The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath | Page 9

the
toad-things whether it were light or dark. The odour of the place was intolerable, and
when Carter was locked into a chamber and left alone he scarcely had strength to crawl
around and ascertain its form and dimensions. It was circular, and about twenty feet
across.
From then on time ceased to exist. At intervals food was pushed in, but Carter would not
touch it. What his fate would be, he did not know; but he felt that he was held for the
coming of that frightful soul and messenger of infinity's Other Gods, the crawling chaos
Nyarlathotep. Finally, after an unguessed span of hours or days, the great stone door
swung wide again, and Carter was shoved down the stairs and out into the red-litten
streets of that fearsome city. It was night on the moon, and all through the town were
stationed slaves bearing torches.
In a detestable square a sort of procession was formed; ten of the toad-things and
twenty-four almost human torch-bearers, eleven on either side, and one each before and
behind. Carter was placed in the middle of the line; five toad-things ahead and five
behind, and one almost-human torch-bearer on either side of him. Certain of the
toad-things produced disgustingly carven flutes of ivory and made loathsome sounds. To
that hellish piping the column advanced out of the tiled streets and into nighted plains of
obscene fungi, soon commencing to climb one of the lower and more gradual hills that
lay behind the city. That on some frightful slope or blasphemous plateau the crawling
chaos waited, Carter could not doubt; and he wished that the suspense might soon be over.
The whining of those impious flutes was shocking, and he would have given worlds for
some even half-normal sound; but these toad-things had no voices, and the slaves did not
talk.
Then through that star-specked darkness there did come a normal sound. It rolled from
the higher hills, and from all the jagged peaks around it was caught up and echoed in a
swelling pandaemoniac chorus. It was the midnight yell of the cat, and Carter knew at
last that the old village folk were right when they made low guesses about the cryptical
realms which are known only to cats, and to which the elders among cats repair by stealth
nocturnally, springing from high housetops. Verily, it is to the moon's dark side that they
go to leap and gambol on the hills and converse with ancient shadows, and here amidst
that column of foetid things Carter heard their homely, friendly cry, and thought of the
steep roofs and warm hearths and little lighted windows of home.
Now much of the speech of cats was known to Randolph Carter, and in this far terrible
place he uttered the cry that was suitable. But that he need not have done, for even as his

lips opened he heard the chorus wax and draw nearer, and saw swift shadows against the
stars as small graceful shapes leaped from hill to hill in gathering legions. The call of the
clan had been given, and before the foul procession had time even to be frightened a
cloud of smothering fur and a phalanx of murderous claws were tidally and
tempestuously upon it. The flutes stopped, and there were shrieks in the night. Dying
almost-humans screamed, and cats spit and yowled and roared, but the toad-things made
never a sound as their stinking green ichor oozed fatally upon that porous earth with the
obscene fungi.
It was a stupendous sight while the torches lasted, and Carter had never before seen so
many cats. Black, grey, and white; yellow, tiger, and mixed; common, Persian, and Marix;
Thibetan, Angora, and Egyptian; all were there in the fury of battle, and there hovered
over them some trace of that profound and inviolate sanctity which made their goddess
great in the temples of Bubastis. They would leap seven strong at the throat of an
almost-human or the pink tentacled snout of a toad-thing and drag it down savagely to the
fungous plain, where myriads of their fellows would surge over it and into it with the
frenzied claws and teeth of a divine battle-fury. Carter had seized a torch from a stricken
slave, but was soon overborne by the surging waves of his loyal defenders. Then he lay in
the utter blackness hearing the clangour of war and the shouts of the victors, and feeling
the soft paws of his friends as they rushed to and fro over him in the fray.
At last awe and exhaustion closed his eyes, and when he opened them again it was upon a
strange scene. The great shining disc of the earth, thirteen times greater than that of the
moon as we see it, had