I.
After twenty-two years of nightmare and terror, saved only by a desperate conviction of the
mythical source of certain impressions, I am unwilling to vouch for the truth of that which
I think I found in Western Australia on the night of July 17–18, 1935. There is reason
to hope that my experience was wholly or partly an hallucination—for which, indeed, abundant
causes existed. And yet, its realism was so hideous that I sometimes find hope impossible. If
the thing did happen, then man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and of his
own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralysing. He must, too,
be placed on guard against a specific lurking peril which, though it will never engulf the whole
race, may impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of it. It
is for this latter reason that I urge, with all the force of my being, a final abandonment of
all attempts at unearthing those fragments of unknown, primordial masonry which my expedition
set out to investigate.

Assuming that I was sane and awake, my experience on that night was such as
has befallen no man before. It was, moreover, a frightful confirmation of all I had sought to
dismiss as myth and dream. Mercifully there is no proof, for in my fright I lost the awesome
object which would—if real and brought out of that noxious abyss—have formed irrefutable
evidence. When I came upon the horror I was alone—and I have up to now told no one about
it. I could not stop the others from digging in its direction, but chance and the shifting sand
have so far saved them from finding it. Now I must formulate some definitive statement—not
only for the sake of my own mental balance, but to warn such others as may read it seriously.

These pages—much in whose earlier parts will be familiar to close readers
of the general and scientific press—are written in the cabin of the ship that is bringing
me home. I shall give them to my son, Prof. Wingate Peaslee of Miskatonic University—the
only member of my family who stuck to me after my queer amnesia of long ago, and the man best
informed on the inner facts of my case. Of all living persons, he is least likely to ridicule
what I shall tell of that fateful night. I did not enlighten him orally before sailing, because
I think he had better have the revelation in written form. Reading and re-reading at leisure
will leave with him a more convincing picture than my confused tongue could hope to convey.
He can do as he thinks best with this account—shewing it, with suitable comment, to any
quarters where it will be likely to accomplish good. It is for the sake of such readers as are
unfamiliar with the earlier phases of my case that I am prefacing the revelation itself with
a fairly ample summary of its background.

My name is Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, and those who recall the newspaper tales
of a generation back—or the letters and articles in psychological journals six or seven
years ago—will know who and what I am. The press was filled with the details of my strange
amnesia in 1908–13, and much was made of the traditions of horror, madness, and witchcraft
which lurk behind the ancient Massachusetts town then and now forming my place of residence.
Yet I would have it known that there is nothing whatever of the mad or sinister in my heredity
and early life. This is a highly important fact in view of the shadow which fell so suddenly
upon me from
outside sources. It may be that centuries of dark brooding had given to
crumbling, whisper-haunted Arkham a peculiar vulnerability as regards such shadows—though
even this seems doubtful in the light of those other cases which I later came to study. But
the chief point is that my own ancestry and background are altogether normal. What came, came
from
somewhere else—where, I even now hesitate to assert in plain words.

I am the son of Jonathan and Hannah (Wingate) Peaslee, both of wholesome old
Haverhill stock. I was born and reared in Haverhill—at the old homestead in Boardman Street
near Golden Hill—and did not go to Arkham till I entered Miskatonic University at the
age of eighteen. That was in 1889. After my graduation I studied economics at Harvard, and came
back to Miskatonic as Instructor of Political Economy in 1895. For thirteen years more my life
ran smoothly and happily. I married Alice Keezar of Haverhill in 1896, and my three children,
Robert K., Wingate, and Hannah, were born in 1898, 1900, and 1903, respectively. In 1898 I became
an associate professor, and in 1902 a full professor. At no time had I the least interest in
either occultism or abnormal psychology.

It was on Thursday, May 14, 1908, that the queer amnesia came. The thing was
quite sudden, though later I realised that certain brief, glimmering visions of several hours
previous—chaotic visions which disturbed me greatly because they were so unprecedented—must
have formed premonitory symptoms. My head was aching, and I had a singular feeling—altogether
new to me—that someone else was trying to get possession of my thoughts.

The collapse occurred about 10:20 a.m., while I was conducting a class in Political
Economy VI—history and present tendencies of economics—for juniors and a few sophomores.
I began to see strange shapes before my eyes, and to feel that I was in a grotesque room other
than the classroom. My thoughts and speech wandered from my subject, and the students saw that
something was gravely amiss. Then I slumped down, unconscious in my chair, in a stupor from
which no one could arouse me. Nor did my rightful faculties again look out upon the daylight
of our normal world for five years, four months, and thirteen days.

It is, of course, from others that I have learned what followed. I shewed no
sign of consciousness for sixteen and a half hours, though removed to my home at 27 Crane St.
and given the best of medical attention. At 3 a.m. May 15 my eyes opened and I began to speak,
but before long the doctors and my family were thoroughly frightened by the trend of my expression
and language. It was clear that I had no remembrance of my identity or of my past, though for
some reason I seemed anxious to conceal this lack of knowledge. My eyes gazed strangely at the
persons around me, and the flexions of my facial muscles were altogether unfamiliar.

Even my speech seemed awkward and foreign. I used my vocal organs clumsily
and gropingly, and my diction had a curiously stilted quality, as if I had laboriously learned
the English language from books. The pronunciation was barbarously alien, whilst the idiom seemed
to include both scraps of curious archaism and expressions of a wholly incomprehensible cast.
Of the latter one in particular was very potently—even terrifiedly—recalled by the
youngest of the physicians twenty years afterward. For at that late period such a phrase began
to have an actual currency—first in England and then in the United States—and though
of much complexity and indisputable newness, it reproduced in every least particular the mystifying
words of the strange Arkham patient of 1908.

Physical strength returned at once, although I required an odd amount of re-education
in the use of my hands, legs, and bodily apparatus in general. Because of this and other handicaps
inherent in the mnemonic lapse, I was for some time kept under strict medical care. When I saw
that my attempts to conceal the lapse had failed, I admitted it openly, and became eager for
information of all sorts. Indeed, it seemed to the doctors that I had lost interest in my proper
personality as soon as I found the case of amnesia accepted as a natural thing. They noticed
that my chief efforts were to master certain points in history, science, art, language, and
folklore—some of them tremendously abstruse, and some childishly simple—which remained,
very oddly in many cases, outside my consciousness.

At the same time they noticed that I had an inexplicable command of many almost
unknown sorts of knowledge—a command which I seemed to wish to hide rather than display.
I would inadvertently refer, with casual assurance, to specific events in dim ages outside the
range of accepted history—passing off such references as a jest when I saw the surprise
they created. And I had a way of speaking of the future which two or three times caused actual
fright. These uncanny flashes soon ceased to appear, though some observers laid their vanishment
more to a certain furtive caution on my part than to any waning of the strange knowledge behind
them. Indeed, I seemed anomalously avid to absorb the speech, customs, and perspectives of the
age around me; as if I were a studious traveller from a far, foreign land.

As soon as permitted, I haunted the college library at all hours; and shortly
began to arrange for those odd travels, and special courses at American and European universities,
which evoked so much comment during the next few years. I did not at any time suffer from a
lack of learned contacts, for my case had a mild celebrity among the psychologists of the period.
I was lectured upon as a typical example of secondary personality—even though I seemed
to puzzle the lecturers now and then with some bizarre symptom or some queer trace of carefully
veiled mockery.

Of real friendliness, however, I encountered little. Something in my aspect
and speech seemed to excite vague fears and aversions in everyone I met, as if I were a being
infinitely removed from all that is normal and healthful. This idea of a black, hidden horror
connected with incalculable gulfs of some sort of
distance was oddly widespread and persistent.
My own family formed no exception. From the moment of my strange waking my wife had regarded
me with extreme horror and loathing, vowing that I was some utter alien usurping the body of
her husband. In 1910 she obtained a legal divorce, nor would she ever consent to see me even
after my return to normalcy in 1913. These feelings were shared by my elder son and my small
daughter, neither of whom I have ever seen since.

Only my second son Wingate seemed able to conquer the terror and repulsion
which my change aroused. He indeed felt that I was a stranger, but though only eight years old
held fast to a faith that my proper self would return. When it did return he sought me out,
and the courts gave me his custody. In succeeding years he helped me with the studies to which
I was driven, and today at thirty-five he is a professor of psychology at Miskatonic. But I
do not wonder at the horror I caused—for certainly, the mind, voice, and facial expression
of the being that awaked on May 15, 1908 were not those of Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee.

I will not attempt to tell much of my life from 1908 to 1913, since readers
may glean all the outward essentials—as I largely had to do—from files of old newspapers
and scientific journals. I was given charge of my funds, and spent them slowly and on the whole
wisely, in travel and in study at various centres of learning. My travels, however, were singular
in the extreme; involving long visits to remote and desolate places. In 1909 I spent a month
in the Himalayas, and in 1911 aroused much attention through a camel trip into the unknown deserts
of Arabia. What happened on those journeys I have never been able to learn. During the summer
of 1912 I chartered a ship and sailed in the Arctic north of Spitzbergen, afterward shewing
signs of disappointment. Later in that year I spent weeks alone beyond the limits of previous
or subsequent exploration in the vast limestone cavern systems of western Virginia—black
labyrinths so complex that no retracing of my steps could even be considered.

My sojourns at the universities were marked by abnormally rapid assimilation,
as if the secondary personality had an intelligence enormously superior to my own. I have found,
also, that my rate of reading and solitary study was phenomenal. I could master every detail
of a book merely by glancing over it as fast as I could turn the leaves; while my skill at interpreting
complex figures in an instant was veritably awesome. At times there appeared almost ugly reports
of my power to influence the thoughts and acts of others, though I seemed to have taken care
to minimise displays of this faculty.

Other ugly reports concerned my intimacy with leaders of occultist groups,
and scholars suspected of connexion with nameless bands of abhorrent elder-world hierophants.
These rumours, though never proved at the time, were doubtless stimulated by the known tenor
of some of my reading—for the consultation of rare books at libraries cannot be effected
secretly. There is tangible proof—in the form of marginal notes—that I went minutely
through such things as the Comte d’Erlette’s
Cultes des Goules, Ludvig Prinn’s
De Vermis Mysteriis, the
Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, the surviving
fragments of the puzzling
Book of Eibon, and the dreaded
Necronomicon of the mad
Arab Abdul Alhazred. Then, too, it is undeniable that a fresh and evil wave of underground cult
activity set in about the time of my odd mutation.

In the summer of 1913 I began to display signs of ennui and flagging interest,
and to hint to various associates that a change might soon be expected in me. I spoke of returning
memories of my earlier life—though most auditors judged me insincere, since all the recollections
I gave were casual, and such as might have been learned from my old private papers. About the
middle of August I returned to Arkham and reopened my long-closed house in Crane St. Here I
installed a mechanism of the most curious aspect, constructed piecemeal by different makers
of scientific apparatus in Europe and America, and guarded carefully from the sight of anyone
intelligent enough to analyse it. Those who did see it—a workman, a servant, and the new
housekeeper—say that it was a queer mixture of rods, wheels, and mirrors, though only
about two feet tall, one foot wide, and one foot thick. The central mirror was circular and
convex. All this is borne out by such makers of parts as can be located.

On the evening of Friday, Sept. 26, I dismissed the housekeeper and the maid
till noon of the next day. Lights burned in the house till late, and a lean, dark, curiously
foreign-looking man called in an automobile. It was about 1 a.m. that the lights were last seen.
At 2:15 a.m. a policeman observed the place in darkness, but with the stranger’s motor
still at the curb. By four o’clock the motor was certainly gone. It was at six that a
hesitant, foreign voice on the telephone asked Dr. Wilson to call at my house and bring me out
of a peculiar faint. This call—a long-distance one—was later traced to a public
booth in the North Station in Boston, but no sign of the lean foreigner was ever unearthed.

When the doctor reached my house he found me unconscious in the sitting-room—in
an easy-chair with a table drawn up before it. On the polished table-top were scratches shewing
where some heavy object had rested. The queer machine was gone, nor was anything afterward heard
of it. Undoubtedly the dark, lean foreigner had taken it away. In the library grate were abundant
ashes evidently left from the burning of every remaining scrap of paper on which I had written
since the advent of the amnesia. Dr. Wilson found my breathing very peculiar, but after an hypodermic
injection it became more regular.

At 11:15 a.m., Sept. 27, I stirred vigorously, and my hitherto mask-like face
began to shew signs of expression. Dr. Wilson remarked that the expression was not that of my
secondary personality, but seemed much like that of my normal self. About 11:30 I muttered some
very curious syllables—syllables which seemed unrelated to any human speech. I appeared,
too, to struggle against something. Then, just after noon—the housekeeper and the maid
having meanwhile returned—I began to mutter in English.

“. . . of the orthodox economists of that period, Jevons typifies
the prevailing trend toward scientific correlation. His attempt to link the commercial cycle
of prosperity and depression with the physical cycle of the solar spots forms perhaps the apex
of . . .”

Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee had come back—a spirit in whose time-scale
it was still that Thursday morning in 1908, with the economics class gazing up at the battered
desk on the platform.
II.
My reabsorption into normal life was a painful and difficult process. The loss of over five
years creates more complications than can be imagined, and in my case there were countless matters
to be adjusted. What I heard of my actions since 1908 astonished and disturbed me, but I tried
to view the matter as philosophically as I could. At last regaining custody of my second son
Wingate, I settled down with him in the Crane Street house and endeavoured to resume teaching—my
old professorship having been kindly offered me by the college.

I began work with the February, 1914, term, and kept at it just a year. By
that time I realised how badly my experience had shaken me. Though perfectly sane—I hoped—and
with no flaw in my original personality, I had not the nervous energy of the old days. Vague
dreams and queer ideas continually haunted me, and when the outbreak of the world war turned
my mind to history I found myself thinking of periods and events in the oddest possible fashion.
My conception of
time—my ability to distinguish between consecutiveness and simultaneousness—seemed
subtly disordered; so that I formed chimerical notions about living in one age and casting one’s
mind all over eternity for knowledge of past and future ages.

The war gave me strange impressions of
remembering some of its far-off
consequences—as if I knew how it was coming out and could look
back upon
it in the light of future information. All such quasi-memories were attended with much pain,
and with a feeling that some artificial psychological barrier was set against them. When I diffidently
hinted to others about my impressions I met with varied responses. Some persons looked uncomfortably
at me, but men in the mathematics department spoke of new developments in those theories of
relativity—then discussed only in learned circles—which were later to become so
famous. Dr. Albert Einstein, they said, was rapidly reducing
time to the status of a
mere dimension.

