Three times Randolph Carter dreamed
of the marvelous city, and three times was he snatched away while still
he paused on the high terrace above it. All golden and lovely it blazed
in the sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades and arched bridges of veined
marble, silver-basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad squares and
perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between delicate trees and
blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows; while on steep northward
slopes climbed tiers of red roofs and old peaked gables harbouring little
lanes of grassy cobbles. It was a fever of the gods, a fanfare of supernal
trumpets and a clash of immortal cymbals. Mystery hung about it as clouds
about a fabulous unvisited mountain; and as Carter stood breathless and
expectant on that balustraded parapet there swept up to him the poignancy
and suspense of almost-vanished memory, the pain of lost things and the
maddening need to place again what once had been an awesome and momentous
place.
He knew that for him its meaning must once have been supreme;
though in what cycle or incarnation he had known it, or whether in dream
or in waking, he could not tell. Vaguely it called up glimpses of a far
forgotten first youth, when wonder and pleasure lay in all the mystery
of days, and dawn and dusk alike strode forth prophetic to the eager sound
of lutes and song, unclosing
fiery gates toward further and surprising marvels. But
each night as he stood on that high marble terrace with the curious urns
and carven rail and looked off over that hushed sunset city of beauty and
unearthly immanence he felt the bondage of dream's tyrannous gods; for
in no wise could he leave that lofty spot, or descend the wide marmoreal
fights flung endlessly down to where those streets of elder witchery lay
outspread and beckoning.
When for the third time he awakened with those flights
still undescended and those hushed sunset streets still untraversed, he
prayed long and earnestly to the hidden gods of dream that brood capricious
above the clouds on unknown Kadath, in the cold waste where no man treads.
But the gods made no answer and shewed no relenting, nor did they give
any favouring sign when he
prayed to them in dream, and invoked them sacrificially
through the bearded priests of Nasht and Kaman-Thah, whose cavern-temple
with its pillar of flame lies not far from the gates of the waking world.
It seemed, however, that his prayers must have been adversely heard, for
after even the first of them he ceased wholly to behold the marvellous
city; as if his three glimpses from afar had been mere accidents or oversights,
and against some hidden plan or wish of the gods.
At length, sick with longing for those glittering sunset
streets and cryptical hill lanes among ancient tiled roofs, nor able sleeping
or waking to drive them from his mind, Carter resolved to go with bold
entreaty whither no man had gone before, and dare the icy deserts through
the dark to where unknown Kadath, veiled in cloud and crowned with unimagined
stars, holds secret and
nocturnal the onyx castle of the Great Ones.
In light slumber he descended the seventy steps to the
cavern of flame and talked of this design to the bearded priests Nasht
and Kaman-Thah. And the priests shook their pshent-bearing heads and vowed
it would be the death of his soul. They pointed out that the Great Ones
had shown already their wish, and that it is not agreeable to them to be
harassed by insistent pleas. They
reminded him, too, that not only had no man ever been
to Kadath, but no man had ever suspected in what part of space it may lie;
whether it be in the dreamlands around our own world, or in those surrounding
some unguessed companion of Fomalhaut or Aldebaran. If in our dreamland,
it might conceivably be reached, but only three human souls since time
began had ever crossed and recrossed the black impious gulfs to other dreamlands,
and of that three, two had come back quite mad. There were, in such voyages,
incalculable local dangers; as well as that shocking final peril which
gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe, where no dreams reach;
that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and
bubbles at the centre of all infinity - the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth,
whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable,
unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the muffled, maddening beating of
vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes; to which
detestable pounding and piping dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the
gigantic Ultimate gods, the blind, voiceless, tenebrous, mindless Other
gods whose soul and messenger is the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.
Of these things was Carter warned by the priests Nasht
and Kaman-Thah in the cavern of flame, but still he resolved to find the
gods on unknown Kadath in the cold waste, wherever that might be, and to
win from them the sight and remembrance and shelter of the marvellous sunset
city. He knew that his journey would be strange and long, and that the
Great Ones would be against
it; but being old in the land of dream he counted on
many useful memories and devices to aid him. So asking a formal blessing
of the priests and thinking shrewdly on his course, he boldly descended
the seven hundred steps to the Gate of Deeper Slumber and set out through
the Enchanted Wood.
