Lovecraft’s Tales of Cthulhu, Dreamlands & Lost Civilizations & More (11+ Hrs)

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The Complete H. P. Lovecraft Audiobook Collection | 12 Hours of Cosmic Horror, Eldritch Gods & Madness
Enter the twisted, dream-haunted world of H. P. Lovecraft with this epic 12-hour collection of his most terrifying and iconic horror stories. From the deep mythos of Cthulhu to ancient alien civilizations and the slow unraveling of human sanity, this full audiobook compilation explores the darkest depths of cosmic horror and forbidden knowledge.
This audiobook features five classic Lovecraft stories, each immersing you in the terrifying grandeur of the Cthulhu Mythos:
The Whisperer in Darkness – A tale of extraterrestrial horror, rural isolation, and cosmic infiltration.
The Call of Cthulhu – The foundational story of the Great Old One sleeping beneath the ocean.
At the Mountains of Madness – A doomed Antarctic expedition uncovers ancient ruins and an unspeakable prehuman race.
The Nameless City – A descent into forgotten ruins and the horrors buried beneath the Arabian desert.
The Shadow out of Time – Time travel, body-swapping, and the haunting realization of humanity’s place in the cosmos.
This is Lovecraftian horror at its most powerful—full of ancient gods, non-Euclidean dimensions, lost civilizations, and the relentless fear of the unknown.
Narrated by Shadows of Weekend, this immersive experience is perfect for fans of psychological horror, sci-fi horror, and classic weird fiction.

Chapters:

00:00:58 – The Whisperer in Darkness
02:38:04 – The Call of Cthulhu
03:53:19 – At the Mountains of Madness
08:12:04 – The Nameless City
08:43:31 – The Shadow out of Time

Why Watch This Compilation?
Perfect for long-form horror audiobook listening

Includes top stories from the Cthulhu Mythos
Essential for lovers of eldritch horror, classic literature, and gothic suspense
Full-length readings with no interruptions
Ideal for fans of Stephen King, Algernon Blackwood, and cosmic dread

Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and click the bell to explore more classic horror audiobooks, Lovecraft stories, and dark narrations from Shadows of Weekend.
Support the channel by becoming a member, using Super Thanks, or sharing with other lovers of the Mythos.

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Background Music Credit:
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Content Note
These classic works were written in the early 20th century and may include language or perspectives that reflect outdated societal views. They are presented here for historical and literary appreciation.

We do not endorse any form of prejudice or discrimination. This presentation aims to preserve the original text while encouraging thoughtful engagement with its context.

What if the universe wasn’t made for us? What 
if the history of Earth is only a fragment of a much older, far stranger story—written 
by ancient civilizations and cosmic forces beyond human understanding? In this collection 
from H. P. Lovecraft, we explore stories where the boundaries of sanity and science blur, 
where lost cities hold alien knowledge, and where humanity is a footnote in a vast, 
indifferent cosmos. From Vermont’s isolated hills to the sunken ruins of forgotten cities, these 
tales reveal terrifying truths hidden beneath our reality. Welcome to Shadows of Weekend. If 
you’re drawn to ancient mysteries, cosmic dread, and unsettling truths, you’re in the right place. 
Like, share, and subscribe. For early access, exclusive content, and to support the channel, tap 
the join button and become a member. What if the voices you hear are not just 
in your mind—but from beyond the stars?
  In The Whisperer in Darkness, a scholar 
investigating strange occurrences in the remote hills of Vermont uncovers chilling 
evidence of alien beings communicating   from the shadows. As reality blurs and paranoia 
grows, the story reveals a terrifying connection between knowledge and the unknown—where 
understanding might lead to losing yourself. This tale invites us to question how much of what 
we know is truly ours, and whether the universe is far stranger and less safe than we imagine.
Welcome to Shadows of Weekend. Like, share, and subscribe for more cosmic horror. For early 
access and exclusive content, tap the join button and become a member.Bear in mind closely that I 
did not see any actual visual horror at the end. To say that a mental shock was the cause of what I 
inferred—that last straw which sent me racing out of the lonely Akeley farmhouse and through the 
wild domed hills of Vermont in a commandeered   motor at night—is to ignore the plainest facts 
of my final experience. Notwithstanding the deep extent to which I shared the information 
and speculations of Henry Akeley, the things   I saw and heard, and the admitted vividness of 
the impression produced on me by these things, I cannot prove even now whether I was right or 
wrong in my hideous inference. For after all,   Akeley’s disappearance establishes nothing. 
People found nothing amiss in his house despite the bullet-marks on the outside and inside. It 
was just as though he had walked out casually for a ramble in the hills and failed to return. There 
was not even a sign that a guest had been there, or that those horrible cylinders and machines had 
been stored in the study. That he had mortally feared the crowded green hills and endless trickle 
of brooks among which he had been born and reared, means nothing at all, either; for thousands are 
subject to just such morbid fears. Eccentricity, moreover, could easily account for his strange 
acts and apprehensions toward the last. The whole matter began, so far as I am concerned, 
with the historic and unprecedented Vermont floods of November 3, 1927. I was then, as now, an 
instructor of literature at Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts, and an enthusiastic 
amateur student of New England folklore. Shortly after the flood, amidst the varied reports of 
hardship, suffering, and organised relief which   filled the press, there appeared certain odd 
stories of things found floating in some of the swollen rivers; so that many of my friends 
embarked on curious discussions and appealed to me to shed what light I could on the subject. I 
felt flattered at having my folklore study taken so seriously, and did what I could to belittle 
the wild, vague tales which seemed so clearly an outgrowth of old rustic superstitions. It 
amused me to find several persons of education who insisted that some stratum of obscure, 
distorted fact might underlie the rumours. The tales thus brought to my notice came mostly 
through newspaper cuttings; though one yarn had an oral source and was repeated to a friend of mine 
in a letter from his mother in Hardwick, Vermont. The type of thing described was essentially the 
same in all cases, though there seemed to be three separate instances involved—one connected with the 
Winooski River near Montpelier, another attached to the West River in Windham County beyond 
Newfane, and a third centring in the Passumpsic in Caledonia County above Lyndonville. Of course many 
of the stray items mentioned other instances, but on analysis they all seemed to boil down to these 
three. In each case country folk reported seeing one or more very bizarre and disturbing objects 
in the surging waters that poured down from the unfrequented hills, and there was a widespread 
tendency to connect these sights with a primitive, half-forgotten cycle of whispered legend which 
old people resurrected for the occasion. What people thought they saw were organic shapes 
not quite like any they had ever seen before. Naturally, there were many human bodies washed 
along by the streams in that tragic period; but those who described these strange shapes 
felt quite sure that they were not human, despite some superficial resemblances in size 
and general outline. Nor, said the witnesses, could they have been any kind of animal known to 
Vermont. They were pinkish things about five feet long; with crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs 
of dorsal fins or membraneous wings and several sets of articulated limbs, and with a sort of 
convoluted ellipsoid, covered with multitudes of very short antennae, where a head would 
ordinarily be. It was really remarkable how closely the reports from different sources tended 
to coincide; though the wonder was lessened by   the fact that the old legends, shared at one time 
throughout the hill country, furnished a morbidly vivid picture which might well have coloured 
the imaginations of all the witnesses concerned. It was my conclusion that such witnesses—in every 
case naive and simple backwoods folk—had glimpsed the battered and bloated bodies of human beings 
or farm animals in the whirling currents; and had allowed the half-remembered folklore to invest 
these pitiful objects with fantastic attributes. The ancient folklore, while cloudy, evasive, 
and largely forgotten by the present generation, was of a highly singular character, and obviously 
reflected the influence of still earlier Indian tales. I knew it well, though I had never been in 
Vermont, through the exceedingly rare monograph of Eli Davenport, which embraces material orally 
obtained prior to 1839 among the oldest people of the state. This material, moreover, closely 
coincided with tales which I had personally heard from elderly rustics in the mountains of 
New Hampshire. Briefly summarised, it hinted at a hidden race of monstrous beings which lurked 
somewhere among the remoter hills—in the deep woods of the highest peaks, and the dark valleys 
where streams trickle from unknown sources. These beings were seldom glimpsed, but evidences 
of their presence were reported by those who had ventured farther than usual up the slopes 
of certain mountains or into certain deep, steep-sided gorges that even the wolves shunned.
There were queer footprints or claw-prints in the mud of brook-margins and barren patches, 
and curious circles of stones, with the grass around them worn away, which did not seem to 
have been placed or entirely shaped by Nature. There were, too, certain caves of problematical 
depth in the sides of the hills; with mouths closed by boulders in a manner scarcely 
accidental, and with more than an average   quota of the queer prints leading both toward 
and away from them—if indeed the direction of these prints could be justly estimated. And worst 
of all, there were the things which adventurous people had seen very rarely in the twilight of 
the remotest valleys and the dense perpendicular woods above the limits of normal hill-climbing.
It would have been less uncomfortable if the stray accounts of these things had not agreed so well. 
As it was, nearly all the rumours had several points in common; averring that the creatures were 
a sort of huge, light-red crab with many pairs of legs and with two great bat-like wings in the 
middle of the back. They sometimes walked on all their legs, and sometimes on the hindmost pair 
only, using the others to convey large objects of indeterminate nature. On one occasion 
they were spied in considerable numbers, a detachment of them wading along a shallow 
woodland watercourse three abreast in evidently disciplined formation. Once a specimen was seen 
flying—launching itself from the top of a bald, lonely hill at night and vanishing in the 
sky after its great flapping wings had been   silhouetted an instant against the full moon.
These things seemed content, on the whole, to let mankind alone; though they were at 
times held responsible for the disappearance of venturesome individuals—especially persons who 
built houses too close to certain valleys or too high up on certain mountains. Many localities 
came to be known as inadvisable to settle in, the feeling persisting long after the cause was 
forgotten. People would look up at some of the neighbouring mountain-precipices with a shudder, 
even when not recalling how many settlers had been lost, and how many farmhouses burnt to ashes, on 
the lower slopes of those grim, green sentinels. But while according to the earliest legends the 
creatures would appear to have harmed only those   trespassing on their privacy; there were later 
accounts of their curiosity respecting men, and of their attempts to establish secret 
outposts in the human world. There were tales of the queer claw-prints seen around 
farmhouse windows in the morning, and of   occasional disappearances in regions outside 
the obviously haunted areas. Tales, besides, of buzzing voices in imitation of human speech 
which made surprising offers to lone travellers on roads and cart-paths in the deep woods, and of 
children frightened out of their wits by things seen or heard where the primal forest pressed 
close upon their dooryards. In the final layer of legends—the layer just preceding the decline 
of superstition and the abandonment of close contact with the dreaded places—there are shocked 
references to hermits and remote farmers who at some period of life appeared to have undergone a 
repellent mental change, and who were shunned and whispered about as mortals who had sold themselves 
to the strange beings. In one of the northeastern counties it seemed to be a fashion about 1800 to 
accuse eccentric and unpopular recluses of being allies or representatives of the abhorred things.
As to what the things were—explanations naturally varied. The common name applied to them was “those 
ones”, or “the old ones”, though other terms had a local and transient use. Perhaps the bulk of 
the Puritan settlers set them down bluntly as familiars of the devil, and made them a basis of 
awed theological speculation. Those with Celtic legendry in their heritage—mainly the Scotch-Irish 
element of New Hampshire, and their kindred who had settled in Vermont on Governor Wentworth’s 
colonial grants—linked them vaguely with the malign fairies and “little people” of the bogs 
and raths, and protected themselves with scraps of incantation handed down through many generations. 
But the Indians had the most fantastic theories of all. While different tribal legends differed, 
there was a marked consensus of belief in certain vital particulars; it being unanimously agreed 
that the creatures were not native to this earth. The Pennacook myths, which were the most 
consistent and picturesque, taught that the Winged Ones came from the Great Bear in the sky, and 
had mines in our earthly hills whence they took a kind of stone they could not get on any other 
world. They did not live here, said the myths, but merely maintained outposts and flew back with 
vast cargoes of stone to their own stars in the north. They harmed only those earth-people who got 
too near them or spied upon them. Animals shunned them through instinctive hatred, not because of 
being hunted. They could not eat the things and   animals of earth, but brought their own food 
from the stars. It was bad to get near them, and sometimes young hunters who went into their 
hills never came back. It was not good, either,   to listen to what they whispered at night in 
the forest with voices like a bee’s that tried to be like the voices of men. They knew the 
speech of all kinds of men—Pennacooks, Hurons, men of the Five Nations—but did not seem to 
have or need any speech of their own. They talked with their heads, which changed colour 
in different ways to mean different things. All the legendry, of course, white and Indian 
alike, died down during the nineteenth century, except for occasional atavistical flareups. 
The ways of the Vermonters became settled; and once their habitual paths and dwellings were 
established according to a certain fixed plan, they remembered less and less what fears 
and avoidances had determined that plan, and even that there had been any fears or 
avoidances. Most people simply knew that certain hilly regions were considered as highly unhealthy, 
unprofitable, and generally unlucky to live in, and that the farther one kept from them the 
better off one usually was. In time the ruts of custom and economic interest became so deeply 
cut in approved places that there was no longer any reason for going outside them, and the haunted 
hills were left deserted by accident rather than by design. Save during infrequent local scares, 
only wonder-loving grandmothers and retrospective nonagenarians ever whispered of beings dwelling 
in those hills; and even such whisperers admitted that there was not much to fear from those things 
now that they were used to the presence of houses and settlements, and now that human beings 
let their chosen territory severely alone. All this I had known from my reading, and from 
certain folk-tales picked up in New Hampshire; hence when the flood-time rumours began to appear, 
I could easily guess what imaginative background had evolved them. I took great pains to explain 
this to my friends, and was correspondingly amused when several contentious souls continued to insist 
on a possible element of truth in the reports. Such persons tried to point out that the 
early legends had a significant persistence   and uniformity, and that the virtually unexplored 
nature of the Vermont hills made it unwise to be dogmatic about what might or might not dwell 
among them; nor could they be silenced by my assurance that all the myths were of a well-known 
pattern common to most of mankind and determined by early phases of imaginative experience which 
always produced the same type of delusion. It was of no use to demonstrate to such opponents 
that the Vermont myths differed but little in essence from those universal legends of 
natural personification which filled the ancient world with fauns and dryads and satyrs, 
suggested the kallikanzari of modern Greece, and gave to wild Wales and Ireland their dark 
hints of strange, small, and terrible hidden races of troglodytes and burrowers. No use, either, to 
point out the even more startlingly similar belief of the Nepalese hill tribes in the dreaded Mi-Go 
or “Abominable Snow-Men” who lurk hideously amidst the ice and rock pinnacles of the Himalayan 
summits. When I brought up this evidence, my opponents turned it against me by claiming 
that it must imply some actual historicity   for the ancient tales; that it must argue the 
real existence of some queer elder earth-race, driven to hiding after the advent and 
dominance of mankind, which might very   conceivably have survived in reduced numbers to 
relatively recent times—or even to the present. The more I laughed at such theories, the 
more these stubborn friends asseverated them;   adding that even without the heritage of legend 
the recent reports were too clear, consistent, detailed, and sanely prosaic in manner of telling, 
to be completely ignored. Two or three fanatical extremists went so far as to hint at possible 
meanings in the ancient Indian tales which gave the hidden beings a non-terrestrial origin; citing 
the extravagant books of Charles Fort with their claims that voyagers from other worlds and outer 
space have often visited earth. Most of my foes, however, were merely romanticists who insisted on 
trying to transfer to real life the fantastic lore of lurking “little people” made popular by the 
magnificent horror-fiction of Arthur Machen. As was only natural under the circumstances, 
this piquant debating finally got into print in the form of letters to the Arkham Advertiser; 
some of which were copied in the press of those   Vermont regions whence the flood-stories came. 
The Rutland Herald gave half a page of extracts from the letters on both sides, while the 
Brattleboro Reformer reprinted one of my long historical and mythological summaries in 
full, with some accompanying comments in “The Pendrifter’s” thoughtful column which supported 
and applauded my sceptical conclusions. By the spring of 1928 I was almost a well-known figure in 
Vermont, notwithstanding the fact that I had never set foot in the state. Then came the challenging 
letters from Henry Akeley which impressed me so profoundly, and which took me for the first and 
last time to that fascinating realm of crowded green precipices and muttering forest streams.
Most of what I now know of Henry Wentworth Akeley was gathered by correspondence with his 
neighbours, and with his only son in California, after my experience in his lonely 
farmhouse. He was, I discovered,   the last representative on his home soil of a 
long, locally distinguished line of jurists, administrators, and gentlemen-agriculturists. In 
him, however, the family mentally had veered away from practical affairs to pure scholarship; so 
that he had been a notable student of mathematics, astronomy, biology, anthropology, and folklore 
at the University of Vermont. I had never previously heard of him, and he did not give many 
autobiographical details in his communications; but from the first I saw he was a man of 
character, education, and intelligence, albeit a recluse with very little worldly sophistication.
Despite the incredible nature of what he claimed, I could not help at once taking Akeley more 
seriously than I had taken any of the other challengers of my views. For one thing, he was 
really close to the actual phenomena—visible and tangible—that he speculated so grotesquely about; 
and for another thing, he was amazingly willing to leave his conclusions in a tentative state 
like a true man of science. He had no personal preferences to advance, and was always guided 
by what he took to be solid evidence. Of course I began by considering him mistaken, but gave 
him credit for being intelligently mistaken; and at no time did I emulate some of his 
friends in attributing his ideas, and his fear of the lonely green hills, to insanity. I 
could see that there was a great deal to the man, and knew that what he reported must surely 
come from strange circumstances deserving investigation, however little it might have 
to do with the fantastic causes he assigned. Later on I received from him certain material 
proofs which placed the matter on a somewhat   different and bewilderingly bizarre basis.
I cannot do better than transcribe in full, so far as is possible, the long letter in which Akeley 
introduced himself, and which formed such an important landmark in my own intellectual history. 
It is no longer in my possession, but my memory holds almost every word of its portentous message; 
and again I affirm my confidence in the sanity of the man who wrote it. Here is the text—a text 
which reached me in the cramped, archaic-looking scrawl of one who had obviously not mingled much 
with the world during his sedate, scholarly life. R.F.D. #2,
Townshend, Windham Co.,
  Vermont
May 5, 1928. Albert N. Wilmarth, Esq.,
118 Saltonstall St.,
  Arkham, Mass.,
My dear Sir:— I have read with great interest the Brattleboro 
Reformer’s reprint (Apr. 23, ’28) of your letter on the recent stories of strange bodies seen 
floating in our flooded streams last fall, and on the curious folklore they so well 
agree with. It is easy to see why an outlander would take the position you take, 
and even why “Pendrifter” agrees with you. That is the attitude generally taken by educated 
persons both in and out of Vermont, and was my own attitude as a young man (I am now 57) before 
my studies, both general and in Davenport’s book, led me to do some exploring in parts of 
the hills hereabouts not usually visited. I was directed toward such studies by the queer 
old tales I used to hear from elderly farmers of the more ignorant sort, but now I wish I had 
let the whole matter alone. I might say, with all proper modesty, that the subject of anthropology 
and folklore is by no means strange to me. I took a good deal of it at college, and am familiar with 
most of the standard authorities such as Tylor,   Lubbock, Frazer, Quatrefages, Murray, Osborn, 
Keith, Boule, G. Elliot Smith, and so on. It is no news to me that tales of hidden races are as 
old as all mankind. I have seen the reprints of letters from you, and those arguing with you, in 
the Rutland Herald, and guess I know about where   your controversy stands at the present time.
What I desire to say now is, that I am afraid your adversaries are nearer right than yourself, even 
though all reason seems to be on your side. They are nearer right than they realise themselves—for 
of course they go only by theory, and cannot know what I know. If I knew as little of the matter as 
they, I would not feel justified in believing as they do. I would be wholly on your side.
You can see that I am having a hard time getting to the point, probably because I really 
dread getting to the point; but the upshot of   the matter is that I have certain evidence that 
monstrous things do indeed live in the woods on the high hills which nobody visits. I have not 
seen any of the things floating in the rivers, as reported, but I have seen things like 
them under circumstances I dread to repeat. I have seen footprints, and of late have seen them 
nearer my own home (I live in the old Akeley place south of Townshend Village, on the side of Dark 
Mountain) than I dare tell you now. And I have overheard voices in the woods at certain points 
that I will not even begin to describe on paper. At one place I heard them so much that I 
took a phonograph there—with a dictaphone   attachment and wax blank—and I shall try 
to arrange to have you hear the record I got. I have run it on the machine for some of 
the old people up here, and one of the voices   had nearly scared them paralysed by reason of 
its likeness to a certain voice (that buzzing voice in the woods which Davenport mentions) that 
their grandmothers have told about and mimicked for them. I know what most people think of a man 
who tells about “hearing voices”—but before you draw conclusions just listen to this record 
and ask some of the older backwoods people   what they think of it. If you can account for it 
normally, very well; but there must be something behind it. Ex nihilo nihil fit, you know.
Now my object in writing you is not to start an argument, but to give you information which 
I think a man of your tastes will find deeply   interesting. This is private. Publicly I am on 
your side, for certain things shew me that it does not do for people to know too much about these 
matters. My own studies are now wholly private, and I would not think of saying anything to 
attract people’s attention and cause them to visit   the places I have explored. It is true—terribly 
true—that there are non-human creatures watching us all the time; with spies among us gathering 
information. It is from a wretched man who, if he was sane (as I think he was), was one of 
those spies, that I got a large part of my clues to the matter. He later killed himself, but 
I have reason to think there are others now. The things come from another planet, being able 
to live in interstellar space and fly through it on clumsy, powerful wings which have a way of 
resisting the ether but which are too poor at steering to be of much use in helping them about 
on earth. I will tell you about this later if you   do not dismiss me at once as a madman. They come 
here to get metals from mines that go deep under the hills, and I think I know where they come 
from. They will not hurt us if we let them alone, but no one can say what will happen if we get too 
curious about them. Of course a good army of men could wipe out their mining colony. That is what 
they are afraid of. But if that happened, more would come from outside—any number of them. They 
could easily conquer the earth, but have not tried so far because they have not needed to. They would 
rather leave things as they are to save bother. I think they mean to get rid of me because 
of what I have discovered. There is a great black stone with unknown hieroglyphics half worn 
away which I found in the woods on Round Hill, east of here; and after I took it home everything 
became different. If they think I suspect too much they will either kill me or take me off the earth 
to where they come from. They like to take away men of learning once in a while, to keep informed 
on the state of things in the human world. This leads me to my secondary purpose 
in addressing you—namely, to urge you   to hush up the present debate rather than give 
it more publicity. People must be kept away from these hills, and in order to effect this, their 
curiosity ought not to be aroused any further. Heaven knows there is peril enough anyway, with 
promoters and real estate men flooding Vermont with herds of summer people to overrun the wild 
places and cover the hills with cheap bungalows. I shall welcome further communication with you, 
and shall try to send you that phonograph record and black stone (which is so worn that photographs 
don’t shew much) by express if you are willing. I say “try” because I think those creatures have a 
way of tampering with things around here. There is a sullen, furtive fellow named Brown, on a farm 
near the village, who I think is their spy. Little by little they are trying to cut me off from our 
world because I know too much about their world. They have the most amazing way of finding out 
what I do. You may not even get this letter.   I think I shall have to leave this part of the 
country and go to live with my son in San Diego, Cal., if things get any worse, but it is not easy 
to give up the place you were born in, and where your family has lived for six generations. Also, 
I would hardly dare sell this house to anybody now that the creatures have taken notice of 
it. They seem to be trying to get the black   stone back and destroy the phonograph record, 
but I shall not let them if I can help it. My great police dogs always hold them back, for there 
are very few here as yet, and they are clumsy in getting about. As I have said, their wings are 
not much use for short flights on earth. I am on the very brink of deciphering that stone—in 
a very terrible way—and with your knowledge of folklore you may be able to supply missing links 
enough to help me. I suppose you know all about the fearful myths antedating the coming of man to 
the earth—the Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu cycles—which are hinted at in the Necronomicon. I had access 
to a copy of that once, and hear that you have one in your college library under lock and key.
To conclude, Mr. Wilmarth, I think that with our respective studies we can be very useful to 
each other. I don’t wish to put you in any peril, and suppose I ought to warn you that possession 
of the stone and the record won’t be very safe;   but I think you will find any risks worth 
running for the sake of knowledge. I will drive down to Newfane or Brattleboro to 
send whatever you authorise me to send,   for the express offices there are more to be 
trusted. I might say that I live quite alone now, since I can’t keep hired help any more. They 
won’t stay because of the things that try to   get near the house at night, and that keep the 
dogs barking continually. I am glad I didn’t get as deep as this into the business while my wife 
was alive, for it would have driven her mad. Hoping that I am not bothering you unduly, 
and that you will decide to get in touch   with me rather than throw this letter into 
the waste basket as a madman’s raving, I am Yrs. very truly,
HENRY W. AKELEY P.S. I am making some extra prints 
of certain photographs taken by me,   which I think will help to prove a number of 
the points I have touched on. The old people think they are monstrously true. I shall send you 
these very soon if you are interested. H.W.A. It would be difficult to describe my sentiments 
upon reading this strange document for the first   time. By all ordinary rules, I ought to have 
laughed more loudly at these extravagances than at the far milder theories which had previously 
moved me to mirth; yet something in the tone of the letter made me take it with paradoxical 
seriousness. Not that I believed for a moment in the hidden race from the stars which my 
correspondent spoke of; but that, after some grave preliminary doubts, I grew to feel oddly 
sure of his sanity and sincerity, and of his confrontation by some genuine though singular and 
abnormal phenomenon which he could not explain except in this imaginative way. It could not be 
as he thought it, I reflected, yet on the other hand it could not be otherwise than worthy of 
investigation. The man seemed unduly excited and alarmed about something, but it was hard to think 
that all cause was lacking. He was so specific and logical in certain ways—and after all, his 
yarn did fit in so perplexingly well with some of the old myths—even the wildest Indian legends.
That he had really overheard disturbing voices in the hills, and had really found the black stone 
he spoke about, was wholly possible despite the crazy inferences he had made—inferences probably 
suggested by the man who had claimed to be a spy of the outer beings and had later killed himself. 
It was easy to deduce that this man must have been wholly insane, but that he probably had a 
streak of perverse outward logic which made the naive Akeley—already prepared for such things 
by his folklore studies—believe his tale. As for the latest developments—it appeared from 
his inability to keep hired help that Akeley’s humbler rustic neighbours were as convinced 
as he that his house was besieged by uncanny things at night. The dogs really barked, too.
And then the matter of that phonograph record, which I could not but believe he had obtained 
in the way he said. It must mean something; whether animal noises deceptively like 
human speech, or the speech of some hidden, night-haunting human being decayed to a state 
not much above that of lower animals. From this my thoughts went back to the black hieroglyphed 
stone, and to speculations upon what it might mean. Then, too, what of the photographs which 
Akeley said he was about to send, and which the old people had found so convincingly terrible?
As I re-read the cramped handwriting I felt as never before that my credulous opponents might 
have more on their side than I had conceded. After all, there might be some queer and perhaps 
hereditarily misshapen outcasts in those shunned hills, even though no such race of star-born 
monsters as folklore claimed. And if there were, then the presence of strange bodies in the 
flooded streams would not be wholly beyond belief. Was it too presumptuous to suppose that 
both the old legends and the recent reports had this much of reality behind them? But even as 
I harboured these doubts I felt ashamed that so fantastic a piece of bizarrerie as Henry 
Akeley’s wild letter had brought them up. In the end I answered Akeley’s letter, adopting a 
tone of friendly interest and soliciting further particulars. His reply came almost by return mail; 
and contained, true to promise, a number of kodak views of scenes and objects illustrating what he 
had to tell. Glancing at these pictures as I took them from the envelope, I felt a curious sense of 
fright and nearness to forbidden things; for in spite of the vagueness of most of them, they had a 
damnably suggestive power which was intensified by the fact of their being genuine photographs—actual 
optical links with what they portrayed, and the product of an impersonal transmitting process 
without prejudice, fallibility, or mendacity. The more I looked at them, the more I saw that 
my serious estimate of Akeley and his story had not been unjustified. Certainly, these pictures 
carried conclusive evidence of something in the Vermont hills which was at least vastly outside 
the radius of our common knowledge and belief. The worst thing of all was the footprint—a view 
taken where the sun shone on a mud patch somewhere in a deserted upland. This was no cheaply 
counterfeited thing, I could see at a glance; for the sharply defined pebbles and grass-blades 
in the field of vision gave a clear index of scale and left no possibility of a tricky double 
exposure. I have called the thing a “footprint”, but “claw-print” would be a better term. Even 
now I can scarcely describe it save to say   that it was hideously crab-like, and that there 
seemed to be some ambiguity about its direction. It was not a very deep or fresh print, but seemed 
to be about the size of an average man’s foot. From a central pad, pairs of saw-toothed nippers 
projected in opposite directions—quite baffling as to function, if indeed the whole object 
were exclusively an organ of locomotion. Another photograph—evidently a time-exposure taken 
in deep shadow—was of the mouth of a woodland cave, with a boulder of rounded regularity 
choking the aperture. On the bare ground in front of it one could just discern a dense network 
of curious tracks, and when I studied the picture with a magnifier I felt uneasily sure that the 
tracks were like the one in the other view. A third picture shewed a druid-like circle 
of standing stones on the summit of a wild hill. Around the cryptic circle the grass 
was very much beaten down and worn away, though I could not detect any footprints even 
with the glass. The extreme remoteness of the place was apparent from the veritable sea of 
tenantless mountains which formed the background and stretched away toward a misty horizon.
But if the most disturbing of all the views was that of the footprint, the most curiously 
suggestive was that of the great black stone found in the Round Hill woods. Akeley had photographed 
it on what was evidently his study table, for I could see rows of books and a bust of Milton 
in the background. The thing, as nearly as one might guess, had faced the camera vertically with 
a somewhat irregularly curved surface of one by two feet; but to say anything definite about that 
surface, or about the general shape of the whole mass, almost defies the power of language. What 
outlandish geometrical principles had guided its cutting—for artificially cut it surely was—I could 
not even begin to guess; and never before had I seen anything which struck me as so strangely 
and unmistakably alien to this world. Of the hieroglyphics on the surface I could discern very 
few, but one or two that I did see gave me rather a shock. Of course they might be fraudulent, for 
others besides myself had read the monstrous and abhorred Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul 
Alhazred; but it nevertheless made me shiver to recognise certain ideographs which study had 
taught me to link with the most blood-curdling and blasphemous whispers of things that had had a kind 
of mad half-existence before the earth and the other inner worlds of the solar system were made.
Of the five remaining pictures, three were of swamp and hill scenes which seemed to 
bear traces of hidden and unwholesome   tenancy. Another was of a queer mark 
in the ground very near Akeley’s house, which he said he had photographed the morning 
after a night on which the dogs had barked more   violently than usual. It was very blurred, and one 
could really draw no certain conclusions from it; but it did seem fiendishly like that other mark 
or claw-print photographed on the deserted upland. The final picture was of the Akeley place itself; 
a trim white house of two stories and attic, about a century and a quarter old, and with a 
well-kept lawn and stone-bordered path leading up to a tastefully carved Georgian doorway. 
There were several huge police dogs on the lawn, squatting near a pleasant-faced man with a 
close-cropped grey beard whom I took to be Akeley   himself—his own photographer, one might infer 
from the tube-connected bulb in his right hand. From the pictures I turned to the bulky, closely 
written letter itself; and for the next three hours was immersed in a gulf of unutterable 
horror. Where Akeley had given only outlines before, he now entered into minute details; 
presenting long transcripts of words overheard in the woods at night, long accounts of monstrous 
pinkish forms spied in thickets at twilight on the hills, and a terrible cosmic narrative derived 
from the application of profound and varied scholarship to the endless bygone discourses of 
the mad self-styled spy who had killed himself. I found myself faced by names and terms 
that I had heard elsewhere in the most   hideous of connexions—Yuggoth, Great Cthulhu, 
Tsathoggua, Yog-Sothoth, R’lyeh, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, Hastur, Yian, Leng, the Lake of Hali, 
Bethmoora, the Yellow Sign, L’mur-Kathulos, Bran, and the Magnum Innominandum—and was drawn 
back through nameless aeons and inconceivable dimensions to worlds of elder, outer entity at 
which the crazed author of the Necronomicon had only guessed in the vaguest way. I was told of the 
pits of primal life, and of the streams that had trickled down therefrom; and finally, of the tiny 
rivulet from one of those streams which had become entangled with the destinies of our own earth.
My brain whirled; and where before I had attempted to explain things away, I now began to believe 
in the most abnormal and incredible wonders. The array of vital evidence was damnably vast and 
overwhelming; and the cool, scientific attitude of Akeley—an attitude removed as far as imaginable 
from the demented, the fanatical, the hysterical, or even the extravagantly speculative—had a 
tremendous effect on my thought and judgment. By the time I laid the frightful letter aside 
I could understand the fears he had come to   entertain, and was ready to do anything in 
my power to keep people away from those wild, haunted hills. Even now, when time 
has dulled the impression and made me half question my own experience and 
horrible doubts, there are things in   that letter of Akeley’s which I would not 
quote, or even form into words on paper. I am almost glad that the letter and record 
and photographs are gone now—and I wish,   for reasons I shall soon make clear, that the new 
planet beyond Neptune had not been discovered. With the reading of that letter my public debating 
about the Vermont horror permanently ended. Arguments from opponents remained unanswered 
or put off with promises, and eventually the controversy petered out into oblivion. During late 
May and June I was in constant correspondence with Akeley; though once in a while a letter 
would be lost, so that we would have to   retrace our ground and perform considerable 
laborious copying. What we were trying to do, as a whole, was to compare notes in matters of 
obscure mythological scholarship and arrive at a clearer correlation of the Vermont horrors with 
the general body of primitive world legend. For one thing, we virtually decided that these 
morbidities and the hellish Himalayan Mi-Go were one and the same order of incarnated nightmare. 
There were also absorbing zoölogical conjectures, which I would have referred to Professor Dexter 
in my own college but for Akeley’s imperative   command to tell no one of the matter before 
us. If I seem to disobey that command now, it is only because I think that at this stage 
a warning about those farther Vermont hills—and about those Himalayan peaks which bold explorers 
are more and more determined to ascend—is more conducive to public safety than silence would 
be. One specific thing we were leading up to was a deciphering of the hieroglyphics on that 
infamous black stone—a deciphering which might well place us in possession of secrets deeper and 
more dizzying than any formerly known to man. Toward the end of June the phonograph 
record came—shipped from Brattleboro,   since Akeley was unwilling to trust conditions on 
the branch line north of there. He had begun to feel an increased sense of espionage, aggravated 
by the loss of some of our letters; and said much about the insidious deeds of certain men whom he 
considered tools and agents of the hidden beings. Most of all he suspected the surly farmer Walter 
Brown, who lived alone on a run-down hillside place near the deep woods, and who was often 
seen loafing around corners in Brattleboro, Bellows Falls, Newfane, and South Londonderry in 
the most inexplicable and seemingly unmotivated way. Brown’s voice, he felt convinced, was one of 
those he had overheard on a certain occasion in a very terrible conversation; and he had once found 
a footprint or claw-print near Brown’s house which might possess the most ominous significance. 
It had been curiously near some of Brown’s own footprints—footprints that faced toward it.
So the record was shipped from Brattleboro, whither Akeley drove in his Ford car 
along the lonely Vermont back roads.   He confessed in an accompanying note that he was 
beginning to be afraid of those roads, and that he would not even go into Townshend for supplies 
now except in broad daylight. It did not pay, he repeated again and again, to know too much 
unless one were very remote from those silent and problematical hills. He would be going to 
California pretty soon to live with his son, though it was hard to leave a place where all 
one’s memories and ancestral feelings centred. Before trying the record on the commercial machine 
which I borrowed from the college administration   building I carefully went over all the explanatory 
matter in Akeley’s various letters. This record, he had said, was obtained about 1 a.m. on 
the first of May, 1915, near the closed mouth of a cave where the wooded west slope 
of Dark Mountain rises out of Lee’s Swamp. The place had always been unusually plagued 
with strange voices, this being the reason he had brought the phonograph, dictaphone, 
and blank in expectation of results. Former experience had told him that May-Eve—the 
hideous Sabbat-night of underground European   legend—would probably be more fruitful than 
any other date, and he was not disappointed. It was noteworthy, though, that he never 
again heard voices at that particular spot. Unlike most of the overheard forest voices, the 
substance of the record was quasi-ritualistic, and included one palpably human voice which Akeley 
had never been able to place. It was not Brown’s, but seemed to be that of a man of greater 
cultivation. The second voice, however,   was the real crux of the thing—for this was 
the accursed buzzing which had no likeness to humanity despite the human words which it uttered 
in good English grammar and a scholarly accent. The recording phonograph and dictaphone had not 
worked uniformly well, and had of course been   at a great disadvantage because of the remote 
and muffled nature of the overheard ritual; so that the actual speech secured was very 
fragmentary. Akeley had given me a transcript of what he believed the spoken words to 
be, and I glanced through this again as I   prepared the machine for action. The text was 
darkly mysterious rather than openly horrible, though a knowledge of its origin and manner of 
gathering gave it all the associative horror   which any words could well possess. I will present 
it here in full as I remember it—and I am fairly confident that I know it correctly by heart, not 
only from reading the transcript, but from playing the record itself over and over again. It is 
not a thing which one might readily forget! (INDISTINGUISHABLE SOUNDS)
(A CULTIVATED MALE HUMAN VOICE)
  is the Lord of the Woods, even to and the gifts of 
the men of Leng so from the wells of night to the gulfs of space, and from the gulfs of space to the 
wells of night, ever the praises of Great Cthulhu, of Tsathoggua, and of Him Who is not to be Named. 
Ever Their praises, and abundance to the Black Goat of the Woods. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! 
The Goat with a Thousand Young!
  (A BUZZING IMITATION OF HUMAN SPEECH)
Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!
(HUMAN VOICE)
  And it has come to pass that the Lord 
of the Woods, being seven and nine, down the onyx steps (tri)butes to Him in the Gulf, 
Azathoth, He of Whom Thou hast taught us marv(els) on the wings of night out beyond space, out beyond 
th to That whereof Yuggoth is the youngest child, rolling alone in black aether at the rim .
(BUZZING VOICE)
  go out among men and find the ways thereof, 
that He in the Gulf may know. To Nyarlathotep, Mighty Messenger, must all things be told. 
And He shall put on the semblance of men, the waxen mask and the robe that hides, 
and come down from the world of Seven   Suns to mock .
(HUMAN VOICE) (Nyarl)athotep, Great Messenger, bringer of 
strange joy to Yuggoth through the void, Father   of the Million Favoured Ones, Stalker among .
(SPEECH CUT OFF BY END OF RECORD) Such were the words for which I was to listen when 
I started the phonograph. It was with a trace of genuine dread and reluctance that I pressed the 
lever and heard the preliminary scratching of   the sapphire point, and I was glad that the first 
faint, fragmentary words were in a human voice—a mellow, educated voice which seemed vaguely 
Bostonian in accent, and which was certainly not that of any native of the Vermont hills. As 
I listened to the tantalisingly feeble rendering, I seemed to find the speech identical with 
Akeley’s carefully prepared transcript. On   it chanted, in that mellow Bostonian voice “Iä! 
Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young! ” And then I heard the other voice. To this 
hour I shudder retrospectively when I think of how it struck me, prepared though I was by 
Akeley’s accounts. Those to whom I have since described the record profess to find nothing but 
cheap imposture or madness in it; but could they have heard the accursed thing itself, or read the 
bulk of Akeley’s correspondence (especially that terrible and encyclopaedic second letter), I know 
they would think differently. It is, after all, a tremendous pity that I did not disobey Akeley and 
play the record for others—a tremendous pity, too, that all of his letters were lost. To me, with 
my first-hand impression of the actual sounds, and with my knowledge of the background 
and surrounding circumstances, the voice   was a monstrous thing. It swiftly followed the 
human voice in ritualistic response, but in my imagination it was a morbid echo winging its way 
across unimaginable abysses from unimaginable outer hells. It is more than two years now since 
I last ran off that blasphemous waxen cylinder; but at this moment, and at all other moments, 
I can still hear that feeble, fiendish buzzing as it reached me for the first time.
“Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat   of the Woods with a Thousand Young!”
But though that voice is always in my ears, I have not even yet been able to analyse 
it well enough for a graphic description.   It was like the drone of some loathsome, gigantic 
insect ponderously shaped into the articulate speech of an alien species, and I am perfectly 
certain that the organs producing it can have no resemblance to the vocal organs of man, 
or indeed to those of any of the mammalia. There were singularities in timbre, range, and 
overtones which placed this phenomenon wholly outside the sphere of humanity and earth-life. Its 
sudden advent that first time almost stunned me, and I heard the rest of the record through in a 
sort of abstracted daze. When the longer passage of buzzing came, there was a sharp intensification 
of that feeling of blasphemous infinity which had struck me during the shorter and earlier 
passage. At last the record ended abruptly, during an unusually clear speech of the human 
and Bostonian voice; but I sat stupidly staring long after the machine had automatically stopped.
I hardly need say that I gave that shocking record many another playing, and that I made exhaustive 
attempts at analysis and comment in comparing notes with Akeley. It would be both useless and 
disturbing to repeat here all that we concluded; but I may hint that we agreed in believing 
we had secured a clue to the source of some   of the most repulsive primordial customs 
in the cryptic elder religions of mankind. It seemed plain to us, also, that there were 
ancient and elaborate alliances between the hidden outer creatures and certain members of the 
human race. How extensive these alliances were, and how their state today might compare with 
their state in earlier ages, we had no means of guessing; yet at best there was room for 
a limitless amount of horrified speculation. There seemed to be an awful, immemorial linkage in 
several definite stages betwixt man and nameless infinity. The blasphemies which appeared on earth, 
it was hinted, came from the dark planet Yuggoth, at the rim of the solar system; but this 
was itself merely the populous outpost   of a frightful interstellar race whose ultimate 
source must lie far outside even the Einsteinian space-time continuum or greatest known cosmos.
Meanwhile we continued to discuss the black stone and the best way of getting it to Arkham—Akeley 
deeming it inadvisable to have me visit him at the scene of his nightmare studies. For some reason 
or other, Akeley was afraid to trust the thing to any ordinary or expected transportation route. 
His final idea was to take it across county to Bellows Falls and ship it on the Boston and Maine 
system through Keene and Winchendon and Fitchburg, even though this would necessitate his driving 
along somewhat lonelier and more forest-traversing hill roads than the main highway to Brattleboro. 
He said he had noticed a man around the express office at Brattleboro when he had sent 
the phonograph record, whose actions and   expression had been far from reassuring. This man 
had seemed too anxious to talk with the clerks, and had taken the train on which the record 
was shipped. Akeley confessed that he had   not felt strictly at ease about that record 
until he heard from me of its safe receipt. About this time—the second week in July—another 
letter of mine went astray, as I learned through an anxious communication from Akeley. After that 
he told me to address him no more at Townshend, but to send all mail in care of the General 
Delivery at Brattleboro; whither he would make frequent trips either in his car or on the 
motor-coach line which had lately replaced   passenger service on the lagging branch railway. 
I could see that he was getting more and more anxious, for he went into much detail about the 
increased barking of the dogs on moonless nights, and about the fresh claw-prints he sometimes found 
in the road and in the mud at the back of his farmyard when morning came. Once he told about a 
veritable army of prints drawn up in a line facing an equally thick and resolute line of dog-tracks, 
and sent a loathsomely disturbing kodak picture to prove it. That was after a night on which the dogs 
had outdone themselves in barking and howling. On the morning of Wednesday, July 18, I received a 
telegram from Bellows Falls, in which Akeley said he was expressing the black stone over the B. & M. 
on Train No. 5508, leaving Bellows Falls at 12:15 p.m., standard time, and due at the North Station 
in Boston at 4:12 p.m. It ought, I calculated, to get up to Arkham at least by the next noon; 
and accordingly I stayed in all Thursday morning to receive it. But noon came and went without 
its advent, and when I telephoned down to the express office I was informed that no shipment 
for me had arrived. My next act, performed amidst a growing alarm, was to give a long-distance call 
to the express agent at the Boston North Station; and I was scarcely surprised to learn that my 
consignment had not appeared. Train No. 5508 had pulled in only 35 minutes late on the day 
before, but had contained no box addressed to me. The agent promised, however, to institute a 
searching inquiry; and I ended the day by sending Akeley a night-letter outlining the situation.
With commendable promptness a report came from the Boston office on the following afternoon, the 
agent telephoning as soon as he learned the facts. It seemed that the railway express clerk on 
No. 5508 had been able to recall an incident which might have much bearing on my loss—an 
argument with a very curious-voiced man, lean, sandy, and rustic-looking, when 
the train was waiting at Keene, N.H., shortly after one o’clock standard time.
The man, he said, was greatly excited about a heavy box which he claimed to expect, but 
which was neither on the train nor entered   on the company’s books. He had given the name of 
Stanley Adams, and had had such a queerly thick droning voice, that it made the clerk abnormally 
dizzy and sleepy to listen to him. The clerk could not remember quite how the conversation 
had ended, but recalled starting into a   fuller awakeness when the train began to move. The 
Boston agent added that this clerk was a young man of wholly unquestioned veracity and reliability, 
of known antecedents and long with the company. That evening I went to Boston to interview 
the clerk in person, having obtained his   name and address from the office. He was a frank, 
prepossessing fellow, but I saw that he could add nothing to his original account. Oddly, he was 
scarcely sure that he could even recognise the strange inquirer again. Realising that he had 
no more to tell, I returned to Arkham and sat up till morning writing letters to Akeley, 
to the express company, and to the police   department and station agent in Keene. I felt 
that the strange-voiced man who had so queerly affected the clerk must have a pivotal place in 
the ominous business, and hoped that Keene station employees and telegraph-office records might tell 
something about him and about how he happened   to make his inquiry when and where he did.
I must admit, however, that all my investigations came to nothing. The queer-voiced man had indeed 
been noticed around the Keene station in the early afternoon of July 18, and one lounger 
seemed to couple him vaguely with a heavy box; but he was altogether unknown, and had not been 
seen before or since. He had not visited the telegraph office or received any message so far 
as could be learned, nor had any message which might justly be considered a notice of the black 
stone’s presence on No. 5508 come through the office for anyone. Naturally Akeley joined with 
me in conducting these inquiries, and even made a personal trip to Keene to question the people 
around the station; but his attitude toward the matter was more fatalistic than mine. He seemed to 
find the loss of the box a portentous and menacing fulfilment of inevitable tendencies, and had no 
real hope at all of its recovery. He spoke of the undoubted telepathic and hypnotic powers of 
the hill creatures and their agents, and in one letter hinted that he did not believe the stone 
was on this earth any longer. For my part, I was duly enraged, for I had felt there was at least a 
chance of learning profound and astonishing things from the old, blurred hieroglyphs. The matter 
would have rankled bitterly in my mind had not Akeley’s immediate subsequent letters brought up 
a new phase of the whole horrible hill problem which at once seized all my attention.
The unknown things, Akeley wrote in a script grown pitifully tremulous, had begun to close in 
on him with a wholly new degree of determination. The nocturnal barking of the dogs whenever the 
moon was dim or absent was hideous now, and there had been attempts to molest him on the lonely 
roads he had to traverse by day. On the second of August, while bound for the village in his 
car, he had found a tree-trunk laid in his path at a point where the highway ran through a deep 
patch of woods; while the savage barking of the two great dogs he had with him told all too well 
of the things which must have been lurking near. What would have happened had the dogs not been 
there, he did not dare guess—but he never went   out now without at least two of his faithful and 
powerful pack. Other road experiences had occurred on August 5th and 6th; a shot grazing his car on 
one occasion, and the barking of the dogs telling of unholy woodland presences on the other.
On August 15th I received a frantic letter which disturbed me greatly, and which made me 
wish Akeley could put aside his lonely reticence and call in the aid of the law. There had been 
frightful happenings on the night of the 12-13th, bullets flying outside the farmhouse, and 
three of the twelve great dogs being found shot dead in the morning. There were myriads of 
claw-prints in the road, with the human prints of Walter Brown among them. Akeley had started 
to telephone to Brattleboro for more dogs, but the wire had gone dead before he had a chance 
to say much. Later he went to Brattleboro in his car, and learned there that linemen had found 
the main telephone cable neatly cut at a point where it ran through the deserted hills north of 
Newfane. But he was about to start home with four fine new dogs, and several cases of ammunition 
for his big-game repeating rifle. The letter was written at the post office in Brattleboro, 
and came through to me without delay.
  My attitude toward the matter was by this time 
quickly slipping from a scientific to an alarmedly personal one. I was afraid for Akeley in his 
remote, lonely farmhouse, and half afraid for myself because of my now definite connexion with 
the strange hill problem. The thing was reaching out so. Would it suck me in and engulf me? In 
replying to his letter I urged him to seek help, and hinted that I might take action myself if he 
did not. I spoke of visiting Vermont in person in spite of his wishes, and of helping 
him explain the situation to the proper   authorities. In return, however, I received only 
a telegram from Bellows Falls which read thus: APPRECIATE YOUR POSITION BUT CAN DO NOTHING. TAKE 
NO ACTION YOURSELF FOR IT COULD ONLY HARM BOTH. WAIT FOR EXPLANATION.
HENRY AKELY
  But the affair was steadily deepening. Upon my 
replying to the telegram I received a shaky note from Akeley with the astonishing news that he had 
not only never sent the wire, but had not received   the letter from me to which it was an obvious 
reply. Hasty inquiries by him at Bellows Falls had brought out that the message was deposited by 
a strange sandy-haired man with a curiously thick, droning voice, though more than this he could 
not learn. The clerk shewed him the original text as scrawled in pencil by the sender, 
but the handwriting was wholly unfamiliar.   It was noticeable that the signature 
was misspelled—A-K-E-L-Y, without the second “E”. Certain conjectures were 
inevitable, but amidst the obvious crisis he did not stop to elaborate upon them.
He spoke of the death of more dogs and the   purchase of still others, and of the exchange of 
gunfire which had become a settled feature each moonless night. Brown’s prints, and the prints 
of at least one or two more shod human figures, were now found regularly among the claw-prints in 
the road, and at the back of the farmyard. It was, Akeley admitted, a pretty bad business; and 
before long he would probably have to go to   live with his California son whether or not 
he could sell the old place. But it was not easy to leave the only spot one could really 
think of as home. He must try to hang on a little longer; perhaps he could scare off the 
intruders—especially if he openly gave up all further attempts to penetrate their secrets.
