Primary Sources

Kuranes, like Carter, is a dreamer from the waking world, not a native of the Dreamlands.  There are a few key differences between them, though.

Last time Carter saw Kuranes, the latter was splitting his time between the rose-crystal Palace of the Seventy Delights in Celephais, which sounds like a happening place, and the turreted cloud-castle of sky-floating Serannian, which is to say, Lando’s Cloud City on Bespin.  However nowadays Kuranes spends his time in Cornwall.

“No!” I hear you saying, even now.  “Not Cornwall!  If there’s one thing Book IX of Le Morte D’Arthur has taught us, it’s that Cornwall is a place we never, ever want to go!”

It’s cool, you guys!  Seriously.  Because this Cornwall we’re talking about is not the Cornwall of the waking world, but an incredible Dreamlands simulation, constructed by Kuranes to suit himself.  See, he’s stuck in the Dreamlands; he can never return to the waking world.  Why? Because he’s dead, is why.  BOOM!  Didn’t see that coming, did you?

So east of Celephais, where the Tanarian Hills run down to the seacliffs, Kuranes has arranged for the countryside to be landscaped into a replica Cornwall, complete with fishing village and disused abbey.  Kuranes possesses great power over the Dreamland, inasmuch as he creates these buildings from nothing by dreaming them up, but he can’t generate actual Cornishmen to live in them.  Instead he uses his powers as king to forcibly relocate the inhabitants of Celephais who possess the most English faces, and also he commands them to speak only in the dear remembered accents of old Cornwall fishers.

Kuranes may be a monarch in the land of dream, but he’d trade all the pomps and marvels, splendours and beauties, ecstasies and delights, novelties and excitements for just one day alive once more as a simple boy in that pure and quiet England, that ancient, beloved England which had moulded his being and of which he must always be immutably a part.

Carter hikes out to Kuranes’s current abode, which means wandering across a replica of early eighteenth-century Cornwall, admiring the replica of early eighteenth-century farmers and butlers and gardens and so on, and eventually he finds Kuranes’s estate and the man himself.  Out on a garden terrace with a magnificent view of the faux-village, Kuranes, Lord of Ooth-Hargai and the Sky around Serannian, sits in his pajamas fretting.  He’s all restless, maybe because he’s been dead for several years.

Regardless, he’s happy to see Carter, because he’s crazy racist and Carter is white.  They sit and make small talk for a while, about the various sights they’ve seen in the Dreamlands.  Lovecraft reminds us again that Kuranes is the only dreamer who has ever visited deep space and returned sane and hale to tell about it, a fact he brought up back when Carter met the zoogs for the first time, at the start of the quest.

So you understand Kuranes knows what he’s talking about when he tells Carter to lay off his mad dream-quest for unknown Kadath.  He has a laundry list of reasons.

1) Kuranes knows everywhere worth knowing in the Dreamlands, and he’s never heard of the sunset-city Carter dreams of.

2) The Other Gods are dreadful and liable to smite Carter eight ways from Sunday, if he busts in on the Elder Ones like he’s planning on.

3) Even if Carter somehow finds his sunset-city, he’ll end up bored and depressed, just as Kuranes is.  Kuranes went through all kinds of trials to become the king of Ooth-Nargai and the sky-realm above it, and yet less than two centuries later he’s totes bored of it.  The sights Carter will one day learn to value are his home: Boston, Beacon Hill, Kingsport, Arkham, Dunwich, and various other New England sites which may or may not be copyright Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

Kuranes guest-stars in Carter’s adventure, appearing from his own short story of Lovecraft’s, written a decade or so earlier.  Here Lovecraft tells us that Kuranes had in the old waking days (i.e. before his death) visited Carter in Boston, and was therefore himself familiar with many of these sights.

But, of course, Carter is unmoved by Kuranes’s arguments, and leaves his friend.  He goes — guess where? — to the ancient seaside taverns to talk to crusty old salts!  His favorite activity!  Seriously, he goes down the Street of Pillars to the old sea wall, where he talk[s] more with the mariners of far ports and wait[s] for the dark ship he plans on booking for passage to Inquanok.

