it something utterly alien and inconceivably abhorrent.
When I did glance down and behold the familiar human shape in quiet grey or blue
clothing, I always felt a curious relief, though in order to gain this relief I had to conquer
an infinite dread. I shunned mirrors as much as possible, and was always shaved at the
barber's.
It was a long time before I correlated any of these disappointed feelings with the fleeting,
visual impressions which began to develop. The first such correlation had to do with the
odd sensation of an external, artificial restraint on my memory.
I felt that the snatches of sight I experienced had a profound and terrible meaning, and a
frightful connexion with myself, but that some purposeful influence held me from

The Shadow Out of Time
grasping that meaning and that connexion. Then came that queerness about the element
of time, and with it desperate efforts to place the fragmentary dream-glimpses in the
chronological and spatial pattern.
The glimpses themselves were at first merely strange rather than horrible. I would seem
to be in an enormous vaulted chamber whose lofty stone aroinings were well-nigh lost in
the shadows overhead. In whatever time or place the scene might be, the principle of the
arch was known as fully and used as extensively as by the Romans.
There were colossal, round windows and high, arched doors, and pedestals or tables each
as tall as the height of an ordinary room. Vast shelves of dark wood lined the walls,
holding what seemed to be volumes of immense size with strange hieroglyphs on their
backs.
The exposed stonework held curious carvings, always in curvilinear mathematical
designs, and there were chiselled inscriptions in the same characters that the huge books
bore. The dark granite masonry was of a monstrous megathic type, with lines of convextopped blocks fitting the concave-bottomed courses which rested upon them.
There were no chairs, but the tops of the vast pedestals were littered with books, papers,
and what seemed to be writing materials - oddly figured jars of a purplish metal, and rods
with stained tips. Tall as the pedestals were, I seemed at times able to view them from
above. On some of them were great globes of luminous crystal serving as lamps, and
inexplicable machines formed of vitreous tubes and metal rods.
The windows were glazed, and latticed with stout-looking bars. Though I dared not
approach and peer out them, I could see from where I was he waving tops of singular
fern-like growths. The floor was of massive octagonal flagstones, while rugs and
hangings were entirely lacking.
Later I had visions of sweeping through Cyclopean corridors of stone, and up and down
gigantic inclined planes of the same monstrous masonry. There were no stairs anywhere,
nor was any passageway less than thirty feet wide. Some of the structures through which
I floated must have towered in the sky for thousands of feet.
There were multiple levels of black vaults below, and never-opened trapdoors, sealed
down with metal bands and holding dim suggestions of some special peril.
I seemed to be a prisoner, and horror hung broodingly over everything I saw. I felt that
the mocking curvilinear hieroglyphs on the walls would blast my soul with their message
were I not guarded by a merciful ignorance.
Still later my dreams included vistas from the great round windows, and from the titanic
flat roof, with its curious gardens, wide barren area, and high, scalloped parapet of stone,
to which the topmost of the inclined planes led.

The Shadow Out of Time
There were, almost endless leagues of giant buildings, each in its garden, and ranged
along paved roads fully 200 feet wide. They differed greatly in aspect, but few were less
than 500 feet square or a thousand feet high. Many seemed so limitless that they must
have had a frontage of several thousand feet, while some shot up to mountainous altitudes
in the grey, steamy heavens.
They seemed to be mainly of stone or concrete, and most of them embodied the oddly
curvilinear type of masonry noticeable in the building that held me. Roofs were flat and
garden-covered, and tended to have scalloped parapets. Sometimes there were terraces
and higher levels, and wide, cleared spaces amidst the gardens. The great roads held hints
of motion, but in the earlier visions I could not resolve this impression into details.
In certain places I beheld enormous dark cylindrical towers which climbed far above any
of the other structures. These appeared to be of a totally unique nature and shewed signs
of prodigious age and dilapidation. They were built of a bizarre type of square-cut basalt
masonry, and tapered slightly toward their rounded tops. Nowhere in any of them could
the least traces of windows or other apertures save huge doors be found. I noticed also
some lower buildinigs - all crumbling with the weathering of aeons - which resembled
these dark, cylindrical towers in basic architecture. Around all these aberrant piles of
square-cut masonry there hovered an inexplicable aura of menace and concentrated fear,
like that bred by the sealed trap-doors.
The omnipresent gardens were almost terrifying in their strangeness, with bizarre and
unfamiliar forms of vegetation nodding over broad paths lined with curiously carven
monoliths. Abnormally vast fern-like growths predominated - some green, and some of a
ghastly, fungoid pallor.
Among them rose great spectral things resembling calamites, whose bamboo-like trunks
towered to fabulous heights. Then there were tufted forms like fabulous cycads, and
grotesque dark-green shrubs and trees of coniferous aspect.
Flowers were small, colourless, and unrecognizable, blooming in geometrical beds and at
large among the greenery.
In a few of the terrace and roof-top gardens were larger and more blossoms of most
offensive contours and seeming to suggest artificial breeding. Fungi of inconceivable
size, outlines, and colours speckled the scene in patterns bespeaking some unknown but
well-established horticultural tradition. In the larger gardens on the ground there seemed
to be some attempt to preserve the irregularities of Nature, but on the roofs there was
more selectiveness, and more evidences of the topiary art.
The sides were almost always moist and cloudy, and sometimes I would seem to witness
tremendous rains. Once in a while, though, there would be glimpses of the sun - which
looked abnormally large - and of the moon, whose markings held a touch of difference
from the normal that I could never quite fathom. When - very rarely - the night sky was
clear to any extent, I beheld constellations which were nearly beyond recognition. Known

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outlines were sometimes approximated, but seldom duplicated; and from the position of
the few groups I could recognize, I felt I must be in the earth's southern hemisphere, near
the Tropic of Capricorn.
The far horizon was always steamy and indistinct, but I could see that great jungles of
unknown tree-ferns, calamites, lepidodendra, and sigillaria lay outside the city, their
fantastic frondage waving mockingly in the shifting vapours. Now and then there would
be suggestions of motion in the sky, but these my early visions never resolved.
By the autumn of 1914 I began to have infrequent dreams of strange floatings over the
city and through the regions around it. I saw interminable roads through forests of
fearsome growths with mottled, fluted, and banded trunks, and past other cities as strange
as the one which persistently haunted me.
I saw monstrous constructions of black or iridescent tone in glades and clearings where
perpetual twilight reigned, and traversed long causeways over swamps so dark that I
could tell but little of their moist, towering vegetation.
Once I saw an area of countless miles strewn with age-blasted basaltic ruins whose
architecture had been like that of the few windowless, round-topped towers in the
haunting city.
And once I saw the sea - a boundless, steamy expanse beyond the colossal stone piers of
an enormous town of domes and arches. Great shapeless sugggestions of shadow moved
over it, and here and there its surface was vexed ith anomalous spoutings.
III
As I have said, it was not immediately that these wild visions began to hold their
terrifying quality. Certainly, many persons have dreamed intrinsically stranger things things compounded of unrelated scraps of daily life, pictures, and reading, and arranged in
fantastically novel forms by the unchecked caprices of sleep.
For some time I accepted the visions as natural, even though I had never before been an
extravagant dreamer. Many of the vague anomalies, I argued, must have come from
trivial sources too numerous to track down; while others seemed to reflect a common text
book knowledge of the plants and other conditions of the primitive world of a hundred
and fifty million years ago - the world of the Permian or Triassic age.
In the course of some months, however, the element of terror did figure with
accumulating force. This was when the dreams began so unfailingly to have the aspect of
memories, and when my mind began to link them with my growing abstract disturbances
- the feeling of mnemonic restraint, the curious impressions regarding time, and sense of
a loathsome exchange with my secondary personality of 1908-13, and, considerably later,
the inexplicable loathing of my own person.

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As certain definite details began to enter the dreams, their horror increased a
thousandfold - until by October, 1915, I felt I must do something. It was then that I began
an intensive study of other cases of amnesia and visions, feeling that I might thereby
obectivise my trouble and shake clear of its emotional grip.
However, as before mentioned, the result was at first almost exactly opposite. It disturbed
me vastly to find that my dreams had been so closely duplicated; especially since some of
the accounts were too early to admit of any geological knowledge - and therefore of any
idea of primitive landscapes - on the subjects' part.
What is more, many of these accounts supplied very horrible details and explanations in
connexion with the visions of great buildings and jungle gardens - and other things. The
actual sights and vague impressions were bad enough, but what was hinted or asserted by
some of the other dreamers savored of madness and blasphemy. Worst of all, my own
pseudo-memory was aroused to milder dreams and hints of coming revelations. And yet
most doctors deemed my course, on he whole, an advisable one.
I studied psychology systematically, and under the prevailing stimulus my son Wingate
did the same - his studies leading eventually to his present professorship. In 1917 and
1918 I took special courses at Miskatonic. Meanwhile, my examination of medical,
historical, and anthropological records became indefatigable, involving travels to distant
libraries, and finally including even a reading of the hideous books of forbidden elder
lore in which my secondary personality had been so disturbingly interested.
Some of the latter were the actual copies I had consulted in my altered state, and I was
greatly disturbed by certain marginal notations and ostensible corrections of the hideous
text in a script and idiom which somehow seemed oddly unhuman.
These markings were mostly in the respective languages of the various books, all of
which the writer seemed to know with equal, though obviously academic, facility. One
note appended to von Junzt's Unaussprechlichen Kulten, however, was alarmingly
otherwise. It consisted of certain curvilinear hieroglyphs in the same ink as that of the
German corrections, but following no recognized human pattern. And these hieroglyphs
were closely and unmistakably aldn to the characters constantly met with in my dreams characters whose meaning I would sometimes momentarily fancy I knew, or was just on
the brink of recalling.
To complete my black confusion, my librarians assured me that, in view of previous
examinations and records of consultation of the volumes in question, all of these
notations must have been made by myself in my secondary state. This despite the fact
that I was and still am ignorant of three of the languages involved.
Piecing together the scattered records, ancient and modern, anthropological and medical,
I found a fairly consistent mixture of myth and hallucination whose scope and wildness
left me utterly dazed. Only one thing consoled me, the fact that the myths were of such
early existence. What lost knowledge could have brought pictures of the Palaeozoic or

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Mesozoic landscape into these primitive fables, I could not even guess; but the pictures
had been there. Thus, a basis existed for the formation of a fixed type of delusion.
Cases of amnesia no doubt created the general myth pattern - but afterward the fanciful
accretions of the myths must have reacted on amnesia sufferers and coloured their
pseudo-memories. I myself had read and heard all the early tales during my memory
lapse - my quest had amply proved that. Was it not natural, then, for my subsequent
dreams and emotional impressions to become coloured and moulded by what my memory
subtly held over from my secondary state?
A few of the myths had significant connexions with other cloudy legends of the prehuman world, especially those Hindu tales involving stupefying gulfs of time and
forming part of the lore of modern theosopists.
Primal myth and modern delusion joined in their assumption that mankind is only one perhaps the least - of the highly evolved and dominant races of this planet's long and
largely unknown career. Things of inconceivable shape, they implied, had reared towers
to the sky and delved into every secret of Nature before the first amphibian forbear of
man had crawled out of the hot sea 300 million years ago.
Some had come down from the stars; a few were as old as the cosmos itself, others had
arisen swiftly from terrene germs as far behind the first germs of our life-cycle as those
germs are behind ourselves. Spans of thousands of millions of years, and linkages to
other galaxies and universes, were freely spoken of. Indeed, there was no such thing as
time in its humanly accepted sense.
But most of the tales and impressions concerned a relatively late race, of a queer and
intricate shape, resembling no life-form known to science, which had lived till only fifty
million years before the advent of man. This, they indicated, was the greatest race of all
because it alone had conquered the secret of time.
It had learned all things that ever were known or ever would be known on the earth,
through the power of its keener minds to project themselves into the past and future, even
through gulfs of millions of years, and study the lore of every age. From the
accomplishments of this race arose all legends of prophets, including those in human
mythology.
In its vast libraries were volumes of texts and pictures holding the whole of earth's
annals-histories and descriptions of every species that had ever been or that ever would
be, with full records of their arts, their achievements, their languages, and their
psychologies.
With this aeon-embracing knowledge, the Great Race chose from every era and life-form
such thoughts, arts, and processes as might suit its own nature and situation. Knowledge
of the past, secured through a kind of mind-casting outside the recognized senses, was
harder to glean than knowledge of the future.

