About midday the ghouls and night-gaunts prepared for
flight, each ghoul selecting a suitable pair of horned steeds to bear him.
Carter was placed well up toward the head of the column beside Pickman,
and in front of the whole a double line of riderless night-gaunts was provided
as a vanguard. At a brisk meep from Pickman the whole shocking army rose
in a nightmare cloud
above the broken columns and crumbling sphinxes of primordial
Sarkomand; higher and higher, till even the great basalt cliff behind the
town was cleared, and the cold, sterile table-land of Leng's outskirts
laid open to sight. Still higher flew the black host, till even this table-land
grew small beneath them; and as they worked northward over the wind-swept
plateau of horror Carter
saw once again with a shudder the circle of crude monoliths
and the squat windowless building which he knew held that frightful silken-masked
blasphemy from whose clutches he had so narrowly escaped. This time no
descent was made as the army swept batlike over the sterile landscape,
passing the feeble fires of the unwholesome stone villages at a great altitude,
and pausing not at all to mark the morbid twistings of the hooved, horned
almost-humans that dance and pipe eternally therein. Once they saw a Shantak-bird
flying low over the plain, but when it saw them it screamed noxiously and
flapped off to the north in grotesque panic.
At dusk they reached the jagged grey peaks that form the
barrier of Inquanok, and hovered about these strange caves near the summits
which Carter recalled as so frightful to the Shantaks. At the insistent
meeping of the ghoulish leaders there issued forth from each lofty burrow
a stream of horned black flyers with which the ghouls and night-gaunts
of the party conferred at length by means of ugly gestures. It soon became
clear that the best course would be that over the cold waste north of Inquanok,
for Leng's northward reaches are full of unseen pitfalls that even the
night-gaunts dislike; abysmal influences centering in certain white hemispherical
buildings on curious knolls, which common folklore associates unpleasantly
with the Other Gods and their crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.
Of Kadath the flutterers of the peaks knew almost nothing,
save that there must be some mighty marvel toward the north, over which
the Shantaks and the carven mountains stand guard. They hinted at rumoured
abnormalities of proportion in those trackless leagues beyond, and recalled
vague whispers of a realm where night broods eternally; but of definite
data they had nothing to
give. So Carter and his party thanked them kindly; and,
crossing the topmost granite pinnacles to the skies of Inquanok, dropped
below the level of the phosphorescent night clouds and beheld in the distance
those terrible squatting gargoyles that were mountains till some titan
hand carved fright into their virgin rock.
There they squatted in a hellish half-circle, their legs
on the desert sand and their mitres piercing the luminous clouds; sinister,
wolflike, and double-headed, with faces of fury and right hands raised,
dully and malignly watching the rim of man's world and guarding with horror
the reaches of a cold northern world that is not man's. From their hideous
laps rose evil Shantaks of elephantine bulk, but these all fled with insane
titters as the vanguard of night-gaunts was sighted in the misty sky. Northward
above those gargoyle mountains the army flew, and over leagues of dim desert
where never a landmark rose. Less and less luminous grew the clouds, till
at length Carter could see only blackness around him; but never did the
winged steeds falter, bred as they were in earth's blackest crypts, and
seeing not with any eyes, but with the whole dank surface of their slippery
forms. On and on they flew, past winds of dubious scent and sounds of dubious
import; ever in thickest darkness, and covering such prodigious spaces
that Carter wondered whether or not they could still be within earth's
dreamland.
Then suddenly the clouds thinned and the stars shone spectrally
above. All below was still black, but those pallid beacons in the sky seemed
alive with a meaning and directiveness they had never possessed elsewhere.
It was not that the figures of the constellations were different, but that
the same familiar shapes now revealed a significance they had formerly
failed to make plain.
Everything focussed toward the north; every curve and
asterism of the glittering sky became part of a vast design whose function
was to hurry first the eye and then the whole observer onward to some secret
and terrible goal of convergence beyond the frozen waste that stretched
endlessly ahead. Carter looked toward the east where the great ridge of
barrier peaks had towered along all the length of Inquanok and saw against
the stars a jagged silhouette which told of its continued presence. It
was more broken now, with yawning clefts and fantastically erratic pinnacles;
and Carter studied closely the suggestive turnings and inclinations of
that grotesque outline, which seemed to share with the stars some subtle
northward urge.