Lovecraft describes the vast trading city of Hlanith as follows.  Fast Facts!  Hlanith!

1) It’s at the mouth of the Oukianos river and on the Cerenian Sea.

2) It’s a dull city, all granite walls and A-frames and the wharves are made of boring ol’ oak instead of jasper or beryl or anything cool.

3) In fact, it’s so boring that the folk of the Dreamlands consider it to be a cultural desert; the people here are very similar to those in the waking world, and the only reason to go to Hlanith is to trade with their artisans.

Carter wanders Hlanith for a day.  He stops in the rickety old sea-taverns, full of rickety old mariners, and asks about Inquanok.  The rickety old mariners can tell him some tales of Inquanok, but nothing he doesn’t already know.

The next day, at sunset, the galleon sets out across the sea, heading east towards Celephais.  Near sunset of their second day out from Hlanith, the lookout spots land in the distance, specifically the land of Ooth-Nargai and the big mountain Aran, the snowy peak and its ginko-trees swaying on the lower slope.

From there it’s a short distance to Celephais.  The galleon puts into port just as dusk ends, and while Hlanith is boring-town, Celephais is full of awesome stuff.

1) Minarets, marble walls, bronze statues, a big stone bridge over the Naraxa river, asphodel gardens, and the Tanarian mountains in the distance.

2) Asphodel, I had to look this up, is a kind of lily you find in Greece and places adjacent to Greece (or that engage in sufficient international shipping).  Supposedly the underworld is just one big field of asphodel lilies, and Persephone wears a garland of them in lieu of a crown.

3) The Tanarian mountains are crazy magic mountains full of secret ways from the Dreamland to the waking world and other, more exotic places also.

4) Ships come in to Celephais from all over the Dreamland, including outer space and the sky.  Carter’s galleon flits into harbor past a flotilla of painted galleys from Serannian, which is apparently basically Cloud City on Bespin.

5) People don’t age in Celephais because Celephais is just that awesome.  Nothing tarnishes or wears out and you never see a gray hair in Celephais, either.

Of course Carter’s main concern is finding an ancient tavern full of traders and sailors.  Carter gravitates towards rickety old mariners like a moth to flame.  You could plunk him down in Flagstaff or Tulsa and somehow he’d find the dimly-lit old bar full of crusty retired longshoremen.

Carter checks out all the dockside taverns, looking for new information about Inquanok.  He learns that the next Inquanok freighter won’t be arriving in Celephais for a fortnight, and hears new stories, rumors and legends, because he just can’t get enough of that stuff.

He finds a Thorabonian sailor who used to work in Inquanok, at an onyx quarry.  This guy can confirm there’s a way north from Inquanok towards Leng, if not up to Leng itself.  High unfriendly mountains surround the horrible plateau of Leng, he says, and there’s a desert around those mountains, but if you go down from Inquanok into the desert, and then around the mountains, you can get into Leng by a back way.

He has zilch to say about the precise relationship between Leng, its desert, and the cold gray waste of unknown Kadath, but it’s still the best lead Carter has.

Since he’s got some time to kill, Carter heads to the turquoise temple on the Street of Pillars and checks in with the High-Priest of Nath-Horthath, the greatest spiritual authority in the city.  Just like Atal in distant Ulthar, this priest tells Carter his quest is a poorly-conceived one.  The Great Ones of the Dreamland enjoy the protection of the Other Gods from Outside, and if they’ve decided to steal away Carter’s sunset-city, they aren’t going to appreciate his busting in on them in their home.

Carter, undaunted, checks in with the boss cat of Celephais.  He relays the passwords and secret signs he was given after the battle of the Enchanted Wood, and the old cat fills him in on the men of Inquanok, on whose dark ships no cat will go.

