The Shadow Out of Time | Page 6

correct according to the best psychological
principles. I especially valued the advice of such physicians as had
studied me during my possession by the other personality.
My first disturbances were not visual at all, but concerned the more
abstract matters which I have mentioned. There was, too, a feeling of
profound and inexplicable horror concerning myself. I developed a
queer fear of seeing my own form, as if my eyes would find it
something utterly alien and inconceivably abhorrent.
When I did glance down and behold the familiar human shape in quiet
grey or blue clothing, I always felt a curious relief, though in order to
gain this relief I had to conquer an infinite dread. I shunned mirrors as
much as possible, and was always shaved at the barber's.
It was a long time before I correlated any of these disappointed feelings
with the fleeting, visual impressions which began to develop. The first
such correlation had to do with the odd sensation of an external,
artificial restraint on my memory.
I felt that the snatches of sight I experienced had a profound and
terrible meaning, and a frightful connexion with myself, but that some
purposeful influence held me from grasping that meaning and that
connexion. Then came that queerness about the element of time, and
with it desperate efforts to place the fragmentary dream-glimpses in the
chronological and spatial pattern.
The glimpses themselves were at first merely strange rather than
horrible. I would seem to be in an enormous vaulted chamber whose
lofty stone aroinings were well-nigh lost in the shadows overhead. In

whatever time or place the scene might be, the principle of the arch was
known as fully and used as extensively as by the Romans.
There were colossal, round windows and high, arched doors, and
pedestals or tables each as tall as the height of an ordinary room. Vast
shelves of dark wood lined the walls, holding what seemed to be
volumes of immense size with strange hieroglyphs on their backs.
The exposed stonework held curious carvings, always in curvilinear
mathematical designs, and there were chiselled inscriptions in the same
characters that the huge books bore. The dark granite masonry was of a
monstrous megathic type, with lines of convex-topped blocks fitting the
concave-bottomed courses which rested upon them.
There were no chairs, but the tops of the vast pedestals were littered
with books, papers, and what seemed to be writing materials--oddly
figured jars of a purplish metal, and rods with stained tips. Tall as the
pedestals were, I seemed at times able to view them from above. On
some of them were great globes of luminous crystal serving as lamps,
and inexplicable machines formed of vitreous tubes and metal rods.
The windows were glazed, and latticed with stout-looking bars. Though
I dared not approach and peer out them, I could see from where I was
the waving tops of singular fern-like growths. The floor was of massive
octagonal flagstones, while rugs and hangings were entirely lacking.
Later I had visions of sweeping through Cyclopean corridors of stone,
and up and down gigantic inclined planes of the same monstrous
masonry. There were no stairs anywhere, nor was any passageway less
than thirty feet wide. Some of the structures through which I floated
must have towered in the sky for thousands of feet.
There were multiple levels of black vaults below, and never-opened
trapdoors, sealed down with metal bands and holding dim suggestions
of some special peril.
I seemed to be a prisoner, and horror hung broodingly over everything I
saw. I felt that the mocking curvilinear hieroglyphs on the walls would

blast my soul with their message were I not guarded by a merciful
ignorance.
Still later my dreams included vistas from the great round windows,
and from the titanic flat roof, with its curious gardens, wide barren area,
and high, scalloped parapet of stone, to which the topmost of the
inclined planes led.
There were, almost endless leagues of giant buildings, each in its
garden, and ranged along paved roads fully 200 feet wide. They
differed greatly in aspect, but few were less than 500 feet square or a
thousand feet high. Many seemed so limitless that they must have had a
frontage of several thousand feet, while some shot up to mountainous
altitudes in the grey, steamy heavens.
They seemed to be mainly of stone or concrete, and most of them
embodied the oddly curvilinear type of masonry noticeable in the
building that held me. Roofs were flat and garden-covered, and tended
to have scalloped parapets. Sometimes there were terraces and higher
levels, and wide, cleared spaces amidst the gardens. The great roads
held hints of motion, but in the earlier visions I could not resolve this
impression into details.
In certain places I beheld enormous