Known Accounts of The Great Race of Yith

Known Accounts of The Great Race of Yith

Compiled and Edited by Professor Qui Von Wer Foreman Serendipity

Contents:

Introduction.

1. Amnesiac Phase Symptoms.

2. Initial Apparent Recovery.

3. Subsequent Delusion Phase.

4. Mind Projection.

5. Treatment of the Displaced Mind.

6. Other Traded Minds.

7. Descriptions of Yithian Architecture and Furnishings.

8. Plantlife.

9. Wildlife.

10. Pnakotic Ruins.

11. Pnakotic Library.

12. Yithian Biology.

13. Yithian Society and Culture.

14. Yithian Conflicts.

15. Alleged Confrontation with Flying Yugguthian Polyps.

Introduction.

What is conjectured to be known about the Yithians (also known as "The Great Race of Yith") is based on the dreams, research and conjecture of a recovering amnesia patient, by whose own account after 5 years as an amnesia patient went on to spend an additional twenty-two years researching the ideas from obscure mythical occult tomes and making several expeditionary trips to obscure remote locales.

The patient claims to have unearthed manuscripts and "fragments of unknown, primordial masonry" which would have proven his claims, but that he subsequently lost said evidence in a moment fright.

The patient does claim to describe the original planet Yith, nor the original bodies of the Yithians; but some other species supposedly occupied by the minds of the Yithians on a planet other than Yith tens of millions of years ago.

No contents from the so-called Pnakotic ruins have never recovered, nor the claims of their antiquity authenticated. Certain occult groups continue to make uncorroborated claims to possess manuscripts fragments from the fabled Pnakotic library.

1. Amnesiac Phase Symptoms

Although the victim had no prior history of memory lapses or other known mental illness, nor any hereditary susceptibility to amnesia, he was suddenly stricken and lost consciousness. After his revival, he described premonitory symptoms including a certain brief, glimmering visions of several hours previous "chaotic visions which disturbed me greatly because they were so unprecedented". His head was aching, and experienced a "singular feeling - altogether new to me - that someone else was trying to get possession of my thoughts."

He recounted seeing "strange shapes before my eyes, and to feel that I was in a grotesque room other than the classroom."

"My thoughts and speech wandered from my subject, and the students saw that something was gravely amiss. Then I slumped down, unconscious, in my chair, in a stupor from which no one could arouse me."

The patient was not in his rightful original faculties again for five years, four months, and thirteen days.

The patient showed no sign of consciousness for sixteen and a half hours though removed to his home and given the best of medical attention. The patient’s eyes opened sixteen and a half hours later and began to speak in a manner that frightened the patient’s family "by the trend of his expression and language". The patent had no remembrance of his identity and his past, and seemed anxious to conceal his lack of knowledge. His eyes glazed strangely at the persons around him, and the flections of his facial muscles were as if they were unfamiliar.

Speech seemed awkward and foreign, using his vocal organs clumsily and gropingly, and a curious stilted diction as if he had laboriously learned the English language from books. "The pronunciation was barbarously alien, whilst the idiom seemed to include both scraps of curious archaism and expressions of a wholly incomprehensible cast."

The patient’s physical strength returned at once, although he required an amount of re-education in the use of his hands, legs, and bodily apparatus in general. Because of this and other handicaps inherent in the mnemonic lapse, the patient was for some time kept under strict medical care.

The patient accepted his amnesia and made efforts to master certain points in history, science, art, language, and folklore, some tremendously abstruse and some childishly simple.

The patient exhibited an inexplicable command of many almost unknown sorts of knowledge, which he seemed to wish to hide rather than display. The patient would occasionally inadvertently refer, with casual assurance, to specific events in ages outside of the range of known history.

The patient frequented college and public libraries at all hours; and arranged special courses at Universities and odd travels involving long visits to remote and desolate places.

The patient exhibited abnormally rapid assimilation of the course materials at the universities and his rate of reading was phenomenal. His skill at interpreting complex figures was veritably incredible.

There were ugly reports of his power to influence the thoughts and acts of others, though all accounts had been discredited. Other ugly reports concerned intimacy with leaders and scholars of occultist groups. These rumours were never proved, were doubtless stimulated by the known tenor of some of his reading certain rare books at libraries.

2. Initial Apparent Recovery

After five years, the patient began to display signs of ennui and flagging interest, and hinted to various associates that a change might soon be expected. Although he spoke of returning memories of his earlier life, the recollections he gave were casual, and such as might have been learned from the patient’s own private papers.

Shortly thereafter, household staff reported the installation of a mechanism, constructed piecemeal by different makers of scientific apparatus. Described as "a queer mixture of rods, wheels, and mirrors, though only about two feet tall, one foot wide, and one foot thick. The central mirror was circular and convex."

The next day, the patient was found to have recovered what appeared to be his memories and previous personality. No sign of the scientific apparatus mentioned by the household servants was found. The patient had no memory of the prior five years and all of his papers and effects from that period had been burned.

