The Crawling Chaos

The Crawling Chaos
by H.P. Lovecraft and Elizabeth Berkeley

Of the pleasures and pains of opium much has been written. The ecstasies and
horrors of De Quincey and the paradis artificiels of Baudelaire are preserved
and interpreted with an art which makes them immortal, and the world knows well
the beauty, the terror and the mystery of those obscure realms into which the
inspired dreamer is transported. But much as has been told, no man has yet dared
intimate the nature of the phantasms thus unfolded to the mind, or hint at the
direction of the unheard-of roads along whose ornate and exotic course the
partaker of the drug is so irresistibly borne. De Quincey was drawn back into
Asia, that teeming land of nebulous shadows whose hideous antiquity is so
impressive that "the vast age of the race and name overpowers the sense of youth
in the individual," but farther than that he dared not go. Those who have gone
farther seldom returned, and even when they have, they have been either silent
or quite mad. I took opium but once -- in the year of the plague, when doctors
sought to deaden the agonies they could not cure. There was an overdose -- my
physician was worn out with horror and exertion -- and I travelled very far
indeed. In the end I returned and lived, but my nights are filled with strange
memories, nor have I ever permitted a doctor to give me opium again.
The pain and pounding in my head had been quite unendurable when the drug
was administered, Of the future I had no heed; to escape, whether by cure,
unconsciousness, or death, was all that concerned me. I was partly delirious, so
that it is hard to place the exact moment of transition, but I think the effect
must have begun shortly before the pounding ceased to be painful. As I have
said, there was an overdose; so my reactions were probably far from normal. The
sensation of falling, curiously dissociated from the idea of gravity or
direction, was paramount; though there was subsidiary impression of unseen
throngs in incalculable profusion, throngs of infinitely di-verse nature, but
all more or less related to me. Sometimes it seemed less as though I were
falling, than as though the universe or the ages were falling past me. Suddenly
my pain ceased, and I began to associate the pounding with an external rather
than internal force. The falling had ceased also, giving place to a sensation of
uneasy, temporary rest; and when I listened closely, I fancied the pounding was
that of the vast, inscrutable sea as its sinister, colossal breakers lacerated
some desolate shore after a storm of titanic magnitude. Then I opened my eyes.
For a moment my surroundings seemed confused, like a projected image
hopelessly out of focus, but gradually I realised my solitary presence in a
strange and beautiful room lighted by many windows. Of the exact nature of the
apartment I could form no idea, for my thoughts were still far from settled, but
I noticed van-coloured rugs and draperies, elaborately fashioned tables, chairs,
ottomans, and divans, and delicate vases and ornaments which conveyed a
suggestion of the exotic without being actually alien. These things I noticed,
yet they were not long uppermost in my mind. Slowly but inexorably crawling upon
my consciousness and rising above every other impression, came a dizzying fear
of the unknown; a fear all the greater because I could not analyse it, and
seeming to concern a stealthily approaching menace; not death, but some
nameless, unheard-of thing inexpressibly more ghastly and abhorrent.
Presently I realised that the direct symbol and excitant of my fear was the
hideous pounding whose incessant reverberations throbbed maddeningly against my
exhausted brain. It seemed to come from a point outside and below the edifice in
which I stood, and to associate itself with the most terrifying mental images. I
felt that some horrible scene or object lurked beyond the silk-hung walls, and
shrank from glancing through the arched, latticed windows that opened so
bewilderingly on every hand. Perceiving shutters attached to these windows, I
closed them all, averting my eyes from the exterior as I did so. Then, employing
a flint and steel which I found on one of the small tables, I lit the many
candles reposing about the walls in arabesque sconces. The added sense of
security brought by closed shutters and artificial light calmed my nerves to
some degree, but I could not shut out the monotonous pounding. Now that I was
calmer, the sound became as fascinating as it was fearful, and I felt a
contradictory desire to seek out its source despite my still powerful shrinking.
Opening a portiere at the side of the room nearest the pounding, I beheld a
small and richly draped corridor ending in a cavern door and large oriel window.
To this window I was irresistibly drawn, though my ill-defined apprehensions
seemed almost equally bent on holding me back. As I approached it I could see a
chaotic whirl of waters in the distance. Then, as I attained it and glanced out
on all sides, the stupendous picture of my surroundings burst upon me with full
and devastating force.
I beheld such a sight as I had never beheld before, and which no living
person can have seen save in the delirium of fever or the inferno of opium. The
building stood on a narrow point of land -- or what was now a narrow point of
land -- fully three hundred feet above what must lately have been a seething
vortex of mad waters. On either side of the house there fell a newly washed-out
precipice of red earth, whilst ahead of me the hideous waves were still rolling
in frightfully, eating away the land with ghastly monotony and deliberation. Out
a mile or more there rose and fell menacing breakers at least fifty feet in
height, and on the far horizon ghoulish black clouds of grotesque contour were
resting and brooding like unwholesome vultures. The waves were dark and
purplish, almost black, and clutched at the yielding red mud of the bank as if
with uncouth, greedy hands. I could not but feel that some noxious marine mind
had declared a war of extermination upon all the solid ground, perhaps abetted
by the angry sky.
