Lovecraft, H P - The Colour Out Of Space

VIP免费

2024-12-23 0 0 171.12KB 20 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

The Colour Out of Space

by H. P. Lovecraft

Written March 1927

Published September 1927 in Amazing Stories, Vol. 2, No. 6, p. 557-67

West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has

ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin

brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight. On the gentle slopes

there are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally

over old New England secrets in the lee of great ledges; but these are all vacant now, the

wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel

roofs.

The old folk have gone away, and foreigners do not like to live there. French-Canadians

have tried it, Italians have tried it, and the Poles have come and departed. It is not because

of anything that can be seen or heard or handled, but because of something that is

imagined. The place is not good for imagination, and does not bring restful dreams at

night. It must be this which keeps the foreigners away, for old Ammi Pierce has never

told them of anything he recalls from the strange days. Ammi, whose head has been a

little queer for years, is the only one who still remains, or who ever talks of the strange

days; and he dares to do this because his house is so near the open fields and the travelled

roads around Arkham.

There was once a road over the hills and through the valleys, that ran straight where the

blasted heath is now; but people ceased to use it and a new road was laid curving far

toward the south. Traces of the old one can still be found amidst the weeds of a returning

wilderness, and some of them will doubtless linger even when half the hollows are

flooded for the new reservoir. Then the dark woods will be cut down and the blasted

heath will slumber far below blue waters whose surface will mirror the sky and ripple in

the sun. And the secrets of the strange days will be one with the deep's secrets; one with

the hidden lore of old ocean, and all the mystery of primal earth.

When I went into the hills and vales to survey for the new reservoir they told me the

place was evil. They told me this in Arkham, and because that is a very old town full of

witch legends I thought the evil must he something which grandams had whispered to

children through centuries. The name "blasted heath" seemed to me very odd and

theatrical, and I wondered how it had come into the folklore of a Puritan people. Then I

saw that dark westward tangle of glens and slopes for myself, end ceased to wonder at

anything beside its own elder mystery. It was morning when I saw it, but shadow lurked

always there. The trees grew too thickly, and their trunks were too big for any healthy

New England wood. There was too much silence in the dim alleys between them, and the

floor was too soft with the dank moss and mattings of infinite years of decay.

The Colour Out of Space

In the open spaces, mostly along the line of the old road, there were little hillside farms;

sometimes with all the buildings standing, sometimes with only 6ne or two, and

sometimes with only a lone chimney or fast-filling cellar. Weeds and briers reigned, and

furtive wild things rustled in the undergrowth. Upon everything was a haze of

restlessness and oppression; a touch of the unreal and the grotesque, as if some vital

element of perspective or chiaroscuro were awry. I did not wonder that the foreigners

would not stay, for this was no region to sleep in. It was too much like a landscape of

Salvator Rosa; too much like some forbidden woodcut in a tale of terror.

But even all this was not so bad as the blasted heath. I knew it the moment I came upon it

at the bottom of a spacious valley; for no other name could fit such a thing, or any other

thing fit such a name. It was as if the poet had coined the phrase from having seen this

one particular region. It must, I thought as I viewed it, be the outcome of a fire; but why

had nothing new ever grown over these five acres of grey desolation that sprawled open

to the sky like a great spot eaten by acid in the woods and fields? It lay largely to the

north of the ancient road line, but encroached a little on the other side. I felt an odd

reluctance about approaching, and did so at last only because my business took me

through and past it. There was no vegetation of any kind on that broad expanse, but only

a fine grey dust or ash which no wind seemed ever to blow about. The trees near it were

sickly and stunted, and many dead trunks stood or lay rotting at the rim. As I walked

hurriedly by I saw the tumbled bricks and stones of an old chimney and cellar on my

right, and the yawning black maw of an abandoned well whose stagnant vapours played

strange tricks with the hues of the sunlight. Even the long, dark woodland climb beyond

seemed welcome in contrast, and I marvelled no more at the frightened whispers of

Arkham people. There had been no house or ruin near; even in the old days the place

must have been lonely and remote. And at twilight, dreading to repass that ominous spot,

I walked circuitously back to the town by the curious road on the south. I vaguely wished

some clouds would gather, for an odd timidity about the deep skyey voids above had

crept into my soul.

