The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath — Cthulhu Mythos

The Sunset City Seen Thrice

Randolph Carter dreamed of one city, and dreamed it three times.

It was a city of sunset gold, with marble walls, arched bridges, fountains, gardens, broad streets, and red roofs climbing the hills in tiers. Each time, Carter found himself on a high terrace, looking down into the place below, yet unable to go farther. Some power in the dream snatched him back before he could descend the stair, and he woke in torment, left only with longing.

After the third waking he could no longer endure the loss. He prayed to the Great Ones, who were said to dwell in Unknown Kadath, hidden beyond cold wastes and misty horizons. In dream, through Nasht and Kaman-Thah in the cavern of flame, he pleaded with them as well. But the gods gave no answer. Instead, the sunset city vanished from his dreams as though it had never been.

Nasht and Kaman-Thah warned him not to go seeking Kadath. No mortal knew on which side of the Dreamlands that mountain lay, and no man had ever climbed the black citadel above it. Worse than that, behind the Great Ones were the Other Gods; Nyarlathotep was their messenger, and Azathoth throbbed at the heart of formless chaos beyond ordered existence.

Carter listened—and set out anyway.

He was an experienced dreamer and knew many roads of the Dreamlands. He descended the seven hundred steps, passed through the gate of sleep, and entered the phosphorescent Enchanted Wood.

The Enchanted Wood and Ulthar

The Enchanted Wood was home to the Zoogs.

These sly little brown creatures knew many dream secrets and the hidden ways by which one might cross into the waking world. Carter had once learned their sign-language of slaps, and because he was on old terms with them, he came to their village and asked the council of elders about Kadath.

The Zoogs did not know where it lay, but said that the Great Ones often showed themselves on high mountains. One ancient Zoog remembered that beyond the River Skai, in Ulthar, a rare copy of the Necronomicon was kept, and that a priest there had once seen a trace of the gods.

So Carter left the wood, passed through Nir, crossed the River Skai, and came to Ulthar, where cats moved like shadows through the streets. There was an ancient law in Ulthar: no one may kill a cat. The cats, seeing Zoogs at Carter’s heels, bristled at once. Carter entered the temple on the hill and found the aged priest Atal, who was three hundred years old.

Atal told him that the Great Ones were not as powerful as men imagined. They were only the gods of Earth’s Dreamlands, perhaps willing to hear a prayer when pleased, but unable to leave their own dreaming realm. It was the Other Gods that men should fear. Barzai the Wise had once only climbed Hatheg-Kla to spy on the gods, and had been swept into the sky for his presumption. If any man found Kadath, the consequence would be far worse.

Carter would not give up. He produced moon-wine given him by the Zoogs and pressed Atal to drink. The old man, half drunk, revealed a forbidden clue: on the southern sea lies Oriab, and on it the mountain of Ngranek, whose face bears the likeness of the gods themselves. If Carter could see that countenance, and then search the Dreamlands for those who looked like it, he might find the place where the gods’ blood ran strongest. The cold wastes of Kadath might lie near there.

When Carter left the temple, the Zoogs who had followed him were gone. Ulthar’s cats were licking their lips with satisfaction. Carter loved the little black cats, and so did not mourn the curious Zoogs.

To Oriab

Carter traveled along the River Skai to Dylath-Leen.

It was a dark harbor city where black three-decked galleys often brought rubies to the docks. The merchants aboard them looked human, yet gave one an uneasy feeling; their rowers were never seen. Carter inquired after the southern sea and Oriab, but soon found himself watched by those black-ship traders. He was seized and carried off aboard one of their vessels to the foul port of the Moon-beasts; fortunately, a band of Ulthar’s cats came by secret moon-paths to rescue him and bring him back to Dylath-Leen.

Later he took a proper merchant ship to Oriab. On the way it passed a sunken ancient city. In the moonlight, domes, streets, and strange statues rose from the sea floor; in one still-intact building he saw a sailor in Oriab garb hanging head downward from a courtyard pillar, his eyes gone. Happily, the wind soon bore the ship away.

