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brought us the exchange of stenches which logic called for. In the
neighborhood of the prostrate things that new and lately unexplainable fetor
had been wholly dominant; but by this time it ought to have largely given
place to the nameless stench associated with those others.
This it had not done - for instead, the newer and less bearable smell was now
virtually undiluted, and growing more and more poisonously insistent each
second.
So we glanced back simultaneously, it would appear; though no doubt the
incipient motion of one prompted the imitation of the other. As we did so we
flashed both torches full strength at the momentarily thinned mist; either
from sheer primitive anxiety to see all we could, or in a less primitive but
equally unconscious effort to dazzle the entity before we dimmed our light and
dodged among the penguins of the labyrinth center ahead. Unhappy act! Not
Orpheus himself, or Lot s wife, paid much more dearly for a backward glance.
And again came that shocking, wide-ranged piping - "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"
I might as well be frank - even if I cannot bear to be quite direct - in
stating what we saw; though at the time we felt that it was not to be admitted
even to each other. The words reaching the reader can never even suggest the
awfulness of the sight itself. It crippled our consciousness so completely
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that I wonder we had the residual sense to dim our torches as planned, and to
strike the right tunnel toward the dead city. Instinct alone must have carried
us through -
perhaps better than reason could have done; though if that was what saved us,
we paid a high price. Of reason we certainly had little enough left.
Danforth was totally unstrung, and the first thing I remember of the rest of
the journey was hearing him lightheadedly chant an hysterical formula in which
I
alone of mankind could have found anything but insane irrelevance. It
reverberated in falsetto echoes among the squawks of the penguins;
reverberated through the vaultings ahead, and-thank God-through the now empty
vaultings behind. He could not have begun it at once - else we would not have
been alive and blindly racing. I shudder to think of what a shade of
difference in his nervous reactions might have brought.
"South Station Under - Washington Under - Park Street Under-Kendall - Central
-
Harvard - " The poor fellow was chanting the familiar stations of the
Boston-Cambridge tunnel that burrowed through our peaceful native soil
thousands of miles away in New England, yet to me the ritual had neither
irrelevance nor home feeling. It had only horror, because I knew unerringly
the monstrous, nefandous analogy that had suggested it. We had expected, upon
looking back, to see a terrible and incredible moving entity if the mists were
thin enough; but of that entity we had formed a clear idea. What we did see -
for the mists were indeed all too maliguly thinned - was something altogether
different, and immeasurably more hideous and detestable. It was the utter,
objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist s "thing that should not be";
and its nearest comprehensible analogue is a vast, onrushing subway train as
one sees it from a station platform - the great black front looming colossally
out of infinite subterranean distance, constellated with strangely colored
lights and filling the prodigious burrow as a piston fills a cylinder.
But we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead as the
nightmare, plastic column of fetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward
through its fifteen-foot sinus, gathering unholy speed and driving before it a
spiral, rethickening cloud of the pallid abyss vapor. It was a terrible,
indescribable thing vaster than any subway train - a shapeless congeries of
protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary
eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the
tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and
slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly
free of all litter. Still came that eldritch, mocking cry- "Tekeli-li!
Tekeli-li!" and at last we remembered that the demoniac Shoggoths - given
life, thought, and
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