Haggopian and Other Stories

Before long great clouds came drifting in from a direction I took to be the South, obscuring the moon until only the stars in the sky ahead gave any light by which to travel. Then, it seemed, the dune-cast shadows grew blacker and longer and an eerie sensation of not being alone waxed in me. I found myself casting sharp, nervous glances over my shoulder and shuddering to an extent not entirely warranted by the chill of the night. There came fixed in my mind an awful suspicion which I had to resolve one way or the other.

I hid behind a dune and waited, peering back the way I had come. Soon I saw a darting shadow moving swiftly over the sand, following my trail—and that shadow was endowed with twin points at its top and chuckled obscenely as it came. My hair stood on end as I saw the creature stop to study the ground, then lift its wide-mouthed face to the night sky. I heard again that weird, ululant cry of alert and I waited no longer.

In a passion of fear even greater than that I had known in the streets of Dylath-Leen I fled—racing like a madman over the night sands, gibbering and mumbling in my flight, scrambling and often falling head over heels down the sides of the steeper sandhills—until my head struck something hard in the shadow of a dune and I passed into the even deeper darkness of lower unconsciousness.

This time I was far from sorry when I leapt screaming awake at my home in Norden; and in the sanity of the waking world I recognised the fact that all those horrors of dream and the night had existed only in my slumbers; so that in a few days my second visit to Dylath-Leen was all but forgotten. The mind soon forgets that which it cannot bear to remember.

III

I was forty-three when next—when last—I saw Dylath-Leen. Not that my dream took me straight to the basalt city; rather I found myself first on the outskirts of Ulthar, the City of Cats! Ulthar is well named, for in that city an ancient law decrees that no man may kill a cat, and the streets crowd with many a variety of soft-furred feline. I stooped to pet a fat tom lazily sunning himself in the street, and an ancient shopkeeper seated outside his store beneath a great shade called out to me in a friendly, quavering voice:

“It is good, stranger—it is good when a stranger pets the cats of Ulthar! Have you journeyed far?”

“Far,” I affirmed, “from the waking world—but even there I stop to play when I see a cat. Tell me, Sir—can you direct me to the house of Litha, daughter of Bo-Kareth of Dylath-Leen?’

“Indeed, I know her well,” he nodded his old head, “‘for she is one of the few in Ulthar with as many years to count as I. She lives with her husband and family not far from here. Until some years ago her father—who was ancient beyond belief, second only in years to Atal, climber of Hatheg-Kla and priest and patriarch of Ulthar’s Temple of the Elder Ones—also lived at his daughter’s house. He came out of Dylath-Leen mazed and mumbling, and did not live long here in Ulthar. Now no man goes to Dylath-Leen.”

But the old man had soured at the thought of Dylath-Leen and did not wish to talk any longer. I took his directions and started off with mixed feelings along the street he had indicated; but only half-way up that street I cut off down a dusty alley and made for the Temple of the Elder Ones instead. It could do no good to see Litha now. What use to wake old memories?—if indeed she were capable of remembering anything of those Elysian days of her youth—and it was not as though she might help me solve my problem—that same problem of thirteen waking years ago: how to avenge the outraged peoples of Dylath-Leen; and how to rescue those of them—if any such existed—still enslaved. For there was still a feeling of yearning in me for the black-towered city and its peoples of yore. I remembered the friends I had known and my many walks through the high-walled streets and along the farm lanes of the outskirts. Yet even in Elysian S’eemla the knowledge that certain offensive black galleys moored in the docks had somehow always sufficed to dull my appetite for living, had even impaired the happiness I had known with dark-eyed Litha, in the garret of Bo-Kareth’s house, with the bats of night clustered thick and chittering beneath the sill without my window.

As quickly as the vision of Litha the girl came I put it out of my mind, striding out more purposefully for the Temple of the Elder Ones. If any man could help me in my bid for vengeance against the turbaned traders Atal, the Priest of the Temple, was that man. Atal had even climbed the forbidden peak, Hatheg-Kla, in the stony desert, and had come down again alive and sane! It was rumoured that in the temple he had keep of many incredible volumes of sorcery. His great knowledge of the darker mysteries was, in fact, my main reason for seeking his aid. I could hardly hope to engage the forces of the hell-traders with physical means alone.