But the dreams and disturbed feelings gained on me, so that I had to drop my
regular work in 1915. Certain of the impressions were taking an annoying shape—giving
me the persistent notion that my amnesia had formed some unholy sort of
exchange; that
the secondary personality had indeed been an intruding force from unknown regions, and that
my own personality had suffered displacement. Thus I was driven to vague and frightful speculations
concerning the whereabouts of my true self during the years that another had held my body. The
curious knowledge and strange conduct of my body’s late tenant troubled me more and more
as I learned further details from persons, papers, and magazines. Queernesses that had baffled
others seemed to harmonise terribly with some background of black knowledge which festered in
the chasms of my subconscious. I began to search feverishly for every scrap of information bearing
on the studies and travels of
that other one during the dark years.

Not all of my troubles were as semi-abstract as this. There were the dreams—and
these seemed to grow in vividness and concreteness. Knowing how most would regard them, I seldom
mentioned them to anyone but my son or certain trusted psychologists, but eventually I commenced
a scientific study of other cases in order to see how typical or non-typical such visions might
be among amnesia victims. My results, aided by psychologists, historians, anthropologists, and
mental specialists of wide experience, and by a study that included all records of split personalities
from the days of daemoniac-possession legends to the medically realistic present, at first bothered
me more than they consoled me.

I soon found that my dreams had indeed no counterpart in the overwhelming bulk
of true amnesia cases. There remained, however, a tiny residue of accounts which for years baffled
and shocked me with their parallelism to my own experience. Some of them were bits of ancient
folklore; others were case-histories in the annals of medicine; one or two were anecdotes obscurely
buried in standard histories. It thus appeared that, while my special kind of affliction was
prodigiously rare, instances of it had occurred at long intervals ever since the beginning of
man’s annals. Some centuries might contain one, two, or three cases; others none—or
at least none whose record survived.

The essence was always the same—a person of keen thoughtfulness seized
with a strange secondary life and leading for a greater or lesser period an utterly alien existence
typified at first by vocal and bodily awkwardness, and later by a wholesale acquisition of scientific,
historic, artistic, and anthropological knowledge; an acquisition carried on with feverish zest
and with a wholly abnormal absorptive power. Then a sudden return of the rightful consciousness,
intermittently plagued ever after with vague unplaceable dreams suggesting fragments of some
hideous memory elaborately blotted out. And the close resemblance of those nightmares to my
own—even in some of the smallest particulars—left no doubt in my mind of their significantly
typical nature. One or two of the cases had an added ring of faint, blasphemous familiarity,
as if I had heard of them before through some cosmic channel too morbid and frightful to contemplate.
In three instances there was specific mention of such an unknown machine as had been in my house
before the second change.

Another thing that cloudily worried me during my investigation was the somewhat
greater frequency of cases where a brief, elusive glimpse of the typical nightmares was afforded
to persons not visited with well-defined amnesia. These persons were largely of mediocre mind
or less—some so primitive that they could scarcely be thought of as vehicles for abnormal
scholarship and preternatural mental acquisitions. For a second they would be fired with alien
force—then a backward lapse and a thin, swift-fading memory of un-human horrors.

There had been at least three such cases during the past half century—one
only fifteen years before. Had something been
groping blindly through time from some
unsuspected abyss in Nature? Were these faint cases monstrous, sinister
experiments of
a kind and authorship utterly beyond sane belief? Such were a few of the formless speculations
of my weaker hours—fancies abetted by myths which my studies uncovered. For I could not
doubt but that certain persistent legends of immemorial antiquity, apparently unknown to the
victims and physicians connected with recent amnesia cases, formed a striking and awesome elaboration
of memory lapses such as mine.

Of the nature of the dreams and impressions which were growing so clamorous
I still almost fear to speak. They seemed to savour of madness, and at times I believed I was
indeed going mad. Was there a special type of delusion afflicting those who had suffered lapses
of memory? Conceivably, the efforts of the subconscious mind to fill up a perplexing blank with
pseudo-memories might give rise to strange imaginative vagaries. This, indeed (though an alternative
folklore theory finally seemed to me more plausible), was the belief of many of the alienists
who helped me in my search for parallel cases, and who shared my puzzlement at the exact resemblances
sometimes discovered. They did not call the condition true insanity, but classed it rather among
neurotic disorders. My course in trying to track it down and analyse it, instead of vainly seeking
to dismiss or forget it, they heartily endorsed as correct according to the best psychological
principles. I especially valued the advice of such physicians as had studied me during my possession
by the other personality.

My first disturbances were not visual at all, but concerned the more abstract
matters which I have mentioned. There was, too, a feeling of profound and inexplicable horror
concerning
myself. I developed a queer fear of seeing my own form, as if my eyes would
find it something utterly alien and inconceivably abhorrent. When I did glance down and behold
the familiar human shape in quiet grey or blue clothing I always felt a curious relief, though
in order to gain this relief I had to conquer an infinite dread. I shunned mirrors as much as
possible, and was always shaved at the barber’s.

It was a long time before I correlated any of these disjointed feelings with
the fleeting visual impressions which began to develop. The first such correlation had to do
with the odd sensation of an external, artificial restraint on my memory. I felt that the snatches
of sight I experienced had a profound and terrible meaning, and a frightful connexion with myself,
but that some purposeful influence held me from grasping that meaning and that connexion. Then
came that queerness about the element of
time, and with it desperate efforts to place
the fragmentary dream-glimpses in the chronological and spatial pattern.

The glimpses themselves were at first merely strange rather than horrible.
I would seem to be in an enormous vaulted chamber whose lofty stone groinings were well-nigh
lost in the shadows overhead. In whatever time or place the scene might be, the principle of
the arch was known as fully and used as extensively as by the Romans. There were colossal round
windows and high arched doors, and pedestals or tables each as tall as the height of an ordinary
room. Vast shelves of dark wood lined the walls, holding what seemed to be volumes of immense
size with strange hieroglyphs on their backs. The exposed stonework held curious carvings, always
in curvilinear mathematical designs, and there were chiselled inscriptions in the same characters
that the huge books bore. The dark granite masonry was of a monstrous megalithic type, with
lines of convex-topped blocks fitting the concave-bottomed courses which rested upon them. There
were no chairs, but the tops of the vast pedestals were littered with books, papers, and what
seemed to be writing materials—oddly figured jars of a purplish metal, and rods with stained
tips. Tall as the pedestals were, I seemed at times able to view them from above. On some of
them were great globes of luminous crystal serving as lamps, and inexplicable machines formed
of vitreous tubes and metal rods. The windows were glazed, and latticed with stout-looking bars.
Though I dared not approach and peer out them, I could see from where I was the waving tops
of singular fern-like growths. The floor was of massive octagonal flagstones, while rugs and
hangings were entirely lacking.

Later I had visions of sweeping through Cyclopean corridors of stone, and up
and down gigantic inclined planes of the same monstrous masonry. There were no stairs anywhere,
nor was any passageway less than thirty feet wide. Some of the structures through which I floated
must have towered into the sky for thousands of feet. There were multiple levels of black vaults
below, and never-opened trap-doors, sealed down with metal bands and holding dim suggestions
of some special peril. I seemed to be a prisoner, and horror hung broodingly over everything
I saw. I felt that the mocking curvilinear hieroglyphs on the walls would blast my soul with
their message were I not guarded by a merciful ignorance.

Still later my dreams included vistas from the great round windows, and from
the titanic flat roof, with its curious gardens, wide barren area, and high, scalloped parapet
of stone, to which the topmost of the inclined planes led. There were almost endless leagues
of giant buildings, each in its garden, and ranged along paved roads fully two hundred feet
wide. They differed greatly in aspect, but few were less than five hundred feet square or a
thousand feet high. Many seemed so limitless that they must have had a frontage of several thousand
feet, while some shot up to mountainous altitudes in the grey, steamy heavens. They seemed to
be mainly of stone or concrete, and most of them embodied the oddly curvilinear type of masonry
noticeable in the building that held me. Roofs were flat and garden-covered, and tended to have
scalloped parapets. Sometimes there were terraces and higher levels, and wide cleared spaces
amidst the gardens. The great roads held hints of motion, but in the earlier visions I could
not resolve this impression into details.

In certain places I beheld enormous dark cylindrical towers which climbed far
above any of the other structures. These appeared to be of a totally unique nature, and shewed
signs of prodigious age and dilapidation. They were built of a bizarre type of square-cut basalt
masonry, and tapered slightly toward their rounded tops. Nowhere in any of them could the least
traces of windows or other apertures save huge doors be found. I noticed also some lower buildings—all
crumbling with the weathering of aeons—which resembled these dark cylindrical towers in
basic architecture. Around all these aberrant piles of square-cut masonry there hovered an inexplicable
aura of menace and concentrated fear, like that bred by the sealed trap-doors.

The omnipresent gardens were almost terrifying in their strangeness, with bizarre
and unfamiliar forms of vegetation nodding over broad paths lined with curiously carven monoliths.
Abnormally vast fern-like growths predominated; some green, and some of a ghastly, fungoid pallor.
Among them rose great spectral things resembling calamites, whose bamboo-like trunks towered
to fabulous heights. Then there were tufted forms like fabulous cycads, and grotesque dark-green
shrubs and trees of coniferous aspect. Flowers were small, colourless, and unrecognisable, blooming
in geometrical beds and at large among the greenery. In a few of the terrace and roof-top gardens
were larger and more vivid blossoms of almost offensive contours and seeming to suggest artificial
breeding. Fungi of inconceivable size, outlines, and colours speckled the scene in patterns
bespeaking some unknown but well-established horticultural tradition. In the larger gardens
on the ground there seemed to be some attempt to preserve the irregularities of Nature, but
on the roofs there was more selectiveness, and more evidences of the topiary art.

The skies were almost always moist and cloudy, and sometimes I would seem to
witness tremendous rains. Once in a while, though, there would be glimpses of the sun—which
looked abnormally large—and of the moon, whose markings held a touch of difference from
the normal that I could never quite fathom. When—very rarely—the night sky was clear
to any extent, I beheld constellations which were nearly beyond recognition. Known outlines
were sometimes approximated, but seldom duplicated; and from the position of the few groups
I could recognise, I felt I must be in the earth’s southern hemisphere, near the Tropic
of Capricorn. The far horizon was always steamy and indistinct, but I could see that great jungles
of unknown tree-ferns, calamites, lepidodendra, and sigillaria lay outside the city, their fantastic
frondage waving mockingly in the shifting vapours. Now and then there would be suggestions of
motion in the sky, but these my early visions never resolved.

By the autumn of 1914 I began to have infrequent dreams of strange floatings
over the city and through the regions around it. I saw interminable roads through forests
of fearsome growths with mottled, fluted, and banded trunks, and past other cities as strange
as the one which persistently haunted me. I saw monstrous constructions of black or iridescent
stone in glades and clearings where perpetual twilight reigned, and traversed long causeways
over swamps so dark that I could tell but little of their moist, towering vegetation. Once I
saw an area of countless miles strown with age-blasted basaltic ruins whose architecture had
been like that of the few windowless, round-topped towers in the haunting city. And once I saw
the sea—a boundless steamy expanse beyond the colossal stone piers of an enormous town
of domes and arches. Great shapeless suggestions of shadow moved over it, and here and there
its surface was vexed with anomalous spoutings.
III.
As I have said, it was not immediately that these wild visions began to hold their terrifying
quality. Certainly, many persons have dreamed intrinsically stranger things—things compounded
of unrelated scraps of daily life, pictures, and reading, and arranged in fantastically novel
forms by the unchecked caprices of sleep. For some time I accepted the visions as natural, even
though I had never before been an extravagant dreamer. Many of the vague anomalies, I argued,
must have come from trivial sources too numerous to track down; while others seemed to reflect
a common text-book knowledge of the plants and other conditions of the primitive world of a
hundred and fifty million years ago—the world of the Permian or Triassic age. In the course
of some months, however, the element of terror did figure with accumulating force. This was
when the dreams began so unfailingly to have the aspect of
memories, and when my mind
began to link them with my growing abstract disturbances—the feeling of mnemonic restraint,
the curious impressions regarding
time, the sense of a loathsome exchange with my secondary
personality of 1908–13, and, considerably later, the inexplicable loathing of my own person.

As certain definite details began to enter the dreams, their horror increased
a thousandfold—until by October, 1915, I felt I must do something. It was then that I
began an intensive study of other cases of amnesia and visions, feeling that I might thereby
objectivise my trouble and shake clear of its emotional grip. However, as before mentioned,
the result was at first almost exactly opposite. It disturbed me vastly to find that my dreams
had been so closely duplicated; especially since some of the accounts were too early to admit
of any geological knowledge—and therefore of any idea of primitive landscapes—on
the subjects’ part. What is more, many of these accounts supplied very horrible details
and explanations in connexion with the visions of great buildings and jungle gardens—and
other things. The actual sights and vague impressions were bad enough, but what was hinted or
asserted by some of the other dreamers savoured of madness and blasphemy. Worst of all, my own
pseudo-memory was aroused to wilder dreams and hints of coming revelations. And yet most doctors
deemed my course, on the whole, an advisable one.

I studied psychology systematically, and under the prevailing stimulus my son
Wingate did the same—his studies leading eventually to his present professorship. In 1917
and 1918 I took special courses at Miskatonic. Meanwhile my examination of medical, historical,
and anthropological records became indefatigable; involving travels to distant libraries, and
finally including even a reading of the hideous books of forbidden elder lore in which my secondary
personality had been so disturbingly interested. Some of the latter were the actual copies I
had consulted in my altered state, and I was greatly disturbed by certain marginal notations
and ostensible
corrections of the hideous text in a script and idiom which somehow seemed
oddly un-human.

These markings were mostly in the respective languages of the various books,
all of which the writer seemed to know with equal though obviously academic facility. One note
appended to von Junzt’s
Unaussprechlichen Kulten, however, was alarmingly otherwise.
It consisted of certain curvilinear hieroglyphs in the same ink as that of the German corrections,
but following no recognised human pattern. And these hieroglyphs were closely and unmistakably
akin to the characters constantly met with in my dreams—characters whose meaning I would
sometimes momentarily fancy I knew or was just on the brink of recalling. To complete my black
confusion, my librarians assured me that, in view of previous examinations and records of consultation
of the volumes in question, all of these notations must have been made by myself in my secondary
state. This despite the fact that I was and still am ignorant of three of the languages involved.

Piecing together the scattered records, ancient and modern, anthropological
and medical, I found a fairly consistent mixture of myth and hallucination whose scope and wildness
left me utterly dazed. Only one thing consoled me—the fact that the myths were of such
early existence. What lost knowledge could have brought pictures of the Palaeozoic or Mesozoic
landscape into these primitive fables, I could not even guess, but the pictures had been there.
Thus, a basis existed for the formation of a fixed type of delusion. Cases of amnesia no doubt
created the general myth-pattern—but afterward the fanciful accretions of the myths must
have reacted on amnesia sufferers and coloured their pseudo-memories. I myself had read and
heard all the early tales during my memory lapse—my quest had amply proved that. Was it
not natural, then, for my subsequent dreams and emotional impressions to become coloured and
moulded by what my memory subtly held over from my secondary state? A few of the myths had significant
connexions with other cloudy legends of the pre-human world, especially those Hindoo tales involving
stupefying gulfs of time and forming part of the lore of modern theosophists.

