The dream quest of unknown kadath
The dream quest of unknown kadathTHE DREAM QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH Copyright
The dream quest of unknown kadath
H. P. Lovecraft
THE DREAM QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH
THREE times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvelous city,
and three times was he snatched away while still he paused on the
high terrace above it. All golden and lovely it blazed in the
sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades and arched bridges of
veined marble, silver-basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad
squares and perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between
delicate trees and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming
rows; while on steep northward slopes climbed tiers of red roofs
and old peaked gables harbouring little lanes of grassy cobbles. It
was a fever of the gods, a fanfare of supernal trumpets and a clash
of immortal cymbals. Mystery hung about it as clouds about a
fabulous unvisited mountain; and as Carter stood breathless and
expectant on that balustraded parapet there swept up to him the
poignancy and suspense of almost-vanished memory, the pain of lost
things and the maddening need to place again what once had been an
awesome and momentous place.He knew that for him its meaning must once have been supreme;
though in what cycle or incarnation he had known it, or whether in
dream or in waking, he could not tell. Vaguely it called up
glimpses of a far forgotten first youth, when wonder and pleasure
lay in all the mystery of days, and dawn and dusk alike strode
forth prophetic to the eager sound of lutes and song, unclosing
fiery gates toward further and surprising marvels. But each night
as he stood on that high marble terrace with the curious urns and
carven rail and looked off over that hushed sunset city of beauty
and unearthly immanence he felt the bondage of dream's tyrannous
gods; for in no wise could he leave that lofty spot, or descend the
wide marmoreal flights flung endlessly down to where those streets
of elder witchery lay outspread and beckoning.When for the third time he awakened with those flights still
undescended and those hushed sunset streets still untraversed, he
prayed long and earnestly to the hidden gods of dream that brood
capricious above the clouds on unknown Kadath, in the cold waste
where no man treads. But the gods made no answer and shewed no
relenting, nor did they give any favouring sign when he prayed to
them in dream, and invoked them sacrificially through the bearded
priests of Nasht and Kaman-Thah, whose cavern-temple with its
pillar of flame lies not far from the gates of the waking world. It
seemed, however, that his prayers must have been adversely heard,
for after even the first of them he ceased wholly to behold the
marvellous city; as if his three glimpses from afar had been mere
accidents or oversights, and against some hidden plan or wish of
the gods.At length, sick with longing for those glittering sunset
streets and cryptical hill lanes among ancient tiled roofs, nor
able sleeping or waking to drive them from his mind, Carter
resolved to go with bold entreaty whither no man had gone before,
and dare the icy deserts through the dark to where unknown Kadath,
veiled in cloud and crowned with unimagined stars, holds secret and
nocturnal the onyx castle of the Great Ones.In light slumber he descended the seventy steps to the cavern
of flame and talked of this design to the bearded priests Nasht and
Kaman-Thah. And the priests shook their pshent-bearing heads and
vowed it would be the death of his soul. They pointed out that the
Great Ones had shown already their wish, and that it is not
agreeable to them to be harassed by insistent pleas. They reminded
him, too, that not only had no man ever been to Kadath, but no man
had ever suspected in what part of space it may lie; whether it be
in the dreamlands around our own world, or in those surrounding
some unguessed companion of Fomalhaut or Aldebaran. If in our
dreamland, it might conceivably be reached, but only three human
souls since time began had ever crossed and recrossed the black
impious gulfs to other dreamlands, and of that three, two had come
back quite mad. There were, in such voyages, incalculable local
dangers; as well as that shocking final peril which gibbers
unmentionably outside the ordered universe, where no dreams reach;
that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes
and bubbles at the centre of all infinity—the boundless daemon
sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws
hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time amidst
the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin,
monotonous whine of accursed flutes; to which detestable pounding
and piping dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic
Ultimate gods, the blind, voiceless, tenebrous, mindless Other Gods
whose soul and messenger is the crawling chaos
Nyarlathotep.Of these things was Carter warned by the priests Nasht and
Kaman-Thah in the cavern of flame, but still he resolved to find
the gods on unknown Kadath in the cold waste, wherever that might
be, and to win from them the sight and remembrance and shelter of
the marvellous sunset city. He knew that his journey would be
strange and long, and that the Great Ones would be against it; but
being old in the land of dream he counted on many useful memories
and devices to aid him. So asking a formal blessing of the priests
and thinking shrewdly on his course, he boldly descended the seven
hundred steps to the Gate of Deeper Slumber and set out through the
Enchanted Wood.In the tunnels of that twisted wood, whose low prodigious
oaks twine groping boughs and shine dim with the phosphorescence of
strange fungi, dwell the furtive and secretive Zoogs; who know many
obscure secrets of the dream world and a few of the waking world,
since the wood at two places touches the lands of men, though it
would be disastrous to say where. Certain unexplained rumours,
events, and vanishments occur among men where the Zoogs have
access, and it is well that they cannot travel far outside the
world of dream. But over the nearer parts of the dream world they
pass freely, flitting small and brown and unseen and bearing back
piquant tales to beguile the hours around their hearths in the
forest they love. Most of them live in burrows, but some inhabit
the trunks of the great trees; and although they live mostly on
fungi it is muttered that they have also a slight taste for meat,
either physical or spiritual, for certainly many dreamers have
entered that wood who have not come out. Carter, however, had no
fear; for he was an old dreamer and had learnt their fluttering
language and made many a treaty with them; having found through
their help the splendid city of Celephaïs in Ooth-Nargai beyond the
Tanarian Hills, where reigns half the year the great King Kuranes,
a man he had known by another name in life. Kuranes was the one
soul who had been to the star-gulfs and returned free from
madness.Threading now the low phosphorescent aisles between those
gigantic trunks, Carter made fluttering sounds in the manner of the
Zoogs, and listened now and then for responses. He remembered one
particular village of the creatures was in the centre of the wood,
where a circle of great mossy stones in what was once a clearing
tells of older and more terrible dwellers long forgotten, and
toward this spot he hastened. He traced his way by the grotesque
fungi, which always seem better nourished as one approaches the
dread circle where elder beings danced and sacrificed. Finally the
great light of those thicker fungi revealed a sinister green and
grey vastness pushing up through the roof of the forest and out of
sight. This was the nearest of the great ring of stones, and Carter
knew he was close to the Zoog village. Renewing his fluttering
sound, he waited patiently; and was at last rewarded by an
impression of many eyes watching him. It was the Zoogs, for one
sees their weird eyes long before one can discern their small,
slippery brown outlines.Out they swarmed, from hidden burrow and honeycombed tree,
till the whole dim-litten region was alive with them. Some of the
wilder ones brushed Carter unpleasantly, and one even nipped
loathsomely at his ear; but these lawless spirits were soon
restrained by their elders. The Council of Sages, recognizing the
visitor, offered a gourd of fermented sap from a haunted tree
unlike the others, which had grown from a seed dropt down by
someone on the moon; and as Carter drank it ceremoniously a very
strange colloquy began. The Zoogs did not, unfortunately, know
where the peak of Kadath lies, nor could they even say whether the
cold waste is in our dream world or in another. Rumours of the
Great Ones came equally from all points; and one might only say
that they were likelier to be seen on high mountain peaks than in
valleys, since on such peaks they dance reminiscently when the moon
is above and the clouds beneath.Then one very ancient Zoog recalled a thing unheard-of by the
others; and said that in Ulthar, beyond the River Skai, there still
