The Mound
By H. P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop
I.
It is only within the last few years that
most people have stopped thinking of the West
as a new land. I suppose the idea gained ground
because our own especial civilisation happens
to be new there; but nowadays explorers are
digging beneath the surface and bringing up
whole chapters of life that rose and fell
among these plains and mountains before recorded
history began. We think nothing of a Pueblo
village 2500 years old, and it hardly jolts
us when archaeologists put the sub-pedregal
culture of Mexico back to 17,000 or 18,000
B. C. We hear rumours of still older things,
too—of primitive man contemporaneous with
extinct animals and known today only through
a few fragmentary bones and artifacts—so
that the idea of newness is fading out pretty
rapidly. Europeans usually catch the sense
of immemorial ancientness and deep deposits
from successive life-streams better than we
do. Only a couple of years ago a British author
spoke of Arizona as a “moon-dim region,
very lovely in its way, and stark and old—an
ancient, lonely land”.
Yet I believe I have a deeper sense of the
stupefying—almost horrible—ancientness
of the West than any European. It all comes
from an incident that happened in 1928; an
incident which I’d greatly like to dismiss
as three-quarters hallucination, but which
has left such a frightfully firm impression
on my memory that I can’t put it off very
easily. It was in Oklahoma, where my work
as an American Indian ethnologist constantly
takes me and where I had come upon some devilishly
strange and disconcerting matters before.
Make no mistake—Oklahoma is a lot more than
a mere pioneers’ and promoters’ frontier.
There are old, old tribes with old, old memories
there; and when the tom-toms beat ceaselessly
over brooding plains in the autumn the spirits
of men are brought dangerously close to primal,
whispered things. I am white and Eastern enough
myself, but anybody is welcome to know that
the rites of Yig, Father of Snakes, can get
a real shudder out of me any day. I have heard
and seen too much to be “sophisticated”
in such matters. And so it is with this incident
of 1928. I’d like to laugh it off—but
I can’t.
I had gone into Oklahoma to track down and
correlate one of the many ghost tales which
were current among the white settlers, but
which had strong Indian corroboration, and—I
felt sure—an ultimate Indian source. They
were very curious, these open-air ghost tales;
and though they sounded flat and prosaic in
the mouths of the white people, they had earmarks
of linkage with some of the richest and obscurest
phases of native mythology. All of them were
woven around the vast, lonely, artificial-looking
mounds in the western part of the state, and
all of them involved apparitions of exceedingly
strange aspect and equipment.
The commonest, and among the oldest, became
quite famous in 1892, when a government marshal
named John Willis went into the mound region
after horse-thieves and came out with a wild
yarn of nocturnal cavalry horses in the air
between great armies of invisible spectres—battles
that involved the rush of hooves and feet,
the thud of blows, the clank of metal on metal,
the muffled cries of warriors, and the fall
of human and equine bodies. These things happened
by moonlight, and frightened his horse as
well as himself. The sounds persisted an hour
at a time; vivid, but subdued as if brought
from a distance by a wind, and unaccompanied
by any glimpse of the armies themselves. Later
on Willis learned that the seat of the sounds
was a notoriously haunted spot, shunned by
settlers and Indians alike. Many had seen,
or half seen, the warring horsemen in the
sky, and had furnished dim, ambiguous descriptions.
The settlers described the ghostly fighters
as Indians, though of no familiar tribe, and
having the most singular costumes and weapons.
They even went so far as to say that they
could not be sure the horses were really horses.
The Indians, on the other hand, did not seem
to claim the spectres as kinsfolk. They referred
to them as “those people”, “the old
people”, or “they who dwell below”,
and appeared to hold them in too great a frightened
veneration to talk much about them. No ethnologist
had been able to pin any tale-teller down
to a specific description of the beings, and
apparently nobody had ever had a very clear
look at them. The Indians had one or two old
proverbs about these phenomena, saying that
“men very old, make very big spirit; not
so old, not so big; older than all time, then
spirit he so big he near flesh; those old
people and spirits they mix up—get all the
same”.
Now all of this, of course, is “old stuff”
to an ethnologist—of a piece with the persistent
legends of rich hidden cities and buried races
which abound among the Pueblo and plains Indians,
and which lured Coronado centuries ago on
his vain search for the fabled Quivira. What
took me into western Oklahoma was something
far more definite and tangible—a local and
distinctive tale which, though really old,
was wholly new to the outside world of research,
and which involved the first clear descriptions
of the ghosts which it treated of. There was
an added thrill in the fact that it came from
the remote town of Binger, in Caddo County,
a place I had long known as the scene of a
very terrible and partly inexplicable occurrence
connected with the snake-god myth.
The tale, outwardly, was an extremely naive
and simple one, and centred in a huge, lone
mound or small hill that rose above the plain
about a third of a mile west of the village—a
mound which some thought a product of Nature,
but which others believed to be a burial-place
or ceremonial dais constructed by prehistoric
tribes. This mound, the villagers said, was
constantly haunted by two Indian figures which
appeared in alternation; an old man who paced
back and forth along the top from dawn till
dusk, regardless of the weather and with only
brief intervals of disappearance, and a squaw
who took his place at night with a blue-flamed
torch that glimmered quite continuously till
morning. When the moon was bright the squaw’s
peculiar figure could be seen fairly plainly,
and over half the villagers agreed that the
apparition was headless.
Local opinion was divided as to the motives
and relative ghostliness of the two visions.
Some held that the man was not a ghost at
all, but a living Indian who had killed and
beheaded a squaw for gold and buried her somewhere
on the mound. According to these theorists
he was pacing the eminence through sheer remorse,
bound by the spirit of his victim which took
visible shape after dark. But other theorists,
more uniform in their spectral beliefs, held
that both man and woman were ghosts; the man
having killed the squaw and himself as well
at some very distant period. These and minor
variant versions seemed to have been current
ever since the settlement of the Wichita country
in 1889, and were, I was told, sustained to
an astonishing degree by still-existing phenomena
which anyone might observe for himself. Not
many ghost tales offer such free and open
proof, and I was very eager to see what bizarre
wonders might be lurking in this small, obscure
village so far from the beaten path of crowds
and from the ruthless searchlight of scientific
knowledge. So, in the late summer of 1928
I took a train for Binger and brooded on strange
mysteries as the cars rattled timidly along
their single track through a lonelier and
lonelier landscape.
Binger is a modest cluster of frame houses
and stores in the midst of a flat windy region
full of clouds of red dust. There are about
500 inhabitants besides the Indians on a neighbouring
reservation; the principal occupation seeming
to be agriculture. The soil is decently fertile,
and the oil boom has not reached this part
of the state. My train drew in at twilight,
and I felt rather lost and uneasy—cut off
from wholesome and every-day things—as it
puffed away to the southward without me. The
station platform was filled with curious loafers,
all of whom seemed eager to direct me when
I asked for the man to whom I had letters
of introduction. I was ushered along a commonplace
main street whose rutted surface was red with
the sandstone soil of the country, and finally
delivered at the door of my prospective host.
Those who had arranged things for me had done
well; for Mr. Compton was a man of high intelligence
and local responsibility, while his mother—who
lived with him and was familiarly known as
“Grandma Compton”—was one of the first
pioneer generation, and a veritable mine of
anecdote and folklore.
That evening the Comptons summed up for me
all the legends current among the villagers,
proving that the phenomenon I had come to
study was indeed a baffling and important
one. The ghosts, it seems, were accepted almost
as a matter of course by everyone in Binger.
Two generations had been born and grown up
within sight of that queer, lone tumulus and
its restless figures. The neighbourhood of
the mound was naturally feared and shunned,
so that the village and the farms had not
spread toward it in all four decades of settlement;
yet venturesome individuals had several times
visited it. Some had come back to report that
they saw no ghosts at all when they neared
the dreaded hill; that somehow the lone sentinel
had stepped out of sight before they reached
the spot, leaving them free to climb the steep
slope and explore the flat summit. There was
nothing up there, they said—merely a rough
expanse of underbrush. Where the Indian watcher
could have vanished to, they had no idea.
He must, they reflected, have descended the
slope and somehow managed to escape unseen
along the plain; although there was no convenient
cover within sight. At any rate, there did
not appear to be any opening into the mound;
a conclusion which was reached after considerable
exploration of the shrubbery and tall grass
on all sides. In a few cases some of the more
sensitive searchers declared that they felt
a sort of invisible restraining presence;
but they could describe nothing more definite
than that. It was simply as if the air thickened
against them in the direction they wished
to move. It is needless to mention that all
these daring surveys were conducted by day.
Nothing in the universe could have induced
any human being, white or red, to approach
that sinister elevation after dark; and indeed,
no Indian would have thought of going near
it even in the brightest sunlight.
But it was not from the tales of these sane,
observant seekers that the chief terror of
the ghost-mound sprang; indeed, had their
experience been typical, the phenomenon would
have bulked far less prominently in the local
legendry. The most evil thing was the fact
that many other seekers had come back strangely
impaired in mind and body, or had not come
back at all. The first of these cases had
occurred in 1891, when a young man named Heaton
had gone with a shovel to see what hidden
secrets he could unearth. He had heard curious
tales from the Indians, and had laughed at
the barren report of another youth who had
been out to the mound and had found nothing.
Heaton had watched the mound with a spy glass
from the village while the other youth made
his trip; and as the explorer neared the spot,
he saw the sentinel Indian walk deliberately
down into the tumulus as if a trap-door and
staircase existed on the top. The other youth
had not noticed how the Indian disappeared,
but had merely found him gone upon arriving
at the mound.
When Heaton made his own trip he resolved
to get to the bottom of the mystery, and watchers
from the village saw him hacking diligently
at the shrubbery atop the mound. Then they
saw his figure melt slowly into invisibility;
not to reappear for long hours, till after
the dusk drew on, and the torch of the headless
squaw glimmered ghoulishly on the distant
elevation. About two hours after nightfall
he staggered into the village minus his spade
and other belongings, and burst into a shrieking
monologue of disconnected ravings. He howled
of shocking abysses and monsters, of terrible
carvings and statues, of inhuman captors and
grotesque tortures, and of other fantastic
abnormalities too complex and chimerical even
to remember. “Old! Old! Old!” he would
moan over and over again, “great God, they
are older than the earth, and came here from
somewhere else—they know what you think,
and make you know what they think—they’re
half-man, half-ghost—crossed the line—melt
and take shape again—getting more and more
so, yet we’re all descended from them in
the beginning—children of Tulu—everything
made of gold—monstrous animals, half-human—dead
slaves—madness—Iä! Shub-Niggurath!—that
white man—oh, my God, what they did to him!
. . .”
Heaton was the village idiot for about eight
years, after which he died in an epileptic
fit. Since his ordeal there had been two more
cases of mound-madness, and eight of total
disappearance. Immediately after Heaton’s
mad return, three desperate and determined
men had gone out to the lone hill together;
heavily armed, and with spades and pickaxes.
Watching villagers saw the Indian ghost melt
away as the explorers drew near, and afterward
saw the men climb the mound and begin scouting
around through the underbrush. All at once
they faded into nothingness, and were never
seen again. One watcher, with an especially
powerful telescope, thought he saw other forms
dimly materialise beside the hapless men and
drag them down into the mound; but this account
remained uncorroborated. It is needless to
say that no searching-party went out after
the lost ones, and that for many years the
mound was wholly unvisited. Only when the
incidents of 1891 were largely forgotten did
anybody dare to think of further explorations.
Then, about 1910, a fellow too young to recall
the old horrors made a trip to the shunned
spot and found nothing at all.
By 1915 the acute dread and wild legendry
of ’91 had largely faded into the commonplace
and unimaginative ghost-tales at present surviving—that
is, had so faded among the white people. On
the nearby reservation were old Indians who
thought much and kept their own counsel. About
this time a second wave of active curiosity
and adventuring developed, and several bold
searchers made the trip to the mound and returned.
Then came a trip of two Eastern visitors with
spades and other apparatus—a pair of amateur
archaeologists connected with a small college,
who had been making studies among the Indians.
No one watched this trip from the village,
but they never came back. The searching-party
that went out after them—among whom was
my host Clyde Compton—found nothing whatsoever
amiss at the mound.
The next trip was the solitary venture of
old Capt. Lawton, a grizzled pioneer who had
helped to open up the region in 1889, but
who had never been there since. He had recalled
the mound and its fascination all through
the years; and being now in comfortable retirement,
resolved to have a try at solving the ancient
riddle. Long familiarity with Indian myth
had given him ideas rather stranger than those
of the simple villagers, and he had made preparations
for some extensive delving. He ascended the
mound on the morning of Thursday, May 11,
1916, watched through spy glasses by more
than twenty people in the village and on the
adjacent plain. His disappearance was very
sudden, and occurred as he was hacking at
the shrubbery with a brush-cutter. No one
could say more than that he was there one
moment and absent the next. For over a week
no tidings of him reached Binger, and then—in
the middle of the night—there dragged itself
into the village the object about which dispute
still rages.
It said it was—or had been—Capt. Lawton,
but it was definitely younger by as much as
forty years than the old man who had climbed
the mound. Its hair was jet black, and its
face—now distorted with nameless fright—free
from wrinkles. But it did remind Grandma Compton
most uncannily of the captain as he had looked
back in ’89. Its feet were cut off neatly
at the ankles, and the stumps were smoothly
healed to an extent almost incredible if the
being really were the man who had walked upright
a week before. It babbled of incomprehensible
things, and kept repeating the name “George
Lawton, George E. Lawton” as if trying to
reassure itself of its own identity. The things
it babbled of, Grandma Compton thought, were
curiously like the hallucinations of poor
young Heaton in ’91; though there were minor
differences. “The blue light!—the blue
light! . . .” muttered the object, “always
down there, before there were any living things—older
than the dinosaurs—always the same, only
weaker—never death—brooding and brooding
and brooding—the same people, half-man and
half-gas—the dead that walk and work—oh,
those beasts, those half-human unicorns—houses
and cities of gold—old, old, old, older
than time—came down from the stars—Great
Tulu—Azathoth—Nyarlathotep—waiting,
waiting. . . .” The object died before dawn.
Of course there was an investigation, and
the Indians at the reservation were grilled
unmercifully. But they knew nothing, and had
nothing to say. At least, none of them had
anything to say except old Grey Eagle, a Wichita
chieftain whose more than a century of age
put him above common fears. He alone deigned
to grunt some advice.
“You let um ’lone, white man. No good—those
people. All under here, all under there, them
old ones. Yig, big father of snakes, he there.
Yig is Yig. Tiráwa, big father of men, he
there. Tiráwa is Tiráwa. No die. No get
old. Just same like air. Just live and wait.
One time they come out here, live and fight.
Build um dirt tepee. Bring up gold—they
got plenty. Go off and make new lodges. Me
them. You them. Then big waters come. All
change. Nobody come out, let nobody in. Get
in, no get out. You let um ’lone, you have
no bad medicine. Red man know, he no get catch.
White man meddle, he no come back. Keep ’way
little hills. No good. Grey Eagle say this.”
If Joe Norton and Rance Wheelock had taken
the old chief’s advice, they would probably
be here today; but they didn’t. They were
great readers and materialists, and feared
nothing in heaven or earth; and they thought
that some Indian fiends had a secret headquarters
inside the mound. They had been to the mound
before, and now they went again to avenge
old Capt. Lawton—boasting that they’d
do it if they had to tear the mound down altogether.
Clyde Compton watched them with a pair of
prism binoculars and saw them round the base
of the sinister hill. Evidently they meant
to survey their territory very gradually and
minutely. Minutes passed, and they did not
reappear. Nor were they ever seen again.
Once more the mound was a thing of panic fright,
and only the excitement of the Great War served
to restore it to the farther background of
Binger folklore. It was unvisited from 1916
to 1919, and would have remained so but for
the daredeviltry of some of the youths back
from service in France. From 1919 to 1920,
however, there was a veritable epidemic of
mound-visiting among the prematurely hardened
young veterans—an epidemic that waxed as
one youth after another returned unhurt and
contemptuous. By 1920—so short is human
memory—the mound was almost a joke; and
the tame story of the murdered squaw began
to displace darker whispers on everybody’s
tongues. Then two reckless young brothers—the
especially unimaginative and hard-boiled Clay
boys—decided to go and dig up the buried
squaw and the gold for which the old Indian
had murdered her.
They went out on a September afternoon—about
the time the Indian tom-toms begin their incessant
annual beating over the flat, red-dusty plains.
Nobody watched them, and their parents did
not become worried at their non-return for
several hours. Then came an alarm and a searching-party,
and another resignation to the mystery of
silence and doubt.
But one of them came back after all. It was
Ed, the elder, and his straw-coloured hair
and beard had turned an albino white for two
inches from the roots. On his forehead was
a queer scar like a branded hieroglyph. Three
months after he and his brother Walker had
vanished he skulked into his house at night,
wearing nothing but a queerly patterned blanket
which he thrust into the fire as soon as he
had got into a suit of his own clothes. He
told his parents that he and Walker had been
captured by some strange Indians—not Wichitas
or Caddos—and held prisoners somewhere toward
the west. Walker had died under torture, but
he himself had managed to escape at a high
cost. The experience had been particularly
terrible, and he could not talk about it just
then. He must rest—and anyway, it would
do no good to give an alarm and try to find
and punish the Indians. They were not of a
sort that could be caught or punished, and
it was especially important for the good of
Binger—for the good of the world—that
they be not pursued into their secret lair.
As a matter of fact, they were not altogether
what one could call real Indians—he would
explain about that later. Meanwhile he must
rest. Better not to rouse the village with
the news of his return—he would go upstairs
and sleep. Before he climbed the rickety flight
to his room he took a pad and pencil from
the living-room table, and an automatic pistol
from his father’s desk drawer.
