The Shadow Out of Time by H. P. LovecraftThe Shadow Out of Time
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written Nov 1934-Mar 1935 
Published June 1936 in Astounding Stories, Vol. 17, No. 4, p. 110-54. 
I 
After twenty-two years of nightmare and terror, saved only by a desperate 
conviction of the mythical source of certain impressions, I am unwilling to 
vouch for the truth of that which I think I found in Western Australia on the 
night of 17-18 July 1935. There is reason to hope that my experience was wholly 
or partly an hallucination - for which, indeed, abundant causes existed. And 
yet, its realism was so hideous that I sometimes find hope impossible. 
If the thing did happen, then man must be prepared to accept notions of the 
cosmos, and of his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest 
mention is paralysing. He must, too, be placed on guard against a specific, 
lurking peril which, though it will never engulf the whole race, may impose 
monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of it. 
It is for this latter reason that I urge, with all the force of my being, final 
abandonment of all the attempts at unearthing those fragments of unknown, 
primordial masonry which my expedition set out to investigate. 
Assuming that I was sane and awake, my experience on that night was such as has 
befallen no man before. It was, moreover, a frightful confirmation of all I had 
sought to dismiss as myth and dream. Mercifull there is no proof, for in my 
fright I lost the awesome object which would - if real and brought out of that 
noxious abyss - have formed irrefutable evidence. 
When I came upon the horror I was alone - and I have up to now told no one about 
it. I could not stop the others from digging in its direction, but chance and 
the shifting sand have so far saved them from finding it. Now I must formulate 
some definite statement - not only for the sake of my own mental balance, but to 
warn such others as may read it seriously. 
These pages - much in whose earlier parts will be familiar to close readers of 
the general and scientific press - are written in the cabin of the ship that is 
bringing me home. I shall give them to my son, Professor Wingate Peaslee of 
Miskatonic University - the only member of my family who stuck to me after my 
queer amnesia of long ago, and the man best informed on the inner facts of my 
case. Of all living persons, he is least likely to ridicule what I shall tell of 
that fateful night. 
I did not enlighten him orally before sailing, because I think he had better 
have the revelation in written form. Reading and re-reading at leisure will 
leave with him a more convincing picture than my confused tongue could hope to 
convey. 
He can do anything that he thinks best with this account - showing it, with 
suitable comment, in any quarters where it will be likely to accomplish good. It 
is for the sake of such readers as are unfamiliar with the earlier phases of my 
case that I am prefacing the revelation itself with a fairly ample summary of 
its background. 
My name is Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, and those who recall the newspaper tales 
of a generation back - or the letters and articles in psychological journals six 
or seven years ago - will know who and what I am. The press was filled with the 
details of my strange amnesia in 1908-13, and much was made of the traditions of 
horror, madness, and witchcraft which lurked behind the ancient Massachusetts 
town then and now forming my place of residence. Yet I would have it known that 
there is nothing whatever of the mad or sinister in my heredity and early life. 
This is a highly important fact in view of the shadow which fell so suddenly 
upon me from outside sources. 
It may be that centuries of dark brooding had given to crumbling, 
whisper-haunted Arkham a peculiar vulnerability as regards such shadows - though 
even this seems doubtful in the light of those other cases which I later came to 
study. But the chief point is that my own ancestry and background are altogether 
normal. What came, came from somewhere else - where I even now hesitate to 
assert in plain words. 
I am the son of Jonathan and Hannah (Wingate) Peaslee, both of wholesome old 
Haverhill stock. I was born and reared in Haverhill - at the old homestead in 
Boardman Street near Golden Hill - and did not go to Arkham till I entered 
Miskatonic University as instructor of political economy in 1895. 
For thirteen years more my life ran smoothly and happily. I married Alice Keezar 
of Haverhill in 1896, and my three children, Robert, Wingate and Hannah were 
born in 1898, 1900, and 1903, respectively. In 1898 I became an associate 
professor, and in 1902 a full professor. At no time had I the least interest in 
either occultism or abnormal psychology. 
It was on Thursday, 14 May 1908, that the queer amnesia came. The thing was 
quite sudden, though later I realized that certain brief, glimmering visions of 
several, hours previous - chaotic visions which disturbed me greatly because 
they were so unprecedented - must have formed premonitory symptoms. My head was 
aching, and I had a singular feeling - altogether new to me - that some one else 
was trying to get possession of my thoughts. 
The collapse occurred about 10.20 A.M., while I was conducting a class in 
Political Economy VI - history and present tendencies of economics - for juniors 
and a few sophomores. I began to see strange shapes before my eyes, and to feel 
that I was in a grotesque room other than the classroom. 
My thoughts and speech wandered from my subject, and the students saw that 
something was gravely amiss. Then I slumped down, unconscious, in my chair, in a 
stupor from which no one could arouse me. Nor did my rightful faculties again 
look out upon the daylight of our normal world for five years, four months, and 
thirteen days. 
It is, of course, from others that I have learned what followed. I showed no 
sign of consciousness for sixteen and a half hours though removed to my home at 
27 Crane Street, and given the best of medical attention. 
At 3 A.M. May my eyes opened and began to speak and my family were thoroughly 
frightened by the trend of my expression and language. It was clear that I had 
no remembrance of my identity and my past, though for some reason seemed anxious 
to conceal his lack of knowledge. My eyes glazed strangely at the persons around 
me, and the flections of my facial muscles were altogether unfamiliar. 
Even my speech seemed awkward and foreign. I used my vocal organs clumsily and 
gropingly, and my diction had a curiously stilted quality, as if I had 
laboriously learned the English language from books. The pronunciation was 
barbarously alien, whilst the idiom seemed to include both scraps of curious 
archaism and expressions of a wholly incomprehensible cast. 
Of the latter, one in particular was very potently - even terrifiedly - recalled 
by the youngest of the physicians twenty years afterward. For at that late 
period such a phrase began to have an actual currency - first in England and 
then in the United States - and though of much complexity and indisputable 
newness, it reproduced in every least particular the mystifying words of the 
strange Arkham patient of 1908. 
Physical strength returned at once, although I required an odd amount of 
re-education in the use of my hands, legs, and bodily apparatus in general. 
Because of this and other handicaps inherent in the mnemonic lapse, I was for 
some time kept under strict medical care. 
When I saw that my attempts to conceal the lapse had failed, I admitted it 
openly, and became eager for information of all sorts. Indeed, it seemed to the 
doctors that I lost interest in my proper personality as soon as I found the 
case of amnesia accepted as a natural thing. 
They noticed that my chief efforts were to master certain points in history, 
science, art, language, and folklore - some of them tremendously abstruse, and 
some childishly simple - which remained, very oddly in many cases, outside my 
consciousness. 
At the same time they noticed that I had an inexplicable command of many almost 
unknown sorts of knowledge - a command which I seemed to wish to hide rather 
than display. I would inadvertently refer, with casual assurance, to specific 
events in dim ages outside of the range of accepted history - passing off such 
references as a jest when I saw the surprise they created. And I had a way of 
speaking of the future which two or three times caused actual fright. 
These uncanny flashes soon ceased to appear, though some observers laid their 
vanishment more to a certain furtive caution on my part than to any waning of 
the strange knowledge behind them. Indeed, I seemed anomalously avid to absorb 
the speech, customs, and perspectives of the age around me; as if I were a 
studious traveller from a far, foreign land. 
As soon as permitted, I haunted the college library at all hours; and shortly 
began to arrange for those odd travels, and special courses at American and 
European Universities, which evoked so much comment during the next few years. 
I did not at any time suffer from a lack of learned contacts, for my case had a 
mild celebrity among the psychologists of the period. I was lectured upon as a 
typical example of secondary personality - even though I seemed to puzzle the 
lecturers now and then with some bizarre symptoms or some queer trace of 
carefully veiled mockery. 
Of real friendliness, however, I encountered little. Something in my aspect and 
speech seemed to excite vague fears and aversions in every one I met, as if I 
were a being infinitely removed from all that is normal and healthful. This idea 
of a black, hidden horror connected with incalculable gulfs of some sort of 
distance was oddly widespread and persistent. 
My own family formed no exception. From the moment of my strange waking my wife 
had regarded me with extreme horror and loathing, vowing that I was some utter 
alien usurping the body of her husband. In 1910 she obtained a legal divorce, 
nor would she ever consent to see me even after my return to normality in 1913. 
These feelings were shared by my elder son and my small daughter, neither of 
whom I have ever seen since. 
Only my second son, Wingate, seemed able to conquer the terror and repulsion 
which my change aroused. He indeed felt that I was a stranger, but though only 
eight years old held fast to a faith that my proper self would return. When it 
did return he sought me out, and the courts gave me his custody. In succeeding 
years he helped me with the studies to which I was driven, and today, at 
thirty-five, he is a professor of psychology at Miskatonic. 
But I do not wonder at the horror caused - for certainly, the mind, voice, and 
facial expression of the being that awakened on l5 May 1908, were not those of 
Nathaniel Wingate Peastee. 
I will not attempt to tell much of my life from 1908 to 1913, since readers may 
glean I the outward essentials - as I largely had to do - from files of old 
newspapers and scientific journals. 
I was given charge of my funds, and spent them slowly and on the whole wisely, 
in travel and in study at various centres of learning. My travels, however, were 
singular in the extreme, involving long visits to remote and desolate places. 
In 1909 I spent a month in the Himalayas, and in 1911 roused much attention 
through a camel trip into the unknown deserts of Arabia. What happened on those 
journeys I have never been able to learn. 
During the summer of l9l2 I chartered a ship and sailed in the Arctic, north of 
Spitzbergen, afterward showing signs of disappointment. 
Later in that year I spent weeks - alone beyond the limits of previous or 
subsequent exploration in the vast limestone cavern systems of western Virginia 
- black labyrinths so complex that no retracing of my steps could even be 
considered. 
My sojourns at the universities were marked by abnormally rapid assimilation, as 
if the secondary personality had an intelligence enormously superior to my own. 
I have found, also, that my rate of reading and solitary study was phenomenal. I 
could master every detail of a book merely by glancing over it as fast as I 
could turn the leaves; while my skill at interpreting complex figures in an 
instant was veritably awesome. 
At times there appeared almost ugly reports of my power to influence the 
thoughts and acts of others, though I seemed to have taken care to minimize 
displays of this faculty. 
Other ugly reports concerned my intimacy with leaders of occultist groups, and 
scholars suspected of connection with nameless bands of abhorrent elder-world 
hierophants. These rumours, though never proved at the time, were doubtless 
stimulated by the known tenor of some of my reading - for the consulltation of 
rare books at libraries cannot be effected secretly. 
There is tangible proof - in the form of marginal notes - that I went minutely 
through such things as the Comte d'Erlette's Cultes des Goules, Ludvig Prinn's 
De Vermis Mysteriis, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, the surviving 
fragments of the puzzling Book of Eibon, and the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad 
Arab Abdul Alhazred. Then, too, it is undeniable that a fresh and evil wave of 
underground cult activity set in about the time of my odd mutation. 
In the summer of 1913 I began to display signs of ennui and flagging interest, 
and to hint to various associates that a change might soon be expected in me. I 
spoke of returning memories of my earlier life - though most auditors judged me 
insincere, since all the recollections I gave were casual, and such as might 
have been learned from my old private papers. 
About the middle of August I returned to Arkham and re-opened my long-closed 
house in Crane Street. Here I installed a mechanism of the most curious aspect, 
constructed piecemeal by different makers of scientific apparatus in Europe and 
America, and guarded carefully from the sight of any one intelligent enough to 
analyse it. 
Those who did see it - a workman, a servant, and the new housekeeper - say that 
it was a queer mixture of rods, wheels, and mirros, though only about two feet 
tall, one foot wide, and one foot thick. The central mirror was circular and 
convex. All this is borne out by such makers of parts as can be located. 
On the evening of Friday, 26 September, I dismissed the housekeeper and the maid 
until noon of the next day. Lights burned in the house till late, and a lean, 
dark, curiously foreign-looking man called in an automobile. 
It was about one A.M. that the lights were last seen. At 2.15 A.M. a policeman 
observed the place in darkness, but the strager's motor still at the curb. By 4 
o'clock the motor was certainly gone. 
It was at 6 o'clock that a hesitant, foreign voice on the telephone asked Dr 
Wilson to call at my house and bring me out of a peculiar faint. This call - a 
long-distance one - was later traced to a public booth in the North Station in 
Boston, but no sign of the lean foreigner was ever unearthed. 
When the doctor reached my house he found me unconscious in the sitting room - 
in an easy-chair with a table drawn up before it. On the polished top were 
scratches showing where some heavy object had rested. The queer machine was 
gone, nor was anything afterward heard of it. Undoubtedly the dark, lean 
foreigner had taken it away. 
In the library grate were abundant ashes, evidently left from the burning of the 
every remainmg scrap of paper on which I had written since the advent of the 
amnesia. Dr Wilson found my breathing very peculiar, but after a hypodermic 
injection it became more regular. 
At 11.15 A.M., 27 September, I stirred vigorously, and my hitherto masklike face 
began to show signs of expression. Dr Wilson remarked that the expression was 
not that of my secondary personality, but seemed much like that of my normal 
self. About 11.30 I muttered some very curious syllables - syllables which 
seemed unrelated to any human speech. I appeared, too, to struggle against 
something. Then, just afternoon - the housekeeper and the maid having meanwhile 
returned - I began to mutter in English. 
"- of the orthodox economists of that period, Jevons typifies the prevailing 
trend toward scientific correlation. His attempt to link the commercial cycle of 
prosperity and depression with the physical cycle of the solar spots forms 
perhaps the apex of -" 
Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee had come back - a spirit in whose time scale it was 
still Thursday morning in 1908, with the economics class gazing up at the 
battered desk on the platform. 


II 
My reabsorption into normal life was a painful and difficult process. The loss 
of over five years creates more complications than can be imagined, and in my 
case there were countless matters to be adjusted. 
What I heard of my actions since 1908 astonished and disturbed me, but I tried 
to view the matter as philosophically as I could. At last, regaining custody of 
my second son, Wingate, I settled down with him in the Crane Street house and 
endeavoured to resume my teaching - my old professorship having been kindly 
offered me by the college. 
I began work with the February, 1914, term, and kept at it just a year. By that 
time I realized how badly my experience had shaken me. Though perfectly sane - I 
hoped - and with no flaw in my original personality, I had not the nervous 
energy of the old days. Vague dreams and queer ideas continually haunted me, and 
when the outbreak of the World War turned my mind to history I found myself 
thinking of periods and events in the oddest possible fashion. 
My conception of time, my ability to distinguish between consecutiveness and 
simultaneousness - seemed subtly disordered so that I formed chimerical notions 
about living in one age and casting one's mind all over etenity for knowledge of 
past and future ages. 
The war gave me strange impressions of remembering some of its far-off 
consequences - as if I knew how it was coming out and could look back upon it in 
the light of future information. All such quasi-memories were attended with much 
pain, and with a feeling that some artificial psychological barrier was set a 
against them. 
When I diffidently hinted to others about my impressions I met with varied 
responses. Some persons looked uncomfortably at me, but men in the mathematics 
department spoke of new developments in those theories of relativity - then 
discussed only in learned circles - which were later to become so famous. Dr. 
Albert Einstein, they said, was rapidly reducing time to the status of a mere 
dimension. 
