At the Mountains of Madness (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading): and Other Weird Tales

By H. P. Lovecraft and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

Multi-eyed protoplasmic entities, flesh-eating ghouls, animate corpses, time-traveling body snatchers, and, yes, huge albino penguins. These are some of the bizarre creatures that populate the universe created by American horror author H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft has influenced many of today’s most famous writers and artists, including master of contemporary horror fiction Stephen King, Academy Award-nominated director Guillermo Del Toro, and artist and Alien set-designer H. R. Giger. 

This collection includes three selections from the Cthulhu Mythos: the novella At the Mountains of Madness, which is often considered Lovecraft’s masterpiece; “The Thing on the Doorstep”; and “The Shadow Out of Time.”  While including all the chilling “cyclopean vistas,” monstrous abominations and appalling transformations that readers have come to expect from Lovecraft, this also showcases his fantasy writing in stories such as “The Cats of Ulthar,” “The Silver Key,” and notably The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Mar 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781411434035

H. P. Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was an American author of science fiction and horror stories. Born in Providence, Rhode Island to a wealthy family, he suffered the loss of his father at a young age. Raised with his mother’s family, he was doted upon throughout his youth and found a paternal figure in his grandfather Whipple, who encouraged his literary interests. He began writing stories and poems inspired by the classics and by Whipple’s spirited retellings of Gothic tales of terror. In 1902, he began publishing a periodical on astronomy, a source of intellectual fascination for the young Lovecraft. Over the next several years, he would suffer from a series of illnesses that made it nearly impossible to attend school. Exacerbated by the decline of his family’s financial stability, this decade would prove formative to Lovecraft’s worldview and writing style, both of which depict humanity as cosmologically insignificant. Supported by his mother Susie in his attempts to study organic chemistry, Lovecraft eventually devoted himself to writing poems and stories for such pulp and weird-fiction magazines as Argosy, where he gained a cult following of readers. Early stories of note include “The Alchemist” (1916), “The Tomb” (1917), and “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” (1919). “The Call of Cthulu,” originally published in pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928, is considered by many scholars and fellow writers to be his finest, most complex work of fiction. Inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Lord Dunsany, Lovecraft became one of the century’s leading horror writers whose influence remains essential to the genre.

Book preview

AT THE MOUNTAINS

OF MADNESS

AND

OTHER WEIRD TALES

H. P. LOVECRAFT

INTRODUCTION BY

JEFFREY ANDREW WEINSTOCK

Introduction and Suggested Reading

© 2009 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

This 2011 edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

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ISBN: 978-1-4114-3403-5

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

THE CATS OF ULTHAR

THE QUEST OF IRANON

THE OUTSIDER

THE MUSIC OF ERICH ZANN

COOL AIR

PICKMAN'S MODEL

THE SILVER KEY

THE DREAM-QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH

AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS

THE THING ON THE DOORSTEP

THE SHADOW OUT OF TIME

ENDNOTES

SUGGESTED READING

INTRODUCTION

MULTI-EYED PROTOPLASMIC ENTITIES, FLESH-EATING GHOULS, ANIMATE corpses, time-traveling body snatchers, and, yes, huge albino penguins. These are but some of the bizarre creatures that populate the universe created by early twentieth-century American horror author H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft's strange worlds have enthralled countless readers around the globe and influenced many of today's most famous writers and artists, including master of contemporary horror fiction Stephen King, Academy Award-nominated director Guillermo Del Toro, and artist and Alien set-designer H. R. Giger. While Lovecraft is undoubtedly best known for his Cthulhu Mythos, his cycle of stories involving a pantheon of powerful extraterrestrial monsters referred to as gods, his horrific vision is both more expansive and at times more whimsical. This collection, while including all the chilling cyclopean vistas, monstrous abominations and appalling transformations that readers have come to expect from Lovecraft, also showcases his fantasy writing in stories such as The Cats of Ulthar, The Silver Key, and notably The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. These and the rest of his under-appreciated Dream Cycle stories, which are set in an imagined world of lost cities and fantastic creatures that we can visit only in our dreams, form the heart of this volume and allow for a fuller and more nuanced impression of Lovecraft's peculiar genius.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born on August 20, 1890, in Providence, Rhode Island, a city that would become the setting for several of this tales. He was the only child of Winfield Scott Lovecraft, a traveling salesman, and Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft, who could trace her ancestry back to colonial New England. In 1893, when Lovecraft was three, his father suffered a psychological breakdown and became delusional while on the road in Chicago and was admitted to Butler Hospital (an insane asylum) in Providence where he died five years later of what was most likely tertiary syphilis—it is unclear if Lovecraft ever became aware of the actual nature of his father's illness.