Three hours later the shot rang out. Ed Clay
had put a bullet neatly through his temples
with a pistol clutched in his left hand, leaving
a sparsely written sheet of paper on the rickety
table near his bed. He had, it later appeared
from the whittled pencil-stub and stove full
of charred paper, originally written much
more; but had finally decided not to tell
what he knew beyond vague hints. The surviving
fragment was only a mad warning scrawled in
a curiously backhanded script—the ravings
of a mind obviously deranged by hardships—and
it read thus; rather surprisingly for the
utterance of one who had always been stolid
and matter-of-fact:
For gods sake never go nere that mound it
is part of some kind of a world so devilish
and old it cannot be spoke about me and Walker
went and was took into the thing just melted
at times and made up agen and the whole world
outside is helpless alongside of what they
can do—they what live forever young as they
like and you cant tell if they are really
men or just gostes—and what they do cant
be spoke about and this is only 1 entrance—you
cant tell how big the whole thing is—after
what we seen I dont want to live aney more
France was nothing besides this—and see
that people always keep away o god they wood
if they see poor walker like he was in the
end.
Yrs truely
Ed Clay
At the autopsy it was found that all of young
Clay’s organs were transposed from right
to left within his body, as if he had been
turned inside out. Whether they had always
been so, no one could say at the time, but
it was later learned from army records that
Ed had been perfectly normal when mustered
out of the service in May, 1919. Whether there
was a mistake somewhere, or whether some unprecedented
metamorphosis had indeed occurred, is still
an unsettled question, as is also the origin
of the hieroglyph-like scar on the forehead.
That was the end of the explorations of the
mound. In the eight intervening years no one
had been near the place, and few indeed had
even cared to level a spy glass at it. From
time to time people continued to glance nervously
at the lone hill as it rose starkly from the
plain against the western sky, and to shudder
at the small dark speck that paraded by day
and the glimmering will-o’-the-wisp that
danced by night. The thing was accepted at
face value as a mystery not to be probed,
and by common consent the village shunned
the subject. It was, after all, quite easy
to avoid the hill; for space was unlimited
in every direction, and community life always
follows beaten trails. The mound side of the
village was simply kept trailless, as if it
had been water or swampland or desert. And
it is a curious commentary on the stolidity
and imaginative sterility of the human animal
that the whispers with which children and
strangers were warned away from the mound
quickly sank once more into the flat tale
of a murderous Indian ghost and his squaw
victim. Only the tribesmen on the reservation,
and thoughtful old-timers like Grandma Compton,
remembered the overtones of unholy vistas
and deep cosmic menace which clustered around
the ravings of those who had come back changed
and shattered.
It was very late, and Grandma Compton had
long since gone upstairs to bed, when Clyde
finished telling me this. I hardly knew what
to think of the frightful puzzle, yet rebelled
at any notion to conflict with sane materialism.
What influence had brought madness, or the
impulse of flight and wandering, to so many
who had visited the mound? Though vastly impressed,
I was spurred on rather than deterred. Surely
I must get to the bottom of this matter, as
well I might if I kept a cool head and an
unbroken determination. Compton saw my mood
and shook his head worriedly. Then he motioned
me to follow him outdoors.
We stepped from the frame house to the quiet
side street or lane, and walked a few paces
in the light of a waning August moon to where
the houses were thinner. The half-moon was
still low, and had not blotted many stars
from the sky; so that I could see not only
the westering gleams of Altair and Vega, but
the mystic shimmering of the Milky Way, as
I looked out over the vast expanse of earth
and sky in the direction that Compton pointed.
Then all at once I saw a spark that was not
a star—a bluish spark that moved and glimmered
against the Milky Way near the horizon, and
that seemed in a vague way more evil and malevolent
than anything in the vault above. In another
moment it was clear that this spark came from
the top of a long distant rise in the outspread
and faintly litten plain; and I turned to
Compton with a question.
“Yes,” he answered, “it’s the blue
ghost-light—and that is the mound. There’s
not a night in history that we haven’t seen
it—and not a living soul in Binger that
would walk out over that plain toward it.
It’s a bad business, young man, and if you’re
wise you’ll let it rest where it is. Better
call your search off, son, and tackle some
of the other Injun legends around here. We’ve
plenty to keep you busy, heaven knows!”
II.
But I was in no mood for advice; and though
Compton gave me a pleasant room, I could not
sleep a wink through eagerness for the next
morning with its chances to see the daytime
ghost and to question the Indians at the reservation.
I meant to go about the whole thing slowly
and thoroughly, equipping myself with all
available data both white and red before I
commenced any actual archaeological investigations.
I rose and dressed at dawn, and when I heard
others stirring I went downstairs. Compton
was building the kitchen fire while his mother
was busy in the pantry. When he saw me he
nodded, and after a moment invited me out
into the glamorous young sunlight. I knew
where we were going, and as we walked along
the lane I strained my eyes westward over
the plains.
There was the mound—far away and very curious
in its aspect of artificial regularity. It
must have been from thirty to forty feet high,
and all of a hundred yards from north to south
as I looked at it. It was not as wide as that
from east to west, Compton said, but had the
contour of a rather thinnish ellipse. He,
I knew, had been safely out to it and back
several times. As I looked at the rim silhouetted
against the deep blue of the west I tried
to follow its minor irregularities, and became
impressed with a sense of something moving
upon it. My pulse mounted a bit feverishly,
and I seized quickly on the high-powered binoculars
which Compton had quietly offered me. Focussing
them hastily, I saw at first only a tangle
of underbrush on the distant mound’s rim—and
then something stalked into the field.
It was unmistakably a human shape, and I knew
at once that I was seeing the daytime “Indian
ghost”. I did not wonder at the description,
for surely the tall, lean, darkly robed being
with the filleted black hair and seamed, coppery,
expressionless, aquiline face looked more
like an Indian than anything else in my previous
experience. And yet my trained ethnologist’s
eye told me at once that this was no redskin
of any sort hitherto known to history, but
a creature of vast racial variation and of
a wholly different culture-stream. Modern
Indians are brachycephalic—round-headed—and
you can’t find any dolichocephalic or long-headed
skulls except in ancient Pueblo deposits dating
back 2500 years or more; yet this man’s
long-headedness was so pronounced that I recognised
it at once, even at his vast distance and
in the uncertain field of the binoculars.
I saw, too, that the pattern of his robe represented
a decorative tradition utterly remote from
anything we recognise in southwestern native
art. There were shining metal trappings, likewise,
and a short sword or kindred weapon at his
side, all wrought in a fashion wholly alien
to anything I had ever heard of.
As he paced back and forth along the top of
the mound I followed him for several minutes
with the glass, noting the kinaesthetic quality
of his stride and the poised way he carried
his head; and there was borne in upon me the
strong, persistent conviction that this man,
whoever or whatever he might be, was certainly
not a savage. He was the product of a civilisation,
I felt instinctively, though of what civilisation
I could not guess. At length he disappeared
beyond the farther edge of the mound, as if
descending the opposite and unseen slope;
and I lowered the glass with a curious mixture
of puzzled feelings. Compton was looking quizzically
at me, and I nodded non-committally, “What
do you make of that?” he ventured. “This
is what we’ve seen here in Binger every
day of our lives.”
That noon found me at the Indian reservation
talking with old Grey Eagle—who, through
some miracle, was still alive; though he must
have been close to a hundred and fifty years
old. He was a strange, impressive figure—this
stern, fearless leader of his kind who had
talked with outlaws and traders in fringed
buckskin and French officials in knee-breeches
and three-cornered hats—and I was glad to
see that, because of my air of deference toward
him, he appeared to like me. His liking, however,
took an unfortunately obstructive form as
soon as he learned what I wanted; for all
he would do was to warn me against the search
I was about to make.
“You good boy—you no bother that hill.
Bad medicine. Plenty devil under there—catchum
when you dig. No dig, no hurt. Go and dig,
no come back. Just same when me boy, just
same when my father and he father boy. All
time buck he walk in day, squaw with no head
she walk in night. All time since white man
with tin coats they come from sunset and below
big river—long way back—three, four times
more back than Grey Eagle—two times more
back than Frenchmen—all same after then.
More back than that, nobody go near little
hills nor deep valleys with stone caves. Still
more back, those old ones no hide, come out
and make villages. Bring plenty gold. Me them.
You them. Then big waters come. All change.
Nobody come out, let nobody in. Get in, no
get out. They no die—no get old like Grey
Eagle with valleys in face and snow on head.
Just same like air—some man, some spirit.
Bad medicine. Sometimes at night spirit come
out on half-man–half-horse-with-horn and
fight where men once fight. Keep ’way them
place. No good. You good boy—go ’way and
let them old ones ’lone.”
That was all I could get out of the ancient
chief, and the rest of the Indians would say
nothing at all. But if I was troubled, Grey
Eagle was clearly more so; for he obviously
felt a real regret at the thought of my invading
the region he feared so abjectly. As I turned
to leave the reservation he stopped me for
a final ceremonial farewell, and once more
tried to get my promise to abandon my search.
When he saw that he could not, he produced
something half-timidly from a buckskin pouch
he wore, and extended it toward me very solemnly.
It was a worn but finely minted metal disc
about two inches in diameter, oddly figured
and perforated, and suspended from a leathern
cord.
“You no promise, then Grey Eagle no can
tell what get you. But if anything help um,
this good medicine. Come from my father—he
get from he father—he get from he father—all
way back, close to Tiráwa, all men’s father.
My father say, ‘You keep ’way from those
old ones, keep ’way from little hills and
valleys with stone caves. But if old ones
they come out to get you, then you shew um
this medicine. They know. They make him long
way back. They look, then they no do such
bad medicine maybe. But no can tell. You keep
’way, just same. Them no good. No tell what
they do.’”
As he spoke, Grey Eagle was hanging the thing
around my neck, and I saw it was a very curious
object indeed. The more I looked at it, the
more I marvelled; for not only was its heavy,
darkish, lustrous, and richly mottled substance
an absolutely strange metal to me, but what
was left of its design seemed to be of a marvellously
artistic and utterly unknown workmanship.
One side, so far as I could see, had borne
an exquisitely modelled serpent design; whilst
the other side had depicted a kind of octopus
or other tentacled monster. There were some
half-effaced hieroglyphs, too, of a kind which
no archaeologist could identify or even place
conjecturally. With Grey Eagle’s permission
I later had expert historians, anthropologists,
geologists, and chemists pass carefully upon
the disc, but from them I obtained only a
chorus of bafflement. It defied either classification
or analysis. The chemists called it an amalgam
of unknown metallic elements of heavy atomic
weight, and one geologist suggested that the
substance must be of meteoric origin, shot
from unknown gulfs of interstellar space.
Whether it really saved my life or sanity
or existence as a human being I cannot attempt
to say, but Grey Eagle is sure of it. He has
it again, now, and I wonder if it has any
connexion with his inordinate age. All his
fathers who had it lived far beyond the century
mark, perishing only in battle. Is it possible
that Grey Eagle, if kept from accidents, will
never die? But I am ahead of my story.
When I returned to the village I tried to
secure more mound-lore, but found only excited
gossip and opposition. It was really flattering
to see how solicitous the people were about
my safety, but I had to set their almost frantic
remonstrances aside. I shewed them Grey Eagle’s
charm, but none of them had ever heard of
it before, or seen anything even remotely
like it. They agreed that it could not be
an Indian relic, and imagined that the old
chief’s ancestors must have obtained it
from some trader.
When they saw they could not deter me from
my trip, the Binger citizens sadly did what
they could to aid my outfitting. Having known
before my arrival the sort of work to be done,
I had most of my supplies already with me—machete
and trench-knife for shrub-clearing and excavating,
electric torches for any underground phase
which might develop, rope, field-glasses,
tape-measure, microscope, and incidentals
for emergencies—as much, in fact, as might
be comfortably stowed in a convenient handbag.
To this equipment I added only the heavy revolver
which the sheriff forced upon me, and the
pick and shovel which I thought might expedite
my work.
I decided to carry these latter things slung
over my shoulder with a stout cord—for I
soon saw that I could not hope for any helpers
or fellow-explorers. The village would watch
me, no doubt, with all its available telescopes
and field-glasses; but it would not send any
citizen so much as a yard over the flat plain
toward the lone hillock. My start was timed
for early the next morning, and all the rest
of that day I was treated with the awed and
uneasy respect which people give to a man
about to set out for certain doom.
When morning came—a cloudy though not a
threatening morning—the whole village turned
out to see me start across the dustblown plain.
Binoculars shewed the lone man at his usual
pacing on the mound, and I resolved to keep
him in sight as steadily as possible during
my approach. At the last moment a vague sense
of dread oppressed me, and I was just weak
and whimsical enough to let Grey Eagle’s
talisman swing on my chest in full view of
any beings or ghosts who might be inclined
to heed it. Bidding au revoir to Compton and
his mother, I started off at a brisk stride
despite the bag in my left hand and the clanking
pick and shovel strapped to my back; holding
my field-glass in my right hand and taking
a glance at the silent pacer from time to
time. As I neared the mound I saw the man
very clearly, and fancied I could trace an
expression of infinite evil and decadence
on his seamed, hairless features. I was startled,
too, to see that his goldenly gleaming weapon-case
bore hieroglyphs very similar to those on
the unknown talisman I wore. All the creature’s
costume and trappings bespoke exquisite workmanship
and cultivation. Then, all too abruptly, I
saw him start down the farther side of the
mound and out of sight. When I reached the
place, about ten minutes after I set out,
there was no one there.
There is no need of relating how I spent the
early part of my search in surveying and circumnavigating
the mound, taking measurements, and stepping
back to view the thing from different angles.
It had impressed me tremendously as I approached
it, and there seemed to be a kind of latent
menace in its too regular outlines. It was
the only elevation of any sort on the wide,
level plain; and I could not doubt for a moment
that it was an artificial tumulus. The steep
sides seemed wholly unbroken, and without
marks of human tenancy or passage. There were
no signs of a path toward the top; and, burdened
as I was, I managed to scramble up only with
considerable difficulty. When I reached the
summit I found a roughly level elliptical
plateau about 300 by 50 feet in dimensions;
uniformly covered with rank grass and dense
underbrush, and utterly incompatible with
the constant presence of a pacing sentinel.
This condition gave me a real shock, for it
shewed beyond question that the “Old Indian”,
vivid though he seemed, could not be other
than a collective hallucination.
I looked about with considerable perplexity
and alarm, glancing wistfully back at the
village and the mass of black dots which I
knew was the watching crowd. Training my glass
upon them, I saw that they were studying me
avidly with their glasses; so to reassure
them I waved my cap in the air with a show
of jauntiness which I was far from feeling.
Then, settling to my work I flung down pick,
shovel, and bag; taking my machete from the
latter and commencing to clear away underbrush.
It was a weary task, and now and then I felt
a curious shiver as some perverse gust of
wind arose to hamper my motion with a skill
approaching deliberateness. At times it seemed
as if a half-tangible force were pushing me
back as I worked—almost as if the air thickened
in front of me, or as if formless hands tugged
at my wrists. My energy seemed used up without
producing adequate results, yet for all that
I made some progress.
By afternoon I had clearly perceived that,
toward the northern end of the mound, there
was a slight bowl-like depression in the root-tangled
earth. While this might mean nothing, it would
be a good place to begin when I reached the
digging stage, and I made a mental note of
it. At the same time I noticed another and
very peculiar thing—namely, that the Indian
talisman swinging from my neck seemed to behave
oddly at a point about seventeen feet southeast
of the suggested bowl. Its gyrations were
altered whenever I happened to stoop around
that point, and it tugged downward as if attracted
by some magnetism in the soil. The more I
noticed this, the more it struck me, till
at length I decided to do a little preliminary
digging there without further delay.
As I turned up the soil with my trench-knife
I could not help wondering at the relative
thinness of the reddish regional layer. The
country as a whole was all red sandstone earth,
but here I found a strange black loam less
than a foot down. It was such soil as one
finds in the strange, deep valleys farther
west and south, and must surely have been
brought from a considerable distance in the
prehistoric age when the mound was reared.
Kneeling and digging, I felt the leathern
cord around my neck tugged harder and harder,
as something in the soil seemed to draw the
heavy metal talisman more and more. Then I
felt my implements strike a hard surface,
and wondered if a rock layer rested beneath.
Prying about with the trench-knife, I found
that such was not the case. Instead, to my
intense surprise and feverish interest, I
brought up a mould-clogged, heavy object of
cylindrical shape—about a foot long and
four inches in diameter—to which my hanging
talisman clove with glue-like tenacity. As
I cleared off the black loam my wonder and
tension increased at the bas-reliefs revealed
by that process. The whole cylinder, ends
and all, was covered with figures and hieroglyphs;
and I saw with growing excitement that these
things were in the same unknown tradition
as those on Grey Eagle’s charm and on the
yellow metal trappings of the ghost I had
seen through my binoculars.
Sitting down, I further cleaned the magnetic
cylinder against the rough corduroy of my
knickerbockers, and observed that it was made
of the same heavy, lustrous unknown metal
as the charm—hence, no doubt, the singular
attraction. The carvings and chasings were
very strange and very horrible—nameless
monsters and designs fraught with insidious
evil—and all were of the highest finish
and craftsmanship. I could not at first make
head or tail of the thing, and handled it
aimlessly until I spied a cleavage near one
end. Then I sought eagerly for some mode of
opening, discovering at last that the end
simply unscrewed.
The cap yielded with difficulty, but at last
it came off, liberating a curious aromatic
odour. The sole contents was a bulky roll
of a yellowish, paper-like substance inscribed
in greenish characters, and for a second I
had the supreme thrill of fancying that I
held a written key to unknown elder worlds
and abysses beyond time. Almost immediately,
however, the unrolling of one end shewed that
the manuscript was in Spanish—albeit the
formal, pompous Spanish of a long-departed
day. In the golden sunset light I looked at
the heading and the opening paragraph, trying
to decipher the wretched and ill-punctuated
script of the vanished writer. What manner
of relic was this? Upon what sort of a discovery
had I stumbled? The first words set me in
a new fury of excitement and curiosity, for
instead of diverting me from my original quest
they startlingly confirmed me in that very
effort.