Writing Akeley at once, I renewed my offers of aid, and spoke again of visiting him and helping 
him convince the authorities of his dire peril. In his reply he seemed less set against that 
plan than his past attitude would have led one to predict, but said he would like to hold off 
a little while longer—long enough to get his things in order and reconcile himself to the 
idea of leaving an almost morbidly cherished birthplace. People looked askance at his studies 
and speculations, and it would be better to get quietly off without setting the countryside in 
a turmoil and creating widespread doubts of his own sanity. He had had enough, he admitted, but 
he wanted to make a dignified exit if he could. This letter reached me on the twenty-eighth 
of August, and I prepared and mailed as encouraging a reply as I could. Apparently 
the encouragement had effect, for Akeley had fewer fears to report when he acknowledged 
my note. He was not very optimistic, though, and expressed the belief that it was only the full 
moon season which was holding the creatures off. He hoped there would not be many densely cloudy 
nights, and talked vaguely of boarding in   Brattleboro when the moon waned. Again I wrote him 
encouragingly, but on September 5th there came a fresh communication which had obviously crossed 
my letter in the mails; and to this I could not give any such hopeful response. In view of 
its importance I believe I had better give   it in full—as best I can do from memory of the 
shaky script. It ran substantially as follows: Monday.
Dear Wilmarth—
  A rather discouraging P.S. to my last. Last 
night was thickly cloudy—though no rain—and not a bit of moonlight got through. Things were 
pretty bad, and I think the end is getting near,   in spite of all we have hoped. After midnight 
something landed on the roof of the house, and the dogs all rushed up to see what it was. 
I could hear them snapping and tearing around, and then one managed to get on the roof by 
jumping from the low ell. There was a terrible fight up there, and I heard a frightful buzzing 
which I’ll never forget. And then there was a   shocking smell. About the same time bullets came 
through the window and nearly grazed me. I think the main line of the hill creatures had got close 
to the house when the dogs divided because of the roof business. What was up there I don’t know yet, 
but I’m afraid the creatures are learning to steer   better with their space wings. I put out the light 
and used the windows for loopholes, and raked all around the house with rifle fire aimed just high 
enough not to hit the dogs. That seemed to end the business, but in the morning I found great pools 
of blood in the yard, beside pools of a green sticky stuff that had the worst odour I have ever 
smelled. I climbed up on the roof and found more of the sticky stuff there. Five of the dogs were 
killed—I’m afraid I hit one by aiming too low, for he was shot in the back. Now I am setting the 
panes the shots broke, and am going to Brattleboro for more dogs. I guess the men at the kennels 
think I am crazy. Will drop another note later. Suppose I’ll be ready for moving in a week or 
two, though it nearly kills me to think of it.
  Hastily—
AKELEY But this was not the only letter from Akeley 
to cross mine. On the next morning—September 6th—still another came; this time a frantic 
scrawl which utterly unnerved me and put me at a loss what to say or do next. Again I cannot 
do better than quote the text as faithfully as memory will let me.
Tuesday.
  Clouds didn’t break, so no moon again—and 
going into the wane anyhow. I’d have the house wired for electricity and put in a 
searchlight if I didn’t know they’d cut the   cables as fast as they could be mended.
I think I am going crazy. It may be that all I have ever written you is a dream 
or madness. It was bad enough before,   but this time it is too much. They talked to me 
last night—talked in that cursed buzzing voice and told me things that I dare not repeat to you. 
I heard them plainly over the barking of the dogs, and once when they were drowned out a human voice 
helped them. Keep out of this, Wilmarth—it is worse than either you or I ever suspected. They 
don’t mean to let me get to California now—they want to take me off alive, or what theoretically 
and mentally amounts to alive—not only to Yuggoth, but beyond that—away outside the galaxy and 
possibly beyond the last curved rim of space. I told them I wouldn’t go where they wish, or 
in the terrible way they propose to take me, but I’m afraid it will be no use. My place is 
so far out that they may come by day as well as by night before long. Six more dogs killed, 
and I felt presences all along the wooded parts of the road when I drove to Brattleboro today.
It was a mistake for me to try to send you that   phonograph record and black stone. Better 
smash the record before it’s too late. Will drop you another line tomorrow if I’m still 
here. Wish I could arrange to get my books   and things to Brattleboro and board there. 
I would run off without anything if I could, but something inside my mind holds me back. I can 
slip out to Brattleboro, where I ought to be safe, but I feel just as much a prisoner there as at 
the house. And I seem to know that I couldn’t   get much farther even if I dropped everything and 
tried. It is horrible—don’t get mixed up in this. Yrs—AKELEY
I did not sleep at all the night after   receiving this terrible thing, and was utterly 
baffled as to Akeley’s remaining degree of sanity. The substance of the note was wholly insane, 
yet the manner of expression—in view of all   that had gone before—had a grimly potent quality 
of convincingness. I made no attempt to answer it, thinking it better to wait until Akeley might have 
time to reply to my latest communication. Such a reply indeed came on the following day, though the 
fresh material in it quite overshadowed any of the points brought up by the letter it nominally 
answered. Here is what I recall of the text, scrawled and blotted as it was in the course 
of a plainly frantic and hurried composition. Wednesday.
W—
  Yr letter came, but it’s no use to discuss 
anything any more. I am fully resigned. Wonder that I have even enough will power left to fight 
them off. Can’t escape even if I were willing to   give up everything and run. They’ll get me.
Had a letter from them yesterday—R.F.D. man brought it while I was at Brattleboro. Typed 
and postmarked Bellows Falls. Tells what they want to do with me—I can’t repeat it. Look out 
for yourself, too! Smash that record. Cloudy   nights keep up, and moon waning all the time. 
Wish I dared to get help—it might brace up my will power—but everyone who would dare to come 
at all would call me crazy unless there happened   to be some proof. Couldn’t ask people to come 
for no reason at all—am all out of touch with everybody and have been for years.
But I haven’t told you the worst,   Wilmarth. Brace up to read this, for it will 
give you a shock. I am telling the truth, though. It is this—I have seen and touched one 
of the things, or part of one of the things. God, man, but it’s awful! It was dead, of course. One 
of the dogs had it, and I found it near the kennel this morning. I tried to save it in the woodshed 
to convince people of the whole thing, but it all evaporated in a few hours. Nothing left. You know, 
all those things in the rivers were seen only on the first morning after the flood. And here’s the 
worst. I tried to photograph it for you, but when I developed the film there wasn’t anything visible 
except the woodshed. What can the thing have been   made of? I saw it and felt it, and they all leave 
footprints. It was surely made of matter—but what kind of matter? The shape can’t be described. It 
was a great crab with a lot of pyramided fleshy rings or knots of thick, ropy stuff covered with 
feelers where a man’s head would be. That green sticky stuff is its blood or juice. And there 
are more of them due on earth any minute. Walter Brown is missing—hasn’t been seen loafing 
around any of his usual corners in the villages hereabouts. I must have got him with one 
of my shots, though the creatures always   seem to try to take their dead and wounded away.
Got into town this afternoon without any trouble, but am afraid they’re beginning to hold off 
because they’re sure of me. Am writing this   in Brattleboro P.O. This may be goodbye—if 
it is, write my son George Goodenough Akeley, 176 Pleasant St., San Diego, Cal., but don’t come 
up here. Write the boy if you don’t hear from me in a week, and watch the papers for news.
I’m going to play my last two cards now—if I have the will power left. First to try poison 
gas on the things (I’ve got the right chemicals and have fixed up masks for myself and the dogs) 
and then if that doesn’t work, tell the sheriff. They can lock me in a madhouse if they want 
to—it’ll be better than what the other creatures   would do. Perhaps I can get them to pay attention 
to the prints around the house—they are faint, but I can find them every morning. Suppose, 
though, police would say I faked them somehow; for they all think I’m a queer character.
Must try to have a state policeman spend a   night here and see for himself—though it would 
be just like the creatures to learn about it and hold off that night. They cut my wires whenever 
I try to telephone in the night—the linemen think it is very queer, and may testify for me if they 
don’t go and imagine I cut them myself. I haven’t tried to keep them repaired for over a week now.
I could get some of the ignorant people to testify for me about the reality of the horrors, 
but everybody laughs at what they say, and anyway, they have shunned my place for so 
long that they don’t know any of the new events. You couldn’t get one of those run-down farmers 
to come within a mile of my house for love or   money. The mail-carrier hears what they say and 
jokes me about it—God! If I only dared tell him how real it is! I think I’ll try to get him to 
notice the prints, but he comes in the afternoon and they’re usually about gone by that time. 
If I kept one by setting a box or pan over it, he’d think surely it was a fake or joke.
Wish I hadn’t gotten to be such a hermit,   so folks don’t drop around as they used to. 
I’ve never dared shew the black stone or the kodak pictures, or play that record, to anybody 
but the ignorant people. The others would say I faked the whole business and do nothing 
but laugh. But I may yet try shewing the   pictures. They give those claw-prints clearly, 
even if the things that made them can’t be photographed. What a shame nobody else saw that 
thing this morning before it went to nothing! But I don’t know as I care. After what I’ve been 
through, a madhouse is as good a place as any. The doctors can help me make up my 
mind to get away from this house,   and that is all that will save me.
Write my son George if you don’t hear soon. Goodbye, smash that 
record, and don’t mix up in this.
  Yrs—AKELEY
The letter frankly plunged me into the blackest of fear. I did not know what to 
say in answer, but scratched off some incoherent   words of advice and encouragement and sent them by 
registered mail. I recall urging Akeley to move to Brattleboro at once, and place himself under the 
protection of the authorities; adding that I would come to that town with the phonograph record and 
help convince the courts of his sanity. It was time, too, I think I wrote, to alarm the people 
generally against this thing in their midst. It will be observed that at this moment of 
stress my own belief in all Akeley had told   and claimed was virtually complete, though I did 
think his failure to get a picture of the dead monster was due not to any freak of Nature 
but to some excited slip of his own. Then, apparently crossing my incoherent 
note and reaching me Saturday afternoon,   September 8th, came that curiously different and 
calming letter neatly typed on a new machine; that strange letter of reassurance and invitation 
which must have marked so prodigious a transition in the whole nightmare drama of the lonely hills. 
Again I will quote from memory—seeking for special reasons to preserve as much of the flavour of the 
style as I can. It was postmarked Bellows Falls, and the signature as well as the body of the 
letter was typed—as is frequent with beginners   in typing. The text, though, was marvellously 
accurate for a tyro’s work; and I concluded that Akeley must have used a machine at some previous 
period—perhaps in college. To say that the letter relieved me would be only fair, yet beneath my 
relief lay a substratum of uneasiness. If Akeley had been sane in his fear, was he now sane 
in his deliverance? And the sort of “improved rapport” mentioned what was it? The entire thing 
implied such a diametrical reversal of Akeley’s previous attitude! But here is the substance of 
the text, carefully transcribed from a memory in which I take some pride.
Townshend, Vermont, Thursday, Sept. 6, 1928.
My dear Wilmarth:— It gives me great pleasure to be able to set you 
at rest regarding all the silly things I’ve been   writing you. I say “silly”, although by that 
I mean my frightened attitude rather than my descriptions of certain phenomena. Those 
phenomena are real and important enough;   my mistake had been in establishing 
an anomalous attitude toward them. I think I mentioned that my strange visitors 
were beginning to communicate with me,   and to attempt such communication. Last night 
this exchange of speech became actual. In response to certain signals I admitted to the house a 
messenger from those outside—a fellow-human, let me hasten to say. He told me much that 
neither you nor I had even begun to guess, and shewed clearly how totally we had misjudged and 
misinterpreted the purpose of the Outer Ones in maintaining their secret colony on this planet.
It seems that the evil legends about what they have offered to men, and what they 
wish in connexion with the earth,   are wholly the result of an ignorant misconception 
of allegorical speech—speech, of course, moulded by cultural backgrounds and thought-habits 
vastly different from anything we dream of. My own conjectures, I freely own, shot as 
widely past the mark as any of the guesses of illiterate farmers and savage Indians. What I 
had thought morbid and shameful and ignominious is in reality awesome and mind-expanding and 
even glorious—my previous estimate being merely a phase of man’s eternal tendency to hate and 
fear and shrink from the utterly different. Now I regret the harm I have inflicted upon these 
alien and incredible beings in the course of our nightly skirmishes. If only I had consented 
to talk peacefully and reasonably with them in the first place! But they bear me no grudge, 
their emotions being organised very differently from ours. It is their misfortune to have had as 
their human agents in Vermont some very inferior specimens—the late Walter Brown, for example. 
He prejudiced me vastly against them. Actually, they have never knowingly harmed men, but have 
often been cruelly wronged and spied upon by our species. There is a whole secret cult of evil men 
(a man of your mystical erudition will understand me when I link them with Hastur and the Yellow 
Sign) devoted to the purpose of tracking them down and injuring them on behalf of monstrous 
powers from other dimensions. It is against these aggressors—not against normal humanity—that 
the drastic precautions of the Outer Ones are directed. Incidentally, I learned that many of 
our lost letters were stolen not by the Outer Ones but by the emissaries of this malign cult.
All that the Outer Ones wish of man is peace and non-molestation and an increasing intellectual 
rapport. This latter is absolutely necessary now that our inventions and devices are expanding 
our knowledge and motions, and making it more and more impossible for the Outer Ones’ necessary 
outposts to exist secretly on this planet. The alien beings desire to know mankind more fully, 
and to have a few of mankind’s philosophic and scientific leaders know more about them. With 
such an exchange of knowledge all perils will pass, and a satisfactory modus vivendi be 
established. The very idea of any attempt to enslave or degrade mankind is ridiculous.
As a beginning of this improved rapport, the Outer Ones have naturally chosen me—whose 
knowledge of them is already so considerable—as their primary interpreter on earth. Much was told 
me last night—facts of the most stupendous and vista-opening nature—and more will be subsequently 
communicated to me both orally and in writing. I shall not be called upon to make any trip outside 
just yet, though I shall probably wish to do so later on—employing special means and transcending 
everything which we have hitherto been accustomed to regard as human experience. My house will 
be besieged no longer. Everything has reverted to normal, and the dogs will have no further 
occupation. In place of fear I have been given a rich boon of knowledge and intellectual adventure 
which few other mortals have ever shared. The Outer Beings are perhaps the most marvellous 
organic things in or beyond all space and time—members of a cosmos-wide race of which all 
other life-forms are merely unusual variants. They are more vegetable than animal, if these terms can 
be applied to the sort of matter composing them, and have a somewhat fungoid structure; though the 
presence of a chlorophyll-like substance and a very singular nutritive system differentiate them 
altogether from true cormophytic fungi. Indeed, the type is composed of a form of matter totally 
alien to our part of space—with electrons having a wholly different vibration-rate. That 
is why the beings cannot be photographed on the ordinary camera films and plates of 
our known universe, even though our eyes can see them. With proper knowledge, however, 
any good chemist could make a photographic   emulsion which would record their images.
The genus is unique in its ability to traverse the heatless and airless interstellar void in 
full corporeal form, and some of its variants cannot do this without mechanical aid or curious 
surgical transpositions. Only a few species have the ether-resisting wings characteristic of the 
Vermont variety. Those inhabiting certain remote peaks in the Old World were brought in other 
ways. Their external resemblance to animal life, and to the sort of structure we understand as 
material, is a matter of parallel evolution rather than of close kinship. Their brain-capacity 
exceeds that of any other surviving life-form, although the winged types of our hill country are 
by no means the most highly developed. Telepathy is their usual means of discourse, though 
they have rudimentary vocal organs which,   after a slight operation (for surgery is an 
incredibly expert and every-day thing among them), can roughly duplicate the speech of such 
types of organism as still use speech. Their main immediate abode is a still undiscovered 
and almost lightless planet at the very edge of our solar system—beyond Neptune, and the ninth in 
distance from the sun. It is, as we have inferred, the object mystically hinted at as “Yuggoth” in 
certain ancient and forbidden writings; and it will soon be the scene of a strange focussing of 
thought upon our world in an effort to facilitate mental rapport. I would not be surprised if 
astronomers became sufficiently sensitive to these thought-currents to discover Yuggoth when 
the Outer Ones wish them to do so. But Yuggoth, of course, is only the stepping-stone. The 
main body of the beings inhabits strangely organised abysses wholly beyond the utmost reach 
of any human imagination. The space-time globule which we recognise as the totality of all cosmic 
entity is only an atom in the genuine infinity which is theirs. And as much of this infinity 
as any human brain can hold is eventually to be opened up to me, as it has been to not more than 
fifty other men since the human race has existed. You will probably call this raving at first, 
Wilmarth, but in time you will appreciate   the titanic opportunity I have stumbled upon. I 
want you to share as much of it as is possible, and to that end must tell you thousands of 
things that won’t go on paper. In the past I have warned you not to come to see me. 
Now that all is safe, I take pleasure in   rescinding that warning and inviting you.
Can’t you make a trip up here before your college term opens? It would be marvellously 
delightful if you could. Bring along the phonograph record and all my letters to you 
as consultative data—we shall need them in   piecing together the whole tremendous story. You 
might bring the kodak prints, too, since I seem to have mislaid the negatives and my own prints 
in all this recent excitement. But what a wealth of facts I have to add to all this groping 
and tentative material—and what a stupendous device I have to supplement my additions!
Don’t hesitate—I am free from espionage now, and you will not meet anything unnatural or 
disturbing. Just come along and let my car meet you at the Brattleboro station—prepare to stay 
as long as you can, and expect many an evening of discussion of things beyond all human conjecture. 
Don’t tell anyone about it, of course—for this matter must not get to the promiscuous public.
The train service to Brattleboro is not bad—you can get a time-table in Boston. Take the B. 
& M. to Greenfield, and then change for the   brief remainder of the way. I suggest your taking 
the convenient 4:10 p.m.—standard—from Boston. This gets into Greenfield at 7:35, and at 9:19 a 
train leaves there which reaches Brattleboro at 10:01. That is week-days. Let me know the date 
and I’ll have my car on hand at the station. Pardon this typed letter, but my handwriting 
has grown shaky of late, as you know,   and I don’t feel equal to long stretches of 
script. I got this new Corona in Brattleboro yesterday—it seems to work very well.
Awaiting word, and hoping to see you   shortly with the phonograph record and 
all my letters—and the kodak prints— I am
Yours in anticipation,
  HENRY W. AKELEY.
To Albert N. Wilmarth, Esq., Miskatonic University,
Arkham, Mass.
  The complexity of my emotions upon reading, 
re-reading, and pondering over this strange and unlooked-for letter is past adequate description. 
I have said that I was at once relieved and made uneasy, but this expresses only crudely the 
overtones of diverse and largely subconscious feelings which comprised both the relief and 
the uneasiness. To begin with, the thing was so antipodally at variance with the whole chain 
of horrors preceding it—the change of mood from stark fear to cool complacency and even exultation 
was so unheralded, lightning-like, and complete! I could scarcely believe that a single day could 
so alter the psychological perspective of one   who had written that final frenzied bulletin of 
Wednesday, no matter what relieving disclosures that day might have brought. At certain moments 
a sense of conflicting unrealities made me wonder whether this whole distantly reported drama of 
fantastic forces were not a kind of half-illusory dream created largely within my own mind. 
Then I thought of the phonograph record and gave way to still greater bewilderment.
The letter seemed so unlike anything which could   have been expected! As I analysed my impression, 
I saw that it consisted of two distinct phases. First, granting that Akeley had been sane before 
and was still sane, the indicated change in the situation itself was so swift and unthinkable. 
And secondly, the change in Akeley’s own manner, attitude, and language was so vastly beyond 
the normal or the predictable. The man’s whole personality seemed to have undergone an 
insidious mutation—a mutation so deep that one could scarcely reconcile his two aspects with the 
supposition that both represented equal sanity. Word-choice, spelling—all were subtly different. 
And with my academic sensitiveness to prose style, I could trace profound divergences in his 
commonest reactions and rhythm-responses. Certainly, the emotional cataclysm or revelation 
which could produce so radical an overturn must be an extreme one indeed! Yet in another way the 
letter seemed quite characteristic of Akeley. The same old passion for infinity—the same old 
scholarly inquisitiveness. I could not a moment—or more than a moment—credit the idea of spuriousness 
or malign substitution. Did not the invitation—the willingness to have me test the truth of 
the letter in person—prove its genuineness? I did not retire Saturday night, but sat up 
thinking of the shadows and marvels behind   the letter I had received. My mind, aching from 
the quick succession of monstrous conceptions it had been forced to confront during the last four 
months, worked upon this startling new material in a cycle of doubt and acceptance which repeated 
most of the steps experienced in facing the earlier wonders; till long before dawn a burning 
interest and curiosity had begun to replace the original storm of perplexity and uneasiness. 
Mad or sane, metamorphosed or merely relieved, the chances were that Akeley had actually 
encountered some stupendous change of   perspective in his hazardous research; some change 
at once diminishing his danger—real or fancied—and opening dizzy new vistas of cosmic and superhuman 
knowledge. My own zeal for the unknown flared up to meet his, and I felt myself touched by the 
contagion of the morbid barrier-breaking. To shake off the maddening and wearying limitations 
of time and space and natural law—to be linked with the vast outside—to come close to the 
nighted and abysmal secrets of the infinite and the ultimate—surely such a thing was worth 
the risk of one’s life, soul, and sanity! And Akeley had said there was no longer any peril—he 
had invited me to visit him instead of warning me away as before. I tingled at the thought of what 
he might now have to tell me—there was an almost paralysing fascination in the thought of sitting 
in that lonely and lately beleaguered farmhouse with a man who had talked with actual emissaries 
from outer space; sitting there with the terrible record and the pile of letters in which Akeley 
had summarised his earlier conclusions. So late Sunday morning I telegraphed Akeley 
that I would meet him in Brattleboro on the   following Wednesday—September 12th—if that date 
were convenient for him. In only one respect did I depart from his suggestions, and that concerned 
the choice of a train. Frankly, I did not feel like arriving in that haunted Vermont region late 
at night; so instead of accepting the train he chose I telephoned the station and devised another 
arrangement. By rising early and taking the 8:07 a.m. (standard) into Boston, I could catch the 
9:25 for Greenfield; arriving there at 12:22 noon. This connected exactly with a train reaching 
Brattleboro at 1:08 p.m.—a much more comfortable hour than 10:01 for meeting Akeley and riding with 
him into the close-packed, secret-guarding hills. I mentioned this choice in my telegram, and was 
glad to learn in the reply which came toward evening that it had met with my prospective 
host’s endorsement. His wire ran thus: ARRANGEMENT SATISFACTORY. WILL MEET 1:08 
TRAIN WEDNESDAY. DON’T FORGET RECORD AND LETTERS AND PRINTS. KEEP DESTINATION 
QUIET. EXPECT GREAT REVELATIONS.
  AKELEY.
Receipt of this message in direct response to one sent to Akeley—and 
necessarily delivered to his house from the   Townshend station either by official messenger 
or by a restored telephone service—removed any lingering subconscious doubts I may have had about 
the authorship of the perplexing letter. My relief was marked—indeed, it was greater than I could 
account for at that time; since all such doubts had been rather deeply buried. But I slept soundly 
and long that night, and was eagerly busy with preparations during the ensuing two days.
On Wednesday I started as agreed, taking with me a valise full of simple necessities and scientific 
data, including the hideous phonograph record, the kodak prints, and the entire file of 
Akeley’s correspondence. As requested, I had told no one where I was going; for I could 
see that the matter demanded utmost privacy, even allowing for its most favourable turns. 
The thought of actual mental contact with alien, outside entities was stupefying enough to my 
trained and somewhat prepared mind; and this being so, what might one think of its effect on 
the vast masses of uninformed laymen? I do not know whether dread or adventurous expectancy was 
uppermost in me as I changed trains in Boston and began the long westward run out of familiar 
regions into those I knew less thoroughly.   Waltham—Concord—Ayer—Fitchburg—Gardner—Athol—
My train reached Greenfield seven minutes late, but the northbound connecting express had been 
held. Transferring in haste, I felt a curious breathlessness as the cars rumbled on through 
the early afternoon sunlight into territories I had always read of but had never before visited. I 
knew I was entering an altogether older-fashioned and more primitive New England than the 
mechanised, urbanised coastal and southern areas where all my life had been spent; an unspoiled, 
ancestral New England without the foreigners and factory-smoke, billboards and concrete roads, of 
the sections which modernity has touched. There would be odd survivals of that continuous native 
life whose deep roots make it the one authentic outgrowth of the landscape—the continuous native 
life which keeps alive strange ancient memories, and fertilises the soil for shadowy, 
marvellous, and seldom-mentioned beliefs. Now and then I saw the blue Connecticut River 
gleaming in the sun, and after leaving Northfield we crossed it. Ahead loomed green and cryptical 
hills, and when the conductor came around I learned that I was at last in Vermont. 
He told me to set my watch back an hour, since the northern hill country will have 
no dealings with new-fangled daylight time   schemes. As I did so it seemed to me that I was 
likewise turning the calendar back a century. The train kept close to the river, and across in 
New Hampshire I could see the approaching slope of steep Wantastiquet, about which singular old 
legends cluster. Then streets appeared on my left, and a green island shewed in the stream on 
my right. People rose and filed to the door, and I followed them. The car stopped, 
and I alighted beneath the long   train-shed of the Brattleboro station.
Looking over the line of waiting motors I hesitated a moment to see which one might turn 
out to be the Akeley Ford, but my identity was divined before I could take the initiative. 
And yet it was clearly not Akeley himself who   advanced to meet me with an outstretched hand 
and a mellowly phrased query as to whether I was indeed Mr. Albert N. Wilmarth of Arkham. 
This man bore no resemblance to the bearded, grizzled Akeley of the snapshot; but was a younger 
and more urban person, fashionably dressed, and wearing only a small, dark moustache. 
His cultivated voice held an odd and almost disturbing hint of vague familiarity, though 
I could not definitely place it in my memory. As I surveyed him I heard him explaining that 
he was a friend of my prospective host’s who   had come down from Townshend in his stead. 
Akeley, he declared, had suffered a sudden attack of some asthmatic trouble, and did not 
feel equal to making a trip in the outdoor air. It was not serious, however, and there was to be 
no change in plans regarding my visit. I could not make out just how much this Mr. Noyes—as he 
announced himself—knew of Akeley’s researches and discoveries, though it seemed to me that 
his casual manner stamped him as a comparative outsider. Remembering what a hermit Akeley had 
been, I was a trifle surprised at the ready availability of such a friend; but did not let 
my puzzlement deter me from entering the motor to which he gestured me. It was not the small ancient 
car I had expected from Akeley’s descriptions, but a large and immaculate specimen of 
recent pattern—apparently Noyes’s own,   and bearing Massachusetts licence plates 
with the amusing “sacred codfish” device of that year. My guide, I concluded, must be 
a summer transient in the Townshend region. Noyes climbed into the car beside me and started 
it at once. I was glad that he did not overflow with conversation, for some peculiar atmospheric 
tensity made me feel disinclined to talk. The town seemed very attractive in the afternoon sunlight 
as we swept up an incline and turned to the right into the main street. It drowsed like the older 
New England cities which one remembers from boyhood, and something in the collocation of roofs 
and steeples and chimneys and brick walls formed contours touching deep viol-strings of ancestral 
emotion. I could tell that I was at the gateway of a region half-bewitched through the piling-up of 
unbroken time-accumulations; a region where old, strange things have had a chance to grow and 
linger because they have never been stirred up. As we passed out of Brattleboro my sense 
of constraint and foreboding increased,   for a vague quality in the hill-crowded 
countryside with its towering, threatening, close-pressing green and granite slopes 
hinted at obscure secrets and immemorial   survivals which might or might not be hostile to 
mankind. For a time our course followed a broad, shallow river which flowed down from unknown 
hills in the north, and I shivered when my   companion told me it was the West River. It was 
in this stream, I recalled from newspaper items, that one of the morbid crab-like beings 
had been seen floating after the floods. Gradually the country around us grew wilder and 
more deserted. Archaic covered bridges lingered fearsomely out of the past in pockets of the 
hills, and the half-abandoned railway track   paralleling the river seemed to exhale 
a nebulously visible air of desolation. There were awesome sweeps of vivid valley where 
great cliffs rose, New England’s virgin granite shewing grey and austere through the verdure that 
scaled the crests. There were gorges where untamed streams leaped, bearing down toward the river 
the unimagined secrets of a thousand pathless   peaks. Branching away now and then were narrow, 
half-concealed roads that bored their way through solid, luxuriant masses of forest among whose 
primal trees whole armies of elemental spirits might well lurk. As I saw these I thought 
of how Akeley had been molested by unseen agencies on his drives along this very route, 
and did not wonder that such things could be. The quaint, sightly village of Newfane, reached 
in less than an hour, was our last link with that world which man can definitely call his own 
by virtue of conquest and complete occupancy. After that we cast off all allegiance to 
immediate, tangible, and time-touched things,   and entered a fantastic world of hushed unreality 
in which the narrow, ribbon-like road rose and fell and curved with an almost sentient and 
purposeful caprice amidst the tenantless green peaks and half-deserted valleys. Except for the 
sound of the motor, and the faint stir of the few lonely farms we passed at infrequent intervals, 
the only thing that reached my ears was the gurgling, insidious trickle of strange waters from 
numberless hidden fountains in the shadowy woods. The nearness and intimacy of the dwarfed, 
domed hills now became veritably breath-taking. Their steepness and abruptness were even 
greater than I had imagined from hearsay,   and suggested nothing in common with the 
prosaic objective world we know. The dense, unvisited woods on those inaccessible slopes 
seemed to harbour alien and incredible things, and I felt that the very outline of the hills 
themselves held some strange and aeon-forgotten meaning, as if they were vast hieroglyphs left 
by a rumoured titan race whose glories live only in rare, deep dreams. All the legends of the 
past, and all the stupefying imputations of Henry Akeley’s letters and exhibits, welled up in my 
memory to heighten the atmosphere of tension and growing menace. The purpose of my visit, and the 
frightful abnormalities it postulated, struck me all at once with a chill sensation that nearly 
overbalanced my ardour for strange delvings. My guide must have noticed my disturbed attitude; 
for as the road grew wilder and more irregular, and our motion slower and more jolting, 
his occasional pleasant comments expanded into a steadier flow of discourse. He spoke 
of the beauty and weirdness of the country, and revealed some acquaintance with the folklore 
studies of my prospective host. From his polite questions it was obvious that he knew I had come 
for a scientific purpose, and that I was bringing data of some importance; but he gave no sign 
of appreciating the depth and awfulness of the knowledge which Akeley had finally reached.
His manner was so cheerful, normal, and urbane that his remarks ought to have calmed 
and reassured me; but oddly enough, I felt only the more disturbed as we bumped and veered onward 
into the unknown wilderness of hills and woods. At times it seemed as if he were pumping me to see 
what I knew of the monstrous secrets of the place, and with every fresh utterance that vague, 
teasing, baffling familiarity in his voice increased. It was not an ordinary or healthy 
familiarity despite the thoroughly wholesome and cultivated nature of the voice. I somehow 
linked it with forgotten nightmares, and felt that I might go mad if I recognised it. If any good 
excuse had existed, I think I would have turned back from my visit. As it was, I could not well do 
so—and it occurred to me that a cool, scientific conversation with Akeley himself after my 
arrival would help greatly to pull me together. Besides, there was a strangely calming element of 
cosmic beauty in the hypnotic landscape through which we climbed and plunged fantastically. 
Time had lost itself in the labyrinths behind, and around us stretched only the flowering waves 
of faery and the recaptured loveliness of vanished centuries—the hoary groves, the untainted 
pastures edged with gay autumnal blossoms, and at vast intervals the small brown farmsteads 
nestling amidst huge trees beneath vertical precipices of fragrant brier and meadow-grass. 
Even the sunlight assumed a supernal glamour, as if some special atmosphere or exhalation 
mantled the whole region. I had seen nothing like it before save in the magic vistas that 
sometimes form the backgrounds of Italian primitives. Sodoma and Leonardo conceived such 
expanses, but only in the distance, and through the vaultings of Renaissance arcades. We were now 
burrowing bodily through the midst of the picture, and I seemed to find in its necromancy a 
thing I had innately known or inherited, and for which I had always been vainly searching.
Suddenly, after rounding an obtuse angle at the top of a sharp ascent, the car came to a 
standstill. On my left, across a well-kept lawn which stretched to the road and flaunted 
a border of whitewashed stones, rose a white, two-and-a-half-story house of unusual size 
and elegance for the region, with a congeries of contiguous or arcade-linked barns, sheds, and 
windmill behind and to the right. I recognised it at once from the snapshot I had received, and was 
not surprised to see the name of Henry Akeley on the galvanised-iron mail-box near the road. For 
some distance back of the house a level stretch of marshy and sparsely wooded land extended, 
beyond which soared a steep, thickly forested hillside ending in a jagged leafy crest. This 
latter, I knew, was the summit of Dark Mountain, half way up which we must have climbed already.
Alighting from the car and taking my valise, Noyes asked me to wait while he went in and 
notified Akeley of my advent. He himself, he added, had important business elsewhere, 
and could not stop for more than a moment. As he briskly walked up the path to the 
house I climbed out of the car myself,   wishing to stretch my legs a little before 
settling down to a sedentary conversation. My feeling of nervousness and tension had risen 
to a maximum again now that I was on the actual scene of the morbid beleaguering described so 
hauntingly in Akeley’s letters, and I honestly dreaded the coming discussions which were to 
link me with such alien and forbidden worlds. Close contact with the utterly bizarre is often 
more terrifying than inspiring, and it did not cheer me to think that this very bit of dusty 
road was the place where those monstrous tracks and that foetid green ichor had been found after 
moonless nights of fear and death. Idly I noticed that none of Akeley’s dogs seemed to be about. 
Had he sold them all as soon as the Outer Ones   made peace with him? Try as I might, I could 
not have the same confidence in the depth and sincerity of that peace which appeared in Akeley’s 
final and queerly different letter. After all, he was a man of much simplicity and with 
little worldly experience. Was there not,   perhaps, some deep and sinister undercurrent 
beneath the surface of the new alliance? Led by my thoughts, my eyes turned downward to the 
powdery road surface which had held such hideous testimonies. The last few days had been dry, 
and tracks of all sorts cluttered the rutted, irregular highway despite the unfrequented nature 
of the district. With a vague curiosity I began to trace the outline of some of the heterogeneous 
impressions, trying meanwhile to curb the flights of macabre fancy which the place and its 
memories suggested. There was something menacing and uncomfortable in the funereal stillness, in 
the muffled, subtle trickle of distant brooks, and in the crowding green peaks and black-wooded 
precipices that choked the narrow horizon. And then an image shot into my consciousness which 
made those vague menaces and flights of fancy seem mild and insignificant indeed. I have said that I 
was scanning the miscellaneous prints in the road with a kind of idle curiosity—but all at once 
that curiosity was shockingly snuffed out by a sudden and paralysing gust of active fear. 
For though the dust tracks were in general confused and overlapping, and unlikely to arrest 
any casual gaze, my restless vision had caught certain details near the spot where the path to 
the house joined the highway; and had recognised beyond doubt or hope the frightful significance 
of those details. It was not for nothing, alas, that I had pored for hours over the kodak views of 
the Outer Ones’ claw-prints which Akeley had sent. Too well did I know the marks of those loathsome 
nippers, and that hint of ambiguous direction which stamped the horrors as no creatures of this 
planet. No chance had been left me for merciful mistake. Here, indeed, in objective form before 
my own eyes, and surely made not many hours ago, were at least three marks which stood out 
blasphemously among the surprising plethora of blurred footprints leading to and from 
the Akeley farmhouse. They were the hellish tracks of the living fungi from Yuggoth.
I pulled myself together in time to stifle a scream. After all, what more was there than I 
might have expected, assuming that I had really believed Akeley’s letters? He had spoken 
of making peace with the things. Why, then, was it strange that some of them had visited 
his house? But the fear was stronger than the reassurance. Could any man be expected to look 
unmoved for the first time upon the claw-marks of animate beings from outer depths of space? 
Just then I saw Noyes emerge from the door and approach with a brisk step. I must, I reflected, 
keep command of myself, for the chances were this genial friend knew nothing of Akeley’s profoundest 
and most stupendous probings into the forbidden. Akeley, Noyes hastened to inform 
me, was glad and ready to see me;   although his sudden attack of asthma would prevent 
him from being a very competent host for a day or two. These spells hit him hard when they came, 
and were always accompanied by a debilitating fever and general weakness. He never was good for 
much while they lasted—had to talk in a whisper, and was very clumsy and feeble in getting 
about. His feet and ankles swelled, too, so that he had to bandage them like a gouty old 
beef-eater. Today he was in rather bad shape, so that I would have to attend very largely to 
my own needs; but he was none the less eager for conversation. I would find him in the study at the 
left of the front hall—the room where the blinds were shut. He had to keep the sunlight out when 
he was ill, for his eyes were very sensitive. As Noyes bade me adieu and rode off northward in 
his car I began to walk slowly toward the house. The door had been left ajar for me; but before 
approaching and entering I cast a searching glance around the whole place, trying to decide what had 
struck me as so intangibly queer about it. The barns and sheds looked trimly prosaic enough, and 
I noticed Akeley’s battered Ford in its capacious, unguarded shelter. Then the secret of the 
queerness reached me. It was the total silence. Ordinarily a farm is at least moderately 
murmurous from its various kinds of livestock,   but here all signs of life were missing. What of 
the hens and the hogs? The cows, of which Akeley had said he possessed several, might conceivably 
be out to pasture, and the dogs might possibly have been sold; but the absence of any trace 
of cackling or grunting was truly singular. I did not pause long on the path, but resolutely 
entered the open house door and closed it behind me. It had cost me a distinct psychological effort 
to do so, and now that I was shut inside I had a momentary longing for precipitate retreat. 
Not that the place was in the least sinister   in visual suggestion; on the contrary, I thought 
the graceful late-colonial hallway very tasteful and wholesome, and admired the evident 
breeding of the man who had furnished it.   What made me wish to flee was something 
very attenuated and indefinable. Perhaps it was a certain odd odour which I thought I 
noticed—though I well knew how common musty odours are in even the best of ancient farmhouses.
Refusing to let these cloudy qualms overmaster me, I recalled Noyes’s instructions and pushed open 
the six-panelled, brass-latched white door on my left. The room beyond was darkened, as I had 
known before; and as I entered it I noticed that the queer odour was stronger there. 
There likewise appeared to be some faint, half-imaginary rhythm or vibration in the air. 
For a moment the closed blinds allowed me to see very little, but then a kind of apologetic hacking 
or whispering sound drew my attention to a great easy-chair in the farther, darker corner of the 
room. Within its shadowy depths I saw the white blur of a man’s face and hands; and in a moment 
I had crossed to greet the figure who had tried   to speak. Dim though the light was, I perceived 
that this was indeed my host. I had studied the kodak picture repeatedly, and there could be 
no mistake about this firm, weather-beaten face with the cropped, grizzled beard.
But as I looked again my recognition was mixed with sadness and anxiety; for certainly, 
this face was that of a very sick man. I felt that there must be something more than asthma behind 
that strained, rigid, immobile expression and unwinking glassy stare; and realised how terribly 
the strain of his frightful experiences must have told on him. Was it not enough to break any human 
being—even a younger man than this intrepid delver into the forbidden? The strange and sudden 
relief, I feared, had come too late to save him from something like a general breakdown. 
There was a touch of the pitiful in the limp, lifeless way his lean hands rested in 
his lap. He had on a loose dressing-gown, and was swathed around the head and high around 
the neck with a vivid yellow scarf or hood. And then I saw that he was trying to talk in the 
same hacking whisper with which he had greeted me. It was a hard whisper to catch at first, since 
the grey moustache concealed all movements of   the lips, and something in its timbre disturbed 
me greatly; but by concentrating my attention I could soon make out its purport surprisingly 
well. The accent was by no means a rustic one, and the language was even more polished 
than correspondence had led me to expect.
  “Mr. Wilmarth, I presume? You must 
pardon my not rising. I am quite ill, as Mr. Noyes must have told you; but I could not 
resist having you come just the same. You know what I wrote in my last letter—there is so much 
to tell you tomorrow when I shall feel better. I can’t say how glad I am to see you in person after 
all our many letters. You have the file with you, of course? And the kodak prints and record? Noyes 
put your valise in the hall—I suppose you saw it. For tonight I fear you’ll have to wait on yourself 
to a great extent. Your room is upstairs—the one over this—and you’ll see the bathroom door open at 
the head of the staircase. There’s a meal spread for you in the dining-room—right through this door 
at your right—which you can take whenever you feel like it. I’ll be a better host tomorrow—but 
just now weakness leaves me helpless. “Make yourself at home—you might take out the 
letters and pictures and record and put them on   the table here before you go upstairs with your 
bag. It is here that we shall discuss them—you can see my phonograph on that corner stand.
“No, thanks—there’s nothing you can do for me. I know these spells of old. Just come back 
for a little quiet visiting before night,   and then go to bed when you please. I’ll rest 
right here—perhaps sleep here all night as I often do. In the morning I’ll be far better able to 
go into the things we must go into. You realise, of course, the utterly stupendous nature of the 
matter before us. To us, as to only a few men on this earth, there will be opened up gulfs of time 
and space and knowledge beyond anything within the conception of human science and philosophy.
“Do you know that Einstein is wrong, and that certain objects and forces can move with 
a velocity greater than that of light? With proper aid I expect to go backward and forward in time, 
and actually see and feel the earth of remote past and future epochs. You can’t imagine the degree 
to which those beings have carried science. There is nothing they can’t do with the mind 
and body of living organisms. I expect to visit other planets, and even other stars and 
galaxies. The first trip will be to Yuggoth, the nearest world fully peopled by the beings. 
It is a strange dark orb at the very rim of our solar system—unknown to earthly astronomers as 
yet. But I must have written you about this. At the proper time, you know, the beings there 
will direct thought-currents toward us and   cause it to be discovered—or perhaps let one of 
their human allies give the scientists a hint. “There are mighty cities on Yuggoth—great tiers 
of terraced towers built of black stone like the specimen I tried to send you. That came from 
Yuggoth. The sun shines there no brighter than a star, but the beings need no light. They have 
other, subtler senses, and put no windows in their great houses and temples. Light even hurts and 
hampers and confuses them, for it does not exist at all in the black cosmos outside time and space 
where they came from originally. To visit Yuggoth would drive any weak man mad—yet I am going there. 
The black rivers of pitch that flow under those mysterious Cyclopean bridges—things built by some 
elder race extinct and forgotten before the things came to Yuggoth from the ultimate voids—ought to 
be enough to make any man a Dante or Poe if he can keep sane long enough to tell what he has seen.
“But remember—that dark world of fungoid gardens and windowless cities isn’t really terrible. 
It is only to us that it would seem so. Probably this world seemed just as terrible 
to the beings when they first explored it in   the primal age. You know they were here long 
before the fabulous epoch of Cthulhu was over, and remember all about sunken R’lyeh when it was 
above the waters. They’ve been inside the earth, too—there are openings which human beings know 
nothing of—some of them in these very Vermont hills—and great worlds of unknown life down 
there; blue-litten K’n-yan, red-litten Yoth, and black, lightless N’kai. It’s from N’kai 
that frightful Tsathoggua came—you know, the amorphous, toad-like god-creature mentioned 
in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon and the Commoriom myth-cycle preserved by 
the Atlantean high-priest Klarkash-Ton. “But we will talk of all this later on. It must 
be four or five o’clock by this time. Better bring the stuff from your bag, take a bite, 
and then come back for a comfortable chat.” Very slowly I turned and began to obey my host; 
fetching my valise, extracting and depositing the desired articles, and finally ascending to the 
room designated as mine. With the memory of that roadside claw-print fresh in my mind, Akeley’s 
whispered paragraphs had affected me queerly; and the hints of familiarity with this unknown 
world of fungous life—forbidden Yuggoth—made my flesh creep more than I cared to own. I was 
tremendously sorry about Akeley’s illness, but had to confess that his hoarse whisper had a hateful 
as well as pitiful quality. If only he wouldn’t gloat so about Yuggoth and its black secrets!
My room proved a very pleasant and well-furnished one, devoid alike of the musty odour and 
disturbing sense of vibration; and after leaving my valise there I descended again to greet Akeley 
and take the lunch he had set out for me. The dining-room was just beyond the study, and I saw 
that a kitchen ell extended still farther in the same direction. On the dining-table an ample array 
of sandwiches, cake, and cheese awaited me, and a Thermos-bottle beside a cup and saucer testified 
that hot coffee had not been forgotten. After a well-relished meal I poured myself a liberal cup 
of coffee, but found that the culinary standard had suffered a lapse in this one detail. My first 
spoonful revealed a faintly unpleasant acrid taste, so that I did not take more. Throughout 
the lunch I thought of Akeley sitting silently in the great chair in the darkened next room. 
Once I went in to beg him to share the repast, but he whispered that he could eat nothing as 
yet. Later on, just before he slept, he would take some malted milk—all he ought to have that day.
After lunch I insisted on clearing the dishes away and washing them in the kitchen sink—incidentally 
emptying the coffee which I had not been able   to appreciate. Then returning to the darkened 
study I drew up a chair near my host’s corner and prepared for such conversation as he might 
feel inclined to conduct. The letters, pictures, and record were still on the large centre-table, 
but for the nonce we did not have to draw upon them. Before long I forgot even the bizarre 
odour and curious suggestions of vibration. I have said that there were things in some 
of Akeley’s letters—especially the second and   most voluminous one—which I would not dare 
to quote or even form into words on paper. This hesitancy applies with still greater force to 
the things I heard whispered that evening in the darkened room among the lonely haunted hills. Of 
the extent of the cosmic horrors unfolded by that raucous voice I cannot even hint. He had known 
hideous things before, but what he had learned since making his pact with the Outside Things was 
almost too much for sanity to bear. Even now I absolutely refuse to believe what he implied 
about the constitution of ultimate infinity,   the juxtaposition of dimensions, and the 
frightful position of our known cosmos of space and time in the unending chain of linked 
cosmos-atoms which makes up the immediate super-cosmos of curves, angles, and material 
and semi-material electronic organisation. Never was a sane man more dangerously close to the 
arcana of basic entity—never was an organic brain nearer to utter annihilation in the chaos that 
transcends form and force and symmetry. I learned whence Cthulhu first came, and why half the great 
temporary stars of history had flared forth. I guessed—from hints which made even my informant 
pause timidly—the secret behind the Magellanic Clouds and globular nebulae, and the black truth 
veiled by the immemorial allegory of Tao. The nature of the Doels was plainly revealed, and I 
was told the essence (though not the source) of the Hounds of Tindalos. The legend of Yig, Father 
of Serpents, remained figurative no longer, and I started with loathing when told of the monstrous 
nuclear chaos beyond angled space which the   Necronomicon had mercifully cloaked under the name 
of Azathoth. It was shocking to have the foulest nightmares of secret myth cleared up in concrete 
terms whose stark, morbid hatefulness exceeded the boldest hints of ancient and mediaeval 
mystics. Ineluctably I was led to believe that the first whisperers of these accursed tales 
must have had discourse with Akeley’s Outer Ones, and perhaps have visited outer cosmic realms 
as Akeley now proposed visiting them. I was told of the Black Stone and what it 
implied, and was glad that it had not reached me. My guesses about those hieroglyphics had been all 
too correct! And yet Akeley now seemed reconciled to the whole fiendish system he had stumbled 
upon; reconciled and eager to probe farther   into the monstrous abyss. I wondered what beings 
he had talked with since his last letter to me, and whether many of them had been as human 
as that first emissary he had mentioned. The tension in my head grew insufferable, and 
I built up all sorts of wild theories about the queer, persistent odour and those insidious 
hints of vibration in the darkened room. Night was falling now, and as I recalled 
what Akeley had written me about those   earlier nights I shuddered to think there would 
be no moon. Nor did I like the way the farmhouse nestled in the lee of that colossal forested 
slope leading up to Dark Mountain’s unvisited crest. With Akeley’s permission I lighted 
a small oil lamp, turned it low, and set it on a distant bookcase beside the ghostly bust of 
Milton; but afterward I was sorry I had done so, for it made my host’s strained, immobile face 
and listless hands look damnably abnormal and corpse-like. He seemed half-incapable of motion, 
though I saw him nod stiffly once in a while. After what he had told, I could scarcely imagine 
what profounder secrets he was saving for the morrow; but at last it developed that his 
trip to Yuggoth and beyond—and my own possible participation in it—was to be the next day’s 
topic. He must have been amused by the start of horror I gave at hearing a cosmic voyage on 
my part proposed, for his head wabbled violently when I shewed my fear. Subsequently he spoke very 
gently of how human beings might accomplish—and several times had accomplished—the seemingly 
impossible flight across the interstellar void. It seemed that complete human bodies did not indeed 
make the trip, but that the prodigious surgical, biological, chemical, and mechanical skill of the 
Outer Ones had found a way to convey human brains without their concomitant physical structure.
There was a harmless way to extract a brain, and a way to keep the organic residue 
alive during its absence. The bare,   compact cerebral matter was then immersed in 
an occasionally replenished fluid within an ether-tight cylinder of a metal mined in Yuggoth, 
certain electrodes reaching through and connecting at will with elaborate instruments capable of 
duplicating the three vital faculties of sight, hearing, and speech. For the winged fungus-beings 
to carry the brain-cylinders intact through space was an easy matter. Then, on every planet covered 
by their civilisation, they would find plenty of adjustable faculty-instruments capable of 
being connected with the encased brains; so that after a little fitting these travelling 
intelligences could be given a full sensory and articulate life—albeit a bodiless and mechanical 
one—at each stage of their journeying through and beyond the space-time continuum. It was as simple 
as carrying a phonograph record about and playing it wherever a phonograph of the corresponding 
make exists. Of its success there could be no question. Akeley was not afraid. Had it not 
been brilliantly accomplished again and again? For the first time one of the inert, wasted hands 
raised itself and pointed to a high shelf on the farther side of the room. There, in a neat 
row, stood more than a dozen cylinders of a metal I had never seen before—cylinders about 
a foot high and somewhat less in diameter, with three curious sockets set in an isosceles 
triangle over the front convex surface of each. One of them was linked at two of the 
sockets to a pair of singular-looking   machines that stood in the background. Of 
their purport I did not need to be told, and I shivered as with ague. Then I saw the hand 
point to a much nearer corner where some intricate instruments with attached cords and plugs, several 
of them much like the two devices on the shelf   behind the cylinders, were huddled together.
