Late 1920. Lovecraft was spontaneously combusting with new visions, and burst to put them down on paper. Nyarlathotep and Celephais have very different dream-plots, but don't let that fool you. The writer was struggling to say things.
I've placed elements of both below so that you can see that Lovecraft is trying to blend his nightmares with scientific cosmology.
Nyarlathotep:
... out of the
abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver
in dark and lonely places. I believe we felt something coming down from the
greenish moon, for when we began to depend on its light
we drifted into curious involuntary marching formations and seemed to know our destinations though we dared not think of them. ... a sickened, sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush
the pallid stars and make them flicker low.
Celephais:
...
he had been drawn down a lane that led off from the village street toward the channel cliffs, and had come to the end of things to the precipice and
the abyss where all the village and all
the world fell abruptly into the unechoing emptiness of infinity, and where even
the sky ahead was empty and unlit by
the crumbling moon and
the peering stars. Faith had urged him on, over the precipice and into the gulf, where he had floated down, down, down; past dark, shapeless, undreamed dreams, faintly glowing spheres that may have been partly dreamed dreams, and laughing winged things that seemed to mock the dreamers of all the worlds. ... As before, he dreamed first of the village that was asleep or dead, and of
the abyss down which one must float silently ... the lane that ends in the abyss of dreams ... The abyss was a seething chaos of roseate and cerulean splendour ...
***
And witht hat being said, can we make another connection?
Is King Kynaratholis somewhat akin to Nyarlathotep, only by a different name? The letters and semiotic parsing are very, very similar.
Kyn // ar // ath // olis
Ny // ar // lat // hotep