The harbor city of Baharna in Oriab lay amid stairways and canals, with snow-capped Ngranek visible in the distance. Carter asked everywhere about the mountain’s carved face, but no one would admit to having gone to its upper heights. He hired a mount and rode inland toward its base, passing old ruins and camps of lava-gatherers. At night his beast was drained of blood, and web-footed tracks were left in the soil; the gatherers said that Night-gaunts haunted the mountain and that none who vanished there ever returned.

Still Carter climbed.

He ascended through woods, slopes, bare stone, and perilous ridges, until at last he rounded the hidden face of Ngranek. Sunset struck the vast cliff, and he saw a godly countenance carved into the mountain: long of eye and ear, with a thin nose and pointed chin, majestic beyond anything human hands should have made.

Yet he realized at once that he need not search the Dreamlands for such a visage. He had already seen something like it in Celephaïs. The sailors who came north in black ships to trade onyx there had precisely that godlike look. So Carter concluded that the blood of the gods—and the clue to Kadath—must lie north of Celephaïs, in the colder lands beyond.

Night had already fallen. He was trapped on the cliff, unable to go up or down. Then, in the starlight, an unseen hand drew his scimitar from his belt, and silent wings darkened the sky. The Night-gaunts seized him and bore him into a cavern.

Allies in the Underworld

The Night-gaunts had no faces, and their bodies were cold and damp, their wings soundless. They carried Carter through the underworld and dropped him among the black bone-heaps of the Vale of Pnath. There the invisible Dholes writhed through the hills of bone, and Carter, unwilling to meet them, gave the old call of the Ghouls.

He had once known the painter Richard Upton Pickman. Pickman had dealt with Ghouls in the waking world, and then disappeared. Carter knew something of their cries, and at last they lowered a rope-ladder and drew him up from the edge of the abyss.

There, in that dim land, he found Pickman himself, now turned Ghoul. Pickman still remembered a little human speech and was willing to help him reach the upper Dreamlands. But the lands of the Gugs lay between them. Huge, shaggy Gugs had once set up stone circles in the Enchanted Wood and offered sacrifice to the Other Gods and Nyarlathotep; afterward the Great Ones banished them below. They feared Ghouls, yet still regarded human dreamers as old-time food.

Pickman disguised Carter as a Ghoul and sent three Ghouls with him through the Gug necropolis. In the midst of the journey, Ghasts sprang from the pits of Zin, and the Gugs themselves woke in their tower-city. Carter and his Ghoul companions escaped in the confusion to a tower marked with the sign of Koth, where they pried up the iron-runged stone slab and returned to the Enchanted Wood.

There Carter remembered the face upon Ngranek. He must go to Celephaïs, and from there seek the North from which those sailors had come.

Black Ships, Cats, and the North

Carter reached Celephaïs and visited Kuranes, the Dream-King. In waking life Kuranes had once been known to Carter; now he ruled the dream-city for half a year. He urged Carter to stay, for the search for Kadath was perilous, but Carter would not turn back.

From Celephaïs he sailed to the north of Inganok. Through dim seas and among nameless reefs he heard ominous howling. Inganok was a city of onyx and dusk, with towers, domes, goldwork, and black-stone streets of an antique beauty. Many of its people resembled the face of Ngranek, and there seemed little doubt that they shared the blood of the Great Ones.

Carter inquired after the northern wastes and abandoned quarries. The miners were reluctant to speak, but mentioned a vast pit far from human settlement, where blocks of onyx had once been taken by hands older than men. Carter thought of the black citadel of Kadath and its onyx walls, hired a yak, and rode north into the uninhabited lands.

The farther north he went, the darker the road grew, and the more frightened his yak became. He came upon a quarry so immense that no human race could have made it, and then upon a ring of hills sculpted like sentinels. After that, the Shantaks came down from the sky. They were larger than elephants, with horse-like heads, scaly bodies, and wings cold with the breath of the abyss. The merchant with the slant eyes who had appeared in Dylath-Leen arrived again on a yak and forced Carter up onto one of the Shantaks.

They flew over the mountains to Leng. There the inhabitants had hooves, horns, broad mouths, and tails: they were kin to the black-ship traders, and servants of the Moon-beasts. Carter was taken to a windowless stone monastery to meet an indescribable high priest in a yellow-silk mask.

