H.P. Lovecraft. The Green Meadow
The Green Meadow
by H. P. Lovecraft and Winifred V. Jackson
Written 1918/19
Published Spring 1927 in The Vagrant, p. 188-95
(INTRODUCTORY NOTE: The following very singular narrative, or record of
impressions, was discovered under circumstances so extraordinary that they
deserve careful description. On the evening of Wednesday, August 27, 1913,
at about eight-thirty o'clock, the population of the small seaside village
of Potowonket, Maine, U.S.A., was aroused by a thunderous report
accompanied by a blinding flash; and persons near the shore beheld a
mammoth ball of fire dart from the heavens into the sea but a short
distance out, sending up a prodigious column of water. The following
Sunday a fishing party composed of John Richmond, Peter B. Carr, and Simon
Canfield, caught in their trawl and dragged ashore a mass of metallic
rock, weighing 360 pounds, and looking (as Mr. Canfield said) like a piece
of slag. Most of the inhabitants agreed that this heavy body was none
other than the fireball which had fallen from the sky four days before;
and Dr. Richard M. Jones, the local scientific authority, allowed that it
must be an aerolite or meteoric stone. In chipping off specimens to send
to an expert Boston analyst, Dr. Jones discovered imbedded in the
semi-metallic mass the strange book containing the ensuing tale, which is
still in his possession.
In form the discovery resembles an ordinary note-book, about 5 X 3 inches
in size, and containing thirty leaves. In material, however it presents
marked peculiarities. The covers are apparently of some dark stony
substance unknown to geologists, and unbreakable by any mechanical means.
No chemical reagent seems to act upon them. The leaves are much the same,
save that they are lighter in colour, and so infinitely thin as to be
quite flexible. The whole is bound by some process not very clear to those
who have observed it; a process involving the adhesion of the leaf
substance to the cover substance. These substances cannot now be
separated, nor can the leaves be torn by any amount of force. The writing
is Greek of the purest classical quality, and several students of
palaeography declare that the characters are in a cursive hand used about
the second century B. C. There is little in the text to determine the
date. The mechanical mode of writing cannot be deduced beyond the fact
that it must have resembled that of the modern slate and slate-pencil.
During the course of analytical efforts made by the late Professor
Chambers of Harvard, several pages, mostly at the conclusion of the
narrative, were blurred to the point of utter effacement before being
read; a circumstance forming a well-nigh irreparable loss. What remains of
the contents was done into modem Greek letters by the palaeographer,
Rutherford, and in this form submitted to the translators.
Professor Mayfield of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who
examined samples of the strange stone, declares it a true meteorite; an
opinion in which Dr. von Winterfeldt of Heidelberg (interned in 1918 as a
dangerous enemy alien) does not concur. Professor Bradley of Columbia
College adopts a less dogmatic ground; pointing out that certain utterly
unknown ingredients are present in large quantities, and warning that no
classification is as yet possible.
The presence, nature, and message of the strange book form so momentous a
problem, that no explanation can even be attempted. The text, as far as
preserved, is here rendered as literally as our language permits, in the
hope that some reader may eventually hit upon an interpretation and solve
one of the greatest scientific mysteries of recent years.)
It was a narrow place, and I was alone. On one side, beyond a margin of
vivid waving green, was the sea; blue; bright, and billowy, and send-ing
up vaporous exhalations which intoxicated me. So profuse, indeed, were
these exhalations, that they gave me an odd impression of a coales-cence
of sea and sky; for the heavens were likewise bright and blue. On the
other side was the forest, ancient almost as the sea itself, and
stretch-ing infinitely inland. It was very dark, for the trees were
grotesquely huge and luxuriant, and incredibly numerous. Their giant
trunks were of a horrible green which blended weirdly with the narrow
green tract whereon I stood. At some distance away, on either side of
me, the strange forest extended down to the water's edge, obliterating
the shore line and completely hemming in the narrow tract. Some of the
trees, I observed, stood in the water itself; as though impatient of any
barrier to their progress.
I saw no living thing, nor sign that any living thing save myself had
ever existed. The sea and the sky and the wood encircled me, and reached
off into regions beyond my imagination. Nor was there any sound save of
the wind-tossed wood and of the sea.
As I stood in this silent place, I suddenly commenced to tremble; for
though I knew not how I came there, and could scarce remember what my
name and rank had been, I felt that I should go mad if I could
understand what lurked about me. I recalled things I had learned, things
I had dreamed, things I had imagined and yearned for in some other
distant life. I thought of long nights when I had gazed up at the stars
of heaven and cursed the gods that my free soul could not traverse the
vast abysses which were inaccessible to my body. I conjured up ancient
blasphemies, and terrible delvings into the papri of Democritus; but as
memories appeared, I shuddered in deeper fear, for I knew that I was
alone - horribly alone. Alone, yet dose to sentient impulses of vast,
vague kind; which I prayed never to comprehend nor encounter. In the
voice of the swaying green branches I fancied I could detect a kind of
malignant hatred and demoniac triumph. Sometimes they struck me as being
in horrible colloquy with ghastly and unthinkable things which the scaly
green bodies of the trees half-hid; hid from sight but not from
consciousness. The most oppressive of my sensations was a sinister
feeling of alienage. Though I saw about me objects which I could name;
trees, grass, sea, and sky; I felt that their relation to me was not the
same as that of the trees, grass, sea, and sky I knew in another and
dimly remembered life. The nature of the difference I could not tell,
yet I shook in stark fright as it impressed itself upon me.
