Lovecraft, H P & Bishop, Zealia - The Mound

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The Mound

by H. P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop

Written December 1929 through early 1930

Published November 1940 in Weird Tales, Volume 35, Number 6, pages 98-120

It is only within the last few years that most people have stopped thinking of the West as

a new land. I suppose the idea gained ground because our own especial civilisation

happens to be new there; but nowadays explorers are digging beneath the surface and

bringing up whole chapters of life that rose and fell among these plains and mountains

before recorded history began. We think nothing of a Pueblo village 2500 years old, and

it hardly jolts us when archaeologists put the sub-pedregal culture of Mexico back to

17,000 or 18,000 B.C. We hear rumours of still older things, too—of primitive man

contemporaneous with extinct animals and known today only through a few fragmentary

bones and artifacts—so that the idea of newness is fading out pretty rapidly. Europeans

usually catch the sense of immemorial ancientness and deep deposits from successive

life-streams better than we do. Only a couple of years ago a British author spoke of

Arizona as a "moon-dim region, very lovely in its way, and stark and old—an ancient,

lonely land".

Yet I believe I have a deeper sense of the stupefying—almost horrible—ancientness of

the West than any European. It all comes from an incident that happened in 1928; an

incident which I'd greatly like to dismiss as three-quarters hallucination, but which has

left such a frightfully firm impression on my memory that I can't put it off very easily. It

was in Oklahoma, where my work as an American Indian ethnologist constantly takes me

and where I had come upon some devilishly strange and disconcerting matters before.

Make no mistake—Oklahoma is a lot more than a mere pioneers' and promoters' frontier.

There are old, old tribes with old, old memories there; and when the tom-toms beat

ceaselessly over brooding plains in the autumn the spirits of men are brought dangerously

close to primal, whispered things. I am white and Eastern enough myself, but anybody is

welcome to know that the rites of Yig, Father of Snakes, can get a real shudder out of me

any day. I have heard and seen too much to be "sophisticated" in such matters. And so it

is with this incident of 1928. I'd like to laugh it off—but I can't.

I had gone into Oklahoma to track down and correlate one of the many ghost tales which

were current among the white settlers, but which had strong Indian corroboration, and—I

felt sure—an ultimate Indian source. They were very curious, these open-air ghost tales;

and though they sounded flat and prosaic in the mouths of the white people, they had

earmarks of linkage with some of the richest and obscurest phases of native mythology.

All of them were woven around the vast, lonely, artificial-looking mounds in the western

part of the state, and all of them involved apparitions of exceedingly strange aspect and

equipment.

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The commonest, and among the oldest, became quite famous in 1892, when a

government marshal named John Willis went into the mound region after horse-thieves

and came out with a wild yarn of nocturnal cavalry horses in the air between great armies

of invisible spectres—battles that involved the rush of hooves and feet, the thud of blows,

the clank of metal on metal, the muffled cries of warriors, and the fall of human and

equine bodies. These things happened by moonlight, and frightened his horse as well as

himself. The sounds persisted an hour at a time; vivid, but subdued as if brought from a

distance by a wind, and unaccompanied by any glimpse of the armies themselves. Later

on Willis learned that the seat of the sounds was a notoriously haunted spot, shunned by

settlers and Indians alike. Many had seen, or half seen, the warring horsemen in the sky,

and had furnished dim, ambiguous descriptions. The settlers described the ghostly

fighters as Indians, though of no familiar tribe, and having the most singular costumes

and weapons. They even went so far as to say that they could not be sure the horses were

really horses.

The Indians, on the other hand, did not seem to claim the spectres as kinsfolk. They

referred to them as "those people", "the old people", or "they who dwell below", and

appeared to hold them in too great a frightened veneration to talk much about them. No

ethnologist had been able to pin any, tale-teller down to a specific description of the

beings, and apparently nobody had ever had a very clear look at them. The Indians had

one or two old proverbs about these phenomena, saying that "men very old, make very

big spirit; not so old, not so big; older than all time, then spirit he so big he near flesh;

those old people and spirits they mix up—get all the same".

