Azathotho by HP Lovecraft, read by Mike Bennett. Craft. When age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men, when grey cities

reared to smoky skies, tall towers, grim and ugly, in whose shadow none might dream of the sun or of springs

flowering meads, when learning stripped the earth of her mantle of beauty, and poets sang no more of

twisted phantoms seen with bleared and inward-looking eyes.

When these things had come to pass and childish hopes had gone forever, there was a man who travelled

out of life on a quest into spaces with the world's dreams had fled.

Of the name and abode of this man, little is written, for they were of the waking world only.

Yet it is said that both were obscure.

It is enough to say that he dwelt in a city of high walls where sterile twilight reined,

that he toiled all day among shadow and turmoil, coming home at evening to a room whose one window opened not to open

fields and groves, but onto a dim court where other windows stared in dull despair.

From that casement one might see only walls and windows,

except sometimes when one leaned so far out and peered at the small

stars that passed, and because mere walls and windows must soon drive a man to madness who dreams and reads much,

the dweller in that room used night after night to lean out and peer aloft to glimpse some fragment of things beyond

the waking world and the tall cities.

After years he began to call the slow sailing stars by name and to follow them in fancy when they glided

regretfully out of sight.

Till at length, his vision opened to many secret vistas

whose existence no common eye suspected.

And one night a mighty gulf was bridged and the dream haunted skies swelled down to the lonely

watchers window to merge with the close air of his room and to make

...