Primal myth and modern delusion joined in their assumption that mankind is
only one—perhaps the least—of the highly evolved and dominant races of this planet’s
long and largely unknown career. Things of inconceivable shape, they implied, had reared towers
to the sky and delved into every secret of Nature before the first amphibian forbear of man
had crawled out of the hot sea three hundred million years ago. Some had come down from the
stars; a few were as old as the cosmos itself; others had arisen swiftly from terrene germs
as far behind the first germs of our life-cycle as those germs are behind ourselves. Spans of
thousands of millions of years, and linkages with other galaxies and universes, were freely
spoken of. Indeed, there was no such thing as time in its humanly accepted sense.

But most of the tales and impressions concerned a relatively late race, of
a queer and intricate shape resembling no life-form known to science, which had lived till only
fifty million years before the advent of man. This, they indicated, was the greatest race of
all; because it alone had conquered the secret of time. It had learned all things that ever
were known
or ever would be known on the earth, through the power of its keener minds
to project themselves into the past and future, even through gulfs of millions of years, and
study the lore of every age. From the accomplishments of this race arose all legends of
prophets,
including those in human mythology.

In its vast libraries were volumes of texts and pictures holding the whole
of earth’s annals—histories and descriptions of every species that had ever been
or that ever would be, with full records of their arts, their achievements, their languages,
and their psychologies. With this aeon-embracing knowledge, the Great Race chose from every
era and life-form such thoughts, arts, and processes as might suit its own nature and situation.
Knowledge of the past, secured through a kind of mind-casting outside the recognised senses,
was harder to glean than knowledge of the future.

In the latter case the course was easier and more material. With suitable mechanical
aid a mind would project itself forward in time, feeling its dim, extra-sensory way till it
approached the desired period. Then, after preliminary trials, it would seize on the best discoverable
representative of the highest of that period’s life-forms; entering the organism’s
brain and setting up therein its own vibrations while the displaced mind would strike back to
the period of the displacer, remaining in the latter’s body till a reverse process was
set up. The projected mind, in the body of the organism of the future, would then pose as a
member of the race whose outward form it wore; learning as quickly as possible all that could
be learned of the chosen age and its massed information and techniques.

Meanwhile the displaced mind, thrown back to the displacer’s age and
body, would be carefully guarded. It would be kept from harming the body it occupied, and would
be drained of all its knowledge by trained questioners. Often it could be questioned in its
own language, when previous quests into the future had brought back records of that language.
If the mind came from a body whose language the Great Race could not physically reproduce, clever
machines would be made, on which the alien speech could be played as on a musical instrument.
The Great Race’s members were immense rugose cones ten feet high, and with head and other
organs attached to foot-thick, distensible limbs spreading from the apexes. They spoke by the
clicking or scraping of huge paws or claws attached to the end of two of their four limbs, and
walked by the expansion and contraction of a viscous layer attached to their vast ten-foot bases.

When the captive mind’s amazement and resentment had worn off, and when
(assuming that it came from a body vastly different from the Great Race’s) it had lost
its horror at its unfamiliar temporary form, it was permitted to study its new environment and
experience a wonder and wisdom approximating that of its displacer. With suitable precautions,
and in exchange for suitable services, it was allowed to rove all over the habitable world in
titan airships or on the huge boat-like atomic-engined vehicles which traversed the great roads,
and to delve freely into the libraries containing the records of the planet’s past and
future. This reconciled many captive minds to their lot; since none were other than keen, and
to such minds the unveiling of hidden mysteries of earth—closed chapters of inconceivable
pasts and dizzying vortices of future time which include the years ahead of their own natural
ages—forms always, despite the abysmal horrors often unveiled, the supreme experience
of life.

Now and then certain captives were permitted to meet other captive minds seized
from the future—to exchange thoughts with consciousnesses living a hundred or a thousand
or a million years before or after their own ages. And all were urged to write copiously in
their own languages of themselves and their respective periods; such documents to be filed in
the great central archives.

It may be added that there was one sad special type of captive whose privileges
were far greater than those of the majority. These were the dying
permanent exiles, whose
bodies in the future had been seized by keen-minded members of the Great Race who, faced with
death, sought to escape mental extinction. Such melancholy exiles were not as common as might
be expected, since the longevity of the Great Race lessened its love of life—especially
among those superior minds capable of projection. From cases of the permanent projection of
elder minds arose many of those lasting changes of personality noticed in later history—including
mankind’s.

As for the ordinary cases of exploration—when the displacing mind had
learned what it wished in the future, it would build an apparatus like that which had started
its flight and reverse the process of projection. Once more it would be in its own body in its
own age, while the lately captive mind would return to that body of the future to which it properly
belonged. Only when one or the other of the bodies had died during the exchange was this restoration
impossible. In such cases, of course, the exploring mind had—like those of the death-escapers—to
live out an alien-bodied life in the future; or else the captive mind—like the dying permanent
exiles—had to end its days in the form and past age of the Great Race.

This fate was least horrible when the captive mind was also of the Great Race—a
not infrequent occurrence, since in all its periods that race was intensely concerned with its
own future. The number of dying permanent exiles of the Great Race was very slight—largely
because of the tremendous penalties attached to displacements of future Great Race minds by
the moribund. Through projection, arrangements were made to inflict these penalties on the offending
minds in their new future bodies—and sometimes forced re-exchanges were effected. Complex
cases of the displacement of exploring or already captive minds by minds in various regions
of the past had been known and carefully rectified. In every age since the discovery of mind-projection,
a minute but well-recognised element of the population consisted of Great Race minds from past
ages, sojourning for a longer or shorter while.

When a captive mind of alien origin was returned to its own body in the future,
it was purged by an intricate mechanical hypnosis of all it had learned in the Great Race’s
age—this because of certain troublesome consequences inherent in the general carrying
forward of knowledge in large quantities. The few existing instances of clear transmission had
caused, and would cause at known future times, great disasters. And it was largely in consequence
of two cases of the kind (said the old myths) that mankind had learned what it had concerning
the Great Race. Of all things surviving
physically and directly from that aeon-distant
world, there remained only certain ruins of great stones in far places and under the sea, and
parts of the text of the frightful Pnakotic Manuscripts.

Thus the returning mind reached its own age with only the faintest and most
fragmentary visions of what it had undergone since its seizure. All memories that could be eradicated
were eradicated, so that in most cases only a dream-shadowed blank stretched back to the time
of the first exchange. Some minds recalled more than others, and the chance joining of memories
had at rare times brought hints of the forbidden past to future ages. There probably never was
a time when groups or cults did not secretly cherish certain of these hints. In the
Necronomicon
the presence of such a cult among human beings was suggested—a cult that sometimes gave
aid to minds voyaging down the aeons from the days of the Great Race.

And meanwhile the Great Race itself waxed well-nigh omniscient, and turned
to the task of setting up exchanges with the minds of other planets, and of exploring their
pasts and futures. It sought likewise to fathom the past years and origin of that black, aeon-dead
orb in far space whence its own mental heritage had come—for the mind of the Great Race
was older than its bodily form. The beings of a dying elder world, wise with the ultimate secrets,
had looked ahead for a new world and species wherein they might have long life; and had sent
their minds en masse into that future race best adapted to house them—the cone-shaped
things that peopled our earth a billion years ago. Thus the Great Race came to be, while the
myriad minds sent backward were left to die in the horror of strange shapes. Later the race
would again face death, yet would live through another forward migration of its best minds into
the bodies of others who had a longer physical span ahead of them.

Such was the background of intertwined legend and hallucination. When, around
1920, I had my researches in coherent shape, I felt a slight lessening of the tension which
their earlier stages had increased. After all, and in spite of the fancies prompted by blind
emotions, were not most of my phenomena readily explainable? Any chance might have turned my
mind to dark studies during the amnesia—and then I read the forbidden legends and met
the members of ancient and ill-regarded cults. That, plainly, supplied the material for the
dreams and disturbed feelings which came after the return of memory. As for the marginal notes
in dream-hieroglyphs and languages unknown to me, but laid at my door by librarians—I
might easily have picked up a smattering of the tongues during my secondary state, while the
hieroglyphs were doubtless coined by my fancy from descriptions in old legends, and
afterward
woven into my dreams. I tried to verify certain points through conversation with known cult-leaders,
but never succeeded in establishing the right connexions.

At times the parallelism of so many cases in so many distant ages continued
to worry me as it had at first, but on the other hand I reflected that the excitant folklore
was undoubtedly more universal in the past than in the present. Probably all the other victims
whose cases were like mine had had a long and familiar knowledge of the tales I had learned
only when in my secondary state. When these victims had lost their memory, they had associated
themselves with the creatures of their household myths—the fabulous invaders supposed
to displace men’s minds—and had thus embarked upon quests for knowledge which they
thought they could take back to a fancied, non-human past. Then when their memory returned,
they reversed the associative process and thought of themselves as the former captive minds
instead of as the displacers. Hence the dreams and pseudo-memories following the conventional
myth-pattern.

Despite the seeming cumbrousness of these explanations, they came finally to
supersede all others in my mind—largely because of the greater weakness of any rival theory.
And a substantial number of eminent psychologists and anthropologists gradually agreed with
me. The more I reflected, the more convincing did my reasoning seem; till in the end I had a
really effective bulwark against the visions and impressions which still assailed me. Suppose
I did see strange things at night? These were only what I had heard and read of. Suppose I did
have odd loathings and perspectives and pseudo-memories? These, too, were only echoes of myths
absorbed in my secondary state. Nothing that I might dream, nothing that I might feel, could
be of any actual significance.

Fortified by this philosophy, I greatly improved in nervous equilibrium, even
though the visions (rather than the abstract impressions) steadily became more frequent and
more disturbingly detailed. In 1922 I felt able to undertake regular work again, and put my
newly gained knowledge to practical use by accepting an instructorship in psychology at the
university. My old chair of political economy had long been adequately filled—besides
which, methods of teaching economics had changed greatly since my heyday. My son was at this
time just entering on the post-graduate studies leading to his present professorship, and we
worked together a great deal.
IV.
I continued, however, to keep a careful record of the outré dreams which crowded upon
me so thickly and vividly. Such a record, I argued, was of genuine value as a psychological
document. The glimpses still seemed damnably like
memories, though I fought off this
impression with a goodly measure of success. In writing, I treated the phantasmata as things
seen; but at all other times I brushed them aside like any gossamer illusions of the night.
I had never mentioned such matters in common conversation; though reports of them, filtering
out as such things will, had aroused sundry rumours regarding my mental health. It is amusing
to reflect that these rumours were confined wholly to laymen, without a single champion among
physicians or psychologists.

Of my visions after 1914 I will here mention only a few, since fuller accounts
and records are at the disposal of the serious student. It is evident that with time the curious
inhibitions somewhat waned, for the scope of my visions vastly increased. They have never, though,
become other than disjointed fragments seemingly without clear motivation. Within the dreams
I seemed gradually to acquire a greater and greater freedom of wandering. I floated through
many strange buildings of stone, going from one to the other along mammoth underground passages
which seemed to form the common avenues of transit. Sometimes I encountered those gigantic sealed
trap-doors in the lowest level, around which such an aura of fear and forbiddenness clung. I
saw tremendous tessellated pools, and rooms of curious and inexplicable utensils of myriad sorts.
Then there were colossal caverns of intricate machinery whose outlines and purpose were wholly
strange to me, and whose
sound manifested itself only after many years of dreaming. I
may here remark that sight and sound are the only senses I have ever exercised in the visionary
world.

The real horror began in May, 1915, when I first saw the
living things.
This was before my studies had taught me what, in view of the myths and case histories, to expect.
As mental barriers wore down, I beheld great masses of thin vapour in various parts of the building
and in the streets below. These steadily grew more solid and distinct, till at last I could
trace their monstrous outlines with uncomfortable ease. They seemed to be enormous iridescent
cones, about ten feet high and ten feet wide at the base, and made up of some ridgy, scaly,
semi-elastic matter. From their apexes projected four flexible, cylindrical members, each a
foot thick, and of a ridgy substance like that of the cones themselves. These members were sometimes
contracted almost to nothing, and sometimes extended to any distance up to about ten feet. Terminating
two of them were enormous claws or nippers. At the end of a third were four red, trumpet-like
appendages. The fourth terminated in an irregular yellowish globe some two feet in diameter
and having three great dark eyes ranged along its central circumference. Surmounting this head
were four slender grey stalks bearing flower-like appendages, whilst from its nether side dangled
eight greenish antennae or tentacles. The great base of the central cone was fringed with a
rubbery, grey substance which moved the whole entity through expansion and contraction.

Their actions, though harmless, horrified me even more than their appearance—for
it is not wholesome to watch monstrous objects doing what one has known only human beings to
do. These objects moved intelligently around the great rooms, getting books from the shelves
and taking them to the great tables, or vice versa, and sometimes writing diligently with a
penlike rod gripped in the greenish head-tentacles. The huge nippers were used in carrying
books and in conversation—speech consisting of a kind of clicking and scraping. The objects
had no clothing, but wore satchels or knapsacks suspended from the top of the conical trunk.
They commonly carried their head and its supporting member at the level of the cone top, although
it was frequently raised or lowered. The other three great members tended to rest downward on
the sides of the cone, contracted to about five feet each, when not in use. From their rate
of reading, writing, and operating their machines (those on the tables seemed somehow connected
with thought) I concluded that their intelligence was enormously greater than man’s.

Afterward I saw them everywhere; swarming in all the great chambers and corridors,
tending monstrous machines in vaulted crypts, and racing along the vast roads in gigantic boat-shaped
cars. I ceased to be afraid of them, for they seemed to form supremely natural parts of their
environment. Individual differences amongst them began to be manifest, and a few appeared to
be under some kind of restraint. These latter, though shewing no physical variation, had a diversity
of gestures and habits which marked them off not only from the majority, but very largely from
one another. They wrote a great deal in what seemed to my cloudy vision a vast variety of characters—never
the typical curvilinear hieroglyphs of the majority. A few, I fancied, used our own familiar
alphabet. Most of them worked much more slowly than the general mass of the entities.