They were flying past at a tremendous speed, so that the
watcher had to strain hard to catch details; when all at once he beheld
just above the line of the topmost peaks a dark and moving object against
the stars, whose course exactly paralleled that of his own bizarre party.
The ghouls had likewise glimpsed it, for he heard their low glibbering
all about him, and for a moment he fancied the object was a gigantic Shantak,
of a size vastly greater than that of the average specimen. Soon, however,
he saw that this theory would not hold; for the shape of the thing above
the mountains was not that of any hippocephalic bird. Its outline against
the stars, necessarily vague as it was, resembled rather some huge mitred
head, or pair of heads infinitely magnified; and its rapid bobbing flight
through the sky seemed most peculiarly a wingless one. Carter could not
tell which side of the mountains it was on, but soon perceived that it
had parts below the parts he had first seen, since it blotted out all the
stars in places where the ridge was deeply cleft.
Then came a wide gap in the range, where the hideous reaches
of transmontane Leng were joined to the cold waste on this side by a low
pass trough which the stars shone wanly. Carter watched this gap with intense
care, knowing that he might see outlined against the sky beyond it the
lower parts of the vast thing that flew undulantly above the pinnacles.
The object had now
floated ahead a trifle, and every eye of the party was
fixed on the rift where it would presently appear in full-length silhouette.
Gradually the huge thing above the peaks neared the gap, slightly slackening
its speed as if conscious of having outdistanced the ghoulish army. For
another minute suspense was keen, and then the brief instant of full silhouette
and revelation came; bringing
to the lips of the ghouls an awed and half-choked meep
of cosmic fear, and to the soul of the traveller a chill that never wholly
left it. For the mammoth bobbing shape that overtopped the ridge was only
a head - a mitred double head - and below it in terrible vastness loped
the frightful swollen body that bore it; the mountain-high monstrosity
that walked in stealth and silence; the
hyaena-like distortion of a giant anthropoid shape that
trotted blackly against the sky, its repulsive pair of cone-capped heads
reaching half way to the zenith.
Carter did not lose consciousness or even scream aloud,
for he was an old dreamer; but he looked behind him in horror and shuddered
when he saw that there were other monstrous heads silhouetted above the
level of the peaks, bobbing along stealthily after the first one. And straight
in the rear were three of the mighty mountain shapes seen full against
the southern stars, tiptoeing
wolflike and lumberingly, their tall mitres nodding thousands
of feet in the aft. The carven mountains, then, had not stayed squatting
in that rigid semicircle north of Inquanok, with right hands uplifted.
They had duties to perform, and were not remiss. But it was horrible that
they never spoke, and never even made a sound in walking.
Meanwhile the ghoul that was Pickman had glibbered an
order to the night-gaunts, and the whole army soared higher into the air.
Up toward the stars the grotesque column shot, till nothing stood out any
longer against the sky; neither the grey granite ridge that was still nor
the carven mitred mountains that walked. All was blackness beneath as the
fluttering legion surged northward amidst rushing winds and invisible laughter
in the aether, and never a Shantak or less mentionable entity rose from
the haunted wastes to pursue them. The farther they went, the faster they
flew, till soon their dizzying speed seemed to pass that of a rifle ball
and approach that of a planet in its orbit. Carter wondered how with such
speed the earth could still stretch
beneath them, but knew that in the land of dream dimensions
have strange properties. That they were in a realm of eternal night he
felt certain, and he fancied that the constellations overhead had subtly
emphasized their northward focus; gathering themselves up as it were to
cast the flying army into the void of the boreal pole, as the folds of
a bag are gathered up to cast out the last bits of substance therein.
Then he noticed with terror that the wings of the night-gaunts
were not flapping any more. The horned and faceless steeds had folded their
membranous appendages, and were resting quite passive in the chaos of wind
that whirled and chuckled as it bore them on. A force not of earth had
seized on the army, and ghouls and night-gaunts alike were powerless before
a current which pulled madly and relentlessly into the north whence no
mortal had ever returned. At length a lone pallid light was seen on the
skyline ahead, thereafter rising steadily as they approached, and having
beneath it a black mass that blotted out the stars. Carter saw that it
must be some beacon on a mountain, for only a mountain could rise so vast
as seen from so prodigious a height in the air.