But the dreams and disturbed feelings gained on me, so that I had to drop my 
regular work in 1915. Certainly the impressions were taking an annoying shape - 
giving me the persistent notion that my amnesia had formed some unholy sort of 
exchange; that the secondary personality had indeed had had suffered 
displacement. been an in- 
Thus I was driven to vague and fright speculations concerning the whereabouts of 
my true self during the years that another had held my body. The curious 
knowledge and strange conduct of my body's late tenant troubled me more and more 
as I learned further details from persons, papers, and magazines. 
Queernesses that had baffled others seemed to harmonize terribly with some 
background of black knowledge which festered in the chasms of my subconscious. I 
began to search feverishly for every scrap of information bearing on the studies 
and travels of that other one during the dark years. 
Not all of my troubles were as semi-abstract as this. There were the dreams - 
and these seemed to grow in vividness and concreteness. Knowing how most would 
regard them, I seldom mentioned them to anyone but my son or certain trusted 
psychologists, but eventually I commenced a scientific study of other cases in 
order to see how typical or nontypical such visions might be among amnesia 
victims. 
My results, aided by psychologists, historians, anthropologists, and mental 
specialists of wide experience, and by a study that included all records of 
split personalities from the days of daemonic-possession legends to the 
medically realistic present, at first bothered me more than they consoled me. 
I soon found that my dreams had, indeed, no counterpart in the overwhelming bulk 
of true amnesia cases. There remained, however, a tiny residue of accounts which 
for years baffled and shocked me with their parallelism to my own experience. 
Some of them were bits of ancient folklore; others were case histories in the 
annals of medicine; one or two were anecdotes obscurely buried in standard 
histories. 
It thus appeared that, while my special kind of affliction was prodigiously 
rare, instances of it had occurred at long intervals ever since the beginnig of 
men's annals. Some centuries might contain one, two, or three cases, others none 
- or at least none whose record survived. 
The essence was always the same - a person of keen thoughtfulness seized a 
strange secondary life and leading for a greater or lesser period an utterly 
alien existence typified at first by vocal and bodily awkwardness, an later by a 
wholesale acquisition of scientific, historic, artistic, and anthropologic 
knowledge; an acquisition carried on with feverish zest and with a wholly 
abnormal absorptive power. Then a sudden return of rightful consciousness, 
intermittently plagued ever after with vague unplaceable dreams suggesting 
fragments of some hideous memory elaborately blotted out. 
And the close resemblance of those nightmares to my own - even in some of the 
smallest particulars - left no doubt in my mind of their significantly typical 
nature. One or two of the cases had an added ring of faint, blasphemous 
familiarity, as if I had heard of them before through some cosmic channel too 
morbid and frightful to contemplate. In three instances there was specific 
mention of such an unknown machine as had been in my house before the second 
change. 
Another thing that worried me during my investigation was the somewhat greater 
frequency of cases where a brief, elusive glimpse of the typical nightmares was 
afforded to persons not visited well-defined amnesia. 
These persons were largely of mediocre mind or less - some so primitive that 
they could scarcely be thought of as vehicles forabnormal scholarship and 
preternatural mental acquisitions. For a second they would be fired with alien 
force - then a backward lapse, and a thin, swift-fading memory of unhuman 
horrors. 
There had been at least three such cases during the past half century - one only 
fifteen years before. Had something been groping blindly through time from some 
unsuspected abyss in Nature? Were these faint cases monstrous, sinister 
experiments of a kind and authorship uttely beyond same belief? 
Such were a few of the forless speculations of my weaker hours - fancies abetted 
by myths which my studies uncovered. For I could not doubt but that certain 
persistent legends of immemorial antiquity, apparently unknown to the victims 
and physicians connected with recent amnesia cases, formed a striking and 
awesome elaboration of memory lapses such as mine. 
Of the nature of the dreams and impressions which were growing so clamorous I 
still almost fear to speak. They seemed to savor of madness, and at times I 
believed I was indeed going mad. Was there a special type of delusion afflicting 
those who had suffered lapses of memory? Conceivably, the efforts of the 
subconscious mind to fill up a perplexing blank with pseudo-memories might give 
rise to strange imaginative vagaries. 
This indeed - though an alternative folklore theory finally seemed to me more 
plausible - was the belief of many of the alienists who helped me in my search 
for parallel cases, and who shared my puzzlement at the exact resemblances 
sometimes discovered. 
They did not call the condition true insanity, but classed it rather among 
neurotic disorders. My course in trying to track down and analyze it, instead of 
vaintly seeking to dismiss or forget it, they heartily endorsed as correct 
according to the best psychological principles. I especially valued the advice 
of such physicians as had studied me during my possession by the other 
personality. 
My first disturbances were not visual at all, but concerned the more abstract 
matters which I have mentioned. There was, too, a feeling of profound and 
inexplicable horror concerning myself. I developed a queer fear of seeing my own 
form, as if my eyes would find it something utterly alien and inconceivably 
abhorrent. 
When I did glance down and behold the familiar human shape in quiet grey or blue 
clothing, I always felt a curious relief, though in order to gain this relief I 
had to conquer an infinite dread. I shunned mirrors as much as possible, and was 
always shaved at the barber's. 
It was a long time before I correlated any of these disappointed feelings with 
the fleeting, visual impressions which began to develop. The first such 
correlation had to do with the odd sensation of an external, artificial 
restraint on my memory. 
I felt that the snatches of sight I experienced had a profound and terrible 
meaning, and a frightful connexion with myself, but that some purposeful 
influence held me from grasping that meaning and that connexion. Then came that 
queerness about the element of time, and with it desperate efforts to place the 
fragmentary dream-glimpses in the chronological and spatial pattern. 
The glimpses themselves were at first merely strange rather than horrible. I 
would seem to be in an enormous vaulted chamber whose lofty stone aroinings were 
well-nigh lost in the shadows overhead. In whatever time or place the scene 
might be, the principle of the arch was known as fully and used as extensively 
as by the Romans. 
There were colossal, round windows and high, arched doors, and pedestals or 
tables each as tall as the height of an ordinary room. Vast shelves of dark wood 
lined the walls, holding what seemed to be volumes of immense size with strange 
hieroglyphs on their backs. 
The exposed stonework held curious carvings, always in curvilinear mathematical 
designs, and there were chiselled inscriptions in the same characters that the 
huge books bore. The dark granite masonry was of a monstrous megathic type, with 
lines of convex-topped blocks fitting the concave-bottomed courses which rested 
upon them. 
There were no chairs, but the tops of the vast pedestals were littered with 
books, papers, and what seemed to be writing materials - oddly figured jars of a 
purplish metal, and rods with stained tips. Tall as the pedestals were, I seemed 
at times able to view them from above. On some of them were great globes of 
luminous crystal serving as lamps, and inexplicable machines formed of vitreous 
tubes and metal rods. 
The windows were glazed, and latticed with stout-looking bars. Though I dared 
not approach and peer out them, I could see from where I was he waving tops of 
singular fern-like growths. The floor was of massive octagonal flagstones, while 
rugs and hangings were entirely lacking. 
Later I had visions of sweeping through Cyclopean corridors of stone, and up and 
down gigantic inclined planes of the same monstrous masonry. There were no 
stairs anywhere, nor was any passageway less than thirty feet wide. Some of the 
structures through which I floated must have towered in the sky for thousands of 
feet. 
There were multiple levels of black vaults below, and never-opened trapdoors, 
sealed down with metal bands and holding dim suggestions of some special peril. 
I seemed to be a prisoner, and horror hung broodingly over everything I saw. I 
felt that the mocking curvilinear hieroglyphs on the walls would blast my soul 
with their message were I not guarded by a merciful ignorance. 
Still later my dreams included vistas from the great round windows, and from the 
titanic flat roof, with its curious gardens, wide barren area, and high, 
scalloped parapet of stone, to which the topmost of the inclined planes led. 
There were, almost endless leagues of giant buildings, each in its garden, and 
ranged along paved roads fully 200 feet wide. They differed greatly in aspect, 
but few were less than 500 feet square or a thousand feet high. Many seemed so 
limitless that they must have had a frontage of several thousand feet, while 
some shot up to mountainous altitudes in the grey, steamy heavens. 
They seemed to be mainly of stone or concrete, and most of them embodied the 
oddly curvilinear type of masonry noticeable in the building that held me. Roofs 
were flat and garden-covered, and tended to have scalloped parapets. Sometimes 
there were terraces and higher levels, and wide, cleared spaces amidst the 
gardens. The great roads held hints of motion, but in the earlier visions I 
could not resolve this impression into details. 
In certain places I beheld enormous dark cylindrical towers which climbed far 
above any of the other structures. These appeared to be of a totally unique 
nature and shewed signs of prodigious age and dilapidation. They were built of a 
bizarre type of square-cut basalt masonry, and tapered slightly toward their 
rounded tops. Nowhere in any of them could the least traces of windows or other 
apertures save huge doors be found. I noticed also some lower buildinigs - all 
crumbling with the weathering of aeons - which resembled these dark, cylindrical 
towers in basic architecture. Around all these aberrant piles of square-cut 
masonry there hovered an inexplicable aura of menace and concentrated fear, like 
that bred by the sealed trap-doors. 
The omnipresent gardens were almost terrifying in their strangeness, with 
bizarre and unfamiliar forms of vegetation nodding over broad paths lined with 
curiously carven monoliths. Abnormally vast fern-like growths predominated - 
some green, and some of a ghastly, fungoid pallor. 
Among them rose great spectral things resembling calamites, whose bamboo-like 
trunks towered to fabulous heights. Then there were tufted forms like fabulous 
cycads, and grotesque dark-green shrubs and trees of coniferous aspect. 
Flowers were small, colourless, and unrecognizable, blooming in geometrical beds 
and at large among the greenery. 
In a few of the terrace and roof-top gardens were larger and more blossoms of 
most offensive contours and seeming to suggest artificial breeding. Fungi of 
inconceivable size, outlines, and colours speckled the scene in patterns 
bespeaking some unknown but well-established horticultural tradition. In the 
larger gardens on the ground there seemed to be some attempt to preserve the 
irregularities of Nature, but on the roofs there was more selectiveness, and 
more evidences of the topiary art. 
The sides were almost always moist and cloudy, and sometimes I would seem to 
witness tremendous rains. Once in a while, though, there would be glimpses of 
the sun - which looked abnormally large - and of the moon, whose markings held a 
touch of difference from the normal that I could never quite fathom. When - very 
rarely - the night sky was clear to any extent, I beheld constellations which 
were nearly beyond recognition. Known outlines were sometimes approximated, but 
seldom duplicated; and from the position of the few groups I could recognize, I 
felt I must be in the earth's southern hemisphere, near the Tropic of Capricorn. 

The far horizon was always steamy and indistinct, but I could see that great 
jungles of unknown tree-ferns, calamites, lepidodendra, and sigillaria lay 
outside the city, their fantastic frondage waving mockingly in the shifting 
vapours. Now and then there would be suggestions of motion in the sky, but these 
my early visions never resolved. 
By the autumn of 1914 I began to have infrequent dreams of strange floatings 
over the city and through the regions around it. I saw interminable roads 
through forests of fearsome growths with mottled, fluted, and banded trunks, and 
past other cities as strange as the one which persistently haunted me. 
I saw monstrous constructions of black or iridescent tone in glades and 
clearings where perpetual twilight reigned, and traversed long causeways over 
swamps so dark that I could tell but little of their moist, towering vegetation. 

Once I saw an area of countless miles strewn with age-blasted basaltic ruins 
whose architecture had been like that of the few windowless, round-topped towers 
in the haunting city. 
And once I saw the sea - a boundless, steamy expanse beyond the colossal stone 
piers of an enormous town of domes and arches. Great shapeless sugggestions of 
shadow moved over it, and here and there its surface was vexed ith anomalous 
spoutings. 
III 
As I have said, it was not immediately that these wild visions began to hold 
their terrifying quality. Certainly, many persons have dreamed intrinsically 
stranger things - things compounded of unrelated scraps of daily life, 
pictures,and reading, and arranged in fantastically novel forms by the unchecked 
caprices of sleep. 
For some time I accepted the visions as natural, even though I had never before 
been an extravagant dreamer. Many of the vague anomalies, I argued, must have 
come from trivial sources too numerous to track down; while others seemed to 
reflect a common text book knowledge of the plants and other conditions of the 
primitive world of a hundred and fifty million years ago - the world of the 
Permian or Triassic age. 
In the course of some months, however, the element of terror did figure with 
accumulating force. This was when the dreams began so unfailingly to have the 
aspect of memories, and when my mind began to link them with my growing abstract 
disturbances - the feeling of mnemonic restraint, the curious impressions 
regarding time, and sense of a loathsome exchange with my secondary personality 
of 1908-13, and, considerably later, the inexplicable loathing of my own person. 

As certain definite details began to enter the dreams, their horror increased a 
thousandfold - until by October, 1915, I felt I must do something. It was then 
that I began an intensive study of other cases of amnesia and visions, feeling 
that I might thereby obectivise my trouble and shake clear of its emotional 
grip. 
However, as before mentioned, the result was at first almost exactly opposite. 
It disturbed me vastly to find that my dreams had been so closely duplicated; 
especially since some of the accounts were too early to admit of any geological 
knowledge - and therefore of any idea of primitive landscapes - on the subjects' 
part. 
What is more, many of these accounts supplied very horrible details and 
explanations in connexion with the visions of great buildings and jungle gardens 
- and other things. The actual sights and vague impressions were bad enough, but 
what was hinted or asserted by some of the other dreamers savored of madness and 
blasphemy. Worst of all, my own pseudo-memory was aroused to milder dreams and 
hints of coming revelations. And yet most doctors deemed my course, on he whole, 
an advisable one. 
I studied psychology systematically, and under the prevailing stimulus my son 
Wingate did the same - his studies leading eventually to his present 
professorship. In 1917 and 1918 I took special courses at Miskatonic. Meanwhile, 
my examination of medical, historical, and anthropological records became 
indefatigable, involving travels to distant libraries, and finally including 
even a reading of the hideous books of forbidden elder lore in which my 
secondary personality had been so disturbingly interested. 
Some of the latter were the actual copies I had consulted in my altered state, 
and I was greatly disturbed by certain marginal notations and ostensible 
corrections of the hideous text in a script and idiom which somehow seemed oddly 
unhuman. 
These markings were mostly in the respective languages of the various books, all 
of which the writer seemed to know with equal, though obviously academic, 
facility. One note appended to von Junzt's Unaussprechlichen Kulten, however, 
was alarmingly otherwise. It consisted of certain curvilinear hieroglyphs in the 
same ink as that of the German corrections, but following no recognized human 
pattern. And these hieroglyphs were closely and unmistakably aldn to the 
characters constantly met with in my dreams - characters whose meaning I would 
sometimes momentarily fancy I knew, or was just on the brink of recalling. 
To complete my black confusion, my librarians assured me that, in view of 
previous examinations and records of consultation of the volumes in question, 
all of these notations must have been made by myself in my secondary state. This 
despite the fact that I was and still am ignorant of three of the languages 
involved. 
Piecing together the scattered records, ancient and modern, anthropological and 
medical, I found a fairly consistent mixture of myth and hallucination whose 
scope and wildness left me utterly dazed. Only one thing consoled me, the fact 
that the myths were of such early existence. What lost knowledge could have 
brought pictures of the Palaeozoic or Mesozoic landscape into these primitive 
fables, I could not even guess; but the pictures had been there. Thus, a basis 
existed for the formation of a fixed type of delusion. 
