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<td><center><br><font face='Arial,Sans-Serif' size='+2'><b>The Call of Cthulhu<br><font size=+1>By H. P. Lovecraft</font><br></b></font><br><img
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<center>(Found Among the Papers of the Late<br />Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston)</center>
<blockquote>“Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival . . .
a survival of a hugely remote period when . . . consciousness was manifested,
perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity . . .
forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters,
mythical beings of all sorts and kinds. . . .”<br />
<div align="right">—Algernon Blackwood.</div></blockquote>
<br /><center>I.<br /><i>The Horror in Clay.</i></center><br />
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate
all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity,
and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction,
have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will
open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall
either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of
a new dark age.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein
our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in
terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them
that there came the single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and
maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from
an accidental piecing together of separated things—in this case an old newspaper item
and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out;
certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain. I think that
the professor, too, intended to keep silent regarding the part he knew, and that he would have
destroyed his notes had not sudden death seized him.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 1926–27 with the death
of my grand-uncle George Gammell Angell, Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages in Brown University,
Providence, Rhode Island. Professor Angell was widely known as an authority on ancient inscriptions,
and had frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent museums; so that his passing at
the age of ninety-two may be recalled by many. Locally, interest was intensified by the obscurity
of the cause of death. The professor had been stricken whilst returning from the Newport boat;
falling suddenly, as witnesses said, after having been jostled by a nautical-looking negro who
had come from one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short
cut from the waterfront to the deceased’s home in Williams Street. Physicians were unable
to find any visible disorder, but concluded after perplexed debate that some obscure lesion
of the heart, induced by the brisk ascent of so steep a hill by so elderly a man, was responsible
for the end. At the time I saw no reason to dissent from this dictum, but latterly I am inclined
to wonder—and more than wonder.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>As my grand-uncle’s heir and executor, for he died a childless widower,
I was expected to go over his papers with some thoroughness; and for that purpose moved his
entire set of files and boxes to my quarters in Boston. Much of the material which I correlated
will be later published by the American Archaeological Society, but there was one box which
I found exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much averse from shewing to other eyes. It had
been locked, and I did not find the key till it occurred to me to examine the personal ring
which the professor carried always in his pocket. Then indeed I succeeded in opening it, but
when I did so seemed only to be confronted by a greater and more closely locked barrier. For
what could be the meaning of the queer clay bas-relief and the disjointed jottings, ramblings,
and cuttings which I found? Had my uncle, in his latter years, become credulous of the most
superficial impostures? I resolved to search out the eccentric sculptor responsible for this
apparent disturbance of an old man’s peace of mind.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five
by six inches in area; obviously of modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from modern
in atmosphere and suggestion; for although the vagaries of cubism and futurism are many and
wild, they do not often reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric writing.
And writing of some kind the bulk of these designs seemed certainly to be; though my memory,
despite much familiarity with the papers and collections of my uncle, failed in any way to identify
this particular species, or even to hint at its remotest affiliations.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial intent,
though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be
a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could
conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of
an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the
thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings;
but it was the <i>general outline</i> of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.
Behind the figure was a vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural background.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a stack of press cuttings,
in Professor Angell’s most recent hand; and made no pretence to literary style. What seemed
to be the main document was headed “CTHULHU CULT” in characters painstakingly printed
to avoid the erroneous reading of a word so unheard-of. The manuscript was divided into two
sections, the first of which was headed “1925—Dream and Dream Work of H. A. Wilcox,
7 Thomas St., Providence, R.I.”, and the second, “Narrative of Inspector John R.
Legrasse, 121 Bienville St., New Orleans, La., at 1908 A. A. S. Mtg.—Notes on Same, &
Prof. Webb’s Acct.” The other manuscript papers were all brief notes, some of them
accounts of the queer dreams of different persons, some of them citations from theosophical
books and magazines (notably W. Scott-Elliot’s <i>Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria</i>),
and the rest comments on long-surviving secret societies and hidden cults, with references to
passages in such mythological and anthropological source-books as Frazer’s <i>Golden Bough</i>
and Miss Murray’s <i>Witch-Cult in Western Europe.</i> The cuttings largely alluded to
outré mental illnesses and outbreaks of group folly or mania in the spring of 1925.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>The first half of the principal manuscript told a very peculiar tale. It appears
that on March 1st, 1925, a thin, dark young man of neurotic and excited aspect had called upon
Professor Angell bearing the singular clay bas-relief, which was then exceedingly damp and fresh.
His card bore the name of Henry Anthony Wilcox, and my uncle had recognised him as the youngest
son of an excellent family slightly known to him, who had latterly been studying sculpture at
the Rhode Island School of Design and living alone at the Fleur-de-Lys Building near that institution.
Wilcox was a precocious youth of known genius but great eccentricity, and had from childhood
excited attention through the strange stories and odd dreams he was in the habit of relating.