Higher and higher rose the light and the blackness beneath
it, till all the northern sky was obscured by the rugged conical mass.
Lofty as the army was, that pale and sinister beacon rose above it, towering
monstrous over all peaks and concernments of earth, and tasting the atomless
aether where the cryptical moon and the mad planets reel. No mountain known
of man was that which loomed before them. The high clouds far below were
but a fringe for its foothills. The groping dizziness of topmost air was
but a girdle for its loins. Scornful and spectral climbed that bridge betwixt
earth and heaven, black in eternal night, and crowned with a pshent of
unknown stars whose awful and significant outline grew every moment clearer.
Ghouls meeped in wonder as they saw it, and Carter shivered in fear lest
all the hurtling army be dashed to pieces on the unyielding onyx of that
cyclopean cliff.
Higher and higher rose the light, till it mingled with
the loftiest orbs of the zenith and winked down at the flyers with lurid
mockery. All the north beneath it was blackness now; dread, stony blackness
from infinite depths to infinite heights, with only that pale winking beacon
perched unreachably at the top of all vision. Carter studied the light
more closely, and saw at last what lines its inky background made against
the stars. There were towers on that titan mountaintop; horrible domed
towers in noxious and incalculable tiers and clusters beyond any dreamable
workmanship of man; battlements and terraces of wonder and menace, all
limned tiny and black and distant against the starry pshent that glowed
malevolently at the uppermost rim of sight. Capping that
most measureless of mountains was a castle beyond all
mortal thought, and in it glowed the daemon-light. Then Randolph Carter
knew that his quest was done, and that he saw above him the goal of all
forbidden steps and audacious visions; the fabulous, the incredible home
of the Great Ones atop unknown Kadath.
Even as he realised this thing, Carter noticed a change
in the course of the helplessly wind-sucked party. They were rising abruptly
now, and it was plain that the focus of their flight was the onyx castle
where the pale light shone. So close was the great black mountain that
its sides sped by them dizzily as they shot upward, and in the darkness
they could discern nothing upon it.
Vaster and vaster loomed the tenebrous towers of the
nighted castle above, and Carter could see that it was well-nigh blasphemous
in its immensity. Well might its stones have been quarried by nameless
workmen in that horrible gulf rent out of the rock in the hill pass north
of Inquanok, for such was its size that a man on its threshold stood even
as air out on the steps of earth's
loftiest fortress. The pshent of unknown stars above
the myriad domed turrets glowed with a sallow, sickly flare, so that a
kind of twilight hung about the murky walls of slippery onyx. The pallid
beacon was now seen to be a single shining window high up in one of the
loftiest towers, and as the helpless army neared the top of the mountain
Carter thought he detected unpleasant
shadows flitting across the feebly luminous expanse.
It was a strangely arched window, of a design wholly alien to earth.
The solid rock now gave place to the giant foundations
of the monstrous castle, and it seemed that the speed of the party was
somewhat abated. Vast walls shot up, and there was a glimpse of a great
gate through which the voyagers were swept. All was night in the titan
courtyard, and then came the deeper blackness of inmost things as a huge
arched portal engulfed the column. Vortices of cold wind surged dankly
through sightless labyrinths of onyx, and Carter could never tell what
Cyclopean stairs and corridors lay silent along the route of his endless
aerial twisting. Always upward led the terrible plunge in darkness, and
never a sound, touch or glimpse broke the dense pall of mystery. Large
as the army of ghouls and night-gaunts was, it was lost in the
prodigious voids of that more than earthly castle. And
when at last there suddenly dawned around him the lurid light of that single
tower room whose lofty window had served as a beacon, it took Carter long
to discern the far walls and high, distant ceiling, and to realize that
he was indeed not again in the boundless air outside.
