H.P. Lovecraft ..........................................................................................................................................1

High up, crowning the grassy summit of a swelling mount whose sides are wooded near the base with the

gnarled trees of the primeval forest stands the old chateau of my ancestors. For centuries its lofty battlements

have frowned down upon the wild and rugged countryside about, serving as a home and stronghold for the

proud house whose honored line is older even than the mossgrown castle walls. These ancient turrets,

stained by the storms of generations and crumbling under the slow yet mighty pressure of time, formed in the

ages of feudalism one of the most dreaded and formidable fortresses in all France. From its machicolated

parapets and mounted battlements Barons, Counts, and even Kings had been defied, yet never had its

But since those glorious years, all is changed. A poverty but little above the level of dire want, together with a

pride of name that forbids its alleviation by the pursuits of commercial life, have prevented the scions of our

line from maintaining their estates in pristine splendour; and the falling stones of the walls, the overgrown

vegetation in the parks, the dry and dusty moat, the illpaved courtyards, and toppling towers without, as

well as the sagging floors, the wormeaten wainscots, and the faded tapestries within, all tell a gloomy tale of

fallen grandeur. As the ages passed, first one, then another of the four great turrets were left to ruin, until at

last but a single tower housed the sadly reduced descendants of the once mighty lords of the estate.

It was in one of the vast and gloomy chambers of this remaining tower that I, Antoine, last of the unhappy

and accursed Counts de C, first saw the light of day, ninety long years ago. Within these walls and amongst

the dark and shadowy forests, the wild ravines and grottos of the hillside below, were spent the first years of

my troubled life. My parents I never knew. My father had been killed at the age of thirtytwo, a month before

I was born, by the fall of a stone somehow dislodged from one of the deserted parapets of the castle. And my

mother having died at my birth, my care and education devolved solely upon one remaining servitor, an old

and trusted man of considerable intelligence, whose name I remember as Pierre. I was an only child and the

lack of companionship which this fact entailed upon me was augmented by the strange care exercised by my

aged guardian, in excluding me from the society of the peasant children whose abodes were scattered here

and there upon the plains that surround the base of the hill. At that time, Pierre said that this restriction was

imposed upon me because my noble birth placed me above association with such plebeian company. Now I

know tht its real object was to keep from my ears the idle tales of the dread curse upon our line that were

nightly told and magnified by the simple tenantry as they conversed in hushed accents in the glow of their

Thus isolated, and thrown upon my own resources, I spent the hours of my childhood in poring over the

ancient tomes that filled the shadowhaunted library of the chateau, and in roaming without aim or purpose

through the perpetual dust of the spectral wood that clothes the side of the hill near its foot. It was perhaps an

effect of such surroundings that my mind early acquired a shade of melancholy. Those studies and pursuits

which partake of the dark and occult in nature most strongly claimed my attention.

Of my own race I was permitted to learn singularly little, yet what small knowledge of it I was able to gain

seemed to depress me much. Perhaps it was at first only the manifest reluctance of my old preceptor to

discuss with me my paternal ancestry that gave rise to the terror which I ever felt at the mention of my great

house, yet as I grew out of childhood, I was able. to piece together disconnected fragments of discourse, let

slip from the unwilling tongue which had begun to falter in approaching senility, that had a sort of relation to

a certain circumstance which I had always deemed strange, but which now became dimly terrible. The

circumstance to which I allude is the early age at which all the Counts of my line had met their end. Whilst I

had hitherto considered this but a natural attribute of a family of shortlived men, I afterward pondered long

upon these premature deaths, and began to connect them with the wanderings of the old man, who often

spoke of a curse which for centuries had prevented the lives of the holders of my title from much exceeding

the span of thirtytwo years. Upon my twentyfirst birthday, the aged Pierre gave to me a family document

which he said had for many generations been handed down from father to son, and continued by each

possessor. Its contents were of the most startling nature, and its perusal confirmed the gravest of my

apprehensions. At this time, my belief in the supernatural was firm and deepseated, else I should have

The paper carried me back to the days of the thirteenth century, when the old castle in which I sat had been a

feared and impregnable fortress. It told of a certain ancient man who had once dwelled on our estates, a

person of no small accomplishments, though little above the rank of peasant, by name, Michel, usually

designated by the surname of Mauvais, the Evil, on account of his sinister reputation. He had studied beyond

the custom of his kind, seeking such things as the Philosopher's Stone or the Elixir of Eternal Life, and was

reputed wise in the terrible secrets of Black Magic and Alchemy. Michel Mauvais had one son, named

Charles, a youth as proficient as himself in the hidden arts, who had therefore been called Le Sorcier, or the

Wizard. This pair, shunned by all honest folk, were suspected of the most hideous practices. Old Michel was

said to have burnt his wife alive as a sacrifice to the Devil, and the unaccountable disappearance of many

small peasant children was laid at the dreaded door of these two. Yet through the dark natures of the father

and son ran one redeeming ray of humanity; the evil old man loved his offspring with fierce intensity, whilst

One night the castle on the hill was thrown into the wildest confusion by the vanishment of young Godfrey,

son to Henri, the Count. A searching party, headed by the frantic father, invaded the cottage of the sorcerers

and there came upon old Michel Mauvais, busy over a huge and violently boiling cauldron. Without certain

cause, in the ungoverned madness of fury and despair, the Count laid hands on the aged wizard, and ere he

released his murderous hold, his victim was no more. Meanwhile, joyful servants were proclaiming the

finding of young Godfrey in a distant and unused chamber of the great edifice, telling too late that poor

Michel had been killed in vain. As the Count and his associates turned away from the lowly abode of the

alchemist, the form of Charles Le Sorcier appeared through the trees. The excited chatter of the menials

standing about told him what had occurred, yet he seemed at first unmoved at his father's fate. Then, slowly

advancing to meet the Count, he pronounced in dull yet terrible accents the curse that ever afterward haunted

`May ne'er a noble of they murd'rous line Survive to reach a greater age than thine!'

spake he, when, suddenly leaping backwards into the black woods, he drew from his tunic a phial of

colourless liquid which he threw into the face of his father's slayer as he disappeared behind the inky curtain

of the night. The Count died without utterance, and was buried the next day, but little more than two and

thirty years from the hour of his birth. No trace of the assassin could be found, though relentless bands of

Thus time and the want of a reminder dulled the memory of the curse in the minds of the late Count's family,

so that when Godfrey, innocent cause of the whole tragedy and now bearing the title, was killed by an arrow

whilst hunting at the age of thirtytwo, there were no thoughts save those of grief at his demise. But when,

years afterward, the next young Count, Robert by name, was found dead in a nearby field of no apparent

cause, the peasants told in whispers that their seigneur had but lately passed his thirtysecond birthday when

surprised by early death. Louis, son to Robert, was found drowned in the moat at the same fateful age, and

thus down through the centuries ran the ominous chronicle: Henris, Roberts, Antoines, and Armands snatched

from happy and virtuous lives when little below the age of their unfortunate ancestor at his murder.

That I had left at most but eleven years of further existence was made certain to me by the words which I had

read. My life, previously held at small value, now became dearer to me each day, as I delved deeper and

deeper into the mysteries of the hidden world of black magic. Isolated as I was, modern science had produced

no impression upon me, and I laboured as in the Middle Ages, as wrapt as had been old Michel and young

Charles themselves in the acquisition of demonological and alchemical learning. Yet read as I might, in no

manner could I account for the strange curse upon my line. In unusually rational moments I would even go so

far as to seek a natural explanation, attributing the early deaths of my ancestors to the sinister Charles Le

Sorcier and his heirs; yet, having found upon careful inquiry that there were no known descendants of the

alchemist, I would fall back to occult studies, and once more endeavor to find a spell, that would release my

house from its terrible burden. Upon one thing I was absolutely resolved. I should never wed, for, since no

other branch of my family was in existence, I might thus end the curse with myself.

As I drew near the age of thirty, old Pierre was called to the land beyond. Alone I buried him beneath the

stones of the courtyard about which he had loved to wander in life. Thus was I left to ponder on myself as the

only human creature within the great fortress, and in my utter solitude my mind began to cease its vain

protest against the impending doom, to become almost reconciled to the fate which so many of my ancestors

had met. Much of my time was now occupied in the exploration of the ruined and abandoned halls and towers

of the old chateau, which in youth fear had caused me to shun, and some of which old Pierre had once told

me had not been trodden by human foot for over four centuries. Strange and awesome were many of the

objects I encountered. Furniture, covered by the dust of ages and crumbling with the rot of long dampness,

met my eyes. Cobwebs in a profusion never before seen by me were spun everywhere, and huge bats flapped

Of my exact age, even down to days and hours, I kept a most careful record, for each movement of the

pendulum of the massive clock in the library told off so much of my doomed existence. At length I

approached that time which I had so long viewed with apprehension. Since most of my ancestors had been

seized some little while before they reached the exact age of Count Henri at his end, I was every moment on

the watch for the coming of the unknown death. In what strange form the curse should overtake me, I knew

not; but I was resolved at least that it should not find me a cowardly or a passive victim. With new vigour I

It was upon one of the longest of all my excursions of discovery in the deserted portion of the castle, less than

a week before that fatal hour which I felt must mark the utmost limit of my stay on earth, beyond which I

could have not even the slightest hope of continuing to draw breath. that I came upon the culminating event

of my whole life. I had spent the better part of the morning in climbing up and down half ruined staircases in

one of the most dilapidated of the ancient turrets. As the afternoon progressed, I sought the lower levels,

descending into what appeared to be either a mediaeval place of confinement, or a more recently excavated

storehouse for gunpowder. As I slowly traversed the nitreencrusted passageway at the foot of the last

staircase, the paving became very damp, and soon I saw by the light of my flickering torch that a blank,

waterstained wall impeded my journey. Turning to retrace my steps, my eye fell upon a small trapdoor with

a ring, which lay directly beneath my foot. Pausing, I succeeded with difficulty in raising it, whereupon there

was revealed a black aperture, exhaling noxious fumes which caused my torch to sputter, and disclosing in

As soon as the torch which I lowered into the repellent depths burned freely and steadily, I commenced my

descent. The steps were many, and led to a narrow stoneflagged passage which I knew must be far

underground. This passage proved of great length, and terminated in a massive oaken door, dripping with the

moisture of the place, and stoutly resisting all my attempts to open it. Ceasing after a time my efforts in this

direction, I had proceeded back some distance toward the steps when there suddenly fell to my experience

one of the most profound and maddening shocks capable of reception by the human mind. Without warning, I

heard the heavy door behind me creak slowly open upon its rusted hinges. My immediate sensations were

incapable of analysis. To be confronted in a place as thoroughly deserted as I had deemed the old castle with

evidence of the presence of man or spirit produced in my brain a horror of the most acute description. When

at last I turned and faced the seat of the sound, my eyes must have started from their orbits at the sight that

There in the ancient Gothic doorway stood a human figure. It was that of a man clad in a skullcap and long

mediaeval tunic of dark colour. His long hair and flowing beard were of a terrible and intense black hue, and

of incredible profusion. His forehead, high beyond the usual dimensions; his cheeks, deepsunken and

heavily lined with wrinkles; and his hands, long, clawlike, and gnarled, were of such a deadly marblelike

whiteness as I have never elsewhere seen in man. His figure, lean to the proportions of a skeleton, was

strangely bent and almost lost within the voluminous folds of his peculiar garment. But strangest of all were

his eyes, twin caves of abysmal blackness, profound in expression of understanding, yet inhuman in degree of

wickedness. These were now fixed upon me, piercing my soul with their hatred, and rooting me to the spot

At last the figure spoke in a rumbling voice that chilled me through with its dull hollowness and latent

malevolence. The language in which the discourse was clothed was that debased form of Latin in use

amongst the more learned men of the Middle Ages, and made familiar to me by my prolonged researches into

the works of the old alchemists and demonologists. The apparition spoke of the curse which had hovered over

my house, told me of my coming end, dwelt on the wrong perpetrated by my ancestor against old Michel

Mauvais, and gloated over the revenge of Charles Le Sorcier. He told how young Charles has escaped into

the night, returning in after years to kill Godfrey the heir with an arrow just as he approached the age which

had been his father's at his assassination; how he had secretly returned to the estate and established himself,

unknown, in the even then deserted subterranean chamber whose doorway now framed the hideous narrator,

how he had seized Robert, son of Godfrey, in a field, forced poison down his throat, and left him to die at the

age of thirtytwo, thus maintaing the foul provisions of his vengeful curse. At this point I was left to imagine

the solution of the greatest mystery of all, how the curse had been fulfilled since that time when Charles Le

Sorcier must in the course of nature have died, for the man digressed into an account of the deep alchemical

studies of the two wizards, father and son, speaking most particularly of the researches of Charles Le Sorcier

concerning the elixir which should grant to him who partook of it eternal life and youth.

His enthusiasm had seemed for the moment to remove from his terrible eyes the black malevolence that had

first so haunted me, but suddenly the fiendish glare returned and, with a shocking sound like the hissing of a

serpent, the stranger raised a glass phial with the evident intent of ending my life as had Charles Le Sorcier,

six hundred years before, ended that of my ancestor. Prompted by some preserving instinct of selfdefense, I

broke through the spell that had hitherto held me immovable, and flung my now dying torch at the creature

who menaced my existence. I heard the phial break harmlessly against the stones of the passage as the tunic

of the strange man caught fire and lit the horrid scene with a ghastly radiance. The shriek of fright and

impotent malice emitted by the wouldbe assassin proved too much for my already shaken nerves, and I fell

When at last my senses returned, all was frightfully dark, and my mind, remembering what had occurred,

shrank from the idea of beholding any more; yet curiosity overmastered all. Who, I asked myself, was this

man of evil, and how came he within the castle walls? Why should he seek to avenge the death of Michel

Mauvais, and how bad the curse been carried on through all the long centuries since the time of Charles Le

Sorcier? The dread of years was lifted from my shoulder, for I knew that he whom I had felled was the source

of all my danger from the curse; and now that I was free, I burned with the desire to learn more of the sinister

thing which had haunted my line for centuries, and made of my own youth one longcontinued nightmare.

Determined upon further exploration, I felt in my pockets for flint and steel, and lit the unused torch which I

First of all, new light revealed the distorted and blackened form of the mysterious stranger. The hideous eyes

were now closed. Disliking the sight, I turned away and entered the chamber beyond the Gothic door. Here I

found what seemed much like an alchemist's laboratory. In one corner was an immense pile of shining yellow

metal that sparkled gorgeously in the light of the torch. It may have been gold, but I did not pause to examine

it, for I was strangely affected by that which I had undergone. At the farther end of the apartment was an

opening leading out into one of the many wild ravines of the dark hillside forest. Filled with wonder, yet now

realizing how the man had obtained access to the chauteau, I proceeded to return. I had intended to pass by

the remains of the stranger with averted face but, as I approached the body, I seemed to hear emanating from

it a faint sound,. as though life were not yet wholly extinct. Aghast, I turned to examine the charred and

Then all at once the horrible eyes, blacker even than the seared face in which they were set, opened wide with

an expression which I was unable to interpret. The cracked lips tried to frame words which I could not well

understand. Once I caught the name of Charles Le Sorcier, and again I fancied that the words `years' and

`curse' issued from the twisted mouth. Still I was at a loss to gather the purport of his disconnnected speech.

At my evident ignorance of his meaning, the pitchy eyes once more flashed malevolently at me, until,

Suddenly the wretch, animated with his last burst of strength, raised his piteous head from the damp and

sunken pavement. Then, as I remained, paralyzed with fear, he found his voice and in his dying breath

screamed forth those words which have ever afterward haunted my days and nights. `Fool!' he shrieked, `Can

you not guess my secret? Have you no brain whereby you may recognize the will which has through six long

centuries fulfilled the dreadful curse upon the house? Have I not told you of the great elixir of eternal life?

Know you not how the secret of Alchemy was solved? I tell you, it is I! I! I! that have lived for six hundred

The horrible conclusion which had been gradually obtruding itself upon my confused and reluctant mind was

now an awful certainty. I was lost, completely, hopelessly lost in the vast and labyrinthine recess of the

Mammoth Cave. Turn as I might, In no direction could my straining vision seize on any object capable of

serving as a guidepost to set me on the outward path. That nevermore should I behold the blessed light of

day, or scan the pleasant bills and dales of the beautiful world outside, my reason could no longer entertain

the slightest unbelief. Hope had departed. Yet, indoctrinated as I was by a life of philosophical study, I

derived no small measure of satisfaction from my unimpassioned demeanour; for although I had frequently

read of the wild frenzies into which were thrown the victims of similar situation, I experienced none of these,

Nor did the thought that I had probably wandered beyond the utmost limits of an ordinary search cause me to

abandon my composure even for a moment. If I must die, I reflected, then was this terrible yet majestic

cavern as welcome a sepulchre as that which any churchyard might afford, a conception which carried with it

Starving would prove my ultimate fate; of this I was certain. Some, I knew, had gone mad under

circumstances such as these, but I felt that this end would not be mine. My disaster was the result of no fault

save my own, since unknown to the guide I had separated myself from the regular party of sightseers; and,

wandering for over an hour in forbidden avenues of the cave, had found myself unable to retrace the devious

Already my torch had begun to expire; soon I would be enveloped by the total and almost palpable blackness

of the bowels of the earth. As I stood in the waning, unsteady light, I idly wondered over the exact

circumstances of my coming end. I remembered the accounts which I had heard of the colony of

consumptives, who, taking their residence in this gigantic grotto to find health from the apparently salubrious

air of the underground world, with its steady, uniform temperature, pure air, and peaceful quiet, had found,

instead, death in strange and ghastly form. I had seen the sad remains of their illmade cottages as I passed

them by with the party, and had wondered what unnatural influence a long sojourn in this immense and silent

cavern would exert upon one as healthy and vigorous as I. Now, I grimly told myself, my opportunity for

settling this point had arrived, provided that want of food should not bring me too speedy a departure from

As the last fitful rays of my torch faded into obscurity, I resolved to leave no stone unturned, no possible

means of escape neglected; so, summoning all the powers possessed by my lungs, I set up a series of loud

shoutings, in the vain hope of attracting the attention of the guide by my clamour. Yet, as I called, I believed

in my heart that my cries were to no purpose, and that my voice, magnified and reflected by the numberless

All at once, however, my attention was fixed with a start as I fancied that I heard the sound of soft

Was my deliverance about to be accomplished so soon? Had, then, all my horrible apprehensions been for

naught, and was the guide, having marked my unwarranted absence from the party, following my course and

seeking me out in this limestone labyrinth? Whilst these joyful queries arose in my brain, I was on the point

of renewing my cries, in order that my discovery might come the sooner, when in an instant my delight was

turned to horror as I listened; for my ever acute ear, now sharpened in even greater degree by the complete

silence of the cave, bore to my benumbed understanding the unexpected and dreadful knowledge that these

footfalls were not like those of any mortal man. In the unearthly stillness of this subterranean region, the tread

of the booted guide would have sounded like a series of sharp and incisive blows. These impacts were soft,

and stealthy, as of the paws of some feline. Besides, when I listened carefully, I seemed to trace the falls of

I was now convinced that I had by my own cries aroused and attracted some wild beast, perhaps a mountain

lion which had accidentally strayed within the cave. Perhaps, I considered, the Almighty had chosen for me a

swifter and more merciful death than that of hunger; yet the instinct of selfpreservation, never wholly

dormant, was stirred in my breast, and though escape from the oncoming peril might but spare me for a

sterner and more lingering end, I determined nevertheless to part with my life at as high a price as I could

command. Strange as it may seem, my mind conceived of no intent on the part of the visitor save that of

hostility. Accordingly, I became very quiet, In the hope that the unknown beast would, In the absence of a

guiding sound, lose its direction as had I, and thus pass me by. But this hope was not destined for realisation,

for the strange footfalls steadily advanced, the animal evidently having obtained my scent, which in an

atmosphere so absolutely free from all distracting influences as is that of the cave, could doubtless be

Seeing therefore that I must be armed for defense against an uncanny and unseen attack in the dark, I groped

about me the largest of the fragments of rock which were strewn upon all parts of the floor of the cavern In

the vicinity, and grasping one in each hand for immediate use, awaited with resignation the inevitable result.

Meanwhile the hideous pattering of the paws drew near. Certainly, the conduct of the creature was

exceedingly strange. Most of the time, the tread seemed to be that of a quadruped, walking with a singular

lack of unison betwixt hind and fore feet, yet at brief and infrequent intervals I fancied that but two feet were

engaged in the process of locomotion. I wondered what species of animal was to confront me; it must, I

thought, be some unfortunate beast who had paid for its curiosity to investigate one of the entrances of the

fearful grotto with a lifelong confinement in its interminable recesses. It doubtless obtained as food the

eyeless fish, bats and rats of the cave, as well as some of the ordinary fish that are wafted in at every freshet

of Green River, which communicates in some occult manner with the waters of the cave. I occupied my

terrible vigil with grotesque conjectures of what alteration cave life might have wrought In the physical

structure of the beast, remembering the awful appearances ascribed by local tradition to the consumptives

who had died after long residence in the cave. Then I remembered with a start that, even should I succeed in

felling my antagonist, I should never behold its form, as my torch had long since been extinct, and I was

entirely unprovided with matches. The tension on my brain now became frightful. My disordered fancy

conjured up hideous and fearsome shapes from the sinister darkness that surrounded me, and that actually

seemed to press upon my body. Nearer, nearer, the dreadful footfalls approached. It seemed that I must give

vent to a piercing scream, yet had I been sufficiently irresolute to attempt such a thing, my voice could scarce

have responded. I was petrified, rooted to the spot. I doubted if my right arm would allow me to hurl its

missile at the oncoming thing when the crucial moment should arrive. Now the steady pat, pat, of the steps

was close at hand; now very close. I could hear the laboured breathing of the animal, and terrorstruck as I

was, I realised that it must have come from a considerable distance, and was correspondingly fatigued.

Suddenly the spell broke. My right hand, guided by my ever trustworthy sense of hearing, threw with full

force the sharpangled bit of limestone which it contained, toward that point in the darkness from which

emanated the breathing and pattering, and, wonderful to relate, it nearly reached its goal, for I heard the thing

Having readjusted my aim, I discharged my second missile, this time moat effectively, for with a flood of joy

I listened as the creature fell in what sounded like a complete collapse and evidently remained prone and

unmoving. Almost overpowered by the great relief which rushed over me, I reeled back against the wall. The

breathing continued, in heavy, gasping inhalation. and expirations, whence I realised that I had no more than

wounded the creature. And now all desire to examine the thing ceased. At last something allied to groundless,

superstitious fear had entered my brain, and I did not approach the body, nor did I continue to cast stones at it

in order to complete the extinction of its life. Instead, I ran at full speed in what was, as nearly as I could

estimate in my frenzied condition, the direction from which I had come. Suddenly I heard a sound or rather, a

regular succession of sounds. In another Instant they had resolved themselves into a series of sharp, metallic

clicks. This time there was no doubt. It was the guide. And then I shouted, yelled, screamed, even shrieked

with joy as I beheld in the vaulted arches above the faint and glimmering effulgence which I knew to be the

reflected light of an approaching torch. I ran to meet the flare, and before I could completely understand what

had occurred, was lying upon the ground at the feet of the guide, embracing his boots and gibbering. despite

my boasted reserve, in a most meaningless and idiotic manner, pouring out my terrible story, and at the same

time overwhelming my auditor with protestations of gratitude. At length, I awoke to something like my

normal consciousness. The guide had noted my absence upon the arrival of the party at the entrance of the

cave, and had, from his own intuitive sense of direction, proceeded to make a thorough canvass of

bypassages just ahead of where he had last spoken to me, locating my whereabouts after a quest of about

By the time he had related this to me, I, emboldened by his torch and his company, began to reflect upon the

strange beast which I had wounded but a short distance back in the darkness, and suggested that we ascertain,

by the flashlight's aid, what manner of creature was my victim. Accordingly I retraced my steps, this time

with a courage born of companionship, to the scene of my terrible experience. Soon we descried a white

object upon the floor, an object whiter even than the gleaming limestone itself. Cautiously advancing, we

gave vent to a simultaneous ejaculation of wonderment, for of all the unnatural monsters either of us had in

our lifetimes beheld, this was in surpassing degree the strangest. It appeared to be an anthropoid ape of large

proportions, escaped, perhaps, from some itinerant menagerie. Its hair was snowwhite, a thing due no doubt

to the bleaching action of a long existence within the inky confines of the cave, but it was also surprisingly

thin, being indeed largely absent save on the head, where it was of such length and abundance that it fell over

the shoulders in considerable profusion. The face was turned away from us, as the creature lay almost directly

upon it. The inclination of the limbs was very singular, explaining, however, the alternation in their use

which I bad before noted, whereby the beast used sometimes all four, and on other occasions but two for its

progress. From the tips of the fingers or toes, long ratlike claws extended. The hands or feet were not

prehensile, a fact that I ascribed to that long residence in the cave which, as I before mentioned, seemed

evident from the allpervading and almost unearthly whiteness so characteristic of the whole anatomy. No

The respiration had now grown very feeble, and the guide had drawn his pistol with the evident intent of

despatching the creature, when a sudden sound emitted by the latter caused the weapon to fall unused. The

sound was of a nature difficult to describe. It was not like the normal note of any known species of simian,

and I wonder if this unnatural quality were not the result of a long continued and complete silence, broken by

the sensations produced by the advent of the light, a thing which the beast could not have seen since its first

entrance into the cave. The sound, which I might feebly attempt to classify as a kind of deeptone chattering,

All at once a fleeting spasm of energy seemed to pass through the frame of the beast. The paws went through

a convulsive motion, and the limbs contracted. With a jerk, the white body rolled over so that its face was

turned in our direction. For a moment I was so struck with horror at the eyes thus revealed that I noted

nothing else. They were black, those eyes, deep jetty black, in hideous contrast to the snowwhite hair and

flesh. Like those of other cave denizens, they were deeply sunken in their orbits, and were entirely destitute

of iris. As I looked more closely, I saw that they were set in a face less prognathous than that of the average

ape, and infinitely less hairy. The nose was quite distinct. As we gazed upon the uncanny sight presented to

our vision, the thick lips opened, and several sounds issued from them, after which the thing relaxed in death.

The guide clutched my coatsleeve and trembled so violently that the light shook fitfully, casting weird

I made no motion, but stood rigidly still, my horrified eyes fixed upon the floor ahead.

The fear left, and wonder, awe, compassion, and reverence succeeded in its place, for the sounds uttered by

the stricken figure that lay stretched out on the limestone had told us the awesome truth. The creature I had

killed, the strange beast of the unfathomed cave, was, or had at one time been a MAN!!!

In the valley of Nis the accursed waning moon shines thinly, tearing a path for its light with feeble horns

through the lethal foliage of a great upastree. And within the depths of the valley, where the light reaches

not, move forms not meant to be beheld. Rank is the herbage on each slope, where evil vines and creeping

plants crawl amidst the stones of ruined palaces, twining tightly about broken columns and strange monoliths,

and heaving up marble pavements laid by forgotten hands. And in trees that grow gigantic in crumbling

courtyards leap little apes, while in and out of deep treasurevaults writhe poison serpents and scaly things

without a name. Vast are the stones which sleep beneath coverlets of dank moss, and mighty were the walls

from which they fell. For all time did their builders erect them, and in sooth they yet serve nobly, for beneath

At the very bottom of the valley lies the river Than, whose waters are slimy and filled with weeds. From

hidden springs it rises, and to subterranean grottoes it flows, so that the Daemon of the Valley knows not why

The Genie that haunts the moonbeams spake to the Daemon of the Valley, saying, "I am old, and forget

much. Tell me the deeds and aspect and name of them who built these things of Stone." And the Daemon

replied, "I am Memory, and am wise in lore of the past, but I too am old. These beings were like the waters of

the river Than, not to be understood. Their deeds I recall not, for they were but of the moment. Their aspect I

recall dimly, it was like to that of the little apes in the trees. Their name I recall clearly, for it rhymed with

So the Genie flew back to the thin horned moon, and the Daemon looked intently at a little ape in a tree that

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven

mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter

down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and

the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands.

But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and

justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for

there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness and ignorance combine to form the perfection of

Most horrible of all sights are the little unpainted wooden houses remote from travelled ways, usually

squatted upon some damp grassy slope or leaning against some gigantic outcropping of rock. Two hundred

years and more they have leaned or squatted there, while the vines have crawled and the trees have swelled

and spread. They are almost hidden now in lawless luxuriances of green and guardian shrouds of shadow; but

the smallpaned windows still stare shockingly, as if blinking through a lethal stupor which wards off

In such houses have dwelt generations of strange people, whose like the world has never seen. Seized with a

gloomy and fanatical belief which exiled them from their kind, their ancestors sought the wilderness for

freedom. There the scions of a conquering race indeed flourished free from the restrictions of their fellows,

but cowered in an appalling slavery to the dismal phantasms of their own minds. Divorced from the

enlightenment of civilization, the strength of these Puritans turned into singular channels; and in their

isolation, morbid selfrepression, and struggle for life with relentless Nature, there came to them dark furtive

traits from the prehistoric depths of their cold Northern heritage. By necessity practical and by philosophy

stern, these folks were not beautiful in their sins. Erring as all mortals must, they were forced by their rigid

code to seek concealment above all else; so that they came to use less and less taste in what they concealed.

Only the silent, sleepy, staring houses in the backwoods can tell all that has lain hidden since the early days,

and they are not communicative, being loath to shake off the drowsiness which helps them forget. Sometimes

one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream.

It was to a timebattered edifice of this description that I was driven one afternoon in November, 1896, by a

rain of such chilling copiousness that any shelter was preferable to exposure. I had been travelling for some

time amongst the people of the Miskatonic Valley in quest of certain genealogical data; and from the remote,

devious, and problematical nature of my course, had deemed it convenient to employ a bicycle despite the

lateness of the season. Now I found myself upon an apparently abandoned road which I had chosen as the

shortest cut to Arkham, overtaken by the storm at a point far from any town, and confronted with no refuge

save the antique and repellent wooden building which blinked with bleared windows from between two huge

leafless elms near the foot of a rocky hill. Distant though it is from the remnant of a road, this house none the

less impressed me unfavorably the very moment I espied it. Honest, wholesome structures do not stare at

travellers so slyly and hauntingly, and in my genealogical researches I had encountered legends of a century

before which biased me against places of this kind. Yet the force of the elements was such as to overcome my

scruples, and I did not hesitate to wheel my machine up the weedy rise to the closed door which seemed at

I had somehow taken it for granted that the house was abandoned, yet as I approached it I was not so sure, for

though the walks were indeed overgrown with weeds, they seemed to retain their nature a little tco well to

argue complete desertion. Therefore instead of trying the dcor I knocked, feeling as I did so a trepidation I

could scarcely explain. As I waited on the rough, mossy rock which served as a dcorstep, I glanced at the

neighboring windows and the panes of the transom above me, and noticed that although old, rattling, and

almost opaque with dirt, they were not broken. The building, then, must still be inhabited, despite its isolation

and general neglect. However, my rapping evoked no response, so after repeating the summons I tried the

rusty latch and found the door unfastened. Inside was a little vestibule with walls from which the plaster was

falling, and through the doorway came a faint but peculiarly hateful odor. I entered, carrying my bicycle, and

closed the door behind me. Ahead rose a narrow staircase, flanked by a small door probably leading to the

cellar, while to the left and right were closed doors leading to rooms on the ground floor.

Leaning my cycle against the wall I opened the door at the left, and crossed into a small lowceiled chamber

but dimly lighted by its two dusty windows and furnished in the barest and most primitive possible way. It

appeared to be a kind of sittingroom, for it had a table and several chairs, and an immense fireplace above

which ticked an antique clock on a mantel. Books and papers were very few, and in the prevailing gloom I

could not readily discern the titles. What interested me was the uniform air of archaism as displayed in every

visible detail. Most of the houses in this region I had found rich in relics of the past, but here the antiquity

was curiously complete; for in all the room I could not discover a single article of definitely

postrevolutionary date. Had the furnishings been less humble, the place would have been a collector's

As I surveyed this quaint apartment, I felt an increase in that aversion first excited by the bleak exterior of the

house. Just what it was that I feared or loathed, I could by no means define; but something in the whole

atmosphere seemed redolent of unhallowed age, of unpleasant crudeness, and of secrets which should be

forgotten. I felt disinclined to sit down, and wandered about examining the various articles which I had

noticed. The first object of my curiosity was a book of medium size lying upon the table and presenting such

an antediluvian aspect that I marvelled at beholding it outside a museum or library. It was bound in leather

with metal fittings, and was in an excellent state of preservation; being altogether an unusual sort of volume

to encounter in an abode so lowly. When I opened it to the title page my wonder grew even greater, for it

proved to be nothing less rare than Pigafetta's account of the Congo region, written in Latin from the notes of

the sailor Lopex and printed at Frankfurt in 1598. I had often heard of this work, with its curious illustrations

by the brothers De Bry, hence for a moment forgot my uneasiness in my desire to turn the pages before me.

The engravings were indeed interesting, drawn wholly from imagination and careless descriptions, and

represented negroes with white skins and Caucasian features; nor would I soon have closed the book had not

an exceedingly trivial circumstance upset my tired nerves and revived my sensation of disquiet. What

annoyed me was merely the persistent way in which the volume tended to fall open of itself at Plate XII,

which represented in gruesome detail a butcher's shop of the cannibal Anziques. I experienced some shame at

my susceptibility to so slight a thing, but the drawing nevertheless disturbed me, especially in connection

I had turned to a neighboring shelf and was examining its meagre literary contents an eighteenth century

Bible, a "Pilgrim's Progress" of like period, illustrated with grotesque woodcuts and printed by the

almanackmaker Isaiah Thomas, the rotting bulk of Cotton Mather's "Magnalia Christi Americana," and a

few other books of evidently equal age when my attention was aroused by the unmistakable sound of

walking in the room overhead. At first astonished and startled, considering the lack of response to my recent

knocking at the door, I immediately afterward concluded that the walker had just awakened from a sound

sleep, and listened with less surprise as the footsteps sounded on the creaking stairs. The tread was heavy, yet

seemed to contain a curious quality of cautiousness; a quality which I disliked the more because the tread was

heavy. When I had entered the room I had shut the door behind me. Now, after a moment of silence during

which the walker may have been inspecting my bicycle in the hall, I heard a fumbling at the latch and saw the

In the doorway stood a person of such singular appearance that I should have exclaimed aloud but for the

restraints of good breeding. Old, whitebearded, and ragged, my host possessed a countenance and physique

which inspired equal wonder and respect. His height could not have been less than six feet, and despite a

general air of age and poverty he was stout and powerful in proportion. His face, almost hidden by a long

beard which grew high on the cheeks, seemed abnormally ruddy and less wrinkled than one might expect;

while over a high forehead fell a shock of white hair little thinned by the years. His blue eyes, though a trifle

bloodshot, seemed inexplicably keen and burning. But for his horrible unkemptness the man would have been

as distinguishedlooking as he was impressive. This unkemptness, however, made him offensive despite his

face and figure. Of what his clothing consisted I could hardly tell, for it seemed to me no more than a mass of

tatters surmounting a pair of high, heavy boots; and his lack of cleanliness surpassed description.

The appearance of this man, and the instinctive fear he inspired, prepared me for something like enmity; so

that I almost shuddered through surprise and a sense of uncanny incongruity when he motioned me to a chair

and addressed me in a thin, weak voice full of fawning respect and ingratiating hospitality. His speech was

very curious, an extreme form of Yankee dialect I had thought long extinct; and I studied it closely as he sat

"Ketched in the rain, be ye?" he greeted. "Glad ye was nigh the haouse en' hed the sense ta come right in. I

calc'late I was alseep, else I'd a heerd yeI ain't as young as I uster be, an' I need a paowerful sight o' naps

naowadays. Trav'lin fur? I hain't seed many folks 'long this rud sence they tuk off the Arkham stage."

I replied that I was going to Arkham, and apologized for my rude entry into his domicile, whereupon he

"Glad ta see ye, young Sir new faces is scurce arount here, an' I hain't got much ta cheer me up these days.

Guess yew hail from Bosting, don't ye? I never ben thar, but I kin tell a taown man when I see 'im we hed

one fer deestrick schoolmaster in 'eightyfour, but he quit suddent an' no one never heerd on 'im sence "

here the old man lapsed into a kind of chuckle, and made no explanation when I questioned him. He seemed

to be in an aboundingly good humor, yet to possess those eccentricities which one might guess from his

grooming. For some time he rambled on with an almost feverish geniality, when it struck me to ask him how

he came by so rare a book as Pigafetta's "Regnum Congo." The effect of this volume had not left me, and I

felt a certain hesitancy in speaking of it, but curiosity overmastered all the vague fears which had steadily

accumulated since my first glimpse of the house. To my relief, the question did not seem an awkward one, for

"Oh, that Afriky book? Cap'n Ebenezer Holt traded me thet in 'sixtyeight him as was kilt in the war."

Something about the name of Ebenezer Holt caused me to look up sharply. I had encountered it in my

genealogical work, but not in any record since the Revolution. I wondered if my host could help me in the

task at which I was laboring, and resolved to ask him about it later on. He continued.

"Ebenezer was on a Salem merchantman for years, an' picked up a sight o' queer stuff in every port. He got

this in London, I guess he uster like ter buy things at the shops. I was up ta his haouse onct, on the hill,

tradin' hosses, when I see this book. I relished the picters, so he give it in on a swap. 'Tis a queer book here,

leave me git on my spectacles" The old man fumbled among his rags, producing a pair of dirty and

amazingly antique glasses with small octagonal lenses and steel bows. Donning these, he reached for the

"Ebenezer cud read a leetle o' this'tis Latin but I can't. I had two er three schoolmasters read me a bit, and

Passon Clark, him they say got draownded in the pond kin yew make anything outen it?" I told him that I

could, and translated for his benefit a paragraph near the beginning. If I erred, he was not scholar enough to

correct me; for he seemed childishly pleased at my English version. His proximity was becoming rather

obnoxious, yet I saw no way to escape without offending him. I was amused at the childish fondness of this

ignorant old man for the pictures in a book he could not read, and wondered how much better he could read

the few books in English which adorned the room. This revelation of simplicity removed much of the

"Queer haow picters kin set a body thinkin'. Take this un here near the front. Hey yew ever seed trees like

thet, with big leaves a floppin' over an' daown? And them men them can't be niggers they dew beat all.

Kinder like Injuns, I guess, even ef they be in Afriky. Some o' these here critters looks like monkeys, or half

monkeys an' half men, but I never heerd o' nothin' like this un." Here he pointed to a fabulous creature of the

artist, which one might describe as a sort of dragon with the head of an alligator.

"But naow I'll show ye the best un over here nigh the middle "The old man's speech grew a trifle thicker

and his eyes assumed a brighter glow; but his fumbling hands, though seemingly clumsier than before, were

entirely adequate to their mission. The book fell open, almost of its own accord and as if from frequent

consultation at this place, to the repellent twelfth plate showing a butcher's shop amongst the Anzique

cannibals. My sense of restlessness returned, though I did not exhibit it. The especially bizarre thing was that

the artist had made his Africans look like white men the limbs and quarters hanging about the walls of the

shop were ghastly, while the butcher with his axe was hideously incongruous. But my host seemed to relish

"What d'ye think o' this ain't never see the like hereabouts, eh? When I see this I telled Eb Holt, 'That's

suthin' ta stir ye up an' make yer blood tickle.' When I read in Scripter about slayin' like them Midianites

was slew I kinder think things, but I ain't got no picter of it. Here a body kin see all they is to it I s'pose

'tis sinful, but ain't we all born an' livin' in sin? Thet feller bein' chopped up gives me a tickle every time I

look at 'im I hey ta keep lookin' at 'im see whar the butcher cut off his feet? Thar's his head on thet bench,

with one arm side of it, an' t'other arm's on the other side o' the meat block."