All this time
my own part in the dreams seemed to be that of a disembodied
consciousness with a range of vision wider than the normal; floating freely about, yet confined
to the ordinary avenues and speeds of travel. Not until August, 1915, did any suggestions of
bodily existence begin to harass me. I say
harass, because the first phase was a purely
abstract though infinitely terrible association of my previously noted body-loathing with the
scenes of my visions. For a while my chief concern during dreams was to avoid looking down at
myself, and I recall how grateful I was for the total absence of large mirrors in the strange
rooms. I was mightily troubled by the fact that I always saw the great tables—whose height
could not be under ten feet—from a level not below that of their surfaces.

And then the morbid temptation to look down at myself became greater and greater,
till one night I could not resist it. At first my downward glance revealed nothing whatever.
A moment later I perceived that this was because my head lay at the end of a flexible neck of
enormous length. Retracting this neck and gazing down very sharply, I saw the scaly, rugose,
iridescent bulk of a vast cone ten feet tall and ten feet wide at the base. That was when I
waked half of Arkham with my screaming as I plunged madly up from the abyss of sleep.

Only after weeks of hideous repetition did I grow half-reconciled to these
visions of myself in monstrous form. In the dreams I now moved bodily among the other unknown
entities, reading terrible books from the endless shelves and writing for hours at the great
tables with a stylus managed by the green tentacles that hung down from my head. Snatches of
what I read and wrote would linger in my memory. There were horrible annals of other worlds
and other universes, and of stirrings of formless life outside of all universes. There were
records of strange orders of beings which had peopled the world in forgotten pasts, and frightful
chronicles of grotesque-bodied intelligences which would people it millions of years after the
death of the last human being. And I learned of chapters in human history whose existence no
scholar of today has ever suspected. Most of these writings were in the language of the hieroglyphs;
which I studied in a queer way with the aid of droning machines, and which was evidently an
agglutinative speech with root systems utterly unlike any found in human languages. Other volumes
were in other unknown tongues learned in the same queer way. A very few were in languages I
knew. Extremely clever pictures, both inserted in the records and forming separate collections,
aided me immensely. And all the time I seemed to be setting down a history of my own age in
English. On waking, I could recall only minute and meaningless scraps of the unknown tongues
which my dream-self had mastered, though whole phrases of the history stayed with me.

I learned—even before my waking self had studied the parallel cases or
the old myths from which the dreams doubtless sprang—that the entities around me were
of the world’s greatest race, which had conquered time and had sent exploring minds into
every age. I knew, too, that I had been snatched from my age while
another used my body
in that age, and that a few of the other strange forms housed similarly captured minds. I seemed
to talk, in some odd language of claw-clickings, with exiled intellects from every corner of
the solar system.

There was a mind from the planet we know as Venus, which would live incalculable
epochs to come, and one from an outer moon of Jupiter six million years in the past. Of earthly
minds there were some from the winged, star-headed, half-vegetable race of palaeogean Antarctica;
one from the reptile people of fabled Valusia; three from the furry pre-human Hyperborean worshippers
of Tsathoggua; one from the wholly abominable Tcho-Tchos; two from the arachnid denizens of
earth’s last age; five from the hardy coleopterous species immediately following mankind,
to which the Great Race was some day to transfer its keenest minds en masse in the face of horrible
peril; and several from different branches of humanity.

I talked with the mind of Yiang-Li, a philosopher from the cruel empire of
Tsan-Chan, which is to come in A.D. 5000; with that of a general of the great-headed brown people
who held South Africa in B.C. 50,000; with that of a twelfth-century Florentine monk named Bartolomeo
Corsi; with that of a king of Lomar who had ruled that terrible polar land 100,000 years before
the squat, yellow Inutos came from the west to engulf it; with that of Nug-Soth, a magician
of the dark conquerors of A.D. 16,000; with that of a Roman named Titus Sempronius Blaesus,
who had been a quaestor in Sulla’s time; with that of Khephnes, an Egyptian of the 14th
Dynasty who told me the hideous secret of Nyarlathotep; with that of a priest of Atlantis’
middle kingdom; with that of a Suffolk gentleman of Cromwell’s day, James Woodville; with
that of a court astronomer of pre-Inca Peru; with that of the Australian physicist Nevil Kingston-Brown,
who will die in A.D. 2518; with that of an archimage of vanished Yhe in the Pacific; with that
of Theodotides, a Graeco-Bactrian official of B.C. 200; with that of an aged Frenchman of Louis
XIII’s time named Pierre-Louis Montmagny; with that of Crom-Ya, a Cimmerian chieftain
of B.C. 15,000; and with so many others that my brain cannot hold the shocking secrets and dizzying
marvels I learned from them.

I awaked each morning in a fever, sometimes frantically trying to verify or
discredit such information as fell within the range of modern human knowledge. Traditional facts
took on new and doubtful aspects, and I marvelled at the dream-fancy which could invent such
surprising addenda to history and science. I shivered at the mysteries the past may conceal,
and trembled at the menaces the future may bring forth. What was hinted in the speech of post-human
entities of the fate of mankind produced such an effect on me that I will not set it down here.
After man there would be the mighty beetle civilisation, the bodies of whose members the cream
of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world. Later, as the
earth’s span closed, the transferred minds would again migrate through time and space—to
another stopping-place in the bodies of the bulbous vegetable entities of Mercury. But there
would be races after them, clinging pathetically to the cold planet and burrowing to its horror-filled
core, before the utter end.

Meanwhile, in my dreams, I wrote endlessly in that history of my own age which
I was preparing—half voluntarily and half through promises of increased library and travel
opportunities—for the Great Race’s central archives. The archives were in a colossal
subterranean structure near the city’s centre, which I came to know well through frequent
labours and consultations. Meant to last as long as the race, and to withstand the fiercest
of earth’s convulsions, this titan repository surpassed all other buildings in the massive,
mountain-like firmness of its construction.

The records, written or printed on great sheets of a curiously tenacious cellulose
fabric, were bound into books that opened from the top, and were kept in individual cases of
a strange, extremely light rustless metal of greyish hue, decorated with mathematical designs
and bearing the title in the Great Race’s curvilinear hieroglyphs. These cases were stored
in tiers of rectangular vaults—like closed, locked shelves—wrought of the same rustless
metal and fastened by knobs with intricate turnings. My own history was assigned a specific
place in the vaults of the lowest or vertebrate level—the section devoted to the culture
of mankind and of the furry and reptilian races immediately preceding it in terrestrial dominance.

But none of the dreams ever gave me a full picture of daily life. All were
the merest misty, disconnected fragments, and it is certain that these fragments were not unfolded
in their rightful sequence. I have, for example, a very imperfect idea of my own living arrangements
in the dream-world; though I seem to have possessed a great stone room of my own. My restrictions
as a prisoner gradually disappeared, so that some of the visions included vivid travels over
the mighty jungle roads, sojourns in strange cities, and explorations of some of the vast dark
windowless ruins from which the Great Race shrank in curious fear. There were also long sea-voyages
in enormous, many-decked boats of incredible swiftness, and trips over wild regions in closed,
projectile-like airships lifted and moved by electrical repulsion. Beyond the wide, warm ocean
were other cities of the Great Race, and on one far continent I saw the crude villages of the
black-snouted, winged creatures who would evolve as a dominant stock after the Great Race had
sent its foremost minds into the future to escape the creeping horror. Flatness and exuberant
green life were always the keynote of the scene. Hills were low and sparse, and usually displayed
signs of volcanic forces.

Of the animals I saw, I could write volumes. All were wild; for the Great Race’s
mechanised culture had long since done away with domestic beasts, while food was wholly vegetable
or synthetic. Clumsy reptiles of great bulk floundered in steaming morasses, fluttered in the
heavy air, or spouted in the seas and lakes; and among these I fancied I could vaguely recognise
lesser, archaic prototypes of many forms—dinosaurs, pterodactyls, ichthyosaurs, labyrinthodonts,
rhamphorhynci, plesiosaurs, and the like—made familiar through palaeontology. Of birds
or mammals there were none that I could discern.

The ground and swamps were constantly alive with snakes, lizards, and crocodiles,
while insects buzzed incessantly amidst the lush vegetation. And far out at sea unspied and
unknown monsters spouted mountainous columns of foam into the vaporous sky. Once I was taken
under the ocean in a gigantic submarine vessel with searchlights, and glimpsed some living horrors
of awesome magnitude. I saw also the ruins of incredible sunken cities, and the wealth of crinoid,
brachiopod, coral, and ichthyic life which everywhere abounded.

Of the physiology, psychology, folkways, and detailed history of the Great
Race my visions preserved but little information, and many of the scattered points I here set
down were gleaned from my study of old legends and other cases rather than from my own dreaming.
For in time, of course, my reading and research caught up with and passed the dreams in many
phases; so that certain dream-fragments were explained in advance, and formed verifications
of what I had learned. This consolingly established my belief that similar reading and research,
accomplished by my secondary self, had formed the source of the whole terrible fabric of pseudo-memories.

The period of my dreams, apparently, was one somewhat less than 150,000,000
years ago, when the Palaeozoic age was giving place to the Mesozoic. The bodies occupied by
the Great Race represented no surviving—or even scientifically known—line of terrestrial
evolution, but were of a peculiar, closely homogeneous, and highly specialised organic type
inclining as much to the vegetable as to the animal state. Cell-action was of an unique sort
almost precluding fatigue, and wholly eliminating the need of sleep. Nourishment, assimilated
through the red trumpet-like appendages on one of the great flexible limbs, was always semi-fluid
and in many aspects wholly unlike the food of existing animals. The beings had but two of the
senses which we recognise—sight and hearing, the latter accomplished through the flower-like
appendages on the grey stalks above their heads—but of other and incomprehensible senses
(not, however, well utilisable by alien captive minds inhabiting their bodies) they possessed
many. Their three eyes were so situated as to give them a range of vision wider than the normal.
Their blood was a sort of deep-greenish ichor of great thickness. They had no sex, but reproduced
through seeds or spores which clustered on their bases and could be developed only under water.
Great, shallow tanks were used for the growth of their young—which were, however, reared
only in small numbers on account of the longevity of individuals; four or five thousand years
being the common life span.

Markedly defective individuals were quietly disposed of as soon as their defects
were noticed. Disease and the approach of death were, in the absence of a sense of touch or
of physical pain, recognised by purely visual symptoms. The dead were incinerated with dignified
ceremonies. Once in a while, as before mentioned, a keen mind would escape death by forward
projection in time; but such cases were not numerous. When one did occur, the exiled mind from
the future was treated with the utmost kindness till the dissolution of its unfamiliar tenement.

The Great Race seemed to form a single loosely knit nation or league, with
major institutions in common, though there were four definite divisions. The political and economic
system of each unit was a sort of fascistic socialism, with major resources rationally distributed,
and power delegated to a small governing board elected by the votes of all able to pass certain
educational and psychological tests. Family organisation was not overstressed, though ties among
persons of common descent were recognised, and the young were generally reared by their parents.

Resemblances to human attitudes and institutions were, of course, most marked
in those fields where on the one hand highly abstract elements were concerned, or where on the
other hand there was a dominance of the basic, unspecialised urges common to all organic life.
A few added likenesses came through conscious adoption as the Great Race probed the future and
copied what it liked. Industry, highly mechanised, demanded but little time from each citizen;
and the abundant leisure was filled with intellectual and aesthetic activities of various sorts.
The sciences were carried to an unbelievable height of development, and art was a vital part
of life, though at the period of my dreams it had passed its crest and meridian. Technology
was enormously stimulated through the constant struggle to survive, and to keep in existence
the physical fabric of great cities, imposed by the prodigious geologic upheavals of those primal
days.

Crime was surprisingly scanty, and was dealt with through highly efficient
policing. Punishments ranged from privilege-deprivation and imprisonment to death or major emotion-wrenching,
and were never administered without a careful study of the criminal’s motivations. Warfare,
largely civil for the last few millennia though sometimes waged against reptilian and octopodic
invaders, or against the winged, star-headed Old Ones who centred in the Antarctic, was infrequent
though infinitely devastating. An enormous army, using camera-like weapons which produced tremendous
electrical effects, was kept on hand for purposes seldom mentioned, but obviously connected
with the ceaseless fear of the dark, windowless elder ruins and of the great sealed trap-doors
in the lowest subterrene levels.

This fear of the basalt ruins and trap-doors was largely a matter of unspoken
suggestion—or, at most, of furtive quasi-whispers. Everything specific which bore on it
was significantly absent from such books as were on the common shelves. It was the one subject
lying altogether under a taboo among the Great Race, and seemed to be connected alike with horrible
bygone struggles, and with that future peril which would some day force the race to send its
keener minds ahead en masse in time. Imperfect and fragmentary as were the other things presented
by dreams and legends, this matter was still more bafflingly shrouded. The vague old myths avoided
it—or perhaps all allusions had for some reason been excised. And in the dreams of myself
and others, the hints were peculiarly few. Members of the Great Race never intentionally referred
to the matter, and what could be gleaned came only from some of the more sharply observant captive
minds.

According to these scraps of information, the basis of the fear was a horrible
elder race of half-polypous, utterly alien entities which had come through space from immeasurably
distant universes and had dominated the earth and three other solar planets about six hundred
million years ago. They were only partly material—as we understand matter—and their
type of consciousness and media of perception differed wholly from those of terrestrial organisms.
For example, their senses did not include that of sight; their mental world being a strange,
non-visual pattern of impressions. They were, however, sufficiently material to use implements
of normal matter when in cosmic areas containing it; and they required housing—albeit
of a peculiar kind. Though their
senses could penetrate all material barriers, their
substance could not; and certain forms of electrical energy could wholly destroy them.
They had the power of aërial motion despite the absence of wings or any other visible means
of levitation. Their minds were of such texture that no exchange with them could be effected
by the Great Race.

When these things had come to the earth they had built mighty basalt cities
of windowless towers, and had preyed horribly upon the beings they found. Thus it was when the
minds of the Great Race sped across the void from that obscure trans-galactic world known in
the disturbing and debatable Eltdown Shards as Yith. The newcomers, with the instruments they
created, had found it easy to subdue the predatory entities and drive them down to those caverns
of inner earth which they had already joined to their abodes and begun to inhabit. Then they
had sealed the entrances and left them to their fate, afterward occupying most of their great
cities and preserving certain important buildings for reasons connected more with superstition
than with indifference, boldness, or scientific and historical zeal.

But as the aeons passed, there came vague, evil signs that the Elder Things
were growing strong and numerous in the inner world. There were sporadic irruptions of a particularly
hideous character in certain small and remote cities of the Great Race, and in some of the deserted
elder cities which the Great Race had not peopled—places where the paths to the gulfs
below had not been properly sealed or guarded. After that greater precautions were taken, and
many of the paths were closed for ever—though a few were left with sealed trap-doors for
strategic use in fighting the Elder Things if ever they broke forth in unexpected places; fresh
rifts caused by that selfsame geologic change which had choked some of the paths and had slowly
lessened the number of outer-world structures and ruins surviving from the conquered entities.

