The Other Gods | Page 3

heard in the dark a
loathsome laughing, mixed with such a cry as no man else ever heard save in the
Phlegethon of unrelatable nightmares; a cry wherein reverberated the horror and anguish
of a haunted lifetime packed into one atrocious moment:
"The other gods! The other gods! The gods of the outer hells that guard the feeble gods of
earth!... Look away... Go back... Do not see! Do not see! The vengeance of the infinite
abysses... That cursed, that damnable pit... Merciful gods of earth, I am falling into the
sky!"
And as Atal shut his eyes and stopped his ears and tried to hump downward against the
frightful pull from unknown heights, there resounded on Hatheg-Kla that terrible peal of
thunder which awaked the good cotters of the plains and the honest burgesses of Hatheg,
Nir and Ulthar, and caused them to behold through the clouds that strange eclipse of the

moon that no book ever predicted. And when the moon came out at last Atal was safe on
the lower snows of the mountain without sight of earth's gods, or of the other gods.
Now it is told in the moldy Pnakotic Manuscripts that Sansu found naught but wordless
ice and rock when he did climb Hatheg-Kla in the youth of the world. Yet when the men
of Ulthar and Nir and Hatheg crushed their fears and scaled that haunted steep by day in
search of Barzai the Wise, they found graven in the naked stone of the summit a curious
and cyclopean symbol fifty cubits wide, as if the rock had been riven by some titanic
chisel. And the symbol was like to one that learned men have discerned in those frightful
parts of the Pnakotic Manuscripts which were too ancient to be read. This they found.
Barzai the Wise they never found, nor could the holy priest Atal ever be persuaded to
pray for his soul's repose. Moreover, to this day the people of Ulthar and Nir and Hatheg
fear eclipses, and pray by night when pale vapors hide the mountain-top and the moon.
And above the mists on Hatheg-Kla, earth's gods sometimes dance reminiscently; for
they know they are safe, and love to come from unknown Kadath in ships of clouds and
play in the olden way, as they did when earth was new and men not given to the climbing
of inaccessible places. 2 RTEXTR*ch

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