From then on time ceased to exist. At intervals food
was pushed in, but Carter would not touch it. What his fate would be, he
did not know; but he felt that he was held for the coming of that frightful
soul and messenger of infinity's Other Gods, the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.
Finally, after an unguessed span of hours or days, the great stone door
swung wide again, and Carter was shoved down the stairs and out into the
red-litten streets of that fearsome city. It was night on the moon, and
all through the town were stationed slaves bearing torches.
In a detestable square a sort of procession was formed;
ten of the toad-things and twenty-four almost human torch-bearers, eleven
on either side, and one each before and behind. Carter was placed in the
middle of the line; five toad-things ahead and five behind, and one almost-human
torch-bearer on either side of him. Certain of the toad-things produced
disgustingly carven flutes of ivory and made loathsome sounds. To that
hellish piping the column advanced out of the tiled streets and into nighted
plains of obscene fungi, soon commencing to climb one of the lower and
more gradual hills that lay behind the city. That on some frightful slope
or blasphemous plateau the crawling chaos waited, Carter could not doubt;
and he wished that the suspense might
soon be over. The whining of those impious flutes was
shocking, and he would have given worlds for some even half-normal sound;
but these toad-things had no voices, and the slaves did not talk.
Then through that star-specked darkness there did come
a normal sound. It rolled from the higher hills, and from all the jagged
peaks around it was caught up and echoed in a swelling pandaemoniac chorus.
It was the midnight yell of the cat, and Carter knew at last that the old
village folk were right when they made low guesses about the cryptical
realms which are known only to
cats, and to which the elders among cats repair by stealth
nocturnally, springing from high housetops. Verily, it is to the moon's
dark side that they go to leap and gambol on the hills and converse with
ancient shadows, and here amidst that column of foetid things Carter heard
their homely, friendly cry, and thought of the steep roofs and warm hearths
and little lighted windows of home.
Now much of the speech of cats was known to Randolph Carter,
and in this far terrible place he uttered the cry that was suitable. But
that he need not have done, for even as his lips opened he heard the chorus
wax and draw nearer, and saw swift shadows against the stars as small graceful
shapes leaped from hill to hill in gathering legions. The call of the clan
had been given, and before the foul procession had time even to be frightened
a cloud of smothering fur and a phalanx of murderous claws were tidally
and tempestuously upon it. The flutes stopped, and there were shrieks in
the night. Dying almost-humans screamed, and cats spit and yowled and roared,
but the toad-things made never a sound as their stinking green ichor oozed
fatally upon that porous earth with the obscene fungi.
It was a stupendous sight while the torches lasted, and
Carter had never before seen so many cats. Black, grey, and white; yellow,
tiger, and mixed; common, Persian, and Marix; Thibetan, Angora, and Egyptian;
all were there in the fury of battle, and there hovered over them some
trace of that profound and inviolate sanctity which made their goddess
great in the temples of
Bubastis. They would leap seven strong at the throat
of an almost-human or the pink tentacled snout of a toad-thing and drag
it down savagely to the fungous plain, where myriads of their fellows would
surge over it and into it with the frenzied claws and teeth of a divine
battle-fury. Carter had seized a torch from a stricken slave, but was soon
overborne by the surging waves of his loyal defenders. Then he lay in the
utter blackness hearing the clangour of war and the shouts of the victors,
and feeling the soft paws of his friends as they rushed to and fro over
him in the fray.
At last awe and exhaustion closed his eyes, and when he
opened them again it was upon a strange scene. The great shining disc of
the earth, thirteen times greater than that of the moon as we see it, had
risen with floods of weird light over the lunar landscape; and across all
those leagues of wild plateau and ragged crest there squatted one endless
sea of cats in orderly array. Circle
on circle they reached, and two or three leaders out
of the ranks were licking his face and purring to him consolingly. Of the
dead slaves and toad-things there were not many signs, but Carter thought
he saw one bone a little way off in the open space between him and the
warriors.
Carter now spoke with the leaders in the soft language
of cats, and learned that his ancient friendship with the species was well
known and often spoken of in the places where cats congregate. He had not
been unmarked in Ulthar when he passed through, and the sleek old cats
had remembered how he patted them after they had attended to the hungry
Zoogs who looked evilly at a small black kitten. And they recalled, too,
how he had welcomed the very little kitten who came to see him at the inn,
and how he had given it a saucer of rich cream in the morning before he
left. The grandfather of that very little kitten was the leader of the
army now assembled, for he had seen the evil procession from a far hill
and recognized the prisoner as a sworn friend of his
kind on earth and in the land of dream.