And then, in a spot where I had before discerned nothing but the misty
sea, I beheld the Green Meadow; separated from me by a vast expanse of
blue rippling water with suntipped wavelets, yet strangely near. Often I
would peep fearfully over my right shoulder at the trees, but I
preferred to look at the Green Meadow, which affected me oddly.
It was while my eyes were fixed upon this singular tract, that I first
felt the ground in motion beneath me. Beginning with a kind of throbbing
agitation which held a fiendish suggestion of conscious action, the bit
of bank on which I stood detached itself from the grassy shore and
commenced to float away; borne slowly onward as if by some current of
resistless force. I did not move, astonished and startled as I was by
the unprecedented phenomenon; but stood rigidly still until a wide lane
of water yawned betwixt me and the land of trees. Then I sat down in a
sort of daze, and again looked at the sun-tipped water and the Green
Meadow.
Behind me the trees and the things they may have been hiding seemed to
radiate infinite menace. This I knew without turning to view them, for
as I grew more used to the scene I became less and less depen-dent upon
the five senses that once had been my sole reliance. I knew the green
scaly forest hated me, yet now I was safe from it, for my bit of bank
had drifted far from the shore.
But though one peril was past, another loomed up before me. Pieces of
earth were constantly crumbling from the floating isle which held me, so
that death could not be far distant in any event. Yet even then I seemed
to sense that death would be death to me no more, for I turned again to
watch the Green Meadow, imbued with a curious feeling of security in
strange contrast to my general horror.
Then it was that I heard, at a distance immeasurable, the sound of
falling water. Not that of any trival cascade such as I had known, but
that which might be heard in the far Scythian lands if all the
Mediterranean were poured down an unfathomable abyss. It was toward this
sound that my shrinking island was drifting, yet I was content.
Far in the rear were happening weird and terrible things; things which I
turned to view, yet shivered to behold. For in the sky dark vaporous
forms hovered fantastically, brooding over trees and seeming to answer
the challenge of the waving green branches. Then a thick mist arose from
the sea to join the sky-forms, and the shore was erased from my sight.
Though the sun - what sun I knew not - shone brightly on the water
around me, the land I had left seemed involved in a demoniac tempest
where dashed the will of the hellish trees and what they hid, with that
of the sky and the sea. And when the mist vanished, I saw only the blue
sky and the blue sea, for the land and the trees were no more.
It was at this point that my attention was arrested by the singing in
the Green Meadow. Hitherto, as I have said, I had encountered no sign of
human life; but now there arose to my ears a dull chant whose origin and
nature were apparently unmistakable. While the words were utterly
undistinguishable, the chant awaked in me a peculiar train of
associations; and I was reminded of some vaguely disquieting lines I had
once translated out of an Egyptian book, which in turn were taken from a
papyrus of ancient Meroe. Through my brain ran lines that I fear to
repeat; lines telling of very antique things and forms of life in the
days when our earth was exceeding young. Of things which thought and
moved and were alive, yet which gods and men would not consider alive.
It was a strange book.
As I listened, I became gradually conscious of a circumstance which had
before puzzled me only subconsciously. At no time had my sight
distinguished any definite objects in the Green Meadow, an impression of
vivid homogeneous verdure being the sum total of my perception. Now,
however, I saw that the current would cause my island to pass the shore
at but a little distance; so that I might learn more of the land and of
the singing thereon. My curiosity to behold the singers had mounted
high, though it was mingled with apprehension.
Bits of sod continued to break away from the tiny tract which carried
me, but I heeded not their loss; for I felt that I was not to die with
the body (or appearance of a body) which I seemed to possess. That
everything about me, even life and death, was illusory; that I had
overleaped the bounds of mortality and corporeal entity, becoming a
free, detached thing; impressed me as almost certain. Of my location I
knew nothing, save that I felt I could not be on the earth-planet once
so familiar to me. My sensations, apart from a kind of haunting terror,
were those of a traveller just embarked upon an unending voyage of
discovery. For a moment I thought of the lands and persons I had left
behind; and of strange ways whereby I might some day tell them of my
adventurings, even though I might never return.
I had now floated very near the Green Meadow, so that the voices were
clear and distinct; but though I knew many languages I could not quite
interpret the words of the chanting. Familiar they indeed were, as I had
subtly felt when at a greater distance, but beyond a sensation of vague
and awesome remembrance I could make nothing of them. A most
extraordinary quality in the voices-a quality which I cannot describe-at
once frightened and fascinated me. My eyes could now discern several
things amidst the omnipresent verdure-rocks, covered with I bright green
moss, shrubs of considerable height, and less definable shapes of great
magnitude which seemed to move or vibrate amidst the shrubbery in a
peculiar way. The chanting, whose authors I was so anxious to glimpse,
seemed loudest, at points where these shapes were most numerous and most
vigorously in motion.
And then, as my island drifted closer and the sound of the distant
waterfall grew louder, I saw clearly the source of the chanting, and in
one horrible instant remembered everything. Of such things I cannot,
dare not tell, for therein was revealed the hideous solution of all
which had puzzled me; and that solution would drive you mad, even as it
al-most drove me.... I knew now the change through which I had passed,
and through which certain others who once were men had passed! and I
knew the endless cycle of the future which none like me may escape... I
shall live forever, be conscious forever, though my soul cries out to
the gods for the boon of death and oblivion... All is before me: beyond
the deafening torrent lies the land of Stethelos, where young men are
infinitely old... The Green Meadow... I will send a message across the
horrible immeasurable abyss....
(At this point the text becomes illegible.)
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Scanned by Eulogio Garcia Recalde for "The H. P. Lovecraft Library"