The yellow scroll with the green script began
with a bold, identifying caption and a ceremoniously
desperate appeal for belief in incredible
revelations to follow:
RELACIÓN DE PÁNFILO DE ZAMACONA Y NUÑEZ,
HIDALGO DE LUARCA EN ASTURIAS, TOCANTE AL
MUNDO SOTERRÁNEO DE XINAIÁN, A. D. MDXLV
En el nombre de la santísima Trinidad, Padre,
Hijo, y Espíritu-Santo, tres personas distintas
y un solo. Dios verdadero, y de la santísima
Virgen muestra Señora, YO, PÁNFILO DE ZAMACONA,
HIJO DE PEDRO GUZMAN Y ZAMACONA, HIDALGO,
Y DE LA DOÑA YNÉS ALVARADO Y NUÑEZ, DE
LUARCA EN ASTURIAS, juro para que todo que
deco está verdadero como sacramento. . . .
I paused to reflect on the portentous significance
of what I was reading. “The Narrative of
Pánfilo de Zamacona y Nuñez, gentleman,
of Luarca in Asturias, Concerning the Subterranean
World of Xinaián, A. D. 1545” . . . Here,
surely, was too much for any mind to absorb
all at once. A subterranean world—again
that persistent idea which filtered through
all the Indian tales and through all the utterances
of those who had come back from the mound.
And the date—1545—what could this mean?
In 1540 Coronado and his men had gone north
from Mexico into the wilderness, but had they
not turned back in 1542! My eye ran questingly
down the opened part of the scroll, and almost
at once seized on the name Francisco Vásquez
de Coronado. The writer of this thing, clearly,
was one of Coronado’s men—but what had
he been doing in this remote realm three years
after his party had gone back? I must read
further, for another glance told me that what
was now unrolled was merely a summary of Coronado’s
northward march, differing in no essential
way from the account known to history.
It was only the waning light which checked
me before I could unroll and read more, and
in my impatient bafflement I almost forgot
to be frightened at the onrush of night in
this sinister place. Others, however, had
not forgotten the lurking terror, for I heard
a loud distant hallooing from a knot of men
who had gathered at the edge of the town.
Answering the anxious hail, I restored the
manuscript to its strange cylinder—to which
the disc around my neck still clung until
I pried it off and packed it and my smaller
implements for departure. Leaving the pick
and shovel for the next day’s work, I took
up my handbag, scrambled down the steep side
of the mound, and in another quarter-hour
was back in the village explaining and exhibiting
my curious find. As darkness drew on, I glanced
back at the mound I had so lately left, and
saw with a shudder that the faint bluish torch
of the nocturnal squaw-ghost had begun to
glimmer.
It was hard work waiting to get at the bygone
Spaniard’s narrative; but I knew I must
have quiet and leisure for a good translation,
so reluctantly saved the task for the later
hours of night. Promising the townsfolk a
clear account of my findings in the morning,
and giving them an ample opportunity to examine
the bizarre and provocative cylinder, I accompanied
Clyde Compton home and ascended to my room
for the translating process as soon as I possibly
could. My host and his mother were intensely
eager to hear the tale, but I thought they
had better wait till I could thoroughly absorb
the text myself and give them the gist concisely
and unerringly.
Opening my handbag in the light of a single
electric bulb, I again took out the cylinder
and noted the instant magnetism which pulled
the Indian talisman to its carven surface.
The designs glimmered evilly on the richly
lustrous and unknown metal, and I could not
help shivering as I studied the abnormal and
blasphemous forms that leered at me with such
exquisite workmanship. I wish now that I had
carefully photographed all these designs—though
perhaps it is just as well that I did not.
Of one thing I am really glad, and that is
that I could not then identify the squatting
octopus-headed thing which dominated most
of the ornate cartouches, and which the manuscript
called “Tulu”. Recently I have associated
it, and the legends in the manuscript connected
with it, with some new-found folklore of monstrous
and unmentioned Cthulhu, a horror which seeped
down from the stars while the young earth
was still half-formed; and had I known of
the connexion then, I could not have stayed
in the same room with the thing. The secondary
motif, a semi-anthropomorphic serpent, I did
quite readily place as a prototype of the
Yig, Quetzalcoatl, and Kukulcan conceptions.
Before opening the cylinder I tested its magnetic
powers on metals other than that of Grey Eagle’s
disc, but found that no attraction existed.
It was no common magnetism which pervaded
this morbid fragment of unknown worlds and
linked it to its kind.
At last I took out the manuscript and began
translating—jotting down a synoptic outline
in English as I went, and now and then regretting
the absence of a Spanish dictionary when I
came upon some especially obscure or archaic
word or construction. There was a sense of
ineffable strangeness in thus being thrown
back nearly four centuries in the midst of
my continuous quest—thrown back to a year
when my own forbears were settled, homekeeping
gentlemen of Somerset and Devon under Henry
the Eighth, with never a thought of the adventure
that was to take their blood to Virginia and
the New World; yet when that new world possessed,
even as now, the same brooding mystery of
the mound which formed my present sphere and
horizon. The sense of a throwback was all
the stronger because I felt instinctively
that the common problem of the Spaniard and
myself was one of such abysmal timelessness—of
such unholy and unearthly eternity—that
the scant four hundred years between us bulked
as nothing in comparison. It took no more
than a single look at that monstrous and insidious
cylinder to make me realise the dizzying gulfs
that yawned between all men of the known earth
and the primal mysteries it represented. Before
that gulf Pánfilo de Zamacona and I stood
side by side; just as Aristotle and I, or
Cheops and I, might have stood.
III.
Of his youth in Luarca, a small, placid port
on the Bay of Biscay, Zamacona told little.
He had been wild, and a younger son, and had
come to New Spain in 1532, when only twenty
years old. Sensitively imaginative, he had
listened spellbound to the floating rumours
of rich cities and unknown worlds to the north—and
especially to the tale of the Franciscan friar
Marcos de Niza, who came back from a trip
in 1539 with glowing accounts of fabulous
Cíbola and its great walled towns with terraced
stone houses. Hearing of Coronado’s contemplated
expedition in search of these wonders—and
of the greater wonders whispered to lie beyond
them in the land of buffaloes—young Zamacona
managed to join the picked party of 300, and
started north with the rest in 1540.
History knows the story of that expedition—how
Cíbola was found to be merely the squalid
Pueblo village of Zuñi, and how de Niza was
sent back to Mexico in disgrace for his florid
exaggerations; how Coronado first saw the
Grand Canyon, and how at Cicuyé, on the Pecos,
he heard from the Indian called El Turco of
the rich and mysterious land of Quivira, far
to the northeast, where gold, silver, and
buffaloes abounded, and where there flowed
a river two leagues wide. Zamacona told briefly
of the winter camp at Tiguex on the Pecos,
and of the northward start in April, when
the native guide proved false and led the
party astray amidst a land of prairie-dogs,
salt pools, and roving, bison-hunting tribes.
When Coronado dismissed his larger force and
made his final forty-two-day march with a
very small and select detachment, Zamacona
managed to be included in the advancing party.
He spoke of the fertile country and of the
great ravines with trees visible only from
the edge of their steep banks; and of how
all the men lived solely on buffalo-meat.
And then came mention of the expedition’s
farthest limit—of the presumable but disappointing
land of Quivira with its villages of grass
houses, its brooks and rivers, its good black
soil, its plums, nuts, grapes, and mulberries,
and its maize-growing and copper-using Indians.
The execution of El Turco, the false native
guide, was casually touched upon, and there
was a mention of the cross which Coronado
raised on the bank of a great river in the
autumn of 1541—a cross bearing the inscription,
“Thus far came the great general, Francisco
Vásquez de Coronado”.
This supposed Quivira lay at about the fortieth
parallel of north latitude, and I see that
quite lately the New York archaeologist Dr.
Hodge has identified it with the course of
the Arkansas River through Barton and Rice
Counties, Kansas. It is the old home of the
Wichitas, before the Sioux drove them south
into what is now Oklahoma, and some of the
grass-house village sites have been found
and excavated for artifacts. Coronado did
considerable exploring hereabouts, led hither
and thither by the persistent rumours of rich
cities and hidden worlds which floated fearfully
around on the Indians’ tongues. These northerly
natives seemed more afraid and reluctant to
talk about the rumoured cities and worlds
than the Mexican Indians had been; yet at
the same time seemed as if they could reveal
a good deal more than the Mexicans had they
been willing or dared to do so. Their vagueness
exasperated the Spanish leader, and after
many disappointing searches he began to be
very severe toward those who brought him stories.
Zamacona, more patient than Coronado, found
the tales especially interesting; and learned
enough of the local speech to hold long conversations
with a young buck named Charging Buffalo,
whose curiosity had led him into much stranger
places than any of his fellow-tribesmen had
dared to penetrate.
It was Charging Buffalo who told Zamacona
of the queer stone doorways, gates, or cave-mouths
at the bottom of some of those deep, steep,
wooded ravines which the party had noticed
on the northward march. These openings, he
said, were mostly concealed by shrubbery;
and few had entered them for untold aeons.
Those who went to where they led, never returned—or
in a few cases returned mad or curiously maimed.
But all this was legend, for nobody was known
to have gone more than a limited distance
inside any of them within the memory of the
grandfathers of the oldest living men. Charging
Buffalo himself had probably been farther
than anyone else, and he had seen enough to
curb both his curiosity and his greed for
the rumoured gold below.
Beyond the aperture he had entered there was
a long passage running crazily up and down
and round about, and covered with frightful
carvings of monsters and horrors that no man
had ever seen. At last, after untold miles
of windings and descents, there was a glow
of terrible blue light; and the passage opened
upon a shocking nether world. About this the
Indian would say no more, for he had seen
something that had sent him back in haste.
But the golden cities must be somewhere down
there, he added, and perhaps a white man with
the magic of the thunder-stick might succeed
in getting to them. He would not tell the
big chief Coronado what he knew, for Coronado
would not listen to Indian talk any more.
Yes—he could shew Zamacona the way if the
white man would leave the party and accept
his guidance. But he would not go inside the
opening with the white man. It was bad in
there.
The place was about a five days’ march to
the south, near the region of great mounds.
These mounds had something to do with the
evil world down there—they were probably
ancient closed-up passages to it, for once
the Old Ones below had had colonies on the
surface and had traded with men everywhere,
even in the lands that had sunk under the
big waters. It was when those lands had sunk
that the Old Ones closed themselves up below
and refused to deal with surface people. The
refugees from the sinking places had told
them that the gods of outer earth were against
men, and that no men could survive on the
outer earth unless they were daemons in league
with the evil gods. That is why they shut
out all surface folk, and did fearful things
to any who ventured down where they dwelt.
There had been sentries once at the various
openings, but after ages they were no longer
needed. Not many people cared to talk about
the hidden Old Ones, and the legends about
them would probably have died out but for
certain ghostly reminders of their presence
now and then. It seemed that the infinite
ancientness of these creatures had brought
them strangely near to the borderline of spirit,
so that their ghostly emanations were more
commonly frequent and vivid. Accordingly the
region of the great mounds was often convulsed
with spectral nocturnal battles reflecting
those which had been fought in the days before
the openings were closed.
The Old Ones themselves were half-ghost—indeed,
it was said that they no longer grew old or
reproduced their kind, but flickered eternally
in a state between flesh and spirit. The change
was not complete, though, for they had to
breathe. It was because the underground world
needed air that the openings in the deep valleys
were not blocked up as the mound-openings
on the plains had been. These openings, Charging
Buffalo added, were probably based on natural
fissures in the earth. It was whispered that
the Old Ones had come down from the stars
to the world when it was very young, and had
gone inside to build their cities of solid
gold because the surface was not then fit
to live on. They were the ancestors of all
men, yet none could guess from what star—or
what place beyond the stars—they came. Their
hidden cities were still full of gold and
silver, but men had better let them alone
unless protected by very strong magic.
They had frightful beasts with a faint strain
of human blood, on which they rode, and which
they employed for other purposes. The things,
so people hinted, were carnivorous, and like
their masters, preferred human flesh; so that
although the Old Ones themselves did not breed,
they had a sort of half-human slave-class
which also served to nourish the human and
animal population. This had been very oddly
recruited, and was supplemented by a second
slave-class of reanimated corpses. The Old
Ones knew how to make a corpse into an automaton
which would last almost indefinitely and perform
any sort of work when directed by streams
of thought. Charging Buffalo said that the
people had all come to talk by means of thought
only; speech having been found crude and needless,
except for religious devotions and emotional
expression, as aeons of discovery and study
rolled by. They worshipped Yig, the great
father of serpents, and Tulu, the octopus-headed
entity that had brought them down from the
stars; appeasing both of these hideous monstrosities
by means of human sacrifices offered up in
a very curious manner which Charging Buffalo
did not care to describe.
Zamacona was held spellbound by the Indian’s
tale, and at once resolved to accept his guidance
to the cryptic doorway in the ravine. He did
not believe the accounts of strange ways attributed
by legend to the hidden people, for the experiences
of the party had been such as to disillusion
one regarding native myths of unknown lands;
but he did feel that some sufficiently marvellous
field of riches and adventure must indeed
lie beyond the weirdly carved passages in
the earth. At first he thought of persuading
Charging Buffalo to tell his story to Coronado—offering
to shield him against any effects of the leader’s
testy scepticism—but later he decided that
a lone adventure would be better. If he had
no aid, he would not have to share anything
he found; but might perhaps become a great
discoverer and owner of fabulous riches. Success
would make him a greater figure than Coronado
himself—perhaps a greater figure than anyone
else in New Spain, including even the mighty
viceroy Don Antonio de Mendoza.
On October 7, 1541, at an hour close to midnight,
Zamacona stole out of the Spanish camp near
the grass-house village and met Charging Buffalo
for the long southward journey. He travelled
as lightly as possible, and did not wear his
heavy helmet and breastplate. Of the details
of the trip the manuscript told very little,
but Zamacona records his arrival at the great
ravine on October 13th. The descent of the
thickly wooded slope took no great time; and
though the Indian had trouble in locating
the shrubbery-hidden stone door again amidst
the twilight of that deep gorge, the place
was finally found. It was a very small aperture
as doorways go, formed of monolithic sandstone
jambs and lintel, and bearing signs of nearly
effaced and now undecipherable carvings. Its
height was perhaps seven feet, and its width
not more than four. There were drilled places
in the jambs which argued the bygone presence
of a hinged door or gate, but all other traces
of such a thing had long since vanished.
At sight of this black gulf Charging Buffalo
displayed considerable fear, and threw down
his pack of supplies with signs of haste.
He had provided Zamacona with a good stock
of resinous torches and provisions, and had
guided him honestly and well; but refused
to share in the venture that lay ahead. Zamacona
gave him the trinkets he had kept for such
an occasion, and obtained his promise to return
to the region in a month; afterward shewing
the way southward to the Pecos Pueblo villages.
A prominent rock on the plain above them was
chosen as a meeting-place; the one arriving
first to pitch camp until the other should
arrive.
In the manuscript Zamacona expressed a wistful
wonder as to the Indian’s length of waiting
at the rendezvous—for he himself could never
keep that tryst. At the last moment Charging
Buffalo tried to dissuade him from his plunge
into the darkness, but soon saw it was futile,
and gestured a stoical farewell. Before lighting
his first torch and entering the opening with
his ponderous pack, the Spaniard watched the
lean form of the Indian scrambling hastily
and rather relievedly upward among the trees.
It was the cutting of his last link with the
world; though he did not know that he was
never to see a human being—in the accepted
sense of that term—again.
Zamacona felt no immediate premonition of
evil upon entering that ominous doorway, though
from the first he was surrounded by a bizarre
and unwholesome atmosphere. The passage, slightly
taller and wider than the aperture, was for
many yards a level tunnel of Cyclopean masonry,
with heavily worn flagstones under foot, and
grotesquely carved granite and sandstone blocks
in sides and ceiling. The carvings must have
been loathsome and terrible indeed, to judge
from Zamacona’s description; according to
which most of them revolved around the monstrous
beings Yig and Tulu. They were unlike anything
the adventurer had ever seen before, though
he added that the native architecture of Mexico
came closest to them of all things in the
outer world. After some distance the tunnel
began to dip abruptly, and irregular natural
rock appeared on all sides. The passage seemed
only partly artificial, and decorations were
limited to occasional cartouches with shocking
bas-reliefs.
Following an enormous descent, whose steepness
at times produced an acute danger of slipping
and tobogganing, the passage became exceedingly
uncertain in its direction and variable in
its contour. At times it narrowed almost to
a slit or grew so low that stooping and even
crawling were necessary, while at other times
it broadened out into sizeable caves or chains
of caves. Very little human construction,
it was plain, had gone into this part of the
tunnel; though occasionally a sinister cartouche
or hieroglyphic on the wall, or a blocked-up
lateral passageway, would remind Zamacona
that this was in truth the aeon-forgotten
high-road to a primal and unbelievable world
of living things.
For three days, as best he could reckon, Pánfilo
de Zamacona scrambled down, up, along, and
around, but always predominately downward,
through this dark region of palaeogean night.
Once in a while he heard some secret being
of darkness patter or flap out of his way,
and on just one occasion he half glimpsed
a great, bleached thing that set him trembling.
The quality of the air was mostly very tolerable;
though foetid zones were now and then met
with, while one great cavern of stalactites
and stalagmites afforded a depressing dampness.
This latter, when Charging Buffalo had come
upon it, had quite seriously barred the way;
since the limestone deposits of ages had built
fresh pillars in the path of the primordial
abyss-denizens. The Indian, however, had broken
through these; so that Zamacona did not find
his course impeded. It was an unconscious
comfort to him to reflect that someone else
from the outside world had been there before—and
the Indian’s careful descriptions had removed
the element of surprise and unexpectedness.
