H.P. Lovecraft. The Tree On The Hill
The Tree On The Hill
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written 1934
Southeast of Hampden, near the tortuous Salmon River gorge, is a range of
steep, rocky hills which have defied all efforts of sturdy homesteaders.
The canyons are too deep and the slopes too precipitous to encourage
anything save seasonal livestock grazing. The last time I visited Hampden
the region - known as Hell's Acres - was part of the Blue Mountain Forest
Reserve. There are no roads linking this inaccessible locality with the
outside world, and the hillfolk will tell you that it is indeed a spot
transplanted from his Satanic Majesty's front yard. There is a local
superstition that the area is haunted - but by what or by whom no one
seems to know. Natives will not venture within its mysterious depths, for
they believe the stories handed down to them by the Nez Perce Indians, who
have shunned the region for untold generations, because, according to
them, it is a playground of certain giant devils from the Outside. These
suggestive tales made me very curious.
My first excursion - and my last, thank God! - into those hills occurred
while Constantine Theunis and I were living in Hampden the summer of 1938.
He was writing a treatise on Egyptian mythology, and I found myself alone
much of the time, despite the fact that we shared a modest cabin on Beacon
Street, within sight of the infamous Pirate House, built by Exer Jones
over sixty years ago.
The morning of June 23rd found me walking in those oddly shaped hills,
which had, since seven o'clock, seemed very ordinary indeed. I must have
been about seven miles south of Hampden before I noticed anything unusual.
I was climbing a grassy ridge overlooking a particularly deep canyon, when
I came upon an area totally devoid of the usual bunch-grass and
greaseweed. It extended southward, over numerous hills and valleys. At
first I thought the spot had been burned over the previous fall, but upon
examining the turf, I found no signs of a blaze. The nearby slopes and
ravines looked terribly scarred and seared, as if some gigantic torch had
blasted them, wiping away all vegetation. And yet there was no evidence of
fire...
I moved on over rich, black soil in which no grass flourished. As I headed
for the approximate center of this desolate area, I began to notice a
strange silence. There were no larks, no rabbits, and even the insects
seemed to have deserted the place. I gained the summit of a lofty knoll
and tried to guess at the size of that bleak, inexplicable region. Then I
saw the lone tree.
It stood on a hill somewhat higher than its companions, and attracted the
eye because it was so utterly unexpected. I had seen no trees for miles:
thorn and hackberry bushes clustered the shallower ravines, but there had
been no mature trees. Strange to find one standing on the crest of the
hill.
I crossed two steep canyons before I came to it; and a surprise awaited
me. It was not a pine tree, nor a fir tree, nor a hackberry tree. I had
never, in all my life, seen one to compare with it - and I never have to
this day, for which I am eternally thankful!
More than anything it resembled an oak. It had a huge, twisted trunk,
fully a yard in diameter, and the large limbs began spreading outward
scarcely seven feet from the ground. The leaves were round, and curiously
alike in size and design. It might have been a tree painted on a canvas,
but I will swear that it was real. I shall always know that it was real,
despite what Theunis said later.
I recall that I glanced at the sun and judged the time to be about ten
o'clock a.m., although I did not look at my watch. The day was becoming
warm, and I sat for a while in the welcome shade of the huge tree. Then I
regarded the rank grass that flourished beneath it - another singular
phenomenon when I remembered the bleak terrain through which I had passed.
A wild maze of hills, ravines, and bluffs hemmed me in on all sides,
although the rise on which I sat was rather higher than any other within
miles. I looked far to the east - and I jumped to my feet, startled and
amazed. Shimmering through a blue haze of distance were the Bitterroot
Mountains! There is no other range of snow-capped peaks within three
hundred miles of Hampden; and I knew - at this altitude - that I shouldn't
be seeing them at all. For several minutes I gazed at the marvel; then I
became drowsy. I lay in the rank grass, beneath the tree. I unstrapped my
camera, took off my hat, and relaxed, staring skyward through the green
leaves. I closed my eyes.
