by Donald Tyson
The practical consequence of this philosophy for Lovecraft's fiction is that there is always something lurking just below the threshold of perception, and those unfortunate individuals who become aware of it are never quite the same afterward. Once opened, Pandora's box cannot be shut, nor can the jinni be forced back into the lamp. Lovecraft placed these off-stage horrors in various plausible locations that allowed them to be present in our world, but undetected by the greater mass of mankind.
Many of the great alien races he fixed in the Earth's distant past. The mythos contains an entire history of the various species that rose to prominence on this planet before the ascent of Homo sapiens. They are assigned various geographical regions of the world for their own territories. Cthulhu and his spawn occupied the newly formed volcanic landmasses of the Pacific Ocean. The Elder Things at various times inhabited all parts of the lands and seas, but eventually were concentrated in their great stone city in Antarctica. The primary city of the Yithians, Pnakotus, occupied what is presently the Great Sandy Desert of Australia. The Mi-Go were at one time concentrated on the lost continent of Mu. The race of K'n-yan occupied the Earth's surface before retreating into their blue-litten cavern land. Each of these and other alien species came to prominence at one period in the distant past, and then declined in power. They did not vanish completely, however, but merely retreated to places of security, where they wait the opportunity to emerge and dominate once more.
The horrors of the real world of the present time, beneath the mask of illusion we have placed upon it for our own peace of mind, are to be found under the ground, under the seas, and behind dimensional portals to other levels of reality. The remains of their cities lie in wastelands of ice or sand, or steaming jungles, or beneath the waves. Their catacombs and caverns and tunnels riddle the body of the Earth, sometimes stacked one atop the other like worm-tracks in an apple.
Perhaps the most horrifying of Lovecraft's realizations is that alien creatures are all around us, just slightly out of phase with our time and space, but forever waiting for their opportunity to pass over the boundary of the known and destroy us. In the story The Beyond, Crawford Tillinghast invents a machine that awakens dormant human senses by stimulating the pineal gland, allowing humans to see what has always been all around them, but had mercifully passed unnoticed. What is more chilling is that the rays of the machine allow these terrifying creatures to see us. Once aware of us, they are able to do us harm.
Lovecraft, speaking through his character Tillinghast, wrote: "Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have."
This is the ultimate horror to contemplate-that malignant alien things intent on our destruction are not safely locked away beneath the earth or the oceans, but are with us this very instant, all around us, passing through our very flesh, and we can never truly escape from them because we share the same space and time. Something similar to this terrifying realization was achieved by Lovecraft's close friend, Frank Belknap Long, in his story The Hounds of Tindalos. Once the Hounds catch the scent of their human prey, they never cease to pursue, and can materialize anywhere at any time out of the angles of space itself.
The only refuge lies in blissful obliviousness. Those who refuse to look when given a chance to see, who close their eyes and resolutely turn their thoughts away from the harsher colors of reality, remain comparatively safe. Their materialistic worldview serves as an armor of ignorance. Danger threatens the few who cannot contain their curiosity, or slack their thirst for knowledge. They explore lost cities and buried tombs, they seek out and read forbidden books, or they simply become aware of things that were always there, waiting to be noticed.
Among the mountains on a high plateau of Antarctica is located the last great city of the crinoid species known as the Elder Things. It was abandoned when the crinoids retreated from the intensifying cold to a warmer subterranean sea beneath the city. In his story At the Mountains of Madness Lovecraft located this plateau at the coordinates "Latitude 76° 15', Longitude 113° 10' E." He hinted that it might be the true location of the fabled plateau of Leng, which most mythologists placed in Central Asia. There is the intimation that beyond the deserted cyclopean city and the mountains, which are higher than those of the Himalaya range, lies something even vaster and more sinister that may be what is referred to in the Pnakotic Fragments as Kadath in the Cold Waste.
(At the Mountains of Madness)
An ancient place referred to by Randolph Carter as, "hoary Atlaanat, of which few even dare speak." In this place thought was given tangible form and substance by adepts.
