Azathoth
By H. P. Lovecraft
When age fell upon the world, and wonder went
out of the minds of men; when grey cities
reared to smoky skies tall towers grim and
ugly, in whose shadow none might dream of
the sun or of spring’s flowering meads;
when learning stripped earth of her mantle
of beauty, and poets sang no more save of
twisted phantoms seen with bleared and inward-looking
eyes; when these things had come to pass,
and childish hopes had gone away forever,
there was a man who travelled out of life
on a quest into the spaces whither the world’s
dreams had fled.
Of the name and abode of this man but little
is written, for they were of the waking world
only; yet it is said that both were obscure.
It is enough to know that he dwelt in a city
of high walls where sterile twilight reigned,
and that he toiled all day among shadow and
turmoil, coming home at evening to a room
whose one window opened not on the fields
and groves but on a dim court where other
windows stared in dull despair. From that
casement one might see only walls and windows,
except sometimes when one leaned far out and
peered aloft at the small stars that passed.
And because mere walls and windows must soon
drive to madness a man who dreams and reads
much, the dweller in that room used night
after night to lean out and peer aloft to
glimpse some fragment of things beyond the
waking world and the greyness of tall cities.
After years he began to call the slow-sailing
stars by name, and to follow them in fancy
when they glided regretfully out of sight;
till at length his vision opened to many secret
vistas whose existence no common eye suspects.
And one night a mighty gulf was bridged, and
the dream-haunted skies swelled down to the
lonely watcher’s window to merge with the
close air of his room and make him a part
of their fabulous wonder.
There came to that room wild streams of violet
midnight glittering with dust of gold; vortices
of dust and fire, swirling out of the ultimate
spaces and heavy with perfumes from beyond
the worlds. Opiate oceans poured there, litten
by suns that the eye may never behold and
having in their whirlpools strange dolphins
and sea-nymphs of unrememberable deeps. Noiseless
infinity eddied around the dreamer and wafted
him away without even touching the body that
leaned stiffly from the lonely window; and
for days not counted in men’s calendars
the tides of far spheres bare him gently to
join the dreams for which he longed; the dreams
that men have lost. And in the course of many
cycles they tenderly left him sleeping on
a green sunrise shore; a green shore fragrant
with lotus-blossoms and starred by red camalotes.