In the evening I asked old people in Arkham about the blasted heath, and what was meant

by that phrase "strange days" which so many evasively muttered. I could not, however,

get any good answers1 except that all the mystery was much more recent than I had

dreamed. It was not a matter of old legendry at all, but something within the lifetime of

those who spoke. It had happened in the 'eighties, and a family had disappeared or was

killed. Speakers would not be exact; and because they all told me to pay no attention to

old Ammi Pierce's crazy tales, I sought him out the next morning, having heard that he

lived alone in the ancient tottering cottage where the trees first begin to get very thick. It

was a fearsomely ancient place, and had begun to exude the faint miasmal odour which

clings about houses that have stood too long. Only with persistent knocking could I rouse

the aged man, and when he shuffled timidly to the door could could tell he was not glad

to see me. He was not so feeble as I had expected; but his eyes drooped in a curious way,

and his unkempt clothing and white beard made him seem very worn and dismal.

Not knowing just how he could best be launched on his tales, I feigned a matter of

business; told him of my surveying, and asked vague questions about the district. He was

The Colour Out of Space

far brighter and more educated than I had been led to think, and before I knew it had

graNped quite as much of the subject as any man I had talked with in Arkham. He was

not like other rustics I bad known in the sections where reservoirs were to be. From him

there were no protests at the miles of old wood and farmland to be blotted out, though

perhaps there would have been had not his home lain outside the bounds of the future

lake. Relief was all that he showed; relief at the doom of the dark ancient valleys through

which he had roamed all his life. They were better under water now - better under water

since the strange days. And with this opening his husky voice sank low, while his body

leaned forward and his right forefinger began to point shakily and impressively.

It was then that I heard the story, and as the rambling voice scraped and whispered on I

shivered again and again spite the summer day. Often I had to recall the speaker from

ramblings, piece out scientific points which he knew only by a fading parrot memory of

professors' talk, or bridge over gaps, where his sense of logic and continuity broke down.

When he was done I did not wonder that his mind had snapped a trifle, or that the folk of

Arkham would not speak much of the blasted heath. I hurried back before sunset to my

hotel, unwilling to have the stars come out above me in the open; and the next day

returned to - Boston to give up my position. I could not go into that dim chaos of old

forest and slope again, or face another time that grey blasted heath where the black well

yawned deep beside the tumbled bricks and stones. The reservoir will soon be built now,

and all those elder secrets will be safe forever under watery fathoms. But even then I do

not believe I would like to visit that country by night - at least not when the sinister stars

are out; and nothing could bribe me to drink the new city water of Arkham.

It all began, old Ammi said, with the meteorite. Before that time there had been no wild

legends at all since the witch trials, and even then these western woods were not feared

half so much as the small island in the Miskatonic where the devil held court beside a

curious 'lone altar older than the Indians. These were not haunted woods, and their

fantastic dusk was never terrible till the strange days. Then there had come that white

noontide cloud, that string of explosions in the air, and that pillar of smoke from the

valley far in the wood. And by night all Arkham had heard of the great rock that fell out

of the sky and bedded itself in the ground beside the well at the Nahum Gardner place.

That was the house which had stood where the blasted heath was to come - the trim white

Nahum Gardner house amidst its fertile gardens and orchards.