Now all of this, of course, is "old stuff" to an ethnologist—of a piece with the persistent

legends of rich hidden cities and buried races which abound among the Pueblo and plains

Indians, and which lured Coronado centuries ago on his vain search for the fabled

Quivira. What took me into western Oklahoma was something far more definite and

tangible—a local and distinctive tale which, though really old, was wholly new to the

outside world of research, and which involved the first clear descriptions of the ghosts

which it treated of. There was an added thrill in the fact that it came from the remote

town of Binger, in Caddo County, a place I had long known as the scene of a very terrible

and partly inexplicable occurrence connected with the snake-god myth.

The tale, outwardly, was an extremely naive and simple one, and centred in a huge, lone

mound or small hill that rose above the plain about a third of a mile west of the village—

a mound which some thought a product of Nature, but which others believed to be a

burial-place or ceremonial dais constructed by prehistoric tribes. This mound, the

villagers said, was constantly haunted by, two Indian figures which appeared in

alternation; an old man who paced back and forth along the top from dawn till dusk,

regardless of the weather and with only brief intervals of disappearance, and a squaw

who took his place at night with a blue-flamed torch that glimmered quite continuously

till morning. When the moon was bright the squaw's peculiar figure could be seen fairly

plainly, and over half the villagers agreed that the apparition was headless.

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Local opinion was divided as to the motives and relative ghostliness of the two visions.

Some held that the man was not a ghost all, but a living Indian who had killed and

beheaded a squaw for gold and buried her somewhere on the mound. According to these

theorists he was pacing the eminence through sheer remorse, bound by the spirit of his

victim which took visible shape after dark. But other theorists, more uniform in their

spectral beliefs, held that both man and woman were ghosts; the man having killed the

squaw and himself as well at some very distant period. These and minor variant versions

seemed to have been current ever since the settlement of the Wichita country in 1889, and

were, I was told, sustained to an astonishing degree by still-existing phenomena which

anyone might observe for himself. Not many ghost tales offer such free and open proof,

and I was very eager to see what bizarre wonders might be lurking in this small, obscure

village so far from the beaten path of crowds and from the ruthless searchlight of

scientific knowledge. So, in the late summer of 1928 I took a train for Binger and

brooded on strange mysteries as the cars rattled timidly along their single track through a

lonelier and lonlier landscape.

Binger is a modest cluster of frame houses and stores in the midst of a flat windy region

full of clouds of red dust. There are about 500 inhabitants besides the Indians on a

neighbouring reservation; the principal occupation seeming to be agriculture. The soil is

decently fertile, and the oil boom has not reached this part of the state. My train drew in

at twilight, and 1 felt rather lost and uneasy—cut off from wholesome and every-day

things—as it puffed away to the southward without me. The station platform was filled

with curious loafers, all of whom seemed eager to direct me when I asked for the man to

whom I had letters of introduction. I was ushered along a commonplace main street

whose ruled surface was red with the sandstone soil of the country, and finally delivered

at the door of my prospective host. Those who had arranged things for me had done well;

for Mr. Compton was a man of high intelligence and local responsibility, while his

mother—who lived with him and was familiarly known as "Grandma Compton"—was

one of the first pioneer generation, and a veritable mine of anecdote and folklore.

That evening the Comptons summed up for me all the legends current among the

villagers, proving that the phenomenon I had come to study was indeed a baffling and

important one. The ghosts, it seems, were accepted almost as a matter of course by

everyone in Binger. Two generations had been born and grown up within sight of that

queer, lone tumulus and its restless figures. The neighbourhood of the mound was

naturally feared and shunned, so that the village and the farms had not spread toward it in

all four decades of settlement; yet venturesome individuals had several times visited it.

