It seems that he could no more find content in those places, but had formed a mighty longing
for the English cliffs and downlands of his boyhood; where in little dreaming villages England’s
old songs hover at evening behind lattice windows, and where grey church towers peep lovely
through the verdure of distant valleys. He could not go back to these things in the waking world
because his body was dead; but he had done the next best thing and dreamed a small tract of
such countryside in the region east of the city, where meadows roll gracefully up from the sea-cliffs
to the foot of the Tanarian Hills. There he dwelt in a grey Gothic manor-house of stone looking
on the sea, and tried to think it was ancient Trevor Towers, where he was born and where thirteen
generations of his forefathers had first seen the light. And on the coast nearby he had built
a little Cornish fishing village with steep cobbled ways, settling therein such people as had
the most English faces, and seeking ever to teach them the dear remembered accents of old Cornwall
fishers. And in a valley not far off he had reared a great Norman Abbey whose tower he could
see from his window, placing around it in the churchyard grey stones with the names of his ancestors
carved thereon, and with a moss somewhat like Old England’s moss. For though Kuranes was
a monarch in the land of dream, with all imagined pomps and marvels, splendours and beauties,
ecstacies and delights, novelties and excitements at his command, he would gladly have resigned
forever the whole of his power and luxury and freedom for one blessed day as a simple boy in
that pure and quiet England, that ancient, beloved England which had moulded his being and of
which he must always be immutably a part.
H.P Lovecraft, 1927.
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
No comments:
Post a Comment