Long story short: Inquanok is a dark place.  We’re talking eerie magical darkness, here, none of your lousy grade-school darkness.  The darkness of space!  And cats hate the darkness of space.  The cats aren’t sure if that magical darkness was exuded out from Leng, or if it comes from elsewhere, but they know it’s unwholesome.

Next time, Carter checks in with a third local expert, King Kuranes of Celephais!  Will he also tell Carter this whole “dream quest of unknown Kadath” thing is a bad idea?  Tune in and find out, as the Season of Lovecraft reaches its approximate halfway point!

Carter fills the cats in on the looming zoog threat, and the cats are all, yo, let’s take them out premptively!  So they do.  The cats swarm into the woods, mob the zoogs, demand unconditional surrender, and get it.  Lovecraft intimates it takes them all of five minutes.

I’m not sure whether we’re meant to deduce that cats should not be underestimated, or that zoogs are losers.  The zoog surrender comes with terms: the zoogs must provide the cats with a steady supply of gamebirds, and the cats get to take a bunch of zoog-children hostage back to Ulthar.

Afterwards the cats escort Carter through the forest, protecting him against any possible zoog reprisals.  The old cat general gives Carter some passwords of great value among the cats of Dreamland, and tells him to hook up with the boss cat of Celephais once he’s there.  Carter already knows the boss cat in charge of Celephais, but the cat-general’s recommendation will surely enrich Carter in the boss-cat’s eyes.

Anyway.  Carter leaves the Enchanted Wood and heads northwards, following the Oukianos River to its outlet at the northern Cerenerian Sea.  While the Skai river valley is all homey, with farms and cottages, the Oukianos valley is wilder.  It’s no less picaresque, but there’s golden sunlight and dappled this and that and a fey atmosphere.

After a half-day of hiking Carter comes to the jasper terraces of the town of Kiran, where the King of Ilek-Vad grew up.  The king still visits annually to pay respects to the river-god Oukianos.  Lovecraft explains that Oukianos and the king go way back; the former used to sing to the latter when the latter was just an infant.  The temple to the god is a big complex built of jasper stone, with seven towers and a whole caste of cryptical priests, who dwell inside the forbidden sectors of the temple, and who the king only is permitted to meet.

Carter doesn’t stop in Kiran for any length of time, but keeps on hiking downriver.  Past Kiran the land is studded with farms, but only on the side of the river Carter walks on; the other side is a thick dark forest.  His side has all kinds of peaceful thatched cottages and the shrines of amiable gods carven from jasper or chrysoberyl.

He keeps up a good pace all day, and comes to the river-port city of Thran at dusk.  We’re talking a thousand gilded spires, also alabaster walls which are lofty beyond belief with a hundred gates and two hundred turrets, which where wrought in one solid piece by what means no man knows.  Impressive, is what Lovecraft is saying here.

On his way into the city, at one of the gates, a red-robed sentry stops Carter and demands that the traveler tell three dreams beyond belief and [prove] himself a dreamer worthy to walk up Thran’s steep mysterious streets.  It’s not clear why Thran’s streets are steep, given the city is on a river and surrounded by farmland.  Lovecraft mentions that further back from the river the land becomes hilly, but Thran sounds wide and open.

But Carter has been to Thran many times before, and takes for granted the lovely music in the air and the marble fountains and high impressive buildings and towers.  He goes immediately to the docks, where he books passage to Celephais on a great green galleon, checks in with a local cat, and turns in for the night in a local hotel.

The next morning Carter boards his ship and sits back while the sailors do all the work of disembarking.  The ship sails lazily down the Oukianos river towards the Cerenian Sea, across which lies the city of Celephais.  The lower Oukianos valley strongly resembles the upper, with more villages and temples per square mile but no other changes.

Carter bugs the sailors as they work, asking them about the particular ethnicity that matches the graven image of Mount Ngranek:  the strange men with long, narrow eyes, long-lobed ears, thin noses, and pointed chins.  Carter remembers seeing such men in Celephais, and the sailors can confirm that.  They come from further north in dark ships and trade onyx for jade, gold, and tame birds.

