Short Fiction - H. P. Lovecraft (i can read book club .TXT) 📗

the features of that underground nightmare were merely the dreams of one long coma which began with the shock of my descent into that abyss and ended with the healing balm of the outer air and of the rising sun which found me stretched on the sands of Giza before the sardonic and dawn-flushed face of the Great Sphinx.

I prefer to believe this latter explanation as much as I can, hence was glad when the police told me that the barrier to Khephren’s gateway temple had been found unfastened, and that a sizable rift to the surface did actually exist in one corner of the still buried part. I was glad, too, when the doctors pronounced my wounds only those to be expected from my seizure, blinding, lowering, struggling with bonds, falling some distance⁠—perhaps into a depression in the temple’s inner gallery⁠—dragging myself to the outer barrier and escaping from it, and experiences like that⁠ ⁠… a very soothing diagnosis. And yet I know that there must be more than appears on the surface. That extreme descent is too vivid a memory to be dismissed⁠—and it is odd that no one has ever been able to find a man answering the description of my guide Abdul Reis el Drogman⁠—the tomb-throated guide who looked and smiled like King Khephren.

I have digressed from my connected narrative⁠—perhaps in the vain hope of evading the telling of that final incident; that incident which of all is most certainly an hallucination. But I promised to relate it, and do not break promises. When I recovered⁠—or seemed to recover⁠—my senses after that fall down the black stone stairs, I was quite as alone and in darkness as before. The windy stench, bad enough before, was now fiendish; yet I had acquired enough familiarity by this time to bear it stoically. Dazedly I began to crawl away from the place whence the putrid wind came, and with my bleeding hands felt the colossal blocks of a mighty pavement. Once my head struck against a hard object, and when I felt of it I learned that it was the base of a column⁠—a column of unbelievable immensity⁠—whose surface was covered with gigantic chiseled hieroglyphics very perceptible to my touch. Crawling on, I encountered other titan columns at incomprehensible distances apart; when suddenly my attention was captured by the realization of something which must have been impinging on my subconscious hearing long before the conscious sense was aware of it.

From some still lower chasm in earth’s bowels were proceeding certain sounds, measured and definite, and like nothing I had ever heard before. That they were very ancient and distinctly ceremonial, I felt almost intuitively; and much reading in Egyptology led me to associate them with the flute, the sambuke, the sistrum, and the tympanum. In their rhythmic piping, droning, rattling, and beating, I felt an element of terror beyond all the known terrors of earth⁠—a terror peculiarly dissociated from personal fear, and taking the form of a sort of objective pity for our planet, that it should hold within its depths such horrors as must lie behind these aegipanic cacophonies. The sounds increased in volume, and I felt that they were approaching. Then⁠—and may all the gods of all pantheons unite to keep the like from my ears again⁠—I began to hear, faintly and afar off, the morbid and millennial tramping of the marching things.

It was hideous that footfalls so dissimilar should move in such perfect rhythm. The training of unhallowed thousands of years must lie behind that march of earth’s inmost monstrosities⁠ ⁠… padding, clicking, walking, stalking, rumbling, lumbering, crawling⁠ ⁠… and all to the abhorrent discords of those mocking instruments. And then⁠ ⁠… God keep the memory of those Arab legends out of my head! The mummies without souls⁠ ⁠… the meeting place of the wandering kas⁠ ⁠… the hordes of the devil-cursed pharaonic dead of forty centuries⁠ ⁠… the composite mummies led through the uttermost onyx voids by King Khephren and his ghoul-queen Nitocris⁠ ⁠…

The tramping drew nearer⁠—Heaven save me from the sound of those feet and paws and hooves and pads and talons as it commenced to acquire detail! Down limitless reaches of sunless pavement a spark of light flickered in the malodorous wind, and I drew behind the enormous circumference of a Cyclopic column that I might escape for a while the horror that was stalking million-footed toward me through gigantic hypostyles of inhuman dread and phobic antiquity. The flickers increased, and the tramping and dissonant rhythm grew sickeningly loud. In the quivering orange light there stood faintly forth a scene of such stony awe that I gasped from a sheer wonder that conquered even fear and repulsion. Bases of columns whose middles were higher than human sight⁠ ⁠… mere bases of things that must each dwarf the Eiffel Tower to insignificance⁠ ⁠… hieroglyphics carved by unthinkable hands in caverns where daylight can be only a remote legend⁠ ⁠…

I would not look at the marching things. That I desperately resolved as I heard their creaking joints and nitrous wheezing above the dead music and the dead tramping. It was merciful that they did not speak⁠ ⁠… but God! their crazy torches began to cast shadows on the surface of those stupendous columns. Heaven take it away! Hippopotami should not have human hands and carry torches⁠ ⁠… men should not have the heads of crocodiles⁠ ⁠…

I tried to turn away, but the shadows and the sounds and the stench were everywhere. Then I remembered something I used to do in half-conscious nightmares as a boy, and began to repeat to myself, “This is a dream! This is a dream!” But it was of no use, and I could only shut my eyes and pray⁠ ⁠… at least, that is what I think I did, for one is never sure in visions⁠—and I know this can have been nothing more. I wondered whether I should ever reach the world again, and at times would furtively open my eyes to see if I could discern any feature of the place