The high priest blew an evil flute, and the slant-eyed merchant conversed with it by signs. When Carter saw a grayish, slimy claw showing beneath the yellow robe, he understood at once that the high priest was itself of the Moon-beast kind. Terror gave him strength. He hurled the slant-eyed trader into a well, seized a lamp, and fled into the maze.

When the lamp went out, he slipped in darkness for a long while, and at last fell into the ruins of Sarkomand.

The Battle of Sarkomand

Sarkomand was the ruin of an ancient capital of Leng, with two vast stone lions guarding the stair down into the underworld. Carter had barely escaped the lower passages when the Moon-beasts and Leng-men overtook him, bringing Shantaks and slaves with them, eager to deliver him again into Nyarlathotep’s hands.

This time, however, he had other allies.

The Ghouls came up from below, Pickman among them; and the Night-gaunts descended from the darkness. The Night-gaunts serve Nodens, not Nyarlathotep. Ghouls, Night-gaunts, Moon-beasts, Leng-men, and Shantaks fought wildly among the ruins. Carter was borne away by the Night-gaunts through the high air and the wastes, and at last they carried him to Unknown Kadath in the cold wilderness.

The onyx castle of Kadath rose high above the clouds, yet it was empty and godless. Carter saw no Great Ones there, only a strange radiance within a vast tower-chamber. Then horns sounded, and Ghouls and Night-gaunts were swept away by an unseen force, leaving him alone in the hall.

Through smoke, perfume, torches, and drumbeats came a great figure with the face of an Egyptian Pharaoh. It was Nyarlathotep.

It told Carter that the Great Ones were not in Kadath. They had fallen in love with the sunset city from Carter’s dreams and had left their onyx castle to dwell in the very place that had once belonged to him. The Other Gods did not wish Earth’s Dreamlands to lose its gods, yet they could not enter Carter’s own half-awake domain. Only Carter could find that city and bring the gods back to Kadath.

Nyarlathotep said the city was not in any far ocean, but in the years Carter knew best. It was made from the Boston hills of his childhood, the gold dome of the State House, the Charles River, Salem, Marblehead, Arkham, Kingsport, the sea wind of New England, orchards, and twilight. If he turned back into the country of his earliest memory, he would find it.

It sounded almost as if it were helping him.

Then it provided him a Shantak and told him to fly toward Vega, turning back only when he heard the singing of the heights and returned to the sunset city. At parting it named itself at last: Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos.

Return to Childhood

Carter rode the Shantak into the stars.

At first he believed he was indeed traveling toward the city. But beyond the constellations came an ancient, beautiful song, impossible to resist. The Shantak no longer obeyed him; it flew higher and farther, straight toward the depths above all worlds. Then Carter understood that Nyarlathotep had set a trap. The song was not a road home, but a lure drawing him toward the blind heart of Azathoth.

There were tentacles in the darkness, formless hungers, and the servants of the Other Gods. The Shantak flew faster and faster, and Carter was almost dragged into a chasm no dream could ever reach.

Then he remembered what Nyarlathotep had said.

That sunset city was made from all that he had loved in childhood. It was not a prize bestowed by Kadath, nor a secret gift of the Great Ones, but his own memory. Boston, morning, old houses, the harbor, the hills, flowers, rivers, and dusk—those were its true materials.

So Carter realized, in the dream itself, that he was dreaming.

And if he was dreaming, he could turn aside. He did not have to fly on toward destruction. He leaped from the dreadful mount and fell into an endless dark that seemed alive. Time and the universe whirled with his descent; stars died and were born again. Far away, purple vapors of Xoth spoke a path for him, and Nodens himself sounded triumph from the deep, warding off the hunters sent by Nyarlathotep.

At last Carter did not fall before Azathoth.

He woke in his room in Boston. Morning light lay on the window, birds sang in the garden, and the black cat by the hearth woke in alarm at his cry. The city had never been in remote Kadath, nor in any gift of the Outer Gods. It had always been there—in the home, the memory, and the childhood he saw again upon waking.

Far away beyond imagining, Nyarlathotep returned to the onyx castle of Kadath and mocked the Great Ones it had drawn back from Carter’s sunset city. Carter’s dream-quest was over. The Great Ones had gone back to their ancient seat, and Carter at last understood: some of the farthest places can only be reached by turning back.