One new piece of information: the land of these people is called Inquanok, a cold and twilight land separated from its neighbor Leng by a mountain range.  Getting to Leng directly from Inquanok is generally thought impossible, and the sea route involves going a tremendous distance out of your way.

Carter also asks about Kadath and his sunset-city, but the sailors can’t help him there.

Overnight the galleon keeps passing downriver, going through the perfumed jungles of Kied.  Carter’d like to stretch his legs there and maybe explore one of the fabulous lost Kied ruins, but the sailors aren’t up for stopping.  In the morning they arrive at the mouth of the Oukianos and the seaport Hlanith.

Carter reflects that he’s happy to be back in familiar territory.  Once again he stands in the Enchanted Forest of the zoogs, though there aren’t any zoogs around, because they’re scared of the passage down to the land of the Gugs.  Carter traveled through this forest back at the start of the story.  Now, here at the approximate halfway point, he once more dwells beneath its spreading branches.

First order of business: disposing of his ghoul escort. They review their options:

1) Go to the waking world, and from there to the ancient cemeteries that touch upon the ghoul kingdom in the Dreamland.  The ghouls reject this because they would have to ascend the Steps of Deeper Slumber and pass through the temple of flames, as per Carter’s original entrance.  Ghouls and bearded priests named Nasht and Kaman-Thah don’t mix.

2) Open the heavy trapdoor again, and descend the Tower of Koth through the Gug city.  This was the ghouls’ original plan, but they reject it as too risky, now that the Gugs are all fired up.  That’s why they fled into the Enchanted Wood, after all.

3) Travel to the city of Sarkomand, alluded to a couple of entries back.  Sarkomand, an ancient city located below the plateau of Leng, contains a gateway to the underdark inhabited by the ghouls.  The downside to this plan is that Carter has no idea where Sarkomand or Leng are, and the ghouls only know how to get there starting from their own lands, not up here on the surface.

However Carter recalls that back when he was in the city of Dylath-Leen, he questioned an old trader whom popular rumor said did business with travelers from Leng.  Therefore some connection between Leng and Dylath-Leen must exist, some caravan route or trading ship.  Carter tells the ghouls about this, and the ghouls immediately recognize it as their best bet.  They shake Carter’s hand, bid him good luck, and make out for Dylath-Leen.

Carter is not sorry to see them go, which Lovecraft feels he needs to explain, since if we were paying attention during the last few entries we might have noticed that the ghouls were extremely helpful to Carter.  They sent him a very convenient ladder, they escorted him through their land to his old friend Pickman, they escorted him again through the City of Gugs, they carried him up the Tower of Koth, they killed a ghast for him, and they hauled him out of the underdark!  But on the other hand, they’re weird and naked and smelly and they eat corpses, so on balance, Carter would prefer they not be around.

Once they’re gone, Carter can finally drop his ghoul disguise, which is to say, wash himself and put clothes on.  It’s night in the forest when he begins hiking to Celephais at last, but before he’s gone far, he overhears the zoogs arguing amongst themselves.

Carter had been avoiding zoog settlements, but he can’t help hearing this debate; the forest echoes with zoog flutterings.  He listens in, and determines that the zoog are deciding just how to go to war with cats.  All zoogs versus all cats: that’s the plan.

Screw that, thinks Carter.  He came to the Dreamlands neutral on the cat-zoog conflict.  After the massacre of his zoog traveling companions in Ulthar (the spark of this current conflict, though Carter thinks the zoogs deserved it) and especially after the cats all banded together to save his life on the moon, Carter has picked a side.  He’s a cat person, not a zoog person.

So Carter sneaks away to the edge of the woods, where the forest gives way to the farms that fill the Skai river valley.  He makes a noise like a cat, until a big ol’ farm-cat hears him and investigates.  Carter warns it about the zoog intentions, and cat dashes off, Paul Revere style, to warn all the cats along the Skai, and in Nir, and on into Ulthar, about the coming zoog invasion.