The void in Lovecraft's life left by his late father was ably filled by his maternal grandfather, the delightfully named Whipple Van Buren Phillips, who introduced Lovecraft to the classics (among them, children's versions of The Iliad and The Odyssey), as well as to Gothic tales of his own invention. A precocious, sickly child coddled by his overprotective mother, Lovecraft began composing poetry at age six and short horror tales and musings on science at age seven. However, it was his discovery at age eight of the work of Edgar Allan Poe that truly initiated him into the realm of tales of the uncanny. Later in life, the works of the Irish fantasist Lord Dunsany and Welsh fantasy writer Arthur Machen would also exercise considerable influence on his artistic development. Lovecraft suffered his first near-breakdown in 1898 at the age of eight, and poor health (largely psychosomatic) limited his official schooling. However, he compensated for his lack of formal education by his voracious reading and, in the assessment of preeminent Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi, became one of the most prodigious autodidacts in modern history.¹

What brought Lovecraft out of his shell and introduced him to the world of publishing was his association with the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA), a relatively small group of amateur journalists who published journals and circulated them among themselves in the 1910s and 1920s. Lovecraft contributed poetry and essays to UAPA journals and published thirteen issues of his own journal, the Conservative, a periodical that reflected his own conservative cultural views. His first published story, The Alchemist, appeared in the United Amateur in 1916, but it wasn't until six years later (at the age of thirty-one) that he broke into professional fiction with the publication of Herbert West—Reanimator in a crude professional publication called Home Brew. Then, at the urging of colleagues, Lovecraft began to submit his tales to the celebrated pulp magazine Weird Tales which was founded in 1923 and which included the early work of notable authors such as Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, and Theodore Sturgeon. Weird Tales became the principle publication venue for Lovecraft. In the early 1920s, Lovecraft also began to build an ever-expanding network of correspondents that led to his becoming one of the most prolific letter writers of the twentieth century—letters which Joshi speculates may one day be recognized as in fact his greatest achievement.²

Given Lovecraft's notorious anti-Semitism, his romance and then failed marriage with a Russian Jewish immigrant named Sonia H. Greene is surprising—the only explanation critics have been able to suggest is that Sonia was secular and acculturated enough to allow Lovecraft to overlook her religious background. She also seems to have done the pursuing. In any case, the marriage did not last. After several years of attempting to subsist in New York through a combination of writing, ghostwriting, and editing the work of others, and unsuccessful stints working for firms including a collection agency and a lamp-testing company, Lovecraft returned to Providence in 1926. His mother had died in 1921 as a result of complications from gallbladder surgery, so Lovecraft moved in with his two maternal aunts. This transition touched off the most fertile period in Lovecraft's creative life—in a nine-month period between 1926 and 1927 Lovecraft produced several of his best-known and most-celebrated works: The Call of Cthulhu, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and The Colour Out of Space.

Despite his best efforts, however, Lovecraft found it difficult to sell his increasingly lengthy and complicated later work, and his editorial work for others brought in diminishing returns. His last years were lamentably plagued by poverty and hardship. In 1936, he was saddened by the suicide of his correspondent Robert E. Howard, author of the Conan the Barbarian stories, and Lovecraft himself succumbed to cancer of the intestine on March 10, 1937, at the age of forty-seven, having never seen a true book publication of his work.

Lovecraft's body of fiction is often divided up into three roughly chronological categories: his early Poe-inspired horror stories (approximately 1905–1920), his Lord Dunsany-inspired Dream Cycle stories (1920–1927), and his Cthulhu Mythos (1925–1935). Central to this collection are Lovecraft's Dream Cycle fantasy tales. In 1919, Lovecraft discovered the work of Lord Dunsany, an Irish fantasy writer and dramatist, and for two years after, Lovecraft did little but write Dunsany imitations. What Lovecraft found so captivating in Dunsany's fiction was the remoteness of his imaginary lands—realms of pure fantasy without connection to the human world.³ The stories in Dunsany's first two books, The Gods of Pegāna (1905) and Time and the Gods (1906), and in part of his third book, The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories (1908), are set in his invented world of Pegāna, complete with its own gods, geography, and history.