(Through the Gates of the Silver Key)
The vast city of the crinoid race known as the Elder Things, their final citadel on the surface of this planet, is located in Antarctica on a high plateau amid the peaks of a mountain range. It is mostly buried under glacial ice, but its taller towers and walls are visible. They are of massive dimensions, and show an architecture like nothing else on earth. The city is constructed from "prodigious blocks of dark primordial slate, schist, and sandstone-blocks in many cases as large as 4 x 6 x 8 feet." Elsewhere, the walls are cut from the matrix of the rock of the mountains itself, so that the city seems to grow organically out of the mountains. It is a jumble of truncated cones, terraces, pyramids, cylinders, cubes, and needle-like spires grouped in clusters of five, all linked by arched bridges that once spanned the air, but which are now locked within the ice. Many of the blocks of stone lie scattered where they were pushed by the moving glacier, and all surfaces are weathered by millions of years of erosion. Once there were domes in the city, but these have fallen in upon themselves. The coming of the cold and the ice to Antarctica forced the crinoids to abandon their city and seek refuge in the waters of a warm subterranean sea that lies beneath the mountains.
The mathematics student of Miskatonic University, Walter Gilman, was transported through a dimensional portal by the witch Keziah Mason to a very similar city on a planet with three suns of different colors in the sky. This city of the Elder Things flourishes in another star system, but whether it exists in the present or the distant past is impossible to know. The climate is tropical, and is probably the climate the crinoids find most suited to their physiology, even though they can withstand prolonged periods of freezing.
(At the Mountains of Madness; The Dreams in the Witch House)
A range of low hills on the plain of Nath in blue-litten K'n-yan. They conceal the entrance to a forgotten tunnel leading from subterranean K'n-yan to the surface of the earth.
(The Mound)
A very rough region of deep canyons and sharp hills seven miles to the south of Hampden, Idaho, part of the Blue Mountain Forest Reserve. There is a local superstition that the area is haunted, but no one seems to know by what. The Nez Perce Indians have shunned it for countless generations. They say it is the playground for giant devils from the Outside. It is to a hill in Hell's Acres that the shadow from the starless gulf, the coming of which was foretold in the Chronicle of Nath, manifested in the form of a tree in the year 1938, which was the Year of the Black Goat.
(The Tree on the Hill)
A gray stone city in the land of Mnar that was located on the shore of a vast and misty green lake fed by no river or stream. The inhuman inhabitants of Ib are described on the brick cylinders of Kadatheron as having been green in color, with "bulging eyes, pouting, flabby lips, and curious ears." They were voiceless. It is also written that they descended in a mist from the moon one night along with their city and their lake. They worshipped an idol of sea-green sto
ne carved in the likeness of Bokrug, the great water-lizard. The papyrus of Ilarnek records that when this inhuman race discovered the making of fire, they thereafter worshipped Bokrug by kindling sacred flames on ceremonial occasions. Within the city were strange sculptures on gray monoliths.
How long Ib endured alone in the land of Mnar is not known. Lovecraft wrote that it was "many eons." Around eleven thousand years ago, a nomadic race of human beings built the city of Sarnath not far from Ib on the lakeshore, to exploit rich deposits of minerals in the area. The proud men of Sarnath came to hate and despise the inhabitants of Ib. One day they attacked Ib, killed all its inhabitants and pushed their corpses into the lake, along with their gray sculpted monoliths, and then cast down the city. Sarnath prospered for a thousand years, but on the thousandth anniversary of the destruction of Ib, it was destroyed so that not a trace remained, not even the foundation stones.
(The Doom That Came to Sarnath)
An inhabited land within a great cavern deep beneath the surface of Oklahoma. It is known as blue-litten K'n-yan because it is illuminated by a natural blue radiance. The name is also written as "Xinaian."