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In the latter case the course was easier and more material. With suitable mechanical aid a
mind would project itself forward in time, feeling its dim, extra-sensory way till it
approached the desired period. Then, after preliminary trials, it would seize on the best
discoverable representative of the highest of that period's life-forms. It would enter the
organism's brain and set up therein its own vibrations, while the displaced mind would
strike back to the period of the displacer, remaining in the latter's body till a reverse
process was set up.
The projected mind, in the body of the organism of the future, would then pose as a
member of the race whose outward form it wore, learning as quickly as possible all that
could be learned of the chosen age and its massed information and techniques.
Meanwhile the displaced mind, thrown back to the displacer's age and body, would be
carefully guarded. It would be kept from harming the body it occupied, and would be
drained of all its knowledge by trained questioners. Often it could be questioned in its
own language, when previous quests into the future had brought back records of that
language.
If the mind came from a body whose language the Great Race could not physically
reproduce, clever machines would be made, on which the alien speech could be played as
on a musical instrument.
The Great Race's members were immense rugose cones ten feet high, and with head and
other organs attached to foot-thick, distensible limbs spreading from the apexes. They
spoke by the clicking or scraping of huge paws or claws attached to the end of two of
their four limbs, and walked by the expansion and contraction of a viscous layer attached
to their vast, ten-foot bases.
When the captive mind's amazement and resentment had worn off, and when - assuming
that it came from a body vastly different from the Great Race's - it had lost its horror at its
unfamiliar temporary form, it was permitted to study its new environment and experience
a wonder and wisdom approyimating that of its displacer.
With suitable precautions, and in exchange for suitable services, it was allowed to rove
all over the habitable world in titan airships or on the huge boatlike atomic-engined
vehicles which traversed the great roads, and to delve freely into the libraries containing
the records of the planet's past and future.
This reconciled many captive minds to their lot; since none were other than keen, and to
such minds the unveiling of hidden mysteries of earth-closed chapters of inconceivable
pasts and dizzying vortices of future time which include the years ahead of their own
natural ages-forms always, despite the abysmal horrors often unveiled, the supreme
experience of life.
Now and then certain captives were permitted to meet other captive minds seized from
the future - to exchange thoughts with consciousnesses living a hundred or a thousand or

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a million years before or after their own ages. And all were urged to write copiously in
their own languages of themselves and their respective periods; such documents to be
filed in the great central archives.
It may be added that there was one special type of captive whose privileges were far
greater than those of the majority. These were the dying permanent exiles, whose bodies
in the future had been seized by keen-minded members of the Great Race who, faced
with death, sought to escape mental extinction.
Such melancholy exiles were not as common as might be expected, since the longevity of
the Great Race lessened its love of life - especially among those superior minds capable
of projection. From cases of the permanent projection of elder minds arose many of those
lasting changes of personality noticed in later history - including mankind's.
As for the ordinary cases of exploration - when the displacing mind had learned what it
wished in the future, it would build an apparatus like that which had started its flight and
reverse the process of projection. Once more it would be in its own body in its own age,
while the lately captive mind would return to that body of the future to which it properly
belonged.
Only when one or the other of the bodies had died during the exchange was this
restoration impossible. In such cases, of course, the exploring mind had - like those of the
death-escapers - to live out an alien-bodied life in the future; or else the captive mind-like
the dying permanent exiles - had to end its days in the form and past age of the Great
Race.
This fate was least horrible when the captive mind was also of the Great Race - a not
infrequent occurrence, since in all its periods that race was intensely concerned with its
own future. The number of dying permanent exiles of the Great Race was very slight largely because of the tremendous penalties attached to displacements of future Great
Race minds by the moribund.
Through projection, arrangements were made to inflict these penalties on the offending
minds in their new future bodies - and sometimes forced rexchanges were effected.
Complex cases of the displacement of exploring or already captive minds by minds in
various regions of the past had been known and carefully rectified. In every age since the
discovery of mind projection, a minute but well-recognised element of the population
consisted of Great Race minds from past ages, sojourning for a longer or shorter while.
When a captive mind of alien origin was returned to its own body in the future, it was
purged by an intricate mechanical hypnosis of all it had learned in the Great Race's age this because of certain troublesome consequences inherent in the general carrying
forward of knowledge in large quantities.

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The few existing instances of clear transmission had caused, and would cause at known
future times, great disasters. And it was largely in consequence of two cases of this kind said the old myths - that mankind had learned what it had concerning the Great Race.
Of all things surviving physically and directly from that aeon-distant world, there
remained only certain ruins of great stones in far places and under the sea, and parts of
the text of the frightful Pnakotic Manuscripts.
Thus the returning mind reached its own age with only the faintest and most fragmentary
visions of what it had undergone since its seizure. All memories that could be eradicated
were eradicated, so that in most cases only a dream-shadowed blank stretched back to the
time of the first exchange. Some minds recalled more than others, and the chance joining
of memories had at rare times brought hints of the forbidden past to future ages.
There probably never was a time when groups or cults did not secretly cherish certain of
these hints. In the Necronomicon the presence of such a cult among human beings was
suggested - a cult that sometimes gave aid to minds voyaging down the aeons from the
days of the Great Race.
And, meanwhile, the Great Race itself waxed well-nigh omniscient, and turned to the task
of setting up exchanges with the minds of other planets, and of exploring their pasts and
futures. It sought likewise to fathom the past years and origin of that black, aeon-dead orb
in far space whence its own mental heritage had come - for the mind of the Great Race
was older than its bodily form.
The beings of a dying elder world, wise with the ultimate secrets, had looked ahead for a
new world and species wherein they might have long life; and had sent their minds en
masse into that future race best adapted to house them - the cone-shaped beings that
peopled our earth a billion years ago.
Thus the Great Race came to be, while the myriad minds sent backward were left to die
in the horror of strange shapes. Later the race would again face death, yet would live
through another forward migration of its best minds into the bodies of others who had a
longer physical span ahead of them.
Such was the background of intertwined legend and hallucination. When, around 1920, I
had my researches in coherent shape, I felt a slight lessening of the tension which their
earlier stages had increased. After all, and in spite of the fancies prompted by blind
emotions, were not most of my phenomena readily explainable? Any chance might have
turned my mind to dark studies during the amnesia - and then I read the forbidden
legends and met the members of ancient and ill-regarded cults. That, plainly, supplied the
material for the dreams and disturbed feelings which came after the return of memory.
As for the marginal notes in dream-hieroglyphs and languages unknown to me, but laid at
my door by librarians - I might easily have picked up a smattering of the tongues during
my secondary state, while the hieroglyphs were doubtless coined by my fancy from

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descriptions in old legends, and afterward woven into my dreams. I tried to verify certain
points through conversation with known cult leaders, but never succeeded in establishing
the right connexions.
At times the parallelism of so many cases in so many distant ages continued to worry me
as it had at first, but on the other hand I reflected that the excitant folklore was
undoubtedly more universal in the past than in the present.
Probably all the other victims whose cases were like mine had had a long and familiar
knowledge of the tales I had learned only when in my secondary state. When these
victims had lost their memory, they had associated themselves with the creatures of their
household myths - the fabulous invaders supposed to displace men's minds - and had thus
embarked upon quests for knowledge which they thought they could take back to a
fancied, non-human past.
Then, when their memory returned, they reversed the associative process and thought of
themselves as the former captive minds instead of as the displacers. Hence the dreams
and pseudo-memories following the conventional myth pattern.
Despite the seeming cumbrousness of these explanations, they came finally to supersede
all others in my mind-largely because of the greater weakness of any rival theory. And a
substantial number of eminent psychologists and anthropologists gradually agreed with
me.
The more I reflected, the more convincing did my reasoning seem; till in the end I had a
really effective bulwark against the visions and impressions which still assailed me.
Suppose I did see strange things at night? These were only what I had heard and read of.
Suppose I did have odd loathings and perspectives and pseudo-memories? These, too,
were only echoes of myths absorbed in my secondary state. Nothing that I might dream,
nothing that I might feel, could be of any actual significance.
Fortified by this philosophy, I greatly improved in nervous equilibrium, even though the
visions - rather than the abstract impressions - steadily became more frequent and more
disturbingly detailed. In 1922 I felt able to undertake regular work again, and put my
newly gained knowledge to practical use by accepting an instructorship in psychology at
the university.
My old chair of political economy had long been adequately filled - besides which,
methods of teaching economics had changed greatly since my heyday. My son was at this
time just entering on the post-graduate studies leading to his resent professorship, and we
worked together a great deal.
IV
I continued, however, to keep a careful record of the outr dreams which crowded upon
me so thickly and vividly. Such a record, I argued, was of genuine value as a

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psychological document. The glimpses still seemed damnably like memories, though I
fought off this impression with a goodly measure of success.
In writing, I treated the phantasmata as things seen; but at all other times I brushed them
aside like any gossamer illusions of the night. I had never mentioned such matters in
common conversation; though reports of them, filtering out as such things will, had
aroused sundry rumors regarding my mental health. It is amusing to reflect that these
rumors were confined wholly to laymen, without a single champion among physicians or
psychologists.
Of my visions after 1914 I will here mention only a few, since fuller accounts and records
are at the disposal of the serious student. It is evident that with time the curious
inhibitions somewhat waned, for the scope of my visions vastly increased. They have
never, though, become other than disjointed fragments seemingly without clear
motivation.
Within the dreams I seemed gradually to acquire a greater and greater freedom of
wandering. I floated through many strange buildings of stone, going from one to the other
along mammoth underground passages which seemed to form the common avenues of
transit. Sometimes I encountered those gigantic sealed trap-doors in the lowest level,
around which such an aura of fear and forbiddenness clung.
I saw tremendously tessellated pools, and rooms of curious and inexplicable utensils of
myriad sorts. Then there were colossal caverns of intricate machinery whose outlines and
purpose were wholly strange to me, and whose sound manifested itself only after many
years of dreaming. I may here remark that sight and sound are the only senses I have ever
exercised in the visionary world.
The real horror began in May, 1915, when I first saw the living things. This was before
my studies had taught me what, in view of the myths and case histories, to expect. As
mental barriers wore down, I beheld great masses of thin vapour in various parts of the
building and in the streets below.
These steadily grew more solid and distinct, till at last I could trace their monstrous
outlines with uncomfortable ease. They seemed to be enormous, iridescent cones, about
ten feet high and ten feet wide at the base, and made up of some ridgy, scaly, semi-elastic
matter. From their apexes projected four flexible, cylindrical members, each a foot thick,
and of a ridgy substance like that of the cones themselves.
These members were sometimes contracted almost to nothing, and sometimes extended
to any distance up to about ten feet. Terminating two of them were enormous claws or
nippers. At the end of a third were four red, trumpetlike appendages. The fourth
terminated in an irregular yellowish globe some two feet in diameter and having three
great dark eyes ranged along its central circumference.