The irruptions of the Elder Things must have been shocking beyond all description,
since they had permanently coloured the psychology of the Great Race. Such was the fixed mood
of horror that the very
aspect of the creatures was left unmentioned—at no time
was I able to gain a clear hint of what they looked like. There were veiled suggestions of a
monstrous
plasticity, and of temporary
lapses of visibility, while other fragmentary
whispers referred to their control and military use of
great winds. Singular
whistling
noises, and colossal footprints made up of five circular toe-marks, seemed also to be associated
with them.

It was evident that the coming doom so desperately feared by the Great Race—the
doom that was one day to send millions of keen minds across the chasm of time to strange bodies
in the safer future—had to do with a final successful irruption of the Elder Beings. Mental
projections down the ages had clearly foretold such a horror, and the Great Race had resolved
that none who could escape should face it. That the foray would be a matter of vengeance, rather
than an attempt to reoccupy the outer world, they knew from the planet’s later history—for
their projections shewed the coming and going of subsequent races untroubled by the monstrous
entities. Perhaps these entities had come to prefer earth’s inner abysses to the variable,
storm-ravaged surface, since light meant nothing to them. Perhaps, too, they were slowly weakening
with the aeons. Indeed, it was known that they would be quite dead in the time of the post-human
beetle race which the fleeing minds would tenant. Meanwhile the Great Race maintained its cautious
vigilance, with potent weapons ceaselessly ready despite the horrified banishing of the subject
from common speech and visible records. And always the shadow of nameless fear hung about the
sealed trap-doors and the dark, windowless elder towers.
V.
That is the world of which my dreams brought me dim, scattered echoes every night. I cannot
hope to give any true idea of the horror and dread contained in such echoes, for it was upon
a wholly intangible quality—the sharp sense of
pseudo-memory—that such feelings
mainly depended. As I have said, my studies gradually gave me a defence against these feelings,
in the form of rational psychological explanations; and this saving influence was augmented
by the subtle touch of accustomedness which comes with the passage of time. Yet in spite of
everything the vague, creeping terror would return momentarily now and then. It did not, however,
engulf me as it had before; and after 1922 I lived a very normal life of work and recreation.

In the course of years I began to feel that my experience—together with
the kindred cases and the related folklore—ought to be definitely summarised and published
for the benefit of serious students; hence I prepared a series of articles briefly covering
the whole ground and illustrated with crude sketches of some of the shapes, scenes, decorative
motifs, and hieroglyphs remembered from the dreams. These appeared at various times during 1928
and 1929 in the
Journal of the American Psychological Society, but did not attract much
attention. Meanwhile I continued to record my dreams with the minutest care, even though the
growing stack of reports attained troublesomely vast proportions.

On July 10, 1934, there was forwarded to me by the Psychological Society the
letter which opened the culminating and most horrible phase of the whole mad ordeal. It was
postmarked Pilbarra, Western Australia, and bore the signature of one whom I found, upon inquiry,
to be a mining engineer of considerable prominence. Enclosed were some very curious snapshots.
I will reproduce the text in its entirety, and no reader can fail to understand how tremendous
an effect it and the photographs had upon me.

I was, for a time, almost stunned and incredulous; for although I had often
thought that some basis of fact must underlie certain phases of the legends which had coloured
my dreams, I was none the less unprepared for anything like a tangible survival from a lost
world remote beyond all imagination. Most devastating of all were the photographs—for
here, in cold, incontrovertible realism, there stood out against a background of sand certain
worn-down, water-ridged, storm-weathered blocks of stone whose slightly convex tops and slightly
concave bottoms told their own story. And when I studied them with a magnifying glass I could
see all too plainly, amidst the batterings and pittings, the traces of those vast curvilinear
designs and occasional hieroglyphs whose significance had become so hideous to me. But here
is the letter, which speaks for itself:
49,
Dampier Str.,
Pilbarra, W. Australia,
 18
May, 1934. |
Prof. N. W. Peaslee,
c/o Am. Psychological Society,
30, E. 41st Str.,
N. Y. City, U.S.A.
My dear Sir:—
A recent conversation with Dr. E. M. Boyle of Perth, and some papers with your
articles which he has just sent me, make it advisable for me to tell you about certain things
I have seen in the Great Sandy Desert east of our gold field here. It would seem, in view of
the peculiar legends about old cities with huge stonework and strange designs and hieroglyphs
which you describe, that I have come upon something very important.
The blackfellows have always been full of talk about “great stones with
marks on them”, and seem to have a terrible fear of such things. They connect them in
some way with their common racial legends about Buddai, the gigantic old man who lies asleep
for ages underground with his head on his arm, and who will some day awake and eat up the world.
There are some very old and half-forgotten tales of enormous underground huts of great stones,
where passages lead down and down, and where horrible things have happened. The blackfellows
claim that once some warriors, fleeing in battle, went down into one and never came back, but
that frightful winds began to blow from the place soon after they went down. However, there
usually isn’t much in what these natives say.
But what I have to tell is more than this. Two years ago, when I was prospecting
about 500 miles east in the desert, I came on a lot of queer pieces of dressed stone perhaps
3 × 2 × 2 feet in size, and weathered and pitted to the very limit. At first I couldn’t
find any of the marks the blackfellows told about, but when I looked close enough I could make
out some deeply carved lines in spite of the weathering. They were peculiar curves, just like
what the blacks had tried to describe. I imagine there must have been 30 or 40 blocks, some
nearly buried in the sand, and all within a circle perhaps a quarter of a mile’s diameter.
When I saw some, I looked around closely for more, and made a careful reckoning
of the place with my instruments. I also took pictures of 10 or 12 of the most typical blocks,
and will enclose the prints for you to see. I turned my information and pictures over to the
government at Perth, but they have done nothing with them. Then I met Dr. Boyle, who had read
your articles in the Journal of the American Psychological Society, and in time happened
to mention the stones. He was enormously interested, and became quite excited when I shewed
him my snapshots, saying that the stones and markings were just like those of the masonry you
had dreamed about and seen described in legends. He meant to write you, but was delayed. Meanwhile
he sent me most of the magazines with your articles, and I saw at once from your drawings and
descriptions that my stones are certainly the kind you mean. You can appreciate this from the
enclosed prints. Later on you will hear directly from Dr. Boyle.
Now I can understand how important all this will be to you. Without question
we are faced with the remains of an unknown civilisation older than any dreamed of before, and
forming a basis for your legends. As a mining engineer, I have some knowledge of geology, and
can tell you that these blocks are so ancient they frighten me. They are mostly sandstone and
granite, though one is almost certainly made of a queer sort of cement or concrete.
They bear evidence of water action, as if this part of the world had been submerged and come
up again after long ages—all since these blocks were made and used. It is a matter of
hundreds of thousands of years—or heaven knows how much more. I don’t like to think
about it.
In view of your previous diligent work in tracking down the legends and everything
connected with them, I cannot doubt but that you will want to lead an expedition to the desert
and make some archaeological excavations. Both Dr. Boyle and I are prepared to coöperate
in such work if you—or organisations known to you—can furnish the funds. I can get
together a dozen miners for the heavy digging—the blacks would be of no use, for I’ve
found that they have an almost maniacal fear of this particular spot. Boyle and I are saying
nothing to others, for you very obviously ought to have precedence in any discoveries or credit.
The place can be reached from Pilbarra in about 4 days by motor tractor—which
we’d need for our apparatus. It is somewhat west and south of Warburton’s path of
1873, and 100 miles southeast of Joanna Spring. We could float things up the De Grey River instead
of starting from Pilbarra—but all that can be talked over later. Roughly, the stones lie
at a point about 22° 3′ 14″ South Latitude, 125° 0′ 39″ East
Longitude. The climate is tropical, and the desert conditions are trying. Any expedition had better
be made in winter—June or July or August. I shall welcome further correspondence upon this
subject, and am keenly eager to assist in any plan you may devise. After studying your articles I
am deeply impressed with the profound significance of the whole matter. Dr. Boyle will write later.
When rapid communication is needed, a cable to Perth can be relayed by wireless.
Hoping profoundly for an early message,
Believe
me,
Most faithfully yours,
 Robert B. F.
Mackenzie. |

Of the immediate aftermath of this letter, much can be learned from the press.
My good fortune in securing the backing of Miskatonic University was great, and both Mr. Mackenzie
and Dr. Boyle proved invaluable in arranging matters at the Australian end. We were not too
specific with the public about our objects, since the whole matter would have lent itself unpleasantly
to sensational and jocose treatment by the cheaper newspapers. As a result, printed reports
were sparing; but enough appeared to tell of our quest for reported Australian ruins and to
chronicle our various preparatory steps.

Professors William Dyer of the college’s geology department (leader of
the Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition of 1930–31), Ferdinand C. Ashley of the department
of ancient history, and Tyler M. Freeborn of the department of anthropology—together with
my son Wingate—accompanied me. My correspondent Mackenzie came to Arkham early in 1935
and assisted in our final preparations. He proved to be a tremendously competent and affable
man of about fifty, admirably well-read, and deeply familiar with all the conditions of Australian
travel. He had tractors waiting at Pilbarra, and we chartered a tramp steamer of sufficiently
light draught to get up the river to that point. We were prepared to excavate in the most careful
and scientific fashion, sifting every particle of sand, and disturbing nothing which might seem
to be in or near its original situation.

Sailing from Boston aboard the wheezy
Lexington on March 28, 1935, we
had a leisurely trip across the Atlantic and Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal, down the
Red Sea, and across the Indian Ocean to our goal. I need not tell how the sight of the low,
sandy West Australian coast depressed me, and how I detested the crude mining town and dreary
gold fields where the tractors were given their last loads. Dr. Boyle, who met us, proved to
be elderly, pleasant, and intelligent—and his knowledge of psychology led him into many
long discussions with my son and me.

Discomfort and expectancy were oddly mingled in most of us when at length our
party of eighteen rattled forth over the arid leagues of sand and rock. On Friday, May 31st,
we forded a branch of the De Grey and entered the realm of utter desolation. A certain positive
terror grew on me as we advanced to this actual site of the elder world behind the legends—a
terror of course abetted by the fact that my disturbing dreams and pseudo-memories still beset
me with unabated force.

It was on Monday, June 3, that we saw the first of the half-buried blocks.
I cannot describe the emotions with which I actually touched—in objective reality—a
fragment of Cyclopean masonry in every respect like the blocks in the walls of my dream-buildings.
There was a distinct trace of carving—and my hands trembled as I recognised part of a
curvilinear decorative scheme made hellish to me through years of tormenting nightmare and baffling
research.

A month of digging brought a total of some 1250 blocks in varying stages of
wear and disintegration. Most of these were carven megaliths with curved tops and bottoms. A
minority were smaller, flatter, plain-surfaced, and square or octagonally cut—like those
of the floors and pavements in my dreams—while a few were singularly massive and curved
or slanted in such a manner as to suggest use in vaulting or groining, or as parts of arches
or round window casings. The deeper—and the farther north and east—we dug, the more
blocks we found; though we still failed to discover any trace of arrangement among them. Professor
Dyer was appalled at the measureless age of the fragments, and Freeborn found traces of symbols
which fitted darkly into certain Papuan and Polynesian legends of infinite antiquity. The condition
and scattering of the blocks told mutely of vertiginous cycles of time and geologic upheavals
of cosmic savagery.

We had an aëroplane with us, and my son Wingate would often go up to different
heights and scan the sand-and-rock waste for signs of dim, large-scale outlines—either
differences of level or trails of scattered blocks. His results were virtually negative; for
whenever he would one day think he had glimpsed some significant trend, he would on his next
trip find the impression replaced by another equally insubstantial—a result of the shifting,
wind-blown sand. One or two of these ephemeral suggestions, though, affected me queerly and
disagreeably. They seemed, after a fashion, to dovetail horribly with something which I had
dreamed or read, but which I could no longer remember. There was a terrible
pseudo-familiarity
about them—which somehow made me look furtively and apprehensively over the abominable,
sterile terrain toward the north and northeast.

Around the first week in July I developed an unaccountable set of mixed emotions
about that general northeasterly region. There was horror, and there was curiosity—but
more than that, there was a persistent and perplexing illusion of
memory. I tried all
sorts of psychological expedients to get these notions out of my head, but met with no success.
Sleeplessness also gained upon me, but I almost welcomed this because of the resultant shortening
of my dream-periods. I acquired the habit of taking long, lone walks in the desert late at night—usually
to the north or northeast, whither the sum of my strange new impulses seemed subtly to pull
me.

Sometimes, on these walks, I would stumble over nearly buried fragments of
the ancient masonry. Though there were fewer visible blocks here than where we had started,
I felt sure that there must be a vast abundance beneath the surface. The ground was less level
than at our camp, and the prevailing high winds now and then piled the sand into fantastic temporary
hillocks—exposing some traces of the elder stones while it covered other traces. I was
queerly anxious to have the excavations extend to this territory, yet at the same time dreaded
what might be revealed. Obviously, I was getting into a rather bad state—all the worse
because I could not account for it.

An indication of my poor nervous health can be gained from my response to an
odd discovery which I made on one of my nocturnal rambles. It was on the evening of July 11th,
when a gibbous moon flooded the mysterious hillocks with a curious pallor. Wandering somewhat
beyond my usual limits, I came upon a great stone which seemed to differ markedly from any we
had yet encountered. It was almost wholly covered, but I stooped and cleared away the sand with
my hands, later studying the object carefully and supplementing the moonlight with my electric
torch. Unlike the other very large rocks, this one was perfectly square-cut, with no convex
or concave surface. It seemed, too, to be of a dark basaltic substance wholly dissimilar to
the granite and sandstone and occasional concrete of the now familiar fragments.

Suddenly I rose, turned, and ran for the camp at top speed. It was a wholly
unconscious and irrational flight, and only when I was close to my tent did I fully realise
why I had run. Then it came to me. The queer dark stone was something which I had dreamed and
read about, and which was linked with the uttermost horrors of the aeon-old legendry. It was
one of the blocks of that basaltic elder masonry which the fabled Great Race held in such fear—the
tall, windowless ruins left by those brooding, half-material, alien Things that festered in
earth’s nether abysses and against whose wind-like, invisible forces the trap-doors were
sealed and the sleepless sentinels posted.

