And round by the House of Silence, wound the Road Where The Silent Ones
Walk. And concerning this Road, which passed out of the Unknown Lands,
nigh by the Place of the Ab-humans, where was always the green, luminous
mist, nothing was known; save that it was held that, of all the works
about the Mighty Pyramid, it was, alone, the one that was bred, long
ages past, of healthy human toil and labour. And on this point alone,
had a thousand books, and more, been writ; and all contrary, and so to
no end, as is ever the way in such matters.
And as it was with the Road Where The Silent Ones Walk, so it was with
all those other monstrous things ... whole libraries had there been made
upon this and upon that; and many a thousand million mouldered into the
forgotten dust of the earlier world.
I mind me now that presently I stepped upon the central
travelling-roadway which spanned the one thousandth plateau of the Great
Redoubt. And this lay six miles and thirty fathoms above the Plain of
the Night Land, and was somewhat of a great mile or more across. And so,
in a few minutes, I was at the South-Eastern wall, and looking out
through The Great Embrasure towards the Three Silver-fire Holes, that
shone before the Thing That Nods, away down, far in the South-East.
Southward of this, but nearer, there rose the vast bulk of the
South-East Watcher--The Watching Thing of the South-East. And to the
right and to the left of the squat monster burned the Torches; maybe
half-a-mile upon each side; yet sufficient light they threw to show the
lumbered-forward head of the never-sleeping Brute.
To the East, as I stood there in the quietness of the Sleeping-Time on
the One Thousandth Plateau, I heard a far, dreadful sound, down in the
lightless East; and, presently, again--a strange, dreadful laughter,
deep as a low thunder among the mountains. And because this sound came
odd whiles from the Unknown Lands beyond the Valley of The Hounds, we
had named that far and never-seen Place "The Country Whence Comes The
Great Laughter." And though I had heard the sound, many and oft a time,
yet did I never hear it without a most strange thrilling of my heart,
and a sense of my littleness, and of the utter terror which had beset
the last millions of the world.
Yet, because I had heard the Laughter oft, I paid not over-long
attention to my thoughts upon it; and when, in a little it died away
into that Eastern Darkness, I turned my spy-glass upon the Giants' Pit,
which lay to the South of the Giants' Kilns. And these same Kilns were
tended by the giants, and the light of the Kilns was red and fitful, and
threw wavering shadows and lights across the mouth of the pit; so that I
saw giants crawling up out of the pit; but not properly seen, by reason
of the dance of the shadows. And so, because ever there was so much to
behold, I looked away, presently, to that which was plainer to be
examined.