Nor had my flesh trembled without cause, for when I raised my eyes I saw that the waters had ebbed very low, shewing much of the vast reef whose rim I had seen before. He suddenly feels a chill and notices something far-off beneath the waves: He watches the sea for a while, observing ripples in it, which he attributes as sea worms. The narrator sees a condor and wishes to ask it about the people he knows who have died. Soon, he finds himself staring down at the ruins of an ancient city, a city of the dead. And knowing that to this sunken place all the dead had come, I trembled and did not wish again to speak with the lotus-faces. But when that moon went over to the west and the still tide ebbed from the sullen shore, I saw in that light old spires that the waves almost uncovered, and white columns gay with festoons of green seaweed. Suddenly, the lotus-faces disappear as the moon sinks into the horizon:Īnd as I saw therein the lotus-faces vanish, I longed for nets that I might capture them and learn from them the secrets which the moon had brought upon the night. The dead faces urge him on farther and farther, as the stream becomes a river before leading him to the shore of a sea. Where the walls once stood are now trees and shrubs, with terrifying stone idols between each corner.
Silent and sparkling, bright and baleful, those moon-cursed waters hurried I knew not whither whilst from the embowered banks white lotus-blossoms fluttered one by one in the opiate night-wind and dropped despairingly into the stream, swirling away horribly under the arched, carven bridge, and staring back with the sinister resignation of calm, dead faces.Īfter crossing a bridge, he realizes the garden has no end.
The narrator wanders through his garden one evening and, in the moonlight, witnesses many bizarre sights.
The story describes a surreal dreamscape. This story is told from the first person view of an unnamed narrator. The story is based on one of Lovecraft's dreams, a common technique. It's shorter than most of Lovecraft's other short stories, and is essentially a fragment. This story was first published in the National Amateur in May 1923. " What the Moon Brings" is a prose poem by American horror fiction writer H.
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