Once there was a curious, intrusive flash of half-sight—a faint, diffuse suspicion of bluish radiance far overhead. Then there came a dream of wind-pursued climbing and crawling—of wriggling into a blaze of sardonic moonlight through a jumble of debris which slid and collapsed after me amidst a morbid hurricane. It was the evil, monotonous beating of that maddening moonlight which at last told me of the return of what I had once known as the objective, waking world.
I was clawing prone through the sands of the Australian desert, and around me shrieked such a tumult of wind as I had never before known on our planet’s surface. My clothing was in rags, and my whole body was a mass of bruises and scratches. Full consciousness returned very slowly, and at no time could I tell just where true memory left off and delirious began. There had seemed to be a mound of titan blocks, an abyss beneath it, a monstrous revelation from the past, and a nightmare horror at the end—but how much of this was real? My flashlight was gone, and likewise any metal case I may have discovered. Had there been such a case—or any abyss—or any mound? Raising my head, I looked behind me, and saw only the sterile, undulant sands of the waste.
The dæmon wind died down, and the bloated, fungoid moon sank reddeningly in the west. I lurched to my feet and began to stagger southwestward toward the camp. What in truth had happened to me? Had I merely collapsed in the desert and dragged a dream-racked body over miles of sand and buried blocks? If not, how could I bear to live any longer? For in this new doubt all my faith in the myth-born unreality of my visions dissolved once more into the hellish older doubting. If that abyss was real, then the Great Race was real—and its blasphemous reachings and seizures in the cosmos-wide vortex of time were no myths or nightmares, but a terrible, soul-shattering actuality.
Had I, in full hideous fact, been drawn back to a pre-human world of a hundred and fifty million years ago in those dark, baffling days of the amnesia? Had my present body been the vehicle of a frightful alien consciousness from palæogean gulfs of time? Had I, as the captive mind of those shambling horrors, indeed known that accursed city of stone in its primordial heyday, and wriggled down those familiar corridors in the loathsome shape of my captor? Were those tormenting dreams of more than twenty years the offspring of stark, monstrous memories? Had I once veritably talked with minds from reachless corners of time and space, learned the universe’s secrets past and to come, and written the annals of my own world for the metal cases of those titan archives? And were those others—those shocking Elder Things of the mad winds and dæmon pipings—in truth a lingering, lurking menace, waiting and slowly weakening in black abysses while varied shapes of life drag out their multimillennial courses on the planet’s age-racked surface?
I do not know. If that abyss and what it held were real, there is no hope. Then, all too truly, there lies upon this world of man a mocking and incredible shadow out of time. But mercifully, there is no proof that these things are other than fresh phases of my myth-born dreams. I did not bring back the metal case that would have been a proof, and so far those subterrene corridors have not been found. If the laws of the universe are kind, they will never be found. But I must tell my son what I saw or thought I saw, and let him use his judgment as a psychologist in gauging the reality of my experience, and communicating this account to others.
I have said that the awful truth behind my tortured years of dreaming hinges absolutely upon the actuality of what I thought I saw in those Cyclopean, buried ruins. It has been hard for me literally to set down the crucial revelation, though no reader can have failed to guess it. Of course, it lay in that book within the metal case—the case which I pried out of its forgotten lair amidst the undisturbed dust of a million centuries. No eye had seen, no hand had touched that book since the advent of man to this planet. And yet, when I flashed my torch upon it in that frightful megalithic abyss, I saw that the queerly pigmented letters on the brittle, æon-browned cellulose pages were not indeed any nameless hieroglyphs of earth’s youth. They were, instead, the letters of our familiar alphabet, spelling out the words of the English language in my own handwriting.
1. Written during 1934 and 1935, this first appeared in Astounding Stories 17, no. 4 (June 1936), 110–54.
2. Lovecraft’s notes, reproduced in Something About Cats and Other Pieces, gives the following brief biography:
Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee b. Haverhill 1871 son of Jonathan & Hannah (Wingate) Peaslee. :: att. Miskatonic U. 1889–1893. Harvard 1893–5. Instructor Pol. Econ. Miskatonic 1895–1898. M. Alice Keezar of Harvard 1896. Robert K. B. 1898. Wingate b. 1900. Hannah b. 1903. Assc. Prof. 1898–1902. Prof. 1902–1908. ::: Amnesia Thurs. May 14, 1908 (age 37) 1913 (age 42). Work on strange dreams and Amnesia—studies in psychology 1915 onward. Instr. Psych. Miskatonic 1922+ (age 51). Hear of Australian legends from Perth 1934. Visit Australia—June (equin. Dec.) 1935. Climax July 1935. Age 64. . . .
