The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath | Page 2

mindless Other gods
whose soul and messenger is the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.
Of these things was Carter warned by the priests Nasht and Kaman-Thah in the cavern of
flame, but still he resolved to find the gods on unknown Kadath in the cold waste,
wherever that might be, and to win from them the sight and remembrance and shelter of
the marvellous sunset city. He knew that his journey would be strange and long, and that
the Great Ones would be against it; but being old in the land of dream he counted on
many useful memories and devices to aid him. So asking a formal blessing of the priests
and thinking shrewdly on his course, he boldly descended the seven hundred steps to the
Gate of Deeper Slumber and set out through the Enchanted Wood.
In the tunnels of that twisted wood, whose low prodigious oaks twine groping boughs and
shine dim with the phosphorescence of strange fungi, dwell the furtive and secretive
Zoogs; who know many obscure secrets of the dream world and a few of the waking
world, since the wood at two places touches the lands of men, though it would be
disastrous to say where. Certain unexplained rumours, events, and vanishments occur
among men where the Zoogs have access, and it is well that they cannot travel far outside
the world of dreams. But over the nearer parts of the dream world they pass freely,
flitting small and brown and unseen and bearing back piquant tales to beguile the hours
around their hearths in the forest they love. Most of them live in burrows, but some
inhabit the trunks of the great trees; and although they live mostly on fungi it is muttered
that they have also a slight taste for meat, either physical or spiritual, for certainly many
dreamers have entered that wood who have not come out. Carter, however, had no fear;
for he was an old dreamer and had learnt their fluttering language and made many a
treaty with them; having found through their help the splendid city of Celephais in
Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills, where reigns half the year the great King
Kuranes, a man he had known by another name in life. Kuranes was the one soul who
had been to the star-gulls and returned free from madness.

Threading now the low phosphorescent aisles between those gigantic trunks, Carter made
fluttering sounds in the manner of the Zoogs, and listened now and then for responses. He
remembered one particular village of the creatures was in the centre of the wood, where a
circle of great mossy stones in what was once a cleaning tells of older and more terrible
dwellers long forgotten, and toward this spot he hastened. He traced his way by the
grotesque fungi, which always seem better nourished as one approaches the dread circle
where elder beings danced and sacrificed. Finally the great light of those thicker fungi
revealed a sinister green and grey vastness pushing up through the roof of the forest and
out of sight. This was the nearest of the great ring of stones, and Carter knew he was
close to the Zoog village. Renewing his fluttering sound, he waited patiently; and was at
last rewarded by an impression of many eyes watching him. It was the Zoogs, for one
sees their weird eyes long before one can discern their small, slippery brown outlines.
Out they swarmed, from hidden burrow and honeycombed tree, till the whole dim-litten
region was alive with them. Some of the wilder ones brushed Carter unpleasantly, and
one even nipped loathsomely at his ear; but these lawless spirits were soon restrained by
their elders. The Council of Sages, recognizing the visitor, offered a gourd of fermented
sap from a haunted tree unlike the others, which had grown from a seed dropt down by
someone on the moon; and as Carter drank it ceremoniously a very strange colloquy
began. The Zoogs did not, unfortunately, know where the peak of Kadath lies, nor could
they even say whether the cold waste is in our dream world or in another. Rumours of the
Great Ones came equally from all points; and one might only say that they were likelier
to be seen on high mountain peaks than in valleys, since on such peaks they dance
reminiscently when the moon is above and the clouds beneath.
Then one very ancient Zoog recalled a thing unheard-of by the others; and said that in
Ulthar, beyond the River Skai, there still lingered the last copy of those inconceivably old
Pnakotic Manuscripts made by waking men in forgotten boreal kingdoms and borne into
the land of dreams when the hairy cannibal Gnophkehs overcame many-templed Olathoe
and slew all the heroes of the land of Lomar. Those manuscripts