This is by far my favourite passage from the story, purely for the evocative Gothic imagery it conjures. It is almost like a painting in words:
H.P. Lovecraft wrote:I can recall the scene in these final moments—the pale autumnal moon over the graves, casting long horrible shadows; the grotesque trees, drooping sullenly to meet the neglected grass and the crumbling slabs; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the moon; the antique ivied church pointing a huge spectral finger at the livid sky; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires under the yews in a distant corner; the odours of mould, vegetation, and less explicable things that mingled feebly with the night-wind from over far swamps and seas; and worst of all, the faint deep-toned baying of some gigantic hound which we could neither see nor definitely place.
It's repeated almost directly underneath, which really emphasises the morbid excitement the characters draw from the scene:
H.P. Lovecraft wrote:I remembered how we delved in this ghoul’s grave with our spades, and how we thrilled at the picture of ourselves, the grave, the pale watching moon, the horrible shadows, the grotesque trees, the titanic bats, the antique church, the dancing death-fires, the sickening odours, the gently moaning night-wind, and the strange, half-heard, directionless baying, of whose objective existence we could scarcely be sure.
Then, finally, I love how when he returns to Holland the second time, alone, the scene is described again -- this time no longer as a thrill-seeker aesthete's Halloween fantasy, but as a scene of desperate, desolate wintry loneliness:
H.P. Lovecraft wrote:So at last I stood again in that unwholesome churchyard where a pale winter moon cast hideous shadows, and leafless trees drooped sullenly to meet the withered, frosty grass and cracking slabs, and the ivied church pointed a jeering finger at the unfriendly sky, and the night-wind howled maniacally from over frozen swamps and frigid seas. The baying was very faint now, and it ceased altogether as I approached the ancient grave I had once violated, and frightened away an abnormally large horde of bats which had been hovering curiously around it.
I'm assuming, from their lifestyle, that these two men are aristocrats with an insane amount of disposable income. Every time I read it I often wonder what technology they are using to create the "special effects" in their little dungeon:
H.P. Lovecraft wrote:It was a secret room, far, far underground; where huge winged daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths weird green and orange light, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death the lines of red charnel things hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings. Through these pipes came at will the odours our moods most craved; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies, sometimes the narcotic incense of imagined Eastern shrines of the kingly dead, and sometimes—how I shudder to recall it!—the frightful, soul-upheaving stenches of the uncovered grave.
Weird green and orange light? Assuming this story is set in the 1920s, these men could probably afford electric lighting, and presumably they're using some kind of stained glass within the mouths of the daemon statues to change the colour of the light? I wonder what is powering the pneumatic pipes, though? Also, how do they get
smells to blow through the pipes? I know all this would be easy to re-create with modern theater technology, but I have no idea what kind of things were technically possible back then.
Moving on,
this part of the story is not further elaborated on, but is critically important for several reasons:
H.P. Lovecraft wrote:Alien it indeed was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, but we recognised it as the thing hinted of in the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; the ghastly soul-symbol of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in Central Asia. All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the souls of those who vexed and gnawed at the dead.
This is the very first story in which Lovecraft mentions
The Necronomicon -- the infamous fictional book which ties all the rest of his tales together into one cohesive "mythos" (later referred to as the Cthulhu Mythos). It's also significant because it ties
The Hound -- a distinctly Gothic tale in the Poe tradition -- into the larger Cthulhu Mythos (which at the time The Hound was written, wasn't fully developed), thus gives the tale a distinctly Lovecraftian stamp that sets it apart from other Gothic tales. The above passage is also significant because we hear about the Arab author of the Necronomicon,
Abdul Alhazred, though this is not the first time (and by no means the last) he is mentioned by Lovecraft. We'll talk more about him later. Other important features of the above passage are the mystical (and inaccessible)
Plateau of Leng, which features several times in other Lovecraft tales as a mysterious otherworldly place where strange things dwell and stranger things take place. The "corpse-eating cult" and "canine face" of the carving are, arguably, shadows of Lovecraft's
ghouls which feature in later works. Finally, the object itself which the grave-robbers steal is in its design and colour, possibly a precursor to a similar object which appears in a later, more famous tale, which we'll cover at another time.
Finally, I want to ask you a few questions:
1. How scary did you find the story?
2. What do you think The Hound actually is?
3. Why do you think the protagonist kills the vulture with his spade at the end? Is there some kind of significance of this, or is he just a psycho? ¬_¬
4. Slightly loaded question, but who do you think is the real monster in this story?