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Surmounting this head were four slender grey stalks bearing flower-like appendages,
whilst from its nether side dangled eight greenish antennae or tentacles. The great base of
the central cone was fringed with a rubbery, grey substance which moved the whole
entity through expansion and contraction.
Their actions, though harmless, horrified me even more than their appearance - for it is
not wholesome to watch monstrous objects doing what one had known only human
beings to do. These objects moved intelligently about the great rooms, getting books from
the shelves and taking them to the great tables, or vice versa, and sometimes writing
diligently with a peculiar rod gripped in the greenish head tentacles. The huge nippers
were used in carrying books and in conversation-speech consisting of a kind of clicking
and scraping.
The objects had no clothing, but wore satchels or knapsacks suspended from the top of
the conical trunk. They commonly carried their head and its supporting member at the
level of the cone top, although it was frequently raised or lowered.
The other three great members tended to rest downward at the sides of the cone,
contracted to about five feet each when not in use. From their rate of reading, writing,
and operating their machines - those on the tables seemed somehow connected with
thought - I concluded that their intelligence was enormously greater than man's.
Aftenvard I saw them everywhere; swarming in all the great chambers and corridors,
tending monstrous machines in vaulted crypts, and racing along the vast roads in
gigantic, boat-shaped cars. I ceased to be afraid of them, for they seemed to form
supremely natural parts of their environment.
Individual differences amongst them began to be manifest, and a few appeared to be
under some kind of restraint. These latter, though shewing no physical variation, had a
diversity of gestures and habits which marked them off not only from the majority, but
very largely from one another.
They wrote a great deal in what seemed to my cloudy vision a vast variety of characters never the typical curvilinear hieroglyphs of the majority. A few, I fancied, used our own
familiar alphabet. Most of them worked much more slowly than the general mass of the
entities.
All this time my own part in the dreams seemed to be that of a disembodied
consciousness with a range of vision wider than the normal, floating freely about, yet
confined to the ordinary avenues and speeds of travel. Not until August, 1915, did any
suggestions of bodily existence begin to harass me. I say harass, because the first phase
was a purely abstract, though infinitely terrible, association of my previously noted body
loathing with the scenes of my visions.
For a while my chief concern during dreams was to avoid looking down at myself, and I
recall how grateful I was for the total absence of large mirrors in the strange rooms. I was

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mightily troubled by the fact that I always saw the great tables - whose height could not
be under ten feet - from a level not below that of their surfaces.
And then the morbid temptation to look down at myself became greater and greater, till
one night I could not resist it. At first my downward glance revealed nothing whatever. A
moment later I perceived that this was because my head lay at the end of a flexible neck
of enormous length. Retracting this neck and gazing down very sharply, I saw the scaly,
rugose, iridescent bulk of a vast cone ten feet tall and ten feet wide at the base. That was
when I waked half of Arkham with my screaming as I plunged madly up from the abyss
of sleep.
Only after weeks of hideous repetition did I grow half-reconciled to these visions of
myself in monstrous form. In the dreams I now moved bodily among the other unknown
entities, reading terrible books from the endless shelves and writing for hours at the great
tables with a stylus managed by the green tentacles that hung down from my head.
Snatches of what I read and wrote would linger in my memory. There were horrible
annals of other worlds and other universes, and of stirrings of formless life outside of all
universes. There were records of strange orders of beings which had peopled the world in
forgotten pasts, and frightful chronicles of grotesque-bodied intelligences which would
people it millions of years after the death of the last human being.
I learned of chapters in human history whose existence no scholar of today has ever
suspected. Most of these writings were in the language of the hieroglyphs; which I
studied in a queer way with the aid of droning machines, and which was evidently an
agglutinative speech with root systems utterly unlike any found in human languages.
Other volumes were in other unknown tongues learned in the same queer way. A very
few were in languages I knew. Extremely clever pictures, both inserted in the records and
forming separate collections, aided me immensely. And all the time I seemed to be
setting down a history of my own age in English. On waking, I could recall only minute
and meaningless scraps of the unknown tongues which my dream-self had mastered,
though whole phrases of the history stayed with me.
I learned - even before my waking self had studied the parallel cases or the old myths
from which the dreams doubtless sprang - that the entities around me were of the world's
greatest race, which had conquered time and had sent exploring minds into every age. I
knew, too, that I had been snatched from my age while another used my body in that age,
and that a few of the other strange forms housed similarly captured minds. I seemed to
talk, in some odd language of claw clickings, with exiled intellects from every corner of
the solar system.
There was a mind from the planet we know as Venus, which would live incalculable
epochs to come, and one from an outer moon of Jupiter six million years in the past. Of
earthly minds there were some from the winged, starheaded, half-vegetable race of
palaeogean Antarctica; one from the reptile people of fabled Valusia; three from the furry

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pre-human Hyperborean worshippers of Tsathoggua; one from the wholly abominable
Tcho-Tchos; two from the arachnid denizens of earth's last age; five from the hardy
coleopterous species immediately following mankind, to which the Great Race was some
day to transfer its keenest minds en masse in the face of horrible peril; and several from
different branches of humanity.
I talked with the mind of Yiang-Li, a philosopher from the cruel empire of Tsan-Chan,
which is to come in 5,000 A.D.; with that of a general of the greatheaded brown people
who held South Africa in 50,000 B.C.; with that of a twelfth-century Florentine monk
named Bartolomeo Corsi; with that of a king of Lomar who had ruled that terrible polar
land one hundred thousand years before the squat, yellow Inutos came from the west to
engulf it.
I talked with the mind of Nug-Soth, a magician of the dark conquerors of 16,000 A.D.;
with that of a Roman named Titus Sempronius Blaesus, who had been a quaestor in
Sulla's time; with that of Khephnes, an Egyptian of the 14th Dynasty, who told me the
hideous secret of Nyarlathotep, with that of a priest of Atlantis' middle kingdom; with
that of a Suffolk gentleman of Cromwell's day, James Woodville; with that of a court
astronomer of pre-Inca Peru; with that of the Australian physicist Nevil Kingston-Brown,
who will die in 2,518 A.D.; with that of an archimage of vanished Yhe in the Pacific;
with that of Theodotides, a Greco-Bactrian official Of 200 B.C.; with that of an aged
Frenchman of Louis XIII's time named Pierre-Louis Montagny; with that of Crom-Ya, a
Cimmerian chieftain of 15,000 B.C.; and with so many others that my brain cannot hold
the shocking secrets and dizzying marvels I learned from them.
I awaked each morning in a fever, sometimes frantically trying to verify or discredit such
information as fell within the range of modern human knowledge. Traditional facts took
on new and doubtful aspects, and I marvelled at the dream-fancy which could invent such
surprising addenda to history and science.
I shivered at the mysteries the past may conceal, and trembled at the menaces the future
may bring forth. What was hinted in the speech of post-human entities of the fate of
mankind produced such an effect on me that I will not set it down here.
After man there would be the mighty beetle civilisation, the bodies of whose members
the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder
world. Later, as the earth's span closed, the transferred minds would again migrate
through time and space - to another stopping-place in the bodies of the bulbous vegetable
entities of Mercury. But there would be races after them, clinging pathetically to the cold
planet and burrowing to its horror-filled core, before the utter end.
Meanwhile, in my dreams, I wrote endlessly in that history of my own age which I was
preparing - half voluntarily and half through promises of increased library and travel
opportunities - for the Great Race's central archives. The archives were in a colossal
subterranean structure near the city's center, which I came to know well through frequent
labors and consultations. Meant to last as long as the race, and to withstand the fiercest of

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earth's convulsions, this titan repository surpassed all other buildings in the massive,
mountain-like firmness of its construction.
The records, written or printed on great sheets of a curiously tenacious cellulose fabric
were bound into books that opened from the top, and were kept in individual cases of a
strange, extremely light, restless metal of greyish hue, decorated with mathematical
designs and bearing the title in the Great Race's curvilinear hieroglyphs.
These cases were stored in tiers of rectangular vaults-like closed, locked shelves wrought of the same rustless metal and fastened by knobs with intricate turnings. My
own history was assigned a specific place in the vaults of the lowest or vertebrate level the section devoted to the culture of mankind and of the furry and reptilian races
immediately preceding it in terrestrial dominance.
But none of the dreams ever gave me a full picture of daily life. All were the merest
misty, disconnected fragments, and it is certain that these fragments were not unfolded in
their rightful sequence. I have, for example, a very imperfect idea of my own living
arrangements in the dream-world; though I seem to have possessed a great stone room of
my own. My restrictions as a prisoner gradually disappeared, so that some of the visions
included vivid travels over the mighty jungle roads, sojourns in strange cities, and
explorations of some of the vast, dark, windowless ruins from which the Great Race
shrank in curious fear. There were also long sea voyages in enormous, many-decked
boats of incredible swiftness, and trips over wild regions in closed projectile-like airships
lifted and moved by electrical repulsion.
Beyond the wide, warm ocean were other cities of the Great Race, and on one far
continent I saw the crude villages of the black-snouted, winged creatures who would
evolve as a dominant stock after the Great Race had sent its foremost minds into the
future to escape the creeping horror. Flatness and exuberant green life were always the
keynote of the scene. Hills were low and sparse, and usually displayed signs of volcanic
forces.
Of the animals I saw, I could write volumes. All were wild; for the Great Race's
mechanised culture had long since done away with domestic beasts, while food was
wholly vegetable or synthetic. Clumsy reptiles of great bulk floundered in steaming
morasses, fluttered in the heavy air, or spouted in the seas and lakes; and among these I
fancied I could vaguely recognise lesser, archaic prototypes of many forms - dinosaurs,
pterodactyls, ichthyosaurs, labyrinthodonts, plesiosaurs, and the like-made familiar
through palaeontology. Of birds or mammals there were none that I could discover.
The ground and swamps were constantly alive with snakes, lizards, and crocodiles while
insects buzzed incessantly among the lush vegetation. And far out at sea, unspied and
unknown monsters spouted mountainous columns of foam into the vaporous sky. Once I
was taken under the ocean in a gigantic submarine vessel with searchlights, and glimpsed
some living horrors of awesome magnitude. I saw also the ruins of incredible sunken

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cities, and the wealth of crinoid, brachiopod, coral, and ichthyic life which everywhere
abounded.
Of the physiology, psychology, folkways, and detailed history of the Great Race my
visions preserved but little information, and many of the scattered points I here set down
were gleaned from my study of old legends and other cases rather than from my own
dreaming.
For in time, of course, my reading and research caught up with and passed the dreams in
many phases, so that certain dream-fragments were explained in advance and formed
verifications of what I had learned. This consolingly established my belief that similar
reading and research, accomplished by my secondary self, had formed the source of the
whole terrible fabric of pseudomemories.
The period of my dreams, apparently, was one somewhat less than 150,000,000 years
ago, when the Palaeozoic age was giving place to the Mesozoic. The bodies occupied by
the Great Race represented no surviving - or even scientifically known-line of terrestrial
evolution, but were of a peculiar, closely homogeneous, and highly specialised organic
type inclining as much as to the vegetable as to the animal state.
Cell action was of an unique sort almost precluding fatigue, and wholly eliminating the
need of sleep. Nourishment, assimilated through the red trumpet-like appendages on one
of the great flexible limbs, was always semifluid and in many aspects wholly unlike the
food of existing animals.
The beings had but two of the senses which we recognise - sight and hearing, the latter
accomplished through the flower-like appendages on the grey stalks above their heads.
Of other and incomprehensible senses - not, however, well utilizable by alien captive
minds inhabiting their bodies - they possessed many. Their three eyes were so situated as
to give them a range of vision wider than the normal. Their blood was a sort of deepgreenish ichor of great thickness.
They had no sex, but reproduced through seeds or spores which clustered on their bases
and could be developed only under water. Great, shallow tanks were used for the growth
of their young - which were, however, reared only in small numbers on account of the
longevity of individuals - four or five thousand years being the common life span.
Markedly defective individuals were quickly disposed of as soon as their defects were
noticed. Disease and the approach of death were, in the absence of a sense of touch or of
physical pain, recognised by purely visual symptoms.
The dead were incinerated with dignified ceremonies. Once in a while, as before
mentioned, a keen mind would escape death by forward projection in time; but such cases
were not numerous. When one did occur, the exiled mind from the future was treated
with the utmost kindness till the dissolution of its unfamiliar tenement.

