tomb sitting

''we were sitting on a delapitated seventeenth century tomb in the late afternoon of an autumn day at the old burying ground in arkham, and speculating about the unnamable. ... with this friend, joel manton, i had often languidly disputed. he was principle of the east high school, born and bred in boston and sharing new england's self-satisfied deafness to the delicate overtones of life ... especially did he object to my preoccupation with the mystical and the unexplained; for although believing in the super natural much more fully than i, he would not admit that it is sufficiently commonplace for literary treatment ... he believed himself justified in drawing an arbitrary line and ruling out of court all that cannot be experianced and understood by the average citizen. besides he was almost sure that nothing can be really "unnamable" it didnt sound sensible to him ...

''twilight had now approached, but neither of us felt any wish to cease speaking, manton seemed unimpressed by my arguments, and eager to refute them, having that confidence in his own opinions which doubtless caused his success as a teacher; whilst i was too sure of my ground to fear defeat. there in the dark, upon that riven tomb by the deserted house, we talked on about the "unnamable", and after my friend had finished his scoffing i told him of the awful evidence behind the story at which he had scoffed the most. ...

''i told him what i had found in an old diary kept between 1706 and 1723, unearthed among family papers not a mile from where we were sitting; that, and the certain reality of the scars on my ancestors chest and back which the diary described. i told him, too, of the fears of others in that region, and how they were whispered down for generations; ... and how no mythical madness came to the boy who in 1793 entered an abandoned house to examine certain traces suspected to be there ... it is all in that "ancestral diary" i found; all the hushed innuendoes and furtive tales of things with a blemished eye seen at windows in the night or in deserted meadows near the woods. something had caught my ancestor on a dark valley road. leaving him with marks of horns on his chest and of apelike claws on his back; and when they looked for prints in the trampled dust they found the mixed marks of split hooves and vaguely anthropoid paws. ...

''i suppose the thing, if it was a living thing, must have died. the memory had lingered hideously--all the more hideous because it was so secret. ... manton remained thoughtful as i said this; but gradually reverted to his analytical mood. he granted for the sake of argument that some unnatural monster had really existed but reminded me that even the most morbid perversion of nature need not be unnameable or scientifically indescribable.''

h.p.lovecraft, the unnamable.