3. A similar reaction is recorded in Walter de la Mare’s The Return (1910), in which the wife of a man possessed by the spirit of an eighteenth-century suicide rejects him.
4. This may be the incident recorded in “The Nameless City” (here, above).
5. An island, beyond 80° north latitude, 600 miles east of northern Greenland.
6. These are likely the “Endless Caverns” of New Market, Virginia, approximately six miles in length. Only the eighteenth-longest caves in Virginia, they have been promoted widely since 1920 as a tourist destination.
7. High priests.
8. The book is mentioned again in “The Haunter of the Dark,” below. D’Erlette is said to have been the family name of Lovecraft’s friend and apostle August Derleth, but this is likely a fiction.
9. Mysteries of the Worm, a fictional text or grimoire known mainly by the Latin title Lovecraft provides here, and its author, Ludvig Prinn, are the creation of Robert Bloch. The text appears in Bloch’s short story “The Shambler from the Stars” (1935). He wrote to Lovecraft about “Shambler,” and Lovecraft provided a Latin incantation that appears in the story: “Tibi, magnum Innominandum, signa stellarum nigrarum et bufaniformis Sadoquae sigillum” (To you, the great Not-to-Be-Named, signs of the black stars, and the seal of the toad-shaped Tsathoggua). References to the Bloch text also appear in “The Haunter of the Dark,” below, and in Lovecraft’s story “The Diary of Alonzo Typer.”
10. Located at 120 Causeway Street in Boston, serving the Boston & Maine Railroad.
11. A Liverpudlian who trained in chemistry and botany at University College London and in logic and philosophy at the University of London, William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882) first demonstrated that economics was a science concerned with mathematical quantities. He helped to develop the theory of utility and was prolific in his writings on economics and logic equally. This particular lecture by Peaslee seems to be a discussion of Jevons’s empirical study of economic upturns and downturns coincident with meteorological conditions influenced by sunspots, outlined in his essay “The Solar Period and the Price of Corn,” first read at a conference in 1875 and published posthumously in Investigations in Currency and Finance (1884). Jevons died in an accidental drowning while swimming recreationally.
12. This being the incidents recorded in “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” (here, above).
13. Extinct horsetail plants, typically growing as high as 100 feet.
14. Note that the astronomical observations—150 million years in the past—are consistent with astronomical theories of the nineteenth century, including a contracting sun (because of its consumption of solar fuel), lesser evidence of volcanic action on the lunar surface, and the shifting positions of stars because of “star streams.” See generally T. R. Livesey’s “Dispatches from the Providence Observatory” for a discussion of Lovecraft’s knowledge of astronomy. Livesey points out that, in the scientific community, these theories had been largely discounted by the 1930s. Peaslee made his observations, it must be noted, under highly unreliable conditions. Not a man of science, more than twenty years after the eve
nts, he recorded what he thought he should have seen, based on his out-of-date knowledge of astronomy.
15. Vegetation of the Carboniferous age, from about 360 million years ago to 300 million years ago.
16. The Permian period followed the Carboniferous and was in turn succeeded by the Triassic age. The latter saw the breakup of the supercontinent Pangaea.
17. Wrinkled.
18. That is, capable of being distended.
The Great Race, as depicted for the cover of Dreams and Fancies (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House Publishers, 1962). (artist: Richard Taylor)
19. “Agglutinative speech” is a feature of languages (such as Turkish, Sanskrit, and Bengali, among many others) in which compound words are formed that contain the meaning of short sentences In Bantu, for instance, the word “yu-le m-tu m-moja m-refu a-li y-e ki-soma ki-le ki-tabu ki-refu” means “that tall person who read the long book,” and in Japanese, the word “tabetakunakatta” (食べたくなかった) means that the subject did not want to eat.