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The Great Race seemed to form a single, loosely knit nation or league, with major
institutions in common, though there were four definite divisions. The political and
economic system of each unit was a sort of fascistic socialism, with major resources
rationally distributed, and power delegated to a small governing board elected by the
votes of all able to pass certain educational and psychological tests. Family organisation
was not overstressed, though ties among persons of common descent were recognised,
and the young were generally reared by their parents.
Resemblances to human attitudes and institutions were, of course, most marked in those
fields where on the one hand highly abstract elements were concerned, or where on the
other hand there was a dominance of the basic, unspecialised urges common to all
organic life. A few added likenesses came through conscious adoption as the Great Race
probed the future and copied what it liked.
Industry, highly mechanised, demanded but little time from each citizen; and the
abundant leisure was filled with intellectual and aesthetic activities of various sorts.
The sciences were carried to an unbelievable height of development, and art was a vital
part of life, though at the period of my dreams it had passed its crest and meridian.
Technology was enormously stimulated through the constant struggle to survive, and to
keep in existence the physical fabric of great cities, imposed by the prodigious geologic
upheavals of those primal days.
Crime was surprisingly scant, and was dealt with through highly efficient policing.
Punishments ranged from privilege deprivation and imprisonment to death or major
emotion wrenching, and were never administered without a careful study of the criminal's
inotivations.
Warfare, largely civil for the last few millennia though sometimes waged against reptilian
or octopodic invaders, or against the winged, star-headed Old Ones who centered in the
antarctic, was infrequent though infinitely devastating. An enormous army, using cameralike weapons which produced tremendous electrical effects, was kept on hand for
purposes seldom mentioned, but obviously connected with the ceaseless fear of the dark,
windowless elder ruins and of the great sealed trap-doors in the lowest subterranean
levels.
This fear of the basalt ruins and trap-doors was largely a matter of unspoken suggestion or, at most, of furtive quasi-whispers. Everything specific which bore on it was
significantly absent from such books as were on the common shelves. It was the one
subject lying altogether under a taboo among the Great Race, and seemed to be connected
alike with horrible bygone struggles, and with that future peril which would some day
force the race to send its keener minds ahead en masse in time.
Imperfect and fragmentary as were the other things presented by dreams and legends, this
matter was still more bafflingly shrouded. The vague old myths avoided it - or perhaps all
allusions had for some reason been excised. And in the dreams of myself and others, the

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hints were peculiarly few. Members of the Great Race never intentionally referred to the
matter, and what could be gleaned came only from some of the more sharply observant
captive minds.
According to these scraps of information, the basis of the fear was a horrible elder race of
half-polypous, utterly alien entities which had come through space from immeasurably
distant universes and had dominated the earth and three other solar planets about 600
million years ago. They were only partly material - as we understand matter - and their
type of consciousness and media of perception differed widely from those of terrestrial
organisms. For example, their senses did not include that of sight; their mental world
being a strange, non-visual pattern of impressions.
They were, however, sufficiently material to use implements of normal matter when in
cosmic areas containing it; and they required housing - albeit of a peculiar kind. Though
their senses could penetrate all material barriers, their substance could not; and certain
forms of electrical energy could wholly destroy them. They had the power of arial
motion, despite the absence of wings or any other visible means of levitation. Their
minds were of such texture that no exchange with them could be effected by the Great
Race.
When these things had come to the earth they had built mighty basalt cities of
windowless towers, and had preyed horribly upon the beings they found. Thus it was
when the minds of the Great Race sped across the void from that obscure, trans-galactic
world known in the disturbing and debatable Eltdown Shards as Yith.
The newcomers, with the instruments they created, had found it easy to subdue the
predatory entities and drive them down to those caverns of inner earth which they had
already joined to their abodes and begun to inhabit.
Then they had sealed the entrances and left them to their fate, afterward occupying most
of their great cities and preserving certain important buildings for reasons connected
more with superstition than with indifference, boldness, or scientific and historical zeal.
But as the aeons passed there came vague, evil signs that the elder things were growing
strong and numerous in the inner world. There were sporadic irruptions of a particularly
hideous character in certain small and remote cities of the Great Race, and in some of the
deserted elder cities which the Great Race had not peopled - places where the paths to the
gulfs below had not been properly sealed or guarded.
After that greater precautions were taken, and many of the paths were closed forever though a few were left with sealed trap-doors for strategic use in fighting the elder things
if ever they broke forth in unexpected places.
The irruptions of the elder things must have been shocking beyond all description, since
they had permanently coloured the psychology of the Great Race. Such was the fixed

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mood of horror that the very aspect of the creatures was left unmentioned. At no time was
I able to gain a clear hint of what they looked like.
There were veiled suggestions of a monstrous plasticity, and of temporary lapses of
visibility, while other fragmentary whispers referred to their control and military use of
great winds. Singular whistling noises, and colossal footprints made up of five circular
toe marks, seemed also to be associated with them.
It was evident that the coming doom so desperately feared by the Great Race - the doom
that was one day to send millions of keen minds across the chasm of time to strange
bodies in the safer future - had to do with a final successful irruption of the elder beings.
Mental projections down the ages had clearly foretold such a horror, and the Great Race
had resolved that none who could escape should face it. That the foray would be a matter
of vengeance, rather than an attempt to reoccupy the outer world, they knew from the
planet's later history - for their projections shewed the coming and going of subsequent
races untroubled by the monstrous entities.
Perhaps these entities had come to prefer earth's inner abysses to the variable, stormravaged surface, since light meant nothing to them. Perhaps, too, they were slowly
weakening with the aeons. Indeed, it was known that they would be quite dead in the time
of the post-human beetle race which the fleeing minds would tenant.
Meanwhile, the Great Race maintained its cautious vigilance, with potent weapons
ceaselessly ready despite the horrified banishing of the subject from common speech and
visible records. And always the shadow of nameless fear hung bout the sealed trap-doors
and the dark, windowless elder towers.
V
That is the world of which my dreams brought me dim, scattered echoes every night. I
cannot hope to give any true idea of the horror and dread contained in such echoes, for it
was upon a wholly intangible quality - the sharp sense of pseudo-memory - that such
feelings mainly depended.
As I have said, my studies gradually gave me a defence against these feelings in the form
of rational psychological explanations; and this saving influence was augmented by the
subtle touch of accustomedness which comes with the passage of time. Yet in spite of
everything the vague, creeping terror would return momentarily now and then. It did not,
however, engulf me as it had before; and after 1922 I lived a very normal life of work and
recreation.
In the course of years I began to feel that my experience - together with the kindred cases
and the related folklore - ought to be definitely summarised and published for the benefit
of serious students; hence I prepared a series of articles briefly covering the whole ground

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and illustrated with crude sketches of some of the shapes, scenes, decorative motifs, and
hieroglyphs remembered from the dreams.
These appeared at various times during 1928 and 1929 in the Journal of the American
Psychological Society, but did not attract much attention. Meanwhile I continued to
record my dreams with the minutest care, even though the growing stack of reports
attained troublesomely vast proportions. On July 10, 1934, there was forwarded to me by
the Psychological Society the letter which opened the culminating and most horrible
phase of the whole mad ordeal. It was postmarked Pilbarra, Western Australia, and bore
the signature of one whom I found, upon inquiry, to be a mining engineer of considerable
prominence. Enclosed were some very curious snapshots. I will reproduce the text in its
entirety, and no reader can fail to understand how tremendous an effect it and the
photographs had upon me.
I was, for a time, almost stunned and incredulous; for although I had often thought that
some basis of fact must underlie certain phases of the legends which had coloured my
dreams, I was none the less unprepared for anything like a tangible survival from a lost
world remote beyond all imagination. Most devastating of all were the photographs - for
here, in cold, incontrovertible realism, there stood out against a background of sand
certain worn-down, water-ridged, storm-weathered blocks of stone whose slightly convex
tops and slightly concave bottoms told their own story.
And when I studied them with a magnifying glass I could see all too plainly, amidst the
batterrings and pittings, the traces of those vast curvilinear designs and occasional
hieroglyphs whose significance had become so hideous to me. But here is the letter,
which speaks for itself.
49, Dampier St.,
Pilbarra, W. Australia,
May 18, 1934.
Prof. N. W Peaslee,
c/o Am. Psychological Society,
30 E. 41st St.,
New York City, U.S.A.
My Dear Sir:
A recent conversation with Dr. E. M. Boyle of Perth, and some papers with your articles
which he has just sent me, make it advisable for me to tell you about certain things I have
seen in the Great Sandy Desert east of our gold field here. It would seem, in view of the
peculiar legends about old cities with huge stonework and strange designs and
hieroglyphs which you describe, that I have come upon something very important.
The blackfellows have always been full of talk about "great stones with marks on them,"
and seem to have a terrible fear of such things. They connect them in some way with their
common racial legends about Buddai, the gigantic old man who lies asleep for ages
underground with his head on his arm, and who will some day awake and eat up the
world.

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There are some very old and half-forgotten tales of enormous underground huts of great
stones, where passages lead down and down, and where horrible things have happened.
The blackfellows claim that once some warriors, fleeing in battle, went down into one
and never came back, but that frightful winds began to blow from the place soon after
they went down. However, there usually isn't much in what these natives say.
But what I have to tell is more than this. Two years ago, when I was prospecting about
500 miles east in the desert, I came on a lot of queer pieces of dressed stone perhaps 3 X
2 X 2 feet in size, and weathered and pitted to the very limit.
At first I couldn't find any of the marks the blackfellows told about, but when I looked
close enough I could make out some deeply carved lines in spite of the weathering. There
were peculiar curves, just like what the blackfellows had tried to describe. I imagine there
must have been thirty or forty blocks, some nearly buried in the sand, and all within a
circle perhaps a quarter of a mile in diameter.
When I saw some, I looked around closely for more, and made a careful reckoning of the
place with my instruments. I also took pictures of ten or twelve of the most typical
blocks, and will enclose the prints for you to see.
I turned my information and pictures over to the government at Perth, but they have done
nothing about them.
Then I met Dr. Boyle, who had read your articles in the Joumal of the American
Psychological Society, and, in time, happened to mention the stones. He was enormously
interested, and became quite excited when I shewed him my snapshots, saying that the
stones and the markings were just like those of the masonry you had dreamed about and
seen described in legends.
He meant to write you, but was delayed. Meanwhile, he sent me most of the magazines
with your articles, and I saw at once, from your drawings and descriptions, that my stones
are certainly the kind you mean. You can appreciate this from the enclosed prints. Later
on you will hear directly from Dr. Boyle.
Now I can understand how important all this will be to you. Without question we are
faced with the remains of an unknown civilization older than any dreamed of before, and
forming a basis for your legends.
As a mining engineer, I have some knowledge of geology, and can tell you that these
blocks are so ancient they frighten me. They are mostly sandstone and granite, though
one is almost certainly made of a queer sort of cement or concrete.
They bear evidence of water action, as if this part of the world had been submerged and
come up again after long ages - all since those blocks were made and used. It is a matter
of hundreds of thousands of years - or heaven knows how much more. I don't like to
think about it.
In view of your previous diligent work in tracking down the legends and everything
connected with them, I cannot doubt but that you will want to lead an expedition to the
desert and make some archaeological excavations. Both Dr. Boyle and I are prepared to
cooperate in such work if you - or organizations known to you - can furnish the funds.

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I can get together a dozen miners for the heavy digging - the blackfellows would be of no
use, for I've found that they have an almost maniacal fear of this particular spot. Boyle
and I are saying nothing to others, for you very obviously ought to have precedence in
any discoveries or credit.
The place can be reached from Pilbarra in about four days by motor tractor - which we'd
need for our apparatus. It is somewhat west and south of Warburton's path of 1873, and
100 miles southeast of Joanna Spring. We could float things up the De Grey River instead
of starting from Pilbarra - but all that can be talked over later.
Roughly the stones lie at a point about 22 3' 14" South Latitude, 125 0' 39" East
Longitude. The climate is tropical, and the desert conditions are trying.
I shall welcome further correspondence upon this subject, and am keenly eager to assist
in any plan you may devise. After studying your articles I am deeply impressed with the
profound significance of the whole matter. Dr. Boyle will write later. When rapid
communication is needed, a cable to Perth can be relayed by wireless.
Hoping profoundly for an early message,
Believe me,
Most faithfully yours,
Robert B.F. Mackenzie
Of the immediate aftermath of this letter, much can be learned from the press. My good
fortune in securing the backing of Miskatonic University was great, and both Mr.
Mackenzie and Dr. Boyle proved invaluable in arranging matters at the Australian end.
We were not too specific with the public about our objects, since the whole matter would
have lent itself unpleasantly to sensational and jocose treatment by the cheaper
newspapers. As a result, printed reports were sparing; but enough appeared to tell of our
quest for reported Australian ruins and to chronicle our various preparatory steps.
Professor William Dyer of the college's geology department - leader of the Miskatonic
Antarctic Expedition Of 1930-31 - Ferdin and C. Ashley of the department of ancient
history, and Tyler M. Freeborn of the department of anthropology - together with my son
Wingate - accompanied me.
My correspondent, Mackenzie, came to Arkham early in 1935 and assisted in our final
preparations. He proved to be a tremendously competent and affable man of about fifty,
admirably well-read, and deeply familiar with all the conditions of Australian travel.
He had tractors waiting at Pilbarra, and we chartered a tramp steamer sufficiently small to
get up the river to that point. We were prepared to excavate in the most careful and
scientific fashion, sifting every particle of sand, and disturbing nothing which might seem
to be in or near its original situation.
Sailing from Boston aboard the wheezy Lexington on March 28, 1935, we had a leisurely
trip across the Atlantic and Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal, down the Red Sea,
and across the Indian Ocean to our goal. I need not tell how the sight of the low, sandy

