Kuranes of Celephaïs

  I gave up, at length, all care of things within the hotel, and became absorbed in contemplation of the scene without. I knew that there was not a single shred of evidence against me, barring the fact that I was the last one known to be alone with the professor. On other nights Kuranes walked up a damp stone spiral stairway endlessly, and came to a tower window overlooking a mighty plain and river lit by the full moon; and in the silent city that spread away from the river-bank he thought he beheld some feature or arrangement which he had known before.

And just as the lily is repeated in the lake, or the eyes of amaryllis in the mirror, so is the mere oral or written repetition of these forms, and sounds, and colors, and odors, and sentiments a duplicate source of the light.

But this mere repetition is not poetry. Retaining some presence of mind, I took the one offered me by Kuranes; placed it, unnoticed, over my own; left the apartment with a resolute scowl of defiance; and, next morning ere dawn of day, commenced a hurried journey from Avalon to the continent, in a perfect agony of horror and of shame.

Why, you fool, do you think I did this?

But whatever the reason, this old man and woman took pleasure in trapping and slaying every cat which came near to their hovel; and from some of the sounds heard after dark, many villagers fancied that the manner of slaying was exceedingly peculiar…

Why they did this I know not; save that many hate the voice of the cat in the night, and take it ill that cats should run stealthily about yards and gardens at twilight.

The showman paused and rose, crossing the room to the piece of burlap at which he had glanced so often. Professor and liquid, both, were gone, and in their place was a little pile of soft, white ashes. The very air from the south seemed to us redolent with death. Let us admit that the results are unbeautiful from our limited human standpoint.

Nothing remained but ashes!

The survival and return of some of the things is not impossible.

What of it?

Never, in all my life, had I witnessed so lavish, so wasteful an expenditure of the good things of life. This idea, having once seized upon my fancy, greatly excited it, and I lost myself forthwith in revery. I didn’t put it on display, because there were more important things to do for it.

The great problem is at length solved. We had here around us all the ordinary means of summer amusement; and what with rambling in the woods, sketching, boating, fishing, bathing, music, and books, we should have passed the time pleasantly enough, but for the fearful intelligence which reached us every morning from the populous city.

The traveler, having passed the tombs of the Caliphs, just beyond the gates of the city, proceeds to the southward, nearly at right angles to the road across the desert to Suez, and after having travelled some ten miles up a low barren valley, covered with sand, gravel, and sea shells, fresh as if the tide had retired but yesterday, crosses a low range of sandhills, which has for some distance run parallel to his path. His imagery was from the worlds which no mortals can see but with the vision of genius.

But the shadow was vague, and formless, and indefinite, and was the shadow neither of man nor of God–neither God of Greece, nor God of Chaldaea, nor any Egyptian God. Modern discoveries, indeed, in what may be termed ethical magnetism or magnetoesthetics, render it probable that the most natural, and, consequently, the truest and most intense of the human affections are those which arise in the heart as if by electric sympathy–in a word, that the brightest and most enduring of the psychal fetters are those which are riveted by a glance.

But my work is not hard, and I have always had plenty of time to plan things to do to Kuranes. A careful search soon brought to light the hidden spring. To sacrifice is merely to offer. The fact is that his precocity in vice was awful. At five months of age he used to get into such passions that he was unable to articulate. At six months, I caught him gnawing a pack of cards. At seven months he was in the constant habit of catching and kissing the female babies. I dreaded lest the continued pressure of misfortune had, at length, fairly unsettled the reason of my young friend.

The more he withdrew from the world about him, the more wonderful became his dreams; and it would have been quite futile to try to describe them on paper. You’ve laughed enough at my work, now it’s time for you to get some facts.

I suppose it actually is a standard manual, they use it at Columbia, Harvard, and the U. Retaining some presence of mind, I took the one offered me; placed it, unnoticed, over my own; left the apartment with a resolute scowl of defiance; and, next morning ere dawn of day, commenced a hurried journey from Oxford to the continent, in a perfect agony of horror and of shame. Why, you fool, do you think I did this?

That was, to perform the experiment upon a human being. I wondered what I would do when you were gone!

My next step was to look for the beast which had been the cause of so much wretchedness; for I had, at length, firmly resolved to put it to death. At another, I resolved to dig a grave for it in the floor of the cellar.

I have said that the whims of my friend were manifold, and that je les menageais:–for this phrase there is no English equivalent, something like “I watch over.” But Kuranes was inexorable, and began to lift the square of burlap. An irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm.

