It is a recording of a dream, where the protagonist is a Roman military official in the Vascon country near Pompelo. The countryside is, every year, ravaged by terrible hill people who kidnap citizens and perform cruel rituals at a Sabbath. The narrator wishes to lead a military expedition to crush these hill folk, as a feeling of approaching evil has enveloped the countryside, due to a riot between the citizens and the hill people. These hill folk came to trade, yet some of these are killed and later, no disappearances occur before the time of the Sabbath. The incursion is guided by a local-born son of Roman parents. As the Romans approach the seat of the Sabbath rituals, something terrible attacks them and in an instant, horrible things come to pass: "He had killed himself when the horses screamed... He, who had been born and lived all his life in that region, and knew what men whispered about the hills. All the torches now began to dim, and the cries of frightened legionaries mingled with the unceasing screams of the tethered horses. The air grew perceptibly colder, more suddenly so than is usual at November's brink, and seemed stirred by terrible undulations which I could not help connecting with the beating of huge wings." The story ends with the narrator waking up and claiming that "it was the most vivid dream in years, drawing upon wells of the subconscious long untouched and forgotten".
60 Gothic Classics : Exploring the Haunting Depths of Classic Gothic Literature
Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe, William Hope Hodgson, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Anna Katharine Green, George MacDonald, Bram Stoker, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, William Godwin, Henry James, Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jane Austen, John Meade Falkner, George Eliot, Robert Hugh Benson, Horace Walpole, Frederick Marryat, Thomas Love Peacock, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Gaston Leroux, Grant Allen, Arthur Machen, Wilkie Collins, Thomas Peckett Prest, James Malcolm Rymer, Charles Brockden Brown, James Hogg, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Richard Marsh, Charles Robert Maturin, John William Polidori, H. G. Wells, W. Jacobs, H. P. Lovecraft, William Thomas Beckford, Nikolai Gogol, Mary Shelley, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Fitz-James O'Brien, Eliza Parsons
bookIbid (The Work of H. P. Lovecraft, Episode 53)
H. P. Lovecraft
audiobookThe History of the Necronomicon (The Work of H. P. Lovecraft, Episode 52)
H. P. Lovecraft
audiobookThe Thing in the Moonlight (The Work of H. P. Lovecraft, Episode 51)
H. P. Lovecraft
audiobookThe Very Old Folk (The Work of H. P. Lovecraft, Episode 50)
H. P. Lovecraft
audiobookThe Colour out of Space (The Work of H. P. Lovecraft, Episode 49)
H. P. Lovecraft
audiobookThe Case of Charles Dexter Ward (The Work of H. P. Lovecraft, Episode 48)
H. P. Lovecraft
audiobookThe Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (The Work of H. P. Lovecraft, Episode 47)
H. P. Lovecraft
audiobookThe Strange High House in the Mist (The Work of H. P. Lovecraft, Episode 46)
H. P. Lovecraft
audiobookThe Silver Key (The Work of H. P. Lovecraft, Episode 45)
H. P. Lovecraft
audiobookPickman's Model (The Work of H. P. Lovecraft, Episode 44)
H. P. Lovecraft
audiobookThe Call of Cthulhu (The Work of H. P. Lovecraft, Episode 43)
H. P. Lovecraft
audiobook
The Tomb (The Work of H. P. Lovecraft, Episode 1)
H. P. Lovecraft
audiobookDagon (The Work of H. P. Lovecraft, Episode 2)
H. P. Lovecraft
audiobookPolaris (The Work of H. P. Lovecraft, Episode 3)
H. P. Lovecraft
audiobookBeyond the Wall of Sleep (The Work of H. P. Lovecraft, Episode 4)
H. P. Lovecraft
audiobookMemory (The Work of H. P. Lovecraft, Episode 5)
H. P. Lovecraft
audiobookOld Bugs (The Work of H. P. Lovecraft, Episode 6)
H. P. Lovecraft
audiobookThe Transition of Juan Romero (The Work of H. P. Lovecraft, Episode 7)
H. P. Lovecraft
audiobookThe White Ship (The Work of H. P. Lovecraft, Episode 8)
H. P. Lovecraft
audiobookThe Doom That Came to Sarnath (The Work of H. P. Lovecraft, Episode 9)
H. P. Lovecraft
audiobookThe Statement of Randolph Carter (The Work of H. P. Lovecraft, Episode 10)
H. P. Lovecraft
audiobookThe Terrible Old Man (The Work of H. P. Lovecraft, Episode 11)
H. P. Lovecraft
audiobookThe Tree (The Work of H. P. Lovecraft, Episode 12)
H. P. Lovecraft
audiobook