Some had come back to report that they saw no ghosts at all when they neared the

dreaded hill; that somehow the lone sentinel had stepped out of sight before they reached

the spot, leaving them free to climb the steep slope and explore the flat summit. There

was nothing up there, they said—merely a rough expanse of underbrush. Where the

Indian watcher could have vanished to, they had no idea. He must, they reflected, have

descended the slope and somehow managed to escape unseen along the plain; although

there was no convenient cover within sight. At any rate, there did not appear to be any

opening into the mound; a conclusion which was reached after considerable exploration

of the shrubbery and tall grass on all sides. In a few cases some of the more sensitive

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searchers declared that they felt a sort of invisible restraining presence; but they could

describe nothing more definite than that.

It was simply as if the air thickened against them in the direction they wished to move. It

is heedless to mention that all these daring surveys were conducted by day. Nothing in

the universe could have induced any human being, white or red, to approach that sinister

elevation after dark; and indeed, no Indian would have thought of going near it even in

the brightest sunlight.

But it was not from the tales of these sane, observant seekers that the chief terror of the

ghost-mound sprang; indeed, had their experience been typical, the phenomenon would

have bulked far less prominently in the local legendry. The most evil thing was the fact

that many other seekers had come back strangely impaired in mind and body, or had not

come back at all. The first of these cases had occurred in 1891, when a young man named

Heaton had gone with a shovel to see what hidden secrets he could unearth. He had heard

curious tales from the Indians, and had laughed at the barren report of another youth who

had been out to the mound and had found nothing. Heaton had watched the mound with a

spy glass from the village while the other youth made his trip; and as the explorer neared

the spot, he saw the sentinel Indian walk deliberately down into the tumulus as if a trap-

door and staircase existed on the top. The other youth had not noticed how the Indian

disappeared, but had merely found him gone upon arriving at the mound.

When Heaton made his own trip he resolved to get to the bottom of the mystery, and

watchers from the village saw him hacking diligently at the shrubbery atop the mound.

Then they saw his figure melt slowly into invisibility; not to reappear for long hours, till

after the dusk drew on, and the torch of the headless squaw glimmered ghoulishly on the

distant elevation. About two hours after nightfall he staggered into the village minus his

spade and other belongings, and burst into a shrieking monologue of disconnected

ravings. He howled of shocking abysses and monsters, of terrible carvings and statues, of

inhuman captors and grotesque tortures, and of other fantastic abnormalities too complex

and chimerical even to remember. "Old! Old! Old!" he would moan over and over again,

"great God, they are older than the earth, and came here from somewhere else—they

know what you think, and make you know what they think—they're half-man, half-

ghost—crossed the line—melt and take shape again—getting more and more so, yet

we're all descended from them in the beginning—children of Tulu—everything made of

gold—monstrous animals, half-human—dead slaves—madness—Iä! Shub-Niggurath!—

that white man—oh, my God, What they did to him!..."

Heaton was the village idiot for about eight years, after which he died in an epileptic fit.

Since his ordeal there had been two more cases of mound-madness, and eight of total

disappearance. Immediately after Heaton's mad return, three desperate and determined

men had gone out to the lone hill together; heavily armed, and with spades and pickaxes.

Watching villagers saw the Indian ghost melt away as the explorers drew near, and

afterward saw the men climb the mound and begin scouting around through the

underbrush. All at once they faded into nothingness, and were never seen again. One

watcher, with an especially powerful telescope, thought he saw other forms dimly

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materialise beside the hapless men and drag them down into the mound; but this account

remained uncorroborated. It is needless to say that no searching-party went out after the

lost ones, and that for many years the mound was wholly unvisited. Only when the

incidents of 1891 were largely forgotten did anybody dare to think of further

explorations. Then, about 1910, a fellow too young to recall the old horrors made a trip to

the shunned spot and found nothing at all.

By 1915 the acute dread and wild legendry of '91 had largely faded into the

commonplace and unimaginative ghost-tales at present surviving—that is, had so faded

among the white people. On the nearby reservation were old Indians who thought much

and kept their own counsel. About this time a second wave of active curiosity and

adventuring developed, and several bold searchers made the trip to the mound and

returned. Then came a trip of two Eastern visitors with spades and other apparatus—a

pair of amateur archaeologists connected with a small college, who had been making

studies among the Indians. No one watched this trip from the village, but they never came

back. The searching-party that went out after them—among whom was my host Clyde

Compton—found nothing whatsoever amiss at the mound.

