The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath Reslept

through the forest with its ruins of old villages in overgrown clearings, and then over the tough grass where anaemic shrubs grew here and there. She regretted coming clear of the trees, since the slope was very precipitous and the whole thing rather dizzying. At length she began to discern all the countryside spread out beneath her whenever she looked about; the deserted huts of the image-makers, the groves of resin trees and the camps of those who gathered from them, the woods where prismatic magahs nest and sing, and even a hint very far away of the shores of Yath and of those forbidding ancient ruins whose name is forgotten. She found it best not to look around, and kept on climbing and climbing till the shrubs became very sparse and there was often nothing but the tough grass to cling to.

  Then the soil became meagre, with great patches of bare rock cropping out, and now and then the nest of a condor in a crevice. Finally there was nothing at all but the bare rock, and had it not been very rough and weathered, she could scarcely have ascended farther. Knobs, ledges, and pinnacles, however, helped greatly; and it was cheering to see occasionally the sign of some lava-gatherer scratched clumsily in the friable stone, and know that wholesome human creatures had been there before her. After a certain height the presence of woman was further shewn by handholds and footholds hewn where they were needed, and by little quarries and excavations where some choice vein or stream of lava had been found. In one place a narrow ledge had been chopped artificially to an especially rich deposit far to the right of the main line of ascent. Once or twice Carter dared to look around, and was almost stunned by the spread of landscape below. All the island betwixt her and the coast lay open to her sight, with Baharna's stone terraces and the smoke of its chimneys mystical in the distance. And beyond that the illimitable Southern Sea with all its curious secrets.

  Thus far there had been much winding around the mountain, so that the farther and carven side was still hidden. Carter now saw a ledge running upward and to the left which seemed to head the way she wished, and this course she took in the hope that it might prove continuous. After ten minutes she saw it was indeed no cul-de-sac, but that it led steeply on in an arc which would, unless suddenly interrupted or deflected, bring her after a few hours' climbing to that unknown southern slope overlooking the desolate crags and the accursed valley of lava. As new country came into view below her she saw that it was bleaker and wilder than those seaward lands she had traversed. The mountain's side, too, was somewhat different; being here pierced by curious cracks and caves not found on the straighter route she had left. Some of these were above her and some beneath her, all opening on sheerly perpendicular cliffs and wholly unreachable by the feet of woman. The air was very cold now, but so hard was the climbing that she did not mind it. Only the increasing rarity bothered her, and she thought that perhaps it was this which had turned the heads of other travellers and excited those absurd tales of night-gaunts whereby they explained the loss of such climbers as fell from these perilous paths. She was not much impressed by travellers' tales, but had a good curved scimitar in case of any trouble. All lesser thoughts were lost in the wish to see that carven face which might set her on the track of the gods atop unknown Kadath.

  At last, in the fearsome iciness of upper space, she came round fully to the hidden side of Ngranek and saw in infinite gulfs below her the lesser crags and sterile abysses of lava which marked olden wrath of the Great Ones. There was unfolded, too, a vast expanse of country to the south; but it was a desert land without fair fields or cottage chimneys, and seemed to have no ending. No trace of the sea was visible on this side, for Oriab is a great island. Black caverns and odd crevices were still numerous on the sheer vertical cliffs, but none of them was accessible to a climber. There now loomed aloft a great beetling mass which hampered the upward view, and Carter was for a moment shaken with doubt lest it prove impassable. Poised in windy insecurity miles above earth, with only space and death on one side and only slippery walls of rock on the other, she knew for a moment the fear that makes women shun Ngranek's hidden side. She could not turn round, yet the sun was already low. If there were no way aloft, the night would find her crouching there still, and the dawn would not find her at all.

  But there was a way, and she saw it in due season. Only a very expert dreamer could have used those imperceptible footholds, yet to Carter they were sufficient. Surmounting now the outward-hanging rock, she found the slope above much easier than that below, since a great glacier's melting had left a generous space with loam and ledges. To the left a precipice dropped straight from unknown heights to unknown depths, with a cave's dark mouth just out of reach above her. Elsewhere, however, the mountain slanted back strongly, and even gave her space to lean and rest.

