Lovecraft, H P - The Tomb

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The Tomb

by H. P. Lovecraft

Written June 1917

Published March 1922 in The Vagrant, No. 14, p. 50-64.

In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the

demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the

authenticity of my narrative. It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too

limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated

phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its

common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction

betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the

delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of

them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of

supersight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empricism.

My name is Jervas Dudley, and from earliest childhood I have been a dreamer and a

visionary. Wealthy beyond the necessity of a commercial life, and temperamentally

unfitted for the formal studies and social recreation of my acquaintances, I have dwelt

ever in realms apart from the visible world; spending my youth and adolescence in

ancient and little known books, and in roaming the fields and groves of the region near

my ancestral home. I do not think that what I read in these books or saw in these fields

and groves was exactly what other boys read and saw there; but of this I must say little,

since detailed speech would but confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect which I

sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy attendants around me. It is

sufficient for me to relate events without analyzing causes.

I have said that I dwelt apart from the visible world, but I have not said that I dwelt alone.

This no human creature may do; for lacking the fellowship of the living, he inevitably

draws upon the companionship of things that are not, or are no longer, living. Close by

my home there lies a singular wooded hollow, in whose twilight deeps I spent most of my

time; reading, thinking, and dreaming. Down its moss-covered slopes my first steps of

infancy were taken, and around its grotesquely gnarled oak trees my first fancies of

boyhood were woven. Well did I come to know the presiding dryads of those trees, and

often have I watched their wild dances in the struggling beams of a waning moon but of

these things I must not now speak. I will tell only of the lone tomb in the darkest of the

hillside thickets; the deserted tomb of the Hydes, an old and exalted family whose last

direct descendant had been laid within its black recesses many decades before my birth.

The vault to which I refer is of ancient granite, weathered and discolored by the mists and

dampness of generations. Excavated back into the hillside, the structure is visible only at

the entrance. The door, a ponderous and forbidding slab of stone, hangs upon rusted iron

hinges, and is fastened ajar in a queerly sinister way by means of heavy iron chains and

The Tomb

padlocks, according to a gruesome fashion of half a century ago. The abode of the race

whose scions are here inurned had once crowned the declivity which holds the tomb, but

had long since fallen victim to the flames which sprang up from a stroke of lightning. Of

the midnight storm which destroyed this gloomy mansion, the older inhabitants of the

region sometimes speak in hushed and uneasy voices; alluding to what they call 'divine

wrath' in a manner that in later years vaguely increased the always strong fascination

which I had felt for the forest-darkened sepulcher. One man only had perished in the fire.

When the last of the Hydes was buried in this place of shade and stillness, the sad urnful

of ashes had come from a distant land, to which the family had repaired when the

mansion burned down. No one remains to lay flowers before the granite portal, and few

care to brave the depressing shadows which seem to linger strangely about the water-

worn stones.

I shall never forget the afternoon when first I stumbled upon the half-hidden house of

death. It was in midsummer, when the alchemy of nature transmutes the sylvan landscape

to one vivid and almost homogeneous mass of green; when the senses are well-nigh

intoxicated with the surging seas of moist verdure and the subtly indefinable odors of the

soil and the vegetation. In such surroundings the mind loses its perspective; time and

space become trivial and unreal, and echoes of a forgotten prehistoric past beat insistently

upon the enthralled consciousness.

All day I had been wandering through the mystic groves of the hollow; thinking thoughts

I need not discuss, and conversing with things I need not name. In years a child of ten, I

had seen and heard many wonders unknown to the throng; and was oddly aged in certain

respects. When, upon forcing my way between two savage clumps of briars, I suddenly

encountered the entrance of the vault, I had no knowledge of what I had discovered. The

dark blocks of granite, the door so curiously ajar, and the funeral carvings above the arch,

aroused in me no associations of mournful or terrible character. Of graves and tombs I

knew and imagined much, but had on account of my peculiar temperament been kept

from all personal contact with churchyards and cemeteries. The strange stone house on

the woodland slope was to me only a source of interest and speculation; and its cold,

damp interior, into which I vainly peered through the aperture so tantalizingly left,

contained for me no hint of death or decay. But in that instant of curiosity was born the

madly unreasoning desire which has brought me to this hell of confinement. Spurred on

by a voice which must have come from the hideous soul of the forest, I resolved to enter

the beckoning gloom in spite of the ponderous chains which barred my passage. In the

waning light of day I alternately rattled the rusty impediments with a view to throwing

wide the stone door, and essayed to squeeze my slight form through the space already

provided; but neither plan met with success. At first curious, I was now frantic; and when

in the thickening twilight I returned to my home, I had sworn to the hundred gods of the

grove that at any cost I would some day force an entrance to the black, chilly depths that

seemed calling out to me. The physician with the iron-grey beard who comes each day to

my room, once told a visitor that this decision marked the beginning of a pitiful

monomania; but I will leave final judgment to my readers when they shall have learnt all.

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摘要：

TheTombTheTombbyH.P.LovecraftWrittenJune1917PublishedMarch1922inTheVagrant,No.14,p.50-64.Inrelatingthecircumstanceswhichhaveledtomyconfinementwithinthisrefugeforthedemented,Iamawarethatmypresentpositionwillcreateanaturaldoubtoftheauthenticityofmynarrative.Itisanunfortunatefactthatthebulkofhumanityis...

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