As the man mumbled on in his shocking ecstasy the expression on his hairy, spectacled face became

indescribable, but his voice sank rather than mounted. My own sensations can scarcely be recorded. All the

terror I had dimly felt before rushed upon me actively and vividly, and I knew that I loathed the ancient and

abhorrent creature so near me with an infinite intensity. His madness, or at least his partial perversion,

seemed beyond dispute. He was almost whispering now, with a huskiness more terrible than a scream, and I

"As I says, 'tis queer haow picters sets ye thinkin'. D'ye know, young Sir, I'm right sot on this un here. Arter I

got the book off Eb I uster look at it a lot, especial when I'd heerd Passon Clark rant o' Sundays in his big

wig. Onct I tried suthin' funny here, young Sir, don't git skeert all I done was ter look at the picter afore I

kilt the sheep for market killin' sheep was kinder more fun arter lookin' at it " The tone of the old man

now sank very low, sometimes becoming so faint that his words were hardly audible. I listened to the rain,

and to the rattling of the bleared, smallpaned windows, and marked a rumbling of approaching thunder quite

unusual for the season. Once a terrific flash and peal shook the frail house to its foundations, but the

"Killin' sheep was kinder more fun but d'ye know, 'twan't quite satisfyin'. Queer haow a cravin' gits a holt

on ye As ye love the Almighty, young man, don't tell nobody, but I swar ter Gawd thet picter begun to

make me hungry fer victuals I couldn't raise nor buy here, set still, what's ailin' ye? I didn't do nothin',

only I wondered haow 'twud be ef I did They say meat makes blood an' flesh, an' gives ye new life, so I

wondered ef 'twudn't make a man live longer an' longer ef 'twas more the same " But the whisperer never

continued. The interruption was not produced by my fright, nor by the rapidly increasing storm amidst whose

fury I was presently to open my eyes on a smoky solitude of blackened ruins. It was produced by a very

The open book lay flat between us, with the picture staring repulsively upward. As the old man whispered the

words "more the same" a tiny splattering impact was heard, and something showed on the yellowed paper of

the upturned volume. I thought of the rain and of a leaky roof, but rain is not red. On the butcher's shop of the

Anzique cannibals a small red spattering glistened picturesquely, lending vividness to the horror of the

engraving. The old man saw it, and stopped whispering even before my expression of horror made it

necessary; saw it and glanced quickly toward the floor of the room he had left an hour before. I followed his

glance, and beheld just above us on the loose plaster of the ancient ceiling a large irregular spot of wet

crimson which seemed to spread even as I viewed it. I did not shriek or move, but merely shut my eyes. A

moment later came the titanic thunderbolt of thunderbolts; blasting that accursed house of unutterable secrets

I have often wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the occasionally titanic

significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which they belong. Whilst the greater number of our

nocturnal visions are perhaps no more than faint and fantastic reflections of our waking experiences Freud

to the contrary with his puerile symbolism there are still a certain remainder whose immundane and

ethereal character permit of no ordinary interpretation, and whose vaguely exciting and disquieting effect

suggests possible minute glimpses into a sphere of mental existence no less important than physical life, yet

separated from that life by an all but impassable barrier. From my experience I cannot doubt but that man,

when lost to terrestrial consciousness, is indeed sojourning in another and uncorporeal life of far different

nature from the life we know, and of which only the slightest and most indistinct memories linger after

waking. From those blurred and fragmentary memories we may infer much, yet prove little. We may guess

that in dreams life, matter, and vitality, as the earth knows such things, are not necessarily constant; and that

time and space do not exist as our waking selves comprehend them. Sometimes I believe that this less

material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or

It was from a youthful revery filled with speculations of this sort that I arose one afternoon in the winter of

190001, when to the state psychopathic institution in which I served as an intern was brought the man

whose case has ever since haunted me so unceasingly. His name, as given on the records, was Joe Slater, or

Slaader, and his appearance was that of the typical denizen of the Catskill Mountain region; one of those

strange, repellent scions of a primitive Colonial peasant stock whose isolation for nearly three centuries in the

hilly fastnesses of a littletraveled countryside has caused them to sink to a kind of barbaric degeneracy,

rather than advance with their more fortunately placed brethren of the thickly settled districts. Among these

odd folk, who correspond exactly to the decadent element of "white trash" in the South, law and morals are

nonexistent; and their general mental status is probably below that of any other section of native American

Joe Slater, who came to the institution in the vigilant custody of four state policemen, and who was described

as a highly dangerous character, certainly presented no evidence of his perilous disposition when I first

beheld him. Though well above the middle stature, and of somewhat brawny frame, he was given an absurd

appearance of harmless stupidity by the pale, sleepy blueness of his small watery eyes, the scantiness of his

neglected and nevershaven growth of yellow beard, and the listless drooping of his heavy nether lip. His age

was unknown, since among his kind neither family records nor permanent family ties exist; but from the

baldness of his head in front, and from the decayed condition of his teeth, the head surgeon wrote him down

From the medical and court documents we learned all that could be gathered of his case: this man, a

vagabond, hunter and trapper, had always been strange in the eyes of his primitive associates. He had

habitually slept at night beyond the ordinary time, and upon waking would often talk of unknown things in a

manner so bizarre as to inspire fear even in the hearts of an unimaginative populace. Not that his form of

language was at all unusual, for he never spoke save in the debased patois of his environment; but the tone

and tenor of his utterances were of such mysterious wildness, that none might listen without apprehension.

He himself was generally as terrified and baffled as his auditors, and within an hour after awakening would

forget all that he had said, or at least all that had caused him to say what he did; relapsing into a bovine,

As Slater grew older, it appeared, his matutinal aberrations had gradually increased in frequency and

violence; till about a month before his arrival at the institution had occurred the shocking tragedy which

caused his arrest by the authorities. One day near noon, after a profound sleep begun in a whiskey debauch at

about five of the previous afternoon, the man had roused himself most suddenly, with ululations so horrible

and unearthly that they brought several neighbors to his cabin a filthy sty where he dwelt with a family as

indescribable as himself. Rushing out into the snow, he had flung his arms aloft and commenced a series of

leaps directly upward in the air; the while shouting his determination to reach some "big, big cabin with

brightness in the roof and walls and floor and the loud queer music far away." As two men of moderate size

sought to restrain him, he had struggled with maniacal force and fury, screaming of his desire and need to

find and kill a certain "thing that shines and shakes and laughs." At length, after temporarily felling one of his

detainers with a sudden blow, he had flung himself upon the other in a demoniac ecstasy of bloodthirstiness,

shrieking fiendishly that he would "jump high in the air and burn his way through anything that stopped him."

Family and neighbors had now fled in a panic, and when the more courageous of them returned, Slater was

gone, leaving behind an unrecognizable pulplike thing that had been a living man but an hour before. None

of the mountaineers had dared to pursue him, and it is likely that they would have welcomed his death from

the cold; but when several mornings later they heard his screams from a distant ravine they realized that he

had somehow managed to survive, and that his removal in one way or another would be necessary. Then had

followed an armed searchingparty, whose purpose (whatever it may have been originally) became that of a

sheriff's posse after one of the seldom popular state troopers had by accident observed, then questioned, and

On the third day Slater was found unconscious in the hollow of a tree, and taken to the nearest jail, where

alienists from Albany examined him as soon as his senses returned. To them he told a simple story. He had,

he said, gone to sleep one afternoon about sundown after drinking much liquor. He had awakened to find

himself standing bloodyhanded in the snow before his cabin, the mangled corpse of his neighbor Peter

Slader at his feet. Horrified, he had taken to the woods in a vague effort to escape from the scene of what

must have been his crime. Beyond these things he seemed to know nothing, nor could the expert questioning

That night Slater slept quietly, and the next morning he awakened with no singular feature save a certain

alteration of expression. Doctor Barnard, who had been watching the patient, thought he noticed in the pale

blue eyes a certain gleam of peculiar quality, and in the flaccid lips an all but imperceptible tightening, as if

of intelligent determination. But when questioned, Slater relapsed into the habitual vacancy of the

On the third morning occurred the first of the man's mental attacks. After some show of uneasiness in sleep,

he burst forth into a frenzy so powerful that the combined efforts of four men were needed to bind him in a

straightjacket. The alienists listened with keen attention to his words, since their curiosity had been aroused to

a high pitch by the suggestive yet mostly conflicting and incoherent stories of his family and neighbors.

Slater raved for upward of fifteen minutes, babbling in his backwoods dialect of green edifices of light,

oceans of space, strange music, and shadowy mountains and valleys. But most of all did he dwell upon some

mysterious blazing entity that shook and laughed and mocked at him. This vast, vague personality seemed to

have done him a terrible wrong, and to kill it in triumphant revenge was his paramount desire. In order to

reach it, he said, he would soar through abysses of emptiness, burning every obstacle that stood in his way.

Thus ran his discourse, until with the greatest suddenness he ceased. The fire of madness died from his eyes,

and in dull wonder he looked at his questioners and asked why he was bound. Dr. Barnard unbuckled the

leather harness and did not restore it till night, when he succeeded in persuading Slater to don it of his own

volition, for his own good. The man had now admitted that he sometimes talked queerly, though he knew not

Within a week two more attacks appeared, but from them the doctors learned little. On the source of Slater's

visions they speculated at length, for since he could neither read nor write, and had apparently never heard a

legend or fairytale, his gorgeous imagery was quite inexplicable. That it could not come from any known

myth or romance was made especially clear by the fact that the unfortunate lunatic expressed himself only in

his own simple manner. He raved of things he did not understand and could not interpret; things which he

claimed to have experienced, but which he could not have learned through any normal or connected

narration. The alienists soon agreed that abnormal dreams were the foundation of the trouble; dreams whose

vividness could for a time completely dominate the waking mind of this basically inferior man. With due

formality Slater was tried for murder, acquitted on the ground of insanity, and committed to the institution

I have said that I am a constant speculator concerning dreamlife, and from this you may judge of the

eagerness with which I applied myself to the study of the new patient as soon as I had fully ascertained the

facts of his case. He seemed to sense a certain friendliness in me, born no doubt of the interest I could not

conceal, and the gentle manner in which I questioned him. Not that he ever recognized me during his attacks,

when I hung breathlessly upon his chaotic but cosmic wordpictures; but he knew me in his quiet hours,

when he would sit by his barred window weaving baskets of straw and willow, and perhaps pining for the

mountain freedom he could never again enjoy. His family never called to see him; probably it had found

By degrees I commenced to feel an overwhelming wonder at the mad and fantastic conceptions of Joe Slater.

The man himself was pitiably inferior in mentality and language alike; but his glowing, titanic visions,

though described in a barbarous disjointed jargon, were assuredly things which only a superior or even

exceptional brain could conceive How, I often asked myself, could the stolid imagination of a Catskill

degenerate conjure up sights whose very possession argued a lurking spark of genius? How could any

backwoods dullard have gained so much as an idea of those glittering realms of supernal radiance and space

about which Slater ranted in his furious delirium? More and more I inclined to the belief that in the pitiful

personality who cringed before me lay the disordered nucleus of something beyond my comprehension;

something infinitely beyond the comprehension of my more experienced but less imaginative medical and

And yet I could extract nothing definite from the man. The sum of all my investigation was, that in a kind of

semicorporeal dreamlife Slater wandered or floated through resplendent and prodigious valleys, meadows,

gardens, cities, and palaces of light, in a region unbounded and unknown to man; that there he was no peasant

or degenerate, but a creature of importance and vivid life, moving proudly and dominantly, and checked only

by a certain deadly enemy, who seemed to be a being of visible yet ethereal structure, and who did not appear

to be of human shape, since Slater never referred to it as a man, or as aught save a thing. This thing had done

Slater some hideous but unnamed wrong, which the maniac (if maniac he were) yearned to avenge.

From the manner in which Slater alluded to their dealings, I judged that he and the luminous thing had met on

equal terms; that in his dream existence the man was himself a luminous thing of the same race as his enemy.

This impression was sustained by his frequent references to flying through space and burning all that

impeded his progress. Yet these conceptions were formulated in rustic words wholly inadequate to convey

them, a circumstance which drove me to the conclusion that if a dream world indeed existed, oral language

was not its medium for the transmission of thought. Could it be that the dream soul inhabiting this inferior

body was desperately struggling to speak things which the simple and halting tongue of dullness could not

utter? Could it be that I was face to face with intellectual emanations which would explain the mystery if I

could but learn to discover and read them? I did not tell the older physicians of these things, for middle age is

skeptical, cynical, and disinclined to accept new ideas. Besides, the head of the institution had but lately

warned me in his paternal way that I was overworking; that my mind needed a rest.

It had long been my belief that human thought consists basically of atomic or molecular motion, convertible

into ether waves or radi ant energy like heat, light and electricity. This belief had early led me to contemplate

the possibility of telepathy or mental communication by means of suitable apparatus, and I had in my college

days prepared a set of transmitting and receiving instruments somewhat similar to the cumbrous devices

employed in wireless telegraphy at that crude, preradio period. These I had tested with a fellowstudent, but

achieving no result, had soon packed them away with other scientific odds and ends for possible future use.

Now, in my intense desire to probe into the dreamlife of Joe Slater, I sought these instruments again, and

spent several days in repairing them for action. When they were complete once more I missed no opportunity

for their trial. At each outburst of Slater's violence, I would fit the transmitter to his forehead and the receiver

to my own, constantly making delicate adjustments for various hypothetical wavelengths of intellectual

energy. I had but little notion of how the thoughtimpressions would, if successfully conveyed, arouse an

intelligent response in my brain, but I felt certain that I could detect and interpret them. Accordingly I

It was on the twentyfirst of February, 1901, that the thing occurred. As I look back across the years I realize

how unreal it seems, and sometimes wonder if old Doctor Fenton was not right when he charged it all to my

excited imagination. I recall that he listened with great kindness and patience when I told him, but afterward

gave me a nervepowder and arranged for the halfyear's vacation on which I departed the next week.

That fateful night I was wildly agitated and perturbed, for despite the excellent care he had received, Joe

Slater was unmistakably dying. Perhaps it was his mountain freedom that he missed, or perhaps the turmoil in

his brain had grown too acute for his rather sluggish physique; but at all events the flame of vitality flickered

low in the decadent body. He was drowsy near the end, and as darkness fell he dropped off into a troubled

I did not strap on the straightjacket as was customary when he slept, since I saw that he was too feeble to be

dangerous, even if he woke in mental disorder once more before passing away. But I did place upon his head

and mine the two ends of my cosmic "radio," hoping against hope for a first and last message from the dream

world in the brief time remaining. In the cell with us was one nurse, a mediocre fellow who did not

understand the purpose of the apparatus, or think to inquire into my course. As the hours wore on I saw his

head droop awkwardly in sleep, but I did not disturb him. I myself, lulled by the rhythmical breathing of the

The sound of weird lyric melody was what aroused me. Chords, vibrations, and harmonic ecstasies echoed

passionately on every hand, while on my ravished sight burst the stupendous spectacle ultimate beauty.

Walls, columns, and architraves of living fire blazed effulgently around the spot where I seemed to float in

air, extending upward to an infinitely high vaulted dome of indescribable splendor. Blending with this display

of palatial magnificence, or rather, supplanting it at times in kaleidoscopic rotation, were glimpses of wide

plains and graceful valleys, high mountains and inviting grottoes, covered with every lovely attribute of

scenery which my delighted eyes could conceive of, yet formed wholly of some glowing, ethereal plastic

entity, which in consistency partook as much of spirit as of matter. As I gazed, I perceived that my own brain

held the key to these enchanting metamorphoses; for each vista which appeared to me was the one my

changing mind most wished to behold. Amidst this elysian realm I dwelt not as a stranger, for each sight and

sound was familiar to me; just as it had been for uncounted eons of eternity before, and would be for like

Then the resplendent aura of my brother of light drew near and held colloquy with me, soul to soul, with

silent and perfect interchange of thought. The hour was one of approaching triumph, for was not my

fellowbeing escaping at last from a degrading periodic bondage; escaping forever, and preparing to follow

the accursed oppressor even unto the uttermost fields of ether, that upon it might be wrought a flaming

cosmic vengeance which would shake the spheres? We floated thus for a little time, when I perceived a slight

blurring and fading of the objects around us, as though some force were recalling me to earth where I least

wished to go. The form near me seemed to feel a change also, for it gradually brought its discourse toward a

conclusion, and itself prepared to quit the scene, fading from my sight at a rate somewhat less rapid than that

of the other objects. A few more thoughts were exchanged, and I knew that the luminous one and I were

being recalled to bondage, though for my brother of light it would be the last time. The sorry planet shell

being wellnigh spent, in less than an hour my fellow would be free to pursue the oppressor along the Milky

A welldefined shock separates my final impression of the fading scene of light from my sudden and

somewhat shamefaced awakening and straightening up in my chair as I saw the dying figure on the couch

move hesitantly. Joe Slater was indeed awaking, though probably for the last time. As I looked more closely,

I saw that in the sallow cheeks shone spots of color which had never before been present. The lips, too,

seemed unusual, being tightly compressed, as if by the force of a stronger character than had been Slater's.

The whole face finally began to grow tense, and the head turned restlessly with closed eyes.

I did not rouse the sleeping nurse, but readjusted the slightly disarranged headband of my telepathic "radio,"

intent to catch any parting message the dreamer might have to deliver. All at once the head turned sharply in

my direction and the eyes fell open, causing me to stare in blank amazement at what I beheld. The man who

had been Joe Slater, the Catskill decadent, was gazing at me with a pair of luminous, expanding eyes whose

blue seemed subtly to have deepened. Neither mania nor degeneracy was `visible in that gaze, and I felt

beyond a doubt that I was viewing a face behind which lay an active mind of high order.

At this juncture my brain became aware of a steady external influence operating upon it. I closed my eyes to

concentrate my thoughts more profoundly and was rewarded by the positive knowledge that my longsought

mental message had come at last. Each transmitted idea formed rapidly in my mind, and though no actual

language was employed, my habitual association of conception and expression was so great that I seemed to

"Joe Slater is dead," came the soulpetrifying voice of an agency from beyond the wall of sleep. My opened

eyes sought the couch of pain in curious horror, but the blue eyes were still calmly gazing, and the

countenance was still intelligently animated. "He is better dead, for he was unfit to bear the active intellect of

cosmic entity. His gross body could not undergo the needed adjustments between ethereal life and planet life.

He was too much an animal, too little a man; yet it is through his deficiency that you have come to discover

me, for the cosmic and planet souls rightly should never meet. He has been in my torment and diurnal prison

"I am an entity like that which you yourself become in the freedom of dreamless sleep. I am your brother of

light, and have floated with you in the effulgent valleys. It is not permitted me to tell your waking earthself

of your real self, but we are all roamers of vast spaces and travelers in many ages. Next year I may be

dwelling in the Egypt which you call ancient, or in the cruel empire of Tsan Chan which is to come three

thousand years hence. You and I have drifted to the worlds that reel about the red Arcturus, and dwelt in the

bodies of the insectphilosophers that crawl proudly over the fourth moon of Jupiter. How little does the

earth self know life and its extent! How little, indeed, ought it to know for its own tranquility!

"Of the oppressor I cannot speak. You on earth have unwittingly felt its distant presence you who without

knowing idly gave the blinking beacon the name of Algol, the DemonStar It is to meet and conquer the

oppressor that I have vainly striven for eons, held back by bodily encumbrances. Tonight I go as a Nemesis

bearing just and blazingly cataclysmic vengeance. Watch me in the sky close by the DemonStar.

"I cannot speak longer, for the body of Joe Slater grows cold and rigid, and the coarse brains are ceasing to

vibrate as I wish. You have been my only friend on this planet the only soul to sense and seek for me within

the repellent form which lies on this couch. We shall meet again perhaps in the shining mists of Orion's

Sword, perhaps on a bleak plateau in prehistoric Asia, perhaps in unremembered dreams tonight, perhaps in

some other form an eon hence, when the solar system shall have been swept away."

At this point the thoughtwaves abruptly ceased, the pale eyes of the dreamer or can I say dead man?

commenced to glaze fishily. In a halfstupor I crossed over to the couch and felt of his wrist, but found it

cold, stiff, and pulseless. The sallow cheeks paled again, and the thick lips fell open, disclosing the

repulsively rotten fangs of the degenerate Joe Slater. I shivered, pulled a blanket over the hideous face, and

awakened the nurse. Then I left the cell and went silently to my room. I had an instant and unaccountable

The climax? What plain tale of science can boast of such a rhetorical effect? I have merely set down certain

things appealing to me as facts, allowing you to construe them as you will. As I have already admitted, my

superior, old Doctor Fenton, denies the reality of everything I have related. He vows that I was broken down

with nervous strain, and badly in need of a long vacation on full pay which he so generously gave me. He

assures me on his professional honor that Joe Slater was but a lowgrade paranoiac, whose fantastic notions

must have come from the crude hereditary folktales which circulated in even the most decadent of

communities. All this he tells me yet I cannot forget what I saw in the sky on the night after Slater died.

Lest you think me a biased witness, another pen must add this final testimony, which may perhaps supply the

climax you expect. I will quote the following account of the star Nova Persei verbatim from the pages of that

"On February 22, 1901, a marvelous new star was discovered by Doctor Anderson of Edinburgh, not very far

from Algol. No star had been visible at that point before. Within twentyfour hours the stranger had become

so bright that it outshone Capella. In a week or two it had visibly faded, and in the course of a few months it

I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the

end of my supply of the drug which alone, makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall

cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below. Do not think from my slavery to morphine

that I am a weakling or a degenerate. When you have read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess,

It was in one of the most open and least frequented parts of the broad Pacific that the packet of which I was

supercargo fell a victim to the German searaider. The great war was then at its very beginning, and the

ocean forces of the Hun had not completely sunk to their later degradation; so that our vessel was made a

legitimate prize, whilst we of her crew were treated with all the fairness and consideration due us as naval

prisoners. So liberal, indeed, was the discipline of our captors, that five days after we were taken I managed

to escape alone in a small boat with water and provisions for a good length of time.

When I finally found myself adrift and free, I had but little idea of my surroundings. Never a competent

navigator, I could only guess vaguely by the sun and stars that I was somewhat south of the equator. Of the

longitude I knew nothing, and no island or coastline was in sight. The weather kept fair, and for uncounted

days I drifted aimlessly beneath the scorching sun; waiting either for some passing ship, or to be cast on the

shores of some habitable land. But neither ship nor land appeared, and I began to despair in my solitude upon

The change happened whilst I slept. Its details I shall never know; for my slumber, though troubled and

dreaminfested, was continuous. When at last I awakened, it was to discover myself half sucked into a slimy

expanse of hellish black mire which extended about me in monotonous undulations as far as I could see, and

Though one might well imagine that my first sensation would be of wonder at so prodigious and unexpected

a transformation of scenery, I was in reality more horrified than astonished; for there was in the air and in the

rotting soil a sinister quality which chilled me to the very core. The region was putrid with the carcasses of

decaying fish, and of other less describable things which I saw protruding from the nasty mud of the

unending plain. Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable hideousness that can

dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity. There was nothing within hearing, and nothing in sight save

a vast reach of black slime; yet the very completeness of the stillness and the homogeneity of the landscape

The sun was blazing down from a sky which seemed to me almost black in its cloudless cruelty; as though

reflecting the inky marsh beneath my feet. As I crawled into the stranded boat I realised that only one theory

could explain my position. Through some unprecedented volcanic upheaval, a portion of the ocean floor must

have been thrown to the surface, exposing regions which for innumerable millions of years had lain hidden

under unfathomable watery depths. So great was the extent of the new land which had risen beneath me, that

I could not detect the faintest noise of the surging ocean, strain my ears as I might. Nor were there any

For several hours I sat thinking or brooding in the boat, which lay upon its side and afforded a slight shade as

the sun moved across the heavens. As the day progressed, the ground lost some of its stickiness, and seemed

likely to dry sufficiently for travelling purposes in a short time. That night I slept but little, and the next day I

made for myself a pack containing food and water, preparatory to an overland journey in search of the

On the third morning I found the soil dry enough to walk upon with ease. The odour of the fish was

maddening; but I was too much concerned with graver things to mind so slight an evil, and set out boldly for

an unknown goal. All day I forged steadily westward, guided by a faraway hummock which rose higher

than any other elevation on the rolling desert. That night I encamped, and on the following day still travelled

toward the hummock, though that object seemed scarcely nearer than when I had first espied it. By the fourth

evening I attained the base of the mound, which turned out to be much higher than it had appeared from a

distance, an intervening valley setting it out in sharper relief from the general surface. Too weary to ascend, I

I know not why my dreams were so wild that night; but ere the waning and fantastically gibbous moon had

risen far above the eastern plain, I was awake in a cold perspiration, determined to sleep no more. Such

visions as I had experienced were too much for me to endure again. And in the glow of the moon I saw how

unwise I had been to travel by day. Without the glare of the parching sun, my journey would have cost me

less energy; indeed, I now felt quite able to perform the ascent which had deterred me at sunset. Picking up

I have said that the unbroken monotony of the rolling plain was a source of vague horror to me; but I think

my horror was greater when I gained the summit of the mound and looked down the other side into an

immeasurable pit or canyon, whose black recesses the moon had not yet soared high enough to illumine. I felt

myself on the edge of the world, peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night. Through my

terror ran curious reminiscences of Paradise Lost, and Satan's hideous climb through the unfashioned realms

As the moon climbed higher in the sky, I began to see that the slopes of the valley were not quite so

perpendicular as I had imagined. Ledges and outcroppings of rock afforded fairly easy footholds for a

descent, whilst after a drop of a few hundred feet, the declivity became very gradual. Urged on by an impulse

which I cannot definitely analyse, I scrambled with difficulty down the rocks and stood on the gentler slope

All at once my attention was captured by a vast and singular object on the opposite slope, which rose steeply

about a hundred yards ahead of me; an object that gleamed whitely in the newly bestowed rays of the

ascending moon. That it was merely a gigantic piece of stone, I soon assured myself; but I was conscious of a

distinct impression that its contour and position were not altogether the work of Nature. A closer scrutiny

filled me with sensations I cannot express; for despite its enormous magnitude, and its position in an abyss

which had yawned at the bottom of the sea since the world was young, I perceived beyond a doubt that the

strange object was a wellshaped monolith whose massive bulk had known the workmanship and perhaps the

Dazed and frightened, yet not without a certain thrill of the scientist's or archaeologist's delight, I examined

my surroundings more closely. The moon, now near the zenith, shone weirdly and vividly above the towering

steeps that hemmed in the chasm, and revealed the fact that a farflung body of water flowed at the bottom,

winding out of sight in both directions, and almost lapping my feet as I stood on the slope. Across the chasm,

the wavelets washed the base of the Cyclopean monolith, on whose surface I could now trace both

inscriptions and crude sculptures. The writing was in a system of hieroglyphics unknown to me, and unlike

anything I had ever seen in books, consisting for the most part of conventionalised aquatic symbols such as

fishes, eels, octopi, crustaceans, molluscs, whales and the like. Several characters obviously represented

marine things which are unknown to the modern world, but whose decomposing forms I had observed on the

It was the pictorial carving, however, that did most to hold me spellbound. Plainly visible across the

intervening water on account of their enormous size was an array of basreliefs whose subjects would have

excited the envy of a Dore. I think that these things were supposed to depict men at least, a certain sort of

men; though the creatures were shown disporting like fishes in the waters of some marine grotto, or paying

homage at some monolithic shrine which appeared to be under the waves as well. Of their faces and forms I

dare not speak in detail, for the mere remembrance makes me grow faint. Grotesque beyond the imagination

of a Poe or a Bulwer, they were damnably human in general outline despite webbed hands and feet,

shockingly wide and flabby lips, glassy, bulging eyes, and other features less pleasant to recall. Curiously

enough, they seemed to have been chiselled badly out of proportion with their scenic background; for one of

the creatures was shown in the act of killing a whale represented as but little larger than himself. I remarked,

as I say, their grotesqueness and strange size; but in a moment decided that they were merely the imaginary

gods of some primitive fishing or seafaring tribe; some tribe whose last descendant had perished eras before

the first ancestor of the Piltdown or Neanderthal Man was born. Awestruck at this unexpected glimpse into a

past beyond the conception of the most daring anthropologist, I stood musing whilst the moon cast queer

Then suddenly I saw it. With only a slight churning to mark its rise to the surface, the thing slid into view

above the dark waters. Vast, Polyphemuslike, and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of

nightmares to the monolith, about which it flung its gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its hideous head

Of my frantic ascent of the slope and cliff, and of my delirious journey back to the stranded boat, I remember

little. I believe I sang a great deal, and laughed oddly when I was unable to sing. I have indistinct

recollections of a great storm some time after I reached the boat; at any rate, I knew that I heard peals of

When I came out of the shadows I was in a San Francisco hospital; brought thither by the captain of the

American ship which had picked up my boat in midocean. In my delirium I had said much, but found that

my words had been given scant attention. Of any land upheaval in the Pacific, my rescuers knew nothing; nor

did I deem it necessary to insist upon a thing which I knew they could not believe. Once I sought out a

celebrated ethnologist, and amused him with peculiar questions regarding the ancient Philistine legend of

Dagon, the FishGod; but soon perceiving that he was hopelessly conventional, I did not press my inquiries.

It is at night, especially when the moon is gibbous and waning, that I see the thing. I tried morphine; but the

drug has given only transient surcease, and has drawn me into its clutches as a hopeless slave. So now I am to

end it all, having written a full account for the information or the contemptuous amusement of my

fellowmen. Often I ask myself if it could not all have been a pure phantasm a mere freak of fever as I lay

sunstricken and raving in the open boat after my escape from the German manofwar. This I ask myself,

but ever does there come before me a hideously vivid vision in reply. I cannot think of the deep sea without

shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed,

worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of

watersoaked granite. I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking

talons the remnants of puny, warexhausted mankind of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark

The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not

I am Basil Elton, keeper of the North Point light that my father and grandfather kept before me. Far from the

shore stands the gray lighthouse, above sunken slimy rocks that are seen when the tide is low, but unseen

when the tide is high. Past that beacon for a century have swept the majestic barques of the seven seas. In the

days of my grandfather there were many; in the days of my father not so many; and now there are so few that

From far shores came those whitesailed argosies of old; from far Eastern shores where warm suns shine and

sweet odors linger about strange gardens and gay temples. The old captains of the sea came often to my

grandfather and told him of these things which in turn he told to my father, and my father told to me in the

long autumn evenings when the wind howled eerily from the East. And I have read more of these things, and

of many things besides, in the books men gave me when I was young and filled with wonder.

But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean. Blue, green,

gray, white or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent. All my days have I watched it

and listened to it, and I know it well. At first it told to me only the plain little tales of calm beaches and near

ports, but with the years it grew more friendly and spoke of other things; of things more strange and more

distant in space and time. Sometimes at twilight the gray vapors of the horizon have parted to grant me

glimpses of the ways beyond; and sometimes at night the deep waters of the sea have grown clear and

phosphorescent, to grant me glimpses of the ways beneath. And these glimpses have been as often of the

ways that were and the ways that might be, as of the ways that are; for ocean is more ancient than the

Out of the South it was that the White Ship used to come when the moon was full and high in the heavens.

Out of the South it would glide very smoothly and silently over the sea. And whether the sea was rough or

calm, and whether the wind was friendly or adverse, it would always glide smoothly and silently, its sails

distant and its long strange tiers of oars moving rhythmically. One night I espied upon the deck a man,

bearded and robed, and he seemed to beckon me to embark for far unknown shores. Many times afterward I

Very brightly did the moon shine on the night I answered the call, and I walked out over the waters to the

White Ship on a bridge of moonbeams. The man who had beckoned now spoke a welcome to me in a soft

language I seemed to know well, and the hours were filled with soft songs of the oarsmen as we glided away

And when the day dawned, rosy and effulgent, I beheld the green shore of far lands, bright and beautiful, and

to me unknown. Up from the sea rose lordly terraces of verdure, treestudded, and shewing here and there

the gleaming white roofs and colonnades of strange temples. As we drew nearer the green shore the bearded

man told me of that land, the land of Zar, where dwell all the dreams and thoughts of beauty that come to

men once and then are forgotten. And when I looked upon the terraces again I saw that what he said was true,

for among the sights before me were many things I had once seen through the mists beyond the horizon and

in the phosphorescent depths of ocean. There too were forms and fantasies more splendid than any I had ever

known; the visions of young poets who died in want before the world could learn of what they had seen and

dreamed. But we did not set foot upon the sloping meadows of Zar, for it is told that he who treads them may

As the White Ship sailed silently away from the templed terraces of Zar, we beheld on the distant horizon

ahead the spires of a mighty city; and the bearded man said to me, �This is Thalarion, the City of a Thousand

Wonders, wherein reside all those mysteries that man has striven in vain to fathom.� And I looked again, at

closer range, and saw that the city was greater than any city I had known or dreamed of before. Into the sky

the spires of its temples reached, so that no man might behold their peaks; and far back beyond the horizon

stretched the grim, gray walls, over which one might spy only a few roofs, weird and ominous, yet adorned

with rich friezes and alluring sculptures. I yearned mightily to enter this fascinating yet repellent city, and

besought the bearded man to land me at the stone pier by the huge carven gate Akariel; but he gently denied

my wish, saying, �Into Thalarion, the City of a Thousand Wonders, many have passed but none returned.

Therein walk only daemons and mad things that are no longer men, and the streets are white with the

unburied bones of those who have looked upon the eidolon Lathi, that reigns over the city.� So the White

Ship sailed on past the walls of Thalarion, and followed for many days a southwardflying bird, whose

Then came we to a pleasant coast gay with blossoms of every hue, where as far inland as we could see basked

lovely groves and radiant arbors beneath a meridian sun. From bowers beyond our view came bursts of song

and snatches of lyric harmony, interspersed with faint laughter so delicious that I urged the rowers onward in

my eagerness to reach the scene. And the bearded man spoke no word, but watched me as we approached the

lilylined shore. Suddenly a wind blowing from over the flowery meadows and leafy woods brought a scent

at which I trembled. The wind grew stronger, and the air was filled with the lethal, charnel odor of

plaguestricken towns and uncovered cemeteries. And as we sailed madly away from that damnable coast the

bearded man spoke at last, saying, "This is Xura, the Land of Pleasures Unattained.�

So once more the White Ship followed the bird of heaven, over warm blessed seas fanned by caressing,

aromatic breezes. Day after day and night after night did we sail, and when the moon was full we would

listen to soft songs of the oarsmen, sweet as on that distant night when we sailed away from my far native

land. And it was by moonlight that we anchored at last in the harbor of SonaNyl, which is guarded by twin

headlands of crystal that rise from the sea and meet in a resplendent arch. This is the Land of Fancy, and we

In the Land of SonaNyl there is neither time nor space, neither suffering nor death; and there I dwelt for

many aeons. Green are the groves and pastures, bright and fragrant the flowers, blue and musical the streams,

clear and cool the fountains, and stately and gorgeous the temples, castles, and cities of SonaNyl. Of that

land there is no bound, for beyond each vista of beauty rises another more beautiful. Over the countryside and

amidst the splendor of cities can move at will the happy folk, of whom all are gifted with unmarred grace and

unalloyed happiness. For the aeons that I dwelt there I wandered blissfully through gardens where quaint

pagodas peep from pleasing clumps of bushes, and where the white walks are bordered with delicate

blossoms. I climbed gentle hills from whose summits I could see entrancing panoramas of loveliness, with

steepled towns nestling in verdant valleys, and with the golden domes of gigantic cities glittering on the

infinitely distant horizon. And I viewed by moonlight the sparkling sea, the crystal headlands, and the placid

It was against the full moon one night in the immemorial year of Tharp that I saw outlined the beckoning

form of the celestial bird, and felt the first stirrings of unrest. Then I spoke with the bearded man, and told

him of my new yearnings to depart for remote Cathuria, which no man hath seen, but which all believe to lie

beyond the basalt pillars of the West. It is the Land of Hope, and in it shine the perfect ideals of all that we

know elsewhere; or at least so men relate. But the bearded man said to me, �Beware of those perilous seas

wherein men say Cathuria lies. In SonaNyl there is no pain or death, but who can tell what lies beyond the

basalt pillars of the West?� Natheless at the next full moon I boarded the White Ship, and with the reluctant

And the bird of heaven flew before, and led us toward the basalt pillars of the West, but this time the oarsmen

sang no soft songs under the full moon. In my mind I would often picture the unknown Land of Cathuria with

its splendid groves and palaces, and would wonder what new delights there awaited me. �Cathuria,� I would

say to myself, �is the abode of gods and the land of unnumbered cities of gold. Its forests are of aloe and

sandalwood, even as the fragrant groves of Camorin, and among the trees flutter gay birds sweet with song.

On the green and flowery mountains of Cathuria stand temples of pink marble, rich with carven and painted

glories, and having in their courtyards cool fountains of silver, where purr with ravishing music the scented

waters that come from the grottoborn river Narg. And the cities of Cathuria are cinctured with golden walls,

and their pavements also are of gold. In the gardens of these cities are strange orchids, and perfumed lakes

whose beds are of coral and amber. At night the streets and the gardens are lit with gay lanthorns fashioned

from the threecolored shell of the tortoise, and here resound the soft notes of the singer and the lutanist. And

the houses of the cities of Cathuria are all palaces, each built over a fragrant canal bearing the waters of the

sacred Narg. Of marble and porphyry are the houses, and roofed with glittering gold that reflects the rays of

the sun and enhances the splendor of the cities as blissful gods view them from the distant peaks. Fairest of

all is the palace of the great monarch Dorieb, whom some say to be a demigod and others a god. High is the

palace of Dorieb, and many are the turrets of marble upon its walls. In its wide halls many multitudes

assemble, and here hang the trophies of the ages. And the roof is of pure gold, set upon tall pillars of ruby and

azure, and having such carven figures of gods and heroes that he who looks up to those heights seems to gaze

upon the living Olympus. And the floor of the palace is of glass, under which flow the cunningly lighted

waters of the Narg, gay with gaudy fish not known beyond the bounds of lovely Cathuria.�

Thus would I speak to myself of Cathuria, but ever would the bearded man warn me to turn back to the happy

shore of SonaNyl; for SonaNyl is known of men, while none hath ever beheld Cathuria.

And on the thirtyfirst day that we followed the bird, we beheld the basalt pillars of the West. Shrouded in

mist they were, so that no man might peer beyond them or see their summits which indeed some say reach

even to the heavens. And the bearded man again implored me to turn back, but I heeded him not; for from the

mists beyond the basalt pillars I fancied there came the notes of singers and lutanists; sweeter than the

sweetest songs of SonaNyl, and sounding mine own praises; the praises of me, who had voyaged far from

the full moon and dwelt in the Land of Fancy. So to the sound of melody the White Ship sailed into the mist

betwixt the basalt pillars of the West. And when the music ceased and the mist lifted, we beheld not the Land

of Cathuria, but a swiftrushing resistless sea, over which our helpless barque was borne toward some

unknown goal. Soon to our ears came the distant thunder of falling waters, and to our eyes appeared on the

far horizon ahead the titanic spray of a monstrous cataract, wherein the oceans of the world drop down to

abysmal nothingness. Then did the bearded man say to me, with tears on his cheek, "We have rejected the

beautiful Land of SonaNyl, which we may never behold again. The gods are greater than men, and they

have conquered." And I closed my eyes before the crash that I knew would come, shutting out the sight of the

celestial bird which flapped its mocking blue wings over the brink of the torrent.

Out of that crash came darkness, and I heard the shrieking of men and of things which were not men. From

the East tempestuous winds arose, and chilled me as I crouched on the slab of damp stone which had risen

beneath my feet. Then as I heard another crash I opened my eyes and beheld myself upon the platform of that

lighthouse whence I had sailed so many aeons ago. In the darkness below there loomed the vast blurred

outlines of a vessel breaking up on the cruel rocks, and as I glanced out over the waste I saw that the light had

And in the later watches of the night, when I went within the tower, I saw on the wall a calendar which still

remained as when I had left it at the hour I sailed away. With the dawn I descended the tower and looked for

wreckage upon the rocks, but what I found was only this: a strange dead bird whose hue was as of the azure

sky, and a single shattered spar, of a whiteness greater than that of the wavetips or of the mountain snow.

And thereafter the ocean told me its secrets no more; and though many times since has the moon shone full

Again I say, I do not know what has become of Harley Warren, though I thinkalmost hopethat he is in

peaceful oblivion, if there be anywhere so blessed a thing. It is true that I have for five years been his closest

friend, and a partial sharer of his terrible researches into the unknown. I will not deny, though my memory is

uncertain and indistinct, that this witness of yours may have seen us together as he says, on the Gainsville

pike, walking toward Big Cypress Swamp, at half past 11 on that awful night. That we bore electric lanterns,

spades, and a curious coil of wire with attached instruments, I will even affirm; for these things all played a

part in the single hideous scene which remains burned into my shaken recollection. But of what followed, and

of the reason I was found alone and dazed on the edge of the swamp next morning, I must insist that I know

nothing save what I have told you over and over again. You say to me that there is nothing in the swamp or

near it which could form the setting of that frightful episode. I reply that I knew nothing beyond what I saw.

Vision or nightmare it may have beenvision or nightmare I fervently hope it wasyet it is all that my

mind retains of what took place in those shocking hours after we left the sight of men. And why Harley

Warren did not return, he or his shadeor some nameless thing I cannot describe alone can tell.

As I have said before, the weird studies of Harley Warren were well known to me, and to some extent shared

by me. Of his vast collection of strange, rare books on forbidden subjects I have read all that are written in the

languages of which I am master; but these are few as compared with those in languages I cannot understand.

Most, I believe, are in Arabic; and the fiendinspired book which brought on the endthe book which he

carried in his pocket out of the worldwas written in characters whose like I never saw elsewhere. Warren

would never tell me just what was in that book. As to the nature of our studiesmust I say again that I no

longer retain full comprehension? It seems to me rather merciful that I do not, for they were terrible studies,

which I pursued more through reluctant fascination than through actual inclination. Warren always dominated

me, and sometimes I feared him. I remember how I shuddered at his facial expression on the night before the

awful happening, when he talked so incessantly of his theory, why certain corpses never decay, but rest firm

and fat in their tombs for a thousand years. But I do not fear him now, for I suspect that he has known horrors

Once more I say that I have no clear idea of our object on that night. Certainly, it had much to do with

something in the book which Warren carried with himthat ancient book in undecipherable characters

which had come to him from India a month beforebut I swear I do not know what it was that we expected

to find. Your witness says he saw us at half past 11 on the Gainsville pike, headed for Big Cypress Swamp.

This is probably true, but I have no distinct memory of it. The picture seared into my soul is of one scene

only, and the hour must have been long after midnight; for a waning crescent moon was high in the vaporous

The place was an ancient cemetery; so ancient that I trembled at the manifold signs of immemorial years. It

was in a deep, damp hollow, overgrown with rank grass, moss, and curious creeping weeds, and filled with a

vague stench which my idle fancy associated absurdly with rotting stone. On every hand were the signs of

neglect and decrepitude, and I seemed haunted by the notion that Warren and I were the first living creatures

to invade a lethal silence of centuries. Over the valley's rim a wan, waning crescent moon peered through the

noisome vapors that seemed to emanate from unheard of catacombs, and by its feeble, wavering beams I

could distinguish a repellent array of antique slabs, urns, cenotaphs, and mausoleum facades; all crumbling,

mossgrown, and moisturestained, and partly concealed by the gross luxuriance of the unhealthy vegetation.

