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THE WHITE SHIP AND OTHER STORIES
nacle. Then on the fi fth night, which was the night of the full
moon, Barzai saw some dense clouds far to the north, and
stayed up with Atal to watch them draw near. Thick and majestic they sailed, slowly and deliberately onward; ranging themselves round the peak high above the watchers, and hiding
the moon and the summit from view. For a long hour the watchers gazed, whilst the vapours swirled and the screen of clouds
grew thicker and more restless. Barzai was wise in the lore of
earth’s gods, and listened hard for certain sounds, but Atal felt
the chill of the vapours and the awe of the night, and feared
much. And when Barzai began to climb higher and beckon
eagerly, it was long before Atal would follow.
So thick were the vapours that the way was hard, and
though Atal followed at last, he could scarce see the gray
shape of Barzai on the dim slope above in the clouded
moonlight. Barzai forged very far ahead, and seemed despite
his age to climb more easily than Atal; fearing not the steepness that began to grow too great for any save a strong and
dauntless man, nor pausing at wide black chasms that Atal
could scarce leap. And so they went up wildly over rocks
and gulfs, slipping and stumbling, and sometimes awed at
the vastness and horrible silence of bleak ice pinnacles and
mute granite steeps.
Very suddenly Barzai went out of Atal’s sight, scaling a hideous cliff that seemed to bulge outward and block the path for
any climber not inspired of earth’s gods. Atal was far below,
and planning what he should do when he reached the place,
when curiously he noticed that the light had grown strong,
as if the cloudless peak and moonlit meetingplace of the gods
51
HOWARD LOVECRAFT
were very near. And as he scrambled on toward the bulging
cliff and litten sky he felt fears more shocking than any he
had known before. Then through the high mists he heard
the voice of Barzai shouting wildly in delight:
“I have heard the gods. I have heard earth’s gods singing in revelry on Hatheg–Kla! The voices of earth’s gods are
known to Barzai the Prophet! The mists are thin and the moon
is bright, and I shall see the gods dancing wildly on Hatheg–
Kla that they loved in youth. The wisdom of Barzai hath
made him greater than earth’s gods, and against his will their
spells and barriers are as naught; Barzai will behold the gods,
the proud gods, the secret gods, the gods of earth who spurn
the sight of man!”
Atal could not hear the voices Barzai heard, but he was
now close to the bulging cliff and scanning it for footholds.
Then he heard Barzai’s voice grow shriller and louder:
“The mist is very thin, and the moon casts shadows on
the slope; the voices of earth’s gods are high and wild, and
they fear the coming of Barzai the Wise, who is greater than
they . . . The moon’s light fl ickers, as earth’s gods dance against
it; I shall see the dancing forms of the gods that leap and
howl in the moonlight . . . The light is dimmer and the gods
are afraid . . . ”
Whilst Barzai was shouting these things Atal felt a spectral
change in all the air, as if the laws of earth were bowing to
greater laws; for though the way was steeper than ever, the upward path was now grown fearsomely easy, and the bulging
cliff proved scarce an obstacle when he reached it and slid perilously up its convex face. The light of the moon had strangely
52
THE WHITE SHIP AND OTHER STORIES
failed, and as Atal plunged upward through the mists he heard
Barzai the Wise shrieking in the shadows:
“The moon is dark, and the gods dance in the night; there is
terror in the sky, for upon the moon hath sunk an eclipse foretold in no books of men or of earth’s gods . . . There is unknown
magic on Hatheg–Kla, for the screams of the frightened gods
have turned to laughter, and the slopes of ice shoot up endlessly into the black heavens whither I am plunging . . . Hei!
Hei! At last! In the dim light I behold the gods of earth!”
And now Atal, slipping dizzily up over inconceivable
steeps, heard in the dark a loathsome laughing, mixed with
such a cry as no man else ever heard save in the Phlegethon of
unrelatable nightmares; a cry wherein reverberated the horror and anguish of a haunted lifetime packed into one atrocious moment:
“The other gods! The other gods! The gods of the outer
hells that guard the feeble gods of earth! . . . Look away . . . Go
back . . . Do not see! Do not see! The vengeance of the infi nite
abysses . . . That cursed, that damnable pit . . . Merciful gods of
earth, I am falling into the sky!”
And as Atal shut his eyes and stopped his ears and tried to
hump downward against the frightful pull from unknown
heights, there resounded on Hatheg–Kla that terrible peal of
thunder which awaked the good cotters of the plains and
the honest burgesses of Hatheg, Nir and Ulthar, and caused
them to behold through the clouds that strange eclipse of
the moon that no book ever predicted. And when the moon
came out at last Atal was safe on the lower snows of the mountain without sight of earth’s gods, or of the other gods.