Randolph Carter had hoped to come into the throne-room
of the Great Ones with poise and dignity, flanked and followed by impressive
lines of ghouls in ceremonial order, and offering his prayer as a free
and potent master among dreamers. He had known that the Great Ones themselves
are not beyond a mortal's power to cope with, and had trusted to luck that
the Other Gods and
their crawling chaos Nyarlathotep would not happen to
come to their aid at the crucial moment, as they had so often done before
when men sought out earth's gods in their home or on their mountains. And
with his hideous escort he had half hoped to defy even the Other Gods if
need were, knowing as he did that ghouls have no masters, and that night-gaunts
own not Nyarlathotep
but only archaic Nodens for their lord. But now he saw
that supernal Kadath in its cold waste is indeed girt with dark wonders
and nameless sentinels, and that the Other Gods are of a surety vigilant
in guarding the mild, feeble gods of earth. Void as they are of lordship
over ghouls and night-gaunts, the mindless, shapeless blasphemies of outer
space can yet control them when they must; so that it was not in state
as a free and potent master of dreamers that Randolph Carter came into
the Great Ones' throne-room with his ghouls. Swept and herded by nightmare
tempests from the stars, and dogged by unseen horrors of the northern waste,
all that army floated captive and helpless in the lurid light, dropping
numbly to the onyx floor when by some voiceless order the winds of fright
dissolved.
Before no golden dais had Randolph Carter come, nor was
there any august circle of crowned and haloed beings with narrow eyes,
long-lobed ears, thin nose, and pointed chin whose kinship to the carven
face on Ngranek might stamp them as those to whom a dreamer might pray.
Save for the one tower room the onyx castle atop Kadath was dark, and the
masters were not there.
Carter had come to unknown Kadath in the cold waste,
but he had not found the gods. Yet still the lurid light glowed in that
one tower room whose size was so little less than that of all outdoors,
and whose distant walls and roof were so nearly lost to sight in thin,
curling mists. Earth's gods were not there, it was true, but of subtler
and less visible presences there could be no lack.
Where the mild gods are absent, the Other Gods are not
unrepresented; and certainly, the onyx castle of castles was far from tenantless.
In what outrageous form or forms terror would next reveal itself Carter
could by no means imagine. He felt that his visit had been expected, and
wondered how close a watch had all along been kept upon him by the crawling
chaos Nyarlathotep. It is Nyarlathotep, horror of infinite shapes and dread
soul and messenger of the Other Gods, that the fungous moonbeasts serve;
and Carter thought of the black galley that had vanished when the tide
of battle turned against the toadlike abnormalities on the jagged rock
in the sea.
Reflecting upon these things, he was staggering to his
feet in the midst of his nightmare company when there rang without warning
through that pale-litten and limitless chamber the hideous blast of a daemon
trumpet. Three times pealed that frightful brazen scream, and when the
echoes of the third blast had died chucklingly away Randolph Carter saw
that he was alone. Whither,
why and how the ghouls and night-gaunts had been snatched
from sight was not for him to divine. He knew only that he was suddenly
alone, and that whatever unseen powers lurked mockingly around him were
no powers of earth's friendly dreamland. Presently from the chamber's uttermost
reaches a new sound came. This, too, was a rhythmic trumpeting; but of
a kind far
removed from the three raucous blasts which had dissolved
his goodly cohorts. In this low fanfare echoed all the wonder and melody
of ethereal dream; exotic vistas of unimagined loveliness floating from
each strange chord and subtly alien cadence. Odours of incense came to
match the golden notes; and overhead a great light dawned, its colours
changing in cycles unknown to
earth's spectrum, and following the song of the trumpets
in weird symphonic harmonies. Torches flared in the distance, and the beat
of drums throbbed nearer amidst waves of tense expectancy.
Out of the thinning mists and the cloud of strange incenses
filed twin columns of giant black slaves with loin-cloths of iridescent
silk. Upon their heads were strapped vast helmet-like torches of glittering
metal, from which the fragrance of obscure balsams spread in fumous spirals.
In their right hands were crystal wands whose tips were carven into leering
chimaeras, while their left
hands grasped long thin silver trumpets which they blew
in turn. Armlets and anklets of gold they had, and between each pair of
anklets stretched a golden chain that held its wearer to a sober gait.
That they were true black men of earth's dreamland was at once apparent,
but it seemed less likely that their rites and costumes were wholly things
of our earth. Ten feet from Carter the
columns stopped, and as they did so each trumpet flew
abruptly to its bearer's thick lips. Wild and ecstatic was the blast that
followed, and wilder still the cry that chorused just after from dark throats
somehow made shrill by strange artifice.