Dunsany's influence is clearly evident in Lovecraft's Dream Cycle stories, his sequence of interconnected tales that shift the reader out of the familiar world of day-to-day reality and into an alternative universe accessible through dreams. The delightfully macabre The Cats of Ulthar (1920) not only makes it clear that Lovecraft was a cat fancier, but also why to kill a cat in mythical Ulthar is forbidden. The Quest of Iranon, written in 1921, expands the geography of this alternative universe as the title character quests for the lost city of his youth, Aira, and remains eternally young as long as the dream to find Aira remains in his heart. One of Lovecraft's most wonderful stories, The Silver Key (1926) introduces readers to two of Lovecraft's characteristic themes, the importance of dreams and the quest to get outside time, as well as to his recurring character Randolph Carter. Carter at age thirty discovers that he has lost the key to the gate of dreams. Disenchanted with the insipidness of daily life, Carter is, in a dream, directed by his grandfather to a silver key that allows him to travel back in time to when he was ten.

Carter is an especially interesting character who is arguably a thinly disguised alter ego for Lovecraft himself and appears in several of Lovecraft's stories. He first appears in The Statement of Randolph Carter (1919), one of Lovecraft's Poe-inspired stories, in which Carter and his friend Harley Warren investigate an apparently abandoned crypt. It may or may not be the same Carter who appears in The Unnamable (1923) (the first name of the Carter in this story is never provided), a similarly Poe-esque horror story in which Carter and another pal—again in a cemetery—encounter some monstrous creature. Carter is at the center of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926–27) as he ventures through the Dreamlands, and it is an older Carter who is the protagonist of The Silver Key, having lost access to the Dreamlands. He then appears one last time in Through the Gates of the Silver Key (1933), written in collaboration with Lovecraft admirer E. Hoffman Price and generally regarded as an inferior tale, which details Carter's adventures in another dimension.

All of Lovecraft's Dream Cycle stories ultimately flow into and out of one of his true masterpieces, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. This 43,000-word novella, unpublished in Lovecraft's lifetime, chronicles the epic journey of Randolph Carter through the Dreamlands, and in the process, illustrates the breadth and originality of Lovecraft's literary vision. Carter, in this Dunsany-inspired story, resolves to quest in his dreams for Kadath, the city where the gods live, to question them concerning the location of another, majestic city he has dreamed of three times. His dream-quest takes him from the Enchanted Woods populated by sentient rodents to the town of Ulthar, where he speaks with Atal, a character featured in Lovecraft's story The Other Gods. Carter is captured by turbaned men and flown to the moon, but the cats of Ulthar rescue him and return him to Earth. While climbing the treacherous peaks of Ngranek, he is carried off by winged humanoid monsters called night-gaunts to the underworld, where ghouls, including the transformed Pickman from the story Pickman's Model, rescue him. In the city of Celephaïs, Carter meets his old friend Kuranes, the king of the city—and a character featured in Lovecraft's story Celephaïs—who tries to deter Carter from his dangerous quest. Undaunted, Carter forges on, and after a series of other adventures, finally arrives at Kadath, where he is confronted by none other than Lovecraft's emissary of the gods, Nyarlathotep himself.

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath combines fantasy and horror with a delicious touch of whimsy that is lacking in much of Lovecraft's better-known fiction. More important though, it acts as a sort of central node for much of Lovecraft's writing, connecting one story with another and building out of these connections a complete world. Indeed, by bringing together characters including Randolph Carter, Atal, Pickman, and Kuranes; locations such as Ultar, Celephaïs, Ngranek, and the Plateau of Leng; and the gods Nyarlathotep and Azathoth (the former the mouthpiece of the gods, the latter an entity of chaos), Dream-Quest arguably is the central text of Lovecraft's entire oeuvre, linking his early Poe-inspired stories with his Cthulhu Mythos in the land of dreams.

Although Lovecraft's Dream Cycle stories include some of his best writing, what he is most well-known for are the Cthulhu Mythos, his stories set in the contemporary world of twentieth-century America (often in New England) that introduce monstrous extraterrestrial forces into that world. Most famous is his The Call of Cthulhu, which has spawned not only legions of devotees who have made their own contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos, but also a popular role-playing game, a video game, and more than a few Lovecraft-themed rock songs, including The Call of Ktulu by Metallica. Written in the summer of 1926, it was first published in Weird Tales in 1928. The Call of Cthulhu actually consists of three separate stories linked together by the narrator, who discovers the notes of his deceased relative; it culminates with the characteristically Lovecraftian realization that human beings are not the center of the universe and it is only our ignorance of our true insignificance that keeps us from going mad.

