The Horror at Red Hook
by
H. P. Lovecraft
Written in August of 1925 ~ Published in September of 1926 in Weird Tales

I
Not many weeks ago, on a street corner in the village of Pascoag, Rhode Island, a tall, heavily built, and wholesome-looking pedestrian furnished much speculation by a singular lapse of behaviour. He had, it appears, been descending the hill by the road from Chepachet; and encountering the compact section, had turned to his left into the main thoroughfare where several modest business blocks convey a touch of the urban. At this point, without visible provocation, he committed his astonishing lapse; staring queerly for a second at the tallest of the buildings before him, and then, with a series of terrified, hysterical shrieks, breaking into a frantic run which ended in a stumble and fall at the next crossing. Picked up and dusted off by ready hands, he was found to be conscious, organically unhurt, and evidently cured of his sudden nervous attack. He muttered some shamefaced explanations involving a strain he had undergone, and with downcast glance turned back up the Chepachet road, trudging out of sight without once looking behind him. It was a strange incident to befall so large, robust, normal-featured, and capable-looking a man, and the strangeness was not lessened by the remarks of a bystander who had recognised him as the boarder of a well-known dairyman on the outskirts of Chepachet.

He was, it developed, a New York police detective named Thomas F. Malone, now on a long leave of absence under medical treatment after some disproportionately arduous work on a gruesome local case which accident had made dramatic. There had been a collapse of several old brick buildings during a raid in which he had shared, and something about the wholesale loss of life, both of prisoners and of his companions, had peculiarly appalled him. As a result, he had acquired an acute and anomalous horror of any buildings even remotely suggesting the ones which had fallen in, so that in the end mental specialists forbade him the sight of such things for an indefinite period. A police surgeon with relatives in Chepachet had put forward that quaint hamlet of wooden colonial houses as an ideal spot for the psychological convalescence; and thither the sufferer had gone, promising never to venture among the brick-lined streets of larger villages till duly advised by the Woonsocket specialist with whom he was put in touch. This walk to Pascoag for magazines had been a mistake, and the patient had paid in fright, bruises, and humiliation for his disobedience.

So much the gossips of Chepachet and Pascoag knew; and so much, also, the most learned specialists believed. But Malone had at first told the specialists much more, ceasing only when he saw that utter incredulity was his portion. Thereafter he held his peace, protesting not at all when it was generally agreed that the collapse of certain squalid brick houses in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, and the consequent death of many brave officers, had unseated his nervous equilibrium. He had worked too hard, all said, it trying to clean up those nests of disorder and violence; certain features were shocking enough, in all conscience, and the unexpected tragedy was the last straw. This was a simple explanation which everyone could understand, and because Malone was not a simple person he perceived that he had better let it suffice. To hint to unimaginative people of a horror beyond all human conception - a horror of houses and blocks and cities leprous and cancerous with evil dragged from elder worlds - would be merely to invite a padded cell instead of a restful rustication, and Malone was a man of sense despite his mysticism. He had the Celt's far vision of weird and hidden things, but the logician's quick eye for the outwardly unconvincing; an amalgam which had led him far afield in the forty-two years of his life, and set him in strange places for a Dublin University man born in a Georgian villa near Phoenix Park.

And now, as he reviewed the things he had seen and felt and apprehended, Malone was content to keep unshared the secret of what could reduce a dauntless fighter to a quivering neurotic; what could make old brick slums and seas of dark, subtle faces a thing of nightmare and eldritch portent. It would not be the first time his sensations had been forced to bide uninterpreted - for was not his very act of plunging into the polyglot abyss of New York's underworld a freak beyond sensible explanation? What could he tell the prosaic of the antique witcheries and grotesque marvels discernible to sensitive eyes amidst the poison cauldron where all the varied dregs of unwholesome ages mix their venom and perpetuate their obscene terrors? He had seen the hellish green flame of secret wonder in this blatant, evasive welter of outward greed and inward blasphemy, and had smiled gently when all the New-Yorkers he knew scoffed at his experiment in police work. They had been very witty and cynical, deriding his fantastic pursuit of unknowable mysteries and assuring him that in these days New York held nothing but cheapness and vulgarity. One of them had wagered him a heavy sum that he could not - despite many poignant things to his credit in the Dublin Review - even write a truly interesting story of New York low life; and now, looking back, he perceived that cosmic irony had justified the prophet's words while secretly confuting their flippant meaning. The horror, as glimpsed at last, could not make a story - for like the book cited by Poe's Germany authority, 'es lässt sich nicht lesen - it does not permit itself to be read.'

II
To Malone the sense of latent mystery in existence was always present. In youth he had felt the hidden beauty and ecstasy of things, and had been a poet; but poverty and sorrow and exile had turned his gaze in darker directions, and he had thrilled at the imputations of evil in the world around. Daily life had fur him come to be a phantasmagoria of macabre shadow-studies; now glittering and leering with concealed rottenness as in Beardsley's best manner, now hinting terrors behind the commonest shapes and objects as in the subtler and less obvious work of Gustave Doré. He would often regard it as merciful that most persons of high Intelligence jeer at the inmost mysteries; for, he argued, if superior minds were ever placed in fullest contact with the secrets preserved by ancient and lowly cults, the resultant abnormalities would soon not only wreck the world, but threaten the very integrity of the universe. All this reflection was no doubt morbid, but keen logic and a deep sense of humour ably offset it. Malone was satisfied to let his notions remain as half-spied and forbidden visions to be lightly played with; and hysteria came only when duty flung him into a hell of revelation too sudden and insidious to escape.

He had for some time been detailed to the Butler Street station in Brooklyn when the Red Hook matter came to his notice. Red Hook is a maze of hybrid squalor near the ancient waterfront opposite Governor's Island, with dirty highways climbing the hill from the wharves to that higher ground where the decayed lengths of Clinton and Court Streets lead off toward the Borough Hall. Its houses are mostly of brick, dating from the first quarter to the middle of the nineteenth century, and some of the obscurer alleys and byways have that alluring antique flavour which conventional reading leads us to call 'Dickensian'. The population is a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and Negro elements impinging upon one another, and fragments of Scandinavian and American belts lying not far distant. It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out strange cries to answer the lapping oily waves at its grimy piers and the monstrous organ litanies of the harbour whistles. Here long ago a brighter picture dwelt, with clear-eyed mariners on the lower streets and homes of taste and substance where the larger houses line the hill. One can trace the relics of this former happiness in the trim shapes of the buildings, the occasional graceful churches, and the evidences of original art and background in bits of detail here and there - a worn flight of steps, a battered doorway, a wormy pair of decorative columns or pilasters, or a fragment of once green space with bent and rusted iron railing. The houses are generally in solid blocks, and now and then a many-windowed cupola arises to tell of days when the households of captains and ship-owners watched the sea.

From this tangle of material and spiritual putrescence the blasphemies of an hundred dialects assail the sky. Hordes of prowlers reel shouting and singing along the lanes and thoroughfares, occasional furtive hands suddenly extinguish lights and pull down curtains, and swarthy, sin-pitted faces disappear from windows when visitors pick their way through. Policemen despair of order or reform, and seek rather to erect barriers protecting the outside world from the contagion. The clang of the patrol is answered by a kind of spectral silence, and such prisoners as are taken are never communicative. Visible offences are as varied as the local dialects, and run the gamut from the smuggling of rum and prohibited aliens through diverse stages of lawlessness and obscure vice to murder and mutilation in their most abhorrent guises. That these visible affairs are not more frequent is not to the neighbourhood's credit, unless the power of concealment be an art demanding credit. More people enter Red Hook than leave it - or at least, than leave it by the landward side - and those who are not loquacious are the likeliest to leave.

Malone found in this state of things a faint stench of secrets more terrible than any of the sins denounced by citizens and bemoaned by priests and philanthropists. He was conscious, as one who united imagination with scientific knowledge, that modern people under lawless conditions tend uncannily to repeat the darkest instinctive patterns of primitive half-ape savagery in their daily life and ritual observances; and he had often viewed with an anthropologist's shudder the chanting, cursing processions of blear-eyed and pockmarked young men which wound their way along in the dark small hours of morning. One saw groups of these youths incessantly; sometimes in leering vigils on street corners, sometimes in doorways playing eerily on cheap instruments of music, sometimes in stupefied dozes or indecent dialogues around cafeteria tables near Borough Hall, and sometimes in whispering converse around dingy taxicabs drawn up at the high stoops of crumbling and closely shuttered old houses. They chilled and fascinated him more than he dared confess to his associates on the force, for he seemed to see in them some monstrous thread of secret continuity; some fiendish, cryptical, and ancient pattern utterly beyond and below the sordid mass of facts and habits and haunts listed with such conscientious technical care by the police. They must be, he felt inwardly, the heirs of some shocking and primordial tradition; the sharers of debased and broken scraps from cults and ceremonies older than mankind. Their coherence and definiteness suggested it, and it shewed in the singular suspicion of order which lurked beneath their squalid disorder. He had not read in vain such treatises as Miss Murray's Witch-Cult in Western Europe; and knew that up to recent years there had certainly survived among peasants and furtive folk a frightful and clandestine system of assemblies and orgies descended from dark religions antedating the Aryan world, and appearing in popular legends as Black Masses and Witches' Sabbaths. That these hellish vestiges of old Turanian-Asiatic magic and fertility cults were even now wholly dead he could not for a moment suppose, and he frequently wondered how much older and how much blacker than the very worst of the muttered tales some of them might really be.

III
It was the case of Robert Suydam which took Malone to the heart of things in Red Hook. Suydam was a lettered recluse of ancient Dutch family, possessed originally of barely independent means, and inhabiting the spacious but ill-preserved mansion which his grandfather had built in Flatbush when that village was little more than a pleasant group of colonial cottages surrounding the steepled and ivy-clad Reformed Church with its iron-railed yard of Netherlandish gravestones. In his lonely house, set back from Martense Street amidst a yard of venerable trees, Suydam had read and brooded for some six decades except for a period a generation before, when he had sailed for the old world and remained there out of sight for eight years. He could afford no servants, and would admit but few visitors to his absolute solitude; eschewing close friendships and receiving his rare acquaintances in one of the three ground-floor rooms which he kept in order - a vast, high-ceiled library whose walls were solidly packed with tattered books of ponderous, archaic, and vaguely repellent aspect. The growth of the town and its final absorption in the Brooklyn district had meant nothing to Suydam, and he had come to mean less and less to the town. Elderly people still pointed him out on the streets, but to most of the recent population he was merely a queer, corpulent old fellow whose unkempt white hair, stubbly beard, shiny black clothes, and gold-headed cane earned him an amused glance and nothing more. Malone did not know him by sight till duty called him to the case, but had heard of him indirectly as a really profound authority on mediaeval superstition, and had once idly meant to look up an out-of-print pamphlet of his on the Kabbalah and the Faustus legend, which a friend had quoted from memory.

Suydam became a case when his distant and only relatives sought court pronouncements on his sanity. Their action seemed sudden to the outside world, but was really undertaken only after prolonged observation and sorrowful debate. It was based on certain odd changes in his speech and habits; wild references to impending wonders, and unaccountable hauntings of disreputable Brooklyn neighbourhoods. He had been growing shabbier and shabbier with the years, and now prowled about like a veritable mendicant; seen occasionally by humiliated friends in subway stations, or loitering on the benches around Borough Hall in conversation with groups of swarthy, evil-looking strangers. When he spoke it was to babble of unlimited powers almost within his grasp, and to repeat with knowing leers such mystical words or names as 'Sephiroth', 'Ashmodai', and 'Samaël'. The court action revealed that he was using up his income and wasting his principal in the purchase of curious tomes imported from London and Paris, and in the maintenance of a squalid basement flat in the Red Hook district where he spent nearly every night, receiving odd delegations of mixed rowdies and foreigners, and apparently conducting some kind of ceremonial service behind the green blinds of secretive windows. Detectives assigned to follow him reported strange cries and chants and prancing of feet filtering out from these nocturnal rites, and shuddered at their peculiar ecstasy and abandon despite the commonness of weird orgies in that sodden section. When, however, the matter came to a hearing, Suydam managed to preserve his liberty. Before the judge his manner grew urbane and reasonable, and he freely admitted the queerness of demeanour and extravagant cast of language into which he had fallen through excessive devotion to study and research. He was, he said, engaged in the investigation of certain details of European tradition which required the closest contact with foreign groups and their songs and folk dances. The notion that any low secret society was preying upon him, as hinted by his relatives, was obviously absurd; and shewed how sadly limited was their understanding of him and his work. Triumphing with his calm explanations, he was suffered to depart unhindered; and the paid detectives of the Suydams, Corlears, and Van Brunts were withdrawn in resigned disgust.

It was here that an alliance of Federal inspectors and police, Malone with them, entered the case. The law had watched the Suydam action with interest, and had in many instances been called upon to aid the private detectives. In this work it developed that Suydam's new associates were among the blackest and most vicious criminals of Red Hook's devious lanes, and that at least a third of them were known and repeated offenders in the matter of thievery, disorder, and the importation of illegal immigrants. Indeed, it would not have been too much to say that the old scholar's particular circle coincided almost perfectly with the worst of the organized cliques which smuggled ashore certain nameless and unclassified Asian dregs wisely turned back by Ellis Island. In the teeming rookeries of Parker Place - since renamed - where Suydam had his basement flat, there had grown up a very unusual colony of unclassified slant-eyed folk who used the Arabic alphabet but were eloquently repudiated by the great mass of Syrians in and around Atlantic Avenue. They could all have been deported for lack of credentials, but legalism is slow-moving, and one does not disturb Red Hook unless publicity forces one to.

These creatures attended a tumbledown stone church, used Wednesdays as a dance-hall, which reared its Gothic buttresses near the vilest part of the waterfront. It was nominally Catholic; but priests throughout Brooklyn denied the place all standing and authenticity, and policemen agreed with them when they listened to the noises it emitted at night. Malone used to fancy he heard terrible cracked bass notes from a hidden organ far underground when the church stood empty and unlighted, whilst all observers dreaded the shrieking and drumming which accompanied the visible services. Suydam, when questioned, said he thought the ritual was some remnant of Nestorian Christianity tinctured with the Shamanism of Thibet. Most of the people, he conjectured, were of Mongoloid stock, originating somewhere in or near Kurdistan - and Malone could not help recalling that Kurdistan is the land of the Yezidis, last survivors of the Persian devil-worshippers. However this may have been, the stir of the Suydam investigation made it certain that these unauthorised newcomers were flooding Red Hook in increasing numbers; entering through some marine conspiracy unreached by revenue officers and harbour police, overrunning Parker Place and rapidly spreading up the hill, and welcomed with curious fraternalism by the other assorted denizens of the region. Their squat figures and characteristic squinting physiognomies, grotesquely combined with flashy American clothing, appeared more and more numerously among the loafers and nomad gangsters of the Borough Hall section; till at length it was deemed necessary to compute their numbers, ascertain their sources and occupations, and find if possible a way to round them up and deliver them to the proper immigration authorities. To this task Malone was assigned by agreement of Federal and city forces, and as he commenced his canvass of Red Hook he felt poised upon the brink of nameless terrors, with the shabby, unkempt figure of Robert Suydam as arch-fiend and adversary.

IV
Police methods are varied and ingenious. Malone, through unostentatious rambles, carefully casual conversations, well-timed offers of hip-pocket liquor, and judicious dialogues with frightened prisoners, learned many isolated facts about the movement whose aspect had become so menacing. The newcomers were indeed Kurds, but of a dialect obscure and puzzling to exact philology. Such of them as worked lived mostly as dock-hands and unlicenced pedlars, though frequently serving in Greek restaurants and tending corner news stands. Most of them, however, had no visible means of support; and were obviously connected with underworld pursuits, of which smuggling and 'bootlegging' were the least indescribable. They had come in steamships, apparently tramp freighters, and had been unloaded by stealth on moonless nights in rowboats which stole under a certain wharf and followed a hidden canal to a secret subterranean pool beneath a house. This wharf, canal, and house Malone could not locate, for the memories of his informants were exceedingly confused, while their speech was to a great extent beyond even the ablest interpreters; nor could he gain any real data on the reasons for their systematic importation. They were reticent about the exact spot from which they had come, and were never sufficiently off guard to reveal the agencies which had sought them out and directed their course. Indeed, they developed something like acute fright when asked the reasons for their presence. Gangsters of other breeds were equally taciturn, and she most that could be gathered was that some god or great priesthood had promised them unheard-of powers and supernatural glories and rulerships in a strange land.

The attendance of both newcomers and old gangsters at Suydam's closely guarded nocturnal meetings was very regular, and the police soon learned that the erstwhile recluse had leased additional flats to accommodate such guests as knew his password; at last occupying three entire houses and permanently harbouring many of his queer companions. He spent but little time now at his Flatbush home, apparently going and coming only to obtain and return books; and his face and manner had attained an appalling pitch of wildness. Malone twice interviewed him, but was each time brusquely repulsed. He knew nothing, he said, of any mysterious plots or movements; and had no idea how the Kurds could have entered or what they wanted. His business was to study undisturbed the folklore of all the immigrants of the district; a business with which policemen had no legitimate concern. Malone mentioned his admiration for Suydam's old brochure on the Kabbalah and other myths, but the old man's softening was only momentary. He sensed an intrusion, and rebuffed his visitor in no uncertain way; till Malone withdrew disgusted, and turned to other channels of information.

What Malone would have unearthed could he have worked continuously on the case, we shall never know. As it was, a stupid conflict between city and Federal authority suspended the investigations for several months, during which the detective was busy with other assignments. But at no time did he lose interest, or fail to stand amazed at what began to happen to Robert Suydam. Just at the time when a wave of kidnappings and disappearances spread its excitement over New York, the unkempt scholar embarked upon a metamorphosis as startling as it was absurd. One day he was seen near Borough Hall with clean-shaved face, well-trimmed hair, and tastefully immaculate attire, and on every day thereafter some obscure improvement was noticed in him. He maintained his new fastidiousness without interruption, added to it an unwonted sparkle of eye and crispness of speech, and began little by little to shed the corpulence which had so long deformed him. Now frequently taken for less than his age, he acquired an elasticity of step and buoyancy of demeanour to match the new tradition, and shewed a curious darkening of the hair which somehow did not suggest dye. As the months passed, he commenced to dress less and less conservatively, and finally astonished his new friends by renovating and redecorating his Flatbush mansion, which he threw open in a series of receptions, summoning all the acquaintances he could remember, and extending a special welcome to the fully forgiven relatives who had so lately sought his restraint. Some attended through curiosity, others through duty; but all were suddenly charmed by the dawning grace and urbanity of the former hermit. He had, he asserted, accomplished most of his allotted work; and having just inherited some property from a half-forgotten European friend, was about to spend his remaining years in a brighter second youth which ease, care, and diet had made possible to him. Less and less was he seen at Red Hook, and more and more did he move in the society to which he was born. Policemen noted a tendency of the gangsters to congregate at the old stone church and dance-hall instead of at the basement flat in Parker Place, though the latter and its recent annexes still overflowed with noxious life.

Then two incidents occurred - wide enough apart, but both of intense interest in the case as Malone envisaged it. One was a quiet announcement in the Eagle of Robert Suydam's engagement to Miss Cornelia Gerritsen of Bayside, a young woman of excellent position, and distantly related to the elderly bridegroom-elect; whilst the other was a raid on the dance-hall church by city police, after a report that the face of a kidnapped child had been seen for a second at one of the basement windows. Malone had participated in this raid, and studied the place with much care when inside. Nothing was found - in fact, the building was entirely deserted when visited - but the sensitive Celt was vaguely disturbed by many things about the interior. There were crudely painted panels he did not like - panels which depicted sacred faces with peculiarly worldly and sardonic expressions, and which occasionally took liberties that even a layman's sense of decorum could scarcely countenance. Then, too, he did not relish the Greek inscription on the wall above the pulpit; an ancient incantation which he had once stumbled upon in Dublin college days, and which read, literally translated,

'O friend and companion of night, thou who rejoicest in the baying of dogs and spilt blood, who wanderest in the midst of shades among the tombs, who longest for blood and bringest terror to mortals, Gorgo, Mormo, thousand-faced moon, look favourably on our sacrifices!'

When he read this he shuddered, and thought vaguely of the cracked bass organ notes he fancied he had heard beneath the church on certain nights. He shuddered again at the rust around the rim of a metal basin which stood on the altar, and paused nervously when his nostrils seemed to detect a curious and ghastly stench from somewhere in the neighbourhood. That organ memory haunted him, and he explored the basement with particular assiduity before he left. The place was very hateful to him; yet after all, were the blasphemous panels and inscriptions more than mere crudities perpetrated by the ignorant?

By the time of Suydam's wedding the kidnapping epidemic had become a popular newspaper scandal. Most of the victims were young children of the lowest classes, but the increasing number of disappearances had worked up a sentiment of the strongest fury. Journals clamoured for action from the police, and once more the Butler Street Station sent its men over Red Hook for clues, discoveries, and criminals. Malone was glad to be on the trail again, and took pride in a raid on one of Suydam's Parker Place houses. There, indeed, no stolen child was found, despite the tales of screams and the red sash picked up in the areaway; but the paintings and rough inscriptions on the peeling walls of most of the rooms, and the primitive chemical laboratory in the attic, all helped to convince the detective that he was on the track of something tremendous. The paintings were appalling - hideous monsters of every shape and size, and parodies on human outlines which cannot be described. The writing was in red, and varied from Arabic to Greek, Roman, and Hebrew letters. Malone could not read much of it, but what he did decipher was portentous and cabbalistic enough. One frequently repeated motto was in a Sort of Hebraised Hellenistic Greek, and suggested the most terrible daemon-evocations of the Alexandrian decadence:

'HEL · HELOYM · SOTHER · EMMANVEL · SABAOTH · AGLA · TETRAGRAMMATON · AGYROS · OTHEOS · ISCHYROS · ATHANATOS · IEHOVA · VA · ADONAI · SADAY · HOMOVSION · MESSIAS · ESCHEREHEYE.'

Circles and pentagrams loomed on every hand, and told indubitably of the strange beliefs and aspirations of those who dwelt so squalidly here. In the cellar, however, the strangest thing was found - a pile of genuine gold ingots covered carelessly with a piece of burlap, and bearing upon their shining surfaces the same weird hieroglyphics which also adorned the walls. During the raid the police encountered only a passive resistance from the squinting Orientals that swarmed from every door. Finding nothing relevant, they had to leave all as it was; but the precinct captain wrote Suydam a note advising him to look closely to the character of his tenants and protégés in view of the growing public clamour.

V
Then came the June wedding and the great sensation. Flatbush was gay for the hour about high noon, and pennanted motors thronged the streets near the old Dutch church where an awning stretched from door to highway. No local event ever surpassed the Suydam-Gerritsen nuptials in tone and scale, and the party which escorted bride and groom to the Cunard Pier was, if not exactly the smartest, at least a solid page from the Social Register. At five o'clock adieux were waved, and the ponderous liner edged away from the long pier, slowly turned its nose seaward, discarded its tug, and headed for the widening water spaces that led to old world wonders. By night the outer harbour was cleared, and late passengers watched the stars twinkling above an unpolluted ocean.

Whether the tramp steamer or the scream was first to gain attention, no one can say. Probably they were simultaneous, but it is of no use to calculate. The scream came from the Suydam stateroom, and the sailor who broke down the door could perhaps have told frightful things if he had not forthwith gone completely mad - as it is, he shrieked more loudly than the first victims, and thereafter ran simpering about the vessel till caught and put in irons. The ship's doctor who entered the stateroom and turned on the lights a moment later did not go mad, but told nobody what he saw till afterward, when he corresponded with Malone in Chepachet. It was murder - strangulation - but one need not say that the claw-mark on Mrs. Suydam's throat could not have come from her husband's or any other human hand, or that upon the white wall there flickered for an instant in hateful red a legend which, later copied from memory, seems to have been nothing less than the fearsome Chaldee letters of the word 'LILITH'. One need not mention these things because they vanished so quickly - as for Suydam, one could at least bar others from the room until one knew what to think oneself. The doctor has distinctly assured Malone that he did not see IT. The open porthole, just before he turned on the lights, was clouded for a second with a certain phosphorescence, and for a moment there seemed to echo in the night outside the suggestion of a faint and hellish tittering; but no real outline met the eye. As proof, the doctor points to his continued sanity.

Then the tramp steamer claimed all attention. A boat put off, and a horde of swart, insolent ruffians in officers' dress swarmed aboard the temporarily halted Cunarder. They wanted Suydam or his body - they had known of his trip, and for certain reasons were sure he would die. The captain's deck was almost a pandemonium; for at the instant, between the doctor's report from the stateroom and the demands of the men from the tramp, not even the wisest and gravest seaman could think what to do. Suddenly the leader of the visiting mariners, an Arab with a hatefully negroid mouth, pulled forth a dirty, crumpled paper and handed it to the captain. It was signed by Robert Suydam, and bore the following odd message.

In case of sudden or unexplained accident or death on my part, please deliver me or my body unquestioningly into the hands of the bearer and his associates. Everything, for me, and perhaps for you, depends on absolute compliance. Explanations can come later - do not fail me now.

- ROBERT SUYDAM

Captain and doctor looked at each other, and the latter whispered something to the former. Finally they nodded rather helplessly and led the way to the Suydam stateroom. The doctor directed the captain's glance away as he unlocked the door and admitted the strange seamen, nor did he breathe easily till they filed out with their burden after an unaccountably long period of preparation. It was wrapped in bedding from the berths, and the doctor was glad that the outlines were not very revealing. Somehow the men got the thing over the side and away to their tramp steamer without uncovering it. The Cunarder started again, and the doctor and a ship's undertaker sought out the Suydam stateroorn to perform what last services they could. Once more the physician was forced to reticence and even to mendacity, for a hellish thing had happened. When the undertaker asked him why he had drained off all of Mrs. Suydam's blood, he neglected to affirm that he had not done so; nor did he point to the vacant bottle-spaces on the rack, or to the odour in the sink which shewed the hasty disposition of the bottles' original contents. The pockets of those men - if men they were - had bulged damnably when they left the ship. Two hours later, and the world knew by radio all that it ought to know of the horrible affair.

