Yeti of the Elder Snows
Astrikos Katoikos
Upon the buttresses of Kailash, beneath the frozen stone
There climbed men from Western institutes into the great unknown
Ethnologists and scholars armed with maps and instruments
Certain every mystery would yield to intellect
In a hidden mountained cloister drowned in vapors bleak and white
An anchorite addressed them in the candle-burnished night
There abides among these summits one no chronicle can name
Whose vigil long preceded time and every human age
Across the skins of glaciers under astral sheets of snow
They discovered monstrous markings in the ravines far below
Neither snow leopard nor bear from prehistoric night
Could have carved such dreadful signatures upon those walls of ice
Then the Moon poured argent fire on the skeletons of peaks
And there thundered through the chasms a roar no language speaks
Neither tempest nor eruption nor the cracking of the world
Sounded like those ancient mountains collapsing in the dark
On the eighth ascending passage all their lanterns perished pale
And a primordial terror seized both man and beast alike
Then they saw upon a cliffside towering above the squall
An enormous simian shadow in the sepulchral fog
Yeti of the elder snows
Sepulchral hierophant
Your visage in the mountains
Brings wise men to collapse
And whoever meets your shadow
Beneath the southern stars
Falls exiled from mankind
Through the frozen wastes of God
Then they fired all their rifles toward the looming shape ahead
Yet the bullets rang like echoes and the creature never bled
Still it wandered through the ridges of the ancient fields of ice
With the dreadful solemn grandeur borne by tyrants before Christ
Then there rose from out the ravines a subterranean cry
And a thousand shattered boulders thundered from the mountain side
Tents and mules and all provisions vanished underneath the stone
By the mineral cataclysm of that avalanche of doom
Only one man staggered downward through the glacial labyrinth
Hair transformed to winter whiteness, eyes consumed by emptiness
Never afterward coherent since that prehistoric sight
For he swore that he had witnessed something older than mankind
Yeti of the elder snows
Sepulchral hierophant
Your visage in the mountains
Brings wise men to collapse
And whoever meets your shadow
Beneath the southern stars
Falls exiled from mankind
Through the frozen wastes of God