The patient’s hitherto masklike face began to show signs of expression and his personality seemed much like that of his former normal self.

The patient was reported afterwards to have muttered some very curious syllables which seemed unrelated to any known human speech.

The patient’s conception of time, his ability to distinguish between consecutiveness and simultaneousness, seemed subtly disordered.

The patient also exhibited certain symptoms such as shunning mirrors, so much so that he was shaved by a barber.

The patient reported that "vague dreams and queer ideas continually haunted me". The patient complained about being intermittently plagued with vague unplaceable dreams suggesting fragments of some hideous memory elaborately blotted out. The patient described some of his dream fragments at first as merely strange rather than horrible.

Much of the dreams’s content could have come from trivial sources such as common text book knowledge of the plants and other conditions of the planet from a hundred and fifty million years ago, the world of the Permian or Triassic age.

The patient became increasingly concerned after seeing margin notes and ostensible text corrections in various books he had consulted during his 5 year amnesiac period. The patient characterized the text to be in a script and idiom which he described to somehow seem oddly unhuman. Most of the markings were mostly in the respective languages of the various books. One note however consisted of certain curvilinear hieroglyphs in the same ink as the other corrections, but following no known pattern.

The patient retains no facility in the languages he learned during his five year amnesiac period.

3. Subsequent Delusion Phase

Piecing together the scattered records, ancient and modern, anthropological and medical, the patient found a fairly consistent mixture of myth related to early existence, particularly of the Palaeozoic or Mesozoic. A basis existed for the formation of a fixed type of delusion. A few of the myths had significant connexions with other cloudy legends of the pre-human world, especially those Hindu tales involving stupefying gulfs of time and forming part of the lore of modern theosopists.

Primal myth and modern delusion joined in their assumption that mankind is only one of the highly evolved and dominant races of the planet's history. The myths implied that things of inconceivable shape had reared towers to the sky and delved into every secret of nature before the first amphibians had crawled out of the sea hundreds of millions of years ago.

Some had come down from the stars; a few were as old as the cosmos itself, others had arisen swiftly from terrene germs as far behind the first germs of our life- cycle as those germs are behind ourselves. Spans of thousands of millions of years, and linkages to other galaxies and universes, were freely spoken of.

Most of the tales and impressions concerned a relatively late race, of a strange and intricate shape, resembling no life-form known to science, which had lived till only fifty million years before the advent of man. This race, they indicated, had conquered the secret of time. It had learned all things that ever were known or ever would be known on the earth, through the power of its keener minds to project themselves into the past and future, even through gulfs of millions of years, and study the lore of every age.

This type of delusion is rare, but not unknown.

4. Mind Projection

"In the latter case the course was easier and more material. With suitable mechanical aid a mind would project itself forward in time, feeling its dim, extra- sensory way till it approached the desired period. Then, after preliminary trials, it would seize on the best discoverable representative of the highest of that period's life-forms. It would enter the organism's brain and set up therein its own vibrations, while the displaced mind would strike back to the period of the displacer, remaining in the latter's body till a reverse process was set up."

"The projected mind, in the body of the organism of the future, would then pose as a member of the race whose outward form it wore, learning as quickly as possible all that could be learned of the chosen age and its massed information and techniques."

"As for the ordinary cases of exploration - when the displacing mind had learned what it wished in the future, it would build an apparatus like that which had started its flight and reverse the process of projection. Once more it would be in its own body in its own age, while the lately captive mind would return to that body of the future to which it properly belonged."

"Only when one or the other of the bodies had died during the exchange was this restoration impossible. In such cases, of course, the exploring mind had - like those of the death-escapers - to live out an alien-bodied life in the future; or else the captive mind-like the dying permanent exiles - had to end its days in the form and past age of the Great Race."

"This fate was least horrible when the captive mind was also of the Great Race - a not infrequent occurrence, since in all its periods that race was intensely concerned with its own future. The number of dying permanent exiles of the Great Race was very slight - largely because of the tremendous penalties attached to displacements of future Great Race minds by the moribund."

"Through projection, arrangements were made to inflict these penalties on the offending minds in their new future bodies - and sometimes forced re-exchanges were effected."

"Complex cases of the displacement of exploring or already captive minds by minds in various regions of the past had been known and carefully rectified. In every age since the discovery of mind projection, a minute but well-recognised element of the population consisted of Great Race minds from past ages, sojourning for a longer or shorter while."

"When a captive mind of alien origin was returned to its own body in the future, it was purged by an intricate mechanical hypnosis of all it had learned in the Great Race's age - this because of certain troublesome consequences inherent in the general carrying forward of knowledge in large quantities."

"The few existing instances of clear transmission had caused, and would cause at known future times, great disasters. And it was largely in consequence of two cases of this kind - said the old myths – that mankind had learned what it had concerning the Great Race."