20. Possibly the beings referred to in “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” (here, above).
21. That is, the race of Old Ones described in At the Mountains of Madness.
22. See At the Mountains of Madness, note 52, above.
23. Mentioned in Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” (1931; written in 1929), in the northern realm of Hyperborea.
24. The Tcho-Tchos appear in “The Lair of the Star-Spawn,” by August Derleth and Mark Schorer (1932).
25. Referred to in “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” (here, above).
26. The story of this invasion is told in part in “Polaris,” probably written in the late spring or early summer of 1918 and first appearing in The Philosopher (December 1920).
27. Lucius Cornelius Sulla (138–78 BCE) was a Roman tyrant and reformer. The quaestors were appointed financial officials.
28. From the year 1705 BCE to the year 1690 BCE. Historians are uncertain about who ruled during this period. Kephren ruled Egypt from 2558 to 2535 BCE.
29. Oliver Cromwell lived from 1599 to 1658 and took his seat on the Council of State of England immediately following the execution of Charles I in 1649; he held more and more powerful positions until he eventually became lord protector in 1653, supreme governor of England; he held this post until his death.
30. That is, prior to the thirteenth century.
31. The Greco-Bactrian kingdom held sway from 250 to 125 BCE in Bactria and Sogdiana. These regions are referred to as the easternmost portion of the Hellenistic world.
32. Louis XIII, known as Louis the Just, lived from 1601 to 1643. Counseled by Cardinal Richelieu, who served as his prime minister, he ended the role of the great feudal lords (in part by ordering the destruction of all of their castles), consolidating royal power and leading France toward becoming a centralized state. His reign was also marked by struggles with the Huguenots, which had a sizable military force and were a leading religious power, and the Habsburg Empire, which had dominion over Austria and Spain.
33. Cimmeria was the name of a continent in the Hyperborean age, home to Conan the Barbarian (see “The Whisperer in Darkness,” note 37, above).
34. Amphibians with a complicated (hence the name, after labyrinthine) set of infolded teeth and massive skull roofs.
35. Long-tailed winged pterosaurs (Jurassic period).
36. Marine reptiles (Mesozoic era).
37. All classes of deep-sea life.
38. See At the Mountains of Madness, note 66, for a discussion of Lovecraft’s own views on eugenics and the sterilization of the unfit.
39. As described in At the Mountains of Madness (here, above).
40. First mentioned by Richard F. Searight in “The Sealed Casket,” published in Weird Tales in March 1935. Reportedly, Lovecraft himself contributed this fragment that was intended to head the story but was omitted from publication:
. . . And it is recorded that in the Elder Times, Om Oris, mightiest of the wizards, laid crafty snare for the dæmon Avaloth, and pitted dark magic against him; for Avaloth plagued the earth with a strange growth of ice and snow that crept as if alive, ever southward, and swallowed up the forests and the mountains. And the outcome of the contest with the dæmon is not known; but wizards of that day maintained that Avaloth, who was not easily discernable, could not be destroyed save by a great heat, the means whereof was not then known, although certain of the wizards foresaw that one day it should be. Yet, at this time the ice fields began to shrink and dwindle and finally vanished; and the earth bloomed forth afresh.
Lovecraft wrote to Searight on January 15, 1934 (quoted in Edward P. Berglund’s “Lovecraft on Eldritch Tomes”):
I like the fragment from the Eltdown Shards, too. These cryptic & terrible records of man’s earliest struggles with the survivors of the pre-human world—related as they are to the abhorred paragraphs of the Book of Eibon & the later (& purely human) sections of the Pnakotic Manuscripts—have always fascinated me . . . especially in view of those tantalising & subtly disquieting references in the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, the more obscure (& often disputed) single allusion in the monstrous Unaussprechlichen Kulten of the ill-fated Friedrich-Wilhelm von Junzt.
41. This may be a reference to the vaults beneath the Nameless City (see “The Nameless City,” here, above).
42. All of these characteristics are described in detail in At the Mountains of Madness (here, above).
43. In 1894 the American Psychological Association began publishing a journal, Psychological Review, which continues today.