“There are four kinds of instruments here, Wilmarth,” whispered the voice. “Four kinds—three 
faculties each—makes twelve pieces in all. You see there are four different sorts of beings presented 
in those cylinders up there. Three humans, six fungoid beings who can’t navigate space 
corporeally, two beings from Neptune (God! if you could see the body this type has on its 
own planet!), and the rest entities from the   central caverns of an especially interesting 
dark star beyond the galaxy. In the principal outpost inside Round Hill you’ll now and then 
find more cylinders and machines—cylinders of extra-cosmic brains with different senses from any 
we know—allies and explorers from the uttermost Outside—and special machines for giving them 
impressions and expression in the several ways suited at once to them and to the comprehensions 
of different types of listeners. Round Hill, like most of the beings’ main outposts 
all through the various universes, is a   very cosmopolitan place! Of course, only the more 
common types have been lent to me for experiment. “Here—take the three machines I point to and 
set them on the table. That tall one with the two glass lenses in front—then the box with 
the vacuum tubes and sounding-board—and now the one with the metal disc on top. Now for the 
cylinder with the label ‘B-67’ pasted on it. Just stand in that Windsor chair to reach 
the shelf. Heavy? Never mind! Be sure of the number—B-67. Don’t bother that fresh, 
shiny cylinder joined to the two testing instruments—the one with my name on it. Set 
B-67 on the table near where you’ve put the machines—and see that the dial switch on all three 
machines is jammed over to the extreme left. “Now connect the cord of the lens machine with 
the upper socket on the cylinder—there! Join the tube machine to the lower left-hand socket, 
and the disc apparatus to the outer socket.   Now move all the dial switches on the machines 
over to the extreme right—first the lens one, then the disc one, and then the tube one. That’s 
right. I might as well tell you that this is a human being—just like any of us. I’ll give 
you a taste of some of the others tomorrow.” To this day I do not know why I obeyed those 
whispers so slavishly, or whether I thought Akeley was mad or sane. After what had gone before, 
I ought to have been prepared for anything; but this mechanical mummery seemed so like 
the typical vagaries of crazed inventors and scientists that it struck a chord of doubt which 
even the preceding discourse had not excited. What the whisperer implied was beyond all human 
belief—yet were not the other things still farther beyond, and less preposterous only because of 
their remoteness from tangible concrete proof? As my mind reeled amidst this chaos, I became 
conscious of a mixed grating and whirring from all three machines lately linked to the cylinder—a 
grating and whirring which soon subsided into a virtual noiselessness. What was about to 
happen? Was I to hear a voice? And if so, what proof would I have that it was not some 
cleverly concocted radio device talked into by   a concealed but closely watching speaker? Even 
now I am unwilling to swear just what I heard, or just what phenomenon really took place before 
me. But something certainly seemed to take place. To be brief and plain, the machine with the tubes 
and sound-box began to speak, and with a point   and intelligence which left no doubt that the 
speaker was actually present and observing us. The voice was loud, metallic, lifeless, and 
plainly mechanical in every detail of its production. It was incapable of inflection 
or expressiveness, but scraped and rattled on with a deadly precision and deliberation.
“Mr. Wilmarth,” it said, “I hope I do not startle you. I am a human being like yourself, though my 
body is now resting safely under proper vitalising   treatment inside Round Hill, about a mile and a 
half east of here. I myself am here with you—my brain is in that cylinder and I see, hear, and 
speak through these electronic vibrators. In a week I am going across the void as I have 
been many times before, and I expect to have   the pleasure of Mr. Akeley’s company. I wish 
I might have yours as well; for I know you by sight and reputation, and have kept close track 
of your correspondence with our friend. I am, of course, one of the men who have become allied 
with the outside beings visiting our planet. I met them first in the Himalayas, and have helped 
them in various ways. In return they have given me experiences such as few men have ever had.
“Do you realise what it means when I say   I have been on thirty-seven different 
celestial bodies—planets, dark stars, and less definable objects—including eight 
outside our galaxy and two outside the curved cosmos of space and time? All this has not harmed 
me in the least. My brain has been removed from my body by fissions so adroit that it would be 
crude to call the operation surgery. The visiting beings have methods which make these extractions 
easy and almost normal—and one’s body never ages when the brain is out of it. The brain, I may 
add, is virtually immortal with its mechanical   faculties and a limited nourishment supplied 
by occasional changes of the preserving fluid. “Altogether, I hope most heartily that you 
will decide to come with Mr. Akeley and me. The visitors are eager to know men of knowledge 
like yourself, and to shew them the great abysses that most of us have had to dream about in 
fanciful ignorance. It may seem strange at first to meet them, but I know you will be above 
minding that. I think Mr. Noyes will go along, too—the man who doubtless brought you up here 
in his car. He has been one of us for years—I suppose you recognised his voice as one of 
those on the record Mr. Akeley sent you.” At my violent start the speaker 
paused a moment before concluding. “So, Mr. Wilmarth, I will leave the matter 
to you; merely adding that a man with your   love of strangeness and folklore ought never to 
miss such a chance as this. There is nothing to fear. All transitions are painless, and there 
is much to enjoy in a wholly mechanised state of sensation. When the electrodes are 
disconnected, one merely drops off into   a sleep of especially vivid and fantastic dreams.
“And now, if you don’t mind, we might adjourn our session till tomorrow. Good night—just turn 
all the switches back to the left; never mind   the exact order, though you might let the lens 
machine be last. Good night, Mr. Akeley—treat our guest well! Ready now with those switches?”
That was all. I obeyed mechanically and shut off all three switches, though dazed with doubt of 
everything that had occurred. My head was still reeling as I heard Akeley’s whispering voice 
telling me that I might leave all the apparatus   on the table just as it was. He did not essay 
any comment on what had happened, and indeed no comment could have conveyed much to my burdened 
faculties. I heard him telling me I could take the lamp to use in my room, and deduced that he 
wished to rest alone in the dark. It was surely time he rested, for his discourse of the afternoon 
and evening had been such as to exhaust even a vigorous man. Still dazed, I bade my host good 
night and went upstairs with the lamp, although I had an excellent pocket flashlight with me.
I was glad to be out of that downstairs study with the queer odour and vague suggestions 
of vibration, yet could not of course escape   a hideous sense of dread and peril and cosmic 
abnormality as I thought of the place I was in and the forces I was meeting. The wild, lonely region, 
the black, mysteriously forested slope towering so close behind the house, the footprints in the 
road, the sick, motionless whisperer in the dark, the hellish cylinders and machines, and above 
all the invitations to strange surgery and stranger voyagings—these things, all so new 
and in such sudden succession, rushed in on me with a cumulative force which sapped my will 
and almost undermined my physical strength. To discover that my guide Noyes was the human 
celebrant in that monstrous bygone Sabbat-ritual on the phonograph record was a particular 
shock, though I had previously sensed a dim, repellent familiarity in his voice. Another 
special shock came from my own attitude toward my host whenever I paused to analyse it; for much 
as I had instinctively liked Akeley as revealed in his correspondence, I now found that he 
filled me with a distinct repulsion. His   illness ought to have excited my pity; but 
instead, it gave me a kind of shudder. He was so rigid and inert and corpse-like—and that 
incessant whispering was so hateful and unhuman! It occurred to me that this whispering 
was different from anything else of the   kind I had ever heard; that, despite the curious 
motionlessness of the speaker’s moustache-screened lips, it had a latent strength and carrying-power 
remarkable for the wheezings of an asthmatic. I had been able to understand the speaker when 
wholly across the room, and once or twice it had seemed to me that the faint but penetrant sounds 
represented not so much weakness as deliberate repression—for what reason I could not guess. 
From the first I had felt a disturbing quality in their timbre. Now, when I tried to weigh the 
matter, I thought I could trace this impression to a kind of subconscious familiarity like 
that which had made Noyes’s voice so hazily ominous. But when or where I had encountered the 
thing it hinted at, was more than I could tell. One thing was certain—I would not spend 
another night here. My scientific zeal had   vanished amidst fear and loathing, and I felt 
nothing now but a wish to escape from this net of morbidity and unnatural revelation. I knew 
enough now. It must indeed be true that cosmic linkages do exist—but such things are surely not 
meant for normal human beings to meddle with. Blasphemous influences seemed to surround me and 
press chokingly upon my senses. Sleep, I decided, would be out of the question; so I merely 
extinguished the lamp and threw myself on   the bed fully dressed. No doubt it was absurd, 
but I kept ready for some unknown emergency; gripping in my right hand the revolver I had 
brought along, and holding the pocket flashlight   in my left. Not a sound came from below, and I 
could imagine how my host was sitting there with cadaverous stiffness in the dark.
Somewhere I heard a clock ticking, and was vaguely grateful for the 
normality of the sound. It reminded me,   though, of another thing about the region which 
disturbed me—the total absence of animal life. There were certainly no farm beasts about, and now 
I realised that even the accustomed night-noises of wild living things were absent. Except for 
the sinister trickle of distant unseen waters, that stillness was anomalous—interplanetary—and 
I wondered what star-spawned, intangible blight could be hanging over the region. I recalled 
from old legends that dogs and other beasts had always hated the Outer Ones, and thought of what 
those tracks in the road might mean. Do not ask me how long my unexpected lapse into 
slumber lasted, or how much of what ensued was sheer dream. If I tell you that I awaked at a 
certain time, and heard and saw certain things, you will merely answer that I did not wake then; 
and that everything was a dream until the moment when I rushed out of the house, stumbled 
to the shed where I had seen the old Ford, and seized that ancient vehicle for a mad, 
aimless race over the haunted hills which at last landed me—after hours of jolting and 
winding through forest-threatened labyrinths—in a village which turned out to be Townshend.
You will also, of course, discount everything else in my report; and declare that all the pictures, 
record-sounds, cylinder-and-machine sounds, and kindred evidences were bits of pure deception 
practiced on me by the missing Henry Akeley. You will even hint that he conspired with other 
eccentrics to carry out a silly and elaborate   hoax—that he had the express shipment removed at 
Keene, and that he had Noyes make that terrifying wax record. It is odd, though, that Noyes has not 
even yet been identified; that he was unknown at any of the villages near Akeley’s place, though 
he must have been frequently in the region. I wish I had stopped to memorise the licence-number 
of his car—or perhaps it is better after all that I did not. For I, despite all you can say, and 
despite all I sometimes try to say to myself, know that loathsome outside influences 
must be lurking there in the half-unknown   hills—and that those influences have spies 
and emissaries in the world of men. To keep as far as possible from such influences and such 
emissaries is all that I ask of life in future. When my frantic story sent a sheriff’s posse out 
to the farmhouse, Akeley was gone without leaving a trace. His loose dressing-gown, yellow scarf, 
and foot-bandages lay on the study floor near his corner easy-chair, and it could not be decided 
whether any of his other apparel had vanished with him. The dogs and livestock were indeed missing, 
and there were some curious bullet-holes both on the house’s exterior and on some of the walls 
within; but beyond this nothing unusual could be detected. No cylinders or machines, none 
of the evidences I had brought in my valise, no queer odour or vibration-sense, no 
footprints in the road, and none of the problematical things I glimpsed at the very last.
I stayed a week in Brattleboro after my escape, making inquiries among people of every kind who 
had known Akeley; and the results convince me that the matter is no figment of dream or delusion. 
Akeley’s queer purchases of dogs and ammunition and chemicals, and the cutting of his telephone 
wires, are matters of record; while all who knew him—including his son in California—concede that 
his occasional remarks on strange studies had a certain consistency. Solid citizens believe he 
was mad, and unhesitatingly pronounce all reported evidences mere hoaxes devised with insane cunning 
and perhaps abetted by eccentric associates; but the lowlier country folk sustain his 
statements in every detail. He had shewed some of these rustics his photographs and black 
stone, and had played the hideous record for them; and they all said the footprints and buzzing voice 
were like those described in ancestral legends. They said, too, that suspicious sights and 
sounds had been noticed increasingly around Akeley’s house after he found the black stone, 
and that the place was now avoided by everybody except the mail man and other casual, tough-minded 
people. Dark Mountain and Round Hill were both notoriously haunted spots, and I could find 
no one who had ever closely explored either. Occasional disappearances of natives throughout 
the district’s history were well attested, and these now included the semi-vagabond Walter 
Brown, whom Akeley’s letters had mentioned. I even came upon one farmer who thought he had 
personally glimpsed one of the queer bodies at   flood-time in the swollen West River, but his 
tale was too confused to be really valuable. When I left Brattleboro I resolved never to 
go back to Vermont, and I feel quite certain I shall keep my resolution. Those wild hills are 
surely the outpost of a frightful cosmic race—as I doubt all the less since reading that a new 
ninth planet has been glimpsed beyond Neptune, just as those influences had said it would 
be glimpsed. Astronomers, with a hideous appropriateness they little suspect, have named 
this thing “Pluto”. I feel, beyond question, that it is nothing less than nighted Yuggoth—and 
I shiver when I try to figure out the real reason why its monstrous denizens wish it to be known 
in this way at this especial time. I vainly try to assure myself that these daemoniac creatures 
are not gradually leading up to some new policy hurtful to the earth and its normal inhabitants.
But I have still to tell of the ending of that terrible night in the farmhouse. As I have 
said, I did finally drop into a troubled doze; a doze filled with bits of dream which involved 
monstrous landscape-glimpses. Just what awaked me I cannot yet say, but that I did indeed awake 
at this given point I feel very certain. My first confused impression was of stealthily creaking 
floor-boards in the hall outside my door,   and of a clumsy, muffled fumbling at the 
latch. This, however, ceased almost at once; so that my really clear impressions began 
with the voices heard from the study below.   There seemed to be several speakers, and I 
judged that they were controversially engaged. By the time I had listened a few seconds 
I was broad awake, for the nature of the   voices was such as to make all thought of sleep 
ridiculous. The tones were curiously varied, and no one who had listened to that accursed 
phonograph record could harbour any doubts about the nature of at least two of them. Hideous 
though the idea was, I knew that I was under the same roof with nameless things from abysmal 
space; for those two voices were unmistakably the blasphemous buzzings which the Outside Beings 
used in their communication with men. The two were individually different—different 
in pitch, accent, and tempo—but they were both of the same damnable general kind.
A third voice was indubitably that of a mechanical utterance-machine connected with one of the 
detached brains in the cylinders. There was as little doubt about that as about 
the buzzings; for the loud, metallic,   lifeless voice of the previous evening, with 
its inflectionless, expressionless scraping and rattling, and its impersonal precision and 
deliberation, had been utterly unforgettable. For a time I did not pause to question whether 
the intelligence behind the scraping was the   identical one which had formerly talked to me; 
but shortly afterward I reflected that any brain would emit vocal sounds of the same quality if 
linked to the same mechanical speech-producer; the only possible differences being in language, 
rhythm, speed, and pronunciation. To complete the eldritch colloquy there were two actually human 
voices—one the crude speech of an unknown and evidently rustic man, and the other the suave 
Bostonian tones of my erstwhile guide Noyes. As I tried to catch the words which the stoutly 
fashioned floor so bafflingly intercepted,   I was also conscious of a great deal of stirring 
and scratching and shuffling in the room below; so that I could not escape the impression that it 
was full of living beings—many more than the few whose speech I could single out. The exact nature 
of this stirring is extremely hard to describe, for very few good bases of comparison exist. 
Objects seemed now and then to move across the room like conscious entities; the sound of their 
footfalls having something about it like a loose, hard-surfaced clattering—as of the contact 
of ill-coördinated surfaces of horn or hard rubber. It was, to use a more concrete but less 
accurate comparison, as if people with loose, splintery wooden shoes were shambling and 
rattling about on the polished board floor. On the nature and appearance of those responsible 
for the sounds, I did not care to speculate. Before long I saw that it would be impossible 
to distinguish any connected discourse. Isolated words—including the names of Akeley and myself—now 
and then floated up, especially when uttered by the mechanical speech-producer; but their true 
significance was lost for want of continuous context. Today I refuse to form any definite 
deductions from them, and even their frightful effect on me was one of suggestion rather than of 
revelation. A terrible and abnormal conclave, I felt certain, was assembled below me; but for what 
shocking deliberations I could not tell. It was curious how this unquestioned sense of the malign 
and the blasphemous pervaded me despite Akeley’s assurances of the Outsiders’ friendliness.
With patient listening I began to distinguish clearly between voices, even though 
I could not grasp much of what any   of the voices said. I seemed to catch certain 
typical emotions behind some of the speakers. One of the buzzing voices, for example, 
held an unmistakable note of authority;   whilst the mechanical voice, notwithstanding its 
artificial loudness and regularity, seemed to be in a position of subordination and pleading. 
Noyes’s tones exuded a kind of conciliatory atmosphere. The others I could make no attempt to 
interpret. I did not hear the familiar whisper of Akeley, but well knew that such a sound could 
never penetrate the solid flooring of my room. I will try to set down some of the few 
disjointed words and other sounds I caught, labelling the speakers of the words as best I know 
how. It was from the speech-machine that I first picked up a few recognisable phrases.
(THE SPEECH-MACHINE) “ brought it on myself sent back the letters 
and the record end on it taken in seeing and hearing damn you impersonal force, after 
all fresh, shiny cylinder great God .” (FIRST BUZZING VOICE)
“ time we stopped small and   human Akeley brain saying ”
(SECOND BUZZING VOICE) “ Nyarlathotep Wilmarth records 
and letters cheap imposture .” (NOYES)
“ (an unpronounceable word or name,   possibly N’gah-Kthun) harmless peace couple of 
weeks theatrical told you that before .” (FIRST BUZZING VOICE)
“ no reason original plan effects Noyes can watch   Round Hill fresh cylinder Noyes’s car .”
(NOYES) “ well all yours down here rest place .”
(SEVERAL VOICES AT ONCE IN   INDISTINGUISHABLE SPEECH)
(MANY FOOTSTEPS, INCLUDING THE PECULIAR LOOSE STIRRING OR CLATTERING)
(A CURIOUS SORT OF FLAPPING SOUND)
  (THE SOUND OF AN AUTOMOBILE 
STARTING AND RECEDING) (SILENCE)
That is the substance of what my ears brought me as I lay 
rigid upon that strange upstairs bed in the haunted farmhouse among the daemoniac hills—lay 
there fully dressed, with a revolver clenched in my right hand and a pocket flashlight gripped in 
my left. I became, as I have said, broad awake; but a kind of obscure paralysis nevertheless 
kept me inert till long after the last echoes of the sounds had died away. I heard the wooden, 
deliberate ticking of the ancient Connecticut clock somewhere far below, and at last made out 
the irregular snoring of a sleeper. Akeley must have dozed off after the strange session, and 
I could well believe that he needed to do so. Just what to think or what to do was 
more than I could decide. After all, what had I heard beyond things which previous 
information might have led me to expect? Had I not known that the nameless Outsiders were 
now freely admitted to the farmhouse? No doubt Akeley had been surprised by an unexpected 
visit from them. Yet something in that   fragmentary discourse had chilled me immeasurably, 
raised the most grotesque and horrible doubts, and made me wish fervently that I might wake 
up and prove everything a dream. I think my subconscious mind must have caught something which 
my consciousness has not yet recognised. But what of Akeley? Was he not my friend, and would he 
not have protested if any harm were meant me? The peaceful snoring below seemed to cast 
ridicule on all my suddenly intensified fears. Was it possible that Akeley had been imposed 
upon and used as a lure to draw me into the   hills with the letters and pictures and 
phonograph record? Did those beings mean to engulf us both in a common destruction 
because we had come to know too much? Again I thought of the abruptness and unnaturalness 
of that change in the situation which must   have occurred between Akeley’s penultimate and 
final letters. Something, my instinct told me, was terribly wrong. All was not as it seemed. 
That acrid coffee which I refused—had there not been an attempt by some hidden, unknown entity 
to drug it? I must talk to Akeley at once, and restore his sense of proportion. They had 
hypnotised him with their promises of cosmic   revelations, but now he must listen to reason. 
We must get out of this before it would be too late. If he lacked the will power to make the 
break for liberty, I would supply it. Or if I could not persuade him to go, I could at least 
go myself. Surely he would let me take his Ford and leave it in a garage at Brattleboro. I 
had noticed it in the shed—the door being   left unlocked and open now that peril was deemed 
past—and I believed there was a good chance of its being ready for instant use. That momentary 
dislike of Akeley which I had felt during and after the evening’s conversation was all gone 
now. He was in a position much like my own, and we must stick together. Knowing his indisposed 
condition, I hated to wake him at this juncture, but I knew that I must. I could not stay in 
this place till morning as matters stood. At last I felt able to act, and stretched 
myself vigorously to regain command of my muscles. Arising with a caution more impulsive 
than deliberate, I found and donned my hat, took my valise, and started downstairs with the 
flashlight’s aid. In my nervousness I kept the revolver clutched in my right hand, being able 
to take care of both valise and flashlight with   my left. Why I exerted these precautions I do not 
really know, since I was even then on my way to awaken the only other occupant of the house.
As I half tiptoed down the creaking stairs to the lower hall I could hear the sleeper 
more plainly, and noticed that he must   be in the room on my left—the living-room I 
had not entered. On my right was the gaping blackness of the study in which I had heard 
the voices. Pushing open the unlatched door of the living-room I traced a path with the 
flashlight toward the source of the snoring, and finally turned the beams on the sleeper’s 
face. But in the next second I hastily turned them away and commenced a cat-like retreat to the hall, 
my caution this time springing from reason as well as from instinct. For the sleeper on the couch was 
not Akeley at all, but my quondam guide Noyes. Just what the real situation was, I could not 
guess; but common sense told me that the safest   thing was to find out as much as possible before 
arousing anybody. Regaining the hall, I silently closed and latched the living-room door after me; 
thereby lessening the chances of awaking Noyes. I now cautiously entered the dark study, where I 
expected to find Akeley, whether asleep or awake, in the great corner chair which was evidently his 
favourite resting-place. As I advanced, the beams of my flashlight caught the great centre-table, 
revealing one of the hellish cylinders with sight and hearing machines attached, and 
with a speech-machine standing close by,   ready to be connected at any moment. This, 
I reflected, must be the encased brain I had heard talking during the frightful conference; and 
for a second I had a perverse impulse to attach the speech-machine and see what it would say.
It must, I thought, be conscious of my presence even now; since the sight and hearing attachments 
could not fail to disclose the rays of my flashlight and the faint creaking of the floor 
beneath my feet. But in the end I did not dare meddle with the thing. I idly saw that it was the 
fresh, shiny cylinder with Akeley’s name on it, which I had noticed on the shelf earlier in the 
evening and which my host had told me not to bother. Looking back at that moment, I can only 
regret my timidity and wish that I had boldly caused the apparatus to speak. God knows what 
mysteries and horrible doubts and questions of identity it might have cleared up! But then, 
it may be merciful that I let it alone. From the table I turned my flashlight to the 
corner where I thought Akeley was, but found to my perplexity that the great easy-chair 
was empty of any human occupant asleep or awake. From the seat to the floor there trailed 
voluminously the familiar old dressing-gown, and near it on the floor lay the yellow scarf and 
the huge foot-bandages I had thought so odd. As I hesitated, striving to conjecture where Akeley 
might be, and why he had so suddenly discarded his necessary sick-room garments, I observed that 
the queer odour and sense of vibration were no longer in the room. What had been their cause? 
Curiously it occurred to me that I had noticed them only in Akeley’s vicinity. They had been 
strongest where he sat, and wholly absent except in the room with him or just outside the doors 
of that room. I paused, letting the flashlight wander about the dark study and racking my brain 
for explanations of the turn affairs had taken. Would to heaven I had quietly left the place 
before allowing that light to rest again on the vacant chair. As it turned out, I did not leave 
quietly; but with a muffled shriek which must have disturbed, though it did not quite awake, the 
sleeping sentinel across the hall. That shriek, and Noyes’s still-unbroken snore, are the last 
sounds I ever heard in that morbidity-choked farmhouse beneath the black-wooded crest of 
a haunted mountain—that focus of trans-cosmic horror amidst the lonely green hills and 
curse-muttering brooks of a spectral rustic land. It is a wonder that I did not drop flashlight, 
valise, and revolver in my wild scramble, but somehow I failed to lose any of these. I actually 
managed to get out of that room and that house without making any further noise, to drag myself 
and my belongings safely into the old Ford in the shed, and to set that archaic vehicle in motion 
toward some unknown point of safety in the black, moonless night. The ride that followed was a piece 
of delirium out of Poe or Rimbaud or the drawings of Doré, but finally I reached Townshend. 
That is all. If my sanity is still unshaken, I am lucky. Sometimes I fear what the years 
will bring, especially since that new planet   Pluto has been so curiously discovered.
As I have implied, I let my flashlight return to the vacant easy-chair after its circuit 
of the room; then noticing for the first time the presence of certain objects in the seat, made 
inconspicuous by the adjacent loose folds of the empty dressing-gown. These are the objects, 
three in number, which the investigators did not find when they came later on. As I said at 
the outset, there was nothing of actual visual horror about them. The trouble was in what they 
led one to infer. Even now I have my moments of half-doubt—moments in which I half accept the 
scepticism of those who attribute my whole   experience to dream and nerves and delusion.
The three things were damnably clever constructions of their kind, and were furnished 
with ingenious metallic clamps to attach them   to organic developments of which I dare not 
form any conjecture. I hope—devoutly hope—that they were the waxen products of a master artist, 
despite what my inmost fears tell me. Great God! That whisperer in darkness with its morbid odour 
and vibrations! Sorcerer, emissary, changeling, outsider that hideous repressed buzzing and 
all the time in that fresh, shiny cylinder   on the shelf poor devil “prodigious surgical, 
biological, chemical, and mechanical skill” For the things in the chair, perfect to the 
last, subtle detail of microscopic resemblance—or identity—were the face and hands 
of Henry Wentworth Akeley. Knowledge can be a double-edged sword.
The Whisperer in Darkness reminds us that seeking truth can be dangerous, especially 
when it comes from beyond our world.   Lovecraft warns that some secrets come at 
a cost—the unraveling of the mind itself. Thank you for listening. What 
part of this story unsettled   you the most? Share your thoughts below.
Don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe to Shadows of Weekend. To support more explorations 
into the unknown, click join and become a member. Until next time—some voices are better left 
unheard. What if the nightmares of ancient 
cults were more than stories?
  The Call of Cthulhu reveals a cosmic terror 
sleeping beneath the waves—a force older than humanity, whose return could reshape the world. 
Pieced together through fragments of dreams, investigations, and whispered legends, 
this story challenges our sense of   control and place in the universe.
It shows us a reality where humanity is insignificant, and ancient powers 
loom just beyond our perception. Welcome to Shadows of Weekend. Like, 
share, and subscribe for more dark tales. For early access and exclusive content, 
tap the join button and become a member. (Found Among the Papers of the Late
Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston) “Of such great powers or beings there may be 
conceivably a survival . . . a survival of a hugely remote period when . . . consciousness 
was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing 
humanity . . . forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called 
them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all   sorts and kinds. . . .”
—Algernon Blackwood. (pause:3s)
The Horror in Clay.
  The most merciful thing in the world, I think, 
is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of 
ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. 
The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some 
day the piecing together of dissociated   knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of 
reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the 
revelation or flee from the deadly light   into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human 
race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze 
the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single 
glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. 
That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together 
of separated things—in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I hope 
that no one else will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly 
supply a link in so hideous a chain. I think that the professor, too, intended to 
keep silent regarding the part he knew,   and that he would have destroyed his 
notes had not sudden death seized him. My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 
1926–27 with the death of my grand-uncle George Gammell Angell, Professor Emeritus of Semitic 
Languages in Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Professor Angell was widely 
known as an authority on ancient inscriptions, and had frequently been resorted to by the 
heads of prominent museums; so that his passing at the age of ninety-two may be recalled by many. 
Locally, interest was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death. The professor had been 
stricken whilst returning from the Newport boat; falling suddenly, as witnesses said, after 
having been jostled by a nautical-looking   Black individual who had come from one of the 
queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short cut from the waterfront to 
the deceased’s home in Williams Street. Physicians were unable to find any visible disorder, but 
concluded after perplexed debate that some obscure lesion of the heart, induced by the brisk 
ascent of so steep a hill by so elderly a man, was responsible for the end. At the time I saw no 
reason to dissent from this dictum, but latterly I am inclined to wonder—and more than wonder.
As my grand-uncle’s heir and executor, for he died a childless widower, I was expected to go over 
his papers with some thoroughness; and for that purpose moved his entire set of files and boxes 
to my quarters in Boston. Much of the material which I correlated will be later published by the 
American Archaeological Society, but there was one box which I found exceedingly puzzling, and which 
I felt much averse from shewing to other eyes. It had been locked, and I did not find the key till 
it occurred to me to examine the personal ring   which the professor carried always in his pocket. 
Then indeed I succeeded in opening it, but when I did so seemed only to be confronted by a greater 
and more closely locked barrier. For what could be the meaning of the queer clay bas-relief and the 
disjointed jottings, ramblings, and cuttings which I found? Had my uncle, in his latter years, become 
credulous of the most superficial impostures? I resolved to search out the eccentric 
sculptor responsible for this apparent   disturbance of an old man’s peace of mind.
The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five by six inches in 
area; obviously of modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from modern in atmosphere and 
suggestion; for although the vagaries of cubism   and futurism are many and wild, they do not often 
reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric writing. And writing of some kind 
the bulk of these designs seemed certainly to be; though my memory, despite much familiarity with 
the papers and collections of my uncle, failed in any way to identify this particular species, 
or even to hint at its remotest affiliations. Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure 
of evidently pictorial intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear 
idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a 
form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination 
yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be 
unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque 
and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole 
which made it most shockingly frightful.   Behind the figure was a vague suggestion 
of a Cyclopean architectural background. The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside 
from a stack of press cuttings, in Professor Angell’s most recent hand; and made no pretence 
to literary style. What seemed to be the main document was headed “CTHULHU CULT” in characters 
painstakingly printed to avoid the erroneous reading of a word so unheard-of. The manuscript 
was divided into two sections, the first of which was headed “1925—Dream and Dream Work of H. A. 
Wilcox, 7 Thomas St., Providence, R.I.”, and the second, “Narrative of Inspector John R. Legrasse, 
121 Bienville St., New Orleans, La., at 1908 A. A. S. Mtg.—Notes on Same, & Prof. Webb’s Acct.” The 
other manuscript papers were all brief notes, some of them accounts of the queer dreams of different 
persons, some of them citations from theosophical books and magazines (notably W. Scott-Elliot’s 
Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria), and the rest comments on long-surviving secret societies and 
hidden cults, with references to passages in such mythological and anthropological source-books 
as Frazer’s Golden Bough and Miss Murray’s   Witch-Cult in Western Europe. The cuttings largely 
alluded to outré mental illnesses and outbreaks of group folly or mania in the spring of 1925.
The first half of the principal manuscript told a very peculiar tale. It appears that on March 
1st, 1925, a thin, dark young man of neurotic and excited aspect had called upon Professor 
Angell bearing the singular clay bas-relief, which was then exceedingly damp and fresh. His 
card bore the name of Henry Anthony Wilcox, and my uncle had recognised him as the youngest 
son of an excellent family slightly known to him, who had latterly been studying sculpture at the 
Rhode Island School of Design and living alone at the Fleur-de-Lys Building near that institution. 
Wilcox was a precocious youth of known genius but great eccentricity, and had from childhood 
excited attention through the strange stories and odd dreams he was in the habit of relating. 
He called himself “psychically hypersensitive”, but the staid folk of the ancient commercial city 
dismissed him as merely “queer”. Never mingling much with his kind, he had dropped gradually 
from social visibility, and was now known only to a small group of aesthetes from other towns. 
Even the Providence Art Club, anxious to preserve its conservatism, had found him quite hopeless.
On the occasion of the visit, ran the professor’s manuscript, the sculptor abruptly asked for the 
benefit of his host’s archaeological knowledge in identifying the hieroglyphics on the bas-relief. 
He spoke in a dreamy, stilted manner which suggested pose and alienated sympathy; and 
my uncle shewed some sharpness in replying, for the conspicuous freshness of the tablet 
implied kinship with anything but archaeology. Young Wilcox’s rejoinder, which impressed my uncle 
enough to make him recall and record it verbatim, was of a fantastically poetic cast which 
must have typified his whole conversation,   and which I have since found highly characteristic 
of him. He said, “It is new, indeed, for I made it last night in a dream of strange cities; and 
dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon.”
It was then that he began that rambling tale which suddenly played upon a sleeping memory and won 
the fevered interest of my uncle. There had been a slight earthquake tremor the night before, 
the most considerable felt in New England for   some years; and Wilcox’s imagination had been 
keenly affected. Upon retiring, he had had an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of 
titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror. 
Hieroglyphics had covered the walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point below 
had come a voice that was not a voice;   a chaotic sensation which only fancy could 
transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable 
jumble of letters, “Cthulhu fhtagn”. This verbal jumble was the key to the 
recollection which excited and disturbed   Professor Angell. He questioned the sculptor 
with scientific minuteness; and studied with almost frantic intensity the bas-relief on 
which the youth had found himself working, chilled and clad only in his night-clothes, 
when waking had stolen bewilderingly over him. My uncle blamed his old age, Wilcox afterward 
said, for his slowness in recognising both hieroglyphics and pictorial design. Many of 
his questions seemed highly out-of-place to his visitor, especially those which tried to connect 
the latter with strange cults or societies; and Wilcox could not understand the repeated 
promises of silence which he was offered in exchange for an admission of membership in some 
widespread mystical or paganly religious body. When Professor Angell became convinced that the 
sculptor was indeed ignorant of any cult or system of cryptic lore, he besieged his visitor with 
demands for future reports of dreams. This bore regular fruit, for after the first interview the 
manuscript records daily calls of the young man, during which he related startling fragments 
of nocturnal imagery whose burden was always some terrible Cyclopean vista of dark and 
dripping stone, with a subterrene voice or intelligence shouting monotonously in enigmatical 
sense-impacts uninscribable save as gibberish. The two sounds most frequently repeated are those 
rendered by the letters “Cthulhu” and “R’lyeh”. On March 23d, the manuscript continued, Wilcox 
failed to appear; and inquiries at his quarters revealed that he had been stricken with an obscure 
sort of fever and taken to the home of his family   in Waterman Street. He had cried out in the night, 
arousing several other artists in the building, and had manifested since then only alternations 
of unconsciousness and delirium. My uncle at once telephoned the family, and from that time forward 
kept close watch of the case; calling often at the Thayer Street office of Dr. Tobey, whom he 
learned to be in charge. The youth’s febrile mind, apparently, was dwelling on strange things; and 
the doctor shuddered now and then as he spoke   of them. They included not only a repetition of 
what he had formerly dreamed, but touched wildly on a gigantic thing “miles high” which walked or 
lumbered about. He at no time fully described this object, but occasional frantic words, as repeated 
by Dr. Tobey, convinced the professor that it must be identical with the nameless monstrosity 
he had sought to depict in his dream-sculpture. Reference to this object, the doctor added, 
was invariably a prelude to the young man’s   subsidence into lethargy. His temperature, 
oddly enough, was not greatly above normal; but his whole condition was otherwise such as to 
suggest true fever rather than mental disorder. On April 2nd at about 3 p.m. every trace 
of Wilcox’s malady suddenly ceased. He sat upright in bed, astonished to find himself 
at home and completely ignorant of what had happened in dream or reality since the night of 
March 22nd. Pronounced well by his physician, he returned to his quarters in three days; but to 
Professor Angell he was of no further assistance. All traces of strange dreaming had vanished with 
his recovery, and my uncle kept no record of his night-thoughts after a week of pointless and 
irrelevant accounts of thoroughly usual visions. Here the first part of the manuscript ended, but 
references to certain of the scattered notes gave me much material for thought—so much, in fact, 
that only the ingrained scepticism then forming my philosophy can account for my continued 
distrust of the artist. The notes in question were those descriptive of the dreams of various 
persons covering the same period as that in which   young Wilcox had had his strange visitations. 
My uncle, it seems, had quickly instituted a prodigiously far-flung body of inquiries amongst 
nearly all the friends whom he could question   without impertinence, asking for nightly reports 
of their dreams, and the dates of any notable visions for some time past. The reception of his 
request seems to have been varied; but he must, at the very least, have received more responses 
than any ordinary man could have handled without a secretary. This original correspondence was 
not preserved, but his notes formed a thorough and really significant digest. Average people in 
society and business—New England’s traditional “salt of the earth”—gave an almost completely 
negative result, though scattered cases of uneasy but formless nocturnal impressions appear here and 
there, always between March 23d and April 2nd—the period of young Wilcox’s delirium. Scientific men 
were little more affected, though four cases of vague description suggest fugitive glimpses 
of strange landscapes, and in one case there   is mentioned a dread of something abnormal.
It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic 
would have broken loose had they been able to   compare notes. As it was, lacking their original 
letters, I half suspected the compiler of having asked leading questions, or of having edited 
the correspondence in corroboration of what he had latently resolved to see. That 
is why I continued to feel that Wilcox, somehow cognisant of the old data which my uncle 
had possessed, had been imposing on the veteran   scientist. These responses from aesthetes told 
a disturbing tale. From February 28th to April 2nd a large proportion of them had dreamed very 
bizarre things, the intensity of the dreams being immeasurably the stronger during the period of the 
sculptor’s delirium. Over a fourth of those who reported anything, reported scenes and half-sounds 
not unlike those which Wilcox had described; and some of the dreamers confessed acute fear 
of the gigantic nameless thing visible toward the last. One case, which the note describes 
with emphasis, was very sad. The subject, a widely known architect with leanings toward 
theosophy and occultism, went violently insane on the date of young Wilcox’s seizure, and expired 
several months later after incessant screamings to be saved from some escaped denizen of hell. Had 
my uncle referred to these cases by name instead of merely by number, I should have attempted 
some corroboration and personal investigation; but as it was, I succeeded in tracing 
down only a few. All of these, however,   bore out the notes in full. I have often wondered 
if all the objects of the professor’s questioning felt as puzzled as did this fraction. It is 
well that no explanation shall ever reach them. The press cuttings, as I have intimated, 
touched on cases of panic, mania, and eccentricity during the given period. Professor 
Angell must have employed a cutting bureau, for the number of extracts was tremendous and 
the sources scattered throughout the globe.   Here was a nocturnal suicide in London, where 
a lone sleeper had leaped from a window after a shocking cry. Here likewise a rambling letter 
to the editor of a paper in South America, where a fanatic deduces a dire future from visions 
he has seen. A despatch from California describes a theosophist colony as donning white robes en 
masse for some “glorious fulfilment” which never arrives, whilst items from India speak guardedly 
of serious native unrest toward the end of March. Voodoo orgies multiply in Hayti, and African 
outposts report ominous mutterings. American officers in the Philippines find certain tribes 
bothersome about this time, and New York policemen   are mobbed by hysterical Levantines on the night 
of March 22–23. The west of Ireland, too, is full of wild rumour and legendry, and a fantastic 
painter named Ardois-Bonnot hangs a blasphemous “Dream Landscape” in the Paris spring salon of 
1926. And so numerous are the recorded troubles in insane asylums, that only a miracle can have 
stopped the medical fraternity from noting strange parallelisms and drawing mystified conclusions. 
A weird bunch of cuttings, all told; and I can at this date scarcely envisage the callous 
rationalism with which I set them aside. But I was then convinced that young Wilcox had known of the 
older matters mentioned by the professor. The Tale of Inspector Legrasse.
The older matters which had made the sculptor’s dream and bas-relief so significant 
to my uncle formed the subject of the second half of his long manuscript. Once before, it appears, 
Professor Angell had seen the hellish outlines of the nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the unknown 
hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which can be rendered only as “Cthulhu”; 
and all this in so stirring and horrible a connexion that it is small wonder he pursued 
young Wilcox with queries and demands for data. The earlier experience had come 
in 1908, seventeen years before,   when the American Archaeological Society held its 
annual meeting in St. Louis. Professor Angell, as befitted one of his authority and attainments, 
had had a prominent part in all the deliberations; and was one of the first to be approached by 
the several outsiders who took advantage of   the convocation to offer questions for correct 
answering and problems for expert solution. The chief of these outsiders, and in a short time 
the focus of interest for the entire meeting, was a commonplace-looking middle-aged man who 
had travelled all the way from New Orleans for certain special information unobtainable from any 
local source. His name was John Raymond Legrasse, and he was by profession an Inspector of Police. 
With him he bore the subject of his visit, a grotesque, repulsive, and apparently very ancient 
stone statuette whose origin he was at a loss to determine. It must not be fancied that Inspector 
Legrasse had the least interest in archaeology. On the contrary, his wish for enlightenment was 
prompted by purely professional considerations. The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it 
was, had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans 
during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites 
connected with it, that the police could   not but realise that they had stumbled on a dark 
cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African 
voodoo circles. Of its origin, apart from the erratic and unbelievable tales extorted from 
the captured members, absolutely nothing was to be discovered; hence the anxiety of the police 
for any antiquarian lore which might help them to place the frightful symbol, and through it 
track down the cult to its fountain-head. Inspector Legrasse was scarcely prepared for 
the sensation which his offering created. One sight of the thing had been enough to throw 
the assembled men of science into a state of tense excitement, and they lost no time in crowding 
around him to gaze at the diminutive figure whose utter strangeness and air of genuinely abysmal 
antiquity hinted so potently at unopened and archaic vistas. No recognised school of sculpture 
had animated this terrible object, yet centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in its 
dim and greenish surface of unplaceable stone. The figure, which was finally passed slowly 
from man to man for close and careful study, was between seven and eight inches in height, and of 
exquisitely artistic workmanship. It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with 
an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious 
claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct 
with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted 
evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of 
the wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat occupied the centre, whilst the 
long, curved claws of the doubled-up,   crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and 
extended a quarter of the way down toward the bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was 
bent forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge fore paws 
which clasped the croucher’s elevated knees. The aspect of the whole was abnormally life-like, 
and the more subtly fearful because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, 
and incalculable age was unmistakable; yet not one link did it shew with any known type 
of art belonging to civilisation’s youth—or indeed to any other time. Totally separate and apart, 
its very material was a mystery; for the soapy, greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent 
flecks and striations resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy. The characters along the 
base were equally baffling; and no member present, despite a representation of half the world’s 
expert learning in this field, could form the   least notion of even their remotest linguistic 
kinship. They, like the subject and material, belonged to something horribly remote and distinct 
from mankind as we know it; something frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in 
which our world and our conceptions have no part. And yet, as the members severally shook their 
heads and confessed defeat at the Inspector’s   problem, there was one man in that gathering 
who suspected a touch of bizarre familiarity in the monstrous shape and writing, and 
who presently told with some diffidence of the odd trifle he knew. This person was the late 
William Channing Webb, Professor of Anthropology in Princeton University, and an explorer of no 
slight note. Professor Webb had been engaged, forty-eight years before, in a tour of Greenland 
and Iceland in search of some Runic inscriptions which he failed to unearth; and whilst high up 
on the West Greenland coast had encountered a   singular tribe or cult of unusual Esquimaux 
whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness 
and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which other Esquimaux knew little, and which they mentioned 
only with shudders, saying that it had come down from horribly ancient aeons before ever the 
world was made. Besides nameless rites and human sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary 
rituals addressed to a supreme elder devil or tornasuk; and of this Professor Webb had taken 
a careful phonetic copy from an aged angekok or wizard-priest, expressing the sounds in Roman 
letters as best he knew how. But just now of prime significance was the fetish which this cult had 
cherished, and around which they danced when the aurora leaped high over the ice cliffs. It was, 
the professor stated, a very crude bas-relief of stone, comprising a hideous picture and some 
cryptic writing. And so far as he could tell, it was a rough parallel in all essential features of 
the bestial thing now lying before the meeting. This data, received with suspense and astonishment 
by the assembled members, proved doubly exciting to Inspector Legrasse; and he began at 
once to ply his informant with questions. Having noted and copied an oral ritual among 
the swamp cult-worshippers his men had arrested, he besought the professor to remember as 
best he might the syllables taken down   amongst the diabolist Esquimaux. There then 
followed an exhaustive comparison of details, and a moment of really awed silence when both 
detective and scientist agreed on the virtual identity of the phrase common to two hellish 
rituals so many worlds of distance apart. What, in substance, both the Esquimau wizards and 
the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols was something very like this—the 
word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in the phrase as chanted aloud:
“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh   Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for several among his 
unusual prisoners had repeated to him what   older celebrants had told them the words meant. 
This text, as given, ran something like this: “In his house at R’lyeh dead 
Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
  And now, in response to a general and urgent 
demand, Inspector Legrasse related as fully as possible his experience with the swamp 
worshippers; telling a story to which I could   see my uncle attached profound significance. It 
savoured of the wildest dreams of myth-maker and theosophist, and disclosed an astonishing degree 
of cosmic imagination among such half-castes and pariahs as might be least expected to possess it.
On November 1st, 1907, there had come to the New Orleans police a frantic summons from the 
swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive but 
good-natured descendants of Lafitte’s men, were in the grip of stark fear from an unknown 
thing which had stolen upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a 
more terrible sort than they had ever known; and some of their women and children had 
disappeared since the malevolent tom-tom   had begun its incessant beating far within the 
black haunted woods where no dweller ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, 
soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames; and, the frightened messenger added, 
the people could stand it no more. So a body of twenty police, filling two carriages 
and an automobile, had set out in the late afternoon with the shivering squatter as a guide. 
At the end of the passable road they alighted, and for miles splashed on in silence through the 
terrible cypress woods where day never came. Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss 
beset them, and now and then a pile of dank stones or fragment of a rotting wall intensified by its 
hint of morbid habitation a depression which every malformed tree and every fungous islet combined 
to create. At length the squatter settlement, a miserable huddle of huts, hove in sight; and 
hysterical dwellers ran out to cluster around the group of bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of 
tom-toms was now faintly audible far, far ahead; and a curdling shriek came at infrequent intervals 
when the wind shifted. A reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through the pale undergrowth 
beyond endless avenues of forest night. Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of 
the cowed squatters refused point-blank to advance another inch toward the scene of unholy 
worship, so Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on unguided into black arcades 
of horror that none of them had ever trod before. The region now entered by the police was one of 
traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by white men. There were legends 
of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypous 
thing with luminous eyes; and squatters whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in 
inner earth to worship it at midnight. They said it had been there before D’Iberville, before 
La Salle, before the Indians, and before even the wholesome beasts and birds of the woods. It 
was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die. But it made men dream, and so they knew enough to 
keep away. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the merest fringe of this abhorred area, but that 
location was bad enough; hence perhaps the very place of the worship had terrified the squatters 
more than the shocking sounds and incidents. Only poetry or madness could do justice to the 
noises heard by Legrasse’s men as they ploughed on through the black morass toward the red glare and 
the muffled tom-toms. There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to 
beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other. Animal fury 
and orgiastic licence here whipped themselves to daemoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstasies 
that tore and reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs 
of hell. Now and then the less organised ululation would cease, and from what seemed a well-drilled 
chorus of hoarse voices would rise in sing-song chant that hideous phrase or ritual:
“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
Then the men, having reached a spot where the trees were thinner, came suddenly in sight 
of the spectacle itself. Four of them reeled, one fainted, and two were shaken into a 
frantic cry which the mad cacophony of the orgy fortunately deadened. Legrasse dashed swamp water 
on the face of the fainting man, and all stood trembling and nearly hypnotised with horror.
In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acre’s extent, clear of 
trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of human 
abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn 
were braying, bellowing, and writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped bonfire; in the centre 
of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the curtain of flame, stood a great granite monolith 
some eight feet in height; on top of which, incongruous with its diminutiveness, rested the 
noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular intervals with 
the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless 
squatters who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of worshippers jumped and 
roared, the general direction of the mass motion being from left to right in endless Bacchanal 
between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire. It may have been only imagination and it may have 
been only echoes which induced one of the men, an excitable Spaniard, to fancy he heard 
antiphonal responses to the ritual from some far and unillumined spot deeper within the wood of 
ancient legendry and horror. This man, Joseph D. Galvez, I later met and questioned; and he proved 
distractingly imaginative. He indeed went so far as to hint of the faint beating of great wings, 
and of a glimpse of shining eyes and a mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest trees—but I suppose 
he had been hearing too much native superstition. Actually, the horrified pause of the men was of 
comparatively brief duration. Duty came first; and although there must have been nearly a 
hundred unusual celebrants in the throng,   the police relied on their firearms and plunged 
determinedly into the nauseous rout. For five minutes the resultant din and chaos were 
beyond description. Wild blows were struck, shots were fired, and escapes were made; but 
in the end Legrasse was able to count some forty-seven sullen prisoners, whom he forced to 
dress in haste and fall into line between two rows of policemen. Five of the worshippers lay dead, 
and two severely wounded ones were carried away on improvised stretchers by their fellow-prisoners. 
The image on the monolith, of course, was carefully removed and carried back by Legrasse.
Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness, the prisoners all proved to 
be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling 
of Black individuales and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde 
Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But before many questions 
were asked, it became manifest that something far deeper and older than Black individual fetichism 
was involved. Degraded and ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprising consistency 
to the central idea of their loathsome faith. They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old 
Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. 
Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had 
told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was 
that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant 
wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from 
his dark house in the mighty city of R’lyeh   under the waters, should rise and bring the earth 
again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret 
cult would always be waiting to liberate him.
  Meanwhile no more must be told. There was a secret 
which even torture could not extract. Mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious things 
of earth, for shapes came out of the dark to visit   the faithful few. But these were not the Great 
Old Ones. No man had ever seen the Old Ones. The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none might say 
whether or not the others were precisely like him. No one could read the old writing now, but things 
were told by word of mouth. The chanted ritual was not the secret—that was never spoken aloud, 
only whispered. The chant meant only this: “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be hanged, and the rest were committed to 
various institutions. All denied a part in the ritual murders, and averred that the killing had 
been done by Black Winged Ones which had come to them from their immemorial meeting-place in the 
haunted wood. But of those mysterious allies no coherent account could ever be gained. What the 
police did extract, came mainly from an immensely aged mestizo named Castro, who claimed to have 
sailed to strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of China.
Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations of theosophists 
and made man and the world seem recent and transient indeed. There had been aeons 
when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, 
he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still to be found as Cyclopean stones on 
islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts 
which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of 
eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.
These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had 
shape—for did not this star-fashioned image prove it?—but that shape was not made of matter. When 
the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were 
wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They 
all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R’lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu 
for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them. But at 
that time some force from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved 
Them intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in 
the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring 
in the universe, but Their mode of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in 
Their tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to 
the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language 
reach the fleshly minds of mammals.
  Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed 
the cult around small idols which the Great Ones shewed them; idols brought in dim aeras from 
dark stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests 
would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The 
time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free 
and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and 
killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and 
kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and 
freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways 
and shadow forth the prophecy of their return. In the elder time chosen men had talked with the 
entombed Old Ones in dreams, but then something had happened. The great stone city R’lyeh, with 
its monoliths and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep waters, full of the one primal 
mystery through which not even thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse. But memory 
never died, and high-priests said that the city would rise again when the stars were right. Then 
came out of the earth the black spirits of earth, mouldy and shadowy, and full of dim rumours picked 
up in caverns beneath forgotten sea-bottoms. But of them old Castro dared not speak much. He 
cut himself off hurriedly, and no amount of persuasion or subtlety could elicit more in 
this direction. The size of the Old Ones,   too, he curiously declined to mention. Of the 
cult, he said that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless deserts of Arabia, where Irem, 
the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. It was not allied to the European witch-cult, 
and was virtually unknown beyond its members. No book had ever really hinted of it, though the 
deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul 
Alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:
“That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.”
Legrasse, deeply impressed and not a little bewildered, had inquired in vain concerning 
the historic affiliations of the cult. Castro, apparently, had told the truth when he said that 
it was wholly secret. The authorities at Tulane University could shed no light upon either cult 
or image, and now the detective had come to the highest authorities in the country and met with no 
more than the Greenland tale of Professor Webb. The feverish interest aroused at the meeting 
by Legrasse’s tale, corroborated as it was   by the statuette, is echoed in the subsequent 
correspondence of those who attended; although scant mention occurs in the formal publications 
of the society. Caution is the first care of those accustomed to face occasional charlatanry and 
imposture. Legrasse for some time lent the image to Professor Webb, but at the latter’s death it 
was returned to him and remains in his possession, where I viewed it not long ago. It is truly 
a terrible thing, and unmistakably akin to the dream-sculpture of young Wilcox.