In the tunnels of that twisted wood, whose low prodigious
oaks twine groping boughs and shine dim with the phosphorescence of strange
fungi, dwell the furtive and secretive Zoogs; who know many obscure secrets
of the dream world and a few of the waking world, since the wood at two
places touches the lands of men, though it would be disastrous to say where.
Certain
unexplained rumours, events, and vanishments occur among
men where the Zoogs have access, and it is well that they cannot travel
far outside the world of dreams. But over the nearer parts of the dream
world they pass freely, flitting small and brown and unseen and bearing
back piquant tales to beguile the hours around their hearths in the forest
they love. Most of them live in
burrows, but some inhabit the trunks of the great trees;
and although they live mostly on fungi it is muttered that they have also
a slight taste for meat, either physical or spiritual, for certainly many
dreamers have entered that wood who have not come out. Carter, however,
had no fear; for he was an old dreamer and had learnt their fluttering
language and made many a treaty with
them; having found through their help the splendid city
of Celephais in Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills, where reigns half
the year the great King Kuranes, a man he had known by another name in
life. Kuranes was the one soul who had been to the star-gulls and returned
free from madness.
Threading now the low phosphorescent aisles between those
gigantic trunks, Carter made fluttering sounds in the manner of the Zoogs,
and listened now and then for responses. He remembered one particular village
of the creatures was in the centre of the wood, where a circle of great
mossy stones in what was once a cleaning tells of older and more terrible
dwellers long
forgotten, and toward this spot he hastened. He traced
his way by the grotesque fungi, which always seem better nourished as one
approaches the dread circle where elder beings danced and sacrificed. Finally
the great light of those thicker fungi revealed a sinister green and grey
vastness pushing up through the roof of the forest and out of sight. This
was the nearest of the great ring of stones, and Carter knew he was close
to the Zoog village. Renewing his fluttering sound, he waited patiently;
and was at last rewarded by an impression of many eyes watching him. It
was the Zoogs, for one sees their weird eyes long before one can discern
their small, slippery brown outlines.
Out they swarmed, from hidden burrow and honeycombed tree,
till the whole dim-litten region was alive with them. Some of the wilder
ones brushed Carter unpleasantly, and one even nipped loathsomely at his
ear; but these lawless spirits were soon restrained by their elders. The
Council of Sages, recognizing the visitor, offered a gourd of fermented
sap from a haunted tree unlike
the others, which had grown from a seed dropt down by
someone on the moon; and as Carter drank it ceremoniously a very strange
colloquy began. The Zoogs did not, unfortunately, know where the peak of
Kadath lies, nor could they even say whether the cold waste is in our dream
world or in another. Rumours of the Great Ones came equally from all points;
and one might only say that they were likelier to be seen on high mountain
peaks than in valleys, since on such peaks they dance reminiscently when
the moon is above and the clouds beneath.
Then one very ancient Zoog recalled a thing unheard-of
by the others; and said that in Ulthar, beyond the River Skai, there still
lingered the last copy of those inconceivably old Pnakotic Manuscripts
made by waking men in forgotten boreal kingdoms and borne into the land
of dreams when the hairy cannibal Gnophkehs overcame many-templed Olathoe
and slew all the heroes of the land of Lomar. Those manuscripts he said,
told much of the gods, and besides, in Ulthar there were men who had seen
the signs of the gods, and even one old priest who had scaled a great mountain
to behold them dancing by moonlight. He had failed, though his companion
had succeeded and perished namelessly.
So Randolph Carter thanked the Zoogs, who fluttered amicably
and gave him another gourd of moon-tree wine to take with him, and set
out through the phosphorescent wood for the other side, where the rushing
Skai flows down from the slopes of Lerion, and Hatheg and Nir and Ulthar
dot the plain. Behind him, furtive and unseen, crept several of the curious
Zoogs; for they
wished to learn what might befall him, and bear back
the legend to their people. The vast oaks grew thicker as he pushed on
beyond the village, and he looked sharply for a certain spot where they
would thin somewhat, standing quite dead or dying among the unnaturally
dense fungi and the rotting mould and mushy logs of their fallen brothers.
There he would turn sharply aside, for at that spot a mighty slab of stone
rests on the forest floor; and those who have dared approach it say that
it bears an iron ring three feet wide. Remembering the archaic circle of
great mossy rocks, and what it was possibly set up for, the Zoogs do not
pause near that expansive slab with its huge ring; for they realise that
all which is forgotten need not necessarily be dead, and they would not
like to see the slab rise slowly and deliberately.
