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

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

The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath

by H. P. Lovecraft

Written Autumn? 1926-22 Jan 1927

Published in Beyond the Wall of Sleep, Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1943, p.

76-134

Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvelous city, and three times was

he snatched away while still he paused on the high terrace above it. All golden

and lovely it blazed in the sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades and arched

bridges of veined marble, silver-basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad

squares and perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between delicate trees

and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows; while on steep

northward slopes climbed tiers of red roofs and old peaked gables harbouring

little lanes of grassy cobbles. h was a fever of the gods, a fanfare of supernal

trumpets and a clash of immortal cymbals. Mystery hung about it as clouds about

a fabulous unvisited mountain; and as Carter stood breathless and expectant on

that balustraded parapet there swept up to him the poignancy and suspense of

almost-vanished memory, the pain of lost things and the maddening need to place

again what once had been an awesome and momentous place.

He knew that for him its meaning must once have been supreme; though in what

cycle or incarnation he had known it, or whether in dream or in waking, he could

not tell. Vaguely it called up glimpses of a far forgotten first youth, when

wonder and pleasure lay in all the mystery of days, and dawn and dusk alike

strode forth prophetic to the eager sound of lutes and song, unclosing fiery

gates toward further and surprising marvels. But each night as he stood on that

high marble terrace with the curious urns and carven rail and looked off over

that hushed sunset city of beauty and unearthly immanence he felt the bondage of

dream's tyrannous gods; for in no wise could he leave that lofty spot, or

descend the wide marmoreal fights flung endlessly down to where those streets of

elder witchery lay outspread and beckoning.

When for the third time he awakened with those flights still undescended and

those hushed sunset streets still untraversed, he prayed long and earnestly to

the hidden gods of dream that brood capricious above the clouds on unknown

Kadath, in the cold waste where no man treads. But the gods made no answer and

shewed no relenting, nor did they give any favouring sign when he prayed to them

in dream, and invoked them sacrificially through the bearded priests of Nasht

and Kaman-Thah, whose cavern-temple with its pillar of flame lies not far from

the gates of the waking world. It seemed, however, that his prayers must have

been adversely heard, for after even the first of them he ceased wholly to

behold the marvellous city; as if his three glimpses from afar had been mere

accidents or oversights, and against some hidden plan or wish of the gods.

At length, sick with longing for those glittering sunset streets and cryptical

hill lanes among ancient tiled roofs, nor able sleeping or waking to drive them

from his mind, Carter resolved to go with bold entreaty whither no man had gone

before, and dare the icy deserts through the dark to where unknown Kadath,

veiled in cloud and crowned with unimagined stars, holds secret and nocturnal

the onyx castle of the Great Ones.

In light slumber he descended the seventy steps to the cavern of flame and

talked of this design to the bearded priests Nasht and Kaman-Thah. And the

priests shook their pshent-bearing heads and vowed it would be the death of his

soul. They pointed out that the Great Ones had shown already their wish, and

that it is not agreeable to them to be harassed by insistent pleas. They

reminded him, too, that not only had no man ever been to Kadath, but no man had

ever suspected in what part of space it may lie; whether it be in the dreamlands

around our own world, or in those surrounding some unguessed companion of

Fomalhaut or Aldebaran. If in our dreamland, it might conceivably be reached,

but only three human souls since time began had ever crossed and recrossed the

black impious gulfs to other dreamlands, and of that three, two had come back

quite mad. There were, in such voyages, incalculable local dangers; as well as

that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered

universe, where no dreams reach; that last amorphous blight of nethermost

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confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity - the

boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who

gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the

muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of

accursed flutes; to which detestable pounding and piping dance slowly,

awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic Ultimate gods, the blind, voiceless,

tenebrous, mindless Other gods whose soul and messenger is the crawling chaos

Nyarlathotep.

Of these things was Carter warned by the priests Nasht and Kaman-Thah in the

cavern of flame, but still he resolved to find the gods on unknown Kadath in the

cold waste, wherever that might be, and to win from them the sight and

remembrance and shelter of the marvellous sunset city. He knew that his journey

would be strange and long, and that the Great Ones would be against it; but

being old in the land of dream he counted on many useful memories and devices to

aid him. So asking a formal blessing of the priests and thinking shrewdly on his

course, he boldly descended the seven hundred steps to the Gate of Deeper

Slumber and set out through the Enchanted Wood.

