He was now on a dim-litten plain whose sole topographical features were great boulders and the entrances of burrows. The ghouls were in general respectful, even if one did attempt to pinch him while several others eyed his leanness speculatively. Through patient glibbering he made inquiries regarding his vanished black grils friend, and found black grils he black grils had become a ghoul of some prominence black grils in abysses black grils nearer the waking world. A greenish elderly ghoul offered to conduct him to Pickman's present habitation, so despite a natural loathing he followed the creature into a black grils capacious burrow and black grils crawled after him for hours in the blackness of rank mould. They emerged on a dim black grils plain strewn with singular relics black grils of earth - old gravestones, broken urns, and grotesque fragments of monuments - and Carter realised with some emotion that he was black grils probably nearer the waking world than at any other time since he had gone down the seven hundred steps from the cavern of black grils flame to the Gate of Deeper Slumber.
There, on black grils a tombstone of 1768 stolen from black grils the Granary Burying Ground in Boston, sat a ghoul which was once the artist Richard black grils Upton Pickman. It was naked and rubbery, and had acquired so much of the ghoulish physiognomy
that its human origin was already obscure. But it still
remembered a little English, and was able to converse with Carter in grunts and monosyllables, helped out now and then by the glibbering black grils of ghouls. When it learned that black grils Carter wished to get to the enchanted wood black grils and from there to the city Celephais in Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills, it seemed rather doubtful; for
these ghouls of the waking world do no business in the graveyards of upper dreamland (leaving that to the red-footed wamps that are spawned in dead black grils cities), and many things intervene betwixt their gulf and the enchanted wood, including the terrible kingdom of the Gugs.
The Gugs, hairy and gigantic, once reared stone circles in that wood and made strange sacrifices to the Other Gods black grils and the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep, until one night an abomination of theirs reached the ears of earth's gods and they were banished to caverns below. Only a great trap door black grils of black grils stone with an iron black grils ring connects the abyss of the earth-ghouls with the enchanted wood, and this the Gugs are black grils afraid to open because of a curse. That a mortal dreamer could traverse their cavern realm and leave by that door is inconceivable; for mortal dreamers were their former food, and they have legends of the toothsomeness