This collection includes three selections from the Cthulhu Mythos: the novella At the Mountains of Madness, which is often considered Lovecraft's masterpiece; The Thing on the Doorstep; and The Shadow Out of Time. In keeping with the theme of man's insignificance in the universe emphasized in The Call of Cthulhu, all three of these stories showcase humanity's relative powerlessness and inevitable decline. Both At the Mountains of Madness and The Shadow Out of Time chronicle the rise and fall of alien races far more sophisticated than humanity, while The Thing on the Doorstep demonstrates the existence of powers at work in the universe that humankind does not comprehend. These stories thus participate in what critic David E. Schultz has referred to as Lovecraft's anti-mythology, a pseudo-mythology brutally show[ing] that man is not the center of the universe, that the 'gods' care nothing for him, and that the earth and all its inhabitants are but a momentary incident in the unending cyclical chaos of the universe.⁴

At the Mountains of Madness, written in early 1931, is in Joshi's estimation Lovecraft's most ambitious attempt at 'non-supernatural cosmic art.'⁵ In this 40,000-word novella, Lovecraft provides his richest and most sustained elaboration on his extraterrestrial pantheon, focusing on the lost alien race known as the Old Ones. As a team of Antarctic explorers survey an enormous deserted stone city, they learn that it was constructed by an alien race some fifty million years ago with the assistance of shoggoths—amorphous masses of protoplasm held in check by mind control. The history of the Old Ones also details contests for control of territory between them and other extraterrestrial races, including a sentient fungoid race from the planet Yuggoth and the spawn of Cthulhu.

Of particular importance in this novella is the recognition by the narrator, William Dyer, of the bond that connects the Old Ones and human beings. Dyer realizes that the Old Ones were not simply good or evil. Rather, they were the men of another age and another order of being. Their decline signals the inevitable rise and fall of all civilizations—including humanity. Indeed, that a race so much more advanced than humanity should disappear bodes poorly for the future of humankind.

Lovecraft's The Thing on the Doorstep, written in 1933 but not published until 1937 in Weird Tales, is a very different sort of story from the atmospheric and slow-moving At the Mountains of Madness. Rather than an anthropologically oriented exposé of the Old Ones, this tale of mind control and identity switching fuses themes from a number of Lovecraft's other works, including the possibility of post-mortem sentience in Cool Air and mental projection from Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Astute readers will observe frequent references to elements from other Lovecraft stories, including places such as Miskatonic University, Arkham, and Innsmouth; books including Lovecraft's invented volume of occult lore, the Necronomicon; and entities including Lovecraft's god of chaos, Azathoth, and shoggoths. Thus this story further develops the connections among Lovecraft's tales and presages his return to the idea of mind transference in the much more accomplished The Shadow Out of Time.

Written between November 1934 and February 1935, The Shadow Out of Time combines the anthropological impulse of At the Mountains of Madness with the theme of mind transference introduced in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Thing on the Doorstep. The story is told from the perspective of Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, an American living in the early 1900s who trades bodies with a member of an extraterrestrial species known as Yithians who possess the ability to move through space and time. His consciousness transferred into the distant past, Peaslee discovers that the Yithians died out on Earth eons ago, their civilization destroyed by a rival, pre-human race. Peaslee's hold on his sanity is shaken when he discovers proof that the remains of the Yithians' past civilization still exist on Earth.

Although this collection obviously emphasizes Lovecraft's Dream Cycle and Cthulhu Mythos stories with his two great novellas, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and At the Mountains of Madness, as focal points, it also includes a taste of Lovecraft's Poe-inspired tales in the form of The Outsider (1921) and the brilliant Cool Air (1926). The former, which in setting recalls the deserted haunted dreamscapes of Poe works such as The Fall of the House of Usher and Ligeia and involves a characteristically Poe-esque ironic reversal, compels a reconsideration of just what makes a monster, while the latter, which could almost be considered an homage to Poe's The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, sets up shop at the eerie crossroads between life and death. Straddling the line in this volume between stand-alone horror stories and Cthulhu Mythos contributions are Pickman's Model (1926) and the celebrated The Music of Erich Zann (1921). In the former, the naïve narrator has his eyes opened to the horrors that actually inhabit our world, while in the latter the equally naïve narrator catches a glimpse of the chaotic madness at the heart of the universe itself. (The character Richard Upton Pickman from Pickman's Model, it should be noted, returns in a transfigured state in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and assists that story's protagonist, Randolph Carter, on his journey.)

Taken together, all these stories reflect the development and refinement of Lovecraft's cosmicism, his philosophical position that, given the vastness of space and time, human civilization is wholly insignificant. And this indeed is Lovecraft's unique achievement—the pioneering of what has come to be known as cosmic horror. In a famous passage from the introduction to his treatise on horror fiction, Supernatural Horror in Literature, Lovecraft asserts that Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.⁶ What presses hideously in At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow Out of Time, and Lovecraft's other Cthulhu Mythos is the realization of human inconsequentiality in the midst of a godless universe populated by irresistible alien forces. However, whether turning inward in dreams or outward toward the far reaches of time and space, all Lovecraft's fiction inspires a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim.⁷ The fiction of H. P. Lovecraft testifies to the powers of the imagination to expand the boundaries of our known universe into uncharted regions.