Luckily, says Lovecraft, the moon isn’t out that night, because otherwise the cats would all be scampering around up there.  Soon all the cats from the Skai to Ulthar have gathered at the edge of the forest, where Carter meets and greets.  He’s happy to see the general-cat that led the attack on the moon, and even more so to see that cat’s grandson, the little black kitten Carter befriended in Ulthar.  The kitten has grown up, which reminds us just how long the Dream-Quest has been.  Lovecraft gets all twee describing the former kitten: he was a strapping and promising cat now, and purred as he shook hands with his friend. His grandfather said he was doing very well in the army, and that he might well expect a captaincy after one more campaign.

And so Carter and the cats turn and march to war, under the bowers of the Enchanted Forest.

He crawls through tunnels again to get to the land of the Gugs, in the company of three ghouls and a headstone (Col. Nepemiah Derby, obit 1719, from the Charter Street Burying Ground in Salem) in case they need to bash something with a headstone, or lever the slab with it.  They emerge in the Gug graveyard, full of huge Gug tombs thirty feet high.  Ghouls visit the Gug tombs regularly, as a dead Gug will feed a whole pack of ghouls for months and months.  Carter now understood the occasional titan bones he had felt beneath him in the vale of Pnath.

Carter and the ghouls sneak past the entrance to Zin, where the Gugs go to hunt ghasts, hoping not to encounter any.  Sometimes the ghasts raid the Gugs, and while Gugs avoid ghouls, ghasts will attack them.  Unluckily for Carter, more than a dozen ghasts choose just that moment to break into the land of the Gugs.  Carter turned sick at the aspect of that scabrous and unwholesome beast, whose face is so curiously human despite the absence of a nose, a forehead, and other important particulars, Lovecraft tells us, neatly avoiding the question of how something without a nose or a forehead or “other important particulars” can look “so” human.

The ghasts rouse a Gug who had been supposed to be guarding the way to Zin, and if you want a description of a Gug I suggest a Google image search for “umber hulk,” that gets you 95% of the way there.  The fifteen ugly hopping monsters and the one really big buggy/hairy monster fight.  They make no sound, as the ghasts are trying to be stealthy and Gugs are naturally mute, but the rumble of their rumble worries Carter nonetheless.

He and the ghouls don’t stick around to see who wins the fight; they press on through the city of the Gugs .  The towering grave-monuments are replaced by towering residences, and the ground is black and hard, not unlike asphalt.  It’s hours of hiking, even if the ghouls insist on setting a fast pace, because the city of the Gugs is just so big.

Finally they come to a truly vast tower, with a mysterious symbol carved over its doorway.  The ghouls identify this as the Tower of Koth, so it’s time to start climbing.  The stairs within were meant for Gugs, and are over three feet high, so it’s an arduous climb.  Carter loses count of how many steps he’s climbed sometime before he collapses and the ghouls have to carry him.

They have to be absolutely silent while climbing. While the Gugs are afraid to open the trapdoor at the top of the tower, lest they be smited by the Other Gods, but there’s nothing sacred about the tower itself.  In fact it’s often used as a sort of trap for ghasts that invade the city; they start climbing and it’s essentially a dead end (the ghasts being too puny to lift the stone slab) so the Gugs can capture and eat them at leisure.  If a a Gug hears them climbing, it will assume they are ghasts, and come to eat them, and then the jig will probably be up.  Even the superstitious fear the Gugs have for ghouls has its limits.

Then they hear the coughing call of a ghast high above them, which is a whole new kind of peril.  The ghouls confer among themselves, and set an ambush with the tombstone.  A ghast comes loping down the steps, the ghouls bash its brains in with the headstone, and they climb the rest of the way to the stone slab without incident.