Carter detoured at the proper place, and heard behind
him the frightened fluttering of some of the more timid Zoogs. He had known
they would follow him, so he was not disturbed; for one grows accustomed
to the anomalies of these prying creatures. It was twilight when he came
to the edge of the wood, and the strengthening glow told him it was the
twilight of morning. Over
fertile plains rolling down to the Skai he saw the smoke
of cottage chimneys, and on every hand were the hedges and ploughed fields
and thatched roofs of a peaceful land. Once he stopped at a farmhouse well
for a cup of water, and all the dogs barked affrightedly at the inconspicuous
Zoogs that crept through the grass behind. At another house, where people
were stirring, he
asked questions about the gods, and whether they danced
often upon Lerion; but the farmer and his wile would only make the Elder
Sign and tell him the way to Nir and Ulthar.
At noon he walked through the one broad high street of
Nir, which he had once visited and which marked his farthest former travels
in this direction; and soon afterward he came to the great stone bridge
across the Skai, into whose central piece the masons had sealed a living
human sacrifice when they built it thirteen-hundred years before. Once
on the other side, the frequent
presence of cats (who all arched their backs at the trailing
Zoogs) revealed the near neighborhood of Ulthar; for in Ulthar, according
to an ancient and significant law, no man may kill a cat. Very pleasant
were the suburbs of Ulthar, with their little green cottages and neatly
fenced farms; and still pleasanter was the quaint town itself, with its
old peaked roofs and overhanging upper stories and numberless chimney-pots
and narrow hill streets where one can see old cobbles whenever the graceful
cats afford space enough. Carter, the cats being somewhat dispersed by
the half-seen Zoogs, picked his way directly to the modest Temple of the
Elder Ones where the priests and old records were said to be; and once
within that venerable circular tower of ivied stone - which crowns Ulthar's
highest hill - he sought out the patriarch Atal, who had been up the forbidden
peak Hatheg-Kia in the stony desert and had come down again alive.
Atal, seated on an ivory dais in a festooned shrine at
the top of the temple, was fully three centuries old; but still very keen
of mind and memory. From him Carter learned many things about the gods,
but mainly that they are indeed only Earth's gods, ruling feebly our own
dreamland and having no power or habitation elsewhere. They might, Atal
said, heed a man's prayer if in good humour; but one must not think of
climbing to their onyx stronghold atop Kadath in the cold waste. It was
lucky that no man knew where Kadath towers, for the fruits of ascending
it would be very grave. Atal's companion Banni the Wise had been drawn
screaming into the sky for climbing merely the known peak of Hatheg-Kia.
With unknown Kadath, if ever found, matters would be much worse; for although
Earth's gods may sometimes be surpassed by a wise mortal, they are protected
by the Other Gods from Outside, whom it is better not to discuss. At least
twice in the world's history the Other Gods set their seal upon Earth's
primal granite; once in antediluvian times, as guessed from a drawing in
those parts of the Pnakotic Manuscripts too ancient to be
read, and once on Hatheg-Kia when Barzai the Wise tried
to see Earth's gods dancing by moonlight. So, Atal said, it would be much
better to let all gods alone except in tactful prayers.
Carter, though disappointed by Atal's discouraging advice
and by the meagre help to be found in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the
Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan, did not wholly despair. First he questioned
the old priest about that marvellous sunset city seen from the railed terrace,
thinking that perhaps he might find it without the gods' aid; but Atal
could tell him nothing.
Probably, Atal said, the place belonged to his especial
dream world and not to the general land of vision that many know; and conceivably
it might be on another planet. In that case Earth's gods could not guide
him if they would. But this was not likely, since the stopping of the dreams
shewed pretty clearly that it was something the Great Ones wished to hide
from him.
Then Carter did a wicked thing, offering his guileless
host so many draughts of the moon-wine which the Zoogs had given him that
the old man became irresponsibly talkative. Robbed of his reserve, poor
Atal babbled freely of forbidden things; telling of a great image reported
by travellers as carved on the solid rock of the mountain Ngranek, on the
isle of Oriab in the Southern
Sea, and hinting that it may be a likeness which Earth's
gods once wrought of their own features in the days when they danced by
moonlight on that mountain. And he hiccoughed likewise that the features
of that image are very strange, so that one might easily recognize them,
and that they are sure signs of the authentic race of the gods.