The Shadow Out of Time
West Australian coast depressed me, and how I detested the crude mining town and
dreary gold fields where the tractors were given their last loads.
Dr. Boyle, who met us, proved to be elderly, pleasant, and intelligent - and his knowledge
of psychology led him into many long discussions with my son and me.
Discomfort and expectancy were oddly mingled in most of us when at length our party of
eighteen rattled forth over the arid leagues of sand and rock. On Friday, May 31st, we
forded a branch of the De Grey and entered the realm of utter desolation. A certain
positive terror grew on me as we advanced to this actual site of the elder world behind the
legends - a terror, of course, abetted by the fact that my disturbing dreams and pseudomemories still beset me with unabated force.
It was on Monday, June 3rd, that we saw the first of the half-buried blocks. I cannot
describe the emotions with which I actually touched - in objective reality - a fragment of
Cyclopean masonry in every respect like the blocks in the walls of my dream-buildings.
There was a distinct trace of carving - and my hands trembled as I recognised part of a
curvilinear decorative scheme made hellish to me through years of tormenting nightmare
and baffling research.
A month of digging brought a total of some 1250 blocks in varying stages of wear and
disintegration. Most of these were carven megaliths with curved tops and bottoms. A
minority were smaller, flatter, plain-surfaced, and square or octagonally cut-like those of
the floors and pavements in my dreams - while a few were singularly massive and curved
or slanted in such a manner as to suggest use in vaulting or groining, or as parts of arches
or round window casings.
The deeper - and the farther north and east - we dug, the more blocks we found; though
we still failed to discover any trace of arrangement among them. Professor Dyer was
appalled at the measureless age of the fragments, and Freeborn found traces of symbols
which fitted darkly into certain Papuan and Polynesian legends of infinite antiquity. The
condition and scattering of the blocks told mutely of vertiginous cycles of time and
geologic upheavals of cosmic savagery.
We had an aroplane with us, and my son Wingate would often go up to different heights
and scan the sand-and-rock waste for signs of dim, large-scale outlines - either
differences of level or trails of scattered blocks. His results were virtually negative; for
whenever he would one day think he had glimpsed some significant trend, he would on
his next trip find the impression replaced by another equally insubstantial - a result of the
shifting, wind-blown sand.
One or two of these ephemeral suggestions, though, affected me queerly and
disagreeably. They seemed, after a fashion, to dovetail horribly with something I had
dreamed or read, but which I could no longer remember. There was a terrible familiarity
about them - which somehow made me look furtively and apprehensively over the
abominable, sterile terrain toward the north and northeast.

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Around the first week in July I developed an unaccountable set of mixed emotions about
that general northeasterly region. There was horror, and there was curiosity - but more
than that, there was a persistent and perplexing illusion of memory.
I tried all sorts of psychological expedients to get these notions out of my head, but met
with no success. Sleeplessness also gained upon me, but I almost welcomed this because
of the resultant shortening of my dream-periods. I acquired the habit of taking long, lone
walks in the desert late at night-usually to the north or northeast, whither the sum of my
strange new impulses seemed subtly to pull me.
Sometimes, on these walks, I would stumble over nearly buried fragments of the ancient
masonry. Though there were fewer visible blocks here than where we had started, I felt
sure that there must be a vast abundance beneath the surface. The ground was less level
than at our camp, and the prevailing high winds now and then piled the sand into fantastic
temporary hillocks - exposing low traces of the elder stones while it covered other traces.
I was queerly anxious to have the excavations extend to this territory, yet at the same
time dreaded what might be revealed. Obviously, I was getting into a rather bad state - all
the worse because I could not account for it.
An indication of my poor nervous health can be gained from my response to an odd
discovery which I made on one of my nocturnal rambles. It was on the evening of July
l1th, when the moon flooded the mysterious hillocks with a curious pallor.
Wandering somewhat beyond my usual limits, I came upon a great stone which seemed
to differ markedly from any we had yet encountered. It was almost wholly covered, but I
stooped and cleared away the sand with my hands, later studying the object carefully and
supplementing the moonlight with my electric torch.
Unlike the other very large rocks, this one was perfectly square-cut, with no convex or
concave surface. It seemed, too, to be of a dark basaltic substance, wholly dissimilar to
the granite and sandstone and occasional concrete of the now familiar fragments.
Suddenly I rose, turned, and ran for the camp at top speed. It was a wholly unconscious
and irrational flight, and only when I was close to my tent did I fully realise why I had
run. Then it came to me. The queer dark stone was something which I had dreamed and
read about, and which was linked with the uttermost horrors of the aeon-old legendry.
It was one of the blocks of that basaltic elder masonry which the fabled Great Race held
in such fear - the tall, windowless ruins left by those brooding, half-material, alien things
that festered in earth's nether abysses and against whose wind-like, invisible forces the
trap-doors were sealed and the sleepless sentinels posted.
I remained awake all night, but by dawn realised how silly I had been to let the shadow of
a myth upset me. Instead of being frightened, I should have had a discoverer's
enthusiasm.

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The next forenoon I told the others about my find, and Dyer, Freeborn, Boyle, my son,
and I set out to view the anomalous block. Failure, however, confronted us. I had formed
no clear idea of the stone's location, and a late ind had wholly altered the hillocks of
shifting sand.
VI
I come now to the crucial and most difficult part of my narrative - all the more difficult
because I cannot be quite certain of its reality. At times I feel uncomfortably sure that I
was not dreaming or deluded; and it is this feelingin view of the stupendous implications
which the objective truth of my experience would raise - which impels me to make this
record.
My son - a trained psychologist with the fullest and most sympathetic knowledge of my
whole case - shall be the primary judge of what I have to tell.
First let me outline the externals of the matter, as those at the camp know them. On the
night of July 17-18, after a windy day, I retired early but could not sleep. Rising shortly
before eleven, and afflicted as usual with that strange feeling regarding the northeastward
terrain, I set out on one of my typical nocturnal walks; seeing and greeting only one
person - an Australian miner named Tupper - as I left our precincts.
The moon, slightly past full, shone from a clear sky, and drenched the ancient sands with
a white, leprous radiance which seemed to me somehow infinitely evil. There was no
longer any wind, nor did any return for nearly five hours, as amply attested by Tupper
and others who saw me walking rapidly across the pallid, secret-guarding hillocks toward
the northeast.
About 3:30 a.m. a violent wind blew up, waking everyone in camp and felling three of
the tents. The sky was unclouded, and the desert still blazed with that leprous moonlight.
As the party saw to the tents my absence was noted, but in view of my previous walks
this circumstance gave no one alarm. And yet, as many as three men - all Australians seemed to feel something sinister in the air.
Mackenzie explained to Professor Freeborn that this was a fear picked up from
blackfellow folklore - the natives having woven a curious fabric of malignant myth about
the high winds which at long intervals sweep across the sands under a clear sky. Such
winds, it is whispered, blow out of the great stone huts under the ground, where terrible
things have happened - and are never felt except near places where the big marked stones
are scattered. Close to four the gale subsided as suddenly as it had begun, leaving the
sand hills in new and unfamiliar shapes.
It was just past five, with the bloated, fungoid moon sinking in the west, when I staggered
into camp - hatless, tattered, features scratched and ensanguined, and without my electric
torch. Most of the men had returned to bed, but Professor Dyer was smoking a pipe in
front of his tent. Seeing my winded and almost frenzied state, he called Dr. Boyle, and

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the two of them got me on my cot and made me comfortable. My son, roused by the stir,
soon joined them, and they all tried to force me to lie still and attempt sleep.
But there was no sleep for me. My psychological state was very extraordinary - different
from anything I had previously suffered. After a time I insisted upon talking - nervously
and elaborately explaining my condition. I told them I had become fatigued, and had lain
down in the sand for a nap. There had, I said, been dreams even more frightful than usual
- and when I was awaked by the sudden high wind my overwrought nerves had snapped.
I had fled in panic, frequently falling over half-buried stones and thus gaining my tattered
and bedraggled aspect. I must have slept long - hence the hours of my absence.
Of anything strange either seen or experienced I hinted absolutely nothing - exercising
the greatest self-control in that respect. But I spoke of a change of mind regarding the
whole work of the expedition, and urged a halt in all digging toward the northeast. My
reasoning was patently weak - for I mentioned a dearth of blocks, a wish not to offend the
superstitious miners, a possible shortage of funds from the college, and other things either
untrue or irrelevant. Naturally, no one paid the least attention to my new wishes - not
even my son, whose concern for my health was obvious.
The next day I was up and around the camp, but took no part in the excavations. Seeing
that I could not stop the work, I decided to return home as soon as possible for the sake of
my nerves, and made my son promise to fly me in the plane to Perth - a thousand miles to
the southwest - as soon as he had surveyed the region I wished let alone.
If, I reflected, the thing I had seen was still visible, I might decide to attempt a specific
warning even at the cost of ridicule. It was just conceivable that the miners who knew the
local folklore might back me up. Humouring me, my son made the survey that very
afternoon, flying over all the terrain my walk could possibly have covered. Yet nothing of
what I had found remained in sight.
It was the case of the anomalous basalt block all over again - the shifting sand had wiped
out every trace. For an instant I half regretted having lost a certain awesome object in my
stark fright - but now I know that the loss was merciful. I can still believe my whole
experience an illusion - especially if, as I devoutly hope, that hellish abyss is never found.
Wingate took me to Perth on July 20th, though declining to abandon the expedition and
return home. He stayed with me until the 25th, when the steamer for Liverpool sailed.
Now, in the cabin of the Empress, I am pondering long and frantically upon the entire
matter, and have decided that my son at least must be informed. It shall rest with him
whether to diffuse the matter more widely.
In order to meet any eventuality I have prepared this summary of my background - as
already known in a scattered way to others - and will now tell as briefly as possible what
seemed to happen during my absence from the camp that hideous night.

The Shadow Out of Time
Nerves on edge, and whipped into a kind of perverse eagerness by that inexplicable,
dread-mingled, mnemonic urge toward the northeast, I plodded on beneath the evil,
burning moon. Here and there I saw, half shrouded by sand, those primal Cyclopean
blocks left from nameless and forgotten aeons.
The incalculable age and brooding horror of this monstrous waste began to oppress me as
never before, and I could not keep from thinking of my maddening dreams, of the
frightful legends which lay behind them, and of the present fears of natives and miners
concerning the desert and its carven stones.
And yet I plodded on as if to some eldritch rendezvous - more and more assailed by
bewildering fancies, compulsions, and pseudo-memories. I thought of some of the
possible contours of the lines of stones as seen by my son from the air, and wondered
why they seemed at once so ominous and so familiar. Something was fumbling and
rattling at the latch of my recollection, while another unknown force sought to keep the
portal barred.
The night was windless, and the pallid sand curved upward and downward like frozen
waves of the sea. I had no goal, but somehow ploughed along as if with fate-bound
assurance. My dreams welled up into the waking world, so that each sand-embedded
megalith seemed part of endless rooms and corridors of pre-human masonry, carved and
hieroglyphed with symbols that I knew too well from years of custom as a captive mind
of the Great Race.
At moments I fancied I saw those omniscient, conical horrors moving about at their
accustomed tasks, and I feared to look down lest I find myself one with them in aspect.
Yet all the while I saw the sand-covered blocks as well as the rooms and corridors; the
evil, burning moon as well as the lamps of luminous crystal; the endless desert as well as
the waving ferns beyond the windows. I was awake and dreaming at the same time.
I do not know how long or how far - or indeed, in just what direction -I had walked when
I first spied the heap of blocks bared by the day's wind. It was the largest group in one
place that I had seen so far, and so sharply did it impress me that the visions of fabulous
aeons faded suddenly away.
Again there were only the desert and the evil moon and the shards of an unguessed past. I
drew close and paused, and cast the added light of my electric torch over the tumbled
pile. A hillock had blown away, leaving a low, irregularly round mass of megaliths and
smaller fragments some forty feet across and from two to eight feet high.
From the very outset I realized that there was some utterly unprecedented quality about
those stones. Not only was the mere number of them quite without parallel, but
something in the sandworn traces of design arrested me as I scanned them under the
mingled beams of the moon and my torch.