lingered the last copy of those inconceivably old Pnakotic
Manuscripts made by waking men in forgotten boreal kingdoms and
borne into the land of dreams when the hairy cannibal Gnophkehs
overcame many-templed Olathoë and slew all the heroes of the land
of Lomar. Those manuscripts he said, told much of the gods, and
besides, in Ulthar there were men who had seen the signs of the
gods, and even one old priest who had scaled a great mountain to
behold them dancing by moonlight. He had failed, though his
companion had succeeded and perished namelessly.So Randolph Carter thanked the Zoogs, who fluttered amicably
and gave him another gourd of moon-tree wine to take with him, and
set out through the phosphorescent wood for the other side, where
the rushing Skai flows down from the slopes of Lerion, and Hatheg
and Nir and Ulthar dot the plain. Behind him, furtive and unseen,
crept several of the curious Zoogs; for they wished to learn what
might befall him, and bear back the legend to their people. The
vast oaks grew thicker as he pushed on beyond the village, and he
looked sharply for a certain spot where they would thin somewhat,
standing quite dead or dying among the unnaturally dense fungi and
the rotting mould and mushy logs of their fallen brothers. There he
would turn sharply aside, for at that spot a mighty slab of stone
rests on the forest floor; and those who have dared approach it say
that it bears an iron ring three feet wide. Remembering the archaic
circle of great mossy rocks, and what it was possibly set up for,
the Zoogs do not pause near that expansive slab with its huge ring;
for they realise that all which is forgotten need not necessarily
be dead, and they would not like to see the slab rise slowly and
deliberately.Carter detoured at the proper place, and heard behind him the
frightened fluttering of some of the more timid Zoogs. He had known
they would follow him, so he was not disturbed; for one grows
accustomed to the anomalies of these prying creatures. It was
twilight when he came to the edge of the wood, and the
strengthening glow told him it was the twilight of morning. Over
fertile plains rolling down to the Skai he saw the smoke of cottage
chimneys, and on every hand were the hedges and ploughed fields and
thatched roofs of a peaceful land. Once he stopped at a farmhouse
well for a cup of water, and all the dogs barked affrightedly at
the inconspicuous Zoogs that crept through the grass behind. At
another house, where people were stirring, he asked questions about
the gods, and whether they danced often upon Lerion; but the farmer
and his wife would only make the Elder Sign and tell him the way to
Nir and Ulthar.At noon he walked through the one broad high street of Nir,
which he had once visited and which marked his farthest former
travels in this direction; and soon afterward he came to the great
stone bridge across the Skai, into whose central piece the masons
had sealed a living human sacrifice when they built it
thirteen-hundred years before. Once on the other side, the frequent
presence of cats (who all arched their backs at the trailing Zoogs)
revealed the near neighborhood of Ulthar; for in Ulthar, according
to an ancient and significant law, no man may kill a cat. Very
pleasant were the suburbs of Ulthar, with their little green
cottages and neatly fenced farms; and still pleasanter was the
quaint town itself, with its old peaked roofs and overhanging upper
stories and numberless chimney-pots and narrow hill streets where
one can see old cobbles whenever the graceful cats afford space
enough. Carter, the cats being somewhat dispersed by the half-seen
Zoogs, picked his way directly to the modest Temple of the Elder
Ones where the priests and old records were said to be; and once
within that venerable circular tower of ivied stone—which crowns
Ulthar's highest hill—he sought out the patriarch Atal, who had
been up the forbidden peak Hatheg-Kla in the stony desert and had
come down again alive.Atal, seated on an ivory dais in a festooned shrine at the
top of the temple, was fully three centuries old; but still very
keen of mind and memory. From him Carter learned many things about
the gods, but mainly that they are indeed only Earth's gods, ruling
feebly our own dreamland and having no power or habitation
elsewhere. They might, Atal said, heed a man's prayer if in good
humour; but one must not think of climbing to their onyx stronghold
atop Kadath in the cold waste. It was lucky that no man knew where
Kadath towers, for the fruits of ascending it would be very grave.