He called himself “psychically hypersensitive”, but the staid folk of the ancient
commercial city dismissed him as merely “queer”. Never mingling much with his kind,
he had dropped gradually from social visibility, and was now known only to a small group of
aesthetes from other towns. Even the Providence Art Club, anxious to preserve its conservatism,
had found him quite hopeless.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>On the occasion of the visit, ran the professor’s manuscript, the sculptor
abruptly asked for the benefit of his host’s archaeological knowledge in identifying the
hieroglyphics on the bas-relief. He spoke in a dreamy, stilted manner which suggested pose and
alienated sympathy; and my uncle shewed some sharpness in replying, for the conspicuous freshness
of the tablet implied kinship with anything but archaeology. Young Wilcox’s rejoinder,
which impressed my uncle enough to make him recall and record it verbatim, was of a fantastically
poetic cast which must have typified his whole conversation, and which I have since found highly
characteristic of him. He said, “It is new, indeed, for I made it last night in a dream
of strange cities; and dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx, or
garden-girdled Babylon.”<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>It was then that he began that rambling tale which suddenly played upon a sleeping
memory and won the fevered interest of my uncle. There had been a slight earthquake tremor the
night before, the most considerable felt in New England for some years; and Wilcox’s imagination
had been keenly affected. Upon retiring, he had had an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean
cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with
latent horror. Hieroglyphics had covered the walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point
below had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy could transmute
into sound, but which he attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters,
“<i>Cthulhu fhtagn</i>”.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>This verbal jumble was the key to the recollection which excited and disturbed
Professor Angell. He questioned the sculptor with scientific minuteness; and studied with almost
frantic intensity the bas-relief on which the youth had found himself working, chilled and clad
only in his night-clothes, when waking had stolen bewilderingly over him. My uncle blamed his
old age, Wilcox afterward said, for his slowness in recognising both hieroglyphics and pictorial
design. Many of his questions seemed highly out-of-place to his visitor, especially those which
tried to connect the latter with strange cults or societies; and Wilcox could not understand
the repeated promises of silence which he was offered in exchange for an admission of membership
in some widespread mystical or paganly religious body. When Professor Angell became convinced
that the sculptor was indeed ignorant of any cult or system of cryptic lore, he besieged his
visitor with demands for future reports of dreams. This bore regular fruit, for after the first
interview the manuscript records daily calls of the young man, during which he related startling
fragments of nocturnal imagery whose burden was always some terrible Cyclopean vista of dark
and dripping stone, with a subterrene voice or intelligence shouting monotonously in enigmatical
sense-impacts uninscribable save as gibberish. The two sounds most frequently repeated are those
rendered by the letters “<i>Cthulhu</i>” and “<i>R’lyeh</i>”.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>On March 23d, the manuscript continued, Wilcox failed to appear; and inquiries
at his quarters revealed that he had been stricken with an obscure sort of fever and taken to
the home of his family in Waterman Street. He had cried out in the night, arousing several other
artists in the building, and had manifested since then only alternations of unconsciousness
and delirium. My uncle at once telephoned the family, and from that time forward kept close
watch of the case; calling often at the Thayer Street office of Dr. Tobey, whom he learned to
be in charge. The youth’s febrile mind, apparently, was dwelling on strange things; and
the doctor shuddered now and then as he spoke of them. They included not only a repetition of
what he had formerly dreamed, but touched wildly on a gigantic thing “miles high”
which walked or lumbered about. He at no time fully described this object, but occasional frantic
words, as repeated by Dr. Tobey, convinced the professor that it must be identical with the
nameless monstrosity he had sought to depict in his dream-sculpture. Reference to this object,
the doctor added, was invariably a prelude to the young man’s subsidence into lethargy.
His temperature, oddly enough, was not greatly above normal; but his whole condition was otherwise
such as to suggest true fever rather than mental disorder.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>On April 2nd at about 3 p.m. every trace of Wilcox’s malady suddenly
ceased. He sat upright in bed, astonished to find himself at home and completely ignorant of
what had happened in dream or reality since the night of March 22nd. Pronounced well by his
physician, he returned to his quarters in three days; but to Professor Angell he was of no further
assistance. All traces of strange dreaming had vanished with his recovery, and my uncle kept
no record of his night-thoughts after a week of pointless and irrelevant accounts of thoroughly
usual visions.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>Here the first part of the manuscript ended, but references to certain of the
scattered notes gave me much material for thought—so much, in fact, that only the ingrained
scepticism then forming my philosophy can account for my continued distrust of the artist. The
notes in question were those descriptive of the dreams of various persons covering the same
period as that in which young Wilcox had had his strange visitations. My uncle, it seems, had
quickly instituted a prodigiously far-flung body of inquiries amongst nearly all the friends
whom he could question without impertinence, asking for nightly reports of their dreams, and
the dates of any notable visions for some time past. The reception of his request seems to have
been varied; but he must, at the very least, have received more responses than any ordinary
man could have handled without a secretary. This original correspondence was not preserved,
but his notes formed a thorough and really significant digest. Average people in society and
business—New England’s traditional “salt of the earth”—gave an
almost completely negative result, though scattered cases of uneasy but formless nocturnal impressions
appear here and there, always between March 23d and April 2nd—the period of young Wilcox’s
delirium. Scientific men were little more affected, though four cases of vague description suggest
fugitive glimpses of strange landscapes, and in one case there is mentioned a dread of something
abnormal.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know
that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes. As it was, lacking their