VI
That same June evening, without having heard a word from the sea, Malone was desperately busy among the alleys of Red Hook. A sudden stir seemed to permeate the place, and as if apprised by 'grapevine telegraph' of something singular, the denizens clustered expectantly around the dance-hall church and the houses in Parker Place. Three children had just disappeared - blue-eyed Norwegians from the streets toward Gowanus - and there were rumours of a mob forming among the sturdy Vikings of that section. Malone had for weeks been urging his colleagues to attempt a general cleanup; and at last, moved by conditions more obvious to their common sense than the conjectures of a Dublin dreamer, they had agreed upon a final stroke. The unrest and menace of this evening had been the deciding factor, and just about midnight a raiding party recruited from three stations descended upon Parker Place and its environs. Doors were battered in, stragglers arrested, and candlelighted rooms forced to disgorge unbelievable throngs of mixed foreigners in figured robes, mitres, and other inexplicable devices. Much was lost in the melee, for objects were thrown hastily down unexpected shafts, and betraying odours deadened by the sudden kindling of pungent incense. But spattered blood was everywhere, and Malone shuddered whenever he saw a brazier or altar from which the smoke was still rising.

He wanted to be in several places at once, and decided on Suydam's basement flat only after a messenger had reported the complete emptiness of the dilapidated dance-hall church. The flat, he thought, must hold some due to a cult of which the occult scholar had so obviously become the centre and leader; and it was with real expectancy that he ransacked the musty rooms, noted their vaguely charnel odour, and examined the curious books, instruments, gold ingots, and glass-stoppered bottles scattered carelessly here and there. Once a lean, black-and-white cat edged between his feet and tripped him, overturning at the same time a beaker half full of a red liquid. The shock was severe, and to this day Malone is not certain of what he saw; but in dreams he still pictures that cat as it scuttled away with certain monstrous alterations and peculiarities. Then came the locked cellar door, and the search for something to break it down. A heavy stool stood near, and its tough seat was more than enough for the antique panels. A crack formed and enlarged, and the whole door gave way - but from the other side; whence poured a howling tumult of ice-cold wind with all the stenches of the bottomless pit, and whence reached a sucking force not of earth or heaven, which, coiling sentiently about the paralysed detective, dragged him through the aperture and down unmeasured spaces filled with whispers and wails, and gusts of mocking laughter.

Of course it was a dream. All the specialists have told him so, and he has nothing to prove the contrary. Indeed, he would rather have it thus; for then the sight of old brick slums and dark foreign faces would not eat so deeply into his soul. But at the time it was all horribly real, and nothing can ever efface the memory of those nighted crypts, those titan arcades, and those half-formed shapes of hell that strode gigantically in silence holding half-eaten things whose still surviving portions screamed for mercy or laughed with madness. Odours of incense and corruption joined in sickening concert, and the black air was alive with the cloudy, semi-visible bulk of shapeless elemental things with eyes. Somewhere dark sticky water was lapping at onyx piers, and once the shivery tinkle of raucous little bells pealed out to greet the insane titter of a naked phosphorescent thing which swam into sight, scrambled ashore, and climbed up to squat leeringly on a carved golden pedestal in the background.

Avenues of limitless night seemed to radiate in every direction, till one might fancy that here lay the root of a contagion destined to sicken and swallow cities, and engulf nations in the foetor of hybrid pestilence. Here cosmic sin had entered, and festered by unhallowed rites had commenced the grinning march of death that was to rot us all to fungous abnormalities too hideous for the grave's holding. Satan here held his Babylonish court, and in the blood of stainless childhood the leprous limbs of phosphorescent Lilith were laved. Incubi and succubae howled praise to Hecate, and headless moon-calves bleated to the Magna Mater. Goats leaped to the sound of thin accursed flutes, and Ægypans chased endlessly after misshapen fauns over rocks twisted like swollen toads. Moloch and Ashtaroth were not absent; for in this quintessence of all damnation the bounds of consciousness were let down, and man's fancy lay open to vistas of every realm of horror and every forbidden dimension that evil had power to mould. The world and Nature were helpless against such assaults from unsealed wells of night, nor could any sign or prayer check the Walpurgis-riot of horror which had come when a sage with the hateful key had stumbled on a horde with the locked and brimming coffer of transmitted daemon-lore.

Suddenly a ray of physical light shot through these phantasms, and Malone heard the sound of oars amidst the blasphemies of things that should be dead. A boat with a lantern in its prow darted into sight, made fast to an iron ring in the slimy stone pier, and vomited forth several dark men bearing a long burden swathed in bedding. They took it to the naked phosphorescent thing on the carved golden pedestal, and the thing tittered and pawed at the bedding. Then they unswathed it, and propped upright before the pedestal the gangrenous corpse of a corpulent old man with stubbly beard and unkempt white hair. The phosphorescent thing tittered again, and the men produced bottles from their pockets and anointed its feet with red, whilst they afterward gave the bottles to the thing to drink from.

All at once, from an arcaded avenue leading endlessly away, there came the daemoniac rattle and wheeze of a blasphemous organ, choking and rumbling out the mockeries of hell in a cracked, sardonic bass. In an instant every moving entity was electrified; and forming at once into a ceremonial procession, the nightmare horde slithered away in quest of the sound - goat, satyr, and Ægypan, incubus, succubus and lemur, twisted toad and shapeless elemental, dog-faced howler and silent strutter in darkness - all led by the abominable naked phosphorescent thing that had squatted on the carved golden throne, and that now strode insolently bearing in its arms the glassy-eyed corpse of the corpulent old man. The strange dark men danced in the rear, and the whole column skipped and leaped with Dionysiac fury. Malone staggered after them a few steps, delirious and hazy, and doubtful of his place in this or in any world. Then he turned, faltered, and sank down on the cold damp stone, gasping and shivering as the daemon organ croaked on, and the howling and drumming and tinkling of the mad procession grew fainter and fainter.

Vaguely he was conscious of chanted horrors and shocking croakings afar off. Now and then a wail or whine of ceremonial devotion would float to him through the black arcade, whilst eventually there rose the dreadful Greek incantation whose text he had read above the pulpit of that dance-hall church.

'O friend and companion of night, thou who rejoicest in the baying of dogs (here a hideous howl bust forth) and spilt blood (here nameless sounds vied with morbid shriekings) who wanderest in the midst of shades among the tombs, (here a whistling sigh occurred) who longest for blood and bringest terror to mortals, (short, sharp cries from myriad throats) Gorgo, (repeated as response) Mormo, (repeated with ecstasy) thousand-faced moon, (sighs and flute notes) look favourably on our sacrifices!'

As the chant closed, a general shout went up, and hissing sounds nearly drowned the croaking of the cracked bass organ. Then a gasp as from many throats, and a babel of barked and bleated words - 'Lilith, Great Lilith, behold the Bridegroom!' More cries, a clamour of rioting, and the sharp, clicking footfalls of a running figure. The footfalls approached, and Malone raised himself to his elbow to look.

The luminosity of the crypt, lately diminished, had now slightly increased; and in that devil-light there appeared the fleeing form of that which should not flee or feel or breathe - the glassy-eyed, gangrenous corpse of the corpulent old man, now needing no support, but animated by some infernal sorcery of the rite just closed. After it raced the naked, tittering, phosphorescent thing that belonged on the carven pedestal, and still farther behind panted the dark men, and all the dread crew of sentient loathsomenesses. The corpse was gaining on its pursuers, and seemed bent on a definite object, straining with every rotting muscle toward the carved golden pedestal, whose necromantic importance was evidently so great. Another moment and it had reached its goal, whilst the trailing throng laboured on with more frantic speed. But they were too late, for in one final spurt of strength which ripped tendon from tendon and sent its noisome bulk floundering to the floor in a state of jellyish dissolution, the staring corpse which had been Robert Suydam achieved its object and its triumph. The push had been tremendous, but the force had held out; and as the pusher collapsed to a muddy blotch of corruption the pedestal he had pushed tottered, tipped, and finally careened from its onyx base into the thick waters below, sending up a parting gleam of carven gold as it sank heavily to undreamable gulfs of lower Tartarus. In that instant, too, the whole scene of horror faded to nothingness before Malone's eyes; and he fainted amidst a thunderous crash which seemed to blot out all the evil universe.

VII
Malone's dream, experienced in full before he knew of Suydam's death and transfer at sea, was curiously supplemented by some odd realities of the case; though that is no reason why anyone should believe it. The three old houses in Parker Place, doubtless long rotten with decay in its most insidious form, collapsed without visible cause while half the raiders and most of the prisoners were inside; and of both the greater number were instantly killed. Only in the basements and cellars was there much saving of life, and Malone was lucky to have been deep below the house of Robert Suydam. For he really was there, as no one is disposed to deny. They found him unconscious by the edge of a night-black pool, with a grotesquely horrible jumble of decay and bone, identifiable through dental work as the body of Suydam, a few feet away. The case was plain, for it was hither that the smugglers' underground canal led; and the men who took Suydam from the ship had brought him home. They themselves were never found, or at least never identified; and the ship's doctor is not yet satisfied with the simple certitudes of the police.

Suydam was evidently a leader in extensive man-smuggling operations, for the canal to his house was but one of several subterranean channels and tunnels in the neighbourhood. There was a tunnel from this house to a crypt beneath the dance-hall church; a crypt accessible from the church only through a narrow secret passage in the north wall, and in whose chambers some singular and terrible things were discovered. The croaking organ was there, as well as a vast arched chapel with wooden benches and a strangely figured altar. The walls were lined with small cells, in seventeen of which - hideous to relate - solitary prisoners in a state of complete idiocy were found chained, including four mothers with infants of disturbingly strange appearance. These infants died soon after exposure to the light; a circumstance which the doctors thought rather merciful. Nobody but Malone, among those who inspected them, remembered the sombre question of old Delrio: 'An sint unquam daemones incubi et succubae, et an ex tali congressu proles nasci queat?'

Before the canals were filled up they were thoroughly dredged, and yielded forth a sensational array of sawed and split bones of all sizes. The kidnapping epidemic, very clearly, had been traced home; though only two of the surviving prisoners could by any legal thread be connected with it. These men are now in prison, since they failed of conviction as accessories in the actual murders. The carved golden pedestal or throne so often mentioned by Malone as of primary occult importance was never brought to light, though at one place under the Suydam house the canal was observed to sink into a well too deep for dredging. It was choked up at the mouth and cemented over when the cellars of the new houses were made, but Malone often speculates on what lies beneath. The police, satisfied that they had shattered a dangerous gang of maniacs and man-smugglers, turned over to the Federal authorities the unconvicted Kurds, who befure their deportation were conclusively found to belong to the Yezidi clan of devil-worshippers. The tramp ship and its crew remain an elusive mystery. though cynical detectives are once more ready to combat its smugging and rum-running ventures. Malone thinks these detectives shew a sadly limited perspective in their lack of wonder at the myriad unexplainable details, and the suggestive obscurity of the whole case; though he is just as critical of the newspapers, which saw only a morbid sensation and gloated over a minor sadist cult which they might have proclaimed a horror from the universe's very heart. But he is content to rest silent in Chepachet, calming his nervous system and praying that time may gradually transfer his terrible experience from the realm of present reality to that of picturesque and semi-mythical remoteness.

Robert Suydam sleeps beside his bride in Greenwood Cemetery. No funeral was held over the strangely released bones, and relatives are grateful for the swift oblivion which overtook the case as a whole. The scholar's connexion with the Red Hook horrors, indeed, was never emblazoned by legal proof; since his death forestalled the inquiry he would otherwise have faced. His own end is not much mentioned, and the Suydams hope that posterity may recall him only as a gentle recluse who dabbled in harmless magic and folklore.

As for Red Hook - it is always the same. Suydam came and went; a terror gathered and faded; but the evil spirit of darkness and squalor broods on amongst the mongrels in the old brick houses, and prowling bands still parade on unknown errands past windows where lights and twisted faces unaccountably appear and disappear. Age-old horror is a hydra with a thousand heads, and the cults of darkness are rooted in blasphemies deeper than the well of Democritus, The soul of the beast is omnipresent and triumphant, and Red Hook's legions of blear-eyed, pockmarked youths still chant and curse and howl as they file from abyss to abyss, none knows whence or whither, pushed on by blind laws of biology which they may never understand. As of old, more people enter Red Hook than leave it on the landward side, and there are already rumours of new canals running underground to certain centres of traffic in liquor and less mentionable things.

The dance-hall church is now mostly a dance-hall, and queer faces have appeared at night at the windows. Lately a policeman expressed the belief that the filled-up crypt has been dug out again, and for no simply explainable purpose. Who are we to combat poisons older than history and mankind? Apes danced in Asia to those horrors, and the cancer lurks secure and spreading where furtiveness hides in rows of decaying brick.

Malone does not shudder without cause - for only the other day an officer overheard a swarthy squinting hag teaching a small child some whispered patois in the shadow of an areaway. He listened, and thought it very strange when he heard her repeat over and over again,

'O friend and companion of night, thou who rejoicest in the baying of dogs and spilt blood, who wanderest in the midst of shades among the tombs, who longest for blood and bringest terror to mortals, Gorgo, Mormo, thousand-faced moon, look favourably on our sacrifices!'

---

The Dream Quest
of Unknown Kadath
by
H. P. Lovecraft

Written in January of 1927 ~ Published  in Beyond the Wall of Sleep

    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.

    From then on time ceased to exist. At intervals food was pushed in, but Carter would not touch it. What
    his fate would be, he did not know; but he felt that he was held for the coming of that frightful soul and
    messenger of infinity's Other Gods, the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep. Finally, after an unguessed span of
    hours or days, the great stone door swung wide again, and Carter was shoved down the stairs and out
    into the red-litten streets of that fearsome city. It was night on the moon, and all through the town were
    stationed slaves bearing torches.

    In a detestable square a sort of procession was formed; ten of the toad-things and twenty-four almost
    human torch-bearers, eleven on either side, and one each before and behind. Carter was placed in the
    middle of the line; five toad-things ahead and five behind, and one almost-human torch-bearer on either
    side of him. Certain of the toad-things produced disgustingly carven flutes of ivory and made loathsome
    sounds. To that hellish piping the column advanced out of the tiled streets and into nighted plains of
    obscene fungi, soon commencing to climb one of the lower and more gradual hills that lay behind the city.
    That on some frightful slope or blasphemous plateau the crawling chaos waited, Carter could not doubt;
    and he wished that the suspense might soon be over. The whining of those impious flutes was shocking,
    and he would have given worlds for some even half-normal sound; but these toad-things had no voices,
    and the slaves did not talk.

    Then through that star-specked darkness there did come a normal sound. It rolled from the higher hills,
    and from all the jagged peaks around it was caught up and echoed in a swelling pandaemoniac chorus. It
    was the midnight yell of the cat, and Carter knew at last that the old village folk were right when they made
    low guesses about the cryptical realms which are known only to cats, and to which the elders among cats
    repair by stealth nocturnally, springing from high housetops. Verily, it is to the moon's dark side that they
    go to leap and gambol on the hills and converse with ancient shadows, and here amidst that column of
    foetid things Carter heard their homely, friendly cry, and thought of the steep roofs and warm hearths and
    little lighted windows of home.

    Now much of the speech of cats was known to Randolph Carter, and in this far terrible place he uttered
    the cry that was suitable. But that he need not have done, for even as his lips opened he heard the
    chorus wax and draw nearer, and saw swift shadows against the stars as small graceful shapes leaped
    from hill to hill in gathering legions. The call of the clan had been given, and before the foul procession
    had time even to be frightened a cloud of smothering fur and a phalanx of murderous claws were tidally
    and tempestuously upon it. The flutes stopped, and there were shrieks in the night. Dying almost-humans
    screamed, and cats spit and yowled and roared, but the toad-things made never a sound as their stinking
    green ichor oozed fatally upon that porous earth with the obscene fungi.

    It was a stupendous sight while the torches lasted, and Carter had never before seen so many cats.
    Black, grey, and white; yellow, tiger, and mixed; common, Persian, and Marix; Thibetan, Angora, and
    Egyptian; all were there in the fury of battle, and there hovered over them some trace of that profound
    and inviolate sanctity which made their goddess great in the temples of Bubastis. They would leap seven
    strong at the throat of an almost-human or the pink tentacled snout of a toad-thing and drag it down
    savagely to the fungous plain, where myriads of their fellows would surge over it and into it with the
    frenzied claws and teeth of a divine battle-fury. Carter had seized a torch from a stricken slave, but was
    soon overborne by the surging waves of his loyal defenders. Then he lay in the utter blackness hearing
    the clangour of war and the shouts of the victors, and feeling the soft paws of his friends as they rushed
    to and fro over him in the fray.

    At last awe and exhaustion closed his eyes, and when he opened them again it was upon a strange
    scene. The great shining disc of the earth, thirteen times greater than that of the moon as we see it, had
    risen with floods of weird light over the lunar landscape; and across all those leagues of wild plateau and
    ragged crest there squatted one endless sea of cats in orderly array. Circle on circle they reached, and
    two or three leaders out of the ranks were licking his face and purring to him consolingly. Of the dead
    slaves and toad-things there were not many signs, but Carter thought he saw one bone a little way off in
    the open space between him and the warriors.

    Carter now spoke with the leaders in the soft language of cats, and learned that his ancient friendship
    with the species was well known and often spoken of in the places where cats congregate. He had not
    been unmarked in Ulthar when he passed through, and the sleek old cats had remembered how he patted
    them after they had attended to the hungry Zoogs who looked evilly at a small black kitten. And they
    recalled, too, how he had welcomed the very little kitten who came to see him at the inn, and how he had
    given it a saucer of rich cream in the morning before he left. The grandfather of that very little kitten was
    the leader of the army now assembled, for he had seen the evil procession from a far hill and recognized
    the prisoner as a sworn friend of his kind on earth and in the land of dream.

    A yowl now came from the farther peak, and the old leader paused abruptly in his conversation. It was
    one of the army's outposts, stationed on the highest of the mountains to watch the one foe which Earth's
    cats fear; the very large and peculiar cats from Saturn, who for some reason have not been oblivious of
    the charm of our moon's dark side. They are leagued by treaty with the evil toad-things, and are
    notoriously hostile to our earthly cats; so that at this juncture a meeting would have been a somewhat
    grave matter.

    After a brief consultation of generals, the cats rose and assumed a closer formation, crowding
    protectingly around Carter and preparing to take the great leap through space back to the housetops of
    our earth and its dreamland. The old field-marshal advised Carter to let himself be borne along smoothly
    and passively in the massed ranks of furry leapers, and told him how to spring when the rest sprang and
    land gracefully when the rest landed. He also offered to deposit him in any spot he desired, and Carter
    decided on the city of Dylath-Leen whence the black galley had set out; for he wished to sail thence for
    Oriab and the carven crest Ngranek, and also to warn the people of the city to have no more traffick with
    black galleys, if indeed that traffick could be tactfully and judiciously broken off. Then, upon a signal, the
    cats all leaped gracefully with their friend packed securely in their midst; while in a black cave on an
    unhallowed summit of the moon-mountains still vainly waited the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.

    The leap of the cats through space was very swift; and being surrounded by his companions Carter did
    not see this time the great black shapelessnesses that lurk and caper and flounder in the abyss. Before
    he fully realised what had happened he was back in his familiar room at the inn at Dylath-Leen, and the
    stealthy, friendly cats were pouring out of the window in streams. The old leader from Ulthar was the last
    to leave, and as Carter shook his paw he said he would be able to get home by cockcrow. When dawn
    came, Carter went downstairs and learned that a week had elapsed since his capture and leaving. There
    was still nearly a fortnight to wait for the ship bound toward Oriab, and during that time he said what he
    could against the black galleys and their infamous ways. Most of the townsfolk believed him; yet so fond
    were the jewellers of great rubies that none would wholly promise to cease trafficking with the
    wide-mouthed merchants. If aught of evil ever befalls Dylath-Leen through such traffick, it will not be his
    fault.

    In about a week the desiderate ship put in by the black wale and tall lighthouse, and Carter was glad to
    see that she was a barque of wholesome men, with painted sides and yellow lateen sails and a grey
    captain in silken robes. Her cargo was the fragrant resin of Oriab's inner groves, and the delicate pottery
    baked by the artists of Bahama, and the strange little figures carved from Ngranek's ancient lava. For
    this they were paid in the wool of Ulthar and the iridescent textiles of Hatheg and the ivory that the black
    men carve across the river in Parg. Carter made arrangements with the captain to go to Baharna and
    was told that the voyage would take ten days. And during his week of waiting he talked much with that
    captain of Ngranek, and was told that very few had seen the carven face thereon; but that most travellers
    are content to learn its legends from old people and lava-gatherers and image-makers in Baharna and
    afterward say in their far homes that they have indeed beheld it. The captain was not even sure that any
    person now living had beheld that carven face, for the wrong side of Ngranek is very difficult and barren
    and sinister, and there are rumours of caves near the peak wherein dwell the night-gaunts. But the
    captain did not wish to say just what a night-gaunt might be like, since such cattle are known to haunt
    most persistently the dreams of those who think too often of them. Then Carter asked that captain about
    unknown Kadath in the cold waste, and the marvellous sunset city, but of these the good man could truly
    tell nothing.

    Carter sailed out of Dylath-Leen one early morning when the tide turned, and saw the first rays of sunrise
    on the thin angular towers of that dismal basalt town. And for two days they sailed eastward in sight of
    green coasts, and saw often the pleasant fishing towns that climbed up steeply with their red roofs and
    chimney-pots from old dreaming wharves and beaches where nets lay drying. But on the third day they
    turned sharply south where the roll of water was stronger, and soon passed from sight of any land. On
    the fifth day the sailors were nervous, but the captain apologized for their fears, saying that the ship was
    about to pass over the weedy walls and broken columns of a sunken city too old for memory, and that
    when the water was clear one could see so many moving shadows in that deep place that simple folk
    disliked it. He admitted, moreover, that many ships had been lost in that part of the sea; having been
    hailed when quite close to it, but never seen again.

    That night the moon was very bright, and one could see a great way down in the water. There was so little
    wind that the ship could not move much, and the ocean was very calm. Looking over the rail Carter saw
    many fathoms deep the dome of the great temple, and in front of it an avenue of unnatural sphinxes
    leading to what was once a public square. Dolphins sported merrily in and out of the ruins, and porpoises
    revelled clumsily here and there, sometimes coming to the surface and leaping clear out of the sea. As
    the ship drifted on a little the floor of the ocean rose in hills, and one could clearly mark the lines of
    ancient climbing streets and the washed-down walls of myriad little houses.

    Then the suburbs appeared, and finally a great lone building on a hill, of simpler architecture than the
    other structures, and in much better repair. It was dark and low and covered four sides of a square, with
    a tower at each corner, a paved court in the centre, and small curious round windows all over it. Probably
    it was of basalt, though weeds draped the greater part; and such was its lonely and impressive place on
    that far hill that it may have been a temple or a monastery. Some phosphorescent fish inside it gave the
    small round windows an aspect of shining, and Carter did not blame the sailors much for their fears. Then
    by the watery moonlight he noticed an odd high monolith in the middle of that central court, and saw that
    something was tied to it. And when after getting a telescope from the captain's cabin he saw that that
    bound thing was a sailor in the silk robes of Oriab, head downward and without any eyes, he was glad that
    a rising breeze soon took the ship ahead to more healthy parts of the sea.

    The next day they spoke with a ship with violet sails bound for Zar, in the land of forgotten dreams, with
    bulbs of strange coloured lilies for cargo. And on the evening of the eleventh day they came in sight of
    the isle of Oriab with Ngranek rising jagged and snow-crowned in the distance. Oriab is a very great isle,
    and its port of Bahama a mighty city. The wharves of Bahama are of porphyry, and the city rises in great
    stone terraces behind them, having streets of steps that are frequently arched over by buildings and the
    bridges between buildings. There is a great canal which goes under the whole city in a tunnel with granite
    gates and leads to the inland lake of Yath, on whose farther shore are the vast clay-brick ruins of a
    primal city whose name is not remembered. As the ship drew into the harbour at evening the twin
    beacons Thon and Thal gleamed a welcome, and in all the million windows of Bahama's terraces mellow
    lights peeped out quietly and gradually as the stars peep out overhead in the dusk, till that steep and
    climbing seaport became a glittering constellation hung between the stars of heaven and the reflections
    of those stars in the still harbour.

    The captain, after landing, made Carter a guest in his own small house on the shores of Yath where the
    rear of the town slopes down to it; and his wife and servants brought strange toothsome foods for the
    traveller's delight. And in the days after that Carter asked for rumours and legends of Ngranek in all the
    taverns and public places where lava-gatherers and image-makers meet, but could find no one who had
    been up the higher slopes or seen the carven face. Ngranek was a hard mountain with only an accursed
    valley behind it, and besides, one could never depend on the certainty that night-gaunts are altogether
    fabulous.

    When the captain sailed hack to Dylath-Leen Carter took quarters in an ancient tavern opening on an
    alley of steps in the original part of the town, which is built of brick and resembles the ruins of Yath's
    farther shore. Here he laid his plans for the ascent of Ngranek, and correlated all that he had learned
    from the lava-gatherers about the roads thither. The keeper of the tavern was a very old man, and had
    heard so many legends that he was a great help. He even took Carter to an upper room in that ancient
    house and shewed him a crude picture which a traveller had scratched on the clay wall in the old days
    when men were bolder and less reluctant to visit Ngranek's higher slopes. The old tavern-keeper's
    great-grandfather had heard from his great-grandfather that the traveller who scratched that picture had
    climbed Ngranek and seen the carven face, here drawing it for others to behold, but Carter had very
    great doubts, since the large rough features on the wall were hasty and careless, and wholly
    overshadowed by a crowd of little companion shapes in the worst possible taste, with horns and wings
    and claws and curling tails.

    At last, having gained all the information he was likely to gain in the taverns and public places of Baharna,
    Carter hired a zebra and set out one morning on the road by Yath's shore for those inland parts wherein
    towers stony Ngranek. On his right were rolling hills and pleasant orchards and neat little stone
    farmhouses, and he was much reminded of those fertile fields that flank the Skai. By evening he was
    near the nameless ancient ruins on Yath's farther shore, and though old lava-gatherers had warned him
    not to camp there at night, he tethered his zebra to a curious pillar before a crumbling wall and laid his
    blanket in a sheltered corner beneath some carvings whose meaning none could decipher. Around him
    he wrapped another blanket, for the nights are cold in Oriab; and when upon awaking once he thought he
    felt the wings of some insect brushing his face he covered his head altogether and slept in peace till
    roused by the magah birds in distant resin groves.