The next trip was the solitary venture of old Capt. Lawton, a grizzled pioneer who had

helped to open up the region in 1889, but who had never been there since. He had

recalled the mound and its fascination all through the years; and being now in

comfortable retirement, resolved to have a try at solving the ancient riddle. Long

familiarity with Indian myth had given him ideas rather stranger than those of the simple

villagers, and he had made preparations for some extensive delving. He ascended the

mound on the morning of Thursday, May 11, 1916, watched through spy glasses by more

than twenty people in the village and on the adjacent plain. His disappearance was very

sudden, and occurred as he was hacking at the shrubbery with a brush-cutter. No one

could say more than that he was there one moment and absent the next. For over a week

no tidings of him reached Binger, and then—in the middle of the night—there dragged

itself into the village the object about which dispute still rages.

It said it was—or had been—Capt. Lawton, but it was definitely younger by as much as

forty years than the old man who had climbed the mound. Its hair was jet black, and its

face—now distorted with nameless fright—free from wrinkles. But it did remind

Grandma Compton most uncannily of the captain as he had looked back in '89. Its feet

were cut off neatly at the ankles, and the stumps were smoothly healed to an extent

almost incredible if the being really were the man who had walked upright a week before.

It babbled of incomprehensible things, and kept repeating the name "George Lawton,

George E. Lawton" as if trying to reassure itself of its own identity. The things it babbled

of, Grandma Compton thought, were curiously like the hallucinations of poor young

Heaton in '91; though there were minor differences. "The blue light!—the blue light!..."

muttered the object, "always down there, before there were any living things—older than

the dinosaurs—always the same, only weaker—never death—brooding and brooding and

brooding—the same people, half-man and half-gas—the dead that walk and work—oh,

those beasts, those half-human unicorns—houses and cities of gold—old, old, old, older

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than time—came down from the stars—Great Tulu—Azathoth—Nyarlathotep—waiting,

waiting...." The object died before dawn.

Of course there was an investigation, and the Indians at the reservation were grilled

unmercifully. But they knew nothing, and had nothing to say. At least, none of them had

anything to say except old Grey Eagle, a Wichita chieftain whose more than a century of

age put him above common fears. He alone deigned to grunt some advice.

"You let um 'lone, white man. No good—those people. All under here, all under there,

them old ones. Yig, big father of snakes, he there. Yig is Yig. Tiráwa, big father of men,

he there. Tiráwa is Tiráwa. No die. No get old. Just same like air. Just live and wait. One

time they come out here, live and fight. Build um dirt tepee. Bring up gold—they got

plenty. Go off and make new lodges. Me them. You them. Then big waters come. All

change. Nobody come out, let nobody in. Get in, no get out. You let um 'lone, you have

no bad medicine. Red man know, he no get catch. White man meddle, he no come back.

Keep 'way little hills. No good. Grey Eagle say this."

If Joe Norton and Rance Wheelock had taken the old chief's advice, they would probably

be here today; but they didn't. They were great readers and materialists, and feared

nothing in heaven or earth; and they thought that some Indian fiends had a secret

headquarters inside the mound. They had been to the mound before, and now they went

again to avenge old Capt. Lawton—boasting that they'd do it if they had to tear the

mound down altogether. Clyde Compton watched them with a pair of prism binoculars

and saw them round the base of the sinister hill. Evidently they meant to survey their

territory very gradually and minutely. Minutes passed, and they did not reappear. Nor

were they ever seen again.

Once more the mound was a thing of panic fright, and only the excitement of the Great

War served to restore it to the farther background of Binger folklore. It was unvisited

from 1916 to 1919, and would have remained so but for the daredeviltry of some of the

youths back from service in France. From 1919 to 1920, however, there was a veritable

epidemic of mound-visiting among the prematurely hardened young veterans—an

epidemic that waxed as one youth after another returned unhurt and contemptuous. By

1920—so short is human memory—the mound was almost a joke; and the tame story of

the murdered squaw began to displace darker whispers on everybody's tongues. Then two

reckless young brothers—the especially unimaginative and hard-boiled Clay boys—

decided to go and dig up the buried squaw and the gold for which the old Indian had

murdered her.