I remained awake all that night, but by dawn realised how silly I had been
to let the shadow of a myth upset me. Instead of being frightened, I should have had a discoverer’s
enthusiasm. The next forenoon I told the others about my find, and Dyer, Freeborn, Boyle, my
son, and I set out to view the anomalous block. Failure, however, confronted us. I had formed
no clear idea of the stone’s location, and a late wind had wholly altered the hillocks
of shifting sand.
VI.
I come now to the crucial and most difficult part of my narrative—all the more difficult
because I cannot be quite certain of its reality. At times I feel uncomfortably sure that I
was not dreaming or deluded; and it is this feeling—in view of the stupendous implications
which the objective truth of my experience would raise—which impels me to make this record.
My son—a trained psychologist with the fullest and most sympathetic knowledge of my whole
case—shall be the primary judge of what I have to tell.

First let me outline the externals of the matter, as those at the camp know
them. On the night of July 17–18, after a windy day, I retired early but could not sleep.
Rising shortly before eleven, and afflicted as usual with that strange feeling regarding the
northeastward terrain, I set out on one of my typical nocturnal walks; seeing and greeting only
one person—an Australian miner named Tupper—as I left our precincts. The moon, slightly
past full, shone from a clear sky and drenched the ancient sands with a white, leprous radiance
which seemed to me somehow infinitely evil. There was no longer any wind, nor did any return
for nearly five hours, as amply attested by Tupper and others who did not sleep through the
night. The Australian last saw me walking rapidly across the pallid, secret-guarding hillocks
toward the northeast.

About 3:30 a.m. a violent wind blew up, waking everyone in camp and felling
three of the tents. The sky was unclouded, and the desert still blazed with that leprous moonlight.
As the party saw to the tents my absence was noted, but in view of my previous walks this circumstance
gave no one alarm. And yet as many as three men—all Australians—seemed to feel something
sinister in the air. Mackenzie explained to Prof. Freeborn that this was a fear picked up from
blackfellow folklore—the natives having woven a curious fabric of malignant myth about
the high winds which at long intervals sweep across the sands under a clear sky. Such winds,
it is whispered, blow out of the great stone huts under the ground where terrible things have
happened—and are never felt except near places where the big marked stones are scattered.
Close to four the gale subsided as suddenly as it had begun, leaving the sand hills in new and
unfamiliar shapes.

It was just past five, with the bloated, fungoid moon sinking in the west,
when I staggered into camp—hatless, tattered, features scratched and ensanguined, and
without my electric torch. Most of the men had returned to bed, but Prof. Dyer was smoking a
pipe in front of his tent. Seeing my winded and almost frenzied state, he called Dr. Boyle,
and the two of them got me on my cot and made me comfortable. My son, roused by the stir, soon
joined them, and they all tried to force me to lie still and attempt sleep.

But there was no sleep for me. My psychological state was very extraordinary—different
from anything I had previously suffered. After a time I insisted upon talking—nervously
and elaborately explaining my condition. I told them I had become fatigued, and had lain down
in the sand for a nap. There had, I said, been dreams even more frightful than usual—and
when I was awaked by the sudden high wind my overwrought nerves had snapped. I had fled in panic,
frequently falling over half-buried stones and thus gaining my tattered and bedraggled aspect.
I must have slept long—hence the hours of my absence.

Of anything strange either seen or experienced I hinted absolutely nothing—exercising
the greatest self-control in that respect. But I spoke of a change of mind regarding the whole
work of the expedition, and earnestly urged a halt in all digging toward the northeast. My reasoning
was patently weak—for I mentioned a dearth of blocks, a wish not to offend the superstitious
miners, a possible shortage of funds from the college, and other things either untrue or irrelevant.
Naturally, no one paid the least attention to my new wishes—not even my son, whose concern
for my health was very obvious.

The next day I was up and around the camp, but took no part in the excavations.
Seeing that I could not stop the work, I decided to return home as soon as possible for the
sake of my nerves, and made my son promise to fly me in the plane to Perth—a thousand
miles to the southwest—as soon as he had surveyed the region I wished let alone. If, I
reflected, the thing I had seen was still visible, I might decide to attempt a specific warning
even at the cost of ridicule. It was just conceivable that the miners who knew the local folklore
might back me up. Humouring me, my son made the survey that very afternoon; flying over all
the terrain my walk could possibly have covered. Yet nothing of what I had found remained in
sight. It was the case of the anomalous basalt block all over again—the shifting sand
had wiped out every trace. For an instant I half regretted having lost a certain awesome object
in my stark fright—but now I know that the loss was merciful. I can still believe my whole
experience an illusion—especially if, as I devoutly hope, that hellish abyss is never
found.

Wingate took me to Perth July 20, though declining to abandon the expedition
and return home. He stayed with me until the 25th, when the steamer for Liverpool sailed. Now,
in the cabin of the
Empress, I am pondering long and frantically on the entire matter,
and have decided that my son at least must be informed. It shall rest with him whether to diffuse
the matter more widely. In order to meet any eventuality I have prepared this summary of my
background—as already known in a scattered way to others—and will now tell as briefly
as possible what seemed to happen during my absence from the camp that hideous night.

Nerves on edge, and whipped into a kind of perverse eagerness by that inexplicable,
dread-mingled, pseudo-mnemonic urge toward the northeast, I plodded on beneath the evil, burning
moon. Here and there I saw, half-shrouded by the sand, those primal Cyclopean blocks left from
nameless and forgotten aeons. The incalculable age and brooding horror of this monstrous waste
began to oppress me as never before, and I could not keep from thinking of my maddening dreams,
of the frightful legends which lay behind them, and of the present fears of natives and miners
concerning the desert and its carven stones.

And yet I plodded on as if to some eldritch rendezvous—more and more
assailed by bewildering fancies, compulsions, and pseudo-memories. I thought of some of the
possible contours of the lines of stones as seen by my son from the air, and wondered why they
seemed at once so ominous and so familiar. Something was fumbling and rattling at the latch
of my recollection, while another unknown force sought to keep the portal barred.

The night was windless, and the pallid sand curved upward and downward like
frozen waves of the sea. I had no goal, but somehow ploughed along as if with fate-bound assurance.
My dreams welled up into the waking world, so that each sand-embedded megalith seemed part of
endless rooms and corridors of pre-human masonry, carved and hieroglyphed with symbols that
I knew too well from years of custom as a captive mind of the Great Race. At moments I fancied
I saw those omniscient conical horrors moving about at their accustomed tasks, and I feared
to look down lest I find myself one with them in aspect. Yet all the while I saw the sand-covered
blocks as well as the rooms and corridors; the evil, burning moon as well as the lamps of luminous
crystal; the endless desert as well as the waving ferns and cycads beyond the windows. I was
awake and dreaming at the same time.

I do not know how long or how far—or indeed, in just what direction—I
had walked when I first spied the heap of blocks bared by the day’s wind. It was the largest
group in one place that I had so far seen, and so sharply did it impress me that the visions
of fabulous aeons faded suddenly away. Again there were only the desert and the evil moon and
the shards of an unguessed past. I drew close and paused, and cast the added light of my electric
torch over the tumbled pile. A hillock had blown away, leaving a low, irregularly round mass
of megaliths and smaller fragments some forty feet across and from two to eight feet high.

From the very outset I realised that there was some utterly unprecedented quality
about these stones. Not only was the mere number of them quite without parallel, but something
in the sand-worn traces of design arrested me as I scanned them under the mingled beams of the
moon and my torch. Not that any one differed essentially from the earlier specimens we had found.
It was something subtler than that. The impression did not come when I looked at one block alone,
but only when I ran my eye over several almost simultaneously. Then, at last, the truth dawned
upon me. The curvilinear patterns on many of these blocks were
closely related—parts
of one vast decorative conception. For the first time in this aeon-shaken waste I had come upon
a mass of masonry in its old position—tumbled and fragmentary, it is true, but none the
less existing in a very definite sense.

Mounting at a low place, I clambered laboriously over the heap; here and there
clearing away the sand with my fingers, and constantly striving to interpret varieties of size,
shape, and style, and relationships of design. After a while I could vaguely guess at the nature
of the bygone structure, and at the designs which had once stretched over the vast surfaces
of the primal masonry. The perfect identity of the whole with some of my dream-glimpses appalled
and unnerved me. This was once a Cyclopean corridor thirty feet tall, paved with octagonal blocks
and solidly vaulted overhead. There would have been rooms opening off on the right, and at the
farther end one of those strange inclined planes would have wound down to still lower depths.

I started violently as these conceptions occurred to me, for there was more
in them than the blocks themselves had supplied. How did I know that this level should have
been far underground? How did I know that the plane leading upward should have been behind me?
How did I know that the long subterrene passage to the Square of Pillars ought to lie on the
left one level above me? How did I know that the room of machines, and the rightward-leading
tunnel to the central archives, ought to lie two levels below? How did I know that there would
be one of those horrible, metal-banded trap-doors at the very bottom, four levels down? Bewildered
by this intrusion from the dream-world, I found myself shaking and bathed in a cold perspiration.

Then, as a last, intolerable touch, I felt that faint, insidious stream of
cool air trickling upward from a depressed place near the centre of the huge heap. Instantly,
as once before, my visions faded, and I saw again only the evil moonlight, the brooding desert,
and the spreading tumulus of palaeogean masonry. Something real and tangible, yet fraught with
infinite suggestions of nighted mystery, now confronted me. For that stream of air could argue
but one thing—a hidden gulf of great size beneath the disordered blocks on the surface.

My first thought was of the sinister blackfellow legends of vast underground
huts among the megaliths where horrors happen and great winds are born. Then thoughts of my
own dreams came back, and I felt dim pseudo-memories tugging at my mind. What manner of place
lay below me? What primal, inconceivable source of age-old myth-cycles and haunting nightmares
might I be on the brink of uncovering? It was only for a moment that I hesitated, for more than
curiosity and scientific zeal was driving me on and working against my growing fear.

I seemed to move almost automatically, as if in the clutch of some compelling
fate. Pocketing my torch, and struggling with a strength that I had not thought I possessed,
I wrenched aside first one titan fragment of stone and then another, till there welled up a
strong draught whose dampness contrasted oddly with the desert’s dry air. A black rift
began to yawn, and at length—when I had pushed away every fragment small enough to budge—the
leprous moonlight blazed on an aperture of ample width to admit me.

I drew out my torch and cast a brilliant beam into the opening. Below me was
a chaos of tumbled masonry, sloping roughly down toward the north at an angle of about forty-five
degrees, and evidently the result of some bygone collapse from above. Between its surface and
the ground level was a gulf of impenetrable blackness at whose upper edge were signs of gigantic,
stress-heaved vaulting. At this point, it appeared, the desert’s sands lay directly upon
a floor of some titan structure of earth’s youth—how preserved through aeons of
geologic convulsion I could not then and cannot now even attempt to guess.

In retrospect, the barest idea of a sudden, lone descent into such a doubtful
abyss—and at a time when one’s whereabouts were unknown to any living soul—seems
like the utter apex of insanity. Perhaps it was—yet that night I embarked without hesitancy
upon such a descent. Again there was manifest that lure and driving of fatality which had all
along seemed to direct my course. With torch flashing intermittently to save the battery, I
commenced a mad scramble down the sinister, Cyclopean incline below the opening—sometimes
facing forward as I found good hand and foot holds, and at other times turning to face the heap
of megaliths as I clung and fumbled more precariously. In two directions beside me, distant
walls of carven, crumbling masonry loomed dimly under the direct beams of my torch. Ahead, however,
was only unbroken blackness.

I kept no track of time during my downward scramble. So seething with baffling
hints and images was my mind, that all objective matters seemed withdrawn into incalculable
distances. Physical sensation was dead, and even fear remained as a wraith-like, inactive gargoyle
leering impotently at me. Eventually I reached a level floor strown with fallen blocks, shapeless
fragments of stone, and sand and detritus of every kind. On either side—perhaps thirty
feet apart—rose massive walls culminating in huge groinings. That they were carved I could
just discern, but the nature of the carvings was beyond my perception. What held me the most
was the vaulting overhead. The beam from my torch could not reach the roof, but the lower parts
of the monstrous arches stood out distinctly. And so perfect was their identity with what I
had seen in countless dreams of the elder world, that I trembled actively for the first time.

Behind and high above, a faint luminous blur told of the distant moonlit world
outside. Some vague shred of caution warned me that I should not let it out of my sight, lest
I have no guide for my return. I now advanced toward the wall on my left, where the traces of
carving were plainest. The littered floor was nearly as hard to traverse as the downward heap
had been, but I managed to pick my difficult way. At one place I heaved aside some blocks and
kicked away the detritus to see what the pavement was like, and shuddered at the utter, fateful
familiarity of the great octagonal stones whose buckled surface still held roughly together.

Reaching a convenient distance from the wall, I cast the torchlight slowly
and carefully over its worn remnants of carving. Some bygone influx of water seemed to have
acted on the sandstone surface, while there were curious incrustations which I could not explain.
In places the masonry was very loose and distorted, and I wondered how many aeons more this
primal, hidden edifice could keep its remaining traces of form amidst earth’s heavings.

But it was the carvings themselves that excited me most. Despite their time-crumbled
state, they were relatively easy to trace at close range; and the complete, intimate familiarity
of every detail almost stunned my imagination. That the major attributes of this hoary masonry
should be familiar, was not beyond normal credibility. Powerfully impressing the weavers of
certain myths, they had become embodied in a stream of cryptic lore which, somehow coming to
my notice during the amnesic period, had evoked vivid images in my subconscious mind. But how
could I explain the exact and minute fashion in which each line and spiral of these strange
designs tallied with what I had dreamt for more than a score of years? What obscure, forgotten
iconography could have reproduced each subtle shading and nuance which so persistently, exactly,
and unvaryingly besieged my sleeping vision night after night?

For this was no chance or remote resemblance. Definitely and absolutely, the
millennially ancient, aeon-hidden corridor in which I stood was the original of something I
knew in sleep as intimately as I knew my own house in Crane Street, Arkham. True, my dreams
shewed the place in its undecayed prime; but the identity was no less real on that account.
I was wholly and horribly oriented. The particular structure I was in was known to me. Known,
too, was its place in that terrible elder city of dreams. That I could visit unerringly any
point in that structure or in that city which had escaped the changes and devastations of uncounted
ages, I realised with hideous and instinctive certainty. What in God’s name could all
this mean? How had I come to know what I knew? And what awful reality could lie behind those
antique tales of the beings who had dwelt in this labyrinth of primordial stone?

Words can convey only fractionally the welter of dread and bewilderment which
ate at my spirit. I knew this place. I knew what lay before me, and what had lain overhead before
the myriad towering stories had fallen to dust and debris and the desert. No need now, I thought
with a shudder, to keep that faint blur of moonlight in view. I was torn betwixt a longing to
flee and a feverish mixture of burning curiosity and driving fatality. What had happened to
this monstrous megalopolis of eld in the millions of years since the time of my dreams? Of the
subterrene mazes which had underlain the city and linked all its titan towers, how much had
still survived the writhings of earth’s crust?

