The CALL of CTHULHU



By H.P. LOVECRAFT



[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Weird Tales, February 1928.

Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that

the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]





    "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    since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity ...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...."



                                                --_Algernon Blackwood._





[Illustration: "The ring of worshipers moved in endless bacchanale

between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire."][1]



[Footnote 1: Found among the papers of the late Francis Wayland

Thurston, of Boston.]









                       _1. The Horror in Clay._



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.



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 eons 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.



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.



As my granduncle'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 Archeological Society, but there was one box which I

found exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much averse from showing

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.



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 hint at its remotest affiliations.



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 _general outline_ of the whole which made it most

shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestion of a

Cyclopean architectural background.



The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a stack of

press cuttings, in Professor Angell's most recent hand; and made no

pretense 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. This 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-Eliott's _Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria_), 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 _Golden Bough_ and Miss Murray's _Witch-Cult in Western

Europe_. The cuttings largely alluded to outré mental illnesses and

outbreaks of group folly or mania in the spring of 1925.



       *       *       *       *       *



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 recognized 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 esthetes from

other towns. Even the Providence Art Club, anxious to preserve its

conservatism, had found him quite hopeless.



On the occasion of the visit, ran the professor's manuscript, the

sculptor abruptly asked for the benefit of his host's archeological

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 showed some sharpness in replying, for the

conspicuous freshness of the tablet implied kinship with anything but

archeology. 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."



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, "_Cthulhu fhtagn_".



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 nightclothes, when waking had stolen bewilderingly over him.

My uncle blamed his old age, Wilcox afterward said, for his slowness

in recognizing 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

"_Cthulhu_" and "_R'lyeh_".



On March 23rd, 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 the whole condition was otherwise such as to

suggest true fever rather than mental disorder.



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.



       *       *       *       *       *



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 skepticism 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

23rd 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.



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

cognizant of the old data which my uncle had possessed, had been

imposing on the veteran scientist. These responses from esthetes 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.



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 dispatch 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 Haiti, 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 rumor 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.









                 _2. The Tale of Inspector Legrasse._





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 "_Cthulhu_"; and all this in so stirring and horrible a

connection that it is small wonder he pursued young Wilcox with queries

and demands for data.



This earlier experience had come in 1908, seventeen years before,

when the American Archeological 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.



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 traveled 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 archeology. 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 realize 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.



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 recognized 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.



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 octopuslike 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 center,

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 forepaws

which clasped the croucher's elevated knees. The aspect of the whole

was abnormally lifelike, 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 show with any known type of art

belonging to civilization'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.



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 Eskimos whose

religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its

deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which

other Eskimos knew little, and which they mentioned only with shudders,

saying that it had come down from horribly ancient eons 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

_tornasuk_; and of this Professor Webb had taken a careful phonetic

copy from an aged _angekok_ 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 as far as he could tell,

it was a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial thing

now lying before the meeting.



These 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-worshipers his men had arrested, he

besought the professor to remember as best he might the syllables taken

down amongst the diabolist Eskimos. 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 Eskimo 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:



        "_Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn._"



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:



         "In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."



       *       *       *       *       *



And now, in response to a general urgent demand, Inspector Legrasse

related as fully as possible his experience with the swamp worshipers;

telling a story to which I could see my uncle attached profound

significance. It savored 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.



On November 1st, 1907, there had come to 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.



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 fragments 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.



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.



Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by

Legrasse's men as they plowed 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 license here whipped themselves to demoniac 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 organized ululations would cease, and from what

seemed a well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in singsong

chant that hideous phrase or ritual:



        "_Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn._"



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 hypnotized

with horror.



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 center 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 in 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 center hung,

head downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters who

had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of worshipers

jumped and roared, the general direction of the mass motion being from

left to right in endless bacchanale between the ring of bodies and the

ring of fire.



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.



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 worshipers 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.



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 coloring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult.

But before many questions were asked, it became manifest that something

far deeper and older than negro fetishism was involved. Degraded and

ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprizing consistency

to the central idea of their loathsome faith.



They worshiped, 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 man,

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.



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."



       *       *       *       *       *



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.



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 eons 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 man 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.



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,

for 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 molding their

dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of

mammals.



Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around small

idols which the Great Ones showed them; idols brought in dim eras

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 reveling 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.



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 sepulchers, 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, moldy and shadowy, and full of dim rumors 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 _size_ of the Old

Ones, too, he curiously declined to mention. Of the cult, he said that

he thought the center 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 _Necronomicon_

of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they

chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:



    "That is not dead which can eternal lie,

    And with strange eons even death may die."



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.



       *       *       *       *       *



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 publication 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.



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 _dreamed_ not only the figure and exact hieroglyphics of the

swamp-found image and the Greenland devil tablet, but had come _in his

dreams_ upon at least three of the precise words of the formula uttered

alike by Eskimo 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.



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, be heard from

sometime as one of the great decadents; for he has crystallized in clay

and will one day mirror in marble those nightmares and fantasies which

Arthur Machen evokes in prose, and Clark Ashton Smith makes visible in

verse and in painting.



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 showed

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.



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 _geometry_, he oddly said, was _all wrong_--and hear

with frightened expectancy the ceaseless, half-mental calling from

underground: "_Cthulhu fhtagn_," "_Cthulhu fhtagn_."



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.



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

connections. 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, _as I wish

it still were_, and I discounted with almost inexplicable perversity

the coincidence of the dream notes and odd cuttings collected by

Professor Angell.



One thing which I began to suspect, and which I now fear I _know_, 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 surprized 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.









                    _3. The Madness from the Sea._





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, _Sydney Bulletin_ 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.



I had largely given over my inquiries into what Professor Angell called

the "Cthulhu Cult," and was visiting a learned friend of 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

_Sydney Bulletin_ 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.