More—Charging Buffalo’s knowledge of the
tunnel had led him to provide so good a torch
supply for the journey in and out, that there
would be no danger of becoming stranded in
darkness. Zamacona camped twice, building
a fire whose smoke seemed well taken care
of by the natural ventilation.
At what he considered the end of the third
day—though his cocksure guesswork chronology
is not at any time to be given the easy faith
that he gave it—Zamacona encountered the
prodigious descent and subsequent prodigious
climb which Charging Buffalo had described
as the tunnel’s last phase. As at certain
earlier points, marks of artificial improvement
were here discernible; and several times the
steep gradient was eased by a flight of rough-hewn
steps. The torch shewed more and more of the
monstrous carvings on the walls, and finally
the resinous flare seemed mixed with a fainter
and more diffusive light as Zamacona climbed
up and up after the last downward stairway.
At length the ascent ceased, and a level passage
of artificial masonry with dark, basaltic
blocks led straight ahead. There was no need
for a torch now, for all the air was glowing
with a bluish, quasi-electric radiance that
flickered like an aurora. It was the strange
light of the inner world that the Indian had
described—and in another moment Zamacona
emerged from the tunnel upon a bleak, rocky
hillside which climbed above him to a seething,
impenetrable sky of bluish coruscations, and
descended dizzily below him to an apparently
illimitable plain shrouded in bluish mist.
He had come to the unknown world at last,
and from his manuscript it is clear that he
viewed the formless landscape as proudly and
exaltedly as ever his fellow-countryman Balboa
viewed the new-found Pacific from that unforgettable
peak in Darien. Charging Buffalo had turned
back at this point, driven by fear of something
which he would only describe vaguely and evasively
as a herd of bad cattle, neither horse nor
buffalo, but like the things the mound-spirits
rode at night—but Zamacona could not be
deterred by any such trifle. Instead of fear,
a strange sense of glory filled him; for he
had imagination enough to know what it meant
to stand alone in an inexplicable nether world
whose existence no other white man suspected.
The soil of the great hill that surged upward
behind him and spread steeply downward below
him was dark grey, rock-strown, without vegetation,
and probably basaltic in origin; with an unearthly
cast which made him feel like an intruder
on an alien planet. The vast distant plain,
thousands of feet below, had no features he
could distinguish; especially since it appeared
to be largely veiled in a curling, bluish
vapour. But more than hill or plain or cloud,
the bluely luminous, coruscating sky impressed
the adventurer with a sense of supreme wonder
and mystery. What created this sky within
a world he could not tell; though he knew
of the northern lights, and had even seen
them once or twice. He concluded that this
subterraneous light was something vaguely
akin to the aurora; a view which moderns may
well endorse, though it seems likely that
certain phenomena of radio-activity may also
enter in.
At Zamacona’s back the mouth of the tunnel
he had traversed yawned darkly; defined by
a stone doorway very like the one he had entered
in the world above, save that it was of greyish-black
basalt instead of red sandstone. There were
hideous sculptures, still in good preservation
and perhaps corresponding to those on the
outer portal which time had largely weathered
away. The absence of weathering here argued
a dry, temperate climate; indeed, the Spaniard
already began to note the delightfully spring-like
stability of temperature which marks the air
of the north’s interior. On the stone jambs
were works proclaiming the bygone presence
of hinges, but of any actual door or gate
no trace remained. Seating himself for rest
and thought, Zamacona lightened his pack by
removing an amount of food and torches sufficient
to take him back through the tunnel. These
he proceeded to cache at the opening, under
a cairn hastily formed of the rock fragments
which everywhere lay around. Then, readjusting
his lightened pack, he commenced his descent
toward the distant plain; preparing to invade
a region which no living thing of outer earth
had penetrated in a century or more, which
no white man had ever penetrated, and from
which, if legend were to be believed, no organic
creature had ever returned sane.
Zamacona strode briskly along down the steep,
interminable slope; his progress checked at
times by the bad walking that came from loose
rock fragments, or by the excessive precipitousness
of the grade. The distance of the mist-shrouded
plain must have been enormous, for many hours’
walking brought him apparently no closer to
it than he had been before. Behind him was
always the great hill stretching upward into
a bright aërial sea of bluish coruscations.
Silence was universal; so that his own footsteps,
and the fall of stones that he dislodged,
struck on his ears with startling distinctness.
It was at what he regarded as about noon that
he first saw the abnormal footprints which
set him to thinking of Charging Buffalo’s
terrible hints, precipitate flight, and strangely
abiding terror.
The rock-strown nature of the soil gave few
opportunities for tracks of any kind, but
at one point a rather level interval had caused
the loose detritus to accumulate in a ridge,
leaving a considerable area of dark-grey loam
absolutely bare. Here, in a rambling confusion
indicating a large herd aimlessly wandering,
Zamacona found the abnormal prints. It is
to be regretted that he could not describe
them more exactly, but the manuscript displayed
far more vague fear than accurate observation.
Just what it was that so frightened the Spaniard
can only be inferred from his later hints
regarding the beasts. He referred to the prints
as ‘not hooves, nor hands, nor feet, nor
precisely paws—nor so large as to cause
alarm on that account’. Just why or how
long ago the things had been there, was not
easy to guess. There was no vegetation visible,
hence grazing was out of the question; but
of course if the beasts were carnivorous they
might well have been hunting smaller animals,
whose tracks their own would tend to obliterate.
Glancing backward from this plateau to the
heights above, Zamacona thought he detected
traces of a great winding road which had once
led from the tunnel downward to the plain.
One could get the impression of this former
highway only from a broad panoramic view,
since a trickle of loose rock fragments had
long ago obscured it; but the adventurer felt
none the less certain that it had existed.
It had not, probably, been an elaborately
paved trunk route; for the small tunnel it
reached seemed scarcely like a main avenue
to the outer world. In choosing a straight
path of descent Zamacona had not followed
its curving course, though he must have crossed
it once or twice. With his attention now called
to it, he looked ahead to see if he could
trace it downward toward the plain; and this
he finally thought he could do. He resolved
to investigate its surface when next he crossed
it, and perhaps to pursue its line for the
rest of the way if he could distinguish it.
Having resumed his journey, Zamacona came
some time later upon what he thought was a
bend of the ancient road. There were signs
of grading and of some primal attempt at rock-surfacing,
but not enough was left to make the route
worth following. While rummaging about in
the soil with his sword, the Spaniard turned
up something that glittered in the eternal
blue daylight, and was thrilled at beholding
a kind of coin or medal of a dark, unknown,
lustrous metal, with hideous designs on each
side. It was utterly and bafflingly alien
to him, and from his description I have no
doubt but that it was a duplicate of the talisman
given me by Grey Eagle almost four centuries
afterward. Pocketing it after a long and curious
examination, he strode onward; finally pitching
camp at an hour which he guessed to be the
evening of the outer world.
The next day Zamacona rose early and resumed
his descent through this blue-litten world
of mist and desolation and preternatural silence.
As he advanced, he at last became able to
distinguish a few objects on the distant plain
below—trees, bushes, rocks, and a small
river that came into view from the right and
curved forward at a point to the left of his
contemplated course. This river seemed to
be spanned by a bridge connected with the
descending roadway, and with care the explorer
could trace the route of the road beyond it
in a straight line over the plain. Finally
he even thought he could detect towns scattered
along the rectilinear ribbon; towns whose
left-hand edges reached the river and sometimes
crossed it. Where such crossings occurred,
he saw as he descended, there were always
signs of bridges either ruined or surviving.
He was now in the midst of a sparse grassy
vegetation, and saw that below him the growth
became thicker and thicker. The road was easier
to define now, since its surface discouraged
the grass which the looser soil supported.
Rock fragments were less frequent, and the
barren upward vista behind him looked bleak
and forbidding in contrast to his present
milieu.
It was on this day that he saw the blurred
mass moving over the distant plain. Since
his first sight of the sinister footprints
he had met with no more of these, but something
about that slowly and deliberately moving
mass peculiarly sickened him. Nothing but
a herd of grazing animals could move just
like that, and after seeing the footprints
he did not wish to meet the things which had
made them. Still, the moving mass was not
near the road—and his curiosity and greed
for fabled gold were great. Besides, who could
really judge things from vague, jumbled footprints
or from the panic-twisted hints of an ignorant
Indian?
In straining his eyes to view the moving mass
Zamacona became aware of several other interesting
things. One was that certain parts of the
now unmistakable towns glittered oddly in
the misty blue light. Another was that, besides
the towns, several similarly glittering structures
of a more isolated sort were scattered here
and there along the road and over the plain.
They seemed to be embowered in clumps of vegetation,
and those off the road had small avenues leading
to the highway. No smoke or other signs of
life could be discerned about any of the towns
or buildings. Finally Zamacona saw that the
plain was not infinite in extent, though the
half-concealing blue mists had hitherto made
it seem so. It was bounded in the remote distance
by a range of low hills, toward a gap in which
the river and roadway seemed to lead. All
this—especially the glittering of certain
pinnacles in the towns—had become very vivid
when Zamacona pitched his second camp amidst
the endless blue day. He likewise noticed
the flocks of high-soaring birds, whose nature
he could not clearly make out.
The next afternoon—to use the language of
the outer world as the manuscript did at all
times—Zamacona reached the silent plain
and crossed the soundless, slow-running river
on a curiously carved and fairly well-preserved
bridge of black basalt. The water was clear,
and contained large fishes of a wholly strange
aspect. The roadway was now paved and somewhat
overgrown with weeds and creeping vines, and
its course was occasionally outlined by small
pillars bearing obscure symbols. On every
side the grassy level extended, with here
and there a clump of trees or shrubbery, and
with unidentifiable bluish flowers growing
irregularly over the whole area. Now and then
some spasmodic motion of the grass indicated
the presence of serpents. In the course of
several hours the traveller reached a grove
of old and alien-looking evergreen-trees which
he knew, from distant viewing, protected one
of the glittering-roofed isolated structures.
Amidst the encroaching vegetation he saw the
hideously sculptured pylons of a stone gateway
leading off the road, and was presently forcing
his way through briers above a moss-crusted
tessellated walk lined with huge trees and
low monolithic pillars.
At last, in this hushed green twilight, he
saw the crumbling and ineffably ancient facade
of the building—a temple, he had no doubt.
It was a mass of nauseous bas-reliefs; depicting
scenes and beings, objects and ceremonies,
which could certainly have no place on this
or any sane planet. In hinting of these things
Zamacona displays for the first time that
shocked and pious hesitancy which impairs
the informative value of the rest of his manuscript.
We cannot help regretting that the Catholic
ardour of Renaissance Spain had so thoroughly
permeated his thought and feeling. The door
of the place stood wide open, and absolute
darkness filled the windowless interior. Conquering
the repulsion which the mural sculptures had
excited, Zamacona took out flint and steel,
lighted a resinous torch, pushed aside curtaining
vines, and sallied boldly across the ominous
threshold.
For a moment he was quite stupefied by what
he saw. It was not the all-covering dust and
cobwebs of immemorial aeons, the fluttering
winged things, the shriekingly loathsome sculptures
on the walls, the bizarre form of the many
basins and braziers, the sinister pyramidal
altar with the hollow top, or the monstrous,
octopus-headed abnormality in some strange,
dark metal leering and squatting broodingly
on its hieroglyphed pedestal, which robbed
him of even the power to give a startled cry.
It was nothing so unearthly as this—but
merely the fact that, with the exception of
the dust, the cobwebs, the winged things,
and the gigantic emerald-eyed idol, every
particle of substance in sight was composed
of pure and evidently solid gold.
Even the manuscript, written in retrospect
after Zamacona knew that gold is the most
common structural metal of a nether world
containing limitless lodes and veins of it,
reflects the frenzied excitement which the
traveller felt upon suddenly finding the real
source of all the Indian legends of golden
cities. For a time the power of detailed observation
left him, but in the end his faculties were
recalled by a peculiar tugging sensation in
the pocket of his doublet. Tracing the feeling,
he realised that the disc of strange metal
he had found in the abandoned road was being
attracted strongly by the vast octopus-headed,
emerald-eyed idol on the pedestal, which he
now saw to be composed of the same unknown
exotic metal. He was later to learn that this
strange magnetic substance—as alien to the
inner world as to the outer world of men—is
the one precious metal of the blue-lighted
abyss. None knows what it is or where it occurs
in Nature, and the amount of it on this planet
came down from the stars with the people when
great Tulu, the octopus-headed god, brought
them for the first time to this earth. Certainly,
its only known source was a stock of pre-existing
artifacts, including multitudes of Cyclopean
idols. It could never be placed or analysed,
and even its magnetism was exerted only on
its own kind. It was the supreme ceremonial
metal of the hidden people, its use being
regulated by custom in such a way that its
magnetic properties might cause no inconvenience.
A very weakly magnetic alloy of it with such
base metals as iron, gold, silver, copper,
or zinc, had formed the sole monetary standard
of the hidden people at one period of their
history.
Zamacona’s reflections on the strange idol
and its magnetism were disturbed by a tremendous
wave of fear as, for the first time in this
silent world, he heard a rumble of very definite
and obviously approaching sound. There was
no mistaking its nature. It was a thunderously
charging herd of large animals; and, remembering
the Indian’s panic, the footprints, and
the moving mass distantly seen, the Spaniard
shuddered in terrified anticipation. He did
not analyse his position, or the significance
of this onrush of great lumbering beings,
but merely responded to an elemental urge
toward self-protection. Charging herds do
not stop to find victims in obscure places,
and on the outer earth Zamacona would have
felt little or no alarm in such a massive,
grove-girt edifice. Some instinct, however,
now bred a deep and peculiar terror in his
soul; and he looked about frantically for
any means of safety.
There being no available refuge in the great,
gold-patined interior, he felt that he must
close the long-disused door; which still hung
on its ancient hinges, doubled back against
the inner wall. Soil, vines, and moss had
entered the opening from outside, so that
he had to dig a path for the great gold portal
with his sword; but he managed to perform
this work very swiftly under the frightful
stimulus of the approaching noise. The hoofbeats
had grown still louder and more menacing by
the time he began tugging at the heavy door
itself; and for a while his fears reached
a frantic height, as hope of starting the
age-clogged metal grew faint. Then, with a
creak, the thing responded to his youthful
strength, and a frenzied siege of pulling
and pushing ensued. Amidst the roar of unseen
stampeding feet success came at last, and
the ponderous golden door clanged shut, leaving
Zamacona in darkness but for the single lighted
torch he had wedged between the pillars of
a basin-tripod. There was a latch, and the
frightened man blessed his patron saint that
it was still effective.
Sound alone told the fugitive the sequel.
When the roar grew very near it resolved itself
into separate footfalls, as if the evergreen
grove had made it necessary for the herd to
slacken speed and disperse. But feet continued
to approach, and it became evident that the
beasts were advancing among the trees and
circling the hideously carven temple walls.
In the curious deliberation of their tread
Zamacona found something very alarming and
repulsive, nor did he like the scuffling sounds
which were audible even through the thick
stone walls and heavy golden door. Once the
door rattled ominously on its archaic hinges,
as if under a heavy impact, but fortunately
it still held. Then, after a seemingly endless
interval, he heard retreating steps and realised
that his unknown visitors were leaving. Since
the herds did not seem to be very numerous,
it would have perhaps been safe to venture
out within a half-hour or less; but Zamacona
took no chances. Opening his pack, he prepared
his camp on the golden tiles of the temple’s
floor, with the great door still securely
latched against all comers; drifting eventually
into a sounder sleep than he could have known
in the blue-litten spaces outside. He did
not even mind the hellish, octopus-headed
bulk of great Tulu, fashioned of unknown metal
and leering with fishy, sea-green eyes, which
squatted in the blackness above him on its
monstrously hieroglyphed pedestal.
Surrounded by darkness for the first time
since leaving the tunnel, Zamacona slept profoundly
and long. He must have more than made up the
sleep he had lost at his two previous camps,
when the ceaseless glare of the sky had kept
him awake despite his fatigue, for much distance
was covered by other living feet while he
lay in his healthily dreamless rest. It is
well that he rested deeply, for there were
many strange things to be encountered in his
next period of consciousness.
IV.
What finally roused Zamacona was a thunderous
rapping at the door. It beat through his dreams
and dissolved all the lingering mists of drowsiness
as soon as he knew what it was. There could
be no mistake about it—it was a definite,
human, and peremptory rapping; performed apparently
with some metallic object, and with all the
measured quality of conscious thought or will
behind it. As the awakening man rose clumsily
to his feet, a sharp vocal note was added
to the summons—someone calling out, in a
not unmusical voice, a formula which the manuscript
tries to represent as “oxi, oxi, giathcán
ycá relex”. Feeling sure that his visitors
were men and not daemons, and arguing that
they could have no reason for considering
him an enemy, Zamacona decided to face them
openly and at once; and accordingly fumbled
with the ancient latch till the golden door
creaked open from the pressure of those outside.
As the great portal swung back, Zamacona stood
facing a group of about twenty individuals
of an aspect not calculated to give him alarm.
They seemed to be Indians; though their tasteful
robes and trappings and swords were not such
as he had seen among any of the tribes of
the outer world, while their faces had many
subtle differences from the Indian type. That
they did not mean to be irresponsibly hostile,
was very clear; for instead of menacing him
in any way they merely probed him attentively
and significantly with their eyes, as if they
expected their gaze to open up some sort of
communication. The longer they gazed, the
more he seemed to know about them and their
mission; for although no one had spoken since
the vocal summons before the opening of the
door, he found himself slowly realising that
they had come from the great city beyond the
low hills, mounted on animals, and that they
had been summoned by animals who had reported
his presence; that they were not sure what
kind of person he was or just where he had
come from, but that they knew he must be associated
with that dimly remembered outer world which
they sometimes visited in curious dreams.