My first vivid impression of my own presence in this terrible necropolis concerns the act of pausing with

Warren before a certain half obliterated sepulcher and of throwing down some burdens which we seemed to

have been carrying. I now observed that I had with me an electric lantern and two spades, whilst my

companion was supplied with a similar lantern and a portable telephone outfit. No word was uttered, for the

spot and the task seemed known to us; and without delay we seized our spades and commenced to clear away

the grass, weeds, and drifted earth from the flat, archaic mortuary. After uncovering the entire surface, which

consisted of three immense granite slabs, we stepped back some distance to survey the charnel scene; and

Warren appeared to make some mental calculations. Then he returned to the sepulcher, and using his spade as

a lever, sought to pry up the slab lying nearest to a stony ruin which may have been a monument in its day.

He did not succeed, and motioned to me to come to his assistance. Finally our combined strength loosened

The removal of the slab revealed a black aperture, from which rushed an effluence of miasmal gases so

nauseous that we started back in horror. After an interval, however, we approached the pit again, and found

the exhalations less unbearable. Our lanterns disclosed the top of a flight of stone steps, dripping with some

detestable ichor of the inner earth, and bordered by moist walls encrusted with niter. And now for the first

time my memory records verbal discourse, Warren addressing me at length in his mellow tenor voice; a voice

"I'm sorry to have to ask you to stay on the surface," he said, "but it would be a crime to let anyone with your

frail nerves go down there. You can't imagine, even from what you have read and from what I've told you, the

things I shall have to see and do. It's fiendish work, Carter, and I doubt if any man without ironclad

sensibilities could ever see it through and come up alive and sane. I don't wish to offend you, and Heaven

knows I'd be glad enough to have you with me; but the responsibility is in a certain sense mine, and I couldn't

drag a bundle of nerves like you down to probable death or madness. I tell you, you can't imagine what the

thing is really like! But I promise to keep you informed over the telephone of every moveyou see I've

I can still hear, in memory, those coolly spoken words; and I can still remember my remonstrances. I seemed

desperately anxious to accompany my friend into those sepulchral depths, yet he proved inflexibly obdurate.

At one time he threatened to abandon the expedition if I remained insistent; a threat which proved effective,

since he alone held the key to the thing. All this I can still remember, though I no longer know what manner

of thing we sought. After he had obtained my reluctant acquiescence in his design, Warren picked up the reel

of wire and adjusted the instruments. At his nod I took one of the latter and seated myself upon an aged,

discolored gravestone close by the newly uncovered aperture. Then he shook my hand, shouldered the coil of

For a minute I kept sight of the glow of his lantern, and heard the rustle of the wire as he laid it down after

him; but the glow soon disappeared abruptly, as if a turn in the stone staircase had been encountered, and the

sound died away almost as quickly. I was alone, yet bound to the unknown depths by those magic strands

whose insulated surface lay green beneath the struggling beams of that waning crescent moon.

I constantly consulted my watch by the light of my electric lantern, and listened with feverish anxiety at the

receiver of the telephone; but for more than a quarter of an hour heard nothing. Then a faint clicking came

from the instrument, and I called down to my friend in a tense voice. Apprehensive as I was, I was

nevertheless unprepared for the words which came up from that uncanny vault in accents more alarmed and

quivering than any I had heard before from Harley Warren. He who had so calmly left me a little while

previously, now called from below in a shaky whisper more portentous than the loudest shriek:

I could not answer. Speechless, I could only wait. Then came the frenzied tones again:

This time my voice did not fail me, and I poured into the transmitter a flood of excited questions. Terrified, I

Once more came the voice of my friend, still hoarse with fear, and now apparently tinged with despair:

"I can't tell you, Carter! It's too utterly beyond thoughtI dare not tell youno man could know it and

Stillness again, save for my now incoherent torrent of shuddering inquiry. Then the voice of Warren in a

"Carter! for the love of God, put back the slab and get out of this if you can! Quick!leave everything else

and make for the outsideit's your only chance! Do as I say, and don't ask me to explain!"

I heard, yet was able only to repeat my frantic questions. Around me were the tombs and the darkness and the

shadows; below me, some peril beyond the radius of the human imagination. But my friend was in greater

danger than I, and through my fear I felt a vague resentment that he should deem me capable of deserting him

under such circumstances. More clicking, and after a pause a piteous cry from Warren:

Something in the boyish slang of my evidently stricken companion unleashed my faculties. I formed and

shouted a resolution, "Warren, brace up! I'm coming down!" But at this offer the tone of my auditor changed

"Don't! You can't understand! It's too lateand my own fault. Put back the slab and runthere's nothing

The tone changed again, this time acquiring a softer quality, as of hopeless resignation. Yet it remained tense

I tried not to heed him; tried to break through the paralysis which held me, and to fulfil my vow to rush down

to his aid. But his next whisper found me still held inert in the chains of stark horror.

"Nearly over nowdon't make it hardercover up those damned steps and run for your lifeyou're losing

Here Warren's whisper swelled into a cry; a cry that gradually rose to a shriek fraught with all the horror of

After that was silence. I know not how many interminable eons I sat stupefied; whispering, muttering,

calling, screaming into that telephone. Over and over again through those eons I whispered and muttered,

And then there came to me the crowning horror of allthe unbelievable, unthinkable, almost unmentionable

thing. I have said that eons seemed to elapse after Warren shrieked forth his last despairing warning, and that

only my own cries now broke the hideous silence. But after a while there was a further clicking in the

receiver, and I strained my ears to listen. Again I called down, "Warren, are you there?" and in answer heard

the thing which has brought this cloud over my mind. I do not try, gentlemen, to account for that thingthat

voicenor can I venture to describe it in detail, since the first words took away my consciousness and

created a mental blank which reaches to the time of my awakening in the hospital. Shall I say that the voice

was deep; hollow; gelatinous; remote; unearthly; inhuman; disembodied? What shall I say? It was the end of

my experience, and is the end of my story. I heard it, and knew no moreheard it as I sat petrified in that

unknown cemetery in the hollow, amidst the crumbling stones and the falling tombs, the rank vegetation and

the miasmal vapors heard it well up from the innermost depths of that damnable open sepulcher as I

There is in the land of Mnar a vast still lake that is fed by no stream, and out of which no stream flows. Ten

thousand years ago there stood by its shore the mighty city of Sarnath, but Sarnath stands there no more.

It is told that in the immemorial years when the world was young, before ever the men of Sarnath came to the

land of Mnar, another city stood beside the lake; the gray stone city of Ib, which was old as the lake itseli, and

peopled with beings not pleasing to behold. Very odd and ugly were these beings, as indeed are most beings

of a world yet inchoate and rudely fashioned. It is written on the brick cylinders of Kadatheron that the beings

of lb were in hue as green as the lake and the mists that rise above it; that they had bulging eyes, pouting,

flabby lips, and curious ears, and were without voice. It is also written that they descended one night from the

moon in a mist; they and the vast still lake and gray stone city lb. However this may be, it is certain that they

worshipped a seagreen stone idol chiseled in the likeness of Bokrug, the great waterlizard; before which

they danced horribly when the moon was gibbous. And it is written in the papyrus of Ilarnek, that they one

day discovered fire, and thereafter kindled flames on many ceremonial occasions. But not much is written of

these beings, because they lived in very ancient times, and man is young, and knows but little of the very

After many eons men came to the land of Mnar, dark shepherd folk with their fleecy flocks, who built Thraa,

Ilarnek, and Kadatheron on the winding river Ai. And certain tribes, more hardy than the rest, pushed on to

the border of the lake and built Sarnath at a spot where precious metals were found in the earth.

Not far from the gray city of lb did the wandering tribes lay the first stones of Sarnath, and at the beings of lb

they marveled greatly. But with their marveling was mixed hate, for they thought it not meet that beings of

such aspect should walk about the world of men at dusk. Nor did they like the strange sculptures upon the

gray monoliths of Ib, for why those sculptures lingered so late in the world, even until the coming men, none

can tell; unless it was because the land of Mnar is very still, and remote from most other lands, both of

As the men of Sarnath beheld more of the beings of lb their hate grew, and it was not less because they found

the beings weak, and soft as jelly to the touch of stones and arrows. So one day the young warriors, the

slingers and the spearmen and the bowmen, marched against lb and slew all the inhabitants thereof, pushing

the queer bodies into the lake with long spears, because they did not wish to touch them. And because they

did not like the gray sculptured monoliths of lb they cast these also into the lake; wondering from the

greatness of the labor how ever the stones were brought from afar, as they must have been, since there is

Thus of the very ancient city of lb was nothing spared, save the seagreen stone idol chiseled in the likeness

of Bokrug, the waterlizard. This the young warriors took back with them as a symbol of conquest over the

old gods and beings of Th, and as a sign of leadership in Mnar. But on the night after it was set up in the

temple, a terrible thing must have happened, for weird lights were seen over the lake, and in the morning the

people found the idol gone and the highpriest TaranIsh lying dead, as from some fear unspeakable. And

before he died, TaranIsh had scrawled upon the altar of chrysolite with coarse shaky strokes the sign of

After TaranIsh there were many highpriests in Sarnath but never was the seagreen stone idol found. And

many centuries came and went, wherein Sarnath prospered exceedingly, so that only priests and old women

remembered what TaranIsh had scrawled upon the altar of chrysolite. Betwixt Sarnath and the city of

flarnek arose a caravan route, and the precious metals from the earth were exchanged for other metals and

rare cloths and jewels and books and tools for artificers and all things of luxury that are known to the people

who dwell along the winding river Ai and beyond. So Sarnath waxed mighty and learned and beautiful, and

sent forth conquering armies to subdue the neighboring cities; and in time there sate upon a throne in Sarnath

The wonder of the world and the pride of all mankind was Sarnath the magnificent. Of polished

desertquarried marble were its walls, in height three hundred cubits and in breadth seventyfive, so that

chariots might pass each other as men drove them along the top. For full five hundred stadia did they run,

being open only on the side toward the lake where a green stone seawall kept back the waves that rose oddly

once a year at the festival of the `destroying of lb. In Sarnath were fifty streets from the lake to the gates of

the caravans, and fifty more intersecting them. With onyx were they paved, save those whereon the horses

and camels and elephants trod, which were paved with granite. And the gates of Sarnath were as many as the

landward ends of the streets, each of bronze, and flanked by the figures of lions and elephants carven from

some stone no longer known among men. The houses of Sarnath were of glazed brick and chalcedony, each

having its walled garden and crystal lakelet. With strange art were they builded, for no other city had houses

like them; and travelers from Thraa and Ilarnek and Kadatheron marveled at the shining domes wherewith

But more marvelous still were the palaces and the temples, and the gardens made by Zokkar the olden king.

There were many palaces, the last of which were mightier than any in Thraa or Ilarnek or Kadatheron. So

high were they that one within might sometimes fancy himself beneath only the sky; yet when lighted with

torches dipt in the oil of Dother their walls showed vast paintings of kings and armies, of a splendor at once

inspiring and stupefying to the beholder. Many were the pillars of the palaces, all of tinted marble, and carven

into designs of surpassing beauty. And in most of the palaces the floors were mosaics of beryl and lapis lazuli

and sardonyx and carbuncle and other choice materials, so disposed that the beholder might fancy himself

walking over beds of the rarest flowers. And there were likewise fountains, which cast scented waters about

in pleasing jets arranged with cunning art. Outshining all others was the palace of the kings of Mnar and of

the lands adjacent. On a pair of golden crouching lions rested the throne, many steps above the gleaming

floor. And it was wrought of one piece of ivory, though no man lives who knows whence so vast a piece

could have come. In that palace there were also many galleries, and many amphitheaters where lions and men

and elephants battled at the pleasure of the kings. Sometimes the amphitheaters were flooded with water

conveyed from the lake in mighty aqueducts, and then were enacted stirring seafights, or combats betwixt

Lofty and amazing were the seventeen towerlike temples of Sarnath, fashioned of a bright multicolored

stone not known elsewhere. A full thousand cubits high stood the greatest among them, wherein the

highpriests dwelt with a magnificence scarce less than that of the kings. On the ground were halls as vast

and splendid as those of the palaces; where gathered throngs in worship of ZoKalar and Tamash and Lobon,

the chief gods of Sarnath, whose incenseenveloped shrines were as the thrones of monarchs. Not like the

eikons of other gods were those of ZoKalar and Tamash and Lobon. For so close to life were they that one

might swear the graceful bearded gods themselves sate on the ivory thrones. And up unending steps of zircon

was the towerchamber, wherefrom the highpriests looked out over the city and the plains and the lake by

day; and at the cryptic moon and significant stars and planets, and their reflections in the lake, at night. Here

was done the very secret and ancient rite in detestation of Bokrug, the waterlizard, and here rested the altar

Wonderful likewise were the gardens made by Zokkar the olden king. In the center of Sarnath they lay,

covering a great space and encircled by a high wall. And they were surmounted by a mighty dome of glass,

through which shone the sun and moon and planets when it was clear, and from which were hung fulgent

images of the sun and moon and stars and planets when it was not clear. In summer the gardens were cooled

with fresh odorous breezes skilfully wafted by fans, and in winter they were heated with concealed fires, so

that in those gardens it was always spring. There ran little streams over bright pebbles, dividing meads of

green and gardens of many hues, and spanned by a multitude of bridges. Many were the waterfalls in their

courses, and many were the hued lakelets into which they expanded. Over the streams and lakelets rode white

swans, whilst the music of rare birds chimed in with the melody of the waters. In ordered terraces rose the

green banks, adorned here and there with bowers of vines and sweet blossoms, and seats and benches of

marble and porphyry. And there were many small shrines and temples where one might rest or pray to small

Each year there was celebrated in Sarnath the feast of the destroying of lb, at which time wine, song, dancing,

and merriment of every kind abounded. Great honors were then paid to the shades of those who had

annihilated the odd ancient beings, and the memory of those beings and of their elder gods was derided by

dancers and lutanists crowned with roses from the gardens of Zokkar. And the kings would look out over the

At first the highpriests liked not these festivals, for there had descended amongst them queer tales of how

the seagreen eikon had vanished, and how TaranIsh had died from fear and left a warning. And they said

that from their high tower they sometimes saw lights beneath the waters of the lake. But as many years

passed without calamity even the priests laughed and cursed and joined in the orgies of the feasters. Indeed,

had they not themselves, in their high tower, often performed the very ancient and secret rite in detestation of

Bokrug, the waterlizard? And a thousand years of riches and delight passed over Sarnath, wonder of the

Gorgeous beyond thought was the feast of the thousandth year of the destroying of lb. For a decade had it

been talked of in the land of Mnar, and as it drew nigh there came to Sarnath on horses and camels and

elephants men from Thraa, llarnek, and Kadetheron, and all the cities of Mnar and the lands beyond. Before

the marble walls on the appointed night were pitched the pavilions of princes and the tents of travelers.

Within his banquethall reclined NargisHei, the king, drunken with ancient wine from the vaults of

conquered Pnoth, and surrounded by feasting nobles and hurrying slaves. There were eaten many strange

delicacies at that feast; peacocks from the distant hills of linplan, heels of camels from the Bnazic desert, nuts

and spices from Sydathrian groves, and pearls from wavewashed Mtal dissolved in the vinegar of Thraa. Of

sauces there were an untold number, prepared by the subtlest cooks in all Mnar, and suited to the palate of

every feaster. But most prized of all the viands were the great fishes from the lake, each of vast size, and

Whilst the king and his nobles feasted within the palace, and viewed the crowning dish as it awaited them on

golden platters, others feasted elsewhere. In the tower of the great temple the priests held revels, and in

pavilions without the walls the princes of neighboring lands made merry. And it was the highpriest

GnaiKah who first saw the shadows that descended from the gibbous moon into the lake, and the damnable

green mists that arose from the lake to meet the moon and to shroud in a sinister haze the towers and the

domes of fated Sarnath. Thereafter those in the towers and without the walls beheld strange lights on the

water, and saw that the gray rock Akurion, which was wont to rear high above it near the shore, was almost

submerged. And fear grew vaguely yet swiftly, so that the princes of Ilarnek and of far Rokol took down and

folded their tents and pavilions and departed, though they scarce knew the reason for their departing.

Then, close to the hour of midnight, all the bronze gates of Sarnath burst open and emptied forth a frenzied

throng that blackened the plain, so that all the visiting princes and travelers fled away in fright. For on the

faces of this throng was writ a madness born of horror unendurable, and on their tongues were words so

terrible that no hearer paused for proof. Men whose eyes were wild with fear shrieked aloud of the sight

within the king's banquethall, where through the windows were seen no longer the forms of NargisHei and

his nobles and slaves, but a horde of indescribable green voiceless things with bulging eyes, pouting, flabby

lips, and curious ears; things which danced horribly, bearing in their paws golden platters set with rubies and

diamonds and containing uncouth flames. And the princes and travelers, as they fled from the doomed city of

Sarnath on horses and camels and elephants, looked again upon the mistbegetting lake and saw the gray

rock Akurion was quite submerged. Through all the land of Mnar and the land adjacent spread the tales of

those who had fled from Sarnath, and caravans sought that accursed city and its precious metals no more. It

was long ere any travelers went thither, and even then only the brave and adventurous young men of yellow

hair and blue eyes, who are no kin to the men of Mnar. These men indeed went to the lake to view Sarnath;

but though they found the vast still lake itself, and the gray rock Akurion which rears high above it near the

shore, they beheld not the wonder of the world and pride of all mankind. Where once had risen walls of three

hundred cubits and towers yet higher, now stretched only the marshy shore, and where once had dwelt fifty

million of men now crawled the detestable waterlizard. Not even the mines of precious metal remained.

But half buried in the rushes was spied a curious green idol; an exceedingly ancient idol chiseled in the

likeness of Bokrug, the great waterlizard. That idol, enshrined in the high temple at llarnek, was

Nyarlathotep... the crawling chaos... I am the last... I will tell the audient void...

I do not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago. The general tension was horrible. To a season

of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a

danger widespread and allembracing, such a danger as may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms

of the night. I recall that the people went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and

prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense of

monstrous guilt was upon the land, and out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made

men shiver in dark and lonely places. There was a demoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons�the

autumn heat lingered fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed from

the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown.

And it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt. Who he was, none could tell, but he was of the old

native blood and looked like a Pharaoh. The fellahin knelt when they saw him, yet could not say why. He said

he had risen up out of the blackness of twentyseven centuries, and that he had heard messages from places

not on this planet. Into the lands of civilisation came Nyarlathotep, swarthy, slender, and sinister, always

buying strange instruments of glass and metal and combining them into instruments yet stranger. He spoke

much of the sciences�of electricity and psychology�and gave exhibitions of power which sent his

spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame to exceeding magnitude. Men advised one another to

see Nyarlathotep, and shuddered. And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished, for the small hours were rent

with the screams of nightmare. Never before had the screams of nightmare been such a public problem; now

the wise men almost wished they could forbid sleep in the small hours, that the shrieks of cities might less

horribly disturb the pale, pitying moon as it glimmered on green waters gliding under bridges, and old

I remember when Nyarlathotep came to my city�the great, the old, the terrible city of unnumbered crimes.

My friend had told me of him, and of the impelling fascination and allurement of his revelations, and I burned

with eagerness to explore his uttermost mysteries. My friend said they were horrible and impressive beyond

my most fevered imaginings; and what was thrown on a screen in the darkened room prophesied things none

but Nyarlathotep dared prophesy, and in the sputter of his sparks there was taken from men that which had

never been taken before yet which shewed only in the eyes. And I heard it hinted abroad that those who knew

It was in the hot autumn that I went through the night with the restless crowds to see Nyarlathotep; through

the stifling night and up the endless stairs into the choking room. And shadowed on a screen, I saw hooded

forms amidst ruins, and yellow evil faces peering from behind fallen monuments. And I saw the world

battling against blackness; against the waves of destruction from ultimate space; whirling, churning,

struggling around the dimming, cooling sun. Then the sparks played amazingly around the heads of the

spectators, and hair stood up on end whilst shadows more grotesque than I can tell came out and squatted on

the heads. And when I, who was colder and more scientific than the rest, mumbled a trembling protest about

�imposture� and �static electricity,� Nyarlathotep drove us all out, down the dizzy stairs into the damp, hot,

deserted midnight streets. I screamed aloud that I was not afraid; that I never could be afraid; and others

screamed with me for solace. We swore to one another that the city was exactly the same, and still alive; and

when the electric lights began to fade we cursed the company over and over again, and laughed at the queer

I believe we felt something coming down from the greenish moon, for when we began to depend on its light

we drifted into curious involuntary marching formations and seemed to know our destinations though we

dared not think of them. Once we looked at the pavement and found the blocks loose and displaced by grass,

with scarce a line of rusted metal to shew where the tramways had run. And again we saw a tramcar, lone,

windowless, dilapidated, and almost on its side. When we gazed around the horizon, we could not find the

third tower by the river, and noticed that the silhouette of the second tower was ragged at the top. Then we

split up into narrow columns, each of which seemed drawn in a different direction. One disappeared in a

narrow alley to the left, leaving only the echo of a shocking moan. Another filed down a weedchoked

subway entrance, howling with a laughter that was mad. My own column was sucked toward the open

country, and presently I felt a chill which was not of the hot autumn; for as we stalked out on the dark moor,

we beheld around us the hellish moonglitter of evil snows. Trackless, inexplicable snows, swept asunder in

one direction only, where lay a gulf all the blacker for its glittering walls. The column seemed very thin

indeed as it plodded dreamily into the gulf. I lingered behind, for the black rift in the greenlitten snow was

frightful, and I thought I had heard the reverberations of a disquieting wail as my companions vanished; but

my power to linger was slight. As if beckoned by those who had gone before, I halffloated between the

titanic snowdrifts, quivering and afraid, into the sightless vortex of the unimaginable.

Screamingly sentient, dumbly delirious, only the gods that were can tell. A sickened, sensitive shadow

writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of

dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low.

Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; halfseen columns of unsanctifled temples that rest on

nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness. And

through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin,

monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the

detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous

ultimate gods�the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.

It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat; and this I can verily believe

as I gaze upon him who sitteth purring before the fire. For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which

men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroe and

Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle�s lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is

his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she

In Ulthar, before ever the burgesses forbade the killing of cats, there dwelt an old cotter and his wife who

delighted to trap and slay the cats of their neighbors. Why they did this I know not; save that many hate the

voice of the cat in the night, and take it ill that cats should run stealthily about yards and gardens at twilight.

But whatever the reason, this old man and woman took pleasure in trapping and slaying every cat which came

near to their hovel; and from some of the sounds heard after dark, many villagers fancied that the manner of

slaying was exceedingly peculiar. But the villagers did not discuss such things with the old man and his wife;

because of the habitual expression on the withered faces of the two, and because their cottage was so small

and so darkly hidden under spreading oaks at the back of a neglected yard. In truth, much as the owners of

cats hated these odd folk, they feared them more; and instead of berating them as brutal assassins, merely

took care that no cherished pet or mouser should stray toward the remote hovel under the dark trees. When

through some unavoidable oversight a cat was missed, and sounds heard after dark, the loser would lament

impotently; or console himself by thanking Fate that it was not one of his children who had thus vanished.

For the people of Ulthar were simple, and knew not whence it is all cats first came.

One day a caravan of strange wanderers from the South entered the narrow cobbled streets of Ulthar. Dark

wanderers they were, and unlike the other roving folk who passed through the village twice every year. In the

marketplace they told fortunes for silver, and bought gay beads from the merchants. What was the land of

these wanderers none could tell; but it was seen that they were given to strange prayers, and that they had

painted on the sides of their wagons strange figures with human bodies and the heads of cats, hawks, rams

and lions. And the leader of the caravan wore a headdress with two horns and a curious disk betwixt the

There was in this singular caravan a little boy with no father or mother, but only a tiny black kitten to cherish.

The plague had not been kind to him, yet had left him this small furry thing to mitigate his sorrow; and when

one is very young, one can find great relief in the lively antics of a black kitten. So the boy whom the dark

people called Menes smiled more often than he wept as he sat playing with his graceful kitten on the steps of

On the third morning of the wanderers� stay in Ulthar, Menes could not find his kitten; and as he sobbed

aloud in the marketplace certain villagers told him of the old man and his wife, and of sounds heard in the

night. And when he heard these things his sobbing gave place to meditation, and finally to prayer. He

stretched out his arms toward the sun and prayed in a tongue no villager could understand; though indeed the

villagers did not try very hard to understand, since their attention was mostly taken up by the sky and the odd

shapes the clouds were assuming. It was very peculiar, but as the little boy uttered his petition there seemed

to form overhead the shadowy, nebulous figures of exotic things; of hybrid creatures crowned with

That night the wanderers left Ulthar, and were never seen again. And the householders were troubled when

they noticed that in all the village there was not a cat to be found. From each hearth the familiar cat had

vanished; cats large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow and white. Old Kranon, the burgomaster, swore

that the dark folk had taken the cats away in revenge for the killing of Menes� kitten; and cursed the caravan

and the little boy. But Nith, the lean notary, declared that the old cotter and his wife were more likely persons

to suspect; for their hatred of cats was notorious and increasingly bold. Still, no one durst complain to the

sinister couple; even when little Atal, the innkeeper�s son, vowed that he had at twilight seen all the cats of

Ulthar in that accursed yard under the trees, pacing very slowly and solemnly in a circle around the cottage,

two abreast, as if in performance of some unheardof rite of beasts. The villagers did not know how much to

believe from so small a boy; and though they feared that the evil pair had charmed the cats to their death, they

preferred not to chide the old cotter till they met him outside his dark and repellent yard.

So Ulthar went to sleep in vain anger; and when the people awakened at dawn�behold! every cat was back

at his accustomed hearth! Large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow and white, none was missing. Very

sleek and fat did the cats appear, and sonorous with purring content. The citizens talked with one another of

the affair, and marveled not a little. Old Kranon again insisted that it was the dark folk who had taken them,

since cats did not return alive from the cottage of the ancient man .and his wife. But all agreed on one thing:

that the refusal of all the cats to eat their portions of meat or drink their saucers of milk was exceedingly

curious. And for two whole days the sleek, lazy cats of Ulthar would touch no food, but only doze by the fire

It was fully a week before the villagers noticed that no lights were appearing at dusk in the windows of the

cottage under the trees. Then the lean Nith remarked that no one had seen the old man or his wife since the

night the cats were away. In another week the burgomaster decided to overcome his fears and call at the

strangely silent dwelling as a matter of duty, though in so doing he was careful to take with him Shang the

blacksmith and Thul the cutter of stone as witnesses. And when they had broken down the frail door they

found only this: two cleanly picked human skeletons on the earthen floor, and a number of singular beetles

There was subsequently much talk among the burgesses of Ulthar. Zath, the coroner, disputed at length with

Nith, the lean notary; and Kranon and Shang and Thul were overwhelmed with questions. Even little Atal, the

innkeeper�s son, was closely questioned and given a sweetmeat as reward. They talked of the old cotter and

his wife, of the caravan of dark wanderers, of small Menes and his black kitten, of the prayer of Menes and of

the sky during that prayer, of the doings of the cats on the night the caravan left, and of what was later found

And in the end the burgesses passed that remarkable law which is told of by traders in Hatheg and discussed

Into the North Window of my chamber glows the Pole Star with uncanny light. All through the long hellish

hours of blackness it shines there. And in the autumn of the year, when the winds from the north curse and

whine, and the redleaved trees of the swamp mutter things to one another in the small hours of the morning

under the horned waning moon, I sit by the casement and watch that star. Down from the heights reels the

glittering Cassiopeia as the hours wear on, while Charles' Wain lumbers up from behind the vapoursoaked

swamp trees that sway in the night wind. Just before dawn Arcturus winks ruddily from above the cemetary

on the low hillock, and Coma Berenices shimmers weirdly afar off in the mysterious east; but still the Pole

Star leers down from the same place in the black vault, winking hideously like an insane watching eye which

strives to convey some strange message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey.

Well do I remember the night of the great Aurora, when over the swamp played the shocking corruscations of

And it was under a horned waning moon that I saw the city for the first time. Still and somnolent did it lie, on

a strange plateau in a hollow between strange peaks. Of ghastly marble were its walls and its towers, its

columns, domes, and pavements. In the marble streets were marble pillars, the upper parts of which were

carven into the images of grave bearded men. The air was warm and stirred not. And overhead, scarce ten

degrees from the zenith, glowed that watching Pole Star. Long did I gaze on the city, but the day came not.

When the red Aldebaran, which blinked low in the sky but never set, had crawled a quarter of the way around

the horizon, I saw light and motion in the houses and the streets. Forms strangely robed, but at once noble

and familiar, walked abroad and under the horned waning moon men talked wisdom in a tongue which I

understood, though it was unlike any language which I had ever known. And when the red Aldebaran had

crawled more than halfway around the horizon, there were again darkness and silence.

When I awaked, I was not as I had been. Upon my memory was graven the vision of the city, and within my

soul had arisen another and vaguer recollection, of whose nature I was not then certain. Thereafter, on the

cloudy nights when I could not sleep, I saw the city often; sometimes under the hot, yellow rays of a sun

which did not set, but which wheeled low in the horizon. And on the clear nights the Pole Star leered as never

Gradually I came to wonder what might be my place in that city on the strange plateau betwixt strange peaks.

At first content to view the scene as an allobservant uncorporeal presence, I now desired to define my

relation to it, and to speak my mind amongst the grave men who conversed each day in the public squares. I

said to myself, "This is no dream, for by what means can I prove the greater reality of that other life in the

house of stone and brick south of the sinister swamp and the cemetery on the low hillock, where the Pole Star

One night as I listened to the discourses in the large square containing many statues, I felt a change; and

perceived that I had at last a bodily form. Nor was I a stranger in the streets of Olathoe, which lies on the

plateau of Sarkia, betwixt the peaks of Noton and Kadiphonek. It was my friend Alos who spoke, and his

speech was one that pleased my soul, for it was the speech of a true man and patriot. That night had the news

come of Daikos' fall, and of the advance of the Inutos; squat, hellish yellow fiends who five years ago had

appeared out of the unknown west to ravage the confines of our kingdom, and to besiege many of our towns.

Having taken the fortified places at the foot of the mountains, their way now lay open to the plateau, unless

every citizen could resist with the strength of ten men. For the squat creatures were mighty in the arts of war,

and knew not the scruples of honour which held back our tall, greyeyed men of Lomar from ruthless

Alos, my friend, was commander of all the forces on the plateau, and in him lay the last hope of our country.

On this occasion he spoke of the perils to be faced and exhorted the men of Olathoe, bravest of the

Lomarians, to sustain the traditions of their ancestors, who when forced to move southward from Zobna

before the advance of the great ice sheet (even as our descendents must some day flee from the land of

Lomar) valiently and victoriously swept aside the hairly, longarmed, cannibal Gnophkehs that stood in their

way. To me Alos denied the warriors part, for I was feeble and given to strange faintings when subjected to

stress and hardships. But my eyes were the keenest in the city, despite the long hours I gave each day to the

study of the Pnakotic manuscripts and the wisdom of the Zobnarian Fathers; so my friend, desiring not to

doom me to inaction, rewarded me with that duty which was second to nothing in importance. To the

watchtower of Thapnen he sent me, there to serve as the eyes of our army. Should the Inutos attempt to gain

the citadel by the narrow pass behind the peak Noton and thereby surprise the garrison, I was to give the

signal of fire which would warn the waiting soldiers and save the town from immediate disaster.

Alone I mounted the tower, for every man of stout body was needed in the passes below. My brain was sore

dazed with excitement and fatigue, for I had not slept in many days; yet was my purpose firm, for I loved my

native land of Lomar, and the marble city Olathoe that lies betwixt the peaks Noton and Kadiphonek.

But as I stood in the tower's topmost chamber, I beheld the horned waning moon, red and sinister, quivering

through the vapours that hovered over the distant valley of Banof. And through an opening in the roof

glittered the pale Pole Star, fluttering as if alive, and leering like a fiend and tempter. Methought its spirit

whispered evil counsel, soothing me to traitorous somnolence with a damnable rhythmical promise which it

Vainly did I struggle with my drowsiness, seeking to connect these strange words with some lore of the skies

which I had learnt from the Pnakotic manuscripts. My head, heavy and reeling, drooped to my breast, and

when next I looked up it was in a dream, with the Pole Star grinning at me through a window from over the

In my shame and despair I sometimes scream frantically, begging the dreamcreatures around me to waken

me ere the Inutos steal up the pass behind the peak Noton and take the citadel by surprise; but these creatures

are daemons, for they laugh at me and tell me I am not dreaming. They mock me whilst I sleep, and whilst

the squat yellow foe may be creeping silently upon us. I have failed in my duties and betrayed the marble city

of Olathoe; I have proven false to Alos, my friend and commander. But still these shadows of my dreams

deride me. They say there is no land of Lomar, save in my nocturnal imaginings; that in these realms where

the Pole Star shines high, and red Aldebaran crawls low around the horizon, there has been naught save ice

and snow for thousands of years of years, and never a man save squat, yellow creatures, blighted by the cold,

And as I writhe in my guilty agony, frantic to save the city whose peril every moment grows, and vainly

striving to shake off this unnatural dream of a house of stone and brick south of a sinister swamp and a

cemetery on a low hillock, the Pole Star, evil and monstrous, leers down from the black vault, winking

hideously like an insane watching eye which strives to convey some message, yet recalls nothing save that it

There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have not; I dare

Men of strength and honour fashioned that Street: good valiant men of our blood who had come from the

Blessed Isles across the sea. At first it was but a path trodden by bearers of water from the woodland spring to

the cluster of houses by the beach. Then, as more men came to the growing cluster of houses and looked

about for places to dwell, they built cabins along the north side, cabins of stout oaken logs with masonry on

the side toward the forest, for many Indians lurked there with firearrows. And in a few years more, men

Up and down the Street walked grave men in conical hats, who most of the time carried muskets or fowling

pieces. And there were also their bonneted wives and sober children. In the evening these men with their

wives and children would sit about gigantic hearths and read and speak. Very simple were the things of which

they read and spoke, yet things which gave them courage and goodness and helped them by day to subdue the

forest and till the fields. And the children would listen and learn of the laws and deeds of old, and of that dear

There was war, and thereafter no more Indians troubled the Street. The men, busy with labour, waxed

prosperous and as happy as they knew how to be. And the children grew up comfortable, and more families

came from the Mother Land to dwell on the Street. And the children�s children, and the newcomers� children,

grew up. The town was now a city, and one by one the cabins gave place to houses�simple, beautiful houses

of brick and wood, with stone steps and iron railings and fanlights over the doors. No flimsy creations were

these houses, for they were made to serve many a generation. Within there were carven mantels and graceful

stairs, and sensible, pleasing furniture, china, and silver, brought from the Mother Land.

So the Street drank in the dreams of a young people and rejoiced as its dwellers became more graceful and

happy. Where once had been only strength and honour, taste and learning now abode as well. Books and

paintings and music came to the houses, and the young men went to the university which rose above the plain

to the north. In the place of conical hats and smallswords, of lace and snowy periwigs, there were

cobblestones over which clattered many a blooded horse and rumbled many a gilded coach; and brick

There were in that Street many trees: elms and oaks and maples of dignity; so that in the summer, the scene

was all soft verdure and twittering birdsong. And behind the houses were walled rosegardens with hedged

paths and sundials, where at evening the moon and stars would shine bewitchingly while fragrant blossoms

So the Street dreamed on, past wars, calamities, and change. Once, most of the young men went away, and

some never came back. That was when they furled the old flag and put up a new banner of stripes and stars.

But though men talked of great changes, the Street felt them not, for its folk were still the same, speaking of

the old familiar things in the old familiar accounts. And the trees still sheltered singing birds, and at evening

In time there were no more swords, threecornered hats, or periwigs in the Street. How strange seemed the

inhabitants with their walkingsticks, tall beavers, and cropped heads! New sounds came from the

distance�first strange puffings and shrieks from the river a mile away, and then, many years later, strange

puffings and shrieks and rumblings from other directions. The air was not quite so pure as before, but the

spirit of the place had not changed. The blood and soul of their ancestors had fashioned the Street. Nor did

the spirit change when they tore open the earth to lay down strange pipes, or when they set up tall posts

bearing weird wires. There was so much ancient lore in that Street, that the past could not easily be forgotten.

Then came days of evil, when many who had known the Street of old knew it no more, and many knew it

who had not known it before, and went away, for their accents were coarse and strident, and their mien and

faces unpleasing. Their thoughts, too, fought with the wise, just spirit of the Street, so that the Street pined

silently as its houses fell into decay, and its trees died one by one, and its rosegardens grew rank with weeds

and waste. But it felt a stir of pride one day when again marched forth young men, some of whom never came

With the years, worse fortune came to the Street. Its trees were all gone now, and its rosegardens were

displaced by the backs of cheap, ugly new buildings on parallel streets. Yet the houses remained, despite the

ravages of the years and the storms and worms, for they had been made to serve many a generation. New

kinds of faces appeared in the Street, swarthy, sinister faces with furtive eyes and odd features, whose owners

.spoke unfamiliar words and placed signs in known and unknown characters upon most of the musty houses.

Pushcarts crowded the gutters. A sordid, undefinable stench settled over the place, and the ancient spirit

Great excitement once came to the Street. War and revolution were raging across the seas; a dynasty had

collapsed, and its degenerate subjects were flocking with dubious intent to the Western Land. Many of these

took lodgings in the battered houses that had once known the songs of birds and the scent of roses. Then the

Western Land itself awoke and joined the Mother Land in her titanic struggle for civilization. Over the cities

once more floated the old flag, companioned by the new flag, and by a plainer, yet glorious tricolour. But not

many flags floated over the Street, for therein brooded only fear and hatred and ignorance. Again young men

went forth, but not quite as did the young men of those other days. Something was lacking. And the sons of

those young men of other days, who did indeed go forth in olivedrab with the true spirit of their ancestors,

Over the seas there was a great victory, and in triumph most of the young men returned. Those who had

lacked something lacked it no longer, yet did fear and hatred and ignorance still brood over the Street; for

many had stayed behind, and many strangers had come from distance places to the ancient houses. And the

young men who had returned dwelt there no longer. Swarthy and sinister were most of the strangers, yet

among them one might find a few faces like those who fashioned the Street and moulded its spirit. Like and

yet unlike, for there was in the eyes of all a weird, unhealthy glitter as of greed, ambition, vindictiveness, or

misguided zeal. Unrest and treason were abroad amongst an evil few who plotted to strike the Western Land

its death blow, that they might mount to power over its ruins, even as assassins had mounted in that unhappy,

frozen land from whence most of them had come. And the heart of that plotting was in the Street, whose

crumbling houses teemed with alien makers of discord and echoed with the plans and speeches of those who

Of the various odd assemblages in the Street, the Law said much but could prove little. With great diligence

did men of hidden badges linger and listen about such places as Petrovitch�s Bakery, the squalid Rifkin

School of Modern Economics, the Circle Social Club, and the Liberty Cafe. There congregated sinister men

in great numbers, yet always was their speech guarded or in a foreign tongue. And still the old houses stood,

with their forgotten lore of nobler, departed centuries; of sturdy Colonial tenants and dewy rosegardens in

the moonlight. Sometimes a lone poet or traveler would come to view them, and would try to picture them in

The rumour now spread widely that these houses contained the leaders of a vast band of terrorists, who on a

designated day were to launch an orgy of slaughter for the extermination of America and of all the fine old

traditions which the Street had loved. Handbills and papers fluttered about filthy gutters; handbills and papers

printed in many tongues and in many characters, yet all bearing messages of crime and rebellion. In these

writings the people were urged to tear down the laws and virtues that our fathers had exalted, to stamp out the

soul of the old America�the soul that was bequeathed through a thousand and a half years of AngloSaxon

freedom, justice, and moderation. It was said that the swart men who dwelt in the Street and congregated in

its rotting edifices were the brains of a hideous revolution, that at their word of command many millions of

brainless, besotted beasts would stretch forth their noisome talons from the slums of a thousand cities,

burning, slaying, and destroying till the land of our fathers should be no more. All this was said and repeated,

and many looked forward in dread to the fourth day of July, about which the strange writings hinted much;

yet could nothing be found to place the guilt. None could tell just whose arrest might cut off the damnable

plotting at its source. Many times came bands of bluecoated police to search the shaky houses, though at last

they ceased to come; for they too had grown tired of law and order, and had abandoned all the city to its fate.

Then men in olivedrab came, bearing muskets, till it seemed as if in its sad sleep the Street must have some

haunting dreams of those other days, when musketbearing men in conical hats walked along it from the

woodland spring to the cluster of houses by the beach. Yet could no act be performed to check the impending

So the Street slept uneasily on, till one night there gathered in Petrovitch�s Bakery, and the Rifkin School of

Modern Economics, and the Circle Social Club, and Liberty Cafe, and in other places as well, vast hordes of

men whose eyes were big with horrible triumph and expectation. Over hidden wires strange messages

traveled, and much was said of still stranger messages yet to travel; but most of this was not guessed till

afterward, when the Western Land was safe from the peril. The men in olivedrab could not tell what was

happening, or what they ought to do; for the swart, sinister men were skilled in subtlety and concealment.

