Yeti of the Elder Snows lyrics

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