The Shadow Out of Time
Not that any one differed essentially from the earlier specimens we had found. It was
something subtler than that. The impression did not come when I looked at one block
alone, but only when I ran my eye over several almost simultaneously.
Then, at last, the truth dawned upon me. The curvilinear patterns on many of those blocks
were closely related - parts of one vast decorative conception. For the first time in this
aeon-shaken waste I had come upon a mass of masonry in its old position - tumbled and
fragmentary, it is true, but none the less existing in a very definite sense.
Mounting at a low place, I clambered laboriously over the heap; here and there clearing
away the sand with my fingers, and constantly striving to interpret varieties of size,
shape, and style, and relationships of design.
After a while I could vaguely guess at the nature of the bygone structure, and at the
designs which had once stretched over the vast surfaces of the primal masonry. The
perfect identity of the whole with some of my dream-glimpses appalled and unnerved me.
This was once a Cyclopean corridor thirty feet tall, paved with octagonal blocks and
solidly vaulted overhead. There would have been rooms opening off on the right, and at
the farther end one of those strange inclined planes would have wound down to still
lower depths.
I started violently as these conceptions occurred to me, for there was more in them than
the blocks themselves had supplied. How did I know that this level should have been far
underground? How did I know that the plane leading upward should have been behind
me? How did I know that the long subterrene passage to the Square of Pillars ought to lie
on the left one level above me?
How did I know that the room of machines and the rightward-leading tunnel to the
central archives ought to lie two levels below? How did I know that there would be one
of those horrible, metal-banded trap-doors at the very bottom four levels down?
Bewildered by this intrusion from the dream-world, I found myself shaking and bathed in
a cold perspiration.
Then, as a last, intolerable touch, I felt that faint, insidious stream of cool air trickling
upward from a depressed place near the center of the huge heap. Instantly, as once before,
my visions faded, and I saw again only the evil moonlight, the brooding desert, and the
spreading tumulus of palaeogean masonry. Something real and tangible, yet fraught with
infinite suggestions of nighted mystery, now confronted me. For that stream of air could
argue but one thing - a hidden gulf of great size beneath the disordered blocks on the
surface.
My first thought was of the sinister blackfellow legends of vast underground huts among
the megaliths where horrors happen and great winds are born. Then thoughts of my own
dreams came back, and I felt dim pseudo-memories tugging at my mind. What manner of

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place lay below me? What primal, inconceivable source of age-old myth-cycles and
haunting nightmares might I be on the brink of uncovering?
It was only for a moment that I hesitated, for more than curiosity and scientific zeal was
driving me on and working against my growing fear.
I seemed to move almost automatically, as if in the clutch of some compelling fate.
Pocketing my torch, and struggling with a strength that I had not thought I possessed, I
wrenched aside first one titan fragment of stone and then another, till there welled up a
strong draught whose dampness contrasted oddly with the deserts dry air. A black rift
began to yawn, and at length - when I had pushed away every fragment small enough to
budge - the leprous moonlight blazed on an aperture of ample width to admit me.
I drew out my torch and cast a brilliant beam into the opening. Below me was a chaos of
tumbled masonry, sloping roughly down toward the north at an angle of about forty-five
degrees, and evidently the result of some bygone collapse from above.
Between its surface and the ground level was a gulf of impenetrable blackness at whose
upper edge were signs of gigantic, stress-heaved vaulting. At this point, it appeared, the
deserts sands lay directly upon a floor of some titan structure of earth's youth - how
preserved through aeons of geologic convulsion I could not then and cannot now even
attempt to guess.
In retrospect, the barest idea of a sudden, lone descent into such a doubtful abyss - and at
a time when one's whereabouts were unknown to any living soul - seems like the utter
apex of insanity. Perhaps it was - yet that night I embarked without hesitancy upon such a
descent.
Again there was manifest that lure and driving of fatality which had all along seemed to
direct my course. With torch flashing intermittently to save the battery, I commenced a
mad scramble down the sinister, Cyclopean incline below the opening - sometimes facing
forward as I found good hand - and foot-holds, and at other times turning to face the heap
of megaliths as I clung and fumbled more precariously.
In two directions beside me distant walls of carven, crumbling masonry loomed dimly
under the direct beams of my torch. Ahead, however, was only unbroken darkness.
I kept no track of time during my downward scramble. So seething with baffling hints
and images was my mind that all objective matters seemed withdrawn into incalculable
distances. Physical sensation was dead, and even fear remained as a wraith-like, inactive
gargoyle leering impotently at me.
Eventually, I reached a level floor strewn with fallen blocks, shapeless fragments of
stone, and sand and detritus of every kind. On either side - perhaps thirty feet apart - rose
massive walls culminating in huge groinings. That they were carved I could just discern,
but the nature of the carvings was beyond my perception.

The Shadow Out of Time
What held me the most was the vaulting overhead. The beam from my torch could not
reach the roof, but the lower parts of the monstrous arches stood out distinctly. And so
perfect was their identity with what I had seen in countless dreams of the elder world,
that I trembled actively for the first time.
Behind and high above, a faint luminous blur told of the distant moonlit world outside.
Some vague shred of caution warned me that I should not let it out of my sight, lest I
have no guide for my return.
I now advanced toward the wall at my left, where the traces of carving were plainest. The
littered floor was nearly as hard to traverse as the downward heap had been, but I
managed to pick my difficult way.
At one place I heaved aside some blocks and locked away the detritus to see what the
pavement was like, and shuddered at the utter, fateful familiarity of the great octagonal
stones whose buckled surface still held roughly together.
Reaching a convenient distance from the wall, I cast the searchlight slowly and carefully
over its worn remnants of carving. Some bygone influx of water seemed to have acted on
the sandstone surface, while there were curious incrustations which I could not explain.
In places the masonry was very loose and distorted, and I wondered how many aeons
more this primal, hidden edifice could keep its remaining traces of form amidst earth's
heavings.
But it was the carvings themselves that excited me most. Despite their time-crumbled
state, they were relatively easy to trace at close range; and the complete, intimate
familiarity of every detail almost stunned my imagination.
That the major attri butes of this hoary masonry should be familiar, was not beyond
normal credibility.
Powerfully impressing the weavers of certain myths, they had become embodied in a
stream of cryptic lore which, somehow, coming to my notice during the amnesic period,
had evoked vivid images in my subconscious mind.
But how could I explain the exact and minute fashion in which each line and spiral of
these strange designs tallied with what I had dreamed for more than a score of years?
What obscure, forgotten iconography could have reproduced each subtle shading and
nuance which so persistently, exactly, and unvaryingly besieged my sleeping vision night
after night?
For this was no chance or remote resemblance. Definitely and absolutely, the millennially
ancient, aeon-hidden corridor in which I stood was the original of something I knew in
sleep as intimately as I knew my own house in Crane Street, Arkham. True, my dreams

The Shadow Out of Time
shewed the place in its undecayed prime; but the identity was no less real on that account.
I was wholly and horribly oriented.
The particular structure I was in was known to me. Known, too, was its place in that
terrible elder city of dreams. That I could visit unerringly any point in that structure or in
that city which had escaped the changes and devastations of uncounted ages, I realized
with hideous and instinctive certainty. What in heaven's name could all this mean? How
had I come to know what I knew? And what awful reality could lie behind those antique
tales of the beings who had dwelt in this labyrinth of primordial stone?
Words can convey only fractionally the welter of dread and bewilderment which ate at
my spirit. I knew this place. I knew what lay before me, and what had lain overhead
before the myriad towering stories had fallen to dust and debris and the desert. No need
now, I thought with a shudder, to keep that faint blur of moonlight in view.
I was torn betwixt a longing to flee and a feverish mixture of burning curiosity and
driving fatality. What had happened to this monstrous megalopolis of old in the millions
of years since the time of my dreams? Of the subterrene mazes which had underlain the
city and linked all the titan towers, how much had still survived the writhings of earth's
crust?
Had I come upon a whole buried world of unholy archaism? Could I still find the house
of the writing master, and the tower where S'gg'ha, the captive mind from the star-headed
vegetable carnivores of Antarctica, had chiselled certain pictures on the blank spaces of
the walls?
Would the passage at the second level down, to the hall of the alien minds, be still
unchoked and traversable? In that hall the captive mind of an incredible entity - a halfplastic denizen of the hollow interior of an unknown trans-Plutonian planet eighteen
million years in the future - had kept a certain thing which it had modelled from clay.
I shut my eyes and put my hand to my head in a vain, pitiful effort to drive these insane
dream-fragments from my consciousness. Then, for the first time, I felt acutely the
coolness, motion, and dampness of the surrounding air. Shuddering, I realized that a vast
chain of aeon-dead black gulfs must indeed be yawning somewhere beyond and below
me.
I thought of the frightful chambers and corridors and inclines as I recalled them from my
dreams. Would the way to the central archives still be open? Again that driving fatality
tugged insistently at my brain as I recalled the awesome records that once lay cased in
those rectangular vaults of rustless metal.
There, said the dreams and legends, had reposed the whole history, past and future, of the
cosmic space-time continuum - written by captive minds from every orb and every age in
the solar system. Madness, of course - but had I not now stumbled into a nighted world as
mad as I?

The Shadow Out of Time
I thought of the locked metal shelves, and of the curious knob twistings needed to open
each one. My own came vividly into my consciousness. How often had I gone through
that intricate routine of varied turns and pressures in the terrestrial vertebrate section on
the lowest level! Every detail was fresh and familiar.
If there were such a vault as I had dreamed of, I could open it in a moment. It was then
that madness took me utterly. An instant later, and I was leaping and stumbling over the
rocky debris toward the well-remembered incline to the depths below.
VII
From that point forward my impressions are scarcely to be relied on - indeed, I still
possess a final, desperate hope that they all form parts of some daemonic dream or
illusion born of delirium. A fever raged in my brain, and everything came to me through
a kind of haze - sometimes only intermittently.
The rays of my torch shot feebly into the engulfing blackness, bringing phantasmal
flashes of hideously familiar walls and carvings, all blighted with the decay of ages. In
one place a tremendous mass of vaulting had fallen, so that I had to clamber over a
mighty mound of stones reaching almost to the ragged, grotesquely stalactited roof.
It was all the ultimate apex of nightmare, made worse by the blasphemous tug of pseudomemory. One thing only was unfamiliar, and that was my own size in relation to the
monstrous masonry. I felt oppressed by a sense of unwonted smallness, as if the sight of
these towering walls from a mere human body was something wholly new and abnormal.
Again and again I looked nervously down at myself, vaguely disturbed by the human
form I possessed.
Onward through the blackness of the abyss I leaped, plunged, and staggered - often
falling and bruising myself, and once nearly shattering my torch. Every stone and corner
of that daemonic gulf was known to me, and at many points I stopped to cast beams of
light through choked and crumbling, yet familiar, archways.
Some rooms had totally collapsed; others were bare, or debris-filled. In a few I saw
masses of metal - some fairly intact, some broken, and some crushed or battered - which I
recognised as the colossal pedestals or tables of my dreams. What they could in truth
have been, I dared not guess.
I found the downward incline and began its descent - though after a time halted by a
gaping, ragged chasm whose narrowest point could not be much less than four feet
across. Here the stonework had fallen through, revealing incalculable inky depths
beneath.
I knew there were two more cellar levels in this titan edifice, and trembled with fresh
panic as I recalled the metal-clamped trap-door on the lowest one. There could be no
guards now - for what had lurked beneath had long since done its hideous work and sunk

The Shadow Out of Time
into its long decline. By the time of the posthuman beetle race it would be quite dead.
And yet, as I thought of the native legends, I trembled anew.
It cost me a terrible effort to vault that yawning chasm, since the littered floor prevented a
running start - but madness drove me on. I chose a place close to the left-hand wall where the rift was least wide and the landing-spot reasonably clear of dangerous debris and after one frantic moment reached the other side in safety.
At last, gaining the lower level, I stumbled on past the archway of the room of machines,
within which were fantastic ruins of metal, half buried beneath fallen vaulting.
Everything was where I knew it would be, and I climbed confidently over the heaps
which barred the entrance of a vast transverse corridor. This, I realised, would take me
under the city to the central archives.
Endless ages seemed to unroll as I stumbled, leaped, and crawled along that debriscluttered corridor. Now and then I could make out carvings on the ages-tained walls some familiar, others seemingly added since the period of my dreams. Since this was a
subterrene house - connecting highway, there were no archways save when the route led
through the lower levels of various buildings.
At some of these intersections I turned aside long enough to look down well-remembered
corridors and into well-remembered rooms. Twice only did I find any radical changes
from what I had dreamed of - and in one of these cases I could trace the sealed-up
outlines of the archway I remembered.
I shook violently, and felt a curious surge of retarding weakness, as I steered a hurried
and reluctant course through the crypt of one of those great windowless, ruined towers
whose alien, basalt masonry bespoke a whispered and horrible origin.
This primal vault was round and fully two hundred feet across, with nothing carved upon
the dark-hued stonework. The floor was here free from anything save dust and sand, and I
could see the apertures leading upward and downward. There were no stairs or inclines indeed, my dreams had pictured those elder towers as wholly untouched by the fabulous
Great Race. Those who had built them had not needed stairs or inclines.
In the dreams, the downward aperture had been tightly sealed and nervously guarded.
Now it lay open-black and yawning, and giving forth a current of cool, damp air. Of what
limitless caverns of eternal night might brood below, I would not permit myself to think.
Later, clawing my way along a badly heaped section of the corridor, I reached a place
where the roof had wholly caved in. The debris rose like a mountain, and I climbed up
over it, passing through a vast, empty space where my torchlight could reveal neither
walls nor vaulting. This, I reflected, must be the cellar of the house of the metalpurveyors, fronting on the third square not far from the archives. What had happened to it
I could not conjecture.