And yet the men in olivedrab will always remember that night, and will speak of the Street as they tell of it

to their grandchildren; for many of them were sent there toward morning on a mission unlike that which they

had expected. It was known that this nest of anarchy was old, and that the houses were tottering from the

ravages of the years and the storms and worms; yet was the happening of that summer night a surprise

because of its very queer uniformity. It was, indeed, an exceedingly singular happening, though after all, a

simple one. For without warning, in one of the small hours beyond midnight, all the ravages of the years and

the storms and the worms came to a tremendous climax; and after the crash there was nothing left standing in

the Street save two ancient chimneys and part of a stout brick wall. Nor did anything that had been alive

come alive from the ruins. A poet and a traveler, who came with the mighty crowd that sought the scene, tell

odd stories. The poet says that all through the hours before dawn he beheld sordid ruins indistinctly in the

glare of the arclights; that there loomed above the wreckage another picture wherein he could describe

moonlight and fair houses and elms and oaks and maples of dignity. And the traveler declares that instead of

the place�s wonted stench there lingered a delicate fragrance as of roses in full bloom. But are not the dreams

There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have not; I dare

Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth

which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous. Science, already oppressive with its shocking

revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species�if separate species we be�for

its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world. If we knew

what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur Jermyn did; and Arthur Jermyn soaked himself in oil and set fire to

his clothing one night. No one placed the charred fragments in an urn or set a memorial to him who had been;

for certain papers and a certain boxed object were found which made men wish to forget. Some who knew

Arthur Jermyn went out on the moor and burned himself after seeing the boxed object which had come from

Africa. It was this object, and not his peculiar personal appearance, which made him end his life. Many

would have disliked to live if possessed of the peculiar features of Arthur Jermyn, but he had been a poet and

scholar and had not minded. Learning was in his blood, for his greatgrandfather, Sir Robert Jermyn, Bt., had

been an anthropologist of note, whilst his greatgreatgreatgrandfather, Sir Wade Jermyn, was one of the

earliest explorers of the Congo region, and had written eruditely of its tribes, animals, and supposed

antiquities. Indeed, old Sir Wade had possessed an intellectual zeal amounting almost to a mania; his bizarre

conjectures on a prehistoric white Congolese civilisation earning him much ridicule when his book,

Observation on the Several Parts of Africa, was published. In 1765 this fearless explorer had been placed in a

Madness was in all the Jermyns, and people were glad there were not many of them. The line put forth no

branches, and Arthur was the last of it. If he had not been, one can not say what he would have done when the

object came. The Jermyns never seemed to look quite right�something was amiss, though Arthur was the

worst, and the old family portraits in Jermyn House showed fine faces enough before Sir Wade�s time.

Certainly, the madness began with Sir Wade, whose wild stories of Africa were at once the delight and terror

of his few friends. It showed in his collection of trophies and specimens, which were not such as a normal

man would accumulate and preserve, and appeared strikingly in the Oriental seclusion in which he kept his

wife. The latter, he had said, was the daughter of a Portuguese trader whom he had met in Africa; and did not

like English ways. She, with an infant son born in Africa, had accompanied him back from the second and

longest of his trips, and had gone with him on the third and last, never returning. No one had ever seen her

closely, not even the servants; for her disposition had been violent and singular. During her brief stay at

Jermyn House she occupied a remote wing, and was waited on by her husband alone. Sir Wade was, indeed,

most peculiar in his solicitude for his family; for when he returned to Africa he would permit no one to care

for his young son save a loathsome black woman from Guinea. Upon coming back, after the death of Lady

But it was the talk of Sir Wade, especially when in his cups, which chiefly led his friends to deem him mad.

In a rational age like the eighteenth century it was unwise for a man of learning to talk about wild sights and

strange scenes under a Congo moon; of the gigantic walls and pillars of a forgotten city, crumbling and

vinegrown, and of damp, silent, stone steps leading interminably down into the darkness of abysmal

treasurevaults and inconceivable catacombs. Especially was it unwise to rave of the living things that might

haunt such a place; of creatures half of the jungle and half of the impiously aged city�fabulous creatures

which even a Pliny might describe with scepticism; things that might have sprung up after the great apes had

overrun the dying city with the walls and the pillars, the vaults and the weird carvings. Yet after he came

home for the last time Sir Wade would speak of such matters with a shudderingly uncanny zest, mostly after

his third glass at the Knight�s Head; boasting of what he had found in the jungle and of how he had dwelt

among terrible ruins known only to him. And finally he had spoken of the living things in such a manner that

he was taken to the madhouse. He had shown little regret when shut into the barred room at Huntingdon, for

his mind moved curiously. Ever since his son had commenced to grow out of infancy, he had liked his home

less and less, till at last he had seemed to dread it. The Knight�s Head had been his headquarters, and when he

was confined he expressed some vague gratitude as if for protection. Three years later he died.

Wade Jermyn�s son Philip was a highly peculiar person. Despite a strong physical resemblance to his father,

his appearance and conduct were in many particulars so coarse that he was universally shunned. Though he

did not inherit the madness which was feared by some, he was densely stupid and given to brief periods of

uncontrollable violence. In frame he was small, but intensely powerful, and was of incredible agility. Twelve

years after succeeding to his title he married the daughter of his gamekeeper, a person said to be of gypsy

extraction, but before his son was born joined the navy as a common sailor, completing the general disgust

which his habits and misalliance had begun. After the close of the American war he was heard of as sailor on

a merchantman in the African trade, having a kind of reputation for feats of strength and climbing, but finally

In the son of Sir Philip Jermyn the now accepted family peculiarity took a strange and fatal turn. Tall and

fairly handsome, with a sort of weird Eastern grace despite certain slight oddities of proportion, Robert

Jermyn began life as a scholar and investigator. It was he who first studied scientifically the vast collection of

relics which his mad grandfather had brought from Africa, and who made the family name as celebrated in

ethnology as in exploration. In 1815 Sir Robert married a daughter of the seventh Viscount Brightholme and

was subsequently blessed with three children, the eldest and youngest of whom were never publicly seen on

account of deformities in mind and body. Saddened by these family misfortunes, the scientist sought relief in

work, and made two long expeditions in the interior of Africa. In 1849 his second son, Nevil, a singularly

repellent person who seemed to combine the surliness of Philip Jermyn with the hauteur of the Brightholmes,

ran away with a vulgar dancer, but was pardoned upon his return in the following year. He came back to

Jermyn House a widower with an infant son, Alfred, who was one day to be the father of Arthur Jermyn.

Friends said that it was this series of griefs which unhinged the mind of Sir Robert Jermyn, yet it was

probably merely a bit of African folklore which caused the disaster. The elderly scholar had been collecting

legends of the Onga tribes near the field of his grandfather�s and his own explorations, hoping in some way to

account for Sir Wade�s wild tales of a lost city peopled by strange hybrid creatures. A certain consistency in

the strange papers of his ancestor suggested that the madman�s imagination might have been stimulated by

native myths. On October 19, 1852, the explorer Samuel Seaton called at Jermyn House with a manuscript of

notes collected among the Ongas, believing that certain legends of a gray city of white apes ruled by a white

god might prove valuable to the ethnologist. In his conversation he probably supplied many additional

details; the nature of which will never be known, since a hideous series of tragedies suddenly burst into

being. When Sir Robert Jermyn emerged from his library he left behind the strangled corpse of the explorer,

and before he could be restrained, had put an end to all three of his children; the two who were never seen,

and the son who had run away. Nevil Jermyn died in the successful defence of his own twoyearold son,

who had apparently been included in the old man�s madly murderous scheme. Sir Robert himself, after

repeated attempts at suicide and a stubborn refusal to utter an articulate sound, died of apoplexy in the second

Sir Alfred Jermyn was a baronet before his fourth birthday, but his tastes never matched his title. At twenty

he had joined a band of musichall performers, and at thirtysix had deserted his wife and child to travel with

an itinerant American circus. His end was very revolting. Among the animals in the exhibition with which he

travelled was a huge bull gorilla of lighter colour than the average; a surprisingly tractable beast of much

popularity with the performers. With this gorilla Alfred Jermyn was singularly fascinated, and on many

occasions the two would eye each other for long periods through the intervening bars. Eventually Jermyn

asked and obtained permission to train the animal,, astonishing audiences and fellow performers alike with

his success. One morning in Chicago, as the gorilla and Alfred Jermyn were rehearsing an exceedingly clever

boxing match, the former delivered a blow of more than the usual force, hurting both the body and the dignity

of the amateur trainer. Of what followed, members of �The Greatest Show On Earth� do not like to speak.

They did not expect to hear Sir Alfred Jermyn emit a shrill, inhuman scream, or to see him seize his clumsy

antagonist with both hands, dash it to the floor of the cage, and bite fiendishly at its hairy throat. The gorilla

was off its guard, but not for long, and before anything could be done by the regular trainer, the body which

Arthur Jermyn was the son of Sir Alfred Jermyn and a musichall singer of unknown origin. When the

husband and father deserted his family, the mother took the child to Jermyn House; where there was none left

to object to her presence. She was not without notions of what a nobleman�s dignity should be, and saw to it

that her son received the best education which limited money could provide. The family resources were now

sadly slender, and Jermyn House had fallen into woeful disrepair, but young Arthur loved the old edifice and

all its contents. He was not like any other Jermyn who had ever lived, for he was a poet and� a dreamer. Some

of the neighbouring families who had heard tales of old Sir Wade Jermyn�s unseen Portuguese wife declared

that her Latin blood must be showing itself; but most persons merely sneered at his sensitiveness to beauty,

attributing it to his musichall mother, who was socially unrecognised. The poetic delicacy of Arthur Jermyn

was the more remarkable because of his uncouth personal appearance. Most of the Jermyns had possessed a

subtly odd and repellent cast, but Arthur�s case was very striking. It is hard to say just what he resembled, but

his expression, his facial angle, and the length of his arms gave a thrill of repulsion to those who met him for

It was the mind and character of Arthur Jermyn which atoned for his aspect. Gifted and learned, he took

highest honours at Oxford and seemed likely to redeem the intellectual fame of his family. Though of poetic

rather than scientific temperament, he planned to continue the work of his forefathers in African ethnology

and antiquities, utilising the truly wonderful though strange collection of Sir Wade. With his fanciful mind he

thought often of the prehistoric civilisation in which the mad explorer had so implicitly believed, and would

weave tale after tale about the silent jungle city mentioned in the latter�s wilder notes and paragraphs. For the

nebulous utterances concerning a nameless, unsuspected race of jungle hybrids he had a peculiar feeling of

mingled terror and attraction, speculating on the possible basis of such a fancy, and seeking to obtain light

among the more recent data gleaned by his greatgrandfather and Samuel Seaton amongst the Ongas.

In 1911, after the death of his mother, Sir Arthur Jermyn determined to pursue his investigations to the

utmost extent. Selling a portion of his estate to obtain the requisite money, he outfitted an expedition and

sailed for the Congo. Arranging with the Belgian authorities for a party of guides, he spent a year in the Onga

and Kahn country, finding data beyond the highest of his expectations. Among the Kaliris was an aged chief

called Mwanu, who possessed not only a highly retentive memory, but a singular degree of intelligence and

interest in old legends. This ancient confirmed every tale which Jermyn had heard, adding his own account of

According to Mwanu, the gray city and the hybrid creatures were no more, having been annihilated by the

warlike N�bangus many years ago. This tribe, after destroying most of the edifices and killing the live beings,

had carried off the stuffed goddess which had been the object of their quest; the white apegoddess which the

strange beings worshipped, and which was held by Congo tradition to be the form of one who had reigned as

a princess among these beings. Just what the white apelike creatures could have been, Mwanu had no idea,

but he thought they were the builders of the ruined city. Jermyn could form no conjecture, but by close

The apeprincess, it was said, became the consort of a great white god who had come out of the West. For a

long time they had reigned over the city together, but when they had a son, all three went away. Later the god

and princess had returned, and upon the death of the princess her divine husband had mummified the body

and enshrined it in a vast house of stone, where it was worshipped. Then he departed alone. The legend here

seemed to present three variants. According to one story, nothing further happened save that the stuffed

goddess became a symbol of supremacy for whatever tribe might possess it. It was for this reason that the

N�bangus carried it off. A second story told of a god�s return and death at the feet of his enshrined wife. A

third told of the return of the son, grown to manhood�or apehood or godhood, as the case might be�yet

unconscious of his identity. Surely the imaginative blacks had made the most of whatever events might lie

Of the reality of the jungle city described by old Sir Wade, Arthur Jermyn had no further doubt; and was

hardly astonished when early in 1912 he came upon what was left of it. Its size must have been exaggerated,

yet the stones lying about proved that it was no mere Negro village. Unfortunately no carvings could be

found, and the small size of the expedition prevented operations toward clearing the one visible passageway

that seemed to lead down into the system of vaults which Sir Wade had mentioned. The white apes and the

stuffed goddess were discussed with all the native chiefs of the region, but it remained for a European to

improve on the data offered by old Mwanu. M. Verhaeren, Belgian agent at a tradingpost on the

Congo, believed that he could not only locate but obtain the stuffed goddess, of which he had vaguely heard;

since the once mighty N�bangus were now the submissive servants of King Albert�s government, and with

but little persuasion could be induced to part with the gruesome deity they had carried off. When Jermyn

sailed for England, therefore, it was with the exultant probability that he would within a few months receive a

priceless ethnological relic confirming the wildest of his greatgreatgreatgrandfather�s narratives�that is,

the wildest which he had ever heard. Countrymen near Jermyn House had perhaps heard wilder tales handed

down from ancestors who had listened to Sir Wade around the tables of the Knight�s Head.

Arthur Jermyn waited very patiently for the expected box from M. Verhaeren, meanwhile studying with

increased diligence the manuscripts left by his mad ancestor. He began to feel closely akin to Sir Wade, and

to seek relics of the latter�s personal life in England as well as of his African exploits. Oral accounts of the

mysterious and secluded wife had been numerous, but no tangible relic of her stay at Jermyn House

remained. Jermyn wondered what circumstance had prompted or permitted such an effacement, and decided

that the husband�s insanity was the prime cause. His greatgreatgreatgrandmother, he recalled, was said to

have been the daughter of a Portuguese trader in Africa. No doubt her practical heritage and superficial

knowledge of the Dark Continent had caused her to flout Sir Wade�s tales of the interior, a thing which such a

man would not be likely to forgive. She had died in Africa, perhaps dragged thither by a husband determined

to prove what he had told. But as Jermyn indulged in these reflections he could not but smile at their futility,

In June, 1913, a letter arrived from M. Verhaeren, telling of the finding of the stuffed goddess. It was, the

Belgian averred, a most extraordinary object; an object quite beyond the power of a layman to classify.

Whether it was human or simian only a scientist could determine, and the process of determination would be

greatly hampered by its imperfect condition. Time and the Congo climate are not kind to mummies;

especially when their preparation is as amateurish as seemed to be the case here. Around the creature�s neck

�had been found a golden chain bearing an empty locket on which were armorial designs; no doubt some

hapless traveller�s keepsake, taken by the N�bangus and hung upon the goddess as a charm. In commenting

on the contour of the mummy�s face, M. Verhaeren suggested a whimsical comparison; or rather, expressed a

humorous wonder just how it would strike his corespondent, but was too much interested scientifically to

waste many words in levity. The stuffed. goddess, he wrote, would arrive duly packed about a month after

The boxed object was delivered at Jermyn House on the afternoon of August 3, 1913, being conveyed

immediately to the large chamber which housed the collection of African specimens as arranged by Sir

Robert and Arthur. What ensued can best be gathered from the tales of servants and from things and papers

later examined. Of the various tales, that of aged Soames, the family butler, is most ample and coherent.

According to this trustworthy man, Sir Arthur Jermyn dismissed everyone from the room before opening the

box, though the instant sound of hammer and chisel showed that he did not delay the operation. Nothing was

heard for some time; just how long Soames cannot exactly estimate, but it was certainly less than a quarter of

an hour later that the horrible scream, undoubtedly in Jermyn�s voice, was heard. Immediately afterward

Jermyn emerged from the room, rushing frantically toward the front of the house as if pursued by some

hideous enemy. The expression on his face, a face ghastly enough in repose, was beyond description. When

near the front door he seemed to think of something, and turned back in his flight, finally disappearing down

the stairs to the cellar. The servants were utterly dumbfounded, and watched at the head of the stairs, but their

master did not return. A smell of oil was all that came up from the regions below. After dark a rattling was

heard at the door leading from the cellar into the courtyard; and a stableboy saw Arthur Jermyn, glistening

from head to foot with oil and redolent of that fluid, steal furtively out and vanish on the black moor

surrounding the house. Then, in an exaltation of supreme horror, everyone saw the end. A spark appeared on

the moor, a flame arose, and a pillar of human fire reached to the heavens. The house of Jermyn no longer

The reason why Arthur Jermyn�s charred fragments were not collected and buried lies in what was found

afterward, principally the thing in the box. The stuffed goddess was a nauseous sight, withered and eaten

away, but it was clearly a mummified white ape of some unknown species, less hairy than any recorded

variety, and infinitely nearer mankind�quite shockingly so. Detailed description would be rather unpleasant,

but two salient particulars must be told, for they fit in revoltingly with certain notes of Sir Wade Jermyn�s

African expeditions and with the Congolese legends of the white god and the apeprincess. The two

particulars in question are these: the arms on the golden locket about the creature�s neck were the Jermyn

arms, and the jocose suggestion of M. Verhaeren about certain resemblance as connected with the shrivelled

face applied with vivid, ghastly, and unnatural horror to none other than the sensitive Arthur Jermyn,

greatgreatgreatgrandson of Sir Wade Jermyn and an unknown wife. Members of the Royal

Anthropological Institute burned the thing and threw the locket into a well, and some of them do not admit

When the last days were upon me, and the ugly trifles of existence began to drive me to madness like the

small drops of water that torturers let fall ceaselessly upon one spot of their victims body, I loved the irradiate

refuge of sleep. In my dreams I found a little of the beauty I had vainly sought in life, and wandered through

Once when the wind was soft and scented I heard the south calling, and sailed endlessly and languorously

Once when the gentle rain fell I glided in a barge down a sunless stream under the earth till I reached another

And once I walked through a golden valley that led to shadowy groves and ruins, and ended in a mighty wall

Many times I walked through that valley, and longer and longer would I pause in the spectral halflight

where the giant trees squirmed and twisted grotesquely, and the grey ground stretched damply from trunk to

trunk, some times disclosing the mouldstained stones of buried temples. And alway the goal of my fancies

After a while, as the days of waking became less and less bearable from their greyness and sameness, I would

often drift in opiate peace through the valley and the shadowy groves, and wonder how I might seize them for

my eternal dwellingplace, so that I need no more crawl back to a dull world stript of interest and new

colours. And as I looked upon the little gate in the mighty wall, I felt that beyond it lay a dreamcountry from

So each night in sleep I strove to find the hidden latch of the gate in the ivied antique wall, though it was

exceedingly well hidden. And I would tell myself that the realm beyond the wall was not more lasting

Then one night in the dreamcity of Zakarion I found a yellowed papyrus filled with the thoughts of

dreamsages who dwelt of old in that city, and who were too wise ever to be born in the waking world.

Therein were written many things concerning the world of dream, and among them was lore of a golden

valley and a sacred grove with temples, and a high wall pierced by a little bronze gate. When I saw this lore, I

knew that it touched on the scenes I had haunted, and I therefore read long in the yellowed papyrus.

Some of the dreamsages wrote gorgeously of the wonders beyond the irrepassable gate, but others told of

horror and disappointment. I knew not which to believe, yet longed more and more to cross for ever into the

unknown land; for doubt and secrecy are the lure of lures, and no new horror can be more terrible than the

daily torture of the commonplace. So when I learned of the drug which would unlock the gate and drive me

Last night I swallowed the drug and floated dreamily into the golden valley and the shadowy groves; and

when I came this time to the antique wall, I saw that the small gate of bronze was ajar. From beyond came a

glow that weirdly lit the giant twisted trees and the tops of the buried temples, and I drifted on songfully,

But as the gate swung wider and the sorcery of the drug and the dream pushed me through, I knew that all

sights and glories were at an end; for in that new realm was neither land nor sea, but only the white void of

unpeopled and illimitable space. So, happier than I had ever dared hope to be, I dissolved again into that

native infinity of crystal oblivion from which the daemon Life had called me for one brief and desolate hour.

Of the pleasures and pains of opium much has been written. The ecstasies and horrors of De Quincey and the

paradis artificiels of Baudelaire are preserved and interpreted with an art which makes them immortal, and

the world knows well the beauty, the terror and the mystery of those obscure realms into which the inspired

dreamer is transported. But much as has been told, no man has yet dared intimate the nature of the phantasms

thus unfolded to the mind, or hint at the direction of the unheardof roads along whose ornate and exotic

course the partaker of the drug is so irresistibly borne. De Quincey was drawn back into Asia, that teeming

land of nebulous shadows whose hideous antiquity is so impressive that "the vast age of the race and name

overpowers the sense of youth in the individual," but farther than that he dared not go. Those who have gone

farther seldom returned, and even when they have, they have been either silent or quite mad. I took opium but

once in the year of the plague, when doctors sought to deaden the agonies they could not cure. There was

an overdose my physician was worn out with horror and exertion and I travelled very far indeed. In the

end I returned and lived, but my nights are filled with strange memories, nor have I ever permitted a doctor to

The pain and pounding in my head had been quite unendurable when the drug was administered, Of the

future I had no heed; to escape, whether by cure, unconsciousness, or death, was all that concerned me. I was

partly delirious, so that it is hard to place the exact moment of transition, but I think the effect must have

begun shortly before the pounding ceased to be painful. As I have said, there was an overdose; so my

reactions were probably far from normal. The sensation of falling, curiously dissociated from the idea of

gravity or direction, was paramount; though there was subsidiary impression of unseen throngs in

incalculable profusion, throngs of infinitely diverse nature, but all more or less related to me. Sometimes it

seemed less as though I were falling, than as though the universe or the ages were falling past me. Suddenly

my pain ceased, and I began to associate the pounding with an external rather than internal force. The falling

had ceased also, giving place to a sensation of uneasy, temporary rest; and when I listened closely, I fancied

the pounding was that of the vast, inscrutable sea as its sinister, colossal breakers lacerated some desolate

For a moment my surroundings seemed confused, like a projected image hopelessly out of focus, but

gradually I realised my solitary presence in a strange and beautiful room lighted by many windows. Of the

exact nature of the apartment I could form no idea, for my thoughts were still far from settled, but I noticed

vancoloured rugs and draperies, elaborately fashioned tables, chairs, ottomans, and divans, and delicate

vases and ornaments which conveyed a suggestion of the exotic without being actually alien. These things I

noticed, yet they were not long uppermost in my mind. Slowly but inexorably crawling upon my

consciousness and rising above every other impression, came a dizzying fear of the unknown; a fear all the

greater because I could not analyse it, and seeming to concern a stealthily approaching menace; not death, but

Presently I realised that the direct symbol and excitant of my fear was the hideous pounding whose incessant

reverberations throbbed maddeningly against my exhausted brain. It seemed to come from a point outside and

below the edifice in which I stood, and to associate itself with the most terrifying mental images. I felt that

some horrible scene or object lurked beyond the silkhung walls, and shrank from glancing through the

arched, latticed windows that opened so bewilderingly on every hand. Perceiving shutters attached to these

windows, I closed them all, averting my eyes from the exterior as I did so. Then, employing a flint and steel

which I found on one of the small tables, I lit the many candles reposing about the walls in arabesque

sconces. The added sense of security brought by closed shutters and artificial light calmed my nerves to some

degree, but I could not shut out the monotonous pounding. Now that I was calmer, the sound became as

fascinating as it was fearful, and I felt a contradictory desire to seek out its source despite my still powerful

shrinking. Opening a portiere at the side of the room nearest the pounding, I beheld a small and richly draped

corridor ending in a cavern door and large oriel window. To this window I was irresistibly drawn, though my

illdefined apprehensions seemed almost equally bent on holding me back. As I approached it I could see a

chaotic whirl of waters in the distance. Then, as I attained it and glanced out on all sides, the stupendous

I beheld such a sight as I had never beheld before, and which no living person can have seen save in the

delirium of fever or the inferno of opium. The building stood on a narrow point of land or what was now a

narrow point of land fully three hundred feet above what must lately have been a seething vortex of mad

waters. On either side of the house there fell a newly washedout precipice of red earth, whilst ahead of me

the hideous waves were still rolling in frightfully, eating away the land with ghastly monotony and

deliberation. Out a mile or more there rose and fell menacing breakers at least fifty feet in height, and on the

far horizon ghoulish black clouds of grotesque contour were resting and brooding like unwholesome vultures.

The waves were dark and purplish, almost black, and clutched at the yielding red mud of the bank as if with

uncouth, greedy hands. I could not but feel that some noxious marine mind had declared a war of

Recovering at length from the stupor into which this unnatural spectacle had thrown me, I realized that my

actual physical danger was acute. Even whilst I gazed, the bank had lost many feet, and it could not be long

before the house would fall undermined into the awful pit of lashing waves. Accordingly I hastened to the

opposite side of the edifice, and finding a door, emerged at once, locking it after me with a curious key which

had hung inside. I now beheld more of the strange region about me, and marked a singular division which

seemed to exist in the hostile ocean and firmament. On each side of the jutting promontory different

conditions held sway. At my left as I faced inland was a gently heaving sea with great green waves rolling

peacefully in under a brightly shining sun. Something about that sun�s nature and position made me shudder,

but I could not then tell, and cannot tell now, what it was. At my right also was the sea, but it was blue, calm,

and only gently undulating, while the sky above it was darker and the washedout bank more nearly white

I now turned my attention to the land, and found occasion for fresh surprise; for the vegetation resembled

nothing I had ever seen or read about. It was apparently tropical or at least subtropical a conclusion

borne out by the intense heat of the air. Sometimes I thought I could trace strange analogies with the flora of

my native land, fancying that the wellknown plants and shrubs might assume such forms under a radical

change of climate; but the gigantic and omnipresent palm trees were plainly foreign. The house I had just left

was very small hardly more than a cottage but its material was evidently marble, and its architecture

was weird and composite, involving a quaint fusion of Western and Eastern forms. At the corners were

Corinthian columns, but the red tile roof was like that of a Chinese pagoda. From the door inland there

stretched a path of singularly white sand, about four feet wide, and lined on either side with stately palms and

unidentifiable flowering shrubs and plants. It lay toward the side of the promontory where the sea was blue

and the bank rather whitish. Down this path I felt impelled to flee, as if pursued by some malignant spirit

from the pounding ocean. At first it was slightly uphill, then I reached a gentle crest. Behind me I saw the

scene I had left; the entire point with the cottage and the black water, with the green sea on one side and the

blue sea on the other, and a curse unnamed and unnamable lowering over all. I never saw it again, and often

wonder.... After this last look I strode ahead and surveyed the inland panorama before me.

The path, as I have intimated, ran along the righthand shore as one went inland. Ahead and to the left I now

viewed a magnificent valley comprising thousands of acres, and covered with a swaying growth of tropical

grass higher than my head. Almost at the limit of vision was a colossal palm tree which seemed to fascinate

and beckon me. By this time wonder and� escape from the imperilled peninsula had largely dissipated my

fear, but as I paused and sank fatigued to the path, idiy digging with my hands into the warm, whitishgolden

sand, a new and acute sense of danger seized me. Some terror in the swishing tall grass seemed added to that

of the diabolically pounding sea, and I started up crying aloud and disjointedly, "Tiger? Tiger? Is it Tiger?

Beast? Beast? Is it a Beast that I am afraid of?" My mind wandered back to an ancient and classical story of

tigers which I had read; I strove to recall the author, but had difficulty. Then in the midst of my fear I

remembered that the tale was by Rudyard Kipling; nor did the grotesqueness of deeming him an ancient

author occur to me; I wished for the volume containing this story, and had almost started back toward the

doomed cottage to procure it when my better sense and the lure of the palm prevented me.

Whether or not I could have resisted the backward beckoning without the counterfascination of the vast

palm tree, I do not know. This attraction was now dominant, and I left the path and crawled on hands and

knees down the valley�s slope despite my fear of the grass and of the serpents it might contain. I resolved to

fight for life and reason as long as possible against all menaces of sea or land, though I sometimes feared

defeat as the maddening swish of the uncanny grasses joined the still audible and irritating pounding of the

distant breakers. I would frequently pause and put my hands to my ears for relief, but could never quite shut

out the detestable sound. It was, as it seemed to me, only after ages that I finally dragged myself to the

There now ensued a series of incidents which transported me to the opposite extremes of ecstasy and horror;

incidents which I tremble to recall and dare not seek to interpret. No sooner had I crawled beneath the

overhanging foliage of the palm, than there dropped from its branches a young child of such beauty as I never

beheld before. Though ragged and dusty, this being bore the features of a faun or demigod, and seemed

almost to diffuse a radiance in the dense shadow of the tree. It smiled and extended its hand, but before I

could arise and speak I heard in the upper air the exquisite melody of singing; notes high and low blent with a

sublime and ethereal harmoniousness. The sun had by this time sunk below the horizon, and in the twilight I

saw an aureole of lambent light encircled the child�s head. Then in a tone of silver it addressed me: �It is the

end. They have come down through the gloaming from the stars. Now all is over, and beyond the Arinurian

streams we shall dwell blissfully in Teloe.� As the child spoke, I beheld a soft radiance through the leaves of

the palm tree, and rising, greeted a pair whom I knew to be the chief singers among those I had heard. A god

and goddess they must have been, for such beauty is not mortal; and they took my hands, saying, �Come,

child, you have heard the voices, and all is well. In Teloe beyond the Milky Way and the Arinurian streams

are cities all of amber and chalcedony. And upon their domes of many facets glisten the images of strange

and beautiful stars. Under the ivory bridges of Teloe flow rivers of liquid gold bearing pleasurebarges

bound for blossomy Cytharion of the Seven Suns. And in Teloe and Cytharion abide only youth, beauty, and

pleasure, nor are any sounds heard, save of laughter, song, and the lute. Only the gods dwell in Teloe of the

As I listened, enchanted, I suddenly became aware of a change in my surroundings. The palm tree, so lately

overshadowing my exhausted form, was now some distance to my left and considerably below me. I was

obviously floating in the atmosphere; companioned not only by the strange child and the radiant pair, but by a

constantly increasing throng of halfluminous, vinecrowned youths and maidens with windblown hair and

joyful countenance. We slowly ascended together, as if borne on a fragrant breeze which blew not from the

earth but from the golden nebulae, and the child whispered in my ear that I must look always upward to the

pathways of light, and never backward to the sphere I had just left. The youths and maidens now chanted

mellifluous choriambics to the accompaniment of lutes, and I felt enveloped in a peace and happiness more

profound than any I had in life imagined, when the intrusion of a single sound altered my destiny and

shattered my soul. Through the ravishing strains of the singers and the lutanists, as if in mocking, daemoniac

concord, throbbed from gulfs below the damnable, the detestable pounding of that hideous ocean. As those

black breakers beat their message into my ears I forgot the words of the child and looked back, down upon

Down through the aether I saw the accursed earth slowly turning, ever turning, with angry and tempestuous

seas gnawing at wild desolate shores and dashing foam against the tottering towers of deserted cities. And

under a ghastly moon there gleamed sights I can never describe, sights I can never forget; deserts of

corpselike clay and jungles of ruin and decadence where once stretched the populous plains and villages of

my native land, and maelstroms of frothing ocean where once rose the mighty temples of my forefathers.

Mound the northern pole steamed a morass of noisome growths and miasmal vapours, hissing before the

onslaught of the evermounting waves that curled and fretted from the shuddering deep. Then a rending

report dave the night, and athwart the desert of deserts appeared a smoking rift. Still the black ocean foamed

and gnawed, eating away the desert on either side as the rift in the center widened and widened.

There was now no land left but the desert, and still the fuming ocean ate and ate. All at once I thought even

the pounding sea seemed afraid of something, afraid of dark gods of the inner earth that are greater than the

evil god of waters, but even if it was it could not turn back; and the desert had suffered too much from those

nightmare waves to help them now. So the ocean ate the last of the land and poured into the smoking gulf,

thereby giving up all it had ever conquered. From the newflooded lands it flowed again, uncovering death

and decay; and from its ancient and immemorial bed it trickled loathsomely, uncovering nighted secrets of

the years when Time was young and the gods unborn. Above the waves rose weedy remembered spires. The

moon laid pale lilies of light on dead London, and Paris stood up from its damp grave to be sanctified with

stardust. Then rose spires and monoliths that were weedy but not remembered; terrible spires and monoliths

There was not any pounding now, but only the unearthly roaring and hissing of waters tumbling into the rift.

The smoke of that rift had changed to steam, and almost hid the world as it grew denser and denser. It seared

my face and hands, and when I looked to see how it affected my companions I found they had all

disappeared. Then very suddenly it ended, and I knew no more till I awaked upon a bed of convalescence. As

the cloud of steam from the Plutonic gulf finally concealed the entire surface from my sight, all the firmament

shrieked at a sudden agony of mad reverberations which shook the trembling aether. In one delirious flash

and burst it happened; one blinding, deafening holocaust of fire, smoke, and thunder that dissolved the wan

And when the smoke cleared away, and I sought to look upon the earth, I beheld against the background of

cold, humorous stars only the dying sun and the pale mournful planets searching for their sister.

It was the design of Angelo Ricci and Joe Czanek and Manuel Silva to call on the Terrible Old Man. This old

man dwells all alone in a very ancient house on Water Street near the sea, and is reputed to be both

exceedingly rich and exceedingly feeble; which forms a situation very attractive to men of the profession of

Messrs. Ricci, Czanek, and Silva, for that profession was nothing less dignified than robbery.

The inhabitants of Kingsport say and think many things about the Terrible Old Man which generally keep

him safe from the attention of gentlemen like Mr. Ricci and his colleagues, despite the almost certain fact that

he hides a fortune of indefinite magnitude somewhere about his musty and venerable abode. He is, in truth, a

very strange person, believed to have been a captain of East India clipper ships in his day; so old that no one

can remember when he was young, and so taciturn that few know his real name. Among the gnarled trees in

the front yard of his aged and neglected place he maintains a strange collection of large stones, oddly grouped

and painted so that they resemble the idols in some obscure Eastern temple. This collection frightens away

most of the small boys who love to taunt the Terrible Old Man about his long white hair and beard, or to

break the smallpaned windows of his dwelling with wicked missiles; but there are other things which

frighten the older and more curious folk who sometimes steal up to the house to peer in through the dusty

panes. These folk say that on a table in a bare room on the ground floor are many peculiar bottles, in each a

small piece of lead suspended pendulumwise from a string. And they say that the Terrible Old Man talks to

these bottles, addressing them by such names as Jack, ScarFace, Long Tom, Spanish Joe, Peters, and Mate

Ellis, and that whenever he speaks to a bottle the little lead pendulum within makes certain definite vibrations

Those who have watched the tall, lean, Terrible Old Man in these peculiar conversations, do not watch him

again. But Angelo Ricci and Joe Czanek and Manuel Silva were not of Kingsport blood; they were of that

new and heterogeneous alien stock which lies outside the charmed circle of New England life and traditions,

and they saw in the Terrible Old Man merely a tottering, almost helpless greybeard, who could not walk

without the aid of his knotted cane, and whose thin, weak hands shook pitifully. They were really quite sorry

in their way for the lonely, unpopular old fellow, whom everybody shunned, and at whom all the dogs barked

singularly. But business is business, and to a robber whose soul is in his profession, there is a lure and a

challenge about a very old and very feeble man who has no account at the bank, and who pays for his few

necessities at the village store with Spanish gold and silver minted two centuries ago.

Messrs. Ricci, Czanek, and Silva selected the night of April 11th for their call. Mr. Ricci and Mr. Silva were

to interview the poor old gentleman, whilst Mr. Czanek waited for them and their presumable metallic burden

with a covered motorcar in Ship Street, by the gate in the tall rear wall of their host�s grounds. Desire to

avoid needless explanations in case of unexpected police intrusions prompted these plans for a quiet and

As prearranged, the three adventurers started out separately in order to prevent any evilminded suspicions

afterward. Messrs. Ricci and Silva met in Water Street by the old man�s front gate, and although they did not

like the way the moon shone down upon the painted stones through the budding branches of the gnarled trees,

they had more important things to think about than mere idle superstition. They feared it might be unpleasant

work making the Terrible Old Man loquacious concerning his hoarded gold and silver, for aged seacaptains

are notably stubborn and perverse. Still, he was very old and very feeble, and there were two visitors. Messrs.

Ricci and Silva were experienced in the art of making unwilling persons voluble, and the screams of a weak

and exceptionally venerable man can be easily muffled. So they moved up to the one lighted window and

heard the Terrible Old Man talking childishly to his bottles with pendulums. Then they donned masks and

Waiting seemed very long to Mr. Czanek as he fidgeted restlessly in the covered motorcar by the Terrible

Old Man�s back gate in Ship Street. He was more than ordinarily tenderhearted, and he did not like the

hideous screams he had heard in the ancient house just after the hour appointed for the deed. Had he not told

his colleagues to be as gentle as possible with the pathetic old seacaptain? Very nervously he watched that

narrow oaken gate in the high and ivyclad stone wall. Frequently he consulted his watch, and wondered at

the delay. Had the old man died before revealing where his treasure was hidden, and had a thorough search

become necessary? Mr. Czanek did not like to wait so long in the dark in such a place. Then he sensed a soft

tread or tapping on the walk inside the gate, heard a gentle fumbling at the rusty latch, and saw the narrow,

heavy door swing inward. And in the pallid glow of the single dim streetlamp he strained his eyes to see

what his colleagues had brought out of that sinister house which loomed so close behind. But when he

looked, he did not see what he had expected; for his colleagues were not there at all, but only the Terrible Old

Man leaning quietly on his knotted cane and smiling hideously. Mr. Czanek had never before noticed the

Little things make considerable excitement in little towns, which is the reason that Kingsport people talked

all that spring and summer about the three unidentifiable bodies, horribly slashed as with many cutlasses, and

horribly mangled as by the tread of many cruel bootheels, which the tide washed in. And some people even

spoke of things as trivial as the deserted motorcar found in Ship Street, or certain especially inhuman cries,

probably of a stray animal or migratory bird, heard in the night by wakeful citizens. But in this idle village

gossip the Terrible Old Man took no interest at all. He was by nature reserved, and when one is aged and

feeble, one�s reserve is doubly strong. Besides, so ancient a seacaptain must have witnessed scores of things

On a verdant slope of Mount Maenalus, in Arcadia, there stands an olive grove about the ruins of a villa.

Close by is a tomb, once beautiful with the sublimest sculptures, but now fallen into as great decay as the

house. At one end of that tomb, its curious roots displacing the timestained blocks of Panhellic marble,

grows an unnaturally large olive tree of oddly repellent shape; so like to some grotesque man, or

deathdistorted body of a man, that the country folk fear to pass it at night when the moon shines faintly

through the crooked boughs. Mount Maenalus is a chosen haunt of dreaded Pan, whose queer companions are

many, and simple swains believe that the tree must have some hideous kinship to these weird Panisci; but an

Many years ago, when the hillside villa was new and resplendent, there dwelt within it the two sculptors

Kalos and Musides. From Lydia to Neapolis the beauty of their work was praised, and none dared say that the

one excelled the other in skill. The Hermes of Kalos stood in a marble shrine in Corinth, and the Pallas of

Musides surmounted a pillar in Athens near the Parthenon. All men paid homage to Kalos and Musides, and

marvelled that no shadow of artistic jealousy cooled the warmth of their brotherly friendship.

But though Kalos and Musides dwelt in unbroken harmony, their natures were not alike. Whilst Musides

revelled by night amidst the urban gaieties of Tegea, Saios would remain at home; stealing away from the

sight of his slaves into the cool recesses of the olive grove. There he would meditate upon the visions that

filled his mind, and there devise the forms of beauty which later became immortal in breathing marble. Idle

folk, indeed, said that Kalos conversed with the spirits of the grove, and that his statues were but images of

the fauns and dryads he met there for he patterned his work after no living model.

So famous were Kalos and Musides, that none wondered when the Tyrant of Syracuse sent to them deputies

to speak of the costly statue of Tyche which he had planned for his city. Of great size and cunning

workmanship must the statue be, for it was to form a wonder of nations and a goal of travellers. Exalted

beyond thought would be he whose work should gain acceptance, and for this honor Kalos and Musides were

invited to compete. Their brotherly love was well known, and the crafty Tyrant surmised that each, instead of

concealing his work from the other, would offer aid and advice; this charity producing two images of unheard

With joy the sculptors hailed the Tyrant's offer, so that in the days that followed their slaves heard the

ceaseless blows of chisels. Not from each other did Kalos and Musides conceal their work, but the sight was

for them alone. Saving theirs, no eyes beheld the two divine figures released by skillful blows from the rough

At night, as of yore, Musides sought the banquet halls of Tegea whilst Kalos wandered alone in the olive

Grove. But as time passed, men observed a want of gaiety in the once sparkling Musides. It was strange, they

said amongst themselves that depression should thus seize one with so great a chance to win art's loftiest

reward. Many months passed yet in the sour face of Musides came nothing of the sharp expectancy which the

Then one day Musides spoke of the illness of Kalos, after which none marvelled again at his sadness, since

the sculptors' attachment was known to be deep and sacred. Subsequently many went to visit Kalos, and

indeed noticed the pallor of his face; but there was about him a happy serenity which made his glance more

magical than the glance of Musides who was clearly distracted with anxiety and who pushed aside all the

slaves in his eagerness to feed and wait upon his friend with his own hands. Hidden behind heavy curtains

stood the two unfinished figures of Tyche, little touched of late by the sick man and his faithful attendant.

