The Shadow Out of Time | Page 7

dark cylindrical towers which
climbed far above any of the other structures. These appeared to be of a
totally unique nature and shewed signs of prodigious age and
dilapidation. They were built of a bizarre type of square-cut basalt
masonry, and tapered slightly toward their rounded tops. Nowhere in
any of them could the least traces of windows or other apertures save
huge doors be found. I noticed also some lower buildinigs--all
crumbling with the weathering of aeons--which resembled these dark,
cylindrical towers in basic architecture. Around all these aberrant piles
of square-cut masonry there hovered an inexplicable aura of menace
and concentrated fear, like that bred by the sealed trap-doors.
The omnipresent gardens were almost terrifying in their strangeness,
with bizarre and unfamiliar forms of vegetation nodding over broad
paths lined with curiously carven monoliths. Abnormally vast fern-like

growths predominated--some green, and some of a ghastly, fungoid
pallor.
Among them rose great spectral things resembling calamites, whose
bamboo-like trunks towered to fabulous heights. Then there were tufted
forms like fabulous cycads, and grotesque dark-green shrubs and trees
of coniferous aspect.
Flowers were small, colourless, and unrecognizable, blooming in
geometrical beds and at large among the greenery.
In a few of the terrace and roof-top gardens were larger and more
blossoms of most offensive contours and seeming to suggest artificial
breeding. Fungi of inconceivable size, outlines, and colours speckled
the scene in patterns bespeaking some unknown but well-established
horticultural tradition. In the larger gardens on the ground there seemed
to be some attempt to preserve the irregularities of Nature, but on the
roofs there was more selectiveness, and more evidences of the topiary
art.
The sides were almost always moist and cloudy, and sometimes I
would seem to witness tremendous rains. Once in a while, though, there
would be glimpses of the sun--which looked abnormally large--and of
the moon, whose markings held a touch of difference from the normal
that I could never quite fathom. When--very rarely--the night sky was
clear to any extent, I beheld constellations which were nearly beyond
recognition. Known outlines were sometimes approximated, but
seldom duplicated; and from the position of the few groups I could
recognize, I felt I must be in the earth's southern hemisphere, near the
Tropic of Capricorn.
The far horizon was always steamy and indistinct, but I could see that
great jungles of unknown tree-ferns, calamites, lepidodendra, and
sigillaria lay outside the city, their fantastic frondage waving
mockingly in the shifting vapours. Now and then there would be
suggestions of motion in the sky, but these my early visions never
resolved.

By the autumn of 1914 I began to have infrequent dreams of strange
floatings over the city and through the regions around it. I saw
interminable roads through forests of fearsome growths with mottled,
fluted, and banded trunks, and past other cities as strange as the one
which persistently haunted me.
I saw monstrous constructions of black or iridescent tone in glades and
clearings where perpetual twilight reigned, and traversed long
causeways over swamps so dark that I could tell but little of their moist,
towering vegetation.
Once I saw an area of countless miles strewn with age-blasted basaltic
ruins whose architecture had been like that of the few windowless,
round-topped towers in the haunting city.
And once I saw the sea--a boundless, steamy expanse beyond the
colossal stone piers of an enormous town of domes and arches. Great
shapeless sugggestions of shadow moved over it, and here and there its
surface was vexed ith anomalous spoutings.

Chapter 3
As I have said, it was not immediately that these wild visions began to
hold their terrifying quality. Certainly, many persons have dreamed
intrinsically stranger things--things compounded of unrelated scraps of
daily life, pictures,and reading, and arranged in fantastically novel
forms by the unchecked caprices of sleep.
For some time I accepted the visions as natural, even though I had
never before been an extravagant dreamer. Many of the vague
anomalies, I argued, must have come from trivial sources too numerous
to track down; while others seemed to reflect a common text book
knowledge of the plants and other conditions of the primitive world of
a hundred and fifty million years ago--the world of the Permian or
Triassic age.

In the course of some months, however, the element of terror did figure
with accumulating force. This was when the dreams began so
unfailingly to have the aspect of memories, and when my mind began
to link them with my growing abstract disturbances--the feeling of
mnemonic restraint, the curious impressions regarding time, and sense
of a loathsome exchange with my secondary personality of 1908-13,
and, considerably later, the inexplicable loathing of my own person.
As certain definite details began to enter the dreams, their horror
increased a thousandfold--until by October, 1915, I felt I