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock is associate professor of American literature and culture at Central Michigan University and has written extensively on uncanny fiction, cult film, and popular culture.

EDITOR'S NOTE

The commentary opening each chapter has been provided by S. T. Joshi.

THE CATS OF ULTHAR

This short tale, written on June 15, 1920, is perhaps Lovecraft's most delightful tribute to his beloved felidae. Lovecraft outlined the basic plot of the story in a letter of May 21, 1920. It features several borrowings from the work of Lord Dunsany, in particular the citation of dark wanderers (a similar tribe is cited in Idle Days on the Yann). Its depiction of an elementary, and particularly gruesome, tit-for-tat vengeance motif is fitting for a story that purports to be an ancient fable or legend. The story first appeared in the Tryout (November 1920).

IT IS SAID THAT IN ULTHAR, WHICH LIES BEYOND THE RIVER SKAI, NO MAN may kill a cat; and this I can verily believe as I gaze upon him who sitteth purring before the fire. For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroë and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle's lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.

In Ulthar, before ever the burgesses forbade the killing of cats, there dwelt an old cotter and his wife who delighted to trap and slay the cats of their neighbours. Why they did this I know not; save that many hate the voice of the cat in the night, and take it ill that cats should run stealthily about yards and gardens at twilight. But whatever the reason, this old man and woman took pleasure in trapping and slaying every cat which came near to their hovel; and from some of the sounds heard after dark, many villagers fancied that the manner of slaying was exceedingly peculiar. But the villagers did not discuss such things with the old man and his wife; because of the habitual expression on the withered faces of the two, and because their cottage was so small and so darkly hidden under spreading oaks at the back of a neglected yard. In truth, much as the owners of cats hated these odd folk, they feared them more; and instead of berating them as brutal assassins, merely took care that no cherished pet or mouser should stray toward the remote hovel under the dark trees. When through some unavoidable oversight a cat was missed, and sounds heard after dark, the loser would lament impotently; or console himself by thanking Fate that it was not one of his children who had thus vanished. For the people of Ulthar were simple, and knew not whence it is all cats first came.

One day a caravan of strange wanderers from the South entered the narrow cobbled streets of Ulthar. Dark wanderers they were, and unlike the other roving folk who passed through the village twice every year. In the market place they told fortunes for silver, and bought gay beads from the merchants. What was the land of these wanderers none could tell; but it was seen that they were given to strange prayers, and that they had painted on the sides of their wagons strange figures with human bodies and the heads of cats, hawks, rams, and lions. And the leader of the caravan wore a head-dress with two horns and a curious disc betwixt the horns.

There was in this singular caravan a little boy with no father or mother, but only a tiny black kitten to cherish. The plague had not been kind to him, yet had left him this small furry thing to mitigate his sorrow; and when one is very young, one can find great relief in the lively antics of a black kitten. So the boy whom the dark people called Menes smiled more often than he wept as he sate playing with his graceful kitten on the steps of an oddly painted wagon.

On the third morning of the wanderers' stay in Ulthar, Menes could not find his kitten; and as he sobbed aloud in the market place certain villagers told him of the old man and his wife, and of sounds heard in the night. And when he heard these things his sobbing gave place to meditation, and finally to prayer. He stretched out his arms toward the sun and prayed in a tongue no villager could understand; though indeed the villagers did not try very hard to understand, since their attention was mostly taken up by the sky and the odd shapes the clouds were assuming. It was very peculiar, but as the little boy uttered his petition there seemed to form overhead the shadowy, nebulous figures of exotic things; of hybrid creatures crowned with horn-flanked discs. Nature is full of such illusions to impress the imaginative.

That night the wanderers left Ulthar, and were never seen again. And the householders were troubled when they noticed that in all the village there was not a cat to be found. From each hearth the familiar cat had vanished; cats large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow, and white. Old Kranon, the burgomaster, swore that the dark folk had taken the cats away in revenge for the killing of Menes' kitten; and cursed the caravan and the little boy. But Nith, the lean notary, declared that the old cotter and his wife were more likely persons to suspect; for their hatred of cats was notorious and increasingly bold. Still, no one durst complain to the sinister couple; even when little Atal, the innkeeper's son, vowed that he had at twilight seen all the cats of Ulthar in that accursed yard under the trees, pacing very slowly and solemnly in a circle around the cottage, two abreast, as if in performance of some unheard-of rite of beasts. The villagers did not know how much to believe from so small a boy; and though they feared that the evil pair had charmed the cats to their death, they preferred not to chide the old cotter till they met him outside his dark and repellent yard.