Cases of amnesia no doubt created the general myth pattern - but afterward the 
fanciful accretions of the myths must have reacted on amnesia sufferers and 
coloured their pseudo-memories. I myself had read and heard all the early tales 
during my memory lapse - my quest had amply proved that. Was it not natural, 
then, for my subsequent dreams and emotional impressions to become coloured and 
moulded by what my memory subtly held over from my secondary state? 
A few of the myths had significant connexions with other cloudy legends of the 
pre-human world, especially those Hindu tales involving stupefying gulfs of time 
and forming part of the lore of modern theosopists. 
Primal myth and modern delusion joined in their assumption that mankind is only 
one - perhaps the least - of the highly evolved and dominant races of this 
planet's long and largely unknown career. Things of inconceivable shape, they 
implied, had reared towers to the sky and delved into every secret of Nature 
before the first amphibian forbear of man had crawled out of the hot sea 300 
million years ago. 
Some had come down from the stars; a few were as old as the cosmos itself, 
others had arisen swiftly from terrene germs as far behind the first germs of 
our life-cycle as those germs are behind ourselves. Spans of thousands of 
millions of years, and linkages to other galaxies and universes, were freely 
spoken of. Indeed, there was no such thing as time in its humanly accepted 
sense. 
But most of the tales and impressions concerned a relatively late race, of a 
queer and intricate shape, resembling no life-form known to science, which had 
lived till only fifty million years before the advent of man. This, they 
indicated, was the greatest race of all because it alone had conquered the 
secret of time. 
It had learned all things that ever were known or ever would be known on the 
earth, through the power of its keener minds to project themselves into the past 
and future, even through gulfs of millions of years, and study the lore of every 
age. From the accomplishments of this race arose all legends of prophets, 
including those in human mythology. 
In its vast libraries were volumes of texts and pictures holding the whole of 
earth's annals-histories and descriptions of every species that had ever been or 
that ever would be, with full records of their arts, their achievements, their 
languages, and their psychologies. 
With this aeon-embracing knowledge, the Great Race chose from every era and 
life-form such thoughts, arts, and processes as might suit its own nature and 
situation. Knowledge of the past, secured through a kind of mind-casting outside 
the recognized senses, was harder to glean than knowledge of the future. 
In the latter case the course was easier and more material. With suitable 
mechanical aid a mind would project itself forward in time, feeling its dim, 
extra-sensory way till it approached the desired period. Then, after preliminary 
trials, it would seize on the best discoverable representative of the highest of 
that period's life-forms. It would enter the organism's brain and set up therein 
its own vibrations, while the displaced mind would strike back to the period of 
the displacer, remaining in the latter's body till a reverse process was set up. 

The projected mind, in the body of the organism of the future, would then pose 
as a member of the race whose outward form it wore, learning as quickly as 
possible all that could be learned of the chosen age and its massed information 
and techniques. 
Meanwhile the displaced mind, thrown back to the displacer's age and body, would 
be carefully guarded. It would be kept from harming the body it occupied, and 
would be drained of all its knowledge by trained questioners. Often it could be 
questioned in its own language, when previous quests into the future had brought 
back records of that language. 
If the mind came from a body whose language the Great Race could not physically 
reproduce, clever machines would be made, on which the alien speech could be 
played as on a musical instrument. 
The Great Race's members were immense rugose cones ten feet high, and with head 
and other organs attached to foot-thick, distensible limbs spreading from the 
apexes. They spoke by the clicking or scraping of huge paws or claws attached to 
the end of two of their four limbs, and walked by the expansion and contraction 
of a viscous layer attached to their vast, ten-foot bases. 
When the captive mind's amazement and resentment had worn off, and when - 
assuming that it came from a body vastly different from the Great Race's - it 
had lost its horror at its unfamiliar temporary form, it was permitted to study 
its new environment and experience a wonder and wisdom approyimating that of its 
displacer. 
With suitable precautions, and in exchange for suitable services, it was allowed 
to rove all over the habitable world in titan airships or on the huge boatlike 
atomic-engined vehicles which traversed the great roads, and to delve freely 
into the libraries containing the records of the planet's past and future. 
This reconciled many captive minds to their lot; since none were other than 
keen, and to such minds the unveiling of hidden mysteries of earth-closed 
chapters of inconceivable pasts and dizzying vortices of future time which 
include the years ahead of their own natural ages-forms always, despite the 
abysmal horrors often unveiled, the supreme experience of life. 
Now and then certain captives were permitted to meet other captive minds seized 
from the future - to exchange thoughts with consciousnesses living a hundred or 
a thousand or a million years before or after their own ages. And all were urged 
to write copiously in their own languages of themselves and their respective 
periods; such documents to be filed in the great central archives. 
It may be added that there was one special type of captive whose privileges were 
far greater than those of the majority. These were the dying permanent exiles, 
whose bodies in the future had been seized by keen-minded members of the Great 
Race who, faced with death, sought to escape mental extinction. 
Such melancholy exiles were not as common as might be expected, since the 
longevity of the Great Race lessened its love of life - especially among those 
superior minds capable of projection. From cases of the permanent projection of 
elder minds arose many of those lasting changes of personality noticed in later 
history - including mankind's. 
As for the ordinary cases of exploration - when the displacing mind had learned 
what it wished in the future, it would build an apparatus like that which had 
started its flight and reverse the process of projection. Once more it would be 
in its own body in its own age, while the lately captive mind would return to 
that body of the future to which it properly belonged. 
Only when one or the other of the bodies had died during the exchange was this 
restoration impossible. In such cases, of course, the exploring mind had - like 
those of the death-escapers - to live out an alien-bodied life in the future; or 
else the captive mind-like the dying permanent exiles - had to end its days in 
the form and past age of the Great Race. 
This fate was least horrible when the captive mind was also of the Great Race - 
a not infrequent occurrence, since in all its periods that race was intensely 
concerned with its own future. The number of dying permanent exiles of the Great 
Race was very slight - largely because of the tremendous penalties attached to 
displacements of future Great Race minds by the moribund. 
Through projection, arrangements were made to inflict these penalties on the 
offending minds in their new future bodies - and sometimes forced reëxchanges 
were effected. 
Complex cases of the displacement of exploring or already captive minds by minds 
in various regions of the past had been known and carefully rectified. In every 
age since the discovery of mind projection, a minute but well-recognised element 
of the population consisted of Great Race minds from past ages, sojourning for a 
longer or shorter while. 
When a captive mind of alien origin was returned to its own body in the future, 
it was purged by an intricate mechanical hypnosis of all it had learned in the 
Great Race's age - this because of certain troublesome consequences inherent in 
the general carrying forward of knowledge in large quantities. 
The few existing instances of clear transmission had caused, and would cause at 
known future times, great disasters. And it was largely in consequence of two 
cases of this kind - said the old myths - that mankind had learned what it had 
concerning the Great Race. 
Of all things surviving physically and directly from that aeon-distant world, 
there remained only certain ruins of great stones in far places and under the 
sea, and parts of the text of the frightful Pnakotic Manuscripts. 
Thus the returning mind reached its own age with only the faintest and most 
fragmentary visions of what it had undergone since its seizure. All memories 
that could be eradicated were eradicated, so that in most cases only a 
dream-shadowed blank stretched back to the time of the first exchange. Some 
minds recalled more than others, and the chance joining of memories had at rare 
times brought hints of the forbidden past to future ages. 
There probably never was a time when groups or cults did not secretly cherish 
certain of these hints. In the Necronomicon the presence of such a cult among 
human beings was suggested - a cult that sometimes gave aid to minds voyaging 
down the aeons from the days of the Great Race. 
And, meanwhile, the Great Race itself waxed well-nigh omniscient, and turned to 
the task of setting up exchanges with the minds of other planets, and of 
exploring their pasts and futures. It sought likewise to fathom the past years 
and origin of that black, aeon-dead orb in far space whence its own mental 
heritage had come - for the mind of the Great Race was older than its bodily 
form. 
The beings of a dying elder world, wise with the ultimate secrets, had looked 
ahead for a new world and species wherein they might have long life; and had 
sent their minds en masse into that future race best adapted to house them - the 
cone-shaped beings that peopled our earth a billion years ago. 
Thus the Great Race came to be, while the myriad minds sent backward were left 
to die in the horror of strange shapes. Later the race would again face death, 
yet would live through another forward migration of its best minds into the 
bodies of others who had a longer physical span ahead of them. 
Such was the background of intertwined legend and hallucination. When, around 
1920, I had my researches in coherent shape, I felt a slight lessening of the 
tension which their earlier stages had increased. After all, and in spite of the 
fancies prompted by blind emotions, were not most of my phenomena readily 
explainable? Any chance might have turned my mind to dark studies during the 
amnesia - and then I read the forbidden legends and met the members of ancient 
and ill-regarded cults. That, plainly, supplied the material for the dreams and 
disturbed feelings which came after the return of memory. 
As for the marginal notes in dream-hieroglyphs and languages unknown to me, but 
laid at my door by librarians - I might easily have picked up a smattering of 
the tongues during my secondary state, while the hieroglyphs were doubtless 
coined by my fancy from descriptions in old legends, and afterward woven into my 
dreams. I tried to verify certain points through conversation with known cult 
leaders, but never succeeded in establishing the right connexions. 
At times the parallelism of so many cases in so many distant ages continued to 
worry me as it had at first, but on the other hand I reflected that the excitant 
folklore was undoubtedly more universal in the past than in the present. 
Probably all the other victims whose cases were like mine had had a long and 
familiar knowledge of the tales I had learned only when in my secondary state. 
When these victims had lost their memory, they had associated themselves with 
the creatures of their household myths - the fabulous invaders supposed to 
displace men's minds - and had thus embarked upon quests for knowledge which 
they thought they could take back to a fancied, non-human past. 
Then, when their memory returned, they reversed the associative process and 
thought of themselves as the former captive minds instead of as the displacers. 
Hence the dreams and pseudo-memories following the conventional myth pattern. 
Despite the seeming cumbrousness of these explanations, they came finally to 
supersede all others in my mind-largely because of the greater weakness of any 
rival theory. And a substantial number of eminent psychologists and 
anthropologists gradually agreed with me. 
The more I reflected, the more convincing did my reasoning seem; till in the end 
I had a really effective bulwark against the visions and impressions which still 
assailed me. Suppose I did see strange things at night? These were only what I 
had heard and read of. Suppose I did have odd loathings and perspectives and 
pseudo-memories? These, too, were only echoes of myths absorbed in my secondary 
state. Nothing that I might dream, nothing that I might feel, could be of any 
actual significance. 
Fortified by this philosophy, I greatly improved in nervous equilibrium, even 
though the visions - rather than the abstract impressions - steadily became more 
frequent and more disturbingly detailed. In 1922 I felt able to undertake 
regular work again, and put my newly gained knowledge to practical use by 
accepting an instructorship in psychology at the university. 
My old chair of political economy had long been adequately filled - besides 
which, methods of teaching economics had changed greatly since my heyday. My son 
was at this time just entering on the post-graduate studies leading to his 
resent professorship, and we worked together a great deal. 
IV 
I continued, however, to keep a careful record of the outré dreams which crowded 
upon me so thickly and vividly. Such a record, I argued, was of genuine value as 
a psychological document. The glimpses still seemed damnably like memories, 
though I fought off this impression with a goodly measure of success. 
In writing, I treated the phantasmata as things seen; but at all other times I 
brushed them aside like any gossamer illusions of the night. I had never 
mentioned such matters in common conversation; though reports of them, filtering 
out as such things will, had aroused sundry rumors regarding my mental health. 
It is amusing to reflect that these rumors were confined wholly to laymen, 
without a single champion among physicians or psychologists. 
Of my visions after 1914 I will here mention only a few, since fuller accounts 
and records are at the disposal of the serious student. It is evident that with 
time the curious inhibitions somewhat waned, for the scope of my visions vastly 
increased. They have never, though, become other than disjointed fragments 
seemingly without clear motivation. 
Within the dreams I seemed gradually to acquire a greater and greater freedom of 
wandering. I floated through many strange buildings of stone, going from one to 
the other along mammoth underground passages which seemed to form the common 
avenues of transit. Sometimes I encountered those gigantic sealed trap-doors in 
the lowest level, around which such an aura of fear and forbiddenness clung. 
I saw tremendously tessellated pools, and rooms of curious and inexplicable 
utensils of myriad sorts. Then there were colossal caverns of intricate 
machinery whose outlines and purpose were wholly strange to me, and whose sound 
manifested itself only after many years of dreaming. I may here remark that 
sight and sound are the only senses I have ever exercised in the visionary 
world. 
The real horror began in May, 1915, when I first saw the living things. This was 
before my studies had taught me what, in view of the myths and case histories, 
to expect. As mental barriers wore down, I beheld great masses of thin vapour in 
various parts of the building and in the streets below. 
These steadily grew more solid and distinct, till at last I could trace their 
monstrous outlines with uncomfortable ease. They seemed to be enormous, 
iridescent cones, about ten feet high and ten feet wide at the base, and made up 
of some ridgy, scaly, semi-elastic matter. From their apexes projected four 
flexible, cylindrical members, each a foot thick, and of a ridgy substance like 
that of the cones themselves. 
These members were sometimes contracted almost to nothing, and sometimes 
extended to any distance up to about ten feet. Terminating two of them were 
enormous claws or nippers. At the end of a third were four red, trumpetlike 
appendages. The fourth terminated in an irregular yellowish globe some two feet 
in diameter and having three great dark eyes ranged along its central 
circumference. 
Surmounting this head were four slender grey stalks bearing flower-like 
appendages, whilst from its nether side dangled eight greenish antennae or 
tentacles. The great base of the central cone was fringed with a rubbery, grey 
substance which moved the whole entity through expansion and contraction. 
Their actions, though harmless, horrified me even more than their appearance - 
for it is not wholesome to watch monstrous objects doing what one had known only 
human beings to do. These objects moved intelligently about the great rooms, 
getting books from the shelves and taking them to the great tables, or vice 
versa, and sometimes writing diligently with a peculiar rod gripped in the 
greenish head tentacles. The huge nippers were used in carrying books and in 
conversation-speech consisting of a kind of clicking and scraping. 
The objects had no clothing, but wore satchels or knapsacks suspended from the 
top of the conical trunk. They commonly carried their head and its supporting 
member at the level of the cone top, although it was frequently raised or 
lowered. 
The other three great members tended to rest downward at the sides of the cone, 
contracted to about five feet each when not in use. From their rate of reading, 
writing, and operating their machines - those on the tables seemed somehow 
connected with thought - I concluded that their intelligence was enormously 
greater than man's. 
Aftenvard I saw them everywhere; swarming in all the great chambers and 
corridors, tending monstrous machines in vaulted crypts, and racing along the 
vast roads in gigantic, boat-shaped cars. I ceased to be afraid of them, for 
they seemed to form supremely natural parts of their environment. 
Individual differences amongst them began to be manifest, and a few appeared to 
be under some kind of restraint. These latter, though shewing no physical 
variation, had a diversity of gestures and habits which marked them off not only 
from the majority, but very largely from one another. 
They wrote a great deal in what seemed to my cloudy vision a vast variety of 
characters - never the typical curvilinear hieroglyphs of the majority. A few, I 
fancied, used our own familiar alphabet. Most of them worked much more slowly 
than the general mass of the entities. 