Then down the wide lane betwixt the two columns a lone
figure strode; a tall, slim figure with the young face of an antique Pharaoh,
gay with prismatic robes and crowned with a golden pshent that glowed with
inherent light. Close up to Carter strode that regal figure; whose proud
carriage and smart features had in them the fascination of a dark god or
fallen archangel, and around
whose eyes there lurked the languid sparkle of capricious
humour. It spoke, and in its mellow tones there rippled the wild music
of Lethean streams.
"Randolph Carter," said the voice, "you have come to see
the Great Ones whom it is unlawful for men to see. Watchers have spoken
of this thing, and the Other Gods have grunted as they rolled and tumbled
mindlessly to the sound of thin flutes in the black ultimate void where
broods the daemon-sultan whose name no lips dare speak aloud.
"When Barzai the Wise climbed Hatheg-Kia to see the Greater
Ones dance and howl above the clouds in the moonlight he never returned.
The Other Gods were there, and they did what was expected. Zenig of Aphorat
sought to reach unknown Kadath in the cold waste, and his skull is now
set in a ring on the little finger of one whom I need not name.
"But you, Randolph Carter, have braved all things of earth's
dreamland, and burn still with the flame of quest. You came not as one
curious, but as one seeking his due, nor have you failed ever in reverence
toward the mild gods of earth. Yet have these gods kept you from the marvellous
sunset city of your dreams, and wholly through their own small covetousness;
for verily, they
craved the weird loveliness of that which your fancy
had fashioned, and vowed that henceforward no other spot should be their
abode.
"They are gone from their castle on unknown Kadath to
dwell in your marvellous city. All through its palaces of veined marble
they revel by day, and when the sun sets they go out in the perfumed gardens
and watch the golden glory on temples and colonnades, arched bridges and
silver-basined fountains, and wide streets with blossom-laden urns and
ivory statues in gleaming rows. And when night comes they climb tall
terraces in the dew, and sit on carved benches of porphyry scanning the
stars, or lean over pale balustrades to gaze at the town's steep northward
slopes, where one by one the little windows in old peaked gables shine
softly out with the calm yellow light of homely candles.
"The gods love your marvellous city, and walk no more
in the ways of the gods. They have forgotten the high places of earth,
and the mountains that knew their youth. The earth has no longer any gods
that are gods, and only the Other Ones from outer space hold sway on unremembered
Kadath. Far away in a valley of your own childhood, Randolph Carter, play
the heedless Great Ones. You have dreamed too well, O wise arch-dreamer,
for you have drawn dream's gods away from the world of all men's visions
to that which is wholly yours; having builded out of your boyhood's small
fancies a city more lovely than all the phantoms that have gone before.
"It is not well that earth's gods leave their thrones
for the spider to spin on, and their realm for the Others to sway in the
dark manner of Others. Fain would the powers from outside bring chaos and
horror to you, Randolph Carter, who are the cause of their upsetting, but
that they know it is by you alone that the gods may be sent back to their
world. In that half-waking dreamland which is yours, no power of uttermost
night may pursue; and only you can send the selfish Great Ones gently out
of your marvellous sunset city, back through the northern twilight to their
wonted place atop unknown Kadath in the cold waste.
"So. Randolph Carter, in the name of the Other Gods I
spare you and charge you to seek that sunset city which is yours, and to
send thence the drowsy truant gods for whom the dream world waits. Not
hard to find is that roseal fever of the gods, that fanfare of supernal
trumpets and clash of immortal cymbals, that mystery whose place and meaning
have haunted you through the halls of waking and the gulfs of dreaming,
and tormented you with hints of vanished memory and the pain of lost things
awesome and momentous. Not hard to find is that symbol and relic of your
days of wonder, for truly, it is but the stable and eternal gem wherein
all that wonder sparkles crystallised to light your evening path. Behold!
It is not over unknown seas but back over
well-known years that your quest must go; back to the
bright strange things of infancy and the quick sun-drenched glimpses of
magic that old scenes brought to wide young eyes.