So Ulthar went to sleep in vain anger; and when the people awaked at dawn—behold! Every cat was back at his accustomed hearth! Large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow, and white, none was missing. Very sleek and fat did the cats appear, and sonorous with purring content. The citizens talked with one another of the affair, and marvelled not a little. Old Kranon again insisted that it was the dark folk who had taken them, since cats did not return alive from the cottage of the ancient man and his wife. But all agreed on one thing: that the refusal of all the cats to eat their portions of meat or drink their saucers of milk was exceedingly curious. And for two whole days the sleek, lazy cats of Ulthar would touch no food, but only doze by the fire or in the sun.

It was fully a week before the villagers noticed that no lights were appearing at dusk in the windows of the cottage under the trees. Then the lean Nith remarked that no one had seen the old man or his wife since the night the cats were away. In another week the burgomaster decided to overcome his fears and call at the strangely silent dwelling as a matter of duty, though in so doing he was careful to take with him Shang the blacksmith and Thul the cutter of stone as witnesses. And when they had broken down the frail door they found only this: two cleanly picked human skeletons on the earthen floor, and a number of singular beetles crawling in the shadowy corners.

There was subsequently much talk among the burgesses of Ulthar. Zath, the coroner, disputed at length with Nith, the lean notary; and Kranon and Shang and Thul were overwhelmed with questions. Even little Atal, the innkeeper's son, was closely questioned and given a sweetmeat as reward. They talked of the old cotter and his wife, of the caravan of dark wanderers, of small Menes and his black kitten, of the prayer of Menes and of the sky during that prayer, of the doings of the cats on the night the caravan left, and of what was later found in the cottage under the dark trees in the repellent yard.

And in the end the burgesses passed that remarkable law which is told of by traders in Hatheg and discussed by travellers in Nir; namely, that in Ulthar no man may kill a cat.

THE QUEST OF IRANON

Perhaps the best and most poignant of Lovecraft's Dunsanian tales, The Quest of Iranon was written on February 28, 1921. As he wrote in a letter: I am picking up a new style lately—running to pathos as well as horror. The best thing I have yet done is 'The Quest of Iranon,' whose English [Samuel] Loveman calls the most musical and flowing I have yet written. . . . In later years, Lovecraft condemned the story as excessively mawkish, but it is in reality a pungent satire on the Protestant work ethic in its depiction of a city where people work only in order to work some more. The story took a long time to see print, appearing in the Galleon for July—August 1935.

INTO THE GRANITE CITY OF TELOTH WANDERED THE YOUTH, VINE-CROWNED, his yellow hair glistening with myrrh and his purple robe torn with briers of the mountain Sidrak that lies across the antique bridge of stone. The men of Teloth are dark and stern, and dwell in square houses, and with frowns they asked the stranger whence he had come and what were his name and fortune. So the youth answered:

I am Iranon, and come from Aira, a far city that I recall only dimly but seek to find again. I am a singer of songs that I learned in the far city, and my calling is to make beauty with the things remembered of childhood. My wealth is in little memories and dreams, and in hopes that I sing in gardens when the moon is tender and the west wind stirs the lotos-buds.

When the men of Teloth heard these things they whispered to one another; for though in the granite city there is no laughter or song, the stern men sometimes look to the Karthian hills in the spring and think of the lutes of distant Oonai whereof travellers have told. And thinking thus, they bade the stranger stay and sing in the square before the Tower of Mlin, though they liked not the colour of his tattered robe, nor the myrrh in his hair, nor his chaplet of vine-leaves, nor the youth in his golden voice. At evening Iranon sang, and while he sang an old man prayed and a blind man said he saw a nimbus over the singer's head. But most of the men of Teloth yawned, and some laughed and some went away to sleep; for Iranon told nothing useful, singing only his memories, his dreams, and his hopes.

"I remember the twilight, the moon, and soft songs, and the window where I was rocked to sleep. And through the window was the street where the golden lights came, and where the shadows danced on houses of marble. I remember the square of moonlight on the floor, that was not like any other light, and the visions that danced in the moonbeams when my mother sang to me. And too, I remember the sun of morning bright above the many-coloured hills in summer, and the sweetness of flowers borne on the south wind that made the trees sing.

"O Aira, city of marble and beryl, how many are thy beauties! How loved I the warm and fragrant groves across the hyaline Nithra, and the falls of the tiny Kra that flowed through the verdant valley! In those groves and in that vale the children wove wreaths for one another, and at dusk I dreamed strange dreams under the yath-trees on the mountain as I saw below me the lights of the city, and the curving Nithra reflecting a ribbon of stars.