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:



                     MYSTERY DERELICT FOUND AT SEA



    _Vigilant_ Arrives With Helpless Armed New Zealand Yacht in Tow.

    One Survivor and Dead Man Found Aboard. Tale of Desperate Battle

    and Deaths at Sea. Rescued Seaman Refuses Particulars of Strange

    Experience. Odd Idol Found in His Possession. Inquiry to Follow.



        *       *       *       *       *



    The Morrison Co.'s freighter _Vigilant_, bound from Valparaiso,

    arrived this morning at its wharf in Darling Harbour, having in tow

    the battled and disabled but heavily armed steam yacht _Alert_ 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.



    The _Vigilant_ left Valparaiso March 25th, and on April 2d 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.



    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 _Emma_ of Auckland, which sailed for Callao February 20th,

    with a complement of eleven men.



    The _Emma_, he says, was delayed and thrown widely south of her

    course by the great storm of March 1st, and on March 22d, in S.

    Latitude 49° 51´, W. Longitude 128° 34´, encountered the _Alert_,

    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 _Emma's_ men showed 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.



    Three of the _Emma's_ 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 _Alert_ 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 _Emma_ 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.



       *       *       *       *       *



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 _Emma_ as they sailed about with their hideous idol?

What was the unknown island on which six of the _Emma's_ 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 marvelous 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?



March 1st--our February 28th according to the International Date

Line--the earthquake and storm had come. From Dunedin the _Alert_ 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

molded in his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu. March 23rd the

crew of the _Emma_ 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 _and their mastery of dreams_? 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.



       *       *       *       *       *



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 _with yellow hair

turned white_ 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.



After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with seamen and

members of the vice-admiralty court. I saw the _Alert_, 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."



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

re-embarked 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 "Christiania." 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.



He had not long 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.



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 connection 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 can not attempt to transcribe it verbatim in all its

cloudiness and redundance, but I will tell its gist enough to show why

the sound of the water against the vessel's sides became so unendurable

to me that I stopped my ears with cotton.



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 favored 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.



       *       *       *       *       *



Johansen's voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-admiralty.

The _Emma_, 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 _Alert_ 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 _Alert_ he speaks with significant horror. There was some

peculiarly abominable quality about them which made their destruction

seem almost a duty, and Johansen shows 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 coastline 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 eons 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!



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 _extent_ 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 demons,

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 _Alert_, is poignantly visible

in every line of the mate's frightened description.



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 the broad

impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces--surfaces too great to

belong to anything right or proper for this earth, and impious with

horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about _angles_

because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams.

He had said that the _geometry_ 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.



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 polarizing 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 showed concavity after the first showed convexity.



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.



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 fantasmally variable.



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 molding--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 fantasy of prismatic distortion it

moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter

and perspective seemed upset.



The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That

tenebrousness was indeed a _positive quality_; for it obscured such

parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually

burst forth like smoke from its eon-long imprisonment, visibly

darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky

on flapping membranous wings. The odor 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.



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 can not 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. After vigintillions of years great

Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.



Three men were swept up by the flabby claws before anybody turned. God

rest them, if there be any rest in the universe. They were Donovan,

Guerrera and Angstrom. Parker slipped as the other three were plunging

frenziedly over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to the boat,

and Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which

shouldn't have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as

if it were obtuse. So only Briden and Johansen reached the boat, and

pulled desperately for the _Alert_ as the mountainous monstrosity

flopped down the slimy stones and hesitated floundering at the edge of

the water.



Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite the departure

of all hands for the shore; and it was the work of only a few moments

of feverish rushing up and down between wheels and engines to get

the _Alert_ under way. Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors of that

indescribable scene, she began to churn the lethal waters; whilst on

the masonry of that charnel shore that was not of earth the titan Thing

from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing

ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu

slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising

strokes of cosmic potency. Briden looked back and went mad, laughing

shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals till death found him one

night in the cabin whilst Johansen was wandering deliriously.



But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could

surely overtake the _Alert_ until steam was fully up, he resolved

on a desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran

lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty

eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted

higher and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against

the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern

of a demon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came

nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on

relentlessly.



There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness

as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and

a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper. For an instant

the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then

there was only a venomous seething astern; where--God in heaven!--the

scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously

_recombining_ in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened

every second as the _Alert_ gained impetus from its mounting steam.



       *       *       *       *       *



That was all. After that Johansen only brooded over the idol in the

cabin and attended to a few matters of food for himself and the

laughing maniac by his side. He did not try to navigate after the first

bold flight, for the reaction had taken something out of his soul. Then

came the storm of April 2nd, and a gathering of the clouds about his

consciousness. There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid

gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a

comet's tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and

from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating

chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged

mocking imps of Tartarus.



Out of that dream came rescue--the _Vigilant_, the vice-admiralty

court, the streets of Dunedin, and the long voyage back home to the

old house by the Egeberg. He could not tell--they would think him mad.

He would write of what he knew before death came, but his wife must not

guess. Death would be a boon if only it could blot out the memories.



That was the document I read, and now I have placed it in the tin box

beside the bas-relief and the papers of Professor Angell. With it shall

go this record of mine--this test of my own sanity, wherein is pieced

together that which I hope may never be pieced together again. I have

looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the

skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison

to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went, as

poor Johansen went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still

lives.



Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone

which has shielded him since the sun was young. His accursed city is

sunken once more, for the _Vigilant_ sailed over the spot after the

April storm; but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and

slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places. He must have been

trapped by the sinking whilst within his black abyss, or else the world

would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end?

What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness

waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering

cities of men. A time will come--but I must not and can not think! Let

me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put

caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.