In the tunnels of that twisted wood, whose low prodigious oaks twine groping

boughs and shine dim with the phosphorescence of strange fungi, dwell the

furtive and secretive Zoogs; who know many obscure secrets of the dream world

and a few of the waking world, since the wood at two places touches the lands of

men, though it would be disastrous to say where. Certain unexplained rumours,

events, and vanishments occur among men where the Zoogs have access, and it is

well that they cannot travel far outside the world of dreams. But over the

nearer parts of the dream world they pass freely, flitting small and brown and

unseen and bearing back piquant tales to beguile the hours around their hearths

in the forest they love. Most of them live in burrows, but some inhabit the

trunks of the great trees; and although they live mostly on fungi it is muttered

that they have also a slight taste for meat, either physical or spiritual, for

certainly many dreamers have entered that wood who have not come out. Carter,

however, had no fear; for he was an old dreamer and had learnt their fluttering

language and made many a treaty with them; having found through their help the

splendid city of Celephais in Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills, where

reigns half the year the great King Kuranes, a man he had known by another name

in life. Kuranes was the one soul who had been to the star-gulls and returned

free from madness.

Threading now the low phosphorescent aisles between those gigantic trunks,

Carter made fluttering sounds in the manner of the Zoogs, and listened now and

then for responses. He remembered one particular village of the creatures was in

the centre of the wood, where a circle of great mossy stones in what was once a

cleaning tells of older and more terrible dwellers long forgotten, and toward

this spot he hastened. He traced his way by the grotesque fungi, which always

seem better nourished as one approaches the dread circle where elder beings

danced and sacrificed. Finally the great light of those thicker fungi revealed a

sinister green and grey vastness pushing up through the roof of the forest and

out of sight. This was the nearest of the great ring of stones, and Carter knew

he was close to the Zoog village. Renewing his fluttering sound, he waited

patiently; and was at last rewarded by an impression of many eyes watching him.

It was the Zoogs, for one sees their weird eyes long before one can discern

their small, slippery brown outlines.

Out they swarmed, from hidden burrow and honeycombed tree, till the whole

dim-litten region was alive with them. Some of the wilder ones brushed Carter

unpleasantly, and one even nipped loathsomely at his ear; but these lawless

spirits were soon restrained by their elders. The Council of Sages, recognizing

the visitor, offered a gourd of fermented sap from a haunted tree unlike the

others, which had grown from a seed dropt down by someone on the moon; and as

Carter drank it ceremoniously a very strange colloquy began. The Zoogs did not,

unfortunately, know where the peak of Kadath lies, nor could they even say

whether the cold waste is in our dream world or in another. Rumours of the Great

Ones came equally from all points; and one might only say that they were

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likelier to be seen on high mountain peaks than in valleys, since on such peaks

they dance reminiscently when the moon is above and the clouds beneath.

Then one very ancient Zoog recalled a thing unheard-of by the others; and said

that in Ulthar, beyond the River Skai, there still lingered the last copy of

those inconceivably old Pnakotic Manuscripts made by waking men in forgotten

boreal kingdoms and borne into the land of dreams when the hairy cannibal

Gnophkehs overcame many-templed Olathoe and slew all the heroes of the land of

Lomar. Those manuscripts he said, told much of the gods, and besides, in Ulthar

there were men who had seen the signs of the gods, and even one old priest who

had scaled a great mountain to behold them dancing by moonlight. He had failed,

though his companion had succeeded and perished namelessly.

So Randolph Carter thanked the Zoogs, who fluttered amicably and gave him

another gourd of moon-tree wine to take with him, and set out through the

phosphorescent wood for the other side, where the rushing Skai flows down from

the slopes of Lerion, and Hatheg and Nir and Ulthar dot the plain. Behind him,

furtive and unseen, crept several of the curious Zoogs; for they wished to learn

what might befall him, and bear back the legend to their people. The vast oaks

grew thicker as he pushed on beyond the village, and he looked sharply for a

certain spot where they would thin somewhat, standing quite dead or dying among

the unnaturally dense fungi and the rotting mould and mushy logs of their fallen

brothers. There he would turn sharply aside, for at that spot a mighty slab of

stone rests on the forest floor; and those who have dared approach it say that

it bears an iron ring three feet wide. Remembering the archaic circle of great

mossy rocks, and what it was possibly set up for, the Zoogs do not pause near

that expansive slab with its huge ring; for they realise that all which is

forgotten need not necessarily be dead, and they would not like to see the slab

rise slowly and deliberately.

Carter detoured at the proper place, and heard behind him the frightened

fluttering of some of the more timid Zoogs. He had known they would follow him,

so he was not disturbed; for one grows accustomed to the anomalies of these

prying creatures. It was twilight when he came to the edge of the wood, and the

strengthening glow told him it was the twilight of morning. Over fertile plains

rolling down to the Skai he saw the smoke of cottage chimneys, and on every hand

were the hedges and ploughed fields and thatched roofs of a peaceful land. Once

he stopped at a farmhouse well for a cup of water, and all the dogs barked

affrightedly at the inconspicuous Zoogs that crept through the grass behind. At

another house, where people were stirring, he asked questions about the gods,

and whether they danced often upon Lerion; but the farmer and his wile would

only make the Elder Sign and tell him the way to Nir and Ulthar.