As Kalos grew inexplicably weaker and weaker despite the ministrations of puzzled physicians and of his

assiduous friend, he desired to be carried often to the grove which he so loved. There he would ask to be left

alone, as if wishing to speak with unseen things. Musides ever granted his requests, though his eyes filled

with visible tears at the thought that Kalos should care more for the fauns and the dryads than for him. At last

the end drew near, and Kalos discoursed of things beyond this life. Musides, weeping, promised him a

sepulchre more lovely than the tomb of Mausolus; but Kalos bade him speak no more of marble glories. Only

one wish now haunted the mind of the dying man; that twigs from certain olive trees in the grove be buried

by his resting placeclose to his head. And one night, sitting alone in the darkness of the olive grove, Kalos

died. Beautiful beyond words was the marble sepulchre which stricken Musides carved for his beloved friend.

None but Kalos himself could have fashioned such basreliefs, wherein were displayed all the splendours of

Elysium. Nor did Musides fail to bury close to Kalos' head the olive twigs from the grove.

As the first violence of Musides' grief gave place to resignation, he labored with diligence upon his figure of

Tyche. All honour was now his, since the Tyrant of Syracuse would have the work of none save him or

Kalos. His task proved a vent for his emotion and he toiled more steadily each day, shunning the gaieties he

once had relished. Meanwhile his evenings were spent beside the tomb of his friend, where a young olive tree

had sprung up near the sleeper's head. So swift was the growth of this tree, and so strange was its form, that

all who beheld it exclaimed in surprise; and Musides seemed at once fascinated and repelled.

Three years after the death of Kalos, Musides despatched a messenger to the Tyrant, and it was whispered in

the agora at Tegea that the mighty statue was finished. By this time the tree by the tomb had attained amazing

proportions, exceeding all other trees of its kind, and sending out a singularly heavy branch above the

apartment in which Musides labored. As many visitors came to view the prodigious tree, as to admire the art

of the sculptor, so that Musides was seldom alone. But he did not mind his multitude of guests; indeed, he

seemed to dread being alone now that his absorbing work was done. The bleak mountain wind, sighing

through the olive grove and the tombtree, had an uncanny way of forming vaguely articulate sounds.

The sky was dark on the evening that the Tyrant's emissaries came to Tegea. It was definitely known that

they had come to bear away the great image of Tyche and bring eternal honour to Musides, so their reception

by the proxenoi was of great warmth. As the night wore on a violent storm of wind broke over the crest of

Maenalus, and the men from far Syracuse were glad that they rested snugly in the town. They talked of their

illustrious Tyrant, and of the splendour of his capital and exulted in the glory of the statue which Musides had

wrought for him. And then the men of Tegea spoke of the goodness of Musides, and of his heavy grief for his

friend and how not even the coming laurels of art could console him in the absence of Kalos, who might have

worn those laurels instead. Of the tree which grew by the tomb, near the head of Kalos, they also spoke. The

wind shrieked more horribly, and both the Syracusans and the Arcadians prayed to Aiolos.

In the sunshine of the morning the proxenoi led the Tyrant's messengers up the slope to the abode of the

sculptor, but the night wind had done strange things. Slaves' cries ascended from a scene of desolation, and

no more amidst the olive grove rose the gleaming colonnades of that vast hall wherein Musides had dreamed

and toiled. Lone and shaken mourned the humble courts and the lower walls, for upon the sumptuous greater

peristyle had fallen squarely the heavy overhanging bough of the strange new tree, reducing the stately

poem in marble with odd completeness to a mound of unsightly ruins. Strangers and Tegeans stood aghast,

looking from the wreckage to the great, sinister tree whose aspect was so weirdly human and whose roots

reached so queerly into the sculptured sepulchre of Kalos. And their fear and dismay increased when they

searched the fallen apartment, for of the gentle Musides, and of the marvellously fashioned image of Tyche,

no trace could be discovered. Amidst such stupendous ruin only chaos dwelt, and the representatives of two

cities left disappointed; Syracusans that they had no statue to bear home, Tegeans that they had no artist to

crown. However, the Syracusans obtained after a while a very splendid statue in Athens, and the Tegeans

consoled themselves by erecting in the agora a marble temple commemorating the gifts, virtues, and brotherly

But the olive grove still stands, as does the tree growing out of the tomb of Kalos, and the old beekeeper

told me that sometimes the boughs whisper to one another in the night wind, saying over and over again.

When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed. I was traveling in a parched and terrible valley

under the moon, and afar I saw it protruding uncannily above the sands as parts of a corpse may protrude

from an illmade grave. Fear spoke from the ageworn stones of this hoary survivor of the deluge, this

greatgrandfather of the eldest pyramid; and a viewless aura repelled me and bade me retreat from antique

Remote in the desert of Araby lies the nameless city, crumbling and inarticulate, its low walls nearly hidden

by the sands of uncounted ages. It must have been thus before the first stones of Memphis were laid, and

while the bricks of Babylon were yet unbaked. There is no legend so old as to give it a name, or to recall that

it was ever alive; but it is told of in whispers around campfires and muttered about by grandams in the tents

of sheiks so that all the tribes shun it without wholly knowing why. It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred

I should have known that the Arabs had good reason for shunning the nameless city, the city told of in strange

tales but seen by no living man, yet I defied them and went into the untrodden waste with my camel. I alone

have seen it, and that is why no other face bears such hideous lines of fear as mine; why no other man shivers

so horribly when the night wind rattles the windows. When I came upon it in the ghastly stillness of unending

sleep it looked at me, chilly from the rays of a cold moon amidst the desert's heat. And as I returned its look I

forgot my triumph at finding it, and stopped still with my camel to wait for the dawn.

For hours I waited, till the east grew grey and the stars faded, and the grey turned to roseate light edged with

gold. I heard a moaning and saw a storm of sand stirring among the antique stones though the sky was clear

and the vast reaches of desert still. Then suddenly above the desert's far rim came the blazing edge of the sun,

seen through the tiny sandstorm which was passing away, and in my fevered state I fancied that from some

remote depth there came a crash of musical metal to hail the fiery disc as Memnon hails it from the banks of

the Nile. My ears rang and my imagination seethed as I led my camel slowly across the sand to that unvocal

In and out amongst the shapeless foundations of houses and places I wandered, finding never a carving or

inscription to tell of these men, if men they were, who built this city and dwelt therein so long ago. The

antiquity of the spot was unwholesome, and I longed to encounter some sign or device to prove that the city

was indeed fashioned by mankind. There were certain proportions and dimensions in the ruins which I did

not like. I had with me many tools, and dug much within the walls of the obliterated edifices; but progress

was slow, and nothing significant was revealed. When night and the moon returned I felt a chill wind which

brought new fear, so that I did not dare to remain in the city. And as I went outside the antique walls to sleep,

a small sighing sandstorm gathered behind me, blowing over the grey stones though the moon was bright and

I awakened just at dawn from a pageant of horrible dreams, my ears ringing as from some metallic peal. I saw

the sun peering redly through the last gusts of a little sandstorm that hovered over the nameless city, and

marked the quietness of the rest of the landscape. Once more I ventured within those brooding ruins that

swelled beneath the sand like an ogre under a coverlet, and again dug vainly for relics of the forgotten race.

At noon I rested, and in the afternoon I spent much time tracing the walls and bygone streets, and the outlines

of the nearly vanished buildings. I saw that the city had been mighty indeed, and wondered at the sources of

its greatness. To myself I pictured all the spendours of an age so distant that Chaldaea could not recall it, and

thought of Sarnath the Doomed, that stood in the land of Mnar when mankind was young, and of Ib, that was

All at once I came upon a place where the bedrock rose stark through the sand and formed a low cliff; and

here I saw with joy what seemed to promise further traces of the antediluvian people. Hewn rudely on the

face of the cliff were the unmistakable facades of several small, squat rock houses or temples; whose interiors

might preserve many secrets of ages too remote for calculation, though sandstorms had long effaced any

Very low and sandchoked were all the dark apertures near me, but I cleared one with my spade and crawled

through it, carrying a torch to reveal whatever mysteries it might hold. When I was inside I saw that the

cavern was indeed a temple, and beheld plain signs of the race that had lived and worshipped before the

desert was a desert. Primitive altars, pillars, and niches, all curiously low, were not absent; and though I saw

no sculptures or frescoes, there were many singular stones clearly shaped into symbols by artificial means.

The lowness of the chiselled chamber was very strange, for I could hardly kneel upright; but the area was so

great that my torch showed only part of it at a time. I shuddered oddly in some of the far corners; for certain

altars and stones suggested forgotten rites of terrible, revolting and inexplicable nature and made me wonder

what manner of men could have made and frequented such a temple. When I had seen all that the place

Night had now approached, yet the tangible things I had seen made curiosity stronger than fear, so that I did

not flee from the long mooncast shadows that had daunted me when first I saw the nameless city. In the

twilight I cleared another aperture and with a new torch crawled into it, finding more vague stones and

symbols, though nothing more definite than the other temple had contained. The room was just as low, but

much less broad, ending in a very narrow passage crowded with obscure and cryptical shrines. About these

shrines I was prying when the noise of a wind and my camel outside broke through the stillness and drew me

The moon was gleaming vividly over the primitive ruins, lighting a dense cloud of sand that seemed blown

by a strong but decreasing wind from some point along the cliff ahead of me. I knew it was this chilly, sandy

wind which had disturbed the camel and was about to lead him to a place of better shelter when I chanced to

glance up and saw that there was no wind atop the cliff. This astonished me and made me fearful again, but I

immediately recalled the sudden local winds that I had seen and heard before at sunrise and sunset, and

judged it was a normal thing. I decided it came from some rock fissure leading to a cave, and watched the

troubled sand to trace it to its source; soon perceiving that it came from the black orifice of a temple a long

distance south of me, almost out of sight. Against the choking sandcloud I plodded toward this temple,

which as I neared it loomed larger than the rest, and shewed a doorway far less clogged with caked sand. I

would have entered had not the terrific force of the icy wind almost quenched my torch. It poured madly out

of the dark door, sighing uncannily as it ruffled the sand and spread among the weird ruins. Soon it grew

fainter and the sand grew more and more still, till finally all was at rest again; but a presence seemed stalking

among the spectral stones of the city, and when I glanced at the moon it seemed to quiver as though mirrored

in unquiet waters. I was more afraid than I could explain, but not enough to dull my thirst for wonder; so as

soon as the wind was quite gone I crossed into the dark chamber from which it had come.

This temple, as I had fancied from the outside, was larger than either of those I had visited before; and was

presumably a natural cavern since it bore winds from some region beyond. Here I could stand quite upright,

but saw that the stones and altars were as low as those in the other temples. On the walls and roof I beheld for

the first time some traces of the pictorial art of the ancient race, curious curling streaks of paint that had

almost faded or crumbled away; and on two of the altars I saw with rising excitement a maze of

wellfashioned curvilinear carvings. As I held my torch aloft it seemed to me that the shape of the roof was

too regular to be natural, and I wondered what the prehistoric cutters of stone had first worked upon. Their

Then a brighter flare of the fantastic flame showed that form which I had been seeking, the opening to those

remoter abysses whence the sudden wind had blown; and I grew faint when I saw that it was a small and

plainly artificial door chiselled in the solid rock. I thrust my torch within, beholding a black tunnel with the

roof arching low over a rough flight of very small, numerous and steeply descending steps. I shall always see

those steps in my dreams, for I came to learn what they meant. At the time I hardly knew whether to call

them steps or mere footholds in a precipitous descent. My mind was whirling with mad thoughts, and the

words and warning of Arab prophets seemed to float across the desert from the land that men know to the

nameless city that men dare not know. Yet I hesitated only for a moment before advancing through the portal

and commencing to climb cautiously down the steep passage, feet first, as though on a ladder.

It is only in the terrible phantasms of drugs or delirium that any other man can have such a descent as mine.

The narrow passage led infinitely down like some hideous haunted well, and the torch I held above my head

could not light the unknown depths toward which I was crawling. I lost track of the hours and forgot to

consult my watch, though I was frightened when I thought of the distance I must have be traversing. There

were changes of direction and of steepness; and once I came to a long, low, level passage where I had to

wriggle my feet first along the rocky floor, holding torch at arm's length beyond my head. The place was not

high enough for kneeling. After that were more of the steep steps, and I was still scrambling down

interminably when my failing torch died out. I do not think I noticed it at the time, for when I did notice it I

was still holding it above me as if it were ablaze. I was quite unbalanced with that instinct for the strange and

the unknown which had made me a wanderer upon earth and a haunter of far, ancient, and forbidden places.

In the darkness there flashed before my mind fragments of my cherished treasury of daemonic lore; sentences

from Alhazred the mad Arab, paragraphs from the apocryphal nightmares of Damascius, and infamous lines

from the delirious Image du Monde of Gauthier de Metz. I repeated queer extracts, and muttered of Afrasiab

and the daemons that floated with him down the Oxus; later chanting over and over again a phrase from one

of Lord Dunsany's tales"The unreveberate blackness of the abyss." Once when the descent grew amazingly

steep I recited something in singsong from Thomas Moore until I feared to recite more:

As witches' cauldrons are, when fill'd With moondrugs in th' eclipse distill'd Leaning to look if foot might

Time had quite ceased to exist when my feet again felt a level floor, and I found myself in a place slightly

higher than the rooms in the two smaller temples now so incalculably far above my head. I could not quite

stand, but could kneel upright, and in the dark I shuffled and crept hither and thither at random. I soon knew

that I was in a narrow passage whose walls were lined with cases of wood having glass fronts. As in that

Palaeozoic and abysmal place I felt of such things as polished wood and glass I shuddered at the possible

implications. The cases were apparently ranged along each side of the passage at regular intervals, and were

oblong and horizontal, hideously like coffins in shape and size. When I tried to move two or three for further

I saw that the passage was a long one, so floundered ahead rapidly in a creeping run that would have seemed

horrible had any eye watched me in the blackness; crossing from side to side occasionally to feel of my

surroundings and be sure the walls and rows of cases still stretched on. Man is so used to thinking visually

that I almost forgot the darkness and pictured the endless corridor of wood and glass in its lowstudded

monotony as though I saw it. And then in a moment of indescribable emotion I did see it.

Just when my fancy merged into real sight I cannot tell; but there came a gradual glow ahead, and all at once

I knew that I saw the dim outlines of a corridor and the cases, revealed by some unknown subterranean

phosphorescence. For a little while all was exactly as I had imagined it, since the glow was very faint; but as I

mechanically kept stumbling ahead into the stronger light I realised that my fancy had been but feeble. This

hall was no relic of crudity like the temples in the city above, but a monument of the most magnificent and

exotic art. Rich, vivid, and daringly fantastic designs and pictures formed a continuous scheme of mural

paintings whose lines and colours were beyond description. The cases were of a strange golden wood, with

fronts of exquisite glass, and containing the mummified forms of creatures outreaching in grotesqueness the

To convey any idea of these monstrosities is impossible. They were of the reptile kind, with body lines

suggesting sometimes the crocodile, sometimes the seal, but more often nothing of which either the naturalist

or the palaeontologist ever heard. In size they approximated a small man, and their forelegs bore delicate

and evident feet curiously like human hands and fingers. But strangest of all were their heads, which

presented a contour violating all know biological principles. To nothing can such things be well compared

in one flash I thought of comparisons as varied as the cat, the bullfrog, the mythic Satyr, and the human

being. Not Jove himself had had so colossal and protuberant a forehead, yet the horns and the noselessness

and the alligatorlike jaw placed things outside all established categories. I debated for a time on the reality

of the mummies, half suspecting they were artificial idols; but soon decided they were indeed some

palaeogean species which had lived when the nameless city was alive. To crown their grotesqueness, most of

them were gorgeously enrobed in the costliest of fabrics, and lavishly laden with ornaments of gold, jewels,

The importance of these crawling creatures must have been vast, for they held first place among the wild

designs on the frescoed walls and ceiling. With matchless skill had the artist drawn them in a world of their

own, wherein they had cities and gardens fashioned to suit their dimensions; and I could not help but think

that their pictured history was allegorical, perhaps shewing the progress of the race that worshipped them.

These creatures, I said to myself, were to men of the nameless city what the shewolf was to Rome, or some

Holding this view, I could trace roughly a wonderful epic of the nameless city; the tale of a mighty seacoast

metropolis that ruled the world before Africa rose out of the waves, and of its struggles as the sea shrank

away, and the desert crept into the fertile valley that held it. I saw its wars and triumphs, its troubles and

defeats, and afterwards its terrible fight against the desert when thousands of its people here represented in

allegory by the grotesque reptiles were driven to chisel their way down though the rocks in some

marvellous manner to another world whereof their prophets had told them. It was all vividly weird and

realistic, and its connection with the awesome descent I had made was unmistakable. I even recognized the

As I crept along the corridor toward the brighter light I saw later stages of the painted epic the leavetaking

of the race that had dwelt in the nameless city and the valley around for ten million years; the race whose

souls shrank from quitting scenes their bodies had known so long where they had settled as nomads in the

earth's youth, hewing in the virgin rock those primal shrines at which they had never ceased to worship. Now

that the light was better I studied the pictures more closely and, remembering that the strange reptiles must

represent the unknown men, pondered upon the customs of the nameless city. Many things were peculiar and

inexplicable. The civilization, which included a written alphabet, had seemingly risen to a higher order than

those immeasurably later civilizations of Egypt and Chaldaea, yet there were curious omissions. I could, for

example, find no pictures to represent deaths or funeral customs, save such as were related to wars, violence,

and plagues; and I wondered at the reticence shown concerning natural death. It was as though an ideal of

Still nearer the end of the passage was painted scenes of the utmost picturesqueness and extravagance:

contrasted views of the nameless city in its desertion and growing ruin, and of the strange new realm of

paradise to which the race had hewed its way through the stone. In these views the city and the desert valley

were shewn always by moonlight, golden nimbus hovering over the fallen walls, and halfrevealing the

splendid perfection of former times, shown spectrally and elusively by the artist. The paradisal scenes were

almost too extravagant to be believed, portraying a hidden world of eternal day filled with glorious cities and

ethereal hills and valleys. At the very last I thought I saw signs of an artistic anticlimax. The paintings were

less skillful, and much more bizarre than even the wildest of the earlier scenes. They seemed to record a slow

decadence of the ancient stock, coupled with a growing ferocity toward the outside world from which it was

driven by the desert. The forms of the people always represented by the sacred reptiles appeared to be

gradually wasting away, through their spirit as shewn hovering above the ruins by moonlight gained in

proportion. Emaciated priests, displayed as reptiles in ornate robes, cursed the upper air and all who breathed

it; and one terrible final scene shewed a primitivelooking man, perhaps a pioneer of ancient Irem, the City

of Pillars, torn to pieces by members of the elder race. I remember how the Arabs fear the nameless city, and

As I viewed the pageant of mural history I had approached very closely to the end of the lowceiled hall, and

was aware of a gate through which came all of the illuminating phosphorescence. Creeping up to it, I cried

aloud in transcendent amazement at what lay beyond; for instead of other and brighter chambers there was

only an illimitable void of uniform radiance, such one might fancy when gazing down from the peak of

Mount Everest upon a sea of sunlit mist. Behind me was a passage so cramped that I could not stand upright

Reaching down from the passage into the abyss was the head of a steep flight of steps small numerous steps

like those of black passages I had traversed but after a few feet the glowing vapours concealed everything.

Swung back open against the lefthand wall of the passage was a massive door of brass, incredibly thick and

decorated with fantastic basreliefs, which could if closed shut the whole inner world of light away from the

vaults and passages of rock. I looked at the step, and for the nonce dared not try them. I touched the open

brass door, and could not move it. Then I sank prone to the stone floor, my mind aflame with prodigious

As I lay still with closed eyes, free to ponder, many things I had lightly noted in the frescoes came back to me

with new and terrible significance scenes representing the nameless city in its heyday the vegetations of

the valley around it, and the distant lands with which its merchants traded. The allegory of the crawling

creatures puzzled me by its universal prominence, and I wondered that it would be so closely followed in a

pictured history of such importance. In the frescoes the nameless city had been shewn in proportions fitted to

the reptiles. I wondered what its real proportions and magnificence had been, and reflected a moment on

certain oddities I had noticed in the ruins. I thought curiously of the lowness of the primal temples and of the

underground corridor, which were doubtless hewn thus out of deference to the reptile deities there honoured;

though it perforce reduced the worshippers to crawling. Perhaps the very rites here involved crawling in

imitation of the creatures. No religious theory, however, could easily explain why the level passages in that

awesome descent should be as low as the temples or lower, since one cold not even kneel in it. As I thought

of the crawling creatures, whose hideous mummified forms were so close to me, I felt a new throb of fear.

Mental associations are curious, and I shrank from the idea that except for the poor primitive man torn to

pieces in the last painting, mine was the only human form amidst the many relics and symbols of the

But as always in my strange and roving existence, wonder soon drove out fear; for the luminous abyss and

what it might contain presented a problem worthy of the greatest explorer. That a weird world of mystery lay

far down that flight of peculiarly small steps I could not doubt, and I hoped to find there those human

memorials which the painted corridor had failed to give. The frescoes had pictured unbelievable cities, and

valleys in this lower realm, and my fancy dwelt on the rich and colossal ruins that awaited me.

My fears, indeed, concerned the past rather than the future. Not even the physical horror of my position in

that cramped corridor of dead reptiles and antediluvian frescoes, miles below the world I knew and faced by

another world of eery light and mist, could match the lethal dread I felt at the abysmal antiquity of the scene

and its soul. An ancientness so vast that measurement is feeble seemed to leer down from the primal stones

and rockhewn temples of the nameless city, while the very latest of the astounding maps in the frescoes

shewed oceans and continents that man has forgotten, with only here and there some vaguely familiar

outlines. Of what could have happened in the geological ages since the paintings ceased and the deathhating

race resentfully succumbed to decay, no man might say. Life had once teemed in these caverns and in the

luminous realm beyond; now I was alone with vivid relics, and I trembled to think of the countless ages

Suddenly there came another burst of that acute fear which had intermittently seized me ever since I first saw

the terrible valley and the nameless city under a cold moon, and despite my exhaustion I found myself

starting frantically to a sitting posture and gazing back along the black corridor toward the tunnels that rose to

the outer world. My sensations were like those which had made me shun the nameless city at night, and were

as inexplicable as they were poignant. In another moment, however, I received a still greater shock in the

form of a definite sound the first which had broken the utter silence of these tomblike depths. It was a

deep, low moaning, as of a distant throng of condemned spirits, and came from the direction in which I was

staring. Its volume rapidly grew, till it soon reverberated frightfully through the low passage, and at the same

time I became conscious of an increasing draught of old air, likewise flowing from the tunnels and the city

above. The touch of this air seemed to restore my balance, for I instantly recalled the sudden gusts which had

risen around the mouth of the abyss each sunset and sunrise, one of which had indeed revealed the hidden

tunnels to me. I looked at my watch and saw that sunrise was near, so bracing myself to resist the gale that

was sweeping down to its cavern home as it had swept forth at evening. My fear again waned low, since a

More and more madly poured the shrieking, moaning night wind into the gulf of the inner earth. I dropped

prone again and clutched vainly at the floor for fear of being swept bodily through the open gate into the

phosphorescent abyss. Such fury I had not expected, and as I grew aware of an actual slipping of my form

toward the abyss I was beset by a thousand new terrors of apprehension and imagination. The malignancy of

the blast awakened incredible fancies; once more I compared myself shudderingly to the only human image

in that frightful corridor, the man who was torn to pieces by the nameless race, for in the fiendish clawing of

the swirling currents there seemed to abide a vindictive rage all the stronger because it was largely impotent. I

think I screamed frantically near the last I was almost mad of the howling windwraiths. I tried to crawl

against the murderous invisible torrent, but I could not even hold my own as I was pushed slowly and

inexorably toward the unknown world. Finally reason must have wholly snapped; for I fell babbling over and

over that unexplainable couplet of the mad Arab Alhazred, who dreamed of the nameless city:

That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.

Only the grim brooding desert gods know what really took placewhat indescribable struggles and

scrambles in the dark I endured or what Abaddon guided me back to life, where I must always remember and

shiver in the night wind till oblivion or worse claims me. Monstrous, unnatural, colossal, was the thing

too far beyond all the ideas of man to be believed except in the silent damnable small hours of the morning

I have said that the fury of the rushing blast was infernal cacodaemoniacal and that its voices were

hideous with the pentup viciousness of desolate eternities. Presently these voices, while still chaotic before

me, seemed to my beating brain to take articulate form behind me; and down there in the grave of

unnumbered aeondead antiquities, leagues below the dawnlit world of men, I heard the ghastly cursing and

snarling of strangetongued fiends. Turning, I saw outlined against the luminous aether of the abyss what

could not be seen against the dusk of the corridor a nightmare horde of rushing devils; hate distorted,

grotesquely panoplied, half transparent devils of a race no man might mistake the crawling reptiles of the

And as the wind died away I was plunged into the ghoulpooled darkness of earth's bowels; for behind the

last of the creatures the great brazen door clanged shut with a deafening peal of metallic music whose

reverberations swelled out to the distant world to hail the rising sun as Memnon hails it from the banks of the

Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only with extreme terror. This

terror is not due altogether to the sinister manner of his recent disappearance, but was engendered by the

whole nature of his lifework, and first gained its acute form more than seventeen years ago, when we were

in the third year of our course at the Miskatonic University Medical School in Arkham. While he was with

me, the wonder and diabolism of his experiments fascinated me utterly, and I was his closest companion.

Now that he is gone and the spell is broken, the actual fear is greater. Memories and possibilities are ever

The first horrible incident of our acquaintance was the greatest shock I ever experienced, and it is only with

reluctance that I repeat it. As I have said, it happened when we were in the medical school1 where West had

already made himself notorious through his wild theories on the nature of death and the possibility of

overcoming it artificially. His views, which were widely ridiculed by the faculty and by his fellowstudents,

hinged on the essentially mechanistic nature of life; and concerned means for operating the organic

machinery of mankind by calculated chemical action after the failure of natural processes. In his experiments

with various animating solutions, he had killed and treated immense numbers of rabbits, guineapigs, cats,

dogs, and monkeys, till he had become the prime nuisance of the college. Several times he had actually

obtained signs of life in. animals supposedly dead; in many cases violent sign5; but he soon saw that the

perfection of his process, if indeed possible, would necessarily involve a lifetime of research. It likewise

became clear that, since the same solution never worked alike on different organic species, he would require

human subjects for further and more specialised progress. It was here that he first came into conflict with the

college authorities, and was debarred from future experiments by no less a dignitary than the dean of the

medical school himself the learned and benevolent Dr. Allan Halsey, whose work in behalf of the stricken

I had always been exceptionally tolerant of West�s pursuits, and we frequently discussed his theories, whose

ramifications and corollaries were almost infinite. Holding with Haeckel that all life is a chemical and

physical process, and that the socalled "soul" is a myth, my friend believed that artificial reanimation of the

dead can depend only on the condition of the tissues; and that unless actual decomposition has set in, a corpse

fully equipped with organs may with suitable measures be set going again in the peculiar fashion known as

life. That the psychic or intellectual life might be impaired by the slight deterioration of sensitive braincells

which even a short period of death would be apt to cause, West fully realised. It had at first been his hope to

find a reagent which would restore vitality before the actual advent of death, and only repeated failures on

animals had shewn him that the natural and artificial lifemotions were incompatible. He then sought

extreme freshness in his specimens, injecting his solutions into the blood immediately after the extinction of

life. It was this circumstance which made the professors so carelessly sceptical, for they felt that true death

had not occurred in any case. They did not stop to view the matter closely and reasoningly.

It was not long after the faculty had interdicted his work that West confided to me his resolution to get fresh

human bodies in some manner, and continue in secret the experiments he could no longer perform openly. To

hear him discussing ways and means was rather ghastly, for at the college we had never procured anatomical

specimens ourselves. Whenever the morgue proved inadequate, two local negroes attended to this matter, and

they were seldom questioned. West was then a small, slender, spectacled youth with delicate features, yellow

hair, pale blue eyes, and a soft voice, and it was uncanny to hear him dwelling on the relative merits of

Christchurch Cemetery and the potter�s field. We finally decided on the potter�s field, because practically

every body in Christchurch was embalmed; a thing of course ruinous to West�s researches.

I was by this time his active and enthralled assistant, and helped him make all his decisions, not only

concerning the source of bodies but concerning a suitable place for our loathsome work. It was I who thought

of the deserted Chapman farmhouse beyond Meadow Hill, where we fitted up on the ground floor an

operating room and a laboratory, each with dark curtains to conceal our midnight doings. The place was far

from any road, and in sight of no other house, yet precautions were none the less necessary; since rumours of

strange lights, started by chance nocturnal roamers, would soon bring disaster on our enterprise. It was agreed

to call the whole thing a chemical laboratory if discovery should occur. Gradually we equipped our sinister

haunt of science with materials either purchased in Boston or quietly borrowed from the college materials

carefully made unrecognisable save to expert eyes and provided spades and picks for the many burials we

should have to make in the cellar. At the college we used an incinerator, but the apparatus was too costly for

our unauthorised laboratory. Bodies were always a nuisance even the small guineapig bodies from the

We followed the local deathnotices like ghouls, for our specimens demanded particular qualities. What we

wanted were corpses interred soon after death and without artificial preservation; preferably free from

malforming disease, and certainly with all organs present. Accident victims were our best hope. Not for many

weeks did we hear of anything suitable; though we talked with morgue and hospital authorities, ostensibly in

the college�s interest, as often as we could without exciting suspicion. We found that the college had first

choice in every case, so that it might be necessary to remain in Arkham during the summer, when only the

limited summerschool classes were held. In the end, though, luck favoured us; for one day we heard of an

almost ideal case in the potter�s field; a brawny young workman drowned only the morning before in

Summer�s Pond, and buried at the town�s expense without delay or embalming. That afternoon we found the

It was a repulsive task that we undertook in the black small hours, even though we lacked at that time the

special horror of graveyards which later experiences brought to us. We carried spades and oil dark lanterns,

for although electric torches were then manufactured, they were not as satisfactory as the tungsten

contrivances of today. The process of unearthing was slow and sordid it might have been gruesomely

poetical if we had been artists instead of scientists and we were glad when our spades struck wood. When

the pine box was fully uncovered, West scrambled down and removed the lid, dragging out and propping up

the contents. I reached down and hauled the contents out of the grave, and then both toiled hard to restore the

spot to its former appearance. The affair made us rather nervous, especially the stiff form and vacant face of

our first trophy, but we managed to remove all traces of our visit. When we had patted down the last

shovelful of earth, we put the specimen in a canvas sack and set out for the old Chapman place beyoiid

On an improvised dissectingtable in the old farmhouse, by the light of a powerful acetylene lamp, the

specimen was not very spectral looking. It had been a sturdy and apparently unimaginative youth of

wholesome plebeian type largeframed, greyeyed, and brownhaired a sound animal without

psychological subtleties, and probably having vital processes of the simplest and healthiest sort. Now, with

the eyes closed, it looked more asleep than dead; though the expert test of my friend soon left no doubt on

that score. We had at last what West had always longed for a real dead man of the ideal kind, ready for the

solution as prepared according to the most careful calculations and theories for human use. The tension on

our part became very great. We knew that there was scarcely a chance for anything like complete success,

and could not avoid hideous fears at possible grotesque results of partial animation. Especially were we

apprehensive concerning the mind and impulses of the creature, since in the space following death some of

the more delicate cerebral cells might well have suffered deterioration. I, myself, still held some curious

notions about the traditional "soul" of man, and felt an awe at the secrets that might be told by one returning

from the dead. I wondered what sights this placid youth might have seen in inaccessible spheres, and what he

could relate if fully restored to life. But my wonder was not overwhelming, since for the most part I shared

the materialism of my friend. He was calmer than I as he forced a large quantity of his fluid into a vein of the

The waiting was gruesome, but West never faltered. Every now and then he applied his stethoscope to the

specimen, and bore the negative results philosophically. After about threequarters of an hour without the

least sign of life he disappointedly pronounced the solution inadequate, but determined to make the most of

his opportunity and try one change in the formula before disposing of his ghastly prize. We had that afternoon

dug a grave in the cellar, and would have to fill it by dawn for although we had fixed a lock on the house,

we wished to shun even the remotest risk of a ghoulish discovery. Besides, the body would not be even

approximately fresh the next night. So taking the solitary acetylene lamp into the adjacent laboratory, we left

our silent guest on the slab in the dark, and bent every energy to the mixing of a new solution; the weighing

The awful event was very sudden, and wholly unexpected. I was pouring something from one testtube to

another, and West was busy over the alcohol blastlamp which had to answer for a Bunsen burner in this

gasless edifice, when from the pitchblack room we had left there burst the most appalling and daemoniac

succession of cries that either of us had ever heard. Not more unutterable could have been the chaos of hellish

sound if the pit itself had opened to release the agony of the damned, for in one inconceivable cacophony was

centered all the supernal terror and unnatural despair of animate nature. Human it could not have been it is

not in man to make such sounds and without a thought of our late employment or its possible discovery,

both West and I leaped to the nearest window like stricken animals; overturning tubes, lamp, and retorts, and

vaulting madly into the starred abyss of the rural night. I think we screamed ourselves as we stumbled

frantically toward the town, though as we reached the outskirts we put on a semblance of restraint just

We did not separate, but managed to get to West�s room, where we whispered with the gas up until dawn. By

then we had calmed ourselves a little with rational theories and plans for investigation, so that we could sleep

through the day classes being disregarded. But that evening two items in the paper, wholly unrelated,

made it again impossible for us to sleep. The old deserted Chapman house had inexplicably burned to an

amorphous heap of ashes; that we could understand because of the upset lamp. Also, an attempt had been

made to disturb a new grave in the potter�s field, as if by futile and spadeless clawing at the earth. That we

And for seventeen years after that West would look frequently over his shoulder, and complain of fancied

I shall never forget that hideous summer sixteen years ago, when like a noxious afrite from the halls of Eblis

typhoid stalked leeringly through Arkham. It is by that satanic scourge that most recall the year, for truly

terror brooded with batwings over the piles of coffins in the tombs of Christchurch Cemetery; yet for me

there is a greater horror in that time a horror known to me alone now that Herbert West has disappeared.

West and I were doing postgraduate work in summer classes at the medical school of Miskatonic

University, and my friend had attained a wide notoriety because of his experiments leading toward the

revivification of the dead. After the scientific slaughter of uncounted small animals the freakish work had

ostensibly stopped by order of our sceptical dean, Dr. Allan Halsey; though West had continued to perform

certain secret tests in his dingy boardinghouse room, and had on one terrible and unforgettable occasion

taken a human body from its grave in the potter�s field to a deserted farmhouse beyond Meadow Hill.

I was with him on that odious occasion, and saw him inject into the still veins the elixir which he thought

would to some extent restore life�s chemical and physical processes. It had ended horribly in a delirium of

fear which we gradually came to attribute to our own overwrought nerves and West had never afterward

been able to shake off a maddening sensation of being haunted and hunted. The body had not been quite fresh

enough; it is obvious that to restore normal mental attributes a body must be very fresh indeed; and the

burning of the old house had prevented us from burying the thing. It would have been better if we could have

After that experience West had dropped his researches for some time; but as the zeal of the born scientist

slowly returned, he again became importunate with the college faculty, pleading for the use of the

dissectingroom and of fresh human specimens for the work he regarded as so overwhelmingly important.

His pleas, however, were wholly in vain; for the decision of Dr. Halsey was inflexible, and the other

professors all endorsed the verdict of their leader. In the radical theory of reanimation they saw nothing but

the immature vagaries of a youthful enthusiast whose slight form, yellow hair, spectacled blue eyes, and soft

voice gave no hint of the supernormal almost diabolical power of the cold brain within. I can see him

now as he was then and I shiver. He grew sterner of face, but never elderly. And now Sefton Asylum has

West clashed disagreeably with Dr. Halsey near the end of our last undergraduate term in a wordy dispute

that did less credit to him than to the kindiy dean in point of courtesy. He felt that he was needlessly and

irrationally retarded in a supremely great work; a work which he could of course conduct to suit himself in

later years, but which he wished to begin while still possessed of the exceptional facilities of the university.

That the traditionbound elders should ignore his singular results on animals, and persist in their denial of the

possibility of reanimation, was inexpressibly disgusting and almost incomprehensible to a youth of West�s

logical temperament. Only greater maturity could help him understand the chronic mental limitations of the

"professordoctor" type the product of generations of pathetic Puritanism; kindly, conscientious, and

sometimes gentle and amiable, yet always narrow, intolerant, customridden, and lacking in perspective. Age

has more charity for these incomplete yet highsouled characters, whose worst real vice is timidity, and who

are ultimately punished by general ridicule for their intellectual sins sins like Ptolemaism, Calvinism,

antiDarwinism, antiNietzscheism, and every sort of Sabbatarianism and sumptuary legislation. West,

young despite his marvellous scientific acquirements, had scant patience with good Dr. Halsey and his erudite

colleagues; and nursed an increasing resentment, coupled with a desire to prove his theories to these obtuse

worthies in some striking and dramatic fashion. Like most youths, he indulged in elaborate daydreams of

And then had come the scourge, grinning and lethal, from the nightmare caverns of Tartarus. West and I had

graduated about the time of its beginning, but had remained for additional work at the summer school, so that

we were in Arkham when it broke with full daemoniac fury upon the town. Though not as yet licenced

physicians, we now had our degrees, and were pressed frantically into public service as the numbers of the

stricken grew. The situation was almost past management, and deaths ensued too frequently for the local

undertakers fully to handle. Burials without embalming were made in rapid succession, and even the

Christchurch Cemetery receiving tomb was crammed with coffins of the unembalmed dead. This

circumstance was not without effect on West, who thought often of the irony of the situation so many

fresh specimens, yet none for his persecuted researches! We were frightfully overworked, and the terrific

But West�s gentle enemies were no less harassed with prostrating duties. College had all but closed, and

every doctor of the medical faculty was helping to fight the typhoid plague. Dr. Halsey in particular had

distinguished himself in sacrificing service, applying his extreme skill with wholehearted energy to cases

which many others shunned because of danger or apparent hopelessness. Before a month was over the

fearless dean had become a popular hero, though he seemed unconscious of his fame as he struggled to keep

from collapsing with physical fatigue and nervous exhaustion. West could not withhold admiration for the

fortitude of his foe, but because of this was even more determined to prove to him the truth of his amazing

doctrines. Taking advantage of the disorganisation of both college work and municipal health regulations, he

managed to get a recently deceased body smuggled into the university dissectingroom one night, and in my

presence injected a new modification of his solution. The thing actually opened its eyes, but only stared at the

ceiling with a look of soulpetrifying horror before collapsing into an inertness from which nothing could

rouse it. West said it was not fresh enough the hot summer air does not favour corpses. That time we were

almost caught before we incinerated the thing, and West doubted the advisability of repeating his daring

The peak of the epidemic was reached in August. West and I were almost dead, and Dr. Halsey did die on the

14th. The students all attended the hasty funeral on the 15th, and bought an impressive wreath, though the

latter was quite overshadowed by the tributes sent by wealthy Arkham citizens and by the municipality itself.

It was almost a public affair, for the dean had surely been a public benefactor. After the entombment we were

all somewhat depressed, and spent the afternoon at the bar of the Commercial House; where West, though

shaken by the death of his chief opponent, chilled the rest of us with references to his notorious theories.

Most of the students went home, or to various duties, as the evening advanced; but West persuaded me to aid

him in "making a night of it" West�s landlady saw us arrive at his room about two in the morning, with a third

man between us; and told her husband that we had all evidently dined and wined rather well.

Apparently this acidulous matron was right; for about 3 a.m. the whole house was aroused by cries coming

from West�s room, where when they broke down the door, they found the two of us unconscious on the

bloodstained carpet, beaten, scratched, and mauled, and with the broken remnants of West�s bottles and

instruments around us. Only an open window told what had become of our assailant, and many wondered

how he himself had fared after the terrific leap from the second story to the lawn which he must have made.

There were some strange garments in the room, but West upon regaining consciousness said they did not

belong to the stranger, but were specimens collected for bacteriological analysis in the course of

investigations on the transmission of germ diseases. He ordered them burnt as soon as possible in the

capacious fireplace. To the police we both declared ignorance of our late companion�s identity. He was, West

nervously said, a congenial stranger whom we had met at some downtown bar of uncertain location. We had

all been rather jovial, and West and I did not wish to have our pugnacious companion hunted down.

That same night saw the beginning of the second Arkham horror the horror that to me eclipsed the plague

itself. Christchurch Cemetery was the scene of a terrible killing; a watchman having been clawed to death in

a manner not only too hideous for description, but raising a doubt as to the human agency of the deed. The

victim had been seen alive considerably after midnight the dawn revealed the unutterable thing. The

manager of a circus at the neighbouring town of Bolton was questioned, but he swore that no beast had at any

time escaped from its cage. Those who found the body noted a trail of blood leading to the receiving tomb,

where a small pool of red lay on the concrete just outside the gate. A fainter trail led away toward the woods,

The next night devils danced on the roofs of Arkham, and unnatural madness howled in the wind. Through

the fevered town had crept a curse which some said was greater than the plague, and which some whispered

was the embodied daemonsoul of the plague itself. Eight houses were entered by a nameless thing which

strewed red death in its wake in all, seventeen maimed and shapeless remnants of bodies were left behind

by the voiceless, sadistic monster that crept abroad. A few persons had half seen it in the dark, and said it was

white and like a malformed ape or anthropomorphic fiend. It had not left behind quite all that it had attacked,

for sometimes it had been hungry. The number it had killed was fourteen; three of the bodies had been in

On the third night frantic bands of searchers, led by the police, captured it in a house on Crane Street near the

Miskatonic campus. They had organised the quest with care, keeping in touch by means of volunteer

telephone stations, and when someone in the college district had reported hearing a scratching at a shuttered

window, the net was quickly spread. On account of the general alarm and precautions, there were only two

more victims, and the capture was effected without major casualties. The thing was finally stopped by a

bullet, though not a fatal one, and was rushed to the local hospital amidst universal excitement and loathing.