Now the use of all this in finding the gods became at
once apparent to Carter. It is known that in disguise the younger among
the Great Ones often espouse the daughters of men, so that around the borders
of the cold waste wherein stands Kadath the peasants must all bear their
blood. This being so, the way to find that waste must be to see the stone
face on Ngranek and mark the
features; then, having noted them with care, to search
for such features among living men. Where they are plainest and thickest,
there must the gods dwell nearest; and whatever stony waste lies back of
the villages in that place must be that wherein stands Kadath.
Much of the Great Ones might be learnt in such regions,
and those with their blood might inherit little memories very useful to
a seeker. They might not know their parentage, for the gods so dislike
to be known among men that none can be found who has seen their faces wittingly;
a thing which Carter realized even as he sought to scale Kadath. But they
would have queer lofty
thoughts misunderstood by their fellows, and would sing
of far places and gardens so unlike any known even in the dreamland that
common folk would call them fools; and from all this one could perhaps
learn old secrets of Kadath, or gain hints of the marvellous sunset city
which the gods held secret. And more, one might in certain cases seize
some well-loved child of a god as
hostage; or even capture some young god himself, disguised
and dwelling amongst men with a comely peasant maiden as his bride.
Atal, however, did not know how to find Ngranek on its
isle of Oriab; and recommended that Carter follow the singing Skai under
its bridges down to the Southern Sea; where no burgess of Ulthar has ever
been, but whence the merchants come in boats or with long caravans of mules
and two-wheeled carts. There is a great city there, Dylath-Leen, but in
Ulthar its reputation is bad because of the black three-banked galleys
that sail to it with rubies from no clearly named shore. The traders that
come from those galleys to deal with the jewellers are human, or nearly
so, but the rowers are never beheld; and it is not thought wholesome in
Ulthar that merchants should trade with black ships from unknown places
whose rowers cannot be exhibited.
By the time he had given this information Atal was very
drowsy, and Carter laid him gently on a couch of inlaid ebony and gathered
his long beard decorously on his chest. As he turned to go, he observed
that no suppressed fluttering followed him, and wondered why the Zoogs
had become so lax in their curious pursuit. Then he noticed all the sleek
complacent cats of Ulthar
licking their chops with unusual gusto, and recalled
the spitting and caterwauling he had faintly heard, in lower parts of the
temple while absorbed in the old priest's conversation. He recalled, too,
the evilly hungry way in which an especially impudent young Zoog had regarded
a small black kitten in the cobbled street outside. And because he loved
nothing on earth more than small black kittens, he stooped and petted the
sleek cats of Ulthar as they licked their chops, and did not mourn because
those inquisitive Zoogs would escort him no farther.
It was sunset now, so Carter stopped at an ancient inn
on a steep little street overlooking the lower town. And as he went out
on the balcony of his room and gazed down at the sea of red tiled roofs
and cobbled ways and the pleasant fields beyond, all mellow and magical
in the slanted light, he swore that Ulthar would be a very likely place
to dwell in always, were not the memory of a greater sunset city ever goading
one onward toward unknown perils. Then twilight fell, and the pink walls
of the plastered gables turned violet and mystic, and little yellow lights
floated up one by one from old lattice windows. And sweet bells pealed
in. the temple tower above, and the first star winked softly above the
meadows across the Skai. With the night came song, and Carter nodded as
the lutanists praised ancient days from beyond the filigreed balconies
and tesselated courts of simple Ulthar. And there might have been sweetness
even in the voices of Ulthar's many cats, but that they were mostly heavy
and silent from strange feasting. Some of them stole off to those cryptical
realms which are known only to cats and which villagers say are on the
moon's dark side, whither the cats leap from tall housetops, but one small
black kitten crept upstairs and sprang in Carter's lap to purr and play,
and curled up near his feet when he lay down at last on the little couch
whose pillows were stuffed with fragrant, drowsy herbs.
In the morning Carter joined a caravan of merchants bound
for Dylath-Leen with the spun wool of Ulthar and the cabbages of Ulthar's
busy farms. And for six days they rode with tinkling bells on the smooth
road beside the Skai; stopping some nights at the inns of little quaint
fishing towns, and on other nights camping under the stars while snatches
of boatmen's songs came from
the placid river. The country was very beautiful, with
green hedges and groves and picturesque peaked cottages and octagonal windmills.
On the seventh day a blur of smoke rose on the horizon
ahead, and then the tall black towers of Dylath-Leen, which is built mostly
of basalt. Dylath-Leen with its thin angular towers looks in the distance
like a bit of the Giant's Causeway, and its streets are dark and uninviting.