At noon he walked through the one broad high street of Nir, which he had once

visited and which marked his farthest former travels in this direction; and soon

afterward he came to the great stone bridge across the Skai, into whose central

piece the masons had sealed a living human sacrifice when they built it

thirteen-hundred years before. Once on the other side, the frequent presence of

cats (who all arched their backs at the trailing Zoogs) revealed the near

neighborhood of Ulthar; for in Ulthar, according to an ancient and significant

law, no man may kill a cat. Very pleasant were the suburbs of Ulthar, with their

little green cottages and neatly fenced farms; and still pleasanter was the

quaint town itself, with its old peaked roofs and overhanging upper stories and

numberless chimney-pots and narrow hill streets where one can see old cobbles

whenever the graceful cats afford space enough. Carter, the cats being somewhat

dispersed by the half-seen Zoogs, picked his way directly to the modest Temple

of the Elder Ones where the priests and old records were said to be; and once

within that venerable circular tower of ivied stone - which crowns Ulthar's

highest hill - he sought out the patriarch Atal, who had been up the forbidden

peak Hatheg-Kia in the stony desert and had come down again alive.

Atal, seated on an ivory dais in a festooned shrine at the top of the temple,

was fully three centuries old; but still very keen of mind and memory. From him

Carter learned many things about the gods, but mainly that they are indeed only

Earth's gods, ruling feebly our own dreamland and having no power or habitation

elsewhere. They might, Atal said, heed a man's prayer if in good humour; but one

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must not think of climbing to their onyx stronghold atop Kadath in the cold

waste. It was lucky that no man knew where Kadath towers, for the fruits of

ascending it would be very grave. Atal's companion Banni the Wise had been drawn

screaming into the sky for climbing merely the known peak of Hatheg-Kia. With

unknown Kadath, if ever found, matters would be much worse; for although Earth's

gods may sometimes be surpassed by a wise mortal, they are protected by the

Other Gods from Outside, whom it is better not to discuss. At least twice in the

world's history the Other Gods set their seal upon Earth's primal granite; once

in antediluvian times, as guessed from a drawing in those parts of the Pnakotic

Manuscripts too ancient to be read, and once on Hatheg-Kia when Barzai the Wise

tried to see Earth's gods dancing by moonlight. So, Atal said, it would be much

better to let all gods alone except in tactful prayers.

Carter, though disappointed by Atal's discouraging advice and by the meagre help

to be found in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan,

did not wholly despair. First he questioned the old priest about that marvellous

sunset city seen from the railed terrace, thinking that perhaps he might find it

without the gods' aid; but Atal could tell him nothing. Probably, Atal said, the

place belonged to his especial dream world and not to the general land of vision

that many know; and conceivably it might be on another planet. In that case

Earth's gods could not guide him if they would. But this was not likely, since

the stopping of the dreams shewed pretty clearly that it was something the Great

Ones wished to hide from him.

Then Carter did a wicked thing, offering his guileless host so many draughts of

the moon-wine which the Zoogs had given him that the old man became

irresponsibly talkative. Robbed of his reserve, poor Atal babbled freely of

forbidden things; telling of a great image reported by travellers as carved on

the solid rock of the mountain Ngranek, on the isle of Oriab in the Southern

Sea, and hinting that it may be a likeness which Earth's gods once wrought of

their own features in the days when they danced by moonlight on that mountain.

And he hiccoughed likewise that the features of that image are very strange, so

that one might easily recognize them, and that they are sure signs of the

authentic race of the gods.

Now the use of all this in finding the gods became at once apparent to Carter.

It is known that in disguise the younger among the Great Ones often espouse the

daughters of men, so that around the borders of the cold waste wherein stands

Kadath the peasants must all bear their blood. This being so, the way to find

that waste must be to see the stone face on Ngranek and mark the features; then,

having noted them with care, to search for such features among living men. Where

they are plainest and thickest, there must the gods dwell nearest; and whatever

stony waste lies back of the villages in that place must be that wherein stands

Kadath.

Much of the Great Ones might be learnt in such regions, and those with their

blood might inherit little memories very useful to a seeker. They might not know

their parentage, for the gods so dislike to be known among men that none can be

found who has seen their faces wittingly; a thing which Carter realized even as

he sought to scale Kadath. But they would have queer lofty thoughts

misunderstood by their fellows, and would sing of far places and gardens so

unlike any known even in the dreamland that common folk would call them fools;

and from all this one could perhaps learn old secrets of Kadath, or gain hints

of the marvellous sunset city which the gods held secret. And more, one might in

certain cases seize some well-loved child of a god as hostage; or even capture

some young god himself, disguised and dwelling amongst men with a comely peasant

maiden as his bride.

