A Fear of Stone

H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (Part 6)

“And far to the north… there was an unused quarry greater than all the rest; from which had been hewn in forgotten times such prodigious lumps and blocks that the sight of their chiseled vacancies struck terror to all who beheld.”  Here, it is the absence of the stone – the spatial ghost, as it were – that marks the scope of sculptural efforts, and thus their horror.  The concept is reversed later, when Carter actually encounters some soaring monuments: “But now those hills were hills no more, for some hand greater than man’s had touched them.  Silent they squatted there atop the world like wolves or ghouls, crowned with clouds and mists and guarding the secrets of the north forever.”

Part of stone’s terrible power lies in the fact that it is not organic – it has no life in it, but depends on the craft of some intelligence beyond its boundaries.  And for Lovecraft, there are always monstrous hands eager to produce some evil art.

The fear of stone, though, really solidifies at the “prehistoric” monastery of “the high-priest not to be described.”  “There, all alone in the hush and the dusk and the cold, rose the uncouth stones of a squat windowless building around which a circle of crude monoliths stood.”  Monoliths, of course, are a favorite image of Lovecraft’s – stone daggers piercing earth or sky.  Here they crown or honor an unholy constellation of stone, within which dwells some agent of Nyarlathotep.  Eventually, Carter must escape from “hopeless labyrinths of stone” – a notion that echoes the dreadful ruined city of the Elder Things in The Mountains of Madness.

Part of stone’s menace, then is in its lifelessness – but it is also empowered by its antiquity and its capacity to bridge the notion of architecture (cities, monoliths, and monasteries) with that of earthly forms (mountains and crags).  Stone is the bone of the world – the skeletal horror beneath an organic husk:  “All this while there had stretched before him the great corpse-like width of fabled Sarkomand with its black broken pillars and crumbling sphinx-crowned gates and titan stones and monstrous winged lions against the sickly glow of those luminous night clouds.”

Image: Piranesi, Getty Open Content