THE SHADOW OUT OF TIME

BY
H.P. LOVECRAFT

1936
 The Shadow Out of Time by H.P. Lovecraft.

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CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
 1

CHAPTER 1

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

conviction of the mythical source of certain impressions, I am unwilling to
vouch for the truth of that which I think I found in Western Australia on the
night of 17-18 July 1935. There is reason to hope that my experience was
wholly or partly an hallucination—for which, indeed, abundant causes
existed. And yet, its realism was so hideous that I sometimes find hope
impossible.

If the thing did happen, then man must be prepared to accept notions of the
cosmos, and of his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest
mention is paralysing. He must, too, be placed on guard against a specific,
lurking peril which, though it will never engulf the whole race, may impose
monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of
it.

It is for this latter reason that I urge, with all the force of my being, final
abandonment of all the attempts at unearthing those fragments of
unknown, primordial masonry which my expedition set out to investigate.

Assuming that I was sane and awake, my experience on that night was such
as has befallen no man before. It was, moreover, a frightful confirmation of
all I had sought to dismiss as myth and dream. Mercifully there is no proof,
for in my fright I lost the awesome object which would—if real and brought
out of that noxious abyss—have formed irrefutable evidence.

When I came upon the horror I was alone—and I have up to now told no
one about it. I could not stop the others from digging in its direction, but
chance and the shifting sand have so far saved them from finding it. Now I
must formulate some definite statement—not only for the sake of my own
mental balance, but to warn such others as may read it seriously.

These pages—much in whose earlier parts will be familiar to close readers of

the general and scientific press—are written in the cabin of the ship that is
bringing me home. I shall give them to my son, Professor Wingate Peaslee of
 2

Miskatonic University—the only member of my family who stuck to me after

my queer amnesia of long ago, and the man best informed on the inner facts
of my case. Of all living persons, he is least likely to ridicule what I shall tell of
that fateful night.

I did not enlighten him orally before sailing, because I think he had better
have the revelation in written form. Reading and re-reading at leisure will
leave with him a more convincing picture than my confused tongue could
hope to convey.

He can do anything that he thinks best with this account—showing it, with
suitable comment, in any quarters where it will be likely to accomplish good.
It is for the sake of such readers as are unfamiliar with the earlier phases of
my case that I am prefacing the revelation itself with a fairly ample summary
of its background.

My name is Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, and those who recall the newspaper
tales of a generation back—or the letters and articles in psychological
journals six or seven years ago—will know who and what I am. The press
was filled with the details of my strange amnesia in 1908-13, and much was
made of the traditions of horror, madness, and witchcraft which lurked
behind the ancient Massachusetts town then and now forming my place of
residence. Yet I would have it known that there is nothing whatever of the
mad or sinister in my heredity and early life. This is a highly important fact in
view of the shadow which fell so suddenly upon me from outside sources.

It may be that centuries of dark brooding had given to crumbling, whisper-

haunted Arkham a peculiar vulnerability as regards such shadows—though
even this seems doubtful in the light of those other cases which I later came
to study. But the chief point is that my own ancestry and background are
altogether normal. What came, came from somewhere else—where I even
now hesitate to assert in plain words.

I am the son of Jonathan and Hannah (Wingate) Peaslee, both of

wholesome old Haverhill stock. I was born and reared in Haverhill—at the
old homestead in Boardman Street near Golden Hill—and did not go to
Arkham till I entered Miskatonic University as instructor of political economy
in 1895.
 3

For thirteen years more my life ran smoothly and happily. I married Alice
Keezar of Haverhill in 1896, and my three children, Robert, Wingate and
Hannah were born in 1898, 1900, and 1903, respectively. In 1898 I became an
associate professor, and in 1902 a full professor. At no time had I the least
interest in either occultism or abnormal psychology.

It was on Thursday, 14 May 1908, that the queer amnesia came. The thing
was quite sudden, though later I realized that certain brief, glimmering
visions of several hours previous—chaotic visions which disturbed me
greatly because they were so unprecedented—must have formed
premonitory symptoms. My head was aching, and I had a singular feeling—
altogether new to me—that some one else was trying to get possession of
my thoughts.

The collapse occurred about 10.20 A.M., while I was conducting a class in
Political Economy VI—history and present tendencies of economics—for
juniors and a few sophomores. I began to see strange shapes before my
eyes, and to feel that I was in a grotesque room other than the classroom.

My thoughts and speech wandered from my subject, and the students saw
that something was gravely amiss. Then I slumped down, unconscious, in my
chair, in a stupor from which no one could arouse me. Nor did my rightful
faculties again look out upon the daylight of our normal world for five years,
four months, and thirteen days.

It is, of course, from others that I have learned what followed. I showed no
sign of consciousness for sixteen and a half hours though removed to my
home at 27 Crane Street, and given the best of medical attention.

At 3 A.M. 15 May my eyes opened and I began to speak, but before long the
doctor and my family were thoroughly frightened by the trend of my
expression and language. It was clear that I had no remembrance of my
identity and my past, though for some reason I seemed anxious to conceal
this lack of knowledge. My eyes glazed strangely at the persons around me,
and the flections of my facial muscles were altogether unfamiliar.

Even my speech seemed awkward and foreign. I used my vocal organs

clumsily and gropingly, and my diction had a curiously stilted quality, as if I
 4

had laboriously learned the English language from books. The pronunciation
was barbarously alien, whilst the idiom seemed to include both scraps of
curious archaism and expressions of a wholly incomprehensible cast.

Of the latter, one in particular was very potently—even terrifiedly—recalled

by the youngest of the physicians twenty years afterward. For at that late
period such a phrase began to have an actual currency—first in England and
then in the United States—and though of much complexity and indisputable
newness, it reproduced in every least particular the mystifying words of the
strange Arkham patient of 1908.

Physical strength returned at once, although I required an odd amount of re-

education in the use of my hands, legs, and bodily apparatus in general.
Because of this and other handicaps inherent in the mnemonic lapse, I was
for some time kept under strict medical care.

When I saw that my attempts to conceal the lapse had failed, I admitted it
openly, and became eager for information of all sorts. Indeed, it seemed to
the doctors that I lost interest in my proper personality as soon as I found
the case of amnesia accepted as a natural thing.

They noticed that my chief efforts were to master certain points in history,
science, art, language, and folklore—some of them tremendously abstruse,
and some childishly simple—which remained, very oddly in many cases,
outside my consciousness.

At the same time they noticed that I had an inexplicable command of many
almost unknown sorts of knowledge—a command which I seemed to wish
to hide rather than display. I would inadvertently refer, with casual
assurance, to specific events in dim ages outside of the range of accepted
history—passing off such references as a jest when I saw the surprise they
created. And I had a way of speaking of the future which two or three times
caused actual fright.

These uncanny flashes soon ceased to appear, though some observers laid
their vanishment more to a certain furtive caution on my part than to any
waning of the strange knowledge behind them. Indeed, I seemed
 5

anomalously avid to absorb the speech, customs, and perspectives of the

age around me; as if I were a studious traveller from a far, foreign land.

As soon as permitted, I haunted the college library at all hours; and shortly
began to arrange for those odd travels, and special courses at American and
European Universities, which evoked so much comment during the next few
years.

I did not at any time suffer from a lack of learned contacts, for my case had a
mild celebrity among the psychologists of the period. I was lectured upon as
a typical example of secondary personality—even though I seemed to
puzzle the lecturers now and then with some bizarre symptoms or some
queer trace of carefully veiled mockery.

Of real friendliness, however, I encountered little. Something in my aspect

and speech seemed to excite vague fears and aversions in every one I met,
as if I were a being infinitely removed from all that is normal and healthful.
This idea of a black, hidden horror connected with incalculable gulfs of some
sort of distance was oddly widespread and persistent.

My own family formed no exception. From the moment of my strange

waking my wife had regarded me with extreme horror and loathing, vowing
that I was some utter alien usurping the body of her husband. In 1910 she
obtained a legal divorce, nor would she ever consent to see me even after
my return to normality in 1913. These feelings were shared by my elder son
and my small daughter, neither of whom I have ever seen since.

Only my second son, Wingate, seemed able to conquer the terror and
repulsion which my change aroused. He indeed felt that I was a stranger,
but though only eight years old held fast to a faith that my proper self would
return. When it did return he sought me out, and the courts gave me his
custody. In succeeding years he helped me with the studies to which I was
driven, and today, at thirty-five, he is a professor of psychology at
Miskatonic.

But I do not wonder at the horror caused—for certainly, the mind, voice,
and facial expression of the being that awakened on 15 May 1908, were not
those of Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee.
 6

I will not attempt to tell much of my life from 1908 to 1913, since readers
may glean the outward essentials—as I largely had to do—from files of old
newspapers and scientific journals.

I was given charge of my funds, and spent them slowly and on the whole
wisely, in travel and in study at various centres of learning. My travels,
however, were singular in the extreme, involving long visits to remote and
desolate places.

In 1909 I spent a month in the Himalayas, and in 1911 roused much attention
through a camel trip into the unknown deserts of Arabia. What happened on
those journeys I have never been able to learn.

During the summer of 1912 I chartered a ship and sailed in the Arctic, north
of Spitzbergen, afterward showing signs of disappointment.

Later in that year I spent weeks—alone beyond the limits of previous or

subsequent exploration in the vast limestone cavern systems of western
Virginia—black labyrinths so complex that no retracing of my steps could
even be considered.

My sojourns at the universities were marked by abnormally rapid

assimilation, as if the secondary personality had an intelligence enormously
superior to my own. I have found, also, that my rate of reading and solitary
study was phenomenal. I could master every detail of a book merely by
glancing over it as fast as I could turn the leaves; while my skill at
interpreting complex figures in an instant was veritably awesome.

At times there appeared almost ugly reports of my power to influence the

thoughts and acts of others, though I seemed to have taken care to
minimize displays of this faculty.

Other ugly reports concerned my intimacy with leaders of occultist groups,

and scholars suspected of connection with nameless bands of abhorrent
elder-world hierophants. These rumours, though never proved at the time,
were doubtless stimulated by the known tenor of some of my reading—for
the consultation of rare books at libraries cannot be effected secretly.
 7

There is tangible proof—in the form of marginal notes—that I went

minutely through such things as the Comte d'Erlette's Cultes des Goules,
Ludvig Prinn's De Vermis Mysteriis, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von
Junzt, the surviving fragments of the puzzling Book of Eibon, and the
dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. Then, too, it is
undeniable that a fresh and evil wave of underground cult activity set in
about the time of my odd mutation.

In the summer of 1913 I began to display signs of ennui and flagging interest,
and to hint to various associates that a change might soon be expected in
me. I spoke of returning memories of my earlier life—though most auditors
judged me insincere, since all the recollections I gave were casual, and such
as might have been learned from my old private papers.

About the middle of August I returned to Arkham and re-opened my long-

closed house in Crane Street. Here I installed a mechanism of the most
curious aspect, constructed piecemeal by different makers of scientific
apparatus in Europe and America, and guarded carefully from the sight of
any one intelligent enough to analyse it.

Those who did see it—a workman, a servant, and the new housekeeper—
say that it was a queer mixture of rods, wheels, and mirrors, though only
about two feet tall, one foot wide, and one foot thick. The central mirror
was circular and convex. All this is borne out by such makers of parts as can
be located.

On the evening of Friday, 26 September, I dismissed the housekeeper and

the maid until noon of the next day. Lights burned in the house till late, and
a lean, dark, curiously foreign-looking man called in an automobile.

It was about one A.M. that the lights were last seen. At 2.15 A.M. a
policeman observed the place in darkness, but the stranger's motor still at
the curb. By 4 o'clock the motor was certainly gone.

It was at 6 o'clock that a hesitant, foreign voice on the telephone asked Dr

Wilson to call at my house and bring me out of a peculiar faint. This call—a
long-distance one—was later traced to a public booth in the North Station in
Boston, but no sign of the lean foreigner was ever unearthed.
 8

When the doctor reached my house he found me unconscious in the sitting

room—in an easy-chair with a table drawn up before it. On the polished top
were scratches showing where some heavy object had rested. The queer
machine was gone, nor was anything afterward heard of it. Undoubtedly the
dark, lean foreigner had taken it away.

In the library grate were abundant ashes, evidently left from the burning of
the every remaining scrap of paper on which I had written since the advent
of the amnesia. Dr Wilson found my breathing very peculiar, but after a
hypodermic injection it became more regular.

At 11.15 A.M., 27 September, I stirred vigorously, and my hitherto masklike

face began to show signs of expression. Dr Wilson remarked that the
expression was not that of my secondary personality, but seemed much like
that of my normal self. About 11.30 I muttered some very curious syllables—
syllables which seemed unrelated to any human speech. I appeared, too, to
struggle against something. Then, just afternoon—the housekeeper and the
maid having meanwhile returned—I began to mutter in English.

"—of the orthodox economists of that period, Jevons typifies the prevailing
trend toward scientific correlation. His attempt to link the commercial cycle
of prosperity and depression with the physical cycle of the solar spots forms
perhaps the apex of—"

Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee had come back—a spirit in whose time scale it
was still Thursday morning in 1908, with the economics class gazing up at
the battered desk on the platform.
 9

CHAPTER 2

MY reabsorption into normal life was a painful and difficult process. The loss
of over five years creates more complications than can be imagined, and in
my case there were countless matters to be adjusted.

What I heard of my actions since 1908 astonished and disturbed me, but I
tried to view the matter as philosophically as I could. At last, regaining
custody of my second son, Wingate, I settled down with him in the Crane
Street house and endeavoured to resume my teaching—my old
professorship having been kindly offered me by the college.

I began work with the February, 1914, term, and kept at it just a year. By that
time I realized how badly my experience had shaken me. Though perfectly
sane—I hoped—and with no flaw in my original personality, I had not the
nervous energy of the old days. Vague dreams and queer ideas continually
haunted me, and when the outbreak of the World War turned my mind to
history I found myself thinking of periods and events in the oddest possible
fashion.

My conception of time, my ability to distinguish between consecutiveness

and simultaneousness—seemed subtly disordered so that I formed
chimerical notions about living in one age and casting one's mind all over
eternity for knowledge of past and future ages.

The war gave me strange impressions of remembering some of its far-off

consequences—as if I knew how it was coming out and could look back
upon it in the light of future information. All such quasi-memories were
attended with much pain, and with a feeling that some artificial
psychological barrier was set against them.

When I diffidently hinted to others about my impressions I met with varied

responses. Some persons looked uncomfortably at me, but men in the
mathematics department spoke of new developments in those theories of
relativity—then discussed only in learned circles—which were later to
 10

become so famous. Dr. Albert Einstein, they said, was rapidly reducing time
to the status of a mere dimension.

But the dreams and disturbed feelings gained on me, so that I had to drop
my regular work in 1915. Certainly the impressions were taking an annoying
shape—giving me the persistent notion that my amnesia had formed some
unholy sort of exchange; that the secondary personality had indeed had
suffered displacement.