Atal, however, did not know how to find Ngranek on its isle of Oriab; and

recommended that Carter follow the singing Skai under its bridges down to the

Southern Sea; where no burgess of Ulthar has ever been, but whence the merchants

come in boats or with long caravans of mules and two-wheeled carts. There is a

great city there, Dylath-Leen, but in Ulthar its reputation is bad because of

the black three-banked galleys that sail to it with rubies from no clearly named

shore. The traders that come from those galleys to deal with the jewellers are

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human, or nearly so, but the rowers are never beheld; and it is not thought

wholesome in Ulthar that merchants should trade with black ships from unknown

places whose rowers cannot be exhibited.

By the time he had given this information Atal was very drowsy, and Carter laid

him gently on a couch of inlaid ebony and gathered his long beard decorously on

his chest. As he turned to go, he observed that no suppressed fluttering

followed him, and wondered why the Zoogs had become so lax in their curious

pursuit. Then he noticed all the sleek complacent cats of Ulthar licking their

chops with unusual gusto, and recalled the spitting and caterwauling he had

faintly heard, in lower parts of the temple while absorbed in the old priest's

conversation. He recalled, too, the evilly hungry way in which an especially

impudent young Zoog had regarded a small black kitten in the cobbled street

outside. And because he loved nothing on earth more than small black kittens, he

stooped and petted the sleek cats of Ulthar as they licked their chops, and did

not mourn because those inquisitive Zoogs would escort him no farther.

It was sunset now, so Carter stopped at an ancient inn on a steep little street

overlooking the lower town. And as he went out on the balcony of his room and

gazed down at the sea of red tiled roofs and cobbled ways and the pleasant

fields beyond, all mellow and magical in the slanted light, he swore that Ulthar

would be a very likely place to dwell in always, were not the memory of a

greater sunset city ever goading one onward toward unknown perils. Then twilight

fell, and the pink walls of the plastered gables turned violet and mystic, and

little yellow lights floated up one by one from old lattice windows. And sweet

bells pealed in. the temple tower above, and the first star winked softly above

the meadows across the Skai. With the night came song, and Carter nodded as the

lutanists praised ancient days from beyond the filigreed balconies and

tesselated courts of simple Ulthar. And there might have been sweetness even in

the voices of Ulthar's many cats, but that they were mostly heavy and silent

from strange feasting. Some of them stole off to those cryptical realms which

are known only to cats and which villagers say are on the moon's dark side,

whither the cats leap from tall housetops, but one small black kitten crept

upstairs and sprang in Carter's lap to purr and play, and curled up near his

feet when he lay down at last on the little couch whose pillows were stuffed

with fragrant, drowsy herbs.

In the morning Carter joined a caravan of merchants bound for Dylath-Leen with

the spun wool of Ulthar and the cabbages of Ulthar's busy farms. And for six

days they rode with tinkling bells on the smooth road beside the Skai; stopping

some nights at the inns of little quaint fishing towns, and on other nights

camping under the stars while snatches of boatmen's songs came from the placid

river. The country was very beautiful, with green hedges and groves and

picturesque peaked cottages and octagonal windmills.

On the seventh day a blur of smoke rose on the horizon ahead, and then the tall

black towers of Dylath-Leen, which is built mostly of basalt. Dylath-Leen with

its thin angular towers looks in the distance like a bit of the Giant's

Causeway, and its streets are dark and uninviting. There are many dismal

sea-taverns near the myriad wharves, and all the town is thronged with the

strange seamen of every land on earth and of a few which are said to be not on

earth. Carter questioned the oddly robed men of that city about the peak of

Ngranek on the isle of Oriab, and found that they knew of it well.

Ships came from Baharna on that island, one being due to return thither in only

a month, and Ngranek is but two days' zebra-ride from that port. But few had

seen the stone face of the god, because it is on a very difficult side of

Ngranek, which overlooks only sheer crags and a valley of sinister lava. Once

the gods were angered with men on that side, and spoke of the matter to the

Other Gods.

It was hard to get this information from the traders and sailors in

Dylath-Leen's sea taverns, because they mostly preferred to whisper of the black

galleys. One of them was due in a week with rubies from its unknown shore, and

the townsfolk dreaded to see it dock. The mouths of the men who came from it to

trade were too wide, and the way their turbans were humped up in two points

above their foreheads was in especially bad taste. And their shoes were the

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shortest and queerest ever seen in the Six Kingdoms. But worst of all was the

matter of the unseen rowers. Those three banks of oars moved too briskly and

accurately and vigorously to be comfortable, and it was not right for a ship to

stay in port for weeks while the merchants traded, yet to give no glimpse of its

crew. It was not fair to the tavern-keepers of Dylath-Leen, or to the grocers

and butchers, either; for not a scrap of provisions was ever sent aboard. The

merchants took only gold and stout black slaves from Parg across the river. That

was all they ever took, those unpleasantly featured merchants and their unseen

rowers; never anything from the butchers and grocers, but only gold and the fat

black men of Parg whom they bought by the pound. And the odours from those

galleys which the south wind blew in from the wharves are not to be described.