Then a curious phenomenon began to assail me - a vague, cloudy sort of
vision - glimpsing or day-dreaming seemingly without relevance to anything
familiar. I thought I saw a great temple by a sea of ooze, where three
suns gleamed in a pale red sky. The vast tomb, or temple, was an anomalous
color - a nameless blue-violet shade. Large beasts flew in the cloudy sky,
and I seemed to hear the pounding of their scaly wings. I went nearer the
stone temple, and a huge doorway loomed in front of me. Within that portal
were swirling shadows that seemed to dart and leer and try to snatch me
inside that awful darkness. I thought I saw three flaming eyes in the
shifting void of a doorway, and I screamed with mortal fear. In that
noisome depth, I knew, lurked utter destruction - a living hell even worse
than death. I screamed again. The vision faded.
I saw the round leaves and the sane earthly sky. I struggled to rise. I
was trembling; cold perspiration beaded my brow. I had a mad impulse to
flee; run insanely from that sinister tree on the hill - but I checked the
absurd intuition and sat down, trying to collect my senses. Never had I
dreamed anything so realistic; so horrifying. What had caused the vision?
I had been reading several of Theunis' tomes on ancient Egypt. ... I
mopped my forehead, and decided that it was time for lunch. But I did not
feel like eating.
Then I had an inspiration. I would take a few snapshots of the tree, for
Theunis. They might shock him out of his habitual air of unconcern.
Perhaps I would tell him about the dream. . . . Opening my camera, I took
half a dozen shots of the tree, and every aspect of the landscape as seen
from the tree. Also, I included one of the gleaming, snow-crested peaks. I
might want to return, and these photos would help. . . .
Folding the camera, I returned to my cushion of soft grass. Had that spot
beneath the tree a certain alien enchantment? I know that I was reluctant
to leave it. ...
I gazed upward at the curious round leaves. I closed my eyes. A breeze
stirred the branches, and their whispered music lulled me into tranquil
oblivion. And suddenly I saw again the pale red sky and the three suns.
The land of three shadows! Again the great temple came into view. I seemed
to be floating on the air - a disembodied spirit exploring the wonders of
a mad, multi-dimensional world! The temple's oddly angled cornices
frightened me, and I knew that this place was one that no man on earth had
ever seen in his wildest dreams.
Again the vast doorway yawned before me; and I was sucked within that
black, writhing cloud. I seemed to be staring at space unlimited. I saw a
void beyond my vocabulary to describe; a dark, bottomless gulf teeming
with nameless shapes and entities - things of madness and delirium, as
tenuous as a mist from Shamballah.
My soul shrank. I was terribly afraid. I screamed and screamed, and felt
that I would soon go mad. Then in my dream I ran and ran in a fever of
utter terror, but I did not know what I was running from. ... I left that
hideous temple and that hellish void, yet I knew I must, barring some
miracle, return. . . .
At last my eyes flew open. I was not beneath the tree. I was sprawled on a
rocky slope, my clothing torn and disordered. My hands were bleeding. I
stood up, pain stabbing through me. I recognized the spot - the ridge
where I had first seen the blasted area! I must have walked miles -
unconscious! The tree was not in sight, and I was glad. . . . Even the
knees of my trousers were torn, as if I had crawled part of the way. . . .
I glanced at the sun. Late afternoon! Where had I been? I snatched out my
watch. It had stopped at 10:34. . . .
II.
"So you have the snapshots?" Theunis drawled. I met his gray eyes across
the breakfast table. Three days had slipped by since my return from Hell's
Acres. I had told him about the dream beneath the tree, and he had
laughed.
"Yes," I replied. "They came last night. Haven't had a chance to open them
yet. Give 'em a good, careful study - if they aren't all failures. Perhaps
you'll change your mind."
Theunis smiled; sipped his coffee. I gave him the unopened envelope and he
quickly broke the seal and withdrew the pictures. He glanced at the first
one, and the smile faded from his leonine face. He crushed out his
cigarette.
"My God, man! Look at this!"
I seized the glossy rectangle. It was the first picture of the tree, taken
at a distance of fifty feet or so. The cause of Theunis' excitement
escaped me. There it was, standing boldly on the hill, while below it grew
the jungle of grass where I had lain. In the distance were my snow-capped
mountains!