original letters, I half suspected the compiler of having asked leading questions, or of having
edited the correspondence in corroboration of what he had latently resolved to see. That is
why I continued to feel that Wilcox, somehow cognisant of the old data which my uncle had possessed,
had been imposing on the veteran scientist. These responses from aesthetes told a disturbing
tale. From February 28th to April 2nd a large proportion of them had dreamed very bizarre things,
the intensity of the dreams being immeasurably the stronger during the period of the sculptor’s
delirium. Over a fourth of those who reported anything, reported scenes and half-sounds not
unlike those which Wilcox had described; and some of the dreamers confessed acute fear of the
gigantic nameless thing visible toward the last. One case, which the note describes with emphasis,
was very sad. The subject, a widely known architect with leanings toward theosophy and occultism,
went violently insane on the date of young Wilcox’s seizure, and expired several months
later after incessant screamings to be saved from some escaped denizen of hell. Had my uncle
referred to these cases by name instead of merely by number, I should have attempted some corroboration
and personal investigation; but as it was, I succeeded in tracing down only a few. All of these,
however, bore out the notes in full. I have often wondered if all the objects of the professor’s
questioning felt as puzzled as did this fraction. It is well that no explanation shall ever
reach them.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>The press cuttings, as I have intimated, touched on cases of panic, mania,
and eccentricity during the given period. Professor Angell must have employed a cutting bureau,
for the number of extracts was tremendous and the sources scattered throughout the globe. Here
was a nocturnal suicide in London, where a lone sleeper had leaped from a window after a shocking
cry. Here likewise a rambling letter to the editor of a paper in South America, where a fanatic
deduces a dire future from visions he has seen. A despatch from California describes a theosophist
colony as donning white robes en masse for some “glorious fulfilment” which never
arrives, whilst items from India speak guardedly of serious native unrest toward the end of
March. Voodoo orgies multiply in Hayti, and African outposts report ominous mutterings. American
officers in the Philippines find certain tribes bothersome about this time, and New York policemen
are mobbed by hysterical Levantines on the night of March 22–23. The west of Ireland,
too, is full of wild rumour and legendry, and a fantastic painter named Ardois-Bonnot hangs
a blasphemous “Dream Landscape” in the Paris spring salon of 1926. And so numerous
are the recorded troubles in insane asylums, that only a miracle can have stopped the medical
fraternity from noting strange parallelisms and drawing mystified conclusions. A weird bunch
of cuttings, all told; and I can at this date scarcely envisage the callous rationalism with
which I set them aside. But I was then convinced that young Wilcox had known of the older matters
mentioned by the professor.<br />
<br /><center>II.<br /><i>The Tale of Inspector Legrasse.</i></center><br />
The older matters which had made the sculptor’s dream and bas-relief so significant to
my uncle formed the subject of the second half of his long manuscript. Once before, it appears,
Professor Angell had seen the hellish outlines of the nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the
unknown hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which can be rendered only as “<i>Cthulhu</i>”;
and all this in so stirring and horrible a connexion that it is small wonder he pursued young
Wilcox with queries and demands for data.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>The earlier experience had come in 1908, seventeen years before, when the American
Archaeological Society held its annual meeting in St. Louis. Professor Angell, as befitted one
of his authority and attainments, had had a prominent part in all the deliberations; and was
one of the first to be approached by the several outsiders who took advantage of the convocation
to offer questions for correct answering and problems for expert solution.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>The chief of these outsiders, and in a short time the focus of interest for
the entire meeting, was a commonplace-looking middle-aged man who had travelled all the way
from New Orleans for certain special information unobtainable from any local source. His name
was John Raymond Legrasse, and he was by profession an Inspector of Police. With him he bore
the subject of his visit, a grotesque, repulsive, and apparently very ancient stone statuette
whose origin he was at a loss to determine. It must not be fancied that Inspector Legrasse had
the least interest in archaeology. On the contrary, his wish for enlightenment was prompted
by purely professional considerations. The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had
been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on
a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with it, that
the police could not but realise that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them,
and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo circles. Of its origin,
apart from the erratic and unbelievable tales extorted from the captured members, absolutely
nothing was to be discovered; hence the anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore which
might help them to place the frightful symbol, and through it track down the cult to its fountain-head.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>Inspector Legrasse was scarcely prepared for the sensation which his offering
created. One sight of the thing had been enough to throw the assembled men of science into a
state of tense excitement, and they lost no time in crowding around him to gaze at the diminutive
figure whose utter strangeness and air of genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted so potently at
unopened and archaic vistas. No recognised school of sculpture had animated this terrible object,
yet centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in its dim and greenish surface of
unplaceable stone.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>The figure, which was finally passed slowly from man to man for close and careful
study, was between seven and eight inches in height, and of exquisitely artistic workmanship.
It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose
face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore
feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural
malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block
or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of the wings touched the back edge
of the block, the seat occupied the centre, whilst the long, curved claws of the doubled-up,
crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and extended a quarter of the way down toward the
bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent forward, so that the ends of the facial
feelers brushed the backs of huge fore paws which clasped the croucher’s elevated knees.