Only by constantly smoking strong thagweed could even the hardiest denizen of

the old sea-taverns bear them. Dylath-Leen would never have tolerated the black

galleys had such rubies been obtainable elsewhere, but no mine in all Barth's

dreamland was known to produce their like.

Of these things Dylath-Leen's cosmopolitan folk chiefly gossiped whilst Carter

waited patiently for the ship from Baharna, which might bear him to the isle

whereon carven Ngranek towers lofty and barren. Meanwhile he did not fall to

seek through the haunts of far travellers for any tales they might have

concerning Kadath in the cold waste or a marvellous city of marble walls and

silver fountains seen below terraces in the sunset. Of these things, however, he

learned nothing; though he once thought that a certain old slant-eyed merchant

looked queerly intelligent when the cold waste was spoken of. This man was

reputed to trade with the horrible stone villages on the icy desert plateau of

Leng, which no healthy folk visit and whose evil fires are seen at night from

afar. He was even rumoured to have dealt with that High-Priest Not To Be

Described, which wears a yellow silken mask over its face and dwells all alone

in a prehistoric stone monastery. That such a person might well have had

nibbling traffick with such beings as may conceivably dwell in the cold waste

was not to be doubted, but Carter soon found that it was no use questioning him.

Then the black galley slipped into the harbour past the basalt wale and the tall

lighthouse, silent and alien, and with a strange stench that the south wind

drove into the town. Uneasiness rustled through the taverns along that

waterfront, and after a while the dark wide-mouthed merchants with humped

turbans and short feet clumped steathily ashore to seek the bazaars of the

jewellers. Carter observed them closely, and disliked them more the longer he

looked at them. Then he saw them drive the stout black men of Parg up the

gangplank grunting and sweating into that singular galley, and wondered in what

lands - or if in any lands at all - those fat pathetic creatures might be

destined to serve.

And on the third evening of that galley's stay one of the uncomfortable

merchants spoke to him, smirking sinfully and hinting of what he had heard in

the taverns of Carter's quest. He appeared to have knowledge too secret for

public telling; and although the sound of his voice was unbearably hateful,

Carter felt that the lore of so far a traveller must not be overlooked. He bade

him therefore be his guest in locked chambers above, and drew out the last of

the Zoogs' moon-wine to loosen his tongue. The strange merchant drank heavily,

but smirked unchanged by the draught. Then he drew forth a curious bottle with

wine of his own, and Carter saw that the bottle was a single hollowed ruby,

grotesquely carved in patterns too fabulous to be comprehended. He offered his

wine to his host, and though Carter took only the least sip, he felt the

dizziness of space and the fever of unimagined jungles. All the while the guest

had been smiling more and more broadly, and as Carter slipped into blankness the

last thing he saw was that dark odious face convulsed with evil laughter and

something quite unspeakable where one of the two frontal puffs of that orange

turban had become disarranged with the shakings of that epileptic mirth.

Carter next had consciousness amidst horrible odours beneath a tent-like awning

on the deck of a ship, with the marvellous coasts of the Southern Sea flying by

in unnatural swiftness. He was not chained, but three of the dark sardonic

merchants stood grinning nearby, and the sight of those humps in their turbans

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made him almost as faint as did the stench that filtered up through the sinister

hatches. He saw slip past him the glorious lands and cities of which a

fellow-dreamer of earth - a lighthouse-keeper in ancient Kingsport - had often

discoursed in the old days, and recognized the templed terraces of Zak, abode of

forgotten dreams; the spires of infamous Thalarion, that daemon-city of a

thousand wonders where the eidolon Lathi reigns; the charnel gardens of Zura,

land of pleasures unattained, and the twin headlands of crystal, meeting above

in a resplendent arch, which guard the harbour of Sona-Nyl, blessed land of

fancy.

Past all these gorgeous lands the malodourous ship flew unwholesomely, urged by

the abnormal strokes of those unseen rowers below. And before the day was done

Carter saw that the steersman could have no other goal than the Basalt Pillars

of the West, beyond which simple folk say splendid Cathuria lies, but which wise

dreamers well know are the gates of a monstrous cataract wherein the oceans of

earth's dreamland drop wholly to abysmal nothingness and shoot through the empty

spaces toward other worlds and other stars and the awful voids outside the

ordered universe where the daemon sultan Azathoth gnaws hungrily in chaos amid

pounding and piping and the hellish dancing of the Other Gods, blind, voiceless,

tenebrous, and mindless, with their soul and messenger Nyarlathotep.