How he read all this in the gaze of the two
or three leaders he could not possibly explain;
though he learned why a moment later.
As it was, he attempted to address his visitors
in the Wichita dialect he had picked up from
Charging Buffalo; and after this failed to
draw a vocal reply he successively tried the
Aztec, Spanish, French, and Latin tongues—adding
as many scraps of lame Greek, Galician, and
Portuguese, and of the Bable peasant patois
of his native Asturias, as his memory could
recall. But not even this polyglot array—his
entire linguistic stock—could bring a reply
in kind. When, however, he paused in perplexity,
one of the visitors began speaking in an utterly
strange and rather fascinating language whose
sounds the Spaniard later had much difficulty
in representing on paper. Upon his failure
to understand this, the speaker pointed first
to his own eyes, then to his forehead, and
then to his eyes again, as if commanding the
other to gaze at him in order to absorb what
he wanted to transmit.
Zamacona, obeying, found himself rapidly in
possession of certain information. The people,
he learned, conversed nowadays by means of
unvocal radiations of thought; although they
had formerly used a spoken language which
still survived as the written tongue, and
into which they still dropped orally for tradition’s
sake, or when strong feeling demanded a spontaneous
outlet. He could understand them merely by
concentrating his attention upon their eyes;
and could reply by summoning up a mental image
of what he wished to say, and throwing the
substance of this into his glance. When the
thought-speaker paused, apparently inviting
a response, Zamacona tried his best to follow
the prescribed pattern, but did not appear
to succeed very well. So he nodded, and tried
to describe himself and his journey by signs.
He pointed upward, as if to the outer world,
then closed his eyes and made signs as of
a mole burrowing. Then he opened his eyes
again and pointed downward, in order to indicate
his descent of the great slope. Experimentally
he blended a spoken word or two with his gestures—for
example, pointing successively to himself
and to all of his visitors and saying “un
hombre”, and then pointing to himself alone
and very carefully pronouncing his individual
name, Pánfilo de Zamacona.
Before the strange conversation was over,
a good deal of data had passed in both directions.
Zamacona had begun to learn how to throw his
thoughts, and had likewise picked up several
words of the region’s archaic spoken language.
His visitors, moreover, had absorbed many
beginnings of an elementary Spanish vocabulary.
Their own old language was utterly unlike
anything the Spaniard had ever heard, though
there were times later on when he was to fancy
an infinitely remote linkage with the Aztec,
as if the latter represented some far stage
of corruption, or some very thin infiltration
of loan-words. The underground world, Zamacona
learned, bore an ancient name which the manuscript
records as “Xinaián”, but which, from
the writer’s supplementary explanations
and diacritical marks, could probably be best
represented to Anglo-Saxon ears by the phonetic
arrangement K’n-yan.
It is not surprising that this preliminary
discourse did not go beyond the merest essentials,
but those essentials were highly important.
Zamacona learned that the people of K’n-yan
were almost infinitely ancient, and that they
had come from a distant part of space where
physical conditions are much like those of
the earth. All this, of course, was legend
now; and one could not say how much truth
was in it, or how much worship was really
due to the octopus-headed being Tulu who had
traditionally brought them hither and whom
they still reverenced for aesthetic reasons.
But they knew of the outer world, and were
indeed the original stock who had peopled
it as soon as its crust was fit to live on.
Between glacial ages they had had some remarkable
surface civilisations, especially one at the
South Pole near the mountain Kadath.
At some time infinitely in the past most of
the outer world had sunk beneath the ocean,
so that only a few refugees remained to bear
the news to K’n-yan. This was undoubtedly
due to the wrath of space-devils hostile alike
to men and to men’s gods—for it bore out
rumours of a primordially earlier sinking
which had submerged the gods themselves, including
great Tulu, who still lay prisoned and dreaming
in the watery vaults of the half-cosmic city
Relex. No man not a slave of the space-devils,
it was argued, could live long on the outer
earth; and it was decided that all beings
who remained there must be evilly connected.
Accordingly traffic with the lands of sun
and starlight abruptly ceased. The subterraneous
approaches to K’n-yan, or such as could
be remembered, were either blocked up or carefully
guarded; and all encroachers were treated
as dangerous spies and enemies.
But this was long ago. With the passing of
ages fewer and fewer visitors came to K’n-yan,
and eventually sentries ceased to be maintained
at the unblocked approaches. The mass of the
people forgot, except through distorted memories
and myths and some very singular dreams, that
an outer world existed; though educated folk
never ceased to recall the essential facts.
The last visitors ever recorded—centuries
in the past—had not even been treated as
devil-spies; faith in the old legendry having
long before died out. They had been questioned
eagerly about the fabulous outer regions;
for scientific curiosity in K’n-yan was
keen, and the myths, memories, dreams, and
historical fragments relating to the earth’s
surface had often tempted scholars to the
brink of an external expedition which they
had not quite dared to attempt. The only thing
demanded of such visitors was that they refrain
from going back and informing the outer world
of K’n-yan’s positive existence; for after
all, one could not be sure about these outer
lands. They coveted gold and silver, and might
prove highly troublesome intruders. Those
who had obeyed the injunction had lived happily,
though regrettably briefly, and had told all
they could about their world—little enough,
however, since their accounts were all so
fragmentary and conflicting that one could
hardly tell what to believe and what to doubt.
One wished that more of them would come. As
for those who disobeyed and tried to escape—it
was very unfortunate about them. Zamacona
himself was very welcome, for he appeared
to be a higher-grade man, and to know much
more about the outer world, than anyone else
who had come down within memory. He could
tell them much—and they hoped he would be
reconciled to his life-long stay.
Many things which Zamacona learned about K’n-yan
in that first colloquy left him quite breathless.
He learned, for instance, that during the
past few thousand years the phenomena of old
age and death had been conquered; so that
men no longer grew feeble or died except through
violence or will. By regulating the system,
one might be as physiologically young and
immortal as he wished; and the only reason
why any allowed themselves to age, was that
they enjoyed the sensation in a world where
stagnation and commonplaceness reigned. They
could easily become young again when they
felt like it. Births had ceased, except for
experimental purposes, since a large population
had been found needless by a master-race which
controlled Nature and organic rivals alike.
Many, however, chose to die after a while;
since despite the cleverest efforts to invent
new pleasures, the ordeal of consciousness
became too dull for sensitive souls—especially
those in whom time and satiation had blinded
the primal instincts and emotions of self-preservation.
All the members of the group before Zamacona
were from 500 to 1500 years old; and several
had seen surface visitors before, though time
had blurred the recollection. These visitors,
by the way, had often tried to duplicate the
longevity of the underground race; but had
been able to do so only fractionally, owing
to evolutionary differences developing during
the million or two years of cleavage.
These evolutionary differences were even more
strikingly shewn in another particular—one
far stranger than the wonder of immortality
itself. This was the ability of the people
of K’n-yan to regulate the balance between
matter and abstract energy, even where the
bodies of living organic beings were concerned,
by the sheer force of the technically trained
will. In other words, with suitable effort
a learned man of K’n-yan could dematerialise
and rematerialise himself—or, with somewhat
greater effort and subtler technique, any
other object he chose; reducing solid matter
to free external particles and recombining
the particles again without damage. Had not
Zamacona answered his visitors’ knock when
he did, he would have discovered this accomplishment
in a highly puzzling way; for only the strain
and bother of the process prevented the twenty
men from passing bodily through the golden
door without pausing for a summons. This art
was much older than the art of perpetual life;
and it could be taught to some extent, though
never perfectly, to any intelligent person.
Rumours of it had reached the outer world
in past aeons; surviving in secret traditions
and ghostly legendry. The men of K’n-yan
had been amused by the primitive and imperfect
spirit tales brought down by outer-world stragglers.
In practical life this principle had certain
industrial applications, but was generally
suffered to remain neglected through lack
of any particular incentive to its use. Its
chief surviving form was in connexion with
sleep, when for excitement’s sake many dream-connoisseurs
resorted to it to enhance the vividness of
their visionary wanderings. By the aid of
this method certain dreamers even paid half-material
visits to a strange, nebulous realm of mounds
and valleys and varying light which some believed
to be the forgotten outer world. They would
go thither on their beasts, and in an age
of peace live over the old, glorious battles
of their forefathers. Some philosophers thought
that in such cases they actually coalesced
with immaterial forces left behind by these
warlike ancestors themselves.
The people of K’n-yan all dwelt in the great,
tall city of Tsath beyond the mountains. Formerly
several races of them had inhabited the entire
underground world, which stretched down to
unfathomable abysses and which included besides
the blue-litten region a red-litten region
called Yoth, where relics of a still older
and non-human race were found by archaeologists.
In the course of time, however, the men of
Tsath had conquered and enslaved the rest;
interbreeding them with certain horned and
four-footed animals of the red-litten region,
whose semi-human leanings were very peculiar,
and which, though containing a certain artificially
created element, may have been in part the
degenerate descendants of those peculiar entities
who had left the relics. As aeons passed,
and mechanical discoveries made the business
of life extremely easy, a concentration of
the people of Tsath took place; so that all
the rest of K’n-yan became relatively deserted.
It was easier to live in one place, and there
was no object in maintaining a population
of overflowing proportions. Many of the old
mechanical devices were still in use, though
others had been abandoned when it was seen
that they failed to give pleasure, or that
they were not necessary for a race of reduced
numbers whose mental force could govern an
extensive array of inferior and semi-human
industrial organisms. This extensive slave-class
was highly composite, being bred from ancient
conquered enemies, from outer-world stragglers,
from dead bodies curiously galvanised into
effectiveness, and from the naturally inferior
members of the ruling race of Tsath. The ruling
type itself had become highly superior through
selective breeding and social evolution—the
nation having passed through a period of idealistic
industrial democracy which gave equal opportunities
to all, and thus, by raising the naturally
intelligent to power, drained the masses of
all their brains and stamina. Industry, being
found fundamentally futile except for the
supplying of basic needs and the gratification
of inescapable yearnings, had become very
simple. Physical comfort was ensured by an
urban mechanisation of standardised and easily
maintained pattern, and other elemental needs
were supplied by scientific agriculture and
stock-raising. Long travel was abandoned,
and people went back to using the horned,
half-human beasts instead of maintaining the
profusion of gold, silver, and steel transportation
machines which had once threaded land, water,
and air. Zamacona could scarcely believe that
such things had ever existed outside dreams,
but was told he could see specimens of them
in museums. He could also see the ruins of
other vast magical devices by travelling a
day’s journey to the valley of Do-Hna, to
which the race had spread during its period
of greatest numbers. The cities and temples
of this present plain were of a far more archaic
period, and had never been other than religious
and antiquarian shrines during the supremacy
of the men of Tsath.
In government, Tsath was a kind of communistic
or semi-anarchical state; habit rather than
law determining the daily order of things.
This was made possible by the age-old experience
and paralysing ennui of the race, whose wants
and needs were limited to physical fundamentals
and to new sensations. An aeon-long tolerance
not yet undermined by growing reaction had
abolished all illusions of values and principles,
and nothing but an approximation to custom
was ever sought or expected. To see that the
mutual encroachments of pleasure-seeking never
crippled the mass life of the community—this
was all that was desired. Family organisation
had long ago perished, and the civil and social
distinction of the sexes had disappeared.
Daily life was organised in ceremonial patterns;
with games, intoxication, torture of slaves,
day-dreaming, gastronomic and emotional orgies,
religious exercises, exotic experiments, artistic
and philosophical discussions, and the like,
as the principal occupations. Property—chiefly
land, slaves, animals, shares in the common
city enterprise of Tsath, and ingots of magnetic
Tulu-metal, the former universal money standard—was
allocated on a very complex basis which included
a certain amount equally divided among all
the freemen. Poverty was unknown, and labour
consisted only of certain administrative duties
imposed by an intricate system of testing
and selection. Zamacona found difficulty in
describing conditions so unlike anything he
had previously known; and the text of his
manuscript proved unusually puzzling at this
point.
Art and intellect, it appeared, had reached
very high levels in Tsath; but had become
listless and decadent. The dominance of machinery
had at one time broken up the growth of normal
aesthetics, introducing a lifelessly geometrical
tradition fatal to sound expression. This
had soon been outgrown, but had left its mark
upon all pictorial and decorative attempts;
so that except for conventionalised religious
designs, there was little depth or feeling
in any later work. Archaistic reproductions
of earlier work had been found much preferable
for general enjoyment. Literature was all
highly individual and analytical, so much
so as to be wholly incomprehensible to Zamacona.
Science had been profound and accurate, and
all-embracing save in the one direction of
astronomy. Of late, however, it was falling
into decay, as people found it increasingly
useless to tax their minds by recalling its
maddening infinitude of details and ramifications.
It was thought more sensible to abandon the
deepest speculations and to confine philosophy
to conventional forms. Technology, of course,
could be carried on by rule of thumb. History
was more and more neglected, but exact and
copious chronicles of the past existed in
the libraries. It was still an interesting
subject, and there would be a vast number
to rejoice at the fresh outer-world knowledge
brought in by Zamacona. In general, though,
the modern tendency was to feel rather than
to think; so that men were now more highly
esteemed for inventing new diversions than
for preserving old facts or pushing back the
frontier of cosmic mystery.
Religion was a leading interest in Tsath,
though very few actually believed in the supernatural.
What was desired was the aesthetic and emotional
exaltation bred by the mystical moods and
sensuous rites which attended the colourful
ancestral faith. Temples to Great Tulu, a
spirit of universal harmony anciently symbolised
as the octopus-headed god who had brought
all men down from the stars, were the most
richly constructed objects in all K’n-yan;
while the cryptic shrines of Yig, the principle
of life symbolised as the Father of all Serpents,
were almost as lavish and remarkable. In time
Zamacona learned much of the orgies and sacrifices
connected with this religion, but seemed piously
reluctant to describe them in his manuscript.
He himself never participated in any of the
rites save those which he mistook for perversions
of his own faith; nor did he ever lose an
opportunity to try to convert the people to
that faith of the Cross which the Spaniards
hoped to make universal.
Prominent in the contemporary religion of
Tsath was a revived and almost genuine veneration
for the rare, sacred metal of Tulu—that
dark, lustrous, magnetic stuff which was nowhere
found in Nature, but which had always been
with men in the form of idols and hieratic
implements. From the earliest times any sight
of it in its unalloyed form had impelled respect,
while all the sacred archives and litanies
were kept in cylinders wrought of its purest
substance. Now, as the neglect of science
and intellect was dulling the critically analytical
spirit, people were beginning to weave around
the metal once more that same fabric of awestruck
superstition which had existed in primitive
times.
Another function of religion was the regulation
of the calendar, born of a period when time
and speed were regarded as prime fetiches
in man’s emotional life. Periods of alternate
waking and sleeping, prolonged, abridged,
and inverted as mood and convenience dictated,
and timed by the tail-beats of Great Yig,
the Serpent, corresponded very roughly to
terrestrial days and nights; though Zamacona’s
sensations told him they must actually be
almost twice as long. The year-unit, measured
by Yig’s annual shedding of his skin, was
equal to about a year and a half of the outer
world. Zamacona thought he had mastered this
calendar very well when he wrote his manuscript,
whence the confidently given date of 1545;
but the document failed to suggest that his
assurance in this matter was fully justified.
As the spokesman of the Tsath party proceeded
with his information, Zamacona felt a growing
repulsion and alarm. It was not only what
was told, but the strange, telepathic manner
of telling, and the plain inference that return
to the outer world would be impossible, that
made the Spaniard wish he had never descended
to this region of magic, abnormality, and
decadence. But he knew that nothing but friendly
acquiescence would do as a policy, hence decided
to coöperate in all his visitors’ plans
and furnish all the information they might
desire. They, on their part, were fascinated
by the outer-world data which he managed haltingly
to convey.
It was really the first draught of reliable
surface information they had had since the
refugees straggled back from Atlantis and
Lemuria aeons before, for all their subsequent
emissaries from outside had been members of
narrow and local groups without any knowledge
of the world at large—Mayas, Toltecs, and
Aztecs at best, and mostly ignorant tribes
of the plains. Zamacona was the first European
they had ever seen, and the fact that he was
a youth of education and brilliancy made him
of still more emphatic value as a source of
knowledge. The visiting party shewed their
breathless interest in all he contrived to
convey, and it was plain that his coming would
do much to relieve the flagging interest of
weary Tsath in matters of geography and history.
The only thing which seemed to displease the
men of Tsath was the fact that curious and
adventurous strangers were beginning to pour
into those parts of the upper world where
the passages to K’n-yan lay. Zamacona told
them of the founding of Florida and New Spain,
and made it clear that a great part of the
world was stirring with the zest of adventure—Spanish,
Portuguese, French, and English. Sooner or
later Mexico and Florida must meet in one
great colonial empire—and then it would
be hard to keep outsiders from the rumoured
gold and silver of the abyss. Charging Buffalo
knew of Zamacona’s journey into the earth.
Would he tell Coronado, or somehow let a report
get to the great viceroy, when he failed to
find the traveller at the promised meeting-place?
Alarm for the continued secrecy and safety
of K’n-yan shewed in the faces of the visitors,
and Zamacona absorbed from their minds the
fact that from now on sentries would undoubtedly
be posted once more at all the unblocked passages
to the outside world which the men of Tsath
could remember.
V.
The long conversation of Zamacona and his
visitors took place in the green-blue twilight
of the grove just outside the temple door.
Some of the men reclined on the weeds and
moss beside the half-vanished walk, while
others, including the Spaniard and the chief
spokesman of the Tsath party, sat on the occasional
low monolithic pillars that lined the temple
approach. Almost a whole terrestrial day must
have been consumed in the colloquy, for Zamacona
felt the need of food several times, and ate
from his well-stocked pack while some of the
Tsath party went back for provisions to the
roadway, where they had left the animals on
which they had ridden. At length the prime
leader of the party brought the discourse
to a close, and indicated that the time had
come to proceed to the city.