The aspect of the whole was abnormally life-like, and the more subtly fearful because its source
was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was unmistakable; yet not one
link did it shew with any known type of art belonging to civilisation’s youth—or
indeed to any other time. Totally separate and apart, its very material was a mystery; for the
soapy, greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent flecks and striations resembled nothing
familiar to geology or mineralogy. The characters along the base were equally baffling; and
no member present, despite a representation of half the world’s expert learning in this
field, could form the least notion of even their remotest linguistic kinship. They, like the
subject and material, belonged to something horribly remote and distinct from mankind as we
know it; something frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which our
world and our conceptions have no part.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>And yet, as the members severally shook their heads and confessed defeat at
the Inspector’s problem, there was one man in that gathering who suspected a touch of
bizarre familiarity in the monstrous shape and writing, and who presently told with some diffidence
of the odd trifle he knew. This person was the late William Channing Webb, Professor of Anthropology
in Princeton University, and an explorer of no slight note. Professor Webb had been engaged,
forty-eight years before, in a tour of Greenland and Iceland in search of some Runic inscriptions
which he failed to unearth; and whilst high up on the West Greenland coast had encountered a
singular tribe or cult of degenerate Esquimaux whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship,
chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which
other Esquimaux knew little, and which they mentioned only with shudders, saying that it had
come down from horribly ancient aeons before ever the world was made. Besides nameless rites
and human sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary rituals addressed to a supreme elder
devil or <i>tornasuk;</i> and of this Professor Webb had taken a careful phonetic copy from
an aged <i>angekok</i> or wizard-priest, expressing the sounds in Roman letters as best he knew
how. But just now of prime significance was the fetish which this cult had cherished, and around
which they danced when the aurora leaped high over the ice cliffs. It was, the professor stated,
a very crude bas-relief of stone, comprising a hideous picture and some cryptic writing. And
so far as he could tell, it was a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial thing
now lying before the meeting.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>This data, received with suspense and astonishment by the assembled members,
proved doubly exciting to Inspector Legrasse; and he began at once to ply his informant with
questions. Having noted and copied an oral ritual among the swamp cult-worshippers his men had
arrested, he besought the professor to remember as best he might the syllables taken down amongst
the diabolist Esquimaux. There then followed an exhaustive comparison of details, and a moment
of really awed silence when both detective and scientist agreed on the virtual identity of the
phrase common to two hellish rituals so many worlds of distance apart. What, in substance, both
the Esquimau wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols was
something very like this—the word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in
the phrase as chanted aloud:<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '><i>“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl
fhtagn.”</i><br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for several among his
mongrel prisoners had repeated to him what older celebrants had told them the words meant. This
text, as given, ran something like this:<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '><i>“In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”</i><br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>And now, in response to a general and urgent demand, Inspector Legrasse related
as fully as possible his experience with the swamp worshippers; telling a story to which I could
see my uncle attached profound significance. It savoured of the wildest dreams of myth-maker
and theosophist, and disclosed an astonishing degree of cosmic imagination among such half-castes
and pariahs as might be least expected to possess it.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>On November 1st, 1907, there had come to the New Orleans police a frantic summons
from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive but good-natured
descendants of Lafitte’s men, were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which
had stolen upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible
sort than they had ever known; and some of their women and children had disappeared since the
malevolent tom-tom had begun its incessant beating far within the black haunted woods where
no dweller ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and
dancing devil-flames; and, the frightened messenger added, the people could stand it no more.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>So a body of twenty police, filling two carriages and an automobile, had set
out in the late afternoon with the shivering squatter as a guide. At the end of the passable
road they alighted, and for miles splashed on in silence through the terrible cypress woods
where day never came. Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them, and
now and then a pile of dank stones or fragment of a rotting wall intensified by its hint of
morbid habitation a depression which every malformed tree and every fungous islet combined to
create. At length the squatter settlement, a miserable huddle of huts, hove in sight; and hysterical
dwellers ran out to cluster around the group of bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of tom-toms
was now faintly audible far, far ahead; and a curdling shriek came at infrequent intervals when
the wind shifted. A reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through the pale undergrowth beyond
endless avenues of forest night. Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of the cowed
squatters refused point-blank to advance another inch toward the scene of unholy worship, so
Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on unguided into black arcades of horror
that none of them had ever trod before.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute,
substantially unknown and untraversed by white men. There were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed
by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes; and
squatters whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship
it at midnight. They said it had been there before D’Iberville, before La Salle, before
the Indians, and before even the wholesome beasts and birds of the woods. It was nightmare itself,
and to see it was to die. But it made men dream, and so they knew enough to keep away. The present
voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the merest fringe of this abhorred area, but that location was bad
enough; hence perhaps the very place of the worship had terrified the squatters more than the
shocking sounds and incidents.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by Legrasse’s
men as they ploughed on through the black morass toward the red glare and the muffled tom-toms.
There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is
terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other. Animal fury and orgiastic licence
here whipped themselves to daemoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and
reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell.
Now and then the less organised ululation would cease, and from what seemed a well-drilled chorus
of hoarse voices would rise in sing-song chant that hideous phrase or ritual:<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '><i>“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl
fhtagn.”</i><br />
Then the men, having reached a spot where the trees were thinner, came suddenly in sight of
the spectacle itself. Four of them reeled, one fainted, and two were shaken into a frantic cry
which the mad cacophony of the orgy fortunately deadened. Legrasse dashed swamp water on the
face of the fainting man, and all stood trembling and nearly hypnotised with horror.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acre’s
extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable
horde of human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint. Void of clothing,
this hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing, and writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped bonfire;
in the centre of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the curtain of flame, stood a great
granite monolith some eight feet in height; on top of which, incongruous with its diminutiveness,
rested the noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular intervals
with the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head downward, the oddly marred bodies of the
helpless squatters who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of worshippers
jumped and roared, the general direction of the mass motion being from left to right in endless
Bacchanal between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>It may have been only imagination and it may have been only echoes which induced
one of the men, an excitable Spaniard, to fancy he heard antiphonal responses to the ritual
from some far and unillumined spot deeper within the wood of ancient legendry and horror. This
man, Joseph D. Galvez, I later met and questioned; and he proved distractingly imaginative.
He indeed went so far as to hint of the faint beating of great wings, and of a glimpse of shining
eyes and a mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest trees—but I suppose he had been
hearing too much native superstition.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>Actually, the horrified pause of the men was of comparatively brief duration.
Duty came first; and although there must have been nearly a hundred mongrel celebrants in the
throng, the police relied on their firearms and plunged determinedly into the nauseous rout.
For five minutes the resultant din and chaos were beyond description. Wild blows were struck,
shots were fired, and escapes were made; but in the end Legrasse was able to count some forty-seven
sullen prisoners, whom he forced to dress in haste and fall into line between two rows of policemen.