There are many dismal sea-taverns near the myriad wharves, and all the
town is thronged with the strange seamen of every land on earth and of
a few which are said to be not on earth. Carter questioned the oddly robed
men of that city about the peak of Ngranek on the isle of Oriab, and found
that they knew of it well.
Ships came from Baharna on that island, one being due
to return thither in only a month, and Ngranek is but two days' zebra-ride
from that port. But few had seen the stone face of the god, because it
is on a very difficult side of Ngranek, which overlooks only sheer crags
and a valley of sinister lava. Once the gods were angered with men on that
side, and spoke of the matter to the
Other Gods.
It was hard to get this information from the traders and
sailors in Dylath-Leen's sea taverns, because they mostly preferred to
whisper of the black galleys. One of them was due in a week with rubies
from its unknown shore, and the townsfolk dreaded to see it dock. The mouths
of the men who came from it to trade were too wide, and the way their turbans
were humped up in two points above their foreheads was in especially bad
taste. And their shoes were the shortest and queerest ever seen in the
Six Kingdoms. But worst of all was the matter of the unseen rowers. Those
three banks of oars moved too briskly and accurately and vigorously to
be comfortable, and it was not right for a ship to stay in port for weeks
while the merchants traded, yet to give no glimpse of its crew. It was
not fair to the tavern-keepers of Dylath-Leen, or to the grocers and butchers,
either; for not a scrap of provisions was ever sent aboard. The merchants
took only gold and stout black slaves from Parg across the river. That
was all they ever took, those unpleasantly featured merchants and their
unseen rowers; never anything from the butchers and grocers, but only gold
and the fat black men of Parg whom they bought by the pound. And the odours
from those galleys which the south wind blew in from the wharves are not
to be described. Only by constantly smoking strong thagweed could even
the hardiest denizen of the old sea-taverns bear them. Dylath-Leen would
never have tolerated the black galleys had such rubies been obtainable
elsewhere, but no mine in all Barth's dreamland was known to produce their
like.
Of these things Dylath-Leen's cosmopolitan folk chiefly
gossiped whilst Carter waited patiently for the ship from Baharna, which
might bear him to the isle whereon carven Ngranek towers lofty and barren.
Meanwhile he did not fall to seek through the haunts of far travellers
for any tales they might have concerning Kadath in the cold waste or a
marvellous city of marble walls and
silver fountains seen below terraces in the sunset. Of
these things, however, he learned nothing; though he once thought that
a certain old slant-eyed merchant looked queerly intelligent when the cold
waste was spoken of. This man was reputed to trade with the horrible stone
villages on the icy desert plateau of Leng, which no healthy folk visit
and whose evil fires are seen at night from afar. He was even rumoured
to have dealt with that High-Priest Not To Be Described, which wears a
yellow silken mask over its face and dwells all alone in a prehistoric
stone monastery. That such a person might well have had nibbling traffick
with such beings as may conceivably dwell in the cold waste was not to
be doubted, but Carter soon found that it was no use questioning him.
Then the black galley slipped into the harbour past the
basalt wale and the tall lighthouse, silent and alien, and with a strange
stench that the south wind drove into the town. Uneasiness rustled through
the taverns along that waterfront, and after a while the dark wide-mouthed
merchants with humped turbans and short feet clumped steathily ashore to
seek the bazaars of the
jewellers. Carter observed them closely, and disliked
them more the longer he looked at them. Then he saw them drive the stout
black men of Parg up the gangplank grunting and sweating into that singular
galley, and wondered in what lands - or if in any lands at all - those
fat pathetic creatures might be destined to serve.
And on the third evening of that galley's stay one of
the uncomfortable merchants spoke to him, smirking sinfully and hinting
of what he had heard in the taverns of Carter's quest. He appeared to have
knowledge too secret for public telling; and although the sound of his
voice was unbearably hateful, Carter felt that the lore of so far a traveller
must not be overlooked. He bade him therefore be his guest in locked chambers
above, and drew out the last of the Zoogs' moon-wine to loosen his tongue.
The strange merchant drank heavily, but smirked unchanged by the draught.