"And in the city were palaces of veined and tinted marble, with golden domes and painted walls, and green gardens with cerulean pools and crystal fountains. Often I played in the gardens and waded in the pools, and lay and dreamed among the pale flowers under the trees. And sometimes at sunset I would climb the long hilly street to the citadel and the open place, and look down upon Aira, the magic city of marble and beryl, splendid in a robe of golden flame.

Long have I missed thee, Aira, for I was but young when we went into exile; but my father was thy King and I shall come again to thee, for it is so decreed of Fate. All through seven lands have I sought thee, and someday shall I reign over thy groves and gardens, thy streets and palaces, and sing to men who shall know whereof I sing, and laugh not nor turn away. For I am Iranon, who was a Prince in Aira.

That night the men of Teloth lodged the stranger in a stable, and in the morning an archon came to him and told him to go to the shop of Athok the cobbler, and be apprenticed to him.

But I am Iranon, a singer of songs, he said, and have no heart for the cobbler's trade.

All in Teloth must toil, replied the archon, for that is the law. Then said Iranon,

Wherefore do ye toil; is it not that ye may live and be happy? And if ye toil only that ye may toil more, when shall happiness find you? Ye toil to live, but is not life made of beauty and song? And if ye suffer no singers among you, where shall be the fruits of your toil? Toil without song is like a weary journey without an end. Were not death more pleasing? But the archon was sullen and did not understand, and rebuked the stranger.

Thou art a strange youth, and I like not thy face nor thy voice. The words thou speakest are blasphemy, for the gods of Teloth have said that toil is good. Our gods have promised us a haven of light beyond death, where there shall be rest without end, and crystal coldness amidst which none shall vex his mind with thought or his eyes with beauty. Go thou then to Athok the cobbler or be gone out of the city by sunset. All here must serve, and song is folly.

So Iranon went out of the stable and walked over the narrow stone streets between the gloomy square houses of granite, seeking something green in the air of spring. But in Teloth was nothing green, for all was of stone. On the faces of men were frowns, but by the stone embankment along the sluggish river Zuro sate a young boy with sad eyes gazing into the waters to spy green budding branches washed down from the hills by the freshets. And the boy said to him:

Art thou not indeed he of whom the archons tell, who seekest a far city in a fair land? I am Romnod, and born of the blood of Teloth, but am not old in the ways of the granite city, and yearn daily for the warm groves and the distant lands of beauty and song. Beyond the Karthian hills lieth Oonai, the city of lutes and dancing, which men whisper of and say is both lovely and terrible. Thither would I go were I old enough to find the way, and thither shouldst thou go and thou wouldst sing and have men listen to thee. Let us leave the city Teloth and fare together among the hills of spring. Thou shalt shew me the ways of travel and I will attend thy songs at evening when the stars one by one bring dreams to the minds of dreamers. And peradventure it may be that Oonai the city of lutes and dancing is even the fair Aira thou seekest, for it is told that thou hast not known Aira since old days, and a name often changeth. Let us go to Oonai, O Iranon of the golden head, where men shall know our longings and welcome us as brothers, nor ever laugh or frown at what we say. And Iranon answered:

Be it so, small one; if any in this stone place yearn for beauty he must seek the mountains and beyond, and I would not leave thee to pine by the sluggish Zuro. But think not that delight and understanding dwell just across the Karthian hills, or in any spot thou canst find in a day's, or a year's, or a lustrum's journey. Behold, when I was small like thee I dwelt in the valley of Narthos by the frigid Xari, where none would listen to my dreams; and I told myself that when older I would go to Sinara on the southern slope, and sing to smiling dromedary-men in the marketplace. But when I went to Sinara I found the dromedary-men all drunken and ribald, and saw that their songs were not as mine, so I travelled in a barge down the Xari to onyx-walled Jaren. And the soldiers at Jaren laughed at me and drave me out, so that I wandered to many other cities. I have seen Stethelos that is below the great cataract, and have gazed on the marsh where Sarnath once stood. I have been to Thraa, Ilarnek, and Kadatheron on the winding river Ai, and have dwelt long in Olathoë in the land of Lomar. But though I have had listeners sometimes, they have ever been few, and I know that welcome shall await me only in Aira, the city of marble and beryl where my father once ruled as King. So for Aira shall we seek, though it were well to visit distant and lute-blessed Oonai across the Karthian hills, which may indeed be Aira, though I think not. Aira's beauty is past imagining, and none can tell of it without rapture, whilst of Oonai the camel-drivers whisper leeringly.