44. The Pilbara, in the northwest of Australia, though sparsely populated, boasts a huge minerals and energy industry, described by the University of Western Australia as “the heaving heart of the resources economy” (UWA News 31, no. 19 [November 26, 2012], 1). Known for its gas, mineral, and iron ore deposits, it has some of the oldest known rock formations on Earth.
45. Dampier Street is in the very small town of Dampier, a major industrial port on the eponymous archipelago (on the coast of the Pilbara). William Dampier (1652–1715) was an early British explorer of northwestern Australia.
46. That is, Australian Aborigines.
47. Buddai is described in the Encyclopædia Britannica (9th ed.): “The only idea of a god known to be entertained by these people [the native Australians], is that of Buddai, a gigantic old man lying asleep for ages, with his head resting upon his arm, which is deep in the sand. He is expected one day to awake and eat up the world. They have no religion beyond those gloomy dreams.”
48. Peter Egerton Warburton (1813–1889) explored Western Australia and the Great Sandy Desert from 1872 to 1874, becoming the first Briton or European to do so. An expedition from South Australia—its purpose was to establish a trail—presented almost insurmountable obstacles. Although the travelers reached Alice Springs in early 1873 without hardship, after their departure in April they experienced extreme heat and a scarcity of water. As with Roald Amundsen’s South Pole expedition of 1910–12, the men survived only by eating their transportation—Warburton his camels, Amundsen his dogs. Eventually, Warburton, prostrate with heat and thirst, was strapped to a camel and arrived, thus transported, at the Oakover River. On January 11, 1874, the expedition pulled in to Charles Harper’s De Grey station—an 883,000-acre outpost—in northern Western Australia. Warburton is said to have credited his Aboriginal companion Charley with his survival and success. Lovecraft’s notes for the tale, reproduced in Something About Cats and Other Pieces, also reveal that the location is “East of Mr. Macpherson & Gregory’s path of 1861.” “Gregory” refers to Francis Thomas Gregory (1821–1888), brother of the explorer Sir Augustus George Gregory; Frank, as he was known, led a party of nine in the Pilbara in 1861. Macpherson is unidentified.
49. The nearest body of water to the dig-site is the seasonal (or, in the language of unique seawater environments, “impermanent”) Percival Lakes, which is described in the singular, despite the final s.
50. The spot is about four hundred miles south of Dampier. Lovecraft’s notes describe it further as “N. of Dry Salt Lake & Amgas Range. S. of St. George Range, Fitzroy R. & Kimberly goldfield. East of De Grey R. & Pilbarra goldfield.”
51. As recounted in At the Mountains of Madness, above. Donald R. Burleson comments, in H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study, “One has to wonder about Dyer’s frame of mind, after the Antarctic experience, embarking on this second unearthing of primal secrets . . .” (201).
52. The full moon occurred five days later, on July 16, 1935, consistent with Peaslee’s record.
53. See “The Haunter of the Dark,” note 25, below, for a discussion of trans-Neptunian objects, a subject about which Lovecraft himself published a paper.
54. “The asteroids,” Lovecraft observed, “are a numerous group of tiny planets which lie between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, and whose discovery was prompted by the belief that, according to the law of proportion of planetary distances, some body ought to exist in that region” (“The March Sky,” Providence Evening News, March 2, 1914, 8). Ceres was the first planetoid or asteroid discovered in the predicted space. It was observed by Giuseppe Piazzi (1746–1826) on January 1, 1801, at the “shoulder” of the constellation Taurus; Piazzi was unsure whether it was a star or a comet. Others, however, among them the brilliant German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, recognized it as the missing “planet” foretold by the theories of Johannes Kepler, Johann Elert Bode, and Johann Daniel Titius.
Giuseppe Piazzi and Ceres, probably painted by Giuseppe Velasco (ca. 1803).
In 1802, the asteroid Pallas was observed; by 1807, two more, Juno and Vesta, had joined what would become, within a century, a long list. H. W. M. Olbers (1758–1840), upon discovering Pallas, formulated a hypothesis about the origin of these small bodies, described in the Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.): They were “fragments of a larger planet which had been shattered by an internal convulsion; and [Olbers] proposed that search should be made near the common node of the two orbits to see whether other fragments could be found.” By 1910, more than six hundred had been found, and by the time of Lovecraft’s essay, he said that over one thousand had been tallied.
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