The Shadow Out of Time
I found the corridor again beyond the mountain of detritus and stone, but after a short
distance encountered a wholly choked place where the fallen vaulting almost touched the
perilously sagging ceiling. How I managed to wrench and tear aside enough blocks to
afford a passage, and how I dared disturb the tightly packed fragments when the least
shift of equilibrium might have brought down all the tons of superincumbent masonry to
crush me to nothingness, I do not know.
It was sheer madness that impelled and guided me - if, indeed, my whole underground
adventure was not - as I hope - a hellish delusion or phase of dreaming. But I did make or dream that I made - a passage that I could squirm through. As I wiggled over the
mound of debris - my torch, switched continuously on, thrust deeply in my mouth - I felt
myself torn by the fantastic stalactites of the jagged floor above me.
I was now close to the great underground archival structure which seemed to form my
goal. Sliding and clambering down the farther side of the barrier, and picking my way
along the remaining stretch of corridor with hand-held, intermittently flashing torch, I
came at last to a low, circular crypt with arches - still in a marvelous state of preservation
- opening off on every side.
The walls, or such parts of them as lay within reach of my torchlight, were densely
hieroglyphed and chiselled with typical curvilinear symbols - some added since the
period of my dreams.
This, I realised, was my fated destination, and I turned at once through a familiar archway
on my left. That I could find a clear passage up and down the incline to all the surviving
levels, I had, oddly, little doubt. This vast, earth-protected pile, housing the annals of all
the solar system, had been built with supernal skill and strength to last as long as that
system itself.
Blocks of stupendous size, poised with mathematical genius and bound with cements of
incredible toughness, had combined to form a mass as firm as the planet's rocky core.
Here, after ages more prodigious than I could sanely grasp, its buried bulk stood in all its
essential contours, the vast, dust-drifted floors scarce sprinkled with the litter elsewhere
so dominant.
The relatively easy walking from this point onward went curiously to my head. All the
frantic eagerness hitherto frustrated by obstacles now took itself out in a kind of febrile
speed, and I literally raced along the low-roofed, monstrously well-remembered aisles
beyond the archway.
I was past being astonished by the familiarity of what I saw. On every hand the great
hieroglyphed metal shelf-doors loomed monstrously; some yet in place, others sprung
open, and still others bent and buckled under bygone geological stresses not quite strong
enough to shatter the titan masonry.

The Shadow Out of Time
Here and there a dust-covered heap beneath a gaping, empty shelf seemed to indicate
where cases had been shaken down by earth tremors. On occasional pillars were great
symbols or letters proclaiming classes and subclasses of volumes.
Once I paused before an open vault where I saw some of the accustomed metal cases still
in position amidst the omnipresent gritty dust. Reaching up, I dislodged one of the thinner
specimens with some difficulty, and rested it on the floor for inspection. It was titled in
the prevailing curvilinear hieroglyphs, though something in the arrangement of the
characters seemed subtly unusual.
The odd mechanism of the hooked fastener was perfectly well known to me, and I
snapped up the still rustless and workable lid and drew out the book within. The latter, as
expected, was some twenty by fifteen inches in area, and two inches thick; the thin metal
covers opening at the top.
Its tough cellulose pages seemed unaffected by the myriad cycles of time they had lived
through, and I studied the queerly pigmented, brush-drawn letters of the text-symbols
unlike either the usual curved hieroglyphs or any alphabet known to human scholarship with a haunting, half-aroused memory.
It came to me that this was the language used by a captive mind I had known slightly in
my dreams - a mind from a large asteroid on which had survived much of the archaic life
and lore of the primal planet whereof it formed a fragment. At the same time I recalled
that this level of the archives was devoted to volumes dealing with the non-terrestrial
planets.
As I ceased poring over this incredible document I saw that the light of my torch was
beginning to fail, hence quickly inserted the extra battery I always had with me. Then,
armed with the stronger radiance, I resumed my feverish racing through unending tangles
of aisles and corridors - recognising now and then some familiar shelf, and vaguely
annoyed by the acoustic conditions which made my footfalls echo incongruously in these
catacombs.
The very prints of my shoes behind me in the millennially untrodden dust made me
shudder. Never before, if my mad dreams held anything of truth, had human feet pressed
upon those immemorial pavements.
Of the particular goal of my insane racing, my conscious mind held no hint. There was,
however, some force of evil potency pulling at my dazed will and buried recollection, so
that I vaguely felt I was not running at random.
I came to a downward incline and followed it to profounder depths. Floors flashed by me
as I raced, but I did not pause to explore them. In my whirling brain there had begun to
beat a certain rhythm which set my right hand twitching in unison. I wanted to unlock
something, and felt that I knew all the intricate twists and pressures needed to do it. It
would be like a modern safe with a combination lock.

The Shadow Out of Time
Dream or not, I had once known and still knew. How any dream - or scrap of
unconsciously absorbed legend - could have taught me a detail so minute, so intricate,
and so complex, I did not attempt to explain to myself. I was beyond all coherent thought.
For was not this whole experience - this shocking familiarity with a set of unknown ruins,
and this monstrously exact identity of everything before me with what only dreams and
scraps of myth could have suggested - a horror beyond all reason?
Probably it was my basic conviction then - as it is now during my saner moments - that I
was not awake at all, and that the entire buried city was a fragment of febrile
hallucination.
Eventually, I reached the lowest level and struck off to the right of the incline. For some
shadowy reason I tiled to soften my steps, even though I lost speed thereby. There was a
space I was afraid to cross on this last, deeply buried floor.
As I drew near it I recalled what thing in that space I feared. It was merely one of the
metal-barred and closely guarded trap-doors. There would be no guards now, and on that
account I trembled and tiptoed as I had done in passing through that black basalt vault
where a similar trap-door had yawned.
I felt a current of cool, damp air as I had felt there, and wished that my course led in
another direction. Why I had to take the particular course I was taking, I did not know.
When I came to the space I saw that the trap-door yawned widely open. Ahead, the
shelves began again, and I glimpsed on the floor before one of them a heap very thinly
covered with dust, where a number of cases had recently fallen. At the same moment a
fresh wave of panic clutched me, though for some time I could not discover why.
Heaps of fallen cases were not uncommon, for all through the aeons this lightless
labyrinth had been racked by the heavings of earth and had echoed at intervals of the
deafening clatter of toppling objects. It was only when I was nearly across the space that I
realized why I shook so violently.
Not the heap, but something about the dust of the level floor was troubling me. In the
light of my torch it seemed as if that dust were not as even as it ought to be - there were
places where it looked thinner, as if it had been disturbed not many months before. I
could not be sure, for even the apparently thinner places were dusty enough; yet a certain
suspicion of regularity in the fancied unevenness was highly disquieting.
When I brought the torchlight close to one of the queer places I did not like what I saw for the illusion of regularity became very great. It was as if there were regular lines of
composite impressions - impressions that went in threes, each slightly over a foot square,
and consisting of five nearly circular three-inch prints, one in advance of the other four.
These possible lines of foot-square impressions appeared to lead in two directions, as if
something had gone somewhere and returned. They were, of course, very faint, and may

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have been illusions or accidents; but there was an element of dim, fumbling terror about
the way I thought they ran. For at one end of them was the heap of cases which must have
clattered down not long before, while at the other end was the ominous trap-door with the
cool, damp wind, yawning unguarded down to abysses past imagination.
VIII
That my strange sense of compulsion was deep and overwhelming is shewn by its
conquest of my fear. No rational motive could have drawn me on after that hideous
suspicion of prints and the creeping dream-memories it excited. Yet my right hand, even
as it shook with fright, still twitched rhythmically in its eagerness to turn a lock it hoped
to find. Before I knew it I was past the heap of lately fallen cases and running on tiptoe
through aisles of utterly unbroken dust toward a point which I seemed to know morbidly,
horribly well.
My mind was asking itself questions whose origin and relevancy I was only beginning to
guess. Would the shelf be reachable by a human body? Could my human hand master all
the aeon-remembered motions of the lock? Would the lock be undamaged and workable?
And what would I do - what dare I do with what - as I now commenced to realise - I both
hoped and feared to find? Would it prove the awesome, brain-shattering truth of
something past normal conception, or shew only that I was dreaming?
The next I knew I had ceased my tiptoed racing and was standing still, staring at a row of
maddeningly familiar hieroglyphed shelves. They were in a state of almost perfect
preservation, and only three of the doors in this vicinity had sprung open.
My feelings toward these shelves cannot be described - so utter and insistent was the
sense of old acquaintance. I was looking high up at a row near the top and wholly out of
my reach, and wondering how I could climb to best advantage. An open door four rows
from the bottom would help, and the locks of the closed doors formed possible holds for
hands and feet. I would grip the torch between my teeth, as I had in other places where
both hands were needed. Above all I must make no noise.
How to get down what I wished to remove would be difficult, but I could probably hook
its movable fastener in my coat collar and carry it like a knapsack. Again I wondered
whether the lock would be undamaged. That I could repeat each familiar motion I had not
the least doubt. But I hoped the thing would not scrape or creak - and that my hand could
work it properly.
Even as I thought these things I had taken the torch in my mouth and begun to climb. The
projecting locks were poor supports; but, as I had expected, the opened shelf helped
greatly. I used both the swinging door and the edge of the aperture itself in my ascent,
and managed to avoid any loud creaking.

The Shadow Out of Time
Balanced on the upper edge of the door, and leaning far to my right, I could just reach the
lock I sought. My fingers, half numb from climbing, were very clumsy at first; but I soon
saw that they were anatomically adequate. And the memory-rhythm was strong in them.
Out of unknown gulfs of time the intricate, secret motions had somehow reached my
brain correctly in every detail - for after less than five minutes of trying there came a
click whose familiarity was all the more startling because I had not consciously
anticipated it. In another instant the metal door was slowly swinging open with only the
faintest grating sound.
Dazedly I looked over the row of greyish case ends thus exposed, and felt a tremendous
surge of some wholly inexplicable emotion. Just within reach of my right hand was a case
whose curving hieroglyphs made me shake with a pang infinitely more complex than one
of mere fright. Still shaking, I managed to dislodge it amidst a shower of gritty flakes,
and ease it over toward myself without any violent noise.
Like the other case I had handled, it was slightly more than twenty by fifteen inches in
size, with curved mathematical designs in low relief. In thickness it just exceeded three
inches.
Crudely wedging it between myself and the surface I was climbing, I fumbled with the
fastener and finally got the hook free. Lifting the cover, I shifted the heavy object to my
back, and let the hook catch hold of my collar. Hands now free, I awkwardly clambered
down to the dusty floor, and prepared to inspect my prize.
Kneeling in the gritty dust, I swung the case around and rested it in front of me. My
hands shook, and I dreaded to draw out the book within almost as much as I longed - and
felt compelled - to do so. It had very gradually become clear to me what I ought to find,
and this realisation nearly paralysed my faculties.
If the thing were there - and if I were not dreaining - the implications would be quite
beyond the power of the human spirit to bear. What tormented me most was my
momentary inability to feel that my surroundings were a dream. The sense of reality was
hideous - and again becomes so as I recall the scene.
At length I tremblingly pulled the book from its container and stared fascinatedly at the
well-known hieroglyphs on the cover. It seemed to be in prime condition, and the
curvilinear letters of the title held me in almost as hypnotised a state as if I could read
them. Indeed, I cannot swear that I did not actually read them in some transient and
terrible access of abnormal memory.
I do not know how long it was before I dared to lift that thin metal cover. I temporized
and made excuses to myself. I took the torch from my mouth and shut it off to save the
battery. Then, in the dark, I collected my courage finally lifting the cover without turning
on the light. Last of all, I did indeed flash the torch upon the exposed page - steeling
myself in advance to suppress any sound no matter what I should find.

