markov-generator 0.9.1 → 0.9.2

checksums.yaml

@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
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data/VERSION

@@ -1 +1 @@
-0.9.1
+0.9.2

data/lib/markov/generator.rb

@@ -15,8 +15,8 @@ module Markov
       @depth = depth
       
       @split_sentence = /(?<=[.?!])\s+/
-      @split_words = /([,.?!\n\r])|[\s]/
-      @replace_chars = /[„':;_"()\n\r]/
+      @split_words = /([,.?!])|[\s]/
+      @replace_chars = /[„':;_"()]/
       
       @dictionary = {}
       @start_words = {}
@@ -116,6 +116,27 @@ module Markov
       end
     end
     
+    def dump_dictionary_stats
+      puts "Keys: #{@dictionary.keys.size}"
+      dist = {}
+      n = 0
+      @dictionary.keys.each do |words|
+        following = @dictionary[words]
+        size = following.size
+        if dist[size]
+          dist[size] = dist[size] + following.size
+        else
+          dist[size] = following.size
+        end
+        n = n + following.size
+      end
+      
+      dist.keys.sort.each do |s|
+        puts "BUCKET: #{s}\t=#{dist[s]} (#{((dist[s].to_f/n.to_f)*100).to_i}%)"
+      end
+      
+    end
+    
     private
     
     def parse_text
@@ -167,6 +188,7 @@ module Markov
     end # end parse_text
     
     def next_token
+      
       if @tokens.empty?
         sentence = @unparsed_sentences.slice!(0)
         if sentence
@@ -181,7 +203,7 @@ module Markov
             elsif word.include?(".")
               @tokens << Token.new(".", :stop)
             elsif word == ""
-              # skip
+              # skip blanks
             else
               @tokens << Token.new(word, :word)
             end            
@@ -192,6 +214,8 @@ module Markov
       end
       
       return @tokens.slice!(0) if @tokens
+      
+      @tokens = []
       nil  
     end # end next_token
     
@@ -271,11 +295,3 @@ module Markov
   end
   
 end
-
-#markov = Markov::Generator.new
-
-#Dir["../../public/text/seed_*"].each do | f |
-#  markov.parse_source_file f
-#end
-
-#markov.dump_dictionary

data/markov-generator.gemspec

@@ -2,11 +2,11 @@
 # DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE DIRECTLY
 # Instead, edit Jeweler::Tasks in Rakefile, and run 'rake gemspec'
 # -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-
-# stub: markov-generator 0.9.1 ruby lib
+# stub: markov-generator 0.9.2 ruby lib
 
 Gem::Specification.new do |s|
   s.name = "markov-generator"
-  s.version = "0.9.1"
+  s.version = "0.9.2"
 
   s.required_rubygems_version = Gem::Requirement.new(">= 0") if s.respond_to? :required_rubygems_version=
   s.require_paths = ["lib"]
@@ -32,8 +32,7 @@ Gem::Specification.new do |s|
     "test/file_parser_test.txt",
     "test/generator_test.rb",
     "test/helper.rb",
-    "test/test_markov_generator.rb",
-    "test/test_seed.txt"
+    "test/test_markov_generator.rb"
   ]
   s.homepage = "http://github.com/ratchetcc/markov-generator"
   s.licenses = ["MIT"]

data/test/file_parser_test.rb

@@ -10,10 +10,11 @@ require 'markov/generator'
 #@split_sentence = /(?<=[.!?\n])\s+/
 
 split_sentence = /(?<=[.?!])\s+/
-split_words = /([,.?!\n\r])|[\s]/
-replace_chars = /[„':;_"()\n\r]/
+split_words = /([,.?!])|[\s]/
+replace_chars = /[„':;_"()]/
 
-source = "./file_parser_test.txt"
+#source = "./file_parser_test.txt"
+source = "./seed_alts1.txt"
 
 sentences = File.open(source, "r").read.force_encoding(Encoding::UTF_8).split(split_sentence)
 

data/test/generator_test.rb

@@ -2,6 +2,14 @@
 require 'markov/generator'
 
 markov = Markov::Generator.new
-markov.parse_source_file "./test_seed.txt"
+markov.parse_source_file "./generator_test2.txt"
+markov.parse_source_file "./generator_test1.txt"
+
+markov.dump_dictionary
+markov.dump_start_words
+markov.dump_dictionary_stats
+
+1..5.times do
+  puts "#{markov.generate_sentence}"
+end
 
-puts "#{markov.generate_sentence}"

metadata

@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
 --- !ruby/object:Gem::Specification
 name: markov-generator
 version: !ruby/object:Gem::Version
-  version: 0.9.1
+  version: 0.9.2
 platform: ruby
 authors:
 - Michael Kuehl
@@ -102,7 +102,6 @@ files:
 - test/generator_test.rb
 - test/helper.rb
 - test/test_markov_generator.rb
-- test/test_seed.txt
 homepage: http://github.com/ratchetcc/markov-generator
 licenses:
 - MIT

data/test/test_seed.txt

@@ -1,1096 +0,0 @@
-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.