Thus I was driven to vague and fright speculations concerning the

whereabouts of my true self during the years that another had held my
body. The curious knowledge and strange conduct of my body's late tenant
troubled me more and more as I learned further details from persons,
papers, and magazines.

Queernesses that had baffled others seemed to harmonize terribly with

some background of black knowledge which festered in the chasms of my
subconscious. I began to search feverishly for every scrap of information
bearing on the studies and travels of that other one during the dark years.

Not all of my troubles were as semi-abstract as this. There were the

dreams—and these seemed to grow in vividness and concreteness.
Knowing how most would regard them, I seldom mentioned them to
anyone but my son or certain trusted psychologists, but eventually I
commenced a scientific study of other cases in order to see how typical or
nontypical such visions might be among amnesia victims.

My results, aided by psychologists, historians, anthropologists, and mental

specialists of wide experience, and by a study that included all records of
split personalities from the days of daemonic-possession legends to the
medically realistic present, at first bothered me more than they consoled
me.

I soon found that my dreams had, indeed, no counterpart in the

overwhelming bulk of true amnesia cases. There remained, however, a tiny
residue of accounts which for years baffled and shocked me with their
parallelism to my own experience. Some of them were bits of ancient
 11

folklore; others were case histories in the annals of medicine; one or two
were anecdotes obscurely buried in standard histories.

It thus appeared that, while my special kind of affliction was prodigiously

rare, instances of it had occurred at long intervals ever since the beginning
of men's annals. Some centuries might contain one, two, or three cases,
others none—or at least none whose record survived.

The essence was always the same—a person of keen thoughtfulness seized
a strange secondary life and leading for a greater or lesser period an utterly
alien existence typified at first by vocal and bodily awkwardness, and later
by a wholesale acquisition of scientific, historic, artistic, and anthropologic
knowledge; an acquisition carried on with feverish zest and with a wholly
abnormal absorptive power. Then a sudden return of rightful consciousness,
intermittently plagued ever after with vague unplaceable dreams suggesting
fragments of some hideous memory elaborately blotted out.

And the close resemblance of those nightmares to my own—even in some

of the smallest particulars—left no doubt in my mind of their significantly
typical nature. One or two of the cases had an added ring of faint,
blasphemous familiarity, as if I had heard of them before through some
cosmic channel too morbid and frightful to contemplate. In three instances
there was specific mention of such an unknown machine as had been in my
house before the second change.

Another thing that worried me during my investigation was the somewhat

greater frequency of cases where a brief, elusive glimpse of the typical
nightmares was afforded to persons not visited well-defined amnesia.

These persons were largely of mediocre mind or less—some so primitive

that they could scarcely be thought of as vehicles for abnormal scholarship
and preternatural mental acquisitions. For a second they would be fired with
alien force—then a backward lapse, and a thin, swift-fading memory of
unhuman horrors.

There had been at least three such cases during the past half century—one
only fifteen years before. Had something been groping blindly through time
 12

from some unsuspected abyss in Nature? Were these faint cases monstrous,
sinister experiments of a kind and authorship utterly beyond sane belief?

Such were a few of the formless speculations of my weaker hours—fancies

abetted by myths which my studies uncovered. For I could not doubt but
that certain persistent legends of immemorial antiquity, apparently
unknown to the victims and physicians connected with recent amnesia
cases, formed a striking and awesome elaboration of memory lapses such as
mine.

Of the nature of the dreams and impressions which were growing so

clamorous I still almost fear to speak. They seemed to savor of madness, and
at times I believed I was indeed going mad. Was there a special type of
delusion afflicting those who had suffered lapses of memory? Conceivably,
the efforts of the subconscious mind to fill up a perplexing blank with
pseudo-memories might give rise to strange imaginative vagaries.

This indeed—though an alternative folklore theory finally seemed to me

more plausible—was the belief of many of the alienists who helped me in
my search for parallel cases, and who shared my puzzlement at the exact
resemblances sometimes discovered.

They did not call the condition true insanity, but classed it rather among
neurotic disorders. My course in trying to track down and analyze it, instead
of vainly seeking to dismiss or forget it, they heartily endorsed as correct
according to the best psychological principles. I especially valued the advice
of such physicians as had studied me during my possession by the other
personality.

My first disturbances were not visual at all, but concerned the more abstract
matters which I have mentioned. There was, too, a feeling of profound and
inexplicable horror concerning myself. I developed a queer fear of seeing my
own form, as if my eyes would find it something utterly alien and
inconceivably abhorrent.

When I did glance down and behold the familiar human shape in quiet grey
or blue clothing, I always felt a curious relief, though in order to gain this
 13

relief I had to conquer an infinite dread. I shunned mirrors as much as

possible, and was always shaved at the barber's.

It was a long time before I correlated any of these disappointed feelings

with the fleeting, visual impressions which began to develop. The first such
correlation had to do with the odd sensation of an external, artificial
restraint on my memory.

I felt that the snatches of sight I experienced had a profound and terrible
meaning, and a frightful connexion with myself, but that some purposeful
influence held me from grasping that meaning and that connexion. Then
came that queerness about the element of time, and with it desperate
efforts to place the fragmentary dream-glimpses in the chronological and
spatial pattern.

The glimpses themselves were at first merely strange rather than horrible. I
would seem to be in an enormous vaulted chamber whose lofty stone
groinings were well-nigh lost in the shadows overhead. In whatever time or
place the scene might be, the principle of the arch was known as fully and
used as extensively as by the Romans.

There were colossal, round windows and high, arched doors, and pedestals
or tables each as tall as the height of an ordinary room. Vast shelves of dark
wood lined the walls, holding what seemed to be volumes of immense size
with strange hieroglyphs on their backs.

The exposed stonework held curious carvings, always in curvilinear

mathematical designs, and there were chiselled inscriptions in the same
characters that the huge books bore. The dark granite masonry was of a
monstrous megathic type, with lines of convex-topped blocks fitting the
concave-bottomed courses which rested upon them.

There were no chairs, but the tops of the vast pedestals were littered with
books, papers, and what seemed to be writing materials—oddly figured jars
of a purplish metal, and rods with stained tips. Tall as the pedestals were, I
seemed at times able to view them from above. On some of them were
great globes of luminous crystal serving as lamps, and inexplicable machines
formed of vitreous tubes and metal rods.
 14

The windows were glazed, and latticed with stout-looking bars. Though I
dared not approach and peer out them, I could see from where I was the
waving tops of singular fern-like growths. The floor was of massive
octagonal flagstones, while rugs and hangings were entirely lacking.

Later I had visions of sweeping through Cyclopean corridors of stone, and

up and down gigantic inclined planes of the same monstrous masonry.
There were no stairs anywhere, nor was any passageway less than thirty
feet wide. Some of the structures through which I floated must have
towered in the sky for thousands of feet.

There were multiple levels of black vaults below, and never-opened trap-
doors, sealed down with metal bands and holding dim suggestions of some
special peril.

I seemed to be a prisoner, and horror hung broodingly over everything I

saw. I felt that the mocking curvilinear hieroglyphs on the walls would blast
my soul with their message were I not guarded by a merciful ignorance.

Still later my dreams included vistas from the great round windows, and
from the titanic flat roof, with its curious gardens, wide barren area, and
high, scalloped parapet of stone, to which the topmost of the inclined
planes led.

There were, almost endless leagues of giant buildings, each in its garden,
and ranged along paved roads fully 200 feet wide. They differed greatly in
aspect, but few were less than 500 feet square or a thousand feet high.
Many seemed so limitless that they must have had a frontage of several
thousand feet, while some shot up to mountainous altitudes in the grey,
steamy heavens.

They seemed to be mainly of stone or concrete, and most of them

embodied the oddly curvilinear type of masonry noticeable in the building
that held me. Roofs were flat and garden-covered, and tended to have
scalloped parapets. Sometimes there were terraces and higher levels, and
wide, cleared spaces amidst the gardens. The great roads held hints of
motion, but in the earlier visions I could not resolve this impression into
details.
 15

In certain places I beheld enormous dark cylindrical towers which climbed

far above any of the other structures. These appeared to be of a totally
unique nature and shewed signs of prodigious age and dilapidation. They
were built of a bizarre type of square-cut basalt masonry, and tapered
slightly toward their rounded tops. Nowhere in any of them could the least
traces of windows or other apertures save huge doors be found. I noticed
also some lower buildings—all crumbling with the weathering of aeons—
which resembled these dark, cylindrical towers in basic architecture. Around
all these aberrant piles of square-cut masonry there hovered an inexplicable
aura of menace and concentrated fear, like that bred by the sealed trap-
doors.

The omnipresent gardens were almost terrifying in their strangeness, with

bizarre and unfamiliar forms of vegetation nodding over broad paths lined
with curiously carven monoliths. Abnormally vast fern-like growths
predominated—some green, and some of a ghastly, fungoid pallor.

Among them rose great spectral things resembling calamites, whose

bamboo-like trunks towered to fabulous heights. Then there were tufted
forms like fabulous cycads, and grotesque dark-green shrubs and trees of
coniferous aspect.

Flowers were small, colourless, and unrecognizable, blooming in

geometrical beds and at large among the greenery.

In a few of the terrace and roof-top gardens were larger and more blossoms
of most offensive contours and seeming to suggest artificial breeding. Fungi
of inconceivable size, outlines, and colours speckled the scene in patterns
bespeaking some unknown but well-established horticultural tradition. In
the larger gardens on the ground there seemed to be some attempt to
preserve the irregularities of Nature, but on the roofs there was more
selectiveness, and more evidences of the topiary art.

The skies were almost always moist and cloudy, and sometimes I would
seem to witness tremendous rains. Once in a while, though, there would be
glimpses of the sun—which looked abnormally large—and of the moon,
whose markings held a touch of difference from the normal that I could
never quite fathom. When—very rarely—the night sky was clear to any
 16

extent, I beheld constellations which were nearly beyond recognition.

Known outlines were sometimes approximated, but seldom duplicated; and
from the position of the few groups I could recognize, I felt I must be in the
earth's southern hemisphere, near the Tropic of Capricorn.

The far horizon was always steamy and indistinct, but I could see that great
jungles of unknown tree-ferns, calamites, lepidodendra, and sigillaria lay
outside the city, their fantastic frondage waving mockingly in the shifting
vapours. Now and then there would be suggestions of motion in the sky,
but these my early visions never resolved.

By the autumn of 1914 I began to have infrequent dreams of strange

floatings over the city and through the regions around it. I saw interminable
roads through forests of fearsome growths with mottled, fluted, and
banded trunks, and past other cities as strange as the one which persistently
haunted me.

I saw monstrous constructions of black or iridescent tone in glades and

clearings where perpetual twilight reigned, and traversed long causeways
over swamps so dark that I could tell but little of their moist, towering
vegetation.

Once I saw an area of countless miles strewn with age-blasted basaltic ruins
whose architecture had been like that of the few windowless, round-topped
towers in the haunting city.

And once I saw the sea—a boundless, steamy expanse beyond the colossal
stone piers of an enormous town of domes and arches. Great shapeless
suggestions of shadow moved over it, and here and there its surface was
vexed with anomalous spoutings.
 17

CHAPTER 3
AS I have said, it was not immediately that these wild visions began to hold
their terrifying quality. Certainly, many persons have dreamed intrinsically
stranger things—things compounded of unrelated scraps of daily life,
pictures, and reading, and arranged in fantastically novel forms by the
unchecked caprices of sleep.

For some time I accepted the visions as natural, even though I had never
before been an extravagant dreamer. Many of the vague anomalies, I
argued, must have come from trivial sources too numerous to track down;
while others seemed to reflect a common text book knowledge of the
plants and other conditions of the primitive world of a hundred and fifty
million years ago—the world of the Permian or Triassic age.

In the course of some months, however, the element of terror did figure
with accumulating force. This was when the dreams began so unfailingly to
have the aspect of memories, and when my mind began to link them with
my growing abstract disturbances—the feeling of mnemonic restraint, the
curious impressions regarding time, and sense of a loathsome exchange
with my secondary personality of 1908-13, and, considerably later, the
inexplicable loathing of my own person.

As certain definite details began to enter the dreams, their horror increased
a thousandfold—until by October, 1915, I felt I must do something. It was
then that I began an intensive study of other cases of amnesia and visions,
feeling that I might thereby objectivise my trouble and shake clear of its
emotional grip.

However, as before mentioned, the result was at first almost exactly

opposite. It disturbed me vastly to find that my dreams had been so closely
duplicated; especially since some of the accounts were too early to admit of
any geological knowledge—and therefore of any idea of primitive
landscapes—on the subjects' part.
 18

What is more, many of these accounts supplied very horrible details and
explanations in connexion with the visions of great buildings and jungle
gardens—and other things. The actual sights and vague impressions were
bad enough, but what was hinted or asserted by some of the other
dreamers savored of madness and blasphemy. Worst of all, my own pseudo-
memory was aroused to wilder dreams and hints of coming revelations. And
yet most doctors deemed my course, on the whole, an advisable one.

I studied psychology systematically, and under the prevailing stimulus my

son Wingate did the same—his studies leading eventually to his present
professorship. In 1917 and 1918 I took special courses at Miskatonic.
Meanwhile, my examination of medical, historical, and anthropological
records became indefatigable, involving travels to distant libraries, and
finally including even a reading of the hideous books of forbidden elder lore
in which my secondary personality had been so disturbingly interested.

Some of the latter were the actual copies I had consulted in my altered
state, and I was greatly disturbed by certain marginal notations and
ostensible corrections of the hideous text in a script and idiom which
somehow seemed oddly unhuman.

These markings were mostly in the respective languages of the various

books, all of which the writer seemed to know with equal, though obviously
academic, facility. One note appended to von Junzt'sUnaussprechlichen
Kulten, however, was alarmingly otherwise. It consisted of certain
curvilinear hieroglyphs in the same ink as that of the German corrections,
but following no recognized human pattern. And these hieroglyphs were
closely and unmistakably akin to the characters constantly met with in my
dreams—characters whose meaning I would sometimes momentarily fancy
I knew, or was just on the brink of recalling.

To complete my black confusion, my librarians assured me that, in view of

previous examinations and records of consultation of the volumes in
question, all of these notations must have been made by myself in my
secondary state. This despite the fact that I was and still am ignorant of
three of the languages involved.
 19

Piecing together the scattered records, ancient and modern,

anthropological and medical, I found a fairly consistent mixture of myth and
hallucination whose scope and wildness left me utterly dazed. Only one
thing consoled me, the fact that the myths were of such early existence.
What lost knowledge could have brought pictures of the Palaeozoic or
Mesozoic landscape into these primitive fables, I could not even guess; but
the pictures had been there. Thus, a basis existed for the formation of a
fixed type of delusion.

