Page:Weird Tales Volume 8 Number 5 (1926-11).djvu/130

 always found newspaper men exceedingly prosaic. The following cutting from a New York paper demonstrates my point:

Where a grim and ghastly river wrapped in brooding menace flows Through a barren blackened mountain that was never known to man, In an awful land of silence where the sun all blood-red shows, Lie those shrieking pits of horror called the Caves of Kooli-Kan.

Down the grim and ghastly river, clothed in lurid lights, come boats Full of great black hairy Somethings with a hundred staring eyes, Who converse on grisly subjects in their low and froglike notes, Bathed in bloody beams of sunlight which come dripping from the skies.

Where the boats stop at a landing built of countless polished bones, There the huge and hairy Somethings, full of mutterings, climb out, To descend a gloomy stairway from whence issue tortured groans, Mixed with peals of ghoulish laughter from that awful realm of doubt.

Some foul, sweaty, slimy substance from the walls exudes in beads, For the barren, blackened mountain has, for ages steeped in sin, Acted as the bridal chamber of the blackest, foulest deeds, As the cradle of the creature called the Never-Should-Have-Been.

Huge, uncouth, misshapen Things whose screams of pain the senses numb. Mighty, voiceless grim Unknowns with wings like bats the darkness fan; All the wild-eyed stark mad terror for a million years to come Haunts those shrieking pits of horror called the Caves of Kooli-Kan.