For it had been a man. This much was clear despite the nauseous eyes, the voiceless simianism, and the

daemoniac savagery. They dressed its wound and carted it to the asylum at Sefton, where it beat its head

against the walls of a padded cell for sixteen years until the recent mishap, when it escaped under

circumstances that few like to mention. What had most disgusted the searchers of

Arkham was the thing they noticed when the monster�s face was cleaned the mocking, unbelievable

resemblance to a learned and selfsacrificing martyr who had been entombed but three days before the

late Dr. Allan Halsey, public benefactor and dean of the medical school of Miskatonic University.

To the vanished Herbert West and to me the disgust and horror were supreme. I shudder tonight as I think of

it; shudder even more than I did that morning when West muttered through his bandages, "Damn it, it wasn�t

It is uncommon to fire all six shots of a revolver with great suddenness when one would probably be

sufficient, but many things in the life of Herbert West were uncommon. It is, for instance, not often that a

young physician leaving college is obliged to conceal the principles which guide his selection of a home and

office, yet that was the case with Herbert West. When he and I obtained our degrees at the medical school of

Miskatonic University, and sought to relieve our poverty by setting up as general practitioners, we took great

care not to say that we chose our house because it was fairly well isolated, and as near as possible to the

Reticence such as this is seldom without a cause, nor indeed was ours; for our requirements were those

resulting from a lifework distinctly unpopular. Outwardly we were doctors only, but beneath the surface

were aims of far greater and more terrible moment for the essence of Herbert West�s existence was a

quest amid black and forbidden realms of the unknown, in which he hoped to uncover the secret of life and

restore to perpetual animation the graveyard�s cold clay. Such a quest demands strange materials, among

them fresh human bodies; and in order to keep supplied with these indispensable things one must live quietly

West and I had met in college, and I had been the only one to sympathise with his hideous experiments.

Gradually I had come to be his inseparable assistant, and now that we were out of college we had to keep

together. It was not easy to find a good opening for two doctors in company, but finally the influence of the

university secured us a practice in Bolton a factory town near Arkham, the seat of the college. The Bolton

Worsted Mills are the largest in the Miskatonic Valley, and their polyglot employees are never popular as

patients with the local physicians. We chose our house with the greatest care, seizing at last on a rather

rundown cottage near the end of Pond Street; five numbers from the closest neighbour, and separated from

the local potter�s field by only a stretch of meadow land, bisected by a narrow neck of the rather dense forest

which lies to the north. The distance was greater than we wished, but we could get no nearer house without

going on the other side of the field, wholly out of the factory district. We were not much displeased, however,

since there were no people between us and our sinister source of supplies. The walk was a trifle long, but we

Our practice was surprisingly large from the very first large enough to please most young doctors, and

large enough to prove a bore and a burden to students whose real interest lay elsewhere. The millhands were

of somewhat turbulent inclinations; and besides their many natural needs, their frequent clashes and stabbing

affrays gave us plenty to do. But what actually absorbed our minds was the secret laboratory we had fitted up

in the cellar the laboratory with the long table under the electric lights, where in the small hours of the

morning we often injected West�s various solutions into the veins of the things we dragged from the potter�s

field. West was experimenting madly to find something which would start man�s vital motions anew after

they had been stopped by the thing we call death, but had encountered the most ghastly obstacles. The

solution had to be differently compounded for different types what would serve for guineapigs would not

serve for human beings, and different human specimens required large modifications.

The bodies had to be exceedingly fresh, or the slight decomposition of brain tissue would render perfect

reanimation impossible. Indeed, the greatest problem was to get them fresh enough West had had horrible

experiences during his secret college researches with corpses of doubtful vintage. The results of partial or

imperfect animation were much more hideous than were the total failures, and we both held fearsome

recollections of such things. Ever since our first daemoniac session in the deserted farmhouse on Meadow

Hill in Arkham, we had felt a brooding menace; and West, though a calm, blond, blueeyed scientific

automaton in most respects, often confessed to a shuddering sensation of stealthy pursuit. He half felt that he

was followed a psychological delusion of shaken nerves, enhanced by the undeniably disturbing fact that

at least one of our reanimated specimens was still alive a frightful carnivorous thing in a padded cell at

We had fair luck with specimens in Bolton much better than in Arkham. We had not been settled a week

before we got an accident victim on the very night of burial, and made it open its eyes with an amazingly

rational expression before the solution failed. It had lost an arm if it had been a perfect body we might

have succeeded better. Between then and the next January we secured three more; one total failure, one case

of marked muscular motion, and one rather shivery thing it rose of itself and uttered a sound. Then came a

period when luck was poor; interments fell off, and those that did occur were of specimens either too diseased

or too maimed for use. We kept track of all the deaths and their circumstances with systematic care.

One March night, however, we unexpectedly obtained a specimen which did not come from the potter�s field.

In Bolton the prevailing spirit of Puritanism had outlawed the sport of boxing with the usual result.

Surreptitious and illconducted bouts among the millworkers were common, and occasionally professional

talent of low grade was imported. This late winter night there had been such a match; evidently with

disastrous results, since two timorous Poles had come to us with incoherently whispered entreaties to attend

to a very secret and desperate case. We followed them to an abandoned barn, where the remnants of a crowd

The match had been between Kid O�Brien a lubberly and now quaking youth with a most unHibernian

hooked nose and Buck Robinson, "The Harlem Smoke." The negro had been knocked out, and a

moment�s examination shewed us that he would permanently remain so. He was a loathsome, gorillalike

thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up

thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tomtom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have

looked even worse in life but the world holds many ugly things. Fear was upon the whole pitiful crowd,

for they did not know what the law would exact of them if the affair were not hushed up; and they were

grateful when West, in spite of my involuntary shudders, offered to get rid of the thing quietly for a

There was bright moonlight over the snowless landscape, but we dressed the thing and carried it home

between us through the deserted streets and meadows, as we had carried a similar thing one horrible night in

Arkham. We approached the house from the field in the rear, took the specimen in the back door and down

the cellar stairs, and prepared it for the usual experiment. Our fear of the police was absurdly great, though

The result was wearily anticlimactic. Ghastly as our prize appeared, it was wholly unresponsive to every

solution we injected in its black arm; solutions prepared from experience with white specimens only. So as

the hour grew dangerously near to dawn, we did as we had done with the others dragged the thing across

the meadows to the neck of the woods near the potter�s field, and buried it there in the best sort of grave the

frozen ground would furnish. The grave was not very deep, but fully as good as that of the previous specimen

the thing which had risen of itself and uttered a sound. In the light of our dark lanterns we carefully

covered it with leaves and dead vines, fairly certain that the police would never find it in a forest so dim and

The next day I was increasingly apprehensive about the police, for a patient brought rumours of a suspected

fight and death. West had still another source of worry, for he had been called in the afternoon to a case

which ended very threateningly. An Italian woman had become hysterical over her missing child a lad of

five who had strayed off early in the morning and failed to appear for dinner and had developed

symptoms highly alarming in view of an always weak heart. It was a very foolish hysteria, for the boy had

often run away before; but Italian peasants are exceedingly superstitious, and this woman seemed as much

harassed by omens as by facts. About seven o�clock in the evening she had died, and her frantic husband had

made a frightful scene in his efforts to kill West, whom he wildly blamed for not saving her life. Friends had

held him when he drew a stiletto, but West departed amidst his inhuman shrieks, curses and oaths of

vengeance. In his latest affliction the fellow seemed to have forgotten his child, who was still missing as the

night advanced. There was some talk of searching the woods, but most of the family�s friends were busy with

the dead woman and the screaming man. Altogether, the nervous strain upon West must have been

We retired about eleven, but I did not sleep well. Bolton had a surprisingly good police force for so small a

town, and I could not help fearing the mess which would ensue if the affair of the night before were ever

tracked down. It might mean the end of all our local work and perhaps prison for both West and me. I did

not like those rumours of a fight which were floating about. After the clock had struck three the moon shone

in my eyes, but I turned over without rising to pull down the shade. Then came the steady rattling at the back

I lay still and somewhat dazed, but before long heard West�s rap on my door. He was clad in dressinggown

and slippers, and had in his hands a revolver and an electric flashlight. From the revolver I knew that he was

"We�d better both go," he whispered. "It wouldn�t do not to answer it anyway, and it may be a patient it

So we both went down the stairs on tiptoe, with a fear partly justified and partly that which comes only from

the soul of the weird small hours. The rattling continued, growing somewhat louder. When we reached the

door I cautiously unbolted it and threw it open, and as the moon streamed revealingly down on the form

silhouetted there, West did a peculiar thing. Despite the obvious danger of attracting notice and bringing

down on our heads the dreaded police investigation a thing which after all was mercifully averted by the

relative isolation of our cottage my friend suddenly, excitedly, and unnecessarily emptied all six chambers

For that visitor was neither Italian nor policeman. Looming hideously against the spectral moon was a

gigantic misshapen thing not to be imagined save in nightmares a glassyeyed, inkblack apparition

nearly on all fours, covered with bits of mould, leaves, and vines, foul with caked blood, and having between

its glistening teeth a snowwhite, terrible, cylindrical object terminating in a tiny hand.

The scream of a dead man gave to me that acute and added horror of Dr. Herbert West which harassed the

latter years of our companionship. It is natural that such a thing as a dead man�s scream should give horror,

for it is obviously, not a pleasing or ordinary occurrence; but I was used to similar experiences, hence

suffered on this occasion only because of a particular circumstance. And, as I have implied, it was not of the

Herbert West, whose associate and assistant I was, possessed scientific interests far beyond the usual routine

of a village physician. That was why, when establishing his practice in Bolton, he had chosen an isolated

house near the potter�s field. Briefly and brutally stated, West�s sole absorbing interest was a secret study of

the phenomena of life and its cessation, leading toward the reanimation of the dead through injections of an

excitant solution. For this ghastly experimenting it was necessary to have a constant supply of very fresh

human bodies; very fresh because even the least decay hopelessly damaged the brain structure, and human

because we found that the solution had to be compounded differently for different types of organisms. Scores

of rabbits and guineapigs had been killed and treated, but their trail was a blind one. West had never fully

succeeded because he had never been able to secure a corpse sufficiently fresh. What he wanted were bodies

from which vitality had only just departed; bodies with every cell intact and capable of receiving again the

impulse toward that mode of motion called life. There was hope that this second and artificial life might be

made perpetual by repetitions of the injection, but we had learned that an ordinary natural life would not

respond to the action. To establish the artificial motion, natural life must be extinct the specimens must be

The awesome quest had begun when West and I were students at the Miskatonic University Medical School

in Arkham, vividly conscious for the first time of the thoroughly mechanical nature of life. That was seven

years before, but West looked scarcely a day older now he was small, blond, cleanshaven, softvoiced,

and spectacled, with only an occasional flash of a cold blue eye to tell of the hardening and growing

fanaticism of his character under the pressure of his terrible investigations. Our experiences had often been

hideous in the extreme; the results of defective reanimation, when lumps of graveyard clay had been

galvanised into morbid, unnatural, and brainless motion by various modifications of the vital solution.

One thing had uttered a nerveshattering scream; another had risen violently, beaten us both to

unconsciousness, and run amuck in a shocking way before it could be placed behind asylum bars; still

another, a loathsome African monstrosity, had clawed out of its shallow grave and done a deed West had

had to shoot that object. We could not get bodies fresh enough to shew any trace of reason when reanimated,

so had perforce created nameless horrors. It was disturbing to think that one, perhaps two, of our monsters

still lived that thought haunted us shadowingly, till finally West disappeared under frightful

circumstances. But at the time of the scream in the cellar laboratory of the isolated Bolton cottage, our fears

were subordinate to our anxiety for extremely fresh specimens. West was more avid than I, so that it almost

It was in July, 1910, that the bad luck regarding specimens began to turn. I had been on a long visit to my

parents in Illinois, and upon my return found West in a state of singular elation. He had, he told me excitedly,

in all likelihood solved the problem of freshness through an approach from an entirely new angle that of

artificial preservation. I had known that he was working on a new and highly unusual embalming compound,

and was not surprised that it had turned Out well; but until he explained the details I was rather puzzled as to

how such a compound could help in our work, since the objectionable staleness of the specimens was largely

due to delay occurring before we secured them. This, I now saw, West had clearly recognised; creatuig his

embalming compound for future rather than immediate use, and trusting to fate to supply again some very

recent and unburied corpse, as it had years before when we obtained the negro killed in the Bolton

prizefight. At last fate had been kind, so that on this occasion there lay in the secret cellar laboratory a

corpse whose decay could not by any possibility have begun. What would happen on reanimation, and

whether we could hope for a revival of mind and reason, West did not venture to predict. The experiment

would be a landmark in our studies, and he had saved the new body for my return, so that both might share

West told me how he had obtained the specimen. It had been a vigorous man; a welldressed stranger just off

the train on his way to transact some business with the Bolton Worsted Mills. The walk through the town had

been long, and by the time the traveller paused at our cottage to ask the way to the factories, his heart had

become greatly overtaxed. He had refused a stimulant, and had suddenly dropped dead only a moment later.

The body, as might be expected, seemed to West a heavensent gift. In his brief conversation the stranger

had made it clear that he was unknown in Bolton, and a search of his pockets subsequently revealed him to be

one Robert Leavitt of St. Louis, apparently without a family to make instant inquiries about his

disappearance. If this man could not be restored to life, no one would know of our experiment. We buried our

materials in a dense strip of woods between the house and the potter�s field. If, on the other hand, he could be

restored, our fame would be brilliantly and perpetually established. So without delay West had injected into

the body�s wrist the compound which would hold it fresh for use after my arrival. The matter of the

presumably weak heart, which to my mind imperilled the success of our experiment, did not appear to trouble

West extensively. He hoped at last to obtain what he had never obtained before a rekindled spark of

So on the night of July 18, 1910, Herbert West and I stood in the cellar laboratory and gazed at a white, silent

figure beneath the dazzling arclight. The embalming compound had worked uncannily well, for as I stared

fascinatedly at the sturdy frame which had lain two weeks without stiffening, I was moved to seek West�s

assurance that the thing was really dead. This assurance he gave readily enough; reminding me that the

reanimating solution was never used without careful tests as to life, since it could have, no effect if any of the

original vitality were present. As West proceeded to take preliminary steps, I was impressed by the vast

intricacy of the new experiment; an intricacy so vast that he could trust no hand less delicate than his own.

Forbidding me to touch the body, he first injected a drug in the wrist just beside the place his needle had

punctured when injecting the embalming compound. This, he said, was to neutralise the compound and

release the system to a normal relaxation so that the reanimating solution might freely work when injected.

Slightly later, when a change and a gentle tremor seemed to affect the dead limbs; West stuffed a pillowlike

object violently over the twitching face, not withdrawing it until the corpse appeared quiet and ready for our

attempt at reanimation. The pale enthusiast now applied some last perfunctory tests for absolute lifelessness,

withdrew satisfied, and finally injected into the left arm an accurately measured amount of the vital elixir,

prepared during the afternoon with a greater care than we had used since college days, when our feats were

new and groping. I cannot express the wild, breathless suspense with which we waited for results on this first

really fresh specimen the first we could reasonably expect to open its lips in rational speech, perhaps to

West was a materialist, believing in no soul and attributing all the working of consciousness to bodily

phenomena; consequently he looked for no revelation of hideous secrets from gulfs and caverns beyond

death�s barrier. I did not wholly disagree with him theoretically, yet held vague instinctive remnants of the

primitive faith of my forefathers; so that I could not help eyeing the corpse with a certain amount of awe and

terrible expectation. Besides I could not extract from my memory that hideous, inhuman shriek we heard

Very little time had elapsed before I saw the attempt was not to be a total failure. A touch of colour came to

cheeks hitherto chalkwhite, and spread out under the curiously ample stubble of sandy beard. West, who

had his hand on the pulse of the left wrist, suddenly nodded significantly; and almost simultaneously a mist

appeared on the mirror inclined above the body�s mouth. There followed a few spasmodic muscular motions,

and then an audible breathing and visible motion of the chest. I looked at the closed eyelids, and thought I

detected a quivering. Then the lids opened, shewing eyes which were grey, calm, and alive, but still

In a moment of fantastic whim I whispered questions to the reddening ears; questions of other worlds of

which the memory might still be present. Subsequent terror drove them from my mind, but I think the last

one, which I repeated, was: "Where have you been?" I do not yet know whether I was answered or not, for no

sound came from the wellshaped mouth; but I do know that at that moment I firmly thought the thin lips

moved silently, forming syllables which I would have vocalised as "only now" if that phrase had possessed

any sense or relevancy. At that moment, as I say, I was elated with the conviction that the one great goal had

been attained; and that for the first time a reanimated corpse had uttered distinct words impelled by actual

reason. In the next moment there was no doubt about the triumph; no doubt that the solution had truly

accomplished, at least temporarily, its full mission of restoring rational and articulate life to the dead. But in

that triumph there came to me the greatest of all horrors not horror of the thing that spoke, but of the deed

that I had witnessed and of the man with whom my professional fortunes were joined.

For that very fresh body, at last writhing into full and terrifying consciousness with eyes dilated at the

memory of its last scene on earth, threw out its frantic hands in a life and death struggle with the air, and

suddenly collapsing into a second and final dissolution from which there could be no return, screamed out the

"Help! Keep off, you cursed little towhead fiend keep that damned needle away from me!"

Many men have related hideous things, not mentioned in print, which happened on the battlefields of the

Great War. Some of these things have made me faint, others have convulsed me with devastating nausea,

while still others have made me tremble and look behind me in the dark; yet despite the worst of them I

believe I can myself relate the most hideous thing of all the shocking, the unnatural, the unbelievable

In 1915 I was a physician with the rank of First Lieutenant in a Canadian regiment in Flanders, one of many

Americans to precede the government itself into the gigantic struggle. I had not entered the army on my own

initiative, but rather as a natural result of the enlistment of the man whose indispensable assistant I was

the celebrated Boston surgical specialist, Dr. Herbert West. Dr. West had been avid for a chance to serve as

surgeon in a great war, and when the chance had come, he carried me with him almost against my will. There

were reasons why I could have been glad to let the war separate us; reasons why I found the practice of

medicine and the companionship of West more and more irritating; but when he had gone to Ottawa and

through a colleague�s influence secured a medical commission as Major, I could not resist the imperious

When I say that Dr. West was avid to serve in battle, I do not mean to imply that he was either naturally

warlike or anxious for the safety of civilisation. Always an icecold intellectual machine; slight, blond,

blueeyed, and spectacled; I think he secretly sneered at my occasional martial enthusiasms and censures of

supine neutrality. There was, however, something he wanted in embattled Flanders; and in order to secure it

had had to assume a military exterior. What he wanted was not a thing which many persons want, but

something connected with the peculiar branch of medical science which he had chosen quite clandestinely to

follow, and in which he had achieved amazing and occasionally hideous results. It was, in fact, nothing more

or less than an abundant supply of freshly killed men in every stage of dismemberment.

Herbert West needed fresh bodies because his lifework was the reanimation of the dead. This work was not

known to the fashionable clientele who had so swiftly built up his fame after his arrival in Boston; but was

only too well known to me, who had been his closest friend and sole assistant since the old days in

Miskatonic University Medical School at Arkham. It was in those college days that he had begun his terrible

experiments, first on small animals and then on human bodies shockingly obtained. There was a solution

which he injected into the veins of dead things, and if they were fresh enough they responded in strange

ways. He had had much trouble in discovering the proper formula, for each type of organism was found to

need a stimulus especially adapted to it. Terror stalked him when he reflected on his partial failures; nameless

things resulting from imperfect solutions or from bodies insufficiently fresh. A certain number of these

failures had remained alive one was in an asylum while others had vanished and as he thought of

conceivable yet virtually impossible eventualities he often shivered beneath his usual stolidity.

West had soon learned that absolute freshness was the prime requisite for useful specimens, and had

accordingly resorted to frightful and unnatural expedients in bodysnatching. In college, and during our early

practice together in the factory town of Bolton, my attitude toward him had been largely one of fascinated

admiration; but as his boldness in methods grew, I began to develop a gnawing fear. I did not like the way he

looked at healthy living bodies; and then there came a nightmarish session in the cellar laboratory when I

learned that a certain specimen had been a living body when he secured it. That was the first time he had ever

been able to revive the quality of rational thought in a corpse; and his success, obtained at such a loathsome

Of his methods in the intervening five years I dare not speak. I was held to him by sheer force of fear, and

witnessed sights that no human tongue could repeat. Gradually I came to find Herbert West himself more

horrible than anything he did that was when it dawned on me that his once normal scientific zeal for

prolonging life had subtly degenerated into a mere morbid and ghoulish curiosity and secret sense of charnel

picturesqueness. His interest became a hellish and perverse addiction to the repellently and fiendishly

abnormal; he gloated calmly over artificial monstrosities which would make most healthy men drop dead

from fright and disgust; he became, behind his pallid intellectuality, a fastidious Baudelaire of physical

Dangers he met unflinchingly; crimes he committed unmoved. I think the climax came when he had proved

his point that rational life can be restored, and had sought new worlds to conquer by experimenting on the

reanimation of detached parts of bodies. He had wild and original ideas on the independent vital properties of

organic cells and nervetissue separated from natural physiological systems; and achieved some hideous

preliminary results in the form of neverdying, artificially nourished tissue obtained from the nearly hatched

eggs of an indescribably tropical reptile. Two biological points he was exceedingly anxious to settle first,

whether any amount of consciousness and rational action be possible without the brain, proceeding from the

spinal cord and various nervecentres; and second, whether any kind of ethereal, intangible relation distinct

from the material cells may exist to link the surgically separated parts of what has previously been a single

living organism. All this research work required a prodigious supply of freshly slaughtered human flesh

The phantasmal, unmentionable thing occurred one midnight late in March, 1915, in a field hospital behind

the lines of St. Eloi. I wonder even now if it could have been other than a daemoniac dream of delirium. West

had a private laboratory in an east room of the barnlike temporary edifice, assigned him on his plea that he

was devising new and radical methods for the treatment of hitherto hopeless cases of maiming. There he

worked like a butcher in the midst of his gory wares I could never get used to the levity with which he

handled and classified certain things. At times he actually did perform marvels of surgery for the soldiers; but

his chief delights were of a less public and philanthropic kind, requiring many explanations of sounds which

seemed peculiar even amidst that babel of the damned. Among these sounds were frequent revolvershots

surely not uncommon on a battlefield, but distinctly uncommon in an hospital. Dr. West�s reanimated

specimens were not meant for long existence or a large audience. Besides human tissue, West employed

much of the reptile embryo tissue which he had cultivated with such singular results. It was better than human

material for maintaining life in organless fragments, and that was now my friend�s chief activity. In a dark

corner of the laboratory, over a queer incubating burner, he kept a large covered vat full of this reptilian

On the night of which I speak we had a splendid new specimen a man at once physically powerful and of

such high mentality that a sensitive nervous system was assured. It was rather ironic, for he was the officer

who had helped West to his commission, and who was now to have been our associate. Moreover, he had in

the past secretly studied the theory of reanimation to some extent under West. Major Sir Eric Moreland

ClaphamLee, D.S.O., was the greatest surgeon in our division, and had been hastily assigned to the St. Eloi

sector when news of the heavy fighting reached headquarters. He had come in an aeroplane piloted by the

intrepid Lieut. Ronald Hill, only to be shot down when directly over his destination. The fall had been

spectacular and awful; Hill was unrecognisable afterward, but the wreck yielded up the great surgeon in a

nearly decapitated but otherwise intact condition. West had greedily seized the lifeless thing which had once

been his friend and fellowscholar; and I shuddered when he finished severing the head, placed it in his

hellish vat of pulpy reptiletissue to preserve it for future experiments, and proceeded to treat the decapitated

body .on the operating table. He injected new blood, joined certain veins, arteries, and nerves at the headless

neck, and closed the ghastly aperture with engrafted skin from an unidentified specimen which had borne an

officer�s uniform. I knew what he wanted to see if this highly organised body could exhibit, without its

head, any of the signs of mental life which had distinguished Sir Eric Moreland ClaphamLee. Once a

student of reanimation, this silent trunk was now gruesomely called upon to exemplify it.

I can still see Herbert West under the sinister electric light as he injected his reanimating solution into the arm

of the headless body. The scene I cannot describe I should faint if I tried it, for there is madness in a room

full of classified charnel things, with blood and lesser human debris almost ankledeep on the slimy floor,

and with hideous reptilian abnormalities sprouting, bubbling, and baking over a winking bluishgreen spectre

The specimen, as West repeatedly observed, had a splendid nervous system. Much was expected of it; and as

a few twitching motions began to appear, I could see the feverish interest on West�s face. He was ready, I

think, to see proof of his increasingly strong opinion that consciousness, reason, and personality can exist

independently of the brain that man has no central connective spirit, but is merely a machine of nervous

matter, each section more or less complete in itself. In one triumphant demonstration West was about to

relegate the mystery of life to the category of myth. The body now twitched more vigorously, and beneath

our avid eyes commenced to heave in a frightful way. The arms stirred disquietingly, the legs drew up, and

various muscles contracted in a repulsive kind of writhing. Then the headless thing threw out its arms in a

gesture which was unmistakably one of desperation an intelligent desperation apparently sufficient to

prove every theory of Herbert West. Certainly, the nerves were recalling the man�s last act in life; the

What followed, I shall never positively know. It may have been wholly an hallucination from the shock

caused at that instant by the sudden and complete destruction of the building in a cataclysm of German

shellfire who can gainsay it, since West and I were the only proved survivors? West liked to think that

before his recent disappearance, but there were times when he could not; for it was queer that we both had the

same hallucination. The hideous occurrence itself was very simple, notable only for what it implied.

The body on the table had risen with a blind and terrible groping, and we had heard a sound. I should not call

that sound a voice, for it was too awful. And yet its timbre was not the most awful thing about it. Neither was

its message it had merely screamed, "Jump, Ronald, for God�s sake, jump!" The awful thing was its

For it had come from the large covered vat in that ghoulish corner of crawling black shadows.

When Dr. Herbert West disappeared a year ago, the Boston police questioned me closely. They suspected that

I was holding something back, and perhaps suspected graver things; but I could not tell them the truth

because they would not have believed it. They knew, indeed, that West had been connected with activities

beyond the credence of ordinary men; for his hideous experiments in the reanimation of dead bodies had long

been too extensive to admit of perfect secrecy; but the final soulshattering catastrophe held elements of

I was West�s closest friend and only confidential assistant. We had met years before, in medical school, and

from the first I had shared his terrible researches. He had slowly tried to perfect a solution which, injected

into the veins of the newly deceased, would restore life; a labour demanding an abundance of fresh corpses

and therefore involving the most unnatural actions. Still more shocking were the products of some of the

experiments grisly masses of flesh that had been dead, but that West waked to a blind, brainless, nauseous

ammation. These were the usual results, for in order to reawaken the mind it was necessary to have

specimens so absolutely fresh that no decay could possibly affect the delicate braincells.

This need for very fresh corpses had been West�s moral undoing. They were hard to get, and one awful day

he had secured his specimen while it was still alive and vigorous. A struggle, a needle, and a powerful

alkaloid had transformed it to a very fresh corpse, and the experiment had succeeded for a brief and

memorable moment; but West had emerged with a soul calloused and seared, and a hardened eye which

sometimes glanced with a kind of hideous and calculating appraisal at men of especially sensitive brain and

especially vigorous physique. Toward the last I became acutely afraid of West, for he began to look at me

that way. People did not seem to notice his glances, but they noticed my fear; and after his disappearance

West, in reality, was more afraid than I; for his abominable pursuits entailed a life of furtiveness and dread of

every shadow. Partly it was the police he feared; but sometimes his nervousness was deeper and more

nebulous, touching on certain indescribable things into which he had injected a morbid life, and from which

he had not seen that life depart. He usually finished his experiments with a revolver, but a few times he had

not been quick enough. There was that first specimen on whose rifled grave marks of clawing were later seen.

There was also that Arkham professor�s body which had done cannibal things before it had been captured and

thrust unidentified into a madhouse cell at Sefton, where it beat the walls for sixteen years. Most of the other

possibly surviving results were things less easy to speak of for in later years West�s scientific zeal had

degenerated to an unhealthy and fantastic mania, and he had spent his chief skill in vitalising not entire

human bodies but isolated parts of bodies, or parts joined to organic matter other than human. It had become

fiendishly disgusting by the time he disappeared; many of the experiments could not even be hinted at in

print. The Great War, through which both of us served as surgeons, had intensified this side of West.

In saying that West�s fear of his specimens was nebulous, I have in mind particularly its complex nature. Part

of it came merely from knowing of the existence of such nameless monsters, while another part arose from

apprehension of the bodily harm they might under certain circumstances do him. Their disappearance added

horror to the situation of them all, West knew the whereabouts of only one, the pitiful asylum thing. Then

there was a more subtle fear a very fantastic sensation resulting from a curious experiment in the

Canadian army in 1915. West, in the midst of a severe battle, had reanimated Major Sir Eric Moreland

ClaphamLee, D.S.O., a fellowphysician who knew about his experiments and could have duplicated them.

The head had been removed, so that the possibilities of quasiintelligent life in the trunk might be

investigated. Just as the building was wiped out by a German shell, there had been a success. The trunk had

moved intelligently; and, unbelievable to relate, we were both sickeningly sure that articulate sounds had

come from the detached head as it lay in a shadowy corner of the laboratory. The shell had been merciful, in a

way but West could never feel as certain as he wished, that we two were the only survivors. He used to

make shuddering conjectures about the possible actions of a headless physician with the power of

West�s last quarters were in a venerable house of much elegance, overlooking one of the oldest

buryinggrounds in Boston. He had chosen the place for purely symbolic and fantastically aesthetic reasons,

since most of the interments were of the colonial period and therefore of little use to a scientist seeking very

fresh bodies. The laboratory was in a subcellar secretly constructed by imported workmen, and contained a

huge incinerator for the quiet and complete disposal of such bodies, or fragments and synthetic mockeries of

bodies, as might remain from the morbid experiments and unhallowed amusements of the owner. During the

excavation of this cellar the workmen had struck some exceedingly ancient masonry; undoubtedly connected

with the old buryingground, yet far too deep to correspond with any known sepulchre therein. After a

number of calculations West decided that it represented some secret chamber beneath the tomb of the

Averills, where the last interment had been made in 1768. I was with him when he studied the nitrous,

dripping walls laid bare by the spades and mattocks of the men, and was prepared for the gruesome thrill

which would attend the uncovering of centuried gravesecrets; but for the first time West�s new timidity

conquered his natural curiosity, and he betrayed his degenerating fibre by ordering the masonry left intact and

plastered over. Thus it remained till that final hellish night; part of the walls of the secret laboratory. I speak

of West�s decadence, but must add that it was a purely mental and intangible thing. Outwardly he was the

same to the last calm, cold, slight, and yellowhaired, with spectacled blue eyes and a general aspect of

youth which years and fears seemed never to change. He seemed calm even when he thought of that clawed

grave and looked over his shoulder; even when he thought of the carnivorous thing that gnawed and pawed at

The end of Herbert West began one evening in our joint study when he was dividing his curious glance

between the newspaper and me. A strange headline item had struck at him from the crumpled pages, and a

nameless titan claw had seemed to reach down through sixteen years. Something fearsome and incredible had

happened at Sefton Asylum fifty miles away, stunning the neighbourhood and baffling the police. In the

small hours of the morning a body of silent men had entered the grounds, and their leader had aroused the

attendants. He was a menacing military figure who talked without moving his lips and whose voice seemed

almost ventriloquially connected with an immense black case he carried. His expressionless face was

handsome to the point of radiant beauty, but had shocked the superintendent when the hall light fell on it

for it was a wax face with eyes of painted glass. Some nameless accident had befallen this man. A larger man

guided his steps; a repellent hulk whose bluish face seemed half eaten away by some unknown malady. The

speaker had asked for the custody of the cannibal monster committed from Arkham sixteen years before; and

upon being refused, gave a signal which precipitated a shocking riot. The fiends had beaten, trampled, and

bitten every attendant who did not flee; killing four and finally succeeding in the liberation of the monster.

Those victims who could recall the event without hysteria swore that the creatures had acted less like men

than like unthinkable automata guided by the waxfaced leader. By the time help could be summoned, every

From the hour of reading this item until midmght, West sat almost paralysed. At midnight the doorbell rang,

startling him fearfully. All the servants were asleep in the attic, so I answered the bell. As I have told the

police, there was no wagon in the street, but only a group of strangelooking figures bearing a large square

box which they deposited in the hallway after one of them had grunted in a highly unnatural voice, "Express

prepaid." They filed out of the house with a jerky tread, and as I watched them go I had an odd idea that

they were turning toward the ancient cemetery on which the back of the house abutted. When I slammed the

door after them West came downstairs and looked at the box. It was about two feet square, and bore West�s

correct name and present address. It also bore the inscription, "From Eric Moreland ClaphamLee, St. Eloi,

Flanders." Six years before, in Flanders, a shelled hospital had fallen upon the headless reanimated trunk of

Dr. ClaphamLee, and upon the detached head which perhaps had uttered articulate sounds.

West was not even excited now. His condition was more ghastly. Quickly he said, "It�s the finish but let�s

incinerate this." We carried the thing down to the laboratory listening. I do not remember many

particulars you can imagine my state of mind but it is a vicious lie to say it was Herbert West�s body

which I put into the incinerator. We both inserted the whole unopened wooden box, closed the door, and

It was West who first noticed the falling plaster on that part of the wall where the ancient tomb masonry had

been covered up. I was going to run, but he stopped me. Then I saw a small black aperture, felt a ghoulish

wind of ice, and smelled the charnel bowels of a putrescent earth. There was no sound, but just then the

electric lights went out and I saw outlined against some phosphorescence of the nether world a horde of silent

toiling things which only insanity or worse could create. Their outlines were human, semihuman,

fractionally human, and not human at all the horde was grotesquely heterogeneous. They were removing

the stones quietly, one by one, from the centuried wall. And then, as the breach became large enough, they

came out into the laboratory in single file; led by a talking thing with a beautiful head made of wax. A sort of

madeyed monstrosity behind the leader seized on Herbert West. West did not resist or utter a sound. Then

they all sprang at him and tore him to pieces before my eyes, bearing the fragments away into that

subterranean vault of fabulous abominations. West�s head was carried off by the waxheaded leader, who

wore a Canadian officer�s uniform. As it disappeared I saw that the blue eyes behind the spectacles were

Servants found me unconscious in the morning. West was gone. The incinerator contained only unidentifiable

ashes. Detectives have questioned me, but what can I say? The Sef ton tragedy they will not connect with

West; not that, nor the men with the box, whose existence they deny. I told them of the vault, and they

pointed to the unbroken plaster wall and laughed. So I told them no more. They imply that I am either a

madman or a murderer probably I am mad. But I might not be mad if those accursed tomblegions had

In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am

aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative. It is an

unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and

intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie

outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the

real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and

mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority

condemns as madness the flashes of supersight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empricism.

My name is Jervas Dudley, and from earliest childhood I have been a dreamer and a visionary. Wealthy

beyond the necessity of a commercial life, and temperamentally unfitted for the formal studies and social

recreation of my acquaintances, I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible world; spending my youth

and adolescence in ancient and little known books, and in roaming the fields and groves of the region near

my ancestral home. I do not think that what I read in these books or saw in these fields and groves was

exactly what other boys read and saw there; but of this I must say little, since detailed speech would but

confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect which I sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy

attendants around me. It is sufficient for me to relate events without analyzing causes.

I have said that I dwelt apart from the visible world, but I have not said that I dwelt alone. This no human

creature may do; for lacking the fellowship of the living, he inevitably draws upon the companionship of

things that are not, or are no longer, living. Close by my home there lies a singular wooded hollow, in whose

twilight deeps I spent most of my time; reading, thinking, and dreaming. Down its mosscovered slopes my

first steps of infancy were taken, and around its grotesquely gnarled oak trees my first fancies of boyhood

were woven. Well did I come to know the presiding dryads of those trees, and often have I watched their wild

dances in the struggling beams of a waning moon but of these things I must not now speak. I will tell only of

the lone tomb in the darkest of the hillside thickets; the deserted tomb of the Hydes, an old and exalted family

whose last direct descendant had been laid within its black recesses many decades before my birth.

The vault to which I refer is of ancient granite, weathered and discolored by the mists and dampness of

generations. Excavated back into the hillside, the structure is visible only at the entrance. The door, a

ponderous and forbidding slab of stone, hangs upon rusted iron hinges, and is fastened ajar in a queerly

sinister way by means of heavy iron chains and padlocks, according to a gruesome fashion of half a century

ago. The abode of the race whose scions are here inurned had once crowned the declivity which holds the

tomb, but had long since fallen victim to the flames which sprang up from a stroke of lightning. Of the

midnight storm which destroyed this gloomy mansion, the older inhabitants of the region sometimes speak in

hushed and uneasy voices; alluding to what they call `divine wrath' in a manner that in later years vaguely

increased the always strong fascination which I had felt for the forestdarkened sepulcher. One man only had

perished in the fire. When the last of the Hydes was buried in this place of shade and stillness, the sad urnful

of ashes had come from a distant land, to which the family had repaired when the mansion burned down. No

one remains to lay flowers before the granite portal, and few care to brave the depressing shadows which

I shall never forget the afternoon when first I stumbled upon the halfhidden house of death. It was in

midsummer, when the alchemy of nature transmutes the sylvan landscape to one vivid and almost

homogeneous mass of green; when the senses are wellnigh intoxicated with the surging seas of moist

verdure and the subtly indefinable odors of the soil and the vegetation. In such surroundings the mind loses

its perspective; time and space become trivial and unreal, and echoes of a forgotten prehistoric past beat

All day I had been wandering through the mystic groves of the hollow; thinking thoughts I need not discuss,

and conversing with things I need not name. In years a child of ten, I had seen and heard many wonders

unknown to the throng; and was oddly aged in certain respects. When, upon forcing my way between two

savage clumps of briars, I suddenly encountered the entrance of the vault, I had no knowledge of what I had

discovered. The dark blocks of granite, the door so curiously ajar, and the funeral carvings above the arch,

aroused in me no associations of mournful or terrible character. Of graves and tombs I knew and imagined

much, but had on account of my peculiar temperament been kept from all personal contact with churchyards

and cemeteries. The strange stone house on the woodland slope was to me only a source of interest and

speculation; and its cold, damp interior, into which I vainly peered through the aperture so tantalizingly left,

contained for me no hint of death or decay. But in that instant of curiosity was born the madly unreasoning

desire which has brought me to this hell of confinement. Spurred on by a voice which must have come from

the hideous soul of the forest, I resolved to enter the beckoning gloom in spite of the ponderous chains which

barred my passage. In the waning light of day I alternately rattled the rusty impediments with a view to

throwing wide the stone door, and essayed to squeeze my slight form through the space already provided; but

neither plan met with success. At first curious, I was now frantic; and when in the thickening twilight I

returned to my home, I had sworn to the hundred gods of the grove that at any cost I would some day force an

entrance to the black, chilly depths that seemed calling out to me. The physician with the irongrey beard

who comes each day to my room, once told a visitor that this decision marked the beginning of a pitiful

monomania; but I will leave final judgment to my readers when they shall have learnt all.

The months following my discovery were spent in futile attempts to force the complicated padlock of the

slightly open vault, and in carefully guarded inquiries regarding the nature and history of the structure. With

the traditionally receptive ears of the small boy, I learned much; though an habitual secretiveness caused me

to tell no one of my information or my resolve. It is perhaps worth mentioning that I was not at all surprised

or terrified on learning of the nature of the vault. My rather original ideas regarding life and death had caused

me to associate the cold clay with the breathing body in a vague fashion; and I felt that the great and sinister

family of the burneddown mansion was in some way represented within the stone space I sought to explore.

Mumbled tales of the weird rites and godless revels of bygone years in the ancient hall gave to me a new and

potent interest in the tomb, before whose door I would sit for hours at a time each day. Once I thrust a candie

within the nearly closed entrance, but could see nothing save a flight of damp stone steps leading downward.