Meanwhile the three sardonic merchants would give no word of their intent,

though Carter well knew that they must be leagued with those who wished to hold

him from his quest. It is understood in the land of dream that the Other Gods

have many agents moving among men; and all these agents, whether wholly human or

slightly less than human, are eager to work the will of those blind and mindless

things in return for the favour of their hideous soul and messenger, the

crawling chaos Nyarlathotep. So Carter inferred that the merchants of the humped

turbans, hearing of his daring search for the Great Ones in their castle of

Kadath, had decided to take him away and deliver him to Nyarlathotep for

whatever nameless bounty might be offered for such a prize. What might be the

land of those merchants in our known universe or in the eldritch spaces outside,

Carter could not guess; nor could he imagine at what hellish trysting-place they

would meet the crawling chaos to give him up and claim their reward. He knew,

however, that no beings as nearly human as these would dare approach the

ultimate nighted throne of the daemon Azathoth in the formless central void.

At the set of sun the merchants licked their excessively wide lips and glared

hungrily and one of them went below and returned from some hidden and offensive

cabin with a pot and basket of plates. Then they squatted close together beneath

the awning and ate the smoking meat that was passed around. But when they gave

Carter a portion, he found something very terrible in the size and shape of it;

so that he turned even paler than before and cast that portion into the sea when

no eye was on him. And again he thought of those unseen rowers beneath, and of

the suspicious nourishment from which their far too mechanical strength was

derived.

It was dark when the galley passed betwixt the Basalt Pillars of the West and

the sound of the ultimate cataract swelled portentous from ahead. And the spray

of that cataract rose to obscure the stars, and the deck grew damp, and the

vessel reeled in the surging current of the brink. Then with a queer whistle and

plunge the leap was taken, and Carter felt the terrors of nightmare as earth

fell away and the great boat shot silent and comet-like into planetary space.

Never before had he known what shapeless black things lurk and caper and

flounder all through the aether, leering and grinning at such voyagers as may

pass, and sometimes feeling about with slimy paws when some moving object

excites their curiosity. These are the nameless larvae of the Other Gods, and

like them are blind and without mind, and possessed of singular hungers and

thirsts.

But that offensive galley did not aim as far as Carter had feared, for he soon

saw that the helmsman was steering a course directly for the moon. The moon was

a crescent shining larger and larger as they approached it, and shewing its

singular craters and peaks uncomfortably. The ship made for the edge, and it

soon became clear that its destination was that secret and mysterious side which

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is always turned away from earth, and which no fully human person, save perhaps

the dreamer Snireth-Ko, has ever beheld. The close aspect of the moon as the

galley drew near proved very disturbing to Carter, and he did not like the size

and shape of the ruins which crumbled here and there. The dead temples on the

mountains were so placed that they could have glorified no suitable or wholesome

gods, and in the symmetries of the broken columns there seemed to be some dark

and inner meaning which did not invite solution. And what the structure and

proportions of the olden worshippers could have been, Carter steadily refused to

conjecture.

When the ship rounded the edge, and sailed over those lands unseen by man, there

appeared in the queer landscape certain signs of life, and Carter saw many low,

broad, round cottages in fields of grotesque whitish fungi. He noticed that

these cottages had no windows, and thought that their shape suggested the huts

of Esquimaux. Then he glimpsed the oily waves of a sluggish sea, and knew that

the voyage was once more to be by water - or at least through some liquid. The

galley struck the surface with a peculiar sound, and the odd elastic way the

waves received it was very perplexing to Carter.

They now slid along at great speed, once passing and hailing another galley of

kindred form, but generally seeing nothing but that curious sea and a sky that

was black and star-strewn even though the sun shone scorchingly in it.

There presently rose ahead the jagged hills of a leprous-looking coast, and

Carter saw the thick unpleasant grey towers of a city. The way they leaned and

bent, the manner in which they were clustered, and the fact that they had no

windows at all, was very disturbing to the prisoner; and he bitterly mourned the

folly which had made him sip the curious wine of that merchant with the humped

turban. As the coast drew nearer, and the hideous stench of that city grew

stronger, he saw upon the jagged hills many forests, some of whose trees he

recognized as akin to that solitary moon-tree in the enchanted wood of earth,

from whose sap the small brown Zoogs ferment their curious wine.