Then he drew forth a curious bottle with wine of his own, and Carter saw
that the bottle was a single hollowed ruby, grotesquely carved in patterns
too fabulous to be comprehended. He offered his wine to his host, and though
Carter took only the least sip, he felt the dizziness of space and the
fever of unimagined jungles. All the while the guest had been smiling more
and more broadly, and as Carter slipped into blankness the last thing he
saw was that dark odious face convulsed with evil laughter and something
quite unspeakable where one of the two frontal puffs of that orange turban
had become disarranged with the shakings of that epileptic mirth.
Carter next had consciousness amidst horrible odours beneath
a tent-like awning on the deck of a ship, with the marvellous coasts of
the Southern Sea flying by in unnatural swiftness. He was not chained,
but three of the dark sardonic merchants stood grinning nearby, and the
sight of those humps in their turbans made him almost as faint as did the
stench that filtered up through the sinister hatches. He saw slip past
him the glorious lands and cities of which a fellow-dreamer of earth -
a lighthouse-keeper in ancient Kingsport - had often discoursed in the
old days, and recognized the templed terraces of Zak, abode of forgotten
dreams; the spires of infamous Thalarion, that daemon-city of a thousand
wonders where the eidolon Lathi reigns; the charnel gardens of Zura, land
of pleasures unattained, and the twin headlands of crystal, meeting above
in a resplendent arch, which guard the harbour of Sona-Nyl, blessed land
of fancy.
Past all these gorgeous lands the malodourous ship flew
unwholesomely, urged by the abnormal strokes of those unseen rowers below.
And before the day was done Carter saw that the steersman could have no
other goal than the Basalt Pillars of the West, beyond which simple folk
say splendid Cathuria lies, but which wise dreamers well know are the gates
of a monstrous cataract
wherein the oceans of earth's dreamland drop wholly to
abysmal nothingness and shoot through the empty spaces toward other worlds
and other stars and the awful voids outside the ordered universe where
the daemon sultan Azathoth gnaws hungrily in chaos amid pounding and piping
and the hellish dancing of the Other Gods, blind, voiceless, tenebrous,
and mindless, with their soul and messenger Nyarlathotep.
Meanwhile the three sardonic merchants would give no word
of their intent, though Carter well knew that they must be leagued with
those who wished to hold him from his quest. It is understood in the land
of dream that the Other Gods have many agents moving among men; and all
these agents, whether wholly human or slightly less than human, are eager
to work the will of
those blind and mindless things in return for the favour
of their hideous soul and messenger, the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep. So
Carter inferred that the merchants of the humped turbans, hearing of his
daring search for the Great Ones in their castle of Kadath, had decided
to take him away and deliver him to Nyarlathotep for whatever nameless
bounty might be offered for such a
prize. What might be the land of those merchants in our
known universe or in the eldritch spaces outside, Carter could not guess;
nor could he imagine at what hellish trysting-place they would meet the
crawling chaos to give him up and claim their reward. He knew, however,
that no beings as nearly human as these would dare approach the ultimate
nighted throne of the daemon
Azathoth in the formless central void.
At the set of sun the merchants licked their excessively
wide lips and glared hungrily and one of them went below and returned from
some hidden and offensive cabin with a pot and basket of plates. Then they
squatted close together beneath the awning and ate the smoking meat that
was passed around. But when they gave Carter a portion, he found something
very terrible in the size and shape of it; so that he turned even paler
than before and cast that portion into the sea when no eye was on him.
And again he thought of those unseen rowers beneath, and of the suspicious
nourishment from which their far too mechanical strength was derived.
It was dark when the galley passed betwixt the Basalt
Pillars of the West and the sound of the ultimate cataract swelled portentous
from ahead. And the spray of that cataract rose to obscure the stars, and
the deck grew damp, and the vessel reeled in the surging current of the
brink. Then with a queer whistle and plunge the leap was taken, and Carter
felt the terrors of nightmare as
earth fell away and the great boat shot silent and comet-like
into planetary space. Never before had he known what shapeless black things
lurk and caper and flounder all through the aether, leering and grinning
at such voyagers as may pass, and sometimes feeling about with slimy paws
when some moving object excites their curiosity. These are the nameless
larvae of the Other
Gods, and like them are blind and without mind, and possessed
of singular hungers and thirsts.
But that offensive galley did not aim as far as Carter
had feared, for he soon saw that the helmsman was steering a course directly
for the moon. The moon was a crescent shining larger and larger as they
approached it, and shewing its singular craters and peaks uncomfortably.
The ship made for the edge, and it soon became clear that its destination
was that secret and mysterious
side which is always turned away from earth, and which
no fully human person, save perhaps the dreamer Snireth-Ko, has ever beheld.