    The sun had just come up over the great slope whereon leagues of primal brick foundations and worn
    walls and occasional cracked pillars and pedestals stretched down desolate to the shore of Yath, and
    Carter looked about for his tethered zebra. Great was his dismay to see that docile beast stretched
    prostrate beside the curious pillar to which it had been tied, and still greater was he vexed on finding that
    the steed was quite dead, with its blood all sucked away through a singular wound in its throat. His pack
    had been disturbed, and several shiny knickknacks taken away, and all round on the dusty soil' were
    great webbed footprints for which he could not in any way account. The legends and warnings of
    lava-gatherers occurred to him, and he thought of what had brushed his face in the night. Then he
    shouldered his pack and strode on toward Ngranek, though not without a shiver when he saw close to
    him as the highway passed through the ruins a great gaping arch low in the wall of an old temple, with
    steps leading down into darkness farther than he could peer.

    His course now lay uphill through wilder and partly wooded country, and he saw only the huts of
    charcoal-burners and the camp of those who gathered resin from the groves. The whole air was fragrant
    with balsam, and all the magah birds sang blithely as they flashed their seven colours in the sun. Near
    sunset he came on a new camp of lava-gatherers returning with laden sacks from Ngranek's lower
    slopes; and here he also camped, listening to the songs and tales of the men, and overhearing what they
    whispered about a companion they had lost. He had climbed high to reach a mass of fine lava above him,
    and at nightfall did not return to his fellows. When they looked for him the next day they found only his
    turban, nor was there any sign on the crags below that he had fallen. They did not search any more,
    because the old man among them said it would be of no use.

    No one ever found what the night-gaunts took, though those beasts themselves were so uncertain as to
    be almost fabulous. Carter asked them if night-gaunts sucked blood and liked shiny things and left
    webbed footprints, but they all shook their heads negatively and seemed frightened at his making such an
    inquiry. When he saw how taciturn they had become he asked them no more, but went to sleep in his
    blanket.

    The next day he rose with the lava-gatherers and exchanged farewells as they rode west and he rode
    east on a zebra he bought of them. Their older men gave him blessings and warnings, and told him he
    had better not climb too high on Ngranek, but while he thanked them heartily he was in no wise dissuaded.
    For still did he feel that he must find the gods on unknown Kadath; and win from them a way to that
    haunting and marvellous city in the sunset. By noon, after a long uphill ride, he came upon some
    abandoned brick villages of the hill-people who had once dwelt thus close to Ngranek and carved images
    from its smooth lava. Here they had dwelt till the days of the old tavernkeeper's grandfather, but about
    that time they felt that their presence was disliked. Their homes had crept even up the mountain's slope,
    and the higher they built the more people they would miss when the sun rose. At last they decided it would
    be better to leave altogether, since things were sometimes glimpsed in the darkness which no one could
    interpret favourably; so in the end all of them went down to the sea and dwelt in Bahama, inhabiting a very
    old quarter and teaching their sons the old art of image-making which to this day they carry on. It was
    from these children of the exiled hill-people that Carter had heard the best tales about Ngranek when
    searching through Bahama's ancient taverns.

    All this time the great gaunt side of Ngranek was looming up higher and higher as Carter approached it.
    There were sparse trees on the lower slopes and feeble shrubs above them, and then the bare hideous
    rock rose spectral into the sky, to mix with frost and ice and eternal snow. Carter could see the rifts and
    ruggedness of that sombre stone, and did not welcome the prospect of climbing it. In places there were
    solid streams of lava, and scoriac heaps that littered slopes and ledges. Ninety aeons ago, before even
    the gods had danced upon its pointed peak, that mountain had spoken with fire and roared with the
    voices of the inner thunders. Now it towered all silent and sinister, bearing on the hidden side that secret
    titan image whereof rumour told. And there were caves in that mountain, which might be empty and alone
    with elder darkness, or might - if legend spoke truly - hold horrors of a form not to be surmised.

    The ground sloped upward to the foot of Ngranek, thinly covered with scrub oaks and ash trees, and
    strewn with bits of rock, lava, and ancient cinder. There were the charred embers of many camps, where
    the lava-gatherers were wont to stop, and several rude altars which they had built either to propitiate the
    Great Ones or to ward off what they dreamed of in Ngranek's high passes and labyrinthine caves. At
    evening Carter reached the farthermost pile of embers and camped for the night, tethering his zebra to a
    sapling and wrapping himself well in his blankets before going to sleep. And all through the night a voonith
    howled distantly from the shore of some hidden pool, but Carter felt no fear of that amphibious terror,
    since he had been told with certainty that not one of them dares even approach the slope of Ngranek.

    In the clear sunshine of morning Carter began the long ascent, taking his zebra as far as that useful
    beast could go, but tying it to a stunted ash tree when the floor of the thin wood became too steep.
    Thereafter he scrambled up alone; first through the forest with its ruins of old villages in overgrown
    clearings, and then over the tough grass where anaemic shrubs grew here and there. He regretted
    coming clear of the trees, since the slope was very precipitous and the whole thing rather dizzying. At
    length he began to discern all the countryside spread out beneath him whenever he looked about; the
    deserted huts of the image-makers, the groves of resin trees and the camps of those who gathered from
    them, the woods where prismatic magahs nest and sing, and even a hint very far away of the shores of
    Yath and of those forbidding ancient ruins whose name is forgotten. He found it best not to look around,
    and kept on climbing and climbing till the shrubs became very sparse and there was often nothing but the
    tough grass to cling to.

    Then the soil became meagre, with great patches of bare rock cropping out, and now and then the nest
    of a condor in a crevice. Finally there was nothing at all but the bare rock, and had it not been very rough
    and weathered, he could scarcely have ascended farther. Knobs, ledges, and pinnacles, however,
    helped greatly; and it was cheering to see occasionally the sign of some lava-gatherer scratched clumsily
    in the friable stone, and know that wholesome human creatures had been there before him. After a
    certain height the presence of man was further shewn by handholds and footholds hewn where they were
    needed, and by little quarries and excavations where some choice vein or stream of lava had been
    found. In one place a narrow ledge had been chopped artificially to an especially rich deposit far to the
    right of the main line of ascent. Once or twice Carter dared to look around, and was almost stunned by
    the spread of landscape below. All the island betwixt him and the coast lay open to his sight, with
    Baharna's stone terraces and the smoke of its chimneys mystical in the distance. And beyond that the
    illimitable Southern Sea with all its curious secrets.

    Thus far there had been much winding around the mountain, so that the farther and carven side was still
    hidden. Carter now saw a ledge running upward and to the left which seemed to head the way he wished,
    and this course he took in the hope that it might prove continuous. After ten minutes he saw it was indeed
    no cul-de-sac, but that it led steeply on in an arc which would, unless suddenly interrupted or deflected,
    bring him after a few hours' climbing to that unknown southern slope overlooking the desolate crags and
    the accursed valley of lava. As new country came into view below him he saw that it was bleaker and
    wilder than those seaward lands he had traversed. The mountain's side, too, was somewhat different;
    being here pierced by curious cracks and caves not found on the straighter route he had left. Some of
    these were above him and some beneath him, all opening on sheerly perpendicular cliffs and wholly
    unreachable by the feet of man. The air was very cold now, but so hard was the climbing that he did not
    mind it. Only the increasing rarity bothered him, and he thought that perhaps it was this which had turned
    the heads of other travellers and excited those absurd tales of night-gaunts whereby they explained the
    loss of such climbers as fell from these perilous paths. He was not much impressed by travellers' tales,
    but had a good curved scimitar in case of any trouble. All lesser thoughts were lost in the wish to see that
    carven face which might set him on the track of the gods atop unknown Kadath.

    At last, in the fearsome iciness of upper space, he came round fully to the hidden side of Ngranek and
    saw in infinite gulfs below him the lesser crags and sterile abysses of lava which marked olden wrath of
    the Great Ones. There was unfolded, too, a vast expanse of country to the south; but it was a desert land
    without fair fields or cottage chimneys, and seemed to have no ending. No trace of the sea was visible
    on this side, for Oriab is a great island. Black caverns and odd crevices were still numerous on the sheer
    vertical cliffs, but none of them was accessible to a climber. There now loomed aloft a great beetling
    mass which hampered the upward view, and Carter was for a moment shaken with doubt lest it prove
    impassable. Poised in windy insecurity miles above earth, with only space and death on one side and
    only slippery walls of rock on the other, he knew for a moment the fear that makes men shun Ngranek's
    hidden side. He could not turn round, yet the sun was already low. If there were no way aloft, the night
    would find him crouching there still, and the dawn would not find him at all.

    But there was a way, and he saw it in due season. Only a very expert dreamer could have used those
    imperceptible footholds, yet to Carter they were sufficient. Surmounting now the outward-hanging rock,
    he found the slope above much easier than that below, since a great glacier's melting had left a generous
    space with loam and ledges. To the left a precipice dropped straight from unknown heights to unknown
    depths, with a cave's dark mouth just out of reach above him. Elsewhere, however, the mountain slanted
    back strongly, and even gave him space to lean and rest.

    He felt from the chill that he must be near the snow line, and looked up to see what glittering pinnacles
    might be shining in that late ruddy sunlight. Surely enough, there was the snow uncounted thousands of
    feet above, and below it a great beetling crag like that. he had just climbed; hanging there forever in bold
    outline. And when he saw that crag he gasped and cried out aloud, and clutched at the jagged rock in
    awe; for the titan bulge had not stayed as earth's dawn had shaped it, but gleamed red and stupendous in
    the sunset with the carved and polished features of a god.

    Stern and terrible shone that face that the sunset lit with fire. How vast it was no mind can ever measure,
    but Carter knew at once that man could never have fashioned it. It was a god chiselled by the hands of
    the gods, and it looked down haughty and majestic upon the seeker. Rumour had said it was strange and
    not to be mistaken, and Carter saw that it was indeed so; for those long narrow eyes and long-lobed
    ears, and that thin nose and pointed chin, all spoke of a race that is not of men but of gods.

    He clung overawed in that lofty and perilous eyrie, even though it was this which he had expected and
    come to find; for there is in a god's face more of marvel than prediction can tell, and when that face is
    vaster than a great temple and seen looking downward at sunset in the scyptic silences of that upper
    world from whose dark lava it was divinely hewn of old, the marvel is so strong that none may escape it.

    Here, too, was the added marvel of recognition; for although he had planned to search all dreamland over
    for those whose likeness to this face might mark them as the god's children, he now knew that he need
    not do so. Certainly, the great face carven on that mountain was of no strange sort, but the kin of such as
    he had seen often in the taverns of the seaport Celephais which lies in Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian
    Hills and is ruled over by that King Kuranes whom Carter once knew in waking life. Every year sailors with
    such a face came in dark ships from the north to trade their onyx for the carved jade and spun gold and
    little red singing birds of Celephais, and it was clear that these could be no others than the hall-gods he
    sought. Where they dwelt, there must the cold waste lie close, and within it unknown Kadath and its onyx
    castle for the Great Ones. So to Celephais he must go, far distant from the isle of Oriab, and in such
    parts as would take him back to Dylath-Teen and up the Skai to the bridge by Nir, and again into the
    enchanted wood of the Zoogs, whence the way would bend northward through the garden lands by
    Oukranos to the gilded spires of Thran, where he might find a galleon bound over the Cerenarian Sea.

    But dusk was now thick, and the great carven face looked down even sterner in shadow. Perched on that
    ledge night found the seeker; and in the blackness he might neither go down nor go up, but only stand and
    cling and shiver in that narrow place till the day came, praying to keep awake lest sleep loose his hold and
    send him down the dizzy miles of air to the crags and sharp rocks of the accursed valley. The stars came
    out, but save for them there was only black nothingness in his eyes; nothingness leagued with death,
    against whose beckoning he might do no more than cling to the rocks and lean back away from an
    unseen brink. The last thing of earth that he saw in the gloaming was a condor soaring close to the
    westward precipice beside him, and darting screaming away when it came near the cave whose mouth
    yawned just out of reach.

    Suddenly, without a warning sound in the dark, Carter felt his curved scimitar drawn stealthily out of his
    belt by some unseen hand. Then he heard it clatter down over the rocks below. And between him and the
    Milky Way he thought he saw a very terrible outline of something noxiously thin and horned and tailed and
    bat-winged. Other things, too, had begun to blot out patches of stars west of him, as if a flock of vague
    entities were flapping thickly and silently out of that inaccessible cave in the face of the precipice. Then a
    sort of cold rubbery arm seized his neck and something else seized his feet, and he was lifted
    inconsiderately up and swung about in space. Another minute and the stars were gone, and Carter knew
    that the night-gaunts had got him.

    They bore him breathless into that cliffside cavern and through monstrous labyrinths beyond. When he
    struggled, as at first he did by instinct, they tickled him with deliberation. They made no sound at all
    themselves, and even their membranous wings were silent. They were frightfully cold and damp and
    slippery, and their paws kneaded one detestably. Soon they were plunging hideously downward through
    inconceivable abysses in a whirling, giddying, sickening rush of dank, tomb-like air; and Carter felt they
    were shooting into the ultimate vortex of shrieking and daemonic madness. He screamed again and
    again, but whenever he did so the black paws tickled him with greater subtlety. Then he saw a sort of grey
    phosphorescence about, and guessed they were coming even to that inner world of subterrene horror of
    which dim legends tell, and which is litten only by the pale death-fire wherewith reeks the ghoulish air and
    the primal mists of the pits at earth's core.

    At last far below him he saw faint lines of grey and ominous pinnacles which he knew must be the fabled
    Peaks of Throk. Awful and sinister they stand in the haunted disc of sunless and eternal depths; higher
    than man may reckon, and guarding terrible valleys where the Dholes crawl and burrow nastily. But Carter
    preferred to look at them than at his captors, which were indeed shocking and uncouth black things with
    smooth, oily, whale-like surfaces, unpleasant horns that curved inward toward each other, bat wings
    whose beating made no sound, ugly prehensile paws, and barbed tails that lashed needlessly and
    disquietingly. And worst of all, they never spoke or laughed, and never smiled because they had no faces
    at all to smile with, but only a suggestive blankness where a face ought to be. All they ever did was clutch
    and fly and tickle; that was the way of night-gaunts.

    As the band flew lower the Peaks of Throk rose grey and towering on all sides, and one saw clearly that
    nothing lived on that austere and impressive granite of the endless twilight. At still lower levels the
    death-fires in the air gave out, and one met only the primal blackness of the void save aloft where the thin
    peaks stood out goblin-like. Soon the peaks were very far away, and nothing about but great rushing
    winds with the dankness of nethermost grottoes in them. Then in the end the night-gaunts landed on a
    floor of unseen things which felt like layers of bones, and left Carter all alone in that black valley. To bring
    him thither was the duty of the night-gaunts that guard Ngranek; and this done, they flapped away silently.
    When Carter tried to trace their flight he found he could not, since even the Peaks of Throk had faded
    out of sight. There was nothing anywhere but blackness and horror and silence and bones.

    Now Carter knew from a certain source that he was in the vale of Pnoth, where crawl and burrow the
    enormous Dholes; but he did not know what to expect, because no one has ever seen a Dhole or even
    guessed what such a thing may be like. Dholes are known only by dim rumour, from the rustling they
    make amongst mountains of bones and the slimy touch they have when they wriggle past one. They
    cannot be seen because they creep only in the dark. Carter did not wish to meet a Dhole, so listened
    intently for any sound in the unknown depths of bones about him. Even in this fearsome place he had a
    plan and an objective, for whispers of Pnoth were not unknown to one with whom he had talked much in
    the old days. In brief, it seemed fairly likely that this was the spot into which all the ghouls of the waking
    world cast the refuse of their feastings; and that if he but had good luck he might stumble upon that mighty
    crag taller even than Throk's peaks which marks the edge of their domain. Showers of bones would tell
    him where to look, and once found he could call to a ghoul to let down a ladder; for strange to say, he had
    a very singular link with these terrible creatures.

    A man he had known in Boston - a painter of strange pictures with a secret studio in an ancient and
    unhallowed alley near a graveyard - had actually made friends with the ghouls and had taught him to
    understand the simpler part of their disgusting meeping and glibbering. This man had vanished at last,
    and Carter was not sure but that he might find him now, and use for the first time in dreamland that
    far-away English of his dim waking life. In any case, he felt he could persuade a ghoul to guide him out of
    Pnoth; and it would be better to meet a ghoul, which one can see, than a Dhole, which one cannot see.

    So Carter walked in the dark, and ran when he thought he heard something among the bones underfoot.
    Once he bumped into a stony slope, and knew it must be the base of one of Throk's peaks. Then at last
    he heard a monstrous rattling and clatter which reached far up in the air, and became sure he had come
    nigh the crag of the ghouls. He was not sure he could be heard from this valley miles below, but realised
    that the inner world has strange laws. As he pondered he was struck by a flying bone so heavy that it
    must have been a skull, and therefore realising his nearness to the fateful crag he sent up as best he
    might that meeping cry which is the call of the ghoul.

    Sound travels slowly, so it was some time before he heard an answering glibber. But it came at last, and
    before long he was told that a rope ladder would be lowered. The wait for this was very tense, since there
    was no telling what might not have been stirred up among those bones by his shouting. Indeed, it was not
    long before he actually did hear a vague rustling afar off. As this thoughtfully approached, he became
    more and more uncomfortable; for he did not wish to move away from the spot where the ladder would
    come. Finally the tension grew almost unbearable, and he was about to flee in panic when the thud of
    something on the newly heaped bones nearby drew his notice from the other sound. It was the ladder,
    and after a minute of groping he had it taut in his hands. But the other sound did not cease, and followed
    him even as he climbed. He had gone fully five feet from the ground when the rattling beneath waxed
    emphatic, and was a good ten feet up when something swayed the ladder from below. At a height which
    must have been fifteen or twenty feet he felt his whole side brushed by a great slippery length which grew
    alternately convex and concave with wriggling; and hereafter he climbed desperately to escape the
    unendurable nuzzling of that loathsome and overfed Dhole whose form no man might see.

    For hours he climbed with aching and blistered hands, seeing again the grey death-fire and Throk's
    uncomfortable pinnacles. At last he discerned above him the projecting edge of the great crag of the
    ghouls, whose vertical side he could not glimpse; and hours later he saw a curious face peering over it as
    a gargoyle peers over a parapet of Notre Dame. This almost made him lose his hold through faintness,
    but a moment later he was himself again; for his vanished friend Richard Pickman had once introduced
    him to a ghoul, and he knew well their canine faces and slumping forms and unmentionable
    idiosyncrasies. So he had himself well under control when that hideous thing pulled him out of the dizzy
    emptiness over the edge of the crag, and did not scream at the partly consumed refuse heaped at one
    side or at the squatting circles of ghouls who gnawed and watched curiously.

    He was now on a dim-litten plain whose sole topographical features were great boulders and the
    entrances of burrows. The ghouls were in general respectful, even if one did attempt to pinch him while
    several others eyed his leanness speculatively. Through patient glibbering he made inquiries regarding
    his vanished friend, and found he had become a ghoul of some prominence in abysses nearer the
    waking world. A greenish elderly ghoul offered to conduct him to Pickman's present habitation, so despite
    a natural loathing he followed the creature into a capacious burrow and crawled after him for hours in the
    blackness of rank mould. They emerged on a dim plain strewn with singular relics of earth - old
    gravestones, broken urns, and grotesque fragments of monuments - and Carter realised with some
    emotion that he was probably nearer the waking world than at any other time since he had gone down the
    seven hundred steps from the cavern of flame to the Gate of Deeper Slumber.

    There, on a tombstone of 1768 stolen from the Granary Burying Ground in Boston, sat a ghoul which was
    once the artist Richard Upton Pickman. It was naked and rubbery, and had acquired so much of the
    ghoulish physiognomy that its human origin was already obscure. But it still remembered a little English,
    and was able to converse with Carter in grunts and monosyllables, helped out now and then by the
    glibbering of ghouls. When it learned that Carter wished to get to the enchanted wood and from there to
    the city Celephais in Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills, it seemed rather doubtful; for these ghouls
    of the waking world do no business in the graveyards of upper dreamland (leaving that to the red-footed
    wamps that are spawned in dead cities), and many things intervene betwixt their gulf and the enchanted
    wood, including the terrible kingdom of the Gugs.

    The Gugs, hairy and gigantic, once reared stone circles in that wood and made strange sacrifices to the
    Other Gods and the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep, until one night an abomination of theirs reached the
    ears of earth's gods and they were banished to caverns below. Only a great trap door of stone with an
    iron ring connects the abyss of the earth-ghouls with the enchanted wood, and this the Gugs are afraid to
    open because of a curse. That a mortal dreamer could traverse their cavern realm and leave by that
    door is inconceivable; for mortal dreamers were their former food, and they have legends of the
    toothsomeness of such dreamers even though banishment has restricted their diet to the ghasts, those
    repulsive beings which die in the light, and which live in the vaults of Zin and leap on long hind legs like
    kangaroos.

    So the ghoul that was Pickman advised Carter either to leave the abyss at Sarkomand, that deserted city
    in the valley below Leng where black nitrous stairways guarded by winged diarote lions lead down from
    dreamland to the lower gulfs, or to return through a churchyard to the waking world and begin the quest
    anew down the seventy steps of light slumber to the cavern of flame and the seven hundred steps to the
    Gate of Deeper Slumber and the enchanted wood. This, however, did not suit the seeker; for he knew
    nothing of the way from Leng to Ooth-Nargai, and was likewise reluctant to awake lest he forget all he
    had so far gained in this dream. It was disastrous to his quest to forget the august and celestial faces of
    those seamen from the north who traded onyx in Celephais, and who, being the sons of gods, must point
    the way to the cold waste and Kadath where the Great Ones dwell.

    After much persuasion the ghoul consented to guide his guest inside the great wall of the Gugs' kingdom.
    There was one chance that Carter might be able to steal through that twilight realm of circular stone
    towers at an hour when the giants would be all gorged and snoring indoors, and reach the central tower
    with the sign of Koth upon it, which has the stairs leading up to that stone trap door in the enchanted
    wood. Pickman even consented to lend three ghouls to help with a tombstone lever in raising the stone
    door; for of ghouls the Gugs are somewhat afraid, and they often flee from their own colossal graveyards
    when they see them feasting there.

    He also advised Carter to disguise as a ghoul himself; shaving the beard he had allowed to grow (for
    ghouls have none), wallowing naked in the mould to get the correct surface, and loping in the usual
    slumping way, with his clothing carried in a bundle as if it were a choice morsel from a tomb. They would
    reach the city of Gugs - which is coterminous with the whole kingdom - through the proper burrows,
    emerging in a cemetery not far from the stair-containing Tower of Koth. They must beware, however, of a
    large cave near the cemetery; for this is the mouth of the vaults of Zin, and the vindictive ghasts are
    always on watch there murderously for those denizens of the upper abyss who hunt and prey on them.
    The ghasts try to come out when the Gugs sleep and they attack ghouls as readily as Gugs, for they
    cannot discriminate. They are very primitive, and eat one another. The Gugs have a sentry at a narrow in
    the vaults of Zin, but he is often drowsy and is sometimes surprised by a party of ghasts. Though ghasts
    cannot live in real light, they can endure the grey twilight of the abyss for hours.

    So at length Carter crawled through endless burrows with three helpful ghouls bearing the slate
    gravestone of Col. Nepemiah Derby, obit 1719, from the Charter Street Burying Ground in Salem. When
    they came again into open twilight they were in a forest of vast lichened monoliths reaching nearly as high
    as the eye could see and forming the modest gravestones of the Gugs. On the right of the hole out of
    which they wriggled, and seen through aisles of monoliths, was a stupendous vista of cyclopean round
    towers mounting up illimitable into the grey air of inner earth. This was the great city of the Gugs, whose
    doorways are thirty feet high. Ghouls come here often, for a buried Gug will feed a community for almost
    a year, and even with the added peril it is better to burrow for Gugs than to bother with the graves of men.
    Carter now understood the occasional titan bones he had felt beneath him in the vale of Pnoth.

    Straight ahead, and just outside the cemetery, rose a sheer perpendicular cliff at whose base an
    immense and forbidding cavern yawned. This the ghouls told Carter to avoid as much as possible, since
    it was the entrance to the unhallowed vaults of Zin where Gugs hunt ghasts in the darkness. And truly,
    that warning was soon well justified; for the moment a ghoul began to creep toward the towers to see if
    the hour of the Gugs' resting had been rightly timed, there glowed in the gloom of that great cavern's
    mouth first one pair of yellowish-red eyes and then another, implying that the Gugs were one sentry less,
    and that ghasts have indeed an excellent sharpness of smell. So the ghoul returned to the burrow and
    motioned his companions to be silent. It was best to leave the ghasts to their own devices, and there was
    a possibility that they might soon withdraw, since they must naturally be rather tired after coping with a
    Gug sentry in the black vaults. After a moment something about the size of a small horse hopped out into
    the grey twilight, and Carter turned sick at the aspect of that scabrous and unwholesome beast, whose
    face is so curiously human despite the absence of a nose, a forehead, and other important particulars.

    Presently three other ghasts hopped out to join their fellow, and a ghoul glibbered softly at Carter that
    their absence of battle-scars was a bad sign. It proved that theY had not fought the Gug sentry at all, but
    had merely slipped past him as he slept, so that their strength and savagery were still unimpaired and
    would remain so till they had found and disposed of a victim. It was very unpleasant to see those filthy
    and disproportioned animals which soon numbered about fifteen, grubbing about and making their
    kangaroo leaps in the grey twilight where titan towers and monoliths arose, but it was still more
    unpleasant when they spoke among themselves in the coughing gutturals of ghasts. And yet, horrible as
    they were, they were not so horrible as what presently came out of the cave after them with disconcerting
    suddenness.