Nahum had come to town to tell people about the stone, and dropped in at Ammi Pierce's

on the way. Ammi was forty then, and all the queer things were fixed very strongly in his

mind. He and his wife had gone with the three professors from Miskatonic University

who hastened out the next morning to see the weird visitor from unknown stellar space,

and had wondered why Nahum had called it so large the day before. It had shrunk,

Nahum said as he pointed out the big brownish mound above the ripped earth and charred

grass near the archaic well-sweep in his front yard; but the wise men answered that stones

do not shrink. Its heat lingered persistently, and Nahum declared it had glowed faintly in

the night. The professors tried it with a geologist's hammer and found it was oddly soft. It

was, in truth, so soft as to be almost plastic; and they gouged rather than chipped a

specimen to take back to the college for testing. They took it in an old pail borrowed from

The Colour Out of Space

Nahum's kitchen, for even the small piece refused to grow cool. On the trip back they

stopped at Ammi's to rest, and seemed thoughtful when Mrs. Pierce remarked that the

fragment was growing smaller and burning the bottom of the pail. Truly, it was not large,

but perhaps they had taken less than they thought.

The day after that-all this was in June of '82-the professors had trooped out again in a

great excitement. As they passed Ammi's they told him what queer things the specimen

had done, and how it had faded wholly away when they put it in a glass beaker. The

beaker had gone, too, and the wise men talked of the strange stone's affinity for silicon. It

had acted quite unbelievably in that well-ordered laboratory; doing nothing at all and

showing no occluded gases when heated on charcoal, being wholly negative in the borax

bead, and soon proving itself absolutely non-volatile at any producible temperature,

including that of the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe. On an anvil it appeared highly malleable,

and in the dark its luminosity was very marked. Stubbornly refusing to grow cool, it soon

had the college in a state of real excitement; and when upon heating before the

spectroscope it displayed shining bands unlike any known colours of the normal spectrum

there was much breathless talk of new elements, bizarre optical properties, and other

things which puzzled men of science are wont to say when faced by the unknown.

Hot as it was, they tested it in a crucible with all the proper reagents. Water did nothing.

Hydrochloric acid was the same. Nitric acid and even aqua regia merely hissed and

spattered against its torrid invulnerability. Ammi had difficulty in recalling all these

things, but recognized some solvents as I mentioned them in the usual order of use. There

were am monia and caustic soda, alcohol and ether, nauseous carbon disulphide and a

dozen others; but although the weight grew steadily less as time passed, and the fragment

seemed to be slightly cooling, there was no change in the solvents to show that they had

attacked the substance at all. It was a metal, though, beyond a doubt. It was magnetic, for

one thing; and after its immersion in the acid solvents there seemed to be faint traces of

the Widmanstatten figures found on meteoric iron. When the cooling had grown very

considerable, the testing was carried on in glass; and it was in a glass beaker that they left

all the chips made of the original fragment during the work. The next morning both chips

and beaker were gone without trace, and only a charred spot marked the place on the

wooden shelf where they had been.

All this the professors told Ammi as they paused at his door, and once more he went with

them to see the stony messenger from the stars, though this time his wife did not

accompany him. It had now most cer tainly shrunk, and even the sober professors could

not doubt the truth of what they saw. All around the dwindling brown lump near the well

was a vacant space, except where the earth had caved in; and whereas it had been a good

seven feet across the day before, it was now scarcely five. It was still hot, and the sages

studied its surface curiously as they detached another and larger piece with hammer and

chisel. They gouged deeply this time, and as they pried away the smaller mass they saw

that the core of the thing was not quite homogeneous.

They had uncovered what seemed to be the side of a large coloured globule embedded in

the substance. The colour, which resembled some of the bands in the meteor's strange

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

TheColourOutofSpaceTheColourOutofSpacebyH.P.LovecraftWrittenMarch1927PublishedSeptember1927inAmazingStories,Vol.2,No.6,p.557-67WestofArkhamthehillsrisewild,andtherearevalleyswithdeepwoodsthatnoaxehasevercut.Therearedarknarrowglenswherethetreesslopefantastically,andwherethinbrookletstricklewithouteve...

展开>> 收起<<

Lovecraft, H P - The Colour Out Of Space.pdf

共20页,预览4页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Lovecraft, H P - The Colour Out Of Space

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: