Baf 15 the dream quest.., p.1
BAF 15 - The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, page 1
part #15 of Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series
22-06-2024
Adult
Fantasy
‘“The Kadath stories take place in a parallel world that men of this Earth can sometimes visit in dreams .. . Lovecraft’s dream world of Kadath was never concretely visualized. He never, in fact, committed himself as to this world’s location and was even uncertain as to whether it exists now or in the remote past. That, however, does not interfere with our enjoyment of it”
—L. Sprague de Camp
’’Howard Phillips Lovecraft shifted the focus of supernatural dread from man and his little world and his gods, to the stars and the black, unplumbed gulfs of space … a literary Copernicus.”
—Fritz Leiber
THE DREAM-QUEST
OF UNKNOWN KADATH
H. P. LOVECRAFT
EDITED, AND WITH AN
INTRODUCTION BY LIN CARTER
BALLANTINE BOOKS • NEW YORK
An Intext Publisher
Contents
Introduction ~ Through the Gates of Deeper Slumber
The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath
Celephais
The Silver Key
Through the Gates of The Silver Key
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
The White Ship
The Strange High House In The Mist
“Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath” “The Silver Key and “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” from ‘ At The Mountains of Madness and Other Novels by H. P. Lovecraft, published by Arkham House; Copyright 1939, 1943 by August Derleth and Donald Copyright 1964 by August Derleth.
“Celephais,” “The White Ship,” and “The Strange High House in the Mist” from Dagon and Other Macabre Tales by H. P. Lovecraft, published by Arkham House; Copyright 1939, 1943 by August Derleth and Donald Copyright 1965 by August Derleth.
The poem “Unknown Kadath” is sonnet XII of the Sonnet-sequence Dreams from R’lyeh. “Unknown Kadath” was first published in Amra, Volume 2, number 39; Copyright © 1966 by George Scithers.
Copyright © 1970 by Lin Carter
SBN 345-01923-7-095
All rights reserved
First Printing: May, 1970
Cover art by Gervasio Gallardo
Printed in the United States of America
BALLANTTNE BOOKS, INC.
101 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10003
Titles by
H. P. Lovecraft
THE DREAM OF
UNKNOWN KADATH
THE TOMB AND OTHER TALES
AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS AND
OTHER TALES OF TERROR
THE LURKING FEAR
OTHER STORIES
THE SHUTTERED ROOM AND
OTHER TALES OF HORROR
(with August Derleth)
TALES OF THE CTHULHU MYTH
Volume 1
TALES OF THE CTHULHU MYTHOS
Volume 2
Published by Ballantine Books
About THE DREAM QUEST OF UNKNOWN
KADATH and H. P. Lovecraft:
Through the Gates of Deeper Slumber
He loved cats and ice cream, and ancient Rome; the Colonial architecture of his native Providence, and Arthur Machen’s stories. He adored the eighteenth century, and supernatural literature, and astronomy, and the books of Lord Dunsany. He loathed modernity and mechanization, cold weather, and anything that had to do with the sea. He detested the “Babylonian avenues” of New York, “aswarm with alien and mongrel hordes of foreigners,” and he decried the slow erosion of ancient standards and traditions. And, somehow, out of this melange of quaint pretensions, fervent fondnesses, and rabid prejudices, he became the author of some of the finest and most enduring supernatural fiction that has been written in this country since the days of that other Providence gentleman, Edgar Allan Poe.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was bom in Providence, Rhode Island, August 20, 1890. He was a sickly, sensitive, precocious boy and had a sheltered youth surrounded by doting female relatives. He lived most of his rather short life in a sort of self-imposed exile from his century, a recluse, something of an invalid, holding the world at arm’s length and having little to do with people. Although he was once married briefly, he seems to have had little or no experience with, or interest in, women. And although he had a wide and articulate circle of admiring friends, he saw them seldom, avoiding closer personal contact, and preferring to conduct longdistance friendships by means of letters. He was one of the most amazing letter writers of all times; at the peak of his voluminous correspondence, he was writing fifteen or twenty letters a day. Nor were they brief notes; as his disciple, friend, and sometimes collaborator August Derleth has written, “they sometimes covered thirty, fifty, or even seventy typewriter-sized pages, closely written.”
Today, most readers know Lovecraft for his tales of the macabre and the gruesome. Early in his literary career, however, he fell under the influence of that Anglo-Irish pioneer of the imaginary-world fantasy, the great Lord Dunsany, of whom he wrote to a friend in 1929:
I know of no other writer who so magically opens up the enchanted sunset gates of secret & ethereal worlds. … It is sheer music, colour, ecstacy, & dream. … All in all, I think Dunsany represents the high-water mark in verbal magic With me, at least, it doesn’t wear thin with the years; & I can enjoy his early work as much today as when I first stumbled on it in 1919.
