P.E.’s Reviews > The Abominations of Yondo > Status Update

'And, seeing this, I remembered all that had been; and the other dreams of sleep, and the dream of birth, and of everything thereafter, alike returned to me. I thus I recalled the name I had assumed beneath the terrene sun, and the names I had borne beneath suns of sleep and of reverie.'

'If you seem to be happy in this place of solitude, you will acquire great reputation for wisdom, and I know, by my own experience, that under the cloak of a great reputation it is possible to hide whole treasures of folly.'

'Somewhere in the gloom ahead, they heard a prolonged, equivocal noise that baffled the ear with incongruous elements. It was a sharp rustling and rattling as of metal dragged over rock; and also it was somehow like the smacking of myriad wet, enormous mouths. Anon it receded and died out at a level that was seemingly far below.'

'For a few moments, as he ran, Quanga failed to perceive the sinister and ill-boding alterations, comparable to those of the cave, which had somehow occurred in the sheated plain itself. With a terrific shock which became an actual vertigo, he saw that he was climbing a long, insanely tilted slope above whose remote extreme the sun had receded strangely and was now small and chill as if seen from an outer planet.'

'Somehow, she seemed to bring with her the infrangible solitude of remote places, the death-deep hush of lonely plateaus and mountains. A silence such as might dwell in some abandoned city fell on the chaffering, chattering crowd as she went by, and the people drew back from her in sudden awe.'

'The sand of the Desert of Yondo is not as the sand of other deserts; for Yondo lies nearest of all to the world's rim and strange winds blowing from a gulf no astronomer may hope to fathom have sown its ruinous fields with the grey dust of corroding planets, the black ashes of extinguished suns.'

'We were seven-and-thirty buccaneers, who raked the Spanish Main under Barnaby Dwale, he that was called Red Barnaby for the spilling of blood that attended him everywhere. Our ship, the Black Falcon, could outfly and outstrike all other craft that flew the Jolly Roger. Full often, Captain Dwale was wont to seek a remote isle on the eastward verge of the West Indies, and lighten the vessel of its weight of ingots'

'He maintained that life and death were not the fixed conditions that people commonly believed them to be; that the two realms were often intermingled in ways not readily discerned, and had penumbral border-lands; that the dead were not always the dead, nor the living the living, as such terms are habitually understood.'

'Somewhat against my will, I gazed on the dead features, and averted my eyes very hastily. I was prepared for the stony pallor and rigor, but not for the full betrayal of that hideous revulsion, that inhuman terror and horror, which must have corroded the man's heart through infernal years; and which, with almost superhuman control, he had masked from the casual beholder in life.