A yowl now came from the farther peak, and the old leader
paused abruptly in his conversation. It was one of the army's outposts,
stationed on the highest of the mountains to watch the one foe which Earth's
cats fear; the very large and peculiar cats from Saturn, who for some reason
have not been oblivious of the charm of our moon's dark side. They are
leagued by treaty with the
evil toad-things, and are notoriously hostile to our
earthly cats; so that at this juncture a meeting would have been a somewhat
grave matter.
After a brief consultation of generals, the cats rose
and assumed a closer formation, crowding protectingly around Carter and
preparing to take the great leap through space back to the housetops of
our earth and its dreamland. The old field-marshal advised Carter to let
himself be borne along smoothly and passively in the massed ranks of furry
leapers, and told him how to spring
when the rest sprang and land gracefully when the rest
landed. He also offered to deposit him in any spot he desired, and Carter
decided on the city of Dylath-Leen whence the black galley had set out;
for he wished to sail thence for Oriab and the carven crest Ngranek, and
also to warn the people of the city to have no more traffick with black
galleys, if indeed that traffick could be
tactfully and judiciously broken off. Then, upon a signal,
the cats all leaped gracefully with their friend packed securely in their
midst; while in a black cave on an unhallowed summit of the moon-mountains
still vainly waited the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.
The leap of the cats through space was very swift; and
being surrounded by his companions Carter did not see this time the great
black shapelessnesses that lurk and caper and flounder in the abyss. Before
he fully realised what had happened he was back in his familiar room at
the inn at Dylath-Leen, and the stealthy, friendly cats were pouring out
of the window in streams. The old
leader from Ulthar was the last to leave, and as Carter
shook his paw he said he would be able to get home by cockcrow. When dawn
came, Carter went downstairs and learned that a week had elapsed since
his capture and leaving. There was still nearly a fortnight to wait for
the ship bound toward Oriab, and during that time he said what he could
against the black galleys and their
infamous ways. Most of the townsfolk believed him; yet
so fond were the jewellers of great rubies that none would wholly promise
to cease trafficking with the wide-mouthed merchants. If aught of evil
ever befalls Dylath-Leen through such traffick, it will not be his fault.
In about a week the desiderate ship put in by the black
wale and tall lighthouse, and Carter was glad to see that she was a barque
of wholesome men, with painted sides and yellow lateen sails and a grey
captain in silken robes. Her cargo was the fragrant resin of Oriab's inner
groves, and the delicate pottery baked by the artists of Bahama, and the
strange little figures carved from Ngranek's ancient lava. For this they
were paid in the wool of Ulthar and the iridescent textiles of Hatheg and
the ivory that the black men carve across the river in Parg. Carter made
arrangements with the captain to go to Baharna and was told that the voyage
would take ten days. And during his week of waiting he talked much with
that captain of Ngranek, and was told that very few had seen the carven
face thereon; but that most travellers are content to learn its legends
from old people and lava-gatherers and image-makers in Baharna and afterward
say in their far homes that they have indeed beheld it. The captain was
not even sure that any person now living had beheld that carven face, for
the wrong side of Ngranek is very difficult and barren and sinister, and
there are rumours of caves near the peak wherein dwell the night-gaunts.
But the captain did not wish to say just what a night-gaunt might be like,
since such cattle are known to haunt most persistently the dreams of those
who think too often of them. Then Carter asked that captain about unknown
Kadath in the cold waste, and the marvellous sunset city, but of these
the good man could truly tell nothing.
Carter sailed out of Dylath-Leen one early morning when
the tide turned, and saw the first rays of sunrise on the thin angular
towers of that dismal basalt town. And for two days they sailed eastward
in sight of green coasts, and saw often the pleasant fishing towns that
climbed up steeply with their red roofs and chimney-pots from old dreaming
wharves and beaches where nets lay
drying. But on the third day they turned sharply south
where the roll of water was stronger, and soon passed from sight of any
land. On the fifth day the sailors were nervous, but the captain apologized
for their fears, saying that the ship was about to pass over the weedy
walls and broken columns of a sunken city too old for memory, and that
when the water was clear one could
see so many moving shadows in that deep place that simple
folk disliked it. He admitted, moreover, that many ships had been lost
in that part of the sea; having been hailed when quite close to it, but
never seen again.