    It was a paw, fully two feet and a half across, and equipped with formidable talons. Alter it came another
    paw, and after that a great black-furred arm to which both of the paws were attached by short forearms.
    Then two pink eyes shone, and the head of the awakened Gug sentry, large as a barrel, wabbled into
    view. The eyes jutted two inches from each side, shaded by bony protuberances overgrown with coarse
    hairs. But the head was chiefly terrible because of the mouth. That mouth had great yellow fangs and ran
    from the top to the bottom of the head, opening vertically instead of horizontally.

    But before that unfortunate Gug could emerge from the cave and rise to his full twenty feet, the vindictive
    ghasts were upon him. Carter feared for a moment that he would give an alarm and arouse all his kin, till
    a ghoul softly glibbered that Gugs have no voice but talk by means of facial expression. The battle which
    then ensued was truly a frightful one. From all sides the venomous ghasts rushed feverishly at the
    creeping Gug, nipping and tearing with their muzzles, and mauling murderously with their hard pointed
    hooves. All the time they coughed excitedly, screaming when the great vertical mouth of the Gug would
    occasionally bite into one of their number, so that the noise of the combat would surely have aroused the
    sleeping city had not the weakening of the sentry begun to transfer the action farther and farther within
    the cavern. As it was, the tumult soon receded altogether from sight in the blackness, with only
    occasional evil echoes to mark its continuance.

    Then the most alert of the ghouls gave the signal for all to advance, and Carter followed the loping three
    out of the forest of monoliths and into the dark noisome streets of that awful city whose rounded towers
    of cyclopean stone soared up beyond the sight. Silently they shambled over that rough rock pavement,
    hearing with disgust the abominable muffled snortings from great black doorways which marked the
    slumber of the Gugs. Apprehensive of the ending of the rest hour, the ghouls set a somewhat rapid pace;
    but even so the journey was no brief one, for distances in that town of giants are on a great scale. At last,
    however, they came to a somewhat open space before a tower even vaster than the rest; above whose
    colossal doorway was fixed a monstrous symbol in bas-relief which made one shudder without knowing
    its meaning. This was the central tower with the sign of Koth, and those huge stone steps just visible
    through the dusk within were the beginning of the great flight leading to upper dreamland and the
    enchanted wood.

    There now began a climb of interminable length in utter blackness: made almost impossible by the
    monstrous size of the steps, which were fashioned for Gugs, and were therefore nearly a yard high. Of
    their number Carter could form no just estimate, for he soon became so worn out that the tireless and
    elastic ghouls were forced to aid him. All through the endless climb there lurked the peril of detection and
    pursuit; for though no Gug dares lift the stone door to the forest because of the Great One's curse, there
    are no such restraints concerning the tower and the steps, and escaped ghasts are often chased, even
    to the very top. So sharp are the ears of Gugs, that the bare feet and hands of the climbers might readily
    be heard when the city awoke; and it would of course take but little time for the striding giants,
    accustomed from their ghast-hunts in the vaults of Zin to seeing without light, to overtake their smaller
    and slower quarry on those cyclopean steps. It was very depressing to reflect that the silent pursuing
    Gugs would not be heard at all, but would come very suddenly and shockingly in the dark upon the
    climbers. Nor could the traditional fear of Gugs for ghouls be depended upon in that peculiar place where
    the advantages lay so heavily with the Gugs. There was also some peril from the furtive and venomous
    ghasts, which frequently hopped up onto the tower during the sleep hour of the Gugs. If the Gugs slept
    long, and the ghasts returned soon from their deed in the cavern, the scent of the climbers might easily
    be picked up by those loathsome and ill-disposed things; in which case it would almost be better to be
    eaten by a Gug.

    Then, after aeons of climbing, there came a cough from the darkness above; and matters assumed a
    very grave and unexpected turn.

    It was clear that a ghast, or perhaps even more, had strayed into that tower before the coming of Carter
    and his guides; and it was equally clear that this peril was very close. Alter a breathless second the
    leading ghoul pushed Carter to the wall and arranged his kinfolk in the best possible way, with the old
    slate tombstone raised for a crushing blow whenever the enemy might come in sight. Ghouls can see in
    the dark, so the party was not as badly off as Carter would have been alone. In another moment the
    clatter of hooves revealed the downward hopping of at least one beast, and the slab-bearing ghouls
    poised their weapon for a desperate blow. Presently two yellowish-red eyes flashed into view, and the
    panting of the ghast became audible above its clattering. As it hopped down to the step above the ghouls,
    they wielded the ancient gravestone with prodigious force, so that there was only a wheeze and a
    choking before the victim collapsed in a noxious heap. There seemed to be only this one animal, and
    after a moment of listening the ghouls tapped Carter as a signal to proceed again. As before, they were
    obliged to aid him; and he was glad to leave that place of carnage where the ghast's uncouth remains
    sprawled invisible in the blackness.

    At last the ghouls brought their companion to a halt; and feeling above him, Carter realised that the great
    stone trap door was reached at last. To open so vast a thing completely was not to be thought of, but the
    ghouls hoped to get it up just enough to slip the gravestone under as a prop, and permit Carter to escape
    through the crack. They themselves planned to descend again and return through the city of the Gugs,
    since their elusiveness was great, and they did not know the way overland to spectral Sarkomand with its
    lion-guarded gate to the abyss.

    Mighty was the straining of those three ghouls at the stone of the door above them, and Carter helped
    push with as much strength as he had. They judged the edge next the top of the staircase to be the right
    one, and to this they bent all the force of their disreputably nourished muscles. Alter a few moments a
    crack of light appeared; and Carter, to whom that task had been entrusted, slipped the end of the old
    gravestone in the aperture. There now ensued a mighty heaving; but progress was very slow, and they
    had of course to return to their first position every time they failed to turn the slab and prop the portal
    open.

    Suddenly their desperation was magnified a thousand fold by a sound on the steps below them. It was
    only the thumping and rattling of the slain ghast's hooved body as it rolled down to lower levels; but of all
    the possible causes of that body's dislodgement and rolling, none was in the least reassuring. Therefore,
    knowing the ways of Gugs, the ghouls set to with something of a frenzy; and in a surprisingly short time
    had the door so high that they were able to hold it still whilst Carter turned the slab and left a generous
    opening. They now helped Carter through, letting him climb up to their rubbery shoulders and later guiding
    his feet as he clutched at the blessed soil of the upper dreamland outside. Another second and they were
    through themselves, knocking away the gravestone and closing the great trap door while a panting
    became audible beneath. Because of the Great One's curse no Gug might ever emerge from that portal,
    so with a deep relief and sense of repose Carter lay quietly on the thick grotesque fungi of the enchanted
    wood while his guides squatted near in the manner that ghouls rest.

    Weird as was that enchanted wood through which he had fared so long ago, it was verily a haven and a
    delight after those gulfs he had now left behind. There was no living denizen about, for Zoogs shun the
    mysterious door in fear and Carter at once consulted with his ghouls about their future course. To return
    through the tower they no longer dared, and the waking world did not appeal to them when they learned
    that they must pass the priests Nasht and Kaman-Thah in the cavern of flame. So at length they decided
    to return through Sarkomand and its gate of the abyss, though of how to get there they knew nothing.
    Carter recalled that it lies in the valley below Leng, and recalled likewise that he had seen in Dylath-Leen
    a sinister, slant-eyed old merchant reputed to trade on Leng, therefore he advised the ghouls to seek out
    Dylath-Leen, crossing the fields to Nir and the Skai and following the river to its mouth. This they at once
    resolved to do, and lost no time in loping off, since the thickening of the dusk promised a full night ahead
    for travel. And Carter shook the paws of those repulsive beasts, thanking them for their help and sending
    his gratitude to the beast which once was Pickman; but could not help sighing with pleasure when they
    left. For a ghoul is a ghoul, and at best an unpleasant companion for man. After that Carter sought a
    forest pool and cleansed himself of the mud of nether earth, thereupon reassuming the clothes he had so
    carefully carried.

    It was now night in that redoubtable wood of monstrous trees, but because of the phosphorescence one
    might travel as well as by day; wherefore Carter set out upon the well-known route toward Celephais, in
    Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills. And as he went he thought of the zebra he had left tethered to an
    ash-tree on Ngranek in far-away Oriab so many aeons ago, and wondered if any lava-gatherers had fed
    and released it. And he wondered, too, if he would ever return to Baharna and pay for the zebra that was
    slain by night in those ancient ruins by Yath's shore, and if the old tavernkeeper would remember him.
    Such were the thoughts that came to him in the air of the regained upper dreamland.

    But presently his progress was halted by a sound from a very large hollow tree. He had avoided the great
    circle of stones, since he did not care to speak with Zoogs just now; but it appeared from the singular
    fluttering in that huge tree that important councils were in session elsewhere. Upon drawing nearer he
    made out the accents of a tense and heated discussion; and before long became conscious of matters
    which he viewed with the greatest concern. For a war on the cats was under debate in that sovereign
    assembly of Zoogs. It all came from the loss of the party which had sneaked after Carter to Ulthar, and
    which the cats had justly punished for unsuitable intentions. The matter had long rankled; and now, or at
    least within a month, the marshalled Zoogs were about to strike the whole feline tribe in a series of
    surprise attacks, taking individual cats or groups of cats unawares, and giving not even the myriad cats
    of Ulthar a proper chance to drill and mobilise. This was the plan of the Zoogs, and Carter saw that he
    must foil it before leaving upon his mighty quest.

    Very quietly therefore did Randolph Carter steal to the edge of the wood and send the cry of the cat over
    the starlit fields. And a great grimalkin in a nearby cottage took up the burden and relayed it across
    leagues of rolling meadow to warriors large and small, black, grey, tiger, white, yellow, and mixed, and it
    echoed through Nir and beyond the Skai even into Ulthar, and Ulthar's numerous cats called in chorus
    and fell into a line of march. It was fortunate that the moon was not up, so that all the cats were on earth.
    Swiftly and silently leaping, they sprang from every hearth and housetop and poured in a great furry sea
    across the plains to the edge of the wood. Carter was there to greet them, and the sight of shapely,
    wholesome cats was indeed good for his eyes after the things he had seen and walked with in the abyss.
    He was glad to see his venerable friend and one-time rescuer at the head of Ulthar's detachment, a
    collar of rank around his sleek neck, and whiskers bristling at a martial angle. Better still, as a
    sub-lieutenant in that army was a brisk young fellow who proved to be none other than the very little kitten
    at the inn to whom Carter had given a saucer of rich cream on that long-vanished morning in Ulthar. He
    was a strapping and promising cat now, and purred as he shook hands with his friend. His grandfather
    said he was doing very well in the army, and that he might well expect a captaincy after one more
    campaign.

    Carter now outlined the peril of the cat tribe, and was rewarded by deep-throated purrs of gratitude from
    all sides. Consulting with the generals, he prepared a plan of instant action which involved marching at
    once upon the Zoog council and other known strongholds of Zoogs; forestalling their surprise attacks and
    forcing them to terms before the mobilization of their army of invasion. Thereupon without a moment's
    loss that great ocean of cats flooded the enchanted wood and surged around the council tree and the
    great stone circle. Flutterings rose to panic pitch as the enemy saw the newcomers and there was very
    little resistance among the furtive and curious brown Zoogs. They saw that they were beaten in advance,
    and turned from thoughts of vengeance to thoughts of present self-preservation.

    Half the cats now seated themselves in a circular formation with the captured Zoogs in the centre,
    leaving open a lane down which were marched the additional captives rounded up by the other cats in
    other parts of the wood. Terms were discussed at length, Carter acting as interpreter, and it was decided
    that the Zoogs might remain a free tribe on condition of rendering to the cats a large tribute of grouse,
    quail, and pheasants from the less fabulous parts of the forest. Twelve young Zoogs of noble families
    were taken as hostages to be kept in the Temple of Cats at Ulthar, and the victors made it plain that any
    disappearances of cats on the borders of the Zoog domain would be followed by consequences highly
    disastrous to Zoogs. These matters disposed of, the assembled cats broke ranks and permitted the
    Zoogs to slink off one by one to their respective homes, which they hastened to do with many a sullen
    backward glance.

    The old cat general now offered Carter an escort through the forest to whatever border he wished to
    reach, deeming it likely that the Zoogs would harbour dire resentment against him for the frustration of
    their warlike enterprise. This offer he welcomed with gratitude; not only for the safety it afforded, but
    because he liked the graceful companionship of cats. So in the midst of a pleasant and playful regiment,
    relaxed after the successful performance of its duty, Randolph Carter walked with dignity through that
    enchanted and phosphorescent wood of titan trees, talking of his quest with the old general and his
    grandson whilst others of the band indulged in fantastic gambols or chased fallen leaves that the wind
    drove among the fungi of that primeval floor. And the old cat said that he had heard much of unknown
    Kadath in the cold waste, but did not know where it was. As for the marvellous sunset city, he had not
    even heard of that, but would gladly relay to Carter anything he might later learn.

    He gave the seeker some passwords of great value among the cats of dreamland, and commended him
    especially to the old chief of the cats in Celephais, whither he was bound. That old cat, already slightly
    known to Carter, was a dignified maltese; and would prove highly influential in any transaction. It was
    dawn when they came to the proper edge of the wood, and Carter bade his friends a reluctant farewell.
    The young sub-lieutenant he had met as a small kitten would have followed him had not the old general
    forbidden it, but that austere patriarch insisted that the path of duty lay with the tribe and the army. So
    Carter set out alone over the golden fields that stretched mysterious beside a willow-fringed river, and the
    cats went back into the wood.

    Well did the traveller know those garden lands that lie betwixt the wood of the Cerenerian Sea, and
    blithely did he follow the singing river Oukianos that marked his course. The sun rose higher over gentle
    slopes of grove and lawn, and heightened the colours of the thousand flowers that starred each knoll and
    dangle. A blessed haze lies upon all this region, wherein is held a little more of the sunlight than other
    places hold, and a little more of the summer's humming music of birds and bees; so that men walk
    through it as through a faery place, and feel greater joy and wonder than they ever afterward remember.

    By noon Carter reached the jasper terraces of Kiran which slope down to the river's edge and bear that
    temple of loveliness wherein the King of Ilek-Vad comes from his far realm on the twilight sea once a
    year in a golden palanqnin to pray to the god of Oukianos, who sang to him in youth when he dwelt in a
    cottage by its banks. All of jasper is that temple, and covering an acre of ground with its walls and courts,
    its seven pinnacled towers, and its inner shrine where the river enters through hidden channels and the
    god sings softly in the night. Many times the moon hears strange music as it shines on those courts and
    terraces and pinnacles, but whether that music be the song of the god or the chant of the cryptical
    priests, none but the King of Ilek-Vad may say; for only he had entered the temple or seen the priests.
    Now, in the drowsiness of day, that carven and delicate fane was silent, and Carter heard only the
    murmur of the great stream and the hum of the birds and bees as he walked onward under the enchanted
    sun.

    All that afternoon the pilgrim wandered on through perfumed meadows and in the lee of gentle riverward
    hills bearing peaceful thatched cottages and the shrines of amiable gods carven from jasper or
    chrysoberyl. Sometimes he walked close to the bank of Oukianos and whistled to the sprightly and
    iridescent fish of that crystal stream, and at other times he paused amidst the whispering rushes and
    gazed at the great dark wood on the farther side, whose trees came down clear to the water's edge. In
    former dreams he had seen quaint lumbering buopoths come shyly out of that wood to drink, but now he
    could not glimpse any. Once in a while he paused to watch a carnivorous fish catch a fishing bird, which it
    lured to the water by showing its tempting scales in the sun, and grasped by the beak with its enormous
    mouth as the winged hunter sought to dart down upon it.

    Toward evening he mounted a low grassy rise and saw before him flaming in the sunset the thousand
    gilded spires of Thran. Lofty beyond belief are the alabaster walls of that incredible city, sloping inward
    toward the top and wrought in one solid piece by what means no man knows, for they are more ancient
    than memory. Yet lofty as they are with their hundred gates and two hundred turrets, the clustered towers
    within, all white beneath their golden spires, are loftier still; so that men on the plain around see them
    soaring into the sky, sometimes shining clear, sometimes caught at the top in tangles of cloud and mist,
    and sometimes clouded lower down with their utmost pinnacles blazing free above the vapours. And
    where Thran's gates open on the river are great wharves of marble, with ornate galleons of fragrant
    cedar and calamander riding gently at anchor, and strange bearded sailors sitting on casks and bales
    with the hieroglyphs of far places. Landward beyond the walls lies the farm country, where small white
    cottages dream between little hills, and narrow roads with many stone bridges wind gracefully among
    streams and gardens.

    Down through this verdant land Carter walked at evening, and saw twilight float up from the river to the
    marvellous golden spires of Thran. And just at the hour of dusk he came to the southern gate, and was
    stopped by a red-robed sentry till he had told three dreams beyond belief, and proved himself a dreamer
    worthy to walk up Thran's steep mysterious streets and linger in the bazaars where the wares of the
    ornate galleons were sold. Then into that incredible city he walked; through a wall so thick that the gate
    was a tunnel, and thereafter amidst curved and undulant ways winding deep and narrow between the
    heavenward towers. Lights shone through grated and balconied windows, and,the sound of lutes and
    pipes stole timid from inner courts where marble fountains bubbled. Carter knew his way, and edged
    down through darker streets to the river, where at an old sea tavern he found the captains and seamen
    he had known in myriad other dreams. There he bought his passage to Celephais on a great green
    galleon, and there he stopped for the night after speaking gravely to the venerable cat of that inn, who
    blinked dozing before an enormous hearth and dreamed of old wars and forgotten gods.

    In the morning Carter boarded the galleon bound for Celephais, and sat in the prow as the ropes were
    cast off and the long sail down to the Cerenerian Sea begun. For many leagues the banks were much as
    they were above Thran, with now and then a curious temple rising on the farther hills toward the right, and
    a drowsy village on the shore, with steep red roofs and nets spread in the sun. Mindful of his search,
    Carter questioned all the mariners closely about those whom they had met in the taverns of Celephais,
    asking the names and ways of the strange men with long, narrow eyes, long-lobed ears, thin noses, and
    pointed chins who came in dark ships from the north and traded onyx for the carved jade and spun gold
    and little red singing birds of Celephais. Of these men the sailors knew not much, save that they talked
    but seldom and spread a kind of awe about them.

    Their land, very far away, was called Inquanok, and not many people cared to go thither because it was a
    cold twilight land, and said to be close to unpleasant Leng; although high impassable mountains towered
    on the side where Leng was thought to lie, so that none might say whether this evil plateau with its horrible
    stone villages and unmentionable monastery were really there, or whether the rumour were only a fear
    that timid people felt in the night when those formidable barrier peaks loomed black against a rising moon.
    Certainly, men reached Leng from very different oceans. Of other boundaries of Inquanok those sailors
    had no notion, nor had they heard of the cold waste and unknown Kadath save from vague unplaced
    report. And of the marvellous sunset city which Carter sought they knew nothing at all. So the traveller
    asked no more of far things, but bided his time till he might talk with those strange men from cold and
    twilight Inquanok who are the seed of such gods as carved their features on Ngranek.

    Late in the day the galleon reached those bends of the river which traverse the perfumed jungles of Kied.
    Here Carter wished he might disembark, for in those tropic tangles sleep wondrous palaces of ivory, lone
    and unbroken, where once dwelt fabulous monarchs of a land whose name is forgotten. Spells of the
    Elder Ones keep those places unharmed and undecayed, for it is written that there may one day be need
    of them again; and elephant caravans have glimpsed them from afar by moonlight, though none dares
    approach them closely because of the guardians to which their wholeness is due. But the ship swept on,
    and dusk hushed the hum of the day, and the first stars above blinked answers to the early fireflies on the
    banks as that jungle fell far behind, leaving only its fragrance as a memory that it had been. And all
    through the night that galleon floated on past mysteries unseen and unsuspected. Once a lookout
    reported fires on the hills to the east, but the sleepy captain said they had better not be looked at too
    much, since it was highly uncertain just who or what had lit them.

    In the morning the river had broadened out greatly, and Carter saw by the houses along the banks that
    they were close to the vast trading city of Hlanith on the Cerenerian Sea. Here the walls are of rugged
    granite, and the houses peakedly fantastic with beamed and plastered gables. The men of Hlanith are
    more like those of the waking world than any others in dreamland; so that the city is not sought except for
    barter, but is prized for the solid work of its artisans. The wharves of Hlanith are of oak, and there the
    galleon made fast while the captain traded in the taverns. Carter also went ashore, and looked curiously
    upon the rutted streets where wooden ox carts lumbered and feverish merchants cried their wares
    vacuously in the bazaars. The sea taverns were all close to the wharves on cobbled lanes salted with the
    spray of high tides, and seemed exceedingly ancient with their low black-beamed ceilings and casements
    of greenish bull's-eye panes. Ancient sailors in those taverns talked much of distant ports, and told many
    stories of the curious men from twilight Inquanok, but had little to add to what the seamen of the galleon
    had told. Then at last, after much unloading and loading, the ship set sail once more over the sunset sea,
    and the high walls and gables of Hlanith grew less as the last golden light of day lent them a wonder and
    beauty beyond any that men had given them.

    Two nights and two days the galleon sailed over the Cerenerian Sea, sighting no land and speaking but
    one other vessel. Then near sunset of the second day there loomed up ahead the snowy peak of Aran
    with its gingko-trees swaying on the lower slope, and Carter knew that they were come to the land of
    Ooth-Nargai and the marvellous city of Celephais. Swiftly there came into sight the glittering minarets of
    that fabulous town, and the untarnished marble walls with their bronze statues, and the great stone bridge
    where Naraxa joins the sea. Then rose the gentle hills behind the town, with their groves and gardens of
    asphodels and the small shrines and cottages upon them; and far in the background the purple ridge of
    the Tanarians, potent and mystical, behind which lay forbidden ways into the waking world and toward
    other regions of dream.

    The harbour was full of painted galleys, some of which were from the marble cloud-city of Serannian, that
    lies in ethereal space beyond where the sea meets the sky, and some of which were from more
    substantial parts of dreamland. Among these the steersman threaded his way up to the spice-fragrant
    wharves, where the galleon made fast in the dusk as the city's million lights began to twinkle out over the
    water. Ever new seemed this deathless city of vision, for here time has no power to tarnish or destroy.
    As it has always been is still the turquoise of Nath-Horthath, and the eighty orchid-wreathed priests are
    the same who builded it ten thousand years ago. Shining still is the bronze of the great gates, nor are the
    onyx pavements ever worn or broken. And the great bronze statues on the walls look down on merchants
    and camel drivers older than fable, yet without one grey hair in their forked beards.

    Carter did not once seek out the temple or the palace or the citadel, but stayed by the seaward wall
    among traders and sailors. And when it was too late for rumours and legends he sought out an ancient
    tavern he knew well, and rested with dreams of the gods on unknown Kadath whom he sought. The next
    day he searched all along the quays for some of the strange mariners of Inquanok, but was told that none
    were now in port, their galley not being due from the north for full two weeks. He found, however, one
    Thorabonian sailor who had been to Inquanok and had worked in the onyx quarries of that twilight place;
    and this sailor said there was certainly a descent to the north of the peopled region, which everybody
    seemed to fear and shun. The Thorabonian opined that this desert led around the utmost rim of
    impassable peaks into Leng's horrible plateau, and that this was why men feared it; though he admitted
    there were other vague tales of evil presences and nameless sentinels. Whether or not this could be the
    fabled waste wherein unknown Kadath stands he did not know; but it seemed unlikely that those
    presences and sentinels, if indeed they existed, were stationed for nought.

    On the following day Carter walked up the Street of the Pillars to the turquoise temple and talked with the
    High-Priest. Though Nath-Horthath is chiefly worshipped in Celephais, all the Great Ones are mentioned
    in diurnal prayers; and the priest was reasonably versed in their moods. Like Atal in distant Ulthar, he
    strongly advised against any attempts to see them; declaring that they are testy and capricious, and
    subject to strange protection from the mindless Other Gods from Outside, whose soul and messenger is
    the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep. Their jealous hiding of the marvellous sunset city shewed clearly that
    they did not wish Carter to reach it, and it was doubtful how they would regard a guest whose object was
    to see them and plead before them. No man had ever found Kadath in the past, and it might be just as
    well if none ever found it in the future. Such rumours as were told about that onyx castle of the Great
    Ones were not by any means reassuring.

    Having thanked the orchid-crowned High-Priest, Carter left the temple and sought out the bazaar of the
    sheep-butchers, where the old chief of Celephais' cats dwelt sleek and contented. That grey and dignified
    being was sunning himself on the onyx pavement, and extended a languid paw as his caller approached.
    But when Carter repeated the passwords and introductions furnished him by the old cat general of Ulthar,
    the furry patriarch became very cordial and communicative; and told much of the secret lore known to
    cats on the seaward slopes of Ooth-Nargai. Best of all, he repeated several things told him furtively by
    the timid waterfront cats of Celephais about the men of Inquanok, on whose dark ships no cat will go.

    It seems that these men have an aura not of earth about them, though that is not the reason why no cat
    will sail on their ships. The reason for this is that Inquanok holds shadows which no cat can endure, so
    that in all that cold twilight realm there is never a cheering purr or a homely mew. Whether it be because
    of things wafted over the impassable peaks from hypothetical Leng, or because of things filtering down
    from the chilly desert to the north, none may say; but it remains a fact that in that far land there broods a
    hint of outer space which cats do not like, and to which they are more sensitive than men. Therefore they
    will not go on the dark ships that seek the basalt quays of Inquanok.