"Thus the returning mind reached its own age with only the faintest and most fragmentary visions of what it had undergone since its seizure. All memories that could be eradicated were eradicated, so that in most cases only a dream-shadowed blank stretched back to the time of the first exchange. Some minds recalled more than others, and the chance joining of memories had at rare times brought hints of the forbidden past to future ages."

5. Treatment of the Displaced Mind

"Meanwhile the displaced mind, thrown back to the displacer's age and body, Would be carefully guarded. It would be kept from harming the body it occupied, and would be drained of all its knowledge by trained questioners. Often it could be questioned in its own language, when previous quests into the future had brought back records of that language."

"If the mind came from a body whose language the Great Race could not physically reproduce, clever machines would be made, on which the alien speech could be played as on a musical instrument."

"When the captive mind's amazement and resentment had worn off, and when – assuming that it came from a body vastly different from the Great Race's - it had lost its horror at its unfamiliar temporary form, it was permitted to study its new environment and experience a wonder and wisdom approximating that of its displacer."

"With suitable precautions, and in exchange for suitable services, it was allowed to rove all over the habitable world in titan airships or on the huge boatlike atomic-engined vehicles which traversed the great roads, and to delve freely into the libraries containing the records of the planet's past and future."

"This reconciled many captive minds to their lot; since none were other than keen, and to such minds the unveiling of hidden mysteries of earth-closed chapters of inconceivable pasts and dizzying vortices of future time which include the years ahead of their own natural ages-forms always, despite the abysmal horrors often unveiled, the supreme experience of life."

"Now and then certain captives were permitted to meet other captive minds seized from the future - to exchange thoughts with consciousnesses living a hundred or a thousand or a million years before or after their own ages. And all were urged to write copiously in their own languages of themselves and their respective periods; such documents to be filed in the great central archives."

"It may be added that there was one special type of captive whose privileges were far greater than those of the majority. These were the dying permanent exiles, whose bodies in the future had been seized by keen-minded members of the Great Race who, faced with death, sought to escape mental extinction."

"Such melancholy exiles were not as common as might be expected, since the longevity of the Great Race lessened its love of life - especially among those superior minds capable of projection. From cases of the permanent projection of elder minds arose many of those lasting changes of personality noticed in later history - including mankind's."

6. Other Traded Minds

The patient claims to have traded minds with such aliens, having spent the five years of his amnesiac period inhabiting the body of a ten foot tall iridescent cone creature. The patient described that other minds were present as well.

The patient also claims to have spoken with the mind of:

An unnamed king of Lomar who had ruled that terrible polar land one hundred thousand years before.

An unnamed member of a race of "insect-philosophers" which hail from the fourth moon of Jupiter, 6 million years ago.

A unnamed general of the greatheaded brown people who held South Africa circa B.C.50,000.

An unnamed priest of Atlantis' middle kingdom.

An unnamed archmage of vanished Yhe in the Pacific.

Crom-Ya, a Cimmerian chieftain circa B.C. 15,000.

Khephnes, an Egyptian of the 14th Dynasty, B.C. 1640-1674, learns about Nyarlathotep.

An unnamed court astronomer of pre-Inca Peru.

Theodotides, a Greco-Bactrian official of B.C. 200.

Titus Sempronius Blaesus, A Roman who had been a quaestor in Sulla's time, between B.C. 82 and B.C. 75.

Wolfred Herman Freimann, Germanic tribesmen in A.D. 9, a veteran of the battle of Teutoberger Wald.

Bartolomeo Corsi, a twelfth-century Florentine monk who subsequently goes mad. He is eventually exiled to the island of Stromboli and writes the Harmaticon.

Pierre-Louis Montagny, An aged Frenchman of Louis XIII's time, between A.D. 1610 and 1643.

James Woodville, a Suffolk gentleman of Cromwell's day, between A.D. 1651 and 1658.

Nevil Kingston-Brown, an Australian physicist who will die in A.D. 2518.

Yiang-Li, a philosopher circa A.D. 5000; a scholar known for his "overviews".

Nug-Soth, a magician of the dark conquerors, circa A.D. 16,000.

An unnamed "half-plastic denizen" of the interior of a planet beyond Pluto, circa A.D. 18,000,000.

An unnamed member of a Venusian species which will not develop for millions of years into the future, circa A.D. 500,000,000.

Other unnamed entities whose date reference were not given:

An unnamed winged, starheaded, half-vegetable race, no date given.

An unnamed reptile of fabled Valusia, no date given.

Three unnamed furry pre-human Hyperborean worshippers of Tsathoggua, no date given.

An unnamed being called a Tcho-Tchos, no date given.

Two unnamed arachnids from the far future, no date given.

Five unnamed members from some hardy coleopterous species, no date given.

The Great Race has supposedly transferred its keenest minds en masse in the face of horrible peril.

