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+The Call of Cthulhu
+
+  by H. P. Lovecraft
+
+                              Written Summer 1926
+
+    Published February 1928 in Weird Tales, Vol. 11, No. 2, p. 159-78, 287.
+
+     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+     perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of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
+
+                             I. 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 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 intented 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 great-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 great-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 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 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 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 evident 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 suggestions 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 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 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 outre mental illness and
+   outbreaks of group folly or mania in the spring of 1925.
+
+   The first half of the principal manuscript told a very particular 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 chidhood 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 ocassion 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 of 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 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 afterwards 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 imaginery
+   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
+   frequently repeated are those rendered by the letters "Cthulhu" and
+   "R'lyeh."
+
+   On March 23, 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 2 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
+   22. 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 inquires
+   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 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 23 and
+   and April 2 - 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 disturbing tale. From
+   February 28 to April 2 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 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 fulfiment" which never arrives, whilst
+   items from India speak guardedly of serious native unrest toward the end
+   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.
+
+                      II. 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 connexion 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 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.
+
+   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.
+
+   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.
+
+   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 clown 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.
+
+   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 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 so far
+   as he could tell, it was a rough parallel in all essential features of the
+   bestial thing now lying before the meeting.
+
+   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 Esquimaux 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 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.
+
+   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.
+
+   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 pale undergrowth beyond the 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 ploughed on through the black morass toward the red glare and
+   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 daemoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstacies
+   that tore and reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential
+   tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less organized 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:
+
+     "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 hypnotised 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
+   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 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 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.
+
+   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 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.
+
+   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 fetishism was involved. Degraded and ignorant
+   as they were, the creatures held with surprising consistency to the
+   central idea of their loathsome faith.
+
+   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.
+
+   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 the
+   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 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 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.
+
+   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
+   surrection 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 moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach
+   the fleshly minds of mammals.
+
+   Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around tall idols
+   which the Great Ones shewed 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 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.
+
+   In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in
+   dreams, but then something 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 the
+   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 size of the Old Ones, too, he curiously declined to
+   mention. Of the cult, he said that he thought the centre lay amid the
+   pathless desert 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 aeons 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 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.
+
+   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 Esquimaux 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 olonial 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.
+
+   Dark, frail, and somewhat unkempt in aspect, he turned languidly at my
+   knock and asked me my business without rising. Then 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 ofhis
+   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.
+
+   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 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, as l 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 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 surprised to learn of secret methods and 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.
+
+                         III. 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, the 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 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 Sydney Bulletin I
+   have mentioned, for my friend had 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 34DEG21', W. Longitude 152DEG17',
+     with one living and one dead man aboard.
+
+     The Vigilant 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 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 22nd, in S.
+     Latitude 49DEG51' W. Longitude 128DEG34', 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 shewed fight, says the survivor,
+     and though the schooner began to sink from shots beneath the water-line
+     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
+   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?
+
+   March 1st - or 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 moulded 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 mentnon; 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 Old 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 reembarked
+   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 th
+   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 sea in
+   1925 had broken him. He had told her no more than he told the public, but
+   had left a long manuscript - of "technical matters" as he said - written
+   in English, evidently in order to guard her from the peril of casual
+   perusal. During a walk rough 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 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. Persuad-g 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 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 favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them upon
+   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
+   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
+   47DEG9', W. Longitude l23DEG43', 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 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 faithfull 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 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 Alert, is poignantly visible in every line of
+   the mates 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 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 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 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.
+
+   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 phantasmally 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 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 lintel began to give inward at the
+   top; and they saw that it was balauced
+
+   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.
+
+   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 aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk
+   away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous wings. The
+   odour rising 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 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.
+   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 wheel 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 daemon 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
+   could 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 comets 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 cannot 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.
+
+     ----------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+   The Lovecraft Library wishes to extend its gratitude to Eulogio Garcia
+   Recalde for transcribing this text.