Cases of amnesia no doubt created the general myth pattern—but

afterward the fanciful accretions of the myths must have reacted on
amnesia sufferers and coloured their pseudo-memories. I myself had read
and heard all the early tales during my memory lapse—my quest had amply
proved that. Was it not natural, then, for my subsequent dreams and
emotional impressions to become coloured and moulded by what my
memory subtly held over from my secondary state?

A few of the myths had significant connexions with other cloudy legends of
the pre-human world, especially those Hindu tales involving stupefying gulfs
of time and forming part of the lore of modern theosopists.

Primal myth and modern delusion joined in their assumption that mankind is
only one—perhaps the least—of the highly evolved and dominant races of
this planet's long and largely unknown career. Things of inconceivable
shape, they implied, had reared towers to the sky and delved into every
secret of Nature before the first amphibian forbear of man had crawled out
of the hot sea 300 million years ago.

Some had come down from the stars; a few were as old as the cosmos itself,
others had arisen swiftly from terrene germs as far behind the first germs of
our life-cycle as those germs are behind ourselves. Spans of thousands of
millions of years, and linkages to other galaxies and universes, were freely
spoken of. Indeed, there was no such thing as time in its humanly accepted
sense.

But most of the tales and impressions concerned a relatively late race, of a
queer and intricate shape, resembling no life-form known to science, which
had lived till only fifty million years before the advent of man. This, they
 20

indicated, was the greatest race of all because it alone had conquered the
secret of time.

It had learned all things that ever were known or ever would be known on
the earth, through the power of its keener minds to project themselves into
the past and future, even through gulfs of millions of years, and study the
lore of every age. From the accomplishments of this race arose all legends
of prophets, including those in human mythology.

In its vast libraries were volumes of texts and pictures holding the whole of
earth's annals—histories and descriptions of every species that had ever
been or that ever would be, with full records of their arts, their
achievements, their languages, and their psychologies.

With this aeon-embracing knowledge, the Great Race chose from every era
and life-form such thoughts, arts, and processes as might suit its own nature
and situation. Knowledge of the past, secured through a kind of mind-
casting outside the recognized senses, was harder to glean than knowledge
of the future.

In the latter case the course was easier and more material. With suitable
mechanical aid a mind would project itself forward in time, feeling its dim,
extra-sensory way till it approached the desired period. Then, after
preliminary trials, it would seize on the best discoverable representative of
the highest of that period's life-forms. It would enter the organism's brain
and set up therein its own vibrations, while the displaced mind would strike
back to the period of the displacer, remaining in the latter's body till a
reverse process was set up.

The projected mind, in the body of the organism of the future, would then
pose as a member of the race whose outward form it wore, learning as
quickly as possible all that could be learned of the chosen age and its
massed information and techniques.

Meanwhile the displaced mind, thrown back to the displacer's age and body,
would be carefully guarded. It would be kept from harming the body it
occupied, and would be drained of all its knowledge by trained questioners.
 21

Often it could be questioned in its own language, when previous quests into
the future had brought back records of that language.

If the mind came from a body whose language the Great Race could not
physically reproduce, clever machines would be made, on which the alien
speech could be played as on a musical instrument.

The Great Race's members were immense rugose cones ten feet high, and
with head and other organs attached to foot-thick, distensible limbs
spreading from the apexes. They spoke by the clicking or scraping of huge
paws or claws attached to the end of two of their four limbs, and walked by
the expansion and contraction of a viscous layer attached to their vast, ten-
foot bases.

When the captive mind's amazement and resentment had worn off, and
when—assuming that it came from a body vastly different from the Great
Race's—it had lost its horror at its unfamiliar temporary form, it was
permitted to study its new environment and experience a wonder and
wisdom approximating that of its displacer.

With suitable precautions, and in exchange for suitable services, it was

allowed to rove all over the habitable world in titan airships or on the huge
boatlike atomic-engined vehicles which traversed the great roads, and to
delve freely into the libraries containing the records of the planet's past and
future.

This reconciled many captive minds to their lot; since none were other than
keen, and to such minds the unveiling of hidden mysteries of earth-closed
chapters of inconceivable pasts and dizzying vortices of future time which
include the years ahead of their own natural ages-forms always, despite the
abysmal horrors often unveiled, the supreme experience of life.

Now and then certain captives were permitted to meet other captive minds
seized from the future—to exchange thoughts with consciousnesses living a
hundred or a thousand or a million years before or after their own ages. And
all were urged to write copiously in their own languages of themselves and
their respective periods; such documents to be filed in the great central
archives.
 22

It may be added that there was one special type of captive whose privileges
were far greater than those of the majority. These were the dying
permanent exiles, whose bodies in the future had been seized by keen-
minded members of the Great Race who, faced with death, sought to
escape mental extinction.

Such melancholy exiles were not as common as might be expected, since

the longevity of the Great Race lessened its love of life—especially among
those superior minds capable of projection. From cases of the permanent
projection of elder minds arose many of those lasting changes of personality
noticed in later history—including mankind's.

As for the ordinary cases of exploration—when the displacing mind had

learned what it wished in the future, it would build an apparatus like that
which had started its flight and reverse the process of projection. Once
more it would be in its own body in its own age, while the lately captive
mind would return to that body of the future to which it properly belonged.

Only when one or the other of the bodies had died during the exchange was
this restoration impossible. In such cases, of course, the exploring mind
had—like those of the death-escapers—to live out an alien-bodied life in the
future; or else the captive mind—like the dying permanent exiles—had to
end its days in the form and past age of the Great Race.

This fate was least horrible when the captive mind was also of the Great
Race—a not infrequent occurrence, since in all its periods that race was
intensely concerned with its own future. The number of dying permanent
exiles of the Great Race was very slight—largely because of the tremendous
penalties attached to displacements of future Great Race minds by the
moribund.

Through projection, arrangements were made to inflict these penalties on

the offending minds in their new future bodies—and sometimes forced re-
exchanges were effected.

Complex cases of the displacement of exploring or already captive minds by

minds in various regions of the past had been known and carefully rectified.
In every age since the discovery of mind projection, a minute but well-
 23

recognised element of the population consisted of Great Race minds from

past ages, sojourning for a longer or shorter while.

When a captive mind of alien origin was returned to its own body in the
future, it was purged by an intricate mechanical hypnosis of all it had learned
in the Great Race's age—this because of certain troublesome consequences
inherent in the general carrying forward of knowledge in large quantities.

The few existing instances of clear transmission had caused, and would
cause at known future times, great disasters. And it was largely in
consequence of two cases of this kind—said the old myths—that mankind
had learned what it had concerning the Great Race.

Of all things surviving physically and directly from that aeon-distant world,
there remained only certain ruins of great stones in far places and under the
sea, and parts of the text of the frightful Pnakotic Manuscripts.

Thus the returning mind reached its own age with only the faintest and most
fragmentary visions of what it had undergone since its seizure. All memories
that could be eradicated were eradicated, so that in most cases only a
dream-shadowed blank stretched back to the time of the first exchange.
Some minds recalled more than others, and the chance joining of memories
had at rare times brought hints of the forbidden past to future ages.

There probably never was a time when groups or cults did not secretly
cherish certain of these hints. In the Necronomicon the presence of such a
cult among human beings was suggested—a cult that sometimes gave aid
to minds voyaging down the aeons from the days of the Great Race.

And, meanwhile, the Great Race itself waxed well-nigh omniscient, and
turned to the task of setting up exchanges with the minds of other planets,
and of exploring their pasts and futures. It sought likewise to fathom the
past years and origin of that black, aeon-dead orb in far space whence its
own mental heritage had come—for the mind of the Great Race was older
than its bodily form.

The beings of a dying elder world, wise with the ultimate secrets, had
looked ahead for a new world and species wherein they might have long
life; and had sent their minds en masse into that future race best adapted to
 24

house them—the cone-shaped beings that peopled our earth a billion years
ago.

Thus the Great Race came to be, while the myriad minds sent backward
were left to die in the horror of strange shapes. Later the race would again
face death, yet would live through another forward migration of its best
minds into the bodies of others who had a longer physical span ahead of
them.

Such was the background of intertwined legend and hallucination. When,

around 1920, I had my researches in coherent shape, I felt a slight lessening
of the tension which their earlier stages had increased. After all, and in spite
of the fancies prompted by blind emotions, were not most of my
phenomena readily explainable? Any chance might have turned my mind to
dark studies during the amnesia—and then I read the forbidden legends and
met the members of ancient and ill-regarded cults. That, plainly, supplied
the material for the dreams and disturbed feelings which came after the
return of memory.

As for the marginal notes in dream-hieroglyphs and languages unknown to

me, but laid at my door by librarians—I might easily have picked up a
smattering of the tongues during my secondary state, while the hieroglyphs
were doubtless coined by my fancy from descriptions in old legends, and
afterward woven into my dreams. I tried to verify certain points through
conversation with known cult leaders, but never succeeded in establishing
the right connexions.

At times the parallelism of so many cases in so many distant ages continued

to worry me as it had at first, but on the other hand I reflected that the
excitant folklore was undoubtedly more universal in the past than in the
present.

Probably all the other victims whose cases were like mine had had a long
and familiar knowledge of the tales I had learned only when in my secondary
state. When these victims had lost their memory, they had associated
themselves with the creatures of their household myths—the fabulous
invaders supposed to displace men's minds—and had thus embarked upon
 25

quests for knowledge which they thought they could take back to a fancied,
non-human past.

Then, when their memory returned, they reversed the associative process
and thought of themselves as the former captive minds instead of as the
displacers. Hence the dreams and pseudo-memories following the
conventional myth pattern.

Despite the seeming cumbrousness of these explanations, they came finally

to supersede all others in my mind—largely because of the greater
weakness of any rival theory. And a substantial number of eminent
psychologists and anthropologists gradually agreed with me.

The more I reflected, the more convincing did my reasoning seem; till in the
end I had a really effective bulwark against the visions and impressions
which still assailed me. Suppose I did see strange things at night? These
were only what I had heard and read of. Suppose I did have odd loathings
and perspectives and pseudo-memories? These, too, were only echoes of
myths absorbed in my secondary state. Nothing that I might dream, nothing
that I might feel, could be of any actual significance.

Fortified by this philosophy, I greatly improved in nervous equilibrium, even

though the visions—rather than the abstract impressions—steadily became
more frequent and more disturbingly detailed. In 1922 I felt able to
undertake regular work again, and put my newly gained knowledge to
practical use by accepting an instructorship in psychology at the university.

My old chair of political economy had long been adequately filled—besides

which, methods of teaching economics had changed greatly since my
heyday. My son was at this time just entering on the post-graduate studies
leading to his present professorship, and we worked together a great deal.
 26

CHAPTER 4

I CONTINUED, however, to keep a careful record of the outré dreams which

crowded upon me so thickly and vividly. Such a record, I argued, was of
genuine value as a psychological document. The glimpses still seemed
damnably like memories, though I fought off this impression with a goodly
measure of success.

In writing, I treated the phantasmata as things seen; but at all other times I
brushed them aside like any gossamer illusions of the night. I had never
mentioned such matters in common conversation; though reports of them,
filtering out as such things will, had aroused sundry rumors regarding my
mental health. It is amusing to reflect that these rumors were confined
wholly to laymen, without a single champion among physicians or
psychologists.

Of my visions after 1914 I will here mention only a few, since fuller accounts
and records are at the disposal of the serious student. It is evident that with
time the curious inhibitions somewhat waned, for the scope of my visions
vastly increased. They have never, though, become other than disjointed
fragments seemingly without clear motivation.

Within the dreams I seemed gradually to acquire a greater and greater

freedom of wandering. I floated through many strange buildings of stone,
going from one to the other along mammoth underground passages which
seemed to form the common avenues of transit. Sometimes I encountered
those gigantic sealed trap-doors in the lowest level, around which such an
aura of fear and forbiddenness clung.

I saw tremendously tessellated pools, and rooms of curious and inexplicable

utensils of myriad sorts. Then there were colossal caverns of intricate
machinery whose outlines and purpose were wholly strange to me, and
whose sound manifested itself only after many years of dreaming. I may
here remark that sight and sound are the only senses I have ever exercised
in the visionary world.
 27

The real horror began in May, 1915, when I first saw the living things. This
was before my studies had taught me what, in view of the myths and case
histories, to expect. As mental barriers wore down, I beheld great masses of
thin vapour in various parts of the building and in the streets below.

These steadily grew more solid and distinct, till at last I could trace their
monstrous outlines with uncomfortable ease. They seemed to be enormous,
iridescent cones, about ten feet high and ten feet wide at the base, and
made up of some ridgy, scaly, semi-elastic matter. From their apexes
projected four flexible, cylindrical members, each a foot thick, and of a ridgy
substance like that of the cones themselves.

These members were sometimes contracted almost to nothing, and

sometimes extended to any distance up to about ten feet. Terminating two
of them were enormous claws or nippers. At the end of a third were four
red, trumpetlike appendages. The fourth terminated in an irregular
yellowish globe some two feet in diameter and having three great dark eyes
ranged along its central circumference.

Surmounting this head were four slender grey stalks bearing flower-like
appendages, whilst from its nether side dangled eight greenish antennae or
tentacles. The great base of the central cone was fringed with a rubbery,
grey substance which moved the whole entity through expansion and
contraction.

Their actions, though harmless, horrified me even more than their

appearance—for it is not wholesome to watch monstrous objects doing
what one had known only human beings to do. These objects moved
intelligently about the great rooms, getting books from the shelves and
taking them to the great tables, or vice versa, and sometimes writing
diligently with a peculiar rod gripped in the greenish head tentacles. The
huge nippers were used in carrying books and in conversation-speech
consisting of a kind of clicking and scraping.

The objects had no clothing, but wore satchels or knapsacks suspended

from the top of the conical trunk. They commonly carried their head and its
supporting member at the level of the cone top, although it was frequently
raised or lowered.
 28

The other three great members tended to rest downward at the sides of the
cone, contracted to about five feet each when not in use. From their rate of
reading, writing, and operating their machines—those on the tables seemed
somehow connected with thought—I concluded that their intelligence was
enormously greater than man's.

Afterward I saw them everywhere; swarming in all the great chambers and
corridors, tending monstrous machines in vaulted crypts, and racing along
the vast roads in gigantic, boat-shaped cars. I ceased to be afraid of them,
for they seemed to form supremely natural parts of their environment.

Individual differences amongst them began to be manifest, and a few

appeared to be under some kind of restraint. These latter, though shewing
no physical variation, had a diversity of gestures and habits which marked
them off not only from the majority, but very largely from one another.

They wrote a great deal in what seemed to my cloudy vision a vast variety of
characters—never the typical curvilinear hieroglyphs of the majority. A few,
I fancied, used our own familiar alphabet. Most of them worked much more
slowly than the general mass of the entities.