All this time my own part in the dreams seemed to be that of a disembodied 
consciousness with a range of vision wider than the normal, floating freely 
about, yet confined to the ordinary avenues and speeds of travel. Not until 
August, 1915, did any suggestions of bodily existence begin to harass me. I say 
harass, because the first phase was a purely abstract, though infinitely 
terrible, association of my previously noted body loathing with the scenes of my 
visions. 
For a while my chief concern during dreams was to avoid looking down at myself, 
and I recall how grateful I was for the total absence of large mirrors in the 
strange rooms. I was mightily troubled by the fact that I always saw the great 
tables - whose height could not be under ten feet - from a level not below that 
of their surfaces. 
And then the morbid temptation to look down at myself became greater and 
greater, till one night I could not resist it. At first my downward glance 
revealed nothing whatever. A moment later I perceived that this was because my 
head lay at the end of a flexible neck of enormous length. Retracting this neck 
and gazing down very sharply, I saw the scaly, rugose, iridescent bulk of a vast 
cone ten feet tall and ten feet wide at the base. That was when I waked half of 
Arkham with my screaming as I plunged madly up from the abyss of sleep. 
Only after weeks of hideous repetition did I grow half-reconciled to these 
visions of myself in monstrous form. In the dreams I now moved bodily among the 
other unknown entities, reading terrible books from the endless shelves and 
writing for hours at the great tables with a stylus managed by the green 
tentacles that hung down from my head. 
Snatches of what I read and wrote would linger in my memory. There were horrible 
annals of other worlds and other universes, and of stirrings of formless life 
outside of all universes. There were records of strange orders of beings which 
had peopled the world in forgotten pasts, and frightful chronicles of 
grotesque-bodied intelligences which would people it millions of years after the 
death of the last human being. 
I learned of chapters in human history whose existence no scholar of today has 
ever suspected. Most of these writings were in the language of the hieroglyphs; 
which I studied in a queer way with the aid of droning machines, and which was 
evidently an agglutinative speech with root systems utterly unlike any found in 
human languages. 
Other volumes were in other unknown tongues learned in the same queer way. A 
very few were in languages I knew. Extremely clever pictures, both inserted in 
the records and forming separate collections, aided me immensely. And all the 
time I seemed to be setting down a history of my own age in English. On waking, 
I could recall only minute and meaningless scraps of the unknown tongues which 
my dream-self had mastered, though whole phrases of the history stayed with me. 
I learned - even before my waking self had studied the parallel cases or the old 
myths from which the dreams doubtless sprang - that the entities around me were 
of the world's greatest race, which had conquered time and had sent exploring 
minds into every age. I knew, too, that I had been snatched from my age while 
another used my body in that age, and that a few of the other strange forms 
housed similarly captured minds. I seemed to talk, in some odd language of claw 
clickings, with exiled intellects from every corner of the solar system. 
There was a mind from the planet we know as Venus, which would live incalculable 
epochs to come, and one from an outer moon of Jupiter six million years in the 
past. Of earthly minds there were some from the winged, starheaded, 
half-vegetable race of palaeogean Antarctica; one from the reptile people of 
fabled Valusia; three from the furry pre-human Hyperborean worshippers of 
Tsathoggua; one from the wholly abominable Tcho-Tchos; two from the arachnid 
denizens of earth's last age; five from the hardy coleopterous species 
immediately following mankind, to which the Great Race was some day to transfer 
its keenest minds en masse in the face of horrible peril; and several from 
different branches of humanity. 
I talked with the mind of Yiang-Li, a philosopher from the cruel empire of 
Tsan-Chan, which is to come in 5,000 A.D.; with that of a general of the 
greatheaded brown people who held South Africa in 50,000 B.C.; with that of a 
twelfth-century Florentine monk named Bartolomeo Corsi; with that of a king of 
Lomar who had ruled that terrible polar land one hundred thousand years before 
the squat, yellow Inutos came from the west to engulf it. 
I talked with the mind of Nug-Soth, a magician of the dark conquerors of 16,000 
A.D.; with that of a Roman named Titus Sempronius Blaesus, who had been a 
quaestor in Sulla's time; with that of Khephnes, an Egyptian of the 14th 
Dynasty, who told me the hideous secret of Nyarlathotep, with that of a priest 
of Atlantis' middle kingdom; with that of a Suffolk gentleman of Cromwell's day, 
James Woodville; with that of a court astronomer of pre-Inca Peru; with that of 
the Australian physicist Nevil Kingston-Brown, who will die in 2,518 A.D.; with 
that of an archimage of vanished Yhe in the Pacific; with that of Theodotides, a 
Greco-Bactrian official Of 200 B.C.; with that of an aged Frenchman of Louis 
XIII's time named Pierre-Louis Montagny; with that of Crom-Ya, a Cimmerian 
chieftain of 15,000 B.C.; and with so many others that my brain cannot hold the 
shocking secrets and dizzying marvels I learned from them. 
I awaked each morning in a fever, sometimes frantically trying to verify or 
discredit such information as fell within the range of modern human knowledge. 
Traditional facts took on new and doubtful aspects, and I marvelled at the 
dream-fancy which could invent such surprising addenda to history and science. 
I shivered at the mysteries the past may conceal, and trembled at the menaces 
the future may bring forth. What was hinted in the speech of post-human entities 
of the fate of mankind produced such an effect on me that I will not set it down 
here. 
After man there would be the mighty beetle civilisation, the bodies of whose 
members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook 
the elder world. Later, as the earth's span closed, the transferred minds would 
again migrate through time and space - to another stopping-place in the bodies 
of the bulbous vegetable entities of Mercury. But there would be races after 
them, clinging pathetically to the cold planet and burrowing to its 
horror-filled core, before the utter end. 
Meanwhile, in my dreams, I wrote endlessly in that history of my own age which I 
was preparing - half voluntarily and half through promises of increased library 
and travel opportunities - for the Great Race's central archives. The archives 
were in a colossal subterranean structure near the city's center, which I came 
to know well through frequent labors and consultations. Meant to last as long as 
the race, and to withstand the fiercest of earth's convulsions, this titan 
repository surpassed all other buildings in the massive, mountain-like firmness 
of its construction. 
The records, written or printed on great sheets of a curiously tenacious 
cellulose fabric were bound into books that opened from the top, and were kept 
in individual cases of a strange, extremely light, restless metal of greyish 
hue, decorated with mathematical designs and bearing the title in the Great 
Race's curvilinear hieroglyphs. 
These cases were stored in tiers of rectangular vaults-like closed, locked 
shelves - wrought of the same rustless metal and fastened by knobs with 
intricate turnings. My own history was assigned a specific place in the vaults 
of the lowest or vertebrate level - the section devoted to the culture of 
mankind and of the furry and reptilian races immediately preceding it in 
terrestrial dominance. 
But none of the dreams ever gave me a full picture of daily life. All were the 
merest misty, disconnected fragments, and it is certain that these fragments 
were not unfolded in their rightful sequence. I have, for example, a very 
imperfect idea of my own living arrangements in the dream-world; though I seem 
to have possessed a great stone room of my own. My restrictions as a prisoner 
gradually disappeared, so that some of the visions included vivid travels over 
the mighty jungle roads, sojourns in strange cities, and explorations of some of 
the vast, dark, windowless ruins from which the Great Race shrank in curious 
fear. There were also long sea voyages in enormous, many-decked boats of 
incredible swiftness, and trips over wild regions in closed projectile-like 
airships lifted and moved by electrical repulsion. 
Beyond the wide, warm ocean were other cities of the Great Race, and on one far 
continent I saw the crude villages of the black-snouted, winged creatures who 
would evolve as a dominant stock after the Great Race had sent its foremost 
minds into the future to escape the creeping horror. Flatness and exuberant 
green life were always the keynote of the scene. Hills were low and sparse, and 
usually displayed signs of volcanic forces. 
Of the animals I saw, I could write volumes. All were wild; for the Great Race's 
mechanised culture had long since done away with domestic beasts, while food was 
wholly vegetable or synthetic. Clumsy reptiles of great bulk floundered in 
steaming morasses, fluttered in the heavy air, or spouted in the seas and lakes; 
and among these I fancied I could vaguely recognise lesser, archaic prototypes 
of many forms - dinosaurs, pterodactyls, ichthyosaurs, labyrinthodonts, 
plesiosaurs, and the like-made familiar through palaeontology. Of birds or 
mammals there were none that I could discover. 
The ground and swamps were constantly alive with snakes, lizards, and crocodiles 
while insects buzzed incessantly among the lush vegetation. And far out at sea, 
unspied and unknown monsters spouted mountainous columns of foam into the 
vaporous sky. Once I was taken under the ocean in a gigantic submarine vessel 
with searchlights, and glimpsed some living horrors of awesome magnitude. I saw 
also the ruins of incredible sunken cities, and the wealth of crinoid, 
brachiopod, coral, and ichthyic life which everywhere abounded. 
Of the physiology, psychology, folkways, and detailed history of the Great Race 
my visions preserved but little information, and many of the scattered points I 
here set down were gleaned from my study of old legends and other cases rather 
than from my own dreaming. 
For in time, of course, my reading and research caught up with and passed the 
dreams in many phases, so that certain dream-fragments were explained in advance 
and formed verifications of what I had learned. This consolingly established my 
belief that similar reading and research, accomplished by my secondary self, had 
formed the source of the whole terrible fabric of pseudomemories. 
The period of my dreams, apparently, was one somewhat less than 150,000,000 
years ago, when the Palaeozoic age was giving place to the Mesozoic. The bodies 
occupied by the Great Race represented no surviving - or even scientifically 
known-line of terrestrial evolution, but were of a peculiar, closely 
homogeneous, and highly specialised organic type inclining as much as to the 
vegetable as to the animal state. 
Cell action was of an unique sort almost precluding fatigue, and wholly 
eliminating the need of sleep. Nourishment, assimilated through the red 
trumpet-like appendages on one of the great flexible limbs, was always semifluid 
and in many aspects wholly unlike the food of existing animals. 
The beings had but two of the senses which we recognise - sight and hearing, the 
latter accomplished through the flower-like appendages on the grey stalks above 
their heads. Of other and incomprehensible senses - not, however, well 
utilizable by alien captive minds inhabiting their bodies - they possessed many. 
Their three eyes were so situated as to give them a range of vision wider than 
the normal. Their blood was a sort of deep-greenish ichor of great thickness. 
They had no sex, but reproduced through seeds or spores which clustered on their 
bases and could be developed only under water. Great, shallow tanks were used 
for the growth of their young - which were, however, reared only in small 
numbers on account of the longevity of individuals - four or five thousand years 
being the common life span. 
Markedly defective individuals were quickly disposed of as soon as their defects 
were noticed. Disease and the approach of death were, in the absence of a sense 
of touch or of physical pain, recognised by purely visual symptoms. 
The dead were incinerated with dignified ceremonies. Once in a while, as before 
mentioned, a keen mind would escape death by forward projection in time; but 
such cases were not numerous. When one did occur, the exiled mind from the 
future was treated with the utmost kindness till the dissolution of its 
unfamiliar tenement. 
The Great Race seemed to form a single, loosely knit nation or league, with 
major institutions in common, though there were four definite divisions. The 
political and economic system of each unit was a sort of fascistic socialism, 
with major resources rationally distributed, and power delegated to a small 
governing board elected by the votes of all able to pass certain educational and 
psychological tests. Family organisation was not overstressed, though ties among 
persons of common descent were recognised, and the young were generally reared 
by their parents. 
Resemblances to human attitudes and institutions were, of course, most marked in 
those fields where on the one hand highly abstract elements were concerned, or 
where on the other hand there was a dominance of the basic, unspecialised urges 
common to all organic life. A few added likenesses came through conscious 
adoption as the Great Race probed the future and copied what it liked. 
Industry, highly mechanised, demanded but little time from each citizen; and the 
abundant leisure was filled with intellectual and aesthetic activities of 
various sorts. 
The sciences were carried to an unbelievable height of development, and art was 
a vital part of life, though at the period of my dreams it had passed its crest 
and meridian. Technology was enormously stimulated through the constant struggle 
to survive, and to keep in existence the physical fabric of great cities, 
imposed by the prodigious geologic upheavals of those primal days. 
Crime was surprisingly scant, and was dealt with through highly efficient 
policing. Punishments ranged from privilege deprivation and imprisonment to 
death or major emotion wrenching, and were never administered without a careful 
study of the criminal's inotivations. 
Warfare, largely civil for the last few millennia though sometimes waged against 
reptilian or octopodic invaders, or against the winged, star-headed Old Ones who 
centered in the antarctic, was infrequent though infinitely devastating. An 
enormous army, using camera-like weapons which produced tremendous electrical 
effects, was kept on hand for purposes seldom mentioned, but obviously connected 
with the ceaseless fear of the dark, windowless elder ruins and of the great 
sealed trap-doors in the lowest subterranean levels. 
This fear of the basalt ruins and trap-doors was largely a matter of unspoken 
suggestion - or, at most, of furtive quasi-whispers. Everything specific which 
bore on it was significantly absent from such books as were on the common 
shelves. It was the one subject lying altogether under a taboo among the Great 
Race, and seemed to be connected alike with horrible bygone struggles, and with 
that future peril which would some day force the race to send its keener minds 
ahead en masse in time. 
Imperfect and fragmentary as were the other things presented by dreams and 
legends, this matter was still more bafflingly shrouded. The vague old myths 
avoided it - or perhaps all allusions had for some reason been excised. And in 
the dreams of myself and others, the hints were peculiarly few. Members of the 
Great Race never intentionally referred to the matter, and what could be gleaned 
came only from some of the more sharply observant captive minds. 
According to these scraps of information, the basis of the fear was a horrible 
elder race of half-polypous, utterly alien entities which had come through space 
from immeasurably distant universes and had dominated the earth and three other 
solar planets about 600 million years ago. They were only partly material - as 
we understand matter - and their type of consciousness and media of perception 
differed widely from those of terrestrial organisms. For example, their senses 
did not include that of sight; their mental world being a strange, non-visual 
pattern of impressions. 
They were, however, sufficiently material to use implements of normal matter 
when in cosmic areas containing it; and they required housing - albeit of a 
peculiar kind. Though their senses could penetrate all material barriers, their 
substance could not; and certain forms of electrical energy could wholly destroy 
them. They had the power of aërial motion, despite the absence of wings or any 
other visible means of levitation. Their minds were of such texture that no 
exchange with them could be effected by the Great Race. 
When these things had come to the earth they had built mighty basalt cities of 
windowless towers, and had preyed horribly upon the beings they found. Thus it 
was when the minds of the Great Race sped across the void from that obscure, 
trans-galactic world known in the disturbing and debatable Eltdown Shards as 
Yith. 
The newcomers, with the instruments they created, had found it easy to subdue 
the predatory entities and drive them down to those caverns of inner earth which 
they had already joined to their abodes and begun to inhabit. 
Then they had sealed the entrances and left them to their fate, afterward 
occupying most of their great cities and preserving certain important buildings 
for reasons connected more with superstition than with indifference, boldness, 
or scientific and historical zeal. 
But as the aeons passed there came vague, evil signs that the elder things were 
growing strong and numerous in the inner world. There were sporadic irruptions 
of a particularly hideous character in certain small and remote cities of the 
Great Race, and in some of the deserted elder cities which the Great Race had 
not peopled - places where the paths to the gulfs below had not been properly 
sealed or guarded. 
After that greater precautions were taken, and many of the paths were closed 
forever - though a few were left with sealed trap-doors for strategic use in 
fighting the elder things if ever they broke forth in unexpected places. 