The odor of the place repelled yet bewitched me. I felt I had known it before, in a past remote beyond all

The year after I first beheld the tomb, I stumbled upon a wormeaten translation of Plutarch's Lives in the

bookfilled attic of my home. Reading the life of Theseus, I was much impressed by that passage telling of

the great stone beneath which the boyish hero was to find his tokens of destiny whenever he should become

old enough to lift its enormous weight. The legend had the effect of dispelling my keenest impatience to enter

the vault, for it made me feel that the time was not yet ripe. Later, I told myself, I should grow to a strength

and ingenuity which might enable me to unfasten the heavily chained door with ease; but until then I would

Accordingly my watches by the dank portal became less persistent, and much of my time was spent in other

though equally strange pursuits. I would sometimes rise very quietly in the night, stealing out to walk in those

churchyards and places of burial from which I had been kept by my parents. What I did there I may not say,

for I am not now sure of the reality of certain things; but I know that on the day after such a nocturnal ramble

I would often astonish those about me with my knowledge of topics almost forgotten for many generations. It

was after a night like this that I shocked the community with a queer conceit about the burial of the rich and

celebrated Squire Brewster, a maker of local history who was interred in 1711, and whose slate headstone,

bearing a graven skull and crossbones, was slowly crumbling to powder. In a moment of childish imagination

I vowed not only that the undertaker, Goodman Simpson, had stolen the silverbuckled shoes, silken hose,

and satin smallclothes of the deceased before burial; but that the Squire himself, not fully inanimate, had

But the idea of entering the tomb never left my thoughts; being indeed stimulated by the unexpected

genealogical discovery that my own maternal ancestry possessed at least a slight link with the supposediy

extinct family of the Hydes. Last of my paternal race, I was likewise the last of this older and more

mysterious line. I began to feel that the tomb was mine, and to look forward with hot eagerness to the time

when I might pass within that stone door and down those slimy stone steps in the dark. I now formed the

habit of listening very intently at the slightly open portal, choosing my favorite hours of midnight stillness for

the odd vigil. By the time I came of age, I had made a small clearing in the thicket before the moldstained

facade of the hillside, allowing the surrounding vegetation to encircle and overhang the space like the walls

and roof of a sylvan bower. This bower was my temple, the fastened door my shrine, and here I would lie

outstretched on the mossy ground, thinking strange thoughts and dreaming strange dreams.

The night of the first revelation was a sultry one. I must have fallen asleep from fatigue, for it was with a

distinct sense of awakening that I heard the voices. Of these tones and accents I hesitate to speak; of their

quality I will not speak; but I may say that they presented certain uncanny differences in vocabulary,

pronunciation, and mode of utterance. Every shade of New England dialect, from the uncouth syllables of the

Puritan colonists to the precise rhetoric of fifty years ago, seemed represented in that shadowy colloquy,

though it was only later that I noticed the fact. At the time, indeed, my attention was distracted from this

matter by another phenomenon; a phenomenon so fleeting that I could not take oath upon its reality. I barely

fancied that as I awoke, a light had been hurriedly extinguished within the sunken sepulcher. I do not think I

was either astounded or panicstricken, but I know that I was greatly and permanently changed that night.

Upon returning home I went with much directness to a rotting chest in the attic, wherein I found the key

It was in the soft glow of late afternoon that I first entered the vault on the abandoned slope. A spell was upon

me, and my heart leaped with an exultation I can but ill describe. As I closed the door behind me and

descended the dripping steps by the light of my lone candle, I seemed to know the way; and though the

candle sputtered with the stifling reek of the place, I felt singularly at home in the musty, charnelhouse air.

Looking about me, I beheld many marble slabs bearing coffins, or the remains of coffins. Some of these were

sealed and intact, but others had nearly vanished, leaving the silver handles and plates isolated amidst certain

curious heaps of whitish dust. Upon one plate I read the name of Sir Geoffrey Hyde, who had come from

Sussex in 1640 and died here a few years later. In a conspicuous alcove was one fairly well preserved and

untenanted casket, adorned with a single name which brought me both a smile and a shudder. An odd impulse

caused me to climb upon the broad slab, extinguish my candle, and lie down within the vacant box.

In the gray light of dawn I staggered from the vault and locked the chain of the door behind me. I was no

longer a young man, though but twentyone winters had chilled my bodily frame. Earlyrising villagers who

observed my homeward progress looked at me strangely, and marveled at the signs of ribald revelry which

they saw in one whose life was known to be sober and solitary. I did not appear before my parents till after a

Henceforward I haunted the tomb each night; seeing, hearing, and doing things I must never recall. My

speech, always susceptible to environmental influences, was the first thing to succumb to the change; and my

suddenly acquired archaism of diction was soon remarked upon. Later a queer boldness and recklessness

came into my demeanor, till I unconsciously grew to possess the bearing of a man of the world despite my

lifelong seclusion. My formerly silent tongue waxed voluble with the easy grace of a Chesterfield or the

godless cynicism of a Rochester. I displayed a peculiar erudition utterly unlike the fantastic, monkish lore

over which I had pored in youth; and covered the flyleaves of my books with facile impromptu epigrams

which brought up suggestions of Gay, Prior, and the sprightliest of the Augustan wits and rimesters. One

morning at breakfast I came close to disaster by declaiming in palpably liquorish accents an effusion of

Eighteenth Century bacchanalian mirth, a bit of Georgian playfulness never recorded in a book, which ran

Come hither, my lads, with your tankards of ale, And drink to the present before it shall fail; Pile each on

your platter a mountain of beef, For `tis eating and drinking that bring us relief: So fill up your glass,

But what's a red nose if ye're happy and gay? Gad split me! I'd rather be red whilst I'm here, Than white as a

Young Harry, propp'd up just as straight as he's able, Will soon lose his wig and slip under the table, But fill

up your goblets and pass `em around Better under the table than under the ground! So revel and chaff

The fiend strike me blue! l'm scarce able to walk, And damn me if I can stand upright or talk! Here, landlord,

bid Betty to summon a chair; l'll try home for a while, for my wife is not there! So lend me a hand;

About this time I conceived my present fear of fire and thunderstorms. Previously indifferent to such things, I

had now an unspeakable horror of them; and would retire to the innermost recesses of the house whenever the

heavens threatened an electrical display. A favorite haunt of mine during the day was the ruined cellar of the

mansion that had burned down, and in fancy I would picture the structure as it had been in its prime. On one

occasion I startled a villager by leading him confidently to a shallow subcellar, of whose existence I seemed

to know in spite of the fact that it had been unseen and forgotten for many generations.

At last came that which I had long feared. My parents, alarmed at the altered manner and appearance of their

only son, commenced to exert over my movements a kindly espionage which threatened to result in disaster. I

had told no one of my visits to the tomb, having guarded my secret purpose with religious zeal since

childhood; but now I was forced to exercise care in threading the mazes of the wooded hollow, that I might

throw off a possible pursuer. My key to the vault I kept suspended from a cord about my neck, its presence

known only to me. I never carried out of the sepulcher any of the things I came upon whilst within its walls.

One morning as I emerged from the damp tomb and fastened the chain of the portal with none too steady

hand, I beheld in an adjacent thicket the dreaded face of a watcher. Surely the end was near; for my bower

was discovered, and the objective of my nocturnal journeys revealed. The man did not accost me, so I

hastened home in an effort to overhear what he might report to my careworn father. Were my sojourns

beyond the chained door about to be proclaimed to the world? Imagine my delighted astonishment on hearing

the spy inform my parent in a cautious whisper that I had spent the night in the bower outside the tomb; my

sleepfilmed eyes fixed upon the crevice where the padlocked portal stood ajar! By what miracle had the

watcher been thus deluded? I was now convinced that a supernatural agency protected me. Made bold by this

heavensent circumstance, I began to resume perfect openness in going to the vault; confident that no one

could witness my entrance. For a week I tasted to the full joys of that charnel conviviality which I must not

describe, when the thing happened, and I was borne away to this accursed abode of sorrow and monotony.

I should not have ventured out that night; for the taint of thunder was in the clouds, and a hellish

phosphoresence rose from the rank swamp at the bottom of the hollow. The call of the dead, too, was

different. Instead of the hillside tomb, it was the charred cellar on the crest of the slope whose presiding

demon beckoned to me with unseen fingers. As I emerged from an intervening grove upon the plain before

the ruin. I beheld in the misty moonlight a thing I had always vaguely expected. The mansion, gone for a

century, once more reared its stately height to the raptured vision; every window ablaze with the splendor of

many candles. Up the long drive rolled the coaches of the Boston gentry, whilst on foot came a numerous

assemblage of powdered exquisites from the neighboring mansions. With this throng I mingled, though I

knew I belonged with the hosts rather than with the guests. Inside the hall were music, laughter, and wine on

every hand. Several faces I recognized; though I should have known them better had they been shriveled or

eaten away by death and decomposition. Amidst a wild and reckless throng I was the wildest and most

abandoned. Gay blasphemy poured in torrents from my lips, and in shocking sallies I heeded no law of God,

Suddenly a peal of thunder, resonant even above the din of the swinish revelry, clave the very roof and laid a

hush of fear upon the boisterous company. Red tongues of flame and searing gusts of heat engulfed the

house; and the roysterers, struck with terror at the descent of a calamity which seemed to transcend the

bounds of unguided nature, fled shrieking into the night. I alone remained, riveted to my seat by a groveling

fear which I had never felt before. And then a second horror took possession of my soul. Burnt alive to ashes,

my body dispersed by the four winds, I might never lie in the tomb of the Hydesi Was not my coffin prepared

for me? Had I not a right to rest till eternity amongst the descendants of Sir Geoffrey Hyde? Aye! I would

claim my heritage of death, even though my soul go seeking through the ages for another corporeal tenement

to represent it on that vacant slab in the alcove of the vault. Jervas Hyde should never share the sad fate of

As the phantom of the burning house faded, I found myself screaming and struggling madly in the arms of

two men, one of whom was the spy who had followed me to the tomb. Rain was pouring down in torrents,

and upon the southern horizon were flashes of lightning that had so lately passed over our heads. My father,

his face lined with sorrow, stood by as I shouted my demands to be laid within the tomb, frequently

admonishing my captors to treat me as gently as they could. A blackened circle on the floor of the ruined

cellar told of a violent stroke from the heavens; and from this spot a group of curious villagers with lanterns

were prying a small box of antique workmanship, which the thunderbolt had brought to light.

Ceasing my futile and now objectless writhing, I watched the spectators as they viewed the treasuretrove,

and was permitted to share in their discoveries. The box, whose fastenings were broken by the stroke which

had unearthed it, contained many papers and objects of value, but I had eyes for one thing alone. It was the

porcelain miniature of a young man in a smartly curled bagwig, and bore the initials `J. H.' The face was

On the following day I was brought to this room with the barred windows, but I have been kept informed of

certain things through an aged and simpleminded servitor, for whom I bore a fondness in infancy, and who,

like me, loves the churchyard. What I have dared relate of my experiences within the vault has brought me

only pitying smiles. My father, who visits me frequently, declares that at no time did I pass the chained

portal, and swears that the rusted padlock had not been touched for fifty years when he examined it. He even

says that all the village knew of my journeys to the tomb, and that I was often watched as I slept in the bower

outside the grim facade, my halfopen eyes fixed on the crevice that leads to the interior. Against these

assertions I have no tangible proof to offer, since my key to the padlock was lost in the struggle on that night

of horrors. The strange things of the past which I have learned during those nocturnal meetings with the dead

he dismisses as the fruits of my lifelong and omnivorous browsing amongst the ancient volumes of the family

library. Had it not been for my old servant Hiram, I should have by this time become quite convinced of my

But Hiram, loyal to the last, has held faith in me, and has done that which impels me to make public at least

part of my story. A week ago he burst open the lock which chains the door of the tomb perpetually ajar, and

descended with a lantern into the murky depths. On a slab in an alcove he found an old but empty coffin

whose tarnished plate bears the single word: Jervas. In that coffin and in that vault they have promised me I

I have examined maps of the city with the greatest care, yet have never again found the Rue d�Auseil. These

maps have not been modem maps alone, for I know that names change. I have, on the contrary, delved deeply

into all the antiquities of the place, and have personally explored every region, of whatever name, which

could possibly answer to the street I knew as the Rue d�Auseil. But despite all I have done, it remains an

humiliating fact that I cannot find the house, the street, or even the locality, where, during the last months of

my impoverished life as a student of metaphysics at the university, I heard the music of Erich Zann.

That my memory is broken, I do not wonder; for my health, physical and mental, was gravely disturbed

throughout the period of my residence in the Rue d�Auseil, and I recall that I took none of my few

acquaintances there. But that I cannot find the place again is both singular and perplexing; for it was within a

halfhour�s walk of the university and was distinguished by peculiarities which could hardly be forgotten by

any one who had been there. I have never met a person who has seen the Rue d�Auseil.

The Rue d�Auseil lay across a dark river bordered by precipitous brick blearwindowed warehouses and

spanned by a ponderous bridge of dark stone. It was always shadowy along that river, as if the smoke of

neighboring factories shut out the sun perpetually. The river was also odorous with evil stenches which I have

never smelled elsewhere, and which may some day help me to find it, since I should recognize them at once.

Beyond the bridge were narrow cobbled streets with rails; and then came the ascent, at first gradual, but

I have never seen another street as narrow and steep as the Rue d�Auseil. It was almost a cliff, closed to all

vehicles, consisting in several places of ffights of steps, and ending at the top in a lofty ivied wall. Its paving

was irregular, sometimes stone slabs, sometimes cobblestones, and sometimes bare earth with struggling

greenishgrey vegetation. The houses were tall, peakedroofed, incredibly old, and crazily leaning backward,

forward, and sidewise. Occasionally an opposite pair, both leaning forward, almost met across the street like

an arch; and certainly they kept most of the light from the ground below. There were a few overhead bridges

The inhabitants of that street impressed me peculiarly; At first I thought it was because they were all silent

and reticent; but later decided it was because they were all very old. I do not know how I came to live on such

a street, but I was not myself when I moved there. I had been living in many poor places, always evicted for

want of money; until at last I came upon that tottering house in the Rue d�Auseil kept by the paralytic

Blandot. It was the third house from the top of the street, and by far the tallest of them all.

My rcom was on the fifth story; the only inhabited room there, since the house was almost empty. On the

night I arrived I heard strang music from the peaked garret overhead, and the next day asked old Blandot

about it. He told me it was an old German violplayer, a strange dumb man who signed his name as Erich

Zann, and who played eve nings in a cheap theater orchestra; adding that Zann�s desire to play in the night

after his return from the theater was the reason he had chosen this lofty and isolated garret room, whose

single gable window was the only point on the street from which one could look over the terminating wall at

Thereafter I heard Zann every night, and although he kept me awake, I was haunted by the weirdness of his

music. Knowing little of the art myself, I was yet certain that none of his harmonies had any relation to music

I had heard before; and concluded that he was a composer of highly original genius. The longer I listened, the

more I was fascinated, until after a week I resolved to make the old man�s acquaintance.

One night as he was returning from his work, I intercepted Zann in the hallway and told him that I would like

to know him and be with him when he played. He was a small, lean, bent person, with shabby clothes, blue

eyes, grotesque, satyrlike face, and nearly bald head; and at my first words seemed both angered and

frightened. My obvious friendliness, however, finally melted him; and he grudgingly motioned to me to

follow him up the dark, creaking and rickety attic stairs. His room, one of only two in the steeply pitched

garret, was on the west side, toward the high wall that formed the upper end of the street. Its size was very

great, and seemed the greater because of its extraordinary barrenness and neglect. Of furniture there was only

a narrow iron bedstead, a dingy washstand, a small table, a large bookcase, an iron musicrack, and three

oldfashioned chairs. Sheets of music were piled in disorder about the floor. The walls were of bare boards,

and had probably never known plaster; whilst the abundance of dust and cobwebs made the place seem more

deserted than inhabited. Evidently Erich Zann�s world of beauty lay in some far cosmos of the imagination.

Motioning me to sit down, the dumb man closed the door, turned the large wooden bolt, and lighted a candle

to augment the one he had brought with him. He now removed his viol from its motheaten covering, and

taking it, seated himself in the least uncomfortable of the chairs. He did not employ the musicrack, but,

offering no choice and playing from memory, enchanted me for over an hour with strains I had never heard

before; strains which must have been of his own devising. To describe their exact nature is impossible for one

unversed in music. They were a kind of fugue, with recurrent passages of the most captivating quality, but to

me were notable for the absence of any of the weird notes I had overheard from my room below on other

Those haunting notes I had remembered, and had often hummed and whistled inaccurately to myself, so

when the player at length laid down his bow I asked him if he would render some of them. As I began my

request the wrinkled satyrlike face lost the bored placidity it had possessed during the playing, and seemed to

show the same curious mixture of anger and fright which I had noticed when first I accosted the old man. For

a moment I was inclined to use persuasion, regarding rather lightly the whims of senility; and even tried to

awaken my host�s weirder mood by whistling a few of the strains to which I had listened the night before. But

I did not pursue this course for more than a moment; for when the dumb musician recognized the whistled air

his face grew suddenly distorted with an expression wholly beyond analysis, and his long, cold, bony right

hand reached out to stop my mouth and silence the crude imitation. As he did this he further demonstrated his

eccentricity by casting a startled glance toward the lone curtained window, as if fearful of some intruder�a

glance doubly absurd, since the garret stood high and inaccessible above all the adjacent roofs, this window

being the only point on the steep street, as the concierge had told me, from which one could see over the wall

The old man�s glance brought Blandot�s remark to my mind, and with a certain capriciousness I felt a wish to

look out over the wide and dizzying panorama of moonlit roofs and city lights beyond the hilltop, which of

all the dwellers in the Rue d�Auseil only this crabbed musician could see. I moved toward the window and

would have drawn aside the nondescript curtains, when with a frightened rage even greater than before, the

dumb lodger was upon me again; this time motioning with his head toward the door as he nervously strove to

drag me thither with both hands. Now thoroughly disgusted with my host, I ordered him to release me, and

told him I would go at once. His clutch relaxed, and as he saw my disgust and offense, his own anger seemed

to subside. He tightened his relaxing grip, but this time in a friendly manner, forcing me into a chair; then

with an appearance of wistfulness crossing to the littered table, where he wrote many words with a pencil, in

The note which he finally handed me was an appeal for tolerance and forgiveness. Zann said that he was old,

lonely, and afflicted with strange fears and nervous disorders connected with his music and with other things.

He had enjoyed my listening to his music, and wished I would come again and not mind his eccentricities.

But he could not play to another his weird harmonies, and could not bear hearing them from another; nor

could he bear having anything in his room touched by another. He had not known until our hallway

conversation that I could overhear his playing in my room, and now asked me if I would arrange with

Blandot to take a lower room where I could not hear him in the night. He would, he wrote, defray the

As I sat deciphering the execrable French, I felt more lenient toward the old man. He was a victim of physical

and nervous suffering, as was I; and my metaphysical studies had taught me kindness. In the silence there

came a slight sound from the window�the shutter must have rattled in the night wind, and for some reason I

started almost as violently as did Erich Zann. So when I had finished reading, I shook my host by the hand,

The next day Blandot gave me a more expensive room on the third floor, between the apartments of an aged

moneylender and the room of a respectable upholsterer. There was no one on the fourth floor.

It was not long before I found that Zann�s eagerness for my company was not as great as it had seemed while

he was persuading me to move down from the fifth story. He did not ask me to call on him, and when I did

call he appeared uneasy and played listlessly. This was always at night�in the day he slept and would admit

no one. My liking for him did not grow, though the attic room and the weird music seemed to hold an odd

fascination for me. I had a curious desire to look out of that window, over the wall and down the unseen slope

at the glittering roofs and spires which must lie outspread there. Once I went up to the garret during theater

What I did succeed in doing was to overhear the nocturnal playing of the dumb old man. At first I would

tiptoe up to my old fifth floor, then I grew bold enough to climb the last creaking staircase to the peaked

garret. There in the narrow hall, outside the bolted door with the covered keyhole, I often heard sounds which

filled me with an indefinable dread�the dread of vague wonder and brooding mystery. It was not that the

sounds were hideous, for they were not; but that they held vibrations suggesting nothing on this globe of

earth, and that at certain intervals they assumed a symphonic quality which I could hardly conceive as

produced by one player. Certainly, Erich Zann was a genius of wild power. As the weeks passed, the playing

grew wilder, whilst the old musician acquired an increasing haggardness and furtiveness pitiful to behold. He

now refused to admit me at any time, and shunned me whenever we met on the stairs.

Then one night as I listened at the door, I heard the shrieking viol swell into a chaotic babel of sound; a

pandemonium which would have led me to doubt my own shaking sanity had there not come from behind

that barred portal a piteous proof that the horror was real�the awful, inarticulate cry which only a mute can

utter, and which rises only in moments of the most terrible fear or anguish. I knocked repeatedly at the door,

but received no response. Afterward I waited in the black hallway, shivering with cold and fear, till I heard

the poor musician�s feeble effort to rise from the floor by the aid of a chair. Believing him just conscious after

a fainting fit, I renewed my rapping, at the same time calling out my name reassuringly. I heard Zann stumble

to the window and close both shutter and sash, then stumble to the door, which he falteringly unfastened to

admit me. This time his delight at having me present was real; for his distorted face gleamed with relief while

Shaking pathetically, the old man forced me into a chair whilst he sank into another, beside which his viol

and bow lay carelessly on the floor. He sat for some time inactive, nodding oddly, but having a paradoxical

suggestion of intense and frightened listening. Subsequently he seemed to be satisfied, and crossing to a chair

by the table wrote a brief note, handed it to me, and returned to the table, where he began to write rapidly and

incessantly. The note implored me in the name of mercy, and for the sake of my own curiosity, to wait where

I was while he prepared a full account in German of all the marvels and terrors which beset him. I waited, and

It was perhaps an hour later, while I still waited and while the old musician�s feverishly written sheets still

continued to pile up, that I saw Zann start as from the hint of a horrible shock. Unmistakably he was looking

at the curtained window and listening shudderingly. Then I half fancied I heard a sound myself; though it was

not a horrible sound, but rather an exquisitely low and infinitely distant musical note, suggesting a player in

one of the neighboring houses, or in some abode beyond the lofty wall over which I had never been able to

look. Upon Zann the effect was terrible, for, dropping his pencil, suddenly he rose, seized his viol, and

commenced to rend the night with the wildest playing I had ever heard from his bow save when listening at

It would be useless to describe the playing of Erich Zann on that dreadful night. It was more horrible than

anything I had ever overheard, because I could now see the expression of his face, and could realize that this

time the motive was stark fear. He was trying to make a noise; to ward something off or drown something

out�what, I could not imagine, awesome though I felt it must be. The playing grew fantastic, dehnous, and

hysterical, yet kept to the last the qualities of supreme genius which I knew this strange old man possessed. I

recognized the air�it was a wild Hungarian dance popular in the theaters, and I reflected for a moment that

this was the first time I had ever heard Zann play the work of another composer.

Louder and louder, wilder and wilder, mounted the shrieking and whining of that desperate viol. The player

was dripping with an uncanny perspiration and twisted like a monkey, always looking frantically at the

curtained window. In his frenzied strains I could almost see shadowy satyrs and bacchanals dancing and

whirling insanely through seething abysses of clouds and smoke and lightning. And then I thought I heard a

shriller, steadier note that was not from the viol; a calm, deliberate, purposeful, mocking note from far away

At this juncture the shutter began to rattle in a howling night wind which had sprung up outside as if in

answer to the mad playing within. Zann�s screaming viol now outdid itself emitting sounds I had never

thought a viol could emit. The shutter rattled more loudly, unfastened, and commenced slamming against the

window. Then the glass broke shiveringly under the persistent impacts, and the chill wind rushed in, making

the candles sputter and rustling the sheets of paper on the table where Zann had begun to write out his

horrible secret. I looked at Zann, and saw that he was past conscious observation. His blue eyes were bulging,

glassy and sightless, and the frantic playing had become a blind, mechanical, unrecognizable orgy that no pen

A sudden gust, stronger than the others, caught up the manuscript and bore it toward the window. I followed

the flying sheets in desperation, but they were gone before I reached the demolished panes. Then I

remembered my old wish to gaze from this window, the only window in the Rue d�Auseil from which one

might see the slope beyond the wall, and the city outspread beneath. It was very dark, but the city�s lights

always burned, and I expected to see them there amidst the rain and wind. Yet when I looked from that

highest of all gable windows, looked while the candles sputtered and the insane viol howled with the

nightwind, I saw no city spread below, and no friendly lights gleamed from remembered streets, but only

the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance

of anything on earth. And as I stood there looking in terror, the wind blew out both the candles in that ancient

peaked garret, leaving me in savage and impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium before me, and

I staggered back in the dark, without the means of striking a light, crashing against the table, overturning a

chair, and finally groping my way to the place where the blackness screamed with shocking music. To save

myself and Erich Zann I could at least try, whatever the powers opposed to me. Once I thought some chill

thing brushed me, and I screamed, but my scream could not be heard above that hideous viol. Suddenly out of

the blackness the madly sawing bow struck me, and I knew I was close to the player. I felt ahead, touched the

back of Zann�s chair, and then found and shook his shoulder in an effort to bring him to his senses.

He did not respond, and still the viol shrieked on without slackening. I moved my hand to his head, whose

mechanical nodding I was able to stop, and shouted in his ear that we must both flee from the unknown

things of the night. But he neither answered me nor abated the frenzy of his unutterable music, while all

through the garret strange currents of wind seemed to dance in the darkness and babel. When my hand

touched his ear I shuddered, though I knew not why�knew not why till I felt the still face; the icecold,

stiffened, unbreathing face whose glassy eyes bulged uselessly into the void. And then, by some miracle,

finding the door and the large wooden bolt, I plunged wildly away from that glassyeyed thing in the dark,

and from the ghoulish howling of that accursed viol whose fury increased even as I plunged.

Leaping, floating, flying down those endless stairs through the dark house; racing mindlessly out into the

narrow, steep, and ancient street of steps and tottering houses; clattering down steps and over cobbles to the

lower streets and the putrid canyonwalled river; panting across the great dark bridge to the broader,

healthier streets and boulevards we know; all these are terrible impressions that linger with me. And I recall

that there was no wind, and that the moon was out, and that all the lights of the city twinkled.

Despite my most careful searches and investigations, I have never since been able to find the Rue d�Auseil.

But I am not wholly sorry; either for this or for the loss in undreamable abysses of the closelywritten sheets

In a dream Kuranes saw the city in the valley, and the seacoast beyond, and the snowy peak overlooking the

sea, and the gaily painted galleys that sail out of the harbour toward distant regions where the sea meets the

sky. In a dream it was also that he came by his name of Kuranes, for when awake he was called by another

name. Perhaps it was natural for him to dream a new name; for he was the last of his family, and alone among

the indifferent millions of London, so there were not many to speak to him and to remind him who he had

been. His money and lands were gone, and he did not care for the ways of the people about him, but preferred

to dream and write of his dreams. What he wrote was laughed at by those to whom he showed it, so that after

a time he kept his writings to himself, and finally ceased to write. The more he withdrew from the world

about him, the more wonderful became his dreams; and it would have been quite futile to try to describe them

on paper. Kuranes was not modern, and did not think like others who wrote. Whilst they strove to strip from

life its embroidered robes of myth and to show in naked ugliness the foul thing that is reality, Kuranes sought

for beauty alone. When truth and experience failed to reveal it, he sought it in fancy and illusion, and found it

There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their

youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but halfformed thoughts, and when as men we try

to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. But some of us awake in the night with

strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs

overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of

shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we

know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we

Kuranes came very suddenly upon his old world of childhood. He had been dreaming of the house where he

had been born; the great stone house covered with ivy, where thirteen generations of his ancestors had lived,

and where he had hoped to die. It was moonlight, and he had stolen out into the fragrant summer night,

through the gardens, down the terraces, past the great oaks of the park, and along the long white road to the

village. The village seemed very old, eaten away at the edge like the moon which had commenced to wane,

and Kuranes wondered whether the peaked roofs of the small houses hid sleep or death. In the streets were

spears of long grass, and the windowpanes on either side broken or ifimily staring. Kuranes had not

lingered, but had plodded on as though summoned toward some goal. He dared not disobey the summons for

fear it might prove an illusion like the urges and aspirations of waking life, which do not lead to any goal.

Then he had been drawn down a lane that led off from the village street toward the channel cliffs, and had

come to the end of things�to the precipice and the abyss where all the village and all the world fell abruptly

into the unechoing emptiness of infinity, and where even the sky ahead was empty and unit by the crumbling

moon and the peering stars. Faith had urged him on, over the precipice and into the gulf, where he had floated

down, down, down; past dark, shapeless, undreamed dreams, faintly glowing spheres that may have been

partly dreamed dreams, and laughing winged things that seemed to mock the dreamers of all the worlds. Then

a rift seemed to open in the darkness before him, and he saw the city of the valley, glistening radiantly far, far

below, with a background of sea and sky, and a snowcapped mountain near the shore.

Kuranes had awakened the very moment he beheld the city, yet he knew from his brief glance that it was

none other than Celephais, in the Valley of OothNargai beyond the Tanarian Hills where his spirit had dwelt

all the eternity of an hour one summer afternoon very long ago, when he had slipt away from his nurse and let

the warm seabreeze lull him to sleep as he watched the clouds from the cliff near the village. He had

protested then, when they had found him, waked him, and carried him home, for just as he was aroused he

had been about to sail in a golden galley for those alluring regions where the sea meets the sky. And now he

was equally resentful of awaking, for he had found his fabulous city after forty weary years.

But three nights afterward Kuranes came again to Celephais. As before, he dreamed first of the village that

was asleep or dead, and of the abyss down which one must float silently; then the rift appeared again, and he

beheld the glittering minarets of the city, and saw the graceful galleys riding at anchor in the blue harbour,

and watched the gingko trees of Mount Man swaying in the seabreeze. But this time he was not snatched

away, and like a winged being settled gradually over a grassy hillside till finally his feet rested gently on the

turf. He had indeed come back to the Valley of OothNargai and the splendid city of Celephais.

Down the hill amid scented grasses and brilliant flowers walked Kuranes, over the bubbling Naraxa on the

small wooden bridge where he had carved his name so many years ago, and through the whispering grove to

the great stone bridge by the city gate. All was as of old, nor were the marble walls discoloured, nor the

polished bronze statues upon them tarnished. And Kuranes saw that he need not tremble lest the things he

knew be vanished; for even the sentries on the ramparts were the same, and still as young as he remembered

them. When he entered the city, past the bronze gates and over the onyx pavements, the merchants and

cameldrivers greeted him as if he had never been away; and it Was the same at the turquoise temple of

NathHorthath, where the orchidwreathed priests told him that there is no time in OothNargai, but only

perpetual youth. Then Kuranes walked through the Street of Pillars to the seaward wall, where gathered the

traders and sailors, and strange men from the regions where the sea meets the sky. There he stayed long,

gazing out over the bright harbour where the ripples sparkled beneath an unknown sun, and where rode

lightly the galleys from far places over the water. And he gazed also upon Mount Man rising regally from the

shore, its lower slopes green with swaying trees and its white summit touching the sky.

More than ever Kuranes wished to sail in a galley to the far places of which he had heard so many strange

tales, and he sought again the captain who had agreed to carry him so long ago. He found the man, Athib,

sitting on the same chest of spice he had sat upon before, and Athib seemed not to realize that any time had

passed. Then the two rowed to a galley in the harbour, and giving orders to the oarmen, commenced to sail

out into the billowy Cerenarian Sea that leads to the sky. For several days they glided undulatingly over the

water, till finally they came to the horizon, where the sea meets the sky. Here the galley paused not at all, but

floated easily in the blue of the sky among fleecy clouds tinted with rose. And far beneath the keel Kuranes

could see strange lands and rivers and cities of surpassing beauty, spread indolently in the sunshine which

seemed never to lessen or disappear. At length Athib told him that their journey was near its end, and that

they would soon enter the harbour of Serannian, the pink marble city of the clouds, which is built on that

ethereal coast where the west wind flows into the sky; but as the highest of the city�s carven towers came into

sight there was a sound somewhere in space, and Kuranes awaked in his London garret.

For many months after that Kuranes sought the marvellous city of Celephais and its skybound galleys in

vain; and though his dreams carried him to many gorgeous and unheardof places, no one whom he met

could tell him how to find OothNargai beyond the Tanarian Hills. One night he went flying over dark

mountains where there were faint, lone campfires at great distances apart, and strange, shaggy herds with

tinkling bells on the leaders, and in the wildest part of this hilly country, so remote that few men could ever

have seen it, he found a hideously ancient wall or causeway of stone zigzagging along the ridges and valleys;

too gigantic ever to have risen by human hands, and of such a length that neither end of it could be seen.

Beyond that wall in the grey dawn he came to a land of quaint gardens and cherry trees, and when the sun

rose he beheld such beauty of red and white flowers, green foliage and lawns, white paths, diamond brooks,

blue lakelets, carven bridges, and redroofed pagodas, that he for a moment forgot Celephais in sheer delight.

But he remembered it again when he walked down a white path toward a redroofed pagoda, and would have

questioned the people of this land about it, had he not found that there were no people there, but only birds

and bees and butterflies. On another night Kuranes walked up a damp stone spiral stairway endlessly, and

came to a tower window overlooking a mighty plain and river lit by the full moon; and in the silent city that

spread away from the river bank he thought he beheld some feature or arrangement which he had known

before. He would have descended and asked the way to OothNargai had not a fearsome aurora sputtered up

from some remote place beyond the horizon, showing the ruin and antiquity of the city, and the stagnation of

the reedy river, and the death lying upon that land, as it had lain since King Kynaratholis came home from his

So Kuranes sought fruitlessly for the marvellous city of Celephais and its galleys that sail to Serannian in the

sky, meanwhile seeing many wonders and once barely escaping from the highpriest not to be described,

which wears a yellow silken mask over its face and dwells all alone in a prehistoric stone monastery in the

cold desert plateau of Leng. In time he grew so impatient of the bleak intervals of day that he began buying

drugs in order to increase his periods of sleep. Hasheesh helped a great deal, and once sent him to a part of

space where form does not exist, but where glowing gases study the secrets of existence. And a

violetcoloured gas told him that this part of space was outside what he had called infinity. The gas had not

heard of planets and organisms before, but identified Kuranes merely as one from the infinity where matter,

energy, and gravitation exist. Kuranes was now very anxious to return to minaretstudded Celephais, and

increased his doses of drugs; but eventually he had no more money left, and could buy no drugs. Then one

summer day he was turned out of his garret, and wandered aimlessly through the streets, drifting over a

bridge to a place where the houses grew thinner and thinner. And it was there that fulfillment came, and he

Handsome knights they were, astride roan horses and clad in shining armour with tabards of clothofgold

curiously emblazoned. So numerous were they, that Kuranes almost mistook them for an army, but they were

sent in his honour; since it was he who had created OothNargai in his dreams, on which account he was now

to be appointed its chief god for evermore. Then they gave Kuranes a horse and placed him at the head of the

cavalcade, and all rode majestically through the downs of Surrey and onward toward the region where

Kuranes and his ancestors were born. It was very strange, but as the riders went on they seemed to gallop

back through Time; for whenever they passed through a village in the twilight they saw only such houses and

villagers as Chaucer or men before him might have seen, and sometimes they saw knights on horseback with

small companies of retainers. When it grew dark they travelled more swiftly, till soon they were flying

uncannily as if in the air. In the dim dawn they came upon the village which Kuranes had seen alive in his

childhood, and asleep or dead in his dreams. It was alive now, and early villagers curtsied as the horsemen

clattered down the street and turned off into the lane that ends in the abyss of dreams. Kuranes had previously

entered that abyss only at night, and wondered what it would look like by day; so he watched anxiously as the

column approached its brink. Just as they galloped up the rising ground to the precipice a golden glare came

somewhere out of the west and hid all the landscape in effulgent draperies. The abyss was a seething chaos of

roseate and cerulean splendour, and invisible voices sang exultantly as the knightly entourage plunged over

the edge and floated gracefully down past glittering clouds and silvery coruscations. Endlessly down the

horsemen floated, their chargers pawing the aether as if galloping over golden sands; and then the luminous

vapours spread apart to reveal a greater brightness, the brightness of the city Celephais, and the sea coast

beyond, and the snowy peak overlooking the sea, and the gaily painted galleys that sail out of the harbour

And Kuranes reigned thereafter over OothNargai and all the neighboring regions of dream, and held his

court alternately in Celephais and in the cloudfashioned Serannian. He reigns there still, and will reign

happily for ever, though below the cliffs at Innsmouth the channel tides played mockingly with the body of a

tramp who had stumbled through the halfdeserted village at dawn; played mockingly, and cast it upon the

rocks by ivycovered Trevor Towers, where a notably fat and especially offensive millionaire brewer enjoys

Apropos of sleep, that sinister adventure of all our nights, we may say that men go to bed daily with an

audacity that would be incomprehensible if we did not know that it is the result of ignorance of the danger.

May the merciful gods, if indeed there be such, guard those hours when no power of the will, or drug that the

cunning of man devises, can keep me from the chasm of sleep. Death is merciful, for there is no return

therefrom, but with him who has come back out of the nethermost chambers of night, haggard and knowing,

peace rests nevermore. Fool that I was to plunge with such unsanctioned phrensy into mysteries no man was

meant to penetrate; fool or god that he wasmy only friend, who led me and went before me, and who in the

We met, I recall, in a railway station, where he was the center of a crowd of the vulgarly curious. He was

unconscious, having fallen in a kind of convulsion which imparted to his slight blackclad body a strange

rigidity. I think he was then approaching forty years of age, for there were deep lines in the face, wan and

hollowcheeked, but oval and actually beautiful; and touches of gray in the thick, waving hair and small full

beard which had once been of the deepest raven black. His brow was white as the marble of Pentelicus, and

I said to myself, with all the ardor of a sculptor, that this man was a faun's statue out of antique Hellas, dug

from a temple's ruins and brought somehow to life in our stifling age only to feel the chill and pressure of

devastating years. And when he opened his immense, sunken, and wildly luminous black eyes I knew he

would be thenceforth my only friendthe only friend of one who had never possessed a friend beforefor I

saw that such eyes must have looked fully upon the grandeur and the terror of realms beyond normal

consciousness and reality; realms which I had cherished in fancy, but vainly sought. So as I drove the crowd

away I told him he must come home with me and be my teacher and leader in unfathomed mysteries, and he

assented without speaking a word. Afterward I found that his voice was musicthe music of deep viols and of

crystalline spheres. We talked often in the night, and in the day, when I chiseled busts of him and carved

Of our studies it is impossible to speak, since they held so slight a connection with anything of the world as

living men conceive it. They were of that vaster and more appalling universe of dim entity and consciousness

which lies deeper than matter, time, and space, and whose existence we suspect only in certain forms of

sleep those rare dreams beyond dreams which come never to common men, and but once or twice in the

lifetime of imaginative men. The cosmos of our waking knowledge, born from such an universe as a bubble

is born from the pipe of a jester, touches it only as such a bubble may touch its sardonic source when sucked

back by the jester's whim. Men of learning suspect it little and ignore it mostly. Wise men have interpreted

dreams, and the gods have laughed. One man with Oriental eyes has said that all time and space are relative,

and men have laughed. But even that man with Oriental eyes has done no more than suspect. I had wished

and tried to do more than suspect, and my friend had tried and partly succeeded. Then we both tried together,

and with exotic drugs courted terrible and forbidden dreams in the tower studio chamber of the old

Among the agonies of these after days is that chief of torments inarticulateness. What I learned and saw in

those hours of impious exploration can never be toldfor want of symbols or suggestions in any language. I

say this because from first to last our discoveries partook only of the nature of sensations; sensations

correlated with no impression which the nervous system of normal humanity is capable of receiving. They

were sensations, yet within them lay unbelievable elements of time and spacethings which at bottom possess

no distinct and definite existence. Human utterance can best convey the general character of our experiences

by calling them plungings or soarings; for in every period of revelation some part of our minds broke boldly

away from all that is real and present, rushing aerially along shocking, unlighted, and fearhaunted abysses,

and occasionally tearing through certain wellmarked and typical obstacles describable only as viscous,

In these black and bodiless flights we were sometimes alone and sometimes together. When we were

together, my friend was always far ahead; I could comprehend his presence despite the absence of form by a

species of pictorial memory whereby his face appeared to me, golden from a strange light and frightful with

its weird beauty, its anomalously youthful cheeks, its burning eyes, its Olympian brow, and its shadowing

Of the progress of time we kept no record, for time had become to us the merest illusion. I know only that

there must have been something very singular involved, since we came at length to marvel why we did not

grow old. Our discourse was unholy, and always hideously ambitiousno god or daemon could have aspired

to discoveries and conquest like those which we planned in whispers. I shiver as I speak of them, and dare not

be explicit; though I will say that my friend once wrote on paper a wish which he dared not utter with his

tongue, and which made me burn the paper and look affrightedly out of the window at the spangled night sky.

I will hintonly hint that he had designs which involved the rulership of the visible universe and more;

designs whereby the earth and the stars would move at his command, and the destinies of all living things be

his. I affirmI swearthat I had no share in these extreme aspirations. Anything my friend may have said or

written to the contrary must be erroneous, for I am no man of strength to risk the unmentionable spheres by

There was a night when winds from unknown spaces whirled us irresistibly into limitless vacua beyond all

thought and entity. Perceptions of the most maddeningly untransmissible sort thronged upon us; perceptions

of infinity which at the time convulsed us with joy, yet which are now partly lost to my memory and partly

incapable of presentation to others. Viscous obstacles were clawed through in rapid succession, and at length

I felt that we had been borne to realms of greater remoteness than any we had previously known.

My friend was vastly in advance as we plunged into this awesome ocean of virgin aether, and I could see the

sinister exultation on his floating, luminous, tooyouthful memoryface. Suddenly that face became dim and

quickly disappeared, and in a brief space I found myself projected against an obstacle which I could not

penetrate. It was like the others, yet incalculably denser; a sticky clammy mass, if such terms can be applied

I had, I felt, been halted by a barrier which my friend and leader had successfully passed. Struggling anew, I

came to the end of the drugdream and opened my physical eyes to the tower studio in whose opposite corner

reclined the pallid and still unconscious form of my fellow dreamer, weirdly haggard and wildly beautiful as

Then, after a short interval, the form in the corner stirred; and may pitying heaven keep from my sight and

sound another thing like that which took place before me. I cannot tell you how he shrieked, or what vistas of

unvisitable hells gleamed for a second in black eyes crazed with fright. I can only say that I fainted, and did

not stir till he himself recovered and shook me in his phrensy for someone to keep away the horror and

That was the end of our voluntary searchings in the caverns of dream. Awed, shaken, and portentous, my

friend who had been beyond the barrier warned me that we must never venture within those realms again.