That night the moon was very bright, and one could see
a great way down in the water. There was so little wind that the ship could
not move much, and the ocean was very calm. Looking over the rail Carter
saw many fathoms deep the dome of the great temple, and in front of it
an avenue of unnatural sphinxes leading to what was once a public square.
Dolphins sported merrily in and out of the ruins, and porpoises revelled
clumsily here and there, sometimes coming to the surface and leaping clear
out of the sea. As the ship drifted on a little the floor of the ocean
rose in hills, and one could clearly mark the lines of ancient climbing
streets and the washed-down walls of myriad little houses.
Then the suburbs appeared, and finally a great lone building
on a hill, of simpler architecture than the other structures, and in much
better repair. It was dark and low and covered four sides of a square,
with a tower at each corner, a paved court in the centre, and small curious
round windows all over it. Probably it was of basalt, though weeds draped
the greater part; and such was its lonely and impressive place on that
far hill that it may have been a temple or a monastery. Some phosphorescent
fish inside it gave the small round windows an aspect of shining, and Carter
did not blame the sailors much for their fears. Then by the watery moonlight
he noticed an odd high monolith in the middle of that central court, and
saw that something was tied to it. And when after getting a telescope from
the captain's cabin he saw that that bound thing was a sailor in the silk
robes of Oriab, head downward and without any eyes, he was glad that a
rising breeze soon took the ship ahead to more healthy parts of the sea.
The next day they spoke with a ship with violet sails
bound for Zar, in the land of forgotten dreams, with bulbs of strange coloured
lilies for cargo. And on the evening of the eleventh day they came in sight
of the isle of Oriab with Ngranek rising jagged and snow-crowned in the
distance. Oriab is a very great isle, and its port of Bahama a mighty city.
The wharves of Bahama are of
porphyry, and the city rises in great stone terraces
behind them, having streets of steps that are frequently arched over by
buildings and the bridges between buildings. There is a great canal which
goes under the whole city in a tunnel with granite gates and leads to the
inland lake of Yath, on whose farther shore are the vast clay-brick ruins
of a primal city whose name is not
remembered. As the ship drew into the harbour at evening
the twin beacons Thon and Thal gleamed a welcome, and in all the million
windows of Bahama's terraces mellow lights peeped out quietly and gradually
as the stars peep out overhead in the dusk, till that steep and climbing
seaport became a glittering constellation hung between the stars of heaven
and the reflections of
those stars in the still harbour.
The captain, after landing, made Carter a guest in his
own small house on the shores of Yath where the rear of the town slopes
down to it; and his wife and servants brought strange toothsome foods for
the traveller's delight. And in the days after that Carter asked for rumours
and legends of Ngranek in all the taverns and public places where lava-gatherers
and image-makers meet,
but could find no one who had been up the higher slopes
or seen the carven face. Ngranek was a hard mountain with only an accursed
valley behind it, and besides, one could never depend on the certainty
that night-gaunts are altogether fabulous.
When the captain sailed hack to Dylath-Leen Carter took
quarters in an ancient tavern opening on an alley of steps in the original
part of the town, which is built of brick and resembles the ruins of Yath's
farther shore. Here he laid his plans for the ascent of Ngranek, and correlated
all that he had learned from the lava-gatherers about the roads thither.
The keeper of the tavern was a very old man, and had heard so many legends
that he was a great help. He even took Carter to an upper room in that
ancient house and shewed him a crude picture which a traveller had scratched
on the clay wall in the old days when men were bolder and less reluctant
to visit Ngranek's higher slopes. The old tavern-keeper's great-grandfather
had heard from his great-grandfather
that the traveller who scratched that picture had climbed
Ngranek and seen the carven face, here drawing it for others to behold,
but Carter had very great doubts, since the large rough features on the
wall were hasty and careless, and wholly overshadowed by a crowd of little
companion shapes in the worst possible taste, with horns and wings and
claws and curling tails.