After man there would be the mighty beetle civilisation, the bodies of whose members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world. Later, as the earth's span closed, the transferred minds would again migrate through time and space - to another stopping-place in the bodies of the bulbous vegetable entities of Mercury. But there would be races after them, clinging pathetically to the cold planet and burrowing to its horror-filled core, before the utter end.

7. Descriptions of Yithian Architecture and Furnishings

"….an enormous vaulted chamber whose lofty stone aroinings were well-nigh lost in the shadows overhead. In whatever time or place the scene might be, the principle of the arch was known as fully and used as extensively as by the Romans."

"There were colossal, round windows and high, arched doors, and pedestals or tables each as tall as the height of an ordinary room. Vast shelves of dark wood lined the walls, holding what seemed to be volumes of immense size with strange hieroglyphs on their backs."

"The exposed stonework held curious carvings, always in curvilinear mathematical designs, and there were chiselled inscriptions in the same characters that the huge books bore. The dark granite masonry was of a monstrous megathic type, with lines of convex-topped blocks fitting the concave-bottomed courses which rested upon them."

"There were no chairs, but the tops of the vast pedestals were littered with books, papers, and what seemed to be writing materials - oddly figured jars of a purplish metal, and rods with stained tips. Tall as the pedestals were, I seemed at times able to view them from above. On some of them were great globes of luminous crystal serving as lamps, and inexplicable machines  formed of vitreous tubes and metal rods."

"The windows were glazed, and latticed with stout-looking bars. Though I dared not approach and peer out them, I could see from where I was he waving tops of singular fern-like growths. The floor was of massive octagonal flagstones, while rugs and hangings were entirely lacking."

"Sweeping through Cyclopean corridors of stone, and up and down gigantic inclined planes of the same monstrous masonry. There were no stairs anywhere, nor was any passageway less than thirty feet wide. Some of the structures through which I floated must have towered in the sky for thousands of feet."

"There were multiple levels of black vaults below, and never-opened trapdoors, sealed down with metal bands and holding dim suggestions of some special peril."

"I seemed to be a prisoner, and horror hung broodingly over everything I saw. I felt that the mocking curvilinear hieroglyphs on the walls would blast my soul with their message were I not guarded by a merciful ignorance."

"Still later my dreams included vistas from the great round windows, and from the titanic flat roof, with its curious gardens, wide barren area, and high, scalloped parapet of stone, to which the topmost of the inclined planes led."

"There were, almost endless leagues of giant buildings, each in its garden, and ranged along paved roads fully 200 feet wide. They differed greatly in aspect, but few were less than 500 feet square or a thousand feet high. Many seemed so limitless that they must have had a frontage of several thousand feet, while some shot up to mountainous altitudes in the grey, steamy heavens."

"They seemed to be mainly of stone or concrete, and most of them embodied the oddly curvilinear type of masonry noticeable in the building that held me. Roofs were flat and garden-covered, and tended to have scalloped parapets. Sometimes there were terraces and higher levels, and wide, cleared spaces amidst the gardens. The great roads held hints of motion, but in the earlier visions I could not resolve this impression into details."

"….enormous dark cylindrical towers which climbed far above any of the other structures. These appeared to be of a totally unique nature and showed signs of prodigious age and dilapidation. They were built of a bizarre type of square-cut basalt masonry, and tapered slightly toward their rounded tops. Nowhere in any of them could the least traces of windows or other apertures save huge doors be found."

"….some lower buildings - all crumbling with the weathering of aeons - which resembled these dark, cylindrical towers in basic architecture. Around all these aberrant piles of square-cut masonry there hovered an inexplicable aura of menace and concentrated fear, like that bred by the sealed trap-doors."

"….monstrous constructions of black or iridescent tone in glades and clearings where perpetual twilight reigned, and traversed long causeways over swamps so dark that I could tell but little of their moist, towering vegetation."

"….an area of countless miles strewn with age-blasted basaltic ruins whose architecture had been like that of the few windowless, round-topped towers in the haunting city."

"….the sea - a boundless, steamy expanse beyond the colossal stone piers of an enormous town of domes and arches. Great shapeless suggestions of shadow moved over it, and here and there its surface was vexed its anomalous spoutings."

"Many strange buildings of stone, going from one to the other along mammoth underground passages which seemed to form the common avenues of transit."

"Gigantic sealed trap-doors in the lowest level, with an aura of fear and forbiddenness."

"Tremendously tessellated pools."

"Rooms of curious and inexplicable utensils of myriad sorts."

"Colossal caverns of intricate machinery of unknown outline and purpose."

8. Plantlife

"The omnipresent gardens were almost terrifying in their strangeness, with bizarre and unfamiliar forms of vegetation nodding over broad paths lined with curiously carven monoliths. Abnormally vast fern-like growths predominated - some green, and some of a ghastly, fungoid pallor."

"Among them rose great spectral things resembling calamites, whose bamboo-like trunks towered to fabulous heights. Then there were tufted forms like fabulous cycads, and grotesque dark-green shrubs and trees of coniferous aspect."