There were, he affirmed, several extra beasts
in the cavalcade, upon one of which Zamacona
could ride. The prospect of mounting one of
those ominous hybrid entities whose fabled
nourishment was so alarming, and a single
sight of which had set Charging Buffalo into
such a frenzy of flight, was by no means reassuring
to the traveller. There was, moreover, another
point about the things which disturbed him
greatly—the apparently preternatural intelligence
with which some members of the previous day’s
roving pack had reported his presence to the
men of Tsath and brought out the present expedition.
But Zamacona was not a coward, hence followed
the men boldly down the weed-grown walk toward
the road where the things were stationed.
And yet he could not refrain from crying out
in terror at what he saw when he passed through
the great vine-draped pylons and emerged upon
the ancient road. He did not wonder that the
curious Wichita had fled in panic, and had
to close his eyes a moment to retain his sanity.
It is unfortunate that some sense of pious
reticence prevented him from describing fully
in his manuscript the nameless sight he saw.
As it is, he merely hinted at the shocking
morbidity of these great floundering white
things, with black fur on their backs, a rudimentary
horn in the centre of their foreheads, and
an unmistakable trace of human or anthropoid
blood in their flat-nosed, bulging-lipped
faces. They were, he declared later in his
manuscript, the most terrible objective entities
he ever saw in his life, either in K’n-yan
or in the outer world. And the specific quality
of their supreme terror was something apart
from any easily recognisable or describable
feature. The main trouble was that they were
not wholly products of Nature.
The party observed Zamacona’s fright, and
hastened to reassure him as much as possible.
The beasts or gyaa-yothn, they explained,
surely were curious things; but were really
very harmless. The flesh they ate was not
that of intelligent people of the master-race,
but merely that of a special slave-class which
had for the most part ceased to be thoroughly
human, and which indeed was the principal
meat stock of K’n-yan. They—or their principal
ancestral element—had first been found in
a wild state amidst the Cyclopean ruins of
the deserted red-litten world of Yoth which
lay below the blue-litten world of K’n-yan.
That part of them was human, seemed quite
clear; but men of science could never decide
whether they were actually the descendants
of the bygone entities who had lived and reigned
in the strange ruins. The chief ground for
such a supposition was the well-known fact
that the vanished inhabitants of Yoth had
been quadrupedal. This much was known from
the very few manuscripts and carvings found
in the vaults of Zin, beneath the largest
ruined city of Yoth. But it was also known
from these manuscripts that the beings of
Yoth had possessed the art of synthetically
creating life, and had made and destroyed
several efficiently designed races of industrial
and transportational animals in the course
of their history—to say nothing of concocting
all manner of fantastic living shapes for
the sake of amusement and new sensations during
the long period of decadence. The beings of
Yoth had undoubtedly been reptilian in affiliations,
and most physiologists of Tsath agreed that
the present beasts had been very much inclined
toward reptilianism before they had been crossed
with the mammal slave-class of K’n-yan.
It argues well for the intrepid fire of those
Renaissance Spaniards who conquered half the
unknown world, that Pánfilo de Zamacona y
Nuñez actually mounted one of the morbid
beasts of Tsath and fell into place beside
the leader of the cavalcade—the man named
Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn, who had been most active
in the previous exchange of information. It
was a repulsive business; but after all, the
seat was very easy, and the gait of the clumsy
gyaa-yothn surprisingly even and regular.
No saddle was necessary, and the animal appeared
to require no guidance whatever. The procession
moved forward at a brisk gait, stopping only
at certain abandoned cities and temples about
which Zamacona was curious, and which Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn
was obligingly ready to display and explain.
The largest of these towns, B’graa, was
a marvel of finely wrought gold, and Zamacona
studied the curiously ornate architecture
with avid interest. Buildings tended toward
height and slenderness, with roofs bursting
into a multitude of pinnacles. The streets
were narrow, curving, and occasionally picturesquely
hilly, but Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn said that the
later cities of K’n-yan were far more spacious
and regular in design. All these old cities
of the plain shewed traces of levelled walls—reminders
of the archaic days when they had been successively
conquered by the now dispersed armies of Tsath.
There was one object along the route which
Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn exhibited on his own initiative,
even though it involved a detour of about
a mile along a vine-tangled side path. This
was a squat, plain temple of black basalt
blocks without a single carving, and containing
only a vacant onyx pedestal. The remarkable
thing about it was its story, for it was a
link with a fabled elder world compared to
which even cryptic Yoth was a thing of yesterday.
It had been built in imitation of certain
temples depicted in the vaults of Zin, to
house a very terrible black toad-idol found
in the red-litten world and called Tsathoggua
in the Yothic manuscripts. It had been a potent
and widely worshipped god, and after its adoption
by the people of K’n-yan had lent its name
to the city which was later to become dominant
in that region. Yothic legend said that it
had come from a mysterious inner realm beneath
the red-litten world—a black realm of peculiar-sensed
beings which had no light at all, but which
had had great civilisations and mighty gods
before ever the reptilian quadrupeds of Yoth
had come into being. Many images of Tsathoggua
existed in Yoth, all of which were alleged
to have come from the black inner realm, and
which were supposed by Yothic archaeologists
to represent the aeon-extinct race of that
realm. The black realm called N’kai in the
Yothic manuscripts had been explored as thoroughly
as possible by these archaeologists, and singular
stone troughs or burrows had excited infinite
speculation.
When the men of K’n-yan discovered the red-litten
world and deciphered its strange manuscripts,
they took over the Tsathoggua cult and brought
all the frightful toad images up to the land
of blue light—housing them in shrines of
Yoth-quarried basalt like the one Zamacona
now saw. The cult flourished until it almost
rivalled the ancient cults of Yig and Tulu,
and one branch of the race even took it to
the outer world, where the smallest of the
images eventually found a shrine at Olathoë,
in the land of Lomar near the earth’s north
pole. It was rumoured that this outer-world
cult survived even after the great ice-sheet
and the hairy Gnophkehs destroyed Lomar, but
of such matters not much was definitely known
in K’n-yan. In that world of blue light
the cult came to an abrupt end, even though
the name of Tsath was suffered to remain.
What ended the cult was the partial exploration
of the black realm of N’kai beneath the
red-litten world of Yoth. According to the
Yothic manuscripts, there was no surviving
life in N’kai, but something must have happened
in the aeons between the days of Yoth and
the coming of men to the earth; something
perhaps not unconnected with the end of Yoth.
Probably it had been an earthquake, opening
up lower chambers of the lightless world which
had been closed against the Yothic archaeologists;
or perhaps some more frightful juxtaposition
of energy and electrons, wholly inconceivable
to any sort of vertebrate minds, had taken
place. At any rate, when the men of K’n-yan
went down into N’kai’s black abyss with
their great atom-power searchlights they found
living things—living things that oozed along
stone channels and worshipped onyx and basalt
images of Tsathoggua. But they were not toads
like Tsathoggua himself. Far worse—they
were amorphous lumps of viscous black slime
that took temporary shapes for various purposes.
The explorers of K’n-yan did not pause for
detailed observations, and those who escaped
alive sealed the passage leading from red-litten
Yoth down into the gulfs of nether horror.
Then all the images of Tsathoggua in the land
of K’n-yan were dissolved into the ether
by disintegrating rays, and the cult was abolished
forever.
Aeons later, when naive fears were outgrown
and supplanted by scientific curiosity, the
old legends of Tsathoggua and N’kai were
recalled, and a suitably armed and equipped
exploring party went down to Yoth to find
the closed gate of the black abyss and see
what might still lie beneath. But they could
not find the gate, nor could any man ever
do so in all the ages that followed. Nowadays
there were those who doubted that any abyss
had ever existed, but the few scholars who
could still decipher the Yothic manuscripts
believed that the evidence for such a thing
was adequate, even though the middle records
of K’n-yan, with accounts of the one frightful
expedition into N’kai, were more open to
question. Some of the later religious cults
tried to suppress remembrance of N’kai’s
existence, and attached severe penalties to
its mention; but these had not begun to be
taken seriously at the time of Zamacona’s
advent to K’n-yan.
As the cavalcade returned to the old highway
and approached the low range of mountains,
Zamacona saw that the river was very close
on the left. Somewhat later, as the terrain
rose, the stream entered a gorge and passed
through the hills, while the road traversed
the gap at a rather higher level close to
the brink. It was about this time that light
rainfall came. Zamacona noticed the occasional
drops and drizzle, and looked up at the coruscating
blue air, but there was no diminution of the
strange radiance. Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn then told
him that such condensations and precipitations
of water-vapour were not uncommon, and that
they never dimmed the glare of the vault above.
A kind of mist, indeed, always hung about
the lowlands of K’n-yan, and compensated
for the complete absence of true clouds.
The slight rise of the mountain pass enabled
Zamacona, by looking behind, to see the ancient
and deserted plain in panorama as he had seen
it from the other side. He seems to have appreciated
its strange beauty, and to have vaguely regretted
leaving it; for he speaks of being urged by
Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn to drive his beast more rapidly.
When he faced frontward again he saw that
the crest of the road was very near; the weed-grown
way leading starkly up and ending against
a blank void of blue light. The scene was
undoubtedly highly impressive—a steep green
mountain wall on the right, a deep river-chasm
on the left with another green mountain wall
beyond it, and ahead, the churning sea of
bluish coruscations into which the upward
path dissolved. Then came the crest itself,
and with it the world of Tsath outspread in
a stupendous forward vista.
Zamacona caught his breath at the great sweep
of peopled landscape, for it was a hive of
settlement and activity beyond anything he
had ever seen or dreamed of. The downward
slope of the hill itself was relatively thinly
strown with small farms and occasional temples;
but beyond it lay an enormous plain covered
like a chess board with planted trees, irrigated
by narrow canals cut from the river, and threaded
by wide, geometrically precise roads of gold
or basalt blocks. Great silver cables borne
aloft on golden pillars linked the low, spreading
buildings and clusters of buildings which
rose here and there, and in some places one
could see lines of partly ruinous pillars
without cables. Moving objects shewed the
fields to be under tillage, and in some cases
Zamacona saw that men were ploughing with
the aid of the repulsive, half-human quadrupeds.
But most impressive of all was the bewildering
vision of clustered spires and pinnacles which
rose afar off across the plain and shimmered
flower-like and spectral in the coruscating
blue light. At first Zamacona thought it was
a mountain covered with houses and temples,
like some of the picturesque hill cities of
his own Spain, but a second glance shewed
him that it was not indeed such. It was a
city of the plain, but fashioned of such heaven-reaching
towers that its outline was truly that of
a mountain. Above it hung a curious greyish
haze, through which the blue light glistened
and took added overtones of radiance from
the million golden minarets. Glancing at Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn,
Zamacona knew that this was the monstrous,
gigantic, and omnipotent city of Tsath.
As the road turned downward toward the plain,
Zamacona felt a kind of uneasiness and sense
of evil. He did not like the beast he rode,
or the world that could provide such a beast,
and he did not like the atmosphere that brooded
over the distant city of Tsath. When the cavalcade
began to pass occasional farms, the Spaniard
noticed the forms that worked in the fields;
and did not like their motions and proportions,
or the mutilations he saw on most of them.
Moreover, he did not like the way that some
of these forms were herded in corrals, or
the way they grazed on the heavy verdure.
Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn indicated that these beings
were members of the slave-class, and that
their acts were controlled by the master of
the farm, who gave them hypnotic impressions
in the morning of all they were to do during
the day. As semi-conscious machines, their
industrial efficiency was nearly perfect.
Those in the corrals were inferior specimens,
classified merely as livestock.
Upon reaching the plain, Zamacona saw the
larger farms and noted the almost human work
performed by the repulsive horned gyaa-yothn.
He likewise observed the more manlike shapes
that toiled along the furrows, and felt a
curious fright and disgust toward certain
of them whose motions were more mechanical
than those of the rest. These, Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn
explained, were what men called the y’m-bhi—organisms
which had died, but which had been mechanically
reanimated for industrial purposes by means
of atomic energy and thought-power. The slave-class
did not share the immortality of the freemen
of Tsath, so that with time the number of
y’m-bhi had become very large. They were
dog-like and faithful, but not so readily
amenable to thought-commands as were living
slaves. Those which most repelled Zamacona
were those whose mutilations were greatest;
for some were wholly headless, while others
had suffered singular and seemingly capricious
subtractions, distortions, transpositions,
and graftings in various places. The Spaniard
could not account for this condition, but
Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn made it clear that these
were slaves who had been used for the amusement
of the people in some of the vast arenas;
for the men of Tsath were connoisseurs of
delicate sensation, and required a constant
supply of fresh and novel stimuli for their
jaded impulses. Zamacona, though by no means
squeamish, was not favourably impressed by
what he saw and heard.
Approached more closely, the vast metropolis
became dimly horrible in its monstrous extent
and inhuman height. Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn explained
that the upper parts of the great towers were
no longer used, and that many had been taken
down to avoid the bother of maintenance. The
plain around the original urban area was covered
with newer and smaller dwellings, which in
many cases were preferred to the ancient towers.
From the whole mass of gold and stone a monotonous
roar of activity droned outward over the plain,
while cavalcades and streams of wagons were
constantly entering and leaving over the great
gold- or stone-paved roads.
Several times Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn paused to shew
Zamacona some particular object of interest,
especially the temples of Yig, Tulu, Nug,
Yeb, and the Not-to-Be-Named One which lined
the road at infrequent intervals, each in
its embowering grove according to the custom
of K’n-yan. These temples, unlike those
of the deserted plain beyond the mountains,
were still in active use; large parties of
mounted worshippers coming and going in constant
streams. Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn took Zamacona into
each of them, and the Spaniard watched the
subtle orgiastic rites with fascination and
repulsion. The ceremonies of Nug and Yeb sickened
him especially—so much, indeed, that he
refrained from describing them in his manuscript.
One squat, black temple of Tsathoggua was
encountered, but it had been turned into a
shrine of Shub-Niggurath, the All-Mother and
wife of the Not-to-Be-Named One. This deity
was a kind of sophisticated Astarte, and her
worship struck the pious Catholic as supremely
obnoxious. What he liked least of all were
the emotional sounds emitted by the celebrants—jarring
sounds in a race that had ceased to use vocal
speech for ordinary purposes.
Close to the compact outskirts of Tsath, and
well within the shadow of its terrifying towers,
Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn pointed out a monstrous circular
building before which enormous crowds were
lined up. This, he indicated, was one of the
many amphitheatres where curious sports and
sensations were provided for the weary people
of K’n-yan. He was about to pause and usher
Zamacona inside the vast curved facade, when
the Spaniard, recalling the mutilated forms
he had seen in the fields, violently demurred.
This was the first of those friendly clashes
of taste which were to convince the people
of Tsath that their guest followed strange
and narrow standards.
Tsath itself was a network of strange and
ancient streets; and despite a growing sense
of horror and alienage, Zamacona was enthralled
by its intimations of mystery and cosmic wonder.
The dizzy giganticism of its overawing towers,
the monstrous surge of teeming life through
its ornate avenues, the curious carvings on
its doorways and windows, the odd vistas glimpsed
from balustraded plazas and tiers of titan
terraces, and the enveloping grey haze which
seemed to press down on the gorge-like streets
in low ceiling-fashion, all combined to produce
such a sense of adventurous expectancy as
he had never known before. He was taken at
once to a council of executives which held
forth in a gold-and-copper palace behind a
gardened and fountained park, and was for
some time subjected to close, friendly questioning
in a vaulted hall frescoed with vertiginous
arabesques. Much was expected of him, he could
see, in the way of historical information
about the outside earth; but in return all
the mysteries of K’n-yan would be unveiled
to him. The one great drawback was the inexorable
ruling that he might never return to the world
of sun and stars and Spain which was his.
A daily programme was laid down for the visitor,
with time apportioned judiciously among several
kinds of activities. There were to be conversations
with persons of learning in various places,
and lessons in many branches of Tsathic lore.
Liberal periods of research were allowed for,
and all the libraries of K’n-yan both secular
and sacred were to be thrown open to him as
soon as he might master the written languages.
Rites and spectacles were to be attended—except
when he might especially object—and much
time would be left for the enlightened pleasure-seeking
and emotional titillation which formed the
goal and nucleus of daily life. A house in
the suburbs or an apartment in the city would
be assigned him, and he would be initiated
into one of the large affection-groups, including
many noblewomen of the most extreme and art-enhanced
beauty, which in latter-day K’n-yan took
the place of family units. Several horned
gyaa-yothn would be provided for his transportation
and errand-running, and ten living slaves
of intact body would serve to conduct his
establishment and protect him from thieves
and sadists and religious orgiasts on the
public highways. There were many mechanical
devices which he must learn to use, but Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn
would instruct him immediately regarding the
principal ones.
Upon his choosing an apartment in preference
to a suburban villa, Zamacona was dismissed
by the executives with great courtesy and
ceremony, and was led through several gorgeous
streets to a cliff-like carven structure of
some seventy or eighty floors. Preparations
for his arrival had already been instituted,
and in a spacious ground-floor suite of vaulted
rooms slaves were busy adjusting hangings
and furniture. There were lacquered and inlaid
tabourets, velvet and silk reclining-corners
and squatting-cushions, and infinite rows
of teakwood and ebony pigeon-holes with metal
cylinders containing some of the manuscripts
he was soon to read—standard classics which
all urban apartments possessed. Desks with
great stacks of membrane-paper and pots of
the prevailing green pigment were in every
room—each with graded sets of pigment brushes
and other odd bits of stationery. Mechanical
writing devices stood on ornate golden tripods,
while over all was shed a brilliant blue light
from energy-globes set in the ceiling. There
were windows, but at this shadowy ground-level
they were of scant illuminating value. In
some of the rooms were elaborate baths, while
the kitchen was a maze of technical contrivances.