They went out on a September afternoon—about the time the Indian tom-toms begin their

incessant annual beating over the flat, red-dusty plains. Nobody watched them, and their

parents did not become worried at their non-return for several hours. Then came an alarm

and a searching-party, and another resignation to the mystery of silence and doubt.

But one of them came back after all. It was Ed, the elder, and his straw-coloured hair and

beard had turned an albino white for two inches from the roots. On his forehead was a

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queer scar like a branded hieroglyph. Three months after he and his brother Walker had

vanished he skulked into his house at night, wearing nothing but a queerly patterned

blanket which he thrust into the fire as soon as he had got into a suit of his own clothes.

He told his parents that he and Walker had been captured by some strange Indians—not

Wichitas or Caddos—and held prisoners somewhere toward the west. Walker had died

under torture, but he himself had managed to escape at a high cost. The experience had

been particularly terrible, and he could not talk about it just then. He must rest—and

anyway, it would do no good to give an alarm and try to find and punish the Indians.

They were not of a sort that could be caught or punished, and it was especially important

for the good of Binger—for the good of the world—that they be not pursued into their

secret lair. As a matter of fact, they were not altogether what one could call real

Indians—he would explain about that later. Meanwhile he must rest. Better not to rouse

the village with the news of his return—he would go upstairs and sleep. Before he

climbed the rickety flight to his room he took a pad and pencil from the living-room

table, and an automatic pistol from his father's desk drawer.

Three hours later the shot rang out. Ed Clay had put a bullet neatly through his temples

with a pistol clutched in his left hand, leaving a sparsely written sheet of paper on the

rickety table near his bed. He had, it later appeared from the whittled pencil-stub and

stove full of charred paper, originally written much more; but had finally decided not to

tell what he knew beyond vague hints. The surviving fragment was only a mad warning

scrawled in a curiously backhanded script—the ravings of a mind obviously deranged by

hardships—and it read thus; rather surprisingly for the utterance of one who had always

been stolid and matter-of-fact:

For gods sake never go nere that mound it is part of some kind of a world

so devilish and old it cannot be spoke about me and Walker went and was

took into the thing just melted at times and made up agen and the whole

world outside is helpless alongside of what they can do—they what live

forever young as they like and you cant tell if they are really men or just

gostes—and what they do cant be spoke about and this is only 1

entrance—you cant tell how big the whole thing is—after what we seen I

dont want to live aney more France was nothing besides this—and see that

people always keep away o god they wood if they see poor walker like he

was in the end.

Yrs truely

Ed Clay

At the autopsy it was found that all of young Clay's organs were transposed from right to

left within his body, as if he had been turned inside out. Whether they had always been

so, no one could say at the time, but it was later learned from army records that Ed had

been perfectly normal when mustered out of the service in May, 1919. Whether there was

a mistake somewhere, or whether some unprecedented metamorphosis had indeed

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occurred, is still an unsettled question, as is also the origin of the hieroglyph-like scar on

the forehead.

That was the end of the explorations of the mound. In the eight intervening years no one

had been near the place, and few indeed had even cared to level a spy glass at it. From

time to time people continued to glance nervously at the lone hill as it rose starkly from

the plain against the western sky, and to shudder at the small dark speck that paraded by

day and the glimmering will-o'-the-wisp that danced by night. The thing was accepted at

face value as a mystery not to be probed, and by common consent the village shunned the

subject. It was, after all, quite easy to avoid the hill; for space was unlimited in every

direction, and community life always follows beaten trails. The mound side of the village

was simply kept trailless, as if it had been water or swampland or desert. And it is a

curious commentary on the stolidity and imaginative sterility of the human animal that

the whispers with which children and strangers were warned away from the mound

quickly sank once more into the flat tale of a murderous Indian ghost and his squaw

victim. Only the tribesmen on the reservation, and thoughtful old-timers like Grandma

Compton, remembered the overtones of unholy vistas and deep cosmic menace which

clustered around the ravings of those who had come back changed and shattered.

