further tellings:

Before me ran the Road Where The Silent Ones Walk; and I searched it, as
many a time in my earlier youth had I, with the spy-glass; for my heart
was always stirred mightily by the sight of those Silent Ones.

And, presently, alone in all the miles of that night-grey road, I saw
one in the field of my glass--a quiet, cloaked figure, moving along,
shrouded, and looking neither to right nor left. And thus was it with
these beings ever. It was told about in the Redoubt that they would harm
no human, if but the human did keep a fair distance from them; but that
it were wise never to come close upon one. And this I can well believe.

And so, searching the road with my gaze, I passed beyond this Silent
One, and past the place where the road, sweeping vastly to the
South-East, was lit a space, strangely, by the light from the
Silver-fire Holes. And thus at last to where it swayed to the South of
the Dark Palace, and thence Southward still, until it passed round to
the Westward, beyond the mountain bulk of the Watching Thing in the
South--the hugest monster in all the visible Night Lands. My spy-glass
showed it to me with clearness--a living hill of watchfulness, known to
us as The Watcher Of The South. It brooded there, squat and tremendous,
hunched over the pale radiance of the Glowing Dome.

Much, I know, had been writ concerning this Odd, Vast Watcher; for it
had grown out of the blackness of the South Unknown Lands a million
years gone; and the steady growing nearness of it had been noted and set
out at length by the men they called Monstruwacans; so that it was
possible to search in our libraries, and learn of the very coming of
this Beast in the olden-time.

And, while I mind me, there were even then, and always, men named
Monstruwacans, whose duty it was to take heed of the great Forces, and
to watch the Monsters and the Beasts that beset the great Pyramid, and
measure and record, and have so full a knowledge of these same that, did
one but sway an head in the darkness, the same matter was set down with
particularness in the Records.

And, so to tell more about the South Watcher. A million years gone, as I
have told, came it out from the blackness of the South, and grew
steadily nearer through twenty thousand years; but so slow that in no
one year could a man perceive that it had moved.

Yet it had movement, and had come thus far upon its road to the Redoubt,
when the Glowing Dome rose out of t