"For know you, that your gold and marble city of wonder
is only the sum of what you have seen and loved in youth. It is the glory
of Boston's hillside roofs and western windows aflame with sunset, of the
flower-fragrant Common and the great dome on the hill and the tangle of
gables and chimneys in the violet valley where the many-bridged Charles
flows drowsily. These things you saw, Randolph Carter, when your nurse
first wheeled you out in the springtime, and they will be the last things
you will ever see with eyes of memory and of love. And there is antique
Salem with its brooding years, and spectral Marblehead scaling its rocky
precipices into past centuries! And the glory of Salem's towers and spires
seen afar from Marblehead's pastures across the harbour against the setting
sun.
"There is Providence quaint and lordly on its seven hills
over the blue harbour, with terraces of green leading up to steeples and
citadels of living antiquity, and Newport climbing wraithlike from its
dreaming breakwater. Arkham is there, with its moss-grown gambrel roofs
and the rocky rolling meadows behind it; and antediluvian Kingsport hoary
with stacked chimneys and deserted quays and overhanging gables, and the
marvel of high cliffs and the milky-misted ocean with tolling buoys beyond.
"Cool vales in Concord, cobbled lands in Portsmouth, twilight
bends of rustic New Hampshire roads where giant elms half hide white farmhouse
walls and creaking well-sweeps. Gloucester's salt wharves and Truro's windy
willows. Vistas of distant steepled towns and hills beyond hills along
the North Shore, hushed stony slopes and low ivied cottages in the lee
of huge boulders in
Rhode Island's back country. Scent of the sea and fragrance
of the fields; spell of the dark woods and joy of the orchards and gardens
at dawn. These, Randolph Carter, are your city; for they are yourself.
New England bore you, and into your soul she poured a liquid loveliness
which cannot die. This loveliness, moulded, crystallised, and polished
by years of memory and dreaming, is your terraced wonder of elusive sunsets;
and to find that marble parapet with curious urns and carven rail, and
descend at last these endless balustraded steps to the city of broad squares
and prismatic fountains, you need only to turn back to the thoughts and
visions of your wistful boyhood.
"Look! through that window shine the stars of eternal
night. Even now they are shining above the scenes you have known and cherished,
drinking of their charm that they may shine more lovely over the gardens
of dream. There is Antares-he is winking at this moment over the roofs
of Tremont Street, and you could see him from your window on Beacon Hill.
Out beyond those
stars yawn the gulfs from whence my mindless masters
have sent me. Some day you too may traverse them, but if you are wise you
will beware such folly; for of those mortals who have been and returned,
only one preserves a mind unshattered by the pounding, clawing horrors
of the void. Terrors and blasphemies gnaw at one another for space, and
there is more evil in the lesser
ones than in the greater; even as you know from the deeds
of those who sought to deliver you into my hands, whilst I myself harboured
no wish to shatter you, and would indeed have helped you hither long ago
had I not been elsewhere busy,and certain that you would yourself find
the way. Shun then, the outer hells, and stick to the calm, lovely things
of your youth. Seek out your marvellous city and drive thence the recreant
Great Ones, sending them back gently to those scenes which are of their
own youth, and which wait uneasy for their return.
"Easier even then the way of dim memory is the way I will
prepare for you. See! There comes hither a monstrous Shantak, led by a
slave who for your peace of mind had best keep invisible. Mount and be
ready - there! Yogash the Black will help you on the scaly horror. Steer
for that brightest star just south of the zenith - it is Vega, and in two
hours will be just above the terrace
of your sunset city. Steer for it only till you hear
a far-off singing in the high aether. Higher than that lurks madness, so
rein your Shantak when the first note lures. Look then back to earth, and
you will see shining the deathless altar-flame of Ired-Naa from the sacred
roof of a temple. That temple is in your desiderate sunset city, so steer
for it before you heed the singing and are
lost.
"When you draw nigh the city steer for the same high parapet
whence of old you scanned the outspread glory, prodding the Shantak till
he cry aloud. That cry the Great Ones will hear and know as they sit on
their perfumed terraces, and there will come upon them such a homesickness
that all of your city's wonders will not console them for the absence of
Kadath's grim castle and
the pshent of eternal stars that crowns it.
"Then must you land amongst them with the Shantak, and
let them see and touch that noisome and hippocephalic bird; meanwhile discoursing
to them of unknown Kadath, which you will so lately have left, and telling
them how its boundless halls are lovely and unlighted, where of old they
used to leap and revel in supernal radiance. And the Shantak will talk
to them in the manner
of Shantaks, but it will have no powers of persuasion
beyond the recalling of elder days.
