Terrifying Vistas of Reality

In July 1917, Howard Phillips Lovecraft of Providence, Rhode Island wrote a short story called ‘Dagon’. ‘If you don’t care for this,’ he wrote to one editor, ‘you won’t care for anything of mine.’ In the tale, a sailor lost at sea in a wooden rowboat finds himself abruptly stranded on a vast stretch of seabed that had risen to the surface, pushed up by volcanic activity. As the territory of marine muck hardens in the sun, the sailor begins to walk across it, heading westward towards a distant hummock. But after days of walking, he realises the knoll is in fact a high hill. Camping in its shadow, he awakes one night in a cold sweat and endeavours to climb it. But at the summit, he looks over the side ‘into an immeasurable pit or canyon, whose black recesses the moon had not yet soared high enough to illumine.’