The Night Land

And round by the House of Silence, wound the Road Where The Silent Ones

Walk. And concerning this Road, which passed out of the Unknown Lands,

nigh by the Place of the Ab-humans, where was always the green, luminous

mist, nothing was known; save that it was held that, of all the works

about the Mighty Pyramid, it was, alone, the one that was bred, long

ages past, of healthy human toil and labour. And on this point alone,

had a thousand books, and more, been writ; and all contrary, and so to

no end, as is ever the way in such matters.

And as it was with the Road Where The Silent Ones Walk, so it was with

all those other monstrous things ... whole libraries had there been made

upon this and upon that; and many a thousand million mouldered into the

forgotten dust of the earlier world.

I mind me now that presently I stepped upon the central

travelling-roadway which spanned the one thousandth plateau of the Great

Redoubt. And this lay six miles and thirty fathoms above the Plain of

the Night Land, and was somewhat of a great mile or more across. And so,

in a few minutes, I was at the South-Eastern wall, and looking out

through The Great Embrasure towards the Three Silver-fire Holes, that

shone before the Thing That Nods, away down, far in the South-East.

Southward of this, but nearer, there rose the vast bulk of the

South-East Watcher--The Watching Thing of the South-East. And to the

right and to the left of the squat monster burned the Torches; maybe

half-a-mile upon each side; yet sufficient light they threw to show the

lumbered-forward head of the never-sleeping Brute.

To the East, as I stood there in the quietness of the Sleeping-Time on

the One Thousandth Plateau, I heard a far, dreadful sound, down in the

lightless East; and, presently, again--a strange, dreadful laughter,

deep as a low thunder among the mountains. And because this sound came

odd whiles from the Unknown Lands beyond the Valley of The Hounds, we

had named that far and never-seen Place "The Country Whence Comes The

Great Laughter." And though I had heard the sound, many and oft a time,

yet did I never hear it without a most strange thrilling of my heart,

and a sense of my littleness, and of the utter terror which had beset

the last millions of the world.

Yet, because I had heard the Laughter oft, I paid not over-long

attention to my thoughts upon it; and when, in a little it died away

into that Eastern Darkness, I turned my spy-glass upon the Giants' Pit,

which lay to the South of the Giants' Kilns. And these same Kilns were

tended by the giants, and the light of the Kilns was red and fitful, and

threw wavering shadows and lights across the mouth of the pit; so that I

saw giants crawling up out of the pit; but not properly seen, by reason

of the dance of the shadows. And so, because ever there was so much to

behold, I looked away, presently, to that which was plainer to be

examined.