XXI. THE UNSPEAKABLE
I drank the golden mead and did those things
Of which I read within the ancient book.
The wind awoke. The elms and willows shook
Before the thunder of fantastic wings.
Down from the cosmic gulfs the monster fell,
The grim, stupendous, bat-winged Byakhee,
Come from the cloudy shores of Lake Hali,
Black-furred and iron-beaked, with eyes of Hell.
When I bestrode its back, the beast unfurled
Its vast and mighty wings. Across dark seas
Of space we flew. Amid the Hyades
We reached at last that bleak and mythic world
To men forbidden and by gods abhorred,
Carcosa, where the great Hastur is Lord.
XXII. CARCOSA
It was a scene that I had known before,
This barren, desolate, and drear expanse
Through which I wandered in a dream-like trance.
And there in somber splendor by the shore
Of dark Hali the nameless city stood:
Black domes and monolithic towers loom
Stark and gigantic in the midnight gloom
Like druid menhirs in a haunted wood.
These streets and walls I seem to half-recall,
Wandering blindly through the winding ways
Beneath a sky with strange black stars ablaze.
From some mad dream ... or was it dream at all?
Aye, here it was I heard Cassilda sing.
Where flap the yellow tatters of The King!
XXIII. THE CANDIDATE
Down the dark street of monoliths I passed.
The shambling, faceless figure of my Guide
A voiceless thing that beckoned at my side.
And to the dreaded Gate I came at last.
Before the silent Guardian I made
The black unhallowed Sacrifice, and spoke
Names at whose sound forgotten echoes woke.
The portals gaped. I entered unafraid.
Fate, or my stars, or some accursed pride
Had brought me here. Naked, I stood alone
And took the Vow before the Elder Throne—
He laughed, and drew His tattered mantle wide—
O do not seek to learn nor ever ask
What horror hides behind ... The Pallid Mask!
XXIV. THE DREAM-DAEMON
In dreams the Daemon comes upon the hour
Of full moon over Arkham. And I see
The opal shores of seas unknown to me
Where Babel-tall, bizarre, the cities tower—
Black and basalt metropoli of myth
Athrong with ziggurat and pyramid
That scale dark skies where ebon moons are hid.
Is it a dream of Yaddath or of Ith?
Or some outré and undimensioned sphere
Beyond the cosmos? I seek not to learn
Upon what occult world those ruins rear.
Remembering those books I ought to burn.
This much I know: the cities and the shore
Were somewhere, somehow, known to me before ....
XXV. DARK YUGGOTH
There lies a world beyond the seas of night.
Past the last planet, on the farthest Rim
Of curving space, where by some cosmic whim
It reels and wheels beyond the shores of light,
Lost in the howling dark. The eye of man
Can never glimpse its lone imperial place,
Deep in the blackest depths of elder space,
Nor astronomic glass may ever scan.
This is the planet that Alhazred knew,
Beyond the measured, known, and numbered nine;
Lost and alone where never sun doth shine.
Nor soft winds blow, nor skies are ever blue.
Far in the midnight deeps beyond our sight,
There the black planet rides the tides of night.
XXVI. THE SILVER KEY
Dreams hold no dread for me, for I alone
Went down the Seven Hundred Steps and passed
The Gate of Deeper Slumber, till at last
I went beyond the limits of the Known ...
I have seen many-columned Y’ha-nthlei,
And talked with serpent-boarded Byatis,
And, flown on Night Gaunts to the last abyss,
Have glimpsed the foetid pits where Abhoth lay.
All worlds lie open to me ... time and space
Reveal their darkest secrets to the one
Who dares the nighted realm of They Who Shun
The Light, and comes to gaze into His face.
What I have seen would drive you mad; yet I
Cannot go mad; I cannot even ... die.
XXVII. THE PEAKS BEYOND THROK
Where ominous the mould-encumbered walls
Of riven citadels old as Mnar
Rise in their ruin, from a distant star
I wandered; now, nightmare alone recalls
Those greenly-litten vales of writhing trees
Whose scaled and snaky limbs reached for my flesh;
And those black, hellish jungles beyond Kesh
Where I with ghouls conversed by foetid seas.
And there was one that shambled from the feast,
Whining with eagerness to scan my face,
A filth-encrusted, gaunt, hound-muzzled beast
Who sought to fold me in its vile embrace.
It spake those words at which I paled and fled.
"I was your Uncle, when I lived," it said.
XXVIII. SPAWN OF THE BLACK GOAT
They ride the night-wind when the Demon Star
Over the dim horizon burns bale-red.
Come from the charnel-pits of the undead,
Nadir of nightmare, where the shoggoths are.
Now, till the light of morning-litten east
Bids them return to the unbottomed slime,
Freely they roam the darkling earth a time
And from fresh grave abominably feast.
These are they spawn that nighted pits confine,
And shouldst thou sight them in the midnight gloom,
Then art thou lost! For not the Elder Sign
That seals the great Cthulhu in his tomb.
Canst save thee from the hunger-maddened wrath
Of the Begotten of Shub-Niggurath
XXIX. BEYOND
I have seen Yith, and Yuggoth on the Rim.
And black Carcosa in the Hyades;
And in the slimy depths of certain seas,
I have beheld the tomb where lieth Him
Who Was And Who Shall Be; and I have flown
Astride the shantak or the byakbee
Where Kadath in the Cold Waste terribly
Bears up her onyx-castled crest unknown.
I have conversed with seer and archimage
In glacier-buried, drear Commoriom,
And traced the maggot-eaten parchment page
Of tomes that Tsarhoggua carried from
Dim vast Cykranosh. I am no more sane,
For too much horror burns away the brain.
XXX. THE ACCURSED