The close aspect of the moon as the galley drew near proved very disturbing
to Carter, and he did not like the size and shape of the ruins which crumbled
here and there. The dead temples on the mountains were so placed that they
could have glorified no suitable or wholesome gods, and in the symmetries
of the broken columns there seemed to be some dark and inner meaning which
did not invite solution. And what the structure and proportions of the
olden worshippers could have been, Carter steadily refused to conjecture.
When the ship rounded the edge, and sailed over those
lands unseen by man, there appeared in the queer landscape certain signs
of life, and Carter saw many low, broad, round cottages in fields of grotesque
whitish fungi. He noticed that these cottages had no windows, and thought
that their shape suggested the huts of Esquimaux. Then he glimpsed the
oily waves of a sluggish sea, and knew that the voyage was once more to
be by water - or at least through some liquid. The galley struck the surface
with a peculiar sound, and the odd elastic way the waves received it was
very perplexing to Carter.
They now slid along at great speed, once passing and hailing
another galley of kindred form, but generally seeing nothing but that curious
sea and a sky that was black and star-strewn even though the sun shone
scorchingly in it.
There presently rose ahead the jagged hills of a leprous-looking
coast, and Carter saw the thick unpleasant grey towers of a city. The way
they leaned and bent, the manner in which they were clustered, and the
fact that they had no windows at all, was very disturbing to the prisoner;
and he bitterly mourned the folly which had made him sip the curious wine
of that merchant with the humped turban. As the coast drew nearer, and
the hideous stench of that city grew stronger, he saw upon the jagged hills
many forests, some of whose trees he recognized as akin to that solitary
moon-tree in the enchanted wood of earth, from whose sap the small brown
Zoogs ferment their curious wine.
Carter could now distinguish moving figures on the noisome
wharves ahead, and the better he saw them the worse he began to fear and
detest them. For they were not men at all, or even approximately men, but
great greyish-white slippery things which could expand and contract at
will, and whose principal shape - though it often changed - was that of
a sort of toad without any
eyes, but with a curious vibrating mass of short pink
tentacles on the end of its blunt, vague snout. These objects were waddling
busily about the wharves, moving bales and crates and boxes with preternatural
strength, and now and then hopping on or off some anchored galley with
long oars in their forepaws. And now and then one would appear driving
a herd of clumping slaves,
which indeed were approximate human beings with wide
mouths like those merchants who traded in Dylath-Leen; only these herds,
being without turbans or shoes or clothing, did not seem so very human
after all. Some of the slaves - the fatter ones, whom a sort of overseer
would pinch experimentally - were unloaded from ships and nailed in crates
which workers pushed into the
low warehouses or loaded on great lumbering vans.
Once a van was hitched and driven off, and the, fabulous
thing which drew it was such that Carter gasped, even after having seen
the other monstrosities of that hateful place. Now and then a small herd
of slaves dressed and turbaned like the dark merchants would be driven
aboard a galley, followed by a great crew of the slippery toad-things as
officers, navigators, and rowers. And
Carter saw that the almost-human creatures were reserved
for the more ignominious kinds of servitude which required no strength,
such as steering and cooking, fetching and carrying, and bargaining with
men on the earth or other planets where they traded. These creatures must
have been convenient on earth, for they were truly not unlike men when
dressed and carefully shod and turbaned, and could haggle in the shops
of men without embarrassment or curious explanations. But most of them,
unless lean or ill-favoured, were unclothed and packed in crates and drawn
off in lumbering lorries by fabulous things. Occasionally other beings
were unloaded and crated; some very like these semi-humans, some not so
similar, and some not similar at all. And he
wondered if any of the poor stout black men of Parg were
left to be unloaded and crated and shipped inland in those obnoxious drays.
When the galley landed at a greasy-looking quay of spongy
rock a nightmare horde of toad-things wiggled out of the hatches, and two
of them seized Carter and dragged him ashore. The smell and aspect of that
city are beyond telling, and Carter held only scattered images of the tiled
streets and black doorways and endless precipices of grey vertical walls
without windows. At
length he was dragged within a low doorway and made to
climb infinite steps in pitch blackness. It was, apparently, all one to
the toad-things whether it were light or dark. The odour of the place was
intolerable, and when Carter was locked into a chamber and left alone he
scarcely had strength to crawl around and ascertain its form and dimensions.
It was circular, and about
twenty feet across.