That my uncle was excited by the tale of   the sculptor I did not wonder, for what thoughts 
must arise upon hearing, after a knowledge of what Legrasse had learned of the cult, of a sensitive 
young man who had dreamed not only the figure and   exact hieroglyphics of the swamp-found image 
and the Greenland devil tablet, but had come in his dreams upon at least three of the precise 
words of the formula uttered alike by Esquimau diabolists and unusual Louisianans? Professor 
Angell’s instant start on an investigation of the utmost thoroughness was eminently natural; 
though privately I suspected young Wilcox of   having heard of the cult in some indirect way, and 
of having invented a series of dreams to heighten and continue the mystery at my uncle’s expense. 
The dream-narratives and cuttings collected by the professor were, of course, strong corroboration; 
but the rationalism of my mind and the   extravagance of the whole subject led me to adopt 
what I thought the most sensible conclusions. So, after thoroughly studying the manuscript again and 
correlating the theosophical and anthropological   notes with the cult narrative of Legrasse, I 
made a trip to Providence to see the sculptor and give him the rebuke I thought proper for so 
boldly imposing upon a learned and aged man. Wilcox still lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys 
Building in Thomas Street, a hideous Victorian imitation of seventeenth-century Breton 
architecture which flaunts its stuccoed   front amidst the lovely colonial houses on the 
ancient hill, and under the very shadow of the finest Georgian steeple in America. I found him 
at work in his rooms, and at once conceded from the specimens scattered about that his 
genius is indeed profound and authentic. He will, I believe, some time be heard from 
as one of the great decadents; for he has   crystallised in clay and will one day mirror 
in marble those nightmares and phantasies which Arthur Machen evokes in prose, and Clark Ashton 
Smith makes visible in verse and in painting. Dark, frail, and somewhat unkempt in aspect, 
he turned languidly at my knock and asked me my business without rising. When I told 
him who I was, he displayed some interest;   for my uncle had excited his curiosity in 
probing his strange dreams, yet had never explained the reason for the study. I did 
not enlarge his knowledge in this regard, but sought with some subtlety to draw him 
out. In a short time I became convinced of his absolute sincerity, for he spoke of 
the dreams in a manner none could mistake. They and their subconscious residuum had 
influenced his art profoundly, and he shewed me a morbid statue whose contours almost made me 
shake with the potency of its black suggestion. He could not recall having seen the original of 
this thing except in his own dream bas-relief, but the outlines had formed themselves 
insensibly under his hands. It was, no doubt, the giant shape he had raved of in delirium. 
That he really knew nothing of the hidden cult, save from what my uncle’s relentless catechism 
had let fall, he soon made clear; and again I strove to think of some way in which he could 
possibly have received the weird impressions.
  He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic 
fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green 
stone—whose geometry, he oddly said, was all wrong—and hear with frightened expectancy the 
ceaseless, half-mental calling from underground: “Cthulhu fhtagn”, “Cthulhu fhtagn”. These 
words had formed part of that dread ritual which told of dead Cthulhu’s dream-vigil in 
his stone vault at R’lyeh, and I felt deeply   moved despite my rational beliefs. Wilcox, I was 
sure, had heard of the cult in some casual way, and had soon forgotten it amidst the mass of 
his equally weird reading and imagining. Later, by virtue of its sheer impressiveness, it 
had found subconscious expression in dreams,   in the bas-relief, and in the terrible statue I 
now beheld; so that his imposture upon my uncle had been a very innocent one. The youth was of 
a type, at once slightly affected and slightly ill-mannered, which I could never like; but I was 
willing enough now to admit both his genius and his honesty. I took leave of him amicably, and 
wish him all the success his talent promises. The matter of the cult still remained to fascinate 
me, and at times I had visions of personal fame from researches into its origin and connexions. 
I visited New Orleans, talked with Legrasse and others of that old-time raiding-party, saw the 
frightful image, and even questioned such of the unusual prisoners as still survived. Old Castro, 
unfortunately, had been dead for some years. What I now heard so graphically at first-hand, 
though it was really no more than a detailed confirmation of what my uncle had written, 
excited me afresh; for I felt sure that I was on the track of a very real, very secret, and very 
ancient religion whose discovery would make me an anthropologist of note. My attitude was still one 
of absolute materialism, as I wish it still were, and I discounted with almost inexplicable 
perversity the coincidence of the dream notes and odd cuttings collected by Professor Angell.
One thing I began to suspect, and which I now fear I know, is that my uncle’s death was far 
from natural. He fell on a narrow hill street leading up from an ancient waterfront swarming 
with foreign unusuals, after a careless push   from a Black individual sailor. I did not 
forget the mixed blood and marine pursuits of the cult-members in Louisiana, and would not be 
surprised to learn of secret methods and poison needles as ruthless and as anciently known as the 
cryptic rites and beliefs. Legrasse and his men, it is true, have been let alone; but in Norway 
a certain seaman who saw things is dead. Might not the deeper inquiries of my uncle after 
encountering the sculptor’s data have come   to sinister ears? I think Professor 
Angell died because he knew too much, or because he was likely to learn too much. 
Whether I shall go as he did remains to be seen, for I have learned much now.
The Madness from the Sea. If heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it 
will be a total effacing of the results of a mere chance which fixed my eye on a certain stray 
piece of shelf-paper. It was nothing on which I would naturally have stumbled in the course of 
my daily round, for it was an old number of an Australian journal, the Sydney Bulletin for April 
18, 1925. It had escaped even the cutting bureau which had at the time of its issuance been avidly 
collecting material for my uncle’s research. I had largely given over my inquiries into what 
Professor Angell called the “Cthulhu Cult”, and was visiting a learned friend in Paterson, 
New Jersey; the curator of a local museum and a mineralogist of note. Examining one day the 
reserve specimens roughly set on the storage shelves in a rear room of the museum, my eye was 
caught by an odd picture in one of the old papers spread beneath the stones. It was the Sydney 
Bulletin I have mentioned, for my friend has wide affiliations in all conceivable foreign 
parts; and the picture was a half-tone cut of a hideous stone image almost identical with 
that which Legrasse had found in the swamp. Eagerly clearing the sheet of its precious 
contents, I scanned the item in detail; and was disappointed to find it of only 
moderate length. What it suggested, however, was of portentous significance to my flagging 
quest; and I carefully tore it out for immediate action. It read as follows:
MYSTERY DERELICT FOUND AT SEA
  Vigilant Arrives With Helpless 
Armed New Zealand Yacht in Tow. One Survivor and Dead Man Found Aboard. Tale of
Desperate Battle and Deaths at Sea. Rescued Seaman Refuses
Particulars of Strange Experience.
  Odd Idol Found in His Possession. Inquiry
to Follow. The Morrison Co.’s freighter Vigilant, bound from 
Valparaiso, arrived this morning at its wharf in   Darling Harbour, having in tow the battled and 
disabled but heavily armed steam yacht Alert of Dunedin, N. Z., which was sighted April 12th 
in S. Latitude 34° 21′, W. Longitude 152° 17′ with one living and one dead man aboard.
The Vigilant left Valparaiso March 25th, and on April 2nd was driven considerably south 
of her course by exceptionally heavy storms and monster waves. On April 12th the derelict 
was sighted; and though apparently deserted, was found upon boarding to contain one survivor 
in a half-delirious condition and one man who   had evidently been dead for more than a week. The 
living man was clutching a horrible stone idol of unknown origin, about a foot in height, regarding 
whose nature authorities at Sydney University, the Royal Society, and the Museum in College Street 
all profess complete bafflement, and which the survivor says he found in the cabin of the yacht, 
in a small carved shrine of common pattern. This man, after recovering his senses, told an 
exceedingly strange story of piracy and slaughter. He is Gustaf Johansen, a Norwegian of some 
intelligence, and had been second mate of the two-masted schooner Emma of Auckland, which 
sailed for Callao February 20th with a complement of eleven men. The Emma, he says, was delayed 
and thrown widely south of her course by the great storm of March 1st, and on March 22nd, 
in S. Latitude 49° 51′, W. Longitude 128° 34′, encountered the Alert, manned by a queer and 
evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes. Being ordered peremptorily to turn back, Capt. 
Collins refused; whereupon the strange crew   began to fire savagely and without warning upon 
the schooner with a peculiarly heavy battery of brass cannon forming part of the yacht’s 
equipment. The Emma’s men shewed fight, says the survivor, and though the schooner 
began to sink from shots beneath the waterline   they managed to heave alongside their enemy 
and board her, grappling with the savage crew on the yacht’s deck, and being forced to kill 
them all, the number being slightly superior,   because of their particularly abhorrent and 
desperate though rather clumsy mode of fighting. Three of the Emma’s men, including Capt. 
Collins and First Mate Green, were killed; and the remaining eight under Second Mate Johansen 
proceeded to navigate the captured yacht, going ahead in their original direction to see if any 
reason for their ordering back had existed. The next day, it appears, they raised and landed on a 
small island, although none is known to exist in   that part of the ocean; and six of the men somehow 
died ashore, though Johansen is queerly reticent about this part of his story, and speaks only of 
their falling into a rock chasm. Later, it seems, he and one companion boarded the yacht and tried 
to manage her, but were beaten about by the storm of April 2nd. From that time till his rescue on 
the 12th the man remembers little, and he does not even recall when William Briden, his companion, 
died. Briden’s death reveals no apparent cause, and was probably due to excitement or exposure. 
Cable advices from Dunedin report that the Alert was well known there as an island trader, and bore 
an evil reputation along the waterfront. It was owned by a curious group of half-castes whose 
frequent meetings and night trips to the woods attracted no little curiosity; and it had set 
sail in great haste just after the storm and earth tremors of March 1st. Our Auckland correspondent 
gives the Emma and her crew an excellent reputation, and Johansen is described as a sober 
and worthy man. The admiralty will institute an inquiry on the whole matter beginning tomorrow, at 
which every effort will be made to induce Johansen to speak more freely than he has done hitherto.
This was all, together with the picture of the hellish image; but what a train of ideas it 
started in my mind! Here were new treasuries of data on the Cthulhu Cult, and evidence that it 
had strange interests at sea as well as on land. What motive prompted the hybrid crew to order back 
the Emma as they sailed about with their hideous idol? What was the unknown island on which six 
of the Emma’s crew had died, and about which the mate Johansen was so secretive? What had the 
vice-admiralty’s investigation brought out, and what was known of the noxious cult 
in Dunedin? And most marvellous of all, what deep and more than natural linkage of 
dates was this which gave a malign and now undeniable significance to the various turns 
of events so carefully noted by my uncle? March 1st—our February 28th according to the 
International Date Line—the earthquake and storm had come. From Dunedin the Alert and her noisome 
crew had darted eagerly forth as if imperiously summoned, and on the other side of the earth 
poets and artists had begun to dream of a strange, dank Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had 
moulded in his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu. March 23d the crew of the Emma landed 
on an unknown island and left six men dead; and on that date the dreams of sensitive men assumed 
a heightened vividness and darkened with dread of a giant monster’s malign pursuit, whilst an 
architect had gone mad and a sculptor had lapsed   suddenly into delirium! And what of this storm 
of April 2nd—the date on which all dreams of the dank city ceased, and Wilcox emerged unharmed from 
the bondage of strange fever? What of all this—and of those hints of old Castro about the sunken, 
star-born Old Ones and their coming reign; their faithful cult and their mastery of dreams? Was I 
tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man’s power to bear? If so, they must be horrors 
of the mind alone, for in some way the second of April had put a stop to whatever monstrous 
menace had begun its siege of mankind’s soul. That evening, after a day of hurried cabling 
and arranging, I bade my host adieu and took a train for San Francisco. In less than a month 
I was in Dunedin; where, however, I found that little was known of the strange cult-members 
who had lingered in the old sea-taverns. Waterfront scum was far too common for special 
mention; though there was vague talk about one inland trip these unusuals had made, during 
which faint drumming and red flame were noted on the distant hills. In Auckland I learned 
that Johansen had returned with yellow hair turned white after a perfunctory and inconclusive 
questioning at Sydney, and had thereafter sold his cottage in West Street and sailed with his 
wife to his old home in Oslo. Of his stirring experience he would tell his friends no more than 
he had told the admiralty officials, and all they   could do was to give me his Oslo address.
After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with seamen and members of the 
vice-admiralty court. I saw the Alert, now sold and in commercial use, at Circular Quay in Sydney 
Cove, but gained nothing from its non-committal bulk. The crouching image with its cuttlefish 
head, dragon body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal, was preserved in the Museum at Hyde 
Park; and I studied it long and well, finding it a thing of balefully exquisite workmanship, and 
with the same utter mystery, terrible antiquity, and unearthly strangeness of material which I had 
noted in Legrasse’s smaller specimen. Geologists, the curator told me, had found it a monstrous 
puzzle; for they vowed that the world held no rock like it. Then I thought with a shudder 
of what old Castro had told Legrasse about the primal Great Ones: “They had come from the 
stars, and had brought Their images with Them.” Shaken with such a mental revolution as I had 
never before known, I now resolved to visit Mate Johansen in Oslo. Sailing for London, I 
reëmbarked at once for the Norwegian capital; and one autumn day landed at the trim wharves in 
the shadow of the Egeberg. Johansen’s address, I discovered, lay in the Old Town of King Harold 
Haardrada, which kept alive the name of Oslo during all the centuries that the greater city 
masqueraded as “Christiana”. I made the brief trip by taxicab, and knocked with palpitant heart 
at the door of a neat and ancient building with plastered front. A sad-faced woman in black 
answered my summons, and I was stung with disappointment when she told me in halting 
English that Gustaf Johansen was no more. He had not survived his return, said his wife, 
for the doings at sea in 1925 had broken him. He had told her no more than he had told the 
public, but had left a long manuscript—of “technical matters” as he said—written in 
English, evidently in order to safeguard her   from the peril of casual perusal. During a walk 
through a narrow lane near the Gothenburg dock, a bundle of papers falling from an attic window 
had knocked him down. Two Lascar sailors at once helped him to his feet, but before the ambulance 
could reach him he was dead. Physicians found no adequate cause for the end, and laid it to 
heart trouble and a weakened constitution. I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark fear 
which will never leave me till I, too, am at rest; “accidentally” or otherwise. Persuading the 
widow that my connexion with her husband’s “technical matters” was sufficient to entitle 
me to his manuscript, I bore the document away and began to read it on the London boat. It 
was a simple, rambling thing—a naive sailor’s effort at a post-facto diary—and strove to 
recall day by day that last awful voyage. I cannot attempt to transcribe it verbatim in all 
its cloudiness and redundance, but I will tell its gist enough to shew why the sound of the water 
against the vessel’s sides became so unendurable to me that I stopped my ears with cotton.
Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the city and the Thing, but 
I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of   the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life 
in time and in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath 
the sea, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them on the world 
whenever another earthquake shall heave their   monstrous stone city again to the sun and air.
Johansen’s voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-admiralty. The Emma, in ballast, 
had cleared Auckland on February 20th, and had felt the full force of that 
earthquake-born tempest which must have   heaved up from the sea-bottom the horrors that 
filled men’s dreams. Once more under control, the ship was making good progress when held up 
by the Alert on March 22nd, and I could feel the mate’s regret as he wrote of her bombardment and 
sinking. Of the zealous cult-fiends on the Alert he speaks with significant horror. There was 
some peculiarly abominable quality about them which made their destruction seem almost a duty, 
and Johansen shews ingenuous wonder at the charge of ruthlessness brought against his party during 
the proceedings of the court of inquiry. Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured 
yacht under Johansen’s command, the men sight   a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea, and 
in S. Latitude 47° 9′, W. Longitude 126° 43′ come upon a coast-line of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy 
Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth’s supreme 
fear—the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons behind 
history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay 
great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and sending out at last, after cycles 
incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive and called imperiously to 
the faithful to come on a pilgrimage of liberation and restoration. All this Johansen did not 
suspect, but God knows he soon saw enough! I suppose that only a single mountain-top, the 
hideous monolith-crowned citadel whereon great Cthulhu was buried, actually emerged from the 
waters. When I think of the extent of all that may be brooding down there I almost wish to kill 
myself forthwith. Johansen and his men were awed by the cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon 
of elder daemons, and must have guessed without guidance that it was nothing of this or of any 
sane planet. Awe at the unbelievable size of the greenish stone blocks, at the dizzying height of 
the great carven monolith, and at the stupefying identity of the colossal statues and bas-reliefs 
with the queer image found in the shrine on the Alert, is poignantly visible in every 
line of the mate’s frightened description. Without knowing what futurism is like, 
Johansen achieved something very close   to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of 
describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles 
and stone surfaces—surfaces too great to belong to any thing right or proper for this earth, and 
impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about angles because it 
suggests something Wilcox had told me of his   awful dreams. He had said that the geometry of the 
dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions 
apart from ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst gazing at the terrible reality.
Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous Acropolis, and clambered 
slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun 
of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this 
sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive 
angles of carven rock where a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed convexity.
Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything more definite 
than rock and ooze and weed was seen. Each would have fled had he not feared the scorn of 
the others, and it was only half-heartedly that   they searched—vainly, as it proved—for 
some portable souvenir to bear away. It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed 
up the foot of the monolith and shouted of   what he had found. The rest followed him, and 
looked curiously at the immense carved door with the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. 
It was, Johansen said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that it was a door because of 
the ornate lintel, threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it lay 
flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an   outside cellar-door. As Wilcox would have said, 
the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground 
were horizontal, hence the relative position of   everything else seemed phantasmally variable.
Briden pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then Donovan felt over it 
delicately around the edge, pressing each point separately as he went. He climbed interminably 
along the grotesque stone moulding—that is, one would call it climbing if the thing was not 
after all horizontal—and the men wondered how any door in the universe could be so vast. Then, 
very softly and slowly, the acre-great panel began to give inward at the top; and they saw 
that it was balanced. Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down or along the jamb and 
rejoined his fellows, and everyone watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. 
In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the 
rules of matter and perspective seemed upset. The aperture was black with a darkness almost 
material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of 
the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its 
aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky 
on flapping membraneous wings. The odour arising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, 
and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. 
Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and 
gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted 
outside air of that poison city of madness. Poor Johansen’s handwriting almost gave out 
when he wrote of this. Of the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure 
fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms 
of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic 
order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect 
went mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, 
the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and 
what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. 
After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu   was loose again, and ravening for delight.
Three men were swept up by the flabby claws before anybody turned. God rest them, if there 
be any rest in the universe. They were Donovan, Guerrera, and Ångstrom. Parker slipped as 
the other three were plunging frenziedly over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to 
the boat, and Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t 
have been there; an angle which was acute,   but behaved as if it were obtuse. So only 
Briden and Johansen reached the boat, and pulled desperately for the Alert as the mountainous 
monstrosity flopped down the slimy stones and hesitated floundering at the edge of the water.
Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite the departure of all hands for the 
shore; and it was the work of only a few moments of feverish rushing up and down between wheel and 
engines to get the Alert under way. Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors of that indescribable scene, 
she began to churn the lethal waters; whilst on the masonry of that charnel shore that was not 
of earth the titan Thing from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing 
ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the 
water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency. Briden looked back and 
went mad, laughing shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals till death found him one night in the 
cabin whilst Johansen was wandering deliriously. But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that 
the Thing could surely overtake the Alert until steam was fully up, he resolved on a desperate 
chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. 
There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and 
higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the 
unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came 
nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly. There 
was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a 
stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper. For 
an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a 
venomous seething astern; where—God in heaven!—the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn 
was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every second as 
the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam. That was all. After that Johansen only brooded 
over the idol in the cabin and attended to a few matters of food for himself and the 
laughing maniac by his side. He did not try to navigate after the first bold flight, 
for the reaction had taken something out of his soul. Then came the storm of April 2nd, and a 
gathering of the clouds about his consciousness. There is a sense of spectral whirling through 
liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet’s tail, 
and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit, all 
livened by a cachinnating chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, 
bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus. Out of that dream came rescue—the Vigilant, the 
vice-admiralty court, the streets of Dunedin, and the long voyage back home to the old house by the 
Egeberg. He could not tell—they would think him mad. He would write of what he knew before death 
came, but his wife must not guess. Death would be a boon if only it could blot out the memories.
That was the document I read, and now I have placed it in the tin box beside the bas-relief and 
the papers of Professor Angell. With it shall go this record of mine—this test of my own sanity, 
wherein is pieced together that which I hope may never be pieced together again. I have looked 
upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of 
summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle 
went, as poor Johansen went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still lives.
Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose,   again in that chasm of stone which has shielded 
him since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more, for the Vigilant sailed over 
the spot after the April storm; but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and slay around 
idol-capped monoliths in lonely places. He must have been trapped by the sinking whilst within 
his black abyss, or else the world would by now   be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the 
end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the 
deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come—but I must not and cannot 
think! Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before 
audacity and see that it meets no other eye. The stars are not just 
distant—they may be watching.
  The Call of Cthulhu reveals a universe 
where humanity’s significance is fleeting and fragile. Lovecraft’s creation challenges us 
to face the unknown with humility—and caution. Thank you for listening. What did this 
story awaken in your mind? Share below.
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never die. What lies buried beneath Antarctica’s ice may 
rewrite history. In At the Mountains of Madness, an expedition uncovers an ancient city built by a 
non-human race—revealing a history far older and stranger than human civilization. As explorers 
delve deeper, the boundaries between science and nightmare blur. This is Lovecraft’s grand vision 
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I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing 
why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion 
of the antarctic—with its vast fossil-hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient 
ice-cap—and I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain. Doubt of the real 
facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; yet if I suppressed what will seem extravagant 
and incredible there would be nothing left. The hitherto withheld photographs, both ordinary 
and aërial, will count in my favour; for they are damnably vivid and graphic. Still, they will be 
doubted because of the great lengths to which clever fakery can be carried. The ink drawings, of 
course, will be jeered at as obvious impostures; notwithstanding a strangeness of technique which 
art experts ought to remark and puzzle over. In the end I must rely on the judgment and 
standing of the few scientific leaders who have,   on the one hand, sufficient independence of 
thought to weigh my data on its own hideously convincing merits or in the light of certain 
primordial and highly baffling myth-cycles; and on the other hand, sufficient influence to 
deter the exploring world in general from any rash and overambitious programme in the region of 
those mountains of madness. It is an unfortunate fact that relatively obscure men like myself 
and my associates, connected only with a small university, have little chance of making an 
impression where matters of a wildly bizarre or highly controversial nature are concerned.
It is further against us that we are not, in the strictest sense, specialists in the 
fields which came primarily to be concerned. As a geologist my object in leading the Miskatonic 
University Expedition was wholly that of securing deep-level specimens of rock and soil from 
various parts of the antarctic continent, aided by the remarkable drill devised by Prof. 
Frank H. Pabodie of our engineering department. I had no wish to be a pioneer in any other field 
than this; but I did hope that the use of this new mechanical appliance at different points along 
previously explored paths would bring to light materials of a sort hitherto unreached by the 
ordinary methods of collection. Pabodie’s drilling apparatus, as the public already knows from our 
reports, was unique and radical in its lightness, portability, and capacity to combine the ordinary 
artesian drill principle with the principle of the small circular rock drill in such a way as to cope 
quickly with strata of varying hardness. Steel head, jointed rods, gasoline motor, collapsible 
wooden derrick, dynamiting paraphernalia, cording, rubbish-removal auger, and sectional piping for 
bores five inches wide and up to 1000 feet deep all formed, with needed accessories, no greater 
load than three seven-dog sledges could carry; this being made possible by the clever aluminum 
alloy of which most of the metal objects were   fashioned. Four large Dornier aëroplanes, designed 
especially for the tremendous altitude flying necessary on the antarctic plateau and with added 
fuel-warming and quick-starting devices worked out by Pabodie, could transport our entire expedition 
from a base at the edge of the great ice barrier to various suitable inland points, and from these 
points a sufficient quota of dogs would serve us. We planned to cover as great an area 
as one antarctic season—or longer,   if absolutely necessary—would permit, operating 
mostly in the mountain-ranges and on the plateau south of Ross Sea; regions explored in 
varying degree by Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott, and Byrd. With frequent changes of camp, made by 
aëroplane and involving distances great enough to be of geological significance, we expected to 
unearth a quite unprecedented amount of material; especially in the pre-Cambrian strata of which 
so narrow a range of antarctic specimens had previously been secured. We wished also to 
obtain as great as possible a variety of the upper fossiliferous rocks, since the primal 
life-history of this bleak realm of ice and death is of the highest importance to our knowledge of 
the earth’s past. That the antarctic continent was once temperate and even tropical, with a teeming 
vegetable and animal life of which the lichens, marine fauna, arachnida, and penguins of 
the northern edge are the only survivals,   is a matter of common information; and we 
hoped to expand that information in variety, accuracy, and detail. When a simple 
boring revealed fossiliferous signs, we would enlarge the aperture by blasting in order 
to get specimens of suitable size and condition. Our borings, of varying depth according to the 
promise held out by the upper soil or rock, were to be confined to exposed or nearly 
exposed land surfaces—these inevitably being slopes and ridges because of the mile or two-mile 
thickness of solid ice overlying the lower levels. We could not afford to waste drilling depth 
on any considerable amount of mere glaciation,   though Pabodie had worked out a plan for sinking 
copper electrodes in thick clusters of borings and melting off limited areas of ice with 
current from a gasoline-driven dynamo. It is this plan—which we could not put into effect 
except experimentally on an expedition such as ours—that the coming Starkweather-Moore Expedition 
proposes to follow despite the warnings I have issued since our return from the antarctic.
The public knows of the Miskatonic Expedition through our frequent wireless reports to 
the Arkham Advertiser and Associated Press,   and through the later articles of Pabodie 
and myself. We consisted of four men from the University—Pabodie, Lake of the biology 
department, Atwood of the physics department (also a meteorologist), and I representing geology and 
having nominal command—besides sixteen assistants; seven graduate students from Miskatonic and nine 
skilled mechanics. Of these sixteen, twelve were qualified aëroplane pilots, all but two of whom 
were competent wireless operators. Eight of them understood navigation with compass and sextant, 
as did Pabodie, Atwood, and I. In addition, of course, our two ships—wooden ex-whalers, 
reinforced for ice conditions and having   auxiliary steam—were fully manned. The Nathaniel 
Derby Pickman Foundation, aided by a few special contributions, financed the expedition; hence our 
preparations were extremely thorough despite the absence of great publicity. The dogs, sledges, 
machines, camp materials, and unassembled parts of our five planes were delivered in Boston, and 
there our ships were loaded. We were marvellously well-equipped for our specific purposes, and 
in all matters pertaining to supplies, regimen, transportation, and camp construction we profited 
by the excellent example of our many recent and exceptionally brilliant predecessors. It was the 
unusual number and fame of these predecessors which made our own expedition—ample though it 
was—so little noticed by the world at large. As the newspapers told, we sailed from Boston 
Harbour on September 2, 1930; taking a leisurely course down the coast and through the Panama 
Canal, and stopping at Samoa and Hobart, Tasmania, at which latter place we took on final supplies. 
None of our exploring party had ever been in the polar regions before, hence we all relied greatly 
on our ship captains—J. B. Douglas, commanding the brig Arkham, and serving as commander 
of the sea party, and Georg Thorfinnssen, commanding the barque Miskatonic—both veteran 
whalers in antarctic waters. As we left the inhabited world behind the sun sank lower and 
lower in the north, and stayed longer and longer above the horizon each day. At about 62° South 
Latitude we sighted our first icebergs—table-like objects with vertical sides—and just 
before reaching the Antarctic Circle,   which we crossed on October 20 with appropriately 
quaint ceremonies, we were considerably troubled with field ice. The falling temperature bothered 
me considerably after our long voyage through the tropics, but I tried to brace up for the worse 
rigours to come. On many occasions the curious atmospheric effects enchanted me vastly; these 
including a strikingly vivid mirage—the first I had ever seen—in which distant bergs became 
the battlements of unimaginable cosmic castles. Pushing through the ice, which was fortunately 
neither extensive nor thickly packed, we regained   open water at South Latitude 67°, East Longitude 
175°. On the morning of October 26 a strong “land blink” appeared on the south, and before noon we 
all felt a thrill of excitement at beholding a vast, lofty, and snow-clad mountain chain which 
opened out and covered the whole vista ahead. At last we had encountered an outpost of the great 
unknown continent and its cryptic world of frozen death. These peaks were obviously the Admiralty 
Range discovered by Ross, and it would now be our task to round Cape Adare and sail down the east 
coast of Victoria Land to our contemplated base on the shore of McMurdo Sound at the foot of 
the volcano Erebus in South Latitude 77° 9′. The last lap of the voyage was vivid and 
fancy-stirring, great barren peaks of   mystery looming up constantly against the west 
as the low northern sun of noon or the still lower horizon-grazing southern sun of midnight 
poured its hazy reddish rays over the white snow, bluish ice and water lanes, and black bits of 
exposed granite slope. Through the desolate summits swept raging intermittent gusts of the 
terrible antarctic wind; whose cadences sometimes held vague suggestions of a wild and half-sentient 
musical piping, with notes extending over a wide range, and which for some subconscious mnemonic 
reason seemed to me disquieting and even dimly terrible. Something about the scene reminded me 
of the strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich, and of the still stranger 
and more disturbing descriptions of the evilly fabled plateau of Leng which occur in the dreaded 
Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. I was rather sorry, later on, that I had ever looked 
into that monstrous book at the college library. On the seventh of November, sight of the 
westward range having been temporarily lost, we passed Franklin Island; and the next day 
descried the cones of Mts. Erebus and Fear on Ross Island ahead, with the long line of the 
Parry Mountains beyond. There now stretched off to the east the low, white line of the great ice 
barrier; rising perpendicularly to a height of 200 feet like the rocky cliffs of Quebec, and marking 
the end of southward navigation. In the afternoon we entered McMurdo Sound and stood off the coast 
in the lee of smoking Mt. Erebus. The scoriac peak towered up some 12,700 feet against the eastern 
sky, like a Japanese print of the sacred Fujiyama; while beyond it rose the white, ghost-like 
height of Mt. Fear, 10,900 feet in altitude, and now extinct as a volcano. Puffs of 
smoke from Erebus came intermittently, and one of the graduate assistants—a brilliant 
young fellow named Danforth—pointed out what looked like lava on the snowy slope; remarking 
that this mountain, discovered in 1840, had undoubtedly been the source of Poe’s 
image when he wrote seven years later of “—the lavas that restlessly roll
Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek
  In the ultimate climes of the pole—
That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek In the realms of the boreal pole.”
Danforth was a great reader of bizarre material, and had talked a good deal of Poe. I was 
interested myself because of the antarctic   scene of Poe’s only long story—the disturbing 
and enigmatical Arthur Gordon Pym. On the barren shore, and on the lofty ice barrier in the 
background, myriads of grotesque penguins squawked and flapped their fins; while many fat seals 
were visible on the water, swimming or sprawling across large cakes of slowly drifting ice.
Using small boats, we effected a difficult landing on Ross Island shortly after 
midnight on the morning of the 9th,   carrying a line of cable from each of the ships 
and preparing to unload supplies by means of a breeches-buoy arrangement. Our sensations on first 
treading antarctic soil were poignant and complex, even though at this particular point the Scott and 
Shackleton expeditions had preceded us. Our camp on the frozen shore below the volcano’s slope was 
only a provisional one; headquarters being kept   aboard the Arkham. We landed all our drilling 
apparatus, dogs, sledges, tents, provisions, gasoline tanks, experimental ice-melting outfit, 
cameras both ordinary and aërial, aëroplane parts, and other accessories, including three small 
portable wireless outfits (besides those in the planes) capable of communicating with 
the Arkham’s large outfit from any part of the antarctic continent that we would be likely 
to visit. The ship’s outfit, communicating with the outside world, was to convey press reports to 
the Arkham Advertiser’s powerful wireless station on Kingsport Head, Mass. We hoped to complete our 
work during a single antarctic summer; but if this proved impossible we would winter on the Arkham, 
sending the Miskatonic north before the freezing of the ice for another summer’s supplies.
I need not repeat what the newspapers have already published about our early work: of our 
ascent of Mt. Erebus; our successful mineral borings at several points on Ross Island 
and the singular speed with which Pabodie’s   apparatus accomplished them, even through solid 
rock layers; our provisional test of the small ice-melting equipment; our perilous ascent of 
the great barrier with sledges and supplies; and our final assembling of five huge 
aëroplanes at the camp atop the barrier. The health of our land party—twenty men 
and 55 Alaskan sledge dogs—was remarkable, though of course we had so far encountered no 
really destructive temperatures or windstorms.   For the most part, the thermometer varied between 
zero and 20° or 25° above, and our experience with New England winters had accustomed us to rigours 
of this sort. The barrier camp was semi-permanent, and destined to be a storage cache for gasoline, 
provisions, dynamite, and other supplies. Only four of our planes were needed to carry the 
actual exploring material, the fifth being left   with a pilot and two men from the ships at the 
storage cache to form a means of reaching us from the Arkham in case all our exploring planes were 
lost. Later, when not using all the other planes for moving apparatus, we would employ one or two 
in a shuttle transportation service between this cache and another permanent base on the great 
plateau from 600 to 700 miles southward, beyond Beardmore Glacier. Despite the almost unanimous 
accounts of appalling winds and tempests that pour down from the plateau, we determined to dispense 
with intermediate bases; taking our chances in the interest of economy and probable efficiency.
Wireless reports have spoken of the breath-taking four-hour non-stop flight of our squadron 
on November 21 over the lofty shelf ice, with vast peaks rising on the west, and the 
unfathomed silences echoing to the sound of our engines. Wind troubled us only moderately, 
and our radio compasses helped us through the one opaque fog we encountered. When the vast rise 
loomed ahead, between Latitudes 83° and 84°, we knew we had reached Beardmore Glacier, the 
largest valley glacier in the world, and that the frozen sea was now giving place to a frowning 
and mountainous coastline. At last we were truly entering the white, aeon-dead world of the 
ultimate south, and even as we realised it we saw the peak of Mt. Nansen in the eastern distance, 
towering up to its height of almost 15,000 feet. The successful establishment of the southern 
base above the glacier in Latitude 86° 7′, East Longitude 174° 23′, and the phenomenally 
rapid and effective borings and blastings made at various points reached by our sledge trips and 
short aëroplane flights, are matters of history; as is the arduous and triumphant ascent 
of Mt. Nansen by Pabodie and two of the graduate students—Gedney and Carroll—on December 
13–15. We were some 8500 feet above sea-level, and when experimental drillings revealed solid 
ground only twelve feet down through the snow   and ice at certain points, we made considerable 
use of the small melting apparatus and sunk bores and performed dynamiting at many places where no 
previous explorer had ever thought of securing mineral specimens. The pre-Cambrian granites and 
beacon sandstones thus obtained confirmed our belief that this plateau was homogeneous with 
the great bulk of the continent to the west,   but somewhat different from the parts lying 
eastward below South America—which we then thought to form a separate and smaller 
continent divided from the larger one   by a frozen junction of Ross and Weddell Seas, 
though Byrd has since disproved the hypothesis. In certain of the sandstones, dynamited and 
chiselled after boring revealed their nature, we found some highly interesting fossil markings 
and fragments—notably ferns, seaweeds, trilobites, crinoids, and such molluscs as lingulae 
and gasteropods—all of which seemed of real significance in connexion with the region’s 
primordial history. There was also a queer triangular, striated marking about a foot in 
greatest diameter which Lake pieced together from three fragments of slate brought up from a 
deep-blasted aperture. These fragments came from a point to the westward, near the Queen Alexandra 
Range; and Lake, as a biologist, seemed to find their curious marking unusually puzzling and 
provocative, though to my geological eye it looked not unlike some of the ripple effects reasonably 
common in the sedimentary rocks. Since slate is no more than a metamorphic formation into which 
a sedimentary stratum is pressed, and since the pressure itself produces odd distorting effects on 
any markings which may exist, I saw no reason for extreme wonder over the striated depression.
On January 6, 1931, Lake, Pabodie, Danforth, all six of the students, four mechanics, and I 
flew directly over the south pole in two of the great planes, being forced down once by a sudden 
high wind which fortunately did not develop into a typical storm. This was, as the papers have 
stated, one of several observation flights; during others of which we tried to discern 
new topographical features in areas unreached   by previous explorers. Our early flights 
were disappointing in this latter respect; though they afforded us some magnificent examples 
of the richly fantastic and deceptive mirages of the polar regions, of which our sea voyage had 
given us some brief foretastes. Distant mountains floated in the sky as enchanted cities, and often 
the whole white world would dissolve into a gold, silver, and scarlet land of Dunsanian 
dreams and adventurous expectancy under the magic of the low midnight sun. On cloudy 
days we had considerable trouble in flying, owing to the tendency of snowy earth and sky to 
merge into one mystical opalescent void with no visible horizon to mark the junction of the two.
At length we resolved to carry out our original plan of flying 500 miles eastward with all four 
exploring planes and establishing a fresh sub-base at a point which would probably be on the smaller 
continental division, as we mistakenly conceived it. Geological specimens obtained there would be 
desirable for purposes of comparison. Our health so far had remained excellent; lime-juice well 
offsetting the steady diet of tinned and salted food, and temperatures generally above zero 
enabling us to do without our thickest furs. It was now midsummer, and with haste and care 
we might be able to conclude work by March and avoid a tedious wintering through the long 
antarctic night. Several savage windstorms had burst upon us from the west, but we had escaped 
damage through the skill of Atwood in devising rudimentary aëroplane shelters and windbreaks of 
heavy snow blocks, and reinforcing the principal camp buildings with snow. Our good luck and 
efficiency had indeed been almost uncanny. The outside world knew, of course, of our 
programme, and was told also of Lake’s strange   and dogged insistence on a westward—or rather, 
northwestward—prospecting trip before our radical shift to the new base. It seems he had pondered 
a great deal, and with alarmingly radical daring, over that triangular striated marking in the 
slate; reading into it certain contradictions   in Nature and geological period which whetted his 
curiosity to the utmost, and made him avid to sink more borings and blastings in the west-stretching 
formation to which the exhumed fragments evidently belonged. He was strangely convinced that the 
marking was the print of some bulky, unknown, and radically unclassifiable organism 
of considerably advanced evolution,   notwithstanding that the rock which bore it 
was of so vastly ancient a date—Cambrian if not actually pre-Cambrian—as to preclude the probable 
existence not only of all highly evolved life, but of any life at all above the unicellular or 
at most the trilobite stage. These fragments, with their odd marking, must have been 500 million 
to a thousand million years old. Popular imagination, I judge, responded actively 
to our wireless bulletins of Lake’s start northwestward into regions never trodden by human 
foot or penetrated by human imagination; though we did not mention his wild hopes of revolutionising 
the entire sciences of biology and geology. His preliminary sledging and boring journey of January 
11–18 with Pabodie and five others—marred by the loss of two dogs in an upset when crossing one of 
the great pressure-ridges in the ice—had brought   up more and more of the Archaean slate; and even 
I was interested by the singular profusion of evident fossil markings in that unbelievably 
ancient stratum. These markings, however, were of very primitive life-forms involving no 
great paradox except that any life-forms should occur in rock as definitely pre-Cambrian as this 
seemed to be; hence I still failed to see the good sense of Lake’s demand for an interlude in our 
time-saving programme—an interlude requiring the use of all four planes, many men, and the whole of 
the expedition’s mechanical apparatus. I did not, in the end, veto the plan; though I decided 
not to accompany the northwestward party despite Lake’s plea for my geological advice. 
While they were gone, I would remain at the base with Pabodie and five men and work out final 
plans for the eastward shift. In preparation for this transfer one of the planes had begun to 
move up a good gasoline supply from McMurdo Sound; but this could wait temporarily. I kept with me 
one sledge and nine dogs, since it is unwise to be at any time without possible transportation in 
an utterly tenantless world of aeon-long death. Lake’s sub-expedition into the unknown, 
as everyone will recall, sent out its own reports from the short-wave transmitters on the 
planes; these being simultaneously picked up by our apparatus at the southern base and by the 
Arkham at McMurdo Sound, whence they were relayed to the outside world on wave-lengths up to fifty 
metres. The start was made January 22 at 4 A.M.; and the first wireless message we received 
came only two hours later, when Lake spoke of descending and starting a small-scale ice-melting 
and bore at a point some 300 miles away from us. Six hours after that a second and very excited 
message told of the frantic, beaver-like work whereby a shallow shaft had been sunk and blasted; 
culminating in the discovery of slate fragments with several markings approximately like the 
one which had caused the original puzzlement. Three hours later a brief bulletin announced 
the resumption of the flight in the teeth of   a raw and piercing gale; and when I despatched 
a message of protest against further hazards, Lake replied curtly that his new specimens 
made any hazard worth taking. I saw that his excitement had reached the point of mutiny, and 
that I could do nothing to check this headlong risk of the whole expedition’s success; but 
it was appalling to think of his plunging deeper and deeper into that treacherous 
and sinister white immensity of tempests   and unfathomed mysteries which stretched off for 
some 1500 miles to the half-known, half-suspected coast-line of Queen Mary and Knox Lands.
Then, in about an hour and a half more, came that doubly excited message from Lake’s 
moving plane which almost reversed my sentiments   and made me wish I had accompanied the party.
“10:05 P.M. On the wing. After snowstorm, have spied mountain-range ahead higher than any 
hitherto seen. May equal Himalayas allowing for height of plateau. Probable Latitude 76° 15′, 
Longitude 113° 10′ E. Reaches far as can see to right and left. Suspicion of two smoking 
cones. All peaks black and bare of snow. Gale blowing off them impedes navigation.”
After that Pabodie, the men, and I hung breathlessly over the receiver. Thought of this 
titanic mountain rampart 700 miles away inflamed our deepest sense of adventure; and we rejoiced 
that our expedition, if not ourselves personally, had been its discoverers. In half 
an hour Lake called us again. “Moulton’s plane forced down on plateau in 
foothills, but nobody hurt and perhaps can   repair. Shall transfer essentials to other three 
for return or further moves if necessary, but no more heavy plane travel needed just now. Mountains 
surpass anything in imagination. Am going up scouting in Carroll’s plane, with all weight out. 
You can’t imagine anything like this. Highest peaks must go over 35,000 feet. Everest out of the 
running. Atwood to work out height with theodolite while Carroll and I go up. Probably wrong about 
cones, for formations look stratified. Possibly pre-Cambrian slate with other strata mixed in. 
Queer skyline effects—regular sections of cubes clinging to highest peaks. Whole thing marvellous 
in red-gold light of low sun. Like land of mystery in a dream or gateway to forbidden world of 
untrodden wonder. Wish you were here to study.” Though it was technically sleeping-time, not 
one of us listeners thought for a moment of   retiring. It must have been a good deal the same 
at McMurdo Sound, where the supply cache and the Arkham were also getting the messages; for Capt. 
Douglas gave out a call congratulating everybody on the important find, and Sherman, the cache 
operator, seconded his sentiments. We were sorry, of course, about the damaged aëroplane; 
but hoped it could be easily mended. Then, at 11 P.M., came another call from Lake.
“Up with Carroll over highest foothills. Don’t dare try really tall peaks in present 
weather, but shall later. Frightful work climbing,   and hard going at this altitude, but 
worth it. Great range fairly solid, hence can’t get any glimpses beyond. Main summits 
exceed Himalayas, and very queer. Range looks like pre-Cambrian slate, with plain signs of many other 
upheaved strata. Was wrong about volcanism. Goes farther in either direction than we can see. 
Swept clear of snow above about 21,000 feet. Odd formations on slopes of highest mountains. 
Great low square blocks with exactly vertical sides, and rectangular lines of low vertical 
ramparts, like the old Asian castles clinging to steep mountains in Roerich’s paintings. 
Impressive from distance. Flew close to some, and Carroll thought they were formed of smaller 
separate pieces, but that is probably weathering. Most edges crumbled and rounded off as if exposed 
to storms and climate changes for millions of   years. Parts, especially upper parts, seem to be 
of lighter-coloured rock than any visible strata on slopes proper, hence an evidently crystalline 
origin. Close flying shews many cave-mouths, some unusually regular in outline, square or 
semicircular. You must come and investigate. Think I saw rampart squarely on top of one 
peak. Height seems about 30,000 to 35,000 feet. Am up 21,500 myself, in devilish gnawing cold. 
Wind whistles and pipes through passes and in and out of caves, but no flying danger so far.”
From then on for another half-hour Lake kept up a running fire of comment, and expressed his 
intention of climbing some of the peaks on foot. I replied that I would join him as soon as he could 
send a plane, and that Pabodie and I would work   out the best gasoline plan—just where and how to 
concentrate our supply in view of the expedition’s altered character. Obviously, Lake’s boring 
operations, as well as his aëroplane activities, would need a great deal delivered for the new 
base which he was to establish at the foot of the   mountains; and it was possible that the eastward 
flight might not be made after all this season. In connexion with this business I called Capt. 
Douglas and asked him to get as much as possible out of the ships and up the barrier with the 
single dog-team we had left there. A direct route across the unknown region between Lake and McMurdo 
Sound was what we really ought to establish. Lake called me later to say that he had 
decided to let the camp stay where Moulton’s   plane had been forced down, and where 
repairs had already progressed somewhat. The ice-sheet was very thin, with dark ground here 
and there visible, and he would sink some borings and blasts at that very point before making any 
sledge trips or climbing expeditions. He spoke of the ineffable majesty of the whole scene, and 
the queer state of his sensations at being in the lee of vast silent pinnacles whose ranks shot up 
like a wall reaching the sky at the world’s rim. Atwood’s theodolite observations had placed 
the height of the five tallest peaks at from   30,000 to 34,000 feet. The windswept nature of the 
terrain clearly disturbed Lake, for it argued the occasional existence of prodigious gales violent 
beyond anything we had so far encountered. His camp lay a little more than five miles from 
where the higher foothills abruptly rose. I could almost trace a note of subconscious alarm 
in his words—flashed across a glacial void of 700 miles—as he urged that we all hasten with the 
matter and get the strange new region disposed of as soon as possible. He was about to rest 
now, after a continuous day’s work of almost unparalleled speed, strenuousness, and results.
In the morning I had a three-cornered wireless talk with Lake and Capt. Douglas 
at their widely separated bases;   and it was agreed that one of Lake’s planes 
would come to my base for Pabodie, the five men, and myself, as well as for all the fuel it 
could carry. The rest of the fuel question, depending on our decision about an easterly trip, 
could wait for a few days; since Lake had enough for immediate camp heat and borings. Eventually 
the old southern base ought to be restocked; but if we postponed the easterly trip we would 
not use it till the next summer, and meanwhile   Lake must send a plane to explore a direct route 
between his new mountains and McMurdo Sound. Pabodie and I prepared to close our base for a 
short or long period, as the case might be. If we wintered in the antarctic we would probably fly 
straight from Lake’s base to the Arkham without returning to this spot. Some of our conical 
tents had already been reinforced by blocks of hard snow, and now we decided to complete 
the job of making a permanent Esquimau village. Owing to a very liberal tent supply, Lake had 
with him all that his base would need even after our arrival. I wirelessed that Pabodie 
and I would be ready for the northwestward move after one day’s work and one night’s rest.
Our labours, however, were not very steady after 4 P.M.; for about that time Lake began sending in 
the most extraordinary and excited messages. His working day had started unpropitiously; since 
an aëroplane survey of the nearly exposed rock surfaces shewed an entire absence of those 
Archaean and primordial strata for which he was looking, and which formed so great a part of 
the colossal peaks that loomed up at a tantalising distance from the camp. Most of the rocks glimpsed 
were apparently Jurassic and Comanchian sandstones and Permian and Triassic schists, with now and 
then a glossy black outcropping suggesting a hard and slaty coal. This rather discouraged 
Lake, whose plans all hinged on unearthing specimens more than 500 million years older. 
It was clear to him that in order to recover   the Archaean slate vein in which he had found 
the odd markings, he would have to make a long sledge trip from these foothills to the steep 
slopes of the gigantic mountains themselves. He had resolved, nevertheless, to do some local 
boring as part of the expedition’s general programme; hence set up the drill and put five men 
to work with it while the rest finished settling the camp and repairing the damaged aëroplane. The 
softest visible rock—a sandstone about a quarter of a mile from the camp—had been chosen for the 
first sampling; and the drill made excellent progress without much supplementary blasting. 
It was about three hours afterward, following the first really heavy blast of the operation, 
that the shouting of the drill crew was heard; and that young Gedney—the acting foreman—rushed 
into the camp with the startling news. They had struck a cave. Early in the boring 
the sandstone had given place to a vein of Comanchian limestone full of minute fossil 
cephalopods, corals, echini, and spirifera, and with occasional suggestions of siliceous 
sponges and marine vertebrate bones—the latter probably of teliosts, sharks, and ganoids. This 
in itself was important enough, as affording the first vertebrate fossils the expedition had yet 
secured; but when shortly afterward the drill-head   dropped through the stratum into apparent vacancy, 
a wholly new and doubly intense wave of excitement spread among the excavators. A good-sized blast 
had laid open the subterrene secret; and now, through a jagged aperture perhaps five feet across 
and three feet thick, there yawned before the avid searchers a section of shallow limestone hollowing 
worn more than fifty million years ago by the trickling ground waters of a bygone tropic world.
The hollowed layer was not more than seven or eight feet deep, but extended off indefinitely in 
all directions and had a fresh, slightly moving air which suggested its membership in an extensive 
subterranean system. Its roof and floor were abundantly equipped with large stalactites and 
stalagmites, some of which met in columnar form; but important above all else was the vast 
deposit of shells and bones which in places nearly choked the passage. Washed down from 
unknown jungles of Mesozoic tree-ferns and fungi, and forests of Tertiary cycads, 
fan-palms, and primitive angiosperms, this osseous medley contained representatives 
of more Cretaceous, Eocene, and other animal species than the greatest palaeontologist could 
have counted or classified in a year. Molluscs, crustacean armour, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, 
birds, and early mammals—great and small, known and unknown. No wonder Gedney ran back to the camp 
shouting, and no wonder everyone else dropped work and rushed headlong through the biting cold to 
where the tall derrick marked a new-found gateway to secrets of inner earth and vanished aeons.
When Lake had satisfied the first keen edge of his curiosity he scribbled a message in his notebook 
and had young Moulton run back to the camp to despatch it by wireless. This was my first word of 
the discovery, and it told of the identification of early shells, bones of ganoids and placoderms, 
remnants of labyrinthodonts and thecodonts, great mososaur skull fragments, dinosaur vertebrae and 
armour-plates, pterodactyl teeth and wing-bones, archaeopteryx debris, Miocene sharks’ teeth, 
primitive bird-skulls, and skulls, vertebrae, and other bones of archaic mammals such as 
palaeotheres, xiphodons, dinocerases, eohippi, oreodons, and titanotheres. There was nothing 
as recent as a mastodon, elephant, true camel, deer, or bovine animal; hence Lake concluded 
that the last deposits had occurred during the Oligocene age, and that the hollowed stratum had 
lain in its present dried, dead, and inaccessible state for at least thirty million years.