The irruptions of the elder things must have been shocking beyond all 
description, since they had permanently coloured the psychology of the Great 
Race. Such was the fixed mood of horror that the very aspect of the creatures 
was left unmentioned. At no time was I able to gain a clear hint of what they 
looked like. 
There were veiled suggestions of a monstrous plasticity, and of temporary lapses 
of visibility, while other fragmentary whispers referred to their control and 
military use of great winds. Singular whistling noises, and colossal footprints 
made up of five circular toe marks, seemed also to be associated with them. 
It was evident that the coming doom so desperately feared by the Great Race - 
the doom that was one day to send millions of keen minds across the chasm of 
time to strange bodies in the safer future - had to do with a final successful 
irruption of the elder beings. 
Mental projections down the ages had clearly foretold such a horror, and the 
Great Race had resolved that none who could escape should face it. That the 
foray would be a matter of vengeance, rather than an attempt to reoccupy the 
outer world, they knew from the planet's later history - for their projections 
shewed the coming and going of subsequent races untroubled by the monstrous 
entities. 
Perhaps these entities had come to prefer earth's inner abysses to the variable, 
storm-ravaged surface, since light meant nothing to them. Perhaps, too, they 
were slowly weakening with the aeons. Indeed, it was known that they would be 
quite dead in the time of the post-human beetle race which the fleeing minds 
would tenant. 
Meanwhile, the Great Race maintained its cautious vigilance, with potent weapons 
ceaselessly ready despite the horrified banishing of the subject from common 
speech and visible records. And always the shadow of nameless fear hung bout the 
sealed trap-doors and the dark, windowless elder towers. 
V 
That is the world of which my dreams brought me dim, scattered echoes every 
night. I cannot hope to give any true idea of the horror and dread contained in 
such echoes, for it was upon a wholly intangible quality - the sharp sense of 
pseudo-memory - that such feelings mainly depended. 
As I have said, my studies gradually gave me a defence against these feelings in 
the form of rational psychological explanations; and this saving influence was 
augmented by the subtle touch of accustomedness which comes with the passage of 
time. Yet in spite of everything the vague, creeping terror would return 
momentarily now and then. It did not, however, engulf me as it had before; and 
after 1922 I lived a very normal life of work and recreation. 
In the course of years I began to feel that my experience - together with the 
kindred cases and the related folklore - ought to be definitely summarised and 
published for the benefit of serious students; hence I prepared a series of 
articles briefly covering the whole ground and illustrated with crude sketches 
of some of the shapes, scenes, decorative motifs, and hieroglyphs remembered 
from the dreams. 
These appeared at various times during 1928 and 1929 in the Journal of the 
American Psychological Society, but did not attract much attention. Meanwhile I 
continued to record my dreams with the minutest care, even though the growing 
stack of reports attained troublesomely vast proportions. On July 10, 1934, 
there was forwarded to me by the Psychological Society the letter which opened 
the culminating and most horrible phase of the whole mad ordeal. It was 
postmarked Pilbarra, Western Australia, and bore the signature of one whom I 
found, upon inquiry, to be a mining engineer of considerable prominence. 
Enclosed were some very curious snapshots. I will reproduce the text in its 
entirety, and no reader can fail to understand how tremendous an effect it and 
the photographs had upon me. 
I was, for a time, almost stunned and incredulous; for although I had often 
thought that some basis of fact must underlie certain phases of the legends 
which had coloured my dreams, I was none the less unprepared for anything like a 
tangible survival from a lost world remote beyond all imagination. Most 
devastating of all were the photographs - for here, in cold, incontrovertible 
realism, there stood out against a background of sand certain worn-down, 
water-ridged, storm-weathered blocks of stone whose slightly convex tops and 
slightly concave bottoms told their own story. 
And when I studied them with a magnifying glass I could see all too plainly, 
amidst the batterrings and pittings, the traces of those vast curvilinear 
designs and occasional hieroglyphs whose significance had become so hideous to 
me. But here is the letter, which speaks for itself. 
  49, Dampier St., 
  Pilbarra, W. Australia, 
  May 18, 1934. 
  Prof. N. W Peaslee, 
  c/o Am. Psychological Society, 
  30 E. 41st St., 
  New York City, U.S.A. 
  My Dear Sir: 
  A recent conversation with Dr. E. M. Boyle of Perth, and some papers with your 
  articles which he has just sent me, make it advisable for me to tell you about 
  certain things I have seen in the Great Sandy Desert east of our gold field 
  here. It would seem, in view of the peculiar legends about old cities with 
  huge stonework and strange designs and hieroglyphs which you describe, that I 
  have come upon something very important. 
  The blackfellows have always been full of talk about "great stones with marks 
  on them," and seem to have a terrible fear of such things. They connect them 
  in some way with their common racial legends about Buddai, the gigantic old 
  man who lies asleep for ages underground with his head on his arm, and who 
  will some day awake and eat up the world. 
  There are some very old and half-forgotten tales of enormous underground huts 
  of great stones, where passages lead down and down, and where horrible things 
  have happened. The blackfellows claim that once some warriors, fleeing in 
  battle, went down into one and never came back, but that frightful winds began 
  to blow from the place soon after they went down. However, there usually isn't 
  much in what these natives say. 
  But what I have to tell is more than this. Two years ago, when I was 
  prospecting about 500 miles east in the desert, I came on a lot of queer 
  pieces of dressed stone perhaps 3 X 2 X 2 feet in size, and weathered and 
  pitted to the very limit. 
  At first I couldn't find any of the marks the blackfellows told about, but 
  when I looked close enough I could make out some deeply carved lines in spite 
  of the weathering. There were peculiar curves, just like what the blackfellows 
  had tried to describe. I imagine there must have been thirty or forty blocks, 
  some nearly buried in the sand, and all within a circle perhaps a quarter of a 
  mile in diameter. 
  When I saw some, I looked around closely for more, and made a careful 
  reckoning of the place with my instruments. I also took pictures of ten or 
  twelve of the most typical blocks, and will enclose the prints for you to see. 

  I turned my information and pictures over to the government at Perth, but they 
  have done nothing about them. 
  Then I met Dr. Boyle, who had read your articles in the Joumal of the American 
  Psychological Society, and, in time, happened to mention the stones. He was 
  enormously interested, and became quite excited when I shewed him my 
  snapshots, saying that the stones and the markings were just like those of the 
  masonry you had dreamed about and seen described in legends. 
  He meant to write you, but was delayed. Meanwhile, he sent me most of the 
  magazines with your articles, and I saw at once, from your drawings and 
  descriptions, that my stones are certainly the kind you mean. You can 
  appreciate this from the enclosed prints. Later on you will hear directly from 
  Dr. Boyle. 
  Now I can understand how important all this will be to you. Without question 
  we are faced with the remains of an unknown civilization older than any 
  dreamed of before, and forming a basis for your legends. 
  As a mining engineer, I have some knowledge of geology, and can tell you that 
  these blocks are so ancient they frighten me. They are mostly sandstone and 
  granite, though one is almost certainly made of a queer sort of cement or 
  concrete. 
  They bear evidence of water action, as if this part of the world had been 
  submerged and come up again after long ages - all since those blocks were made 
  and used. It is a matter of hundreds of thousands of years - or heaven knows 
  how much more. I don't like to think about it. 
  In view of your previous diligent work in tracking down the legends and 
  everything connected with them, I cannot doubt but that you will want to lead 
  an expedition to the desert and make some archaeological excavations. Both Dr. 
  Boyle and I are prepared to cooperate in such work if you - or organizations 
  known to you - can furnish the funds. 
  I can get together a dozen miners for the heavy digging - the blackfellows 
  would be of no use, for I've found that they have an almost maniacal fear of 
  this particular spot. Boyle and I are saying nothing to others, for you very 
  obviously ought to have precedence in any discoveries or credit. 
  The place can be reached from Pilbarra in about four days by motor tractor - 
  which we'd need for our apparatus. It is somewhat west and south of 
  Warburton's path of 1873, and 100 miles southeast of Joanna Spring. We could 
  float things up the De Grey River instead of starting from Pilbarra - but all 
  that can be talked over later. 
  Roughly the stones lie at a point about 22° 3' 14" South Latitude, 125° 0' 39" 
  East Longitude. The climate is tropical, and the desert conditions are trying. 

  I shall welcome further correspondence upon this subject, and am keenly eager 
  to assist in any plan you may devise. After studying your articles I am deeply 
  impressed with the profound significance of the whole matter. Dr. Boyle will 
  write later. When rapid communication is needed, a cable to Perth can be 
  relayed by wireless. 
  Hoping profoundly for an early message, 
  Believe me, 
  Most faithfully yours, 
  Robert B.F. Mackenzie 
Of the immediate aftermath of this letter, much can be learned from the press. 
My good fortune in securing the backing of Miskatonic University was great, and 
both Mr. Mackenzie and Dr. Boyle proved invaluable in arranging matters at the 
Australian end. We were not too specific with the public about our objects, 
since the whole matter would have lent itself unpleasantly to sensational and 
jocose treatment by the cheaper newspapers. As a result, printed reports were 
sparing; but enough appeared to tell of our quest for reported Australian ruins 
and to chronicle our various preparatory steps. 
Professor William Dyer of the college's geology department - leader of the 
Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition Of 1930-31 - Ferdinand C. Ashley of the 
department of ancient history, and Tyler M. Freeborn of the department of 
anthropology - together with my son Wingate - accompanied me. 
My correspondent, Mackenzie, came to Arkham early in 1935 and assisted in our 
final preparations. He proved to be a tremendously competent and affable man of 
about fifty, admirably well-read, and deeply familiar with all the conditions of 
Australian travel. 
He had tractors waiting at Pilbarra, and we chartered a tramp steamer 
sufficiently small to get up the river to that point. We were prepared to 
excavate in the most careful and scientific fashion, sifting every particle of 
sand, and disturbing nothing which might seem to be in or near its original 
situation. 
Sailing from Boston aboard the wheezy Lexington on March 28, 1935, we had a 
leisurely trip across the Atlantic and Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal, 
down the Red Sea, and across the Indian Ocean to our goal. I need not tell how 
the sight of the low, sandy West Australian coast depressed me, and how I 
detested the crude mining town and dreary gold fields where the tractors were 
given their last loads. 
Dr. Boyle, who met us, proved to be elderly, pleasant, and intelligent - and his 
knowledge of psychology led him into many long discussions with my son and me. 
Discomfort and expectancy were oddly mingled in most of us when at length our 
party of eighteen rattled forth over the arid leagues of sand and rock. On 
Friday, May 31st, we forded a branch of the De Grey and entered the realm of 
utter desolation. A certain positive terror grew on me as we advanced to this 
actual site of the elder world behind the legends - a terror, of course, abetted 
by the fact that my disturbing dreams and pseudo-memories still beset me with 
unabated force. 
It was on Monday, June 3rd, that we saw the first of the half-buried blocks. I 
cannot describe the emotions with which I actually touched - in objective 
reality - a fragment of Cyclopean masonry in every respect like the blocks in 
the walls of my dream-buildings. There was a distinct trace of carving - and my 
hands trembled as I recognised part of a curvilinear decorative scheme made 
hellish to me through years of tormenting nightmare and baffling research. 
A month of digging brought a total of some 1250 blocks in varying stages of wear 
and disintegration. Most of these were carven megaliths with curved tops and 
bottoms. A minority were smaller, flatter, plain-surfaced, and square or 
octagonally cut-like those of the floors and pavements in my dreams - while a 
few were singularly massive and curved or slanted in such a manner as to suggest 
use in vaulting or groining, or as parts of arches or round window casings. 
The deeper - and the farther north and east - we dug, the more blocks we found; 
though we still failed to discover any trace of arrangement among them. 
Professor Dyer was appalled at the measureless age of the fragments, and 
Freeborn found traces of symbols which fitted darkly into certain Papuan and 
Polynesian legends of infinite antiquity. The condition and scattering of the 
blocks told mutely of vertiginous cycles of time and geologic upheavals of 
cosmic savagery. 
We had an aëroplane with us, and my son Wingate would often go up to different 
heights and scan the sand-and-rock waste for signs of dim, large-scale outlines 
- either differences of level or trails of scattered blocks. His results were 
virtually negative; for whenever he would one day think he had glimpsed some 
significant trend, he would on his next trip find the impression replaced by 
another equally insubstantial - a result of the shifting, wind-blown sand. 
One or two of these ephemeral suggestions, though, affected me queerly and 
disagreeably. They seemed, after a fashion, to dovetail horribly with something 
I had dreamed or read, but which I could no longer remember. There was a 
terrible familiarity about them - which somehow made me look furtively and 
apprehensively over the abominable, sterile terrain toward the north and 
northeast. 
Around the first week in July I developed an unaccountable set of mixed emotions 
about that general northeasterly region. There was horror, and there was 
curiosity - but more than that, there was a persistent and perplexing illusion 
of memory. 
I tried all sorts of psychological expedients to get these notions out of my 
head, but met with no success. Sleeplessness also gained upon me, but I almost 
welcomed this because of the resultant shortening of my dream-periods. I 
acquired the habit of taking long, lone walks in the desert late at 
night-usually to the north or northeast, whither the sum of my strange new 
impulses seemed subtly to pull me. 
Sometimes, on these walks, I would stumble over nearly buried fragments of the 
ancient masonry. Though there were fewer visible blocks here than where we had 
started, I felt sure that there must be a vast abundance beneath the surface. 
The ground was less level than at our camp, and the prevailing high winds now 
and then piled the sand into fantastic temporary hillocks - exposing low traces 
of the elder stones while it covered other traces. 
I was queerly anxious to have the excavations extend to this territory, yet at 
the same time dreaded what might be revealed. Obviously, I was getting into a 
rather bad state - all the worse because I could not account for it. 
An indication of my poor nervous health can be gained from my response to an odd 
discovery which I made on one of my nocturnal rambles. It was on the evening of 
July l1th, when the moon flooded the mysterious hillocks with a curious pallor. 
Wandering somewhat beyond my usual limits, I came upon a great stone which 
seemed to differ markedly from any we had yet encountered. It was almost wholly 
covered, but I stooped and cleared away the sand with my hands, later studying 
the object carefully and supplementing the moonlight with my electric torch. 
Unlike the other very large rocks, this one was perfectly square-cut, with no 
convex or concave surface. It seemed, too, to be of a dark basaltic substance, 
wholly dissimilar to the granite and sandstone and occasional concrete of the 
now familiar fragments. 
Suddenly I rose, turned, and ran for the camp at top speed. It was a wholly 
unconscious and irrational flight, and only when I was close to my tent did I 
fully realise why I had run. Then it came to me. The queer dark stone was 
something which I had dreamed and read about, and which was linked with the 
uttermost horrors of the aeon-old legendry. 
It was one of the blocks of that basaltic elder masonry which the fabled Great 
Race held in such fear - the tall, windowless ruins left by those brooding, 
half-material, alien things that festered in earth's nether abysses and against 
whose wind-like, invisible forces the trap-doors were sealed and the sleepless 
sentinels posted. 
I remained awake all night, but by dawn realised how silly I had been to let the 
shadow of a myth upset me. Instead of being frightened, I should have had a 
discoverer's enthusiasm. 
The next forenoon I told the others about my find, and Dyer, Freeborn, Boyle, my 
son, and I set out to view the anomalous block. Failure, however, confronted us. 
I had formed no clear idea of the stone's location, and a late ind had wholly 
altered the hillocks of shifting sand. 