Had I come upon a whole buried world of unholy archaism? Could I still find
the house of the writing-master, and the tower where S’gg’ha, a captive mind from
the star-headed vegetable carnivores of Antarctica, had chiselled certain pictures on the blank
spaces of the walls? Would the passage at the second level down, to the hall of the alien minds,
be still unchoked and traversable? In that hall the captive mind of an incredible entity—a
half-plastic denizen of the hollow interior of an unknown trans-Plutonian planet eighteen million
years in the future—had kept a certain thing which it had modelled from clay.

I shut my eyes and put my hand to my head in a vain, pitiful effort to drive
these insane dream-fragments from my consciousness. Then, for the first time, I felt acutely
the coolness, motion, and dampness of the surrounding air. Shuddering, I realised that a vast
chain of aeon-dead black gulfs must indeed be yawning somewhere beyond and below me. I thought
of the frightful chambers and corridors and inclines as I recalled them from my dreams. Would
the way to the central archives still be open? Again that driving fatality tugged insistently
at my brain as I recalled the awesome records that once lay cased in those rectangular vaults
of rustless metal.

There, said the dreams and legends, had reposed the whole history, past and
future, of the cosmic space-time continuum—written by captive minds from every orb and
every age in the solar system. Madness, of course—but had I not now stumbled into a nighted
world as mad as I? I thought of the locked metal shelves, and of the curious knob-twistings
needed to open each one. My own came vividly into my consciousness. How often had I gone through
that intricate routine of varied turns and pressures in the terrestrial vertebrate section on
the lowest level! Every detail was fresh and familiar. If there were such a vault as I had dreamed
of, I could open it in a moment. It was then that madness took me utterly. An instant later,
and I was leaping and stumbling over the rocky debris toward the well-remembered incline to
the depths below.
VII.
From that point forward my impressions are scarcely to be relied on—indeed, I still possess
a final, desperate hope that they all form parts of some daemoniac dream—or illusion born
of delirium. A fever raged in my brain, and everything came to me through a kind of haze—sometimes
only intermittently. The rays of my torch shot feebly into the engulfing blackness, bringing
phantasmal flashes of hideously familiar walls and carvings, all blighted with the decay of
ages. In one place a tremendous mass of vaulting had fallen, so that I had to clamber over a
mighty mound of stones reaching almost to the ragged, grotesquely stalactited roof. It was all
the ultimate apex of nightmare, made worse by the blasphemous tug of pseudo-memory. One thing
only was unfamiliar, and that was my own size in relation to the monstrous masonry. I felt oppressed
by a sense of unwonted smallness, as if the sight of these towering walls from a mere human
body was something wholly new and abnormal. Again and again I looked nervously down at myself,
vaguely disturbed by the human form I possessed.

Onward through the blackness of the abyss I leaped, plunged, and staggered—often
falling and bruising myself, and once nearly shattering my torch. Every stone and corner of
that daemoniac gulf was known to me, and at many points I stopped to cast beams of light through
choked and crumbling yet familiar archways. Some rooms had totally collapsed; others were bare
or debris-filled. In a few I saw masses of metal—some fairly intact, some broken, and
some crushed or battered—which I recognised as the colossal pedestals or tables of my
dreams. What they could in truth have been, I dared not guess.

I found the downward incline and began its descent—though after a time
halted by a gaping, ragged chasm whose narrowest point could not be much less than four feet
across. Here the stonework had fallen through, revealing incalculable inky depths beneath. I
knew there were two more cellar levels in this titan edifice, and trembled with fresh panic
as I recalled the metal-clamped trap-door on the lowest one. There could be no guards now—for
what had lurked beneath had long since done its hideous work and sunk into its long decline.
By the time of the post-human beetle race it would be quite dead. And yet, as I thought of the
native legends, I trembled anew.

It cost me a terrible effort to vault that yawning chasm, since the littered
floor prevented a running start—but madness drove me on. I chose a place close to the
left-hand wall—where the rift was least wide and the landing-spot reasonably clear of
dangerous debris—and after one frantic moment reached the other side in safety. At last
gaining the lower level, I stumbled on past the archway of the room of machines, within which
were fantastic ruins of metal half-buried beneath fallen vaulting. Everything was where I knew
it would be, and I climbed confidently over the heaps which barred the entrance of a vast transverse
corridor. This, I realised, would take me under the city to the central archives.

Endless ages seemed to unroll as I stumbled, leaped, and crawled along that
debris-cluttered corridor. Now and then I could make out carvings on the age-stained walls—some
familiar, others seemingly added since the period of my dreams. Since this was a subterrene
house-connecting highway, there were no archways save when the route led through the lower levels
of various buildings. At some of these intersections I turned aside long enough to look down
well-remembered corridors and into well-remembered rooms. Twice only did I find any radical
changes from what I had dreamed of—and in one of these cases I could trace the sealed-up
outlines of the archway I remembered.

I shook violently, and felt a curious surge of retarding weakness, as I steered
a hurried and reluctant course through the crypt of one of those great windowless ruined towers
whose alien basalt masonry bespoke a whispered and horrible origin. This primal vault was round
and fully two hundred feet across, with nothing carved upon the dark-hued stonework. The floor
was here free from anything save dust and sand, and I could see the apertures leading upward
and downward. There were no stairs or inclines—indeed, my dreams had pictured those elder
towers as wholly untouched by the fabulous Great Race. Those who had built them had not needed
stairs or inclines. In the dreams, the downward aperture had been tightly sealed and nervously
guarded. Now it lay open—black and yawning, and giving forth a current of cool, damp air.
Of what limitless caverns of eternal night might brood below, I would not permit myself to think.

Later, clawing my way along a badly heaped section of the corridor, I reached
a place where the roof had wholly caved in. The debris rose like a mountain, and I climbed up
over it, passing through a vast empty space where my torchlight could reveal neither walls nor
vaulting. This, I reflected, must be the cellar of the house of the metal-purveyors, fronting
on the third square not far from the archives. What had happened to it I could not conjecture.

I found the corridor again beyond the mountain of detritus and stones, but
after a short distance encountered a wholly choked place where the fallen vaulting almost touched
the perilously sagging ceiling. How I managed to wrench and tear aside enough blocks to afford
a passage, and how I dared disturb the tightly packed fragments when the least shift of equilibrium
might have brought down all the tons of superincumbent masonry to crush me to nothingness, I
do not know. It was sheer madness that impelled and guided me—if, indeed, my whole underground
adventure was not—as I hope—a hellish delusion or phase of dreaming. But I did make—or
dream that I made—a passage that I could squirm through. As I wriggled over the mound
of debris—my torch, switched continuously on, thrust deeply within my mouth—I felt
myself torn by the fantastic stalactites of the jagged floor above me.

I was now close to the great underground archival structure which seemed to
form my goal. Sliding and clambering down the farther side of the barrier, and picking my way
along the remaining stretch of corridor with hand-held, intermittently flashing torch, I came
at last to a low, circular crypt with arches—still in a marvellous state of preservation—opening
off on every side. The walls, or such parts of them as lay within reach of my torchlight, were
densely hieroglyphed and chiselled with typical curvilinear symbols—some added since the
period of my dreams.

This, I realised, was my fated destination, and I turned at once through a
familiar archway on my left. That I could find a clear passage up and down the incline to all
the surviving levels, I had oddly little doubt. This vast, earth-protected pile, housing the
annals of all the solar system, had been built with supernal skill and strength to last as long
as that system itself. Blocks of stupendous size, poised with mathematical genius and bound
with cements of incredible toughness, had combined to form a mass as firm as the planet’s
rocky core. Here, after ages more prodigious than I could sanely grasp, its buried bulk stood
in all its essential contours; the vast, dust-drifted floors scarce sprinkled with the litter
elsewhere so dominant.

The relatively easy walking from this point onward went curiously to my head.
All the frantic eagerness hitherto frustrated by obstacles now took itself out in a kind of
febrile speed, and I literally raced along the low-roofed, monstrously well-remembered aisles
beyond the archway. I was past being astonished by the familiarity of what I saw. On every hand
the great hieroglyphed metal shelf-doors loomed monstrously; some yet in place, others sprung
open, and still others bent and buckled under bygone geological stresses not quite strong enough
to shatter the titan masonry. Here and there a dust-covered heap below a gaping empty shelf
seemed to indicate where cases had been shaken down by earth-tremors. On occasional pillars
were great symbols or letters proclaiming classes and sub-classes of volumes.

Once I paused before an open vault where I saw some of the accustomed metal
cases still in position amidst the omnipresent gritty dust. Reaching up, I dislodged one of
the thinner specimens with some difficulty, and rested it on the floor for inspection. It was
titled in the prevailing curvilinear hieroglyphs, though something in the arrangement of the
characters seemed subtly unusual. The odd mechanism of the hooked fastener was perfectly well
known to me, and I snapped up the still rustless and workable lid and drew out the book within.
The latter, as expected, was some twenty by fifteen inches in area, and two inches thick; the
thin metal covers opening at the top. Its tough cellulose pages seemed unaffected by the myriad
cycles of time they had lived through, and I studied the queerly pigmented, brush-drawn letters
of the text—symbols utterly unlike either the usual curved hieroglyphs or any alphabet
known to human scholarship—with a haunting, half-aroused memory. It came to me that this
was the language used by a captive mind I had known slightly in my dreams—a mind from
a large asteroid on which had survived much of the archaic life and lore of the primal planet
whereof it formed a fragment. At the same time I recalled that this level of the archives was
devoted to volumes dealing with the non-terrestrial planets.

As I ceased poring over this incredible document I saw that the light of my
torch was beginning to fail, hence quickly inserted the extra battery I always had with me.
Then, armed with the stronger radiance, I resumed my feverish racing through unending tangles
of aisles and corridors—recognising now and then some familiar shelf, and vaguely annoyed
by the acoustic conditions which made my footfalls echo incongruously in these catacombs of
aeon-long death and silence. The very prints of my shoes behind me in the millennially untrodden
dust made me shudder. Never before, if my mad dreams held anything of truth, had human feet
pressed upon those immemorial pavements. Of the particular goal of my insane racing, my conscious
mind held no hint. There was, however, some force of evil potency pulling at my dazed will and
buried recollections, so that I vaguely felt I was not running at random.

I came to a downward incline and followed it to profounder depths. Floors flashed
by me as I raced, but I did not pause to explore them. In my whirling brain there had begun
to beat a certain rhythm which set my right hand twitching in unison. I wanted to unlock something,
and felt that I knew all the intricate twists and pressures needed to do it. It would be like
a modern safe with a combination lock. Dream or not, I had once known and still knew. How any
dream—or scrap of unconsciously absorbed legend—could have taught me a detail so
minute, so intricate, and so complex, I did not attempt to explain to myself. I was beyond all
coherent thought. For was not this whole experience—this shocking familiarity with a set
of unknown ruins, and this monstrously exact identity of everything before me with what only
dreams and scraps of myth could have suggested—a horror beyond all reason? Probably it
was my basic conviction then—as it is now during my saner moments—that I was not
awake at all, and that the entire buried city was a fragment of febrile hallucination.

Eventually I reached the lowest level and struck off to the right of the incline.
For some shadowy reason I tried to soften my steps, even though I lost speed thereby. There
was a space I was afraid to cross on this last, deeply buried floor, and as I drew near it I
recalled what thing in that space I feared. It was merely one of the metal-barred and closely
guarded trap-doors. There would be no guards now, and on that account I trembled and tiptoed
as I had done in passing through that black basalt vault where a similar trap-door had yawned.
I felt a current of cool, damp air, as I had felt there, and wished that my course led in another
direction. Why I had to take the particular course I was taking, I did not know.

When I came to the space I saw that the trap-door yawned widely open. Ahead
the shelves began again, and I glimpsed on the floor before one of them a heap very thinly covered
with dust, where a number of cases had recently fallen. At the same moment a fresh wave of panic
clutched me, though for some time I could not discover why. Heaps of fallen cases were not uncommon,
for all through the aeons this lightless labyrinth had been racked by the heavings of earth
and had echoed at intervals to the deafening clatter of toppling objects. It was only when I
was nearly across the space that I realised why I shook so violently.

Not the heap, but something about the dust of the level floor was troubling
me. In the light of my torch it seemed as if that dust were not as even as it ought to be—there
were places where it looked thinner, as if it had been disturbed not many months before. I could
not be sure, for even the apparently thinner places were dusty enough; yet a certain suspicion
of regularity in the fancied unevenness was highly disquieting. When I brought the torchlight
close to one of the queer places I did not like what I saw—for the illusion of regularity
became very great. It was as if there were regular lines of composite impressions—impressions
that went in threes, each slightly over a foot square, and consisting of five nearly circular
three-inch prints, one in advance of the other four.

These possible lines of foot-square impressions appeared to lead in two directions,
as if something had gone somewhere and returned. They were of course very faint, and may have
been illusions or accidents; but there was an element of dim, fumbling terror about the way
I thought they ran. For at one end of them was the heap of cases which must have clattered down
not long before, while at the other end was the ominous trap-door with the cool, damp wind,
yawning unguarded down to abysses past imagination.
VIII.
That my strange sense of compulsion was deep and overwhelming is shewn by its conquest of my
fear. No rational motive could have drawn me on after that hideous suspicion of prints and the
creeping dream-memories it excited. Yet my right hand, even as it shook with fright, still twitched
rhythmically in its eagerness to turn a lock it hoped to find. Before I knew it I was past the
heap of lately fallen cases and running on tiptoe through aisles of utterly unbroken dust toward
a point which I seemed to know morbidly, horribly well. My mind was asking itself questions
whose origin and relevancy I was only beginning to guess. Would the shelf be reachable by a
human body? Could my human hand master all the aeon-remembered motions of the lock? Would the
lock be undamaged and workable? And what would I do—what dare I do—with what (as
I now commenced to realise) I both hoped and feared to find? Would it prove the awesome, brain-shattering
truth of something past normal conception, or shew only that I was dreaming?

The next I knew I had ceased my tiptoe racing and was standing still, staring
at a row of maddeningly familiar hieroglyphed shelves. They were in a state of almost perfect
preservation, and only three of the doors in this vicinity had sprung open. My feelings toward
these shelves cannot be described—so utter and insistent was the sense of old acquaintance.
I was looking high up, at a row near the top and wholly out of my reach, and wondering how I
could climb to best advantage. An open door four rows from the bottom would help, and the locks
of the closed doors formed possible holds for hands and feet. I would grip the torch between
my teeth as I had in other places where both hands were needed. Above all, I must make no noise.
How to get down what I wished to remove would be difficult, but I could probably hook its movable
fastener in my coat collar and carry it like a knapsack. Again I wondered whether the lock would
be undamaged. That I could repeat each familiar motion I had not the least doubt. But I hoped
the thing would not scrape or creak—and that my hand could work it properly.