On the other hand, the prevalence of very early life-forms was singular in the highest 
degree. Though the limestone formation was, on the evidence of such typical imbedded fossils 
as ventriculites, positively and unmistakably Comanchian and not a particle earlier; the 
free fragments in the hollow space included a surprising proportion from organisms hitherto 
considered as peculiar to far older periods—even rudimentary fishes, molluscs, and corals as remote 
as the Silurian or Ordovician. The inevitable inference was that in this part of the world 
there had been a remarkable and unique degree of   continuity between the life of over 300 million 
years ago and that of only thirty million years ago. How far this continuity had extended beyond 
the Oligocene age when the cavern was closed, was of course past all speculation. In any event, 
the coming of the frightful ice in the Pleistocene some 500,000 years ago—a mere yesterday as 
compared with the age of this cavity—must have put an end to any of the primal forms which had 
locally managed to outlive their common terms. Lake was not content to let his first message 
stand, but had another bulletin written and   despatched across the snow to the camp before 
Moulton could get back. After that Moulton stayed at the wireless in one of the planes; transmitting 
to me—and to the Arkham for relaying to the   outside world—the frequent postscripts which Lake 
sent him by a succession of messengers. Those who followed the newspapers will remember the 
excitement created among men of science by that   afternoon’s reports—reports which have finally 
led, after all these years, to the organisation of that very Starkweather-Moore Expedition which 
I am so anxious to dissuade from its purposes. I had better give the messages literally as 
Lake sent them, and as our base operator McTighe translated them from his pencil shorthand.
“Fowler makes discovery of highest importance in sandstone and limestone fragments from 
blasts. Several distinct triangular striated prints like those in Archaean slate, proving 
that source survived from over 600 million years ago to Comanchian times without more than 
moderate morphological changes and decrease in average size. Comanchian prints apparently 
more primitive or decadent, if anything, than older ones. Emphasise importance of discovery 
in press. Will mean to biology what Einstein has meant to mathematics and physics. Joins up with my 
previous work and amplifies conclusions. Appears to indicate, as I suspected, that earth has seen 
whole cycle or cycles of organic life before known one that begins with Archaeozoic cells. Was 
evolved and specialised not later than thousand million years ago, when planet was young and 
recently uninhabitable for any life-forms or normal protoplasmic structure. Question arises 
when, where, and how development took place.” “Later. Examining certain skeletal fragments 
of large land and marine saurians and primitive mammals, find singular local wounds or injuries 
to bony structure not attributable to any known predatory or carnivorous animal of any 
period. Of two sorts—straight, penetrant bores, and apparently hacking incisions. One or 
two cases of cleanly severed bone. Not many specimens affected. Am sending to camp 
for electric torches. Will extend search area underground by hacking away stalactites.”
“Still later. Have found peculiar soapstone fragment about six inches across and an inch 
and a half thick, wholly unlike any visible local formation. Greenish, but no evidences to 
place its period. Has curious smoothness and regularity. Shaped like five-pointed star with 
tips broken off, and signs of other cleavage at inward angles and in centre of surface. 
Small, smooth depression in centre of unbroken surface. Arouses much curiosity as to source and 
weathering. Probably some freak of water action. Carroll, with magnifier, thinks he can make out 
additional markings of geologic significance.   Groups of tiny dots in regular patterns. Dogs 
growing uneasy as we work, and seem to hate this soapstone. Must see if it has any peculiar 
odour. Will report again when Mills gets back with light and we start on underground area.”
“10:15 P.M. Important discovery. Orrendorf and Watkins, working underground at 9:45 with 
light, found monstrous barrel-shaped fossil of wholly unknown nature; probably vegetable unless 
overgrown specimen of unknown marine radiata. Tissue evidently preserved by mineral salts. 
Tough as leather, but astonishing flexibility retained in places. Marks of broken-off parts 
at ends and around sides. Six feet end to end, 3.5 feet central diameter, tapering to 1 foot at 
each end. Like a barrel with five bulging ridges in place of staves. Lateral breakages, as of 
thinnish stalks, are at equator in middle of these ridges. In furrows between ridges are 
curious growths. Combs or wings that fold up   and spread out like fans. All greatly damaged but 
one, which gives almost seven-foot wing spread. Arrangement reminds one of certain monsters of 
primal myth, especially fabled Elder Things in   Necronomicon. These wings seem to be membraneous, 
stretched on framework of glandular tubing. Apparent minute orifices in frame tubing at wing 
tips. Ends of body shrivelled, giving no clue to interior or to what has been broken off there. 
Must dissect when we get back to camp. Can’t decide whether vegetable or animal. Many features 
obviously of almost incredible primitiveness. Have set all hands cutting stalactites and looking for 
further specimens. Additional scarred bones found, but these must wait. Having trouble with 
dogs. They can’t endure the new specimen,   and would probably tear it to pieces if we 
didn’t keep it at a distance from them.” “11:30 P.M. Attention, Dyer, Pabodie, 
Douglas. Matter of highest—I might say transcendent—importance. Arkham must relay 
to Kingsport Head Station at once. Strange barrel growth is the Archaean thing that 
left prints in rocks. Mills, Boudreau, and Fowler discover cluster of thirteen more 
at underground point forty feet from aperture.   Mixed with curiously rounded and configured 
soapstone fragments smaller than one previously found—star-shaped but no marks of breakage except 
at some of the points. Of organic specimens, eight apparently perfect, with all appendages. 
Have brought all to surface, leading off dogs   to distance. They cannot stand the things. 
Give close attention to description and repeat back for accuracy. Papers must get this right.
“Objects are eight feet long all over. Six-foot five-ridged barrel torso 3.5 feet central 
diameter, 1 foot end diameters. Dark grey, flexible, and infinitely tough. Seven-foot 
membraneous wings of same colour, found folded, spread out of furrows between ridges. Wing 
framework tubular or glandular, of lighter grey, with orifices at wing tips. Spread wings have 
serrated edge. Around equator, one at central apex of each of the five vertical, stave-like 
ridges, are five systems of light grey flexible arms or tentacles found tightly folded to torso 
but expansible to maximum length of over 3 feet. Like arms of primitive crinoid. Single stalks 3 
inches diameter branch after 6 inches into five sub-stalks, each of which branches after 8 inches 
into five small, tapering tentacles or tendrils, giving each stalk a total of 25 tentacles.
“At top of torso blunt bulbous neck of lighter grey with gill-like suggestions holds yellowish 
five-pointed starfish-shaped apparent head covered with three-inch wiry cilia of various 
prismatic colours. Head thick and puffy, about 2 feet point to point, with three-inch flexible 
yellowish tubes projecting from each point. Slit in exact centre of top probably breathing 
aperture. At end of each tube is spherical expansion where yellowish membrane rolls back 
on handling to reveal glassy, red-irised globe, evidently an eye. Five slightly longer reddish 
tubes start from inner angles of starfish-shaped head and end in sac-like swellings of same colour 
which upon pressure open to bell-shaped orifices 2 inches maximum diameter and lined with 
sharp white tooth-like projections. Probable mouths. All these tubes, cilia, and points of 
starfish-head found folded tightly down; tubes and points clinging to bulbous neck and torso. 
Flexibility surprising despite vast toughness. “At bottom of torso rough but dissimilarly 
functioning counterparts of head arrangements   exist. Bulbous light-grey pseudo-neck, without 
gill suggestions, holds greenish five-pointed starfish-arrangement. Tough, muscular arms 4 feet 
long and tapering from 7 inches diameter at base to about 2.5 at point. To each point is attached 
small end of a greenish five-veined membraneous triangle 8 inches long and 6 wide at farther 
end. This is the paddle, fin, or pseudo-foot which has made prints in rocks from a thousand 
million to fifty or sixty million years old. From inner angles of starfish-arrangement project 
two-foot reddish tubes tapering from 3 inches diameter at base to 1 at tip. Orifices at tips. 
All these parts infinitely tough and leathery, but extremely flexible. Four-foot arms with 
paddles undoubtedly used for locomotion of some sort, marine or otherwise. When moved, display 
suggestions of exaggerated muscularity. As found, all these projections tightly folded 
over pseudo-neck and end of torso,   corresponding to projections at other end.
“Cannot yet assign positively to animal or vegetable kingdom, but odds now favour animal. 
Probably represents incredibly advanced evolution of radiata without loss of certain primitive 
features. Echinoderm resemblances unmistakable despite local contradictory evidences. Wing 
structure puzzles in view of probable marine habitat, but may have use in water navigation. 
Symmetry is curiously vegetable-like, suggesting vegetable’s essentially up-and-down structure 
rather than animal’s fore-and-aft structure. Fabulously early date of evolution, preceding 
even simplest Archaean protozoa hitherto known, baffles all conjecture as to origin.
“Complete specimens have such uncanny resemblance to certain creatures of primal 
myth that suggestion of ancient existence   outside antarctic becomes inevitable. Dyer 
and Pabodie have read Necronomicon and seen Clark Ashton Smith’s nightmare paintings based on 
text, and will understand when I speak of Elder Things supposed to have created all earth-life 
as jest or mistake. Students have always thought conception formed from morbid imaginative 
treatment of very ancient tropical radiata. Also like prehistoric folklore things Wilmarth 
has spoken of—Cthulhu cult appendages, etc. “Vast field of study opened. Deposits probably 
of late Cretaceous or early Eocene period, judging from associated specimens. Massive 
stalagmites deposited above them. Hard work hewing out, but toughness prevented damage. 
State of preservation miraculous, evidently owing to limestone action. No more found so 
far, but will resume search later. Job now to get fourteen huge specimens to camp without 
dogs, which bark furiously and can’t be trusted near them. With nine men—three left to guard 
the dogs—we ought to manage the three sledges fairly well, though wind is bad. Must establish 
plane communication with McMurdo Sound and begin shipping material. But I’ve got to dissect one of 
these things before we take any rest. Wish I had a real laboratory here. Dyer better kick himself 
for having tried to stop my westward trip. First the world’s greatest mountains, and then this. If 
this last isn’t the high spot of the expedition,   I don’t know what is. We’re made scientifically. 
Congrats, Pabodie, on the drill that opened up the cave. Now will Arkham please repeat description?”
The sensations of Pabodie and myself at receipt of this report were almost beyond description, nor 
were our companions much behind us in enthusiasm. McTighe, who had hastily translated a few high 
spots as they came from the droning receiving set, wrote out the entire message from his shorthand 
version as soon as Lake’s operator signed off. All appreciated the epoch-making significance of 
the discovery, and I sent Lake congratulations as soon as the Arkham’s operator had repeated 
back the descriptive parts as requested; and my example was followed by Sherman from his 
station at the McMurdo Sound supply cache, as well as by Capt. Douglas of the Arkham. Later, as 
head of the expedition, I added some remarks to be relayed through the Arkham to the outside world. 
Of course, rest was an absurd thought amidst this excitement; and my only wish was to get to Lake’s 
camp as quickly as I could. It disappointed me when he sent word that a rising mountain 
gale made early aërial travel impossible. But within an hour and a half interest again 
rose to banish disappointment. Lake was sending more messages, and told of the completely 
successful transportation of the fourteen   great specimens to the camp. It had been a hard 
pull, for the things were surprisingly heavy; but nine men had accomplished it very neatly. Now 
some of the party were hurriedly building a snow corral at a safe distance from the camp, to which 
the dogs could be brought for greater convenience in feeding. The specimens were laid out on the 
hard snow near the camp, save for one on which Lake was making crude attempts at dissection.
This dissection seemed to be a greater task than had been expected; for despite the heat of a 
gasoline stove in the newly raised laboratory   tent, the deceptively flexible tissues of the 
chosen specimen—a powerful and intact one—lost nothing of their more than leathery toughness. 
Lake was puzzled as to how he might make the requisite incisions without violence destructive 
enough to upset all the structural niceties he was looking for. He had, it is true, seven more 
perfect specimens; but these were too few to use up recklessly unless the cave might later yield 
an unlimited supply. Accordingly he removed the specimen and dragged in one which, though 
having remnants of the starfish-arrangements   at both ends, was badly crushed and partly 
disrupted along one of the great torso furrows. Results, quickly reported over the wireless, were 
baffling and provocative indeed. Nothing like delicacy or accuracy was possible with instruments 
hardly able to cut the anomalous tissue,   but the little that was achieved left us all awed 
and bewildered. Existing biology would have to be wholly revised, for this thing was no product 
of any cell-growth science knows about. There had been scarcely any mineral replacement, and 
despite an age of perhaps forty million years the internal organs were wholly intact. The leathery, 
undeteriorative, and almost indestructible quality was an inherent attribute of the thing’s form of 
organisation; and pertained to some palaeogean cycle of invertebrate evolution utterly beyond 
our powers of speculation. At first all that Lake found was dry, but as the heated tent produced 
its thawing effect, organic moisture of pungent and offensive odour was encountered toward 
the thing’s uninjured side. It was not blood, but a thick, dark-green fluid apparently answering 
the same purpose. By the time Lake reached this stage all 37 dogs had been brought to the still 
uncompleted corral near the camp; and even at that distance set up a savage barking and show 
of restlessness at the acrid, diffusive smell. Far from helping to place the strange entity, 
this provisional dissection merely deepened its mystery. All guesses about its external 
members had been correct, and on the evidence of these one could hardly hesitate to call the thing 
animal; but internal inspection brought up so many vegetable evidences that Lake was left hopelessly 
at sea. It had digestion and circulation, and eliminated waste matter through the reddish 
tubes of its starfish-shaped base. Cursorily, one would say that its respiratory apparatus 
handled oxygen rather than carbon dioxide; and there were odd evidences of air-storage 
chambers and methods of shifting respiration from the external orifice to at least two other 
fully developed breathing-systems—gills and pores. Clearly, it was amphibian and probably adapted to 
long airless hibernation-periods as well. Vocal organs seemed present in connexion with the main 
respiratory system, but they presented anomalies beyond immediate solution. Articulate speech, in 
the sense of syllable-utterance, seemed barely conceivable; but musical piping notes covering 
a wide range were highly probable. The muscular system was almost preternaturally developed.
The nervous system was so complex and highly developed as to leave Lake aghast. Though 
excessively primitive and archaic in some respects, the thing had a set of ganglial 
centres and connectives arguing the very extremes of specialised development. Its 
five-lobed brain was surprisingly advanced; and there were signs of a sensory equipment, 
served in part through the wiry cilia of the head, involving factors alien to any other terrestrial 
organism. Probably it had more than five senses, so that its habits could not be predicted from 
any existing analogy. It must, Lake thought, have been a creature of keen sensitiveness and 
delicately differentiated functions in its primal world; much like the ants and bees of today. 
It reproduced like the vegetable cryptogams, especially the pteridophytes; having spore-cases 
at the tips of the wings and evidently   developing from a thallus or prothallus.
But to give it a name at this stage was mere folly. It looked like a radiate, but was 
clearly something more. It was partly vegetable, but had three-fourths of the essentials of 
animal structure. That it was marine in origin, its symmetrical contour and certain 
other attributes clearly indicated;   yet one could not be exact as to the limit of 
its later adaptations. The wings, after all, held a persistent suggestion of the aërial. 
How it could have undergone its tremendously   complex evolution on a new-born earth in time to 
leave prints in Archaean rocks was so far beyond conception as to make Lake whimsically recall the 
primal myths about Great Old Ones who filtered down from the stars and concocted earth-life as 
a joke or mistake; and the wild tales of cosmic hill things from Outside told by a folklorist 
colleague in Miskatonic’s English department. Naturally, he considered the possibility of the 
pre-Cambrian prints’ having been made by a less evolved ancestor of the present specimens; but 
quickly rejected this too facile theory upon considering the advanced structural qualities of 
the older fossils. If anything, the later contours shewed decadence rather than higher evolution. 
The size of the pseudo-feet had decreased, and the whole morphology seemed coarsened and simplified. 
Moreover, the nerves and organs just examined held singular suggestions of retrogression from forms 
still more complex. Atrophied and vestigial parts were surprisingly prevalent. Altogether, 
little could be said to have been solved; and Lake fell back on mythology for a provisional 
name—jocosely dubbing his finds “The Elder Ones”. At about 2:30 A.M., having decided to postpone 
further work and get a little rest, he covered the dissected organism with a tarpaulin, emerged 
from the laboratory tent, and studied the intact specimens with renewed interest. The ceaseless 
antarctic sun had begun to limber up their tissues a trifle, so that the head-points and tubes of 
two or three shewed signs of unfolding; but Lake did not believe there was any danger of immediate 
decomposition in the almost sub-zero air. He did, however, move all the undissected specimens closer 
together and throw a spare tent over them in order to keep off the direct solar rays. That would also 
help to keep their possible scent away from the dogs, whose hostile unrest was really becoming 
a problem even at their substantial distance and behind the higher and higher snow walls which an 
increased quota of the men were hastening to raise around their quarters. He had to weight down the 
corners of the tent-cloth with heavy blocks of snow to hold it in place amidst the rising gale, 
for the titan mountains seemed about to deliver some gravely severe blasts. Early apprehensions 
about sudden antarctic winds were revived, and under Atwood’s supervision precautions 
were taken to bank the tents, new dog-corral,   and crude aëroplane shelters with snow on 
the mountainward side. These latter shelters, begun with hard snow blocks during odd moments, 
were by no means as high as they should have been; and Lake finally detached all hands 
from other tasks to work on them. It was after four when Lake at last prepared 
to sign off and advised us all to share the rest period his outfit would take when the shelter 
walls were a little higher. He held some friendly chat with Pabodie over the ether, and repeated 
his praise of the really marvellous drills that had helped him make his discovery. Atwood also 
sent greetings and praises. I gave Lake a warm word of congratulation, owning up that he was 
right about the western trip; and we all agreed   to get in touch by wireless at ten in the morning. 
If the gale was then over, Lake would send a plane for the party at my base. Just before retiring 
I despatched a final message to the Arkham with instructions about toning down the day’s news for 
the outside world, since the full details seemed radical enough to rouse a wave of incredulity 
until further substantiated. None of us, I imagine, slept very heavily or 
continuously that morning; for both the excitement of Lake’s discovery and the mounting fury of the 
wind were against such a thing. So savage was the blast, even where we were, that we could not help 
wondering how much worse it was at Lake’s camp, directly under the vast unknown peaks that bred 
and delivered it. McTighe was awake at ten o’clock and tried to get Lake on the wireless, as agreed, 
but some electrical condition in the disturbed air to the westward seemed to prevent communication. 
We did, however, get the Arkham, and Douglas told me that he had likewise been vainly trying to 
reach Lake. He had not known about the wind, for very little was blowing at McMurdo Sound 
despite its persistent rage where we were. Throughout the day we all listened anxiously and 
tried to get Lake at intervals, but invariably without results. About noon a positive 
frenzy of wind stampeded out of the west, causing us to fear for the safety of our camp; 
but it eventually died down, with only a moderate relapse at 2 P.M. After three o’clock it was 
very quiet, and we redoubled our efforts to get Lake. Reflecting that he had four planes, each 
provided with an excellent short-wave outfit, we could not imagine any ordinary accident capable 
of crippling all his wireless equipment at once. Nevertheless the stony silence continued; and 
when we thought of the delirious force the wind must have had in his locality we could not 
help making the most direful conjectures. By six o’clock our fears had become intense and 
definite, and after a wireless consultation with Douglas and Thorfinnssen I resolved to take steps 
toward investigation. The fifth aëroplane, which we had left at the McMurdo Sound supply cache 
with Sherman and two sailors, was in good shape and ready for instant use; and it seemed that the 
very emergency for which it had been saved was now upon us. I got Sherman by wireless and ordered 
him to join me with the plane and the two sailors at the southern base as quickly as possible; the 
air conditions being apparently highly favourable. We then talked over the personnel of the coming 
investigation party; and decided that we would include all hands, together with the sledge 
and dogs which I had kept with me. Even so great a load would not be too much for one of 
the huge planes built to our especial orders for heavy machinery transportation. 
At intervals I still tried to reach Lake with the wireless, but all to no purpose.
Sherman, with the sailors Gunnarsson and Larsen, took off at 7:30; and reported a quiet flight 
from several points on the wing. They arrived at our base at midnight, and all hands at 
once discussed the next move. It was risky business sailing over the antarctic in a single 
aëroplane without any line of bases, but no one drew back from what seemed like the plainest 
necessity. We turned in at two o’clock for a   brief rest after some preliminary loading 
of the plane, but were up again in four hours to finish the loading and packing.
At 7:15 A.M., January 25th, we started flying northwestward under McTighe’s pilotage with ten 
men, seven dogs, a sledge, a fuel and food supply, and other items including the plane’s wireless 
outfit. The atmosphere was clear, fairly quiet, and relatively mild in temperature; and we 
anticipated very little trouble in reaching   the latitude and longitude designated by Lake 
as the site of his camp. Our apprehensions were over what we might find, or fail to find, at 
the end of our journey; for silence continued to answer all calls despatched to the camp.
Every incident of that four-and-a-half-hour flight is burned into my recollection because of its 
crucial position in my life. It marked my loss, at the age of fifty-four, of all that peace and 
balance which the normal mind possesses through its accustomed conception of external Nature 
and Nature’s laws. Thenceforward the ten of us—but the student Danforth and myself above all 
others—were to face a hideously amplified world of lurking horrors which nothing can erase from 
our emotions, and which we would refrain from sharing with mankind in general if we could. The 
newspapers have printed the bulletins we sent from the moving plane; telling of our non-stop course, 
our two battles with treacherous upper-air gales, our glimpse of the broken surface where Lake had 
sunk his mid-journey shaft three days before, and our sight of a group of those strange fluffy 
snow-cylinders noted by Amundsen and Byrd as rolling in the wind across the endless leagues 
of frozen plateau. There came a point, though, when our sensations could not be conveyed 
in any words the press would understand;   and a later point when we had to adopt 
an actual rule of strict censorship. The sailor Larsen was first to spy the jagged 
line of witch-like cones and pinnacles ahead, and his shouts sent everyone to the windows 
of the great cabined plane. Despite our speed, they were very slow in gaining prominence; hence 
we knew that they must be infinitely far off, and visible only because of their abnormal 
height. Little by little, however, they rose grimly into the western sky; allowing us to 
distinguish various bare, bleak, blackish summits, and to catch the curious sense of phantasy which 
they inspired as seen in the reddish antarctic light against the provocative background 
of iridescent ice-dust clouds. In the whole spectacle there was a persistent, pervasive hint 
of stupendous secrecy and potential revelation; as if these stark, nightmare spires marked the 
pylons of a frightful gateway into forbidden spheres of dream, and complex gulfs of remote 
time, space, and ultra-dimensionality. I could not help feeling that they were evil things—mountains 
of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething, 
half-luminous cloud-background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness 
far more than terrestrially spatial; and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, 
separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world.
It was young Danforth who drew our notice to the curious regularities of the higher mountain 
skyline—regularities like clinging fragments of perfect cubes, which Lake had mentioned in 
his messages, and which indeed justified his comparison with the dream-like suggestions 
of primordial temple-ruins on cloudy Asian mountain-tops so subtly and strangely painted by 
Roerich. There was indeed something hauntingly Roerich-like about this whole unearthly continent 
of mountainous mystery. I had felt it in October when we first caught sight of Victoria Land, and 
I felt it afresh now. I felt, too, another wave of uneasy consciousness of Archaean mythical 
resemblances; of how disturbingly this lethal realm corresponded to the evilly famed plateau 
of Leng in the primal writings. Mythologists have placed Leng in Central Asia; but the racial 
memory of man—or of his predecessors—is long, and it may well be that certain tales have come down 
from lands and mountains and temples of horror   earlier than Asia and earlier than any human 
world we know. A few daring mystics have hinted at a pre-Pleistocene origin for the fragmentary 
Pnakotic Manuscripts, and have suggested that the devotees of Tsathoggua were as alien to mankind as 
Tsathoggua itself. Leng, wherever in space or time it might brood, was not a region I would care to 
be in or near; nor did I relish the proximity of a world that had ever bred such ambiguous and 
Archaean monstrosities as those Lake had just mentioned. At the moment I felt sorry that 
I had ever read the abhorred Necronomicon, or talked so much with that unpleasantly 
erudite folklorist Wilmarth at the university. This mood undoubtedly served to aggravate my 
reaction to the bizarre mirage which burst upon us from the increasingly opalescent zenith 
as we drew near the mountains and began to make out the cumulative undulations of the foothills. 
I had seen dozens of polar mirages during the preceding weeks, some of them quite as uncanny 
and fantastically vivid as the present sample; but this one had a wholly novel and 
obscure quality of menacing symbolism, and I shuddered as the seething labyrinth of 
fabulous walls and towers and minarets loomed out of the troubled ice-vapours above our heads.
The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to human imagination, 
with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical 
laws and attaining the most grotesque extremes of sinister bizarrerie. There were truncated cones, 
sometimes terraced or fluted, surmounted by tall cylindrical shafts here and there bulbously 
enlarged and often capped with tiers of   thinnish scalloped discs; and strange, beetling, 
table-like constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous rectangular slabs or circular plates 
or five-pointed stars with each one overlapping the one beneath. There were composite cones and 
pyramids either alone or surmounting cylinders or cubes or flatter truncated cones and pyramids, and 
occasional needle-like spires in curious clusters of five. All of these febrile structures seemed 
knit together by tubular bridges crossing from one to the other at various dizzy heights, and 
the implied scale of the whole was terrifying and oppressive in its sheer giganticism. The general 
type of mirage was not unlike some of the wilder forms observed and drawn by the Arctic whaler 
Scoresby in 1820; but at this time and place, with those dark, unknown mountain peaks soaring 
stupendously ahead, that anomalous elder-world discovery in our minds, and the pall of probable 
disaster enveloping the greater part of our expedition, we all seemed to find in it a taint 
of latent malignity and infinitely evil portent. I was glad when the mirage began to break up, 
though in the process the various nightmare   turrets and cones assumed distorted temporary 
forms of even vaster hideousness. As the whole illusion dissolved to churning opalescence we 
began to look earthward again, and saw that   our journey’s end was not far off. The unknown 
mountains ahead rose dizzyingly up like a fearsome rampart of giants, their curious regularities 
shewing with startling clearness even without a field-glass. We were over the lowest foothills 
now, and could see amidst the snow, ice, and bare patches of their main plateau a couple of darkish 
spots which we took to be Lake’s camp and boring. The higher foothills shot up between five and six 
miles away, forming a range almost distinct from the terrifying line of more than Himalayan peaks 
beyond them. At length Ropes—the student who had relieved McTighe at the controls—began to head 
downward toward the left-hand dark spot whose size marked it as the camp. As he did so, McTighe 
sent out the last uncensored wireless message the world was to receive from our expedition.
Everyone, of course, has read the brief and   unsatisfying bulletins of the rest of our 
antarctic sojourn. Some hours after our landing we sent a guarded report of the tragedy we 
found, and reluctantly announced the wiping out of the whole Lake party by the frightful wind of the 
preceding day, or of the night before that. Eleven known dead, young Gedney missing. People pardoned 
our hazy lack of details through realisation of the shock the sad event must have caused us, and 
believed us when we explained that the mangling action of the wind had rendered all eleven bodies 
unsuitable for transportation outside. Indeed, I flatter myself that even in the midst 
of our distress, utter bewilderment,   and soul-clutching horror, we scarcely went 
beyond the truth in any specific instance. The tremendous significance lies in what we dared 
not tell—what I would not tell now but for the need of warning others off from nameless fears.
It is a fact that the wind had wrought dreadful havoc. Whether all could have lived through 
it, even without the other thing, is gravely open to doubt. The storm, with its fury of 
madly driven ice-particles, must have been beyond anything our expedition had encountered 
before. One aëroplane shelter—all, it seems, had been left in a far too flimsy and inadequate 
state—was nearly pulverised; and the derrick at the distant boring was entirely shaken to pieces. 
The exposed metal of the grounded planes and drilling machinery was bruised into a high polish, 
and two of the small tents were flattened despite their snow banking. Wooden surfaces left out in 
the blast were pitted and denuded of paint, and all signs of tracks in the snow were completely 
obliterated. It is also true that we found none of the Archaean biological objects in a condition 
to take outside as a whole. We did gather some minerals from a vast tumbled pile, including 
several of the greenish soapstone fragments whose odd five-pointed rounding and faint patterns of 
grouped dots caused so many doubtful comparisons; and some fossil bones, among which were the most 
typical of the curiously injured specimens. None of the dogs survived, their hurriedly built 
snow enclosure near the camp being almost wholly destroyed. The wind may have done that, though the 
greater breakage on the side next the camp, which was not the windward one, suggests an outward 
leap or break of the frantic beasts themselves. All three sledges were gone, and we have tried to 
explain that the wind may have blown them off into the unknown. The drill and ice-melting machinery 
at the boring were too badly damaged to warrant salvage, so we used them to choke up that subtly 
disturbing gateway to the past which Lake had blasted. We likewise left at the camp the two most 
shaken-up of the planes; since our surviving party had only four real pilots—Sherman, Danforth, 
McTighe, and Ropes—in all, with Danforth in a poor nervous shape to navigate. We brought back 
all the books, scientific equipment, and other incidentals we could find, though much was rather 
unaccountably blown away. Spare tents and furs were either missing or badly out of condition.
It was approximately 4 P.M., after wide plane cruising had forced us to give Gedney up for lost, 
that we sent our guarded message to the Arkham for relaying; and I think we did well to keep it as 
calm and non-committal as we succeeded in doing. The most we said about agitation concerned 
our dogs, whose frantic uneasiness near the biological specimens was to be expected from poor 
Lake’s accounts. We did not mention, I think, their display of the same uneasiness when sniffing 
around the queer greenish soapstones and certain other objects in the disordered region; objects 
including scientific instruments, aëroplanes, and machinery both at the camp and at the boring, 
whose parts had been loosened, moved, or otherwise tampered with by winds that must have harboured 
singular curiosity and investigativeness. About the fourteen biological specimens we 
were pardonably indefinite. We said that the only ones we discovered were damaged, but 
that enough was left of them to prove Lake’s   description wholly and impressively accurate. It 
was hard work keeping our personal emotions out of this matter—and we did not mention numbers or say 
exactly how we had found those which we did find. We had by that time agreed not to transmit 
anything suggesting madness on the part of Lake’s   men, and it surely looked like madness to find six 
imperfect monstrosities carefully buried upright in nine-foot snow graves under five-pointed 
mounds punched over with groups of dots in   patterns exactly like those on the queer greenish 
soapstones dug up from Mesozoic or Tertiary times. The eight perfect specimens mentioned by Lake 
seemed to have been completely blown away. We were careful, too, about the public’s general 
peace of mind; hence Danforth and I said little about that frightful trip over the mountains the 
next day. It was the fact that only a radically lightened plane could possibly cross a range 
of such height which mercifully limited that   scouting tour to the two of us. On our return 
at 1 A.M. Danforth was close to hysterics, but kept an admirably stiff upper lip. It took 
no persuasion to make him promise not to shew our sketches and the other things we brought 
away in our pockets, not to say anything more to the others than what we had agreed to 
relay outside, and to hide our camera films for private development later on; so that part 
of my present story will be as new to Pabodie, McTighe, Ropes, Sherman, and the rest as it will 
be to the world in general. Indeed—Danforth is closer mouthed than I; for he saw—or thinks 
he saw—one thing he will not tell even me. As all know, our report included a tale of a hard 
ascent; a confirmation of Lake’s opinion that the great peaks are of Archaean slate and other very 
primal crumpled strata unchanged since at least middle Comanchian times; a conventional 
comment on the regularity of the clinging   cube and rampart formations; a decision that the 
cave-mouths indicate dissolved calcareous veins; a conjecture that certain slopes and passes would 
permit of the scaling and crossing of the entire   range by seasoned mountaineers; and a remark 
that the mysterious other side holds a lofty and immense super-plateau as ancient and unchanging as 
the mountains themselves—20,000 feet in elevation, with grotesque rock formations protruding 
through a thin glacial layer and with low gradual foothills between the general plateau surface 
and the sheer precipices of the highest peaks. This body of data is in every respect true so 
far as it goes, and it completely satisfied the men at the camp. We laid our absence of sixteen 
hours—a longer time than our announced flying, landing, reconnoitring, and rock-collecting 
programme called for—to a long mythical spell of adverse wind conditions; and told truly of our 
landing on the farther foothills. Fortunately our tale sounded realistic and prosaic enough not to 
tempt any of the others into emulating our flight. Had any tried to do that, I would have used 
every ounce of my persuasion to stop them—and I do not know what Danforth would have done. 
While we were gone, Pabodie, Sherman, Ropes, McTighe, and Williamson had worked like beavers 
over Lake’s two best planes; fitting them again for use despite the altogether unaccountable 
juggling of their operative mechanism. We decided to load all the planes the next 
morning and start back for our old base as   soon as possible. Even though indirect, that 
was the safest way to work toward McMurdo Sound; for a straight-line flight across the most 
utterly unknown stretches of the aeon-dead   continent would involve many additional 
hazards. Further exploration was hardly feasible in view of our tragic decimation 
and the ruin of our drilling machinery; and the doubts and horrors around us—which 
we did not reveal—made us wish only to escape from this austral world of desolation and 
brooding madness as swiftly as we could. As the public knows, our return to the world was 
accomplished without further disasters. All planes reached the old base on the evening of the next 
day—January 27th—after a swift non-stop flight; and on the 28th we made McMurdo Sound in 
two laps, the one pause being very brief, and occasioned by a faulty rudder in the furious 
wind over the ice-shelf after we had cleared the great plateau. In five days more the Arkham and 
Miskatonic, with all hands and equipment on board, were shaking clear of the thickening field ice and 
working up Ross Sea with the mocking mountains of Victoria Land looming westward against a troubled 
antarctic sky and twisting the wind’s wails into a wide-ranged musical piping which chilled my 
soul to the quick. Less than a fortnight later we left the last hint of polar land behind us, and 
thanked heaven that we were clear of a haunted, accursed realm where life and death, space and 
time, have made black and blasphemous alliances in the unknown epochs since matter first writhed 
and swam on the planet’s scarce-cooled crust. Since our return we have all constantly 
worked to discourage antarctic exploration,   and have kept certain doubts and guesses to 
ourselves with splendid unity and faithfulness. Even young Danforth, with his nervous breakdown, 
has not flinched or babbled to his doctors—indeed, as I have said, there is one thing he thinks he 
alone saw which he will not tell even me, though I think it would help his psychological state if 
he would consent to do so. It might explain and relieve much, though perhaps the thing was no more 
than the delusive aftermath of an earlier shock. That is the impression I gather after those rare 
irresponsible moments when he whispers disjointed things to me—things which he repudiates vehemently 
as soon as he gets a grip on himself again. It will be hard work deterring others from the 
great white south, and some of our efforts may   directly harm our cause by drawing inquiring 
notice. We might have known from the first that human curiosity is undying, and that the results 
we announced would be enough to spur others ahead on the same age-long pursuit of the unknown. 
Lake’s reports of those biological monstrosities had aroused naturalists and palaeontologists to 
the highest pitch; though we were sensible enough not to shew the detached parts we had taken from 
the actual buried specimens, or our photographs of those specimens as they were found. We also 
refrained from shewing the more puzzling of the scarred bones and greenish soapstones; while 
Danforth and I have closely guarded the pictures we took or drew on the super-plateau across 
the range, and the crumpled things we smoothed, studied in fear, and brought away in our 
pockets. But now that Starkweather-Moore party is organising, and with a thoroughness far beyond 
anything our outfit attempted. If not dissuaded, they will get to the innermost nucleus of the 
antarctic and melt and bore till they bring   up that which may end the world we know. 
So I must break through all reticences at last—even about that ultimate nameless thing 
beyond the mountains of madness. It is only with vast hesitancy and repugnance 
that I let my mind go back to Lake’s camp and what we really found there—and to that other 
thing beyond the frightful mountain wall. I am constantly tempted to shirk the details, and to 
let hints stand for actual facts and ineluctable deductions. I hope I have said enough already 
to let me glide briefly over the rest; the rest, that is, of the horror at the camp. I have told 
of the wind-ravaged terrain, the damaged shelters, the disarranged machinery, the varied uneasinesses 
of our dogs, the missing sledges and other items, the deaths of men and dogs, the absence of Gedney, 
and the six insanely buried biological specimens, strangely sound in texture for 
all their structural injuries,   from a world forty million years dead. I do not 
recall whether I mentioned that upon checking up the canine bodies we found one dog missing. We 
did not think much about that till later—indeed, only Danforth and I have thought of it at all.
The principal things I have been keeping back relate to the bodies, and to certain subtle 
points which may or may not lend a hideous   and incredible kind of rationale to the 
apparent chaos. At the time I tried to keep the men’s minds off those points; for it 
was so much simpler—so much more normal—to lay everything to an outbreak of madness on the part 
of some of Lake’s party. From the look of things, that daemon mountain wind must have been enough 
to drive any man mad in the midst of this centre of all earthly mystery and desolation.
The crowning abnormality, of course,   was the condition of the bodies—men and dogs 
alike. They had all been in some terrible kind of conflict, and were torn and mangled in 
fiendish and altogether inexplicable ways. Death, so far as we could judge, had in each 
case come from strangulation or laceration. The dogs had evidently started the trouble, for the 
state of their ill-built corral bore witness to its forcible breakage from within. It had been 
set some distance from the camp because of the hatred of the animals for those hellish Archaean 
organisms, but the precaution seemed to have been taken in vain. When left alone in that monstrous 
wind behind flimsy walls of insufficient height they must have stampeded—whether from the wind 
itself, or from some subtle, increasing odour emitted by the nightmare specimens, one 
could not say. Those specimens, of course,   had been covered with a tent-cloth; yet the low 
antarctic sun had beat steadily upon that cloth, and Lake had mentioned that solar heat tended 
to make the strangely sound and tough tissues   of the things relax and expand. Perhaps the 
wind had whipped the cloth from over them, and jostled them about in such a way that their 
more pungent olfactory qualities became manifest despite their unbelievable antiquity.
But whatever had happened, it was hideous   and revolting enough. Perhaps I had better 
put squeamishness aside and tell the worst at last—though with a categorical statement of 
opinion, based on the first-hand observations and most rigid deductions of both Danforth and 
myself, that the then missing Gedney was in no way responsible for the loathsome horrors we found. 
I have said that the bodies were frightfully mangled. Now I must add that some were incised and 
subtracted from in the most curious, cold-blooded, and inhuman fashion. It was the same with dogs and 
men. All the healthier, fatter bodies, quadrupedal or bipedal, had had their most solid masses 
of tissue cut out and removed, as by a careful butcher; and around them was a strange sprinkling 
of salt—taken from the ravaged provision-chests on the planes—which conjured up the most horrible 
associations. The thing had occurred in one of the crude aëroplane shelters from which the plane 
had been dragged out, and subsequent winds had   effaced all tracks which could have supplied any 
plausible theory. Scattered bits of clothing, roughly slashed from the human incision-subjects, 
hinted no clues. It is useless to bring up the half-impression of certain faint snow-prints 
in one shielded corner of the ruined   enclosure—because that impression did not concern 
human prints at all, but was clearly mixed up with all the talk of fossil prints which poor Lake 
had been giving throughout the preceding weeks. One had to be careful of one’s imagination in the 
lee of those overshadowing mountains of madness. As I have indicated, Gedney and one dog turned 
out to be missing in the end. When we came on that terrible shelter we had missed two dogs and 
two men; but the fairly unharmed dissecting tent, which we entered after investigating the monstrous 
graves, had something to reveal. It was not as Lake had left it, for the covered parts of the 
primal monstrosity had been removed from the   improvised table. Indeed, we had already realised 
that one of the six imperfect and insanely buried things we had found—the one with the trace of 
a peculiarly hateful odour—must represent the collected sections of the entity which Lake had 
tried to analyse. On and around that laboratory table were strown other things, and it did not 
take long for us to guess that those things were   the carefully though oddly and inexpertly 
dissected parts of one man and one dog. I shall spare the feelings of survivors by 
omitting mention of the man’s identity. Lake’s anatomical instruments were missing, but there 
were evidences of their careful cleansing. The gasoline stove was also gone, though around 
it we found a curious litter of matches. We buried the human parts beside the other ten men, 
and the canine parts with the other 35 dogs. Concerning the bizarre smudges on the laboratory 
table, and on the jumble of roughly handled illustrated books scattered near it, we 
were much too bewildered to speculate.
  This formed the worst of the camp horror, 
but other things were equally perplexing. The disappearance of Gedney, the one dog, the 
eight uninjured biological specimens, the three sledges, and certain instruments, illustrated 
technical and scientific books, writing materials, electric torches and batteries, food and fuel, 
heating apparatus, spare tents, fur suits, and the like, was utterly beyond sane conjecture; 
as were likewise the spatter-fringed ink-blots on certain pieces of paper, and the evidences of 
curious alien fumbling and experimentation around the planes and all other mechanical devices 
both at the camp and at the boring. The dogs seemed to abhor this oddly disordered machinery. 
Then, too, there was the upsetting of the larder, the disappearance of certain staples, and the 
jarringly comical heap of tin cans pried open in the most unlikely ways and at the most unlikely 
places. The profusion of scattered matches, intact, broken, or spent, formed another minor 
enigma; as did the two or three tent-cloths and fur suits which we found lying about with 
peculiar and unorthodox slashings conceivably due to clumsy efforts at unimaginable adaptations. 
The maltreatment of the human and canine bodies, and the crazy burial of the damaged Archaean 
specimens, were all of a piece with this   apparent disintegrative madness. In view of 
just such an eventuality as the present one, we carefully photographed all the main evidences 
of insane disorder at the camp; and shall use the prints to buttress our pleas against the departure 
of the proposed Starkweather-Moore Expedition. Our first act after finding the bodies in 
the shelter was to photograph and open the   row of insane graves with the five-pointed snow 
mounds. We could not help noticing the resemblance of these monstrous mounds, with their clusters 
of grouped dots, to poor Lake’s descriptions of the strange greenish soapstones; and when we 
came on some of the soapstones themselves in the great mineral pile we found the likeness very 
close indeed. The whole general formation, it must be made clear, seemed abominably suggestive 
of the starfish-head of the Archaean entities; and we agreed that the suggestion must have worked 
potently upon the sensitised minds of Lake’s overwrought party. Our own first sight of the 
actual buried entities formed a horrible moment, and sent the imaginations of Pabodie and myself 
back to some of the shocking primal myths we had read and heard. We all agreed that the mere sight 
and continued presence of the things must have coöperated with the oppressive polar solitude and 
daemon mountain wind in driving Lake’s party mad. For madness—centring in Gedney as the only 
possible surviving agent—was the explanation spontaneously adopted by everybody so 
far as spoken utterance was concerned;   though I will not be so naive as to deny 
that each of us may have harboured wild guesses which sanity forbade him to formulate 
completely. Sherman, Pabodie, and McTighe made an exhaustive aëroplane cruise over all 
the surrounding territory in the afternoon,   sweeping the horizon with field-glasses in quest 
of Gedney and of the various missing things; but nothing came to light. The party reported that the 
titan barrier range extended endlessly to right and left alike, without any diminution in height 
or essential structure. On some of the peaks, though, the regular cube and rampart formations 
were bolder and plainer; having doubly fantastic similitudes to Roerich-painted Asian hill ruins. 
The distribution of cryptical cave-mouths on the black snow-denuded summits seemed roughly 
even as far as the range could be traced. In spite of all the prevailing horrors we were 
left with enough sheer scientific zeal and   adventurousness to wonder about the unknown 
realm beyond those mysterious mountains. As our guarded messages stated, we rested at 
midnight after our day of fear and bafflement; but not without a tentative plan for one or more 
range-crossing altitude flights in a lightened plane with aërial camera and geologist’s 
outfit, beginning the following morning. It was decided that Danforth and I try it first, 
and we awaked at 7 A.M. intending an early trip; though heavy winds—mentioned in our brief 
bulletin to the outside world—delayed our start till nearly nine o’clock.
I have already repeated the non-committal story we told the men at camp—and relayed 
outside—after our return sixteen hours later. It is now my terrible duty to amplify this account 
by filling in the merciful blanks with hints of   what we really saw in the hidden trans-montane 
world—hints of the revelations which have finally driven Danforth to a nervous collapse. I wish 
he would add a really frank word about the thing which he thinks he alone saw—even though it was 
probably a nervous delusion—and which was perhaps the last straw that put him where he is; but he 
is firm against that. All I can do is to repeat his later disjointed whispers about what set him 
shrieking as the plane soared back through the wind-tortured mountain pass after that real and 
tangible shock which I shared. This will form my last word. If the plain signs of surviving 
elder horrors in what I disclose be not enough to keep others from meddling with the inner 
antarctic—or at least from prying too deeply   beneath the surface of that ultimate waste 
of forbidden secrets and unhuman, aeon-cursed desolation—the responsibility for unnamable and 
perhaps immensurable evils will not be mine. Danforth and I, studying the notes made by Pabodie 
in his afternoon flight and checking up with a sextant, had calculated that the lowest available 
pass in the range lay somewhat to the right of us, within sight of camp, and about 23,000 or 24,000 
feet above sea-level. For this point, then, we first headed in the lightened plane as we embarked 
on our flight of discovery. The camp itself, on foothills which sprang from a high continental 
plateau, was some 12,000 feet in altitude; hence the actual height increase necessary was 
not so vast as it might seem. Nevertheless we were acutely conscious of the rarefied air and intense 
cold as we rose; for on account of visibility conditions we had to leave the cabin windows open. 
We were dressed, of course, in our heaviest furs. As we drew near the forbidding peaks, dark and 
sinister above the line of crevasse-riven snow and interstitial glaciers, we noticed more and 
more the curiously regular formations clinging to the slopes; and thought again of the strange 
Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich. The ancient and wind-weathered rock strata fully verified all 
of Lake’s bulletins, and proved that these hoary pinnacles had been towering up in exactly the same 
way since a surprisingly early time in earth’s history—perhaps over fifty million years. How much 
higher they had once been, it was futile to guess; but everything about this strange region pointed 
to obscure atmospheric influences unfavourable to change, and calculated to retard the usual 
climatic processes of rock disintegration. But it was the mountainside tangle of regular 
cubes, ramparts, and cave-mouths which fascinated and disturbed us most. I studied them with a 
field-glass and took aërial photographs whilst Danforth drove; and at times relieved 
him at the controls—though my aviation knowledge was purely an amateur’s—in 
order to let him use the binoculars. We could easily see that much of the material 
of the things was a lightish Archaean quartzite, unlike any formation visible over 
broad areas of the general surface;   and that their regularity was extreme and uncanny 
to an extent which poor Lake had scarcely hinted. As he had said, their edges were crumbled and 
rounded from untold aeons of savage weathering; but their preternatural solidity and tough 
material had saved them from obliteration. Many parts, especially those closest to the slopes, 
seemed identical in substance with the surrounding rock surface. The whole arrangement looked 
like the ruins of Machu Picchu in the Andes, or the primal foundation-walls of Kish as dug up 
by the Oxford–Field Museum Expedition in 1929; and both Danforth and I obtained that occasional 
impression of separate Cyclopean blocks which Lake had attributed to his flight-companion Carroll. 
How to account for such things in this place was frankly beyond me, and I felt queerly humbled as 
a geologist. Igneous formations often have strange regularities—like the famous Giants’ Causeway in 
Ireland—but this stupendous range, despite Lake’s original suspicion of smoking cones, was above 
all else non-volcanic in evident structure. The curious cave-mouths, near which the 
odd formations seemed most abundant,   presented another albeit a lesser puzzle because 
of their regularity of outline. They were, as Lake’s bulletin had said, often approximately 
square or semicircular; as if the natural orifices had been shaped to greater symmetry by some magic 
hand. Their numerousness and wide distribution were remarkable, and suggested that the whole 
region was honeycombed with tunnels dissolved out of limestone strata. Such glimpses as we secured 
did not extend far within the caverns, but we saw that they were apparently clear of stalactites and 
stalagmites. Outside, those parts of the mountain slopes adjoining the apertures seemed invariably 
smooth and regular; and Danforth thought that the slight cracks and pittings of the weathering 
tended toward unusual patterns. Filled as he was with the horrors and strangenesses discovered 
at the camp, he hinted that the pittings vaguely resembled those baffling groups of dots 
sprinkled over the primeval greenish soapstones, so hideously duplicated on the madly conceived 
snow mounds above those six buried monstrosities. We had risen gradually in flying over the higher 
foothills and along toward the relatively low pass we had selected. As we advanced we occasionally 
looked down at the snow and ice of the land route, wondering whether we could have attempted the 
trip with the simpler equipment of earlier   days. Somewhat to our surprise we saw that the 
terrain was far from difficult as such things go; and that despite the crevasses and other bad 
spots it would not have been likely to deter the sledges of a Scott, a Shackleton, or 
an Amundsen. Some of the glaciers appeared to lead up to wind-bared passes with unusual 
continuity, and upon reaching our chosen pass we found that its case formed no exception.
Our sensations of tense expectancy as we prepared to round the crest and peer out over an 
untrodden world can hardly be described on paper; even though we had no cause to think the regions 
beyond the range essentially different from those already seen and traversed. The touch of evil 
mystery in these barrier mountains, and in the beckoning sea of opalescent sky glimpsed betwixt 
their summits, was a highly subtle and attenuated matter not to be explained in literal words. 
Rather was it an affair of vague psychological symbolism and aesthetic association—a thing 
mixed up with exotic poetry and paintings, and with archaic myths lurking in shunned and 
forbidden volumes. Even the wind’s burden held a peculiar strain of conscious malignity; and 
for a second it seemed that the composite sound included a bizarre musical whistling or piping 
over a wide range as the blast swept in and out of the omnipresent and resonant cave-mouths. 
There was a cloudy note of reminiscent repulsion in this sound, as complex and unplaceable 
as any of the other dark impressions. We were now, after a slow ascent, at a height of 
23,570 feet according to the aneroid; and had left the region of clinging snow definitely below 
us. Up here were only dark, bare rock slopes and the start of rough-ribbed glaciers—but with 
those provocative cubes, ramparts, and echoing cave-mouths to add a portent of the unnatural, 
the fantastic, and the dream-like. Looking along the line of high peaks, I thought I could see the 
one mentioned by poor Lake, with a rampart exactly on top. It seemed to be half-lost in a queer 
antarctic haze; such a haze, perhaps, as had been responsible for Lake’s early notion of volcanism. 
The pass loomed directly before us, smooth and windswept between its jagged and malignly 
frowning pylons. Beyond it was a sky fretted with swirling vapours and lighted by the low polar 
sun—the sky of that mysterious farther realm upon which we felt no human eye had ever gazed.