It was very late, and Grandma Compton had long since gone upstairs to bed, when Clyde

finished telling me this. I hardly knew what to think of the frightful puzzle, yet rebelled at

any notion to conflict with sane materialism. What influence had brought madness, or the

impulse of flight and wandering, to so many who had visited the mound? Though vastly

impressed, I was spurred on rather than deterred. Surely I must get to the bottom of this

matter, as well I might if I kept a cool head and an unbroken determination. Compton saw

my mood and shook his head worriedly. Then he motioned me to follow him outdoors.

We stepped from the frame house to the quiet side street or lane, and walked a few paces

in the light of a waning August moon to where the houses were thinner. The half-moon

was still low, and had not blotted many stars from the sky; so that I could see not only the

weltering gleams of Altair and Vega, but the mystic shimmering of the Milky Way, as I

looked out over the vast expanse of earth and sky in the direction that Compton pointed.

Then all at once I saw a spark that was not a star—a bluish spark that moved and

glimmered against the Milky Way near the horizon, and that seemed in a vague way more

evil and malevolent than anything in the vault above. In another moment it was clear that

this spark came from the top of a long distant rise in the outspread and faintly litten plain;

and I turned to Compton with a question.

"Yes," he answered, "it's the blue ghost-light—and that is the mound. There's not a night

in history that we haven't seen it—and not a living soul in Binger that would walk out

over that plain toward it. It's a bad business, young man, and if you're wise you'll let it

rest where it is. Better call your search off, son, and tackle some of the other Injun

legends around here. We've plenty to keep you busy, heaven knows!"

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II.

But I was in no mood for advice; and though Compton gave me a pleasant room, I could

not sleep a wink through eagerness for the next morning with its chances to see the

daytime ghost and to question the Indians at the reservation. I meant to go about the

whole thing slowly and thoroughly, equipping myself with all available data both white

and red before I commenced any actual archaeological investigations. I rose and dressed

at dawn, and when I heard others stirring I went downstairs. Compton was building the

kitchen fire while his mother was busy in the pantry. When he saw me he nodded, and

after a moment invited me out into the glamorous young sunlight. I knew where we were

going, and as we walked along the lane I strained my eyes westward over the plains.

There was the mound—far away and very curious in its aspect of artificial regularity. It

must have been from thirty to forty feet high, and all of a hundred yards from north to

south as I looked at it. It was not as wide as that from east to west, Compton said, but had

the contour of a rather thinnish ellipse. He, I knew, had been safely out to it and back

several times. As I looked at the rim silhouetted against the deep blue of the west I tried

to follow its minor irregularities, and became impressed with a sense of something

moving upon it. My pulse mounted a bit feverishly, and I seized quickly on the high-

powered binoculars which Compton had quietly offered me. Focussing them hastily, I

saw at first only a tangle of underbrush on the distant mound's rim—and then something

stalked into the field.

It was unmistakably a human shape, and I knew at once that I was seeing the daytime

"Indian ghost". I did not wonder at the description, for surely the tall, lean, darkly robed

being with the filleted black hair and seamed, coppery, expressionless, aquiline face

looked more like an Indian than anything else in my previous experience. And yet my

trained ethnologist's eye told me at once that this was no redskin of any sort hitherto

known to history, but a creature of vast racial variation and of a wholly different culture-

stream. Modern Indians are brachycephalic—round-headed—and you can't find any

dolichocephalic or long-headed skulls except in ancient Pueblo deposits dating back 2500

years or more; yet this man's long-headedness was so pronounced that I recognised it at

once, even at his vast distance and in the uncertain field of the binoculars. I saw, too, that

the pattern of his robe represented a decorative tradition utterly remote from anything we

recognise in southwestern native art. There were shining metal trappings, likewise, and a

short sword or kindred weapon at his side, all wrought in a fashion wholly alien to

anything I had ever heard of.