All this time my own part in the dreams seemed to be that of a disembodied
consciousness with a range of vision wider than the normal, floating freely
about, yet confined to the ordinary avenues and speeds of travel. Not until
August, 1915, did any suggestions of bodily existence begin to harass me. I
say harass, because the first phase was a purely abstract, though infinitely
terrible, association of my previously noted body loathing with the scenes of
my visions.

For a while my chief concern during dreams was to avoid looking down at
myself, and I recall how grateful I was for the total absence of large mirrors
in the strange rooms. I was mightily troubled by the fact that I always saw
the great tables—whose height could not be under ten feet—from a level
not below that of their surfaces.

And then the morbid temptation to look down at myself became greater
and greater, till one night I could not resist it. At first my downward glance
revealed nothing whatever. A moment later I perceived that this was
 29

because my head lay at the end of a flexible neck of enormous length.

Retracting this neck and gazing down very sharply, I saw the scaly, rugose,
iridescent bulk of a vast cone ten feet tall and ten feet wide at the base. That
was when I waked half of Arkham with my screaming as I plunged madly up
from the abyss of sleep.

Only after weeks of hideous repetition did I grow half-reconciled to these

visions of myself in monstrous form. In the dreams I now moved bodily
among the other unknown entities, reading terrible books from the endless
shelves and writing for hours at the great tables with a stylus managed by
the green tentacles that hung down from my head.

Snatches of what I read and wrote would linger in my memory. There were
horrible annals of other worlds and other universes, and of stirrings of
formless life outside of all universes. There were records of strange orders
of beings which had peopled the world in forgotten pasts, and frightful
chronicles of grotesque-bodied intelligences which would people it millions
of years after the death of the last human being.

I learned of chapters in human history whose existence no scholar of today

has ever suspected. Most of these writings were in the language of the
hieroglyphs; which I studied in a queer way with the aid of droning
machines, and which was evidently an agglutinative speech with root
systems utterly unlike any found in human languages.

Other volumes were in other unknown tongues learned in the same queer
way. A very few were in languages I knew. Extremely clever pictures, both
inserted in the records and forming separate collections, aided me
immensely. And all the time I seemed to be setting down a history of my
own age in English. On waking, I could recall only minute and meaningless
scraps of the unknown tongues which my dream-self had mastered, though
whole phrases of the history stayed with me.

I learned—even before my waking self had studied the parallel cases or the
old myths from which the dreams doubtless sprang—that the entities
around me were of the world's greatest race, which had conquered time
and had sent exploring minds into every age. I knew, too, that I had been
snatched from my age while another used my body in that age, and that a
 30

few of the other strange forms housed similarly captured minds. I seemed
to talk, in some odd language of claw clickings, with exiled intellects from
every corner of the solar system.

There was a mind from the planet we know as Venus, which would live
incalculable epochs to come, and one from an outer moon of Jupiter six
million years in the past. Of earthly minds there were some from the
winged, star-headed, half-vegetable race of palaeogean Antarctica; one
from the reptile people of fabled Valusia; three from the furry pre-human
Hyperborean worshippers of Tsathoggua; one from the wholly abominable
Tcho-Tchos; two from the arachnid denizens of earth's last age; five from
the hardy coleopterous species immediately following mankind, to which
the Great Race was some day to transfer its keenest minds en masse in the
face of horrible peril; and several from different branches of humanity.

I talked with the mind of Yiang-Li, a philosopher from the cruel empire of
Tsan-Chan, which is to come in 5,000 A.D.; with that of a general of the
greatheaded brown people who held South Africa in 50,000 B.C.; with that
of a twelfth-century Florentine monk named Bartolomeo Corsi; with that of
a king of Lomar who had ruled that terrible polar land one hundred
thousand years before the squat, yellow Inutos came from the west to
engulf it.

I talked with the mind of Nug-Soth, a magician of the dark conquerors of

16,000 A.D.; with that of a Roman named Titus Sempronius Blaesus, who
had been a quaestor in Sulla's time; with that of Khephnes, an Egyptian of
the 14th Dynasty, who told me the hideous secret of Nyarlathotep, with that
of a priest of Atlantis' middle kingdom; with that of a Suffolk gentleman of
Cromwell's day, James Woodville; with that of a court astronomer of pre-
Inca Peru; with that of the Australian physicist Nevil Kingston-Brown, who
will die in 2,518 A.D.; with that of an archimage of vanished Yhe in the
Pacific; with that of Theodotides, a Greco-Bactrian official of 200 B.C.; with
that of an aged Frenchman of Louis XIII's time named Pierre-Louis
Montagny; with that of Crom-Ya, a Cimmerian chieftain of 15,000 B.C.; and
with so many others that my brain cannot hold the shocking secrets and
dizzying marvels I learned from them.
 31

I awaked each morning in a fever, sometimes frantically trying to verify or

discredit such information as fell within the range of modern human
knowledge. Traditional facts took on new and doubtful aspects, and I
marvelled at the dream-fancy which could invent such surprising addenda to
history and science.

I shivered at the mysteries the past may conceal, and trembled at the
menaces the future may bring forth. What was hinted in the speech of post-
human entities of the fate of mankind produced such an effect on me that I
will not set it down here.

After man there would be the mighty beetle civilisation, the bodies of
whose members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the
monstrous doom overtook the elder world. Later, as the earth's span
closed, the transferred minds would again migrate through time and
space—to another stopping-place in the bodies of the bulbous vegetable
entities of Mercury. But there would be races after them, clinging
pathetically to the cold planet and burrowing to its horror-filled core, before
the utter end.

Meanwhile, in my dreams, I wrote endlessly in that history of my own age

which I was preparing—half voluntarily and half through promises of
increased library and travel opportunities—for the Great Race's central
archives. The archives were in a colossal subterranean structure near the
city's center, which I came to know well through frequent labors and
consultations. Meant to last as long as the race, and to withstand the
fiercest of earth's convulsions, this titan repository surpassed all other
buildings in the massive, mountain-like firmness of its construction.

The records, written or printed on great sheets of a curiously tenacious

cellulose fabric were bound into books that opened from the top, and were
kept in individual cases of a strange, extremely light, rustless metal of
greyish hue, decorated with mathematical designs and bearing the title in
the Great Race's curvilinear hieroglyphs.

These cases were stored in tiers of rectangular vaults—like closed, locked

shelves—wrought of the same rustless metal and fastened by knobs with
intricate turnings. My own history was assigned a specific place in the vaults
 32

of the lowest or vertebrate level—the section devoted to the culture of

mankind and of the furry and reptilian races immediately preceding it in
terrestrial dominance.

But none of the dreams ever gave me a full picture of daily life. All were the
merest misty, disconnected fragments, and it is certain that these fragments
were not unfolded in their rightful sequence. I have, for example, a very
imperfect idea of my own living arrangements in the dream-world; though I
seem to have possessed a great stone room of my own. My restrictions as a
prisoner gradually disappeared, so that some of the visions included vivid
travels over the mighty jungle roads, sojourns in strange cities, and
explorations of some of the vast, dark, windowless ruins from which the
Great Race shrank in curious fear. There were also long sea voyages in
enormous, many-decked boats of incredible swiftness, and trips over wild
regions in closed projectile-like airships lifted and moved by electrical
repulsion.

Beyond the wide, warm ocean were other cities of the Great Race, and on
one far continent I saw the crude villages of the black-snouted, winged
creatures who would evolve as a dominant stock after the Great Race had
sent its foremost minds into the future to escape the creeping horror.
Flatness and exuberant green life were always the keynote of the scene.
Hills were low and sparse, and usually displayed signs of volcanic forces.

Of the animals I saw, I could write volumes. All were wild; for the Great
Race's mechanised culture had long since done away with domestic beasts,
while food was wholly vegetable or synthetic. Clumsy reptiles of great bulk
floundered in steaming morasses, fluttered in the heavy air, or spouted in
the seas and lakes; and among these I fancied I could vaguely recognise
lesser, archaic prototypes of many forms—dinosaurs, pterodactyls,
ichthyosaurs, labyrinthodonts, plesiosaurs, and the like-made familiar
through palaeontology. Of birds or mammals there were none that I could
discover.

The ground and swamps were constantly alive with snakes, lizards, and
crocodiles while insects buzzed incessantly among the lush vegetation. And
far out at sea, unspied and unknown monsters spouted mountainous
 33

columns of foam into the vaporous sky. Once I was taken under the ocean in
a gigantic submarine vessel with searchlights, and glimpsed some living
horrors of awesome magnitude. I saw also the ruins of incredible sunken
cities, and the wealth of crinoid, brachiopod, coral, and ichthyic life which
everywhere abounded.

Of the physiology, psychology, folkways, and detailed history of the Great

Race my visions preserved but little information, and many of the scattered
points I here set down were gleaned from my study of old legends and
other cases rather than from my own dreaming.

For in time, of course, my reading and research caught up with and passed
the dreams in many phases, so that certain dream-fragments were
explained in advance and formed verifications of what I had learned. This
consolingly established my belief that similar reading and research,
accomplished by my secondary self, had formed the source of the whole
terrible fabric of pseudomemories.

The period of my dreams, apparently, was one somewhat less than

150,000,000 years ago, when the Palaeozoic age was giving place to the
Mesozoic. The bodies occupied by the Great Race represented no
surviving—or even scientifically known—line of terrestrial evolution, but
were of a peculiar, closely homogeneous, and highly specialised organic
type inclining as much as to the vegetable as to the animal state.

Cell action was of an unique sort almost precluding fatigue, and wholly
eliminating the need of sleep. Nourishment, assimilated through the red
trumpet-like appendages on one of the great flexible limbs, was always
semi-fluid and in many aspects wholly unlike the food of existing animals.

The beings had but two of the senses which we recognise—sight and
hearing, the latter accomplished through the flower-like appendages on the
grey stalks above their heads. Of other and incomprehensible senses—not,
however, well utilizable by alien captive minds inhabiting their bodies—they
possessed many. Their three eyes were so situated as to give them a range
of vision wider than the normal. Their blood was a sort of deep-greenish
ichor of great thickness.
 34

They had no sex, but reproduced through seeds or spores which clustered
on their bases and could be developed only under water. Great, shallow
tanks were used for the growth of their young—which were, however,
reared only in small numbers on account of the longevity of individuals—
four or five thousand years being the common life span.

Markedly defective individuals were quickly disposed of as soon as their

defects were noticed. Disease and the approach of death were, in the
absence of a sense of touch or of physical pain, recognised by purely visual
symptoms.

The dead were incinerated with dignified ceremonies. Once in a while, as

before mentioned, a keen mind would escape death by forward projection
in time; but such cases were not numerous. When one did occur, the exiled
mind from the future was treated with the utmost kindness till the
dissolution of its unfamiliar tenement.

The Great Race seemed to form a single, loosely knit nation or league, with
major institutions in common, though there were four definite divisions. The
political and economic system of each unit was a sort of fascistic socialism,
with major resources rationally distributed, and power delegated to a small
governing board elected by the votes of all able to pass certain educational
and psychological tests. Family organisation was not overstressed, though
ties among persons of common descent were recognised, and the young
were generally reared by their parents.

Resemblances to human attitudes and institutions were, of course, most

marked in those fields where on the one hand highly abstract elements
were concerned, or where on the other hand there was a dominance of the
basic, unspecialised urges common to all organic life. A few added
likenesses came through conscious adoption as the Great Race probed the
future and copied what it liked.

Industry, highly mechanised, demanded but little time from each citizen; and
the abundant leisure was filled with intellectual and aesthetic activities of
various sorts.
 35

The sciences were carried to an unbelievable height of development, and art

was a vital part of life, though at the period of my dreams it had passed its
crest and meridian. Technology was enormously stimulated through the
constant struggle to survive, and to keep in existence the physical fabric of
great cities, imposed by the prodigious geologic upheavals of those primal
days.

Crime was surprisingly scant, and was dealt with through highly efficient
policing. Punishments ranged from privilege deprivation and imprisonment
to death or major emotion wrenching, and were never administered without
a careful study of the criminal's motivations.

Warfare, largely civil for the last few millennia though sometimes waged
against reptilian or octopodic invaders, or against the winged, star-headed
Old Ones who centered in the antarctic, was infrequent though infinitely
devastating. An enormous army, using camera-like weapons which
produced tremendous electrical effects, was kept on hand for purposes
seldom mentioned, but obviously connected with the ceaseless fear of the
dark, windowless elder ruins and of the great sealed trap-doors in the
lowest subterranean levels.

This fear of the basalt ruins and trap-doors was largely a matter of unspoken
suggestion—or, at most, of furtive quasi-whispers. Everything specific which
bore on it was significantly absent from such books as were on the common
shelves. It was the one subject lying altogether under a taboo among the
Great Race, and seemed to be connected alike with horrible bygone
struggles, and with that future peril which would some day force the race to
send its keener minds ahead en masse in time.

Imperfect and fragmentary as were the other things presented by dreams

and legends, this matter was still more bafflingly shrouded. The vague old
myths avoided it—or perhaps all allusions had for some reason been
excised. And in the dreams of myself and others, the hints were peculiarly
few. Members of the Great Race never intentionally referred to the matter,
and what could be gleaned came only from some of the more sharply
observant captive minds.
 36

According to these scraps of information, the basis of the fear was a horrible
elder race of half-polypous, utterly alien entities which had come through
space from immeasurably distant universes and had dominated the earth
and three other solar planets about 600 million years ago. They were only
partly material—as we understand matter—and their type of consciousness
and media of perception differed widely from those of terrestrial organisms.
For example, their senses did not include that of sight; their mental world
being a strange, non-visual pattern of impressions.

They were, however, sufficiently material to use implements of normal

matter when in cosmic areas containing it; and they required housing—
albeit of a peculiar kind. Though their senses could penetrate all material
barriers, their substance could not; and certain forms of electrical energy
could wholly destroy them. They had the power of aërial motion, despite the
absence of wings or any other visible means of levitation. Their minds were
of such texture that no exchange with them could be effected by the Great
Race.

When these things had come to the earth they had built mighty basalt cities
of windowless towers, and had preyed horribly upon the beings they found.
Thus it was when the minds of the Great Race sped across the void from
that obscure, trans-galactic world known in the disturbing and debatable
Eltdown Shards as Yith.

The newcomers, with the instruments they created, had found it easy to
subdue the predatory entities and drive them down to those caverns of
inner earth which they had already joined to their abodes and begun to
inhabit.

Then they had sealed the entrances and left them to their fate, afterward
occupying most of their great cities and preserving certain important
buildings for reasons connected more with superstition than with
indifference, boldness, or scientific and historical zeal.

But as the aeons passed there came vague, evil signs that the elder things
were growing strong and numerous in the inner world. There were sporadic
irruptions of a particularly hideous character in certain small and remote
cities of the Great Race, and in some of the deserted elder cities which the
 37

Great Race had not peopled—places where the paths to the gulfs below
had not been properly sealed or guarded.