At the sunset Iranon and small Romnod went forth from Teloth, and for long wandered amidst the green hills and cool forests. The way was rough and obscure, and never did they seem nearer to Oonai the city of lutes and dancing; but in the dusk as the stars came out Iranon would sing of Aira and its beauties and Romnod would listen, so that they were both happy after a fashion. They ate plentifully of fruit and red berries, and marked not the passing of time, but many years must have slipped away. Small Romnod was now not so small, and spoke deeply instead of shrilly, though Iranon was always the same, and decked his golden hair with vines and fragrant resins found in the woods. So it came to pass one day that Romnod seemed older than Iranon, though he had been very small when Iranon had found him watching for green budding branches in Teloth beside the sluggish stone-banked Zuro.

Then one night when the moon was full the travellers came to a mountain crest and looked down upon the myriad lights of Oonai. Peasants had told them they were near, and Iranon knew that this was not his native city of Aira. The lights of Oonai were not like those of Aira; for they were harsh and glaring, while the lights of Aira shine as softly and magically as shone the moonlight on the floor by the window where Iranon's mother once rocked him to sleep with song. But Oonai was a city of lutes and dancing, so Iranon and Romnod went down the steep slope that they might find men to whom songs and dreams would bring pleasure. And when they were come into the town they found rose-wreathed revellers bound from house to house and leaning from windows and balconies, who listened to the songs of Iranon and tossed him flowers and applauded when he was done. Then for a moment did Iranon believe he had found those who thought and felt even as he, though the town was not an hundredth as fair as Aira.

When dawn came Iranon looked about with dismay, for the domes of Oonai were not golden in the sun, but grey and dismal. And the men of Oonai were pale with revelling and dull with wine, and unlike the radiant men of Aira. But because the people had thrown him blossoms and acclaimed his songs Iranon stayed on, and with him Romnod, who liked the revelry of the town and wore in his dark hair roses and myrtle. Often at night Iranon sang to the revellers, but he was always as before, crowned only with the vine of the mountains and remembering the marble streets of Aira and the hyaline Nithra. In the frescoed halls of the Monarch did he sing, upon a crystal dais raised over a floor that was a mirror, and as he sang he brought pictures to his hearers till the floor seemed to reflect old, beautiful, and half-remembered things instead of the wine-reddened feasters who pelted him with roses. And the King bade him put away his tattered purple, and clothed him in satin and cloth-of-gold, with rings of green jade and bracelets of tinted ivory, and lodged him in a gilded and tapestried chamber on a bed of sweet carven wood with canopies and coverlets of flower-embroidered silk. Thus dwelt Iranon in Oonai, the city of lutes and dancing.

It is not known how long Iranon tarried in Oonai, but one day the King brought to the palace some wild whirling dancers from the Liranian desert, and dusky flute-players from Drinen in the East, and after that the revellers threw their roses not so much at Iranon as at the dancers and the flute-players. And day by day that Romnod who had been a small boy in granite Teloth grew coarser and redder with wine, till he dreamed less and less, and listened with less delight to the songs of Iranon. But though Iranon was sad he ceased not to sing, and at evening told again his dreams of Aira, the city of marble and beryl. Then one night the red and fattened Romnod snorted heavily amidst the poppied silks of his banquet-couch and died writhing, whilst Iranon, pale and slender, sang to himself in a far corner. And when Iranon had wept over the grave of Romnod and strown it with green budding branches, such as Romnod used to love, he put aside his silks and gauds and went forgotten out of Oonai the city of lutes and dancing clad only in the ragged purple in which he had come, and garlanded with fresh vines from the mountains.

Into the sunset wandered Iranon, seeking still for his native land and for men who would understand and cherish his songs and dreams. In all the cities of Cydathria and in the lands beyond the Bnazic desert gay-faced children laughed at his olden songs and tattered robe of purple; but Iranon stayed ever young, and wore wreaths upon his golden head whilst he sang of Aira, delight of the past and hope of the future.

So came he one night to the squalid cot of an antique shepherd, bent and dirty, who kept lean flocks on a stony slope above a quicksand marsh. To this man Iranon spoke, as to so many others:

Canst thou tell me where I may find Aira, the city of marble and beryl, where flows the hyaline Nithra and where the falls of the tiny Kra sing to verdant valleys and hills forested with yath trees? And the shepherd, hearing, looked long and strangely at Iranon, as if recalling something very far away in time, and noted each line of the stranger's face, and his golden hair, and his crown of vine-leaves. But he was old, and shook his head as he replied:

"O stranger, I have indeed heard the name of Aira,