Sandworm Ride: H.P. Lovecraft

Gentlemen, I have read the brief, and I must register — at the outset — my profound unease. You have asked me to render a scene in which a youth MOUNTS one of these things and rides it, as a frontier lout might break a horse. I put it to the room that you do not ride such an entity. You are, at the very most, briefly tolerated by it. But I shall proceed. Avert the lamps. I write better when the corners of the room are not fully accounted for.

There are latitudes of the waking world into which the sane mind ought never to wander, and I have come to believe that the open desert of that accursed planet is foremost among them. It was there, beneath a sky the color of old bone, that I witnessed the thing I am now compelled — against every instinct of self-preservation — to set down.

The young man stood upon the crest of a dune as though he meant to do something reasonable.

Note the dune. I have specified that it is the WRONG sort of dune. The geometry of these formations is subtly incorrect — they do not lie as wind-blown sand ought to lie. Something beneath arranges them. I shall not say what. The reader’s imagination will furnish a worse answer than any I could provide, and that is the entire art.

He carried with him certain implements — hooked instruments of barbarous design, worn smooth by the hands of countless predecessors, few of whom, I should think, survived to pass them on. The people of that place had taught him their use with the dreadful casualness of a folk long accustomed to bargaining with the unbargainable. They did not regard what was coming as a beast. They regarded it as a sacrament, which is far worse, for it means they had thought about it carefully and decided to worship it anyway.

This is the detail that unmans me, and I want it underlined. It is not the monster. It is never merely the monster. It is that the natives have a LITURGY for the monster. They have made their peace. A thing you can make peace with is not nearly so terrible as a thing other men have already knelt to.

He drove one of the hooks into the sand — no, not into the sand, but into something beneath the sand, something vast and segmented and patient that had been moving toward him for some time with the slow inevitability of a tide that has decided, this once, to take a personal interest.

And the desert rose.

Restraint, here. RESTRAINT. The amateur describes the creature. He catalogues its teeth, its length, its glistening this-and-that, and in the cataloguing he murders the horror, for a thing fully described is a thing diminished to mere zoology. I describe only what the watching mind can BEAR to perceive — and let the rest press against the edges of the page, unspoken.

I shall not say how large it was. I have tried, in the privacy of my own correspondence, to commit its dimensions to paper, and each time the pen has stopped of its own accord. It was large in the way that certain thoughts are large — the ones that arrive at four in the morning and concern the true age of the earth and one’s own infinitesimal tenancy upon it. It came up out of the deep sand trailing a hot wind that stank of cinnamon and centuries, and where its leading edge breached the surface the very air seemed to bend, as light is said to bend about those gulfs in space from which nothing, having entered, returns.

The young man did not flee. This is the part I cannot forgive him.

Any RATIONAL organism flees. Flight is the one unambiguous proof of a functioning mind. The lower creatures flee. The higher creatures flee FASTER. And yet here is this youth, scrambling UP the flank of the abomination, fitting his little hooks so as to hold open a single segment of its hide — for it cannot, you understand, abide the abrasion of its own inner flesh against the sand, and so it rolls the wounded segment AWAY from the ground, and in rolling, it LIFTS him. He has not conquered it. He has merely made himself a splinter too irritating to grind out. I find no comfort in this. I find, if anything, the opposite of comfort.

And so he rode.

He stood astride a living thing older than the cities of men — older, perhaps, than the notion of cities, older than the first ancestor who looked up at the wheeling stars and felt afraid — and he balanced there upon its rolling immensity with an expression I can only describe as concentration, as though the proper management of the hooks were the whole of the matter, and not the bottomless and blasphemous fact of the thing beneath his feet.

Behind him, upon the dunes, the desert folk had gathered to watch.

And THEY are smiling. Mark it. The watchers are smiling. To them this is a coming-of-age, a thing to be celebrated with whatever grim festivities such a people permit themselves. To me it is the single most horrifying image in the entire account — for it means this is NORMAL here. It happens. It has a name. There are SONGS. I should like very much to go home now, except that I begin to suspect there is no longer any such place, only a thin pretense of one stretched over the same patient dark that waits beneath every desert and every dune and, I am increasingly persuaded, every floor.

The boy turned the creature toward the deep desert, toward the trackless waste where the maps surrender and the names run out, and the people raised a cry that was half triumph and half prayer — and I understood, with the cold and total clarity that comes only once or twice in a life and is never afterward welcome, that he was not the master of the thing.

He was its newest priest.

…Yes. End it there. Do not let them see it set him down — a thing that has been ridden and dismounted is merely an animal, and we have worked too hard to keep it from becoming one. Leave him atop it, dwindling into the waste, and let the reader supply the rest from that bottomless storehouse of dread we all keep and never speak of. …Why is the naturalist fellow raising his hand. Why is he looking at the worm like that. I do not like the look he is giving my worm.