
The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath
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 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-