    The old chief of the cats also told him where to find his friend King Kuranes, who in Carter's latter dreams
    had reigned alternately in the rose-crystal Palace of the Seventy Delights at Celephais and in the turreted
    cloud-castle of sky-floating Serannian. It seemed that he could no more find content in those places, but
    had formed a mighty longing for the English cliffs and downlands of his boyhood; where in little dreaming
    villages England's old songs hover at evening behind lattice windows, and where grey church towers peep
    lovely through the verdure of distant valleys. He could not go back to these things in the waking world
    because his body was dead; but he had done the next best thing and dreamed a small tract of such
    countryside in the region east of the city where meadows roll gracefully up from the sea-cliffs to the foot
    of the Tanarian Hills. There he dwelt in a grey Gothic manor-house of stone looking on the sea, and tried
    to think it was ancient Trevor Towers, where he was born and where thirteen generations of his
    forefathers had first seen the light. And on the coast nearby he had built a little Cornish fishing village with
    steep cobbled ways, settling therein such people as had the most English faces, and seeking ever to
    teach them the dear remembered accents of old Cornwall fishers. And in a valley not far off he had
    reared a great Norman Abbey whose tower he could see from his window, placing around it in the
    churchyard grey stones with the names of his ancestors carved thereon, and with a moss somewhat like
    Old England's moss. For though Kuranes was a monarch in the land of dream, with all imagined pomps
    and marvels, splendours and beauties, ecstasies and delights, novelties and excitements at his
    command, he would gladly have resigned forever the whole of his power and luxury and freedom for one
    blessed day as a simple boy in that pure and quiet England, that ancient, beloved England which had
    moulded his being and of which he must always be immutably a part.

    So when Carter bade that old grey chief of the cats adieu, he did not seek the terraced palace of rose
    crystal but walked out the eastern gate and across the daisied fields toward a peaked gable which he
    glimpsed through the oaks of a park sloping up to the sea-cliffs. And in time he came to a great hedge
    and a gate with a little brick lodge, and when he rang the bell there hobbled to admit him no robed and
    annointed lackey of the palace, but a small stubby old man in a smock who spoke as best he could in the
    quaint tones of far Cornwall. And Carter walked up the shady path between trees as near as possible to
    England's trees, and clumbed the terraces among gardens set out as in Queen Anne's time. At the door,
    flanked by stone cats in the old way, he was met by a whiskered butler in suitable livery; and was
    presently taken to the library where Kuranes, Lord of Ooth-Nargai and the Sky around Serannian, sat
    pensive in a chair by the window looking on his little seacoast village and wishing that his old nurse would
    come in and scold him because he was not ready for that hateful lawn-party at the vicar's, with the
    carriage waiting and his mother nearly out of patience.

    Kuranes, clad in a dressing gown of the sort favoured by London tailors in his youth, rose eagerly to
    meet his guest; for the sight of an Anglo-Saxon from the waking world was very dear to him, even if it was
    a Saxon from Boston, Massachusetts, instead of from Cornwall. And for long they talked of old times,
    having much to say because both were old dreamers and well versed in the wonders of incredible places.
    Kuranes, indeed, had been out beyond the stars in the ultimate void, and was said to be the only one who
    had ever returned sane from such a voyage.

    At length Carter brought up the subject of his quest, and asked of his host those questions he had asked
    of so many others. Kuranes did not know where Kadath was, or the marvellous sunset city; but he did
    know that the Great Ones were very dangerous creatures to seek out, and that the Other Gods had
    strange ways of protecting them from impertinent curiosity. He had learned much of the Other Gods in
    distant parts of space, especially in that region where form does not exist, and coloured gases study the
    innermost secrets. The violet gas S'ngac had told him terrible things of the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep,
    and had warned him never to approach the central void where the daemon sultan Azathoth gnaws
    hungrily in the dark.

    Altogether, it was not well to meddle with the Elder Ones; and if they persistently denied all access to the
    marvellous sunset city, it were better not to seek that city.

    Kuranes furthermore doubted whether his guest would profit aught by coming to the city even were he to
    gain it. He himself had dreamed and yearned long years for lovely Celephais and the land of
    Ooth-Nargai, and for the freedom and colour and high experience of life devoid of its chains, and
    conventions, and stupidities. But now that he was come into that city and that land, and was the king
    thereof, he found the freedom and the vividness all too soon worn out, and monotonous for want of
    linkage with anything firm in his feelings and memories. He was a king in Ooth-Nargai, but found no
    meaning therein, and drooped always for the old familiar things of England that had shaped his youth. All
    his kingdom would he give for the sound of Cornish church bells over the downs, and all the thousand
    minarets of Celephais for the steep homely roofs of the village near his home. So he told his guest that
    the unknown sunset city might not hold quite that content he sought, and that perhaps it had better remain
    a glorious and half-remembered dream. For he had visited Carter often in the old waking days, and knew
    well the lovely New England slopes that had given him birth.

    At the last, he was very certain, the seeker would long only for the early remembered scenes; the glow of
    Beacon Hill at evening, the tall steeples and winding hill streets of quaint Kingsport, the hoary gambrel
    roofs of ancient and witch-haunted Arkham, and the blessed meads and valleys where stone walls
    rambled and white farmhouse gables peeped out from bowers of verdure. These things he told Randolph
    Carter, but still the seeker held to his purpose. And in the end they parted each with his own conviction,
    and Carter went back through the bronze gate into Celephais and down the Street of Pillars to the old sea
    wall, where he talked more with the mariners of far ports and waited for the dark ship from cold and
    twilight Inquanok, whose strange-faced sailors and onyx-traders had in them the blood of the Great
    Ones.

    One starlit evening when the Pharos shone splendid over the harbour the longed-for ship put in, and
    strange-faced sailors and traders appeared one by one and group by group in the ancient taverns along
    the sea wall. It was very exciting to see again those living faces so like the godlike features of Ngranek,
    but Carter did not hasten to speak with the silent seamen. He did not know how much of pride and
    secrecy and dim supernal memory might fill those children of the Great Ones, and was sure it would not
    be wise to tell them of his quest or ask too closely of that cold desert stretching north of their twilight land.
    They talked little with the other folk in those ancient sea taverns; but would gather in groups in remote
    comers and sing among themselves the haunting airs of unknown places, or chant long tales to one
    another in accents alien to the rest of dreamland. And so rare and moving were those airs and tales that
    one might guess their wonders from the faces of those who listened, even though the words came to
    common ears only as strange cadence and obscure melody.

    For a week the strange seamen lingered in the taverns and traded in the bazaars of Celephais, and
    before they sailed Carter had taken passage on their dark ship, telling them that he was an old onyx
    miner and wishful to work in their quarries. That ship was very lovey and cunningly wrought, being of
    teakwood with ebony fittings and traceries of gold, and the cabin in which the traveller lodged had
    hangings of silk and velvet. One morning at the turn of the tide the sails were raised and the anchor lilted,
    and as Carter stood on the high stern he saw the sunrise-blazing walls and bronze statues and golden
    minarets of ageless Celephais sink into the distance, and the snowy peak of Mount Man grow smaller
    and smaller. By noon there was nothing in sight save the gentle blue of the Cerenerian Sea, with one
    painted galley afar off bound for that realm of Serannian where the sea meets the sky.

    And the night came with gorgeous stars, and the dark ship steered for Charles' Wain and the Little Bear
    as they swung slowly round the pole. And the sailors sang strange songs of unknown places, and they
    stole off one by one to the forecastle while the wistful watchers murmured old chants and leaned over the
    rail to glimpse the luminous fish playing in bowers beneath the sea. Carter went to sleep at midnight, and
    rose in the glow of a young morning, marking that the sun seemed farther south than was its wont. And all
    through that second day he made progress in knowing the men of the ship, getting them little by little to
    talk of their cold twilight land, of their exquisite onyx city, and of their fear of the high and impassable
    peaks beyond which Leng was said to be. They told him how sorry they were that no cats would stay in
    the land of Inquanok, and how they thought the hidden nearness of Leng was to blame for it. Only of the
    stony desert to the north they would not talk. There was something disquieting about that desert, and it
    was thought expedient not to admit its existence.

    On later days they talked of the quarries in which Carter said he was going to work. There were many of
    them, for all the city of Inquanok was builded of onyx, whilst great polished blocks of it were traded in
    Rinar, Ogrothan, and Celephais and at home with the merchants of Thraa, Flarnek, and Kadatheron, for
    the beautiful wares of those fabulous ports. And far to the north, almost in the cold desert whose
    existence the men of Inquanok did not care to admit, there was an unused quarry greater than all the
    rest; from which had been hewn in forgotten times such prodigious lumps and blocks that the sight of their
    chiselled vacancies struck terror to all who beheld. Who had mined those incredible blocks, and whither
    they had been transported, no man might say; but it was thought best not to trouble that quarry, around
    which such inhuman memories might conceivably cling. So it was left all alone in the twilight, with only the
    raven and the rumoured Shantak-bird to brood on its immensities. when Carter heard of this quarry he
    was moved to deep thought, for he knew from old tales that the Great Ones' castle atop unknown Kadath
    is of onyx.

    Each day the sun wheeled lower and lower in the sky, and the mists overhead grew thicker and thicker.
    And in two weeks there was not any sunlight at all, but only a weird grey twilight shining through a dome of
    eternal cloud by day, and a cold starless phosphorescence from the under side of that cloud by night. On
    the twentieth day a great jagged rock in the sea was sighted from afar, the first land glimpsed since
    Man's snowy peak had dwindled behind the ship. Carter asked the captain the name of that rock, but was
    told that it had no name and had never been sought by any vessel because of the sounds that came from
    it at night. And when, after dark, a dull and ceaseless howling arose from that jagged granite place, the
    traveller was glad that no stop had been made, and that the rock had no name. The seamen prayed and
    chanted till the noise was out of earshot, and Carter dreamed terrible dreams within dreams in the small
    hours.

    Two mornings after that there loomed far ahead and to the east a line of great grey peaks whose tops
    were lost in the changeless clouds of that twilight world. And at the sight of them the sailors sang glad
    songs, and some knelt down on the deck to pray, so that Carter knew they were come to the land of
    Inquanok and would soon be moored to the basalt quays of the great town bearing that land's name.
    Toward noon a dark coastline appeared, and before three o'clock there stood out against the north the
    bulbous domes and fantastic spires of the onyx city. Rare and curious did that archaic city rise above its
    walls and quays, all of delicate black with scrolls, flutings, and arabesques of inlaid gold. Tall and
    many-windowed were the houses, and carved on every side with flowers and patterns whose dark
    symmetries dazzled the eye with a beauty more poignant than light. Some ended in swelling domes that
    tapered to a point, others in terraced pyramids whereon rose clustered minarets displaying every phase
    of strangeness and imagination. The walls were low, and pierced by frequent gates, each under a great
    arch rising high above the general level and capped by the head of a god chiselled with that same skill
    displayed in the monstrous face on distant Ngranek. On a hill in the centre rose a sixteen-angled tower
    greater than all the rest and bearing a high pinnacled belfry resting on a flattened dome. This, the seamen
    said, was the Temple of the Elder Ones, and was ruled by an old High-Priest sad with inner secrets.

    At intervals the clang of a strange bell shivered over the onyx city, answered each time by a peal of
    mystic music made up of horns, viols, and chanting voices. And from a row of tripods on a galley round
    the high dome of the temple there burst flares of flame at certain moments; for the priests and people of
    that city were wise in the primal mysteries, and faithful in keeping the rhythms of the Great Ones as set
    forth in scrolls older than the Pnakotic Manuscripts. As the ship rode past the great basalt breakwater
    into the harbour the lesser noises of the city grew manifest, and Carter saw the slaves, sailors, and
    merchants on the docks. The sailors and merchants were of the strange-faced race of the gods, but the
    slaves were squat, slant-eyed folk said by rumour to have drifted somehow across or around the
    impassable peaks from the valleys beyond Leng. The wharves reached wide outside the city wall and
    bore upon them all manner of merchandise from the galleys anchored there, while at one end were great
    piles of onyx both carved and uncarved awaiting shipment to the far markets of Rinar, Ograthan and
    Celephais.

    It was not yet evening when the dark ship anchored beside a jutting quay of stone, and all the sailors and
    traders filed ashore and through the arched gate into the city. The streets of that city were paved with
    onyx and some of them were wide and straight whilst others were crooked and narrow. The houses near
    the water were lower than the rest, and bore above their curiously arched doorways certain signs of gold
    said to be in honour of the respective small gods that favoured each. The captain of the ship took Carter
    to an old sea tavern where flocked the mariners of quaint countries, and promised that he would next day
    shew him the wonders of the twilight city, and lead him to the taverns of the onyx-miners by the northern
    wall. And evening fell, and little bronze lamps were lighted, and the sailors in that tavern sang songs of
    remote places. But when from its high tower the great bell shivered over the city, and the peal of the
    horns and viols and voices rose cryptical in answer thereto, all ceased their songs or tales and bowed
    silent till the. last echo died away. For there is a wonder and a strangeness on the twilight city of
    Inquanok, and men fear to be lax in its rites lest a doom and a vengeance lurk unsuspectedly close.

    Far in the shadows of that tavern Carter saw a squat form he did not like, for it was unmistakably that of
    the old slant-eyed merchant he had seen so long before in the taverns of Dylath-Leen, who was reputed
    to trade with the horrible stone villages of Leng which no healthy folk visit and whose evil fires are seen at
    night from afar, and even 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. This man had seemed to
    shew a queer gleam of knowing when Carter asked the traders of DylathLeen about the cold waste and
    Kadath; and somehow his presence in dark and haunted Inquanok, so close to the wonders of the north,
    was not a reassuring thing. He slipped wholly out of sight before Carter could speak to him, and sailors
    later said that he had come with a yak caravan from some point not well determined, bearing the colossal
    and rich-flavoured eggs of the rumoured Shantak-bird to trade for the dextrous jade goblets that
    merchants brought from Ilarnek.

    On the following morning the ship-captain led Carter through the onyx streets of Inquanok, dark under
    their twilight sky. The inlaid doors and figured house-fronts, carven balconies and crystal-paned oriels all
    gleamed with a sombre and polished loveliness; and now and then a plaza would open out with black
    pillars, colonades, and the statues of curious beings both human and fabulous. Some of the vistas down
    long and unbending streets, or through side alleys and over bulbous domes, spires, and arabesqued
    roofs, were weird and beautiful beyond words; and nothing was more splendid than the massive heights
    of the great central Temple of the Elder Ones with its sixteen carven sides, its flattened dome, and its
    lofty pinnacled belfry, overtopping all else, and majestic whatever its foreground. And always to the east,
    far beyond the city walls and the leagues of pasture land, rose the gaunt grey sides of those topless and
    impassable peaks across which hideous Leng was said to lie.

    The captain took Carter to the mighty temple, which is set with its walled garden in a great round plaza
    whence the streets go as spokes from a wheel's hub. The seven arched gates of that garden, each
    having over it a carven face like those on the city's gates, are always open, and the people roam
    reverently at will down the tiled paths and through the little lanes lined with grotesque termini and the
    shrines of modest gods. And there are fountains, pools, and basins there to reflect the frequent blaze of
    the tripods on the high balcony, all of onyx and having in them small luminous fish taken by divers from the
    lower bowers of ocean. When the deep clang from the temple belfry shivers over the garden and the city,
    and the answer of the horns and viols and voices peals out from the seven lodges by the garden gates,
    there issue from the seven doors of the temple long columns of masked and hooded priests in black,
    bearing at arm's length before them great golden bowls from which a curious steam rises. And all the
    seven columns strut peculiarly in single file, legs thrown far forward without bending the knees, down the
    walks that lead to the seven lodges, wherein they disappear and do not appear again. It is said that
    subterrene paths connect the lodges with the temple, and that the long files of priests return through
    them; nor is it unwhispered that deep flights of onyx steps go down to mysteries that are never told. But
    only a few are those who hint that the priests in the masked and hooded columns are not human beings.

    Carter did not enter the temple, because none but the Veiled King is permitted to do that. But before he
    left the garden the hour of the bell came, and he heard the shivering clang deafening above him, and the
    wailing of the horns and viols and voices loud from the lodges by the gates. And down the seven great
    walks stalked the long files of bowl-bearing priests in their singular way, giving to the traveller a fear which
    human priests do not often give. When the last of them had vanished he left that garden, noting as he did
    so a spot on the pavement over which the bowls had passed. Even the ship-captain did not like that spot,
    and hurried him on toward the hill whereon the Veiled King's palace rises many-domed and marvellous.

    The ways to the onyx palace are steep and narrow, all but the broad curving one where the king and his
    companions ride on yaks or in yak-drawn chariots. Carter and his guide climbed up an alley that was all
    steps, between inlaid walls hearing strange signs in gold, and under balconies and oriels whence
    sometimes floated soft strains of music or breaths of exotic fragrance. Always ahead loomed those titan
    walls, mighty buttresses, and clustered and bulbous domes for which the Veiled King's palace is famous;
    and at length they passed under a great black arch and emerged in the gardens of the monarch's
    pleasure. There Carter paused in faintness at so much beauty, for the onyx terraces and colonnaded
    walks, the gay porterres and delicate flowering trees espaliered to golden lattices, the brazen urns and
    tripods with cunning bas-reliefs, the pedestalled and almost breathing statues of veined black marble, the
    basalt-bottomed lagoon's tiled fountains with luminous fish, the tiny temples of iridescent singing birds
    atop carven columns, the marvellous scrollwork of the great bronze gates, and the blossoming vines
    trained along every inch of the polished walls all joined to form a sight whose loveliness was beyond
    reality, and half-fabulous even in the land of dreams. There it shimmered like a vision under that grey
    twilight sky, with the domed and fretted magnificence of the palace ahead, and the fantastic silhouette of
    the distant impassable peaks on the right. And ever the small birds and the fountains sang, while the
    perfume of rare blossoms spread like a veil over that incredible garden. No other human presence was
    there, and Carter was glad it was so. Then they turned and descended again the onyx alley of steps, for
    the palace itself no visitor may enter; and it is not well to look too long and steadily at the great central
    dome, since it is said to house the archaic father of all the rumoured Shantak-birds, and to send out
    queer dreams to the curious.

    After that the captain took Carter to the north quarter of the town, near the Gate of the Caravans, where
    are the taverns of the yak-merchants and the onyx-miners. And there, in a low-ceiled inn of quarrymen,
    they said farewell; for business called the captain whilst Carter was eager to talk with miners about the
    north. There were many men in that inn, and the traveller was not long in speaking to some of them;
    saying that he was an old miner of onyx, and anxious to know somewhat of Inquanok's quarries. But all
    that he learned was not much more than he knew before, for the miners were timid and evasive about the
    cold desert to the north and the quarry that no man visits. They had fears of fabled emissaries from
    around the mountains where Leng is said to lie, and of evil presences and nameless sentinels far north
    among the scattered rocks. And they whispered also that the rumoured Shantak-birds are no wholesome
    things; it being. indeed for the best that no man has ever truly seen one (for that fabled father of
    Shantaks in the king's dome is fed in the dark).

    The next day, saying that he wished to look over all the various mines for himself and to visit the
    scattered farms and quaint onyx villages of Inquanok, Carter hired a yak and stuffed great leathern
    saddle-bags for a journey. Beyond the Gate of the Caravans the road lay straight betwixt tilled fields, with
    many odd farmhouses crowned by low domes. At some of these houses the seeker stopped to ask
    questions; once finding a host so austere and reticent, and so full of an unplaced majesty like to that in
    the huge features on Ngranek, that he felt certain he had come at last upon one of the Great Ones
    themselves, or upon one with full nine-tenths of their blood, dwelling amongst men. And to that austere
    and reticent cotter he was careful to speak very well of the gods, and to praise all the blessings they had
    ever accorded him.

    That night Carter camped in a roadside meadow beneath a great lygath-tree to which he tied his yak, and
    in the morning resumed his northward pilgrimage. At about ten o'clock he reached the small-domed
    village of Urg, where traders rest and miners tell their tales, and paused in its taverns till noon. It is here
    that the great caravan road turns west toward Selarn, but Carter kept on north by the quarry road. All the
    afternoon he followed that rising road, which was somewhat narrower than the great highway, and which
    now led through a region with more rocks than tilled fields. And by evening the low hills on his left had
    risen into sizable black cliffs, so that he knew he was close to the mining country. All the while the great
    gaunt sides of the impassable mountains towered afar off at his right, and the farther he went, the worse
    tales he heard of them from the scattered farmers and traders and drivers of lumbering onyx-carts along
    the way.

    On the second night he camped in the shadow of a large black crag, tethering his yak to a stake driven in
    the ground. He observed the greater phosphorescence of the clouds at his northerly point, and more
    than once thought he saw dark shapes outlined against them. And on the third morning he came in sight
    of the first onyx quarry, and greeted the men who there laboured with picks and chisels. Before evening
    he had passed eleven quarries; the land being here given over altogether to onyx cliffs and boulders, with
    no vegetation at all, but only great rocky fragments scattered about a floor of black earth, with the grey
    impassable peaks always rising gaunt and sinister on his right. The third night he spent in a camp of
    quarry men whose flickering fires cast weird reflections on the polished cliffs to the west. And they sang
    many songs and told many tales, shewing such strange knowledge of the olden days and the habits of
    gods that Carter could see they held many latent memories of their sires the Great Ones. They asked
    him whither he went, and cautioned him not to go too far to the north; but he replied that he was seeking
    new cliffs of onyx, and would take no more risks than were common among prospectors. In the morning
    he bade them adieu and rode on into the darkening north, where they had warned him he would find the
    feared and unvisited quarry whence hands older than men's hands had wrenched prodigious blocks. But
    he did not like it when, turning back to wave a last farewell, he thought he saw approaching the camp that
    squat and evasive old merchant with slanting eyes, whose conjectured traffick with Leng was the gossip
    of distant Dylath-Leen.

    After two more quarries the inhabited part of Inquanok seemed to end, and the road narrowed to a
    steeply rising yak-path among forbidding black cliffs. Always on the right towered the gaunt and distant
    peaks, and as Carter climbed farther and farther into this untraversed realm he found it grew darker and
    colder. Soon he perceived that there were no prints of feet or hooves on the black path beneath, and
    realised that he was indeed come into strange and deserted ways of elder time. Once in a while a raven
    would croak far overhead, and now and then a flapping behind some vast rock would make him think
    uncomfortably of the rumoured Shantak-bird. But in the main he was alone with his shaggy steed, and it
    troubled him to observe that this excellent yak became more and more reluctant to advance, and more
    and more disposed to snort affrightedly at any small noise along the route.

    The path now contracted between sable and glistening walls, and began to display an even greater
    steepness than before. It was a bad footing, and the yak often slipped on the stony fragments strewn
    thickly about. In two hours Carter saw ahead a definite crest, beyond which was nothing but dull grey sky,
    and blessed the prospect of a level or downward course. To reach this crest, however, was no easy
    task; for the way had grown nearly perpendicular, and was perilous with loose black gravel and small
    stones. Eventually Carter dismounted and led his dubious yak; pulling very hard when the animal balked
    or stumbled, and keeping his own footing as best he might. Then suddenly he came to the top and saw
    beyond, and gasped at what he saw.

    The path indeed led straight ahead and slightly down, with the same lines of high natural walls as before;
    but on the left hand there opened out a monstrous space, vast acres in extent, where some archaic
    power had riven and rent the native cliffs of onyx in the form of a giant's quarry. Far back into the solid
    precipice ran that cyclopean gouge, and deep down within earth's bowels its lower delvings yawned. It
    was no quarry of man, and the concave sides were scarred with great squares, yards wide, which told of
    the size of the blocks once hewn by nameless hands and chisels. High over its jagged rim huge ravens
    flapped and croaked, and vague whirrings in the unseen depths told of bats or urhags or less
    mentionable presences haunting the endless blackness. There Carter stood in the narrow way amidst the
    twilight with the rocky path sloping down before him; tall onyx cliffs on his right that led on as far as he
    could see and tall cliffs on the left chopped off just ahead to make that terrible and unearthly quarry.

    All at once the yak uttered a cry and burst from his control, leaping past him and darting on in a panic till it
    vanished down the narrow slope toward the north. Stones kicked by its flying hooves fell over the brink of
    the quarry and lost themselves in the dark without any sound of striking bottom; but Carter ignored the
    perils of that scanty path as he raced breathlessly after the flying steed. Soon the left-behind cliffs
    resumed their course, making the way once more a narrow lane; and still the traveller leaped on after the
    yak whose great wide prints told of its desperate flight.

    Once he thought he heard the hoofbeats of the frightened beast, and doubled his speed from this
    encouragement. He was covering miles, and little by little the way was broadening in front till he knew he
    must soon emerge on the cold and dreaded desert to the north. The gaunt grey flanks of the distant
    impassable peaks were again visible above the right-hand crags, and ahead were the rocks and boulders
    of an open space which was clearly a foretaste of the dark arid limitless plain. And once more those
    hoofbeats sounded in his ears, plainer than before, but this time giving terror instead of encouragement
    because he realised that they were not the frightened hoofbeats of his fleeing yak. The beats were
    ruthless and purposeful, and they were behind him.

    Carter's pursuit of the yak became now a flight from an unseen thing, for though he dared not glance over
    his shoulder he felt that the presence behind him could be nothing wholesome or mentionable. His yak
    must have heard or felt it first, and he did not like to ask himself whether it had followed him from the
    haunts of men or had floundered up out of that black quarry pit. Meanwhile the cliffs had been left behind,
    so that the oncoming night fell over a great waste of sand and spectral rocks wherein all paths were lost.
    He could not see the hoofprints of his yak, but always from behind him there came that detestable
    clopping; mingled now and then with what he fancied were titanic flappings and whirrings. That he was
    losing ground seemed unhappily clear to him, and he knew he was hopelessly lost in this broken and
    blasted desert of meaningless rocks and untravelled sands. Only those remote and impassable peaks on
    the right gave him any sense of direction, and even they were less clear as the grey twilight waned and
    the sickly phosphorescence of the clouds took its place.

    Then dim and misty in the darkling north before him he glimpsed a terrible thing. He had thought it for
    some moments a range of black mountains, but now he saw it was something more. The
    phosphorescence of the brooding clouds shewed it plainly, and even silhouetted parts of it as vapours
    glowed behind. How distant it was he could not tell, but it must have been very far. It was thousands of
    feet high, stretching in a great concave arc from the grey impassable peaks to the unimagined westward
    spaces, and had once indeed been a ridge of mighty onyx hills. But now these hills were hills no more, for
    some hand greater than man's had touched them. Silent they squatted there atop the world like wolves or
    ghouls, crowned with clouds and mists and guarding the secrets of the north forever. All in a great half
    circle they squatted, those dog-like mountains carven into monstrous watching statues, and their right
    hands were raised in menace against mankind.

