How shall you ever know, as I know in verity, of the greatness and
reality and terror of the thing that I would tell plain to all; for we,
with our puny span of recorded life must have great histories to tell,
but the few bare details we know concerning years that are but a few
thousands in all; and I must set out to you in the short pages of this
my life there, a sufficiency of the life that had been, and the life
that was, both within and without that mighty Pyramid, to make clear to
those who may read, the truth of that which I would tell; and the
histories of that great Redoubt dealt not with odd thousands of years;
but with very millions; aye, away back into what they of that Age
conceived to be the early days of the earth, when the sun, maybe, still
gloomed dully in the night sky of the world. But of all that went
before, nothing, save as myths, and matters to be taken most cautiously,
and believed not by men of sanity and proved wisdom.

And I, ...how shall I make all this clear to you who may read? The thing
cannot be; and yet I must tell my history; for to be silent before so
much wonder would be to suffer of too full a heart; and I must even ease
my spirit by this my struggle to tell to all how it was with me, and how
it will be. Aye, even to the memories which were the possession of that
far future youth, who was indeed I, of his childhood's days, when his
nurse of that Age swung him, and crooned impossible lullabies of this
mythical sun which, according to those future fairy-tales, had once
passed across the blackness that now lay above the Pyramid.

Such is the monstrous futureness of this which I have seen through the
body of that far-off youth.

And so back to my telling. To my right, which was to the North, there