Five of the worshippers lay dead, and two severely wounded ones were carried away on improvised
stretchers by their fellow-prisoners. The image on the monolith, of course, was carefully removed
and carried back by Legrasse.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness, the
prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most
were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese
from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But before
many questions were asked, it became manifest that something far deeper and older than negro
fetichism was involved. Degraded and ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprising
consistency to the central idea of their loathsome faith.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there
were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now,
inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to
the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners
said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places
all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the
mighty city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath
his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always
be waiting to liberate him.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>Meanwhile no more must be told. There was a secret which even torture could
not extract. Mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth, for shapes
came out of the dark to visit the faithful few. But these were not the Great Old Ones. No man
had ever seen the Old Ones. The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none might say whether or
not the others were precisely like him. No one could read the old writing now, but things were
told by word of mouth. The chanted ritual was not the secret—that was never spoken aloud,
only whispered. The chant meant only this: “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu
waits dreaming.”<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be hanged, and the rest
were committed to various institutions. All denied a part in the ritual murders, and averred
that the killing had been done by Black Winged Ones which had come to them from their immemorial
meeting-place in the haunted wood. But of those mysterious allies no coherent account could
ever be gained. What the police did extract, came mainly from an immensely aged mestizo named
Castro, who claimed to have sailed to strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the cult
in the mountains of China.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations of
theosophists and made man and the world seem recent and transient indeed. There had been aeons
when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said
the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still to be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in
the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could
revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity.
They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh
and blood. They had shape—for did not this star-fashioned image prove it?—but that
shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world
through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer
lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R’lyeh,
preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the
earth might once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force from outside must serve
to liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented Them from
making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted
millions of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, but Their mode
of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities
of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding
their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of mammals.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around small idols
which the Great Ones shewed them; idols brought in dim aeras from dark stars. That cult would
never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from
His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know,
for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and
evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy.
Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy
themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile
the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow
forth the prophecy of their return.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in dreams,
but then something had happened. The great stone city R’lyeh, with its monoliths and sepulchres,
had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep waters, full of the one primal mystery through which
not even thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse. But memory never died, and
high-priests said that the city would rise again when the stars were right. Then came out of
the earth the black spirits of earth, mouldy and shadowy, and full of dim rumours picked up
in caverns beneath forgotten sea-bottoms. But of them old Castro dared not speak much. He cut
himself off hurriedly, and no amount of persuasion or subtlety could elicit more in this direction.
The <i>size</i> of the Old Ones, too, he curiously declined to mention. Of the cult, he said
that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless deserts of Arabia, where Irem, the City of
Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. It was not allied to the European witch-cult, and was
virtually unknown beyond its members. No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless
Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the <i>Necronomicon</i> of the mad Arab Abdul
Alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:<br />
<br />
<center>
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tr>
<td>
<font size="-1"><i>“That is not dead which can eternal lie,<br />
And with strange aeons even death may die.”</i></font>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</center>
<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>Legrasse, deeply impressed and not a little bewildered, had inquired in vain
concerning the historic affiliations of the cult. Castro, apparently, had told the truth when
he said that it was wholly secret. The authorities at Tulane University could shed no light
upon either cult or image, and now the detective had come to the highest authorities in the
country and met with no more than the Greenland tale of Professor Webb.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>The feverish interest aroused at the meeting by Legrasse’s tale, corroborated
as it was by the statuette, is echoed in the subsequent correspondence of those who attended;
although scant mention occurs in the formal publications of the society. Caution is the first
care of those accustomed to face occasional charlatanry and imposture. Legrasse for some time
lent the image to Professor Webb, but at the latter’s death it was returned to him and
remains in his possession, where I viewed it not long ago. It is truly a terrible thing, and
unmistakably akin to the dream-sculpture of young Wilcox.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>That my uncle was excited by the tale of the sculptor I did not wonder, for
what thoughts must arise upon hearing, after a knowledge of what Legrasse had learned of the
cult, of a sensitive young man who had <i>dreamed</i> not only the figure and exact hieroglyphics
of the swamp-found image and the Greenland devil tablet, but had come <i>in his dreams</i> upon
at least three of the precise words of the formula uttered alike by Esquimau diabolists and
mongrel Louisianans? Professor Angell’s instant start on an investigation of the utmost
thoroughness was eminently natural; though privately I suspected young Wilcox of having heard
of the cult in some indirect way, and of having invented a series of dreams to heighten and
continue the mystery at my uncle’s expense. The dream-narratives and cuttings collected
by the professor were, of course, strong corroboration; but the rationalism of my mind and the
extravagance of the whole subject led me to adopt what I thought the most sensible conclusions.
So, after thoroughly studying the manuscript again and correlating the theosophical and anthropological
notes with the cult narrative of Legrasse, I made a trip to Providence to see the sculptor and
give him the rebuke I thought proper for so boldly imposing upon a learned and aged man.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>Wilcox still lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys Building in Thomas Street, a hideous
Victorian imitation of seventeenth-century Breton architecture which flaunts its stuccoed front
amidst the lovely colonial houses on the ancient hill, and under the very shadow of the finest
Georgian steeple in America. I found him at work in his rooms, and at once conceded from the
specimens scattered about that his genius is indeed profound and authentic. He will, I believe,
some time be heard from as one of the great decadents; for he has crystallised in clay and will
one day mirror in marble those nightmares and phantasies which Arthur Machen evokes in prose,
and Clark Ashton Smith makes visible in verse and in painting.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>Dark, frail, and somewhat unkempt in aspect, he turned languidly at my knock
and asked me my business without rising. When I told him who I was, he displayed some interest;
for my uncle had excited his curiosity in probing his strange dreams, yet had never explained
the reason for the study. I did not enlarge his knowledge in this regard, but sought with some
subtlety to draw him out. In a short time I became convinced of his absolute sincerity, for
he spoke of the dreams in a manner none could mistake. They and their subconscious residuum
had influenced his art profoundly, and he shewed me a morbid statue whose contours almost made
me shake with the potency of its black suggestion. He could not recall having seen the original
of this thing except in his own dream bas-relief, but the outlines had formed themselves insensibly
under his hands. It was, no doubt, the giant shape he had raved of in delirium. That he really
knew nothing of the hidden cult, save from what my uncle’s relentless catechism had let
fall, he soon made clear; and again I strove to think of some way in which he could possibly
have received the weird impressions.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terrible
vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone—whose <i>geometry,</i> he oddly
said, was <i>all wrong</i>—and hear with frightened expectancy the ceaseless, half-mental
calling from underground: “<i>Cthulhu fhtagn</i>”, “<i>Cthulhu fhtagn</i>”.