53
HOWARD LOVECRAFT
Now it is told in the moldy Pnakotic Manuscripts that Sansu found naught but wordless ice and rock when he did climb
Hatheg–Kla in the youth of the world. Yet when the men of
Ulthar and Nir and Hatheg crushed their fears and scaled
that haunted steep by day in search of Barzai the Wise, they
found graven in the naked stone of the summit a curious and
cyclopean symbol fi fty cubits wide, as if the rock had been
riven by some titanic chisel. And the symbol was like to one
that learned men have discerned in those frightful parts of
the Pnakotic Manuscripts which were too ancient to be read.
This they found.
Barzai the Wise they never found, nor could the holy priest
Atal ever be persuaded to pray for his soul’s repose. Moreover, to this day the people of Ulthar and Nir and Hatheg fear
eclipses, and pray by night when pale vapors hide the mountain-top and the moon. And above the mists on Hatheg–Kla,
earth’s gods sometimes dance reminiscently; for they know
they are safe, and love to come from unknown Kadath in
ships of clouds and play in the olden way, as they did when
earth was new and men not given to the climbing of inaccessible places.
THE SILVER KEY
When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of
the gate of dreams. Prior to that time he had made up for
the prosiness of life by nightly excursions to strange and ancient cities beyond space, and lovely, unbelievable garden
lands across ethereal seas; but as middle age hardened upon
him he felt those liberties slipping away little by little, until at last he was cut off altogether. No more could his galleys sail up the river Oukranos past the gilded spires of Thran,
or his elephant caravans tramp through perfumed jungles in
Kled, where forgotten palaces with veined ivory columns sleep
lovely and unbroken under the moon.
He had read much of things as they are, and talked with
too many people. Well-meaning philosophers had taught
him to look into the logical relations of things, and analyse
the processes which shaped his thoughts and fancies. Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only
a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of
inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above
the other. Custom had dinned into his ears a superstitious
reverence for that which tangibly and physically exists, and
had made him secretly ashamed to dwell in visions. Wise
55
HOWARD LOVECRAFT
men told him his simple fancies were inane and childish, and
even more absurd because their actors persist in fancying
them full of meaning and purpose as the blind cosmos grinds
aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing
the wishes or existence of the minds that fl icker for a second
now and then in the darkness.
They had chained him down to things that are, and had
then explained the workings of those things till mystery had
gone out of the world. When he complained, and longed to
escape into twilight realms where magic moulded all the little vivid fragments and prized associations of his mind into
vistas of breathless expectancy and unquenchable delight,
they turned him instead toward the new-found prodigies of
science, bidding him fi nd wonder in the atom’s vortex and
mystery in the sky’s dimensions. And when he had failed to
fi nd these boons in things whose laws are known and measurable, they told him he lacked imagination, and was immature because he preferred dream-illusions to the illusions of
our physical creation.
So Carter had tried to do as others did, and pretended that
the common events and emotions of earthy minds were more
important than the fantasies of rare and delicate souls. He did
not dissent when they told him that the animal pain of a stuck
pig or dyspeptic ploughman in real life is a greater thing than
the peerless beauty of Narath with its hundred carven gates
and domes of chalcedony, which he dimly remembered from
his dreams; and under their guidance he cultivated a painstaking sense of pity and tragedy.
56
THE WHITE SHIP AND OTHER STORIES
Once in a while, though, he could not help seeing how
shallow, fi ckle, and meaningless all human aspirations are,
and how emptily our real impulses contrast with those pompous ideals we profess to hold. Then he would have recourse to
the polite laughter they had taught him to use against the extravagance and artifi ciality of dreams; for he saw that the daily
life of our world is every inch as extravagant and artifi cial, and
far less worthy of respect because of its poverty in beauty and
its silly reluctance to admit its own lack of reason and purpose.
In this way he became a kind of humorist, for he did not see
that even humour is empty in a mindless universe devoid of
any true standard of consistency or inconsistency.
In the fi rst days of his bondage he had turned to the gentle
churchly faith endeared to him by the naive trust of his fathers, for thence stretched mystic avenues which seemed to
promise escape from life. Only on closer view did he mark
the starved fancy and beauty, the stale and prosy triteness, and
the owlish gravity and grotesque claims of solid truth which
reigned boresomely and overwhelmingly among most of its
professors; or feel to the full the awkwardness with which
it sought to keep alive as literal fact the outgrown fears and
guesses of a primal race confronting the unknown. It wearied
Carter to see how solemnly people tried to make earthly reality out of old myths which every step of their boasted science
confuted, and this misplaced seriousness killed the attachment he might have kept for the ancient creeds had they been
content to offer the sonorous rites and emotional outlets in
their true guise of ethereal fantasy.