At last, having gained all the information he was likely
to gain in the taverns and public places of Baharna, Carter hired a zebra
and set out one morning on the road by Yath's shore for those inland parts
wherein towers stony Ngranek. On his right were rolling hills and pleasant
orchards and neat little stone farmhouses, and he was much reminded of
those fertile fields that flank the
Skai. By evening he was near the nameless ancient ruins
on Yath's farther shore, and though old lava-gatherers had warned him not
to camp there at night, he tethered his zebra to a curious pillar before
a crumbling wall and laid his blanket in a sheltered corner beneath some
carvings whose meaning none could decipher. Around him he wrapped another
blanket, for the nights are
cold in Oriab; and when upon awaking once he thought
he felt the wings of some insect brushing his face he covered his head
altogether and slept in peace till roused by the magah birds in distant
resin groves.
The sun had just come up over the great slope whereon
leagues of primal brick foundations and worn walls and occasional cracked
pillars and pedestals stretched down desolate to the shore of Yath, and
Carter looked about for his tethered zebra. Great was his dismay to see
that docile beast stretched prostrate beside the curious pillar to which
it had been tied, and still greater was he vexed on finding that the steed
was quite dead, with its blood all sucked away through a singular wound
in its throat. His pack had been disturbed, and several shiny knickknacks
taken away, and all round on the dusty soil' were great webbed footprints
for which he could not in any way account. The legends and warnings of
lava-gatherers occurred to him, and he thought of what had brushed his
face in the night. Then he shouldered his pack and strode on toward Ngranek,
though not without a shiver when he saw close to him as the highway passed
through the ruins a great gaping arch low in the wall of an old temple,
with steps leading down into darkness farther than he could peer.
His course now lay uphill through wilder and partly wooded
country, and he saw only the huts of charcoal-burners and the camp of those
who gathered resin from the groves. The whole air was fragrant with balsam,
and all the magah birds sang blithely as they flashed their seven colours
in the sun. Near sunset he came on a new camp of lava-gatherers returning
with laden sacks
from Ngranek's lower slopes; and here he also camped,
listening to the songs and tales of the men, and overhearing what they
whispered about a companion they had lost. He had climbed high to reach
a mass of fine lava above him, and at nightfall did not return to his fellows.
When they looked for him the next day they found only his turban, nor was
there any sign on the crags below that he had fallen. They did not search
any more, because the old man among them said it would be of no use.
No one ever found what the night-gaunts took, though those
beasts themselves were so uncertain as to be almost fabulous. Carter asked
them if night-gaunts sucked blood and liked shiny things and left webbed
footprints, but they all shook their heads negatively and seemed frightened
at his making such an inquiry. When he saw how taciturn they had become
he asked them no more, but went to sleep in his blanket.
The next day he rose with the lava-gatherers and exchanged
farewells as they rode west and he rode east on a zebra he bought of them.
Their older men gave him blessings and warnings, and told him he had better
not climb too high on Ngranek, but while he thanked them heartily he was
in no wise dissuaded. For still did he feel that he must find the gods
on unknown Kadath; and win from them a way to that haunting and marvellous
city in the sunset. By noon, after a long uphill ride, he came upon some
abandoned brick villages of the hill-people who had once dwelt thus close
to Ngranek and carved images from its smooth lava. Here they had dwelt
till the days of the old tavernkeeper's grandfather, but about that time
they felt that their presence was disliked. Their homes had crept even
up the mountain's slope, and the higher they built the more people they
would miss when the sun rose. At last they decided it would be better to
leave altogether, since things were sometimes glimpsed in the darkness
which no one could interpret favourably; so in the end all of them went
down to the sea and dwelt in Bahama, inhabiting a very old quarter and
teaching their sons the old art of image-making which to this day they
carry on. It was from these children of the exiled hill-people that Carter
had heard the best tales about Ngranek when searching through Bahama's
ancient taverns.
All this time the great gaunt side of Ngranek was looming
up higher and higher as Carter approached it. There were sparse trees on
the lower slopes and feeble shrubs above them, and then the bare hideous
rock rose spectral into the sky, to mix with frost and ice and eternal
snow. Carter could see the rifts and ruggedness of that sombre stone, and
did not welcome the prospect of
climbing it. In places there were solid streams of lava,
and scoriac heaps that littered slopes and ledges. Ninety aeons ago, before
even the gods had danced upon its pointed peak, that mountain had spoken
with fire and roared with the voices of the inner thunders. Now it towered
all silent and sinister, bearing on the hidden side that secret titan image
whereof rumour told. And there
were caves in that mountain, which might be empty and
alone with elder darkness, or might - if legend spoke truly - hold horrors
of a form not to be surmised.