"There you are," I cried. "The proof of my story... "
"Look at it!" Theunis snapped. "The shadows... there are three for every
rock, bush, and tree!"
He was right... Below the tree, spread in fanlike incongruity, lay three
overlapping shadows. Suddenly I realized that the picture held an abnormal
and inconsistent element. The leaves on the thing were too lush for the
work of sane nature, while the trunk was bulged and knotted in the most
abhorrent shapes. Theunis dropped the picture on the table.
"There is something wrong," I muttered. "The tree I saw didn't look as
repulsive as that... "
"Are you sure?" Theunis grated. "The fact is, you may have seen many
things not recorded on this film."
"It shows more than I saw!"
"That's the point. There is something damnably out of place in this
landscape; something I can't understand. The tree seems to suggest a
thought - beyond my grasp. ... It is too misty; too uncertain; too unreal
to be natural!" He rapped nervous fingers on the table. He snatched the
remaining films and shuffled through them, rapidly.
I reached for the snapshot he had dropped, and sensed a touch of bizarre
uncertainty and strangeness as my eyes absorbed its every detail. The
flowers and weeds pointed at varying angles, while some of the grass grew
in the most bewildering fashion. The tree seemed too veiled and clouded to
be readily distinguished, but I noted the huge limbs and the half-bent
flower stems that were ready to fall over, yet did not fall. And the many,
overlapping shadows. . . . They were, altogether, very disquieting shadows
- too long or short when compared to the stems they fell below to give one
a feeling of comfortable normality. The landscape hadn't shocked me the
day of my visit. . . . There was a dark familiarity and mocking suggestion
in it; something tangible, yet distant as the stars beyond the galaxy.
Theunis came back to earth. "Did you mention three suns in your dreaming
orgy?"
I nodded, frankly puzzled. Then it dawned on me. My fingers trembled
slightly as I stared at the picture again. My dream! Of course...
"The others are just like it," Theunis said. "That same uncertainness;
that suggestion. I should be able to catch the mood of the thing; see it
in its real light, but it is too. . . . Perhaps later I shall find out, if
I look at it long enough."
We sat in silence for some time. A thought came to me, suddenly, prompted
by a strange, inexplicable longing to visit the tree again. "Let's make an
excursion. I think I can take you there in half a day."
"You'd better stay away," replied Theunis, thoughtfully. "I doubt if you
could find the place again if you wanted to."
"Nonsense," I replied. "Surely, with these photos to guide us... "
"Did you see any familiar landmarks in them?"
His observation was uncanny. After looking through the remaining snaps
carefully, I had to admit that there were none.
Theunis muttered under his breath and drew viciously on his cigarette. "A
perfectly normal - or nearly so - picture of a spot apparently dropped
from nowhere. Seeing mountains at this low altitude is preposterous . . .
but wait!"
He sprang from the chair as a hunted animal and raced from the room. I
could hear him moving about in our makeshift library, cursing volubly.
Before long he reappeared with an old, leather-bound volume. Theunis
opened it reverently, and peered over the odd characters.
"What do you call that?" I inquired.
"This is an early English translation of the Chronicle of Nath, written by
Rudolf Yergler, a German mystic and alchemist who borrowed some of his
lore from Hermes Trismegistus, the ancient Egyptian sorcerer. There is a
passage here that might interest you - might make you understand why this
business is even further from the natural than you suspect. Listen."
"So in the year of the Black Goat there came unto Nath
a shadow that should not be on Earth, and that had no
form known to the eyes of Earth. And it fed on the souls
of men; they that it gnawed being lured and blinded with
dreams till the horror and the endless night lay upon
them. Nor did they see that which gnawed them; for the
shadow took false shapes that men know or dream of, and
only freedom seemed waiting in the Land of the Three Suns.
But it was told by priests of the Old Book that he who
could see the shadow's true shape, and live after the
seeing, might shun its doom and send it back to the
starless gulf of its spawning. This none could do save
through the Gem; wherefore did Ka-Nefer the High-Priest
keep that gem sacred in the temple. And when it was lost
with Phrenes, he who braved the horror and was never seen
more, there was weeping in Nath. Yet did the Shadow depart
sated at last, nor shall it hunger again till the cycles
roll back to the year of the Black Goat."