These words had formed part of that dread ritual which told of dead Cthulhu’s dream-vigil
in his stone vault at R’lyeh, and I felt deeply moved despite my rational beliefs. Wilcox,
I was sure, had heard of the cult in some casual way, and had soon forgotten it amidst the mass
of his equally weird reading and imagining. Later, by virtue of its sheer impressiveness, it
had found subconscious expression in dreams, in the bas-relief, and in the terrible statue I
now beheld; so that his imposture upon my uncle had been a very innocent one. The youth was
of a type, at once slightly affected and slightly ill-mannered, which I could never like; but
I was willing enough now to admit both his genius and his honesty. I took leave of him amicably,
and wish him all the success his talent promises.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>The matter of the cult still remained to fascinate me, and at times I had visions
of personal fame from researches into its origin and connexions. I visited New Orleans, talked
with Legrasse and others of that old-time raiding-party, saw the frightful image, and even questioned
such of the mongrel prisoners as still survived. Old Castro, unfortunately, had been dead for
some years. What I now heard so graphically at first-hand, though it was really no more than
a detailed confirmation of what my uncle had written, excited me afresh; for I felt sure that
I was on the track of a very real, very secret, and very ancient religion whose discovery would
make me an anthropologist of note. My attitude was still one of absolute materialism, <i>as
I wish it still were,</i> and I discounted with almost inexplicable perversity the coincidence
of the dream notes and odd cuttings collected by Professor Angell.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>One thing I began to suspect, and which I now fear I <i>know,</i> is that my
uncle’s death was far from natural. He fell on a narrow hill street leading up from an
ancient waterfront swarming with foreign mongrels, after a careless push from a negro sailor.
I did not forget the mixed blood and marine pursuits of the cult-members in Louisiana, and would
not be surprised to learn of secret methods and poison needles as ruthless and as anciently
known as the cryptic rites and beliefs. Legrasse and his men, it is true, have been let alone;
but in Norway a certain seaman who saw things is dead. Might not the deeper inquiries of my
uncle after encountering the sculptor’s data have come to sinister ears? I think Professor
Angell died because he knew too much, or because he was likely to learn too much. Whether I
shall go as he did remains to be seen, for I have learned much now.<br />
<br /><center>III.<br /><i>The Madness from the Sea.</i></center><br />
If heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it will be a total effacing of the results of a mere
chance which fixed my eye on a certain stray piece of shelf-paper. It was nothing on which I
would naturally have stumbled in the course of my daily round, for it was an old number of an
Australian journal, the <i>Sydney Bulletin</i> for April 18, 1925. It had escaped even the cutting
bureau which had at the time of its issuance been avidly collecting material for my uncle’s
research.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>I had largely given over my inquiries into what Professor Angell called the
“Cthulhu Cult”, and was visiting a learned friend in Paterson, New Jersey; the curator
of a local museum and a mineralogist of note. Examining one day the reserve specimens roughly
set on the storage shelves in a rear room of the museum, my eye was caught by an odd picture
in one of the old papers spread beneath the stones. It was the <i>Sydney Bulletin</i> I have
mentioned, for my friend has wide affiliations in all conceivable foreign parts; and the picture
was a half-tone cut of a hideous stone image almost identical with that which Legrasse had found
in the swamp.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>Eagerly clearing the sheet of its precious contents, I scanned the item in
detail; and was disappointed to find it of only moderate length. What it suggested, however,
was of portentous significance to my flagging quest; and I carefully tore it out for immediate
action. It read as follows:<br />
<blockquote><center><i>MYSTERY DERELICT FOUND AT SEA<br />
Vigilant Arrives With Helpless Armed New Zealand Yacht in Tow.<br />
One Survivor and Dead Man Found Aboard. Tale of<br />
Desperate Battle and Deaths at Sea.<br />
Rescued Seaman Refuses<br />
Particulars of Strange Experience.<br />
Odd Idol Found in His Possession. Inquiry<br />
to Follow.</i></center><br />
The Morrison Co.’s freighter <i>Vigilant,</i> bound from Valparaiso, arrived this morning
at its wharf in Darling Harbour, having in tow the battled and disabled but heavily armed steam
yacht <i>Alert</i> of Dunedin, N. Z., which was sighted April 12th in S. Latitude 34° 21′,
W. Longitude 152° 17′ with one living and one dead man aboard.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>The <i>Vigilant</i> left Valparaiso March 25th, and on April 2nd was driven
considerably south of her course by exceptionally heavy storms and monster waves. On April 12th
the derelict was sighted; and though apparently deserted, was found upon boarding to contain
one survivor in a half-delirious condition and one man who had evidently been dead for more
than a week. The living man was clutching a horrible stone idol of unknown origin, about a foot
in height, regarding whose nature authorities at Sydney University, the Royal Society, and the
Museum in College Street all profess complete bafflement, and which the survivor says he found
in the cabin of the yacht, in a small carved shrine of common pattern.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>This man, after recovering his senses, told an exceedingly strange story of
piracy and slaughter. He is Gustaf Johansen, a Norwegian of some intelligence, and had been
second mate of the two-masted schooner <i>Emma</i> of Auckland, which sailed for Callao February
20th with a complement of eleven men. The <i>Emma,</i> he says, was delayed and thrown widely
south of her course by the great storm of March 1st, and on March 22nd, in S. Latitude 49°