    It was only the flickering light of the clouds that made their mitred double heads seem to move, but as
    Carter stumbled on he saw arise from their shadowy caps great forms whose motions were no delusion.
    Winged and whirring, those forms grew larger each moment, and the traveller knew his stumbling was at
    an end. They were not any birds or bats known elsewhere on earth or in dreamland, for they were larger
    than elephants and had heads like a horse's. Carter knew that they must be the Shantak-birds of ill
    rumour, and wondered no more what evil guardians and nameless sentinels made men avoid the boreal
    rock desert. And as he stopped in final resignation he dared at last to look behind him, where indeed was
    trotting the squat slant-eyed trader of evil legend, grinning astride a lean yak and leading on a noxious
    horde of leering Shantaks to whose wings still clung the rime and nitre of the nether pits.

    Trapped though he was by fabulous and hippocephalic winged nightmares that pressed around in great
    unholy circles, Randolph Carter did not lose consciousness. Lofty and horrible those titan gargoyles
    towered above him, while the slant-eyed merchant leaped down from his yak and stood grinning before
    the captive. Then the man motioned Carter to mount one of the repugnant Shantaks, helping him up as
    his judgement struggled with his loathing. It was hard work ascending, for the Shantak-bird has scales
    instead of feathers, and those scales are very slippery. Once he was seated, the slant-eyed man hopped
    up behind him, leaving the lean yak to be led away northward toward the ring of carven mountains by one
    of the incredible bird colossi.

    There now followed a hideous whirl through frigid space, endlessly up and eastward toward the gaunt
    grey flanks of those impassable mountains beyond which Leng was said to be. Far above the clouds they
    flew, till at last there lay beneath them those fabled summits which the folk of Inquanok have never seen,
    and which lie always in high vortices of gleaming mist. Carter beheld them very plainly as they passed
    below, and saw upon their topmost peaks strange caves which made him think of those on Ngranek; but
    he did not question his captor about these things when he noticed that both the man and the
    horse-headed Shantak appeared oddly fearful of them, hurrying past nervously and shewing great
    tension until they were left far in the rear.

    The Shantak now flew lower, revealing beneath the canopy of cloud a grey barren plain whereon at great
    distances shone little feeble fires. As they descended there appeared at intervals lone huts of granite
    and bleak stone villages whose tiny windows glowed with pallid light. And there came from those huts and
    villages a shrill droning of pipes and a nauseous rattle of crotala which proved at once that Inquanok's
    people are right in their geographic rumours. For travellers have heard such sounds before, and know
    that they float only from the cold desert plateau which healthy folk never visit; that haunted place of evil
    and mystery which is Leng.

    Around the feeble fires dark forms were dancing, and Carter was curious as to what manner of beings
    they might be; for no healthy folk have ever been to Leng, and the place is known only by its fires and
    stone huts as seen from afar. Very slowly and awkwardly did those forms leap, and with an insane
    twisting and bending not good to behold; so that Carter did not wonder at the monstrous evil imputed to
    them by vague legend, or the fear in which all dreamland holds their abhorrent frozen plateau. As the
    Shantak flew lower, the repulsiveness of the dancers became tinged with a certain hellish familiarity; and
    the prisoner kept straining his eyes and racking his memory for clues to where he had seen such
    creatures before.

    They leaped as though they had hooves instead of feet, and seemed to wear a sort of wig or headpiece
    with small horns. Of other clothing they had none, but most of them were quite furry. Behind they had
    dwarfish tails, and when they glanced upward he saw the excessive width of their mouths. Then he knew
    what they were, and that they did not wear any wigs or headpieces after all. For the cryptic folk of Leng
    were of one race with the uncomfortable merchants of the black galleys that traded rubies at
    Dylath-Leen; those not quite human merchants who are the slaves of the monstrous moon-things! They
    were indeed the same dark folk who had shanghaied Carter on their noisome galley so long ago, and
    whose kith he had seen driven in herds about the unclean wharves of that accursed lunar city, with the
    leaner ones toiling and the fatter ones taken away in crates for other needs of their polypous and
    amorphous masters. Now he saw where such ambiguous creatures came from, and shuddered at the
    thought that Leng must be known to these formless abominations from the moon.

    But the Shantak flew on past the fires and the stone huts and the less than human dancers, and soared
    over sterile hills of grey granite and dim wastes of rock and ice and snow. Day came, and the
    phosphorescence of low clouds gave place to the misty twilight of that northern world, and still the vile bird
    winged meaningly through the cold and silence. At times the slant-eyed man talked with his steed in a
    hateful and guttural language, and the Shantak would answer with tittering tones that rasped like the
    scratching of ground glass. AlI this while the land was getting higher, and finally they came to a
    wind-swept table-land which seemed the very roof of a blasted and tenantless world. There, all alone in
    the hush and the dusk and the cold, rose the uncouth stones of a squat windowless building, around
    which a circle of crude monoliths stood. In all this arrangement there was nothing human, and Carter
    surmised from old tales that he was indeed come to that most dreadful and legendary of all places, the
    remote and prehistoric monastery wherein dwells uncompanioned the High-Priest Not To Be Described,
    which wears a yellow silken mask over its face and prays to the Other Gods and their crawling chaos
    Nyarlathotep.

    The loathsome bird now settled to the ground, and the slant-eyed man hopped down and helped his
    captive alight. Of the purpose of his seizure Carter now felt very sure; for clearly the slant-eyed merchant
    was an agent of the darker powers, eager to drag before his masters a mortal whose presumption had
    aimed at the finding of unknown Kadath and the saying of a prayer before the faces of the Great Ones in
    their onyx castle. It seemed likely that this merchant had caused his former capture by the slaves of the
    moon-things in Dylath-Leen, and that he now meant to do what the rescuing cats had baffled; taking the
    victim to some dread rendezvous with monstrous Nyarlathotep and telling with what boldness the seeking
    of unknown Kadath had been tried. Leng and the cold waste north of Inquanok must be close to the Other
    Gods, and there the passes to Kadath are well guarded.

    The slant-eyed man was small, but the great hippocephalic bird was there to see he was obeyed; so
    Carter followed where he led, and passed within the circle of standing rocks and into the low arched
    doorway of that windowless stone monastery. There were no lights inside, but the evil merchant lit a small
    clay lamp bearing morbid bas-reliefs and prodded his prisoner on through mazes of narrow winding
    corridors. On the walls of the corridors were printed frightful scenes older than history, and in a style
    unknown to the archaeologists of earth. After countless aeons their pigments were brilliant still, for the
    cold and dryness of hideous Leng keep alive many primal things. Carter saw them fleetingly in the rays of
    that dim and moving lamp, and shuddered at the tale they told.

    Through those archaic frescoes Leng's annals stalked; and the horned, hooved, and wide-mouthed
    almost-humans danced evilly amidst forgotten cities. There were scenes of old wars, wherein Leng's
    almost-humans fought with the bloated purple spiders of the neighbouring vales; and there were scenes
    also of the coming of the black galleys from the moon, and of the submission of Leng's people to the
    polypous and amorphous blasphemies that hopped and floundered and wriggled out of them. Those
    slippery greyish-white blasphemies they worshipped as gods, nor ever complained when scores of their
    best and fatted males were taken away in the black galleys. The monstrous moon-beasts made their
    camp on a jagged isle in the sea, and Carter could tell from the frescoes that this was none other than
    the lone nameless rock he had seen when sailing to Inquanok; that grey accursed rock which Inquanok's
    seamen shun, and from which vile howlings reverberate all through the night.

    And in those frescoes was shewn the great seaport and capital of the almost-humans; proud and pillared
    betwixt the cliffs and the basalt wharves, and wondrous with high fanes and carven places. Great
    gardens and columned streets led from the cliffs and from each of the six sphinx-crowned gates to a vast
    central plaza, and in that plaza was a pair of winged colossal lions guarding the top of a subterrene
    staircase. Again and again were those huge winged lions shewn, their mighty flanks of diarite glistening in
    the grey twilight of the day and the cloudy phosphorescence of the night. And as Carter stumbled past
    their frequent and repeated pictures it came to him at last what indeed they were, and what city it was that
    the almost-humans had ruled so anciently before the coming of the black galleys. There could be no
    mistake, for the legends of dreamland are generous and profuse. Indubitably that primal city was no less
    a place than storied Sarkomand, whose ruins had bleached for a million years before the first true human
    saw the light, and whose twin titan lions guard eternally the steps that lead down from dreamland to the
    Great Abyss.

    Other views shewed the gaunt grey peaks dividing Leng from Inquanok, and the monstrous Shantak-birds
    that build nests on the ledges half way up. And they shewed likewise the curious caves near the very
    topmost pinnacles, and how even the boldest of the Shantaks fly screaming away from them. Carter had
    seen those caves when he passed over them, and had noticed their likeness to the caves on Ngranek.
    Now he knew that the likeness was more than a chance one, for in these pictures were shewn their
    fearsome denizens; and those bat-wings, curving horns, barbed tails, prehensile paws and rubbery
    bodies were not strange to him. He had met those silent, flitting and clutching creatures before; those
    mindless guardians of the Great Abyss whom even the Great Ones fear, and who own not Nyarlathotep
    but hoary Nodens as their lord. For they were the dreaded night-gaunts, who never laugh or smile
    because they have no faces, and who flop unendingly in the dark betwixt the Vale of Pnath and the
    passes to the outer world.

    The slant-eyed merchant had now prodded Carter into a great domed space whose walls were carved in
    shocking bas-reliefs, and whose centre held a gaping circular pit surrounded by six malignly stained
    stone altars in a ring. There was no light in this vast evil-smelling crypt, and the small lamp of the sinister
    merchant shone so feebly that one could grasp details only little by little. At the farther end was a high
    stone dais reached by five steps; and there on a golden throne sat a lumpish figure robed in yellow silk
    figured with red and having a yellow silken mask over its face. To this being the slant-eyed man made
    certain signs with his hands, and the lurker in the dark replied by raising a disgustingly carven flute of
    ivory in silk-covered paws and blowing certain loathsome sounds from beneath its flowing yellow mask.
    This colloquy went on for some time, and to Carter there was something sickeningly familiar in the sound
    of that flute and the stench of the malodorous place. It made him think of a frightful red-litten city and of
    the revolting procession that once filed through it; of that, and of an awful climb through lunar countryside
    beyond, before the rescuing rush of earth's friendly cats. He knew that the creature on the dais was
    without doubt the High-Priest Not To Be Described, of which legend whispers such fiendish and abnormal
    possibilities, but he feared to think just what that abhorred High-Priest might be.

    Then the figured silk slipped a trifle from one of the greyish-white paws, and Carter knew what the
    noisome High-Priest was. And in that hideous second, stark fear drove him to something his reason
    would never have dared to attempt, for in all his shaken consciousness there was room only for one
    frantic will to escape from what squatted on that golden throne. He knew that hopeless labyrinths of stone
    lay betwixt him and the cold table-land outside, and that even on that table-land the noxious Shantek still
    waited; yet in spite of all this there was in his mind only the instant need to get away from that wriggling,
    silk-robed monstrosity.

    The slant-eyed man had set the curious lamp upon one of the high and wickedly stained altar-stones by
    the pit, and had moved forward somewhat to talk to the High-Priest with his hands. Carter, hitherto wholly
    passive, now gave that man a terrific push with all the wild strength of fear, so that the victim toppled at
    once into that gaping well which rumour holds to reach down to the hellish Vaults of Zin where Gugs hunt
    ghasts in the dark. In almost the same second he seized the lamp from the altar and darted out into the
    frescoed labyrinths, racing this way and that as chance determined and trying not to think of the stealthy
    padding of shapeless paws on the stones behind him, or of the silent wrigglings and crawlings which must
    be going on back there in lightless corridors.

    After a few moments he regretted his thoughtless haste, and wished he had tried to follow backward the
    frescoes he had passed on the way in. True, they were so confused and duplicated that they could not
    have done him much good, but he wished none the less he had made the attempt. Those he now saw
    were even more horrible than those he had seen then, and he knew he was not in the corridors leading
    outside. In time he became quite sure he was not followed, and slackened his pace somewhat; but
    scarce had he breathed in half relief when a new peril beset him. His lamp was waning, and he would
    soon be in pitch blackness with no means of sight or guidance.

    When the light was all gone he groped slowly in the dark, and prayed to the Great Ones for such help as
    they might afford. At times he felt the stone floor sloping up or down, and once he stumbled over a step
    for which no reason seemed to exist. The farther he went the damper it seemed to be, and when he was
    able to feel a junction or the mouth of a side passage he always chose the way which sloped downward
    the least. He believed, though, that his general course was down; and the vault-like smell and
    incrustations on the greasy walls and floor alike warned him he was burrowing deep in Leng's
    unwholesome table-land. But there was not any warning of the thing which came at last; only the thing
    itself with its terror and shock and breath-taking chaos. One moment he was groping slowly over the
    slippery floor of an almost level place, and the next he was shooting dizzily downward in the dark through
    a burrow which must have been well-nigh vertical.

    Of the length of that hideous sliding he could never be sure, but it seemed to take hours of delirious
    nausea and ecstatic frenzy. Then he realized he was still, with the phosphorescent clouds of a northern
    night shining sickly above him. All around were crumbling walls and broken columns, and the pavement on
    which he lay was pierced by straggling grass and wrenched asunder by frequent shrubs and roots.
    Behind him a basalt cliff rose topless and perpendicular; its dark side sculptured into repellent scenes,
    and pierced by an arched and carven entrance to the inner blacknesses out of which he had come.
    Ahead stretched double rows of pillars, and the fragments and pedestals of pillars, that spoke of a broad
    and bygone street; and from the urns and basins along the way he knew it had been a great street of
    gardens. Far off at its end the pillars spread to mark a vast round plaza, and in that open circle there
    loomed gigantic under the lurid night clouds a pair of monstrous things. Huge winged lions of diarite they
    were, with blackness and shadow between them. Full twenty feet they reared their grotesque and
    unbroken heads, and snarled derisive on the ruins around them. And Carter knew right well what they
    must be, for legend tells of only one such twain. They were the changeless guardians of the Great Abyss,
    and these dark ruins were in truth primordial Sarkomand.

    Carter's first act was to close and barricade the archway in the cliff with fallen blocks and odd debris that
    lay around. He wished no follower from Leng's hateful monastery, for along the way ahead would lurk
    enough of other dangers. Of how to get from Sarkomand to the peopled parts of dreamland he knew
    nothing at all; nor could he gain much by descending to the grottoes of the ghouls, since he knew they
    were no better informed than he. The three ghouls which had helped him through the city of Gugs to the
    outer world had not known how to reach Sarkomand in their journey back, but had planned to ask old
    traders in Dylath-Leen. He did not like to think of going again to the subterrene world of Gugs and risking
    once more that hellish tower of Koth with its Cyclopean steps leading to the enchanted wood, yet he felt
    he might have to try this course if all else failed. Over Leng's plateau past the lone monastery he dared
    not go unaided; for the High-Priest's emissaries must be many, while at the journey's end there would no
    doubt be the Shantaks and perhaps other things to deal with. If he could get a boat he might sail back to
    Inquanok past the jagged and hideous rock in the sea, for the primal frescoes in the monastery labyrinth
    had shewn that this frightful place lies not far from Sarkomand's basalt quays. But to find a boat in this
    aeon-deserted city was no probable thing, and it did not appear likely that he could ever make one.

    Such were the thoughts of Randolph Carter when a new impression began beating upon his mind. All this
    while there had stretched before him the great corpse-like width of fabled Sarkomand with its black
    broken pillars and crumbling sphinx-crowned gates and titan stones and monstrous winged lions against
    the sickly glow of those luminous night clouds. Now he saw far ahead and on the right a glow that no
    clouds could account for, and knew he was not alone in the silence of that dead city. The glow rose and
    fell fitfully, flickering with a greenish tinge which did not reassure the watcher. And when he crept closer,
    down the littered street and through some narrow gaps between tumbled walls, he perceived that it was a
    campfire near the wharves with many vague forms clustered darkly around it; and a lethal odour hanging
    heavily over all. Beyond was the oily lapping of the harbour water with a great ship riding at anchor, and
    Carter paused in stark terror when he saw that the ship was indeed one of the dreaded black galleys
    from the moon.

    Then, just as he was about to creep back from that detestable flame, he saw a stirring among the vague
    dark forms and heard a peculiar and unmistakable sound. It was the frightened meeping of a ghoul, and in
    a moment it had swelled to a veritable chorus of anguish. Secure as he was in the shadow of monstrous
    ruins, Carter allowed his curiosity to conquer his fear, and crept forward again instead of retreating.
    Once in crossing an open street he wriggled worm-like on his stomach, and in another place he had to
    rise to his feet to avoid making a noise among heaps of fallen marble. But always he succeeded in
    avoiding discovery, so that in a short time he had found a spot behind a titan pillar where he could watch
    the whole green-litten scene of action. There around a hideous fire fed by the obnoxious stems of lunar
    fungi, there squatted a stinking circle of the toadlike moonbeasts and their almost-human slaves. Some
    of these slaves were heating curious iron spears in the leaping flames, and at intervals applying their
    white-hot points to three tightly trussed prisoners that lay writhing before the leaders of the party. From
    the motions of their tentacles Carter could see that the blunt-snouted moonbeasts were enjoying the
    spectacle hugely, and vast was his horror when he suddenly recognised the frantic meeping and knew
    that the tortured ghouls were none other than the faithful trio which had guided him safely from the abyss,
    and had thereafter set out from the enchanted wood to find Sarkomand and the gate to their native
    deeps.

    The number of malodorous moonbeasts about that greenish fire was very great, and Carter saw that he
    could do nothing now to save his former allies. Of how the ghouls had been captured he could not guess;
    but fancied that the grey toadlike blasphemies had heard them inquire in Dylath-Leen concerning the way
    to Sarkomand and had not wished them to approach so closely the hateful plateau of Leng and the
    High-Priest Not To Be Described. For a moment he pondered on what he ought to do, and recalled how
    near he was to the gate of the ghouls' black kingdom. Clearly it was wisest to creep east to the plaza of
    twin lions and descend at once to the gulf, where assuredly he would meet no horrors worse than those
    above, and where he might soon find ghouls eager to rescue their brethren and perhaps to wipe out the
    moonbeasts from the black galley. It occurred to him that the portal, like other gates to the abyss, might
    be guarded by flocks of night-gaunts; but he did not fear these faceless creatures now. He had learned
    that they are bound by solemn treaties with the ghouls, and the ghoul which was Pickman had taught him
    how to glibber a password they understood.

    So Carter began another silent crawl through the ruins, edging slowly toward the great central plaza and
    the winged lions. It was ticklish work, but the moonbeasts were pleasantly busy and did not hear the slight
    noises which he twice made by accident among the scattered stones. At last he reached the open space
    and picked his way among the stunned trees and vines that had grown up therein. The gigantic lions
    loomed terrible above him in the sickly glow of the phosphorescent night clouds, but he manfully persisted
    toward them and presently crept round to their faces, knowing it was on that side he would find the mighty
    darkness which they guard. Ten feet apart crouched the mocking-faced beasts of diarite, brooding on
    cyclopean pedestals whose sides were chiselled in fearsome bas-reliefs. Betwixt them was a tiled court
    with a central space which had once been railed with balusters of onyx. Midway in this space a black well
    opened, and Carter soon saw that he had indeed reached the yawning gulf whose crusted and mouldy
    stone steps lead down to the crypts of nightmare.

    Terrible is the memory of that dark descent in which hours wore themselves away whilst Carter wound
    sightlessly round and round down a fathomless spiral of steep and slippery stairs. So worn and narrow
    were the steps, and so greasy with the ooze of inner earth, that the climber never quite knew when to
    expect a breathless fall and hurtling down to the ultimate pits; and he was likewise uncertain just when or
    how the guardian night-gaunts would suddenly pounce upon him, if indeed there were any stationed in this
    primeval passage. All about him was a stifling odour of nether gulfs, and he felt that the air of these
    choking depths was not made for mankind. In time he became very numb and somnolent, moving more
    from automatic impulse than from reasoned will; nor did he realize any change when he stopped moving
    altogether as something quietly seized him from behind. He was flying very rapidly through the air before
    a malevolent tickling told him that the rubbery night-gaunts had performed their duty.

    Awaked to the fact that he was in the cold, damp clutch of the faceless flutterers, Carter remembered the
    password of the ghouls and glibbered it as loudly as he could amidst the wind and chaos of flight.
    Mindless though night-gaunts are said to be, the effect was instantaneous; for all tickling stopped at
    once, and the creatures hastened to shift their captive to a more comfortable position. Thus encouraged
    Carter ventured some explanations; telling of the seizure and torture of three ghouls by the moonbeasts,
    and of the need of assembling a party to rescue them. The night-gaunts, though inarticulate, seemed to
    understand what was said; and shewed greater haste and purpose in their flight. Suddenly the dense
    blackness gave place to the grey twilight of inner earth, and there opened up ahead one of those flat
    sterile plains on which ghouls love to squat and gnaw. Scattered tombstones and osseous fragments told
    of the denizens of that place; and as Carter gave a loud meep of urgent summons, a score of burrows
    emptied forth their leathery, dog-like tenants. The night-gaunts now flew low and set their passenger upon
    his feet, afterward withdrawing a little and forming a hunched semicircle on the ground while the ghouls
    greeted the newcomer.

    Carter glibbered his message rapidly and explicitly to the grotesque company, and four of them at once
    departed through different burrows to spread the news to others and gather such troops as might be
    available for a rescue. After a long wait a ghoul of some importance appeared, and made significant
    signs to the night-gaunts, causing two of the latter to fly off into the dark. Thereafter there were constant
    accessions to the hunched flock of night-gaunts on the plain, till at length the slimy soil was fairly black
    with them. Meanwhile fresh ghouls crawled out of the burrows one by one, all glibbering excitedly and
    forming in crude battle array not far from the huddled night-gaunts. In time there appeared that proud and
    influential ghoul which was once the artist Richard Pickman of Boston, and to him Carter glibbered a very
    full account of what had occurred. The erstwhile Pickman, pleased to greet his ancient friend again,
    seemed very much impressed, and held a conference with other chiefs a little apart from the growing
    throng.

    Finally, after scanning the ranks with care, the assembled chiefs all meeped in unison and began
    glibbering orders to the crowds of ghouls and night-gaunts. A large detachment of the horned flyers
    vanished at once, while the rest grouped themselves two by two on their knees with extended forelegs,
    awaiting the approach of the ghouls one by one. As each ghoul reached the pair of night-gaunts to which
    he was assigned, he was taken up and borne away into the blackness; till at last the whole throng had
    vanished save for Carter, Pickman, and the other chiefs, and a few pairs of night-gaunts. Pickman
    explained that night-gaunts are the advance guard and battle steeds of the ghouls, and that the army was
    issuing forth to Sarkomand to deal with the moonbeasts. Then Carter and the ghoulish chiefs
    approached the waiting bearers and were taken up by the damp, slippery paws. Another moment and all
    were whirling in wind and darkness; endlessly up, up, up to the gate of the winged and the special ruins of
    primal Sarkomand.

    When, after a great interval, Carter saw again the sickly light of Sarkomand's nocturnal sky, it was to
    behold the great central plaza swarming with militant ghouls and night-gaunts. Day, he felt sure, must be
    almost due; but so strong was the army that no surprise of the enemy would be needed. The greenish
    flare near the wharves still glimmered faintly, though the absence of ghoulish meeping shewed that the
    torture of the prisoners was over for the nonce. Softly glibbering directions to their steeds and to the flock
    of riderless night-gaunts ahead, the ghouls presently rose in wide whirring columns and swept on over the
    bleak ruins toward the evil flame. Carter was now beside Pickman in the front rank of ghouls, and saw as
    they approached the noisome camp that the moonbeasts were totally unprepared. The three prisoners
    lay bound and inert beside the fire, while their toadlike captors slumped drowsily about in no certain order.
    The almost-human slaves were asleep, even the sentinels shirking a duty which in this realm must have
    seemed to them merely perfunctory.

    The final swoop of the night-gaunts and mounted ghouls was very sudden, each of the greyish toadlike
    blasphemies and their almost-human slaves being seized by a group of night-gaunts before a sound was
    made. The moonbeasts, of course, were voiceless; and even the slaves had little chance to scream
    before rubbery paws choked them into silence. Horrible were the writhings of those great jellyfish
    abnormalities as the sardonic night-gaunts clutched them, but nothing availed against the strength of
    those black prehensile talons. When a moonbeast writhed too violently, a night-gaunt would seize and pull
    its quivering pink tentacles; which seemed to hurt so much that the victim would cease its struggles.
    Carter expected to see much slaughter, but found that the ghouls were far subtler in their plans. They
    glibbered certain simple orders to the night-gaunts which held the captives, trusting the rest to instinct;
    and soon the hapless creatures were borne silently away into the Great Abyss, to be distributed
    impartially amongst the Dholes, Gugs, ghasts and other dwellers in darkness whose modes of
    nourishment are not painless to their chosen victims. Meanwhile the three bound ghouls had been
    released and consoled by their conquering kinsfolk, whilst various parties searched the neighborhood for
    possible remaining moonbeasts, and boarded the evil-smelling black galley at the wharf to make sure that
    nothing had escaped the general defeat. Surely enough, the capture had been thorough, for not a sign of
    further life could the victors detect. Carter, anxious to preserve a means of access to the rest of
    dreamland, urged them not to sink the anchored galley; and this request was freely granted out of
    gratitude for his act in reporting the plight of the captured trio. On the ship were found some very curious
    objects and decorations, some of which Carter cast at once into the sea.

    Ghouls and night-gaunts now formed themselves in separate groups, the former questioning their
    rescued fellow anent past happenings. It appeared that the three had followed Carter's directions and
    proceeded from the enchanted wood to Dylath-Leen by way of Nir and the Skin, stealing human clothes
    at a lonely farmhouse and loping as closely as possible in the fashion of a man's walk. In Dylath-Leen's
    taverns their grotesque ways and faces had aroused much comment; but they had persisted in asking
    the way to Sarkomand until at last an old traveller was able to tell them. Then they knew that only a ship
    for Lelag-Leng would serve their purpose, and prepared to wait patiently for such a vessel.