"Flowers were small, colourless, and unrecognizable, blooming in geometrical beds and at large among the greenery."

"In a few of the terrace and roof-top gardens were larger and more blossoms of most offensive contours and seeming to suggest artificial breeding. Fungi of inconceivable size, outlines, and colours speckled the scene in patterns bespeaking some unknown but well-established horticultural tradition. In the larger gardens on the ground there seemed to be some attempt to preserve the irregularities of Nature, but on the roofs there was more selectiveness, and more evidences of the topiary art."

"The sides were almost always moist and cloudy, and sometimes I would seem to witness tremendous rains. Once in a while, though, there would be glimpses of the sun - which looked abnormally large – and of the moon, whose markings held a touch of difference from the normal that I could never quite fathom. When - very rarely - the night sky was clear to any extent, I beheld constellations which were nearly beyond recognition. Known outlines were sometimes approximated, but seldom duplicated; and from the position of the few groups I could recognize, I felt I must be in the earth's southern hemisphere, near the Tropic of Capricorn."

"The far horizon was always steamy and indistinct, but I could see that great jungles of unknown tree-ferns, calamites, lepidodendra, and sigillaria lay outside the city, their fantastic frondage waving mockingly in the shifting vapours. Now and then there would be suggestions of motion in the sky, but these my early visions never resolved."

"Strange floatings over the city and through the regions around it. I saw interminable roads through forests of fearsome growths with mottled, fluted, and banded trunks, and past other cities as strange as the one which persistently haunted me."

9. Wildlife

"Beyond the wide, warm ocean were other cities of the Great Race, and on one far continent I saw the crude villages of the black-snouted, winged creatures who would evolve as a dominant stock after the Great Race had sent its foremost minds into the future to escape the creeping horror. Flatness and exuberant green life were always the keynote of the scene. Hills were low and sparse, and usually displayed signs of volcanic forces."

"Of the animals I saw, I could write volumes. All were wild; for the Great Race's mechanised culture had long since done away with domestic beasts, while food was wholly vegetable or synthetic. Clumsy reptiles of great bulk floundered in steaming morasses, fluttered in the heavy air, or spouted in the seas and lakes; and among these I fancied I could vaguely recognise lesser, archaic prototypes of many forms - dinosaurs, pterodactyls, ichthyosaurs, labyrinthodonts, plesiosaurs, and the like-made familiar through palaeontology. Of birds or mammals there were none that I could discover."

"The ground and swamps were constantly alive with snakes, lizards, and crocodiles while insects buzzed incessantly among the lush vegetation. And far out at sea, unspied and unknown monsters spouted mountainous columns of foam into the vaporous sky. Once I was taken under the ocean in a gigantic submarine vessel with searchlights, and glimpsed some living horrors of awesome magnitude. I saw also the ruins of incredible sunken cities, and the wealth of crinoid, brachiopod, coral, and ichthyic life which everywhere abounded."

"The patient believed that the period of my dreams was somewhat less than 150,000,000 years ago, when the Palaeozoic age was giving place to the Mesozoic."

10. Pnakotic Ruins

"Of all things surviving physically and directly from that aeon-distant world, there remained only certain ruins of great stones in far places and under the sea, and parts of the text of the frightful Pnakotic Manuscripts."

"There probably never was a time when groups or cults did not secretly cherish certain of these hints. In the Necronomicon the presence of such a cult among human beings was suggested - a cult that sometimes gave aid to minds voyaging down the aeons from the days of the Great Race."

"And, meanwhile, the Great Race itself waxed well-nigh omniscient, and turned to the task of setting up exchanges with the minds of other planets, and of exploring their pasts and futures. It sought likewise to fathom the past years and origin of that black, aeon-dead orb in far space whence its own mental heritage had come - for the mind of the Great Race was older than its bodily form."

"The beings of a dying elder world, wise with the ultimate secrets, had looked ahead for a new world and species wherein they might have long life; and had sent their minds en masse into that future race best adapted to house them - the cone-shaped beings that peopled our earth a billion years ago."

"Thus the Great Race came to be, while the myriad minds sent backward were left to die in the horror of strange shapes. Later the race would again face death, yet would live through another forward migration of its best minds into the bodies of others who had a longer physical span ahead of them."

"Peculiar legends about old cities with huge stonework and strange designs and hieroglyphs."

"Great stones with marks on them connected in some way with the legends about Buddai, the gigantic old man who lies asleep for ages underground with his head on his arm, and who will some day awake and eat up the world."

"Very old and half-forgotten tales of enormous underground huts of great stones, where passages lead down and down, and where horrible things have happened."

"Lot of queer pieces of dressed stone perhaps 3x2x2 feet in size, and weathered and pitted to the very limit."

"Some deeply carved lines with peculiar curves in spite of the weathering. Thirty or forty blocks all within a circle perhaps a quarter of a mile in diameter. They are mostly sandstone and granite, though one is almost certainly made of a queer sort of cement or concrete. They bear evidence of water action, as if this part of the world had been submerged and come up again after long ages - all since those blocks were made and used. It is a matter of hundreds of thousands of years - or more."

