Shadows Out of Time

There were glimpses, vistas, of huge occurrences on the globe, like the cities and wars of the Old Ones with star-shaped heads to which I’ve been told the Necronomicon refers, and which the expedition to the Antarctic in the 1930s confirmed. It looked like the Carboniferous Age to me, but that was peripheral to the things I was seeing. Always the central focus was on that strange plateau, maybe a hundred miles from end to end. Even in my dream I wondered how large it would seem if you reached it and had to traverse it.

Leng was not richly forested. Except when it had lain under an ancient sea, it was a highland, drier than most of the planet. The mineral beings that lived there while the surface was still largely molten were gone ages before, their citadels and their bodies inert, frozen rock deep under the plateau. If they survived, they must have gone deeper into the mantle and concentrated stores of the radioactive matter they — I assumed — needed to exist. More probably by far, they had gone where the trilobites went.

The dinosaurs arose and a race of humanoid reptiles, fanged like cobras, appeared. The other dinosaurs vanished or evolved into birds, and the serpent-men flourished, though they retreated into hiding as the mammals arose. Again, I saw them vaguely and fleetingly, and they never inhabited Leng, if the dreamvisions I had were true.

The first intelligent race to enter that dry plateau were the ancestral Tcho-Tcho, and they were as hideous as the tales of them asserted. I saw them survive a cataclysm of the Earth’s crust that, as Connie said, must have occurred in distorted time or nothing would have lived through it, and then a second cataclysm, the one described in the Nemedian Chronicles, leaving the globe’s topography as it is now.