"Over and over must you speak to the wandering Great Ones
of their home and youth, till at last they will weep and ask to be shewn
the returning path they have forgotten. Thereat can you loose the waiting
Shantak, sending him skyward with the homing cry of his kind; hearing which
the Great Ones will prance and jump with antique mirth, and forthwith stride
after the loathly bird
in the fashion of gods, through the deep gulfs of heaven
to Kadath's familiar towers and domes.
"Then will the marvellous sunset city be yours to cherish
and inhabit for ever, and once more will earth's gods rule the dreams of
men from their accustomed seat. Go now - the casement is open and the stars
await outside. Already your Shantak wheezes and titters with impatience.
Steer for Vega through the night, but turn when the singing sounds. Forget
not this warning, lest horrors unthinkable suck you into the gulf of shrieking
and ululant madness. Remember the Other Gods; they are great and mindless
and terrible, and lurk in the outer voids. They are good gods to shun.
"Hei! Aa-shanta 'nygh! You are off! Send back earth's
gods to their haunts on unknown Kadath, and pray to all space that you
may never meet me in my thousand other forms. Farewell, Randolph Carter,
and beware; for I am Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos."
And Randolph Carter, gasping and dizzy on his hideous
Shantak, shot screamingly into space toward the cold blue glare of boreal
Vega; looking but once behind him at the clustered and chaotic turrets
of the onyx nightmare wherein still glowed the lone lurid light of that
window above the air and the clouds of earth's dreamland. Great polypous
horrors slid darkly past, and unseen bat wings beat multitudinous around
him, but still he clung to the unwholesome mane of that loathly and hippocephalic
scaled bird. The stars danced mockingly, almost shifting now and then to
form pale signs of doom that one might wonder one had not seen and feared
before; and ever the winds of nether howled of vague blackness and loneliness
beyond the cosmos.
Then through the glittering vault ahead there fell a hush
of portent, and all the winds and horrors slunk away as night things slink
away before the dawn. Trembling in waves that golden wisps of nebula made
weirdly visible, there rose a timid hint of far-off melody, droning in
faint chords that our own universe of stars knows not. And as that music
grew, the Shantak raised its ears and plunged ahead, and Carter likewise
bent to catch each lovely strain. It was a song, but not the song of any
voice. Night and the spheres sang it, and it was old when space and Nyarlathotep
and the Other Gods were born.
Faster flew the Shantak, and lower bent the rider, drunk
with the marvel of strange gulfs, and whirling in the crystal coils of
outer magic. Then came too late the warning of the evil one, the sardonic
caution of the daemon legate who had bidden the seeker beware the madness
of that song. Only to taunt had Nyarlathotep marked out the way to safety
and the marvellous sunset city; only to mock had that black messenger revealed
the secret of these truant gods whose steps he could so easily lead back
at will. For madness and the void's wild vengeance are Nyarlathotep's only
gifts to the presumptuous; and frantick though the rider strove to turn
his disgusting steed, that leering, tittering Shantak coursed on impetuous
and relentless, flapping its great slippery wings in malignant joy and
headed for those unhallowed pits whither no dreams reach; that last amorphous
blight of nether-most confusion where bubbles and blasphemes at infinity's
centre the mindless daemon-sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak
aloud.
Unswerving and obedient to the foul legate's orders, that
hellish bird plunged onward through shoals of shapeless lurkers and caperers
in darkness, and vacuous herds of drifting entities that pawed and groped
and groped and pawed; the nameless larvae of the Other Gods, that are like
them blind and without mind, and possessed of singular hungers and thirsts
Onward unswerving and relentless, and tittering hilariously
to watch the chuckling and hysterics into which the risen song of night
and the spheres had turned, that eldritch scaly monster bore its helpless
rider; hurtling and shooting, cleaving the uttermost rim and spanning the
outermost abysses; leaving behind the stars and the realms of matter, and
darting meteor-like through stark formlessness toward those inconceivable,
unlighted chambers beyond time wherein Azathoth gnaws shapeless and ravenous
amidst the muffled, maddening beat of vile drums and the thin, monotonous
whine of accursed flutes.