"1250 blocks in varying stages of wear and disintegration, mostly carven megaliths with curved tops and bottoms. A minority were smaller, flatter, plain-surfaced, and square or octagonally cut -like those of the floors and pavements in my dreams - while a few were singularly massive and curved or slanted in such a manner as to suggest use in vaulting or groining, or as parts of arches or round window casings."

"Failed to discover any trace of arrangement among them. Traces of symbols which fitted darkly into certain Papuan and Polynesian legends from antiquity. The condition and scattering of the blocks told mutely of vertiginous cycles of time and geologic upheavals of cosmic savagery."

"Unlike the other very large rocks, this one was perfectly square-cut, with no convex or concave surface. It seemed, too, to be of a dark basaltic substance, wholly dissimilar to the granite and sandstone and occasional concrete of the now familiar fragments."

"One of the blocks of that basaltic elder masonry which the fabled Great Race held in such fear - the tall, windowless ruins left by those brooding, half-material, alien things that festered in earth's nether abysses and against whose wind-like, invisible forces the trap-doors were sealed and the sleepless sentinels posted."

"The curvilinear patterns on many of those blocks were closely related - parts of one vast decorative conception."

"Cyclopean corridor thirty feet tall, paved with octagonal blocks and solidly vaulted overhead. Rooms opening off on the right, and at the farther end one of those strange inclined planes would have wound down to still lower depths. This level had been far underground. The plane leading had been behind. The long subterrene passage to the Square of Pillars lay on the left one level above. The room of machines and the rightward-leading tunnel to the central archives lay two levels below. Metal-banded trap-doors at the very bottom four levels down."

"On either side - perhaps thirty feet apart – rose massive walls culminating in huge groinings with carvings just barely discernable."

"The vaulting overhead; the torch beam could not reach the roof, but the lower parts of monstrous arches stood out distinctly. The wall at my left, where the traces of carving were plainest."

"The house of the writing master, and the tower where S'gg'ha, the captive mind from the star-headed vegetable carnivores of Antarctica, had chiselled certain pictures on the blank spaces of the walls. The passage at the second level down, to the hall of the alien minds, unchoked and traversable. In that hall the captive mind of an incredible entity - a half-plastic denizen of the hollow interior of an unknown trans-Plutonian planet eighteen million years in the - had kept a certain thing which it had modelled from clay."

"This primal vault was round and fully two hundred feet across, with nothing carved upon the dark-hued stonework. The floor was here free from anything save dust and sand, and apertures leading upward and downward. There were no stairs or inclines; those who had built them had not needed stairs or inclines. The downward aperture was tightly sealed and nervously guarded."

"The walls were densely hieroglyphed and chiselled with typical curvilinear symbols."

"Blocks of stupendous size, poised with mathematical genius and bound with cements of incredible toughness, had combined to form a mass as firm as the planet's rocky core."

"Black basalt crypt that was older than the city itself, where cold draughts welled up from the depths. The five-circle prints, and of strange winds and whistling noises associated with them."

11. Pnakotic Library

"In its vast libraries were volumes of texts and pictures holding the whole of earth's annals-histories and descriptions of every species that had ever been or that ever would be, with full records of their arts, their achievements, their languages, and their psychologies."

"With this aeon-embracing knowledge, the Great Race chose from every era and life-form such thoughts, arts, and processes as might suit its own nature and situation. Knowledge of the past, secured through a kind of mind-casting outside the recognized senses, was harder to glean than knowledge of the future."

"The records, written or printed on great sheets of a curiously tenacious cellulose fabric were bound into books that opened from the top, and were kept in individual cases of a strange, extremely light, restless metal of greyish hue, decorated with mathematical designs and bearing the title in the Great Race's curvilinear hieroglyphs."

"These cases were stored in tiers of rectangular vaults-like closed, locked shelves - wrought of the same rustless metal and fastened by knobs with intricate turnings. My own history was assigned a specific place in the vaults of the lowest or vertebrate level - the section devoted to the culture of mankind and of the furry and reptilian races immediately preceding it in terrestrial dominance."

"On every hand the great hieroglyphed metal shelf-doors loomed monstrously; some yet in place, others sprung open, and still others bent and buckled under bygone geological stresses not quite strong enough to shatter the titan masonry."

"The odd mechanism of the hooked fastener, snapped up the still rustless and workable lid and drew out the book within. The books was some twenty by fifteen inches in area, and two inches thick; the thin metal covers opening at the top."

"It’s tough cellulose pages seemed unaffected by the myriad cycles of time they had lived through, and I studied the queerly pigmented, brush-drawn letters of the text-symbols unlike either the usual curved hieroglyphs or any alphabet known to human scholarship."