57
HOWARD LOVECRAFT
But when he came to study those who had thrown off
the old myths, he found them even more ugly than those who
had not. They did not know that beauty lies in harmony, and
that loveliness of life has no standard amidst an aimless cosmos save only its harmony with the dreams and the feelings
which have gone before and blindly moulded our little spheres
out of the rest of chaos. They did not see that good and evil and
beauty and ugliness are only ornamental fruits of perspective,
whose sole value lies in their linkage to what chance made our
fathers think and feel, and whose fi ner details are different for
every race and culture. Instead, they either denied these things
altogether or transferred them to the crude, vague instincts
which they shared with the beasts and peasants; so that their
lives were dragged malodorously out in pain, ugliness, and disproportion, yet fi lled with a ludicrous pride at having escaped
from something no more unsound than that which still held
them. They had traded the false gods of fear and blind piety for
those of license and anarchy.
Carter did not taste deeply of these modern freedoms; for
their cheapness and squalor sickened a spirit loving beauty
alone while his reason rebelled at the fl imsy logic with which
their champions tried to gild brute impulse with a sacredness stripped from the idols they had discarded. He saw that
most of them, in common with their cast-off priestcraft, could
not escape from the delusion that life has a meaning apart
from that which men dream into it; and could not lay aside
the crude notion of ethics and obligations beyond those of
beauty, even when all Nature shrieked of its unconsciousness
and impersonal unmorality in the light of their scientifi c dis-
58
THE WHITE SHIP AND OTHER STORIES
coveries. Warped and bigoted with preconceived illusions of
justice, freedom, and consistency, they cast off the old lore and
the old way with the old beliefs; nor ever stopped to think that
that lore and those ways were the sole makers of their present
thoughts and judgments, and the sole guides and standards in
a meaningless universe without fi xed aims or stable points of
reference. Having lost these artifi cial settings, their lives grew
void of direction and dramatic interest; till at length they
strove to drown their ennui in bustle and pretended usefulness, noise and excitement, barbaric display and animal sensation. When these things palled, disappointed, or grew nauseous through revulsion, they cultivated irony and bitterness,
and found fault with the social order. Never could they realize
that their brute foundations were as shifting and contradictory as the gods of their elders, and that the satisfaction of one
moment is the bane of the next. Calm, lasting beauty comes
only in a dream, and this solace the world had thrown away
when in its worship of the real it threw away the secrets of
childhood and innocence.
Amidst this chaos of hollowness and unrest Carter tried to
live as befi tted a man of keen thought and good heritage.
With his dreams fading under the ridicule of the age he could
not believe in anything, but the love of harmony kept him
close to the ways of his race and station. He walked impassive
through the cities of men, and sighed because no vista seemed
fully real; because every fl ash of yellow sunlight on tall roofs
and every glimpse of balustraded plazas in the fi rst lamps of
evening served only to remind him of dreams he had once
known, and to make him homesick for ethereal lands he no
59
HOWARD LOVECRAFT
longer knew how to fi nd. Travel was only a mockery; and even
the Great War stirred him but little, though he served from
the fi rst in the Foreign Legion of France. For a while he sought
friends, but soon grew weary of the crudeness of their emotions, and the sameness and earthiness of their visions. He felt
vaguely glad that all his relatives were distant and out of touch
with him, for they would not have understood his mental life.
That is, none but his grandfather and great-uncle Christopher
could, and they were long dead.
Then he began once more the writing of books, which he
had left off when dreams fi rst failed him. But here, too, was
there no satisfaction or fulfi llment; for the touch of earth was
upon his mind, and he could not think of lovely things as he
had done of yore. Ironic humor dragged down all the twilight
minarets he reared, and the earthy fear of improbability blasted all the delicate and amazing fl owers in his faery gardens.
The convention of assumed pity spilt mawkishness on his
characters, while the myth of an important reality and signifi cant human events and emotions debased all his high fantasy
into thin-veiled allegory and cheap social satire. His new novels were successful as his old ones had never been; and because
he knew how empty they must be to please an empty herd, he
burned them and ceased his writing. They were very graceful
novels, in which he urbanely laughed at the dreams he lightly
sketched; but he saw that their sophistication had sapped all
their life away.
It was after this that he cultivated deliberate illusion,
and dabbled in the notions of the bizarre and the eccentric
as an antidote for the commonplace. Most of these, however,
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