Recovering at length from the stupor into which this unnatural spectacle had
thrown me, I realized that my actual physical danger was acute. Even whilst I
gazed, the bank had lost many feet, and it could not be long before the house
would fall undermined into the awful pit of lashing waves. Accordingly I
hastened to the opposite side of the edifice, and finding a door, emerged at
once, locking it after me with a curious key which had hung inside. I now beheld
more of the strange region about me, and marked a singular division which seemed
to exist in the hostile ocean and firmament. On each side of the jutting
promontory different conditions held sway. At my left as I faced inland was a
gently heaving sea with great green waves rolling peacefully in under a brightly
shining sun. Something about that sun’s nature and position made me shudder, but
I could not then tell, and cannot tell now, what it was. At my right also was
the sea, but it was blue, calm, and only gently undulating, while the sky above
it was darker and the washed-out bank more nearly white than reddish.
I now turned my attention to the land, and found occasion for fresh
surprise; for the vegetation resembled nothing I had ever seen or read about. It
was apparently tropical or at least sub-tropical -- a conclusion borne out by
the intense heat of the air. Sometimes I thought I could trace strange analogies
with the flora of my native land, fancying that the well-known plants and shrubs
might assume such forms under a radical change of climate; but the gigantic and
omnipresent palm trees were plainly foreign. The house I had just left was very
small -- hardly more than a cottage -- but its material was evidently marble,
and its architecture was weird and composite, involving a quaint fusion of
Western and Eastern forms. At the corners were Corinthian columns, but the red
tile roof was like that of a Chinese pagoda. From the door inland there
stretched a path of singularly white sand, about four feet wide, and lined on
either side with stately palms and unidentifiable flowering shrubs and plants.
It lay toward the side of the promontory where the sea was blue and the bank
rather whitish. Down this path I felt impelled to flee, as if pursued by some
malignant spirit from the pounding ocean. At first it was slightly uphill, then
I reached a gentle crest. Behind me I saw the scene I had left; the entire point
with the cottage and the black water, with the green sea on one side and the
blue sea on the other, and a curse unnamed and unnamable lowering over all. I
never saw it again, and often wonder.... After this last look I strode ahead and
surveyed the inland panorama before me.
The path, as I have intimated, ran along the right-hand shore as one went
inland. Ahead and to the left I now viewed a magnificent valley comprising
thousands of acres, and covered with a swaying growth of tropical grass higher
than my head. Almost at the limit of vision was a colossal palm tree which
seemed to fascinate and beckon me. By this time wonder and’ escape from the
imperilled peninsula had largely dissipated my fear, but as I paused and sank
fatigued to the path, idiy digging with my hands into the warm, whitish-golden
sand, a new and acute sense of danger seized me. Some terror in the swishing
tall grass seemed added to that of the diabolically pounding sea, and I started
up crying aloud and disjointedly, "Tiger? Tiger? Is it Tiger? Beast? Beast? Is
it a Beast that I am afraid of?" My mind wandered back to an ancient and
classical story of tigers which I had read; I strove to recall the author, but
had difficulty. Then in the midst of my fear I remembered that the tale was by
Rudyard Kipling; nor did the grotesqueness of deeming him an ancient author
occur to me; I wished for the volume containing this story, and had almost
started back toward the doomed cottage to procure it when my better sense and
the lure of the palm prevented me.
Whether or not I could have resisted the backward beckoning without the
counter-fascination of the vast palm tree, I do not know. This attraction was
now dominant, and I left the path and crawled on hands and knees down the
valley’s slope despite my fear of the grass and of the serpents it might
contain. I resolved to fight for life and reason as long as possible against all
menaces of sea or land, though I sometimes feared defeat as the maddening swish
of the uncanny grasses joined the still audible and irritating pounding of the
distant breakers. I would frequently pause and put my hands to my ears for
relief, but could never quite shut out the detestable sound. It was, as it
seemed to me, only after ages that I finally dragged myself to the beckoning
palm tree and lay quiet beneath its protecting shade.