VI 
I come now to the crucial and most difficult part of my narrative - all the more 
difficult because I cannot be quite certain of its reality. At times I feel 
uncomfortably sure that I was not dreaming or deluded; and it is this feelingin 
view of the stupendous implications which the objective truth of my experience 
would raise - which impels me to make this record. 
My son - a trained psychologist with the fullest and most sympathetic knowledge 
of my whole case - shall be the primary judge of what I have to tell. 
First let me outline the externals of the matter, as those at the camp know 
them. On the night of July 17-18, after a windy day, I retired early but could 
not sleep. Rising shortly before eleven, and afflicted as usual with that 
strange feeling regarding the northeastward terrain, I set out on one of my 
typical nocturnal walks; seeing and greeting only one person - an Australian 
miner named Tupper - as I left our precincts. 
The moon, slightly past full, shone from a clear sky, and drenched the ancient 
sands with a white, leprous radiance which seemed to me somehow infinitely evil. 
There was no longer any wind, nor did any return for nearly five hours, as amply 
attested by Tupper and others who saw me walking rapidly across the pallid, 
secret-guarding hillocks toward the northeast. 
About 3:30 a.m. a violent wind blew up, waking everyone in camp and felling 
three of the tents. The sky was unclouded, and the desert still blazed with that 
leprous moonlight. As the party saw to the tents my absence was noted, but in 
view of my previous walks this circumstance gave no one alarm. And yet, as many 
as three men - all Australians - seemed to feel something sinister in the air. 
Mackenzie explained to Professor Freeborn that this was a fear picked up from 
blackfellow folklore - the natives having woven a curious fabric of malignant 
myth about the high winds which at long intervals sweep across the sands under a 
clear sky. Such winds, it is whispered, blow out of the great stone huts under 
the ground, where terrible things have happened - and are never felt except near 
places where the big marked stones are scattered. Close to four the gale 
subsided as suddenly as it had begun, leaving the sand hills in new and 
unfamiliar shapes. 
It was just past five, with the bloated, fungoid moon sinking in the west, when 
I staggered into camp - hatless, tattered, features scratched and ensanguined, 
and without my electric torch. Most of the men had returned to bed, but 
Professor Dyer was smoking a pipe in front of his tent. Seeing my winded and 
almost frenzied state, he called Dr. Boyle, and the two of them got me on my cot 
and made me comfortable. My son, roused by the stir, soon joined them, and they 
all tried to force me to lie still and attempt sleep. 
But there was no sleep for me. My psychological state was very extraordinary - 
different from anything I had previously suffered. After a time I insisted upon 
talking - nervously and elaborately explaining my condition. I told them I had 
become fatigued, and had lain down in the sand for a nap. There had, I said, 
been dreams even more frightful than usual - and when I was awaked by the sudden 
high wind my overwrought nerves had snapped. I had fled in panic, frequently 
falling over half-buried stones and thus gaining my tattered and bedraggled 
aspect. I must have slept long - hence the hours of my absence. 
Of anything strange either seen or experienced I hinted absolutely nothing - 
exercising the greatest self-control in that respect. But I spoke of a change of 
mind regarding the whole work of the expedition, and urged a halt in all digging 
toward the northeast. My reasoning was patently weak - for I mentioned a dearth 
of blocks, a wish not to offend the superstitious miners, a possible shortage of 
funds from the college, and other things either untrue or irrelevant. Naturally, 
no one paid the least attention to my new wishes - not even my son, whose 
concern for my health was obvious. 
The next day I was up and around the camp, but took no part in the excavations. 
Seeing that I could not stop the work, I decided to return home as soon as 
possible for the sake of my nerves, and made my son promise to fly me in the 
plane to Perth - a thousand miles to the southwest - as soon as he had surveyed 
the region I wished let alone. 
If, I reflected, the thing I had seen was still visible, I might decide to 
attempt a specific warning even at the cost of ridicule. It was just conceivable 
that the miners who knew the local folklore might back me up. Humouring me, my 
son made the survey that very afternoon, flying over all the terrain my walk 
could possibly have covered. Yet nothing of what I had found remained in sight. 
It was the case of the anomalous basalt block all over again - the shifting sand 
had wiped out every trace. For an instant I half regretted having lost a certain 
awesome object in my stark fright - but now I know that the loss was merciful. I 
can still believe my whole experience an illusion - especially if, as I devoutly 
hope, that hellish abyss is never found. 
Wingate took me to Perth on July 20th, though declining to abandon the 
expedition and return home. He stayed with me until the 25th, when the steamer 
for Liverpool sailed. Now, in the cabin of the Empress, I am pondering long and 
frantically upon the entire matter, and have decided that my son at least must 
be informed. It shall rest with him whether to diffuse the matter more widely. 
In order to meet any eventuality I have prepared this summary of my background - 
as already known in a scattered way to others - and will now tell as briefly as 
possible what seemed to happen during my absence from the camp that hideous 
night. 
Nerves on edge, and whipped into a kind of perverse eagerness by that 
inexplicable, dread-mingled, mnemonic urge toward the northeast, I plodded on 
beneath the evil, burning moon. Here and there I saw, half shrouded by sand, 
those primal Cyclopean blocks left from nameless and forgotten aeons. 
The incalculable age and brooding horror of this monstrous waste began to 
oppress me as never before, and I could not keep from thinking of my maddening 
dreams, of the frightful legends which lay behind them, and of the present fears 
of natives and miners concerning the desert and its carven stones. 
And yet I plodded on as if to some eldritch rendezvous - more and more assailed 
by bewildering fancies, compulsions, and pseudo-memories. I thought of some of 
the possible contours of the lines of stones as seen by my son from the air, and 
wondered why they seemed at once so ominous and so familiar. Something was 
fumbling and rattling at the latch of my recollection, while another unknown 
force sought to keep the portal barred. 
The night was windless, and the pallid sand curved upward and downward like 
frozen waves of the sea. I had no goal, but somehow ploughed along as if with 
fate-bound assurance. My dreams welled up into the waking world, so that each 
sand-embedded megalith seemed part of endless rooms and corridors of pre-human 
masonry, carved and hieroglyphed with symbols that I knew too well from years of 
custom as a captive mind of the Great Race. 
At moments I fancied I saw those omniscient, conical horrors moving about at 
their accustomed tasks, and I feared to look down lest I find myself one with 
them in aspect. Yet all the while I saw the sand-covered blocks as well as the 
rooms and corridors; the evil, burning moon as well as the lamps of luminous 
crystal; the endless desert as well as the waving ferns beyond the windows. I 
was awake and dreaming at the same time. 
I do not know how long or how far - or indeed, in just what direction -I had 
walked when I first spied the heap of blocks bared by the day's wind. It was the 
largest group in one place that I had seen so far, and so sharply did it impress 
me that the visions of fabulous aeons faded suddenly away. 
Again there were only the desert and the evil moon and the shards of an 
unguessed past. I drew close and paused, and cast the added light of my electric 
torch over the tumbled pile. A hillock had blown away, leaving a low, 
irregularly round mass of megaliths and smaller fragments some forty feet across 
and from two to eight feet high. 
From the very outset I realized that there was some utterly unprecedented 
quality about those stones. Not only was the mere number of them quite without 
parallel, but something in the sandworn traces of design arrested me as I 
scanned them under the mingled beams of the moon and my torch. 
Not that any one differed essentially from the earlier specimens we had found. 
It was something subtler than that. The impression did not come when I looked at 
one block alone, but only when I ran my eye over several almost simultaneously. 
Then, at last, the truth dawned upon me. The curvilinear patterns on many of 
those blocks were closely related - parts of one vast decorative conception. For 
the first time in this aeon-shaken waste I had come upon a mass of masonry in 
its old position - tumbled and fragmentary, it is true, but none the less 
existing in a very definite sense. 
Mounting at a low place, I clambered laboriously over the heap; here and there 
clearing away the sand with my fingers, and constantly striving to interpret 
varieties of size, shape, and style, and relationships of design. 
After a while I could vaguely guess at the nature of the bygone structure, and 
at the designs which had once stretched over the vast surfaces of the primal 
masonry. The perfect identity of the whole with some of my dream-glimpses 
appalled and unnerved me. 
This was once a Cyclopean corridor thirty feet tall, paved with octagonal blocks 
and solidly vaulted overhead. There would have been rooms opening off on the 
right, and at the farther end one of those strange inclined planes would have 
wound down to still lower depths. 
I started violently as these conceptions occurred to me, for there was more in 
them than the blocks themselves had supplied. How did I know that this level 
should have been far underground? How did I know that the plane leading upward 
should have been behind me? How did I know that the long subterrene passage to 
the Square of Pillars ought to lie on the left one level above me? 
How did I know that the room of machines and the rightward-leading tunnel to the 
central archives ought to lie two levels below? How did I know that there would 
be one of those horrible, metal-banded trap-doors at the very bottom four levels 
down? Bewildered by this intrusion from the dream-world, I found myself shaking 
and bathed in a cold perspiration. 
Then, as a last, intolerable touch, I felt that faint, insidious stream of cool 
air trickling upward from a depressed place near the center of the huge heap. 
Instantly, as once before, my visions faded, and I saw again only the evil 
moonlight, the brooding desert, and the spreading tumulus of palaeogean masonry. 
Something real and tangible, yet fraught with infinite suggestions of nighted 
mystery, now confronted me. For that stream of air could argue but one thing - a 
hidden gulf of great size beneath the disordered blocks on the surface. 
My first thought was of the sinister blackfellow legends of vast underground 
huts among the megaliths where horrors happen and great winds are born. Then 
thoughts of my own dreams came back, and I felt dim pseudo-memories tugging at 
my mind. What manner of place lay below me? What primal, inconceivable source of 
age-old myth-cycles and haunting nightmares might I be on the brink of 
uncovering? 
It was only for a moment that I hesitated, for more than curiosity and 
scientific zeal was driving me on and working against my growing fear. 
I seemed to move almost automatically, as if in the clutch of some compelling 
fate. Pocketing my torch, and struggling with a strength that I had not thought 
I possessed, I wrenched aside first one titan fragment of stone and then 
another, till there welled up a strong draught whose dampness contrasted oddly 
with the deserts dry air. A black rift began to yawn, and at length - when I had 
pushed away every fragment small enough to budge - the leprous moonlight blazed 
on an aperture of ample width to admit me. 
I drew out my torch and cast a brilliant beam into the opening. Below me was a 
chaos of tumbled masonry, sloping roughly down toward the north at an angle of 
about forty-five degrees, and evidently the result of some bygone collapse from 
above. 
Between its surface and the ground level was a gulf of impenetrable blackness at 
whose upper edge were signs of gigantic, stress-heaved vaulting. At this point, 
it appeared, the deserts sands lay directly upon a floor of some titan structure 
of earth's youth - how preserved through aeons of geologic convulsion I could 
not then and cannot now even attempt to guess. 
In retrospect, the barest idea of a sudden, lone descent into such a doubtful 
abyss - and at a time when one's whereabouts were unknown to any living soul - 
seems like the utter apex of insanity. Perhaps it was - yet that night I 
embarked without hesitancy upon such a descent. 
Again there was manifest that lure and driving of fatality which had all along 
seemed to direct my course. With torch flashing intermittently to save the 
battery, I commenced a mad scramble down the sinister, Cyclopean incline below 
the opening - sometimes facing forward as I found good hand - and foot-holds, 
and at other times turning to face the heap of megaliths as I clung and fumbled 
more precariously. 
In two directions beside me distant walls of carven, crumbling masonry loomed 
dimly under the direct beams of my torch. Ahead, however, was only unbroken 
darkness. 
I kept no track of time during my downward scramble. So seething with baffling 
hints and images was my mind that all objective matters seemed withdrawn into 
incalculable distances. Physical sensation was dead, and even fear remained as a 
wraith-like, inactive gargoyle leering impotently at me. 
Eventually, I reached a level floor strewn with fallen blocks, shapeless 
fragments of stone, and sand and detritus of every kind. On either side - 
perhaps thirty feet apart - rose massive walls culminating in huge groinings. 
That they were carved I could just discern, but the nature of the carvings was 
beyond my perception. 
What held me the most was the vaulting overhead. The beam from my torch could 
not reach the roof, but the lower parts of the monstrous arches stood out 
distinctly. And so perfect was their identity with what I had seen in countless 
dreams of the elder world, that I trembled actively for the first time. 
Behind and high above, a faint luminous blur told of the distant moonlit world 
outside. Some vague shred of caution warned me that I should not let it out of 
my sight, lest I have no guide for my return. 
I now advanced toward the wall at my left, where the traces of carving were 
plainest. The littered floor was nearly as hard to traverse as the downward heap 
had been, but I managed to pick my difficult way. 
At one place I heaved aside some blocks and locked away the detritus to see what 
the pavement was like, and shuddered at the utter, fateful familiarity of the 
great octagonal stones whose buckled surface still held roughly together. 
Reaching a convenient distance from the wall, I cast the searchlight slowly and 
carefully over its worn remnants of carving. Some bygone influx of water seemed 
to have acted on the sandstone surface, while there were curious incrustations 
which I could not explain. 
In places the masonry was very loose and distorted, and I wondered how many 
aeons more this primal, hidden edifice could keep its remaining traces of form 
amidst earth's heavings. 
But it was the carvings themselves that excited me most. Despite their 
time-crumbled state, they were relatively easy to trace at close range; and the 
complete, intimate familiarity of every detail almost stunned my imagination. 
That the major attributes of this hoary masonry should be familiar, was not 
beyond normal credibility. 
Powerfully impressing the weavers of certain myths, they had become embodied in 
a stream of cryptic lore which, somehow, coming to my notice during the amnesic 
period, had evoked vivid images in my subconscious mind. 
But how could I explain the exact and minute fashion in which each line and 
spiral of these strange designs tallied with what I had dreamed for more than a 
score of years? What obscure, forgotten iconography could have reproduced each 
subtle shading and nuance which so persistently, exactly, and unvaryingly 
besieged my sleeping vision night after night? 
For this was no chance or remote resemblance. Definitely and absolutely, the 
millennially ancient, aeon-hidden corridor in which I stood was the original of 
something I knew in sleep as intimately as I knew my own house in Crane Street, 
Arkham. True, my dreams shewed the place in its undecayed prime; but the 
identity was no less real on that account. I was wholly and horribly oriented. 
The particular structure I was in was known to me. Known, too, was its place in 
that terrible elder city of dreams. That I could visit unerringly any point in 
that structure or in that city which had escaped the changes and devastations of 
uncounted ages, I realized with hideous and instinctive certainty. What in 
heaven's name could all this mean? How had I come to know what I knew? And what 
awful reality could lie behind those antique tales of the beings who had dwelt 
in this labyrinth of primordial stone? 
Words can convey only fractionally the welter of dread and bewilderment which 
ate at my spirit. I knew this place. I knew what lay before me, and what had 
lain overhead before the myriad towering stories had fallen to dust and debris 
and the desert. No need now, I thought with a shudder, to keep that faint blur 
of moonlight in view. 
I was torn betwixt a longing to flee and a feverish mixture of burning curiosity 
and driving fatality. What had happened to this monstrous megalopolis of old in 
the millions of years since the time of my dreams? Of the subterrene mazes which 
had underlain the city and linked all the titan towers, how much had still 
survived the writhings of earth's crust? 