Theunis paused while I stared, bewildered. Finally he spoke. "Now, Single,
I suppose you can guess how all this links up. There is no need of going
deep into the primal lore behind this business, but I may as well tell you
that according to the old legends this is the so-called 'Year of the Black
Goat' - when certain horrors from the fathomless Outside are supposed to
visit the earth and do infinite harm. We don't know how they'll be
manifest, but there's reason to think that strange mirages and
hallucinations will be mixed up in the matter. I don't like the thing
you've run up against - the story or the pictures. It may be pretty bad,
and I warn you to look out. But first I must try to do what old Yergler
says - to see if I can glimpse the matter as it is. Fortunately the old
Gem he mentions has been rediscovered - I know where I can get at it. We
must use it on the photographs and see what we see.
"It's more or less like a lens or prism, though one can't take photographs
with it. Someone of peculiar sensitiveness might look through and sketch
what he sees. There's a bit of danger, and the looker may have his
consciousness shaken a trifle; for the real shape of the shadow isn't
pleasant and doesn't belong on this earth. But it would be a lot more
dangerous not to do anything about it. Meanwhile, if you value your life
and sanity, keep away from that hill - and from the thing you think is a
tree on it."
I was more bewildered than ever. "How can there be organized beings from
the Outside in our midst?" I cried. "How do we know that such things
exist?"
"You reason in terms of this tiny earth," Theunis said. "Surely you don't
think that the world is a rule for measuring the universe. There are
entities we never dream of floating under our very noses. Modern science
is thrusting back the borderland of the unknown and proving that the
mystics were not so far off the track... "
Suddenly I knew that I did not want to look at the picture again; I wanted
to destroy it. I wanted to run from it. Theunis was suggesting something
beyond. ... A trembling, cosmic fear gripped me and drew me away from the
hideous picture, for I was afraid I would recognize some object in it. . .
.
I glanced at my friend. He was poring over the ancient book, a strange
expression on his face. He sat up straight. "Let's call the thing off for
today. I'm tired of this endless guessing and wondering. I must get the
loan of the gem from the museum where it is, and do what is to be done."
"As you say," I replied. "Will you have to go to Croydon?"
He nodded.
"Then we'll both go home," I said decisively.
III.
I need not chronicle the events of the fortnight that followed. With me
they formed a constant and enervating struggle between a mad longing to
return to the cryptic tree of dreams and freedom, and a frenzied dread of
that selfsame thing and all connected with it. That I did not return is
perhaps less a matter of my own will than a matter of pure chance.
Meanwhile I knew that Theunis was desperately active in some investigation
of the strangest nature - something which included a mysterious motor trip
and a return under circumstances of the greatest secrecy. By hints over
the telephone I was made to understand that he had somewhere borrowed the
obscure and primal object mentioned in the ancient volume as "The Gem,"
and that he was busy devising a means of applying it to the photographs I
had left with him. He spoke fragmentarily of "refraction," "polarization,"
and "unknown angles of space and time," and indicated that he was building
a kind of box or camera obscura for the study of the curious snapshots
with the gem's aid.
It was on the sixteenth day that I received the startling message from the
hospital in Croydon. Theunis was there, and wanted to see me at once. He
had suffered some odd sort of seizure; being found prone and unconscious
by friends who found their way into his house after hearing certain cries
of mortal agony and fear. Though still weak and helpless, he had now
regained his senses and seemed frantic to tell me something and have me
perform certain important duties. This much the hospital informed me over
the wire; and within half an hour I was at my friend's bedside, marveling
at the inroads which worry and tension had made on his features in so
brief a time. His first act was to move away the nurses in order to speak
in utter confidence.
"Single - I saw it!" His voice was strained and husky. "You must destroy
them all - those pictures. I sent it back by seeing it, but the pictures
had better go. That tree will never be seen on the hill again - at least,
I hope not - till thousands of eons bring back the Year of the Black Goat.
You are safe now - mankind is safe." He paused, breathing heavily, and
continued.