A few more feet of altitude and we would   behold that realm. Danforth and I, unable to 
speak except in shouts amidst the howling, piping wind that raced through the pass and added 
to the noise of the unmuffled engines, exchanged eloquent glances. And then, having gained those 
last few feet, we did indeed stare across the momentous divide and over the unsampled secrets 
of an elder and utterly alien earth. I think that both of us simultaneously cried out 
in mixed awe, wonder, fear, and disbelief in our own senses as we finally cleared the pass and saw 
what lay beyond. Of course we must have had some natural theory in the back of our heads to steady 
our faculties for the moment. Probably we thought of such things as the grotesquely weathered stones 
of the Garden of the Gods in Colorado, or the fantastically symmetrical wind-carved rocks of the 
Arizona desert. Perhaps we even half thought the sight a mirage like that we had seen the morning 
before on first approaching those mountains   of madness. We must have had some such normal 
notions to fall back upon as our eyes swept that limitless, tempest-scarred plateau and grasped the 
almost endless labyrinth of colossal, regular, and geometrically eurhythmic stone masses which reared 
their crumbled and pitted crests above a glacial sheet not more than forty or fifty feet deep at 
its thickest, and in places obviously thinner. The effect of the monstrous sight was 
indescribable, for some fiendish violation of   known natural law seemed certain at the outset. 
Here, on a hellishly ancient table-land fully 20,000 feet high, and in a climate deadly to 
habitation since a pre-human age not less than 500,000 years ago, there stretched nearly to the 
vision’s limit a tangle of orderly stone which only the desperation of mental self-defence could 
possibly attribute to any but a conscious and artificial cause. We had previously dismissed, 
so far as serious thought was concerned, any theory that the cubes and ramparts of the 
mountainsides were other than natural in origin. How could they be otherwise, when man himself 
could scarcely have been differentiated from the   great apes at the time when this region succumbed 
to the present unbroken reign of glacial death? Yet now the sway of reason seemed irrefutably 
shaken, for this Cyclopean maze of squared, curved, and angled blocks had features which cut 
off all comfortable refuge. It was, very clearly, the blasphemous city of the mirage in stark, 
objective, and ineluctable reality. That damnable portent had had a material basis after 
all—there had been some horizontal stratum of ice-dust in the upper air, and this shocking 
stone survival had projected its image across the mountains according to the simple laws 
of reflection. Of course the phantom had been twisted and exaggerated, and had contained things 
which the real source did not contain; yet now, as we saw that real source, we thought it even 
more hideous and menacing than its distant image. Only the incredible, unhuman massiveness of 
these vast stone towers and ramparts had saved the frightful thing from utter annihilation in 
the hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of   years it had brooded there amidst the blasts of 
a bleak upland. “Corona Mundi . . . Roof of the World . . .” All sorts of fantastic phrases 
sprang to our lips as we looked dizzily down at the unbelievable spectacle. I thought again of 
the eldritch primal myths that had so persistently haunted me since my first sight of this dead 
antarctic world—of the daemoniac plateau of Leng, of the Mi-Go, or Abominable Snow-Men of the 
Himalayas, of the Pnakotic Manuscripts with their pre-human implications, of the Cthulhu cult, of 
the Necronomicon, and of the Hyperborean legends of formless Tsathoggua and the worse than formless 
star-spawn associated with that semi-entity. For boundless miles in every direction the 
thing stretched off with very little thinning;   indeed, as our eyes followed it to the 
right and left along the base of the low, gradual foothills which separated it from the 
actual mountain rim, we decided that we could see no thinning at all except for an interruption 
at the left of the pass through which we had come. We had merely struck, at random, a limited 
part of something of incalculable extent. The foothills were more sparsely sprinkled 
with grotesque stone structures, linking the terrible city to the already familiar 
cubes and ramparts which evidently formed its mountain outposts. These latter, as well as 
the queer cave-mouths, were as thick on the inner as on the outer sides of the mountains.
The nameless stone labyrinth consisted,   for the most part, of walls from 10 to 150 feet 
in ice-clear height, and of a thickness varying from five to ten feet. It was composed mostly 
of prodigious blocks of dark primordial slate, schist, and sandstone—blocks in many cases as 
large as 4 × 6 × 8 feet—though in several places it seemed to be carved out of a solid, uneven 
bed-rock of pre-Cambrian slate. The buildings were far from equal in size; there being innumerable 
honeycomb-arrangements of enormous extent as well as smaller separate structures. The general 
shape of these things tended to be conical,   pyramidal, or terraced; though there were 
many perfect cylinders, perfect cubes, clusters of cubes, and other rectangular forms, 
and a peculiar sprinkling of angled edifices whose five-pointed ground plan roughly suggested modern 
fortifications. The builders had made constant and expert use of the principle of the arch, and 
domes had probably existed in the city’s heyday. The whole tangle was monstrously weathered, 
and the glacial surface from which the towers   projected was strewn with fallen blocks and 
immemorial debris. Where the glaciation was transparent we could see the lower parts of the 
gigantic piles, and noticed the ice-preserved stone bridges which connected the different 
towers at varying distances above the ground. On the exposed walls we could detect the 
scarred places where other and higher   bridges of the same sort had existed. Closer 
inspection revealed countless largish windows; some of which were closed with shutters of a 
petrified material originally wood, though most gaped open in a sinister and menacing fashion. 
Many of the ruins, of course, were roofless, and with uneven though wind-rounded upper 
edges; whilst others, of a more sharply conical or pyramidal model or else protected by higher 
surrounding structures, preserved intact outlines despite the omnipresent crumbling and pitting. 
With the field-glass we could barely make out what seemed to be sculptural decorations in horizontal 
bands—decorations including those curious groups of dots whose presence on the ancient soapstones 
now assumed a vastly larger significance. In many places the buildings were totally ruined 
and the ice-sheet deeply riven from various geologic causes. In other places the stonework 
was worn down to the very level of the glaciation. One broad swath, extending from the plateau’s 
interior to a cleft in the foothills about   a mile to the left of the pass we had 
traversed, was wholly free from buildings; and probably represented, we concluded, the 
course of some great river which in Tertiary   times—millions of years ago—had poured through 
the city and into some prodigious subterranean abyss of the great barrier range. Certainly, 
this was above all a region of caves, gulfs, and underground secrets beyond human penetration.
Looking back to our sensations, and recalling our dazedness at viewing this monstrous 
survival from aeons we had thought pre-human, I can only wonder that we preserved the semblance 
of equilibrium which we did. Of course we knew that something—chronology, scientific theory, 
or our own consciousness—was woefully awry; yet we kept enough poise to guide the 
plane, observe many things quite minutely,   and take a careful series of photographs which 
may yet serve both us and the world in good stead. In my case, ingrained scientific habit may have 
helped; for above all my bewilderment and sense of menace there burned a dominant curiosity 
to fathom more of this age-old secret—to know what sort of beings had built and lived in this 
incalculably gigantic place, and what relation to the general world of its time or of other times 
so unique a concentration of life could have had. For this place could be no ordinary city. 
It must have formed the primary nucleus and   centre of some archaic and unbelievable chapter 
of earth’s history whose outward ramifications, recalled only dimly in the most obscure and 
distorted myths, had vanished utterly amidst the chaos of terrene convulsions long before any human 
race we know had shambled out of apedom. Here sprawled a palaeogean megalopolis compared with 
which the fabled Atlantis and Lemuria, Commoriom and Uzuldaroum, and Olathoë in the land of Lomar 
are recent things of today—not even of yesterday; a megalopolis ranking with such whispered 
pre-human blasphemies as Valusia, R’lyeh, Ib in the land of Mnar, and the Nameless City 
of Arabia Deserta. As we flew above that tangle of stark titan towers my imagination sometimes 
escaped all bounds and roved aimlessly in realms of fantastic associations—even weaving links 
betwixt this lost world and some of my own wildest dreams concerning the mad horror at the camp.
The plane’s fuel-tank, in the interest of greater lightness, had been only partly filled; hence we 
now had to exert caution in our explorations. Even so, however, we covered an enormous extent of 
ground—or rather, air—after swooping down to a level where the wind became virtually negligible. 
There seemed to be no limit to the mountain-range, or to the length of the frightful stone city 
which bordered its inner foothills. Fifty miles of flight in each direction shewed no major change in 
the labyrinth of rock and masonry that clawed up corpse-like through the eternal ice. There were, 
though, some highly absorbing diversifications; such as the carvings on the canyon where that 
broad river had once pierced the foothills   and approached its sinking-place in the great 
range. The headlands at the stream’s entrance had been boldly carved into Cyclopean pylons; and 
something about the ridgy, barrel-shaped designs stirred up oddly vague, hateful, and confusing 
semi-remembrances in both Danforth and me. We also came upon several star-shaped open spaces, 
evidently public squares; and noted various undulations in the terrain. Where a sharp hill 
rose, it was generally hollowed out into some sort of rambling stone edifice; but there were at least 
two exceptions. Of these latter, one was too badly weathered to disclose what had been on the jutting 
eminence, while the other still bore a fantastic conical monument carved out of the solid rock and 
roughly resembling such things as the well-known Snake Tomb in the ancient valley of Petra.
Flying inland from the mountains, we discovered that the city was not of infinite width, even 
though its length along the foothills seemed   endless. After about thirty miles the grotesque 
stone buildings began to thin out, and in ten more miles we came to an unbroken waste virtually 
without signs of sentient artifice. The course of the river beyond the city seemed marked by a broad 
depressed line; while the land assumed a somewhat greater ruggedness, seeming to slope slightly 
upward as it receded in the mist-hazed west. So far we had made no landing, yet to leave 
the plateau without an attempt at entering   some of the monstrous structures would have 
been inconceivable. Accordingly we decided to find a smooth place on the foothills near our 
navigable pass, there grounding the plane and preparing to do some exploration on foot. Though 
these gradual slopes were partly covered with a scattering of ruins, low flying soon disclosed an 
ample number of possible landing-places. Selecting that nearest to the pass, since our next flight 
would be across the great range and back to camp, we succeeded about 12:30 P.M. in coming 
down on a smooth, hard snowfield wholly devoid of obstacles and well adapted to 
a swift and favourable takeoff later on. It did not seem necessary to protect the plane 
with a snow banking for so brief a time and in so comfortable an absence of high winds at this 
level; hence we merely saw that the landing skis were safely lodged, and that the vital parts of 
the mechanism were guarded against the cold. For our foot journey we discarded the heaviest 
of our flying furs, and took with us a small outfit consisting of pocket compass, hand camera, 
light provisions, voluminous notebooks and paper, geologist’s hammer and chisel, specimen-bags, coil 
of climbing rope, and powerful electric torches with extra batteries; this equipment having been 
carried in the plane on the chance that we might be able to effect a landing, take ground pictures, 
make drawings and topographical sketches, and obtain rock specimens from some bare slope, 
outcropping, or mountain cave. Fortunately we had a supply of extra paper to tear up, place in 
a spare specimen-bag, and use on the ancient principle of hare-and-hounds for marking our 
course in any interior mazes we might be able to penetrate. This had been brought in case we 
found some cave system with air quiet enough to allow such a rapid and easy method in place of 
the usual rock-chipping method of trail-blazing. Walking cautiously downhill over the crusted snow 
toward the stupendous stone labyrinth that loomed against the opalescent west, we felt almost as 
keen a sense of imminent marvels as we had felt on approaching the unfathomed mountain pass four 
hours previously. True, we had become visually familiar with the incredible secret concealed by 
the barrier peaks; yet the prospect of actually entering primordial walls reared by conscious 
beings perhaps millions of years ago—before   any known race of men could have existed—was none 
the less awesome and potentially terrible in its implications of cosmic abnormality. Though 
the thinness of the air at this prodigious altitude made exertion somewhat more difficult 
than usual; both Danforth and I found ourselves bearing up very well, and felt equal to almost any 
task which might fall to our lot. It took only a few steps to bring us to a shapeless ruin worn 
level with the snow, while ten or fifteen rods farther on there was a huge roofless rampart still 
complete in its gigantic five-pointed outline and rising to an irregular height of ten or eleven 
feet. For this latter we headed; and when at last we were able actually to touch its weathered 
Cyclopean blocks, we felt that we had established an unprecedented and almost blasphemous link with 
forgotten aeons normally closed to our species. This rampart, shaped like a star and perhaps 
300 feet from point to point, was built of Jurassic sandstone blocks of irregular size, 
averaging 6 × 8 feet in surface. There was a row of arched loopholes or windows about four 
feet wide and five feet high; spaced quite symmetrically along the points of the star and at 
its inner angles, and with the bottoms about four feet from the glaciated surface. Looking through 
these, we could see that the masonry was fully five feet thick, that there were no partitions 
remaining within, and that there were traces of banded carvings or bas-reliefs on the interior 
walls; facts we had indeed guessed before, when flying low over this rampart and others like it. 
Though lower parts must have originally existed, all traces of such things were now wholly obscured 
by the deep layer of ice and snow at this point. We crawled through one of the windows and 
vainly tried to decipher the nearly effaced   mural designs, but did not attempt to disturb 
the glaciated floor. Our orientation flights had indicated that many buildings in the city 
proper were less ice-choked, and that we might perhaps find wholly clear interiors leading 
down to the true ground level if we entered   those structures still roofed at the top. Before 
we left the rampart we photographed it carefully, and studied its mortarless Cyclopean masonry with 
complete bewilderment. We wished that Pabodie were present, for his engineering knowledge might have 
helped us guess how such titanic blocks could have been handled in that unbelievably remote age 
when the city and its outskirts were built up. The half-mile walk downhill to the actual city, 
with the upper wind shrieking vainly and savagely through the skyward peaks in the background, 
was something whose smallest details will always remain engraved on my mind. Only in fantastic 
nightmares could any human beings but Danforth and me conceive such optical effects. Between 
us and the churning vapours of the west lay that monstrous tangle of dark stone towers; its 
outré and incredible forms impressing us afresh at every new angle of vision. It was a mirage in 
solid stone, and were it not for the photographs I would still doubt that such a thing could 
be. The general type of masonry was identical with that of the rampart we had examined; but the 
extravagant shapes which this masonry took in its urban manifestations were past all description.
Even the pictures illustrate only one or two phases of its infinite bizarrerie, endless 
variety, preternatural massiveness, and utterly alien exoticism. There were geometrical 
forms for which an Euclid could scarcely find a name—cones of all degrees of irregularity 
and truncation; terraces of every sort of   provocative disproportion; shafts with odd bulbous 
enlargements; broken columns in curious groups; and five-pointed or five-ridged arrangements 
of mad grotesqueness. As we drew nearer we could see beneath certain transparent parts of 
the ice-sheet, and detect some of the tubular   stone bridges that connected the crazily 
sprinkled structures at various heights. Of orderly streets there seemed to be none, the 
only broad open swath being a mile to the left, where the ancient river had doubtless 
flowed through the town into the mountains.
  Our field-glasses shewed the external horizontal 
bands of nearly effaced sculptures and dot-groups to be very prevalent, and we could half imagine 
what the city must once have looked like—even though most of the roofs and tower-tops had 
necessarily perished. As a whole, it had been a complex tangle of twisted lanes and alleys; all 
of them deep canyons, and some little better than tunnels because of the overhanging masonry or 
overarching bridges. Now, outspread below us, it loomed like a dream-phantasy against a westward 
mist through whose northern end the low, reddish antarctic sun of early afternoon was struggling to 
shine; and when for a moment that sun encountered a denser obstruction and plunged the scene into 
temporary shadow, the effect was subtly menacing in a way I can never hope to depict. Even the 
faint howling and piping of the unfelt wind in the great mountain passes behind us took on a 
wilder note of purposeful malignity. The last stage of our descent to the town was unusually 
steep and abrupt, and a rock outcropping at the edge where the grade changed led us to think 
that an artificial terrace had once existed   there. Under the glaciation, we believed, there 
must be a flight of steps or its equivalent. When at last we plunged into the labyrinthine 
town itself, clambering over fallen masonry and shrinking from the oppressive nearness and 
dwarfing height of omnipresent crumbling and pitted walls, our sensations again became such 
that I marvel at the amount of self-control we retained. Danforth was frankly jumpy, and began 
making some offensively irrelevant speculations about the horror at the camp—which I resented all 
the more because I could not help sharing certain conclusions forced upon us by many features of 
this morbid survival from nightmare antiquity. The speculations worked on his imagination, 
too; for in one place—where a debris-littered alley turned a sharp corner—he insisted that 
he saw faint traces of ground markings which he did not like; whilst elsewhere he stopped 
to listen to a subtle imaginary sound from some undefined point—a muffled musical piping, 
he said, not unlike that of the wind in the mountain caves yet somehow disturbingly 
different. The ceaseless five-pointedness of the surrounding architecture and of the few 
distinguishable mural arabesques had a dimly sinister suggestiveness we could not escape; 
and gave us a touch of terrible subconscious certainty concerning the primal entities which 
had reared and dwelt in this unhallowed place. Nevertheless our scientific and adventurous souls 
were not wholly dead; and we mechanically carried out our programme of chipping specimens from 
all the different rock types represented in the   masonry. We wished a rather full set in order to 
draw better conclusions regarding the age of the place. Nothing in the great outer walls seemed to 
date from later than the Jurassic and Comanchian periods, nor was any piece of stone in the entire 
place of a greater recency than the Pliocene age. In stark certainty, we were wandering amidst a 
death which had reigned at least 500,000 years, and in all probability even longer.
As we proceeded through this maze of stone-shadowed twilight we stopped at all 
available apertures to study interiors and investigate entrance possibilities. Some were 
above our reach, whilst others led only into ice-choked ruins as unroofed and barren as the 
rampart on the hill. One, though spacious and inviting, opened on a seemingly bottomless 
abyss without visible means of descent. Now and then we had a chance to study the 
petrified wood of a surviving shutter,   and were impressed by the fabulous antiquity 
implied in the still discernible grain. These things had come from Mesozoic gymnosperms and 
conifers—especially Cretaceous cycads—and from fan-palms and early angiosperms of plainly 
Tertiary date. Nothing definitely later than the Pliocene could be discovered. In the placing 
of these shutters—whose edges shewed the former presence of queer and long-vanished hinges—usage 
seemed to be varied; some being on the outer and some on the inner side of the deep embrasures. 
They seemed to have become wedged in place, thus surviving the rusting of their former and 
probably metallic fixtures and fastenings. After a time we came across a row of windows—in 
the bulges of a colossal five-ridged cone of undamaged apex—which led into a vast, 
well-preserved room with stone flooring; but these were too high in the room to permit of 
descent without a rope. We had a rope with us, but did not wish to bother with this twenty-foot 
drop unless obliged to—especially in this thin plateau air where great demands were made 
upon the heart action. This enormous room   was probably a hall or concourse of some sort, 
and our electric torches shewed bold, distinct, and potentially startling sculptures 
arranged round the walls in broad,   horizontal bands separated by equally broad strips 
of conventional arabesques. We took careful note of this spot, planning to enter here unless a 
more easily gained interior were encountered. Finally, though, we did encounter exactly the 
opening we wished; an archway about six feet wide and ten feet high, marking the former 
end of an aërial bridge which had spanned an   alley about five feet above the present level of 
glaciation. These archways, of course, were flush with upper-story floors; and in this case one 
of the floors still existed. The building thus accessible was a series of rectangular terraces on 
our left facing westward. That across the alley, where the other archway yawned, was a decrepit 
cylinder with no windows and with a curious bulge about ten feet above the aperture. It was 
totally dark inside, and the archway seemed to open on a well of illimitable emptiness.
Heaped debris made the entrance to the vast left-hand building doubly easy, yet for a 
moment we hesitated before taking advantage of the long-wished chance. For though we had 
penetrated into this tangle of archaic mystery, it required fresh resolution to carry us actually 
inside a complete and surviving building of a fabulous elder world whose nature was becoming 
more and more hideously plain to us. In the end, however, we made the plunge; and scrambled 
up over the rubble into the gaping embrasure. The floor beyond was of great slate slabs, 
and seemed to form the outlet of a long,   high corridor with sculptured walls.
Observing the many inner archways which led off from it, and realising the probable 
complexity of the nest of apartments within, we decided that we must begin our system 
of hare-and-hound trail-blazing. Hitherto our compasses, together with frequent glimpses of 
the vast mountain-range between the towers in our rear, had been enough to prevent our losing our 
way; but from now on, the artificial substitute would be necessary. Accordingly we reduced 
our extra paper to shreds of suitable size, placed these in a bag to be carried by Danforth, 
and prepared to use them as economically as safety would allow. This method would probably gain 
us immunity from straying, since there did not appear to be any strong air-currents inside 
the primordial masonry. If such should develop, or if our paper supply should give out, we could 
of course fall back on the more secure though more   tedious and retarding method of rock-chipping.
Just how extensive a territory we had opened up, it was impossible to guess without a trial. The 
close and frequent connexion of the different   buildings made it likely that we might cross 
from one to another on bridges underneath the ice except where impeded by local collapses and 
geologic rifts, for very little glaciation seemed to have entered the massive constructions. Almost 
all the areas of transparent ice had revealed the submerged windows as tightly shuttered, as if 
the town had been left in that uniform state until the glacial sheet came to crystallise 
the lower part for all succeeding time. Indeed, one gained a curious impression that this 
place had been deliberately closed and deserted in some dim, bygone aeon, rather than overwhelmed 
by any sudden calamity or even gradual decay. Had the coming of the ice been foreseen, and had a 
nameless population left en masse to seek a less doomed abode? The precise physiographic 
conditions attending the formation of   the ice-sheet at this point would have to wait 
for later solution. It had not, very plainly, been a grinding drive. Perhaps the pressure 
of accumulated snows had been responsible; and perhaps some flood from the river, or from the 
bursting of some ancient glacial dam in the great range, had helped to create the special state 
now observable. Imagination could conceive almost anything in connexion with this place.
It would be cumbrous to give a detailed,   consecutive account of our wanderings inside that 
cavernous, aeon-dead honeycomb of primal masonry; that monstrous lair of elder secrets which now 
echoed for the first time, after uncounted epochs, to the tread of human feet. This is especially 
true because so much of the horrible drama and revelation came from a mere study of the 
omnipresent mural carvings. Our flashlight photographs of those carvings will do much toward 
proving the truth of what we are now disclosing, and it is lamentable that we had not a 
larger film supply with us. As it was, we made crude notebook sketches of certain salient 
features after all our films were used up. The building which we had entered was one of great 
size and elaborateness, and gave us an impressive notion of the architecture of that nameless 
geologic past. The inner partitions were less massive than the outer walls, but on the lower 
levels were excellently preserved. Labyrinthine complexity, involving curiously irregular 
differences in floor levels, characterised the entire arrangement; and we should certainly have 
been lost at the very outset but for the trail of torn paper left behind us. We decided to explore 
the more decrepit upper parts first of all, hence climbed aloft in the maze for a distance 
of some 100 feet, to where the topmost tier of chambers yawned snowily and ruinously open to the 
polar sky. Ascent was effected over the steep, transversely ribbed stone ramps or inclined 
planes which everywhere served in lieu of stairs. The rooms we encountered were of all imaginable 
shapes and proportions, ranging from five-pointed stars to triangles and perfect cubes. It might 
be safe to say that their general average was about 30 × 30 feet in floor area, and 20 feet in 
height; though many larger apartments existed. After thoroughly examining the upper regions and 
the glacial level we descended story by story into the submerged part, where indeed we soon 
saw we were in a continuous maze of connected chambers and passages probably leading over 
unlimited areas outside this particular building. The Cyclopean massiveness and giganticism of 
everything about us became curiously oppressive; and there was something vaguely but deeply unhuman 
in all the contours, dimensions, proportions, decorations, and constructional nuances of 
the blasphemously archaic stonework. We soon realised from what the carvings revealed that 
this monstrous city was many million years old. We cannot yet explain the engineering principles 
used in the anomalous balancing and adjustment of the vast rock masses, though the function of 
the arch was clearly much relied on. The rooms we visited were wholly bare of all portable contents, 
a circumstance which sustained our belief in the city’s deliberate desertion. The prime decorative 
feature was the almost universal system of mural sculpture; which tended to run in continuous 
horizontal bands three feet wide and arranged from floor to ceiling in alternation with bands of 
equal width given over to geometrical arabesques. There were exceptions to this rule of arrangement, 
but its preponderance was overwhelming. Often, however, a series of smooth cartouches 
containing oddly patterned groups of dots   would be sunk along one of the arabesque bands.
The technique, we soon saw, was mature, accomplished, and aesthetically evolved to 
the highest degree of civilised mastery;   though utterly alien in every detail to any 
known art tradition of the human race. In delicacy of execution no sculpture I have 
ever seen could approach it. The minutest details of elaborate vegetation, or of animal 
life, were rendered with astonishing vividness despite the bold scale of the carvings; whilst 
the conventional designs were marvels of skilful intricacy. The arabesques displayed a profound 
use of mathematical principles, and were made up of obscurely symmetrical curves and angles 
based on the quantity of five. The pictorial bands followed a highly formalised tradition, 
and involved a peculiar treatment of perspective; but had an artistic force that moved us profoundly 
notwithstanding the intervening gulf of vast geologic periods. Their method of design hinged 
on a singular juxtaposition of the cross-section with the two-dimensional silhouette, and embodied 
an analytical psychology beyond that of any known race of antiquity. It is useless to try to compare 
this art with any represented in our museums. Those who see our photographs will probably 
find its closest analogue in certain grotesque   conceptions of the most daring futurists.
The arabesque tracery consisted altogether of depressed lines whose depth on unweathered 
walls varied from one to two inches. When cartouches with dot-groups appeared—evidently 
as inscriptions in some unknown and primordial language and alphabet—the depression of the smooth 
surface was perhaps an inch and a half, and of the dots perhaps a half-inch more. The pictorial bands 
were in counter-sunk low relief, their background being depressed about two inches from the original 
wall surface. In some specimens marks of a former colouration could be detected, though for the 
most part the untold aeons had disintegrated and banished any pigments which may have been applied. 
The more one studied the marvellous technique the more one admired the things. Beneath their strict 
conventionalisation one could grasp the minute and accurate observation and graphic skill of 
the artists; and indeed, the very conventions themselves served to symbolise and accentuate 
the real essence or vital differentiation of every object delineated. We felt, too, that 
besides these recognisable excellences there were others lurking beyond the reach of our 
perceptions. Certain touches here and there gave vague hints of latent symbols and stimuli which 
another mental and emotional background, and a fuller or different sensory equipment, might have 
made of profound and poignant significance to us. The subject-matter of the sculptures obviously 
came from the life of the vanished epoch of their creation, and contained a large proportion 
of evident history. It is this abnormal historic-mindedness of the primal race—a chance 
circumstance operating, through coincidence, miraculously in our favour—which made the 
carvings so awesomely informative to us, and which caused us to place their photography and 
transcription above all other considerations. In certain rooms the dominant arrangement was varied 
by the presence of maps, astronomical charts, and other scientific designs on an enlarged 
scale—these things giving a naive and terrible corroboration to what we gathered from the 
pictorial friezes and dadoes. In hinting at what the whole revealed, I can only hope that my 
account will not arouse a curiosity greater than sane caution on the part of those who believe 
me at all. It would be tragic if any were to be allured to that realm of death and horror 
by the very warning meant to discourage them. Interrupting these sculptured walls were high 
windows and massive twelve-foot doorways; both now and then retaining the petrified wooden 
planks—elaborately carved and polished—of the actual shutters and doors. All metal fixtures 
had long ago vanished, but some of the doors remained in place and had to be forced aside as we 
progressed from room to room. Window-frames with odd transparent panes—mostly elliptical—survived 
here and there, though in no considerable quantity. There were also frequent niches of great 
magnitude, generally empty, but once in a while containing some bizarre object carved from green 
soapstone which was either broken or perhaps held too inferior to warrant removal. Other apertures 
were undoubtedly connected with bygone mechanical facilities—heating, lighting, and the like—of a 
sort suggested in many of the carvings. Ceilings tended to be plain, but had sometimes been 
inlaid with green soapstone or other tiles, mostly fallen now. Floors were also paved with 
such tiles, though plain stonework predominated. As I have said, all furniture and other 
moveables were absent; but the sculptures   gave a clear idea of the strange devices 
which had once filled these tomb-like, echoing rooms. Above the glacial sheet the floors 
were generally thick with detritus, litter, and debris; but farther down this condition 
decreased. In some of the lower chambers and corridors there was little more than gritty dust 
or ancient incrustations, while occasional areas had an uncanny air of newly swept immaculateness. 
Of course, where rifts or collapses had occurred, the lower levels were as littered as the upper 
ones. A central court—as in other structures we had seen from the air—saved the inner regions from 
total darkness; so that we seldom had to use our electric torches in the upper rooms except when 
studying sculptured details. Below the ice-cap, however, the twilight deepened; and in 
many parts of the tangled ground level   there was an approach to absolute blackness.
To form even a rudimentary idea of our thoughts and feelings as we penetrated this aeon-silent 
maze of unhuman masonry one must correlate a hopelessly bewildering chaos of fugitive moods, 
memories, and impressions. The sheer appalling antiquity and lethal desolation of the place were 
enough to overwhelm almost any sensitive person, but added to these elements were the 
recent unexplained horror at the camp,   and the revelations all too soon effected by 
the terrible mural sculptures around us. The moment we came upon a perfect section of carving, 
where no ambiguity of interpretation could exist, it took only a brief study to give us the hideous 
truth—a truth which it would be naive to claim Danforth and I had not independently suspected 
before, though we had carefully refrained from even hinting it to each other. There could now be 
no further merciful doubt about the nature of the beings which had built and inhabited this 
monstrous dead city millions of years ago,   when man’s ancestors were primitive 
archaic mammals, and vast dinosaurs roamed the tropical steppes of Europe and Asia.
We had previously clung to a desperate alternative and insisted—each to himself—that the omnipresence 
of the five-pointed motif meant only some cultural or religious exaltation of the Archaean natural 
object which had so patently embodied the quality of five-pointedness; as the decorative 
motifs of Minoan Crete exalted the sacred bull, those of Egypt the scarabaeus, those of Rome 
the wolf and the eagle, and those of various savage tribes some chosen totem-animal. But this 
lone refuge was now stripped from us, and we were forced to face definitely the reason-shaking 
realisation which the reader of these pages has doubtless long ago anticipated. I can scarcely 
bear to write it down in black and white even now, but perhaps that will not be necessary.
The things once rearing and dwelling in this frightful masonry in the age of dinosaurs 
were not indeed dinosaurs, but far worse. Mere dinosaurs were new and almost brainless 
objects—but the builders of the city were wise and old, and had left certain traces in rocks 
even then laid down well-nigh a thousand million years . . . rocks laid down before the true life 
of earth had advanced beyond plastic groups of cells . . . rocks laid down before the true life 
of earth had existed at all. They were the makers and enslavers of that life, and above all doubt 
the originals of the fiendish elder myths which things like the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the 
Necronomicon affrightedly hint about. They were the Great Old Ones that had filtered down from 
the stars when earth was young—the beings whose substance an alien evolution had shaped, 
and whose powers were such as this planet   had never bred. And to think that only the day 
before Danforth and I had actually looked upon fragments of their millennially fossilised 
substance . . . and that poor Lake and his party had seen their complete outlines. . . .
It is of course impossible for me to relate in proper order the stages by which we picked up what 
we know of that monstrous chapter of pre-human   life. After the first shock of the certain 
revelation we had to pause a while to recuperate, and it was fully three o’clock before we got 
started on our actual tour of systematic research. The sculptures in the building we entered were 
of relatively late date—perhaps two million years ago—as checked up by geological, biological, and 
astronomical features; and embodied an art which would be called decadent in comparison with that 
of specimens we found in older buildings after crossing bridges under the glacial sheet. One 
edifice hewn from the solid rock seemed to go back forty or possibly even fifty million years—to 
the lower Eocene or upper Cretaceous—and contained bas-reliefs of an artistry surpassing anything 
else, with one tremendous exception, that we encountered. That was, we have since agreed, 
the oldest domestic structure we traversed. Were it not for the support of those flashlights 
soon to be made public, I would refrain from   telling what I found and inferred, lest I be 
confined as a madman. Of course, the infinitely early parts of the patchwork tale—representing 
the pre-terrestrial life of the star-headed beings on other planets, and in other galaxies, and in 
other universes—can readily be interpreted as the fantastic mythology of those beings themselves; 
yet such parts sometimes involved designs and diagrams so uncannily close to the latest 
findings of mathematics and astrophysics that I scarcely know what to think. Let others judge 
when they see the photographs I shall publish. Naturally, no one set of carvings which we 
encountered told more than a fraction of   any connected story; nor did we even begin to 
come upon the various stages of that story in their proper order. Some of the vast rooms were 
independent units so far as their designs were concerned, whilst in other cases a continuous 
chronicle would be carried through a series of rooms and corridors. The best of the maps and 
diagrams were on the walls of a frightful abyss below even the ancient ground level—a cavern 
perhaps 200 feet square and sixty feet high, which had almost undoubtedly been 
an educational centre of some sort.   There were many provoking repetitions of the 
same material in different rooms and buildings; since certain chapters of experience, and 
certain summaries or phases of racial history, had evidently been favourites with different 
decorators or dwellers. Sometimes, though, variant versions of the same theme proved useful 
in settling debatable points and filling in gaps. I still wonder that we deduced so much in 
the short time at our disposal. Of course, we even now have only the barest outline; and much 
of that was obtained later on from a study of the photographs and sketches we made. It may be the 
effect of this later study—the revived memories and vague impressions acting in conjunction 
with his general sensitiveness and with that final supposed horror-glimpse whose essence he 
will not reveal even to me—which has been the immediate source of Danforth’s present breakdown. 
But it had to be; for we could not issue our warning intelligently without the fullest possible 
information, and the issuance of that warning is a prime necessity. Certain lingering influences 
in that unknown antarctic world of disordered time and alien natural law make it imperative that 
further exploration be discouraged. The full story, so far as deciphered, will shortly 
appear in an official bulletin of Miskatonic University. Here I shall sketch only the salient 
high lights in a formless, rambling way. Myth or otherwise, the sculptures told of the coming of 
those star-headed things to the nascent, lifeless earth out of cosmic space—their coming, and the 
coming of many other alien entities such as at certain times embark upon spatial pioneering. 
They seemed able to traverse the interstellar ether on their vast membraneous wings—thus 
oddly confirming some curious hill folklore long ago told me by an antiquarian colleague. 
They had lived under the sea a good deal, building fantastic cities and fighting terrific 
battles with nameless adversaries by means of intricate devices employing unknown principles of 
energy. Evidently their scientific and mechanical knowledge far surpassed man’s today, though they 
made use of its more widespread and elaborate forms only when obliged to. Some of the sculptures 
suggested that they had passed through a stage of mechanised life on other planets, but had receded 
upon finding its effects emotionally unsatisfying. Their preternatural toughness of organisation and 
simplicity of natural wants made them peculiarly able to live on a high plane without the more 
specialised fruits of artificial manufacture, and even without garments except for 
occasional protection against the elements. It was under the sea, at first for food and 
later for other purposes, that they first created earth-life—using available substances according to 
long-known methods. The more elaborate experiments came after the annihilation of various cosmic 
enemies. They had done the same thing on other   planets; having manufactured not only necessary 
foods, but certain multicellular protoplasmic masses capable of moulding their tissues into 
all sorts of temporary organs under hypnotic influence and thereby forming ideal slaves 
to perform the heavy work of the community. These viscous masses were without doubt what Abdul 
Alhazred whispered about as the “shoggoths” in his frightful Necronomicon, though even that mad 
Arab had not hinted that any existed on earth except in the dreams of those who had chewed a 
certain alkaloidal herb. When the star-headed Old Ones on this planet had synthesised their simple 
food forms and bred a good supply of shoggoths, they allowed other cell-groups to develop 
into other forms of animal and vegetable   life for sundry purposes; extirpating 
any whose presence became troublesome. With the aid of the shoggoths, whose expansions 
could be made to lift prodigious weights, the small, low cities under the sea grew to 
vast and imposing labyrinths of stone not unlike those which later rose on land. Indeed, the highly 
adaptable Old Ones had lived much on land in other parts of the universe, and probably retained many 
traditions of land construction. As we studied the architecture of all these sculptured palaeogean 
cities, including that whose aeon-dead corridors we were even then traversing, we were impressed by 
a curious coincidence which we have not yet tried to explain, even to ourselves. The tops of the 
buildings, which in the actual city around us had of course been weathered into shapeless ruins ages 
ago, were clearly displayed in the bas-reliefs; and shewed vast clusters of needle-like spires, 
delicate finials on certain cone and pyramid apexes, and tiers of thin, horizontal scalloped 
discs capping cylindrical shafts. This was exactly what we had seen in that monstrous and portentous 
mirage, cast by a dead city whence such skyline features had been absent for thousands and tens of 
thousands of years, which loomed on our ignorant eyes across the unfathomed mountains of madness as 
we first approached poor Lake’s ill-fated camp. Of the life of the Old Ones, both under the 
sea and after part of them migrated to land, volumes could be written. Those in shallow water 
had continued the fullest use of the eyes at the ends of their five main head tentacles, and had 
practiced the arts of sculpture and of writing in quite the usual way—the writing accomplished 
with a stylus on waterproof waxen surfaces. Those lower down in the ocean depths, though they used a 
curious phosphorescent organism to furnish light, pieced out their vision with obscure special 
senses operating through the prismatic cilia on their heads—senses which rendered all the Old 
Ones partly independent of light in emergencies. Their forms of sculpture and writing had changed 
curiously during the descent, embodying certain   apparently chemical coating processes—probably to 
secure phosphorescence—which the bas-reliefs could not make clear to us. The beings moved in the 
sea partly by swimming—using the lateral crinoid arms—and partly by wriggling with the lower 
tier of tentacles containing the pseudo-feet. Occasionally they accomplished long 
swoops with the auxiliary use of two or   more sets of their fan-like folding wings. 
On land they locally used the pseudo-feet, but now and then flew to great heights or over 
long distances with their wings. The many slender tentacles into which the crinoid arms branched 
were infinitely delicate, flexible, strong, and accurate in muscular-nervous coördination; 
ensuring the utmost skill and dexterity in all artistic and other manual operations.
The toughness of the things was almost incredible. Even the terrific pressures of the deepest 
sea-bottoms appeared powerless to harm them. Very few seemed to die at all except by violence, and 
their burial-places were very limited. The fact that they covered their vertically inhumed dead 
with five-pointed inscribed mounds set up thoughts in Danforth and me which made a fresh pause 
and recuperation necessary after the sculptures revealed it. The beings multiplied by means of 
spores—like vegetable pteridophytes as Lake had suspected—but owing to their prodigious toughness 
and longevity, and consequent lack of replacement needs, they did not encourage the large-scale 
development of new prothalli except when they had new regions to colonise. The young matured 
swiftly, and received an education evidently beyond any standard we can imagine. The prevailing 
intellectual and aesthetic life was highly evolved, and produced a tenaciously enduring set 
of customs and institutions which I shall describe more fully in my coming monograph. These varied 
slightly according to sea or land residence, but had the same foundations and essentials.
Though able, like vegetables, to derive nourishment from inorganic substances; they vastly 
preferred organic and especially animal food. They ate uncooked marine life under the sea, but 
cooked their viands on land. They hunted game and raised meat herds—slaughtering with sharp weapons 
whose odd marks on certain fossil bones our expedition had noted. They resisted all ordinary 
temperatures marvellously; and in their natural state could live in water down to freezing. 
When the great chill of the Pleistocene drew on, however—nearly a million years ago—the land 
dwellers had to resort to special measures including artificial heating; until at last the 
deadly cold appears to have driven them back into the sea. For their prehistoric flights through 
cosmic space, legend said, they had absorbed certain chemicals and became almost independent of 
eating, breathing, or heat conditions; but by the time of the great cold they had lost track of the 
method. In any case they could not have prolonged the artificial state indefinitely without harm.
Being non-pairing and semi-vegetable in structure, the Old Ones had no biological basis for 
the family phase of mammal life; but seemed to organise large households on the principles 
of comfortable space-utility and—as we deduced from the pictured occupations and diversions 
of co-dwellers—congenial mental association. In furnishing their homes they kept everything in 
the centre of the huge rooms, leaving all the wall spaces free for decorative treatment. Lighting, in 
the case of the land inhabitants, was accomplished by a device probably electro-chemical in nature. 
Both on land and under water they used curious tables, chairs, and couches like cylindrical 
frames—for they rested and slept upright with folded-down tentacles—and racks for the hinged 
sets of dotted surfaces forming their books. Government was evidently complex and probably 
socialistic, though no certainties in this regard could be deduced from the sculptures 
we saw. There was extensive commerce,   both local and between different cities; certain 
small, flat counters, five-pointed and inscribed, serving as money. Probably the smaller of 
the various greenish soapstones found by our expedition were pieces of such currency. Though 
the culture was mainly urban, some agriculture and much stock-raising existed. Mining and a limited 
amount of manufacturing were also practiced. Travel was very frequent, but permanent migration 
seemed relatively rare except for the vast   colonising movements by which the race expanded. 
For personal locomotion no external aid was used; since in land, air, and water movement alike 
the Old Ones seemed to possess excessively   vast capacities for speed. Loads, however, were 
drawn by beasts of burden—shoggoths under the sea, and a curious variety of primitive vertebrates 
in the later years of land existence. These vertebrates, as well as an infinity of 
other life-forms—animal and vegetable, marine, terrestrial, and aërial—were the products of 
unguided evolution acting on life-cells made by the Old Ones but escaping beyond their radius 
of attention. They had been suffered to develop unchecked because they had not come in conflict 
with the dominant beings. Bothersome forms, of course, were mechanically exterminated. It 
interested us to see in some of the very last and most decadent sculptures a shambling primitive 
mammal, used sometimes for food and sometimes as an amusing buffoon by the land dwellers, whose 
vaguely simian and human foreshadowings were unmistakable. In the building of land cities 
the huge stone blocks of the high towers were generally lifted by vast-winged pterodactyls of 
a species heretofore unknown to palaeontology. The persistence with which the Old Ones survived 
various geologic changes and convulsions of the earth’s crust was little short of miraculous. 
Though few or none of their first cities seem to have remained beyond the Archaean age, there 
was no interruption in their civilisation or in the transmission of their records. Their 
original place of advent to the planet was the Antarctic Ocean, and it is likely that 
they came not long after the matter forming the moon was wrenched from the neighbouring South 
Pacific. According to one of the sculptured maps, the whole globe was then under water, with stone 
cities scattered farther and farther from the antarctic as aeons passed. Another map shews 
a vast bulk of dry land around the south pole, where it is evident that some of the beings 
made experimental settlements though their   main centres were transferred to the nearest 
sea-bottom. Later maps, which display this land mass as cracking and drifting, and sending 
certain detached parts northward, uphold in a striking way the theories of continental drift 
lately advanced by Taylor, Wegener, and Joly. With the upheaval of new land in the South 
Pacific tremendous events began. Some of the marine cities were hopelessly shattered, yet that 
was not the worst misfortune. Another race—a land race of beings shaped like octopi and probably 
corresponding to the fabulous pre-human spawn of Cthulhu—soon began filtering down from cosmic 
infinity and precipitated a monstrous war which for a time drove the Old Ones wholly back to the 
sea—a colossal blow in view of the increasing land settlements. Later peace was made, and the new 
lands were given to the Cthulhu spawn whilst the Old Ones held the sea and the older lands. New 
land cities were founded—the greatest of them in the antarctic, for this region of first 
arrival was sacred. From then on, as before, the antarctic remained the centre of the Old 
Ones’ civilisation, and all the discoverable cities built there by the Cthulhu spawn were 
blotted out. Then suddenly the lands of the Pacific sank again, taking with them the frightful 
stone city of R’lyeh and all the cosmic octopi, so that the Old Ones were again supreme on the 
planet except for one shadowy fear about which they did not like to speak. At a rather later 
age their cities dotted all the land and water areas of the globe—hence the recommendation 
in my coming monograph that some archaeologist make systematic borings with Pabodie’s type of 
apparatus in certain widely separated regions. The steady trend down the ages was from 
water to land; a movement encouraged by the rise of new land masses, though the ocean 
was never wholly deserted. Another cause of the landward movement was the new difficulty in 
breeding and managing the shoggoths upon which   successful sea-life depended. With the march 
of time, as the sculptures sadly confessed, the art of creating new life from inorganic matter 
had been lost; so that the Old Ones had to depend on the moulding of forms already in existence. On 
land the great reptiles proved highly tractable; but the shoggoths of the sea, reproducing by 
fission and acquiring a dangerous degree of   accidental intelligence, presented 
for a time a formidable problem. They had always been controlled through the 
hypnotic suggestion of the Old Ones, and   had modelled their tough plasticity into various 
useful temporary limbs and organs; but now their self-modelling powers were sometimes exercised 
independently, and in various imitative forms implanted by past suggestion. They had, it seems, 
developed a semi-stable brain whose separate and occasionally stubborn volition echoed the will of 
the Old Ones without always obeying it. Sculptured images of these shoggoths filled Danforth and 
me with horror and loathing. They were normally shapeless entities composed of a viscous jelly 
which looked like an agglutination of bubbles; and each averaged about fifteen feet in diameter 
when a sphere. They had, however, a constantly shifting shape and volume; throwing out temporary 
developments or forming apparent organs of sight, hearing, and speech in imitation of their masters, 
either spontaneously or according to suggestion. They seem to have become peculiarly intractable 
toward the middle of the Permian age,   perhaps 150 million years ago, when a veritable 
war of re-subjugation was waged upon them by the marine Old Ones. Pictures of this war, and of 
the headless, slime-coated fashion in which the shoggoths typically left their slain victims, 
held a marvellously fearsome quality despite the intervening abyss of untold ages. The Old 
Ones had used curious weapons of molecular disturbance against the rebel entities, and 
in the end had achieved a complete victory. Thereafter the sculptures shewed a period 
in which shoggoths were tamed and broken   by armed Old Ones as the wild horses of the 
American west were tamed by cowboys. Though during the rebellion the shoggoths had shewn an 
ability to live out of water, this transition was not encouraged; since their usefulness 
on land would hardly have been commensurate   with the trouble of their management.
During the Jurassic age the Old Ones met fresh adversity in the form of a new invasion 
from outer space—this time by half-fungous, half-crustacean creatures from a planet 
identifiable as the remote and recently   discovered Pluto; creatures undoubtedly the 
same as those figuring in certain whispered hill legends of the north, and remembered in the 
Himalayas as the Mi-Go, or Abominable Snow-Men. To fight these beings the Old Ones attempted, 
for the first time since their terrene advent, to sally forth again into the planetary ether; but 
despite all traditional preparations found it no longer possible to leave the earth’s atmosphere. 
Whatever the old secret of interstellar travel had been, it was now definitely lost to the 
race. In the end the Mi-Go drove the Old Ones out of all the northern lands, though they were 
powerless to disturb those in the sea. Little by little the slow retreat of the elder race to 
their original antarctic habitat was beginning. It was curious to note from the pictured battles 
that both the Cthulhu spawn and the Mi-Go seem to have been composed of matter more widely 
different from that which we know than was   the substance of the Old Ones. They were able 
to undergo transformations and reintegrations impossible for their adversaries, and seem 
therefore to have originally come from even   remoter gulfs of cosmic space. The Old Ones, 
but for their abnormal toughness and peculiar vital properties, were strictly material, and 
must have had their absolute origin within the known space-time continuum; whereas the first 
sources of the other beings can only be guessed at with bated breath. All this, of course, 
assuming that the non-terrestrial linkages and the anomalies ascribed to the invading 
foes are not pure mythology. Conceivably, the Old Ones might have invented a cosmic 
framework to account for their occasional defeats; since historical interest and pride obviously 
formed their chief psychological element. It is significant that their annals failed 
to mention many advanced and potent races of beings whose mighty cultures and towering cities 
figure persistently in certain obscure legends. The changing state of the world through long 
geologic ages appeared with startling vividness in many of the sculptured maps and scenes. In certain 
cases existing science will require revision, while in other cases its bold deductions 
are magnificently confirmed. As I have said, the hypothesis of Taylor, Wegener, and Joly that 
all the continents are fragments of an original antarctic land mass which cracked from centrifugal 
force and drifted apart over a technically viscous lower surface—an hypothesis suggested by 
such things as the complementary outlines   of Africa and South America, and the way the great 
mountain chains are rolled and shoved up—receives striking support from this uncanny source.
Maps evidently shewing the Carboniferous world of an hundred million or more years ago displayed 
significant rifts and chasms destined later to separate Africa from the once continuous realms 
of Europe (then the Valusia of hellish primal legend), Asia, the Americas, and the antarctic 
continent. Other charts—and most significantly one in connexion with the founding fifty million 
years ago of the vast dead city around us—shewed all the present continents well differentiated. 
And in the latest discoverable specimen—dating perhaps from the Pliocene age—the approximate 
world of today appeared quite clearly despite the linkage of Alaska with Siberia, of North 
America with Europe through Greenland, and of South America with the antarctic continent through 
Graham Land. In the Carboniferous map the whole globe—ocean floor and rifted land mass alike—bore 
symbols of the Old Ones’ vast stone cities, but in the later charts the gradual recession toward the 
antarctic became very plain. The final Pliocene specimen shewed no land cities except on the 
antarctic continent and the tip of South America, nor any ocean cities north of the fiftieth 
parallel of South Latitude. Knowledge and interest in the northern world, save for a study of 
coast-lines probably made during long exploration flights on those fan-like membraneous wings, had 
evidently declined to zero among the Old Ones. Destruction of cities through the upthrust of 
mountains, the centrifugal rending of continents,   the seismic convulsions of land or sea-bottom, 
and other natural causes was a matter of common record; and it was curious to observe how fewer 
and fewer replacements were made as the ages wore on. The vast dead megalopolis that yawned 
around us seemed to be the last general centre of the race; built early in the Cretaceous age 
after a titanic earth-buckling had obliterated a still vaster predecessor not far distant. It 
appeared that this general region was the most sacred spot of all, where reputedly the first 
Old Ones had settled on a primal sea-bottom. In the new city—many of whose features we could 
recognise in the sculptures, but which stretched fully an hundred miles along the mountain-range 
in each direction beyond the farthest limits of   our aërial survey—there were reputed to be 
preserved certain sacred stones forming part of the first sea-bottom city, which were thrust 
up to light after long epochs in the course of the general crumpling of strata.
Naturally, Danforth and I studied with especial interest and a peculiarly personal sense of awe 
everything pertaining to the immediate district in which we were. Of this local material there 
was naturally a vast abundance; and on the tangled ground level of the city we were lucky enough to 
find a house of very late date whose walls, though somewhat damaged by a neighbouring rift, contained 
sculptures of decadent workmanship carrying the story of the region much beyond the period of the 
Pliocene map whence we derived our last general glimpse of the pre-human world. This was the last 
place we examined in detail, since what we found there gave us a fresh immediate objective.
Certainly, we were in one of the strangest, weirdest, and most terrible of all the corners 
of earth’s globe. Of all existing lands it was   infinitely the most ancient; and the conviction 
grew upon us that this hideous upland must indeed be the fabled nightmare plateau of Leng which 
even the mad author of the Necronomicon was reluctant to discuss. The great mountain chain 
was tremendously long—starting as a low range at Luitpold Land on the coast of Weddell Sea 
and virtually crossing the entire continent. The really high part stretched in a 
mighty arc from about Latitude 82°, E. Longitude 60° to Latitude 70°, E. Longitude 
115°, with its concave side toward our camp and its seaward end in the region of that long, 
ice-locked coast whose hills were glimpsed   by Wilkes and Mawson at the Antarctic Circle.