There now ensued a series of incidents which transported me to the opposite
extremes of ecstasy and horror; incidents which I tremble to recall and dare not
seek to interpret. No sooner had I crawled beneath the overhanging foliage of
the palm, than there dropped from its branches a young child of such beauty as I
never beheld before. Though ragged and dusty, this being bore the features of a
faun or demigod, and seemed almost to diffuse a radiance in the dense shadow of
the tree. It smiled and extended its hand, but before I could arise and speak I
heard in the upper air the exquisite melody of singing; notes high and low blent
with a sublime and ethereal harmoniousness. The sun had by this time sunk below
the horizon, and in the twilight I saw an aureole of lambent light encircled the
child’s head. Then in a tone of silver it addressed me: “It is the end. They
have come down through the gloaming from the stars. Now all is over, and beyond
the Arinurian streams we shall dwell blissfully in Teloe.” As the child spoke, I
beheld a soft radiance through the leaves of the palm tree, and rising, greeted
a pair whom I knew to be the chief singers among those I had heard. A god and
goddess they must have been, for such beauty is not mortal; and they took my
hands, saying, “Come, child, you have heard the voices, and all is well. In
Teloe beyond the Milky Way and the Arinurian streams are cities all of amber and
chalcedony. And upon their domes of many facets glisten the images of strange
and beautiful stars. Under the ivory bridges of Teloe flow rivers of liquid gold
bearing pleasure-barges bound for blossomy Cytharion of the Seven Suns. And in
Teloe and Cytharion abide only youth, beauty, and pleasure, nor are any sounds
heard, save of laughter, song, and the lute. Only the gods dwell in Teloe of the
golden rivers, but among them shalt thou dwell.”
As I listened, enchanted, I suddenly became aware of a change in my
surroundings. The palm tree, so lately overshadowing my exhausted form, was now
some distance to my left and considerably below me. I was obviously floating in
the atmosphere; companioned not only by the strange child and the radiant pair,
but by a constantly increasing throng of half-luminous, vine-crowned youths and
maidens with wind-blown hair and joyful countenance. We slowly ascended
together, as if borne on a fragrant breeze which blew not from the earth but
from the golden nebulae, and the child whispered in my ear that I must look
always upward to the pathways of light, and never backward to the sphere I had
just left. The youths and maidens now chanted mellifluous choriambics to the
accompaniment of lutes, and I felt enveloped in a peace and happiness more
profound than any I had in life imagined, when the intrusion of a single sound
altered my destiny and shattered my soul. Through the ravishing strains of the
singers and the lutanists, as if in mocking, daemoniac concord, throbbed from
gulfs below the damnable, the detestable pounding of that hideous ocean. As
those black breakers beat their message into my ears I forgot the words of the
child and looked back, down upon the doomed scene from which I thought I had
escaped.
Down through the aether I saw the accursed earth slowly turning, ever
turning, with angry and tempestuous seas gnawing at wild desolate shores and
dashing foam against the tottering towers of deserted cities. And under a
ghastly moon there gleamed sights I can never describe, sights I can never
forget; deserts of corpselike clay and jungles of ruin and decadence where once
stretched the populous plains and villages of my native land, and maelstroms of
frothing ocean where once rose the mighty temples of my forefathers. Mound the
northern pole steamed a morass of noisome growths and miasmal vapours, hissing
before the onslaught of the ever-mounting waves that curled and fretted from the
shuddering deep. Then a rending report dave the night, and athwart the desert of
deserts appeared a smoking rift. Still the black ocean foamed and gnawed, eating
away the desert on either side as the rift in the center widened and widened.
There was now no land left but the desert, and still the fuming ocean ate
and ate. All at once I thought even the pounding sea seemed afraid of something,
afraid of dark gods of the inner earth that are greater than the evil god of
waters, but even if it was it could not turn back; and the desert had suffered
too much from those nightmare waves to help them now. So the ocean ate the last
of the land and poured into the smoking gulf, thereby giving up all it had ever
conquered. From the new-flooded lands it flowed again, uncovering death and
decay; and from its ancient and immemorial bed it trickled loathsomely,
uncovering nighted secrets of the years when Time was young and the gods unborn.
Above the waves rose weedy remembered spires. The moon laid pale lilies of light
on dead London, and Paris stood up from its damp grave to be sanctified with
star-dust. Then rose spires and monoliths that were weedy but not remembered;
terrible spires and monoliths of lands that men never knew were lands.
There was not any pounding now, but only the unearthly roaring and hissing
of waters tumbling into the rift. The smoke of that rift had changed to steam,
and almost hid the world as it grew denser and denser. It seared my face and
hands, and when I looked to see how it affected my companions I found they had
all disappeared. Then very suddenly it ended, and I knew no more till I awaked
upon a bed of convalescence. As the cloud of steam from the Plutonic gulf
finally concealed the entire surface from my sight, all the firmament shrieked
at a sudden agony of mad reverberations which shook the trembling aether. In one
delirious flash and burst it happened; one blinding, deafening holocaust of
fire, smoke, and thunder that dissolved the wan moon as it sped outward to the
void.
And when the smoke cleared away, and I sought to look upon the earth, I
beheld against the background of cold, humorous stars only the dying sun and the
pale mournful planets searching for their sister.