"Take the Gem out of the apparatus and put it in the safe - you know the
combination. It must go back where it came from, for there's a time when
it may be needed to save the world. They won't let me leave here yet, but
I can rest if I know it's safe. Don't look through the box as it is - it
would fix you as it's fixed me. And burn those damned photographs . . .
the one in the box and the others. . . ." But Theunis was exhausted now,
and the nurses advanced and motioned me away as he leaned back and closed
his eyes.
In another half-hour I was at his house and looking curiously at the long
black box on the library table beside the overturned chair. Scattered
papers blew about in a breeze from the open window, and close to the box I
recognized with a queer sensation the envelope of pictures I had taken. It
required only a moment for me to examine the box and detach at one end my
earliest picture of the tree, and at the other end a strange bit of
amber-colored crystal, cut in devious angles impossible to classify. The
touch of the glass fragment seemed curiously warm and electric, and I
could scarcely bear to put it out of sight in Theunis' wall safe. The
snapshot I handled with a disconcerting mixture of emotions. Even after I
had replaced it in the envelope with the rest I had a morbid longing to
save it and gloat over it and rush out and up the hill toward its
original. Peculiar line-arrangements sprang out of its details to assault
and puzzle my memory . . . pictures behind pictures . . . secrets lurking
in half-familiar shapes. . . . But a saner contrary instinct, operating at
the same time, gave me the vigor and avidity of unplaceable fear as I
hastily kindled a fire in the grate and watched the problematic envelope
burn to ashes. Somehow I felt that the earth had been purged of a horror
on whose brink I had trembled, and which was none the less monstrous
because I did not know what it was.
Of the source of Theunis' terrific shock I could form no coherent guess,
nor did I dare to think too closely about it. It is notable that I did not
at any time have the least impulse to look through the box before removing
the gem and photograph. What was shown in the picture by the antique
crystal's lens or prism-like power was not, I felt curiously certain,
anything that a normal brain ought to be called upon to face. Whatever it
was, I had myself been close to it - had been completely under the spell
of its allurement - as it brooded on that remote hill in the form of a
tree and an unfamiliar landscape. And I did not wish to know what I had so
narrowly escaped.
Would that my ignorance might have remained complete! I could sleep better
at night. As it was, my eye was arrested before I left the room by the
pile of scattered papers rustling on the table beside the black box. All
but one were blank, but that one bore a crude drawing in pencil. Suddenly
recalling what Theunis had once said about sketching the horror revealed
by the gem, I strove to turn away; but sheer curiosity defeated my sane
design. Looking again almost furtively, I observed the nervous haste of
the strokes, and the unfinished edge left by the sketcher's terrified
seizure. Then, in a burst of perverse boldness, I looked squarely at the
dark and forbidden design - and fell in a faint.
I shall never describe fully what I saw. After a time I regained my
senses, thrust the sheet into the dying fire, and staggered out through
the quiet streets to my home. I thanked God that I had not looked through
the crystal at the photograph, and prayed fervently that I might forget
the drawing's terrible hint of what Theunis had beheld. Since then I have
never been quite the same. Even the fairest scenes have seemed to hold
some vague, ambiguous hint of the nameless blasphemies which may underlie
them and form their masquerading essence. And yet the sketch was so
slight... so little indicative of all that Theunis, to judge from his
guarded accounts later on, must have discerned!
Only a few basic elements of the landscape were in the thing. For the most
part a cloudy, exotic-looking vapor dominated the view. Every object that
might have been familiar was seen to be part of something vague and
unknown and altogether un-terrestrial - something infinitely vaster than
any human eye could grasp, and infinitely alien, monstrous, and hideous as
guessed from the fragment within range.
Where I had, in the landscape itself, seen the twisted, half-sentient
tree, there was here visible only a gnarled, terrible hand or talon with
fingers or feelers shockingly distended and evidently groping toward
something on the ground or in the spectator's direction. And squarely
below the writhing, bloated digits I thought I saw an outline in the grass
where a man had lain. But the sketch was hasty, and I could not be sure.
The Lovecraft Library wishes to extend its gratitude to Pytheon for
transcribing this text.