Many a weird tale I had listened to over that self-same table. Its character did not undergo any material change. I thought of you, Kuranes, thought of the wonderful, happy hours we had spent together the last few days. In snatches, we learn something of the wisdom which is of good, and more of the mere knowledge which is of evil. It is not human and does not pretend to be. God! When will I awaken?

It was alive now, and early villagers courtesied as the horsemen clattered down the street and turned off into the lane that ends in the abyss of dream. Among other miseries I was smothered to death between huge pillows, by demons of the most ghastly and ferocious aspect. The other dropped on all fours to run toward the car. It was then that I resolved to be even with more sooner or later, though I did not know how.

Endlessly down the horsemen floated, their chargers pawing the aether as if galloping over golden sands; and then the luminous vapors spread apart to reveal a greater brightness, the brightness of the city Celephaïs, and the sea-coast beyond, and the snowy peak overlooking the sea, and the gaily painted galleys that sail out of the harbor toward distant regions where the sea meets the sky.

Many minutes elapsed before any circumstance occurred tending to throw light upon the mystery. Kuranes was inexorable, and began to lift the square of burlap. Bending down, he took hold of one corner as he spoke again. “Orabona tells me you heard a dog screaming around here this afternoon…” Soon, however, I descended to details, and regarded with minute interest the innumerable varieties of figure, dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of countenance. I was interrupted by a low, but harsh and protracted grating sound which seemed to come at once from every corner of the room. There was a dead silence for about half a minute, during which the falling of a leaf, or of a feather, might have been heard. Some made it as short as three minutes–some as long as five.

The door was opened with difficulty. I never fancied any stationary object, such as a house, a mountain, or any thing of that kind; but windmills, ships, large birds, balloons, people on horseback, carriages driving furiously, and similar moving objects, presented themselves in endless succession. But let me show you what it looks like. I stood petrified with horror and rage. The apothecary had an idea that I was actually dead. When night came, I still wandered, hoping for awakening. For hour after hour Kuranes held his way with difficulty along the great thoroughfare; and I here walked close at his elbow through fear of losing sight of him.

At the most remote end of the crypt there appeared another less spacious. In Celephaïs, before ever the Burgesses forbade the killing of cats, there dwelt that old cotter and his wife who delighted to trap and slay the cats of their neighbors. For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. The villagers did not know how much to believe from so small a boy as Kuranes; and though they feared that the evil pair had charmed the cats to their death, they preferred not to chide the old cotter till they met him outside his dark and repellent yard.

In truth, much as the owners of cats hated these odd folk, they feared them more; and instead of berating them as brutal assassins, merely took care that no cherished pet or mouser should stray toward the remote hovel under the dark trees.

So hideous a thing had no right to exist, probably the mere contemplation of it, after it was done, had completed the unhinging of its maker’s mind and led him to worship it with brutal sacrifices. But the villagers did not discuss such things with the old man and his wife; because of the habitual expression on the withered faces of the two, and because their cottage was so small and so darkly hidden under spreading oaks at the back of a neglected yard. For the people of Celephaïs were simple, and knew not whence it is all cats first came.

Kuranes had previously entered that abyss only at night, and wondered what it would look like by day; so he watched anxiously as the column approached its brink. There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life.

In a dream Kuranes saw the city in the valley, and the sea-coast beyond, and the snowy peak overlooking the sea, and the gaily painted galleys that sail out of the harbor toward the distant regions where the sea meets the sky. In a dream it was also that he came by his name of Kuranes, for when awake he was called by another name. The abyss was now a seething chaos of roseate and cerulean splendor, and invisible voices sang exultantly as the knightly entourage plunged over the edge and floated gracefully down past glittering clouds and silvery coruscations.

One night he went flying over dark mountains where there were faint, lone campfires at great distances apart, and strange, shaggy herds with tinkling bells on the leaders; and in the wildest part of this hilly country, so remote that few men could ever have seen it, he found a hideously ancient wall or causeway of stone zigzagging along the ridges and valleys; too gigantic ever to have risen by human hands, and of such a length that neither end of it could be seen.

Where, where is the professor? I shivered as the coffin of glass came within my range of vision.

He calmly informed me that he had selected you as the subject of his experiment, and that I was to play the role of witness! Closer and closer he forced me to the glass coffin. He mixed enough of his horrible liquid to fill it almost to the brim. Then he told me that but one thing remained.

Do you know what that meant?

Closer and closer he forced me to the glass coffin. His hands reached for me. Most of the hair was burned off as by some pungent acid, and the exposed, bloodless skin was riddled by innumerable circular wounds or incisions. Still silently, he crossed directly to the casket, and, taking up a handful of the soft, white ashes, let them sift slowly through his fingers. The form of torture necessary to cause such results was past imagining. For a moment, as the ritual prescribed, he stayed in this abased position, and when he arose the dais was no longer empty. He has fits of trembling, in which he rants affrightedly about the way his soul will pass when he dies. A few moments more and my ashes would join those of the girl I had loved. I fainted. The professor must have feared some sort of intrusion, for the next I remember is waking inside the chest where you discovered me.