Supplies were brought, Zamacona was told,
through the network of underground passages
which lay beneath Tsath, and which had once
accommodated curious mechanical transports.
There was a stable on that underground level
for the beasts, and Zamacona would presently
be shewn how to find the nearest runway to
the street. Before his inspection was finished,
the permanent staff of slaves arrived and
were introduced; and shortly afterward there
came some half-dozen freemen and noblewomen
of his future affection-group, who were to
be his companions for several days, contributing
what they could to his instruction and amusement.
Upon their departure, another party would
take their place, and so onward in rotation
through a group of about fifty members.
VI.
Thus was Pánfilo de Zamacona y Nuñez absorbed
for four years into the life of the sinister
city of Tsath in the blue-litten nether world
of K’n-yan. All that he learned and saw
and did is clearly not told in his manuscript;
for a pious reticence overcame him when he
began to write in his native Spanish tongue,
and he dared not set down everything. Much
he consistently viewed with repulsion, and
many things he steadfastly refrained from
seeing or doing or eating. For other things
he atoned by frequent countings of the beads
of his rosary. He explored the entire world
of K’n-yan, including the deserted machine-cities
of the middle period on the gorse-grown plain
of Nith, and made one descent into the red-litten
world of Yoth to see the Cyclopean ruins.
He witnessed prodigies of craft and machinery
which left him breathless, and beheld human
metamorphoses, dematerialisations, rematerialisations,
and reanimations which made him cross himself
again and again. His very capacity for astonishment
was blunted by the plethora of new marvels
which every day brought him.
But the longer he stayed, the more he wished
to leave, for the inner life of K’n-yan
was based on impulses very plainly outside
his radius. As he progressed in historical
knowledge, he understood more; but understanding
only heightened his distaste. He felt that
the people of Tsath were a lost and dangerous
race—more dangerous to themselves than they
knew—and that their growing frenzy of monotony-warfare
and novelty-quest was leading them rapidly
toward a precipice of disintegration and utter
horror. His own visit, he could see, had accelerated
their unrest; not only by introducing fears
of outside invasion, but by exciting in many
a wish to sally forth and taste the diverse
external world he described. As time progressed,
he noticed an increasing tendency of the people
to resort to dematerialisation as an amusement;
so that the apartments and amphitheatres of
Tsath became a veritable Witches’ Sabbath
of transmutations, age-adjustments, death-experiments,
and projections. With the growth of boredom
and restlessness, he saw, cruelty and subtlety
and revolt were growing apace. There was more
and more cosmic abnormality, more and more
curious sadism, more and more ignorance and
superstition, and more and more desire to
escape out of physical life into a half-spectral
state of electronic dispersal.
All his efforts to leave, however, came to
nothing. Persuasion was useless, as repeated
trials proved; though the mature disillusion
of the upper classes at first prevented them
from resenting their guest’s open wish for
departure. In a year which he reckoned as
1543 Zamacona made an actual attempt to escape
through the tunnel by which he had entered
K’n-yan, but after a weary journey across
the deserted plain he encountered forces in
the dark passage which discouraged him from
future attempts in that direction. As a means
of sustaining hope and keeping the image of
home in mind, he began about this time to
make rough draughts of the manuscript relating
his adventures; delighting in the loved, old
Spanish words and the familiar letters of
the Roman alphabet. Somehow he fancied he
might get the manuscript to the outer world;
and to make it convincing to his fellows he
resolved to enclose it in one of the Tulu-metal
cylinders used for sacred archives. That alien,
magnetic substance could not but support the
incredible story he had to tell.
But even as he planned, he had little real
hope of ever establishing contact with the
earth’s surface. Every known gate, he knew,
was guarded by persons or forces that it were
better not to oppose. His attempt at escape
had not helped matters, for he could now see
a growing hostility to the outer world he
represented. He hoped that no other European
would find his way in; for it was possible
that later comers might not fare as well as
he. He himself had been a cherished fountain
of data, and as such had enjoyed a privileged
status. Others, deemed less necessary, might
receive rather different treatment. He even
wondered what would happen to him when the
sages of Tsath considered him drained dry
of fresh facts; and in self-defence began
to be more gradual in his talks on earth-lore,
conveying whenever he could the impression
of vast knowledge held in reserve.
One other thing which endangered Zamacona’s
status in Tsath was his persistent curiosity
regarding the ultimate abyss of N’kai, beneath
red-litten Yoth, whose existence the dominant
religious cults of K’n-yan were more and
more inclined to deny. When exploring Yoth
he had vainly tried to find the blocked-up
entrance; and later on he experimented in
the arts of dematerialisation and projection,
hoping that he might thereby be able to throw
his consciousness downward into the gulfs
which his physical eyes could not discover.
Though never becoming truly proficient in
these processes, he did manage to achieve
a series of monstrous and portentous dreams
which he believed included some elements of
actual projection into N’kai; dreams which
greatly shocked and perturbed the leaders
of Yig and Tulu-worship when he related them,
and which he was advised by friends to conceal
rather than exploit. In time those dreams
became very frequent and maddening; containing
things which he dared not record in his main
manuscript, but of which he prepared a special
record for the benefit of certain learned
men in Tsath.
It may have been unfortunate—or it may have
been mercifully fortunate—that Zamacona
practiced so many reticences and reserved
so many themes and descriptions for subsidiary
manuscripts. The main document leaves one
to guess much about the detailed manners,
customs, thoughts, language, and history of
K’n-yan, as well as to form any adequate
picture of the visual aspect and daily life
of Tsath. One is left puzzled, too, about
the real motivations of the people; their
strange passivity and craven unwarlikeness,
and their almost cringing fear of the outer
world despite their possession of atomic and
dematerialising powers which would have made
them unconquerable had they taken the trouble
to organise armies as in the old days. It
is evident that K’n-yan was far along in
its decadence—reacting with mixed apathy
and hysteria against the standardised and
time-tabled life of stultifying regularity
which machinery had brought it during its
middle period. Even the grotesque and repulsive
customs and modes of thought and feeling can
be traced to this source; for in his historical
research Zamacona found evidence of bygone
eras in which K’n-yan had held ideas much
like those of the classic and renaissance
outer world, and had possessed a national
character and art full of what Europeans regard
as dignity, kindness, and nobility.
The more Zamacona studied these things, the
more apprehensive about the future he became;
because he saw that the omnipresent moral
and intellectual disintegration was a tremendously
deep-seated and ominously accelerating movement.
Even during his stay the signs of decay multiplied.
Rationalism degenerated more and more into
fanatical and orgiastic superstition, centring
in a lavish adoration of the magnetic Tulu-metal,
and tolerance steadily dissolved into a series
of frenzied hatreds, especially toward the
outer world of which the scholars were learning
so much from him. At times he almost feared
that the people might some day lose their
age-long apathy and brokenness and turn like
desperate rats against the unknown lands above
them, sweeping all before them by virtue of
their singular and still-remembered scientific
powers. But for the present they fought their
boredom and sense of emptiness in other ways;
multiplying their hideous emotional outlets
and increasing the mad grotesqueness and abnormality
of their diversions. The arenas of Tsath must
have been accursed and unthinkable places—Zamacona
never went near them. And what they would
be in another century, or even in another
decade, he did not dare to think. The pious
Spaniard crossed himself and counted his beads
more often than usual in those days.
In the year 1545, as he reckoned it, Zamacona
began what may well be accepted as his final
series of attempts to leave K’n-yan. His
fresh opportunity came from an unexpected
source—a female of his affection-group who
conceived for him a curious individual infatuation
based on some hereditary memory of the days
of monogamous wedlock in Tsath. Over this
female—a noblewoman of moderate beauty and
of at least average intelligence named T’la-yub—Zamacona
acquired the most extraordinary influence;
finally inducing her to help him in an escape,
under the promise that he would let her accompany
him. Chance proved a great factor in the course
of events, for T’la-yub came of a primordial
family of gate-lords who had retained oral
traditions of at least one passage to the
outer world which the mass of people had forgotten
even at the time of the great closing; a passage
to a mound on the level plains of earth which
had, in consequence, never been sealed up
or guarded. She explained that the primordial
gate-lords were not guards or sentries, but
merely ceremonial and economic proprietors,
half-feudal and baronial in status, of an
era preceding the severance of surface-relations.
Her own family had been so reduced at the
time of the closing that their gate had been
wholly overlooked; and they had ever afterward
preserved the secret of its existence as a
sort of hereditary secret—a source of pride,
and of a sense of reserve power, to offset
the feeling of vanished wealth and influence
which so constantly irritated them.
Zamacona, now working feverishly to get his
manuscript into final form in case anything
should happen to him, decided to take with
him on his outward journey only five beast-loads
of unalloyed gold in the form of the small
ingots used for minor decorations—enough,
he calculated, to make him a personage of
unlimited power in his own world. He had become
somewhat hardened to the sight of the monstrous
gyaa-yothn during his four years of residence
in Tsath, hence did not shrink from using
the creatures; yet he resolved to kill and
bury them, and cache the gold, as soon as
he reached the outer world, since he knew
that even a glimpse of one of the things would
drive any ordinary Indian mad. Later he could
arrange for a suitable expedition to transport
the treasure to Mexico. T’la-yub he would
perhaps allow to share his fortunes, for she
was by no means unattractive; though possibly
he would arrange for her sojourn amongst the
plains Indians, since he was not overanxious
to preserve links with the manner of life
in Tsath. For a wife, of course, he would
choose a lady of Spain—or at worst, an Indian
princess of normal outer-world descent and
a regular and approved past. But for the present
T’la-yub must be used as a guide. The manuscript
he would carry on his own person, encased
in a book-cylinder of the sacred and magnetic
Tulu-metal.
The expedition itself is described in the
addendum to Zamacona’s manuscript, written
later, and in a hand shewing signs of nervous
strain. It set out amidst the most careful
precautions, choosing a rest-period and proceeding
as far as possible along the faintly lighted
passages beneath the city. Zamacona and T’la-yub,
disguised in slaves’ garments, bearing provision-knapsacks,
and leading the five laden beasts on foot,
were readily taken for commonplace workers;
and they clung as long as possible to the
subterranean way—using a long and little-frequented
branch which had formerly conducted the mechanical
transports to the now ruined suburb of L’thaa.
Amidst the ruins of L’thaa they came to
the surface, thereafter passing as rapidly
as possible over the deserted, blue-litten
plain of Nith toward the Grh-yan range of
low hills. There, amidst the tangled underbrush,
T’la-yub found the long disused and half-fabulous
entrance to the forgotten tunnel; a thing
she had seen but once before—aeons in the
past, when her father had taken her thither
to shew her this monument to their family
pride. It was hard work getting the laden
gyaa-yothn to scrape through the obstructing
vines and briers, and one of them displayed
a rebelliousness destined to bear dire consequences—bolting
away from the party and loping back toward
Tsath on its detestable pads, golden burden
and all.
It was nightmare work burrowing by the light
of blue-ray torches upward, downward, forward,
and upward again through a dank, choked tunnel
that no foot had trodden since ages before
the sinking of Atlantis; and at one point
T’la-yub had to practice the fearsome art
of dematerialisation on herself, Zamacona,
and the laden beasts in order to pass a point
wholly clogged by shifting earth-strata. It
was a terrible experience for Zamacona; for
although he had often witnessed dematerialisation
in others, and even practiced it himself to
the extent of dream-projection, he had never
been fully subjected to it before. But T’la-yub
was skilled in the arts of K’n-yan, and
accomplished the double metamorphosis in perfect
safety.
Thereafter they resumed the hideous burrowing
through stalactited crypts of horror where
monstrous carvings leered at every turn; alternately
camping and advancing for a period which Zamacona
reckoned as about three days, but which was
probably less. At last they came to a very
narrow place where the natural or only slightly
hewn cave-walls gave place to walls of wholly
artificial masonry, carved into terrible bas-reliefs.
These walls, after about a mile of steep ascent,
ended with a pair of vast niches, one on each
side, in which monstrous, nitre-encrusted
images of Yig and Tulu squatted, glaring at
each other across the passage as they had
glared since the earliest youth of the human
world. At this point the passage opened into
a prodigious vaulted and circular chamber
of human construction; wholly covered with
horrible carvings, and revealing at the farther
end an arched passageway with the foot of
a flight of steps. T’la-yub knew from family
tales that this must be very near the earth’s
surface, but she could not tell just how near.
Here the party camped for what they meant
to be their last rest-period in the subterraneous
world.
It must have been hours later that the clank
of metal and the padding of beasts’ feet
awakened Zamacona and T’la-yub. A bluish
glare was spreading from the narrow passage
between the images of Yig and Tulu, and in
an instant the truth was obvious. An alarm
had been given at Tsath—as was later revealed,
by the returning gyaa-yothn which had rebelled
at the brier-choked tunnel-entrance—and
a swift party of pursuers had come to arrest
the fugitives. Resistance was clearly useless,
and none was offered. The party of twelve
beast-riders proved studiously polite, and
the return commenced almost without a word
or thought-message on either side.
It was an ominous and depressing journey,
and the ordeal of dematerialisation and rematerialisation
at the choked place was all the more terrible
because of the lack of that hope and expectancy
which had palliated the process on the outward
trip. Zamacona heard his captors discussing
the imminent clearing of this choked place
by intensive radiations, since henceforward
sentries must be maintained at the hitherto
unknown outer portal. It would not do to let
outsiders get within the passage, for then
any who might escape without due treatment
would have a hint of the vastness of the inner
world and would perhaps be curious enough
to return in greater strength. As with the
other passages since Zamacona’s coming,
sentries must be stationed all along, as far
as the very outermost gate; sentries drawn
from to amongst all the slaves, the dead-alive
y’m-bhi, or the class of discredited freemen.
With the overrunning of the American plains
by thousands of Europeans, as the Spaniard
had predicted, every passage was a potential
source of danger; and must be rigorously guarded
until the technologists of Tsath could spare
the energy to prepare an ultimate and entrance-hiding
obliteration as they had done for many passages
in earlier and more vigorous times.
Zamacona and T’la-yub were tried before
three gn’agn of the supreme tribunal in
the gold-and-copper palace behind the gardened
and fountained park, and the Spaniard was
given his liberty because of the vital outer-world
information he still had to impart. He was
told to return to his apartment and to his
affection-group; taking up his life as before,
and continuing to meet deputations of scholars
according to the latest schedule he had been
following. No restrictions would be imposed
upon him so long as he might remain peacefully
in K’n-yan—but it was intimated that such
leniency would not be repeated after another
attempt at escape. Zamacona had felt that
there was an element of irony in the parting
words of the chief gn’agn—an assurance
that all of his gyaa-yothn, including the
one which had rebelled, would be returned
to him.
The fate of T’la-yub was less happy. There
being no object in retaining her, and her
ancient Tsathic lineage giving her act a greater
aspect of treason than Zamacona’s had possessed,
she was ordered to be delivered to the curious
diversions of the amphitheatre; and afterward,
in a somewhat mutilated and half-dematerialised
form, to be given the functions of a y’m-bhi
or animated corpse-slave and stationed among
the sentries guarding the passage whose existence
she had betrayed. Zamacona soon heard, not
without many pangs of regret he could scarcely
have anticipated, that poor T’la-yub had
emerged from the arena in a headless and otherwise
incomplete state, and had been set as an outermost
guard upon the mound in which the passage
had been found to terminate. She was, he was
told, a night-sentinel, whose automatic duty
was to warn off all comers with a torch; sending
down reports to a small garrison of twelve
dead slave y’m-bhi and six living but partly
dematerialised freemen in the vaulted, circular
chamber if the approachers did not heed her
warning. She worked, he was told, in conjunction
with a day-sentinel—a living freeman who
chose this post in preference to other forms
of discipline for other offences against the
state. Zamacona, of course, had long known
that most of the chief gate-sentries were
such discredited freemen.
It was now made plain to him, though indirectly,
that his own penalty for another escape-attempt
would be service as a gate-sentry—but in
the form of a dead-alive y’m-bhi slave,
and after amphitheatre-treatment even more
picturesque than that which T’la-yub was
reported to have undergone. It was intimated
that he—or parts of him—would be reanimated
to guard some inner section of the passage;
within sight of others, where his abridged
person might serve as a permanent symbol of
the rewards of treason. But, his informants
always added, it was of course inconceivable
that he would ever court such a fate. So long
as he remained peaceably in K’n-yan, he
would continue to be a free, privileged, and
respected personage.
Yet in the end Pánfilo de Zamacona did court
the fate so direfully hinted to him. True,
he did not really expect to encounter it;
but the nervous latter part of his manuscript
makes it clear that he was prepared to face
its possibility. What gave him a final hope
of scatheless escape from K’n-yan was his
growing mastery of the art of dematerialisation.
Having studied it for years, and having learned
still more from the two instances in which
he had been subjected to it, he now felt increasingly
able to use it independently and effectively.
The manuscript records several notable experiments
in this art—minor successes accomplished
in his apartment—and reflects Zamacona’s
hope that he might soon be able to assume
the spectral form in full, attaining complete
invisibility and preserving that condition
as long as he wished.
Once he reached this stage, he argued, the
outward way lay open to him. Of course he
could not bear away any gold, but mere escape
was enough. He would, though, dematerialise
and carry away with him his manuscript in
the Tulu-metal cylinder, even though it cost
additional effort; for this record and proof
must reach the outer world at all hazards.
He now knew the passage to follow; and if
he could thread it in an atom-scattered state,
he did not see how any person or force could
detect or stop him. The only trouble would
be if he failed to maintain his spectral condition
at all times. That was the one ever-present
peril, as he had learned from his experiments.
But must one not always risk death and worse
in a life of adventure? Zamacona was a gentleman
of Old Spain; of the blood that faced the
unknown and carved out half the civilisation
of the New World.
For many nights after his ultimate resolution
Zamacona prayed to St. Pamphilus and other
guardian saints, and counted the beads of
his rosary. The last entry in the manuscript,
which toward the end took the form of a diary
more and more, was merely a single sentence—“Es
más tarde de lo que pensaba—tengo que marcharme”.
. . . “It is later than I thought; I must
go.” After that, only silence and conjecture—and
such evidence as the presence of the manuscript
itself, and what that manuscript could lead
to, might provide.
VII.
When I looked up from my half-stupefied reading
and note-taking the morning sun was high in
the heavens. The electric bulb was still burning,
but such things of the real world—the modern
outer world—were far from my whirling brain.
I knew I was in my room at Clyde Compton’s
at Binger—but upon what monstrous vista
had I stumbled? Was this thing a hoax or a
chronicle of madness? If a hoax, was it a
jest of the sixteenth century or of today?
The manuscript’s age looked appallingly
genuine to my not wholly unpracticed eyes,
and the problem presented by the strange metal
cylinder I dared not even think about.
Moreover, what a monstrously exact explanation
it gave of all the baffling phenomena of the
mound—of the seemingly meaningless and paradoxical
actions of diurnal and nocturnal ghosts, and
of the queer cases of madness and disappearance!
It was even an accursedly plausible explanation—evilly
consistent—if one could adopt the incredible.
It must be a shocking hoax devised by someone
who knew all the lore of the mound. There
was even a hint of social satire in the account
of that unbelievable nether world of horror
and decay. Surely this was the clever forgery
of some learned cynic—something like the
leaden crosses in New Mexico, which a jester
once planted and pretended to discover as
a relique of some forgotten Dark Age colony
from Europe.
Upon going down to breakfast I hardly knew
what to tell Compton and his mother, as well
as the curious callers who had already begun
to arrive. Still in a daze, I cut the Gordian
Knot by giving a few points from the notes
I had made, and mumbling my belief that the
thing was a subtle and ingenious fraud left
there by some previous explorer of the mound—a
belief in which everybody seemed to concur
when told of the substance of the manuscript.
It is curious how all that breakfast group—and
all the others in Binger to whom the discussion
was repeated—seemed to find a great clearing
of the atmosphere in the notion that somebody
was playing a joke on somebody. For the time
we all forgot that the known, recent history
of the mound presented mysteries as strange
as any in the manuscript, and as far from
acceptable solution as ever.
The fears and doubts began to return when
I asked for volunteers to visit the mound
with me. I wanted a larger excavating party—but
the idea of going to that uncomfortable place
seemed no more attractive to the people of
Binger than it had seemed on the previous
day. I myself felt a mounting horror upon
looking toward the mound and glimpsing the
moving speck which I knew was the daylight
sentinel; for in spite of all my scepticism
the morbidities of that manuscript stuck by
me and gave everything connected with the
place a new and monstrous significance. I
absolutely lacked the resolution to look at
the moving speck with my binoculars. Instead,
I set out with the kind of bravado we display
in nightmares—when, knowing we are dreaming,
we plunge desperately into still thicker horrors,
for the sake of having the whole thing over
the sooner. My pick and shovel were already
out there, so I had only my handbag of smaller
paraphernalia to take. Into this I put the
strange cylinder and its contents, feeling
vaguely that I might possibly find something
worth checking up with some part of the green-lettered
Spanish text. Even a clever hoax might be
founded on some actual attribute of the mound
which a former explorer had discovered—and
that magnetic metal was damnably odd! Grey
Eagle’s cryptic talisman still hung from
its leathern cord around my neck.
I did not look very sharply at the mound as
I walked toward it, but when I reached it
there was nobody in sight. Repeating my upward
scramble of the previous day, I was troubled
by thoughts of what might lie close at hand
if, by any miracle, any part of the manuscript
were actually half-true. In such a case, I
could not help reflecting, the hypothetical
Spaniard Zamacona must have barely reached
the outer world when overtaken by some disaster—perhaps
an involuntary rematerialisation. He would
naturally, in that event, have been seized
by whichever sentry happened to be on duty
at the time—either the discredited freeman,
or, as a matter of supreme irony, the very
T’la-yub who had planned and aided his first
attempt at escape—and in the ensuing struggle
the cylinder with the manuscript might well
have been dropped on the mound’s summit,
to be neglected and gradually buried for nearly
four centuries. But, I added, as I climbed
over the crest, one must not think of extravagant
things like that. Still, if there were anything
in the tale, it must have been a monstrous
fate to which Zamacona had been dragged back
. . . the amphitheatre . . . mutilation . . . duty
somewhere in the dank, nitrous tunnel as a
dead-alive slave . . . a maimed corpse-fragment
as an automatic interior sentry. . . .
It was a very real shock which chased this
morbid speculation from my head, for upon
glancing around the elliptical summit I saw
at once that my pick and shovel had been stolen.
This was a highly provoking and disconcerting
development; baffling, too, in view of the
seeming reluctance of all the Binger folk
to visit the mound. Was this reluctance a
pretended thing, and had the jokers of the
village been chuckling over my coming discomfiture
as they solemnly saw me off ten minutes before?
I took out my binoculars and scanned the gaping
crowd at the edge of the village. No—they
did not seem to be looking for any comic climax;
yet was not the whole affair at bottom a colossal
joke in which all the villagers and reservation
people were concerned—legends, manuscript,
cylinder, and all? I thought of how I had
seen the sentry from a distance, and then
found him unaccountably vanished; thought
also of the conduct of old Grey Eagle, of
the speech and expressions of Compton and
his mother, and of the unmistakable fright
of most of the Binger people. On the whole,
it could not very well be a village-wide joke.
The fear and the problem were surely real,
though obviously there were one or two jesting
daredevils in Binger who had stolen out to
the mound and made off with the tools I had
left.
Everything else on the mound was as I had
left it—brush cut by my machete, slight,
bowl-like depression toward the north end,
and the hole I had made with my trench-knife
in digging up the magnetism-revealed cylinder.
Deeming it too great a concession to the unknown
jokers to return to Binger for another pick
and shovel, I resolved to carry out my programme
as best I could with the machete and trench-knife
in my handbag; so extracting these, I set
to work excavating the bowl-like depression
which my eye had picked as the possible site
of a former entrance to the mound. As I proceeded,
I felt again the suggestion of a sudden wind
blowing against me which I had noticed the
day before—a suggestion which seemed stronger,
and still more reminiscent of unseen, formless,
opposing hands laid on my wrists, as I cut
deeper and deeper through the root-tangled
red soil and reached the exotic black loam
beneath. The talisman around my neck appeared
to twitch oddly in the breeze—not in any
one direction, as when attracted by the buried
cylinder, but vaguely and diffusely, in a
manner wholly unaccountable.
Then, quite without warning, the black, root-woven
earth beneath my feet began to sink cracklingly,
while I heard a faint sound of sifting, falling
matter far below me. The obstructing wind,
or forces, or hands now seemed to be operating
from the very seat of the sinking, and I felt
that they aided me by pushing as I leaped
back out of the hole to avoid being involved
in any cave-in. Bending down over the brink
and hacking at the mould-caked root-tangle
with my machete, I felt that they were against
me again—but at no time were they strong
enough to stop my work. The more roots I severed,
the more falling matter I heard below. Finally
the hole began to deepen of itself toward
the centre, and I saw that the earth was sifting
down into some large cavity beneath, so as
to leave a good-sized aperture when the roots
that had bound it were gone. A few more hacks
of the machete did the trick, and with a parting
cave-in and uprush of curiously chill and
alien air the last barrier gave way. Under
the morning sun yawned a huge opening at least
three feet square, and shewing the top of
a flight of stone steps down which the loose
earth of the collapse was still sliding. My
quest had come to something at last! With
an elation of accomplishment almost overbalancing
fear for the nonce, I replaced the trench-knife
and machete in my handbag, took out my powerful
electric torch, and prepared for a triumphant,
lone, and utterly rash invasion of the fabulous
nether world I had uncovered.
It was rather hard getting down the first
few steps, both because of the fallen earth
which had choked them and because of a sinister
up-pushing of a cold wind from below. The
talisman around my neck swayed curiously,
and I began to regret the disappearing square
of daylight above me. The electric torch shewed
dank, water-stained, and salt-encrusted walls
fashioned of huge basalt blocks, and now and
then I thought I descried some trace of carving
beneath the nitrous deposits. I gripped my
handbag more tightly, and was glad of the
comforting weight of the sheriff’s heavy
revolver in my right-hand coat pocket. After
a time the passage began to wind this way
and that, and the staircase became free from
obstructions. Carvings on the walls were now
definitely traceable, and I shuddered when
I saw how clearly the grotesque figures resembled
the monstrous bas-reliefs on the cylinder
I had found. Winds and forces continued to
blow malevolently against me, and at one or
two bends I half fancied the torch gave glimpses
of thin, transparent shapes not unlike the
sentinel on the mound as my binoculars had
shewed him. When I reached this stage of visual
chaos I stopped for a moment to get a grip
on myself. It would not do to let my nerves
get the better of me at the very outset of
what would surely be a trying experience,
and the most important archaeological feat
of my career.
But I wished I had not stopped at just that
place, for the act fixed my attention on something
profoundly disturbing. It was only a small
object lying close to the wall on one of the
steps below me, but that object was such as
to put my reason to a severe test, and bring
up a line of the most alarming speculations.
That the opening above me had been closed
against all material forms for generations
was utterly obvious from the growth of shrub-roots
and accumulation of drifting soil; yet the
object before me was most distinctly not many
generations old. For it was an electric torch
much like the one I now carried—warped and
encrusted in the tomb-like dampness, but none
the less perfectly unmistakable. I descended
a few steps and picked it up, wiping off the
evil deposits on my rough coat. One of the
nickel bands bore an engraved name and address,
and I recognised it with a start the moment
I made it out. It read “Jas. C. Williams,
17 Trowbridge St., Cambridge, Mass.”—and
I knew that it had belonged to one of the
two daring college instructors who had disappeared
on June 28, 1915. Only thirteen years ago,
and yet I had just broken through the sod
of centuries! How had the thing got there?
Another entrance—or was there something
after all in this mad idea of dematerialisation
and rematerialisation?
Doubt and horror grew upon me as I wound still
farther down the seemingly endless staircase.
Would the thing never stop? The carvings grew
more and more distinct, and assumed a narrative
pictorial quality which brought me close to
panic as I recognised many unmistakable correspondences
with the history of K’n-yan as sketched
in the manuscript now resting in my handbag.
For the first time I began seriously to question
the wisdom of my descent, and to wonder whether
I had not better return to the upper air before
I came upon something which would never let
me return as a sane man. But I did not hesitate
long, for as a Virginian I felt the blood
of ancestral fighters and gentlemen-adventurers
pounding a protest against retreat from any
peril known or unknown.
My descent became swifter rather than slower,
and I avoided studying the terrible bas-reliefs
and intaglios that had unnerved me. All at
once I saw an arched opening ahead, and realised
that the prodigious staircase had ended at
last. But with that realisation came horror
in mounting magnitude, for before me there
yawned a vast vaulted crypt of all-too-familiar
outline—a great circular space answering
in every least particular to the carving-lined
chamber described in the Zamacona manuscript.
It was indeed the place. There could be no
mistake. And if any room for doubt yet remained,
that room was abolished by what I saw directly
across the great vault. It was a second arched
opening, commencing a long, narrow passage
and having at its mouth two huge opposite
niches bearing loathsome and titanic images
of shockingly familiar pattern. There in the
dark unclean Yig and hideous Tulu squatted
eternally, glaring at each other across the
passage as they had glared since the earliest
youth of the human world.
From this point onward I ask no credence for
what I tell—for what I think I saw. It is
too utterly unnatural, too utterly monstrous
and incredible, to be any part of sane human
experience or objective reality. My torch,
though casting a powerful beam ahead, naturally
could not furnish any general illumination
of the Cyclopean crypt; so I now began moving
it about to explore the giant walls little
by little. As I did so, I saw to my horror
that the space was by no means vacant, but
was instead littered with odd furniture and
utensils and heaps of packages which bespoke
a populous recent occupancy—no nitrous reliques
of the past, but queerly shaped objects and
supplies in modern, every-day use. As my torch
rested on each article or group of articles,
however, the distinctness of the outlines
soon began to grow blurred; until in the end
I could scarcely tell whether the things belonged
to the realm of matter or to the realm of
spirit.
All this while the adverse winds blew against
me with increasing fury, and the unseen hands
plucked malevolently at me and snatched at
the strange magnetic talisman I wore. Wild
conceits surged through my mind. I thought
of the manuscript and what it said about the
garrison stationed in this place—twelve
dead slave y’m-bhi and six living but partly
dematerialised freemen—that was in 1545—three
hundred and eighty-three years ago. . . . What
since then? Zamacona had predicted change
. . . subtle disintegration . . . more dematerialisation
. . . weaker and weaker . . . was it Grey
Eagle’s talisman that held them at bay—their
sacred Tulu-metal—and were they feebly trying
to pluck it off so that they might do to me
what they had done to those who had come before?
. . . It occurred to me with shuddering force
that I was building my speculations out of
a full belief in the Zamacona manuscript—this
must not be—I must get a grip on myself—
But, curse it, every time I tried to get a
grip I saw some fresh sight to shatter my
poise still further. This time, just as my
will power was driving the half-seen paraphernalia
into obscurity, my glance and torch-beam had
to light on two things of very different nature;
two things of the eminently real and sane
world; yet they did more to unseat my shaky
reason than anything I had seen before—because
I knew what they were, and knew how profoundly,
in the course of Nature, they ought not to
be there. They were my own missing pick and
shovel, side by side, and leaning neatly against
the blasphemously carved wall of that hellish
crypt. God in heaven—and I had babbled to
myself about daring jokers from Binger!
That was the last straw. After that the cursed
hypnotism of the manuscript got at me, and
I actually saw the half-transparent shapes
of the things that were pushing and plucking;
pushing and plucking—those leprous palaeogean
things with something of humanity still clinging
to them—the complete forms, and the forms
that were morbidly and perversely incomplete
. . . all these, and hideous other entities—the
four-footed blasphemies with ape-like face
and projecting horn . . . and not a sound
so far in all that nitrous hell of inner earth.
. . .
Then there was a sound—a flopping; a padding;
a dull, advancing sound which heralded beyond
question a being as structurally material
as the pickaxe and the shovel—something
wholly unlike the shadow-shapes that ringed
me in, yet equally remote from any sort of
life as life is understood on the earth’s
wholesome surface. My shattered brain tried
to prepare me for what was coming, but could
not frame any adequate image. I could only
say over and over again to myself, “It is
of the abyss, but it is not dematerialised.”
The padding grew more distinct, and from the
mechanical cast of the tread I knew it was
a dead thing that stalked in the darkness.
Then—oh, God, I saw it in the full beam
of my torch; saw it framed like a sentinel
in the narrow passage between the nightmare
idols of the serpent Yig and the octopus Tulu.
. . .
Let me collect myself enough to hint at what
I saw; to explain why I dropped torch and
handbag and fled empty-handed in the utter
blackness, wrapped in a merciful unconsciousness
which did not wear off until the sun and the
distant yelling and the shouting from the
village roused me as I lay gasping on the
top of the accursed mound. I do not yet know
what guided me again to the earth’s surface.
I only know that the watchers in Binger saw
me stagger up into sight three hours after
I had vanished; saw me lurch up and fall flat
on the ground as if struck by a bullet. None
of them dared to come out and help me; but
they knew I must be in a bad state, so tried
to rouse me as best they could by yelling
in chorus and firing off revolvers.
It worked in the end, and when I came to I
almost rolled down the side of the mound in
my eagerness to get away from that black aperture
which still yawned open. My torch and tools,
and the handbag with the manuscript, were
all down there; but it is easy to see why
neither I nor anyone else ever went after
them. When I staggered across the plain and
into the village I dared not tell what I had
seen. I only muttered vague things about carvings
and statues and snakes and shaken nerves.
And I did not faint again until somebody mentioned
that the ghost-sentinel had reappeared about
the time I had staggered half way back to
town. I left Binger that evening, and have
never been there since, though they tell me
the ghosts still appear on the mound as usual.
But I have resolved to hint here at last what
I dared not hint to the people of Binger on
that terrible August afternoon. I don’t
know yet just how I can go about it—and
if in the end you think my reticence strange,
just remember that to imagine such a horror
is one thing, but to see it is another thing.
I saw it. I think you’ll recall my citing
early in this tale the case of a bright young
man named Heaton who went out to that mound
one day in 1891 and came back at night as
the village idiot, babbling for eight years
about horrors and then dying in an epileptic
fit. What he used to keep moaning was “That
white man—oh, my God, what they did to him.
. . .”
Well, I saw the same thing that poor Heaton
saw—and I saw it after reading the manuscript,
so I know more of its history than he did.
That makes it worse—for I know all that
it implies; all that must be still brooding
and festering and waiting down there. I told
you it had padded mechanically toward me out
of the narrow passage and had stood sentry-like
at the entrance between the frightful eidola
of Yig and Tulu. That was very natural and
inevitable—because the thing was a sentry.
It had been made a sentry for punishment,
and it was quite dead—besides lacking head,
arms, lower legs, and other customary parts
of a human being. Yes—it had been a very
human being once; and what is more, it had
been white. Very obviously, if that manuscript
was as true as I think it was, this being
had been used for the diversions of the amphitheatre
before its life had become wholly extinct
and supplanted by automatic impulses controlled
from outside.
On its white and only slightly hairy chest
some letters had been gashed or branded—I
had not stopped to investigate, but had merely
noted that they were in an awkward and fumbling
Spanish; an awkward Spanish implying a kind
of ironic use of the language by an alien
inscriber familiar neither with the idiom
nor the Roman letters used to record it. The
inscription had read “Secuestrado a la voluntad
de Xinaián en el cuerpo decapitado de Tlayúb”—“Seized
by the will of K’n-yan in the headless body
of T’la-yub.”