During Lovecraft’s apprentice-hood as a writer, he produced a sequence of stories very obviously inspired by Dunsany. These stories—Celephais, The White Ship, The Silver Key, and a few others—form a series strikingly unlike, both in concept and execution, the later Cthulhu cycle for which Lovecraft is far better known. In many ways it is a pity that the early Dunsanian cycle is not known equally well, for herein we see Lovecraft as a master of singing and crystalline prose, spinning out bardic legends of fantasy and wonder, richly studded with exotic and evocative names, and with little of the dark horrors of the later tales.
This early cycle culminated in the extraordinary short novel Lovecraft called The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. Few more magical novels of dream-fantasy exist than this phantasmagoric adventure. When the questing spirit of Randolph Carter goes down the seven hundred onyx steps and beyond the Gates of Deeper Slumber, searching for the lost vision of his beloved sunset city, he enters a dreamworld akin to no other in literature. Not in those two nightmarish romances from the pen of George MacDonald, Lilith and Phantastes, not even in the immortal Alice, have the fluid and changing landscapes, the twilit and mysterious silences, and the spire-thronged and opulent Oriental cities of the dreamworld been so lovingly explored.
The short novel (it is only 38,000 words) was written, for the most part, during 1926. In December of that year, in a letter to his young friend August Derleth, Lovecraft describes Dream Quest in these terms:
I was delighted to hear that you like the Strange High House [in the Mist], for that is by all odds my own favourite among my recent yams. The two elements in all existence which are most fascinating to me are strangeness and antiquity; and when I can combine the two in one tale I always feel that the result is better than a§ though I had only one of them. It remains to be seen how successful this bizarrie can be when extended to novel length. I am now on page 72 of my dreamland fantasy, and am very fearful that Randolph Carter’s adventures may have reached the point of palling on the reader; or that the very plethora of weird imagery may have destroyed the power of any one image to produce the desired impression of strangeness. This tale is one of picaresque adventure—a quest for the gods through varied and incredible scenes and perils—and it is written continuously like Vathek without any subdivision into chapters, though it really contains several well-defined episodes. It will probably make about 100 pages—a small book—in all, and has very small likelihood of ever seeing the light of day in print. I dread the task of typing it so badly that I shall not attempt it till I have read it aloud to two or three good judges and obtained a verdict as to whether or not it is worth preserving…
Luckily for those of us who admire the feverish and thronging imagery of this astonishing dream-romance, those judges must have given the nod to the “preserving” of The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, although Lovecraft was correct in his doubts as to its publication. It did not appear in print during his lifetime. The complete manuscript, by now in the keeping of one of his friends, Robert H. Barlow, only reached the permanence of print when it was serialized in a “little magazine” devoted exclusively to the weird and the fantastic. This magazine was The Arkham Sampler, a short-lived periodical launched as an adjunct to the small publishing firm of Arkham House, which was founded after his death by Lovecraft’s friends August Derleth and Donald Wandrei.
When Lovecraft died (early in the morning of March 15, 1937, in the Jane Brown Memorial Hospital in Providence), he was virtually unknown to any save the readers of pulp magazines such as Weird Tales. But Arkham House, established to preserve his remarkable stories in book form, has brought his work to a vastly larger audience. It was in one of the earliest of the Arkham House titles, Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1943), that Dream Quest was again published, this time as part of an anthology of several dozen stories. But the novel had no single independent printing until 1955, when Shroud Publishers in Buffalo, New York, issued it in a very lim
This is the first appearance of The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath in paperback. Since the novel is so very short, I have included with it some of the less well known stories of Lovecraft’s early Dunsanian period which are more or less coeval with it and connected to it by both theme and style.
Lin Carter
Consulting Editor:
The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series
Hollis, Long Island, New York.
The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath
Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvellous city, and three times was he snatched away while still he paused on the high terrace above it. All golden and lovely it blazed in the sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades and arched bridges of veined marble, silver-basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad squares and perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between delicate trees and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows; while on steep northward slopes climbed tiers of red roofs and old peaked gables harbouring little lanes of grassy cobbles. It was a fever of the gods, a fanfare of supernal trumpets and a clash of immortal cymbals. Mystery hung about it as clouds about a fabulous unvisited mountain; and as Carter stood breathless and expectant on that balustraded parapet there swept up to him the poignancy and suspense of almost-vanished memory, the pain of lost things and the maddening need to place again what once had been an awesome and momentous place.
He knew that for him its meaning must once have been supreme; though in what cycle or incarnation he had known it, or whether in dream or in waking, he could not tell. Vaguely it called up glimpses of a far forgotten first youth, when wonder and pleasure lay in all the mystery of days, and dawn and dusk alike strode forth prophetic to the eager sound of lutes and song, unclosing fiery gates toward further and surprising marvels. But each night as he stood on that high marble terrace with the curious urns and carven rail and looked off over that hushed sunset city of beauty and unearthly immanence he felt the bondage of dream’s tyrannous gods; for in no wise could he leave that lofty spot, or descend the wide marmoreal flights flung endlessly down to where those streets of elder witchery lay outspread and beckoning.