What he had seen, he dared not tell me; but he said from his wisdom that we must sleep as little as possible,

even if drugs were necessary to keep us awake. That he was right, I soon learned from the unutterable fear

After each short and inevitable sleep I seemed older, whilst my friend aged with a rapidity almost shocking. It

is hideous to see wrinkles form and hair whiten almost before one's eyes. Our mode of life was now totally

altered. Heretofore a recluse so far as I knowhis true name and origin never having passed his lipsmy

friend now became frantic in his fear of solitude. At night he would not be alone, nor would the company of a

few persons calm him. His sole relief was obtained in revelry of the most general and boisterous sort; so that

Our appearance and age seemed to excite in most cases a ridicule which I keenly resented, but which my

friend considered a lesser evil than solitude. Especially was he afraid to be out of doors alone when the stars

were shining, and if forced to this condition he would often glance furtively at the sky as if hunted by some

monstrous thing therein. He did not always glance at the same place in the skyit seemed to be a different

place at different times. On spring evenings it would be low in the northeast. In the summer it would be

nearly overhead. In the autumn it would be in the northwest. In winter it would be in the east, but mostly if in

Midwinter evenings seemed least dreadful to him. Only after two years did I connect this fear with anything

in particular; but then I began to see that he must be looking at a special spot on the celestial vault whose

position at different times corresponded to the direction of his glancea spot roughly marked by the

We now had a studio in London, never separating, but never discussing the days when we had sought to

plumb the mysteries of the unreal world. We were aged and weak from our drugs, dissipations, and nervous

overstrain, and the thinning hair and beard of my friend had become snowwhite. Our freedom from long

sleep was surprising, for seldom did we succumb more than an hour or two at a time to the shadow which had

Then came one January of fog and rain, when money ran low and drugs were hard to buy. My statues and

ivory heads were all sold, and I had no means to purchase new materials, or energy to fashion them even had

I possessed them. We suffered terribly, and on a certain night my friend sank into a deepbreathing sleep

from which I could not awaken him. I can recall the scene nowthe desolate, pitchblack garret studio under

the eaves with the rain beating down; the ticking of our lone clock; the fancied ticking of our watches as they

rested on the dressingtable; the creaking of some swaying shutter in a remote part of the house; certain

distant city noises muffled by fog and space; and, worst of all, the deep, steady, sinister breathing of my

friend on the coucha rhythmical breathing which seemed to measure moments of supernal fear and agony

for his spirit as it wandered in spheres forbidden, unimagined, and hideously remote.

The tension of my vigil became oppressive, and a wild train of trivial impressions and associations thronged

through my almost unhinged mind. I heard a clock strike somewherenot ours, for that was not a striking

Clockstimespaceinfinity and then my fancy reverted to the locale as I reflected that even now, beyond

the roof and the fog and the rain and the atmosphere, Corona Borealis was rising in the northeast. Corona

Borealis, which my friend had appeared to dread, and whose scintillant semicircle of stars must even now be

glowing unseen through the measureless abysses of aether. All at once my feverishly sensitive ears seemed to

detect a new and wholly distinct component in the soft medley of drugmagnified soundsa low and

damnably insistent whine from very far away; droning, clamoring, mocking, calling, from the northeast.

But it was not that distant whine which robbed me of my faculties and set upon my soul such a seal of fright

as may never in life be removed; not that which drew the shrieks and excited the convulsions which caused

lodgers and police to break down the door. It was not what I heard, but what I saw; for in that dark, locked,

shuttered, and curtained room there appeared from the black northeast corner a shaft of horrible redgold

lighta shaft which bore with it no glow to disperse the darkness, but which streamed only upon the

recumbent head of the troubled sleeper, bringing out in hideous duplication the luminous and strangely

youthful memoryface as I had known it in dreams of abysmal space and unshackled time, when my friend

had pushed behind the barrier to those secret, innermost and forbidden caverns of nightmare.

And as I looked, I beheld the head rise, the black, liquid, and deepsunken eyes open in terror, and the thin,

shadowed lips part as if for a scream too frightful to be uttered. There dwelt in that ghastly and flexible face,

as it shone bodiless, luminous, and rejuvenated in the blackness, more of stark, teeming, brainshattering fear

No word was spoken amidst the distant sound that grew nearer and nearer, but as I followed the

memoryface's mad stare along that cursed shaft of light to its source, the source whence also the whining

came, I, too, saw for an instant what it saw, and fell with ringing ears in that fit of shrieking epilepsy which

brought the lodgers and the police. Never could I tell, try as I might, what it actually was that I saw; nor could

the still face tell, for although it must have seen more than I did, it will never speak again. But always I shall

guard against the mocking and insatiate Hypnos, lord of sleep, against the night sky, and against the mad

Just what happened is unknown, for not only was my own mind unseated by the strange and hideous thing,

but others were tainted with a forgetfulness which can mean nothing if not madness. They have said, I know

not for what reason, that I never had a friend; but that art, philosophy, and insanity had filled all my tragic

life. The lodgers and police on that night soothed me, and the doctor administered something to quiet me, nor

did anyone see what a nightmare event had taken place. My stricken friend moved them to no pity, but what

they found on the couch in the studio made them give me a praise which sickened me, and now a fame which

I spurn in despair as I sit for hours, bald, graybearded, shriveled, palsied, drugcrazed, and broken, adoring

For they deny that I sold the last of my statuary, and point with ecstasy at the thing which the shining shaft of

light left cold, petrified, and unvocal. It is all that remains of my friend; the friend who led me on to madness

and wreckage; a godlike head of such marble as only old Hellas could yield, young with the youth that is

outside time, and with beauteous bearded face, curved, smiling lips, Olympian brow, and dense locks waving

and poppycrowned. They say that that haunting memoryface is modeled from my own, as it was at

twentyfive; but upon the marble base is carven a single name in the letters of AtticaHYPNOS.

I hate the moon I am afraid of it for when it shines on certain scenes familiar and loved it sometimes

It was in the spectral summer when the moon shone down on the old garden where I wandered; the spectral

summer of narcotic flowers and humid seas of foliage that bring wild and manycoloured dreams. And as I

walked by the shallow crystal stream I saw unwonted ripples tipped with yellow light, as if those placid

waters were drawn on in resistless currents to strange oceans that are not in the world. Silent and sparkling,

bright and baleful, those mooncursed waters hurried I knew not whither; whilst from the embowered banks

white lotosblossoms fluttered one by one in the opiate nightwind and dropped despairingly into the stream,

swirling away horribly under the arched, carven bridge, and staring back with the sinister resignation of calm,

And as I ran along the shore, crushing sleeping flowers with heedless feet and maddened ever by the fear of

unknown things and the lure of the dead faces, I saw that the garden had no end under that moon; for where

by day the walls were, there stretched now only new vistas of trees and paths, flowers and shrubs, stone idols

and pagodas, and bendings of the yellowlitten stream past grassy banks and under grotesque bridges of

marble. And the lips of the dead lotosfaces whispered sadly, and bade me follow, nor did I cease my steps

till the stream became a river, and joined amidst marshes of swaying reeds and beaches of gleaming sand the

Upon that sea the hateful moon shone, and over its unvocal waves weird perfumes breeded. And as I saw

therein the lotosfaces vanish, I longed for nets that I might capture them and learn from them the secrets

which the moon had brought upon the night. But when that moon went over to the west and the still tide

ebbed from the sullen shore, I saw in that light old spires that the waves almost uncovered, and white

columns gay with festoons of green seaweed. And knowing that to this sunken place all the dead had come, I

Yet when I saw afar out in the sea a black condor descend from the sky to seek rest on a vast reef, I would

fain have questioned him, and asked him of those whom I had known when they were alive. This I would

have asked him had he not been so far away, but he was very far, and could not be seen at all when he drew

So I watched the tide go out under that sinking moon, and saw gleaming the spires, the towers, and the roofs

of that dead, dripping city. And as I watched, my nostrils tried to close against the perfumeconquering

stench of the world's dead; for truly, in this unplaced and forgotten spot had all the flesh of the churchyards

Over these horrors the evil moon now hung very low, but the puffy worms of the sea need no moon to feed

by. And as I watched the ripples that told of the writhing of worms beneath, I felt a new chill from afar out

whither the condor had flown, as if my flesh had caught a horror before my eyes had seen it.

Nor had my flesh trembled without cause, for when I raised my eyes I saw that the waters had ebbed very

low, shewing much of the vast reef whose rim I had seen before. And when I saw that the reef was but the

black basalt crown of a shocking eikon whose monstrous forehead now shown in the dim moonlight and

whose vile hooves must paw the hellish ooze miles below, I shrieked and shrieked lest the hidden face rise

above the waters, and lest the hidden eyes look at me after the slinking away of that leering and treacherous

And to escape this relentless thing I plunged gladly and unhesitantly into the stinking shallows where amidst

There was thunder in the air on the night I went to the deserted mansion atop Tempest Mountain to find the

lurking fear. I was not alone, for foolhardiness was not then mixed with that love of the grotesque and the

terrible which has made my career a series of quests for strange horrors in literature and in life. With me were

two faithful and muscular men for whom I had sent when the time came; men long associated with me in my

We had started quietly from the village because of the reporters who still lingered about after the eldritch

panic of a month before the nightmare creeping death. Later, I thought, they might aid me; but I did not

want them then. Would to God I had let them share the search, that I might not have had to bear the secret

alone so long; to bear it alone for fear the world would call me mad or go mad itself at the demon

implications of the thing. Now that I am telling it anyway, lest the brooding make me a maniac, I wish I had

never concealed it. For I, and I only, know what manner of fear lurked on that spectral and desolate mountain.

In a small motorcar we covered the miles of primeval forest and hill until the wooded ascent checked it. The

country bore an aspect more than usually sinister as we viewed it by night and without the accustomed

crowds of investigators, so that we were often tempted to use the acetylene headlight despite the attention it

might attract. It was not a wholesome landscape after dark, and I believe I would have noticed its morbidity

even had I been ignorant of the terror that stalked there. Of wild creatures there were nonethey are wise

when death leers close. The ancient lightningscarred trees seemed unnaturally large and twisted, and the

other vegetation unnaturally thick and feverish, while curious mounds and hummocks in the weedy,

fulguritepitted earth reminded me of snakes and dead men's skulls swelled to gigantic proportions.

Fear had lurked on Tempest Mountain for more than a century. This I learned at once from newspaper

accounts of the catastrophe which first brought the region to the world's notice. The place is a remote, lonely

elevation in that part of the Catskills where Dutch civiisation once feebly and transiently penetrated, leaving

behind as it receded only a few mined mansions and a degenerate squatter population inhabiting pitiful

hamlets on isolated slopes. Normal beings seldom visited the locality till the state police were formed, and

even now only infrequent troopers patrol it. The fear, however, is an old tradition throughout the neighboring

villages; since it is a prime topic in the simple discourse of the poor mongrels who sometimes leave their

valleys to trade handwoven baskets for such primitive necessities as they, cannot shoot, raise, or make.

The lurking fear dwelt in the shunned and deserted Martense mansion, which crowned the high but gradual

eminence whose liability to frequent thunderstorms gave it the name of Tempest Mountain. For over a

hundred years the antique, grovecircled stone house had been the subject of stories incredibly wild and

monstrously hideous; stories of a silent colossal creeping death which stalked abroad in summer. With

whimpering insistence the squatters told tales of a demon which seized lone wayfarers after dark, either

carrying them off or leaving them in a frightful state of gnawed dismemberment; while sometimes they

whispered of blood trails toward the distant mansion. Some said the thunder called the lurking fear out of its

No one outside the backwoods had believed these varying and conflicting stories, with their incoherent,

extravagant descriptions of the hallglimpsed fiend; yet not a farmer or villager doubted that the Martense

mansion was ghoulishly haunted. Local history forbade such a doubt, although no ghostly evidence was ever

found by such investigators as had visited the building after some especially vivid tale of the squatters.

Grandmothers told strange myths of the Martense spectre; myths oonceming the Martense family itself, its

queer hereditary dissimilarity of eyes, its long, unnatural annals, and the murder which had cursed it.

The terror which brought me to the scene was a sudden and portentous confirmation of the mountaineers'

wildest legends. One summer night, after a thunderstorm of unprecedented violence, the countryside was

aroused by a squatter stampede which no mere delusion could create. The pitiful throngs of natives shrieked

and whined of the unnamable horror which had descended upon them, and they were not doubted. They had

not seen it, but had heard such cries from one of their hamlets that they knew a creeping death had come.

In the morning citizens and state troopers followed the shuddering mountaineers to the place where they said

the death had come. Death was indeed there. The ground under one of the squatter's villages had caved in

after a lightning stroke, destroying several of the malodorous shanties; but upon this property damage was

superimposed an organic devastation which paled it to insignificance. Of a possible seventyfive natives who

had inhabited this spot, not one living specimen was visible. The disordered earth was covered with blood

and human debris bespeaking too vividly the ravages of demon teeth and talons; yet no visible trail led away

from the carnage. That some hideous animal must be the cause, everyone quickly agreed; nor did any tongue

now revive the charge that such cryptic deaths formed merely the sordid murders common in decadent

communities. That charge was revived only when about twentyfive of the estimated population were found

missing from the dead; and even then it was hard to explain the murder of fifty by half that number. But the

fact remained that on a summer night a bolt had come out of the heavens and left a dead village whose

The excited oountryside immediately connected the horror with the haunted Martense mansion, though the

localities were over three miles apart. The troopers were more skeptical; including the mansion only casually

in their investigations, and dropping it altogether when they found it thoroughly deserted. Country and vrnage

people, however I canvassed the place with infinite care; overturning everything in the house, sounding ponds

and brooks, beating down bushes, and ransacking the nearby forests. All was in vain; the death that had come

By the second day of the search the affair was fully treated by the newspapers, whose reporters overran

Tempest Mountain. They described it in much detail, and with many interviews to elucidate the horror's

history as told by local grandams. I followed the accounts languidly at first, for I am a connoisseur in horrors;

but after a week I detected an atmosphere which stirred me oddly, sQ that on August 5th, 1921, I registered

among the reporters who crowded the hotel at Lefferts Corners, nearest village to Tempest Mountain and

acknowledged headquarters of the searchers. Three weeks more, and the dispersal of the reporters left me

freeto begin a terrible exploration based on the minute inquiries and surveying with which I had meanwhile

So on this summer night, while distant thunder rumbled, I left a silent motorcar and tramped with two armed

companions up the last moundcovered reaches of Tempest Mountain, casting the beams of an electric torch

on the spectral grey walls that began to appear through giant oaks ahead. In this morbid night solitude and

feeble shifting illumination, the vast boxlike pile displayed obscure hints of terror which day could not

uncover; yet I did not hesitate, since I had come with fierce resolution to test an idea. I believed that the

thunder called the deathdemon out of some fearsome secret place; and be that demon solid entity or

I had thoroughly searched the ruin before, hence knew my plan well; choosing as the seat of my vigil the old

room of Jan Martense, whose murder looms so great in the rural legends. I felt subtly that the apartment of

this ancient victim was best for my purposes. The chamber, measuring about twenty feet square, contained

like the other rooms some rubbish which had once been furniture. It lay on the second story, on the southeast

corner of the house, and had an immense east window and narrow south window, both devoid of panes or

shutters. Opposite the large window was 'an enormous Dutch fireplace with scriptural tiles representing the

prodigal son, and opposite the narrow window was a spacious bed built into the wall.

As the treemuffled thunder grew louder, I arranged my plan's details. First I fastened side by side to the

ledge of the large window three rope ladders which I had' brought with me. I knew they reached a suitable

spot on the grass outside, for I had tested them. Then the three of us dragged from another room a wide

fourposter bedstead, crowding it laterally against the window. Having strewn it with fir boughs, all now

rested on it with drawn automatics, two relaxing while the third watched. From whatever direction the demon

might come, our potential escape was provided. If it came from within the house, we had the window ladders;

if from outside the door and the stairs. We did not think, judging from precedent, that it would pursue us far

I watched from midnight to one o'clock, when in spite of the sinister house, the unprotected window, and the

approaching thunder and lightning, I felt singularly drowsy. I was between my two companions, George

Bennett being toward the window and William Tobey toward the fireplace. Bennett was asleep, having

apparently felt the same anomalous drowsiness which affected me, so I designated Tobey for the next watch

although even he was nodding. It is curious how intently I had been watching the fireplace.

The increasing thunder must have affected my dreams, for in the brief time I slept there came to me

apocalyptic visions. Once I partly awaked, probably because the sleeper toward the window had restlessly

flung an arm across my chest. I was not sufficiently awake to see whether Tobey was attending to his duties

as sentinel, but felt a distinct anxiety on that score. Never before had the presence of evil so poignantly

oppressed me. Later I must have dropped asleep again, for it was out of a phantasmal chaos that my mind

leaped when the night grew hideous with shrieks beyond anything in my former experience or imagination.

In that shrieking the inmost soul of human fear and agony clawed hopelessly and insanely at the ebony gates

of oblivion. I awoke to red madness and the mockery of diabolism, as farther and farther down inconceivable

vistas that phobic and crystalline anguish retreated and reverberated. There was, no light, but I knew from the

empty space at my right that Tobey was gone, God alone knew whither. Across my chest still lay the heavy

Then came the devastating stroke of lightning which shook the whole mountain, lit the darkest crypts of the

hoary grove, and splintered the patriarch of the twisted trees. In the demon flash of a monstrous fireball the

sleeper started up suddenly while the glare from beyond the window threw his shadow vividly upon the

chimney above the fireplace from which my eyes had never strayed. That I am still alive and sane, is a marvel

I cannot fathom. I cannot fathom it, for the shadow on that chimney was not that of George Bennett or of any

other human creature, but a blasphemous abnormality from hell's nethermost craters; a nameless, shapeless

abomination which no mind could fully grasp and no pen even partly describe. In another second I was alone

in the accursed mansion, shivering and gibbering. George Bennett and William Tobey had left no trace, not

For days after that hideous experience in the forestswathed mansion I lay nervously exhausted in my hotel

room at Lefferts Corners. I do not remember exactly how I managed to reach the motorcar, start it, and slip

unobserved back to the village; for I retain no distinct impression save of wildarmed titan trees, demoniac

mutterings of thunder, and Charonian shadows athwart the low mounds that dotted and streaked the region.

As I shivered and brooded on the casting of that brainblasting shadow, I knew that I had at last pried out one

of earth's supreme hororsone of those nameless blights of outer voids whose faint demon scratchings we

sometimes hear on the farthest rim of space, yet from which our own finite vision has given us a merciful

immunity. The shadow I had seen, I hardly dared to analyse or identify. Something had lain between me and

the window that night, but I shuddered whenever I could not cast off the instinct to classify it. If it had only

snarled, or bayed, or laughed titteringlyeven that would have relieved the abysmal hideousness. But it was

Obviously it was organic, or had once been organic... Jan Martense, whose room I had invaded, was buried in

the graveyard near the mansion... I must find Bennett and Tobey, if they lived... why had it picked them,

and left me for the last?... Drowsiness is so stifling, and dreams are so horrible...

In a short time I realised that I must tell my storyto someone or break down completely. I had already decided

not to abandon the quest for the lurking fear, for in my rash ignorance it seemed to me that uncertainty was

worse than enlightenment, however terrible the latter might prove to be. Accordingly I resolved in my mind

the best course to pursue; whom to select for my confidences, and how to track down the thing which had

My chief acquaintances at Lefferts Corners had been the affable reporters, of whom several had still remained

to collect final echoes of the tragedy. It was from these that I determined to choose a colleague, and the more

I reflected the more my preference inclined toward one Arthur Munroe, a 'dark, lean man of about thirtyfive,

whose education, taste, intelligence, and temperament all seemed to mark him as one not bound to

On an afternoon in early September, Arthur Munroe listened to my story. I saw from the beginning that he

was both interested and sympathetic, and when I had finished he analysed and discussed the thing with the

greatest shrewdness and judgement. His advice, moreover, was eminently practical; for he recommended a

postponement of operations at the Martense mansion until we might become fortified with more detailed

historical and geographical data. On his initiative we combed the countryside for information regarding the

terrible Martense family, and discovered a man who possessed a marvellously illuminating ancestral diary.

We also talked at length with such of the mountain mongrels as had not fled from the terror and confusion to

remoter slopes, and slope again scanned for dens and caves, but all without result. And yet, as I have said,

vague new fears hovered menacingly over, us; as if giant batwinged gryphons looked on transcosmic gulfs.

As the afternoon advanced, it became increasingly difficult to see; and we heard the rumble of a thunderstorm

gathering over Tempest Mountain. This sound in such a locality naturally stirred us, though less than it would

have done at night. As it was, we hoped desperately that the storm would last until well after dark; and with

that hope turned from our aimless hillside searching toward the nearest inhabited hamlet to gather a body of

squatters as helpers in the investigation. Timid as they were, a few of the younger men were sufficiently

We had hardly more than turned, however, when there descended such a blinding sheet of torrential rain that

shelter became imperative. The extreme, almost nocturnal darkness of the sky caused us to stumble badly, but

guided by the frequent flashes of lightning and by our minute knowledge of the hamlet we soon reached the

least porous cabin of the lot; an heterogeneous combination of logs and boards whose still existing door and

single tiny window both faced Maple Hill. Barring the door after us against the fury of the wind and rain, we

put in place the crude window shutter which our frequent searches had taught us where to find. It was dismal

sitting there on rickety boxes in the pitchy darkness, but we smoked pipes and occasionally flashed our

pocket lamps about. Now and then we could see the lightning through cracks in the wall; the afternoon was

The stormy vigil reminded me shudderingly of my ghastly night on Tempest Mountain. My mind turned to

that odd question which had kept recurring ever since the nightmare thing had happened; and again I

wondered why the demon, approaching the three watchers either from the window or the interior, had begun

with the men on each side and left the middle man till the last, when the titan fireball had scared it away.

Why had it not taken its victims in natural order, with myself second, from whichever direction it had

approached? With what manner of farreaching tentacles did it prey? Or did it know that I was the leader,

In the midst of these reflections, as if dramatically arranged to intensify them, there fell nearby a terrific bolt

of lightning followed by the sound of sliding earth. At the same time the wolfish wind rose to demoniac

crescendos of ululation. We were sure that the one tree on Maple Hill had been struck again, and Munroe rose

from his box and went to the tiny window to ascertain the damage. When he took down the shutter the wind,

and rain howled deafeningly in, so that I could not hear what he said; but I waited while he leaned out and

Gradually a calming of the wind and dispersal of the unusual darkness told of the storm's passing. I had

hoped it would last into the night to help our quest, but a furtive sunbeam from a knothole behind me

removed the likelihood of such a thing. Suggesting to Munroe that we had better get some light even if more

showers came, I unbarred and opened the crude door. The ground outside was a singular mass of mud and

pools, with fresh heaps of earth from the slight landslide; but I saw nothing to justify the interest which kept

my companion silently leaning out the window. Crossing to where he leaned, I touched his shoulder; but he

did not move. Then, as I playfully shook him and turned him around, I felt the strangling tendrils of a

cancerous horror whose roots reached into illimitable pasts and fathomless abysms of the night that broods

For Arthur Munroe was dead. And on what remained of his chewed and gouged head there was no longer a

On the tempestracked night of November 8, 1921, with a lantern which cast charnel shadows, I stood

digging alone and idiotically in the grave of Jan Martense. I had begun to dig in the afternoon, because a

thunderstorm was brewing, and now that it was dark and the storm had burst above the maniacally thick

I believe that my mind was partly unhinged by events since August 5th; the demon shadow in the mansion

the general strain and disappointment, and the thing that occurred at the hamlet in an October storm. After

that thing I had dug a grave for one whose death I could not understand. I knew that others could not

understand either, so let them think Arthur Munroe had wandered away. They searched, but found nothing.

The squatters might have understood, hut I dared not frighten them more. I myself seemed strangely callous.

That shock at the mansion had done something to my brain, and I could think only of the quest for a horror

now grown to cataclysmic stature in my imagination; a quest which the fate of Arthur Munroe made me vow

The scene of my excavations would alone have been enough to unnerve any ordinary man. Baleful primal

trees of unholy size, age, and grotesqueness leered above me like the pillars of some hellish Druidic temple;

muffling the thunder, hushing the clawing wind, and admitting but little rain. Beyond the scarred trunks in the

background, illumined by faint flashes of filtered lightning, rose the damp ivied stones of the deserted

mansion, while somewhat nearer was the abandoned Dutch garden whose walks and beds were polluted by a

white, fungous, foetid, overnourished vegetation that never saw full daylight. And nearest of all was the

graveyard, where deformed trees tossed insane branches as their roots displaced unhallowed slabs and sucked

venom from what lay below. Now and then, beneath the brown pall of leaves that rotted and festered in the

antediluvian forest darkness, I could trace the sinister outlines of some of those low mounds which

History had led me to this archaic grave. History, indeed, was all I had after everything else ended in

mocking Satanism.. I now believed that the lurking fear was no material being, but a wolffanged ghost that

rode the midnight lightning. And I believed, because of the masses of local tradition I had unearthed in search

with Arthur Munroe, that the ghost was that of Jan Martense, who died in 1762. This is why I was digging

The Martense mansion was built in 1670 by Gent Martense, a wealthy NewAmsterdam merchant who

disliked the changing order under British rule, and had constructed this magnificent domicile on a remote

woodland summit whose untrodden solitude and unusual scenery pleased him. The only substantial

disappointment encountered in this site was that which concerned the prevalence of violent thunderstorms in

summer. When selecting the hill and building his mansion, Mynheer Martense had laid these frequent natural

outbursts to some peculiarity of the year; but in time he perceived that the locality was especially liable to

such phenomena. At length, having found these storms injurious to his head, he fitted up a cellar into which

Of Gerrit Martense's descendants less is known than of himself; since they were all reared in hatred of the

English civilisation, and trained to shun such of the colonists as accepted it. Their life was exceedingly

secluded, and people declared that their isolation had made them heavy of speech and comprehension. In

appearance all were marked by a peculiar inherited dissimilarity of eyes; one generally being blue and the

other brown. Their social contacts grew fewer and fewer, till at last they took to intermarrying with the

numerous menial class about the estate. Many of the crowded family degenerated, moved across the valley,

and merged with the mongrel population which was later to produce the pitiful squatters. The rest had stuck

sullenly to their ancestral mansion, becoming more and more clannish and taciturn, yet developing a nervous

Most of this information reached the outside world through young Jan Martense, who from some kind of

restlessness joined the colonial army when news of the Albany Convention reached Tempest Mountain. He

was the first of Gerrit's descendants to see much of the world; and when he returned in 1760 after six years of

campaigning, he was hated as an outsider by his father, uncles, and brothers, in spite of his dissimilar

Martense eyes. No longer could he share the peculiarities and prejudices of the Martenses, while the very

mountain thunderstorms failed to intoxicate him as they had before. Instead, his surroundings depressed him;

and he frequently wrote to a friend in Albany of plans to leave the paternal roof.

In the spring of 1763 Jonathan Gifford, the Albany friend of Jan Martense, became worried by his

correspondent's silence; especially in view of the conditions and quarrels at the Martense mansion.

Determined to visit Jan in person, he went into the mountains on horseback. His diary states that he reached

Tempest Mountain on September 20, finding the mansion in great decrepitude. The sullen, oddeyed

Martenses, whose unclean animal aspect shocked him, told him in broken gutterals that Jan was dead. He

had, they insisted, been struck by lightning the autumn before; and now lay buried behind the neglected

sunken gardens. They showed the visitor the grave, barren and devoid of markers. Something in the

Martenses' manner gave Gifford a feeling of repulsion and suspicion, and a week later he returned' with spade

and mattock to explore the sepulchral spot. He found what he expected a skull crushed cruelly as if by

savage blowsso returning to Albany he openly charged the Martenses with the murder of their kinsman.

Legal evidence was lacking, but the story spread rapidly round the countryside; and from that time the

Martenses were ostracised by the world. No one would deal with them, and their distant manor was shunned

as an accursed place. Some how they managed to live on independently by the product of their estate, for

occasional lights glimpsed from faraway hills attested their continued presence. These lights were seen as

Meanwhile there grew up about the mansion and the mountain a body of diabolic legendry. The place was

avoided with doubled assiduousness, and invested with every whispered myth tradition could supply. It

remained unvisited till 1816, when the continued absence of lights was noticed by the squatters. At that time

There were no skeletons about, so that departure rather than death was inferred. The clan seemed to have left

several years before, and improvised penthouses showed how numerous it had grown prior to its migration.

Its cultural level had fallen very low, as proved by decaying furniture and scattered silverware which must

have been long abandoned when its owners left. But though the dreaded Martenses were gone, the fear of the

haunted house continued; and grew very acute when new and strange stories arose among the mountain

decadents. There it stood; deserted, feared, and linked with the vengeful ghost of Jan Martense. There it still

I have described my protracted digging as idiotic, and such It indeed was in object and method. The coffin of

Jan Martense had soon been unearthedit now held only dust and nitrebut in my fury to exhume his ghost I

delved irrationally and clumsily down beneath where he had lain. God knows what I expected to findI only

It is impossible to say what monstrous depth I had attained when my spade, and soon my feet, broke through

the ground beneath. The event, under the circumstances, was tremendous; for in the existence of a

subterranean space here, my mad theories had terrible confirmation. My slight fall had extinguished the

lantern, but I produced an electric pocket lamp and viewed the small horizontal tunnel which led away

indefinitely in both directions. It was amply large enough for a man to wriggle through; and though no sane

person would have tried at that time, I forgot danger, reason, and cleanliness in my singleminded fever to

unearth the lurking fear. Choosing the direction toward the house, I scrambled recklessly into the narrow

burrow; squirming ahead blindly and rapidly, and flashing but seldom the lamp I kept before me.

What language can describe the spectacle of a man lost in infinitely abysmal earth; pawing, twisting,

wheezing; scrambling madly through sunken convolutions of immemorial blackness without an idea of

time, safety, direction, or definite object? There is something hideous in it, but that is what I did. I did it for

so long that life faded to a far memory, and I became one with the moles and grubs of nighted depths. hdeed,

it was only by accident that after interminable writhings I jarred my forgotten electric lamp alight, so that it

I had been scrambling in this way for some time, so that my battery had burned very low, when the passage

suddenly inclined sharply upward, altering my mode of progress. And as I raised my glance it was without

preparation that I saw glistening in the distance two demoniac reflections of my expiring lamp; two

reflections glowing with a baneful and unmistakable effulgence, and provoking maddeningly nebulous

memories. I stopped automatically, though lacking the brain to retreat. The eyes approached, yet of the thing

that bore them I could distinguish only a claw. But what a claw! Then far overhead I heard a faint crashing

which I recognized. It was the wild thunder of the mountain, raised to hysteric fury I must have been

crawling upward for some time, so that the surface was now quite near. And as the muffled thunder clattered,

Thank God I did not then know what it was, else I should have died. But I was saved by the very thunder that

had summoned it, for after a hideous wait there burst from the unseen outside sky one of those frequent

mountainward bolts whose aftermath I had noticed here and there as gashes of disturbed earth and fulgurites

of various sizes. With Cyclopean rage it tore through the soil above that damnable pit, blinding and deafening

me, yet not wholly reducing me to a coma. In the chaos of sliding, shifting earth I clawed and floundered

helplessly till the rain on my head steadied me and I saw that I had come to the surface in a familiar spot; a

steep unforested place on the southwest slope of the mountain. Recurrent sheet lightuings illumed the

tumbled ground and the remains of the curious low hummock which had stretched down from the wooded

higher slope, but there was nothing in the chaos to show my place of egress from the lethal catacomb. My

brain was as great a chaos as the earth, and as a distant red glare burst on the landscape from the south I

But when two days later the squatters told me what the red glare meant, I felt more horror than that which the

mouldburrow and the claw and eyes had given; more horror because of the overwhelming implications. In a

hamlet twenty miles away an orgy of fear had followed the bolt which brought me above ground, and a

nameless thing had dropped from an overhanging tree into a weakroofed cabin. It had done a deed, but the

squatters had fired the cabin in frenzy before it could escape. It had been doing that deed at the very moment

There can be nothing normal in the mind of one who, knowing what I knew of the horrors of Tempest

Mountain, would seek alone for the fear that lurked there. That at least two of the fear's embodiments were

destroyed, formed but a slight guarantee of mental and physical safety in this Acheron of multiform

diabolism; yet I continued my quest with even greater zeal as events and revelations became more monstrous.

When, two days after my frightful crawl through that crypt of the eyes and claw, I learned that a thing had

malignaly hovered twenty miles away at the same instant the eyes were glaring at me, I experienced virtual

convulsions of fright. But that fright was so mixed with wonder and alluring grotesqueness, that it was almost

a pleasant sensation. Sometimes, in the throes of a nightmare when unseen powers whirl one over the roofs of

strange dead cities toward the grinning chasm of Nis, it is a relief and even a delight to shriek wildly and

throw oneself voluntarily along with the hideous vortex of dreamdoom into whatever bottomless gulf may

yawn. And so it was with the walking nightmare of Tempest Mountain; the discovery that two monsters had

haunted the spot gave me ultimately a mad craving to plunge into the very earth of the accursed region, and

with bare hands dig out the death that leered from every inch of the poisonous soil.

As soon as possible I visited the grave of Jan Martense and dug vainly where I had dug before. Some

extensive cavein had obliterated all trace of the underground passage, while the rain had washed so much

earth back into the excavation that I could not tell how deeply I had dug that other day. I likewise made a

difficult trip to the distant hamlet where the deathcreature had been burnt, and was little repaid for my

trouble. In the ashes of the fateful cabin I found several bones, but apparently none of the monster's. The

squatters said the thing had had only one victim; but in this I judged them inaccurate, since besides the

complete skull of a human being, there was another bony fragment which seemed certainly to have belonged

to a human skull at some time. Though the rapid drop of the monster had been seen, no one could say just

what the creature was like; those who had glimpsed it called it simply a devil. Examining the great tree where

it had lurked, I could discern no distinctive marks. I tried to find some trail into the black forest, but on this

occasion could not stand the sight of those morbidly large boles, or of those vast serpentlike roots that

My next step was to reexamine with microscopic care the deserted hamlet where death had come most

abundantly, and where Arthur Munroe had seen something he never lived to describe. Though my vain

previous searches had been exceedingly minute, I now had new data to test; for my horrible gravecrawl

convinced me that at least one of the phases of the monstrosity had been an underground creature. This time,

on the 14th of November, my quest concerned itself mostly with the slopes of Cone Mountain and Maple Hill

where they overlook the unfortunate hamlet, and I gave particular attention to the loose earth of the landslide

The afternoon of my search brought nothing to light, and dusk came as I stood on Maple Hill looking down at

the hamlet and across the valley to Tempest Mountain. There had been a gorgeous sunset, and now the moon

came up, nearly full and shedding a silver flood over the plain, the distant tant mountainside, and the curious

low mounds that rose here and there. It was a peaceful Arcadian scene, but knowing what it hid I hated it. I

hated the mocking moon, the hypocritical plain, the festering mountain, and those sinister mounds.

Everything seemed to me tainted with a loathsome contagion, and inspired by a noxious alliance with

Presently, as I gazed abstractedly at the moonlit panorama, my eye became attracted by something singular in

the nature and arrangement of a certain topographical element. Without having any exact knowledge of

geology, I had from the first been interested in the odd mounds and hummocks of the region. I had noticed

that they were pretty widely distributed around Tempest Mountain, though less numerous on the plain than

near the hilltop itself, where prehistoric glaciation had doubtless found feebler opposition to its striking and

fantastic caprices. Now, in the light of that low moon which cast long weird shadows, it struck me forcibly

that the various points and lines of the mound system had a peculiar relation to the summit of Tempest

Mountain. That summit was undeniably a centre from which the lines or rows of points radiated indefinitely

and irregularly, as if the unwholesome Martense mansion had thrown visible tentacles of terror. The idea of

such tentacles gave me an unexplained thrill, and I stopped to analyse my reason for believing these mounds

The more I analysed the less I believed, and against my newly opened mind there began to beat grotesque and

horrible analogies based on superficial aspects and upon my experience beneath the earth. Before I knew it I

was uttering frenzied and disjointed words to myself; "My God!... Molehills... the damned place must be

honeycombed... how many... that night at the mansion... they took Bennett and Tobey first... on each side of

us..." Then I was digging frantically into the mound which had stretched nearest me; digging desperately,

shiveringly, but almost jubilantly; digging and at last shrieking aloud with some unplaced emotion as I came

upon a tunnel or burrow just like the one through which I had crawled on the other demoniac night.

After that I recall running, spade in hand; a hideous run across moonlitten, moundmarked meadows and

through diseased, precipitous abysses of haunted hillside forest; leaping screaming, panting, bounding toward

the terrible Martense mansion. I recall digging unreasonably in all parts of the brierchoked cellar; digging to

find the core and centre of that malignant universe of mounds. And then I recall how I laughed when I

stumbled on the passageway; the hole at the base of the old chimney, where the thick weeds grew and cast

queer shadows in the light of the lone candle I had happened to have with me. What still remained down in

that hellhive, lurking and waiting for the thunder to arouse it, I did not know. Two had been killed; perhaps

that had finished it. But still there remained that burning determination to reach the innermost secret of the

My indecisive speculation whether to explore the passage alone and immediately with my pocketlight or to

try to assemble a band of squatters for the quest, was interrupted after a time by a sudden rush of wind from

the outside which blew out the candle and left me in stark blackness. The moon no longer shone through the

chinks and apertures above me, and with a sense of fateful alarm I heard the sinister and significant rumble of

approaching thunder. A confusion of associated ideas possessed my brain, leading me to grope back toward

the farthest corner of the cellar. My eyes, however, never turned away from the horrible opening at the base

of the chimney; and I began to get glimpses of the crumbling bricks and unhealthy weeds as faint glows of

lightning penetrated the weeds outside and illumined the chinks in the upper wall. Every second I was

consumed with a mixture of fear and curiosity. What would the storm call forthor was there anything left for

it to call? Guided by a lightning flash I settled myself down behind a dense clump of vegetation, through

If heaven is merciful, it will some day efface from my consciousness the sight that I saw, and let me live my

last years in peace. I cannot sleep at night now, and have to take opiates when it thunders. The thing came

abruptly and unannounced; a demon, ratlike scurrying from pits remote and unimaginable, a hellish panting

and stifled grunting, and then from that opening beneath the chimney a burst of multitudinous and leprous life

a loathsome nightspawned flood of organic corruption more devastatingly hideous than the blackest

conjurations of mortal madness and morbidity. Seething, stewing, surging, bubbling like serpents' slime it

rolled up and out of that yawning hole, spreading like a septic contagion and streaming from the cellar at

every point of egress streaming out to scatter through the accursed midnight forests and strew fear,

God knows how many there were there must have been thousands. To see the stream of them in that faint

intermittent lightning was shocking. When they had thinned out enough to be glimpsed as separate

organisms, I saw that they were dwarfed, deformed hairy devils or apesmonstrous and diabolic caricatures

of the monkey tribe. They were so hideously silent; there was hardly a squeal when one of the last stragglers

turned with the skill of long practice to make a meal in accustomed fashion on a weaker companion. 0thers

snapped up what it left and ate with slavering relish. Then, in spite of my daze of fright and disgust, my

morbid curiosity triumphed; and as the last of the monstrosities oozed up alone from that nether world of

unknown nightmare, I drew my automatic pistol and shot it under cover of the thunder.

Shrieking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness chasing one another through endless,

ensanguined condors of purple fulgurous sky... formless phantasms and kaleidoscopic mutations of a

ghoulish, remembered scene; forests of monstrous overnourished oaks with serpent roots twisting and

sucking unnamable juices from an earth verminous with millions of cannibal devils; moundlike tentacles

groping from underground nuclei of polypous perversion... insane lightning over malignant ivied walls and

demon arcades choked with fungous vegetation... Heaven be thanked for the instinct which led me

unconscious to places where men dwell; to the peaceful village that slept under the calm stars of clearing

I had recovered enough in a week to send to Albany for a gang of men to blow up the Martense mansion and

the entire top of Tempest Mountain with dynamite, stop up all the discoverable moundburrows, and destroy

certain overnourished trees whose very existence seemed an insult to sanity. I could sleep a little after they

had done this, but true rest will never come as long as I remember that nameless secret of the lurking fear.

The thing will haunt me, for who can say the extermination is complete, and that analogous phenomena do

not exist all over the world? Who can, with my knowledge, think of the earth's unknown caverns without a

nightmare dread of future possibilities? I cannot see a well or a subway entrance without shuddering... why

cannot the doctors give me something to make me sleep, or truly calm my brain when it thunders?

What I saw in the glow of flashlight after I shot the unspeakable straggling object was so simple that almost a

minute elapsed before I understood and went delirious. The object was nauseous; a filthy whitish gorilla thing

with sharp yellow fangs and matted fur. It was the ultimate product of mammalian degeneration; the frightful

outcome of isolated spawning, multiplication, and cannibal nutrition above and below the ground; the

embodiment of all the snarling and chaos and grinning fear that lurk behind life. It had looked at me as it

died, and its eyes had the same odd quality that marked those other eyes which had stared at me underground

and excited cloudy recollections. One eye was blue, the other brown. They were the dissimilar Martense eyes

of the old legends, and I knew in one inundating cataclysm of voiceless horror what had become of that