Yet even more monstrous exaggerations of Nature seemed disturbingly close at hand. I have said 
that these peaks are higher than the Himalayas, but the sculptures forbid me to say that 
they are earth’s highest. That grim honour is beyond doubt reserved for something which 
half the sculptures hesitated to record at all,   whilst others approached it with 
obvious repugnance and trepidation. It seems that there was one part of the ancient 
land—the first part that ever rose from the waters after the earth had flung off the moon and the 
Old Ones had seeped down from the stars—which had come to be shunned as vaguely and namelessly evil. 
Cities built there had crumbled before their time, and had been found suddenly deserted. Then when 
the first great earth-buckling had convulsed the region in the Comanchian age, a frightful line 
of peaks had shot suddenly up amidst the most appalling din and chaos—and earth had received 
her loftiest and most terrible mountains. If the scale of the carvings was correct, 
these abhorred things must have been much over 40,000 feet high—radically vaster than even the 
shocking mountains of madness we had crossed. They extended, it appeared, from about Latitude 77°, 
E. Longitude 70° to Latitude 70°, E. Longitude 100°—less than 300 miles away from the dead city, 
so that we would have spied their dreaded summits in the dim western distance had it not been 
for that vague opalescent haze. Their northern end must likewise be visible from the long 
Antarctic Circle coast-line at Queen Mary Land. Some of the Old Ones, in the decadent days, 
had made strange prayers to those mountains;   but none ever went near them or dared to guess 
what lay beyond. No human eye had ever seen them, and as I studied the emotions conveyed in the 
carvings I prayed that none ever might. There are protecting hills along the coast beyond 
them—Queen Mary and Kaiser Wilhelm Lands—and I thank heaven no one has been able to land and 
climb those hills. I am not as sceptical about old tales and fears as I used to be, and I do not 
laugh now at the pre-human sculptor’s notion that lightning paused meaningfully now and then at each 
of the brooding crests, and that an unexplained glow shone from one of those terrible pinnacles 
all through the long polar night. There may be a very real and very monstrous meaning in the old 
Pnakotic whispers about Kadath in the Cold Waste. But the terrain close at hand was hardly less 
strange, even if less namelessly accursed. Soon after the founding of the city the 
great mountain-range became the seat of   the principal temples, and many carvings shewed 
what grotesque and fantastic towers had pierced the sky where now we saw only the curiously 
clinging cubes and ramparts. In the course of ages the caves had appeared, and had been shaped 
into adjuncts of the temples. With the advance of still later epochs all the limestone veins of 
the region were hollowed out by ground waters, so that the mountains, the foothills, and the 
plains below them were a veritable network of connected caverns and galleries. Many graphic 
sculptures told of explorations deep underground, and of the final discovery of the Stygian 
sunless sea that lurked at earth’s bowels. This vast nighted gulf had undoubtedly been 
worn by the great river which flowed down from the nameless and horrible westward mountains, and 
which had formerly turned at the base of the Old Ones’ range and flowed beside that chain into 
the Indian Ocean between Budd and Totten Lands on Wilkes’s coast-line. Little by little it had 
eaten away the limestone hill base at its turning, till at last its sapping currents reached the 
caverns of the ground waters and joined with them in digging a deeper abyss. Finally its whole bulk 
emptied into the hollow hills and left the old bed toward the ocean dry. Much of the later city as we 
now found it had been built over that former bed. The Old Ones, understanding what had happened, 
and exercising their always keen artistic sense, had carved into ornate pylons those headlands 
of the foothills where the great stream began its descent into eternal darkness.
This river, once crossed by scores of noble stone bridges, was plainly the one whose extinct 
course we had seen in our aëroplane survey. Its position in different carvings of the 
city helped us to orient ourselves to the   scene as it had been at various stages of 
the region’s age-long, aeon-dead history; so that we were able to sketch a hasty but 
careful map of the salient features—squares, important buildings, and the like—for guidance in 
further explorations. We could soon reconstruct in fancy the whole stupendous thing as it was a 
million or ten million or fifty million years ago, for the sculptures told us exactly 
what the buildings and mountains and   squares and suburbs and landscape setting and 
luxuriant Tertiary vegetation had looked like. It must have had a marvellous and mystic beauty, 
and as I thought of it I almost forgot the clammy sense of sinister oppression with which 
the city’s inhuman age and massiveness and   deadness and remoteness and glacial twilight had 
choked and weighed on my spirit. Yet according to certain carvings the denizens of that city had 
themselves known the clutch of oppressive fear; for there was a sombre and recurrent type of scene 
in which the Old Ones were shewn in the act of   recoiling affrightedly from some object—never 
allowed to appear in the design—found in the great river and indicated as having been washed 
down through waving, vine-draped cycad-forests from those horrible westward mountains.
It was only in the one late-built house   with the decadent carvings that we obtained any 
foreshadowing of the final calamity leading to the city’s desertion. Undoubtedly there must have 
been many sculptures of the same age elsewhere, even allowing for the slackened energies and 
aspirations of a stressful and uncertain period; indeed, very certain evidence of the existence 
of others came to us shortly afterward. But this was the first and only set we directly 
encountered. We meant to look farther later on; but as I have said, immediate conditions dictated 
another present objective. There would, though, have been a limit—for after all hope of a long 
future occupancy of the place had perished among   the Old Ones, there could not but have been 
a complete cessation of mural decoration. The ultimate blow, of course, was the coming of 
the great cold which once held most of the   earth in thrall, and which has never departed 
from the ill-fated poles—the great cold that, at the world’s other extremity, put an end 
to the fabled lands of Lomar and Hyperborea. Just when this tendency began in the antarctic 
it would be hard to say in terms of exact years. Nowadays we set the beginning of the general 
glacial periods at a distance of about 500,000 years from the present, but at the poles 
the terrible scourge must have commenced   much earlier. All quantitative estimates 
are partly guesswork; but it is quite likely that the decadent sculptures were made 
considerably less than a million years ago, and that the actual desertion of the city 
was complete long before the conventional   opening of the Pleistocene—500,000 years ago—as 
reckoned in terms of the earth’s whole surface. In the decadent sculptures there were signs 
of thinner vegetation everywhere, and of a decreased country life on the part of the Old 
Ones. Heating devices were shewn in the houses, and winter travellers were represented as muffled 
in protective fabrics. Then we saw a series of cartouches (the continuous band arrangement being 
frequently interrupted in these late carvings) depicting a constantly growing migration to 
the nearest refuges of greater warmth—some fleeing to cities under the sea off the far-away 
coast, and some clambering down through networks of limestone caverns in the hollow hills to the 
neighbouring black abyss of subterrene waters. In the end it seems to have been the neighbouring 
abyss which received the greatest colonisation. This was partly due, no doubt, to the 
traditional sacredness of this especial region; but may have been more conclusively determined by 
the opportunities it gave for continuing the use of the great temples on the honeycombed mountains, 
and for retaining the vast land city as a place of summer residence and base of communication with 
various mines. The linkage of old and new abodes was made more effective by means of several 
gradings and improvements along the connecting   routes, including the chiselling of numerous 
direct tunnels from the ancient metropolis to the black abyss—sharply down-pointing 
tunnels whose mouths we carefully drew, according to our most thoughtful estimates, on 
the guide map we were compiling. It was obvious that at least two of these tunnels lay within a 
reasonable exploring distance of where we were; both being on the mountainward edge of the 
city, one less than a quarter-mile toward   the ancient river-course, and the other perhaps 
twice that distance in the opposite direction. The abyss, it seems, had shelving shores of dry 
land at certain places; but the Old Ones built their new city under water—no doubt because 
of its greater certainty of uniform warmth. The depth of the hidden sea appears to have been 
very great, so that the earth’s internal heat could ensure its habitability for an indefinite 
period. The beings seem to have had no trouble in adapting themselves to part-time—and eventually, 
of course, whole-time—residence under water; since they had never allowed their gill 
systems to atrophy. There were many sculptures   which shewed how they had always frequently 
visited their submarine kinsfolk elsewhere, and how they had habitually bathed on the deep 
bottom of their great river. The darkness of   inner earth could likewise have been no deterrent 
to a race accustomed to long antarctic nights. Decadent though their style undoubtedly was, 
these latest carvings had a truly epic quality where they told of the building of the new city 
in the cavern sea. The Old Ones had gone about it scientifically; quarrying insoluble rocks 
from the heart of the honeycombed mountains, and employing expert workers from the nearest 
submarine city to perform the construction according to the best methods. These workers 
brought with them all that was necessary to establish the new venture—shoggoth-tissue from 
which to breed stone-lifters and subsequent beasts of burden for the cavern city, and 
other protoplasmic matter to mould into   phosphorescent organisms for lighting purposes.
At last a mighty metropolis rose on the bottom of that Stygian sea; its architecture much like 
that of the city above, and its workmanship displaying relatively little decadence because 
of the precise mathematical element inherent   in building operations. The newly bred shoggoths 
grew to enormous size and singular intelligence, and were represented as taking and 
executing orders with marvellous quickness. They seemed to converse with the Old Ones by 
mimicking their voices—a sort of musical piping over a wide range, if poor Lake’s dissection had 
indicated aright—and to work more from spoken commands than from hypnotic suggestions 
as in earlier times. They were, however, kept in admirable control. The phosphorescent 
organisms supplied light with vast effectiveness, and doubtless atoned for the loss of the 
familiar polar auroras of the outer-world night. Art and decoration were pursued, though of course 
with a certain decadence. The Old Ones seemed to realise this falling off themselves; and in many 
cases anticipated the policy of Constantine the Great by transplanting especially fine blocks of 
ancient carving from their land city, just as the emperor, in a similar age of decline, stripped 
Greece and Asia of their finest art to give his new Byzantine capital greater splendours than 
its own people could create. That the transfer of sculptured blocks had not been more extensive, 
was doubtless owing to the fact that the land city was not at first wholly abandoned. By the time 
total abandonment did occur—and it surely must have occurred before the polar Pleistocene was far 
advanced—the Old Ones had perhaps become satisfied with their decadent art—or had ceased to recognise 
the superior merit of the older carvings. At any rate, the aeon-silent ruins around us had 
certainly undergone no wholesale sculptural denudation; though all the best separate statues, 
like other moveables, had been taken away. The decadent cartouches and dadoes telling this 
story were, as I have said, the latest we could   find in our limited search. They left us with a 
picture of the Old Ones shuttling back and forth betwixt the land city in summer and the sea-cavern 
city in winter, and sometimes trading with the sea-bottom cities off the antarctic coast. By 
this time the ultimate doom of the land city must have been recognised, for the sculptures shewed 
many signs of the cold’s malign encroachments. Vegetation was declining, and the terrible snows 
of the winter no longer melted completely even in midsummer. The saurian livestock were nearly 
all dead, and the mammals were standing it none too well. To keep on with the work of 
the upper world it had become necessary to adapt some of the amorphous and curiously 
cold-resistant shoggoths to land life; a thing the Old Ones had formerly been reluctant 
to do. The great river was now lifeless, and the upper sea had lost most of its denizens except the 
seals and whales. All the birds had flown away, save only the great, grotesque penguins.
What had happened afterward we could only   guess. How long had the new sea-cavern 
city survived? Was it still down there, a stony corpse in eternal blackness? Had the 
subterranean waters frozen at last? To what fate had the ocean-bottom cities of the outer world 
been delivered? Had any of the Old Ones shifted north ahead of the creeping ice-cap? Existing 
geology shews no trace of their presence. Had the frightful Mi-Go been still a menace in the outer 
land world of the north? Could one be sure of what might or might not linger even to this day in the 
lightless and unplumbed abysses of earth’s deepest waters? Those things had seemingly been able to 
withstand any amount of pressure—and men of the sea have fished up curious objects at times. And 
has the killer-whale theory really explained the savage and mysterious scars on antarctic seals 
noticed a generation ago by Borchgrevingk? The specimens found by poor Lake did not enter 
into these guesses, for their geologic setting proved them to have lived at what must have been 
a very early date in the land city’s history. They were, according to their location, certainly 
not less than thirty million years old; and we reflected that in their day the sea-cavern 
city, and indeed the cavern itself, had no existence. They would have remembered an older 
scene, with lush Tertiary vegetation everywhere, a younger land city of flourishing arts 
around them, and a great river sweeping northward along the base of the mighty 
mountains toward a far-away tropic ocean. And yet we could not help thinking about these 
specimens—especially about the eight perfect ones that were missing from Lake’s hideously ravaged 
camp. There was something abnormal about that whole business—the strange things we had tried so 
hard to lay to somebody’s madness—those frightful graves—the amount and nature of the missing 
material—Gedney—the unearthly toughness of those archaic monstrosities, and the queer 
vital freaks the sculptures now shewed the   race to have. . . . Danforth and I had seen a good 
deal in the last few hours, and were prepared to believe and keep silent about many appalling and 
incredible secrets of primal Nature. I have said that our study of the decadent 
sculptures brought about a change in our immediate objective. This of course had to do with 
the chiselled avenues to the black inner world, of whose existence we had not known before, but 
which we were now eager to find and traverse. From the evident scale of the carvings we 
deduced that a steeply descending walk of   about a mile through either of the neighbouring 
tunnels would bring us to the brink of the dizzy sunless cliffs above the great abyss; down whose 
side adequate paths, improved by the Old Ones, led to the rocky shore of the hidden and nighted 
ocean. To behold this fabulous gulf in stark reality was a lure which seemed impossible of 
resistance once we knew of the thing—yet we realised we must begin the quest at once if we 
expected to include it on our present flight. It was now 8 P.M., and we had not enough battery 
replacements to let our torches burn on forever. We had done so much of our studying and copying 
below the glacial level that our battery supply had had at least five hours of nearly continuous 
use; and despite the special dry cell formula would obviously be good for only about four 
more—though by keeping one torch unused, except for especially interesting or difficult 
places, we might manage to eke out a safe margin beyond that. It would not do to be without a 
light in these Cyclopean catacombs, hence in order to make the abyss trip we must give up all 
further mural deciphering. Of course we intended to revisit the place for days and perhaps weeks of 
intensive study and photography—curiosity having long ago got the better of horror—but just now we 
must hasten. Our supply of trail-blazing paper was far from unlimited, and we were reluctant 
to sacrifice spare notebooks or sketching   paper to augment it; but we did let one large 
notebook go. If worst came to worst, we could resort to rock-chipping—and of course it would be 
possible, even in case of really lost direction, to work up to full daylight by one channel or 
another if granted sufficient time for plentiful trial and error. So at last we set off eagerly in 
the indicated direction of the nearest tunnel. According to the carvings from which we 
had made our map, the desired tunnel-mouth   could not be much more than a quarter-mile 
from where we stood; the intervening space shewing solid-looking buildings quite likely 
to be penetrable still at a sub-glacial level. The opening itself would be in the basement—on the 
angle nearest the foothills—of a vast five-pointed structure of evidently public and perhaps 
ceremonial nature, which we tried to identify from our aërial survey of the ruins. No such structure 
came to our minds as we recalled our flight, hence we concluded that its upper parts had been greatly 
damaged, or that it had been totally shattered in an ice-rift we had noticed. In the latter case 
the tunnel would probably turn out to be choked, so that we would have to try the next nearest 
one—the one less than a mile to the north. The   intervening river-course prevented our trying 
any of the more southerly tunnels on this trip; and indeed, if both of the neighbouring ones were 
choked it was doubtful whether our batteries would warrant an attempt on the next northerly 
one—about a mile beyond our second choice. As we threaded our dim way through the labyrinth 
with the aid of map and compass—traversing rooms and corridors in every stage of ruin or 
preservation, clambering up ramps, crossing upper floors and bridges and clambering down again, 
encountering choked doorways and piles of debris, hastening now and then along finely preserved and 
uncannily immaculate stretches, taking false leads and retracing our way (in such cases removing 
the blind paper trail we had left), and once in a while striking the bottom of an open shaft 
through which daylight poured or trickled down—we were repeatedly tantalised by the sculptured 
walls along our route. Many must have told   tales of immense historical importance, and only 
the prospect of later visits reconciled us to the need of passing them by. As it was, we slowed down 
once in a while and turned on our second torch. If we had had more films we would certainly have 
paused briefly to photograph certain bas-reliefs, but time-consuming hand copying 
was clearly out of the question.
  I come now once more to a place where the 
temptation to hesitate, or to hint rather than state, is very strong. It is necessary, 
however, to reveal the rest in order to justify my course in discouraging further exploration. 
We had wormed our way very close to the computed site of the tunnel’s mouth—having crossed a 
second-story bridge to what seemed plainly the tip of a pointed wall, and descended to a ruinous 
corridor especially rich in decadently elaborate and apparently ritualistic sculptures of late 
workmanship—when, about 8:30 P.M., Danforth’s keen young nostrils gave us the first hint of 
something unusual. If we had had a dog with us, I suppose we would have been warned before. 
At first we could not precisely say what was wrong with the formerly crystal-pure air, but 
after a few seconds our memories reacted only too definitely. Let me try to state the thing 
without flinching. There was an odour—and that odour was vaguely, subtly, and unmistakably akin 
to what had nauseated us upon opening the insane grave of the horror poor Lake had dissected.
Of course the revelation was not as clearly cut at the time as it sounds now. There 
were several conceivable explanations,   and we did a good deal of indecisive whispering. 
Most important of all, we did not retreat without further investigation; for having come this far, 
we were loath to be balked by anything short of certain disaster. Anyway, what we must have 
suspected was altogether too wild to believe. Such things did not happen in any normal world. 
It was probably sheer irrational instinct which made us dim our single torch—tempted no longer 
by the decadent and sinister sculptures that leered menacingly from the oppressive 
walls—and which softened our progress   to a cautious tiptoeing and crawling over the 
increasingly littered floor and heaps of debris. Danforth’s eyes as well as nose proved better 
than mine, for it was likewise he who first noticed the queer aspect of the debris after we 
had passed many half-choked arches leading to chambers and corridors on the ground level. It 
did not look quite as it ought after countless thousands of years of desertion, and when 
we cautiously turned on more light we saw that a kind of swath seemed to have been lately 
tracked through it. The irregular nature of the litter precluded any definite marks, but in the 
smoother places there were suggestions of the dragging of heavy objects. Once we thought there 
was a hint of parallel tracks, as if of runners. This was what made us pause again.
It was during that pause that we   caught—simultaneously this time—the 
other odour ahead. Paradoxically, it was both a less frightful and a more 
frightful odour—less frightful intrinsically, but infinitely appalling in this place under 
the known circumstances . . . unless, of course, Gedney. . . . For the odour was the plain and 
familiar one of common petrol—every-day gasoline. Our motivation after that is something I will 
leave to psychologists. We knew now that some terrible extension of the camp horrors must 
have crawled into this nighted burial-place   of the aeons, hence could not doubt any longer 
the existence of nameless conditions—present or at least recent—just ahead. Yet in the end we 
did let sheer burning curiosity—or anxiety—or auto-hypnotism—or vague thoughts of responsibility 
toward Gedney—or what not—drive us on. Danforth whispered again of the print he thought he had 
seen at the alley-turning in the ruins above; and of the faint musical piping—potentially of 
tremendous significance in the light of Lake’s dissection report despite its close resemblance to 
the cave-mouth echoes of the windy peaks—which he thought he had shortly afterward half heard 
from unknown depths below. I, in my turn, whispered of how the camp was left—of what had 
disappeared, and of how the madness of a lone survivor might have conceived the inconceivable—a 
wild trip across the monstrous mountains and a descent into the unknown primal masonry—
But we could not convince each other,   or even ourselves, of anything definite. We 
had turned off all light as we stood still, and vaguely noticed that a trace of deeply 
filtered upper day kept the blackness from   being absolute. Having automatically begun to move 
ahead, we guided ourselves by occasional flashes from our torch. The disturbed debris formed an 
impression we could not shake off, and the smell of gasoline grew stronger. More and more ruin met 
our eyes and hampered our feet, until very soon we saw that the forward way was about to cease. 
We had been all too correct in our pessimistic guess about that rift glimpsed from the air. 
Our tunnel quest was a blind one, and we were not even going to be able to reach the basement 
out of which the abyssward aperture opened.
  The torch, flashing over the grotesquely carven 
walls of the blocked corridor in which we stood, shewed several doorways in various states of 
obstruction; and from one of them the gasoline odour—quite submerging that other hint of 
odour—came with especial distinctness. As we looked more steadily, we saw that beyond 
a doubt there had been a slight and recent   clearing away of debris from that particular 
opening. Whatever the lurking horror might be, we believed the direct avenue toward it was 
now plainly manifest. I do not think anyone will wonder that we waited an appreciable 
time before making any further motion. And yet, when we did venture inside that 
black arch, our first impression was one of anticlimax. For amidst the littered expanse 
of that sculptured crypt—a perfect cube with sides of about twenty feet—there remained no 
recent object of instantly discernible size; so that we looked instinctively, though in vain, 
for a farther doorway. In another moment, however, Danforth’s sharp vision had descried a place 
where the floor debris had been disturbed; and we turned on both torches full strength. 
Though what we saw in that light was actually simple and trifling, I am none the less reluctant 
to tell of it because of what it implied. It was a rough levelling of the debris, upon which 
several small objects lay carelessly scattered, and at one corner of which a considerable amount 
of gasoline must have been spilled lately enough   to leave a strong odour even at this extreme 
super-plateau altitude. In other words, it could not be other than a sort of camp—a camp made by 
questing beings who like us had been turned back by the unexpectedly choked way to the abyss.
Let me be plain. The scattered objects were, so far as substance was concerned, all from Lake’s 
camp; and consisted of tin cans as queerly opened as those we had seen at that ravaged place, many 
spent matches, three illustrated books more or less curiously smudged, an empty ink bottle with 
its pictorial and instructional carton, a broken fountain pen, some oddly snipped fragments of 
fur and tent-cloth, a used electric battery with circular of directions, a folder that came 
with our type of tent heater, and a sprinkling of crumpled papers. It was all bad enough, but when 
we smoothed out the papers and looked at what was on them we felt we had come to the worst. We had 
found certain inexplicably blotted papers at the camp which might have prepared us, yet the effect 
of the sight down there in the pre-human vaults of a nightmare city was almost too much to bear.
A mad Gedney might have made the groups of dots in imitation of those found on the greenish 
soapstones, just as the dots on those insane five-pointed grave-mounds might have been made; 
and he might conceivably have prepared rough, hasty sketches—varying in their accuracy or lack 
of it—which outlined the neighbouring parts of the city and traced the way from a circularly 
represented place outside our previous route—a place we identified as a great cylindrical tower 
in the carvings and as a vast circular gulf glimpsed in our aërial survey—to the present 
five-pointed structure and the tunnel-mouth therein. He might, I repeat, have prepared 
such sketches; for those before us were quite obviously compiled as our own had been from late 
sculptures somewhere in the glacial labyrinth, though not from the ones which we had seen and 
used. But what this art-blind bungler could never have done was to execute those sketches in 
a strange and assured technique perhaps superior, despite haste and carelessness, to any of the 
decadent carvings from which they were taken—the characteristic and unmistakable technique of the 
Old Ones themselves in the dead city’s heyday. There are those who will say Danforth and I were 
utterly mad not to flee for our lives after that;   since our conclusions were now—notwithstanding 
their wildness—completely fixed, and of a nature I need not even mention to those who 
have read my account as far as this.   Perhaps we were mad—for have I not said those 
horrible peaks were mountains of madness? But I think I can detect something of the same 
spirit—albeit in a less extreme form—in the men who stalk deadly beasts through African 
jungles to photograph them or study their   habits. Half-paralysed with fear though 
we were, there was nevertheless fanned within us a blazing flame of awe and 
curiosity which triumphed in the end. Of course we did not mean to face that—or 
those—which we knew had been there, but we felt that they must be gone by now. They would 
by this time have found the other neighbouring entrance to the abyss, and have passed within to 
whatever night-black fragments of the past might await them in the ultimate gulf—the ultimate 
gulf they had never seen. Or if that entrance, too, was blocked, they would have gone on 
to the north seeking another. They were,   we remembered, partly independent of light.
Looking back to that moment, I can scarcely recall just what precise form our new emotions 
took—just what change of immediate objective it was that so sharpened our sense of expectancy. We 
certainly did not mean to face what we feared—yet I will not deny that we may have had a lurking, 
unconscious wish to spy certain things from some hidden vantage-point. Probably we had not 
given up our zeal to glimpse the abyss itself, though there was interposed a new goal in the form 
of that great circular place shewn on the crumpled sketches we had found. We had at once recognised 
it as a monstrous cylindrical tower figuring in the very earliest carvings, but appearing only 
as a prodigious round aperture from above. Something about the impressiveness of its 
rendering, even in these hasty diagrams,   made us think that its sub-glacial levels must 
still form a feature of peculiar importance. Perhaps it embodied architectural marvels as 
yet unencountered by us. It was certainly of incredible age according to the sculptures 
in which it figured—being indeed among the   first things built in the city. Its carvings, if 
preserved, could not but be highly significant. Moreover, it might form a good present link 
with the upper world—a shorter route than the   one we were so carefully blazing, and probably 
that by which those others had descended. At any rate, the thing we did was to study 
the terrible sketches—which quite perfectly   confirmed our own—and start back over the 
indicated course to the circular place; the course which our nameless predecessors 
must have traversed twice before us. The other   neighbouring gate to the abyss would lie beyond 
that. I need not speak of our journey—during which we continued to leave an economical trail 
of paper—for it was precisely the same in kind   as that by which we had reached the cul de sac; 
except that it tended to adhere more closely to the ground level and even descend to basement 
corridors. Every now and then we could trace certain disturbing marks in the debris or litter 
under foot; and after we had passed outside the radius of the gasoline scent we were again faintly 
conscious—spasmodically—of that more hideous and more persistent scent. After the way had branched 
from our former course we sometimes gave the rays of our single torch a furtive sweep along the 
walls; noting in almost every case the well-nigh omnipresent sculptures, which indeed seem to have 
formed a main aesthetic outlet for the Old Ones. About 9:30 P.M., while traversing a vaulted 
corridor whose increasingly glaciated floor   seemed somewhat below the ground level 
and whose roof grew lower as we advanced, we began to see strong daylight ahead and were 
able to turn off our torch. It appeared that we were coming to the vast circular place, and that 
our distance from the upper air could not be very great. The corridor ended in an arch surprisingly 
low for these megalithic ruins, but we could see much through it even before we emerged. Beyond 
there stretched a prodigious round space—fully 200 feet in diameter—strown with debris and 
containing many choked archways corresponding   to the one we were about to cross. The walls 
were—in available spaces—boldly sculptured into a spiral band of heroic proportions; and 
displayed, despite the destructive weathering caused by the openness of the spot, an artistic 
splendour far beyond anything we had encountered before. The littered floor was quite heavily 
glaciated, and we fancied that the true bottom lay at a considerably lower depth.
But the salient object of the place was the titanic stone ramp which, eluding the archways 
by a sharp turn outward into the open floor, wound spirally up the stupendous cylindrical wall 
like an inside counterpart of those once climbing outside the monstrous towers or ziggurats of 
antique Babylon. Only the rapidity of our flight, and the perspective which confounded the 
descent with the tower’s inner wall, had   prevented our noticing this feature from the air, 
and thus caused us to seek another avenue to the sub-glacial level. Pabodie might have been able 
to tell what sort of engineering held it in place, but Danforth and I could merely admire and 
marvel. We could see mighty stone corbels and pillars here and there, but what we saw 
seemed inadequate to the function performed.   The thing was excellently preserved up to the 
present top of the tower—a highly remarkable circumstance in view of its exposure—and its 
shelter had done much to protect the bizarre   and disturbing cosmic sculptures on the walls.
As we stepped out into the awesome half-daylight of this monstrous cylinder-bottom—fifty million 
years old, and without doubt the most primally ancient structure ever to meet our eyes—we saw 
that the ramp-traversed sides stretched dizzily up to a height of fully sixty feet. This, 
we recalled from our aërial survey, meant   an outside glaciation of some forty feet; since 
the yawning gulf we had seen from the plane had been at the top of an approximately twenty-foot 
mound of crumbled masonry, somewhat sheltered for three-fourths of its circumference by the 
massive curving walls of a line of higher ruins. According to the sculptures the original tower had 
stood in the centre of an immense circular plaza; and had been perhaps 500 or 600 feet high, 
with tiers of horizontal discs near the top, and a row of needle-like spires along the upper 
rim. Most of the masonry had obviously toppled outward rather than inward—a fortunate happening, 
since otherwise the ramp might have been shattered and the whole interior choked. As it was, the 
ramp shewed sad battering; whilst the choking was such that all the archways at the bottom 
seemed to have been recently half-cleared.
  It took us only a moment to conclude that this 
was indeed the route by which those others had descended, and that this would be the logical 
route for our own ascent despite the long trail of paper we had left elsewhere. The tower’s 
mouth was no farther from the foothills and our waiting plane than was the great terraced 
building we had entered, and any further sub-glacial exploration we might make on this 
trip would lie in this general region. Oddly, we were still thinking about possible later 
trips—even after all we had seen and guessed. Then as we picked our way cautiously over the 
debris of the great floor, there came a sight   which for the time excluded all other matters.
It was the neatly huddled array of three sledges in that farther angle of the ramp’s lower and 
outward-projecting course which had hitherto been screened from our view. There they were—the 
three sledges missing from Lake’s camp—shaken by a hard usage which must have included forcible 
dragging along great reaches of snowless masonry   and debris, as well as much hand portage over 
utterly unnavigable places. They were carefully and intelligently packed and strapped, and 
contained things memorably familiar enough—the gasoline stove, fuel cans, instrument cases, 
provision tins, tarpaulins obviously bulging with books, and some bulging with less obvious 
contents—everything derived from Lake’s equipment. After what we had found in that other room, we 
were in a measure prepared for this encounter. The really great shock came when we stepped 
over and undid one tarpaulin whose outlines   had peculiarly disquieted us. It seems that others 
as well as Lake had been interested in collecting typical specimens; for there were two here, both 
stiffly frozen, perfectly preserved, patched with adhesive plaster where some wounds around the 
neck had occurred, and wrapped with patent care   to prevent further damage. They were the bodies 
of young Gedney and the missing dog. Many people will probably judge us callous as 
well as mad for thinking about the northward tunnel and the abyss so soon after our sombre 
discovery, and I am not prepared to say that we would have immediately revived such thoughts but 
for a specific circumstance which broke in upon us and set up a whole new train of speculations. 
We had replaced the tarpaulin over poor Gedney and were standing in a kind of mute bewilderment when 
the sounds finally reached our consciousness—the first sounds we had heard since descending out of 
the open where the mountain wind whined faintly from its unearthly heights. Well known and 
mundane though they were, their presence in this remote world of death was more unexpected 
and unnerving than any grotesque or fabulous tones could possibly have been—since they gave a fresh 
upsetting to all our notions of cosmic harmony. Had it been some trace of that bizarre musical 
piping over a wide range which Lake’s dissection report had led us to expect in those others—and 
which, indeed, our overwrought fancies had been reading into every wind-howl we had heard since 
coming on the camp horror—it would have had a kind   of hellish congruity with the aeon-dead region 
around us. A voice from other epochs belongs in a graveyard of other epochs. As it was, however, 
the noise shattered all our profoundly seated adjustments—all our tacit acceptance of the inner 
antarctic as a waste as utterly and irrevocably void of every vestige of normal life as the 
sterile disc of the moon. What we heard was not the fabulous note of any buried blasphemy of elder 
earth from whose supernal toughness an age-denied polar sun had evoked a monstrous response. 
Instead, it was a thing so mockingly normal and so unerringly familiarised by our sea days 
off Victoria Land and our camp days at McMurdo Sound that we shuddered to think of it here, where 
such things ought not to be. To be brief—it was simply the raucous squawking of a penguin.
The muffled sound floated from sub-glacial recesses nearly opposite to the corridor whence 
we had come—regions manifestly in the direction of that other tunnel to the vast abyss. The presence 
of a living water-bird in such a direction—in a world whose surface was one of age-long and 
uniform lifelessness—could lead to only one conclusion; hence our first thought was to verify 
the objective reality of the sound. It was, indeed, repeated; and seemed at times to come 
from more than one throat. Seeking its source, we entered an archway from which much debris had 
been cleared; resuming our trail-blazing—with an added paper-supply taken with curious 
repugnance from one of the tarpaulin bundles   on the sledges—when we left daylight behind.
As the glaciated floor gave place to a litter of detritus, we plainly discerned some curious 
dragging tracks; and once Danforth found a distinct print of a sort whose description 
would be only too superfluous. The course   indicated by the penguin cries was precisely what 
our map and compass prescribed as an approach to the more northerly tunnel-mouth, and we were 
glad to find that a bridgeless thoroughfare on the ground and basement levels seemed 
open. The tunnel, according to the chart, ought to start from the basement of a large 
pyramidal structure which we seemed vaguely   to recall from our aërial survey as remarkably 
well preserved. Along our path the single torch shewed a customary profusion of carvings, but 
we did not pause to examine any of these. Suddenly a bulky white shape loomed up ahead 
of us, and we flashed on the second torch. It is odd how wholly this new quest had turned 
our minds from earlier fears of what might lurk near. Those other ones, having left their supplies 
in the great circular place, must have planned to return after their scouting trip toward or into 
the abyss; yet we had now discarded all caution concerning them as completely as if they had never 
existed. This white, waddling thing was fully six feet high, yet we seemed to realise at once that 
it was not one of those others. They were larger and dark, and according to the sculptures 
their motion over land surfaces was a swift, assured matter despite the queerness of their 
sea-born tentacle equipment. But to say that the white thing did not profoundly frighten us would 
be vain. We were indeed clutched for an instant by a primitive dread almost sharper than the worst 
of our reasoned fears regarding those others. Then came a flash of anticlimax as the white shape 
sidled into a lateral archway to our left to join two others of its kind which had summoned it in 
raucous tones. For it was only a penguin—albeit of a huge, unknown species larger than the greatest 
of the known king penguins, and monstrous in its combined albinism and virtual eyelessness.
When we had followed the thing into the archway and turned both our torches on the 
indifferent and unheeding group of three we saw that they were all eyeless albinos 
of the same unknown and gigantic species. Their size reminded us of some of the archaic 
penguins depicted in the Old Ones’ sculptures, and it did not take us long to conclude that they 
were descended from the same stock—undoubtedly surviving through a retreat to some warmer inner 
region whose perpetual blackness had destroyed their pigmentation and atrophied their eyes to 
mere useless slits. That their present habitat was the vast abyss we sought, was not for a moment 
to be doubted; and this evidence of the gulf’s continued warmth and habitability filled us with 
the most curious and subtly perturbing fancies. We wondered, too, what had caused these three 
birds to venture out of their usual domain. The state and silence of the great dead city 
made it clear that it had at no time been an habitual seasonal rookery, whilst the manifest 
indifference of the trio to our presence made it seem odd that any passing party of those others 
should have startled them. Was it possible that those others had taken some aggressive action 
or tried to increase their meat supply? We doubted whether that pungent odour which the 
dogs had hated could cause an equal antipathy in these penguins; since their ancestors had 
obviously lived on excellent terms with the Old   Ones—an amicable relationship which must have 
survived in the abyss below as long as any of the Old Ones remained. Regretting—in a flareup 
of the old spirit of pure science—that we could not photograph these anomalous creatures, 
we shortly left them to their squawking and   pushed on toward the abyss whose openness was 
now so positively proved to us, and whose exact direction occasional penguin tracks made clear.
Not long afterward a steep descent in a long, low, doorless, and peculiarly sculptureless corridor 
led us to believe that we were approaching   the tunnel-mouth at last. We had passed two 
more penguins, and heard others immediately ahead. Then the corridor ended in a prodigious 
open space which made us gasp involuntarily—a perfect inverted hemisphere, obviously deep 
underground; fully an hundred feet in diameter and fifty feet high, with low archways opening 
around all parts of the circumference but one, and that one yawning cavernously with a black 
arched aperture which broke the symmetry of the   vault to a height of nearly fifteen feet. 
It was the entrance to the great abyss. In this vast hemisphere, whose concave roof 
was impressively though decadently carved to a likeness of the primordial celestial dome, 
a few albino penguins waddled—aliens there, but indifferent and unseeing. The black tunnel 
yawned indefinitely off at a steep descending grade, its aperture adorned with grotesquely 
chiselled jambs and lintel. From that cryptical mouth we fancied a current of slightly warmer air 
and perhaps even a suspicion of vapour proceeded; and we wondered what living entities other 
than penguins the limitless void below, and the contiguous honeycombings of the land and 
the titan mountains, might conceal. We wondered, too, whether the trace of mountain-top smoke 
at first suspected by poor Lake, as well as the odd haze we had ourselves perceived around the 
rampart-crowned peak, might not be caused by the tortuous-channelled rising of some such vapour 
from the unfathomed regions of earth’s core. Entering the tunnel, we saw that its outline 
was—at least at the start—about fifteen feet each way; sides, floor, and arched roof 
composed of the usual megalithic masonry. The sides were sparsely decorated with cartouches 
of conventional designs in a late, decadent style; and all the construction and carving were 
marvellously well preserved. The floor was quite clear, except for a slight detritus bearing 
outgoing penguin tracks and the inward tracks of those others. The farther one advanced, the warmer 
it became; so that we were soon unbuttoning our heavy garments. We wondered whether there were 
any actually igneous manifestations below, and whether the waters of that sunless sea were 
hot. After a short distance the masonry gave place to solid rock, though the tunnel kept the 
same proportions and presented the same aspect of carved regularity. Occasionally its varying 
grade became so steep that grooves were cut in the floor. Several times we noted the mouths of small 
lateral galleries not recorded in our diagrams; none of them such as to complicate the problem of 
our return, and all of them welcome as possible refuges in case we met unwelcome entities on 
their way back from the abyss. The nameless scent of such things was very distinct. Doubtless 
it was suicidally foolish to venture into that tunnel under the known conditions, but the lure 
of the unplumbed is stronger in certain persons than most suspect—indeed, it was just such a 
lure which had brought us to this unearthly polar waste in the first place. We saw several 
penguins as we passed along, and speculated on the distance we would have to traverse. 
The carvings had led us to expect a steep downhill walk of about a mile to the abyss, but 
our previous wanderings had shewn us that matters of scale were not wholly to be depended on.
After about a quarter of a mile that nameless   scent became greatly accentuated, and we 
kept very careful track of the various lateral openings we passed. There was no visible 
vapour as at the mouth, but this was doubtless due to the lack of contrasting cooler air. 
The temperature was rapidly ascending, and we were not surprised to come upon a careless 
heap of material shudderingly familiar to us. It was composed of furs and tent-cloth taken 
from Lake’s camp, and we did not pause to study the bizarre forms into which the fabrics had been 
slashed. Slightly beyond this point we noticed a decided increase in the size and number of the 
side-galleries, and concluded that the densely honeycombed region beneath the higher foothills 
must now have been reached. The nameless scent was now curiously mixed with another and scarcely less 
offensive odour—of what nature we could not guess, though we thought of decaying organisms and 
perhaps unknown subterrene fungi. Then came a startling expansion of the tunnel for which the 
carvings had not prepared us—a broadening and rising into a lofty, natural-looking elliptical 
cavern with a level floor; some 75 feet long and 50 broad, and with many immense side-passages 
leading away into cryptical darkness. Though this cavern was natural in appearance, 
an inspection with both torches suggested that   it had been formed by the artificial destruction 
of several walls between adjacent honeycombings. The walls were rough, and the high 
vaulted roof was thick with stalactites;   but the solid rock floor had been smoothed off, 
and was free from all debris, detritus, or even dust to a positively abnormal extent. Except for 
the avenue through which we had come, this was true of the floors of all the great galleries 
opening off from it; and the singularity of the condition was such as to set us vainly puzzling. 
The curious new foetor which had supplemented the nameless scent was excessively pungent here; 
so much so that it destroyed all trace of the other. Something about this whole place, with its 
polished and almost glistening floor, struck us as more vaguely baffling and horrible than any of the 
monstrous things we had previously encountered. The regularity of the passage immediately 
ahead, as well as the larger proportion of   penguin-droppings there, prevented all confusion 
as to the right course amidst this plethora of equally great cave-mouths. Nevertheless we 
resolved to resume our paper trail-blazing if any further complexity should develop; for dust 
tracks, of course, could no longer be expected. Upon resuming our direct progress we cast a 
beam of torchlight over the tunnel walls—and stopped short in amazement at the supremely 
radical change which had come over the carvings in this part of the passage. We realised, of 
course, the great decadence of the Old Ones’ sculpture at the time of the tunnelling; and 
had indeed noticed the inferior workmanship of   the arabesques in the stretches behind us. But 
now, in this deeper section beyond the cavern, there was a sudden difference wholly transcending 
explanation—a difference in basic nature as well as in mere quality, and involving so profound 
and calamitous a degradation of skill that nothing in the hitherto observed rate of 
decline could have led one to expect it. This new and unusual work was coarse, bold, 
and wholly lacking in delicacy of detail. It was counter-sunk with exaggerated depth in 
bands following the same general line as the   sparse cartouches of the earlier sections, but the 
height of the reliefs did not reach the level of the general surface. Danforth had the idea that it 
was a second carving—a sort of palimpsest formed after the obliteration of a previous design. In 
nature it was wholly decorative and conventional; and consisted of crude spirals and angles roughly 
following the quintile mathematical tradition of the Old Ones, yet seeming more like a parody 
than a perpetuation of that tradition. We could not get it out of our minds that some subtly but 
profoundly alien element had been added to the aesthetic feeling behind the technique—an alien 
element, Danforth guessed, that was responsible for the manifestly laborious substitution. It 
was like, yet disturbingly unlike, what we had come to recognise as the Old Ones’ art; and I was 
persistently reminded of such hybrid things as the ungainly Palmyrene sculptures fashioned in the 
Roman manner. That others had recently noticed this belt of carving was hinted by the presence 
of a used torch battery on the floor in front of one of the most characteristic designs.
Since we could not afford to spend any   considerable time in study, we resumed our advance 
after a cursory look; though frequently casting beams over the walls to see if any further 
decorative changes developed. Nothing of   the sort was perceived, though the carvings were 
in places rather sparse because of the numerous mouths of smooth-floored lateral tunnels. We 
saw and heard fewer penguins, but thought we caught a vague suspicion of an infinitely distant 
chorus of them somewhere deep within the earth. The new and inexplicable odour was abominably 
strong, and we could detect scarcely a sign of that other nameless scent. Puffs of visible vapour 
ahead bespoke increasing contrasts in temperature, and the relative nearness of the sunless 
sea-cliffs of the great abyss. Then, quite unexpectedly, we saw certain obstructions 
on the polished floor ahead—obstructions which were quite definitely not penguins—and turned 
on our second torch after making sure that the objects were quite stationary.
Still another time have I come to a place where it is very difficult to proceed. 
I ought to be hardened by this stage;   but there are some experiences and intimations 
which scar too deeply to permit of healing, and leave only such an added sensitiveness that 
memory reinspires all the original horror. We saw, as I have said, certain obstructions on the 
polished floor ahead; and I may add that our   nostrils were assailed almost simultaneously by 
a very curious intensification of the strange prevailing foetor, now quite plainly mixed with 
the nameless stench of those others which had gone before us. The light of the second torch 
left no doubt of what the obstructions were, and we dared approach them only because we could 
see, even from a distance, that they were quite as past all harming power as had been the six 
similar specimens unearthed from the monstrous star-mounded graves at poor Lake’s camp.
They were, indeed, as lacking in completeness as most of those we had unearthed—though it grew 
plain from the thick, dark-green pool gathering around them that their incompleteness was of 
infinitely greater recency. There seemed to be only four of them, whereas Lake’s bulletins 
would have suggested no less than eight as   forming the group which had preceded us. To 
find them in this state was wholly unexpected, and we wondered what sort of monstrous 
struggle had occurred down here in the dark.
  Penguins, attacked in a body, retaliate 
savagely with their beaks; and our ears now made certain the existence of a rookery 
far beyond. Had those others disturbed such a place and aroused murderous pursuit? 
The obstructions did not suggest it, for penguin beaks against the tough tissues Lake had 
dissected could hardly account for the terrible   damage our approaching glance was beginning 
to make out. Besides, the huge blind birds we had seen appeared to be singularly peaceful.
Had there, then, been a struggle among those others, and were the absent four responsible? 
If so, where were they? Were they close at hand and likely to form an immediate menace to us? We 
glanced anxiously at some of the smooth-floored lateral passages as we continued our slow and 
frankly reluctant approach. Whatever the conflict was, it had clearly been that which had frightened 
the penguins into their unaccustomed wandering. It must, then, have arisen near that faintly 
heard rookery in the incalculable gulf beyond, since there were no signs that any birds had 
normally dwelt here. Perhaps, we reflected, there had been a hideous running fight, with the 
weaker party seeking to get back to the cached   sledges when their pursuers finished them. 
One could picture the daemoniac fray between namelessly monstrous entities as it surged 
out of the black abyss with great clouds of   frantic penguins squawking and scurrying ahead.
I say that we approached those sprawling and incomplete obstructions slowly and reluctantly. 
Would to heaven we had never approached them at all, but had run back at top speed out of 
that blasphemous tunnel with the greasily   smooth floors and the unusual murals aping and 
mocking the things they had superseded—run back, before we had seen what we did see, and before 
our minds were burned with something which   will never let us breathe easily again!
Both of our torches were turned on the prostrate objects, so that we soon realised the 
dominant factor in their incompleteness. Mauled, compressed, twisted, and ruptured as they were, 
their chief common injury was total decapitation. From each one the tentacled starfish-head had 
been removed; and as we drew near we saw that the manner of removal looked more like some hellish 
tearing or suction than like any ordinary form of cleavage. Their noisome dark-green ichor formed 
a large, spreading pool; but its stench was half overshadowed by that newer and stranger stench, 
here more pungent than at any other point along our route. Only when we had come very close to the 
sprawling obstructions could we trace that second, unexplainable foetor to any immediate source—and 
the instant we did so Danforth, remembering certain very vivid sculptures of the Old Ones’ 
history in the Permian age 150 million years ago, gave vent to a nerve-tortured cry which echoed 
hysterically through that vaulted and archaic passage with the evil palimpsest carvings.
I came only just short of echoing his cry myself; for I had seen those primal sculptures, 
too, and had shudderingly admired the way   the nameless artist had suggested that hideous 
slime-coating found on certain incomplete and prostrate Old Ones—those whom the frightful 
shoggoths had characteristically slain and sucked to a ghastly headlessness in the great 
war of re-subjugation. They were infamous, nightmare sculptures even when telling of age-old, 
bygone things; for shoggoths and their work ought not to be seen by human beings or portrayed by 
any beings. The mad author of the Necronomicon had nervously tried to swear that none had been bred 
on this planet, and that only drugged dreamers   had ever conceived them. Formless protoplasm 
able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling 
cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, 
builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more 
amphibious, more and more imitative—Great   God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old 
Ones willing to use and to carve such things? And now, when Danforth and I saw the freshly 
glistening and reflectively iridescent black slime which clung thickly to those headless bodies and 
stank obscenely with that new unknown odour whose cause only a diseased fancy could envisage—clung 
to those bodies and sparkled less voluminously on a smooth part of the accursedly re-sculptured 
wall in a series of grouped dots—we understood the quality of cosmic fear to its uttermost 
depths. It was not fear of those four missing others—for all too well did we suspect they 
would do no harm again. Poor devils! After all, they were not evil things of their kind. They 
were the men of another age and another order   of being. Nature had played a hellish jest on 
them—as it will on any others that human madness, callousness, or cruelty may hereafter drag 
up in that hideously dead or sleeping polar waste—and this was their tragic homecoming.
They had not been even savages—for what indeed had they done? That awful awakening in the cold of 
an unknown epoch—perhaps an attack by the furry, frantically barking quadrupeds, and a dazed 
defence against them and the equally frantic white simians with the queer wrappings and paraphernalia 
. . . poor Lake, poor Gedney . . . and poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last—what had they done 
that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing 
of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less 
incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star-spawn—whatever they had been, they were men!
They had crossed the icy peaks on whose templed slopes they had once worshipped and roamed 
among the tree-ferns. They had found their dead city brooding under its curse, and had 
read its carven latter days as we had done. They had tried to reach their living fellows 
in fabled depths of blackness they had never   seen—and what had they found? All this flashed in 
unison through the thoughts of Danforth and me as we looked from those headless, slime-coated 
shapes to the loathsome palimpsest sculptures and the diabolical dot-groups of fresh slime on 
the wall beside them—looked and understood what must have triumphed and survived down there 
in the Cyclopean water-city of that nighted,   penguin-fringed abyss, whence even now a sinister 
curling mist had begun to belch pallidly as if in answer to Danforth’s hysterical scream.
The shock of recognising that monstrous   slime and headlessness had frozen us into mute, 
motionless statues, and it is only through later conversations that we have learned of the complete 
identity of our thoughts at that moment. It seemed aeons that we stood there, but actually it could 
not have been more than ten or fifteen seconds. That hateful, pallid mist curled forward as 
if veritably driven by some remoter advancing bulk—and then came a sound which upset much of 
what we had just decided, and in so doing broke the spell and enabled us to run like mad past 
squawking, confused penguins over our former trail back to the city, along ice-sunken megalithic 
corridors to the great open circle, and up that archaic spiral ramp in a frenzied automatic 
plunge for the sane outer air and light of day. The new sound, as I have intimated, upset much 
that we had decided; because it was what poor Lake’s dissection had led us to attribute to 
those we had just judged dead. It was, Danforth later told me, precisely what he had caught in 
infinitely muffled form when at that spot beyond the alley-corner above the glacial level; and 
it certainly had a shocking resemblance to the wind-pipings we had both heard around the lofty 
mountain caves. At the risk of seeming puerile I will add another thing, too; if only because of 
the surprising way Danforth’s impression chimed with mine. Of course common reading is what 
prepared us both to make the interpretation, though Danforth has hinted at queer notions 
about unsuspected and forbidden sources to which Poe may have had access when writing his Arthur 
Gordon Pym a century ago. It will be remembered that in that fantastic tale there is a word of 
unknown but terrible and prodigious significance connected with the antarctic and screamed 
eternally by the gigantic, spectrally snowy birds of that malign region’s core. “Tekeli-li! 
Tekeli-li!” That, I may admit, is exactly what we thought we heard conveyed by that sudden sound 
behind the advancing white mist—that insidious musical piping over a singularly wide range.
