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