The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath | Page 8

meaning which did not invite solution. And what the structure and proportions of
the olden worshippers could have been, Carter steadily refused to conjecture.
When the ship rounded the edge, and sailed over those lands unseen by man, there
appeared in the queer landscape certain signs of life, and Carter saw many low, broad,

round cottages in fields of grotesque whitish fungi. He noticed that these cottages had no
windows, and thought that their shape suggested the huts of Esquimaux. Then he
glimpsed the oily waves of a sluggish sea, and knew that the voyage was once more to be
by water - or at least through some liquid. The galley struck the surface with a peculiar
sound, and the odd elastic way the waves received it was very perplexing to Carter.
They now slid along at great speed, once passing and hailing another galley of kindred
form, but generally seeing nothing but that curious sea and a sky that was black and
star-strewn even though the sun shone scorchingly in it.
There presently rose ahead the jagged hills of a leprous-looking coast, and Carter saw the
thick unpleasant grey towers of a city. The way they leaned and bent, the manner in
which they were clustered, and the fact that they had no windows at all, was very
disturbing to the prisoner; and he bitterly mourned the folly which had made him sip the
curious wine of that merchant with the humped turban. As the coast drew nearer, and the
hideous stench of that city grew stronger, he saw upon the jagged hills many forests,
some of whose trees he recognized as akin to that solitary moon-tree in the enchanted
wood of earth, from whose sap the small brown Zoogs ferment their curious wine.
Carter could now distinguish moving figures on the noisome wharves ahead, and the
better he saw them the worse he began to fear and detest them. For they were not men at
all, or even approximately men, but great greyish-white slippery things which could
expand and contract at will, and whose principal shape - though it often changed - was
that of a sort of toad without any eyes, but with a curious vibrating mass of short pink
tentacles on the end of its blunt, vague snout. These objects were waddling busily about
the wharves, moving bales and crates and boxes with preternatural strength, and now and
then hopping on or off some anchored galley with long oars in their forepaws. And now
and then one would appear driving a herd of clumping slaves, which indeed were
approximate human beings with wide mouths like those merchants who traded in
Dylath-Leen; only these herds, being without turbans or shoes or clothing, did not seem
so very human after all. Some of the slaves - the fatter ones, whom a sort of overseer
would pinch experimentally - were unloaded from ships and nailed in crates which
workers pushed into the low warehouses or loaded on great lumbering vans.
Once a van was hitched and driven off, and the, fabulous thing which drew it was such
that Carter gasped, even after having seen the other monstrosities of that hateful place.
Now and then a small herd of slaves dressed and turbaned like the dark merchants would
be driven aboard a galley, followed by a great crew of the slippery toad-things as officers,
navigators, and rowers. And Carter saw that the almost-human creatures were reserved
for the more ignominious kinds of servitude which required no strength, such as steering
and cooking, fetching and carrying, and bargaining with men on the earth or other planets
where they traded. These creatures must have been convenient on earth, for they were
truly not unlike men when dressed and carefully shod and turbaned, and could haggle in
the shops of men without embarrassment or curious explanations. But most of them,
unless lean or ill-favoured, were unclothed and packed in crates and drawn off in
lumbering lorries by fabulous things. Occasionally other beings were unloaded and crated;
some very like these semi-humans, some not so similar, and some not similar at all. And

he wondered if any of the poor stout black men of Parg were left to be unloaded and
crated and shipped inland in those obnoxious drays.
When the galley landed at a greasy-looking quay of spongy rock a nightmare horde of
toad-things wiggled out of the hatches, and two of them seized Carter and dragged him
ashore. The smell and aspect of that city are beyond telling, and Carter held only
scattered images of the tiled streets and black doorways and endless precipices of grey
vertical walls without windows. At length he was dragged within a low doorway and
made to climb infinite steps in pitch blackness. It was, apparently, all one to