ilated story capable of bringing home all that the old
Recluse, of the vanished house, had striven to tell.

Of the simple, stiffly given account of weird and extraordinary matters,
I will say little. It lies before you. The inner story must be uncovered,
personally, by each reader, according to ability and desire. And even
should any fail to see, as now I see, the shadowed picture and conception
of that to which one may well give the accepted titles of Heaven and Hell;
yet can I promise certain thrills, merely taking the story as a story.

WILLIAM HOPE HODGSON December 17, 1907

_I_

THE FINDING OF THE MANUSCRIPT

Right away in the west of Ireland lies a tiny hamlet called Kraighten.
It is situated, alone, at the base of a low hill. Far around there
spreads a waste of bleak and totally inhospitable country; where, here
and there at great intervals, one may come upon the ruins of some long
desolate cottage--unthatched and stark. The whole land is bare and
unpeopled, the very earth scarcely covering the rock that lies beneath
it, and with which the country abounds, in places rising out of the soil
in wave-shaped ridges.

Yet, in spite of its desolation, my friend Tonnison and I had elected to
spend our vacation there. He had stumbled on the place by mere chance
the year previously, during the course of a long walking tour, and
discovered the possibilities for the angler in a small and unnamed river
that runs past the outskirts of the little village.

I have said that the river is without name; I may add that no map that I
have hitherto consulted has shown either village or stream. They seem
to have entirely escaped observation: indeed, they might never exist for
all that the average guide tells one. Possibly this can be partly
accounted for by the fact that the nearest railway station (Ardrahan) is
some forty miles distant.

It was early one warm evening when my friend and I arrived in Kraighten.
We had reached Ardrahan the previous night, sleeping there in rooms
hired at the village post office, and leaving in good time on the
following morning, clinging insecurely to one of the typical
jaunting cars.

It had taken us all day to accomplish our journey over some of the
roughest tracks imaginable, with the result that we were thoroughly
tired and somewhat bad tempered. However, the tent had to be erected and
our goods stowed away before we could think of food or rest. And so we
set to work, with the aid of