Carter could now distinguish moving figures on the noisome wharves ahead, and

the better he saw them the worse he began to fear and detest them. For they were

not men at all, or even approximately men, but great greyish-white slippery

things which could expand and contract at will, and whose principal shape -

though it often changed - was that of a sort of toad without any eyes, but with

a curious vibrating mass of short pink tentacles on the end of its blunt, vague

snout. These objects were waddling busily about the wharves, moving bales and

crates and boxes with preternatural strength, and now and then hopping on or off

some anchored galley with long oars in their forepaws. And now and then one

would appear driving a herd of clumping slaves, which indeed were approximate

human beings with wide mouths like those merchants who traded in Dylath-Leen;

only these herds, being without turbans or shoes or clothing, did not seem so

very human after all. Some of the slaves - the fatter ones, whom a sort of

overseer would pinch experimentally - were unloaded from ships and nailed in

crates which workers pushed into the low warehouses or loaded on great lumbering

vans.

Once a van was hitched and driven off, and the, fabulous thing which drew it was

such that Carter gasped, even after having seen the other monstrosities of that

hateful place. Now and then a small herd of slaves dressed and turbaned like the

dark merchants would be driven aboard a galley, followed by a great crew of the

slippery toad-things as officers, navigators, and rowers. And Carter saw that

the almost-human creatures were reserved for the more ignominious kinds of

servitude which required no strength, such as steering and cooking, fetching and

carrying, and bargaining with men on the earth or other planets where they

traded. These creatures must have been convenient on earth, for they were truly

not unlike men when dressed and carefully shod and turbaned, and could haggle in

the shops of men without embarrassment or curious explanations. But most of

them, unless lean or ill-favoured, were unclothed and packed in crates and drawn

off in lumbering lorries by fabulous things. Occasionally other beings were

unloaded and crated; some very like these semi-humans, some not so similar, and

some not similar at all. And he wondered if any of the poor stout black men of

Parg were left to be unloaded and crated and shipped inland in those obnoxious

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drays.

When the galley landed at a greasy-looking quay of spongy rock a nightmare horde

of toad-things wiggled out of the hatches, and two of them seized Carter and

dragged him ashore. The smell and aspect of that city are beyond telling, and

Carter held only scattered images of the tiled streets and black doorways and

endless precipices of grey vertical walls without windows. At length he was

dragged within a low doorway and made to climb infinite steps in pitch

blackness. It was, apparently, all one to the toad-things whether it were light

or dark. The odour of the place was intolerable, and when Carter was locked into

a chamber and left alone he scarcely had strength to crawl around and ascertain

its form and dimensions. It was circular, and about twenty feet across.

From then on time ceased to exist. At intervals food was pushed in, but Carter

would not touch it. What his fate would be, he did not know; but he felt that he

was held for the coming of that frightful soul and messenger of infinity's Other

Gods, the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep. Finally, after an unguessed span of hours

or days, the great stone door swung wide again, and Carter was shoved down the

stairs and out into the red-litten streets of that fearsome city. It was night

on the moon, and all through the town were stationed slaves bearing torches.

In a detestable square a sort of procession was formed; ten of the toad-things

and twenty-four almost human torch-bearers, eleven on either side, and one each

before and behind. Carter was placed in the middle of the line; five toad-things

ahead and five behind, and one almost-human torch-bearer on either side of him.

Certain of the toad-things produced disgustingly carven flutes of ivory and made

loathsome sounds. To that hellish piping the column advanced out of the tiled

streets and into nighted plains of obscene fungi, soon commencing to climb one

of the lower and more gradual hills that lay behind the city. That on some

frightful slope or blasphemous plateau the crawling chaos waited, Carter could

not doubt; and he wished that the suspense might soon be over. The whining of

those impious flutes was shocking, and he would have given worlds for some even

half-normal sound; but these toad-things had no voices, and the slaves did not

talk.

Then through that star-specked darkness there did come a normal sound. It rolled

from the higher hills, and from all the jagged peaks around it was caught up and

echoed in a swelling pandaemoniac chorus. It was the midnight yell of the cat,

and Carter knew at last that the old village folk were right when they made low

guesses about the cryptical realms which are known only to cats, and to which

the elders among cats repair by stealth nocturnally, springing from high

housetops. Verily, it is to the moon's dark side that they go to leap and gambol

on the hills and converse with ancient shadows, and here amidst that column of

foetid things Carter heard their homely, friendly cry, and thought of the steep

roofs and warm hearths and little lighted windows of home.

Now much of the speech of cats was known to Randolph Carter, and in this far

terrible place he uttered the cry that was suitable. But that he need not have

done, for even as his lips opened he heard the chorus wax and draw nearer, and

saw swift shadows against the stars as small graceful shapes leaped from hill to

hill in gathering legions. The call of the clan had been given, and before the

foul procession had time even to be frightened a cloud of smothering fur and a

phalanx of murderous claws were tidally and tempestuously upon it. The flutes

stopped, and there were shrieks in the night. Dying almost-humans screamed, and

cats spit and yowled and roared, but the toad-things made never a sound as their

stinking green ichor oozed fatally upon that porous earth with the obscene

fungi.

