The Conqueror Worm and the Evidence of Its Solitude

Several correspondents have understood my previous account of the Conqueror Worm to mean that I expect another to emerge beneath their breakfast rooms. Others congratulate me upon having proved the creature extinct. I have proved neither proposition, and must ask both parties to postpone the practical arrangements founded upon them. Durn Ossek establishes that an occurrence of this kind is possible; its solitude in our records establishes that we possess one recorded occurrence. Between these statements lies a considerable territory which has lately been occupied by gentlemen carrying very little surveying equipment.

The distinction between testimony and decoration can be made with tolerable confidence. Of fourteen persons who escaped from within the hold, nine left accounts; three describe a moving body. These numbers matter, since a recent lecturer has advertised fourteen independent descriptions of the creature’s anatomy. I wrote requesting his remaining eleven, and he sent me a complimentary ticket. The fullest early account describes a blunt, rounded front, narrower than the body behind it, a crosswise opening, and heavy folds, without visible eyes or limbs. This is sufficient to justify a provisional description, though it supplies no crown of horns, fiery throat or seven mouths. The famous length sufficient to encircle the mountain requires measurements which nobody took, of a body which nobody saw entire. Even the absence of eyes must remain an observation qualified by the circumstances: a terrified witness, uncertain illumination, and very little leisure for inspection.

The mountain supplies evidence of a different quality. During my survey in 1848, we measured four enormous cylindrical shafts averaging approximately a hundred and twenty feet across, together with a trough of crushed rock exceeding a hundred feet in width. We failed to find the bottom of the near-vertical shaft at six hundred feet. I initially entered that last figure as its depth, and was corrected by our Dwarven foreman, Mistress Orra Veld, who pointed out that I had measured the reach of my apparatus. The correction remains in my notebook, where it has performed useful service against subsequent ambitions. These workings establish the scale of the disturbance; they do not provide a trustworthy girth or length for its author. A passage may exceed the breadth of whatever made it, particularly where rock has collapsed. Nor can the several shafts simply be added together to manufacture a longer Worm: their sequence and relation to its movements remain uncertain.

The word worm itself encourages an anatomical confidence which the evidence cannot sustain: no bodily material has been recovered. We have no tissue with which to assign the creature a place in natural history, and a long, limbless body tells us its shape and nothing of its lineage. Its apparent opening may have been a mouth; that it fed within the hold has never been established. Neither have we established how it passed through rock. Crushed stone proves that stone was crushed somewhere in the event; it does not tell us whether the creature excavated by muscular force, enlarged existing weaknesses, or employed some natural agency of which we understand nothing. Professor Quarle’s invocation of magic leaves the difficulty substantially intact, since he must still explain its action and its prodigious scale. No demonstrated magical operation approaches the displacement of a mountain’s substance, and the word cannot be issued unlimited credit merely because the debtor lives underground.

Nevertheless, the existence of such a creature imposes serious obligations upon biology. The mammoth, the largest creature otherwise known on land, and the great whales, larger still, already require us to examine how immense bodies obtain nourishment and distribute it through living tissue. Durn Ossek enlarges the question beyond the dimensions for which we possess observations. If the Worm maintained itself by processes resembling those we know, its demands must have been considerable. This makes an abundant population of continuously active creatures feeding upon ordinary subterranean life difficult to reconcile with our knowledge, though it does not make every possible population impossible. Long intervals of inactivity, very slow growth, or access to an unsuspected source of nourishment would alter the calculation. I offer these as ways in which the difficulty might be met, although we have evidence for none of them. I particularly resist the pleasing suggestion that it eats granite: the ability to enter a substance establishes neither an appetite for it nor a means of deriving sustenance from it.

Why, then, only one sighting? The strongest objection to a numerous population comes from the Dwarves. Thousands of years of mining across the continent have supplied repeated opportunities for encounters, and I disputed with Quarle his convenient assertion that underground creatures are necessarily hidden from observation. Miners observe underground things professionally. Yet Mistress Veld subsequently obliged me to reduce the force of my own argument by drawing our deepest surveyed workings upon a cross-section of the whole mountain: the accessible depth was embarrassingly small. The absence of encounters weighs heavily against creatures which commonly travel through worked levels; it weighs much less against inhabitants of depths we have never reached. Survival also affects the record: Durn Ossek left fourteen witnesses, and a disturbance elsewhere might have left none. That consideration deserves examination, though it cannot be used to annex every unexplained ruined hold to the Worm’s history.

There may have been a single creature, or a population distributed through regions beyond our access; we cannot yet distinguish these possibilities, nor determine whether the emergence represented ordinary movement, an accident, or some exceptional stage of its life. No second disturbance at Durn Ossek has followed, and there is consequently no observed interval from which to calculate a return. I opposed a proposal to evacuate three eastern holds upon the strength of a supposed centennial visitation; its arithmetic depended upon a second event which its author had invented. I supported instead a common register of unexplained deep disturbances, with measured dimensions, dated observations and accounts taken separately before witnesses could harmonise them, since such records may eventually disclose a pattern. Until then, I cannot promise the miners that another Worm will never come, and I will not ask their families to abandon their homes upon a prediction whose principal support is the satisfaction it gives its maker.