"Regular lines of composite impressions that went in threes, each slightly over a foot square, and consisting of five nearly circular three-inch prints, one in advance of the other four. These lines of foot-square impressions lead in two directions, as if something had gone somewhere and returned."

12. Yithian Biology

"The Great Race's members were immense rugose cones ten feet high, and with head and other organs attached to foot-thick, distensible limbs spreading from the apexes. They spoke by the clicking or scraping of huge paws or claws attached to the end of two of their four limbs, and walked by the expansion and contraction of a viscous layer attached to their vast, ten-foot bases."

"They seemed to be enormous, iridescent cones, about ten feet high and ten feet wide at the base, and made up of some ridgy, scaly, semi-elastic matter. From their apexes projected four flexible, cylindrical members, each a foot thick, and of a ridgy substance like that of the cones themselves."

"These members were sometimes contracted almost to nothing, and sometimes extended to any distance up to about ten feet. Terminating two of them were enormous claws or nippers At the end of a third were four red, trumpetlike appendages The fourth terminated in an irregular yellowish globe some two feet in diameter and having three great dark eyes ranged along its central circumference."

"Surmounting this head were four slender grey stalks bearing flower-like appendages, whilst from its nether side dangled eight greenish antennae or tentacles. The great base of the central cone was fringed with a rubbery grey substance which moved the whole entity through expansion and contraction."

"The beings had no clothing, but wore satchels or knapsacks suspended from the top of the conical trunk They commonly carried their head and its supporting member at the level of the cone top, although it was frequently raised or lowered."

"The other three great members tended to rest downward at the sides of the cone, contracted to about five feet each when not in use."

"The bodies occupied by the Great Race represented no surviving - or even scientifically known-line of terrestrial evolution, but were of a peculiar, closely homogeneous, and highly specialised organic type inclining as much as to the vegetable as to the animal state."

"Cell action was of a unique sort almost precluding fatigue, and wholly eliminating the need of sleep. Nourishment, assimilated through the red trumpet-like appendages on one of the great flexible limbs, was always semifluid and in many aspects wholly unlike the food of existing animals."

"The beings had but two of the senses which we recognise - sight and hearing, the latter accomplished through the flower-like appendages on the grey stalks above their heads. Of other and incomprehensible senses - not, however, well utilizable by alien captive minds inhabiting their bodies – they possessed many. Their three eyes were so situated as to give them a range of vision wider than the normal. Their blood was a sort of deep-greenish ichor of great thickness."

"They had no sex, but reproduced through seeds or spores which clustered on their bases and could be developed only under water. Great, shallow tanks were used for the growth of their young - which were, however, reared only in small numbers on account of the longevity of individuals - four or five thousand years being the common life span."

13. Yithian Society and Culture

"Markedly defective individuals were quickly disposed of as soon as their defects were noticed Disease and the approach of death were, in the absence of a sense of touch or of physical pain, recognised by purely visual symptoms."

"The dead were incinerated with dignified ceremonies. Once in a while, as before mentioned, a keen mind would escape death by forward projection in time; but such cases were not numerous. When one did occur, the exiled mind from the future was treated with the utmost kindness till the dissolution of its unfamiliar tenement."

"The Great Race seemed to form a single, loosely knit nation or league, with major institutions in common, though there were four definite divisions. The political and economic system of each unit was a sort of fascistic socialism, with major resources rationally distributed, and power delegated to a small governing board elected by the votes of all able to pass certain educational and psychological tests. Family organisation was not overstressed, though ties among persons of common descent were recognised, and the young were generally reared by their parents."

"Resemblances to human attitudes and institutions were, of course, most marked in those fields where on the one hand highly abstract elements were concerned, or where on the other hand there was a dominance of the basic, unspecialised urges common to all organic life. A few added likenesses came through conscious adoption as the Great Race probed the future and copied what it liked."

"Highly mechanised industry, demanded but little time from each citizen; and the abundant leisure was filled with intellectual and aesthetic activities of various sorts."

"The sciences were carried to an unbelievable height of development, and art was a vital part of life, though at the period of my dreams it had passed its crest and meridian. Technology was enormously stimulated through the constant struggle to survive, and to keep in existence the physical fabric of great cities imposed by the prodigious geologic upheavals of those primal days."

"Crime was surprisingly scant, and was dealt with through highly efficient policing. Punishments ranged from privilege deprivation and imprisonment to death or major emotion wrenching, and were never administered without a careful study of the criminal's motivations."

14. Yithian Conflicts

"Warfare, largely civil for the last few millennia though sometimes waged against reptilian or octopodic invaders, or against the winged, star-headed Old Ones who centered in the Antarctic, was infrequent though infinitely devastating. An enormous army, using camera-like weapons which produced tremendous electrical effects, was kept on hand for purposes seldom mentioned, but obviously connected with the ceaseless fear of the dark, windowless elder ruins and of the great sealed trap-doors in the lowest subterranean levels."