After that greater precautions were taken, and many of the paths were
closed forever—though a few were left with sealed trap-doors for strategic
use in fighting the elder things if ever they broke forth in unexpected places.

The irruptions of the elder things must have been shocking beyond all
description, since they had permanently coloured the psychology of the
Great Race. Such was the fixed mood of horror that the very aspect of the
creatures was left unmentioned. At no time was I able to gain a clear hint of
what they looked like.

There were veiled suggestions of a monstrous plasticity, and of temporary

lapses of visibility, while other fragmentary whispers referred to their
control and military use of great winds. Singular whistling noises, and
colossal footprints made up of five circular toe marks, seemed also to be
associated with them.

It was evident that the coming doom so desperately feared by the Great
Race—the doom that was one day to send millions of keen minds across the
chasm of time to strange bodies in the safer future—had to do with a final
successful irruption of the elder beings.

Mental projections down the ages had clearly foretold such a horror, and
the Great Race had resolved that none who could escape should face it. That
the foray would be a matter of vengeance, rather than an attempt to
reoccupy the outer world, they knew from the planet's later history—for
their projections shewed the coming and going of subsequent races
untroubled by the monstrous entities.

Perhaps these entities had come to prefer earth's inner abysses to the
variable, storm-ravaged surface, since light meant nothing to them. Perhaps,
too, they were slowly weakening with the aeons. Indeed, it was known that
they would be quite dead in the time of the post-human beetle race which
the fleeing minds would tenant.

Meanwhile, the Great Race maintained its cautious vigilance, with potent
weapons ceaselessly ready despite the horrified banishing of the subject
 38

from common speech and visible records. And always the shadow of
nameless fear hung bout the sealed trap-doors and the dark, windowless
elder towers.
 39

CHAPTER 5

THAT is the world of which my dreams brought me dim, scattered echoes

every night. I cannot hope to give any true idea of the horror and dread
contained in such echoes, for it was upon a wholly intangible quality—the
sharp sense of pseudo-memory—that such feelings mainly depended.

As I have said, my studies gradually gave me a defence against these

feelings in the form of rational psychological explanations; and this saving
influence was augmented by the subtle touch of accustomedness which
comes with the passage of time. Yet in spite of everything the vague,
creeping terror would return momentarily now and then. It did not,
however, engulf me as it had before; and after 1922 I lived a very normal life
of work and recreation.

In the course of years I began to feel that my experience—together with the

kindred cases and the related folklore—ought to be definitely summarised
and published for the benefit of serious students; hence I prepared a series
of articles briefly covering the whole ground and illustrated with crude
sketches of some of the shapes, scenes, decorative motifs, and hieroglyphs
remembered from the dreams.

These appeared at various times during 1928 and 1929 in the Journal of the
American Psychological Society, but did not attract much attention.
Meanwhile I continued to record my dreams with the minutest care, even
though the growing stack of reports attained troublesomely vast
proportions. On July 10, 1934, there was forwarded to me by the
Psychological Society the letter which opened the culminating and most
horrible phase of the whole mad ordeal. It was postmarked Pilbarra,
Western Australia, and bore the signature of one whom I found, upon
inquiry, to be a mining engineer of considerable prominence. Enclosed were
some very curious snapshots. I will reproduce the text in its entirety, and no
reader can fail to understand how tremendous an effect it and the
photographs had upon me.
 40

I was, for a time, almost stunned and incredulous; for although I had often
thought that some basis of fact must underlie certain phases of the legends
which had coloured my dreams, I was none the less unprepared for anything
like a tangible survival from a lost world remote beyond all imagination.
Most devastating of all were the photographs—for here, in cold,
incontrovertible realism, there stood out against a background of sand
certain worn-down, water-ridged, storm-weathered blocks of stone whose
slightly convex tops and slightly concave bottoms told their own story.

And when I studied them with a magnifying glass I could see all too plainly,
amidst the batterings and pittings, the traces of those vast curvilinear
designs and occasional hieroglyphs whose significance had become so
hideous to me. But here is the letter, which speaks for itself.

49, Dampier St.,

Pilbarra, W. Australia,
May 18, 1934.

Prof. N. W Peaslee,
c/o Am. Psychological Society,
30 E. 41st St.,
New York City, U.S.A.

My Dear Sir:—

A recent conversation with Dr. E. M. Boyle of Perth, and some papers with your
articles which he has just sent me, make it advisable for me to tell you about
certain things I have seen in the Great Sandy Desert east of our gold field here.
It would seem, in view of the peculiar legends about old cities with huge
stonework and strange designs and hieroglyphs which you describe, that I
have come upon something very important.

The blackfellows have always been full of talk about "great stones with marks
on them," and seem to have a terrible fear of such things. They connect them
in some way with their common racial legends about Buddai, the gigantic old
man who lies asleep for ages underground with his head on his arm, and who
will some day awake and eat up the world.
 41

There are some very old and half-forgotten tales of enormous underground
huts of great stones, where passages lead down and down, and where horrible
things have happened. The blackfellows claim that once some warriors, fleeing
in battle, went down into one and never came back, but that frightful winds
began to blow from the place soon after they went down. However, there
usually isn't much in what these natives say.

But what I have to tell is more than this. Two years ago, when I was
prospecting about 500 miles east in the desert, I came on a lot of queer pieces
of dressed stone perhaps 3 × 2 × 2 feet in size, and weathered and pitted to the
very limit.

At first I couldn't find any of the marks the blackfellows told about, but when I
looked close enough I could make out some deeply carved lines in spite of the
weathering. There were peculiar curves, just like what the blackfellows had
tried to describe. I imagine there must have been thirty or forty blocks, some
nearly buried in the sand, and all within a circle perhaps a quarter of a mile in
diameter.

When I saw some, I looked around closely for more, and made a careful
reckoning of the place with my instruments. I also took pictures of ten or
twelve of the most typical blocks, and will enclose the prints for you to see.

I turned my information and pictures over to the government at Perth, but

they have done nothing about them.

Then I met Dr. Boyle, who had read your articles in the Journal of the American
Psychological Society, and, in time, happened to mention the stones. He was
enormously interested, and became quite excited when I shewed him my
snapshots, saying that the stones and the markings were just like those of the
masonry you had dreamed about and seen described in legends.

He meant to write you, but was delayed. Meanwhile, he sent me most of the
magazines with your articles, and I saw at once, from your drawings and
descriptions, that my stones are certainly the kind you mean. You can
appreciate this from the enclosed prints. Later on you will hear directly from
Dr. Boyle.
 42

Now I can understand how important all this will be to you. Without question
we are faced with the remains of an unknown civilization older than any
dreamed of before, and forming a basis for your legends.

As a mining engineer, I have some knowledge of geology, and can tell you that
these blocks are so ancient they frighten me. They are mostly sandstone and
granite, though one is almost certainly made of a queer sort of cement or
concrete.

They bear evidence of water action, as if this part of the world had been
submerged and come up again after long ages—all since those blocks were
made and used. It is a matter of hundreds of thousands of years—or heaven
knows how much more. I don't like to think about it.

In view of your previous diligent work in tracking down the legends and
everything connected with them, I cannot doubt but that you will want to lead
an expedition to the desert and make some archaeological excavations. Both
Dr. Boyle and I are prepared to cooperate in such work if you—or
organizations known to you—can furnish the funds.

I can get together a dozen miners for the heavy digging—the blackfellows
would be of no use, for I've found that they have an almost maniacal fear of
this particular spot. Boyle and I are saying nothing to others, for you very
obviously ought to have precedence in any discoveries or credit.

The place can be reached from Pilbarra in about four days by motor tractor—
which we'd need for our apparatus. It is somewhat west and south of
Warburton's path of 1873, and 100 miles southeast of Joanna Spring. We could
float things up the De Grey River instead of starting from Pilbarra—but all that
can be talked over later.

Roughly the stones lie at a point about 22° 3' 14" South Latitude, 125° 0' 39" East
Longitude. The climate is tropical, and the desert conditions are trying.

I shall welcome further correspondence upon this subject, and am keenly eager
to assist in any plan you may devise. After studying your articles I am deeply
impressed with the profound significance of the whole matter. Dr. Boyle will
write later. When rapid communication is needed, a cable to Perth can be
relayed by wireless.
 43

Hoping profoundly for an early message,

Believe me,

Most faithfully yours,

Robert B. F. Mackenzie

Of the immediate aftermath of this letter, much can be learned from the
press. My good fortune in securing the backing of Miskatonic University was
great, and both Mr. Mackenzie and Dr. Boyle proved invaluable in arranging
matters at the Australian end. We were not too specific with the public
about our objects, since the whole matter would have lent itself
unpleasantly to sensational and jocose treatment by the cheaper
newspapers. As a result, printed reports were sparing; but enough appeared
to tell of our quest for reported Australian ruins and to chronicle our various
preparatory steps.

Professor William Dyer of the college's geology department—leader of the

Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition Of 1930-31—Ferdinand C. Ashley of the
department of ancient history, and Tyler M. Freeborn of the department of
anthropology—together with my son Wingate—accompanied me.

My correspondent, Mackenzie, came to Arkham early in 1935 and assisted in

our final preparations. He proved to be a tremendously competent and
affable man of about fifty, admirably well-read, and deeply familiar with all
the conditions of Australian travel.

He had tractors waiting at Pilbarra, and we chartered a tramp steamer

sufficiently small to get up the river to that point. We were prepared to
excavate in the most careful and scientific fashion, sifting every particle of
sand, and disturbing nothing which might seem to be in or near its original
situation.

Sailing from Boston aboard the wheezy Lexington on March 28, 1935, we
had a leisurely trip across the Atlantic and Mediterranean, through the Suez
Canal, down the Red Sea, and across the Indian Ocean to our goal. I need
not tell how the sight of the low, sandy West Australian coast depressed me,
 44

and how I detested the crude mining town and dreary gold fields where the
tractors were given their last loads.

Dr. Boyle, who met us, proved to be elderly, pleasant, and intelligent—and
his knowledge of psychology led him into many long discussions with my
son and me.

Discomfort and expectancy were oddly mingled in most of us when at

length our party of eighteen rattled forth over the arid leagues of sand and
rock. On Friday, May 31st, we forded a branch of the De Grey and entered
the realm of utter desolation. A certain positive terror grew on me as we
advanced to this actual site of the elder world behind the legends—a terror,
of course, abetted by the fact that my disturbing dreams and pseudo-
memories still beset me with unabated force.

It was on Monday, June 3rd, that we saw the first of the half-buried blocks. I
cannot describe the emotions with which I actually touched—in objective
reality—a fragment of Cyclopean masonry in every respect like the blocks in
the walls of my dream-buildings. There was a distinct trace of carving—and
my hands trembled as I recognised part of a curvilinear decorative scheme
made hellish to me through years of tormenting nightmare and baffling
research.

A month of digging brought a total of some 1250 blocks in varying stages of

wear and disintegration. Most of these were carven megaliths with curved
tops and bottoms. A minority were smaller, flatter, plain-surfaced, and
square or octagonally cut-like those of the floors and pavements in my
dreams—while a few were singularly massive and curved or slanted in such
a manner as to suggest use in vaulting or groining, or as parts of arches or
round window casings.

The deeper—and the farther north and east—we dug, the more blocks we
found; though we still failed to discover any trace of arrangement among
them. Professor Dyer was appalled at the measureless age of the fragments,
and Freeborn found traces of symbols which fitted darkly into certain
Papuan and Polynesian legends of infinite antiquity. The condition and
scattering of the blocks told mutely of vertiginous cycles of time and
geologic upheavals of cosmic savagery.
 45

We had an aëroplane with us, and my son Wingate would often go up to

different heights and scan the sand-and-rock waste for signs of dim, large-
scale outlines—either differences of level or trails of scattered blocks. His
results were virtually negative; for whenever he would one day think he had
glimpsed some significant trend, he would on his next trip find the
impression replaced by another equally insubstantial—a result of the
shifting, wind-blown sand.

One or two of these ephemeral suggestions, though, affected me queerly

and disagreeably. They seemed, after a fashion, to dovetail horribly with
something I had dreamed or read, but which I could no longer remember.
There was a terrible familiarity about them—which somehow made me look
furtively and apprehensively over the abominable, sterile terrain toward the
north and northeast.

Around the first week in July I developed an unaccountable set of mixed

emotions about that general northeasterly region. There was horror, and
there was curiosity—but more than that, there was a persistent and
perplexing illusion of memory.

I tried all sorts of psychological expedients to get these notions out of my

head, but met with no success. Sleeplessness also gained upon me, but I
almost welcomed this because of the resultant shortening of my dream-
periods. I acquired the habit of taking long, lone walks in the desert late at
night—usually to the north or northeast, whither the sum of my strange
new impulses seemed subtly to pull me.

Sometimes, on these walks, I would stumble over nearly buried fragments

of the ancient masonry. Though there were fewer visible blocks here than
where we had started, I felt sure that there must be a vast abundance
beneath the surface. The ground was less level than at our camp, and the
prevailing high winds now and then piled the sand into fantastic temporary
hillocks—exposing low traces of the elder stones while it covered other
traces.

I was queerly anxious to have the excavations extend to this territory, yet at
the same time dreaded what might be revealed. Obviously, I was getting
into a rather bad state—all the worse because I could not account for it.
 46

An indication of my poor nervous health can be gained from my response to

an odd discovery which I made on one of my nocturnal rambles. It was on
the evening of July 11th, when the moon flooded the mysterious hillocks
with a curious pallor.

Wandering somewhat beyond my usual limits, I came upon a great stone

which seemed to differ markedly from any we had yet encountered. It was
almost wholly covered, but I stooped and cleared away the sand with my
hands, later studying the object carefully and supplementing the moonlight
with my electric torch.

Unlike the other very large rocks, this one was perfectly square-cut, with no
convex or concave surface. It seemed, too, to be of a dark basaltic
substance, wholly dissimilar to the granite and sandstone and occasional
concrete of the now familiar fragments.

Suddenly I rose, turned, and ran for the camp at top speed. It was a wholly
unconscious and irrational flight, and only when I was close to my tent did I
fully realise why I had run. Then it came to me. The queer dark stone was
something which I had dreamed and read about, and which was linked with
the uttermost horrors of the aeon-old legendry.

It was one of the blocks of that basaltic elder masonry which the fabled
Great Race held in such fear—the tall, windowless ruins left by those
brooding, half-material, alien things that festered in earth's nether abysses
and against whose wind-like, invisible forces the trap-doors were sealed and
the sleepless sentinels posted.

I remained awake all night, but by dawn realised how silly I had been to let
the shadow of a myth upset me. Instead of being frightened, I should have
had a discoverer's enthusiasm.

The next forenoon I told the others about my find, and Dyer, Freeborn,
Boyle, my son, and I set out to view the anomalous block. Failure, however,
confronted us. I had formed no clear idea of the stone's location, and a late
wind had wholly altered the hillocks of shifting sand.
 47

CHAPTER 6

I COME now to the crucial and most difficult part of my narrative—all the
more difficult because I cannot be quite certain of its reality. At times I feel
uncomfortably sure that I was not dreaming or deluded; and it is this feeling
in view of the stupendous implications which the objective truth of my
experience would raise—which impels me to make this record.

My son—a trained psychologist with the fullest and most sympathetic

knowledge of my whole case—shall be the primary judge of what I have to
tell.

First let me outline the externals of the matter, as those at the camp know
them. On the night of July 17-18, after a windy day, I retired early but could
not sleep. Rising shortly before eleven, and afflicted as usual with that
strange feeling regarding the northeastward terrain, I set out on one of my
typical nocturnal walks; seeing and greeting only one person—an Australian
miner named Tupper—as I left our precincts.

The moon, slightly past full, shone from a clear sky, and drenched the
ancient sands with a white, leprous radiance which seemed to me somehow
infinitely evil. There was no longer any wind, nor did any return for nearly
five hours, as amply attested by Tupper and others who saw me walking
rapidly across the pallid, secret-guarding hillocks toward the northeast.

About 3:30 a.m. a violent wind blew up, waking everyone in camp and felling
three of the tents. The sky was unclouded, and the desert still blazed with
that leprous moonlight. As the party saw to the tents my absence was
noted, but in view of my previous walks this circumstance gave no one
alarm. And yet, as many as three men—all Australians—seemed to feel
something sinister in the air.

Mackenzie explained to Professor Freeborn that this was a fear picked up

from blackfellow folklore—the natives having woven a curious fabric of
malignant myth about the high winds which at long intervals sweep across
the sands under a clear sky. Such winds, it is whispered, blow out of the
 48

great stone huts under the ground, where terrible things have happened—
and are never felt except near places where the big marked stones are
scattered. Close to four the gale subsided as suddenly as it had begun,
leaving the sand hills in new and unfamiliar shapes.

It was just past five, with the bloated, fungoid moon sinking in the west,
when I staggered into camp—hatless, tattered, features scratched and
ensanguined, and without my electric torch. Most of the men had returned
to bed, but Professor Dyer was smoking a pipe in front of his tent. Seeing
my winded and almost frenzied state, he called Dr. Boyle, and the two of
them got me on my cot and made me comfortable. My son, roused by the
stir, soon joined them, and they all tried to force me to lie still and attempt
sleep.

But there was no sleep for me. My psychological state was very
extraordinary—different from anything I had previously suffered. After a
time I insisted upon talking—nervously and elaborately explaining my
condition. I told them I had become fatigued, and had lain down in the sand
for a nap. There had, I said, been dreams even more frightful than usual—
and when I was awaked by the sudden high wind my overwrought nerves
had snapped. I had fled in panic, frequently falling over half-buried stones
and thus gaining my tattered and bedraggled aspect. I must have slept
long—hence the hours of my absence.

Of anything strange either seen or experienced I hinted absolutely

nothing—exercising the greatest self-control in that respect. But I spoke of
a change of mind regarding the whole work of the expedition, and urged a
halt in all digging toward the northeast. My reasoning was patently weak—
for I mentioned a dearth of blocks, a wish not to offend the superstitious
miners, a possible shortage of funds from the college, and other things
either untrue or irrelevant. Naturally, no one paid the least attention to my
new wishes—not even my son, whose concern for my health was obvious.

The next day I was up and around the camp, but took no part in the
excavations. Seeing that I could not stop the work, I decided to return home
as soon as possible for the sake of my nerves, and made my son promise to
 49

fly me in the plane to Perth—a thousand miles to the southwest—as soon

as he had surveyed the region I wished let alone.

If, I reflected, the thing I had seen was still visible, I might decide to attempt
a specific warning even at the cost of ridicule. It was just conceivable that
the miners who knew the local folklore might back me up. Humouring me,
my son made the survey that very afternoon, flying over all the terrain my
walk could possibly have covered. Yet nothing of what I had found remained
in sight.

It was the case of the anomalous basalt block all over again—the shifting
sand had wiped out every trace. For an instant I half regretted having lost a
certain awesome object in my stark fright—but now I know that the loss
was merciful. I can still believe my whole experience an illusion—especially
if, as I devoutly hope, that hellish abyss is never found.

Wingate took me to Perth on July 20th, though declining to abandon the

expedition and return home. He stayed with me until the 25th, when the
steamer for Liverpool sailed. Now, in the cabin of theEmpress, I am
pondering long and frantically upon the entire matter, and have decided
that my son at least must be informed. It shall rest with him whether to
diffuse the matter more widely.

In order to meet any eventuality I have prepared this summary of my

background—as already known in a scattered way to others—and will now
tell as briefly as possible what seemed to happen during my absence from
the camp that hideous night.

Nerves on edge, and whipped into a kind of perverse eagerness by that

inexplicable, dread-mingled, mnemonic urge toward the northeast, I
plodded on beneath the evil, burning moon. Here and there I saw, half
shrouded by sand, those primal Cyclopean blocks left from nameless and
forgotten aeons.

The incalculable age and brooding horror of this monstrous waste began to
oppress me as never before, and I could not keep from thinking of my
maddening dreams, of the frightful legends which lay behind them, and of
 50

the present fears of natives and miners concerning the desert and its carven
stones.

And yet I plodded on as if to some eldritch rendezvous—more and more

assailed by bewildering fancies, compulsions, and pseudo-memories. I
thought of some of the possible contours of the lines of stones as seen by
my son from the air, and wondered why they seemed at once so ominous
and so familiar. Something was fumbling and rattling at the latch of my
recollection, while another unknown force sought to keep the portal barred.

The night was windless, and the pallid sand curved upward and downward
like frozen waves of the sea. I had no goal, but somehow ploughed along as
if with fate-bound assurance. My dreams welled up into the waking world,
so that each sand-embedded megalith seemed part of endless rooms and
corridors of pre-human masonry, carved and hieroglyphed with symbols
that I knew too well from years of custom as a captive mind of the Great
Race.

At moments I fancied I saw those omniscient, conical horrors moving about

at their accustomed tasks, and I feared to look down lest I find myself one
with them in aspect. Yet all the while I saw the sand-covered blocks as well
as the rooms and corridors; the evil, burning moon as well as the lamps of
luminous crystal; the endless desert as well as the waving ferns beyond the
windows. I was awake and dreaming at the same time.

I do not know how long or how far—or indeed, in just what direction—I had
walked when I first spied the heap of blocks bared by the day's wind. It was
the largest group in one place that I had seen so far, and so sharply did it
impress me that the visions of fabulous aeons faded suddenly away.

Again there were only the desert and the evil moon and the shards of an
unguessed past. I drew close and paused, and cast the added light of my
electric torch over the tumbled pile. A hillock had blown away, leaving a low,
irregularly round mass of megaliths and smaller fragments some forty feet
across and from two to eight feet high.

From the very outset I realized that there was some utterly unprecedented
quality about those stones. Not only was the mere number of them quite
 51

without parallel, but something in the sandworn traces of design arrested

me as I scanned them under the mingled beams of the moon and my torch.

Not that any one differed essentially from the earlier specimens we had
found. It was something subtler than that. The impression did not come
when I looked at one block alone, but only when I ran my eye over several
almost simultaneously.

Then, at last, the truth dawned upon me. The curvilinear patterns on many
of those blocks were closely related—parts of one vast decorative
conception. For the first time in this aeon-shaken waste I had come upon a
mass of masonry in its old position—tumbled and fragmentary, it is true, but
none the less existing in a very definite sense.

Mounting at a low place, I clambered laboriously over the heap; here and
there clearing away the sand with my fingers, and constantly striving to
interpret varieties of size, shape, and style, and relationships of design.

After a while I could vaguely guess at the nature of the bygone structure,
and at the designs which had once stretched over the vast surfaces of the
primal masonry. The perfect identity of the whole with some of my dream-
glimpses appalled and unnerved me.

This was once a Cyclopean corridor thirty feet tall, paved with octagonal
blocks and solidly vaulted overhead. There would have been rooms opening
off on the right, and at the farther end one of those strange inclined planes
would have wound down to still lower depths.

I started violently as these conceptions occurred to me, for there was more
in them than the blocks themselves had supplied. How did I know that this
level should have been far underground? How did I know that the plane
leading upward should have been behind me? How did I know that the long
subterrene passage to the Square of Pillars ought to lie on the left one level
above me?

How did I know that the room of machines and the rightward-leading tunnel
to the central archives ought to lie two levels below? How did I know that
there would be one of those horrible, metal-banded trap-doors at the very
 52

bottom four levels down? Bewildered by this intrusion from the dream-
world, I found myself shaking and bathed in a cold perspiration.

Then, as a last, intolerable touch, I felt that faint, insidious stream of cool air
trickling upward from a depressed place near the center of the huge heap.
Instantly, as once before, my visions faded, and I saw again only the evil
moonlight, the brooding desert, and the spreading tumulus of palaeogean
masonry. Something real and tangible, yet fraught with infinite suggestions
of nighted mystery, now confronted me. For that stream of air could argue
but one thing—a hidden gulf of great size beneath the disordered blocks on
the surface.

My first thought was of the sinister blackfellow legends of vast underground

huts among the megaliths where horrors happen and great winds are born.
Then thoughts of my own dreams came back, and I felt dim pseudo-
memories tugging at my mind. What manner of place lay below me? What
primal, inconceivable source of age-old myth-cycles and haunting
nightmares might I be on the brink of uncovering?

It was only for a moment that I hesitated, for more than curiosity and
scientific zeal was driving me on and working against my growing fear.

I seemed to move almost automatically, as if in the clutch of some

compelling fate. Pocketing my torch, and struggling with a strength that I
had not thought I possessed, I wrenched aside first one titan fragment of
stone and then another, till there welled up a strong draught whose
dampness contrasted oddly with the desert's dry air. A black rift began to
yawn, and at length—when I had pushed away every fragment small
enough to budge—the leprous moonlight blazed on an aperture of ample
width to admit me.

I drew out my torch and cast a brilliant beam into the opening. Below me
was a chaos of tumbled masonry, sloping roughly down toward the north at
an angle of about forty-five degrees, and evidently the result of some
bygone collapse from above.

Between its surface and the ground level was a gulf of impenetrable
blackness at whose upper edge were signs of gigantic, stress-heaved
 53

vaulting. At this point, it appeared, the desert's sands lay directly upon a
floor of some titan structure of earth's youth—how preserved through
aeons of geologic convulsion I could not then and cannot now even attempt
to guess.

In retrospect, the barest idea of a sudden, lone descent into such a doubtful
abyss—and at a time when one's whereabouts were unknown to any living
soul—seems like the utter apex of insanity. Perhaps it was—yet that night I
embarked without hesitancy upon such a descent.

Again there was manifest that lure and driving of fatality which had all along
seemed to direct my course. With torch flashing intermittently to save the
battery, I commenced a mad scramble down the sinister, Cyclopean incline
below the opening—sometimes facing forward as I found good hand—and
foot-holds, and at other times turning to face the heap of megaliths as I
clung and fumbled more precariously.

In two directions beside me distant walls of carven, crumbling masonry

loomed dimly under the direct beams of my torch. Ahead, however, was
only unbroken darkness.

I kept no track of time during my downward scramble. So seething with

baffling hints and images was my mind that all objective matters seemed
withdrawn into incalculable distances. Physical sensation was dead, and
even fear remained as a wraith-like, inactive gargoyle leering impotently at
me.

Eventually, I reached a level floor strewn with fallen blocks, shapeless

fragments of stone, and sand and detritus of every kind. On either side—
perhaps thirty feet apart—rose massive walls culminating in huge groinings.
That they were carved I could just discern, but the nature of the carvings
was beyond my perception.

What held me the most was the vaulting overhead. The beam from my torch
could not reach the roof, but the lower parts of the monstrous arches stood
out distinctly. And so perfect was their identity with what I had seen in
countless dreams of the elder world, that I trembled actively for the first
time.
 54

Behind and high above, a faint luminous blur told of the distant moonlit
world outside. Some vague shred of caution warned me that I should not let
it out of my sight, lest I have no guide for my return.

I now advanced toward the wall at my left, where the traces of carving were
plainest. The littered floor was nearly as hard to traverse as the downward
heap had been, but I managed to pick my difficult way.

At one place I heaved aside some blocks and locked away the detritus to see
what the pavement was like, and shuddered at the utter, fateful familiarity
of the great octagonal stones whose buckled surface still held roughly
together.

Reaching a convenient distance from the wall, I cast the searchlight slowly
and carefully over its worn remnants of carving. Some bygone influx of
water seemed to have acted on the sandstone surface, while there were
curious incrustations which I could not explain.

In places the masonry was very loose and distorted, and I wondered how
many aeons more this primal, hidden edifice could keep its remaining traces
of form amidst earth's heavings.

But it was the carvings themselves that excited me most. Despite their time-
crumbled state, they were relatively easy to trace at close range; and the
complete, intimate familiarity of every detail almost stunned my
imagination.

That the major attributes of this hoary masonry should be familiar, was not
beyond normal credibility.

Powerfully impressing the weavers of certain myths, they had become

embodied in a stream of cryptic lore which, somehow, coming to my notice
during the amnesic period, had evoked vivid images in my subconscious
mind.

But how could I explain the exact and minute fashion in which each line and
spiral of these strange designs tallied with what I had dreamed for more
than a score of years? What obscure, forgotten iconography could have
 55

reproduced each subtle shading and nuance which so persistently, exactly,

and unvaryingly besieged my sleeping vision night after night?

For this was no chance or remote resemblance. Definitely and absolutely,

the millennially ancient, aeon-hidden corridor in which I stood was the
original of something I knew in sleep as intimately as I knew my own house
in Crane Street, Arkham. True, my dreams shewed the place in its undecayed
prime; but the identity was no less real on that account. I was wholly and
horribly oriented.

The particular structure I was in was known to me. Known, too, was its place
in that terrible elder city of dreams. That I could visit unerringly any point in
that structure or in that city which had escaped the changes and
devastations of uncounted ages, I realized with hideous and instinctive
certainty. What in heaven's name could all this mean? How had I come to
know what I knew? And what awful reality could lie behind those antique
tales of the beings who had dwelt in this labyrinth of primordial stone?

Words can convey only fractionally the welter of dread and bewilderment
which ate at my spirit. I knew this place. I knew what lay before me, and
what had lain overhead before the myriad towering stories had fallen to
dust and debris and the desert. No need now, I thought with a shudder, to
keep that faint blur of moonlight in view.

I was torn betwixt a longing to flee and a feverish mixture of burning

curiosity and driving fatality. What had happened to this monstrous
megalopolis of old in the millions of years since the time of my dreams? Of
the subterrene mazes which had underlain the city and linked all the titan
towers, how much had still survived the writhings of earth's crust?

Had I come upon a whole buried world of unholy archaism? Could I still find
the house of the writing master, and the tower where S'gg'ha, the captive
mind from the star-headed vegetable carnivores of Antarctica, had chiselled
certain pictures on the blank spaces of the walls?

Would the passage at the second level down, to the hall of the alien minds,
be still unchoked and traversable? In that hall the captive mind of an
incredible entity—a half-plastic denizen of the hollow interior of an
 56

unknown trans-Plutonian planet eighteen million years in the future—had

kept a certain thing which it had modelled from clay.

I shut my eyes and put my hand to my head in a vain, pitiful effort to drive
these insane dream-fragments from my consciousness. Then, for the first
time, I felt acutely the coolness, motion, and dampness of the surrounding
air. Shuddering, I realized that a vast chain of aeon-dead black gulfs must
indeed be yawning somewhere beyond and below me.

I thought of the frightful chambers and corridors and inclines as I recalled

them from my dreams. Would the way to the central archives still be open?
Again that driving fatality tugged insistently at my brain as I recalled the
awesome records that once lay cased in those rectangular vaults of rustless
metal.

There, said the dreams and legends, had reposed the whole history, past
and future, of the cosmic space-time continuum—written by captive minds
from every orb and every age in the solar system. Madness, of course—but
had I not now stumbled into a nighted world as mad as I?

I thought of the locked metal shelves, and of the curious knob twistings
needed to open each one. My own came vividly into my consciousness. How
often had I gone through that intricate routine of varied turns and pressures
in the terrestrial vertebrate section on the lowest level! Every detail was
fresh and familiar.

If there were such a vault as I had dreamed of, I could open it in a moment.
It was then that madness took me utterly. An instant later, and I was leaping
and stumbling over the rocky debris toward the well-remembered incline to
the depths below.
 57

CHAPTER 7

FROM that point forward my impressions are scarcely to be relied on—

indeed, I still possess a final, desperate hope that they all form parts of
some daemonic dream or illusion born of delirium. A fever raged in my brain,
and everything came to me through a kind of haze—sometimes only
intermittently.

The rays of my torch shot feebly into the engulfing blackness, bringing
phantasmal flashes of hideously familiar walls and carvings, all blighted with
the decay of ages. In one place a tremendous mass of vaulting had fallen, so
that I had to clamber over a mighty mound of stones reaching almost to the
ragged, grotesquely stalactited roof.

It was all the ultimate apex of nightmare, made worse by the blasphemous
tug of pseudo-memory. One thing only was unfamiliar, and that was my own
size in relation to the monstrous masonry. I felt oppressed by a sense of
unwonted smallness, as if the sight of these towering walls from a mere
human body was something wholly new and abnormal. Again and again I
looked nervously down at myself, vaguely disturbed by the human form I
possessed.

Onward through the blackness of the abyss I leaped, plunged, and

staggered—often falling and bruising myself, and once nearly shattering my
torch. Every stone and corner of that daemonic gulf was known to me, and
at many points I stopped to cast beams of light through choked and
crumbling, yet familiar, archways.

Some rooms had totally collapsed; others were bare, or debris-filled. In a

few I saw masses of metal—some fairly intact, some broken, and some
crushed or battered—which I recognised as the colossal pedestals or tables
of my dreams. What they could in truth have been, I dared not guess.

I found the downward incline and began its descent—though after a time
halted by a gaping, ragged chasm whose narrowest point could not be much
 58

less than four feet across. Here the stonework had fallen through, revealing
incalculable inky depths beneath.

I knew there were two more cellar levels in this titan edifice, and trembled
with fresh panic as I recalled the metal-clamped trap-door on the lowest
one. There could be no guards now—for what had lurked beneath had long
since done its hideous work and sunk into its long decline. By the time of the
posthuman beetle race it would be quite dead. And yet, as I thought of the
native legends, I trembled anew.

It cost me a terrible effort to vault that yawning chasm, since the littered
floor prevented a running start—but madness drove me on. I chose a place
close to the left-hand wall—where the rift was least wide and the landing-
spot reasonably clear of dangerous debris—and after one frantic moment
reached the other side in safety.

At last, gaining the lower level, I stumbled on past the archway of the room
of machines, within which were fantastic ruins of metal, half buried beneath
fallen vaulting. Everything was where I knew it would be, and I climbed
confidently over the heaps which barred the entrance of a vast transverse
corridor. This, I realised, would take me under the city to the central
archives.

Endless ages seemed to unroll as I stumbled, leaped, and crawled along that
debris-cluttered corridor. Now and then I could make out carvings on the
ages-stained walls—some familiar, others seemingly added since the period
of my dreams. Since this was a subterrene house-connecting highway, there
were no archways save when the route led through the lower levels of
various buildings.

At some of these intersections I turned aside long enough to look down

well-remembered corridors and into well-remembered rooms. Twice only
did I find any radical changes from what I had dreamed of—and in one of
these cases I could trace the sealed-up outlines of the archway I
remembered.

I shook violently, and felt a curious surge of retarding weakness, as I steered

a hurried and reluctant course through the crypt of one of those great
 59

windowless, ruined towers whose alien, basalt masonry bespoke a

whispered and horrible origin.

This primal vault was round and fully two hundred feet across, with nothing
carved upon the dark-hued stonework. The floor was here free from
anything save dust and sand, and I could see the apertures leading upward
and downward. There were no stairs or inclines—indeed, my dreams had
pictured those elder towers as wholly untouched by the fabulous Great
Race. Those who had built them had not needed stairs or inclines.

In the dreams, the downward aperture had been tightly sealed and
nervously guarded. Now it lay open-black and yawning, and giving forth a
current of cool, damp air. Of what limitless caverns of eternal night might
brood below, I would not permit myself to think.

Later, clawing my way along a badly heaped section of the corridor, I

reached a place where the roof had wholly caved in. The debris rose like a
mountain, and I climbed up over it, passing through a vast, empty space
where my torchlight could reveal neither walls nor vaulting. This, I reflected,
must be the cellar of the house of the metal-purveyors, fronting on the third
square not far from the archives. What had happened to it I could not
conjecture.

I found the corridor again beyond the mountain of detritus and stone, but
after a short distance encountered a wholly choked place where the fallen
vaulting almost touched the perilously sagging ceiling. How I managed to
wrench and tear aside enough blocks to afford a passage, and how I dared
disturb the tightly packed fragments when the least shift of equilibrium
might have brought down all the tons of superincumbent masonry to crush
me to nothingness, I do not know.

It was sheer madness that impelled and guided me—if, indeed, my whole
underground adventure was not—as I hope—a hellish delusion or phase of
dreaming. But I did make—or dream that I made—a passage that I could
squirm through. As I wiggled over the mound of debris—my torch, switched
continuously on, thrust deeply in my mouth—I felt myself torn by the
fantastic stalactites of the jagged floor above me.
 60

I was now close to the great underground archival structure which seemed
to form my goal. Sliding and clambering down the farther side of the barrier,
and picking my way along the remaining stretch of corridor with hand-held,
intermittently flashing torch, I came at last to a low, circular crypt with
arches—still in a marvelous state of preservation—opening off on every
side.

The walls, or such parts of them as lay within reach of my torchlight, were
densely hieroglyphed and chiselled with typical curvilinear symbols—some
added since the period of my dreams.

This, I realised, was my fated destination, and I turned at once through a

familiar archway on my left. That I could find a clear passage up and down
the incline to all the surviving levels, I had, oddly, little doubt. This vast,
earth-protected pile, housing the annals of all the solar system, had been
built with supernal skill and strength to last as long as that system itself.

Blocks of stupendous size, poised with mathematical genius and bound with
cements of incredible toughness, had combined to form a mass as firm as
the planet's rocky core. Here, after ages more prodigious than I could sanely
grasp, its buried bulk stood in all its essential contours, the vast, dust-drifted
floors scarce sprinkled with the litter elsewhere so dominant.

The relatively easy walking from this point onward went curiously to my
head. All the frantic eagerness hitherto frustrated by obstacles now took
itself out in a kind of febrile speed, and I literally raced along the low-roofed,
monstrously well-remembered aisles beyond the archway.

I was past being astonished by the familiarity of what I saw. On every hand
the great hieroglyphed metal shelf-doors loomed monstrously; some yet in
place, others sprung open, and still others bent and buckled under bygone
geological stresses not quite strong enough to shatter the titan masonry.

Here and there a dust-covered heap beneath a gaping, empty shelf seemed
to indicate where cases had been shaken down by earth tremors. On
occasional pillars were great symbols or letters proclaiming classes and
subclasses of volumes.
 61

Once I paused before an open vault where I saw some of the accustomed
metal cases still in position amidst the omnipresent gritty dust. Reaching up,
I dislodged one of the thinner specimens with some difficulty, and rested it
on the floor for inspection. It was titled in the prevailing curvilinear
hieroglyphs, though something in the arrangement of the characters
seemed subtly unusual.

The odd mechanism of the hooked fastener was perfectly well known to
me, and I snapped up the still rustless and workable lid and drew out the
book within. The latter, as expected, was some twenty by fifteen inches in
area, and two inches thick; the thin metal covers opening at the top.

Its tough cellulose pages seemed unaffected by the myriad cycles of time
they had lived through, and I studied the queerly pigmented, brush-drawn
letters of the text-symbols unlike either the usual curved hieroglyphs or any
alphabet known to human scholarship—with a haunting, half-aroused
memory.

It came to me that this was the language used by a captive mind I had
known slightly in my dreams—a mind from a large asteroid on which had
survived much of the archaic life and lore of the primal planet whereof it
formed a fragment. At the same time I recalled that this level of the archives
was devoted to volumes dealing with the non-terrestrial planets.

As I ceased poring over this incredible document I saw that the light of my
torch was beginning to fail, hence quickly inserted the extra battery I always
had with me. Then, armed with the stronger radiance, I resumed my feverish
racing through unending tangles of aisles and corridors—recognising now
and then some familiar shelf, and vaguely annoyed by the acoustic
conditions which made my footfalls echo incongruously in these catacombs.

The very prints of my shoes behind me in the millennially untrodden dust

made me shudder. Never before, if my mad dreams held anything of truth,
had human feet pressed upon those immemorial pavements.

Of the particular goal of my insane racing, my conscious mind held no hint.

There was, however, some force of evil potency pulling at my dazed will and
buried recollection, so that I vaguely felt I was not running at random.
 62

I came to a downward incline and followed it to profounder depths. Floors

flashed by me as I raced, but I did not pause to explore them. In my whirling
brain there had begun to beat a certain rhythm which set my right hand
twitching in unison. I wanted to unlock something, and felt that I knew all
the intricate twists and pressures needed to do it. It would be like a modern
safe with a combination lock.

Dream or not, I had once known and still knew. How any dream—or scrap of
unconsciously absorbed legend—could have taught me a detail so minute,
so intricate, and so complex, I did not attempt to explain to myself. I was
beyond all coherent thought. For was not this whole experience—this
shocking familiarity with a set of unknown ruins, and this monstrously exact
identity of everything before me with what only dreams and scraps of myth
could have suggested—a horror beyond all reason?

Probably it was my basic conviction then—as it is now during my saner

moments—that I was not awake at all, and that the entire buried city was a
fragment of febrile hallucination.

Eventually, I reached the lowest level and struck off to the right of the
incline. For some shadowy reason I tried to soften my steps, even though I
lost speed thereby. There was a space I was afraid to cross on this last,
deeply buried floor.

As I drew near it I recalled what thing in that space I feared. It was merely
one of the metal-barred and closely guarded trap-doors. There would be no
guards now, and on that account I trembled and tiptoed as I had done in
passing through that black basalt vault where a similar trap-door had
yawned.

I felt a current of cool, damp air as I had felt there, and wished that my
course led in another direction. Why I had to take the particular course I was
taking, I did not know.

When I came to the space I saw that the trap-door yawned widely open.
Ahead, the shelves began again, and I glimpsed on the floor before one of
them a heap very thinly covered with dust, where a number of cases had
 63

recently fallen. At the same moment a fresh wave of panic clutched me,
though for some time I could not discover why.

Heaps of fallen cases were not uncommon, for all through the aeons this
lightless labyrinth had been racked by the heavings of earth and had echoed
at intervals of the deafening clatter of toppling objects. It was only when I
was nearly across the space that I realized why I shook so violently.

Not the heap, but something about the dust of the level floor was troubling
me. In the light of my torch it seemed as if that dust were not as even as it
ought to be—there were places where it looked thinner, as if it had been
disturbed not many months before. I could not be sure, for even the
apparently thinner places were dusty enough; yet a certain suspicion of
regularity in the fancied unevenness was highly disquieting.

When I brought the torchlight close to one of the queer places I did not like
what I saw—for the illusion of regularity became very great. It was as if
there were regular lines of composite impressions—impressions that went
in threes, each slightly over a foot square, and consisting of five nearly
circular three-inch prints, one in advance of the other four.

These possible lines of foot-square impressions appeared to lead in two

directions, as if something had gone somewhere and returned. They were,
of course, very faint, and may have been illusions or accidents; but there
was an element of dim, fumbling terror about the way I thought they ran.
For at one end of them was the heap of cases which must have clattered
down not long before, while at the other end was the ominous trap-door
with the cool, damp wind, yawning unguarded down to abysses past
imagination.
 64

CHAPTER 8

THAT my strange sense of compulsion was deep and overwhelming is

shewn by its conquest of my fear. No rational motive could have drawn me
on after that hideous suspicion of prints and the creeping dream-memories
it excited. Yet my right hand, even as it shook with fright, still twitched
rhythmically in its eagerness to turn a lock it hoped to find. Before I knew it I
was past the heap of lately fallen cases and running on tiptoe through aisles
of utterly unbroken dust toward a point which I seemed to know morbidly,
horribly well.

My mind was asking itself questions whose origin and relevancy I was only
beginning to guess. Would the shelf be reachable by a human body? Could
my human hand master all the aeon-remembered motions of the lock?
Would the lock be undamaged and workable? And what would I do—what
dare I do with what—as I now commenced to realise—I both hoped and
feared to find? Would it prove the awesome, brain-shattering truth of
something past normal conception, or shew only that I was dreaming?

The next I knew I had ceased my tiptoed racing and was standing still,
staring at a row of maddeningly familiar hieroglyphed shelves. They were in
a state of almost perfect preservation, and only three of the doors in this
vicinity had sprung open.

My feelings toward these shelves cannot be described—so utter and

insistent was the sense of old acquaintance. I was looking high up at a row
near the top and wholly out of my reach, and wondering how I could climb
to best advantage. An open door four rows from the bottom would help,
and the locks of the closed doors formed possible holds for hands and feet. I
would grip the torch between my teeth, as I had in other places where both
hands were needed. Above all I must make no noise.

How to get down what I wished to remove would be difficult, but I could
probably hook its movable fastener in my coat collar and carry it like a
knapsack. Again I wondered whether the lock would be undamaged. That I
 65

could repeat each familiar motion I had not the least doubt. But I hoped the
thing would not scrape or creak—and that my hand could work it properly.