We were in full flight before three notes or syllables had been uttered, though we knew that 
the swiftness of the Old Ones would enable any scream-roused and pursuing survivor of the 
slaughter to overtake us in a moment if it really wished to do so. We had a vague hope, 
however, that non-aggressive conduct and a display of kindred reason might cause such a 
being to spare us in case of capture; if only from scientific curiosity. After all, if such an 
one had nothing to fear for itself it would have no motive in harming us. Concealment being futile 
at this juncture, we used our torch for a running glance behind, and perceived that the mist was 
thinning. Would we see, at last, a complete and living specimen of those others? Again came that 
insidious musical piping—“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” Then, noting that we were actually gaining 
on our pursuer, it occurred to us that the   entity might be wounded. We could take no 
chances, however, since it was very obviously approaching in answer to Danforth’s scream 
rather than in flight from any other entity. The timing was too close to admit of doubt. Of 
the whereabouts of that less conceivable and less mentionable nightmare—that foetid, unglimpsed 
mountain of slime-spewing protoplasm whose race had conquered the abyss and sent land 
pioneers to re-carve and squirm through the   burrows of the hills—we could form no guess; and 
it cost us a genuine pang to leave this probably crippled Old One—perhaps a lone survivor—to 
the peril of recapture and a nameless fate. Thank heaven we did not slacken our run. The 
curling mist had thickened again, and was driving ahead with increased speed; whilst the straying 
penguins in our rear were squawking and screaming   and displaying signs of a panic really surprising 
in view of their relatively minor confusion when we had passed them. Once more came that sinister, 
wide-ranged piping—“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” We had been wrong. The thing was not wounded, but had 
merely paused on encountering the bodies of its fallen kindred and the hellish slime inscription 
above them. We could never know what that daemon message was—but those burials at Lake’s camp had 
shewn how much importance the beings attached to their dead. Our recklessly used torch now 
revealed ahead of us the large open cavern where various ways converged, and we were glad to be 
leaving those morbid palimpsest sculptures—almost felt even when scarcely seen—behind.
Another thought which the advent of the cave inspired was the possibility of losing our pursuer 
at this bewildering focus of large galleries. There were several of the blind albino penguins 
in the open space, and it seemed clear that their fear of the oncoming entity was extreme to the 
point of unaccountability. If at that point we dimmed our torch to the very lowest limit of 
travelling need, keeping it strictly in front of us, the frightened squawking motions of the 
huge birds in the mist might muffle our footfalls, screen our true course, and somehow set 
up a false lead. Amidst the churning, spiralling fog the littered and unglistening 
floor of the main tunnel beyond this point, as differing from the other morbidly polished 
burrows, could hardly form a highly distinguishing   feature; even, so far as we could conjecture, 
for those indicated special senses which made the Old Ones partly though imperfectly 
independent of light in emergencies. In fact, we were somewhat apprehensive lest we go astray 
ourselves in our haste. For we had, of course, decided to keep straight on toward the dead city; 
since the consequences of loss in those unknown foothill honeycombings would be unthinkable.
The fact that we survived and emerged is sufficient proof that the thing did take a 
wrong gallery whilst we providentially hit on   the right one. The penguins alone could not have 
saved us, but in conjunction with the mist they seem to have done so. Only a benign fate kept the 
curling vapours thick enough at the right moment, for they were constantly shifting and threatening 
to vanish. Indeed, they did lift for a second just before we emerged from the nauseously 
re-sculptured tunnel into the cave; so that we actually caught one first and only half-glimpse 
of the oncoming entity as we cast a final, desperately fearful glance backward before dimming 
the torch and mixing with the penguins in the hope of dodging pursuit. If the fate which screened us 
was benign, that which gave us the half-glimpse was infinitely the opposite; for to that flash 
of semi-vision can be traced a full half of the horror which has ever since haunted us.
Our exact motive in looking back again was perhaps no more than the immemorial instinct of 
the pursued to gauge the nature and course of its pursuer; or perhaps it was an automatic attempt 
to answer a subconscious question raised by one of our senses. In the midst of our flight, with all 
our faculties centred on the problem of escape, we were in no condition to observe and analyse 
details; yet even so our latent brain-cells must have wondered at the message brought them by our 
nostrils. Afterward we realised what it was—that our retreat from the foetid slime-coating on 
those headless obstructions, and the coincident approach of the pursuing entity, had not brought 
us the exchange of stenches which logic called for. In the neighbourhood of the prostrate things 
that new and lately unexplainable foetor had been wholly dominant; but by this time it ought to 
have largely given place to the nameless stench associated with those others. This it had not 
done—for instead, the newer and less bearable smell was now virtually undiluted, and growing 
more and more poisonously insistent each second. So we glanced back—simultaneously, it would 
appear; though no doubt the incipient motion of one prompted the imitation of the other. As 
we did so we flashed both torches full strength at the momentarily thinned mist; either from 
sheer primitive anxiety to see all we could, or in a less primitive but equally unconscious 
effort to dazzle the entity before we dimmed our light and dodged among the penguins of the 
labyrinth-centre ahead. Unhappy act! Not Orpheus himself, or Lot’s wife, paid much more dearly for 
a backward glance. And again came that shocking, wide-ranged piping—“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”
I might as well be frank—even if I cannot bear to be quite direct—in stating what we saw; 
though at the time we felt that it was not to be admitted even to each other. The words reaching 
the reader can never even suggest the awfulness   of the sight itself. It crippled our consciousness 
so completely that I wonder we had the residual sense to dim our torches as planned, and to strike 
the right tunnel toward the dead city. Instinct alone must have carried us through—perhaps 
better than reason could have done; though   if that was what saved us, we paid a high price. 
Of reason we certainly had little enough left. Danforth was totally unstrung, and the first thing 
I remember of the rest of the journey was hearing him light-headedly chant an hysterical formula in 
which I alone of mankind could have found anything but insane irrelevance. It reverberated in 
falsetto echoes among the squawks of the penguins; reverberated through the vaultings ahead, 
and—thank God—through the now empty vaultings   behind. He could not have begun it at once—else 
we would not have been alive and blindly racing. I shudder to think of what a shade of difference 
in his nervous reactions might have brought. “South Station Under—Washington Under—Park Street 
Under—Kendall—Central—Harvard. . . .” The poor fellow was chanting the familiar stations of the 
Boston-Cambridge tunnel that burrowed through   our peaceful native soil thousands of miles 
away in New England, yet to me the ritual had neither irrelevance nor home-feeling. It had only 
horror, because I knew unerringly the monstrous, nefandous analogy that had suggested it. We had 
expected, upon looking back, to see a terrible and incredibly moving entity if the mists were thin 
enough; but of that entity we had formed a clear idea. What we did see—for the mists were indeed 
all too malignly thinned—was something altogether different, and immeasurably more hideous 
and detestable. It was the utter, objective   embodiment of the fantastic novelist’s ‘thing that 
should not be’; and its nearest comprehensible analogue is a vast, onrushing subway train 
as one sees it from a station platform—the great black front looming colossally out of 
infinite subterraneous distance, constellated with strangely coloured lights and filling the 
prodigious burrow as a piston fills a cylinder. But we were not on a station platform. We were 
on the track ahead as the nightmare plastic column of foetid black iridescence oozed tightly 
onward through its fifteen-foot sinus; gathering unholy speed and driving before it a spiral, 
re-thickening cloud of the pallid abyss-vapour. It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster 
than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, 
and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and   unforming as pustules of greenish light all over 
the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering 
over the glistening floor that it and its kind   had swept so evilly free of all litter. Still 
came that eldritch, mocking cry—“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” And at last we remembered that the 
daemoniac shoggoths—given life, thought, and plastic organ patterns solely by the Old Ones, and 
having no language save that which the dot-groups expressed—had likewise no voice save the imitated 
accents of their bygone masters. Danforth and I have recollections of emerging into 
the great sculptured hemisphere and of threading our back trail through the Cyclopean 
rooms and corridors of the dead city;   yet these are purely dream-fragments 
involving no memory of volition, details, or physical exertion. It was as if we floated 
in a nebulous world or dimension without time, causation, or orientation. The grey half-daylight 
of the vast circular space sobered us somewhat; but we did not go near those cached sledges or 
look again at poor Gedney and the dog. They have a strange and titanic mausoleum, and I hope the end 
of this planet will find them still undisturbed. It was while struggling up the colossal spiral 
incline that we first felt the terrible fatigue and short breath which our race through the thin 
plateau air had produced; but not even the fear of collapse could make us pause before reaching 
the normal outer realm of sun and sky. There was something vaguely appropriate about our departure 
from those buried epochs; for as we wound our   panting way up the sixty-foot cylinder of primal 
masonry we glimpsed beside us a continuous procession of heroic sculptures in the dead race’s 
early and undecayed technique—a farewell from the Old Ones, written fifty million years ago.
Finally scrambling out at the top,   we found ourselves on a great mound of tumbled 
blocks; with the curved walls of higher stonework rising westward, and the brooding peaks of the 
great mountains shewing beyond the more crumbled structures toward the east. The low antarctic 
sun of midnight peered redly from the southern horizon through rifts in the jagged ruins, and 
the terrible age and deadness of the nightmare city seemed all the starker by contrast with 
such relatively known and accustomed things as the features of the polar landscape. The 
sky above was a churning and opalescent mass of tenuous ice-vapours, and the cold clutched 
at our vitals. Wearily resting the outfit-bags to which we had instinctively clung throughout 
our desperate flight, we rebuttoned our heavy garments for the stumbling climb down the mound 
and the walk through the aeon-old stone maze to the foothills where our aëroplane waited. Of what 
had set us fleeing from the darkness of earth’s secret and archaic gulfs we said nothing at all.
In less than a quarter of an hour we had found the steep grade to the foothills—the probable ancient 
terrace—by which we had descended, and could see the dark bulk of our great plane amidst the 
sparse ruins on the rising slope ahead. Half way uphill toward our goal we paused for a momentary 
breathing-spell, and turned to look again at the fantastic palaeogean tangle of incredible stone 
shapes below us—once more outlined mystically against an unknown west. As we did so we saw that 
the sky beyond had lost its morning haziness; the restless ice-vapours having moved up to the 
zenith, where their mocking outlines seemed on the point of settling into some bizarre pattern which 
they feared to make quite definite or conclusive. There now lay revealed on the ultimate white 
horizon behind the grotesque city a dim, elfin line of pinnacled violet whose needle-pointed 
heights loomed dream-like against the beckoning rose-colour of the western sky. Up toward this 
shimmering rim sloped the ancient table-land, the depressed course of the bygone river traversing it 
as an irregular ribbon of shadow. For a second we gasped in admiration of the scene’s unearthly 
cosmic beauty, and then vague horror began to creep into our souls. For this far violet line 
could be nothing else than the terrible mountains of the forbidden land—highest of earth’s peaks 
and focus of earth’s evil; harbourers of nameless horrors and Archaean secrets; shunned and prayed 
to by those who feared to carve their meaning; untrodden by any living thing of earth, 
but visited by the sinister lightnings and   sending strange beams across the plains in the 
polar night—beyond doubt the unknown archetype of that dreaded Kadath in the Cold Waste beyond 
abhorrent Leng, whereof unholy primal legends hint evasively. We were the first human beings ever to 
see them—and I hope to God we may be the last. If the sculptured maps and pictures in that 
pre-human city had told truly, these cryptic violet mountains could not be much less than 300 
miles away; yet none the less sharply did their dim elfin essence jut above that remote and snowy 
rim, like the serrated edge of a monstrous alien planet about to rise into unaccustomed heavens. 
Their height, then, must have been tremendous beyond all known comparison—carrying them up 
into tenuous atmospheric strata peopled by such gaseous wraiths as rash flyers have barely 
lived to whisper of after unexplainable falls. Looking at them, I thought nervously of certain 
sculptured hints of what the great bygone river   had washed down into the city from their accursed 
slopes—and wondered how much sense and how much folly had lain in the fears of those Old Ones 
who carved them so reticently. I recalled how their northerly end must come near the coast at 
Queen Mary Land, where even at that moment Sir Douglas Mawson’s expedition was doubtless 
working less than a thousand miles away; and hoped that no evil fate would give Sir Douglas 
and his men a glimpse of what might lie beyond the protecting coastal range. Such thoughts formed 
a measure of my overwrought condition at the time—and Danforth seemed to be even worse.
Yet long before we had passed the great star-shaped ruin and reached our plane our 
fears had become transferred to the lesser but   vast enough range whose re-crossing lay ahead of 
us. From these foothills the black, ruin-crusted slopes reared up starkly and hideously against 
the east, again reminding us of those strange Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich; and when we 
thought of the damnable honeycombs inside them, and of the frightful amorphous entities that 
might have pushed their foetidly squirming way even to the topmost hollow pinnacles, we could 
not face without panic the prospect of again sailing by those suggestive skyward cave-mouths 
where the wind made sounds like an evil musical piping over a wide range. To make matters 
worse, we saw distinct traces of local mist around several of the summits—as poor Lake must 
have done when he made that early mistake about volcanism—and thought shiveringly of that kindred 
mist from which we had just escaped; of that, and of the blasphemous, horror-fostering 
abyss whence all such vapours came. All was well with the plane, and we clumsily 
hauled on our heavy flying furs. Danforth got the engine started without trouble, and we made 
a very smooth takeoff over the nightmare city. Below us the primal Cyclopean masonry spread out 
as it had done when first we saw it—so short, yet infinitely long, a time ago—and we began 
rising and turning to test the wind for our   crossing through the pass. At a very high 
level there must have been great disturbance, since the ice-dust clouds of the zenith were doing 
all sorts of fantastic things; but at 24,000 feet, the height we needed for the pass, we found 
navigation quite practicable. As we drew close to the jutting peaks the wind’s strange piping 
again became manifest, and I could see Danforth’s hands trembling at the controls. Rank amateur 
though I was, I thought at that moment that I might be a better navigator than he in effecting 
the dangerous crossing between pinnacles; and when I made motions to change seats and take over his 
duties he did not protest. I tried to keep all my skill and self-possession about me, and stared 
at the sector of reddish farther sky betwixt the walls of the pass—resolutely refusing to pay 
attention to the puffs of mountain-top vapour, and wishing that I had wax-stopped ears like 
Ulysses’ men off the Sirens’ coast to keep that disturbing wind-piping from my consciousness.
But Danforth, released from his piloting and keyed up to a dangerous nervous pitch, could not 
keep quiet. I felt him turning and wriggling about as he looked back at the terrible receding city, 
ahead at the cave-riddled, cube-barnacled peaks, sidewise at the bleak sea of snowy, rampart-strown 
foothills, and upward at the seething, grotesquely clouded sky. It was then, just as I was trying 
to steer safely through the pass, that his mad shrieking brought us so close to disaster by 
shattering my tight hold on myself and causing me to fumble helplessly with the controls for a 
moment. A second afterward my resolution triumphed and we made the crossing safely—yet I am afraid 
that Danforth will never be the same again. I have said that Danforth refused to tell 
me what final horror made him scream out so   insanely—a horror which, I feel sadly sure, is 
mainly responsible for his present breakdown. We had snatches of shouted conversation above 
the wind’s piping and the engine’s buzzing as we reached the safe side of the range and swooped 
slowly down toward the camp, but that had mostly to do with the pledges of secrecy we had made 
as we prepared to leave the nightmare city. Certain things, we had agreed, were not for people 
to know and discuss lightly—and I would not speak of them now but for the need of heading off 
that Starkweather-Moore Expedition, and others, at any cost. It is absolutely necessary, for 
the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths 
be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving 
nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.
All that Danforth has ever hinted is   that the final horror was a mirage. It was 
not, he declares, anything connected with the cubes and caves of echoing, vaporous, wormily 
honeycombed mountains of madness which we crossed; but a single fantastic, daemoniac glimpse, among 
the churning zenith-clouds, of what lay back of those other violet westward mountains which 
the Old Ones had shunned and feared. It is very probable that the thing was a sheer delusion born 
of the previous stresses we had passed through, and of the actual though unrecognised mirage 
of the dead transmontane city experienced near Lake’s camp the day before; but it was so real 
to Danforth that he suffers from it still. He has on rare occasions whispered disjointed 
and irresponsible things about “the black pit”, “the carven rim”, “the proto-shoggoths”, 
“the windowless solids with five dimensions”, “the nameless cylinder”, “the elder pharos”, 
“Yog-Sothoth”, “the primal white jelly”, “the colour out of space”, “the wings”, “the eyes 
in darkness”, “the moon-ladder”, “the original, the eternal, the undying”, and other bizarre 
conceptions; but when he is fully himself he repudiates all this and attributes it to his 
curious and macabre reading of earlier years. Danforth, indeed, is known to be among the few 
who have ever dared go completely through that   worm-riddled copy of the Necronomicon kept 
under lock and key in the college library. The higher sky, as we crossed the range, was 
surely vaporous and disturbed enough; and although I did not see the zenith I can well imagine that 
its swirls of ice-dust may have taken strange forms. Imagination, knowing how vividly distant 
scenes can sometimes be reflected, refracted, and magnified by such layers of restless cloud, 
might easily have supplied the rest—and of course Danforth did not hint any of those specific 
horrors till after his memory had had a chance to draw on his bygone reading. He could never 
have seen so much in one instantaneous glance. At the time his shrieks were confined 
to the repetition of a single mad word   of all too obvious source:
“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” Some histories are best left buried.
At the Mountains of Madness warns us that beneath the surface of our world is a much older, stranger 
truth. Lovecraft invites us to confront how little we understand—and how fragile our reality is.
Thank you for joining this journey. What part stayed with you most? Share your thoughts below.
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clicking join and becoming a member.   Until next time—tread carefully where 
history sleeps. Some cities are forgotten for a reason.
The Nameless City tells of an explorer who   ventures into the ruins of a lost civilization, 
only to discover a truth older than humanity—one that challenges the boundaries of time 
and memory. The story explores how the   past can still haunt the present, and 
how ancient legacies shape our world. This early Lovecraft tale blends archaeology 
with cosmic dread, reminding us that some ruins are alive with more than just history.
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hidden mysteries. For exclusive content, tap the join button and become a member.
When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed. I was travelling in a parched and 
terrible valley under the moon, and afar I saw it protruding uncannily above the sands as parts 
of a corpse may protrude from an ill-made grave. Fear spoke from the age-worn stones of this hoary 
survivor of the deluge, this great-grandmother of the eldest pyramid; and a viewless aura repelled 
me and bade me retreat from antique and sinister secrets that no man should see, and 
no man else had ever dared to see. Remote in the desert of Araby lies the 
nameless city, crumbling and inarticulate, its low walls nearly hidden by the sands of 
uncounted ages. It must have been thus before the first stones of Memphis were laid, and 
while the bricks of Babylon were yet unbaked. There is no legend so old as to give it a 
name, or to recall that it was ever alive; but it is told of in whispers around campfires and 
muttered about by grandams in the tents of sheiks, so that all the tribes shun it without wholly 
knowing why. It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred the mad poet dreamed on the night 
before he sang his unexplainable couplet: “That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.” I should have known that the Arabs had 
good reason for shunning the nameless city,   the city told of in strange tales but seen by 
no living man, yet I defied them and went into the untrodden waste with my camel. I alone have 
seen it, and that is why no other face bears such hideous lines of fear as mine; why no other man 
shivers so horribly when the night-wind rattles the windows. When I came upon it in the ghastly 
stillness of unending sleep it looked at me, chilly from the rays of a cold moon amidst the 
desert’s heat. And as I returned its look I forgot my triumph at finding it, and stopped 
still with my camel to wait for the dawn. For hours I waited, till the east grew grey and 
the stars faded, and the grey turned to roseal light edged with gold. I heard a moaning and saw 
a storm of sand stirring among the antique stones though the sky was clear and the vast reaches of 
the desert still. Then suddenly above the desert’s far rim came the blazing edge of the sun, seen 
through the tiny sandstorm which was passing away, and in my fevered state I fancied that from some 
remote depth there came a crash of musical metal to hail the fiery disc as Memnon hails it from the 
banks of the Nile. My ears rang and my imagination seethed as I led my camel slowly across the 
sand to that unvocal stone place; that place too old for Egypt and Meroë to remember; that 
place which I alone of living men had seen. In and out amongst the shapeless foundations 
of houses and palaces I wandered, finding never a carving or inscription 
to tell of those men, if men they were, who built the city and dwelt therein so long ago. 
The antiquity of the spot was unwholesome, and I longed to encounter some sign or device to prove 
that the city was indeed fashioned by mankind. There were certain proportions and dimensions 
in the ruins which I did not like. I had with   me many tools, and dug much within the walls of 
the obliterated edifices; but progress was slow, and nothing significant was revealed. When night 
and the moon returned I felt a chill wind which brought new fear, so that I did not dare to remain 
in the city. And as I went outside the antique walls to sleep, a small sighing sandstorm gathered 
behind me, blowing over the grey stones though the moon was bright and most of the desert still.
I awaked just at dawn from a pageant of horrible dreams, my ears ringing as from some metallic 
peal. I saw the sun peering redly through the last gusts of a little sandstorm that hovered over 
the nameless city, and marked the quietness of the rest of the landscape. Once more I ventured within 
those brooding ruins that swelled beneath the sand like an ogre under a coverlet, and again dug 
vainly for relics of the forgotten race. At noon I rested, and in the afternoon I spent much time 
tracing the walls, and the bygone streets, and the outlines of the nearly vanished buildings. I saw 
that the city had been mighty indeed, and wondered at the sources of its greatness. To myself I 
pictured all the splendours of an age so distant that Chaldaea could not recall it, and thought 
of Sarnath the Doomed, that stood in the land of Mnar when mankind was young, and of Ib, that 
was carven of grey stone before mankind existed. All at once I came upon a place where the 
bed-rock rose stark through the sand and formed   a low cliff; and here I saw with joy what seemed 
to promise further traces of the antediluvian people. Hewn rudely on the face of the cliff 
were the unmistakable facades of several small, squat rock houses or temples; whose interiors 
might preserve many secrets of ages too remote for calculation, though sandstorms had long since 
effaced any carvings which may have been outside. Very low and sand-choked were all of the dark 
apertures near me, but I cleared one with my spade and crawled through it, carrying a torch 
to reveal whatever mysteries it might hold. When I was inside I saw that the cavern was indeed a 
temple, and beheld plain signs of the race that had lived and worshipped before the desert was 
a desert. Primitive altars, pillars, and niches, all curiously low, were not absent; and though I 
saw no sculptures nor frescoes, there were many singular stones clearly shaped into symbols by 
artificial means. The lowness of the chiselled chamber was very strange, for I could hardly more 
than kneel upright; but the area was so great that my torch shewed only part at a time. I shuddered 
oddly in some of the far corners; for certain altars and stones suggested forgotten rites of 
terrible, revolting, and inexplicable nature, and made me wonder what manner of men could have 
made and frequented such a temple. When I had seen all that the place contained, I crawled out again, 
avid to find what the other temples might yield. Night had now approached, yet the tangible things 
I had seen made curiosity stronger than fear, so that I did not flee from the long moon-cast 
shadows that had daunted me when first I saw the nameless city. In the twilight I cleared another 
aperture and with a new torch crawled into it, finding more vague stones and symbols, though 
nothing more definite than the other temple had contained. The room was just as low, but 
much less broad, ending in a very narrow passage crowded with obscure and cryptical 
shrines. About these shrines I was prying when the noise of a wind and of my camel outside 
broke through the stillness and drew me forth to see what could have frightened the beast.
The moon was gleaming vividly over the primeval ruins, lighting a dense cloud of sand that seemed 
blown by a strong but decreasing wind from some point along the cliff ahead of me. I knew it was 
this chilly, sandy wind which had disturbed the camel, and was about to lead him to a place 
of better shelter when I chanced to glance up and saw that there was no wind atop the cliff. 
This astonished me and made me fearful again, but I immediately recalled the sudden local winds 
I had seen and heard before at sunrise and sunset, and judged it was a normal thing. I decided that 
it came from some rock fissure leading to a cave, and watched the troubled sand to trace it to 
its source; soon perceiving that it came from the black orifice of a temple a long distance 
south of me, almost out of sight. Against the choking sand-cloud I plodded toward this temple, 
which as I neared it loomed larger than the rest, and shewed a doorway far less clogged with 
caked sand. I would have entered had not the terrific force of the icy wind almost quenched 
my torch. It poured madly out of the dark door, sighing uncannily as it ruffled the sand 
and spread about the weird ruins. Soon it grew fainter and the sand grew more and more 
still, till finally all was at rest again; but a presence seemed stalking among the spectral 
stones of the city, and when I glanced at the moon it seemed to quiver as though mirrored in unquiet 
waters. I was more afraid than I could explain, but not enough to dull my thirst for wonder; 
so as soon as the wind was quite gone I crossed into the dark chamber from which it had come.
This temple, as I had fancied from the outside, was larger than either of those I had visited 
before; and was presumably a natural cavern, since it bore winds from some region beyond. 
Here I could stand quite upright, but saw that the stones and altars were as low as those in the 
other temples. On the walls and roof I beheld for the first time some traces of the pictorial art 
of the ancient race, curious curling streaks of paint that had almost faded or crumbled away; and 
on two of the altars I saw with rising excitement a maze of well-fashioned curvilinear carvings. 
As I held my torch aloft it seemed to me that the shape of the roof was too regular to be 
natural, and I wondered what the prehistoric   cutters of stone had first worked upon. 
Their engineering skill must have been vast. Then a brighter flare of the fantastic flame 
shewed me that for which I had been seeking, the opening to those remoter abysses whence the 
sudden wind had blown; and I grew faint when I saw that it was a small and plainly artificial door 
chiselled in the solid rock. I thrust my torch within, beholding a black tunnel with the roof 
arching low over a rough flight of very small, numerous, and steeply descending steps. I shall 
always see those steps in my dreams, for I came to learn what they meant. At the time I hardly knew 
whether to call them steps or mere foot-holds in a precipitous descent. My mind was whirling with 
mad thoughts, and the words and warnings of Arab prophets seemed to float across the desert from 
the lands that men know to the nameless city that men dare not know. Yet I hesitated only a 
moment before advancing through the portal and commencing to climb cautiously down the steep 
passage, feet first, as though on a ladder. It is only in the terrible phantasms of drugs or 
delirium that any other man can have had such a descent as mine. The narrow passage led infinitely 
down like some hideous haunted well, and the torch I held above my head could not light the unknown 
depths toward which I was crawling. I lost track of the hours and forgot to consult my watch, 
though I was frightened when I thought of the distance I must be traversing. There were changes 
of direction and of steepness, and once I came to a long, low, level passage where I had to wriggle 
feet first along the rocky floor, holding my torch at arm’s length beyond my head. The place was not 
high enough for kneeling. After that were more of the steep steps, and I was still scrambling down 
interminably when my failing torch died out. I do not think I noticed it at the time, for when I did 
notice it I was still holding it high above me as if it were ablaze. I was quite unbalanced with 
that instinct for the strange and the unknown which has made me a wanderer upon earth and a 
haunter of far, ancient, and forbidden places. In the darkness there flashed before my mind 
fragments of my cherished treasury of daemoniac lore; sentences from Alhazred the mad Arab, 
paragraphs from the apocryphal nightmares of Damascius, and infamous lines from the delirious 
Image du Monde of Gauthier de Metz. I repeated queer extracts, and muttered of Afrasiab and 
the daemons that floated with him down the Oxus; later chanting over and over again a phrase from 
one of Lord Dunsany’s tales—“the unreverberate blackness of the abyss”. Once when 
the descent grew amazingly steep I recited something in sing-song from Thomas 
Moore until I feared to recite more: “A reservoir of darkness, black
As witches’ cauldrons are, when fill’d
  With moon-drugs in th’ eclipse distill’d.
Leaning to look if foot might pass Down thro’ that chasm, I saw, beneath,
As far as vision could explore,
  The jetty sides as smooth as glass,
Looking as if just varnish’d o’er With that dark pitch the Sea of Death
Throws out upon its slimy shore.” Time had quite ceased to exist when 
my feet again felt a level floor, and I found myself in a place slightly higher 
than the rooms in the two smaller temples now   so incalculably far above my head. I could 
not quite stand, but could kneel upright, and in the dark I shuffled and crept hither and 
thither at random. I soon knew that I was in a narrow passage whose walls were lined with cases 
of wood having glass fronts. As in that Palaeozoic and abysmal place I felt of such things as 
polished wood and glass I shuddered at the possible implications. The cases were apparently 
ranged along each side of the passage at regular intervals, and were oblong and horizontal, 
hideously like coffins in shape and size. When I tried to move two or three for further 
examination, I found they were firmly fastened. I saw that the passage was a long one, so 
floundered ahead rapidly in a creeping run that would have seemed horrible had 
any eye watched me in the blackness;   crossing from side to side occasionally to feel 
of my surroundings and be sure the walls and rows of cases still stretched on. Man is so 
used to thinking visually that I almost forgot the darkness and pictured the endless corridor 
of wood and glass in its low-studded monotony as though I saw it. And then in a moment 
of indescribable emotion I did see it. Just when my fancy merged into real sight I 
cannot tell; but there came a gradual glow ahead, and all at once I knew that I saw the dim outlines 
of the corridor and the cases, revealed by some unknown subterranean phosphorescence. For a 
little while all was exactly as I had imagined it, since the glow was very faint; but as I 
mechanically kept on stumbling ahead into the   stronger light I realised that my fancy had been 
but feeble. This hall was no relic of crudity like the temples in the city above, but a monument 
of the most magnificent and exotic art. Rich, vivid, and daringly fantastic designs and pictures 
formed a continuous scheme of mural painting whose lines and colours were beyond description. 
The cases were of a strange golden wood, with fronts of exquisite glass, and contained 
the mummified forms of creatures outreaching in grotesqueness the most chaotic dreams of man.
To convey any idea of these monstrosities is impossible. They were of the reptile kind, with 
body lines suggesting sometimes the crocodile, sometimes the seal, but more often nothing of 
which either the naturalist or the palaeontologist ever heard. In size they approximated a small man, 
and their fore legs bore delicate and evidently flexible feet curiously like human hands and 
fingers. But strangest of all were their heads, which presented a contour violating all 
known biological principles. To nothing can such things be well compared—in one flash 
I thought of comparisons as varied as the cat, the bulldog, the mythic Satyr, and the human 
being. Not Jove himself had so colossal and protuberant a forehead, yet the horns and the 
noselessness and the alligator-like jaw placed the things outside all established categories. I 
debated for a time on the reality of the mummies, half suspecting they were artificial idols; but 
soon decided they were indeed some palaeogean species which had lived when the nameless city 
was alive. To crown their grotesqueness, most of them were gorgeously enrobed in the costliest 
of fabrics, and lavishly laden with ornaments of gold, jewels, and unknown shining metals.
The importance of these crawling creatures must have been vast, for they held first place 
among the wild designs on the frescoed walls and ceiling. With matchless skill had the 
artist drawn them in a world of their own, wherein they had cities and gardens 
fashioned to suit their dimensions;   and I could not but think that their pictured 
history was allegorical, perhaps shewing the progress of the race that worshipped them. These 
creatures, I said to myself, were to the men of   the nameless city what the she-wolf was to Rome, 
or some totem-beast is to a tribe of Indians. Holding this view, I thought I could trace roughly 
a wonderful epic of the nameless city; the tale   of a mighty sea-coast metropolis that ruled the 
world before Africa rose out of the waves, and of its struggles as the sea shrank away, and the 
desert crept into the fertile valley that held it. I saw its wars and triumphs, its troubles 
and defeats, and afterward its terrible fight against the desert when thousands of 
its people—here represented in allegory by the   grotesque reptiles—were driven to chisel their way 
down through the rocks in some marvellous manner to another world whereof their prophets had told 
them. It was all vividly weird and realistic, and its connexion with the awesome descent I had made 
was unmistakable. I even recognised the passages. As I crept along the corridor toward the brighter 
light I saw later stages of the painted epic—the leave-taking of the race that had dwelt in the 
nameless city and the valley around for ten   million years; the race whose souls shrank from 
quitting scenes their bodies had known so long, where they had settled as nomads in the earth’s 
youth, hewing in the virgin rock those primal shrines at which they never ceased to worship. Now 
that the light was better I studied the pictures more closely, and, remembering that the strange 
reptiles must represent the unknown men, pondered upon the customs of the nameless city. Many things 
were peculiar and inexplicable. The civilisation, which included a written alphabet, had seemingly 
risen to a higher order than those immeasurably   later civilisations of Egypt and Chaldaea, 
yet there were curious omissions. I could, for example, find no pictures to represent deaths 
or funeral customs, save such as were related to wars, violence, and plagues; and I wondered at 
the reticence shewn concerning natural death. It was as though an ideal of earthly immortality 
had been fostered as a cheering illusion. Still nearer the end of the passage were 
painted scenes of the utmost picturesqueness   and extravagance; contrasted views of the 
nameless city in its desertion and growing ruin, and of the strange new realm or paradise to which 
the race had hewed its way through the stone. In these views the city and the desert 
valley were shewn always by moonlight,   a golden nimbus hovering over the fallen walls 
and half revealing the splendid perfection of former times, shewn spectrally and elusively by 
the artist. The paradisal scenes were almost too extravagant to be believed; portraying a hidden 
world of eternal day filled with glorious cities and ethereal hills and valleys. At the very last 
I thought I saw signs of an artistic anti-climax. The paintings were less skilful, and much more 
bizarre than even the wildest of the earlier scenes. They seemed to record a slow decadence of 
the ancient stock, coupled with a growing ferocity toward the outside world from which it was driven 
by the desert. The forms of the people—always represented by the sacred reptiles—appeared to 
be gradually wasting away, though their spirit as shewn hovering about the ruins by moonlight 
gained in proportion. Emaciated priests, displayed as reptiles in ornate robes, cursed the upper air 
and all who breathed it; and one terrible final scene shewed a primitive-looking man, perhaps 
a pioneer of ancient Irem, the City of Pillars, torn to pieces by members of the elder race. I 
remembered how the Arabs fear the nameless city, and was glad that beyond this place 
the grey walls and ceiling were bare.
  As I viewed the pageant of mural history 
I had approached very closely the end of the low-ceiled hall, and was aware of a great 
gate through which came all of the illuminating phosphorescence. Creeping up to it, I cried aloud 
in transcendent amazement at what lay beyond; for instead of other and brighter chambers there 
was only an illimitable void of uniform radiance, such as one might fancy when gazing down from the 
peak of Mount Everest upon a sea of sunlit mist. Behind me was a passage so cramped that I 
could not stand upright in it; before me   was an infinity of subterranean effulgence.
Reaching down from the passage into the abyss was the head of a steep flight of steps—small 
numerous steps like those of the black passages I had traversed—but after a few feet the glowing 
vapours concealed everything. Swung back open against the left-hand wall of the passage was 
a massive door of brass, incredibly thick and decorated with fantastic bas-reliefs, which could 
if closed shut the whole inner world of light away from the vaults and passages of rock. I looked at 
the steps, and for the nonce dared not try them. I touched the open brass door, and could not 
move it. Then I sank prone to the stone floor, my mind aflame with prodigious reflections which 
not even a death-like exhaustion could banish. As I lay still with closed eyes, free to 
ponder, many things I had lightly noted in the frescoes came back to me with new and terrible 
significance—scenes representing the nameless city in its heyday, the vegetation of the valley 
around it, and the distant lands with which its merchants traded. The allegory of the crawling 
creatures puzzled me by its universal prominence, and I wondered that it should be so closely 
followed in a pictured history of such   importance. In the frescoes the nameless city 
had been shewn in proportions fitted to the reptiles. I wondered what its real proportions and 
magnificence had been, and reflected a moment on certain oddities I had noticed in the ruins. I 
thought curiously of the lowness of the primal temples and of the underground corridor, which 
were doubtless hewn thus out of deference to the reptile deities there honoured; though it perforce 
reduced the worshippers to crawling. Perhaps the very rites had involved a crawling in imitation 
of the creatures. No religious theory, however, could easily explain why the level passage in that 
awesome descent should be as low as the temples—or lower, since one could not even kneel in it. As I 
thought of the crawling creatures, whose hideous mummified forms were so close to me, I felt a new 
throb of fear. Mental associations are curious, and I shrank from the idea that except for the 
poor primitive man torn to pieces in the last painting, mine was the only human form amidst 
the many relics and symbols of primordial life. But as always in my strange and roving existence, 
wonder soon drove out fear; for the luminous abyss and what it might contain presented a problem 
worthy of the greatest explorer. That a weird world of mystery lay far down that flight 
of peculiarly small steps I could not doubt,   and I hoped to find there those human memorials 
which the painted corridor had failed to give. The frescoes had pictured unbelievable cities, 
hills, and valleys in this lower realm, and my fancy dwelt on the rich and 
colossal ruins that awaited me.
  My fears, indeed, concerned the past rather than 
the future. Not even the physical horror of my position in that cramped corridor of dead reptiles 
and antediluvian frescoes, miles below the world I knew and faced by another world of eerie light 
and mist, could match the lethal dread I felt at the abysmal antiquity of the scene and its soul. 
An ancientness so vast that measurement is feeble seemed to leer down from the primal stones and 
rock-hewn temples in the nameless city, while the very latest of the astounding maps in the 
frescoes shewed oceans and continents that man has forgotten, with only here and there some vaguely 
familiar outline. Of what could have happened in the geological aeons since the paintings ceased 
and the death-hating race resentfully succumbed to decay, no man might say. Life had once teemed 
in these caverns and in the luminous realm beyond; now I was alone with vivid relics, and I trembled 
to think of the countless ages through which these relics had kept a silent and deserted vigil.
Suddenly there came another burst of that acute fear which had intermittently seized me ever 
since I first saw the terrible valley and the nameless city under a cold moon, and despite my 
exhaustion I found myself starting frantically to a sitting posture and gazing back along the black 
corridor toward the tunnels that rose to the outer world. My sensations were much like those which 
had made me shun the nameless city at night, and were as inexplicable as they were poignant. 
In another moment, however, I received a still greater shock in the form of a definite sound—the 
first which had broken the utter silence of these tomb-like depths. It was a deep, low moaning, as 
of a distant throng of condemned spirits, and came from the direction in which I was staring. Its 
volume rapidly grew, till soon it reverberated frightfully through the low passage, and at the 
same time I became conscious of an increasing   draught of cold air, likewise flowing from the 
tunnels and the city above. The touch of this air seemed to restore my balance, for I instantly 
recalled the sudden gusts which had risen around the mouth of the abyss each sunset and sunrise, 
one of which had indeed served to reveal the hidden tunnels to me. I looked at my watch and saw 
that sunrise was near, so braced myself to resist the gale which was sweeping down to its cavern 
home as it had swept forth at evening. My fear again waned low, since a natural phenomenon 
tends to dispel broodings over the unknown. More and more madly poured the shrieking, moaning 
night-wind into that gulf of the inner earth. I dropped prone again and clutched vainly at the 
floor for fear of being swept bodily through   the open gate into the phosphorescent abyss. Such 
fury I had not expected, and as I grew aware of an actual slipping of my form toward the abyss I was 
beset by a thousand new fears of apprehension and imagination. The malignancy of the blast awakened 
incredible fancies; once more I compared myself shudderingly to the only other human image in that 
frightful corridor, the man who was torn to pieces by the nameless race, for in the fiendish clawing 
of the swirling currents there seemed to abide a vindictive rage all the stronger because it was 
largely impotent. I think I screamed frantically near the last—I was almost mad—but if I did so 
my cries were lost in the hell-born babel of the howling wind-wraiths. I tried to crawl against the 
murderous invisible torrent, but I could not even hold my own as I was pushed slowly and inexorably 
toward the unknown world. Finally reason must have wholly snapped, for I fell to babbling over and 
over that unexplainable couplet of the mad Arab Alhazred, who dreamed of the nameless city:
“That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even 
death may die.” Only the grim brooding desert gods know what 
really took place—what indescribable struggles and scrambles in the dark I endured or what 
Abaddon guided me back to life, where I must always remember and shiver in the night-wind till 
oblivion—or worse—claims me. Monstrous, unnatural, colossal, was the thing—too far beyond all the 
ideas of man to be believed except in the silent   damnable small hours when one cannot sleep.
I have said that the fury of the rushing blast was infernal—cacodaemoniacal—and that 
its voices were hideous with the pent-up viciousness of desolate eternities. Presently 
those voices, while still chaotic before me, seemed to my beating brain to take articulate 
form behind me; and down there in the grave of unnumbered aeon-dead antiquities, leagues below 
the dawn-lit world of men, I heard the ghastly cursing and snarling of strange-tongued fiends. 
Turning, I saw outlined against the luminous aether of the abyss what could not be seen 
against the dusk of the corridor—a nightmare   horde of rushing devils; hate-distorted, 
grotesquely panoplied, half-transparent; devils of a race no man might mistake—the 
crawling reptiles of the nameless city.
  And as the wind died away I was plunged into 
the ghoul-peopled blackness of earth’s bowels; for behind the last of the creatures 
the great brazen door clanged shut with   a deafening peal of metallic music whose 
reverberations swelled out to the distant world to hail the rising sun as Memnon 
hails it from the banks of the Nile. Some ruins never forget.
The Nameless City invites us   to consider how much lies beneath our feet, and 
how little we truly know of the ancient past. Lovecraft’s message is clear: the universe 
holds secrets that unsettle even time itself. Thank you for listening. What part 
unsettled you the most? Comment below. Like, comment, and subscribe to Shadows of 
Weekend. Support us by clicking join and becoming a member. Until next time—some places are best 
left unknown. What if your mind could travel across 
centuries—and forget its origin?
  In The Shadow out of Time, a professor experiences 
lost years and strange memories, discovering that his consciousness may have been swapped with an 
ancient alien race across time itself. This story explores identity, memory, and the fragility of 
human perspective in a universe beyond time. It’s one of Lovecraft’s most mind-bending 
tales of cosmic horror and mental unraveling. Welcome to Shadows of Weekend. Like, share, 
and subscribe for more journeys through time and terror. For early access and extras, 
tap the join button and become a member. After twenty-two years of nightmare and fear, 
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 July 17–18, 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,   a final abandonment of all 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 definitive 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, Prof. Wingate Peaslee 
of 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 as he thinks best with this account—shewing it, with suitable comment, to 
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   lurk 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 at the age of eighteen. That was in 
1889. After my graduation I studied economics at Harvard, and came back to Miskatonic as Instructor 
of Political Economy in 1895. For thirteen years more my life ran smoothly and happily. I 
married Alice Keezar of Haverhill in 1896, and my three children, Robert K., 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, May 14, 1908, that the queer 
amnesia came. The thing was quite sudden, though later I realised 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 someone 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 shewed no sign of consciousness for sixteen and a half hours, though removed to my 
home at 27 Crane St. and given the best of medical attention. At 3 a.m. May 15 my eyes opened and I 
began to speak, but before long the doctors 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 or of my past, 
though for some reason I seemed anxious to conceal this lack of knowledge. My eyes gazed strangely 
at the persons around me, and the flexions 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 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 had 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 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 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 symptom 
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 everyone 
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 normalcy 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 fear 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 I 
caused—for certainly, the mind, voice, and facial expression of the being that awaked on May 15, 
1908 were not those of Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee. I will not attempt to tell much of my life from 
1908 to 1913, since readers may glean all 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 aroused 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 shewing 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 minimise displays of this faculty. Other ugly reports concerned my intimacy with 
leaders of occultist groups, and scholars suspected of connexion 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. 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 reopened my long-closed house   in Crane St. 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 anyone 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, Sept. 26, I dismissed 
the housekeeper and the maid till 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 1 a.m. 
that the lights were last seen. At 2:15 a.m. a policeman observed the place in darkness, but 
with the stranger’s motor still at the curb. By four o’clock the motor was certainly gone. It 
was at six 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.
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 table-top were scratches 
shewing 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 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 
an hypodermic injection it became more regular. At 11:15 a.m., Sept. 27, I stirred vigorously, 
and my hitherto mask-like face began to shew 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 
after noon—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 that Thursday morning in 1908,   with the economics class gazing up at the 
battered desk on the platform. 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   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 realised 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 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. 
Certain of 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 
been an intruding force from unknown regions,   and that my own personality had suffered 
displacement. Thus I was driven to vague and frightful 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 harmonise 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 non-typical 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 daemoniac-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 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 man’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 with 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 anthropological knowledge; an acquisition 
carried on with feverish zest and with a wholly abnormal absorptive power. Then a sudden return 
of the 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 cloudily 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 with 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 un-human 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 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 savour 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 it down and analyse 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 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 disjointed 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 megalithic 
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. 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 into 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 two hundred feet wide. They differed greatly in 
aspect, but few were less than five hundred 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.
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 unrecognisable, blooming in geometrical beds 
and at large among the greenery. In a few of the terrace and roof-top gardens were larger and more 
vivid blossoms of almost 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 
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 recognise, 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 stone 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 strown 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. 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 fear 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, the 
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. 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 savoured 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 un-human. 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’s Unaussprechlichen 
Kulten, however, was alarmingly otherwise. It consisted of certain curvilinear hieroglyphs in 
the same ink as that of the German corrections, but following no recognised 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. 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 Hindoo tales involving stupefying gulfs of time and 
forming part of the lore of modern theosophists. 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 three hundred 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 with 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 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 recognised 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; entering the organism’s brain 
and setting 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. 
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 boat-like 
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. It may be added that there was one sad 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-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 the 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 house them—the cone-shaped things 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 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.
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 rumours regarding my mental health. It is amusing to reflect that these rumours 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 tremendous 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.
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, trumpet-like 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 has   known only human beings to do. These objects 
moved intelligently around the great rooms, getting books from the shelves and taking them 
to the great tables, or vice versa, and sometimes writing diligently with a penlike 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. 
The other three great members tended to rest downward on 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 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. 
And 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 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 A.D. 5000; with that of a general of the 
great-headed brown people who held South Africa in B.C. 50,000; 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 100,000 years before the squat, yellow Inutos came from the west to engulf it; with that 
of Nug-Soth, a magician of the dark conquerors of A.D. 16,000; 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 A.D. 2518; with that of an archimage of vanished Yhe 
in the Pacific; with that of Theodotides, a Graeco-Bactrian official of B.C. 200; with that 
of an aged Frenchman of Louis XIII’s time named Pierre-Louis Montmagny; with that of Crom-Ya, a 
Cimmerian chieftain of B.C. 15,000; and with so many others that my brain cannot hold the shocking 
secrets and dizzying marvels I learned from them. 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 centre, which I came to know well through frequent 
labours 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 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, 
rhamphorhynci, plesiosaurs, and the like—made familiar through palaeontology. Of birds or 
mammals there were none that I could discern. The ground and swamps were constantly alive with 
snakes, lizards, and crocodiles, while insects buzzed incessantly amidst the lush vegetation. 
And far out at sea unspied and unknown monsters spouted mountainous 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 pseudo-memories.
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 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—but of other and incomprehensible senses (not, however, well utilisable 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. 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 quietly 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. 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 scanty, 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 and octopodic 
invaders, or against the winged, star-headed Old Ones who centred 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 subterrene 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. 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 six hundred million years ago. They were only partly material—as we 
understand matter—and their type of consciousness and media of perception differed wholly 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 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 for ever—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; fresh rifts caused by that selfsame geologic change which 
had choked some of the paths and had slowly lessened the number of outer-world structures 
and ruins surviving from the conquered entities. 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 from common speech and visible records. And always the shadow of nameless 
fear hung about the sealed trap-doors and the dark, windowless elder towers.
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 fear 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.
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 Str.,
Pilbarra, W. Australia,
  18 May, 1934.
Prof. N. W. Peaslee, c/o Am. Psychological Society,
30, E. 41st Str.,
  N. Y. 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. 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. They were peculiar curves, just like what the blacks had tried to describe. 
I imagine there must have been 30 or 40 blocks, some nearly buried in the sand, and all within a 
circle perhaps a quarter of a mile’s 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 10 or 12 
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 with 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 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.
Now I can understand how important all this will be to you. Without question we are faced 
with the remains of an unknown civilisation   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 
these 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 coöperate in such work if you—or organisations known to you—can furnish the 
funds. I can get together a dozen miners for the heavy digging—the blacks 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 4 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. Any expedition had better   be made in winter—June or July or August. 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. 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.
Professors 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 of sufficiently 
light draught 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, 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 fear grew on me as we advanced to this actual site of the elder world 
behind the legends—a fear of course abetted by the fact that my disturbing dreams and pseudo-memories 
still beset me with unabated force. It was on Monday, June 3, 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. 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 which 
I had dreamed or read, but which I could no longer remember. There was a terrible pseudo-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 some 
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. 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 a gibbous 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 that 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. 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 did not sleep through the night. The Australian 
last 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 Prof. 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 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 Prof. 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 earnestly 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 very 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 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 July 20, 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 
the Empress, I am pondering long and frantically on 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, pseudo-mnemonic urge toward 
the northeast, I plodded on beneath the evil, burning moon. Here and there I 
saw, half-shrouded by the 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 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 and cycads 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 
so far seen, 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 realised that there was 
some utterly unprecedented quality about these stones. Not only was the mere number of them quite 
without parallel, but something in the sand-worn 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 these 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 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 centre 
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 
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 blackness. 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 strown 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. 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 on 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 kicked 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 torchlight 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 dreamt for more than a score of years? What obscure, forgotten iconography could 
have 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 realised with hideous and instinctive certainty. What in God’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 eld in the millions of years since the time of my dreams? Of the 
subterrene mazes which had underlain the city and linked all its 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, 
a 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 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 realised 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. 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 daemoniac 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 daemoniac 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 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 post-human 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 age-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 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 stones, 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 wriggled over the mound of debris—my torch, switched continuously on, thrust deeply within 
my mouth—I felt myself torn by the fantastic stalactites of the jagged floor above me.
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 marvellous 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 below 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 sub-classes of volumes. 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 utterly 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 of aeon-long death and silence. 
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 recollections, so that 
I vaguely felt I was not running at random. 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, and 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 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 to the deafening clatter of toppling 
objects. It was only when I was nearly across the space that I realised 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 fear 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.
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 tiptoe 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 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 difficultly 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 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 temporised 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 screwed up 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 almost collapsed. Clenching my teeth, however, I kept silence. 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 around   me. Ideas and images of the starkest fear—excited 
by vistas which my glimpse had opened up—began to throng in upon me and cloud my senses.
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 re-pass through that 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 possible 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 blacks, 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. 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.   It may have been only my imagination. 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   shews me as plunging and tripping and 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 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 pandaemoniac 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 phantasmagoric 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 vapour clutched and picked at 
me, and that 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-visual 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 
true memory left off and delirious dream 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 waste. The daemon wind died down, and the bloated, 
fungoid moon sank reddeningly in the west. I lurched to my feet and began to stagger 
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 it 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 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 the 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 forgotten lair amidst the undisturbed 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 megalithic 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. Our memories define us—or do they?
The Shadow out of Time challenges the limits of identity and the nature of consciousness 
itself. Lovecraft suggests that our minds   may be far less our own than we believe.
Thank you for listening. What idea from this story lingers in your mind? Let us know below.
Like, comment, and subscribe to Shadows of Weekend. To support more explorations, 
click join and become a member. Until next time—some memories belong to 
others. Through cosmic revelations and ancient truths, 
we’ve seen how fragile our understanding of reality truly is. From eldritch entities 
to lost cities beneath ice and sand, Lovecraft’s stories reveal a universe vast, 
cold, and filled with forgotten civilizations that challenge everything we know.
These are not just horror tales—they   are meditations on knowledge, fear, 
and our place in something far greater and more alien than we dare imagine.
Thank you for walking with us through   these stories. Which tale left the 
deepest mark on your imagination? Like, comment, and subscribe to Shadows 
of Weekend for more unsettling journeys.   To support our channel and get exclusive 
access, click join and become a member. Until next time—stay curious, and tread 
carefully through the ruins of reality.