Lovecraft, H P - The Very Old Folk

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The Very Old Folk

by H.P. Lovecraft

From a letter written to "Melmoth" (Donald Wandrei) on Thursday, November 3, 1927

It was a flaming sunset or late afternoon in the tiny provincial town of Pompelo, at the

foot of the Pyrenees in Hispania Citerior. The year must have been in the late republic,

for the province was still ruled by a senatorial proconsul instead of a prætorian legate of

Augustus, and the day was the first before the Kalends of November. The hills rose

scarlet and gold to the north of the little town, and the westering sun shone ruddily and

mystically on the crude new stone and plaster buildings of the dusty forum and the

wooden walls of the circus some distance to the east. Groups of citizens - broad-browed

Roman colonists and coarse-haired Romanised natives, together with obvious hybrids of

the two strains, alike clad in cheap woollen togas - and sprinklings of helmeted

legionaries and coarse-mantled, black-bearded tribesmen of the circumambient Vascones

- all thronged the few paved streets and forum; moved by some vague and ill-defined

uneasiness.

I myself had just alighted from a litter, which the Illyrian bearers seemed to have brought

in some haste from Calagurris, across the Iberus to the southward. It appeared that I was a

provincial quæstor named L. Cælius Rufus, and that I had been summoned by the

proconsul, P. Scribonius Libo, who had come from Tarraco some days before. The

soldiers were the fifth cohort of the XIIth legion, under the military tribune Sex. Asellius;

and the legatus of the whole region, Cn. Balbutius, had also come from Calagurris, where

the permanent station was.

The cause of the conference was a horror that brooded on the hills. All the townsfolk

were frightened, and had begged the presence of a cohort from Calagurris. It was the

Terrible Season of the autumn, and the wild people in the mountains were preparing for

the frightful ceremonies which only rumour told of in the towns. They were the very old

folk who dwelt higher up in the hills and spoke a choppy language which the Vascones

could not understand. One seldom saw them; but a few times a year they sent down little

yellow, squint-eyed messengers (who looked like Scythians) to trade with the merchants

by means of gestures, and every spring and autumn they held the infamous rites on the

peaks, their howlings and altar-fires throwing terror into the villages. Always the same -

the night before the Kalends of Maius and the night before the Kalends of November.

Townsfolk would disappear just before these nights, and would never be heard of again.

And there were whispers that the native shepherds and farmers were not ill-disposed

toward the very old folk - that more than one thatched hut was vacant before midnight on

the two hideous Sabbaths.

This year the horror was very great, for the people knew that the wrath of the very old

folk was upon Pompelo. Three months previously five of the little squint-eyed traders had

come down from the hills, and in a market brawl three of them had been killed. The

remaining two had gone back wordlessly to their mountains - and this autumn not a

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Lovecraft, H P - The Very Old Folk

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