The ground sloped upward to the foot of Ngranek, thinly
covered with scrub oaks and ash trees, and strewn with bits of rock, lava,
and ancient cinder. There were the charred embers of many camps, where
the lava-gatherers were wont to stop, and several rude altars which they
had built either to propitiate the Great Ones or to ward off what they
dreamed of in Ngranek's high passes and labyrinthine caves. At evening
Carter reached the farthermost pile of embers and camped for the night,
tethering his zebra to a sapling and wrapping himself well in his blankets
before going to sleep. And all through the night a voonith howled distantly
from the shore of some hidden pool, but Carter felt no fear of that amphibious
terror, since he had been told with
certainty that not one of them dares even approach the
slope of Ngranek.
In the clear sunshine of morning Carter began the long
ascent, taking his zebra as far as that useful beast could go, but tying
it to a stunted ash tree when the floor of the thin wood became too steep.
Thereafter he scrambled up alone; first through the forest with its ruins
of old villages in overgrown clearings, and then over the tough grass where
anaemic shrubs grew here and there.
He regretted coming clear of the trees, since the slope
was very precipitous and the whole thing rather dizzying. At length he
began to discern all the countryside spread out beneath him whenever he
looked about; the deserted huts of the image-makers, the groves of resin
trees and the camps of those who gathered from them, the woods where prismatic
magahs nest and sing, and even a hint very far away of the shores of Yath
and of those forbidding ancient ruins whose name is forgotten. He found
it best not to look around, and kept on climbing and climbing till the
shrubs became very sparse and there was often nothing but the tough grass
to cling to.
Then the soil became meagre, with great patches of bare
rock cropping out, and now and then the nest of a condor in a crevice.
Finally there was nothing at all but the bare rock, and had it not been
very rough and weathered, he could scarcely have ascended farther. Knobs,
ledges, and pinnacles, however, helped greatly; and it was cheering to
see occasionally the sign of some
lava-gatherer scratched clumsily in the friable stone,
and know that wholesome human creatures had been there before him. After
a certain height the presence of man was further shewn by handholds and
footholds hewn where they were needed, and by little quarries and excavations
where some choice vein or stream of lava had been found. In one place a
narrow ledge had been chopped artificially to an especially rich deposit
far to the right of the main line of ascent. Once or twice Carter dared
to look around, and was almost stunned by the spread of landscape below.
All the island betwixt him and the coast lay open to his sight, with Baharna's
stone terraces and the smoke of its chimneys mystical in the distance.
And beyond that the illimitable Southern Sea with all its curious secrets.
Thus far there had been much winding around the mountain,
so that the farther and carven side was still hidden. Carter now saw a
ledge running upward and to the left which seemed to head the way he wished,
and this course he took in the hope that it might prove continuous. After
ten minutes he saw it was indeed no cul-de-sac, but that it led steeply
on in an arc which would, unless suddenly interrupted or deflected, bring
him after a few hours' climbing to that unknown southern slope overlooking
the desolate crags and the accursed valley of lava. As new country came
into view below him he saw that it was bleaker and wilder than those seaward
lands he had traversed. The mountain's side, too, was somewhat different;
being here pierced by curious
cracks and caves not found on the straighter route he
had left. Some of these were above him and some beneath him, all opening
on sheerly perpendicular cliffs and wholly unreachable by the feet of man.
The air was very cold now, but so hard was the climbing that he did not
mind it. Only the increasing rarity bothered him, and he thought that perhaps
it was this which had turned
the heads of other travellers and excited those absurd
tales of night-gaunts whereby they explained the loss of such climbers
as fell from these perilous paths. He was not much impressed by travellers'
tales, but had a good curved scimitar in case of any trouble. All lesser
thoughts were lost in the wish to see that carven face which might set
him on the track of the gods atop unknown
Kadath.
At last, in the fearsome iciness of upper space, he came
round fully to the hidden side of Ngranek and saw in infinite gulfs below
him the lesser crags and sterile abysses of lava which marked olden wrath
of the Great Ones. There was unfolded, too, a vast expanse of country to
the south; but it was a desert land without fair fields or cottage chimneys,
and seemed to have no ending. No trace of the sea was visible on
this side, for Oriab is a great island. Black caverns and odd crevices
were still numerous on the sheer vertical cliffs, but none of them was
accessible to a climber. There now loomed aloft a great beetling mass which
hampered the upward view, and Carter was for a moment shaken with doubt
lest it prove impassable. Poised in windy insecurity miles above earth,
with only space and death on one side and only slippery walls of rock on
the other, he knew for a moment the fear that makes men shun Ngranek's
hidden side. He could not turn round, yet the sun was already low. If there
were no way aloft, the night would find him crouching there still, and
the dawn would not find him at all.
But there was a way, and he saw it in due season. Only
a very expert dreamer could have used those imperceptible footholds, yet
to Carter they were sufficient. Surmounting now the outward-hanging rock,
he found the slope above much easier than that below, since a great glacier's
melting had left a generous space with loam and ledges. To the left a precipice
dropped straight
from unknown heights to unknown depths, with a cave's
dark mouth just out of reach above him. Elsewhere, however, the mountain
slanted back strongly, and even gave him space to lean and rest.
He felt from the chill that he must be near the snow line,
and looked up to see what glittering pinnacles might be shining in that
late ruddy sunlight. Surely enough, there was the snow uncounted thousands
of feet above, and below it a great beetling crag like that. he had just
climbed; hanging there forever in bold outline. And when he saw that crag
he gasped and cried out aloud,
and clutched at the jagged rock in awe; for the titan
bulge had not stayed as earth's dawn had shaped it, but gleamed red and
stupendous in the sunset with the carved and polished features of a god.
Stern and terrible shone that face that the sunset lit
with fire. How vast it was no mind can ever measure, but Carter knew at
once that man could never have fashioned it. It was a god chiselled by
the hands of the gods, and it looked down haughty and majestic upon the
seeker. Rumour had said it was strange and not to be mistaken, and Carter
saw that it was indeed so; for those
long narrow eyes and long-lobed ears, and that thin nose
and pointed chin, all spoke of a race that is not of men but of gods.
He clung overawed in that lofty and perilous eyrie, even
though it was this which he had expected and come to find; for there is
in a god's face more of marvel than prediction can tell, and when that
face is vaster than a great temple and seen looking downward at sunset
in the scyptic silences of that upper world from whose dark lava it was
divinely hewn of old, the marvel is so strong that none may escape it.
Here, too, was the added marvel of recognition; for although
he had planned to search all dreamland over for those whose likeness to
this face might mark them as the god's children, he now knew that he need
not do so. Certainly, the great face carven on that mountain was of no
strange sort, but the kin of such as he had seen often in the taverns of
the seaport Celephais which lies
in Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills and is ruled
over by that King Kuranes whom Carter once knew in waking life. Every year
sailors with such a face came in dark ships from the north to trade their
onyx for the carved jade and spun gold and little red singing birds of
Celephais, and it was clear that these could be no others than the hall-gods
he sought. Where they dwelt,
there must the cold waste lie close, and within it unknown
Kadath and its onyx castle for the Great Ones. So to Celephais he must
go, far distant from the isle of Oriab, and in such parts as would take
him back to Dylath-Teen and up the Skai to the bridge by Nir, and again
into the enchanted wood of the Zoogs, whence the way would bend northward
through the garden lands by
Oukranos to the gilded spires of Thran, where he might
find a galleon bound over the Cerenarian Sea.
But dusk was now thick, and the great carven face looked
down even sterner in shadow. Perched on that ledge night found the seeker;
and in the blackness he might neither go down nor go up, but only stand
and cling and shiver in that narrow place till the day came, praying to
keep awake lest sleep loose his hold and send him down the dizzy miles
of air to the crags and sharp
rocks of the accursed valley. The stars came out, but
save for them there was only black nothingness in his eyes; nothingness
leagued with death, against whose beckoning he might do no more than cling
to the rocks and lean back away from an unseen brink. The last thing of
earth that he saw in the gloaming was a condor soaring close to the westward
precipice beside him, and darting screaming away when it came near the
cave whose mouth yawned just out of reach.