(The Whisperer in Darkness; The Mound)
The location of Leng is never specified with precision in Lovecraft's stories. It is a sinister desert plateau in Central Asia, or perhaps in Antarctica. It lies in the dreamlands, but may also exist in our world as well. It is a place not quite of this reality. In the dreamlands, Leng is on a plateau located near to the land of Inquanok, but on the other side of a range of high mountains that acts as a protective barrier against the hated plateau. In the story The Hound, "inaccessible Leng" is placed in Central Asia on the authority of the Necronomicon, wherein is said to be described a corpse-eating cult of Leng.
In At the Mountains of Madness, Leng is said to be described in the Necronomicon. It is characterized as "evilly fabled" and "evilly famed." The narrator of the story, geology professor of Miskatonic University, William Dyer, commented "Leng, wherever in space or time it might brood, was not a region I would care to be in or near." The story Out of the Aeons referred to the "abhorred plateau of Leng" as one ancient site for the worship of the god Ghatanothoa. Randolph Carter spoke in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath of the "horrible stone villages on the icy desert plateau of Leng, which no healthy folk visit and whose evil fires are seen at night from afar."
In the dreamlands, Leng is the home of a race of squat, horned humanoids who were conquered by the moon-beasts, and who now serve them as slaves on their black galleys that ply the waters of the dreamland seas, and fly between the earth and the Moon. It is the location of a prehistoric stone monastery in which dwells in solitude the High-Priest Not to be Described, who wears a yellow silken mask to conceal his features. Somewhere on Leng is the forbidden city of Yian-Ho, of which a yogi known to Harley Warren once boasted that he was the only living human being ever to have visited it.
(Celephais; The Hound; The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath; At the Mountains of Madness; Out of the Aeons; The Whisperer in Darkness; Through the Gates of the Silver Key; Fungi from Yuggoth)
A lost and all but forgotten alien city in the great Arabian desert known as the Empty Space. In The Descendant the belief is expressed that no man has ever beheld it. This was an error. In The Nameless City a man enters the ruins of the city, which he describes as poking like parts of a corpse above the sands in a dry valley. It is immensely ancient and was buried beneath the sand before the first foundation stones of Babylon were laid. The Bedouin of the desert fear it as accursed and avoid the valley it is rumored to occupy. The mad Arab poet Abdul Alhazred, author of the Necronomicon, is said to have dreamed of this city the night he penned his enigmatic and most celebrated couplet:
The explorer compares the city to Sarnath, fabled to exist at the early awakening of the human race, as a habitation equally mysterious and ancient. When he crawls into an opening of the buried city, he finds that the roofs of the rooms are very low, and the furniture seems unsuited to the human body. Eventually he comes to realize that the inhabitants of the city were not human beings, but intelligent lizard-like creatures that predated the evolution of mankind. Countless aeons ago, before Africa arose from the ocean, the nameless city was a thriving seaport. Gradually the sea withdrew, and the desert sands came. Its inhabitants cut passages in the rock beneath its base, deeper and deeper into the earth, until they came to a great cavern, where, it is hinted they continue to dwell.
(At the Mountains of Madness; The Descendant; The Nameless City)
A gorse-grown plain in the blue-litten subterranean land of K'n-yan.
(The Mound)
A land inside a cavern deep beneath the surface of the ground of Oklahoma that is known as black, lightless N'kai because it is unilluminated, in contrast with red-litten Yoth, a similar cavern world above it that is illuminated by a reddish glow, and blue-litten K'n-yan, a cavern world above Yoth that is illuminated by a bluish glow.
(The Whisperer in Darkness; The Mound)
The chief city of the time-spanning Great Race of Yith, the immensely ancient ruins of which lie beneath the Great Sandy Desert of Australia.
(The Shadow Out of Time)
The sunken city of Cthulhu and his spawn lies deep beneath the southern Pacific Ocean, at the map coordinates S. Latitude 47° 9', W. Longitude 123° 43'. It is built of massive blocks of greenish stone, the architecture a maddening mingling of nonEuclidian angles. Lovecraft wrote in Medusa's Coil, "The geometry of the whole thing is crazy-one gets the acute and obtuse angles all mixed up." The highest ground in the city, the summit of a mountain, is crowned by an enormous carved obelisk, much larger and thicker than any fashioned by the Egyptians. During the period when Cthulhu contested for dominance of the primordial Earth, the vast city of R'lyeh occupied a large volcanic island. When the pattern of the stars in the heavens became noxious to his kind, Cthulhu and his spawn sealed themselves into stone houses on this island to await the time when the stars should "come right" once again. The vault where great Cthulhu lies dreaming is on the mountaintop, at the base of the obelisk.
