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awful climb through lunar countryside beyond, before the rescuing rush of
earth's friendly cats. He knew that the creature on the dais was without doubt
the High-Priest Not To Be Described, of which legend whispers such fiendish
and abnormal possibilities, but he feared to think just what that abhorred
High-Priest might be.
Then the figured silk slipped a trifle from one of the greyish-white paws, and
Carter knew what the noisome High-Priest was. And in that hideous second,
stark fear drove him to something his reason would never have dared to
attempt, for in all his shaken consciousness there was room only for one
frantic will to escape from what squatted on that golden throne. He knew that
hopeless labyrinths of stone lay betwixt him and the cold table-land outside,
and that even on that table-land the noxious Shantek still waited; yet in
spite of all this there was in his mind only the instant need to get away from
that wriggling, silk-robed monstrosity.
The slant-eyed man had set the curious lamp upon one of the high and wickedly
stained altar-stones by the pit, and had moved forward somewhat to talk to the
High-Priest with his hands. Carter, hitherto wholly passive, now gave that man
a terrific push with all the wild strength of fear, so that the victim toppled
at once into that gaping well which rumour holds to reach down to the hellish
Vaults of Zin where Gugs hunt ghasts in the dark. In almost the same second he
seized the lamp from the altar and darted out into the frescoed labyrinths,
racing this way and that as chance determined and trying not to think of the
stealthy padding of shapeless paws on the stones behind him, or of the silent
wrigglings and crawlings which must be going on back there in lightless
corridors.
After a few moments he regretted his thoughtless haste, and wished he had
tried to follow backward the frescoes he had passed on the way in. True, they
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were so confused and duplicated that they could not have done him much good,
but he wished none the less he had made the attempt. Those he now saw were
even more horrible than those he had seen then, and he knew he was not in the
corridors leading outside. In time he became quite sure he was not followed,
and slackened his pace somewhat; but scarce had he breathed in half relief
when a new peril beset him. His lamp was waning, and he would soon be in pitch
blackness with no means of sight or guidance.
When the light was all gone he groped slowly in the dark, and prayed to the
Great Ones for such help as they might afford. At times he felt the stone
floor sloping up or down, and once he stumbled over a step for which no reason
seemed to exist. The farther he went the damper it seemed to be, and when he
was able to feel a junction or the mouth of a side passage he always chose the
way which sloped downward the least. He believed, though, that his general
course was down; and the vault-like smell and incrustations on the greasy
walls and floor alike warned him he was burrowing deep in Leng's unwholesome
table-land. But there was not any warning of the thing which came at last;
only the thing itself with its terror and shock and breath-taking chaos. One
moment he was groping slowly over the slippery floor of an almost level place,
and the next he was shooting dizzily downward in the dark through a burrow
which must have been well-nigh vertical.
Of the length of that hideous sliding he could never be sure, but it seemed to
take hours of delirious nausea and ecstatic frenzy. Then he realized he was
still, with the phosphorescent clouds of a northern night shining sickly above
him. All around were crumbling walls and broken columns, and the pavement on
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file:///F|/rah/H.%20P.%20Lovecraft/The%20Dream%20Quest%20of%20Unknown%20Kadath
%20by%20H_%20P_%20Lovecraft.txt which he lay was pierced by straggling grass
and wrenched asunder by frequent shrubs and roots. Behind him a basalt cliff
rose topless and perpendicular; its dark side sculptured into repellent
scenes, and pierced by an arched and carven entrance to the inner blacknesses
out of which he had come. Ahead stretched double rows of pillars, and the
fragments and pedestals of pillars, that spoke of a broad and bygone street;
and from the urns and basins along the way he knew it had been a great street
of gardens. Far off at its end the pillars spread to mark a vast round plaza,
and in that open circle there loomed gigantic under the lurid night clouds a
pair of monstrous things. Huge winged lions of diarite they were, with
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