Onward - onward - through the screaming, cackling, and
blackly populous gulfs - and then from some dim blessed distance there
came an image and a thought to Randolph Carter the doomed. Too well had
Nyarlathotep planned his mocking and his tantalising, for he had brought
up that which no gusts of icy terror could quite efface. Home - New England
- Beacon Hill - the
waking world.
"For know you, that your gold and marble city of wonder
is only the sum of what you have seen and loved in youth... the glory of
Boston's hillside roofs and western windows aflame with sunset; of the
flower-fragrant Common and the great dome on the hill and the tangle of
gables and chimneys in the violet valley where the many-bridged Charles
flows drowsily... this loveliness,
moulded, crystallised, and polished by years of memory
and dreaming, is your terraced wonder of elusive sunsets; and to find that
marble parapet with curious urns and carven rail, and descend at last those
endless balustraded steps to the city of broad squares and prismatic fountains,
you need only to turn back to the thoughts and visions of your wistful
boyhood."
Onward - onward - dizzily onward to ultimate doom through
the blackness where sightless feelers pawed and slimy snouts jostled and
nameless things tittered and tittered and tittered. But the image and the
thought had come, and Randolph Carter knew clearly that he was dreaming
and only dreaming, and that somewhere in the background the world of waking
and the city of his
infancy still lay. Words came again - "You need only
turn back to the thoughts and visions of your wistful boyhood." Turn -
turn - blackness on every side, but Randolph Carter could turn.
Thick though the rushing nightmare that clutched his senses,
Randolph Carter could turn and move. He could move, and if he chose he
could leap off the evil Shantak that bore him hurtlingly doomward at the
orders of Nyarlathotep. He could leap off and dare those depths of night
that yawned interminably down, those depths of fear whose terrors yet could
not exceed the
nameless doom that lurked waiting at chaos' core. He
could turn and move and leap - he could - he would - he would - he would.
Off that vast hippocephalic abomination leaped the doomed
and desperate dreamer, and down through endless voids of sentient blackness
he fell. Aeons reeled, universes died and were born again, stars became
nebulae and nebulae became stars, and still Randolph Carter fell through
those endless voids of sentient blackness.
Then in the slow creeping course of eternity the utmost
cycle of the cosmos churned itself into another futile completion, and
all things became again as they were unreckoned kalpas before. Matter and
light were born anew as space once had known them; and comets, suns and
worlds sprang flaming into life, though nothing survived to tell that they
had been and gone, been and
gone, always and always, back to no first beginning.
And there was a firmament again, and a wind, and a glare
of purple light in the eyes of the falling dreamer. There were gods and
presences and wills; beauty and evil, and the shrieking of noxious night
robbed of its prey. For through the unknown ultimate cycle had lived a
thought and a vision of a dreamer's boyhood, and now there were remade
a waking world and an old cherished
city to body and to justify these things. Out of the
void S'ngac the violet gas had pointed the way, and archaic Nodens was
bellowing his guidance from unhinted deeps.
Stars swelled to dawns, and dawns burst into fountains
of gold, carmine, and purple, and still the dreamer fell. Cries rent the
aether as ribbons of light beat back the fiends from outside. And hoary
Nodens raised a howl of triumph when Nyarlathotep, close on his quarry,
stopped baffled by a glare that seared his formless hunting-horrors to
grey dust. Randolph Carter had indeed
descended at last the wide marmoreal flights to his marvellous
city, for he was come again to the fair New England world that had wrought
him.
So to the organ chords of morning's myriad whistles, and
dawn's blaze thrown dazzling through purple panes by the great gold dome
of the State House on the hill, Randolph Carter leaped shoutingly awake
within his Boston room. Birds sang in hidden gardens and the perfume of
trellised vines came wistful from arbours his grandfather had reared. Beauty
and light glowed from
classic mantel and carven cornice and walls grotesquely
figured, while a sleek black cat rose yawning from hearthside sleep that
his master's start and shriek had disturbed. And vast infinities away,
past the Gate of Deeper Slumber and the enchanted wood and the garden lands
and the Cerenarian Sea and the twilight reaches of Inquanok, the crawling
chaos Nyarlathotep strode
brooding into the onyx castle atop unknown Kadath in
the cold waste, and taunted insolently the mild gods of earth whom he had
snatched abruptly from their scented revels in the marvellous sunset city.
