An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

The narrator, an Englishman who because of nameless “calamities” has migrated from his native land (after spending many years in India) to work as a common laborer in America, tells the story of an incident occurring in 1894 at the Norton Mine (presumably somewhere in the Southwest). The narrator becomes friendly with a Mexican peon named Juan Romero, who exhibits a strange fascination for the Hindu ring he owns. One day dynamite is used to blast a cavity for further mining; but the result is the opening up of an immeasurable cavern that cannot be sounded. That night a storm gathers, but beyond the roar of the wind and rain there is another sound, which the frightened Romero can only deem “ el ritmo de la tierra—THAT THROB DOWN IN THE GROUND!” The narrator also hears it—some huge rhythmical pounding in the newly opened abyss. Possessed by some fatality, they both descend down ladders into the cavern; Romero then dashes off ahead of the narrator, only to plunge into a further abyss, screaming hideously. The narrator cautiously peers over the edge, sees something— “but God! I dare not tell you what I saw!”—and flees back to the camp. That morning he and Romero are both found in their bunks, Romero dead. Other miners swear that neither of them left their cabin that night. The narrator later discovers that his Hindu ring is missing. There is some suggestion that Romero is not in fact Mexican but is descended from the Aztecs, a suggestion enhanced by his crying the name “Huitzilopotchli”as he descends into the abyss. The narrator remarks of this word: “Later I definitely placed that word in the works of a great historian— and shuddered when the association came to me.” HPL explicitly footnotes Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico,which contains a vivid passage on the Aztec god and the sacrifices practiced in his name. HPL, clearly unsatisfied with this story, refused to allow it to be published in his lifetime, even in the amateur press. He disavowed it relatively early in life, and it fails to appear on most lists of his stories; he does not even seem to have shown it to anyone until 1932, when R.H.Barlow persuaded HPL to send him the manu

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script so that he could prepare a typescript of it. Aside from the revisions “The Curse of Yig” and “The Mound,” it is HPL’s only tale set in the Southwest.

“Trap, The.”

Short story (8,570 words); written in collaboration with Henry S. Whitehead, probably in the summer of 1931. First published in Strange Tales(March 1932); first collected in Uncollected Prose and Poetry II(1980); corrected text in HM.

Robert Grandison, one of the pupils at the Connecticut academy where Gerald Canevin teaches, comes upon an anomalous mirror in Canevin’s house that sucks hapless individuals into a strange realm where colors are altered and where objects, both animate and inanimate, have a sort of intangible, dreamlike existence. The mirror had been devised by a seventeenth-century Danish glassblower named Axel Holm who yearned for immortality and found it, after a fashion, in his mirrorworld, since “‘life’ in the sense of form and consciousness would go on virtually forever” so long as the mirror itself was not destroyed. Grandison manages to bring his plight to Canevin’s attention, and Canevin contrives to release Grandison from his “trap.”

HPL and Whitehead probably worked on the tale, or at least discussed it, during HPL’s three-week visit to Whitehead’s home in Dunedin, Fla., in May– June 1931. He says in one letter that he “revised & totally recast” the tale (HPL to August Derleth, December 23, 1931; ms., SHSW) and in another that he “supplied] the central part myself (HPL to R.H.Barlow, February 25, 1932; ms., JHL). Judging purely from the prose style, it can be conjectured that the latter three-fourths of the story is HPL’s. Nevertheless, HPL clearly did not wish to share a byline with Whitehead for the story, maintaining that his help was simply a courtesy. The story appears in the second of Whitehead’s two posthumously published collections of tales, West India Lights(1946); HPL’s contribution to the story only came to light in the late 1970s.

Trask, Dr.

In “The Rats in the Walls,” the anthropologist who attempts to classify the human and subhuman bones found beneath Exham Priory.

Travels, Lovecraft’s.