Had I come upon a whole buried world of unholy archaism? Could I still find the 
house of the writing master, and the tower where S'gg'ha, the captive mind from 
the star-headed vegetable carnivores of Antarctica, had chiselled certain 
pictures on the blank spaces of the walls? 
Would the passage at the second level down, to the hall of the alien minds, be 
still unchoked and traversable? In that hall the captive mind of an incredible 
entity - a half-plastic denizen of the hollow interior of an unknown 
trans-Plutonian planet eighteen million years in the future - had kept a certain 
thing which it had modelled from clay. 
I shut my eyes and put my hand to my head in a vain, pitiful effort to drive 
these insane dream-fragments from my consciousness. Then, for the first time, I 
felt acutely the coolness, motion, and dampness of the surrounding air. 
Shuddering, I realized that a vast chain of aeon-dead black gulfs must indeed be 
yawning somewhere beyond and below me. 
I thought of the frightful chambers and corridors and inclines as I recalled 
them from my dreams. Would the way to the central archives still be open? Again 
that driving fatality tugged insistently at my brain as I recalled the awesome 
records that once lay cased in those rectangular vaults of rustless metal. 
There, said the dreams and legends, had reposed the whole history, past and 
future, of the cosmic space-time continuum - written by captive minds from every 
orb and every age in the solar system. Madness, of course - but had I not now 
stumbled into a nighted world as mad as I? 
I thought of the locked metal shelves, and of the curious knob twistings needed 
to open each one. My own came vividly into my consciousness. How often had I 
gone through that intricate routine of varied turns and pressures in the 
terrestrial vertebrate section on the lowest level! Every detail was fresh and 
familiar. 
If there were such a vault as I had dreamed of, I could open it in a moment. It 
was then that madness took me utterly. An instant later, and I was leaping and 
stumbling over the rocky debris toward the well-remembered incline to the depths 
below. 
VII 
From that point forward my impressions are scarcely to be relied on - indeed, I 
still possess a final, desperate hope that they all form parts of some daemonic 
dream or illusion born of delirium. A fever raged in my brain, and everything 
came to me through a kind of haze - sometimes only intermittently. 
The rays of my torch shot feebly into the engulfing blackness, bringing 
phantasmal flashes of hideously familiar walls and carvings, all blighted with 
the decay of ages. In one place a tremendous mass of vaulting had fallen, so 
that I had to clamber over a mighty mound of stones reaching almost to the 
ragged, grotesquely stalactited roof. 
It was all the ultimate apex of nightmare, made worse by the blasphemous tug of 
pseudo-memory. One thing only was unfamiliar, and that was my own size in 
relation to the monstrous masonry. I felt oppressed by a sense of unwonted 
smallness, as if the sight of these towering walls from a mere human body was 
something wholly new and abnormal. Again and again I looked nervously down at 
myself, vaguely disturbed by the human form I possessed. 
Onward through the blackness of the abyss I leaped, plunged, and staggered - 
often falling and bruising myself, and once nearly shattering my torch. Every 
stone and corner of that daemonic gulf was known to me, and at many points I 
stopped to cast beams of light through choked and crumbling, yet familiar, 
archways. 
Some rooms had totally collapsed; others were bare, or debris-filled. In a few I 
saw masses of metal - some fairly intact, some broken, and some crushed or 
battered - which I recognised as the colossal pedestals or tables of my dreams. 
What they could in truth have been, I dared not guess. 
I found the downward incline and began its descent - though after a time halted 
by a gaping, ragged chasm whose narrowest point could not be much less than four 
feet across. Here the stonework had fallen through, revealing incalculable inky 
depths beneath. 
I knew there were two more cellar levels in this titan edifice, and trembled 
with fresh panic as I recalled the metal-clamped trap-door on the lowest one. 
There could be no guards now - for what had lurked beneath had long since done 
its hideous work and sunk into its long decline. By the time of the posthuman 
beetle race it would be quite dead. And yet, as I thought of the native legends, 
I trembled anew. 
It cost me a terrible effort to vault that yawning chasm, since the littered 
floor prevented a running start - but madness drove me on. I chose a place close 
to the left-hand wall - where the rift was least wide and the landing-spot 
reasonably clear of dangerous debris - and after one frantic moment reached the 
other side in safety. 
At last, gaining the lower level, I stumbled on past the archway of the room of 
machines, within which were fantastic ruins of metal, half buried beneath fallen 
vaulting. Everything was where I knew it would be, and I climbed confidently 
over the heaps which barred the entrance of a vast transverse corridor. This, I 
realised, would take me under the city to the central archives. 
Endless ages seemed to unroll as I stumbled, leaped, and crawled along that 
debris-cluttered corridor. Now and then I could make out carvings on the 
ages-tained walls - some familiar, others seemingly added since the period of my 
dreams. Since this was a subterrene house - connecting highway, there were no 
archways save when the route led through the lower levels of various buildings. 
At some of these intersections I turned aside long enough to look down 
well-remembered corridors and into well-remembered rooms. Twice only did I find 
any radical changes from what I had dreamed of - and in one of these cases I 
could trace the sealed-up outlines of the archway I remembered. 
I shook violently, and felt a curious surge of retarding weakness, as I steered 
a hurried and reluctant course through the crypt of one of those great 
windowless, ruined towers whose alien, basalt masonry bespoke a whispered and 
horrible origin. 
This primal vault was round and fully two hundred feet across, with nothing 
carved upon the dark-hued stonework. The floor was here free from anything save 
dust and sand, and I could see the apertures leading upward and downward. There 
were no stairs or inclines - indeed, my dreams had pictured those elder towers 
as wholly untouched by the fabulous Great Race. Those who had built them had not 
needed stairs or inclines. 
In the dreams, the downward aperture had been tightly sealed and nervously 
guarded. Now it lay open-black and yawning, and giving forth a current of cool, 
damp air. Of what limitless caverns of eternal night might brood below, I would 
not permit myself to think. 
Later, clawing my way along a badly heaped section of the corridor, I reached a 
place where the roof had wholly caved in. The debris rose like a mountain, and I 
climbed up over it, passing through a vast, empty space where my torchlight 
could reveal neither walls nor vaulting. This, I reflected, must be the cellar 
of the house of the metal-purveyors, fronting on the third square not far from 
the archives. What had happened to it I could not conjecture. 
I found the corridor again beyond the mountain of detritus and stone, but after 
a short distance encountered a wholly choked place where the fallen vaulting 
almost touched the perilously sagging ceiling. How I managed to wrench and tear 
aside enough blocks to afford a passage, and how I dared disturb the tightly 
packed fragments when the least shift of equilibrium might have brought down all 
the tons of superincumbent masonry to crush me to nothingness, I do not know. 
It was sheer madness that impelled and guided me - if, indeed, my whole 
underground adventure was not - as I hope - a hellish delusion or phase of 
dreaming. But I did make - or dream that I made - a passage that I could squirm 
through. As I wiggled over the mound of debris - my torch, switched continuously 
on, thrust deeply in my mouth - I felt myself torn by the fantastic stalactites 
of the jagged floor above me. 
I was now close to the great underground archival structure which seemed to form 
my goal. Sliding and clambering down the farther side of the barrier, and 
picking my way along the remaining stretch of corridor with hand-held, 
intermittently flashing torch, I came at last to a low, circular crypt with 
arches - still in a marvelous state of preservation - opening off on every side. 

The walls, or such parts of them as lay within reach of my torchlight, were 
densely hieroglyphed and chiselled with typical curvilinear symbols - some added 
since the period of my dreams. 
This, I realised, was my fated destination, and I turned at once through a 
familiar archway on my left. That I could find a clear passage up and down the 
incline to all the surviving levels, I had, oddly, little doubt. This vast, 
earth-protected pile, housing the annals of all the solar system, had been built 
with supernal skill and strength to last as long as that system itself. 
Blocks of stupendous size, poised with mathematical genius and bound with 
cements of incredible toughness, had combined to form a mass as firm as the 
planet's rocky core. Here, after ages more prodigious than I could sanely grasp, 
its buried bulk stood in all its essential contours, the vast, dust-drifted 
floors scarce sprinkled with the litter elsewhere so dominant. 
The relatively easy walking from this point onward went curiously to my head. 
All the frantic eagerness hitherto frustrated by obstacles now took itself out 
in a kind of febrile speed, and I literally raced along the low-roofed, 
monstrously well-remembered aisles beyond the archway. 
I was past being astonished by the familiarity of what I saw. On every hand the 
great hieroglyphed metal shelf-doors loomed monstrously; some yet in place, 
others sprung open, and still others bent and buckled under bygone geological 
stresses not quite strong enough to shatter the titan masonry. 
Here and there a dust-covered heap beneath a gaping, empty shelf seemed to 
indicate where cases had been shaken down by earth tremors. On occasional 
pillars were great symbols or letters proclaiming classes and subclasses of 
volumes. 
Once I paused before an open vault where I saw some of the accustomed metal 
cases still in position amidst the omnipresent gritty dust. Reaching up, I 
dislodged one of the thinner specimens with some difficulty, and rested it on 
the floor for inspection. It was titled in the prevailing curvilinear 
hieroglyphs, though something in the arrangement of the characters seemed subtly 
unusual. 
The odd mechanism of the hooked fastener was perfectly well known to me, and I 
snapped up the still rustless and workable lid and drew out the book within. The 
latter, as expected, was some twenty by fifteen inches in area, and two inches 
thick; the thin metal covers opening at the top. 
Its tough cellulose pages seemed unaffected by the myriad cycles of time they 
had lived through, and I studied the queerly pigmented, brush-drawn letters of 
the text-symbols unlike either the usual curved hieroglyphs or any alphabet 
known to human scholarship - with a haunting, half-aroused memory. 
It came to me that this was the language used by a captive mind I had known 
slightly in my dreams - a mind from a large asteroid on which had survived much 
of the archaic life and lore of the primal planet whereof it formed a fragment. 
At the same time I recalled that this level of the archives was devoted to 
volumes dealing with the non-terrestrial planets. 
As I ceased poring over this incredible document I saw that the light of my 
torch was beginning to fail, hence quickly inserted the extra battery I always 
had with me. Then, armed with the stronger radiance, I resumed my feverish 
racing through unending tangles of aisles and corridors - recognising now and 
then some familiar shelf, and vaguely annoyed by the acoustic conditions which 
made my footfalls echo incongruously in these catacombs. 
The very prints of my shoes behind me in the millennially untrodden dust made me 
shudder. Never before, if my mad dreams held anything of truth, had human feet 
pressed upon those immemorial pavements. 
Of the particular goal of my insane racing, my conscious mind held no hint. 
There was, however, some force of evil potency pulling at my dazed will and 
buried recollection, so that I vaguely felt I was not running at random. 
I came to a downward incline and followed it to profounder depths. Floors 
flashed by me as I raced, but I did not pause to explore them. In my whirling 
brain there had begun to beat a certain rhythm which set my right hand twitching 
in unison. I wanted to unlock something, and felt that I knew all the intricate 
twists and pressures needed to do it. It would be like a modern safe with a 
combination lock. 
Dream or not, I had once known and still knew. How any dream - or scrap of 
unconsciously absorbed legend - could have taught me a detail so minute, so 
intricate, and so complex, I did not attempt to explain to myself. I was beyond 
all coherent thought. For was not this whole experience - this shocking 
familiarity with a set of unknown ruins, and this monstrously exact identity of 
everything before me with what only dreams and scraps of myth could have 
suggested - a horror beyond all reason? 
Probably it was my basic conviction then - as it is now during my saner moments 
- that I was not awake at all, and that the entire buried city was a fragment of 
febrile hallucination. 
Eventually, I reached the lowest level and struck off to the right of the 
incline. For some shadowy reason I tiled to soften my steps, even though I lost 
speed thereby. There was a space I was afraid to cross on this last, deeply 
buried floor. 
As I drew near it I recalled what thing in that space I feared. It was merely 
one of the metal-barred and closely guarded trap-doors. There would be no guards 
now, and on that account I trembled and tiptoed as I had done in passing through 
that black basalt vault where a similar trap-door had yawned. 
I felt a current of cool, damp air as I had felt there, and wished that my 
course led in another direction. Why I had to take the particular course I was 
taking, I did not know. 
When I came to the space I saw that the trap-door yawned widely open. Ahead, the 
shelves began again, and I glimpsed on the floor before one of them a heap very 
thinly covered with dust, where a number of cases had recently fallen. At the 
same moment a fresh wave of panic clutched me, though for some time I could not 
discover why. 
Heaps of fallen cases were not uncommon, for all through the aeons this 
lightless labyrinth had been racked by the heavings of earth and had echoed at 
intervals of the deafening clatter of toppling objects. It was only when I was 
nearly across the space that I realized why I shook so violently. 
Not the heap, but something about the dust of the level floor was troubling me. 
In the light of my torch it seemed as if that dust were not as even as it ought 
to be - there were places where it looked thinner, as if it had been disturbed 
not many months before. I could not be sure, for even the apparently thinner 
places were dusty enough; yet a certain suspicion of regularity in the fancied 
unevenness was highly disquieting. 
When I brought the torchlight close to one of the queer places I did not like 
what I saw - for the illusion of regularity became very great. It was as if 
there were regular lines of composite impressions - impressions that went in 
threes, each slightly over a foot square, and consisting of five nearly circular 
three-inch prints, one in advance of the other four. 
These possible lines of foot-square impressions appeared to lead in two 
directions, as if something had gone somewhere and returned. They were, of 
course, very faint, and may have been illusions or accidents; but there was an 
element of dim, fumbling terror about the way I thought they ran. For at one end 
of them was the heap of cases which must have clattered down not long before, 
while at the other end was the ominous trap-door with the cool, damp wind, 
yawning unguarded down to abysses past imagination. 


VIII 
That my strange sense of compulsion was deep and overwhelming is shewn by its 
conquest of my fear. No rational motive could have drawn me on after that 
hideous suspicion of prints and the creeping dream-memories it excited. Yet my 
right hand, even as it shook with fright, still twitched rhythmically in its 
eagerness to turn a lock it hoped to find. Before I knew it I was past the heap 
of lately fallen cases and running on tiptoe through aisles of utterly unbroken 
dust toward a point which I seemed to know morbidly, horribly well. 
My mind was asking itself questions whose origin and relevancy I was only 
beginning to guess. Would the shelf be reachable by a human body? Could my human 
hand master all the aeon-remembered motions of the lock? Would the lock be 
undamaged and workable? And what would I do - what dare I do with what - as I 
now commenced to realise - I both hoped and feared to find? Would it prove the 
awesome, brain-shattering truth of something past normal conception, or shew 
only that I was dreaming? 
The next I knew I had ceased my tiptoed racing and was standing still, staring 
at a row of maddeningly familiar hieroglyphed shelves. They were in a state of 
almost perfect preservation, and only three of the doors in this vicinity had 
sprung open. 
My feelings toward these shelves cannot be described - so utter and insistent 
was the sense of old acquaintance. I was looking high up at a row near the top 
and wholly out of my reach, and wondering how I could climb to best advantage. 
An open door four rows from the bottom would help, and the locks of the closed 
doors formed possible holds for hands and feet. I would grip the torch between 
my teeth, as I had in other places where both hands were needed. Above all I 
must make no noise. 
How to get down what I wished to remove would be difficult, but I could probably 
hook its movable fastener in my coat collar and carry it like a knapsack. Again 
I wondered whether the lock would be undamaged. That I could repeat each 
familiar motion I had not the least doubt. But I hoped the thing would not 
scrape or creak - and that my hand could work it properly. 