As he paced back and forth along the top of the mound I followed him for several

minutes with the glass, noting the kinaesthetic quality of his stride and the poised way he

carried his head; and there was borne in upon me the strong, persistent conviction that

this man, whoever or whatever he might be, was certainly not a savage. He was the

product of a civilisation, I felt instinctively, though of what civilisation I could not guess.

At length he disappeared beyond the farther edge of the mound, as if descending the

opposite and unseen slope; and I lowered the glass with a curious mixture of puzzled

feelings. Compton was looking quizzically at me, and I nodded non-committally. "What

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do you make of that?" he ventured. "This is what we've seen here in Binger every day of

our lives."

That noon found me at the Indian reservation talking with old Grey Eagle—who, through

some miracle, was still alive; though he must have been close to a hundred and fifty years

old. He was a strange, impressive figure—this stern, fearless leader of his kind who had

talked with outlaws and traders in fringed buckskin and French officials in knee-breeches

and three-cornered hats—and I was glad to see that, because of my air of deference

toward him, he appeared to like me. His liking, however, took an unfortunately

obstructive form as soon as he learned what I wanted; for all he would do was to warn me

against the search I was about to make.

"You good boy—you no bother that hill. Bad medicine. Plenty devil under there—

catchum when you dig. No dig, no hurt. Go and dig, no come back. Just same when me

boy, just same when my father and he father boy. All time buck he walk in day, squaw

with no head she walk in night. All time since white man with tin coats they come from

sunset and below big river—long way back—three, four times more back than Grey

Eagle—two times more back than Frenchmen—all same after then. More back than that,

nobody go near little hills nor deep valleys with stone caves. Still more back, those old

ones no hide, come out and make villages. Bring plenty gold. Me them. You them. Then

big waters come. All change. Nobody come out, let nobody in. Get in, no get out. They

no die—no get old like Grey Eagle with valleys in face and snow on head. Just same like

air—some man, some spirit. Bad medicine. Sometimes at night spirit come out on half-

man–half-horse-with-horn and fight where men once fight. Keep 'way them place. No

good. You good boy—go 'way and let them old ones 'lone."

That was all I could get out of the ancient chief, and the rest of the Indians would say

nothing at all. But if I was troubled, Grey Eagle was clearly more so; for he obviously felt

a real regret at the thought of my invading the region he feared so abjectly. As I turned to

leave the reservation he stopped me for a final ceremonial farewell, and once more tried

to get my promise to abandon my search. When he saw that he could not, he produced

something half-timidly from a buckskin pouch he wore, and extended it toward me very

solemnly. It was a worn but finely minted metal disc about two inches in diameter, oddly

figured and perforated, and suspended from a leathern cord.

"You no promise, then Grey Eagle no can tell what get you. But if anything help um, this

good medicine. Come from my father—he get from he father—he get from he father—all

way back, close to Tiráwa, all men's father. My father say, 'You keep 'way from those old

ones, keep 'way from little hills and valleys with stone caves. But if old ones they come

out to get you, then you shew um this medicine. They know. They make him long way

back. They look, then they no do such bad medicine maybe. But no can tell. You keep

'way, just same. Them no good. No tell what they do.'"

As he spoke, Grey Eagle was hanging the thing around my neck, and I saw it was a very

curious object indeed. The more I looked at it, the more I marvelled; for not only was its

heavy, darkish, lustrous, and richly mottled substance an absolutely strange metal to me,

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摘要：

TheMoundTheMoundbyH.P.LovecraftandZealiaBishopWrittenDecember1929throughearly1930PublishedNovember1940inWeirdTales,Volume35,Number6,pages98-120I.ItisonlywithinthelastfewyearsthatmostpeoplehavestoppedthinkingoftheWestasanewland.Isupposetheideagainedgroundbecauseourownespecialcivilisationhappenstobene...

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Lovecraft, H P & Bishop, Zealia - The Mound

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