In his death-like sleep, Cthulhu was able to rule his worshippers around the globe by sending forth his thought commands, but an unforeseen disaster occurred-the island of R'lyeh sank beneath the waves of the ocean, and the miles of water above it cut off the dreaming mind of Cthulhu from his followers. At rare intervals, upheavals occur in the sea floor, R'lyeh rises just high enough so that the obelisk and the stone tomb at its base are above the waves, and Cthulhu once more reaches out with his mind to his faithful cults, but before they can voyage to his island to release him from his stone prison-for he cannot release himself-R'lyeh falls once more beneath the waves.
(At the Mountains of Madness; The Call of Cthulhu; Medusa's Coil; The Man of Stone; The Shadow Over Innsmouth; The Whisperer in Darkness; Through the Gates of the Silver Key)
A subterranean sea deep beneath Antarctica to which the remnants of the crinoid Elder Things retreated to escape the increasing cold and ice that covered their great city.
(At the Mountains of Madness)
Great city of blue-litten K'n-yan, it occupies an upland in a vast subterranean cavern and is the home of an alien race that resemble in facial features and skin pigmentation the Plains Indians. It is said to have a "million golden minarets" and to be overhung by a perpetual gray haze. The name derives from the cult of Tsathoggua, which for a time ruled in K'n-yan.
(The Mound)
Ancient land inhabited by a reptile race.
(The Shadow Out of Time)
Chambers below the largest ruined city of red-litten Yoth, a land contained in a great cavern beneath the equally vast cavern of blue-litten K'n-yan. The vaults contain manuscripts and carvings connected with the lost race of Yoth, which Lovecraft indicates was quadrupedal and reptilian. The strange half-human beasts ridden by the humanoid race dwelling in K'n-yan may be the descendants of the reptilian race of Yoth, after having been cross-bred with the human c
attle of the race of K'n-yan. Within the Vaults of Zin are depictions of the temples that house the idols of the toad-god Tsathoggua.
The Vaults of Zin are also part of the dreamlands, where they are describes as an underground cavern that has its entrance through a large cave in the cemetery next to the Tower of Koth. The Vaults of Zin in the dreamlands are inhabited by the cannibal ghasts, repulsive creatures who die in strong light, although they can endure twilight for several hours at a time. They leap about on long hind legs like kangaroos. The ghasts sometimes emerge from the cave entrance to hunt the gugs and ghouls while they sleep.
There are a number of persons and places in Lovecraft's fiction that exist both in the real world and simultaneously in the dreamlands. Kadath is perhaps the most significant of these-it is both a mountain in Antarctica and a mountain in the dreamlands. There is no reason why a place cannot be in the real world, yet be echoed in a distorted and fantastic form in the dreamlands. Material things has astral shadows, and exist simultaneously both in the material world and the astral world.
(The Mound; The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath)
A great mountain situated in the middle of the kingdom of K'naa, on the ancient sunken continent of Mu. It is surmounted by a fortress of Cyclopean stones older than mankind that was erected prior to the beginnings of terrestrial life by the spawn of Yuggoth (Pluto) when they settled the Earth. This alien race was either the Mi-Go or the species that inhabited Yuggoth prior to the coming to the Mi-Go-Lovecraft does not actually name the race from Yuggoth that built the fortress, and Yuggoth had two intelligent races, the Mi-Go and an earlier race.
In the crypts beneath the fortress on Yaddith-Gho, a demonic being named Ghatanothoa continued to survive aeons after the alien spawn of Yuggoth had perished from the earth. He survives there still, beneath the waves.