I think we are probably more alike than some of my remarks on a desire to voyage in space and time may have led you to infer. This desire, in all likelihood, is mainly cerebral on my part, and I am not so sure that I would care to be “a permanent colonist” in some alien universe—no matter how bored or disgusted I may
seem
to be at times with my environment. And I have had reason to discover, at past times—particularly in times of nervous disturbance—how dependent I really am on familiar things—even on certain features of my surroundings which might not seem very attractive to others. If I am upset, or “under the weather”, an unfamiliar milieu tends to take on an aspect of the most distressing and confusing
unreality
—similar, no doubt, to what you experienced in Brooklyn. So, in all probability, I will do well to content myself with dream projections… But doubtless your geographical sense is far more clearly and consciously developed than mine.
3
1. FW, letter to CAS, July 22,1930.
2. CAS, letter to AWD, September 5, 1941 (SL 333).
3. CAS, letter to HPL, c. November 16, 1930 (LL 20). Lovecraft’s comments appear in his letter to CAS dated November 7, 1930 (Selected Letters III, pp. 214-215).
APPENDIX TWO:
“THE SATYR”: ALTERNATE CONCLUSION
The following is the version of the story published in La Paree Stories for July 1931, and subsequently reprinted in Genius Loci and Other Tales. It replaces the last four paragraphs that follow the sentence “. He kissed her … and they both forgot the vision of the satyr… .”
They were lying on a patch of golden moss, where the sunrays fell through a single cleft in the high foliage, when Raoul found them. They did not see or hear him, as he paused and stood with drawn rapier before the vision of their unlawful happiness.
He was about to fling himself upon them and impale the two with a single thrust where they lay, when an unlooked-for and scarce conceivable thing occurred. With swiftness veritably supernatural, a brown hairy creature, a being that was not wholly man, not wholly animal, but some hellish mixture of both, sprang from amid the alder branches and snatched Adèle from Olivier’s embrace. Olivier and Raoul saw it only in one fleeting glimpse, and neither could have described it clearly afterwards. But the face was that which had leered upon the lovers from the foliage; and the shaggy legs and body were those of a creature of antique legend. It disappeared as incredibly as it had come, bearing the woman in its arms; and her shrieks of terror were surmounted by the pealing of its mad, diabolical laughter.
The shrieks and laughter died away at some distant remove in the green silence of the forest, and were not followed by any other sound. Raoul and Olivier could only stare at each other in complete stupefaction.
APPENDIX THREE:
FROM THE CRYPTS OF MEMORY
Aeons of aeons ago, in an epoch whose marvellous worlds have crumbled, and whose mighty suns are less than shadow, I dwelt in a star whose course, decadent from the high, irremeable heavens of the past, was even then verging upon the abyss in which, said astronomers, its immemorial cycle should find a dark and disastrous close.
Ah, strange was that gulf-forgotten star—how stranger than any dream of dreamers in the spheres of today, or than any vision that hath soared upon visionaries, in their retrospection of the sidereal past! There, through cycles of a history whose piled and bronze-writ records were hopeless of tabulation, the dead had come to outnumber infinitely the living. And built of a stone that was indestructible save in the furnace of suns, their cities rose beside those of the living like the prodigious metropoli of Titans, with walls that overgloom the vicinal villages. And over all was the black funereal vault of the cryptic heavens—a dome of infinite shadows, where the dismal sun, suspended like a sole, enormous lamp, failed to illumine, and drawing back its fires from the face of the irresolvable ether, threw a baffled and despairing beam on the vague remote horizons, and shrouded vistas illimitable of the visionary land.
We were a sombre, secret, many-sorrowed people—we who dwelt beneath that sky of eternal twilight, pierced by the towering tombs and obelisks of the past. In our blood was the chill of the ancient night of time; and our pulses flagged with a creeping prescience of the lentor of Lethe. Over our courts and fields, like invisible sluggish vampires born of mausoleums, rose and hovered the black hours, with wings that distilled a malefic languor made from the shadowy woe and despair of perished cycles. The very skies were fraught with oppression, and we breathed beneath them as in a sepulcher, forever sealed with all its stagnancies of corruption and slow decay, and darkness impenetrable save to the fretting worm.
Vaguely we lived, and loved as in dreams—the dim and mystic dreams that hover upon the verge of fathomless sleep. We felt for our women, with their pale and spectral beauty, the same desire that the dead may feel for the phantom lilies of Hadean meads. Our days were spent in roaming through the ruins of lone and immemorial cities, whose palaces of fretted copper, and streets that ran between lines of carven golden obelisks, lay dim and ghastly with the dead light, or were drowned forever in seas of stagnant shadow; cities whose vast and iron-builded fanes preserved their gloom of primordial mystery and awe, from which the simulacra of century-forgotten gods looked forth with unalterable eyes to the hopeless heavens, and saw the ulterior night, the ultimate oblivion. Languidly we kept our gardens, whose grey lilies concealed a necromantic perfume, that had power to evoke for us the dead and spectral dreams of the past. Or, wandering through ashen fields of perennial autumn, we sought the rare and mystic immortelles, with sombre leaves and pallid petals, that bloomed beneath willows of wan and veil-like foliage: or wept with a sweet and nepenthe-laden dew by the flowing silence of Acherontic waters.
And one by one we died and were lost in the dust of accumulated time. We knew the years as a passing of shadows, and death itself as the yielding of twilight unto night.
APPENDIX FOUR:
BIBLIOGRAPHY
“To the Daemon.” Acolyte 2, no. 1 (Fall 1943): 3. In PP.
“The Abominations of Yondo.” Overland Monthly 84, no. 4 (April 1926): 100-101, 114, 126. Celephais 1, no. 1 (March 1944): 4-7. In AY.
“Sadastor.” WT 16, no. 1 (July 1930): 133-35. In OST.
“The Ninth Skeleton.” WT 12, no. 3 (September 1928): 363-66. In GL.
“The Last Incantation.” WT 15, no. 6 (June 1930): 783-86. In LW, RA.
“The End of the Story.” WT 15, no. 5 (May 1930): 637-48. In OST, RA.
“The Phantoms of the Fire.” WT 16, no. 3 (September 1930): 363-66. In GL.
“A Night in Malnéant.” Original version: in The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies (Auburn Journal Press, 1933). Revised version: in WT 34, no. 3 (September 1939): 102-5. In OST.
“The Resurrection of the Rattlesnake.” WT 18, no. 3 (October 1931): 387-90. In OD.