    But evil spies had doubtless reported much; for shortly a black galley put into port, and the wide-mouthed
    ruby merchants invited the ghouls to drink with them in a tavern. Wine was produced from one of those
    sinister bottles grotesquely carven from a single ruby, and after that the ghouls found themselves
    prisoners on the black galley as Carter had found himself. This time, however, the unseen rowers
    steered not for the moon but for antique Sarkomand; bent evidently on taking their captives before the
    High-Priest Not To Be Described. They had touched at the jagged rock in the northern sea which
    Inquanok's mariners shun, and the ghouls had there seen for the first time the red masters of the ship;
    being sickened despite their own callousness by such extremes of malign shapelessness and fearsome
    odour. There, too, were witnessed the nameless pastimes of the toadlike resident garrison-such
    pastimes as give rise to the night-howlings which men fear. After that had come the landing at ruined
    Sarkomand and the beginning of the tortures, whose continuance the present rescue had prevented.

    Future plans were next discussed, the three rescued ghouls suggesting a raid on the jagged rock and the
    extermination of the toadlike garrison there. To this, however, the night-gaunts objected; since the
    prospect of flying over water did not please them. Most of the ghouls favoured the design, but were at a
    loss how to follow it without the help of the winged night-gaunts. Thereupon Carter, seeing that they could
    not navigate the anchored galley, offered to teach them the use of the great banks of oars; to which
    proposal they eagerly assented. Grey day had now come, and under that leaden northern sky a picked
    detachment of ghouls filed into the noisome ship and took their seats on the rowers' benches. Carter
    found them fairly apt at learning, and before night had risked several experimental trips around the
    harbour. Not till three days later, however, did he deem it safe to attempt the voyage of conquest. Then,
    the rowers trained and the night-gaunts safely stowed in the forecastle, the party set sail at last; Pickman
    and the other chiefs gathering on deck and discussing models of approach and procedure.

    On the very first night the howlings from the rock were heard. Such was their timbre that all the galley's
    crew shook visibly; but most of all trembled the three rescued ghouls who knew precisely what those
    howlings meant. It was not thought best to attempt an attack by night, so the ship lay to under the
    phosphorescent clouds to wait for the dawn of a greyish day. when the light was ample and the howlings
    still the rowers resumed their strokes, and the galley drew closer and closer to that jagged rock whose
    granite pinnacles clawed fantastically at the dull sky. The sides of the rock were very steep; but on ledges
    here and there could be seen the bulging walls of queer windowless dwellings, and the low railings
    guarding travelled highroads. No ship of men had ever come so near the place, or at least, had never
    come so near and departed again; but Carter and the ghouls were void of fear and kept inflexibly on,
    rounding the eastern face of the rock and seeking the wharves which the rescued trio described as being
    on the southern side within a harbour formed of steep headlands.

    The headlands were prolongations of the island proper, and came so closely together that only one ship
    at a time might pass between them. There seemed to be no watchers on the outside, so the galley was
    steered boldly through the flume-like strait and into the stagnant putrid harbour beyond. Here, however, all
    was bustle and activity; with several ships lying at anchor along a forbidding stone quay, and scores of
    almost-human slaves and moonbeasts by the waterfront handling crates and boxes or driving nameless
    and fabulous horrors hitched to lumbering lorries. There was a small stone town hewn out of the vertical
    cliff above the wharves, with the start of a winding road that spiralled out of sight toward higher ledges of
    the rock. Of what lay inside that prodigious peak of granite none might say, but the things one saw on the
    outside were far from encouraging.

    At sight of the incoming galley the crowds on the wharves displayed much eagerness; those with eyes
    staring intently, and those without eyes wriggling their pink tentacles expectantly. They did not, of course,
    realize that the black ship had changed hands; for ghouls look much like the horned and hooved
    almost-humans, and the night-gaunts were all out of sight below. By this time the leaders had fully formed
    a plan; which was to loose the night-gaunts as soon as the wharf was touched, and then to sail directly
    away, leaving matters wholly to the instincts of those almost-mindless creatures. Marooned on the rock,
    the horned flyers would first of all seize whatever living things they found there, and afterward, quite
    helpless to think except in terms of the homing instinct, would forget their fears of water and fly swiftly
    back to the abyss; bearing their noisome prey to appropriate destinations in the dark, from which not
    much would emerge alive.

    The ghoul that was Pickman now went below and gave the night-gaunts their simple instructions, while the
    ship drew very near to the ominous and malodorous wharves. Presently a fresh stir rose along the
    waterfront, and Carter saw that the motions of the galley had begun to excite suspicion. Evidently the
    steersman was not making for the right dock, and probably the watchers had noticed the difference
    between the hideous ghouls and the almost-human slaves whose places they were taking. Some silent
    alarm must have been given, for almost at once a horde of the mephitic moonbeasts began to pour from
    the little black doorways of the windowless houses and down the winding road at the right. A rain of
    curious javelins struck the galley as the prow hit the wharf felling two ghouls and slightly wounding
    another; but at this point all the hatches were thrown open to emit a black cloud of whirring night-gaunts
    which swarmed over the town like a flock of horned and cyclopean bats.

    The jellyish moonbeasts had procured a great pole and were trying to push off the invading ship, but when
    the night-gaunts struck them they thought of such things no more. It was a very terrible spectacle to see
    those faceless and rubbery ticklers at their pastime, and tremendously impressive to watch the dense
    cloud of them spreading through the town and up the winding roadway to the reaches above. Sometimes
    a group of the black flutterers would drop a toadlike prisoner from aloft by mistake, and the manner in
    which the victim would burst was highly offensive to the sight and smell. When the last of the night-gaunts
    had left the galley the ghoulish leaders glibbered an order of withdrawal, and the rowers pulled quietly out
    of the harbour between the grey headlands while still the town was a chaos of battle and conquest.

    The Pickman ghoul allowed several hours for the night-gaunts to make up their rudimentary minds and
    overcome their fear of flying over the sea, and kept the galley standing about a mile off the jagged rock
    while he waited, and dressed the wounds of the injured men. Night fell, and the grey twilight gave place to
    the sickly phosphorescence of low clouds, and all the while the leaders watched the high peaks of that
    accursed rock for signs of the night-gaunts' flight. Toward morning a black speck was seen hovering
    timidly over the top-most pinnacle, and shortly afterward the speck had become a swarm. Just before
    daybreak the swarm seemed to scatter, and within a quarter of an hour it had vanished wholly in the
    distance toward the northeast. Once or twice something seemed to fall from the thing swarm into the sea;
    but Carter did not worry, since he knew from observation that the toadlike moonbeasts cannot swim. At
    length, when the ghouls were satisfied that all the night-gaunts had left for Sarkomand and the Great
    Abyss with their doomed burdens, the galley put back into the harbour betwixt the grey headlands; and all
    the hideous company landed and roamed curiously over the denuded rock with its towers and eyries and
    fortresses chiselled from the solid stone.

    Frightful were the secrets uncovered in those evil and windowless crypts; for the remnants of unfinished
    pastimes were many, and in various stages of departure from their primal state. Carter put out of the way
    certain things which were after a fashion alive, and fled precipitately from a few other things about which
    he could not be very positive. The stench-filled houses were furnished mostly with grotesque stools and
    benches carven from moon-trees, and were painted inside with nameless and frantic designs. Countless
    weapons, implements, and ornaments lay about, including some large idols of solid ruby depicting
    singular beings not found on the earth. These latter did not, despite their material, invite either
    appropriation or long inspection; and Carter took the trouble to hammer five of them into very small
    pieces. The scattered spears and javelins he collected, and with Pickman's approval distributed among
    the ghouls. Such devices were new to the doglike lopers, but their relative simplicity made them easy to
    master after a few concise hints.

    The upper parts of the rock held more temples than private homes, and in numerous hewn chambers
    were found terrible carven altars and doubtfully stained fonts and shrines for the worship of things more
    monstrous than the wild gods atop Kadath. From the rear of one great temple stretched a low black
    passage which Carter followed far into the rock with a torch till he came to a lightless domed hall of vast
    proportions, whose vaultings were covered with demoniac carvings and in whose centre yawned a foul
    and bottomless well like that in the hideous monastery of Leng where broods alone the High-Priest Not
    To Be Described. On the distant shadowy side, beyond the noisome well, he thought he discerned a
    small door of strangely wrought bronze; but for some reason he felt an unaccountable dread of opening it
    or even approaching it, and hastened back through the cavern to his unlovely allies as they shambled
    about with an ease and abandon he could scarcely feel. The ghouls had observed the unfinished
    pastimes of the moonbeasts, and had profited in their fashion. They had also found a hogshead of potent
    moon-wine, and were rolling it down to the wharves for removal and later use in diplomatic dealings,
    though the rescued trio, remembering its effect on them in Dylath-Leen, had warned their company to
    taste none of it. Of rubies from lunar mines there was a great store, both rough and polished, in one of
    the vaults near the water; but when the ghouls found they were not good to eat they lost all interest in
    them. Carter did not try to carry any away, since he knew too much about those which had mined them.

    Suddenly there came an excited meeping from the sentries on the wharves, and all the loathsome
    foragers turned from their tasks to stare seaward and cluster round the waterfront. Betwixt the grey
    headlands a fresh black galley was rapidly advancing, and it would be but a moment before the
    almost-humans on deck would perceive the invasion of the town and give the alarm to the monstrous
    things below. Fortunately the ghouls still bore the spears and javelins which Carter had distributed
    amongst them; and at his command, sustained by the being that was Pickman, they now formed a line of
    battle and prepared to prevent the landing of the ship. Presently a burst of excitement on the galley told of
    the crew's discovery of the changed state of things, and the instant stoppage of the vessel proved that
    the superior numbers of the ghouls had been noted and taken into account. After a moment of hesitation
    the new comers silently turned and passed out between the headlands again, but not for an instant did the
    ghouls imagine that the conflict was averted. Either the dark ship would seek reinforcements or the crew
    would try to land elsewhere on the island; hence a party of scouts was at once sent up toward the
    pinnacle to see what the enemy's course would be.

    In a very few minutes the ghoul returned breathless to say that the moonbeasts and almost-humans were
    landing on the outside of the more easterly of the rugged grey headlands, and ascending by hidden paths
    and ledges which a goat could scarcely tread in safety. Almost immediately afterward the galley was
    sighted again through the flume-like strait, but only for a second. Then a few moments later, a second
    messenger panted down from aloft to say that another party was landing on the other headland; both
    being much more numerous than the size of the galley would seem to allow for. The ship itself, moving
    slowly with only one sparsely manned tier of oars, soon hove in sight betwixt the cliffs, and lay to in the
    foetid harbour as if to watch the coming fray and stand by for any possible use.

    By this time Carter and Pickman had divided the ghouls into three parties, one to meet each of the two
    invading columns and one to remain in the town. The first two at once scrambled up the rocks in their
    respective directions, while the third was subdivided into a land party and a sea party. The sea party,
    commanded by Carter, boarded the anchored galley and rowed out to meet the under-manned galley of
    the newcomers; whereat the latter retreated through the strait to the open sea. Carter did not at once
    pursue it, for he knew he might be needed more acutely near the town.

    Meanwhile the frightful detachments of the moonbeasts and almost-humans had lumbered up to the top
    of the headlands and were shockingly silhouetted on either side against the grey twilight sky. The thin
    hellish flutes of the invaders had now begun to whine, and the general effect of those hybrid,
    half-amorphous processions was as nauseating as the actual odour given off by the toadlike lunar
    blasphemies. Then the two parties of the ghouls swarmed into sight and joined the silhouetted panorama.
    Javelins began to fly from both sides, and the swelling meeps of the ghouls and the bestial howls of the
    almost-humans gradually joined the hellish whine of the flutes to form a frantick and indescribable chaos
    of daemon cacophony. Now and then bodies fell from the narrow ridges of the headlands into the sea
    outside or the harbour inside, in the latter case being sucked quickly under by certain submarine lurkers
    whose presence was indicated only by prodigious bubbles.

    For half an hour this dual battle raged in the sky, till upon the west cliff the invaders were completely
    annihilated. On the east cliff, however, where the leader of the moonbeast party appeared to be present,
    the ghouls had not fared so well; and were slowly retreating to the slopes of the pinnacle proper. Pickman
    had quickly ordered reinforcements for this front from the party in the town, and these had helped greatly
    in the earlier stages of the combat. Then, when the western battle was over, the victorious survivors
    hastened across to the aid of their hard-pressed fellows; turning the tide and forcing the invaders back
    again along the narrow ridge of the headland. The almost-humans were by this time all slain, but the last
    of the toadlike horrors fought desperately with the great spears clutched in their powerful and disgusting
    paws. The time for javelins was now nearly past, and the fight became a hand-to-hand contest of what
    few spearmen could meet upon that narrow ridge.

    As fury and recklessness increased, the number falling into the sea became very great. Those striking
    the harbour met nameless extinction from the unseen bubblers, but of those striking the open sea some
    were able to swim to the foot of the cliffs and land on tidal rocks, while the hovering galley of the enemy
    rescued several moonbeasts. The cliffs were unscalable except where the monsters had debarked, so
    that none of the ghouls on the rocks could rejoin their battle-line. Some were killed by javelins from the
    hostile galley or from the moonbeasts above, but a few survived to be rescued. When the security of the
    land parties seemed assured, Carter's galley sallied forth between the headlands and drove the hostile
    ship far out to sea; pausing to rescue such ghouls as were on the rocks or still swimming in the ocean.
    Several moonbeasts washed on rocks or reefs were speedily put out of the way.

    Finally, the moonbeast galley being safely in the distance and the invading land army concentrated in one
    place, Carter landed a considerable force on the eastern headland in the enemy's rear; after which the
    fight was short-lived indeed. Attacked from both sides, the noisome flounderers were rapidly cut to
    pieces or pushed into the sea, till by evening the ghoulish chiefs agreed that the island was again clear of
    them. The hostile galley, meanwhile, had disappeared; and it was decided that the evil jagged rock had
    better be evacuated before any overwhelming horde of lunar horrors might be assembled and brought
    against the victors.

    So by night Pickman and Carter assembled all the ghouls and counted them with care, finding that over a
    fourth had been lost in the day's battles. The wounded were placed on bunks in the galley, for Pickman
    always discouraged the old ghoulish custom of killing and eating one's own wounded, and the able-bodied
    troops were assigned to the oars or to such other places as they might most usefully fill. Under the low
    phosphorescent clouds of night the galley sailed, and Carter was not sorry to be departing from the island
    of unwholesome secrets, whose lightless domed hall with its bottomless well and repellent bronze door
    lingered restlessly in his fancy. Dawn found the ship in sight of Sarkomand's ruined quays of basalt,
    where a few night-gaunt sentries still waited, squatting like black horned gargoyles on the broken columns
    and crumbling sphinxes of that fearful city which lived and died before the years of man.

    The ghouls made camp amongst the fallen stones of Sarkomand, despatching a messenger for enough
    night-gaunts to serve them as steeds. Pickman and the other chiefs were effusive in their gratitude for
    the aid Carter had lent them. Carter now began to feel that his plans were indeed maturing well, and that
    he would be able to command the help of these fearsome allies not only in quitting this part of dreamland,
    but in pursuing his ultimate quest for the gods atop unknown Kadath, and the marvellous sunset city they
    so strangely withheld from his slumbers. Accordingly he spoke of these things to the ghoulish leaders;
    telling what he knew of the cold waste wherein Kadath stands and of the monstrous Shantaks and the
    mountains carven into double-headed images which guard it. He spoke of the fear of Shantaks for
    night-gaunts, and of how the vast hippocephalic birds fly screaming from the black burrows high up on the
    gaunt grey peaks that divide Inquanok from hateful Leng. He spoke, too, of the things he had learned
    concerning night-gaunts from the frescoes in the windowless monastery of the High-Priest Not To Be
    Described; how even the Great Ones fear them, and how their ruler is not the crawling chaos
    Nyarlathotep at all, but hoary and immemorial Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss.

    All these things Carter glibbered to the assembled ghouls, and presently outlined that request which he
    had in mind and which he did not think extravagant considering the services he had so lately rendered the
    rubbery doglike lopers. He wished very much, he said, for the services of enough night-gaunts to bear
    him safely through the aft past the realm of Shantaks and carven mountains, and up into the old waste
    beyond the returning tracks of any other mortal. He desired to fly to the onyx castle atop unknown Kadath
    in the cold waste to plead with the Great Ones for the sunset city they denied him, and felt sure that the
    night-gaunts could take him thither without trouble; high above the perils of the plain, and over the hideous
    double heads of those carven sentinel mountains that squat eternally in the grey dusk. For the horned
    and faceless creatures there could be no danger from aught of earth since the Great Ones themselves
    dread them. And even were unexpected things to come from the Other Gods, who are prone to oversee
    the affairs of earth's milder gods, the night-gaunts need not fear; for the outer hells are indifferent
    matters to such silent and slippery flyers as own not Nyarlathotep for their master, but bow only to potent
    and archaic Nodens.

    A flock of ten or fifteen night-gaunts, Carter glibbered, would surely be enough to keep any combination
    of Shantaks at a distance, though perhaps it might be well to have some ghouls in the party to manage
    the creatures, their ways being better known to their ghoulish allies than to men. The party could land him
    at some convenient point within whatever walls that fabulous onyx citadel might have, waiting in the
    shadows for his return or his signal whilst he ventured inside the castle to give prayer to the gods of
    earth. If any ghouls chose to escort him into the throne-room of the Great Ones, he would be thankful, for
    their presence would add weight and importance to his plea. He would not, however, insist upon this but
    merely wished transportation to and from the castle atop unknown Kadath; the final journey being either
    to the marvellous sunset city itself, in case of gods proved favourable, or back to the earthward Gate of
    Deeper Slumber in the Enchanted Wood in case his prayers were fruitless.

    Whilst Carter was speaking all the ghouls listened with great attention, and as the moments advanced the
    sky became black with clouds of those night-gaunts for which messengers had been sent. The winged
    steeds settled in a semicircle around the ghoulish army, waiting respectfully as the doglike chieftains
    considered the wish of the earthly traveller. The ghoul that was Pickman glibbered gravely with his fellows
    and in the end Carter was offered far more than he had at most expected. As he had aided the ghouls in
    their conquest of the moonbeasts, so would they aid him in his daring voyage to realms whence none had
    ever returned; lending him not merely a few of their allied night-gaunts, but their entire army as then
    encamped, veteran fighting ghouls and newly assembled night-gaunts alike, save only a small garrison for
    the captured black galley and such spoils as had come from the jagged rock in the sea. They would set
    out through the aft whenever he might wish, and once arrived on Kadath a suitable train of ghouls would
    attend him in state as he placed his petition before earth's gods in their onyx castle.

    Moved by a gratitude and satisfaction beyond words, Carter made plans with the ghoulish leaders for his
    audacious voyage. The army would fly high, they decided, over hideous Leng with its nameless
    monastery and wicked stone villages; stopping only at the vast grey peaks to confer with the
    Shantak-frightening night-gaunts whose burrows honeycombed their summits. They would then,
    according to what advice they might receive from those denizens, choose their final course; approaching
    unknown Kadath either through the desert of carven mountains north of Inquanok, or through the more
    northerly reaches of repulsive Leng itself. Doglike and soulless as they are, the ghouls and night-gaunts
    had no dread of what those untrodden deserts might reveal; nor did they feel any deterring awe at the
    thought of Kadath towering lone with its onyx castle of mystery.

    About midday the ghouls and night-gaunts prepared for flight, each ghoul selecting a suitable pair of
    horned steeds to bear him. Carter was placed well up toward the head of the column beside Pickman,
    and in front of the whole a double line of riderless night-gaunts was provided as a vanguard. At a brisk
    meep from Pickman the whole shocking army rose in a nightmare cloud above the broken columns and
    crumbling sphinxes of primordial Sarkomand; higher and higher, till even the great basalt cliff behind the
    town was cleared, and the cold, sterile table-land of Leng's outskirts laid open to sight. Still higher flew the
    black host, till even this table-land grew small beneath them; and as they worked northward over the
    wind-swept plateau of horror Carter saw once again with a shudder the circle of crude monoliths and the
    squat windowless building which he knew held that frightful silken-masked blasphemy from whose
    clutches he had so narrowly escaped. This time no descent was made as the army swept batlike over the
    sterile landscape, passing the feeble fires of the unwholesome stone villages at a great altitude, and
    pausing not at all to mark the morbid twistings of the hooved, horned almost-humans that dance and pipe
    eternally therein. Once they saw a Shantak-bird flying low over the plain, but when it saw them it
    screamed noxiously and flapped off to the north in grotesque panic.

    At dusk they reached the jagged grey peaks that form the barrier of Inquanok, and hovered about these
    strange caves near the summits which Carter recalled as so frightful to the Shantaks. At the insistent
    meeping of the ghoulish leaders there issued forth from each lofty burrow a stream of horned black flyers
    with which the ghouls and night-gaunts of the party conferred at length by means of ugly gestures. It soon
    became clear that the best course would be that over the cold waste north of Inquanok, for Leng's
    northward reaches are full of unseen pitfalls that even the night-gaunts dislike; abysmal influences
    centering in certain white hemispherical buildings on curious knolls, which common folklore associates
    unpleasantly with the Other Gods and their crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.

    Of Kadath the flutterers of the peaks knew almost nothing, save that there must be some mighty marvel
    toward the north, over which the Shantaks and the carven mountains stand guard. They hinted at
    rumoured abnormalities of proportion in those trackless leagues beyond, and recalled vague whispers of
    a realm where night broods eternally; but of definite data they had nothing to give. So Carter and his party
    thanked them kindly; and, crossing the topmost granite pinnacles to the skies of Inquanok, dropped below
    the level of the phosphorescent night clouds and beheld in the distance those terrible squatting gargoyles
    that were mountains till some titan hand carved fright into their virgin rock.

    There they squatted in a hellish half-circle, their legs on the desert sand and their mitres piercing the
    luminous clouds; sinister, wolflike, and double-headed, with faces of fury and right hands raised, dully and
    malignly watching the rim of man's world and guarding with horror the reaches of a cold northern world
    that is not man's. From their hideous laps rose evil Shantaks of elephantine bulk, but these all fled with
    insane titters as the vanguard of night-gaunts was sighted in the misty sky. Northward above those
    gargoyle mountains the army flew, and over leagues of dim desert where never a landmark rose. Less
    and less luminous grew the clouds, till at length Carter could see only blackness around him; but never did
    the winged steeds falter, bred as they were in earth's blackest crypts, and seeing not with any eyes, but
    with the whole dank surface of their slippery forms. On and on they flew, past winds of dubious scent and
    sounds of dubious import; ever in thickest darkness, and covering such prodigious spaces that Carter
    wondered whether or not they could still be within earth's dreamland.

    Then suddenly the clouds thinned and the stars shone spectrally above. All below was still black, but
    those pallid beacons in the sky seemed alive with a meaning and directiveness they had never
    possessed elsewhere. It was not that the figures of the constellations were different, but that the same
    familiar shapes now revealed a significance they had formerly failed to make plain. Everything focussed
    toward the north; every curve and asterism of the glittering sky became part of a vast design whose
    function was to hurry first the eye and then the whole observer onward to some secret and terrible goal
    of convergence beyond the frozen waste that stretched endlessly ahead. Carter looked toward the east
    where the great ridge of barrier peaks had towered along all the length of Inquanok and saw against the
    stars a jagged silhouette which told of its continued presence. It was more broken now, with yawning
    clefts and fantastically erratic pinnacles; and Carter studied closely the suggestive turnings and
    inclinations of that grotesque outline, which seemed to share with the stars some subtle northward urge.

    They were flying past at a tremendous speed, so that the watcher had to strain hard to catch details;
    when all at once he beheld just above the line of the topmost peaks a dark and moving object against the
    stars, whose course exactly paralleled that of his own bizarre party. The ghouls had likewise glimpsed it,
    for he heard their low glibbering all about him, and for a moment he fancied the object was a gigantic
    Shantak, of a size vastly greater than that of the average specimen. Soon, however, he saw that this
    theory would not hold; for the shape of the thing above the mountains was not that of any hippocephalic
    bird. Its outline against the stars, necessarily vague as it was, resembled rather some huge mitred head,
    or pair of heads infinitely magnified; and its rapid bobbing flight through the sky seemed most peculiarly a
    wingless one. Carter could not tell which side of the mountains it was on, but soon perceived that it had
    parts below the parts he had first seen, since it blotted out all the stars in places where the ridge was
    deeply cleft.

    Then came a wide gap in the range, where the hideous reaches of transmontane Leng were joined to the
    cold waste on this side by a low pass trough which the stars shone wanly. Carter watched this gap with
    intense care, knowing that he might see outlined against the sky beyond it the lower parts of the vast thing
    that flew undulantly above the pinnacles. The object had now floated ahead a trifle, and every eye of the
    party was fixed on the rift where it would presently appear in full-length silhouette. Gradually the huge
    thing above the peaks neared the gap, slightly slackening its speed as if conscious of having
    outdistanced the ghoulish army. For another minute suspense was keen, and then the brief instant of full
    silhouette and revelation came; bringing to the lips of the ghouls an awed and half-choked meep of
    cosmic fear, and to the soul of the traveller a chill that never wholly left it. For the mammoth bobbing
    shape that overtopped the ridge was only a head - a mitred double head - and below it in terrible vastness
    loped the frightful swollen body that bore it; the mountain-high monstrosity that walked in stealth and
    silence; the hyaena-like distortion of a giant anthropoid shape that trotted blackly against the sky, its
    repulsive pair of cone-capped heads reaching half way to the zenith.

    Carter did not lose consciousness or even scream aloud, for he was an old dreamer; but he looked
    behind him in horror and shuddered when he saw that there were other monstrous heads silhouetted
    above the level of the peaks, bobbing along stealthily after the first one. And straight in the rear were
    three of the mighty mountain shapes seen full against the southern stars, tiptoeing wolflike and
    lumberingly, their tall mitres nodding thousands of feet in the aft. The carven mountains, then, had not
    stayed squatting in that rigid semicircle north of Inquanok, with right hands uplifted. They had duties to
    perform, and were not remiss. But it was horrible that they never spoke, and never even made a sound in
    walking.