Professor and liquid, both, were gone, and in their place was a little pile of soft, white ashes. Better to die in the quest than to return empty-handed.

Last week I encountered the thing which decided me how to kill Kuranes. And yet, despite my love of the bizarre and the dangerous, and my longing to explore far reaches of little-known lands, I had been doomed to a life of prosaic, flat, uneventful business. This much I could only admit with regret. A queer legend, and I don’t know of any local insect deadly enough to account for it.

Perhaps it was natural for him to dream a new name; for he was the last of his family, and alone among the indifferent millions of Celephaïs, so there were not many to speak to him and remind him who he had been. His money and lands were gone, and he did not care for the ways of people about him, but preferred to dream and write of his dreams. What he wrote was laughed at by those to whom he showed it, so that after a time he kept his writings to himself, and finally ceased to write. I was astonished, too, at the vast extent of his reading; and, above all, I felt my soul enkindled within me by the wild fervor, and the vivid freshness of his imagination.

Each night he would eventually rise into the air, and far beneath, Kuranes could see strange lands and rivers and cities of surpassing beauty, spread indolently in the sunshine which seemed never to lessen or disappear. “You are to slay the monster-wizard Anathas, and replenish the treasury with its fabled hoard.” Through the cleverly concealed dishonesty of an aged but shrewd official, the treasury was exhausted.

Many vowed it had been seen from afar in the form of a giant black shadow peculiarly repugnant to human taste, while others alleged it was a mound of gelatinous substance that oozed hatefully in the manner of putrescent flesh. Still others claimed they had seen it as a monstrous insect with astonishing supernumerary appurtenances. On the head and below the proboscis the tentacles tended to be longer and thicker, and marked with spiral stripes, suggesting the traditional serpent-locks of medusa. To say that such a thing could have an expression seems paradoxical; yet the Professor felt that that triangle of bulging fish-eyes and that obliquely poised proboscis all bespoke a blend of hate, greed, and sheer cruelty incomprehensible to mankind because mixed with other emotions not of the world or this solar system. It needed the nourishment of sacrifice, for it was a God.

I’ve chanted the rites and made certain sacrifices, and last week the transition came. The sacrifice was, received and enjoyed! My throat grew parched and dry, everything went black before my eyes. I even prayed that he would kill me, too. One must not be too credulous. With one, last, superhuman effort, I raised the sacrificial scepter high above my head, and brought it down with crushing force upon the skull of my antagonist! Only the mangled head of the victim, lolling upside down at one side, revealed that it represented something once human. And on the far side rose the stairs of a metal dais, encrusted with jewels, and piled high with precious objects; the hoard of the wizard-beast. It was alive now. This, he soon perceived, was not readily to be found; for in all that glowing crypt there was only a slight crescent of flooring near the entrance which a mortal man might hope to walk on. Desperation, however, possessed him; so that at last he resolved to risk all and try transversing the gloomy pavement.

It was fully a week before the villagers noticed that no lights were appearing at dusk in the windows of the cottage under the trees. And when they had broken down the frail door they found only this: two cleanly picked human skeletons on the earthen floor, and a number of singular beetles crawling in the shadowy corners.

That damnable print had been all too faithful; yet it could not carry the full horror which lay in the gigantic actuality. Unconcernedly munching something the priests had given it was a large pudgy creature very hard to describe, and covered with short grey fur. Whence it had come in so brief a time only the priests might tell, but the suppliant knew that it was corn.

Fully ten feet high despite a shambling, crouching attitude expressive of infinite cosmic malignancy, a monstrosity of unbelievable horror was seen starting forward from a cyclopean ivory throne covered with grotesque carvings. The carvings on the gigantic masonry, high walls and peculiar vaulting overhead, were mainly symbolic, and involved both wholly unknown designs and certain hieroglyphs darkly cited in obscene legends.

Just as they galloped up the rising ground to the precipice a golden glare came somewhere out of the east and hid all the landscape in its effulgent draperies. Here the galley paused not at all, but floated easily in the blue of the sky among fleecy clouds tinted with rose. And Kuranes reigned thereafter over Ooth-Nargai and all the neighboring regions of dream, and held his court alternately in Celephaïs and in the cloud-fashioned Serannian.

SOURCES: Edgar Allan Poe, Howard Phillips Lovecraft.