Atal's companion Barzai the Wise had been drawn screaming into the
sky for climbing merely the known peak of Hatheg-Kla. With unknown
Kadath, if ever found, matters would be much worse; for although
Earth's gods may sometimes be surpassed by a wise mortal, they are
protected by the Other Gods from Outside, whom it is better not to
discuss. At least twice in the world's history the Other Gods set
their seal upon Earth's primal granite; once in antediluvian times,
as guessed from a drawing in those parts of the Pnakotic
Manuscripts too ancient to be read, and once on Hatheg-Kla when
Barzai the Wise tried to see Earth's gods dancing by moonlight. So,
Atal said, it would be much better to let all gods alone except in
tactful prayers.Carter, though disappointed by Atal's discouraging advice and
by the meagre help to be found in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the
Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan, did not wholly despair. First he
questioned the old priest about that marvellous sunset city seen
from the railed terrace, thinking that perhaps he might find it
without the gods' aid; but Atal could tell him nothing. Probably,
Atal said, the place belonged to his especial dream world and not
to the general land of vision that many know; and conceivably it
might be on another planet. In that case Earth's gods could not
guide him if they would. But this was not likely, since the
stopping of the dreams shewed pretty clearly that it was something
the Great Ones wished to hide from him.Then Carter did a wicked thing, offering his guileless host
so many draughts of the moon-wine which the Zoogs had given him
that the old man became irresponsibly talkative. Robbed of his
reserve, poor Atal babbled freely of forbidden things; telling of a
great image reported by travellers as carved on the solid rock of
the mountain Ngranek, on the isle of Oriab in the Southern Sea, and
hinting that it may be a likeness which Earth's gods once wrought
of their own features in the days when they danced by moonlight on
that mountain. And he hiccoughed likewise that the features of that
image are very strange, so that one might easily recognize them,
and that they are sure signs of the authentic race of the
gods.Now the use of all this in finding the gods became at once
apparent to Carter. It is known that in disguise the younger among
the Great Ones often espouse the daughters of men, so that around
the borders of the cold waste wherein stands Kadath the peasants
must all bear their blood. This being so, the way to find that
waste must be to see the stone face on Ngranek and mark the
features; then, having noted them with care, to search for such
features among living men. Where they are plainest and thickest,
there must the gods dwell nearest; and whatever stony waste lies
back of the villages in that place must be that wherein stands
Kadath.Much of the Great Ones might be learnt in such regions, and
those with their blood might inherit little memories very useful to
a seeker. They might not know their parentage, for the gods so
dislike to be known among men that none can be found who has seen
their faces wittingly; a thing which Carter realized even as he
sought to scale Kadath. But they would have queer lofty thoughts
misunderstood by their fellows, and would sing of far places and
gardens so unlike any known even in the dreamland that common folk
would call them fools; and from all this one could perhaps learn
old secrets of Kadath, or gain hints of the marvellous sunset city
which the gods held secret. And more, one might in certain cases
seize some well-loved child of a god as hostage; or even capture
some young god himself, disguised and dwelling amongst men with a
comely peasant maiden as his bride.Atal, however, did not know how to find Ngranek on its isle
of Oriab; and recommended that Carter follow the singing Skai under
its bridges down to the Southern Sea; where no burgess of Ulthar
has ever been, but whence the merchants come in boats or with long
caravans of mules and two-wheeled carts. There is a great city
there, Dylath-Leen, but in Ulthar its reputation is bad because of
the black three-banked galleys that sail to it with rubies from no
clearly named shore. The traders that come from those galleys to
deal with the jewellers are human, or nearly so, but the rowers are
never beheld; and it is not thought wholesome in Ulthar that
merchants should trade with black ships from unknown places whose
rowers cannot be exhibited.By the time he had given this information Atal was very
drowsy, and Carter laid him gently on a couch of inlaid ebony and
gathered his long beard decorously on his chest. As he turned to
go, he observed that no suppressed fluttering followed him, and
wondered why the Zoogs had become so lax in their curious pursuit.
Then he noticed all the sleek complacent cats of Ulthar licking
their chops with unusual gusto, and recalled the spitting and
caterwauling he had faintly heard, in lower parts of the temple
while absorbed in the old priest's conversation. He recalled, too,
the evilly hungry way in which an especially impudent young Zoog
had regarded a small black kitten in the cobbled street outside.