Even as I thought these things I had taken the torch in my mouth and begun to 
climb. The projecting locks were poor supports; but, as I had expected, the 
opened shelf helped greatly. I used both the swinging door and the edge of the 
aperture itself in my ascent, and managed to avoid any loud creaking. 
Balanced on the upper edge of the door, and leaning far to my right, I could 
just reach the lock I sought. My fingers, half numb from climbing, were very 
clumsy at first; but I soon saw that they were anatomically adequate. And the 
memory-rhythm was strong in them. 
Out of unknown gulfs of time the intricate, secret motions had somehow reached 
my brain correctly in every detail - for after less than five minutes of trying 
there came a click whose familiarity was all the more startling because I had 
not consciously anticipated it. In another instant the metal door was slowly 
swinging open with only the faintest grating sound. 
Dazedly I looked over the row of greyish case ends thus exposed, and felt a 
tremendous surge of some wholly inexplicable emotion. Just within reach of my 
right hand was a case whose curving hieroglyphs made me shake with a pang 
infinitely more complex than one of mere fright. Still shaking, I managed to 
dislodge it amidst a shower of gritty flakes, and ease it over toward myself 
without any violent noise. 
Like the other case I had handled, it was slightly more than twenty by fifteen 
inches in size, with curved mathematical designs in low relief. In thickness it 
just exceeded three inches. 
Crudely wedging it between myself and the surface I was climbing, I fumbled with 
the fastener and finally got the hook free. Lifting the cover, I shifted the 
heavy object to my back, and let the hook catch hold of my collar. Hands now 
free, I awkwardly clambered down to the dusty floor, and prepared to inspect my 
prize. 
Kneeling in the gritty dust, I swung the case around and rested it in front of 
me. My hands shook, and I dreaded to draw out the book within almost as much as 
I longed - and felt compelled - to do so. It had very gradually become clear to 
me what I ought to find, and this realisation nearly paralysed my faculties. 
If the thing were there - and if I were not dreaining - the implications would 
be quite beyond the power of the human spirit to bear. What tormented me most 
was my momentary inability to feel that my surroundings were a dream. The sense 
of reality was hideous - and again becomes so as I recall the scene. 
At length I tremblingly pulled the book from its container and stared 
fascinatedly at the well-known hieroglyphs on the cover. It seemed to be in 
prime condition, and the curvilinear letters of the title held me in almost as 
hypnotised a state as if I could read them. Indeed, I cannot swear that I did 
not actually read them in some transient and terrible access of abnormal memory. 

I do not know how long it was before I dared to lift that thin metal cover. I 
temporized and made excuses to myself. I took the torch from my mouth and shut 
it off to save the battery. Then, in the dark, I collected my courage finally 
lifting the cover without turning on the light. Last of all, I did indeed flash 
the torch upon the exposed page - steeling myself in advance to suppress any 
sound no matter what I should find. 
I looked for an instant, then collapsed. Clenching my teeth, however, I kept 
silent. I sank wholly to the floor and put a hand to my forehead amidst the 
engulfing blackness. What I dreaded and expected was there. Either I was 
dreaming, or time and space had become a mockery. 
I must be dreaming - but I would test the horror by carrying this thing back and 
shewing it to my son if it were indeed a reality. My head swam frightfully, even 
though there were no visible objects in the unbroken gloom to swirl about me. 
Ideas and images of the starkest terror - excited by vistas which my glimpse had 
opened up - began to throng in upon me and cloud my senses. 
I thought of those possible prints in the dust, and trembled at the sound of my 
own breathing as I did so. Once again I flashed on the light and looked at the 
page as a serpent's victim may look at his destroyer's eyes and fangs. 
Then, with clumsy fingers, in the dark, I closed the book, put it in its 
container, and snapped the lid and the curious, hooked fastener. This was what I 
must carry back to the outer world if it truly existed - if the whole abyss 
truly existed - if I, and the world itself, truly existed. 
Just when I tottered to my feet and commenced my return I cannot be certain. It 
comes to me oddly - as a measure of my sense of separation from the normal world 
- that I did not even once look at my watch during those hideous hours 
nderground. 
Torch in hand, and with the ominous case under one arm, I eventually found 
myself tiptoeing in a kind of silent panic past the draught - giving abyss and 
those lurking suggestions of prints. I lessened my precautions as I climbed up 
the endless inclines, but could not shake off a shadow of apprehension which I 
had not felt on the downward journey. 
I dreaded having to repass through the black basalt crypt that was older than 
the city itself, where cold draughts welled up from unguarded depths. I thought 
of that which the Great Race had feared, and of what might still be lurking - be 
it ever so weak and dying - down there. I thought of those five-circle prints 
and of what my dreams had told me of such prints - and of strange winds and 
whistling noises associated with them. And I thought of the tales of the modern 
blackfellows, wherein the horror of great winds and nameless subterrene ruins 
was dwelt upon. 
I knew from a carven wall symbol the right floor to enter, and came at last 
after passing that other book I had examined - to the great circular space with 
the branching archways. On my right, and at once recognisable, was the arch 
through which I had arrived. This I now entered, conscious that the rest of my 
course would be harder because of the tumbled state of the masonry outside the 
archive building. My new metal-eased burden weighed upon me, and I found it 
harder and harder to be quiet as I stumbled among debris and fragments of every 
sort. 
Then I came to the ceiling-high mound of debris through which I had wrenched a 
scanty passage. My dread at wriggling through again was infinite, for my first 
passage had made some noise, and I now - after seeing those possible prints - 
dreaded sound above all things. The case, too, doubled the problem of traversing 
the narrow crevice. 
But I clambered up the barrier as best I could, and pushed the case through the 
aperture ahead of me. Then, torch in mouth, I scrambled through myself - my back 
torn as before by stalactites. 
As I tried to grasp the case again, it fell some distance ahead of me down the 
slope of the debris, making a disturbing clatter and arousing echoes which sent 
me into a cold perspiration. I lunged for it at once, and regained it without 
further noise - but a moment afterward the slipping of blocks under my feet 
raised a sudden and unprecedented din. 
The din was my undoing. For, falsely or not, I thought I heard it answered in a 
terrible way from spaces far behind me. I thought I heard a shrill, whistling 
sound, like nothing else on earth, and beyond any adequate verbal description. 
If so, what followed has a grim irony - since, save for the panic of this thing, 
the second thing might never have happened. 
As it was, my frenzy was absolute and unrelieved. Taking my torch in my hand and 
clutching feebly at the case, I leaped and bounded wildly ahead with no idea in 
my brain beyond a mad desire to race out of these nightmare ruins to the waking 
world of desert and moonlight which lay so far above. 
I hardly knew it when I reached the mountain of debris which towered into the 
vast blackness beyond the caved-in roof, and bruised and cut myself repeatedly 
in scrambling up its steep slope of jagged blocks and fragments. 
Then came the great disaster. Just as I blindly crossed the summit, unprepared 
for the sudden dip ahead, my feet slipped utterly and I found myself involved in 
a mangling avalanche of sliding masonry whose cannon-loud uproar split the black 
cavern air in a deafening series of earth-shaking reverberations. 
I have no recollection of emerging from this chaos, but a momentary fragment of 
consciousness shows me as plunging and tripping and scrambling along the 
corridor amidst the clangour - case and torch still with me. 
Then, just as I approached that primal basalt crypt I had so dreaded, utter 
madness came. For as the echoes of the avalanche died down, there became audible 
a repetition of that frightful alien whistling I thought I had heard before. 
This time there was no doubt about it - and what was worse, it came from a point 
not behind but ahead of me. 
Probably I shrieked aloud then. I have a dim picture of myself as flying through 
the hellish basalt vault of the elder things, and hearing that damnable alien 
sound piping up from the open, unguarded door of limitless nether blacknesses. 
There was a wind, too - not merely a cool, damp draught, but a violent, 
purposeful blast belching savagely and frigidly from that abominable gulf whence 
the obscene whistling came. 
There are memories of leaping and lurching over obstacles of every sort, with 
that torrent of wind and shrieking sound growing moment by moment, and seeming 
to curl and twist purposefully around me as it struck out wickedly from the 
spaces behind and beneath. 
Though in my rear, that wind had the odd effect of hindering instead of aiding 
my progress; as if it acted like a noose or lasso thrown around me. Heedless of 
the noise I made, I clattered over a great barrier of blocks and was again in 
the structure that led to the surface. 
I recall glimpsing the archway to the room of machines and almost crying out as 
I saw the incline leading down to where one of those blasphemous trap-doors must 
be yawning two levels below. But instead of crying out I muttered over and over 
to myself that this was all a dream from which I must soon awake. Perhaps I was 
in camp - perhaps I was at home in Arkham. As these hopes bolstered up my sanity 
I began to mount the incline to the higher level. 
I knew, of course, that I had the four-foot cleft to re-cross, yet was too 
racked by other fears to realise the full horror until I came almost upon it. On 
my descent, the leap across had been easy - but could I clear the gap as readily 
when going uphill, and hampered by fright, exhaustion, the weight of the metal 
case, and the anomalous backward tug of that daemon wind? I thought of these 
things at the last moment, and thought also of the nameless entities which might 
be lurking in the black abysses below the chasm. 
My wavering torch was growing feeble, but I could tell by some obscure memory 
when I neared the cleft. The chill blasts of wind and the nauseous whistling 
shrieks behind me were for the moment like a merciful opiate, dulling my 
imagination to the horror of the yawning gulf ahead. And then I became aware of 
the added blasts and whistling in front of me - tides of abomination surging up 
through the cleft itself from depths unimagined and unimaginable. 
Now, indeed, the essence of pure nightmare was upon me. Sanity departed - and, 
ignoring everything except the animal impulse of flight, I merely struggled and 
plunged upward over the incline's debris as if no gulf had existed. Then I saw 
the chasm's edge, leaped frenziedly with every ounce of strength I possessed, 
and was instantly engulfed in a pandaemoniae vortex of loathsome sound and 
utter, materially tangible blackness. 
This is the end of my experience, so far as I can recall. Any further 
impressions belong wholly to the domain of phantasmagoria delirium. Dream, 
madness, and memory merged wildly together in a series of fantastic, fragmentary 
delusions which can have no relation to anything real. 
There was a hideous fall through incalculable leagues of viscous, sentient 
darkness, and a babel of noises utterly alien to all that we know of the earth 
and its organic life. Dormant, rudimentary senses seemed to start into vitality 
within me, telling of pits and voids peopled by floating horrors and leading to 
sunless crags and oceans and teeming cities of windowless, basalt towers upon 
which no light ever shone. 
Secrets of the primal planet and its immemorial aeons flashed through my brain 
without the aid of sight or sound, and there were known to me things which not 
even the wildest of my former dreams had ever suggested. And all the while cold 
fingers of damp vapor clutched and picked at me, and that eldritch, damnable 
whistling shrieked fiendishly above all the alternations of babel and silence in 
the whirlpools of darkness around. 
Afterward there were visions of the Cyclopean city of my dreams - not in ruins, 
but just as I had dreamed of it. I was in my conical, non-human body again, and 
mingled with crowds of the Great Race and the captive minds who carried books up 
and down the lofty corridors and vast inclines. 
Then, superimposed upon these pictures, were frightful, momentary flashes of a 
non-vistial consciousness involving desperate struggles, a writhing free from 
clutching tentacles of whistling wind, an insane, bat-like flight through 
half-solid air, a feverish burrowing through the cyclone-whipped dark, and a 
wild stumbling and scrambling over fallen masonry. 
Once there was a curious, intrusive flash of half sight - a faint, diffuse 
suspicion of bluish radiance far overhead. Then there came a dream of wind - 
pursued climbing and crawling - of wriggling into a blaze of sardonic moonlight 
through a jumble of debris which slid and collapsed after me amidst a morbid 
hurricane. It was the evil, monotonous beating of that maddening moonlight which 
at last told me of the return of what I had once known as the objective, waking 
world. 
I was clawing prone through the sands of the Australian desert, and around me 
shrieked such a tumult of wind as I had never before known on our planet's 
surface. My clothing was in rags, and my whole body was a mass of bruises and 
scratches. 
Full consciousness returned very slowly, and at no time could I tell just where 
delirious dream left off and true memory began. There had seemed to be a mound 
of titan blocks, an abyss beneath it, a monstrous revelation from the past, and 
a nightmare horror at the end - but how much of this was real? 
My flashlight was gone, and likewise any metal case I may have discovered. Had 
there been such a case - or any abyss- or any mound? Raising my head, I looked 
behind me, and saw only the sterile, undulant sands of the desert. 
The daemon wind died down, and the bloated, fungoid moon sank reddeningly in the 
west. I lurched to my feet and began to stagger southwestward toward the camp. 
What in truth had happened to me? Had I merely collapsed in the desert and 
dragged a dream-racked body over miles of sand and buried blocks? If not, how 
could I bear to live any longer? 
For, in this new doubt, all my faith in the myth-born unreality of my visions 
dissolved once more into the hellish older doubting. If that abyss was real, 
then the Great Race was real - and its blasphemous reachings and seizures in the 
cosmos-wide vortex of time were no myths or nightmares, but a terrible, 
soul-shattering actuality. 
Had I, in full, hideous fact, been drawn back to a pre-human world of a hundred 
and fifty million years ago in those dark, baffling days of the amnesia? Had my 
present body been the vehicle of a frightful alien consciousness from palaeogean 
gulfs of time? 
Had I, as the captive mind of those shambling horrors, indeed known that 
accursed city of stone in its primordial heyday, and wriggled down those 
familiar corridors in the loathsome shape of my captor? Were those tormenting 
dreams of more than twenty years the offspring of stark, monstrous memories? 
Had I once veritably talked with minds from reachless corners of time and space, 
learned the universe's secrets, past and to come, and written the annals of my 
own world for the metal cases of those titan archives? And were those others - 
those shocking elder things of the mad winds and daemon pipings - in truth a 
lingering, lurking menace, waiting and slowly weakening in black abysses while 
varied shapes of life drag out their multimillennial courses on the planet's 
age-racked surface? 
I do not know. If that abyss and what I held were real, there is no hope. Then, 
all too truly, there lies upon this world of man a mocking and incredible shadow 
out of time. But, mercifully, there is no proof that these things are other than 
fresh phases of my myth-born dreams. I did not bring back the metal case that 
would have been a proof, and so far those subterrene corridors have not been 
found. 
If the laws of the universe are kind, they will never be found. But I must tell 
my son what I saw or thought I saw, and let him use his judgment as a 
psychologist in gauging the reality of my experience, and communicating this 
account to others. 
I have said that the awful truth behind my tortured years of dreaming hinges 
absolutely upon the actuality of what I thought I saw in those Cyclopean, buried 
ruins. It has been hard for me, literally, to set down that crucial revelation, 
though no reader can have failed to guess it. Of course, it lay in that book 
within the metal case - the case which I pried out of its lair amidst the dust 
of a million centuries. 
No eye had seen, no hand had touched that book since the advent of man to this 
planet. And yet, when I flashed my torch upon it in that frightful abyss, I saw 
that the queerly pigmented letters on the brittle, aeon-browned cellulose pages 
were not indeed any nameless hieroglyphs of earth's youth. They were, instead, 
the letters of our familiar alphabet, spelling out the words of the English 
language in my own handwriting. 





The Lovecraft Library wishes to extend its gratitude to Eulogio García Recalde 
for transcribing this text. 



Document modified: 03/01/2000 12:32:52