And now I must to bed. I am far too weary to proceed with my usual late-night inspection.
They say that the seasons change but little in this place, and then only about the Nile. Yet, as what might otherwise be called autumn passes and we face the beginnings of winter, I am sure that Cul Holman has grown hotter. The sun blazes. Sour heat breathes from the rocks at night. I have the slaves bring water and fan me as I lie abed or try to set about my labors. My body sweats as I toss and turn.
I confess that I am grown irritable. Only yesterday, for no other reason than that he stumbled amid the rocks where he was working and I thus had to walk around him, I ordered the flogging of a slave. And news has reached me of the ill-fortune of my patron Servilius Rufus, and of the bewildering demands of my father’s bankers, creditors, and clients.
Everything is bad, and I am too weary to give the details. At least, though, I am now past a half year in this dreadful place. Were the days not still so many, and the prospects of my return to Rome so grim, I could almost begin to count them.
In my dreams, I find that I am still often wandering the strange catacombs to which Alya took me, which in turn become once more the stinking streets of Alexandria under leaden skies, which unfailingly lead, if I cannot awaken myself, toward the dark-draped room of the villa in Naples in which I slept as a child, and where something that is no longer my grandmother awaits me. And even when I cannot hear her words amid the swarming dimness, the shrieking of these mountains that somehow penetrates even the deepest of my dreams, I know that it is always speaking of gold.
Gold, which has traits far beyond the pliancy, glamour, and incorruptibility that men so innocently crave. Gold, which claims ascendancy in a rubric of elements vaster than anything Aristotle conceived, and lies close to the point beyond which this universe must dissolve. Gold, which gives onto other places, other times. A million unfolding doors. Gibbous lines of insanity.
At the worst moment, it seems that I am falling, pushed down and through and under by a stifling weight. Strong hands then reach up to rescue me, and I am lifted into the light of some vast place amid the strangest of buildings. There are angles and shapes that my eyes can hardly comprehend, a sky that has a texture and a color that can never have been of this earth. And I am surrounded by vast, ugly star-headed creatures, and I know that I am lost—unimaginably so.
Yet still I reach toward them.
Now that I am a little better, and although the weakness of the fever that I suffered is still upon me, I can look back on this last entry—and the odder suppositions with which I laced my record of my trip beyond the mountains—with a clearer perspective.
Perhaps the malady that killed my predecessor at last caught up with me. It could have been the foul vapors of those catacombs. Whatever, I am still sane and alive. After the terrible depths of the fever, I must do my best to be grateful. A full month has now passed since my last record, and already, my replacement will be setting out from Rome. For that, also, I must be grateful. Konchab and Taracus have proved themselves more than capable of running these mines without me, and even the miserly Alathn seems happy once again with the regularity of his accounts. I suspect they all welcomed the resumption of their independence. Alya, at the worst of my fever, closed and re-closed the shutters that flew open in the shrieking madness of the wind. Even Kaliphus has been to see me, and left fresh fruit and rose water, and a suggestion that I have the pile of starstones immediately disposed of—which hints well that they might have some small value.
I saw a dark, wind-flapping figure standing high on a rock above the pits at Dylath when I finally roused myself to make an inspection with Konchab this morning. Some of Taracus’s soldiers happened to be about, and I ordered that they attempt to capture whatever it was that I was seeing. Soon, I was face to face with an elderly shepherd, quivering with fear, stinking in his filthy robes. Such was my relief that I laughed and I bid him released back to his starving flock.
All would be better but for the return to Rome, and with it the final loss of the wealth of my family. Childless, and with no desire to correct that situation, my only sister enfeebled by her long ugly face and no prospect of a dowry, it almost seems that I must now contemplate the end of my family’s once-dignified name.
The days now drag interminably. There is the ordering of the new slaves, and much bargaining for tributes and fees with money I do not even control. Yet I throw myself into this work with a new passion, and do my best to demonstrate to Alathn the breadth of my expensively acquired education by ploughing through Cul Holman’s intricate accounts.
In the dust, in the very air here, hang fragments of gold. I sometimes think I see their glimmering when the sun falls in some new way, or shining on the limbs of the slaves as they emerge from the pits as if transformed into intricate gilded machines. In truth, I must have breathed in a little of the stuff along with all this foul air, so that it now infuses the humors of my body.
This last night, I was assailed by yet another foul dream. In it, I found that once more I lay beside the changing and sliding shape that was once my grandmother, although now I fear her form. In a ghastly, buzzing voice, it speaks to me only of darkness and atrocities. Times when the star-headed Old Ones had to flee their great cities from a timeless wind that flooded beyond the stars. As the tapestries billow around us and the wind shrieks, I sense the near-presence of shambling amorphous entities.
“There was once and is and always will be the three-lobed burning eye,” the creature begins. “It was named Nyarlathotep, by one who dared so to name it, and briefly called himself the Golden Keeper. But these are only sounds, and he was but the seed.…” At that, she cackled. Within a vast maw, teeth gleamed. “What it truly feasts upon is terror and debasement. It needs no meaning. It lurks forever beyond all comprehension, writhing at the back of everything…”
Behind the beating curtains and the thinning walls of the room that I must share with whatever my grandmother has become, I sense the scratching and sliding of something massive, bearing before it an insane stench. I know, then, that were I to even glimpse it, my mind would dissolve. But still I sense that this is all part of some ghastly ritual. That, somehow, I am being prepared.
I awoke, slimed with sweat, to the howl of the wind and the persistent barking of Konchab’s dogs. Even then, the curtains of the room still seemed to sway and flutter, and I sensed the fading of some terrible disturbance, and a crouching weight lay upon my head. All of this, as you my trusted reader may well imagine, left me in a poor mood for the meeting that Alathn had requested this morning.
As he talked at his usual tedious length about the intricate principles and procedures of his work, I glanced at Konchab and Taracus, my two other companions, and sensed that they were already pondering other duties. Perhaps, I mused, this ugly dwarf was always thus—and nothing will ever come of the discrepancies of which he speaks.
“Gold,” Alathn said, in what I hoped was his conclusion, “has a greater weight than stone or all other metals. It tends to sink and gather. Of course, this is the very principle upon which it is collected amid the pans, pools, and washing fleeces at Tarsil.”
Here, as if this was all of some especial relevance, he licked his thin lips and glanced boldly at me.
“For this same reason,” he continued, “there have been surprisingly rich finds made amid the sweepings of the counting house floors. Many small grains and even nuggets are thus recovered. And within this last year, the weight of these sweepings have gone up noticeably. Yet we have recovered barely any of the expected gold they can be expected to yield.”