51′, W. Longitude 128° 34′, encountered the <i>Alert,</i> manned by a queer and evil-looking
crew of Kanakas and half-castes. Being ordered peremptorily to turn back, Capt. Collins refused;
whereupon the strange crew began to fire savagely and without warning upon the schooner with
a peculiarly heavy battery of brass cannon forming part of the yacht’s equipment. The
<i>Emma’s</i> men shewed fight, says the survivor, and though the schooner began to sink
from shots beneath the waterline they managed to heave alongside their enemy and board her,
grappling with the savage crew on the yacht’s deck, and being forced to kill them all,
the number being slightly superior, because of their particularly abhorrent and desperate though
rather clumsy mode of fighting.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>Three of the <i>Emma’s</i> men, including Capt. Collins and First Mate
Green, were killed; and the remaining eight under Second Mate Johansen proceeded to navigate
the captured yacht, going ahead in their original direction to see if any reason for their ordering
back had existed. The next day, it appears, they raised and landed on a small island, although
none is known to exist in that part of the ocean; and six of the men somehow died ashore, though
Johansen is queerly reticent about this part of his story, and speaks only of their falling
into a rock chasm. Later, it seems, he and one companion boarded the yacht and tried to manage
her, but were beaten about by the storm of April 2nd. From that time till his rescue on the
12th the man remembers little, and he does not even recall when William Briden, his companion,
died. Briden’s death reveals no apparent cause, and was probably due to excitement or
exposure. Cable advices from Dunedin report that the <i>Alert</i> was well known there as an
island trader, and bore an evil reputation along the waterfront. It was owned by a curious group
of half-castes whose frequent meetings and night trips to the woods attracted no little curiosity;
and it had set sail in great haste just after the storm and earth tremors of March 1st. Our
Auckland correspondent gives the <i>Emma</i> and her crew an excellent reputation, and Johansen
is described as a sober and worthy man. The admiralty will institute an inquiry on the whole
matter beginning tomorrow, at which every effort will be made to induce Johansen to speak more
freely than he has done hitherto.</blockquote>
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>This was all, together with the picture of the hellish image; but what a train
of ideas it started in my mind! Here were new treasuries of data on the Cthulhu Cult, and evidence
that it had strange interests at sea as well as on land. What motive prompted the hybrid crew
to order back the <i>Emma</i> as they sailed about with their hideous idol? What was the unknown
island on which six of the <i>Emma’s</i> crew had died, and about which the mate Johansen
was so secretive? What had the vice-admiralty’s investigation brought out, and what was
known of the noxious cult in Dunedin? And most marvellous of all, what deep and more than natural
linkage of dates was this which gave a malign and now undeniable significance to the various
turns of events so carefully noted by my uncle?<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>March 1st—our February 28th according to the International Date Line—the
earthquake and storm had come. From Dunedin the <i>Alert</i> and her noisome crew had darted
eagerly forth as if imperiously summoned, and on the other side of the earth poets and artists
had begun to dream of a strange, dank Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had moulded in
his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu. March 23d the crew of the <i>Emma</i> landed on an
unknown island and left six men dead; and on that date the dreams of sensitive men assumed a
heightened vividness and darkened with dread of a giant monster’s malign pursuit, whilst
an architect had gone mad and a sculptor had lapsed suddenly into delirium! And what of this
storm of April 2nd—the date on which all dreams of the dank city ceased, and Wilcox emerged
unharmed from the bondage of strange fever? What of all this—and of those hints of old
Castro about the sunken, star-born Old Ones and their coming reign; their faithful cult <i>and
their mastery of dreams?</i> Was I tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man’s
power to bear? If so, they must be horrors of the mind alone, for in some way the second of
April had put a stop to whatever monstrous menace had begun its siege of mankind’s soul.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>That evening, after a day of hurried cabling and arranging, I bade my host
adieu and took a train for San Francisco. In less than a month I was in Dunedin; where, however,
I found that little was known of the strange cult-members who had lingered in the old sea-taverns.
Waterfront scum was far too common for special mention; though there was vague talk about one
inland trip these mongrels had made, during which faint drumming and red flame were noted on
the distant hills. In Auckland I learned that Johansen had returned <i>with yellow hair turned
white</i> after a perfunctory and inconclusive questioning at Sydney, and had thereafter sold
his cottage in West Street and sailed with his wife to his old home in Oslo. Of his stirring
experience he would tell his friends no more than he had told the admiralty officials, and all
they could do was to give me his Oslo address.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with seamen and members
of the vice-admiralty court. I saw the <i>Alert,</i> now sold and in commercial use, at Circular
Quay in Sydney Cove, but gained nothing from its non-committal bulk. The crouching image with
its cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal, was preserved in the
Museum at Hyde Park; and I studied it long and well, finding it a thing of balefully exquisite
workmanship, and with the same utter mystery, terrible antiquity, and unearthly strangeness
of material which I had noted in Legrasse’s smaller specimen. Geologists, the curator
told me, had found it a monstrous puzzle; for they vowed that the world held no rock like it.