When for the third time he awakened with those flights still undescended and those hushed sunset streets still untraversed, he prayed long and earnestly to the hidden gods of dream that brood capricious above the clouds on unknown Kadath, in the cold waste where no man treads. But the gods made no answer and shewed no relenting, nor did they give any favouring sign when he prayed to them in dream, and invoked them sacrificially through the bearded priests of Nasht and Kaman-Thah, whose cavern-temple with its pillar of flame lies not far from the gates of the waking world. It seemed, however, that his prayers must have been adversely heard, for after even the first of them he ceased wholly to behold the marvellous city; as if his three glimpses from afar had been mere accidents or oversights, and against some hidden plan or wish of the gods.
At length, sick with longing for those glittering sunset streets and cryptical hill lanes among ancient tiled roofs, nor able sleeping or waking to drive them from his mind, Carter resolved to go with bold entreaty whither no man had gone before, and dare the icy deserts through the dark to where unknown Kadath, veiled in cloud and crowned with unimagined stars, holds secret and nocturnal the onyx castle of the Great Ones.
In light slumber he descended the seventy steps to the cavern of flame and talked of this design to the bearded priests Nasht and Kaman-Thah. And the priests shook their pshent-bearing heads and vowed it would be the death of his soul. They pointed out that the Great Ones had shown already their wish, and that it is not agreeable to them to be harassed by insistent pleas. They reminded him, too, that not only had no man ever been to Kadath, but no man had ever suspected in what part of space it may lie; whether it be in the dreamlands around our own world, or in those surrounding some unguessed companion of Fomalhaut or Aldebaran. If in our dreamland, it might conceivably be reached, but only three human souls since time began had ever crossed and recrossed the black impious gulfs to other dreamlands, and of that three, two had come back quite mad- There were, in such voyages, incalculable local dangers; as well as that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe, where no dreams reach; that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity—the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes; to which detestable pounding and piping dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic Ultimate gods, the blind, voiceless, tenebrous, mindless Other gods whose soul and messenger is the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.
Of these things was Carter warned by the priests Nasht and Kaman-Thah in the cavern of flame, but still he resolved to find the gods on unknown Kadath in the cold waste, wherever that might be, and to win from them the sight and remembrance and shelter of the marvellous sunset city. He knew that his journey would be strange and long, and that the Great Ones would be against it; but being old in the land of dream he counted on many useful memories and devices to aid him. So asking a formal blessing of the priests and thinking shrewdly on his course, he boldly descended the seven hundred steps to the Gate of Deeper Slumber and set out through the Enchanted Wood.
In the tunnels of that twisted wood, whose low prodigious oaks twine groping boughs and shine dim with the phosphorescence of strange fungi, dwell the furtive and secretive Zoogs; who know many obscure secrets of the dream world and a few of the waking world, since the wood at two places touches the lands of men, though it would be disastrous to say where. Certain unexplained rumours, events, and vanishments occur among men where the Zoogs have access, and it is well that they cannot travel far outside the world of dream. But over the nearer parts of the dream world they pass freely, flitting small and brown and unseen and bearing back piquant tales to beguile the hours around their hearths in the forest they love. Most of them live in burrows, but some inhabit the trunks of the great trees; and although they live mostly on fungi it is muttered that they have also a slight taste for meat, either physical or spiritual, for certainly many dreamers have entered that wood who have not come out. Carter, however, had no fear; for he was an old dreamer and had learnt their fluttering language and made many a treaty with them; having found through their help the splendid city of Celephais in Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills, where reigns half the year the great King Kuranes, a man he had known by another name in life. Kuranes was the one soul who had been to the star-gulfs and returned free from madness.
Threading now the low phosphorescent aisles between those gigantic trunks, Carter made fluttering sounds in the manner of the Zoogs, and listened now and then for responses. He remembered one particular village of the creatures was in the centre of the wood, where a circle of great mossy stones in what was once a clearing tells of older and more terrible dwellers long forgotten, and toward this spot he hastened. He traced his way by the grotesque fungi, which always seem better nourished as one approaches the dread circle where elder beings danced and sacrificed. Finally the great light of those thicker fungi revealed a sinister green and grey vastness pushing up through the roof of the forest and out of sight This was the nearest of the great ring of stones, and Carter knew he was close to the Zoog village. Renewing his fluttering sound, he waited patiently; and was at last rewarded by an impression of many eyes watching him. It was the Zoogs, for one sees their weird eyes long before one can discern their small, slippery brown outlines.
