This
time it was largely external--a force or personality which at once
confronted and surrounded and pervaded him, and which in addition to
its local presence, seemed also to be a part of himself, and likewise
to be co-existent with all time and conterminous with all space. There
was no visual image, yet the sense of entity and the awful concept of
combined localism and identity and infinity lent a paralyzing terror
beyond anything which any Carter-fragment had hitherto deemed capable
of existing. In the face of that awful wonder, the quasi-Carter forgot the horror
of destroyed individuality. It was an All-in-One and One-in-All
of limitless being and self--not merely a thing of one space-time
continuum, but allied to the ultimate animating essence of existence's
whole unbounded sweep--the last, utter sweep which has no confines and
which outreaches fancy and mathematics alike. It was perhaps that which
certain secret cults of Earth had whispered of as _Yog-Sothoth_, and
which has been a deity under other names; that which the crustaceans
of Yuggoth worship as the Beyond-One, and which the vaporous brains of
the spiral nebulæ know by an untranslatable sign--yet in a flash the
Carter-facet realized how slight and fractional all these conceptions
are. And now the Being was addressing the Carter-facet in prodigious waves
that smote and burned and thundered--a concentration of energy that
blasted its recipient with well-nigh unendurable violence, and that
paralleled in an unearthly rhythm the curious swaying of the Ancient
Ones, and the flickering of the monstrous lights, in that baffling
region beyond the First Gate. It was as though suns and worlds and
universes had converged upon one point whose very position in space
they had conspired to annihilate with an impact of resistless fury. But
amidst the greater terror one lesser terror was diminished; for the
searing waves appeared somehow to isolate the Beyond-the-Gate Carter
from his infinity of duplicates--to restore, as it were, a certain
amount of the illusion of identity. After a time the hearer began to
translate the waves into speech-forms known to him, and his sense of
horror and oppression waned. Fright became pure awe, and what had
seemed blasphemously abnormal seemed now only ineffably majestic. "Randolph Carter," it seemed to say, "my manifestations on your
planet's extension, the Ancient Ones, have sent you as one who would
lately have returned to small lands of dream which he had lost, yet
who with greater freedom has risen to greater and nobler desires and
curiosities. You wished to sail up golden Oukranos, to search out
forgotten ivory cities in orchid-heavy Kled, and to reign on the opal
throne of Ilek-Vad, whose fabulous towers and numberless domes rise
mighty toward a single red star in a filament alien to your Earth and
to all matter. Now, with the passing of two Gates, you wish loftier
things. You would not flee like a child from a scene disliked to a
dream beloved, but would plunge like a man into that last and inmost of
secrets which lies behind all scenes and dreams. "What you wish, I have found good; and I am ready to grant that which
I have granted eleven times only to beings of your planet--five times
only to those you call men, or those resembling them. I am ready to
show you the Ultimate Mystery, to look on which is to blast a feeble
spirit. Yet before you gaze full at that last and first of secrets you
may still wield a free choice, and return if you will through the two
Gates with the Veil still unrent before your eyes." CHAPTER 5


A sudden shutting-off of the waves left Carter in a chilling and
awesome silence full of the spirit of desolation. On every hand pressed
the illimitable vastness of the void; yet the seeker knew that the
Being was still there. After a moment he thought of words whose mental
substance he flung into the abyss: "I accept. I will not retreat." The waves surged forth again, and Carter knew that the Being had heard. And now there poured from that limitless Mind a flood of knowledge and
explanation which opened new vistas to the seeker, and prepared him
for such a grasp of the cosmos as he had never hoped to possess. He
was told how childish and limited is the notion of a tri-dimensional
world, and what an infinity of directions there are besides the known
directions of up-down, forward-backward, right-left. He was shown the
smallness and tinsel emptiness of the little Earth gods, with their
petty, human interests and connections--their hatreds, rages, loves and
vanities; their craving for praise and sacrifice, and their demands for
faiths contrary to reason and nature. While most of the impressions translated themselves to Carter as words,
there were others to which other senses gave interpretation. Perhaps
with eyes and perhaps with imagination he perceived that he was in a
region of dimensions beyond those conceivable to the eye and brain of
man. He saw now, in the brooding shadows of that which had been first
a vortex of power and then an illimitable void, a sweep of creation
that dizzied his senses. From some inconceivable vantage-point he
looked upon prodigious forms whose multiple extensions transcended any
conception of being, size and boundaries which his mind had hitherto
been able to hold, despite a lifetime of cryptical study. He began to
understand dimly why there could exist at the same time the little boy
Randolph Carter in the Arkham farmhouse in 1883, the misty form on the
vaguely hexagonal pillar beyond the First Gate, the fragment now facing
the Presence in the limitless abyss, and all the other Carters his
fancy or perception envisaged. Then the waves increased in strength and sought to improve his
understanding, reconciling him to the multiform entity of which his
present fragment was an infinitesimal part. They told him that every
figure of space is but the result of the intersection by a plane of
some corresponding figure of one more dimension--as a square is cut
from a cube, or a circle from a sphere. The cube and sphere, of three
dimensions, are thus cut from corresponding forms of four dimensions,
which men know only through guesses and dreams; and these in turn
are cut from forms of five dimensions, and so on up to the dizzy and
reachless heights of archetypal infinity. The world of men and of
the gods of men is merely an infinitesimal phase of an infinitesimal
thing--the three-dimensional phase of that small wholeness reached
by the First Gate, where Umr at-Tawil dictates dreams to the
Ancient Ones. Though men hail it as reality, and brand thoughts of
its many-dimensioned original as unreality, it is in truth the very
opposite. That which we call substance and reality is shadow and
illusion, and that which we call shadow and illusion is substance and
reality. Time, the waves went on, is motionless, and without beginning or end. That it has motion and is the cause of change is an illusion.