The Tree on the Hill

"The Tree on the Hill" is a short story written by horror author H. P. Lovecraft and his correspondent Duane W. Rimel. It was written in 1934 and published in 1940 in Polaris.

Plot

The story is written in first person. It depicts the main character exploring outside a city called Hampden and finding a special tree atop an unusual hill. From the hill, the man witnesses the Bitterroot Mountains, a seemingly impossible feat of geography. The tree makes him daydream about a temple or tomb in a land with three red suns. The temple was half-violet, half-blue. Some shadows attracted him into the inside where he saw three flaming eyes watching him. He awakes later in a different location with his clothing torn and dirty.

He possessed a camera and took many pictures of the tree to show them to his friend Theunis. Later, they examine the photographs and they see three shadows projected by the tree, indicating that there were three suns causing them, as he saw in his dream.

Theunis tells a story of a shadow or dark force which was repelled by an Egyptian priest, Ka-Nefer during the year of the Black Goat. He used a peculiar amber gem to divert the dark energy. Theunis uses a camera obscura, and the special gem to examine the photos taken earlier. The sight renders him unconscious. Theunis instructs the protagonist to burn the pictures and lock up the gem. He does as instructed, but glances at a drawing of the photograph made by Theunis. The protagonist recoils in horror at the sight of a clawed hand, with tendrils, reaching for a spot in the grass where the protagonist received the vision.

Connections

Theunis mentions that this story takes place during the year of the Black Goat, probably a reference to Lovecraft's invented deity Shub-Niggurath. Theunis recurs in Rimel's story "The Jewels of Charlotte" (Unusual Stories, May-June 1935), which may also have been revised by Lovecraft.^[1]

References

↑ S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz. An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001, p. 227

External links

Works related to The Tree on the Hill at Wikisource

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[1] S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz. An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001, p. 227

Works by H. P. Lovecraft
Cthulhu Mythos Dream Cycle
Novels	The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
Novellas	The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath The Whisperer in Darkness At the Mountains of Madness The Shadow over Innsmouth The Shadow Out of Time
Short stories	"The Beast in the Cave" "The Alchemist" "The Tomb" "Dagon" "A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson" "Polaris" "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" "Memory" "Old Bugs" "The Transition of Juan Romero" "The White Ship" "The Street" "The Doom that Came to Sarnath" "The Statement of Randolph Carter" "The Terrible Old Man" "The Tree" "The Cats of Ulthar" "The Temple" "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" "Celephaïs" "From Beyond" "Nyarlathotep" "The Picture in the House" "Ex Oblivione" "Sweet Ermengarde" "The Nameless City" "The Quest of Iranon" "The Moon-Bog" "The Outsider" "The Other Gods" "The Music of Erich Zann" "Herbert West–Reanimator" "Hypnos" "What the Moon Brings" "Azathoth" "The Hound" "The Lurking Fear" "The Rats in the Walls" "The Unnamable" "The Festival" "The Shunned House" "The Horror at Red Hook" "He" "In the Vault" "Cool Air" "The Call of Cthulhu" "Pickman's Model" "The Silver Key" "The Strange High House in the Mist" "The Colour Out of Space" "The Descendant" "History of the Necronomicon" "The Very Old Folk" "Ibid" "The Dunwich Horror" "The Dreams in the Witch House" "The Thing on the Doorstep" "The Evil Clergyman" "The Book" "The Haunter of the Dark"
Collaborations	"The Green Meadow" "The Loved Dead" "Poetry and the Gods" "The Crawling Chaos" "The Horror at Martin's Beach" "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" "The Curse of Yig" "The Mound" "Medusa's Coil" "The Horror in the Museum" "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" "Out of the Aeons" "The Tree on the Hill" "Till A’the Seas" "In the Walls of Eryx" "The Thing in the Moonlight"
Poetry	Fungi from Yuggoth
Essays	"Supernatural Horror in Literature" To Quebec and the Stars The Cancer of Superstition Autobiography: Some Notes on a Nonentity