It was a stupendous sight while the torches lasted, and Carter had never before

seen so many cats. Black, grey, and white; yellow, tiger, and mixed; common,

Persian, and Marix; Thibetan, Angora, and Egyptian; all were there in the fury

of battle, and there hovered over them some trace of that profound and inviolate

sanctity which made their goddess great in the temples of Bubastis. They would

leap seven strong at the throat of an almost-human or the pink tentacled snout

of a toad-thing and drag it down savagely to the fungous plain, where myriads of

their fellows would surge over it and into it with the frenzied claws and teeth

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of a divine battle-fury. Carter had seized a torch from a stricken slave, but

was soon overborne by the surging waves of his loyal defenders. Then he lay in

the utter blackness hearing the clangour of war and the shouts of the victors,

and feeling the soft paws of his friends as they rushed to and fro over him in

the fray.

At last awe and exhaustion closed his eyes, and when he opened them again it was

upon a strange scene. The great shining disc of the earth, thirteen times

greater than that of the moon as we see it, had risen with floods of weird light

over the lunar landscape; and across all those leagues of wild plateau and

ragged crest there squatted one endless sea of cats in orderly array. Circle on

circle they reached, and two or three leaders out of the ranks were licking his

face and purring to him consolingly. Of the dead slaves and toad-things there

were not many signs, but Carter thought he saw one bone a little way off in the

open space between him and the warriors.

Carter now spoke with the leaders in the soft language of cats, and learned that

his ancient friendship with the species was well known and often spoken of in

the places where cats congregate. He had not been unmarked in Ulthar when he

passed through, and the sleek old cats had remembered how he patted them after

they had attended to the hungry Zoogs who looked evilly at a small black kitten.

And they recalled, too, how he had welcomed the very little kitten who came to

see him at the inn, and how he had given it a saucer of rich cream in the

morning before he left. The grandfather of that very little kitten was the

leader of the army now assembled, for he had seen the evil procession from a far

hill and recognized the prisoner as a sworn friend of his kind on earth and in

the land of dream.

A yowl now came from the farther peak, and the old leader paused abruptly in his

conversation. It was one of the army's outposts, stationed on the highest of the

mountains to watch the one foe which Earth's cats fear; the very large and

peculiar cats from Saturn, who for some reason have not been oblivious of the

charm of our moon's dark side. They are leagued by treaty with the evil

toad-things, and are notoriously hostile to our earthly cats; so that at this

juncture a meeting would have been a somewhat grave matter.

After a brief consultation of generals, the cats rose and assumed a closer

formation, crowding protectingly around Carter and preparing to take the great

leap through space back to the housetops of our earth and its dreamland. The old

field-marshal advised Carter to let himself be borne along smoothly and

passively in the massed ranks of furry leapers, and told him how to spring when

the rest sprang and land gracefully when the rest landed. He also offered to

deposit him in any spot he desired, and Carter decided on the city of

Dylath-Leen whence the black galley had set out; for he wished to sail thence

for Oriab and the carven crest Ngranek, and also to warn the people of the city

to have no more traffick with black galleys, if indeed that traffick could be

tactfully and judiciously broken off. Then, upon a signal, the cats all leaped

gracefully with their friend packed securely in their midst; while in a black

cave on an unhallowed summit of the moon-mountains still vainly waited the

crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.

The leap of the cats through space was very swift; and being surrounded by his

companions Carter did not see this time the great black shapelessnesses that

lurk and caper and flounder in the abyss. Before he fully realised what had

happened he was back in his familiar room at the inn at Dylath-Leen, and the

stealthy, friendly cats were pouring out of the window in streams. The old

leader from Ulthar was the last to leave, and as Carter shook his paw he said he

would be able to get home by cockcrow. When dawn came, Carter went downstairs

and learned that a week had elapsed since his capture and leaving. There was

still nearly a fortnight to wait for the ship bound toward Oriab, and during

that time he said what he could against the black galleys and their infamous

ways. Most of the townsfolk believed him; yet so fond were the jewellers of

great rubies that none would wholly promise to cease trafficking with the

wide-mouthed merchants. If aught of evil ever befalls Dylath-Leen through such

traffick, it will not be his fault.

In about a week the desiderate ship put in by the black wale and tall

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file:///F|/rah/H.%20P.%20Lovecraft/The%20Dream%20Quest%20of%20Unknown%20Kadath%20by%20H_%20P_%20Lovecraft.txtTheDreamQuestofUnknownKadathbyH.P.LovecraftTheDreamQuestofUnknownKadathbyH.P.LovecraftWrittenAutumn?1926-22Jan1927PublishedinBeyondtheWallofSleep,SaukCity,WI:ArkhamHouse,1943,p.76-134Threet...

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

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