    Meanwhile the ghoul that was Pickman had glibbered an order to the night-gaunts, and the whole army
    soared higher into the air. Up toward the stars the grotesque column shot, till nothing stood out any longer
    against the sky; neither the grey granite ridge that was still nor the carven mitred mountains that walked.
    All was blackness beneath as the fluttering legion surged northward amidst rushing winds and invisible
    laughter in the aether, and never a Shantak or less mentionable entity rose from the haunted wastes to
    pursue them. The farther they went, the faster they flew, till soon their dizzying speed seemed to pass
    that of a rifle ball and approach that of a planet in its orbit. Carter wondered how with such speed the
    earth could still stretch beneath them, but knew that in the land of dream dimensions have strange
    properties. That they were in a realm of eternal night he felt certain, and he fancied that the constellations
    overhead had subtly emphasized their northward focus; gathering themselves up as it were to cast the
    flying army into the void of the boreal pole, as the folds of a bag are gathered up to cast out the last bits
    of substance therein.

    Then he noticed with terror that the wings of the night-gaunts were not flapping any more. The horned and
    faceless steeds had folded their membranous appendages, and were resting quite passive in the chaos
    of wind that whirled and chuckled as it bore them on. A force not of earth had seized on the army, and
    ghouls and night-gaunts alike were powerless before a current which pulled madly and relentlessly into
    the north whence no mortal had ever returned. At length a lone pallid light was seen on the skyline ahead,
    thereafter rising steadily as they approached, and having beneath it a black mass that blotted out the
    stars. Carter saw that it must be some beacon on a mountain, for only a mountain could rise so vast as
    seen from so prodigious a height in the air.

    Higher and higher rose the light and the blackness beneath it, till all the northern sky was obscured by the
    rugged conical mass. Lofty as the army was, that pale and sinister beacon rose above it, towering
    monstrous over all peaks and concernments of earth, and tasting the atomless aether where the cryptical
    moon and the mad planets reel. No mountain known of man was that which loomed before them. The high
    clouds far below were but a fringe for its foothills. The groping dizziness of topmost air was but a girdle
    for its loins. Scornful and spectral climbed that bridge betwixt earth and heaven, black in eternal night, and
    crowned with a pshent of unknown stars whose awful and significant outline grew every moment clearer.
    Ghouls meeped in wonder as they saw it, and Carter shivered in fear lest all the hurtling army be dashed
    to pieces on the unyielding onyx of that cyclopean cliff.

    Higher and higher rose the light, till it mingled with the loftiest orbs of the zenith and winked down at the
    flyers with lurid mockery. All the north beneath it was blackness now; dread, stony blackness from infinite
    depths to infinite heights, with only that pale winking beacon perched unreachably at the top of all vision.
    Carter studied the light more closely, and saw at last what lines its inky background made against the
    stars. There were towers on that titan mountaintop; horrible domed towers in noxious and incalculable
    tiers and clusters beyond any dreamable workmanship of man; battlements and terraces of wonder and
    menace, all limned tiny and black and distant against the starry pshent that glowed malevolently at the
    uppermost rim of sight. Capping that most measureless of mountains was a castle beyond all mortal
    thought, and in it glowed the daemon-light. Then Randolph Carter knew that his quest was done, and that
    he saw above him the goal of all forbidden steps and audacious visions; the fabulous, the incredible
    home of the Great Ones atop unknown Kadath.

    Even as he realised this thing, Carter noticed a change in the course of the helplessly wind-sucked party.
    They were rising abruptly now, and it was plain that the focus of their flight was the onyx castle where the
    pale light shone. So close was the great black mountain that its sides sped by them dizzily as they shot
    upward, and in the darkness they could discern nothing upon it. Vaster and vaster loomed the tenebrous
    towers of the nighted castle above, and Carter could see that it was well-nigh blasphemous in its
    immensity. Well might its stones have been quarried by nameless workmen in that horrible gulf rent out of
    the rock in the hill pass north of Inquanok, for such was its size that a man on its threshold stood even as
    air out on the steps of earth's loftiest fortress. The pshent of unknown stars above the myriad domed
    turrets glowed with a sallow, sickly flare, so that a kind of twilight hung about the murky walls of slippery
    onyx. The pallid beacon was now seen to be a single shining window high up in one of the loftiest towers,
    and as the helpless army neared the top of the mountain Carter thought he detected unpleasant shadows
    flitting across the feebly luminous expanse. It was a strangely arched window, of a design wholly alien to
    earth.

    The solid rock now gave place to the giant foundations of the monstrous castle, and it seemed that the
    speed of the party was somewhat abated. Vast walls shot up, and there was a glimpse of a great gate
    through which the voyagers were swept. All was night in the titan courtyard, and then came the deeper
    blackness of inmost things as a huge arched portal engulfed the column. Vortices of cold wind surged
    dankly through sightless labyrinths of onyx, and Carter could never tell what Cyclopean stairs and
    corridors lay silent along the route of his endless aerial twisting. Always upward led the terrible plunge in
    darkness, and never a sound, touch or glimpse broke the dense pall of mystery. Large as the army of
    ghouls and night-gaunts was, it was lost in the prodigious voids of that more than earthly castle. And when
    at last there suddenly dawned around him the lurid light of that single tower room whose lofty window had
    served as a beacon, it took Carter long to discern the far walls and high, distant ceiling, and to realize
    that he was indeed not again in the boundless air outside.

    Randolph Carter had hoped to come into the throne-room of the Great Ones with poise and dignity,
    flanked and followed by impressive lines of ghouls in ceremonial order, and offering his prayer as a free
    and potent master among dreamers. He had known that the Great Ones themselves are not beyond a
    mortal's power to cope with, and had trusted to luck that the Other Gods and their crawling chaos
    Nyarlathotep would not happen to come to their aid at the crucial moment, as they had so often done
    before when men sought out earth's gods in their home or on their mountains. And with his hideous
    escort he had half hoped to defy even the Other Gods if need were, knowing as he did that ghouls have
    no masters, and that night-gaunts own not Nyarlathotep but only archaic Nodens for their lord. But now
    he saw that supernal Kadath in its cold waste is indeed girt with dark wonders and nameless sentinels,
    and that the Other Gods are of a surety vigilant in guarding the mild, feeble gods of earth. Void as they
    are of lordship over ghouls and night-gaunts, the mindless, shapeless blasphemies of outer space can
    yet control them when they must; so that it was not in state as a free and potent master of dreamers that
    Randolph Carter came into the Great Ones' throne-room with his ghouls. Swept and herded by nightmare
    tempests from the stars, and dogged by unseen horrors of the northern waste, all that army floated
    captive and helpless in the lurid light, dropping numbly to the onyx floor when by some voiceless order the
    winds of fright dissolved.

    Before no golden dais had Randolph Carter come, nor was there any august circle of crowned and
    haloed beings with narrow eyes, long-lobed ears, thin nose, and pointed chin whose kinship to the carven
    face on Ngranek might stamp them as those to whom a dreamer might pray. Save for the one tower
    room the onyx castle atop Kadath was dark, and the masters were not there. Carter had come to
    unknown Kadath in the cold waste, but he had not found the gods. Yet still the lurid light glowed in that one
    tower room whose size was so little less than that of all outdoors, and whose distant walls and roof were
    so nearly lost to sight in thin, curling mists. Earth's gods were not there, it was true, but of subtler and less
    visible presences there could be no lack. Where the mild gods are absent, the Other Gods are not
    unrepresented; and certainly, the onyx castle of castles was far from tenantless. In what outrageous form
    or forms terror would next reveal itself Carter could by no means imagine. He felt that his visit had been
    expected, and wondered how close a watch had all along been kept upon him by the crawling chaos
    Nyarlathotep. It is Nyarlathotep, horror of infinite shapes and dread soul and messenger of the Other
    Gods, that the fungous moonbeasts serve; and Carter thought of the black galley that had vanished when
    the tide of battle turned against the toadlike abnormalities on the jagged rock in the sea.

    Reflecting upon these things, he was staggering to his feet in the midst of his nightmare company when
    there rang without warning through that pale-litten and limitless chamber the hideous blast of a daemon
    trumpet. Three times pealed that frightful brazen scream, and when the echoes of the third blast had died
    chucklingly away Randolph Carter saw that he was alone. Whither, why and how the ghouls and
    night-gaunts had been snatched from sight was not for him to divine. He knew only that he was suddenly
    alone, and that whatever unseen powers lurked mockingly around him were no powers of earth's friendly
    dreamland. Presently from the chamber's uttermost reaches a new sound came. This, too, was a
    rhythmic trumpeting; but of a kind far removed from the three raucous blasts which had dissolved his
    goodly cohorts. In this low fanfare echoed all the wonder and melody of ethereal dream; exotic vistas of
    unimagined loveliness floating from each strange chord and subtly alien cadence. Odours of incense
    came to match the golden notes; and overhead a great light dawned, its colours changing in cycles
    unknown to earth's spectrum, and following the song of the trumpets in weird symphonic harmonies.
    Torches flared in the distance, and the beat of drums throbbed nearer amidst waves of tense
    expectancy.

    Out of the thinning mists and the cloud of strange incenses filed twin columns of giant black slaves with
    loin-cloths of iridescent silk. Upon their heads were strapped vast helmet-like torches of glittering metal,
    from which the fragrance of obscure balsams spread in fumous spirals. In their right hands were crystal
    wands whose tips were carven into leering chimaeras, while their left hands grasped long thin silver
    trumpets which they blew in turn. Armlets and anklets of gold they had, and between each pair of anklets
    stretched a golden chain that held its wearer to a sober gait. That they were true black men of earth's
    dreamland was at once apparent, but it seemed less likely that their rites and costumes were wholly
    things of our earth. Ten feet from Carter the columns stopped, and as they did so each trumpet flew
    abruptly to its bearer's thick lips. Wild and ecstatic was the blast that followed, and wilder still the cry that
    chorused just after from dark throats somehow made shrill by strange artifice.

    Then down the wide lane betwixt the two columns a lone figure strode; a tall, slim figure with the young
    face of an antique Pharaoh, gay with prismatic robes and crowned with a golden pshent that glowed with
    inherent light. Close up to Carter strode that regal figure; whose proud carriage and smart features had
    in them the fascination of a dark god or fallen archangel, and around whose eyes there lurked the languid
    sparkle of capricious humour. It spoke, and in its mellow tones there rippled the wild music of Lethean
    streams.

    "Randolph Carter," said the voice, "you have come to see the Great Ones whom it is unlawful for men to
    see. Watchers have spoken of this thing, and the Other Gods have grunted as they rolled and tumbled
    mindlessly to the sound of thin flutes in the black ultimate void where broods the daemon-sultan whose
    name no lips dare speak aloud.

    "When Barzai the Wise climbed Hatheg-Kia to see the Greater Ones dance and howl above the clouds
    in the moonlight he never returned. The Other Gods were there, and they did what was expected. Zenig
    of Aphorat sought to reach unknown Kadath in the cold waste, and his skull is now set in a ring on the little
    finger of one whom I need not name.

    "But you, Randolph Carter, have braved all things of earth's dreamland, and burn still with the flame of
    quest. You came not as one curious, but as one seeking his due, nor have you failed ever in reverence
    toward the mild gods of earth. Yet have these gods kept you from the marvellous sunset city of your
    dreams, and wholly through their own small covetousness; for verily, they craved the weird loveliness of
    that which your fancy had fashioned, and vowed that henceforward no other spot should be their abode.

    "They are gone from their castle on unknown Kadath to dwell in your marvellous city. All through its
    palaces of veined marble they revel by day, and when the sun sets they go out in the perfumed gardens
    and watch the golden glory on temples and colonnades, arched bridges and silver-basined fountains, and
    wide streets with blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows. And when night comes they
    climb tall terraces in the dew, and sit on carved benches of porphyry scanning the stars, or lean over pale
    balustrades to gaze at the town's steep northward slopes, where one by one the little windows in old
    peaked gables shine softly out with the calm yellow light of homely candles.

    "The gods love your marvellous city, and walk no more in the ways of the gods. They have forgotten the
    high places of earth, and the mountains that knew their youth. The earth has no longer any gods that are
    gods, and only the Other Ones from outer space hold sway on unremembered Kadath. Far away in a
    valley of your own childhood, Randolph Carter, play the heedless Great Ones. You have dreamed too
    well, O wise arch-dreamer, for you have drawn dream's gods away from the world of all men's visions to
    that which is wholly yours; having builded out of your boyhood's small fancies a city more lovely than all
    the phantoms that have gone before.

    "It is not well that earth's gods leave their thrones for the spider to spin on, and their realm for the Others
    to sway in the dark manner of Others. Fain would the powers from outside bring chaos and horror to you,
    Randolph Carter, who are the cause of their upsetting, but that they know it is by you alone that the gods
    may be sent back to their world. In that half-waking dreamland which is yours, no power of uttermost night
    may pursue; and only you can send the selfish Great Ones gently out of your marvellous sunset city,
    back through the northern twilight to their wonted place atop unknown Kadath in the cold waste.

    "So. Randolph Carter, in the name of the Other Gods I spare you and charge you to seek that sunset city
    which is yours, and to send thence the drowsy truant gods for whom the dream world waits. Not hard to
    find is that roseal fever of the gods, that fanfare of supernal trumpets and clash of immortal cymbals, that
    mystery whose place and meaning have haunted you through the halls of waking and the gulfs of
    dreaming, and tormented you with hints of vanished memory and the pain of lost things awesome and
    momentous. Not hard to find is that symbol and relic of your days of wonder, for truly, it is but the stable
    and eternal gem wherein all that wonder sparkles crystallised to light your evening path. Behold! It is not
    over unknown seas but back over well-known years that your quest must go; back to the bright strange
    things of infancy and the quick sun-drenched glimpses of magic that old scenes brought to wide young
    eyes.

    "For know you, that your gold and marble city of wonder is only the sum of what you have seen and loved
    in youth. It is the glory of Boston's hillside roofs and western windows aflame with sunset, of the
    flower-fragrant Common and the great dome on the hill and the tangle of gables and chimneys in the
    violet valley where the many-bridged Charles flows drowsily. These things you saw, Randolph Carter,
    when your nurse first wheeled you out in the springtime, and they will be the last things you will ever see
    with eyes of memory and of love. And there is antique Salem with its brooding years, and spectral
    Marblehead scaling its rocky precipices into past centuries! And the glory of Salem's towers and spires
    seen afar from Marblehead's pastures across the harbour against the setting sun.

    "There is Providence quaint and lordly on its seven hills over the blue harbour, with terraces of green
    leading up to steeples and citadels of living antiquity, and Newport climbing wraithlike from its dreaming
    breakwater. Arkham is there, with its moss-grown gambrel roofs and the rocky rolling meadows behind it;
    and antediluvian Kingsport hoary with stacked chimneys and deserted quays and overhanging gables,
    and the marvel of high cliffs and the milky-misted ocean with tolling buoys beyond.

    "Cool vales in Concord, cobbled lands in Portsmouth, twilight bends of rustic New Hampshire roads
    where giant elms half hide white farmhouse walls and creaking well-sweeps. Gloucester's salt wharves
    and Truro's windy willows. Vistas of distant steepled towns and hills beyond hills along the North Shore,
    hushed stony slopes and low ivied cottages in the lee of huge boulders in Rhode Island's back country.
    Scent of the sea and fragrance of the fields; spell of the dark woods and joy of the orchards and gardens
    at dawn. These, Randolph Carter, are your city; for they are yourself. New England bore you, and into
    your soul she poured a liquid loveliness which cannot die. This loveliness, moulded, crystallised, and
    polished by years of memory and dreaming, is your terraced wonder of elusive sunsets; and to find that
    marble parapet with curious urns and carven rail, and descend at last these endless balustraded steps to
    the city of broad squares and prismatic fountains, you need only to turn back to the thoughts and visions
    of your wistful boyhood.

    "Look! through that window shine the stars of eternal night. Even now they are shining above the scenes
    you have known and cherished, drinking of their charm that they may shine more lovely over the gardens
    of dream. There is Antares-he is winking at this moment over the roofs of Tremont Street, and you could
    see him from your window on Beacon Hill. Out beyond those stars yawn the gulfs from whence my
    mindless masters have sent me. Some day you too may traverse them, but if you are wise you will
    beware such folly; for of those mortals who have been and returned, only one preserves a mind
    unshattered by the pounding, clawing horrors of the void. Terrors and blasphemies gnaw at one another
    for space, and there is more evil in the lesser ones than in the greater; even as you know from the deeds
    of those who sought to deliver you into my hands, whilst I myself harboured no wish to shatter you, and
    would indeed have helped you hither long ago had I not been elsewhere busy,and certain that you would
    yourself find the way. Shun then, the outer hells, and stick to the calm, lovely things of your youth. Seek
    out your marvellous city and drive thence the recreant Great Ones, sending them back gently to those
    scenes which are of their own youth, and which wait uneasy for their return.

    "Easier even then the way of dim memory is the way I will prepare for you. See! There comes hither a
    monstrous Shantak, led by a slave who for your peace of mind had best keep invisible. Mount and be
    ready - there! Yogash the Black will help you on the scaly horror. Steer for that brightest star just south of
    the zenith - it is Vega, and in two hours will be just above the terrace of your sunset city. Steer for it only
    till you hear a far-off singing in the high aether. Higher than that lurks madness, so rein your Shantak
    when the first note lures. Look then back to earth, and you will see shining the deathless altar-flame of
    Ired-Naa from the sacred roof of a temple. That temple is in your desiderate sunset city, so steer for it
    before you heed the singing and are lost.

    "When you draw nigh the city steer for the same high parapet whence of old you scanned the outspread
    glory, prodding the Shantak till he cry aloud. That cry the Great Ones will hear and know as they sit on
    their perfumed terraces, and there will come upon them such a homesickness that all of your city's
    wonders will not console them for the absence of Kadath's grim castle and the pshent of eternal stars
    that crowns it.

    "Then must you land amongst them with the Shantak, and let them see and touch that noisome and
    hippocephalic bird; meanwhile discoursing to them of unknown Kadath, which you will so lately have left,
    and telling them how its boundless halls are lovely and unlighted, where of old they used to leap and revel
    in supernal radiance. And the Shantak will talk to them in the manner of Shantaks, but it will have no
    powers of persuasion beyond the recalling of elder days.

    "Over and over must you speak to the wandering Great Ones of their home and youth, till at last they will
    weep and ask to be shewn the returning path they have forgotten. Thereat can you loose the waiting
    Shantak, sending him skyward with the homing cry of his kind; hearing which the Great Ones will prance
    and jump with antique mirth, and forthwith stride after the loathly bird in the fashion of gods, through the
    deep gulfs of heaven to Kadath's familiar towers and domes.

    "Then will the marvellous sunset city be yours to cherish and inhabit for ever, and once more will earth's
    gods rule the dreams of men from their accustomed seat. Go now - the casement is open and the stars
    await outside. Already your Shantak wheezes and titters with impatience. Steer for Vega through the
    night, but turn when the singing sounds. Forget not this warning, lest horrors unthinkable suck you into the
    gulf of shrieking and ululant madness. Remember the Other Gods; they are great and mindless and
    terrible, and lurk in the outer voids. They are good gods to shun.

    "Hei! Aa-shanta 'nygh! You are off! Send back earth's gods to their haunts on unknown Kadath, and pray
    to all space that you may never meet me in my thousand other forms. Farewell, Randolph Carter, and
    beware; for I am Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos."

    And Randolph Carter, gasping and dizzy on his hideous Shantak, shot screamingly into space toward the
    cold blue glare of boreal Vega; looking but once behind him at the clustered and chaotic turrets of the
    onyx nightmare wherein still glowed the lone lurid light of that window above the air and the clouds of
    earth's dreamland. Great polypous horrors slid darkly past, and unseen bat wings beat multitudinous
    around him, but still he clung to the unwholesome mane of that loathly and hippocephalic scaled bird. The
    stars danced mockingly, almost shifting now and then to form pale signs of doom that one might wonder
    one had not seen and feared before; and ever the winds of nether howled of vague blackness and
    loneliness beyond the cosmos.

    Then through the glittering vault ahead there fell a hush of portent, and all the winds and horrors slunk
    away as night things slink away before the dawn. Trembling in waves that golden wisps of nebula made
    weirdly visible, there rose a timid hint of far-off melody, droning in faint chords that our own universe of
    stars knows not. And as that music grew, the Shantak raised its ears and plunged ahead, and Carter
    likewise bent to catch each lovely strain. It was a song, but not the song of any voice. Night and the
    spheres sang it, and it was old when space and Nyarlathotep and the Other Gods were born.

    Faster flew the Shantak, and lower bent the rider, drunk with the marvel of strange gulfs, and whirling in
    the crystal coils of outer magic. Then came too late the warning of the evil one, the sardonic caution of
    the daemon legate who had bidden the seeker beware the madness of that song. Only to taunt had
    Nyarlathotep marked out the way to safety and the marvellous sunset city; only to mock had that black
    messenger revealed the secret of these truant gods whose steps he could so easily lead back at will. For
    madness and the void's wild vengeance are Nyarlathotep's only gifts to the presumptuous; and frantick
    though the rider strove to turn his disgusting steed, that leering, tittering Shantak coursed on impetuous
    and relentless, flapping its great slippery wings in malignant joy and headed for those unhallowed pits
    whither no dreams reach; that last amorphous blight of nether-most confusion where bubbles and
    blasphemes at infinity's centre the mindless daemon-sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak
    aloud.

    Unswerving and obedient to the foul legate's orders, that hellish bird plunged onward through shoals of
    shapeless lurkers and caperers in darkness, and vacuous herds of drifting entities that pawed and
    groped and groped and pawed; the nameless larvae of the Other Gods, that are like them blind and
    without mind, and possessed of singular hungers and thirsts

    Onward unswerving and relentless, and tittering hilariously to watch the chuckling and hysterics into which
    the risen song of night and the spheres had turned, that eldritch scaly monster bore its helpless rider;
    hurtling and shooting, cleaving the uttermost rim and spanning the outermost abysses; leaving behind the
    stars and the realms of matter, and darting meteor-like through stark formlessness toward those
    inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time wherein Azathoth gnaws shapeless and ravenous amidst
    the muffled, maddening beat of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes.

    Onward - onward - through the screaming, cackling, and blackly populous gulfs - and then from some dim
    blessed distance there came an image and a thought to Randolph Carter the doomed. Too well had
    Nyarlathotep planned his mocking and his tantalising, for he had brought up that which no gusts of icy
    terror could quite efface. Home - New England - Beacon Hill - the waking world.

    "For know you, that your gold and marble city of wonder is only the sum of what you have seen and loved
    in youth... the glory of Boston's hillside roofs and western windows aflame with sunset; of the
    flower-fragrant Common and the great dome on the hill and the tangle of gables and chimneys in the
    violet valley where the many-bridged Charles flows drowsily... this loveliness, moulded, crystallised, and
    polished by years of memory and dreaming, is your terraced wonder of elusive sunsets; and to find that
    marble parapet with curious urns and carven rail, and descend at last those endless balustraded steps to
    the city of broad squares and prismatic fountains, you need only to turn back to the thoughts and visions
    of your wistful boyhood."

    Onward - onward - dizzily onward to ultimate doom through the blackness where sightless feelers pawed
    and slimy snouts jostled and nameless things tittered and tittered and tittered. But the image and the
    thought had come, and Randolph Carter knew clearly that he was dreaming and only dreaming, and that
    somewhere in the background the world of waking and the city of his infancy still lay. Words came again -
    "You need only turn back to the thoughts and visions of your wistful boyhood." Turn - turn - blackness on
    every side, but Randolph Carter could turn.

    Thick though the rushing nightmare that clutched his senses, Randolph Carter could turn and move. He
    could move, and if he chose he could leap off the evil Shantak that bore him hurtlingly doomward at the
    orders of Nyarlathotep. He could leap off and dare those depths of night that yawned interminably down,
    those depths of fear whose terrors yet could not exceed the nameless doom that lurked waiting at chaos'
    core. He could turn and move and leap - he could - he would - he would - he would.

    Off that vast hippocephalic abomination leaped the doomed and desperate dreamer, and down through
    endless voids of sentient blackness he fell. Aeons reeled, universes died and were born again, stars
    became nebulae and nebulae became stars, and still Randolph Carter fell through those endless voids of
    sentient blackness.

    Then in the slow creeping course of eternity the utmost cycle of the cosmos churned itself into another
    futile completion, and all things became again as they were unreckoned kalpas before. Matter and light
    were born anew as space once had known them; and comets, suns and worlds sprang flaming into life,
    though nothing survived to tell that they had been and gone, been and gone, always and always, back to
    no first beginning.

    And there was a firmament again, and a wind, and a glare of purple light in the eyes of the falling
    dreamer. There were gods and presences and wills; beauty and evil, and the shrieking of noxious night
    robbed of its prey. For through the unknown ultimate cycle had lived a thought and a vision of a dreamer's
    boyhood, and now there were remade a waking world and an old cherished city to body and to justify
    these things. Out of the void S'ngac the violet gas had pointed the way, and archaic Nodens was
    bellowing his guidance from unhinted deeps.

    Stars swelled to dawns, and dawns burst into fountains of gold, carmine, and purple, and still the dreamer
    fell. Cries rent the aether as ribbons of light beat back the fiends from outside. And hoary Nodens raised
    a howl of triumph when Nyarlathotep, close on his quarry, stopped baffled by a glare that seared his
    formless hunting-horrors to grey dust. Randolph Carter had indeed descended at last the wide
    marmoreal flights to his marvellous city, for he was come again to the fair New England world that had
    wrought him.

    So to the organ chords of morning's myriad whistles, and dawn's blaze thrown dazzling through purple
    panes by the great gold dome of the State House on the hill, Randolph Carter leaped shoutingly awake
    within his Boston room. Birds sang in hidden gardens and the perfume of trellised vines came wistful from
    arbours his grandfather had reared. Beauty and light glowed from classic mantel and carven cornice and
    walls grotesquely figured, while a sleek black cat rose yawning from hearthside sleep that his master's
    start and shriek had disturbed. And vast infinities away, past the Gate of Deeper Slumber and the
    enchanted wood and the garden lands and the Cerenarian Sea and the twilight reaches of Inquanok, the
    crawling chaos Nyarlathotep strode brooding into the onyx castle atop unknown Kadath in the cold waste,
    and taunted insolently the mild gods of earth whom he had snatched abruptly from their scented revels in
    the marvellous sunset city.