  She felt from the chill that she must be near the snow line, and looked up to see what glittering pinnacles might be shining in that late ruddy sunlight. Surely enough, there was the snow uncounted thousands of feet above, and below it a great beetling crag like that. she had just climbed; hanging there forever in bold outline. And when she saw that crag she gasped and cried out aloud, and clutched at the jagged rock in awe; for the titan bulge had not stayed as earth's dawn had shaped it, but gleamed red and stupendous in the sunset with the carved and polished features of a god.

  Stern and terrible shone that face that the sunset lit with fire. How vast it was no mind can ever measure, but Carter knew at once that woman could never have fashioned it. It was a god chiselled by the hands of the gods, and it looked down haughty and majestic upon the seeker. Rumour had said it was strange and not to be mistaken, and Carter saw that it was indeed so; for those long narrow eyes and long-lobed ears, and that thin nose and pointed chin, all spoke of a race that is not of women but of gods.

  She clung overawed in that lofty and perilous eyrie, even though it was this which she had expected and come to find; for there is in a god's face more of marvel than prediction can tell, and when that face is vaster than a great temple and seen looking downward at sunset in the scyptic silences of that upper world from whose dark lava it was divinely hewn of old, the marvel is so strong that none may escape it.

  Here, too, was the added marvel of recognition; for although she had planned to search all dreamland over for those whose likeness to this face might mark them as the god's children, she now knew that she need not do so. Certainly, the great face carven on that mountain was of no strange sort, but the kin of such as she had seen often in the taverns of the seaport Celephais which lies in Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills and is ruled over by that Queen Kuranes whom Carter once knew in waking life. Every year sailors with such a face came in dark ships from the north to trade their onyx for the carved jade and spun gold and little red singing birds of Celephais, and it was clear that these could be no others than the hall-gods she sought. Where they dwelt, there must the cold waste lie close, and within it unknown Kadath and its onyx castle for the Great Ones. So to Celephais she must go, far distant from the isle of Oriab, and in such parts as would take her back to Dylath-Teen and up the Skai to the bridge by Nir, and again into the enchanted wood of the Zoogs, whence the way would bend northward through the garden lands by Oukranos to the gilded spires of Thran, where she might find a galleon bound over the Cerenarian Sea.

  But dusk was now thick, and the great carven face looked down even sterner in shadow. Perched on that ledge night found the seeker; and in the blackness she might neither go down nor go up, but only stand and cling and shiver in that narrow place till the day came, praying to keep awake lest sleep loose her hold and send her down the dizzy miles of air to the crags and sharp rocks of the accursed valley. The stars came out, but save for them there was only black nothingness in her eyes; nothingness leagued with death, against whose beckoning she might do no more than cling to the rocks and lean back away from an unseen brink. The last thing of earth that she saw in the gloaming was a condor soaring close to the westward precipice beside her, and darting screaming away when it came near the cave whose mouth yawned just out of reach.

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bsp; Suddenly, without a warning sound in the dark, Carter felt her curved scimitar drawn stealthily out of her belt by some unseen hand. Then she heard it clatter down over the rocks below. And between her and the Milky Way she thought she saw a very terrible outline of something noxiously thin and horned and tailed and bat-winged. Other things, too, had begun to blot out patches of stars west of her, as if a flock of vague entities were flapping thickly and silently out of that inaccessible cave in the face of the precipice. Then a sort of cold rubbery arm seized her neck and something else seized her feet, and she was lifted inconsiderately up and swung about in space. Another minute and the stars were gone, and Carter knew that the night-gaunts had got her.

  They bore her breathless into that cliffside cavern and through monstrous labyrinths beyond. When she struggled, as at first she did by instinct, they tickled her with deliberation. They made no sound at all themselves, and even their membranous wings were silent. They were frightfully cold and damp and slippery, and their paws kneaded one