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 the ground before it--growing slowly.
And this had stayed the way of the Monster; so that through an eternity
it had looked towards the Pyramid across the pale glare of the Dome, and
seeming to have no power to advance nearer.