For the first time Carter realized how terrific utter silence, mental
and physical, may be. The earlier moments had never failed to contain
some perceptible rhythm, if only the faint, cryptical pulse of the
Earth's dimensional extension, but now the hush of the abyss seemed
to fall upon everything. Despite his intimations of body, he had no
audible breath; and the glow of 'Umr at-Tawil's quasi-sphere had grown
petrifiedly fixed and unpulsating. A potent nimbus, brighter than those
which had played round the heads of the Shapes, blazed frozenly over
the shrouded skull of the terrible Guide. A dizziness assailed Carter, and his sense of lost orientation waxed
a thousandfold. The strange lights seemed to hold the quality of the
most impenetrable blacknesses heaped upon blacknesses, while about
the Ancient Ones, so close on their pseudo-hexagonal thrones, there
hovered an air of the most stupefying remoteness. Then he felt himself
wafted into immeasurable depths, with waves of perfumed warmth lapping
against his face. It was as if he floated in a torrid, rose-tinctured
sea; a sea of drugged wine whose waves broke foaming against shores of
brazen fire. A great fear clutched him as he half saw that vast expanse
of surging sea lapping against its far-off coast. But the moment of
silence was broken--the surgings were speaking to him in a language
that was not of physical sound or articulate words. "_The Man of Truth is beyond good and evil_," intoned a voice that was
not a voice. "_The Man of Truth has ridden to All-Is-One. The Man of
Truth has learned that Illusion is the One Reality, and that Substance
is the Great Impostor._"

And now, in that rise of masonry to which his eyes had been so
irresistibly drawn, there appeared the outline of a titanic arch not
unlike that which he thought he had glimpsed so long ago in that cave
within a cave, on the far, unreal surface of the three-dimensioned
Earth. He realized that he had been using the silver key--moving it in
accord with an unlearned and instinctive ritual closely akin to that
which had opened the Inner Gate. That rose-drunken sea which lapped
his cheeks was, he realized, no more or less than the adamantine mass
of the solid wall yielding before his spell, and the vortex of thought
with which the Ancient Ones had aided his spell. Still guided by
instinct and blind determination, he floated forward--and through the
Ultimate Gate. CHAPTER 4


Randolph Carter's advance through that cyclopean bulk of masonry was
like a dizzy precipitation through the measureless gulfs between the
stars. From a great distance he felt triumphant, god-like surges of
deadly sweetness, and after that the rustling of great wings, and
impressions of sound like the chirpings and murmurings of objects
unknown on Earth or in the solar system. Glancing backward, he saw not
one gate alone, but a multiplicity of gates, at some of which clamored
Forms he strove not to remember. And then, suddenly, he felt a greater terror than that which any of the
Forms could give--a terror from which he could not flee because it was
connected with himself. Even the First Gateway had taken something of
stability from him, leaving him uncertain about his bodily form and
about his relationship to the mistily defined objects around him, but
it had not disturbed his sense of unity. He had still been Randolph
Carter, a fixed point in the dimensional seething. Now, beyond the
Ultimate Gateway, he realized in a moment of consuming fright that he
was not one person, but many persons. He was in many places at the same time. On Earth, on October 7, 1883,
a little boy named Randolph Carter was leaving the Snake Den in the
hushed evening light and running down the rocky slope, and through
the twisted-boughed orchard toward his Uncle Christopher's house in
the hills beyond Arkham; yet at that same moment, which was also
somehow in the earthly year of 1928, a vague shadow not less Randolph
Carter was sitting on a pedestal among the Ancient Ones in Earth's
transdimensional extension. Here, too, was a third Randolph Carter,
in the unknown and formless cosmic abyss beyond the Ultimate Gate. And elsewhere, in a chaos of scenes whose infinite multiplicity and
monstrous diversity brought him close to the brink of madness, were a
limitless confusion of beings which he knew were as much himself as the
local manifestation now beyond the Ultimate Gate. There were Carters in settings belonging to every known and suspected
age of Earth's history, and to remoter ages of earthly entity
transcending knowledge, suspicion, and credibility; Carters of forms
both human and non-human, vertebrate and invertebrate, conscious and
mindless, animal and vegetable. And more, there were Carters having
nothing in common with earthly life, but moving outrageously amidst
backgrounds of other planets and systems and galaxies and cosmic
continua; spores of eternal life drifting from world to world, universe
to universe, yet all equally himself. Some of the glimpses recalled
dreams--both faint and vivid, single and persistent--which he had
had through the long years since he first began to dream; and a few
possessed a haunting, fascinating and almost horrible familiarity which
no earthly logic could explain. Faced with this realization, Randolph Carter reeled in the clutch
of supreme horror--horror such as had not been hinted even at the
climax of that hideous night when two had ventured into an ancient
and abhorred necropolis under a waning moon and only one had emerged. No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which
flows from a loss of _identity_. Merging with nothingness is peaceful
oblivion; but to be aware of existence and yet to know that one is no
longer a definite being distinguished from other beings--that one no
longer has a _self_--that is the nameless summit of agony and dread. He knew that there had been a Randolph Carter of Boston, yet could
not be sure whether he--the fragment or facet of an entity beyond the
Ultimate Gate--had been that one or some other. His _self_ had been
annihilated; and yet he--if indeed there could, in view of that utter
nullity of individual existence, be such a thing as _he_--was equally
aware of being in some inconceivable way a legion of selves. It was
as though his body had been suddenly transformed into one of those
many-limbed and many-headed effigies sculptured in Indian temples, and
he contemplated the aggregation in a bewildered attempt to discern
which was the original and which the additions--if indeed (supremely
monstrous thought!) there _were_ any original as distinguished from
other embodiments. Then, in the midst of these devastating reflections, Carter's
beyond-the-gate fragment was hurled from what had seemed the nadir of
horror to black, clutching pits of a horror still more profound.