Then I thought with a shudder of what old Castro had told Legrasse about the primal Great Ones:
“They had come from the stars, and had brought Their images with Them.”<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>Shaken with such a mental revolution as I had never before known, I now resolved
to visit Mate Johansen in Oslo. Sailing for London, I reëmbarked at once for the Norwegian
capital; and one autumn day landed at the trim wharves in the shadow of the Egeberg. Johansen’s
address, I discovered, lay in the Old Town of King Harold Haardrada, which kept alive the name
of Oslo during all the centuries that the greater city masqueraded as “Christiana”.
I made the brief trip by taxicab, and knocked with palpitant heart at the door of a neat and
ancient building with plastered front. A sad-faced woman in black answered my summons, and I
was stung with disappointment when she told me in halting English that Gustaf Johansen was no
more.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>He had not survived his return, said his wife, for the doings at sea in 1925
had broken him. He had told her no more than he had told the public, but had left a long manuscript—of
“technical matters” as he said—written in English, evidently in order to safeguard
her from the peril of casual perusal. During a walk through a narrow lane near the Gothenburg
dock, a bundle of papers falling from an attic window had knocked him down. Two Lascar sailors
at once helped him to his feet, but before the ambulance could reach him he was dead. Physicians
found no adequate cause for the end, and laid it to heart trouble and a weakened constitution.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will never leave me
till I, too, am at rest; “accidentally” or otherwise. Persuading the widow that
my connexion with her husband’s “technical matters” was sufficient to entitle
me to his manuscript, I bore the document away and began to read it on the London boat. It was
a simple, rambling thing—a naive sailor’s effort at a post-facto diary—and
strove to recall day by day that last awful voyage. I cannot attempt to transcribe it verbatim
in all its cloudiness and redundance, but I will tell its gist enough to shew why the sound
of the water against the vessel’s sides became so unendurable to me that I stopped my
ears with cotton.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the city and
the Thing, but I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly
behind life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which
dream beneath the sea, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them
on the world whenever another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone city again to the
sun and air.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>Johansen’s voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-admiralty.
The <i>Emma,</i> in ballast, had cleared Auckland on February 20th, and had felt the full force
of that earthquake-born tempest which must have heaved up from the sea-bottom the horrors that
filled men’s dreams. Once more under control, the ship was making good progress when held
up by the <i>Alert</i> on March 22nd, and I could feel the mate’s regret as he wrote of
her bombardment and sinking. Of the swarthy cult-fiends on the <i>Alert</i> he speaks with significant
horror. There was some peculiarly abominable quality about them which made their destruction
seem almost a duty, and Johansen shews ingenuous wonder at the charge of ruthlessness brought
against his party during the proceedings of the court of inquiry. Then, driven ahead by curiosity
in their captured yacht under Johansen’s command, the men sight a great stone pillar sticking
out of the sea, and in S. Latitude 47° 9′, W. Longitude 126° 43′ come upon a coast-line
of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible
substance of earth’s supreme terror—the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh, that
was built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down
from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and
sending out at last, after cycles incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams
of the sensitive and called imperiously to the faithful to come on a pilgrimage of liberation
and restoration. All this Johansen did not suspect, but God knows he soon saw enough!<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>I suppose that only a single mountain-top, the hideous monolith-crowned citadel
whereon great Cthulhu was buried, actually emerged from the waters. When I think of the <i>extent</i>
of all that may be brooding down there I almost wish to kill myself forthwith. Johansen and
his men were awed by the cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon of elder daemons, and must
have guessed without guidance that it was nothing of this or of any sane planet. Awe at the
unbelievable size of the greenish stone blocks, at the dizzying height of the great carven monolith,
and at the stupefying identity of the colossal statues and bas-reliefs with the queer image
found in the shrine on the <i>Alert,</i> is poignantly visible in every line of the mate’s
frightened description.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close
to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building,
he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces—surfaces too great
to belong to any thing right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and
hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about <i>angles</i> because it suggests something Wilcox had
told me of his awful dreams. He had said that the <i>geometry</i> of the dream-place he saw
was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours.
Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst gazing at the terrible reality.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous Acropolis,
and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal staircase.
The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out
from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily
elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed
convexity.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything
more definite than rock and ooze and weed was seen. Each would have fled had he not feared the
scorn of the others, and it was only half-heartedly that they searched—vainly, as it proved—for
some portable souvenir to bear away.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the monolith and
shouted of what he had found. The rest followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved
door with the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It was, Johansen said, like a great barn-door;
and they all felt that it was a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and jambs around
it, though they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside
cellar-door. As Wilcox would have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not
be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything
else seemed phantasmally variable.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>Briden pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then Donovan felt
over it delicately around the edge, pressing each point separately as he went. He climbed interminably
along the grotesque stone moulding—that is, one would call it climbing if the thing was
not after all horizontal—and the men wondered how any door in the universe could be so
vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the acre-great panel began to give inward at the top; and
they saw that it was balanced. Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down or along the jamb
and rejoined his fellows, and everyone watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven
portal. In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so
that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousness
was indeed a <i>positive quality;</i> for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought
to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment,
visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous
wings. The odour arising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared
Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone
was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous
green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of
madness.<br />
<img src='/pics/PixelClear.gif' width='25' height='1' alt=' '>Poor Johansen’s handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this. Of
the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed
instant. The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking
and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order.
A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went
mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the
green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and
what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident.