He
was not so feeble as I had expected; but his eyes drooped in a curious
way, and his unkempt clothing and white beard made him seem very worn
and dismal. Not knowing just how he could best be launched on his tales, I feigned
a matter of business; told him of my surveying, and asked vague
questions about the district. He was far brighter and more educated
than I had been led to think, and before I knew it had grasped quite
as much of the subject as any man I had talked with in Arkham. He was
not like other rustics I had known in the sections where reservoirs
were to be. From him there were no protests at the miles of old wood
and farmland to be blotted out, though perhaps there would have been
had not his home lain outside the bounds of the future lake. Relief
was all that he showed; relief at the doom of the dark ancient valleys
through which he had roamed all his life. They were better under water
now--better under water since the strange days. And with this opening
his husky voice sank low, while his body leaned forward and his right
forefinger began to point shakily and impressively. *       *       *       *       *

It was then that I heard the story, and as the rambling voice scraped
and whispered on I shivered again and again despite the summer day. Often I had to recall the speaker from ramblings, piece out scientific
points which he knew only by a fading parrot memory of professors'
talk, or bridge over gaps, where his sense of logic and continuity
broke down. When he was done I did not wonder that his mind had snapped
a trifle, or that the folk of Arkham would not speak much of the
blasted heath. I hurried back before sunset to my hotel, unwilling to
have the stars come out above me in the open; and the next day returned
to Boston to give up my position. I could not go into that dim chaos
of old forest and slope again, or face another time that grey blasted
heath where the black well yawned deep beside the tumbled bricks and
stones. The reservoir will soon be built now, and all those elder
secrets will lie safe forever under watery fathoms. But even then I do
not believe I would like to visit that country by night--at least not
when the sinister stars are out; and nothing could bribe me to drink
the new city water of Arkham. It all began, old Ammi said, with the meteorite. Before that time there
had been no wild legends at all since the witch trials, and even then
these western woods were not feared half so much as the small island
in the Miskatonic where the devil held court beside a curious stone
altar older than the Indians. These were not haunted woods, and their
fantastic dusk was never terrible till the strange days. Then there
had come that white noontide cloud, that string of explosions in the
air, and that pillar of smoke from the valley far in the wood. And by
night all Arkham had heard of the great rock that fell out of the sky
and bedded itself in the ground beside the well at the Nahum Gardner
place. That was the house which had stood where the blasted heath was
to come--the trim white Nahum Gardner house amidst its fertile gardens
and orchards. Nahum had come to town to tell people about the stone, and had dropped
in at Ammi Pierce's on the way. Ammi was forty then, and all the queer
things were fixed very strongly in his mind. He and his wife had gone
with the three professors from Miskatonic University who hastened out
the next morning to see the weird visitor from unknown stellar space,
and had wondered why Nahum had called it so large the day before. It
had shrunk, Nahum said as he pointed out the big brownish mound above
the ripped earth and charred grass near the archaic well-sweep in his
front yard; but the wise men answered that stones do not shrink. Its
heat lingered persistently, and Nahum declared it had glowed faintly in
the night. The professors tried it with a geologist's hammer and found
it was oddly soft. It was, in truth, so soft as to be almost plastic;
and they gouged rather than chipped a specimen to take back to the
college for testing. They took it in an old pail borrowed from Nahum's
kitchen, for even the small piece refused to grow cool. On the trip
back they stopped at Ammi's to rest, and seemed thoughtful when Mrs.
Pierce remarked that the fragment was growing smaller and burning the
bottom of the pail. Truly, it was not large, but perhaps they had taken
less than they thought. The day after that--all this was in June of '82--the professors had
trooped out again in a great excitement. As they passed Ammi's they
told him what queer things the specimen had done, and how it had
faded wholly away when they put it in a glass beaker. The beaker had
gone, too, and the wise men talked of the strange stone's affinity
for silicon. It had acted quite unbelievably in that well-ordered
laboratory; doing nothing at all and showing no occluded gases when
heated on charcoal, being wholly negative in the borax bead, and soon
proving itself absolutely non-volatile at any producible temperature,
including that of the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe. On an anvil it appeared
highly malleable, and in the dark its luminosity was very marked. Stubbornly refusing to grow cool, it soon had the college in a state
of real excitement; and when upon heating before the spectroscope it
displayed shining bands unlike any known colours of the normal spectrum
there was much breathless talk of new elements, bizarre optical
properties, and other things which puzzled men of science are wont to
say when faced by the unknown. Hot as it was, they tested it in a crucible with all the proper
reagents. Water did nothing. Hydrochloric acid was the same. Nitric
acid and even aqua regia merely hissed and spattered against its torrid
invulnerability. Ammi had difficulty in recalling all these things, but
recognized some solvents as I mentioned them in the usual order of use. There were ammonia and caustic soda, alcohol and ether, nauseous carbon
disulphide and a dozen others; but although the weight grew steadily
less as time passed, and the fragment seemed to be slightly cooling,
there was no change in the solvents to show that they had attacked
the substance at all. It was a metal, though, beyond a doubt. It was
magnetic, for one thing; and after its immersion in the acid solvents
there seemed to be faint traces of the Widmänstätten figures found
on meteoric iron. When the cooling had grown very considerable, the
testing was carried on in glass; and it was in a glass beaker that they
left all the chips made of the original fragment during the work. The
next morning both chips and beaker were gone without trace, and only a
charred spot marked the place on the wooden shelf where they had been. All this the professors told Ammi as they paused at his door, and
once more he went with them to see the stony messenger from the
stars, though this time his wife did not accompany him.