The Shadow Out of Time
I looked for an instant, then collapsed. Clenching my teeth, however, I kept silent. I sank
wholly to the floor and put a hand to my forehead amidst the engulfing blackness. What I
dreaded and expected was there. Either I was dreaming, or time and space had become a
mockery.
I must be dreaming - but I would test the horror by carrying this thing back and shewing
it to my son if it were indeed a reality. My head swam frightfully, even though there were
no visible objects in the unbroken gloom to swirl about me. Ideas and images of the
starkest terror - excited by vistas which my glimpse had opened up - began to throng in
upon me and cloud my senses.
I thought of those possible prints in the dust, and trembled at the sound of my own
breathing as I did so. Once again I flashed on the light and looked at the page as a
serpent's victim may look at his destroyer's eyes and fangs.
Then, with clumsy fingers, in the dark, I closed the book, put it in its container, and
snapped the lid and the curious, hooked fastener. This was what I must carry back to the
outer world if it truly existed - if the whole abyss truly existed - if I, and the world itself,
truly existed.
Just when I tottered to my feet and commenced my return I cannot be certain. It comes to
me oddly - as a measure of my sense of separation from the normal world - that I did not
even once look at my watch during those hideous hours nderground.
Torch in hand, and with the ominous case under one arm, I eventually found myself
tiptoeing in a kind of silent panic past the draught - giving abyss and those lurking
suggestions of prints. I lessened my precautions as I climbed up the endless inclines, but
could not shake off a shadow of apprehension which I had not felt on the downward
journey.
I dreaded having to repass through the black basalt crypt that was older than the city
itself, where cold draughts welled up from unguarded depths. I thought of that which the
Great Race had feared, and of what might still be lurking - be it ever so weak and dying down there. I thought of those five-circle prints and of what my dreams had told me of
such prints - and of strange winds and whistling noises associated with them. And I
thought of the tales of the modern blackfellows, wherein the horror of great winds and
nameless subterrene ruins was dwelt upon.
I knew from a carven wall symbol the right floor to enter, and came at last after passing
that other book I had examined - to the great circular space with the branching archways.
On my right, and at once recognisable, was the arch through which I had arrived. This I
now entered, conscious that the rest of my course would be harder because of the tumbled
state of the masonry outside the archive building. My new metal-eased burden weighed
upon me, and I found it harder and harder to be quiet as I stumbled among debris and
fragments of every sort.

The Shadow Out of Time
Then I came to the ceiling-high mound of debris through which I had wrenched a scanty
passage. My dread at wriggling through again was infinite, for my first passage had made
some noise, and I now - after seeing those possible prints - dreaded sound above all
things. The case, too, doubled the problem of traversing the narrow crevice.
But I clambered up the barrier as best I could, and pushed the case through the aperture
ahead of me. Then, torch in mouth, I scrambled through myself - my back torn as before
by stalactites.
As I tried to grasp the case again, it fell some distance ahead of me down the slope of the
debris, making a disturbing clatter and arousing echoes which sent me into a cold
perspiration. I lunged for it at once, and regained it without further noise - but a moment
afterward the slipping of blocks under my feet raised a sudden and unprecedented din.
The din was my undoing. For, falsely or not, I thought I heard it answered in a terrible
way from spaces far behind me. I thought I heard a shrill, whistling sound, like nothing
else on earth, and beyond any adequate verbal description. If so, what followed has a
grim irony - since, save for the panic of this thing, the second thing might never have
happened.
As it was, my frenzy was absolute and unrelieved. Taking my torch in my hand and
clutching feebly at the case, I leaped and bounded wildly ahead with no idea in my brain
beyond a mad desire to race out of these nightmare ruins to the waking world of desert
and moonlight which lay so far above.
I hardly knew it when I reached the mountain of debris which towered into the vast
blackness beyond the caved-in roof, and bruised and cut myself repeatedly in scrambling
up its steep slope of jagged blocks and fragments.
Then came the great disaster. Just as I blindly crossed the summit, unprepared for the
sudden dip ahead, my feet slipped utterly and I found myself involved in a mangling
avalanche of sliding masonry whose cannon-loud uproar split the black cavern air in a
deafening series of earth-shaking reverberations.
I have no recollection of emerging from this chaos, but a momentary fragment of
consciousness shows me as plunging and tripping and scrambling along the corridor
amidst the clangour - case and torch still with me.
Then, just as I approached that primal basalt crypt I had so dreaded, utter madness came.
For as the echoes of the avalanche died down, there became audible a repetition of that
frightful alien whistling I thought I had heard before. This time there was no doubt about
it - and what was worse, it came from a point not behind but ahead of me.
Probably I shrieked aloud then. I have a dim picture of myself as flying through the
hellish basalt vault of the elder things, and hearing that damnable alien sound piping up
from the open, unguarded door of limitless nether blacknesses. There was a wind, too -

The Shadow Out of Time
not merely a cool, damp draught, but a violent, purposeful blast belching savagely and
frigidly from that abominable gulf whence the obscene whistling came.
There are memories of leaping and lurching over obstacles of every sort, with that torrent
of wind and shrieking sound growing moment by moment, and seeming to curl and twist
purposefully around me as it struck out wickedly from the spaces behind and beneath.
Though in my rear, that wind had the odd effect of hindering instead of aiding my
progress; as if it acted like a noose or lasso thrown around me. Heedless of the noise I
made, I clattered over a great barrier of blocks and was again in the structure that led to
the surface.
I recall glimpsing the archway to the room of machines and almost crying out as I saw
the incline leading down to where one of those blasphemous trap-doors must be yawning
two levels below. But instead of crying out I muttered over and over to myself that this
was all a dream from which I must soon awake. Perhaps I was in camp - perhaps I was at
home in Arkham. As these hopes bolstered up my sanity I began to mount the incline to
the higher level.
I knew, of course, that I had the four-foot cleft to re-cross, yet was too racked by other
fears to realise the full horror until I came almost upon it. On my descent, the leap across
had been easy - but could I clear the gap as readily when going uphill, and hampered by
fright, exhaustion, the weight of the metal case, and the anomalous backward tug of that
daemon wind? I thought of these things at the last moment, and thought also of the
nameless entities which might be lurking in the black abysses below the chasm.
My wavering torch was growing feeble, but I could tell by some obscure memory when I
neared the cleft. The chill blasts of wind and the nauseous whistling shrieks behind me
were for the moment like a merciful opiate, dulling my imagination to the horror of the
yawning gulf ahead. And then I became aware of the added blasts and whistling in front
of me - tides of abomination surging up through the cleft itself from depths unimagined
and unimaginable.
Now, indeed, the essence of pure nightmare was upon me. Sanity departed - and, ignoring
everything except the animal impulse of flight, I merely struggled and plunged upward
over the incline's debris as if no gulf had existed. Then I saw the chasm's edge, leaped
frenziedly with every ounce of strength I possessed, and was instantly engulfed in a
pandaemoniae vortex of loathsome sound and utter, materially tangible blackness.
This is the end of my experience, so far as I can recall. Any further impressions belong
wholly to the domain of phantasmagoria delirium. Dream, madness, and memory merged
wildly together in a series of fantastic, fragmentary delusions which can have no relation
to anything real.
There was a hideous fall through incalculable leagues of viscous, sentient darkness, and a
babel of noises utterly alien to all that we know of the earth and its organic life. Dormant,

The Shadow Out of Time
rudimentary senses seemed to start into vitality within me, telling of pits and voids
peopled by floating horrors and leading to sunless crags and oceans and teeming cities of
windowless, basalt towers upon which no light ever shone.
Secrets of the primal planet and its immemorial aeons flashed through my brain without
the aid of sight or sound, and there were known to me things which not even the wildest
of my former dreams had ever suggested. And all the while cold fingers of damp vapor
clutched and picked at me, and that eldritch, damnable whistling shrieked fiendishly
above all the alternations of babel and silence in the whirlpools of darkness around.
Afterward there were visions of the Cyclopean city of my dreams - not in ruins, but just
as I had dreamed of it. I was in my conical, non-human body again, and mingled with
crowds of the Great Race and the captive minds who carried books up and down the lofty
corridors and vast inclines.
Then, superimposed upon these pictures, were frightful, momentary flashes of a nonvistial consciousness involving desperate struggles, a writhing free from clutching
tentacles of whistling wind, an insane, bat-like flight through half-solid air, a feverish
burrowing through the cyclone-whipped dark, and a wild stumbling and scrambling over
fallen masonry.
Once there was a curious, intrusive flash of half sight - a faint, diffuse suspicion of bluish
radiance far overhead. Then there came a dream of wind - pursued climbing and crawling
- of wriggling into a blaze of sardonic moonlight through a jumble of debris which slid
and collapsed after me amidst a morbid hurricane. It was the evil, monotonous beating of
that maddening moonlight which at last told me of the return of what I had once known
as the objective, waking world.
I was clawing prone through the sands of the Australian desert, and around me shrieked
such a tumult of wind as I had never before known on our planet's surface. My clothing
was in rags, and my whole body was a mass of bruises and scratches.
Full consciousness returned very slowly, and at no time could I tell just where delirious
dream left off and true memory began. There had seemed to be a mound of titan blocks,
an abyss beneath it, a monstrous revelation from the past, and a nightmare horror at the
end - but how much of this was real?
My flashlight was gone, and likewise any metal case I may have discovered. Had there
been such a case - or any abyss- or any mound? Raising my head, I looked behind me,
and saw only the sterile, undulant sands of the desert.
The daemon wind died down, and the bloated, fungoid moon sank reddeningly in the
west. I lurched to my feet and began to stagger southwestward toward the camp. What in
truth had happened to me? Had I merely collapsed in the desert and dragged a dreamracked body over miles of sand and buried blocks? If not, how could I bear to live any
longer?

The Shadow Out of Time
For, in this new doubt, all my faith in the myth-born unreality of my visions dissolved
once more into the hellish older doubting. If that abyss was real, then the Great Race was
real - and its blasphemous reachings and seizures in the cosmos-wide vortex of time were
no myths or nightmares, but a terrible, soul-shattering actuality.
Had I, in full, hideous fact, been drawn back to a pre-human world of a hundred and fifty
million years ago in those dark, baffling days of the amnesia? Had my present body been
the vehicle of a frightful alien consciousness from palaeogean gulfs of time?
Had I, as the captive mind of those shambling horrors, indeed known that accursed city of
stone in its primordial heyday, and wriggled down those familiar corridors in the
loathsome shape of my captor? Were those tormenting dreams of more than twenty years
the offspring of stark, monstrous memories?
Had I once veritably talked with minds from reachless corners of time and space, learned
the universe's secrets, past and to come, and written the annals of my own world for the
metal cases of those titan archives? And were those others - those shocking elder things
of the mad winds and daemon pipings - in truth a lingering, lurking menace, waiting and
slowly weakening in black abysses while varied shapes of life drag out their
multimillennial courses on the planet's age-racked surface?
I do not know. If that abyss and what I held were real, there is no hope. Then, all too
truly, there lies upon this world of man a mocking and incredible shadow out of time.
But, mercifully, there is no proof that these things are other than fresh phases of my
myth-born dreams. I did not bring back the metal case that would have been a proof, and
so far those subterrene corridors have not been found.
If the laws of the universe are kind, they will never be found. But I must tell my son what
I saw or thought I saw, and let him use his judgment as a psychologist in gauging the
reality of my experience, and communicating this account to others.
I have said that the awful truth behind my tortured years of dreaming hinges absolutely
upon the actuality of what I thought I saw in those Cyclopean, buried ruins. It has been
hard for me, literally, to set down that crucial revelation, though no reader can have failed
to guess it. Of course, it lay in that book within the metal case - the case which I pried out
of its lair amidst the dust of a million centuries.
No eye had seen, no hand had touched that book since the advent of man to this planet.
And yet, when I flashed my torch upon it in that frightful abyss, I saw that the queerly
pigmented letters on the brittle, aeon-browned cellulose pages were not indeed any
nameless hieroglyphs of earth's youth. They were, instead, the letters of our familiar
alphabet, spelling out the words of the English language in my own handwriting.
The Lovecraft Library wishes to extend its gratitude to Eulogio Garca Recalde for transcribing this text.
This text has been converted into PDF by Agha Yasir
www.ech-pi-el.com



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1f.lovecraft_-_The_Shadow_out_of_Time
The_Shadow_Out_Of_Time

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1f.lovecraft_-_The_Shadow_out_of_Time
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1f.lovecraft - The Shadow out of Time, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Philosophy
  object:1f.lovecraft - The Shadow Out Of Time
  author class:H P Lovecraft
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   Return to The Shadow Out Of Time

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Integral World - Problems With Wilber's Pre-Trans Fallacy, Joseph Dillard
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