Then Carter, heroic load, watches as the ghouls pry the stone slab open.  It takes all three of them and it’s not easy, but they manage it, and slowly jack the slab up with the headstone.

The ghouls’ labor is interrupted by the ghast they slew, specifically by the sound of its corpse rolling down the long, long steps of the Tower.  What prompts it to start falling at this point Lovecraft doesn’t say.  But it inspires the ghouls to work ever more quickly, and they manage to make a space big enough for Carter to slide through.  They even haul Carter up and through to the surface, letting him climb up to their rubbery shoulders and later guiding his feet as he clutched at the blessed soil of the upper Dreamland outside.

The ghouls’ original plan was to drop Carter off and then go back they way they came, but the rumbling below suggests that’s a bad plan, so they scramble up into the Enchanted Wood themselves, and soon all four of them, Carter and his escort, sprawl out on the moldy ground.

Hours of chafing, blistering climbing later, Carter reaches the top of the ladder, at what Lovercraft calls a crag high over Pnath.  I was under the impression that a crag was a climbable cliff surface, but what he describes is basically a huge overhang, so big Carter can’t even see whatever cliff face it sticks out from.  He gets close to the ledge which is the upper surface of the overhang, and ghouls reach down and haul him up.

Carter finds himself on a stony field, presumably still deep underground, where ghouls congregate.  Ghouls, Lovecraft tells us, possess canine faces and slumping forms and unmentionable idiosyncrasies.  Carter knows how to handle them, though, because he’s Carter and therefore perfect.  Also because his friend Pickman introduced him to a ghoul once, ages ago before Pickman ran off to become a ghoul.

Much like the zoogs of the Enchanted Wood, the ghouls on this boulder-strewn plain treat him apprehensively but politely, and again, one tries to eat him but is quickly restrained.  Carter communicates in the tongue of the ghouls, patient gibbering, of course Carter can speak Ghoulish, and learns that not only do these ghouls know Pickman, Pickman’s burrow is nearby.

Nearby is a relative term, of course.  One of the ghouls leads him crawling for hours through the dark to another dim cavern like the first, the only change being that instead of rocks, the floor is littered with broken tombstones and urns and monuments.  Somehow these things were stolen from all the great cemeteries of the waking world, and brought here to the kingdom of the ghouls under the Dreamlands.  Carter’s actually closer to the waking world than he has been at any point in his travels up to now.

He meets Pickman, on a tombstone of 1768 stolen from the Granary Burying Ground in Boston.  It was naked and rubbery, and had acquired so much of the ghoulish physiognomy that its human origin was already obscure. But it still remembered a little English, and was able to converse with Carter in grunts and monosyllables, helped out now and then by the gibbering of ghouls. Carter explains how he’s bound for the city of Celephais far to the north of the zoogs’ forest, which Pickman (or, rather, a ghoul which was once the artist Richard Upton Pickman) thinks is a poor choice of destination.  It’s a long, long way from the ghouls’ realm to the surface, says the ex-Pickman, and between Carter and his goal is the kingdom of the Gugs.

Gugs, Lovecraft explains, are big hairy monsters that used to live on the surface of the Dreamlands and worship the Other Gods, but then the gods got sick of their bullroar and exiled them to the underdark.  They erected the stone circle deep in the zoogs’ wood, and the stone slab with an iron ring on it, the trapdoor that Carter was so eager to avoid, is the connection between their land and the surface.  Gugs are man-eaters; they’d certainly consume Carter, especially as in their current diminished era they get the flesh of dreamers only rarely, and are obliged to eat ghasts (those repulsive beings which die in the light, and which live in the vaults of Zin and leap on long hind legs like kangaroos, says Lovecraft.  He’s just full of helpful explanations today!)

Pickman’s advice to Carter is to either emerge from the underdark at the ruined city of Sarkomand, in the valley below Leng, or else wake up and start his quest over again, since the Enchanted Wood is right next to the Gate of Deeper Slumber.  Carter rejects both these options, though; he has never been to Sarkomand and has no idea how to get from there to Celephais, and he fears if he wakes up he’ll forget the details of his trip, especially the appearance of the carved image atop Mount Ngranek.  That image, and the knowledge that it resembles the seamen from the north who traded onyx in Celephais, are key to his quest.

Between the two of them, Pickman and Carter devise a new plan.  Carter will chance the kingdom of the Gugs, disguised as a ghoul and with a ghoul escort.  Gugs love to eat dreamers, but they fear ghouls for some reason; as part of a pack of ghouls Carter might safely reach the big Tower of Koth in the center of the Gug realm, which contains the spiral staircase that winds up to the zoogs’ forest.

Carter’s ghoul disguise:

1) Shaving, as ghouls do not have any hair.

2) Rolling around in the mud so he smells like a ghoul.

3) Stripping naked and carrying his clothing wrapped up in a tight bundle as if it were a choice morsel from a tomb.

4) Hunching over and faking a limp.

It gets dark quick up there where the air is thin, and Carter’s not equipped to climb down (or up) in the black of night.  He stretches out on the ledge, in the cold, and waits for morning.  Stars come out, but by the starlight he can’t see his hand in front of his face.

Lovecraft mentioned a few paragraphs back that Carter obtained a scimitar in Baharna, and that comes into play now, when he feels somebody slide the cutlass out of its belt-sheath.  That’s trouble sign number one.  Trouble sign number two is the sound of the cutlass landing where someone threw it, a long ways down along the cliffs.  Trouble sign number three is a very terrible outline of something noxiously thin and horned and tailed and bat-winged blotting out some of the stars.

Around the time something grabs him at the neck while something else grabs him by the feet, and he’s carried up into the sky, that’s when Carter starts to worry, because he kn[ows] the night-gaunts had got him.

He struggles and screams, but the night-gaunts put a stop to that by, and I am not making this up, tickling him.  They make no sound at all, as they carry him away first through the sky and then through a tunnel in a cliff, that leads into a vast subterranean labyrinth.  He squirms, they squeeze him.  He shouts, they tickle.  Finally he begins to perceive light, and deduces that the night-gaunts have taken him to the Underdark.

Lovecraft doesn’t call it the Underdark, but that’s what it is, plainly: an inner world of subterrene horror of which dim legends tell, and which is litten only by the pale death-fire wherewith reeks the ghoulish air and the primal mists of the pits at Earth’s core.

The night-gaunts take him down, down, down, to the fabled Peaks of Thok, which Lovecraft feigns surprise you have not heard of.  The peaks are ugly, and evil, and inhabited by terrible monsters, but they’re nicer to look at than the night-gaunts, which in the inexplicable gray light of the Underdark Carter can finally see.  Big oily demons with batwings and scorpion tails and no faces, just a suggestive blankness where a face ought to be.  Charming, I know!

The night-gaunts aren’t so bad, though, it turns out; they fly Carter below the Peaks of Thok, set him down gently on a bone-strewn ground, and depart.  Through no clear explanation, Carter intuits he’s arrived at the vale of Pnath, where crawl and burrow the enormous Dholes.  Lovecraft tries to scare us by observing that no one has ever seen a Dhole and lived to tell about it, but maybe he forgets that he just now played that exact same card with the night-gaunts, who tickle you and set you down gently before leaving.

Carter’s awesome, though, Lovecraft reminds us.  Even in this fearsome place he had a plan and an objective.  Apparently Carter once met a guy who had been to Pnath, and learned all about it.  Funny story about this guy, Pickman: he was a painter who became friends with a race of immortal necrophages, the ghouls, and eventually he became a ghoul himself.  Pnath is a place where the Dreamland and the waking world intersect; Pickman and the other ghouls throw the body parts they don’t eat into it, which is why it’s full of bones.

So Carter looks around for bonefall, as Lovecraft charmingly calls it, and when he finds evidence there are ghouls up above him he shouts Pickman’s name, and asks for a ladder.  They lower one!  It’s awesome, because while Carter scampers up the ladder as fast as he can, a Dhole (no description given) comes up under him to, and this is the word Lovecraft uses, nuzzle him.  Unendurable nuzzling.

But apparently Dholes can’t climb ladders, jump, or fly, because once Carter’s ten feet up he’s out of the Dhole’s reach.  He climbs and climbs until he gets blisters, and I’m really curious as to why and how the ghouls happen to have a couple of hundred feet of rope ladder so readily accessible.

As Carter climbs Mount Ngranek he’s reassured by occasional signs that pumice-gatherers have come this way before him.  Handholds, marks carved in the rock, that kind of thing.  He sees little quarries and excavations where some choice vein or stream of lava had been found. In one place a narrow ledge had been chopped artificially to an especially rich deposit far to the right of the main line of ascent. He makes his way up, and finds a trail winding around to the other face of the mountain, where the carving is.

Carter’s a pretty crazy badass, did you know that?  He doesn’t feel fear, most of the time, although up atop Ngranek, with the air thin and cold, the rock face on one side and the void on the other, he comes close.  Carter’s also an expert enough dreamer to climb even nearly sheer surfaces, which I’m not sure how that works, but Lovecraft has better things to do than explain just how dreaming works in his cosmology.

Finally Carter reaches his goal!  He lost the narrow trail a ways back and down, and as he lifts himself onto a ledge almost at the snowline, he sees the cliff face above him has not been left untouched since nature shaped it, but rather has been carved into the shape of a god.  Again, time to just quote a full paragraph:

Stern and terrible shone that face that the sunset lit with fire. How vast it was no mind can ever measure, but Carter knew at once that man could never have fashioned it. It was a god chiselled by the hands of the gods, and it looked down haughty and majestic upon the seeker. Rumour had said it was strange and not to be mistaken, and Carter saw that it was indeed so; for those long narrow eyes and long-lobed ears, and that thin nose and pointed chin, all spoke of a race that is not of men but of gods.

Carter’s overjoyed, partly because he’s succeeded in his quest to find this carved face (never mind that until recently in the tale it was referred to as multiple figures of gods dancing, rather than just one god’s face) but mostly because he recognizes the ethnicity of the god in question.  His plan, you remember, is to find the part of the Dreamlands where the natives resemble the gods, on the grounds that it must be there that the gods live and interbreed with humans.  This plan might have been unworkable if he hadn’t known where to go, but luckily this isn’t Carter’s first trip through the Dreamlands.

Back at the beginning of our story Lovecraft mentioned that Carter had been to the city of Cephalais, ruled half the year by King Kuranes, another dreamer whom Carter knew in the waking world.  Cephalais is a port city, and at least once a year a ship comes in full of sailors matching this face’s features.

So all Carter has to do is climb back down Mount Ngranek, cross the Yath valley to Baharna, board a ship back to Dylath-Leen, walk up the Skai river and across the bridge to Nir, return through the forest of the zoogs and emerge out on the north side instead of the south side, then cross the garden-country Oukranos to the city of Thran, where he can take a ship across the Cerenarian Sea to the Tanarian Hills, beyond which lies the land of Ooth-Nargai, the greatest city of which is Celephais.  Then wait for the annual ship of weird Northern sailors, get them to take him back to their homeland, find the gods, and somehow talk them into letting him have his city back.  Simplicity itself!

Carter’s feeling pretty awesome about the situation, let me tell you, but then the night-gaunts show up and ruin his good time.

Carter stays for a time in Baharna as the houseguest of the captain of the ship that brought him to the city, and after the captain leaves again without him he stays for a while longer in a hotel in the oldest part of town.  He goes all around Baharna, asking about Mount Ngarnek and the carved image, but no one can give him any information.  Ngranek is a hard mountain with only an accursed valley behind it, also: night-gaunts.  Not that anyone can tell him just what a night-gaunt is, either.

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