Even as I thought these things I had taken the torch in my mouth and begun
to climb. The projecting locks were poor supports; but as I had expected, the opened shelf helped
greatly. I used both the difficultly swinging door and the edge of the aperture itself in my
ascent, and managed to avoid any loud creaking. Balanced on the upper edge of the door, and
leaning far to my right, I could just reach the lock I sought. My fingers, half-numb from climbing,
were very clumsy at first; but I soon saw that they were anatomically adequate. And the memory-rhythm
was strong in them. Out of unknown gulfs of time the intricate secret motions had somehow reached
my brain correctly in every detail—for after less than five minutes of trying there came
a click whose familiarity was all the more startling because I had not consciously anticipated
it. In another instant the metal door was slowly swinging open with only the faintest grating
sound.

Dazedly I looked over the row of greyish case-ends thus exposed, and felt a
tremendous surge of some wholly inexplicable emotion. Just within reach of my right hand was
a case whose curving hieroglyphs made me shake with a pang infinitely more complex than one
of mere fright. Still shaking, I managed to dislodge it amidst a shower of gritty flakes, and
ease it over toward myself without any violent noise. Like the other case I had handled, it
was slightly more than twenty by fifteen inches in size, with curved mathematical designs in
low relief. In thickness it just exceeded three inches. Crudely wedging it between myself and
the surface I was climbing, I fumbled with the fastener and finally got the hook free. Lifting
the cover, I shifted the heavy object to my back, and let the hook catch hold of my collar.
Hands now free, I awkwardly clambered down to the dusty floor, and prepared to inspect my prize.

Kneeling in the gritty dust, I swung the case around and rested it in front
of me. My hands shook, and I dreaded to draw out the book within almost as much as I longed—and
felt compelled—to do so. It had very gradually become clear to me what I ought to find,
and this realisation nearly paralysed my faculties. If the thing were there—and if I were
not dreaming—the implications would be quite beyond the power of the human spirit to bear.
What tormented me most was my momentary inability to feel that my surroundings were a dream.
The sense of reality was hideous—and again becomes so as I recall the scene.

At length I tremblingly pulled the book from its container and stared fascinatedly
at the well-known hieroglyphs on the cover. It seemed to be in prime condition, and the curvilinear
letters of the title held me in almost as hypnotised a state as if I could read them. Indeed,
I cannot swear that I did not actually read them in some transient and terrible access of abnormal
memory. I do not know how long it was before I dared to lift that thin metal cover. I temporised
and made excuses to myself. I took the torch from my mouth and shut it off to save the battery.
Then, in the dark, I screwed up my courage—finally lifting the cover without turning on
the light. Last of all I did indeed flash the torch upon the exposed page—steeling myself
in advance to suppress any sound no matter what I should find.

I looked for an instant, then almost collapsed. Clenching my teeth, however,
I kept silence. I sank wholly to the floor and put a hand to my forehead amidst the engulfing
blackness. What I dreaded and expected was there. Either I was dreaming, or time and space had
become a mockery. I must be dreaming—but I would test the horror by carrying this thing
back and shewing it to my son if it were indeed a reality. My head swam frightfully, even though
there were no visible objects in the unbroken gloom to swirl around me. Ideas and images of
the starkest terror—excited by vistas which my glimpse had opened up—began to throng
in upon me and cloud my senses.

I thought of those possible prints in the dust, and trembled at the sound of
my own breathing as I did so. Once again I flashed on the light and looked at the page as a
serpent’s victim may look at his destroyer’s eyes and fangs. Then, with clumsy fingers
in the dark, I closed the book, put it in its container, and snapped the lid and the curious
hooked fastener. This was what I must carry back to the outer world if it truly existed—if
the whole abyss truly existed—if I, and the world itself, truly existed.

Just when I tottered to my feet and commenced my return I cannot be certain.
It comes to me oddly—as a measure of my sense of separation from the normal world—that
I did not even once look at my watch during those hideous hours underground. Torch in hand,
and with the ominous case under one arm, I eventually found myself tiptoeing in a kind of silent
panic past the draught-giving abyss and those lurking suggestions of prints. I lessened my precautions
as I climbed up the endless inclines, but could not shake off a shadow of apprehension which
I had not felt on the downward journey.

I dreaded having to re-pass through that black basalt crypt that was older
than the city itself, where cold draughts welled up from unguarded depths. I thought of that
which the Great Race had feared, and of what might still be lurking—be it ever so weak
and dying—down there. I thought of those possible five-circle prints and of what my dreams
had told me of such prints—and of strange winds and whistling noises associated with them.
And I thought of the tales of the modern blacks, wherein the horror of great winds and nameless
subterrene ruins was dwelt upon.

I knew from a carven wall symbol the right floor to enter, and came at last—after
passing that other book I had examined—to the great circular space with the branching
archways. On my right, and at once recognisable, was the arch through which I had arrived. This
I now entered, conscious that the rest of my course would be harder because of the tumbled state
of the masonry outside the archive building. My new metal-cased burden weighed upon me, and
I found it harder and harder to be quiet as I stumbled among debris and fragments of every sort.

Then I came to the ceiling-high mound of debris through which I had wrenched
a scanty passage. My dread at wriggling through again was infinite; for my first passage had
made some noise, and I now—after seeing those possible prints—dreaded sound above
all things. The case, too, doubled the problem of traversing the narrow crevice. But I clambered
up the barrier as best I could, and pushed the case through the aperture ahead of me. Then,
torch in mouth, I scrambled through myself—my back torn as before by stalactites. As I
tried to grasp the case again, it fell some distance ahead of me down the slope of the debris,
making a disturbing clatter and arousing echoes which sent me into a cold perspiration. I lunged
for it at once, and regained it without further noise—but a moment afterward the slipping
of blocks under my feet raised a sudden and unprecedented din.

The din was my undoing. For, falsely or not, I thought I heard it answered
in a terrible way from spaces far behind me. I thought I heard a shrill, whistling sound, like
nothing else on earth, and beyond any adequate verbal description. It may have been only my
imagination. If so, what followed has a grim irony—since, save for the panic of this thing,
the second thing might never have happened.

As it was, my frenzy was absolute and unrelieved. Taking my torch in my hand
and clutching feebly at the case, I leaped and bounded wildly ahead with no idea in my brain
beyond a mad desire to race out of these nightmare ruins to the waking world of desert and moonlight
which lay so far above. I hardly knew it when I reached the mountain of debris which towered
into the vast blackness beyond the caved-in roof, and bruised and cut myself repeatedly in scrambling
up its steep slope of jagged blocks and fragments. Then came the great disaster. Just as I blindly
crossed the summit, unprepared for the sudden dip ahead, my feet slipped utterly and I found
myself involved in a mangling avalanche of sliding masonry whose cannon-loud uproar split the
black cavern air in a deafening series of earth-shaking reverberations.

I have no recollection of emerging from this chaos, but a momentary fragment
of consciousness shews me as plunging and tripping and scrambling along the corridor amidst
the clangour—case and torch still with me. Then, just as I approached that primal basalt
crypt I had so dreaded, utter madness came. For as the echoes of the avalanche died down, there
became audible a repetition of that frightful, alien whistling I thought I had heard before.
This time there was no doubt about it—and what was worse, it came from a point not behind
but
ahead of me.

Probably I shrieked aloud then. I have a dim picture of myself as flying through
the hellish basalt vault of the Elder Things, and hearing that damnable alien sound piping up
from the open, unguarded door of limitless nether blacknesses. There was a wind, too—not
merely a cool, damp draught, but a violent, purposeful blast belching savagely and frigidly
from that abominable gulf whence the obscene whistling came.

There are memories of leaping and lurching over obstacles of every sort, with
that torrent of wind and shrieking sound growing moment by moment, and seeming to curl and twist
purposefully around me as it struck out wickedly from the spaces behind and beneath. Though
in my rear, that wind had the odd effect of hindering instead of aiding my progress; as if it
acted like a noose or lasso thrown around me. Heedless of the noise I made, I clattered over
a great barrier of blocks and was again in the structure that led to the surface. I recall glimpsing
the archway to the room of machines and almost crying out as I saw the incline leading down
to where one of those blasphemous trap-doors must be yawning two levels below. But instead of
crying out I muttered over and over to myself that this was all a dream from which I must soon
awake. Perhaps I was in camp—perhaps I was at home in Arkham. As these hopes bolstered
up my sanity I began to mount the incline to the higher level.

I knew, of course, that I had the four-foot cleft to re-cross, yet was too
racked by other fears to realise the full horror until I came almost upon it. On my descent,
the leap across had been easy—but could I clear the gap as readily when going uphill,
and hampered by fright, exhaustion, the weight of the metal case, and the anomalous backward
tug of that daemon wind? I thought of these things at the last moment, and thought also of the
nameless entities which might be lurking in the black abysses below the chasm.

My wavering torch was growing feeble, but I could tell by some obscure memory
when I neared the cleft. The chill blasts of wind and the nauseous whistling shrieks behind
me were for the moment like a merciful opiate, dulling my imagination to the horror of the yawning
gulf ahead. And then I became aware of the added blasts and whistling
in front of me—tides
of abomination surging up through the cleft itself from depths unimagined and unimaginable.

Now, indeed, the essence of pure nightmare was upon me. Sanity departed—and
ignoring everything except the animal impulse of flight, I merely struggled and plunged upward
over the incline’s debris as if no gulf had existed. Then I saw the chasm’s edge,
leaped frenziedly with every ounce of strength I possessed, and was instantly engulfed in a
pandaemoniac vortex of loathsome sound and utter, materially tangible blackness.

This is the end of my experience, so far as I can recall. Any further impressions
belong wholly to the domain of phantasmagoric delirium. Dream, madness, and memory merged wildly
together in a series of fantastic, fragmentary delusions which can have no relation to anything
real. There was a hideous fall through incalculable leagues of viscous, sentient darkness, and
a babel of noises utterly alien to all that we know of the earth and its organic life. Dormant,
rudimentary senses seemed to start into vitality within me, telling of pits and voids peopled
by floating horrors and leading to sunless crags and oceans and teeming cities of windowless
basalt towers upon which no light ever shone.

Secrets of the primal planet and its immemorial aeons flashed through my brain
without the aid of sight or sound, and there were known to me things which not even the wildest
of my former dreams had ever suggested. And all the while cold fingers of damp vapour clutched
and picked at me, and that eldritch, damnable whistling shrieked fiendishly above all the alternations
of babel and silence in the whirlpools of darkness around.

Afterward there were visions of the Cyclopean city of my dreams—not in
ruins, but just as I had dreamed of it. I was in my conical, non-human body again, and mingled
with crowds of the Great Race and the captive minds who carried books up and down the lofty
corridors and vast inclines. Then, superimposed upon these pictures, were frightful momentary
flashes of a non-visual consciousness involving desperate struggles, a writhing free from clutching
tentacles of whistling wind, an insane, bat-like flight through half-solid air, a feverish burrowing
through the cyclone-whipped dark, and a wild stumbling and scrambling over fallen masonry.

Once there was a curious, intrusive flash of half-sight—a faint, diffuse
suspicion of bluish radiance far overhead. Then there came a dream of wind-pursued climbing
and crawling—of wriggling into a blaze of sardonic moonlight through a jumble of debris
which slid and collapsed after me amidst a morbid hurricane. It was the evil, monotonous beating
of that maddening moonlight which at last told me of the return of what I had once known as
the objective, waking world.

I was clawing prone through the sands of the Australian desert, and around
me shrieked such a tumult of wind as I had never before known on our planet’s surface.
My clothing was in rags, and my whole body was a mass of bruises and scratches. Full consciousness
returned very slowly, and at no time could I tell just where true memory left off and delirious
dream began. There had seemed to be a mound of titan blocks, an abyss beneath it, a monstrous
revelation from the past, and a nightmare horror at the end—but how much of this was real?
My flashlight was gone, and likewise any metal case I may have discovered. Had there been such
a case—or any abyss—or any mound? Raising my head, I looked behind me, and saw only
the sterile, undulant sands of the waste.

The daemon wind died down, and the bloated, fungoid moon sank reddeningly in
the west. I lurched to my feet and began to stagger southwestward toward the camp. What in truth
had happened to me? Had I merely collapsed in the desert and dragged a dream-racked body over
miles of sand and buried blocks? If not, how could I bear to live any longer? For in this new
doubt all my faith in the myth-born unreality of my visions dissolved once more into the hellish
older doubting. If that abyss was real, then the Great Race was real—and its blasphemous
reachings and seizures in the cosmos-wide vortex of time were no myths or nightmares, but a
terrible, soul-shattering actuality.

Had I, in full hideous fact, been drawn back to a pre-human world of a hundred
and fifty million years ago in those dark, baffling days of the amnesia? Had my present body
been the vehicle of a frightful alien consciousness from palaeogean gulfs of time? Had I, as
the captive mind of those shambling horrors, indeed known that accursed city of stone in its
primordial heyday, and wriggled down those familiar corridors in the loathsome shape of my captor?
Were those tormenting dreams of more than twenty years the offspring of stark, monstrous
memories? Had I once veritably talked with minds from reachless corners of time and space,
learned the universe’s secrets past and to come, and written the annals of my own world
for the metal cases of those titan archives? And were those others—those shocking Elder
Things of the mad winds and daemon pipings—in truth a lingering, lurking menace, waiting
and slowly weakening in black abysses while varied shapes of life drag out their multimillennial
courses on the planet’s age-racked surface?

I do not know. If that abyss and what it held were real, there is no hope.
Then, all too truly, there lies upon this world of man a mocking and incredible shadow out of
time. But mercifully, there is no proof that these things are other than fresh phases of my
myth-born dreams. I did not bring back the metal case that would have been a proof, and so far
those subterrene corridors have not been found. If the laws of the universe are kind, they will
never be found. But I must tell my son what I saw or thought I saw, and let him use his judgment
as a psychologist in gauging the reality of my experience, and communicating this account to
others.

I have said that the awful truth behind my tortured years of dreaming hinges
absolutely upon the actuality of what I thought I saw in those Cyclopean buried ruins. It has
been hard for me literally to set down the crucial revelation, though no reader can have failed
to guess it. Of course it lay in that book within the metal case—the case which I pried
out of its forgotten lair amidst the undisturbed dust of a million centuries. No eye had seen,
no hand had touched that book since the advent of man to this planet. And yet, when I flashed
my torch upon it in that frightful megalithic abyss, I saw that the queerly pigmented letters
on the brittle, aeon-browned cellulose pages were not indeed any nameless hieroglyphs of earth’s
youth. They were, instead, the letters of our familiar alphabet, spelling out the words of the
English language in my own handwriting.