One day a caravan of strange wanderers from the South entered the narrow
cobbled streets of Ulthar. Dark wanderers they were, and unlike unlike the
other roving folk who passed through the village twice every year.
In the market-place they told fortunes for silver, and bought gay beads from
the merchants. What was the land of these wanderers none could tell; but it
was seen that they were given to strange prayers, and that they had painted
on the sides of their wagons strange figures with human bodies and the heads
of cats, hawks rams and lions. And the leader of the caravan wore a
headdress with two horns and a curious disk betwixt the horns.
There was in this singular caravan a little boy with no father or mother,
but only a tiny black kitten to cherish. The plague had not been kind to
him, yet had left him this small furry thing to mitigate his sorrow; and
when one is very young, one can find great relief in the lively antics of a
black kitten. So the boy whom the dark people called Menes smiled more often
than he wept as he sat playing with his graceful kitten on the steps of an
oddly painted wagon.
On the third morning of the wanderers' stay in Ulthar, Menes could not find
his kitten; and as he sobbed aloud in the market-place certain villagers
told him of the old man and his wife, and of sounds heard in the night. And
when he heard these things his sobbing gave place to meditation, and finally
to prayer. He stretched out his arms towards the sun and prayed in a tongue
no villager could understand, since their attention was mostly taken up by
the sky and the odd shapes the clouds were assuming. It was very peculiar,
but as the little boy uttered his petition there seemed to form overhead the
shadowy, nebulous figures of exotic things; of hybrid creatures crowned with
horn-flanked disks.
Nature is full of such illusions to impress the imaginative