Even as I thought these things I had taken the torch in my mouth and begun
to climb. The projecting locks were poor supports; but, as I had expected,
the opened shelf helped greatly. I used both the swinging door and the
edge of the aperture itself in my ascent, and managed to avoid any loud
creaking.

Balanced on the upper edge of the door, and leaning far to my right, I could
just reach the lock I sought. My fingers, half numb from climbing, were very
clumsy at first; but I soon saw that they were anatomically adequate. And
the memory-rhythm was strong in them.

Out of unknown gulfs of time the intricate, secret motions had somehow
reached my brain correctly in every detail—for after less than five minutes
of trying there came a click whose familiarity was all the more startling
because I had not consciously anticipated it. In another instant the metal
door was slowly swinging open with only the faintest grating sound.

Dazedly I looked over the row of greyish case ends thus exposed, and felt a
tremendous surge of some wholly inexplicable emotion. Just within reach of
my right hand was a case whose curving hieroglyphs made me shake with a
pang infinitely more complex than one of mere fright. Still shaking, I
managed to dislodge it amidst a shower of gritty flakes, and ease it over
toward myself without any violent noise.

Like the other case I had handled, it was slightly more than twenty by fifteen
inches in size, with curved mathematical designs in low relief. In thickness it
just exceeded three inches.

Crudely wedging it between myself and the surface I was climbing, I

fumbled with the fastener and finally got the hook free. Lifting the cover, I
shifted the heavy object to my back, and let the hook catch hold of my
collar. Hands now free, I awkwardly clambered down to the dusty floor, and
prepared to inspect my prize.

Kneeling in the gritty dust, I swung the case around and rested it in front of
me. My hands shook, and I dreaded to draw out the book within almost as
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much as I longed—and felt compelled—to do so. It had very gradually

become clear to me what I ought to find, and this realisation nearly
paralysed my faculties.

If the thing were there—and if I were not dreaming—the implications would

be quite beyond the power of the human spirit to bear. What tormented me
most was my momentary inability to feel that my surroundings were a
dream. The sense of reality was hideous—and again becomes so as I recall
the scene.

At length I tremblingly pulled the book from its container and stared
fascinatedly at the well-known hieroglyphs on the cover. It seemed to be in
prime condition, and the curvilinear letters of the title held me in almost as
hypnotised a state as if I could read them. Indeed, I cannot swear that I did
not actually read them in some transient and terrible access of abnormal
memory.

I do not know how long it was before I dared to lift that thin metal cover. I
temporized and made excuses to myself. I took the torch from my mouth
and shut it off to save the battery. Then, in the dark, I collected my courage
finally lifting the cover without turning on the light. Last of all, I did indeed
flash the torch upon the exposed page—steeling myself in advance to
suppress any sound no matter what I should find.

I looked for an instant, then collapsed. Clenching my teeth, however, I kept

silent. I sank wholly to the floor and put a hand to my forehead amidst the
engulfing blackness. What I dreaded and expected was there. Either I was
dreaming, or time and space had become a mockery.

I must be dreaming—but I would test the horror by carrying this thing back
and shewing it to my son if it were indeed a reality. My head swam
frightfully, even though there were no visible objects in the unbroken gloom
to swirl about me. Ideas and images of the starkest terror—excited by vistas
which my glimpse had opened up—began to throng in upon me and cloud
my senses.
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I thought of those possible prints in the dust, and trembled at the sound of
my own breathing as I did so. Once again I flashed on the light and looked at
the page as a serpent's victim may look at his destroyer's eyes and fangs.

Then, with clumsy fingers, in the dark, I closed the book, put it in its
container, and snapped the lid and the curious, hooked fastener. This was
what I must carry back to the outer world if it truly existed—if the whole
abyss truly existed—if I, and the world itself, truly existed.

Just when I tottered to my feet and commenced my return I cannot be

certain. It comes to me oddly—as a measure of my sense of separation from
the normal world—that I did not even once look at my watch during those
hideous hours underground.

Torch in hand, and with the ominous case under one arm, I eventually found
myself tiptoeing in a kind of silent panic past the draught-giving abyss and
those lurking suggestions of prints. I lessened my precautions as I climbed
up the endless inclines, but could not shake off a shadow of apprehension
which I had not felt on the downward journey.

I dreaded having to repass through the black basalt crypt that was older
than the city itself, where cold draughts welled up from unguarded depths. I
thought of that which the Great Race had feared, and of what might still be
lurking—be it ever so weak and dying—down there. I thought of those five-
circle prints and of what my dreams had told me of such prints—and of
strange winds and whistling noises associated with them. And I thought of
the tales of the modern blackfellows, wherein the horror of great winds and
nameless subterrene ruins was dwelt upon.

I knew from a carven wall symbol the right floor to enter, and came at last
after passing that other book I had examined—to the great circular space
with the branching archways. On my right, and at once recognisable, was
the arch through which I had arrived. This I now entered, conscious that the
rest of my course would be harder because of the tumbled state of the
masonry outside the archive building. My new metal-cased burden weighed
upon me, and I found it harder and harder to be quiet as I stumbled among
debris and fragments of every sort.
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Then I came to the ceiling-high mound of debris through which I had

wrenched a scanty passage. My dread at wriggling through again was
infinite, for my first passage had made some noise, and I now—after seeing
those possible prints—dreaded sound above all things. The case, too,
doubled the problem of traversing the narrow crevice.

But I clambered up the barrier as best I could, and pushed the case through
the aperture ahead of me. Then, torch in mouth, I scrambled through
myself—my back torn as before by stalactites.

As I tried to grasp the case again, it fell some distance ahead of me down
the slope of the debris, making a disturbing clatter and arousing echoes
which sent me into a cold perspiration. I lunged for it at once, and regained
it without further noise—but a moment afterward the slipping of blocks
under my feet raised a sudden and unprecedented din.

The din was my undoing. For, falsely or not, I thought I heard it answered in
a terrible way from spaces far behind me. I thought I heard a shrill, whistling
sound, like nothing else on earth, and beyond any adequate verbal
description. If so, what followed has a grim irony—since, save for the panic
of this thing, the second thing might never have happened.

As it was, my frenzy was absolute and unrelieved. Taking my torch in my

hand and clutching feebly at the case, I leaped and bounded wildly ahead
with no idea in my brain beyond a mad desire to race out of these nightmare
ruins to the waking world of desert and moonlight which lay so far above.

I hardly knew it when I reached the mountain of debris which towered into
the vast blackness beyond the caved-in roof, and bruised and cut myself
repeatedly in scrambling up its steep slope of jagged blocks and fragments.

Then came the great disaster. Just as I blindly crossed the summit,
unprepared for the sudden dip ahead, my feet slipped utterly and I found
myself involved in a mangling avalanche of sliding masonry whose cannon-
loud uproar split the black cavern air in a deafening series of earth-shaking
reverberations.

I have no recollection of emerging from this chaos, but a momentary

fragment of consciousness shows me as plunging and tripping and
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scrambling along the corridor amidst the clangour—case and torch still with
me.

Then, just as I approached that primal basalt crypt I had so dreaded, utter
madness came. For as the echoes of the avalanche died down, there
became audible a repetition of that frightful alien whistling I thought I had
heard before. This time there was no doubt about it—and what was worse,
it came from a point not behind but ahead of me.

Probably I shrieked aloud then. I have a dim picture of myself as flying

through the hellish basalt vault of the elder things, and hearing that
damnable alien sound piping up from the open, unguarded door of limitless
nether blacknesses. There was a wind, too—not merely a cool, damp
draught, but a violent, purposeful blast belching savagely and frigidly from
that abominable gulf whence the obscene whistling came.

There are memories of leaping and lurching over obstacles of every sort,
with that torrent of wind and shrieking sound growing moment by moment,
and seeming to curl and twist purposefully around me as it struck out
wickedly from the spaces behind and beneath.

Though in my rear, that wind had the odd effect of hindering instead of
aiding my progress; as if it acted like a noose or lasso thrown around me.
Heedless of the noise I made, I clattered over a great barrier of blocks and
was again in the structure that led to the surface.

I recall glimpsing the archway to the room of machines and almost crying
out as I saw the incline leading down to where one of those blasphemous
trap-doors must be yawning two levels below. But instead of crying out I
muttered over and over to myself that this was all a dream from which I
must soon awake. Perhaps I was in camp—perhaps I was at home in
Arkham. As these hopes bolstered up my sanity I began to mount the incline
to the higher level.

I knew, of course, that I had the four-foot cleft to re-cross, yet was too
racked by other fears to realise the full horror until I came almost upon it.
On my descent, the leap across had been easy—but could I clear the gap as
readily when going uphill, and hampered by fright, exhaustion, the weight
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of the metal case, and the anomalous backward tug of that daemon wind? I
thought of these things at the last moment, and thought also of the
nameless entities which might be lurking in the black abysses below the
chasm.

My wavering torch was growing feeble, but I could tell by some obscure
memory when I neared the cleft. The chill blasts of wind and the nauseous
whistling shrieks behind me were for the moment like a merciful opiate,
dulling my imagination to the horror of the yawning gulf ahead. And then I
became aware of the added blasts and whistling in front of me—tides of
abomination surging up through the cleft itself from depths unimagined and
unimaginable.

Now, indeed, the essence of pure nightmare was upon me. Sanity
departed—and, ignoring everything except the animal impulse of flight, I
merely struggled and plunged upward over the incline's debris as if no gulf
had existed. Then I saw the chasm's edge, leaped frenziedly with every
ounce of strength I possessed, and was instantly engulfed in a
pandaemoniae vortex of loathsome sound and utter, materially tangible
blackness.

This is the end of my experience, so far as I can recall. Any further

impressions belong wholly to the domain of phantasmagoria delirium.
Dream, madness, and memory merged wildly together in a series of
fantastic, fragmentary delusions which can have no relation to anything real.

There was a hideous fall through incalculable leagues of viscous, sentient

darkness, and a babel of noises utterly alien to all that we know of the earth
and its organic life. Dormant, rudimentary senses seemed to start into
vitality within me, telling of pits and voids peopled by floating horrors and
leading to sunless crags and oceans and teeming cities of windowless, basalt
towers upon which no light ever shone.

Secrets of the primal planet and its immemorial aeons flashed through my
brain without the aid of sight or sound, and there were known to me things
which not even the wildest of my former dreams had ever suggested. And
all the while cold fingers of damp vapor clutched and picked at me, and that
 71

eldritch, damnable whistling shrieked fiendishly above all the alternations of

babel and silence in the whirlpools of darkness around.

Afterward there were visions of the Cyclopean city of my dreams—not in

ruins, but just as I had dreamed of it. I was in my conical, non-human body
again, and mingled with crowds of the Great Race and the captive minds
who carried books up and down the lofty corridors and vast inclines.

Then, superimposed upon these pictures, were frightful, momentary flashes

of a non-vistial consciousness involving desperate struggles, a writhing free
from clutching tentacles of whistling wind, an insane, bat-like flight through
half-solid air, a feverish burrowing through the cyclone-whipped dark, and a
wild stumbling and scrambling over fallen masonry.

Once there was a curious, intrusive flash of half sight—a faint, diffuse
suspicion of bluish radiance far overhead. Then there came a dream of
wind—pursued climbing and crawling—of wriggling into a blaze of sardonic
moonlight through a jumble of debris which slid and collapsed after me
amidst a morbid hurricane. It was the evil, monotonous beating of that
maddening moonlight which at last told me of the return of what I had once
known as the objective, waking world.

I was clawing prone through the sands of the Australian desert, and around
me shrieked such a tumult of wind as I had never before known on our
planet's surface. My clothing was in rags, and my whole body was a mass of
bruises and scratches.

Full consciousness returned very slowly, and at no time could I tell just
where delirious dream left off and true memory began. There had seemed
to be a mound of titan blocks, an abyss beneath it, a monstrous revelation
from the past, and a nightmare horror at the end—but how much of this
was real?

My flashlight was gone, and likewise any metal case I may have discovered.
Had there been such a case—or any abyss—or any mound? Raising my head,
I looked behind me, and saw only the sterile, undulant sands of the desert.

The daemon wind died down, and the bloated, fungoid moon sank
reddeningly in the west. I lurched to my feet and began to stagger
 72

southwestward toward the camp. What in truth had happened to me? Had I
merely collapsed in the desert and dragged a dream-racked body over miles
of sand and buried blocks? If not, how could I bear to live any longer?

For, in this new doubt, all my faith in the myth-born unreality of my visions
dissolved once more into the hellish older doubting. If that abyss was real,
then the Great Race was real—and its blasphemous reachings and seizures
in the cosmos-wide vortex of time were no myths or nightmares, but a
terrible, soul-shattering actuality.

Had I, in full, hideous fact, been drawn back to a pre-human world of a

hundred and fifty million years ago in those dark, baffling days of the
amnesia? Had my present body been the vehicle of a frightful alien
consciousness from palaeogean gulfs of time?

Had I, as the captive mind of those shambling horrors, indeed known that
accursed city of stone in its primordial heyday, and wriggled down those
familiar corridors in the loathsome shape of my captor? Were those
tormenting dreams of more than twenty years the offspring of stark,
monstrous memories?

Had I once veritably talked with minds from reachless corners of time and
space, learned the universe's secrets, past and to come, and written the
annals of my own world for the metal cases of those titan archives? And
were those others—those shocking elder things of the mad winds and
daemon pipings—in truth a lingering, lurking menace, waiting and slowly
weakening in black abysses while varied shapes of life drag out their
multimillennial courses on the planet's age-racked surface?

I do not know. If that abyss and what I held were real, there is no hope.
Then, all too truly, there lies upon this world of man a mocking and
incredible shadow out of time. But, mercifully, there is no proof that these
things are other than fresh phases of my myth-born dreams. I did not bring
back the metal case that would have been a proof, and so far those
subterrene corridors have not been found.

If the laws of the universe are kind, they will never be found. But I must tell
my son what I saw or thought I saw, and let him use his judgment as a
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psychologist in gauging the reality of my experience, and communicating

this account to others.

I have said that the awful truth behind my tortured years of dreaming hinges
absolutely upon the actuality of what I thought I saw in those Cyclopean,
buried ruins. It has been hard for me, literally, to set down that crucial
revelation, though no reader can have failed to guess it. Of course, it lay in
that book within the metal case—the case which I pried out of its lair amidst
the dust of a million centuries.

No eye had seen, no hand had touched that book since the advent of man to
this planet. And yet, when I flashed my torch upon it in that frightful abyss, I
saw that the queerly pigmented letters on the brittle, aeon-browned
cellulose pages were not indeed any nameless hieroglyphs of earth's youth.
They were, instead, the letters of our familiar alphabet, spelling out the
words of the English language in my own handwriting.