And because he loved nothing on earth more than small black
kittens, he stooped and petted the sleek cats of Ulthar as they
licked their chops, and did not mourn because those inquisitive
Zoogs would escort him no farther.It was sunset now, so Carter stopped at an ancient inn on a
steep little street overlooking the lower town. And as he went out
on the balcony of his room and gazed down at the sea of red tiled
roofs and cobbled ways and the pleasant fields beyond, all mellow
and magical in the slanted light, he swore that Ulthar would be a
very likely place to dwell in always, were not the memory of a
greater sunset city ever goading one onward toward unknown perils.
Then twilight fell, and the pink walls of the plastered gables
turned violet and mystic, and little yellow lights floated up one
by one from old lattice windows. And sweet bells pealed in the
temple tower above, and the first star winked softly above the
meadows across the Skai. With the night came song, and Carter
nodded as the lutanists praised ancient days from beyond the
filigreed balconies and tesselated courts of simple Ulthar. And
there might have been sweetness even in the voices of Ulthar's many
cats, but that they were mostly heavy and silent from strange
feasting. Some of them stole off to those cryptical realms which
are known only to cats and which villagers say are on the moon's
dark side, whither the cats leap from tall housetops, but one small
black kitten crept upstairs and sprang in Carter's lap to purr and
play, and curled up near his feet when he lay down at last on the
little couch whose pillows were stuffed with fragrant, drowsy
herbs.In the morning Carter joined a caravan of merchants bound for
Dylath-Leen with the spun wool of Ulthar and the cabbages of
Ulthar's busy farms. And for six days they rode with tinkling bells
on the smooth road beside the Skai; stopping some nights at the
inns of little quaint fishing towns, and on other nights camping
under the stars while snatches of boatmen's songs came from the
placid river. The country was very beautiful, with green hedges and
groves and picturesque peaked cottages and octagonal
windmills.On the seventh day a blur of smoke rose on the horizon ahead,
and then the tall black towers of Dylath-Leen, which is built
mostly of basalt. Dylath-Leen with its thin angular towers looks in
the distance like a bit of the Giant's Causeway, and its streets
are dark and uninviting. There are many dismal sea-taverns near the
myriad wharves, and all the town is thronged with the strange
seamen of every land on earth and of a few which are said to be not
on earth. Carter questioned the oddly robed men of that city about
the peak of Ngranek on the isle of Oriab, and found that they knew
of it well. Ships came from Baharna on that island, one being due
to return thither in only a month, and Ngranek is but two days'
zebra-ride from that port. But few had seen the stone face of the
god, because it is on a very difficult side of Ngranek, which
overlooks only sheer crags and a valley of sinister lava. Once the
gods were angered with men on that side, and spoke of the matter to
the Other Gods.It was hard to get this information from the traders and
sailors in Dylath-Leen's sea taverns, because they mostly preferred
to whisper of the black galleys. One of them was due in a week with
rubies from its unknown shore, and the townsfolk dreaded to see it
dock. The mouths of the men who came from it to trade were too
wide, and the way their turbans were humped up in two points above
their foreheads was in especially bad taste. And their shoes were
the shortest and queerest ever seen in the Six Kingdoms. But worst
of all was the matter of the unseen rowers. Those three banks of
oars moved too briskly and accurately and vigorously to be
comfortable, and it was not right for a ship to stay in port for
weeks while the merchants traded, yet to give no glimpse of its
crew. It was not fair to the tavern-keepers of Dylath-Leen, or to
the grocers and butchers, either; for not a scrap of provisions was
ever sent aboard. The merchants took only gold and stout black
slaves from Parg across the river. That was all they ever took,
those unpleasantly featured merchants and their unseen rowers;
never anything from the butchers and grocers, but only gold and the
fat black men of Parg whom they bought by the pound. And the odours
from those galleys which the south wind blew in from the wharves
are not to be described. Only by constantly smoking strong thagweed
could even the hardiest denizen of the old sea-taverns bear them.
Dylath-Leen would never have tolerated the black galleys had such
rubies been obtainable elsewhere, but no mine in all Earth's
dreamland was known to produce their like.