"This fear of the basalt ruins and trap-doors was largely a matter of unspoken suggestion - or, at most, of furtive quasi-whispers. Everything specific which bore on it was significantly absent from such books as were on the common shelves. It was the one subject lying altogether under a taboo among the Great Race, and seemed to be connected alike with horrible bygone struggles, and with that future peril which would someday force the race to send its keener minds ahead en masse in time."

"The Yithians feared a horrible elder race of half-polypous, utterly alien entities which had come through space from immeasurably distant universes and had dominated the earth and three other solar planets about 600 million years ago. They were only partly material - as we understand matter – and their type of consciousness and media of perception differed widely from those of terrestrial organisms. For example, their senses did not include that of sight; their mental world being a strange, non-visual pattern of impressions."

"They were, however, sufficiently material to use implements of normal matter when in cosmic areas containing it; and they required housing - albeit of a peculiar kind. Though their senses could penetrate all material barriers, their substance could not; and certain forms of electrical energy could wholly destroy them. They had the power of aerial motion, despite the absence of wings or any other visible means of levitation. Their minds were of such texture that no exchange with them could be effected by the Great Race."

"When these things had come to the earth they had built mighty basalt cities of windowless towers, and had preyed horribly upon the beings they found. Thus it was when the minds of the Great Race sped across the void from that obscure, trans-galactic world known in the disturbing and debatable Eltdown Shards as Yith."

"The newcomers, with the instruments they created, had found it easy to subdue the predatory entities and drive them down to those caverns of inner earth which they had already joined to their abodes and begun to inhabit."

"Then they had sealed the entrances and left them to their fate, afterward occupying most of their great cities and preserving certain important buildings for reasons connected more with superstition than with indifference, boldness, or scientific and historical zeal."

"But as the aeons passed there came vague, evil signs that the elder things were growing strong and numerous in the inner world. There were sporadic irruptions of a particularly hideous character in certain small and remote cities of the Great Race, and in some of the deserted elder cities which the Great Race had not peopled - places where the paths to the gulfs below had not been properly sealed or guarded."

"After that greater precautions were taken, and many of the paths were closed forever - though a few were left with sealed trap-doors for strategic use in fighting the elder things if ever they broke forth in unexpected places."

"The irruptions of the elder things must have been shocking beyond all description, since they had permanently coloured the psychology of the Great Race. Such was the fixed mood of horror that the very aspect of the creatures was left unmentioned. At no time was I able to gain a clear hint of what they looked like."

"There were veiled suggestions of a monstrous plasticity, and of temporary lapses of visibility, while other fragmentary whispers referred to their control and military use of great winds. Singular whistling noises, and colossal footprints made up of five circular toe marks, seemed also to be associated with them."

"It was evident that the coming doom so desperately feared by the Great Race - the doom that was one day to send millions of keen minds across the chasm of time to strange bodies in the safer future – had to do with a final successful irruption of the elder beings."

"Mental projections down the ages had clearly foretold such a horror, and the Great Race had resolved that none who could escape should face it. That the foray would be a matter of vengeance, rather than an attempt to reoccupy the outer world, they knew from the planet's later history - for their projections shewed the coming and going of subsequent races untroubled by the monstrous entities."

"Perhaps these entities had come to prefer earth's inner abysses to the variable, storm-ravaged surface, since light meant nothing to them. Perhaps, too, they were slowly weakening with the aeons. Indeed, it was known that they would be quite dead in the time of the post-human beetle race which the fleeing minds would tenant."

"Meanwhile, the Great Race maintained its cautious vigilance, with potent weapons ceaselessly ready despite the horrified banishing of the subject from common speech and visible records. And always the shadow of nameless fear hung about the sealed trap-doors and the dark, windowless elder towers."

15. Alleged Confrontation with Flying Yugguthian Polyps

"A repetition of that frightful alien whistling."

"A violent, purposeful blast wind belching savagely and frigidly from that abominable gulf whence the obscene whistling came."

"Torrent of wind and shrieking sound growing, seeming to curl and twist purposefully as it struck out wickedly from the spaces behind and beneath. A pandaemoniae vortex of loathsome sound and utter, materially tangible blackness. A babel of noises utterly alien."

"Pits and voids peopled by floating horrors and leading to sunless crags and oceans and teeming cities of windowless, basalt towers upon which no light ever shone."

"Desperate struggles, a writhing free from clutching tentacles of whistling wind, an insane, bat-like flight through half-solid air, a feverish burrowing through the cyclone-whipped dark, and a wild stumbling and scrambling over fallen masonry."

"A faint, diffuse suspicion of bluish radiance far overhead. Wind - pursued climbing and crawling - of wriggling into a blaze of sardonic moonlight through a jumble of debris which slid and collapsed after me amidst a morbid hurricane."

"Those shocking elder things of the mad winds and daemon pipings, in truth a lingering, lurking menace, waiting and slowly weakening in black abysses while varied shapes of life drag out their multimillennial courses on the planet's age-racked surface."